“Oh my gosh! ‘The Sun goes around the Earth’ is true for Hunga Huntergatherer, but for Amara Astronomer, ‘The Sun goes around the Earth’ is false! There is no fixed truth!” The deconstruction of this sophomoric nitwittery is left as an exercise to the reader.
Am I correct that this sophomoric nitwittery can be solved by taking Earth as a fixed point? Then sun really will go around it. So will the moon. All other planets will go around the sun.
If not, well… you can imagine why I didn’t get an A in that philosophy where a teacher meant it literally (as in relativism)
I think the main problem is in “goes around”, although HH::the Sun != AA::The Sun and HH::the Earth probably != AA::the Earth, the latter two shouldn’t matter as much.
HH believes “HH:(text X)” is true and AA believes “AA::(text Y)” is true, which isn’t interesting. What’s interesting are three things: that AA::(text X) has meaning, AA::(text X) != AA::(text Y), and if AA::(text X) then NOT AA::(text Y).
Basically, yes. From the earth’s perspective, the earth spinning on its axis while the sun is (relatively) stationary looks exactly the same as the sun going around the earth.
So they look identical, but Amara the Astronomer knows that this illusion is simply a misunderstanding of how the heavenly bodies interact.
Hunga Huntergatherer doesn’t know the earth spins. If he did he’d probably be able to figure out that the sun isn’t circling the earth if he thought about it for a while.
Well in that case Earth doesn’t really go around the sun, it just goes around the center of this galaxy on this weird wiggly orbit and the sun happens to always be in a certain position with respect to...… ouch! See what I did? I babbled myself into ineptness by trying to be “absolutely technically correct.” I just can’t. Even if I finished that “absolutely technically correct” sentence, I’d probably be wrong in some other way I haven’t even imagined yet.
So let’s accept the fact that not everything that is said which is true is “absolutely technically correct.” (True with respect to The Simple Truth, ugh, this semantics is tiring so I’ll quit).
The not-technically-correct truth for Hunga Huntergatherer and the not-technically-correct truth for Amara Astronomer seem to verbally contradict each other in the same way that Albert::sound verbally contradicts Barry::sound. Is the solution to it that one is false and other is true? You take the side of Amara Astronomer (and so do I) because the maps in our heads resemble this view better than the other.
The fact that these two notions seem contradictory is not because they are contradictory, but because our minds are trying to map them both into the same spot.
Your solution brings us back to analyzing maps. Its analogue is defining Albert::sound to be correct. I don’t believe that the point of the article was to define truth. It’s practically impossible to do so (see my fumble above). I think the point of the article was that contradictions in our ill-defined language (and concepts and maps that come with it) do not imply contradictions in reality.
I was simply discribing why Hunga Huntergatherer might not have realized that it is the earth that goes round the sun.
Hunga’s map is still extremely useful, particularly for getting your bearings. The old saying “the sun rises in the east and sets in the west” is still useful even though it is the earth spinning to create the effect rather than the sun actually moving around the earth (which is implied in the saying).
It’s worth noting that Hunga’s map is included in Amara’s map, not eliminated by it. Albert’s map also includes Barry’s map, just like Einstein’s map of gravity includes Newton’s map.
They’re all still just maps though, and should be treated as such.
True, but what you imagine to be territory may just be another layer of maps.
If you need to think that there is a territory down there somewhere in order to keep from drowning in relativism, then go ahead and think that. But be careful not to imagine that you have actually seen the territory. You haven’t. All you have access to (by way of science) are some mighty fine maps.
I pause. “Well…” I say slowly. “Frankly, I’m not entirely sure myself where this ‘reality’ business comes from. I can’t create my own reality in the lab, so I must not understand it yet. But occasionally I believe strongly that something is going to happen, and then something else happens instead. I need a name for whatever-it-is that determines my experimental results, so I call it ‘reality’. This ‘reality’ is somehow separate from even my very best hypotheses. Even when I have a simple hypothesis, strongly supported by all the evidence I know, sometimes I’m still surprised. So I need different names for the thingies that determine my predictions and the thingy that determines my experimental results. I call the former thingies ‘belief’, and the latter thingy ‘reality’.”
The map is not the territory, and the territory is not the map. My hypotheses about it might be wrong, but the territory is still the territory. How would a map determine my experimental observations?
That is a great quote from The Simple Truth. And what is more, it is perfectly responsive to what I was trying to say. Thank you.
As you may already know, Eliezer quoted that passage in Quantum Non-realism because QM makes it necessary to modify that argument slightly. The trouble is that in QM, your experimental results are no longer “determined” or at least not in the same sense. Oh, I agree with the basic message of that Quantum Non-realism posting that QM creates no problems for realism that MWI and a little fine print can’t fix. But I think that the fact that QM forced a change to the argument does suggest that there may be even more changes needed down the road.
I need a name for whatever-it-is that determines my experimental results, so I call it ‘reality’. This ‘reality’ is somehow separate from even my very best hypotheses.
If you want to call the whatever-it-is ‘reality’, that is fine with me. The whatever-it-is is definitely different from the best map that you know of. But it is possible, is it not, that the whatever-it-is is the whole tower of maps—including the maps you know of and the maps you don’t even imagine yet.
How would a map determine my experimental observations?
A map doesn’t determine observations. A whole tower of maps determines observations (modulo the necessary QM/MWI fine print). In much the same way that map-towers determine theoretical predictions. Maps, predictions, and observations are all made out of the same kind of ‘stuff’. There is nothing mysterious about it. You only get into trouble if you somehow begin to imagine that experimental observations are somehow built out of some kind of ‘reality stuff’ which is ontologically different from map-tower stuff. They are not. Observations are very theory-laden.
Logical positivism had all this stuff covered fairly satisfactorily by 1970 or so (IMHO)
but then somehow there was a change in the Zeitgeist and everyone agreed that positivism is dead. I am a contrarian who thinks something like it can be revived—along with a number of more academically serious anti-realist philosophers working in philosophy of science.
I am taking the word ‘map’ to mean pretty much the same as what philosophers of science refer to as ‘theories’. And ‘territory’ to mean ‘reality’. So by a ‘tower’ of maps, I mean a series of theories, each reducing to a ‘lower-level’ theory. For example, one map might be a theory of infinitely divisible material bodies with state properties like density, temperature, and elasticity. At the next level down in the tower of maps, we might have an atomic theory with 92 elements. Next a theory in which the elementary particles include electrons, neutrons, and protons. Next down, we have the standard model with QCD. Then some super-symmetric Kaluza-Klein GUT. Etc.
Is there a base-level theory (‘map’) that reduces to an underlying ‘reality’, rather than to a lower-level map? I suppose we will never know—can never know—whether such a reality exists and what it ‘looks like’. Certainly, we never know whether our current lowest-level map is the final one.
The thing that strikes me is that a ‘reduction’ is really a relation (a morphism?) between maps—an association between the entities and observables at one level with those at the next level down. In doing a reduction, we are constructing in our minds a relation or morphism between maps which also exist in our minds. I am simply saying that if you postulate a new kind of thing—a ‘reality’ or ‘territory’ that exists outside our minds, you may solve some philosophical puzzles, but you create others. For one thing, we need to have two kinds of reduction in our epistemology—one taking maps to territories, and one taking maps to maps. I say, “Why bother! Let’s follow Occam’s advice and stick to maps rather than adding this new entity—the ‘territory’ - without necessity.”
Not to my mind. In fact, I’m not sure they are ‘claims’ at all. I’m suggesting a different way of looking at things—a way which has advantages and disadvantages. I think the advantages dominate. Your mileage may differ.
If I did make claims, it was in the last paragraph where I suggested that anti-realism is both a respectable and a populated position in ontology and philosophy of science. The wikipedia article should provide links to sufficient evidence to back those claims.
The Wikipedia article wasn’t all that helpful other than to give a better idea of what the term means.
There seem to be two major types of anti-realism—one seems to be the idea that nothing is objectively real, and the other that no matter how much indirect evidence we have we can never know what is objectively real.
The first position doesn’t seem to be useful for much of anything (to me, anyway), and the second seems to be pretty close to what “the map is not the territory” is all about, with the claim that the map well never be able to perfectly reflect the territory.
Since you like to argue about the map/territory, I can only assume you believe nothing is objectively real.
I can only assume you believe nothing is objectively real.
