BruceS suggested that I start a thread on my ideas about human cognition. I’m not sure how this will work out, but let’s try. And, I’ll note that I have an earlier thread that is vaguely related.
The title of this thread is one of my non-traditional ideas about cognition. And if I am correct, as I believe I am, then our relation to the world is very different from what is usually assumed.
The traditional view is that we pick up facts, and most of cognition has to do with reasoning about these facts. If I am correct, then there are no facts to pick up. So the core of cognition has to be engaged in solving the problem of having useful facts about the world.
Chicago Coordinates
I’ll start with a simple example. I typed “Chicago Coordinates” into Google, and the top of the page returned showed:
41.8819° N, 87.6278° W
That’s an example of what we would take to be a fact. Yet, without the activity of humans, it could not exist as a fact. In order for that to be a fact, we had to first invent a geographic coordinate system (roughly, the latitude/longitude system). And that coordinate system in turn depends on some human conventions. For example, the meridian through Greenwich was established as the origin for the longitudes.
That fact also depends on the naming convention, which designates “Chicago” as the name of a particular town. And, it depends on a convention specifying a particular location within Chicago (probably the old post office, though I’m not sure of that).
I won’t go through a lot of examples. I think the one is sufficient to illustrate the point. Everything that we call a fact depends, in some way, on human conventions. So facts are artifacts, in the sense that we must first develop the conventions necessary for us to have the possibility of their being facts.
Acquiring information
A number of years ago, I made a usenet post in comp.ai.philosophy. I couldn’t find it in a google search. The idea of the thought experiment was that someone (an airplane pilot) dropped me off in the middle of the Nullarbor plain (in Southern Australia), with a lunch pack, pencil and note paper. I was to record as much information as I could about that location, before I was picked up in the evening.
The thing about the Nullarbor plain, is that it is desert. But it is not sandy desert like the Sahara. There are many plants — desert scrub — that grow in the occasional rain, then dry out and look dead most of the time. So perhaps I could record information about the plants, such as their density. But, how could I do that. Everything looked the same in every direction.
So I used the soda can from the lunch pack as a marker. And I used a couple of other items as markers. That enabled me to fix a particular region where I could start counting, in order to be able to write down some information. The markers broke up the sameness, and allowed me to have a sense of direction. In effect, those markers established conventions that I would use in counting the number of plants.
As I recall, others in the usenet discussion did not like that post. They saw my use of the soda can as something akin to making an arbitrary choice (which it was). There appears to be some unwritten rule of philosophy, that anything depending on arbitrary choices must be wrong. (Oops, there goes that meridian of longitude, based on the arbitrary choice of Greenwich).
Knowledge
The traditional account, from epistemology, is that knowledge is justified true belief. Roughly speaking, your head is full of propositions that you are said to believe, and you are good at applying logic to those propositions.
You can be a highly knowledgeable solipsist that way. And, as a mathematician, I suppose that term “solipsist” fits some of what I know.
My sense is that acquiring knowledge is all about anchors. We must find ways of anchoring our propositions to reality. That’s roughly what the system of geographic coordinates does. That’s what the soda can did in my thought experiment. And that, anchoring ourselves to reality, is what I see our perceptual systems to be doing.
AI and autonomy
AI researchers often talk of autonomous agents. And that’s the core of my skepticism about AI. What makes us autonomous, is that each of us can autonomously anchor our thoughts to reality. The typical AI system uses propositions that are anchored to reality only by the auspices of the programmer. So the AI system has no real autonomy. And, when boiled down, that is really what Searle’s “Chinese Room” criticism of AI is about — Searle describes it as an intentionality problem.
I’ll stop at this point, to see if any discussion develops.
Off topic: I know Chalmers as a philosopher making complex, sophisticated arguments to support a position, property dualism, which is not popular with his audience (of philosophers).
Sort of like WJM’s posts on morality in this forum.
It interested me when I first was taught about it in Grammar school biology but now there is so much info available using a few key presses. Cute video here
But then take dolphins, social organisation, large brains, echo location and identifying whistles that suggest a sense of self and other. Language? Who cares, really. We can study dolphin society and behaviour without having to decide.
