Dennis Hackethal’s Comments

Ukraine need not be a picture of innocence for it to be the best option at the moment.

I don't know what you mean by "best option", but to be clear, when I say Ukraine is not a picture of innocence, I mean that people shouldn't blindly assume that Ukraine is part of the West; for the reasons I've explained, it's unclear to me how exactly supporting Ukraine is a fight for freedom. Due to conscription, it seems to me the opposite is the case.

Would you deny that the Declaration of Independence was a good thing because the Founding Fathers hadn’t abolished slavery at the very beginning of the US?

No, although I think those are two different issues. But if they used coercion to write the declaration, I would judge them accordingly. And weren't the few people who understood at the time that slavery is an abomination right to condemn it?

As you imply, people can't do more than act on their best theories, moral or otherwise. There's a difference between a lack of knowledge and evil. Should today's teachers be jailed? Probably not. Should they be judged for abusing children? Yes. Should they stop abusing children immediately? Yes. Or do you disagree?

Condemning Ukrainians right now as moral monsters for supporting this government [...].

I largely consider the Ukrainian populace victims. I instead condemn Ukrainian politicians for hypocritically abusing the virtue of liberty to coerce their subjects, as well as US politicians for sending my tax dollars over there against my will.

Your argument seems to me similar in structure to the socialist argument of demanding that people in developing countries have wages as high as first-world countries.

Isn't that different? Socialists wish to forcefully prevent such people from entering contracts they might otherwise enter into happily. I don't wish to prevent Ukrainians who want to fight from fighting. I don't wish to replace free trade with coercion, as socialists do. I wish to replace coercion with freedom.

I’m not an advocate for conscription nor am I trying to justify it.

Then why does it sound like you are?

None of that means that it’s immoral to support the current government in Ukraine.

It depends how that support is organized. Tax money? Immoral. Conscription? Disgusting. Voluntary help? Go for it.

As for Zelensky, the fact that he benefited politically from the war doesn’t condemn him morally.

The litmus test will be whether he pocketed any of the billions of dollars that have been sent to Ukraine for himself, accepted bribes, that sort of thing. I understand that organizations such as Transparency International, but also laws in Western countries, have clearly defined rules around what constitutes corruption. As I pointed out in the Twitter thread you implicitly reference below, Ukraine isn't the picture of innocence many seem to think it is. Same goes for Zelensky by extension, IMO. I'm no expert on him but I wouldn't put it past him.

It’s possible his economic policies are wrong not because, as you say, he’s trying to be a “parasite”.

His policies could indeed be wrong for all kinds of reasons. But he's not just trying to be a parasite. Unless he pays himself no salary – and maybe even then, depending on the circumstances – he's a net parasite in the sense that he's made a profit from money extorted from his subjects. Just like most other politicians but also judges, policemen, USPS mailmen (but not Fedex or UPS mailmen), etc are net parasites.

For the policies that you’re advocating [...].

What policies am I advocating?

[J]ust as the morality of conscription doesn’t depend on it’s popularity, so doesn’t the offering help to Ukraine. [Link added]

Agreed; it depends, in part, on whether such help is coercive or not.

Maybe one day you'll be dragged by the feet to die in a war you do not wish to fight. Will you still be glad that governments are making decisions for you?

Ukraine + Russia + NATO sounds like three sides, at least. And NATO countries are helping Ukraine resist Russia.

Whether most Ukrainians align with the government I do not know. But I do know that the morality of a policy such as conscription does not depend on its popularity.

Re what I think an ideal response from a Western country would be: I'm really no expert, but I think all countries should condemn acts of aggression. In addition, Western citizens are free to help Ukrainian citizens voluntarily. I think that's about it. I certainly don't think Western tax money should be spent on the conflict. Nor am I aware of any contractual obligations any Western countries have toward Ukraine.

[I]n your refutation you are seemingly referring back to premise 2 itself [...]. If this is the case then there is still circularity.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I think it's merely a repetition. In other words, if I propose a claim a, and you propose a conflicting claim b, and I then say 'no, I still think a', that isn't circular. Granted, it may be repetitive, but I think it would only be circular if I said, directly or indirectly, 'a because a'.

In any case, I would use a different refutation. The claim that "the execution of certain inborn algorithms by certain means (e.g. by an animal brain) gives rise to conscious experience" seems to imply that there is something special about wetware such as animal brains. As DD and others have pointed out before me, that cannot be true since it's in violation of computational universality: there's nothing a computer made of metal and silicon couldn't do that one made of wetware could (and vice versa). Our computers are universal simulators (within memory and processing-power constraints).

This refutation refers to neither previously stated syllogism, and instead to a different concept altogether (computational universality), so I don't see any circularity here.

I agree that engineering projects shouldn't be attempted on people's free choices. To be very clear, I think men would benefit from focusing less on women, but I'm not prepared to tell anyone what they should and should not do (unless they employ coercion).

You wrote:

[I]ndividuals shouldn’t be making choices based on what they think the dating market ought to look like.

Let's see how this compares to other markets. Continuing with the car market, if someone is looking to buy a car but decides the market isn't favorable at the moment, isn't he right to wait until conditions improve? Or, if he decides not to participate in that market because he finds some fundamental flaws with it, isn't he right to withdraw from it? And if the answer to both questions is 'yes', how is the dating market different?

I agree that planned mass intervention would be a disaster – I'm a libertarian so I think that any such top-down attempt would be immoral anyway, let alone impossible. Instead, I was talking about slowly changing the culture from within.

Creating awareness of the issues as I've described them could be a start. Men could decide to pay less attention to beauty in women and instead value other traits more. Or they could both decide to deprioritize sex and dating in general.

I dismiss my previous syllogism and instead refer back to the DD quote I gave in the main article from BoI ch. 7:

My guess is that every AI is a person: a general-purpose explainer. It is conceivable that there are other levels of universality between AI and ‘universal explainer/constructor’, and perhaps separate levels for those associated attributes like consciousness. But those attributes all seem to have arrived in one jump to universality in humans, and, although we have little explanation of any of them, I know of no plausible argument that they are at different levels or can be achieved independently of each other. So I tentatively assume that they cannot.

