David Lewis Speaks at La Trobe University
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 พ.ค. 2015
- 'Knowing What It's Like', presented in 1981. Lewis responds to Frank Jackson's Knowledge Argument against physicalism/materialism. This lecture was the basis for Lewis's 1988 paper 'What Experience Teaches'.
Very helpful and enlightening. This was touched on at the tail-end: the issue of information which has some essential indexicality in its designation, or even information which can be designated only indexically. An outfielder chasing a fly ball would seem to be a good example of "knowing how". But if I say to a robot programmed to catch fly balls, "Now chase down this fly ball without using all the calculations - you know, the way Willie Mays would do it," and we then ask for an explanation of why the robot can no longer catch the fly ball, we must resort to an observation of the fact that the robot does not possess the 'para-psychological' info that Willie Mays does. So in this case, it seems that although Willie Mays' information can only be referred to indexically (He would probably say, "Well, I just do this," as he demonstrates.) it is necessary to explain the sudden inability of the robot. Another perhaps more troubling question is the alleged ability of newborn humans to mimic facial expressions presented to it. Without positing innate "parapsychological" knowledge, I don't know how we would explain this. One might argue this does not fit the cases of "knowing how" embedded in a causal chain or manifold, nor would it be offered as a prime example of "knowing what it's like," but there seems to be some sort of this latter type mental state which is, as it were, signified by baby's ability to mimic an expression. Anyone who cares to comment, please do so.
Noam Chomsky had a nice opinion piece in the nytimes today titled the false promise of chatgpt where he said:
The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.
For instance, a young child acquiring a language is developing - unconsciously, automatically and speedily from minuscule data - a grammar, a stupendously sophisticated system of logical principles and parameters. This grammar can be understood as an expression of the innate, genetically installed “operating system” that endows humans with the capacity to generate complex sentences and long trains of thought. When linguists seek to develop a theory for why a given language works as it does (“Why are these - but not those - sentences considered grammatical?”), they are building consciously and laboriously an explicit version of the grammar that the child builds instinctively and with minimal exposure to information. The child’s operating system is completely different from that of a machine learning program.
see many Univers ..
John Dewey spoke much about experience, and I wonder what Professor Lewis thinks of Dewey. Thanks for the video!
his imagination was by far greater than his reason.
It's a shame that David Lewis reads this from his paper. It makes the presentation a little bit (for want of a better word) inhuman. This is shown by the lack of audience reaction, except when he mentions Vegemite. I've also noted that in other seminars he reads directly from his papers.
I'm also very surprised that no one wanted to ask him a question. The professors had to step in to help. Perhaps that's because David Lewis has such an intellectually fearsome reputation. And it didn't help that he read his seminar/paper.