That’s an interesting thought. At least since the time of Plato, Western philosophy has been based around the idea that some things never change. Plato called them “forms” or “ideals”. Why would anyone think such a thing, though? How would we even come up with the idea that anything is truly immutable when everything that we see around us is always changing? It most likely originated from us observing the unfailing regularity in the position and motion of the sun and the moon and the stars. That was, I suspect, the source of the notion of (universal) objective truth.
Aaron Bohannon
Karma: 14
I think I might now have the market cornered on the combination of information security, the philosophy of language, and the I Ching. 😄 (I’m not making an attempt to speak accurately.)
An interesting issue that parallels this one is the question of the domains in which we want to encourage people to compete. For instance, the biathlon in the winter Olympic games combines cross-country skiing 🎿 with rifle shooting 🎯. If we can imagine combining those into a single sport, why can’t we imagine awards for explaining concepts from physics in the most verbally and/or visually poetic way that has genuine explanatory power? People are attempting to do such things but might not be getting all of the credit they deserve, and as soon as people are getting more credit, there will be more interest. What I’m thinking about is in the direction of attempts to view the “journey” as important as the “destination”, which I would say was famously illustrated by Douglas Hofstadter in GEB.
I think of it like the catch-phrase from Field of Dreams: ‘Build it and they will come.’ As soon as you can define a goal post, people will compete to get there, as long as it’s been officially sanctioned as deserving of recognition. (Have you heard of competitive cup stacking? 😆) There is nothing at all inherently wrong with the desire to compete. Things turn sour only when you or your supporters feel as though you’ve failed if you haven’t reached first place. The interesting thing about competing is that sometimes there is more than one way to “win”. I could mentioned the 4-man Jamaican bobsleigh team in the 1988 winter Olympic games. They lost the competition because they did not even officially finish, but they had a movie made about them, while nobody remembers who won first place that year. I could also mention the game of chess that the knight played against Death at the end of Ingmar Bergman’s renowned movie The Seventh Seal. I won’t spoil it for you in case you want to watch it; however, it does raise important questions about the nature of intelligence that are all the more obvious in light of the association between artificial intelligence and the game of chess. ♜♚♛
If we’re talking about highly unexpected phenomena, then I think that this analysis is putting the cart before the horse. Look at it this way: The theory of materialism (in all of its forms) pushes us toward the idea that there is a sharp distinction between the mental and the physical. That is to say, it pushes us toward thinking that what exists objectively exists in space and time from the point of view of all observers and that what doesn’t meet those criteria is a hallucination. However, we are already familiar with phenomena that fall in between the cracks of those distinctions. The best example is a rainbow. 🌈 We speak of rainbows as though they had an extent in space — and indeed, we can take photographs that seem to prove that to be true — yet, their extent in space is illusory because it changes with every (physical) point of view. As we know, no person has ever yet found the end of a rainbow. Nevertheless, if you are standing next to me, I can point to a rainbow and you will see it. Thus, with respect to how the phenomenon maps onto our language, it is impossible to answer the question of whether it has an objective physical existence. We grant rainbow the status of having an objective physical existence because they can be studied in a laboratory. However, if we are discussing phenomena of a more exotic nature, phenomena that we have not been able to study in a laboratory, then we should acknowledge the possibility that complications in our ability to map language onto reality could create problems when we attempt to use Bayesian probabilistic reasoning.
I guess that my point is that the question of whether “alien aircraft” physically traveled from another planet to Earth is a different question than whether there was an “intelligently controlled shared hallucination”. And if you are an idealist (as opposed to a materialist), then you might say that everything we collectively see and can objectively measure is a “shared hallucination”, in which case, the question of what is “real” becomes complicated because it is no longer a black-and-white issue. The idealist and the materialist, alike, are always going to be coming back to the same four questions, though: What can we categorize? What can we explain? What can we predict? What can we control?
So, are you saying that want A.I. to be aligned with the values that motivated this post? Or no?
That is a fascinating observation that I never considered. I never took a course in astronomy. My interests are more aligned with with the philosophy of language. And I had a thought that some people might appreciate — one that is probably well-understood by most astronomers. I grew up around many people asking a seemingly sensible question: “What were those ancient humans smoking when they named these constellations? Ursa Major doesn’t look like a bear. Draco doesn’t look like a dragon. Scorpio doesn’t look like a scorpion. And don’t even get me started on Capricorn!”
Finally, a couple of months ago, I had a realization that has probably been long understood by many people: The reason that ancient humans named constellations was not because they looked up into the sky and thought to themselves. “Wow, that configuration of stars had a striking resemblance to Castor and Pollux from the story that I was told when I was a child!” They named the constellations simply because they needed a name for that point in the sky. They just needed to call them something… just like we need we names for our streets. How many people say, “Well, I’ve driven down Cygnus Lane a million times and have never once seen a swan. What a terrible name for that road!”
For a while, I worked for a civil engineering firm that designed subdivisions. They were responsible for laying out the shape of the plots of land and the streets for the developers… and also for naming the streets. Their proposed street names have to be approved by the county, but I can tell you this much: They aren’t thinking all that hard about what to name those streets.
(Incidentally, my parents now happen to live in a town named Star, where all of the streets are named after stars and constellations. That was partly responsible for me getting a clue about all of this.)