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:

...you’ve so far been unable to address the rather basic question of whether “I am conscious of this text” is a truth-baring proposition. — javra

What is your theory of truth?

I would say the cat on the mat is the truth bearer for the proposition, "The cat is on the mat.", and I don't see it as making sense to think that a proposition could be inherently truth bearing.

Since I have it in my c/p buffer:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/04/11/5113/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/

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

Yes. Analog vs digital collection and processing of information becomes interesting in this respect. Analog collection of information captures an actual "imprint" of the real world. In which sense, there may actually be information captured which is unexpected or unknown. — Pantagruel

:up:

This is a good point to bring up.

Analog can preserve a more accurate representation, and per Nyquist's theorem, there are limits to how accurate a digital representation can be, as a function of sample rate. Finite bit depth of samples is another dimension of error in the case of digital.

Neural networks are able to exploit such "hidden" information and extrapolate hidden connections. In fact, that is more or less exactly how they work. By contrast, digitization only encodes what it is specifically designed to encode. — Pantagruel

That is somewhat true, but my inner pedant insists that I point out some inaccuracies.

It may be the case that there is a degree of fidelity maintained, due to the somewhat more analog properties of neurons. However, spikes in action potential are a significant feature of our neurons. So there is an element of sampling, playing a significant role in the way our neural nets work.

Rather than an analog vs digital issue, it's more a matter of how is the hardware arranged, and what sort of information processing is the hardware well suited for. Neural networks, natural or artificial, are very good at pattern recognition. Much of the 'hidden information' results in recognized patterns which happen preconsciously.

Also, it's not exactly the case that "digitization only encodes what it is specifically designed to encode". There is a trivial sense in which that is true, in that digital hardware is designed to encode bit states and can only encode bit states. However, it is very much the case that digitally instantiated artificial neural networks, after training on whatever inputs were provided to the ANN, will have a great many bit states which were not determined by the designer. This article touches on aspects of this sort of information processing, that people who care about humanity's future might want to be aware of.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/04/11/5113/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/

As I preach from the perch of my soap box, one cannot yank out either the subject or the object and still have the real thing. The true is the whole : promises, sassy looks, and earthquakes; checkmates, wankbanks, quarks, and continuous functions. — plaque flag

Amen brother Flag!

I don't think reason counts much in the god debates. You either buy the idea or you don't. — Tom Storm

Most of my relevant experience in recent years has been with discussions at William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith Forum. So not a remotely unbiased sample. Still, there certainly are Christians who are very good reasoners and knowledgeable.

I think the intuitions individuals have, and the willingness those individuals have, to question intuitions, plays a big role. The premises of arguments for God depend greatly on intuitions, and intuitions (key to making the arguments seem like sound arguments) tend to get reinforced on Sunday mornings.

Any other guys feel that way? — Srap Tasmaner

Interesting question. I think I will be thinking about it for awhile.

I think in some sense I know what you mean. It seems I have a more clearly delineated picture associated with "good man" (or "good woman") than associated with "good person".

I see courage as strongly associated with my "good man", and I see that I have a lesser expectation of courage associated with "good person" and "good woman".

As someone who has watched a lot of chimp documentaries, it makes some sense that I would have thinking biased in such a way.

As someone who likes to think of himself as a feminist, I likely wouldn't have recognized this in myself had you not asked the question.

That said, I think arguments like Plantinga's, if successful, do more than just show us our epistemic limits. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think Plantinga's EAAN does succeed in showing people their epistemic limits except in cases where the person recognizes that the EAAN fails.

If your theory of the world is self-defeating, if there is a contradiction in your justification for having true beliefs, it's worth looking at how you can avoid this problem. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think it depends on what is meant by "how you can avoid this problem".

The EAAN suggests that given evolution and naturalism we have good reason to doubt the reliability of our cognitive faculties. (The argument utterly overlooks the fact that we are members of a social species, and therefore there is a huge adaptive benefit to homo sapiens being able to communicate with some accuracy. So the argument fails to make a very good case, but still...)

It seems to me there are two major categories of responses to this:

1. Go with epistemic grandiosity, and deny that one's cognitive faculties have questionable reliability, and reject evolution and/or naturalism.

2. Go with epistemic humility and accept that one's cognitive faculties have questionable reliability, and keep on following where the evidence leads to the best of your abilities.

Now I'm not saying those categories are exhaustive. Certainly they are rather exaggerated charicatures to make a point. However, with those categories in mind I do want to ask, what is the problem to be avoided here?

Nope, that's pretty much it. Intuition is improved by acquiring knowledge. That's all. — Darkneos

Your intuitions about intuition could use some development.

If knowledge is justified true belief, then that is different than intuition. (Or at least the 'justification is of a different sort than what we typically think of as justification for a belief to be considered knowledge.)

Right, you often refer to the importance of metaphor, and I think it is the "softness" and "flexibility of metaphor which enables the communication of ideas through evocation and allusion, allows them to escape the hard walled prison of rigorous logic and mechanistic (cause and effect) thinking. — Janus

:up:

By acquiring knowledge — Darkneos

There is more to it than simply acquiring knowledge. Tom Storm and T Clark brought up important points. TS brought up experience and TC brought up attentiveness.

Of course acquring knowledge from reading books is valuable and of course reading can result in development of intuitions in all sorts of ways. However, there are important aspects to developing intuitions which are a function of the means by which knowledge is acquired.

For example, I'm 99% sure TS would agree (though he is free to correct me if I am wrong) that he didn't develop the intuitive recognitions he has (e.g. that someone has a weapon) from reading a book. Instead those intuitions came from years of interactions with, and observations of, people. Attentiveness to body language and other nonverbal signals undoubtedly played an important role.

Similar for TC and his engineering intuitions. Attentive observations of the way things worked in the domain of his career resulted in the development of intuitions related to his area of expertise that are substantially better than just guesses.

First of all, I have to make an apology to wonderer1 for my earlier, flippant dismissal... — Amity

No problem. It was perfectly understandable for you to respond as you did, in light of my newness here on TPF.

I'll try to get around to writing something up relatively soon. However, I'm finding it a bit difficult to keep up with all the discussions here on TPF that I am interested in, and I already feel that I owe a couple of other forum members responses that are likely to take me significant time to formulate.

In any case, I'm not going to present much (if any) of a case for what people should do. That's way above my pay grade. At best I'd hope to present some stuff that might spark some recognition of what you can do with some degree of effectiveness.

:lol: