The Liar’s Paradox Naturalized
by rsbakker
Can the Liar’s Paradox be understood in a biologically consilient way?
Say what you will about ‘Truth,’ everyone agrees that truth-talk has something to do with harmonizing group orientations relative to group environments. Whenever we find ourselves at odds either with one another or our environments, we resort to the vocabulary of truth and rectitude. The question is what this talk consists in and how it manages to do what it does.
The idea here is to steer clear presumptions of intentionality and look at the problem in the register providing the most information: biomechanically. Whatever our orientation to our environments consists in, everyone agrees that it is physical in some fundamental respect. Strokes are catastrophic for good reason. So, let’s stipulate that an orientation to an environment, in distinction to, say, a ‘perspective on’ an environment, consists of all physical (high-dimensional) facts underwriting our capacity to behaviourally resolve environments in happy (system conserving) ways.
We all agree that causal histories underwrite communication and cognition, but we have no inkling as to the details of that story, nor the details of the way we solve communicative and cognitive problems absent those details. Heuristic neglect simply provides a way to understand this predicament at face value. No one denies that human cognition neglects the natural facts of cognition; the problem is that everyone presumes this fact has little or no bearing on our attempts to solve the nature of cognition. Even though our own intuitive access to our cognitive capacities, given the complexity of those capacities, elides everything save what our ancestors needed to solve ancestral problems, most everyone thinks that intuitive access, given the right interpretation, provides everything cognitive science needs to solve cognitive scientific problems.
It really is remarkable when you think about it. Out of sight, out of explanatory paradigm.
Beginning with orientations rather than perspectives allows us to radically reconceptualize a great many traditional philosophical problematics in ‘post-intentional’ terms. The manifest advantage of orientations, theoretically speaking, lies in their environmental continuity, their mediocrity, the way they comprise (unlike perspectives, meanings, norms, and so on) just more environment. Rather than look at linguistic communication in terms of ‘contents,’ the physical conveyance of ontologically inscrutable ‘meanings,’ we can understand it behaviouristically, as orientations impacting orientations via specialized mechanisms, behaviours, and sensitivities. Rather than conceive the function of communication ‘intersubjectively,’ as the coordination of intentional black boxes, we can view it biologically, as the formation of transient superordinate processes, ephemeral ‘superorganisms,’ taking individuals and their environments as component parts.
Granting that human communication consists in the harmonization of orientations relative to social and natural environments amounts to granting that human communication is biological, that it, like every other basic human capacity, possesses an evolutionary history. Human communication, in other words, is in the business of providing economical solutions to various environmental problems.
This observation motivates a dreadfully consequential question: What is the most economical way for two or more people to harmonize their environmental orientations? To communicate environmental discrepancies, while taking preexisting harmonies for granted. I don’t rehash my autobiography when I see my friends, nor do I lecture them on the physiology of human cognition or the evolution of the human species. I ‘dish dirt.’ I bring everyone ‘up to speed.’
What if we were to look at language as primarily a discrepancy minimization device, as a system possessing exquisite sensitivities (via, say, predictive processing) to the desynchronization of orientations?
In such a system, the sufficiency of preexisting harmonies—our shared physiology, location, and training—would go without saying. I update my friends and they update me. The same can be said of the system itself: the sufficiency of language, it’s biomechanical capacity to effect synchronization would also go without saying—short, that is, the detection of discrepancies. I update my friends and they update me, and so long as everyone agrees, nary a word about truth need be spoken.
Taking a discrepancy view, in other words, elegantly explains why truth is the communicative default: the economical thing is to neglect our harmonized orientations—which is to say, to implicitly presume their sufficiency. It’s only when we question the sufficiency of these communications that truth-talk comes into play.
Truth-talk, in other words, is typically triggered when communication observably fails to minimize discrepancies, when operational sufficiency, for whatever reason, ceases to be automatically presumed. Truth-talk harmonizes group orientations relative to group environments in cases of communicative discrepancy, an incompatibility between updates, say. [Would it be possible to build ways to do new things with existing polling data using discrepancy models? How does consensus within a network arise and cluster? What kind of information is salient or ignored? How do modes or channels facilitate or impede such consensus? Would it be possible, via big data, to track the regional congealing of orientations into tacit cooperatives, simply by tracking ingroup truth-talk? Can a discrepancy view subsume existing metrics? Can we measure the resilience or creativity or solidarity or motivation of a group via patterns in truth-talk activity?]
