1. Daniel Goldberg - August 15, 2007 at 3:52 pm

   Huh. Descartes’ Dreaming Condition has had a profound effect on how I view both the world, and my place in it. His argument does not stray into the mechanistic metaphors you’re referencing, but the impossibility of knowing whether I am dreaming is a central reason I consider myself a skeptic in the technical sense of the word.

2. Bruce Boyden - August 15, 2007 at 4:30 pm

   Frank, this is just the latest in a long line of arguments and thought experiments going, as Daniel notes, all the way back to Descartes. I did brain-in-a-vat type stuff when I was in college back in the early 1990s. The only new bit is in imagining the number of possible worlds as expanded by the number of (seemingly) future simulations that might be run. I really think you’re striving too hard here to find a conspiracy theory.

3. Bruce Boyden - August 15, 2007 at 4:32 pm

   P.S. I mean, if you think this guy is nutty, check out Leibniz on monads:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz#The_Monads

4. Frank - August 15, 2007 at 4:44 pm

   Bruce, Leibniz, etc., didn’t also advocate for a transhumanist political agenda, as Bostrom does. The “butterfly” link above shows the distinguished philosophical pedigree of the idea in Eastern thought.

   I just think that we need to be skeptical here of exactly why Bostrom is writing what he is writing. To put it in Taylor’s terms–there are often unarticulated links between ontology and advocacy. The more we get clear about those links, the better we understand a thinker’s ideas. (Here I’m referring to Taylor’s essay on “cross-purposes” in Liberals and Communitarians.)

5. Patrick S. O'Donnell - August 15, 2007 at 5:29 pm

   Daniel,

   Isn’t (or wasn’t) your understanding of what it means (the experience of) to dream parasitic on your everyday conscious experience (derisively dubbed by some philosophers ‘naive realism’)? Did you not first trust your perceptual experiences (and learn from them) before you understood what it meant to be “tricked,” deceived, or misled by a particular or occasional perceptual experience? Spend more time with William James, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Austin, “among those,” in Hilary Putnam’s words, “who shared James’s sense that progress in philosophy [at least the epistemological branch] requires a recovery of the ‘natural realism of the common man.’” Of course the point here is that epistemology got off track from the seventeenth century forward in the West (through Russell, Ayer, Price, etc.), a point I would think you’d be sympathetic to given Toulmin’s reading of the history of philosophy in Cosmopolis (1990), although to be sure, this was not a topic he addressed at any length. Consider, for instance, the following, also from Putnam:

   “…[W]e all do dream, and when our dreams are vivid and realistic enough they give us a paradigm of an experience in which it is *as if* we were seeing or hearing or feeling something or other when nothing of that kind is physically present for us to see or hear or feel. It is true, as Austin emphasizes, that dreams are normally not ‘just like’ our daily perceptual experiences, and not just because the dream events are (usually) ‘incoherent;’ as a rule, the very phenomenology of dream experience is somehow different, and when we say that some experience is ‘like a dream,’ or that our state of mind is on some occasion is ‘dreamlike,’ we are saying that that experience or that state of mind is somehow *different* from a normal perceptual experience or a normal state of mind; different in a way that reminds us of the *quality* of a dream. Still, some dreams are much less ‘dreamlike’ than others, and we sometimes are confused for a moment on awakening as to whether we are still dreaming.” There’s much more, but you’ll have to read Putnam’s The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World (1999).

   And there’s more I’d like to say about this but it will have to wait until you and I can engage in some lengthy and spirited private correspondence!

6. Patrick S. O'Donnell - August 15, 2007 at 5:46 pm

   Bruce,

   Were you required to read Putnam’s “Brains in a vat” essay in Reason, Truth and History (1981) back in the ’90s? I know the literature on this topic is something of a cottage industry (including responses to Putnam), but I think his argument “that the supposition we are actually brains in a vat….cannot possibly be true, because it is, in a certain way, self-refuting,” is quite persuasive, and one of several possible arguments that should put this stuff to rest once and for all.

