http://mashable.com/2016/06/02/elon-musk-simulated-reality/#sdLXHm2_jsqB
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The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
‘Receiving information’ isn’t sufficient for your Cartesian theater view, keith. One has to perceive sense-data that may have been put there by an evil demon.
Btw, who can’t admit when he’s wrong again? Was that me? Hmmmm. Oh no wait a minute! That was YOU! The sole Cartesian Dennettian in the world!
And that WAS a good deflection. If I were you I’d want to concentrate on my disagreement with Descartes’ pineal gland theory too. Keep in mind though–if you agreed with it, you’d be the only one of those guys living too!
walto,
Yes, that was you.
Let’s review:
walto:
keiths:
walto:
The reception of sensory information is just as true of ordinary perception as it is of a Cartesian demon scenario. It’s just that the source of the information differs.
Neither ordinary perception nor Cartesian demon scenarios need to be instances of Cartesian theaters. Cartesian skepticism is distinct from Cartesian theaterism.
Another error that you won’t admit.
You still don’t get what a Cartesian theater is. Why not take some time and reread Dennett, a little more carefully this time?
One more thing to add to the list of scores of items keiths has been wrong about on this thread alone. He said I would not admit when I was wrong about something–not once but several times. Why was he so sure? Because he can’t do it himself. But alas.
That’s all merely a humorous psychological sidelight though. What’s really fun here is the view that one can be both a Cartesian and a Dennettian without contradiction. Awesome stuff.
I’ve already responded to your ‘it’s just good ole fashion skepticism’ canard. Yours isn’t. It involves the same sense-data theory criticized, not only by Dennett, but by lots of other philosophers since Descartes. Can we be wrong when we think there’s a cow there? Mislead by ‘sensory information, maybe? Sure. That’s common sense.
But don’t forget, on your Cartesian theater view, no one can EVER know whether there’s really a cow there. We’d need God for that. That is not common sense. It’s an entailment of the wrongheaded, cartesian theater view of perception, that what we can really be sure about are sense data only. Physical objects are inferred from our knowledge of sense-data. That, in a nutshell, is the Cartesian theater, and it’s a position you’ve pushed in hundreds of confused posts.
KN is right. You’re certainly not alone in being a cartesian. It’s a very popular position. But bless you, you’re the only Dennettian to do so. Gotta love it.
walto,
I was wrong about this:
You surprised me! It turns out we didn’t need to exhume and reanimate Descartes at all — his written words were enough for you!
Want to surprise me again by admitting another mistake? There are at least three more on the table.
But this…
…is a lie, as you know perfectly well.
walto,
Cartesian skepticism is distinct from Cartesian theaterism.
Do you really not get that, or is this just more pointless mistake denial on your part?
keiths:
Bruce:
There are independent empirical reasons for accepting QM. We accept the counterintuitiveness because the theory is so useful and successful.
What do we gain in exchange for accepting the oddness of your position? Nothing, as far as I can see, apart from some undesirable metaphysical baggage and a redefinition of terms like “understand” and “know” so that they clash with their ordinary meanings.
Swampman might be capable of passing a fluency test with flying colors, but still you’ll say he doesn’t understand English. Swamp Jeff Gordon might be capable of winning at Talladega, but still you’ll say he doesn’t know what a car is or how to drive one.
What do we gain in exchange for this bizarreness?
Bruce,
This would do it: A process that systematically created all possible confgurations of matter fitting within a certain volume.
a) It would produce you;
b) it would be deterministic; and
c) it would not be following a specification of you.
Anyway, I still don’t see why you think the randomness matters. The laws of physics don’t “care” about how Swampman came to be; they just care about his current state and his interactions with the environment.
keiths:
Bruce:
If you agree with it, it’s your position too.
I didn’t say that you or Davidson were wacky. I said your position is wacky.
How is that relevant? Swamp Jeff can shave, brush his teeth, and use the toilet. He can respond appropriately to questions in English. He can drive a car and even win at Talladega. You claim he doesn’t know how to do those things. I think your claim does violence to what people mean when they use the word “know”.
As walto points out, having a skill and knowing that you have that skill are separate qualities. In any case, I don’t see how it’s relevant. Swamp Jeff doesn’t hesitate to use the toilet. He has no doubt that he is capable of using it safely and effectively.
You’re overlooking something. Many of Swampman’s beliefs are justified by the brute fact that he is physically identical to non-Swampman. (Whether he knows they are justified is a separate question.)
What determines which configuration your machine produces that we choose to look at?
How can the laws of physics determine norms?
