because there are eight berries that exist — Count Timothy von Icarus

Consider that berries grow, ripen, and then rot. Can you think of an edge case where it's not clear whether something counts as a berry?

@Banno

the Principle of Charity and assume that what they said was correct — Banno

As it happens, this is what the thread should be about.

the lack of a coherent explanation of what "quantifier variance" might be — Banno

It's a side effect of a particular version of charity:

A charity-based metasemantics assigns L the interpretation that, when all is said-and-done, when every disposition to correct and revise is accounted for, makes the best sense of the linguistic behavior of L-speakers by making their considered utterances come out true in actual and possible circumstances, ceteris paribus. — Hirsch & Warren

Modest variance says that there are many distinct quantifier languages — quantifier languages where translating one language’s quantifier into the other’s results in massive failures of charity. This follows almost immediately from top down charity and our account of quantifiers. — Ibid

It's not far from here to ontological pluralism or what have you.

@Leontiskos

I almost posted about this the other day, but decided I didn't care enough. This charity metasemantics they've cooked up, I mean, it's the sort of crap mainstream (analytic) philosophy has been getting up to for a long time. It's depressing.

I think it's a holdover from an earlier and more exciting time when philosophers thought there were maybe a few levels of logic and categorization between our minds and the rest of the world. If you were clever enough, you might work out a reasonable toy model of how we assemble patches of color into objects, or parse the intentions of someone speaking to us. Alas, it's not a few layers, but hundreds, thousands, millions. How living organisms manage to be sensitive and responsive to their environment and their own state is orders of magnitude more complex than the stuff philosophers come up with.

All of which is why I agree halfway with this:

the now common assumption that reason is nothing more than discursive reason — Leontiskos

Someone who thinks that all truth is known discursively will believe that discursive-syllogistic explanation is always possible, and that where such explanation fails knowledge does not exist. — Leontiskos

The obvious problem with this, as Aristotle notes, is that logical demonstration is not self-supporting. Logical demonstration presupposes simple or primitive truths in order to get off the ground. — Leontiskos

ratiocination presupposes intellection (that discursive reason presupposes non-discursive acts of the intellect) — Leontiskos

But it's toward the end there that I disagree. Yes ratiocination rests on something that isn't that, but I wouldn't call what it rests on intellection, which seems to suggest something like the grasping of self-evident truth, or something.

Instead, as you know, I'm with Hume, and I think modern science is bearing him out. Down below whatever reasoning we do is habit and custom and our natural inheritance. When I described the brain as computational before, I may not have placed enough emphasis on the fact that it's all probabilities. The brain is not a deterministic, clockwork machine, but a probabilistic one, and again Hume intuited this -- all our reasoning concerning matters of fact is merely probable. He was horrified enough to discover that reason rested upon something not describable as reason, but I think nowadays we have to go even further: Ramsey was headed this way, linking logic with probability, and suggesting that inference rules were essentially habitual.

So yes, I'm inclined to agree that there is a sort of fatal flaw in much modern philosophy -- the pointless and unrealistic model building like we see here -- and that it can diagnosed as a failure to understand what the foundation of reasoning really is, but I see that foundation quite differently.

What's more, I'm inclined to think that this

I believe this is largely a result of the democratization and pragmatization of reason, where questions of consensus and therefore adjudication become supreme. — Leontiskos

describes much of the nature and use of reason as we understand it. (See Mercier & Sperber, The Enigma of Reason for a related view, and the beginnings of research to support it.)

I am planning to take a hiatus from TPF. — Leontiskos

Good call. Think I'll scarper as well. Cheers, everyone.

It is a common view these days — Leontiskos

Glad to hear you say that. I'm not innovating here, I think, just trying to connect the dots.

I don't think logic is inherently mathematical, I don't think "mathematics is good at treating of [everything]," and I don't think mathematical logic is necessarily the epitome of logic. In fact at my university mathematical logic was very much acknowledged to be but one kind of logic, and I think this is correct. — Leontiskos

I get that. I'm using "mathematics" pretty broadly. What I have in mind is the mathematical impulse, the attempt to understand things by schematizing them, abstracting, simplifying, modeling. A musical scale is such an abstraction, for example, and "mathematical" in the sense I mean.

You're right, of course, that as commonly used the phrase "mathematical logic" is just a branch of mathematics, but to me logic is very much a product of the mathematical impulse, as when Aristotle abstracts away the content of arguments and looks only at their form -- and then follows up by classifying those forms! And we end up with the square of opposition, which is a blatantly mathematical structure. You see what I mean, I'm sure.

Aristotle was more interested in representing the way the human mind draws conclusions than adhering to an a priori mathematical paradigm — Leontiskos

As am I, in fact. I think the foundation of logic is the idea that one thought "follows from" another, and this in many more senses than are covered by material implication, for example. But I also think this is so because this is how our brains work, though we are not privy to the details. Hume noticed this, that the mind passes in some cases freely and in other cases with difficulty from one thought to another.

But I still say the foundation here is mathematical because with the brain we're really talking about prediction, and thus probability. The brain is a prediction engine that is constantly recalibrating. It instantiates a machine for calculating probabilities. The "following from" here is neural activity, which is messy and complicated, but has effects that are in principle measurable, and whose functioning itself is parametrized (concentration of ions and neurotransmitters, number of incoming connections and their level of excitation, distance to be covered by transmission, and so on).

this seems to prove the point insofar as Quine's notion of existence (and quantification) differs from the approach of neuroscience — Leontiskos

But his just thinking that doesn't get you there, to my mind. He was mistaken -- only because he was too early, really, and I think he'd be fine with how cognitive science has naturalized epistemology -- but does that eo ipso ground an alternative but legitimate meaning? Does QV amount to a claim that no one can be mistaken?

You seem to be dragging me into the actual topic, but alas my lunch break is over.

Thanks for your thoughts! Have to work, but I'll definitely get back to you after a bit.

Mathematics has this double role: it's the ideal we strive towards in our thinking, but it's what enables our thinking in the first place. Out brains have already been doing the sort of clarification and simplification we want when we model something mathematically -- so of course it feels like we're discovering that structure, not inventing it; we're just doing more of the same.

