AI and cognitive psychology rant (getting more and more OT - tell me if I should shut up)

[John J. Lee]

What an outrageously off-topic thread, I can't resist it :-)

Robin Becker <robin at jessikat.fsnet.co.uk> writes:

> In article <2askpv0sqrv7k9hbpis3ig4iqclpl24ojc at 4ax.com>, Stephen Horne
> <steve at ninereeds.fsnet.co.uk> writes
> >Even if this was not the case, you have not proved that reality is not
> >real.

What would it mean to 'prove that reality is not real', in fact??


> >Of course perception still varies slightly from person to
> >person, and more extensively from species to species,

It can vary in arbitrarily large ways.  Our perception of the world is
based on our understanding of it (our models of it), including that
'understanding' embodied in our biology, put there by our evolutionary
past.


> >but it is not
> >independent of reality - it still has to be tied to reality as closely
> >as possible or else it is useless.

Absolutely!  And there's no contradiction between that and the fact
that perception depends on both reality and our models of reality.


> Actually it was not my intention to attempt any such proof, merely to
> indicate that what we call real is at the mercy of perception.

The notion of reality is simply the working hypothesis that there's a
world out there to be understood, and that we have some hope of
understanding it, isn't it?  Why give up on that until we get really
stuck?  Science as a whole shows no sign of being stuck at present.


> If I
> choose to call a particular consensus version of reality the 'one true
> reality' I'm almost certainly wrong.

What justification do you have for that statement?


> As with most of current physics we
> understand that 'reality' is a model.

Can you explain how that statement means anything at all?


> An evolution based on low speed
> physics hardly prepares us for quantum mechanics and spooky action at a
> distance interactions. For that reality, which we cannot perceive, we
> employ mathematicians as interpreters (priests?) to argue about the
> number of hidden dimensions etc etc. Even causality is frowned upon in
> some circles.

Well, they frown on it for no good reason.  They're arbitrarily
setting aside a bunch of stuff and trying to legislate that
"everything works just *as if* it were real, except parts of it aren't
real".  They can make that decision if they want to, but don't expect
others to likewise give up on science.


> What we humans call 'reality' is completely determined by our senses and
> the instruments we can build.

Well, your use of the word 'reality' is at odds with the way it's
usually understood (see above).  You can use it in that way (where
most people would use the word 'model' in its place), but that only
serves to making communication more difficult.


> How we interpret the data is powerfully
> influenced by our social environment and history. As an example the

Oh, sure -- except that you're kind of implying that data even
*exists* in isolation from models of the world.


> persistence of material objects is alleged by some to be true only for
> small time scales <10^31 years; humans don't have long enough to learn
> that.

It must be a mystery to you, then, how we know it.  ;-)


John