Source: Facebook

—“No we don’t. There is no way to describe via current orthodoxy how you are experiencing typing on FB in a non-causal non-evolving domain called objective spacetime geometry.”—

I can do so in existing language with sufficient precision that further increases in precision will not falsify such a statement (and have). And I know Searle can as well if not Dennett. And this was quite some time ago. I haven’t seen any significant improvement since ’05 in general description. We are simply trying to understand the underlying mechanics and new publications come out almost daily.

—“There is no way to describe via current orthodoxy how you are experiencing typing on FB in a non-causal non-evolving domain called objective spacetime geometry.”—

We share experiences all the time. It’s called language. All language is reducible to analogy experience – and has to be. The question is marginal indifference of those experiences since they are always constituted from memory, and while memories are marginally indifferent in composition they very greatly in construction. And that does not mean anything that can be spoken of is marginally different. Just the opposite. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to empathize, sympathize, cooperate, communicate, negotiate, plan, calculate, and compute by the same means. And we can. with just 300 words and time.

The claim that language cannot be converted to geometry is patently false since I have been involved in doing so for over fifteen years now. We were limited until the current video cards, but we are still limited by board and data bandwidth although this is rapidly decreasing. (We could not obtain funding in the mid 2000’s when we proposed it. it was too early and tenuous but people obtain funding daily at present it’s the hot thing.) As far as I know consciousness proper (not sentience and imitation of consciousness) requires sufficient recursion which is somewhere in the distance due to cost (and possibly heat); the open question is whether it is possible to reason without language and grammar as a proxy for categories of experience. The required mathematical constructs are just manifolds and we are not the only people to have used them and proposed them, and agents to search them. In fact, the only difference between the current vertex based world modeling and what we call ‘meaning’ is extra dimensions. Because the only difference between the existential and experiential is the dimensions possible by our lovely homunculus we call a nervous system.

Like I said. Phil is dead. It’s been relegated to ‘religion’ in library science and the university for this reason. And when I find a single argument that is not an attempt at deception I will have something to ‘understand’ that I do not now.

One of our cognitive biases consist in the presumption that when we feel we don’t know something there is much more to be known (mathematics). The converse is that we have overconfidence in the completeness of what we know (economists, and dunning kruger).

Working in computer science eliminates mathematical idealism. Working with databases eliminates a host of illusions about the complexity of reality as other than variations in language, and working in neural networks eliminates the illusion of ‘complexity’.

Our imagination is a wonderful machine of free association and we love the daydreaming experience because it stimulates the reward system that seeks opportunities (the undiscovered valley).

But it is just another recreational drug.

And we love our self induced recreational drugs.

And we are easily addicted to them.

Religion and philosophy more so than literature and science.