[ExI] Can philosophers produce scientific knowledge?

Thu May 6 17:21:14 UTC 2021

Adrian - I am with you nearly all the way.  Psychology is certainly one of
the worst at creating jargon. But - sometimes there is an effort to take a
common concept and subject it to study.  If we use common definitions we
run a great risk of vagueness and ambiguity, and 'you know what I mean'.
So we create a jargon word and give it an operational definition to
separate it from the ambiguity of common definitions (and common people
will not understand operational definitions "You are defining intelligence
as that which is measured by an IQ test?  Isn't that completely
circular?").  Then people in our field will know what we mean by it, though
the average person will not.  So how do we translate the term so it can be
understood?  This can be difficult.  For example, 'ego' is used commonly to
mean 'pride', often overblown.  That is not the way psychiatrists and
psychologists use it.  Einstein was wrong:  there are just some things that
you cannot explain in any language to a six year old (or whatever age he
was using).

One problem is that psychologists get a big kick out of creating a term
that catches on, a meme.  I assume this is common in other science areas,
as well as the general culture.  But we will never get over the problem of
common words having ambiguous meanings, so we must continue to try to make
things more 'scientific'.

bill w

On Thu, May 6, 2021 at 11:50 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> The first step is to define your terms in ways that Neuralink et al can
> work with.  In other words: stop using jargon.
>
> What exactly is "qualia"?  What exactly is "redness"?  These are not terms
> that Neuralink or other such researchers can define experiments around,
> since the definitions are - at best - loose.
>
> Define what you are looking for, using only words that you can find in
> commonly accepted dictionaries.  For instance, instead of "qualia" you
> might use "perceived sensation", if that 100% captures what you are looking
> to measure here.  Neuralink might be able to measure the neurological
> underpinnings of sensation.
>
> Is "redness", "the sensation of seeing light of roughly 700 nanometer
> wavelength"?  If not, what is it?  Remember that "red" is "light of roughly
> 700 nanometer wavelength" (red is a color of light, and that is where red
> falls on the spectrum), so "the sensation of seeing red", which seems to be
> what you mean, is by definition "the sensation of seeing light of roughly
> 700 nanometer wavelength".
>
> The problem of jargon isn't specific to you.  Jargon is a problem in many
> scientific fields.  People inside a field get used to using such shorthand,
> then when they try to relate their concepts to related fields which might
> offer insight, they find that shorthand (specifically that those in the
> related fields don't know it, and are often too polite or too uninterested
> to point out that this is why they do not understand what is being asked of
> them) becomes a barrier to communication - even when the shorthand is
> well-defined, and in this case I'm not entirely certain it is.  I have
> found that the best solution is, when talking in cases where this shorthand
> might not already be understood, is to swap in equivalent terms that are
> understood by the audience (which also helps me make sure that my jargon is
> well-defined).
>
> On Thu, May 6, 2021 at 9:06 AM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> For example, can any one give me any examples of ANY peer reviewed
>> "philosophy of mind" claims which are falsifiable?
>> That is other than what we are describing in our "Consciousness: Not a
>> hard problem, just a color problem
>> <https://canonizer.com/videos/consciousness/>".
>> Basically, all the supporters of "Representational Qualia theory", and
>> all sub camps, are predicting that if experimentalists can discover and
>> demonstrate which of all our descriptions of stuff in the brain is a
>> description of redness, only one camp can remain standing, only the one
>> making the correct prediction about the nature of qualia, all others being
>> falsified by such a demonstration.  Stathis, even functionalists must agree
>> with this, right?  In other words, if someone could demonstrate that nobody
>> could ever experience redness if, and only if that redness was glutamate
>> reacting in the correct set of computationally bound synapses, and that if
>> no neuro substitution of any kind, or anything else, could produce even a
>> pixel of conscious redness experience...
>>
>> In other words, what we have is theoretical physical science, each
>> competing camp describing the experiments required to falsify the camps
>> they support.  Doing the actual experiments is now up to the
>> experimentalists, right?
>>
>> With my Ether earnings, I could now afford to fund some significant
>> experimental research to discover this.  Does anyone have any idea of how I
>> might go about funding such experimental work?  Maybe we could help fund
>> some of the work going on at Neuralink or something, along this direction?
>> Elon once was involved in this list, right?  Any idea how I could propose
>> putting a few $ million towards something like this to Neuralink, or any
>> other neuroscience experimental institutions?
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>> On Thu, May 6, 2021 at 9:32 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>> What I don't get out of that quote by Gillis is whether the philosophers
>>> proceed to do the actual research their proposal suggests.   bill w
>>>
>>> On Thu, May 6, 2021 at 10:26 AM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> I've always considered the difference between scientific and
>>>> philosophical claims to be experimental falsifiability.
>>>> Is that not right?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, May 5, 2021 at 10:30 AM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat <
>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/18972/1/Pradeu-Lemoine-Khelfaoui-Gingras_Philosophy%20in%20Science_Online%20version.pdf
>>>>>
>>>>> Abstract:
>>>>>
>>>>> Most philosophers of science do philosophy ‘on’ science. By contrast,
>>>>> others do philosophy ‘in’ science (‘PinS’), i.e., they use philosophical
>>>>> tools to address scientific problems and to provide scientifically useful
>>>>> proposals. Here, we consider the evidence in favour of a trend of this
>>>>> nature. We proceed in two stages. First, we identify relevant authors and
>>>>> articles empirically with bibliometric tools, given that PinS would be
>>>>> likely to infiltrate science and thus to be published in scientific
>>>>> journals (‘intervention’), cited in scientific journals (‘visibility’) and
>>>>> sometimes recognized as a scientific result by scientists (‘contribution’).
>>>>> We show that many central figures in philosophy of science have been
>>>>> involved in PinS, and that some philosophers have even ‘specialized’ in
>>>>> this practice. Second, we propose a conceptual definition of PinS as a
>>>>> process involving three conditions (raising a scientific problem, using
>>>>> philosophical tools to address it, and making a scientific proposal), and
>>>>> we ask whether the articles identified at the first stage fulfil all these
>>>>> conditions. We show that PinS is a distinctive, quantitatively substantial
>>>>> trend within philosophy of science, demonstrating the existence of a
>>>>> methodological continuity from science to philosophy of science.
>>>>> ——————
>>>>> CHT William Gillis
>>>>>
>>>>> Haven’t finished the paper yet, but not really surprised.
>>>>>
>>>>> Regards,
>>>>>
>>>>> Dan
>>>>> _______________________________________________
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