I must say I'm slightly irked by yet another vague and unfitting application of Godel's incompleteness theorems (GIT). The first one roughly states that given a consistent system F there will be some sentence GF such that you cannot derive in F that GF or not(GF). You can then add GF as an axiom to F resulting in F' but then you will be able to construct GF', and so on. This GF you can construct is called the Godel sentence of F.

If you were to encode some rules of ethics in a formal system E you could interpret it such that X is ethical (or not) if you can derive some sentence S (or not(S)) and that sentence S represents X. E will not decide on everything indeed if E is consistent (thus never deriving both some S and not(S)) and capable of basic arithmetic (what does that mean in terms of ethics?!). However, to conclude anything non-trivial from this is dangerous. First of all everyone then has to interpret what the sentences in E mean in an universal way. Then if you construct a GE does that sentence even mean anything intuitively? Will there even be any other sentence not derived from GE that is not decided upon? It is likely that E, while not deciding on everything, decides on much more than any persons ethical intuition. Surely if E is non-trivial there are some complicated sentences that it decides on that no person could interpret. And don't forget the arithmetic issue. If you just include arithmetic in E then all undecided sentences may simply be sentences of arithmetic. If the ethics part of E and arithmetic part are one whole, what would that even look like?

GIT is quite technical and applying it is troublesome. I have only read a bit of actual literature on the topic and even with my limited knowledge of it I can tell that the applications I see in the wild are shaky at best.

there”s no possible set of rules that will completely coincide with our intuitive sense of good and bad behavior in all potential scenarios.

If you just want to come to this conclusion, all you need is a counter example. Take some system of ethics E. If there is any situation such that some person A asserts S and some person B asserts not(S) then either E only decides on at most one making E not universal or E decides on both making E inconsistent. Basically if there is any disagreement on ethics (which there certainly is) you simply cannot construct a consistent and universal set of rules. We really don't need to open Pandora's box and get GIT involved.

Sorry for this wall of text. I'm not angry and I don't want to start a fight lol. I just think that people are a little too eager to apply GIT to all kinds of things. A little pet peeve of mine I guess.

Well there could be universal ethics but the set would be tiny. You can only expand the ethical standard by expanding the shared assumptions.

For example, if your assumptions are DNA based life that survives in an oxygen rich environment with low carbon dioxide that are not powered by sunlight and have to consume other life forms to survive.

I think Gödel’s incompleteness theorem applies just as well to ethical rules as mathematical ones: there”s no possible set of rules that will completely coincide with our intuitive sense of good and bad behavior in all potential scenarios.

Hey just wondering what it was specifically that led you to think I wasn't already well aware of what epistemology is after being told probably five time over the past year of me posting here in this community? If you could please be as specific as possible I'd really appreciate it.

Edit: since they're not going to answer I'll answer for them. It was the blindness that comes with arrogance, pride, and self-assurance, thus, "ego."

Please don’t force your font predilection on innocent people.

Sadly I think the same.

By the same token, we will still need to face the problems that we have today, but in the future and with a fucked up economy. Maybe starting to make the small nudges to fix could solve it.

My hope is more people learning that a phone could last 10 years instead of one. That a dishwasher don't need to be connected on the internet to function. That entertainment shouldn't be used as propaganda weapon. So on and so on...

But this is me being hopeless optimistic for the future.

Hopefully a pathological stupidity in leadership and in ideology that was realised and turned away from in time. But realistically I suspect we will see a Rome level collapse before 2100.

no, yea, definitely. that's why I mentioned it.

wrong comm, obviously.

Oh good. That's why I posted here.

Is this not a philosophy community?

"Where speculative science is exact, namely in true philosophy — not in what Schopenhauer called 'professorial philosophy' which only serves to distribute all existing phenomena in neat philosophical tables and give them new names..." - Leo Tolstoy, Confession, Chapter six

Categorize our capacity for knowledge all you want, it does nothing to aid our understanding of why we humans live, and what the most sensible explanation is for our living.

The branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of knowledge is called epistemology. This is just bullshit from the Bible.

I hope podcasts are acceptable material to submit here. I like these two teachers and their philosophy show because they'll take a topic and then look at it almost painstakingly to detail.

benefiting from it is really seperate from trying to help and making it better but not solving it. also observing and interacting is really each seperate to. I mean we are all aware of many problems in the world that we can due fuck all about. really at that point its more about power and responsibility. the more capability you have to fix a problem or at least alleviate it that you are aware of the more responsibility you have to do so.

