[FRIAM] Thx for the traffic

[Elizabeth Cates]

I have been working hard to finally take a vacation. Too much focus on how
to regulate bitcoin and I am exhausted.

Anyway, first stop St Petersburg! And when I finally got a moment to check
on what was percolating, there was nothing. I was frankly alarmed at the
lack of traffic. We need more caffeine -- coffee, tea, or chocolate to fuel
our thoughts.

On Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 1:59 PM Steven A Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:

> 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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