Haha. This from the guy who doesn’t think we can ever know anything about cars, windows, toilets, shaving, etc. himself.
I used copy and past to have the text that KN provided in the note you were replying to included in my reply to you so that the whole context was clear. But I should have clarified sources of each part of the text.
Anyway, the point was that the status of SM’s memories was verifiable, even though SM itself at the moment of its creation might not be able to verify that situation.
So statements about SM having memories are meaningful if verification is your criterion for meaningfulness.
That’s relevant to claims of realism if you think that claims for realism must be constrained by what you can know (and which involves being able to state knowledge claims by using only verifiable statements).
It is fair to say that I did not lay out my claims about knowledge well. Let me try again. I’m here concerned with a posteriori knowledge-that.
Many of SM’s beliefs are false and so don’t constitute knowledge, eg autobiographical beliefs.
What about its true beliefs such as the earth goes around the sun? On an externalist account of justification one can say that SM has not arrived at its beliefs by any mechanism, reliable or not. So justification fails on that externalist approach to it.
Now an internalist about justification might argue as you do that only the internal mental state of SM matters to determining the justification for its beliefs. In that case, I would raise the concern that that internal state has arisen purely by luck, without having any basis in standard sources of knowledge (memory, testimony, perception).
There is a different and orthogonal approach to the issue of knowledge. One can claim that SM lacks the causal history needed to provide the required norms for intentionality, hence it cannot have beliefs of any sort, hence it cannot have knowledge. However, as the SEP article on teleosemantics that I’ve linked points out, to argue that way one has to be an externalist about phenomenology.
Here is a thought experiment meant to motivate some of the intuitions underlying my position.
A famous painting by Jackson Pollack is bought and hidden away by a collector who dies with the secret of its location.
A machine programmed to spray paint at random duplicates that painting. The paint and canvas used are physically indistinguishable from Pollack’s.
The painting is evaluated by some art experts.
Q1: Would they say it is genuine?
Q2. Would they say the creator showed understanding of aesthetic quality?
Q3: Is the painting genuine?
Q4: Does the creator of the painting possess understanding of aesthetic quality?
Q5: If the art experts knew its causal history, would that change their answers to Q1 and Q2?
Q6: How do the normative attitudes of the world towards JP’s art affect the answers to Q2 and Q4? Given that they do, on what principled basis do we choose a world for those normative attitudes to evaluate the intrinsic properties referred to in Q4?
In my analogy, the painting is like the predicted emitted behavior of swampman and the understanding of the aesthetic merit by the creator corresponds to the understanding of language purportedly evidenced by that predicted behavior.
Now of course the analogy fails to completely capture the language situation because in that situation SM is claimed to possess an internal structure allowing us to predict not just one instance of behavior (one painting) but ongoing language-like behavior. As I understand many of the replies to my concerns, they say that structure is enough. Whereas as I say we should consider the causal history of its formation to answer the analogs of Q4 and Q6.
(ETA: If you want to make the analogy even better, assume the machine itself was created at random and its only output is that painting).
BruceS,
It’s clearly not a genuine Pollack and could worth no more than the frame. Not sure of all that follows from that, but I think the reduced value to collectors is obvious.
Ok, thanks. I understand what you were saying now. Of course, I’m not a verificationist myself. Wouldn’t matter to me if the SM were the only person on earth and had no way to tell. His ostensible memories are true or they aren’t.
I’d say far from obvious with an atom-perfect copy.
Evil genius invents molecular 3-D printer that can print out atom-perfect replicas from information fed to it by a small mobile scanner that EG can take with him undetected to the Louvre. He surreptitiously scans Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and his printer produces a perfect copy. EG is caught trying to sell his copy. He protests, claiming his is the original and the Louvre article is a fake. What forensic test can be performed to tell the painting from its atom-perfect copy?
Did you watch that French-English TV series “The Tunnel” when it was shown in Europe? It is on PBS here. I find the character of the French detective fascinating although I imagine someone like her would be a challenge to deal with in a forum like TSZ.
Bruce,
Its physical identity with the non-Swampman in question, which is the same criterion we use for choosing among the random* configurations produced by lightning bolts.
* I should note that even the lightning-bolt version of Swampman qualifies as deterministic if no quantum indeterminism is involved in the process. But again, I don’t see why you’re concerned about randomness in the first place, since the laws of physics are insensitive to whether Swampman was produced randomly or deterministically. They only “care” about his current physical state, not his prior history.
“Determine” as in “fix” or “determine” as in “ascertain”?
