[ExI] Limits of human modification

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2015-11-30 16:49, William Flynn Wallace wrote:
> ​My difficulty with some philosophy, esp. existentialism, stems from 
> having gone to a Skinnerian grad school.  If you could not put a 
> concept into operational terms, then you were in the wrong department.
>
> Self, perception, consciousness, awareness, essence, instinct (my 
> favorite ambiguity) - very difficult to define in real world terms.

Yet the cognitive revolution overthrew behaviorism, largely because many 
behaviors are more easily explained through internal concepts (like 
working memory) than just referring to other behaviors. The difference 
between working memory and self is that the first is defined in terms of 
observable effects and can be refined through experiments while self is 
a folk psychological concept that may or may not correspond to anything 
cohesive and has fairly undefined properties.

> I agree fully with your last sentence.  How can philosophers have 
> meaningful conversations with one another when they cannot agree on 
> their terms?  I suspect that each one thinks they are right and the 
> others wrong.  "Boohoo, nobody wants to use my definition."
 From the outside it looks like philosophers don't agree on terminology, 
but from the inside most recognize what definitons are being used. It is 
far more common to hear "I disagree with Anders' definition of X, and to 
show why it is bad, consider the following logical argument based on 
it..." with me responding "Yeah, you got me there. However, your 
definition implies that X is Y, and Y is Z. Do you really think Z?"

There is a brand of concept analysis that spends all effort on refining 
definitions. It is useful, but not very exciting.

> Anders, what's wrong with doing your historical research first?  I 
> thought the idea of research was to take the ball from earlier people 
> and then run with it your way.

In my case it was that I wanted to approach the subject from my own 
angle (essentially borrowing my expertise in reasoning about risk and 
uncertainty to apply to hope) and not get channeled too much into any 
pre-existing standard. But once I had written down my approach, I 
checked if somebody had already done the same job or found useful ideas 
I had missed.

(I found that Waterworth had arrived at the same rough structure but 
focused on much more ordinary hopes - good terminology though; Kant and 
Wittgenstein both had views on the future-oriented aspect of hope that 
fitted in nicely but did ot lead very far; Nietzsche and Camus gave me a 
psychological criticism of hope that I would not normally have come up 
with and I will have to deal with.)

Sometimes not checking what the Great Thinkers have already solved is 
the road to solve problems in a new way. Although, as the saying goes, a 
month in the lab can save you an hour in the library.


-- 
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20151130/1bd6b0ce/attachment.html>