[FRIAM] query and observation

[Steven A Smith]

Dave -

I had noticed a slowdown a while back, but being on the road for 3 weeks
myself, I haven't contributed or really noticed the grinding halt until
now as you call it out.  By coincidence I had dinner and beers with Glen
along the way, and I'm pretty sure he has brought Hoffman's work up here
a few times?

I met Hoffman in 2005 where he gave his spiel to a fairly small crowd of
(mostly) English Majors at the Anneberg School at USC.  I was
participating in a workshop with (mostly) Journalists trying to make
sense of how to use new media to try to explicate the previously
inexpicable.   It was an eclectic and (mostly) young and robust crowd of
very bright people thinking deep and wide about social issues all the
way down to "what it means to be human".   I was trying to bring my own
take on what a tree-map (our own variant known as a bubble-tree)
extruded in 3D to try to apprehend the news cycle/milieu in it's whole.

Hoffman made a good effort to explain his concept with the sophisticated
but not particularly natural-science or hard-philosophy centered
crowd.   He swayed me for the most part, but I had to remind myself that
even though I *beleive* in a heliocentric world-view I still *apprehend*
the sun and moon (and less obvoiusly) the stars rising in the east and
setting in the west, more better (superficially) fitting an
earth-centric model.   So while I think Hoffman might be dead on, I
still hold a bit of "so what?" and "what does it help me do?".   I'd be
interested if you have your own take on this?   Ignoring whether you
believe him to be technically/philosophically "correct", can you say
what you think might be "of use" to take away from it?

I will admit that my question implies some kind of incrementalism...
that the "use" might only become evident through a radical
acceptance/adoption of his (non?) world-view, not through my relatively
"thin" intellectual acknowledgement (thinner by quite a bit than my
acceptance of heliocentricity BTW).

On 9/12/19 12:41 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> Traffic on the FRIAM list seems to have ground to a halt, from my reception point in Amsterdam - i.e. I have seen nothing for some time. Not in spam filter, so question is has the list trickled to a stop or just not making it across the Atlantic.?
>
> Observation: an interesting coincidence arising from reading a new book, The Case Against Reality, How evolution hid the truth from our eyes, by Donald D. Hoffman, professor of cognitive science at UC Irvine. Main thesis is that what we perceive is but a constructed, via evolution,  "interface" and not a veridical perception of "Reality." 
>
> Not a new idea but the evolution / survival / fittest being the ones that see the optimal interface instead of what is behind the interface is interesting.
>
> Coincidence comes from simultaneously rereading Heidegger and Gadamer, and even some Peirce,  and seeing apparent parallels between "interface,: "interpretation," and "experience."  Feels like a lot of Nick's Monism convictions might be illuminated by looking at these works in juxtaposition.
>
> dave west
>
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