A lot of this is black box analysis. I’m interested in white box analysis. I guess maybe “black box vs white box” means the same thing as “intentional stance vs physical stance”.
You speak of knowing the preferences of something, with the implication that you have observed the past behaviour of the system and can infer it’s future behaviour based on an abstract model of it’s “intentions” or “preferences”. Is this what is meant by the “intentional stance”? I think so, and it is indeed a valid way to examine the world.
But within a person, and within an AI model, there is some mechanism that causes those preferences to be so… and that is the kind of understanding I am focusing on. Predicting choice to get Orange flavour, not based on past behaviour involving flavour choices or hearing statements about preferences, but by examining the body and brain and brainstate with enough skill to see how and where the preference for orange is encoded, and predicting based on that. Is this the “physical stance”? In that case I think I might be interested in merging the physical and intentional stance.
For example, I might know that balls roll down hills not because I have analyzed them as physical objects, but because I have observed them roll down hills before. Is this not the same as the intentional stance? Modelling the preferences of the ball based on it’s past behaviour?
On the other hand, it isn’t too difficult to understand how roundness vs flatness affect rolling. The flat object stays where it is put and the round object rolls down the hill. You can see mechanically why this is the case, but you could also just as well know this by inference and I would suggest that most people learn about physical laws first by observing the behaviours of objects and only later in life learning about things like friction and force and gravity.
I haven’t noticed anything you have said that categorically distinguishes the behaviour of an object rolling down a hill from the behaviour of a person expressing their preferences by choosing what they want.
A lot of this is black box analysis. I’m interested in white box analysis. I guess maybe “black box vs white box” means the same thing as “intentional stance vs physical stance”.
You speak of knowing the preferences of something, with the implication that you have observed the past behaviour of the system and can infer it’s future behaviour based on an abstract model of it’s “intentions” or “preferences”. Is this what is meant by the “intentional stance”? I think so, and it is indeed a valid way to examine the world.
But within a person, and within an AI model, there is some mechanism that causes those preferences to be so… and that is the kind of understanding I am focusing on. Predicting choice to get Orange flavour, not based on past behaviour involving flavour choices or hearing statements about preferences, but by examining the body and brain and brainstate with enough skill to see how and where the preference for orange is encoded, and predicting based on that. Is this the “physical stance”? In that case I think I might be interested in merging the physical and intentional stance.
For example, I might know that balls roll down hills not because I have analyzed them as physical objects, but because I have observed them roll down hills before. Is this not the same as the intentional stance? Modelling the preferences of the ball based on it’s past behaviour?
On the other hand, it isn’t too difficult to understand how roundness vs flatness affect rolling. The flat object stays where it is put and the round object rolls down the hill. You can see mechanically why this is the case, but you could also just as well know this by inference and I would suggest that most people learn about physical laws first by observing the behaviours of objects and only later in life learning about things like friction and force and gravity.
I haven’t noticed anything you have said that categorically distinguishes the behaviour of an object rolling down a hill from the behaviour of a person expressing their preferences by choosing what they want.