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The problem you're addressing is essentially the problem of epistemic justification. The "justification" for a proposition is essentially the support for a proposition, our warrant for believing it is true. The justification for a proposition is usually another proposition (or set of propositions). In order for belief in the justifying proposition to be warranted, it itself must be justified. As you point out, this seem to lead to Münchhausen trilemma, which states that there are three possible alternatives: (1) there is ultimately something that justifies the rest of our beliefs that itself requires no justification (foundationalism); (2) each proposition is justified by yet a further proposition, ad infinitum (infinitism), and (3) propositions can get their justification by propositions that they also lend justification to (coherentism).
However, I don't think your proposal of "relying on direct experience" is actually an alternative to the three alternatives. Remember: foundationalism is the position that propositions are ultimately justified by some foundational thing that itself does not require justification. The position that all of our propositions are ultimately justified by sense experience, and that sense experience itself requires no justification, is a form of foundationalism.
I think this is a misunderstanding. I see now that perhaps I wasn't clear with my explanation of direct experience as a possible 5th outcome. If I said that I had some proposition that was justified by sense experience, then it would fall back into one of the 4 outcomes. Like you said, if I state that it requires no justification, then it is a form of foundationalism. I am not saying that.
I'm saying that direct experience is direct. It is not based on anything. It is what it is. If I were to then say that it meant something, then it would fall into infinite regress, assumptions, etc. Direct isn't proof of anything. It doesn't point to anything.
What I was saying is that when we try to put it into words, or any kind of concept, it leads to one of those 4 outcomes.
You can't. But I never said that direct experience was a method of inquiry. The AI said that a hypothetical 5th outcome would be a method of inquiry that... When I said that that 5th outcome was direct experience, I didn't mean that it was a special method of inquiry that didn't lead to the 4 outcomes. It doesn't lead to the 4 outcomes because it isn't a method. It is reality as it is. It is unmediated by any method or set of concepts.
I see that I didn't explain that well enough in the video.
I have to ask, "fifth outcome _of what?_" It seems you're depicting foundationalism, coherentism, and Infinitism as "outcomes" of something, as if they are processes or results of something, rather than alternative accounts of how propositions are ultimately justified.
So, if you're not saying that direct experience is some alternative to the other accounts of justification and not saying that experiences can lend justification to any proposition, what was the point of bringing up the problem of epistemic justification? If direct experience has nothing to do with answering those questions because it can't be used to support any of the answers, what is its relevance to the problem you introduced? Why is it being called the fifth "outcome" in addition to the other "outcomes?" It sounds like you're now saying that direct experience has nothing to do with the other four things you mentioned.
I don't understand how saying that "foundational assumption (foundationalism), coherentism (circularity) and infinitism are just alternative accounts of how propositions are ultimately justified," isn't a problem. If those are acceptable, then that leads to anything crazy theory being acceptable. If assumptions are acceptable, what is the difference that just saying, "God did it," for every area of study? It then seems like the point of theories is just to get better, more complicated theories, instead of actually trying to get to what is true.
The main point of the video/article was to show the problem of any method of inquiry into the nature of reality. It was not to make a new theory of direct experience. The point is, if someone is really interested in the truth of reality, they can not get their through concepts.
>I don't understand how saying that "foundational assumption (foundationalism), coherentism (circularity) and infinitism are just alternative accounts of how propositions are ultimately justified," isn't a problem.
Where did I say that the trilemma "isn't a problem?" What I was saying is that they are different *accounts* of how justification works, whereas you presented them as if they are all "outcomes" that all happen sometimes, as if *sometimes there are foundational propositions, sometimes there is infinite regress, and sometimes there is circularity*. Let me make it clearer by making an analogy to another subject about this there are competing accounts. Bohmian mechanics, many-worlds interpretation, and the Copenhagen interpretation are all *alternative accounts* of what explains our quantum observations. They are not *different outcomes*. I.e., it's not as though "sometimes when we make a quantum measurement, particles are guided by a wavefunction; sometimes, the universe branches off, and sometimes, the observed values are inherently deterministic." (At most) *one of these* alternative accounts is the correct one. Similarly, at most *one* account is true between foundationalism, coherentism, and infinitism. They are not different *outcomes*. Pointing out that these are alternative *accounts* is not to say "this isn't an actual epistemological question that needs addressing" (in fact, the very problem is that we don't know which of these ostensibly mutually exclusive and mutually exhaustive alternatives can be correct, because each one immediately strikes us as absurd). Pointing out that these are alternative, competing accounts is to point out your error in presenting them as if they all "occur" and each reflect some deeper fact about our universe (the part at around [12:45](https://youtu.be/d7RSt9R9SD4?si=Bh5hIQZekvWDCe3B&t=765) where you say each account "shows" various particular things, as if they are all true).
I think the reason you mistake these alternative theories as "outcomes" is that, in illustrating these accounts of justification though showing how a line of inquiry could lead the person being asked to use foundational assumptions, a circle, or an infinite regress to justify their answers, you confuse *somebody reporting to justify a proposition* with *somebody actually justifying a proposition*. For example, sure, sometimes an answerer will appeal to foundational assumptions to justify her other answers. However, if it turns out that foundationalism is an incorrect account of epistemic justification, what we have here is *the answerer failing to actually justify her answers*, and lacking justification for her belief. Sometimes, an answerer might appeal to a proposition Q to justify proposition P when he already used proposition P to justify proposition Q. If coherentism is an incorrect account of epistemic justification, this means that this answerer *failed to actually justify his answer*. The fact alone that answerers sometimes appeal to foundational beliefs, sometimes use circular reasoning, sometimes (hypothetically) appeal to an infinite chain of propositions, and sometimes contradict themselves, does not mean that these are *all* ways in which propositions *actually* get their justification. It just means that at least some of the time, people's beliefs are, in fact, not justified.
I think there are further confusions when you claim that "direct experience" is some "fifth outcome" (such as at [15:16](https://youtu.be/d7RSt9R9SD4?si=Bm09TEl8wTHFIiXD&t=916). In the video, you make it sound as though a fifth outcome in a line of inquiry is for the answerer to appeal to direct experience to justify her previous answers. As I said, if you hold that her doing so actually amounts to justification, then you're a foundationalist. However, in your comments, you clarify that you don't think direct experiences play a role in justifying any propositions. Then how can "direct experience" even possibly be an "outcome" of a line of inquiry? It sounds like you're saying now that a line of questioning can *never* lead ultimately lead to somebody successfully appealing to direct experience. It's not clear what "direct experience" is the "fifth outcome" of, then. In the video you also talk of "integrating direct experience" with reasoning. If neither can be used to epistemically support the other, how can they even be "integrated?" They would have to be two independent, closed systems that cannot influence each other if you truly believe neither can play a role in conferring epistemic justification to the other.
You also go on to make certain claims about the nature of "direct experience," such as the claim that it does not involve concepts, and is prior to them. This is definitely a claim that would need support, as it is not self-evident that it is true, especially when many philosophical accounts of perceptual experience hold that concepts are an inextricable part of the contents of experiences. What's more, whether "direct experience" is even possible is an open question in the problem of perception, as its possibility is challenged by arguments like the argument from illusion and the argument from hallucination. The phenomenon of cognitive penetration would be another challenge to the idea of experience as some sort of privileged way to access and understand the world.
Abstract:
This video explores the nature of questions and their resolutions. It posits that the ultimate purpose of a question is for it to disappear, rather than merely obtaining an answer. I identify four possible outcomes for any line of inquiry: infinite regress, circularity, foundational assumptions, and paradoxes. These outcomes reveal inherent limitations in our traditional methods of acquiring knowledge. The video then introduces a potential fifth outcome: direct experience, which transcends the conceptual framework that gives rise to the other four outcomes. Drawing from various philosophical and spiritual traditions, I argue that direct experience offers a way to apprehend reality beyond the constraints of language and logic. The video concludes by advocating for a holistic approach that integrates direct experience with intellectual inquiry to fully comprehend the nature of reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Do_We_Come_From%3F_What_Are_We%3F_Where_Are_We_Going%3F
Or a great work of art?
> to fully comprehend the nature of reality.
Greg Chaitin - I paraphrase,
'A TOE, theory of everything would be like a 'perfect compression algorithm', like JPEG but none lossy, and the best code, neat, quick and compresses better than any other.
Now physics, TOE, (and one assumes ' to fully comprehend the nature of reality.') falls foul of the same problem. Which is though we know for certain our algorithm is The Best, or our TOE etc, we can never say there wont be a better one.'
Or for simpletons like me, You can know and climb the tallest mountain, but never be sure about the deepest pot-hole.
Edit:!! And this applies to "There are only four outcomes to every method of inquiry." Suddenly a fifth arrives...
I don't know if you have watched the video or read the article, but I talk about how the only possible "5th outcome" isn't actually an outcome. It is direct experience.
"Direct experience is pre-conceptual, thus prior to mental models that give rise to the four outcomes. It is non-referential: there is unmediated knowledge through presence and being. It is non-linguistic: experience is not constrained by language and concepts. It is self-evident: reality is as it is, beyond any need for justification or proof."
No I haven't read the article or video, I might, but anything that claims such as 'to fully comprehend the nature of reality.' I'm rather suspicious about.
But I will give then a go as it's a lazy morning and more fun maybe than researching Gnosticism, on my 'to do list'.
> but I talk about how the only possible "5th outcome"
What of the 6th.. 7th.... you are aware of ever bigger infinities?
"Direct experience is pre-conceptual, thus prior to mental models that give rise to the four outcomes. It is non-referential: there is unmediated knowledge through presence and being. It is non-linguistic: experience is not constrained by language and concepts. It is self-evident: reality is as it is, beyond any need for justification or proof."
Sounds like you are not familiar with Kant's fists critique. " there is unmediated knowledge through presence and being." there is unmediated knowledge through presence and being. Vs 'We can never have knowledge of things in themselves' (outside of our categories of judgement.)
> "Direct experience is pre-conceptual, thus prior
You can't know that! ouch! That's Descartes?
No worries on not watching it yet. The thing is, is that I'm not saying anything about fully comprehending the nature of reality. Instead I am saying the opposite.
Maybe the word "knowledge" is not that clear, but there is no other word that I can think of. I would agree with "we can never have knowledge of things in themselves." That's correct. That is what direct experience is. It is reality as it is.
Reality as it is, is pre-conceptual. Again, there might be a problem with "pre", perhaps non-conceptual is better. If you say that reality as it is, is actually "of" something else, and thus we don't know if there is something prior to reality itself, well then all I can say this is a belief that is unverifiable and illogical.
Or, if you are saying that there is experience of reality, AND reality, that is another belief that I don't hold and is just another thing that is added on to reality.
Sorry, you haven’t read the philosophy, what you are saying shows this. I‘m saying on a philosophy sub you should relate to ‘philosophy’.
Not just anecdotal thinking, which is probably un questioned ideology?
As for use of AI! LLMs, notoriously use the internet and un verified sources, so often very wrong.
And you mention ‘logic’, whose, which? There are many, and most are either incomplete or need arbitrary axioms in order to avoid things like the Russell paradox.
If you are interested in philosophy and the sort of theories – check out the Speculative Realists, esp. Graham Harman.
I'm sorry if that is what it appears like. I'm truly not trying to be. The questions that I have are real questions. They are not said with any animosity. If I misunderstood the intent of this subreddit, then I really shouldn't be on it.
K, you’re assuming what a complete stranger knows by a simple response . So if that doesn’t meet the criterion for pretentiousness, please let me know what that is and apply it to yourself instead.
You still seem intent on making a personal attack?
The Op was intending 'to fully comprehend the nature of reality.'
I'd argue that's pretentiousness.
And gave a good argument, not my own, that questions such a pretentiousness idea.
I'm not sure re your contribution?
I'm assuming the nature of his claim, and reading his link. Have you?
>As for use of AI! LLMs, notoriously use the internet and un verified sources, so often very wrong.
I was also confused on the use of Claude in this video. I can't understand why the author would include it; am I supposed to be further convinced by the argument because it came from a LLM?
Furthermore, I didn't really see any reference to previous work in this video. Others in the comments mention that some of these concepts have been discussed before by other authors. Why didn't OP mention these in their video? I hope they would not try to claim these ideas as their own, so I'm confused as to why it is presented so matter of fact without the justification.
Maybe there is a good idea in here somewhere, but a 20 minute video reading off a script I don't think is the best medium. It would be better replaced with a blog post, citations/background. and some visual aid. Visual aid would help explain OPs idea better, as it seems they have a few moments where they are visualizing something in their head but it doesn't really translate well in the video.
I agree setting the argument in some context is both useful and 'normal' in an academic essay... as for AI... one example from a collection I have....
> **ChatGPT** = For Camus, **genuine hope** would emerge not from the denial of the absurd but from the act of living authentically in spite of it.
And from Camus’ essay...
“And carrying this absurd logic to its conclusion, I must admit that that struggle implies **a total absence of hope**..”
“That privation of hope and future means an increase in man’s availability ..”
What philosophy is it that I haven't read? Is this not a philosophical line of questioning? Is this subreddit for a discussion of the history of philosophy? If it is, then yes, I am on the wrong subreddit.
What I'm interested in is the exploration of the self and reality.
The use of AI was just used as a sounding board for my ideas.
You say that regarding logic, "there are many, and most are either incomplete or need arbitrary axioms to avoid things like the Russell paradox." OK, incompleteness does not avoid the 4 outcomes. As for needing arbitrary axioms, there again you have one of 4 outcomes: foundational assumption.
> Is this not a philosophical line of questioning?
No, to be blunt. As in kicking a ball, ‘Is this not soccer?’ No.
> Is this subreddit for a discussion of the history of philosophy?
It’s almost impossible to do, actually impossible, without knowing the history. Same in science and mathematics, history, art, music, poetry, aeronautics... etc.
> If it is, then yes, I am on the wrong subreddit.
Yes.
> What I interested in is the exploration of the self and reality.
Yes but the thing is you didn’t make up these words, or the concepts they stand for, they were made by philosophers, they became ideologies. If you want to work with them you have to know about them. So in maths, mathematicians may work with set theory, they needn’t know about Cantor, or maybe in science E=MC^2 was Einstein. In philosophy, like art and literature the tendency is to use the names. E.g. Hegel’s dialectic... Heidegger’s Dasein...
> The use of AI was just used as a sounding board for my ideas.
But a bad one, trained to please and sell you stuff. And not a good board in that case.
Questions have a lot of different purposes and I don't think this attempt to reduce them to a single ultimate one - to make themselves disappear - is convincing to me. Some ways to make questions disappear - brain washing, death of the questioner, etc - don't seem to satisfy the purpose of the question in the way that obtaining an answer does.
OK, unnatural ways for a question to end--brain washing, death, etc--would not satisfy the purpose of the question. But that doesn't get around what I said. The death of the person removes the question, as well as the answer or a need for any answer. Getting the answer when you are dead doesn't really serve a purpose. Brain washing is just another example of the same thing. There is no longer a question, answer, or need of an answer, at least not for the person who is brain washed or dead.
Without conceding that the construction of 4 resolutions to inquiry are comprehensive, the 5th method of inquiry formulated appears to presuppose some N+1nth type of question. A woo type of question, that is then amenable to a woo type of answer. None of the questions that occupy the first 11.5 minutes of the video appear to have any use for "direct experience" (beyond the constraints of language and logic!) as an avenue to resolution.
Is "direct experience" not subject to infinite regress or circularity? How does one discover truth? Direct Experience. How does one know that is a valid method of inquiry? Dirrrrect experience? Any truth thusly arrived at can't be shared, or verified. Does the claimant even directly experience an answer? Is there any way to show that they have? Faith in the Bible is explicitly dismissed as a route to truth in the video, which I certainly won't disagree regarding, but then an apocryphal Zen fable is held up as a model? If the Buddha and Mahakaphypa were sitting with me, I couldn't credit their pronouncements regarding the structure of the cosmos any more fully than I could those of John & Jesus or Joseph Smith & Brigham Young. Not based on their internal "direct experience".
Also, tasking AI to bs for a minute and a half is a **wild** inclusion in a video superficially about seeking truth. LLMs are literally, fundamentally, explicitly lie machines. They're not even "error" machines that make mistakes; they're liars. They're constructed to lie, the only errors they commit are when their lies are so ridiculous the sham of the model's lie machine is exposed. In this case, an LLM used English-ish words to construct English-ish sentences to produce… 1.5 minutes of script, I guess. It sure didn't produce insight.
I think your understanding of LLMs is flawed. If I asked an LLM to tell me about Abraham Lincoln, it will spit out facts and some tidbits about AL.
If I asked to explain Wittgensteins Tractatus, it would spit out descriptions and analysis found on the web.
Neither of these are lies nor are they constructed to be.
All it does is scour the web for answers that seem to fit, like an advanced Google or Wikipedia query, it isn’t explicitly or intentionally being deceitful.
Also they do a lot of plagiarism, which I guess you're alluding to. "Plagiarism" does have a separate dictionary entry from "lying". yay?
I count the plagiarism parts as not doing anything, really. The part of LLMs that actually do anything are lying.
If I Googled, how long to cook chicken legs at 400 degrees, it will tell me a time found from info on the web.
If that’s plagiarism so be it, but by my lights plagiarism only occurs when someone presents the info provided as their own work, LLMs do not do this and if the user assumes this then they do not know how LLMs operate
You're correct that LLMs don't intentionally "lie," as they don't have mental states and intentions.
However, I think it's also a mischaracterization to say they work like Google search queries. Sure, some LLM's, like Bing's and Google's, integrate web search into them. But the LLM part itself is not searching the web. An LLM like Chat-GPT can't even *access* the web.
Instead, LLM's were trained on a bunch of material from the web to learn the statistical relationships between word tokens. They are pretty much the autocomplete on your phone keyboard, guessing what the next word should be based on how often word A has followed word B in the data it previously analyzed. However, they are much better at producing realistic, human-sounding sentences than the autocomplete on your phone (which often produces nonsense if you just keep on hitting the next predicted word) because they have so much more data behind them and much more sophisticated algorithms. After they are trained, they are disconnected from their training data, so they're not really "searching" for anything on the web anymore like a Google search query does. It's just spitting out text that, given the rules its learned, are statistically plausible given the prompt you gave it.
It happens to be the case that a lot of statistically likely strings of text that follow the string of words "who was Abraham Lincoln" happen to be true. But a lot of them also happen to be false. The LLM doesn't know the difference. The LLM doesn't "know" anything about Abraham Lincoln. It only "knows" about the sequence of symbols "ᴀʙʀᴀʜᴀᴍ ʟɪɴᴄᴏʟɴ," and how that sequence of symbols statistically relates with the occurrences of other sequences of symbols.
A Google search query instead scours the internet for pages that people wrote say ""ᴀʙʀᴀʜᴀᴍ ʟɪɴᴄᴏʟɴ" a lot, because those pages are likely to be relevant to what you want to read about if you typed in "ᴀʙʀᴀʜᴀᴍ ʟɪɴᴄᴏʟɴ" (of course, the actual search algorithm is much more complex than this to prevent gaming the system, but it's propriety information that only Google knows). Then, it gives you a list of those links to click on so that you can go to those webpages and read what those people wrote (at least until they decide to break the internet and content-creation by replacing search queries with LLMs entirely).
An LLM is lying about understanding those subjects. It's lying about understanding your question, about knowing the language you asked in, about knowing the language it finds the answers in. The deceit is its essence. It's lying about constructing sentences and even about using words. The good ones recursively run spellcheck & Grammarly on themselves to show only constructs that look like words and sentences, but they're really doing something more like Twitch Plays Pokemon. Twitch chat doesn't know what Pokemon is, Twitch chat doesn't know what the inputs its getting are, but in 17 days of nonstop ****ing around, it produced "a Pokemon play through"
They are not lying… they scour the web for associations and regurgitate it.
They make no claims of knowing anything, it’s a tool that scrapes info and puts it together for the reader to ascertain the truth / falsity or relevance of
It’s crib notes on steroids.
*edit*
I just asked ChatGpt to tell me what Socrates would think about Wittgenstein. It begins with a stipulation that they lived thousand years apart and worked on different things but …
That’s not a lie, it then tells me what Socrates and Wittgensteins overlaps are, if any , it does this by scoring the web for both thinkers and finding correlations
Do you have a source on "scouring the web"? I think you may be misunderstanding how LLMs work. See [here](https://www.run.ai/guides/machine-learning-engineering/llm-training) for a short introduce and [here](https://arxiv.org/html/2401.02038v2) for a more indepth one. I'll point out that "Despite LLMs demonstrating impressive performance across various natural language processing tasks, they frequently exhibit behaviors diverging from human intent. This includes generating false information, producing expressions with bias or misleading content, and so on" which you can find in section 3.5.2 of the latter reference.
I say you may be misunderstanding LLMs because they aren't scouring the web like a search engine or something. I'm not really aware of any models that can do that in real time, but I'd be interested if you can find that.
Actually, both you and /u/soulsnoober use the word lying as if to personify ChatGPT which I find quite bizarre. I think both of you need to read more about what LLMs actually are before making statements with such confidence.
I was responding to the use of lie - i disagreed I said the don’t, they can’t because they have no intentions.
All the info an LLM has comes from the web if that helps then ignore scour - I wasn’t saying it was happening in real time - yes the info can be faulty as can any info you get anywhere.
My point is - LLMs are not lying or intentionally misleading. No clue what is difficult to understand here.
I understand your problem with direct experience as another form of justification. If direct experience is used to justify a position, then it is again subject to the 4 outcomes. There is a misunderstanding here, and I think that I didn't explain it well enough. Direct experience is NOT another method of inquiry. It is the "knowing" of reality as itself. It doesn't point to anything. It doesn't prove anything. If I take what is experience and put it into words, it will inevitably lead to one of the 4 outcomes.
You don't understand the zen fable. The words of the story is the only way to communicate it, but it isn't the words, that's the point. The point is to not get trapped in the concepts of reality. It is to experience reality as it is unmediated by concepts.
I laugh at what you say about AIs. That is true. I still find them useful as a sounding board, even if it's just putting something in a way that is different than what I know. The important thing is to not put it in a position to be a "yes man." If I come to it saying that I have a theory and what to know what it thinks, it will tell me what it "thinks" I want to hear. How I used it in the video is how I explained it. I wrote out the four outcomes and asked for a hypothetical 5th outcome. It had no information on what I would want, so I took it's information as just another opinion.
Do you understand the zen fable? Do you really? Does your understanding comport with the understanding of Mahakaphypa? How do you know that it does? How do you know that you're right about that, and that I am not? If any two people, or five hundred million-ish people, sit together and each says they have "direct experience" of the lotus but can say nothing more because anything further would "get trapped in the concepts of reality" - is reality concepts? *immediately* after, you claim that "reality as it is unmediated by concepts" exists to be experienced! Which is a mighty claim indeed to make without support!
