Personally, I don't read ↪Wayfarer's modest proposals as "challenging science" or arguing for "exclusivity" of philosophical reasoning versus scientific reasoning. — Gnomon

Did you read the OP?

Indeed. Conversely, what philosophical point do you think is being made by this oft-cited trope?

As someone somewhere on this forum once said, the answer to "How long would it take monkeys to compose the complete works of Shakespeare?" is about 300,000 years. That experiment has already been run. — Srap Tasmaner — Wayfarer

Probably not a great number for me to have chosen, since that's the emergence of homo sapiens. Something in the millions for hominids or for simians would have been a better choice.

Looked at from the perspective of ecology language is one enormous adaptive advantage in one sense — Janus

I wasn't making any claim about language, or about the adaptive value of language. The point stands if you ask "How long would it take mammals to produce the work of Shakespeare?" and move the starting-point back even more -- but it's not as picturesque as the monkeys.

I took the point to be the claim that life originates as a chance event. — Wayfarer

Truly bizarre. I am speechless.

The analogy of monkeys typing represents the random combination of elements that just happened to form themselves into organisms. — Wayfarer

Now, see, if you had thought about it for a minute, you might have realized that I was making exactly the opposite point. Evolution gets results in the timeframes that it does by not being random. It threw up mammals, then simians, then hominids, then finally something like us. Took millions of years to keep ratcheting up the complexity that would so dramatically increase our cognitive capacity that we might have among us one -- and even then only one, among all the humans who have ever lived -- with the mind of Shakespeare.

I don't have to claim that the ability to write blank verse revenge tragedies is an adaptive advantage. I'm not insane.

The point I have been making is only that the creature that produced Lear shares, what is it, 99.5% of his DNA with chimpanzees, and more than a little with plenty of other terrestrial life forms. He is a product of the same process that produced every living thing we know of.

Now you want to say that his body is, but his mind -- no, no, that's, I don't know, magic, or whatever it is you think makes humans dramatically different from everything else living. And yet it's perfectly obvious that evolution endowed other creatures with mind as well. We are not so unique as all that. And there's more and more evidence that our minds have little flaws that betray their evolutionary origins, just as our bodies do, just as all animals do. Evolution loves a workable kludge.

Credences … can be thought of as ratios — Pierre-Normand


They shouldn’t. One’s credence is the degree to which one believes a thing to be true. Often one’s credence is determined by the ratios but this is not necessary, as shown in this case.

If A iff B and if one is 50% sure that A is true then one is 50% sure that B is true. That just has to follow. — Michael

You know 50% is a ratio, right?

Yeah I think that's not dissimilar to the chess examples I was giving. What remains unexpressed in the moment is still expressible, in this case as clearly as possible in mathematics. It may very well be that there are activities complex enough that no human is ever able to give an analytical account of their actions while so engaged -- just too many variables, too many feedback loops, and so on. And then you have something that's expressible in principle but never in practice. I think sports can be like this, flow state activities like surfing and rock climbing -- these pursuits effectively require lots of very quick calculations and estimates and updates and very fast adjustments of how to weight different factors, things humans can clearly do but which outstrip the speed at which we could consciously analyze or explain them.

But there's another category where people believe there is a kind of judgment that cannot be reduced to analysis even in principle. Maybe judgments about art, for example. I think the idea is that there isn't even conceivably a predefined set of variables to work with, no real way to make the sort of calculations you conceivably could, say, about the wave you're surfing or the pitch you're trying to hit.

Even if you're an excellent critic and can articulate some of what appeals to you (or doesn't) about a work of art, no one even considers the possibility that we're establishing truth here -- as you could, say, determine with certainty whether there was any path by which a fielder could have reached a batted ball. Not only is criticism not plausibly objective, it is not plausibly exhaustive. There is always something in a work of art still to be articulated, even if you go on and on.

