A new world?
Lance
EXCERPT
Sometime in or around the winter of 1993, the world as we knew it ceased to
be. It was then that we finally succeeded in shifting the tender balance we
have always maintained between our two separate levels of reality: the world
we can see and experience outside of ourselves, and the world we can only
experience inside our own heads. It was then that we began to collectively
face an entirely new human predicament: one in which the big action of our
lives is going on not in the certain, material universe, but in the
ungraspable world of thought, image, and idea. This most extraordinary
phenomenon, in which interior reality becomes more pressing -- more real --
than exterior reality -- heretofore a fairly conventional definition of
insanity -- has taken over the mainstream human experience.
Reality itself has gone mental. The future, you might say, is all in your
mind.
The technological events that turbo-charged the transformation are clear.
The Defense Department licenses the Arpanet technology to consumer land
giants AT&T and IBM (Arpanet being, of course, the first project of the
Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the forerunner of the Internet.) In
1991, Timothy Berners-Lee creates the World Wide Web in a particle physics
lab near Lake Geneva. In 1992, Marc Andreesen invents MOSAIC, precursor to
Netscape and the mother of all Net browsers. In 1993 alone, Internet traffic
increases 341,634 percent in a single year. And we begin, en masse, to
disengage ourselves from the physical world -- the world of reliable limits
and steadying reference points -- to gather in village greens nowhere. We
become captured by a non-physical and extraordinarily disequilibriating new
world. (William Gibson, in Neuromancer, called cyberspace "consensual
hallucination.") The World Wide Web gives unstoppable momentum to the
defining phenomenon of Human History Part II: our abandonment of physical
reality as the primary habitat of our species. The Web makes the hegemony of
non-physical reality inevitable, for it sets into motion the same force of
nature that placed so many of us in the first human reality, in physical
reality, to begin with: population explosion. The Web escorts a critical
mass of people into head space.
But this shifting of worlds is not merely a technological phenomenon. Far
from it. An unprecedented convergence of events -- technological, to be
sure, but also socioeconomic, intellectual, psychological, demographic,
scientific, commercial, physiological -- perhaps even cosmic -- is wrenching
our focus from the material world, seizing our primal attention, and forcing
us to become, to our own surprise, a species of skull-dwellers, living in
the uncanny land of the mind's eye. Whether we realize it or not, each of us
is spending less and less time in the exterior, physical world, and more and
more time in an uncertain, imaginational world. Most astonishingly, we treat
living in this new non- ordinary reality as if it were business as usual --
and not the wholesale exodus from the physical universe that it is.
Let's be clear. The imaginational world is not an imaginary world, by any
means, but an invisible, idea-and-electron- spun world that exists -- and
that can only be experienced - - in the human imagination. It is the
increasingly urgent world of digital data bombarding neurons, of knowledge
work and innovation, of image and brand, of a new vision of physics -- of
how the world works -- that deals in mechanisms all too infinite or
infinitesimally small to be anything but imagined. This universe is a dance
of nano- molecular particles, the jansenist machinations of genes, the
jockeying for power between your body and your mind -- the visionary, the
virtual, the intellectually capitalized, the cataclysmically powerful but
unidentifiable. The ungraspable.
The players of this world are intangible: powerful forces that are almost
always unverifiable by the naked human senses, but that are increasingly
perceived to be determinative: molecules, microbes, spirits, x-factors,
energy fields, memes, mood -- not to mention mercurial levels of "economic
vigor," "voter interest," "consumer confidence," "investor courage," and a
whole new generation of terror-inflicted terrors and zeitgeist-begotten
anxieties. The powers that be are, frankly speaking, occult -- hidden from
view, beyond our grasp, no longer a part of the old, familiar certainty of
physical reality -- not of this world.
Even the concept of "action news" has made a shift to the interior realm.
News reports of our day focus less on the event in the physical world, and
more on the imaginational reaction to it inside our collective heads.
Consider the following front-page headlines: "Californians enraged by
insinuations of energy indulgence," "Paradise motivates mindset of zealots."
And today, as I write: "Intelligence humiliated by lack of foresight." The
current event of most powerful import now is an imaginational experience. We
move from the physical event in the outside world to report, with great
urgency, the imaginational reaction to it inside our collective heads --
whether it be a sports contest or a historical global event.
That which is not material is no longer "immaterial."
Reality is not a thing but a spin.
There is very little "let's lift the hood and take a look" appraisal
possible in this new order of things.
And to make life all the more mysterious, we get only uncertain,
imaginational explanations from the Great Explainers. Look for the answers,
they say, in the stuff of dreams. The rock of rationality has gone all
funny. Science has become phenomenological -- ironic. (Einstein himself
called the field of quantum mechanics "spooky action at a distance.")
Astrophysicists peer into the heavens for answers and solemnly intone the
words "black hole." Scientists struggle to find physical evidence to defend
their reputations as empiricists and not poets -- in hopes of
reestablishing, in the words of superstring theorist (and author of The
Elegant Universe) Brian Greene, that "we are not just doing philosophy
here." In his landmark book The End of Science, John Horgan reports a
profound unease on the part of many leading scientific thinkers, who find
themselves engaged in labors more akin to literary criticism, in Horgan's
view, than the pure science that came before. "We have reached the end of
certainty," says Nobel prize- winning scientist Ilya Prigogine. (Ain't that
the truth, the layman replies.) The Truth has become Opinion. Probability.
Dream. Or in the words of physicist John Wheeler, "a figment of the
imagination." Professor Wheeler is among those living men and women who have
actually trafficked with the innermost secrets of physical existence: the
particles, the waves, the cosmic nothingnesses. His conclusion, and the
conclusion of an increasing number of postmodern scientists, is that even
physicality itself may exist exclusively in our own minds.
And while a fixation on the ephemeral has always been the norm for at least
some segments of the culture: the mystics of the world, the intellectual,
the spiritual, the artistic, the dying, and the mad -- each of us at one
time or another -- it is now the norm for most all of us, most all of the
time. This is true whether one engages imaginational reality intellectually,
pragmatically, recreationally, spiritually, or simply by dint of having
moved from the physical world to the world of the screen. (See "What Is Your
Imaginational Profile?" page 46.) Imaginational reality is consuming us all
like a great Biblical mist -- from the most cloud-enshrouded among us to the
most mud-footed -- swallowing us all up, even those big, solid strongholds
of the culture that have always been the least ethereally aware, the least
invisibly inclined, the very least vulnerable to the woo-woo.
Ironically, the movement into a consciousness-based reality has been largely
an unconscious transition. It only becomes top of mind when The Switch
occurs: that moment when you experience a kind of revelation, and clearly
"see" that most of your most important reality is going on, not in the
physical world, but in an intangible world you can only experience in your
mind's eye.
Making The Switch
Benjamin R. experienced The Switch when his company moved him to an
all-electronic, all-the-time mode of business, using computer networking
software that allows real-time group collaboration between members of a
marketing team scattered across multiple continents and time zones. Says
Benjamin: "I was still in my pajamas in bed with my laptop. I logged on to a
meeting that was already in full, angry swing, battling about how to define
our brand's 'core identity.' Suddenly this message flashes across the
screen: Glasgow and Singapore cannot agree. London and Paris would like to
bring you in. Where do you stand, Ben?
"Stand? I thought. Stand! I thought I was falling down a rabbit hole. I was
being addressed by people I could not see or hear, to talk about something
that only exists in our own heads, in a timeless
GlaswegianSingaporeanBritishFrenchAmerican world that, until that moment,
did not even exist." Benjamin R. has made The Switch.
For Pilar H., it was an excruciating revelation experienced in a hospital
corridor. Still in shock from a recent diagnosis of breast cancer -- the
tiny lump removed from her left breast had proven to be malignant -- she was
waiting to hear the doctor's advice: what should her next course of action
be? Says Pilar: "The doctor told me it was up to me, but she thought a
genetic test was in order. If I have some kind of mutation in a specific
pair of genes -- BRCA 1 or BRCA 2 they call it -- she would recommend a
double mastectomy. Or I could just remove one breast. Or I could go with
chemotherapy and radiation. Or just radiation. Or I could just go home. My
whole life was in the balance and the power in charge was a tiny little
genetic tweak that may or may not even be there. Whoa! Whoa! That's all I
could say. I had to make the biggest decision of my life on the basis of a
mystery-world itty-bitty I did not even know existed until that day."
Happily, Pilar was found not to have the genetic predisposition for a
greater risk of recurrence of breast cancer, she had no further surgery, and
she has passed the last five years' tests with flying colors. But Pilar H.
has made The Switch.
Richard W. has a secret ritual -- a superstition, he once called it -- that
he religiously performs every day. He began it several years ago, following
a painful divorce. It consists of deliberately directing loving, healing
thoughts to his daughter, who lives miles away with his former wife. Says
Richard: "I guess I do it for myself as much as for my daughter. Every
morning when I wake up, I picture myself hugging her and telling her I love
her and kind of sprinkling the magic dust of protection all around her." He
made The Switch when he read about a distance healing project conducted by
Dr. Elizabeth Targ that concluded that directed thought does seem to have
the power to alter the physical world. Says Richard: "I knew that! I have
known that all along! But when I saw that my sense of invisible power was
validated by serious science -- that smart people believe it, too -- I felt
this extraordinary exhilaration. This is real! My secret world is the same
as the real world! It felt like I had been shot into space. And I was just
reading a magazine on the couch."
For Anne T., The Switch happened during an ordinary conversation with her
ten-year-old, walking home from the bus stop. Here is her account.
'What did you learn in school today?' I asked my son.
'Superstrings!' he answers.
'Cool!' I say, 'what's that? Are Electro-Slide- Whangers already over?'
'It's not a thing, Mom. It's reality,' he tells me.
'Cool,' I say. 'What do superstrings look like?'
'Well, if you have to see it, Mom, it's almost hopeless.' says my son.
And he begins to help me conjure up an inner vision of the universe that
sent me right back to smoking dope in the seventies. Weird does not begin to
describe it. I was suddenly psychedelic -- and this was my kid's homework! I
see it now as a privileged glimpse into a new reality -- the one my
ten-year-old knows way more about than me.
When Anne T. made The Switch, her son, like many American children between
the ages of twelve and sixteen, was already there.
Many of us made The Switch together when a new reality hit home on September
11, 2001 -- when we all witnessed, at virtually the same moment, a seemingly
unassailable physical reality disappear into thin air. It was an attack that
was unspeakably horrible not only in the finite, physical world, but also in
the imaginational realm, when the American sense of inviolability was
shattered by an enemy who broke through our psychic borders. This enemy
wants to kill the very idea of us, to undermine our imaginational strength,
to inflict a killing blow on our communal state of mind -- the ultimate act
of war in an imaginational age.
Our sense of the threats that are out to get us had already moved
dramatically into invisible territory with worldwide AIDS and environmental
toxins. We were intimately familiar with invisible enemies -- new pathogens
and poisons -- hiding out to ambush us in the most elemental aspects of our
lives -- our air, our food, our water, our lovemaking. Now even our human
enemies are invisible -- no longer reliably to be found on the other side of
a geopolitical border. Now terrorists -- our new macro-biological
predators -- live as invisibly in our midst as microbiological threats. They
lurk in the backs of our minds threatening horror at any moment, making a
mockery of our old concepts of "a safe place." They strike us invisibly in
our hearts. They slip stealthily into our mail, our air, our lungs.
The more the developed world progresses technologically and intellectually,
the more we find ourselves in the dark, living in invisible, unknowable
vapors. The world as we have known it is disappearing. We are having some
reality-testing problems and experiencing what the psychiatric community
calls "derealization." ("I don't know. Sometimes it feels like nothing is
real.") Many have returned to a vision of reality in which our fates are in
the hands of invisible powers beyond our mere human perception,
comprehension, or control. We find ourselves right back where we started --
at the beginning of Human History Part I -- when the earth was so famously
without form and void the first time. Invisible reality is our new Eden (or
purgatory, or hell, depending on your point of view), and we are starting
all over, trying to make sense of a bewildering new jungle. The human
environment is, once again, a radically mystifying place, and we are the
naked new primitives within it -- trying to figure out how to live, the last
several thousand years of human advancement be damned -- because all of the
progress we have made so far is about mastering the old world, the physical
world, the world we are switching out of. The physical world as primary
human environment is over.
Peter H.M. Brooks
"Lance" <Lanc...@worldonline.co.za> wrote in message
>
> Many of us made The Switch together when a new reality hit home on
September
> 11, 2001 -- when we all witnessed, at virtually the same moment, a
seemingly
> unassailable physical reality disappear into thin air. It was an attack
that
> was unspeakably horrible not only in the finite, physical world, but also
in
> the imaginational realm, when the American sense of inviolability was
> shattered by an enemy who broke through our psychic borders. This enemy
> wants to kill the very idea of us, to undermine our imaginational
strength,
> to inflict a killing blow on our communal state of mind -- the ultimate
act
> of war in an imaginational age.
>
profound. The 'enemy' is their friend. Maybe they will be able to lift their
eyes from their navels and consider what 'reality' means.
--
Another consequence is a sizeable underclass in Britain losing touch with
mainstream values, prone to criminality and antisocial behaviour and
disorder, teenage pregnancy, drugs, violence and joblessness. - Peter
Mandelson repents, Grauniad May 18, 2002
Philip Preston
>Excerpt from: "The New Culture of Desire" by Melinda Davis
>
>EXCERPT
>
>
>
>Sometime in or around the winter of 1993, the world as we knew it ceased to
Isn't this just a parody of an essay that's been written countless times
before? The only innovation seems to be the use of the word "imaginational"
instead of "virtual".
[snip]
>Ironically, the movement into a consciousness-based reality has been
>largely
>an unconscious transition. It only becomes top of mind when The Switch
>occurs: that moment when you experience a kind of revelation, and clearly
>"see" that most of your most important reality is going on, not in the
>physical world, but in an intangible world you can only experience in your
>mind's eye.
Like when you start keeping your money in a bank account rather than a
biscuit tin.
Regards,
Philip.
Lance
"Philip Preston" <phi...@preston20.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> >Sometime in or around the winter of 1993, the world as we knew it ceased
to
> >be ...
>
> Isn't this just a parody of an essay that's been written countless times
> before? The only innovation seems to be the use of the word
"imaginational"
> instead of "virtual".
>
> [snip]
> >Ironically, the movement into a consciousness-based reality has been
> >largely
> >an unconscious transition. It only becomes top of mind when The Switch
> >occurs: that moment when you experience a kind of revelation, and clearly
> >"see" that most of your most important reality is going on, not in the
> >physical world, but in an intangible world you can only experience in
your
> >mind's eye.
>
> Like when you start keeping your money in a bank account rather than a
> biscuit tin.
>
people. Glad you agree.
Lance
Lance
"Peter H.M. Brooks" <pe...@new.co.za> wrote:
> > Many of us made The Switch together when a new reality hit home on
> September
> > 11, 2001 -- when we all witnessed, at virtually the same moment, a
> seemingly
> > unassailable physical reality disappear into thin air. It was an attack
> that
> > was unspeakably horrible not only in the finite, physical world, but
also
> in
> > the imaginational realm, when the American sense of inviolability was
> > shattered by an enemy who broke through our psychic borders. This enemy
> > wants to kill the very idea of us, to undermine our imaginational
> strength,
> > to inflict a killing blow on our communal state of mind -- the ultimate
> act
> > of war in an imaginational age.
> >
> Yanks are just so utterly self-obsessed. This sort of crap is seen as
> profound. The 'enemy' is their friend. Maybe they will be able to lift
their
> eyes from their navels and consider what 'reality' means.
>
absolutely transformed and changed in some way. I have lost count of the
recent books making this kind of claim...
Lance
Peter H.M. Brooks
Mind you, and I ought not to confess this in a forum where I may be called
to account, I am panglossian in my world view - not because of the new
transformation, but rather because things are as they have always been.
Also, maybe, because I have been blessed with freedom from the stultifying
consensus that poor Jim, lamented ex-contributor here, suffered from.
--
"Ecce Edwardus Ursus scalis numc tump-tump-tump occipite gradus pulsante
post Christophorum Robinum descendens. Est quod sciatunus et solus modus
gradibus descendendi,nonnunquam autem sentit, etiam alterum modum estare,
dummodo pulsationibus desinere et de eo modo meditari possit. Deinde censet
alios modos non esse. En, nunc ipse in imo est, vobis ostentari paratus." -
Winnie ille Pu.
Jim Purdie
Philip Preston <phi...@preston20.freeserve.co.uk> wrote in message
news:assseh$11r$2...@newsg4.svr.pol.co.uk...
on a piece of paper. Or much earlier, when knowledge was first written on a
piece of paper, or parchment, or clay tablet, or whatever. Or earlier than
that, when we learnt to symbolise the outside world, and talk about it. I
would argue, and have argued, that in an important sense our reality has
always been the one in our mind's eye.
Jim Purdie
Lance
"Jim Purdie" <jimp...@paradise.net.nz> wrote:
> I would argue, and have argued, that in an important sense our reality has
> always been the one in our mind's eye.
>
Let's think. Our reality in the one in the mind's eye. OK - the correctness
of the reality in the mind's eye may be in doubt in the sense that what the
mind's eye sees is not what's really "out there" (wherever out there is).
You agree, I think. Our knowledge of the external world is subject to doubt
and we can never be sure that we know much about it outside of our models -
I think I have seen this claim attached to your name several times.
But can we be sure of the reality in our mind's eye? In other words, if we
can be wrong about "out there" can we be wrong about the reality in our
mind's eye? If you say we can't be wrong about the reality in our mind's eye
then you are making a claim about having guaranteed epistemic access to the
mind's eye reality (guaranteed epistemic access or GEA).
Let's think about GEA for a while. Suppose you choose to deny GEA - and
claim that we can make mistakes about the reality in the mind's eye. If so,
then our knowledge of the mind's eye reality is no more soundly based than
our knowledge of the world out there. We have limited access to the world
out there and we have limited access to our own mind's eye and can be
mistaken about both. In that case others can say something like, Jim you are
not using your mind's eye properly - here's a better way to see the world.
Or they may say something like, Jim you are mistaken when you say you
believe X - what you really believe is Y. Or they become phenomenological
and say - Jim, you are not paying attention to your mind's eye - look more
closely and you will see not X but Y. And in all these sorts of cases they
can be right and you mistaken, about the reality in your mind's eye. If you
grant all this, then surely the mind's eye loses the central place you would
give it as "our reality": for, given all this, it would then be just another
aspect of the world that we are forever trying to grasp fully.
Suppose you assert GEA strongly. About your mind's eye you cannot be
mistaken, ever. About the world "out there" you can be mistaken, but you
know your own models of the world! (In taking this step you would be
following Descartes, as I'm sure you know).
Well, I've seen the word 'model' many times in your posts. It seems to me
that for you "the reality in our mind's eye" is something like a model. A
model can refer to something like an architect's miniature model of a future
building, or it be like Newton's model - in the form of equations - of
planetary motion based on gravity. For the moment, let's take the latter.
Right, consider the idea of black holes. Suppose you put the notion of black
holes to Newton, would you not agree that were he alive to hear you, he
would assert that the idea that there could be such a singularity in the
universe to be preposterous? Everything we know about Newton and his
seventeenth century counterparts suggests that they would have rejected the
idea as a blot on God's ordered universe. BUT - towards the end of the
eighteenth century an English mathematician did in fact show that black
holes are a consequence of Newton's own equations. Here is a consequence of
Newton's own model of the world that was not transparent to him (at least I
don't think so) or to his contemporaries. So even though Newton clearly had
access to his own model of planetary motion it also seems clear that he did
not have GEA - he could be mistaken about his own model. (Alternatively,
think of the difficulties with the three body problem: surely Newton did not
anticipate that).
OK, you might want to say, but most of our mind's eye contents are NOT
mathematical models like Newton's - they are much vaguer and more perceptual
in nature. Oops, perhaps I cheated by sneaking in the word 'vaguer' in the
above sentence. Let's think about it for a bit. It would be very difficult
to be more precise than Newton's equations. If you admit that there may be
unforeseen consequences of even such precise mathematical models, how much
more can we be mistaken if our models are vague? Sometimes people assert
that they think in images - that their models of reality take the form of
images. Right, try this experiment. Think of a really beautiful woman naked.
She has just the right curves, just the right smile. Close your eyes,
picture her as clearly as you can. Got her? OK.
Now, what colour has she painted her toe nails?
OK - so you are one of the exceptions who did somehow fill in her toe nails.
The fact remains that most people don't - that mental images are often vague
in details, and that such vagueness is imperceptible to us. (Consciousness
is positive only - it never tells us about absences). And that suggests that
mental images as models are also things we can be mistaken about because we
often fail to fill in crucial details.
All right, all right, you don't represent the world in images! How could I
suppose you so foolish? You use good old fashioned English. Your models are
linguistic constructions. But of course, the vagueness argument creeps up in
English too. The concepts in natural language are always a bit vague, and
often a lot vague. When we make rules and laws - surely the externalisation
of what started as inner models - we often find ourselves beset with
exceptions and cases we did not anticipate. Even linguistic models are
things to which we have no GEA.
