[FRIAM] "recognize the reality of her psychological experience"

[Nick Thompson]

Ah, Glen.  So MUCH here. No comprehensive response but some trollish larding below, if you care to look at it.  

 

Oh, Yes.  One comprehensive response.  When are you going to move to Santa Fe?  We need you in the home parish. 

 

NIck

 

Nicholas S. Thompson (see below)

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of ? u???
Sent: Friday, December 07, 2018 9:51 AM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] "recognize the reality of her psychological experience"

 

Pronouns

 <https://youtu.be/9bbINLWtMKI?t=1457> https://youtu.be/9bbINLWtMKI?t=1457

[NST==>I have to admit I was sort of charmed by this.  I suppose, what I mean by female, really, is a person with whom I can play my stupid-male -white-sexist-1950’s-vintage social attachment and bonding games with, and since I can’t really play those games with anybody, anymore, I perhaps should start calling everybody “everythey” and be done with it.  After all,  every person isn’t a body, either, right?  They are, after all, human, and have a soul and all that.  Well, I don’t know.  Everythey to their own opinion, I guess. <==nst] 

 

So, after my aborted attempt to learn about OOO

[NST==>We never did this, and it is my fault.  I apologize, Glen.  A graduate student in CS at Clark started following me on RG the other day for some reason.  He says he’s hoping to be an expert in Object Oriented Programing.  Shall I put him on to you? <==nst] 

 (those coy objects) and its relationship to Latour, our descent into the slang of "adulting" (and Nick's conflation of language with biology

[NST==>At the risk of providing further evidence that I am an amnesic geriatric narcissist, Could you take a few sentences, perhaps off line, to remind me when I did that? mean, beyond the obvious fact that all –ologies have to do with … um …words?<==nst] 

), as well as my failed attempts to tease out how evolutionary psych is/can be abused by crypto-fascists like Peterson and Harris, 

[NST==>I agree, Glen.  I can never get my mind around the argument.  The extreme right and the extreme left seem to agree on something about biology that is plain preposterous.  What do they think will have been accomplished, if, say, a biological explanation of teen-aged risky behavior is established.  What freedom will be lost.  Who will be excused who shouldn’t be excused.  This example may be useful because we do, in fact, put teen-aged felons in Juvy and usually give them a clean slate when they come of age.  So, perhaps, the extremes are hoping/fearing that rapists will  be cut loose with a clean slate after a few years in “Manny”.  (That seems to have happened to this guy Epstein who appears to have been pimping 14 year old girls to his friends.)    Is this the argument?  In another biological domain, I am trying to understand why Elizabeth Warren is in such deep shit for getting her DNA done.  If somebody offered me a million dollars to get my DNA done, I would do it, Wouldn’t you?  What does the world think that a biological explanation IS that makes it so contentious.<==nst] 

I stumbled on ContraPoints' channel.  And despite the (false) claim that political correctness is somehow a constraint on free speech, I prefer to call people what they want to be called, rather than impute my own ideology into the world.  Hence, the above video.

[NST==>The most salient impression that video made on me was not the gender of the performer but the exhibitionism.  I think this may be something about my age.  We once got a free subscription to wired and I had to put it out on the porch with the perfumed New Yorkers.  I just didn’t know how to engage with it. To a non-octogenarian, is the performance on this video really pursuant to the message?  And what exactly was the message?  <==nst] 

 

However, I found her statement interesting in the deeper sense of consciousness, qualia, obscenity, mind-reading, and the gen-phen map.  I also recently stumbled upon this article, which I've only skimmed:

 

Reexamining the effect of gustatory disgust on moral judgment: A multi-lab direct replication of Eskine, Kacinik, and Prinz (2011)  <https://psyarxiv.com/349pk/> https://psyarxiv.com/349pk/

[NST==>The general idea of this sort of literature is that in figuring out who we are, and therefore how to act, we are constantly engaging in abduction.  So, if I can get you to do a thing that a psychopath might do, you are more likely to conclude that you are a psychopath and do more things like that in the future.  So, if I go yuck when I make moral judgments, and you make me go yuck, I am more likely to engage in a moral judgment.  It has a long history in the work of William James, i.e., the emotional behavior precedes the emotional feeling, rather than the other way around.  The amount of literature supporting that paradigm is enormous, but yuck-inducement was a particularly charming example, and I hate to see it go.  

<==nst] 

 

 

To what extent do we escape solipsism simply due to our imagination that others have a real psychological experience?  

[NST==>I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t ask you at this point how you come to know that you have a real psychological experience.  Or, for matter, what the contrast=class might be: un unreal psychological experience.  <==nst] 

And even if we're all various types of realists and monists, to what extent does our collectively agnostic, methodological realism constrain the types of psychological experience we are capable of imagining?  Can we ever really sympathize with a person like Hunter S. Thompson,

[NST==>Oh don’t get me started.  Uncle Hunter was quite the life of family parties.  <==nst] 

 Aleister Crowley, or any arbitrary lone wolf domestic terrorist?  I'd hope for answers to questions like this to come from evolutionary psychopathology.  This is a decent book review here:

 

 <http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/03/book-review-evolutionary-psychopathology/> http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/03/book-review-evolutionary-psychopathology/

[NST==>I liked the sound of this book and will certainly watch the movie when it comes out.  I couldn’t help think of the four types as Trump Clinton Carter and Obama.  None of these people give a nod to Nietzsche (Apollonian vs Dionysian cultures) … these ideas weren’t invented yesterday … but since  I have never read any N. either (and won’t even hazard to spell his name twice in the same sentence), who am I to say.  <==nst] 

 

I'd very much appreciate any opinions on any of the above, anything that might help prevent my flailing around like the perennial dilettante that I am.

 

--

∄ uǝʃƃ

 

============================================================

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe  <http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

archives back to 2003:  <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/> http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

FRIAM-COMIC  <http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/> http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20181207/759cce37/attachment.html>