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owlhawk911 posted:this has a been a really fun conversation and i'm glad to post somewhere we can have it without me having to use caps/anyone owning anyone I agree! arguing in bad faith has become so depressingly common in all corners of the internet it is incredibly refreshing to just talk about stuff and learn other perspectives. all the posts and viewpoints here have been valuable and I appreciate you guys. owlhawk911 posted:i think my definition of intelligence would be... cognition well-suited to meeting an organism's needs? being effective is more important than being high-level or understandable to us, and i think the examples i gave about mushrooms and bees are good ones. I appreciate the effort of trying to define something like this. my concern about this approach is that the question immediately shifts to, what are the organism's needs, and how are they prioritized, and when do desires become needs, and what relationship does all this bear to the needs of others? my own answers (not really answers) have a spiritual bent I guess and relate to things like suffering and compassion. if humans were "smarter" what would we be trying to do? evolve or not evolve? spread out into the universe or make the best of life on planet earth? maximize individual autonomy or band together to optimize limited natural resources? shape things to maximize human happiness (which presumably includes living in a world that is diverse and thriving) or keep a minimal footprint even if that means relative privation? if we see an invasive species wiping out something that we love and value, should we interfere or let "natural" forces run their course? our current thought processes don't lead humans to easy answers, but how do we even evaluate the relative merits of another way of thinking if we can't asses the results? that info about fungi and trees is cool, I love that kind of stuff and the natural world is filled with marvels. but highly-connective mycelia that promote thriving in a specific environment would have no inherent capacity to face a sudden existential threat like an asteroid headed for earth or whatever. is that . . . bad? is human intelligence better because we can send bruce willis into space to explode the asteroid? again it depends deeply on where you place your values, and whether for example long-term survival of the species is more or less important than day-to-day tranquility. and how you weight the existential threats that intelligence apparently gives rise to, like climate change and threat of nuclear holocaust. humans don't have a consensus about morals and ethics but those are meaningful concepts to us, we can discuss them and at least try to reconcile differing ideas. fungi are amoral and causing suffering to other conscious beings does not trouble them one whit, it is literally not a value that fungi possess. does the human capacity for compassion fit our needs better our worse than mindlessly and amorally causing suffering in pursuit of mere survival? not that humans act morally perfectly or even minimally often enough, but it is something that can and does occur, and that requires an impressive cognitive toolkit. that bee genetics stuff is amazing, thank you. but I have to note that it is an a mechanism promoting an unexamined core value that bee survival is worthwhile and important. humans may be the only species that is capable of considering whether human survival is important in the grand scheme of things. it is extremely hard for me to evaluate whether that is a good or a bad thing, but somehow it seems significant? nut posted:if u haven't already u should check ur DMs got it, thank you!!
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Jan 6, 2020 03:43
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thank you so much gag! as always you strike a great balance getting across general concepts without going too far into the weeds. I will admit it does give rise to yet more questions but maybe I'll hold off on raising them for a bit, there's plenty of stuff flying around in here already. I do get that "intelligence" is so imprecise and freighted that it's probably not a good word to use, at least without heavy modifiers. is there some good term for "human-like cognition" that we can use instead? I realize this immediately invites the question "well what do you mean by human-like?" but that's exactly the type of swamp it would be nice to avoid.
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Jan 6, 2020 05:43
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Manifisto posted:I do get that "intelligence" is so imprecise and freighted that it's probably not a good word to use, at least without heavy modifiers. is there some good term for "human-like cognition" that we can use instead? I realize this immediately invites the question "well what do you mean by human-like?" but that's exactly the type of swamp it would be nice to avoid. I definitely get the sentiment because at some point you need a foundation to discuss on top of. From what I can tell, the most acceptable approach researchers typically use is to pick a type of cognition and argue that convergent evolution has produced the same form of thinking independently in two or more species. A popular model for this is vocal learning in some types of birds (songbirds, parrots, and believe it or not hummingbirds) and humans. By putting all the species together and arguing convergence you avoid anthropocentrism to a degree, but admittedly they probably wouldn't be studying the cognitive process if it wasn't in humans...
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Jan 6, 2020 12:50
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Manifisto posted:thank you so much gag! as always you strike a great balance getting across general concepts without going too far into the weeds. I will admit it does give rise to yet more questions but maybe I'll hold off on raising them for a bit, there's plenty of stuff flying around in here already. Oh don't get me wrong here, it's not like academic talk has a "list of bad words don't use" or anything, I've seen a logical, good use even of a virtually undefined term before - because the author just defined it prior to its use. In cognitive science and the various branches of psychology and most natural sciences it's usually easier to avoid unclear terms in favor of other ones, or instead introduce a new term that then gets defined afterwards. Especially in philosophy however, authors do this all the time, either using existing words and reworking them for their use or forging new terms. As long as you make clear what you mean by it prior to using it, it's all good - just the general, common usage of the term is usually insanely unhelpful for the discussion. Terms like intelligence that are used regularly in regular talk usually get avoided though, just as even after redefining it, your brain might jump back to whatever you defined it as before, so that's confusing. For human-like cognition, well, depends on what you're talking about. I see the term intentionality being used regularly for the specific, human-version of our ability to relate between things in our cognition, which often sooooomewhat works out, else usually a rather general approach like "our ability to X" to sail around using strange terms altogether. However it's completely fair and academic standard to a certain degree to start off a discussion saying "Okay, so, I'm looking at birds memorizing and teaching each other songs here and for this specific ability I am going to use the term "to songify"" or something like that. It's then is super easy to follow your train of thought and discuss it on the level you have set. I feel like literature in linguistic philosophy is what feels like 70% introducing new terms for 400 pages just to get to the conclusion or issue on the last page of the book. 
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Jan 6, 2020 13:29
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a nice thing about being able to read that paper (ty Nut!) is that it put a little more meat on the bones of "what does it mean to have a sense of the future"?Evidence for Future Cognition in Animals by William A. Roberts posted:If we assume that future cognition is found in animals, a further theoretical question is “what is the nature of future so these seem to be more specific functional ways to define forms of perception / "knowledge" of the future: first, awareness of the contingent and uncertain nature of future events, and second, the ability to make meaningful distinctions among different future points. this is perhaps an example of what I was trying to get at when I talked about "robustness" and flexibility. if your sense of the future lacks such concepts there will be limits to the types of planning and anticipatory activity you can engage in (although such limits might not be meaningful if the animal simply doesn't require advanced planning to thrive). it would be really interesting if we found good evidence of such facilities in animals. on the other hand . . . perhaps it is a blessing for animals to be unburdened with too much awareness of the future, given what mortality is. memory and foresight are powerful tools for accomplishing many tasks, but living in the moment is something I think humans generally wish we could do more. to me, these kind of functional descriptions of future cognition are more helpful than phrases like "mental time travel," which I think is meant to be evocative and a useful shorthand rather than really descriptive. that said, sometimes when I'm thinking about the future I do indeed try to shift my perception to that future point and ask "how will I feel at this point assuming xyz?" but much more frequently I'm just marking things on a mental or physical calendar or looking at a range of outcomes like they were playing cards or pages in a cyoa. I might suggest that the ability to mentally transport yourself to a different time is a variety of the "counterfactual" facility I mentioned earlier. I suspect I would view an animal who was even modestly successful in shifting its subjectivity to a future point in time as having very "human-like" cognitive faculties.
