I'm not sure if we're talking past each other or if there is genuine disagreement, but I'll expound a bit.
When asleep or in a coma, the mind doesn't interact with the environment at all.
The sleeping/comatose mind does interact constantly with the environment in two ways. For starters, it's well established that external sensory input (specifically sounds and touch) regularly makes its way into the conscious experience of dreaming and comatose state. But that's just a side issue here. At a more fundamental level, every living thing interacts 24/7 with its environment through its metabolism.
... (read more)That confuses causality with necessity (metabolism causally preceding understanding doesn't mean that metabolism or continuous input are necessary for
This is bit of a side note but still may interesting: I suppose the history of scientific paradigm shifts can be framed as updates to our "map" v. "territory" partitions. A good scientific theory (in my account) is exactly what converts what was ostensibly "territory" into explicit mathematical models i.e. "maps".
Thanks again for your comments, they're a great help. Hopefully my response below also addresses your other comments.
So yes, I'm familiar with the use/reference aka map/territory distinction. The latter is a very good way to phrase the issue here, so I'll go with that nomenclature here.
Normally map v. territory is an extremely useful distinction that science has made fantastic progress with. But there are also well-known historical cases where it has been a conceptual trap. For example, Newton and Kant assumed that our "maps" of space and time are distinct from the "territory" of space and time. Einstein argued instead that they're only meaningful through their operational definitions - i.e their maps.... (read 357 more words →)
A locked-in person communicating only by eye movement would understand perfectly well in my account. If they're alive, their metabolism keeps their body, brain and mind constantly interacting with their environment. This holds even if they're asleep or in a coma. My point (which is really just orthodox biology) is that human language processing results from metabolic processes (what I've called model predictive controlling to highlight its modeling character), and that includes what we call syntax and semantics - our sense of "understanding".
Thanks for the comment. Honestly it took me a while to disambiguate (i.e. translate to myself what you're getting at). So I take it as an interesting example of the point I was actually trying to make to Mitchell Porter previously. Namely, that our semantic models of normally unproblematic words can diverge quite a bit. E.g., my model for "truth" is not "a relationship between a living organism and a world beyond it". Rather in my model, "the world beyond" is ultimately also part of our internal modeling. That's because the very fact that we humans imagine and form narratives around "the world beyond" makes it per se a product of our... (read more)
Thanks for the questions.
You're correct, I don't deny pizzas exist. I don't even deny that truth and reality exist. But I am arguing for what I believe is a more robust semantic model for the word "exist". My point is that semantic models aren't set in stone or fall from the sky; they're necessarily human creations. In fact every human carries a slightly different semantic model for all our words, but we rarely notice it because our use of them normally coincides so well. That's how we can all play Wittgenstein's language game and feel we understand each other. (Which LLMs do as well, but in their case we have no idea... (read more)
Indeed, in a way that was my intention. In a coming essay I will try to lay out what I believe is a serviceable notion of truth and reality that we work with. The purpose of this first essay was to first lay out how much they are human creations.
The notion of truth and reality I wish to debunk is the denial that they're human mental creations. My argument is a mild form of reductio ad absurdum. That is, I first make "factual" claims as if they're independent of our mental creations. In particular, I take the current scientific worldview that entropy-exporting metabolism is the basis for life. That then leads to the conclusion that entropy-exporting (via predictive modeling) must therefore also be basis of the syntax and semantics of human language. Thus our notions of truth and reality, and whatever narratives and semantics we attach to them, must also be mental creations.
Note that this conclusion is generally considered unproblematic for basically all other human words (e.g. "beauty", "pizza", etc). I can think of no reason why "truth" and "reality" should get a special carve-out clause.
Thanks for the feedback. If I understand you correctly, your point is the just one I intended to make.
The best generative language models like ChatGPT-4 still astonish us with both what they can and can’t do. And that's for one ostensibly simple reason: an AI still doesn’t “understand” what it’s doing. It can’t even “know” what we want it from it; only descend to whatever reward function it is given. That infamously introduces weird failure modes galore, many of which will likely be with us for a while (along with other issues like endless generation of fake news and propaganda). But this essay isn’t about AI helping,... (read 3171 more words →)
The point I’m trying to express (and clearly failing at) isn’t conceptualism or solipsism, at least not in the way my own semantic modeling interprets them. As I interpret them, the idealism of, say, Berkeley, Buddhism et al amounts to a re-branding of reality from being “out there” to “in my mind” (or “God’s mind”). I mean it differently, but because I refer constantly to our mental models, I can see why my argument looks a lot like that. Ironically, my failure may be a sort of illustration of the point itself. Namely, the limits of using language to discuss the limitations of language.
In fact, the point I’m trying to get to... (read 436 more words →)