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."
You’d then need to explain who was controlling them!
Sorry, I was not clear on that: I meant the causal structure of the niche, not the envatted brain.
The brain structures should be the same as ours even if we are not such brains (!), assuming embodiment is perfectly imitated by the replacing vat and its contents which hook to the whatever is left of the neural system and the brain (that perfect imitation may not actually be physically possible).
I’m fine with the rest of your post. In fact, from my understanding of Witt’s perspective, my points concern the language game of a community of communicated envatted brains (that community may have to include all sentient creatures to capture the human niche). Then if we allow envatted brains to “utter” “I am having a veridical perception”, then that statement is true, relative to their language game.
That seems utterly wrong to me. They’re all simply hallucinating. It’s almost what I MEAN by non-veridical.
Me being transported to twin earth.
If SM is good enough for consideration, so is that.
ETA: While I am here, I’ll clarify my inexact use of “functionalist” in order to preserve my reputation as a poster of intellectual merit*.
I am a functionalist when it comes to understanding a language in the sense that any substrate that completely reproduces embodied human causal relations works for me. There may only be one such substrate: that is an empirical matter.
But I also accept any set of causal relations that reproduces the language behavior in a language community. Those need not be the same as the human-instantiated relations.
Of course, “with the right causal history” is needed if we want to talk about “understanding a language” rather than “people in a language community would ascribe understanding a language to an entity”.
————-
* I’ll take the “ha ha ha” replies as read.
OK, but can you be more less subtle and indirect about your viewpoint?
Seriously, I think the view I am trying to describe is the one Putnam puts forward at the start of the section “the premiss of the argument” on p 14 of his paper.
As I read him, he then goes on to claim that shows that skeptics cannot use the phase “I am a brain in a vat” to have the meaning they want to have to in order to express the skeptical argument (which would also spell trouble for Keith’s disjunction, if I understand Putnam correctly).
Or at least they cannot say “I am a brain in a vat” in the way they need to AND also subscribe to the causal history view for reference (in particular, the “right” causal history) in order to avoid Putnam’s permutation arguments regarding meanings being tied to the “real” world.
How does agreeing with that suggest that the vatties can have veridical perceptions?
I will just add that as much as I love Reason Truth and History, I think Putnam was dead wrong during his anti-realism days. I was glad when he put that stuff behind him. Making the vatters “right” seems to me no more than a way to insist that truth is a function of some ideal level of warrant. But….it isn’t.
walto,
I agree with you, of course, that the vatters’ perceptions are non-veridical. What puzzles me is that you nevertheless disagree with my Cartesian skepticism.
How can you know that your senses are veridical if you agree that you might be a vatter?
Bruce,
The skeptical argument doesn’t depend on using the sentence “I am a brain in a vat” or on completing the disjunction.
I expressed it this way earlier in the thread:
Bruce:
keiths:
Bruce:
Swampman isn’t being advanced as a “real-life case.” Could you try again?
Also, don’t forget the second part of the question:
Might, shmight. I might be in Mongolia tonight too. To know something I just need to believe it, have sufficient warrant for it, and have it be true. I think I have sufficient warrant for the fact that my senses are, generally, reliable–even though they lead me astray sometimes. I take my use of ‘know’ to be an ordinary garden variety one. It’s consistent with the possibility that I might be wrong. So long as I’m not ACTUALLY wrong, I know.
keiths:
KN:
You don’t need to subvocally “speak” the thought “the senses are veridical” in order to believe that they are veridical. You could also think “the senses are accurate” or “the senses are trustworthy”, for example.
Also, it’s not clear to me that the thought needs to be subvocalized at all. I don’t know about you, but a lot of my thinking is nonverbal.
Lastly, this whole line of questioning arose from another confusion of walto’s. He wrote:
That’s true but irrelevant to the question of Cartesian skepticism. To defeat Cartesian skepticism, you need to know that your senses are veridical, not that there’s a cow in front of you.
walto,
True.
So how would you answer my question?
No, that’s wrong. I don’t need to ‘defeat’ cartesian skepticism at all. All I care to do is point out that it’s a confusion. We DO know things like that there are cows. QED
keiths:
Alan:
I’ve been doing it my entire time at TSZ, including in this very exchange.
Speaking of which, what was the point of this exchange? You gave some bad advice followed by two false accusations. What did that accomplish other than making you look foolish?
You’ve offered me some unsolicited advice, so let return the favor:
1. Think before posting.
2. Don’t let your emotions lead you around by the nose.
You’re welcome.
walto,
You’re insisting to Bruce, correctly, that the vatters’ perceptions aren’t veridical. That means that if you are a vatter, then your perceptions aren’t veridical. How do you know that you aren’t a vatter?
Show your work.
Those are not the same thing. “The senses are accurate” asserts that they conform to an external standard. “The senses are trustworthy” can be concluded internally based on statistical results of their usefulness.
For myself, I doubt that “the senses are accurate” even makes sense.
KN,
To the contrary, it’s exactly the right kind of concept to use. Check out definition #2 from Merriam-Webster and note the usage example (plus its source):
keiths:
Neil:
No, they all mean the same thing when applied to the senses. Some web definitions:
And:
In any case, my point was simply that there’s nothing special about the word ‘veridical’. You don’t need to know the meaning of ‘veridical’ in order to believe that the senses are veridical.
KN,
That doesn’t make sense. We already know that the senses aren’t perfectly veridical, so that horse has already left the barn. The question isn’t about whether there is any room for doubt, it’s about how much doubt is appropriate.
Second, we are positing the possibility of that kind of “causal rupture”. That’s what the Cartesian demon and brain-in-vat scenarios do.
Those fields all assume the general reliability of the senses. Your reasoning is perfectly circular here.
KN:
keiths:
walto:
No, my comment is correct, as this exchange shows:
walto:
keiths:
walto:
keiths:
Oops.
Bruce:
keiths:
Bruce:
I don’t think it matters. We are physical systems, operating according to meaning-insensitive physical laws. Our future states cannot be influenced by meanings, only by sorta meanings, which are syntactical. The level of abstraction we use doesn’t change that.
For you, ‘water’ means twater to a Twin Earthling, but not water; and to us it means water, but not twater. If one of us is unknowingly teleported to Twin Earth, then you say that water will still mean water to him at first, but that it will gradually come to mean twater as he interacts with the substance and with the Twenglish-speaking community. To use my terminology, the old metaphysical tether dissolves away and is replaced by a new one linking ‘water’ with twater.
For me, the meaning never shifts from one to the other. ‘Water’ always sorta means water, and it always sorta means twater. It also means anything else that puts the syntactic engine — us — into the ‘water’ state. There’s no metaphysical tether.
Right, but to do so he needed a better theory of perception, because he realized that IR did not solve Cartesian skepticism with the theory of perception he had in mind for RTH.
He experimented with McDowell’s version of disjunctivism (in TFC eg), but it seems he was dissatisfied with that and was working on his own version of naive realism when he died. I guess we will have to wait for the book for details.
Well, I am saying in both cases we can speak of veridical perception, as long as one realizes that the meanings of the words must be taken relative to the relevant linguistic community (!). In both cases, the agents perceive the causal structure of the world with which they are interacting.
But IBE says we should prefer a simpler explanation of the instantiation of that causal structure. Brains in a vat needs two ontologies: (1) the world created by patterns inside the machine which is the source of the causal structure sensed by the interconnected brains, and (2) the ontology for that machine.
Although if I was a brain in a vat, I’d say the same thing, perhaps. It hurts my brain to try to explain how that could be, so I had better stop.
Maybe I should not worry about how the causal structure is instantiated and just stick with structural realism?
Yes, we’d need to do that if we want to know the orthodox Putnamian solution, that’s not too important to me, though, especially since his views were constantly evolving. What I think it makes sense to do is to take what seems right from his philosophy, e.g., the stuff on the meaning of natural kind words, and leave the stuff that even HE realized was wrong, e.g., the antii-realism. The vatters will then not be right in ever thinking they are SEEING things–evev their own vattish trees.
I mean, they actually have neither eyes nor ‘eyes’.
keiths:
I see FMM’s robot has been sold.
Fair enough.
I’d also add that Putnam’s papers don’t indicate that he studied the science himself in detail. He relies on Block (who does for sure) in the stuff of his I have seen that includes some science.
That is why I also like Pautz.
I can follow both of Block and Pautz when they are analyzing the philosophical consequences of science; less so when they rely on pure conceptual analysis, thought experiments and possible worlds.
Putnam’s perception stuff, such as it is, seems to consist mostly of the latter. I’ll likely just stick with the NDPR review of his book and not attempt the book itself.