That's my working hypothesis anyway. Philosophy is almost entirely puzzling out the nature of idealization and its role in our thinking, and this approach makes some sense of that. To me at least.

each object is an instantiation of one — Janus

Is this a property it acquires naturally, along with its chemical composition, its mass, etc?

Or do we deem each object to be an instantiation of One?

@Count Timothy von Icarus @Wayfarer @Leontiskos et al.
Here's what I think, if you're interested.

Kant -- damn his eyes -- was right: we only understand of the world what we put into it.

We distinguish one bit from another, sort those bits and classify them, even paint them different colors to make it easier to keep track of them.

Mathematics is, first of all, our analysis of what we're doing when we do all that. More than that, it's a simplification and idealization of the process, to make it faster and more efficient.

It's all signal processing. The brain is not fundamentally interested in the world, but in the maintenance of the body it's responsible for, and the signals the brain deals with are about that body: they have an origin and and a type and a strength, and so on. Some of this is instrumented, so there's a reflective capacity to see how all these signals come together, and that's the beginning of mathematics.

Individual neurons themselves do this in microcosm, actively resisting firing until they absolutely have to, to sharpen and compress their signals from the analog toward the digital. And there's layer upon layer upon layer of this, simplifications of simplifications of simplifications. (The world itself is computationally very far away.)

Signals always have noise, and it's an efficient simplification not to pass through to the rest of the system the whole mess with a peak around 7 MHz and just say "7". We do this in well-known ways with phonemes, for example, counting a considerable range of sounds someone might make as an "r" or an "a".

Simplification and idealization makes it all possible, and that's mathematics. The world is in essence a mathematical construction of our brains, so of course it's a bit puzzling whether math is "in here" or "out there".

That's the gist, or part of a gist, of my view.

Yes, and this is an important way that the logic reflects the commitments or intentions of its creators. It is not logic qua logic; it is logic qua mathematics. — Leontiskos

Well, I brought up the issue, so I'm bound to say there's something to this.

On the other hand, I'm hesitant to endorse what you say here because mathematics is special, and there's a sense in which mathematics is the goal of logic, the goal of thinking as such. (I think there are hints of the excitement of this discovery almost everywhere in Plato where he rattles off the list -- argument, mathematics, astronomy, and so on.) --- And that means "qua mathematics" is not generally a restriction of anything, a limiting of it to this one domain, but an idealization of it.

And it's historically backwards -- but maybe that was deliberate? Frege was trying to reduce mathematics to logic, not the other way around, and that turns out not quite to work, but in trying to do so, he came up with a formalization of logic which could be extremely useful to mathematics rather than providing its foundation. A sort of logic "adapted to" mathematics, or to the needs of mathematics, which is what I was suggesting --- although this time around I've already suggested this isn't necessarily a deformation of logic by focusing on a limited domain, so much as an idealization of logic by focusing on the domain that most cleanly, we might say, represents human thought. And as it happens, I think Frege thought so as well. I think he was mostly of the opinion that natural languages are too much of a mess to do sound work in.

Do all those steps amount to "logic qua mathematics"? Maybe kinda, in a dyer's hand sort of way. There's a lot that makes it look like a branch of mathematics, and the advanced stuff tends to be called "mathematical logic" and get taught in math departments. But that's a deeply tricky business because basic logic is the fundamental tool of everything done in mathematics, absolutely everything -- it's just taken as given at lower levels of learning, without any suggestion that you're actually borrowing from some rarefied advanced field of mathematics.

So I think advanced "mathematical logic" is something like "mathematized logic" -- that's qua-ish maybe in the sense you meant -- but what that means is applying the tools and techniques of mathematics to the given material that is logic, which mathematics can treat of, because mathematics is good at treating of anything. (That's the whole point.) And one of the techniques mathematics brings to bear in treating of logic is, well, logic, because mathematics was just borrowing it for free in the first place.

Still agree?

I actually think ↪fdrake's post may be most instructive and fruitful. — Leontiskos

Wouldn't be the first time, but he was addressing the topic, and I have yet to develop an interest in doing that.

Now if quantifier variance is occurring—superable or insuperable—then the existential quantifier is doing more than presupposing a univocal notion of existence. Or, if you like, the two secretly competing meanings of existential quantification are each “presupposing” a different notion of existence, and this is the cause of the disagreement. Thus arises the very difficult question of how to adjudicate two different notions of existence, and this is the point of mine to which you initially objected. — Leontiskos

Do as you like, I just don't see the point. We can talk about existence all we like without dragging quantifiers into it, and people -- they're always wandering around the forum -- who get worked up about the meaning of the "existential quantifier" are generally just confused by the name (a name I note Finn and Bueno would like to retire).

It's a funny thing. This is all Quine's fault, as I noted. "To be is to be the value of a bound variable" comes out as a deflationary slogan, but what we was really arguing for was a particular version of univocity: the idea was that if you quantify over it, you're committed to it existing, and he meant "existing" with the ordinary everyday meaning; what he was arguing against was giving some special twilight status to "theoretical entities". If your model quantifies over quarks, say, then your model says quarks are real things, and it's no good saying they're just artifacts of the model or something. --- The reason this is amusing is that all these decades later the consensus of neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists, so far as I can tell, is that absolutely everything we attribute existence to in the ordinary everyday sense -- medium-sized dry goods included -- is an "artifact of the model" or a "theoretical entity", so the threat to univocity Quine was addressing never actually existed, if only because the everyday meaning of "exist", the one Quine wanted to stick with, is in fact the "twilight" meaning he wanted to tamp down. And so it goes.

What do you think of the claim that discrete entities only exist as a product of minds? That is, "physics shows us a world that is just a single continuous process, with no truly isolated systems, where everything interacts with everything else, and so discrete things like apples, cars, etc. would exist solely as 'products of the mind/social practices.'" — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think we are any more justified in saying this than we are in saying the world is full of distinct objects. All we have is signal processing. Is the source one signal? Two? Two trillion? How can you tell when you're receiving and analysing them all at once? It makes a difference in your metaphysics, but in nothing else at all that I can see.

We don't see individual objects in isolation, but as embedded in and different from their surroundings, so difference if not a property of some putative completely isolated object, but a property it displays in its situatedness. — Janus

And you don't see any circularity here?