To put this in syllogistic form:

1. There are only two options: either creativity is necessary for consciousness (a) or it is not (b).
2. There is "no plausible argument" that consciousness can be achieved independently from creativity, and it seems that they both "arrived in one jump to universality in humans" (link added).
3. That leaves only (a).

Building on this syllogism, we can address animals separately (I think one of the weaknesses of my circular syllogism, and potentially the reason for its circularity, was that it did too much at once):

1. There are only two options: either some computer is conscious (a) or it is not (b).
2. Evidence of some behavior or idea that must have been created by the computer itself (as opposed to, say, merely having been inherited via genes or copied via rote imitation/memes) would be evidence of creativity and, therefore, consciousness.
3. I know of no such evidence for (non-human) animal computers. That leaves only (b).

In this video, a woman comments on another woman dressing up to go to the club:

She doesn’t dress like that around the house, so it’s not like she’s doing it for herself.

This particular argument first, then potentially my view on animal intelligence in general.

In this video, the interviewer asks:

[T]here's a lot of women who say [...] 'I dress a certain way for myself' [...] My question is, if women are dressing for themselves, why do you often see women walking around in uncomfortable shoes and skimpy dresses when it's freezing cold outside?

He's implying that, if women were dressing for themselves, they'd be wearing comfortable clothes instead. But they're not, so they can't be dressing for themselves. Three women subsequently agree that women do not dress for themselves but for attention. One says:

I think a lot of women say that they dress for themselves but they're really not dressing for themselves.

Her friend agrees:

I think it's, like, subconsciously dressing for others [...].

In other words, many women lie to themselves about their reasons for dressing up. The interviewer did the proper 'mind reading' to bring that to light.

Happy new year!

Same to you.

It looks like premise 2 is doing most of the work here.

Yes.

1. If animals are conscious, then they would correct obvious mistakes in their behavior.
2. Animals have been observed as failing to correct obvious mistakes in their behavior (e.g. the cat failing to drink water from a tap).
3. Therefore, animals are not conscious.

[How do] you establish premise 1 without assuming that creativity is necessary for consciousness?

I see the problem. If premise 1 itself depends on creativity being necessary for consciousness, then that means I (unwittingly) snuck that assumption into my original premise 2, when it was the conclusion I wanted to arrive at. Circular reasoning.

Thanks for pointing this out. Time for me to go back to the drawing board.

Stating that someone is annoyed as a matter of fact is getting outside the realm of credible goodwill, though, and guessing that they’ll deny it is effectively nuking the discussion utterly. [...] The only thing it does is reveal to me that you expect me to lie, which is a breach of the trust and cooperation needed to have a good discussion.

Isn't lying a breach of trust first?

A final point, which is my own mind reading, and thus an example of what I consider an acceptable meta-comment in a rational discussion:
I wrote my master’s thesis on normative argumentation theory, which means I spent two years reading and writing about these exact questions.

I don't understand how that's mind reading.

I think this can be done without us clashing on epistemology, and going forward I will focus on doing just that. If we find that this is clearly not possible without first resolving our epistemological differences then that can be our conclusion. Maybe we would then agree to pick up where we left off and focus on epistemology alone.

OK.

You have provided the following syllogism.

1) Creativity is necessary and sufficient for consciousness/sentience to arise.
2) Animals are not creative.
3) Therefore, animals are not sentient.

You've misquoted me again; as a result, the formatting is off. You can see an explanation here (that site is under development and the link may break). You can use that site to check quotes before submission (expect bugs). Or you can paste your quote into the browser's word search and, if you only get one match (the one in the textarea), it must be a misquote (that won't work in this instance because of the enumeration but it's a decent quick-glance approach in general).

This argument is fine, however it is not the argument I was looking for. I was actually looking for an argument where premise 1 of above would be the conclusion.

I suspect that an explanatory theory of consciousness will provide such an argument. I'm afraid I do not have one yet, but you seem to imply that my claim's epistemic status will increase if it's a conclusion rather than a standalone conjecture.

That cannot be true because we'd always need infinitely many new theories to accept just one new one. Imagine if Einstein had proposed GR and then people had said 'but what does it follow from?' We still don't know. Coming up with the next theory (from which GR follows, if only as an approximation) is another creative act. And if we do find that next theory, people can then always say 'well but what does that theory follow from?'.

This approach exhibits the infinite regress of justificationism, so I'm skeptical as to whether you can "provid[e] [me] with a refutation of [my] claims about animal consciousness [...] without us clashing on epistemology [...]".

All that being sad, I am still interested in your plan of demonstrating circularity, and this path...

If you don’t want to try [or can't, for the moment] provide an argument [ie syllogism] in favor of this claim [...], then maybe you can instead refute the counterclaim: creativity is not necessary for consciousness.

...is still open. (You can see here that my quote is accurate.) I think your request can be rephrased in terms of breaking symmetry between the claims 'creativity is necessary for consciousness' and 'creativity is not necessary for consciousness'. I can then meet your request for my "preferred argument in syllogistic form" by breaking symmetry as follows:

1. There are only two options: either creativity is necessary for consciousness (a) or it is not (b).
2. I rule out (b) because I have seen no evidence of creativity in animals, which I should be seeing if they were creative, and I have seen lots of evidence of animals making mistakes which, were they conscious, they would correct (eg this cat in #107)), as well as evidence of their algorithmic, ie non-creative nature (see #124, among others).
3. That leaves only (a).

Thus there should be a way for you "to demonstrate the circularity [you] see in [my] reasoning."

NYT article about Square making it harder for small businesses during the pandemic by increasing their money-withholding practice with little warning. But publicly they present themselves as caring about small businesses.

There is a petition with over 3,000 signatures on change.org to end this shady practice:

Many small business owners are fighting for survival and cannot afford for this to happen.