Pautz has a paper which based on the title seems to be relevant to perception and epistemology: Can disjunctivists explain our access to the sensible world? but it concentrates on the phenomenal experience.
Obviously there is a link from experience to epistemology, but I have not connected all the dots. I do not have a deep understanding of how the how the phenomenal and epistemological aspects of philosopher of perception can be connected under various approaches to philosophy of perception.
I’ve only skimmed that Pautz paper. The last section, 3.5, includes as good a summary as I have seen of his views of phenomenal properties. I’m not saying I understand when he means with any depth:
On the neo-Galilean [projectivist] view I [Pautz] favor, sensible qualities exist but are not instantiated by anything at all: they only live in the contents of our experiences (complex properties or propositions).
Is that an English statement or a vattish statement?
As I understand it, the brain-hurting issues start when one tries to be precise about the metalanguage and object language for something like
“Envatted brains have eyes” is true iff envatted brains have eyes.
BruceS,
Your strengths coincide with (a few of) my weaknesses. Maybe we should get a room–er, I mean collaborate on something.
FWIW, Pautz just uploaded something on propositions and properties, which looks like it’s more up my alley. But I think I’m more of a traditional Hallian/Dretskian intentional realist than pautz–or Block or putnam turned into his last few years. As I’ve mentioned before though, I’m not sure I have either the background knowledge or the processing power to do a decent job of responding to Block. Pautz originally seemed to me to be very hostile to qualia, which I liked. But I’m not sure where he is now. Some of his papers are hard for me, largely because he tends to keep so many balls in the air at once. When he distinguishes, like, a dozen versions of some representationalist theory over seven pages, and then refers back to numbers 3, 8, and 11 a few pages later, I usually get too dizzy to keep reading.
BruceS,
I think it’s false in both languages.
But there are four combinations for meta and object. Maybe some are ruled out somehow?
ETA:
I have the intuition that if the meta language is English you might be right whatever the object language is taken to beNo, on further thought, I don’t have that intuition.But what if it is vattish?
ETA: causal theory of reference for “eyes” assumed for all of this.
That habit of his also confuses me. So do the nested (?) thought experiments.
He is a primitivist about consciousness so I am guessing he is a primitivist about color experience. He is also a non-realist because I understand him to say color is a non-instantiated external property. .
However, he also rejects tracking representationalism using his empirical arguments; he says sensory consciousness is internally dependent.
I dio not really understand how all three — primitivism, non-realism, empirical evidence for internal dependence — go together.
(BTW, all of above based on the paper I mentioned, section 3.5).
I see I was really unclear there. I didn’t mean to suggest that I thought the Tarskian equivalence is false in both languages, only that ‘Vatters have eyes’ is false in both languages.
The eqivalences? I guess eng–eng and vat–vat are true and the others aren’t. My initial impression is that the results are the same as you’d get from substituting ‘hatters’ and ‘pies’ in various places.
What does “perfectly veridical” mean here? Does it mean that sensory information always conveys to the brain a 1:1 map of microphysical structure of the objects causing that sensory information? (Obviously not — I’m being silly, to mark out one extreme sort of view.) Or does it mean that we can, under most conditions, reliably distinguish perceptions from hallucinations, illusions, and dreams? (That seems mere sanity, to me.)
The claim I am defending is that our sensorimotor systems (not “the senses”) are generally reliable (not “perfectly veridical”), to the point that we can under most conditions, distinguish perceptions from hallucinations, illusions, and dreams. To me this is mere sanity, to be kept safe from the extravagances of unrestrained imagination. (Maybe we’re brains in a vat! Maybe Elon Musk is a poodle!)
You are positing it. I am denying that posit, because it is not consistent with a well confirmed scientific theory. If we were talking about vaccinations or climate change, you’d want to know which hypotheses are grounded in the best available scientific evidence. Why is this any different?
So what? There’s no alternative — not really. Any argument is going to take for granted the reliability of our intellectual capacities. The reliability of those capacities cannot be established by argument. If you’re going to question the reliability of the senses, then out of consistency you should also question the reliability of the intellect. The end-point of that process is the destruction of all thought and all knowledge. Skepticism like that might be therapeutic and it might be enlightening, but it’s not my cup of tea. I like understanding things, and I like knowing things, and your skepticism, consistently taken, allows for neither.