Well, perception then? Surely you cannot be mistaken, for example, about
whether you are cold?
Let's suppose you live in a town something like the one in which I live.
Here the mornings often start off cold, and one leaves for work wearing a
jacket. However, by midday the heatfulness is terrific. Many a jacket needed
in the coolth of the morning is set aside and lost in the heat of the midday
sun. Now consider a series of very short time intervals between early in the
morning when you truthfully know you feel cold, and baking midday when you
truly know you don't. Clearly, at some point in that series there will be
moment when you are in some doubt as to whether you truly feel cold.
So it seems to me that there is good reason to doubt GEA. And that means
that there is good reason to doubt that "in an important sense our reality
has
always been the one in our mind's eye." For our mind's eye reality is just
as much a matter of doubt and conjecture as the world "out there." We can be
as mistaken about the one as we are about the other.
Lance
Jim Purdie
Lance, I think you are trying to think in absolutes. I don't think we have
evolved to attain, or to need, absolutes. Of course my mind's eye reality is
a matter of doubt, but probably not as much doubt as is the nature of the
"world out there". But all "reality" is a matter of doubt. I believe that we
live on a web of probabilities, with no strand strong enough to rescue us
from the abyss of not knowing, but in combination they give us a platform we
can clamber on very satisfactorily. We can be mistaken about anything, and
that is a strand that is nearly enough by itself to take my weight, but not
quite. Even that is not absolute.
One of the things that distinguishes us from machines, I think, is our
ability to think and act on limited knowledge. I am an expert neither in
chess nor in computers, but I gather that the great strength of the machine
is its ability to check possible moves, and their answers, many moves ahead.
The machine can be "certain" that if it makes a move, it can "imagine" all
possible answers, and all of its own answers, for several moves ahead. So it
has absolute certainty of the possible consequences of a given move for some
time in the future. It can then be given rules to assess the desirability of
a possible line of play.
The strength of humans is that while they lack the absolute certainty of the
machine in the short term, they have a broad pattern recognition ability
which gives them a fuzzy view of possible futures much further ahead than
the machine. So until recently the best human players could beat the best
machines, although that is no longer true. A top chess playing computer
would never make a move which would lead to a certain mate against it three
moves ahead, but I believe even grandmasters have been known to make that
mistake.
I used to do some mountaineering, but was never very good at it. I was the
plodding type, who always wanted to be sure before committing his weight to
a hold. So no hold was any use to me unless it would take my weight, and
that when I was lean and fit was about 100kg. I had friends who were good
climbers. They were much lighter than me, which gave them a better
power-to-weight ratio, but the main distinguishing characteristic was that
they were braver, and willing at difficult spots to trust holds which with
their given strength would not support their weight, but could be used as
guidance, and to supply some upward momentum to a moving body. The result
was that they were much better climbers, but some of them are dead. I, with
my need for certainty, still made mistakes, in that I fell off at times, but
they were smaller ones.
So my answer to you must be "Yes, I am uncertain, and I don't care". But
there are grades of uncertainty, and my main wish is to assesss what the
comparitive uncertainty is of various ideas which I have presented to me. I
will admit the comparitive certainty of an agreed chain of logic, but any
chain of logic must start somewhere, ands very often I find that the anchor
point is a completely unwarranted assumption. I live on a web of
probabilities (or the converse, uncertainties), but I seem to be very well
adapted to it.
Incidentally, my main model for my use of the word "model" is the computer
model, which can be all sorts of things, from a spatial representation to a
shade of colour, but is essentially a string of equations. I am aware that
my brain does not at any level I can reach work by equations, but is an
analogue device. (But I gather neurons work by counting the incoming
signals, and then firing when they reach a certain number, so in its
essentials even my brain is digital.) In much the same way the architect's
model you spoke of can be a series of formulae within a computer, which the
architect knows nothing about, but which take his floor plans and
elevations, prepared on the computer, and turn them into a 3D representation
of the finished building. Neither the architect nor his client are aware of
the mathematical underpinning, but it is there.
Jim Purdie
Lance
"Jim Purdie" <jimp...@paradise.net.nz> wrote:
> Lance, I think you are trying to think in absolutes. I don't think we have
> evolved to attain, or to need, absolutes.
I'm following a line of thought. Nothing in that line of thought suggests
anything 'absolute' - whatever that might be. I find myself wondering how
you know what we have evolved to attain or need.
> Of course my mind's eye reality is
> a matter of doubt, but probably not as much doubt as is the nature of the
> "world out there".
Othello comes to mind...
> But all "reality" is a matter of doubt. I believe that we
> live on a web of probabilities, with no strand strong enough to rescue us
> from the abyss of not knowing, but in combination they give us a platform
we
> can clamber on very satisfactorily.
So we have the equivalent, anyway? Given that both the model and the world
are uncertain - poorly grasped - how do we get to this satisfactory
conclusion?
> We can be mistaken about anything, and
> that is a strand that is nearly enough by itself to take my weight, but
not
> quite. Even that is not absolute.
>
> One of the things that distinguishes us from machines, I think, is our
> ability to think and act on limited knowledge. I am an expert neither in
> chess nor in computers, but I gather that the great strength of the
machine
> is its ability to check possible moves, and their answers, many moves
ahead.
> The machine can be "certain" that if it makes a move, it can "imagine" all
> possible answers, and all of its own answers, for several moves ahead. So
it
> has absolute certainty of the possible consequences of a given move for
some
> time in the future. It can then be given rules to assess the desirability
of
> a possible line of play.
The machine has no certainty and no doubt. Certainly IBM's Big Blue chess
playing machine has no aspect that we can remotely consider conscious.
>
> The strength of humans is that while they lack the absolute certainty of
the
> machine in the short term, they have a broad pattern recognition ability
> which gives them a fuzzy view of possible futures much further ahead than
> the machine. So until recently the best human players could beat the best
> machines, although that is no longer true. A top chess playing computer
> would never make a move which would lead to a certain mate against it
three
> moves ahead, but I believe even grandmasters have been known to make that
> mistake.
This seems confused to me. 1. If the machine only acted on "certainty" why
did they tend to lose until so recently? Acting on certainties must lead to
a certain outcome. 2. Not all computers are programmed in the way you
describe - e.g., neural netwrk or genetic algorithm or even "fuzzy logic"
algorithm programs. 3. I'm not sure what any of this has to do with the
discussion we have had.
>
> I used to do some mountaineering, but was never very good at it. I was the
> plodding type, who always wanted to be sure before committing his weight
to
> a hold. So no hold was any use to me unless it would take my weight, and
> that when I was lean and fit was about 100kg. I had friends who were good
> climbers. They were much lighter than me, which gave them a better
> power-to-weight ratio, but the main distinguishing characteristic was that
> they were braver, and willing at difficult spots to trust holds which with
> their given strength would not support their weight, but could be used as
> guidance, and to supply some upward momentum to a moving body. The result
> was that they were much better climbers, but some of them are dead. I,
with
> my need for certainty, still made mistakes, in that I fell off at times,
but
> they were smaller ones.
>
So you do desire certainty. That extract from Adam Philips I posted was
right. Those who profess doubt are often absolutely certain...
> So my answer to you must be "Yes, I am uncertain, and I don't care". But
> there are grades of uncertainty, and my main wish is to assesss what the
> comparitive uncertainty is of various ideas which I have presented to me.
I
> will admit the comparitive certainty of an agreed chain of logic, but any
> chain of logic must start somewhere, ands very often I find that the
anchor
> point is a completely unwarranted assumption. I live on a web of
> probabilities (or the converse, uncertainties), but I seem to be very well
> adapted to it.
Maybe. But that wasn't the point of what I posted. I was exploring the idea
and consequences of extending uncertainty to the mental-model itself.
>
> Incidentally, my main model for my use of the word "model" is the computer
> model, which can be all sorts of things, from a spatial representation to
a
> shade of colour, but is essentially a string of equations. I am aware that
> my brain does not at any level I can reach work by equations, but is an
> analogue device. (But I gather neurons work by counting the incoming
> signals, and then firing when they reach a certain number, so in its
> essentials even my brain is digital.) In much the same way the architect's
> model you spoke of can be a series of formulae within a computer, which
the
> architect knows nothing about, but which take his floor plans and
> elevations, prepared on the computer, and turn them into a 3D
representation
> of the finished building. Neither the architect nor his client are aware
of
> the mathematical underpinning, but it is there.
Humans can understand equations - computers can't. Computers are a modelling
tool for humans - but they do not themselves have models in any sense of
that term. I have not seen or heard of any computer that remotely approaches
conscious understanding. It may be that such things will be developed in the
future - but they are not around yet. (Actually, we have no idea of how to
implement a human type understanding on a computer). So I prefer to talk
about models that humans have - even if they implement those models using a
computer.
Lance
Jim Purdie
>
> "Jim Purdie" <jimp...@paradise.net.nz> wrote:
> > Lance, I think you are trying to think in absolutes. I don't think we
have
> > evolved to attain, or to need, absolutes.
>
> I'm following a line of thought. Nothing in that line of thought suggests
> anything 'absolute' - whatever that might be. I find myself wondering how
> you know what we have evolved to attain or need.
I do not "know". I have constructed, partly from my reading, partly from my
own thought, a "model" of the "world" which suggests that there is a
"computer program" or "model" within my brain, which I use to process the
inputs from my senses, and to reach useful outputs. Those outputs are my
actions in the world. If my "program", or "model" is a useful simulation of
the real world, my actions will produce the results I was expecting. If not,
I will look for a different "model". (Or rather I should. I perceive a
universal human dislike of changing one's "model".)
Now my model may be different for different occasions. We all know what a
"solid object" is, and I can use Newton's Laws of Motion to calculate its
behaviour. But those of us who want to work in chemistry have to use a
different model, in which our "solid object" is made up of discrete atoms,
held to each other by inter-atomic forces, and able to interact with other
atoms in ways which ruin the solidity of the object. If we are atomic
physicists, the atoms themselves are divisible, and made up of more or less
point electrical charges, so that the "solid object" is seen to be mostly
space, and its qualities are the result of statistical laws of the behaviour
of its parts. Already at this level the behaviour of the parts of our "solid
object" have become counter-intuitive in terms of Newton's Laws, and this
becomes worse when we go to the next level, and look at the parts which make
up the sub-atomic particles of our "solid object".
Now most scientifically literate people are aware of these different models,
and how each one arises from the properties of the next deeper level. The
fact remains that they are different models, used for different purposes,
and none is any sort of ultimate "truth".
The same is true of maps. We all know that the world is near enough a
sphere, and the navigator of an inter-continental ship or plane must
remember that the flat paper chart he uses is an approximation, which must
have corrections applied to give him a correct course and distance. But the
maps I used to do cross-country back-packing trips were also approximations,
but if I followed them and arrived at the wrong place, I knew that either
the map was wrong, or I had made a mistake. (Surprisingly often in New
Zealand in the fifties, the map was wrong. Honest!). So over short distances
one could use a model of the world as flat, but over long distances one must
use a model of the world as a spheroid.
We all, mostly unconsciously, use different "models" for different purposes,
and switch happily from one to the other. I cannot see that as a problem, so
long as we remember that all of them are "models", of various degrees of
usefulness, and devised for different purposes.
JP
>
I believe that we
> > live on a web of probabilities, with no strand strong enough to rescue
us
> > from the abyss of not knowing, but in combination they give us a
platform
> we
> > can clamber on very satisfactorily.
>
> So we have the equivalent, anyway? Given that both the model and the world
> are uncertain - poorly grasped - how do we get to this satisfactory
> conclusion?
Because we have to live in the world, and act in it, and if we wait till we
attain "certainty", or "truth", we will wait forever.
JP
So
> it
> > has absolute certainty of the possible consequences of a given move for
> some
> > time in the future. It can then be given rules to assess the
desirability
> of
> > a possible line of play.
>
> The machine has no certainty and no doubt. Certainly IBM's Big Blue chess
> playing machine has no aspect that we can remotely consider conscious.
That is true only if you consider certainty or doubt as facets of
consciousness. I have a feeling that consciousness is not so mysterious as
many people believe it to be, and I can see no inherent impossibility in a
machine being conscious. Artificial intelligence programmers have found many
things to be much more difficult than their first approaches led them to
think they would be, things like OCR, voice dictation, machine translation,
and even picking up and placing blocks. I think the problem was that
originally they had much too facile a view of what their brains had to do in
performing these tasks, but once they realised the problems, and helped by
the exponential growth we are seeing in computer power, they settled down
and began producing useful programs. All of these things are now capable of
useful work on desk-top computers. I cannot believe that consciousness is
beyond their reach, but I fully accept that at present we do not know enough
about it.
But when I talk of "Big Blue" being certain, I mean that it has investigated
all possibilities a certain distance ahead, and "knows" the outcome if its
human opponent makes the best moves. The problem with earlier machines has
been, I gather, that human opponents have read the game, less certainly, but
for a much greater distance ahead. So when the machine attains its
"certainty", it is only that if its opponent makes the best moves, he will
win within the distance the machine can "calculate" ahead.
JP
>
> >
> > The strength of humans is that while they lack the absolute certainty of
> the
> > machine in the short term, they have a broad pattern recognition ability
> > which gives them a fuzzy view of possible futures much further ahead
than
> > the machine. So until recently the best human players could beat the
best
> > machines, although that is no longer true. A top chess playing computer
> > would never make a move which would lead to a certain mate against it
> three
> > moves ahead, but I believe even grandmasters have been known to make
that
> > mistake.
>
> This seems confused to me. 1. If the machine only acted on "certainty" why
> did they tend to lose until so recently? Acting on certainties must lead
to
> a certain outcome.
Don't forget that this "certainty" extends only a limited number of moves
into the future. See above. JP
2. Not all computers are programmed in the way you
> describe - e.g., neural netwrk or genetic algorithm or even "fuzzy logic"
> algorithm programs. 3. I'm not sure what any of this has to do with the
> discussion we have had.
I believe it has to do with the nature of "certainty", which seems to have
much to do with the nature of what and how we can know.
> >
> > I used to do some mountaineering, but was never very good at it. I was
the
> > plodding type, who always wanted to be sure before committing his weight
> to
> > a hold. So no hold was any use to me unless it would take my weight, and
> > that when I was lean and fit was about 100kg. I had friends who were
good
> > climbers. They were much lighter than me, which gave them a better
> > power-to-weight ratio, but the main distinguishing characteristic was
that
> > they were braver, and willing at difficult spots to trust holds which
with
> > their given strength would not support their weight, but could be used
as
> > guidance, and to supply some upward momentum to a moving body. The
result
> > was that they were much better climbers, but some of them are dead. I,
> with
> > my need for certainty, still made mistakes, in that I fell off at times,
> but
> > they were smaller ones.
> >
>
> So you do desire certainty. That extract from Adam Philips I posted was
> right. Those who profess doubt are often absolutely certain...
I did not say I had attained certainty. I said I fell off. I did not want to
fall off, so I desired certainty. I did not achieve it. Those who desired it
less than I did were much better climbers, but stood a greater risk of
killing themselves. 8^) JP
>
> > So my answer to you must be "Yes, I am uncertain, and I don't care". But
> > there are grades of uncertainty, and my main wish is to assesss what the
> > comparitive uncertainty is of various ideas which I have presented to
me.
> I
> > will admit the comparitive certainty of an agreed chain of logic, but
any
> > chain of logic must start somewhere, ands very often I find that the
> anchor
> > point is a completely unwarranted assumption. I live on a web of
> > probabilities (or the converse, uncertainties), but I seem to be very
well
> > adapted to it.
>
> Maybe. But that wasn't the point of what I posted. I was exploring the
idea
> and consequences of extending uncertainty to the mental-model itself.
I most certainly do that. My only claim is that to me, my model seems to
give results fairly well in line with what my senses bring back from the
"world out there". It therefore seems a useful model, since all I "know" of
the "world out there" is what my senses bring back, directly or indirectly
through reading or conversation. JP
>
> >
>
> Humans can understand equations - computers can't. Computers are a
modelling
> tool for humans - but they do not themselves have models in any sense of
> that term. I have not seen or heard of any computer that remotely
approaches
> conscious understanding. It may be that such things will be developed in
the
> future - but they are not around yet. (Actually, we have no idea of how to
> implement a human type understanding on a computer). So I prefer to talk
> about models that humans have - even if they implement those models using
a
> computer.
>
>
> Lance
>
My stance is that what we think about when we attempt to think about the
outside world can only be the "model" (in a very broad sense) we have in our
minds. We can quite happily use different models for different purposes, and
we do, so how can any of them be the "real world"? There seems to me to be
undoubtedly something out there, but what I know cannot be regarded as in
any sense the real world. It is a "model", which I can manipulate in my mind
to increase my understanding of the real world. I think you might agree that
Newton was a greater man than I, but as you say Newton's model had
deficiencies that we know about, but he didn't. Nevertheless, engineers
everywhere use Newton's "model" of the way things move, with complete
satisfaction. They just stay away from black holes, and speeds near that of
light, a wise course in any event. Most of them nowadays do not use his
model of the world as a manifestation of the ordered mind of God, even those
who believe in a personal God. But if Newton could make mistakes, so can I.
So I cannot, and do not, make any claim to certainty, even about what goes
on inside my head.
Jim Purdie
kames.smiths
>
> .........there is good reason to doubt that "in an important sense
our reality has
> always been the one in our mind's eye." For our mind's eye reality
is just
> as much a matter of doubt and conjecture as the world "out there."
We can be
> as mistaken about the one as we are about the other.
I think most of us believe that there is 'a world' independent of our
own minds that would exist if we didn't - a stance sometimes called
realism. However, we can never be certain what this reality is, we can
only know it through our own senses and thoughts and these are
demonstrably fallible and limited. Hence there is 'a world as it
really is', and 'a world as it appears to be to us' (Kant's
position?). The world as it appears to be to us is our model of the
world (if you like, a set of working hypotheses), and we don't take
this model to be definitive - we are constantly checking and refining
it. If the model works well, we assume that it is relatively true.
Our model can be reflexive. We can conceive of ourselves as a part of
reality trying to understand reality.
Dave Smith
Jim Purdie
kames.smiths <kames....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
news:HMYI9.4132$iz3.4...@newsfep2-win.server.ntli.net...
Jim Purdie
Lance
I wonder whether you really get what I was saying? Yes, there is a world out
there. Yes there is a world as it appears to us. Yes the world as it appears
to us can be mistaken. But can we be mistaken about the world as it appears
to us? I offered arguments to suggest that we can be mistaken even about the
world as it appears to us. It is the claim that while our models of the
world can be mistaken we can't be mistaken about our models that provides an
area of privileged or guaranteed epistemic access (GEA) - and it is that
claim that I am attacking. I think it is useful to think about what happens
when we deny that area of GEA.
It seems to me that central relations between mind and the world are
knowledge and action. When we act we adapt the world to mind (outward
relation). In contrast, knowledge is the adaptation of mind to the world
(inward relation). When the world is maladapted to the mind (the action
relation goes wrong) there is remainder of desire. But when mind is
maladapted to the world (the knowledge relation) then there is a remainder
of belief. Desire, as a philosopher once pointed out, aspires to action just
as belief aspires to knowledge.
Putting the matter this way is controversial. Many would hold that desire
aspires only to satisfaction, and belief only to truth. But putting the
matter this way perhaps helps us understand how action and knowledge are
shaped. I think the process of analysis has been carried quite far in the
case of action. I am wondering whether a similar analysis can't be developed
for knowledge. Let's briefly consider the case of action.
Just as I am arguing that we can be mistaken about the world as it appears
to us, so some philosophers (and some psychologists) have argued that a
fundamental uncertainty pertains to action. It is now well known that any
behaviour (to use the jargon of an older psychology, i.e., behaviour = any
movement, any doing) is compatible with many different "actions". A person
opens the window. That person could be cooling himself on a hot day. The
person could be finding an excuse to stand up and avoid a confrontation with
someone else. That person could be a spy, and the opening of the window a
pre-arranged signal to let his confederates know that the coast is clear.
Over time it can be difficult to be sure that the person concerned has even
maintained the same action, or instead has lapsed into doing other things.
Perhaps in an effort to avoid a quarrel the person opens the window and
inadvertently gives the signal to the waiting confederates... Perhaps while
sitting at the piano playing arpeggios a person falls into playing a great
tune.
All of this has been the basis for several concerted attacks on the
lawfulness of human action (e.g., Harre and Secord, 1972; also, of course,
Davis). The argument is that actions are so uncertain that they must be
opaque to normal scientific methods.
On the other hand some psychologists and philosophers studying action were
examining two different kinds of connection between action and thought. On
the one hand there is the reflection connection - where interpretations of
what behaviour is about arise after the behaviour. On the other hand there
is the intentional connection - where a cognitive representation of the
action functions as a template for subsequent behaviour. Compelling cases
can be made for both of these links between thought and action, and it seems
worthwhile to try to link them.
In the reflection connection behaviour is primary and representations arise
after the fact. Bem (who suggests that people will confabulate stories about
the cause of their behaviour when they are in doubt about the real cause)
and Freud (who suggests that there are unconscious motives for some
behaviours where these motives may be repressed and thus unknown to the
actor) are examples of thinkers stressing the reflection connection.
In the intention connection the cognitive representation is primary. The
action follows according to the cognitive template. There has been much
research on how motor movements are planned. W T Powers and his followers
have developed "control theory" as a process by which template intentions
are realised in movement. But higher level theories like decision theory and
attitude research also employ the "intention as template" model - the
intention connection.
Now it is easy to see that the real story is more complex. There is a
cyclical integration between the intention and reflection connections.
Action may start with an intention, for example, where cognition (a plan)
generates the action. But once we have started to act we also reflect on
what we are doing or have done - and this means that we may find new
representations of what we have done or what we are doing. And this in turn
may lead to new intentions and new actions. Over time people will gradually
gravitate to a meaning for their action that proves effective in maintaining
it.
In the process of thinking about how action is accomplished we have found
the action itself to be something malleable - something of a chimera (just
as the critics of science thought - but far more usefully). For while we may
think we are know what we are doing at one particular time, we may decide at
a subsequent time that we were actually doing something else. So an action
has become something we can never be sure we know fully. It is never
completely resolvable.
But it seems to me that the same process can be applied to representations
(the inward counterpart to action). And we can, perhaps, also posit
intention and reflection connections. For knowledge is in part based on what
we intend to find out (the intention connection) in tension with our
subsequent reflection on what we actually have found out (the reflection
connection). But thinking like this makes the representation - the world as
it appears to us - itself a slippery concept. For it is not just that the
representation can be faulty but that we can be mistaken about the
representation. We thought we knew about X but we really knew about Y. So
the application of this kind of thought requires that we deny GEA - there is
no privileged epistemic access even to our own representations. They are as
malleable as actions are...
Lance
Peter H.M. Brooks
> (the inward counterpart to action). And we can, perhaps, also posit
> intention and reflection connections. For knowledge is in part based on
what
> we intend to find out (the intention connection) in tension with our
> subsequent reflection on what we actually have found out (the reflection
> connection). But thinking like this makes the representation - the world
as
> it appears to us - itself a slippery concept. For it is not just that the
> representation can be faulty but that we can be mistaken about the
> representation. We thought we knew about X but we really knew about Y. So
> the application of this kind of thought requires that we deny GEA - there
is
> no privileged epistemic access even to our own representations. They are
as
> malleable as actions are...
>
partially, as you say, related.
However, actions are always interpreted post hoc facto and representations
not necessarily so. This is a fundamental difference.
Lance
> partially, as you say, related.
>
> However, actions are always interpreted post hoc facto and representations
> not necessarily so. This is a fundamental difference.
>
I think there is quite a lot wrong with what I wrote but I don't think your
Latin tag captures it. After all, the "intentional connection" to action is
not post hoc facto; and actions can and do take time - for example "getting
a degree" - and there is plenty of time for interpretation prior to facto
there.
Lance
Lance
I wonder. I was of course treating representations exactly like actions, and
this gets me into difficulties because actions sometimes depend on
representations. But is it the case that they always do? We do sometimes act
first and think later and some actions become quite automatic, and some
habitual. In that case the reflective connection comes afterwards, though
perhaps only if something happens that calls the action into question.
But suppose we do argue that representations are actions - what then?. (I
think that fits rather neatly with a control theory interpretation of
action - especially action as a set of nested control loops - it would just
be another layer of control). Actions can be effortful - but so can be the
building of a (mental) model. Some actions, as John Austin pointed out, are
just words (e.g., getting married, promising). Most verbal actions involve
other people beside the actor, of course, though I suppose one could promise
one-self something - so perhaps other people are not essential. Making a
representation then can be thought of as setting up the equivalent of a set
of words describing what you think is going on in the world - and
representing would then be similar to other verbal actions. If this is so
then both the intentional (before the representation one intends to work out
some representation of what's happening ("Let me think this through")) and
the reflective connection (Othello thinking back on his suspicions) are
possible. And again one might well have a cyclical interplay between them -
just as is the case with ordinary action. Gee, Peter, Perhaps you are a
genius.
The fundamental motives of the knowing and doing would still be different.
Knowing would still be about adapting mind to world, and doing still about
adapting world to mind. But would we have to construe belief as a species of
desire, aspiring to knowledge? (Treating desire as cognitive is not
uncommon - as in decision theory - but reversing this seems rather radical).
Of course, there is a real sense in which all of this is old hat. It seems
very similar to Piaget, doesn't it? Will have to think about that.
Lance
Peter H.M. Brooks
here before. Of course actions take time and there is room for
interpretation there - 'Why am I doing this?' is a thought we have all had
in certain circumstances!
However, even these are after the fact (if you have some prejudice to
English expressions from Latin). If you consider an action as indivisible,
then I'd agree that you can be interpreting before the action is complete -
if, on the other hand, you allow for an action to be made of sub-actions,
then the interpretation always follows the action.
Representations don't need to be tied to actions at all. So I think that my
point still stands.
Peter H.M. Brooks
"Lance" <Lanc...@worldonline.co.za> wrote in message > So
> > > the application of this kind of thought requires that we deny GEA -
> there
> > is
> > > no privileged epistemic access even to our own representations. They
are
> > as
> > > malleable as actions are...
> > >
> > I understand the temptation to relate these two entirely because they
are
> > partially, as you say, related.
> >
> > However, actions are always interpreted post hoc facto and
representations
> > not necessarily so. This is a fundamental difference.
> >
>
> I wonder. I was of course treating representations exactly like actions,
and
> this gets me into difficulties because actions sometimes depend on
> representations. But is it the case that they always do? We do sometimes
act
> first and think later and some actions become quite automatic, and some
> habitual. In that case the reflective connection comes afterwards, though
> perhaps only if something happens that calls the action into question.
>
>
> But suppose we do argue that representations are actions - what then?. (I
> think that fits rather neatly with a control theory interpretation of
> action - especially action as a set of nested control loops - it would
just
> be another layer of control). Actions can be effortful - but so can be the
> building of a (mental) model. Some actions, as John Austin pointed out,
are
> just words (e.g., getting married, promising). Most verbal actions involve
> other people beside the actor, of course, though I suppose one could
promise
> one-self something - so perhaps other people are not essential. Making a
> representation then can be thought of as setting up the equivalent of a
set
> of words describing what you think is going on in the world - and
> representing would then be similar to other verbal actions. If this is so
> then both the intentional (before the representation one intends to work
out
> some representation of what's happening ("Let me think this through")) and
> the reflective connection (Othello thinking back on his suspicions) are
> possible. And again one might well have a cyclical interplay between
them -
> just as is the case with ordinary action. Gee, Peter, Perhaps you are a
> genius.
>
>
> The fundamental motives of the knowing and doing would still be different.
> Knowing would still be about adapting mind to world, and doing still about
> adapting world to mind. But would we have to construe belief as a species
of
> desire, aspiring to knowledge? (Treating desire as cognitive is not
> uncommon - as in decision theory - but reversing this seems rather
radical).
>
> Of course, there is a real sense in which all of this is old hat. It seems
> very similar to Piaget, doesn't it? Will have to think about that.
>
contrasted with ~X, then when considering the brain, you are likely to find
that X and ~X are not as mutually exclusive as you first imagined and that
it actually is a bit of each.
--
We are here on earth to do good to others.
What the others are there for, I don't know.
-- Auden
Lance
"kames.smiths" <kames....@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> I think most of us believe that there is 'a world' independent of our
> own minds that would exist if we didn't - a stance sometimes called
> realism. However, we can never be certain what this reality is, we can
> only know it through our own senses and thoughts and these are
> demonstrably fallible and limited. Hence there is 'a world as it
> really is', and 'a world as it appears to be to us' (Kant's
> position?). The world as it appears to be to us is our model of the
> world (if you like, a set of working hypotheses), and we don't take
> this model to be definitive - we are constantly checking and refining
> it. If the model works well, we assume that it is relatively true.
>
> Our model can be reflexive. We can conceive of ourselves as a part of
> reality trying to understand reality.
>
basically trying to analyse the mental model itself as arising from a
dialectical dance between intention and reflection.
Here is a different take on the issues, derived from recent philosophy of
mind (notably Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge).
Essentially both Dave Smith and Jim Purdie deny the possibility of real
knowledge (e.g., 'we don't take this model to be definitive' in the above
post). In part this arises because both Dave and Jim are committed to an
"internalist" account of factive mental states. Examples of factive mental
states would be states represented by verbs like "Know" or "perceive".
Internalist mental states are mental states that stop at the borders of the
skin - or sometimes the brain. To _believe_ that "the cat is on the mat" can
be an internalist state because it can be true without any reference to the
condition outside of the brain of the cat actually being on the mat.
However, to _know_ that the cat is on the mat requires not only that you
believe that the cat is on the mat but that the cat is actually on the mat
i.e., the mental state of knowing requires that conditions be satisfied that
lie outside a person's skin - or brain. Conditions on mental states that can
be satisfied purely on the basis of what lies inside the skin - or brain -
are called "narrow" conditions. Conditions on mental states that can't be
satisfied in this way are called "broad" conditions. Factive mental states
require broad conditions, and thus are rejected as proper mental states by
internalists, but are accepted as genuine mental states by externalists.
So here's the different take on the issues. In part both Dave's and Jim's
epistemologies arise from a philosophy of mind that denies that mental
states can have broad conditions. And from this it follows that factive
mental states have conditions that can never be satisfied - and thus are not
possible. Following a different philosophy of mind in which externalist
mental states are possible would allow one to be believe that one can
actually, genuinely "know" something.
Lance
Lance
template for an action how could it come after the action?
> Representations don't need to be tied to actions at all. So I think that
my
> point still stands.
>
Lance
Lance
> contrasted with ~X, then when considering the brain, you are likely to
find
> that X and ~X are not as mutually exclusive as you first imagined and that
> it actually is a bit of each.
>
Lance
kames.smiths
Attack the claim by all means. However, I wasn't aware that Jim Purdie
or I had made it.
(If I had to put forward a case for GEA, I think I would turn to
sensations such as pain - it would be rather odd to say something like
"I believe I am in agony, but I might be completely mistaken".)
> ....I think it is useful to think about what happens
Interesting, and I wouldn't want to argue with the general drift.
It would seem that actions and representations can not be directly
measured, though their nature can be inferred to a variable extent
from experience and from behaviour and the context within which it
occurs. Also, there is great complexity to be reckoned with. At any
one time a person can be juggling with large numbers of interacting
representations and actions.
Incidentally, I'm not too clear exactly what you mean by the term
'representation'. How does it fit with other psychological terms such
as belief, attitude, emotion, motive and reason?
Dave Smith
Christopher Houston.
>
> EXCERPT
>
> project conducted by Dr. Elizabeth Targ that concluded that
> directed thought does seem to have the power to alter the
> physical world. Says Richard: "I knew that! I have known
> that all along! But when I saw that my sense of invisible
> power was validated by serious science -- that smart people
> believe it, too -- I felt this extraordinary exhilaration. This is
> real! My secret world is the same as the real world! It felt
> like I had been shot into space. And I was just reading a
> magazine on the couch."
Yes... I read an article about Dr Targ just the other day. A very
interesting article:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.12/prayer.html
Page 5 is where it gets ve-e-ery interesting indeed.
I highly recommend reading it, especially humanists.
--
Christopher Houston.
Peter H.M. Brooks
the point, often they come after the action.
Peter H.M. Brooks
It isn't Hegalian, actually. The Hegelian error is to assume that complex
X's, as opposed to logical X's [simple propositions in other words], can be
reduced to X and ~X.
kames.smiths
I see myself as having a vast system of interlocking beliefs about my
world. Some of these beliefs I accept as virtual certainties (eg my
own existence, the existence of other people), some I accept as highly
probable, and others I regard as quite tentative. This system is open
to modification in the light of future thought and experience, and
changing a fundamental belief can undermine much of the edifice. If
the system serves me well, I assume it reflects reality to some
extent. In practice, I try to steer a course between undue dogmatism
and undue credulity. Is it not possible to regard knowledge as a
matter of degree, a matter of evidence? Absolute knowledge perhaps can
be viewed as an aspiration.
I don't think I deny the existence of mental states that have broad
conditions. An experiment might be set up, for instance, to determine
whether an animal can perceive or differentiate between different
colours. After numerous trials it might be concluded that the animal
very probably can do this, but there would remain some doubt - perhaps
the result was a complete fluke, perhaps the experimental design was
not watertight, etc.
In some ways it is possible to have more confidence in some mental
states that have narrow conditions, provided these mental states are
one's own. I don't need evidence from the outside world to establish
that I am in great pain - and if I am, I don't seriously doubt that I
am. However, here I am probably confusing having a feeling of
psychological certainty with having indubitable factual evidence.
I fear this is a topic which I don't know much about, and which I
could ramble on about indefinitely without getting very far! Terms
such as knowledge and certainty take on different meanings in
different contexts and this tends to muddle my thoughts. I'm going for
a walk!
Dave Smith
Lance
"kames.smiths" <kames....@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Attack the claim by all means. However, I wasn't aware that Jim Purdie
> or I had made it.
>
> (If I had to put forward a case for GEA, I think I would turn to
> sensations such as pain - it would be rather odd to say something like
> "I believe I am in agony, but I might be completely mistaken".)
>
I wonder. If you are concentrating on some carpentry and dropped a hammer on
your toe you may be too absorbed to notice that your toe hurts. Hypnotism
works in the same way. I well remember having an operation for a tooth
condition and realising only afterwards just how severe the pain had been -
it had just become part of my life. And then there is the successive
interval of time argument that I deployed before - about being cold:
...Let's suppose you live in a town something like the one in which I live.
Here the mornings often start off cold, and one leaves for work wearing a
jacket. However, by midday the heatfulness is terrific. Many a jacket needed
in the coolth of the morning is set aside and lost in the heat of the midday
sun. Now consider a series of very short time intervals between early in the
morning when you truthfully know you feel cold, and baking midday when you
truly know you don't. Clearly, at some point in that series there will be
moment when you are in some doubt as to whether you truly feel cold....
This sort of argument surely applies to pain as well. After all, it is the
whole point about tales of dropping frogs into boiling water and they will
hop out - but put them into cold water and gradually bring it to the boil
and they will allow themselves to be cooked. (Horrible story, actually).
Lance
Lance
Ah, the power of prayer!
About five years ago the Psychological Bulletin published an study by a
Harvard professor of engineering showing a very tiny effect of human will on
various gambling machines - if memory serves the effect was so tiny it only
showed up over hundreds of thousands of trials. The author pointed out that
if directed human thought was to influence machinery the effect would have
to be very small - otherwise places like Las Vegas would long since have
returned to desert. So there is a single piece of evidence for a very small
capability of directed thought to influence the physical world.
The topic of prayer is an old one. According to Nicholas Wright Gillham ("A
life of Sir Francis Galton", Oxford University Press, 2001) Francis Galton
wrote a paper on the topic of the efficacy of prayer ("Statistical inquiries
into the efficacy of prayer") which he submitted to "Fortnightly Review" in
1865. The editor, George Lewes, refused to publish it saying that it would
offend the Christian proprietors of the magazine too much. Galton
resubmitted the paper to the same journal in 1872, and the new editor, John
Morely accepted it. It provoked an angry rebuttal article and a truly
enormous correspondence. Charles Darwin wrote delightedly to his cousin,
congratulating Galton on "the tremendous stir-up your excellent article on
'Prayer' has made in England and America."
In fact, in spite its title, there wasn't that much statistical evidence in
Galton's paper - it mostly contained more general observations. For example,
would Christians also accept the efficacy of prayers by Buddhists or pagans?
Galton claimed that there was no evidence that the sick who were prayed for
recovered more often those who were not prayed for, and that medical science
did not use prayer. Further, insurance companies did not generally find it
useful to ask about whether a client prays or not, despite the many other
pointed inquiries they make about their clients. The only bit of real
statistical evidence Galton included in his paper was in examining the
question of whether the prayers - said in every church in the United
Kingdom - for the royal family had any impact on their longevity. But
Galton's statistical data actually showed that "sovereigns are literally the
shortest-lived of all who have the advantage of affluence." Galton concluded
his paper by arguing that any psychological benefit conferred by praying
could be shared by non-believers since the beauty of understanding physical
laws "may not equally rejoice the heart, but it is quite as powerful in
ennobling the resolves, and it is found to give serenity during the trials
of life and in the shadow of approaching death."
Lance
Lance
"Dave Smith" <kames....@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> I see myself as having a vast system of interlocking beliefs about my
> world. Some of these beliefs I accept as virtual certainties (eg my
> own existence, the existence of other people), some I accept as highly
> probable, and others I regard as quite tentative. This system is open
> to modification in the light of future thought and experience, and
> changing a fundamental belief can undermine much of the edifice. If
> the system serves me well, I assume it reflects reality to some
> extent. In practice, I try to steer a course between undue dogmatism
> and undue credulity. Is it not possible to regard knowledge as a
> matter of degree, a matter of evidence? Absolute knowledge perhaps can
> be viewed as an aspiration.
Absolutes again. Why can't you know that the cat is on the mat? Or that we
are born to die and that taxes are inevitable? There are many who believe
that the sort of epistemology developed by Kant and forces us to sacrifice
the very thing we sought to study when we turned to epistemology -
knowledge. And they would rather find an analysis that does not have such
drastic consequences.
>
> I don't think I deny the existence of mental states that have broad
> conditions. An experiment might be set up, for instance, to determine
> whether an animal can perceive or differentiate between different
> colours. After numerous trials it might be concluded that the animal
> very probably can do this, but there would remain some doubt - perhaps
> the result was a complete fluke, perhaps the experimental design was
> not watertight, etc.
I think Putnam developed his alternate worlds argument to demonstrate the
existence of broad conditions...
>
> In some ways it is possible to have more confidence in some mental
> states that have narrow conditions, provided these mental states are
> one's own. I don't need evidence from the outside world to establish
> that I am in great pain - and if I am, I don't seriously doubt that I
> am. However, here I am probably confusing having a feeling of
> psychological certainty with having indubitable factual evidence.
I have deployed arguments that you can't be any more certain of your inner
models than of the outer world. See earlier post.
>
> I fear this is a topic which I don't know much about, and which I
> could ramble on about indefinitely without getting very far! Terms
> such as knowledge and certainty take on different meanings in
> different contexts and this tends to muddle my thoughts. I'm going for
> a walk!
>
Thanks for your response. Hope the walk helped!
Lance
Lance
"Dave Smith" <kames....@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Interesting, and I wouldn't want to argue with the general drift.
>
> It would seem that actions and representations can not be directly
> measured, though their nature can be inferred to a variable extent
> from experience and from behaviour and the context within which it
> occurs. Also, there is great complexity to be reckoned with. At any
> one time a person can be juggling with large numbers of interacting
> representations and actions.
>
> Incidentally, I'm not too clear exactly what you mean by the term
> 'representation'. How does it fit with other psychological terms such
> as belief, attitude, emotion, motive and reason?
>
I was simply using 'representation' as catch all category for image, model,
equation, plan, etc., by which people understand their world.
Lance
kames.smiths
>
> "kames.smiths" <kames....@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> > Attack the claim by all means. However, I wasn't aware that Jim
Purdie
> > or I had made it.
> >
> > (If I had to put forward a case for GEA, I think I would turn to
> > sensations such as pain - it would be rather odd to say something
like
> > "I believe I am in agony, but I might be completely mistaken".)
> >
>
> I wonder. If you are concentrating on some carpentry and dropped a
hammer on
> your toe you may be too absorbed to notice that your toe hurts.
Hypnotism
> works in the same way. I well remember having an operation for a
tooth
> condition and realising only afterwards just how severe the pain had
been -
These are examples of not being conscious of pain, whereas my example
involved being conscious of pain but of somehow being mistaken that
you were feeling pain.
> ............And then there is the successive
> interval of time argument that I deployed before - about being cold:
>
> ...Let's suppose you live in a town something like the one in which
I live.
> Here the mornings often start off cold, and one leaves for work
wearing a
> jacket. However, by midday the heatfulness is terrific. Many a
jacket needed
> in the coolth of the morning is set aside and lost in the heat of
the midday
> sun. Now consider a series of very short time intervals between
early in the
> morning when you truthfully know you feel cold, and baking midday
when you
> truly know you don't.......
Here you seem to be suggesting that "truthfully knowing" sensations is
possible.
>........ Clearly, at some point in that series there will be
> moment when you are in some doubt as to whether you truly feel
cold....
>
> This sort of argument surely applies to pain as well. After all, it
is the
> whole point about tales of dropping frogs into boiling water and
they will
> hop out - but put them into cold water and gradually bring it to the
boil
> and they will allow themselves to be cooked. (Horrible story,
actually).
The argument is not that when nasty things are happening to your body
you necessarily feel pain; rather it is that sometimes when you
believe you are feeling pain, you are feeling pain, and you are
justified in believing that you are feeling pain.
