Re: Which Singularity Don't You Want?

Wayne Throop wrote:
> : "Dr. Dave" <dtate@xxxxxxx>
> : I don't know -- you're the one who argues that your scope is a 'good'
> : description of what's going on, and mine is 'bad'. Part of that is (I
> : believe) a confusion on your part about what I'm actually saying, but
> : part of it is a real fundamental disagreement between us about who is
> : entitled to make semantic distinctions in a debate of this sort.
>
> Well first of all, where do I go to sign up for this entitlement?

Over in the dualist dorm, freshman quad.

> And does it give me the right to define my own words, or other persons'?

No, but it does give you the right to talk about understanding
concepts, rather than merely having beliefs.

> And second, I don't know that your definitions are bad; you seemed to
> me to start out saying that the physicalist ones were bad, and I was
> saying they weren't neither.

Again, you attribute this wholly-unlike-anything-I-said position to me,
without any sort of text behind it. There's no longer any point in
denying these things; you'll invent some weird new one in the reply.

> "there's no reason to treat
> Guido's intentions any different than the tree's, or the hurricane's" /
> "yes there is, and here's roughly how I make the distinction".

Namely, as if Guido and I both had free will.

> And so on.

Indeed.

> Addressing issues that don't seem to
> me to even be issues, such as "how can be be absolutely, positively,
> sure that we can verify the truth of things"

Well, enough things to be able to reason...

> to which my answer is
> "what, do you think it's a reasonable thing to demand? cos I don't".

Yeah, reason is overrated. Instinct is probably enough.

Just out of curiosity, since you haven't actually answered this
question yet: what sort of things do you think that we need to be able
to know, without possibility of uncorrectable error, in order to be
"rational enough" to (say) have philosophical discussions that aren't
Martian on all sides?

> Possibly. But, in the context of "suppose everything's physical", remarking
> that "gosh, these two things are both physical, isn't that a problem
> for you?" seems a bit pointless.

OK; I'll be sure never to assert any such thing then. (See 27 previous
replies for how this differs from what I actually asserted.)

> : On the other hand, every time you say "I distinguish A from B in these
> : contexts", you're invoking a semantic distinction that I don't think
> : exists in a physicalist world -- in essence, just restating the axiom
> : "everything we think we can do, we can do in a physicalist universe".
>
> What does it mean for a "semantic distinction to exist in the physical
> world"? Seems to me that semantic distinctions exist in people's minds.

Precisely. That's a prima facie case that either physicalism is false,
or we're all seriously deluded about lots of important things.

> Is the difference between there being one apple vs two apples in a box a
> "semantic distction that exists in the physical world"?

No, but understanding the difference between one apple and two, or
between apples and pears, or between pie apples and eating apples, is.

[...]

> What do you want to conclude from that? That Guido is no more eligable to
> "having beliefs" than a tree?

No, that Guido is no more responsible for hitting me than a tree. He
has beliefs, but if physicalism is true he has them for boring reasons.

> If so, I don't think it follows. If not
> what's the point of saying "this micro-level description, containing
> a huge lists of teeny tiny physical bits and an incredibly complicated
> causal structure connecting them, is a description of belief formation"?

To point out that the interesting characteristics, that
semantically-enabled folk would care about if we could, are not part of
the causal story. The model that the believer thinks he has is not the
model he actually has.

> : Beliefs are (per hypothesis) a feature of the physical universe
> : exactly the same way hurricanes are.
>
> : You can't reasonably construe me to be saying that the
> : universe-as-a-whole exhibits hurricane-like behavior, or that
> : hurricanes exist everywhere in the universe. They are simply a local
> : feature of some parts of The Mechanism -- just like beliefs.
>
> Just like EVERYthing...

Yeeees? If physicalism is true, then that's right.

> and so in pointing out this comonality, you have failed to say ANYthing.

I wish I knew what you meant by that. From my point of view, it's
worth repeating because you seem to keep forgetting it, and talking
about things as if this were NOT true. As if some processes were not
parts of The Mechanism, and could only be explained or characterized in
terms other than those describing the operation of The Mechanism.

> So stop pointing out the commonality, and let the
> discussion drift towards the nature of the differences. You keep saying
> the processes in a hurricane are "just like" the processes in a human,
> yet when I point out that there are differences, you say you never said
> there weren't differences, but the hurricane is "just like" beliefs.
> See, you said it again right up there.

No, actually, I didn't. I said that the sense in which beliefs are a
feature of the universe is the same as the sense in which hurricanes
are a feature of the universe. If you don't get the difference between
that and "hurricanes are just like beliefs", I can't help you.

> So what's the point of continuing with "yes there are differences,
> but they are the same", and glossing over just what the differences are?

Apparently none at all, given what you did to my last attempt.

> : If they're not[1], I can't trust anything I think, so it's a useful
> : working hypothesis -- like assuming that I'm not a brain in a vat, or
> : that other people are really people.
>
> You seem to be ignoring an extensive middle ground that strikes me
> as a lot more fruitful and useful as a working hypothesis.

