12/15/2017 The Liars Paradox Naturalized | Three Pound Brain

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The Liars Paradox Naturalized

by rsbakker

(h ps://rsbakker.les.wordpress.com/2017/12/liars-paradox.jpg)

Can the Liars Paradox be understood in a biologically consilient way?

Say what you will about Truth, everyone agrees that truth-talk has something to do with harmonizing
group orientations relative to group environments. Whenever we nd ourselves at odds either with one
another or our environments, we resort to the vocabulary of truth and rectitude. The question is what
this talk consists in and how it manages to do what it does.

The idea here is to steer clear presumptions of intentionality and look at the problem in the register
providing the most information: biomechanically. Whatever our orientation to our environments
consists in, everyone agrees that it is physical in some fundamental respect. Strokes are catastrophic for
good reason. So, lets stipulate that an orientation to an environment, in distinction to, say, a perspective
on an environment, consists of all physical (high-dimensional) facts underwriting our capacity to
behaviourally resolve environments in happy (system conserving) ways.

We all agree that causal histories underwrite communication and cognition, but we have no inkling as to
the details of that story, nor the details of the way we solve communicative and cognitive problems
absent those details. Heuristic neglect simply provides a way to understand this predicament at face
value. No one denies that human cognition neglects the natural facts of cognition; the problem is that
everyone presumes this fact has li le or no bearing on our a empts to solve the nature of cognition.
Even though our own intuitive access to our cognitive capacities, given the complexity of those
capacities, elides everything save what our ancestors needed to solve ancestral problems, most everyone
thinks that intuitive access, given the right interpretation, provides everything cognitive science needs to
solve cognitive scientic problems.

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It really is remarkable when you think about it. Out of sight, out of explanatory paradigm.

Beginning with orientations rather than perspectives allows us to radically reconceptualize a great many
traditional philosophical problematics in post-intentional terms. The manifest advantage of
orientations, theoretically speaking, lies in their environmental continuity, their mediocrity, the way they
comprise (unlike perspectives, meanings, norms, and so on) just more environment. Rather than look at
linguistic communication in terms of contents, the physical conveyance of ontologically inscrutable
meanings, we can understand it behaviouristically, as orientations impacting orientations via
specialized mechanisms, behaviours, and sensitivities. Rather than conceive the function of
communication intersubjectively, as the coordination of intentional black boxes, we can view it
biologically, as the formation of transient superordinate processes, ephemeral superorganisms, taking
individuals and their environments as component parts.

Granting that human communication consists in the harmonization of orientations relative to social and
natural environments amounts to granting that human communication is biological, that it, like every
other basic human capacity, possesses an evolutionary history. Human communication, in other words,
is in the business of providing economical solutions to various environmental problems.

This observation motivates a dreadfully consequential question: What is the most economical way for two
or more people to harmonize their environmental orientations? To communicate environmental
discrepancies, while taking preexisting harmonies for granted. I dont rehash my autobiography when I see
my friends, nor do I lecture them on the physiology of human cognition or the evolution of the human
species. I dish dirt. I bring everyone up to speed.

What if we were to look at language as primarily a discrepancy minimization device, as a system possessing
exquisite sensitivities (via, say, predictive processing) to the desynchronization of orientations?

In such a system, the suciency of preexisting harmoniesour shared physiology, location, and
trainingwould go without saying. I update my friends and they update me. The same can be said of
the system itself: the suciency of language, its biomechanical capacity to eect synchronization would
also go without sayingshort, that is, the detection of discrepancies. I update my friends and they
update me, and so long as everyone agrees, nary a word about truth need be spoken.

Taking a discrepancy view, in other words, elegantly explains why truth is the communicative default:
the economical thing is to neglect our harmonized orientationswhich is to say, to implicitly presume
their suciency. Its only when we question the suciency of these communications that truth-talk
comes into play.

Truth-talk, in other words, is typically triggered when communication observably fails to minimize
discrepancies, when operational suciency, for whatever reason, ceases to be automatically presumed.
Truth-talk harmonizes group orientations relative to group environments in cases of communicative
discrepancy, an incompatibility between updates, say.

Neglecting harmonies isnt simply economical, its also necessary, at least to the extent that humans have
only the most supercial access to the details of those harmonies. Its not that I dont bother lecturing my
ingroup on the physiology of human cognition and the evolution of the human species, its that,
ancestrally speaking, I have no way of doing so. I suer, as all humans suer, from medial neglect, an
inability to intuit the nature of my cognitive capacities, as well as frame neglect, an inability to put those
capacities in natural context.

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Neglecting the circumstances and constitution of verbal communication is a condition of verbal

communication. Speech is oblivious to its biological and historical conditions. Verbal communication
appears extensional, as the philosophers of language say, because we have no other way of cognizing it. We
have instances of speech and we have instances of the world, and we have no way of intuitively
fathoming the actual relations between. Luckily for us, if our orientations are suciently isomorphic, we
can communicateharmonize our orientationswithout fathoming these relations.

We can safely presume that the most frequent and demanding discrepancies will be environmental
discrepancies, those which, given otherwise convergent orientations (the same physiology, location, and
training), can be communicated absent contextual and constitutional information. If you and I share the
same general physiology, location, and training, then only environmental discrepancies require our
communicative a ention. Such discrepancies can be resolved while remaining almost entirely
performance blind. All I need do is trust your communication and cognition, build upon your
unfathomable relations the same blind way I build upon my own. You cry, Wolf! and I run for the
shotgun: our orientations converge.

The problem, of course, is that all communicative discrepancies amount to some insuciency in those
actual relations between. They require that we somehow fathom the unfathomable.

There is no understanding truth-talk without understanding that its in the fathoming the unfathomable
business. Truth-talk, in other words, resolves communicative discrepancies neglecting the natural facts
underwriting those discrepancies. Truth-talk is radically heuristic, insofar as it leverages solutions to
communicative problems absent information pertaining to the nature of those communicative problems.

So, to crib the example I gave in my recent Denne posts

(h ps://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2017/10/14/reading-from-bacteria-to-bach-and-back-ii-the-human-
squircle/): say you and I report seeing two dierent birds, a vulture versus an albatross, in circumstances
where such a determination potentially ma erslooking for a lost hunting party, say. An endless
number of frame and medial confounds could possibly explain the discrepancy between our
orientations. Perhaps I have bad eyesight, or I think albatrosses are black, or I was taught as much by an
ignorant father, or Im blinded by the glare of the sun, or Im suering schizophrenia, or Im drunk, or
Im just sick and tired of you being right all the time, or Im teasing you out of boredom, or more
insidiously, Im responsible for the loss of the hunting party, and want to prevent you from nding the
scene of my crime.

Theres no question that, despite neglect, certain forms of access and capacity regarding the enabling
dimension of cognition and communication could provide much in the way of problem resolution.
Given the inaccessibility and complexity of the factors involved, however, it follows that any capacity to
accommodate them will be heuristic in the extreme. This means that our cognitive capacity to
ag/troubleshoot issues of cognitive suciency will be retail, fractionate, geared to dierent kinds of
manifest problems:

Given the topological dependence of our orientations, capacities to solve for positional suciency.
Trump is peering through a keyhole.
Given the environmental sensory dependence of our orientations, capacity to solve for the suciency
of environmental conditions. Trump is wandering in the dark.
Given the physiological sensory dependence of our orientations, capacities to solve for physiological
suciency. Trump is myopic.

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Given the communal interdependence of our orientations, capacities to solve for social suciency, or
trust. Trump is a notorious liar.
Given the experiential dependence of our orientations, capacities to solve for epistemic suciency.
Trump has no government experience whatsoever.
Given the linearity of verbal communication, capacities to solve for combinatorial or syntactic
suciency. Trump said the exact opposite this morning.

Its worth pausing here, I think, to acknowledge the way this radically spare approach to truth-talk
provides ingress to any number of philosophical discourses on the nature of Truth. Heuristic Neglect
Theory allows us to see just why Truth has so thoroughly confounded humanity despite millennia of
ardent inquiry.

The apparent extensionality of language, the way u erances and environments covary, is an artifact of
frame and medial neglect. Once again, we are oblivious to the astronomical complexities, all the buzzing
biology, responsible for the systematic relations between our u erances and our environments. We
detect discrepancies with those relations, in other words, without detecting the relations themselves.
Since truth-talk ministers to these breakdowns in an otherwise inexplicable covariance, correspondence
strikes many as a natural way to dene Truth. With circumstantial and enabling factors out of view, it
appears as though the environment itself sorts our u erancesprovides truth conditions.

Given the abject inability to agree on any formulation of this apparently more than natural
correspondence, the turn to circumstantial and enabling factors was inevitable. Perhaps Truth is a mere
syntactic device, a bridge between mention and use. After all, we generally only say X is true when
saying X is disputed. Or perhaps Truth is a social artifact of some description, something conceded to
u erances in games of giving and asking for reasons. After all, we generally engage in truth-talk only
when resolving disputes with others. Perhaps Truth doesnt so much turn on truth conditions as
assertion conditions.

The heuristic neglect approach allows us to make sense of why these explanatory angles make the
apparent sense they do, why, like the blind swamis and the elephant, each confuses some part for some
chimerical whole. Neglecting the machinery of discrepancy minimization not only strands reection
with a strategic sliver of a far more complicated process, it generates the presumption that this sliver is
somehow self-sucient and whole.

Se ing the ontological truth of Truth aside, the fact remains that truth-talk leverages life-saving
determinations on the neural cheap. This economy turns on ignoring everything that makes truth-talk
possible. The intractable nature of circumstantial and enabling factors enforces frame and medial
neglect, imposing what might be called qualication costs on the resolution of communicative
discrepancies. IGNORE THE MEDIAL is therefore the baseline heuristic governing truth-talk: we
automatically externalize because, ancestrally at least, our communicative problems did not require cognitive
science to solve.

Of course, as a communicative heuristic, IGNORE THE MEDIAL possesses a problem-ecology, which is

to say, limits to its applicability. What philosophers, mistaking a useful incapacity for a magical capacity,
call aboutness or directedness or subjectivity, is only useful so far.

As the name suggests, IGNORE THE MEDIAL will crash when applied to problems where
circumstantial and/or enabling factors either are not or cannot be ignored.

We nd this most famously, I think, in the Liars Paradox:

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The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence is false.

Truth-talk pertains to the neglected suciency of orientations relative to ongoing natural and social
environments. Collective noise reduction is the whole point. As a component in a discrepancy
minimization system, truth-talk is in the business of restoring positional and source neglect, our implicit
view from nowhere, allowing (or not) u erances originally sourced to an individual performance to
update the tacit orientations of everyoneto purge discrepancies and restore synchronization.

Self-reference rather obviously undermines this natural function.

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PUBLISHED: December 15, 2017 (2017-12-15T10:50:42+0000)

FILED UNDER: PHILOSOPHY
TAGS: eliminativism : Heuristic Neglect Theory : liar's paradox : semantics : truth

One Comment to The Liars Paradox Naturalized

dmf says:
December 15, 2017 at 6:05 pm

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Gary Marcus - Arti cial General Intelligence: Why Aren't W

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