More to the point, if we take up the pragmatist’s idea that doubt should never be “idle” but should be motivated by a reason, then we need a reason for doubting that we can, generally speaking, distinguish perceiving from hallucinating or dreaming. Thus far the only reasons that have been presented here involve fantastical scenarios that we have no reason to accept. They show at most that perceiving is not veridical in every possible world — and that’s even if one grants the inference from conceivability to possibility, which is hardly self-evident.
(Chalmers grounds that inference in a highly complicated semantic thesis called “two-dimensional semantics”. Descartes thinks that conceivability entails possibility only because he assumes theism — it is within God’s power to create anything that I can clearly and distinctly perceive, and He would do because he is not a deceiver.)
But, let’s assume Chalmers is right: conceivability entails possibility. We can conceive of worlds in which perception is never veridical. The people in those worlds can never distinguish perception from non-veridical actualizations of sensory consciousness. Or, whenever they think they, there’s always mistaken. Or, they think they do, and sometimes they are right and sometimes they are wrong, and they can never tell which.
Fine.
We would need a reason to believe that we actually live in one of those worlds. The mere possibility isn’t enough, because the mere possibility shows only that it is not a necessary truth that perception is generally reliable. Mere logical possibilities alone are insufficient to show that it is false that we can, for the most part, reliably distinguish perceiving from hallucinating or dreaming.
walto,
You’ve backed yourself into a logical corner.
You want to claim that your perceptions are veridical, but that requires knowing that you aren’t a vatter. After all, vatters’ perceptions are not veridical, as you correctly maintain.
The problem is that you have no way of knowing that you aren’t a vatter, and when asked, you can’t supply one.
Bruce,
No, because the world in which the vatters actually live is not the same as the world they perceive.
They actually live in a world in which they are ensconced in vats, with their sensory information being fed to them by an elaborate apparatus that is designed to fool them. They do not perceive any of that. Their perceptions are not veridical.
KN:
keiths:
KN:
That what we perceive is actually the case. Even without considering Cartesian skepticism, we know that we are subject to misperceptions and illusions. Therefore, the senses aren’t perfectly veridical.
So when you write…
…we can reject that out of hand, because there already are questions about the veridicality of the senses. The “causal slippage” is there.
Even if that weren’t the case, your reasoning would still deserve rejection on grounds of circularity. Everything you think you know about sensorimotor abilities, environmental affordances, and the causal slippage between them depends on the assumption that the senses are generally veridical.
The vat-vat being true is what I had in mind as when I said the vat perception was veridical in the context of the val-world and vat-language community.
I had another look at Khlentzos’s detailed analysis of the argument in his Naturalistic Realism and the Anti-Realistic Challenge. He addresses the T-Convention stuff as part of his much more detailed analysis. He points out if we are not BIVs and we want to interpret it, we need a vat-English to English translation for the right hand side of the iff. That probably does not make sense which is my fault.
If you want an image of that chapter from the book, I can send you one (or upload one to dropbox if anyone else is following along).
Kantian Naturalist,
Nice post, KN.
But I say it’s NOT true, just the Tarski equivalence statement is true! There is no vat perception–whether one means what WE mean by ‘perception’ or one means what THEY mean by ‘perception.’
Sure, I’ll take a look at that. Thanks! If it’s not much more than 10 MB a scan is fine.
I’m not sure what that has to do with veridical perception as I understand the term and which I contrast to hallucination or illusion. An envatted brain could still have hallucinations which would differ from veridical perception, with all terms taken relative to their vat world.
You seem to be talking about something else; perhaps something like them not be able to get at the noumenal essence of their world or some such thing.
Anyway, I’ll leave it at that
Yes, I understand that we don’t agree.
I agree with keiths on this issue. It seems completely obvious to me, so maybe I’m missing something.
Oh, ok. Sorry. I don’t understand your take on this matter at all, though. We know, and they don’t that they are (in English) brains in vats. They think they are (in vattish) people who are not in vats, but really they are, arguably anyhow, (again in vattish) people who ARE in vats. They think they (vattish) SEE, but they do not (either English or vattish) see.
ETA: Is the idea that, in vattish, SEEING just IS what in English is having your sensory info sent to you in a vat? If so, that seems wrong to me. For one thing, such a position wouldn’t even allow them to contemplate being (in vattish) brains in vats.
KN,
Scientific evidence is acquired via the senses. It is only trustworthy to the extent that the senses are trustworthy. Therefore, any firm conclusions based on the evidence implicitly assume the general veridicality of the senses.
