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I'd be very gracious if you could take a look at my recent question and the comments. Your statement
is interesting to me. What is a counter-argument to the claim that the only way that one could claim that " "X is true" means something" is to unpack the statement "X is true" all the way down to amplitudes over configurations (perhaps in a subspace of configuration space that highly factorizes over 'statistically common arrangements of particles in human brains correlating to mathematical conclusions' or something.
Where do the intuition-sympathizers stand on the issue of logical names?
I don't think something like 'ought' can intuitively point to something that has ontological ramifications. If there is any "intuition" to it, why is it unsatisfactory to think it's merely an evolutionary effect?
From the original post above, I find a point of contention with
'I ought to do X' does correspond to something that exists... namely, some distribution over configurations of human minds. It's a proposition like any other, like 'that sign is red' for example. You can track down a fully empirical and quantifiable descriptor of 'I ought to do X' with some sufficiently accurate model and measuring devices with sufficient precision. States of knowledge about what one 'ought' to do are states of knowledge like any others. When tracking down the physics of 'Ought', it will be fleshed out with some nuanced, perhaps situationally specific, definition that relates it to other existing entities.
I guess more succinctly, there is no abstract concept of 'ought'. The label 'ought' just refers to an algorithm A, an outcome desired from that algorithm O, an input space of things the algorithm can operate on, X, an assessment of the probability that the outcome happens under the algorithm, P(A(X) = O). Up to the limit of sensory fidelity, this is all in principle experimentally detectable, no?
I don't believe in an ontology of morals, only an epistemology of them.
Do you think that "The sign is red" means something different from "I believe the sign is red"? (In the technical sense of believe, not the pop sense.)
Do you think that "Murder is wrong" means something different from "I believe that murder is wrong."?
The verb believe goes without saying when making claims about the world. To assert that 'the sign is red' is true would not make sense if I did not believe it, by definition. I would either be lying or unaware of my own mental state. To me, your question borders more on opinions and their consequences.
Quoting from there: "But your beliefs are not about you; beliefs are about the world. Your beliefs should be your best available estimate of the way things are; anything else is a lie."
What I'm trying to say is that the statement (Murder is wrong) implies the further slight linguistic variant (I believe murder is wrong) (modulo the possibility that someone is lying or mentally ill, etc.) The question then is whether (I believe murder is wrong) -> (murder is wrong). Ultimately, from the perspective of the person making these claims, the answer is 'yes'. It makes no sense for me to feel that my preferences are not universally and unequivocally true.
I don't find this at odds with a situation where a notorious murderer who is caught, say Hannibal Lecter, can simultaneously choose his actions and say "murder is wrong". Maybe the person is mentally insane. But even if they aren't, they could simply choose a preference ordering such that the local wrongness of failing to gratify their desire to murder is worse than the local wrongness of murder itself in their society. Thus, they can see that to people who don't have the same preference for murdering someone for self-gratification, the computation of beliefs works out that (murder is wrong) is generally true, but not true when you substitute their local situations into their personal formula for computing the belief. In this case it just becomes an argument over words because the murderer is tacitly substituting his personal local definitions for things when making choices, but then using more general definitions when making statements of beliefs. In essence, the murderer believes it is not wrong for him to murder and get the gratification, but that murder, as society defines it and views it, is "wrong" where "wrong" is a society-level description, not the murderer's personal description. I put a little more about the "words" problem below.
The apparent difference between this way of thinking and the way we all experience our thinking is that, among our assertions is the meta-assertion that (over-asserting beliefs is bad) -> (I believe over-asserting beliefs is bad) or something similar to this. All specific beliefs, including such meta-beliefs, are intertwined. You can't have independent beliefs about whether murder is right that don't depend on your beliefs about whether beliefs should be acted upon like they are cold hard facts.
But at the root, all beliefs are statements about physics. Mapping a complicated human belief down to the level of making statistical pattern recognition claims about amplitude distributions is really hard and inaccessible to us. Further, evolutionarily, we can't afford to burn computation time exploring a fully determined picture of our beliefs. After some amount of computation time, we have to make our chess moves or else the clock runs out and we lose.
It only feels like saying (I believe murder is wrong) fails to imply the claim (murder is wrong). Prefacing a claim with "I believe" is a human-level way or trying to mitigate the harshness of the claim. It could be a statement that tries to roughly quantify how much evidence I can attest to for the claim which the belief describes. It certainly sounds more assured to say (murder is wrong) than to say (I believe murder is wrong), but this is a phantom distinction.
The other thing, which I think you are trying to take special pains to avoid, is that you can very easily run into a battle of words here. If someone says, "I believe murder is wrong" and what they really mean is something like "I believe that it does an intolerable amount of social disservice in the modern society that I live in for anyone to act as if murdering is acceptable, and thus to always make sure to punish murderers," basically, if someone translates "murder" into "the local definition of murder in the world that I frequently experience" and they translate "wrong" into "the local definition of wrong (e.g. punishable in court proceedings or something)", then they are no longer talking about the cognitive concept of murder. An alien race might not define murder the same or "wrong" the same.
