Comments

  • How Does Language Map onto the World?


    Why are you avoiding answering my question?
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    Do you believe it or do you doubt it? How are you going to proceed here so as to minimise your uncertainty?apokrisis

    I expect I will proceed to realize that I don't know unless/until I see evidence providing me with a reason to think otherwise. Perhaps I will ask questions from time to time, in hopes of acquiring such evidence. I'm fine with being uncertain about all sorts of things.
  • Pointlessness of philosophy
    That's fair, but I don't think they throw it about casually. There is a clear pattern of behavior in their posts that hints at something.Darkneos

    I think you might find it worthwhile to develop some understanding of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) and related "personality disorders". It might help you recognize the pattern more clearly, as well as give you insight into how to deal with it.
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    Pragmatism roots itself in the logical consistency of the dichotomy. We could either believe or doubt. Each extreme is logically rooted in its “other”. Together they simplify your options by excluding all other less polarised options.apokrisis

    Are you advocating such a view?
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    ...it might be worth looking at the phenomenological approach maybe? Especially when talking about our experience, knowledge and perceptions of the world in context of individual perspectives.I like sushi

    I would appreciate it if you would point out aspects of the phenomenological approach that you find valuable.
  • Spectrums (a thought experiment)
    Just curious if I should Google the atomic weights of water, helium, and Hanover… :chin:0 thru 9

    Before googling atomic weights, see my edit. ;-)
  • Spectrums (a thought experiment)
    Water, Helium, Batteries, Galaxy Quest, Hanover
  • Spectrums (a thought experiment)
    Tarot, Mu, Savior, Introvert, Babel, Nine
  • Spectrums (a thought experiment)
    Pandas, hippos, iguanas, lemurs, owls, seagulls, ocelots, pigeons, horses, yaks0 thru 9

    Toads, owls, ocelots
    Elephants, ants, seagulls, yaks
  • On knowing
    I am taking the notion of intellectual intuition to task. Intellectualism gives undo privilege to cognition, and the term cognition, like all terms, is an artificial structure imposed on the world to talk about it, manage it, have discourse on it, and so on.Astrophel

    I agree with you that the way cognition is understood is simplistic, but I don't think we social primates are doing so badly at increasing our understanding of the subject. It's a really complicated subject.

    But the original whole out of which this categorical thinking issues remains what it is. It is all of what we might say, and yet none of these: certainly logic is not about nothing, nor is affectivity; but concepts like these that quantify and divide experience, because they are categories, do not represent the original uncategorized primordial whole.
    The idea here is to put at bay the knowledge claims that spontaneously spring into play when we experience the world. Such a suspension delivers the world from the imposition of abstraction that the primacy of the intellect has brought to philosophy. And affectivity is no longer pushed into irrelevance.

    The question then is, what does affectivity "say" in the setting of being restored to its place?
    Astrophel

    It seems to me that you have a rather small box that you want to fit your understanding of human cognition into. What is the basis of your theory of mind?
  • On knowing


    Sounds to me like a revelation is what you are looking for, but why think there is any relationship between intuitions and revelation?
  • On knowing
    And how are we to define a "true essence" of "pure intuition"?Astrophel

    Why would you want to?
  • Masculinity
    Pikachu gets stabbed by a Jamaican man and then asks why?
    The Jamaican man replies he just wanted to poke a mon.
    Amity

    Hmm. I thought I had heard that pokemon is what Jamaicans call proctologists.
  • On knowing
    I have no issue with paradigms shifts and an evolving understanding. But there is an untested assumption in all of this, in whatever scientific field you choose (even the science of getting up in the morning. The world is a science laboratory) that it is not all, in the exhaustive analysis of it, "made". There is a confidence that science is "about" something, even if that something is implicit and elusive. It is here I wish to elucidate.Astrophel

    :up:
  • What do we know?
    Science has no idea how brains produce consciousness.RogueAI

    Suppose there is a scientist alive today who fully understands how consciousness emerges in the brain.

    Do you think that you would be able to understand that scientist's explanation without having studied the relevant science yourself?

    A more accurate and nuanced statement than yours above is that scientists have developed and are continuing to develop more accurate understanding of aspects of how consciousness emerges from brains. Criticisms arising out of anti-scientific ignorance don't even reach the threshold of mildly interesting after awhile.
  • On knowing
    Well, you have just admitted to having intuitions. You find this kind of thing anathema among analytic philosophers, for it implies something directly apprehended, free of interpretation; and if this is what you mean by intuition, then you are making a very strong claim, the strongest, namely, that the world, through intuition, discloses its nature or essence. This stands apart from science's paradigms that are open to theoretical "progress"" one is already there, in possession of something of the same epistemological status as, say, the Ten Commandments. An absolute.Astrophel

    I don't see it as absolute. As i said, "an evolving web of multitudinous interacting intuitions." Recognition of the evolving aspect seem important to me, as it allows for paradigm shifts.
  • On knowing
    Yes, there is: foundational intuition. If it can be shown that there is such a thing, then all of our serious knowledge claims, while certainly not being thereby true absolutely, will be seen occurring, while still "at a distance, within the "play" of an absolute.Astrophel

    I don't really know what you are trying to say here, and I don't know what "foundational intuition" would be. I'm inclined to think that rather than having a foundational intuition, I have an evolving web of multitudinous interacting intuitions.