The petition links to https://squarevictims.org but unfortunately that site isn't working for me at the moment.

I've signed the petition to show my support.

this guy didn't end up doing anything.
he deleted my post even though it was exactly the kind of thing the fb group description asked for.

In BoI chapter 10, Deutsch has Socrates say:

SOCRATES: [...] one thing [Hermes] asked me to do was to imagine a ‘Spartan Socrates’.

But that isn't true. Previously, Socrates starts imagining a Spartan Socrates on his own and Hermes merely points it out:

HERMES: So now you are imagining some Spartan Socrates [...]

It links to The Fountainhead.

I could conjecture all sorts of fantastical/crazy theories to solve any problem I want. These theories would meet the criteria you provided - solving previously unsolved problems - but we wouldn’t expect them to contain truth because of this right?

Right, because they don't meet other criteria (such as not being "fantastical/crazy"). We have all kinds of criteria good theories must meet. DD wrote about this in BoI.

Re induction, I have pointed out that people use 'induction' psychologically. I do not disagree that past successes can be used to convince people to adopt a theory. That doesn't refer to induction as a process that can create knowledge.

If you're going to hold on to induction – Peirce's or someone else's – you better come up with a refutation of Hume's and Popper's work on it. I'm not interested in refuting induction for you, nor in making it work.

Regarding "[t]he source code of the universe", when I wrote "[i]n the above examples, reality is the underlying algorithm – the source code", I was debating whether I should clarify that I do NOT mean that reality is made up of source code. Looks like I was wrong not to. So, to be clear: I was merely using source code as a stand-in for reality.

The justification matters because it gives us confidence/belief in the theory, it gives us a tool to convince/reason others into believing the theory too.

Not in the scenario I've described, where you'd have no 'reason to believe' in your theory whatsoever, nor would anyone else, yet you'd be 100% correct. In addition, I quote BoI ch. 10 once more:

So the thing [justificationists] call ‘knowledge’, namely justified belief, is a chimera. It is unattainable to humans except in the form of self-deception; it is unnecessary for any good purpose; and it is undesired by the wisest among mortals.

You wrote:

You might suggest that the non-creative (algorithmic) aspects of our brain’s processing are without consciousness, but you will need to provide a good argument in favor of that claim before I can accept it.

I think your request for "a good argument in favor" is indicative of a larger problem in this discussion. You seek supportive arguments, whereas I seek refutations, and I also don't consider a 'supportive argument' a success or as causing any sort of increase in a theory's epistemic status. Your methodology is justificationist in nature, mine is Popperian/'refutationist'. The reason you should accept the claim is that you cannot find a refutation of it (if indeed you cannot find one), not that I haven't given enough arguments in favor of it.

This difference in our respective approaches may lead to an impasse in this discussion. That doesn't mean we can't learn from each other, but I follow Elliot in thinking that if you're going to have a fruitful discussion, you better make decisive, yes/no arguments. I'd love for you to offer me a brutal refutation of the claim that animals are not sentient. Conversely, I'm not interested in providing "a good argument in favor" of my claims re animal sentience – not only do I doubt that any such argument will ever convince you because there could always be more justifications, but I also don't ask for such an argument in favor of the claim that animals are sentient after all.

Your first attempt at refutation was this:

Routinely I find evolved aspects of my biological self are also present in other animals.
Consciousness is an evolved aspect of myself.
Therefore, consciousness has a fair chance of being present in other animals.

Notably, this isn't a deductive syllogism of the kind you requested from me. It's inductive. But in any case, that is how we then got to the example with the beads, and this first attempt doesn't work, IMO, for the reasons I've explained re induction. But you can convince me that I'm wrong by refuting Hume's and Popper's work on induction – not by giving arguments in support of your view, but by refuting theirs.

I believe your only other attempt at refutation has been the claim that my argument is circular. I don't see it. But here's the syllogism you requested:

1. Creativity is necessary and sufficient for consciousness/sentience to arise.
2. Animals are not creative.
3. Therefore, animals are not sentient.

You can arrive at this syllogism by taking yours from #488 and reversing 1) and 2). (The major premise should come before the minor premise.)

As I hinted in #482, the syllogism may instead be:

1. An ability to be critical is necessary and sufficient for consciousness/sentience to arise.
2. Animals do not have this ability.
3. Therefore, animals are not sentient.

(Given the links between creativity and criticism, we may eventually find these two syllogisms to be the same, but the difference in focus may be important in understanding animals and consciousness.)

Please explain how these syllogisms are circular? My current guess is that you're looking for a justification for 1), you think 3) would constitute such a justification, and so you misinterpret the syllogism as being circular.

You also wrote:

I have read [chapter 1 of Popper's Objective Knowledge]. He correctly points out the shortcomings of various forms of induction. He also attempts to solve the pragmatic problem of preference with his conception of Corroboration. Did you want to discuss anything in particular?

No. You had requested "a good answer to these problems" so you may "have a much more elegant epistemology to employ". The Popper reference was an attempt to help with that.

How can you determine that a theory solves the problem if you do not test it?

You can know that from theory.

What does calling it psychological change?

I'm distinguishing between the epistemological and the psychological, as Popper did. That distinction matters because the two fields are often after different things. For example, I've quoted Popper here as saying:

Such remarks probably won’t satisfy those who are after a psychological theory of creative thinking […]. Because what they’re after is a theory of successful research and thinking.
I believe that the demand for a theory of successful thinking cannot be satisfied. And it is not the same as a theory of creative thinking. […]

Deutsch picked up the same difference in BoI – in ch. 9 he speaks of "matters not of philosophy but of psychology – more ‘spin’ than substance". And in #252, I mentioned the difference between the logical and the psychological problems of induction.

Back to your comment:

Does it mean that the reasoning is bad and that its conclusions should not be relied on?

Not just because it's psychological, but yes, inductive reasoning is bad.

Which would mean you think it is just as rational to expect a blue bead despite the past 999 jars containing red beads?

Depending on the underlying explanation, yes.

