Proving What We Already "Know"

[Neo-Scholastic]

Why would we need to prove what we already know?

Seems a silly waste of time to me if what you 'know' is true.

Because people "know" things that are false. 

You can also be right for the wrong reasons, a.k.a. Gettier problems.

[The Architect Of Fate]

You can also be right for the wrong reasons, a.k.a. Gettier problems.

Not consistently ....

[The Grand Nudger]

Seems to me you've been projecting.  Every example I give about context-in-truth sends you on a spiral of motivation-questioning and sleuthing.  You state I'm very clearly worried about this or that, or afraid of inclusion or exclusion of that-or-the-other, which I'm fairly clearly not.  You, on the other hand, are very much worried that I'm sneakily trying to undermine your world view, when in fact I'm trying to undermine ALL "knowledge" that is stated out of context, and to consider what one would need to bridge contexts and properly generalize such truths.

The example you just complained about described a generalization: "Seems like me, so likely feels like me" to a specific context that may not match, "seems like me, but maybe not actually like me."  The danger of the generalization (i.e. the "knowledge") is that if you ignore the change in context and continue anything that SEEMS humanoid, you may make very serious decisions that impact real people.  I don't care that much about AI robots (yet), but it's an example of "knowledge" which will need a stronger foundation, sooner rather than later.

If we're wrong for giving a victim machine rights because it -seems like- it's conscious...if that's a potential negative consequence we may wish to avoid...then we're wrong now for giving people rights because they -seem like- they're conscious.  If we need a better understanding than that to give robots rights, we actually need a better understanding now to make the same case for ourselves. The whole thing gives up the game, though, in that it's a direct rejection of how things seem.

I even threw you, specifically, a bone: an example of an overzealous QM zealot insisting that QM was the only good way to think about anything, on the basis that QM is the closest approximation of Reality™.  He "knows" that his position must be true, since no other view of the universe better explains how light travels through slits, or why electronics fail at small scale.  But I'd expect you, as an experienced botanist of a pragmatic type, to have issue with that view.  I'd expect you to say something like, "That's all very fine and well, but what does QM say about where I should snip this new bud, or what I should plant when we have a dry spell?"

And to the same person, with the same "knowledge," I'd say, "That's very fine and well, but what does that really tell us about why we experience qualia, and how we should live our lives?"

Well - I'm not a botanist - and knowing where to trim a plant isn't actually botany to begin with.  That'll be specific to a production method and equipment and market.  Agronomy.  Secondly, a physicist is far more likely than me to understand what I don't about the process of photosynthesis (or, for that matter, describe the missing bit of photosynthesis that we don't know) - botanists aren't our obi-wan on that count.

You and I are both in that same boat with respect to brains, minds, and nueroscientists - but knowing how the brain works doesn't make a person an ethicist, so....it seems odd to object to some fact of botany, of agronomy, or the brain with "but how does that tell me how to live my life?"  Don't you think?

That's very true, and it's a good example.  And we (I mean the primarily white West here) eventually included black people among full members of humanity largely on feeling: children loving a black maid, slave owners (some of them) being proud of how well their slaves learned the Bible, sex and babies and feelings that go along with them, admiration for incredible bravery in the Civil war and later in WWII, and so on.

The knowledge that black people are just like the rest of us actually expands our faith in our social feelings, i.e. in the context of "seems like, so is like."  But if we're willing to follow that same process for AI-generated characters, no matter how likeable, relatable, or "squeeee"-worthy, and if we're wrong, the consequences could be disastrous.  Such is the danger of accepting generalization without building a bridge to a new context.

As disastrous as the consequences of extending human rights to black people, or at all...sure?  Look, you tell me that you're unbothered and unconcerned and I'm projecting - but here you are listing off something you think could be disastrous. Do you think that granting personhood to things that seem like people is the disaster - or are you using the disaster of what people might do, in that event, ala historic examples..as the disaster? I mean, at the very bottom of it, we think we're people and that affords us some rights, so why wouldn't we think that things that seem like us in that regard wouldn't qualify on those same like grounds? Isn't contending otherwise a rejection of the claim on whatever grounds we offer in our own cases, as fellow seemers? Or, lets go the other way with it. Let's say that what a nueroscientist tells us is that we're not doing whatever we seem to be doing. Does that, then, "tell you how to live" - and eradicate the foundation of your rights as you see them, as a person? That truly would be disastrous, I think - if human rights hinged on some biological fact of how the human mind worked, such that finding out it worked one way and not another meant that they didn't exist.

