Those who live on the edge of time, in a rapidly evolving environment, such as a high risk occupation, or a professional athlete in a fast sport, are usually the ones who find the most purpose for superstition. In these situations a large part of a person's professional environment is completely unpredictable, and many of the happenings appear to be at the hands of fate, or chance. — Metaphysician Undercover

Interesting observation. It makes sense that people who make their living off their ability to act effectively in the heat of the moment are used to being able to go with their intuitions successfully, and tend to do so even when critical thinking might serve them better.

What if the desire for coldness is just a way to mask the unappealing flavor of one's drink, as some Europeans would say with respect to American beer? Subconscious mitigation of unappealing flavor? :razz: — Leontiskos

Well that too. I tend to go for Guiness.

I tend to separate superstitious thinking "Hey, this red shirt is a lucky charm!" from OCD "I HAVE TO count the chairs in my row, or I'll be really uncomfortable." I have a habit, or mild compulsion, to rinse out my glass before I fill it with cold water from the tap. I find a wet glass more appealing. A plastic glass, on the other hand, can't be helped by rinsing it out first. Yuck. It's a non-functional behavior. I used to have more of these, but they have faded away. — BC

Is it superstition, or subconscious deep learning. By rinsing a glass, you can remove a substantial amount of heat from the glass. Without pre-chilling the glass, the heat in the glass would warm your drink and result in less enjoyment of the coldness of your drink.

Sounds like subconscious thermodynamics to me. :nerd:

There is considerable debate over whether plants are conscious and this, indeed, is an important question. Here I look at developments in neuroscience, physics and mathematics that may impact on this question. Two major concomitants of consciousness in animals are microtubule function and electrical gamma wave synchrony. Both these factors may also play a role in plant consciousness. I show that plants possess aperiodic quasicrystal structures composed of ribosomes that may enable quantum computing, which has been suggested to lie at the core of animal consciousness. Finally I look at whether a microtubule fractal suggests that electric current plays a part in conventional neurocomputing processes in plants." — RogueAI

Careful. That way lies crank magnetism or even worse, fractal wrongness.

Sneaky little things. — Patterner

Indeed.

Great card! :lol:

Nevertheless we would have to find the "ego-neuron" so to speak to locate the point in space where all this information transmitted by our nerves come together to generate our experience of a "personality". — Pez

I.e. we would need to find a homunculus?

There is no cognition in perception; the senses don’t think. — Mww

I suppose it depends on what one categorizes under "thinking", but I'd say there is ample evidence of perception and thinking being entangled.

Meaning that, we have a consensus view of the nature of reality, and that view is, at the end of the day, that the physical sciences are definitive, and that psychic phenomena and belief in higher planes of being can only be understood in subjective terms. — Wayfarer

Psi. (Pun intended.)

Yep. What we see is not an upside-down sense-impression created by the brain, but the things in the world.

But Michael now thinks there isn't an upside down and a right way up anyway, so the point is moot, so far as the thread goes. One can't nail jelly to the wall, the discussion hereabouts being the jelly. — Banno

From my perspective, the question of the thread looks like an attempt to address a complex subject (actually a diverse set of subjects) with a false dichotomy. Those arguing for direct realism seeming to have the pragmatic advantage, of being able to acknowledge common ground for discussion.

For there to be a "right way up" would seem to require something like absolute space and/or a preferred frame which I believe is at odds with modern scientific theory. — Michael

Ordinary language is tied to a frame of reference where the direction of the center of gravity of the Earth plays an important role. So it's not really a problem to translate, "Banno (in Oz) reached down to catch the cup falling off the table." to a frame of reference suitable for an accurate understanding of what happened.

So could there be a species in which half the population see the world upside down?

Wouldn't they "flip" the image in the way your paper describes, seeing the world right way up? — Banno

Yeah, a species in which half the population sees the world upside down doesn't seem scientifically plausible.

Yep. What does this tell us? — Banno

I'd say it tells us that our brains, given time, can adjust our perceptions so that we see things in a way that allows us to behave in a way consistent with the way the world is, despite an added layer of 'indirectness'.

