[FRIAM] Abduction

[Prof David West]

"Maybe the answer is to take a fistful of magic mushrooms and listen to some Bach? "

Always the answer!

LSD in a sensory deprivation tank, ala Timothy Hurt in the movie Altered States, was, for me, even better.

davew


On Mon, Dec 31, 2018, at 12:59 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> Ha!  Dude.  I feel like I've said it over and over again.  Nothing is 
> real.  To do what you've (or Peirce's) done and simply redefine the word 
> "real" is iffy, at best.  Why not simply *admit* that nothing is real 
> and move on?  The answer to your question is that there's something that 
> lies, within you, apparently, that is not comfortable with the idea that 
> there is no real.  Those of us who are comfortable with the idea that 
> there is nothing that's real can't really provide the answer you want.  
> Maybe the answer is to take a fistful of magic mushrooms and listen to 
> some Bach?  I don't know.
> 
> But I can *simulate* someone like you, I think.  And the answer my 
> simulation provides is either embodied-situated cognition or something 
> like panpsychism. I.e. the brain-in-a-vat is a useless game and nobody 
> should be playing it.  Most of it devolves into persnickety 
> redefinitions of "experience".  So, because you just said "instincts are 
> a result of natural selection and are products of experience", I can 
> extend that claim to claims like:
> 
>    Dopamine, part of the generative system for human behavior, is a 
> product of human experience.
> 
> Is 3,4-dihydroxyphenethylamine a part of human experience, defined in 
> terms of human experience?  Or is it an objective chemical whose reality 
> existed before/after/independent of humans?  I'd claim this sort of 
> question *requires* our inference to handle causal loops.  It's 
> simultaneously a generator and a phenomenon of human experience.  Is 
> this a (flat) tautology?  Would it require modal logic?  Etc.
> 
> These are the answers my simulations of people like you provide.  And if 
> our inference engine can't handle loops, then we're screwed. (Note that 
> if I *stop* playing along and allow that Truth and Reality can come from 
> something outside experience - human or not -, then the answers can 
> change.)
> 
> A little particular word-salad included below:
> 
> On 12/31/18 11:21 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> > Oh Joy.  Oh Rapture!  SOMEBODY understands me.  A new day is dawning.  A new year has begun! 
> 
> But Eric(S) already (however implicitly) brought up methodological-
> Peircianism.  I often worry that others really do understand *me* even 
> if/when I feel like I haven't been understood.  It's based, I suppose, 
> on reflection.  When someone repeats what they thought I said in words I 
> would never have used, does it mean they do or don't understand me?
> 
> > Yes.  Even stronger.  It is clear that we can NOT extrapolate .*  Unless you regard “Given normal error, the mean of the population, μ, probably lies within +/-  s/n, the standard error” as metaphysics.  That’s the absolute best you can hope for.  Somebody once called it, “A kiss from your aunt” realism.
> 
> Yes, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone (making money 
> outside an ivory tower or outside their Church) who would claim to 
> *know* anything more than that.  Pluralism is the rule, not the 
> exception.
> 
> > Ok, Glen.  So now that you understand me, how can I understand you?  How do you break free from the he fact that when we speak of truth beyond human experience we inevitably extrapolate from human experience and that such extrapolations are inevitably human experiences? Honest.  I am not trying to be a jerk, here.  I just can’t see my way out of that box, given the brain-in-the-vat.  By the way, instincts, being the result of natural selection, are also taken as products of human experience.
> 
> As may be obvious from my first paragraphs in this post, I may not be 
> very clear on what you mean by "break free from the fact".  You're 
> playing a weird game where you have access to a fact that a Peircian has 
> no access to.  I'm starting to think Kellyanne Conway (with her 
> "alternate facts") and Rudy Giuliani (with his "truth is not truth") are 
> Peircians, too. >8^D  You can break free from it by a) admitting it's 
> not a fact - e.g. there are lots of people who don't make the 
> extrapolation, b) there are no such things as "facts", or c) the driving 
> force for such a demiurge is *not* experience.  I'm sure there are other 
> ways to break free of it, too.
> 
> -- 
> ☣ uǝlƃ
> 
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