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TheOtherDave comments on Rationality Quotes April 2012 - Less Wrong
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I accept that you don't consider dogs to have cognitive systems capable of having thoughts. I disagree. I suspect we don't disagree on the cognitive capabilities of dogs, but rather on what the label "thought" properly refers to.
Perhaps we would do better to avoid the word "thought" altogether in this discussion in order to sidestep that communications failure. That said, I'm not exactly sure how to do that without getting really clunky, really fast. I'll give it a shot, though.
I certainly agree with you that if cognitive system B (for example, the mind of a Geman speaker) has a simple lexical item Lb (for example, the word "schadenfreude") ,
...and Lb is related to some cognitive state Slb (for example, the thought /schadenfreude/) such that Slb = M(Lb) (which we ordinarily colloquially express by saying that a word means some specific thought),
...and cognitive system A (for example, the mind of an English speaker) lacks a simple lexical item La such that Slb=M(La) (for example, the state we'd ordinarily express by saying that English doesn't have a word for "schadenfreude")...
that we CANNOT conclude from this that A can't enter Slb, nor that there exists no Sla such that A can enter Sla and the difference between Sla and Slb is < N, where N is the threshold below which we'd be comfortable saying that Sla and Slb are "the same thought" despite incidental differences which may exist.
So far, so good, I think. This is essentially the same claim you made above about the fact that there is no English word analogous to "schadenfreude" not preventing an English speaker from thinking the thought /schadenfreude/.
In those terms, I assert that there can exist a state Sa such that A can enter Sa but B cannot enter Sa. Further, I assert that there can exist a state Sa such that A can enter Sa but B cannot enter any state Sb such that the difference between Sa and Sb is < N.
Do you disagree with that? Or do you simply assert that if so, Sa and Sb aren't thoughts? Or something else?
I agree that this is an issue of what 'thoughts' are, though I'm not sure it's productive to side step the term, since if there's an interesting point to be found in the OP, it's one which involves claims about what a thought is.
I'd like to disagree with that unqualifiedly, but I don't think I have the grounds to do so, so my disagreement is a qualified one. I would say that there is no state Sa such that A can enter Sa, and such that B cannot enter Sa, and such that B can recognise Sa as a cognitive state. So without the last 'and such that', this would be a metaphysical claim that all cognitive systems are capable of entertaining all thoughts, barring uninteresting accidental interference (such as a lack of memory capacity, a lack of sufficient lifespan, etc.). I think this is true, but alas.
With the qualification that 'B would not be able to recognise Sa as a cognitive state', this is a more modest epistemic claim, one which amounts to the claim that recognising something as a cognitive state is nothing other than entering that state to one degree of precision or another. This effectively marks out my opinion on your second assertion: for any Sa and any Sb, such that the difference between Sa and Sb cannot be < N, A (and/or B) cannot by any means recognise the difference as part of that cognitive state.
All this is a way of saying that you could never have reason to think that there are thoughts that you cannot think. Nothing could give you evidence for this, so it's effectively a metaphysical speculation. Not only is evidence for such thoughts impossible, but evidence for the possibility of such thoughts is impossible.
I'm not exactly sure what it means to recognize something as a cognitive state, but I do assert that there can exist a state Sa such that A can enter Sa, and such that B cannot enter Sa, and such that B can believe that A is entering into a particular cognitive state whenever (and only when) A enters Sa. That ought to be equivalent, yes?
This seems to lead me back to your earlier assertion that if there's some shared "thought" at a very abstract level I and an alien mind can be said to share, then the remaining "terra incognito" between that and sharing the "thought" at a detailed level is necessarily something I can traverse.
I just don't see any reason to expect that to be true. I am as bewildered by that claim as if you had said to me that if there's some shared object that I and an alien can both perceive, then I can necessarily share the alien's perceptions. My response to that claim would be "No, not necessarily; if the alien's perceptions depend on sense organs or cognitive structures that i don't possess, for example, then I may not be able to share those perceptions even if I;n perceiving the same object." Similarly, my response to your claim is "No, not necessarily, if the alien's 'thought' depends on cognitive structures that i don't possess, for example, then I may not be able to share that 'thought'."
You suggest that because the aliens can understand one another's thoughts, it follows that I can understand the alien's thoughts, and I don't see how that's true either.
So, I dunno... I'm pretty stumped here. From my perspective you're simply asserting the impossibility, and I cannot see how you arrive at that assertion.
Well, if the terra incogntio has any relationship at all to the thoughts you do understand, such that the terra could be recognized as a part of or related to a cognitive state, then the terra is going to consist in stuff which bears inferential relations to what you do understand. These are relations you can necessarily traverse if the alien can traverse them. Add to that the fact that you've already assumed that the aliens largely share your world, that their beliefs are largely true, and that they are largely rational, and it becomes hard to see how you could justify the assertion at the top of your last post.
And that assertion has, thus far, gone undefended.
Well, I justify it by virtue of believing that my brain isn't some kind of abstract general-purpose thought-having or inferential-relationship-traversing device; it is a specific bit of machinery that evolved to perform specific functions in a particular environment, just like my digestive system, and I find it no more plausible that I can necessarily traverse an inferential relationship that an alien mind can traverse than that I can necessarily extract nutrients from a food source that an alien digestive system can digest.
How do you justify your assertion that I can necessarily traverse an inferential relationship if an alien mind is capable of traversing it?
Well, your brain isn't that, but its only a necessary but insufficient condition on your having thoughts. Understanding a language is both necessary and sufficient and a language actually is the device you describe. Your competance with your own language ensures the possibility of your traversal in another.
Sorry, I didn't follow that at all.
The source of your doubt seemed to be that you didn't think you posessed a general purpose thought having and inferential relationship traversing device. A brain is not such a device, we agree. But you do have such a device. A language is a general purpose thought having and inferential relationship traversing device, and you have that too. So, doubt dispelled?
Ah! OK, your comment now makes sense to me. Thanks.
Agreed that my not believing that my brain is a general-purpose inferential relationship traversing device (hereafter gpirtd) is at the root of my not believing that all thoughts thinkable by any brain are thinkable by mine.
I'm glad we agree that my brain is not a gpirtd.
But you seem to be asserting that English (for example) is a gpirtd.
Can you expand on your reasons for believing that? I can see no justification for that claim, either.
But I do agree that if English were a gpirtd while my brain was not, it would follow that I could infer in English any thought that an alien mind could infer, at the same level of detail that the alien mind could think it, even if my brain was incapable of performing that inference.
So the claim is really that language is a gpirtd, excepting very defective cases (like sign-language or something). That language is an inference relation traversing device is, I think, pretty clear on the surface of things: logic is that in virtue of which we traverse inference relations (if anything is). This isn't to say that English, or any language, is a system of logic, but only that logic is one of the things language allows us to do.
I think it actually follows from this that language is also a general purpose thought having device: thoughts are related, and their content is in large part (or perhaps entirely) constituted, by inferential relations. If we're foundationalists about knowledge, then we think that the content of thoughts is not entirely constituted by inferential relations, but this isn't a serious problem. If we can get anywhere in a process of translation, it is by assuming we share a world with whatever speaker we're trying to understand. If we don't assume this, and to whatever extent we don't assume this, just to that extent we can't recognize the gap as conceptual or cognitive. If an alien was reacting in part to facts of the shared world, and in part to facts of an unshared world (whatever that means), then just to the extent that the alien is acting on the latter facts, to that extent would we have to conclude that they are behaving irrationally. The reasons are invisible to us, after all. If we manage to infer from their behavior that they are acting on reasons we don't have immediate access to, then just to the extent that we now view their behavior as rational, we now share that part of the world with them. We can't decide that behavior is rational while knowing nothing of the action or the content of the reason, in the same sense that we can't decide whether or not a belief is rational, or true, while knowing nothing of its meaning or the facts it aimes at.
This last claim is most persuasively argued, I think, by showing that any example we might construct is going to fall apart. So it's here that I want to re-ask my question: what would a thought that we cannot think even look like to us? My claim isn't that there aren't any such thoughts, only that we could never be given reason for thinking that there are.
ETA: as to the question of brains, here I think there is a sense in which there could be thoughts we cannot think. For example, thoughts which take more than a lifetime to think. But this isn't an interesting case, and it's fundamentally remediable. Imagine someone said that there were languages that are impossible for me to understand, and when I pressed him on what he meant, he just pointed out that I do not presently understand chinese, and that he's about to kill me. He isn't making an interesting point, or one anyone would object to. If that is all the original quote intended, then seems a bit trivial: the quoted person could have just pointed out that 1000 years ago, no one could have had any thoughts about airplanes.