Objectivist and Popperian Epistemology

[Brant Gaede]

Certainty is certain. If we say "I am certain of uncertainty" (all the way down), that's a contradiction. Uncertainty must be rooted in certainty. Ergo, we improve our uncertain knowledge by searching for the certainty which is certainly there--must be there--for we have already blessed reality per se with it. If you are uncertain about this, that's your problem, it doesn't have to be anyone else's. It's all, afterall, about driving your car and not bumping into things.

The only way to criticize the scientific method is to improve it. If the conversation cannot ultimately directly inform scientific methodology it's worthless philosophy--not that all philosophy is worthless, just that most of it is. Ask the professor how he is addressing science with his investigative wallowings in uncertainty. They are wallowings if he's not looking for certainty for he'll never get out of the pit, nor will his students.

--Brant

[BaalChatzaf]

Certainty is certain. If we say "I am certain of uncertainty" (all the way down), that's a contradiction. Uncertainty must be rooted in certainty. Ergo, we improve our uncertain knowledge by searching for the certainty which is certainly there--must be there--for we have already blessed reality per se with it. If you are uncertain about this, that's your problem, it doesn't have to be anyone else's. It's all, afterall, about driving your car and not bumping into things.

The only way to criticize the scientific method is to improve it. If the conversation cannot ultimately directly inform scientific methodology it's worthless philosophy--not that all philosophy is worthless, just that most of it is. Ask the professor how he is addressing science with his investigative wallowings in uncertainty. They are wallowings if he's not looking for certainty for he'll never get out of the pit, nor will his students.

--Brant

On balance, philosophy, especially metaphysics has done more to retard the progress of the physical sciences than to promote them.

Keep in mind what Galileo had to go through with the Aristotelians.

Bottom line: physical science delivers, most philosophy wallows and vents warm moist air.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Darrell Hougen]

Darrell,

There's an intriguing hypothesis by Rupert Sheldrake about vision.

He speculates that not only do we receive photons through the eyes and process them in our brains, but that our sight goes out like a field and actually touches (in a visual sense) the stuff we are looking at.

Think magnetic field or gravity, but for sight.

Fields are very, very intriguing.

So are fractals, for that matter.

(btw - Every time I mention Sheldrake, some people have fits. )

Michael

Michael,

I don't know anything about Rupert Sheldrake, but I see immediate problems with the notion of a field-like visual sensing modality. Of course, there are actual sensors that operate by emitting a signal and then analyzing the return signal, e.g., radar, ladar, SAR, or even a light-striping camera. Active sensing allows a system to gather information about an environment including 3-D shape information that is not immediately available to a human observer. And that is fine as far as it goes. But, such systems fail when looking at a photograph of a scene. A photograph is inherently 2-D and therefore has no information for an active system to use for scene interpretation.

Humans are able to interpret photographs, movies, paintings, and even simple line drawings --- representations so distant from the physical world that it is hard to imagine how any active system would have any advantage interpreting them. It is clear to me that humans are able to interpret passively presented visual information, often even when it is noisy, blurry, band-limited, and contains jpeg artifacts.

Darrell

[BaalChatzaf]

Humans are able to interpret photographs, movies, paintings, and even simple line drawings --- representations so distant from the physical world that it is hard to imagine how any active system would have any advantage interpreting them. It is clear to me that humans are able to interpret passively presented visual information, often even when it is noisy, blurry, band-limited, and contains jpeg artifacts.

Darrell

We have a few things going for us. 1. memory 2. the ability to infer and to form inductive guesses.

[Darrell Hougen]

Humans are able to interpret photographs, movies, paintings, and even simple line drawings --- representations so distant from the physical world that it is hard to imagine how any active system would have any advantage interpreting them. It is clear to me that humans are able to interpret passively presented visual information, often even when it is noisy, blurry, band-limited, and contains jpeg artifacts.

Darrell

We have a few things going for us. 1. memory 2. the ability to infer and to form inductive guesses.

Computers have memory.

How does "the ability to infer and form inductive guesses" help? Or, what do you mean, in other words?