Say you have a bead-drawing algorithm (the kind of thing you might see in a virtual casino). Given that the algorithm works as follows...

(defn draw-bead []
  "red")

...the 'inductive' approach would happen to be spot on.

But given that it works as follows...

(defn draw-bead' []
  (if (zero? (rand-int 2))
    "red"
    "blue")) 

...the same approach would fail pretty soon – although you might find yourself very unlucky (or lucky, depending on how you look at it) and have it repeat the same color many times.

And given that it works as follows...

(defn draw-bead'' [beads-drawn]
  (if (< beads-drawn 1000)
    "red"
    "blue"))

...the 'inductive' approach would be spot on for the first 999 draws, and then it would suddenly fail when you're more confident than ever before that it's correct (like people were with Newtonian physics).

The Popperian approach says that making predictions is only part of reasoning, and it's not the main part. Reasoning is mainly about explaining reality, which involves resolving contradictions between ideas. In the above examples, reality is the underlying algorithm – the source code. If it's hidden from you, like reality, all you have is your knowledge of which beads you've drawn in the past, and even that you only have fallibly. But you don't limit yourself to predicting which beads will be drawn in the future. You look for cases where your predictions do not come true so you can improve your idea of what the algorithm looks like, i.e., resolve contradictions between what you think the source code is and its return values on the one hand, and the real source code and its so-far observed return values on the other. While we typically make predictions that are in line with past observations, doing so shouldn't be mistaken for induction.

Re the last example, draw-bead'', you might ask: 'If we've only drawn 500 beads, what earthly reason would we have to suspect that the code flips after 999?' As in: we would continue to think that draw-bead is the correct solution. We wouldn't conjecture that the algorithm contains that conditional (if (< beads-drawn 1000) ...) – after all, our predictions have always come true so far, so we've had no reason to adjust our model of the algorithm to include that conditional. In other words: we wouldn't be justified in introducing the conditional; we should only change our code when a prediction fails. And I would agree. But if somebody made that change, even without justification, they'd happen to be right! Not only would they be vindicated after 500 more draws, but they'd have discovered the true source code without any justification. So how can justification possibly matter?

The problem is that premise 2 is what is under question. You linked me to your ‘Buggy Dogs’ post as evidence of premise 2, [...].

No, I think you may have misread me. In #476, you asked, "[w]hat sort of evidence tells us that animals are not conscious?" I responded with a link to my 'Buggy Dogs' post. To be sure, there was an aside of mine in between on how consciousness isn't the same as creativity but follows from it, but when I wrote "For specific evidence [...]", I was referring specifically to your question.

I consider premise 2 – "Creativity is required for consciousness." – to be uncontroversial for the moment. But if you have arguments why that premise cannot be true, ie refutations, I want to know.

I am aware of the flaws in my epistemology which involves induction, but I am also aware of problems in Popperian epistemology (corroboration).

As I've said in #109 re corroboration:

Salmon is right to point out that there are problems with Popper’s concept of corroboration. Others have written about that. But I think you can retain much of Popper’s epistemology just fine without accepting that concept. It’s not that important.

That leaves the problem of induction. You also wrote:

If Popperian epistemology can give me a good answer to these problems then that would be a win for me, because I would then have a much more elegant epistemology to employ.

Popper has addressed induction thoroughly. Have you read chapter 1 of his book Objective Knowledge, titled 'Conjectural Knowledge: My Solution of the Problem of Induction'?

On second thought, re when I wrote:

Square had my up-to-date email address on file. When I wrote that they sent an email “to an old email address I do not use to log in to Square anymore”, I meant that they did so despite having my new email. I may update that line for clarity.

I don't think I need to update that line. The implication is that, when I log in to Square using some email address, Square must have that email address on file. (Otherwise I wouldn't be able to log in with it.)

you didn’t update an email when you changed emails

Square had my up-to-date email address on file. When I wrote that they sent an email "to an old email address I do not use to log in to Square anymore", I meant that they did so despite having my new email. I may update that line for clarity.

any credit card company would act this way!

Square isn't a credit-card company. They're a payment processor.

Also they ask for bank statements to ensure it’s an active account

I realize that. I don't think it would have helped anyway since no amount of activity in my bank account could convince them that my client is not a fraudster. (Recall that this particular issue was caused by my client's cards being declined repeatedly.)

So it looks like they did everything within the law and it was your screw up for the beginning.

I disagree. Even if their closing my account was legitimate – and I don't think it was – that is a separate issue from them keeping my money past their self-imposed deadline without explanation. I cannot imagine that the latter is legal.

I wrote:

[T]heories that have survived lots of criticism contain mistakes and truth.

(Which you misquoted, btw, by not italicizing the 'and'. Those italics are important. Continuing with my quote:)

Your [Kieren's] question was: “Why would you continue to use GPS if not because of its past success?” That’s one of the reasons why – that I know that even if it contains mistakes, it also contains truth.

Then you said:

In this scenario, the only true parts of GPS that you are aware of are where it has been successful in the past.

One can mistakenly think that it worked in some situations and also mistakenly think that it didn't work in others. We're fallible in our interpretation of test results, too. But in any case, I wouldn't restrict my truth claims about the theory to only those applications of it that I have observed (and correctly think worked). A major 'reason to believe' – and I'm phrasing this in justificationist terms on purpose – that a theory is true, or closer to the truth, is that it solves previously unsolved problems. People can and do make such truth claims without ever testing a theory – so there can be no corroboration or (psychological) induction at play.

Regarding your adjusted GPS example about precision timing of industrial-control systems, you wrote:

I think I could convince them to operate the system based on its past success (massive sample size).

As I believe I've said before, there was a massive sample size of tests of Newton's theories over the centuries, they were all successful, and yet Newton was wrong. Do I doubt that one could convince people based on past success? As I've said: no. But that's a psychological question. Sometimes, just a few decisive negative test results undo thousands of corroborations.

[W]hen you speak of “intelligence” you are actually referring to the definition of it in terms of creativity right? Therefore this is an invalid reason because you are referencing the very thing that is under question (creativity -> consciousness).

