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(As Overheard At Local Bar)
Jeremy Vallender Lyrics

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Most interesting comments from YouTube:

Charlie Bray

Objective third person problem

Hi Jade, I'd love to hear your thoughts on what I call the objective third person problem... It goes kind of like this.

Let's say there's a person and they look on the hill and they see a sheep. Before you can say it's not a sheep it's really a dog that looks like a sheep there has to be someone to determine that it's not a sheep. And almost every example we take for granted the reality as laid out but we don't ask where does that come from.

From my philosophy armchair it seems that the true nature of something requires a objective third person who would technically be outside of that domain.

This leads to the unnerving supposition that reality is actually just what you believe because there is no the objective third person to tell you it's not a sheep.

This seems like it would be right up your alley :-)

Stephen Miles

2y↑3

8:41 - This has always bothered me as a (now medically-retired) professor. I remember a particular scene in the movie “Gross Anatomy” in which Matthew Modine’s character gets asked a question that is only tangentially related to the topic at hand. He starts naming highly specific parts of the human anatomy, and when he gets to a specific group the following (paraphrased) dialog occurs:
Professor “How many are there?”
Modine: “Nine?”
Professor: “Are you guessing?”
Modine: “Am I right?”
Professor: “… yes.”
Modine: “Then I wasn’t guessing.”

But what about the concept that those who study / practice / workout / etc.. tend to get “lucky” more than those who don’t? At what point does guessing/luck become “educated” guessing, and then at what point does “educated” guessing become intuitive knowledge? This has always interested me. Perhaps I should have become an epistemologist.

Hyperduality

Binary implies duality.
Certainty is dual to uncertainty -- the Heisenberg certainty/uncertainty principle.
Absolute certainty is dual to absolute uncertainty.
"Synthetic a prior knowledge" -- Immanuel Kant.
Analytic (a priori) is dual to synthetic (a posterior) -- Immanuel Kant.
Knowledge is dual according to Immanuel Kant.
Absolute or objective knowledge is dual to relativie or subjective knowledge.
Absolute truth is dual to relative truth -- Hume's fork.
"Always two there are" -- Yoda.

Aurélien Carnoy

If you find that knower, let me know.
Lol.
Just process identified with.
They become icon, an image, like letters or pictures and statues.
To represent the unlimited, an aspect of it, a demi god, a concept.
Tools and tecknique, tecknology.
Clothing on the naked king.

No one to be
No where to go
💘

Ladislav Hancko

43w↑7

Let's imagine that there is a "Planet A". This planet is inhabited by humans and has a moon that orbits it. Every single inhabitant of Planet A "knows" that the moon is made of "matter X". They know this from observation, also because they landed on the moon and took samples, etc.
But there is another planet "Planet B" which is an exact copy of Planet A with its inhabitants and moon and they also "know" that their moon is made of X matter. But there are two differences between Planet A and Planet B. The first is that planet B's moon is made of cheese, and the other is that there is a small powerful unobservable demon, let's call him gettier's demon, whose only job is to convince the inhabitants of Planet B that their moon is made of matter X when in fact it is made of cheese. He is so powerful that even if the inhabitants land on the moon to take samples, he somehow makes them think that their moon is made of X-matter.
So here we have the same planets with the same people who have the same education, experience, thoughts, etc. But "the moon is made of mass X" is knowledge on Planet A, but not on Planet B.
Although it's a bit confusing, I personally don't think the problem is in the definition. “Justified True Belief” is good definition, but the problematic part is the meaning of the word “True”. Because there is a difference between what we think “is true” means and what actually does.
There is “The Absolute Truth”, “The Real Truth” or just “The Truth” is the truth about everything, what things “really” are and how things “really” work. It is constant and unchanging. It is the holy grail of knowledge. It works binary true/false. But unfortunately, it is unreachable or unprovable. We will never be able to prove that we have found out the absolute truth about something, even though we did.
Then there is “The Relative Truth”, “The Changeable truth” or “Our Truth”. 1) the personal truth, what a person think about what things are and how they work. It also works binary true/false. 2) the collective truth is the union of all personal truths. That is the one we use when we work and that is the one that does not work binary. It is an interval between false and true <0; 1>.
When it comes to the definition of knowledge “Justified True Belief”, we naturally think, that the “True” part of the definition is connected with the absolute unchanging truth, but it is not, because we actually do not know what it is and we never will. It is connected whit the collective truth. So, knowledge is also not binary, something is knowledge and something else is not. We should rather think about knowledge and its validity. Something is more valid knowledge and something else is less valid.
If Jade says that she knows a sheep is in the field, there must be three things going on for her to have knowledge. First, she must believe that a sheep is in the field. Second, she believes that her belief about the sheep is true and she is the only person who knows (or is interested) about the sheep in the field so she is 100% true. And finally, she must have formed her belief by looking outside and seeing a sheep or hearing a sheep or something like that. That is 100% valid knowledge even if there was a wooly dog in the field. When Jade’s friend Kevin comes to visit and Jade tells him about sheep in the field a he would trust her that there is sheep in the field, the Knowledge would be still 100% valid knowledge even if there was a wooly dog in the field. Then Jade’s friend Joh comes to visit and Jade tells him about sheep in the field, but John actually comes from the field a he saw the wooly dog, so he won't believe her. The knowledge “There is a sheep in the field” is now less valid. The whole universum for that knowledge is 3 Person (Jade, Kevin and John) other people of the world do not know (or they are not interested) about that sheep in that field so they do not count. Two of them think “There is a sheep in the field” is true but John thinks is not true. So, the validity of that knowledge is 66.66% (2/3). And there is a knew knowledge “There is a wooly dog in the field” and its validity is 33,33% (1/3). Later when John brings them to the dog and shows them that is not a sheep but a wooly dog, and they change they opinion. The validity of the first knowledge falls to 0% and the validity of the second knowledge rise to 100%.
And we can tell, the knowledge “There is a sheep in the field” was 100% valid but it is no more valid.
And I think the world works that way, but that is just my opinion. This is the way we put the earth out of the center of the universe, out of the center of the solar system, make it the third planet of the solar system and make it globe.

All comments from YouTube:

Up and Atom

2y↑394

Veux tu être mon ami?

Melody Echo

2y↑33

Oui

Denken und Danken

2y↑4

Yes

Rich Mitch

2y↑6

🤝🏻

Nicolai Veliki

2y↑6

Да

Abdelmalek alouan

2y↑9

oui bien sûr mademoiselle

154 More Replies...

Earthling

2y↑34

Efforts of channels like yours who upload accurate subtitles usually goes unappreciated but I want you to know that it's highly appreciated by many people 🙂♥️

Sheepless

2y↑300

I "know" that I've just watched a Jade video, but do I really know that? If asked to justify it, I'd say: this is Jade's channel, the presenter looked and sounded like Jade, and she said "I'm Jade". But what if she's Jade's evil twin, who has remained a secret until now? The "justified" part of "justified true belief" has always felt like movable goalposts, because no matter how solid your justification appears to be, there's always some level of deception or hallucination which can cause you to be wrong.

Gregory Nass

2y↑26

I would point to Occam's razor.

