http://mashable.com/2016/06/02/elon-musk-simulated-reality/#sdLXHm2_jsqB
2,657 thoughts on “Elon Musk Thinks Evolution is Bullshit.”
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The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
Bruce,
Dennett’s failure of nerve regarding Swampman is especially disappointing because Swampman is really just Dennett’s “two-bitser” writ large.
Just as the two-bitser is capable of recognizing Panamanian quarter-balboas despite having no causal history involving them, Swampman recognizes trees and knows that the word “tree” refers to them despite never before having seen a tree nor having heard the word “tree” — ever.
The US quarter detector is physically identical to the quarter-balboa detector, and Swampman is physically identical to non-Swampman. They are both syntactic engines approximating impossible semantic engines.
Anyone else out there who agrees with Bruce and wants to tackle the question I posed to him?
This summary is from James Klagge’s new introductory book, Simply Wittgenstein:
walto,
That strikes me as a terrible argument.
More later.
I think you would need to argue that with Wittgenstein. What walto suggested does seem to be what Wittgenstein was arguing.
To me, it seems pretty obvious that I can invent a private rule and follow it. Wittgenstein’s argument was all about following a public rule.
We see, with technology, that people can invent a private protocol for use with technical equipment. But that does not seem to be what Wittgenstein was arguing about. So I think W. would deny that the private protocol counted as a language.
Hard to see how something that does not involve communication of information between, at minimum, two individuals can be a language. Was the last native speaker of Cornish communicating or babbling? Who knew?
It’s an odd convention, I think. They’re like a cross between semi-colons and parentheses. In the chapter on Grouping in his Methods of Logic, Quine writes,
Quine goes on for another couple of pages before adding this historical note:
Note that Quine doesn’t use the dot for conjunction. He prefers the convention of simply placing the symbols for each statement next to each other. Hence, if ‘p’, ‘q’ and ‘r’ are statements, he represents their conjunction by ‘pqr’.
Hope that helps.
I agree. But the “talking in tongues” religious folk might have a different idea.
Thanks for taking the time, helpful in two ways:
– if I wanted to work through the gory details of that paper rather than stop at the impressions I posted earlier
– explains why I have never seen that notation elsewhere and also why I don’t have to worry about learning it .
Dropped in to pick up Walt’s reply on notation, so here is extra bonus comment:
You must be reading a different Dennett than me, as I see P 161-163 as supportive of what I say. Recognition requires norms. Dennett’s denial of original intentionality does imply denying that behavior requires norms to make it meaningful.
Double bonus:
My concerns with private languages are twofold:
– Witt’s point that language is a public entity and hence language norms must be publicly sourced
– No one could invent a full natural language (that is, not just a few rules or words) without relying on the norms of a natural language they had already acquired. Development of a new natural language requires cultural evolution.
It is conceivable that Dennett, a trained philosopher who has subjected his views to criticism by his peers over decades, has had a failure of intellectual nerve and failed to draw the right conclusions from his overall set of views.
But I can think of other possibilities.
My own sense of that paper (which I love) is that it’s an “anything you can do I can do better” (i.e., without essential properties) vehicle. Kripke had denied that scope distinctions were sufficient for handling all of our de re intuitions. This is Quine’s attempt to refute that claim. You may remember that I asked on QuickPhil whether anybody knew if there were any responses to it from the Kripke-Plantinga axis, but nobody responded. I’d still be curious to know that.
Bruce,
Failure of nerve is sometimes due to fear of criticism.
But I can think of other possibilities. 🙂
Bruce,
Don’t worry about it. I take it with a grain of salt when you say things like this:
Bruce:
Could you specify the chapter and a leading quote? I have the Kindle version (sans page numbers).
If you define language as public, then of course “private language” is an oxymoron. But that’s merely argument by definitional fiat.
In my journal-writing example, I am using my private language to communicate with my future self, while hiding my thoughts from prying eyes. Why shouldn’t that count as a language? What justifies the “only if public” qualifier?
If I were inventing a private language, I would certainly take advantage of my experience with public languages. However, that doesn’t demonstrate the in-principle impossibility of developing a language de novo.
