I agree with Chalmers, on the grounds that objective physical sciences exclude the first person as a matter of principle. — Wayfarer

But physical sciences don't exclude the first person as far as I can tell.

Can you show me somewhere, where this principle you speak of is written down?

That makes sense. Not everyone's intuition on a given subject is going to have equal weight. — Tom Storm

:up:

Some chimps know how to crack the nuts, and some chimps don't.

Of the chimps that don't, the smart ones are the one's who are watching and learning.

Yeah, I got that part. If I accept your definition I accept your conclusion because your conclusion is contained in the definition. The question is, why should I accept your definition? Something starting to exist when it did not exist prior its first moment of existence is something coming from nothing. I am not sure how the position just stated violates some core principle of logic? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I suspect Jabberwock is sleeping now. So I'll interject.

I don't think is is a matter of definition. It looks to me as if you don't have a clear mental model of what Jabberwock is proposing. Jabberwock is proposing a first state, in which something exists. "A state prior to the absolute first state" is a nonsensical construction, which you seem to be insisting on inserting into Jabberwock's model instead of grasping the model that Jabberwock is trying to convey to you.

IOW, it looks to me like you are attacking a straw man of your own creation, where you've tacked your own addition, of a state of nothingness prior to the absolute first state, onto Jabberwock's model.

Might I suggest, spending some time, on getting a better grasp on the picture Jabberwock is seeking to convey to you?

It has always surprised me how many people are not aware of their own thinking processes. Unaware that their consciousness and reason are just a small part of their mental life and that most of what we think, feel, know is not a function of those two limited processes. It's certainly something you see all the time here on the forum. So, I guess you could say you're in good company. — T Clark

I think individual variation in cognitive strengths and weaknesses plays a big role that few people are cognizant of. Most people aren't going to see a need for the sort of cognitive testing that I've had done on myself, and therefore most people likely lack an intuitive understanding of the role that variations in cognitive faculties between individuals play in the way those individuals understand things.

The first time I took a WAIS block design test, the person conducting the test commented on how much better it is giving the test to engineers. I had subjectively felt that I was performing slowly, when in fact I was doing the tasks quickly. I realized that I had previously just assumed that everyone has the same visuo-spatial abilities that I do. It is still difficult for me to imagine being without visuo-spatial abilities like mine, because those abilities play such a big role in much that I do.

I think something similar may be going on with many of the extremely language focused philosophers. Some say thinking is impossible apart from language, and maybe for them that is much moreso the case, than it is for me. However I wonder if there isn't a deficit in visuo-spatial abilities involved, with having such a point of view.

I posted a link to that passage here on TPF recently. I don't think there is a chapter in which I don't find something that moves me deeply.

Oh yeah. I've been an atheist so long that I can enjoy theological metaphors now. — plaque flag

Yeah, I love The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. I've been considering posting The Coming of the Ship at what is left of the Reasonable Faith Forums but I'm afraid doing so might come across as grandiose, instead of conveying what I want.

At the beginning of relationships, there's the moment of the first kiss, letting 'I love you' slip out, all kinds of stuff. — plaque flag

I was attracted to her before witnessing the 'magic', but wasn't considering asking her out because I knew she was going to be leaving the country in a few months. She was here on a Fullbright scholarship, and part of the terms were that she return home to Finland for two years after completing her studies. I figured I was going to be heartbroken when I decided to ask her out, and that intuition was sure as hell right, but that was the best three months of my life.

It's the book Plato at the Googleplex, Rebecca Goldstein. — Wayfarer

Ah that makes more sense. When I first clicked the link, it too me to an article on biosemiotics.

Looks interesting. I've got another of Goldstein's books on my to read pile.

You might find this title of interest. — Wayfarer

Can you post an excerpt of what in particular you see as pertinent?

I only got a bit past, "But was this only a poetic metaphor or can we really say that the genetic code is a true molecular language?", and saw that the author was likely going to give the wrong answer.

