Because I had faith you’d figure it out (and I like brevity). I don’t know how you failed that. Do you think I don’t know that “conscience” is a topic philosophy already deals with?
Did you mean “consciousness”? To put is bluntly, if you haven’t; heard of MR, there is probably a lot you don’t know about the subject.
That doesn’t answer the question. If we talk about conscience and experiences, that is presumably because we want to understand something about them through reason. But if we’re reasoning about experiences, we’re probably dealing with memories of experiences, rather than the experiences themselves.
We are reasoning about consciousness in general, and experience in general. That’s not at all the same as comparing the taste of today’s coffee to yesterdays.
Oh, I just use “magic” to refer to immeasurable, irreproducible things, that can’t be understood through experimentation.
You yourself are blocking off the possibility of understanding consciousness , subjectivity and experience by refusing to allow them as prima-facie, pre-theoretic phenomena.
You say that we must start with reality, but we cannot: (an accruate map of reality) is the end point of a process of explanation. We start with pima-facie evidence, we build theories, we test them, and eventually we end up with a map of reality. What you call “reality” is a subset of empirical evidence that has certain qualities . of being public, objective, measurable and so on. Starting there means discarding any other kind of prima-facie evidence. The problem being that discarding subjective, private experience at the outset is equivalent to stating that consciousness does not exist.
I get that you hate, hate, hate dualism or anything else that threatens physical monism, but you can’t prove physical monism by begging the question against it. You are doing it no favours.
But before that, can you elaborate on what, if anything, that has to do with our “robot pain” problem?
Nobody else has a problem with robot pain as a meaningful possibility. You do because you have removed the fist person from your definitions.
We are reasoning about consciousness in general, and experience in general. That’s not at all the same as comparing the taste of today’s coffee to yesterdays.
If having experiences is an important part of consciousness, then I’d expect you to reason about them, what induces them, their components, their similarities and differences. This “consciousness in general” phrasing is extremely weird.
Starting there means discarding any other kind of prima-facie evidence.
I didn’t start here, I wasn’t born yesterday and fully formed, I started from the same magical assumptions that everyone starts with, and eventually I found them unnecessary and unattractive. Unless you meant something else by “start”.
I didn’t start here, I wasn’t born yesterday and fully formed, I started from the same magical assumptions that everyone starts with, and eventually I found them unnecessary and unattractive. Unless you meant something else by “start”.
You say that we must start with reality, but we cannot: (an accruate map of,) reality is the end point of a process of explanation. We start with pima-facie evidence, we build theories, we test them, and eventually we end up with a map of reality. What you call “reality” is a subset of empirical evidence that has certain qualities . of being public, objective, measurable and so on. Starting there means discarding any other kind of prima-facie evidence. The problem being that discarding subjective, private experience at the outset is equivalent to stating that consciousness does not exist
The question “where did you start” has some bad assumptions. Of course at first we all have to start from the same naive point. If we did arbitrarily start from different unrelated assumptions, expecting to agree on anything would be weird.
So, what happened is that I started from naive assumptions, and arrived at physicalism. Then when I ask myself a new question, I start from where I last stopped—discarding all of my progress would be weird.
You may think that dropping an initial assumption is inherently wrong, but it’s quite normal, not only in physical sciences, but also in math. Note that I’m not contradicting consciousness, I just find it meaningless or, if you prefer, unnecessary. You might be able to convince me that I do need to keep some similar assumption for technical reasons, but that wouldn’t solve the “robot pain” problem.
The problem being that discarding subjective, private experience at the outset is equivalent to stating that consciousness does not exist
You see, if I started from the assumption that gravity does not exist, my life would be very hard and I’d eventually have to introduce some concept that’s like gravity but by another name. But when I drop consciousness, my life gets easier. How does that work?
I start from where I last stopped—discarding all of my progress would be weird.
There is a difference between a working hypothesis and an unfalsifiable dogma. It seems to you that there is nothing to explain about consciousness because you only accept 3rd-person empirical data, because of your ontology.
You may think that dropping an initial assumption is inherently wrong,
Could explain what assumption you are dropping, and why, without using the word magical.
but it’s quite normal, not only in physical sciences, but also in math. Note that I’m not contradicting consciousness, I just find it meaningless or, if you prefer, unnecessary.
I’d prefer if you settled on one claim.
the “robot pain” problem.
That would be the problem for which there is no evidence except your say-so.
You see, if I started from the assumption that gravity does not exist, my life would be very hard and I’d eventually have to introduce some concept that’s like gravity but by another name.
You can function practically without a concept of gravity, as people before Newton did. What you can get away with theoretically depends on what you are trying to explain. Perhaps there is a gravity sceptic out there somewhere insisting that “falling object” is a meaningless term, and that gravity is magic.
There is a difference between a working hypothesis and an unfalsifiable dogma.
Is my position less falsifiable than yours? No, most statements about consciousness are unfalsifiable. I think that’s a strong hint that it’s a flawed concept.
Could explain what assumption you are dropping, and why, without using the word magical.
The assumption that “consciousness” is a meaningful (but supposedly poorly understood) concept that explains something happening either in the outside world or in my own head. I dropped it because I found that physicalism explains everything better. “Better” doesn’t mean that I have all the answers about anything, it just means that the answers consciousness gives are even worse.
I don’t understand what your problem with “magical” is?
I’d prefer if you settled on one claim.
Well, I suppose an assumption could be unnecessary without being meaningless, so the words aren’t identical, but I do refer to the same thing, when I use them in this context. I also recall explaining how a “meaningless” statement can be considered “false”. The question is, why are you so uncomfortable with paraphrasing? Do you feel that there are some substantial differences? Honestly, I mostly do this to clarify what I mean, not to obscure it.
That would be the problem for which there is no evidence except your say-so.
The “robot pain” problem is the problem where you think that maybe robots could feel pain, but you have not even a shred of an idea how to test if they do. That’s a pretty big problem, regardless of what I say. Now, when I ask if this or that idea solves “robot pain” problem, I’m not asking if it produces an actual test, I just ask for a smallest hint that maybe the test could exist.
You can function practically without a concept of gravity, as people before Newton did.
That’s ridiculous. The mathematical law of gravity was written down by Newton, but the concept of gravity, in the sense that “things fall down”, is something most animals have. Do you literally think that nobody noticed gravity before Newton?
most statements about consciousness are unfalsifiable
That’s not the problem.
The assumption that “consciousness” is a meaningful (but supposedly poorly understood) concept that explains something happening either in the outside world or in my own head.
The assumption is more that consciousness is something that needs explaining,
I also recall explaining how a “meaningless” statement can be considered “false”.
That’s wrong. If you can put a truth-value on a sentence , it is meaningful.
The question is, why are you so uncomfortable with paraphrasing?
I think it is better to express yourself using words that mean what you are trying to express.
Do you feel that there are some substantial differences?
Yes. “Meaningless” , “immeasurable”, “unnecessary” and “non existent” all mean different things.
Honestly, I mostly do this to clarify what I mean, not to obscure it.
I think ti is likely that your entire argument is based on vagueness and semantic confusion,
robot pain” problem is the problem where you think that maybe robots could feel pain, but you have not even a shred of an idea how to test if they do.
There is a real problem of not being able to test for a pain sensation directly.
Why did it take you so long too express it that way? Perhaps the problem is this:
Expressed in plain terms “robots do not feel pain” does not follow from “we do not know how to measure robot pain”. Perhaps you have to use vagueness and confusion to make the invalid inference seem valid.
Wow, so you agree with me here? Is it not a problem to you at all, or just not “the” problem?
Yes. “Meaningless” , “immeasurable”, “unnecessary” and “non existent” all mean different things.
Invisible unicorns are immeasurable. They do not exist. The assumption that they do exist is unnecessary. The statement “invisible unicorns are purple” is meaningless. The words aren’t all exactly the same, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t all appropriate.
Why did it take you so long too express it that way?
A long long time ago you wrote: You seem to have taken the (real enough) issue of not knowing how to tell if a robot feels pain, and turned into a problem with the word “pain”. So I assumed you understood that immeasurability is relevant here. Did you then forget?
Expressed in plain terms “robots do not feel pain” does not follow from “we do not know how to measure robot pain”.
No, but it follows from “we have no arguments suggesting that maybe ‘robot pain’ could be something measurable, unless we redefine pain to mean something a lot more specific”.
So I assumed you understood that immeasurability is relevant here
I might be able to follow an argument based on immeasurabilty alone, but you have brought in a bunch of different issues without explaining how they interrelate. you
Expressed in plain terms “robots do not feel pain” does not follow from “we do not know how to measure robot pain”.
No, but it follows from “we have no arguments suggesting that maybe ‘robot pain’ could be something measurable, unless we redefine pain to mean something a lot more specific”.
No, still not from that.
You can make any sentence come out true or false by juggling definitions...which is why people distrust argument by definition.
but you have brought in a bunch of different issues without explaining how they interrelate
Which issues exactly?
No, still not from that.
Why not? Is this still about how you’re uncomfortable saying that invisible unicorns don’t exist? Does “‘robot pain’ is meaningless” follow from the same better?
but you have brought in a bunch of different issues without explaining how they interrelate
Which issues exactly
Meaningfulness, existence, etc.
