[FRIAM] Acid epistemology - Eric Help!!!!

Tue Mar 10 12:31:43 EDT 2020

Glen, 

Thanks.  

You often and rightly accuse me of overstating stuff, and I apologize if I am about to do it again.  But I think you are perhaps saying that there are no idiosyncratic experiences?  That an experience, to be an experience, has to be repeated or shared or both.  If so, I think I agree with you.  And a very strident position it would be if that were the position.  I think many humanists would assert that ONLY idiosyncratic experiences are real and that it is upon the uniqueness of individual experience that we must focus.  Hmmm!  

I feel that this thought is a genuine crowbar.

. It's that protocol that carries the knowledge, not the internal experiences or the particular toolchain used to execute the protocol.

Can you pry some more things with it? 

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

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

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2020 9:19 AM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - Eric Help!!!!

Right. I'm not at all bored with your conversation. But, to me, what/how we know things has more to do with *repeated* invocation of thoughts/behaviors, not unitary experiences. Being as "episodic" as I am, any single experience is useless, meaningless nonsense. But a repeated experience acquires meaning. I'm that way with names, too. People tell me their names and I forget them immediately ... even if I use their name repeatedly right after I learn it. But if I meet that person twice, three times, etc., then their name (the word "Bob" or whatever) takes on meaning ... becomes grounded to that person.

It seems so silly to talk about epistemology without requiring repeated experiences. A one-off conversation with Brigham Young means nothing. But repeated conversations means something. Granted, it's impossible to treat the Nth experience accumulation without talking about how the 2nd experience accumulates knowledge from the 1st experience. So, accounting for trust transfer from your one-off conversation with BY to another person is important. But what we're really after is the *accumulation*. Consideration of the 1st experience is only in service to consideration of the 1000th or the 10,000th. 

I suppose we *could* get there by talking about how to predictably *force* Nick to have the same experience you had (of unicorns or whatever). But, again, to do that, we'd have to talk about the science ... controlled manipulation of behavior that has been shown to channel people such that they have some experience. Attributing too much causal influence of the drug (or any particular tool in the toolkit) ignores/discounts the objective, which is the method, the process, the protocol. It's that protocol that carries the knowledge, not the internal experiences or the particular toolchain used to execute the protocol.

On 3/10/20 1:48 AM, Prof David West wrote:

> I don't think bored is a correct term. 

> 

> More interested in examples and arguments-tied-to-examples that are less fanciful than unicorns.

--

☣ uǝlƃ

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