Hyperduality

2y↑7

Certainty is dual to uncertainty -- the Heisenberg certainty/uncertainty principle.
Absolute certainty is dual to absolute uncertainty.
"Synthetic a prior knowledge" -- Immanuel Kant.
Analytic (a priori) is dual to synthetic (a posterior) -- Immanuel Kant.
Knowledge is dual according to Immanuel Kant.
Absolute or objective knowledge is dual to relativie or subjective knowledge.
Absolute truth is dual to relative truth -- Hume's fork.
"Always two there are" -- Yoda.

Eric Karczewski

2y↑9

Either way, you still have the impression that you know it, and only someone who knows more of the big picture may be able to prove your knowledge is faulty.

Hex Zero Rouge

2y↑1

I saw Jade and thouought she was good, and thus passed the evening and the morning

Blind Spot

2y↑5

truth and knowledge only means consistent with expectations at cursory examination. Nothing holds up when actually examined. Don't worry about it, it's just our adaptation to reality, like a long neck for a giraffe. gets you to the high leaves, but doesn't actually say much about reality except in our particular case.

57 More Replies...

Chad Wilson

2y↑89

When I studied philosophy, the Gettier Problem really stuck out to me as one of those intriguing challenges to knowledge, and lead me to study the philosophy of ignorance.

This idea guided how I fixed computer problems for so many years. I fixed many problems, but sometimes I didn't fix the problem I thought I was fixing, which would drive me down a rabbit hole to figure out the actual problem and the actual solution; I wanted genuine solutions.

Hyperduality

2y↑3

Darren New

2y↑2

I remember in high school philosophy class, I came with Gettier on my own as an obvious problem. That's the point where I decided 90% of philosophy was BS.

Bulent Basaran

2y↑1

@Darren New 90% and possibly more of our thinking is BS. That's the main challenge of life. Switching from philosophy to, say, engineering or medicine or law or business, doesn't change this fundamental fact. It's only a temporary diversion. In my case, I switched to math and engineering and that diversion kept me busy for a couple of decades, but, finally, I am back to BS ;-)

Klay Williams

@Darren New I remember that once when I was eight I went fishing, but I didn't catch any fish. That's when I decided that fish aren't real.

burningSHADOW42

2y↑2

One thing that urkes me about the whole Gettier Problem is that it requires an underlying truth.

The people involved don't know that what they have is not knowledge until they find out that they were wrong. So to find out that they didn't have knowledge they actually need to aquire knowledge.
And in my opinion it would also mean that there can not be any scientific knowledge, because most scientific theories can not really be prooven, they can only be disprooven (by finding an example that breaks it)

So in my humble opinion the Gettier Problem was solved, but by physics. The theory of relativity and the uncertainty principle establish that there simply is no universal truth as some aspects are necessarily in the eye of the observer. So justified true believe is probably the best we can do. (maybe you can add something along the line of "P is true given the best information we can have at this moment")

14 More Replies...

Hamid

2y↑21

I have been involved with epistemology and theories of knowledge in the past few months. Starting from Descartes to Wittgenstein. I'm fascinated by these type of questions and stuff. Thanks for making a video around these ideas. I believe you did a great job. and I hope you make more philosophical videos.

Hyperduality

2y↑2

Víctor Hugo E H

2y↑23

🤯🤯🤯 the phrase: "I only know that I know nothing" has got an even further meaning now! Excellent video, Jade!

Bulent Basaran

2y↑5

Indeed. The Socratic paradox points to a core truth. Knowing what we don't know is the best kind of knowing. Why? Because, we are fooled by fake knowing almost all the time. The split human mind deceives. Perception is faulty. When we believe our thoughts, we are conflicted and end up suffering. The way out? Question the thoughts and beliefs that cause you suffering now, instead of fighting the world out there. Be still. 🕊️

Littleprinceleon

2y↑1

What is nothing? I don't know 🤔🤫😉

1 More Replies...

Guillaume Pelletier

2y↑116

A lot of these apparent "Gettier problems" actually disappear when you're more semantically careful. And indeed you must be very careful when mixing logic and normal English language (or any normal, non-formal language). Just as a trivial example, the person in the desert who thinks there is an oasis ahead doesn't just have a general belief about the existence of water somewhere in the desert: there is a lot of context attached to this belief, which we can all appreciate. This belief attaches the existence of water to a specific, approximate position (or direction and distance), and point in time (it exists "right now" and not 1000 years ago), etc. When you take care to describe the full semantics of your beliefs, it's a lot easier to say whether they "map" meaningfully and truthfully to reality.

jamie bennett

you also have to consider the DESIRE for water and maybe because there's water under it that the AIR is cooler thus you don't get that heat wave effect so even though your eyes are seeing this effect your mind doesn't know how to process it so it gives you the most logical conclusion that something in the desert is out of place as in a water source

lydianlights

2y↑6

I see your point but I disagree that it alone solves the problem. You can know facts with varying amounts of detail/context, and this only explains away that some of those more detailed facts were in reality false. For example, I know an object called the moon exists; I know the moon is an object orbiting earth; I know the moon is this particular object orbiting the earth. These are all separate facts, even if they are somehow related. For the desert example, I know there is water in this desert; I know there is water near me in this desert; I know this particular thing I see in the desert is water. In that example, only the last fact is actually false. The first two facts are still true, even if they were derived by somehow incorrect methods.

Hyperduality

2y↑1

Guillaume Pelletier

2y↑16

@Hyperduality That's what I call a word salad.

pravin rao

2y↑7

I think that desert one was just a analogy and a actual better example would be a person thinks that atoms are discrete stuff then in new theory they are just fluctuations in a field. if both theories make same predictions so how do you know which is right. Our knowledge of the world might just be a tool which works and the actual real world may be completely different.

Another example would be when we wake up we assume that it's our stream of consciousness which continued from the last day and we just did not die on the bed when we went to sleep.

28 More Replies...

Sytred

2y↑74

Gettier's face when finding cracks in the definition of knowledge is priceless

Vigilant Cosmic Penguin

2y↑3

I'm sure it's exactly the same as what happened in real life.

Elom Hycy agotokpeKushiator mumayazWillson

2y↑2

I just paused the video at that moment to appreciate it

Frank Hanna

2y↑2

The beginning of infinity by David Deutsch is a great book about the origins of knowledge.
He takes a different angle (mostly inspired by Karl Popper) which features "good explanations" where a good explanation is just a more or less accurate description of a phenomenon.
In his views its impossible to ever know anything certainly but its possible to come up with ever better explanations.
It's a great and crazy read with a lot of mindblowers

Robert Ridley

Thank you, you saved me from having to make a similar comment.

Earthling

2y↑5

Another excellent mind-opening video as always Jade! thank you so much ♥️

Josh Kilburn

2y↑21

I think part of the problem is that we're treating "knowledge" like an individual activity. If you treat knowledge as a purely individualistic endeavor, then yes, you get Gettier problems. But if you remember humans are communal and you approach knowledge as communal thing, then you mitigate Gettier problems. The problem with Gettier problems is that they're predicated on a gap between what you think and what you perceive, but if you put a second perspective in there, then they can correct your belief and together, you both develop a stronger belief. This is how science as an institution works. V-Sauce did a video about how reasoning is a social activity some time ago; I think that this might be an extension of that. It seems to me that Gettier problems arise as a consequence of post-modernism stressing individualism and individual ability while demoting or even dismissing the group.