An interesting case is unsolved problems in mathematics. Lots of mathematicians will have a strong intuition about the truth or falsehood of something like the continuum hypothesis, but that intuition itself may be a little strange. We're talking about math after all, so the truth of a statement is directly tied to its provability, but provability may not be on the table given the math currently available and something that we will still recognize as math will have to be invented to support proving or disproving what's hypothesized. That's just how math evolves, but then what could be the basis for a mathematician's intuition today? Not just the math he knows, because that's not enough, so the math that could be? Intuitions about what other kinds of math are possible? Long before Andrew Wiles proved it, most mathematicians believed Fermat's last theorem to be true, but it took some major and somewhat unexpected (as I understand it) results from other mathematicians, bringing together disparate fields of mathematics. (Double-checking at Wikipedia, they mention right off that most mathematicians believed it was not yet provable, kinda the position we're in now with the Collatz conjecture, which seems almost obviously true but it does not appear a proof is coming anytime soon.) So what was the basis for that common intuition that indeed the theorem was true?

I may be misremembering, but I think he claimed that evolution by natural selection is blatantly circular, which is clearly horseshit, and not a criticism working biologists even considered taking to heart.

But, hey, you go ahead and add him to your list of voices crying in the wilderness.

You can always find a guy, but Fodor's writing on evolution found few defenders. Make of that what you will.

Is this David Lewis you are speaking about? — Janus

C. S. Lewis

But academic employment is dismal these days for many, including minorities. — jgill

Think law school, medical school.

perhaps because Tunisians walk in hidden pairs. When you meet a member of a Tunisian pair for the first time, their sibling ensures they are the next one you meet. — Pierre-Normand

I'm gonna come back to this, but I just want to point out that you're now describing a pickpocketing team, a stick and a cannon.

I foresee fun new variations of Sleeping Beauty.

It doesn't seem this ruling affects hiring practices at universities. — jgill

But it would likely affect the pool of qualified candidates in the future.

The point of affirmative action in education was to intervene early-ish in the employment and wealth pipeline, as a way to redress racial disparities that are the lingering result of our history.

It's a sensible plan, but it's not clear it's been successful -- but then, compared to what? Black Americans would probably be even further behind than they are without affirmative action. And of course there's been continual litigation since it began so programs have been continuously shifting their goals and methods.

I was thinking of Twilight of the Idols and Ecce Homo.

It's not important.

Only reason I posted was because there isn't really one thing in what @Darkneos posted that marks it as fake philosophy; the elements there, even the style, have all found use in serious work. (One element typical of the new age style missing here is the sort of talismanic use of numbers, four types of this, seven steps to reach that, five stages of whatever -- and again, that's not in itself indefensible, but its role in these texts is to convey authority.)

It's surprisingly difficult to draw a line that would put serious or valuable philosophy on one side and BS on the other. Which is interesting. Our little demarcation problem.

No. What gave you that idea?

Did you have a look through the threads? — Darkneos

No. Life is short.

Don't think of this sort of writing as an attempt at communication at all. Like a lot of bullshit, it's an attempt to assert dominance. I'm sorry you've been taken in before. Stick around here. Hardly any of that sort of social engineering. This site is much saner and safer than the rest of the internet.

Please do! — Wayfarer

It's the obvious ones, really.

I'll give you one, but only the definition: biological theory everyone thinks they understand.

I'm not hiding anything. I like to think of these as the philosophical equivalents of Godwin's law. So I am carefully not summoning those demons only because it amuses me.

What we have here is the unholy union of several styles of philosophy that are tricky on their own but dangerous junk when mixed.

(1) The oracular style. Nietzsche could pull this off, but probably no one since. Open to a torrent of obvious criticism, and only young people like Nietzsche's final period best.

(2) The discourse by tendentious definition or gloss. This is Heidegger's trademark. If you're not used to it, it seems like he's just making shit up. But he does have reasons, and his method is to burrow into those simple tendentious phrases and allow them to open up into something that by the end is usually both convincing and enlightening, or at least thought-provoking. (Derrida turns this into argument by innuendo, which is not as cool.)

