5 ms·

Articles like this annoy me: it seems to want to comment on philosophy of mind, but shows zero awareness of the classic debates in that discipline - materialism

Articles like this annoy me: it seems to want to comment on philosophy of mind, but shows zero awareness of the classic debates in that discipline - materialism vs idealism vs dualism vs neutral monism, and the competing versions of each of those, e.g. substance dualism vs hylemorphic dualism, eliminativist vs reductionist/emergentist materialism, property dualism, epiphenomenalism, panpsychism, Chalmers’ distinctions between different idealisms, such as realist vs anti-realist and micro-idealism vs macro-idealism… Add to that the typical journalistic fault of forcing one to read through paragraph after paragraph of narrative before actually explaining what the thesis they are presenting is. I’d much prefer to read a journal article where they state their central thesis upfront

protocolture 2y ago
I bailed 10 words in and came to the comments to see if the article was worth reading. Thanks for confirming its a skip.
- felizuno 2y ago
  So many adjectives... and "radical" in the title is a doozy considering this article is essentially a stoner summary of LeDoux's "Deep History of Ourselves" with the science replaced with thesaurus suggestions.
- rramadass 2y ago
  The gp is wrong. They are just being supercilious with a word salad of their own which is best ignored. The article is pretty good making you rethink all your preexisting concepts of Mind/Intelligence based on what we know from Biology today. It is not an article on various theories of Mind but on how scientific research (conveyed through pointers from various researchers) is advancing rapidly on so many fronts that we are forced to confront our very fundamental beliefs. Absolutely worth reading at least a couple of times.
- metalmangler 2y ago
  I held out a bit longer, and then skimmed, but started to become offended by the whole ,thing, but couldnt be bothered to be that annoyed by so many different things. That said I am very much into bieng outside in the company of many animals, working with them, and just bieng in wild environments, but language fails, when it comes to describing how species interact, and in the end, we cant describe our own mental proceseses in a clear, intellible by all, way. There is yet to be a genius of the mind, where the definition of genius is,:an idea that once explained, everyone else goes "of course" My main issue is that these sort of philisophical projects, reek, of money and hidden agenda's, and shade very quickly into, policy decisions, and quasi religious beurocratic powers.
mcswell 2y ago
As a linguist, article like this also annoy me by the claims that "X [whales, dolphins, parrots, crows...] uses language." We have known since 1957 that there is a hierarchy of "grammars", with finite state "languages" being near the bottom, and transformational grammars at the top. Human languages are certainly at a minimum at the context free phrase structure grammar level. My point is that by using the word "language" loosely, almost anything (DNA codons, for example) can be considered to be a language. But few if any other animals can get past the finite state level--and perhaps none gets even that far. And an article or book that uses the word "communicate" is even more annoying, since "communicate" seems to mean virtually anything. End of my rant...
- ggm 2y ago
  This. it nicely encapsulates why AI aficionados use words like "hallucinate" which become secret clues to belief around the G part of AGI. If it's just a coding mistake, how can the machine be "alive" but if I can re-purpose "hallucinate" as a term of art, I can also make you, dear reader, embue the AI with more and more traits of meaning which go to "it's alive" It's language Jim, but more as Chomsky said. or maybe Chimpsky. I 100% agree with your rant. This time fly likes your arrow.
  - crooked-v 2y ago
    The correct term isn't "hallucinate", it's "bullshit". I mean that in the casual sense of "a bullshitter" - every LLM is a moderately knowleable bullshitter that never stops talking (In a literal sense - even the end of responses is just a magic string from the LLM that cues the containing system to stop the LLM, and if not stopped like that it would just keep going after the "end".) The remarkable thing is that we ever get correct responses out of them.
    - h0l0cube 2y ago
      You could probably s/LLM/human/ in your comment. Essentially all intelligent life is a pachinko machine that takes a bunch of sensory inputs, bounces electricity around a number of neurons, and eventually lands them as actions, which further affect sensory inputs. In between there may be thoughts in there, like 'I've no more to say', or 'Shut your mouth before they figure you out'. The question is, how is it that humans are not a deterministic computer? And if the answer is that actually they are, then what differs between LLMs and actual intelligence?
