Comment by scoofy
5 days ago
I don't want to do the thing where we fight on the internet. I don't know your background, but I'll push back here just because this type of comment that non-philosophers seem to present to me, which misses a lot of the points I'm trying to make.
(1) "intuitive knowledge" - whether or not you want to take "intuitive knowledge" as a type of knowledge (I don't think I would) is basically immaterial. The deductive-inductive framework dynamic is for reasoning frameworks, not knowledge. The reasoning frameworks are pointed in opposite directions. The deductive framework is inherited from rationalist tradition, it's premises are by definition arbitrary and cannot be justified, and information is perfect (excepting when you get rare truth values, like something being undecidable). Inductive/empirical framework is quite the opposite. Its premises are observations and absolutely not arbitrary, the information is wholly imperfect (by necessity, thanks Popper), and there is always a kind of adjustable resolution to any research conducted. Newton vs Einsteinian physics, for example, shows how zooming in on the resolution of experimentation shows how a perfectly workable model can fail when instruments get precise enough. I'll also note here that abduction is another niche reasoning framework, but is effectively immaterial to my point here.
(2) The Turing Test is not, and has never been, a philosophically rigorous test. It's effectively a pointless exercise. The literature about "philosophical zombies" has covered this, but the most important work here is Searle's "Chinese Room."
>The fact that AI seems to be able to (digitally) do anything we ask for is also very interesting.
I don't even know how to respond to this. It's trivially, demonstrably false. Beyond that, my entire point is that philosophy of language actually presents so hard problems with regards to what meaning actually is that might end up creating a kind of uncertainty principle to this line of thinking in the long run. Specifically Quine's indeterminacy of translation.
Your response is... interesting.
I thought I agreed with most of your original comment that I replied to, and here you are ready to fight. I'm not even sure what you're fighting, and I certainly didn't have in mind the things you responded to.
Well, I guess I learned not to talk to philosophers (especially those who went through school) the hard way. Sometimes I forget my lesson and it's always sad when this happens. Have a good day.
I do not think I handled the response as well as I would have liked to. I'm sorry if you felt poorly treated. That was not my intention.
Searle's Chinese Room is a fallacious mess ... see the works of Larry Hauser, e.g., https://philpapers.org/rec/HAUNGT and https://philpapers.org/rec/HAUSCB-2 The importance of Searle's Chinese Room is how such extraordinarily bad argumentation has persuaded so many people open to it.
And the literature about philosophical zombies is contentious, to say the least, and much of it is also among the worst arguments in philosophy--Dennett confided in me that he thought it set back progress in Philosophy of Mind for decades, along with that monstrosity of misdirection, "the hard problem". Chalmers (nice guy, fun drunk at parties, very smart, but hopelessly deluded) once admitted to me on the Psyche-D list that his argument in The Conscious Mind that zombies are conceivable is logically equivalent to denying that physicalism is conceivable, so it's no argument against physicalism ... he said he used the argument to till the soil to make people more susceptible to his later arguments against physicalism (which I consider unethical)--all of which are bogus, like the Knowledge Argument--even Frank Jackson who originated it admits this.
Similarly, Robert Kirk, who coined the phrase "philosophical zombie" in 1974, wrote his book Zombies and Consciousness "as penance", he told me when he signed my copy.
> I don't want to do the thing where we fight on the internet.
Nor me ... I've had these "fights" too many times already and I know how they go, and I understand why people believe what they believe and why they can't be swayed, so I won't comment further ... I just want to put a dent in this "I'm a philosopher" argumentum ad verecundiam.
I would hope that philosophy would be exempt from accusations of arguments from authority. I say I don’t want to fight exactly because I don’t want to come off like a jerk because I’m arguing. If the Chinese Room is a mess, I welcome the argument, and will happily read the paper.
I’m less open to push back against philosophical zombies, as the argument seems trivially plausible, from a position of solipsism.
Philosophy may be exempt from accusations of arguments from authority--because that's a category mistake--but philosophers certainly aren't.
Hauser's papers are just a part of a large literature rejecting/refuting Searle's Chinese Room, but he has probably taken Searle more seriously than most. After Searle's well known response that waves away numerous objections, many people dismissed him as acting in bad faith. (It would have been even worse if they had known about the accusations of sexual assault. Sure, that would be ad hominem and intellectually dishonest, but we're talking about human beings, same as with arguments from authority.) See, e.g., https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/12/21/the-mystery-of-c... where Daniel Dennett writes:
> For his part, he has one argument, the Chinese Room, and he has been trotting it out, basically unchanged, for fifteen years. It has proven to be an amazingly popular number among the non-experts, in spite of the fact that just about everyone who knows anything about the field dismissed it long ago. It is full of well-concealed fallacies. By Searle’s own count, there are over a hundred published attacks on it. He can count them, but I guess he can’t read them, for in all those years he has never to my knowledge responded in detail to the dozens of devastating criticisms they contain; he has just presented the basic thought experiment over and over again. I just went back and counted: I am dismayed to discover that no less than seven of those published criticisms are by me (in 1980, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1990, 1991, 1993).
etc. If you've never read any of this literature yet can facilely write what you did above about Searle's discussion of the Chinese Room being "the most important work here", I don't expect you to start now ... but at least reconsider posing as a philosopher who is knowledgeable about such things.
Your reason to be less open to "push back against" (an odd formulation--the burden is on those who claim that they are conceivable, and therefore physicalism is false) philosophical zombies seems to hinge on another radical failure to understand the issue and unfamiliarity with the literature.
Philosophical zombies are completely independent of solipsism. The conceivability of zombies says that, if this is a world in which you are the sole inhabitant and you are conscious, then there is a possible world that is physically identical to this world and has the same physical laws, but the sole inhabitant (scoofy'), while physically identical to you and behaves identically, isn't conscious. That is, consciousness is not a consequence of physical laws and contingencies but is some sort of ethereal goop that accompanies physical entities. Of course Chalmers and other modern dualists don't subscribe to Descartes' substance dualism, but their attempts to formulate "process dualism" or some other nonsense solely because they need some alternative to physicalism--which they reject because they are hopelessly confused about the nature of consciousness and "qualia"--are frankly incoherent.
Maybe read Kirk's book and learn something about the subject. Here's a review that gives you a peek at what you'll find there: https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2...
Over and out.