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Jan 6, 2020 21:56
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Manifisto posted:
Manifisto's post reminds me of a paper I read in grad school. The crux of the argument revolved around reasssing the function of human memory. The author's position was that contrary to the mainline view of the role of memory in cognitive science, the role of memory is not to remember things per se, but rather memory serves as a part of a broader cognitive system whose function is to aid in the production of counterfactual thoughts. That is, every time we access a memory, we aren't accessing anything close to a veridical record of the events we remember (which I suspect is pretty much common, almost folk knowledge), but some counterfactual record, a way things might or could have been. Of course, how much ontoloogical/epistemic weight you place on memory will change the impact of this view, but Manifisto's post seemed tangential to this line of thought. Phoneposting atm but when I am at my computer I will track down a link to that paper if folks are interested, though as I said, it's not really dealing much with animal cognition. ... Also GaG I gotta ask: p-zombies, yay or nay?
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Jan 7, 2020 04:51
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about future cognition.
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this is a good thread, and even though i keep making the mistake of trying to read it when tired i am learning a bunch if i remember i will re-read a bunch of this after getting sleep thank you brain crew for teaching me things, i like you all
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Jan 7, 2020 05:06
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magic cactus posted:
Mr. Dick's in the epiphenomenalist camp, so it's a yea qualified with an it absolutely would not matter and you would not be able to tell. ---------------- |
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Jan 7, 2020 05:19
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Mr. Dick posted:Mr. Dick's in the epiphenomenalist camp, so it's a yea qualified with an it absolutely would not matter and you would not be able to tell. if you don't mind . . . all I know about epiphenomenalism is what I've skimmed from a few articles. how does your view treat a complicated logical decision like, say, figuring out what materials to buy to build a shed? are all the logical steps and mathematical calculations one consciously goes through to arrive at that decision simply window dressing for some buried crypto-logical neurological process? if I decide to recheck my math at the end of the process, is that apparent conscious decision just a cover story for something that is done sub-rationally? at a certain point I guess I don't understand how non-conscious rationality differs from conscious rationality except for maybe the speed with which it arises.
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Jan 7, 2020 06:01
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Mr. Dick posted:Mr. Dick's in the epiphenomenalist camp, so it's a yea qualified with an it absolutely would not matter and you would not be able to tell. It's kind of funny. I find myself leaning toward epiphenominalist sympathies as well, but the one thing stopping me from full-on buying into that thesis is emotions. Emotions just seem to affect cognitive processing so strongly that I don't see how epiphenomenalism can accommodate them and still be able to defend their position.
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Jan 7, 2020 06:53
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Manifisto posted:I don't understand how non-conscious rationality differs from conscious rationality except for maybe the speed with which it arises. That's exactly the point. Same thing with free will, there is no difference between a strictly deterministic universe where people think they have free will and a universe where free will is actually a thing. That's one of those flags that's set when the executable is run, but you're inside the executable so you can't ever seen the command line prompt that started everything. Epiphenominalism's actually a pretty weak position. Consciousness can be whatever you want it to be as long as you don't assert that is has casual powers. If you're going to be a reductionist, and you have to be in brain work because dualism won't get you anywhere, you gotta be reductionist about mind too. magic cactus posted:It's kind of funny. I find myself leaning toward epiphenominalist sympathies as well, but the one thing stopping me from full-on buying into that thesis is emotions. Emotions just seem to affect cognitive processing so strongly that I don't see how epiphenomenalism can accommodate them and still be able to defend their position. It's your brain cognizing and emoting. Cognition and emotion aren't exactly cleanly distinguishable, in so far as they are separable they affect each other. Same brain, same neurons, same adrianalines and sarahtonins. Mr. Dick fucked around with this message at 07:26 on Jan 7, 2020 ---------------- |
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Jan 7, 2020 07:20
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I just can't stop thinking about beavers. |
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Jan 7, 2020 13:35
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very cool brain op
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Jan 7, 2020 13:44
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Manifisto posted:I might suggest that the ability to mentally transport yourself to a different time is a variety of the "counterfactual" facility I mentioned earlier. I suspect I would view an animal who was even modestly successful in shifting its subjectivity to a future point in time as having very "human-like" cognitive faculties. I'd add to that, that maybe even the picture of the subject travelling through time mentally is already a very human-like process and I wouldn't rule out the sheer possibility, that other animals than us might be able to do that in one way or another without being bound to a subject at all, which is a point of view I mainly maintain due to having worked on the question of the nature of animal subjectivity in general. Of course, we have virtually no evidence at all for any of this happening, but I'd open the theoretical possibility up for an animal to anticipate future events in a very general way, even though that's basically unimaginable from our human point of view. As an easy example, assuming an ant could foresee the future happening, would it do so from its own point of view, or rather its entire colony, maybe the queen's, maybe the entire ant family? . It's just a thought experiment, really, but sometimes I have the feeling that animals and other lifeforms are so fundamentally different to us, mainly because they never had any reason to develop even remotely similar to us, that I like to entertain the idea that we are so focused on our way of thinking that, maybe, there are other species who do not do that at all and are able to have a rather, well, objective? perspective of the world. It's just fun to think about it. magic cactus posted:Also GaG I gotta ask: p-zombies, yay or nay?  I was wondering when someone will bring this up, as I specifically avoided it so far.  Just for any lurkers that might not be familiar with the term: In philosophy of mind a philosophical zombie is an argument where we think about the question whether or not it is logically possible for a person to exist with absolutely no difference in look, behavior or any properties we expect from that person, but with the exception that this person has no conscious experience, sentience or the ability to perceive qualia (primary individual instances of subjective experience, eg seeing the "redness" of a red object) in any way. That person would then act exactly like any other person, but has no inner "self" at all - he wouldn't feel any pain when hurt, but react exactly like he would, making it impossible to realize the lack of consciousness from outside. Mr. Dick posted:Mr. Dick's in the epiphenomenalist camp, so it's a yea qualified with an it absolutely would not matter and you would not be able to tell. Anyways I'm mostly on Mr Dick's end here on a yay, as from my personal view I'm mostly a monist and want to keep the possibility open that subjectivity or rather consciousness in general might(!!!) be less of an important thing than we humans tend to think (hence my view on animal time travel above, too) and that the intuitive way on saying that philosophical zombies would result in a massive epistemological problem is maybe going too far. I wouldn't dismiss any problems and issues coming up with this, however, I'm open for debating that. Mr. Dick posted:That's exactly the point. Same thing with free will, there is no difference between a strictly deterministic universe where people think they have free will and a universe where free will is actually a thing. That's one of those flags that's set when the executable is run, but you're inside the executable so you can't ever seen the command line prompt that started everything. I was about to write pretty much exactly that, when I saw that my phone didn't show me your post before! That's a big agreed from me here.
