[FRIAM] science privilege — fork from acid epistemology

Tue Mar 17 12:46:29 EDT 2020

I’ve always interpreted the usage of those terms as passing admiration:  “That’s good but don’t get so self-indulgent thinking about why.”

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Date: Tuesday, March 17, 2020 at 8:34 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] science privilege — fork from acid epistemology

Who knew this:

<https://www.yourdictionary.com/qwan>
Qwan dictionary definition | qwan defined - YourDictionary<https://www.yourdictionary.com/qwan>

qwan. Acronym. Quality Without A Name - in computer programming QWAN refers to a more metaphysical attribute that expresses elegancy of code.

?
---
Frank C. Wimberly
505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Tue, Mar 17, 2020, 8:52 AM Steven A Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com<mailto:sasmyth at swcp.com>> wrote:

Dave -

I myself am having an ineffable experience just now, as my drive through the big-rock country has taken on a Mad Max quality (simile borrowed from a friend on his own Hellride back up the coast of CA after retrieving his college son, with counties closing down behind him as he rolls through).   FWIW, I was pretty close to your brother's place on this trip but didn't give over to the thought of stopping by and asking if I could help dig an extra bunker or two.   Bunker rhymes with hunker.

I think your enumeration of "reasons" for "cannot express in words" covers the space well, but as a self-referential example naturally fails for many of the reasons you cite.   It is rather concise to reference "knowing ABOUT" vs "knowing", the biggest failing I find amongst our discussions here on FriAM... perhaps convenings of the Mother Church itself do better?

I am also reminded of JIddu Krishnamurti's "cousin", also a Krishnamurti who, when asked of Jiddu's knowledge/wisdom/perception reluctantly replied "Jiddu has held the sugar cube in the palm of his hand, but he has not tasted it".

Context;SignVsSignifier;Incompleteness;Paradox;EtCetera

We have words/phrases LIKE ineffable;QWAN;je ne sais quois "for a reason" though circularly, said reason cannot be described, merely "gestured in the direction of"?

Carry On,

 - Steve

PS.  The Sheriff shut down Durango just as we slipped into a motel here and will be raiding *their* City Market before we drive toward home...  Gas tank is fullish, within range I think, though fueling is not closed, just virtually everything else.   I will check for TP there out of curiosity, but we have a dozen rolls at home unless our house-sitter snatched them all for HER hoard.   Time to start raking, drying, sorting the cottonwood leaves methinks!   Are you sorry you are in Weesp rather than Utah for this incipient "Jackpot"?
On 3/17/20 4:16 AM, Prof David West wrote:
Hi Nick,

You are correct: I assert that you can know things of which you cannot speak; but there is still too much ambiguity in that statement. It would be more correct to say: some experiences are not expressible in words. I am making a narrow, but ubiquitous, claim — ubiquitous, because all of us have a ton of experiences that we cannot express in words.

Another dimension of precision, "cannot express in words" can mean: 1) we do not have enough words; 2) we do not have the right words; 3) any expression in words fails the capture the whole of the experience; 4) translating the experience to words creates a conflict (e.g. a paradox) in the words that was not present in the experience; 5) words are mere symbols (pointers or representations) and never the "thing" itself (Korzibski); 6) missing context;  and/or 7) the grammar of the language mandates untrue or less than true assertions.  Probably a few other ways that language fails.

This is not to deny the possibility of a language that could express some of these experiences. We have myths of such languages; e.g. The language of the birds that Odin used to communicate with Huggin and Muninn. Maybe there is some element of fact behind the myths?

It does not preclude using words in a non-representational way to communicate. Words can be evocative, recall to present experience, experiences past. Poetry does this. Nor does it preclude non-verbal, e.g. painting, as an evocative means of "bring to mind" experiences. (There is a lot of evidence that evocation can bring to mind experience that the construct called Nick did not itself experience — evidence that led Jung to posit the "collective unconscious.")

It is also quite possible to talk about experience rather than of experience. Mystics to this all the time, but always with the caveat that what is said about IT is not IT.

A specific example: Huxley talks about "the Is-ness" of  flower and the variability of Time. Heidegger and his followers have written volumes about Is-ness and Time. One more: Whitehead and process philosophers have written volumes about a dynamic, in constant flux, Reality; that I have experience of.

davew

On Mon, Mar 16, 2020, at 11:10 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com<mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:

Yeah, Dave, I screwed it up by mixing up “speaking of” and “knowing”.

I would never expect that you would sign up for a conversation about that of which we cannot know.   But, others at friam, if I understood them correctly, HAVE tried to engage me in such a conversation.

I think you would agree that that of which we cannot speak, we cannot speak.  [Tautology]

And you also would agree that which we cannot know we cannot know. [Another tautology}

And I think it also follows that we cannot speak of what we cannot know, since we would have no basis on which to speak of it.