Is this still about how you’re uncomfortable saying that invisible unicorns don’t exist?
Huh? It’s perfectly good as a standalone stament , it’s just that it doens’t have much to do with meaning or measurabiltiy.
Does “‘robot pain’ is meaningless” follow from the [we have no arguments suggesting that maybe ‘robot pain’ could be something measurable, unless we redefine pain to mean something a lot more specific] better?
Not really, because you haven’t explained why meaning should depend on measurability.
It is evident that this is a major source of our disagreement. Can you define “meaningless” for me, as you understand it? In particular, how it applies to grammatically correct statements.
It’s perfectly good as a standalone stament
So you agree that invisible unicorns indeed do not exist? How do you know? Obviously, the unicorns I’m talking about are not just undetectable by light, they’re also undetectable by all other methods.
. Can you define “meaningless” for me, as you understand it? In
Useless for communication.
Meaningless statements cannot have truth values assigned to them. (But not all statements without truth values ae meaningless).
So you agree that invisible unicorns indeed do not exist? How do you know? Obviously, the unicorns I’m talking about are not just undetectable by light, they’re also undetectable by all other methods
Where is this going? You can’t stipulate that robot pain is forever immeasurable without begging the question.It is not analogous to your invisible unicorns.
A bit too vague. Can I clarify that as “Useless for communication, because it transfers no information”? Even though that’s a bit too strict.
Meaningless statements cannot have truth values assigned to them.
What is stopping me from assigning them truth values? I’m sure you meant, “meaningless statements cannot be proven or disproven”. But “proof” is a problematic concept. You may prefer “for meaningless statements there are no arguments in favor or against them”, but for statements “X exists”, Occam’s razor is often a good counter-argument. Anyway, isn’t (1.) enough?
Where is this going?
It’s still entirely about meaning, measurability and existence. I want you to decide whether “there is an invisible/undetectable unicorn in your room” is meaningless or false.
This started when you said that “robots don’t feel pain” does not follow from “we have no arguments suggesting that maybe ‘robot pain’ could be something measurable”. I’m trying to understand why not and what it could follow from. Does “invisible unicorns do not exist” not follow from “invisible unicorns cannot be detected in any way?”. Or maybe “invisible unicorns cannot be detected” does not follow from “we have no arguments suggesting that maybe ‘invisible unicorns’ could be something detectable”?
What is stopping me from assigning them truth values?
The fact that you can’t understand them.
You may prefer “for meaningless statements there are no arguments in favor or against them”, but for statements “X exists”, Occam’s razor is often a good counter-argument.
If you cant understand a statement as exerting the existence of something, it isn’t meaningless by my definition. What I have asserted makes sense with my definiions. If you are interpreting in terms of your own definitions....don’t.
I want you to decide whether “there is an invisible/undetectable unicorn in your room” is meaningless or false.
I think it is false by occam;’s razor, which automaticaly means it is meaningful, beause it it were meanignless I would not know how to apply occam’s razor or anything else to it.
This started when you said that “robots don’t feel pain” does not follow from “we have no arguments suggesting that maybe ‘robot pain’ could be something measurable”. I’m trying to understand why not
Because it needs premises along the lines of “what is not measurable is meaningless” and “what is meaningless is false”, but you have not been able to argue for either (except by gerrymandered definitions).
Does “invisible unicorns do not exist” not follow from “invisible unicorns cannot be detected in any way?”
There’s an important difference between stipulating something to be indetectable … in any way, forever … and having contingent evidence that we cannot detect something at time T. What happens if a robot pain detector is invented tomorrow? Then you would have doen the thing people are always accusing philosophers of doing: you would have an armchair argument, based on wordplay that is “true” in some way that has nothing to do with reality.
What I have asserted makes sense with my definiions. If you are interpreting in terms of your own definitions....don’t.
I’m trying to understand your definitions and how they’re different from mine.
I think it is false by occam;’s razor, which automaticaly means it is meaningful, beause it it were meanignless I would not know how to apply occam’s razor or anything else to it.
I see that for you “meaningless” is a very narrow concept. But does that agree with your stated definition? In what way is “there is an invisible/undetectable unicorn in your room” not “useless for communication”?
Also, can you offer a concrete meaningless statement yourself? Preferably one in the form “X exists”.
What happens if a robot pain detector is invented tomorrow?
I can give you a robot pain detector today. It only works on robots though. The detector always says “no”. The point is that you have no arguments why this detector is bad. This is not normal. I think we need to talk about other currently immeasurable things. None of them work like this.