7. Patrick S. O'Donnell - August 15, 2007 at 6:26 pm

   Frank,

   Zhuangzi’s use of a dream “argument” does not appear to be on the order of that suggested by similar arguments in the West inasmuch as it is not, it seems, intended to prompt a global epistemic skepticism but rather, much as in the Dao Dejing (or Laozi), to provoke us to see what happens in routine perception and categorization, to appreciate how discriminatory our perceiving and thinking routinely is, such that much is left out, missed, ignored, forgotten and so on. As Chad Hansen has written in his discussion of the dream passages in Zhuangzi:

   “The main target of doubt in these passages is conventional wisdom, especially of our shared, conventional patterns of discrimination or distinction making. A key claim is that any time we make a discrimination, we fail to see something. That the scope is broad, however, does not mean that it is total. It does not…signal any doubt about the natural-world context in which our ways of life operate, nor that the alternate ‘ways’ [daos] operate in the same world. Besides reminders of how we can go wrong, the stories mainly underline the irresolvability of our disputes about different ways of life and the difficulty of appreciating alternatives. They remind us that our confidence in our own comprehensive view is neither reliable nor unique to us. The text naturally implies that we are to learn (come to know) something from these stories. The knowing about knowing is valuable. Ignoring it would be bad from many, if not all, points of view.” See his chapter, “Guru or Skeptic? Relativistic Skepticism in the *Zhuangzi*,” in Scott Cook, ed., Hiding the World in the World: Uneven Discourses on the *Zhuangzi* (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003).

8. Daniel Goldberg - August 15, 2007 at 6:40 pm

   Patrick,

   I’m not sure I understand what you are getting at, and I think you know I’ve “spent some time” with James, Wittgenstein, and Putnam.

   There is no test we can devise that can tell us whether or not we are dreaming, because we could always be dreaming the test itself. The cogito and the brain-in-a-vat scenario does posit the existence of a self, of course, but Nietzsche exposes the various assumptions needed to derive the cogito quite well in BG&E.

   So again, I’m not at all sure I understand your point. I am quite comfortable with the notion that I cannot know that I am not dreaming. It is a basis for much of my philosophical skepticism and shapes much of my world view. It is also consistent with the classical insistence on humility, IMO (though it is not necessary for it, of course).

   In other words, skepticism is for me as it was for Sextus Empiricus, many of the Pyrrhonians, and for Montaigne: a deeply pragmatic way of viewing the world and my place in it. Accordingly, I’m not sure why you seem to refer to James as a way of undermining the skeptical argument.

   FYI, Barry Stroud and Peter Unger are excellent on skepticism in general.

9. Bruce Boyden - August 15, 2007 at 6:54 pm

   Frank, I’m just not getting it. Are you saying that Bostrom’s secretly laying the groundwork for the day when we’re all asked to become androids? That if we think too hard about Matrix-like scenarios, we’re more likely to take the blue pill?

   Patrick, I actually read Putnam’s book voluntarily. I found the BIV argument more persuasive than most (as apparently do you), but it’s definitely not airtight — see, e.g., Anthony Brueckner, Brains in a Vat, J.Phil. vol. 83 (1986), 148-67; but see Ted A. Warfield, Knowing the World and Knowing Our Minds, Phil. & Phenom. Res. vol.55 (1995), 525-45.

   Anyway, it’s always seemed to me to be more of a definitional issue than a “solution” (like, e.g., the “undetectable gremlin” hypo — if you start thinking of all the ways a gremlin in your refrigerator might bother you, it turns out that those things make it detectable, and hence not within the class of “undetectable gremlins”). And it’s subject to a significant caveat — the answer to whether you’re a brain in a vat doesn’t matter only as long as there’s no evidence that you are. Which is of course kind of circular.