@ Neil
Drop a hint if this is off-topic.
Not a problem for me. I do have an interest in language in other species, and I think it relevant, even if a bit distant.
When I started this study, I had little background in philosophy. So I probably did not know how to talk to philosophers. I have since studied a lot of philosophy, mainly to learn how to communicate.
By now, I am retired. It does not seem important to me whether I get published in a peer reviewed journal. I’m more interested in getting the ideas out, which is why I started a blog.
Neil Rickert,
Well, OK, then. BruceS links to a Wikipedia page on displacement as a way of looking at animal communication. I think an example there that I already alluded to is interesting.as a way of inquiring into the rôle of social organisation in developing communication and vice versa (and did one or the other come first or is it co-evolution? Ants and eusociality and how that could have co-evolved with pheromone communication.
Neil,
I don’t see the circularity. Could you identify it explicitly?
Of course I am. How else could I communicate the fact to you?
Remember, the statement “the boulder is balanced at the top of the hill” is a proposition — a P-fact. The actual state of affairs is an M-fact. The boulder is balanced at the top of the hill even if no one knows or asserts that it is there.
What actual state of affairs?
I’ll take it that you are probably talking about a bunch of molecules in an inconspicuous planet that moves at high speed around a mediocre star. In turn that star moves at high speed around the periphery of the Milky Way galaxy, etc.
That some bunches of molecules are called “boulders” is itself a human convention. And something similar could be said about just about every word in the above discussion.
In terms of my earlier comment, I am refusing to accept a “God’s eye view” way of talking about this, because I don’t see that we could ever have access to such a view. The best we can do is construct procedures, naming conventions, communications protocols — artifacts, all of them — that can allow us to discuss our world.
The “state of affairs” terminology presupposes a God’s eye view. In real life, where we talk about states of anything, we must first come up with some sort of procedure for specifying what is a state. And only then can we talk about states of affairs. Since what counts as a state depends on us, the states amount to human artifacts.
Neil,
Yes.
Sure. We have to know what “boulder”, “hill”, and “balanced” all refer to in order to establish the statement “the boulder is balanced at the top of the hill” as a true statement — a P-fact.
However, the molecules don’t rearrange themselves simply because we attach the word “boulder” to a collection of them. The M-facts remain the same before and after the creation of the P-fact. M-facts precede P-facts and constrain them.
We don’t need access to the “God’s-eye view”. All we need is to accept that external reality — the arrangement of molecules making up the boulder and the hill, in this case — remains the same whether or not anyone is looking, thinking, or talking about it.
P.S. Don’t forget to point out the circularity you think you’ve identified.
Meaning is subjective. No two people mean exactly the same thing by “the boulder is balanced at the top of the hill” though there might be agreement about to consider the statement to be true.
The M-facts are merely adornments in your metaphysics. But they play no role. The molecules are important, but whether or not there are M-facts is not relevant to anything.
If there can be said to be M-facts, then there are an uncountable infinitude of them, not one of them expressible or accessible.
That’s pretty much meaningless. Or, if not meaningless, then false.
Thanks for the video and the previous links to the Chalmers paper and the paper on semiotics in biology.
The Chalmers paper was quick, enjoyable read on whether AI is possible (yes), whether it could be self amplifying and so design a more intelligent AI+ (yes) and whether that would lead to a superintelligent AI++ (most likely with caveats on possible limits of intelligence or amplification). Would such an AI++ destroy us or drastically limit our lives — quite likely. Trying to build in morality or limit its growth are risky. The best solution would be uploading so we ourselves would be superintelligent. He believes an uploaded person would be conscious, because he is a functionalist, but is unsure whether it would be the same person and he includes a discussion of basic philosophy of personal identity to give the pros and cons.
The biology paper looks a tougher slog, but I’ll go through the introductory material at least.