Darrell

[Daniel Barnes]

[in Lee Kelly's essay] He doesn't seem to grasp that what one can't do is to assert intelligibly that there isn't something, one's statement itself being something. The issue isn't what one is allowed to say or believe, like following rules in a game.

...Again, he seems to be thinking of logic as normative prescriptions on belief, and not as an essential means of assessing truth. I wonder what method he proposes to use in trying to find out what's true - and if he proposes shooting the horse Popper rode in on (modus tollens).

Lee Kelly argues here in some detail that Ellen's criticisms are on the wrong track. For example her argument from "intelligibility" doesn't stand up to scrutiny, and what seems intuitively unassailable turns out to be quite questionable under closer analysis.

Further, I would add that the above comment about Kelly "shooting the horse Popper rode in on" suggests it is Ellen's readings of Popper that have missed the point, not Kelly's. Popper's work from "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" onwards is an attempt to answer the problem of "what is the best way to use logic to discover the truth about the world?" And his answer was logic is better used to eliminate what's false, rather than find out what's true. So this other criticism of Kelly also seems on the wrong track.

But let's give Ellen's criticisms of Kelly the maximum sympathy, and assume she is right and Kelly is wrong about the statement "S:S doesn't exist".

The question then is, what follows from this? What wider point does she think this makes? One can anticipate an obvious larger argument from this point, perhaps following from Rand, and likewise anticipate what is also obviously wrong with that wider argument.

But we will not know until she explains her wider point, if indeed she has one.

[Ellen Stuttle]

"Intelligibly" was the wrong word. One can understand what it means to say that there isn't anything, but one can' assert that there isn't anything or even that maybe there isn't anything without disproving the assertion.

Further, I would add that the above comment about Kelly "shooting the horse Popper rode in on" suggests it is Ellen's readings of Popper that have missed the point, not Kelly's. Popper's work from "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" onwards is an attempt to answer the problem of "what is the best way to use logic to discover the truth about the world?" And his answer was logic is better used to eliminate what's false, rather than find out what's true. So this other criticism of Kelly also seems on the wrong track.

I'm aware that Popper thought that "logic is better used to eliminate what's false, rather than [to] find out what's true," but how is one to eliminate what's false on the supposition that there isn't anything to make a statement, whether true or false, about? And what's a modus tollens or any other form of argument if there isn't anything, including an argument form?

My initial impression of that site is that Popper's views have themselves been left by the wayside.

Ellen

[BaalChatzaf]

"Intelligibly" was the wrong word. One can understand what it means to say that there isn't anything, but one can' assert that there isn't anything or even that maybe there isn't anything without disproving the assertion.

Further, I would add that the above comment about Kelly "shooting the horse Popper rode in on" suggests it is Ellen's readings of Popper that have missed the point, not Kelly's. Popper's work from "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" onwards is an attempt to answer the problem of "what is the best way to use logic to discover the truth about the world?" And his answer was logic is better used to eliminate what's false, rather than find out what's true. So this other criticism of Kelly also seems on the wrong track.

I'm aware that Popper thought that "logic is better used to eliminate what's false, rather than [to] find out what's true," but how is one to eliminate what's false on the supposition that there isn't anything to make a statement, whether true or false, about? And what's a modus tollens or any other form of argument if there isn't anything, including an argument form?

My initial impression of that site is that Popper's views have themselves been left by the wayside.

Ellen

Modus Tollens is used to falsify a hypothesis. Suppose hypothesis H implies prediction P. Suppose a fact F is found which contradicts P. Then P is false and my modus tollens so is H. That is how Michelson and Morely falsified the hypothesis that light is carried by an elastic space filling substance, aether.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Daniel Barnes]

OK, so Kelly explains why Ellen still don't seem to have grasped the point he is making.

http://www.criticalrationalism.net/2013/07/07/the-quest-for-doubt/comment-page-1/#comment-17754

I will try as well.

There are two things: 1) What is true and 2) What I believe (sometimes with a feeling of unassailable certainty) is true.