In any case, the norms of my private language would in fact be private. No one but me could tell you what they were (unless they managed to get their hands on my journal and spent some time deciphering it).
Keiths thinks he’s Samuel Pepys, now! 🙂
Alan Fox,
Humbert Humbert thought his journal was indecipherable. 🙁
Like the guy who wrote the Voynich Manuscript.
Glen Davidson
I see Alan is still struggling with the concept of a thought experiment:
walto,
keiths,
If you’re interested in this issue, you might want to look at the SEP entry on it: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/private-language/ It provides more detail and background than the couple of sentences from Klagg that I posted. There is also the ‘Kripkenstein’ book which some (not me) find very helpful.
The only thing I want to note here is that Witt wasn’t talking about anything like your “‘e’ after ‘x'” rule. He was concerned about the possibility of fixing meanings by private rules. He wasn’t talking about syntax.
FWIW, my general sense is that your Cartesianianism requires private languages. So I think your dismissal of Witt here is you simply being consistent on the matter.
It is the wandering two-bitser chapter; the part I had in mind starts with “Such a two-bitser, whisked off to Panama” and continues to the end of that section (the next section is twin earth).
What I see Dennett doing with the two bitser is saying that what it recognizes depends on norms, namely the norms of the designer of the two bitser.
Now I agree with you that brains are causal and that two-bitsers are causal. The issue we seem to be talking past each other on is how to get norms out of a causal world. That is, what makes a word mean this and not that (“rules” for meaning)? When is recognition correct and when is it incorrect? Why do mental representations about this and not that?
A challenge is to answer those questions using a scientific explanation* and without simply appealing to people’s thoughts on what the norm is. As explained in SEP and I think indirectly by the two-bitser story, very simple synchronized causal variation explanations fail.
I see that whole chapter 29 as Dennett dealing with the basics of how he thinks one should answer those questions, but of course there is much more to say. SEP has lots, eg the link to teleosemantic theories I provided earlier and then the other articles it links.
————————————
* As I understand Putnam (and Walt?), he believes that in some sense the question is unanswerable, that intentionality cannot be reduced completely by scientific, causal explanations. Putnam is not a dualist; he agree that meaning somehow supervenes on a “physical” (my word) world. And he thinks explanations like Millikan’s are helpful. But he does not think they can ever completely capture intentionality, partly because any such explanation depends on intentionality somehow.
Yes, that’s pretty much my view of the matter. Most days, anyhow. (There are so many meanings of “supervenience” though.)
Yes. Hence I used the philosophical term of art “somehow” as in “somehow supervene” and the scare quotes for “physical”.
BTW, on Intensions Revisited, I got the impression from your last post on that paper that you thought Quine’s overall message in that paper was positive.
That is, one could preserve de re by using rigid designators for modal usage and vivid designators for propositional attitude usage and have thereby have something helpful as long as in both cases one restricted to a fixed with a context (scope). Is that what you meant to imply about Quine’s overall message?
I thought the overall theme was negative: he gives up on modal (both de re and de dicto) for any science, and keeps only the de dicto versions of prop att’s, but for secondary sciences only.
walto,
You can’t ignore syntax. The meaning of “man bites dog” is different from that of “dog bites man”.
I am being consistent, but that’s not my reason for rejecting the Klagge/Wittgenstein argument. My actual reasons are the ones given in my comment.
Depends what you mean by “positive.” I take that paper to have been intended to show the Kripkeites that no essentialism (I think he’d like to say “bullshit essentialism”) is required to save all our intuitions about the differences between “necessarily ‘x is F'” and “X is necessarily F”. All the things that Kripke proudly hailed as requiring de re necessity are claimed to be bogus. As Quine says right at the beginning, unlike the modal logican’s little box his “nec” operator “occasions no departure from extensional logic.”
Of course, Quine doesn’t believe in analyticity, but he does believe in logical truths (statements like “a = a” that are true in virtue of their form alone). His goal was to show that all of our intuitions about possible and necessary worlds can be accommodated in an extensional logic.
I was persuaded myself, but I’d like to know Kripke’s reaction.
