[FRIAM] Abduction

Eric Charles eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com
Mon Dec 31 15:27:35 EST 2018


"And the answer.... embodied-situated cognition "

Well... I think that if THAT work is to be coherent,  it needs to be
grounded in pragmatism.... so I think that's a great answer. Trying to lay
embodied cognition on any other foundation is going to result in collapse.
Alas,  only a few people have joined me in writing about such things,  and
none of those writings sweep the full logical arc. Sigh.

(Incidentally,  it doesn't help that Peirce is incoherent when writing
about psychology or that James died after only taking us a short way down
the path.)


On Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 2:59 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com 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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