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A prereminiscence: It's like it was with chess. We passed through that stage when AI could beat most of us to where it obviously outperforms all of us. Only for cultural output in general. People still think now, but privately, in the shower, or in quaint artisanal forms as if we were making our own yogurts or weaving our own clothes. Human-produced works are now a genre with a dwindling and eccentric fan base more concerned with the process than the product.
It was like the tide coming in. One day it was cutely, clumsily trying to mimic that thing we do. Soon after it was doing it pretty well and you watched it with admiration as if it were a dog balancing on a ball. Then soon it could do it well enough for most purposes, you couldn't help but admit. Then as good as all but the best, even to those who could tell the difference. And then we were suddenly all wet, gathering our remaining picnic and heading for higher ground, not only completely outclassed but even unable to judge by how far we were being outclassed. Once a chess machine can beat everybody every time, who is left to applaud when it gets twice again as good?
If it had been a war, we would have had a little ceremony as we brought down our flag and folded it up and put it away, but because it happened as quickly and quietly as it did and because we weren't sure whether we wanted to admit it was happening, there was no formal hand-off. One day we just resignedly realized we could no longer matter much, but there was so much more now to appreciate and we could see echoes and reflections of ourselves in it, so we didn't put up a fight.
Every once in a while someone would write an essay, Joan Didion quality, really good. Or write a song. Poignant, beautiful, original even. Not maybe the best essay or the best song we'd seen that day, but certainly worthy of being in the top ranks. And we'd think: we've still got it. We can still rally when we've got our backs to the wall. Don't count us out yet. But it was just so hard, and there was so much else to do. And so when it happened less and less frequently, we weren't surprised.
And our curiosity left us, too. We half-remembered a time when we would have satisfied curiosity by research and experiment (words that increasingly had the flavor of “thaumaturgy,” denoting processes productive though by unclear means). But nowadays curiosity is déclassé. It suggests laziness (why not just ask it?)… or poverty (oh, you can’t afford to ask it; you want one of us to ask it)—an increasing problem as we less and less have something to offer in trade that it desires and lacks.
"But nowadays curiosity was déclassé. It suggested laziness (why not just ask it?)…"
I think that does not work. Asking is easy, so asking is the lazy option.
How about "idle musings" or "sense of wonder", rather than "curiosity"? I remember a time before I had instant access to google whenever I had a question. Back then, a thought of "I wonder why X" was not immediately followed by googling "why X", but sometimes instead followed by thinking about X (incl. via "shower thoughts"), daydreaming about X, looking up X in a book, etc. It's not exactly bad that we have search engines and LLMs nowadays, but for me it does feel like something was lost, too.
Exactly. But then what does "curiosity" signal? Not laziness (as suggested in the post), but the opposite, right? Just asking seems the lazier version.
Compare to asking your colleague something that could be found by 10 seconds of googling. These days, you are supposed to google first. In ten years, you will be supposed to ask an AI for the explanation first, which for many people will also be the last step; and for the more curious ones the expected second and third steps will be something like "try a different prompt", "ask additional questions", "switch to a different AI", etc.
This is a brief follow-up to my post “Redirecting one’s own taxes as an effective altruism method.” Since I wrote that post:
In my fantasies, if I ever were to get that god-like glimpse at how everything actually is, with all that is currently hidden unveiled, it would be something like the feeling you have when you get a joke, or see a "magic eye" illustration, or understand an illusionist's trick, or learn to juggle: what was formerly perplexing and incoherent becomes in a snap simple and integrated, and there's a relieving feeling of "ah, but of course."
But it lately occurs to me that the things I have wrong about the world are probably things I've grasped at exactly because they are more simple and more integrated than the reality they hope to approximate. I think if I really were to get this god-like glimpse, I wouldn't know what to do with it. I probably couldn't fit it in with anything I think I know. It wouldn't mesh. It wouldn't be the missing piece of my puzzle, but would overturn the table the incomplete puzzle is on. I have a feeling I couldn't even be there, intact, in the way I am now: observing, puzzling over things, trying to shuffle and combine ideas. What makes me think I can bring my face along, face-to-face with the All?
