C CJul 25, 2016 11:14 PM (This post was last modified: Jul 25, 2016 11:16 PM by C C.)
(Jul 25, 2016 07:34 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: C C, can I ask you something else that's a little off topic? Do you think that my use of art is a vain attempt to fit in? Do you think that Socrates was right, that the artist is twice removed from the truth?
No, many (like MR seems to) take similar pit-stops with the Muses. As for art being even more distant from the "truth"...
"Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own--unaided by the describing activities of humans--cannot.” --Interview with Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty: I argue that when extended in a certain way they [Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey] let us see truth as, in Jame’s phrase, 'what it is better for us to believe,' rather than as 'the accurate representation of reality.' Or, to put the point less provocatively, they show us that the notion of 'accurate representation' is simply an automatic and empty compliment which we pay to those beliefs which are successful in helping us do what we want to do.
[...] But it is fruitless to ask whether the Greek language, or Greek economic conditions, or the idle fancy of some nameless pre-Socratic , is responsible for viewing this sort of knowledge as 'looking' at something [the mirror of nature] (rather than, say, rubbing up against it, or crushing it underfoot, or having sexual intercourse with it).--Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
Whereas science is a regulated investigation and tire-kicked description of a supposed "given" (the broadest of which ideas like reality or world signify), art is freedom of conceiving and representing the given. Even though specific instances of creative expression might reflect the characteristics or theme of a past, current or regional movement -- the overall pursuit is still a liberating from standard, familiar constructs (when not utilized to exemplify / reinforce those conventions).
Art also has one foot in prescription. It may provoke the viewer, reader, listener, smeller, feeler to deliberate on what confronts him/her: "Okay, so this is how _X_ is interpreting be-ing, life, etc. So what ought you to do about it? What sort of meaning, concerns, revelations, and goals fall out of that, if any, or tearing of the veil? Will you be slightly or greatly modified by it or wallow in the stark 'is of the situation or abstract something else from it or inject something higher upon it, or reshape it?" Or maybe the work already issues advice or direction or propaganda, rather than stirring it out of the subject.
Dennett is said to have once distinguished between himself and Richard Rorty by explaining that he wanted a constrained philosophy that scientists could appreciate. Whereas Rorty wanted to provide basis for the freedom of conception which artists enjoyed (or emulate such via his neo-pragmatism).
- - - - - The Given slash epistemological foundation - - - - -
Willem deVries: Antecedent to epistemology, Sellars’s treatment of semantics essentially constitutes a denial of what can be called a semantic given—the idea that some of our terms or concepts, independently of their occurrence in formal and material inferences, derive their meaning directly from confrontation with a particular (kind of) object or experience. Sellars is anti-foundationalist in his theories of concepts, knowledge, and truth.
Traditional epistemology assumed that knowledge is hierarchically structured. There must, it was believed, be some cognitive states in direct contact with reality that serve as a firm foundation on which the rest of our knowledge is built by various inferential methods.--Wilfrid Sellars, SEP
Eric M. Rubenstein: But empirical knowledge is possible only if there is ultimately a stratum of most basic knowledge, which in some way involves our making cognitive contact with the world. It is natural to think that this most basic contact with the world involves our having sensory experiences. We can know the world, ultimately, because in some manner the world reveals itself to us through sensation. Or better yet, the world gives itself to us, in a form we can understand. If it didn’t, it would be hard to understand how we ever know anything. For Descartes, and for centuries of philosophers since, the basic knowledge which forms the foundation of knowledge is just the knowledge of our own inner states, our own thoughts, feelings, and sensations that we have from being in sensory contact with the world.
As for these inner states themselves, we both have them and also know them just by being in sensory contact with the world. In short, sensing the world was held, from Descartes on, to be sufficient for the production of inner states which we in turn know about just because of that sensory contact. For instance, simply sensing a red patch would be sufficient for knowing that we are sensing a red patch. We may doubt whether there really is a red patch there (maybe it is blue and the lighting misleads us), but our knowledge of the sensation of a red patch itself is immediate, direct, and a result simply of that sensing. The knowledge that we gain is, again, knowledge of our own sensations or thoughts.
As plausible as this picture seems, Sellars takes issue with it, referring to it as the Myth of the Given: that there are such sensory episodes that by their mere occurrence give us knowledge of themselves, is a myth to be dispelled, one to be replaced by a better account of the nature of sensing, thinking, and knowing. Of course, our aim here isn’t to explore Sellars’ reasons for thinking such episodes are mythological, nor to pursue his views on the nature of knowledge. Instead, we’ll address only what Sellars thinks is missing in this traditional account of knowledge of our inner, private episodes. Doing so will help explain why, according to Sellars, knowledge of even our own private episodes is itself much more complicated than the tradition held. Paradoxically, however, though knowledge of our own inner states is more complicated, explaining how it is possible will make our knowledge of other peoples’ inner episodes less complicated, less vulnerable to skepticism than traditionally thought.
What then is required for knowledge of our own inner, private episodes, say knowledge that I’m having a sensation of a red triangle, if it isn’t just that I am sensing a red triangle? What else is required besides the actual sensation? In short, knowledge requires concepts, and since concepts are linguistic entities, we can say that knowledge requires a language. To know something as simple as that the patch is red requires an ability to classify that patch, and Sellars thinks the only resource for such rich categorization as adult humans are capable of comes from a public language. Knowledge, and in fact all awareness, according to Sellars, is a linguistic affair. There is no such thing, accordingly, as preconceptual awareness or prelinguistic awareness or knowledge. Sellars calls this the thesis of “Psychological Nominalism,” and it is at the heart of his epistemology and theory of mind. We don’t know the world just by sensing it. We don’t even know our own sensations just by having them. We need a language for any awareness, including of our own sensations.
Importantly, this also creates a serious problem. Remember that Sellars is sympathetic to the claim of First Person Authority (even if it is to be modified or revised in some manner). Sellars does think that we can know our own thoughts better than others can. But his Psychological Nominalism threatens this, and threatens our claim to be able to know our thoughts at all. Consider how we could ever come to be aware of our thoughts and the like in the first place. Relying on the mythical Given would have helped, for we would be aware of such episodes just by having them. But we’ve rejected that account.
Instead, any awareness, even of our own thoughts, requires the concept of that of which we are to be aware. So, to be aware of a private, inner episode requires the concept of a private, mental episode. But how can I have the concept of something which is in me in a way that you can’t see? I can’t get it by noticing my own private sensations (as we’ve seen, that presupposes we already have the concept and the source of the concept is now what is in question!). Nor can I get the concept of a private episode by noticing yours, for it is private to you. And of course, you can’t notice yours, nor mine either! How do we, or anyone for that matter, get the concept of something hidden, inner, and private, in the first place? (Compare this with becoming aware of something public: I can learn the concept, cow, by, for starters having you point cows out to me. But that is because we have common, shared access to that object, which isn’t the case for private episodes).
Sellars has now forced us to confront the difficult question of the source and nature of the concept of an inner episode. What is the status of that concept? And how do speakers of a language come to have it, given that possession of it seems to be a condition for anyone noticing their own private episodes?--Wilfrid Sellars: Philosophy of Mind, IEP
Wow, I'm impressed by both Stryder's and C C's well-thought-out replies. A math teacher said to me once, "What do you think I am? A machine that you can put coins in and extract information?" Yes, that's your job, right? Well, here, I simply submit a question, and bada bing, bada boom—food for thought is dispensed. Right on! I’ll read "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind". Thanks!
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Curiosity is an emotion. The desire for knowledge is an emotion.
Damasio: In everyday language we often use the terms interchangeably. This shows how closely connected emotions are with feelings. But for neuroscience, emotions are more or less the complex reactions the body has to certain stimuli. When we are afraid of something, our hearts begin to race, our mouths become dry, our skin turns pale, and our muscles contract. This emotional reaction occurs automatically and unconsciously. Feelings occur after we become aware in our brain of such physical changes; only then do we experience the feeling of fear.
MIND: So, then, feelings are formed by emotions?
Damasio: Yes. The brain is constantly receiving signals from the body, registering what is going on inside of us. It then processes the signals in neural maps, which it then compiles in the so-called somatosensory centers. Feelings occur when the maps are read and it becomes apparent that emotional changes have been recorded—as snapshots of our physical state, so to speak.
If I manage to find a solution to a complicated mathematical problem, that could make me happy too, even if nobody asked me to solve it and it does not have any concrete application in my life. It is a purely intellectual problem with no external cause, but solving it confers satisfaction.
