[FRIAM] A longer response to Dave's question

Sat Feb 22 12:35:32 EST 2020

Hi, Eric, ‘n all, 

Thanks for the citation.  

Here’s where I think we need you. I think Dave West and others in the group are interested in the notion of truth beyond experience, or truth in extraordinary experience, or truth found through drugs or pain, or through intense meditations, or when dreaming or at the threshold of death or (as I would put it) at other times when the system isn’t fully functioning.  My prejudices tell me that these folks, among them my dearest colleagues,  are descending down the Jamesian Rat Hole.  We need you because you are both more knowledgeable about William James than I am and more forgiving.  I suspect you may be able to … um … modulate the rather harsh sentiment expressed below. 

First, let me stipulate that all experiences endured under extremis ARE experiences and can (by abduction) be the origin of good hunches.  I give you, courtesy of my great wisdom AND Wikipedia, Kekule’s dream.

Here is a wonderful example of an extreme experience that “proved out”.   “Proved out” means that when the chemist worked out all the practicial implications of the abduction that benzene was a ring, and carried those implications into laboratory practice, his expectations were confirmed.   

What I object to is the notion that such experiences in extremis are ==>in principle<== more likely to be true than ordinary ones, or, further, that there is any way to confirm the implications of one experience except through further experiences.  

Let me put this as clearly as I can. 

Transcendence = bullpucky

Nick

PS :  Eric:  Please stop using the word “practical” and adopt the more accurate term, “practicial”.  “Practical” was a mistake when Peirce used it, and is a mistake everytime you use it.  Peirce an you are both referring to consequences to knowledge-gathering practices, broadly conceived.  The pragmatic maxim of meaning should be, 

Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practicial bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.

Pps:  Do I have more or less evidence that Christ Existed than I do that Marcus exists.  I have never met either of them, but of both, I can say, “I have read a lot of his writings and I know a lot of people who believe in him and speak highly of him. “ What would constitute indoubitable proof of the Existence of Marcus.  

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, February 22, 2020 5:59 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A longer response to Dave's question

Assertion: 

1. Since Christ has never been proved to have existed, it seems to me (as a non-psychologist) those consuming his 'blood' religiously appear as victims/participants of group mass delusions reinforced by their regular shared consumption of a narcotic in a controlled environment replete with symbols to reinforce their delusion.

Reply: I mean.... transubstantiation is one of the first examples Peirce uses to illuminate thinking that can be improved via the pragmatic maxim....

As Nick points out, for Peirce, Pragmatism is, first and foremost, a means of figuring out what your ideas mean. Two important benefits of this are figuring out when you have vacuous thoughts, and gaining the ability to avoid what Orwell would label "doublethink". That is, being able to figure out when your ideas are meaningless and when they contradict each other.  

------ How to make your ideas clear, 1878 -----------

To see what this principle leads to, consider in the light of it such a doctrine as that of transubstantiation. The Protestant churches generally hold that the elements of the sacrament are flesh and blood only in a tropical sense; they nourish our souls as meat and the juice of it would our bodies. But the Catholics maintain that they are literally just meat and blood; although they possess all the sensible qualities of wafercakes and diluted wine. But we can have no conception of wine except what may enter into a belief, either --

1. That this, that, or the other, is wine; or,
2. That wine possesses certain properties.
Such beliefs are nothing but self-notifications that we should, upon occasion, act in regard to such things as we believe to be wine according to the qualities which we believe wine to possess. The occasion of such action would be some sensible perception, the motive of it to produce some sensible result. Thus our action has exclusive reference to what affects the senses, our habit has the same bearing as our action, our belief the same as our habit, our conception the same as our belief; and we can consequently mean nothing by wine but what has certain effects, direct or indirect, upon our senses; and to talk of something as having all the sensible characters of wine, yet being in reality blood, is senseless jargon. Now, it is not my object to pursue the theological question; and having used it as a logical example I drop it, without caring to anticipate the theologian's reply. I only desire to point out how impossible it is that we should have an idea in our minds which relates to anything but conceived sensible effects of things. Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects; and if we fancy that we have any other we deceive ourselves, and mistake a mere sensation accompanying the thought for a part of the thought itself. It is absurd to say that thought has any meaning unrelated to its only function. It is foolish for Catholics and Protestants to fancy themselves in disagreement about the elements of the sacrament, if they agree in regard to all their sensible effects, here and hereafter.

It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the third grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.

------------

So, the first question is NOT "Did Jesus exist?" nor "Does wine transform into his blood." The first question is "What does it mean, practically speaking, to claim Jesus had existed?" and "What does it mean, practically speaking, for the wine to be transformed into blood?"  In both cases, by "practically speaking" I mean, "what consequences would it have for possible outcomes of our actions?" which could also be translated pretty reasonably to "what could a scientist investigate based on that claim". Nick is fond of asking questions like "If the wine is blood, can we use it for a transfusion?" Where as I, a bit more petulant, prefer questions like "Given that one can still get drunk off of communion wine, how far over the DUI limit must He have been at all times, and what implications does that have for the rest of His physiology?" 

After you have some idea what your ideas mean, Peirce has ideas about how we (in the very long run) find out which of your clear-ideas are true, but that is a separate conversation. 

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

On Fri, Feb 21, 2020 at 10:20 PM Sarbajit Roy <sroy.mb at gmail.com <mailto:sroy.mb at gmail.com> > wrote:

Nick

1. Since Christ has never been proved to have existed, it seems to me (as a non-psychologist) those consuming his 'blood' religiously appear as victims/participants of group mass delusions reinforced by their regular shared consumption of a narcotic in a controlled environment replete with symbols to reinforce their delusion. 

2. Now to your more important question for us outside the USA.  "Is Trump a proto-dictator?  What are the consequences in experience of believing that he is?  What does that belief cause us to expect in him. "

In my view, and in the  <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/opinion/taliban-afghanistan-war-haqqani.html> view of many non-Americans, it is the nation of USA collectively which is the tyrannical dictatorship, and it is quite irrelevant who heads it (symbolically), because all US Presidents carry on the same acts of raining bombs from the sky on those who disagree with US policies or the US' aforesaid mass delusion called Christianity.

Sarbajit Roy

Brahma University

On Thu, Feb 20, 2020 at 10:31 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> > wrote:

Geez, Dave, 

 There's an awful lot here.  Do you mean to take the hardest case?  A person?  And particularly a person who has been so much in all our faces that it's hard for most of us to think of him rationally, if at all?  

 Let's take a simpler example.  An example that Peirce takes is transubstantiation, the idea that in ritual of the mass the communion wine becomes the blood of Christ.  Once consecrated, is the communion "beverage" wine or blood?  Let's say we disagree on that point.  We both see that it's a red liquid in a chalice, on which basis we jump to different conclusions.  From the properties or redness and liquidness that the substance in the chalice shares with both blood and wine, you abduce that it is wine, I abduce that it is blood.  So far, we stand equal. But now the chalice is brought to our lips.  For me, (forgive me, Catholics, for I know not what I say) I feel momentarily cleansed of my sins, uplifted.  Since part of my conception of Christ's blood is that if I drank some of it I would feel cleansed and uplifted, I conclude that it is indeed, Christs' blood.  You, on the other hand, experience the flat, sour taste of inexpensive wine, feel no uplift whatsoever, and conclude that the chalice contains wine.  We are still on equal footing. 

 But now the science begins.  We whisk away the stuff in the chalice to the laboratory.  As a preliminary, each of us is asked to list in their entirety all the effects of our conception.  We are being asked to deduce from the categories to which we have abduced, the consequences of our abductions  They are numerous, but to simply the discussion, lets say each of us lists five.  I say, if it is Christ's blood, then I should feel transformed when drinking it, and then I pause.  The scientists also pause, pencils in hand, and I have to go on.  Well, in addition to its red-liquidity,  I say, it should be slightly salty-sweet to taste, be thick on the tongue, curdle when heated, sustain life of somebody in need of a transfusion, etc.  So we do the tests, and the  results are yes, no, no, no, no.  The scientists now turn to you and you say, it should, as well as red and liquid, be sour, thin on the tongue, intoxicating in large amounts, produce a dark residue when heated, etc..  So, the tests come out yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. 

 So, is it really blood or really wine?  Well, that of course depends on one’s priorities.  If the sole criterion for a red fluid being Christ’s blood is that it produces in one person, Nick Thompson, a sense of cleansing, then the fact that it doesn’t pass any of the other tests for blood will make no difference.  I can assert that that Christ’s blood is a very special sort of blood that cleanses the spirit of Nick Thompson, but does none of the other things that blood does.  Indeed, I might assert that anything the priest handed me in the chalice, once duly consecrated, would be Christ’s blood.   The idea that it “works for me” makes it “Christ’s blood for me and that’s all that matters.  And if I could bring a regiment of Spanish soldiers with spears to friam, and have them insist that you drink from the chalice and feel cleansed, many of you might begin to agree with me.  

 This is the view of pragmatism that James has been accused of, but it is definitely NOT the view that Peirce held.  If the position is, “whatever the officiant says is christs blood is christ’s blood by definition”, then, Piece would say the position is either 

Meaningless or false.  It might be meaningless, because there is no possible world in which it could be false.  Or it might be false, because our best guess as scientists is  that in the very long run, in the asymptote of scientific inquiry, our best scientific guess is that the contents of the chalice will be agreed upon to be wine. 

 Again, let me apologize for my ignorant rendition of Catholic ritual.  It IS the example that Peirce takes, but I now see that that is probably a poor excuse.  Peirce was, after all, a protestant, and one with many prejudices, so it would not surprise me if he was anti-catholic and himself chose the example in a mean-spirited way.  So, be a little careful in how you respond.  

 Is Trump a proto-dictator?  What are the consequences in experience of believing that he is?  What does that belief cause us to expect in him.  Tim Snyder, in his little book ON TYRANNY, does a very good job of laying out the parallels between what is going on in our politics right now and what goes on in the early stages of the establishment o a dictatorship.  Trump is fulfilling many of Snyder’s expectations.  Whether Trump succeeds in establishing a dictatorship or not, I think the long run of history will conclude that he is making a stab at it.  

 Nick 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> 

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

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