[FRIAM] [EXT] Re: A pluralistic model of the mind?

Wed Dec 11 13:44:45 EST 2019

I'm surprised no one has quoted Wittgenstein:

Wovon Mann nicht sprechen kann daruber muss Mann schweigen.

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

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Phone (505) 670-9918

On Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 11:34 AM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> It seems like you're asking a question with the ???? at the end. But it's
> unclear to me what the question is.  If the question is:
>
> Can a thing-occurance exist/be-real even if any attempt to describe it in
> any language will be a false description?
>
> Phrased that way, it's unclear how anyone could say "No". I enjoy quoting
> Gödel's interpretation of what von Neumann said [†] to demonstrate one way
> that could happen:
>
> von Neumann: But in the complicated parts of formal logic it is always one
> order of magnitude harder to tell what an object can do than to produce the
> object.
>
> Gödel: However, what von Neumann perhaps had in mind appears more clearly
> from the universal Turing machine. There it might be said that the complete
> description of its behavior is infinite because, in view of the
> non-existence of a decision procedure predicting its behavior, the complete
> description could be given only by an enumeration of all instances. Of
> course this presupposes that only decidable descriptions are considered to
> be complete descriptions, but this is in line with the finitistic way of
> thinking. The universal Turing machine, where the ratio of the two
> complexities is infinity, might then be considered to be a limiting case of
> other finite mechanisms. This immediately leads to von Neumann's conjecture.
>
> By this reasoning, it's relatively easy to see why *any* description will
> fall short of the thing described, at least in this levels-of-types
> conception.
>
>
>
> [†] Or what Burks says Gödel said anyway -- Theory of Self-Reproducing
> Automata
>
> On 12/11/19 1:58 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> >
> > Last summer I spoke with God. The effects were profound and obvious to
> all. Many of the effects, measured with MRI and encephalographic devices,
> were quantifiable. I spoke of my experience, as best as I could,
> recognizing that whatever words I used told but part of the story. Other's
> experience of me changed as well - they uniformly and consistently
> experience me, not as the fun loving drunken whoring party guy, but only as
> the pious jackass that was the inevitable and most profound effect of my
> experience.
> >
> > God is therefore real and extant?
> >
> > But wait ...
> >
> > I did not really speak with God. That word and all the other words, and
> the framing of the effects, piety replacing ribaldry, came after the fact,
> a post hoc rationalization/interpretation/articulation of "something." And,
> of course, the form of all those words and effects is but an artifact of
> the culture (and maybe the Jungian collective unconscious) within which I
> was raised.
> >
> > There was "An Experience;" but even that label, those two words, is
> false-to-fact. What "Was" had no bounds, in time or space and, in fact
> continues (and predated) the implied bounded context inherent in the
> meaning of 'an experience'. There is an implied relation between the
> "Experience" and an ego, an "I:" 1) the "Experience" was apart from "I," 2)
> "I" was part of the "Experience," 3) "I" perceived/sensed the
> "Experience."  None of these implied relations are accurate or complete, or
> even differentiable from each other.
> >
> > There was a Real, Existing, Thing. "It" was effectual; in that patterns
> of brain waves and detectable activity in different parts of the brain
> before and after "It" are measurable and comparable. Behavior and
> experience — from the "inside" — was altered dramatically, in the sense of
> the "color," the filtering lens, the 'fit" of interpretations of individual
> experiences is dramatically altered. Experience — of others on the
> "outside" —  is altered as well, although often not expressible beyond,
> "there's something different about you, can't put my finger on it, but ... "
> >
> > Not only was the "Thing" effectual, it is, within statistical limits,
> possible to predict the nature and degree of the effects that ensue from
> "Thing-Occurrence." Moreover, it is possible to establish an "experimental
> context" whereby others can "experience" the "Thing" and thereby confirm
> the prediction of effects.
> >
> > "Thing-Occurrence" ---> partially predictable, measurable (sometimes
> quantifiable) effects ---> "Thing is Real/Existing?
> >
> > Despite being, in every way ineffable —  in that no words capture its
> totality and any words used, in any naturally occurring human language, are
> false-to-fact.
> >
> > ????
> >
> > dave west
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Dec 11, 2019, at 6:10 AM, Eric Charles wrote:
> >> Ok.... I'm going to try to do a better take on the "ineffable" issue. I
> want to start by admitting that there is some sense in which ANYTHING I
> want to describe is never fully described by the words I use, in some
> reasonable use of the word "fully." If I see a turtle, and I tell you that
> I saw a turtle, I haven't provided you with a full description of exactly
> what the experience was like. So, I'm willing to admit that... but I'm not
> convinced there is anything deeper than that about Nick's inability to
> express his "feelings" to his granddaughter... and with that out of the way
> I will return to what I think is the broader issue.
> >>
> >> Real / existing things have effects. That is what it is to be real / to
> exist. If someone wants to talk about something that exists but have no
> effects, they are wandering down an rabbit hole with no bottom, and might
> as well be talking about noiseless sounds or blue-less blue.
> >>
> >> The pragmatic maxim tells us: " Consider what effects... we conceive
> the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects
> is the whole of our conception of the object." So anything we conceive of
> is, in some sense, a cluster of effects, and so everything "real" is _in
> principle_ conceivable. And to the extent anything can be expressed
> adequately - whether by words or any other means of expression - concepts
> can be expressed, and so anything real can be expressed.
> >>
> >> However, i'm not sure the effability is really the important part. The
> bigger question was about epistemology and ontology. But the pragmatic
> maxim covers that as well. Things that have effects are _in principle_ we
> may presume there are many, many effects that we don't yet have the means
> to detect, but anything that has effects could, under some circumstances,
> be detectable. So the limits of what _is_ are the same as the limits of
> what can in principle be known. Postulation of things that are existing but
> which can't, under any circumstances, be known is internally contradictory.
> >>
> >> Was that a better reply? It felt more thorough at least...
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
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