What emotions could machines experience?
Even though many human emotions are beyond the range of machines due to their non-biological nature, some emotions could very well be felt by an artificial intelligence. These include, among others:
What emotions and feelings would machines not be able to experience?
The following emotions and feelings could not be wholly or faithfully experienced by an AI, even with a sensing robotic body, beyond mere implanted simulation.
Hunger, thirst, drunkenness, gastronomical enjoyment
Various feelings of sickness, such as nausea, indigestion, motion sickness, sea sickness, etc.
Sexual love, attachment, jealousy
Maternal/paternal instincts towards one’s own offspring
Fatigue, sleepiness, irritability
Dreams and associated creativity
In addition, machine emotions would run up against the following issues that would prevent them to feel and experience the world truly like humans.
Machines wouldn’t mature emotionally with age.
Machines don’t grow up and don’t go through puberty to pass from a relatively asexual childhood stage to a sexual adult stage
Machines cannot fall in love (+ associated emotions, behaviours and motivations) as they aren’t sexual beings
Being asexual, machines are genderless and therefore lack associated behaviour and emotions caused by male and female hormones.
Machines wouldn’t experience gut feelings (fear, love, intuition).
Machine emotions, intellect, psychology and sociability couldn’t vary with nutrition and microbiome, hormonal changes, or environmental factors like the weather.
It is not completely impossible to bypass these obstacles, but that would require to create a humanoid machine that not only possess human-like intellectual faculties, but also an artificial body that can eat and digest and with a digestive system connected to the central microprocessor in the same way as our vagus nerve is connected to our brain. That robot would also need a gender and a capacity to have sex and feel attracted to other humanoid robots or humans based on a predefined programming that serves as an alternative to a biological genome to create a sense of ‘sexual chemistry’ when matched with an individual with a compatible “genome”. It would necessitate artificial hormones to regulate its hunger, thirst, sexual appetite, homeostasis, and so on.
Although we lack the technology and in-depth knowledge of the human body to consider such an ambitious project any time soon, it could eventually become possible one day. One could wonder whether such a magnificent machine could still be called a machine, or simply an artificially made life being. I personally don’t think it should be called a machine at that point.
C CJul 26, 2016 06:43 PM (This post was last modified: Jul 26, 2016 06:47 PM by C C.)
(Jul 26, 2016 03:13 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: [...] Damasio: In everyday language we often use the terms interchangeably. This shows how closely connected emotions are with feelings. But for neuroscience, emotions are more or less the complex reactions the body has to certain stimuli. When we are afraid of something, our hearts begin to race, our mouths become dry, our skin turns pale, and our muscles contract. This emotional reaction occurs automatically and unconsciously. Feelings occur after we become aware in our brain of such physical changes; only then do we experience the feeling of fear.
MIND: So, then, feelings are formed by emotions?
Damasio: Yes. The brain is constantly receiving signals from the body, registering what is going on inside of us. It then processes the signals in neural maps, which it then compiles in the so-called somatosensory centers. Feelings occur when the maps are read and it becomes apparent that emotional changes have been recorded—as snapshots of our physical state, so to speak.
If I manage to find a solution to a complicated mathematical problem, that could make me happy too, even if nobody asked me to solve it and it does not have any concrete application in my life. It is a purely intellectual problem with no external cause, but solving it confers satisfaction.
What emotions could machines experience?
This focus on conscious experiences (of whichever particular stripe) takes us to the question of whether or not philosophical zombies are possible. Certainly robots engineered without any deliberate attempt to reproduce human bodily sensations, emotions, and visual, aural, tactile, etc manifestations for their perceptual systems would qualify in the loose respect of a p-zombie. But the original thought experiments arguably centered on even people who were physical duplicates of each other, differing only in the respect that one had experiences whereas the other didn't (though the outward behavior was still AS IF the latter did have them).