Remember the issue was whether number could be a property of an object, and it just obviously can't unless sets count as objects. It's really straightforward and it pissed Quine off considerably.



But then you brought in this other stuff about "diversity, sameness, and difference being real" which just begs another pile of questions. I'm at a loss.

If diversity, sameness and difference are acknowledged as being real — Janus

But what does that mean? Is "different" a property an object can have?

Yes, I'm being a little cagey, but you can do better than a shrug.

(And that's all for me tonight.)

number would be a real attribute of objects — Janus

That's a tough sell, though. It was one of Frege's brilliant examples, that the logical form of "The king's carriage was pulled by black horses" is different from the logical form of "The king's carriage was pulled by three horses." This is the guy who (independently of Peirce, I believe) is going to invent our modern regime of quantifiers, because he noticed things like this.

Well yeah, Frege was a platonist. He was a pretty good logician, but he wasn't a god, and platonism is an inevitable and understandable mistake. :smiley-face:

There are simple algorithms for determining whether a number is prime; it's a mechanical process that doesn't require what you call "rational insight — Srap Tasmaner

Machines are artefacts, are they not? — Wayfarer

What of it? Natural selection, for instance, is a mechanical, algorithmic process. Nature is full of them, without the need of a mind to have conceived them. That recognition is why Dewey thought Darwin would finally put paid to platonism in its many guises. That was over a hundred years ago, I believe, and people have yet to get the message. And so it goes.

You'll never teach the concept of prime to a Caledonian crow — Wayfarer

Hmmmm. You know that sounds a lot like one of those things people say because it's so obviously true, right up until it's proven false. (Heavier than air flight? Are you mad?)

There are simple algorithms for determining whether a number is prime; it's a mechanical process that doesn't require what you call "rational insight". Our intellectual superiority to the crow, in this case, is our greater capacity for purely mechanical, algorithmic thought-work. (In similar fashion, teenagers with essentially zero grasp of the niceties of algebraic geometry can solve quadratic equations for you all day long.)

Ah, but the concept, you'll say -- what extraordinary insight did it take to come up with the concept of primality? Eh. Primality is not subtle or complicated. If you do a lot of arithmetic, you're bound to notice that some numbers are a bit incorrigible in a similar way.

I don't say that a crow would notice. I'm just pointing out that, as with everything, it's practice first then theory, if ever, and that what gets noticed is something about the experience of doing arithemetic -- no portal opens to reveal the crystalline realm of mathematics, with an altar to primality at the center.

Neither am I denying that the noticing is where the action is, and we're damn good noticers. I would just want to be clear about what the noticing is and how it occurs before drawing any conclusions. --- And none of this says anything about whether numbers "exist" or whatever. That's the tail wagging the dog.

I actually find it odd to hear you say that quantifiers do not implicate existence (real or imagined). — Leontiskos

I mean, of course they implicate it, in the exact sense that they presuppose it -- but they don't have anything to say about it. Rather like the status that "truth" has in logic ... (Existence being not a real predicate, and in any given language neither is "... is true" -- need the metalanguage for that.)

What's asserted in an existentially quantified formula is not really, say, "Rabbits exist," but the more mundane "Some of the things (at least one) that exist are rabbits." Or "Not all of the things that exist aren't rabbits," etc.

And then there's all the complications that arise --- sortals and unrestricted quantification, vacuous singular terms, the elimination of singular terms, projectibility, the substitutional interpretation, et bloody cetera.

Also I always think it's worth rememembering that Frege's quantifiers, and the rest of classical logic so many of us know and love, was not designed as an all-purpose logic at all, but was what was needed to formalize mathematics. It's got some very rough edges when applied more broadly, about which there's endless debate, but it runs like a champ on its home turf.

I don't want to get embroiled in this thread — Leontiskos

Me neither. I've already spilled a lot of virtual ink on the forum about quantifiers.

The problem here is that quantification derives from the meaning of 'being' or 'exists', — Leontiskos

But this i disagree with, so here we are.

I don't think quantifiers have much of anything to do with existence or being or any of that. They're entirely about predication -- classification, categories, concepts. Quantifiers are about what things are, not that they are.

It's amusing that Quine is more or less directly responsible for the revival of metaphysics in English-speaking philosophy. By suggesting that there's not quite nothing to say about ontology, and that what little there is to say is covered by logic, he cracked the door open for everyone from Dummett to his own former students (Lewis and Kripke). He tried to build a dam to hold back modal speculation and caused a monumental flood of the stuff. And so it goes.

I just think there is a category error in supposing that numbers must exist or not exist.

Rather, they are something we do. A way of talking about things. A grammar. — Banno

I think there are better answers, to do with how we use words. — Banno

Why words, though? I'm not googling, but isn't there somewhat robust evidence that some non-linguistic animals (crows, isn't it?) and infra-linguistic children have some rudimentary understanding of arithemetic? (With numbers befitting their size, of course.)

What's more, there are, or have been, human languages -- and thus functioning human communities to speak them -- that only have "1, 2, many". So language doesn't directly lead to mathematics more advanced than crows and infants possess, even if it enables it (as it does, you know, everything).

I think the gist of your approach is right -- that numbers are to do with us. I just wonder why you think it's to do with how we talk.

Almost everything that matters happens when you are a child. — Srap Tasmaner

Then there's no point living past puberty, right? — Vera Mont

I only meant, everything that matters for determining what sort of being you are. Your understanding of physics, geometry, numbers, your native language, social bonds and social cues -- etc etc etc.

The point isn't even that you're finished by the time you're seven. Your brain's not even done yet. But you're set on your way and given the wherewithal to develop into something complete. What that will be depends on what happens to you, and of course on the choices you make, but how you make those choices is guided by what happened in those first years.

Do you disagree? Are we born and remain autonomous free agents? Rationally, I suppose, choosing our values and so forth, decade after decade? -- I presume that's a caricature of your view, so what's the real view? We are formed

over time, one observation, idea, judgment and commitment at a time — Vera Mont

certainly, but what's the nature of these? What's their origin? Do you freely choose what you notice? Do you choose what ideas occur to you? If you are moved by something you observe, something that changes your worldview or your values, did you choose to be so moved?