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Jan 7, 2020 14:07
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Finger Prince posted:I just can't stop thinking about beavers. my man there's a good book on animal construction behaviour that talks about what little behavioural info about beavers exists. They show a tremendous amount of adaptation in how they build their dams and it's very cool. I will look it up and let you know the name of it when i get off holidays if you want. One story is about a pair of beavers in the zoo that would block their pool drainage to flood the enclosure and, after chewing down all the trees in the enclosure to make new material to block the drainage after it was cleared, replacement trees were protected with metal along the trunk. The beavers would build ramps to climb over the shielded trunk and chew down the motherfucker anyway i must make a :justchew:
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Jan 7, 2020 15:00
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Ok so beavers right? They do this whole thing where they dam a stream to flood a depression, then they build a lodge in the middle which provides shelter and protection from predators. Then when the winter hits, which they did all this in advance of, and their pond freezes over with a thick enough layer of ice, they go and make a hole in the dam and drain the pond, so they have an ice roof over plentiful pond tubers which they can eat at peace with direct access from their lodge without having to dig through tons of snow to get at. They select a plot, they prepare the land, they build a structure, they build another completely different purpose structure, then selectively damage the first structure, in order to have an supply of food and protection throughout the long winter. Also they let muskrats chill with them in the lodge, like pets? Nobody knows. Now they could be doing this entirely by some rote autonomous script hardwired in their little beaver brains with no conscious thought, forethought, planning, externalization, or abstract thinking, etc. But when we build a shed, we do all those things, because we're human and different from beavers. So you could say, it's convergent evolution, and advanced construction techniques evolved in humans through their use of human consciousness, and in beavers through some unknown beaver mechanism that isn't anything like human consciousness or whatever. OK but how about this - maybe we can build a shed the same way a beaver builds a lodge, we just couch our methods in concepts of advanced cognition in a circular justification of our methods. Like, I build the shed because I have these particular human cognition abilities that other things don't have. The proof of these cognition abilities is I built this shed, and I couldn't have done that without them. But what if we built the shed because that's just what animal brains do, and we aren't really any different from any other thing that employs advanced construction techniques, we just think we are. |
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Jan 7, 2020 15:07
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Finger Prince posted:Ok so beavers right? hell ya don't forget that after beavers exhaust all the local trees for building material that they dig their own small canals so they can chew down farther away trees and float the logs on water back to the dam and lodge being built 
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Jan 7, 2020 15:10
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Finger Prince posted:Ok so beavers right? They do this whole thing where they dam a stream to flood a depression, then they build a lodge in the middle which provides shelter and protection from predators. Then when the winter hits, which they did all this in advance of, and their pond freezes over with a thick enough layer of ice, they go and make a hole in the dam and drain the pond, so they have an ice roof over plentiful pond tubers which they can eat at peace with direct access from their lodge without having to dig through tons of snow to get at. That's a very good point, yes, I think there's a lot of potential overlap here and questioning our cognitive abilities by offering the possibility that we, as well, are just doing the same stuff beavers do is fair game, especially given that we humans tend to be very good at building up mental illusions and believing them afterwards. My point that our perspective might be so entirely different to those of, say, beavers, is not because we are special or super good, but because of how oddly different we as primates seem to act and, from the homo sapiens view, think, compared to other animals. I think it's not entirely off-base to assume that every biological order, family, genera or even species has their own special way of perception, specifically built from ground up to fit their biological needs. For example, primates have this apparently inherent need for social structure, complex interaction, a seemingly biological requirement for social hierarchy and yet, an insane focus on the individual good. This goes for macaques who have "noble families" that train soldiers to protect them and enforce their will among the others in their local community, baboons who plan raids and something close to ape wars with other tribes to steal resources and even slaves and humans who, as the first neurological reaction upon seeing someone else, check if the other human is a threat to them. Babies have a natural aversion towards foreign male humans up to a certain age, probably because primates are the kings when it comes to murdering each others infants in order to establish or demolish ranks. These are biological observations that we can see for our species and close relatives and that are fundamentally different in other animals. Dogs love us intensively and with passion, they won't take revenge for bad stuff, they seemingly won't ever hate their owners even if they are treating them terribly - at worse they get insanely scared as they lose their basis of life. That might be because wolves seem to think in packs and belonging to a pack, supporting it no matter what and loving those who are part of it is so vital, that it seems to overrule emotional reactions we would expect from a human perspective given certain situations. Cats, on the other hand, do not have this social structure of packs and since our cats at home are basically just tiny tigers, they are very independent and do not at all do what you want them to do just because you happen to exist. Yet, they are very capable of showing emotions, have a lot of interest in you and love you and other animals. I'm taking these simplified examples to illustrate the possibility that the way animals form social structures might be a hint to how their minds work, too. I think that it is possible that given how we are able to observe these structures we may get a hint into what matters for their thinking the most - be it the pack, their family, their food, the dams they build or the way they organize themselves (or not at all). This makes every single animal family special in its own way, sometimes related to each other, sometimes not at all and this, while certainly sharing specfic structures due to similar evolution, might have impact on the question of subjectivity and consciousness, as well. That is, of course, assuming that these things are part of the evolutionary process at all, which may be entirely wrong as well, as it already implies a ton of other stuff. That's the stuff I like to explore though.