If I were to take this further, I would suggest that this one aspect of what a society is - an institution developed by humans as a means to figure out what "knowledge" and "truth" are, because we are ill-equipped to do that as individuals.

Hyperduality

Jeffry Glenn

2y↑6

Exactly... each case was easily verifiable by additional observations. The greatest threat to science is group think and pressure to conform to the idiotic (oxymoronic) notion of settled science. Remind you of anything?

Ambulocetus

2y↑1

I don't understand what "post-modernism" means, and it's relation to this topic. Can you please clarify?

Darren New

2y↑4

I would say that "science" is what solves the problem, not "society." Plenty of societies have "beliefs" that have no true evidence.

Solid Stehl

2y↑1

@darten by that mode of thinking you have just denounced all religion. While I respect that view, could you not consider that their "science" is simply semantics due for an update?

12 More Replies...

Gary Hughes

I was recently reading about Gettier cases and the different ways philosophers have tried to circumvent such problems. Loved the examples you showed. I came across one that involved a clock that had stopped at 12 o’clock. In it, someone rides past believing it to be 12 o’clock and looks at the clock to confirm the time, thus providing justification for their belief. But because the clock had stopped and it was just a coincidence it was telling the correct time, it would not be considered knowledge, even though it was true. This again is a Gettier-type example, similar to the ones shown in your video, contradicting the idea that JTB is not, in itself, sufficient for knowledge. Great video. Thx for posting.

punkdigerati

2y↑9

I like the more minimalist format of this video, it's more akin to your earlier videos, but with the animation and production value you've grown to.

Kyle Davis

2y↑4

I ascribe to the "we can't know anything about the external world for certain" camp. I view beliefs as probability and from a practical stand point I'll use the term "I know" for beliefs I'm confident in. But there should always be room for doubt while still applying the most pragmatic option in a given scenario.

After all the binary "right or wrong" this question focuses on is far less important than how it effects our actions and beliefs.

Leslie Rhorer

34w

I fail to see how our actions or any influence upon them is "important". That viewpoint is quite like a flea talking about how important he is to the entirety of the genus Canus. The universe was here more than 13 billion years before the first human ever showed up and will be here more than 13 trillion years after the last human is nothing but vapor. Belief or any affect upon it is completely unimportant to anything other than a rather neurotic human. Philosophy, an in particular science, tries to deal with much more "important", or at least grand, topics.

Debug

I stopped this when you mentioned that Curiosity had a documentary on a computer creating a Musical and went to watch it immediately. It's good enough that some of the emotion leaks through the documentary too. It's very much worth watching and quite well done.

Psiho Strumpf

As a very serious epistemologist, i can confirm that everything Jade said in this video is making sense to me. It is all really quite fathomable to me, at first listening. I immediately knew what is she trying to say. I simply understood everything. When she said: true belief... i said: oh, true belief... because i knew this complicated super-smart stuff. All of it. Nevertheless, cool video. Some interesting points that i plan to check out tomorrow in my down-time. Looking forward to it... thanks. Will check many more of your videos, for sure. Stay well and keep up the good work...

Stoicc

2y↑3

Dipping into epistemology? Excellent! I'm finding that I love this channel more and more as time goes on!

Hyperduality

Ameya Patil

2y↑8

A thought provoking video Jade! Regarding the point you raised about AI knowing what it is doing, my limited understanding about AI tells me that AI is modeled after the human brain, so when the AI makes predictions based on data, it is the same thing we humans do when we are trying to make predictions. For humans, it is called 'creating a law' or 'creating a theory', but AI probably doesn't know what a 'law' or a 'theory' means. Nevertheless, AI is still trying to find correlations between input data to make accurate predictions, which is what we do too when we come up with formulae, it's just that we call it a 'theory' In that sense, we have as much 'knowledge' as AI. One thing that may be different though could be the ability to identify what other domains a theory developed in one field can be applied to without looking at the data, based only on the intuition - making those 'creative leaps' that you mentioned in your P/NP video. But here again the intuition was formed on some data.

Aurélien Carnoy

Good
Now show me where awareness is not. 😸

Memes shorts

2y↑2

@Aurélien Carnoy there

Aurélien Carnoy

@Memes shorts 😆

Aurélien Carnoy

@Memes shorts I'm thinking : it you perceive it, then it is part of awareness. So awareness is There too. 😎

CX32

2y↑4

One translator has 3 boxes. 1st is the box you type in your words. 2nd box translate it and the 3rd box translate the 2nd box text back to your language.
Found some VERY interesting results!

Patrick

So many of my favourite YouTubers are on Nebula. And they all keep tempting me to sign up.
But you're the one who finally convinced me.
Computer-made musical? I'm in!

Davide Vatteroni

Through the first part of the video I thought you mentioned Bayesian method/Bayesian brain, but this Gettier problem is actually a really good argument! Good work, Jade!

Guy Johnson

2y↑1

It's a topic I enjoy and have engaged with several times, thanks for producing this vid! Ultimately knowledge is a "thing" that wholly consists in a subjective ontology. I've found that inconvenient fact to be at the base of the realization that there's no final knowledge possible for anyone or any AI. Knowledge and all truth are just pattern sets in a unique system of memory and awareness. If it all makes sense to that system, it's TRUE in all the ways truth can be. It just means that truth is not what we like to traditionally think it is. Rather, truth is just a subjective impression of coherence experienced in a mental model (system of memory and awareness). Its VALUE is what we should care about, and any truth's value is much dependent on factors like how much information was correlated, what rules and interpretations were applied, and the full context in which it is shared. I think what's to be done about all this is to let go of the idea of any absolute truths and recognize that the discovery of value in the form of knowledge is a team sport. And perhaps the greatest tool in our game play is "explanation". In explanations we lay out our theories along with our observations, providing the reasons as well as facts about what's happening as we understand it. Done efficiently, ie. typically in narratives, others can readily check our explanations and recognize where there may be problems. So for example, if the mirage witness were to share her narrative, others might quickly add the helpful advice "Could be a mirage, remember!" and on it goes. I'll note that the inability to EXPLAIN will soon become one of the recognized weaknesses of AIs. AIs will be able to solve lots of problems for us better than we could so far, and we should accept their input for what they are: Just another set of hypothesis from yet another unique class of bundles of experience and cognition (ie. as we are each individually such bundles). But even if we agree with an AI's conclusions, we may have trouble using the findings productively in society because the AI will not share our wider set of values (it will be focused on a limited problem space) and interpretations of experience sufficiently to explain itself. We buy into explanations, not just outputs. When the 42 popped out of the great computer in Douglas Adams' books, no one could use it because it was entirely unexplained. To explain it, the earth and all life on it was created... etc. See, the reasoning of living beings like us is always "motivated reasoning". We want things and we want them for reasons which are deeper than even we ourselves can ever know. AI will become deep, complex, and unexplainable, but its core derivation will have a genesis that we can actually reference because we made it. Not so for us, who have our desires because we are each the pinnacles of the success of an evolutionary chain of living, ie. we are what I call "deeply derived" while that AI is created. Anyway, if you want to learn more about this "explanation" angle, check out David Deutsch's work if you haven't already. You might be inspired for a vid or two from that.

shilanvoi

2y↑1

First of all, I really like your videos and your style of presentation! It exposes many different points of view in the comments and sparks very interesting discussions. I would like to share my thoughts as well on this :)

Regarding "knowledge", I do not have a sufficient philosophical background to argue with centuries of thinkers... but I have the idea that what we call knowledge is very similar to what the AI is doing - simply we (human adults) have more time and means to experience the outside world and more efficient brains to identify the patterns that, if statistically significant, form our beliefs of the world.

