[FRIAM] more modal realism

Tue Dec 28 19:37:31 EST 2021

Dave,

Would you call the anxiety you experienced a "panic attack"?  I've had a
couple each of which was stimulated by a dream in which I was going to be
trapped inside of something (claustrophobia).  In each case it took
medication to dissipate the intense anxiety.  Also, I think I had a milder
attack when I first smoked marijuana in 1966.  Given my background it's
tempting to understand the intense ones as unconscious memories of birth.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 4:38 PM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm> wrote:

> An experiential (400 mike trip):
>
> In the beginning there was Nothing —  the Singularity. Then a quite
> literally impossible differentiation occurred; setting of a chain reaction
> of differentiation and hence Something(s).
>
> This experience parallels the Taoist dictum that from One came Two, from
> Two Four, and from Four Everything. Of course I was aware of Taoism before
> I had the experience, so maybe what I "observed" was merely a visualization
> of a concept encountered decades ago.
>
> BTW, this was the closest I ever felt at mental risk. Part of the
> experience was observing two "flawless diamond necklaces" then descending
> into an infinite recursion of differentiation: e.g. one necklace had an
> imperfect diamond, the diamond had a near invisible flaw, a single atom in
> the lattice was misaligned, a quantum string was vibrating incorrectly, ...
> . It was actually anxiety inducing as I watched my mind tripping out.
>
> davew
>
>
> On Tue, Dec 28, 2021, at 12:50 PM, glen wrote:
> > It's OK. I fixed your larding format.
> >
> > Just like with your challenge to what "possible" means, we have to also
> > challenge the use of "random". You can't say "experience is random"
> > without some kind of _set_ or _space_ of experiences from which to
> > choose. E.g. it makes sense to say things like "There exist a black
> > ball and a white ball. Choose one at random." It does not make sense to
> > say "There exists nothing. Choose an experience at random."
> >
> > So we need some sense of a set of experiences from which to choose. We
> > can conflate concepts like "choice", "select", and "random" together, I
> > think. But we have to talk seriously about what *exists* ... the set of
> > things from which the selection selects. This is where Lewis has an
> > advantage. Anything that could exist, does exist. We don't have to
> > worry about construction of nothing to something, from a little bit of
> > stuff to a lot of stuff, etc. It's all already out there.
> >
> > But to toss in a little more grist just to help skip over all this to
> > get to the question:
> >
> > Then we have to talk about what you're calling repetitions or
> > regularities ... "laws", rules to which the extant things adhere (or
> > would/will adhere if we ever got around to
> > measuring/perceiving/experiencing them). As I've ranted, there are 2
> > features we probably want: consistency and completeness. Any 2 things
> > from the set of extant things shouldn't contradict each other. And the
> > set of extant things has to be complete. I.e. we can't dream up stuff
> > that is NOT in the set.
> >
> > This is where counterfactuals play a role. When we talk about different
> > things within a world versus different worlds, we're talking about
> > contradictions/inconsistencies. But counterfactuals come in 2 senses,
> > the (broader?) linguistic one (future [plu]perfect?) and the
> > (specific?) logical one.
> >
> > I think we could derive a way of *counting* worlds based on the way we
> > *count* things within a world.
> >
> > Without that minutiae out of the way, back to the question: Regardless
> > of whether the choice of things from a world, or the choices of a world
> > is *random* or not, when we talk about regularities/patters over
> > collections of worlds, is that probabilistic? Or is it a clear case of
> > sizes/measures of those collections? My guess at the answer is that
> > every particular world will always be distinguishable (observability)
> > from every other particular world. There are no equivalence classes
> > unless we gloss/abstract some predicate/selector/choice. But maybe
> > there *are* some inevitable equivalence classes ... like
> > complementarity in quantum mechanics, where something is always
> > unobservable, unreachable, behind the ontological wall. If that's the
> > case, then our choice/selection methods must be probabilistic, a
> > partial versus total ordering/sizing.
> >
> > Please remember that I don't *believe* any of this, personally. I'm
> > simply building a defensible answer to the question "Why is there
> > something, rather than nothing?"
> >
> > On 12/28/21 11:10, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> >> On 12/28/21 09:30, glen wrote:
> >>>
> >>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds
> >>>
> >>> We see something like this in evolutionary justifications of various
> phenotypic traits, the most egregious being evolutionary psychology, but
> including Nick's hyena penis and the ontological status of epiphenomena.
> Yes, I'm posting this in part because of EricC's kindasorta Voltaire-ish
> response to what might seem like my Leibnizian defense of bureaucracy. But
> I'm also hoping y'all could help with the question I ask later.
> >>>
> >>> Of course, I'm more on Spinoza's (or Lewis') side, here, something
> closer to a commitment to the existence of all possible worlds. I'm in a
> running argument at our pub salon about the metaphysical question "Why is
> there something, rather than nothing?" My personal answer to that question,
> unsatisfying to the philosopher who asked it, is that this is either a
> nonsense question *or* it relies fundamentally on the ambiguity in the
> concepts of "something" and "nothing". Every denial of the other proposed
> answers (mostly cosmological) involves moving the goal posts or invoking
> persnickety metaphysical assumptions that weren't laid out when the
> question was asked. ... it's just a lot of hemming and hawing by those who
> want to remain committed to their own romantic nonsense.
> >>>
> >> Ok, I don’t know whether my nonsense is romantic, but here it is.
> Experience is essentially random.  So, to answer the question, there is
> mostly nothing.  Indeed, experience seems often to repeat itself, but all
> random processes repeat themselves, and so are still nothing.  Every once
> in a while, however, such repetitions are so persistent as to beyond our
> capacity to shrug them off as random, and these experiences are somethings.
> >>
> >>> But a better answer might be something like: Because the size of the
> set of possible worlds where there is something is *so much larger* than
> the size of the set of worlds where there is nothing. And one might even
> argue that all the possible worlds where there is nothing are degenerate,
> resulting in only 1 possible world with nothing. [⛧]
> >>>
> >>> I don't think this is a probabilistic argument. But I'm too ignorant
> to be confident in that. Can any of you argue one way or the other? Is this
> argument from size swamping probabilistic, combinatorial? Or can I take a
> Lewisian stance and assert that all the possible worlds do, already, exist
> and this is just a numbers thing?
> >> OOOOOPS!  My always-slippery grasp on the word “possible” has failed.
> What do we mean, in this context, by “possible”?
> >
> > --
> > glen
> > Theorem 3. There exists a double master function.
> >
> >
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