Maybe none. Sometimes crimes can’t be detected. But there’s still a fact of the matter. Leonardo painted only one of the them. Imagine if an abduction is of YOU or some perfect clone. You’d care which, right?
We’d both believe we we were me. If a truly perfect copy can be made, we both are me. Imagine the argument between us! I’m
SpartacusAlan. No, I’m Alan!keiths, to Bruce:
walto:
My Cartesian skepticism actually preserves the standard definition of knowledge as “justified true belief”. It’s just honest about the justification part.
What we’re talking about in this thread is knowledge with the implicit asterisk. We’re setting aside the possibility that Swampman is envatted or being Carteased in some other way.
BruceS,
I did catch a couple of episodes but we no longer get UK satellite TV since they refocused the UK beam.
ETA my mistake, it was The Bridge. I haven’t seen the Tunnel.
ETA2 Wrong! It was Spiral not The Bridge.
ETA3 The
BridgeTunnel* was broadcast on French TV but on Canal+ which we don’t subscribe to!*ETA4
No. Only YOU talk about your absurd endless propositions, that can’t even be stated. Your position on what people think they know is that nobody knows any of it. You’re hardly in a position to be calling somebody’s use of “knowledge” unusual. Yours pretty much takes the cake. But, as I’ve said, it follows from your Cartesian theaterism.
I don’t think so. I wouldn’t care about the other one too much, and the other one wouldn’t care too much about me. What good would it do YOU if somebody were to create a replica of you at the moment of your death? It might do your family and friends some good (especially if they didn’t realize)–but it wouldn’t be you living longer–just a copy.
I think ETA4 was supposed to be: “Hey Walto, it turns out you’re right about everything!” 😉
So it has to have the physically identical body to be you?
I would go with psychological continuity view myself; where by “continuity” I mean
(wait for it)
the right kind of causal history.
Randomness is important because it means the being has no causal history.
There is no choosing or fixing or determining in the thought of experiment of swampman: (other than we choose to think about that situation which involves inherent randomness)
The randomness is not in the mechanism, but rather in the lucky coincidence that the outcome is a replica of someone.
The lightning mechanism is usually avoided because it is scientifically impossible which would make it even less justifiable to empirically predict SM’s behavior.
While I’m at it: I see I got called out in another post for not addressing your idea of a “metaphysical tether” between a word and some referent. It’s because I have not idea what you are referring to by that phrase. Are you saying it is incorrect to think that words refer?
ETA: For me, words refer, but the norms that determine that depend on present context for the entity and on the history an of entity’s personal context if we want to talk about it inherently understanding a language.
I mean, that’s sorta the point of my posts; what they are referring to so to speak.
Why do you say that?
That’s what I understood from you saying that if you died but left a copy, you should not take any comfort in that. But if the copy has psychological continuity, would it not be you?
If you don’t die, things get a bit trickier. I think the standard answer is that the copy would not be you.
You think the mind is something other than the body?
Bruce,
Remember that according to you, Swampman’s “earth” and “sun” don’t refer to anything at the time of his creation. So “the earth goes around the sun” is not a true belief of Swampman on your account, even though Swampman would answer “yes” if someone asked him “Does the earth orbit the sun?”, and could actually form a mental image of this.
Not only isn’t it a true belief, but it wouldn’t count as a belief at all in your scheme, because “earth” and “sun” don’t refer to anything. In other words, your position does as much violence to the standard meaning of “believe” as it does to that of “know”.
You’re assuming that the justification must reside in the mechanism by which Swampman is produced, but that’s not true. It resides in the fact that Swampman, regardless of how he’s produced, is physically identical to non-Swampman.
The physical identity guarantees that any belief of Swampman is shared by non-Swampman and is justified to the same extent (excepting indexical beliefs, of course).
That’s actually not what I’m arguing. A consistent internal state isn’t enough to justify Swampman’s beliefs. They could be consistent but false, after all. Again, it’s the fact that he’s physically identical to non-Swampman that justifies (some of) his beliefs.
I did notice the exchange but just got around to reading it.
I would have not have contributed because I’m never sure exactly what the participants are referring to.
Does “sense data” refer to what I take as its standard meaning: some kind of mental entity which bears the phenomenal properties that a subject is aware of? Or is the writer of the post including representations based in neural vehicles as sense data?
Do representations, either in philosophical or scientific explanations, introduce the Cartesian veil and the skeptical worry? Or can we be representationalists and (like Crane in his SEP article on problems of perception) still claim awareness of and openness to the world?
When we talk about “inferring from sense data” does that inferring have to be at the personal level to count as inferring? Does it have to be logical deduction or induction, or does subpersonal Bayesian IBE from neurally-based representations of probability distributions count as inferring?
