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,
Here’s how I would summarize:
For most English speakers, “X understands English” means that X has certain capabilities. For you, “X understands English” means that X has a certain kind of history.
Your definition leads to absurdities like those I described in my “Lassie” example.
Even you acknowledge that your position “is a pain intuitively.”
I think the problem is that you, like walto, are envisioning some sort of metaphysical tether between a word or concept and its referent.
I’d be interested in hearing your responses to the two linked comments.
Yeah, I don’t agree with some of that. I do think ‘English’ is a natural kind term, but ‘understand’ isn’t. As indicated above, I think you can understand a ton of english even mistaking the natural kind terms and proper names in it. Do you know English? Not sure, but I’m obviously more latitudinarian than you about that.
keiths,
It’s not incorrect, and you’ve given no good reason for thinking it is. The rest of your post contains the same kind of absurd bullshit. As many have noted here, but I have forgotten again, it’s silly to try to discuss anything with you as if you were an adult.
keiths,
As you obviously have no idea what my views are, you aren’t really in a very good position to be summarizing them.
Actually, either you don’t even know what your own views are–or are too embarrassed about them to answer any questions about them.
Since both of his links here are broken, here is the comment walto is responding to.
walto,
Good grief, walto. That comment was addressed to Bruce, not to you. See the name ‘Bruce’ at the top of it?
If you think I’ve missed a relevant question, then by all means repeat it. I’m happy to explain my views, and I’ve been doing so throughout the thread. Obviously.
I see that this contradicts something I said yesterday: I claimed that the language spoken in the swamp was also English. I suppose it couldn’t be if “English” is a rigid designator. But I continue to think that there’s a perfectly good sense in which the Swamp People understand a lot of English. I take the fact that their language is so close in structure to English as to allow them to get around quite well in English-speaking countries to be quite important. I don’t think such capabilities should be dismissed as showing competence in a particular language. But I guess it’s wrong that it can make the two languages identical.
keiths,
Yes, but I also saw my name in there. Didn’t you?
No thanks. I tried that in Noyau. You demonstrated quite clearly there that you consider simply repeating the position that was being questioned an example of answering the question.
walto,
Of course. I put it there.
But I wasn’t summarizing your views, just pointing out an apparent overlap with Bruce’s.
keiths:
walto:
Come on, walto. If you really think I’ve missed a relevant question of yours, and you’re not just making this up, then repeat the question so I can answer it.
So is QM, except even more so.
Swampman at the instant of its creation does not have memories.
Then he’d be easily distinguishable from non-swamp man just by virtue of being interviewed, surely. Certainly not identical.
ETA: without memories, could he be capable of speech, even?
That can’t be right. If my Swampman is physically identical to me in every possible respect, then he has the exact same pattern of synaptic connections in his hippocampus as I do, ergo his memories are identical to mine.
They are only ostensible memories.
Ha ha ha!
I’m not sure what you mean by “Swamp People”. I prefer to stick to a single entity created utterly at random with a structure stipulated to match some person. In particular, I am not claiming my conclusions apply to some collection of such random entities who have been living together in the world for some time.
It’s not just natural kind terms that are meaningless for SM at the moment of its creation. According to Burge’s account of externalism, so are any terms which depend on the social context. Also, if Kripke’s arguments against descriptive approaches to the meaning of names are accepted, then names are excluded as well, since SM has never had directed acquaintance with anyone nor has it had any contact with the linguistic communities which encompass the causal chains involved creating the reference for a name.
Further, if we accept for the sake of argument that we can predict how SM will behave despite its totally random nature (which I doubt), then we can say SM will make consistently false statements about any situation which involves its causal history. Despite what it says, it had no parents, never went to school, does not have any friends, did not eat anything the previous day. In fact, since SM never perceived anything, does not have any memories, has never heard any testimony, we must conclude it has no (a posteriori) knowledge. Any statement it utters involving knowledge will be false.
I don’t see how one can credit an entity which utters so many false or meaningless statements about the world with understanding a language.