Ironically, her arguments for certainty turned out to be wrong in at least one, and quite possibly two, ways that she didn'trealise. The point being that while she was feeling unassailably certain, she was actually wrong without knowing it. This islike a perfect little case study for the benefits of a fallibilist attitude.

Understanding this is a very important part of Critical Rationalism. This is why it is clear Ellen hasn't quite grokked Kelly's, and Popper's, point. Popper argues the truth exists, that you can know it but...and this is the important bit...you can never quite know that you know it.

As Ellen has found out.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

There are two things: 1) What is true and 2) What I believe (sometimes with a feeling of unassailable certainty) is true.

Daniel,

I can't get my head around it.

According to your standard, when would something be true that did not involve belief?

Who knows rather than believes when he or she encounters the truth, and how do they know it?

If it's the case they can't, they can only believe it, this implies truth does not exist. Only belief of truth exists. And even for this truth, that does not really exist, only the belief of it does. And so on.

It's turtles all the way down.

Therefore, the very existence of pure truth disconnected from belief must be taken on faith (or rejected) because there is no way to know it--and that's belief.

So there are not "two things" in this system of thinking like you said.

Only one.

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

There are two things: 1) What is true and 2) What I believe (sometimes with a feeling of unassailable certainty) is true.

Daniel,

I can't get my head around it.

According to your standard, when would something be true that did not involve belief?

Who knows rather than believes when he or she encounters the truth, and how do they know it?

If it's the case they can't, they can only believe it, this implies truth does not exist. Only belief of truth exists. And even for this truth, that does not really exist, only the belief of it does. And so on.

It's turtles all the way down.

Therefore, the very existence of pure truth disconnected from belief must be taken on faith (or rejected) because there is no way to know it--and that's belief.

So there are not "two things" in this system of thinking like you said.

Only one.

Michael

Suppose a statement is true before you believed it was true. Then you found out it was true, and true even when you did not believe it was true. Such a statement is true even without our belief that it is true.

For example, the Pythagorieans believed all lengths were pairwise comeasurable. Then some pesky dude proved that the diagonal of a unit square is not rational. The initial belief in the co-measurabliity of lengths was shown to be erroneous. By the way, the pesky dude was killed for finding out the bad news.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[merjet]

Suppose a statement is true before you believed it was true. Then you found out it was true, and true even when you did not believe it was true. Such a statement is true even without our belief that it is true.

For example, the Pythagorieans believed all lengths were pairwise comeasurable. Then some pesky dude proved that the diagonal of a unit square is not rational. The initial belief in the co-measurabliity of lengths was shown to be erroneous. By the way, the pesky dude was killed for finding out the bad news.

The pesky dude Hippasus may not have proved it, but he divulged the proof. That he was murdered is legend, not verified truth. (link)

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Suppose a statement is true before you believed it was true. Then you found out it was true...

Bob,

I can suppose that, sure, but it has nothing to do with Daniel's argument.

You wrote, "then you found out it was true."

How could I find that out? Playing falsification word and logic and math games, and making fuzzy connections between that and what I observe?

OK. Let's do it. I have to vary it a little because under falsifiability, you can never prove a statement is true.

Abracadabra. I falsified a statement I believed was true. So now I can say it's true that my former statement is false.

Even if that were the case, according to Daniel's standard, I would have to write, "then I found out I BELIEVED it was true that my former statement was false."

In this manner of thinking, I can never KNOW whether this is true or not.

What's worse, I can't even know that. I can only believe it.

Truth is like the horizon to this way of thinking. You see it as an illusion and you can travel toward it, but you can never reach it, although they say you can, but you would never know it.

Using this standard, you either take that on faith or not. That's the inner inconsistency. There is never any way to know anything.

Or you can do what they do--take it on faith and say it isn't faith. Blank out.

Michael

[Ellen Stuttle]

Computers have memory.

Do you mean in the same sense as a human has memory?

I did a Google search looking for some quick bits from Gerald Edelman on the differences between brains and computers. Edelman has been a strong critic of analogizing brains to computers.

I searched on:

Edelman brain computer

search screen results

On clicking the currently second entry, I came upon a fascinating site I hadn't known of before.