A term like "quale" (qualia plural) obscures the fact that its usage should actually be trying to indicate the "showing" capacity of qualitative properties rather than the type of the psychological content itself. IOW, the marvel is that matter could be able to "show" itself as anything at all, given that materialism is typically against panpsychism of even a primitive, atavistic or precursor variety. As Erwin Schrödinger once put it: "But it [the world] certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence. Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings-on in very special parts of this very world, namely on certain events that happen in a brain. That is an inordinately peculiar kind of implication, which prompts the question: What particular properties distinguish these brain processes and enable them to produce the manifestation? Can we guess which material processes have this power, which not? Or simple: What kind of material process is directly associated with consciousness?"--What is Life? Mind and Matter
[The adjective "phenomenal", for instance, that also crops up often in discussions about the hard problem, etymologically means items like "show forth", "of appearance", etc. Accordingly it's closer to hitting the nail on the head than qualia.]
But back to machines... With the addition of experiences, full embodiment, etc we've gone beyond tabletop AI to a machine that would be the functional equivalent of a human in all respects. Differing, again, only in terms of the substrate which physically realizes either's complex relational system of operation: Organic "stuff" versus technological "stuff".
Since even John Searle's biological naturalism isn't really prejudiced toward only a biological substrate having the power to conjure specialized mental features (as once believed by his critics), then we're seemingly left with POVs like David Chalmers' p-zombie argument as a means of denying the potential of robots / androids having experiences even when they're intentionally designed to generate such (which is currently unknown).
I feel that such arguments about experiences not being physical ultimately boil down to physics not attributing any officially recognized or non-speculative explanatory precursor to its stratum of forces and microscopic entities which could explain how manifestations emerge in a non-brute way (non-magical-like way). Whereas, in contrast, everything else in the biological realm seems both composition-wise and cause-wise reducible to physics (in terms of explaining what it arose from and what enables its abilities).
Put another way: Neural tissue utilizes and deals in the manipulation of electrochemical properties, and the latter lack anything being assigned to them in physics (that is not speculative or fringe) which would enable their organized patterns of activity to result in a "showing" of pain or showing of the odor of roses or a showing of the feeling of the texture of silk, etc. The opposite of non-consciousness is an absence of everything, which is accordingly what matter would normally be like to itself (and thus why materialism is usually deemed against panpsychism).
So technically the possibility of p-zombies, "experience being non-physical", etc can't be eliminated yet until, say, Christof Koch or somebody finally makes panexperientialism scientific. Which is probably going to be quite a while, since there's an inherent bias against even mitigated panpsychism and both philosophers and their scientist allies keep obscuring what the actual target of the "hard problem" is by babbling about "qualia" and "what it's like to be _X_" rather than something direct and to the point like Schrödinger's choice of "manifestation".
For the time being though, blindsight is arguably a partial and compromised instance of "zombie-ism" --confined strictly to vision -- which imperfectly indicates a zombie human would not behave exactly like a non-zombie. A person suffering from blindsight does not pretend that there is something being shown in the affected area of their sight even though they exhibit linguistic knowledge of the object (can identify it without confidence).
(Jul 26, 2016 06:43 PM)C C Wrote: But the original thought experiments arguably centered on even people who were physical duplicates of each other, differing only in the respect that one had experiences whereas the other didn't (though the outward behavior was still AS IF the latter did have them).
"We have one body, not two, not three." I, too, think that it can all be explained from a neurobiological standpoint.
C C Wrote:I feel that such arguments about experiences not being physical ultimately boil down to physics not attributing any officially recognized or non-speculative explanatory precursor to its stratum of forces and microscopic entities which could explain how manifestations emerge in a non-brute way (non-magical-like way). Whereas, in contrast, everything else in the biological realm seems both composition-wise and cause-wise reducible to physics (in terms of explaining what it arose from and what enables its abilities).
Neuroscience is starting to contribute.
"How can you have this reference point, this stability that is required to maintain the continuity of selves day after day?" And I thought about a solution to this problem. It's the following. We generate brain maps of the body's interior and use them as the reference for all other maps."—Antonio Damasio
So, let me tell you just a little bit about how I came to this.
I came to this because, if you're going to have a reference that we know as self -- the Me, the I in our own processing -- we need to have something that is stable, something that does not deviate much from day to day. Well it so happens that we have a singular body. We have one body, not two, not three. And so that is a beginning. There is just one reference point, which is the body. But then, of course, the body has many parts, and things grow at different rates, and they have different sizes and different people; however, not so with the interior. The things that have to do with what is known as our internal milieu -- for example, the whole management of the chemistry within our body are, in fact, extremely maintained day after day for one very good reason. If you deviate too much in the parameters that are close to the mid-line of that life-permitting survival range, you go into disease or death. So we have an in-built system within our own lives that ensures some kind of continuity. I like to call it an almost infinite sameness from day to day. Because if you don't have that sameness, physiologically, you're going to be sick or you're going to die. So that's one more element for this continuity.