To be clear, the Deutschian claim as I understand it is that some entity is conscious if and only if it is creative. (Though I have wondered whether it's really: some entity is conscious if and only if it is critical. But I digress.)

Since it is an 'if and only if', we can deduce a lack of creativity from a lack of consciousness, and vice versa – can we not?

In #481, you wrote:

I had been pursuing the role of induction/corroboration in your epistemology and I think in regards to that I have been on track.

Are you interested in being right or in finding flaws in your thinking?

Have you noticed that, when I offer refutations or counterexamples, you then keep tweaking the scenarios until I'm more or less forced to agree with you?

For example:

In this scenario, [...].

and

Ok, then consider [...].

and

However, if you imagine a period [...].

and

Ok, but before we could [...].

and

Assume you don’t have any background knowledge like this [...].

It's easy to find examples of you doing this, ie making adjustments to your original point so that my refutations or counterexamples don't apply anymore. You were successful in doing this with the example of the beads because you tweaked it sufficiently.

Do you think that approach is conducive to you changing your mind if you're wrong, or to "seeing this discussion to its conclusion", as you wrote?

The distinction is between a theory that has survived all falsification attempts (tentatively true), and one which has not (known to be false). So right now the problem is deciding what to do when all you have are theories that are known to be false.

I agree. I guess serious fallibilists consider even their best guesses to be false, or eventually found to be false, always. But they might be going too far: sometimes we do speak the truth, if only accidentally. (But, of course, we can never know whether we have spoken the truth, as Xenophanes said, and we should remain critical.)

I don’t think this works. A conjecture that GPS will work tomorrow is arbitrary and easy to vary. I could just as easily conjecture that it will not work. From a Popperian perspective, If we still had a good, tentatively true theory explaining GPS then we could rule out one of these options, but in this hypothetical we no longer have this.

Let me try another approach: what we know of Popperian epistemology (which is quite difficult to vary) says that theories that have survived lots of criticism contain mistakes and truth. Your question was: "Why would you continue to use GPS if not because of its past success?" That's one of the reasons why – that I know that even if it contains mistakes, it also contains truth.

I agree that people might just continue using GPS out of habit.

I don't think it's habit. What I've described is a hard requirement/dependance. In this light, regarding your followup question:

However if [habit] were the only remaining reason for using [GPS], then wouldn’t people quickly transition away from relying on it (especially for life critical application)? I think we can both agree that this wouldn’t happen, but why?

The reason they can't is not habit but dependance and because coming up with new solutions is usually difficult. It takes skill, time, and also luck. They may quickly begin to work on alternatives, but it might take a while before they find a viable one. In the meantime, it seems to me they have no choice but to keep using GPS. Breaking with traditions is hard.

What sort of evidence tells us that animals are not conscious? It cannot be evidence of their lack of creativity (since creativity == consciousness is what is under question).

Following Deutsch, I think it's more like: creativity leads to consciousness. As in: creativity bestows consciousness/consciousness is a side effect of creativity. I don't think they're the same.

For specific evidence, see (I may have linked to some of these before):

• ‘Buggy Dogs’ and the comments underneath starting at #107
• ‘Evidence Is Ambiguous’ and comment #121 underneath

On the topic of animal sentience more generally, I recommend my ‘Animal-Sentience FAQ’.

Ok, but before we could adjust our theories there would be a period of time where all we have are theories that we know to be wrong.

As fallibilists, isn't that already the case, ~all the time?

I would continue to use and rely on GPS during this period and I imagine you would too.

Yes.

Why would you continue to use GPS if not because of its past success?

I think it'd be more like: a conjecture that GPS and GR can still solve some of the problems I need solved. To put in your terms: there's no 'reason to believe' that GPS or GR are wrong in their entirety – they're wrong, but they contain truth. The true parts may still be useful.

Another reason to keep using GPS in such a scenario is tradition/dependency: lots of people rely on it and removing it would cause chaos, so you have no choice but to keep using it. (In short: dependency management, avoiding revolutions.) It's a lot like in software development where introducing breaking changes should be done with care and ripping out entire pieces of software without replacement should generally be avoided. If my macOS is found to have a bug I generally (though there are some exceptions) will not (or simply cannot) stop using macOS. If possible, I'll avoid the bug until it is fixed (ie a successor theory is found) or, if the bug is bad and pressing enough, I'll try to switch, if only temporarily, to another OS that isn't known to have this problem. In such cases, my thinking isn't 'my OS has worked in the past so it will work in the future' – if, say, I'm not confident in Apple's abilities, I may conclude that the OS won't be fixed in the future – and my reason for continued use is my dependency on the OS and my theories around the nature of the bug (not wrecking the OS entirely, the OS still being safe to use overall, etc).

[I]f you imagine a period between knowing that Newton’s gravity is incorrect and before GR was discovered, then you can ask a similar question to the one I asked above. Why continue using Newtonian physics during this period?

You can extend my previous answer to this question. In short: Newtonian physics still contained truth, and people needed to keep building bridges.

By the way, I think historically there was such a period, but I'd have to look into it further.

In the same way I would bet that the last jar contains red beads, I would bet that other animals have consciousness. This is a reason why I have the belief/expectation that animals are conscious, which conflicts with your restriction to consciousness requiring creativity.

But for the beads we assumed no other (background) knowledge, whereas with animals we have lots of evidence even if the can't see the figurative beads (ie look inside animals' heads). If there were no such evidence nor any theoretical background so that the situation with judging animal minds really were analogous to the example with the beads, I might agree with you about animals being conscious.

It irritates me a little when Popperians react strongly to seeing the word “justification”. Popper rightfully rejects justification as far as it means to prove something as infallibly true, but the word also has a more everyday meaning. When I say “justify your claim”, I don’t mean “Prove absolutely and without error that your claim is true”, I just mean “Provide reasons why I should think your claim is any good”. Here “reasons” can be those that a Popperian restricts themselves to using.

That's fair.

