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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Arlyn Culwick‏ @arlynculwick Jun 11
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      Replying to @arlynculwick @vgr

      Now here I think I ought to elaborate a bit, since your view differs. Science is fundamentally a social coordination activity. It takes a private experience as falling short of knowledge until it can be confirmed as a verifiable public object. So […]

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    2. Arlyn Culwick‏ @arlynculwick Jun 11
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      Replying to @arlynculwick @vgr

      if (following Quine) you can privately experience either the experiment's outcome, or experience an experimenter signalling outcome known to confirm a hypothesis, then you directly experience a publicly verified object.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    3. Arlyn Culwick‏ @arlynculwick Jun 11
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      Replying to @arlynculwick @vgr

      Now a solipsist could object here with "well how do we even know these other scientists exist? I experience them, sure, but they might be in my mind only." But that lands the solipsist in the hard problem of what the "I" even is, AND the problem of how to know anything as an "I"

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    4. Arlyn Culwick‏ @arlynculwick Jun 11
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      Replying to @arlynculwick @vgr

      Meanwhile, analysing the solipsist's scenario in terms of relations opens up a new possibility. A relation always terminates at something. This thing can be real or unreal. If it's unreal, it has only a "formal" terminus. If real, it additionally has a "material" terminus.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    5. Arlyn Culwick‏ @arlynculwick Jun 11
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      Replying to @arlynculwick @vgr

      So the solipsist can ask "how do I know that any directly experienced relation has a material terminus?" If it doesn't, then everything is in the mind.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    6. Arlyn Culwick‏ @arlynculwick Jun 11
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      Replying to @arlynculwick @vgr

      Now it looks more likely that some relations have material termini. We don't know this with certainty, but rather simply by contrasting what we discover to be merely formal termini with what is revealed to have a nature transcending a given formal terminus, e.g.:pic.twitter.com/dOK0Tng4jx

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    7. Arlyn Culwick‏ @arlynculwick Jun 11
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      Replying to @arlynculwick @vgr

      "But you don't know any of this," says the solipsist. Well sure. But this isn't about certainty, it's about the scientific knowledge we actually have, which we use to build space shuttles, computers, etc. The growth of scientific knowledge starts on shaky foundations [...]

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    8. Arlyn Culwick‏ @arlynculwick Jun 11
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      Replying to @arlynculwick @vgr

      but by building up test after test, hypothesis after hypothesis (each one provisional, and each one revealing extremely little about reality), after centuries we get the Standard Model.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    9. Arlyn Culwick‏ @arlynculwick Jun 11
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      Replying to @arlynculwick @vgr

      Even equipped with the standard model, we still don't know the intrinsic natures of objects. We *only* know real relations between things, in terms of directly experienced relations to ourselves. But we do really know these relations (e.g. Newtonian mechanics). Hence, realism!

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    10. Arlyn Culwick‏ @arlynculwick Jun 11
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      Replying to @arlynculwick @vgr

      I'm aware of how similar our views actually are. (I'm being polemical in order to draw out contrasts where they may be found). We both exist in the "valley of the least unstable," as you say. We both need to know before accepting. We both deny that reality is the way it looks.

      2 replies 0 retweets 1 like
      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 11
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      Replying to @arlynculwick

      I think I understand our diffs now :D Won't go another round since this is already at the limit of twitter conversations, but yeah... good points, which I mostly agree with, but cash out differently.

      10:27 AM - 11 Jun 2020
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