[FRIAM] Posts from the Scotts

[glen∈ℂ]

The 3 excerpts below seem to indicate the (my?) problem. At first, I though Marcus was agreeing with me by listing options for harm-of-eating-animals. But then he goes toward monism-by-unification with "agreeing on what matters" and whole-equilibrium-implies-part-equilibrium. And I thought Steve agreed with me by arguing for complexification and allowing duality. But then he reduces to unification-by-hidden-variables and ways-that-are-fundamentally-opposed.

The heart of the problem is this *intolerance* for inconsistency (otherwise known as reductionism?). Why do we (and I'm not immune, despite my schizotypal rhetoric) insist on boiling everything down to 1 or a few fundamental, self-consistent, things? Why can't reality be an inherently unpatterned mess of infinite, inconsistent, things? The heuristics that work in one era fail in another era, and so on, forever? The heuristics that work for one agent (e.g. 2 eyes, 10 fingers) fail for another agent? Why do we need universality across space, time, and world-cuttings?

I really like the idea that we need such things because we're resource and inference-style constrained computational devices ... as I imagine someone like David Wolpert might argue. But why can't the types over which one infers and one's inference style be dynamically context-sensitive such that practically, methodologically, deep pluralism is a more accurate way to model what it is _we_ are? Why is that sort of thing so repellent?

Maybe I'm a victim of my culture? Maybe deep pluralism is less repellent in Eastern philosophies, with multiple gods, or a reliance on "mystery" or somesuch? But, sheesh, I too get irritated when surrounded by *woo* people unwilling to really play some zero sum game, some admittedly temporary local what-if, set up by whoever the dungeon master is that evening. So, my willingness to play reductionist games prevents me from hanging out with the woo-peddlers who prescriptively and without irony, embrace pluralisms like "all is one" or "the Lord works in mysterious ways", seemingly just so they can be comfortable in their reductive grokking.

Bah! The jet lag must have scrambled my brain.

On 7/27/19 12:13 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> wanting my answers to all be simple
On 7/27/19 12:54 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> On 7/27/19 12:13 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>> The article on Cosmopolitanism seems to reference this somewhat...
>> That "giving a damn about the world at large" does not have to be in
>> opposition to "giving a damn about one's
>> family/community/region/nation", yet it is caricatured/characterized
>> that way so often.  How might one (one self or all-one) resolve this
>> kind of (artificial/rhetorical?) difference without geologic upheaval?
> 
> Logic?   If the whole is in equilibrium than the parts are in equilibrium.
> I think upheaval is ok.   A few small earthquakes here and there won't release the energy.

On 7/27/19 1:44 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:>
> I made reference to "adding another level of indirection" to point in
> the general direction of admitting a more complex model that *subsumes*
> the disparate models that are currently at odds.   I agree/accept that
> some of the ways the models disagree may be fundamentally opposed and
> perhaps eggs will be broken, earthquakes and volcanism will be
> triggered, but I suspect a great deal of the tensions we experience
> *can* be resolved through a more complex model.
> 
> I think the local/global duality might be a good example...  the "think
> global/act local" bumper sticker did seem to acknowledge that when it
> first erupted.   When we consider the ways that a (more) global
> optimization may actually improve our local circumstance, albeit in a
> higher-dimensional space than the one we originally considered, this is
> what happens.