(3) Logical persuasion, the typical informal argumentation of philosophy since forever.

Putting all of these together is sort of the do-it-yourself kit for new agey charlatans. The style must be pompous, tendentious without acknowledging it, and give the appearance of being logical. (Examples are, you know, everywhere. Pick any page of the likes of Aleister Crowley or David Hawkins or any other flavor of pseudo-philosophy.)

Needless to say, there is no method here. There is no logic, no real argument, no side-door into phenomenology like in Heidegger, there is just performance. It sounds to the speaker like philosophy, like wisdom, or at least like a text from a wisdom tradition -- but those texts were the product of living cultures; this stuff tends to lead to believers creating practices and lifestyles to go with the text, which is all backwards.

Do not be taken in. It's all a fraud, even if the speaker is fooling himself too. Just pass on by.

By the way, it's your model so I don't know what to do with this, but it might be worth bearing in mind that something that is invariably unarticulated might not be inarticulable, but simply not hooked up to the speech-producing system. There are phenomena like blindsight, where people have clearly acquired information about the world, but they don't know they have and cannot articulate it. And other studies that exploit left-right differences where people cannot report what they quite definitely simply because it does not reach their speech center. (Might have been severed corpus colossum patients, don't remember.)

No idea whether there's any room for such an idea in your thinking, but it is possible that the knowledge we have but can't quite put into words is not a different kind of knowledge but only knowledge that is not given access to speech.

Yes, yes, we all know there is another framework. What you need to argue for is exclusivity.

I think your position is that naturalism itself makes an unjustified claim to exclusivity, and you're just rebutting that. I mean, yeah, you do that all the time, but the argument from reason claims that biology needs to get off reason's lawn. And that has to be argued for.

It's worth noting that this idea of competition has of course been institutionalized in science. Scientific theories do face competition, but only from other scientific theories. It's for this very reason that cdesign proponentists have been trying to pass off their faith as just as scientific as something that's really science.

As I understand it, you are not proposing an alternative scientific theory, and imagine your quest as challenging a foundational assumption of science.

But already science allows such challenges. There are some really obvious examples I dare not mention.

Your choice then is (1) present your view as a genuine scientific hypothesis; (2) challenge the methodology of science. Mostly theists opt for door number 2, and defend revelation as knowledge producing.

There is one last alternative, which is not to challenge science but to live alongside it, as religion continues to do, but also art, sports, geez all the other stuff people get up to, and most especially our standard ways of talking about things like the sun rising, tables being solid, people picturing things in their head -- all of that is fine, and scientists also do all that stuff when they're not doing science.

But haven't you lost Sleeping Beauty's other constraint, that the chances of encountering one Italian or two Tunisians are equal?

The random process is fully specified by the equal distribution of coin toss outcomes (over the long run) and the longer "hang around" times of tails outcomes — Pierre-Normand

Haven't read all the recent back and forth here, but I think the usual examples of conditional probability do not apply.

If you want a closer analogy with pedestrians, it's Tunisians walking around in pairs. If the chances of meeting an Italian or a pair of Tunisians are equal, then the chances of meeting *a* Tunisian are either nil, since you can't meet just one, or the same as meeting a pair.

Look at how hang-around times affect the pedestrian-encountering odds. Roughly, if you miss a short walker, you've missed him, but if you miss a long walker you get another chance. That's not how Sleeping Beauty works at all. There's no way to miss your first tatils interview but still catch the second one.

One thing that strikes me as a little odd is that descriptions can be faithful without being exhaustive, and, knowing that, we expect there to be many faithful descriptions of a thing, only some of which compete directly. 7 is a prime number, a lucky number, the most common roll of a pair of dice, the average number of items a person can hold in short-term memory, etc., none of those to the exclusion of the others.