    Or if you prefer, a poetic take.
  • Simplisticators and complicators
    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.Srap Tasmaner

    This discussion has gotten me thinking back over a set of related experiences I've had.

    Around 15 years ago I had designed some logic, recognizing its efficiency compared to what my employer had done in the past. Sometime later my boss was asking about the functionality of that bit of logic, and checking to make sure I had done it in the approved historical way. I told him I hadn't done it the historical way, and he asked me to explain how I had done it. I didn't have a good way to explain it to him except by drawing a schematic. I'm guessing he realized fairly quickly that I wasn't going to be able to convey an understanding of the design as quickly as he could develop his own understanding from looking at the schematic. So he had me bring him the schematic. I gave a brief explanation of what various submodules do, and he looked at it for a minute or so, and said we should have gotten a patent on that.

    I don't really know what it was he saw in the schematic but I suspect it is things that I wouldn't recognize until much later. My boss was one of those guys who went to university studying physics when he was 15 years old, and was the star of the math team even though he wasn't a mathematics student.

    I think now, that he likely recognized a mathematical elegance to the design which, at least in some regards, I did not recognize at that time. There is a fairly simple mathematical equation which conveys the gist of the logical process occurring in the design, and I think that I had an intuitive recognition of the mathematical elegance 'driving' me to design the logic as I did. However, I didn't think in those terms when doing the design.

    As best I can recall, when designing the logic I focused on a design which would efficiently use 'space' in an FPGA as well as DSP clock cycles, while doing the job the logic was intended to achieve with much greater accuracy than we had any practical use for. As I said, I think in retrospect, that intuitive subconscious recognition of the mathematical elegance played a role in what I designed. However, I don't think I can say that I consciously recognized the relevant mathematical equation. I would say it was more like I trusted the part of my mind that did recognize the elegance, even though that part of my mind wasn't able to 'speak into consciousness' except in a vague way motivating me to design what I did.

    Anyway, I really didn't start this thread to talk about me. I greatly appreciate the way you've gotten me to think about things in ways I haven't before.
  • Simplisticators and complicators
    Missing the forest for the trees is a real thing, but a forest without trees is a castle in the air, if you don't mind mixed metaphors.Srap Tasmaner

    Trying to catch up on responding...

    I like it, but here in Indiana we call forests without trees corn fields. :razz:

    Here's a more controversial example because it speaks to methodology. Timothy Williamson tells a story about explaining the Gettier problem to an economist colleague, who was really puzzled by all the fuss: "So there's a counterexample, so what? Models always have counterexamples."Srap Tasmaner

    I'd be interested in reading more about this controversy. I have the same reaction as Williamson's colleague. It is a bit baffling to me that people could go through life and still be surprised(?) by Gettier problems.

    When Capablanca played chess, someone said, it was like he was speaking his native language.Srap Tasmaner

    Sounds really interesting. I'd love to read the account a time travelling Oliver Sacks might give. Any reading recommendations?
  • Hylomorphism and consciousness - what's the secret?
    Given that physics is the science of matter (hyle), then the question is, what is the science of form? (morphe)Wayfarer

    All sciences are sciences of both.
  • Simplisticators and complicators
    All you say may be true, that you fully comprehend without having an easy way of showing that to others by reducing your thoughts to conveyable language, but would not that still make you a complicator under your use of the term?Hanover

    Oh absolutely. I can be an annoying as fuck complicator of things.

    I'm not surprised, that my OP is easily misinterpreted. I wrote the OP wanting to see what would arise in people's thinking without painting too clear a picture. So I'm not too surprised that you were misinterpreting me, but still the following helps me recognize what I might clarify to convey the ideas I am interested in discussing.

    I imagined a complicator or simplifier to be someone who offers information to others for clarification purposes, but if you're imagining those terms to describe a person in terms of what goes on internally for their self-clarification, then that would be a difference in how I considered the terms you presented.Hanover

    I think of simplisticator and complicator as different approaches to communicating ideas. Some people lean more towards one approach or the other. I see both simplisticators and complicators as seeking a result of increasing understanding of something in the other party to a communication, but using different strategies to reach that goal.

