So what I, what I thought I would do today, I didn't know the tenants is a lot lower than I thought it would be. I thought we'd at least talk through some of the ideas that we had from and say we, the last time we had like a real meeting was probably the middle of an inner September right before a lot of the conferences and events started kind of taking away a lot more time from people so these items over here on the left were the things that we had talked about, no kind of network extensions for no policy for CNI. Maybe looking at like extensions for like routes within cloud native specific capabilities that maybe above the CNI layer. We had kind of talked about, you know, you have the interface and you have sort of things above that interface and routes seem to fit that category and other things might fit that category as well. We talked about several low balancing IPv6 DNS service chaining slash sharing of you know how you can you discover these services how do you sort of define network services and how they can work together. Especially there's like a dependency need there. And then things like you know service mesh and network observability were topics that we we touched on as things that really hadn't been defined very clearly for for cloud native use cases so I kind of thought we'd start with these items and you know we can add other items to this if we wanted to or we could just sort of start with, you know, trying to, you know at the next meeting, maybe taking a couple of these and trying to define what we'd want to do within within our environment, you know within this work group to address these are a few others, you know, yes, when the serverless works we came up with kind of a landscape for serverless and I didn't know if within the network land within our cloud native landscape today we have networking as a category but I don't know if that's really the thing that we want to define the network for cloud native right sort of a bunch of network vendors right now, you know, and their projects in there. So this is just like a question I'm not saying we have to do something that was something I thought about was sort of looking at network from different areas kind of like serverless did. So, we also did like a white paper in serverless to kind of talk about what that means in terms of cloud native and I don't know if it makes sense to have a white paper sort of white papers around networking and cloud native on what that means. Yeah, I'm enthused by both by nearly all of these to help brainstorm a bit and reinforce the network landscape. It's been, I just popped the link over in zoom and it's it's been maybe 18 months or so about a year and a half ago or more. The CNCF staff had asked for me to put together a perspective on at the time it was container networking and it was to help facilitate a panel. I think it was an ONIF a panel there. And part of that was I actually called out the cloud native landscape at the time. And yeah, I think that was pre serverless landscape was pre sort of sub landscape if you will. And to make it simple and based on the time that I had, I tried to characterize and contrast for prominent projects. At least, at least back then, and it was yet to help at the time it was to help facilitate a discussion and a panel and. I'm just brainstorming out loud about the possibility of a net, you know, like a networking landscape. Right. Yeah, it actually if you think about that landscape actually if a landscape was defined it might actually even help describe some of the other cards that you have there. Because you can imagine it in a networking landscape if we've got categories here, you know, right now it's application and application definition and development orchestration or management on this landscape but pre networking when it might be security, observability, management, routing, you know server load balancing routing, you know, it might be API gateways that might be because network as a term and as a space covers. In some respects, unfortunately, like, well I guess, I was gonna say it covers some of the same things that are on like the ones that are highlighted actually are. No, no, no, but there's many that are networking related on this landscape even this old version here. Right. We certainly list some of the same projects there. I don't think that even that I think kind of helps right because it shows it kind of shows what's in scope for what group versus what's covered by other areas, you know. Yeah, right. Right. This is from the standpoint of, you know, with with Kubernetes having SIGs now, and they have a network SIG, I was kind of thinking of, you know, what's our purpose in this ecosystem? You know, we doing the same thing as a Kubernetes SIG should we join forces with them. And then the more I thought about the more I thought about, you know what, you know, the Kubernetes is very focused on Kubernetes and we're supposed to be more focused on the cloud native landscape principles or what what it means to go towards cloud native right and we're from a user standpoint I think. And so I can't thought, you know, maybe we, you know, we highlight where the Kubernetes SIG fits into this but we don't try to address any other things that they're trying to address or we maybe have requirements that we have to submit to that SIG to address some of the needs from the user community right. I agree. I agree. I agree that in the past they've been confusing with people to raise it up that the challenge from my perspective and responding to that question was that it was undeniable that the net of the communities networking SIG was a greater center of gravity than, than this working group was areas, I think, I think with organization like this and discussion, I think we can change some of that. And to your point, like, yeah, hey, there are things there are concerns in areas to address that are well beyond Kubernetes and things that are, you know, certainly of concern to end users and to vendors. There's, you know, between hybrid things work well, you know, Kubernetes on-prem, Kubernetes running as a service. The networking between those, there's a number of, like, like ingress controllers is kind of a good example. Like, it's something that certainly the Kubernetes focuses on in terms of their networking SIG, but there's a number of projects within there. How do those relate to each other? Maybe they should be laid out on a landscape. You know, something of, it's been interesting to reflect on why a project like Envoy took off as well as it has in comparison to something like NGNX or traffic. And there's a couple of, and it's not that we need to go get into politics. That's not the point being like highlighting, here's why this, here's where the cloud native aspect of this project has helped it see much more adoption in these environments. And I think a white paper that discusses some of that is of interest. I recently recently pulled out a report through O'Reilly on service mesh and some of what I'm talking about was spoken to in there. I think, yeah, it's kind of fun. It's kind of interesting because this working group, like it could have so much to discuss of these topics. Do you know, so Core DNS as an example, I'm assuming that I haven't been involved in that group, but I'm assuming they've got some other community where they meet within. But maybe, maybe that, sorry, I'm just ripping here, but maybe that's what a card to put on here is potentially, like