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By Wittgenstein's time, there were already plenty of philosophers who thought definitions aren't quite captured by necessary and sufficient conditions.
And the recognition that the process that ordinary people went though had pretty much NOTHING in common with "necessary and sufficient conditions" was not made by philosophers.
Ordinary people struggle to decide whether dolphins are fish or penguins are birds. And they often get it wrong if they haven't been explicitly taught otherwise; even then, some still screw up their answers.
In response to
The Featherless Biped
Does this sound familiar?
Yes. I see nothing here not already covered by this, this, and this.
Your final conclusion is like saying that the computation done by computers doesn't involve arithmetic. It's *flow of electric charge*. The charge flows around, then settles down in some stable point in the sea of possible distributions. ETA: On that point, see also this.
Your final conclusion is like saying that [blah blah blah]
No, it's not. Associational processing can emulate logical thinking, but it's not restricted to it and will not normally produce it. Restrictions have to be added for logic to arise out of the sea of associations.
In response to
The Featherless Biped
This post could use some citations.
Common knowledge, thomblake. Do you need citations to know that water is composed of one atom of oxygen and two of hydrogen?
These points are to psychology what the composition of water is to chemistry: widely known and non-controversial.
Physicists asked to evaluate paranormal claims do very poorly, yet they are clearly very brainy.
Reference, please. I defy the implied claim that "Physicists asked to evaluate paranormal claims do worse than the average person". I bet 6:1 against this.
If I had a dollar for every brainy person who'd been gulled because they thought they were "too smart" to require being skeptical...
and if I had a dollar for every average idiot who sleepwalked straight into an obvious scam I would make a lot more money.
If I had a dollar for every brainy person who'd been gulled because they thought they were "too smart" to require being skeptical...
and if I had a dollar for every average idiot who sleepwalked straight into an obvious scam I would make a lot more money.
Those sets are not disjoint.
In response to
Misleading the witness
Can anyone think of good ways to notice when outright deception is being used? How could a rationalist practice her skills at a magic show?
Most "rationalists" are quite smart people, so tricks that are designed by a trickster to fool the masses rarely work on us. For example, I doubt that many on this site would invest heavily in a pyramid scheme or get fooled by a used car salesman. This is because these tricks are targeted at the average idiot.
However, I have recently noticed that there is, for each of us, a stalker who stalks us and at each and every turn attempts to deceive us, and is just as smart as we are. That stalker/trickster is your own cognitive biases, and by far and away inflicts the greatest material losses on you. This is certainly true in my case.
I cannot even remember the last time I was fooled by someone else, but now that I am working on reducing my losses due to self deception, I realize that basically every day I engage in successful self-deception: I get into some emotional state, myopic, irrational algorithms take over, and I make up little excuses to myself for why they reached the right conclusion.
The real enemy is already inside your head.
Most "rationalists" are quite smart people, so tricks that are designed by a trickster to fool the masses rarely work on us.
Wrong. Tricksters rely on people making stupid assumptions and failing to check assertions. People with a lot of brainpower can do those things just as easily as people without.
Physicists asked to evaluate paranormal claims do very poorly, yet they are clearly very brainy. It takes more than just brains to be intelligent - you have to use the brains properly.
If I had a dollar for every brainy person who'd been gulled because they thought they were "too smart" to require being skeptical...
"He sharply stubbed his toe on a large rock and proclaimed, 'Thus, I refute this!'"
That traditional anecdote (and its modified forms) only illustrate how little the pro-qualia advocates understand the arguments against the idea.
Dismissing 'qualia' does not, as many people frequently imply, require dismissing the idea that sensory stimuli can be distinguish and grouped into categories. That would be utterly absurd - it would render the senses useless and such a system would never have evolved.
All that's needed to is reject the idea that there are some mysterious properties to sensation which somehow violate basic logic and the principles of information theory.
The most charitable thing that categorical imperatives can be called is arational. The most accurate thing they can be called is unintelligible. The statement "You should do X" is meaningless without an "if you want to accomplish Y," because otherwise it can't answer the question, "Why?" More importantly, there is no way to determine which of two contradictory CIs should be followed.
No moral rule can be derived via any rational decision making process alone. Morality requires arational axioms or values. The litany of things you "should" have done if you were individually rational does not actually follow. "Rational" gets used to mean "strictly selfish utility maximizer" a bit more often than it should be, which is never. There may be people who are indeed individually arational to not do those things, but as we all have different values, that does not mean we all are.
-I'm using categorical imperative as distinct from hypothetical imperative - "Don't lie" vs. "Don't lie if you want people to trust you." There can be some confusion over what people mean by CI, from what I've seen written on this site.
Categorical imperatives that result in persistence will accumulate.
Why should any lifeform preserve its own existence? There's no reason. But those that do eventually dominate existence. Those that do not, are not.
In response to
Are You Anosognosic?
yawn
Most people who devote the necessary thought to the matter eventually realize that they are pathological, deeply so, and that significant work-arounds are the only way to compensate for the irrevocable faults hardwired into their minds.
It's not a question of whether, it's a question of how.
In response to
Are you crazy?
"Sanity" is not well-defined, here.
There are plenty of people just as sociopathic as John, and just as dangerous as John but more so, who would not be considered insane or perceived as dangerous by society at large.
Most people in positions of power have strong sociopathic tendencies. It's just that many of them conform sufficiently well with society's expectations that they're not recognized as threats.
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I think it's exactly right. All reasons are rationalizations.
Not in the way that 'rationalization' is used in natural language. That refers to a non-rational statement that is used in place of rationality in order to satisfy the desire to present an argument as rational without having to go through the trouble of actually constructing and adopting a rational position.
The biggest functional difference: when a reason is abolished, the behavior goes away. When a rationalization is abolished, the behavior remains.