Regardless, it does bring up a couple questions. Do you think DNA is *about* something? I.e. does DNA have intentionality? Is a question of, "What is meant by intentionality?", involved in determining whether or not something is a language?

League of Legends. — Darkneos

That's interesting. I don't know League of Legends. I'm not good at games requiring super quick response times.

On the matter of expertise, and its relationship to intuition; I'd say video games provide a pretty 'thin' training set. Intuitions developed from playing a videogame don't tend to be very useful outside of video games.

Having expertise in something a lot more complex than a video game, might help you get a better grasp on the nature of intuition.

Wow. Same book and same attitude for me at the same age. I loved that dude back then. — plaque flag

:lol:

How thing have changed, eh?

I'm kind of a C.S. Lewis own goal.

Ah but part of the calculation, because she saw that he saw that you were with her -- carrot and the stick. — plaque flag

I would think so too.

I'd love to know what thoughts went through Meri's head. Would she have done the same if it had been just her and Barb there? I'd guess yes.
— wonderer1

Ah, but was there time for thoughts ? — plaque flag

Ok, I was lazy with my language. How about, "What intuitions arose?"

I wonder about trust. Barb and I had known each other for years. Meri, being a great observer of people, I'd guess she recognized Barb's trust in me while we were in the bar. I hadn't asked for her number or anything at that point though. On one hand, I think it was rather bold of her to assume I would step in. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if she 'knew' I had her covered.

I was primarily interested in the details of SGD and backprop. I whipped up software for exploring the math basically, wasn't terribly interested at that time in applications. — plaque flag

I was very interested in the applications but not so much the math. My best friend in college was still in school working on his M.S. and I looked through his copy of Parallel Distributed Processing when visiting one weekend. It changed the course of my life enormously.

About six months later (36 years ago), in a manic state that scared the shit out of me, I intuited an explanation for a lot of idiosnycratic things about myself (including social issues), in terms of hypothesized variations in low level neural interconnect structure. I only recently found out, that some years back evidence that fit my hypothesis well has been found.

I think I became a bit dissociated, with one part of my brain yelling, "This makes so much sense!" and another part of my brain yelling something like, "You don't have anywhere near the educational basis to think this hypothesis merits serious consideration!" Over three days I became pretty out of touch with reality due to this shouting match going on in my head.

It took a year for me to get over the fear of being in that mental state and reach the point that I was willing to risk allowing myself to think about such things.

In you situation, the bodies involved play a huge rule. — plaque flag

Tis true, and now I'm wondering now, what role my body being there played. I'm a big guy too, but she had only known me for a couple of hours.

I'd love to know what thoughts went through Meri's head. Would she have done the same if it had been just her and Barb there? I'd guess yes.

for those who can bear to drop the errors and move on, of course. — plaque flag

:up:

...we might also add that human intuition is the raw ingredient... — plaque flag

I would think human intuition was a huge component of the training ingredients, but I would think there was a fair bit of slow thinking thrown in as well - in reaching a diagnosis to tag each X-ray with. I'd guess that in some cases there was evidence in addition to the X-ray. E.g. biopsy results.

In any case, you bring up a good point - that the training data involves more than just the X-rays.

Is there anything that you are an expert in?

It might be harder to recognize the sense of intuition being discussed here, if one has never developed expertise in something.

5. "But of course we have the concept of equality!" --- We are adept at doing the things that having a concept of equality was supposed to explain, certainly. But if we cannot have such a concept, then the explanation must change. — Srap Tasmaner

Pattern recognition in neural nets. Pretty simple to explain recognition of equality these days.

Of course Plato wasn't in a position to understand this, and fabricated his ideas without sufficient basis for knowing what he was talking about.

Sometimes philosophy looks a bit like ancestor worship.

Isn't there a study from years ago showing that AI is better at reading x-rays than most radiologists? — Srap Tasmaner

Isn't there a study from years ago showing that AI is better at reading x-rays than most radiologists? — Srap Tasmaner

A relevant article.

The scientists used about 112,000 X-rays to train the algorithm.