But remember in this hypothetical we have found that both GR and quantum physics are wrong. Therefore, we no longer have good explanations for why GPS is working right?

We'd adjust our explanations to why it only works in certain cases, or why GR (despite being wrong) still explains GPS but not certain other things. We've done this with Newtonian physics: we understand why it only works as an approximation and when it's still acceptable to use. From BoI ch. 5:

Newton’s predictions are indeed excellent in the context of bridge-building, and only slightly inadequate when running the Global Positioning System, but they are hopelessly wrong when explaining a pulsar or a quasar – or the universe as a whole. To get all those right, one needs Einstein’s radically different explanations.

Sometimes we don't know yet know why an explanation doesn't work in some area, only that it doesn't, until we find its successor – which, per Popper, will explain where and why its predecessor failed. But that's for the negative cases. In a case where a theory does work, like Newtonian physics for bridge-building, yea, continue using it, I don't see the problem. On the contrary, Newtonian physics may even have an advantage over relativity in legitimate applications, where, say, ease of use outweighs the fact that (I'm making this up) the 15th decimal place in the result is wrong, and you only need three decimal places anyway. Likewise, I'm not aware of anyone having found that GR does not work for GPS.

Back to your comment:

It sounds like you would bet that the last jar also contains red (even if only because of your psychology)?

Yes. As I have written: "[k]nowing nothing else I probably would bet on the next jar containing only red beads [...]".

These quotes give a general statement of Popper’s views, but it’s his comments on corroboration that Salmon was reacting to (the stem of this discussion).

We have also talked a bunch about justification, which Salmon invokes, too. Like when he writes "[w]hat I want to see is how corroboration could justify such a preference." I had taken the position that justification is always impossible and never desirable – but Popper is more nuanced than that and makes room for some form of justification (while being careful about how he phrases it). (I think I've 'inherited' this mistake from Deutsch. FWIW, when Deutsch borrows ideas from Popper (and maybe others), there's sometimes a reduction in quality, as I've written about here and here. I think fans of Deutsch should read those articles.) Since Popper accommodates justification a little bit, maybe I was wrong to reject it wholesale, and so maybe there's some compatibility between Salmon and Popper.

This discussion may be difficult if you take months to respond. Can you commit to responding within, say, a week?

By the way, the first quote in your last comment is a misquote of me. The first line (starting with "Because your") should be a nested quote since you originally wrote that, not me.

Adding some more info on whether Plato went by 'Aristocles', as Deutsch calls him in BoI ch. 10. The Wikipedia article I referenced in this footnote says that Plato didn't go by 'Aristocles'. I translate freely from the article (original German at the end of this comment):

Also, a claim which has been passed on, according to which Plato originally used his grandfather's name, Aristocles, is a fabrication [...].

The corresponding source/footnote reads (slightly modified for the purpose of translation into English) "James A. Notopoulos: The Name of Plato. In: Classical Philology. vol. 34, 1939, p. 135–145, here: 141–143; Alice Swift Riginos: Platonica. Leiden 1976, p. 35, 38."

Auch eine Überlieferung, wonach Platon ursprünglich den Namen seines Großvaters Aristokles trug, ist eine [...] Erfindung.

lol, I wrote "all the other room get". It should be 'rooms' (plural).

[I]f progress is to be made, some of the opportunities and some of the discoveries will be inconceivable in advance.

– BoI ch. 9

Not only some but all of the discoveries will be inconceivable in advance, or else they wouldn't be discoveries.

I’ve seen Justin Malone’s video. It’s been a while but I remember him making some good points.

[...] QR readers work best when there are the same amount of white and black areas.

Should be 'when there is' because the verb refers to "amount", but the verb's closest preceding noun is "readers", which is plural, so again the same mistake is made.

Arguably, maybe the author was thinking of the word "areas" and assigned the number that way. Either way, the sentence still fits the pattern.

https://twitter.com/danhollick/status/1570040261950205954

[A]ll proposed evidence for consciousness of animals thus far are either false or based on bad epistemology.

Should be 'is' instead of "are". But the verb's closest preceding noun is "animals", which is plural, so the author made the mistake.

https://twitter.com/magnetthatcher/status/1457496012180709379

I wrote:

Before, it seemed overwhelmingly probably [...].

It should say 'probable'.

You linked to a Wikipedia article on the 'g factor'. It states:

[A]n individual's performance on one type of cognitive task tends to be comparable to that person's performance on other kinds of cognitive tasks.

And it presents an open problem:

The measured value of this construct depends on the cognitive tasks that are used, and little is known about the underlying causes of the observed correlations.

How about this: some knowledge has reach, as David Deutsch would call it. Sometimes, when some knowledge can solve this problem, it can also solve that problem.

In light of that, let me get to your question:

Do you claim this measure is completely explained by “differences in knowledge or its quality”?

Not completely. But it is partly (I think mainly, for most people) explained by the quality of knowledge, and that quality is partly determined by reach (greater reach is better than lower reach). There are hardware differences – the most important being processing power and memory capacity, as with any computer. Those will affect one's abilities, too. As will some other hardware issues, such as whether one is blind. Even then, just improving the hardware doesn't always lead to an increase in what some might consider intelligence. Let me link to my article on curing blindness again – suddenly being able to see can cause much confusion, but it is definitely a hardware improvement. The boy in the linked article mostly enjoys his new ability – enjoyment can be an indication that knowledge is being created – but one could imagine a case where such a sudden hardware improvement overwhelms the subject completely and consequently stunts the growth of his knowledge. In which case quality of hardware and software (knowledge) would be inversely correlated. So it really depends.

By the way, you quote me as saying “differences in knowledge or its quality”, but I didn't write that anywhere. The correct quote is "differences in knowledge – more precisely, quality of knowledge". If you mean to use scare quotes, or if you want to use quotation marks to refer to abstract concepts or phrases, or for anything else, really, I suggest you use single quotes (‘ and ’) and reserve double quotes only for literal quotations. I learned this approach from Deutsch. (As I did much of my stance on brains vs. knowledge, see e.g. this interview with him.)

