[FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!

[Steven A Smith]

Eric -

Great weigh-in as usual!

> Since in every “now” there is a need to navigate some choice of what
> to do, and since the experience of each now is constantly being
> superseded by the following now, the need to be constantly
> constructing an experiential edifice is the relentless driver of human
> nature and behavior.  The awareness that there is such an edifice, and
> that it is something constructed, seems very close to Husserl’s
> arguments that (in my language) we think of experience as a
> transparent window through which we passively receive a reality, but
> it is more like a painted surface on which we are constructing things
> we believe to be co-registered with something outside the window.  The
> assertion that we can only look at our own painting, and that it is
> our nature to be unable to see it as our own painting, because to
> function we need to use it as a transparent thing seen “through”, are
> I think Husserl’s conception of what “experience” (or Experience) is
> distinct from some list of “propositions that are true”.  These
> frameworks of experience, as a system from which one can extract
> choices, seem to be what Ortega is calling “the World” for each of us,
> or in a zeitgeist carried by a generation.

I appreciate the subtlety and thoroughness of this description but want
to seek some parallax between the experience of "homo sapiens" and any
other perceiving consciousness.   I do believe that humans (and perhaps
other species like cetaceans and elephants and apes) have a significant
self-awareness *capability* which helps us stand somewhat apart from the
other creatures (including plants, micorbiota, etc.).   We *can* know
something of *how we think we know what we know* and even have a sense
of *knowing that there are things we don't know* up to and including the
stunning incompleteness of formal systems as exposed by Kurt Godel.

Life itself (consciousness) seems to be a self-organized collection of
coherence-maintaining, gradient-seeking self-perpetuating subunits.  
Each subunit (whether it be individual organism, colony, tribe, culture,
species, etc.) seems to have as it's main (only?) tactic a skill at
predicting it's environment as a phase space of relevant qualities...
sense organs, hormonal/endocrinal systems, appetites, desires, hopes,
fears, dreams, stories, disciplines of knowledge, religions, all seem to
be artifacts contrived to support effective prediction of the subunits
trajectory.    To the extent that the only sure thing (besides taxes) in
life is death, all these trajectories ultimately terminate in the
decoherence of the individual, whether that be you or me, the mosquito I
just smooshed on my arm, the multi-element organism that is the aspen
grove on the side of the mountain or the Roman (or US) Empire, the
project is a failure.  On the other hand, these multiple trajectories
are perhaps illusory (at least in their distinctness) and join together
in a piecewise plurality of trajectories...  which when admitting the
smallest/simplest (dancing quarks?) to the largest, most complex
(supergalactic clusters?) into this description, becomes "the World". 
Yet each subsystem with a "map of the world" embedded in itself (e.g.
somewhere among the state-space of the 302 nerve-cell system of C.
Elegans or the ~40,000 cells dancing biochemically within a tardigrade).  

We watch other species make what appear to be devastatingly bad
decisions for themselves (as individuals or groups... like lemmings, or
suicidal drone-bees, or beaching pilot whale pods) but with enough
introspection and study can usually discover how these "bad decisions"
are "adaptive" at *some level*.  

Of course "we humans" seem more psychotic than most with our incessant
warfare and polluting/collapsing our local (now unto global) ecosystems,
etc.  To whatever extent we are "the first of our kind" it seems very
optimistic to imagine that we are likely to "get it right" the first
time.   How many "living fossils" were "the first of their kind"?   Were
they more likely all but a fluke side-shoot of a "good idea turned bad"
which happened to find/maintain a niche for itself in the larger milieu?


>  I find the discussion interesting because I see it as an effort to
> give a concept decomposition to dimensions of cognition or awareness.
>  Even If being unaware of Experience in this sense is not an important
> source of error, we seem to have little concept system to discuss
> empirically what the aware state “is”, and I wonder if the thing
> Husserl and Ortega are after goes part of the way to supplying one
> relevant such concept.

Very fascinatingly packed set of observations... I hope there is more
conversation here to try to help me unpack it more.

- Steve