I’m actually not as much interested in dolphin or bee language per se as to what light it can throw on philosophy of mind for humans: How can we explain conspicuousness and qualia naturalistically, how do we learn, how did those capabilities evolve, how could we build artificial versions of them. So that is why Neil’s description of his unpublished research piqued my interest.
However, I am a scientific realist a heart, which means I think that P-facts stated using terms of an accepted scientific theory make true statements about reality, or at least converge on such statements in some sense as science progresses. So I’m rooting for keiths in their current exchange.
But isn’t this a quasi-admission that there is an objective M-fact about which observers can make observations, measurements and share results, compare notes?
It was a minute or two’s googling and the semiotics stuff was already in a draft so no worries.
Good. I was worried when you mentioned he was a dualist. I only glanced through the paper myself but got the impression it was soberly written (no woo) I’ll read it properly. There is a response to rebuttals on line too.
On semiotics, the original reason I was looking for material is the Upright Biped Semiotic Argument. which has haunted these halls for a while.
I’m not sure what that means.
It is pretty clear that keiths is insisting on a “God’s eye view” philosophy, while I have rejected that. Neither of us is going to persuade the other. So I guess you get to make up your own mind.
I doubt that there’s much disagreement between us on that. However, I’m sure that we (keiths and I) have very different views about truth.
What do M-facts have to do with anything?
There’s a human independent world about which observers can make observations, measurements, statements, conversations, etc. M-facts don’t play a role, as far as I can see.
I would guess that it is mostly co-evolution. I’m inclined to guess that some sort of social organization may have come first, perhaps as behavioral choices to deal with an uncongenial environment, and that further evolution of social abilities and communication abilities followed.
In that case, you have close kin relationships. Human social structure is interesting, because it does not appear to depend on such kinship.
As far as I know, Chalmers is a property dualist, but not a substance dualist. He comes to property dualism, because he thinks he needs that to explain consciousness.
Absolutely agree.
OK. I was just baffled about the “God’s eye” stuff. I thought we were getting into “when a tree falls etc” sort of woo. I’m not very receptive to woo. I suspect we humans are not always good at coping with the conflict of being part of reality and also trying to observe and understand reality.
Nobody’s mentioned my fog metaphor 🙁
On checking Wikpedia I note:
In recent work, Chalmers has concentrated on verbal disputes.[8] He argues that a dispute is best characterized as “verbal” when it concerns some sentence S which contains a term T such that (i) the parties to the dispute disagree over the meaning of T, and (ii) the dispute arises solely because of this disagreement. In the same work, Chalmers proposes certain procedures for the resolution of verbal disputes. One of these he calls the “elimination method”, which involves eliminating the contentious term and observing whether any dispute remains.
If we eliminate M-facts, there doesn’t seem much disagreement.
I forgot the smiley.
What I meant by “my heart” is I wish scientific realism is true, because I want to believe that science can tell us true things about entities in the real world.
But the arguments pro and con I know about seem evenly matched. So my heart is made up but it’s still an open issue to me if I think about it.
Certainly an ant colony consists of a mother and daughters who are all more closely related to each other than human siblings due to their haplodiploidy.
But humans have been human for around two hundred thousand years. We have been living in large non-family groups for a small fraction of that. I think Homo sapiens did nearly all it’s evolving prior to developing large settlements.
As Neil says, he is a property dualist to explain consciousness, although he does not think that bears on the arguments in the paper. In particular, he points out that property dualism and functionalism are orthogonal so he can be both. And he uses functionalism to justify consciousness in AI.
I’m probably not using the words the way you mean them I understand the propositions of a scientific theory to be an example of P-facts. M-facts are the underlying reality. Further, and this is where I think the conflict is, P-facts provide true statements about that reality and how it behave, and not just true predictions of what we observe when experimenting.
Or at least that is what I am hoping for.
I don’t have a problem with there being an underlying reality. It’s just that the introduction of M-facts confuses the issue.