The same seems to be true, but maybe to a lesser degree, when we talk about explanations rather than descriptions. The macro-scale, observable phenomena we're talking about, things people do in the way of talking, reasoning, making decisions, all admit of multiple descriptions and explanations, depending, as you say, on context, on what we're interested in. --- It's even a standard technique in humor to switch descriptive framework in the middle of the joke, or to suggest one framework but reveal another. (Why did the chicken cross the road?)

Lewis's premise is that reasoning admits of only one description. He could have claimed that other accounts leave out what he's interested in, that they miss the reasoning in an act of reasoning and treat it like any other psychological or biological event. Instead he claims that no such description is even possible, and that nothing that could be so described and explained could be what he considers reasoning.

The question is, why would he think that? And it looks like the answer is: theology.

Right, right. Some of us tend to quote Ockham's with a little emphasis on the necessity. That was Quine's read, I'd say: anything your theory needs to quantify over you're committed to, whether you like it or not.

I haven't read enough of by the Russian authors discussed, to have a very deep understanding — wonderer1

Btw, me neither, I think, but it's been years since I looked at that essay. It's just part of the culture now. For instance, it's why 538's mascot is a fox ("Fivey Fox").

Which is almost identical to the original Ockham's, entities should not be multiplied without necessity. (And the simplified version: all else being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the best -- or something like that.)

There are interesting things to say about Ockham's as a rule of thumb, or as a principle.

You looking up the Einstein and me quoting multiple versions of Ockham (almost included the Latin but I'd have to look it up), classic complicator moves.

More to the point, its attributes can't be either predicted or explained on the basis of physics. — Wayfarer

So what's the deal with lesion studies, anesthesia, all the usual things people point to where changes in the brain affect a person's thinking and emotions in predictable ways?

Do you think it might be worth looking deeper than "just experience"? — wonderer1

I think everything you posted is right, and comports with what I understand of the two systems model; thus we can continue to use the word intuition just to mean something like very fast, largely unconscious, habitual thinking, problem solving, recognition, and so on.

Not sure what you had in mind with the question, but I can give a little more background that might clarify things. I think it's actually Simon and company who discover the phenomenon of chunking -- could be he got the idea elsewhere, I don't remember. Basically, a master looks at a position and breaks it up into little clusters of pieces, in some cases standard patterns with known properties (like a fianchettoed bishop, or a knight blockading an isolated pawn) and sometimes one-off peculiarities of the position. Chunking gives another layer of structure to the position that amateurs lack; for them it's just pieces and squares, and they'll tend to see too many possibilities in a position. Masters only see a few, the ones that make sense.

It's obvious how chunking and the stock of known patterns go together, and Simon got an interesting experimental result out of it. Shown a position from a real game, for only a few seconds, masters could recreate it with high fidelity while amateurs made lots of mistakes; shown an irrational, illegal, arbitrary arrangement of pieces on the board, masters performed no better than amateurs at recreating it. Chunking and pattern knowledge are efficient.

(I can attest to this from personal experience. I remember going over a game I had just played and toward the end there had been a time scramble so I didn't have a score to go by and had to recreate the moves from memory. I remember getting stuck until my friend remembered that at some point one of the other guy's pieces ended up on a certain square -- I couldn't remember that move because it didn't make any sense!)

All of that research would have been early days of cognitive science. I think the basic gloss on "experience" was probably something like the "10,000 hours" rule of thumb, which might have come out around then. ("The Magic Number 7" had not been published so long ago at that time.) It just meant more games played, analyzed, studied. More training data.

All of that leaves untouched questions about basic aptitude, since most people have a ceiling for how good they can get at something no matter how long they work at it. And it doesn't address issues of creativity.