Dave Smith
kames.smiths
>
> "Dave Smith" <kames....@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> > I see myself as having a vast system of interlocking beliefs
about my
> > world. Some of these beliefs I accept as virtual certainties (eg
my
> > own existence, the existence of other people), some I accept as
highly
> > probable, and others I regard as quite tentative. This system is
open
> > to modification in the light of future thought and experience, and
> > changing a fundamental belief can undermine much of the edifice.
If
> > the system serves me well, I assume it reflects reality to some
> > extent. In practice, I try to steer a course between undue
dogmatism
> > and undue credulity. Is it not possible to regard knowledge as a
> > matter of degree, a matter of evidence? Absolute knowledge perhaps
can
> > be viewed as an aspiration.
>
> Absolutes again. Why can't you know that the cat is on the mat? Or
that we
> are born to die and that taxes are inevitable?
One suggested (and probably by now rather dated?) definition of
knowledge is that it is justified true belief.
A person knows that 'p' (some proposition) iff
1. p is true
2. the person believes that p
3. the person is justified in believing that p.
If all these conditions have to be satisfied beyond a shadow of a
doubt, knowledge will be in short supply. However, they can be applied
less stringently when there are no philosophers about!
> There are many who believe
> that the sort of epistemology developed by Kant and forces us to
sacrifice
> the very thing we sought to study when we turned to epistemology -
> knowledge. And they would rather find an analysis that does not have
such
> drastic consequences.
But what is this analysis - some form of 'probabilistic knowledge'?
Dave Smith
Jim Purdie
>
Sorry, I have been away, and have missed some of the most interesting
discussion we have had since I have been here.
Anyway. I understand you to be saying that if you say "The cat is on the
mat", you can KNOW it to be true if the cat is actually on the mat. You
perceive the cat through your senses, or at least your senses give you
messages which are most easily explicable by there being a cat on the mat.
But I think you must concede that some times your senses can deceive you.
How can you test the hypothesis that there is actually a cat on the mat? You
have only one recourse, to use your senses. But if they can deceive you
once, they can surely deceive you twice.
Now I am quite happy to concede that for all practical purposes, you can
"know" the cat is on the mat. The possibility of error is very small. But it
is not zero. The rub comes when you consider something a little less
certain. There are not two classes, things we can "know", and things we only
think are so. There is an evenly graded series of "facts", from the almost
certain to the most unlikely. As soon as you start talking of certain
knowledge, you must be prepared to draw a line somewhere in that even spread
of probabilities, and say that up to that line, we can "know" things, but
beyond it, we can only "believe" things. There seems no logical reason for
this, since all our knowledge of everything in the world out there surely
comes in the same way, through our senses, mediated by our brains. By
allocating every "fact" a probability, which never becomes unity or zero, we
not only avoid this need to make a division at an arbitrary point, we also
seem to me to achieve a better fit with the world which is brought to me by
my senses.
I have a nephew who has enrolled at a Bible college in the US. He sends a
family e-mail, which always ends with his signature "He Lives". Now he is a
man who has made his way in the world with no suggestion that he is
incompetent, though I think he is a little peculiar. The thing is, he
believes with a passionate sincerity that Christ is metaphorically alive in
the world, probably just as sincerely as you believe in that cat. How do you
rule him out of those who know, if you claim that we can "know" the outside
world? I would place his beliefs as very much less probable than your cat.
He would not agree.
You mentioned Bem and Freud in an earlier post. I am reminded of reading
Eysenk, nearly fifty years ago, describing an experiment in post-hypnotic
suggestion. A group of hypnotised subjects were told to forget the
hypnotism, but to carry out an inappropriate action at a signal, after they
awoke. They were given the signal individually, duly carried out the action,
and were then asked why. It was found that there was a strong correlation
between the intelligence of the subject and the plausibility of the reasons
they gave, but no correlation with the facts of the situation. I have
mistrusted intelligent people ever since!
You must remember that we can all have several "world models" at different
levels of our brain. Athletes, say cricketers, spend considerable time
training their reflexes to react in ways that the conscious part of the
brain considers appropriate to various situations, but much more quickly. We
also have a hormonal world-model, which reacts at a level below conscious
thought, and sometimes in ways that the conscious mind considers
inappropriate. Freud's unconscious can also be considered to have its own
"model", which can differ considerably from that of the conscious mind.
That is why I used the term "software", before I was reminded that the
metaphor was not very exact, and at least some of these models were
hard-wired. I still think that "software" is appropriate, because it is a
term for the switching in the brain, variable to at least some extent, which
takes the input from our senses and translates it into output, which is
action of one sort or another.
To sum up, if you want "truth" you won't get it from your brain, which has
evolved to handle fuzzy inputs, and take appropriate actions in a fuzzily
perceived world. It sees the world through a narrow keyhole presented by our
senses. Nevertheless, it does appear to achieve a reasonable approximation
to the truth, and that is all we can reasonably ask of it.
Jim Purdie
Peter Ashby
"Jim Purdie" <jimp...@paradise.net.nz> wrote:
>
> Anyway. I understand you to be saying that if you say "The cat is on the
> mat", you can KNOW it to be true if the cat is actually on the mat. You
> perceive the cat through your senses, or at least your senses give you
> messages which are most easily explicable by there being a cat on the mat.
> But I think you must concede that some times your senses can deceive you.
> How can you test the hypothesis that there is actually a cat on the mat? You
> have only one recourse, to use your senses. But if they can deceive you
> once, they can surely deceive you twice.
>
I will give you a gist of a reply I gave to the departed Interesting
Ian. Since it can be demonstrated that our senses are both separate and
separable it is valid to confirm your vision of the cat by, touching it,
smelling it,hearing it or tasting it. The first two could also be used
to confirm the cat's proximity to the rug. All these senses report to
differing subsets of the brain and can all be done without. The only
valid objection to this that I can see is a retreat to existentialism,
which is fine but not very useful or productive.
Peter
--
Peter Ashby
Wellcome Trust Biocentre
University of Dundee, Scotland
Reverse the Spam and remove to email me.
Lance
"kames.smiths" <kames....@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> These are examples of not being conscious of pain, whereas my example
> involved being conscious of pain but of somehow being mistaken that
> you were feeling pain.
I hypnotise you. I tell you that you are feeling excruciating pain. You are
conscious of feeling pain. Yet you are mistaken in that you are not really
feeling pain. (I suspect that a brainscan would support the latter
position).
> Here you seem to be suggesting that "truthfully knowing" sensations is
> possible.
>
Aye. But you can be mistaken.
>
> The argument is not that when nasty things are happening to your body
> you necessarily feel pain; rather it is that sometimes when you
> believe you are feeling pain, you are feeling pain, and you are
> justified in believing that you are feeling pain.
>
I'll discuss the justified belief bit in the mnext post.
Lance
Lance
"kames.smiths" <kames....@ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
> One suggested (and probably by now rather dated?) definition of
> knowledge is that it is justified true belief.
> A person knows that 'p' (some proposition) iff
>
> 1. p is true
> 2. the person believes that p
> 3. the person is justified in believing that p.
>
> If all these conditions have to be satisfied beyond a shadow of a
> doubt, knowledge will be in short supply. However, they can be applied
> less stringently when there are no philosophers about!
>
Interesting. I will refer you to an article - quite famous I believe - by
Gettier:
Gettier, E. (1963). Is justified true belief knowledge?. Analysis, 23:
121-123.
Let's start with just two conditions: If you claim to know that Edinburgh is
north of London then 1) it is true that Edinburgh is north of London, and 2)
you believe that Edinburgh is north of London.
Now consider the Gettier counter-example of the lucky punter. Someone has a
hunch - and so believes that - a certain horse will win a race. The horse
does win. The punter did not know that horse would win - he had a hunch that
it would win. Still, he believed that the horse would win and that belief
was true. It follows that the two conditions above will not suffice.
But you will say - the lucky punter counter example only works because the
punter did not have justification for his belief. Right, now lets add your
third condition.
Consider a man called Smith in competition with Jones for a job. Smith and
Jones are the only people in contention. Smith believes that the man who
will get the job has ten coins in his pocket, and he is right. But does
Smith know that the successful applicant has ten coins in his pocket?
Consider his evidence. The man doing the hiring has told him Jones is going
to get the job, and Smith has counted ten coins and ten coins only in Jones'
pocket. This is what makes him believe that the one to be appointed to the
job will have ten coins in his pocket. To everyone's surprise, however, it
is Smith who gets the job, and as it happens, Smith also turns out to have
ten coins in his pocket. So it is true that the man who will get the job has
ten coins in his pocket. Smith also believes this truth. And further, Smith
believes this truth for reasons that we would ordinarily consider good. For
all that, it is not Jones who gets the job but Smith - so Smith
"accidentally" had a true justified belief - not knowledge. So knowledge
cannot be true justified belief.
Gettier constructs quite a few more examples of this kind, and the game has
continued ever since. A great deal of the subsequent history can be found
in:
Shope, R. K. (1983). "The Analysis of Knowing: A decade of research."
Princeton University Press.
All of this suggests, as Timothy Williamson (2001, p.30) points out, that
"no analysis of the concept _knows_ of the standard kind is correct. Indeed
the candidate concepts turn out to be not merely distinct from, but not even
necessarily coextensive with, the target concept. Since Gettier refuted the
traditional analysis of _knows_ as _has a true justified belief_ in 1963, a
succession of increasingly complex analyses have been overturned by
increasingly complex counterexamples..."
On this basis Williamson suggests that is simply wrong to regard belief as
conceptually prior to knowledge. Knowledge cannot be analysed in terms of
belief.
Lance
Lance
"Peter Ashby" <p.r....@MAPS.dundee.ac.uk> wrote:
> > Anyway. I understand you to be saying that if you say "The cat is on the
> > mat", you can KNOW it to be true if the cat is actually on the mat. You
> > perceive the cat through your senses, or at least your senses give you
> > messages which are most easily explicable by there being a cat on the
mat.
> > But I think you must concede that some times your senses can deceive
you.
> > How can you test the hypothesis that there is actually a cat on the mat?
You
> > have only one recourse, to use your senses. But if they can deceive you
> > once, they can surely deceive you twice.
> >
> I will give you a gist of a reply I gave to the departed Interesting
> Ian. Since it can be demonstrated that our senses are both separate and
> separable it is valid to confirm your vision of the cat by, touching it,
> smelling it,hearing it or tasting it. The first two could also be used
> to confirm the cat's proximity to the rug. All these senses report to
> differing subsets of the brain and can all be done without. The only
> valid objection to this that I can see is a retreat to existentialism,
> which is fine but not very useful or productive.
>
(I think that term comes from Donald Campbell). The idea is that you should
seek to confirm any claim by using more than one method, more than one
source of information, etc. Obviously it is useful in perceiving the world
as well.
Lance
Lance
Well the concept know is being considered to have broad conditions - so it
cannot be applied if you only consider internal states.
In Psychology, perception is not exclusively analysed as you analyse it
above. (The constructivist model is often associated with Richard Gregory).
There is also a distinguished tradition associated with J J Gibson called
"direct" perception that argues that the perceptual stimulus is rich
especially when you take into account the possibility of movement - and that
consequently you can have direct access to information via the senses. But
notice that Gibson's analysis of perception is of a distinctly "broad"
kind - they eye and the environment being seen by the eye are considered to
be part of the same system.
> Now I am quite happy to concede that for all practical purposes, you can
> "know" the cat is on the mat. The possibility of error is very small. But
it
> is not zero. The rub comes when you consider something a little less
> certain. There are not two classes, things we can "know", and things we
only
> think are so. There is an evenly graded series of "facts", from the almost
> certain to the most unlikely. As soon as you start talking of certain
> knowledge, you must be prepared to draw a line somewhere in that even
spread
> of probabilities, and say that up to that line, we can "know" things, but
> beyond it, we can only "believe" things. There seems no logical reason for
> this, since all our knowledge of everything in the world out there surely
> comes in the same way, through our senses, mediated by our brains. By
> allocating every "fact" a probability, which never becomes unity or zero,
we
> not only avoid this need to make a division at an arbitrary point, we also
> seem to me to achieve a better fit with the world which is brought to me
by
> my senses.
>
But if this were true you would never know anything and the word 'know'
would be completely redundant. Ask yourself why we have a word like "know"
in our vocabularies.
> I have a nephew who has enrolled at a Bible college in the US. He sends a
> family e-mail, which always ends with his signature "He Lives". Now he is
a
> man who has made his way in the world with no suggestion that he is
> incompetent, though I think he is a little peculiar. The thing is, he
> believes with a passionate sincerity that Christ is metaphorically alive
in
> the world, probably just as sincerely as you believe in that cat. How do
you
> rule him out of those who know, if you claim that we can "know" the
outside
> world? I would place his beliefs as very much less probable than your cat.
> He would not agree.
>
If your nephew points to the cat on the mat and says 'The cat is on the mat'
and you can see and touch the cat on the mat, you would be rather nutty to
deny the cat being on the mat. But as far as I know no one has ever seen any
God, and even if they have you can't verify their assertion by seeing God
yourself. The two cases are different.
> You mentioned Bem and Freud in an earlier post. I am reminded of reading
> Eysenk, nearly fifty years ago, describing an experiment in post-hypnotic
> suggestion. A group of hypnotised subjects were told to forget the
> hypnotism, but to carry out an inappropriate action at a signal, after
they
> awoke. They were given the signal individually, duly carried out the
action,
> and were then asked why. It was found that there was a strong correlation
> between the intelligence of the subject and the plausibility of the
reasons
> they gave, but no correlation with the facts of the situation. I have
> mistrusted intelligent people ever since!
>
It seems to me that stupid people are quite likely to assert that they know
the cat is on the mat if they see the cat on the mat. Perhaps you should
believe them.
> You must remember that we can all have several "world models" at different
> levels of our brain. Athletes, say cricketers, spend considerable time
> training their reflexes to react in ways that the conscious part of the
> brain considers appropriate to various situations, but much more quickly.
We
> also have a hormonal world-model, which reacts at a level below conscious
> thought, and sometimes in ways that the conscious mind considers
> inappropriate. Freud's unconscious can also be considered to have its own
> "model", which can differ considerably from that of the conscious mind.
>
> That is why I used the term "software", before I was reminded that the
> metaphor was not very exact, and at least some of these models were
> hard-wired. I still think that "software" is appropriate, because it is a
> term for the switching in the brain, variable to at least some extent,
which
> takes the input from our senses and translates it into output, which is
> action of one sort or another.
>
> To sum up, if you want "truth" you won't get it from your brain, which has
> evolved to handle fuzzy inputs, and take appropriate actions in a fuzzily
> perceived world. It sees the world through a narrow keyhole presented by
our
> senses. Nevertheless, it does appear to achieve a reasonable approximation
> to the truth, and that is all we can reasonably ask of it.
>
The idea of broad conditions is that you don't exclusively rely only on the
brain, or on a mental model.
Lance
Jim Purdie
Peter Ashby <p.r....@MAPS.dundee.ac.uk> wrote in message
news:p.r.ashby-4C599...@dux.dundee.ac.uk...
Are you saying that a delusion is only experienced by one sense at a time? A
very far-reaching claim, surely. I think you are making a common mistake, of
looking for an extreme case, and wanting to argue on that. I have already
said that for all practical purposes you can be sure the cat is there, i.e.
the probability of it being there approaches unity. But in fact all our
"knowledge" has a probability somewhere between zero and unity. It obviously
approaches either end-point, but never attains unity, though perhaps zero is
possible. Some things, such as the cat, come very close, but I feel it is a
useful distinction to remember that there is not a difference in kind
between our most cherished and demonstrable beliefs, and the rankest
superstition. The difference is in degree of probability, and those who hold
the superstitions would no doubt argue that they are in fact absolutely
true. Because they "know".
We can attain better and better models of the world, but we cannot attain an
absolutely accurate model, because the model is a firing of neurons in our
brains, while reality is something else. Remember you are not talking about
the cat, but about your perception of it, which in the end is a pattern of
activity in your brain. Unless you subscribe to a spiritual dimension for
that part of us which "knows".
Remember that as far as we can ascertain the brain is a machine, which works
on a "model" of the world, consisting of patterns of neurons interacting
with other neurons. It cannot "know", it can only constuct a model and test
its validity.
The importance of this comes not in the case of a cat on a mat, but in
situations where intelligent and reasonable men disagree. But it is
important to realise that there is not a change in kind between the two
sorts of belief, just a difference in probabilities.
Jim Purdie
Jim Purdie
>
> "Jim Purdie" <jimp...@paradise.net.nz> wrote:
> >
"To_ know_ that the cat is on the mat requires not only that you believe
that the cat is on the mat, but that the cat is actually on the mat"? Since
the only check you have on actuality is the same process as you used to
reach the belief, I take it that "knowing" consists in "believing" twice? Or
what does it mean? Have you a shortcut to the world outside your head, so
that you can match what is "actually" there to the model of it you have in
your head, and thus "know" that the model is correct? Of course you have, it
is the same process you used to form the model of it within your brain.
Remember what is in your brain is a set of neurons, which have evolved to
model parts of the world sufficiently well to enable you to predict their
behaviour. Nothing more, so far as we can discover. To claim that this model
can be equated to the world, absolutely, seems to me to be a little
presumptuous. We can test the model in different ways, in different
circumstances, and so reach a greater probability that it is accurate, or at
least useful. But "knowing"?
>
> But if this were true you would never know anything and the word 'know'
> would be completely redundant. Ask yourself why we have a word like "know"
> in our vocabularies.
Ask yourself why we have a word like "God" in our vocabularies. An idea is
not made absolutely true solely because a great number of humans have
"known" it to be true. "Know" is a useful approximation.
>
> > I have a nephew who has enrolled at a Bible college in the US. He sends
a
> > family e-mail, which always ends with his signature "He Lives". Now he
is
> a
> > man who has made his way in the world with no suggestion that he is
> > incompetent, though I think he is a little peculiar. The thing is, he
> > believes with a passionate sincerity that Christ is metaphorically alive
> in
> > the world, probably just as sincerely as you believe in that cat. How do
> you
> > rule him out of those who know, if you claim that we can "know" the
> outside
> > world? I would place his beliefs as very much less probable than your
cat.
> > He would not agree.
> >
>
> If your nephew points to the cat on the mat and says 'The cat is on the
mat'
> and you can see and touch the cat on the mat, you would be rather nutty to
> deny the cat being on the mat. But as far as I know no one has ever seen
any
> God, and even if they have you can't verify their assertion by seeing God
> yourself. The two cases are different.
I have never met the gentleman in question, let alone discuss theology or
philosophy with him, (God forbid! (See, the word has its uses)) but if I
should ever do so, I am sure he would say that his beliefs were founded on
seeing the work of Christ in the world, and I am sure would give many
telling examples, which I would find difficult to refute to his
satisfaction. The cases are not as different as you claim.
<snip>
>>It was found that there was a strong correlation between the intelligence
of the subject and the plausibility of the reasons they gave, but no
>>correlation with the facts of the situation. I have mistrusted intelligent
people ever since!
>
> It seems to me that stupid people are quite likely to assert that they
know
> the cat is on the mat if they see the cat on the mat. Perhaps you should
> believe them.
In the case of the cat on the mat I would consider other facets of their
personality before considering their intelligence, in deciding on their
reliability. And I might believe the cat is on the mat, and believe that
they believe that the cat is on the mat, but as to their "knowing", I would
have the same reservations as I have endeavoured to outline here.
To sum up, if you want "truth" you won't get it from your brain, which
has
> > evolved to handle fuzzy inputs, and take appropriate actions in a
fuzzily
> > perceived world. It sees the world through a narrow keyhole presented by
> our
> > senses. Nevertheless, it does appear to achieve a reasonable
approximation
> > to the truth, and that is all we can reasonably ask of it.
> >
>
> The idea of broad conditions is that you don't exclusively rely only on
the
> brain, or on a mental model.
>
> Lance
>
I believe that I have nothing but my brain to think with, that machinery of
living cells, and their connections, between my ears. I am afraid that if I
don't rely on it, and on the mental models it makes, I have nothing to think
with or believe with at all. Do I detect in your stance a slight tendency to
feel that the brain is not enough, that there might perhaps be a soul
somewhere behind it?
Jim Purdie
Philip Preston
Peter Ashby wrote in message ...
But our senses are demonstrably not independant. You gave an example of this
the other day when you said that whenever you see a picture of a dissection
you smell formalin. If you saw a dissected body on the mat you could not
claim that the smell of formalin was confirmation of there being a dissected
body on the mat because your past experience has shown that sight itself
would give you the sensation of smelling formalin whether or not fumes of
the chemical were actually present. That particular association is so strong
for you that you have become aware of it but it is reasonable to suppose
that we all develop associations between our senses without necessarily
being aware of them.
Regards,
Philip.
Peter Ashby
"Jim Purdie" <jimp...@paradise.net.nz> wrote:
> Are you saying that a delusion is only experienced by one sense at a time? A
> very far-reaching claim, surely.