It would probably be more productive to assume that I have seen no evidence that anything is objectively real, and that I have noticed no particular advantage to forming a belief on the subject in the absence of evidence.
And since I don’t expect to see or hear any evidence on the question any time soon, I follow Occam’s advice and try to think of how I can live without that belief in the real existence of something called ‘territory’.
I think I understand you, but what I don’t understand is how the idea that our subjective observations do not have an objective cause is simpler than the idea that what we sense directly and measure indirectly is the objective cause.
I would think Occam’s razor would require you to assume there is an objective reality causing all of your indirect observations. Even if all of reality is just a figment of our imagination, or just a part of some simulator (to take an extreme position), doesn’t there need to be a cause of such figments, or a machine of some kind on which the simulation runs?
In other words, I could understand the position that our understanding of reality (our best maps, if you will) may be completely wrong, and I could even understand the position that the nature of reality may be impossible for us to discover, but it seems to me the fact of our existence is pretty significant evidence that some kind of objective reality exists, whether or not we have accurately mapped it. Furthermore, both positions seem far more complicated than the position that what we have seen and measured is reality. Both positions must explain all of our senses as well as having some larger thing that is an undiscoverable reality. Occam’s razor seems to say the simplest answer is that what we have sensed directly and measured indirectly is reality (though not necessarily the fundamental reality).
It does. But I think you are underestimating just how much complication a belief in an unknown (or not yet known) reality brings with it. And it is an unsupportable position to claim “that what we have seen and measured is reality”. Measurement is obviously theory-laden. Sense data is too, though the theories involved are in the field of psychology and the neurosciences.
it seems to me the fact of our existence is pretty significant evidence that some kind of objective reality exists
One thing I notice you doing that you may not notice yourself: you are using the words “objective” and “subjective” as a kind of praise or condemnation. And you seem to associate the adjective ‘objective’ with the noun ‘reality’ as if ‘reality’ has a natural right to that adjective. But I am taking the position here that the only ‘reality’ you have access to is a subjective one (or, at best, intersubjective).
I think we pretty much understand each other at this point. I’m not trying to convert anyone—just to open some minds. And I apologize for my “maps all the way down’ crack that started the conversation. It came across as trollish, and I regret that.
True but not the right answer. Suppose instead that it said “Oh my gosh! ‘Rain is caused by the rain god Zarphomek’ is true for Hunga Huntergatherer, but for Martha Meteorologist, ‘Rain is caused by water condensation’ is true! There is no fixed truth!” What would be the deconstruction in that case?
Am I correct that this sophomoric nitwittery can be solved by taking Earth as a fixed point? Then sun really will go around it. So will the moon. All other planets will go around the sun.
If not, well… you can imagine why I didn’t get an A in that philosophy where a teacher meant it literally (as in relativism)
I think the main problem is in “goes around”, although HH::the Sun != AA::The Sun and HH::the Earth probably != AA::the Earth, the latter two shouldn’t matter as much.
HH believes “HH:(text X)” is true and AA believes “AA::(text Y)” is true, which isn’t interesting. What’s interesting are three things: that AA::(text X) has meaning, AA::(text X) != AA::(text Y), and if AA::(text X) then NOT AA::(text Y).
Basically, yes. From the earth’s perspective, the earth spinning on its axis while the sun is (relatively) stationary looks exactly the same as the sun going around the earth.
So they look identical, but Amara the Astronomer knows that this illusion is simply a misunderstanding of how the heavenly bodies interact.
Hunga Huntergatherer doesn’t know the earth spins. If he did he’d probably be able to figure out that the sun isn’t circling the earth if he thought about it for a while.
Well in that case Earth doesn’t really go around the sun, it just goes around the center of this galaxy on this weird wiggly orbit and the sun happens to always be in a certain position with respect to...… ouch! See what I did? I babbled myself into ineptness by trying to be “absolutely technically correct.” I just can’t. Even if I finished that “absolutely technically correct” sentence, I’d probably be wrong in some other way I haven’t even imagined yet.
So let’s accept the fact that not everything that is said which is true is “absolutely technically correct.” (True with respect to The Simple Truth, ugh, this semantics is tiring so I’ll quit).