In what way is “there is an invisible/undetectable unicorn in your room” not “useless for communication”?
Well, you used it,.
I can give you a robot pain detector today. It only works on robots though. The detector always says “no”. The point is that you have no arguments why this detector is bad.
Its’ bad because there’s nothign inside the box. It’s just a apriori argument.
I can also use”ftoy ljhbxd drgfjh”. Is that not meaningless either? Seriously, if you have no arguments, then don’t respond.
What happens if a robot pain detector is invented tomorrow?
Let me answer that differently. You said invisible unicorns don’t exist. What happens if an invisible unicorn detector is invented tomorrow? To make a detector for a thing, that thing has to have known properties. If they did invent a robot pain detector tomorrow, how would you check that it really detects robot pain? You’re supposed to be able to check that somehow.
But you could not have used it to make a point about links between meaning, detectabiity, and falsehood.
If you have no arguments, then don’t respond.
The implicit argument is that meaning/communication is not restricted to literal truth.
Let me answer that differently. You said invisible unicorns don’t exist. What happens if an invisible unicorn detector is invented tomorrow?
What would happen is that you are changing the hypothesis. Originally, you stipulated an invisible unicvorn as undetectable in any possible way, in relation to which I agreed that one could use an armchair argument like occam’s razor against their existence. Now you imply that they possible could be detected, in which case I withdraw my original claim, because if something could be detected, then armchair arguments are not appropriate.
But you could not have used it to make a point about links between meaning, detectabiity, and falsehood.
No, but I can use it to make a point about how low your bar for meaningfulness is. Does that not count for some reason? I asked you before to propose a meaningless statement of your own. Do none exist? Are none of them grammatically correct?
???
Now you imply that they possible could be detected, in which case I withdraw my original claim
Yes, the unicorns don’t have to be undetectable be definition. They’re just undetectable by all methods that I’m aware of. If “invisible unicorns” have too much undetectability in the title, we can call them “ghost unicorns”. But, of course, if you do detect some unicorns, I’ll say that they aren’t the unicorns I’m talking about and that you’re just redefining this profound problem to suit you. Obviously this isn’t a perfect analogue for your “robot pain”, but I think it’s alright.
So, what you’re saying, is that you don’t know if “ghost unicorns” exist? Why would Occam’s razor not apply here? How would you evaluate the likelihood that they exist?
I asked you before to propose a meaningless statement of your own.
And what I said before is that a well-formed sentence can robustly be said to be meaningful if it embeds a contradiction, like “colourless green”, or category error, like “sleeping idea”.
So, what you’re saying, is that you don’t know if “ghost unicorns” exist? Why would Occam’s razor not apply here? How would you evaluate the likelihood that they exist?
Very low finite rather than infinitessimal or zero.
I don’t see how this is helping. You have a chain of reasoning that starts with your not knowing something, how to detect robot pain, and ends with your knowing something: that robots don’t feel pain. I don’t see how that can be valid.
Obviously I agree this is meaningless, but I disagree about the reasoning. A long time ago I asked you to prove that “bitter purple” (or something) was a category error, and your answer was very underwhelming.
I say that “sleeping idea” is meaningless, because I don’t have a procedure for deciding if an idea is sleeping or not. However, we could easily agree on such procedures. For example we could say that only animals can sleep and for every idea, “is this idea sleeping” is answered with “no”. It’s just that I honestly don’t have such a restriction. I use the exact same explanation for the meaninglessness of both “fgdghffgfc” and “robot pain”.
a contradiction, like “colourless green”
The question “is green colorless” has a perfectly good answer (“no, green is green”), unless you don’t think that colors can have colors (in that case it’s a category error too). But I’m nitpicking.
starts with your not knowing something, how to detect robot pain
Here you treat detectability as just some random property of a thing. I’m saying that if you don’t know how to detect a thing, even in theory, then you know nothing about that thing. And if you know nothing about a thing, then you can’t possibly say that it exists.
My “unicorn ghost” example is flawed in that we know what the shape of a unicorn should be, and we could expect unicorn ghosts to have the same shape (even though I would argue against such expectations). So if you built a detector for some new particle, and it detected a unicorn-shaped obstacle, you could claim that you detected a ghost-unicorn, and then I’d have to make up an argument why this isn’t the unicorn I was talking about. “Robot pain” has no such flaws—it is devoid of any traces of meaningfulness.
300th comment! My post only had 40 before you showed up. LW has been having some persistent people lately, but you (and the people replying to you) take the cake.
Can you define “meaningless” for me, as you understand it?
I means “does not have a meaning.”
In particular, how it applies to grammatically correct statements.