In the example above you can make it so. When you are sitting in a chair
you are not touching, or tasting the cat or the mat. As to hearing and
smelling we come to the fact that we cannot consciously be aware of all
our senses at once. For example until I mention it you are not aware of
the touch of your clothes. In this example it is perfectly valid to
treat your senses as indpendent for the purpose of determining the
presence of the cat.
I think you are making a common mistake, of
> looking for an extreme case, and wanting to argue on that. I have already
> said that for all practical purposes you can be sure the cat is there, i.e.
> the probability of it being there approaches unity. But in fact all our
> "knowledge" has a probability somewhere between zero and unity. It obviously
> approaches either end-point, but never attains unity, though perhaps zero is
> possible.
That is the whole point about independent verification from different
senses. They are additive not average so you can approach unity far
closer than with one sense alone. If you wish to postulate a
hallucination which affects all the senses at once I will have to ask
you for verified examples.
Some things, such as the cat, come very close, but I feel it is a
> useful distinction to remember that there is not a difference in kind
> between our most cherished and demonstrable beliefs, and the rankest
> superstition. The difference is in degree of probability, and those who hold
> the superstitions would no doubt argue that they are in fact absolutely
> true. Because they "know".
Oh I agree about the probability bit, I can do no other and remain a
scientist. I think I would establish the rank difference in probability
with our superstitious person by examining the sensory information they
use.
> We can attain better and better models of the world, but we cannot attain an
> absolutely accurate model, because the model is a firing of neurons in our
> brains, while reality is something else. Remember you are not talking about
> the cat, but about your perception of it, which in the end is a pattern of
> activity in your brain. Unless you subscribe to a spiritual dimension for
> that part of us which "knows".
But again, unless you retreat to existentialism you have to acknowledge
that their comes a point of diminishing returns as we approach unity.
What is the point of eliminating a one in ten million probability that
the cat is in an overlapping dimension? This is where I lose patience
with philosophy I'm afraid. I think we should stop on 'good enough' for
knowing. But then in science that's what we do all the time so I'm
comfortable with that.
> Remember that as far as we can ascertain the brain is a machine, which works
> on a "model" of the world, consisting of patterns of neurons interacting
> with other neurons. It cannot "know", it can only constuct a model and test
> its validity.
Precisely, which is what confirmation by other senses is doing. By using
more senses you are testing an initial model. in practice we also test
in surprising situations by staring for long periods and changing our
point of view. Touching something to see if it's 'real' is after all not
an uncommon reaction to seeing something unexpected.
> The importance of this comes not in the case of a cat on a mat, but in
> situations where intelligent and reasonable men disagree. But it is
> important to realise that there is not a change in kind between the two
> sorts of belief, just a difference in probabilities.
You will get no argument from me about that.
Peter Ashby
"Philip Preston" <phi...@preston20.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> But our senses are demonstrably not independant. You gave an example of this
> the other day when you said that whenever you see a picture of a dissection
> you smell formalin.
Yes but I am not sensing the formalin, I am associating. The first time
I noticed the association in fact, I remember sniffing the picture in
the book. The smell then promptly vanished on testing reality.
If you saw a dissected body on the mat you could not
> claim that the smell of formalin was confirmation of there being a dissected
> body on the mat because your past experience has shown that sight itself
> would give you the sensation of smelling formalin whether or not fumes of
> the chemical were actually present. That particular association is so strong
> for you that you have become aware of it but it is reasonable to suppose
> that we all develop associations between our senses without necessarily
> being aware of them.
Of course but that does not remove the fact that we can demonstrate the
reality or otherwise of the association by testing it. I would also
suggest to you that when people associate they know they are not sensing
reality, its there in the language used.
The independence of our senses is easily demonstrable, a psychology
textbook will be full of examples.
Lance
"Jim Purdie" <jimp...@paradise.net.nz> wrote:
>
> "To_ know_ that the cat is on the mat requires not only that you believe
> that the cat is on the mat, but that the cat is actually on the mat"?
Since
> the only check you have on actuality is the same process as you used to
> reach the belief, I take it that "knowing" consists in "believing" twice?
Or
> what does it mean?
According to the model of knowledge I am offering (note that it is a
different model to the one you have put forward) knowing does not require
belief at all. The Gettier counter examples I presented in another post show
that it is impossible and wrong to analyse knowledge as any form of belief.
Knowledge requires broad conditions to be ascribed - belief does not.
Knowing is a relation between a mind and the world - belief is an internal
affair. One can try to understand the broad conditions of knowledge in
different ways. For example, Alvin Goldman (of Tuscon) has suggested that
the relation is causal - that particular configurations of mind and world
causally produce knowledge. I'm not especially happy with this (it doesn't
seem to me to work with universal claims) but is one way of thinking about
the way in which the relating of mind and world involved in how knowing
happens.
Please note that this is a different model of knowledge to the one you have
been defending. Simply repeating your model neither refutes my alternative
not makes your view true. That said, you can see many other biological
systems require a relation to the world to work. Think of bone growth. Of
course there are all sorts of internal things going on, but we know from the
effects of space travel that bone growth also requires gravity or an outside
stress. So no purely "internal" account of bone growth can possibly be
true - you must see the bone growth as part of a system involving both
internal and external elements. In a similar way my alternative model of
knowledge insists that knowledge can never be analysed in terms of purely
internal states such as belief (see the Gettier examples for reasons why
belief is inadequate) but requires you to see the mind as part of a system
that contains aspects of the environment.
> Have you a shortcut to the world outside your head, so
> that you can match what is "actually" there to the model of it you have
in
> your head, and thus "know" that the model is correct?
This is simply reiterating the starting point of YOUR model. There is no
shortcut in the alternative model because knowledge cannot be contained in
your head. recall, knowledge ascription requires broad conditions - and by
definition they will be external to your head. Knowledge therefore always
requires a mind and a world.
> Of course you have, it
> is the same process you used to form the model of it within your brain.
The knowledge is not the model because you can ascribe a model using only
narrow conditions.
> Remember what is in your brain is a set of neurons, which have evolved to
> model parts of the world sufficiently well to enable you to predict their
> behaviour.
Not so. The neurons evolved to help you control your perception of the
world. Models may or may not be helpful in controlling your perception. For
detailed arguments see W T Powers "Behaviour: The control of perception"
(1973).
> Nothing more, so far as we can discover. To claim that this model
> can be equated to the world, absolutely, seems to me to be a little
> presumptuous.
The model is not being equated with the world. The alternative view of
knowledge asserts that the model can NEVER be knowledge.
> We can test the model in different ways, in different
> circumstances, and so reach a greater probability that it is accurate, or
at
> least useful. But "knowing"?
>
Yeah - knowing! Knowing is NOT a model, it is not a belief (whether true and
justified, or not). It is a relation between mind and world. That is the
alternative view. To show it is wrong you cannot just repeat your model
saying something like "What I say three times in true". You will need to
show that it is inconsistent; that it is contradicted by important facts; or
that it conflicts with the larger understanding of science and philosophy.
As I see it, it is your model that is in trouble, not the alternative. For
example, your model is in conflict with the Gettier counterexamples.
>
>
> >
> > But if this were true you would never know anything and the word 'know'
> > would be completely redundant. Ask yourself why we have a word like
"know"
> > in our vocabularies.
>
> Ask yourself why we have a word like "God" in our vocabularies. An idea is
> not made absolutely true solely because a great number of humans have
> "known" it to be true. "Know" is a useful approximation.
I don't see how anyone can say that they know they are mortal and mean by
know "a useful approximation". This is just the sort of example that shows
that your model is inadequate.
> >
> > If your nephew points to the cat on the mat and says 'The cat is on the
> mat'
> > and you can see and touch the cat on the mat, you would be rather nutty
to
> > deny the cat being on the mat. But as far as I know no one has ever seen
> any
> > God, and even if they have you can't verify their assertion by seeing
God
> > yourself. The two cases are different.
>
> I have never met the gentleman in question, let alone discuss theology or
> philosophy with him, (God forbid! (See, the word has its uses)) but if I
> should ever do so, I am sure he would say that his beliefs were founded on
> seeing the work of Christ in the world, and I am sure would give many
> telling examples, which I would find difficult to refute to his
> satisfaction. The cases are not as different as you claim.
>
If your model cannot distinguish between faith and knowledge - a distinction
recognised in every theology of which I have heard - then that is another
sign that your model is inadequate.
> <snip>
>
> >>It was found that there was a strong correlation between the
intelligence
> of the subject and the plausibility of the reasons they gave, but no
> >>correlation with the facts of the situation. I have mistrusted
intelligent
> people ever since!
>
> >
> > It seems to me that stupid people are quite likely to assert that they
> know
> > the cat is on the mat if they see the cat on the mat. Perhaps you should
> > believe them.
>
> In the case of the cat on the mat I would consider other facets of their
> personality before considering their intelligence, in deciding on their
> reliability. And I might believe the cat is on the mat, and believe that
> they believe that the cat is on the mat, but as to their "knowing", I
would
> have the same reservations as I have endeavoured to outline here.
>
Much of what we know comes from authority. Some of the material given to
us - such as the existence of God - is not justified, and we come to reject
it. There are many ways in which claims from authority are tested and found
wanting. Some of them may well be based on considerations of motive, or
humbug detection. In my opinion all of this fits the alternative model
better than it fits your model.
>
> I believe that I have nothing but my brain to think with, that machinery
of
> living cells, and their connections, between my ears. I am afraid that if
I
> don't rely on it, and on the mental models it makes, I have nothing to
think
> with or believe with at all. Do I detect in your stance a slight tendency
to
> feel that the brain is not enough, that there might perhaps be a soul
> somewhere behind it?
>
You have never used a calculator or a computer? You have never asked someone
else their opinion on a matter? You have never tested the reliability of
your memory against a reference source? You have never used a memory aid
such as a piece of string around your finger?
Lance
Lance
"Philip Preston" <phi...@preston20.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> But our senses are demonstrably not independant. You gave an example of
this
> the other day when you said that whenever you see a picture of a
dissection
> you smell formalin. If you saw a dissected body on the mat you could not
> claim that the smell of formalin was confirmation of there being a
dissected
> body on the mat because your past experience has shown that sight itself
> would give you the sensation of smelling formalin whether or not fumes of
> the chemical were actually present. That particular association is so
strong
> for you that you have become aware of it but it is reasonable to suppose
> that we all develop associations between our senses without necessarily
> being aware of them.
>
Synaesthesia or the mingling of the senses is a comparatively rare
condition, and is almost exclusively found in children or women. As such it
is not a terribly good counter-example.
Lance
Peter Ashby
"Lance" <Lanc...@worldonline.co.za> wrote:
> > Remember what is in your brain is a set of neurons, which have evolved to
> > model parts of the world sufficiently well to enable you to predict their
> > behaviour.
>
> Not so. The neurons evolved to help you control your perception of the
> world. Models may or may not be helpful in controlling your perception. For
> detailed arguments see W T Powers "Behaviour: The control of perception"
> (1973).
That is an exellent point Lance. Our perceptions have had millions of
years of selection in representing reality accurately enough for
survival. We humans have added to that by building machines which can
perceive things we cannot directly. That those augmented perceptions
mesh pretty seamlessly with our innate ones is good evidence that the
innate is pretty accurate. We know we can suffer from illusions, but the
very fact we are aware of these is evidence that we have good error
detection algorithms.
kames.smiths
>
> "kames.smiths" <kames....@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> >
> > One suggested (and probably by now rather dated?) definition of
> > knowledge is that it is justified true belief.
> > A person knows that 'p' (some proposition) iff
> >
> > 1. p is true
> > 2. the person believes that p
> > 3. the person is justified in believing that p.
> >
> > If all these conditions have to be satisfied beyond a shadow of a
> > doubt, knowledge will be in short supply. However, they can be
applied
> > less stringently when there are no philosophers about!
> >
>
> Interesting. I will refer you to an article - quite famous I
believe - by
> Gettier:
>
> Gettier, E. (1963). Is justified true belief knowledge?. Analysis,
23:
> 121-123.
Thanks. I have heard of Gettier's analysis but have read little about
it. In my relative ignorance, I can't see why it necessarily warrants
the conclusion claimed.
> Let's start with just two conditions: If you claim to know that
Edinburgh is
> north of London then 1) it is true that Edinburgh is north of
London, and 2)
> you believe that Edinburgh is north of London.
I don't follow the logic here. I expect you didn't intend "claim to".
> Now consider the Gettier counter-example of the lucky punter.
Someone has a
> hunch - and so believes that - a certain horse will win a race. The
horse
> does win. The punter did not know that horse would win - he had a
hunch that
> it would win. Still, he believed that the horse would win and that
belief
> was true. It follows that the two conditions above will not suffice.
Agreed - he made a lucky guess, he didn't know.
Smith may have had good reasons for his belief, but they weren't
watertight. He assumed that the man doing the hiring was truthful; and
he neglected the possibility that he might have ten coins in his own
pocket. So I would say that his belief, though it had some foundation,
wasn't (fully) justified.
> Gettier constructs quite a few more examples of this kind, and the
game has
> continued ever since. A great deal of the subsequent history can be
found
> in:
>
> Shope, R. K. (1983). "The Analysis of Knowing: A decade of
research."
> Princeton University Press.
>
> All of this suggests, as Timothy Williamson (2001, p.30) points out,
that
> "no analysis of the concept _knows_ of the standard kind is correct.
Indeed
> the candidate concepts turn out to be not merely distinct from, but
not even
> necessarily coextensive with, the target concept. Since Gettier
refuted the
> traditional analysis of _knows_ as _has a true justified belief_ in
1963, a
> succession of increasingly complex analyses have been overturned by
> increasingly complex counterexamples..."
I take it that Gettier's point is that a person can have a true
justified belief that isn't knowledge, therefore the definition of
knowledge as true justified belief doesn't stand up. But surely there
are degrees of justification? Perhaps it is not possible to be fully
justified in holding a belief, and it follows from this that 'certain
knowledge' isn't possible.
> On this basis Williamson suggests that is simply wrong to regard
belief as
> conceptually prior to knowledge. Knowledge cannot be analysed in
terms of
> belief.
Then does he - or can you - say how knowledge should be defined?
Dave Smith
Peter H.M. Brooks
"kames.smiths" <kames....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
>
> I take it that Gettier's point is that a person can have a true
> justified belief that isn't knowledge, therefore the definition of
> knowledge as true justified belief doesn't stand up. But surely there
> are degrees of justification? Perhaps it is not possible to be fully
> justified in holding a belief, and it follows from this that 'certain
> knowledge' isn't possible.
>
You are right to put it in parentheses. Certain knowledge of logical and
mathematical truths is possible. Pretty certain knowledge, like the limited
lifespan and unusually low affinity for teamwork of the chainsmoker in the
fireworks factory is also possible.
--
A goose is just for Christmas.
kames.smiths
>
> "kames.smiths" <kames....@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> > These are examples of not being conscious of pain, whereas my
example
> > involved being conscious of pain but of somehow being mistaken
that
> > you were feeling pain.
>
> I hypnotise you. I tell you that you are feeling excruciating pain.
You are
> conscious of feeling pain. Yet you are mistaken in that you are not
really
> feeling pain. (I suspect that a brainscan would support the latter
> position).
It would be very interesting to know what a brainscan would show in
this type of experiment. It might indicate that some, but not all, of
the usual physiological correlates of pain are present. (What happens
when you are dreaming - is there not some physiological evidence of
imagery? Has anyone studied the physiological correlates of nightmares
in which people experience great fear?)
Let us assume, however, that I think I am feeling great pain, but that
a painometer that has been scientifically developed to measure pain
indicates that I am not. Why should we accept the objective measure
rather than the subjective one? The validity of the objective measure
would depend on how well it had been found to correlate with
subjective reports of pain. I think there would be an interesting
asymmetry. If I was conscious of great pain I would conclude that
there was something wrong with the painometer. Since you don't
experience my feelings of pain, you would be more likely to conclude
that the painometer was right and that I was mistaken or lying.
Dave Smith
kames.smiths
"Peter Ashby" <p.r....@MAPS.dundee.ac.uk> wrote in message
news:p.r.ashby-4C599...@dux.dundee.ac.uk...
> I will give you a gist of a reply I gave to the departed Interesting
> Ian. Since it can be demonstrated that our senses are both separate
and
> separable it is valid to confirm your vision of the cat by, touching
it,
> smelling it,hearing it or tasting it. The first two could also be
used
> to confirm the cat's proximity to the rug. All these senses report
to
> differing subsets of the brain and can all be done without.
Russell (in The Problems of Philosophy) suggests there are two
difficulties with the view that truth consists in coherence. First, it
is possible for there to be more than one coherent set of beliefs that
might explain certain phenomena. Second, in order to demonstrate
'coherence' one needs to have established beforehand the truth of the
law of contradiction. Russell concludes - "For the above two reasons,
coherence cannot be accepted as giving the meaning of truth, though it
is often a most important test of truth after a certain amount of
truth has become known".
>The only
> valid objection to this that I can see is a retreat to
existentialism,
> which is fine but not very useful or productive.
What do you you mean by "existentialism" here?
Dave Smith
Philip Preston
Peter Ashby wrote in message ...
> "Philip Preston" <phi...@preston20.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> But our senses are demonstrably not independant. You gave an example of
>> this the other day when you said that whenever you see a picture of a
>> dissection you smell formalin.
>
>Yes but I am not sensing the formalin, I am associating. The first time
>I noticed the association in fact, I remember sniffing the picture in
>the book. The smell then promptly vanished on testing reality.
>
>> If you saw a dissected body on the mat you could not
>> claim that the smell of formalin was confirmation of there being a
>> dissected
>> body on the mat because your past experience has shown that sight itself
>> would give you the sensation of smelling formalin whether or not fumes of
>> the chemical were actually present. That particular association is so
>> strong
>> for you that you have become aware of it but it is reasonable to suppose
>> that we all develop associations between our senses without necessarily
>> being aware of them.
>
>Of course but that does not remove the fact that we can demonstrate the
>reality or otherwise of the association by testing it.
Sure, but remember whole point of sniffing the object of consideration is to
confirm an initial visual observation. I'm not convinced that this
confirmation would have some extra validity simply by virtue of the evidence
being acquired with a different sense organ rather than, say, by looking
again more carefully, more closely, with better light, from different
angles, prodding it to see how it moved and so on.
> I would also
>suggest to you that when people associate they know they are not sensing
>reality, its there in the language used.
Your account suggests otherwise. Why did you sniff the page if not to make
sure? If the page had smelled of formalin close up would you immediately
have concluded the smell was real or investigated furhter, maybe asked
someone else to sniff it?
>The independence of our senses is easily demonstrable,
Yes, I have experienced a demonstration of getting totally contradictory
information from two different senses. It involved a luminous three
dimensional simulation of a Necker cube. You held it at arms length in total
darkness, rotated your hand slightly in one direction and saw what you were
holding clearly rotate in the opposite direction. It felt very strange,
slightly disconcerting but rather fun. I've never experienced anything quite
like it before or since.
But that only goes to emphasize how rare it is for our senses to contradict
each other in this way. I can think of two possible explanations for this.
The first is that our senses are practically never mistaken but accurately
inform us of a self consistent reality. The second is that our senses are
sometimes mistaken but are interdependant in such a way as to give us a self
consistent perception of reality which is sometimes inaccurate.
>a psychology
>textbook will be full of examples.
If you know of any that are as much fun as the Necker cube simulation I'd
love to hear about them.
Regards,
Philip.
Philip Preston
>
>Synaesthesia or the mingling of the senses is a comparatively rare
>condition, and is almost exclusively found in children or women. As such it
>is not a terribly good counter-example.
But synaesthesia is not the same as an aquired association like the formalin
smell, is it?
Regards,
Philip.
Peter H.M. Brooks
> a painometer that has been scientifically developed to measure pain
> indicates that I am not. Why should we accept the objective measure
> rather than the subjective one?
>
one previously used by the CIA in Guantanamo Bay.
Peter Ashby
I don't know. I did read a report of a study into synaesthesia which
showed that more than one region of primary sensory cortex was activated
(visual with a word for eg) in syaesthetics. I'm not aware of any
comparable studies wrt association but it would be interesting. In my
case, surely memory should play a role giving a different signal.
Synaesthetics usually report double senses from a very early age. Many
report the extreme surprise they experienced when they realised not
everyone worked that way.
Peter
Peter Ashby
> "Peter Ashby" <p.r....@MAPS.dundee.ac.uk> wrote in message
> news:p.r.ashby-4C599...@dux.dundee.ac.uk...
>
> > I will give you a gist of a reply I gave to the departed Interesting
> > Ian. Since it can be demonstrated that our senses are both separate
> and
> > separable it is valid to confirm your vision of the cat by, touching
> it,
> > smelling it,hearing it or tasting it. The first two could also be
> used
> > to confirm the cat's proximity to the rug. All these senses report
> to
> > differing subsets of the brain and can all be done without.