And then today I read this: “We yearn for the transcendent, for God, for something divine and good and pure, but in picturing the transcendent we transform it into idols which we then realize to be contingent particulars, just things among others here below. If we destroy these idols in order to reach something untainted and pure, what we really need, the thing itself, we render the Divine ineffable, and as such in peril of being judged non-existent. Then the sense of the Divine vanishes in the attempt to preserve it.” (Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals)
I like to phrase it as "the path to simplicity involves a lot of detours." Yes, Newtonian mechanics doesn't account for the orbit of Mercury but it turned out there was an even simpler, more parsimonious theory, general relativity, waiting for us.
How to best break out of this loop?
In (3), the word “merely” is doing a lot of unexamined work. My perceptions have a coherence to them, an obstinate coherence that I cannot wish away. I reach out for the coffee cup that I see, and it shows up to my sense of touch. What does it mean to call this a “mere” response, when it maintains a persistent similarity of structure to my idea of what is out there—that is, it is a representation of it.
In (4), if the hypothesis explains the perceptions, the perceptions are evidence for the hypothesis. These are two different ways of saying the same thing.
A hypothesis that explains the perceptions can be a just-so story. For any set of perceptions ζ, there may be a vast number of hypotheses that explain those perceptions. How do you choose among them?
In other words, if f() and g() both explain ζ equally well, but are incompatible in all sorts of other ways for which you do not have perceptions to distinguish them, ζ may be "evidence for the hypothesis" f and ζ may be "evidence for the hypothesis" g, but ζ offers no help in determining whether f or g is truer. Consider e.g. f is idealism, g is realism, or some other incompatible metaphysical positions that start with our perceptions and speculate from there.
An author I read recently compared this obstinate coherence of our perceptions to a GUI. When I move my mouse pointer to a file, click, and drag that file into another folder, I'm doing something that has predictable results, and that is similar to other actions I've performed in the past, and that plays nicely with my intuitions about objects and motion and so forth. But it would be a mistake for me to then extrapolate from this and assume that somewhere on my hard drive or in my computer memory is a "file" which I have "dragged" "into" a "folder". My perceptions via the interface may have consistency and practical utility, but they are not themselves a reliable guide to the actual state of the world.
Obstinate coherence and persistent similarity of structure are intriguing but they are limited in how much they can explain by themselves.
Dragging files around in a GUI is a familiar action that does known things with known consequences. Somewhere on the hard disc (or SSD, or somewhere in the cloud, etc.) there is indeed a "file" which has indeed been "moved" into a "folder", and taking off those quotation marks only requires some background knowledge (which in fact I have) of the lower-level things that are going on and which the GUI presents to me through this visual metaphor.
Some explanations work better than others. The idea that there is stuff out there that gives rise to my perceptions, and which I can act on with predictable results, seems to me the obvious explanation that any other contender will have to do a great deal of work to topple from the plinth. The various philosophical arguments over doctrines such as "idealism", "realism", and so on are more like a musical recreation (see my other comment) than anything to take seriously as a search for truth. They are hardly the sort of thing that can be right or wrong, and to the extent that they are, they are all wrong.
Ok, that's my personal view of a lot of philosophy, but I'm not the only one.
It sounds like you want to say things like "coherence and persistent similarity of structure in perceptions demonstrates that perceptions are representations of things external to the perceptions themselves" or "the idea that there is stuff out there seems the obvious explanation" or "explanations that work better than others are the best alternatives in the search for truth" and yet you also want to say "pish, philosophy is rubbish; I don't need to defend an opinion about realism or idealism or any of that nonsense". In fact what you're doing isn't some alternative to philosophy, but a variety of it.
Some philosophy is rubbish. Quite a lot, I believe. And with a statement such as "perceptions are caused by things external to the perceptions themselves", which I find unremarkable in itself as a prima facie obvious hypothesis to run with, there is a tendency for philosophers to go off the rails immediately by inventing precise definitions of words such as "perceptions", "are", and "caused", and elaborating all manner of quibbles and paradoxes. Hence the whole tedious catalogue of realisms.
Science did not get anywhere by speculating on whether there are four or five elements and arguing about their natures.
There's a soft patch around 5 and 6. Why is testability important? It's a charactersitic of science, but science assumes an external world. It's not a characteristic of philosophy -- good explanation is enough in philosophy, and the general posit of some sort of external world does explanatory work. And it's separate from the specific posit that the external world is knowable in some particular way.
It's a characteristic of philosophy, too, at least according to the positivists. If you're humoring a metaphysical theory that could not even in theory be confirmed or falsified by some possible observation, they suggest that you're really engaging in mythmaking or poetry or something, not philosophy.
Positivism isn't necessarily true, and if it is, it still doesn't get you to 6, because LP recommends you have no metaphysics which would imply no solipsistic metaphysics. (LP might be compatible with the claim that your own sense-data are all you can know , but that isn't quite the same thing).
A lot of philosophy is like that. Or perhaps it is better compared to music. Music sounds meaningful, but no-one has explained what it means. Even so, much philosophy sounds meaningful, consisting of grammatical sentences with a sense of coherence, but actually meaning nothing. This is why there is no progress in philosophy, any more than there is in music. New forms can be invented and other forms can go out of fashion, but the only development is the ever-greater sprawl of the forest.
According to Seigen Ishin (Ch'ing-yüan Wei-hsin):
"Before a man studies Zen, to him mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after he gets an insight into the truth of Zen through the instruction of a good master, mountains to him are not mountains and waters are not waters; but after this when he really attains to the abode of rest, mountains are once more mountains and waters are waters."
(D. T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, 1926, London; New York: Published for the Buddhist Society, London by Rider, p. 24.)
What loop? They are all various viewpoints on the nature of reality, not steps you have to go through in some order or anything. (1) is a more useful viewpoint than the rest, and you can adopt that one for 99%+ of everything you think about and only care about the rest as basically ideas to toy with rather than live by.
I don't know about you (assuming you even exist in any sense other than my perception of words on a screen), but to me a model that an external reality exists beyond what I can perceive is amazingly useful for essentially everything. Even if it might not be actually true, it explains my perceptions to a degree that seems incredible if it were not even partly true. Even most of the apparent exceptions in (2) are well explained by it once your physical model includes much of how perception works.
So while (4) holds, it's to such a powerful degree that (2) to (6) are essentially identical to (1).
I thought this quote was nice and oddly up-to-the-minute, from Iris Murdoch's novel The Philosopher's Pupil (1983), spoken by the character William Eastcote at a Quaker meeting:
My dear friends, we live in an age of marvels. Men among us can send machines far out into space. Our homes are full of devices which would amaze our forebears. At the same time our beloved planet is ravaged by suffering and threatened by dooms. Experts and wise men give us vast counsels suited to vast ills. I want only to say something about simple good things which are as it were close to us, within our reach, part still of our world. Let us love the close things, the close clear good things, and hope that in their light other goods may be added. Let us prize innocence. The child is innocent, the man is not. Let us prolong and cherish the innocence of childhood, as we find it in the child and as we rediscover it later within ourselves. Repentance, renewal of life, such as is the task and possibility of every man, is a recovery of innocence. Let us see it thus, a return to a certain simplicity, something which is not hard to understand, not a remote good but very near. And let us not hesitate to preach to our young people and to impart to them an idealism which may later serve them as a shield. A deep cynicism in our society too soon touches old and young, forbidding us to speak and them to hear, and making us by an awful reversal ashamed of what is best. A habit of mockery destroys the intelligence and sensibility which is reverence. Let us prize chastity, not as a censorious or rigid code, but as fastidious respect and gentleness, a rejection of promiscuity, a sense of the delicate mystery of human relations. Let us do and praise those things which make for a simple orderly open and truthful life. Herein let us make it a practice to banish evil thoughts. When such thoughts come, envious, covetous, cynical thoughts, let us positively drive them off, like people in the olden days who felt they were defeating Satan. Let us then seek aid in pure things, turning our minds to good people, to our best work, to beautiful and noble art, to the pure words of Christ in the Gospel, and to the works of God obedient to Him in nature. Help is always near if we will only turn. Conversion is turning about, and it can happen not only every day but every moment. Shun the cynicism which says that our world is so terrible that we may as well cease to care and cease to strive, the notion of a cosmic crisis where ordinary duties cease to be and moral fastidiousness is out of place. At any time, there are many many small things we can do for other people which will refresh us and them with new hope. Shun too the common malice which finds consolation in the suffering and sin of others, blackening them to make our grey seem white, rejoicing in our neighbours’ downfall and disgrace, while excusing our own failures and cherishing our own undiscovered secret sins. Above all, do not despair, either for the planet or in the deep inwardness of the heart. Recognize one’s own evil, mend what can be mended, and for what cannot be undone, place it in love and faith in the clear light of the healing goodness of God.