In general, it doesn’t apply to grammatically correct sentences, and definitely not to statements. It’s possible that you will find something grammatically correct which is meaningless, but it would have to be severely contorted.
How do you know?
If you can ask the question, “How do you know?”, then the thing has a meaning. I will show you an example of something meaningless:
faheuh fr dhwuidfh d dhwudhdww
Note that there is no question of knowing or not knowing anything. When you can ask how you know something or don’t know it, then the thing has a meaning.
It only explains the “-less” suffix. It’s fine as a dictionary definition, but that’s obviously not what I asked for. I need you to explain “meaning” as well.
The problem with that is that if the word “meaning” has several meanings you will have a situation like this:
Suppose the word “meaning” has two meanings, A & B. But then we can ask what the word “meanings” means in the previous sentence: does it mean A, or B? If you answer that it means A, then the word “meaning” might have two meanings in the A sense, but five meanings in the B sense. But then we can ask what the word “meanings” means in the previous statement. And it might turn out that if the word “meanings” is taken in the B sense, the statement (about 2 and 5) is only true if we take the fourth meaning of the B sense, while in the 3rd sense, it has 7 meanings in the A sense, and 2 meanings in the B sense. And so on, ad infinitum.
All of that means that we have to accept a basic sense of meaning which comes before all the others if we want to talk about meaning at all. And in that basic sense, statements like that obviously have a meaning, whereas ones like “shirwho h wehjoeihqw dhfufh sjs” do not.
we have to accept a basic sense … And in that basic sense, statements like that obviously have a meaning
Your comment boils down to “It’s complicated, but I’m obviously right”. It’s not a very convincing argument.
Meaning is complicated. It is a function of at least four variables: the speaker, the listener, the message, and the context. It’s also well-trodden ground over which herds of philosophers regularly stampede and everything with the tag of “obviously” has been smashed into tiny little pieces by now.
Your comment boils down to “It’s complicated, but I’m obviously right”.
You’re right about the “I’m obviously right” part, but not the rest. It boils down to “you have to start somewhere.” You can’t start out with many meanings of “meaning”, otherwise you don’t know what you mean by “meanings” in the sentence “I am starting out with many meanings of meaning.” You have to start with one meaning, and in that case you can know what you mean when you say “I am starting with one meaning of meaning.”
Did you mean “consciousness”? To put is bluntly, if you haven’t; heard of MR, there is probably a lot you don’t know about the subject.
We are reasoning about consciousness in general, and experience in general. That’s not at all the same as comparing the taste of today’s coffee to yesterdays.
You yourself are blocking off the possibility of understanding consciousness , subjectivity and experience by refusing to allow them as prima-facie, pre-theoretic phenomena.
You say that we must start with reality, but we cannot: (an accruate map of reality) is the end point of a process of explanation. We start with pima-facie evidence, we build theories, we test them, and eventually we end up with a map of reality. What you call “reality” is a subset of empirical evidence that has certain qualities . of being public, objective, measurable and so on. Starting there means discarding any other kind of prima-facie evidence. The problem being that discarding subjective, private experience at the outset is equivalent to stating that consciousness does not exist.
I get that you hate, hate, hate dualism or anything else that threatens physical monism, but you can’t prove physical monism by begging the question against it. You are doing it no favours.
Nobody else has a problem with robot pain as a meaningful possibility. You do because you have removed the fist person from your definitions.
Heh. That’s fair.
If having experiences is an important part of consciousness, then I’d expect you to reason about them, what induces them, their components, their similarities and differences. This “consciousness in general” phrasing is extremely weird.
I didn’t start here, I wasn’t born yesterday and fully formed, I started from the same magical assumptions that everyone starts with, and eventually I found them unnecessary and unattractive. Unless you meant something else by “start”.
Of course, I mean your methodology starts..
I’m not sure that changes anything.
Can you argue your point? I can argue mine.
You say that we must start with reality, but we cannot: (an accruate map of,) reality is the end point of a process of explanation. We start with pima-facie evidence, we build theories, we test them, and eventually we end up with a map of reality. What you call “reality” is a subset of empirical evidence that has certain qualities . of being public, objective, measurable and so on. Starting there means discarding any other kind of prima-facie evidence. The problem being that discarding subjective, private experience at the outset is equivalent to stating that consciousness does not exist
The question “where did you start” has some bad assumptions. Of course at first we all have to start from the same naive point. If we did arbitrarily start from different unrelated assumptions, expecting to agree on anything would be weird.
So, what happened is that I started from naive assumptions, and arrived at physicalism. Then when I ask myself a new question, I start from where I last stopped—discarding all of my progress would be weird.