When Davidson created the SM thought experiment, he thought it obvious that the entity could not understand a language since it lacked causal connections to the world. I was hesitant about relying on such a bare statement, since it seems to beg the question by defining a language as involving causal considerations. However, based on the considerations in the above paragraphs, I think I understand why Davidson felt justified in making the claim.
I’d say one cannot call a neural configuration a memory without the further qualification that it has to have been formed in the “right way”. I think “the right way” can be specified by saying it involves causal contact with the content of the memory.
In any event, that is how I remember John Campbell defining it in his Phil of Mind course .
Well, of course, he would say he has memories! (Once more, if I accept for the sake of argument that one can make empirical predictions about such utterly random entities).
ETA: he is certainly capable of uttering meaningless sounds which we might incorrectly attribute meaning to!
Bruce:
KN:
walto:
KN:
He’s not joking. To Bruce, they aren’t memories, only “memories”. At the moment of his electro-birth, Swampman can “remember” everything that non-Swampman can, but he can’t remember a single thing.
I hope the bizarreness of Bruce’s position is starting to sink in.
Sorry, Keith, but I think we are just too far apart on how to characterize the issues and on what type of evidence should be brought to bear for me to say anything that will advance the conversation.
walto:
I think one can only list examples.
Pautz has some thoughts about some typical locutions, like “looks reports” or “as of” predicates in the second paragraph of section 1 of his Why Explain Visual Experiences in Terms of Content.
Bruce,
Not at all. The mere fact of our disagreement doesn’t mean that we can’t understand each other’s positions. In fact, we’ve had quite a productive discussion so far, and you’ve indicated that I understand your position quite well, despite our disagreements.
The real problem, I suspect, is that you can’t defend your position against the criticisms I raise in those two comments, particularly the criticisms involving the metaphysical “tether” between word/concept and referent.
Here is that comment (originally addressed to walto, but applicable to your position):
Right. So you’ve said. As indicated, I disagree. Linguistic abilities are the key to understanding languages, and theirs is basically as good as yours and mine, in spite of their many misunderstandings. IMO, one can have a basic understanding of language and still not know the references of lots of names and general terms. Every parent knows or should know this. What language did my kids speak when they were three?
Ha ha ha.
I’ve asked a couple of them a half dozen times–to no avail. I know I’m dumb, but Jesus.
keiths:
walto:
keiths:
walto:
walto, translated:
By Bruce’s reasoning, Swamp Jeff Gordon doesn’t know how to shave, or brush his teeth, or use the toilet, though he can do all of those things perfectly well. He doesn’t even know what a razor is, or a toothbrush, or a toilet — though he can point them out to you if you ask — in English, a language he doesn’t understand.
He doesn’t know what a car is, or how to drive one. But he can get behind the wheel and win at Talledega.
Bruce is normally pretty level-headed, but this position of his is just wacky.
Bad translation, but typical, pathetic, self-protective, obnoxious keiths stuff. Anyhow, it didn’t need translation. I’m pretty sure it was perfectly clear to everyone but you, just as I wrote it.
ETA: actually, it was probably clear to you too.
Bruce,
I addressed that already:
In other words, the randomness isn’t essential and can be jettisoned. You just need a causal history that differs in the right ways from a normal, non-Swamp causal history.
keiths,
I agree that bruce’s position is wacky, but yours is too–in the other direction. You’re both pretty far off the rails, IMO.
walto,
I’d be interested in hearing your specific argument(s) against my views.
And also your response to my metaphysical “tether” criticisms of your stated position.
Your views–i.e. Dennett’s–(except that you are a Cartesian theaterist–a view he tends to–I think correctly–criticize)–have this problem, pointed out by Dennett himself in his book, when he notes that– and why– Fodor and others basically think he’s nuts:
He’s wrong about two-bitsers because he’s wrong about the Chinese room. (That doesn’t mean that Searle was right about it, however–he concludes too much.) But I will not talk about the Chinese room here. I spent a good couple of years discussing it on another site maybe a decade ago. I wish I had that time back.
walto,
I am not a “Cartesian theaterist”. You think so only because you misunderstand the concept.