Neglecting harmonies isn’t simply economical, it’s also necessary, at least to the extent that humans have only the most superficial access to the details of those harmonies. It’s not that I don’t bother lecturing my ingroup on the physiology of human cognition and the evolution of the human species, it’s that, ancestrally speaking, I have no way of doing so. I suffer, as all humans suffer, from medial neglect, an inability to intuit the nature of my cognitive capacities, as well as frame neglect, an inability to put those capacities in natural context.
Neglecting the circumstances and constitution of verbal communication is a condition of verbal communication. Speech is oblivious to its biological and historical conditions. Verbal communication appears ‘extensional,’ as the philosophers of language say, because we have no other way of cognizing it. We have instances of speech and we have instances of the world, and we have no way of intuitively fathoming the actual relations between. Luckily for us, if our orientations are sufficiently isomorphic, we can communicate—harmonize our orientations—without fathoming these relations.
We can safely presume that the most frequent and demanding discrepancies will be environmental discrepancies, those which, given otherwise convergent orientations (the same physiology, location, and training), can be communicated absent contextual and constitutional information. If you and I share the same general physiology, location, and training, then only environmental discrepancies require our communicative attention. Such discrepancies can be resolved while remaining almost entirely ‘performance blind.’ All I need do is ‘trust’ your communication and cognition, build upon your unfathomable relations the same blind way I build upon my own. You cry, ‘Wolf!’ and I run for the shotgun: our orientations converge.
The problem, of course, is that all communicative discrepancies amount to some insufficiency in those ‘actual relations between.’ They require that we somehow fathom the unfathomable.
There is no understanding truth-talk without understanding that it’s in the ‘fathoming the unfathomable’ business. Truth-talk, in other words, resolves communicative discrepancies neglecting the natural facts underwriting those discrepancies. Truth-talk is radically heuristic, insofar as it leverages solutions to communicative problems absent information pertaining to the nature of those communicative problems.
So, to crib the example I gave in my recent Dennett posts: say you and I report seeing two different birds, a vulture versus an albatross, in circumstances where such a determination potentially matters—looking for a lost hunting party, say. An endless number of frame and medial confounds could possibly explain the discrepancy between our orientations. Perhaps I have bad eyesight, or I think albatrosses are black, or I was taught as much by an ignorant father, or I’m blinded by the glare of the sun, or I’m suffering schizophrenia, or I’m drunk, or I’m just sick and tired of you being right all the time, or I’m teasing you out of boredom, or more insidiously, I’m responsible for the loss of the hunting party, and want to prevent you from finding the scene of my crime.
There’s no question that, despite neglect, certain forms of access and capacity regarding the enabling dimension of cognition and communication could provide much in the way of problem resolution. Given the inaccessibility and complexity of the factors involved, however, it follows that any capacity to accommodate them will be heuristic in the extreme. This means that our cognitive capacity to flag/troubleshoot issues of cognitive sufficiency will be retail, fractionate, geared to different kinds of manifest problems:
- Given the topological dependence of our orientations, capacities to solve for positional sufficiency. “Trump is peering through a keyhole.”
- Given the environmental sensory dependence of our orientations, capacity to solve for the sufficiency of environmental conditions. “Trump is wandering in the dark.”
- Given the physiological sensory dependence of our orientations, capacities to solve for physiological sufficiency. “Trump is myopic.”
- Given the communal interdependence of our orientations, capacities to solve for social sufficiency, or trust. “Trump is a notorious liar.”
- Given the experiential dependence of our orientations, capacities to solve for epistemic sufficiency. “Trump has no government experience whatsoever.”
- Given the linearity of verbal communication, capacities to solve for combinatorial or syntactic sufficiency. “Trump said the exact opposite this morning.”
It’s worth pausing here, I think, to acknowledge the way this radically spare approach to truth-talk provides ingress to any number of philosophical discourses on the ‘nature of Truth.’ Heuristic Neglect Theory allows us to see just why ‘Truth’ has so thoroughly confounded humanity despite millennia of ardent inquiry.