One can imagine your creature's physiologist making the "discovery" that half the population sees things upside down, and their philosophers explaining carefully that no, they don't.
— Banno

The philosopher would be wrong. The scientist knows best. They're the ones actually studying how the world and perception works. — Michael

Some relevant science:

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/nov/12/improbable-research-seeing-upside-down

The professor made Kohler wear a pair of hand-engineered goggles. Inside those goggles, specially arranged mirrors flipped the light that would reach Kohler's eyes, top becoming bottom, and bottom top.

At first, Kohler stumbled wildly when trying to grasp an object held out to him, navigate around a chair, or walk down stairs. In a simple fencing game with sticks, Kohler would rise his stick high when attacked low, and low in response to a high stab.

Holding a teacup out to be filled, he would turn the cup upside down the instant he saw the water apparently pouring upward. The sight of smoke rising from a match, or a helium balloon bobbing on a string, could trigger an instant change in his sense of which direction was up, and which down.

But over the next week, Kohler found himself adapting, in fits and starts, then more consistently, to such sights.

After 10 days, he had grown so accustomed to the invariably upside-down world that, paradoxically and happily, everything seemed to him normal, rightside-up. Kohler could do everyday activities in public perfectly well: walk along a crowded sidewalk, even ride a bicycle. Passersby on the street did ogle the man, though, because his eyewear looked, from the outside, unfashionable.

There is an interesting parallel to humans being overly reliant on human authorities, and the development of religions.

Two hundred years ago, a machine that does what Chat-GPT does was unimaginable. Why think that the limits of your imagination is so informative?

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871) introduction

This seems to assume that AI will never be provided with 'sensory organs', so that AI can never learn about reality first hand. That doesn't seem like a good assumption to me.

So, there is no issue. — AmadeusD

Tell that to the spouse of the duplicated person. :wink:

Can you give a definition of "creative thinking " that could be used in a Turing-type test? — Ludwig V

AI outperforms humans in standardized tests of creative potential:

Score another one for artificial intelligence. In a recent study, 151 human participants were pitted against ChatGPT-4 in three tests designed to measure divergent thinking, which is considered to be an indicator of creative thought.

Divergent thinking is characterized by the ability to generate a unique solution to a question that does not have one expected solution, such as "What is the best way to avoid talking about politics with my parents?" In the study, GPT-4 provided more original and elaborate answers than the human participants...

The definition I linked to was as follows:

Biological reductionism: A theoretical approach that aims to explain all social or cultural phenomena in biological terms, denying them any causal autonomy. Twentieth-century incarnations of biological reductionism have relied to varying degrees on Darwin's theory of evolution and principles of natural selection. Within the human sciences, there have been attempts to explain observed differences in group behaviour—such as performance on intelligence tests, rates of mental illness, intergenerational poverty, male dominance or patriarchy, and propensity for crime—as being biologically determined, by claiming that groups have different biological capacities or evolutionary trajectories. The theories of Social Darwinism, eugenics, and sociobiology often involve biological reductionism. A recognition of the importance of biological conditions and human nature need not involve biological reductionism. — Wayfarer

There's a bit of argumentum ad odium to that definition.

One might also say, that some understanding of the way things reduce to biology is a matter or being educated.

...I can't believe we just 'pick it up' by nature. — kudos

It seems to me we pick up experience and knowledge by nature. Experience and knowledge are part of most definitions of wisdom I have seen.

Why think that people wouldn't tend to pick up wisdom by nature?

That's exactly why Turing's test is so persuasive - except that when we find machines that could pass it, we don't accept the conclusion, but start worrying about what's going on inside them. If our test is going to be that the putative human needs to have a human inside - mentally if not necessarily physically, the game's over. — Ludwig V

It seems to me that it is time to rethink the relevance of the Turing Test. If humans ever create a machine that develops sentience, I would expect the machine to think in ways quite alien to us. So I don't see 'being indistinguishable from a human' as a very good criteria for judging sentience. (Or at the very least, humanity will need to attain much deeper understanding of our own natures, to create sentient machines whose sentience is human-like.)

Furthermore, it seems quite plausible that machines with no sentience will soon be able to convince many Turing Test judges. So to me, the Turing Test doesn't seem to provide a useful criteria for much of anything.