No, I'm not ignoring it. I've dismissed it as wishful thinking. There
is no useful middle ground between "I'm sometimes capable of rational
thought" and "I'm not", if you hope to be a reasoning being. "I might
sometimes reason correctly, but don't know when" is not an
intellectually useful ability or position.

> You jump directly to "I can't trust anything I think", as if "trust" were a binary
> thing, that if you haven't got it 100 percent, you haven't got anything,
> so you might as well assume you've got 100 percent.

Right. If I have a calculator that is right half the time, but I don't
know which half, I've got nothing of any use.

> This does not strike me as a useful working hypothesis.
> Nor is it akin to supposing that, provisionally, you are not
> a brain in a vat, which is a much more local and focussed assumption.

Not really. In both cases, I refuse to believe something that makes
knowledge impossible, on the principle that if I'm wrong, it doesn't
matter anyway. You, I'm sure, think you're doing something similar.
The difference is that you're hypothesizing a mechanism that
demonstrably undermines your chances for rationality.

> :: We act less sphexishly than the wasp,
> : We do?
>
> Yes. We do.
>
> : How do you know that?
>
> Because we are demonstrably not sucked in by the same loops
> that suck in the wasp,

Letting slide that 'demonstrably', which is unjustified, who said
anything about the *same* loops. Make them bigger, better, more
complex loops. We deserve it.

> and the differences seem to be ones of
> scope and memory.

'Seem' is the key word there.

> It is entirely reasonable to call this "less sphexish".

It would be, if there were any reason to believe it's true. Instead,
we know that the evolutionary process we have pinned our hopes on is
prone to creating things like Vespa sphexidia.

> : *That* was the point -- that the sphexish entity does not recognize
> : itself as such.
>
> More likely, the wasp doesn't recognize itself at all.

So pick your favorite stupid self-aware creature. It got there the
same way we got to where we are, brainwise. "I am sufficiently evolved
to have transcended the possibility of unnoticed irrationality" is
sheerest wishful thinking, no less than "I have free will".

> : Words fail me. How irrational are you willing to believe yourself to
> : be, before it actually affects your view of whether 'reasoning' is
> : anything to do with reality?
>
> I don't know. I thought you just said I didn't know.
> So why worry about it? Why "wish it weren't so"?
> Does wishing one were somehow handed down from a dualist pedistal
> gain me anything?

Potentially.

> How do you trust the process that handed them down?

Dunno; I don't know enough about them yet. But at least I don't yet
*know* they are broken, the way I know evolution-as-producer-of-beliefs
is broken. Maybe they'll turn out to be just as bogus, and I'm SOL.
I'll cross that bridge later.

> It all boils down do variations on the theme of "I could be wrong".
> Big woop.

No, it comes down to the difference between "I could be wrong" and "I'm
going to assume something that makes it almost certain that I'm wrong,
and then ignore it".

> : Part of the kicker of physicalism is that the mapping between the
> : subjective experience and the external reality is not necessarily
> : important.
>
> You present no alternative, other than wishful thinking.

I have in the past, but you labelled it Martian. Suffice it to say
that my alternative is merely outlandish, while yours is (to my eye)
self-defeating. Wishful thinking is better than nihilism.

> : What makes you think that you can design a logic engine that isn't
> : flawed in the same ways that you are at your most careful?
>
> Because we've already done so, as I pointed out.

Well, we seem to have done so. But then, we seem to reason just fine,
too, when we put our minds to it. This sounds like the kind of wishful
thinking you were just complaining about.

> : I can't tell the difference between your argument here and the claim
> : that hopelessly insane people can nevertheless function fine by
> : analysing the nature of their insanity and correcting for it.
>
> OK. "Note to self: don't put Dave in charge of the asylum,
> he doesn't see the difference between insanity and logic".

Come on, Wayne, that's even less plausible than your usual misreading
of what I said.

> Look. If a drunk thinks he can "compensate" for his reduced reflexes,
> this can be checked.

Of course -- he's merely drunk, not wholly insane, and other people are
sober enough to perform the tests. What does this have to do with your
claim that, if we were all persisently irrational in systematic evolved
ways, we would necessarily be able to recognize that?

> Does he bump into things? Does he weave? Are
> people who claim this any less likely to have accidents? And the drunk
> can be convinced he is wrong by evidence (I've seen it done). Similarly
> with insane people. Not universally, but it can be done.

I see you nicely deleted my comment about Nash, then responded as if I
hadn't made it. Insane people have the advantage that there are sane
people out there to set them right. Physicalism suggests that, if
there is a persistent set of biases like these, we all pretty much
share them. There's nobody running this asylum but us; the analogy
breaks down.

> And finally, as before, dualism doesn't help with this problem in the least.

Sure it does; it takes away a positive reason to believe that we can't
trust what we believe.

David Tate

.

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