The site is called "Conscious Entities."

Here's a link to the Home page.

There's loads of stuff on the site pertaining to issues of consciousness. When I get back from the conference, I'll want to use some of the site's material as springboards to discussion.

Meanwhile, here's a link to a FAQ sort of entry about brain versus computer.

One relevant subject I thus far haven't found discussed on the site is David Deutsch's views.

Elliot Temple, who started this thread, did an interview of Deutsch about Deutsch's newest book, The Beginning of Infinity - link.

Although this is only briefly mentioned in the interview, Deutsch has a computationalist theory of brain function.

link

Despite this long record of failure, AGI must be possible. And that is because of a deep property of the laws of physics, namely the universality of computation. This entails that everything that the laws of physics require a physical object to do can, in principle, be emulated in arbitrarily fine detail by some program on a general-purpose computer, provided it is given enough time and memory. The first people to guess this and to grapple with its ramifications were the 19th-century mathematician Charles Babbage and his assistant Ada, Countess of Lovelace. It remained a guess until the 1980s, when I proved it using the quantum theory of computation.

I assume, therefore, that "Peter," who authors the material on the "Conscious Entities" site, disagrees on that issue with Deutsch.

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

Daniel, re your post #109, speaking of missing a point, I'm not talking about normative proscriptions on belief or about a feeling of certainty. I'm talking about the impossibility of making any assertion whatsoever without disproving that there isn't anything.

I already said the word "intelligibly" wasn't the right word. Doesn't change the point. (You wouldn't want to make a Federal case over a word, would you?)

Nor do Lee's logic examples get around the point.

I'll leave it there for the moment - already spent three hours I didn't have to spare reading stuff on the "Conscious Entities" site I linked in the post above.

Ellen

[BaalChatzaf]

Computers have memory.

Computers have data storage. They do not function in an associative manner as does human memory.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Darrell Hougen]

Computers have memory.

Computers have data storage. They do not function in an associative manner as does human memory.

Ba'al Chatzaf

I don't believe there is any significant difference between computer memory and human memory for purposes of this discussion. Computer programs can implement an associative memory in terms of key-value pairs. The problem is that computers don't have concepts. That doesn't mean it is impossible to program computers to have concepts but we just don't know how. So, the key-value pairs in an associative memory are just an association between labels, or the labels might be connected to chunks of data, but a chunk of data is not structured in such a way that it could legitimately be referred to as a concept.

Darrell

[Darrell Hougen]

[in Lee Kelly's essay] He doesn't seem to grasp that what one can't do is to assert intelligibly that there isn't something, one's statement itself being something. The issue isn't what one is allowed to say or believe, like following rules in a game.

...Again, he seems to be thinking of logic as normative prescriptions on belief, and not as an essential means of assessing truth. I wonder what method he proposes to use in trying to find out what's true - and if he proposes shooting the horse Popper rode in on (modus tollens).

Lee Kelly argues here in some detail that Ellen's criticisms are on the wrong track. For example her argument from "intelligibility" doesn't stand up to scrutiny, and what seems intuitively unassailable turns out to be quite questionable under closer analysis.

Further, I would add that the above comment about Kelly "shooting the horse Popper rode in on" suggests it is Ellen's readings of Popper that have missed the point, not Kelly's. Popper's work from "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" onwards is an attempt to answer the problem of "what is the best way to use logic to discover the truth about the world?" And his answer was logic is better used to eliminate what's false, rather than find out what's true. So this other criticism of Kelly also seems on the wrong track.

But let's give Ellen's criticisms of Kelly the maximum sympathy, and assume she is right and Kelly is wrong about the statement "S:S doesn't exist".

The question then is, what follows from this? What wider point does she think this makes? One can anticipate an obvious larger argument from this point, perhaps following from Rand, and likewise anticipate what is also obviously wrong with that wider argument.

But we will not know until she explains her wider point, if indeed she has one.

Consider the statement, "nothing exists." Now, in order for a statement to be true, it must first exist --- there must be a statement in order for it to be true or false. So, if the statement, "nothing exists," is true, then it does not exist, and if it does not exist, then it cannot be true. Therefore, the statement, "nothing exists," cannot be true. It excludes itself from being true.

