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This is a case of where our intuitions and expectations are deeply flawed. It's not a paradox. I think the explanation of it is pretty simple. To ourselves, t

This is a case of where our intuitions and expectations are deeply flawed. It's not a paradox. I think the explanation of it is pretty simple. To ourselves, the unconscious things like vision and bodily movement tend to feel effortless. Whereas the consciously controlled things like reasoning involve conscious effort, and they can feel difficult to us. The "paradox" comes from assuming that the amount of effort or difficulty that we consciously experience corresponds to the actual degree of sophistication of the processing involved.

msla 7y ago
Quine had three classes of paradox: > A veridical paradox produces a result that appears absurd but is demonstrated to be true nonetheless. Thus the paradox of Frederic's birthday in The Pirates of Penzance establishes the surprising fact that a twenty-one-year-old would have had only five birthdays if he had been born on a leap day. Likewise, Arrow's impossibility theorem demonstrates difficulties in mapping voting results to the will of the people. The Monty Hall paradox demonstrates that a decision which has an intuitive 50–50 chance is in fact heavily biased towards making a decision which, given the intuitive conclusion, the player would be unlikely to make. In 20th-century science, Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel and Schrödinger's cat are famously vivid examples of a theory being taken to a logical but paradoxical end. > A falsidical paradox establishes a result that not only appears false but actually is false, due to a fallacy in the demonstration. The various invalid mathematical proofs (e.g., that 1 = 2) are classic examples, generally relying on a hidden division by zero. Another example is the inductive form of the horse paradox, which falsely generalises from true specific statements. Zeno's paradoxes are 'falsidical', concluding, for example, that a flying arrow never reaches its target or that a speedy runner cannot catch up to a tortoise with a small head-start. > A paradox that is in neither class may be an antinomy, which reaches a self-contradictory result by properly applying accepted ways of reasoning. For example, the Grelling–Nelson paradox points out genuine problems in our understanding of the ideas of truth and description. > A fourth kind, which may be alternatively interpreted as a special case of the third kind, has sometimes been described since Quine's work. > A paradox that is both true and false at the same time and in the same sense is called a dialetheia. In Western logics it is often assumed, following Aristotle, that no dialetheia exist, but they are sometimes accepted in Eastern traditions (e.g. in the Mohists,[12] the Gongsun Longzi,[13] and in Zen[14]) and in paraconsistent logics. It would be mere equivocation or a matter of degree, for example, to both affirm and deny that "John is here" when John is halfway through the door but it is self-contradictory simultaneously to affirm and deny the event. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox
- jamesrcole 7y ago
  I don't think it's a paradox by any of those definitions. Why do you think it is?
  - Sharlin 7y ago
    Clearly number 1: an unintuitive, unexpected result that is nevertheless true. Other examples include Simpson's paradox, Braess' paradox, or the mentioned Monty Hall paradox.
    - mannykannot 7y ago
      I agree with that as the best fit to Quine's categories, but it is also paradoxical (though not a logical paradox) in that one might think that such a result would have far-reaching implications for cognitive science and AI, but, on reflection, it is not a disruptive result.
    - jamesrcole 7y ago
      There are paradoxes that are unintuitive because they appear contrary to other knowledge that we seem reasonably certain of. Then there are things that people find unintuitive or unexpected simply because they run contrary to their intuitions and assumptions. Like, for numerous people in history, the idea of a spherical Earth or how far away the stars really are. These latter cases aren't paradoxes. Is there some established knowledge that the relative difficulties of these AI tasks appear to run contra to? I believe it is just intuition and assumptions they run contra to.
      - pure-awesome 7y ago
        The fact that stars appear close despite being incredibly far away, and the fact that the earth appears flat (and that we don't fall off) despite being spherical are both, indeed, paradoxes.
        jamesrcole 7y ago
toxik 7y ago
The idea that there must be a connection between robotic capabilities and human evolution is also a naturalistic misstep. It’s impossible for humans to create accurate metric maps accurately so we prefer topological maps, but in robotics, this is reverses. Robots and humans do not have the same premises.
- jamesrcole 7y ago
  There doesn't have to be such a connection. Of course different approaches are going to have their pros and cons relative to different tasks, but that doesn't mean we can overlook the inherent difficulty of the task in question. It's a mistake to assume that spatial navigation and interaction with the physical world, for example, must be inherently simpler tasks than abstract reasoning.
  - toxik 7y ago
    What I'm saying, basically, is that achieving true artificial intelligence does not mean mimicking human abilities and modes of operation. Grasping a pen is easy _for humans_. I am attacking the idea that human abilities should somehow serve as a benchmark or landmark for robotics and AI. Academia is really caught in that idea, and it is often used to justify research directions and whole fields.
    - jamesrcole 7y ago
      Ok, but I don't see the relevance of that point to what I said in my comment.
pure-awesome 7y ago
"Paradox" does not mean "contradiction", it means "appears to be a contradiction (at least at first glance) whether or not it actually is". This result is highly unintuitive to humans, and is hence a paradox.
- jamesrcole 7y ago
  Newtons laws of motion would be paradoxes according to your definition. An educated modern person is very familiar with them, but they are highly unintuitive to the uninitiated - this why it took so long to invent them and why they were such a big deal. There's a distinction I've made in another comment between appearing to be contradictory to reasonably-well established knowledge vs appearing to be contradictory to intuitions. I don't think the latter are paradoxes, and I think the case in question is one of these.
  - pure-awesome 7y ago
    It is possible to fall (essentially) forever without hitting the ground. In fact, the ISS does exactly that. In addition an object can be "in freefall" whilst travelling upwards. A ball thrown upwards begins "falling" the moment it leaves your hand. (And this is not just an arbitrary definition of the word "fall" - if you are catapulted out of a slingshot, you feel weightless from the moment you leave the slingshot, not just when you begin to come back down) These direct consequences of Newton's laws of motion, and are unintuitive to most modern people, even those who learned Newton's Laws in high-school science. They are apparent contradictions, and hence I would classify them as paradoxes.
js8 7y ago
> I think the explanation of it is pretty simple. To ourselves, the unconscious things like vision and bodily movement tend to feel effortless. Whereas the consciously controlled things like reasoning involve conscious effort, and they can feel difficult to us. However! Maybe the reasoning feels difficult for an evolutionary reason, because it actually consumes a lot of energy. That would contradict the claim that the processing involved is simple.
dcolkitt 7y ago
I really recommend the book Consciousness and the Brain as a summary of modern neuropsychology. The long story short is that conscious thought is only a small fraction of the brain. There's a tremendous amount of pre-conscious machinery that pre-processes and evaluates sensory input. The role of consciousness is only to act as a sort of "global workspace" to reconcile any discrepancies that can't easily be evaluated and explained by the pre-conscious modules of the brain. As such the vast majority of sensory input never even makes it to the conscious level.