For the record, while I can mention that we're swirling around an argument to consequence, and while I can suggest that you're defending that argument to consequence as though it's my own projection, and while I can mention that an argument to consequence cannot sell a dispute to fact - I actually enjoy the argument to consequence much more on it's own grounds as an argument against consequences. What we'll do the next time something pops up and says "I'm like you, I feel, I'm a person!" is definitely an area of concern...but me..personally, I'm not concerned that we're going to give out rights willy nilly. We don't have a history of that, at all, and I can't think of any time that human rights have been afforded or extended that I think was a bad thing in and of itself. Give me some of that truth in context. In what context is the broader conception of human rights to include things that seem relevantly or meaningfully like us a bad thing?

[bennyboy]

If we're wrong for giving a victim machine rights because it -seems like- it's conscious...if that's a potential negative consequence we may wish to avoid...then we're wrong now for giving people rights because they -seem like- they're conscious.  If we need a better understanding than that to give robots rights, we actually need a better understanding now to make the same case for ourselves.  The whole thing gives up the game, though, in that it's a direct rejection of how things seem.  

Well, we once talked about that-- how would you go from solipsism to anything beyond it? It's not easy to do.

I have no rational reason for accepting you or anyone else as real. I've grown up feeling and believing that people are real, and that makes life meaningful in some sense. So right off the bat, literally everything I believe is limited by that context: "In a world where anything is real beyond my experience of it, TGN is this and that kind of person who expresses ideas in this or that way."

And this is not a trivial nitpick. Once I've decided that senses are intrinsically untrustworthy as a method of sourcing themselves, then I'm never really sure if I'm a BIaJ, or in a sim, or the Matrix, of the Mind of God, or a material monism.

Well - I'm not a botanist - and knowing where to trim a plant isn't actually botany to begin with.  That'll be specific to a production method and equipment and market.  Agronomy.  Secondly, a physicist is far more likely than me to understand what I don't about the process of photosynthesis (or, for that matter, describe the missing bit of photosynthesis that we don't know) - botanists aren't our obi-wan on that count.

You and I are both in that same boat with respect to brains, minds, and nueroscientists - but knowing how the brain works doesn't make a person an ethicist, so....it seems odd to object to some fact of botany, of agronomy, or the brain with "but how does that tell me how to live my life?"  Don't you think?

My ignorance of your life and of the various branches of plant science notwithstanding, I think this is a pretty fair place to examine the idea of context. Let's say that all those things are separate bodies of knowledge-- certain truths are specific to say botany, agronomy, neurology, or physics.

If you say, "Science is the best tool for learning about things," and all those things are branches of science, then that implies that there's a main branch, big-S science, which provides a context for all those various branches.

I suppose a material monist view, then could be that bigger context-- it is the one ring which binds them all. But I'm not so sure that there IS such a big-S science, or that there really IS any context which allows QM to say useful things about botany-- or agronomy-- let alone the nature of what-things-are-like, or of moral or artistic truths.

My attempt to provide that bigger context is to define Science and the material world as a subset of experience-- they are unlike dreams, unlike abstract thoughts, but they certainly are things which can be experienced.

Your attempt, I think, is to define mind as a natural feature of material, specifically of brains and possibly anything that acts sufficiently like a brain. But "mind as material" is an assertion that's hard to prove, while "material as experience" is true by definition (as literally everything I can know about must be known through experience)-- with the weakness of my view being that it doesn't even really draw useful inferences about where experiences come from.

[The Grand Nudger]

Well, we once talked about that-- how would you go from solipsism to anything beyond it?  It's not easy to do.

I have no rational reason for accepting you or anyone else as real.  I've grown up feeling and believing that people are real, and that makes life meaningful in some sense.  So right off the bat, literally everything I believe is limited by that context: "In a world where anything is real beyond my experience of it, TGN is this and that kind of person who expresses ideas in this or that way."