You may think that dropping an initial assumption is inherently wrong, but it’s quite normal, not only in physical sciences, but also in math. Note that I’m not contradicting consciousness, I just find it meaningless or, if you prefer, unnecessary. You might be able to convince me that I do need to keep some similar assumption for technical reasons, but that wouldn’t solve the “robot pain” problem.
You see, if I started from the assumption that gravity does not exist, my life would be very hard and I’d eventually have to introduce some concept that’s like gravity but by another name. But when I drop consciousness, my life gets easier. How does that work?
There is a difference between a working hypothesis and an unfalsifiable dogma. It seems to you that there is nothing to explain about consciousness because you only accept 3rd-person empirical data, because of your ontology.
Could explain what assumption you are dropping, and why, without using the word magical.
I’d prefer if you settled on one claim.
That would be the problem for which there is no evidence except your say-so.
You can function practically without a concept of gravity, as people before Newton did. What you can get away with theoretically depends on what you are trying to explain. Perhaps there is a gravity sceptic out there somewhere insisting that “falling object” is a meaningless term, and that gravity is magic.
Is my position less falsifiable than yours? No, most statements about consciousness are unfalsifiable. I think that’s a strong hint that it’s a flawed concept.
The assumption that “consciousness” is a meaningful (but supposedly poorly understood) concept that explains something happening either in the outside world or in my own head. I dropped it because I found that physicalism explains everything better. “Better” doesn’t mean that I have all the answers about anything, it just means that the answers consciousness gives are even worse.
I don’t understand what your problem with “magical” is?
Well, I suppose an assumption could be unnecessary without being meaningless, so the words aren’t identical, but I do refer to the same thing, when I use them in this context. I also recall explaining how a “meaningless” statement can be considered “false”. The question is, why are you so uncomfortable with paraphrasing? Do you feel that there are some substantial differences? Honestly, I mostly do this to clarify what I mean, not to obscure it.
The “robot pain” problem is the problem where you think that maybe robots could feel pain, but you have not even a shred of an idea how to test if they do. That’s a pretty big problem, regardless of what I say. Now, when I ask if this or that idea solves “robot pain” problem, I’m not asking if it produces an actual test, I just ask for a smallest hint that maybe the test could exist.
That’s ridiculous. The mathematical law of gravity was written down by Newton, but the concept of gravity, in the sense that “things fall down”, is something most animals have. Do you literally think that nobody noticed gravity before Newton?
That’s not the problem.
The assumption is more that consciousness is something that needs explaining,
That’s wrong. If you can put a truth-value on a sentence , it is meaningful.
I think it is better to express yourself using words that mean what you are trying to express.
Yes. “Meaningless” , “immeasurable”, “unnecessary” and “non existent” all mean different things.
I think ti is likely that your entire argument is based on vagueness and semantic confusion,
There is a real problem of not being able to test for a pain sensation directly.
Why did it take you so long too express it that way? Perhaps the problem is this:
Expressed in plain terms “robots do not feel pain” does not follow from “we do not know how to measure robot pain”. Perhaps you have to use vagueness and confusion to make the invalid inference seem valid.
Wow, so you agree with me here? Is it not a problem to you at all, or just not “the” problem?
Invisible unicorns are immeasurable. They do not exist. The assumption that they do exist is unnecessary. The statement “invisible unicorns are purple” is meaningless. The words aren’t all exactly the same, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t all appropriate.
A long long time ago you wrote: You seem to have taken the (real enough) issue of not knowing how to tell if a robot feels pain, and turned into a problem with the word “pain”. So I assumed you understood that immeasurability is relevant here. Did you then forget?
No, but it follows from “we have no arguments suggesting that maybe ‘robot pain’ could be something measurable, unless we redefine pain to mean something a lot more specific”.
I might be able to follow an argument based on immeasurabilty alone, but you have brought in a bunch of different issues without explaining how they interrelate. you
No, still not from that.
You can make any sentence come out true or false by juggling definitions...which is why people distrust argument by definition.
Which issues exactly?
Why not? Is this still about how you’re uncomfortable saying that invisible unicorns don’t exist? Does “‘robot pain’ is meaningless” follow from the same better?
Meaningfulness, existence, etc.
Huh? It’s perfectly good as a standalone stament , it’s just that it doens’t have much to do with meaning or measurabiltiy.
Not really, because you haven’t explained why meaning should depend on measurability.
It is evident that this is a major source of our disagreement. Can you define “meaningless” for me, as you understand it? In particular, how it applies to grammatically correct statements.
So you agree that invisible unicorns indeed do not exist? How do you know? Obviously, the unicorns I’m talking about are not just undetectable by light, they’re also undetectable by all other methods.