Roughly speaking, Kant argued that we cannot access the world as it is. I see that as a misleading way of talking. My disagreement is not with “the world”, but with the “as it is”. That’s what I think we cannot make sense of. It seems to suggest that there is, in principle, some sort of description or specification of the world “as it is” that we cannot achieve. But, it seems to me, there could not be a specification or description without a specification language or description language. And I am doubting the possibility of such a specification language.
So the best we can do, is the world as we describe it through science. And maybe science will continue to get better at that.
Perhaps it’s the mathematician in me. Any description is necessarily finite. But if we take a sequence of ever-improving finite descriptions, there’s no guarantee that there will be something finite that it converges to. Perhaps the world is such that there could not be any God’s eye view of it.
YES. Its the premises. Yet I’m adding premises are so unknown that logic itself does not exist. or not as people use the word.
There is just profound accurate conclusions in the universe. Logic is a very special case dealing with this accuracy and so is almost useless in human thought.
What world?
keiths:
Neil:
To the contrary, M-facts — actual states of affairs — are central. They determine which statements are P-facts and which aren’t. If there weren’t an actual set of molecules in some configuration — an M-fact — we couldn’t determine that “the boulder is balanced at the top of the hill” is true — a P-fact.
Neil:
If they were inaccessible, then we would be unable to determine the truth of a statement and establish it as a P-fact. If they weren’t expressible, then we would be unable to make true statements about reality, which again would make P-facts impossible. A P-fact is just an expression of an M-fact.
I would argue that when people refer to “facts”, they are usually talking about M-facts, not P-facts. An investigation into a suspicious explosion “gathers the facts”, but by your usage this would be impossible, because the facts don’t exist to be gathered. We would have to say that investigators create the facts, which is clunky and misleading.
The phrase “statement of fact” makes sense if “fact” refers to an M-fact, but is a redundancy if “fact” refers to a P-fact. “A statement of a state of affairs” makes sense; “a statement of a true statement” does not.
keiths:
Neil:
Can you explain why?
Also, I’m still interested in hearing about the circularity you said you’ve identified in my position.
I think the problem is that while reliable and repeatable measurement and observation implies “something is really there,” the thereness is irrelevant. the regularity is what is relevant.
“Thereness” is elusive. When I was a kid we talked of atoms as if they were little solid balls. As I got older they became little solar systems. Then I was told they were more like a ball of mist. All of these analogies and metaphors were wrong in varying degrees. The thereness of particles is irrelevant. What is relevant is the measurements and the relationships linking measurements.
There are\, of course, levels of abstraction and metaphor. larger assemblages of atoms can be crystals or rocks or cats or people or stars. We cannot help but classify assemblages and assign attributes to them. The attributes cannot be logically derived from constituent components, so we have to name the assemblies as if they are things that exist. But again, the thereness is irrelevant as long as the observations are consistent.
petrushka,
I think of it as an application of Ockham’s Razor.
It’s true that the boulder and the hill might not really be there. For example, a Cartesian demon might be manipulating my sensory input to create the illusion of a boulder and a hill.
However, it’s far more parsimonious to suppose that the boulder and the hill are really there, given that my experiences comport well with that model.
Like any of my beliefs, my belief in the “thereness” of the boulder and hill is provisional and subject to revision on the basis of future observations.
But consitency of the measurement it is relative to your ability of measure.
When you tought atoms were were little solid balls your measurements were consistent with that idea. Then you added ability to became little solar systems and after that again you could say that the atoms are more like a ball of mist.
So thereness is irrelevant and measurement consistency is relative to your capacity of measure. The only thing that remain are your ideas about reality, because you can still think in the atoms as solid balls or solar systems.
There is only one practical application of consistent observations. You can use them to make your life better.
Let’s not go there. For it is turtles all the way down.
Science is the fog light we use to see through the fog to the real world it is obscuring.
Not just yours, but everyone else’s, especially after the “boulders” are subject to confirmation by science.
Part of my problem here, is that there are no such things as “actual states of affairs”. You are attempting to make a vague reference to the names of things that have never been named. That’s what makes such talk meaningless from my perspective.