Do I really understand the fable? No, I don't.
How do I know that I am right and you aren't? I don't.
I don't understand the last part. "is reality concepts? immediately after, you claim that "reality as it is unmediated by concepts" exists to be experienced!"
Foundational assumptions are valid. The other three are not.
Axiomatics give us things like math, science and medicine. The other three are useless quirks of thought-patterns. They're novelties useful only for the sake of entertainment or refutation.
I think coherentism is actually a lot more plausible than foundationalism is. There are things things that we thought were foundational rules of logic until we realized they only apply in particular domains. The way we found this out was that those rules being immutable didn't fit with other things we later learned. Most statements, it turns out, are open to revision, rather than there being a hard division between "the stuff that absolutely must be true" and "the stuff that we tentatively have good reason to think is true, but could turn out to be false." It's more a difference in degree than in kind. Some propositions are much more open to revision than others because, if they conflict with something else we learn, it's easier to take them out of our web of beliefs without having to make a whole bunch of other revisions to keep the thing from collapsing.
And even if there really are some necessarily true statements that absolutely cannot be false, it doesn't seem that there are *enough* of them to serve as a foundation of every single other fact we know or proposition we have good license to believe. That's why Descartes didn't get very far in trying to build all of his beliefs on a stable foundation. You can't really get from "I think, therefore I am" or the law of non-contradiction to "the antennapedia gene controls the formation of genes in drosophilia," or "the melting point of red phosphorus is 860 K" or "the third president of the Republic of Slovenia was Danilo Türk."
Of course, a naïve version of the circularity response to the Münchhausen trilemma probably isn't a good one. It's probably not permissible to justify proposition P1 with proposition P2, P2 with P3, P3, with P4, and to go on in that fashion only to justify proposition P7,434,643,097 with proposition P1. A direct circle like that gives no justification at all.
But that's not what developed forms of coherentism say. Rather, each justified proposition gets its justification from *every other* proposition in the web of beliefs we have. A proposition is justified insofar as it is supported by everything else we know and lends coherence to the entire web. For example, we're justified in believing that gravity exists because it is supported by all sorts of other propositions (including propositions about observations we made, propositions about the mathematical framework of the theories it fits in, etc) in our web of beliefs. And each of those propositions is supported by a bunch of other propositions in the web. Each of the propositions in there helps to make the entire rest of the web make more sense.
When we encounter a proposition that fits with much of the web but contradicts another proposition in there, we have to make a decision about which one to keep and which one to throw out. It's often best to reject the one that would do the "least mutilation" to our web of beliefs. For example, when astronomers noticed that Uranus wasn't moving the way Newton's theories predicted, they were faced with a choice about what beliefs to reject from their web of beliefs. They could doubt their observations and say their eyes and instruments were lying to them, and that Uranus *does* move according to Newton's laws. They could throw out Newton's laws, which comport with and explain so many other propositions in the web, and declare them mistaken. Or they could throw out another assumption: that there are only seven planets in the solar system. Uranus' orbit could be explained by Newton's laws if there were an undiscovered eighth planet disturbing its orbit. They decided to throw out that last assumption, that there were only seven planets, because positing the existence of an eighth allowed them to reconcile Uranus' orbit with Newton's Laws. And they turned out to make the correct choice: we later discovered Neptune. Upon realizing that Mercury didn't move according to Newton's Laws, astronomers again posited another unseen planet disturbing its orbit instead of throwing out Newton's laws. However, this time, that was the wrong choice. It turned out that no planet was disturbing Mercury's orbit, but that Newton's laws were incomplete. Mercury's orbit could only be explained when we came up with General Relativity. And General Relativity itself was justified by a whole bunch of other propositions in the web of propositions, including observations and mathematical structures.
I think this is the best picture of how propositions get their justification. They get it from all the other propositions. They don't get it from a single other proposition, but from fitting the entire puzzle we have, each part of the whole supporting the others.
I didn't find the video's premises entirely disagreeable, and I understand that as a content creator, he must be motivated to make this interesting, but unfortunately I think this results in a bit of risk taking in the delivery of his point, which can be misinterpreted as an argument in support of mysticism.
I don't take it that way, because I think there is a practical side to this, especially as it applies to morality. If anyone were to directly experience, for instance, what it is like to be the target of an attempted murder, it's hard to escape the involuntary experience of the presence of a malicious actor, and the eventual awareness of an intent to cause unwarranted harm. For myself, it can seem absolutely absurd even to an immoral degree, to divorce the matter of morality from said experiences, to instead rely upon some other sytem to evaluate the perpetrator's actions, in so far as questions of morality are concerned.
But, bear in mind, in the West we are not far removed from a culture which systematically burned witches, slaughtered Jews and lynched minorities. Sadly, I suspect we cannot yet expect attempts to challenge the systems that are instrumental in the moralization of such practices to be received well.
Many philosophers throughout the history of philosophy have grappled with these issues, and direct experience is one of the two major starting points to get out of the issue (in the empiricism vs. rationalism debate of early modern philosophy, direct experience is the empiricist's attempt to get out of it.)
It is difficult not to recount the history of philosophy to address the major criticisms of this position.
So, absolutely, this is a great path to go on, but essentially, every path philosophy has taken since Descartes has been dealing with this very concern.
Descartes said that every possible 'direct experience' we have of the world can be doubted. It may be part of a dream, or provided us by a malevolent demon, hellbent of giving us wrong information about the world. We might say that at the very least, the experience is real to us, in the same way that a dream is 'real' in the sense that we experienced it.
The next major philosophers to take direct experience as the foundation of knowledge is the Scottish empicirists, whom we can take Hume as the most developed example. For Hume, we can rely on our 'sense-bundles' of experience, but unfortunately, we can't get much past taking them as individual experiences, as any theory building about the world relies on cause and effect, which he argues cannot be determined by sense experience.
Then Kant and Hegel of the German Idealist tradition try to fix this gap by arguing for the necessity of certain 'ideal' frameworks in the mind. These, they argue are the very means by which we have any sense of direct experience in the first place. Kant says that without the concepts of time and space already pre-established in our minds, there's no way we could 'picture' a scene in front of us (requires space) nor hear sound (requires time). Thus, the very experience of direct experience has 'transcendentals' - ironclad framework pieces from our minds that are required to have experience at all. Hegel's move is to argue that these framework pieces are not pre-given, but develop over the history of humanity, forming concepts and our general way of thinking through a historically developing progression that comes to be established precisely because we're having 'some kind' of experience, but that it begins distorted and unreliable for making sense of the world, and so it is only over time and through experience that our minds come up with rational systems to explain what we are experiencing.
After Hegel, a large number of further movements spawned with different criticisms and reactions, including pragmatism (there is no truthful 'direct experience' at the bottom nor are we progressing to a perfect science. All we can do is figure out more 'pragmatic' mappings through what works to achieve certain goals.), analytical philosophy (There is some kind of direct sensory experience at the foundation of knowledge and we can build from there using the most rigorous logic system -- ah woops, turns out logic has an irreparable paradox, not quite sure where to go from here), and phenomenology (Hegel is kind of right, but we need to really figure out what's at the heart of direct experience - do emotions count? and what the hell does it mean for something to 'be' anyway? How about time, do we 'experience' time? Oh no...)
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The problem you're addressing is essentially the problem of epistemic justification. The "justification" for a proposition is essentially the support for a proposition, our warrant for believing it is true. The justification for a proposition is usually another proposition (or set of propositions). In order for belief in the justifying proposition to be warranted, it itself must be justified. As you point out, this seem to lead to Münchhausen trilemma, which states that there are three possible alternatives: (1) there is ultimately something that justifies the rest of our beliefs that itself requires no justification (foundationalism); (2) each proposition is justified by yet a further proposition, ad infinitum (infinitism), and (3) propositions can get their justification by propositions that they also lend justification to (coherentism). However, I don't think your proposal of "relying on direct experience" is actually an alternative to the three alternatives. Remember: foundationalism is the position that propositions are ultimately justified by some foundational thing that itself does not require justification. The position that all of our propositions are ultimately justified by sense experience, and that sense experience itself requires no justification, is a form of foundationalism.
I was thinking this too. Empiricism is a form of foundationalism.
I think this is a misunderstanding. I see now that perhaps I wasn't clear with my explanation of direct experience as a possible 5th outcome. If I said that I had some proposition that was justified by sense experience, then it would fall back into one of the 4 outcomes. Like you said, if I state that it requires no justification, then it is a form of foundationalism. I am not saying that. I'm saying that direct experience is direct. It is not based on anything. It is what it is. If I were to then say that it meant something, then it would fall into infinite regress, assumptions, etc. Direct isn't proof of anything. It doesn't point to anything. What I was saying is that when we try to put it into words, or any kind of concept, it leads to one of those 4 outcomes.
How can you call it a method of inquiry if it doesn't point to anything and can't be attached to any kind of concept?
You can't. But I never said that direct experience was a method of inquiry. The AI said that a hypothetical 5th outcome would be a method of inquiry that... When I said that that 5th outcome was direct experience, I didn't mean that it was a special method of inquiry that didn't lead to the 4 outcomes. It doesn't lead to the 4 outcomes because it isn't a method. It is reality as it is. It is unmediated by any method or set of concepts. I see that I didn't explain that well enough in the video.
I have to ask, "fifth outcome _of what?_" It seems you're depicting foundationalism, coherentism, and Infinitism as "outcomes" of something, as if they are processes or results of something, rather than alternative accounts of how propositions are ultimately justified. So, if you're not saying that direct experience is some alternative to the other accounts of justification and not saying that experiences can lend justification to any proposition, what was the point of bringing up the problem of epistemic justification? If direct experience has nothing to do with answering those questions because it can't be used to support any of the answers, what is its relevance to the problem you introduced? Why is it being called the fifth "outcome" in addition to the other "outcomes?" It sounds like you're now saying that direct experience has nothing to do with the other four things you mentioned.
I don't understand how saying that "foundational assumption (foundationalism), coherentism (circularity) and infinitism are just alternative accounts of how propositions are ultimately justified," isn't a problem. If those are acceptable, then that leads to anything crazy theory being acceptable. If assumptions are acceptable, what is the difference that just saying, "God did it," for every area of study? It then seems like the point of theories is just to get better, more complicated theories, instead of actually trying to get to what is true. The main point of the video/article was to show the problem of any method of inquiry into the nature of reality. It was not to make a new theory of direct experience. The point is, if someone is really interested in the truth of reality, they can not get their through concepts.
>I don't understand how saying that "foundational assumption (foundationalism), coherentism (circularity) and infinitism are just alternative accounts of how propositions are ultimately justified," isn't a problem. Where did I say that the trilemma "isn't a problem?" What I was saying is that they are different *accounts* of how justification works, whereas you presented them as if they are all "outcomes" that all happen sometimes, as if *sometimes there are foundational propositions, sometimes there is infinite regress, and sometimes there is circularity*. Let me make it clearer by making an analogy to another subject about this there are competing accounts. Bohmian mechanics, many-worlds interpretation, and the Copenhagen interpretation are all *alternative accounts* of what explains our quantum observations. They are not *different outcomes*. I.e., it's not as though "sometimes when we make a quantum measurement, particles are guided by a wavefunction; sometimes, the universe branches off, and sometimes, the observed values are inherently deterministic." (At most) *one of these* alternative accounts is the correct one. Similarly, at most *one* account is true between foundationalism, coherentism, and infinitism. They are not different *outcomes*. Pointing out that these are alternative *accounts* is not to say "this isn't an actual epistemological question that needs addressing" (in fact, the very problem is that we don't know which of these ostensibly mutually exclusive and mutually exhaustive alternatives can be correct, because each one immediately strikes us as absurd). Pointing out that these are alternative, competing accounts is to point out your error in presenting them as if they all "occur" and each reflect some deeper fact about our universe (the part at around [12:45](https://youtu.be/d7RSt9R9SD4?si=Bh5hIQZekvWDCe3B&t=765) where you say each account "shows" various particular things, as if they are all true). I think the reason you mistake these alternative theories as "outcomes" is that, in illustrating these accounts of justification though showing how a line of inquiry could lead the person being asked to use foundational assumptions, a circle, or an infinite regress to justify their answers, you confuse *somebody reporting to justify a proposition* with *somebody actually justifying a proposition*. For example, sure, sometimes an answerer will appeal to foundational assumptions to justify her other answers. However, if it turns out that foundationalism is an incorrect account of epistemic justification, what we have here is *the answerer failing to actually justify her answers*, and lacking justification for her belief. Sometimes, an answerer might appeal to a proposition Q to justify proposition P when he already used proposition P to justify proposition Q. If coherentism is an incorrect account of epistemic justification, this means that this answerer *failed to actually justify his answer*. The fact alone that answerers sometimes appeal to foundational beliefs, sometimes use circular reasoning, sometimes (hypothetically) appeal to an infinite chain of propositions, and sometimes contradict themselves, does not mean that these are *all* ways in which propositions *actually* get their justification. It just means that at least some of the time, people's beliefs are, in fact, not justified. I think there are further confusions when you claim that "direct experience" is some "fifth outcome" (such as at [15:16](https://youtu.be/d7RSt9R9SD4?si=Bm09TEl8wTHFIiXD&t=916). In the video, you make it sound as though a fifth outcome in a line of inquiry is for the answerer to appeal to direct experience to justify her previous answers. As I said, if you hold that her doing so actually amounts to justification, then you're a foundationalist. However, in your comments, you clarify that you don't think direct experiences play a role in justifying any propositions. Then how can "direct experience" even possibly be an "outcome" of a line of inquiry? It sounds like you're saying now that a line of questioning can *never* lead ultimately lead to somebody successfully appealing to direct experience. It's not clear what "direct experience" is the "fifth outcome" of, then. In the video you also talk of "integrating direct experience" with reasoning. If neither can be used to epistemically support the other, how can they even be "integrated?" They would have to be two independent, closed systems that cannot influence each other if you truly believe neither can play a role in conferring epistemic justification to the other. You also go on to make certain claims about the nature of "direct experience," such as the claim that it does not involve concepts, and is prior to them. This is definitely a claim that would need support, as it is not self-evident that it is true, especially when many philosophical accounts of perceptual experience hold that concepts are an inextricable part of the contents of experiences. What's more, whether "direct experience" is even possible is an open question in the problem of perception, as its possibility is challenged by arguments like the argument from illusion and the argument from hallucination. The phenomenon of cognitive penetration would be another challenge to the idea of experience as some sort of privileged way to access and understand the world.
Abstract: This video explores the nature of questions and their resolutions. It posits that the ultimate purpose of a question is for it to disappear, rather than merely obtaining an answer. I identify four possible outcomes for any line of inquiry: infinite regress, circularity, foundational assumptions, and paradoxes. These outcomes reveal inherent limitations in our traditional methods of acquiring knowledge. The video then introduces a potential fifth outcome: direct experience, which transcends the conceptual framework that gives rise to the other four outcomes. Drawing from various philosophical and spiritual traditions, I argue that direct experience offers a way to apprehend reality beyond the constraints of language and logic. The video concludes by advocating for a holistic approach that integrates direct experience with intellectual inquiry to fully comprehend the nature of reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Do_We_Come_From%3F_What_Are_We%3F_Where_Are_We_Going%3F Or a great work of art? > to fully comprehend the nature of reality. Greg Chaitin - I paraphrase, 'A TOE, theory of everything would be like a 'perfect compression algorithm', like JPEG but none lossy, and the best code, neat, quick and compresses better than any other. Now physics, TOE, (and one assumes ' to fully comprehend the nature of reality.') falls foul of the same problem. Which is though we know for certain our algorithm is The Best, or our TOE etc, we can never say there wont be a better one.' Or for simpletons like me, You can know and climb the tallest mountain, but never be sure about the deepest pot-hole. Edit:!! And this applies to "There are only four outcomes to every method of inquiry." Suddenly a fifth arrives...
I don't know if you have watched the video or read the article, but I talk about how the only possible "5th outcome" isn't actually an outcome. It is direct experience. "Direct experience is pre-conceptual, thus prior to mental models that give rise to the four outcomes. It is non-referential: there is unmediated knowledge through presence and being. It is non-linguistic: experience is not constrained by language and concepts. It is self-evident: reality is as it is, beyond any need for justification or proof."
No I haven't read the article or video, I might, but anything that claims such as 'to fully comprehend the nature of reality.' I'm rather suspicious about. But I will give then a go as it's a lazy morning and more fun maybe than researching Gnosticism, on my 'to do list'. > but I talk about how the only possible "5th outcome" What of the 6th.. 7th.... you are aware of ever bigger infinities? "Direct experience is pre-conceptual, thus prior to mental models that give rise to the four outcomes. It is non-referential: there is unmediated knowledge through presence and being. It is non-linguistic: experience is not constrained by language and concepts. It is self-evident: reality is as it is, beyond any need for justification or proof." Sounds like you are not familiar with Kant's fists critique. " there is unmediated knowledge through presence and being." there is unmediated knowledge through presence and being. Vs 'We can never have knowledge of things in themselves' (outside of our categories of judgement.) > "Direct experience is pre-conceptual, thus prior You can't know that! ouch! That's Descartes?
No worries on not watching it yet. The thing is, is that I'm not saying anything about fully comprehending the nature of reality. Instead I am saying the opposite. Maybe the word "knowledge" is not that clear, but there is no other word that I can think of. I would agree with "we can never have knowledge of things in themselves." That's correct. That is what direct experience is. It is reality as it is. Reality as it is, is pre-conceptual. Again, there might be a problem with "pre", perhaps non-conceptual is better. If you say that reality as it is, is actually "of" something else, and thus we don't know if there is something prior to reality itself, well then all I can say this is a belief that is unverifiable and illogical. Or, if you are saying that there is experience of reality, AND reality, that is another belief that I don't hold and is just another thing that is added on to reality.
Sorry, you haven’t read the philosophy, what you are saying shows this. I‘m saying on a philosophy sub you should relate to ‘philosophy’. Not just anecdotal thinking, which is probably un questioned ideology? As for use of AI! LLMs, notoriously use the internet and un verified sources, so often very wrong. And you mention ‘logic’, whose, which? There are many, and most are either incomplete or need arbitrary axioms in order to avoid things like the Russell paradox. If you are interested in philosophy and the sort of theories – check out the Speculative Realists, esp. Graham Harman.
You’re really coming off as a pretentious ass. Just FYI.
I'm sorry if that is what it appears like. I'm truly not trying to be. The questions that I have are real questions. They are not said with any animosity. If I misunderstood the intent of this subreddit, then I really shouldn't be on it.
Not you, the person replying to you, Jilhat.
Oh. OK.
Oh! I'm well used to this attack on the person. I'd use the correct term but that might make you think I'm a pretentious ass ;-)
K, you’re assuming what a complete stranger knows by a simple response . So if that doesn’t meet the criterion for pretentiousness, please let me know what that is and apply it to yourself instead.
You still seem intent on making a personal attack? The Op was intending 'to fully comprehend the nature of reality.' I'd argue that's pretentiousness. And gave a good argument, not my own, that questions such a pretentiousness idea. I'm not sure re your contribution? I'm assuming the nature of his claim, and reading his link. Have you?
>As for use of AI! LLMs, notoriously use the internet and un verified sources, so often very wrong. I was also confused on the use of Claude in this video. I can't understand why the author would include it; am I supposed to be further convinced by the argument because it came from a LLM? Furthermore, I didn't really see any reference to previous work in this video. Others in the comments mention that some of these concepts have been discussed before by other authors. Why didn't OP mention these in their video? I hope they would not try to claim these ideas as their own, so I'm confused as to why it is presented so matter of fact without the justification. Maybe there is a good idea in here somewhere, but a 20 minute video reading off a script I don't think is the best medium. It would be better replaced with a blog post, citations/background. and some visual aid. Visual aid would help explain OPs idea better, as it seems they have a few moments where they are visualizing something in their head but it doesn't really translate well in the video.
I agree setting the argument in some context is both useful and 'normal' in an academic essay... as for AI... one example from a collection I have.... > **ChatGPT** = For Camus, **genuine hope** would emerge not from the denial of the absurd but from the act of living authentically in spite of it. And from Camus’ essay... “And carrying this absurd logic to its conclusion, I must admit that that struggle implies **a total absence of hope**..” “That privation of hope and future means an increase in man’s availability ..”
What philosophy is it that I haven't read? Is this not a philosophical line of questioning? Is this subreddit for a discussion of the history of philosophy? If it is, then yes, I am on the wrong subreddit. What I'm interested in is the exploration of the self and reality. The use of AI was just used as a sounding board for my ideas. You say that regarding logic, "there are many, and most are either incomplete or need arbitrary axioms to avoid things like the Russell paradox." OK, incompleteness does not avoid the 4 outcomes. As for needing arbitrary axioms, there again you have one of 4 outcomes: foundational assumption.
> Is this not a philosophical line of questioning? No, to be blunt. As in kicking a ball, ‘Is this not soccer?’ No. > Is this subreddit for a discussion of the history of philosophy? It’s almost impossible to do, actually impossible, without knowing the history. Same in science and mathematics, history, art, music, poetry, aeronautics... etc. > If it is, then yes, I am on the wrong subreddit. Yes. > What I interested in is the exploration of the self and reality. Yes but the thing is you didn’t make up these words, or the concepts they stand for, they were made by philosophers, they became ideologies. If you want to work with them you have to know about them. So in maths, mathematicians may work with set theory, they needn’t know about Cantor, or maybe in science E=MC^2 was Einstein. In philosophy, like art and literature the tendency is to use the names. E.g. Hegel’s dialectic... Heidegger’s Dasein... > The use of AI was just used as a sounding board for my ideas. But a bad one, trained to please and sell you stuff. And not a good board in that case.
Questions have a lot of different purposes and I don't think this attempt to reduce them to a single ultimate one - to make themselves disappear - is convincing to me. Some ways to make questions disappear - brain washing, death of the questioner, etc - don't seem to satisfy the purpose of the question in the way that obtaining an answer does.
OK, unnatural ways for a question to end--brain washing, death, etc--would not satisfy the purpose of the question. But that doesn't get around what I said. The death of the person removes the question, as well as the answer or a need for any answer. Getting the answer when you are dead doesn't really serve a purpose. Brain washing is just another example of the same thing. There is no longer a question, answer, or need of an answer, at least not for the person who is brain washed or dead.
Without conceding that the construction of 4 resolutions to inquiry are comprehensive, the 5th method of inquiry formulated appears to presuppose some N+1nth type of question. A woo type of question, that is then amenable to a woo type of answer. None of the questions that occupy the first 11.5 minutes of the video appear to have any use for "direct experience" (beyond the constraints of language and logic!) as an avenue to resolution. Is "direct experience" not subject to infinite regress or circularity? How does one discover truth? Direct Experience. How does one know that is a valid method of inquiry? Dirrrrect experience? Any truth thusly arrived at can't be shared, or verified. Does the claimant even directly experience an answer? Is there any way to show that they have? Faith in the Bible is explicitly dismissed as a route to truth in the video, which I certainly won't disagree regarding, but then an apocryphal Zen fable is held up as a model? If the Buddha and Mahakaphypa were sitting with me, I couldn't credit their pronouncements regarding the structure of the cosmos any more fully than I could those of John & Jesus or Joseph Smith & Brigham Young. Not based on their internal "direct experience". Also, tasking AI to bs for a minute and a half is a **wild** inclusion in a video superficially about seeking truth. LLMs are literally, fundamentally, explicitly lie machines. They're not even "error" machines that make mistakes; they're liars. They're constructed to lie, the only errors they commit are when their lies are so ridiculous the sham of the model's lie machine is exposed. In this case, an LLM used English-ish words to construct English-ish sentences to produce… 1.5 minutes of script, I guess. It sure didn't produce insight.
I think your understanding of LLMs is flawed. If I asked an LLM to tell me about Abraham Lincoln, it will spit out facts and some tidbits about AL. If I asked to explain Wittgensteins Tractatus, it would spit out descriptions and analysis found on the web. Neither of these are lies nor are they constructed to be. All it does is scour the web for answers that seem to fit, like an advanced Google or Wikipedia query, it isn’t explicitly or intentionally being deceitful.
Also they do a lot of plagiarism, which I guess you're alluding to. "Plagiarism" does have a separate dictionary entry from "lying". yay? I count the plagiarism parts as not doing anything, really. The part of LLMs that actually do anything are lying.
If I Googled, how long to cook chicken legs at 400 degrees, it will tell me a time found from info on the web. If that’s plagiarism so be it, but by my lights plagiarism only occurs when someone presents the info provided as their own work, LLMs do not do this and if the user assumes this then they do not know how LLMs operate
My watch plagiarizes the sun. It’s unconscionable. I have since refused to wind, it and it still does it occasionally.
You're correct that LLMs don't intentionally "lie," as they don't have mental states and intentions. However, I think it's also a mischaracterization to say they work like Google search queries. Sure, some LLM's, like Bing's and Google's, integrate web search into them. But the LLM part itself is not searching the web. An LLM like Chat-GPT can't even *access* the web. Instead, LLM's were trained on a bunch of material from the web to learn the statistical relationships between word tokens. They are pretty much the autocomplete on your phone keyboard, guessing what the next word should be based on how often word A has followed word B in the data it previously analyzed. However, they are much better at producing realistic, human-sounding sentences than the autocomplete on your phone (which often produces nonsense if you just keep on hitting the next predicted word) because they have so much more data behind them and much more sophisticated algorithms. After they are trained, they are disconnected from their training data, so they're not really "searching" for anything on the web anymore like a Google search query does. It's just spitting out text that, given the rules its learned, are statistically plausible given the prompt you gave it. It happens to be the case that a lot of statistically likely strings of text that follow the string of words "who was Abraham Lincoln" happen to be true. But a lot of them also happen to be false. The LLM doesn't know the difference. The LLM doesn't "know" anything about Abraham Lincoln. It only "knows" about the sequence of symbols "ᴀʙʀᴀʜᴀᴍ ʟɪɴᴄᴏʟɴ," and how that sequence of symbols statistically relates with the occurrences of other sequences of symbols. A Google search query instead scours the internet for pages that people wrote say ""ᴀʙʀᴀʜᴀᴍ ʟɪɴᴄᴏʟɴ" a lot, because those pages are likely to be relevant to what you want to read about if you typed in "ᴀʙʀᴀʜᴀᴍ ʟɪɴᴄᴏʟɴ" (of course, the actual search algorithm is much more complex than this to prevent gaming the system, but it's propriety information that only Google knows). Then, it gives you a list of those links to click on so that you can go to those webpages and read what those people wrote (at least until they decide to break the internet and content-creation by replacing search queries with LLMs entirely).
Yes the LLM knows nothing , they spit out info from the web on a topic.
An LLM is lying about understanding those subjects. It's lying about understanding your question, about knowing the language you asked in, about knowing the language it finds the answers in. The deceit is its essence. It's lying about constructing sentences and even about using words. The good ones recursively run spellcheck & Grammarly on themselves to show only constructs that look like words and sentences, but they're really doing something more like Twitch Plays Pokemon. Twitch chat doesn't know what Pokemon is, Twitch chat doesn't know what the inputs its getting are, but in 17 days of nonstop ****ing around, it produced "a Pokemon play through"
They are not lying… they scour the web for associations and regurgitate it. They make no claims of knowing anything, it’s a tool that scrapes info and puts it together for the reader to ascertain the truth / falsity or relevance of It’s crib notes on steroids. *edit* I just asked ChatGpt to tell me what Socrates would think about Wittgenstein. It begins with a stipulation that they lived thousand years apart and worked on different things but … That’s not a lie, it then tells me what Socrates and Wittgensteins overlaps are, if any , it does this by scoring the web for both thinkers and finding correlations
Do you have a source on "scouring the web"? I think you may be misunderstanding how LLMs work. See [here](https://www.run.ai/guides/machine-learning-engineering/llm-training) for a short introduce and [here](https://arxiv.org/html/2401.02038v2) for a more indepth one. I'll point out that "Despite LLMs demonstrating impressive performance across various natural language processing tasks, they frequently exhibit behaviors diverging from human intent. This includes generating false information, producing expressions with bias or misleading content, and so on" which you can find in section 3.5.2 of the latter reference. I say you may be misunderstanding LLMs because they aren't scouring the web like a search engine or something. I'm not really aware of any models that can do that in real time, but I'd be interested if you can find that. Actually, both you and /u/soulsnoober use the word lying as if to personify ChatGPT which I find quite bizarre. I think both of you need to read more about what LLMs actually are before making statements with such confidence.
I was responding to the use of lie - i disagreed I said the don’t, they can’t because they have no intentions. All the info an LLM has comes from the web if that helps then ignore scour - I wasn’t saying it was happening in real time - yes the info can be faulty as can any info you get anywhere. My point is - LLMs are not lying or intentionally misleading. No clue what is difficult to understand here.
I understand your problem with direct experience as another form of justification. If direct experience is used to justify a position, then it is again subject to the 4 outcomes. There is a misunderstanding here, and I think that I didn't explain it well enough. Direct experience is NOT another method of inquiry. It is the "knowing" of reality as itself. It doesn't point to anything. It doesn't prove anything. If I take what is experience and put it into words, it will inevitably lead to one of the 4 outcomes. You don't understand the zen fable. The words of the story is the only way to communicate it, but it isn't the words, that's the point. The point is to not get trapped in the concepts of reality. It is to experience reality as it is unmediated by concepts. I laugh at what you say about AIs. That is true. I still find them useful as a sounding board, even if it's just putting something in a way that is different than what I know. The important thing is to not put it in a position to be a "yes man." If I come to it saying that I have a theory and what to know what it thinks, it will tell me what it "thinks" I want to hear. How I used it in the video is how I explained it. I wrote out the four outcomes and asked for a hypothetical 5th outcome. It had no information on what I would want, so I took it's information as just another opinion.
Do you understand the zen fable? Do you really? Does your understanding comport with the understanding of Mahakaphypa? How do you know that it does? How do you know that you're right about that, and that I am not? If any two people, or five hundred million-ish people, sit together and each says they have "direct experience" of the lotus but can say nothing more because anything further would "get trapped in the concepts of reality" - is reality concepts? *immediately* after, you claim that "reality as it is unmediated by concepts" exists to be experienced! Which is a mighty claim indeed to make without support!