I cannot speak for Dennett’s views on perception when he did the bulk of his work, but these days he seems to buy into a Bayesian account, which I take as a form of scientific and philosophical representationalism. See the 2015 article I linked earlier in reply to Alan F.
Then for another post is the consideration of how the Global Work Space theory (which Dennett supports) relates to a Cartesian theatre, if at all.
Well it is the body in a certain configuration and I think that if that configuration could be transferred to another body, and the first body died, then that second body would be you.
Nice to see someone reads my posts.
I’m still not following this. In fact you’ve confused me even more.
1. I don’t think it’s obvious that to be me at t2, that thing must be physically identical to what I was at t1 (or, really at any other time).
But 2. I don’t know what that has to do with the claim of psychological continuity.
I mean, if you were right in supposing that I thought that there must be physical identity for something to be me (i.e., for me to be comforted), what would that have to with there having to be psychological continuity in order for something to be me? And what, exactly, do you mean by “psychological continuity”?
Yes, I did remember that, and in fact it is point of the last paragraph of my post. But it is an orthogonal claim. When I say “earth goes round the sun” to you that proposition has meaning.
I am not sure how what you are saying differs from epistemological internalism: justification relies on internal mental structure.
I raised a worry for that view for SM if one relies standard sources like memories etc to avoid pure coherentism. Swampman has no memories. I did see you rejected the standard definition of memory that I quoted from SEP. I don’t.
Did I ever reply to that? I’m losing track.
It is critical because it means there is no causal history.
Avoiding causal history was critical to how Davidson formulated the thought experiment. So if one avoids randomness, one misses his (and my) points (H/T: Neil.)
And with that last*, feeble attempt at humor, I really have to find other ways to bang my head against a wall (and a walto).
———-
* Second last, I guess. No, wait, what about the footnote? OK, third-last.
There are a lot of questions there, some of them probably too hard for me to answer. Not sure it’s necessary, though.
I take my main recent dispute with keiths to center around what sorts of positions regarding perception provide support for a Cartesian theater (or, as you put it, “veil”) that prevents us from knowing, e.g., that there is a cow in front of us. There are also subsidiary questions like whether a Cartesian theater picture requires some bodily organ (like the pineal gland, e.g.) to be the seat of consciousness, and what connections we are likely to find between sense-data theories generally and keiths’ (extremely restrictive IMO) view about what human beings can know (only infinite propositions that we can’t even state, comprehend or contemplate).
It is, apparently, important to keiths NOT to be a Cartesian theaterist. One can, of course, define the Cartesian theater restrictively as, e.g., requiring a pineal screen, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what Dennett had in mind. He was talking about traditional views of perception that result in a veil of one or more of the types you describe. They are views according to which we directly perceive things like images and feels, and then infer (or construct) physical objects out of them. Descartes held such a view. Locke, Hume, and Russell too. Lots of famous philosophers. I believe those are the types of traditional views Dennett is being cricitical of when he talks about the Cartesian theater.
And that’s why I believe there are no Cartesian Dennettians in the world except keiths.
Bruce, to walto:
Walto either never learned, or has forgotten, the technical meaning of the term “sense data”. You can see that he mixes it up with ‘sensory information’ in the following quote:
In that comment he also confuses Cartesian skepticism with the Cartesian theater, just as he earlier confused the Swampman scenario with Twin Earth.
It’s been a real battle trying to get him to recognize the kinds of distinctions that philosophers routinely maintain.
I don’t think that’s true. The “Cartesian theater” is supposed to be a place where all mental contents are available for examination by Something Else, The Conscious Ego. If one is committed to a Conscious Ego that inspects mental contents, then one will be forced to chose between an ‘Orwellian’ or ‘Stalinesque’ interpretation of the Ego: does it edit contents that it inspects, or does it prevent certain contents from becoming conscious?*
Since there is no way of verifying whether the Ego is Orwellian or Stalinesque, Dennett concludes that we are better off without it entirely. And that clears the room for the multiple drafts theory. (That’s a version of global workspace theory, I think?)
The point is, one can accept all of this here and leave untouched sense-datum theory. The criticism of the Cartesian theater has nothing to do with theories of perception per se. I don’t know if Dennett even has any worked-out views on philosophy of perception.
To that extent, I think keiths is consistent when he subscribes to Dennett on intentionality and consciousness but accepts sense-datum theory. It’s not a position that I regard as terribly attractive, but it’s not inconsistent.
