When trying to explain something whose existence is strongly contested AND has not been quantified or proven in any way, you simply can't analogize with something whose existence is universally accepted AND is easily quantified and proven.
Like you can’t describe a claim or possible phenomenon, including with analogies, if its existence has yet to be proven….????
That’s like a doctor saying to a patient describing their perception:
“
You can’t say ‘burning pain’ unless we’ve proven the tissue damage mechanism.”
Or: if you’re claiming there are aliens held at Roswell, you can’t describe anything about their form as physically analogous to humans. “
That’s just invalid because you can’t use an analogy to something we know exists - human bodies - to describe something that has not been proven yet!”
Or
we can’t describe the concept of Artificial General Intelligence, and certainly with no analogy to human intelligence, before we’ve demonstrated it already exists!
But of course you can. You can describe human-like aliens and then say “ now that we’ve described what we’re looking for, let’s go look for them.”
You can describe artificial intelligence, and especially artificial general intelligence, using analogies to human intelligence, in order to have some idea what you’re aiming to develop. And defining the proposed phenomenon allows you to look for evidence for when it might exist.
Likewise if a company’s gonna claim some form of distortion they are reducing, it’s perfectly valid for them to try to describe the perceptual nature of that distortion in the first place, so it can be tested for. (Eg in controlled listening tests). And if analogies help in defining that distortion, fine,
That’s human language at work!
It's like making claims about the strength and speed of Bigfoot by extrapolating the strength and speed of primates that have been empirically quantified.
But that’s perfectly valid! Certainly in the sense I have been using descriptions/analogies. You don’t have to even assume a phenomenon is real before you provide a description.
Making claims about the character of a PROPOSED phenomenon, before or whether we know that phenomenon exists, is entirely reasonable. It’s done all the time in science and elsewhere. You describe the character of some proposed phenomenon and then you can go looking for it, if there is motivation to do so.
Applied to describing Bigfoot, your logic is like saying:
You can’t appeal to animals we know exist to help describe a creature proposed to exist. So you can’t describe an “ape-like” creature roaming forests in the Pacific Northwest, or use any analogy to ape or human forms or locomotion to describe Bigfoot, unless we already have determined that Bigfoot exists.
Can you see the problem here? (“Uh… what are we looking for again?…”)
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