>
> Russell (in The Problems of Philosophy) suggests there are two
> difficulties with the view that truth consists in coherence. First, it
> is possible for there to be more than one coherent set of beliefs that
> might explain certain phenomena. Second, in order to demonstrate
> 'coherence' one needs to have established beforehand the truth of the
> law of contradiction. Russell concludes - "For the above two reasons,
> coherence cannot be accepted as giving the meaning of truth, though it
> is often a most important test of truth after a certain amount of
> truth has become known".
I suppose I would then posit that I would take visual evidence of the
cat as a prima facie amount of truth in the matter, and would then use
the other senses and more time to use coherence to test that. But then I
am quite happy with the idea that we sense reality in a damn good way,
but not 100% accurately. The latter has been amply demonstrated in
vision for eg. We think we 'see' the whole of a scene but in fact we are
only consciously aware of small portions of it.
> >The only
> > valid objection to this that I can see is a retreat to
> existentialism,
> > which is fine but not very useful or productive.
>
> What do you you mean by "existentialism" here?
The crude formulation which states that we cannot be sure of anything
outside of our own heads. Nothing more.
Peter
Jim Purdie
>
> "Jim Purdie" <jimp...@paradise.net.nz> wrote:
> >
> > "To_ know_ that the cat is on the mat requires not only that you believe
> > that the cat is on the mat, but that the cat is actually on the mat"?
> Since
> > the only check you have on actuality is the same process as you used to
> > reach the belief, I take it that "knowing" consists in "believing"
twice?
> Or
> > what does it mean?
>
> According to the model of knowledge I am offering (note that it is a
> different model to the one you have put forward) knowing does not require
> belief at all. The Gettier counter examples I presented in another post
show
> that it is impossible and wrong to analyse knowledge as any form of
belief.
Are you saying that you can know a fact, but not believe it? I think you are
using different word definitions from mine, and from the generally accepted
ones. I presume that you mean that we can know something directly from
perception of the world, without intellectual processing, more or less as an
animal might. As far as I am concerned, an animal also has a world model,
which it might or not be able to change in the light of experience. It is
possible to speak of a mobile single-celled animal having a world model, in
that it has sensors which can measure the concentration of its food, and can
move itself in a direction which increases that concentration. Its world
model is a very simple one, and I think totally immutable, but nevertheless
it receives sense inputs, processes them, and delivers outputs in that it
moves its flagellae in such a way that it moves towards the food. It can
also be said to "know" how to obtain food, but I don't think that is so
useful a model as mine.
I suspect that you are following the "soul" fallacy, which is that if you
don't see how something can happen, or a machine can do what you do, you
postulate an entity of which the principal definition is that it can do the
actions which you do, but which you are unwilling to ascribe to a machine.
Our ancestors called it a "soul", you call it a "mind". In a recent post you
commented that someone who believed in God could not demonstrate its
existence, or produce it for your examination. I fully agree. I now find you
talking about a "mind", which you are totally unable to produce or
demonstrate. I have never had a look, but I see no reason why what is inside
your head is not the same as I am told is inside everyone else's head, an
enormously complex assemblage of neurons, interacting with each other
through chemical and electrical messages. This is the most complex object we
know of in the universe. If this does not produce what you think of as your
"mind", I would suggest you cannot produce anything else which does. Nor can
you produce any sort of interface between mind and brain, nor even the
cockpit where the mind sits while it controls your brain. What you perceive
as your mind can surely only be an organisation of neurons, just as you are
an organisation of simple cells, which individually have none of the
characteristics of "Lance", or even of that disembodied finger.
Furthermore, I would suggest that you are unable to produce any way in which
your mind can know the world without using your senses. What comes in
through those senses is a series of electrical impulses which of themselves
are without meaning. They have meaning only so far as they are able to be
decoded by that assemblage of neurons which is your brain. What they produce
in the brain is fields of electrical impulses, along with some chemicals.
There is no indication of anything else. If you choose to postulate some
immaterial "mind", you are perfectly free to do so, and I probably cannot
convince you you are wrong, any more than I would attempt to argue with my
fundamentalist nephew.
Bone growth is perhaps a special example, in that gravity is all-pervasive,
and does not require any senses to have its effect. There are no doubt other
ways in which the outside world has an effect on our bodies without acting
through our senses. I would be more impressed if you gave an example in
which the outside world affected our thought processes, in moving them
towards a greater correspondence with itself, except through our senses.
Chemicals undoubtedly affect the workings of our brain, when absorbed
through our stomachs, lungs, or skin. As far as I can see, though, we gather
information only through those electrical signals sent by our senses. I
would love a counter-example.
>
> > Have you a shortcut to the world outside your head, so
> > that you can match what is "actually" there to the model of it you have
> in
> > your head, and thus "know" that the model is correct?
>
> This is simply reiterating the starting point of YOUR model. There is no
> shortcut in the alternative model because knowledge cannot be contained in
> your head. recall, knowledge ascription requires broad conditions - and by
> definition they will be external to your head. Knowledge therefore always
> requires a mind and a world.
Lance, my information, call it what you will, knowledge, belief, or
whatever, IS in my head. It cannot be altered by any means except through
messages from my senses. Inside my head, it consists of an organisation of
the atoms and particles, particularly electrons, which make up my brain. The
outside world cannot affect my brain in any way WHICH TRANSFERS INFORMATION
except through messages through my senses. If you wish to postulate "broad
conditions" which change that, you must surely demonstrate a mechanism. You
have certainly not done so yet. If you can demonstrate a "mind" which exists
independently of the assemblage of neurons which is my brain, and accepts
information in any way except through electrical impulses travelling along
nerves from my senses, you have destroyed my argument. I am waiting.
>
> > Of course you have, it
> > is the same process you used to form the model of it within your brain.
>
> The knowledge is not the model because you can ascribe a model using only
> narrow conditions.
>
> > Remember what is in your brain is a set of neurons, which have evolved
to
> > model parts of the world sufficiently well to enable you to predict
their
> > behaviour.
>
> Not so. The neurons evolved to help you control your perception of the
> world. Models may or may not be helpful in controlling your perception.
For
> detailed arguments see W T Powers "Behaviour: The control of perception"
> (1973).
If you believe in anything behind the set of neurons, you must demonstrate
it. I believe the neurons ARE the mind, and ARE the information.
>
> > Nothing more, so far as we can discover. To claim that this model
> > can be equated to the world, absolutely, seems to me to be a little
> > presumptuous.
>
> The model is not being equated with the world. The alternative view of
> knowledge asserts that the model can NEVER be knowledge.
>
> > We can test the model in different ways, in different
> > circumstances, and so reach a greater probability that it is accurate,
or
> at
> > least useful. But "knowing"?
> >
>
> Yeah - knowing! Knowing is NOT a model, it is not a belief (whether true
and
> justified, or not). It is a relation between mind and world. That is the
> alternative view. To show it is wrong you cannot just repeat your model
> saying something like "What I say three times in true". You will need to
> show that it is inconsistent; that it is contradicted by important facts;
or
> that it conflicts with the larger understanding of science and philosophy.
> As I see it, it is your model that is in trouble, not the alternative. For
> example, your model is in conflict with the Gettier counterexamples.
I think I have abundantly answered that one.
> >
> > >
> > > But if this were true you would never know anything and the word
'know'
> > > would be completely redundant. Ask yourself why we have a word like
> "know"
> > > in our vocabularies.
> >
> > Ask yourself why we have a word like "God" in our vocabularies. An idea
is
> > not made absolutely true solely because a great number of humans have
> > "known" it to be true. "Know" is a useful approximation.
I note that you are quite happy to ditch the concept "God", but remain
wedded to the concept "know". Is that because university professors are
supposed to know all about their subjects? ;-)
>
> I don't see how anyone can say that they know they are mortal and mean by
> know "a useful approximation". This is just the sort of example that shows
> that your model is inadequate.
I did not say that "know" means "a useful approximation". I said that "know"
IS a useful approximation. Just as Newton's Laws of Motion are a useful
approximation. Just as my road map of New Zealand is a useful approximation.
When you say you are mortal that is almost certainly true. I certainly would
not argue. Nevertheless, I try to stay aware that the graph of probabilities
is strongly asymptotic. You mentioned once that you were not strong in
maths. That means that it approaches unity, but never quite reaches it
> > I believe that I have nothing but my brain to think with, that machinery
> of
> > living cells, and their connections, between my ears. I am afraid that
if
> I
> > don't rely on it, and on the mental models it makes, I have nothing to
> think
> > with or believe with at all. Do I detect in your stance a slight
tendency
> to
> > feel that the brain is not enough, that there might perhaps be a soul
> > somewhere behind it?
> >
>
> You have never used a calculator or a computer? You have never asked
someone
> else their opinion on a matter? You have never tested the reliability of
> your memory against a reference source? You have never used a memory aid
> such as a piece of string around your finger?
>
> Lance
>
Nothing I have said implies that I may not do all of those things. I do them
primarily with my brain, or as Poirot says, "with the little grey cells".
All the information I obtain from those sources, as from every other source,
comes to me through my senses, and is stored as changes in the organisation
of my brain. That organisation is my model of the world. I certainly have no
"mind" apart from my brain, and if you "know" anything different, you had
better tell the neurologists to stop wasting their time.
And thanks for a most interesting discussion.
Jim Purdie
Lance
I find all of this a bit sad. You are so convinced that you have the truth
that you don't even try to understand another viewpoint. Ah well, you can
take a horse to water...
Lance
Lance
"Peter Ashby" <pas...@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> > >Synaesthesia or the mingling of the senses is a comparatively rare
> > >condition, and is almost exclusively found in children or women. As
such it
> > >is not a terribly good counter-example.
> >
> > But synaesthesia is not the same as an aquired association like the
formalin
> > smell, is it?
>
> I don't know. I did read a report of a study into synaesthesia which
> showed that more than one region of primary sensory cortex was activated
> (visual with a word for eg) in syaesthetics. I'm not aware of any
> comparable studies wrt association but it would be interesting. In my
> case, surely memory should play a role giving a different signal.
> Synaesthetics usually report double senses from a very early age. Many
> report the extreme surprise they experienced when they realised not
> everyone worked that way.
>
function - touch and sound can guide the eye for instance - so it is really
strange that synaesthesia is so rare. But yes, I suspect the two are
distinct.
Lance
Lance
"Peter Ashby" <p.r....@MAPS.dundee.ac.uk> wrote:
> > > Remember what is in your brain is a set of neurons, which have evolved
to
> > > model parts of the world sufficiently well to enable you to predict
their
> > > behaviour.
> >
> > Not so. The neurons evolved to help you control your perception of the
> > world. Models may or may not be helpful in controlling your perception.
For
> > detailed arguments see W T Powers "Behaviour: The control of perception"
> > (1973).
>
> That is an exellent point Lance. Our perceptions have had millions of
> years of selection in representing reality accurately enough for
> survival. We humans have added to that by building machines which can
> perceive things we cannot directly. That those augmented perceptions
> mesh pretty seamlessly with our innate ones is good evidence that the
> innate is pretty accurate. We know we can suffer from illusions, but the
> very fact we are aware of these is evidence that we have good error
> detection algorithms.
>
The word 'control' can be given a number of different readings. Jim Purdie
has an organism 'lost in thought' (to use the phrase behaviourists used
against Tolman) trying to model the world. But in early evolution the animal
was trying to avoid being eaten and to find food, shelter, warmth, sex, and
the like. The sense organism could (with increasing sophistication) be
relied upon to identify these things when they came the animal's way. But
the important thing was to find or avoid (in the case of predators) these
things as needed. The easiest way of achieving this is to view the neural
system as a control system designed to bring about the desired perceptions
(i.e. the perceptions are the control signal in the control loop). the
control loops then act on the motor system and other bodily systems to bring
about the desired perceptions. It is relatively easy to build a simple robot
using just these ideas, of course. The need for sophisticated models of the
world comes much later in evolution.... Of course, much neural circuitry is
devoted to finding the correct perceptual input - but initially that was
probably something quite simple, such as a gradient of chemicals.
Lance
Lance
There are all sorts of illusions that go with pain. have a look at Patrick
Wall's recent book (he has just died of cancer and has first hand experience
of pain - apart from many years of collaboration with Ron Melzack
researching the subject). Some compelling examples are phantom limb pain,
the absence of pain after severe wounds, the effectiveness of attentional
strategies such as hypnotism, and the like. Pains also compete so that a
smaller pain can disguise a larger pain - that was the point of biting a
bullet in days gone by. Also have a look at Luria's 'Mind of mnemonist' for
a rather rare case of a person who regularly made mistakes about his own
perceptions - for example he often struggled to distinguish between
perceptions and memories.
Lance
Lance
"kames.smiths" <kames....@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> I take it that Gettier's point is that a person can have a true
> justified belief that isn't knowledge, therefore the definition of
> knowledge as true justified belief doesn't stand up. But surely there
> are degrees of justification? Perhaps it is not possible to be fully
> justified in holding a belief, and it follows from this that 'certain
> knowledge' isn't possible.
>
I haven't read the even a small part of the literature, but those that have
believe that however you try to formulate your definition of knowledge in
terms of belief it will be possible for some clever philosopher to formulate
a gettier counter-example.
> > On this basis Williamson suggests that is simply wrong to regard
> belief as
> > conceptually prior to knowledge. Knowledge cannot be analysed in
> terms of
> > belief.
>
> Then does he - or can you - say how knowledge should be defined?
>
Knowledge has to be defined as involving both internal and external
conditions. Williamson maintains that it is not conceptually dependent on
belief at all - that is a separate concept and logically independent of
belief. If I get chance I'll try to post some of Williamson's points... But
there are views other than Williamson - such as Goldman's. Goldman takes a
naturalistic stance, and argues that knowledge arises in the interaction of
the inner and the outer in a causal process. Both of these authors are
rather conceptually complex and write rather densely so they are very
difficult to summarise in a few well chosen sentences.
My view, for the moment, is that knowledge is to be analysed as the product
of a system involving persons and environments. All, of evolution and much
of physiology is exactly like this, of course, so you can see why Goldman
calls the approach naturalistic. But I haven't come to any conclusions about
how that system operates. But I am fairly sure that following Descartes and
imagining a person sitting with their eyes closed in an armchair trying to
model the world when not beset by evil daemons creating illusions is quite
the wrong approach. In exactly the same way it is quite wrong to try to
understand evolution separately from competition and the exploitation of an
environmental opportunity.
Lance
kames.smiths
"Peter H.M. Brooks" <pe...@new.co.za> wrote in message
news:atghnn$ira$1...@ctb-nnrp2.saix.net...
>
> "kames.smiths" <kames....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
>
> >
> > I take it that Gettier's point is that a person can have a true
> > justified belief that isn't knowledge, therefore the definition of
> > knowledge as true justified belief doesn't stand up. But surely
there
> > are degrees of justification? Perhaps it is not possible to be
fully
> > justified in holding a belief, and it follows from this that
'certain
> > knowledge' isn't possible.
> >
> You are right to put it in parentheses. Certain knowledge of logical
and
I was waiting for this! What took you so long?
I expect I am unwise to try to discuss this with someone who has
actually studied mathematics and logic, since I may soon be out of my
depth, but I would question whether logical and mathematical ideas
could be derived without prior experience of the external world. It
seems to me that symbols and rules are abstractions that mean nothing
without some sort of empirical underpinning.
Have you a very simple example of a logical or mathematical truth
which we can consider?
Dave Smith
Peter H.M. Brooks
>
> "Peter H.M. Brooks" <pe...@new.co.za> wrote in message
> news:atghnn$ira$1...@ctb-nnrp2.saix.net...
> >
> > "kames.smiths" <kames....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> >
> > >
> > > I take it that Gettier's point is that a person can have a true
> > > justified belief that isn't knowledge, therefore the definition of
> > > knowledge as true justified belief doesn't stand up. But surely
> there
> > > are degrees of justification? Perhaps it is not possible to be
> fully
> > > justified in holding a belief, and it follows from this that
> 'certain
> > > knowledge' isn't possible.
> > >
> > You are right to put it in parentheses. Certain knowledge of logical
> and
> > mathematical truths is possible......
>
> I was waiting for this! What took you so long?
>
>
> I expect I am unwise to try to discuss this with someone who has
> actually studied mathematics and logic, since I may soon be out of my
> depth, but I would question whether logical and mathematical ideas
> could be derived without prior experience of the external world. It
> seems to me that symbols and rules are abstractions that mean nothing
> without some sort of empirical underpinning.
>
If there isn't an external world, then you are on your tod and any
mathematical truths you know to be certainly true are so - but it is up to
you whether you wish to believe this or not.
If there is an external world then you can't be unless you have some
experience with it. Certainly we can't examine what an entity believes to be
true or false unless we have some means of communication with it.
>
> Have you a very simple example of a logical or mathematical truth
> which we can consider?
>
Lets try 1=1. Of course this identity need not be expressed in the same
symbols I est I might do in Latin.
Lance
"kames.smiths" <kames....@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> > You are right to put it in parentheses. Certain knowledge of logical
> and
> > mathematical truths is possible......
>
> I was waiting for this! What took you so long?
>
> I expect I am unwise to try to discuss this with someone who has
> actually studied mathematics and logic, since I may soon be out of my
> depth, but I would question whether logical and mathematical ideas
> could be derived without prior experience of the external world. It
> seems to me that symbols and rules are abstractions that mean nothing
> without some sort of empirical underpinning.
>
> Have you a very simple example of a logical or mathematical truth
> which we can consider?
>
Could we argue something like: 2 + 2 = 3.
Impossible you say?
But consider: Two Fathers and Two sons might well make three people if one
of the fathers is also a son.
So a statement like 2 + 2 = 4 requires assumptions about mutual exclusivity.
Would such assumptions have to be part of what you know indubitably?
Lance
Jim Purdie
>
> "Jim Purdie" <jimp...@paradise.net.nz> wrote:
>
> I find all of this a bit sad. You are so convinced that you have the truth
> that you don't even try to understand another viewpoint. Ah well, you can
> take a horse to water...
>
> Lance
>
>
Honestly, and seriously, I have tried very hard to understand another
viewpoint. I am quite prepared to accept that my inability to do so arises
from a deficiency in myself. It does seem to me, though, that I could make
the same accusation. And you are still being bloody patronising, for a
disembodied finger.
My sticking point is that in talking of a direct mind-world interaction, you
seem to be considering the mind to be something outside the world, and that
you have not supplied any mechanism enabling this interaction to take place.
If our minds reach correspondence with the world, surely it must be by
receiving sense messages, interpreting them, and then testing them. This
process has been shaped by our evolution, but is also shaped by experience.
In our case it is shaped also by conscious thought, and by communication
with other minds.
My point is that our minds are part of the material world, as are the bodies
through which they communicate with it, and that therefore the whole process
of communication, both in absorbing information and in acting on it, must
take place in the world, as part of the world. It must therefore be
accessible to our senses, and although we do not understand the process
fully as yet, we do understand quite a lot of it.
If you believe that your mind exists outside the material world, I believe
that you are acting as much by faith as is anyone who believes in a God. (I
accept that in the end, I am too) If you do not, I have totally
misunderstood you, but you have still not given any indication as to what
the mechanism is by which our minds reach correspondence with the world. I
believe, as I believe most biologists and neurologists do nowadays, that our
minds, and the information they contain, consist of an organisation of the
neurons and their connections within our heads. That being the case, I
cannot see that it can ever reach any perfect correspondence with the world.
It is a different thing, and however powerful, is subject to error. It can
and does, though, reach a correspondence which is sufficiently good for
practical purposes. So when you say the cat is on the mat, I believe you,
though not absolutely, and am prepared to act on my belief.
Jim Purdie
Leonid Gavrilov
> mathematical truths is possible. Pretty certain knowledge, like the limited
Lifespan is not limited:
http://www.src.uchicago.edu/~gavr1/
Jim Purdie
Leonid Gavrilov <laga...@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote in message
news:9259eb2.02121...@posting.google.com...
I rather think that you did not understand Peter Brooks' post. I suggest you
go back and read it again, right to the end. Especially the bit about the
fireworks factory.
But note that I have had "we are mortal" given to me as an example of
something we can know with certainty. Perhaps it is not absolutely certain,
when someone with a string of publications can deny it on what appears to be
a university website? And no, I have not read the research, or the
publications. I have never denied the possibility of reasonable certainty.
Jim Purdie
kames.smiths
"Peter Ashby" <pas...@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote in message
news:1fn87oz.1onnis0m3zf9cN%pas...@blueyonder.co.uk...
> I suppose I would then posit that I would take visual evidence of
the
> cat as a prima facie amount of truth in the matter, and would then
use
> the other senses and more time to use coherence to test that. But
then I
> am quite happy with the idea that we sense reality in a damn good
way,
> but not 100% accurately. The latter has been amply demonstrated in
> vision for eg. We think we 'see' the whole of a scene but in fact we
are
> only consciously aware of small portions of it.
OK, I'll stop nit-picking.
> > >The only
> > > valid objection to this that I can see is a retreat to
> > existentialism,
> > > which is fine but not very useful or productive.
> >
> > What do you you mean by "existentialism" here?
>
> The crude formulation which states that we cannot be sure of
anything
> outside of our own heads. Nothing more.