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Jan 7, 2020 15:44
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Goons Are Great posted:That's a very good point, yes, I think there's a lot of potential overlap here and questioning our cognitive abilities by offering the possibility that we, as well, are just doing the same stuff beavers do is fair game, especially given that we humans tend to be very good at building up mental illusions and believing them afterwards. The separation of animals into class, order, family, genus, species is completely human abstraction, and while based (now) on scientific concepts like differences in DNA, it doesn't account for things like, for example, lions who live in close social groups and commit infanticide just like primates, and in that respect aren't like housecats at all, despite being closer related in DNA. Why would a lion's brain functions responsible for social interaction and murder be significantly different from and ape's or wolf's? Their brains are made of the same matter. |
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Jan 7, 2020 16:06
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Finger Prince posted:The separation of animals into class, order, family, genus, species is completely human abstraction, and while based (now) on scientific concepts like differences in DNA, it doesn't account for things like, for example, lions who live in close social groups and commit infanticide just like primates, and in that respect aren't like housecats at all, despite being closer related in DNA. Why would a lion's brain functions responsible for social interaction and murder be significantly different from and ape's or wolf's? Their brains are made of the same matter. Yeah, I'm just using the taxonomic structure here as it's well established in biology to relate between species, of course it's not set in stone and different concepts might lead to entirely different results. As I said, this idea implies a ton of stuff and, for example, takes away the possibility that social structures are trained and not the result of neurological structures, which is a huge weak spot, I agree. Perhaps it's not different at all and it's part of the evolutionary equation and the state they built their structures into, perhaps it transcends this entirely. To really answer that we'd have to find out what the actual reason for certain animals is to do what they do based on brain functions and so far neurobiology has mostly failed to do so for humans already, except being able to see that certain areas of the brain seem to be connected to certain behaviors, emotions and reactions. If there additionally and in general is no neural correlate of consciousness at all, the entire idea of jumping to that conclusion falls ad absurdum and we couldn't possibly make predictions like that from any perspective. It's not a strong theory with solid backup, it's mostly just theoretically exploring possibilities and certainly not the base of animal cognition or cognitive science in general.
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Jan 7, 2020 16:22
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Mr. Dick posted:That's exactly the point. Same thing with free will, there is no difference between a strictly deterministic universe where people think they have free will and a universe where free will is actually a thing. That's one of those flags that's set when the executable is run, but you're inside the executable so you can't ever seen the command line prompt that started everything. Goons Are Great posted:I was about to write pretty much exactly that, when I saw that my phone didn't show me your post before! That's a big agreed from me here. interesting, thank you both. obviously I can't dispute such positions either objectively or on the basis of reading or much thought etc. I did see one objection in the wikipedia article that resonated with me however, which is, if qualia/subjectivity didn't confer any benefit, why would it have stuck around? not a slam dunk but it seems related to a parsimony/occam's razor type of argument, why assume multiple entities (subjectivity vs. nerual activity) when you can get the same result with a single entity (both are the same)? as I said previously though, parsimony is weird, it doesn't have great (any?) logical force but it's a way of making progress with otherwise tricky problems. a weak analogy perhaps, but what if one thought of neural activity as a boat moving through water and qualia/subjectivity as the wake. the wake doesn't "cause" the boat to move but it's an aspect of the whole system changing, and you can't really have a wakeless moving boat (let's concede for sake of discussion?). I mean, we can't say that things work anything like that, but wouldn't the parsimony/utility considerations provisionally tend in that direction, as to the p-zombie problem? Finger Prince posted:beavers the beaver construction analogy is interesting because as you and nut point out it's pretty sophisticated and involves a lot of individual challenges that vary situationally. (it doesn't seem fragile, robotic, or "sphexish" to go back to one of my earlier posts.) perhaps it would indeed be valid to say that beavers are employing something like our conscious logic when they are sizing up how to fell a particular tree in a particular direction without getting hurt, or how to place a particular log to lock in other logs. but that's not inherently an argument for "human conscious logic invalid," it could just as easily point towards "conscious logic a valid phenomenon present at least analogously, but perhaps to a much lesser degree, in other species." still, I will bring up a point that one might or might not think significant. I know I read this somewhere and it might be that one guy again. the animal world is filled with remarkable examples of individual or cooperative feats of this type, solutions that a single human would be unlikely to come up with (although they might if they had access to computers letting them simulate millions of years of evolutionary pressures, and since the computer is a human invented tool I would credit the win to human intelligence). the "unique" feature of human intelligence, according to this line of thought, is not how it performs at any one thing but how amazingly generalist it is. humans can employ the same (well, analogous) planning techniques for building a shed to build a space station, design a currency system, write a book, found a religion, move a mountain, generate electricity, bring water into a desert, well you get the point. I am sure beavers can do other things but I feel like I can say with great confidence that their engineering skills are pretty limited to a few specific tasks that are closely related to their survival. they're not suddenly going to start quarrying rocks if they can't find trees, for example. you say "maybe humans aren't really different," I think the argument for those who want to say "yes we appear different" has more to do with the generalist point. also natural language, that's pretty different, based on what we currently know and understand yadda yadda. are people okay if I stop making that disclaimer? I feel like it should go without saying, people in these fields seem quite up front in acknowledging what they don't know, flaws in their hypotheses, directions for further research, and so on. natural langauge is also "generalist" and it complements our other highly flexible mental capabilities very well. I was reading some stuff related to the ai question of "what types of capabilities would persuade researchers an ai is intelligent"? look it's a nascent field but people have given plenty of thought to it. perhaps it is not really fair to apply these criteria (they're not even really criteria per se) to animal behaviors, but the stuff they focus on are types of behaviors that SEEM fairly unique to humans vs. other species, complex natural language being one of them.
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Jan 7, 2020 16:31
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Goons Are Great posted:Cats, on the other hand, do not have this social structure of packs and since our cats at home are basically just tiny tigers, they are very independent and do not at all do what you want them to do just because you happen to exist. Yet, they are very capable of showing emotions, have a lot of interest in you and love you and other animals. this in no way undermines your point, and I imagine you're aware of it, but it's kind of fascinating to me how cats do manage to form social groups sometimes, apparently in situations where food is plentiful. feral cat colonies are cool, but I take your point to be that it's not really a cohesive "pack" mentality it's just a loosely structured social grouping. cats are very adaptable, they're pretty amazing creatures. more broadly though, I agree that it's fascinating to compare/contrast cognitions of different species. I watch various parrot videos regularly and I love when experienced bird owners/trainers are able to sort of "get into the parrot mindset," they seem to have valid and surprisingly useful intuitions about how parrots think, react emotionally . . . their psychology more or less. that's probably possible because parrots have lots of similarities to humans, including being one of only a very few examples in the natural world of species that not only communicate via sound but are able to mimic sounds. we were talking about the facility of humans to project their subjectivity, and to me that seems like, at least arguably, a fairly unique feature of our cognition, if not in kind at least in extent. we can effortlessly put ourselves in other people's shoes and imagine facing challenges and motivations we do not ourselves experience. we project ourselves into the minds of animals all the time (especially with pets), and even if it may be philosophically impossible to inhabit the subjectivity of a bat or whatever we are often capable of doing it well enough to be . . . useful to us, to predict behaviors for example. we are masters of analogy and can use that to map impulses that animals seem to feel onto other (quite different) impulses we ourselves feel. that trips us up obviously, there's this whole thing about pet owners being convinced that dogs feel and express regret/remorse and I keep reading about researchers saying "they absolutely do not, they act sad because they've learned it will avoid punishment/anger from humans." my point is not that humans inhabit animal psychologies perfectly or even well, I just find it amazing that we do it at all.