Regarding the rest of your comment, there’s no argument there. You’re simply pointing out that Fodor and Searle disagree with Dennett, and that you do too.
The question is whether you can present an argument in support of your disagreement.
Also, don’t forget to address the metaphysical “tether” issue.
I see some of us have been over this before.
You certainly ARE a Cartesian theaterist. It’s just that YOU misunderstand the concept.
As indicated I have no interest in discussing this matter with you. The burden is on Dennett and you to show that we are just like two-bitsers and that syntax yields sematics–not any anybody else. When you meet it, I’ll consider returning. But I’m not holding my breath.
What deterministic process could generate you without some causal relationship to you (eg a specification for how you are constructed)? That was the point of my transporter examples.
Well, it is not my position, it is Davidson’s, although the details of my supporting case differ from his.
He may be wrong, but Davidson is normally not considered to be wacky. At least if we go by the meaning of the word “wacky” in our English.
On skills: all the skills you list involve words with meanings and actions whose success conditions; in both cases the applicable norms depend on social context. Burge has arguments which show there can be molecular duplicates from different societies so that we cannot determine the meaning or correctness of the behavior we predict will be emitted by the entity without specifying a context for that behavior.
But even if we accept that the entity will demonstrate skills as judged successful and meaningful in our context, it cannot know that it has such skills. For given how it was created, it cannot have any justification for any (a posteriori) knowledge-that.
And as for me, I really don’t know what to stop, do I?
ETA: fixed some typos 20 minutes after posting
I agree we do not need to know correct descriptions for (say) names when we successfully refer with them. I understand that as the point of Kripke’s argument from ignorance or error. But that argument relies on our being embedded in a linguistic community and its associated causal links in order to make reference successful.
There is a similar reliance for natural kinds in Putnam and Bruge through the division of linguistic labor.
Your daughter is not a good analogy because she has an evolutionary history and a causal history of embedding in a linguistic community.
The key aspects of SM for my arguments are:
– it is utterly random
– we are going by predicted behavior; it has never causally interacted with a linguistic community
– all that is specified is its internal structure; by Putnam/Kripke/Burge arguments, that internal structure could be shared by people who speak a language that differs from ours in its context and the resulting effects on both causal histories of names and also of division of linguistic labor for natural and social kinds
– since it is random, there is no reason to say the entity intrinsically shares one of those causal histories; hence, even though we may choose to judge its predicted, emitted behavior by our standards, there is no reason to think those standards apply to it intrinsically, and lacking those intrinsic standards, we are making a mistake if we attribute understanding to its predicted behavior
It’s funny, but I guess unsurprising, that the main thing I think Dennett is right about in epistemology is his anti-Cartesianism. That’s the main thing keiths seems to DISagree with him about. Love it.
From SEP
For me to have a personal episodic memory, my present act of remembering must be causally connected in an appropriate way to the past experience being recollected. Even if it happens to be true that, as a child of four, I got lost in a shopping mall, we would deny that I personally remember the experience if I had completely forgotten it, and have only later been told about it by my parents, or had such a possibility suggested to me by a therapist or an experimental psychologist. Genuine episodic memories, then, causally depend in certain ways on the particular remembered experiences (Martin and Deutscher 1966; Shoemaker 1970; Perner 2000; Bernecker 2008).
I don’t think you’re quite grokking where I agree and disagree with you. I agree with Putnam on division of labor and the (let’s call it) “causal essentialism” of certain general terms and names. But I think your criteria for being a speaker of English is too strict, and I don’t think that causal essentialism extends to the remainder of linguistic behavior.
Obviously, it doesn’t do to repeat arguments for the stuff I already agree with on these matters. The question is whether I don’t take those morals we agree on far enough, or you take them too far.
Some of the complaints that keiths has made about your position seem apt to me. Does your swamp man know to shave or not? Or take the three-year-old again: how does its admitted causal relationship with lots of English speakers magically make her an English speaker? After all, someone might have such relations and NOT be an English speaker–because of a lack of capabilities.