10. Patrick S. O'Donnell - August 15, 2007 at 8:38 pm

    Daniel,

    “The scientific researcher, the inquiring philosopher, and the plain man, all desire and strive for information about the ‘real’ world. The sceptic rejects their ventures as vain and their hopes as foredoomed to disappointment from the very outset.”–Nicholas Rescher

    “Wittgenstein remarks that, if you tried to doubt everything, you would not get as far as doubting anything. This is not a matter of practicality: one reason we have lots of default entitlements [to knowledge] is that holding many true beliefs, or not being subject to certain kinds of error, is a condition of making sense, thus of being in a position to raise questions at all. [Contra the skeptic], unless we routinely get lots of things right, it is not clear what we are talking or thinking *about*, if anything.”–Michael Williams

    There are different sorts of skepticism, and as Michael Williams points out, skepticism about the external world is comparatively new (with Descartes). Pragmatists like James and Putnam cannot be identified with skeptics simply because they don’t subscribe to foundationalist or coherentist theories of knowledge: both endeavor to counter sceptical challenges to our knowledge claims. I’m not sure what is pragmatic about undermining our claims to knowledge or “justified” true beliefs, which is what skepticism seeks to do. I’m not sure what is served by being skeptical about invocations of evidence with questions on the order of “and what evidence do you have to justify that evidence?” ad infinitum (infinite regress). As in the Default and Challenge model elaborated by John McDowell and Robert Brandom (and, earlier, Sellars), we can believe responsibly without in the first instance basing our beliefs, self-consciously, on evidence. Nevertheless, we can, and should, provide such evidence “should the adequacy of [our] epistemic performance be challenged.” Skeptics in effect argue that “bizarre stories bout Evil Deceivers and brains-in-vats are just as like to be true as our ordinary beliefs *given all the evidence we will ever have.*” In short, “all the evidence we will ever have radically underdetermines what it would be true or even justifiable to believe.” Skeptics argue that no one is ever justified in believing one thing rather than another.

    But our claims to knowledge can have a presumptive claim to innocence or justification:

    “[E]pistemic entitlement is the default status of a person’s beliefs and assertions. One is entitled to a belief or assertion…in the absence of appropriate ‘defeaters:’ that is, reasons to think one is *not” so entitlted.” This Default and Challenge model shifts the burden of proof back on to the skeptic, who is not allowed a foothold whereby to undercut presumptive knowledge claims as lacking adequate jusfication. Skeptics would have us establish the groundedness of our beliefs prior to holding them, but “A claim to knowledge involves a commitment to respond to whatever appropriate challenges emerge, or to withdraw the claim should not effective defence be available. In claiming knowledge, I commit myself to my belief’s *being* adequately grounded–formed by a reliable method–but not to having *already established* its well-groundedness. [....] Meeting challenges means citing evidence (to defeat defeaters). But being able to cite evidence is not the sine qua non of being justified. [...] The crucial feature of the Default and Challenge conception is that it saddles challengers, as well as claimants, with justificational obligations. Assuming the Prior Grounding Requirement, a request to back up a belief or assertion needs no justification: in conceding an unrestricted commitment to produce grounds, the claimant grants the skeptic’s entitlement to request them. The skeptic acquires the right to issue naked challenges. If we reject the Prior Grounding Requirement, however, the skeptic loses this right. Entitlement to enter a challenge must itself be earned by finding specific reasons for questioning either the truth of the target belief or the claimant’s entitlement to hold it, which means that naked challenges are out of order. The question ‘How do your know?’ or ‘Mightn’t you be mistaken?’ can always reasonably be met with ‘What do you have in mind?’ or ‘What mistake do you think I am making?’ If no answer is forthcoming, no challenge has been entered and no response is required.” This effectively disables the corrosive challenges of the skeptic, and I think that’s a good thing. No longer can the skeptic exploit the gross asymmetry in the justificational responsibilities of claimants and challengers. Justificational regress is stopped “in its tracks.” As William further states, “It follows that although (perhaps) *any* belief may be challenged given appropriate stage-setting, there is no possibility of questioning the legitimacy of our beliefs in the *collective* way that the philosophical skeptic aspires to.” At the same time, “there is no room for the traditional [i.e. foundationalism or coherence theory] epistemologist’s global reassurances,” a point both you and I can well appreciate.

    Williams and Rescher are excellent resources for arguments against scepticism.

11. Patrick S. O'Donnell - August 15, 2007 at 8:47 pm

    Bruce,

    I’m familiar with Brueckner’s article (afraid to complicate things, so I didn’t mention it), as he teaches nearby in the Phil. Dept. at UC Santa Barbara, although I didn’t know the Warfield piece, and thus appreciate your citing it. How refreshing that your read Putnam’s book “voluntarily,” although in your case I’m not surprised! I still like to cite his discussion of the “cat on the mat” for addressing the fact/value entanglement question.

12. Daniel Goldberg - August 16, 2007 at 10:48 am

    Patrick,

    I suggest we cease subjecting the poor CoOp readers to our debate! I have emailed.

13. Patrick S. O'Donnell - August 16, 2007 at 12:28 pm

    Thanks Daniel. And they should know you’re a formidable interlocutor whose thoughts I very much respect (take quite seriously: the highest compliment one can make to those one disagrees with) despite the fact that I got the last word here and in spite of my unintentional but possibly patronizing tone in parts above and for which I apologize.

14. Frank - August 16, 2007 at 1:41 pm

    To Bruce: My point is not about the questions presented, it is about the person presenting them. I’m just warning readers to have a good sense of why Bostrom is talking about these issues, and about how his biases as an advocate may inform his ontology.

    To again evoke Taylor, I think one of the biggest problems in philosophy is the effort to divorce epistemology from a larger sense of teh context in which philosophers are talking and acting. To take an example you might find genial: is it any wonder that Rawls’s theory of justice looks the way it does given the debates over the welfare state happening at the time? It is A, and not The, Theory of Justice in part because it is written directly in response to debates over the welfare state happening at the time he was writing it. I would think a Rawls scholar would have a much better chance of fully understanding and appreciating the work if they were aware of that intellectual history, rather than just assuming that they ought to talk about justice in the abstract.

15. Patrick S. O'Donnell - August 16, 2007 at 2:08 pm

    Frank,

    (Speaking for myself and not for Bruce) Your point about Rawls is well-taken, and taken up by Ian Shapiro in his discussion of Rawls and Nozick in the introduction to his chapter on “The neo-classical moment” in his The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory (1986), pp. 151-156.

16. Bruce Boyden - August 16, 2007 at 6:42 pm

    Bostrom’s argument is either true or false. Why do we need to know anything else about him to evaluate it? I take it we’re not talking about hidden premises or explication of vague definitions; it sounds like you’re saying, in order to evaluate Bostrom’s claim that there is a significant chance that we are living in a simulation, we need to know more “about the person presenting them” — e.g., what organizations he belongs to, how he votes, whether he has an “I (heart) Cyborgs” bumper sticker on his car. Then we can alter our view of whether his article is true or false based on this other information. But isn’t doing so pretty much the definition of the ad hominem fallacy?

17. Frank - August 16, 2007 at 7:24 pm

    Since when is contextualization an ad hominem argument? I would think a key purpose of, say, Quentin Skinner’s work in intellectual history/political theory is to get us to understand how ideas are embedded in beliefs and commitments.

    I also like Daniel Goldberg’s point:

    “I’m not sure I understand why arguments about character and motives are ever irrelevant in understanding why one takes a particular interpretive commitment.”

    in a comment here:

    http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2007/08/perils_of_metho.html#comments

18. Patrick S. O'Donnell - August 16, 2007 at 7:44 pm

    Bruce,

    We might look at it this way: Perhaps Frank is saying that the evaluation of an argument like this is not just about its internal philosophical merits or lack thereof, important or interesting as those might be, but also entails locating the decision, discussing the possible motivations (as/or reasons) for making THIS kind of argument rather than THAT, about THESE kind of questions rather than THOSE sorts of questions. In other words, we need not assume that this question and its elaboration are intrinsically interesting, for it may be motivated by a philosophical, ideological or scientific agenda or set of interests that help us understand why Bostrom is interested in such things in the first place. Perhaps that is common knowledge, but I doubt it. Such interests may be related to untenable or arguable assumptions about what science is about or up to (as with scientism). For instance, and I’m not attributing this to Bostrom as I don’t know enough about him or his projects to comment intelligently, but an argument like this might presuppose or assume, say, that science is progressing towards producing a “complete, comprehensive ’scientific world picture,’ which will constitute the ultimate ‘reality’” (John Ziman). Or perhaps it assumes or endorses a scientific research agenda with strong “reductionist” assumptions and goals, ones which we might have good reason to suspect are unrealistic or unattainable. Indeed, such questions may help us see why particular premises and their assumptions are chosen for the argument, and what might count as evidence for or against them. In this case, it might include Bostrom’s values and interests that serve as the argumentative context which helps us better understand the kinds of questions he asks and the answers he comes up with. Ad hominem fallacies are by definition informal fallacies, and their evaluation is utterly dependent on argument forms and contexts, as the work of Douglas Walton has made clear (e.g., when the defense attempts to show the character of the jailhouse snitch is such that we should not trust his testimony: the attack is on his character, but that doesn’t it make it an ad hominem fallacy even if it is an ad hominem argument, or, when we discuss the character of a presidential candidate in helping us to determine if she is worthy of our vote…). So this may not be an ad hominem fallacy if it contributes to clarifying features of the argument/dialogue, both internal assumptions and/or external values and interests. Knowing such interests and values would simply be one element in the overall assessment of the argument, not so much as to whether it is true or false (that does not seem germane here), but whether or not we find it compelling or persuasive.

19. Bruce Boyden - August 17, 2007 at 12:19 am

    Using “context” to determine the *truth* (rather than the correct interpretation, or the influence) of a claim is just a fancy name for an ad hominem argument, I think. For example, suppose I state that all claims made by Professor X about tax policy should be read in the “context” that she is a Democrat, and is no doubt trying to push the Democratic Party agenda. Doesn’t that sound like improper “context” to you? It’s just irrelevant ad hominem hand-waving. It doesn’t tell us diddly-squat about whether Professor X is correct or not.

    Similarly, it looks to me like you’re pointing in this post to the “context” of Bostrom’s claim because you believe it sheds some light on the truth of Bostrom’s claim. For example, you say that “we need to be skeptical” of Bostrom’s claim due to these other facts about him. You also question his motivation in making the claim, and hint darkly that even raising the issue “can be quite helpful to certain groups and harmful to others.” That doesn’t sound like interpretation or analysis of effect to me; it sounds like you’re trying to persuade readers that Bostrom’s claim is *less likely to be true* due to these additional facts about his other views and motivations. That’s a classic ad hominem argument.

20. Patrick S. O'Donnell - August 17, 2007 at 2:09 am

    Again, Bruce, an ad hominem argument, classic or not, is not necessarily fallacious. See, for example, Douglas N. Walton, Informal Logic: A Handbook for Critical Argumentation (1989), Chapter 6, “Personal attack in argumentation,” pp. 134-171; Plausible Argument in Everyday Conversation (1992), 7.5, “Argumentum Ad Hominem” and 7.6, “Evaluating Ad Hominem Argumentation;” and his book on the subject, Ad Hominem Arguments (1998).

21. Daniel Goldberg - August 17, 2007 at 9:23 am

    For moral particularists, context is directly relevant to the truth of a proposition.

22. Daniel Goldberg - August 17, 2007 at 9:29 am

    Whoops, pressed post too soon. If we think about cross-examination, it seems to me that the context of the speaker is directly relevant to our interpretation of the truth of their sentences.

    I imagine Bruce would respond that our interpretation of the truth of the witness’s statements have nothing to do with whether the statements are actually true, but this certainly presupposes a certain ontology of truth (here we go again, Patrick!) that is hardly beyond dispute.

    Indeed, a Wittgensteinian theory of meaning would indicate that kind of rule-based notion of truth is dubious. Tracking Kripke, if assertability is a more accurate basis for grounding meaning, it follows that context is absolutely relevant to the truth conditions of a proposition, because one’s motivations for any given utterance are absolutely connected to the merits of asserting the given proposition.

23. Patrick S. O'Donnell - August 17, 2007 at 11:21 am

    I’m not feeling at all argumentative this morning, and I think Daniel may agree with this in any case, so I’ll simply point out that I suspect some of the differences here have to do with differences found in philosophy of language and theories of meaning (in addition to epistemology, etc.) and that Bruce does not seem at all hospitable to what is called, in the former, “pragmatics.” Charles Travis elaborates: [Consider the following substantial thesis:] “such things as English sentences *have” stable conditions for truth, and meanings can be given in or by stating these. That *might* be wrong. Perhaps, as J.L. Austin suggested, questions of truth arise at a different level entirely from that of expressions of a language [simpliciter]. Perhaps conditions for truth depend, pervasively, on the circumstances in which, or the way in which, words were produced.” [....] That is to say, “it is intrinsically part of what expressions of (say) English mean that any English (or whatever) sentence may, on one speaking of it or another, have any of indefinitely many different truth conditions, and that any English (or whatever) expression may, meaning what it does, make any of many different contributions to truth conditions of wholes in which it figures as a part. [....] Any description admits of many different applications. The same description, applied differently, yields different thoughts. A right application, where there is one, is fixed by the circumstances of producing the description, not just by the description itself. If a sentence may thus equally well express any of many thoughts, conditions for the truth of one of these cannot be conditions for the truth of the *sentence*.” From a Wittgensteinian perspective (or so I imagine): there may be a role for rules, both essential and inessential, yet “we can ultimately distinguish these rules [e.g. truth conditions] only by looking at the point, purpose, or role the rule or concept plays in context” (Michael Lynch). In analyzing Bostrom’s arguments, for example, we might consider the fact that concepts like “brain” and “mind” can be stretched in incompatible directions and the way such concepts will be employed, even if we are successfully communicating with each other at some level, can be rather different: the mind and brain as synonyms, the mind as a nonphysical spiritual object, the mind as having emerged yet different from the brain, etc., such that our first year philosophy student, her teacher, the neuroscientist, a Patricia or Paul Churchland, P.M.S. Hacker, Sunny Auyang, Vincent Descombes, and Paul Thagard, are all using different concepts of the brain and/or mind. Moreover, there may be what Lynch calls a “minimal concept of epistemic justification of mind” that allows us to communicate in the first instance while at the same time permitting this and other minimal concepts to be enriched or extended (part of different mind/brain theories, for example, and thus more ‘robust’ concepts of mind) in incompatible directions. In such cases, possibilities for employing different concepts in conversations, dialogic settings, arguments and so forth suggest to us that an examination of context is absolutely essential to discernment of meaning. The neuroscientist and Cartesian both do (relying on a minimal concept) and do not (using a robust concept) share the same concepts of mind (a paraphrase of Lynch). To conclude: “For whether the proposition that the grass is green is to be understood minimally, and hence as indexed to, or shared between, two conceptual schemes, or understood robustly, and hence as relative to a particular scheme, is not an absolute fact about it, but is fixed or determined itself by the overall context in which that proposition is being expressed or employed. Independent of the shifting sands of context, there is no fact of the matter” (Lynch). So, and again after Lynch, we endeavor to understand Bostrom’s beliefs and the concepts he employs that formed his beliefs, as well as the interests that help account for why he prefers THESE concepts, the values that have guided THOSE interests, and the underlying practices and capacities that limit and define his cognitive production and intake.

24. greglas - August 17, 2007 at 2:01 pm

    Frank, shouldn’t the photo credit go to “ittybittiesforyou”? Flickr is just the hosting platform, not the author.

    Fwiw, I blogged on this one too: http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2007/08/what-would-you-.html

    I’m split. I’ve read a bit on this question, but clearly not as much as others. I’m kind of with Bruce on 1) not caring practically, and 2) generally liking the way these ideas tickle the brain (hence my limited reading).

    But I also share your interest in calling attention to the implicit confusion here between self and mechanism — I think you referenced Turkle in a comment somewhere else.

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