    My (jaundiced) view of simplisticators is that they tend to present simplistic, but relatively easy to understand accounts of things that don't tend to challenge people's intuitions too much.

    On the other hand my (clearly superior) complicator style is to present things to challenge people's intuitions, and get them thinking outside the box. For example, I might simply present some facts that I think someone else's simplistic view of things can't account for and leave it to the other person to develop a more complex understanding that can account for the fact. (I.e. I provide no story.)

    I can understand why this sort of style might not seem too practical. It would be the wrong style to use in a courtroom. However, I find that in practice it does get results, in the right environment and given time. An aspect of how it works in practice on a forum like this, is that some people do pick up what I'm laying down relatively easily. (Srap and Janus are two examples.)

    Furthermore, in my experience, people who get things I say, often expand on something I say in a word to the wise sort of way. An example of this is this post by Jabberwock in response to a one sentence post of mine:

    And in that model nothing is synchronized enough to be called 'the present'. If you see a bird flying in the sky near the sun, the light that bounced off the bird hit it a fraction of a second ago, but the rays coming for the Sun left it eight minutes ago. That is, what you perceive as contemporary is not – the Sun might have suddenly ceased to exist four minutes ago, long before that bird even got near you. Your perception 'the bird flies when the sun shines' would be false in that case.

    The same goes for all your senses, of course. If you step on something sharp, you feel it about 0.3 s after the fact. If you think that you have heard something at the exact same moment - you did not, as your auditory impulses are also delayed, but less than touch. And of course both stimuli occurred even earlier, before they were processed by your brain. What you perceive as 'the present' is a jumble of of various occurences that have already happened at different times. 'Reality itself' it is not.
    Jabberwock

    Jabberwock fleshed things out nicely. He has had some practice translating from wonderer to neurotypical. I get by with a little help from my friends. :smile:
  • Simplisticators and complicators
    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.Srap Tasmaner

    I had a rough two system model in which I used "intuition" vs "logical/linguistic" instead of "fast thinking" vs "slow" thinking. So talking in terms of "intuition" comes a bit more naturally for me and I suspect might be more communicative to many than is "fast thinking". For example, here's something I wrote four years before TF&S was published.

    Now my impression, as someone who's studied a bit about human mind/brain issues, is that it's highly reasonable to think that there are variations in brain organization that bias people towards one of these perspectives or the other. (Obviously there are social factors as well that play a huge role in which perspective one takes, and there are likely factors of brain organization that influence the degree to which a person adopts the view of those around them, or strikes out on their own in searching for the truth. It's all very complicated with regard to the nature/nurture question.)

    Anyway, one way of looking at how people's minds work differently is, looking at whether they have a bias towards intuitive (pattern recognizing) cognitive processes, or logical thought. Now both aspects of human mental processing can be of great value, and both aspects can produce misleading results. And I'm inclined to think an ideal is to use both intuition and logic in a synergistic way, but anyway, that's somewhat tangential.

    Sounds familiar I expect. I came at my view based on considering the properties of neural nets, and recognizing how suitable they were to doing the sort of information processing that we experience as intuition. As far as I know, Kahneman came to the view he presents in TF&S, on the basis of the sort of experimental results he lays out in the book. So finding Kahneman's view so consistent with mine was awesome.

    Anyway, what I meant by looking deeper was looking into how what we experience as intuition can be understood as naturally arising from networks of neurons. I like to think other people can recognize the sort of things I've been recognizing for a long time, about the relevance of things at the level of neural nets where I see intentionality arising. Though I have to admit I do have a significant advantage due to my electrical engineering background and visuo-spatial abilities. There is an easy for you to say element to it. And part of me recognizes that few are going to have the kind of background knowledge and visuo-spatial aptitude to 'see' it as I do, and part of me doesn't want to admit that.

    I'm sorry I haven't responded to more of your last two posts. You've said a lot that reinforces my view and warrants a response, but I need to call it a night. Once again thank you, and I hope to catch up in responding to you.
  • Simplisticators and complicators
    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.Srap Tasmaner

    Thank you very much for taking the time.

    I think the question to ask is, what is "just experience"?

    This is the less early days of AI. Today we have ChatGPT, with information processing which in part is based on studying how neurons process information. ChatGPT was trained via an enormous amount of experience.

    I'd agree with you somewhat about intuition being a myth, in that what some people conceive of as intuition isn't very realistic, but I think "intuition" is a quite useful word, to label something which is important to understand about human cognition, and which people (to vaying degrees) recognize as an aspect of how their mind works. I'd say intuition just is outputs resulting from deep learning in neural networks, which were trained to do the information processing that they do, with experience as input.