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Jan 7, 2020 16:53
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Manifisto posted:still, I will bring up a point that one might or might not think significant. I know I read this somewhere and it might be that one guy again. the animal world is filled with remarkable examples of individual or cooperative feats of this type, solutions that a single human would be unlikely to come up with (although they might if they had access to computers letting them simulate millions of years of evolutionary pressures, and since the computer is a human invented tool I would credit the win to human intelligence). the "unique" feature of human intelligence, according to this line of thought, is not how it performs at any one thing but how amazingly generalist it is. humans can employ the same (well, analogous) planning techniques for building a shed to build a space station, design a currency system, write a book, found a religion, move a mountain, generate electricity, bring water into a desert, well you get the point. I am sure beavers can do other things but I feel like I can say with great confidence that their engineering skills are pretty limited to a few specific tasks that are closely related to their survival. they're not suddenly going to start quarrying rocks if they can't find trees, for example. So, one thing that really makes us different in these regards is tool usage. Now, you can argue chicken and egg wrt excellent hand-eye coordination, opposable digits, fine motor skills and tool usage evolution, but it's tool usage that allows all these things. We use rocks to build because we can use tools to form rocks. We use rebar because we use tools to melt and form metal to reinforce concrete, which we made by using tools. But we also use sticks to reinforce mud just like beavers do, when we haven't got access concrete and steel. We may have even learned the technique from observing animals (actually I think a lot of what we know and do as humans, and attribute to being human, we learned from observing other animals). And what's a space station but mud and sticks in space only made from fiber reinforced plastic and metal? So, tools, and the ability to observe and learn from others, and language so we can teach ourselves the things we learned. Other things as well (longetiviety, social structure, etc). What I'm trying to say is, the human approach uses the same ingredients as other animals use, and just the way we put them together results in what we do and how we live and survive. We don't have anything exclusively ours or different from other animals, we just combine it differently to suit our needs just as a wolf or an octopus combines them to suit their needs. And I know we aren't really talking about this, or dancing around so we don't, but my whole point is to counter the idea of human exceptionalism. You point to examples of exceptionalism like building space stations, etc., despite the fact that most humans cannot accomplish these feats any more than a beaver or a bee can. An elephant can teach its family group how to clear a path through the woods and find water in drout and find food when there isn't any, just like a human can. And if an elephant had the means (tool usage, physical adaptation, etc.), and the need, and the desire, over the course of hundreds of thousands of generations, I don't see why they couldn't build a space station either. Sorry if this is rambling I'm at work and also ramble. |
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Jan 7, 2020 17:36
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Finger Prince posted:And I know we aren't really talking about this, or dancing around so we don't, but my whole point is to counter the idea of human exceptionalism. You point to examples of exceptionalism like building space stations, etc., despite the fact that most humans cannot accomplish these feats any more than a beaver or a bee can. An elephant can teach its family group how to clear a path through the woods and find water in drout and find food when there isn't any, just like a human can. And if an elephant had the means (tool usage, physical adaptation, etc.), and the need, and the desire, over the course of hundreds of thousands of generations, I don't see why they couldn't build a space station either. hmm I realize my line of argument may sound a bit inconsistent and perhaps it is. I sm having an issue with the word "exceptionalism." If that is meant normatively, than no I don't subscribe to it. philosophically I think human cognition leads to suffering in the Buddhist sense, although it also enables compassion which I do think is normatively good, but not necessarily enough to counterbalance the suffering. it also leads to poo poo like climate change which is bad imo. it might allow us to colonize other planets which I can't even pass judgment on in the abstract. but if we're talking purely empirically rather than normatively, then I guess I do believe human cognition is special, or at least arguably so. other types of cognition can be special in other ways, maybe better ways. I feel unequipped to make nuanced distinctions between kind and extent. natural language appears to be unique and powerful, but can you characterize it as merely "x behavior we see in many animals, on steroids?" sure ok maybe maybe not. regardless of whether human abilities are a different "kind" or "extent" than other animals, the upshot is that we can do things in the world that are apparently utterly unlike any other species. I call that special, keeping in mind special does not imply good. the point about what individual humans can or cannot do strikes me as a little arbitrary. many of our abilities depend on cooperation, which is both collective and individual. if we weren't individually wired to cooperate we couldn't do it. I have no problem attributing achievements to "humanity" even if neither I nor any human could do it alone from scratch. likewise if a flock of parrots built a space station iI would credit parrots with that facility. Manifisto fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Jan 7, 2020 |
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Jan 7, 2020 18:40
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Manifisto posted:this in no way undermines your point, and I imagine you're aware of it, but it's kind of fascinating to me how cats do manage to form social groups sometimes, apparently in situations where food is plentiful. feral cat colonies are cool, but I take your point to be that it's not really a cohesive "pack" mentality it's just a loosely structured social grouping. cats are very adaptable, they're pretty amazing creatures. Ugh yeah, I successfully managed to believe that I added my actual point without doing so, sorry. I read a lot words today already and will read even more, so brain is leaking. However you got my point already! The great adaptability was the second part of the contrast I was trying to draw there and you were able to finish my thought better than me. Before I take a nap and flood my office with coffee again, I'll quickly add to the point of differences between our thinking and animal cognition that a main difference that comes up in cognitive science (and since I already mentioned it before) is intentionality. In anthropology and when researching human evolution in particular there often are models of various "levels" of intentionality (for example by Tomasello or Gamble in different degrees, both anthropologists that tried to look into the cultural and presumably cognitive differences between homo sapiens and, for example, homo erectus (lol)) and these models may or may not be useful for our discussion, entirely on your own discretion. I'll break down the simpler model by Tomasello real quick, as it suggests three different levels for the ability to relate between things, the individual, the shared and the collective intentionality. In that model the ongoing evolution of humans showed a continuous growth in brain size and a changing pattern of behavior and abilities. On the individual level, they are able to mentally represent things and circumstances (eg understand that a bird can fly and a crab cannot), draw logical conclusions out of their perception (eg seeing an object disappear behind another object will lead to them believe the first object is still there) and they are able to judge about their own ability to decide something (eg not deciding on doing something when they are lacking further information). That means that these individuals should be mostly aware of what they are doing (thus by the way denying the concept that animals in general are unable to think) and experiments on this model have shown that most hominidae seem to be able to have these abilities, and thus our shared ancestors probably had them as well. On the shared level the individuals develop the ability to relate between each other. They hunt together, are able to share their perception and communicate to various degrees about what they perceive (the concept of joint attention being a key here, as in: You are able to follow someone else's gaze and understand that he perceives something that you do not perceive). This leads to vastly increased cooperation, the development of a "We" concept and an increase in social dependencies between individuals. Intentions and ideas are being reflected as a group, decision are made on a common ground, the individuals understand that someone else is having a meta-idea about the entire group complex and is able to think in a socially recursive manner. This specific kind of high level cooperation and shared reflection is something we could not yet find in apes, but the increased use of specified tools in the past have let anthropologists to believe that our ancestors as the early version of humans developed this ability - which, in that specific sense - would be a unique ability of the (soon to be) human mind. The last level is the collective intentionality that, according to the authors, only homo sapiens have developed so far. The ability of shared thought is even further expanded, leading to a species-wide group-focused development of culture, where shared knowledge and abilities are being taught across generation and specific plans to do so are developed. This ultimately leads to the ability to socially learn and the specific ability to teach our children, further increasing our knowledge not only across individuals or even groups, but across the entirety of our species. We are able to develop wide ranging plans that may last for centuries, we can understand ideas from the past and we have the will and intention to learn and teach others what we already know, further improve our abilities. We can develop rules and define things that we consider as wanted or normal and filter out things specifically once we overruled them - of course all in countless separate processes, with people agreeing or disagreeing. This behavior was not found in other animals, despite their proven abilities to learn and also teach. Tests have suggested that apes seem to not understand the motive behind teaching someone else just for the sake of doing so, although they are able to mimic something and then learn it their way by mimicry. The abstract ability to learn by being taught by sharing mental representations is the difference there. Just as a general input you guys might like to think about, whether or not it is relevant for the general question regarding animal cognition and differences between species I'll leave up to you, because I definitely need to buy a Pumpernickelbrötchen now.