I think you have to render unto internalism that which belongs there–just as I think keiths needs to render unto externalism that which belongs there. The truth, as so often, is in the middle.
I agree with the view that, to be an actual memory, the correct causal connections must obtain–just as, to be an actual perception, the correct causal connections must obtain. Denial of that leads to either Cartesian skepticism or the sort of idealism about the past that Neil has pushed. In my view, good philosophy requires tossing off such Cartesian or Berkleyan views as that we either “compare” memories with some sort of inaccessible “past-in-itself” or that we “construct it” out of current experiences.
The past exists, just as a lot of present stuff outside of our current experience. Any philosophy that is inconsistent with that “home truth” is, IMO, basically crap.
I replied on the shaving bit.
I’m going to leave it on disagreement about what we can conclude about the predicted, emitted behavior of randomly created entities when such behavior is subject to norms of behavior appropriate to judging the success of whether such predicted behavior constitutes understanding language.
.
Sorry–I must have missed that. I see that you wrote,
FWIW, whether or not one can know that one has those skills seems irrelevant to the question–which was whether one can HAVE them.
I leave it here too.
walto:
That’s what the horse/schmorse argument does, along with my “metaphysical tether” criticism.
Now, let’s review this little exchange:
walto: Your view is just as wacky as Bruce’s!
keiths: Why do you say that?
walto: Fodor, Searle and I disagree with you and Dennett.
keiths: Do you have an argument in support of your disagreement?
walto: No. It isn’t my job to support my claim!
Too funny.
Here is Dennett in 2015:
People are often baffled by my theory of con-sciousness, which seems to them to be summed up neatly in the paradoxical claim that consciousness is an illusion. How could that be? Whose illusion? And would it not be a con-cious illusion? What a hopeless view! In a better world, the principle of charity would set in and they would realise that I probably had something rather less daft in mind, but life is short, and we’ll have one less difficult and counterintuitive theory to worry about if we just dismiss Dennett’s as the swiftly self-refuting claim that consciousness is an illusion. Other theor ists, including, notably, Nicholas Humphrey (2006, 2011), Thomas Metzinger (2003, 2009) and Jesse Prinz (2012), know better, and offer theories that share important features with mine.
He uses “qualia” throughout that paper.
Graziano’s theory that (as I recall) consciousness is a representation of one’s attentional scheme is a form of higher order representationalism, which is one of the standard general approaches to consciousness and qualia in philosophy.. I find Graziano somewhat vague in his explanation of qualia; see page 55-57. I’m not saying that is a bad or unavoidable thing at this stage of our knowledge.
That of course is your (typically absurd) translation of the discussion. Horse/shmorse is not an argument–just a claim….and a creeky attempt to burden shift.
I’m a little skittish about the “must” here.
It is certainly true that, in all the cases that we’re familiar with, there are “correct” causal relations between a perception and the object perceived, and between a memory and the event or object remembered. (The hard work lies in determining what “correct” means here.)
Suppose, in the middle of the night, while I’m asleep, aliens beam down, replace me with an exact duplicate, and destroy the source material. KN2 wakes up and goes about his day. He has psychological continuity with KN1. Would we say that KN2 has no memories of his parents?
It seems to me that we would need to say something like, KN2 has ‘schmemories’: he has the same synaptic connections as KN1, and the same introspective states supervene on those synaptic connections, but since he doesn’t actually have the same causal connections between those synaptic connections and the events under which those connections were shaped, they aren’t memories but Something Else.
But here is where I get most nervous. For in this scenario, no one — not KN2 and not anyone else — can determine that what KN2 has are not genuine memories but only schmemories. The distinction cannot be verified. Perhaps the aliens could make that distinction, but only if they had something like the human concept of ‘memory’ at all.
Maybe this is part and parcel of my objection to thought-experiments generally: they invite us to drive too great a wedge between metaphysics and epistemology, or between idealized epistemic practice and actual epistemic practice, for them to be useful tools of philosophical reflection.