A big advantage AI has over humans for tasks like this, is the ability to be trained on such a huge dataset without getting bored and quitting.

:up:

I guess I'm a melioristic-optimist as well, although I didn't know that terms before today.

:up:

The argument still commits the formal fallacy of affirming the consequent.

An aspect of this is that I would expect the courage of women to tend to show up most strongly in defense of their offspring (and perhaps children in general). I think the trope of the human 'mama bear' fits well with this. Men I would expect to be more inclined to band together with other men, in defense of the whole social group.
— wonderer1

This seems to be quite a narrow expectation of where 'courage' shows up. Especially, if we are talking about increasing social awareness of gender issues and the like. — Amity

As I said, "An aspect of this..." I was pointing out one factor (or more accurately complex of factors) out of a great many factors, that I would expect to play a role in the courage of people manifesting differently. If you want to look at an illustration of other factors see here.

Given how common lack of recognition that we are all social primates is, I see it as a significant aspect of increasing social awareness of gender issues.

Do you think that we humans having more accurate understanding of what we are is likely to improve social awareness generally?

:up:

May I ask your background? Based on our earlier discussion I can see that you are scientifically insightful.

>If it rained last night, the lawn will be wet.
>The lawn is wet.
>Thus, it must have rained last night. (proposed entailment/conclusion)

This is a logically valid argument... — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ummm. Look again?

Very cool to hear about this. This kind of knowledge seems to play a huge role in life and maybe doesn't get celebrated enough by bookish types. — plaque flag

I agree. This got me thinking back to the night I met one of my girlfriends.

I was in a bar shooting pool when my friend Barb, and her friend Meri came in. I wrapped up the game of pool I was playing and went and joined them, and spent the rest of the evening talking to them. We walked out together and a big, rough looking, obviously very drunk guy walked out at the same time, taking out his car keys. I can't recall the details of what was said, but Meri very matter of factly told the guy that he was too drunk to drive, and that he needed to call a cab to drive him home. The guy went back into the bar to call a cab.

It's very much a "You have to have been there." situation, but Meri handled this guy twice her size perfectly. To me then, it was like watching magic. I would have expected to get belligerence in response if I had tried something similar, but somehow Meri intuitively recognized a means of getting compliance.

At that time Meri was working on finishing up her Ph.D. in marriage and family therapy, and undoubtedly her education played a role in her insightful handling of the situation, but things happened so quickly and smoothly that I think Meri had to have been going nearly purely on her intuitions about people, and not consciously recalling what various texts had to say.

I have huge respect for the sort of intuitions that Tom is talking about.

Darkneos seems to be trading on the ambiguity of the term 'knowledge', What he said makes no sense if you consider knowledge as being JTB, but if you think of it as being know-how, then it does make sense. — Janus

Darkneos is trolling for now. I'm not seeing any reason to reward his trolling with further responses.

I like "being know-how".

The theory is a starting point, a launch pad toward a more accurate understanding of the reality of time. — Metaphysician Undercover

I've been meaning to get back to this for awhile. I hope your statement above is an accurate description of your view. However, I can't say that I get the impression that it really is true based on what I have read of this thread since I last posted in it.

I don't see how your comment about communication is relevant. Clearly communication is a difficult task, as my attempt at discussion with Luke indicates, and the capacity to communicate is not something which ought to be taken for granted. However, I don't see how this bears on my temporal theory.

I should have connected more dots. What I was hoping you would recognize is that we are communicating via the internet.

There are implications to that, relevent to having a theory of time that is explanatory in a general way of a great many events that go on in the world. Your theory of time defines time in terms of your subjective experience. It suggests solipsism.

The way things are in reality, is that in the period of time it takes you to have a subjective recognition of PRESENT-NOW, zillions of things happen, one after the other, all around you, and within you.

You lack sufficient resolution on your metric for time, because your metric for time is part of a paradigm that doesn't really work for communicating with people about time with accuracy.

Do you see how it's a bit egocentric to base your metric of time on your subjective experience?