I agree that some parts of this effect are due to your upbringing [...].

I didn't say that, so you can't agree with me on it.

In BoI ch. 8, Deutsch presents a thought experiment in which the guests of David Hilbert's Infinity Hotel each receive a copy of either of Deutsch's books, FoR or BoI. Every millionth room gets FoR, all the other room get BoI. Guests are confident they will receive BoI since the odds of that seem to be 999,999 in 1 million.

Then, hotel management makes an announcement moving all recipients of one book to odd-numbered rooms, and all recipients of the other book to even-numbered rooms. Guests receive a card telling them which room number to move to, without telling them which book they got.

Your card arrives and you move to your new room. Are you now any less sure about which of the two books you have received? Presumably not. By your previous reasoning, there is now only a one in two chance that your book is The Beginning of Infinity, because it is now in ‘half the rooms’.

In other words, Deutsch argues the guests wouldn't be any less sure which of the two books they have received. But why not? Before, they were pretty sure they'd be receiving BoI – the odds seemed to be 999,999 in 1 million, after all – really close to 1. Now, the odds seem to be 1 in 2, so only 0.5. Before, it seemed overwhelmingly probably that they'd receive BoI, now it's equally probable they might receive FoR.

To be sure, Deutsch uses this thought experiment to show that, due to the different probabilities the guests arrive at, they must be mistaken about their way of assessing them. But, within that faulty logic, it seems to me the guests should be less confident which book they have received. I think it should say 'Presumably.' instead of "Presumably not.".

Women also used to be considered crazy (and, to some extent, still are). In her Time article titled 'Declared Insane for Speaking Up: The Dark American History of Silencing Women Through Psychiatry' about women's-rights advocate Elizabeth Packard, author Kate Moore writes:

The received medical wisdom of the [19th century] was that assertive, ambitious women were unnatural, and therefore sick.

Medical scientism.

Women who studied or read—or who simply had minds of their own and a determination to use them—were demonstrating “eccentricity of conduct,” which meant they were “morally insane,” a diagnosis invented by James Cowles Prichard in 1835.

Doctors seem to have a knack for inventing fake diagnoses that get their patients in trouble.

[I]f drugs and straightjackets didn’t work, there was always surgery. Contemporary medical notes reveal that a 20-year-old woman who spent “much time in serious reading” and a 30-year-old wife who dared express “great distaste for her husband” were among those subjected to the latest treatment to cure female insanity: a clitoridectomy [removal of the clitoris].

Mistake epistemological problems for medical ones and you're liable to cause a lot of damage.

And there was only one way to escape: to submit.

Children face the same harsh reality in school. There is no way other way out.

Elizabeth Packard grasped the harsh reality: “If [women] remain, true to their natures, there is no hope for them.”

Brackets are in the original. Replace "women" with 'children' and the sentence still applies. So much so that I have adjusted the subsequent paragraph to apply to schoolchildren:

Every genuine emotion had to be stifled. Every act of difference from society’s prescribed model of [maturity/adulthood] had to be suppressed. Elizabeth could not display her anger at what had happened or even hint at hatred for her [teachers]. Her [teacher] was watching—and her [immature] emotion would justify continued incarceration. After all, [children] who had “ungovernable” personalities and “strong resolution…plenty of what is termed nerve” were literally textbook examples of [child] insanity.

Today, some "ungovernable" children are diagnosed with ADD, placed in detention, given bad grades, and so on.

Moore also shines a light on how much of medical scientism against women still continues to this day:

Think of Rose McGowan, whose resolve to hold Harvey Weinstein to account saw his lawyers discuss a plot to make her seem “increasingly unglued,” a memo revealed.

Still today, many women and especially children are "declared insane [...] simply for speaking [their] mind[s]".

In The Batman (2022) – spoiler alert, I guess – the Riddler says:

[E]very winter one of the babies die [...].

No, really. You can watch him say it here.

How did the director not notice this?

You seem to criticize the idea that brains and in-born brain strength affect our behavior and experience.

I criticize the idea that what we see in the image above is determined by whether we're "left-brained" or "right-brained", as the image claims. I do not doubt that our brains "affect our behavior and experience" to some degree.

What's "brain strength"?

Are you claiming every brain is the exact same universal computer?

No.

How do you explain phenomena such as autism, synesthesia, and intelligence differences?

I don't know enough about autism and synesthesia to say. Differences in intelligence are really differences in knowledge – more precisely, quality of knowledge. Those differences are easy to explain from a Popperian standpoint: two different people often come up with different answers to different problems (and sometimes even to the same problem). More generally, we all create different knowledge in response to the problems we face. As a result, your knowledge may be better in some regards than mine, and so you're more intelligent in those regards than me.

[...] I think it would be interesting to consider that virtue signaling sells more product by creating trust and thus is a capitalistic act [...].

To be clear, are you criticizing capitalism?

I'm not a native speaker but AFAIK 'blood money' is a common term meaning "money obtained at the cost of another's life". See, for example, the Breaking Bad episode titled 'Blood Money'.

Speaking more loosely/figuratively, it's money obtained through violence. (Although, referencing Ayn Rand, when it comes to taxation it's not as figurative as it sounds because "the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life". See The Virtue of Selfishness, chapter 12.)

But I've modified the article to link to the above definition just in case.

I have found four different endings to the same line in a quote by Xenophanes. In BoI, he is quoted as having said:

And even if by chance he were to utter
The perfect truth, he would himself not know it –

Note that the second line ends in a dash. Deutsch cites "Popper’s translation in The World of Parmenides (1998)." Popper does not use a dash – he uses a semicolon (p. 25 and 64) and a period (p. 84 and 137), respectively:

The perfect truth, he would himself not know it;

and

The perfect truth, he would himself not know it.

So Popper isn't consistent. (He is also inconsistent about ending the preceding line "Nor will he know it; neither of the gods" with either a comma or no punctuation.)