Thanks. I did not understand it that way,so I need to revisit. TSZ is not the right place for more on this, though.
While we’re talking about stuff that doesn’t belong here, let me get in the little brag that my paper on artistic value has finally come out in Perspectives of New Music and (except for 3 minor corrections) is available on my academia.edu page now:
https://www.academia.edu/26819479/TONAL … ate_Proof_
(Sorry for the shameless self-promo.) 🙁
Back to Musk!
Bruce,
No, because it does just as well at recognizing quarter balboas as it does at recognizing US quarters. It’s sensitive only to syntactic properties, not to norms.
What is considered a “mistake” depends on who is deploying the two-bitser. In the US, the two-bitser makes a “mistake” when it accepts a quarter balboa, but in Panama, it makes a “mistake” when it accepts a US quarter. There is no actual fact of the matter.
In the Twin Earth section, Dennett extends this idea to humans. There is no fact of the matter concerning whether Jones means horse or schmorse when he uses the word “horse”, and even Jones himself can’t tell you.
Humans, like two-bitsers, are syntactic engines that mimic unrealizable semantic engines.
In the Giant Robot section, Dennett writes:
Fwiw, I think that last paragraph of Dennett’s is confused. That there’s no fact of the matter doesn’t follow from the claim that there’s no privileged access to any such fact. Furthermore, no externalist I know of has ever suggested that anybody (whether artifact or not) has privileged access to any such fact (if there is one). What matters is whether causal relations play a role in the meanings of some terms. Bruce and Putnam say they do–you and Dennett (at least in that passage) say they don’t. But the ‘privileged access’ bit is a red herring.
walto,
He isn’t claiming that the former follows from the latter — just that both are true. (Of course, the latter does follow from the former.)
Dennett’s point is that if anyone is in a position to decide exactly what Jones means by “horse” — horse or schmorse — then Jones himself should be able to do so. He can’t, and neither can anyone else, because there is no fact of the matter.
Causal relations obviously do play a role in the (sorta) meanings. A two-bitser won’t mistake nickels for quarters or quarter balboas, and Jones (if he’s sober and healthy) won’t mistake a cat for a horse or a schmorse.
Where Bruce and I differ is that Bruce sees norms playing a causal role:
While norms clearly influenced the design of the two-bitser, they don’t play a causal role in the two-bitser’s recognition process, which is purely syntactic. That’s what I was getting at here:
I think the crux of my disagreement with Bruce is encapsulated by the issue of Swampman. Bruce believes that Swampman doesn’t understand English, and I find that preposterous:
keiths,
Yes, I think the Swampman issue between you concerns the same thing.
Instead of thinking about what the Swampman knows, it may help to think about what WE know or are saying when confronted by him. So, e.g., I move to Swampville and at the same moment, Swamp Bruce and I say “Hi Keith!” to your double. We don’t mean the same thing by “Keith,” do we? I’m talking about YOU, Swamp Bruce is talking about Swamp Keiths. And if Swamp Bruce tells me I’d be surprised to hear how many people there are getting heart valves, he doesn’t mean by “people” or “heart” what I mean by those terms, does he?
And if It’s all just twater, there, same thing for “water.” I think that’s the intuition that Bruce is pumping.
walto,
I understand the point Bruce is trying to make. I just disagree with it.
No, but not for the reason you’re thinking. You and Bruce are different individuals with different Keith-recognizers, so the cues that trigger Keith-recognition will differ between the two of you.
A better question is whether Bruce and Swamp Bruce mean the same thing by “Keith”, given that their Keith-recognizers are atom-for-atom identical. Bruce thinks they don’t. In fact, he thinks that Swamp Bruce doesn’t mean anything at all by “Keith”. Why? Because there is nothing in Swamp Bruce’s history associating “Keith” with anything.
As far as Bruce is concerned, Swamp Bruce doesn’t even understand English, because he lacks a history of learning the language. He is babbling when he says “Hi Keith!” and proceeds to discuss our latest exchange at TSZ. Bruce and Swamp Bruce exhibit identical behavior and competence and undergo identical subjective experiences, but in Bruce’s eyes Swamp Bruce’s random beginnings negate any meanings his utterances would otherwise have.