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Jan 7, 2020 18:49
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Manifisto posted:hmm I realize my line of argument may sound a bit inconsistent and perhaps it is. I sm having an issue with the word "exceptionalism." If that is meant normatively, than no I don't subscribe to it. I think I see what you mean. Also sometimes what I'm arguing gets confused or confusing because, as a total layman in this, I haven't applied the kind of intellectual rigor to my thinking that say a researcher would have. So it gets a bit mushy. |
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Jan 7, 2020 18:55
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Mr. Dick posted:It's your brain cognizing and emoting. Cognition and emotion aren't exactly cleanly distinguishable, in so far as they are separable they affect each other. Same brain, same neurons, same adrianalines and sarahtonins. So I agree with this to an extent, insofar as cognition and emotion aren't clearly distinguishable. However (and it's been a couple of years since I did any serious academic philosophy, so please forgive my rustiness) I fail to see how this position resolves the question of emotions having causal efficacy. The epiphenomenalist wants to say that mental states are not causally efficatious. The reductionalist about the brain holds that the mental reduces down to the physical (for instance consciousness is just the firing of neurons, which I tend to agree with). However, emotions seem to be prima facie strong evidence for some kind of causal efficacy. Consider the (un-BYOB) scenario of getting extremely angry at someone on a dead gay comedy forum and say, breaking your favorite mug. Now insofar as this scenario has us worrying for some person's mental health, we've got something like the following (very abstracted) causal chain: (read bad post) ---> (get angry) ---> (break mug) Prima facie, it seems like the emotion of anger is what causes this person to go and throw the mug against the wall (I mean one way to sort of dig deeper here is to say that the person decided to throw the mug against the wall, but I feel like all this does is push the emotion back a step in our causal chain. There is still a question of a person feeling anger at reading a bad post and as a result throwing the mug against the wall). So how does the interrelationship of emotion and cognition here explain the action? One way out that I can see is to say something like "well as stated, cognition and emotion aren't cleanly distinguishable, but they do affect each other. So emotions just are these neurotransmitter suffused brain states, and it is these brain states that are doing the causal work. The emotion itself is just a convenient first-person reporting label for those states that filters up to the level of personhood." But it seems like from the perspective of the person in question, there's still going to be a strong ascription of causal efficacy toward the emotion. Now maybe that's all that's happening, all emotions (and, I suspect, consciousness itself) are are just these epistemic errors in brain-state reporting, but I'm skeptical of emotional reduction in a way that I'm not skeptical of other reductionalist arguments, because emotions seem deeply important to human experience in a way that something like "the experience of redness" doesn't track, but I freely admit it might just be my human bias showing.
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Jan 7, 2020 18:59
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Goons Are Great posted:cool stuff about intentionality would this framework have anything interesting/useful to say about entities like multinational corporations? corporations seem to . . . well, do things that aren't accidental but aren't in the intention of any one human being, and also not collectively decided by a deliberative process. at least some of this activity is goal-oriented, in terms of directions like making money and competitive survival, these values are kind of written into the dna of a for-profit business entity. would this be, for example, a sort of minor or lesser collective intentionality, an advanced example of shared intentionality, something else altogether?
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Jan 7, 2020 21:30
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Goons Are Great posted:
The qualitative difference comes down mostly to communication and tool use, it's a folksy truism, but it totally holds. It's not two special things, it's two pretty regular things in conjunction (being on land and not in the water, Mr. Dick believes, helps too and is why whales or octopuses don't rules the world) . What it means is that it only takes one smart person to figure something out once. We don't need to reinvent the wheel every time we want to dig for termites, fish a treat out of a bottle or have a realization that the speed of light a:)exists and b:)is a constant. Add writing to the mix and the one thing we truly excel at as a species, bullshitting, and the one thing we excel at as individuals of that species, figuring poo poo out, attain a sort of easily transmissible, lasting status as a physical object. While Mr. Dick has no theory as to the differentiation, or matter of degrees, tool use and building and agriculture and breeding and all the other praxis kind of poo poo that separate man and dickman from the animals that do the same praxis kind of poo poo, but goddamnit, we are not living in the beeocine. Also, you are right, we should reinvigorate the philosophy thread, or move it literally anywhere else on the forums where it will get more traffic. Mr. Dick fucked around with this message at 01:46 on Jan 8, 2020 ---------------- |
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Jan 8, 2020 01:44
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Manifisto posted:if qualia/subjectivity didn't confer any benefit, why would it have stuck around? Natural selection doesn't select for, it only selects against. An essentially free rider that has zero, or nominal metabolic cost doesn't have any negative impact on fitness, there's no imperative for it to be culled. Also, while the experiential aspect of conscious might be ultimately inert, the collective brain structures or mechanisms that give rise to it might be utterly essential for brainly tasks that do have impact on survival. Manifisto posted:and you can't really have a wakeless moving boat For the sake of an easy analogy, the boat produces a tidal wake, which the fish under the lake feel. It also produces a disturbance in the air above the lake which the fish do not feel. There's a fundamental difference in kind for consciousness, it has been puzzling mankind for a while now. Mr. Dick fucked around with this message at 02:10 on Jan 8, 2020 ---------------- |
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Jan 8, 2020 02:01
