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[In Exile]

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...
The time isn't excessive if that's the time necessary to achieve the objective. [/quote]

Unless the amount of time taken affects the ability to reach the objective. It is like working against a deadline: in principle, more time could result in a better product. But if a product has to be submitted prior to a certain date, failing to finish it entirely will lead to a more dramatic failure.

Conversation is like this. There are more constraints on conversation than merely conveying with exact precision the specific thought that you intend to convey.

[quote]And you're using "natural" like a value judgment.  Who cares how a natural conversation flows if speaking in the manner that produces that natural flow leads to lesser outcomes with regard to expressing oneself?[/quote]

I am using it as a comparative standard. There is an established social and biological demand that makes demands on powerful demands on what constitutes effective communication.

The more you deviate from this, the more you are hampering the outcome of being able to express yourself. To put it another way: part of communication is accurately conveying information. We can meaningfully say that part of this is related to how you phrase statements. At the same time, another part is ensuring that the information actually reaches the intendent party.

Violating natural expectations towards conversation effectively hampers your ability to deliver information because it leads your audience to dismissing you. Of course, I'm sure your reply will be that people ought not ignore you for what are ostensibly frivolous reasons in your eyes (like how well you convey to their expectations).

The reality, however, is that there are hard-wired biological reasons for why people evaluate others and communications on strictly non-logical grounds (for example, how confident the speaker sounds while speaking, e.g. the speed of speech and tone). These relate to how we establish dominance behaviour.

My problem with taking a normative stance on this is that it is akin to taking a normative stance on the laws of chemistry. Human behaviour is, among other things, dominace oriented. Communication involves markers of this sort, among others. 

So plainly put, the reality of the situation is what while you could, in doing this, produce a more refined message, you are not communicating effectively, because your refinment comes at the cost of being capable of accurately conveying the message.

[quote]I find they routinely don't.  People will say things (or even write things) that are demonstrably nonsensical.  unless they're insane, that can't have been their intent.  And whether others understand them is, I think, only tangential to whether they expressed themselves well.[/quote]

What do you mean by nonsensical? Based on your predisposition, I suppose you mean that people believe or otherwise make claims that to you are intuitively logically false, and so you conclude that it could only be possible for people to consciously say logically false things if they were insane.

Is this at least a semi-accurate take?

The issue with this is that the majority of our cognition is not intended to be strictly logical, because strictly logical cognition is useless for the majority of problems. In fact, logic is decidedly worthless for solving all of our evolutionary problems, because the survival value in truth preservation is effectively zero in comparison to statistically relevant correlations mistakenly taken to be indicators of causal relations.

[quote]What we call communication is two different events.  One person speaks, and the other interprets.  Neither has any control over the other.[/quote]

See, this is where our inclinations on the part-whole debate lead to wildly different conclusions. Communication is not two single events: it is one event that can be divided into two subsections.

[quote]I dispute the existence of intuitive knowledge.[/quote]

Empirically, it is undeniable. We can quite clearly separate intuition from other process as a kind of information processing in the brain, and more importantly in various cognitive models of processing.

If we are speaking philosphically, I agree with you that things like Platonic forms are highly disputable and likely false. But when speaking about physical reality, and granting science, we are under different constraints.

And intuition is a real and demonstrable phenomenon.

[quote]What do you think communication is that me actually saying the thing I want to say more often is somehow making the quality of my speech outcomes worse?[/quote]

It is not making the quality of your speech worse; it is impairing your ability to communicate, which is not the same thing.

[quote]I don't understand that at all.  If I construct sentences on the fly, I make mistakes at a certain rate.  If I don't construct sentences on the fly, I make mistakes at a lesser rate.  Is there some other standard I should be
using to measure the two systems, because my way looks unequivocally better.[/quote]

You've over-simplified what communication is. Yes, if we were merely exchanging sentences, and this was the only element in communication, it would be trivially better to produce the best possible sentences for maximum accuracy. But communication is nothing like this. See the description I provide above about natural constraints on how communication can operate.

[quote]I often go through two or three draughts of a sentence before I speak it.  I need to take into account the particular interpretation tendencies of my audience, and since those differ from mine I won't usally get it right on my first try.[/quote]

The problem with this being that one very common interpretation of your behaviour is a lack of certainty and confidence in what you say, and an overall diminishing of the strength of the final thing which you do say. I appreciate that you want to ensure maximum clarity, but there is more to clarity that merely producing the best possile sentence.

You will say, of course, people are entirely unjustified in making this kind of assumption and it seems insane that they do. But it is a matter of physical reality that this happens. It has to do with our basic physiology. It is the same reason why we see doors as meaningful units.

[quote]And this I also dispute.  People do try to glean information from non-verbal cues, but I think they're guessing.  Their error rate is too great for them to claim they're actually interpreting something real, and if they were they should be able to tell me how it works so I can do it too. [/quote]

That's absurd. You're supposing that people have insight into their full range of cognitive capacities, which is not neccesarily true (in fact it's false). People are not guessing any more so than when they are making inductive inferences, because this is the rough principle under which the entire machinery operates. But it is largely non-conscious machinery, and has nothing to do with what people are consciously experiencing, but rather with the mood and attitude changes that are consistent as the conversation goes on.

Let me give you a demonstration. Without referencing any prior knowledge, can you give me an exhaustive set of instructions for how to tie my shoelaces? Suppose I cannot comprehend analogy and assume that I need accurate instructions for any motor movement to be able to engage in it (so I would require instructions more specific than, say, moving by fingers, as I would require knowing which finger to move and how).

[quote]Ignoring my general denial that communication is a thing, whether language comes later is immaterial.  Language can supplant other means of expression.  And since language is the only place we find any formal definitions, it's a far more useful means of expression than its predecessors.[/quote]

It does not matter how useful language is.

You will agree with me that information processing is crucial to communication, yes? Information is what is being meaningfully conveyed, and you are attempting to provide it in such a way that I can hold the same kind of idea you are currently hold. So far so good, yes?

The issue is that the modules we have for processing information, again as a matter of physical reality, interfer with purely propositional communication. Put simply, we are not the kind of machine that could exclusively process information like this. Making a demand of us to do so is like a normative theory for a natural phenomenon. It is pointless to tell an earthquake what it ought to do; this is the same situation, albeit not as rigid because of the degree to which we do have control over our cognition.

[quote]If it produces inferior outcomes (the outcome being: did I say what I wanted to say), yes it is.

The only reasonable way for me to measure my success when speaking is to measure how often I say what I want to say.[/quote]

Then you are not communicating; you are simply evaluating the effectiveness of utterances. Communication requres the other person understanding what you are saying, and the distinction between what I am currently saying and what you are saying above is enormous.

[quote]You're making a leap I don't understand.  Yes, the writer writes the lines as a coherent unit.  I don't see why that then forces me to view them as a coherent unit.[/quote]

Let me try again, from the start.

The writer has written two lines - they are done as a unit. The line of the PC, and the line of the NPC, which neccesarily interprets the line of the PC as it a response.

Now, I the player choose a line. I have some interpretation of it. The interpretation is wrong, as the NPC responds to it entirely different than I conceived. You will say, the interpretation is not wrong; the NPC merely misunderstood it, but the line legitimately contained the information which I believed it did.

My response to this is that it introduces a dramatic contradiction: for reasons that are too long to explain here, the game would become unplayable for me where I to believe that events happen without my (speaking as the player) seeing them happen on the screen. So I cannot assume a misunderstanding, unless I assume that it is a misunderstanding that I have no option of ever correcting, mentioning as a misunderstanding, or otherwise addressing. But this removes any illusion that the character is mine or that I control the character; so therefore I reject than a misunderstanding is possible, unless explicitly addressed in-game.

[quote]Very.  I very much enjoyed the Philosophy of Law when I was in school, and in fact all of my graduate-level classes were in this field.[/quote]

It's an interest I share (well, I'm interested in becoming a lawyer since I actually don't care for the carying out of science) and I've done a fair bit of legal philosophy lately. It's wonderful until someone mentions political philosophy, in which case my head is about to explode. I don't know about you, but I feel there is nothing more nonsensical than the collection of "works" currently referenced as political philosophy.

[quote]I did not like Dworkin.  He assertions were routinely unfounded.  The same was true of his theory of natural law.  And I think he landed on the wrong side of the is-ought problem.[/quote]

I'm not very familiar with Dworkin at all. Aside from an introduction in the implications of moral philsophy on law, I haven't studied him. Most of the courses I've taken are in legal positivism.

What I do recall, though, is that he advocated, roughly, that the law is written with a particular intent and that appropriate interpretation requires the recognition of this intent. This is roughly similar to what I am arguing for video-games, though for very different reasons and justified on a different basis.

[quote]And as you know, my view of game content is that all implicit content is mutable.  The player is free to modify it as he sees fit (recall our discussions about talking to Trask at the start of KotOR).[/quote]

I know. So far no one has been open to my suggestion that the Warden had been replaced by shapeshifting aliens who wished to investigate the strange phenomenon of the Blight that had appeared in Ferelden and is having a dramatic effect on their homeworld.

[quote]Of course.  You know this is true.  You were the first one to work out that I'm a nominalist (I didn't even know it at the time).[/quote]

To be fair, I don't think that nominalism requires taking the part side on the part-whole debate.

[quote]After doing some reading, it turns out I'm quite a strict nominalist.  And since I'm a strong advocate of Karl Popper's theories regarding the nature of science, I've concluded that belief in the existence of groups, like communication (a grouping of discrete expression and interpretation), or society (a grouping of individuals), is unscientific.  Since belief in society, for example, constitutes positing the existence of an unecessary layer of complexity (as all things in a society can be described in relation only to the individuals within it), that belief thus fails to satisfy Ockham's Razor, and is therefore unscientific.[/quote]

Popper is just flat out wrong, though. Falsification is unworkable as a scientific standard.

Now, why do you say that positing a group is uneccesary from the standpoint of a scientific theory?

I adopt a variant Kuhn's position on this: the existence of groups are neccesary pressupositions to avoid combinatorial explosion, so are neccesarily scientific, as otherwise the quantity of information in the world is infinite and impossible to process. So in a strict sense, I believe it is unjustified to say universals exist. At the same time, I argue it is neccesary to suppose that they existence, for the simple matter that otherwise it is impossible to function.

[quote]The organisation is one of the components of the duck. [/quote]

Now you're just not being a nominalist. You're telling me we have a natural kind, and that kind is duck?

[quote]Does your character see it?  If you're roleplaying, you're making decisions I presume are constitent with his experiences.  You don't think the world in which he lives exist, but does he?[/quote]

I don't think I think my character exists in the same way you think my character exists. That was an awkward sentence. Stil, I hope it conveys the intention, which is to say that I do not think a character in a video-game (even for the purposes of role-play) is a person in the same sense I think you are a person.

As for the issue of experiences, well, I don't really use them as relevant in role-playing. But then as I was saying to Valerion, I think expereinces are not a significant part of what it means to be a person, even when speaking about you or I.

[quote]How does your character view his world?  If you're roleplaying him, you should have an answer to that.  Or am I misunderstanding what you mean my "roleplay"? [/quote]

I think so. I don't suppose there is a world, or a him for that matter, that he is viewing. Keep in mind that I've come to a definition of what it means to role-play exclusively from playing video-games, as I've never played PnP or role-played with another living human being.

So it is quite possible that what I consider role-play is something else entirely.

[quote]My preference there was, again, a question of coherence.  If the rules within the gameworld are not applied consistently, I would expect the characters in the world to notice this and behave accordingly.

But they don't.  Characters will all behave the same way, even though the rules that govern them are different.  BioWare seems to recognise that the rules of the game world should affect the behaviour of its resident characters; this is why they didn't include resurrection magic in DAO.  And yet inconsistently applied rules don't produce inconsistent behaviourial results.[/quote]

But there are different degrees of inconsistency. For example, I cannot know if particular laws related to abilities apply to you or I equally. I have no way of independently investigating, for example, whether you and I require different amounts of time to learn the same thing (or the same amount of time) because we are under the influence of some universal and our qualities differ, or because we are under the dominion of two different sets of rules entirely.

[quote]One of these two things should change, and I think the consistency of the ruleset would be easier.[/quote]

If rules are not applied consistently it does not neccesarily imply incoherence. The rules could be different for each of us yet not be sufficiently different for us to notice differences.

Take physics, as a real world example. Since we have traveled at different speeds all our lives (in cars, walking, etc.) it is technically true that the total amount of time that has passed for me is not strictly equivalent to the total amount of time that has passed for you (since I was born, since I think you are older than me). This despite the fact that the common belief is that we are each subject to the same universal time.

So I do not think that inconsistent laws are neccesarily demanding of a change in coherence.

[quote]Yes, people are stupid.  This isn't news.[/quote]

Haha.

Okay, not what I was actually driving at. I don't think the person is stupid for thinking this, because this happens to be a common pattern in our thought. We're all predisposed to over-evaluating ourselves, even when we are justified in doing so.

[quote]But they didn't walk out on me.  Regardless of whether that's realistic behaviour (and since people are all different, I see no reason why it wouldn't be), that's what happened.[/quote]

You and I both grant that physical and biological laws are often played with in video-games. I don't think this is a particularly shocking premise. Yet you and I can both agree that if I game said it was attempting to simulate reality, that a dramatic departure from those laws would be unjustified and, if it happened, an error in the game.

I think this justification follows along the same line. It does not matter that people are different; it matters the ways in which people can be different. 

[quote]And I didn't need to convince anyone.  Morrigan was told to follow.  Leliana suggested it herself.  I gave Shale and Sten the option to follow me, but never did I tell them to do it.  Alistair volunteered to follow me.  The dog just seemed to like me.  Oghren accompanied me out of self-interest.  Neither Zevran nor Wynne joined the party.  Am I missing anyone?[/quote]

To meta-game for a second, Shale and Sten cannot refuse to follow you. Yes, you can argue that within the context of the game you do not know this, etc. etc. But from a programming standpoint, the only way in which to not have either Shale or Sten join you is to not provide them the option. I can provide similar addresses for the rest, but for a second I want to focus on these two because I will present a general critique.

Taking this as evidence of posibility is, in my view, like using a thought experiment as evidence. I dislike thought experiments, strongtly. Since it is possible for humans to think and believe in mutually exclusive or otherwise impossible things, thought experiments can make plausible impossible or otherwise mutually exclusive things in virtue of their design.

I believe being capable of completing the game with every personality is not evidence that every personality could complete the game, but rather evidence that the game was designed so that it can be completed.

[quote]The armies had contracts that bound them to follow me.  I didn't convince anyone of anything; they chose on their own to honour their agreements.  I don't claim to have any idea how persuasion works (I had a professor once write of me "he lacks the necessary persuasive skills to support his idiosyncratic opinions"), so I was quite pleased the the game never claimed my character was persuasive.  Because that would have been implausible[/quote]

Technically, the armies never follow the Warden, since they all just seem to happily march up to Denerim and do their own thing, but I agree with you that supposing they respect the force of the treaties, it did not matter who came to them.

The Landsmeet was incredibly contrived as a way to avoid that in a way that basically contradicted the entire lore up to that point. If you fail to convice the nobles (and I would hope the option to fail is there even if you have the appropriate evidence; otherwise the game forces you to be persuasive, since being persuasive has nothing to do with even the strength of your evidence; this is why politicians can lie so dramatically yet retain power) then you just try to murder Loghain (or alternatively he tries to murder you). 

In either case the Landsmeet decides for you because you happened to beat someone senseless by proxy.

[Vaeliorin]

[quote]In Exile wrote...
[quote]Vaeliorin wrote...
Scaling is good because it means the game is always challenging!

Actually, it doesn't, sadly, as DA was far too easy. [/quote]
On nightmare, no less. I think the fact that the encounters weren't sufficiently tactical was the problem.[/quote]
Agreed.  Though I would add that the reason the encounters weren't sufficiently tactical was largely related to how simplistic the capabilities of the enemies were.  The most difficult fights (outside of outright overpowered enemies) were those where you fought large numbers of enemies that all tried to use crowd control abilities against you.  The fight against the six statues in Redcliffe comes to mind, as they liked to spam War Cry.


[quote][quote]That's an interesting view point.  It's one I don't share, obviously, but it's one I hadn't considered.  I also find it somewhat depressing (it makes me somewhat sad to think that I'd always be who I am, regardless of how I was raised), but that's neither here nor there.  Regardless, that does explain the difference between our viewpoints.

I do think, however, that beyond a certain age (probably early teens at the latest) only fairly major events can make significant changes to someone's personality. [/quote]
To say that you are who you are regardless of how you are raised is too strong of a claim. I wouldn't go so far as to say that. But I would say that who you are is determined to a very large extent by birth.

So for example - you could be more competitive than othes, but depending on how you were raised, this might mean different things.

And never discount the effects of poor child-rearing as things can affect aspects of personality (for example, how well your caregivers treat you as a child affects how you form romantic relationships as an adult).

The issue with looking at how dramatically kinds change and supposing nurture as largely the explanation for that change is that there is a dramatic cognitive and neurological maturation that takes place. In a very real sense children do not have the same brain at 3 that they do at 8.

Beyond that, things like temperment we can predict with a high degree of accuracy from the behaviour of infants.

This is all empirical. But the main point is that in no way I am (or modern psychology) making the claim you are a defined person at birth, and that events in your life do not influence who you are. They most certainly do. It is just arguable the extent to which they influence you, and it is clear nature gives you a starting point.

Is that a little clearer?[/quote]
Definitely.  I get more clearly what you're saying now, and I do actually agree to an extent.  It would seem illogical to claim that the initial state of one's mental wiring doesn't end up influencing who they are as a person.  We differe, I believe, on how much that inital state can be "rewired" during one's formative years.
[quote]
[quote]I'll admit, I don't really get this point.  I could understand it if you managed to never have a conversation in real life wherein someone misinterpreted what you said, but I find that happens to me fairly frequently.[/quote]It happens occasionally; I`m not denying that. What I am saying, however, is that in a game we do not have the luxury of clarifying misunderstands as we do in real life. To me, something that does not happen as illustrated on screen does not happen in the game, period.

So when I say a line, and am provided with no option to clarify it (or if I can clarify it but not as I intended) I can only assume that the line was meant to be played straight.[/quote]
Ah, I see.  I tend to see it as more of a situation where the other person simply doesn't give me the option to clarify.  Whether they walk off or simply change the subject, I find that it mimics real life fairly well.  Admittedly, it's not really that often that I encounter a misunderstanding in game that would really be helped with clarification (as I find that things that are going to anger someone are usually fairly clear, and I find that trying to clarify non-emotional misunderstandings usually isn't that successful in real life.)

[quote][quote]First of all, yes, I did mean the "Never mind." line.  I'd have given more context, but that part of the conversation is the only part I had readily available (I used it as a signature at one point, so I had it written down.)

Huh.  It would seem you take punctuation much more seriously than I do.  While I generally accept that the content of any given line is determined within the game, as well as the phrasing as long as it isn't too far out of character, I generally ignore punctuation beyond determining whether something is a question or not.  I'll add pauses, hesitations, etc., whatever is appropriate for the character.[/quote]
But punctuation matters very much to the meaning of the line. Even if the game had no VO, would we not assume that punctuation for the NPCs accurately indicates how they phrase things? Or would you say that I am justified in a game like BG or NWN to think that every NPC is constantly screaming irrespective of punctuation? And if we play punctuation straight for NPCs, why ought I not do the same for the PC?[/quote]
Of course punctuation accurately indicates how they phrase things.  The difference is that they're NPCs (whom I have no control over their personality and how they speak, nor should I) while my character is mine (and I necessarily have control over their personality and how they speak.)  That's largely why I feel that outside of that required for proper grammar, PC lines shouldn't contain any punctuation other than either a period or a question mark, and that simply to delineate between a statement and a question.

[quote][quote]Phrasing isn't something I think matters as much as you do.  I think pretty much any phrase can be used in pretty much any way, provided it's given the right tone.  I can easily see "Never mind" being used as kind of a snarled, angry response when someone doesn't actually have an adequate response to someone who has just one-upped them in an argument.

Anyway, I certainly understand your point, though obviously I don't agree.[/quote]
I think I was a little too strong with the language I used in the previous post because what very particular means for a person like me is not the same for everyone; I am probably the least methodical and particualr person in the world, so generally when I say I am particular I probably mean, relative to everyone else, I am now at the average expected level of attention to detail.

I just think certain expressions cannot be used in certain ways. Now, I`m sure in the absolute case you agree with me, insofar as `never mind`could never be a tender declaration of love. The issue is to what extent each range of meaning is possible with a phrase, and I can`t escape my own preconceptions about this when role-playing.[/quote]
Ah, that makes a little more sense.  However, I don't really agree with you in the absolute.  To point to a somewhat famous example, at the very beginning of The Princess Bride there's a whole bit where Wesley says "As you wish" but what he really means is "I love you."  I would agree that it's not common for people to use certain phrases to express certain emotions, but I'm not willing to agree that it never occurs.

I can certainly understand how your own preconceptions could cause issues with interpreting certain lines with a meaning outside of that which you would find reasonable.
[quote]
[quote]Essentially, nature vs. nurture, with you leaning towards nature and me leaning towards nurture.  I get what you're saying, even if I don't agree. [/quote]Yes, with a very strong emphasis on lean. I think both nature and nurture have a role in determining personality. I simply think the role of nurture is subordinate and defines details, whereas nature is dominant and determines archetype, or the major dominant personality aspects of the individual.[/quote]
*nods sagely, stroking his beard*

Honestly, your own knowledge of the field far exceeds my own (my knowledge being largely anecdotal) so I don't really have the means to argue as to which is more true.  Suffice it to say I understand what you're saying.

[quote][quote]While I'm not quite in the people do not change camp, I do certainly understand what you're saying.  Personal experience demonstrates that everyone isn't going to be the same in every situation (for example, I tend to be very gregarious with groups of people who are close friends, but in any group with strangers I fade entirely into the background.)

Anyway, like I said earlier, I do believe that people can change, but it requires a major event for a significant change to occur beyond a certain (fairly young) age.  A betrayal by a trusted friend, tragic death of a loved one, etc. [/quote]
I would agree, but I think the range of change is much more narrow. So to go back to our example, betrayal by a male friend might make one less likely to trust male friends, but not neccesarily less likely to trust romantic partners. I also think that trust is relative - so a person that naturally does not trust others might, after a betrayal, not really trust anyone any less because this person always failed to trust people (now the person just consciously thinks they do not trust others) whereras a trusting person may trust other people less but still trust them more than the average person. So I tend to have a highly complicated and compartmentalized view of how nature changes a personality.[/quote]
I don't know that it's that complicated.  In fact, it makes a great deal of sense.  But I would say that it's not universally true, however.  Some people, when betrayed by a male friend would only lose trust with male friends, and others would lose trust with everyone, for example.  I think that the initial personality of the person and the depth of the betrayal would determine how exactly the person's personality changed.  If the betrayal was hurtful enough, I could certainly see someone going from a very trusting individual to someone who has little trust for anyone at all.

[quote]All of this is why I prefer not to ever worry about the details because they just make things far too complicated.[/quote]
Well, I like complicated, so perhaps that's why I like to worry about the details.

[quote][quote]I'm not sure I understand you here.  Are you saying that you always play the same personality/appearance?  If so, I think that's probably part of our disconnect.  I play a wide range of characters, and as such, I definitely appreciate a lot of customization.  This isn't to say that I have a problem with a fixed protagonist (after all, I think Planescape:Torment is probably the best game ever made) but I have a problem with a fixed protagonist who also has a fixed personality that isn't adequately explained.

Anyway, I don't just build a character from a picture on a whim.  I generally only do it when a particular image catches my eye, and I want to use it, and to explore who the person I see in the picture is.[/quote]
Insofar as apperance is concerned, I always strive to make sure the character is attractive by my standards. I have character types I like with associated apperances, but I do have more than one stock character I use. I tend to have a much more narrow range of apperances than personalities however, as there is just a very narrow range of features I find attractive.

But this leads to problems like never being able to RP dwarves because of vanity.[/quote]
Ah.  I'll admit, I tend to try to make characters that are attractive as well, but that's largely because if I try to make an ugly character, they always seem to end up looking not quite human.  Of course, in a non-visual medium, I will happily make ugly characters, but I tend not to in video games.

[quote]As for the exploring part, this I never do. But I think this is just a personal trait, wherein I generally do not actually care about the background of others. Which is kind of weird when you think about it, because I study psychology and enjoy it. So for whatever reason I don`t ever care to learn about people (in the specific sense)... but I want to learn about people (in the general sense).[/quote]
That is interesting.  I'm guessing you don't write?  That's a large part of why I like to take a picture and figure out who the person behind it is.  I find that it helps develop character ideas, and also helps me improve my writing by making me work on my characterization.

[quote][quote]Well, I'd argue that we all see ourselves differently than we actually appear in the mirror, but that's neither here nor there.  I suppose I just don't take games as literally as you seem to.[/quote]
Well, I actually agree there. (also, interesting fact: if you show a person a picture of how they look in the mirror but reversed, i.e. how the rest of the world sees them, people will rate it as dramatically less attractive than the mirror-flipped picture because it is less familiar). I was just trying to illustrate a point.[/quote]
Interesting.  I'll have to try that some time.
[quote]
[quote]That certainly explains a lot.  As Sylvius said, it seems that you missed (for the most part) the era when RPGs left most of the details to your imagination.  You're used to taking things in game literally, while I'm used to taking things as a best possible representation, so I expect to fill in any of the gaps I think exist with my own imagination.  PnP games push me even farther into filling in details with my own imagination, so I just naturally do that with any sort of interactive story medium.[/quote]I think that`s a fair point. It is impossible for me to consider a video-game as a medium where you use your imagination. But I`m not sure this has to do with the generation gap so strongly, because I`m not sure I would have ever felt connected or been capable of RPing in either a PnP setting or with the text-based games.[/quote]
It's possible, I suppose.  There's no way of really knowing short of doing a large scale study, and I doubt anyone would really be interested in it.

[quote]I played adventure games that are text-based when I was in Eastern Europe, but to me it just felt like a huge abstraction and it was very clear I was playing a game (leisure suit larry for the win). But that might also be because I was like 7 at the time. So who knows.[/quote]
While I'm not directly familiar with Leisure Suit Larry (I know of it, but have never played one of the games) I did play other adventure games that I understand were in a similar vein (other adventure games by Sierra) and I'll admit, those games weren't really conducive to an immersive role-playing experience in my mind (though admittedly, I was also quite young, 6 or so, at the time.)  They basically just amounted to running around solving puzzles, and while it would certainly be possible to roleplay in them, the games didn't facilitate it by any stretch of the imagination.

[quote][quote]I can certainly understand being frustrated with the limited choices.  Again, from having played RPGs from such a young age, it just comes naturally to me to want things to go a certain way, even to play it out in my head, but within the game itself work within the confines the game has given to me.

Honestly...I'm beginning to think the entirety of our differences are due to a generational gap.[/quote]
Now I`m getting curious. I wonder if we could poll VO and non-VO and other sources of disagreement in our RPGs and see if it is a generational gap at work or not.[/quote]
It would definitely be an interesting study.  I doubt we could get a good sample size or distribution, however.
[quote]
[quote]I find this interesting.  I can see what you're saying, even if it doesn't reflect my own experiences.  I imagine there's some psychological explanation for the way that people's imaginations differ, but I can't even begin to guess at it, so I'm not going to out myself as a moron by trying. [/quote]It could be a personality issue. You and I, compared to you and Sylvius, have different personalities. It may be that because I am more of a person that likes to be visible and in front of others, and instead of dissapearing within a group, leading it and being in the centre of it, it may be that my imagination simply needs to make itself front-row-centre too.[/quote]
It's possible.  I wish I still had access to a college library, so I could get some decent books and journals to look into it.  I doubt the local library has much that's really scientific in nature.
[quote]
[quote]Ah, I see.  To me, these inconsistencies don't ever occur.  I always know what my character is saying and how he's saying it, and when the NPC's response isn't what I expect, I just chalk that up to communication being imperfect.  But I can certainly see where you're having a problem, since you use an NPC's reaction to determine the tone of what your character said.[/quote]It is not quite like that. Like I said to Sylvius: I think the line is defined from the moment I pick it. In practice I have to reason backwards since I don`t know what the NPC would say to the line until picking it, but to me the entire affair was determined long ago.

It`s actually why I feel I can`t roleplay on the first playthrough.[/quote]
Ah, I understand now.  Having read what you said to Sylvius, I can certainly see why you feel that way, and I don't think it's an untenable position.  I just choose not to see it that way, because, honestly, that would take a lot of the fun out of the game for me.  I refuse to accept that authorial intent matters in a situation where I, ostensibly, am suppose to have control over the character that I'm playing.

[quote][quote]Yeah, this is one point where Sylvius and I disagree.  I don't think I ever control anything about what the other characters in my party do, beyond their actions in combat (and the only reason I do that is because AI is dumb and there's yet to be a good system to issue orders that doesn't involve directly taking control.)

Even in games where I create the entire party, there's almost always one character that I think of as "my character" with the rest of the characters being that character's companions.  The only exception to this is games wherein the characters literally can't act without my input (so, turn-based games) at which point I generally consider myself as playing the entire party.[/quote]
I really prefer party-based control to AI. Not just because the AI is dumb, but because it`s more fun.[/quote]
Well, I won't deny that party-based control is fun.  I think that it would be more conducive to maintaining immersion and staying in character to not have to control the party.

[quote]I couldn`t even get through IWD so I think I`m not a pure party game person.[/quote]
Interestingly, IWD is my second favorite Infinity Engine game (Planescape:Torment being my favorite).  Admittedly, I've never gotten very far in BG2.
[quote]
[quote]This is, to me, a weird way to play, but I see what you're saying.  You've basically turned over your character's moment to moment details to the writers.  I can't do that, because it almost always results in my character not making much sense to me.  I just rely on the fallibility of human communication to understand the occasional seeming disconnect.[/quote]The problem is that I cannot clarify these misunderstandings. It is not that I turn control over to the writers. The writers simply have control in virtue of how they have written the lines and what options they provide me. When there is a misunderstanding my only options are supposing I do not care to clarify it which means I have to invent a motivation to rationalize the game or that there was a breakdown in the writers conveying the meaning of the line to me. [/quote]
As mentioned above, I find it somewhat realistic not to be given the option to clarify when there's a misunderstanding, but I get what you're saying.  I think this is one of those personality differences coming out.  I'm generally willing to let minor misunderstandings pass (because usually clarifying them isn't worth the effort) and not having the chance to clarify more major misunderstandings (particularly those that anger someone) is, to me, fairly realistic (I suppose largely because I'm not generally willing to put myself forward.)
[quote]
[quote]Anyway, like I mentioned earlier, I'm beginning to think the problem is a generational one.  The games of my youth (which completely lacked voicing...the first game I remember having voice was Realms of Arkania:Star Trails.  It was also the first game I ever owned on CD. ) raised me to play one particular way, and the games you've played (which for the most part have all had at least some degree of voiceover) have conditioned you to expect something else.[/quote]Technically, I played MS-DOS games first. And then strategy games. But I never played RPGs without voice-over save NWN early. And I didn`t know what role-playing was when I played NWN.[/quote]
Yeah, I should have been more specific in my terminology.  I should have said the role-playing games of my youth, instead of simply games.

[quote][quote]I have to admit, I'm with Sylvius on this.  Though I'm capable of taking charge and leading, I hate doing it, so I avoid it whenever possible.  As such, it's very natural for me to play a character who's more passive.  Perhaps that's why it doesn't bother me at all for my character to not be very active physically in conversation (that, and it prevents my character from doing horribly out of character things like Shepard tended to do, such as violently threatening C-Sec officers.)[/quote]
Possibly. Though I`m not ever physically active in conversations. I`m a short guy; I`m not throttling anyone by the neck any time soon. But I do stand out. I can`t help but want to stand out. It`s just impossible for me to be passive. Like I a class seminar. I have two modes: 1) half paying attention to the lecture half playing minesweeper because I am not speaking; 2) speaking.[/quote]
Interesting.  I find that people in leadership positions tend to be very animated when they're talking, while I personally tend to be more staid (my favorite being somewhat slouched with crossed arms.)  That's what I meant more active physically, as I recall you mentioning in the past that it bothered you having your character so passive in conversation, and I assumed that had as much to do with him just standing still while talking as well as it did with him being passive conversationally.

Personally, my modes in class seminars were: 1) bored and staring off into space or 2) doing all the talking because I was sick of eveyone else in the class just sitting there staring at the professor.

[Sylvius the Mad]

[quote]In Exile wrote...

Unless the amount of time taken affects the ability to reach the objective. It is like working against a deadline: in principle, more time could result in a better product. But if a product has to be submitted prior to a certain date, failing to finish it entirely will lead to a more dramatic failure.[/quote]
We clearly disagree about what the objective is, probably because we're evaluating different things.

You're evaluating communication.  I'm evaluating expression.  There are two reasons for this.  First, I don't think communication exists.  Second, I can't control people's interpretation of my remarks.  If I express myself in a way they can understand (to the best of my ability to discern that, which is less than perfect), I've done my job.  Whether they actually do understand me is beyond my control.

So when someone misunderstands me, I don't immediately assume I've done something wrong, nor do I necessarily work to correct their misconception (their poor reasoning is their problem).  That the game doesn't give me an opportunity to correct misundersstandings doesn't really bother me, because I almost never do it.
[quote]I am using it as a comparative standard. There is an established social and biological demand that makes demands on powerful demands on what
constitutes effective communication.

The more you deviate from this, the more you are hampering the outcome of being able to express yourself. To put it another way: part of communication is accurately conveying information. We can meaningfully say that part of this is related to how you phrase statements. At the same time, another part is ensuring that the information actually reaches the intendent party.[/quote]
And since I don't believe in communication, a lot of this doesn't really apply.  I might skip over a few sections as a result.
[quote]Violating natural expectations towards conversation effectively hampers your ability to deliver information because it leads your audience to
dismissing you. Of course, I'm sure your reply will be that people ought not ignore you for what are ostensibly frivolous reasons in your eyes (like how well you convey to their expectations).[/quote]
Not so much that they ought not ignore me, but that if they do I generally lose interest in trying to convince them.  They've demonstrated their lack of value.
[quote]The reality, however, is that there are hard-wired biological reasons for why people evaluate others and communications on strictly non-logical
grounds (for example, how confident the speaker sounds while speaking,
e.g. the speed of speech and tone). These relate to how we establish
dominance behaviour.[/quote]
These relate to how people typically establish dominance behaviour.  Again, there is no reason people necessarily have to do this.

One of my complaints with psychology generally is that it likes to apply generalisations universally.  That something is generally true is applied as if it is univerally true or necessarily true, and I see no rason to believe that is the case.  I think it far more likely that there is variety within the population.  Plus, many of these processes are cognitively penetrable, as you've said, so the people do have the ability to change or override them.

But sometimes you tell me that I can't be doing the thing I think I'm doing, simply on the basis that no one does it.  But you can't know that.
[quote]So plainly put, the reality of the situation is what while you could, in doing this, produce a more refined message, you are not communicating
effectively, because your refinment comes at the cost of being capable of accurately conveying the message.[/quote]
And again, communication isn't my objective.  It cannot reasonably be anyone's objective.
[quote]What do you mean by nonsensical? Based on your predisposition, I suppose you mean that people believe or otherwise make claims that to you are intuitively logically false, and so you conclude that it could only be possible for people to consciously say logically false things if they were insane.

Is this at least a semi-accurate take?[/quote]
Semi-accurate, sure.

I would hope I would never declare someone mentally unfit based purely on my intuitive understanding of logic.  When I say their remarks are nonsensical, I mean they're demonstrably nonsensical.  I can prove they're nonsensical by parsing them logically.

Nonsense is binary.  Either a remark is nonsensical or it isn't, and as long as we understand the language being used we should be able to determine
which side it is on with certainty.
[quote]The issue with this is that the majority of our cognition is not intended to be strictly logical, because strictly logical cognition is useless for the majority of problems. In fact, logic is decidedly worthless for solving all of our evolutionary problems, because the survival value in
truth preservation is effectively zero in comparison to statistically
relevant correlations mistakenly taken to be indicators of causal
relations.[/quote]
Yes, but we have the capacity for logical thought.  That capacity is an important part of my standard for sapience.
[quote]See, this is where our inclinations on the part-whole debate lead to wildly different conclusions. Communication is not two single events: it is
one event that can be divided into two subsections.[/quote]
And this is where I think you've failed Ockham's Razor.  Why do you think communication is a thing?
[quote]Empirically, it is undeniable. We can quite clearly separate intuition from other process as a kind of information processing in the brain, and more importantly in various cognitive models of processing.

If we are speaking philosphically, I agree with you that things like Platonic
forms are highly disputable and likely false. But when speaking about
physical reality, and granting science, we are under different constraints.

And intuition is a real and demonstrable phenomenon. [/quote]
But does it produce knowledge?  I assert it cannot, as the thinker would have no reason to trust its accuracy.
[quote]I often go through two or three draughts of a sentence before I speak it.  I need to take into account the particular interpretation tendencies of my audience, and since those differ from mine I won't usally get it right on my first try.

The problem with this being that one very common interpretation of your behaviour is a lack of certainty and confidence in what you say, and an overall diminishing of the strength of the final thing which you do say. I appreciate that you want to ensure maximum clarity, but there is more to clarity that merely producing the best possile sentence.[/quote]
I admit I do most of my expression in writing.  I'm terrible with people.  Unless I'm quite familiar with them, I often freeze up and am unable to construct any sentences at all.  I certainly cannot speak to them while making eye contact.  I'm better in groups because then I can look at none of them and they can't really tell (because they're not a hive-mind), though I do still speak too quickly and I don't enunciate well.

[quote]That's absurd. You're supposing that people have insight into their full range of cognitive capacities, which is not neccesarily true (in fact it's false). People are not guessing any more so than when they are making
inductive inferences, because this is the rough principle under which the entire machinery operates.[/quote]
Induction is also guessing.

It is possible to deduce statistical probability, though (if it matters, measure it), and choose actions based on that.
[quote]Let me give you a demonstration. Without referencing any prior knowledge, can you give me an exhaustive set of instructions for how to tie my shoelaces?[/quote]
No.  We would need a shared language.
[quote]Suppose I cannot comprehend analogy and assume that I need accurate
instructions for any motor movement to be able to engage in it (so I
would require instructions more specific than, say, moving by fingers,
as I would require knowing which finger to move and how).[/quote]
That sounds a lot like talking to a toddler.  If my instructions can include a visual demonstration, I think it would work.  Without the visual demonstration,the set of instructions would be very long indeed,
[quote]It does not matter how useful language is.[/quote]
Do people not consider the usefulness of the available tools before choosing one over the others?
[quote]You will agree with me that information processing is crucial to
communication, yes?  Information is what is being meaningfully
conveyed, and you are attempting to provide it in such a way that I can
hold the same kind of idea you are currently hold. So far so good, yes?[/quote]
Given your concept of communication as a thing (which I do not accept), yes.
[quote]The issue is that the modules we have for processing information, again as a matter of physical reality, interfer with purely propositional
communication. Put simply, we are not the kind of machine that could
exclusively process information like this.[/quote]
We don't need to process information exclusively like this.  We need only to be able to process information like this (which you don't seem to dispute) and then discard the conclusions arising from other processes.
[quote]Making a demand of us to do so is like a normative theory for a natural phenomenon. It is pointless to tell an earthquake what it ought to do; this is the same situation, albeit not as rigid because of the degree
to which we do have control over our cognition.[/quote]
I'm not suggesting that anyone can turn off the non-conscious parts of his
brain.  I'm suggesting that he can identify and ignore the information
coming out of those parts of his brain.

I'm not saying intuition doesn't happen.  I'm saying intuition isn't informative.
[quote]Then you are not communicating; you are simply evaluating the effectiveness of utterances.[/quote]
Exactly.  That's all anyone can do.
[quote]Communication requres the other person understanding what you are saying, and the distinction between what I am currently saying and what you are saying above is enormous.[/quote]
Yes.  I've said as much above.
[quote]I'm not very familiar with Dworkin at all. Aside from an introduction in the implications of moral philsophy on law, I haven't studied him. Most of the courses I've taken are in legal positivism.

What I do recall, though, is that he advocated, roughly, that the law is written with a particular intent and that appropriate interpretation requires the recognition of this intent.[/quote]
Yes.  My response was always that even if we cared about the intent (and he gave us no such reason to care - this is why I call his position unfounded), the intent was unknowable.  Even in cases where the author of the passage wrote about his intent in other documents, we can't know those remarks were not politically motivated or obfuscatory.  Or just lies.

All we really know about the law is what the law says.  In modern legal interpretation there is often a battle between strict constructionists and broad constructionists.  I'm more of an anti-constructionist.  Construing anything beyond the literal content of the law is necessarily baseless.  This does result in some laws being rendered entirely meaningless, but since I'm happy with the process I'm necessarily happy with the result.

Many legal theorists (Dworkin included) seem to be trying to rationalise their own preferences with regard to legal outcomes.  If a law produces a result they feel is unjust, then there must have been something wrong either with the law or the application of that law.  But I think the
application of law should be simple arithmetic; that's the only way for
it to be fair (Dworkin explicitly appeals to the twin principles of
justice and fairness, but I generally find the two to be in conflict).
[quote]Popper is just flat out wrong, though. Falsification is unworkable as a scientific standard.

Now, why do you say that positing a group is uneccesary from the standpoint of a scientific theory?[/quote]
I think asserting the existence of a group is necessarily unscientific because there's no evidence for their existence.
[quote]I adopt a variant Kuhn's position on this: the existence of groups are
neccesary pressupositions to avoid combinatorial explosion, so are
neccesarily scientific, as otherwise the quantity of information in the
world is infinite and impossible to process. So in a strict sense, I believe it is unjustified to say universals exist. At the same time, I argue it is neccesary to suppose that they existence, for the simple matter that otherwise it is impossible to function.[/quote]
That position is not incompatible with nominalism.  And the name suggests, nominalists maintain that groups exist "in name only".

The problem arises when you attribute characteristics to those groups. 
Since things that don't exist can't exhibit characteristics, by assigning characteristics you're presupposing that they actually exist (more than in name only).
[quote]Now you're just not being a nominalist. You're telling me we have a natural kind, and that kind is duck?[/quote]
If I disassemble your car, but leave all the parts in your garage, I haven't taken anything from you.  But what you have cannot reasonably be called a car.  You have a pile of car parts.

The relative position of those parts is a component of the car.  If you add that component back in, you get your car back.

Similarly, if you reassemble and reanimate the duck, you'll have a duck.

Information is a thing.
[quote]I don't think I think my character exists in the same way you think my
character exists. That was an awkward sentence. Stil, I hope it conveys the intention, which is to say that I do not think a character in a
video-game (even for the purposes of role-play) is a person in the same
sense I think you are a person.[/quote]
Clearly he isn't, but to make realistic decisions on his behalf I need him to behave as if he is real, and as if he thinks he is real.
[quote]As for the issue of experiences, well, I don't really use them as relevant in role-playing. But then as I was saying to Valerion, I think
expereinces are not a significant part of what it means to be a person,
even when speaking about you or I.[/quote]
Metacognition (thinking about thinking) is an important part of my life.  I would prefer to do the same while roleplaying my character, but I cannot if I'm unaware of his thoughts.
[quote]If rules are not applied consistently it does not neccesarily imply
incoherence. The rules could be different for each of us yet not be
sufficiently different for us to notice differences.[/quote]
Certainly.  But if I can notice the difference just by playing the game, surely my character can notice by living her entire life in that setting.

I would think the threshhold for incoherence is actually lower for the characters than it is for us.  There are doctors in the world, and they presumably know how death works.  If there's an XP penalty in the game, then the characters should notice a consistent and predictable effect on the rates at which they acquire new skills.

The basic facts about the physical laws of the universe are common
knowledge for us.  Should they not also be for the characters in a
fictional setting?
[quote]Haha.

Okay, not what I was actually driving at. I don't think the person is stupid for thinking this, because this happens to be a common pattern in our thought. We're all predisposed to over-evaluating ourselves, even when we are justified in doing so.[/quote]
If they were smart their self-evaluation would include some sort of objective measurement.

I take a lot of surveys (because I have idiosyncratic opinions and I want them heard), but surveys will often ask what I think are idiotic questions that ordinary people (myself included) can't possibly answer without just guessing.  And yet presumably they do induce responses from people (else they wouldn't end up in surveys).
[quote]To meta-game for a second, Shale and Sten cannot refuse to follow you.
Yes, you can argue that within the context of the game you do not know
this, etc. etc. But from a programming standpoint, the only way in
which to not have either Shale or Sten join you is to not provide them
the option. I can provide similar addresses for the rest, but for a
second I want to focus on these two because I will present a general
critique.[/quote]
Well yes, I know that.  But my character does not, and what matters to me is that the game's story and setting make sense from my character's point of view.  When roleplaying, my point of view is entirely subservient to his.

This is why I completely missed the supposedly obvious clue in Mass Effect
to take the Mako with me on the Ilos trench run.  The companions
literally tell the player to do that very thing.  But since I was
trying to roleplay, and I don't exist within the gameworld, I interpreted the line solely as if it were directed at Shepard.  Shepard dismissed the suggestion (it was actually out of character for her squadmates to suggest tactics like that), and continued as she saw fit.  ME forumites (again) told me I was an idiot for missing the clue, but from my point of view the clue didn't exist (as my point of view doesn't really exist when I'm playing the game).
[quote]Taking this as evidence of posibility is, in my view, like using a thought experiment as evidence. I dislike thought experiments, strongtly.[/quote]
I approach roleplaying as one big thought experiment.
[quote]Since it is possible for humans to think and believe in mutually exclusive or otherwise impossible things, thought experiments can make plausible impossible or otherwise mutually exclusive things in virtue of their design.[/quote]
What you describe risks cognitive dissonance, and I see that as a gigantic character flaw.  I'm not confident that people who are willing to believe mutually exclusive things at the same time are even people.  They're certainly not sapient, which is supposedly the defining characteristic of the species.
[quote]I believe being capable of completing the game with every personality is not evidence that every personality could complete the game, but rather evidence that the game was designed so that it can be completed.[/quote]
I would suggest that "being capable of completing the game with every personality" is logically equivalent to "every personality could complete the game".
[quote]I would hope the option to fail is there even if you have the appropriate evidence[/quote]
I'm pretty sure you can.  That city elf character I mentioned earlier had no persuasion skills, and I think that's what happened with him.
[quote]being persuasive has nothing to do with even the strength of your evidence; this is why politicians can lie so dramatically yet retain power[/quote]
Being persuasive in the eyes of most people has nothing to do with the strength of your evidence.

I still don't like your universal claims.
[quote]In either case the Landsmeet decides for you because you happened to beat someone senseless by proxy.[/quote]
I don't see why we even need the Landsmeet.  We don't have a treaty to
compel the humans to help, so there's no real reason to expect any, and
it's not like the humans aren't going to fight back once the Blight reaches their city (and even if they don't, we still have the other armies to aid us against the archdemon).

Modifié par Sylvius the Mad, 18 juillet 2010 - 06:46 .

[In Exile]

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...
We clearly disagree about what the objective is, probably because we're evaluating different things.

You're evaluating communication.  I'm evaluating expression.[/quote]

Yes, that much I think we can agree on.

[quote]There are two reasons for this.  First, I don't think communication exists.  Second, I can't control people's interpretation of my remarks.  If I express myself in a way they can understand (to the best of my ability to discern that, which is less than perfect), I've done my job.  Whether they actually do understand me is beyond my control.[/quote]

I'm confused by your fourth sentence. You said that what you are evaluatinng is expression. But then you introduce the measurable standard of "expression in a way they can understand." So now you are reflecting the interaction on the other party - to some degree are you making it about them, instead of about you.

Whether or not they understand your meaning in a strict sense is not something you can control (you cannot ensure you will be understood with 100% accuracy 100% of the time) the degree to which you are understood and how often you are understood is under your control.

I can't reconcile the two positions. I'm afraid. Could you clarify?

[quote]So when someone misunderstands me, I don't immediately assume I've done something wrong, nor do I necessarily work to correct their misconception (their poor reasoning is their problem).  That the game doesn't give me an opportunity to correct misundersstandings doesn't really bother me, because I almost never do it.[/quote]

That's certainly a fair point for you personally, but can you see how in general that is effectively saying, I do not mind the absence of the following choice in game, merely because I would not choose it? Even supposing I as a person would be like you, if I were to have a character that is not, that character would never be allowed to correct perceived misunderstandings either. And I see this as incredibly problematic as a matter of design, from a principled as opposed to practical standpoint.

[quote]And since I don't believe in communication, a lot of this doesn't really apply.  I might skip over a few sections as a result.[/quote]

Certainly that is your perrogative, but you seem to grant that the other party understanding is a part of expression, as youv'e defined it. So I do not see how terms aside, we are not trying to grasp the same meaning.

[quote]Not so much that they ought not ignore me, but that if they do I generally lose interest in trying to convince them. They've demonstrated their lack of value.[/quote]

This kind of instrumentalism seems irreconcilable with your detail that communication expression is not instrumental.

[quote]These relate to how people typically establish dominance behaviour.  Again, there is no reason people necessarily have to do this.[/quote]

Yes, there is. It is a matter of biology. There is no one way people neccesarily do any one thing, but that is because the brain as a matter of course is designed to allow for multiple anchored outcomes. The best way to describe the brain, in a very rough analogy, would be as a function. Say f(x) = x+5. It is not neccesary that this is any one specific number. But it is neccesary that f(0) is 5. The same applies to the brain.

[quote]One of my complaints with psychology generally is that it likes to apply generalisations universally.  That something is generally true is applied as if it is univerally true or necessarily true, and I see no rason to believe that is the case.  I think it far more likely that there is variety within the population.  Plus, many of these processes are cognitively penetrable, as you've said, so the people do have the ability to change or override them.[/quote]

Psychology makes universal generalizations only insofar as there is a biological/biochemical basis for the mechanism. In that case, it is no different than a biologist making such a claim, which is largely equivalent to a physicist or chemist making the same claim.

Now we are going to theories of knowledge, and particularly to abudction versus deduction, and you know very wellI think the latter is useless and the former is our only relatively speaking reliable form of knowledge.

Some processes (largely S2, i.e. purely propositional processes, which in information processing terms are serial inferential and symbolic kinds of processing) are cognitively penetrable to some extent. But language is very likely on partially S2, and communication is more archaic and so itself only partially S2. These things are better described by analogy as reflex (though not by mechanism, as they are in fact something far more complicated and different).

[quote]But sometimes you tell me that I can't be doing the thing I think I'm doing, simply on the basis that no one does it.  But you can't know that.[/quote]

It is more than that. I am telling you that what you think you are doing is physically impossible. It is not that no one does it - it is that no one could do it based on their configuration as physical entities. The reason for why you believe you are doing it is separate from why you are doing it.

[quote]And again, communication isn't my objective.  It cannot reasonably be anyone's objective.[/quote]

I would appreciate it if you would avoid broad normative pronouncements of this sort, especially with the majority of your position has not been reliably demonstrated.

[quote]Semi-accurate, sure.

I would hope I would never declare someone mentally unfit based purely on my intuitive understanding of logic.  When I say their remarks are nonsensical, I mean they're demonstrably nonsensical.  I can prove they're nonsensical by parsing them logically. [/quote]

Right, and this is where you are simply taking a worldview that is failed. Put simply: thinking is not a thing that exists to reliably demonstrate truth. So the fact that it fails to do so, even if it were the case that it reliably failed to do so, is effectively meaningless.

[quote]Nonsense is binary.  Either a remark is nonsensical or it isn't, and as long as we understand the language being used we should be able to determine which side it is on with certainty.[/quote]

I disagree. Truth in the formal sense is binary. Nonsence, I would say, is something else. Because to say that something is nonsense we have to presuppose a theory of knowledge, and I simply do not accept deduction as a source of justified knowledge about the world. It is only a mechanism to investigate already previously justified knowledge. The absolute lack of value in deduction is apparent in the essence of the infinite number of theorems and how they are constructed: they are all conditional statements. To make any strictly logical claim, you need some independent definite knowledge about the world.

Not to mention that deduction can only justify itself, and you cannot prove P=>Q, P .'. Q to me if I reject the logical rule by which it operates.

[quote]Yes, but we have the capacity for logical thought.  That capacity is an important part of my standard for sapience.[/quote]

Well, that's actually arguable. Currently our imagination and brain structure seems more important than logic for our sapience. In fact, logic seems to be a consequence of the properties of our language, which we arguably had prior to logic in any form.

[quote] And this is where I think you've failed Ockham's Razor.  Why do you think communication is a thing?[/quote]

I think universals neccesarily need to be a thing for us to have justified knowledge. Ockham is merely about supposing the superflous; but I despite that I deny that it is ever possible to know whether or not a universal is metaphisically true, I claim it is neccesary to suppose that they exist.

Put another way, regarding metaphysical realism I am a nominalism, but would reach the same conclusion in a lot of ways as a scientific realist on the matter of how to interpret our theories and invisible entities and universals on the basis on how I believe we acquire knowledge, through frameworks and abduction.

[quote]But does it produce knowledge?  I assert it cannot, as the thinker would have no reason to trust its accuracy.[/quote]

But accuracy is not knowledge. But another way: I deny that deduction produces knowledge. It unpacks already existing knowledge, to be sure, and whatever it unpacks correctly we know must be true if the inital thing we knew was true, but that is it.

I refuse to claim that knowledge is ever as reliable as you believe. So there are two ways I can respond to this, but they boil down to the same thing: we can trust intuition insofar as we can reliably trust any other kind of source of knowledge, which is to say not at all or completely, because knowledge is exclusively provisionary.

[quote]I admit I do most of my expression in writing.  I'm terrible with people.  Unless I'm quite familiar with them, I often freeze up and am unable to construct any sentences at all.  I certainly cannot speak to them while making eye contact.  I'm better in groups because then I can look at none of them and they can't really tell (because they're not a hive-mind), though I do still speak too quickly and I don't enunciate well. [/quote]

Writing is dramatically different than speaking, you have to agree with me here. I don't want to push the issue here though, because I do not like speaking about others personally.

[quote]Induction is also guessing.

It is possible to deduce statistical probability, though (if it matters, measure it), and choose actions based on that. [/quote]

I disagree that it is possible to deduce statistical probability. In fact, if we are measuring it we are already relying on induction (because we are supposing our measurement is reliable in the future). So what you are telling me is that it is possible to deduce statistical probability by, in your own words, guessing it.

But we are right back to whether or not deduction has value, and I am quite adamant it has none.

[quote]No.  We would need a shared language.[/quote]

Suppose we have English, but I am unfamiliar with actions. I am aware of what limbs are, and aware of the full range of motions of them. But if you were to tell me, for example, tie it in the shape of a bow I would not know what a bow is.

[quote]That sounds a lot like talking to a toddler.  If my instructions can include a visual demonstration, I think it would work.  Without the visual demonstration,the set of instructions would be very long indeed, [/quote]

Exactly! But a visual demonstraton is cheating, because then you are using an entirely different kind of knowledge which is not propositional. The essence of this demonstration is to show that communication, and the information that we mentally store and daily manipulate, is not exclusively propositional.

[quote]Do people not consider the usefulness of the available tools before choosing one over the others?[/quote]

But we are speaking evolutionarily here. Language appeared in absence of language existing. It was wired it an entirely non-consensual way. That we use language is not particularly a choice. How we use language is.

[quote]Given your concept of communication as a thing (which I do not accept), yes. [/quote]

I will take that as a no, then. I want to find common ground for us. Taking for granted a presumption of mine that you disagree with is not getting us closer to that common ground.

[quote]We don't need to process information exclusively like this.  We need only to be able to process information like this (which you don't seem to dispute) and then discard the conclusions arising from other processes.[/quote]

The issue is that the second conjuct is not possible. Could you tell your body to stop producing insulin, or testosterone? Quite clearly these are hormones you are making, and more to the point they are released under the direction of your brain, from relatively speaking evolutionary recent areas. Yet they are not under our control.

To say that we should ignore non-propositional knowledge is somewhat like saying we should make judgements without emotions. A largely powerful misconstrual of what non-prositional knowledge and emotion does for us.

There was an interesting experiment done on people with fuctional higher order reasoning (they could understand logic as if unimpaired) but with a dramatically diminished capacity for emotion. They were asked to play games of chance. The assumption would be that in absence of emotion they would rely purely on inference to play the game, and so their decisions would map well on statistical outcomes. It turned out they were incredibly risk seeking - that in absence of emotion as a moderating variable, they went for the least logical outcome. In absence of emotion.

[quote]I'm not suggesting that anyone can turn off the non-conscious parts of hisbrain.  I'm suggesting that he can identify and ignore the informationcoming out of those parts of his brain.[/quote]

Sadly this is not possible. For example, can you ignore the orienting reflex? This is a very basic reflex. When there are loud, dramatic changes in the enviroment, we naturally oriented out bodies toward it. 

The basic issue from the information processing standpoint is that the operation is parallael. It works in unison and it is not something you can ignore, because often you are not aware of it.

Take a priming experiment. If people are given word pairs subliminally as a prime (say, ocean-moon among others) and then asked to identify a laundry detergent, a statistically significant number of those who say ocean-moon will say Tide compared to those who did not. Now, ask them why they said Tide. You'll have half-a-hundred different reasons (my mom uses it; I like the brand, etc.). The apparent reason is the ocean-moon pair, since this was the only meaningful difference between the control group and the experimental group.

[quote]I'm not saying intuition doesn't happen.  I'm saying intuition isn't informative.[/quote]

Intuition

[quote]Exactly.  That's all anyone can do.[/quote]

No. Or rather, I disagree.

[quote]Yes.  My response was always that even if we cared about the intent (and he gave us no such reason to care - this is why I call his position unfounded), the intent was unknowable.  Even in cases where the author of the passage wrote about his intent in other documents, we can't know those remarks were not politically motivated or obfuscatory.  Or just lies.[/quote]

Wouldn't Dworkin appeal to some metaphysical greater law to justify all of this?

At any rate, I would disagree with you on the point that the intent was unknowable because I believe that is directly derivable from the law as written. To put it another way, I think we can reliably (and keep in mind how I use this word, with my theory of knowledge based on abduction and not deduction) know intent from what it is that people say.

[quote]All we really know about the law is what the law says.  In modern legal interpretation there is often a battle between strict constructionists and broad constructionists.  I'm more of an anti-constructionist.  Construing anything beyond the literal content of the law is necessarily baseless.  This does result in some laws being rendered entirely meaningless, but since I'm happy with the process I'm necessarily happy with the result. [/quote]

I happen to agree with regard to legal theory, because the law is not something that can afford to be ambiguous. Whether or not we can write it in a non-ambiguous way is up for debate, though. Still, aren't anti-constructionists groups that include legal positivist, who believe that it is appropriate to add things external to the law in interpreting it?

[quote]Many legal theorists (Dworkin included) seem to be trying to rationalise their own preferences with regard to legal outcomes.  If a law produces a result they feel is unjust, then there must have been something wrong either with the law or the application of that law.  But I think the application of law should be simple arithmetic; that's the only way for it to be fair (Dworkin explicitly appeals to the twin principles of justice and fairness, but I generally find the two to be in conflict).[/quote]

Oh, you have no idea how much I agree with you on this. But no one wants to agree! I've gotten to the point where I feel like I pressued to sacrifice my intellectual position for the sake of a better mark; not that I would, because I value on more than the other, but still. It is frustrating to encounter this.

[quote]I think asserting the existence of a group is necessarily unscientific because there's no evidence for their existence. [/quote]

Not all philosophies of science would agree that it is evidence for the existence of groups that leads us to posit groups. I, for one, do not believe we posit groups on the basis of evidence.

[quote]That position is not incompatible with nominalism.  And the name suggests, nominalists maintain that groups exist "in name only".

The problem arises when you attribute characteristics to those groups. 
Since things that don't exist can't exhibit characteristics, by assigning characteristics you're presupposing that they actually exist (more than in name only). [/quote]

See, I look at characteristics as a matter of an unreliable theory of knowledge. Deduction can provide nothing; it is empty and bankrupt. My options are to be incapable of processing reality or to make demands on it for the purpose of meaningfully interacting with it. I create groups and ascribe characters which I do not believe exist (but believe indicate reliable abductive knowledge) on instrumental groups, that intellectul paralysis is worthless.

[quote]If I disassemble your car, but leave all the parts in your garage, I haven't taken anything from you.  But what you have cannot reasonably be called a car.  You have a pile of car parts.

The relative position of those parts is a component of the car.  If you add that component back in, you get your car back.

Similarly, if you reassemble and reanimate the duck, you'll have a duck.[/quote]

But you are saying that the relative position is what makes the thing uniquely car instead of (supposing the parts were the same) uniquely bus. And this is ascribing a character to things that is more fundamental than name. It is saying there is a natural kind which is a car.

[quote]Information is a thing.[/quote]

I disagree. I happen to think information is an entirely different abstract kind of class, whereas a thing is physical.

[quote]Clearly he isn't, but to make realistic decisions on his behalf I need him to behave as if he is real, and as if he thinks he is real.[/quote]

Certainly; but I don't.

[quote]Metacognition (thinking about thinking) is an important part of my life.  I would prefer to do the same while roleplaying my character, but I cannot if I'm unaware of his thoughts. [/quote]

As it is in mine. But I think we think about thinking in different ways. Specifically, I think about the patterns in my thought independet from their content, so I don't quite see how the content is in itself neccesary.

[quote]Certainly.  But if I can notice the difference just by playing the game, surely my character can notice by living her entire life in that setting.[/quote]

That's an uncalled for equivocation. For one, you have access to a lot of information your character does not and is not even meaningful (like levels, and mana/health pools, specific damage reports, etc.).

[qupote]I would think the threshhold for incoherence is actually lower for the characters than it is for us.  There are doctors in the world, and they presumably know how death works.  If there's an XP penalty in the game, then the characters should notice a consistent and predictable effect on the rates at which they acquire new skills.[/quote]

But there are noticeable and predictable effects on the rates which we acquire knew skills. Blows to the skull that involve bleeding and unconsciousness can lead to impairments in learning and processing. Not all people learn at the same rate - we even have terms for this, like intelligent and stupid.

[quote]The basic facts about the physical laws of the universe are common knowledge for us.  Should they not also be for the characters in a fictional setting?[/quote]

But our basic facts are dramatically wrong. For example, in absence of science, our basic fact for most of our existence was that the natural state of objects was motionless. But this is wrong. Yet in absence of being taught physics people believe this to be true.

So I see no reason why people should be aware of the true natural laws of their own world, when we clearly are not.

More to the point, being a nominalism, it's not entirely clear that we should believe these laws exist as anything more than constructs.

[quote]If they were smart their self-evaluation would include some sort of objective measurement.[/quote]

But the objective measures are themselves questionable. I've worked a bit with IQ research, and the only strong claim you can make about IQ is that there is evidence for general as opposed to specific IQ (i.e. that people are smart as opposed to smart at things). But as of right now relatively rankings of intelligence via IQ are, well, useless garbage.

[quote]I take a lot of surveys (because I have idiosyncratic opinions and I want them heard), but surveys will often ask what I think are idiotic questions that ordinary people (myself included) can't possibly answer without just guessing.  And yet presumably they do induce responses from people (else they wouldn't end up in surveys).[/quote]

That's because language is abductive, like everything else we do. Yes, strictly speaking (now that I remembered your theory of knowledge) language and communication is all guessing. But so is interacting with the world. In fact, whenever we say anything (e.g. I know...) we are guessing.

[quote]Well yes, I know that.  But my character does not, and what matters to me is that the game's story and setting make sense from my character's point of view.  When roleplaying, my point of view is entirely subservient to his. [/quote]

It does not matter. We are talking about what the game makes possible now, versus what you can rationalize. And I happen to think the setting is contrived.

Put another way. If I press 1-2-3-4 on my keyboard in random order in every dialogue option and simply do not die, I will complete the game. The game does not require anything to be completed short of not dying in any encounter. So completing the game cannot be evidence for what type of person, were the world of the game to plausibly exist, could actually achieve what the PC did.

[quote]I approach roleplaying as one big thought experiment.[/quote]

Then we can never see eye to eye. I believe thought experiments are a blight on our species.

[quote]What you describe risks cognitive dissonance, and I see that as a gigantic character flaw.  I'm not confident that people who are willing to believe mutually exclusive things at the same time are even people.  They're certainly not sapient, which is supposedly the defining characteristic of the species.[/quote]

No, that's not cognitive dissonance. I'm sorry, but cognitive dissonance is a very specific term that refers to the unpleasant feeling from a contradiction between action and behaviour you are aware of. I appreciate what you are trying to say, but this term does not mean what you think it means.

There is absolutely nothing about being human that precludes us from believing mutually exclusive thing.

[quote]I would suggest that "being capable of completing the game with every personality" is logically equivalent to "every personality could complete the game".[/quote]

And I disagree, dramatically, because there is more to what is being said that the logical s

[quote] I still don't like your universal claims.[/quote]

Yes, but keep in mind what I think are universal claims. In your vocabulary, whenever I say, x is the case, what I actually mean is: it is probable based on current methods that X is the case using a philosophical method of obtaining knowledge that is not truth preserving but is reliable.

So what I happen to think a universal is is not what people happen to think a universal is. Hard to escape from language habits, though.

[quote]I don't see why we even need the Landsmeet.  We don't have a treaty to
compel the humans to help, so there's no real reason to expect any, and
it's not like the humans aren't going to fight back once the Blight reaches their city (and even if they don't, we still have the other armies to aid us against the archdemon).[/quote]

Because the writers demand it.

[Sylvius the Mad]

[quote]In Exile wrote...

I'm confused by your fourth sentence. You said that what you are evaluatinng is expression. But then you introduce the measurable standard of "expression in a way they can understand." So now you are reflecting the interaction on the other party - to some degree are you making it about them, instead of about you. [/quote]
If I wilfully speak in a language they don't know, or use jargon I have reason to believe is beyond their ken, then I'm not expressing myself in a way they are capable of understanding.  It would be difficult for me to blame them for that and call it their failure.
[quote]Whether or not they understand your meaning in a strict sense is not something you can control (you cannot ensure you will be understood with 100% accuracy 100% of the time) the degree to which you are understood and how often you are understood is under your control.

I can't reconcile the two positions. I'm afraid. Could you clarify?[/quote]
The degree to which I am understandable (limited by the extent to which I'm familair with my audience) is something I can control.  Whether the listener then actually understands me, no, I cannot control that.

[quote]That's certainly a fair point for you personally, but can you see how in general that is effectively saying, I do not mind the absence of the following choice in game, merely because I would not choose it?[/quote]
Yes.  It's analogous to you saying you don't mind the lack of ability to direct expression rather than intent, because you wouldn't choose to do so even if you could.


[quote]Even supposing I as a person would be like you, if I were to have a character that is not, that character would never be allowed to correct perceived misunderstandings either. And I see this as incredibly problematic as a matter of design, from a principled as opposed to practical standpoint.[/quote]
Yes, but it might also be a necessary consequence of allowing the player greater control over his character's expression.  I can't think of a way to fix the problem without robbing the player of control over his character's expression.  Since that expression is something I count as vital, I'm willing to sacrifice other things in order to get it.


[quote]This kind of instrumentalism seems irreconcilable with your detail that communication expression is not instrumental. [/quote]
Expression is instrumental.  It's a tool.  But because of the uncontrollable variables involved, I can use the tool perfectly and still miss my objective through no fault of my own.

It's like playing poker.  If I play a certain way based on the present odds, and based on those odds I've made the correct decision, I can still lose.  My objective wasn't to play properly; my objective was to win.  But given the element of chance in what is otherwise a game of skill, playing well doesn't always lead to victory.

Unless you control all the variables, decisions that usually produce good outcomes can occasionally produce bad outcomes.  So if someone misundertands me, I probably haven't achieved my ultimate objective, but that misunderstanding is not conclusive evidence that I made an error in my expression.


[quote]Psychology makes universal generalizations only insofar as there is a biological/biochemical basis for the mechanism. In that case, it is no different than a biologist making such a claim, which is largely equivalent to a physicist or chemist making the same claim. [/quote]
I think a physicist has far more cause to claim that all neutrinos behave similarly than a psychologist does to suggest all brains behave the same.  In fact, neutrinos all behave the same by definition; If we find a neutrino that behaves differently, it's not a neutrino.


[quote][quote]And again, communication isn't my objective.  It cannot reasonably be anyone's objective.[/quote]
I would appreciate it if you would avoid broad normative pronouncements of this sort, especially with the majority of your position has not been reliably demonstrated.[/quote]
Since communicating, as an objective, would require control over the listener's interpretation of your remarks, only someone who believed himself to have mind-control powers could reasonably think he could communicate effectively.


[quote]Right, and this is where you are simply taking a worldview that is failed. Put simply: thinking is not a thing that exists to reliably demonstrate truth. So the fact that it fails to do so, even if it were the case that it reliably failed to do so, is effectively meaningless. [/quote]
I'm not sure what you mean when you say "thinking is not a thing that exists to relaibaly demonstrate truth".  Are you talking about the circumstances under which thinking arose, because I wouldn't think those relevant to the capabilities to thinking.

I'm not concerned with what thinking does.  I'm concerned with what thinking can do.
[quote]Nonsense is binary.  Either a remark is nonsensical or it isn't, and as long as we understand the language being used we should be able to determine which side it is on with certainty.

I disagree. Truth in the formal sense is binary. Nonsence, I would say, is something else.[/quote]
To be demonstrably nonsensical I'd say a remark would have to be either self-contradictory or literally meaningless.


[quote]Because to say that something is nonsense we have to presuppose a theory of knowledge, and I simply do not accept deduction as a source of justified knowledge about the world. It is only a mechanism to investigate already previously justified knowledge. The absolute lack of value in deduction is apparent in the essence of the infinite number of theorems and how they are constructed: they are all conditional statements.[/quote]
Of course.  Conditionals are the only knowledge we can ever have.

Deduction allows us to investigate any possible set of conditionals to determine whether that set is incoherent.


[quote]To make any strictly logical claim, you need some independent definite knowledge about the world.[/quote]
No you wouldn't.  As you point out, we can make strictly logical conditional claims.


[quote]I think universals neccesarily need to be a thing for us to have justified knowledge.[/quote]
I would agree.  I just don't think we have justified knowledge.


[quote]But accuracy is not knowledge.[/quote]
But it is.  Knowledge requires accuracy.  You cannot know untrue things.


[quote]But another way: I deny that deduction produces knowledge. It unpacks already existing knowledge, to be sure, and whatever it unpacks correctly we know must be true if the inital thing we knew was true, but that is it.[/quote]
I agree entirely with this.


[quote]I refuse to claim that knowledge is ever as reliable as you believe.[/quote]
Then it's not knowledge.  Knowledge requires certainty.


[quote]So there are two ways I can respond to this, but they boil down to the same thing: we can trust intuition insofar as we can reliably trust any other kind of source of knowledge, which is to say not at all or completely, because knowledge is exclusively provisionary.[/quote]
In my experience intuition is wholly unreliable, so I trust it not at all.

Given that, how am I to choose expressions if I'm unaware of their content?  What deductive process can I use (given that deductive processes are the only ones I trust) to direct my character? 


[quote]Writing is dramatically different than speaking, you have to agree with me here.[/quote]
Yes, writing is better.  Writing has punctuation, and thus is easier to parse, and readers tend to pay more attention to the written word than listeners do to the spoken word.

If I want to improve my understandability, I choose writing every time.

You would likely tell me that there are different types of information I'm failing to convey, or tools I'm not using, which are only available when speaking.  But if I don't know how to use them or what they are, I'm not likely to find them very helpful.
[quote]I disagree that it is possible to deduce statistical probability. In fact, if we are measuring it we are already relying on induction (because we are supposing our measurement is reliable in the future). So what you are telling me is that it is possible to deduce statistical probability by, in your own words, guessing it.

But we are right back to whether or not deduction has value, and I am quite adamant it has none. [/quote]
I'm making the same assumptions about the world that you are.  The only difference is that you think you know them to be true, whereas I think they're just assumptions.

Assumptions like "the physical world exists largely as I perceive it" and "physical laws, on the macro level, are constant".


[quote][quote]That sounds a lot like talking to a toddler.  If my instructions can include a visual demonstration, I think it would work.  Without the visual demonstration,the set of instructions would be very long indeed,[/quote]
Exactly! But a visual demonstraton is cheating, because then you are using an entirely different kind of knowledge which is not propositional.[/quote]
Okay.  I still think it would work, but it was take a really long time.

I have a toddler, and I think I'm better at speaking to toddlers than many people are because I'm used to keeping track of what knowledge other people have.  Rather than just assuming a common shared experience when speaking to people, I usually tailor my remarks to accommodate my audience (I do this partly because I think it would be offensive to assume everyone is the same).  I do not have a common shared experience with a toddler, so this works really well.


[quote]The essence of this demonstration is to show that communication, and the information that we mentally store and daily manipulate, is not exclusively propositional. [/quote]
Sure, but storing knowledge and acquiring knowledge are two different things.

How are we to interpret non-verbal cues accurately without some formal set of definitions?


[quote]But we are speaking evolutionarily here.[/quote]
I'm not.  I'm talking about individuals making decisions about how to express themselves.


[quote]I will take that as a no, then. I want to find common ground for us. Taking for granted a presumption of mine that you disagree with is not getting us closer to that common ground. [/quote]
Sorry.  I thought you were trying to lead me somewhere, so I was signalling my understanding.


[quote]To say that we should ignore non-propositional knowledge is somewhat like saying we should make judgements without emotions.[/quote]
Yes.

Shouldn't your judgment drive your emotions, anyway?  Here's something people do that really irritates me.  If someone becomes angry as a result of a misunderstanding, and then has that misunderstanding corrected, the anger should go away, shouldn't it?  The cause for the anger was an error on that person's part, so once that's corrected there no longer is any reason to be angry (and in fact, there never was).  But the person who was angry will continue to harbour resentment over the episode, even though no one wronged him.
[quote]Sadly this is not possible. For example, can you ignore the orienting reflex? This is a very basic reflex. When there are loud, dramatic changes in the enviroment, we naturally oriented out bodies toward it. 

The basic issue from the information processing standpoint is that the operation is parallael. It works in unison and it is not something you can ignore, because often you are not aware of it. [/quote]
Okay, maybe not all of the non-conscious parts processes, but we can know what we know (or believe), and why we hold those opinions.


[quote]No. Or rather, I disagree. [/quote]
And so I'm aware.  I'm just not sure how.  We've established previously that you don't think you can read or control the minds of others, so why do you think you have a hand in their mental functioning?


[quote]Wouldn't Dworkin appeal to some metaphysical greater law to justify all of this?[/quote]
Yes, but he would then need to justify belief in such a law, and he did no such thing.

It's like he was assuming some common cultural point of view, but not making that assumption explicit.


[quote]At any rate, I would disagree with you on the point that the intent was unknowable because I believe that is directly derivable from the law as written. To put it another way, I think we can reliably (and keep in mind how I use this word, with my theory of knowledge based on abduction and not deduction) know intent from what it is that people say.[/quote]
Right, and there's no certainty in what you do so I don't think it's knowledge.

I'd be more open to abductive reasoning if I knew how to formalise it.  I trust things I understand.  I understand deduction.


[quote]I happen to agree with regard to legal theory, because the law is not something that can afford to be ambiguous. Whether or not we can write it in a non-ambiguous way is up for debate, though.[/quote]
We just need formal definitions for everything.


[quote]Still, aren't anti-constructionists groups that include legal positivist, who believe that it is appropriate to add things external to the law in interpreting it?[/quote]
I certainly don't believe that to be appropriate.


[quote]Oh, you have no idea how much I agree with you on this. But no one wants to agree! I've gotten to the point where I feel like I pressued to sacrifice my intellectual position for the sake of a better mark; not that I would, because I value on more than the other, but still. It is frustrating to encounter this. [/quote]
I'm a bit surprised you agree with me.

I want legal decisions to be simple arithmetic because I want all decisions to be simple arithmetic.


[quote]See, I look at characteristics as a matter of an unreliable theory of knowledge. Deduction can provide nothing; it is empty and bankrupt. My options are to be incapable of processing reality or to make demands on it for the purpose of meaningfully interacting with it. I create groups and ascribe characters which I do not believe exist (but believe indicate reliable abductive knowledge) on instrumental groups, that intellectul paralysis is worthless. [/quote]
I don't see why the worh of intellectual paralysis matters.  If intellectual paralysis (worthless or not) is the consequence of sound reasoning, then intellectual paralysis we should have.


[quote]But you are saying that the relative position is what makes the thing uniquely car instead of (supposing the parts were the same) uniquely bus. And this is ascribing a character to things that is more fundamental than name.[/quote]
I don't see why you think this is different from simply naming the construct.


[quote]It is saying there is a natural kind which is a car. [/quote]
I don't know what this means.


[quote]I disagree. I happen to think information is an entirely different abstract kind of class, whereas a thing is physical.[/quote]
Bertrand Russell once tried to name all the different types of things in the universe.  He counted three.  Facts, propositions, and sentences (he later discarded propositions).

Information is a thing.  Information travels, and its speed is limited as is the speed of a particle.  That information is a thing is an important part of the theory that lead to the discovery of Hawking Radiation.

A thing need not be physical.  It need only exist, and thus be able to exhibit characteristics.


[quote]As it is in mine. But I think we think about thinking in different ways. Specifically, I think about the patterns in my thought independet from their content, so I don't quite see how the content is in itself neccesary. [/quote]
But if I think the pattern is just the sum of the parts that make up that pattern, then I still need the thoughts.


[quote]That's an uncalled for equivocation. For one, you have access to a lot of information your character does not and is not even meaningful (like levels, and mana/health pools, specific damage reports, etc.).[/quote]
So no one in her world has noticed how some behaviour impacts the learning of skills, or how magical power works or is replenished, or the relative effectiveness of different types of weapons against different types of armour?

Your characters lives in a shockingly uninquisitive world (and of course they do, since you don't think the world is there, even from its residents' perspective).


[quote]But there are noticeable and predictable effects on the rates which we acquire knew skills. Blows to the skull that involve bleeding and unconsciousness can lead to impairments in learning and processing. Not all people learn at the same rate - we even have terms for this, like intelligent and stupid. [/quote]
Exactly.  So in Mass Effect, when there's a steep XP penalty for defeating enemies using the Mako, there can easily be an in-setting explanation for this.  Perhaps the retort from the main gun is concussive.

But the question is, is it credible that the characters who live in this world wouldn't know that?  I assert it is not.
[quote]But our basic facts are dramatically wrong. For example, in absence of science, our basic fact for most of our existence was that the natural state of objects was motionless. But this is wrong. Yet in absence of being taught physics people believe this to be true.

So I see no reason why people should be aware of the true natural laws of their own world, when we clearly are not. [/quote]
Let me rephrase.  Should the characters in the world not be as aware of the las that govern them as we are?

As I've said before, "if it matters, measure it".  There's no reason why the characters in the gameworld would be any less likely to measure things than we are.  So if the ability to hit a target with a thrown rock correlates with the ability to lift heavy objects, they would know.  Or at least, anyone who cared enough to measure it (or read about those measurements) would know, just like in our world.

[quote]But the objective measures are themselves questionable. I've worked a bit with IQ research, and the only strong claim you can make about IQ is that there is evidence for general as opposed to specific IQ (i.e. that people are smart as opposed to smart at things). But as of right now relatively rankings of intelligence via IQ are, well, useless garbage. [/quote]
There are more measurements than IQ tests.  If these people were predicting their own earnings, did they know what the average earnings were in their chosen field?  Did they know the failure rate in the training programs for their field?

I bet they didn't.
[quote]It does not matter. We are talking about what the game makes possible now, versus what you can rationalize. And I happen to think the setting is contrived.

Put another way. If I press 1-2-3-4 on my keyboard in random order in every dialogue option and simply do not die, I will complete the game. The game does not require anything to be completed short of not dying in any encounter. So completing the game cannot be evidence for what type of person, were the world of the game to plausibly exist, could actually achieve what the PC did.[/quote]
But the PC did do it, and did it within the game world.

What standard of plausibility are you using?  Why are you making plausibility a condition?

Is your world plausible to the in-game characters?  Remember that their standards of plausibility will be informed by the world in which they live, whereas your standards are informed by your world.  The two don't apply to each other.


[quote]Then we can never see eye to eye. I believe thought experiments are a blight on our species.[/quote]
I think internally inconsistent sets of opinions are a blight on our species.


[quote]I appreciate what you are trying to say, but this term does not mean what you think it means.[/quote]
Thanks for the clarification.  My concern is the internal contradiction, which I understand to be a necessary condition for cognitive dissonance to occur.  That internal contradiction is a massive problem I cannot abide.


[quote]There is absolutely nothing about being human that precludes us from believing mutually exclusive thing. [/quote]
There's something about being rational that does.
[quote]Yes, but keep in mind what I think are universal claims. In your vocabulary, whenever I say, x is the case, what I actually mean is: it is probable based on current methods that X is the case using a philosophical method of obtaining knowledge that is not truth preserving but is reliable.

So what I happen to think a universal is is not what people happen to think a universal is. Hard to escape from language habits, though.[/quote]
Yes.  Very.  Here's a brief story.

When I was a student, my degree requirements included that I complete a small number (2) of classes offered by the Faculty of Social Sciences.  It didn't matter what they were beyond that.  In my fourth year, I enrolled in Introduction to Psychology.  I'd heard it was easy, and I thought it might be interesting.  To this point, I'd already completed several (7?) classes in Logic and Epistemology, and had developed certain intellectual habits as a result.

I understood almost nothing that took place in that Psychology class.  After 8 weeks, I withdrew.

Modifié par Sylvius the Mad, 19 juillet 2010 - 10:57 .

[In Exile]

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...
If I wilfully speak in a language they don't know, or use jargon I have reason to believe is beyond their ken, then I'm not expressing myself in a way they are capable of understanding.  It would be difficult for me to blame them for that and call it their failure.[/quote]

Moving away for a second from the issue of communication versus expression, what I am in essence saying is that when you speak about what expression ought to be, or how people ought to understand you, you are doing precisely this.

Obviously you present an absurd example. But the essence of what I am saying when I say that communication involves two people is that one aspect to what you are doing is trying to appreciate the mental state of the other person as best you can insofar as you are trying to devise what it is precisely that would reasonably be beyond keen, or what would be an expression that they cannot understand.

When I speak about biological constraits, or social conventions, or dominance behaviour, all of these things are just justifications for the initial claim: why it is that how you express yourself succeeds precisely in alienating yourself from the most effective way from the listener to understand.

[quote]The degree to which I am understandable (limited by the extent to which I'm familair with my audience) is something I can control.  Whether the listener then actually understands me, no, I cannot control that.[/quote]

Right, I agree with this completely.

What I am saying, however, is that choosing to speak in a matter that can be reasonably predictive of failure on the basis of a philosophical inclination is effectively not choosing to express yourself in the clearest possible fashion.

Essentially, I see anyone making a normative demand as making a personal claim on how the world should be. When the world deviates and the person persists in maintaing the normative claim, I see that as self-destructive and petulant.

[quote]Yes.  It's analogous to you saying you don't mind the lack of ability to direct expression rather than intent, because you wouldn't choose to do so even if you could.[/quote]

All I want to convey is that the mere fact the absence of the choice does not bother you does not mean it is not a significant absence.

[quote]Yes, but it might also be a necessary consequence of allowing the player greater control over his character's expression.  I can't think of a way to fix the problem without robbing the player of control over his character's expression.  Since that expression is something I count as vital, I'm willing to sacrifice other things in order to get it.[/quote]

Right, and that's where we differ. But at least we can identify the specific source of our difference regarding which relative thing is important. I am thinking we can say here that with respect to the spectrum between active influence in the world and free internal expression, we are on opposite ends of the scale?

[quote]Expression is instrumental.  It's a tool.  But because of the uncontrollable variables involved, I can use the tool perfectly and still miss my objective through no fault of my own.[/quote]

Do why I was confused in conjuction with the comments made above? Effectively as I see it you are choosing to use expression in a way that we can reliably predict (and remember how I use all of these terms per my previous post regarding universality) will fail relative to other means.

[quote]Unless you control all the variables, decisions that usually produce good outcomes can occasionally produce bad outcomes.  So if someone misundertands me, I probably haven't achieved my ultimate objective, but that misunderstanding is not conclusive evidence that I made an error in my expression.[/quote]

Whereas I would say it is, if you are misunderstood because you reject other forms of expression on the basis of a normative position. I think you are putting the ought before the is, in essence.

[quote]I think a physicist has far more cause to claim that all neutrinos behave similarly than a psychologist does to suggest all brains behave the same.  In fact, neutrinos all behave the same by definition; If we find a neutrino that behaves differently, it's not a neutrino.[/quote]

A physicist has math, which makes it much more evident how things behave similarly. And it is important to see how a psychologist would claim that all brains behave the same (because no psychologist would make the broadest claim of this sort; obviously you and I are different and to a biological psychologist, this would be precisely because of differences in our brain).

I dislike analogies between brains and computers (because brains are nothing like the computers we use; the best parallel are generative neural networks in machine learning) but think of it this way. Different computers do not need to behave the same. But there are general, higher-order principles that the define the sum total of ways in which te computers can behave. So we can certainly have computers that do different things, but we can also know how we can have computers that cannot do certain other kinds of things.

[quote]Since communicating, as an objective, would require control over the listener's interpretation of your remarks, only someone who believed himself to have mind-control powers could reasonably think he could communicate effectively.[/quote]

Not at all. This is only a consequence on your standard of certainty. You see it as binary; I either know something, or I do not know something, and it is not possible to have any kind of variation in how you do not know something.

But I reject this binary definition of knowledge. In fact, I think the extreme end, which to you is "I know something" is practically impossible and so useless as anything other than a philosophical point for metaphysical debate. We could name that knowledge and invent another term for anything else, but quite frankly that is a waste of a term and it is better we use knowledge for the continuum and some new term like absolute metaphysical certainity for the extreme.

[quote]I'm not sure what you mean when you say "thinking is not a thing that exists to relaibaly demonstrate truth".  Are you talking about the circumstances under which thinking arose, because I wouldn't think those relevant to the capabilities to thinking.[/quote]

Popper believed that we know things when we know which things are not possible. Despite the fact that I think Popper failed to provide an account for science, I think the principle in his idea is powerful.

Evolutionarily speaking, our mind evolved under pressure to achieve a particualr kind of thing. Not just the empty claim of allow us to survive, but allow us to survive in a specific way by being able to model our environment. The particular ways in which we have gained capacities to reason are reliant on the ways in which we developed to effectively model our environment.

So truth-preservation is irrelevant. Our capacity to recognize it appears more as a joint consequence of abstract reasoning and langauge, which likely arises out of our capacity for mental maps among other things (this is where we gained the ability for recursive thought and attentional scaling that is crucial for cognitive penetrability).

[quote]I'm not concerned with what thinking does.  I'm concerned with what thinking can do.[/quote]

Right, and all it can do is occasionally identify statements that preserve truth with tremendous cognitive effort and only when exclusively focused on the task, and for the general university population (like what is the top quarter of intelligence in the population), only in short durations. In fact, the general population is entirely incapable of reasoning formally. Logic is something that people have to be taught, otherwise they fail at it.

Read about the Wason selection task if you're interested. People do quite poorly when given the purely formal form; people do much better when given a social equivalent of it, yet the underlying logic is the same.

[quote]Of course.  Conditionals are the only knowledge we can ever have.

Deduction allows us to investigate any possible set of conditionals to determine whether that set is incoherent.[/quote]

Conditionls are not knowledge. I'll expand below.

[quote]No you wouldn't.  As you point out, we can make strictly logical conditional claims.[/quote]

No, you do. Let us say we have P=>Q. We can only conclude Q, in your terms, if we know P. But we canot use deduction to know P. We can only know P=>Q.

Theorems are self-referential. They add no new truth. So if I know Q=>P=>Q, I i

[quote]I would agree.  I just don't think we have justified knowledge.[/quote]

Ah, but remember that I have a different definition of knowledge.

[quote]But it is.  Knowledge requires accuracy.  You cannot know untrue things.[/quote]

Whether or not a thing is true is not the mos relevant consideration. Whether or not a thing is predict and allows for reasonable interpretation of the world is, and that is not the same as truth.

Take phlogiston chemistry. This is a failed scientific theory. Yet it allowed for meaningful predictions. I could more reliably take action in the world using this theory than any other of its contemporaries.

To me, this is knowledge. Knowledge is about the ability to effect change in the world under a framework that is not internally contradictory. Whether or not the framework is true in a philsophical sense is irrelevant. In fact, I think it is impossble to know anything as true in that sense beyond vacuous truth (deductive theorems).

[quote]Then it's not knowledge.  Knowledge requires certainty.[/quote]

I disagree. I agree that we can represent a concept like certainty, and we can repersent its logical opposite, but I simply deny that this is all there is, and that certainty is neccesary for knowledge.

[quote]In my experience intuition is wholly unreliable, so I trust it not at all.[/quote]

Well, I can't comment on your experience. My intuition is very reliable. Of course, we could not be using the same term for intuition. What do you consider intuition?

[quote]Given that, how am I to choose expressions if I'm unaware of their content?  What deductive process can I use (given that deductive processes are the only ones I trust) to direct my character? [/quote]

None, because deductive processes are useless. Simply put, if that is all you want to trust, then you have to resign yourself to these rather unhappy consequences.

[quote[You would likely tell me that there are different types of information I'm failing to convey, or tools I'm not using, which are only available when speaking.  But if I don't know how to use them or what they are, I'm not likely to find them very helpful.[/quote]

I was going to say instead that you cannot escape other mediums.

The best advice I have is to refine for standard. Effectively, grant that that you you say is not knowledge is not all equivalent, and you will suddenly become aware of the wealth of varyingly reliable methods available to you to effect change.

Put another way: tone in itself is not going to work; body language in itself is not going to work; speech in itself is not going to work. Triangulating all three will not gurantee understanding; but it will increase the number of outcomes you are understood over your current normative stance.

My response, effectively, is that what you want is impossible, and that you are attempting to force a normative stance on the world (with respect to knowledge, among other things) that is not neccesarily true, and in fact for which there are good reasons to believe is not misleading. I think you are right about your stance, but I think that you are missing something important, and focusing your attention on the wrong side of the certainty/non-certainty divide, and therein lie your problems.

[quote]I'm making the same assumptions about the world that you are.  The only difference is that you think you know them to be true, whereas I think they're just assumptions.[/quote]

It is more than that. I do not think they are true. In fact, I think it is impossible to know they are true. But I believe there is value in acting as if they were true. It is like dealing with a conditional: we evaluate it a conditional proof in part by supposing the antencendet is true and seeing if the consequent follows.

[quote]Assumptions like "the physical world exists largely as I perceive it" and "physical laws, on the macro level, are constant".[/quote]

I happen to not actually assume the first one. I actually assume the physical world does not exist directly as I perceive it. Of course, Bas van Fraseen would tell me that is silly.

[quote]Okay.  I still think it would work, but it was take a really long time.

I have a toddler, and I think I'm better at speaking to toddlers than many people are because I'm used to keeping track of what knowledge other people have.  Rather than just assuming a common shared experience when speaking to people, I usually tailor my remarks to accommodate my audience (I do this partly because I think it would be offensive to assume everyone is the same).  I do not have a common shared experience with a toddler, so this works really well.[/quote]

Here is an experiment, if you ever have the time. Write out the passage, and give it to someone else, without telling them what it is about. Ask them to read it, and see if they can identify it as tying their solelaces. Then, tell other people that it is about tying their shoelaces, and ask them how accurate the list of instructions is.

Keep in mind that since there are no controls you aren't actually getting a scientific result, and so what we find in the lab may not bear out for lots of reasons.

[quote]Sure, but storing knowledge and acquiring knowledge are two different things.

How are we to interpret non-verbal cues accurately without some formal set of definitions?[/quote]

We do have a formal set of definitions. Genetically. Smiles, for example, are not things we learn to produce. We produce them. Individuals that are blind from birth produce smiles that are indistinguishable from the sighted, despite never having seen a smile.

We have a basic hard-wired framework for what verbal cues roughly mean. And we do not consciously interpet them all the time. 

[quote]I'm not.  I'm talking about individuals making decisions about how to express themselves.[/quote]

But you must either reject science or grant the evolutionary constraints on how this expression can work. There is no middle ground.

[quote]Yes.

Shouldn't your judgment drive your emotions, anyway?  Here's something people do that really irritates me.  If someone becomes angry as a result of a misunderstanding, and then has that misunderstanding corrected, the anger should go away, shouldn't it?  The cause for the anger was an error on that person's part, so once that's corrected there no longer is any reason to be angry (and in fact, there never was).  But the person who was angry will continue to harbour resentment over the episode, even though no one wronged him.[/quote]

Anger is not tied to reason. The very simplified biological explanation is thus: there is a part of our brain that deals with the abstract, with cognitive penetrability, and so on. There is another part of our brain that deals with emotions. The emotional part has many projections (think of them as connections that influence behaviour) to the abstract part. The abstract part has very few projections to the emotional part.

So what can happen, as a consequence of how we are physically structured, is that we can intellectually recognize a fact without ever being able to influence the emotion.

In fact, our emotion is not even triggered consciously. There are ways you can force yourself to experience an emotion, but these are done in ways that trick your body into thinking the appropriate conditions have been met for the emotion "program" so to speak to run.

[quote]Okay, maybe not all of the non-conscious parts processes, but we can know what we know (or believe), and why we hold those opinions.[/quote]

Not quite. Look into split brain studies. There are amazing findings for how people construct explanations for things, which in fact entirely contract the very obvious reason why they hold opinions.

Simply put, there is a fair amount of empirical evidence that people in fact do not always know why they hold the opinions they do.

[quote]And so I'm aware.  I'm just not sure how.  We've established previously that you don't think you can read or control the minds of others, so why do you think you have a hand in their mental functioning?[/quote]

I do not think I have a hand in their mental functioning. Now that I understand where you are coming from better, I agree that all I can control is my own expression. But I allow for more tools, which leads to greater success.

[quote]Yes, but he would then need to justify belief in such a law, and he did no such thing.

It's like he was assuming some common cultural point of view, but not making that assumption explicit.[/quote]

I always found that aspect confusing. The "whole" law, I asked my professor. Where is this "whole" law? It is in the text as written. My reply: If it is in the text, then it is not a meta-law; it is the current law, because you can point me to it. No, says the professor, because we have not realized it is so yet. My reply: so we have laws that we do not know exist, until we interpret them "the right way" in which case they've always existed? 

And apparently there is nothing wrong with that.

[quote]I'd be more open to abductive reasoning if I knew how to formalise it.  I trust things I understand.  I understand deduction.[/quote]

But abduction is outside the scope of deduction. It would be like asking me to explain the of a set with reference only to one element. Insofar as you only trust deduction, you cannot 'get' why there is an appeal to abduction, partly because we (or at least I) am drawn to it precsely because I think deduction fails to capture something very important.

[quote]We just need formal definitions for everything.[/quote]

I happen to think this is as impossible as having universals.

[quote]I'm a bit surprised you agree with me.

I want legal decisions to be simple arithmetic because I want all decisions to be simple arithmetic.[/quote]

It's because we are debating, and you are further along the spectrum than I am, so I sound like I am far more extreme on the other side than I actually am, because having the two of us wax poetically about the virtue in things that are deductive wouldn't be informative for either of us. I'm always more interested in knowing why I disagree with others than why I agree.

That being said I think that a simple arithmetic is not possible for all things. I really reccomend looking at the work of Kaplan, Newell and Simon in the Search Inference framework in machine learning.

They tried to create a general problem solving proto-neural network, and discovered a great deal of things about the limitations of simple arithmetic in dealing with problems. In fact, I would recommend reading as much as you can find in the problem solving scientific literature, because that is by far the most interest part of psychology.

[quote]I don't see why the worh of intellectual paralysis matters.  If intellectual paralysis (worthless or not) is the consequence of sound reasoning, then intellectual paralysis we should have.[/quote]

When I say intellectual paralysis, I mean that faced with any alternative, I would have no means of knowing which to choose. I base my philosophy on the neccesity of choice. That is what I start with.

[quote]I don't see why you think this is different from simply naming the construct.[/quote]

http://en.wikipedia....ki/Natural_kind

If the structural organizaton of a duck is part of the kind duck, then it is a natural kind. And if it is a natural kind, then it is a thing that exist in nature as a category. And that would just be contrary to nominalism.

[quote]I don't know what this means.[/quote]

See above.

[quote]Bertrand Russell once tried to name all the different types of things in the universe.  He counted three.  Facts, propositions, and sentences (he later discarded propositions).

Information is a thing.  Information travels, and its speed is limited as is the speed of a particle.  That information is a thing is an important part of the theory that lead to the discovery of Hawking Radiation.

A thing need not be physical.  It need only exist, and thus be able to exhibit characteristics.[/quote]

I am clearly wrong about what I considered a thing. After doing some reading on the above, I think the following would be a closer statement of what I originally wanted to say:

If the structure of a duck is part of what makes something a duck, and anything that is a duck must have the struture of a duck, then a duck is a natural kind. It is a real set, instead of an arbitrary set.

The difference with in-name-only is this. When we have the lump of things that are part of duck, I see that lump, and name the particular organization of them a duck. A duck is a duck because I define it so. I am imposing structure on a set of discrete elements that could be seen from an infinite number of perspectives.

Species is a great example for this, because there could be different sets of physical components that I happen to think are both duck. But if the if there was an independent thing, a structure that was duck, for a thing to be a duck it would have to have that independent of what I do. And then it would be natural kind of thing, and we would grant classes of objects exist in nature.

[quote]But if I think the pattern is just the sum of the parts that make up that pattern, then I still need the thoughts.[/quote]

And here we disagree again, beacuse I do not think you can give primacy to things like this. Put another way, here is how I interpret my nominalism on the part whole debate.

I think that all things are classes becase we name them so. To look at  processes and divide it into parts (or combine it into a whole) is a matter of imposing a perspective on it. I cannot know whether this divison is a true divison unless I know these things are natural kinds that exist independent of my defining them as such. But if they exist independent of my defining them as such, I am quite clearly wrong in my nominalism.

I think it is just as wrong to look at a thing in parts as it is to look at a thing as a whole. What I think should determine how we look at a thing is how is the impact the perspective would have on our ability to act on the world.


[quote]So no one in her world has noticed how some behaviour impacts the learning of skills, or how magical power works or is replenished, or the relative effectiveness of different types of weapons against different types of armour?[/quote]

Someone could have done all of these things and failed to find a difference. We spent centuries looking at the world and only in the last century did we discover that time is not in fact identical for all of us, but rather depends on our frame of reference.

[quote]Your characters lives in a shockingly uninquisitive world (and of course they do, since you don't think the world is there, even from its residents' perspective).[/quote]

I am arguing from your perspective here. Obviously, from my perspective, the question of consistency is not even a question. But I think that your position from your own starting point presumes too much.

[quote]Exactly.  So in Mass Effect, when there's a steep XP penalty for defeating enemies using the Mako, there can easily be an in-setting explanation for this.  Perhaps the retort from the main gun is concussive.[/quote]

Let's not go here. You know how strongly I hate XP as a violation of any meaningfully coherent representation of how learing and growth can occur.

[quote]But the question is, is it credible that the characters who live in this world wouldn't know that?  I assert it is not.[/quote]

Why? Do you believe people can quantify the rates their learn to such a degree that they can empirically and with certanity give you a measure of how they are learning and developing?

[quote]Let me rephrase.  Should the characters in the world not be as aware of the las that govern them as we are?[/quote]

Yes. But what I am trying to say is that when you speak of the laws that we, as players know, you are meta-gaming. What we see via things like XP and character sheets do not have to be how the characters in the game see their world.

[quote]As I've said before, "if it matters, measure it".  There's no reason why the characters in the gameworld would be any less likely to measure things than we are.  So if the ability to hit a target with a thrown rock correlates with the ability to lift heavy objects, they would know.  Or at least, anyone who cared enough to measure it (or read about those measurements) would know, just like in our world.[/quote]

Well, certainly. But as I said, it took us millenia to learn that the natural state of objects is motion and not rest. So the mere fact the laws are incosistent does not mean that the characters in the game ought to know it is inconsistent. They could simply have not discovered it yet. I think you are being too restrictive.


[quote]There are more measurements than IQ tests.  If these people were predicting their own earnings, did they know what the average earnings were in their chosen field?  Did they know the failure rate in the training programs for their field?[/quote]

These are only reliable predictors for the average worker, or the average trainee. If you were well and truly exceptional, you could not draw conclusions from the data, because you would be non-representative.

[quote]But the PC did do it, and did it within the game world.

What standard of plausibility are you using?  Why are you making plausibility a condition?[/quote]

To you agree it is possible to believe a logically incorrect thing? I would assume so.

Well, look at it this way: back when we spoke about coherence, you said this was a design mistake. But the developers could make a game where the laws are different, and yet the characters cannot know it. Supposing in our debate you are actually right, and I am actually wrong, it does not change the fact that the game exists as was designed and the characters in it are not aware of the inconsistency in their own world.

So what I am saying is that people have the capacity to be wrong, and without realizing it hold beliefs that are logically impossible. Moreover, they can produce works that carry these logical contradictions.

[quote]Is your world plausible to the in-game characters?  Remember that their standards of plausibility will be informed by the world in which they live, whereas your standards are informed by your world.  The two don't apply to each other.[/quote]

Well, what I am saying is that it is possible to design a world which is not plausible to the in-game characters by an external standard, but to which the in-game characters could not react.

This is effectively my objection to the thought experiment in general. We cannot be perfectly certain that we are logically correct 100% of the time and we lack a technique for always verifying this. So it is possible to construct possibly sounding false demonstrations using trickery.

[quote]Thanks for the clarification.  My concern is the internal contradiction, which I understand to be a necessary condition for cognitive dissonance to occur.  That internal contradiction is a massive problem I cannot abide.[/quote]

The internal contradiction is neccesary but not sufficient. The sufficient condition is the experience of mental distress in light of the contradiction. So people could have internal contradictions and not experience dissonance so long as they do not experience distress.

[quote]There's something about being rational that does.[/quote]

Well, that's an explosive debate in itself. What does it mean to be rational (please don't answer, we are debating enough already!).

[quote]I understood almost nothing that took place in that Psychology class.  After 8 weeks, I withdrew.[/quote]

Don't get me wrong - 80% of psychology is garbage. Social psychology is effectively witchcraft and obfuscation in my eyes.

There is a very, verry narrow range of psychology that is worth taking seriously and it is in the minority, and psychologists that are in the mainstream fight it strongly. This is why I would never become a psychologist. Not to mention that many psychologists are crackpots and introductory courses are basicaly forced memorization of facts.

[Sylvius the Mad]

[quote]In Exile wrote...

Moving away for a second from the issue of communication versus expression, what I am in essence saying is that when you speak about what expression ought to be, or how people ought to understand you, you are doing precisely this.

Obviously you present an absurd example. But the essence of what I am saying when I say that communication involves two people is that one aspect to what you are doing is trying to appreciate the mental state of the other person as best you can insofar as you are trying to devise what it is precisely that would reasonably be beyond keen, or what would be an expression that they cannot understand.

When I speak about biological constraits, or social conventions, or dominance behaviour, all of these things are just justifications for the initial claim: why it is that how you express yourself succeeds precisely in alienating yourself from the most effective way from the listener to understand.[/quote]Clearly I'm trying to maximise the rate at which I am understood.  This is the way that works best for me.

Also, imagine that someone in transcribing all your conversations.  If there are misunderstandings, you can go back through the transcript and find out where the error occurred.  I really want to avoid that error being my error.  Being wrong is bad.
[quote]Right, I agree with this completely.

What I am saying, however, is that choosing to speak in a matter that can be reasonably predictive of failure on the basis of a philosophical inclination is effectively not choosing to express yourself in the clearest possible fashion.

Essentially, I see anyone making a normative demand as making a personal claim on how the world should be. When the world deviates and the person persists in maintaing the normative claim, I see that as self-destructive and petulant.[/quote]Let's look at another venue wherein people interact with each other, and need to do so effectively, but their ability to communicate is constrained:

Driving.

When I'm driving a car (not something I do a lot - I don't own a car, and live in a city friendly to walking), I obviously want to avoid being involved in an accident.  I assume that other drivers want the same, and that they take steps to avoid being in accidents.  Except accidents are sometimes just one driver's fault, so I can't guarantee that I'll avoid accidents even though that's what I'm trying to do.

But I can control whether those accidents are my fault.  So instead, I choose to drive to reduce that risk to zero.  If I obey traffic law and drive attentively, any accidents in which I find myself won't be my fault.  However, this does increase the risk of me being in accidents, as many of these traffic laws are routinely ignored by other drivers.  By following them, I'll be behaving in a way they will find unpredictable.

What you're suggesting with regard to communication would be akin to driving in the way that minimizes the risk of accidents.  What I'm suggesting would be akin to obeying all the rules even if that increases the risk of accidents.

[quote]All I want to convey is that the mere fact the absence of the choice does not bother you does not mean it is not a significant absence.[/quote]
That's fair.

[quote]I am thinking we can say here that with respect to the spectrum between active influence in the world and free internal expression, we are on opposite ends of the scale?[/quote]So it would appear.

[quote]Do why I was confused in conjuction with the comments made above? Effectively as I see it you are choosing to use expression in a way that we can reliably predict (and remember how I use all of these terms per my previous post regarding universality) will fail relative to other means. [/quote]Except I don't know how to use the other means, so they're not a viable option.

[quote]A physicist has math, which makes it much more evident how things behave similarly. And it is important to see how a psychologist would claim that all brains behave the same (because no psychologist would make the broadest claim of this sort; obviously you and I are different and to a biological psychologist, this would be precisely because of differences in our brain).[/quote]I recall a previous discussion (I've no idea what the context was) is which you claimed that all people's brains were "damned near identical" with regard to how they interpreted something or other.

I'm looking for it now.  The old BioBoards search engine isn't being entirely cooperative.

[quote]But I reject this binary definition of knowledge. In fact, I think the extreme end, which to you is "I know something" is practically impossible and so useless as anything other than a philosophical point for metaphysical debate. We could name that knowledge and invent another term for anything else, but quite frankly that is a waste of a term and it is better we use knowledge for the continuum and some new term like absolute metaphysical certainity for the extreme.[/quote]And this seems really odd to me, because I look at the continuum and aside from that one end I see a bunch of stuff we don't know, and little means to choose among them.
[quote]Popper believed that we know things when we know which things are not possible. Despite the fact that I think Popper failed to provide an account for science, I think the principle in his idea is powerful.

Evolutionarily speaking, our mind evolved under pressure to achieve a particualr kind of thing. Not just the empty claim of allow us to survive, but allow us to survive in a specific way by being able to model our environment. The particular ways in which we have gained capacities to reason are reliant on the ways in which we developed to effectively model our environment.

So truth-preservation is irrelevant. Our capacity to recognize it appears more as a joint consequence of abstract reasoning and langauge, which likely arises out of our capacity for mental maps among other things (this is where we gained the ability for recursive thought and attentional scaling that is crucial for cognitive penetrability).[/quote]But we change.  It's only in the last 3000 years or so that humans have begun to recognise their internal monologues as their own, and not the voices of gods or spirits trying to talk to them. 

[quote]Right, and all it can do is occasionally identify statements that preserve truth with tremendous cognitive effort and only when exclusively focused on the task, and for the general university population (like what is the top quarter of intelligence in the population), only in short durations. In fact, the general population is entirely incapable of reasoning formally. Logic is something that people have to be taught, otherwise they fail at it.[/quote]Recall an earlier discussion we had about material conditionals vs. indicative conditionals.  I don't think I'd known what an indicative conditional was or how one worked before that discussion.

The reason I'm trying to get the general population to think the way I think is because they've been entirely unable to explain to me how they think.

[quote]Read about the Wason selection task if you're interested. People do quite poorly when given the purely formal form; people do much better when given a social equivalent of it, yet the underlying logic is the same.[/quote]I've looked up the Wason task, and you are correct.  The logic is equivalent in both cases.  This suggests that the general public is bad at parsing sentences to uncover their formal structure.  The social example is easier for them because they've done that particular set of reasoning before (or had it done for them with the answer explained).

[quote]No, you do. Let us say we have P=>Q. We can only conclude Q, in your terms, if we know P. But we canot use deduction to know P. We can only know P=>Q.[/quote]But you can now disprove P if you've already disproved Q.

As one of my astrophysics professors said on the very first day of class, "There's no truth in science."  Since scientific investigation shows only what is untrue, you never actually know what's right.  You only know what's wrong.

[quote]Ah, but remember that I have a different definition of knowledge.[/quote]Yes, but I don't how you can claim that knowledge is justified.

Some people claim to have justified beliefs, and I don't get that either.  If it's justified, then it's knowledge.  And justification would involve certainty.

What is your standard of justification?

[quote]Whether or not a thing is true is not the mos relevant consideration.[/quote]But it is mandatory.  You cannot know something that is not true.

[quote]Take phlogiston chemistry. This is a failed scientific theory. Yet it allowed for meaningful predictions. I could more reliably take action in the world using this theory than any other of its contemporaries.[/quote]I don't dispute that some tools can be useful even if they're not based on truth.

Read Huygens's wave diffraction theories.  His equations describe wave behaviour really, really well.  But his explanation about how the diffraction occurs is laughable.  So we don't know why wave diffraction actually occurs (we even know that Huygens was wrong about it), but we can predict it incredibly well.

[quote]To me, this is knowledge. Knowledge is about the ability to effect change in the world under a framework that is not internally contradictory. Whether or not the framework is true in a philsophical sense is irrelevant. In fact, I think it is impossble to know anything as true in that sense beyond vacuous truth (deductive theorems). [/quote]Our difference on this point would appear to be only semantic.

[quote]Well, I can't comment on your experience. My intuition is very reliable. Of course, we could not be using the same term for intuition. What do you consider intuition?[/quote]Let me rephrase.  Intuition, which is the reaching of conclusions without having followed any identifiable process to get there, makes more mistakes than I am comfortable with.

There are circumstances under which I'm unable to choose a response using reason, but I still try to respond.  And it is in those circumstances where things so wrong.  And given my failure to use an identifiable process, I cannot then defend my action.

[quote]None, because deductive processes are useless. Simply put, if that is all you want to trust, then you have to resign yourself to these rather unhappy consequences. [/quote]I don't think trust is a choice.

How would you suggest I choose dialogue options, then, if I'm to be denied deduction?  I might need detailed instructions.
[quote]The best advice I have is to refine for standard. Effectively, grant that that you you say is not knowledge is not all equivalent, and you will suddenly become aware of the wealth of varyingly reliable methods available to you to effect change.

Put another way: tone in itself is not going to work; body language in itself is not going to work; speech in itself is not going to work. Triangulating all three will not gurantee understanding; but it will increase the number of outcomes you are understood over your current normative stance.[/quote]But it will also increase the outcomes in which I am indefensibly wrong.

[quote]It is more than that. I do not think they are true. In fact, I think it is impossible to know they are true. But I believe there is value in acting as if they were true. It is like dealing with a conditional: we evaluate it a conditional proof in part by supposing the antencendet is true and seeing if the consequent follows. [/quote]I don't think we disagree here beyond semantics.  This is as above.
[quote]We do have a formal set of definitions. Genetically. Smiles, for example, are not things we learn to produce. We produce them. Individuals that are blind from birth produce smiles that are indistinguishable from the sighted, despite never having seen a smile.

We have a basic hard-wired framework for what verbal cues roughly mean. And we do not consciously interpet them all the time. [/quote]Then why are my tone and body language so often misunderstood?  I don't control for them, because I don't think they're meaningful, but people routinely ascribe the wrong meanings to them.  If this is all hard-wired, I shouldn't be able to do it wrong.

But these misunderstandings occur.  This is why I don't mind the misunderstandings in the game, because misunderstanding aren't an unusual outcome.

[quote]Simply put, there is a fair amount of empirical evidence that people in fact do not always know why they hold the opinions they do.[/quote]They don't, but they can.

[quote]I do not think I have a hand in their mental functioning. Now that I understand where you are coming from better, I agree that all I can control is my own expression. But I allow for more tools, which leads to greater success. [/quote]I'm not turning any tools off, and my success rate is terrible.
[quote]I always found that aspect confusing. The "whole" law, I asked my professor. Where is this "whole" law? It is in the text as written. My reply: If it is in the text, then it is not a meta-law; it is the current law, because you can point me to it. No, says the professor, because we have not realized it is so yet. My reply: so we have laws that we do not know exist, until we interpret them "the right way" in which case they've always existed? 

And apparently there is nothing wrong with that.[/quote]Except there is something wrong with that.  That prevents a citizen from knowing what the law that governs him is.  That prevents a person who is about to act from being able to tell whether the thing he is about to do will invite legal sanction.

The law doesn't tell you what you can't do.  The law tells you what the legal consequences of certain actions will be.  By performing those actions, you're consenting to the consequences.  That this consent is given voluntarily is what makes the whole process fair.

But by denying the person access to the whole law (and since it doesn't exist anywhere, everyone is necessarily denied it), no one is able to give informed consent.

This is the main reason I vastly prefer civil law systems to common law systems.

[quote]But abduction is outside the scope of deduction. It would be like asking me to explain the of a set with reference only to one element. Insofar as you only trust deduction, you cannot 'get' why there is an appeal to abduction, partly because we (or at least I) am drawn to it precsely because I think deduction fails to capture something very important. [/quote]How does it work?  How do you use it?  Why do you use it?  How did you reach the conclusion that it was useful?
[quote]That being said I think that a simple arithmetic is not possible for all things. I really reccomend looking at the work of Kaplan, Newell and Simon in the Search Inference framework in machine learning.

They tried to create a general problem solving proto-neural network, and discovered a great deal of things about the limitations of simple arithmetic in dealing with problems. In fact, I would recommend reading as much as you can find in the problem solving scientific literature, because that is by far the most interest part of psychology.[/quote]Machines have skills that are different from ours.  They excel at computation.  I've been reading about Steven Wolfram's efforts to discover a unified field theory, not by working from the universe and trying to discern the theory that runs it, but by having computers try out every possible theory to see if he can emulate the universe.

[quote]When I say intellectual paralysis, I mean that faced with any alternative, I would have no means of knowing which to choose. I base my philosophy on the neccesity of choice. That is what I start with. [/quote]And I want the choice (or lack thereof) to arise from a valid process.

Though Buridan's_ass is a real problem.
[quote]I am clearly wrong about what I considered a thing. After doing some reading on the above, I think the following would be a closer statement of what I originally wanted to say:

If the structure of a duck is part of what makes something a duck, and anything that is a duck must have the struture of a duck, then a duck is a natural kind. It is a real set, instead of an arbitrary set. [/quote]I'd say that any combination of parts, to be properly called a duck, must include among those parts the structure of a duck.

[quote]Someone could have done all of these things and failed to find a difference. We spent centuries looking at the world and only in the last century did we discover that time is not in fact identical for all of us, but rather depends on our frame of reference. [/quote]Certainly it's a question of plausibility.  If the difference is so small that people could plausibly not notice it, or if it is so small that it makes no material difference to gameplay, then the characters need not be aware of it or make note of it.

[quote]Let's not go here. You know how strongly I hate XP as a violation of any meaningfully coherent representation of how learing and growth can occur. [/quote]I know how you think XP is a violation of any meaningfully coherent representation of how learning and growth do occur in the real world, but the game world is not the real world.

I'm not wed to XP as a mechanic, but it's a good example of something that behaves in a way that should drive behaviour in Mass Effect, but appears not to.

[quote]Why? Do you believe people can quantify the rates their learn to such a degree that they can empirically and with certanity give you a measure of how they are learning and developing?[/quote]Events in the world can be measured.  I'm not suggesting the characters could reproduce the equations behind those events (though there was a pair of Polish mathematicians who accurately designed an Enigma code machine based purely on the the encoded signals they'd intercepted), but in a case where the behaviour varies by a wide margin (I picked the ME XP penality as an example because it was a 60% penalty - how could anyone not notice a 60% difference?).

[quote]These are only reliable predictors for the average worker, or the average trainee. If you were well and truly exceptional, you could not draw conclusions from the data, because you would be non-representative.[/quote]How would you know you were well and truly exceptional?  I'm sure you know the dangers of self-evaluation.

[quote]To you agree it is possible to believe a logically incorrect thing? I would assume so.[/quote]I would not agree that is possible, but nor would I deny it.

I don't claim to have any idea how belief works.
[quote]Well, look at it this way: back when we spoke about coherence, you said this was a design mistake. But the developers could make a game where the laws are different, and yet the characters cannot know it. Supposing in our debate you are actually right, and I am actually wrong, it does not change the fact that the game exists as was designed and the characters in it are not aware of the inconsistency in their own world.

So what I am saying is that people have the capacity to be wrong, and without realizing it hold beliefs that are logically impossible. Moreover, they can produce works that carry these logical contradictions.[/quote]But the characters then would live amidst these contradictions.  And that's a problem.  Let me paraphrase one of the smarter forumites here:

Quite simply, characters who can tolerate contradiction are aesthetically aversive to me.  By virtue of their lack of introspection, I cannot relate to them.  It is impossible to consider myself as having a connection to such a character, so I would never be able to play any computer-game where the PC doesn't investigate his own thoughts and weed out the contradictions.

Modifié par Sylvius the Mad, 20 juillet 2010 - 10:56 .

[In Exile]

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

Clearly I'm trying to maximise the rate at which I am understood.  This is the way that works best for me.

Also, imagine that someone in transcribing all your conversations.  If there are misunderstandings, you can go back through the transcript and find out where the error occurred.  I really want to avoid that error being my error.  [/quote]

First - I apologize for the delay in response. It took time to gather my thoughts. I believe that when discussing a deeper subject it is appropriate to think more profoundly that I usually do before responding.

I have no issue with framing communication as maximizing the rate of understanding. In fact, this is a very accurate take on part of my on view on the matter. Where we seem to differ is not so much in the practicality of what communication involves, but rather how it is that we can best achieve it.

That being said: I think your view of a transcript mischaracterizes misunderstandings. I see misunderstands as not quibbling over how things were said to restore the situation, but rather recognizing that one particular communication strategy failed and trying a new one. This is anectodal, but in my experience it is far more succesful to say the same thing an entirely different way from scratch than try to recall the conversation and point out line-by-line misinterpretations.

[quote]Let's look at another venue wherein people interact with each other, and need to do so effectively, but their ability to communicate is constrained:

Driving. [/quote]

I like this analogy very much. My response to it, I think, exposes the core of our disagreement.

[quote]When I'm driving a car (not something I do a lot - I don't own a car, and live in a city friendly to walking), I obviously want to avoid being involved in an accident.  I assume that other drivers want the same, and that they take steps to avoid being in accidents.  Except accidents are sometimes just one driver's fault, so I can't guarantee that I'll avoid accidents even though that's what I'm trying to do.[/quote]

Indeed. So far I agree with you. I think we can safely say that we have isolated several important variables in how communication is approached: people have a roughly similar goal (avoid accident/avoid misunderstanding), have particular limitations (can only control own driving/access only to own internal state) and must negotiate with others to reach their desired outcome. 

[quote]But I can control whether those accidents are my fault.  So instead, I choose to drive to reduce that risk to zero.  If I obey traffic law and drive attentively, any accidents in which I find myself won't be my fault.  However, this does increase the risk of me being in accidents, as many of these traffic laws are routinely ignored by other drivers.  By following them, I'll be behaving in a way they will find unpredictable.[/quote]

Again, I agree with you and think the analogy captures the issue wheel. But here we uncover a very fundamental issue which is the source of our disagreement: the common ground of the law, which actually exists in a much more powerful way in communication than it does in driving.

Traffic law exists as the ostensibly shared knowledge and conventions by which we can assume that all others are operating by, and through this assumption we can then work to choose the best available means to reach our goal (avoid accidents/misunderstandings). The main thing about the law is that it is entirely social convention. It is an agreed upon set of customs. The "law" which governs communication, however, is not.

The point-at-issue between the two of us is what precisely this "law" means.

You see, I think where your analogy breaks down is that you do not, in fact, follow the laws of traffic. The situation as you characterize it is that you follow the laws of traffic and others deviate; but in fact I would argue the situation is that you are the one who intentionally deviates from the laws of traffic. I will expand on this below. Please bear with me.

[quote]What you're suggesting with regard to communication would be akin to driving in the way that minimizes the risk of accidents.  What I'm suggesting would be akin to obeying all the rules even if that increases the risk of accidents.[/quote]

No; what I am suggesting is that the only way to minimize accidents is to follow the law (jointly social convention and biology); what you are suggesting is that we ought to follow a particular kind of normative philosophy. You follow the normative philosophy by choice, deviating from the law as far as you can (the law through biology can make absolute demands on you in the case of communication; in the same way you cannot see ultraviolet radiation).

This is why I argue that you reverse the "is" and "ought". To you, the "ought" it the law. But that is not so. The law which compels people is the "is". When you are arguing for your method of representation, what you are in fact arguing for is changing this law. Hence why there is a profound failing in the way in which you communicate.

Keeping in mind that throughout this entire argument, I am taking your analogy and altering it to find my argument.

[quote]Except I don't know how to use the other means, so they're not a viable option.[/quote]

That's not an excuse. Surely if someone told you he constantly holds internal contradictions because he does not understand logic, so there is no viable option but to be contradictory, you would say that the solution instead is to try and study logic. The same applies here: not knowing how is not equivalent to not being able.

[quote]I recall a previous discussion (I've no idea what the context was) is which you claimed that all people's brains were "damned near identical" with regard to how they interpreted something or other.[/quote]

Different levels of analysis. Our brains are structurally similar enough that we can accurately produce an exhaustive list of things which are and are not possible for us. At the same time, our brains are sufficiently different that it is possible that each brain can express a unique set of features from the set of limited elements.

Put another way, we can use science to both define the set and explain why each element of the set is different. It all depends at the level of abstraction where you are looking.

To use an analogy: my calculator is not the same kind of machine as my laptop, but I can use the same principles (electronics, mathematics) to understand the operation of both, and accurately describe how they are similar and how they are dissimilar, and how their similarity and disimilarity is a result of fundamental properties of their structure.

It is the same with people and brains.

[quote]And this seems really odd to me, because I look at the continuum and aside from that one end I see a bunch of stuff we don't know, and little means to choose among them.[/quote]

This is because for whatever reason, you seem to think certainty has value. But it does not, because we never know anything. You do not know from one second to the next that the physical laws that you experience will stay constant. Yet neverthless this sort of not knowing is, beside philosophical consideration, practically useless.

The value in recognizing degrees of knowing is in building an accurate theory of partial knowledge. This is how discovery and invention work. In fact, it is the very essence of nature to be forced into making decisions with only partial (at best) information.

So theories of manipulation of partial information are crucial, and this is where abduction has value.

[quote]But we change.  It's only in the last 3000 years or so that humans have begun to recognise their internal monologues as their own, and not the voices of gods or spirits trying to talk to them. [/quote]

I would like some evidence for that claim. That being said, even if this were true, it would not be the sort of change I am refering to. The absence of value in truth preservation has nothing to do with what we can do, but rather with what we need to be able to do.

This relates to arguments about the justification of abduction, however.

[quote]Recall an earlier discussion we had about material conditionals vs. indicative conditionals.  I don't think I'd known what an indicative conditional was or how one worked before that discussion.

The reason I'm trying to get the general population to think the way I think is because they've been entirely unable to explain to me how they think.[/quote]

This is because we do not happen to have access to our thinking. I could provide empirical proof that you do not think the way you think. That we are all bad at understanding how we think is not an indication of anything, and the belief and even the ability to provide a plausible account of how we think is not evidence that the account of thinking is justified. We need to decide on a theory of evidence before we know that, and if we accept the scientific method, then we have very strong reasons to believe we are incapable of being able to understand how we think purely through methods like introspection.

[quote]I've looked up the Wason task, and you are correct.  The logic is equivalent in both cases.  This suggests that the general public is bad at parsing sentences to uncover their formal structure.  The social example is easier for them because they've done that particular set of reasoning before (or had it done for them with the answer explained).[/quote]

The findings are more complicated than that, actually. The social contract theories that attempt to justify the ability to discover the right answer in the case of beer (for example) are not workable theories. The current model is very complicated, and effectively relates to hypothesis building.

The gist of the theory is that, in the abstract case, we fail to apply a logical principle because we do not apply logical principles in isolation. They are slave system to other forms of hypothesis generation that we only once we've developed particular kinds of theories about the world, appropriate evidence and kinds of possible information.

[quote]But you can now disprove P if you've already disproved Q.[/quote]

Which requires that you disprove Q. In other words, it requires independent, material knowledge of the world.

[quote]As one of my astrophysics professors said on the very first day of class, "There's no truth in science."  Since scientific investigation shows only what is untrue, you never actually know what's right.  You only know what's wrong.[/quote]

No, this is Popperian nonsence. Popper is simply wrong about using modus tollens in this way. For whatever reason, though, scientists just like Popper's portrayal of them as heoric searchers for truth, willing to discard all of their beliefs for the sake of knowledge, so they keep feeding students this myth about how science works.

Let us take a classic example: electrons. They are unobservable, theoretical entities which we believe exist. If I am to test my theory of electrons, I require instruments. This creates the following theoretical problem: the instrumetns themselves are dependent on theory.

Contra Popper, when we test a theory, it is not Theory T => Observation O, ~O => ~T. It is in fact, Theory T => Observation O, with Auxiliarity Theories A', A'' etc. justifying instrumentation.

So when what we have in fact is T^A'^A'' .... => O. And ~O => ~(T^A'^A''....) but you know via De Morgan's rules that this tells us that all we know is that ~T v ~A' v ~ A''... and so in fact we have learned nothing other than there is something wrong in our theoretical cluster.

Now, you might say, we can test each theory in isolation. Except this is not possible. Certain theoretical constructs are untestable and true by definition.

This is all a long answer, but today it is called the Duhem-Quine thesis so you can find a fair bit of reading under that name. As an introduction, I reccomend reading excerpts from Duhem himself. Though he predates Popper, he actually raises many objections to him,.

[quote]Yes, but I don't how you can claim that knowledge is justified.[/quote]

Justification is simply reason for good reason for belief. I'm aware justification can also refer to logical consequence, but not everyone uses it so. I do not, precisely because I think concepts like logical consequence and neccesity are vacuous in any practical sense.

[quote]Some people claim to have justified beliefs, and I don't get that either.  If it's justified, then it's knowledge.  And justification would involve certainty.[/quote]

I disagree. But the problem is our terminology, not our concepts. I recognize the terms you apprehend with both knowledge and justification, and have a place for both in my theoretical account. I simply do not wish to use the terms "knowledge" and "justification" for them, because I think both are more appropriate for other concepts.

Of course, this relates to another divide between us: you believe that defining words gives them meaning, whereas I think what matters is the general understanding of the word.

People commonly apprehend concepts other than knowledge and justification as you use them with knowledge and justification, and I think it is more effective to retain the words in the vernacular and invent new words for practically useless theoretical concepts rather than the inverse.

[quote]What is your standard of justification?[/quote]

Whether or not there are compelling reasons to believe. I do not think a belief is ever justified. To me that just sounds stupid, because it flips the causality.

We cannot have certainty. But I argue we can have good reasons to suppose that we should take certain things for granted as true, even if we cannot know if they are true.

[quote]But it is mandatory.  You cannot know something that is not true.[/quote]

Now we are being semantic. By your definition of knowledge, no. I reject this definition. I agree you cannot with certainty know something that you cannot absolutely demonstrate is true. But as I repeatetly said, I reject certainty as a meaningful standard, and do not take the absence of absolute demonstrate as an absence of knowing.

[quote]I don't dispute that some tools can be useful even if they're not based on truth.[/quote]

But this is the essence of abduction, and the theory of knowledge I suggest.

[quote]Read Huygens's wave diffraction theories.  His equations describe wave behaviour really, really well.  But his explanation about how the diffraction occurs is laughable.  So we don't know why wave diffraction actually occurs (we even know that Huygens was wrong about it), but we can predict it incredibly well.[/quote]

Duhem uses this Huygens as his example (at least in the paper I read). I think you would enjoy it.

This is a very good analogy for what I am advocating with both knowledge and abduction, however.

We do not need to know the certain truth of a matter to meaningfully have what we can term knowledge, which is to say we can have useful tools for manipulating the world.

To me, it is not truth that has value, but manipulation of the world. Hence why I background certainty and foreground a spectrum of relative uncertainty.

[quote]Let me rephrase.  Intuition, which is the reaching of conclusions without having followed any identifiable process to get there, makes more mistakes than I am comfortable with.[/quote]

To speak empirically for a second, intuition does plausible have an identifiable process. It is simply not conscious. Does walking many you uncomfortable? There is no identifiable process to it - you were will to walk someone, and you do.

To make a long story short, intuition is a trained mechanism. It is the building of a precise kind of mental framework for problems. To be intuitive you need a good intuition, and to have a good intuition you need the proper kind of training.

You've done a fair amount of math and physics, no? Intuition works something like this: at first, when faced with the sort of problems in math, the the mind was paralyzed because it knew nothing. It had to learn. As it learned, it build increasingly better frameworks of those problems. Eventually, it becomes so good at building the framework that it does so automatically. Now, looking at a problem salient features for the solution are immediately apparent.

This is how intuition works. But intuition cannot work without the apporpriate training. It would be like asking a novice in physics to characterize physics problem like an expert (and the two do it in radically different ways - I reccomend reading into the literature on expertiese; it is very illustrative of some of the modern aspects of intuition).

[quote]There are circumstances under which I'm unable to choose a response using reason, but I still try to respond.  And it is in those circumstances where things go wrong.  And given my failure to use an identifiable process, I cannot then defend my action.[/quote]

Self-reports are poor evidence, so I can't comment very much on this, especially without any particular description of a situation. I would say, however, that your social intiution is poor not simply because you have not trained it, but because you insisit on thinking about social situations in a very atypical way. It is something like asking an untrained dog to perform obedience tricks. The failure of the dog does not mean it could not do the trick if it received training so much as it means that he cannot currently do the trick. I think you are confusing the latter for the former.

[quote]I don't think trust is a choice.[/quote]

Whereas I think trust is a kind of existential choice we have to make.

We had this debate about deduction. You simply cannot prove deduction to me. So long as I reject your fundamental axioms, all you are providing for me is a circular argument ("Don't you see? Deduction justifies deduction!).

[quote]How would you suggest I choose dialogue options, then, if I'm to be denied deduction?  I might need detailed instructions.[/quote]

Are we talking in a video-game or reality? In either case I would say inference through context, which is to say abduction as it is actually useful.

[quote]Then why are my tone and body language so often misunderstood?  I don't control for them, because I don't think they're meaningful, but people routinely ascribe the wrong meanings to them.  If this is all hard-wired, I shouldn't be able to do it wrong. [/quote]

Specific body language is not hard-wired, and we can learn poor habbits. For the longest time I had the tendency to bob my head up and down whenever I talked to a woman. Not particularly charming. Took me months to try and get it under control and I still occasionally do it. I have no even why I did it in the first place.

Still, to be able to comment specifically I would need to know what your body language is and what others are misinterpreting. Do people misread emotions, mood, tone?

The general answer, though, is that not all body language is hardwired. Hand-gestures, etc. are very much culture specific. We just have some common indicators that are genetic and the rest are culture.

For example, I come from a cultural group where speaking with our hands is common, but to the anglo-saxon crowd, I look a bit like an animated loon.

[quote]But these misunderstandings occur.  This is why I don't mind the misunderstandings in the game, because misunderstanding aren't an unusual outcome. [/quote]

A misunderstanding is not a misunderstanding unless it is acknowledge. You know what I think about things that only happen in the character's head, yes?

[quote]They don't, but they can.[/quote]

Frankly, it depends. In the case of split-brain patients, the answer is actually that they can't (I mean, it is physically impossible for them to do this) but they nevertheless think they do and absolutely nothing can sake this belief. It is actually quite a lot like your example wi

[quote]Except there is something wrong with that.  That prevents a citizen from knowing what the law that governs him is.  That prevents a person who is about to act from being able to tell whether the thing he is about to do will invite legal sanction.[/quote]

Oh, I agree completely. I was being sarcastic, but I forget that sarcasm doesn't carry over the internet.

[quote]The law doesn't tell you what you can't do.  The law tells you what the legal consequences of certain actions will be.  By performing those actions, you're consenting to the consequences.  That this consent is given voluntarily is what makes the whole process fair.[/quote]

Well, that is a whole can of worms apparently (I have a friend who is a libertarian, you see) but I happen to agree with you.

[quote]How does it work?  How do you use it?  Why do you use it?  How did you reach the conclusion that it was useful?[/quote]

This is a very long explanation. I have a post-it note to remind me to send you a PM, since you're interested.

[quote]Machines have skills that are different from ours.  They excel at computation.  I've been reading about Steven Wolfram's efforts to discover a unified field theory, not by working from the universe and trying to discern the theory that runs it, but by having computers try out every possible theory to see if he can emulate the universe.[/quote]

Right, but the interesting thing is that Search Inference framework plausibly illustrate how combinatorial explosion makes simple arithmetic approaches to most problems impossible even for computers, much less for people who lack the computational capacity.

This was a very influential read for me. It is what led me to abandon my original views on a lot of things, which as I said we're quite similar to yours (I was even a Popperian!).

[quote]And I want the choice (or lack thereof) to arise from a valid process.

Though Buridan's_ass is a real problem.[/quote]

Well, there is no problem of choice from a deductive process, since there is nothing to choose. You have everything (all theorems) and yet nothing (no definites) at the same time.