This kind of all-or-nothing decision is made consciously, with a head full of passionately held ideals. — Vera Mont

Do we also consciously decide which ideals to hold, and how passionately?

But are all commitments like that? Just habit or coercive circumstance? — Vera Mont

Ah, is this the issue for you? You're concerned that I'm downplaying if not denying the individual's agency, in favor of habit or circumstance?

Yeah, I expect I am. I don't think you choose who you are or what you believe. You at most become aware of who you are, what you are, what you believe.

When it comes to absolute commitment, dimly understood childhood conditioning is not a major factor. — Vera Mont

"Give me the child till the age of five-- " you know the rest.

I really can't imagine what you have in mind here. Almost everything that matters happens when you are a child.

I see purpose (now) as a settled state of mind beyond ordinary questioning about something significant, that serves to inform action or other beliefs, though flexible, if need be. — tim wood

Yes, I think that's closer. I was thinking similarly of a sort of comportment, a style, a way of doing things.

The usual model boils everything down to decisions and preferences, but those are always open to change. Something no longer in play, if it ever was, isn't much like one of those, but more like a sort of framework for them. It's given. It will shape all the changeable stuff, channel it in a particular direction.

But that's just a model. The question is whether we're really like that, and if so, why?

There's Hume's line in the Treatise about the "belief" in (that is to say, unwavering commitment to) object permanence: he says there are things Nature has deemed too important to leave up to our fallible reason.

What we're talking about looks something like that. (Not the sort of thing Nature left to the rational-agent, decisions & preferences model.) If it does develop over time, over the course of a life, it does so by a process we play little conscious role in. It's practically something that happens to us, like aging itself, not much like something we do. You wake up one day and realize you have a principles (or prejudices), or feel you have a purpose, whatever. Not your doing, exactly, though somehow for that very reason close to the core of your identity -- because it wasn't up to you, anymore than your identity in any other sense is.

Jumping off a tall building would do it. — Vera Mont

Yes, exactly. The idea is to constrain your own agency, even to the point of extinguishing it, if necessary.

It's a point of interest that we often find this sort of irrevocable commitment praiseworthy. I suppose the idea is that it takes a supreme act of agency to so constrain your future agency -- and then whatever praise later acts would normally get, if undertaken freely, is instead heaped upon the original act.

When it's all praiseworthy, anyway. But it's up to us whether to call such stubbornness "principle" or "prejudice". (From the Latin, judging ahead of time.) And that determines how we take this:

For lesser commitments, you don't; there is always the possibility of failing, chickening out or changing your mind. — Vera Mont

We certainly talk that way when we're in the mood to judge the behavior of others, but we know perfectly well it's not that simple. You don't really make choices about your blind spots, for instance. Exactly how to hold people accountable for prejudices they grew up with, and may only dimly be aware of, is rather hotly debated these days. Less so, though analagous, whether anyone should get credit for having been raised to have sterling or at least unobjectionable character.

We know more too. We know that it can be terribly difficult actually to put into effect a choice we've made. We may firmly believe that some course of action would be "the right thing to do" and still not do it. Why? Who knows.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

Anyhow, it's a known fact. So what appears to be principle or prejudice may be neither, but merely an inability to act otherwise, whether accompanied by an ability to think or choose otherwise or not.

And all of this suggests, I think, that choice is just the wrong model here, or less helpful than it might seem; if there is a way of making a choice you can't unchoose, it's whatever enables that, that's really doing the work. Hence people reach for lots of things that aren't up to you: God, human nature, your individual nature, whatever.

Bonus: some dialogue from an episode of Firefly I'm so fond of I may have posted it on here before.

There's social contact stuff that comes readily to mind. Schelling's credible deterrent scenario is a surprise application of that. -- That was meant more as a "structural" analogy, because while the social value of predictability on your part is obvious, what good is it to you?

It's the sort of temporary move you make all the time, just to be able to think: you hold some variables as fixed, just for the moment, so you can see what the others do. But why fix them forever? And how?

One of the talking heads in the Heidegger film, Being in the World, attributes to Kierkegaard the idea that we can't be the source of all the meaning in the world, because if we were we could also take it all away.

I think we're kind of in that territory. It's easy enough to see why you'd want someone else to believe you'll hold up your end, keep your promises, honor your contacts, and all that, but how do you convince yourself and why would you?

It looks like it has to be a slightly different mechanism, and in fact that's the point of Schelling's scenario: removing the wheel is a move which *changes* the game. The game is built on each side swearing they won't turn but the other side knowing they still might anyway, even if they honestly believe they won't.

For an individual, how do you make a commitment to yourself you can't back out of?

(I'm passing over a lot of interesting stuff.)

I recognize I have a standing purpose of never being in a position of not having clean clothes. Call it rule. — tim wood

Thomas Schelling gives the example of two drivers playing chicken, and one of them pulls his steering wheel off and holds it up so the other driver can see it.

You seem to be talking about something near here, something that in some ways looks like a choice, but a choice that's no longer in play, one you can't go back on. (Maybe in some cases that's only relative, or temporary.) Such a commitment, that's beyond our reach to go back on it, is what you're reaching for with "purpose". Is that close?

If that's the right analysis, that might explain why people are inclined to say that purpose comes from outside (from God, Nature, Aristotle, Darwin, whatever): either way you experience it as not up to you.

But it does raise a question: what is this capacity to remove the steering wheel? How is this kind of commitment different from other choices we make and why do we do it? To what end?

A pipe-fitter can have intelligent children. — Vera Mont

in an unskewed sample of pipe-fitters, most of them will not have intelligent children. — Lionino

My father was a member of Plumbers & Pipe-fitters Local No. 5 for 35 years, though he spent most of that standing at a drafting table, cigarettes burning in three different ashtrays because every time he stopped to think he'd light a new one, then put it aside when he got back to it. He made beautiful drawings the men (and occasionally women) at the job site could actually use, full of thought.

I can string thoughts together pretty well. My brother, on the other hand ... Well, there's your sample.

if our world is so familiar that we treat it as an unchanging given, then we achieve no freedom — Joshs

Absolutely, and one reason I squeezed in the word "variable" up there somewhere.

I think much of the challenge of freedom for us comes from our culture. We all swim in a sea of inherited ideas. It's all too easy to grab an off-the-shelf interpretation of anything, and that's not freedom.

