I asked you before to propose a meaningless statement of your own.
And what I said before is that a well-formed sentence can robustly be said to be meaningful if it embeds a contradiction, like “colourless green”, or category error, like “sleeping idea”.
So, what you’re saying, is that you don’t know if “ghost unicorns” exist? Why would Occam’s razor not apply here? How would you evaluate the likelihood that they exist?
Very low finite rather than infinitessimal or zero.
I don’t see how this is helping. You have a chain of reasoning that starts with your not knowing something, how to detect robot pain, and ends with your knowing something: that robots don’t feel pain. I don’t see how that can be valid.
Obviously I agree this is meaningless, but I disagree about the reasoning. A long time ago I asked you to prove that “bitter purple” (or something) was a category error, and your answer was very underwhelming.
I say that “sleeping idea” is meaningless, because I don’t have a procedure for deciding if an idea is sleeping or not. However, we could easily agree on such procedures. For example we could say that only animals can sleep and for every idea, “is this idea sleeping” is answered with “no”. It’s just that I honestly don’t have such a restriction. I use the exact same explanation for the meaninglessness of both “fgdghffgfc” and “robot pain”.
a contradiction, like “colourless green”
The question “is green colorless” has a perfectly good answer (“no, green is green”), unless you don’t think that colors can have colors (in that case it’s a category error too). But I’m nitpicking.
starts with your not knowing something, how to detect robot pain
Here you treat detectability as just some random property of a thing. I’m saying that if you don’t know how to detect a thing, even in theory, then you know nothing about that thing. And if you know nothing about a thing, then you can’t possibly say that it exists.
My “unicorn ghost” example is flawed in that we know what the shape of a unicorn should be, and we could expect unicorn ghosts to have the same shape (even though I would argue against such expectations). So if you built a detector for some new particle, and it detected a unicorn-shaped obstacle, you could claim that you detected a ghost-unicorn, and then I’d have to make up an argument why this isn’t the unicorn I was talking about. “Robot pain” has no such flaws—it is devoid of any traces of meaningfulness.
And what I said before is that a well-formed sentence can robustly be said to be meaningful if it embeds a contradiction, like “colourless green”, or category error, like “sleeping idea”.
Very low finite rather than infinitessimal or zero.
I don’t see how this is helping. You have a chain of reasoning that starts with your not knowing something, how to detect robot pain, and ends with your knowing something: that robots don’t feel pain. I don’t see how that can be valid.
Obviously I agree this is meaningless, but I disagree about the reasoning. A long time ago I asked you to prove that “bitter purple” (or something) was a category error, and your answer was very underwhelming.
I say that “sleeping idea” is meaningless, because I don’t have a procedure for deciding if an idea is sleeping or not. However, we could easily agree on such procedures. For example we could say that only animals can sleep and for every idea, “is this idea sleeping” is answered with “no”. It’s just that I honestly don’t have such a restriction. I use the exact same explanation for the meaninglessness of both “fgdghffgfc” and “robot pain”.
The question “is green colorless” has a perfectly good answer (“no, green is green”), unless you don’t think that colors can have colors (in that case it’s a category error too). But I’m nitpicking.
Here you treat detectability as just some random property of a thing. I’m saying that if you don’t know how to detect a thing, even in theory, then you know nothing about that thing. And if you know nothing about a thing, then you can’t possibly say that it exists.
My “unicorn ghost” example is flawed in that we know what the shape of a unicorn should be, and we could expect unicorn ghosts to have the same shape (even though I would argue against such expectations). So if you built a detector for some new particle, and it detected a unicorn-shaped obstacle, you could claim that you detected a ghost-unicorn, and then I’d have to make up an argument why this isn’t the unicorn I was talking about. “Robot pain” has no such flaws—it is devoid of any traces of meaningfulness.