This Territory Does Not Exist

How do you deal with Gödel's finding that every system is left with some questions that can't be resolved and where the answers can't be verified? 

Okay, circling around on this to maybe say something more constructive now that I've thought about it a bit.

Part of the problem is that your central thesis is not very clear on first read, so I had to think about it a bit to really get what your "big idea" or ideas are that motivate this post. I realize you say right up top that you believe a strong version of verificationism is correct, but to me that's not really getting at the core of what you're thinking, that's just something worked out by other people you can point at and say "something in that direction seems right".

(FWIW, even some of the people who came up with logical positivism and related ideas like verificationism eventually worked themselves into a corner and realized there was no way out and the whole thing fell apart. The arguments for why it doesn't work eventually get pretty subtle if you really press the issue, and I doubt I could do them justice, so I'll stay higher level and may not have the time and energy to address every objection that you could bring up, but basically there's 50+ years of literature trying to make ideas like this work and then finding there were inevitably problems.)

So, as best I can tell, the insight you had driving this was something like "oh, there's no way to fully ground most statements, thus those statements are meaningless". I'll respond based on this assumption.

Now, up to a point you are right. Because there is an epistemological gap between the ontological and the ontic, statements about the ontic are "meaningless" in that they are not fully grounded. This is due to epistemic circularity, a modern formulation of the problem of the criterion. Thus the only statements that can be true in a classical sense are statements about statements, i.e. you can only get "truth" from inside an ontology, and there is no matter of truth to be assessed about statements of any other kind. This, alas, is not so great, because it takes all the power out of our everyday experience of truth.

One possible response is to hold this classical notion of truth fixed and say all those statements that can't be grounded are false. The alternative is to say we screwed up on the classical notion of truth, and it's not the category we thought it was.

Which every path you take, they converge to the same place, because if you reject things as not having truth value, now you have to introduce some new concept to talk about what everyone in everyday speech thinks of as truth, and you'll be forced to go around annoying everyone with your jargon but whatever. The alternative is to accept that the classical notion of truth is malformed and not the category it was thought to be [LW · GW], and to rehabilitate truth in epistemology to match what people actually mean by it.

As I say, in the limit they converge to the same place, but in different language (cf. the situation with moral realism and anti-realism [LW · GW]). I'll speak now from the second perspective because it's mine, but there's one from the other side.

So then, if we were wrong that truth is about statements that can be proven true and grounded in reality, then what is truth? I take from your talk of "constrained expectations" you already see the gist of it: truth can be about predicting experiences, as in what is true is that which is part of a web of causality that generates our perceptions. This is messy, of course, because we're embedded in the world [LW · GW] and have to perceive it from inside it, but it gives us a way to make sense of what we really mean when we talk about truth, and to see that classical notions of truth were poor but reasonable first approximations of this, made with the intuitive assumption that there was ever some (classical) truth to know that was of a special kind. And on this view, truth of statements about the ontic are not meaningless; in fact, they are the only kind of statements you can make, because the ontological is ontic, but the ontic is not ontological.

Thus, also, why you have a comment section full of people arguing with you, because of course the natural notion of truth we have is meaningful, and it is only on a particular narrow view of it that it is not, which is right within itself but leaves out much and confusingly repurposes words to mean things they don't normally mean.

On a deductive level, verificationism is self-defeating; if it's true then it's meaningless. On an inductive level, I've found it to be a good rule of thumb for determining which controversies are likely to be resolvable and which are likely to go nowhere.

General assessment: valid critiques but then you go and make your own metaphysical claims in exactly the opposite direction, missing the point of your own analysis.

Huh, upon reflection I can't figure out a good way to define reality without referring to subjective experience. I might not go so far as to say it's not a coherent concept, but you raise some interesting points.

Thanks for writing up an excellent Reduction Ad Absurdum of verificationism. As they say, "One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens".

I strongly agree with the claim that it is self-defeating. Here's another weird effect - let's suppose I roll a dice and see that it is a 6. I then erase the information from my brain, which then takes us to a position where the statement is impossible to verify. Does the statement then become meaningless?

Beyond this, I would say that "exists" is a primitive. If it makes sense to take anything as a primitive, then it makes sense to take "exists" as a primitive. And the thing with primitives is that you can't really define them in any satisfactory sense. Instead, you can only talk around them.

My concept of a meaningless claim is a claim that can be substituted for any alternative without any change to anticipated experience. For example, the claim 'Photon does not exist after reaching the Event Horizon' can be substituted for the claim 'Photon exists after crossing the Event Horizon' without bringing any change to anticipated experience. Thus, it is not rational to believe in any of the alternatives. What is your practical definition of 'meaningless'?

It seems like you are both arguing that reality exist is false and that it's meaningless. It's worth keeping those apart.

When it comes to meaningness of terms EY wrote a more about truth then reality. He defends the usefulness of the term truth by asking

If we were dealing with an Artificial Intelligence that never had to argue politics with anyone, would it ever need a word or a concept for 'truth'? 

He finds that he has good reasons to answer yes. In a similar regard it might be useful to tell an AI that has a notion that there's a reality outside of itself that's distinct from anything that AI knows and not directly assessible by the AI. It's not necessary for the existince of reality to be verifiable for the AI for it being a good idea for the creator of the AI that knows something about reality to teach the AI about it.

A couple thoughts:

I think of explanations as being prior to predictions. The goal of (epistemic) rationality, for me, is not to accurately predict what future experiences I will have. It’s to come up with the best model of reality that includes the experiences I’m having right now.

I’ve even lately come to be skeptical of the notion of anticipated experience. In Many Worlds, there is no such thing as “what I will experience”, there are just future people descended from me who experience different things. There are substitute notions that play the role of beliefs about future experiences, but they aren’t the same thing.

Experiences are physical processes in the world. If you have beliefs about your future experiences, then you must either have beliefs about physical processes, or you have to be a dualist. If you don’t have beliefs about experiences, but instead just “anticipate” them, then idk.

There is an odd question that I think about sometimes - why does “exist” refer to actual real world existence, as opposed to something like “exists according to Max Tegmark”, or “exists inside the observable universe”? I’m taking for granted that there is a property of existence - the question is, how do we manage to pick it out? There are a couple ideas off the top of my head that could answer this question. Reference magnetism is the idea that some properties are so special that they magically cause our words to be about them. Existence is pretty special - it’s a property that everything has. Alternatively, maybe “exist” acquires its meaning somehow through our interaction with the physical world - existent things are those things that I can causally interact with. This option has the “benefit” of ruling out the possibility of causally isolated parallel worlds.

you're an anti-realist about reality :o :P

side note (not addressing the main point)

it's not like there's a great altruism argument if only we conceded that verificationism is wrong

altruism is a value, not a belief. do you think there's no great argument for why it's possible in principle to configure a mind to be altruistic?

Yeah. This post could also serve, more or less verbatim, as a write-up of my own current thoughts on the matter. In particular, this section really nails it:

As above, my claim is not that the photon disappears. That would indeed be a silly idea. My claim is that the very claim that a photon "exists" is meaningless. We have a map that makes predictions. The map contains a proton, and it contains that proton even outside any areas relevant to predictions, but why should I care? The map is for making predictions, not for ontology.

[...]

I don't suppose that. I suppose that the concept of a photon actually existing is meaningless and irrelevant to the model.

[...]

This latter belief is an "additional fact". It's more complicated than "these equations describe my expectations".

And the two issues you mention — the spaceship that's leaving Earth to establish a colony that won't causally interact with us, and the question of whether other people have internal experiences — are the only two notes of dissonance in my own understanding.

(Actually, I do disagree with "altruism is hard to ground regardless". For me, it's very easy to ground. Supposing that the question "Do other people have internal conscious experiences?" is meaningful and that the answer is "yes", I just very simply would prefer those people to have pleasant experiences rather than unpleasant ones. Then again, you may mean that it's hard to convince other people to be altruistic, if that isn't their inclination. In that case, I agree.)

So I need different names for the thingies that determine my predictions and the thingy that determines my experimental results. I call the former thingies ‘belief’, and the latter thingy ‘reality’.”

Here, reality is merely a convenient term to use, which helps conceptualize errors in the map.

No, the point of the argument for realism, in general, is that it explains how prediction, in general, is possible.

That's different from saying that the predictive ability of a specific theory is good evidence for the ontological accuracy of a specific theory.

So I need different names for the thingies that determine my predictions and the thingy that determines my experimental results. I call the former thingies ‘belief’, and the latter thingy ‘reality’.”

Here, reality is merely a convenient term to use, which helps conceptualize errors in the map.

No, the point of the argument for realism in general is that it explains how prediction, in general, is possible.

That's different from saying that the predictive ability of a specific theory is good evidence for the ontological accuracy of a specific theory.

Is the thing you are defending verificationism, or anti-realism?

Here you say you argue for verificationism

. This post consists of two parts—first, the positive case for verificationism,

..here you argue "from* verificationism:-

One consequence of verificationism

If you are arguing for verificationism , you need to argue against main alternative theory -- that meaning is an essentially linguistic issue.

1 It’s impossible to reach that world from ours, it’s entirely causally disconnected, and

2 That world “really exists

That’s exactly what decoherent many worlds asserts!

Both sides of the many worlds debate appear to understand what "causally isolated worlds" means, the evidence for which is that they can actuallly communicate their disagreements about it.

If verificationism means that "exists" is a meaningless word, then "this territory does not exist" is a meaningless claim not a true claim.

For one, it’s not clear what it ["exists"] means

Anti realism needs key terms like "map","observer", "experience" and predict. Giving clear definitions is a problem everyone faces.

And it's hard to see it how it can get by without an ontology. Not only does "observer" need to be defined , observers need to exist. Strong anti realism seems to be incoherent.

Anr way to look at this is through the map-territory distinction. “X really exists” is a map claim (i.e a claim made by the map), not a territory claim, but it’s about the territory. It’s a category error and meaningless

What? What's a "map claim"?

"Electrons exist" means I anticipate other people acting in a way that matches how they would act if their observations matched my map of how electrons function. Verbal shorthands are useful things.