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

Thu Dec 12 08:36:44 EST 2019

I'm pretty slow on the uptake in this conversation. I'm still thinking about there being no "out there". The language we use seems to be based on concepts such as "out there". So if "out there" makes no sense then our language is deeply flawed and, at best, an approximate instrument. It would hardly be surprising if there are things that our language cannot express. The same seems to be true of science which is based on experiments. The most fundamental kind of experiments seem to presume basic geometry which would, I think, involve a concept of "out there".

--John
________________________________
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm>
Sent: Thursday, December 12, 2019 7:34 AM
To: friam at redfish.com <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: [EXT] Re: [FRIAM] [EXT] Re: A pluralistic model of the mind?

Nick style larding follows:

On Thu, Dec 12, 2019, at 5:15 AM, Eric Charles wrote:
I think the effableness is a red herring. "Last night I ate spaghetti" doesn't fully and completely explain exactly what happened last night... but we all agree that I used words to describe a thing that is not "ineffable". So far, no argument has been offered to demonstrate that Dave's conversation with God is any more or less effable than my having eaten spaghetti

[DW-->in the case of speaking with God, I completely agree with you. In the second example, I was at least attempting to depict  an 'X' that was truly ineffable, in that even asserting a label like 'Experience' is falsehood. I will leave that for another time and consider your other comments. <---dw]

Absent an argument to that effect, we are begging the question by taking it as given that the two differ. I think the more interesting issue that Dave's example brings up is our original issue regarding monism, in its relation to the question "what is real?"

[DW -->May I restate as a question of what criteria are sufficient to assert that something is not real? In a previous post you asserted that something is not real if it has no "effects;" and you seem to reiterate that assertion in your remarks about a Deist god having no current effects. Are "effects" the criteria, and if so how do we utilize them to determine the reality of 'X'? <-- dw]

We all agree that that Dave could have been having a conversation with something real or something not real, right? We can call the other option "imaginary" or "illusory" or whatever else we want to call it, but we recognize that people sometimes have conversations with those types of conversational partners, so it is a live possibility.

I said in prior emails, we are in-particular talking about "monism" in contrast to mind-matter dualism (and all variants of that particular dualism), meaning that we reject that mental things and matter things are made of two different stuffs.

[DW -->This is a key point that I would really appreciate a good monist to explain to me. Using a metaphor of a computer, there seems to be one kind of "stuff," the ones and zeros (high and low voltages) flowing about a set of circuits. But, any given sequence of ones and zeros can 'effect' a given state of the collective circuitry, and any given sequence of states can effect more comprehensible constructs like the screensaver of Bears Ears that appears behind this email window. The graphic is, of course, but ones and zeros.  Ones and zeros is the "stuff" of all. What status have the "constructs" up to and including the images and icons? <--dw]

So Dave is talking to God. Whether he is talking to something that is "mental" or something "physical" is a post-hoc judgement. That is, we discover that based on future experience, not based on the initial experience, which is neutral with regards to that distinction. What later experiences will allow us to determine if the conversational partner is real? That is hard to specify when we are discussing a deity with ambiguous properties, but the method must be in principle very similar to how we would confirm or reject the reality of any other conversational partner. How do you determine when a child has an imaginary friend versus a real friend? You look for other consequences of the conversational partner. Ultimately we look for convergent agreement by anyone who honestly inquires into the existence of the conversational partner (i.e., the long term convergence / pattern-stability, referenced earlier in the conversation).

[DW -->I would argue that we have a body of precisely this kind of evidence, convergent agreement/pattern-stability, with regard "honest inquiries." I make this assertion with regard "goddness" but would make it emphatically with regard the "mystical otherness."  That evidence does not, however, seem to result in the assignation of "Real" status. So something else must be in play. What? <--dw]

The only thing we can't allow - because it is internally incoherent - is for there to exist a "real" thing with "no consequences" that we could investigate. So the "Deist" God, the instigator with no current effects, is off the table a priori, because that is a description of a thing that doesn't exist --- and also because Dave couldn't have had a conversation with that. We could only be discussing a conception of God that can be interacted with to certain ends, which means that some tractable means of converging opinions one way or the other is possible.

