[FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

[glen]

I try to be careful about my allusions to "openness". I attribute (perhaps wrongly) the openness of science to Critical Rationalism (Popper, but better described by David Miller). Good (and bad) ideas can come from *anywhere*. Even those miracle people like FGJ Perey can come up with bad ideas. My (false) dichotomy between nonsense and abductive triggers might be problematic. But that's just a distraction. The real point is about the interstitial spaces *between* models, not the models or the ground they cover. I would never ask whether James and/or Husserl are correct. But asking whether they're talking about the same thing is a good question.

The backend of the LLMs seem like mere validation, to me. What's more important is whether the weights and structure of the underlying system span the space of the (natural) language. Let James and Husserl be language models, J and H, themselves. The way J would determine if H is talking about the same thing J is talking about is by talking. When the language expressed by H is enough *like* the language expressed by J, then J will say "yes". If the expressions stably remain dissimilar, or explode in dissimilarity, then J will say "no".

Objectively, if J and H are capable of "online learning", then we might be able to do some kind of similarity measure of their language before they interacted. Then let them yap with each other for, say, 1000 iterations. And measure the [dis]similarity between their expressions at time 0 and their post-interactive expressions. Maybe H brainwashes J such that d(H0,H1) = 0, but d(J0,J1) = d(J0,H0) ... or vice versa.

On 6/5/23 10:45, Steve Smith wrote:
> If/when/as AI (such a broad term, no?) can be used in the mode you describe here somewhat transparently I would likely be open to an "augmented intuition" mode of use....
> 
> and as a point of gratuitous contention, how *does* one tell the difference between "stupid nonsense" and "an abductive candidate for experimental research"?   Is there truly a qualitative difference (in the world) or is that an artifact of our own judgement(s) based on some quantitative threshold(s)?
> 
> Your description of "T" Truth as a spanning kernel for a plurality of theories and models feels quite apt and the way I took the name of the Docuseries "Closer to Truth", very assiduously avoiding the specific "the Truth"...   and implying an "asymptotic" approach not a collision course.
> 
> As I look at the (near) decomposable systems and map it onto (near) spanning trees within process-relation networks of those systems I imagine these LLM training exercises building/finding highly connected clusters (like ganglia in vertebrate neural systems) which fundamentally reflect what KellyAnne Conway so naively claimed as "alternate realities".
> 
> If there is a singular capital T Truth (or capital R Reality) then it is probably at most apprehended by finite beings (who have not achieved Satori, nod to DaveW) as the superposition of many sub-complete T' (or R') descriptions?
> 
> - Steve
> 
> On 6/5/23 10:18 AM, glen wrote:
>> But this misses the point, I think. And, in fact, I think it's a mistake to focus too much on (natural) language models at all, even for things that *seem* to be all about language, like philosophy. I'm most interested in the concept of an embedding <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embedded>. Ideally, I'd like to be able to query a modeling system (e.g. decoding/encoding transformers) for a (vector) space that (accurately) encodes *both* James and Husserl. Then that would help satisfy Marcus' and EricS' task to see if there are gaps between them, or not.
>>
>> The problem has nothing to do, really, with how much one might have to read/think in order to understand anything. Understanding is a delusion. What matters is the differences and similarities between any 2 or more things (processes, devices, systems, whatever 'thing' might mean).
>>
>> These automatic modelers (like the transformers) might help us do that. As for some kind of "ground truth", something that might provide a foundation like the physicists seem to think they have, if our automatic modeling device is capable of embedding all (or most) of all the models surrounding us (over time, space, and individual theorists or collections of theorists), then we can experimentally test for kernels/bases that can span *most* of those theories/models. If such a kernel exists, then it is a candidate for the capital T truth, and any theory/model that is not spanned by that kernel is either stupid nonsense or an abductive candidate for experimental research.
>>
>> On 6/4/23 18:48, Frank Wimberly wrote:
>>> As one of the few, if not the only, person who has been a full time employee of a philosophy department for multiple years, I am quick to defend my former colleagues.  Read "Actual Causation and Thought Experiments" by Glymour and Wimberly in J. K. Campbell, M. O'Rourke & H. S. Silverstein (eds.), Causation and Explanation. MIT Press
>>>
>>> You don't have to read thousands, or even hundreds, of pages to be able to grok that paper.
>>>
>>> ---
>>> Frank C. Wimberly
>>> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
>>> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>>>
>>> 505 670-9918
>>> Santa Fe, NM
>>>
>>> On Sun, Jun 4, 2023, 7:30 PM David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu <mailto:desmith at santafe.edu>> wrote:
>>>
>>>     So there’s a rather concrete way in which one can imagine ChatGPT’s being particularly useful as a time-saver.
>>>
>>>     I have heard it said (and find it persuasive), that philosophy is different from physics because what philosophers want to do and settle for being is different from that for physicists.
>>>
>>>     A physicist can pick up F = ma and start from there to get something done.
>>>
>>>     Each philosopher is, in a sense, a new beginning of the universe, and you are expected to read thousands of pages of his composition to be permitted to engage with him. That is a good barrier to exclude pretty-much-everbody from most conversations.
>>>
>>>     But there are specific topics on which engaging with this group is a game of whack-a-mole, and it would be _so_ satisfying to catch that damned mole far enough out of the hole to pin him down to the board for once.
>>>
>>>     It is on this point:
>>>
>>>     Summarizing what, as Marcus rightly says, as been repeated 10^n times before, CGTP quotes:
>>>
>>>     At the core of radical empiricism is the concept of "pure experience." According to James, pure experience refers to the immediate, unmediated apprehension of reality, devoid of any conceptual or interpretative filters. It involves experiencing the world as it is, without imposing preconceived notions or theories onto the experience.
>>>
>>>     What the HELL does anyone think this is supposed to refer to?  I am not asking whether it actually does refer to anything, but rather what anyone believes he is saying by it.
>>>
>>>     And I can ask that in a rather concrete way.  Were James to engage with Husserl, would he claim that the access to the “immediate apprehension” is by way of the same portal as Husserl’s epoche?
>>>
>>>     I ask because they set themselves up to make a particular style of assertion.
>>>
>>>     By analogy, we have seen that human bodies can do things like Amanars and any of the 4 Bileses (which should have been 5, and would have been were it not for COVID).  But that doesn’t mean every human body can do any of them.  There is rather a lot of specific training that goes into becoming one of the bodies that can do any of this.
>>>
>>>     The various “internal” experience-focused philosophers present these things as doable, but technical and particular and requiring training.
>>>
>>>     But if you then ask what that is about, you get either a demand to follow several thousand pages in each person’s formulation, or the kind of cloudy motivational life-coach speech that almost all of the CGPT summary is composed of.  (Reminds me of something I once heard said of chimp speech: if you aren’t there working with them, you cannot anticipate how mind-numbingly repetitive it is).
>>>
>>>     So rather than asking “what it is” (the skill or whatever), I can ask “If they were arguing with each other, would they even assert to each other, each with his supposed privileged appreciation of the mysteries, assert or deny that they are referring to the same thing.
>>>
>>>     This might allow us to not have to approach the full body of philosophical literature as if each corpus were Sui generis.
>>>
>>>     Eric
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>     On Jun 5, 2023, at 2:43 AM, Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net <mailto:jofr at cas-group.net>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>     ChatGPT now allows sharing conversations. I've asked it about William James book "Essays in Radical Empiricism"
>>>> https://chat.openai.com/share/375aef4e-a8d6-467e-8061-bd85b341c46b <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fchat.openai.com%2fshare%2f375aef4e-a8d6-467e-8061-bd85b341c46b&c=E,1,SrWav4ypspeJiXxANsU84IqWFKy5OPWIx-qHp0YLHpEHLinoe3Q3aAeuo_0eErOe6fnJYosh3T6fflwMl7CsxV2wKAIIwCbBlleeoZM8db1fEE4,&typo=1&ancr_add=1>
>>>>
>>


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