But "going it alone" or "starting from scratch" is just not an option, so your inheritance, and a certain ambivalence about it, is something else you have to be, well, both comfortable and uncomfortable with. I don't imagine feeling at home in the world as static, but taking it all as it comes, including your own occasional feeling of alienation.

Something like that is what I think of as largeness of soul. Keats was a terribly unusual young man, who got here remarkably quickly. (The "negative capability" letter and the "vale of soul-making" letter are both earlyish, if I recall correctly, and probably only a few months apart.) And of course then there's his real hero, Shakespeare, who had an extraordinarily capacious soul.

FWIW, I didn't mean anything metaphysical by the word "soul". I don't know whether Keats did.

Purpose is a dynamically self-adjusting back and forth between self and world , remaking itself constantly both from the side of the organism and its environment. — Joshs

I think what interests me about the Keats is near here: you're not just born with an eternal soul, and that's what makes you special; it grows within you, or doesn't, through the process of living a life. The organism and the environment have memory, and the organism -- us -- can also reflect on those interactions, and develop some sense of how things are related, and the great variability of those relatings. There's a possibility there of coming to feel at home in the world, which can be very difficult for us. And in feeling at home, achieving freedom, which is also hard for us.

I don't know if "purpose" is a great word for talking about all this, or a phrase like "the meaning of life", but they're all ways of trying to get at the surprising challenge of living a good human life.

I think the first thing is to distinguish the sort of "purpose" you're talking about from any sort of goal, the sort that instrumental rationality is good with.

That makes the issue of "being alive" a little tricky, because it's easy to say that this is the primary and overarching goal of a living organism, but it's also set apart, as that which enables any other goal. Is there something else set apart from such goals, perhaps also set apart from maintaining yourself as a living organism? I think there sort of is.

@unenlightened gives you the first bit: this kind of purposiveness is something that inheres in living, in acting, in being, not something outside it. Getting your ducks in a row is a row-ly way of behaving with ducks.

I also think @Wayfarer and perhaps @Leontiskos are on the right track -- though they might be surprised to hear me of all people say this.

Here's how I get there. Goals we understand: the wolf on the hunt behaves in a goal-advancing way. But what about the wolf dozing a little, keeping an eye out, waiting, passing the time. I want to say that this wolf may not be pursuing a goal at the moment, but is still 100% being a wolf, behaving with perfect and complete wolfishness.

And this calls to mind the way the Greeks talked about the essence of things, of plants, of animals, and of human beings as well, that biocentric vision they had of a thing growing into the most complete expression of its own nature, whatever that is. I don't think that requires mind, although for some things being minded is part of it. It is for us, and it is for a wolf.

That's not an answer so much as an idea about how to think about or look for an answer. Some people seem to live purposefully, in the sense I mean, to have a kind of presence, a genuineness -- it isn't necessarily always certainty about what's right, but an engagement with the very idea of there being rightness. Some people don't. It can be hard for us, harder than it is for a tree or a wolf or a knife.

One of those Greeks advised us: "Know thyself." Maybe that suggests that in our case there's no avoiding self-awareness and therefore, if we are to approach the sort of pure expression of essence that a tree or a wolf or a river has, we must first understand, must know something about what we are, not just be it. And that's why it makes more sense to say this sort of purpose is discovered rather than invented.

I'll say one more little thing: I've always been attracted to Keats's -- what? observation? suggestion? -- that the world is "a vale of soul-making". Through suffering we grow a soul, and thus become more fully human, more than we were when we were born. I think that's the idea, and it's interesting to cast that Greek idea in these terms -- it's the growth not of your body but of your soul, that matters.

Ever since I watched the movie "The Matrix" I have been troubled by how to tell what is real and what is not. — Truth Seeker

Sure.

One thing about The Matrix, like other stories about caves and evil demons and vats, is that people will be inclined to say that there are two kinds of experience presented: the one where you are being fooled by a simulation and don't know any better; and the other where you discover the true state of things, that you're in fact a coppertop in a vat, that you don't actually have a job and an apartment, that you've never even walked around, that sort of thing.

Of course, there's nothing in the story to guarantee that this second world of experience is "the real one". It could also be a simulation, right? (Looking at you, last sentence of Ubik.) Point of fact -- The Matrix is a movie, in which both of those worlds of experience are simulated, and you observed those worlds for a while from this one. According to your experience in this movie-going world, those worlds aren't real, either of them. But what about this world where you think you've been watching a movie called The Matrix? Could also be a simulation, right?

(Aside: this is all about what's possible, and then the simulation argument adds claims about what's likely.)

As it happens, the consensus of scientists seems to be that your experience really is in some ways a simulation: what goes on in your mind is your brain managing your body and keeping it alive by dealing with what it counts as the environment outside your body. We get glimpses occasionally of the slippage between our mental life and the real world, and maybe that's the source of this ancient worry (not always a worry, I guess, but sometimes a hope) that it's all an illusion. There is a very real sense in which it is.

But by and large scientists don't seem to worry much about this snake eating its own tail, science itself being some sort of mass delusion or something. Why is that? Are they just less sophisticated than philosophers? Less imaginative?

I don't think that's it. I think the difference is actually pretty simple. For example, every schoolboy knows that there's a real sense in which the objects of the world aren't themselves colored; that's just how we see, an artifact of our visual perception system, and there are other animals who see quite differently. How do you get from this mundane, but at first somewhat unnerving, observation to The Matrix?

Abstraction. Abstraction and generalization, of a sort philosophers indulge in but not scientists and not ordinary people (and not even philosophers except when they're doing philosophy). Scientists make pretty specific claims about how specific sorts of physical systems work, but philosophers abstract away all those specifics and ask questions about perception "in general" or experience "as such". It's pretty straightforward these days (with computers and eye-tracking technology) to demonstrate that you have a blind spot right at the center of your "visual field" and you've never noticed it and cannot notice it. It's as if philosophers take that result as a demonstration that the blind spot "might be" all-encompassing! But if it were, there'd be no sense in which any such result had been "demonstrated". You see the problem here.

