[FRIAM] flattening -isms

[glen∈ℂ]

My guess is you're a methodological pluralist just like the rest of us.

The trick is that monism is moot. Even *if* all things are somehow organizations of experience, to be pragmatic, you have to be able to *generate* 2 seemingly different things (like your experience vs. my experience) by different organizations (or timelines, or historical ephemerides, or iterations, or embeddings, or whatever). And so even if there is only 1 stuff, there must be different ways of organizing the stuff. So, there's, literally, no point in making a big stink about the 1 stuff. Multiplicities will *always* creep in. So, monism is one of: tautological, false, or useless, perhaps all three!

Worst case, if we can't *show* (i.e. actually *do* it) how the 1 stuff is differently organized into different things and are only left with the different things, then reality may as well *be* pluralist because saying it's not is pure fideism/imputation/speculation and does no explanatory or predictive work.

String theory and loop quantum gravity are *trying* to show how to construct multiple stuff from singular stuff. So, they're setting the bar pretty high. If you want to be a monist, why not work on those?

On 11/17/19 8:42 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:> Gosh.  So Stuff of Stuff and plain old stuff are different stuffs?  So Nick
> Thompson is a dualist?
> 
> Damn!
> 
> Perhaps to maintain my monism I  have to become an "of" monist.  It's "of's"
> all the way down.