Tim Scarfe: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think behaviourism is it has a bad name, but it's not that discontinuous with a lot of thinking which is sort of normal and still acceptable insights, which is to treat things as black boxes. This is precisely what the behaviorist said. It's like, the mind is opaque, it's hidden within the walls of someone else's individual subjectivity. As scientists, all we know are the inputs and the outputs, and we'll just track those. And that's like a version of what you just said if, well, if the inputs and the outputs, the behavior of this system are looking like what we know to be a conscious system elsewhere, well, let's just treat them as all of the same class of objects given that the only available information is the inputs and outputs. I think that kind of reasoning can be fine in certain contexts, but it's a philosophical leap to say that access that we have to our own thoughts and the presence or absence of subjectivity that we're aware of with other people is irrelevant to making these decisions or judgments about what other kinds of systems can have consciousness. So I think it's much too quick to just go behaviorist and say, well, there's no relevant difference between x and y, even if 1 is a person, 1 is a machine, just because we can say that there's some similarities in inputs and outputs. I think if I remember correctly, at 1 point you drew an imaginary kind of graph where you said on 1 axis we have science realism, which is where our scientific theories actually represent things in the world, then we have empiricism, is the idea that facts we receive tell us something about the world. And then there's this more interesting access, which I think you're very inspired by, which is this kind of constructivist idea. Right, yeah. Can you explain that? Yeah, so the constructivist path, sort of, which is different from the scientific realist and empiricist 1, sort of really runs with the idea that we are active makers of knowledge. It shouldn't be confused with the kind of constructivism that we have in some kind of, like, more extreme branches of sociology of knowledge which say that all scientific theories are social constructs and not constrained by phenomena that have been observed in nature. So it's So I'm not saying that scientific theories are merely constructed in the way that like poems could be a work of imagination and so forth. But the idea is that there's this interactivity between humans, groups of scientists, their plans as epistemic agents going out into the world with an agenda to find stuff out about certain phenomena in order to achieve certain goals, often technological, applied science goals, and there's some pushback from the things in nature themselves that they're investigating. But the idea that knowledge is always the product of this interactivity, so we cannot discount that there is a human framing side to this. We can't go along with this idea that a scientific theory is just like reading off the source code of the universe as if the human way of conceptualizing those phenomena had no bearing on the theory as it ultimately turns out. But we also can't discount that the theory that arises is constrained by how things happen to be that is worked out through that process of experimental interaction.…

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