you'd said, going over to the Kubernetes segment and submitting some things to that, or actually going over to those other projects like Core DNS, or Envoy, or Istio, or, you know, or what Calico and et cetera. And we've had a couple of them present, but maybe one of the themes, one of the backlog items is something of a regular cadence of the presentations from that and kind of where they're going. Yeah, I was thinking about that too. That's a good way to, I didn't have a way to define, but that's something that's a perfect way to define it. I think the value to them is feedback, exposure. I mean, conceptually, if there were enough folks that were attending these working group meetings, I think it wouldn't be valuable to them, the exposure to feedback that. I think so too. And I think once the, like the end user community is getting a little bit more, it's getting a regular meeting cadence, not going to present to them in an upcoming event, you know, a meeting to kind of say, you know, some of the workloads we have today, we love participation from end user community and things that you're trying to solve or problems you're facing in the network area. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, for MasterCard standpoint, we have several things that I was going to, you know, bring up, but I'm sure that there's other other industries with other issues and concerns are trying to solve. I want to reflect for a moment and give ourselves some credit with respect to trying to help the industry address. One thing that pops to mind address some serious contention around the adoption of CNI between Swarm and Kubernetes back when that was, you know, back when that war was raging. And so yeah, this is an excellent vendor neutral forum for, you know, for this discussion. Yeah, I think there's, it's interesting in the certain when we, when we collaborated on the serverless white paper and we, you know, part of it was like defining what is serverless. I mean, what does that mean. I mean, interestingly, and I don't blame anyone for it, but the service match as a buzzword, you know, everyone wants to, well, most want to rub a bit of that buzzword love on their project. And their project may or may not actually be a service match. Right. In a white paper, you know, maybe suggest that we're laying it down in the description for qualifications of what it is to be. I am concerned. I'm interested. I'm very pleased to see that you're doing this. I'm happy for having this discussion because I'm concerned that as we go to define, as we go to reform working groups and define cities that the question of what what these things should be created and the reflection of how active or inactive this group has been. Right. People might suggest what well hey, no one cares about networking. But the fact of the matter is, there's a suggestion that there's an observability see as like an example of when to be created. It's like, well look, anymore in cloud native land in this distributed systems environment, observability, half of that is about the network. The other half is, you know, in app APM. I think there's so many things that we could be discussing within here and observability being, you know, or a portion of observability certainly being one of security is another set of the whole as a genre of topics that might be a backlog item. So, you know, the, you know, so tag era and Calico and some of the things they wrap around it. You know how they hooked in with to raise security policy and I don't know that they've ever spoken to that in depth, or some of the other projects apparatus. Some of the other scenes yet sober members that they're good ones to also go to and have them have them point to some of the things that they're doing. I mentioned them because they're apparatus security center as well. Right. No, definitely. And I, I, I thought about adding some of the, I don't know if I put no security. I thought about putting no security at that. You know, these days are so tied together. It's hard to kind of, you know, separate them out and they've been looking like he said, you know, with those ability point they've been thinking about the same thing with the security or the safe work group right and I think there's, there's some overlap things that we should be kind of careful not to move into because it's, you want to have too many work groups trying to address the problem from different angles right you're kind of sort of identify where it belongs and stick it in the right place. I kind of move this cloud native just so you know before we continue, you know, brainstorm and move this cloud in the landscape over to our current current spread because I think if we define that that landscape and those those categories up front that will help with sort of where we put these other items and what we do with them so That makes a lot of sense. I like how you qualified security is network security to your point about, say, another, you know, network accessibility. I don't think you were able to make the meeting. We talked with, you know, I forgot his name, the guy from Cisco that's doing the network service mesh stuff. Ed, yeah, Ed wonky. So we talked with Ed. And, you know, they're, they're kind of going down I guess the, I forgot which standards by them they're trying to go down like a standards body approach with that and so they didn't seem interested in like, you know, putting that into the cloud native landscape and it's so specialized for like so survivors I don't really know if it would be a good fit. And since we're more focusing on cloud native users I believe then network providers right so we kind of left that off but we can definitely open that back up to discussion as well as as the year goes on and get updates at least from them on nothing else right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah updates would be nice because it may be the case that there are some facets of what they're doing that are, yeah, the service provider land is, yeah, I mean I as you know, I'm telling you things you know but yeah, significantly different can be from enterprise land. You know, much of the, much of the focus of the CNC app has been enterprise end user. Right. It is, and this is one of those things that they. Yeah, so they've got network service mesh.io as their landing page to discuss it. I actually thought that that program was somewhat represented in a different Linux foundation group like the FDIO. I thought that they were, or the open networking front was the open IF. I thought they were already sort of friendly with the different Linux foundation. Yeah, I think they are too. I remember from like, were you at KubeCon? No, yeah, you were there. We just couldn't catch up with each other. They had their own little like work stream across the street in that building right where they were doing sort of a bunch of sessions on network service mesh and the ONIF aspects right so. Yeah, Ed is actually here in Austin. He keeps asking to go to, and I keep wanting to but not making it. There's some axe throwing, axe throwing that happens here in Austin. Yeah, I would not want to be at throwing an axe at it, I don't think. I'm excited talking about. Yeah, he uses his hands quite a bit when he talks so. I figured, I'll do this. Anita, if you're on the call and you're able to, you know, we're just kind of brainstorming mode here so if you've got comments or thoughts about some of the topics that are being