4 ms·

Yes, this is an essential point, and the great circularity is not at all obvious. You can't start by talking about "inputs" and "outputs". At that stage you're

Yes, this is an essential point, and the great circularity is not at all obvious. You can't start by talking about "inputs" and "outputs". At that stage you're already talking about "the mind" in a reality furnished to you by the mind, and perhaps little to do with what the mind does or how to "carve reality at the joints". At level zero we have no insight at all into what Kant called "the thing in itself" -- our reasoning begins at pre-furnished objects. It is not at all obvious that we have the preconditions necessary to discover "what minds are" or "how they work".

hackinthebochs 4y ago
>At that stage you're already talking about "the mind" in a reality furnished to you by the mind While we presumably need minds to pick a set of distinctions for our purposes, it is not at all required that a mind picks such a set for the sake of analyzing the behavior of a system that processes such sets. A function, for example, requires an input to provide its output, yet we can analyze a function by abstracting over the input space and analyzing the transformations on an arbitrary input. This picks out the function uniquely without relying on any specifically chosen inputs. The same can be said for an "information processing" function on the space of possible sets of distinctions.
- vintermann 4y ago
  > The same can be said for an "information processing" function on the space of possible sets of distinctions. No, I don't think it can. "The space of possible sets of distinctions" is one of those nastily large things I'm not even sure is a set. I don't think you will be able to rule out that the drafts in a storm or the swirls in a stream aren't carrying out a computation, if you try to do it over all possible sets of distinctions.
  - hackinthebochs 4y ago
    >is one of those nastily large things I'm not even sure is a set. I don't see that it needs to be. The issue is the nature of the function, not the nature of the entire space of possible input to the function. >I don't think you will be able to rule out that the drafts in a storm or the swirls in a stream aren't carrying out a computation, if you try to do it over all possible sets of distinctions. You can if you consider the fact that computation has the counterfactual property that different inputs result in different meaningful outputs. Sure, given any arbitrary (complex) dynamic and target output, you can find an input that maps to that output. But given some restricted set of dynamics (e.g. what can be classified as a hurricane), it is safe to say there is no meaningful space of inputs/outputs for which the hurricane will provide a semantic mapping between the input/output spaces (not just a single point in that space, but the entire space). The entropy of the process is just too high to support such a mapping.
- usgroup 4y ago
  It wasn’t the point I was trying to make. The mind furnishes you not just with objects but also the constraints within which objects (abstract or otherwise) can be analysed. You are trying to work out how the mind works in a box provided to you by your mind.

hackinthebochs 4y ago

>At that stage you're already talking about "the mind" in a reality furnished to you by the mind While we presumably need minds to pick a set of distinctions for our purposes, it is not at all required that a mind picks such a set for the sake of analyzing the behavior of a system that processes such sets. A function, for example, requires an input to provide its output, yet we can analyze a function by abstracting over the input space and analyzing the transformations on an arbitrary input. This picks out the function uniquely without relying on any specifically chosen inputs. The same can be said for an "information processing" function on the space of possible sets of distinctions.

vintermann 4y ago
> The same can be said for an "information processing" function on the space of possible sets of distinctions. No, I don't think it can. "The space of possible sets of distinctions" is one of those nastily large things I'm not even sure is a set. I don't think you will be able to rule out that the drafts in a storm or the swirls in a stream aren't carrying out a computation, if you try to do it over all possible sets of distinctions.
- hackinthebochs 4y ago
  >is one of those nastily large things I'm not even sure is a set. I don't see that it needs to be. The issue is the nature of the function, not the nature of the entire space of possible input to the function. >I don't think you will be able to rule out that the drafts in a storm or the swirls in a stream aren't carrying out a computation, if you try to do it over all possible sets of distinctions. You can if you consider the fact that computation has the counterfactual property that different inputs result in different meaningful outputs. Sure, given any arbitrary (complex) dynamic and target output, you can find an input that maps to that output. But given some restricted set of dynamics (e.g. what can be classified as a hurricane), it is safe to say there is no meaningful space of inputs/outputs for which the hurricane will provide a semantic mapping between the input/output spaces (not just a single point in that space, but the entire space). The entropy of the process is just too high to support such a mapping.
usgroup 4y ago
It wasn’t the point I was trying to make. The mind furnishes you not just with objects but also the constraints within which objects (abstract or otherwise) can be analysed. You are trying to work out how the mind works in a box provided to you by your mind.