[DW -->Whose opinions? Those on the FRIAM list? The public at large? Something akin to the "scientific community?" If the latter, why do not alchemists — in the general sense of the term, not the lead into gold caricature subset — constitute such a body? <--dw]

As such: Dave's conversation with God is not in-kind difference from John's seeing a bear in the woods: Both are equally effable/ineffable. Both have the same question about the reality of the thing experienced. Both can be subjected to the same types of analyses (I offered Peircian, Jamesian, or Holtian options regarding the bear).

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor

<mailto:echarles at american.edu>

On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 3:17 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com<mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>> wrote:
The thing being left out of this still seems, to me, to be constructive vs ... what? ... analytical explanation. Your larger document beats around that bush quite a bit, I think. But I don't think it ever names/tackles the point explicitly.

When you say things like "explanations are based on prior explanations" and "depends on the understandings that exist between speaker and audience", you're leaving out THE fundamental ontology atop which it's all built ... the building of the experimental apparatus. Feynman's pithy aphorism applies: What I cannot create, I do not understand.

Explanations facilitate replication. They tell you *how* to do the trick yourself. Descriptions can be explanatory, of course. But they can also be non-explanatory. And some explanations are more facilitating than others. (E.g. I can write out some obtuse math and print it on paper or I can hand you a floppy disk with some Matlab code on it.)

But the foundation is that we all have the same basic hardware. And *that's* what explanations are built upon. Change the hardware and your explanation becomes mere description. ... E.g. take a big hit of LSD and many explanations become mere descriptions. The evolutionary biological content of your paper (as well as Figure 1.2[†]) seems like it's just crying out for something like "construction". Reading it feels like watching someone struggle for a word that's on the "tip of their tongue".

[†] In particular, if I replace "is the model for" with *generates*, I get some sort of Necker cube flipping feeling.

On 12/11/19 11:23 AM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com<mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> [... the thought experiment being explaining an eraser falling behind a book ...]
> Working through thought-experiments like the one above leads us to conclude that all descriptions, particularly satisfying ones, are inevitably explanatory and that all explanations are descriptive. And yet, you cannot explain something until you have something to explain – so all explanations must be based on prior descriptions. The only reasonable conclusion, if you take both of these claims at face value, is that all explanations are based on prior explanations! The distinction between description and explanation concerns their position in an argument, not their objectivity or subjectivity in some enduring sense.  Whether a statement is explanatory or descriptive depends upon the understandings that exist between the speaker and his or her audience at the time the statement is made. /Descriptions are explanations that the speaker and the audience take to be true for the purpose of seeking further explanations/.[1] <#_ftn1>

--
☣ uǝlƃ

============================================================
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<https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fredfish.com%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Ffriam_redfish.com&data=02%7C01%7Cjkennison%40clarku.edu%7Ce2a1eac960e5437abbfc08d77effda13%7Cb5b2263d68aa453eb972aa1421410f80%7C1%7C0%7C637117509657838446&sdata=2ghCZkQQg77mj5dRzZvjhGCyGczXC7ZyhuihyzdGoXA%3D&reserved=0>
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC<https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffriam.471366.n2.nabble.com%2FFRIAM-COMIC&data=02%7C01%7Cjkennison%40clarku.edu%7Ce2a1eac960e5437abbfc08d77effda13%7Cb5b2263d68aa453eb972aa1421410f80%7C1%7C0%7C637117509657848442&sdata=54cjWe1iNkGATjzFeqhGQGO6sQ4ZdUdiZ17NV4hU8no%3D&reserved=0> http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/<https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2F&data=02%7C01%7Cjkennison%40clarku.edu%7Ce2a1eac960e5437abbfc08d77effda13%7Cb5b2263d68aa453eb972aa1421410f80%7C1%7C0%7C637117509657848442&sdata=XaR%2FEqfHGY4DHcpeZ16DaRDJp4ELwknXwkx06%2Be2Yj8%3D&reserved=0> by Dr. Strangelove
============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20191212/0573a182/attachment-0001.html>