globnomulous 2y ago
Is there a philosopher or philosophical school that identifies intelligence as a being's capacity to deploy a capability towards some end with intention? If so, what is this called? Or who is associated with it? Edit: I'd expect this thinker/school also to argue that the being needs to be able to experience its intention as an intention (as opposed to a dumb, inarticulate urge); in other words, intelligence would require an agent to be aware of itself as an intelligent agent. Edit 2: I strongly recommend Peter Watts' Blindsight to anybody who's on the market for sci fi that deals with these issues.
- jcgl 2y ago
  This is _not_ about defining intelligence. But it's about supposing intentionality as a tool for explaining the behavior of a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance
geuis 2y ago
[flagged]
- MadSudaca 2y ago
  Sir, where do hypotheses come from?
- gizajob 2y ago
  You just reinvented Wittgenstein a priori.
- rramadass 2y ago
  Well said. The gp's comment was mere snobbish verbiage since the article is not about various theories of Mind, but on biological research which is making us rethink our very fundamental assumptions. It is a pretty good one.
- DrFalkyn 2y ago
  So you’re an empiricist. Is science “reality” or is it just a series of models/ conceptual frameworks ?
  - geuis 2y ago
    Keep walking into a glass door a few dozen times. Is the door a reality even though you can't see it, or just a conceptual framework you keep bouncing off of? At some point you have to stop thinking in your head why you can't walk through the window and start testing and figuring out what keeps breaking your nose.
- skissane 2y ago
  Your position is self-refuting: you are dismissing philosophy, yet simultaneously making philosophical claims in doing so-claiming that all knowledge is empirical is itself a philosophical claim (empiricism)
  - geuis 2y ago
    This is a philosophical argument, therefore dismissible by science. Unless you can rephrase your argument as something testable, it's philosophy and thereby not relevant.
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
Agree. This last couple years of AI has been a wellspring of people/articles re-inventing philosophy, like all these subjects haven't been debated and studied for a few hundred years. At least acknowledge them, even if we aren't going to try and build on what has come before.
dsjoerg 2y ago
Yes. The article is really about conceptual framing — how clinging to outdated or vague definitions prevents progress in understanding biological and cognitive processes. People keep forcing everything into the vague, overloaded concept of "intelligence" instead of just using the right terms for the phenomena they’re studying. If we simply describe behaviors in terms of adaptation, computation, or decision-making, the whole debate evaporates https://chatgpt.com/share/67c07325-3140-8007-8177-c56a89b257be https://chatgpt.com/share/67c07325-3140-8007-8177-c56a89b257...
kordlessagain 2y ago
Wait. If words fail to capture the truth, why do we keep making more words about it?
NoGravitas 2y ago
So, I think you' are wrong about this: the article is discussing a change in perspective that would largely make the classic debates in philosophy of mind irrelevant in the same way that heliocentrism made classic debates within the geocentric paradigm (about epicycles, and such) irrelevant. Highly worthwhile, if insufficiently in-depth.
- photonthug 2y ago
  It seems like this might be missing or just talking past parents point. Sure, new paradigms might always make old lines of research irrelevant. But otoh, something like idealism vs materialism vs dualism can’t just be dismissed because the categories are exhaustive! So new paradigms might shed light on it but can’t just cancel out the question. So yes, to parents point some stuff is fundamental, and if you’re not acquainted with the fundamentals then it’s hard to discuss the deep issues coherently. It’s possible I guess that a plant biologist or a journalist or a ML engineer for that matter is going to crack the problem wide open with new lines of inquiry that are completely ignorant about historical debates in theory of mind, but in that case it will still probably take someone else to explain what /how that actually happened.
- SilasX 2y ago
  I agree in spirit, that it's possible for a field to be so lost that a new paradigm fundamentally obviates it and frees you from having to recapitulate the entire thicket. But still, a minimal test for whether you've actually obviated them would be whether you can double back and show how the new paradigm resolves/makes them look naive and confused. And so I'd expect an author to do that for at least one such school of thought as part of their exposition.

