I like the classification {conviction, {insight, delusion}}. But I don't quite know *who*
you mean when you say "the other side of this position". It seems like you mean
the collection of people (perhaps Dave's one of them) who believe that mystically/locally
sourced models/thoughts are or can be as true as mechanically/algorithmically sourced
models/thoughts. So I'll run with that. I realize there may be a word choice problem
there. But that's as best as I can frame it.
The people who invest in the results of religious belief, meditation,
psychedelics, the qualia of the hard problem, etc. seem to attribute veracity
to those intra-person models that the people who invest in inter-personal,
externalized scripts, recipes, documents, artifacts, methods, etc. do not.
If that's the distinction, then it wouldn't be hard to rephrase Dave's
objection as: potential insight is *never* well-described by externalized
representations of it. You can't write it down. But you can *grok* it ... a bit
like obscenity I guess. It's not a statement that, say, robots/computers will
never be able to *have* insights (or delusions), only that if/when such a
creature emerges, they TOO will not be able to externalize their insights well.
And if my rephrasing of the objection works, then it seems to me like it's just
a restatement of von Neumann's inference from Gödel, that a perfect description
of any concrete object must be infinitely long. Then, what distinguishes the 2
sides are {those who think finite descriptions are, say 80/20, good enough} vs
{those who don't}, a corollary being that there's a thresholding of the ε slop.
How close is close enough? Language isn't quite enough. But perhaps it would be
if it were augmented in some way? With what?
My answer is "training data", "training time", and the accretion structure that
results from training. You can't *program* an intelligent thing. But you can *grow* an intelligent
thing.
On 5/17/22 13:10, David Eric Smith wrote:
I thought, Glen, that Marcus’s request for “scrutiny” was after a (modestly)
different point.
Marcus, you seem to be able to distill things that can bother me for years,
without my being able to articulate them.
This notion of fervor-as-truth is what has been bothering me too. I have
struggled to find the common-language words that get closest to it. I
understand why the feeling / thinking dichotomy exists in English
lexicaliztation, but it is so ancient and tropified that I am reluctant to
inherit all its baggage.
Words I could come up with:
1. Conviction. This is somehow a “feeling” word. But it is particularly the
“feeling” that whatever you are currently about is profoundly “real” or “right”
or (I would say at the end, only) “satisfying”.
Now historically, conviction seems to have been a measure of truth for many.
For those (and I am in conversation with some) who think medieval mysticism was
a far greater achievement than the enlightenment — and after the world
collapses back into sheer brute predation, we will return to the age when that
is the highest human attainment — that is the profound “apprehension of
reality” that mere “thinking” has missed. There is a fervor among the
religious, the mystically inclined, the psychedelists, and the “contemplatives”
(their own term; I tend to lump them with the religious, just parting from the
power-politics accretions of the latter), that seems to me to mainly be
anchored in this view.
But now we need to get to why the enlightenment seemed necessary to some, from
a cultural background in mysticism. There seem to be more than one kind of
conviction.
2a. Delusion. This is the conviction of the schizophrenics, who by some
argument, we want to say are not attached to “the real reality”, but who would
strongly protest otherwise (again, I have conversations in which this has
happened).
2b. “Insight”, for lack of a better word. This could be sub-categorized, but
it has something to do with having ideas that might tend to pan out in a
Peircian sense, but more importantly, that are somehow anchored to the world in
such a way that it is not entirely accidental that they should pan out.
The reason we wanted to not leave the matter at the level of conviction, is
that it doesn’t obviously give us a way to distinguish the cases 2a and 2b,
whereas there seem to be other approaches that help.
Now, I have been in these discussions for enough years to know that the ones on
the other side of this position can argue, essentially forever, why what I have
just said is not only wrong, but so missing the point that it is “not even
wrong”. And they are professional debaters, so the one thing they and I seem
able to agree on is that we can demonstrate that language on its own is never
strong enough to settle any skew in points of view. It just goes in circles
forever, with no productive impact on either side. They will go on about how
mysticism had its intersubjectivity just like science has, so there is no
difference there. And that the mystics were always the smartest of people in
their time, and the various “wisdom traditions” have been accumulating cultural
memory for millennia, so they _must_ have much more of truth about them than
any mere single person will have in a working argument, so one should grant the
argument from authority. Etc.
Given, then, that we all know what it is like to feel states of conviction, but
we also routinely make distinctions between patterns that we think are delusion
and patterns that we think are insightful (or plausibly so), what to do? It
seems to me it would be silly to deny that humans have this dimensionality of
experience, or to assert that in any adequate sense we can encapsulate the
whole spectrum into either one of its poles. But I also strongly agree with
and appreciate Glen’s framing, which seems very clean and valid, that merely
asserting incompleteness doesn’t really move any fuller understanding forward.