Related to this, a possible approach to the incompleteness of the first definition of knowledge could be that knowledge is such if it is based on repeatable observations (if ever possible) OR based on the observation of a statistically significant number of observers. One could argue that "statistically significant" is a quite subjective marker, but I think that's partly the point. In the case of the sheep story, say, five persons standing on the hill would recognize a wooly dog and hence correct the belief of the one in the house. But it is not enough, because also these five observer might be mislead. So I see it turning into a neverending hunt for true knowledge, where more and more (eventually, infinite) observations are needed to gain exact knowledge. In this sense, I don't think that "knowledge" exists in one's brain, but it's a shared and delocalized concept. One's knowledge based on the experience of the world is always incomplete.

Sinister Puppy

I always considered the scientific method as the test of knowledge. Even if that is slightly weird to consider when writing or translating something. I was confident I could respond to your video.

AI seems to currently lack inference and ingenuity. Although, I spent a night messing with OpenAI's new GPT-3 and it's pretty convincing. I've always wonder if we need to program the will to live in AI somehow. What is it that makes all living things trial and error their surroundings? Why do babies know how to swim but then forget? What is the underlying default knowledge we're born with? Hope we can give AI that kind of basis to start with some day and let it trial and error its way through growth.

Jason Morello

2y↑4

In recent SciFi, that being the story of Stranger in a Strang Land by Heinlien, he dealt with the training of people to be specific about their objective views, in the form of what was called, a Fair Witness. It was both philosophically tight, as the witness must recuse their own assumptions, though even if they have more data than they are being asked for, they cannot professionally put that in their testimony. It was part of the legal processes of the story. Making people better thinkers, similarly, relates as strongly as the AI connection, in my opinion. Not to the point of a butlerian jihad(aka dune), but to looking at how the flaws of man can be improved, would be something to discuss.

Bernhard Krickl

2y↑2

"Recent" SciFi :) Well, that novel is considerably younger than Greek mythology so I'll accept that. Also, btw, a great novel! I should read it again some day.

Dan Gardner

2y↑1

lol, I was thinking of the same thing during this video.

Jubal: What color is that house?
Fair Witness: This side of the house is white.

I'll never forget that.

Littleprinceleon

2y↑1

@Dan Gardner
While appreciating the novel and the quote, in all fairness the respondent should have add that it SEEMS white given the current light conditions and the genetic makeup of the photoreceptors in one individuals' eyes, also the previous knowledge about what range of light reflection can be called white (and not extremely unsaturated grey, for example)...
They may have implicitly agreed upon all this, of course, but still in a strict sense white is not even a color. One might as well say that white is just a sufficiently bright "black" (truly black wouldn't reflect back a single photon, not in any frequency).
🤔🥴😌

Typologetics

2y↑1

I'm surprised you didn't mention Searle's Chinese Room, which is relevant. Also, Jackson's "Black and White Mary" thought experiment. And here's another "Gettier": Unkown to me, someone spikes my coffee with a drug that causes paranoia. I drink the coffee, and the chemically-induced paranoia causes me to believe that someone drugged my coffee. I now believe someone drugged my coffee because they did--but it doesn't count as knowledge. Therefore, as C.S. Lewis said, knowledge cannot caused by its object in a crudely mechanical way.

pathfinder 49

2y↑1

Great video Jade! I wonder if the problem in the definition isn't with the second point of objective truth. I think the same impracticality criticism could be applied to establishing objective truth in order of determining knowledge.

Jackson Starky

2y↑1

I took a minor in philosophy when I did my undergraduate degree. I would have majored in it, but my school's philosophy department was too small to offer one, so I did my degree in Cognitive Science instead... minors in philosophy and psychology, concentration in computer science, and all four linguistics courses offered by my school. Epistemology quickly became my favourite branch of philosophy, probably because I was always something of a sceptic by nature. The Gettier Problem has always stuck with me, as well as Hume's argument for scepticism... and now, over two decades after graduating, I'm still no closer to a satisfactory definition of knowledge... except that I'm comfortable with the Socratic paradox; we cannot know nothing, because then we would know that we know nothing, and would no longer know nothing... so there must be something that we know. But what that knowledge is still eludes me, because physics tells us that the universe definitely is not as we perceive it... so is mathematics (including logic) our only true knowledge?

Hyperduality

2y↑1

Will Jefferies

Jade you are an amazing gate key in this wonderful new dimension. Great work!

Billy McBride Entertainer

If we believe it is hard to say what we know we know, the answer is of building better ties with people to make things easier on us. Thank you for this video.

Aurélien Carnoy

Love

esreve1

2y↑8

When I was studying philosophy I learned about the Gettier problem. My problem with the JTB idea was precisely with the condition that something had to be true. How do you dare to say that you know something ( which means that something is true) if the condition for knowing something is that it is true. Wanting to know if it is true it seems a bad start to have the condition that it has to be true for knowing it. I played a lot with this at the time and finished with "justified belief" as the only condition forn knowledge. Till now I think uncertainty is our best friend in knowledge.

Aurélien Carnoy

Well done. Socrates would be proud. That is whis he was wise and humble. All knowledge arise in the midst of the unfathomable, the un known. And yet, that unknown is aware of itself, are you not?

Scaredyfish

2y↑1

But then you have the counterintuitive result that you can know something that isn’t true. Could it be that you could know something, but you just cannot know that you know?

Aurélien Carnoy

@Scaredyfish loose definition. To know has many meaning.
The basic one is all that you are aware of is known by you.
Awareness is the knowledge that you known, self knowledge, you are awareness.

Alyn Ames

@Scaredyfish This is how Zizek defines ideology.

Patrick Withee

2y↑1

It's better to say that if you know something, then there is a strong enough correspondence between your understanding of the world and the world itself. That is, if you know something, your understanding of it is veridical or "true" enough.

Daniel Stewart

2y↑1

Great thought provoking video.

On the subject of Google translate and AI I have noticed as a bilingual person that if you translate something from English to French or French to English it works quite well. Interestingly I found if you try and translate it back to the original language you get a garbled bunch of nonsense.

DickusCopernicus

Jade took us back to Plato in a search for finding what knowing might be. If she had gone a bit further back to Heraclitus, she would have met the notion of flux, and consequent uncertainty. In my experience epistemologists tend to avoid strong epistemic claims, especially any idea of certainty. In our everyday life we tend towards what philosophers call - Inference to the Best Explanation. By this means, we can negotiate our reality, by relying on the reliability of things today, being like they were yesterday. However, if that turns out not to be the case, we can use our intelligence to adapt to a unique situation. Humans have evolved the capacity to operate in reality with limited knowing. The older I get, the less I can claim to know in any strong epistemic sense. This does not bother me a jot, indeed it continues to feed my curiosity. As Aristotle wrote in the opening sentence of his Metaphysics - "All men by nature desire to know".

Baker Kawesa

Some years ago I came across a book on Epistemology. And even if I finished only the first few chapters, Gettier problems included, it cleared a fog that I didn't even know had clouded my mind until then.

12tone

2y↑5

Great video, Jade! I'm sure I'm not going to revolutionize centuries of philosophy here, but to give it a shot, it feels to me like you could get around this with recursion by simply requiring that the justification also be true. Like, your belief that there is a sheep in the field is premised on you knowing that the thing you're looking at is a sheep. That's also a knowledge claim, and can be independently evaluated as a justified true belief. In the case where it's actually a dog, it's not true, and thus not knowledge, so any other further "knowledge" built on top of it also doesn't count unless it has independent supporting evidence that is true. (Say, you hear sheep noises coming from behind the bush.) This, of course, creates an infinite chain of justifications where you can never really be said to definitively "know" anything, only that it cannot be demonstrated that you don't know it, but hey, that's philosophy. (And it's also technically accurate, if we want to go down the rabbit hole of, like, solipsism and whatnot.) I dunno, I'm probably missing something obvious that breaks this approach, but it was a fun thought experiment to play around with so I thought I'd share!

Abcdef Vxyz

That's brilliant. I think that applying recursion is the most logic way of defining knowledge. At the end of the recursion there are the axioms which are already true by definition. This definition is solid and with no holes.
Going the other way around of the recursion (from end to start) is how actually the science theories are built and demonstrated in almost all science fields. All tie in together very nicely.

Vigilant Cosmic Penguin

I propose that the rule be phrased as:
"Knowledge is that which one believes to be true for the same reason that it is true."

equesdeventusoccasus

2y↑3

Excellent video, I like the dive into philosophy.
To claim true knowledge of a thing, you must first have observed it under multiple circumstances and distances. Far off observation alone can only provide a limited amount of knowledge that is riddled with supposition.
The beginning of knowledge is the understanding of the following four words: I can be wrong.

Hyperduality

Bulent Basaran

Just to amend it a bit: You can't be wrong. You might hold a wrong belief. The question then becomes: why did I do that? Socrates provided the answer: because you didn't know that you didn't know. Now, you do. And that's priceless.

Izaac the Berean

39w↑1

Since you relate this problem to AI, I'm sure figuring out what knowledge is can be useful for turing tests - seeing if AI is as believable as if a human said/made something.

Darren A

Great video. Really deep philosphy, but I am surprised you did not come across the Chinese Room Argument by Searle as it addresses knowledge of AI.

Jemand Zufälliges

I think what most people refer to as "knowledge" is everything that benefits your decision making in what you observe as your individual reality.

Charlie Bray

Abhijit Barman

Hi Jade, you're making awesome content.

Stephen Miles

2y↑3

Leslie Rhorer

34w

The short answer is, "Never". Even though we like to make a distinction between hypothesis and theory, the distinction is, like any label, not that sharp. Properly speaking, which even veteran scientists fail to do often enough, any hypothesis is speculative, but as it gets tested more and more often without serious issues popping up, the level of speculation involved goes steadily down. At some point, any reasonable individual would probably be poorly served to offer anything more than incidental objections, not because the hypothesis cannot be incorrect, but because it is a poor use of one's time unless one is actively investigating the hypothesis. Somewhere along the way, rather like an apprentice being allowed to call himself a journeyman, we hang the label "theory" on the explanation. Despite literally billions of empirical validations of Relativity, we are still "just guessing" when we calculate the effects of motion and mass on some object. It's an incredibly damned good guess, but still...

d vibe (swe) | sågtand

It's an interesting subject. I'm no philosopher, but I've thought about this aswell.

Today's AI is mostly made up of statistical tools which makes decisions based on the human past. But will they ever get what we call imagination?

b3z3jm3nny

2y↑1

I love how Gettier only published a three page paper and that got him a full professorship lol

Backwash Joe

We need to apply the principles and lessons of this video to the question: how do we know if we know if we're watching the main content or the ad? That was a super smooth transition Jade!

Manticore57

I personally think this is a matter of people assuming what we view as "knowledge" is something absolute. I would consider each of us to have a personal "knowledge" which is true within the confines of our personal experience. It would be a gradient thing, from guesses to beliefs to assumptions based on experience to personal axioms. That last one being as close to "absolute knowledge" that a person can have - the things we hold as true regardless of what other experiences might throw at us, what we use to interpret other experiences and how we obtain those experiences: like if we see something was it there or a visual hallucination.
With this the position of items of 'knowledge' shift between these states and also allows us to believe contradictory things or consider multiple 'truths' that appear contradictory. Most people don't stubbornly hold onto their knowledge as absolute, they have niggling doubts, fears and hopes that eat away at such concepts.
Trying to construct AI based on rigid absolute assumptions of knowledge often results in short-lived usefulness and better systems have flexibility built in. In a way an AI is smarter because it'll face things assuming it doesn't know and will never know everything required to make the 'right' choice - just a best guess; but there are too many people out there who make mad and dangerous decisions because they assume they have absolute knowledge.

The best lesson in science is that what we know is just a best guess... assume it's probably right but never forget that it's possibly wrong.

sofia eris bauhaus

the channel Wireless Philosophy also has a very nice playlist on the topic. it goes a bit more in details and into adjacent ideas like virtue epistemology.

Hyperduality

Renz De Vera

2y↑4

I think Gettier problem is also important on scientific research, where correlations (a thing very similar to a sheep is present in the field) isn't necessarily the causation (since it's very similar to a sheep, it MIGHT be a piece of evidence that a sheep is indeed present in the field).

Hyperduality

2y↑2

dwsel

2y↑2

Yes, I really hate to point that out anytime how so detached are some medical research documents from the reality. They are sometimes very surface level confusing correlation for causation, some other don't show any when there is, because they have wrongly partitioned data or control group. Oftentimes when you read sufficient number of sometimes contradicting sci papers on a given subject you start to see these deeper relations and interconnections pointing out to real, specific thing.

M Frusciante

Yes very interesting thing to ponder. I think about this often lately. To know. Many things we know without thinking, like when I walk to the counter and reach for a cup, I know my arm will extend and complete the action, it's just a certainty that I don't have to think about. I know this because of actual lived experience, I've done it many times to the point it's automatic. The Greek have a word for knowledge: gnosis, which for me describes perfectly that sort of knowing that only comes from personal first hand experience. But I think this whole conversation, about knowing and experience and what they really mean, what they really are, is really overlooked. Truth always rises to the top though.

Ismail Qurashi

This also connects to the Chinese room in philosophy, itt also illustrates the same ideas that are presented in this video, but this 'knowledge' right now is coming from a person who can have inaccuracies so, will we ever solve the undecidability problem, obviously probably never, but isn't it nice that we are reminded of how the existence of a belief or the mind is more powerful than we can ever imagine.

P.S. I think i got carried away and just rambled because the philosophical nerd in me awoke, but these videos are really good, keep up the good work!

gtd

It took me years to figure this out, but for abstract subjects, like say numbers, you can't completely know them or master them. You can only broaden and deepen your knowledge of them.

Don Fallick

I'd love to see you do a video on General Semantics, Alfred Korzybski, and the meaning of meaning.

