But according to Hoffman, it’s much worse than this. There’s really just no resemblance between the interface and the underlying reality at all.
This, I think, is the most indefensible claim made, if that’s what he is actually saying. OF COURSE there’s a resemblance. If there weren’t, there would have been nothing for natural selection to act on to produce this interface instead of some other. It is an approximate and slight resemblance, very much so, but claiming it is not there is just nonsensical.
It’s not nonsensical. It’s an assertion that can be made sense of with a little effort.
Consider the user interface analogy. On your desktop there is a mouse pointer with which you can drag a file from here to there. In the underlying computer which executes the actions which are represented by this interface, there is nothing that resembles a pointer, a dragging action, or a file. That the interface associates certain activity in the hardware with certain things that appear on the desktop is a useful convention for us, but it is not one that was designed to give us an accurate notion of what is taking place inside the machine. Hoffman suggests that the same thing is true of the interface-reality we perceive and the real-reality underneath. The interface-reality was “designed” by natural selection to be a useful convention for us as we interact with the real-reality which is not apparent to us.
That, to me, reads like a very different statement. One I completely agree with. But different. I maintain that the very fact of the interface’s usefulness demonstrates that there is enough of a resemblance to the underlying reality to create said usefulness—by giving us accurate expectations about selected aspects of the behavior of whatever is going on beneath the surface, while lowering mental overhead by abstracting away the rest.
Edit to add: side note, who says the word red has to be defined based on wavelengths in absolute terms instead of relationally? I can create a less inaccurate but also usually less useful definition based on expected qualia produced in a set of observers in response to ambient light of particular kinds of spectra. Repeat until you get as accurate as desired, with each step eliminating an abstraction that’s normally subsumed in the interface.
In the underlying computer which executes the actions which are represented by this interface, there is nothing that resembles a pointer
Course’ there are: probably 64 bits in memory (for more degree of detail: 64 places of persistent electric charge with two stable states), which change iff pointer moves, and each bit restricts the places pointer can appear at. That resemblance exists certainly; I also agree there’s no resemblance like “small pointer-like thing/charge pattern in RAM module”.
In other words, one has to taboo “resemblance” but it’s not clear if that can be done.
We taboo resemblance all the time for things that refer to other things: Words, for example. The word “mouse” does not resemble a mouse, but we can usefully use the word as a reference. Words that resemble their references are a peculiar and remarkable tiny category (onomatopoeia) that are the exception to the rule.
If you thought your computer interface were an accurate picture of what is going on inside the computer, you might indeed go looking for a microscopic pointer somewhere in the wires. It’s because you don’t think this that you know to look for correspondences and representations instead. Hoffman’s point is that we don’t tend to do this with things like space, time, matter, etc.: we think those things in our interface-with-reality correspond to the same sorts of things in reality-under-the-hood (space, time, matter, etc.). He believes we’re mistaken.
Ok, fair, I agree they do not resemble one another in this kind of way. That isn’t how I was interpreting “resemblence.” I was thinking of it as “correspondence.”
Minor off topic aside: While they are a small minority, I suspect onomatopoeia-like words are probably more common than we usually think. A lot of words resemble, to me, aspects of their referent, even if only in a synesthetic way, or only if you look at older forms of the word. Add that to things like the bouba/kiki effect, and I start to wonder how much we coin new words using some kind of felt, metaphorical sense of meanings corresponding to how sounds feel.
This, I think, is the most indefensible claim made, if that’s what he is actually saying. OF COURSE there’s a resemblance. If there weren’t, there would have been nothing for natural selection to act on to produce this interface instead of some other. It is an approximate and slight resemblance, very much so, but claiming it is not there is just nonsensical.
It’s not nonsensical. It’s an assertion that can be made sense of with a little effort.
Consider the user interface analogy. On your desktop there is a mouse pointer with which you can drag a file from here to there. In the underlying computer which executes the actions which are represented by this interface, there is nothing that resembles a pointer, a dragging action, or a file. That the interface associates certain activity in the hardware with certain things that appear on the desktop is a useful convention for us, but it is not one that was designed to give us an accurate notion of what is taking place inside the machine. Hoffman suggests that the same thing is true of the interface-reality we perceive and the real-reality underneath. The interface-reality was “designed” by natural selection to be a useful convention for us as we interact with the real-reality which is not apparent to us.
That, to me, reads like a very different statement. One I completely agree with. But different. I maintain that the very fact of the interface’s usefulness demonstrates that there is enough of a resemblance to the underlying reality to create said usefulness—by giving us accurate expectations about selected aspects of the behavior of whatever is going on beneath the surface, while lowering mental overhead by abstracting away the rest.
Edit to add: side note, who says the word red has to be defined based on wavelengths in absolute terms instead of relationally? I can create a less inaccurate but also usually less useful definition based on expected qualia produced in a set of observers in response to ambient light of particular kinds of spectra. Repeat until you get as accurate as desired, with each step eliminating an abstraction that’s normally subsumed in the interface.
Course’ there are: probably 64 bits in memory (for more degree of detail: 64 places of persistent electric charge with two stable states), which change iff pointer moves, and each bit restricts the places pointer can appear at. That resemblance exists certainly; I also agree there’s no resemblance like “small pointer-like thing/charge pattern in RAM module”.
In other words, one has to taboo “resemblance” but it’s not clear if that can be done.
We taboo resemblance all the time for things that refer to other things: Words, for example. The word “mouse” does not resemble a mouse, but we can usefully use the word as a reference. Words that resemble their references are a peculiar and remarkable tiny category (onomatopoeia) that are the exception to the rule.
If you thought your computer interface were an accurate picture of what is going on inside the computer, you might indeed go looking for a microscopic pointer somewhere in the wires. It’s because you don’t think this that you know to look for correspondences and representations instead. Hoffman’s point is that we don’t tend to do this with things like space, time, matter, etc.: we think those things in our interface-with-reality correspond to the same sorts of things in reality-under-the-hood (space, time, matter, etc.). He believes we’re mistaken.
Ok, fair, I agree they do not resemble one another in this kind of way. That isn’t how I was interpreting “resemblence.” I was thinking of it as “correspondence.”
Minor off topic aside: While they are a small minority, I suspect onomatopoeia-like words are probably more common than we usually think. A lot of words resemble, to me, aspects of their referent, even if only in a synesthetic way, or only if you look at older forms of the word. Add that to things like the bouba/kiki effect, and I start to wonder how much we coin new words using some kind of felt, metaphorical sense of meanings corresponding to how sounds feel.