He's definitely a very smart man but I find his style reminds me of a used car dealer, haranguing you to buy the product. For my taste he's too slick, too fast, too insinuating. — Tom Storm

Oh, me too. But I've spent 15 years biting my tongue while participating on his forum. Old habits die hard.

Having thought about it more, I guess I would expect courage to tend to manifest differently in men and women.
— wonderer1

I agree, given that expression, rather than traits, is what makes a gender. Care to say more? — Moliere

Sure. A significant element of my thinking is related to evolutionary psychology, and I see it as naive to think that humans are born blank slates. I know there is a tendency to antipathy towards evolutionary psychology among humanities types, so I won't be surprised if there are negative reactions to this sort of thinking from some on TPF, but this is where the evidence strongly points.

Having looked into the social behavior of chimpanzees a bit, I see us as sharing similar social impulses, human behavior is not determined by instincts to the same degree as is the behavior of chimps. Furthermore, homo sapiens is a sexually dimorphic species and it is unrealistic to think that human sexual dimorphism doesn't effect our mentality as well as our physicality.

An aspect of this is that I would expect the courage of women to tend to show up most strongly in defense of their offspring (and perhaps children in general). I think the trope of the human 'mama bear' fits well with this. Men I would expect to be more inclined to band together with other men, in defense of the whole social group.

The sexual dimorphism in humans (and chimps) is not as clear as in the case of gorillas. So like not all men are taller than all women, it's unsurprising from an evolutionary psychology perspective that the mental characteristics of men and women show a degree of overlap. So as I said, "*tend* to manifest differently".

BTW, there is a four part documentary available on Netflix called Chimp Empire. It focuses on a band of chimps that shows typical sexual dimorphism of behavior. However, one of the neighboring bands of chimps is a particularly small band, and the females and males of this other group go on raids together. So it seems that even chimps show a degree of flexibility when it comes to such aspects of behavior. But see https://news.yale.edu/2023/06/08/conflicted-opinion-yale-chimpanzee-expert-weighs-chimp-empire.

When I think of defensive, perhaps even aggressive reasoning, I tend to think of apologists. Especially the presuppositionalists. — Tom Storm

I don't associate aggressiveness with apologetics so much as naive confidence, and I can relate to having such naive confidence myself. When I was 16 or 17 I read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, and not having much in the way of exposure to philosophy, I was impressed and felt ready to argue with any atheist I had the chance to. I have the impression that for many W.L. Craig fans it is similar. WLC is skilled at presenting arguments, and conveying the sense that any reasonable person must come to the same conclusions he does. However, 'normal' apologists, who have an appreciation for logical reasoning have a lot of potential for developing a broader perspective.

Presuppositionalism is the worst though. It's mind poison. It really messes people up, and sets them up for becoming more and more out of touch with reality.

Most atheists I know (certainly those who are not in America and don't have to face fundamentalists) are complacent and don't care much about the arguments for or against god. Their atheism is often a kind of lazy cultural scientism. You know the kind of thing - 'science makes sense, god's don't.' — Tom Storm

Yeah, it's kind of unfortunate that more such atheists don't understand the thinking of believers better because they tend to say cringeworthy things (from the perspective of people with an insider view of the thinking of believers) which feed into the stereotypes many Christians have with respect to atheists. However, I don't blame such atheists for not getting the thinking of Christians better, and not being prepared to have a potentially fruitful dialogue with Christians. The cultural gap is just too wide.

On a weirder note... I just found out Sunday that my mom is going to be passing on a letter from my fundamentalist home schooled 16 year old niece, which I'm pretty sure is going to be a 'come to Jesus' letter. So I get to look forward to deciding how or whether to respond without alienating my whole family of origin.