If someone uses 'believe' to distinguish between making a claim about the most generalized form of murder they can think of, applicable to the widest array of potential sentient beings, or something like that, then the two statements are different, but only artificially.
If I say "I believe murder is wrong" and I really mean "I believe (my local definition of murder) is (my local definition of wrong)" then this implies the statement (The concept described by my local definition of murder is locally wrong), with no "quantifier" of belief required.
In the end, all statements can be reduced this way. If a statement has "I believe" as a "quantifier", then either it is only an artificial facet of language that restricts the definitions of words in the claim to some (usually local) subset on which the full, unprefaced claim can be made... or else if local definitions of words aren't being implicated, then the "I believe" prefix literally contains no additional information about the state of your mind than the raw assertion would yield.
This is why rhetoric professors go nuts when students write argumentative papers and drop "I think that" or "I believe that" all over the place. Assertions are assertions. It's a social custom that you can allude to the fact that you might not have 100% confidence in your assertion by prefacing it with "I believe". It's also a social custom that you can allude to respect for other beliefs or participation in a negotiation process by prefacing claims with "I believe", but in the strictest sense of what information you're conveying to third parties (separate from any social custom dressings), the "I believe" preface adds no information content.
The difference is here
Alice: "I bet you $500 that the sign is red" Bob: "OK" later, they find out it's blue Bob: "Pay up!"
Alice: "I bet you $500 that I believe the sign is red" Bob: "OK" later, they find out it's blue Alice: "But I thought it was red! Pay up!"
That's the difference between "X" and "I believe X". We say them in the same situation, but they mean different things.
The way statements like "murder is wrong" communicate facts about preference orders is pretty ambiguous. But suppose someone says that "Murder is wrong, and this is more important than gratifying my desire, possible positive consequences of murder, and so on" and then murders, without changing their mind. Would they therefore be insane? If yes, you agree with me.
Correct is at issue, not true.
Why? Why do you say this?
Does "i believe the sky is green" imply "the sky is green"? Sure, you believe that, when you believe X, X is probably true, but that's a belief, not a logical implication.
I am suggesting a similar thing for morality. People believe that "(I believe murder is wrong) => (murder is wrong)" and that belief is not reducible to physics.
Assertions aren't about the state of your mind! At least some of them are about the world - that thing, over there.
I don't understand this. If Alice bet Bob that she believed that the sign was red, then going and looking at the sign would in no way settle the bet. They would have to go look at her brain to settle that bet, because the claim, "I believe the sign is red" is a statement about the physics of Alice's brain.
I want to think more about this and come up with a more coherent reply to the other points. I'm very intrigued. Also, I think that I accidentally hit the 'report' button when trying to reply. Please disregard any communication you might get about that. I'll take care of it if anyone happens to follow up.
You are correct in your first paragraph, I oversimplified.
I think this address this topic very well. The first person experience of belief is one in the same with fact-assertion. 'I ought to do X' refers to a 4-tuple of actions, outcomes, utility function, and conditional probability function.
W.r.t. your question about whether a murderer who, prior to and immediately after committing murder, attests to believing that murder is wrong, I would say it is a mistaken question to bring their sanity into it. You can't decide that question without debating what is meant by 'sane'. How a person's preference ordering and resulting actions look from the outside does not necessarily reveal that the person failed to behave rationally, according to their utility function, on the inside. If I choose to label them as 'insane' for seeming to violate their own belief, this is just a verbal distinction about how I will label such third-person viewings of that occurrence. Really though, their preference ordering might have been temporarily suspended due to clouded judgment from rage or emotion. Or, they might not be telling the full truth about their preference ordering and may not even be aware of some aspects of it.
The point is that beliefs are always statements of physics. If I say, "murder is wrong", I am referring to some quantified subset of states of matter and their consequences. If I say, "I believe murder is wrong", I am telling you that I assert that "murder is wrong" is true, which is a statement about my brain's chemistry.
Everyone keeps saying that, but they never give convincing arguments for it.
I also disagree with this.
Pardon me, but I believe the burden of proof here is for you to supply something non-physical that's being specified and then produce evidence that this is the case. If the thing you're talking about is supposed to be outside of a magisterium of evidence, then I fail to see how your claim is any different than that we are zombies.
At a coarse scale, we're both asking about the evidence that we observe, which is the first-person experience of assertions about beliefs. Over models that can explain this phenomenon, I am attempting to select the one with minimum message length, as a computer program for producing the experience of beliefs out of physical material can have some non-zero probability attached to it through evidence. How are we to assign probability to the explanation that beliefs do not point to things that physically exist? Is that claim falsifiable? Are there experiments we can do which depend on the result? If not, then the burden of proof here is squarely on you to present a convincing case why the same-old same-old punting to complicated physics is not good enough. If it's not good enough for you, and you insist on going further, that's fine. But physics is good enough for me here and that's not a cop out or an unjustified conclusion in the slightest.