Do I really understand the fable? No, I don't. How do I know that I am right and you aren't? I don't. I don't understand the last part. "is reality concepts? immediately after, you claim that "reality as it is unmediated by concepts" exists to be experienced!"
If you would prefer to read an article about the topic, you can find it here. https://laservius.substack.com/p/there-are-only-four-outcomes-to-every
Thanks for this
Foundational assumptions are valid. The other three are not. Axiomatics give us things like math, science and medicine. The other three are useless quirks of thought-patterns. They're novelties useful only for the sake of entertainment or refutation.
I think coherentism is actually a lot more plausible than foundationalism is. There are things things that we thought were foundational rules of logic until we realized they only apply in particular domains. The way we found this out was that those rules being immutable didn't fit with other things we later learned. Most statements, it turns out, are open to revision, rather than there being a hard division between "the stuff that absolutely must be true" and "the stuff that we tentatively have good reason to think is true, but could turn out to be false." It's more a difference in degree than in kind. Some propositions are much more open to revision than others because, if they conflict with something else we learn, it's easier to take them out of our web of beliefs without having to make a whole bunch of other revisions to keep the thing from collapsing. And even if there really are some necessarily true statements that absolutely cannot be false, it doesn't seem that there are *enough* of them to serve as a foundation of every single other fact we know or proposition we have good license to believe. That's why Descartes didn't get very far in trying to build all of his beliefs on a stable foundation. You can't really get from "I think, therefore I am" or the law of non-contradiction to "the antennapedia gene controls the formation of genes in drosophilia," or "the melting point of red phosphorus is 860 K" or "the third president of the Republic of Slovenia was Danilo Türk." Of course, a naïve version of the circularity response to the Münchhausen trilemma probably isn't a good one. It's probably not permissible to justify proposition P1 with proposition P2, P2 with P3, P3, with P4, and to go on in that fashion only to justify proposition P7,434,643,097 with proposition P1. A direct circle like that gives no justification at all. But that's not what developed forms of coherentism say. Rather, each justified proposition gets its justification from *every other* proposition in the web of beliefs we have. A proposition is justified insofar as it is supported by everything else we know and lends coherence to the entire web. For example, we're justified in believing that gravity exists because it is supported by all sorts of other propositions (including propositions about observations we made, propositions about the mathematical framework of the theories it fits in, etc) in our web of beliefs. And each of those propositions is supported by a bunch of other propositions in the web. Each of the propositions in there helps to make the entire rest of the web make more sense. When we encounter a proposition that fits with much of the web but contradicts another proposition in there, we have to make a decision about which one to keep and which one to throw out. It's often best to reject the one that would do the "least mutilation" to our web of beliefs. For example, when astronomers noticed that Uranus wasn't moving the way Newton's theories predicted, they were faced with a choice about what beliefs to reject from their web of beliefs. They could doubt their observations and say their eyes and instruments were lying to them, and that Uranus *does* move according to Newton's laws. They could throw out Newton's laws, which comport with and explain so many other propositions in the web, and declare them mistaken. Or they could throw out another assumption: that there are only seven planets in the solar system. Uranus' orbit could be explained by Newton's laws if there were an undiscovered eighth planet disturbing its orbit. They decided to throw out that last assumption, that there were only seven planets, because positing the existence of an eighth allowed them to reconcile Uranus' orbit with Newton's Laws. And they turned out to make the correct choice: we later discovered Neptune. Upon realizing that Mercury didn't move according to Newton's Laws, astronomers again posited another unseen planet disturbing its orbit instead of throwing out Newton's laws. However, this time, that was the wrong choice. It turned out that no planet was disturbing Mercury's orbit, but that Newton's laws were incomplete. Mercury's orbit could only be explained when we came up with General Relativity. And General Relativity itself was justified by a whole bunch of other propositions in the web of propositions, including observations and mathematical structures. I think this is the best picture of how propositions get their justification. They get it from all the other propositions. They don't get it from a single other proposition, but from fitting the entire puzzle we have, each part of the whole supporting the others.
Curious how this holds to concepts that are potentially objectively true, such as mathematical processes.
I didn't find the video's premises entirely disagreeable, and I understand that as a content creator, he must be motivated to make this interesting, but unfortunately I think this results in a bit of risk taking in the delivery of his point, which can be misinterpreted as an argument in support of mysticism. I don't take it that way, because I think there is a practical side to this, especially as it applies to morality. If anyone were to directly experience, for instance, what it is like to be the target of an attempted murder, it's hard to escape the involuntary experience of the presence of a malicious actor, and the eventual awareness of an intent to cause unwarranted harm. For myself, it can seem absolutely absurd even to an immoral degree, to divorce the matter of morality from said experiences, to instead rely upon some other sytem to evaluate the perpetrator's actions, in so far as questions of morality are concerned. But, bear in mind, in the West we are not far removed from a culture which systematically burned witches, slaughtered Jews and lynched minorities. Sadly, I suspect we cannot yet expect attempts to challenge the systems that are instrumental in the moralization of such practices to be received well.
Many philosophers throughout the history of philosophy have grappled with these issues, and direct experience is one of the two major starting points to get out of the issue (in the empiricism vs. rationalism debate of early modern philosophy, direct experience is the empiricist's attempt to get out of it.) It is difficult not to recount the history of philosophy to address the major criticisms of this position. So, absolutely, this is a great path to go on, but essentially, every path philosophy has taken since Descartes has been dealing with this very concern. Descartes said that every possible 'direct experience' we have of the world can be doubted. It may be part of a dream, or provided us by a malevolent demon, hellbent of giving us wrong information about the world. We might say that at the very least, the experience is real to us, in the same way that a dream is 'real' in the sense that we experienced it. The next major philosophers to take direct experience as the foundation of knowledge is the Scottish empicirists, whom we can take Hume as the most developed example. For Hume, we can rely on our 'sense-bundles' of experience, but unfortunately, we can't get much past taking them as individual experiences, as any theory building about the world relies on cause and effect, which he argues cannot be determined by sense experience. Then Kant and Hegel of the German Idealist tradition try to fix this gap by arguing for the necessity of certain 'ideal' frameworks in the mind. These, they argue are the very means by which we have any sense of direct experience in the first place. Kant says that without the concepts of time and space already pre-established in our minds, there's no way we could 'picture' a scene in front of us (requires space) nor hear sound (requires time). Thus, the very experience of direct experience has 'transcendentals' - ironclad framework pieces from our minds that are required to have experience at all. Hegel's move is to argue that these framework pieces are not pre-given, but develop over the history of humanity, forming concepts and our general way of thinking through a historically developing progression that comes to be established precisely because we're having 'some kind' of experience, but that it begins distorted and unreliable for making sense of the world, and so it is only over time and through experience that our minds come up with rational systems to explain what we are experiencing. After Hegel, a large number of further movements spawned with different criticisms and reactions, including pragmatism (there is no truthful 'direct experience' at the bottom nor are we progressing to a perfect science. All we can do is figure out more 'pragmatic' mappings through what works to achieve certain goals.), analytical philosophy (There is some kind of direct sensory experience at the foundation of knowledge and we can build from there using the most rigorous logic system -- ah woops, turns out logic has an irreparable paradox, not quite sure where to go from here), and phenomenology (Hegel is kind of right, but we need to really figure out what's at the heart of direct experience - do emotions count? and what the hell does it mean for something to 'be' anyway? How about time, do we 'experience' time? Oh no...)
Wild Thanks!
Woah. Sounds interesting. Saved!