I'm interested in Pantagruel's suggestion that there may be more of the analog input in the system than the digitized projection of that reality. That's really interesting. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, it is an interesting aspect of things to consider. My knowledge of human hearing is not very up to date, but what I recall is that for low frequency sounds the system generates nerve impulses in sync with the incoming low frequency components of what is heard. So hearing may be a good sense to consider, in looking for analogicity in human neural processing. There might be some sense to be made of why we find music so affecting by looking into that. (Not something I've really thought about before, so there may be all sorts of relevant research out there that I'm not aware of.)

But in a general way you could choose to self-consciously do something *different* from what your hardware does on its own, and I think this is kind of the goal in practices like meditation and phenomenology. — Srap Tasmaner

I've never been enough of a meditator to have much to say about what understandings might be reached through meditation. However, in the vein of doing "something *different* from what your hardware does on its own", I find conversations with diverse people to be a good way of getting my brain out of the ruts it is inclined to ride in on its own.

That's why David Chalmers, a professional Neurologist... — Gnomon

A neurologist is an MD. Wikipedia says:

Chalmers received his undergraduate degree in pure mathematics from the University of Adelaide in Australia.[10] After graduating Chalmers spent six months reading philosophy books while hitchhiking across Europe,[11] before continuing his studies at the University of Oxford,[10] where he was a Rhodes Scholar but eventually withdrew from the course.[12] In 1993, Chalmers received his PhD in philosophy and cognitive science from Indiana University Bloomington under Douglas Hofstadter,[13] writing a doctoral thesis entitled Toward a Theory of Consciousness.[12] He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program directed by Andy Clark at Washington University in St. Louis from 1993 to 1995.

Do you have any evidence for Chalmers being a neurologist?

The people expressing opinions about what "we" need to do are not the ones who actually pull any of the levers. — Vera Mont

:up:

Exactly.

:up:

Ah, that's a shame. I happened on that article some time ago. Probably before the website became so annoying. I'll keep an eye out (and if I get really motivated maybe even look) for something else that communicates some of the important issues in a reasonably accessible way.

I am not talking about bit states, I am talking about the objective data (information) which is digitally encoded. Since data is being specifically symbolically encoded, digital neural networks have only that known data to work with. Versus an analog system which works with a "signal" whose total data properties are not necessarily so restricted. — Pantagruel

I think we are talking past each other to some extent. We can hypothesize about some sort of neuromorphic hardware which maintains analog fidelity to a greater degree than current artificial or natural neural networks do. However, I'm skeptical that such a system can be practically implemented.

There is neuromorphic hardware under development, but from what I've seen, much of what is under development uses spiking/sampling. Spiking necessitates a loss of fidelity to a representation of an analog signal due to the the fact that maximum spike frequency cannot be infinite. Now, as is the case with the digitized audio that we listen to all the time these days, the loss of fidelity with a spiking architecture might be for practical purposes undetectable. However, I think it important to recognize that any sort of information processing is going to result in some loss of fidelity in the processing of an analog input.

Still, if you can cite something discussing a practically implementable information processing system which maintains analog fidelity, I'd be interested in taking a look.

You can talk about bit states being "information", it is a level of abstraction below that at which artificial neural nets actually operate, part of the underlying mechanism and addressed via back-propagation, which is a function of error-correction, which is determined at the top informational level. — Pantagruel

I referred to bit states to make clear that we are talking about digital information. Yes we can combine bits to represent numbers, but any digital representation of a number is going to have a finite bit depth, and I think it important to keep in mind, the loss of fidelity that comes with such encoding.

In the context of considering our sensory and information processing apparatus, there is strong evidence that we do not have some ideal 'purely analog' system. Simply considering the fact that our visual system relies on discrete rod and cone cells, producing outputs in the form of spike trains, points towards ideal analog representations not being what our brains have to work with.

All these simplifications do good work and save real time and energy. They are useful approximations of reality, not the other way around. — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

:up:

I loved the Chandler quote the first time I saw it, as well as reading it again just now.

The example everyone agrees on is that women who behave in masculine ways (self-assertive, whatever) are often given a hard time for it. — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah, they are given a hard time for it, but I don't see confident, competent, and assertive women as unfeminine. I have a bad habit of falling in love with them.

:up: