[FRIAM] [dis]integrated

Tue Oct 12 09:03:09 EDT 2021

As Yogi Berra might have said: all this talk about the ineffable, je ne
sais quoi.

The way that can be spoken is not the way, because the speaking itself
spoils the effect.  Chuang Tzu's butcher can carve a beast in one fluid
stroke of the knife, but he can't explain how he's doing it; and if he did
explain how he was doing it, it wouldn't be the same it anymore.

https://inference-review.com/article/primate-memory

IN MY OWN WORK, I have often described the social learning techniques of
> chimpanzees as education by master-apprenticeship.11
> <https://inference-review.com/article/primate-memory#endnote-11> Mothers
> and other adults take on the role of the master. The young chimpanzees in
> the community learn by carefully observing the behavior of the masters.
> Observational learning has three important aspects: the master models
> behavior but does not actively teach it; the apprentice has a strong and
> intrinsic motivation to copy the behavior; and, importantly, the masters
> are tolerant toward their apprentices while they learn.

Note that the chimpanzees also learn to be teachers by the same method,
they model the "moral obligation" to teach along with the practical
lesson.  One could almost say that the chimpanzees "believe" in teaching
their young.  Or that the chimps are practicing a kind of "ancestor
worship" by preserving these activities in their "culture".  Then again one
could write it all off to natural selection of traits that accidentally map
to moral categories.

And we taller primates also learn a lot this way, language, moral judgment,
bragging about our language skills and moral judgment, and bullying others
to acknowledge our skills and accept our judgments.

-- rec --

On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 4:53 AM uǝlƃ ☤>$ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> I feel that way about anyone who "stands in awe" of anything, actually.
> We're consistently bombarded with phrases like "the majesty of" this or
> that ... or this or that "takes my breath away" and whatnot. Maybe we could
> call such nonsense the Idioms of Awe. Religious belief is the favorite
> bogey of atheists. But we find it everywhere. Back in Portland, I abutted
> so many "foodies", it literally dis-gusted me. Food is fuel. That's it. No
> matter how much the True Believers proselytize the latest fad, that Awesome
> New Breakfast Place or whatever. It's just food. Please eat so we don't
> have to hear you talk anymore.
>
> We see it a lot in our obComplexity crowd. We see it in the Singularians.
> We see it in the formalists and even the Dionysians. Runners are especially
> bad, coonnssttantly yapping about their religion. But weightlifters are no
> better. Even the mobility bros seem to have drunk the Kool-Aid. Pretty much
> anywhere anyone can "get carried away" with something, you'll find the True
> Believers waiting in the wings to swoop in and brainwash you.
>
> At least the Rationalists have a method for mind-changing, unlike most
> True Believers. But rationality isn't *fascinating*. People need to be
> fascinated. My own pet theory is that our anatomy has been pressured toward
> fascination, a desire to concentrate, to focus for an extended time. The
> trick is to ask, given the target domain/problem/issue, how long do we need
> to focus on it? Perhaps some domains really do need multiple generations of
> concentrating individuals. Perhaps some domains only need a few people to
> focus on it for a year or so.
>
> In that context, those who are seemingly stuck in some gravity well of
> True Belief are more pitiful than repulsive. (Or maybe they're repulsive
> *because* they're so pitiable?) What we need is an education program that
> gives the pathetic True Believers some tools that help them climb out of
> their hole. But like the cops responding to a call from a homeless camp
> littered with human feces and used needles, educating the True Believers
> can be dangerous. The abyss stares back into you.
>
> On 10/11/21 12:38 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> > Yeah I don’t know.
> >
> > For some years I was working in ocean-floor engineering, and got a feel
> for seawater.  For all the devices you design, it is all-surrounding and
> omnipresent.  It relentlessly intrudes through any crack, seam, or pore,
> and it corrodes whatever it touches.  For whatever reason, this describes
> the affect of my response to people’s religiosity.  The more genuine and
> sincere they are, the stronger my aversion to that in them.  It’s not even
> the same as being averse to the whole person.  There are people of whom I
> think the world, and to whom I am very attached, in whom I just have to
> work around this one radioactive thing.  n.b., however, that all such
> people are related to me by birth.  There don’t seem to be any ones I have
> sought out as friends of whom that happens to be the case.  Maybe,
> borderline, one or two Jews, who seem to have a decorum and sense of proper
> privacy (those particular people, I mean) for themselves and for others.
> >
> > There is another metaphor that also serves.  I have a friend with fairly
> bad arachnophobia.  I was commenting that I didn’t know what that would
> feel like, as spiders don’t particularly bother me, was for example ticks
> do.  She commented that it was funny, because her brother had said the same
> thing, using the same examples.  The reason, of course, is that most
> spiders prefer to mind their own business.  (Some Australian mouse spiders,
> perhaps less so.)  For ticks, their business is _you_.  Likewise, there is
> no box within which religiosity is content to stay.  It’s business is
> always _you_, so you can never turn your back on it in rest.
> >
> > In trying to form a clear view, for my own purposes, of why I respond
> this way, in a quite different context earlier this week, I was thinking of
> trying to explain to someone that I grew up with religious people on me
> trying to force some kind of “religious conversion” and, in looking for a
> metaphor, the one that came to me was “like cops on a black man”.  And no
> matter how submissive I am and how much I would like to be cooperative, I
> so far have not found it in myself to want to go back into that.
> >
> > It surprises me that these studies don’t seem to address questions of
> domination and constriction, and the degree to which being able to breathe
> matters to one or another person.
> >
> > Eric
> >
> >
> >
> >> On Oct 11, 2021, at 2:07 PM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> Doesn't work for me.   My parents are in a very liberal church and (I
> think) like it because it gives some structure and support in their
> community.   My dad's (I think formative) education at a strong liberal
> arts college probably contributed to my tendency to deconstruct things.
>  I'm not particularly annoyed with their semi-religious activities, but
> there were plenty of people in my high school that I found to be religious
> crazies who I almost felt obligated to abuse.  That hardened my atheism,
> but really it was hard right away in my early teenage years.
> >>
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
> >> Sent: Monday, October 11, 2021 9:43 AM
> >> To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
> >> Subject: [FRIAM] [dis]integrated
> >>
> >> Study: Atheists are Made By Their Parents
> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fskepchick.org%2f2021%2f10%2fstudy-atheists-are-made-by-their-parents%2f&c=E,1,2G1IsnysW37qkXOrMoyLXGgacehySvzlBBD0wGXgUiHZFPFiq8oRkLu4J8VyPqz0vteY4F9ijy0I1jQMz57JJIg1WkOeQPeOqYDV9WgSFj4,&typo=1
> >>
> >> Much of the argument is about credible displays of faith and hypocrisy.
> I thought this might be interesting following on the epically bent thread
> on [in]consistency, as well as some old conversations about how well one
> can describe/explain some historical decision/branch-point in their own
> life.
> >>
> >> I land about where Rebecca does, I think.
>
> --
> "Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
> ☤>$ uǝlƃ
>
>
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