This sounds more like solipsism?
Dave Smith
kames.smiths
> There are all sorts of illusions that go with pain. have a look at
Patrick
> Wall's recent book (he has just died of cancer and has first hand
experience
> of pain - apart from many years of collaboration with Ron Melzack
> researching the subject). Some compelling examples are phantom limb
pain,
> the absence of pain after severe wounds, the effectiveness of
attentional
> strategies such as hypnotism, and the like. Pains also compete so
that a
> smaller pain can disguise a larger pain - that was the point of
biting a
> bullet in days gone by. Also have a look at Luria's 'Mind of
mnemonist' for
> a rather rare case of a person who regularly made mistakes about his
own
> perceptions - for example he often struggled to distinguish between
> perceptions and memories.
Imagine you are conscious of great pain and you go to your doctor for
help. He takes various physiological measurements and then tells you
that the pain is an illusion. Do you believe him?
Of course, there are various strategies for coping with pain - such as
receiving suggestions under hypnosis and 'thinking of something
else' - but these don't seem to me to be of much relevance to the main
point.
Dave Smith
kames.smiths
>
> "kames.smiths" <kames....@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> > I take it that Gettier's point is that a person can have a true
> > justified belief that isn't knowledge, therefore the definition of
> > knowledge as true justified belief doesn't stand up. But surely
there
> > are degrees of justification? Perhaps it is not possible to be
fully
> > justified in holding a belief, and it follows from this that
'certain
> > knowledge' isn't possible.
> >
> I haven't read the even a small part of the literature, but those
that have
> believe that however you try to formulate your definition of
knowledge in
> terms of belief it will be possible for some clever philosopher to
formulate
> a gettier counter-example.
It seems to me that the Gettier examples are intended to show that you
can hold a belief that is justified and true, which nevertheless isn't
knowledge - because despite the apparent soundness of your thinking,
you have only managed to reach the right conclusion for the wrong
reasons. My objection is that for a belief to be justified it must be
based on correct reasoning, not on apparently sound reasoning.
I can see the value of Goldman's approach, but I would have thought
that he and Descartes were dealing with rather different problems.
Dave Smith
Peter Ashby
"kames.smiths" <kames....@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> > The crude formulation which states that we cannot be sure of
> anything
> > outside of our own heads. Nothing more.
>
> This sounds more like solipsism?
Does it? I will have to go back to my Philosophy texts and refresh my
memory of the different 'isms'. I used to be sure I understood the
existentialist position but now I'm not so sure.
Peter Ashby
laga...@midway.uchicago.edu (Leonid Gavrilov) wrote:
Are you actually claiming that immortality is possible? If so that claim
is well hidden in your site.
Peter Ashby
"Lance" <Lanc...@worldonline.co.za> wrote:
> Of course, much neural circuitry is
> devoted to finding the correct perceptual input - but initially that was
> probably something quite simple, such as a gradient of chemicals.
Almost certainly. I have spoken before about work done here and
elsewhere on the slime mould Dyctostelium discoideum. Much work focusses
on how they detect and respond to the gradient of the molecule which
they use to induce free cells to aggregate. Understanding the way these
single cells solve the problem is progressing but the answer isn't
simple.
Peter H.M. Brooks
> In article <lJgL9.1920$Om2.4...@newsfep2-win.server.ntli.net>,
> "kames.smiths" <kames....@ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
> > > The crude formulation which states that we cannot be sure of
> > anything
> > > outside of our own heads. Nothing more.
> >
> > This sounds more like solipsism?
>
> Does it? I will have to go back to my Philosophy texts and refresh my
> memory of the different 'isms'. I used to be sure I understood the
> existentialist position but now I'm not so sure.
>
Stranger' in translation], it's a slight volume so might fill in the odd
moment of relative free space (not to be confused with relativistically free
space). The initial scene on the beach is magnificently evocative writing
and the whole experience is a far more pleasant way of getting the drift
(there is only really a drift, rather than a definition) of existentialism
than some turgid crap by Satre.
--
The grandeur of real art, on the contrary, . . . is to rediscover, grasp
again and lay before us that reality from which we become more and more
separated as the formal knowledge which we substitute for it grows in
thickness and imperviousness--that reality which there is grave danger we
might die without ever having known and yet which is simply our life, life
as it really is, life disclosed and made clear . . . .
- Vladimir Nabokov "Marcel Proust (1871-1922)"
Peter H.M. Brooks
> In article <athr1q$adl$1...@ctb-nnrp2.saix.net>,
> "Lance" <Lanc...@worldonline.co.za> wrote:
>
> > Of course, much neural circuitry is
> > devoted to finding the correct perceptual input - but initially that was
> > probably something quite simple, such as a gradient of chemicals.
>
> Almost certainly. I have spoken before about work done here and
> elsewhere on the slime mould Dyctostelium discoideum. Much work focusses
> on how they detect and respond to the gradient of the molecule which
> they use to induce free cells to aggregate. Understanding the way these
> single cells solve the problem is progressing but the answer isn't
> simple.
>
of flocks of birds are easily shown to be emergent from very simple
individual rules for each bird to follow. Rather like those pretty displays
that soldiers put on at the Edinburgh tattoo.
--
"Ecce Edwardus Ursus scalis numc tump-tump-tump occipite gradus pulsante
post Christophorum Robinum descendens. Est quod sciatunus et solus modus
gradibus descendendi,nonnunquam autem sentit, etiam alterum modum estare,
dummodo pulsationibus desinere et de eo modo meditari possit. Deinde censet
alios modos non esse. En, nunc ipse in imo est, vobis ostentari paratus." -
Winnie ille Pu.
Lance
"Jim Purdie" <jimp...@paradise.net.nz> wrote:
> > I find all of this a bit sad. You are so convinced that you have the
truth
> > that you don't even try to understand another viewpoint. Ah well, you
can
> > take a horse to water...
> viewpoint. I am quite prepared to accept that my inability to do so arises
> from a deficiency in myself. It does seem to me, though, that I could make
> the same accusation. And you are still being bloody patronising, for a
> disembodied finger.
>
> My sticking point is that in talking of a direct mind-world interaction,
you
> seem to be considering the mind to be something outside the world, and
that
> you have not supplied any mechanism enabling this interaction to take
place.
> If our minds reach correspondence with the world, surely it must be by
> receiving sense messages, interpreting them, and then testing them. This
> process has been shaped by our evolution, but is also shaped by
experience.
> In our case it is shaped also by conscious thought, and by communication
> with other minds.
>
I am not at all sure why you produce the above material. There is nothing
out-of-the-world in anything I have claimed. If you say you know something I
can legitimately ask 'How do you know that?', and you will reply with
whatever evidence warrants your knowledge. But if you say you "believe"
something it not normally the case that I will ask 'How do you believe
that?' unless I'm being sarcastic or something of that sort. A knowledge
claim is not a claim only about what is in your head - it is a claim about a
relation or correspondence between your ideas and the world and thus
involves more than your head. I am denying the priority of belief over
knowledge. And far from using belief to legitimise knowledge I am arguing
that knowledge can provide a warrant for your belief (thus reversing the
normal relation between knowledge and belief claimed in standard
epistemology). Why do you believe that a particular person is a murderer?
Well, you can reply, I know that he emerged stealthily from the room where
the body was found carrying a bloody knife - and I know this because I saw
him so emerge.
> My point is that our minds are part of the material world, as are the
bodies
> through which they communicate with it, and that therefore the whole
process
> of communication, both in absorbing information and in acting on it, must
> take place in the world, as part of the world. It must therefore be
> accessible to our senses, and although we do not understand the process
> fully as yet, we do understand quite a lot of it.
>
So knowledge is the product of a system involving both your mind and the
world. That is what I am claiming. You don't sit in an armchair, and then
believe things, and then try to find some way of justifying your beliefs.
Rather, you act, perceive, communicate and live in the world, and as a
result, the combination of world and you, produces knowledge. Some of that
knowledge you can use to legitimate your beliefs...
> If you believe that your mind exists outside the material world, I believe
> that you are acting as much by faith as is anyone who believes in a God.
(I
> accept that in the end, I am too) If you do not, I have totally
> misunderstood you, but you have still not given any indication as to what
> the mechanism is by which our minds reach correspondence with the world.
The mechanisms are many and various. Perhaps as Goldman believes, they can
be considered to be of a causal nature (which would explain why one can't
really choose to disbelieve what one knows), but which is troubling when you
think about universals ('All nuts give me allergies' - I am making a claim
about nuts that I have had no causal interaction with, and even about nuts
that have yet to grow on trees). At the present I prefer just to consider it
a systemic relation between mind and world.
> I believe, as I believe most biologists and neurologists do nowadays, that
our
> minds, and the information they contain, consist of an organisation of
the
> neurons and their connections within our heads. That being the case, I
> cannot see that it can ever reach any perfect correspondence with the
world.
> It is a different thing, and however powerful, is subject to error. It can
> and does, though, reach a correspondence which is sufficiently good for
> practical purposes. So when you say the cat is on the mat, I believe you,
> though not absolutely, and am prepared to act on my belief.
>
Yes, but knowledge is more than neurons etc. When I ask you what you know
about X murdering his wife you cannot produce a bunch of neurons and their
connections. You cannot just produce allegations. You need to produce some
warrant for your allegations as well - and that is a condition for having
knowledge that exists in the world (i.e., an external condition), not in
your neurons (an internal condition).
Lance
Lance
"kames.smiths" <kames....@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> It seems to me that the Gettier examples are intended to show that you
> can hold a belief that is justified and true, which nevertheless isn't
> knowledge - because despite the apparent soundness of your thinking,
> you have only managed to reach the right conclusion for the wrong
> reasons. My objection is that for a belief to be justified it must be
> based on correct reasoning, not on apparently sound reasoning.
>
simply deny that knowledge is any form of belief, or that belief has any
priority over knowledge.
>
>
> I can see the value of Goldman's approach, but I would have thought
> that he and Descartes were dealing with rather different problems.
>
justification - but the strating point is knowledge not belief, and that
gives quite a different take on these issues.
Lance
Lance
"Peter Ashby" <p.r....@MAPS.dundee.ac.uk> wrote:
> > Of course, much neural circuitry is
> > devoted to finding the correct perceptual input - but initially that was
> > probably something quite simple, such as a gradient of chemicals.
>
> Almost certainly. I have spoken before about work done here and
> elsewhere on the slime mould Dyctostelium discoideum. Much work focusses
> on how they detect and respond to the gradient of the molecule which
> they use to induce free cells to aggregate. Understanding the way these
> single cells solve the problem is progressing but the answer isn't
> simple.
>
guidance systems in missiles are also of this kind.
Lance
Lance
"kames.smiths" <kames....@ntlworld.com> wrote:
in message news:gJgL9.1919$Om2.4...@newsfep2-win.server.ntli.net...
thinking of? Illusion doesn't mean 'not real' - it means that you have an
experience but are mistaken about its meaning. The person with phantom limb
pain has pain - but is quite wrong in attributing it to the small toe on his
missing foot.
Lance
Peter Ashby
"Peter H.M. Brooks" <pe...@new.co.za> wrote:
> I read some interesting work on flocking models - quite complex behaviours
> of flocks of birds are easily shown to be emergent from very simple
> individual rules for each bird to follow. Rather like those pretty displays
> that soldiers put on at the Edinburgh tattoo.
Just outside our building flocks of starlings swoop and loop around
their roosts in some trees in the evenings. The sight is mesmerising,
especially as roosting birds join and leave the flock apparently at
random.
Peter H.M. Brooks
> In article <atkeol$mar$1...@ctb-nnrp2.saix.net>,
> "Peter H.M. Brooks" <pe...@new.co.za> wrote:
>
> > I read some interesting work on flocking models - quite complex
behaviours
> > of flocks of birds are easily shown to be emergent from very simple
> > individual rules for each bird to follow. Rather like those pretty
displays
> > that soldiers put on at the Edinburgh tattoo.
>
> Just outside our building flocks of starlings swoop and loop around
> their roosts in some trees in the evenings. The sight is mesmerising,
> especially as roosting birds join and leave the flock apparently at
> random.
>
simulate flockings - one would make a good screen saver, and it would be fun
to tweak the rules and see how the results change.
Maybe part of the mesmerising effect is our attempt to fit patterns to
random movements.
Like most emergent properties it isn't certain if the shape of a flock of
birds migrating or roosting is a genuine artifact or a pattern that we apply
to make sense of our observation.
--
'The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise.
So it must be on every original atrtist to some degree, on me to a marked
degree'
Gerard Manley Hopkins (letter to Bridges 1888)
Peter Ashby
"Peter H.M. Brooks" <pe...@new.co.za> wrote:
>
> Like most emergent properties it isn't certain if the shape of a flock of
> birds migrating or roosting is a genuine artifact or a pattern that we apply
> to make sense of our observation.
>
Indeed, but of such things are many long discussions into the evening at
science conferences made. We have just had our floor solstice party, and
I spent much of the latter part talking evolution with a prokaryote
evolutionary genetecist. Despite our very different perspectives we had
much to talk about.
Peter H.M. Brooks
> In article <atl12b$ne$1...@ctb-nnrp2.saix.net>,
> "Peter H.M. Brooks" <pe...@new.co.za> wrote:
>
> >
> > Like most emergent properties it isn't certain if the shape of a flock
of
> > birds migrating or roosting is a genuine artifact or a pattern that we
apply
> > to make sense of our observation.
> >
> Indeed, but of such things are many long discussions into the evening at
> science conferences made. We have just had our floor solstice party, and
> I spent much of the latter part talking evolution with a prokaryote
> evolutionary genetecist. Despite our very different perspectives we had
> much to talk about.
>
21st/22nd December. Still the days are certainly drawing out here.
I'd have thought that the sex of the genetecist might possibly be a factor.
--
Another consequence is a sizeable underclass in Britain losing touch with
mainstream values, prone to criminality and antisocial behaviour and
disorder, teenage pregnancy, drugs, violence and joblessness. - Peter
Mandelson repents, Grauniad May 18, 2002
Leonid Gavrilov
> In article <9259eb2.02121...@posting.google.com>,
> laga...@midway.uchicago.edu (Leonid Gavrilov) wrote:
>
> > "Peter H.M. Brooks" <pe...@new.co.za> wrote in message
> > news:<atghnn$ira$1...@ctb-nnrp2.saix.net>...
> > > You are right to put it in parentheses. Certain knowledge of logical and
> > > mathematical truths is possible. Pretty certain knowledge, like the limited
> > > lifespan...
> >
> > Lifespan is not limited:
> > http://www.src.uchicago.edu/~gavr1/
>
> Are you actually claiming that immortality is possible? If so that claim
> is well hidden in your site.
Try these links:
http://www.src.uchicago.edu/~gavr1/Actuary-paper.pdf
http://www.src.uchicago.edu/~gavr1/DYue.html
http://www.src.uchicago.edu/~gavr1/DBuettner.html
http://www.src.uchicago.edu/~gavr1/Interview.html
Hope it helps.
Philip Preston
Peter H.M. Brooks wrote in message ...
>
>I think that there are some contributed freeware programs about that
>simulate flockings - one would make a good screen saver, and it would be
>fun to tweak the rules and see how the results change.
>
>Maybe part of the mesmerising effect is our attempt to fit patterns to
>random movements.
Perhaps it has a similar effect on predators.
>Like most emergent properties it isn't certain if the shape of a flock of
>birds migrating or roosting is a genuine artifact or a pattern that we
>apply to make sense of our observation.
What does "genuine artefact" mean in this context? Is it to do with having
an identifiable function?
Regards,
Philip.
Jim Purdie
>
> "Jim Purdie" <jimp...@paradise.net.nz> wrote:
> > > I find all of this a bit sad. You are so convinced that you have the
> truth
> > > that you don't even try to understand another viewpoint. Ah well, you
> can
> > > take a horse to water...
> > Honestly, and seriously, I have tried very hard to understand another
> > viewpoint. I am quite prepared to accept that my inability to do so
arises
> > from a deficiency in myself. It does seem to me, though, that I could
make
> > the same accusation. And you are still being bloody patronising, for a
> > disembodied finger.
> >
> If I was patronising it wasn't intentional.
Do you often find your colleagues arguments "a bit sad"? Don't worry, I have
been long enough in the world not to be very sensitive. I have been attacked
by people who intended to belittle me, and have been amused rather than
belittled. I find you rather courteous, in your attitude to my sometimes
blundering attempts to discuss a subject in which I am not an expert, in
particular in not knowing the jargon.
>
> > My sticking point is that in talking of a direct mind-world interaction,
> you
> > seem to be considering the mind to be something outside the world, and
> that
> > you have not supplied any mechanism enabling this interaction to take
> place.
> > If our minds reach correspondence with the world, surely it must be by
> > receiving sense messages, interpreting them, and then testing them. This
> > process has been shaped by our evolution, but is also shaped by
> experience.
> > In our case it is shaped also by conscious thought, and by communication
> > with other minds.
> >
> I am not at all sure why you produce the above material. There is nothing
> out-of-the-world in anything I have claimed. If you say you know something
I
> can legitimately ask 'How do you know that?', and you will reply with
> whatever evidence warrants your knowledge. But if you say you "believe"
> something it not normally the case that I will ask 'How do you believe
> that?' unless I'm being sarcastic or something of that sort.
The more usual question would be "Why do you believe that?" The meaning is
very similar to "How do you know that?", except that "know" implies a direct
access of the outside world to the brain, while "believe" implies something
manufactured in the brain, such as, say, a religion. I personally do not
make much differentiation between "know", and "believe". I am certainly not
arguing that we convert belief into knowledge. I am arguing that any
"knowledge", in fact, has been processed by the brain, by that mass of
neurons and their connections, and is a material change in the brain. In
that, it does not differ at all from a "belief".
If that is true, the "model" I am talking about is a change in the
connections in the brain. In that sense, everything perceived by the brain
must have a model there. That "model' is all we know, since for me, the
"mind" which "knows" IS the brain. There is nothing else. So everything you
know or think, is a change in the way the brain is interconnected within
itself. Now the brain consists of about one hundred thousand million
neurons, and the number of interconnections is enormously greater, but it is
still much less than infinite. So I do not believe that it can ever have any
one-to-one correspondence to the real world. We do not know how it models
the world, and I am sure it does so in ways that are cleverer than we have
imagined to date, but it is still small compared to the manyfold complexity
and variety of the world. So it can only be an approximation to the real
world.
I have already given the example of a cricketer whose reflexes have a model
of the world, according to my usage. They receive an input consisting of a
message on the optic nerve, and without any conscious intellectualising,
send a message to the muscles. That model can be changed to a more useful
one, but only by lengthy practice. He also has an intellectual model of the
flight of the ball, which is exactly the same thing in the end, an
interaction of neurons, but which has been shaped by his experience, his
thoughts about his experience, and the thoughts of others about similar
experiences. If he sees a ball from a fast bowler approaching, it is
academic to argue about the certainty with which he knows it is coming. His
reflexes will take over, and he will hit a six, or get bowled, or suffer
appreciable pain. He may later go and sit in an armchair, and attempt to
refine his model, and endeavour at practice the next day to build the new
model into his reflexes. His success or pain the next time will tell him how
well he made his model correspond to the real world.
Note that most of that model was built in, genetically determined, and was
certainly not thought out while sitting in an armchair. But some of it was.
But I would claim that there must be a model, since what is doing the
thinking is an assemblage of neurons, and they have no resemblance
whatsoever to a cricket ball. I have already said to you that if you posit a
"mind", which you can't see or touch, but which does your thinking for you,
you are avoiding the issue, in the same way as our ancestors posited a
"soul", which did the hard bits for them.
Now all your alternative theories of knowledge are taking place well above
the hardware level. When you look at the hardware available, and what it
does, you must work at a level well below your theories. I cannot give what
happens in detail, but I am fairly sure that something like what I have
described is taking place.
>A knowledge
> claim is not a claim only about what is in your head - it is a claim about
a
> relation or correspondence between your ideas and the world and thus
> involves more than your head. I am denying the priority of belief over
> knowledge. And far from using belief to legitimise knowledge I am arguing
> that knowledge can provide a warrant for your belief (thus reversing the
> normal relation between knowledge and belief claimed in standard
> epistemology). Why do you believe that a particular person is a murderer?
> Well, you can reply, I know that he emerged stealthily from the room where
> the body was found carrying a bloody knife - and I know this because I saw
> him so emerge.
I am not claiming to use belief to legitimise knowledge. I am saying that
while things we "know" might be more probable than things we believe, they
can both be legitimised in the end ONLY by comparing what they tell us will
happen to what our senses tell us has happened. When the cricketer believes
a ball is approaching him at 150kph, he is unlikely to be mistaken, but it
is possible. His belief will be strongly confirmed if he feels the pain of
the ball hitting him. But note that the confirmation arrives via the same
route as the original belief, and is also theoretically subject to error.
For all practical purposes, though, if he suffers a broken cheek bone, his
original belief was confirmed. In theory, it could still be wrong.