The circularity is obvious when you spell it out:
1. Assume that the senses are generally veridical.
2. Collect scientific evidence via the senses.
3. Use that evidence to conclude that the senses are generally veridical.
I do! That’s the basis of my argument against absolute certainty.
Not at all. Things go on as they did before. The only difference is that the skeptic acknowledges that assumptions are being made that may in fact be untrue.
You keep forgetting that the Cartesian skeptic is not arguing that perception isn’t generally reliable; only that we can’t know that it is generally reliable.
Thus, we don’t need a reason to believe that we actually live in one of those worlds. The possibility that we do, coupled with our inability to assess the likelihood of this, is enough.
Bruce,
When you say “relative to their vat world”, you are really saying “relative to the world implied by the sensory information they are receiving from their vats.” But we already know that this information is false. The whole point of the vat apparatus is to fool its occupant.
You are seeing only two possibilities, veridical perception and illusion/hallucination, when in fact there are three:
1. Veridical perception.
2. Non-veridical perception due to illusion/hallucination or some other processing error.
3. Non-veridical perception due to a bogus stream of sensory information.
An envatted brain is subject to #3 even when it is working perfectly.
Ok, there’s a pretty serious miscommunication here between us. Notice the difference between
1. The senses are not perfectly veridical, because we sometimes have non-veridical actualizations of sensory consciousness such as hallucinations, illusions, and dreams.
2. The senses are not generally reliable, because we can never distinguish adequately between perceptions and non-veridical actualizations of sensory consciousness such as hallucinations, illusions, and dreams.
It seems to me that you are defending (1), whereas I am defending (2). The important part of (2) is that we usually are able to discriminate between veridical and non-veridical perceptions. We’re not usually in doubt as to whether some particular sensory episode belongs to the category of veridical and non-veridical category. In particular there’s intersubjective correction which is useful for some cases (hallucinations) though not others (mirages).
The difference between veridical and non-veridical seemings can be handled by whether the causal chains between the object and the perceiver are normal or deviant. But a deviant causal chain is still a causal chain, and our ability to recognize it as deviant rests on a background of implicit knowledge of a normal causal chain.
That’s completely different from the Cartesian worry that we cannot discriminate between perceptions and hallucinations or dreams, that we cannot distinguish between normal and deviant causal chains, and that — for all we know — all of our perceptions could be non-veridical.
If you had read carefully, you would have noted that I conceded this point. The problem here is that skepticism isn’t easily self-contained. It’s a corrosive acid. Descartes tries to contain it, and he fails. That failure is instructive.
Once one allows the reliability of the senses to be questioned, there’s nothing to prevent one from also questioning the reliability of the intellect. Descartes gamely attempts to vindicate the reliability of the intellect using the intellect, but his attempt is plainly circular. (In fact the circularity was obvious at the time. It was pointed out by several of Descartes’s female correspondents and was made in print by Arnauld.)
In other words, if you’re going to question the senses, then you should question the intellect as well. But just as it is circular to vindicate the senses by means of the senses, so too it is circular to vindicate the intellect by means of the intellect. If the senses are not to be trusted because there’s no foundation that vindicates their use, then so too the intellect is not to be trusted because there’s no foundation that vindicates its use, either. (Hume is superb on this point, if you haven’t read “Of Skepticism With Regard to Reason” in the Treatise.)
In short, your only option is to abstain from all thinking altogether. Which was, by the way, the teaching of the ancient Greek Skeptics. Best to be led by the appearances!
Or, one could side with pragmatist sanity and notice that, by and large and for the most part, we don’t have trouble distinguishing between (1) the smooth transactions of sensorimotor abilities and environmental affordances and (2) deviant, unusual, and even pathological activations of sensory consciousness.
Again, the issue is not that we don’t have anything that falls into (2). Of course we do. The issue is not, I think, that we can reliably distinguish between (1) and (2). What’s philosophically interesting is how we are able to distinguish between (1) and (2).
keiths,
I generally agree with that. But I think that what’s going on with the vatters isn’t even non-veridical perception. It’s not perception at all.
That’s false. The possibility that we live in a world where none of our perceptions are veridical is enough only to show that perceptions are not necessarily veridical.
If you want some stronger claim than “perceptions are not necessarily veridical,” appealing to mere conceivability will not give you that claim.