Can the statement, "nothing exists," be false? Yes. If it exists, then it is false. That's not a proof that it is false in the deductive sense. In order to show that it is false, one needs evidence --- any evidence. The slightest shred of evidence that something exists is enough to show that it is false. Clearly, such evidence exists in abundance, so the statement is clearly false. Again, that is not a proof, but it is absurd to argue otherwise as the existence of an argument is, itself, evidence that the statement is false.

The statement, "nothing exists," is the inverse of the statement, "something exists." So, if the former is false, the latter must be true. And, since the statement, "existence exists" is taken to mean "something exists", if something exists then existence exists.

BTW, though I'm no Popper expert, I think Popper would accept the above argument. Popper didn't say that fallibilism goes all the way down. Instead, it is critical to his theory that individual facts be facts. Popper said something more like what Robert has been saying, that one can never be sure of the truth of a universally quantified statement and, further, that if one finds a single counterexample, one must modify or abandon the original statement. Well, the existence of this note is a counterexample to the universally quantified statement, "nothing exists." Therefore, the statement, "nothing exists," must be abandoned according to Popper's own methodology.

Darrell

[Brant Gaede]

A negative is verified by reference to a more basic positive which is the basis for Rand's impotence of evil theme.

--Brant

[BaalChatzaf]

I don't believe there is any significant difference between computer memory and human memory for purposes of this discussion. Computer programs can implement an associative memory in terms of key-value pairs. The problem is that computers don't have concepts. That doesn't mean it is impossible to program computers to have concepts but we just don't know how. So, the key-value pairs in an associative memory are just an association between labels, or the labels might be connected to chunks of data, but a chunk of data is not structured in such a way that it could legitimately be referred to as a concept.

Darrell

The way to support your assertion is to program a computer that will pass the Turing Test. Please let us know if you find that happening anywhere.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Darrell Hougen]

I don't believe there is any significant difference between computer memory and human memory for purposes of this discussion. Computer programs can implement an associative memory in terms of key-value pairs. The problem is that computers don't have concepts. That doesn't mean it is impossible to program computers to have concepts but we just don't know how. So, the key-value pairs in an associative memory are just an association between labels, or the labels might be connected to chunks of data, but a chunk of data is not structured in such a way that it could legitimately be referred to as a concept.

Darrell

The way to support your assertion is to program a computer that will pass the Turing Test. Please let us know if you find that happening anywhere.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Yes. But, I would have to solve a bunch of problems that aren't at issue in order to accomplish that.

Darrell

[Ellen Stuttle]

Daniel,

May I take your non response to my post #115 as acknowledging "the impossibility of making any assertion whatsoever without disproving that there isn't anything"?

(Just checking in case you missed the post.)

Ellen

[caroljane]

When Longtime Frenemies Collide....

[caroljane]

Frentillectuals?

[Samson Corwell]

Ayn Rand has the best moral philosophy ever invented. Karl Popper has the most important breakthrough in epistemology. Most Objectivists seem to think that Popper and Rand are incompatible, and Popper is an enemy of reason. They have not understood him. These lists are intended to help explain my motivation for integrating Rand and Popper, and also to help highlight many similarities they already have.

Points Popperian epistemology and Objectivist epistemology have in common. In Popperian epistemology I include additions and improvements by David Deutsch and myself:

- opposition to subjectivism and relativism

- fallibilism

- says that objective knowledge is attainable (in practice by fallible humans)

- realism: says reality is objective

...

My understanding of Popper is that, although he would like to show that objective knowledge is possible, he ends by saying that all of our theories are just the best approximation we currently have to reality, that they are contingent, that they can be superseded at any time, that certainty is impossible. Clearly, that is in opposition to Objectivism which requires the possibility of certainty.

I don't think either Popper or Rand solved the problem of knowledge (epistemology) --- how do we know things? --- but I can certainly see how the philosophies are incompatible.

Darrell

Not really. Objectivism recognizes that one is not infallible, so judgements are certainly contingent.