Since I mentioned Capablanca in my last post -- he was famous for his flawless (or so it seemed at the time -- frickin' Stockfish might disagree) endgame technique, and the endgame lends itself to a sort of elegance and clarity that seemed to suit Capablanca temperamentally. But I believe he acquired that famous technical mastery by carefully analyzing thousands and thousands of endgame positions. The man had a gift, no question, but he also put in the time. The thing is, to chessplayers this never took away from Capablanca's reputation; it was considered an extraordinary thing that he did this, that he was so devoted to the art of endgame play, and that he was capable of finding the truth of so many positions and discovering the best way to play them

In this case, words means variations. And yes, with the limited time available, a player might not be able to produce all the variations that justify a move. But if a move has a relatively definitive result, it has to be possible to show that with variations. (The exceptions might be something like "compensation" or something else that's unavoidably a little squishy.)

Back in the early days of AI, Herbert Simon did a lot of work on chess and concluded that intuition is in some sense a myth, that it is just experience, and chess masters have vastly more experience than amateurs, have a huge stock of positions and patterns committed to memory and can draw on those to evaluate positions, find variations and so on.

A claim about a chess position (mostly) has to cash out as specific variations with a well-understood result. It often can't in the heat of the moment, but eventually it must.

Here's a classic example that's slightly different. Story is that two strong players at an international tournament (this would have been maybe the 20s, I guess) were going over the ending of a game and unable to figure out who was better. Jose Raul Capablanca* walked up, watched for a moment, then removed most of the pieces from the board and arranged the remaining kings and a handful of pawns in a certain way. Both players saw immediately the meaning of the position (a draw, let's say, I don't remember) and both also saw clearly that Black (also don't remember) could force this position. They had been struggling through analysing the position move by move, but Capablanca saw the essence of it.

* When Capablanca played chess, someone said, it was like he was speaking his native language. A British champion said (paraphrased): I've won the British championship three times, have had the honor of playing many great players, including five world champions, but when I sat down across from Capablanca, even my first move seemed a little suspect.

A chess master's intuition would seem by definition to be something that the CM can't put into words — wonderer1

There are lots of things where I think that's true, where it's even obviously true, but actually I don't think chess is one of them. Chess has no hidden information. (Why von Neumann said it's not a game but a form of calculation.)

I can write paragraphs about this but I doubt anyone wants to read that.

Johnny Cash wrote a song about a boy named 'Sue,' — universeness

Shel Silverstein wrote it; also "25 Minutes to Go"

what is mental can still be seen as material, just not in the neuro-reductionist way — Jamal

I think scientists instinctively talk this way -- "When the light from this object passes through your retina and strikes these cones, blah blah blah". A word like "vision" describes an interaction between an organism and some part of its environment, not just the internal state of the organism, interesting though that is. And you can still describe the whole tableau in naturalist terms, which doesn't change "vision" being the sort of thing we think of as mental.

Just as I have a mind, and that takes in a lot of my interactions with my environment, I have a gait -- somewhat like my father's I am told -- which is not exactly a property of mine, is not evident when I am sitting, but is a consistent feature of how I ambulatorily (!) interact with my environment. There's nothing non-physical involved in how I walk, but how I walk is only available within a particular descriptive framework, and one that necessarily involves both my body and the ground I tread.

If you mean that a non-neuro-reductionist understanding of the mind, while it does presuppose mental objects, need not presuppose internal representations, then I think I probably agree. — Jamal

I don't mean anything in particular. There's the older reflex action model -- which James describes as the singular achievement of 19th century physiology -- which is triadic: input-processing-output. The way James tells it, you have to learn to consider thinking and friends as just this middle step between sensation and action, and action -- in furtherance of life -- is the point of the whole system. But then there's the newer model, in which it's the state of the middle part that's the point, reducing its level of excitation (through action), minimizing surprise (through prediction) to minimize future excitation. (Freud's death drive but with better math.)

All I was saying is that I don't really think we need to take sides here, let alone address thorny questions of representation, to recognize that our everyday mental vocabulary is not a vocabulary about our internal states, so there's no reason to expect our everyday vocabulary to map cleanly onto whatever neuroscience discovers about those internal states.

