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This Message Does Not Exist

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Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#211

Post by BurningFrog »

tempodox wrote: post #166
dfabulich wrote: post #151

I think this is an example of the "answering machine paradox," which philosophers have been writing about since the 1970's. https://philpapers.org/rec/SIDTAM > According to an intuitive semantics for 'I,' 'here' and 'now,' 'I am not here now' should always be false when uttered. But occurrences of 'I am not here now' on an answering machine seem to be true (when the speaker is not home). (If you're interested, you ca…

This is ludicrous. Failure to distinguish the person (“I”) from their recorded voice does not make a philosophical problem. It's pure and unadulterated stupidity.

I think that describes a considerable chunk of the Philosophy field.

But that's of course what an engineer would say.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#212

Post by robryk »

pavlov wrote: post #188

Computers can stop time because they don’t have to execute instructions. In a sense this is an example of what that affords. Think of a physical message on a piece of paper. The paper is on fire. You can still see the text, but it’s too late to put out the fire. If you have good memory, you can figuratively stop time at that instant and memorize the contents of the paper. With a computer, the message is already “burn…

As with race conditions, making things faster doesn't change things but only exposes preexisting problems. The preexisting problem I see here is sloppy definition of existence for the message: if you can see the message on a burning piece of paper, it should be considered to still exist (just as a message being sent with smoke signals does not disappear the moment it's committed to smoke).

E: The obvious way to fix this is to stop talking about messages existing/not existing, but talk in terms of messages being stored in X (or having been deleted from X), for some value of X.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#213

Post by thecodedmessage »

skyechurch wrote: post #209
goatlover wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably haven't thought deeply about the problems. Usually they expose some issue with our concepts or assumptions. Things we take to be obvious and simple aren't always on careful reflection.

I was being glib, of course. Presumably there's some legitimate technical philosophical issue, and actual philosophers are capable of using answering machines and even landline telephones without having all their assumptions about reality collapse around them like a PKD novel (those born prior to 1980, anyway). But, like Jay Z, I've got problems of a more pressing nature, and legitimately don't see how this matters.…

Math problems are quite similar in this way!

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#214

Post by rayval »

runlaszlorun wrote: post #201
dfabulich wrote: post #151

I think this is an example of the "answering machine paradox," which philosophers have been writing about since the 1970's. https://philpapers.org/rec/SIDTAM > According to an intuitive semantics for 'I,' 'here' and 'now,' 'I am not here now' should always be false when uttered. But occurrences of 'I am not here now' on an answering machine seem to be true (when the speaker is not home). (If you're interested, you ca…

Absolutely off topic, but does remind me of a Mexican movie ‘I Am No Longer Here’ that I’d seen not long ago was astonishingly good for something I hadn’t heard of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_No_Longer_Here

By the way, that is a great movie. Or do I say "was"?

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#216

Post by andybak »

tempodox wrote: post #166
dfabulich wrote: post #151

I think this is an example of the "answering machine paradox," which philosophers have been writing about since the 1970's. https://philpapers.org/rec/SIDTAM > According to an intuitive semantics for 'I,' 'here' and 'now,' 'I am not here now' should always be false when uttered. But occurrences of 'I am not here now' on an answering machine seem to be true (when the speaker is not home). (If you're interested, you ca…

This is ludicrous. Failure to distinguish the person (“I”) from their recorded voice does not make a philosophical problem. It's pure and unadulterated stupidity.

I find that the joy many commenters here have in both denigrating philosophys and at the same time proudly demonstrating no interest in knowing anything about it to be one of the more embarrassing things regularly on display.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#217

Post by rpigab »

lisper wrote: post #85

Everyone is snickering at this and talking about philosophy, but there is actually a legitimate point being made here, albeit obliquely: how do you explain to a non-technical user that their data has been deleted on the server, but that their client still has a cached copy that they might want to try to salvage somehow? I submit that this is a nontrivial problem worthy of serious consideration.

Yes, let’s try to explain technical things to non technical people without using technical words and pretend we're getting somewhere and that it's useful for them.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#219

Post by alpinisme »

robryk wrote: post #212
pavlov wrote: post #188

Computers can stop time because they don’t have to execute instructions. In a sense this is an example of what that affords. Think of a physical message on a piece of paper. The paper is on fire. You can still see the text, but it’s too late to put out the fire. If you have good memory, you can figuratively stop time at that instant and memorize the contents of the paper. With a computer, the message is already “burn…

As with race conditions, making things faster doesn't change things but only exposes preexisting problems. The preexisting problem I see here is sloppy definition of existence for the message: if you can see the message on a burning piece of paper, it should be considered to still exist (just as a message being sent with smoke signals does not disappear the moment it's committed to smoke). E: The obvious way to fix t…

It’s not the word “exists” that causes the problem (although it definitely gives it an added air of strange mystery). It’s the word “this.” Consider the case of a draft email I am writing on my laptop, but have to leave before finishing. Later, I resume composing the email on my phone and I hit send. But I do it in a hurry and mostly forget about it. The next morning, though, I open my laptop and I see the still unfinished draft I left there.

Now, when I try to finish and send that I’m hopefully going to get an error message. But “you already sent this email” is both right and wrong, since “this” email (the one I’m looking at) may have different contents from the one I sent.

Agreed that the best error message is just more precise though: “You are attempting to edit a draft that you already finished and sent from another device. Would you like to treat this as a new email?” Or something like that.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#220

Post by skyechurch »

thecodedmessage wrote: post #213
skyechurch wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was being glib, of course. Presumably there's some legitimate technical philosophical issue, and actual philosophers are capable of using answering machines and even landline telephones without having all their assumptions about reality collapse around them like a PKD novel (those born prior to 1980, anyway). But, like Jay Z, I've got problems of a more pressing nature, and legitimately don't see how this matters.…

Math problems are quite similar in this way!

... not the ones involving the rent check.
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