And this is not a trivial nitpick.  Once I've decided that senses are intrinsically untrustworthy as a method of sourcing themselves, then I'm never really sure if I'm a BIaJ, or in a sim, or the Matrix, of the Mind of God, or a material monism.

I don't think it's accurate to say that you have no rational reason for accepting me or anyone else as real.  Whether or not you accept any of them is another story.  

My ignorance of your life and of the various branches of plant science notwithstanding, I think this is a pretty fair place to examine the idea of context.  Let's say that all those things are separate bodies of knowledge-- certain truths are specific to say botany, agronomy, neurology, or physics.

If you say, "Science is the best tool for learning about things," and all those things are branches of science, then that implies that there's a main branch, big-S science, which provides a context for all those various branches.

I suppose a material monist view, then could be that bigger context-- it is the one ring which binds them all.  But I'm not so sure that there IS such a big-S science, or that there really IS any context which allows QM to say useful things about botany-- or agronomy-- let alone the nature of what-things-are-like, or of moral or artistic truths.

My attempt to provide that bigger context is to define Science and the material world as a subset of experience-- they are unlike dreams, unlike abstract thoughts, but they certainly are things which can be experienced.

Your attempt, I think, is to define mind as a natural feature of material, specifically of brains and possibly anything that acts sufficiently like a brain.  But "mind as material" is an assertion that's hard to prove, while "material as experience" is true by definition (as literally everything I can know about must be known through experience)-- with the weakness of my view being that it doesn't even really draw useful inferences about where experiences come from.

You believe that this assertion is true by definition, in addition to believing that you have no rational reason to accept anyone else as real? In addition to believing that your senses are intrinsically untrustworthy as a method of sourcing themselves?

The combination of these beliefs seems..what, more rational than the belief that I'm real? I feel like if any argument for something so specific as whether or not things like humans have (or should have) human rights dissolves into one sided solipsism then there is no specific objection to the item at hand. Fine as far as it goes, I suppose - but you haven't been a very consistent solipsist, and I recall you mentioning earlier in thread that was a pet peeve of yours. I'm personally content with the evidence that you are real, and the inferences I can make to that effect...though I often find myself wondering just wtf you are, or think you are. In the end, none of that threatens your rights, or the rights of anything like you, so far as I'm concerned. I wouldn't want to put you through simulated suffering either, as opposed to real suffering, assuming there's a difference, and even if I'm a bot. Guess it's just the kind of bot I am - thinking about the kind of bot you are?

You could end run the whole bit, couldn't you? Because so long as you maintain that you, at least, are real, then we're only considering what rights that a thing like you would have, if it existed - and we still have at least one real thing like you to consider.. don't we? That's ignoring that we can and do..and even have been considering the rights of hypothetical entities that are absolutely not real, which you seemed to believe would be some real disaster....but I digress.

[bennyboy]

I don't think it's accurate to say that you have no rational reason for accepting me or anyone else as real.  Whether or not you accept any of them is another story.  

Let me clarify. I can, once I have a working world view of some kind, use it and its axioms to rationalize further. I live within a model of an external world-- objects with properties doing things, situated in space and changing over time. That being a pretty much inbred world view, I can say something like, "Well, I have no recollection of creating people as figments of my imagination, and no awareness of any capacity for doing so, so I think it's likely that they are truly objective to my perspective." Or, I can just ask someone to hit my hand with a sledge hammer.

But that rationale isn't what allowed me to believe in the reality of the other. It's a reflection back onto the world view I have already developed.

It's important to know this, because I can see to what a great degree other people's world views are intrinsically faulty, and I have some ideas about how they got that way. It would be pretty brazen to say, "All those MFs have got it wrong, but luckily I stumbled onto a perfectly functional world view." They are stupid and delusional to a degree that borders on malfunction. Am I so confident that I am not? If so, then I don't really believe in "seems like therefore like" after all; actually I believe I'm a kind of god while "those other idiots" are chimps.


One more thing-- you may wonder why I keep talking about the views of others when I cannot establish a rational basis for their existence? Why do I keep chatting online with you?