Eric
On May 18, 2022, at 2:01 AM, glen <[email protected]> wrote:
I think Roger Penrose and Robert Rosen are fairly good examples of how to go about making
the objection. Gerald Edelman comes close, too, with "reentrant" networks
(which lead to Tononi's IIT). There are lots of others in various domains.
The idea being that you best formulate your objection to the status quo by the
painstaking work of constructing your counter example. The relatively blank
accusation of inadequacy isn't good enough because your objection is too easily
written off with a parade of whataboutist other things. What about gpt3? What about
paraconsistent logics? What about <fill in your own obscure thing>? Both
Penrose's and Rosen's formulations have fallen out of favor. But that's a good thing.
They did the work that promoted serious criticism. Penrose's and Rosen's good
criticism begat good criticism. (Sure, both were ridiculed by the peanut gallery. But
even sneers from the peanut gallery demonstrate engagement.)
It's not clear to me how to formulate a good criticism without first pretending
[⛧] you believe what you intend to criticize. Part of the problem with
requiring scrutiny into the objector is that the necessary pretension invites
accusations of hypocrisy and ad hominem. E.g. it's irrelevant whether Rosen was
actually facile with metamath or category theory. So, scrutiny into the
objector isn't the issue. But it's close. We do need to see enough to help the
objector decide her case. What was Rosen *trying* to do? Why did he think
category theory would help? Etc. Robert resisted his cult following to some
extent. His daughter, unfortunately, didn't resist it very well, despite her
good intentions. Like Peirce, though, Rosen got too hung up on arguing about
words, facilitating that cultish air.
[⛧] "Pretending" isn't the best word, here. I mean something more like "suspending disbelief" or "steelmanning". But
I'm using "pretend" because it evokes the *play* we do, especially as children. When Renee's granddaughter pretends her Barbie dolls are
real people, she's not "faking it", "posturing", "suspending disbelief", or anything of the sort. She's actually inside
the domain, living inside the pretension.
On 5/17/22 09:18, Marcus Daniels wrote:
A problem I have with accepting Dave’s view is that it allows the person making
a claim to not be subject to scrutiny, Because, well, they feel that way so it
must be true. That there is some point at which precision impedes accuracy.
It is a recipe for the proliferation of cult leaders.
On May 17, 2022, at 7:55 AM, glen <[email protected]> wrote:
Right. This is why the wet monkey theory (along with many other false but useful for manipulation heuristics) fails to
capture anything important about "groupthink". We can re-orient Dave's no-largest-model objection toward any
just-so manipulative rhetoric. Of course the choice of language biases the description written in it! Sheesh. And, yes,
it's important to make that clear to any novice entering whatever domain. Pluralism (or parallax) of languages is one
mitigation tactic. But another common one is basic error-checking, the social process of saying out loud your
construction and listening as others criticize, deconstruct, or outright ridicule it. Spend too much time stewing in
your own juices and your constructs become private. Spend too much time socializing with those who agree and your
constructs become groupthink. Nick likes to say he's grateful for anyone who reads his writing. But the actual good
faith action is to criticize it. Reading it is like nodding politely with the occasional "ah",
"yes", "uh-huh" while someone tells you their boring story. Engagement is the real objective.
Reading is a mere means to that end. And disagreement is demonstrative engagement.
But [dis]agreement isn't well-covered by "contrarian", "oppositional", or "adversarial". Dualism is
just one form of foundationalism. Monism < dualism < trialism < quadrialism < ?. 4 forces? 17 objects? 3 types of
object? Who cares? Those particular numbers are schematic in the larger discipline of disagreement. The foundation is important.
But getting hung up on the particular number/value misses the forest for the trees. Arguing over the number of things in the
foundation is akin to arguing about the meanings of words. In the spirit of "not even wrong", it's not even sophistry.
On 5/16/22 14:41, Marcus Daniels wrote:
Glen writes:
< Of course, we *could* be working our way into a fictitious corner. (E.g. the just-so story of
the wet monkey thing
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.patheos.com%2fblogs%2funreasonablefaith%2f2009%2f08%2fwet-monkey-theory%2f&c=E,1,-cHQRn1fLStevDlpWFP8gX5uCn2HIrbZusQ87TdMjT9lRW8vEYPCU_FULrOoR0o0XoEd-Y6N7FyOb4n6j1IFrpKXgy2jZyCquCkv9LHZ-KLfQA,,&typo=1>,
where all the kids who believe in the ability of formalism(s) to capture the world are simply
thinking inside the box.) But what's the likelihood of that? I claim vanishingly small. >
Using the Standard Model, applied physicists and engineers build careers and do
useful work. Are they thinking in a box? Perhaps. But there are also
physicists who are obsessed with poking holes in it and generalizing it.
--
Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙
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