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Reference and identity

#1
Magical Realist Offline
I was thinking about how we talk about things with such certainty. Many things we haven't even seen before, like that new planet they feel sure is on the edge of our solar system. How does language get to do this--to refer to a thing which correlates to no accurate image in our heads? The planet doesn't even have a name yet. How can we be sure we are talking about it then? What is the placeholder for its identity when it has no image or name attached to it? We assume we ARE referring to it vaguely as that "moving planet out there". But what if there are other planets moving around out there too? How do we know we meant this one planet as opposed to another? Language assigns self-identical being-- grammatical objectivity--to things in order to say things about them and describe them. But let us not confuse this sort of referrability with words with physical reality. Unless language has some innate mystical power to make real things we have never experienced or named yet. There's the "it" of speaking, an abstraction or variable of propositions. And then there is the thing in itself, which no amount of speaking can ever bring into immediate conscious presence.
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#2
elte Offline
I guess that the astronomers' knowledge makes it most likely to be a planet, yet they could possibly be mistaken somehow, yet it would be really strange if it turned out to be a black hole.  I wonder if a black hole as low in mass as would fit the observations could even exist without vanishing.
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#3
C C Offline
(Feb 4, 2016 08:57 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [...] But let us not confuse this sort of referrability with words with physical reality. Unless language has some innate mystical power to make real things we have never experienced or named yet. There's the "it" of speaking, an abstraction or variable of propositions. And then there is the thing in itself, which no amount of speaking can ever bring into immediate conscious presence.


Language does seem to create a parallel, mutable "story" which doesn't always jibe with the "story" first exhibited by sensations and feelings. Kind of oscillating from significant periods of good agreement with the basic empirical saga to brief, speculative romps and predictive episodes of wandering around in its own conceptual terrain. In the course of which language activity can actually anticipate (at times) what the other will yield in the future, discovery-wise.

We've got at least two representational systems: The extrospective / introspective sensory one with its spatiotemporal experiences; and the language one, arguably nested within the other (as far as "shown evidence" of its existence or shown awareness of it transpiring goes). The latter is thereby taken to be lower in hierarchy and even more representationally indirect, since it describes the former rather than the supposed unadulterated source of both (a thought and perception independent world or provenance).

Yet language has its own rules / relationships, and in a broad sense (taken to include abstract-sign systems) thus mediates reason and formulaic thinking slash processes (especially conclusion generation). It kind of can become its own semi-closed domain, an intellectual domain, which a disembodied AI like Watson exemplifies (its earliest version anyway). Though Watson could formidably learn and progress to be more accurate in its responses to questions, it only understood the "objects" of its reality (nouns and verbs) in terms of semantic relationships to more words and their definitions. A circular, self-referencing realm (like a dictionary cosmos devoid of pictures) which it could not escape in terms of attaching phenomenal or material experiences to those symbols and their lawful manipulations.
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#4
Magical Realist Offline
Quote:It kind of can become its own semi-closed domain, an intellectual domain, which a disembodied AI like Watson exemplifies (its earliest version anyway). Though Watson could formidably learn and progress to be more accurate in its responses to questions, it only understood the "objects" of its reality (nouns and verbs) in terms of semantic relationships to more words and their definitions. A circular, self-referencing realm (like a dictionary cosmos devoid of pictures) which it could not escape in terms of attaching phenomenal or material experiences to those symbols and their lawful manipulations.

True in both the semantic and logic-based senses--of a self-contained cognitive program completely cut off from sentience to physical reality. Words in the end refer to and are defined only by other words and the implicit rules of intertextuality. How does language transcend itself to pertain to the perceptual? How does the matrix of endlessly iterating words and statements "unword" itself enough to become representative of objectively experienced things? Indeed, how does the spatio-temporal perceptual construct overlay and fit over the template of semantic informational structure?
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#5
C C Offline
(Feb 6, 2016 12:02 AM)Magical Realist Wrote: True in both the semantic and logic-based senses--of a self-contained cognitive program completely cut off from sentience to physical reality. Words in the end refer and are defined only by other words and the implicit rules of intertextuality. How does language transcend itself to pertain to the perceptual? How does the matrix of endlessly iterating words and statements "unword" itself enough to become representative of objectively experienced things? Indeed, how does the spatio-temporal perceptual construct overlay and fit over the template of semantic informational structure?


Embodied sapience (like that of humans) overcomes the symbol grounding problem by having sensory systems that deal with a non-abstract environment (of physical phenomena). Which in the course of that information being stored in memory, also provides fodder for the play of introspective events. The latter representational method then being coupled with the former. But evolution-wise, the empirical apparatus of biological entities was probably first and the rational apparatus second (the opposite of the order in artificial intelligence development). [With animals like ravens, creative intellect may be mediated by byte-devouring visual experiences of the original phenomena rather than the economic aural signals of their limited "proto-language".]

There's still the challenge of how either class of representational objects (perceptual and linguistic) becomes "shown" as various qualitative characteristics which don't resemble the usually hidden electrical or whatever brand of energy patterns. But at least the integration of the two as distinct kinds of data mediation slash processing is there in brains and any AIs making the transition to embodiment or at least having sensory systems (like HAL).
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#6
C C Offline
(Feb 4, 2016 08:57 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: I was thinking about how we talk about things with such certainty. Many things we haven't even seen before, like that new planet they feel sure is on the edge of our solar system.

Science is definitely no longer just about empirical affairs, if it was ever (back in its most primitive, early days of natural philosophy) the restricted case of simply cataloging particular objects and events minus drawing deep inductions about them. Today its waters are brimming with the abstractions of rationalist activity. Amazing how if you're an exception to some generalization that has been outputted from statistical data, there are scientism-like disciples which will demand that you must still conform to a generic conception as endorsed by an applicable authority. As if one is literally an extrapolated human living in that conclusion's generalized version of the world rather than being an item of sense, definite location, and contingency.

For instance: I once mentioned on a board that I immediately start to dream even during brief spans of merely dozing-off for a couple of minutes. I was quickly surrounded by protests that I was mistaken / deluded; that no one routinely or always dreams in NREM sleep as opposed to late or later stage REM sleep. That degree of dogmatism and global-thinking was surprising in a science group (granted, it was back in the days when usenet still mattered, but it was a moderated group -- not one freely infested by the creatures now inhabiting the ruins of usenet).

Anyway, it just points out that there are times when one must go by personal experience rather than robotically abiding by universal standards, beliefs and prescriptions of _x_ institution about what is and what isn't, what ought and what ought not. Methodological procedures and formulaic thought processes, by their very nature of yielding many determinations that go beyond one's local and immediate situation, are good guides and lawsuit[*] avoiders rather than absolute truth producers. [And depending upon any constant revisions ahead, perhaps just "good guides" for the current era.]

- - - - - - -

[*] "Your team didn't design and construct that building according to the proper engineering standards. That's why it collapsed."

"Your casual conversations with other employees on this office floor seem to sport antiquated terms and ideas which are politically offensive to millennials. That's why we are firing you."
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