    You mention "positions and patterns committed to memory". Pattern recognition is something neural networks can be trained to be extremely good at. So good that if you have driven a long commute over and over, you eventually develop the ability to drive the route on 'autopilot' with your conscious mind free to consider something completely unrelated to the experience of driving.

    Do you think it might be worth looking deeper than "just experience"?
  • God and the Present


    Exactly. Thank you for explaining.

    May I use you, as a demonstration to other forum members, of something apropos to discussion going on in the "Simplisticators and Complicators" thread? :nerd:
  • Masculinity
    So, I just got the word today, that I get to go from three month checkups after treatment for prostate cancer, to six month check ups. Is it kosher for me to bring up experience with hormone therapy in the Masculinity thread?
  • Simplisticators and complicators
    I can write paragraphs about this but I doubt anyone wants to read that.Srap Tasmaner

    I'd be very interested. Although I've never put much effort into becoming good at chess, and I'm not sure I would understand it very comprehensively.
  • Simplisticators and complicators
    I take as an indicator of comprehension, the ability to simplify and explain.Hanover

    Thanks for the substantive response.

    I'm not surprised that you, as an attorney, see things that way. However an understanding of Broca's aphasia shows thing are not that simple. Another thing to consider is Srap's comment:

    Chess provides a clear example, as usual: there's a saying among masters that the move you want to play is the right move, even if it seems impossible. This is intuition...Srap Tasmaner

    A chess master's intuition would seem by definition to be something that the CM can't put into words, and yet it is demonstrable that the CM's intuition must in some regard be comprehension, even if it not a comprehension that the CM can express linguistically.

    In my case, I do much of my electronic design by mentally modelling designs in the form of 'pictures' in my head. It is often the case that I can see why designs will or won't work, but it would take a lot of effort to translate the dynamic model I am picturing in my mind into language. Ability to comprehend is separate issue from being able to express what is comprehended verbally. Fortunately electronic designs can be communicated in the form of schematic diagrams, that others with the right knowledge base can develop their own comprehension of.

    To simplify, it must be a story because stories are what happens in real life.Hanover

    But that's simplistic. Vastly more happens in real life than has ever been put into a story. Can you really disagree?

    The complicator keeps it abstract without the ability to fully explain it, either because he's just poor at anticipating what his audience doesn't understand, or more commonly, he doesn't fully understand what he's talking about

    I think it is pretty natural for most people to interpret the thinking of others, in terms of the experience of thinking that they themselves have. However, most people don't have a very fine grained understanding of what their particular constellation of cognitive strengths and weaknesses are, and how that constellation of cognitive strengths and weaknesses shapes the way they go through life. So most people are inclined to jump to simplistic conclusions about the thinking of people whose constellation differs significantly from their own. It may be the case for you, that if you are unable to explain something you don't understand it. It might even be the case that such is true for most of the people you encounter, but it certainly isn't universally true.

    Being autistic, it is definitely the case that I can be poor at anticipating what other people will and won't understand, at least until I've gotten to know the person somewhat.

    I'd urge you to watch the movie Temple Grandin, as a means of developing a more informed perspective.
  • Simplisticators and complicators
    The hedgehog and the fox?Srap Tasmaner

    I've had the opportunity to look into it more and it seems very insightful, although I haven't read enough of by the Russian authors discussed, to have a very deep understanding. The notion of a fox who thinks he should be a hedgehog certainly resonates.
  • Insect Consciousness
    One of my favourites is Galapagos and the other is Cat's Cradle.Vera Mont

    Cat's Cradle is what my book group is planning to read prior to our museum trip. I've read it, but I think I was 14 or 15 at the time, so I expect to get a lot out of rereading it.
  • Insect Consciousness
    I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I just happened upon Brain size predicts learning abilities in bees.
  • Insect Consciousness
    Among other things. Why?Vera Mont

    I get the impression that you might appreciate Vonnegut's thinking.

    Which might not have occurred to me, except someone in my science fiction book group recently suggested a group field trip to the Kurt Vonnegut museum. I haven't read anything by Vonnegut in a long time, other than the short story Harrison Bergeron which I reread occasionally.
  • God and the Present
    'Where you live' is in your brain's model of reality, which is generated in part based on the light that hit your retina (on the order of 100 milliseconds) earlier.
  • Atheist Dogma.
    do dolphins have laws?Moliere

    I don't know, but it seems orcas don't object to their kids being juvenile delinquents.

    We were suddenly surprised by what felt like a bad wave from the side,” he said of the recent incident. “That happened twice, and the second time we realized that we had two orcas underneath the boat, biting the rudder off. They were two juveniles, and the adults were cruising around, and it seemed to me like they were monitoring that action.
  • Insect Consciousness
    Makes me mad as a hornet.Hanover

    He said waspishly.
  • Insect Consciousness


    Are you a Vonnegut fan?