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“I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that’s a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein
I often wonder if LLMs would have made Wittgenstein cry...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
False propositions are not knowledge, only true propositions are knowledge. Therefore you cannot know something true that is actually false, you can only believe something true that is actually false. Precisely describing how one moves from belief to knowledge is exactly what epistemology is about.
> False propositions are not knowledge, only true propositions are knowledge From my point of view, "to know" is a subjective feeling, an assessment on the degree of faith we put on a statement. "Knowledge" instead is an abstract concept, a corpus of statements, similar to "science". People "know" false stuff all the time (for some definition of "true" and "false", which may also vary).
A flat-earther may feel they "know" the earth is flat. I feel that i "know" that their feeling isn't "true" knowledge.
This is the simple case where we all (in this forum, or at least I hope so) agree. If we consider controversial beliefs, such as the existence of God, where Covid-19 originated or whether we have free will, people will often still feel they "know" the answer.
In other words, the experience of "knowinging" is not only personal, but also interpersonal, and often a source of conflicts. Which may be why people fight over the defintion.
In reality, there are very few things (if any) that can be "known" with absolute certainty. Anyone who has studied modern Physics would "know" that our intuition is a very poor guide to fundamental knowledge.
The scientific method may be better in some ways, but even that can be compromized. Also, it's not really useful for people outside the specific scientific field. For most people, scientific findings are only "known" second hard from seeing the scientists as authorities.
A bigger problem, though, is that a lot of people are misusing the label "scientific" to justify beliefs or propaganda that has only weak (if any) support from the use of hard science.
In the end, I don't think the word "knowledge" has any fundamental correspondence to something essential.
Instead, I see the ability to "know" something as a characteristic of the human brain. It's an ability that causes the brain to lock onto one belief and disregard all others. It appears to be tendency we all have, which means it's probably evolved by evolution due to providing some evolutionary advantage.
The types of "knowledge" that we feel we "know", to the extend that we learn them from others, seem to evolve in parallel to this as memes/memeplexes (using Dawkin's original use of "meme").
Such memes spread in part virously by pure replication. But if they convey advantages to the hosts they may spread more effectively.
For example, after Galilei/Newton, Physics provided several types of competitive advantage to those who saw it as "knowledge". Some economic, some military (like calculating artillery trajectories). This was especially the case in a politically and religously fragmented Europe.
The memeplex of "Science" seems to have grown out of that. Not so much because it produces absolute truths, but more because those who adopted a belief in science could reap benefits from it that allowed them to dominate their neighbours.
In other areas, religious/cultural beliefs (also seen as "knowledge" by te believers) seem to have granted similar power to the believers.
And it seems to me that this is starting to become the case again, especially in areas of the world where the government provides a welfare state to all that prevent scientific knowledge to grant a differential survival/reproductive advantage to those who still base their knowledge on Science.
If so, Western culture may be heading for another Dark Age....
I see no practical usefulness in all of these examples, except as instances of the rule that you can get correct results from incorrect reasoning.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
edit : Then there's the whole "what is a cow" thing. Like if you you stuffed a cow carcass with a robot and no one could tell the difference, would that still be a cow? Or what if you came across a horrifying cow-horse hybrid, what would you call that? Or if the cow in question had a unique mutation possessed by no other cow - does it still fit the cow archetype? For example, what if the cow couldn't produce milk? Or…
A robot in a cow carcass is not a cow, it's a "robot in a cow carcass". Someone might believe it's a cow because they lack crucial information but that's on them, doesn't change the fact. A cow-horse hybris is not a cow, it's a cow-horse hybrid. A cow with a genetic mutation is a cow with a genetic mutation. A cow created in a lab, perhaps even grown 100% by artificial means in-vitro is of course still a cow since it…
From “it has the genetic makeup of a cow”, you’re saying that what make a cow a cow is the genetic makeup. But then part of that ADN defines the cow? What can vary, by how much, before a cow stops being a cow?
The point is that you can give any definition of “cow”, and we can imagine a thing that fits this definition yet you’d probably not consider a cow. It’s a reflection on how language relates to reality. Whether it’s an interesting point or not is left to the reader (I personally don’t think it is)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, good times. I just recently had one that was a really strong misdirection, ended up being 2 simultaneous other, non related things that conspired to make it look convincingly like my code was not doing what it was supposed to. I even wrote tests to see if I had found a corner-case compiler bug or some broken library code. I was half way through opening an issue on the library when the real culprit became appare…
> corner-case compiler bug They say never to blame the compiler, and indeed it's pretty much never the compiler. But DNS on the other hand... :-)
“I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that’s a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein
I often wonder if LLMs would have made Wittgenstein cry...
A tool for filling the fields with papier-mache cows.
- JTB is not enough, for something to be “true” it needs _testability_. In other words, make a prediction from your knowledge-under-test which would be novel information (for example, “we’ll find fresh cow dung in the field”). - nothing is really ever considered “true”, there’s only theories that describe reality increasingly correctly
In fact, physics did away with the J: it doesn’t matter that your belief is justified if it’s tested. You could make up a theory with zero justification (which doesn’t contradict existing knowledge ofc), make predictions and if they’re tested, that’s still knowledge. The J is just the way that beliefs are formed (inference)
Physics has kinda-solved what it means to know something. - JTB is not enough, for something to be “true” it needs _testability_. In other words, make a prediction from your knowledge-under-test which would be novel information (for example, “we’ll find fresh cow dung in the field”). - nothing is really ever considered “true”, there’s only theories that describe reality increasingly correctly In fact, physics did awa…
Because every time they said, "I've found the absolute truth," the philosophers just replied, "Only in your frame of reference!"
Physics has kinda-solved what it means to know something. - JTB is not enough, for something to be “true” it needs _testability_. In other words, make a prediction from your knowledge-under-test which would be novel information (for example, “we’ll find fresh cow dung in the field”). - nothing is really ever considered “true”, there’s only theories that describe reality increasingly correctly In fact, physics did awa…
For example, if I toss a coin and it comes up heads, put the coin in my pocket and then go about my day, and later on say to somebody "I tossed a coin earlier, and it came up heads", that is a JTB, but it's not testable. You might assume I'm lying, but we're not talking about whether you have a JTB in whether I tossed a heads or not, we're talking about if I have one.
There are many areas of human experience where JTB is about as good as we are going to get, and testability is off-limits. If somebody tells me they saw an alien climb out of a UFO last night, I have lots of reasons to not believe them, but if this a very trustworthy individual who has never lied to me about anything in my decades of experience of knowing them, I might have a JTB that they think this is true, even if it isn't. But none of it is testable.
Physics - the scientific method as a whole - is a superb way to think about and understand huge swathes of the World, but it has mathematically proven limits, and that's fine, but let's not assume that just because something isn't testable it can't be true.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I often wonder if LLMs would have made Wittgenstein cry...
It's remarkable how LLMs have skipped any kind of philosophical grounding for "how do we know that this output is valid?" and just gone straight to "looks good to me". Very postmodernist. Also why LLMs are going to turn us into a low-trust society. A tool for filling the fields with papier-mache cows.
Cargo culting as a service.