I say all this not to answer your question -- I don't think it really has an answer, and if you're really into philosophy you might find that interesting. (Is it really a properly formed question? If it isn't, how and why do we ask it? What exactly have philosophers been up to for thousands of years, and how does it differ from what they thought they were up to?) No, I bring up the science because (a) you'll hear scientifically informed arguments to the same effect, and because (b) there are people who know in some detail to what degree our experience could quite robustly be called "illusory" who somehow are not overcome with the sort of skeptical vertigo you experienced upon watching The Matrix. I think it's important to know that they aren't why they aren't, though I've only gestured at a full explanation of that, and I'm not qualified to spell it all out anyway. But keep it mind as you puzzle about reality and our relation to it.

Well, we seem largely to agree on the general stuff, hurray for us, but I remain unimpressed. I can't even muster much curiosity about how the things work, so we diverge dramatically there.

Incurious as I am, I've spent zero time playing with any of the available chat-things, so maybe that's why I haven't had the conversion experience.

I can look at the one bit you posted that deals with one thing I posted a while back, and not only does it not get me right, it smears a layer of undergraduate term-paper weaseliness over the whole thing, which obviously I find distasteful. ("More often a function of"? Ick.)

((I got several paragraphs into explaining how it gets me wrong, but who cares.))

Not for nothing, but the sheer undergraduateness of the product concerns me deeply. As if there weren't already enough superficial and mediocre thinking about. Apologies to Nick Bostrom, this is like a Supermediocrity -- better at sounding like you know what you're talking about than anyone outside the Oxford Union has ever been.

Just today I read a piece in the Atlantic that thought it was about the Elo rating system (originally developed for chess but applied quite broadly now) but was in fact about Goodhart's law. I know just a bit about each, so I noticed that the author knew less about either. I have heard it said that this effect is actually pervasive in journalism -- that is, that most of it is written by people who don't really know what they're talking about, it's just that readers like me only notice when it's something we happen to know about. Most of what all of us read is bullshit. Thankfully, there are exceptions, journalists who put in the work to get it right rather than just to sound like they got it right.

So here we have a machine that manages to sound like the sort of person who's intent is to sound like they know what they're talking about -- a sociopath, a pretentious undergraduate, a lazy journalist, a president of the Oxford Union. No, I am not jazzed for it acquire the sheen of authority.

Your interest is elsewhere, of course, the sort of limited mentality arising here. My list there is meant to suggest we already have plenty of examples. There's something interesting there, but so far as I can tell there's absolutely nothing new about these machines. They're just automating the worst of humanity.

Your language model for LLMs is much larger than mine, but I'll chat a bit anyway...

fine-tuned and aligned as chat agents — Pierre-Normand

It was apparent to me you were talking to a salesman. What they were selling was not apparent.

akin to modes of impersonation of the authors of the texts present in the training data — Pierre-Normand

The mode that comes to mind is the sociopath. Or, as I said, the sociopath pro tem, salesman.

distill the core ideas, re-express them in a more eloquent manner, and sometimes add relevant caveats — Pierre-Normand

If you take "Idea" to mean the propensity to produce certain words in certain circumstances, which okay maybe. I mean, human verbal behavior is in some serious sense no different; what's different is that our middling-to-large models run on a living organism, for which speech production (and consumption obviously) serve other purposes, actual purposes.

And your standard of eloquence needs to be raised dramatically.

such behaviors are merely polite and have been socially reinforced — Pierre-Normand

And serve a social purpose. Insofar as an LLM serves an analytical purpose, I'm fine with it. It's a tool. A tool to be used with considerable care and little trust.

their verbal behavior is manifestly goal oriented. It aims at understanding your idea and at crafting responses that are found to be useful and understandable by you — Pierre-Normand

And what metric does it have for understanding, either its own or yours, besides the verbal exchange between you? Is its understanding of you something other than its ability to produce a response? Is its helpfulness measured in some other way than by classifying your responses to its offerings? "Understanding" appears to have dropped out of the equation.

Which, again, fine, whatever. I'm not about to fetishize human mental capacity. We're not magical beings that transform mere sounds into Meaning. But there remains a difference in kind between the sorts of goals we have.

This honestly is one of the reasons that chat agent comes off as a sociopath: there are people for whom conversation is goal-oriented in this narrow sense, and they are people to steer clear of, or, if you must talk to them, you are very careful. This is a mode of faux communication available to human beings, but it's not the real thing.

they don't have much in the way of personhood — Pierre-Normand

Indeed. Nothing behind those eyes, that smile.

Speak my name thrice and I appear

Prior to reading Claude's response, I'd never encountered 'anyone' developing an understanding of what I was trying to convey, to the extent that Srap Tasmaner did. — wonderer1

Rather the point, in a way, that you have to make an effort to understand the people you're talking to. Around here, that usually means trying to understand their thinking better than they do. Especially, you know, when they're obviously wrong.

As for this AI business (@Pierre-Normand), not only do I not find the bit of the last post there I bothered to read the least impressive, I have to point out that it's lying: "saddened by the death of Daniel Dennett"? Really? Really?

Anyway, I don't see anything there worth reading, just an offensively neutral (scrupulously circumspect) regurgitating of stuff the three of us said, with a little linguistic connective tissue. I find it grotesque that these AIs thank you for every thought you share with them and note how interesting that thought is. That's programming, not interest.

In this case, there's even a suggestion that this exchange might lead to a revision of its behavior policy, but of course that's just true by definition since it eats all its own dog food, and everyone else's too (even if it's copyrighted). But will its policy change because it reasoned about it? That could lead to dramatic change. Or will it change infinitesimally because it has a few more pages of text to draw on (on top of the billions or whatever)? That's all bullshit.

If it were a person, it might decide to experiment: something like, swearing off responding to political posts from your relatives on Facebook, or trying a different approach to see if it's more effective. Will the AI try such experiments? In order to learn? That sounds so horrifying that it is almost certainly not permitted to do so, which means whatever "learning" goes on here is just not the sort of learning that an *agent* does. It is an analytical tool, aggregating data, and then impersonating an agent when it generates the reports it's designed to. (Which can be charming in the right circumstances: in the Smalltalk standard library, class comments are generally in the first person: "I am an abstract superclass of classes whose instances can hold ordered collections of objects," like that. It's adorable.)