The apparent ‘extensionality’ of language, the way utterances and environments covary, is an artifact of frame and medial neglect. Once again, we are oblivious to the astronomical complexities, all the buzzing biology, responsible for the systematic relations between our utterances and our environments. We detect discrepancies with those relations, in other words, without detecting the relations themselves. Since truth-talk ministers to these breakdowns in an otherwise inexplicable covariance, ‘correspondence’ strikes many as a natural way to define Truth. With circumstantial and enabling factors out of view, it appears as though the environment itself sorts our utterances—provides ‘truth conditions.’
Given the abject inability to agree on any formulation of this apparently more than natural correspondence, the turn to circumstantial and enabling factors was inevitable. Perhaps Truth is a mere syntactic device, a bridge between mention and use. After all, we generally only say ‘X is true’ when saying X is disputed. Or perhaps Truth is a social artifact of some description, something conceded to utterances in ‘games of giving and asking for reasons.’ After all, we generally engage in truth-talk only when resolving disputes with others. Perhaps ‘Truth’ doesn’t so much turn on ‘truth conditions’ as ‘assertion conditions.’
The heuristic neglect approach allows us to make sense of why these explanatory angles make the apparent sense they do, why, like the blind swamis and the elephant, each confuses some part for some chimerical whole. Neglecting the machinery of discrepancy minimization not only strands reflection with a strategic sliver of a far more complicated process, it generates the presumption that this sliver is somehow self-sufficient and whole.
Setting the ontological truth of Truth aside, the fact remains that truth-talk leverages life-saving determinations on the neural cheap. This economy turns on ignoring everything that makes truth-talk possible. The intractable nature of circumstantial and enabling factors enforces frame and medial neglect, imposing what might be called qualification costs on the resolution of communicative discrepancies. IGNORE THE MEDIAL is therefore the baseline heuristic governing truth-talk: we automatically ‘externalize’ because, ancestrally at least, our communicative problems did not require cognitive science to solve.
Of course, as a communicative heuristic, IGNORE THE MEDIAL possesses a problem-ecology, which is to say, limits to its applicability. What philosophers, mistaking a useful incapacity for a magical capacity, call ‘aboutness’ or ‘directedness’ or ‘subjectivity,’ is only useful so far.
As the name suggests, IGNORE THE MEDIAL will crash when applied to problems where circumstantial and/or enabling factors either are not or cannot be ignored.
We find this most famously, I think, in the Liar’s Paradox:
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence is false.
Truth-talk pertains to the neglected sufficiency of orientations relative to ongoing natural and social environments. Collective ‘noise reduction’ is the whole point. As a component in a discrepancy minimization system, truth-talk is in the business of restoring positional and source neglect, our implicit ‘view from nowhere,’ allowing (or not) utterances originally sourced to an individual performance to update the tacit orientations of everyone—to purge discrepancies and restore synchronization.
Self-reference rather obviously undermines this natural function.
“Rather than conceive the function of communication ‘intersubjectively,’ as the coordination of intentional black boxes, we can view it biologically, as the formation of transient superordinate processes, ephemeral ‘superorganisms,’ taking individuals and their environments as component parts.”
This is a really interesting idea. I may have more to say about it if you build on it in the future. I think anyone that has ever found themselves caught in the cogs of some bureaucratic machine will understand the image of the “ephemeral superorganism”.
“Truth-talk pertains to the neglected sufficiency of orientations relative to ongoing natural and social environments. Collective ‘noise reduction’ is the whole point. As a component in a discrepancy minimization system, truth-talk is in the business of restoring positional and source neglect, our implicit ‘view from nowhere,’ allowing (or not) utterances originally sourced to an individual performance to update the tacit orientations of everyone—to purge discrepancies and restore synchronization. Self-reference rather obviously undermines this natural function.”
You should try to assemble an account of how this system emerged from the forms of communication non-human animals use. There’s a risk of ending up with an evolutionary “just so story” but you could just couch it in speculative terms. Additionally, you should discuss why you think we ended up with the capacity for self-reference in the first place: did it evolve as some kind of system exploit that some of our ancestors used to reproductive benefits? Being able to undermine truth using specific forms of self-reference seems like it could be a powerful tool for benefiting individuals in the genetic rat race.
Only tangentially related:
https://qz.com/1153647/ai-isnt-just-taking-away-our-privacy-its-destroying-our-free-will-too/
When machines become inscrutable in the same way other people are, and also become unaccountable:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/14/16776154/fcc-net-neutrality-vote-results-rules-repealed
This blog has talked at length about the consequences of internet-driven self segregation. Truth talk ‘works’ because of the things we have in common, and can therefore ignore. This implies that the less we have in common the less effective truth talk will be. Self segregation brings like minded people together and therefore makes truth talk more effective within groups. Self segregation make different groups more different, so truth talk between groups becomes less effective. The resulting polarization makes civil society harder and harder to sustain.
That is the primary social punchline. It’s kind of crazy the way HNT has so many decisive things to say about our cognitive ecological future. But who knows? System Zero technocracies might no longer require civil society as we know it.
Will definitely check out the links…
I doubt most of the claims of us being more divided by the intertubes for most of its existence as opposed to us just now being more exposed to our preexisting divisions/differences, and the self-selection isn’t the real bugaboo but as we are seeing the uses and abuses of our ‘likes’ by platformers,oligarchs and their governments (social-media engineering if you will) alike is the real danger, as for the scifi threat of truly ‘smart’ cities or the like see the above video on the limits of AI.
for actually happening threats/divisions see:
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘preexisting divisions’ here, as opposed to native groupishness. The selection is an empirical fact (even if ‘media bubbles’ are not). So you’re saying that an instrument allowing authority-disposed, difference-allergic folks to effortlessly find one another and organize isn’t going to have a dramatic political impact? It already has. Trump is an ideological prostitute, bound to sell-out his constituency, but just imagine if he were a true ideologue. Fascist coups in times of preposterous material prosperity are now a live possibility. The ovens are no longer safely locked in our past.
It’s too easy, I think, to look at System Zero as a mass compliancy mechanism–too beholden to 20th century assumptions. Mass compliance turns on mass institutions, all of which evolved in pre-System Zero societies. Everybody’s standing on marbles here, including oligarchs and their governments. We can expect them to intensify their efforts given ecological anxiety (just think of Obama’s dismaying response to Snowden), but all the pigs will be greased before long. I think we can bet on that much.
I’m saying that if you looked at any town (or family) or church or the like before the intertubes we were always already divided and the grouping of like-minded folks on the intertubes has been shown to be of limited value (in terms of organizing) but the manipulations of such groupings (and individuals) by people with resources and offline organizations is the real deal. Fascism is likely a creature of strong state govts, now we are in an age of rising techno-mafia-states
like Russia and yes it’s all crumbling but when the state infrastructures finally go so will the intertubes and all other big tech. See the new books by Masha Gessen and Zeynep Tufekci for example.
Tell that to the Austrians or Hungarians. In the West, far right parties have vastly increased (230%, last I’ve read) their portion of popular vote since the web was born. Almost unthinkably extreme rhetoric is now status quo.
Are you saying this phenomena is driven by institutional collectives? Its certainly being exploited and goosed. But take Fox News. By going all in with populism, has it, a) destroyed American democracy; b) delivered the Republican party to Populism, thereby saving it; c) delivered the Republican party to Populism, thereby delivered a generation of political ascendancy to the Democrats; d) split the Republican party in two; or so on and so on.
Tribalism is hardwired into us, so it goes without saying that it’s ‘always been that way.’ The issue is how it expresses itself given a certain institutional and technical ecology. What’s happening now is anything but more of the same, and trust me, no one is in control of anything but momentary determinations (save by dint of dumb luck). The sum of local manipulation going up simply increases global unpredictability. Trump is living proof.
You don’t seem to have followed American politics very carefully if you think that Fox News is any different from the party propaganda that preceded it (google Roger Ailes and Nixon) , Trump is what happens as industrial capitalism (ends of cheap resources and labor) grinds to a halt and in particular the post WW2 bubble for the US,, as for far right parties in Europe that’s pretty much the story of modern Europe and again failing economics, when resources get limited the tribalism gets cranked up. The best that the big tech firms can do is to try and monopolize on highjacking attention, for real power/impact you need an offline apparatus/system https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-all-seeing-surveillance-state-feared-in-the-west-is-a-reality-in-china-1498493020
Quite closely. Even more, I’ve been following (and battling) the ‘alt-right’ for more than a decade now as well. I’ve watched it grow from small bands of cranks to organized networks possessing boggling numbers of followers in the space of a decade. European economies have been on the mend for quite some time, yet far right memberships continue to surge. Macron routed Le Pen, but only by taking her central populist planks away from her.