Deutsch's quote is a misquote either way since Popper never uses a dash.

In C&R, Popper likewise gives two differing versions of that second line, namely on pages 34 and 205, respectively:

The perfect truth, he would himself not know it;

and

The perfect truth, he would himself not know it:

One ends in a semicolon, the other in a colon.

David Hume is introduced twice in the same chapter (5), only a few pages apart (strictly eyeballing it from the distance in the ebook):

[A]s the philosopher David Hume pointed out, we cannot perceive causation, only a succession of events.

And then, a bit later:

[...] ‘you can’t derive an ought from an is’ (a paraphrase of a remark by the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume).”

This second time, more information is revealed about Hume by associating him with the enlightenment. It would have been better to call Hume an "Enlightenment philosopher" the first time and then just refer to him as 'Hume' the second time.

Hume is not credited in the discussion of the problem of induction in chapter 1.

Kieren, I just stumbled upon a couple of passages in Popper's Objective Knowledge (1983, Oxford Clarendon Press in Oxford).

On p. 67, he speaks of "the logical justification of the preference for one theory over another" (emphasis removed) and calls it "the only kind of ‘justification’ which I believe possible [...]".

He also says on p. 7 (emphasis removed):

[T]he assumption of the truth of test statements sometimes allows us to justify the claim that an explanatory universal theory is false.

Do these quotes help your case?

I think there's an instance of the wrong-number pattern in David Deutsch's 'Taking Children Seriously and fallibilism':

[W]hat passes for rival educational theories all depend on structures of arbitrary authority [...].

The verb should be singular 'depends' because "what" is the subject, and it refers to a singular concept – hence the singular "passes". Deutsch mistakenly took the closer preceding noun 'theories' to be the subject and hence assigned a plural number to the verb.

To play devil's advocate, the word 'what' can be singular or plural. But if it were plural in the quote above, the verb would be 'pass' instead of "passes", and the beginning would read: 'What pass for rival educational theories all depend on structures' – and that doesn't sound right, either. So I don't think 'what' can be plural here.

Lastly, the sentence would read better to me if "rival educational theories" were singular as well. Since, if the number of the word "passes" is correct, whatever "passes" must be singular, it can only be one thing at a time that passes as an educational theory. So, ideally, to my non-native-speaker mind, the sentence would read: 'What passes for a rival educational theory all depends on' etc.

I just noticed that I erroneously quoted Lysander Spooner on a man's rights being his against the whole world twice – once in the main text, once in the previous comment, each from a different source.

I also noticed that the quotes are slightly different, so at least one of them may be a misquote in the given source. (I did verify that I quoted each source correctly; I didn't introduce the error myself.)

I thought of two more things people can do.

First, companies can aggressively poach government workers so there are fewer and fewer government workers left and it gets harder and harder for the government to function on a daily basis because it simply runs out of them. (The private sector has to be willing to pay higher salaries as government workers become scarce.) This approach can also promote the building of private alternatives to government 'services'. For example, consider private-security companies hiring cops.

Second, whenever you interact with a government worker, invite them to think about the source of their salary (it's paid with money that was robbed of peaceful citizens). Then, invite them to consider a switch to the private sector. Not everyone will be convinced, but if even a single person switches, that will be a win.

By the way, in my previous comment I wrote that people should "never work in the 'public' sector". To be clear, they shouldn't work for the public sector either – e.g., they should not accept government contracts.

Speaking of Popper's Open Society, somebody should look into how much overlap there is between his distinction between open and closed societies and Deutsch's distinction between dynamic and static societies. At the very least, Deutsch probably got the idea that one can and should distinguish between different types of society from Popper.

Because your [sic] expecting GPS to work because it worked in the past.

No. I'm expecting it to work because others have good explanations for why it works. Conversely, if those explanations stated that GPS only works for the hemisphere facing the sun at any given moment, I would expect it to work only intermittently. If our explanations said it will stop working in the year 2030 and why (maybe something changes about the universe that destroys it), I would expect it to stop working despite it having worked in the past.

In all those cases, our explanations tell us why GPS worked in the past and why and when it is or isn't going to work in the future. In no case does the explanation say it's going to work in the future because it has worked in the past.

I think you could have just answered “no” [to the question "If we actually did open 30 random jars and all the beads were red, would you not bet on red beads in the next jar?"] since we don’t have to be so careful about restating that we are fallible every time we answer a question.

So shouldn't I have answered 'yes'? Since "I may well" make the mistake of predicting the future from the past. (Note that it remains a mistake methodologically even if I happen to be right about the color of the bead.)

Circling back, this would mean that given 1000 random jars, you would not bet that the final jar contains a red bead, even though the previous 999 jars only contained red beads?

For you it would be just as rational to bet on a blue bead?

Depending on the explanation, yes. Knowing nothing else I probably would bet on the next jar containing only red beads (I think that's what you mean when you say "the final jar contains a red bead", emphasis added). But this strikes me as another case of distinguishing between the logical and the psychological. And, as always, it depends on what Popper calls background knowledge: what if I know the owner of the jars wants to fool me? What if I know there's at least one blue bead in one of the jars and we haven't found it yet? What if I'm at a casino and know a thing or two about how the odds are stacked against customers? What if I don't? Etc.

Is this not a case of using a theory based on its pass success (past testing)?

I don't think so. Why would it be?

Sorry, I’m still not sure how your referenced comments are answering my question. Could you please elaborate on your answer?

Not sure what you're looking for. You asked me if I break symmetry that way and I said "I may well". As in: I'm fallible. I may use wrong ways to break symmetry sometimes, even if I make an effort not do.

Comprimises are made to meet deadlines and a “seems to fix it, but not sure why” can be acceptable. The basis on whether to accept such a solution is often the result of repeated testing. If the bug doesn’t happen more than 1 in 1000, then that might be fit for purpose.

I agree that people do that (hopefully only as a last resort). Of course, then they might find that they can reproduce the bug 1 in 1000 times only in dev, and that in prod it happens every time, or every other time, or whatever.