protocolture 2y ago

I bailed 10 words in and came to the comments to see if the article was worth reading. Thanks for confirming its a skip.

felizuno 2y ago
So many adjectives... and "radical" in the title is a doozy considering this article is essentially a stoner summary of LeDoux's "Deep History of Ourselves" with the science replaced with thesaurus suggestions.
rramadass 2y ago
The gp is wrong. They are just being supercilious with a word salad of their own which is best ignored. The article is pretty good making you rethink all your preexisting concepts of Mind/Intelligence based on what we know from Biology today. It is not an article on various theories of Mind but on how scientific research (conveyed through pointers from various researchers) is advancing rapidly on so many fronts that we are forced to confront our very fundamental beliefs. Absolutely worth reading at least a couple of times.
metalmangler 2y ago
I held out a bit longer, and then skimmed, but started to become offended by the whole ,thing, but couldnt be bothered to be that annoyed by so many different things. That said I am very much into bieng outside in the company of many animals, working with them, and just bieng in wild environments, but language fails, when it comes to describing how species interact, and in the end, we cant describe our own mental proceseses in a clear, intellible by all, way. There is yet to be a genius of the mind, where the definition of genius is,:an idea that once explained, everyone else goes "of course" My main issue is that these sort of philisophical projects, reek, of money and hidden agenda's, and shade very quickly into, policy decisions, and quasi religious beurocratic powers.

mcswell 2y ago

As a linguist, article like this also annoy me by the claims that "X [whales, dolphins, parrots, crows...] uses language." We have known since 1957 that there is a hierarchy of "grammars", with finite state "languages" being near the bottom, and transformational grammars at the top. Human languages are certainly at a minimum at the context free phrase structure grammar level. My point is that by using the word "language" loosely, almost anything (DNA codons, for example) can be considered to be a language. But few if any other animals can get past the finite state level--and perhaps none gets even that far. And an article or book that uses the word "communicate" is even more annoying, since "communicate" seems to mean virtually anything. End of my rant...

ggm 2y ago
This. it nicely encapsulates why AI aficionados use words like "hallucinate" which become secret clues to belief around the G part of AGI. If it's just a coding mistake, how can the machine be "alive" but if I can re-purpose "hallucinate" as a term of art, I can also make you, dear reader, embue the AI with more and more traits of meaning which go to "it's alive" It's language Jim, but more as Chomsky said. or maybe Chimpsky. I 100% agree with your rant. This time fly likes your arrow.
- crooked-v 2y ago
  The correct term isn't "hallucinate", it's "bullshit". I mean that in the casual sense of "a bullshitter" - every LLM is a moderately knowleable bullshitter that never stops talking (In a literal sense - even the end of responses is just a magic string from the LLM that cues the containing system to stop the LLM, and if not stopped like that it would just keep going after the "end".) The remarkable thing is that we ever get correct responses out of them.
  - h0l0cube 2y ago
    You could probably s/LLM/human/ in your comment. Essentially all intelligent life is a pachinko machine that takes a bunch of sensory inputs, bounces electricity around a number of neurons, and eventually lands them as actions, which further affect sensory inputs. In between there may be thoughts in there, like 'I've no more to say', or 'Shut your mouth before they figure you out'. The question is, how is it that humans are not a deterministic computer? And if the answer is that actually they are, then what differs between LLMs and actual intelligence?