What throws people is the identification of consciousness with the mental -- better to allow that simpler organisms may have mind but not consciousness -- because consciousness appears to be exclusively internal. Mostly it isn't, of course, else we wouldn't have it; consciousness is primarily consciousness of our environment. But there are derivative phenomena like remembering and dreaming and analysing, where all the stuff to be thought about has already been accumulated. So you go down the empiricist rabbit-hole of starting out saying sensation is the ultimate source of all of our thoughts (the thread James picks up) and end up allowing that so far as the internal state is concerned, there's just whatever's given, and you've no real way to tell where it came from.

Even worse is going on to equate mind and consciousness and self-consciousness. Even worser is equating all of those with the non-physical.

Blah blah blah. We just don't have to get into all that for the straightforward recognition that our everyday mental vocabulary is not about our internal states, so a lot of the putative problems with neuroscience are not problems at all.

The philosophical distinction between physical causation and logical necessity, and the implications of that. — Wayfarer

physical in some respects, mental in others — Wayfarer

I give up.

If you ever figure out exactly what you want to say, let me know.

Peace

The philosophical distinction between physical causation and logical necessity, and the implications of that. — Wayfarer

If I put three cupcakes on a table otherwise devoid of cupcakes, I have caused an odd number of cupcakes to be on the table.

Which one is that, physical causation or logical necessity?

I don't necessarily think that at all. — Wayfarer

Then what are we talking about?

How do you feel about neuroscientists saying things like "the self is an illusion"? --- Before answering, note that no reduction is implied; it's not a claim that the self is "really" a bit of functioning brain tissue, but that our everyday ideas about our selves don't seem to have a correlate in the brain, just as our visual field has no real correlate in the brain and is, in a suitable sense, an illusion.

when you see causal relationships between ideas, that this is distinct from the mindless processes typically invoked by physicalism. You're seeing the connection between ideas. That is a different process to that of physical causation. — Wayfarer

It's a different framework, sure. The question is why you think the existence and utility of this framework, our everyday understanding of mentality, invalidates the framework used in neuroscience and biology at large.

Neuroscientists in the lab use that same everyday framework to talk to each other and their subjects. They'll continue to say things like "I'll be right there, just grabbing my coffee," even if they're about to sit down with a nice interviewer from PBS and tell them, and the audience at home, that "the self is a myth," or something like that.

Your answer is exactly what I'm looking for — Moliere

(How can I not quote that?)

Imagine a bygone era when social roles for the sexes were more sharply distinguished. There are some paradoxes. Most households are entirely dependent on the man's income (again, unlike most households today, I believe); if anything happened to him, the wife and the kids are at least materially screwed. And yet --- if the cat gets up on the roof, who is expected to go up there and get it? I think it's not just a question of capability, but there's an expectation that the man take on this risk. And that's interesting. He is in some sense carrying his whole family up the ladder and onto the roof to get that damn cat. But that's everyone's expectation.

I can relate. I've tried to read The Catcher in the Rye a couple times and could barely get 10 or 20 pages in. I think I might have loved it at 15, but now ...

Thought maybe nobody would notice that one. ;)

I mean, there's some stuff in there that's kinda okay, or at least a start on something that might be interesting, but the style in which it is written is a dead giveaway that it's bullshit.

I've certainly known many stress tolerant women. — Hanover

I'm thinking selection bias.

Don't think I've ever seen the whole poem and it's magnificent! As a bookseller, I will cherish this.

There's always Gore Vidal:

whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies

Neal Stephenson — T Clark

The inventor of my name.

Well there's a whole thing about being respectable that's crap, of course. SF may be "the dreams our stuff is made of" now (book by Tom Disch about how sf took over popular culture), but so far as "literature" (pronounced derisively) is concerned, it's still a ghetto. Which is fine by me.

I reserve my greatest disdain for mainstream folks who figure anybody can write speculative fiction. (The way celebrities seem to think anyone can write a children's book.) They don't get it. They don't get what makes it different.