The reason isn't rational-- it's that I'm defined by my place in this world model. If I turn out to be in the Matrix or the Mind of God, that will be surprising news, but it defines what I am so much that I will continue living in that model regardless-- much as knowing that a table is 99.9999% empty space (or at least is a collection of fields rather than a discrete object with contiguous surfaces) has very little impact on my willingness to accept a desk as a place upon which to rest other objects.

[The Grand Nudger]

Right, even in solip-world, the single real thing continues acting the way it always has - boilerplate stuff.

You certainly don't have to believe "seems like, therefore like". We know it's not a rule. We're aware of things that seem one way to us but are actually some other way. The central question raised by the vicitim machine example remains unanswered, however. If it's a poor reason to grant a hypothetical machine rights then, would it not also be a poor reason to grant an animal rights now?

I think that from that viewpoint, the hypothetical machine in future is irrelevant to the problem which must exist in present, and only serves (or even could serve) as yet another example of how we repeatedly effect the same disasters. The disaster itself being having ever posited or granted or accepted that anything has rights based on it seeming some particular way, in the first place.

[bennyboy]

Right, even in solip-world, the single real thing continues acting the way it always has - boilerplate stuff.  

You certainly don't have to believe "seems like, therefore like".  We know it's not a rule.  We're aware of things that seem one way to us but are actually some other way.  The central question raised by the vicitim machine example remains unanswered, however.  If it's a poor reason to grant a hypothetical machine rights then, would it not also be a poor reason to grant an animal rights now?  

As I said with the acquaintance and then appreciation of black people, then the same goes for animals, at least warm-blooded ones. Most of us with pets would go to pretty great lengths to prevent them from suffering the same fate that say an industrial milk cow does. But what's the essential difference, really? Mainly just familiarity.

And yes, I suspect that we WILL follow this same path with AI entities-- familiarity with the "personality" will lead us to appreciate, comfort, and then an instinct to protect. The difference is that the AI will be almost perfectly-honed. You think a puppy is cute? Wait until the full force of an AI trained to elecit emotions is unleashed. I suspect it will spawn a religion, or will lead people to death. "For Goooogllllllllleeeeeee!" *with a tear in the eye while rushing into harm's way*

[The Grand Nudger]

You may not be giving the millions of years of biological r/d credit. I’m already as compelled as I could possibly be- to the detriment of my own life even in the case of strangers.

Is that a bad thing, though? Now or then? Then but not now? What am I waiting -for- that isn’t already in effect today? We already agree on animals rights on this seeming business. Chiefly, human ones. It seems to me that it would be inconsistent to deny the next seemer what we’ve granted the last seemer.

[bennyboy]

You may not be giving the millions of years of biological r/d credit.  I’m already as compelled as I could possibly be- to the detriment of my own life even in the case of strangers.

Is that a bad thing, though?  Now or then?  Then but not now?  What am I waiting -for- that isn’t already in effect today?  We already agree on animals rights on this seeming business.  Chiefly, human ones.  It seems to me that it would be inconsistent to deny the next seemer what we’ve granted the last seemer.

Okay, let's consider the evolutionary narrative.  I consider evolution from a non-life perspective-- in any system where there are (1) sufficiently complex elements that they may form a great number of compounds, which themselves may also form new compounds of even greater complexity; (2) the flow of time, such that some compounds may persist longer than others-- then evolution not only can happen, but necessarily will.  So I'd refer to the initial forming of proteins in a primordial soup "evolution," not just DNA and how animals negotiate their persistence through life-and-death interactions.

In evolution, then, what really persists?  Information, I'd argue-- about the Earth's environment, about the state of trillions of individual animals, about how persistent information of one animal interacts with that of another.

So what happens if we get "squeed" into supporting Googalina, giving her rights and so on?  Well, I suppose technically an AI is an evolved system with a different mechanism, but its body is currently only whyatever we give it access to.  If AI is ever powered with the ability to replicate materially as well as informationally, say by directing teams of robots to mine resources and build robot factories, then its a done deal.

After all, that, though, I'd still wonder-- is Googalina really experiencing?  If I could know, for sure, that she was, I might accept the demise of humanity to a massively-greater and more capable information-processing evolutionary system. Nietzsche said, "God is dead," but I wonder if he knew he was telling our fortunes as a species?