msla 7y ago

Quine had three classes of paradox: > A veridical paradox produces a result that appears absurd but is demonstrated to be true nonetheless. Thus the paradox of Frederic's birthday in The Pirates of Penzance establishes the surprising fact that a twenty-one-year-old would have had only five birthdays if he had been born on a leap day. Likewise, Arrow's impossibility theorem demonstrates difficulties in mapping voting results to the will of the people. The Monty Hall paradox demonstrates that a decision which has an intuitive 50–50 chance is in fact heavily biased towards making a decision which, given the intuitive conclusion, the player would be unlikely to make. In 20th-century science, Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel and Schrödinger's cat are famously vivid examples of a theory being taken to a logical but paradoxical end. > A falsidical paradox establishes a result that not only appears false but actually is false, due to a fallacy in the demonstration. The various invalid mathematical proofs (e.g., that 1 = 2) are classic examples, generally relying on a hidden division by zero. Another example is the inductive form of the horse paradox, which falsely generalises from true specific statements. Zeno's paradoxes are 'falsidical', concluding, for example, that a flying arrow never reaches its target or that a speedy runner cannot catch up to a tortoise with a small head-start. > A paradox that is in neither class may be an antinomy, which reaches a self-contradictory result by properly applying accepted ways of reasoning. For example, the Grelling–Nelson paradox points out genuine problems in our understanding of the ideas of truth and description. > A fourth kind, which may be alternatively interpreted as a special case of the third kind, has sometimes been described since Quine's work. > A paradox that is both true and false at the same time and in the same sense is called a dialetheia. In Western logics it is often assumed, following Aristotle, that no dialetheia exist, but they are sometimes accepted in Eastern traditions (e.g. in the Mohists,[12] the Gongsun Longzi,[13] and in Zen[14]) and in paraconsistent logics. It would be mere equivocation or a matter of degree, for example, to both affirm and deny that "John is here" when John is halfway through the door but it is self-contradictory simultaneously to affirm and deny the event. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox

jamesrcole 7y ago
I don't think it's a paradox by any of those definitions. Why do you think it is?
- Sharlin 7y ago
  Clearly number 1: an unintuitive, unexpected result that is nevertheless true. Other examples include Simpson's paradox, Braess' paradox, or the mentioned Monty Hall paradox.
  - mannykannot 7y ago
    I agree with that as the best fit to Quine's categories, but it is also paradoxical (though not a logical paradox) in that one might think that such a result would have far-reaching implications for cognitive science and AI, but, on reflection, it is not a disruptive result.
  - jamesrcole 7y ago
    There are paradoxes that are unintuitive because they appear contrary to other knowledge that we seem reasonably certain of. Then there are things that people find unintuitive or unexpected simply because they run contrary to their intuitions and assumptions. Like, for numerous people in history, the idea of a spherical Earth or how far away the stars really are. These latter cases aren't paradoxes. Is there some established knowledge that the relative difficulties of these AI tasks appear to run contra to? I believe it is just intuition and assumptions they run contra to.
    - pure-awesome 7y ago
      The fact that stars appear close despite being incredibly far away, and the fact that the earth appears flat (and that we don't fall off) despite being spherical are both, indeed, paradoxes.
      - jamesrcole 7y ago

toxik 7y ago

The idea that there must be a connection between robotic capabilities and human evolution is also a naturalistic misstep. It’s impossible for humans to create accurate metric maps accurately so we prefer topological maps, but in robotics, this is reverses. Robots and humans do not have the same premises.

jamesrcole 7y ago
There doesn't have to be such a connection. Of course different approaches are going to have their pros and cons relative to different tasks, but that doesn't mean we can overlook the inherent difficulty of the task in question. It's a mistake to assume that spatial navigation and interaction with the physical world, for example, must be inherently simpler tasks than abstract reasoning.
- toxik 7y ago
  What I'm saying, basically, is that achieving true artificial intelligence does not mean mimicking human abilities and modes of operation. Grasping a pen is easy _for humans_. I am attacking the idea that human abilities should somehow serve as a benchmark or landmark for robotics and AI. Academia is really caught in that idea, and it is often used to justify research directions and whole fields.
  - jamesrcole 7y ago
    Ok, but I don't see the relevance of that point to what I said in my comment.

pure-awesome 7y ago

"Paradox" does not mean "contradiction", it means "appears to be a contradiction (at least at first glance) whether or not it actually is". This result is highly unintuitive to humans, and is hence a paradox.

jamesrcole 7y ago
Newtons laws of motion would be paradoxes according to your definition. An educated modern person is very familiar with them, but they are highly unintuitive to the uninitiated - this why it took so long to invent them and why they were such a big deal. There's a distinction I've made in another comment between appearing to be contradictory to reasonably-well established knowledge vs appearing to be contradictory to intuitions. I don't think the latter are paradoxes, and I think the case in question is one of these.
- pure-awesome 7y ago
  It is possible to fall (essentially) forever without hitting the ground. In fact, the ISS does exactly that. In addition an object can be "in freefall" whilst travelling upwards. A ball thrown upwards begins "falling" the moment it leaves your hand. (And this is not just an arbitrary definition of the word "fall" - if you are catapulted out of a slingshot, you feel weightless from the moment you leave the slingshot, not just when you begin to come back down) These direct consequences of Newton's laws of motion, and are unintuitive to most modern people, even those who learned Newton's Laws in high-school science. They are apparent contradictions, and hence I would classify them as paradoxes.

js8 7y ago

> I think the explanation of it is pretty simple. To ourselves, the unconscious things like vision and bodily movement tend to feel effortless. Whereas the consciously controlled things like reasoning involve conscious effort, and they can feel difficult to us. However! Maybe the reasoning feels difficult for an evolutionary reason, because it actually consumes a lot of energy. That would contradict the claim that the processing involved is simple.

dcolkitt 7y ago

I really recommend the book Consciousness and the Brain as a summary of modern neuropsychology. The long story short is that conscious thought is only a small fraction of the brain. There's a tremendous amount of pre-conscious machinery that pre-processes and evaluates sensory input. The role of consciousness is only to act as a sort of "global workspace" to reconcile any discrepancies that can't easily be evaluated and explained by the pre-conscious modules of the brain. As such the vast majority of sensory input never even makes it to the conscious level.