And the final thing is that there is a very tight coupling between the regulations of our body within the brain and the body itself, unlike any other coupling. There is the brain stem in between the cerebral cortex and the spinal cord. And it is within that region that I'm going to highlight now that we have this housing of all the life-regulation devices of the body. This is so specific that, for example, if you look at the part that is covered in red in the upper part of the brain stem, if you damage that as a result of a stroke, for example, what you get is coma or vegetative state, which is a state, of course, in which your mind disappears, your consciousness disappears. What happens then actually is that you lose the grounding of the self, you have no longer access to any feeling of your own existence, and, in fact, there can be images going on, being formed in the cerebral cortex, except you don't know they're there. You have, in effect, lost consciousness when you have damage to that red section of the brain stem.
But if you consider the green part of the brain stem, nothing like that happens. It is that specific. So in that green component of the brain stem, if you damage it, and often it happens, what you get is complete paralysis, but your conscious mind is maintained. You feel, you know, you have a fully conscious mind that you can report very indirectly. This is a horrific condition. You don't want to see it. And people are, in fact, imprisoned within their own bodies, but they do have a mind. There was a very interesting film, one of the rare good films done about a situation like this, by Julian Schnabel some years ago about a patient that was in that condition.
The movie that he’s talking about is "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly". It’s a memoir by journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby. It describes what his life is like after suffering a massive stroke that left him with locked-in syndrome. It also details what his life was like before the stroke.
Edit Reason: addition
C C Wrote:But why should non-believers feel silly?
"If a robot acts appropriately and convincingly emotional, does it matter that the emotions aren’t genuine? The gut reaction is yes—no one likes being lied to. But if a robot can’t form the intent to lie, is emotional acting deceptive?
Emotions facilitate survival, and not just for humans. As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio says, "Too much emotion can hinder intelligent thought and behavior, however, too little emotion is even more problematic." Two Italian scientists developed robots with emotional circuits and found they were better at completing programmed tasks such as searching for food, escaping predators, and finding mates, leading them to conclude that emotional states make robots more fit for survival.
For now, robots’ emotional capabilities are in the hands of everyone who interacts with them. Our relations with robots determine their emotional potency. If we relate to robots socially, not to mention romantically or sexually, then their emotional capabilities are a reflection of us. If robots can learn emotions through experience, then we will be their emotional guides—both a comforting and a terrifying thought."
Holy cow, I had no idea. I'm a bit behind the times, I'm afraid.
"Emotions are states of an individual’s body and brain that allow the motivational decision mechanism of the individual to function more properly, that is, in ways that increase the individual’s survival and reproductive chances. The article describes five different simulated robots which, unlike current ‘‘emotional’’ robots, can be said to have emotions. The robots may need to eat and drink, eat and fly away from a predator, eat and find a mating partner, eat and take care of their offspring, or eat and rest in order to heal from physical damage. We show that adding a special emotional circuit to the neural network controlling the robots’ behavior leads to better motivational decisions, and therefore to higher fitness, and we describe how in many circumstances the robots endowed with an emotional circuit behave differently than those lacking the circuit."
Feelings, desires, and emotions that seem to be about or in response to something might be a kind kind of functional precursor to language. There's something cognitive about a lion feeling hunger upon sight of a zebra; or the latter feeling fear in response to former's gaze. A bit more than raw sensation in that meanings seem to be correlated to objects.
(Jul 30, 2016 09:17 PM)C C Wrote: Feelings, desires, and emotions that seem to be about or in response to something might be a kind kind of functional precursor to language. There's something cognitive about a lion feeling hunger upon sight of a zebra; or the latter feeling fear in response to former's gaze. A bit more than raw sensation in that meanings seem to be correlated to objects.
He seems to think that contrary to the idea that thought and thinking are done in a mental language, that language is not necessarily required.
Jul 25, 2016 11:14 PM
(This post was last modified: Jul 25, 2016 11:16 PM by C C.)
