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From: pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: Is Common Sense Explicit or Implicit?
Message-ID: <Cw8oK7.BB7@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>
Organization: UTCC Public Access
References: <357e2u$f8k@mp.cs.niu.edu> <357ket$j9k@search01.news.aol.com> <Cw6pzp.B0q@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca> <35alp4$4r9@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: Fri, 16 Sep 1994 20:21:42 GMT
Lines: 131

In article <35alp4$4r9@agate.berkeley.edu>,
Gerardo Browne <jerrybro@uclink2.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>Andrzej Pindor (pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca) wrote:
>: Why did a rock slide down a hillside? Perhaps it had a desire to lower
>: its potential energy?
>
>Oh, give me a break.  Humans and 
>rocks are different things.  Would you say that people walk back and forth
>because there is a center that they are gravitationally attracted to?
>This does not invalidate physics.  If you keep that sarcastic approach I
>will not respond.
>
I wasn't sarcastic at all. I also know that humans and rocks are different 
things - humans are so much more complicated. It is not important here  
whether rock's 'desires' are the same thing as human 'desires'. This is 
just a word. Point is if introducing this word we explain something.  
Lacking knowledge of newtonian dynamics and of gravitational attraction
an idea that objects have desire to assume the lowest possible position
would have quite a substantial explanatory power - it would make 
'understandable' lot of phenomena: avalanches, apples falling off trees,
an observation that what goes up must come down, etc. We do not have
a good idea of details of brain's functioning so we invent those heuristics
which seem to work to some extent, but claiming that there is something
'real' behind them because they sort of work is unjustified.

>: The claim you seem to be making is that one needs to accept objectivity of
>: notions like desires (or beliefs) to understand behavior of other people.
>: This would make sense if one had some reasonable way of determining what
>: these beliefs or desires are. 
>
>I think we do.  But we have to be familiar with the individuals in
>question to do it well.  The more familiar we are, the better we can
>do it.  Surely this capacity to get better and better at telling what
>is going on indicates that there is some objective reality that is being
>approached.  To borrow a pragmatic principle, this is what *is* the
>objectively real.
>
Since, as have already been remarked by other people, the same actions
observed can be explained by different assumptions about desires (or beliefs,
purposes etc.) claiming that they are objectively real is risky. Maybe
it depends on what you consider as 'real'. Is there 'really' color red?
You will hopefully agree that there is a limit to how good can we get at 
predicting individual's behavior by honing our theory of her/his desires.
So we can't get better and better at such predictions and your criterion for
objective reality will not work, will it?
You admit that you construct desires on the basis of people's behavior, to
be used to predict other behavior - this simply means that there are some
regularities in the behavior. Your 'desires' are simply names for those
regularities, nothing more, unless you have some independent way of checking
those 'desires'. Do you? Do desires (belief, purposes) have other effects
than behavior? If not, what does it mean that they 'really' exist any more
than a desire for rocks to fall?

>:In another place, referring to authorities
>: (Freud and Wittgenstein), you claim that people may have purposes (desires)
>: they are unaware of, which are apparent to other people.
>
>Oh, arguing from authority, am I?  Are you just in a bad mood?
>
Are you always so suspicious of other people's intentions?

>: And how do these
>: other people know about person's desires (he/she is unaware of)?  I am
>: sure that the only way is from person's behavior, is it not? Then, however,
>: what is the explanatory power of these notions? Desires explain behavior, but 
>: we know just from behavior what the desires are! Isn't this sadly circular?
>
>Sadly circular!  It'sn not enough to say circular.  You have obviously
>not read any of the articles in which I show awareness of this problem
>and attempt to demonstrate that one can develop refutable theories
>concerning beliefs.
>
You are right, I haven't. Could you please give an example of how one can
refute such a theory?

>......
>I did not argue that beliefs were all that there is.  Nowhere.  There are
>desires, there are capacities to recognize.  You can easily tell whether
                    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Another piece of objective reality? How many of these do you need? You
realize hopefully that with enough parameters you can fit almost anything.

>: Now I am sure that one can construct a robot powered by batteries, which it 
>: from time to time has to recharge from an electrical outlet in the lab walls.
>: Assume also that the robot memorizes the position of the outlet when it 
>: wanders around the lab in its 'free' time. Now you could of course say 
>: that the robot 'believes' that there is electrical current in the outlet,
>: since every time its batteries are low it would go to the outlet. In case of
>: robot this is not necessary, since we know well how its system works and can
>: explain its behavior without invoking  the 'belief'. In case of humans we
>: do not know workings of the brain very well, so we stick to the vague 
>: notion of belief. However, do we have reasons to think that human 'beliefs'
>: which you invoke to explain behavior, are any more objective that the belief
>: we could ascribe to the robot above?
>
>You are wrong.  A person might construct a robot to return to the socket
>every now and then.  But if you really constructed a creature like a live
>human, you would have to teach it facts about life, such as, that there is
>a wall socket, etc. etc.  The great thing about this would be that if
>the world changed, your preprogrammed robot might start plugging itself
>into a hole in the wall, and eventually die.  Whereas a robot who has

I am sure you have seen (or heard about) people who, even though circumstances
change, insist on old habits to their great detriment.

>learned *why* there are wall sockets and *why* it needs to plug into

Couldn't I preprogram the robot with such knowledge? I do not see any reason
why not.
Are you suggesting that you seek food because you *know* why you need it?

>the wall socket, will perhaps be able to adjust to the new world.  It
>is the capacity of the world to change in details that requires us to
>have *more* than just fixed habits like your preprogrammed robot, but
>rather something else which does not become obsolete every time there is
>a little change in the world.  A flexibility which is not *unregulated*,
>*anarchic*, anything -may-go flexibility, but one regulated by
>certain beliefs and certain desires, and certain other capacities.
>
Microorganisms which mutate to adjust themselves to changing environment
do not seem to require beliefs and desires, do they?

>-epf
>
Andrzej

-- 
Andrzej Pindor                        The foolish reject what they see and 
University of Toronto                 not what they think; the wise reject
Instructional and Research Computing  what they think and not what they see.
pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca                           Huang Po