globnomulous 2y ago

Is there a philosopher or philosophical school that identifies intelligence as a being's capacity to deploy a capability towards some end with intention? If so, what is this called? Or who is associated with it? Edit: I'd expect this thinker/school also to argue that the being needs to be able to experience its intention as an intention (as opposed to a dumb, inarticulate urge); in other words, intelligence would require an agent to be aware of itself as an intelligent agent. Edit 2: I strongly recommend Peter Watts' Blindsight to anybody who's on the market for sci fi that deals with these issues.

jcgl 2y ago
This is _not_ about defining intelligence. But it's about supposing intentionality as a tool for explaining the behavior of a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance

geuis 2y ago

[flagged]

MadSudaca 2y ago
Sir, where do hypotheses come from?
gizajob 2y ago
You just reinvented Wittgenstein a priori.
rramadass 2y ago
Well said. The gp's comment was mere snobbish verbiage since the article is not about various theories of Mind, but on biological research which is making us rethink our very fundamental assumptions. It is a pretty good one.
DrFalkyn 2y ago
So you’re an empiricist. Is science “reality” or is it just a series of models/ conceptual frameworks ?
- geuis 2y ago
  Keep walking into a glass door a few dozen times. Is the door a reality even though you can't see it, or just a conceptual framework you keep bouncing off of? At some point you have to stop thinking in your head why you can't walk through the window and start testing and figuring out what keeps breaking your nose.
skissane 2y ago
Your position is self-refuting: you are dismissing philosophy, yet simultaneously making philosophical claims in doing so-claiming that all knowledge is empirical is itself a philosophical claim (empiricism)
- geuis 2y ago
  This is a philosophical argument, therefore dismissible by science. Unless you can rephrase your argument as something testable, it's philosophy and thereby not relevant.

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

Agree. This last couple years of AI has been a wellspring of people/articles re-inventing philosophy, like all these subjects haven't been debated and studied for a few hundred years. At least acknowledge them, even if we aren't going to try and build on what has come before.

dsjoerg 2y ago

Yes. The article is really about conceptual framing — how clinging to outdated or vague definitions prevents progress in understanding biological and cognitive processes. People keep forcing everything into the vague, overloaded concept of "intelligence" instead of just using the right terms for the phenomena they’re studying. If we simply describe behaviors in terms of adaptation, computation, or decision-making, the whole debate evaporates https://chatgpt.com/share/67c07325-3140-8007-8177-c56a89b257be https://chatgpt.com/share/67c07325-3140-8007-8177-c56a89b257...

kordlessagain 2y ago

Wait. If words fail to capture the truth, why do we keep making more words about it?

NoGravitas 2y ago

So, I think you' are wrong about this: the article is discussing a change in perspective that would largely make the classic debates in philosophy of mind irrelevant in the same way that heliocentrism made classic debates within the geocentric paradigm (about epicycles, and such) irrelevant. Highly worthwhile, if insufficiently in-depth.

photonthug 2y ago
It seems like this might be missing or just talking past parents point. Sure, new paradigms might always make old lines of research irrelevant. But otoh, something like idealism vs materialism vs dualism can’t just be dismissed because the categories are exhaustive! So new paradigms might shed light on it but can’t just cancel out the question. So yes, to parents point some stuff is fundamental, and if you’re not acquainted with the fundamentals then it’s hard to discuss the deep issues coherently. It’s possible I guess that a plant biologist or a journalist or a ML engineer for that matter is going to crack the problem wide open with new lines of inquiry that are completely ignorant about historical debates in theory of mind, but in that case it will still probably take someone else to explain what /how that actually happened.
SilasX 2y ago
I agree in spirit, that it's possible for a field to be so lost that a new paradigm fundamentally obviates it and frees you from having to recapitulate the entire thicket. But still, a minimal test for whether you've actually obviated them would be whether you can double back and show how the new paradigm resolves/makes them look naive and confused. And so I'd expect an author to do that for at least one such school of thought as part of their exposition.