Suppose I say "X is red".
That indicates something physical - it indicates that I believe X is red
but it means something different, and also physical - it means that X is red
Now suppose I say "X is wrong"
That indicates something physical - it indicates that I believe X is wrong
using the same-old, same-old principle, we include that it means something different.
but there is nothing else physical that we could plausibly say it means.
Hm? It's easy to form beliefs about things that aren't physical. Suppose I tell you that the infinite cardinal aleph-1 is strictly larger than aleph-0. What's the physical referent of the claim?
I'm not making a claim about the messy physical neural structures in my head that correspond to those sets -- I'm making a claim about the nonphysical infinite sets.
Likewise, I can make all sorts of claims about fictional characters. Those aren't claims about the physical book, they're claims about its nonphysical implications.
Why do you think that nonphysical implications are ontologically existing things? I argue that what you're trying to get at by saying "nonphysical implications" are actual quantified subsets of matter. Ideas, however abstract, are referring to arrangements of matter. The vision in your mind when you talk about aleph-1 is of a physically existing thing. When's the last time you imagined something that wasn't physical? A unicorn? You mean a horse with wings glued onto it? Mathematical objects represent states of knowledge, which are as physical as anything else. The color red refers to a particular frequency of light and the physical processes by which it is a common human experience. There is no idea of what red is apart from this. Red is something different to a blind man than it is to you, but by speaking about your physical referent, the blind man can construct his own useful physical referent.
Claims about fictional characters are no better. What do you mean by Bugs Bunny other than some arrangement of colors brought to your eyes by watching TV in the past. That's what Bugs Bunny is. There's no separately existing entity which is Bugs Bunny that can be spoken about as if it ontologically was. Every person who refers to Bugs Bunny refers to physical subsets of matter from their experience, whether that's because they witnessed the cartoon and were told through supervised learning what cognitive object to attach it to or they heard about it later through second hand experience. A blind person can have a physical referent when speaking about Bugs Bunny, albeit one that I have a very hard time mentally simulating.
In any case, merely asserting that something fails to have a physical referent is not a convincing reason to believe so. Ask yourself why you think there is no physical referent and whether one could construct a computational system that behaves that way.
No.
I have no very firm ontological beliefs. I don't want to make any claim about whether fictional characters or mathematical abstractions "really exist".
I do claim that I can talk about abstractions without there being any set of physical referents for that abstraction. I think it's utterly routine to write software that manipulates things without physical referents. A type-checker, for instance, isn't making claims about the contents of memory; it's making higher-order claims about how those values will be used across all possible program executions -- including ones that can't physically happen.
I would cheerfully agree with you that the cognitive process (or program execution) is carried out by physical processes. Of course. But the subject of that process isn't the mechanism. There's nothing very strange about this, as far as I can tell. It's routine for programs and programmers to talk about "infinite lists"; obviously there is no such thing in the physical world, but it is a very useful abstraction.
By the way, I think your Bugs Bunny example fails. When I talk to somebody about Bugs Bunny, I am able to make myself understood. The other person and I are able to talk, in every sense that matters, about the same thing. But we don't share the same mental states. Conversely, my mental picture isn't isomorphic to any particular set of photons; it's a composite. Somehow, that doesn't defeat practical communication.
The case might be clearer for purely literary characters. When I talk about the character King Lear, I certainly am not saying something about the physical copy I read! Consider the perfectly ordinary (and true) sentence "King Lear had three daughters." That's not a claim about ink, it's a claim about the mental models created in competent speakers of English by the work (which itself is an abstraction, not a physical thing). Those models are physically embodied, but they are not physical things! There's no set of quarks you can point to and say "there's the mental model."
I think more salient examples that make this question hard are not going to be borne out of trying to come up with something increasingly abstract. The more puzzling cognitive objects to explain are when you apply unphysical transformations to obvious objects... like taking a dog and imagining it stretched out to the length of a football field. Or a person with a torus-like hole in their abdomen. But these are simply images in the brain. That the semantic content of the image can be interpreted as strange unions of other cognitive objects is not a reason to think that the cognitive object itself isn't physical.
Just to be a little clearer: saying that "I ought to do X" means "There exists some goal Y such that I want to achieve Y; there exists some set of variables D which I can manipulate to bring about the achievement of Y; X is an algorithm for manipulating variables in D to produce effect Y, and according to my current state of knowledge, I assess that the probability of this model of X(D) yielding Y is high enough such that whatever physical resources it costs me to attempt X(D), as a Bayesian, the trade-off works out in favor of actually doing it. That is, Payoff(Y) * P(I was right in modeling the algorithm X(D) as producing Y) > Cost(~Y)*P(I was incorrect in modeling the algorithm X(D)), or some similar decision rule.