I find that view to be absurd. In my view, Swamp Bruce and Bruce, being identical, have equal claim to understanding English and recognizing Keith, just as a swamp two-bitser could be claimed to recognize quarters — just like its non-swamp counterpart — despite having a random origin.
Bruce and Swamp Bruce, a two-bitser and a swamp two-bitser — all syntactic engines mimicking impossible semantic engines, with both members of each pair doing an equally good job. How could they not, when they’re identical?
And being identical to the last molecule, how do you identify which is which?
Alan,
You can’t, which is rather the point.
There is no physical difference between them. Only their histories differ.
I find it rather absurd that entities identical at the molecular level could have different histories. Unless, poof.
keiths,
You obviously want to talk about something other than what I posted. If you could address that particularly we might see precisely where the differences lie.
Yes, the points you make in your post are related to part of what I am saying.
I think the core reason Keith and I (and KN in other threads) talk past one another on this issue is my concern with how we can justify norms using scientific language. As I read him, Keith goes with the intuition that Swampman is supposed to motivate: that functionally identical means identical with respect to norms. I differ because functionality without context and causal history does not explain norms (and Dennett’s two bitser is meant to illustrate this).
In the Swampman example, the key point is that the being is specified to be the result of a completely random event. So nothing that relates to its causal history or to its context can apply at the instant of its creation.
After its creation, when it starts to interact when language users (your example), the situation changes. How soon one can say it understands a language is an open issue in my mind. That is why a made a point of saying earlier that understanding a language was not a yes/no issue. Consider a baby learning its first language or someone learning a new language as other examples.
Now no one has called me out on the following further issues, so I will:
The first issue is that there are two types of norms involved: (1) norms for mental representation and (2) norms for meaning and language. For mental representation, causal history is needed for the biological explanations which I think are the best bet for explaining norms scientifically. (An alternative which also depends on history, I believe, is KN’s view from Okrent involving goals instad of function). As for norms of meaning, I’ve made it clear from the start that my argument depends on assuming content externality as per Putnam, eg, so again meaning depends on context and causal history in that context and hence initially Swampman can have no meaning. I see your twater example as making a similar point about how its subsequent interactions in a language community will set the meaning of its words.
Which comes first: mental or language norms? Good question. My intuition based on continuity of cognition in evolution is that is Dennett is right (and not eg Brandom) that norms for mental representation are first, both explanatorily and metaphysically.
The second point I have been unclear about is whether my points about understanding a language are epistemological or ontological. But I’ll leave expanding on that for another day.
petrushka,
Um, there is a poof — the lightning strike. Remember, this is a thought experiment.
As Petrushka points out, you have no way to know this.
walto,
I responded to the point I thought you were making — namely, that meaning is established by an appropriate history. If you meant something else, try restating your point.
I see nothing to be gained from a thought experiment that invokes magic. It is a variation of Last Thursdayism.
Imagine thé Enterprise transporter malfunctions and beams two Captain Kirks. Who is thé imposter? One, both or neither? And we care because…?
Douglass Adams did a very funny take on this.
petrushka,
Then you’re missing the entire point, just as you did when we were discussing moral thought experiments.
Yes, I miss the point of imagining two individuals who are identical at the molecular level, but which in some way are different.
petrushka,
Then you’re basically agreeing with me and disagreeing with Bruce and walto. Good choice. 🙂
As I put it to Bruce:
And thé point is?
I’m basically agreeing with the Turing Test, except I don’t think any winning candidates are on the horizon.
I move to Swampville and at the same moment, Swamp Bruce and I say “Hi Keith!” to your double. We don’t mean the same thing by “Keith,” do we? I’m talking about YOU, Swamp Bruce is talking about Swamp Keiths. And if Swamp Bruce tells me I’d be surprised to hear how many people there are getting heart valves, he doesn’t mean by “people” or “heart” what I mean by those terms, does he?
ETA: (if you like you can substitute ‘Swamp Walto’ for ‘Swamp Bruce’ so there will be no concern about ‘Keith recognizers’–whatever they might be.)