It isn't dismissive, it's objective. The fundamental mechanism of information processing via artificial neural networks has not changed. — Pantagruel

There are different aspects of information processing to be considered. Yes, understanding of how neural networks can process data in powerful ways has been around for a long time. The hardware that allows that sort of information processing to be practical is a much more recent arrival.

It is simply faster and more robust. It isn't one whit more intelligent than any other kind of mechanism. — Pantagruel

Well, it has an important aspect of intelligence that many other systems don't have, which is learning. Do you think that a distinction between learning mechanisms and non-learning mechanisms is worthwhile to recognize?

Nvidia hasn't become a two trillion dollar corporation because hype.
— wonderer1

This has absolutely no bearing on inherent nature of the technology in question. — Pantagruel

It certainly has bearing on the systems that are actually implemented these days. The type of physical systems available to implement artificial neural nets play a significant role in what can be achieved with such systems. The degree of parallel distributed processing is higher these days, and in that sense the hardware is more brain-like.

What is being hyped as "AI" for marketing purposes is a simulation, a simulacrum, a model, nothing more. — Pantagruel

This seems overly dismissive to me. Nvidia hasn't become a two trillion dollar corporation because hype. Nvidia has become a two trillion dollar corporation because their parallel processing GPUs allow information processing to be done in ways which weren't feasible without highly parallel processor architectures.

There is revolutionary information processing going on in modern "AI" systems. Of course there is no good reason to think that there is anything like human consciousness happening in these systems, but that is a different matter from whether there is something substantially different between the leading edge information processing of today and that of ten years ago. (Which your post seems to suggest.)

Sure. I was just giving a thumb's up to the recognition of value in considering one's 'training set' shown by @Olento's post.

Lately I've been thinking that maybe human thought really is some kind of language model. We expose ourselves to massive amount of text and discussion, and then just "continue the prompt". Well I'm not saying this very seriously, but for sure I'm going to prepare myself to that scenario by reading and writing as much as I can. It will be good for me in any case — Olento

:up:

The issue is that the definition of reason itself, per Adorno and Habermas, has changed in post-Enlightenment philosophy. To throw that into relief, consider the mainstream consensus of the essentially meaningless nature of the Universe. On the one hand, from a purely scientific point of view, it makes complete sense, as we're looking at it from a completely objective point of view. — Wayfarer

On a scientifically informed perspective, it would be naive to think that we're looking at anything from a completely objective point of view.

We are creatures that find things meaningful. Looking for meaning, beyond actually finding things meaningful in this life, might be a fool's errand.

Science consciously excludes anything subjective in its reckonings. — Wayfarer

That is clearly one of your favorite things to say. But it's simply not true. It strongly suggests you are ignorant of a whole lot of scientific thought.

But when this becomes a belief about the 'the way things really are' that it opens up the chasm of nihislim. — Wayfarer

Your bogeyman.

Because we don't actually live in the scientific universe, we dwell in the human condition. — Wayfarer

False dichotomy.

...and then you have to factor climate change in again.... — Pantagruel

AMOC collapse would make Britain a far less balmy place.

How can You convince someone, who thinks that philosophy is just idle talk, that at least not all of this kind is mere empty stream of words? — Pez

Demonstrate the social ninjitsu skills that come from long involvement with philosophical arguments?

ChatGPT has adopted the philosophical approach. Everything seems factual and devoid of evaluation, at least until the conclusion that "belief in the existence of the world is generally regarded as a foundational assumption of human cognition and inquiry, underlying our understanding of the natural world and our place within it," for which no support is provided. — Gary Venter

Do you think the statement is lacking in support? I would think randomly polling people on the question would show general agreement with ChatGPT.

Both, I guess. The fallacy of composition is to assume that because a certain type/element of thought is linguistic, that all aspects of it must be — e.g., if there are things we like about a piece of music or art that we can't put into words, this je ne sais quoi isn't contained in "thought." — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's an interesting way of looking at it. It reminds me of recent discussions on TPF, of variation in the extent to which people experience an inner monolog. I wonder if there is much correlation between the degree to which people experience an inner monolog, and a tendency to categorize things that cannot be put into words, as other than thought.

I'm not at all sure what you said there. I don't know what a "physical reference" might be... — Banno

By a physical reference I mean a physical system used in comparing a second tier reference standard to the current definition of a physical unit (e.g. metre). The physical reference for a metre is something that has changed over time.