* I’m relying on memory here of Consciousness Explained and might not be getting the details right.
As I understand the concern with your position, it is thought that you:
1. Accept Cartesian skepticism.
2. This implies a Cartesian theatre.
3. You deny the Cartesian theatre.
But I have not read all of the posts.
OK, thanks.
One more, if you are in the mood: is “we” in the above meant to be at the personal level only?
If you trace through the details of visual processing at a subpersonal level, “we” do sense (not perceive!) eg light photons which then get transduced to electrochemical energy driving neural firing patterns. Those patterns may be modeled as building representations of objects out of representations of more primitive features of the environment. *
I gather that such an account has nothing to do with your points about how you and Keith would differ about perception.
I’m not so sure that Keith is separating the issues that way.
————————————–
*(Not everyone who posts here will agree with that account of vision, but at as high level it is close to consensus view among visual neuroscientists, I think. Also I know I omitted the role of attention.)
Kantian Naturalist,
What I know about Dennett on perception I mostly know from ‘his Quining Qualia’–and nearly all of his complaints can also be made against sense-data. Actually, qualia ARE sense-data in spite of being properties according to early Russell. Dennett is very dismissive of these items, just as he is of Descartes and the other Cartesians who join him in relying on such ‘data’ to doubt the existence of cows.
But i’ve said this all before. Keiths has made clear that he can’t understand or won’t consider Dennett’s objections to his cartesianism and prefers to make puerile insults. So there’s not much point continuing on this here, I don’t think.
Meanwhile, Have there been many threads here on personal identity? I think Alan mentioned one. The Buddhist/Parfitian puzzles are really fun and mind-boggling, I think.
I’d say sense-data theorists HAVE generally been talking about the (individual) personal level. But you should probably ask somebody who supports stuff like sense-data talk and private languages rather than me. I have trouble with that kind of stuff, as you know.
walto,
My Cartesian skepticism can easily be stated, and it doesn’t require “absurd endless propositions”. It could be stated this way, for instance:
The “absurd endless” disjunction you’re complaining about was introduced by KN as a way of itemizing the different ways in which our senses could fail to be veridical.
Your objection to that is silly. We make statements all the time that, if expanded, would produce massive or even infinite disjunctions. For example, someone might say “I’m going to meet Heidi for lunch on Wednesday, unless she can’t make it.” Expanded, that might read something like this: “I’m going to meet Heidi for lunch on Wednesday unless a) her boss asks her to work through lunch, or b) there’s a major earthquake, or c) Jesus returns in a blaze of glory, or d) she’s sick that day, or e) a meteor hits her, or…
This stuff isn’t that hard, walto, if you’d just apply some discipline to your thinking.
How do you know this?
walto:
Skepticism and the Veil of Perception (Studies in Epistemology and Cognitive Theory)
keiths:
How do you know this?
This is a knowledge claim by keiths that must necessarily (else it would be self-refuting) not be based on the veridicality of our senses. So it is a knowledge claim based on what, exactly?
And how do we know that we can’t know that our senses are veridical without trusting our senses?
Bruce,
For the purposes of the thought experiment, it’s perfectly fine if Swampman has a causal history. All that matters is that it not be causal in the relevant ways. For example, if a manufacturing process aimed at producing quantum discombobulators just happens to produce Swampman as a byproduct, then that’s fine, even if the manufacturing process is deterministic. It’s not random, but it’s still accidental in the relevant sense.
Bruce,
Coincidences don’t have to be random.
I don’t see why. As I keep pointing out, the laws of physics don’t “care” about history. They just care about the current physical state plus any interactions with the environment.
Bruce,
Here’s the original comment, addressed to walto:
You’ve made comments similar to walto’s. For example, you’ve talked about Swampman’s utterances becoming meaningful as he interacts with objects and other speakers.
There are no distinct physical changes associated with this “becoming meaningful” process. After all, if non-Swampman were placed in the same scenario, he would change in exactly the same way that Swampman does. Ditto for the environment.
If there are no distinct physical changes, then what exactly is changing when Swamp Jeff Gordon’s utterance of “car” shifts from being meaningless to referring to a vehicle?
I liken it to a metaphysical “tether” that connects words, concepts, or brain states to their referents. In walto’s comment, the tether gradually comes to connect the word “Rich”, as spoken by Swamp Keith, to my “swamp buddy”. In the Swamp Jeff Gordon example, the tether gradually connects the word “car”, spoken by Swamp Jeff, to a type of vehicle.
So what exactly is this metaphysical tether? How do you know it exists? Can you answer the questions I posed to walto in my comment?