[quote]]I'd say that any combination of parts, to be properly called a duck, must include among those parts the structure of a duck.[/quote]

Now we are getting closer to the issue at stake. The problem in the practical sense (and even the realist who advocate natural kinds recognize this) is that more than one combination of parts are currently called a duck, and each seem to be a 'proper' duck. For us nominalists this is a victory, because it is a recognition there is no unique combination of things that is called duck. At the same time, it rejects the claim that there can ever be a structure that is called duck that exists in the same sense as any other component of the thing called duck. This is nominalism, after all (perhaps I should push a man down a wheel when I say that to make the reference complete).

[quote]Certainly it's a question of plausibility.  If the difference is so small that people could plausibly not notice it, or if it is so small that it makes no material difference to gameplay, then the characters need not be aware of it or make note of it.[/quote]

That was my point. It is possible to have a world with inconsistent rules that appears consistent. In fact, we can have a world with consistent rules that appears consistent with another set of rules, which Poincare pointed out in one of the few thought experiments I actually happen to line. 

[quote]I know how you think XP is a violation of any meaningfully coherent representation of how learning and growth do occur in the real world, but the game world is not the real world.[/quote]

I would argue the game world tries to be relevantly similar, but point taken. That was more a meta-level discussion, though, since I want my game world to be relevantly similar (but not identical; I want magic and dragon-slaying and such, after all). Still, point taken.

[quote]I'm not wed to XP as a mechanic, but it's a good example of something that behaves in a way that should drive behaviour in Mass Effect, but appears not to.[/quote]

Only if characters are aware of XP. Which need not be the case, given our antecedent discussion on physical rules.

[quote]Events in the world can be measured.  I'm not suggesting the characters could reproduce the equations behind those events (though there was a pair of Polish mathematicians who accurately designed an Enigma code machine based purely on the the encoded signals they'd intercepted), but in a case where the behaviour varies by a wide margin (I picked the ME XP penality as an example because it was a 60% penalty - how could anyone not notice a 60% difference?).[/quote]

But we would be speaking of the psychology of that world - this is what a rate of learning is. And you are skeptical of psychology in our world. Are not equally skeptical of it in theirs. To use one of your expressions - it is after all, about the perspective of the characters (who do not know the laws of their world) versus our perspective as players (who know with absolute certain the laws of their world - or rather, we should, if Bioware wasn't hiding them away for some reason).

[quote]How would you know you were well and truly exceptional?  I'm sure you know the dangers of self-evaluation.[/quote]

Oh, we have no way of knowing this. But people believe it. And it appears to be cultural. Eastern cultures do not believe they are better than average. But they believe their group is better than other groups. So there is some element of overestimation apparently at a different level.

But this is all social psychology, and like I said, I look at it with a fair amount of contempt and barely consider it a step above witchcraft.

[quote]]But the characters then would live amidst these contradictions.  And that's a problem.  Let me paraphrase one of the smarter forumites here:

Quite simply, characters who can tolerate contradiction are aesthetically aversive to me.  By virtue of their lack of introspection, I cannot relate to them.  It is impossible to consider myself as having a connection to such a character, so I would never be able to play any computer-game where the PC doesn't investigate his own thoughts and weed out the contradictions.[/quote]

I can appreciate that sentiment. My goal was only to convey what my objection was. To me, having someone understand me is far more important than having someone agree with me.

[Sylvius the Mad]

[quote]In Exile wrote...

First - I apologize for the delay in response. It took time to gather my thoughts. I believe that when discussing a deeper subject it is appropriate to think more profoundly that I usually do before responding.[/quote]
The delay was good.  It gaev me some time to get some other things done.
[quote]That being said: I think your view of a transcript mischaracterizes misunderstandings. I see misunderstands as not quibbling over how things were said to restore the situation, but rather recognizing that one particular communication strategy failed and trying a new one. This is anectodal, but in my experience it is far more succesful to say the same thing an entirely different way from scratch than try to recall the conversation and point out line-by-line misinterpretations. [/quote]
Perhaps within that one conversation, but going back to find the misunderstandings helps both parties avoid them in the future.
[quote]You see, I think where your analogy breaks down is that you do not, in fact, follow the laws of traffic. The situation as you characterize it is that you follow the laws of traffic and others deviate; but in fact I would argue the situation is that you are the one who intentionally deviates from the laws of traffic.[/quote]
Backing up a bit here, there does appear to be some set of extra-legal driving conventions that the bulk of the drivers follow.  This is how they manage to avoid accidents more successfully despite not obeying traffic law as consistently.

But those conventions are not knowable.  So while I am choosing the position I find more defensible, I'm also choosing the position I understand more.

The latter trait (understanding) is something we've alredy been discussing quite a bit with regard to expression, the former trait (defensibility) is also something that drives my choice of expression over communication.

When we go back through the transcipt to find the errors, I want the errors not to be mine.  I want this very strongly, and I compose my expressions accordingly.
[quote]That's not an excuse. Surely if someone told you he constantly holds internal contradictions because he does not understand logic, so there is no viable option but to be contradictory, you would say that the solution instead is to try and study logic. The same applies here: not knowing how is not equivalent to not being able. [/quote]
True.  If he's not able to understand logic, then we have a different sort of problem.

That said, I have these conversations with you because I don't know how to have a conversation where my objective is something that's beyond my control.  If there's a way to do that, I want to learn it.  Some new game designs are making this approach mandatory, but they're not cdocumenting it well enough for me to know how to use it.
[quote]This is because for whatever reason, you seem to think certainty has value. But it does not, because we never know anything.[/quote]
Not true.  We can know things conditionally.  And this is relevant to science.  If we're fairly confident something is true, but them show empirically that something else is also likely to be true, but the two things cannot both be true (given our understanding of their relationship - this is our piece of conditional knowledge), then it tells us what to test next.  We've just uncovered a hole in our understanding (which never would have occurred if we were willing to accept contradictions), and have some idea how to go about filling it.
[quote]The value in recognizing degrees of knowing is in building an accurate theory of partial knowledge. This is how discovery and invention work. In fact, it is the very essence of nature to be forced into making decisions with only partial (at best) information.[/quote]
I'm having trouble wrapping my head around my response to this.  I largely agree with you, but that would appear to contradict my previous assertion.

The problem with lesser degree of probability is that it's difficult to apply that to specific instances.  Across larger populations, statistical knowledge can be very useful.  We can often even quantify our level of certainty.  But applying that information to individuals within the population would mostly be guessing.

So when choosing one particular item, I don't think I have enough information to make that choice with any confidence, though if I were choosing 1000 of them I could probably come up with a reasonable prediction of how often I'd pick the right one.

But from a roleplaying perspective a 10% failure rate is far too high.  And because a failure rate of 0% used to be possible, and because even a single failure at an inopportune time can be devastating, dealing with the possibility of failure is often paralysing when playing these games.
[quote][quote]But we change.  It's only in the last 3000 years or so that humans have begun to recognise their internal monologues as their own, and not the voices of gods or spirits trying to talk to them. [/quote]
I would like some evidence for that claim.[/quote]
I believe the the theory was first advanced by Julian Jaymes in his book The Origin of Consciousness.
[quote]This is because we do not happen to have access to our thinking. I could provide empirical proof that you do not think the way you think. That we are all bad at understanding how we think is not an indication of anything, and the belief and even the ability to provide a plausible account of how we think is not evidence that the account of thinking is justified.[/quote]
But my way of thinking is alien to you, and your way of thinking is alien to me (with respect to expression/communication).  If neither is penetrable, then the gulf between us cannot be bridged.
[quote]The gist of the theory is that, in the abstract case, we fail to apply a logical principle because we do not apply logical principles in isolation.[/quote]
I have encountered that problem when tutoring logic students.  They're unable to disentangle the logic from their understanding of the sentence and what it means in their world.

Applying logical principles in isolation can be learned.
[quote][quote]But you can now disprove P if you've already disproved Q.[/quote]
Which requires that you disprove Q. In other words, it requires independent, material knowledge of the world. [/quote]
As I mentioned above, if Q conflicts with something that is likely to be true given our understanding of the world, that makes P less likely.  That's information.  If it's a strict condition, we can run the probabality backward through it and determine that P is unlikely to be true, and possibly even quantify that lesser likelihood.
[quote]No, this is Popperian nonsence. Popper is simply wrong about using modus tollens in this way. For whatever reason, though, scientists just like Popper's portrayal of them as heoric searchers for truth, willing to discard all of their beliefs for the sake of knowledge, so they keep feeding students this myth about how science works.[/quote]
It seems to me to be exactly how science works.  If you step beyond this then you're not doing science.
[quote]Let us take a classic example: electrons. They are unobservable, theoretical entities which we believe exist. If I am to test my theory of electrons, I require instruments. This creates the following theoretical problem: the instrumetns themselves are dependent on theory.[/quote]
First, we don't need to believe they exist.

Second, yes, all of our experiements are dependent upon extensive theory.  So we can't isolate one variable - we're testing sets of theories against each other, and finding contradictions.  When we find one, we've learned that some of those theories conflict.

Our next experiment (I speak theoretically - one of the interesting things about astrophysics is that you don't get to do experiments, you just observe things and do maybe thought experiments) will compare different sets of theories, thus allowing us to winnow out those theories that aren't causing the contradiction.
[quote]Contra Popper, when we test a theory, it is not Theory T => Observation O, ~O => ~T. It is in fact, Theory T => Observation O, with Auxiliarity Theories A', A'' etc. justifying instrumentation.

So when what we have in fact is T^A'^A'' .... => O. And ~O => ~(T^A'^A''....) but you know via De Morgan's rules that this tells us that all we know is that ~T v ~A' v ~ A''... and so in fact we have learned nothing other than there is something wrong in our theoretical cluster.[/quote]
Yes, exactly.  This is science.
[quote]This is all a long answer, but today it is called the Duhem-Quine thesis so you can find a fair bit of reading under that name. As an introduction, I reccomend reading excerpts from Duhem himself. Though he predates Popper, he actually raises many objections to him,.[/quote]
Thank you for the citation.
[quote]Of course, this relates to another divide between us: you believe that defining words gives them meaning, whereas I think what matters is the general understanding of the word.[/quote]
Much like with traffic law vs. social convention, I don't think think this general understanding is knowable.

Our ability to define things formally makes language a much more powerful and precise tool.
[quote]We cannot have certainty. But I argue we can have good reasons to suppose that we should take certain things for granted as true, even if we cannot know if they are true.[/quote]
Since you're working backward from practicality, that makes sense.  I wouldn't want to take things for granted as true, for that risks introducing confirmation bias into my future observations (so I must always remain aware of the limits of my knowledge), but it certainly makes sense not to re-evaluate one's entire set of assumptions for each action taken.
[quote]But this is the essence of abduction, and the theory of knowledge I suggest.

Duhem uses this Huygens as his example (at least in the paper I read). I think you would enjoy it.

This is a very good analogy for what I am advocating with both knowledge and abduction, however.

We do not need to know the certain truth of a matter to meaningfully have what we can term knowledge, which is to say we can have useful tools for manipulating the world.[/quote]
I would agree entirely, except I think it is dangerous to call that knowledge.
[quote]To me, it is not truth that has value, but manipulation of the world. Hence why I background certainty and foreground a spectrum of relative uncertainty. [/quote]
I think the truth is important because important because I don't make mistakes there, so it gives a safe starting point if ever I do make an error and need to back up to find out why.

We started this discussion because of dialogue, and one of our major differences is that I think my ability to manipulate the world through dialogue ends with me uttering expressions.
[quote]You've done a fair amount of math and physics, no? Intuition works something like this: at first, when faced with the sort of problems in math, the the mind was paralyzed because it knew nothing. It had to learn. As it learned, it build increasingly better frameworks of those problems. Eventually, it becomes so good at building the framework that it does so automatically. Now, looking at a problem salient features for the solution are immediately apparent.[/quote]
Math is an interesting example.  As a child, I can't recall ever being shown something new in math and not immediately grasping it.  It all seemed obvious the moment it wa sshown to me, and in some cases I'd already derived these new formulae independently before being shown them.  So I never spent any time learning them - I just knew them, and they made sense.

And then I studied calculus.  I didn't really understand how calculus worked, and I didn't know why.  I could reduce introductory calculus to simple arithmetic (follow this process and get the answer), and I even found some more advanced arithmetic to solve the problems when the simple arithmetic failed.

But these were stop-gap solutions.  I wasn't able to actually do the calculus.  Integration gave me no end of trouble, and I was going to fail the class.  And then, while taking an exam, I realised why.

There was a question on the test which, as I read it, produced a solution that sprang immediately to mind that didn't use any calculus.  So certain was I that I was correct - and I was correct - that I declared it to be a trick question and answered it using no calculus at all.

And I got the wrong answer.  But I didn't make any mistakes in my math.  The mistake I made was using math.  What I hadn't realised was that calculus and traditional mathematics are mutually exclusive systems.  They can actually find contradictory solutions to the same problem.  Mathematics was, to me, a single logical framework, and literally everything I learned about math (prior to calculus) followed necessarily from a simple set of axioms that everyone learns at a young age.  How to count.  How to add, subtract, multply and divide.  That's it.  Everything else followed logically.  Deductively.  So it all came very naturally to me, as everything deductive does.  Everything I learned about math was part of a single internally consistent logical system.

Calculus is not part of that system.  Calculus is not consistent with lower-level mathematics.  It is an entirely different logical system.  But because I was trying to build it onto the same logical framework, it made no sense to me (and the reason for that was clear the instant I found an explicit contradiction).

This rendered everything I'd learned about calculus useless, and I needed to start over and relearn two years worth of calculus.
[quote]This is how intuition works. But intuition cannot work without the apporpriate training. It would be like asking a novice in physics to characterize physics problem like an expert (and the two do it in radically different ways - I reccomend reading into the literature on expertiese; it is very illustrative of some of the modern aspects of intuition).[/quote]
Since everything I learn gets built onto the same logical system (or a separate relevant system if I happen to need a new one, like with calculus), I cannot trust anything I may have learned already because it will be coloured by that system.

If "this is how intuition works", then I need to start from scratch in learning how to use it.

Any suggestions?
[quote]Self-reports are poor evidence, so I can't comment very much on this, especially without any particular description of a situation. I would say, however, that your social intiution is poor not simply because you have not trained it, but because you insisit on thinking about social situations in a very atypical way.[/quote]
My approach is bad because it is atypical?  That's borderline offensive in a "different is bad" sort of way.
[quote]Are we talking in a video-game or reality? In either case I would say inference through context, which is to say abduction as it is actually useful. [/quote]
A tool is only useful if you know how to use it.
[quote]Specific body language is not hard-wired, and we can learn poor habbits.[/quote]
If it's not hard-wired, then it should be just as easy for people to learn how I behave rather than me having to behave differently.

Each person speaks with different biases, so it's already important to learn how to interpret each person individually.
[quote]Still, to be able to comment specifically I would need to know what your body language is and what others are misinterpreting. Do people misread emotions, mood, tone? [/quote]
All of those.  People often don't realise that I'm happy or excited about things.  People interpret questions to contain judgment or scorn (this one makes no sense to me at all - questions can't convey facts).  And people think I lack confidence in what I say just because speaking to people makes me nervous and I never make eye contact (I literally cannot speak and make eye contact at the same time).
[quote]For example, I come from a cultural group where speaking with our hands is common, but to the anglo-saxon crowd, I look a bit like an animated loon. [/quote]
Sure.  I'm from western Canada; we never touch each other, and we're uncomfortable if people don't maintain a minimum distance of about one metre.

I wonder if one of the reasons I've enjoyed BioWare's games so much is because they are also in western Canada, so we share a common cultural bias.  And perhaps that similarity dwindles as they hire more international writers.
[quote]Frankly, it depends. In the case of split-brain patients, the answer is actually that they can't (I mean, it is physically impossible for them to do this) but they nevertheless think they do and absolutely nothing can sake this belief. It is actually quite a lot like your example wi[/quote]
I'd love to know how that paragraph was supposed to end.
[quote]Oh, I agree completely. I was being sarcastic, but I forget that sarcasm doesn't carry over the internet. [/quote]
Yes, I was agreeing with you and reinforcing your point.
[quote]Well, that is a whole can of worms apparently (I have a friend who is a libertarian, you see) but I happen to agree with you.[/quote]
Whether there should be law at all is a different issue (and not one I want to discuss here).
[quote]This is a very long explanation. I have a post-it note to remind me to send you a PM, since you're interested.[/quote]
I look forward to it.
[quote]Right, but the interesting thing is that Search Inference framework plausibly illustrate how combinatorial explosion makes simple arithmetic approaches to most problems impossible even for computers, much less for people who lack the computational capacity.

This was a very influential read for me. It is what led me to abandon my original views on a lot of things, which as I said we're quite similar to yours (I was even a Popperian!). [/quote]
That doesn't make a lot of sense to me.  If you were a Popperian, then you clearly thought his was a good definition for science.  Learning about combinatorial explosion would then serve to change your mind about the sorts of things science can learn, sure, but I don't see why you would abandon the definition.
[quote]Well, there is no problem of choice from a deductive process, since there is nothing to choose. You have everything (all theorems) and yet nothing (no definites) at the same time.[/quote]
Right, but if I have no reason to choose one option over another, and I'm unaware of the consequences of choosing one over the other, then I can't make any sort of decision about which to choose.  If I knew there were no consequences I wanted to avoid and no opportunity cost, then I could choose arbitrarily, but without that I'm left not knowing how to get though a conversation without breaking something. 
[quote]Now we are getting closer to the issue at stake. The problem in the practical sense (and even the realist who advocate natural kinds recognize this) is that more than one combination of parts are currently called a duck, and each seem to be a 'proper' duck. For us nominalists this is a victory, because it is a recognition there is no unique combination of things that is called duck. At the same time, it rejects the claim that there can ever be a structure that is called duck that exists in the same sense as any other component of the thing called duck.[/quote]Not necessarily.  It might just mean that we haven't yet identified the parameters of the structure of a duck. 

Uncertainty!
[quote]That was my point. It is possible to have a world with inconsistent rules that appears consistent. In fact, we can have a world with consistent rules that appears consistent with another set of rules, which Poincare pointed out in one of the few thought experiments I actually happen to line. [/quote]
Yes.  I don't dispute this at all.
[quote]But we would be speaking of the psychology of that world - this is what a rate of learning is. And you are skeptical of psychology in our world. Are not equally skeptical of it in theirs. [/quote]
The social sciences do a terrible job of telling us anything about individuals, but we don't need to understand anything about any given individual.  We can measure these rates across the general population.  Statistics.

So if there's a 60% reduction in learning rates across one population compared to another (once you correct for other confounding factors), we'd see it.  We probably couldn't say with any certainty that it was a 60% reduction, but it would definitely be a statistically significant reduction.  60% is hard to miss.
[quote]Oh, we have no way of knowing this. But people believe it.[/quote]
It's a dumb thing to believe.
[quote]And it appears to be cultural. Eastern cultures do not believe they are better than average. But they believe their group is better than other groups.[/quote]
Again, without data, it's a dumb thing to believe.
[quote][quote]But the characters then would live amidst these contradictions.  And that's a problem.  Let me paraphrase one of the smarter forumites here:

Quite simply, characters who can tolerate contradiction are aesthetically aversive to me.  By virtue of their lack of introspection, I cannot relate to them.  It is impossible to consider myself as having a connection to such a character, so I would never be able to play any computer-game where the PC doesn't investigate his own thoughts and weed out the contradictions.[/quote]
I can appreciate that sentiment.[/quote]
I would hope so.  I was paraphrasing you.