[Talk] Creating the contexts needed to produce the concepts needed to understand minds

I gave a talk on 20 Feb 2024 in the PIBBSS speaker series. It's a talk version of "A hermeneutic net for agency".

Here's the talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZaxlegV90w

Here's the discussion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vznEzOCAmho

Abstract:

We are fundamentally confused about minds, and about what about a mind determines what about the world. Our concepts don't automatically support the inferences and design choices we would like to make using those concepts, and there are strong forces that will break weak supports. Drive-by attempts to rework one or a few concepts in isolation don't work. Minds are too big and structurally entangled within themselves to centrally unravel with a reductionist piecemeal method. The relevance of the most relevant mental elements is essentially provisional and requires the full context of a mind to be understood. The only source of useable data about minds and their intentions is our own minds. Within the context of our own minds and our familiarity with our own minds, we can maybe ask a network of questions that would induce ourselves to understand ourselves better enough——better enough that we could then understand how we could understand aliener minds well enough to design them to have agreeable intentions. We can't survive while being as horrified as we are to try understanding how we work.

Here are the slides: