Comment on Father sues Google, claiming Gemini chatbot drove son into fatal delusion

• sudoer777@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  It’s supposed to be isolated from outside contex to make that point clearer.

  Isolating it from context doesn’t make the point clearer though, it removes the point entirely. Those sentences mean absolutely nothing if you strip all context from them.

  If you did want to make them contradictory, you could put them in the context of math with some English-like properties, where “pray” is a constant and “may” requests a boolean answer, in which case that claim would be true. But we are talking about “spoken” English language, not mathematics, so this application isn’t relevant.

  Prayer is prayer in this context. No other meaning. There are no types of prayer in this particular sect, focus is irrelevant. Is it against God’s will to smoke while you pray? Can you answer that question, yes or no, based off the priest’s answers?

  There still has to be a clear context to assign meaning to “prayer” and the complexities of English grammar (both of which are subjective). Otherwise it just becomes like the trolley problem.

  The fact that the priest, parishioner, and the typical intended audience for this particular hypothetical don’t do the kind of analysis you’ve worked up here is really a large part of what this particular thought experiment is trying to illuminate, don’t you think?

  Actually they do do this kind of analysis but they don’t realize it. When they read the sentence, every bit of meaning they interpret from it is built off of decades of associating words, syntax, and verbal cues with meanings, all of which come from their own experiences dependent on their environment. Which means that different words and phrases have different meanings for different people, and while there are “standards” that most people speaking that language accept, even then there are still often significant differences among people following those standards and there is no objective meaning. Stripping that context would be similar to stopping those experiences away, or in other words asking the question to a baby.

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  • BranBucket@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I didn’t strip all context from the scenario. I defined the context. It’s just not the context you believe I should be using. You keep adding something that was never in my original post, then arguing against what you yourself added to try invalidate the exercise on the basis of your personal interpretation. Sorry, but that’s missing the point by a wide margin and I feel it’s a waste of time.

    Otherwise it becomes like the trolley problem.

    Yes. That is exactly what it’s meant to be like and precisely what I’ve been saying.

    Just like the trolley problem, it’s a self-contained thought exercise. But instead of illustrating a difficult ethical choice, it demonstrates a point about language shaping reasoning.

    There’s nothing to be won or lost by including outside context or narrowly defining the meaning of each word to prove what is or isn’t contradictory. This isn’t an argument over what the language means. Your personal interpretation of the language is irrelevant, it’s the priest and/or the smoker’s interpretation that matters. The singular point is for you to consider how and why their answer changes.

    If you believe their answer changes because they interpreted the meaning of those words differently due to the order in which they were given, that’s valid. If you believe, like I do, that the answer changes because their reasoning was shallow and contradictory, also valid. If you believe the answer didn’t change and the smoker misunderstood, once again, valid. What conclusion can we draw here, what’s common to all of these? They all show that changing the question changes our thought process and how we interpret meaning.

    If you dislike my example this much, create your own. It makes no difference to me.

    Just invent your own scenario where changes to the way a question is phrased leads a person to two different and contradictory conclusions, and use that example to examine how language can shape our reasoning. That’s all we need here. Digressions on language, meaning, Boolean logic, and speaking to infants only cloud the issue.

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    • sudoer777@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      There’s nothing to be won or lost by including outside context or narrowly defining the meaning of each word to prove what is or isn’t contradictory.

      You’re the one who’s been calling it contradictory.

      This isn’t an argument over what the language means.

      You said it was “contradictory” and “completely different” and implied it was not “rational”. The only way to prove that is to define what the language means.

      You keep adding something that was never in my original post, then arguing against what you yourself added to try invalidate the exercise on the basis of your personal interpretation.

      Your personal interpretation of the language is irrelevant, it’s the priest and/or the smoker’s interpretation that matters.

      You made up a scenario that can’t exist in real life by making each word only have one definition to the priest/smoker, not clarifying what definitions the priest/smoker have and what the grammar means to them, then asserting that they would answer the question differently based on your personal interpretation of the words (which you haven’t proved that they would based on their definitions of the words). It’s nonsense and doesn’t tell us anything about real-life behavior because the premise is flawed.

      Just like the trolley problem, it’s a self-contained thought exercise. But instead of illustrating a difficult ethical choice, it demonstrates a point about language shaping reasoning.

      In both cases, there is no conclusion due to the lack of context. That is their similarity.

      If you believe, like I do, that the answer changes because their reasoning was shallow and contradictory, also valid.

      You haven’t come up with a scenario that actually proves that.

      If you dislike my example this much, create your own.

      If we take your example, add in the context of an average English speaker but with the assumption that the religion only has one way to pray, the priest understands that smoking while praying is problematic, and the priest understands that praying while smoking is helpful, but has never put the two ideas together, then the answers would be contradictory. But that is because of a flawed thought pattern with different ideas being activated by the two different questions, not because the sentences are different.

      Take a priest who has put those ideas together. Then because the priest understood that praying while smoking is helpful, the priest’s religion is not strict about it, so the priest could logically assume non-strict definitions of the word “may” (because the strict definition doesn’t apply here) and that the main action of the sentence is mandatory, then give those responses as a ranking based on what is ideal so they aren’t contradictory.

      If the religion does strictly prohibit smoking and praying simultaneously, then the priest would only answer “yes” to either of those questions if they didn’t know or remember that fact, they were lying intentionally, or they were in a mentally unstable state that caused them to say “yes” for a different reason.

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      • BranBucket@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        One more time: We aren’t examining how the average English speaker would interpret this, only the reasons why the priest’s answer might change.

        This has been interesting. Good luck to you. =)

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