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Mr. Dick posted:The qualitative difference comes down mostly to communication and tool use, it's a folksy truism, but it totally holds. It's not two special things, it's two pretty regular things in conjunction (being on land and not in the water, Mr. Dick believes, helps too and is why whales or octopuses don't rules the world) . What it means is that it only takes one smart person to figure something out once. We don't need to reinvent the wheel every time we want to dig for termites, fish a treat out of a bottle or have a realization that the speed of light a:)exists and b:)is a constant. Add writing to the mix and the one thing we truly excel at as a species, bullshitting, and the one thing we excel at as individuals of that species, figuring poo poo out, attain a sort of easily transmissible, lasting status as a physical object. it feels maybe advisable to exercise a bit of caution in viewing stuff in hindsight and saying, "oh yeah, just putting these two regular things together was what did the trick, it's kind of obvious and not at all special." some of the most important and valuable inventions / patents come not from pioneering a whole field but from putting together multiple well-known processes or techniques in a specific way that creates amazing and unexpected (in foresight) synergies. it often takes a ridiculous amount of experimentation to figure out exactly which things need to go together and how they need to be integrated. let's grant, arguendo, that the human "special sauce" consisted merely of a fortuitous grouping of faculties that all exist in some form or another in other animals. that doesn't make the synergies it created any less unexpected nor any less remarkable. it's like the way the mandelbrot set arises from a really simple mathematical equation, nobody could or did predict exactly what complexities would come out of that. or saying that pi is simple because it can be expressed as a simple concept, i.e. a geometrical ratio. but okay maybe we're not really disagreeing about anything substantive, just whether we're "impressed" by what humans can do compared to animals. if you want to be not impressed by all the crazy poo poo humans have managed to do, fair enough. personally I am basic enough be impressed by aspects of it while also being pretty appalled at other aspects of it. e: I mean holy poo poo primordial life was really just a fortuitous grouping of molecules, amino acids and whatnot, we assume. so should we not be impressed at life in general because it's obvious in retrospect that when stuff came together a certain way it was gonna do crazy poo poo after a few billion years? as I say that I am genuinely not certain how to feel about life on balance, but I do find it super interesting. Manifisto fucked around with this message at 02:46 on Jan 8, 2020
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Jan 8, 2020 02:04
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Mr. Dick posted:the collective brain structures or mechanisms that give rise to it might be utterly essential for brainly tasks that do have impact on survival but if that were the case, then you wouldn't get p-zombies, would you? that was sort of the point I was driving at. I do recognize that neither I nor anyone itt is going to dope out the answer to such an apparently heavily studied problem, we're just shooting the poo poo, thanks for taking the time to respond.
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Jan 8, 2020 02:14
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Mr. Dick posted:The qualitative difference comes down mostly to communication and tool use, it's a folksy truism, but it totally holds. It's not two special things, it's two pretty regular things in conjunction (being on land and not in the water, Mr. Dick believes, helps too and is why whales or octopuses don't rules the world) . What it means is that it only takes one smart person to figure something out once. We don't need to reinvent the wheel every time we want to dig for termites, fish a treat out of a bottle or have a realization that the speed of light a:)exists and b:)is a constant. Add writing to the mix and the one thing we truly excel at as a species, bullshitting, and the one thing we excel at as individuals of that species, figuring poo poo out, attain a sort of easily transmissible, lasting status as a physical object. Thanks Mr. Dick, for being able to say clearly what I was trying to say earlier. Especially about octopi, because poo poo if they lived longer than 4 years we would be living in the octopocene. We still might, so we'd better get eating them before they turn their freaky eyes on us. |
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Jan 8, 2020 02:30
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Manifisto posted:would this framework have anything interesting/useful to say about entities like multinational corporations? corporations seem to . . . well, do things that aren't accidental but aren't in the intention of any one human being, and also not collectively decided by a deliberative process. at least some of this activity is goal-oriented, in terms of directions like making money and competitive survival, these values are kind of written into the dna of a for-profit business entity. would this be, for example, a sort of minor or lesser collective intentionality, an advanced example of shared intentionality, something else altogether? I mean, technically, maybe? It definitely stretches the theory into a whole different sociological and political area that it was not meant for, it's a fundamental theory to look into the development of human cognition over the course of several million years, I wouldn't draw political or socio-economical conclusions from it. Especially as the cognitive base is exactly that, just a base, everything we make out of it on the upper levels goes far beyond the theoretical ability to cooperate, as it further moves on into advanced and highly complex social networks, for which the theory of intentionality can, at best, be the foundation. As a side note, this is just Tomasello's theory, there are several other well-known ones, for example by Gamble and Dunbar, who build up a similar level system but expanded it to six different levels of in-depth analysis and used it to create the theory of a social brain where they take the idea I laid out before about using observable social structures as a stepping stone to get into the cognitive process as a whole, but going even further in, straight into the cognitive process and development of consciousness both found and assumed in humans and pre-humans. I skipped that theory because I was exhausted and because it probably would have been a two pager ITT on its own, but if you're interested in that, check out "Thinking Big. How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind", London 2015 by Clive Gamble, John Gowlett and Robin Dunbar. I find the theory exciting to go into, but it is not uncontroversial due to the fundamental issues pointed out before, from the possibility that none of the inner shape of the mind being affected by natural selection in the first place, social structures being less of a proper way to look into someone's mind, underestimating the ability for lifeforms to develop structures actively and learning to do so in already existing structures etc. Mr. Dick posted:The qualitative difference comes down mostly to communication and tool use, it's a folksy truism, but it totally holds. It's not two special things, it's two pretty regular things in conjunction (being on land and not in the water, Mr. Dick believes, helps too and is why whales or octopuses don't rules the world) . What it means is that it only takes one smart person to figure something out once. We don't need to reinvent the wheel every time we want to dig for termites, fish a treat out of a bottle or have a realization that the speed of light a:)exists and b:)is a constant. Add writing to the mix and the one thing we truly excel at as a species, bullshitting, and the one thing we excel at as individuals of that species, figuring poo poo out, attain a sort of easily transmissible, lasting status as a physical object. Manifisto posted:but if that were the case, then you wouldn't get p-zombies, would you? that was sort of the point I was driving at. I do recognize that neither I nor anyone itt is going to dope out the answer to such an apparently heavily studied problem, we're just shooting the poo poo, thanks for taking the time to respond. Unless it would be proven that these things in fact do lead to a positive outcome that is necessary for our survival and thus stayed around just like our ability to walk on two limbs has, in which case (outside of random mutations in modern society that wouldn't get selected out) p-zombies would be evolutionary nonsense. However both conclusions require the implication of a few of follow-ups, so a pure biological approach to the problem might not be enough to tackle it in general.
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Jan 8, 2020 15:47
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Goons Are Great posted:if you're interested in that, check out "Thinking Big. How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind", London 2015 by Clive Gamble, John Gowlett and Robin Dunbar. I find the theory exciting to go into, but it is not uncontroversial due to the fundamental issues pointed out before, from the possibility that none of the inner shape of the mind being affected by natural selection in the first place, social structures being less of a proper way to look into someone's mind, underestimating the ability for lifeforms to develop structures actively and learning to do so in already existing structures etc. hmmm interesting, sounds like something I should check out. thanks! Goons Are Great posted:Probably not, but it's not an automatic logical conclusion against p-zombies, as Mr Dick already mentioned that natural selection never chooses for anything. If stuff proves useful, it stays around, if it's harmful, it goes away, but there are tons of biological examples where stuff neither really brought any benefit (anymore, eg after changing environments) nor proved harmful in any way, thus it never was selected out, as a mutation that (simply said) didn't have those qualities around, did not have any advantage over those that had. It might as well be that the entire mental concept behind this is the result of a process that developed long time ago and proved useful at some point, but then lost it's inherent biological meaning for survival without doing any harm to the fitness of the species, thus staying around in some way or another. hmmm maybe it is not worth going too far with the p-zombie derail, since I'm confronting the issue for the first time I am not really up to speed the way that experienced people are so I'm undoubtedly going to go through a bunch of things that have already been well considered. as usual, when I try to write quickly I write less clearly. there are a few related but distinct points that were being discussed, and my response you just quoted didn't have anything to do with the "evolution" point. the point was more, if you posit that qualia arise automatically as a side effect of the neural activity required to do stuff in the world, then you wouldn't get p-zombies, just like you never get boat motion without a wake. but of course that essentially assumes the point in question. and I guess if qualia (outside one's own experience) are unmeasurable and unprovable, there is literally no way to determine whether they arise inevitably as a result of cognition, or arise only sometimes, or only uniquely. I must admit I find it weird when you start considering the implications of, at the extreme, a world of people other than yourself who talk in detail about their subjective experiences and the nature of qualia yet do not experience them. it starts to reek of solipsism. sure, just because someone is able to speak about their subjectivity in a way that closely matches your own experience, and even provides insights about their own experience that lead you to discover useful new things about your own subjectivity, I guess that does not technically PROVE they are experiencing subjectivity. but it feels weird and unnatural to assume that your own perspective is unique in that sense. I am reminded of the way Hubble dealt with his discovery that every observable star seemed to be receding from earth: he could either assume that earth was special and unlike every other star, or assume that earth was not uniquely special and proceed on the assumption that everything was receding away from everything else. that turned out to be an extremely productive way of thinking! this is what I mean by the utility of parsimony even when it doesn't logically prove anything. put another way, unless you could prove that other people are p-zombies--and by definition you can't--it would be extremely reckless to treat anyone who claimed to have subjectivity as if they did not. so one would be morally and ethically bound to act as if other people have subjectivity no matter what . . . so at some point I guess it stops being an interesting question, just like other solipsistic musings.
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Jan 8, 2020 16:24
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Manifisto posted:hmmm interesting, sounds like something I should check out. thanks! Ah, sorry, yeah I completely misunderstood your point there. Usually I take several hours to days to write stuff like this at work and outside of conferences (where I prepare myself for a similarly time frame) I rarely get into in depth discussion like this, apart from casually talking with colleagues, so my reading comprehension seems to suffer. Probably doesn't help that ITT I have almost exclusively been office posting with tons of similar stuff around me. From that perspective, I agree! The general impossibility to objectively measure or, hell, even describe qualia are a cornerstone for the p-zombie problem but if you assume in a fundamental way that qualia arise from the general neural activity in the (human, or rather personal?) brain, then yes, p-zombies would be a logical impossibility, as, also assuming that two humans are remotely similarly built and share the ability to have such neural activity that leads to the perception qualia, they would automatically be regular humans with a similar inner life than you. In terms of Solipsism, it always was a rather close companion to the general argument of p-zombies, it's an easy to go step from giving the sheer possibility of their existence, although that logical proximity shouldn't be a reason to rule stuff out on sheer principle either, as it's best to keep all doors open for solving the problem. That, however, obviously doesn't at all translate to any moral or social, practical consequences and usually if people are discussing these fundamental issues in academical epistemology it also doesn't go there - if it for whatever weird reason does, the discussion tends to be quite unproductive from the beginning. In general it's helps keeping theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy as disciplines somewhat further apart to not jump from ideas and conclusions to "Hey, what about we do this probably terrible thing!", despite the natural lack of clearly defined borders of disciplines in philosophy and the controversial nature of literally everything ever discussed on that matter.
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Jan 8, 2020 17:07
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thanks! I feel guilty distracting you from work and appreciate your patience and insight.
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Jan 8, 2020 17:46
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Nonononono, don't feel bad, I posted this thread for specifically this reason and also it's a fun experience to procrastinate work with this! Also I wouldn't post if I couldn't afford doing so here, I really enjoy talking about this in byob, it's an entire change of pace from the usual setup of discussing this stuff in the naturally slow academical world where shape and form of the argument matters more and you need to be aware of deadlines and all the non-philosophical stuff that university work includes. You wouldn't believe how many paid hours of work I spend writing similarly long effort posts about ants. And my boss probably wouldn't either!
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Jan 8, 2020 18:06
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Manifisto posted:would this framework have anything interesting/useful to say about entities like multinational corporations? corporations seem to . . . well, do things that aren't accidental but aren't in the intention of any one human being, and also not collectively decided by a deliberative process. at least some of this activity is goal-oriented, in terms of directions like making money and competitive survival, these values are kind of written into the dna of a for-profit business entity. would this be, for example, a sort of minor or lesser collective intentionality, an advanced example of shared intentionality, something else altogether? i can hardly keep up with this thread much less reply but just wanted to say this is something i've thought about a lot. the process that somehow makes a corporation (or government) made up of people who in theory have morals act completely amorally on a scale that no one person could even if they wanted. it's weird to call it motivation, but something keeps em sucking up wealth and perpetuating their own existence
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Jan 8, 2020 18:37
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Alright, currently I'm working on some really heavy stuff about consciousness and the questions surrounding a human's will which really got me thinking and there's some stuff in there that I discussed and read about recently that I'd be very interested to discuss with you guys. It's not new, it fits right into our previous talks we had ITT regarding cognitive and emotional states and abilities. I'm especially curious to hear your opinion on the question of what exactly a consciousness is, human or not. How would you define, or simply describe it? What, in your opinion, are the key elements of a conscious perception? Would you rather come from a biological perspective, or do you consider it as trascendent from that? Not to provoke an argument, I'm genuinely curious about your views and whether it's something you guys have thought about before, as there are no wrong answers here.
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Jan 8, 2020 23:44
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