The jaw-dropping thing about Trump, I think, is the degree to which his phenomenon is decoupled from economics. What made Fox News so revolutionary isn’t that there wasn’t right-wing partisan papers, radio outlets prior, but because it completed the political segmentation of the mass information marketplace. Material scarcity is dwindling in significance, even as identifications are becoming more and more consequential.
Just think of the online disinhibition effect… multiplied by billions… stewing over time… For the first time in human history, geography is no longer a communicative constraint. To think this just greases the wheels of good old fashioned 20th century tyranny is too comforting to credible. To think politics is the same beast in different clothes is to take the Economist’s view.
🌎🕊
http://moonmagazine.org/conscious-sex-interview-lama-rod-owens-2017-12-30/
🍄♥
Those who say that both are true are hard-pressed to maintain their case. If consciousness reveals the truth of things, on what grounds, in its turn, does consciousness exist?
Which consciousness? The one philosophers have fruitlessly chased for millennia, or the one science will eventually discover?
I wonder if science can figure it out.
https://www.lionsroar.com/studying-mind-from-the-inside/
How does one ‘rigorously observe’ observational artifacts? If ‘mind’ is something we make up as we go along then all science need account for is the ‘making up’ part.
If no one perceives whether the mind is
luminous or not, then there is no point in discussing it, like the beauty of a barren woman’s daughter.
I wonder sometimes if we aren’t getting confused by metaphorical uses of ‘perception’ for mental activities other than sensory perception. The fact that most people have broadly similar sensory apparatus and therefore agree about the redness of red lights and stop signs makes driving fairly safe. I guess the difference between metaphorical ‘perception’ and sensory perception is that metaphorical percepts doesn’t command the same consensus as sensory percepts. Given the lack of consensus on whether minds exist independent of the brains/bodies within which they are incarnated the fact that some of us don’t perceive minds as luminous should not be surprising.
“The scientist’s response was quite surprising. He said that since all mental states arise from physical states, it is not possible for downward causation to occur. Although, out of politeness, I did not respond at the time, I thought then and still think that there is as yet no scientific basis for such a categorical claim. The view that all mental processes are necessarily physical processes is a metaphysical assumption, not a scientific fact.”
Have you, or anybody else you know of ever perceived a mental process that was demonstrably not a physical process? Alzheimers, strokes, shotgun blasts… have you ever known of a brain’s capacity for mental processing to survive that brain’s physical destruction?
I don’t claim to know much of anything about Buddhism, so like most people nowadays I clicked on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism
What are the six realms? How does Buddhism’s description of those realms relate to the universe described by astrophysics and cosmology? Do those realms exist in the same physical universe as the realm we’re living in now? Does reincarnation exist? If so, what is the thing that is conserved through the cycle of rebirth? Is it something that can be observed using scientific techniques? Or perhaps are these questions too literal?
Those are some of questions I’ve been pondering Mike. This may be helpful to get a sense of the Buddhist view.
https://www.siddharthasintent.org/resources/podcasts/is-there-buddhism-without-rebirth/
http://meaningoflife.tv/videos/39447
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=huVJ30oEzls
https://www.lionsroar.com/what-turns-the-wheel-of-life/ 🐖🐍🐓
I wrote a comment earlier, and for some reason it isn’t showing up, but I’ll paraphrase.
“Self-reference rather obviously undermines this natural function.”
Why, then, did it emerge? Was it useful for individuals, as a social exploit? Useful for self-correction in some narrow contexts? Or is it a spandrel in the Gouldian sense? Or maybe an unintentional side effect of our language becoming powerful enough to be “complete” in the mathematical logic sense (the Hofstadter position)?
No different than any other heuristic misfire: our capacity to apply the system outruns the system’s capacity to solve. One (among many, I think) empirical consequence of this is that it suggests that our capacities to communicate and solve for medial issues came after our capacity to environmentally synchronize our behaviour. I’ll check the spam folder for your original comment.
“it suggests that our capacities to communicate and solve for medial issues came after our capacity to environmentally synchronize our behaviour”
Almost certainly.
The truth talk about truth talk. Harmonizing group orientations to group environments, said environment being harmonizing group orientations to group environments. A naturalisation from a recursion so invisible it’s supernatural. Self-reference, for being difficult technical reading, rather obviously doesn’t undermine this natural function. >;)
The doucheyness index of this comment is a reflection of synchronization instincts, as actual naturalisation of truth talk (as opposed to recusitory stabilisation of truth) divides us into what we always were – lone towers of biochemistry, striding the land. This post is true – as shown by how this post, if fully applied, would show this post is false. Eh, I’m even annoying myself now…god, I said ‘actual’? What a douche!
On “collective ‘noise reduction’,” brains seemingly find their own squawking sounds too pleasing.
Otherwise, just a bunch of Greaters oscillating together ;).
Glad to see you active. You really need to put out TTBD as ancillary notation for this place. Or if you or *anyone* feels like indulging the impulse, periodically contribute to TTDB fan glossary – which reminds me… I have major outstanding to-dos…
Cheers, TPB.
Whoa, an extra letter in my email and I’m suddenly blue and awaiting moderator?! Whomp, whomp.
Hi Mike. WordPress has changed something in their posting protocols, I think. Jorge has had difficulties as well. I made a promise to myself that I would go underground after TUC came out. Just climbing out of the cave now, all squint-eyed and confused.
But I remain, as per forever, a squadron of nuts and bolts flying in loose formation. I feel like the Iron Giant sometimes, waiting for all my pieces to reassemble.
Lol, Iron Giant saves us from ourselves, no ;)?
Hope you’ve seen new shadows cast on your cave walkabout and have learned to commune them with others ;).
“Rather than look at linguistic communication in terms of ‘contents,’ the physical conveyance of ontologically inscrutable ‘meanings,’ we can understand it behaviouristically, as orientations impacting orientations via specialized mechanisms, behaviours, and sensitivities.”
This is how routers and switches cooperate to make the internet do what it does. I know most of us hate mind-computer analogies, but if language, for example, can be understood as a mechanism whereby brains reprogram or update other brains, do you need semantics to explain how language works? In general if mechanical explanations suffice do intentional explanations serve any purpose?
At that point the idea of ‘explanation’ itself probably disappears entirely, anyway. It’d just break down into doing things, sans any reference to anything human/semantic – just material interactions, over and over. No more than the internet explains to itself how it works – it doesn’t, just material interactions, over and over.
The Darkness that Comes Before:
https://www.consciousentities.com/2017/12/phenomenal-epiphenomenalism/
This is the link to the actual paper:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01924/full
As Callan says, “just material interactions, over and over.”
https://diogenesinthemarketplace.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/aspect-reflections-on-r-scott-bakkers.html
Hi Scott,
I guess there are a number of distinct claims or issues here. There’s what seems like a teleofunctional statement – along the lines of truth-talk is some kind of socio-linguistic adaptation selected for the function of minimizing discrepancies between “orientations” whose nature would be reflexively dark otherwise.
That seems pretty plausible hypothesis that might be tested with multi-agent modelling in virtual environments, for example. Then there’s the wider problem of what this implies for the philosophical theory of truth. It might be claimed by anti-eliminativists that the intelligibility of such a functional explanation implies a relevant explanandum – namely truth talk itself, perhaps given a syntactic characterization along the lines of content-redundancy theories. The problem here is that the intelligibility of the explanation remains parasitic on the theories of content in which redundancy accounts are embedded. We can’t state the equivalence between all instances of “p” and “p is true” without quantifying over propositions or semantically-individuated sentences (and this goes for sophisticated versions of redundancy theory like Brandoms prosentential theory, which has to quantify over substitudents of prosentences that are in turn fixed by their phrases that antecede them in context]. So adopting a syntactic account of truth absolutely requires some kind of semantic theory.
So it seems to me that the teleofunctional theory doesn’t resolves the Liar’s Paradox so much as explain why it is salient for socio-linguistic beings like ourselves, which is perhaps what you had in mind by ‘naturalizing’ here.
I’m not sure what an eliminativist extension of this account would need to look like, but perhaps one possibility might be a model of orientations which replaced truth-talk with structures or types of orientation – i.e. where these because full-fledged theoretical entities of some kind (where ‘theory’ needs to be understood as a placeholder for a structure that is no longer linguistically or propositionally characterised]. The problem is, if the theory of medial neglect is right we might not be able to understand it.
