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I find it strange that so many of the comments, for & against Chater, are expressed with such certainly. Philosophy and religion (lots of overlap) have been dis

I find it strange that so many of the comments, for & against Chater, are expressed with such certainly. Philosophy and religion (lots of overlap) have been discussing these issues without resolution for millennia, psychology for decades to centuries (depending on your definition), neuroscience is starting to contribute but is still in its infancy. Thousands of minds (of various degrees of brilliance), hundreds of subcultures, dozens of nations have made busy on the topic, without anything having emerged to compel agreement, yet a substantial minority of readers here seem to think they definitively know the answer. Why is it so hard to admit ignorance? Especially in a culture claiming to vaunt science (especially here, I would have thought), whose very basis is admission of the limits of the egoistic individual to cognise reality? After a couple of centuries of incredibly promising empirical work in so many fields, it should be really, really easy to say or write “I’m not sure”. The following step (“how can we devise a way to ask nature what’s true here”) may well be a matter for specialists. But one might have hoped the initial questioning open stance would have seeped, just a little, into the culture by now. We have a long way to go.

truculation 9y ago
>Why is it so hard to admit ignorance? The author could help by retracting his prophecy: >The amazing creativity of your brain, as it helps us improvise our way through daily life, won’t be replicated in silicon in the near future, perhaps never. He's claiming to know the unknowable here. Indeed, it's possible that AGI has already been implemented on silicon chips and we just haven't heard about it yet.
verylittlemeat 9y ago
When you live in a culture that deeply believes in the idea of progress* it's blasphemous to give time to ignorance. If you believe in progress you can be humbled by ignorance but not awed by it. In the west we know of other cultures (past and present) that chose to be complacent and live in ignorant comfort but we know that they chose that path at the expense of truth. We know that our striving for truth is the reason we destroyed and dominated those who chose complacency. There is a lot of cultural superiority wrapped up in why we can't admit ignorance. In the west we believe in cavemen. We think people with spears and grass skirts are "lesser" civilizations. Even if you are the least bigoted person in the west you still feel a sense of cultural pride that you live in a world ruled by the scientific method and not by gods. You pity the natives because they lived and died and created no objective truth, they left no enduring mark on humanity. In terms of human progress they are the before and we are the after. "Cultural relativism" is a phrase many people have no time for in the west. We shouldn't long to live like the "noble savage" but I think we have serious problem in the west appreciating our cultural reality isn't the one true cultural reality. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea_of_progress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea_of_progress

truculation 9y ago

>Why is it so hard to admit ignorance? The author could help by retracting his prophecy: >The amazing creativity of your brain, as it helps us improvise our way through daily life, won’t be replicated in silicon in the near future, perhaps never. He's claiming to know the unknowable here. Indeed, it's possible that AGI has already been implemented on silicon chips and we just haven't heard about it yet.

verylittlemeat 9y ago

When you live in a culture that deeply believes in the idea of progress* it's blasphemous to give time to ignorance. If you believe in progress you can be humbled by ignorance but not awed by it. In the west we know of other cultures (past and present) that chose to be complacent and live in ignorant comfort but we know that they chose that path at the expense of truth. We know that our striving for truth is the reason we destroyed and dominated those who chose complacency. There is a lot of cultural superiority wrapped up in why we can't admit ignorance. In the west we believe in cavemen. We think people with spears and grass skirts are "lesser" civilizations. Even if you are the least bigoted person in the west you still feel a sense of cultural pride that you live in a world ruled by the scientific method and not by gods. You pity the natives because they lived and died and created no objective truth, they left no enduring mark on humanity. In terms of human progress they are the before and we are the after. "Cultural relativism" is a phrase many people have no time for in the west. We shouldn't long to live like the "noble savage" but I think we have serious problem in the west appreciating our cultural reality isn't the one true cultural reality. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea_of_progress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea_of_progress