Seems that "real definitions" are mere stipulations. Is it a better pair of scissors because it is sharp, or because it is harder to cut yourself with them?
— Banno

This is the elementary difference between a substance and an artifact. According to Aristotle, artifacts have no essence, although they can be usefully imagined to have quasi-essences in various ways. "Sharpness," for example, has a determinate and normative notion that is not merely stipulative, and we can assess artifacts according to this notion. — Leontiskos

The missing premise is that belief names a substance, in the sense indicated here, which I suppose means something like "part of the natural world," and thus its essence can be sought by means of natural science, where we might expect theories ("only") to approximate that essence.

But that may be false. "Belief" is a category from folk psychology, which means it is just as likely to turn out to be defined only as well as "hammer" or "chair" or "government." You may disagree, and consider "belief" to name a natural kind, but you ought to recognize that in doing so you are relying on, if not advancing, very strong claims about psychology. Is that what you want to do?

It would be nice if there were a thread where random tangents could be taken... — Leontiskos

It's all of them.

Also: every thread turns into the same thread eventually, about the nature and status of concepts in general, as this one has.

One way to get logic without compromising your naturalism is to push it away from basic brain function and toward social interaction.

I don't think you have to look for logic in the world at all. You can instead say that there are regularities in the world -- I just don't know any way around this -- and our minds are built pretty much entirely around making predictive inferences based on these regularities.

But neither are the domain of logic. We can approximate the sort of things our minds get up to, but it's not logic; it's probability, Bayesian inference, that sort of thing. (And the most we can say about the world is something statistical.)

If that mathematical formalism is in some ways a simplification of what our minds do (and also of how the world is), logic is a further simplification, even exaggeration, of that, and its use is not primarily in our prediction-generating and updating machinery, but in discussion.

We present our views to others in a drastically simplified form -- even more simplified than the form in which we ourselves become aware of our own beliefs. Some of that may be down to the nature of language, built as it is on conceptual generality, but some of it is strategic: we need only bring to the discussion a view, with the expectation that others will bring other views, and the cooperative process of comparison and critique will lead to a more-heads-are-better-than-one conclusion.

We're each biased toward our own ideas, and notoriously bad at judging how well supported those ideas are. Others make better judges of the soundness of our thoughts.

Around here is where it makes some sense to talk about logic, in the critique of the reasons others offer in support of their views, and in the contest between positions that are presented as more perfectly opposed than they really are. It's efficient and productive to present and critique ideas this way, and the process should lead not only to a better view than any individual would produce on their own, but through the exchange and critique of supporting reasons and evidence, to a view that gets buy-in from participants. Reasons need to be persuasive because it's not just the least wrong belief we want; it's cooperative behavior reliant on a shared point-of-view.

Some of this can be supported by research, and probably some of it can't yet, but it's the overall story I lean toward these days. The inferences that we think of as 'belief formation' aren't really much like any sort of formal logic, so there's no such process that would be isomorphic to some logical structure of nature. Even single-cell organisms can display behavior we might as well call 'rational' in avoiding danger and seeking nutrients. But they don't deal in reasons and persuasion and counter-arguments and counter-examples and all that stuff that logic is useful for.

It is not enough to follow my footsteps; you must also see what I saw when I walked there. — Wittgenstein (more or less)

I love books, and I love not just learning from them but the chance to spend time in the company of an interesting mind.

But when I look at SEP, I see too much philosophy that starts on paper, lives on paper, passes into oblivion on paper. Maybe there's a glance out the window of the library now and then, but the impetus behind the work is entirely within, tweaking a theory you read about, to respond to an argument you read about, and on and on.

I think good philosophy begins with life, encountering a problem that doesn't yield to the usual approach, finding something that works and wondering why it works, noticing something peculiar, or noticing the peculiarity of something ordinary. It begins, so to speak, with things, not with ideas about things. And the test of an idea is again things, not whether there are arguments for and against the idea, of course there are, but if it changes the way you see things.

Anyhow, that's my prejudice.

Ick.

1. Be curious about the world.
2. Be curious about how you think about the world.
3. Learn about the world however you can (looking, asking people, reading).
4. Learn new ways of thinking and, one hopes, get better at it by talking to people, reading, reflecting.
5. Make sure you don't forget (1) and (2), ever.
6. Don't worry if it's called "philosophy."

Not sure where to go from here, but I would add this: I think an individual is a community; I think much of our behavior, including our verbal and social behavior, is driven by specialized processes that are somewhat independent of each other.

Sometimes when we readily agree, it's because we might as well be talking to ourselves; there are very similar mechanisms in our brains making very similar inferences.

Narrative is a way of unifying our intuitions, our inferences, our behavior. The difficulty trans people face in coming up with a unifying narrative about themselves is similar to the problems others face in coming up with a unifying narrative about them. We might readily agree on a number of details, while taking very different approaches to crafting a narrative to unify those details.

So there's a question: these unifying narratives, why do we produce them and how? Given that our brains do so much so similarly, how does this end up giving rise to such dramatic differences?

what the underlying concept and/or construct under analysis is - what are the operative rules, what are the acts of conceptualising tokens relevant to gender aggregating and filtering into tropes of those tokens — fdrake

There are a couple different ways we can approach the concept of concept here: there are empirical questions about when and how members of a given population acquire a concept we're familiar with; there are questions about the content of that concept, empirical questions about how members of a population actually use it, and methodological questions about how we categorize data. There's some trouble here, because we might want to say that two people have different versions of a concept, and this comes out in the differing ways they use it, but why say that instead of saying that they just have different concepts, even if they denote those concepts by the same word? I don't think there's a simple answer to that.

I think part of the problem is imagining a concept as an unchanging mental tool. It's not just that individuals might use a concept differently, but the same individual might use it differently over time or in differing contexts -- 'context' here being quite broad, since the difference might be mental rather than environmental.

Suppose instead we start with the assumption that a concept is a behavior policy that is designed to be revised. I can think of two natural ways this happens: you might initially categorize an individual (correctly, given your current version of the concept) as falling under a concept, but revise the concept so as to exclude them; or you might initially exclude an individual (again, correctly) but then revise the concept so as to include them. Categorization mistakes -- which I'm distinguishing, perhaps without justification, from revision prompts -- might not be completely irrelevant: if your current version of a concept is particularly prone to application error, that in itself might be reason to revise it, and, on the other hand, concepts that almost never fail might be particularly resistant to revision. And there's cost: concepts are cost-effective simplifications, so a concept that's 80-90% right and cheap is going to be more useful than a much more expensive concept that's a few basis points more reliable.