Well, except possibly to say we do not know it, perhaps.  I don’t want to die on that hill.

But you insist that the inverse is not true.  We can and do know things of which we cannot speak.  So we might be having a conversation about how to move such things into the domain of speechable.   Your goal, in that case, would be as hunter, sent out into the domain of the unspeakable to capture some specimen from that world and drag it back.  Think, again, Castenada.

Or, we might be having a conversation about how we might transfer knowledge in ways other than speech.  You giving me a dose of some substance that you have already had a dose of would seem to be of this second sort.  Think Don Juan.

Hastily,

Nick

PS.  Any philosopher that holds that “knowledge” can only applied to true belief would not understand this conversation because I think we share the idea that there is probably no such thing as true belief in that sense and that therefore you and I are always talking about provisional knowledge, unless we are talking about an aspiration we might share to arrive at that upon which the community of inquiry will converge in the very long run.

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

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

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

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com><mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Monday, March 16, 2020 2:58 PM
To: friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] science privilege — fork from acid epistemology

Nick,

The only time that I have said something is "unknowable" is referencing complex systems  that some variables and some relations among variables in a complex system are literally unknowable. The context for such a statement is computing / software / and software engineering with a heavy timeline element. Pretty sure it has never appeared on this list.

What I do say, and will repeat, there are things you can know that you cannot articulate in language. There is Experience of which you cannot speak.

I am pretty sure my assertion is 180 degree opposite of what you think I may have been saying. Rest assured that I would never assert that there are things that are unknowable.

What needs care, and I have tried to do this, is to consistently use the same vocabulary — in this case experience. So I say there are experiences that cannot be put into words. Some of those experiences are worth experiencing.

You said "(Or speak of them which is the same thing.)"  Equating "knowing" with "speaking" is an error. Using "knowing" and "experiencing" as synonyms is not.

davew

On Sun, Mar 15, 2020, at 5:39 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com<mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:

Dave,

Thanks for this.  And it goes very well most of the way, but there is one spot where you persistently misunderstand me, and so I will go directly to that:

> Let's say, I say to you that "to speak of that of which we cannot

> speak"  is non-sense.

DW**It is no, everyone has experienced that of which they cannot speak. You can know something and you can know about something. You can know the experience of high or low insulin levels, you can know a lot about insulin and diabetes. You can speak about the latter knowledge, you cannot speak the former.

PLEASE READ CAREFULLY BECAUSE I WANT TO GET THIS NAILED DOWN TODAY.  The claim that I am referring to, which I have heard made by my colleague dualists, is not that there are things that I know nothing of,  or that you and I know nothing of, or that at any finite grouping of human beings or cognitive systems know nothing of.   It is the claim that there are things about which it is impossible to know, period, and that yet, we should try to know them. (Or speak of them, which is the same thing.) (Damn!  I was just induced to do it!)  That is non-sense.  Or a paradox.  Or both.

Now you might (others have) insisted that while the statement is a logical paradox (I would call paradoxes non-sense), the contemplation of paradoxes might lead me to knowledge.  I worry this might even be one of the methods you prescribe when you speak of a deep dive.  If so, I guess I have a right to ask (at least in Western Practice) what is the theory that tells you that these methods will lead to truth or wisdom, etc.

Eric may enter the conversation at this point and start to talk about castles in the sky. We can build castles in the sky, and talk about them, and even argue, from text, or logic, about the color of the third turret to the right on the north wall.  And we might find a lot of inner peace and sense of coherence by engaging in this sort of “knowledge gathering”  with others.  But I think, if he does, his claim will be irrelevant.  Knowledge about castles in the sky, however deeply codified, is fake knowledge in the sense that it lacks the essential element of claims of knowledge, which is the claim that, in the fullness of time, the arc of  inquiry bends to the position that I or you are now asserting.  Someday, people will actually walk in its corridors and admire its battlements.  Kings and queens will reighn, here.  That is what a castle IS.

Later in the day, when I have gotten control of my morning covid19 anxiety,  I may try to lard your message below, but right now, I hope to straighten out this particular misunderstanding.  When I speak of “we” who cannot know, I am NOT referring to you and or me or any other finite population of  knowers, but to what can NOT known by all cognitive systems in the far reach of time.  I still assert, despite your patient and kind argumentation, that to speak of “our knowing” THAT is nonsense.  Actually, to speak of NOT knowing it, is nonsense, also.  It’s just logic, right?  Mathematics.  Tautology, even.  Even Frank would agree.  RIGHT?

Only when we have settled on that logical point does it make sense to go on and talk about how you, and I and Glen and Marcus are going to come to know, that which we do not now know.

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/

-----Original Message-----

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of Prof David West

Sent: Sunday, March 15, 2020 5:54 AM

To: friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] science privilege — fork from acid epistemology

comments embedded.