The metre was originally defined in 1791 by the French National Assembly as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle, so the Earth's polar circumference is approximately 40000 km.

In 1799, the metre was redefined in terms of a prototype metre bar, the bar used was changed in 1889, and in 1960 the metre was redefined in terms of a certain number of wavelengths of a certain emission line of krypton-86. The current definition was adopted in 1983 and modified slightly in 2002 to clarify that the metre is a measure of proper length. From 1983 until 2019, the metre was formally defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum in 1/299792458 of a second. After the 2019 redefinition of the SI base units, this definition was rephrased to include the definition of a second in terms of the caesium frequency ΔνCs. This series of amendments did not alter the size of the metre significantly – today Earth's polar circumference measures 40007.863 km, a change of 0.022% from the original value of exactly 40000 km, which also includes improvements in the accuracy of measuring the circumference.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre

...nor an "actual metre". — Banno

I wasn't suggesting that you had a concept of an "actual metre". As I said, "I assume you aren't suggesting there is such a thing as an actual metre, aside from there being such a consensus on how "metre" is defined." I suppose I was mostly concerned that people might misinterpret you saying "...no more a fact than the length of the standard metre was 1m." as suggesting there is a fact of what an actual metre is, apart from the human consensus.

Are you aware of the difference in opinion between Wittgenstein and Kripke?

A thread on its own. Or a career. — Banno

Not very aware.

I have a career very much involved with metrology (though not metres specifically). I suppose I'm inclined to get pedantic on the subject.

I am questioning the idea of anything being perfect. I am saying that it could be impossible, or simply a made up concept, since there is no evidence of it. If this is the case, according to your definition, goodness also does not exist. Now, something is clearly amiss here. This would suggest that there is something wrong with your definition. — Beverley

:up:

Language as the defining aspect of thought or mental life appears to be a sort of synecdoche, or maybe a fallacy of composition. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Fallacy of composition or division? I could see it as a fallacy of division, i.e. 'thought is language all the way down' or "In the beginning was the word." I'm not seeing how a fallacy of composition might be in play, however.

In any case, this is a very interesting topic to me personally. I'd love to see an OP where you delve into the topic further.

Can you see an analogy with the idea of the conservation of energy? — Janus

I'm not seeing any very good analogy.

I'm suggesting that perhaps the conservation of energy is no more a fact than the length of the standard metre was 1m. — Banno

From my perspective the standard metre is an agreed upon physical reference as to what distance is to be considered 1m. It seems to me the point of a standard metre is that a bunch of people agree to use it as the definition of a metre, until something better comes along. I assume you aren't suggesting there is such a thing as an actual metre, aside from there being such a consensus on how "metre" is defined.

With science we force the object to present more of itself than it wants to. — Jamal

So a connotation of animism? :wink:

Maybe you can help Janus? Why do you and I want to say, and why do some phenomenologists say, that the things we perceive present themselves to us? I feel I’m missing something obvious. — Jamal

Something obvious to me is how much is not being talked about with a statement like "Things we perceive present themselves to us." There are a lot of details that might be understood, that are seemingly brushed under the rug with such a statement.

I'd be curious as to what connotations "present" has in this context and how those connotations might contrast with a scientific view on the matter.

Well, another problem would be that human experts tend to be continually learning, so the system you describe would seem to inevitably lag behind human expertise. So unless the system is going to have a perceptual system, enabling it to become the world's leading expert at everything, how can it avoid lagging behind human experts?

My goal is (1) to make Boolean True(x) computable. (2) This requires that a machine has an understanding of the world at least equal to the best human experts in every field. — PL Olcott

Sounds like a wildly unrealistic goal to me.

Currently humans do not have as much as a good guess between truth and well crafted lies. — PL Olcott

I'd have to say that there is a lot of variation from human to human and subject to subject.

The database that I referred to has always been the the set of general knowledge of the current actual world that can be expressed using language. For example it is true that "cats are animals" thus disagreement is simply incorrect. — PL Olcott

Why is what is "general knowledge" so important? Typically, when I am talking about sailboats, I am talking with fellow sailors who understand "cat" is short for catamaran, and what a cat looks like: