Comment on Uncategories and empty categories

Wed, 18 Feb 2015 04:02:07 GMT

I realize this has little to do with the actual point, but --

I think it does.

Like you, I think "savory" is a term for a certain type of non-sugar related goodness, of which the modern umami are a major component but not the only component. Things clearly get more savory when you salt to taste, for example, despite not hitting glutamate receptors more (I think). Yet pure salt isn't that savory.

It's not an empty category, it corresponds to a perceptual reality which arises for complicated reasons. Not all non-sweet things are savory. Water, bitterness, etc isn't sweet or savory, for example. Extreme sweetness prevents things from being savory, in the same way being burning-hot prevents a touch from being ticklish, but that doesn't mean that the absence of sweetness is truly the definition.

And while "empty categories" is a novel and interesting lens for me to look at things, I still think all the examples listed here suffer from the same flaws, for example:

Spirit - Calculus is neither physical nor spiritual. Spiritual specifically corresponds to meaningful things, and is tied into the subjection perception of a fundamental difference between inanimate and animate objects. The word "spiritual" pins down how some stuff is purposeful and meaningful and elevated.

The reductionist worldview makes it obvious how the intuition of spirits do not carve reality at the joints (much like how the understanding of taste receptors show the intuition of "savory" as not carving reality at the joints!) but that doesn't make them empty categories. Spirit does actually refer to a real thing that we perceive...it's just not a perception that easily withstands reductionist rigor. ...or you can try and say that spirits are made out of matter, thereby slightly altering the original meaning...that's what the "umami = savory = glutamate receptors" schema is doing.

Suppose we had a word that described an optical illusion, but we didn't know it was an optical illusion. Later, we discover that it is an optical illusion, and the reality isn't like we thought. Don't you think our original word describing our naive perceptions continues to mean something?

Originally, we had an illusion that agents and objects were fundamentally different and made words that described that intuition. Are the old words empty, just because reality turned out not to be that way?

The same argument applies to the other examples. Terminal values, for example. It feels like there are some things I value extrinsically (money) and others I value intrinsically (family). If after subsequent analysis it turns out I can't conveniently carve the complex reality of a tangle of neurons with that intuition, if I have to discard that intuition to really get how it works, does that really make the original idea empty?

As for why these are often defined in negative terms...it's often easier to communicate a definition by shooting down nearby concepts. You know from context that "savory" means pleasurable taste, and if you remove sweet from the flavor map, most of what remains falls under savory.

That meant if she found something she called a spirit, and I found that it had a mind containing information about our world, that would prove there were statistical regularities in its interaction with our world, and a configuration of parts to store the information, and it would by definition no longer be a spirit.

I'm not so sure about this. I bet if, when we first opened up the human skull, there was nothing there, and our motor neurons just mysteriously lit up, scientifically-minded people would still be talking seriously about souls and spirits to this day. As reductionists, we could hypothesize that there must be a spirit-mind, governed by spirit-laws, somewhere in a lawful spirit-world which intersects with our world at the spinal chord, and we'd do behavioral psych experiments to determine how it works and made reductionist models, I bet no dualists would feel uncomfortable with that explanation. It's just that reality turned out not to fundamentally separate agents and objects in that way. The only reason dualists and reductionists don't often get along is because reductionist scientific methods discovered the universe is monist, and that fact boggles our poor human intuitions the same way physics sometimes does.

I still think that the "empty category" concept might be useful. It would be nice to have an indicator of which intuitions were beginning to warp thinking and not adequately carve the reality as it revealed itself, and it's possible that the degree to which we have to resort to defining a concept by what it is not is an indicator that we're clinging to something that the evidence is pushing against.

TL:DR This unfortunately is getting too rambling to be useful because I'm thinking while I'm typing. I think what I'm grasping at is, while these so-called "empty" categories might be useful for identifying things which are simultaneously pleasing to the intuition and wrong, they aren't "not even wrong". They do in fact contain meaningful (but either incorrect or non-rigorous) content

...although (sorry, I know this was supposed to be a TL:DR) I guess they might become "not even wrong" if they're foisted into models that don't have room for them. The free will debate made much more sense back when it was more "Can a person really control their destiny, or is that foolish hubris and the gods decide all?" and I think at some deeper emotional level many people who try to debate undissolved free will are really asking "Am I free or are the physics gods bossing me around?"...but then the ground shifted and the debate was inappropriately transferred forced into an arena where the gods were replaced by a lawful universe and now it's all complete nonsense unless we do that "redefine savory as umami" trick and say that free will is implemented by laws, that's right, the "God" was you all along! (I call it a "semantic trick" because it solves problems via a redefinition of word meaning, but respectfully: it's a semantic trick with a long, illustrious history spanning from the Upanishads to Lesswrong's own Yudkowski and it really works for unconfusing people. When a redefined meaning seems to carve reality better than the original, it's more correct in some respects.)

The original question about free will was a valid question, the original constructs of spirits and so-on not empty, even if attempts to engage then analytically often generate nonsense until you understood what exactly that fuzzy human intuition was attempting to communicate.

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