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."
keiths,
Try to resist the urge to speak for other commenters. It only ends in tears.
Bruce,
Could you give a specific example of such a real-life case, and how a non-history-based approach fails to deal with it adequately?
Be careful of an equivocation on “we”: at personal, ie agent, level we do take meanings into account; at a subpersonal, eg brain level, “we” do not. (I’d use “we” only for personal level explanations).
If you post more, please by more specific on how the above contradicts my position.
(ETA: I mean your post by “the above”, leaving aside its possibly equivocation on “we”).
Alan:
That’s silly, Alan. There’s nothing wrong with drawing out the implications of another commenter’s clearly-stated views.
“If what you say were true, it would imply this…” is an indispensable part of rational discussion.
Sorry, but I don’t understand that question.
However, it is an instance of the Cartesian conception of the mind to say that any knowledge claim based on the veridicality of our senses is illegitimate, because we can’t know that our senses are veridical.
This invites a picture where the mind is aware of the deliverances of the senses (on the ‘mind’ side) — it is immediately aware of its own sensations — but open to skeptical doubts about the physical objects which are the distal causes of those sensations. That’s just what it means to doubt that the senses are veridical.
By the way, I’m not sure exactly how Dennett uses the term, but I know that McDowell explicitly singles out Searle as a ‘Cartesian materialist’. From what little I’ve read of Searle, that seems right to me, because he ascribes full-blown cognitive powers — the res cogitans, in fact — to the whole brain and nothing but the brain.
I see this as confusing “meaning” with “reference.” And that’s the same mistake that I see Putnam as making.
I grew up in Australia. I then moved to USA as a grad student. I would think that counts as a switch of linguistic communities. But I’m having trouble making sense of your conclusion.
KN,
That’s enough. Our senses might not be veridical in this world, and we can’t assign a likelihood to that. Therefore we cannot know that they are veridical.
keiths:
KN:
Well, sure. That’s why they call it Cartesian skepticism! But contra walto, Cartesian skepticism is distinct from “Cartesian theaterism”.
Does someone with no behavior due to locked in syndrome understand speech.
ETA: Ascription is probably ascertainable via fMRI analysis which one could call behavior, I guess.
But not sure how much that would help you if you did not know if the injured person might have come from twin earth (or Australia).
Well, that is because you have never lived in a Canadian-English linguistic community.
What I am saying is the along with the switch of communities would come a subtle switch in the meaning of some of your words over time to align with your new community.
Well, I have said that Putnam being right is an assumption underlying my position (among many other assumptions, some likely even more questionable).
Putnam does not see meaning as being constituted only by the referred-to object, but he does think that it is a necessary part of meaning.
But are they not just as veridical for the community of interacting envatted brains as for the community of ordinary beings.
Of course, if you think (some) perceptions have semantic content, then the semantics for envatted brains would involved their language, ie vattish.
ETA: you’d also have understand “perception” etc using vattish. So there is the proviso that the question itself of whether “perception is veridical iff it involves ordinary objects” cannot be asked in a context-free manner. Which I think was one of the points of Putnam’s paper.
Indeed, I do that all the time. Ask if your paraphrase is a fair summary, sure.
That isn’t what you do, Mr Mindreader.
Like this guy.
Phhht! You should try having to explain the Brexit result to every French person you bump into in daily life!
That’s an amazing story; I enjoyed the movie very much. Of course, he could move an eyelid. And there is the fMRI ETA that occurred to me to answer my original post.
One more wrong remark of yours on this thread. At last count you’re in triple digits now.
KN’s post was quite right. As I pointed out the first time you tried to save your absurd view by mentioning “sensory information”–nobody cares about that but you. It’s philosophically irrelevant to anything we’ve been talking about on this thread. Your problem is with your sense-data theory. Everybody has a sensory information theory.
ETA: I should have said “nearly everybody.” Those disjunctivists denying all causal involvement in perception may not.
BruceS,
It seems at least worth considering that people who have learned a language and are then “locked in” may still think linguistically.
Hahaha.
Searle says that he’s not a property dualist, but I think that’s exactly what he is.
We don’t need to know that. One does,kt need to know that one knows X in order to know X.
I think they do: they have the right causal history and structure to understand.
But not a SM who by blind (bad, I guess) luck duplicated such a person.
But what establishes this “might”? Any claim that is true (or false) in the actual world has to be established on the basis of observation, in which case the reliability of the senses must be assumed. A claim that is true (or false) based on reason alone (e.g. conceptual analysis, logical argument) will be true (or false) across all possible worlds, in which case the reliability of the senses is irrelevant.
No.
Kantian Naturalist,
Keiths is going into FMM mode there. He requires the logical impossibility of error, like all presuppositionalists.
ETA: Really, though the safest way to do that is to shorten his disjunction to this:
There’s a tree in front of me, if I’m not wrong.
keiths:
walto:
Is that nervous laughter?