I think there's more to at least one of the examples mentioned. Comparing a drowning child within your reach, to a child in a far off country that can be saved for just a $5 donation. The child drowning is an event you have agency with. You, yourself, are going to the river and pulling a child from it.

But the $5 donation... That child you will never see, and if you do see a picture of them, what chances are that you'd believe that that's that child you're saving, and even if you do believe, will you ever see them again? Can you be 100% certain that every cent of your $5 is going towards the purchase and administration of that life-saving vaccine to that child? That child that, you're not even totally sure is real, or needs saving? We've all heard about scams, and scams disguising themselves as charity aren't new either. Hell, our president and his entire family is no longer allowed to run a charity within the state of New York because they were laundering money through their "charities."

I think when we can actually see the problem, and we have real agency in the situation, then it becomes a moral imperative to act. But to act as a third party, whilst never witnessing the problem, or the person being helped... That's not a moral imperative. You don't have agency in the situation, someone else does. You're not witnessing the problem, you're hearing about it through the TV or internet. Are you really interacting with the problem, in the Copenhagen Interpretation, by hearing about something through a third party? I would say not.

Good is empathy.

Like the spanish flu being named after the first country to speak about it?

Thanks! I edited the post with a new link -- for some reason I got a totally different link when I opened it in the browser vs when I used the share flow, so hopefully this one works?

The link seems broken.

(Or did I break it by observing it?)

Yes, that is literally what my post said. The presence of red is necessary, which is what you've described here, and it perfectly answers the original question.

In short, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave imagines people who have spent their entire lives chained inside a cave, able to see only shadows projected on a wall. Because the shadows are all they have ever known, they mistake them for reality itself.

One prisoner escapes and discovers the outside world, realizing that what everyone in the cave took to be reality was only a limited representation of it.

The core idea is that our perspective can constrain what we think is real or knowable. We may be interpreting appearances without access to the fuller reality that produces them.

Holy molly, that was an amazing summary.

Thanks very much. I've even more questions now, and for sure I'll take some time researching on the topic of evaluating the understanding (and semantics on this sense).

But you are right, we can infer intelligence, we can't guarantee the semantics on the topic.

So thas exactly why I brought up Plato. And I think the song and lyrics do an excellent job summarizing,

Your title asks whether we can infer intelligence. Verbatim. The answer to that is, again, yes. We do it constantly.

You cannot directly observe my intelligence or thoughts. You observe my behavior, language, problem-solving, etc., and infer intelligence from those outputs. The same applies to a machine.

The Chinese Room raises a different question: whether apparently intelligent behavior is sufficient to establish understanding or semantic content. That is not the same as asking whether intelligence can be inferred.

Saying "it's just following rules" doesn't setkle that question either. Humans are also physical systems whose cognition is implemented through mechanisms. The existence of rules or mechanisms does not itself show that intelligence is absent.

So becaus your question is specifically "can we infer intelligence?", yes.

Now, If the question is "does intelligent-looking behavior prove semantic understanding or consciousness?", that's a different and much harder question. But most importantly, it's not the question you asked.

How is this thought experiment different from Platos allegory of the cave?

Not sure if I follow. My point with the Chinese Room experiment focus on the idea that the "machine can't have a mind", and that even without a mind it can "display intelligence" (even without it). Almost like the semantics over concept.

While Plato is about the real world and the projected world. Not sure if they are the same, but can be close enough.

Ps.: Also, I'm not super familiar with the Plato Cave, I know about it, but didn't read the originals like most in this specific place.

I can directly observe my own thought processes because I am inside the system generating them. You cannot [...]

Totally agree with you.
But when you are bounded by a rulebook, the "thought processes" is irrelevant, point of the post.

But for the observer outside of the box it will still look like "magic", or "intelligence" when there is nothing intelligent there, just rules.

My point is, even if the machine does have a inner person, it yet don't use this to communicate, since it only use the manual to translate symbols that carry meaning to us, but no meaning to the machine. And thus the agency that I want the companies behind the machine to have it, instead of "oops the machine did, we didn't knew about it, sowwy"

But I may have misunderstood your point in this whole thing.