[FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

[Eric Charles]

Glen said: " I've disagreed with this point before... I think we can and do
model things we don't understand with other things we don't understand...
E.g. if a child uses, say, styrofoam balls to model the solar system..."

I think this might be some sort of linguistic slippage here. Do you agree
with the following?

* When a child tells you that her conglomeration of styrofoam ball, paint,
and metal wire is "a model" of the solar system, the child is claiming that
the styrofoam-balls-model has shares some properties with the solar system.
* For example, the child might understands that the balls are "round", and
intends that aspect to be shared with the planets, i.e., the model leads to
understanding the planets as round objects, rather than points of light in
the sky.

If you agree with *that*, I think you agree with all that Nick or
David/Quine is getting at. Nick isn't asserting than anyone understands
anything better than people actually understand things in practice:
People TRY to use things they THINK they understand, to gain insights into
things the THINK they understand less. And that attempt works only and
exactly as well as it works, with no pretending otherwise.

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor
<echarles at american.edu>


On Fri, May 1, 2020 at 9:22 AM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've disagreed with this point before. So, I won't lay the whole thing out
> again. But I think we can and do model things we don't understand with
> other things we don't understand. We do this all the time. There are 2 main
> things that allow us to do this: 1) we understand, or imagine we
> understand, every thing just a little bit and 2) what little we understand
> about any one thing differs slightly from what little we understand about
> any other thing.
>
> E.g. if a child uses, say, styrofoam balls to model the solar system. We
> can't claim she fully understands styrofoam or the solar system. But what
> she knows about the model is slightly different from what she knows about
> the solar system and planets. And it's that difference in what she does
> (and does not) know about each that makes it an interesting model.
>
> I can do this even with formalism. Mathematicians are called "Platonic"
> precisely because they don't (fully) understand the formalisms they define
> and use.
>
> On 4/30/20 12:41 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> > We cannot use another (perhaps our internal awareness of being
> conscious) instance of consciousness because we do not know/understand it
> either.
> >
> > If we had a computer that was incontrovertibly conscious, then maybe.
> >
> > We certainly have no formalism we can use to think about and come to
> understand consciousness.
>
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
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