suggested. Anita, I don't know if you can hear. Yeah, you can. Yeah, I can hear you. Hi. I'm actually, I work for a company called RXM, we're a training and consulting firm and I'm a little bit more of an operationalist person. But we didn't notice that, you know, we were trying to be really active and participate in a lot of the groups, which is why I'm sitting on here. Some of the more technical guys are doing a little bit working, but I was just hoping to get like the others to know. Get word back to them. Yeah. But I would be happy to see if they had any feedback that I could send along for guys this way as well. Actually, yeah, I don't know if this resonates with you or not, but I think in part what Ken was describing previously in and around the white paper or one or more white papers was a bit of best practices and guidance toward operations and cloud-native networks or networks running cloud-native workflows. Maybe some of your guys' expertise or questions might be well placed within that. Yeah, definitely. Another thing I thought about when you were saying that Anita is that the, you know, we have a couple of like Kubernetes certifications that the Linux Foundation has been doing and I'm sure, you know, Cisco has already added to the, you know, CCE and P and CTI, some cloud things, right? Kind of, you know, I've been thinking longer term, you know, with this workgroup, what sort of changes we want to add to the training areas for kind of what the network, because I know here at MasterCard we have a lot of really strong networking admins, right? You know, we move towards cloud-native that the skillset needs have greatly changed, right? And so, you know, kind of identify what those changes are, something that might be interesting for this workgroup to say, you know, whether it's in the white paper, if it's in, you know, something more formal like the certification work that the Linux Foundation is doing around Kubernetes, I think having some information about networking in this new cloud-native world makes a lot of sense. And then, Anita, maybe if you could, you know, say it again or the organization that you're with, you've said it. Oh, I'm sorry, RXM? Oh, okay. Oh, right. Okay. Yeah, we're a silver level member. Yeah. Yeah.  Are you treating the network as, you know, infrastructure as code, or what was it? What about for you guys? I guess I realize, as you see that term, I'm sitting in a technical group that I should have thought about. I'm more of like an operational, like, an administrative operational. I'm not sure, yeah. I have, like, a vague awareness of the space, but I'm not sure that I could speak in a way that's super informative about the kind of troubles that the more technical people are going through. But I would be glad if you guys, I'm not sure if I had your guys' emails, but I'd be glad to gather some of that feedback and pass it along. Yeah, very good. Yeah. And it was unfair, but it totally puts you on the spot on that. It's just Ken and I, so we're okay. But there's my email address there. I'm generally interested toward trying to help Ken outline what it is that he thinks that we should be focused on. Yeah, I just, whether it's a description of, like, the environment you guys are within and stuff that's causing you pain or things that you think that you've mastered or maybe you guys had best practices you've come up with already. I popped over a link to a free tool that my group at SolarWinds have created, and as something that might be beneficial to you or might not, feedback in a way would be interesting. Ken, there's another thought. I think to the extent that it's just the three of us, I'll pop over a link as well to speak, that will explain a little bit more about the project that I'd messaged and Nina, you know, the earlier one that we were talking about? Yeah, I put about mastery. Okay. I'm not sure where I heard about that, but I heard about that. Yeah. It's not in a, it's in a premature state. I think we are the, I forgot to pop over a link just as we were talking about kind of, you know, free tools and that's the intention behind it is to help educate people and also help answer like the most popular question. The question that I for sure get, and I've gotten, I've given like five service mesh workshops on this year, you know, KubeCon, the Dockercons, the velocities, every time somebody raises their hand and it's like, hey, so that's really neat and the service mesh provides a lot of value. What, what's the cost? Like you don't get it, you don't get all this for free. What's the overhead of running something on the mesh? And Envoy, and it's kind of, I think the question is asked at two layers, the control plane and at the data plane. I think most people are thinking about the data plane and having to process all those packets. And Envoy being the most prominent proxy there that's processing all these packets. And Envoy project itself, their documentation says we don't publish performance statistics because it's a subject or it can be a hard thing to, because it's, you've got to couch it within this environment at this time, running on this hardware, using this application. But it's still just an open, people have the question and, and so I was considering, you know, working toward the metric to help provide something of a tool that the industry can go to, to do, to run across different measures and help them, you know, more than just producing reports, maybe help them load test their particular deployment or benchmark when they've done a deployment, if it's, if it's okay, if it's good, if it's matching with others, maybe, you know, get some potentially people want to send in their reports to then have an anonymized, you know, collective information that says, you know, here's, here's the average speed by which, you know, the average overhead of the different deployments and things like this, kind of the thoughts behind that but I guess then you can going back to the cognitive network landscape that that makes perfect sense to me is like the starting point for trying to define the categories. I thought about throwing like the white paper over there, but I think we'll start with just the landscape to kind of define the categories and then it would make sense where we want to do a white paper at right. Right. So going to have that drive the next steps for it seems like the right first step. So I would document this up. I'll try to create like a blank template for that with some thoughts in it and then send that out today or tomorrow to the work group email list. Oh, nice. Okay. Hopefully you're on that list if you're not, you know, you. Hopefully you'll be able to join, join that list then, or some of your companies on that list from the team and then we can definitely would be looking for feedback over the next couple of weeks before we meet again in two weeks. I think we meet every two weeks. I'm not sure I'm on the list, but I'll double check. Yeah, I'll double check with Taylor. Sure. If not, you can just have you guys send us thoughts on on a landscape categories that would make sense from their standpoint, you know, Definitely. And I can't I'm pretty sure you know this already but the land, yeah, the current landscape is, you know, the interactive one is now, you know, it's open source project and one can be forked and right. Yep. Yeah, definitely come tonight plan on doing if once we get some traction behind this. I don't know why I keep changing that default but it doesn't ever change. All right. Thanks for joining today so I try to want more of us. Thanks for joining but I guess that's not this in email today and then announced the next meeting and then I mean mind everyone a few days before then we'll try to take this to maybe get hub. We kind of document and discuss your network landscape and do it kind of in the public domain that way it has, you know, more visibility on it from the overall CNCF community. Yeah, I mean we've made garnered some additional interest. 29 is our next one then. Correct. Okay.  So there's no huge rush on my side. Okay. I'm glad for the pressure. I want the project.  The urgent always takes over the strategic. Let's plan to be tactical. Let's strategize. All right, cool. You guys have a great rest of your days. Take care. All right.


Good morning, so today we're moving on with Dretschke's spin on the causal theory of representation and There's a really big gap in the way. We've discussed the causal theory so far. We've looked at How different types of causal chain might be important for reference, but we haven't really got to Why those causal chains should be setting standards of right and wrong for our representations? And that's where Dretschke's account comes in but before we go on to the Dretschke I want to add a couple of footnotes to the stuff we were discussing last time One reason is that five minutes After the lecture last time. I suddenly thought of a much better way of putting the thing about the skeptic strikes back And so I want to spend just a couple of minutes Doing that and the other thing is that In office hours someone raised a question about that I Thought put things in a very helpful way. It hadn't occurred to me to put them in that way So I want to just work over this way. I mean someone in office hours said to me So someone said to me look what's so puzzling about this class is Knowing what's inside the mind and what's outside the mind so you start out thinking well here You have your mind with all its thoughts Out there is the world with all the objects causing things to happen inside your mind And then you think well, okay That seems like the sensible picture. So what's in your mind includes all the thoughts you're having? Yeah, that's all right to it. And then the stuff out there is causing you to have those thoughts and Then you think well, I have a causal theory of reference So that means that which objects are thinking about So it is part of my thoughts. It's which objects are causing my thoughts that makes them the thoughts they are Right, they wouldn't be the same thoughts if it was different objects. The objects have really become constituents of the thoughts Follow me very closely here This is I think this is probably a way to put the most confusing thing about the single Tell me if I'm right about this. There might be lots more confusing things, but then you think well So that's not really the right picture here The what happens is that the thoughts? Encompass the causal chain from object to term So the objects are really there as constituents of your thoughts the objects are literally in your mind And that's where these puzzles about How you have knowledge of your own mind how you know whether you're thinking These come up once you have this kind of picture So what's happened is that you start out thinking of the mind as confined to the head the mind is over here And then you realize that once you've got a causal account of representation The mind is stretching out to encompass Various aspects of the world So you start out thinking my mind is your mind is over here with your brain right, but then you think no I'm looking at that projector say and so my mind Reaches out to and encompasses the projector the projector is a constituent of my mind yes, and Because you're fallible about whether the projectors there or you might make a mistake about whether it's the same projector twice You get that kind of uncertainty about the contents of your own mind now Putting it like this might make it sound like idealism Because it makes it sound like the objects that you started out thinking of as regular tables and chairs concrete objects Independent of you. They're actually just constituents of your mind, but that's not the picture It's rather that look as you can see if you take the mind away The objects are still there Right as I demonstrated that right so The objects aren't sensations or something like that the objects are just the regular Concrete tables and chairs and so on so you start out thinking The objects are out there external to my mind causing thoughts, and then you think well What is it for a thought to be the thought it is well that depends on? Which objects are causally affecting my use of terms And so my mind now when you look at a star when you are thinking about Sirius be Your mind has stretched all the way to Sirius be has looped in and is encompassing it So one thing that is so puzzling about the the class so far I think is partly it's partly just that picture that The world has a stretched out to encompass objects where your natural picture as well It's just confined to your head, but of course that talk about the spatial boundaries of the mind It doesn't make much sense anyhow But if you but if you do think in terms of the spatial boundaries of the mind You have to think over a stretching out to encompass the environment Which is not to say the environments Depends on you might as I say it was someone in office hours who raised this question and I Think part of what's still puzzling if you've got this picture If you get to this picture is look that What's going on is that there's this stuff in your mind and then the object causes stuff The external object causes stuff to happen in your mind and now the external object is a constituent of your mind How did that happen? Just having a causal connect you get something in your mind over here Something causes you something in your mind and that's what actually gets into your mind But that seems a bit a bit sudden a bit intimate Just an account of a causal connection You see what I mean? And I think something like that is Is that so let me just ask you When this was raised I thought that that actually is probably what is confusing about where we have got to That the question how can something just being causally connected to what's inside your mind a term or an image or something How can that be enough to bring the object itself inside your mind? It might be a bit too early for this, but Kind of just ask does that have resonance for any of you does that catch It's something that you find puzzling about the class Yes Yes, right Right That's right Right, but that's a thing that is that is that I think that is the natural picture There's something out there that caused a change in your mind, right? But the thing is you couldn't have the thoughts you're having Unless those objects were causing You to have those to use the terms or have the images that you are having yep They wouldn't you wouldn't be having the same thoughts if it wasn't the same objects The same water the same people the same goodle or whatever it is. Yeah, you couldn't be having those thoughts without the objects So the objects themselves are part of what's making your mind have the psychological states in it that it does So that your mind actually depends on the existence of the objects That's where these dramatic conclusions like we you don't know whether you're thinking or You don't know whether you're having the same thoughts again. That's what makes these dramatic conclusions possible Yeah And the puzzling so I think that's in itself a little bit to take on board But I think the key thing that's puzzling is just how can something merely been causally connected to what's in your mind? Bring that thing into your mind So there isn't an answer at the back of the book for this GSIs I think this is where current discussion of these topics really is I mean something like this is so if you're finding it puzzling That's fine. There are literally thousands of philosophers at the moment to find this puzzling. Yeah Because the arguments that lead us to this position seem individually very compelling But it is a difficult situation to understand and what I was saying What I was suggesting last time is that suppose you think Not just of causation, but of consciousness Suppose you think not just of the object acting on you, but you experiencing the object So to be seeing the table The table has to be causally acting on you all right, but your experience of say the color purple the There's more to it than just the causation Or it is a very special kind of position and if you think of thought as Depending not just on a causal link, but on your experience of the object will experience of the object See if you think of it as a relation You can that helps it seems to me to see how experience could be something that really does Bring the object inside your mind for you to think about it but If you're puzzled about this, that's fine. This is genuinely puzzling if you see what I mean It's not that you're not understanding. It's that it really is difficult But it's hard for me to do it's probably hard for you to to make the distinction between finding it puzzling because it in itself Is puzzling and finding it puzzling because you haven't really understood what's going on I Sorry, can you do that louder? You find it hard to understand. Yeah, yeah sunburn. Yeah, it's not right Yes Right The Sun's not there in the bottom, but it wouldn't be sunburn unless the Sun had caused it.  I just think well, I'm not sure of that sunburn or not Yeah So there's something there's the intrinsic what's happened intrinsically to all the cells Yeah, and then there's a cause and you can know about the nature of the damage to your skin Without knowing its cause Yeah, the thing about your thoughts is You know, if you think of your thoughts as like Sunburn, yeah, so whether it's a thought about Google Well, you know what it isn't intrinsically, right? You look inside your mind you think well, I'm having a thought here and if the sunburn analogy is correct You'd be looking at this damaged the analog of your dad this damage to your skin Yeah, so you say well look at the damage to my skin and I say well there's damage to my skin All right, I wonder if it's sunburn. I wonder if the Sun caused that so you look inside your mind And you see a thought and you see I've got a thought here. I wonder who it's about Maybe it's about good. Oh You see what I mean The trouble is to see what the analog is of the intrinsic damage to the skin because when you look at your thoughts Well, you just seem to get the whole thing You see what I mean If you get anything you could be mistaken about whether you're having a thought Yes, that's right. You could be you could be I'm sorry. I think I'm not hearing quite right You could be disturbed. You could be puzzled about whether it's actually a thought about good or someone else Yeah, I actually had this at a party the other night. I was talking to someone after a bit I had to say to him. You're not thinking of me. You're thinking of Simon Yeah, you so yeah You think you're thinking about one person, but actually you think that can happen But it's it's kind of a special case and it's not really the analog of sunburn is a thing There's not something it's hard to know what's the invariant thing is like the intrinsic nature of the sunburn Right, that's true That's true. Yeah Okay, I See that I see the idea. Yeah Anything else? This was trying to catch what I thought you guys might be finding puzzling So I should just kind of put your hand up if that catches something you found puzzling. I'd really be curious three Okay, can you put your hand up if that seems fairly straightforward what I just said? Okay, okay five Can you put your hand up if you none of this stuff ever occurred to you, but it is extremely puzzling that Okay, six, okay, there's a large volume of abstentions here Okay, you can plead the fifth amendment Okay, so let me tell you the way I thought of putting the revenge of the skeptic last time Which was Normal if the world is the way we think it is then There's the underlying physical reality and the medium-sized world is kind of sitting on top of that in some way It's Jenna all that all that medium-sized world out there is Generated by the underlying physics and then we come along and we encounter this medium-sized world in experience And and the puzzle of the brain in the vat is It could be as we think it is that there's a physical reality out there that supports a medium-sized world And that's what's generating our thoughts and we're thinking about that medium-sized reality or it could be As it is in the brain in a vat scenario where there's the physics of the vat tending machinery But in a way, that's really a basic physics is not actually supporting Anything like the medium-sized world that we ordinarily think in terms of so in both cases We've got a causal story here in both case in one case That causal story is enabling us to think about a medium-sized world and we know what it's like in the other case The thoughts are simply enabling you to think about an alien world where you have no conception of what it's like And the skeptics point is you can't tell just by inner reflection as Dylan just said you can't tell just by inner reflection Which scenario you're in So that's a skeptic striking back At the time, I thought this is a much better way of putting it than I had last week, but um, that's not So the picture I'm suggesting I mean I Think this helps with the puzzles here just to try and draw this together is to say that your thoughts Depend on experience of that medium-sized reality that experience tells you what the world out there is like if you're in the good case then all that medium-sized stuff out there is causing you to have the thoughts that you do all That's happening inside your mind The skeptics point is You might be wrong. You might you could make a mistake about what kind of world you're in but it's Experience of the stuff out there that brings the medium-sized world into your mind so that's how I think we can sort it out, but I'm This is a very confusing set of issues and each must find his own path Okay, I seem to be ending every topic in a kind of whittle of confusion Let's let's move on Okay Unless there are any questions in that okay Dreschke's idea is that we can amp up the causal theory a bit by thinking about As models of most primitive kinds of representation the kind of representation that you find in meters and gauges These aren't usually taken these aren't what would first occur to you as models for the most primitive kinds of representation They seem a little bit fancy You know they seem like complex products that we generate rather than the most primitive kinds of representation But Dreschke has a wonderful idea as to How you might use them as a model for all representation? So remember what the general problem was that we started the class with the problem was how do we say what a language is? How do we characterize what's distinctive of language and I said well? it's something that a sentence is in its think the sentences that are capable of being true or false and So you've got Sentences made up out of bits and pieces that can be recombined with each other and lots of different ways But always so as to generate things that are capable of truth or falsity And the meaning of a statement is the way the world has to be for that statement to be true Now the thing about that is the puzzling thing about that is most of the physical world isn't governed by standards of correctness out there in the physical world you have the movements of the planets you have Electrons are whirling around atom in atoms You have the world governed by all these laws you have lots of causation in the physical world independent of the mind Mercury can be pulled from its orbit by other planets, but if Mercury pulls away from its planets Nobody says oh look Mercury made a mistake There goes Mercury again wobbling off its path Right, I mean you've got a system of causal relations here, but you don't have right and wrong So what's happening with humans is that we ourselves are just made up of lots of atoms governed by general laws There's lots of causation here We are causally affected by each other by the by the external objects around us and so on But no amount of simply being causally affected by other things It's of itself Generates standards of right and wrong So that's a really fundamental problem for the causal theory the causal theory just says look here's a whole stack of causal connections that humans stand into you've got causation that's that you the dominant source or You're differentially sensitive to the various characteristics of the object all these different aspects of causation that we talked about But how can any amount of that stuff stack up to us getting things right or wrong? And once you take it for granted that we do have a language Then you can understand how to set up standards of right and wrong Once you have a language you can set up laws you can set up the rules of games You can set up parking regulations You can it's very easy once you've got a language to set up for the regulations the ceremony What's going to count as right or wrong? But how does it happen in the first place that you get your primitive language? In which their standards are right and wrong the causal theory says well, it's causation that's doing it But how can it be causation that's doing it most of the physical world is governed by causation without having standards of right and wrong So if you take it for granted that you're capable of thinking then you can do that You could say well language depends on thinking but then the basic question is how are there standards are right and wrong for thinking? I said I think I said ages ago Anybody's first thought when they think about how language works is whether it's human psychology that makes it work It's us. It's our minds that breathe life into language But the trouble with that is then you just push all the questions back into how is it that we are capable of thinking in the first place Thinking itself involves having standards of right and wrong apply to you And how does it come about that you stand that your thought is governed by standards of right and wrong not because of some Conventional system that you laid down, but that just presupposes you're already capable of thinking so Anyway, you might say I think ordinary thinking certainly any kind of Complex human thinking usually presupposes an understanding of right and wrong and anyhow the question How could there be standards of right and wrong for thinking is just as puzzling as the question about language So the general problem is how could we explain the original source of the standards of rightness and wrongness for representation? And that's the how does it come about that's the rich kid's title. How does it come about that? There's such a thing as misrepresentation And we haven't really properly addressed that yet all these weeks in we have not squarely addressed this Yeah, I mean, I hope that everything we've said so far has seemed plausible and occasionally illuminating but It hasn't actually been a head-on attack on this Okay, okay, so Gretzka's first pass idea is Let's think about these gauges and meters and so on He says there's a kind of meaning that attaches to systems or components of systems For which there are identifiable functions If you know what it's for if you know what its point is Then you can talk about standards of rightness and wrong Because if it's meant to be doing something you can say if it's doing that thing correctly or not The position of a fuel gauge represents how much fuel there is in the tank So you can talk about a fuel gauge as representing If the needle is over to the right that means that the tank is full Yes That's all right. So you get representation there. So how does that happen? How does that work? What How did it come about that after all you've just got a dumb petrol gauge here? How did that get to I mean if it's puzzling how you or I got to represent then How did the petrol gauge manage to do it? It is but a humble petrol gauge Right, what's going on? How come it's managing to represent? And here's drusk's definition D's being g means Functionally that w is f the needles being over to the right means that the petrol tank is full Yeah if The needles function is to indicate the petrol tank's condition And it does this in part by indicating that w that the petrol tank is full by being over to the right So there are two key notions there function and indicate and indicate is the causal bit indicate is the bit where it is indicate Indicate indicate is The needle being over to the right is caused by the tank being full If the needle is over to the right that will typically be caused by the tank being full Okay, so indicates is the causal notion Indicate is what rich get is in quite a light way basically taking over the whole causal theory Yep, does that make sense? That notion of indication is where the causation comes in Let me put it like this if you say smoke indicates fire The smoke indicate the presence of fire Yes, of course it does Yeah, why because they're not typically causes the smoke? Hello Take it from me that fire typically causes smoke, right?  Yes So you can take the smoke as a sign of fire Smoke indicates fire in that sense Yeah, if you go to the doctor and you say look at these spots are covered in these spots What's going on and the doctor says that means you've got measles Right the spots mean measles Yes, in that they indicate the presence of measles. They are reliably caused by measles measles Yes So indicate there is a causal notion you could say that um, I don't know maybe uh, um Maybe whenever bill walks past I say bill I'm really good at detecting the presence of bill so you could take a cry for hi bill from me as indicating the presence of bill Yes Okay So if I tell you if you ask me what time it is and I say well it's 10 past three or whatever Then you could take my speech as indicating what time it is because the fact it was the fact that it is that time That caused me to say that Right, so that's indicating So indicating is a causal notion Yeah The needle indicates that the tank is full by being over to the right um, and uh Dretschke's definition is r indicates c means if there's an r then c and uh, that will typically be because c's are what cause r's Yeah, so you're going from the effect to the cause If you get the effect then you get the cause How about that that's all right for indicates If I'm telling you all about napoleon Then my remarks are indicators in that sense of how things are with napoleon because I'm really good at this Every time I do this class I have to read up about napoleon Yeah, so it's what napoleon did that is causing my speech Yeah The biter the writer napoleon No I meant napoleon. I meant the um, what was it the uh, the french emperor Yeah, okay Anything else? Okay, so the function of the fuel gauge is to indicate how much fuel is in the tank And we assign that function to the gauge Right, that's up to us We decide what the gauge is I mean you could have decided that you want to measure how high the fuel is in the tank That might be important, but um And I might have the very same design Uh, if it was just even though what his task was now to monitor the height of petrol But what we want it for is to um Determine how much fuel is in the tank Okay, so that's all right for function It's up to us who make a measuring instrument to decide what function it's going to have Yeah So if you ask what's the if you're looking at a whole batch of gauges and you're saying what's the point of all that then um What you need to know is how they were designed what the person was thinking who designed them why they're in the car in the first place So here's the definition of meaning D is being G the petrol the the needles being over to the right Means that the tank is full Uh is the same as The needles function As um imposed on by the designer the needle's function is to indicate the condition of the Petrol of the petrol tank and it performs this function in part by indicating that the petrol tank is full By being over to the right Yeah, so it's the reason you built it is that it's a good indicator of The condition of the petrol tank. That's why you built the petrol gauge um and uh Then it just represents those states that it is its function to indicate We're all on board with it Now the only trouble with this is that if the only functions we can find here are assigned functions And everything depends here on the intentions of the designer of the gauge um If the only uh, this is drichke if the only functions are assigned functions Then this talk about functional meaning is tainted with the purposes intentions And beliefs of those who assign the function from which meaning derives is misrepresentational powers So we haven't really got to the that that's drichke. That's a quote from drichke So we haven't really got to the basic problem here Yeah, because we're appealing we're taking for granted the purposes intentions and beliefs Of a of the designer This is drichke We shall not have tracked meaning in so far as this involves the power of misrepresentation To its original source We shall merely have walked our way back Somewhat indirectly to our own mysterious capacity for representation Yeah, so you see the problem Yep, sure Just getting it wrong. The needle indicates that the tank is a fool, but it's not full Yeah, you have a you can have a faulty gauge. Yeah, you can have a faulty gauge. Yeah, or it just gets stuck a little bit You know that can happen The tank is wrong Your gauge is wrong. That's right. Yeah, it gave me a wrong reading. Yeah, uh, that's what you'd say Yeah And so we are explaining a notion of representation here and misrepresentation But um, it's not fundamental. Yeah It's clear that's clear. It's clear why it's an interesting idea, but it's not really getting at the basic problem Yeah Then the basic problem was explain where it comes from in the first place the original source Are the standards of right and wrong for representations Okay I mean if god had made us all nearly as gauges Then it might work uh, we'd still have the problem of explaining how god can think but um Assuming that that's not Assuming that we wouldn't get away with that is not going to work this Okay, but yes I'm sorry. It's quite noisy. Can you How how it doesn't solve the original issue? Okay, the original issue is how come we have thoughts and uh Speech for which there are standards of right and wrong in the first place um, and this talk about uh functions I mean it's really critical here that you know what the function is of the petrol gauge because otherwise you could be saying If you just have it indicate then the gauge is indicating lots of things It indicates the height of the petrol in the tank. It indicates the volume of petrol in the tank Yeah, yeah So we need to know what the functions are is with the function that you get right and wrong um But then you ask, well, what's the function? Well, the function has to do with the purposes intentions and beliefs of the person who made the gauge and the people who use the gauge Um, and we still haven't explained how it is that those thoughts the thoughts involved in those purposes intentions and beliefs How it is that there are standards of rightness and wrongness for them I mean do they have a function Well, that would just mean that as I said by the god thing that um, there were some other set of purposes Intentions and beliefs lying behind that. Yeah, we've got to stop somewhere and say How does what where does the standards of rightness and wrongness come from in the first place? Yeah, okay Okay, so Gretzky's idea now is let's keep that definition of functional meaning But let's look at some really primitive cases um of representation He gives the example of our old friend the magnetosome um marine bacteria as as is pretty generally known Um need oxygen free water to survive Right, if you're a marine bacterium if you were a marine bacterium Um, your main goal your first goal in life would be to find oxygen free water Yes Take it from me Don't say you don't learn anything in this class Now they have These marine bacteria have internal gadgets that allow them to find oxygen free water They are little magnets that allow them to move towards magnetic north Magnetic north is where the deeper is where the deeper oxygen free water is Right the water at the top is all getting roused around an oxygen bubbled into it um So it moving towards magnetic north into the deeper water is what you want to do if you're a marine bacterium So um here is um here is the kind of thing This is a magnetosome and the red bit there Sorry, there's the whole thing is the bacterium and um the red thing there is the magnetosome Right, so that points you towards magnetic north um Okay So the function what's the function of that of the magnetosome? It does have a function I mean any zoologist looking at this thing is going to say what's that for Yes, just as you say about the organs of the body if you ask about the heart you can ask what's that for Yeah, so there's a notion of function here that doesn't have to do with intention and purpose When harvey said the function of the heart is to pump blood He's not saying that's why He's not saying that's why I made it You see what I mean? It's not like a petrol gauge, but it does have a function with a magnetosome And this thing does have a function But in a different basis than the petrol gauges and so on have a function The function is to indicate the presence of water so um Given that that magnetosome has a function However, that happened um, we can say That the function is to indicate the direction of oxygen free water and then we can just take over gritsky's definition here um, the magnetosomes are pointing To uh, three o'clock Means that the oxygen free water is at three o'clock Yeah, it's just like the petrol gauge means that the oxygen free water is at three o'clock And and that that just has the same definition the magnetosomes function is to indicate Where the location of the oxygen free water? And it does this in part by indicating that the oxygen free water is at three o'clock By itself pointing to three o'clock You see what I mean? Okay, so since there's this more primitive notion of function that we use in biology the whole time You can just take over the definition of meaning that we were using for the petrol gauges And that notion of function Isn't explained in terms of purposes beliefs and intentions This notion of function is explained in terms of the role of the system in meeting the biological needs of the organism When someone says the function of the heart is to pump blood What they mean is this is what good it does you having a heart This is what it does in the biological system. This is its place in keeping the biological system going This is why you need a heart to keep the full blood pumping That's what why you would damage you not to have a heart. Yep That's right. It does it. So first of all, this doesn't presuppose anything about intentions or plans or purposes, right? Because It is but a humble bacterium, right? It doesn't have intentions and plans and purposes. Yeah But it does have needs Yeah, so this is really anchored to needs the biological needs of the organism But that's all right talking about biology. I mean unless you're um How should I say seriously theistic? The talk about needs here doesn't really have anything especially to do with anyone's needs or purposes Sorry with anyone's With anyone's beliefs or purposes Yeah, it is a teleological explanation. That's right Biology is full of teleological explanations I mean the thing wouldn't have evolved Unless it pointed you to the oxygen free water Its point is to point you to the oxygen free water. That doesn't count as a purpose. That's right There are a lot. Okay. So there are lots of complex questions in this area that we are going to come to. Yeah, um, but um Um, the basic idea is that uh, when we talk about functions here We are talking about needs and you can understand needs. Well, you can understand needs just in terms of What keeps the thing alive? And what keeps the thing alive is not a matter of anyone's purposes Yeah, this is the basic fact about it. Yeah, and you can say what the the function of this is What it brings to keeping the thing alive? Yeah I mean, I should say there is an american use of need. There is um, not really quite the notion we have here I was I I first noticed this when I was in a bar. I'm sorry to say and someone said to me. Do you need nuts with that? um That's not the notion of need we have here Right the notion of need we have here has to do with um the survival Yeah, uh the needs of an organism and drink water and so on Food does it need to be alive? That's right. It's a bad function. Yeah Yeah, the These are important questions, right? But let me just give you the the official answer to do this um, which is that uh that the talk about needs and functions here um It is if you're just trying to understand it will first of all it has to do with why the thing is out in the first place If you believe that things evolved Yeah on the evolutionary hypothesis. Yeah, then um The the question is what's the explanation of the existence of the magnetosome? And the explanation of the existence of the magnetosome is that it does this thing for the organism that allows The gene pool to proliferate Something like that. Um, so it has to do with why it's there in the first place So if you say does it need to do that? Well, um Its function is to do that And you explain what its function is because the reason it's the reason it exists in the first place Is that it is serving this need of the organism And a need of the organism is itself a biological notion something without which the organism wouldn't flourish I mean if you're looking if you're going to keep chickens Yeah, a friend of mine just started keeping chickens. So this is fresh in my head. Um that um Then you need to get some kind of instruction on What chickens need Right, and that is not um, that is just a matter of how should I say basic animal husbandry Yeah, I mean if someone said but these chickens need to be alive. Well Yes That that is that is what the needs of the chickens are right there what they need to keep them alive and healthy Yeah, and these are just facts biological facts So what we're doing here is we are rooting meaning in this kind of biological fact Yeah, yeah Right, okay. That's a nice example. Um, so uh, the level of the seed Indicate will indicate the the um, the uh, health of the bird the well-fedness of the bird, right? So you've got indication there. Yes, but intuitively you don't have representation It doesn't represent the condition of the bird Yeah, and in this analysis the reason is that it's not the function of the bird seed to indicate The um, the well-fedness of the bird the level Yeah There's a difference here between the the way the magnetosome is functioning the the magnetosome is functioning to um Direct the behavior of the bacterium. It makes the bacterium go one way rather than the other Yeah, the level of the bird seed is not functioning as an indicator of the well-fedness of the chicken In the sense that it's something I use to then do something else It's not something that's going to direct my activity by tipping me off as to um, what the condition of the bird is And actually just as I speak it occurs to me the causal connection is round the wrong way here anyhow Uh, because it's the level of the bird seed is causing No, wait a minute Actually, I wish to cancel what I was just about to say because um, it does indicate in Dretschke's sense Uh, where's the definition it does indicate in Dretschke's sense If the bird seed is high then it's well fed so it does meet that definition of indication. Okay, but it's not um It's not representation because that's not its function Yeah, it's not there because it indicates the level of well-fedness That's right for representation. You need both indication and that the function is to indicate Yeah, there's someone else Okay Here we're explaining function in a way that doesn't presuppose anything about intentions or plans or purposes So the upshot here is if the experimenter takes a magnet To the top of the water Um Indicating to the hapless bacterium That the oxygen free water is upwards Yep Then the hapless bacteria with the experimenter holding the magnet over the top will be lured to their deaths And the experimenter there then is in a position to say Filled you You misrepresented You thought The oxygen free water was up at the top And you got it wrong Isn't that great Okay, but now we've explained how there can be misrepresentation Yeah, we've got right and wrong from the causal connection plus the idea of function And now the question is can we just take that and run that through everything? Human thought human language the whole lot on that note We'll pick up with that on uh um Monday, okay. Good. Thanks