You know I’m right. Here’s what KN wrote to you, again:
You got Descartes wrong yesterday, as you were forced to admit:
Why repeat the mistake with Dennett? Both KN and I are pointing out your error. Why not read what Dennett actually has to say on the topic, as you failed to do with Descartes?
No, not nervous laughter. Laughter at both your confusions and your absolute inability to admit when you are wrong.
You provide great material for those who enjoy a good laugh. So thanks!
ETA: OTOH, the credit you deserve for quote mining excellence is real. We should all be deadly serious about those skills.
walto,
Not at all. I’m just saying that the likelihood of veridicality has to be high enough to justify the knowledge claim:
That by no means requires that error be impossible.
That seems about right. However, there would be (or should be) much uncertainty.
There is no probability of veridicality which is high enough to defeat your cartesion demon. Nothing but absolute certainty would do.
Or let me put it this way? How high do YOU think this likelihood has to be for you to know something?
Okay, fair enough.
My experience was that changes in meaning were relatively minor. Changes in usage and pronunciation were far more significant.
An example of changes in usage: shortly after arriving in the US, I said something like “See you in a fortnight”. The person I was talking to recognized “fortnight” but thought it was only found in Shakespearean English.
keiths:
walto:
walto,
To defeat Cartesian skepticism, you need to know that your senses are likely to be veridical. You don’t need to know that you know that, although that would tend to follow for a normally functioning human.
I don’t agree with that. In fact I don’t agree that you need even to know what ‘reliability’ or ‘veridicality’ mean to know that there is a cow in front of you.
walto,
You’re just making that up. Why must you do that, walto?
High enough. That’s not a dodge — it’s a consequence of the fact that justification comes in degrees. There isn’t a precise threshold, and in any case — as I’ve explained to you many times — we aren’t talking about numerical probabilities here, though sometimes likelihoods can be expressed that way.
I don’t see that.
Of course, reference and meaning are not independent. But I see the connection is less rigid than Putnam’s view.
Take his example of the meaning of “gold”. Putnam says that the meaning is a community affair in that we have to consult the gold expert. I’ll agree that we might need to consult the gold expert for precise reference. But I see a different relation to ‘meaning’. For me, it is part of the meaning of gold, that I would be wise to consult the expert where precise reference is needed. But the expert’s view is not itself part of my meaning.
Well, it’s not really clear to me if keiths’s denial of the veridicality of the senses commits him to a sense-data theory. Usually that’s how the positions go together, but he denies that he accepts a sense-data theory. I don’t understand how he can avoid a sense-data theory once he calls the veridicality of the sense into question, but that’s not my problem.
Personally, I think that it is deeply mistaken to ask, “are the senses veridical?” First, because it is never clear what “the senses” means here; second, because “veridical” is the wrong kind of concept to use in talking about perception.
On the first point: does “the senses” mean sensory receptors in abstraction from the rest of the cognitive system? If we’re talking about isolated sensory receptors, at what level of detail? Are we talking about eyes (organs), retinas (tissues), or photoreceptors (cells), or rhodoposin (molecules)? And likewise for the other senses.
Or does it mean perceptual systems that are functionally integrated with conceptual and motor systems? O’Reagan and Noe call these ‘sensorimotor contingencies’, and Chemero has nicely integrated this model with Gibson’s theory of affordances. On this account, the information that comprises an animal’s niche is available to the animal as affordances that perturb and influence the development of sensorimotor abilities that in turn modulate neurodynamics that itself generates the neuronal assemblies underlying the sensorimotor abilities that select and affect the affordances. (Borrowing from Chemero’s 2009, p. 203.)
On that account, there’s just not enough causal slippage between sensorimotor abilities and environmental affordances for there to be any question about “the veridicality of the senses”. This suggests that we must first posit some causal rupture or break between ‘the senses’ and ‘the world’ in order for any doubts about the veridicality of the senses to make any sense.
Secondly, it is utterances which are veridical — true or false — not perceptual processes or perceptual states. We shouldn’t use ‘veridical’ as a mere synonym for ‘reliable’, and we should not import the structure of language (or ‘enlanguaged’ thought) into our study of perceptual systems.
On an embodied-embedded view of the causal coupling of sensorimotor abilities, their underlying neurodynamics, and the environmental affordances that shape the evolution and development of those abilities and which those abilities are actively deployed in detecting organism-relevant information, there’s just not enough of a rupture or break between “the senses” and “the world” for there to be any question of whether or not the senses are “reliable” or “veridical”.
One might think that there’s still a question about the relation between “the intellect” and “the senses”, but I disagree. One can instead take the embodied-embedded approach to cognition all the way, to the point of understanding “the intellect” as an abstracted and reified mis-conception of discursive practices, which are themselves modified sensorimotor abilities tailored to the constructed niche of obligate cooperative foraging (Sterelny, Tomasello, Rouse).
My point, then, is this: if we coordinate lines of consilience across embodied cognitive science, neuroscience, evolutionary theory, comparative primate cognitive psychology, and paleoanthropology, we can arrive at a thoroughly naturalistic conception of our cognitive powers which does not allow room for traditional Cartesian or Humean skeptical doubts (or their Kantian ‘solution’).
Do you still say that with the ETA’s I added? If so, why?
walto,
Who said anything about knowing the meaning of those words?
You can think that your senses are veridical without knowing the meaning of the word ‘veridical’.
Of course it’s a dodge. It avoids recognition that, given a demon-type hypothesis there is no likelihood short of 1.0 that can do the trick. Suppose you say, .95 is good enough. Your confidence in that number may just be a clever ploy in the deception game. Your kind of ‘knowledge’ requires absolute certainty, just as FMM’s does. Nothing short of that will do.
And as I’ve said before (and as mung has noted too, I think) the same problem arises with your disjunction. There might always be another disjunct you’ve missed. Saying, ‘oh, well it’s infinite: they’re all in there” as a specification is also a dodge. You have to say, ‘I only know it if I’m not wrong.’
Well, d’uh.
Alan:
keiths:
Alan:
I’m not talking about asking “if your paraphrase is a fair summary”. I’m talking about inferring a person’s position from his or her words and proceeding on that basis. Everyone does that, including you.
Reading and understanding someone’s words isn’t “mindreading”, Mr Giver-of-bad-advice.
How about “reliable” How about “senses”? If you have to know that your senses are reliable in order to know that a cow is in front of you, you must have to know what those mean. (And, furthermore, I don’t see how one could have the sort of theory of reliability you say is necessary without knowing what “veridical” means.)
But that’s all completely wrong. (Or as KN would say, “deeply wrongheaded.”)
Dunno if I saw them all. I was just uttering the obvious, anyhow–that BIVs are generally not having veridical perceptual experiences.
But are they having them if “veridical perceptual experiences” means what it means in vattish as they would “utter” the words.
It’s the essence of communication. Try it.
As best I can see it, what that gives you is alignment between the modulated neurodynamics and the causal structures captured by the information in the affordances.
It says nothing about how those causal structures are instantiated. Lacking that, I think one cannot use that explanation to by itself to rule out envatted brains.
However, I am still puzzling out what is meant by the following. I do agree that semantics of language is a personal-level issue, if that is relevant to your separation of perception and utterance.
This is puzzling.
One needs to know the meaning of the word ‘veridical’ in order to have the fully-fledged judgment (an occurrent mental state in subvocalized language), “the senses are veridical.”
What does it mean to think that the senses are veridical without having the thought, “the senses are veridical”?
Perhaps it means something like: one believes that the senses are veridical if one has the disposition to say “yes” if one were asked “are the senses veridical?” and understood the sentence, even if the disposition were never realized.
But even that depends on understanding the words involved.
Or perhaps it just means something like: having as a background condition, unacknowledged as such, a position that if made explicit would be called “direct realism” or “naive realism” (what Santayana called “animal faith” and Merleau-Ponty called “perceptual faith”).
This might be described as an attitude of unquestionablity towards perceptual openness to the world. One simply takes the world as perceptually present (and perceptually absent) to be what the world is. It is an attitude of a mind uncorrupted by Cartesian anxieties.
In this sense, yes, one could inhabit this attitude without knowing the word “veridical” or without ever having entertained the proposition “the senses are veridical” . The vast majority of human beings, past and present, do just that.
My position here has been that embodied/embedded cognitive science lends evidentiary support to direct realism. The naive mind, uncorrupted by Cartesian anxieties, is in fact correct. It is the Cartesian anxieties that are mistaken, because they presuppose a mistaken conception of our cognitive powers.
No, I don’t think so. Seeing requires cerain causal stuff to happen–even for the vat folk. But it isn’t.
The causal structures are instantiated over the course of phylogeny and ontogeny: as an animal moves, explores, plays, looks around, runs, flies, etc. there will be coordinated wiring and pruning at the synaptic level.
But for the purposes of thought-experiments one could always invoke super-nanites that prune synapses into the required connectome!
Yes, the semantics of natural language is a personal-level issue (actually it is super-personal, if one thinks about communities here). But I also think of perception as a personal-level concept.
I am quite happy to say, along with the Wittgensteinians and Gibsonians, that brains do not perceive. It is animals that perceive, move, act, imagine, want, feel, etc. The subpersonal levels describe how different kinds of neuronal activity, from the firing of single neurons all the way up to the propagation of signals across hierarchically integrated neuronal assemblies, contributes to the personal-level mental life of the whole living animal. That includes perceiving, wanting, thinking, and moving in sentient animals and, in sapient animals, also includes asserting, describing, asking, requesting, explaining, narrating, observing, etc.