Useless for communication.
Meaningless statements cannot have truth values assigned to them. (But not all statements without truth values ae meaningless).
Where is this going? You can’t stipulate that robot pain is forever immeasurable without begging the question.It is not analogous to your invisible unicorns.
A bit too vague. Can I clarify that as “Useless for communication, because it transfers no information”? Even though that’s a bit too strict.
What is stopping me from assigning them truth values? I’m sure you meant, “meaningless statements cannot be proven or disproven”. But “proof” is a problematic concept. You may prefer “for meaningless statements there are no arguments in favor or against them”, but for statements “X exists”, Occam’s razor is often a good counter-argument. Anyway, isn’t (1.) enough?
It’s still entirely about meaning, measurability and existence. I want you to decide whether “there is an invisible/undetectable unicorn in your room” is meaningless or false.
This started when you said that “robots don’t feel pain” does not follow from “we have no arguments suggesting that maybe ‘robot pain’ could be something measurable”. I’m trying to understand why not and what it could follow from. Does “invisible unicorns do not exist” not follow from “invisible unicorns cannot be detected in any way?”. Or maybe “invisible unicorns cannot be detected” does not follow from “we have no arguments suggesting that maybe ‘invisible unicorns’ could be something detectable”?
The fact that you can’t understand them.
If you cant understand a statement as exerting the existence of something, it isn’t meaningless by my definition. What I have asserted makes sense with my definiions. If you are interpreting in terms of your own definitions....don’t.
I think it is false by occam;’s razor, which automaticaly means it is meaningful, beause it it were meanignless I would not know how to apply occam’s razor or anything else to it.
Because it needs premises along the lines of “what is not measurable is meaningless” and “what is meaningless is false”, but you have not been able to argue for either (except by gerrymandered definitions).
There’s an important difference between stipulating something to be indetectable … in any way, forever … and having contingent evidence that we cannot detect something at time T. What happens if a robot pain detector is invented tomorrow? Then you would have doen the thing people are always accusing philosophers of doing: you would have an armchair argument, based on wordplay that is “true” in some way that has nothing to do with reality.
I’m trying to understand your definitions and how they’re different from mine.
I see that for you “meaningless” is a very narrow concept. But does that agree with your stated definition? In what way is “there is an invisible/undetectable unicorn in your room” not “useless for communication”?
Also, can you offer a concrete meaningless statement yourself? Preferably one in the form “X exists”.
I can give you a robot pain detector today. It only works on robots though. The detector always says “no”. The point is that you have no arguments why this detector is bad. This is not normal. I think we need to talk about other currently immeasurable things. None of them work like this.
Well, you used it,.
Its’ bad because there’s nothign inside the box. It’s just a apriori argument.
I can also use”ftoy ljhbxd drgfjh”. Is that not meaningless either? Seriously, if you have no arguments, then don’t respond.
Let me answer that differently. You said invisible unicorns don’t exist. What happens if an invisible unicorn detector is invented tomorrow? To make a detector for a thing, that thing has to have known properties. If they did invent a robot pain detector tomorrow, how would you check that it really detects robot pain? You’re supposed to be able to check that somehow.
But you could not have used it to make a point about links between meaning, detectabiity, and falsehood.
The implicit argument is that meaning/communication is not restricted to literal truth.
What would happen is that you are changing the hypothesis. Originally, you stipulated an invisible unicvorn as undetectable in any possible way, in relation to which I agreed that one could use an armchair argument like occam’s razor against their existence. Now you imply that they possible could be detected, in which case I withdraw my original claim, because if something could be detected, then armchair arguments are not appropriate.
No, but I can use it to make a point about how low your bar for meaningfulness is. Does that not count for some reason? I asked you before to propose a meaningless statement of your own. Do none exist? Are none of them grammatically correct?
???
Yes, the unicorns don’t have to be undetectable be definition. They’re just undetectable by all methods that I’m aware of. If “invisible unicorns” have too much undetectability in the title, we can call them “ghost unicorns”. But, of course, if you do detect some unicorns, I’ll say that they aren’t the unicorns I’m talking about and that you’re just redefining this profound problem to suit you. Obviously this isn’t a perfect analogue for your “robot pain”, but I think it’s alright.
So, what you’re saying, is that you don’t know if “ghost unicorns” exist? Why would Occam’s razor not apply here? How would you evaluate the likelihood that they exist?
And what I said before is that a well-formed sentence can robustly be said to be meaningful if it embeds a contradiction, like “colourless green”, or category error, like “sleeping idea”.
Very low finite rather than infinitessimal or zero.