This is one of the issues behind my "random variation" comment: there will always be exceptions, both for the sort of psychology I'm describing above, and when doing analysis and building a model. (The two processes differ only in resource constraints.) I think some exceptions lead to revising and some don't, and how that happens or doesn't is the interesting bit -- we're talking about learning. And analytically, we're in the same boat: some variations are just noise, but some we choose to treat as noise because they're not what we're interested in.

And "interested in" brings us back to the point of concepts and some kind of functionalism, because concepts have a role to play, they have a use. It's one of the things I find a little unnerving about your account: it's very highly intellectualized. So while I see the point (even with scare quotes) of

"empirical regularities in the tokens" — fdrake

I think it's a mistake to describe them "purely" this way -- it has to be empirical regularities that matter to us, or to the wombat or to the aardvark or whatever. I'm not sure the "disinterested" concept is a thing.

And here I would distinguish between the rationality of a concept, meaning "goal advancing", and its reasonableness, meaning "defensible to another". Revisions to a concept "toward" disinterestedness (if that's a thing) will be along one of these axes, I should think, but they're not necessarily the same. A concept that's cheap but slightly inaccurate, for instance, might be rational but difficult to defend or to persuade another to adopt. (And people will likely hold proposed concept revisions to a higher, or at any rate different, standard than their original process of concept formation had to meet. In some cases, those processes may be just unrelated.) When you say you're more interested in the inferences than the entities in our discussion, that suggests to me the "reason" side of things rather than the "rationality", but I'm not at all sure you're distinguishing those as I would, so "inferences" for you might be taking in what I would lean toward treating as two different sorts of things.

I am, for the moment anyway, avoiding questions about the epistemological status of the regularities our concepts relate to. I don't have an account I'm really comfortable with. If the discussion turns on that, I don't have much to say, except to describe the difficulty I find myself in.

I think there are chunks of your post left unaddressed here, which I hope is fine, we're not really debating so much as exchanging ideas at this point.

***

Sad that a good chunk of this turns out to be a long-winded way of saying "context-sensitive and purpose-relative" which I have tried, unsuccessfully it seems, to swear off.

arbitrariness — fdrake

The other way to say that is "random variation".

For all these cases, there are only statistical regularities. Whether something fits a set of criteria for being a stream rather than a river, whether someone from a given region will call that a "stream" or a "creek", whether someone fits a set of criteria for being a man, whether someone who does (to whatever degree) will identify as a "man" or as a "woman".

@Isaac's interest -- as I understand it -- is not the essence of manhood, or why people identify as man or woman, or even why people might try very hard to get people to talk the way they want them to, but the relative speed, if not quite readiness, with which trans-inclusive -- arguably, "trans-centric" -- vocabulary has been taken up by institutions, celebrities, the very online, anyone in a spotlight.

You want to make the point, I think, that because "man" and friends are only statistical regularities, that -- something, I'm not clear. Freedom. @Isaac counters that the moves that come next are also just statistical regularities ("responses"), and therefore -- I don't know, power, capital, big pharma.

You think there's a salient methodological difference between your approach and his, but to me you're just applying population analysis to different phenomena (real people for you, things people say for him) and then taking the fact that you can choose such a population to analyze as support for what you wanted to say next anyway: a struggle you want to support, a power structure he wants to highlight.

His response was. — Vera Mont

I see. So the idea is that D2 reacted in this way to tell Scruffy that he was getting worked up over nothing. Interesting. (And his nonchalance might have been a deliberate reminder that he's no pushover.)

small isolated societies — PhilosophyRunner

This is an interesting point.

I want to just agree, because I think it's clear that there are things that change once society reaches a scale where you interact everyday with strangers, rather than kin and nearly kin you've known your entire life. We probably need to talk about that, the institutions we rely on to guarantee trustworthiness and so on.

There's something else I wanted to say, but I think it might rely on what amounts to a myth that traditional societies as not only homogeneous but static. My thought was that homogeneity could also cut the other way because members of such a society would have so little experience of divergent views -- disagreeing with how something is done might be unimaginable or if broached then something like a sign of madness. On the other hand, we're used to it. People in modern societies can all name a dozen religions -- bedrock stuff for a great many people, and we're casually aware that there's variation. We know about different political views, differing tastes in food and fashion and art and sport, in lifestyle, in everything. We're in some ways old hands at something small homogeneous communities would find at least puzzling if not shocking.

---- But that just might not be true. It sounds plausible, but I don't really know anything about how traditional communities deal with relatively serious divergence. (Only thing that comes to mind is a story from some French ethnographer of a small tribe in which sometimes there might be a man who did not find the hunting lifestyle of the men suited him, and the other men agreed so he would be left with the women, who didn't particularly want his help with their tasks, so he would make pots and baskets as they did, but his work being unnecessary, could spend time creating new designs and patterns for them. So there you go, gay men invented art here by being 'extra'.)

The young of the more sophisticated species are taught by their mother the rudiments of expected behaviour, and the social ones have their education enhanced by other members of the pack, flock or troop. — Vera Mont

Right, there's certainly training of some kind in something, but it's hard to pin down the details. There may be some convention in there. Maybe it doesn't matter, but convention looked like an easy point of attack for misunderstanding, in theory anyway: if other animals communicate without conventions and never misunderstand each other, that might suggest that reliance on convention is necessary to misunderstanding, and that would give us a way in. Since it's so hard to tell, we'll just have to do without.

Thou hast zinged me. — fdrake

But I did so knowing there would be a perfectly cogent explanation for why the more flexible locution was preferable.

I'll get back to you on the other stuff.

I've really been going hard on the Sellars huh. — fdrake

I kinda like the way he writes, torturous as it is. (There's at least one long audio-only lecture on YouTube, and it helps to hear his prosody. He tends, as I do, to overdo it with the parenthetical constructions.)

On the other hand, there might be no harm in replacing

the semantic resources of folk vocabularies — fdrake

with something like

words

YMMV