On Sat, Mar 14, 2020, at 5:26 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com<mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dave and Glen,

>

> It's great to see your two frames coming into adjustment.  At the risk

> of taking the discussion back to absurdity, let me try to express, in

> laughably simple terms, what I hear you guys agreeing to.

>

> I have been taught a way of thinking about science that is western.

> Like all ways of thinking it both sights me and blinds me.  Nobody

> knows everything; everybody knows what they know.  Nobody should

> presume to judge what they don't know.  I don't know Eastern ways of

> thinking.  I have no basis on which to claim privilege for my western

> ways of thinking about science.

>

> Now, as a person who has always delighted in attending discussions

> among people who do not agree, and always fascinated by the

> possibility of convergence of opinion, what do I do when Dave (or Kim,

> or others) highlight the fact that there are whole ways of thinking

> that I just do not know anything about?

>

> One way would be to shrug.  AW heck, you go your way, I will go mine. I

> can't do that.   Shrugging is just not in my natire.  I need to try to

> integrate discordant ideas held by people I respect.  Now, it is

> possible that need is, in itself, Western.  And what an eastern

> philosophy would tell me is to put aside that need.

DW** Eastern ways of thinking would tell you to do a deep dive into that need. You will never, so they would say, truly understand your partial, Western, way of knowing absent the ability to integrate that way of thinking into a holistic mode of thinking.**DW

Often

> developmental psychologists among my acquaintances have asserted that

> my quest for agreement is a kind of invasion of their mental

> territory, that each person is entitled to his own individual and

> pristine experience.

DW** and Eastern ways would state that all "individual" and "pristine experience" is purely an illusion, but there is a Reality behind that illusion (no, not a Cartesian dualism — still maintaining an experience monism here) — a One (shared) behind the ones (individual).**DW

>

> Let's say you come to me and tell me that you hold in your hand an

> instrument of great wisdom, a revolver.  And if I will only put it to

> my head, and pull the trigger, I will have knowledge and understanding

> beyond anything I can now imagine.  I would be reluctant to follow

> that advice.  Is that western?

DW**No that is universally human common sense. And, as I am not in the habit of encouraging people to kill themselves, such an offer would never be extended.**DW

>

> Let's say, I say to you that "to speak of that of which we cannot

> speak"  is non-sense.

DW**It is no, everyone has experienced that of which they cannot speak. You can know something and you can know about something. You can know the experience of high or low insulin levels, you can know a lot about insulin and diabetes. You can speak about the latter knowledge, you cannot speak the former.

I am baking bread and just pulled the loaves out of the oven. I know when I have kneaded the dough enough to get the consistence I want in the final product but I cannot speak that knowledge. I can speak of it — employing lots of metaphors — but cannot speak it or communicate it directly**DW

To say, as an occasional member of the home

> congregation occasionally says, "What if there is a world out there

> which is totally beyond all forms of human understanding" is non-sense.

>  As Wittgenstein says, the beetle divides out.  Is an Eastern

> philosopher going to reply, "Ah Nick, such a paradox is not non-sense

> but the beginning of wisdom."

DW**be careful of word games — be true to your experience monism. Suppose, at my next FriAM I say to you, you know Nick there are 'experiences' that are beyond 'understanding'. There are many ways to interpret that sentence. I could be saying something like "You will experience death. Do you understand it? Will you understand it once you experience it? The latter is tough, because in your Western way of thinking, death is the end and it is certain that "you" will no longer be extant to understand anything. ——Interesting question: will "you" actually experience death or is death a non experience because there is no experiencer? —— The Tibetan Book of the Dead is premised on the certainty that "you" will experience death, find it rather terrifying, and could use some expert guidance on how to navigate the experience.

In stating that there is experience beyond understanding, I might be merely asserting that there are no words or phrases that adequately represent the totality of the experience and if 'understanding' requires linguistic, symbolic, or algorithmic expression than 'understanding' is impossible.

There are other possible "meanings" in the phrase "experience beyond understanding," but for later. **DW

>

> Or perhaps, the eastern philosopher would say, No, No, Nick, you have

> it all wrong.  If you seek that sense of convergence, go for it

> directly.  Don't argue with dave and Glen, hug them, drink with them,

> play Russian roulette.  What you seek cannot be found with words!

DW**You will have to play Russian Roulette by yourself, I'll not participate. I will accept the hug and a drink. I'll even share a slice of the warm bread I just made. Delicious even if I am the only one saying so.

I am pretty certain the the revolver of which you speak is a euphemism for psychedelics. If so, it is a particularly bad metaphor, one that might express your fears — fears that ALL empirical evidence confirm are unfounded — than it is of the actual use/experience.  [Caveat: there are some instances were the psychedelic provides a tipping point for a psychological ill effect, and overdoses can damage the physiology — but "ordinary" use of psylocibin, mescaline, DMT, and LSD cause no harm of any form.]**DW

>

> If what we have encountered here is the limits of discourse, why are

> we talking?