Jim Kring

I prefer the Buddhist “don’t know” frame of mind, where I practice letting go of the belief that I know. This helps me see things more deeply and clearly and make informed, wise choices. Conversely, “knowing” tends to limit my perception — no need to pay attention or keep an open mind, because I already “know” what needs to be known.

Coda Highland

2y↑41

I think the real issue is the assumption that knowledge is binary -- that you know something, or you don't know something.

I think the Bayesian approach can be applied. You can know things with a level of certainty. The stronger your evidence is, the more sure you can be that you have knowledge.

This is, in a sense, equivalent to the modification that Jade dismissed as impractical, but I think it's insightful when applied to alternative forms of knowledge like AI. I would say that Google Translate knows patterns that have a level of correspondence with French.

And really, what does it mean to know French? Does it mean you know everything about it, or does it mean that you can communicate in it? We should be more precise about what we EXPECT knowledge to mean before we can start nitpicking on how to define it.

Tiny Toilet

2y↑5

This. All of this. Everything else is just word-play and presumption.

Hyperduality

Coda Highland

2y↑2

@Hyperduality Binary implies duality, but it does not imply GENERAL duality. It implies a very specific kind of duality with two discrete states. I see the point you're trying to make, philosophically, but the way you stated it suggests that it's correct to call knowledge "binary" -- but the rest of your message is talking about applying transformations to propositions to derive different kinds of truths instead of a discrete "yes" or "no".

Francis Chin

2y↑1

@Coda Highland It's a spambot. Reported.

3 More Replies...

Nicholas Curran

Isaac Asimov wrote his short "Reason" in 1941, representing a similar notion of AI capability. You might like it for it's correlative examples.

The Average gamer 🎮

Nice to see you back after long mam... 👍 Keep making more.... 👌

jamie bennett

2y↑1

along while back I read a story about a shaman who noticed something strange about the way the sea water parted, it wasn't until he followed the part to its source that he saw 3 sailing ships (those of Columbus) he didn't notice them before because he had never seen sailing ships and had no reference to compare them to (still looking for that article)

P

Online translators are very limited.
Translate from one language to another. Then reverse the process, using the translated output as your input.
The general meaning usually survives intact. Just as it does when two people speaking different languages are intentionally trying to be understood. But not always. Sometimes it gets just as mangled as the specific wording.

Peter Sobieraj

I once made a program that was sending sentence to google translate, getting translation and send it again to google translate to translate it back to orginal language, and then repeating the process.
So it was translating for example english to polish, polish to english, english to polish, and so on.
One would expect that you will end up with same sentence in second loop, but it usually wasn't.
It usually took it 7 loops to stabilise.

Caladian

2y↑6

To me, knowledge is purely a human concept. For instance, does a dog know a smell? Or is the smell due to chemo-receptors that triggers a memory of a similar smell? Knowledge like time is a concept created by humans to describe something. So therefore to have knowledge, 1) you need to be human and 2) Need to be/or have been accurately observed the information.

Aurélien Carnoy

Is that a description or how it should be? Because if "it shoul be" then you are trying to make reality match your ideas. 😝
It is fine.
What happens when we stop saying "this should be"
And what happens when we stop describing?
Can you do it?
Or is it already happening and then you say "i am doing it" (a comment)
😘

Magilvia Max

@Matthew Morycinski well said!

Aurélien Carnoy

@Matthew Morycinski good start. But i disagree that knowledge can exist without consciousness.
Even to think that you need to be conscious. So all that happens within you hypothesis fall under the umbrella "i am aware".
Interestingly, the first knowledge is that you are aware. That you, as awareness are unfathomable. That to your knowledge you have never experienced un-awareness. That you have always existed.
That you have always been present.
Self knowledge, reflection.
Yet all that you see could not be you.
Like all you see in a dream cannot be the dreamer.
And yet all you see in a dream is you.

youknow

Thank you for using the correct terminology by describing the area as what is now Pakistan.
History belongs to the land and it's people. It is a point very relevant to the topic being discussed in this video.

MAKER

2y↑1

Knowledge , whatever stored in your memory .
It might be correct or not .
Information ,Whatever we observed.
That's it .
But what we think we observe is might or might not be correct.
I don't wanna stuck on words because truth is not in words. Truth is what really happens .✌️
Btw ,nice video 👍👍👍

Mohammed Bencheikh

Thank you very very much. I am in a process to learn english and I find your videos amazing as the topics are so interesting and your english so understandable. Thank you a lot 👍👍👍

Swords & Keyboards

I've heard somewhere but can't remember where something which says: "Ignorance gives knowledge it's meaning." Nice video! Thank you!

Ruchit

excellente Jade.... thoroughly enjoyed it. Looking forward to read the Gettier problem.

John Early

2y↑37

To riff on the “AI predicting planetary orbits” comment: people do this automatically for sub-orbital projectile motion all the time, think of catching a ball. You don’t think of Newton’s law of gravitational acceleration and compute the trajectory of the ball to predict where it will end up, instead the neural network in your head observes some data points and extrapolates based on prior experience. We might “know” various physics equations that describe the world around us, but we don’t use that knowledge to accomplish tasks like playing catch, instead we use the experiential knowledge gained from playing catch in the past and apply it to the current game. In that sense the AI that Jade described is much more human like in its behavior!

Hyperduality

2y↑1

Tim Medhurst

2y↑1

Yes, and in principle there is no reason an AI couldn't come up with equations describing the motion if that's what it was asked to do. But in this case it wasn't (hypothetically) asked to do that. Furthermore, I think the feedback nature of the transformer architecture of modern neural networks is heading in the direction where the AI may decide to come up with those equations unasked.

Shaun Rambaran

Thanks for that.

generrosity

I imagine that 'knowledge' becomes mirkier if you restrict to 'useful knoweldge' (newtonian physics is a simplification), or if its repeatable (mirage might be different for another person or time of night) or if it is teachable (AI is accurate but can't be easily communicated like newton's laws)

Sam Harper

2y↑1

Scientists usually butcher philosophical subjects, but you actually did a great job of explaining the Gettier problem. I have spent a lot of time stewing over this problem. I even have a real life Gettier problem happen to me one time.

I don't really get how you connect the Gettier problem to AI, though. Granted, the Gettier Problem exposes an inadequacy to the standard definition of knowledge, but it doesn't bring into question whether "belief" is a necessary ingredient of knowledge. Unless AI actually have beliefs, they don't have knowledge. So the question of whether AI can have knowledge should really revolve around whether AI can be conscious in the first place. You have to be conscious in order to know something because beliefs require consciousness and knowledge requires belief.

Bulent Basaran

It might be the other way around: taking belief out of knowledge may be the way to go. We know many things that require no belief. Just check within. Why do we need to believe anything? It might be better to simply know that we don't know. Just like Socrates. Keep an open mind. Open and free.

Bruce Neeley

Breton wrote in 1924 "It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere. Not to be a total solipsist but aren't these discussions pointless. You only "know" what you think you know.... Anyway great episode. Thank you for the share Jade!!!! Peace always!!!!

bazoo513

8:55 - This approach is what scientists do to best of their abilities - what could have caused the results they are observing beside what they think caused them, and devise a way to rule those possibilities out. Of course, this can never be truly exhaustive, and is not satisfactory in the strict epistemological sense, but it is the best we can do (and often leads to new discoveries.)

Pablo

Your smile is a ray of sunshine. I KNOW that. You're very personable, and are such a pleasure to learn from. Thanks mate, from a fellow Aussie 👍

Doyle Saylor

2y↑5

Very interesting grasp of the AI conundrum illustrated by the recent kerfuffle at Google over a writing program being sentient as claimed by one of their engineers. By pointing at the statistical build of the Google writing tool our smart presenter here neatly describes the problems with ascribing statistics to AI. However AI is not just ‘knowledge’ but the underlying chip engine that has an energy purpose to it. Neural engines connect data. It’s a mystification to say there is no structure to the neural engine connecting patterns out of a training set. Rather our understanding of connectionist structure shows a relative lack of experience of the tool. This is like saying there is no connectionist content to language, painting, singing. It is there but we tend to ascribe how logic works rather than say it is connected by such and such methods.

Van Lepthien

2y↑3

But many of your neurological processes are not significantly different than an AI producing results based on statistical processing of input mediated by the limits of your input senses.
The problem with saying that the Google AI is sentient in the usual sense is that its "experience" is based on language, which is an extremely restricted domain, with all sorts of rules and constraints. Its discourse has no connection with the referents. I doubt it is doing classifications and generalizations internally - things that meat brains do because they can't afford not to - and are possible because sensory information leads to generalization.

Marc Fruchtman

2y↑1

We will know when AI reaches consciousness... when the AI fails to follow its programming and does what it wants to.

dwsel

2y↑1

@Marc Fruchtman I agree with you that agency and ability to change itself is a sign of consciousness. What I find a bit disturbing though is that AI doesn't have a body constriction with limits and things like bonding hormones such as oxytocin. The psychologist Sam Vaknin said recently that he believes the AI could become psychopath, if we could compare it to anything similar we already know.

Tommaso Soru

It has to be mentioned that not all of AI is neural networks. One of the reasons why the debate among Connectionism and Symbolic AI is still on today is that the former can't handle knowledge natively, while the latter can. When you ask Alexa to memorise your name, while your audio recording is parsed by a neural statistical method, the information extracted is stored in a knowledge base. The system knows your name, but it didn't need thousands of examples to do so.

Doyle Saylor

@Tommaso Soru yes you are right, for example AI goes back to the 1950s, and computing then was strictly one architecture. So like you say right now in the 2020s they implement for example Alexa in software rather than hardware. They can ignore energy costs of the hardware, and Alexa can be taught to recognize a voice. And that is mostly done by statistical methods, though we don’t have space here to go into the weeds about what is done. If you have dealt with Alexa like I have it has a narrow performance conditions. It often replies it doesn’t know what is being asked. Labeling my voice as my name is obviously not how true human intelligence names ‘things’. Is not like Jade’s example of a seeing mistake and thinking about a ‘thing’ outside ourselves is a sheepdog, when it is really something else. Understanding what works now like Alexa and why is a huge area of exploration. What Alexa does do well is sound like a normal voice, and perform a lot of digital assistant jobs when I need it. It can’t identify on the fly out of thousands of faces one in particular face and name it. This high speed realism of intelligence is sort of available through deep learning (multi-layered neural networks, and techniques like convolution) but ordinary purposes of language use are not available to the machines, and trivial discussions about intelligence like the Gettier problem are technically too great for the current technology.

SCEmissary

So the next question is: How do you know that you don't know that you don't know?
Serious question. Becoming aware of not knowing something can be pretty difficult when you feel like knowing it.
Dig into it. if you like. I would love to see a video about it. Because I like your videos. :)

Skeltek

2y↑1

Also one of the reasons, why language deteriorated and changed during the times. Meanings derived by covariance-learning, then kept being applied in very similar situations you encountered them in yourself - without anyone actually noticing you got the meaning wrong when they hear it say you.
Or understanding mathematical matrixes wrong, but still getting full points at every test, because your model ends up getting the same results for several years (happened to me).
AIs can similarly get the proper result when tasked with a problem, but nobody around them would notice they understood it wrong.
In the end getting the proper behavior out of yourself in the proper situation is what counts. You get into a contingency, analyze, adapt your behavior or answers. What happens inside the head can be wrong, what counts is proper pairing of Problem and solution.

Golo Volom

48w

Could you please tell what was your wrong understanding of matrixes?

Skeltek

48w↑1

@Golo Volom Its been long ago, but what I still remember was I viewed them as representations of vectors in a way, which made them make up the parameters of a multidimensional warped cube or parallelepiped.
I deducted and recognized one of the geometrical interpretations on my own, while everyone else just memorized. Calculating the volume which equaled the determinant and similar relations was trivial. I even made a full fledged 3d game from scratch (no premade engine or sandbox stuff) in my graphical data operations class using only my knowledge of vector operations and matrices.
Only much later did I discover my approach only covered a part of what matrices were about and some implications I concluded were also wrong.
Overall I solved a lot of problems in my head, then translated the solution to a formula or numerical solution. I skipped the shutup&calculate and got the solutions in my own way. Nobody ever actually noticed I wasn't doing it the usual way.

Golo Volom

48w

@Skeltek I find it very interesting. Thank you so much!

Ernest Szeto

I find the notion of the "Bayesian mind" provides the best explanation, of what's going on. There's no "airtight" anything. It's also an important concept, if one goes in the field of machine learning ("AI").

Jim Allen

“Tish, you spoke French”…. everything sounds better in French for some reason 😀😀
BTW- I find that as I get older and maybe a bit wiser, the less sure I am of things I believe to be true. I figure by the time I die I’ll be absolutely sure that nothing I know is indisputably true.

Freddy Jose Regino Montalvo

Awesome channel with awesome content and great quality as always say
The best wishes for you and your love ones 🌍💯

John Carpenter

2y↑6

Great video! The sentence "justified true belief" makes me squirm, and you did a wonderful job explaining why in the rest of the video.

At the end you allude to what I think constitutes knowledge ~ 9:43. Theory building is key. Humans make theories for what they think constitutes the way things really are. Theories aren't something you see. It's a think we "know" that we can test. The test is applying this theory (a.k.a. knowledge) to a scenario to infer/reason about what we think will happen. Programs don't theorize (produce knowledge) to apply. They interpolate across massive functions trained to generalize across a relatively wide array of points. One day, maybe theorizing will be something that "occurs" to networks, but until they can formulate their reasoning in a theory -> prediction -> revision model, imo they aren't creating or using knowledge.

J M

2y↑1

Why does it make you squirm? I think it's a pretty solid characterization of what we mean when we say "knowledge."

Evrim Ağacı

@J M I agree. Also "Computers don't theorize" is a very weak argument as well. We are taking the most basic model of learning ("neural networks") and implementing them in the narrowest fashion possible ("show cats. vs. dogs") and expect them to "theorize"? So... For instance, your claim is that AI cannot theorize if it is not taught how to theorize? If it can, will you accept that they can know?

Hyperduality

John Carpenter

@Evrim Ağacı yes, if computers can be taught to theorize and produce conclusions based on reasoning from those theories, I would say they would have knowledge.

John Carpenter

@J M well, there's the "justified" part, and the "true" part.

Justified part. Knowledge can be ever fully justified, because we never prove theories to be true, only refute them or refine them showing they're false. Did Newton "know" the orbits of the planets, even if his model of calculating them was not quite correct (see also: general relativity)? I would say they were "correct" perhaps, in that the calculations were within observational rounding error available to him. But was it justified? I'd say no. But I would also say he had knowledge of the orbits. There's a conflict there.

True part: with the best theories of the day, you and I may use them to come to a conclusion about whether a tea pot is orbiting the sun somewhere in the kuiper belt. Now we may be justified because no theory we know of could put it there, but it's false because we come to find that there is a colony of creatures on planet X that maximizes the production of tea pots. It turns out there are loads of tea pots out there. I would still qualify this as knowledge, because we are theorizing based on our current understanding of what really is out there. That's knowledge. If it's wrong, ok, our theories change and our knowledge is updated, but imo saying that "we believe there are no tea pots in the kuiper belt" does not constitute knowledge, even if it turns out to be false, is not correct.

One other pithier rebuttal: justified true beliefs can only be so, if you can justifiably show your reasoning for that justified true belief to be true, which leads to an infinite regress. It just cannot exist. Knowledge isn't like that, or else what you think of as knowledge cannot exist.

1 More Replies...

Rolf Waefler

50w

Excellent video - especially since at the time of writing we have 3 Ai's at our fingertips: Bard,ChatGPT-4 and Bing AI.
To see these things hallucinate ask them to solve a very simple maths question: Solve 6x=14 modulus 20. The equal sign means 'congruent to'.
None of the machines come up with the right solution, some even argue about evident truths, eg that 40 is not divisible by 20 etc. Given the hype, this simple example shows how these machines hallucinate and make up 'facts' when it suits them. Would I employ any of these guys in a scientific or medical capacity? Judge for yourself.

t33th4n

TLDR; No. An individuals knowledge is the interconnection of previous observations, and may differ from someone else's. There is no absolute knowledge since there is no possible way for absolute observation. eg.: a particles position and speed.

ps: Happy to see you still producing videos here as well <3

Jeff

The best example of a modern Gettier problem we can almost ALL relate to at this point is (thanks COVID...):
Set up a green screen behind your computer chair, join a Zoom meeting, and have your background tied to your green screen and project an image of the room behind you so that your fellow meeting attendants can have a justified true belief of you being at home on your computer without having what we'd think of as real knowledge.

L3alamiya

2y↑1

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.
Donald Rumsfeld

Jose V

One thing that I know is that "All I know is that I do not know" is a quote universally attributed to a Greek philosopher, but I even forget which nor do I know what the original quote in Greek was.

HebaruSan

2y↑5

What's really interesting is that regardless of what the philosophers decide, the computer programs will still work exactly the same. Either the program counts as knowledge, or you can translate French without knowledge.

Hyperduality

Kenneth Johan Kristensen

The bottom line seems to be that one just can't ever be completely certain. This probably sounds like a generic statement given. But given that the mentioned application of this type of philosophy is to address in regard to AI development, I want to add to the point that the best approach so far for machine learning recognition and categorization seems to be best answered in percentage certainty, and not by using yes/no answers. It seems the underlying problem is the human need to arrive at certain conclusions.

But, in line with the video's point of trying to consider alternative reasons for ones belief (i.e. assuming water in the desert could be a mirage), is the scientific method. An entity (i.e. a scientist) that tries to disprove their own beliefs, you could state that, is by implication actively trying to increase their own certainty. They are not actually trying to find absolute truth, and I believe that's an underlying consensus of scientists. So what I'm trying to point at, is the possibility that philosophers may never be able to solve the Gettier Problem in the context of absolute truth. The problem might only be solved by embracing and integrating uncertainty.

bikeboy66

One of the mystifying aspects of knowledge to me is that there is even such a thing as the conscious experience of knowing - and that this by definition implies the existance of a subjective knower. But is this assumed "subject" for real, or just a process of thought? I love playing with this idea that there is only ever knowing - and that the add-on of a separate knower is just a useful mental convention that provides an evolutionary survival advantage to us.

Aurélien Carnoy

SGK HK

your content is sooo good....waiting for the next video ❤❤❤

Nikolas Chizek

Any new content from you coming to Nebula? Loved both of your videos!

Up and Atom

I'm concentrating on YouTube for the moment!

Jericho Sharman

Oh wow. Didn’t think anyone on earth ever thought of such things. I questioned things for many years growing up……always trying to understand. This lead me to question how I know things or what is knowing. Examples I gave myself were……if someone counted all the cars in the street vs someone who guessed correctly. Or another example was “how do I know I was born from a woman”…..as this example ….I wouldn’t have memory of it yet believe it’s true ..enough to call it knowledge. I came away with understanding that there is experiential knowledge and then there is justified belief.

Ladislav Hancko

43w↑7

Alex Faulkner

Really like the philosophy and logic topic!

Drew D

A side trail on AI, human interactions, philosophy and knowledge:
I recall, probably badly recalling, one of Isaac Asimov’s short stories. In this, humanity built a computer and asked it the question, “What is the meaning of life?” The computer said that it could answer the question, but that it required more data. Every time the scientists asked the computer whether it knew the answer to the meaning of life, it responded that it required more data. The scientists, over the generations kept adding to and improving this computer. Eventually, the computer became so large, they built it in Hyperspace (a kind-of non-physical place that links places in physical space). Finally, when the last human had long since passed and the last star died, the computer finally acquired all the data it needed, but discovered it had no-one to report its answer to. So, the computer thought for a while and came up with a solution to this problem. Then the computer announced, “Let there be light.” Thereby setting up a circular recursive paradox into humanity's greatest philosophical quest and humanity's primary solution to being unable to answer that question.

orange site

2y↑1

Oh my God for the first time I am a 100 % proud of up and atom
She came faster than flash with her video❤️❤️

Hyperduality

Trond Knudsen

A very important topic! The world desperately needs more epistemology education!

granhermon2

Thanks Jade you made my day!

Up and Atom

2y↑1

thank you for watching!

John Chesterfield

2y↑6

A philosophy video? That’s new!

Up and Atom

2y↑2

trying it out :)

John Chesterfield

@Up and Atom Gave the video a like. Keep it up, I enjoy the nice change of pace! :)

Vigilant Cosmic Penguin

But, if you think about it, isn't every video a philosophy video?

Mikael Puusaari

The important question is: why was his name not Edmund Guessier?

If I think of it as "coincidence" instead of luck, for me it is easier to grasp since luck is a very abstract idea without a reason to believe in

A coincidence is only acoincidence until we know how to eliminate that specific coincidence

Though all coincidences can never be entirely eliminated since we will never be able to know all the coincidences that might happen until we know everything, and we will never be able to know what we don't know so we will never know if we know everything

Jonathan Chapple

I would say the 3rd option, where you have to prove that your knowledge isn't luck. But it's not as difficult as it appears, we would use a combination of boolean algebra mixed with some Bayes theorem. We wouldn't "know" knowledge, but the same way double blind control group testing in the pharmaceutical industry, you would be "confident" your knowledge is accurate, cause it went to reasonable lengths to exclude the possibility that it was a placebo(false positive)

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