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This Message Does Not Exist

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Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#231

Post by layer8 »

madeofpalk wrote: post #230
layer8 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you can read non-existent messages, for example when an AI hallucinates one, or when someone shows you a photoshopped screenshot of one, or even just when you copied one to a text document before deleting the message.

> Of course you can read non-existent messages, for example when an AI hallucinates one This message clearly exists. It's could be not factually correct, but a lie still exists.

No, it’s a citation of a message that does not exist. I wasn’t talking about a message sent by an AI, I was talking about an AI reproducing the alledged content of a purported message.

If you open a text file in an editor, and then delete the file on disk, then the file does not exist anymore, but you can still read its contents in your editor. Same if you open a web page in your browser, and the page is then deleted server-side. You can still read the loaded copy of the web page in your browser, although the web page doesn’t exist anymore. The “message” in TFA’s notification is exactly like that.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#232

Post by Ma8ee »

b112 wrote: post #228
andybak wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rest my case.

Your case was "that made up 'science' is real, and you can't say no because you haven't studied it for years". I don't need to study astrology for years, to know it's nonsense in about 10 minutes. Yet I've hear a lot more philosophical blather than that, and so yes, I have enough data to make a determination. There's an inner logic to tarot cards, books and books on it, but that doesn't make it useful or valuable.

You very clearly illustrate andybak’s point by showing that you just don’t even know what philosophy is.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#233

Post by ordu »

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 wouldn't say so. If we mark this a stupidity, then a lier's paradox is a stupidity also. If people could easily deal with such statements and understand them correctly, it doesn't mean there is no problem. Problem arises when you try to devise some formal system describing all the statements, and then you find some more statements and the system doesn't work for them.

Zeno's paradoxes for example show us the weaknesses of Ancient Greek's system of reasoning, the weaknesses of their kid of logic and math. But will have troubles seeing them as paradoxes if they do not know logic at all or if they know modern logic and modern math which solve all of the Zeno's paradoxes (or most of them?). Now Zeno's paradoxes are not paradoxes at all, but the silly mistakes of reasoning.

It reminds me of edge-cases in programming, you designed a beautiful program and then edge-cases started to pop up, you patch your program, patch it some more, and in no time at all your beautiful program becomes a heap of spaghetti code. The only way to avoid it is to code something that you coded before many times and know all the shenanigans allowing you to combine beautiful design with the practical applicability.

Here is the same thing, if you do not know what the system the author uses, you cannot judge if his reasoning stupid or not.

I don't know either, but I believe, that it is an interesting observation. The person said "I'm not here now", and it was obviously false, when they said it, but when answering machine says it the statements becomes true. I'm not sure what the problem is, but I think, that the problem starts biting you hard, when you try to define a set of all such statements and to choose a condition of their truthfulness. Of course, you can use your intuition as a tool for demarcation, but philosophy doesn't work that way, it seeks an objective criteria, preferably a formal one.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#234

Post by tadala »

ryukoposting wrote: post #229
andybak wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn't call myself a philosphy expert by any means (love me some Epicurus) but I think the previous commenter is right. As far as philosophical dilemmas go, the answering machine problem is contrived at best. It relies on a pretty obvious mischaracterization of the situation at hand - there isn't a person saying "I am not here" at all, it's a machine playing a recording. With the necessary context, the dilemma be…

On the other hand, the other response to OP's comment is a perfect display of what he means. A lot of tech bro hubris/idiocy.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#235

Post by djur »

b112 wrote: post #228
andybak wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rest my case.

Your case was "that made up 'science' is real, and you can't say no because you haven't studied it for years". I don't need to study astrology for years, to know it's nonsense in about 10 minutes. Yet I've hear a lot more philosophical blather than that, and so yes, I have enough data to make a determination. There's an inner logic to tarot cards, books and books on it, but that doesn't make it useful or valuable.

Philosophy is not and does not purport to be a 'science'. The fact that philosophers make and discuss propositions that seem incorrect to you does not mean that the field of philosophy is fraudulent or unimportant.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#236

Post by tadala »

b112 wrote: post #228
andybak wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rest my case.

Your case was "that made up 'science' is real, and you can't say no because you haven't studied it for years". I don't need to study astrology for years, to know it's nonsense in about 10 minutes. Yet I've hear a lot more philosophical blather than that, and so yes, I have enough data to make a determination. There's an inner logic to tarot cards, books and books on it, but that doesn't make it useful or valuable.

Shocking comment. Do you think the scientific method is inbuilt in our DNA or something? Where do you think it all comes from?

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#237

Post by nuancebydefault »

croniev wrote: post #225
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…

Many commenters here seem to be hostile towards philosophy. Heres a take for you: This is only a paradox if you think of language as a way of describing some "real", static state of affairs in the world (look up " correspondence theory of truth"). There is no paradox here if we think of language as pragmatic, action directing, since it is obvious what the sentence should convey (look up "pragmatism"). Some people wil…

I think it is okay to philosophise about situations and events that seem a bit paradoxal but the explanation is obvious. Even more, that is a core trait of philosophy.

There are many similar situations where what we hear, read or see is technically incorrect. Since the sender (or the activator of an agent) of the message in such case assumes the interpreter has enough common knowledge, it is a perfectly okay communication.

A video tape containing a recording: "your watching this means I'm dead."

A secretary of a company impersonating the company when sending a message to many recipients.

An actor speaking about his character, as if they are somebody they know very well.

Writing that an AI hallucinates.

My car informing me that one of the tyres is low on pressure, even though it does not know what a tyre is, let alone how to measure pressure.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#238

Post by b112 »

Ma8ee wrote: post #232
b112 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your case was "that made up 'science' is real, and you can't say no because you haven't studied it for years". I don't need to study astrology for years, to know it's nonsense in about 10 minutes. Yet I've hear a lot more philosophical blather than that, and so yes, I have enough data to make a determination. There's an inner logic to tarot cards, books and books on it, but that doesn't make it useful or valuable.

You very clearly illustrate andybak’s point by showing that you just don’t even know what philosophy is.

So your argument, is that one must spend years studying nonsense, to have an opinion on its worth?

I've already clarified why this is not so. Thus, your main, true disagreement is that you do not agree with my assessment.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#239

Post by nuancebydefault »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #116

The problem is that the message does not speak the truth. If you can read a message it clearly must exist because you cannot read non-existent messages, can you? Can anyone? CAN ANYONE HERE READ NON-EXISTENT MESSAGES? The message should have said "This message is not saved on the server. If you close this window without copying and saving its text you cannot retrieve it from the server ever again.

You might argue that 'not existing' in general does not even exist.

It reminds me of the ted ex talk where a man states that the universe does not exist because it is everything and if we would make a list of everything, the list would not be included as a topic of the list.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#240

Post by nuancebydefault »

derefr wrote: post #92
tikhonj wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still funny that the text of a message can exist without being a message itself. That must make sense in the specific context of Outlook, but it shows that the conceptual design of the software does not match how we want to think about the domain abstractly.

I would assume Outlook means that its locally-cached copy of the message exists, but the original server-side (probably IMAP) message no longer exists. And that without that message, there's no server-side resource to update — just a resource representation of a snapshot of that server-side resource, still temporarily persisted in a client-side read-through cache.

Does Outlook can even have opinions?
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