DW**The Limit of Discourse is, at minimum, when all possible permutations of the 600,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary, have been exchanged and we still lack agreement/convergence. But, then we would have to consider all the other Natural Languages (maybe even those like the one found in the Voinich Manuscript), all of art and music, and body language. Metaphor adds yet another dimension that would need to be taken into consideration.**DW

>

> 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/

>

>

>

> -----Original Message-----

> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of u?l? ?

> Sent: Saturday, March 14, 2020 8:28 AM

> To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>>

> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] science privilege — fork from acid epistemology

>

>

> FWIW, I agree completely with your gist, if not with your pique. The

> lost opportunity is implicit in the ebb and flow of collective

> enterprises. Similar opportunity costs color the efforts of any large

> scale enterprise. I can't blame science or scientists for their lost

> opportunities because triage is necessary [†]. But there is plenty of

> kinship for you out there. I saw this the other day:

>

>   Your Mind is an Excellent Servant, but a Terrible Master - David

> Foster Wallace

>   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsAd4HGJS4o

>

> I'm tempted to dive into particulars on your examples (Vedic, Buddhist,

> Hermetics). But my contributions would be laughable. I'll learn from

> any contributions I hope others make. I've spent far too little of my

> life in those domains.

>

> [†] Both for the individual trying to decide what to spend their life

> researching and the whole (as Wolpert points out

> <https://ti.arc.nasa.gov/m/pub-archive/1476h/1476%20(Wolpert).pdf>).

> Most of the prejudice I encounter doesn't seem mean-spirited, though.

> Even virulent scientismists seem to be victims of their own, personally

> felt, opportunity costs.

>

> On 3/14/20 3:21 AM, Prof David West wrote:

> > Glen, I really appreciate your response and insights.

> >

> > You are certainly correct that much, or most, of my pique is simply impatience. But, I am here now, with these questions, and with a limited window within which to be patient. Should my great grandchildren have my interests, Science might serve them well, but is is frustrating right now.

> >

> > Science is far more reflective that I generally give it credit for. Your examples, save one, illustrate that. The one that I object to is "assessing scientific literacy" which, based on limited exposure, seems to be more of "checking to see if you are bright enough to agree with us" than evaluating what it would mean to be scientifically literate.

> >

> > A closely related, I think, topic is the push by computer science to have "computational thinking" embedded in elementary and secondary education as "essential." Computational thinking is exactly the wrong kind of thinking as most of the critical things we need to think about are not algorithmic in nature. The scientific and computational part of the climate crisis is the easy part. figuring out the complex social-cultural-economic-politcal answers to the problem is the hard part and I doubt it is reducible to scientific thinking and absolutely positive it is not amenable to computational thinking.

> >

> > Maybe when Hari Seldon has his psychohistory all worked out it will be

> > different.  :)

> >

> > It may very well be possible to develop a science of philosophy, but it will require relinquishing what, again to me, appears to be a double standard. Scientists are willing to wax philosophical about quantum interpretations but would, 99 times out of a hundred, reject out of hand any discussion of the cosmological philosophy in the  Vaisesika Sutras — despite the fact that that Schrodinger says the idea for superposition came from the Upanishads.

> >

> > George Everest (the mountain is named after him) introduced Vedic teachings on math and logic to George Boole, Augustus de Morgan, and Charles Babbage; shaping the evolution of Vector Analysis, Boolean Logic, and a whole lot of math behind computer science.

> >

> > One could make a very strong argument that most of the Science that

> > emerged in England in the 1800-2000, including Newton, was derived

> > from Vedic and some Buddhist philosophies. But try to get a Ph.D. in

> > any science today with a dissertation proposal that incorporated

> > Akasa. [The Vedas posited five elements as the constituents of the

> > universe — Aristotle's four, earth, air, fire, water, plus Akasa,

> > which is consciousness.]

> >

> > Swami Vivekananda once explained Vedic philosophical ideas about the relationship between energy and matter to Nicholas Tesla. Tesla tried for years to find the equation that Einstein came up with much later. Try to get a research grant for something like that.

> >

> > A practical question: how would one go about developing a "science" of the philosophy of Hermetic Alchemy and its  2500 years of philosophical investigation. Information, perhaps deep insights, that was tossed out the window simply because some pseudo-alchemists tried to con people into thinking that lead could be turned into gold.

> >

> > Of course the proposal for developing such a science would have to be at least eligible for grants and gaining tenure, or it is not, in a practicial (take note Nick) sense.

>

>

> --

> ☣ uǝlƃ

>

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