> >
> So knowledge is the product of a system involving both your mind and the
> world. That is what I am claiming. You don't sit in an armchair, and then
> believe things, and then try to find some way of justifying your beliefs.
> Rather, you act, perceive, communicate and live in the world, and as a
> result, the combination of world and you, produces knowledge. Some of that
> knowledge you can use to legitimate your beliefs...
We are in complete agreement on that. what I have been saying is that
knowledge and belief are, in our heads, the same thing. I can see that we
use the words in slightly different ways.
>
> > If you believe that your mind exists outside the material world, I
believe
> > that you are acting as much by faith as is anyone who believes in a God.
> (I
> > accept that in the end, I am too) If you do not, I have totally
> > misunderstood you, but you have still not given any indication as to
what
> > the mechanism is by which our minds reach correspondence with the world.
>
> The mechanisms are many and various. Perhaps as Goldman believes, they can
> be considered to be of a causal nature (which would explain why one can't
> really choose to disbelieve what one knows), but which is troubling when
you
> think about universals ('All nuts give me allergies' - I am making a claim
> about nuts that I have had no causal interaction with, and even about nuts
> that have yet to grow on trees). At the present I prefer just to consider
it
> a systemic relation between mind and world.
I am an engineer, a nuts and bolts man. When I talk about "mechanism", I
mean something material, where I can watch the wheels go round, and what
pushes what. Which is no doubt why I am thinking at the hardware level.
Don't forget that when I say "model", I mean an interaction of neurons,
although I don't pretend to know how it works. I know enough to be pretty
sure it is there, though.
>
> > I believe, as I believe most biologists and neurologists do nowadays,
that
> our
> > minds, and the information they contain, consist of an organisation of
> the
> > neurons and their connections within our heads. That being the case, I
> > cannot see that it can ever reach any perfect correspondence with the
> world.
> > It is a different thing, and however powerful, is subject to error. It
can
> > and does, though, reach a correspondence which is sufficiently good for
> > practical purposes. So when you say the cat is on the mat, I believe
you,
> > though not absolutely, and am prepared to act on my belief.
> >
>
> Yes, but knowledge is more than neurons etc. When I ask you what you know
> about X murdering his wife you cannot produce a bunch of neurons and their
> connections. You cannot just produce allegations. You need to produce some
> warrant for your allegations as well - and that is a condition for having
> knowledge that exists in the world (i.e., an external condition), not in
> your neurons (an internal condition).
>
> Lance
>
We might be forever at cross purposes. For me, knowledge, or belief, can
only in the end exist in the neurons. I probably can't convince you that
whatever you think or believe must be an arrangement of neurons in your
head, because you just are not used to thinking of your body as a machine.
And yet you say that you don't believe in God, because you cannot see it or
touch it. There seems to be no evidence that our bodies are anything but
collections of atoms, organised superbly to carry out many functions that to
our ancestors seemed magic. There also seems no evidence that our minds are
in any way less material than our bodies.
Any evidence I produce for anything at all must exist as a pattern of
neurons in my head, and it cannot be evidence to you until it becomes a
pattern of neurons in your head. It may exist in the real world outside our
heads, but in that case it is not evidence. It is a lump of matter, say
blood of X's wife's blood type on the carpet. It is not evidence until it's
model in yours and my heads become part of a greater pattern, which is a
model of X murdering his wife. So I can arrange things so that the blood
sends sense messages to your brain, and I can arrange things so that a
written report that the blood is of the correct type sends sense messages to
your brain, and I can arrange it so that your ears send sense messages to
your brain conveying my theory that this is proof that X murdered his wife.
Until your neurons take up a pattern which is a model of X murdering his
wife, and then a pattern suggesting that this idea conforms to your
knowledge of the real world, I cannot be said to have proved that X murdered
his wife. And then we might both be wrong. Not quite as simple as you
thought, is it?
I admit freely that I cannot begin to tell you what the neuron patterns are
that correspond to these thoughts, but so long as I believe that there is
only
the material world, I must accept that they are there. And I still have not
seen this immaterial mind that you seem to postulate, if you cannot accept
that your brain is a thinking, knowing, machine.
Peter H.M. Brooks
"Philip Preston" <phi...@preston20.freeserve.co.uk> wrote in message
news:atluf6$h03$1...@newsg1.svr.pol.co.uk...
>
> Peter H.M. Brooks wrote in message ...
> >
> >I think that there are some contributed freeware programs about that
> >simulate flockings - one would make a good screen saver, and it would be
> >fun to tweak the rules and see how the results change.
> >
> >Maybe part of the mesmerising effect is our attempt to fit patterns to
> >random movements.
>
> Perhaps it has a similar effect on predators.
>
>
> >Like most emergent properties it isn't certain if the shape of a flock of
> >birds migrating or roosting is a genuine artifact or a pattern that we
> >apply to make sense of our observation.
>
> What does "genuine artefact" mean in this context? Is it to do with having
> an identifiable function?
>
chess board is not a function of the chess pieces, or even intrinsic to
their relative position (a mirror image of a pawn fork is not a fork at
all - if reflected about the pawn's rank) the fork is rather a pattern that
emerges from our visual interpretation of the rules of chess. So, in this
case, the fork that emerges is 'real' in that it can be communicated to
others and illustrated (as, of course, you can, as Hamlet teased Polonius,
communicate the shapes you see in clouds - or the scenes you 'see' in the
fire). However it is not true that 'weaselness' is an emergent property of
certain clouds in any 'real' sense. Rather we take the random shapes of
clouds and provide an spurious interpretation of them - so a certain
pointiness in a cloud could, maybe reliably if a photograph of it were kept,
be seen as leading to the weasel interpretation, but this is not a part of
the nature of clouds, but part of the nature of our perception.
Jim Purdie
Jim Purdie <jimp...@paradise.net.nz> wrote in message
news:MBwL9.1678$j94.3...@news02.tsnz.net...
>
> Lance <Lanc...@worldonline.co.za> wrote in message
> news:atkrrc$rj8$1...@ctb-nnrp2.saix.net...
> >
>
> I admit freely that I cannot begin to tell you what the neuron patterns
are
> that correspond to these thoughts, but so long as I believe that there is
> only
> the material world, I must accept that they are there. And I still have
not
> seen this immaterial mind that you seem to postulate, if you cannot accept
> that your brain is a thinking, knowing, machine.
>
>
To commit a terrible sin, and reply to my own post, or at least add to it.
We not only have a model of the world in our heads, in some circumstances it
over-rides the sense messages it gets from the outside world, and we see not
what is sending those messages, but what we expect to see. In other words,
our own model. I believe that is very well recognised by psychologists.
Note also my use of the word "believe" instead of "know", partly because,
without access to a university library, I cannot produce confirmation of my
statement, and partly because it is less confrontational. It means much the
same. Whether I say "know", or "believe", I cannot guarantee absolute
correspondence with the outside world, but for me, the probability of
correspondence should be greater when I say "I know". I tend to avoid "I
know".
Jim Purdie
Peter Ashby
"Peter H.M. Brooks" <pe...@new.co.za> wrote:
> > Indeed, but of such things are many long discussions into the evening at
> > science conferences made. We have just had our floor solstice party, and
> > I spent much of the latter part talking evolution with a prokaryote
> > evolutionary genetecist. Despite our very different perspectives we had
> > much to talk about.
> >
> It's a little early for the solstice, isn't it? I thought that it was on the
> 21st/22nd December. Still the days are certainly drawing out here.
Well, after much discussion about who would and would not be here
yesterday was deemed the best compromise. It also doubled as the above
genetecist's leaving party for eg. He is off to the Netherlands today.
Anyway, as the song says 'tis the season to be jolly'. I managed to get
just jolly last night instead of completely pissed. The experience which
is supposed to come with age finally seems to be useful ;-)
> I'd have thought that the sex of the genetecist might possibly be a factor.
>
Not when discussing science. IIRC we did stray briefly onto humans but
only as an illustration of a general point. What was interesting was the
number of examples of the same sort of principle being applicable
between prokaryote and eukaryote evolution. Oh yes and we tried to
design the universal anti prokaryote drug. But mitochondria and lateral
transfer stimied us, as well as the sheer diversity of the prokaryotic
world. So sadly we didn't have reason to form a biotech startup there
and then, still today's another day.....
Peter Ashby
laga...@midway.uchicago.edu (Leonid Gavrilov) wrote:
> Peter Ashby <p.r....@MAPS.dundee.ac.uk> wrote in message
> news:<p.r.ashby-ECD51...@dux.dundee.ac.uk>...
> > In article <9259eb2.02121...@posting.google.com>,
> > laga...@midway.uchicago.edu (Leonid Gavrilov) wrote:
> >
> > > "Peter H.M. Brooks" <pe...@new.co.za> wrote in message
> > > news:<atghnn$ira$1...@ctb-nnrp2.saix.net>...
> > > > You are right to put it in parentheses. Certain knowledge of logical
> > > > and
> > > > mathematical truths is possible. Pretty certain knowledge, like the
> > > > limited
> > > > lifespan...
> > >
> > > Lifespan is not limited:
> > > http://www.src.uchicago.edu/~gavr1/
> >
> > Are you actually claiming that immortality is possible? If so that claim
> > is well hidden in your site.
>
> Try these links:
>
> http://www.src.uchicago.edu/~gavr1/Actuary-paper.pdf
No, immortality is not claimed in this paper. No data suggesting its
possibility is presented either.
> http://www.src.uchicago.edu/~gavr1/DYue.html
Okay, here we have the extrapolation of a hypothetical law to infinity.
However neither the theory or the real data approached the hypothesis so
this does not constitute a claim for immortality either.
> http://www.src.uchicago.edu/~gavr1/DBuettner.html
>
There seems to be an implicit claim here that an extreme extrapolation
of the data in Figure 1 might tend to being flat. However the age range
on the x-axis is far too small to even imply that conclusion. So this
isn't a credible claim for immortality being possible either.
> http://www.src.uchicago.edu/~gavr1/Interview.html
So here we do have a claim that human life can be immortal, though a
rather soft claim at that. However from the article this again seems to
be based on extreme extrapolations and some over hyped c. elegans work.
> Hope it helps.
Not really, you seem above to have used the term 'not limited' rather
loosely. Your work cited above would indicate that we do not know where
the limits might be, but to leap from that to 'not limited' is too big a
leap.
kames.smiths
>
> "kames.smiths" <kames....@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> > It seems to me that the Gettier examples are intended to show that
you
> > can hold a belief that is justified and true, which nevertheless
isn't
> > knowledge - because despite the apparent soundness of your
thinking,
> > you have only managed to reach the right conclusion for the wrong
> > reasons. My objection is that for a belief to be justified it must
be
> > based on correct reasoning, not on apparently sound reasoning.
> >
> Well, people like Williamson and Goldman have turned the argument
round and
> simply deny that knowledge is any form of belief, or that belief has
any
> priority over knowledge.
Traditionally concepts of belief and of knowledge have often been
linked, but I can see why a theorist might want to try a different
approach. Knowledge usually seems to be viewed as some sort of
correspondence between a person (or some other organism) and his
environment, and from an evolutionary perspective knowledge can be
regarded as an adaptation.
An adaptation is a change in the organism which has survived because
it 'worked', because it was useful. This
seems comparable to William James' formulation of truth as a dynamic
rather than a static entity - if an idea 'works' it is true, and if
it is true it 'works'.
> >
> > I can see the value of Goldman's approach, but I would have
thought
> > that he and Descartes were dealing with rather different problems.
> Well thge problems of epsitemology are still about evidence and
> justification - but the strating point is knowledge not belief, and
that
> gives quite a different take on these issues.
At the human level adaptation becomes more complicated. It seems a
person forms mental representations of his environment to help him
adapt to it, apparently achieving this by forming concepts and linking
them together in the form of propositions. Perhaps it doesn't matter
too much whether we regard propositions such as "lions are dangerous"
as items of knowledge or as beliefs?
Dave Smith
kames.smiths
> Who said anything about pain not being real - which is what I think
you are
> thinking of? Illusion doesn't mean 'not real' - it means that you
have an
> experience but are mistaken about its meaning. The person with
phantom limb
> pain has pain - but is quite wrong in attributing it to the small
toe on his
> missing foot.
I introduced the example of pain in response to your discussion of
what I think you termed Guaranteed Epistemic Access. I wondered
whether the experience of pain might be an example of GEA - it would
be odd to say 'I think I am in agony, but I might be wrong'.
A host of philosophers - from Descartes and the British Empiricists to
Russell and Ayer - have looked for a starting point for their
construction of an empirical theory of knowledge, and they have
decided to begin with basic sensations/impressions/sense data, since
they have regarded these as not requiring validation. This is not to
say, of course, that they held that perceptions, memories and thoughts
inferred and constructed from these basic data could be relied on
without question. If there is no GEA to any experience, then it is
difficult to know where to start.
Generally, we accept that a person knows (has epistemic access to)
what he believes. If I give my views on a topic in this newsgroup, you
are not likely to tell me that I am mistaken in thinking they are my
views, though of course you might consider my views wrong or muddled.
Dave Smith
kames.smiths
> > Have you a very simple example of a logical or mathematical truth
> > which we can consider?
> >
> Lets try 1=1. Of course this identity need not be expressed in the
same
> symbols I est I might do in Latin.
I am already struggling. I would have thought 1=1 claims numerical
equivalence, whereas 1 is1 claims identity.
Perhaps what is being stated is an instance of a rule of numerical
invariance? When we notice quantity as a feature of our environment,
it may often be stable. Throughout our lives we are likely to have two
arms and two eyes, and I have read that in primitive languages the
word for familiar objects like these are sometimes used to denote a
number as well (the word for hand might double-up as the word for
five, for instance). The idea of a number staying the same would be
important for herdsmen and traders - they might want to know that they
still had thirty sheep, or that a case despatched containing 50 pots
still contained that number on arrival.
If I were a mathematician, I might want to make it clear that the
feature of the environment I was interested in was quantity - whether
it's seven apples or seven bananas, 7=7. What's more, the stated
quantity mustn't be allowed to mysteriously change without being
noted. If you have eight pots and one is broken, you wouldn't record
this as 8=7 but as 8-1=7.
All very speculative, I know, but my main claim would be that
mathematics would seem to be rooted in our understanding of the
everyday world - it isn't conducted in an entirely separate realm,
although it may seem like that to an accomplished mathematician.
Dave Smith
Lance
"Jim Purdie" <jimp...@paradise.net.nz> wrote:
> We might be forever at cross purposes. For me, knowledge, or belief, can
> only in the end exist in the neurons. I probably can't convince you that
> whatever you think or believe must be an arrangement of neurons in your
> head, because you just are not used to thinking of your body as a machine.
> And yet you say that you don't believe in God, because you cannot see it
or
> touch it. There seems to be no evidence that our bodies are anything but
> collections of atoms, organised superbly to carry out many functions that
to
> our ancestors seemed magic. There also seems no evidence that our minds
are
> in any way less material than our bodies.
>
Yeah - I've had enough. I'm obviously not able to present the material in a
way that makes sense to you. If you want to explore views other than your
own try looking at:
Timothy Williamson, "Knowledge and its limits". Oxford University Press,
2000.
I should warn you that it is quite densely written, and that the author
freely uses logical notation (including modal logic) - perhaps because he is
a professor of Logic at Edinburgh university.
(At some points Williamson's obsession with logic struck me as absurd. For
example he derives correlation coefficients from first principles using
purely logical notation - see his appendix 1).
Lance
Lance
"kames.smiths" <kames....@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> I introduced the example of pain in response to your discussion of
> what I think you termed Guaranteed Epistemic Access. I wondered
> whether the experience of pain might be an example of GEA - it would
> be odd to say 'I think I am in agony, but I might be wrong'.
>
> A host of philosophers - from Descartes and the British Empiricists to
> Russell and Ayer - have looked for a starting point for their
> construction of an empirical theory of knowledge, and they have
> decided to begin with basic sensations/impressions/sense data, since
> they have regarded these as not requiring validation. This is not to
> say, of course, that they held that perceptions, memories and thoughts
> inferred and constructed from these basic data could be relied on
> without question. If there is no GEA to any experience, then it is
> difficult to know where to start.
>
> Generally, we accept that a person knows (has epistemic access to)
> what he believes. If I give my views on a topic in this newsgroup, you
> are not likely to tell me that I am mistaken in thinking they are my
> views, though of course you might consider my views wrong or muddled.
>
really are. The effect of fashion and the like are strong. If you were young
and impressionable and brought up in the Soviet Union you would be likely to
express views that you had heard all around you. And you might do so without
much reflection. But deep down your view might really be different. Peter A.
was suggesting that religion might have a genetic component. Many studies of
values from across the world reveal much the same set of dimensions when
factor analysed - it would not surprise me if it should be found that there
is a genetic component to such polarities as conservative - liberal.
(Notice - I am not talking particular political parties here: a conservative
is someone who starts his moral thinking from his family and community and
who is inclined to think 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it'; a liberal is
much more inclined to think in terms of larger principles and tends to
welcome and enjoy change). Someone who is essentially conservative might for
example learn the language of liberalism and spout it without much thought,
only realising his true leanings when hard decisions have to be made. Many
of us have such moments of self-discovery.
Lance
Lance
"Jim Purdie" <jimp...@paradise.net.nz> wrote:
> To commit a terrible sin, and reply to my own post, or at least add to it.
> We not only have a model of the world in our heads, in some circumstances
it
> over-rides the sense messages it gets from the outside world, and we see
not
> what is sending those messages, but what we expect to see. In other words,
> our own model. I believe that is very well recognised by psychologists.
>
> Note also my use of the word "believe" instead of "know", partly because,
> without access to a university library, I cannot produce confirmation of
my
> statement, and partly because it is less confrontational. It means much
the
> same. Whether I say "know", or "believe", I cannot guarantee absolute
> correspondence with the outside world, but for me, the probability of
> correspondence should be greater when I say "I know". I tend to avoid "I
> know".
>
belief as different from knowledge, and the two words have acquired
technical meanings within these traditions.
Lance
Lance
will also recommend Tomothy Williamson's book (Knowledge and its limits) to
you.
Lance
Philip Preston
Peter H.M. Brooks wrote in message ...
>
>"Philip Preston" <phi...@preston20.freeserve.co.uk> wrote in message
>news:atluf6$h03$1...@newsg1.svr.pol.co.uk...
>>
>> Peter H.M. Brooks wrote in message ...
>> >
>> >I think that there are some contributed freeware programs about that
>> >simulate flockings - one would make a good screen saver, and it would be
>> >fun to tweak the rules and see how the results change.
>> >
>> >Maybe part of the mesmerising effect is our attempt to fit patterns to
>> >random movements.
>>
>> Perhaps it has a similar effect on predators.
>>
>Certainly - like the jagged flight of the butterfly.
>>
>> >Like most emergent properties it isn't certain if the shape of a flock
>> >of
>> >birds migrating or roosting is a genuine artifact or a pattern that we
>> >apply to make sense of our observation.
>>
>> What does "genuine artefact" mean in this context? Is it to do with
>> having an identifiable function?
>>
>That is indeed the question! No, it isn't just function. A fork seen on a
>chess board is not a function of the chess pieces,
You seem to have misunderstood my question. It was about *having* a
function, not being one. I was thinking of a function that confers
evolutionary advantage so it's only relevant to living things. It doesn't
apply to emergent properties in general.
> or even intrinsic to
>their relative position (a mirror image of a pawn fork is not a fork at
>all - if reflected about the pawn's rank) the fork is rather a pattern that
>emerges from our visual interpretation of the rules of chess. So, in this
>case, the fork that emerges is 'real' in that it can be communicated to
>others and illustrated (as, of course, you can, as Hamlet teased Polonius,
>communicate the shapes you see in clouds - or the scenes you 'see' in the
>fire). However it is not true that 'weaselness' is an emergent property of
>certain clouds in any 'real' sense. Rather we take the random shapes of
>clouds and provide an spurious interpretation of them - so a certain
>pointiness in a cloud could, maybe reliably if a photograph of it were
>kept,
>be seen as leading to the weasel interpretation, but this is not a part of
>the nature of clouds, but part of the nature of our perception.
While it might make sense to dichotomize between the nature of
inanimate things like clouds and the nature of our perception, the situation
is not so clear cut with living things. As I suggested earlier the nature of
our perception might have things in common with the nature of the perception
of predators which in turn may influence the nature of the of their prey, so
it is quite possible for something to be part of the nature flocks as well
as part of the nature of our perception.
But what got me started on this was baulking at the phrase "genuine
artefact", which doesn't make much sense to me in the context you used it.
Can you put what you meant by it into other words?
Regards,
Philip.
Ron Peterson
> I expect I am unwise to try to discuss this with someone who has
> actually studied mathematics and logic, since I may soon be out of my
> depth, but I would question whether logical and mathematical ideas
> could be derived without prior experience of the external world. It
> seems to me that symbols and rules are abstractions that mean nothing
> without some sort of empirical underpinning.
But, that is precisely what mathematics and logic are. Symbols and rules
that have no direct relevence to the real(external) world.
Ron