I don’t see how this is helping. You have a chain of reasoning that starts with your not knowing something, how to detect robot pain, and ends with your knowing something: that robots don’t feel pain. I don’t see how that can be valid.
Obviously I agree this is meaningless, but I disagree about the reasoning. A long time ago I asked you to prove that “bitter purple” (or something) was a category error, and your answer was very underwhelming.
I say that “sleeping idea” is meaningless, because I don’t have a procedure for deciding if an idea is sleeping or not. However, we could easily agree on such procedures. For example we could say that only animals can sleep and for every idea, “is this idea sleeping” is answered with “no”. It’s just that I honestly don’t have such a restriction. I use the exact same explanation for the meaninglessness of both “fgdghffgfc” and “robot pain”.
The question “is green colorless” has a perfectly good answer (“no, green is green”), unless you don’t think that colors can have colors (in that case it’s a category error too). But I’m nitpicking.
Here you treat detectability as just some random property of a thing. I’m saying that if you don’t know how to detect a thing, even in theory, then you know nothing about that thing. And if you know nothing about a thing, then you can’t possibly say that it exists.
My “unicorn ghost” example is flawed in that we know what the shape of a unicorn should be, and we could expect unicorn ghosts to have the same shape (even though I would argue against such expectations). So if you built a detector for some new particle, and it detected a unicorn-shaped obstacle, you could claim that you detected a ghost-unicorn, and then I’d have to make up an argument why this isn’t the unicorn I was talking about. “Robot pain” has no such flaws—it is devoid of any traces of meaningfulness.
300th comment! My post only had 40 before you showed up. LW has been having some persistent people lately, but you (and the people replying to you) take the cake.
I doubt that’s a good thing. It hasn’t been very productive so far.
“Seriously, if you have no arguments, then don’t respond.”
People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
I means “does not have a meaning.”
In general, it doesn’t apply to grammatically correct sentences, and definitely not to statements. It’s possible that you will find something grammatically correct which is meaningless, but it would have to be severely contorted.
If you can ask the question, “How do you know?”, then the thing has a meaning. I will show you an example of something meaningless:
faheuh fr dhwuidfh d dhwudhdww
Note that there is no question of knowing or not knowing anything. When you can ask how you know something or don’t know it, then the thing has a meaning.
I’m sure you can see how unhelpful this is.
No.
It only explains the “-less” suffix. It’s fine as a dictionary definition, but that’s obviously not what I asked for. I need you to explain “meaning” as well.
You need no such thing, and as I said, we won’t be continuing the discussion of language until you show it has something to do with consciousness.
Noam Chomsky wrote “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” in 1955.
Ideas don’t sleep, so they don’t sleep furiously. The sentence is false, not meaningless.
This topic has been discussed, fairly extensively.
Yes. No one has shown that it is meaningless and it pretty obviously is not.
That’s a definitions argument, isn’t it? Under some ideas of what “meaning”, well, means, such sentences are meaningful; under others they are not.
The problem with that is that if the word “meaning” has several meanings you will have a situation like this:
Suppose the word “meaning” has two meanings, A & B. But then we can ask what the word “meanings” means in the previous sentence: does it mean A, or B? If you answer that it means A, then the word “meaning” might have two meanings in the A sense, but five meanings in the B sense. But then we can ask what the word “meanings” means in the previous statement. And it might turn out that if the word “meanings” is taken in the B sense, the statement (about 2 and 5) is only true if we take the fourth meaning of the B sense, while in the 3rd sense, it has 7 meanings in the A sense, and 2 meanings in the B sense. And so on, ad infinitum.
All of that means that we have to accept a basic sense of meaning which comes before all the others if we want to talk about meaning at all. And in that basic sense, statements like that obviously have a meaning, whereas ones like “shirwho h wehjoeihqw dhfufh sjs” do not.
Your comment boils down to “It’s complicated, but I’m obviously right”. It’s not a very convincing argument.
Meaning is complicated. It is a function of at least four variables: the speaker, the listener, the message, and the context. It’s also well-trodden ground over which herds of philosophers regularly stampede and everything with the tag of “obviously” has been smashed into tiny little pieces by now.
You’re right about the “I’m obviously right” part, but not the rest. It boils down to “you have to start somewhere.” You can’t start out with many meanings of “meaning”, otherwise you don’t know what you mean by “meanings” in the sentence “I am starting out with many meanings of meaning.” You have to start with one meaning, and in that case you can know what you mean when you say “I am starting with one meaning of meaning.”
“eventually I found them unnecessary and unattractive”
It is typically considered unnecessary and unattractive to assert that the Emperor is naked.
There’s that word again.
Do you prefer “naive”? Not exactly the same thing, but similar.