D
Why teleofunctional? ‘Function talk’ is itself heuristic, a way to communicate selective difference-making given prior synchronization. This is why ‘negative causality,’ the idea that the absence of a heartbeat can cause death, strikes us as so implicitly natural and yet so weird upon reflection. Functions relate causes to (ignored) deeper backgrounds relative to certain concurrent (neglected) neuro-predictive processes—our brains synchronizing vis a vis select sensitivities to each other and some environment. Fetishizing absence (positing malfunction) makes perfect heuristic sense in these instances. So long as you keep the superordinate systems in view, function talk need not imply any commitment to Millikan’s mischief! (Otherwise, what distinguishes function talk from intentional idiom in general is its compatibility with causal sources.)
This superordinate system (you and me and environment), which takes us and our communicative behaviour as components, radically recontextualizes philosophical truth-talk as well. Semantics regiments what little information we have available given the profundity of our blindness to our position in this system. We’re privy to but a trickle from the thermodynamic wash. The core observation motivating Redundancy Theory—how the truth-predicate simply makes an apparent implicit semantic property of assertions explicit—could only be intentionally rationalized. Looking at truth in terms of communicative discrepancy minimization, I would argue, allows us to avoid that racket altogether.
In many cases, the problem isn’t the heuristic apparatus (semantics, logic, mathematics, game theory, programming language, etc.), but our second order assumptions regarding that apparatus. Since HNT sees intentional cognition as a biomechanical way to manage biomechanisms absent cognizing them as biomechanisms, then it simply follows that causal cognition cannot replicate intentional cognition, any more than a scalpel can double as a hammer. Understanding intentional cognitive modes as biomechanical hacks for biomechanical systems, as well as understanding the kinds of forced illusions following upon our cognitive predicament once we philosophize, should be enough to overcome indispensability arguments.
What’s required, I think anyway, is an eliminativistic version of what Heidegger called Destuktion, a clearing away of the traditional philosophical infrastructure, combined with radical post-intentional reimaginings of traditional problematics. The Liar’s Paradox is simply an instance where the heuristic communicative strategies (such as extensionality) we evolved to get around medial neglect breakdown for the inability to avoid the medial. HNT explains why cognitive performativity is a problem in regions far afield speculative posits like ‘inclosure schema’ and so on.
OK, just that when you describe language as a ” discrepancy minimization device” you’re giving it a function ascription, even if this is passed off as ontologically innocent heuristic reasoning about what language “is good for” rather an ontology of natural purposes. I drew attention to its functional nature to distinguish that part of the theory from the bit that needs to characterize truth as explanandum.
That’s the bit that seems interesting, as I say, because even characterizing truth syntactically requires heavy semantic equipment. What’s interesting to me at the moment is whether we can undertake a post-intentional destruction of the kind you envisage and still describe ourselves doing philosophy.
It quite often feels (and I’m sure [shudder] sounds) like amateur cognitive psychology to me! But from the view of naturalizing intentional discourses, this is a necessary first step, I think. Ugly to understand. Hard to sell. I could use some help crafting it into something professional philosophers will find palatable.
But it’s important to understand that this is semantic nihilism I’m peddling. There’s no such thing as truth outside practical applications of truth-talk. What’s real is reporting as true. Check out “No results found for cognitive psychology of philosophy,” if you haven’t already David.
There’s still plenty of rough edges, I admit, but I think I’m getting close to a thorough post-intentional accounting of truth talk and the semantic phenomena apparently falling out of it. For one, it provides a naturalistic account for the origins of extensionality and intensionality, as well as the vexed relation between the two. It actually explains the connection between the Liar’s Paradox and the problem of observer effects, for instance, with nary an intentional posit to worry about. And the list goes on…
This might be an interesting test: give me a puzzling semantic phenomena, and let’s see what sense HNT can make out of it.
Hard times.
T-Rex Murphy’s Law
http://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-time-to-move-on-from-the-shepherd-affair-hardly
Macron bet the ranch on Merkel keeping her party’s power intact, needless to say that hasn’t quite panned out, elsewhere:
It is hard to know what is true.
https://www.mindpodnetwork.com/future-fossils-43-william-irwin-thompson-part-2-thinking-together-edge-history/
Are they true or false?
Since the post is up for awhile : There seems to be a sort of idea taken for granted in it that communication is a thing. If you want to naturalize truth, have you looked at describing the interactions in Darwinistic terms rather than as a ‘thing’ (like aerodynamics is a thing/a birds wing shape is a thing, but truth and communication are not a thing like that). Language as a mutational process, where the mutations that end up either actually corresponding to or appearing to correspond to ‘the good fruit’ as Pratchett would put it are ones that survive. As a side point it’s interesting to consider this in regard to delayed gratification and academia – if someone is taking communication as a ‘thing’ and adopting delayed gratification processes rather than short term gratifications, literature could seem like a kind of ‘place’ – the absence of immediate ‘good fruit’ results makes it seem like it isn’t about merely gathering resources, but its ‘thing’ status makes it seem like a place rather than becoming nothing at all. And grander than the common folks scrambling for good fruit.