The not-technically-correct truth for Hunga Huntergatherer and the not-technically-correct truth for Amara Astronomer seem to verbally contradict each other in the same way that Albert::sound verbally contradicts Barry::sound. Is the solution to it that one is false and other is true? You take the side of Amara Astronomer (and so do I) because the maps in our heads resemble this view better than the other.
The fact that these two notions seem contradictory is not because they are contradictory, but because our minds are trying to map them both into the same spot.
Your solution brings us back to analyzing maps. Its analogue is defining Albert::sound to be correct. I don’t believe that the point of the article was to define truth. It’s practically impossible to do so (see my fumble above). I think the point of the article was that contradictions in our ill-defined language (and concepts and maps that come with it) do not imply contradictions in reality.
I believe you missed my point entirely.
I was simply discribing why Hunga Huntergatherer might not have realized that it is the earth that goes round the sun.
Hunga’s map is still extremely useful, particularly for getting your bearings. The old saying “the sun rises in the east and sets in the west” is still useful even though it is the earth spinning to create the effect rather than the sun actually moving around the earth (which is implied in the saying).
It’s worth noting that Hunga’s map is included in Amara’s map, not eliminated by it. Albert’s map also includes Barry’s map, just like Einstein’s map of gravity includes Newton’s map.
They’re all still just maps though, and should be treated as such.
It’s maps all the way down.
The map is not the territory.
True, but what you imagine to be territory may just be another layer of maps.
If you need to think that there is a territory down there somewhere in order to keep from drowning in relativism, then go ahead and think that. But be careful not to imagine that you have actually seen the territory. You haven’t. All you have access to (by way of science) are some mighty fine maps.
The map is not the territory, and the territory is not the map. My hypotheses about it might be wrong, but the territory is still the territory. How would a map determine my experimental observations?
That is a great quote from The Simple Truth. And what is more, it is perfectly responsive to what I was trying to say. Thank you.
As you may already know, Eliezer quoted that passage in Quantum Non-realism because QM makes it necessary to modify that argument slightly. The trouble is that in QM, your experimental results are no longer “determined” or at least not in the same sense. Oh, I agree with the basic message of that Quantum Non-realism posting that QM creates no problems for realism that MWI and a little fine print can’t fix. But I think that the fact that QM forced a change to the argument does suggest that there may be even more changes needed down the road.
If you want to call the whatever-it-is ‘reality’, that is fine with me. The whatever-it-is is definitely different from the best map that you know of. But it is possible, is it not, that the whatever-it-is is the whole tower of maps—including the maps you know of and the maps you don’t even imagine yet.
A map doesn’t determine observations. A whole tower of maps determines observations (modulo the necessary QM/MWI fine print). In much the same way that map-towers determine theoretical predictions. Maps, predictions, and observations are all made out of the same kind of ‘stuff’. There is nothing mysterious about it. You only get into trouble if you somehow begin to imagine that experimental observations are somehow built out of some kind of ‘reality stuff’ which is ontologically different from map-tower stuff. They are not. Observations are very theory-laden.
Logical positivism had all this stuff covered fairly satisfactorily by 1970 or so (IMHO) but then somehow there was a change in the Zeitgeist and everyone agreed that positivism is dead. I am a contrarian who thinks something like it can be revived—along with a number of more academically serious anti-realist philosophers working in philosophy of science.
I’m not sure what you mean by this.
How does one make maps into a tower? What would such a tower of maps look like? How is this different from a “territory” containing a tower of maps?
I am taking the word ‘map’ to mean pretty much the same as what philosophers of science refer to as ‘theories’. And ‘territory’ to mean ‘reality’. So by a ‘tower’ of maps, I mean a series of theories, each reducing to a ‘lower-level’ theory. For example, one map might be a theory of infinitely divisible material bodies with state properties like density, temperature, and elasticity. At the next level down in the tower of maps, we might have an atomic theory with 92 elements. Next a theory in which the elementary particles include electrons, neutrons, and protons. Next down, we have the standard model with QCD. Then some super-symmetric Kaluza-Klein GUT. Etc.
Is there a base-level theory (‘map’) that reduces to an underlying ‘reality’, rather than to a lower-level map? I suppose we will never know—can never know—whether such a reality exists and what it ‘looks like’. Certainly, we never know whether our current lowest-level map is the final one.