As best I can tell, nobody goes looking for M-facts, and then deriving a P-fact. Rather, people come up with P-facts in other ways. And then they assert that there must have been M-facts which are presented in the P-fact. So the M-fact plays no actual role, though it might help you to feel good about things if you can believe that there are M-facts.
I was going to comment on Keiths’s boulder analogy by saying something about a foggy night and two people with torches. They both can’t get the same view at the same time but by sharing information they can build up a pretty good picture;
The Greeks did, particularly the Pythagoreans, including Plato. True, it didn’t really work, except, arguably, in astronomy, but there still was the “unreasonable” application of mathematics to the world that ended up being crucial to science.
Of course there’s no reason any more to suppose that logic and math are “more real” than everything we see. That’s why metaphysics is interesting in the development of philosophy and science, pretty much useless at this time. It is true that we only know what we do know via factors that come beforehand, notably logic and math, but these are not “M-facts,” merely our way of dealing with the world (or “world,” if you prefer).
Metaphysics was both useful and distracting for the development of science, but it doesn’t yield any information about how we know, now. Evolution and the rest of science does.
Glen Davidson
Glenn can you explain to me what do you mean by science?
Wow. You really, truly, seriously do believe that “there are no such things as ‘actual states of affairs'”? Feel free to step off the roof of a 40-story building without a parachute, and get back to me with a report on the experience. Since “there are no such things as ‘actual states of affairs'”, there obviously cannot be any problems with the height of the building, or with gravity, or with the kinetic energy that your body will accumulate in its descent, or with the rapid dispersal of kinetic energy from your body to the environment when you reach the ground, right?
I take this to mean that you don’t think science itself is an acceptable specification language (and that correct science using that language provides a God’s-eye view).
That’s fair enough and certainly a widely held position, eg from a philsophers poll.
For me, I can see a lot of merit in the argument that science is right so often and accurately, and is so useful for building technology, that it would be a miracle if it were not providing an accurate description of how the world really is.
But I can also see a lot of merit in the argument that accepted science changes, so there is no good reason to think current science is providing truth (ie a God’s eye view) about reality.
Unfortunately, I cannot see some way to accept both these arguments (grin).
You are missing the point entirely. I do not question that there are buildings and that stepping off them is bad.
What I am saying is that the sequence of words “state of affairs” has no actual referent.
We do talk of states. But the states that we talk of are not physical things. They are abstractions. They exist by virtue of how we have defined them. In this case, keiths has not defined them (because he cannot). So they do not exist.
If you are trying to make a distinction between “the way the world is” and “the world as described by science”, then science is not a suitable language for that distinction. I was arguing against the meaningfulness of trying to make that distinction.
And no, I don’t see that science can provide a God’s eye view.
I would argue that reality (the way the world is, as far as we can tell) is the world as described by science. What other world is there?
I understand the issue to be about whether we can describe the world in a way that correctly depicts how it is, not just the general question of something existing that underlies our observations.
Often the argument focuses on unobservables, like dinosaurs, electrons, and other universes.
Well, I see the point but I don’t see it as an issue. Pragmatically, what’s the problem?
Oops. That slipped by me. Is there evidence for other universes? They are unobservable in a true sense, completely different from dinosaurs, for which we have an enormous amount of evidence and electrons for which we have a good working explanation for a whole raft of observations albeit indirect (Millikan).
My objection is to “the way the world is” as a language expression. Thus people attempt to distinguish between the way the world is, and the way science describes the world. I think it’s a bogus distinction.
I’m questioning whether there is a meaning of “correctly” for which that sentence makes sense.
Neil,
The phrase “God’s eye view” is a bit misleading. If I say “It’s a fact that the boulder rolled down the hill a hundred million years ago”, I’m really saying that if an observer had been present then and looking in the right direction at the right time, he or she would have witnessed the event.
It wouldn’t have required supernatural powers to make that observation, and it doesn’t require supernatural powers to deduce from present observations that an event happened in the past, even if there were no observers present at the time.
Neil,
It’s not a bogus distinction. I think the earth was orbiting the sun even before science described it that way. Don’t you?