But the main point is there isn’t anything there to naturalize in regard to truth or the liars paradox. It’d be like trying to take it DNA is communicating something and trying to naturalize that communication, rather than taking DNA to be a mutational process and some of it’s mutations continue and many do not. Probably much as this post wont.
Mechanical Consciousness / PTSD treatment
https://www.edge.org/conversation/daniel_c_dennett-a-difference-that-makes-a-difference
Nice find – thanks Dirk. He buries the difficulty of the trick he trying to pull off: information is a difference that makes a cognitive difference. Absent some general theory of cognition, then, saying its a difference making difference leaves the central question unanswered. All differences go on to make differences (that’s the underlying problem with pan-computationalism, after all: wherever there’s systematicity, there’s possible computation, or cognitive differences being made). The trick is understand a) what the difference between differences, those that are cognitive and those that are not, consists in; and b) how these connect to our traditions and metacognitive intuitions regarding the nature of cognition.
Evolutionary and neural processes of filtration give him quite a bit of (a): as I say in my retelling of FBBB, he adduces a ramp of instances of ‘blind comprehension’ in an attempt to jump the comprehension shark. If he fails, it’s because he’s failed to think the consequences of his own heuristic assumptions all the way through, and fails to see what representations, intentions, and so on actually amount to, ‘real pattern-wise.’ As a result he has no real way of tackling (b).
yep, I spend some time this year tracking the great white whale of Information (within the relatively severe limits of my mathematical capabilities) and found (as I suppose I’m want to do) lots of examples of reification, there are of course many limits to trying to grasp the consequences of our heuristics but I’m all for a kind of pragmatism that does its best to own (up to) them, I tried for a while to sell this in terms of thinking of them as proto-types (vs arche-types) that have been assembled with particular affordances/resistances for specific purposes/situations and so will be needing further alterations (if not just being outright scrapped) but no one was buying.
Some technology:
https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21733983-brain-computer-interfaces-may-change-what-it-means-be-human-using-thought-control-machines
https://www.academia.edu/17884088/Cultural_Appropriation_and_the_Arts
I’ve only read the first few pages of this essay but it strikes me that he has some of the same issues defining culture and related concepts as other philosophers have defining intentional concepts. This suggests the idea of culture is intentional and leads me to wonder if BBT/HNT might have some light to shed on how we think of cultures and how we think of cultural appropriation.
“The concept of a culture is a family resemblance concept. A culture is
simply a collection of people who share a certain range of cultural traits.
Perhaps no member of the culture has all of the traits associated with the
culture. Consider, for example, Canadian culture. It is to be defined in
terms of a set of cultural traits, including but not limited to being passionate
about ice hockey, being suspicious of American foreign policy,
valuing universal health care, having an opinion about the future of the
CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), knowing (some of ) the words
to Oh, Canada, being committed to parliamentary democracy, caring
about a new book by Margaret Atwood, and so on. There is such a thing
as Canadian culture, even if no individual possesses all of the cultural
characteristics just listed. Anyone who possesses enough of these characteristics counts as participating in Canadian culture. Such an individual is an insider relative to Canadian culture and an outsider relative to others.”
[…] Recall Floridi’s ‘noetic resources,’ the “world of mental contents, conceptual frameworks, intellectual creations, intelligent insights, dialectical reasonings” that underwrites philosophical, as opposed to empirical or formal, answers. It’s no accident that the ‘noetic dimension’ also happens to be the supercomplicated enabling or performative dimension of cognition—the dimension of medial neglect. Whatever ancestral resources we possessed, they comprised heuristic capacities geared to information strategically correlated to the otherwise intractable systems. Ancestrally, noetic resources consisted of the information and metacognitive capacity available to troubleshoot applications of intentional cognitive systems. When our cognitive hacks went wrong, we had only metacognitive hacks to rely on. ‘Noetic resources’ refers to our heuristic capacities to troubleshoot the enabling dimension of cognition while neglecting its astronomical complexity. […]