The thing that strikes me is that a ‘reduction’ is really a relation (a morphism?) between maps—an association between the entities and observables at one level with those at the next level down. In doing a reduction, we are constructing in our minds a relation or morphism between maps which also exist in our minds. I am simply saying that if you postulate a new kind of thing—a ‘reality’ or ‘territory’ that exists outside our minds, you may solve some philosophical puzzles, but you create others. For one thing, we need to have two kinds of reduction in our epistemology—one taking maps to territories, and one taking maps to maps. I say, “Why bother! Let’s follow Occam’s advice and stick to maps rather than adding this new entity—the ‘territory’ - without necessity.”
I hope that explanation helped.
Is there any real evidence of this? I hear interesting conjecture but not one bit of evidence.
You know the saying, big claims require big evidence. These are very big claims.
Not to my mind. In fact, I’m not sure they are ‘claims’ at all. I’m suggesting a different way of looking at things—a way which has advantages and disadvantages. I think the advantages dominate. Your mileage may differ.
If I did make claims, it was in the last paragraph where I suggested that anti-realism is both a respectable and a populated position in ontology and philosophy of science. The wikipedia article should provide links to sufficient evidence to back those claims.
The Wikipedia article wasn’t all that helpful other than to give a better idea of what the term means.
There seem to be two major types of anti-realism—one seems to be the idea that nothing is objectively real, and the other that no matter how much indirect evidence we have we can never know what is objectively real.
The first position doesn’t seem to be useful for much of anything (to me, anyway), and the second seems to be pretty close to what “the map is not the territory” is all about, with the claim that the map well never be able to perfectly reflect the territory.
Since you like to argue about the map/territory, I can only assume you believe nothing is objectively real.
Am I misunderstanding you?
It would probably be more productive to assume that I have seen no evidence that anything is objectively real, and that I have noticed no particular advantage to forming a belief on the subject in the absence of evidence.
And since I don’t expect to see or hear any evidence on the question any time soon, I follow Occam’s advice and try to think of how I can live without that belief in the real existence of something called ‘territory’.
I think I understand you, but what I don’t understand is how the idea that our subjective observations do not have an objective cause is simpler than the idea that what we sense directly and measure indirectly is the objective cause.
I would think Occam’s razor would require you to assume there is an objective reality causing all of your indirect observations. Even if all of reality is just a figment of our imagination, or just a part of some simulator (to take an extreme position), doesn’t there need to be a cause of such figments, or a machine of some kind on which the simulation runs?
In other words, I could understand the position that our understanding of reality (our best maps, if you will) may be completely wrong, and I could even understand the position that the nature of reality may be impossible for us to discover, but it seems to me the fact of our existence is pretty significant evidence that some kind of objective reality exists, whether or not we have accurately mapped it. Furthermore, both positions seem far more complicated than the position that what we have seen and measured is reality. Both positions must explain all of our senses as well as having some larger thing that is an undiscoverable reality. Occam’s razor seems to say the simplest answer is that what we have sensed directly and measured indirectly is reality (though not necessarily the fundamental reality).
Does that make sense?
It does. But I think you are underestimating just how much complication a belief in an unknown (or not yet known) reality brings with it. And it is an unsupportable position to claim “that what we have seen and measured is reality”. Measurement is obviously theory-laden. Sense data is too, though the theories involved are in the field of psychology and the neurosciences.
One thing I notice you doing that you may not notice yourself: you are using the words “objective” and “subjective” as a kind of praise or condemnation. And you seem to associate the adjective ‘objective’ with the noun ‘reality’ as if ‘reality’ has a natural right to that adjective. But I am taking the position here that the only ‘reality’ you have access to is a subjective one (or, at best, intersubjective).
I think we pretty much understand each other at this point. I’m not trying to convert anyone—just to open some minds. And I apologize for my “maps all the way down’ crack that started the conversation. It came across as trollish, and I regret that.
True but not the right answer. Suppose instead that it said “Oh my gosh! ‘Rain is caused by the rain god Zarphomek’ is true for Hunga Huntergatherer, but for Martha Meteorologist, ‘Rain is caused by water condensation’ is true! There is no fixed truth!” What would be the deconstruction in that case?