[FRIAM] the cancellation arc

Thu Sep 16 16:17:15 EDT 2021

"Re: your claim that monism unifies epistemology and ontology"

I wouldn't phrase it that way. I would say that there is no meaningful
distinction between epistemology, ontology, and metaphysics, and that if
they appear to be different that is a sign of confusion. You can approach
the same subject with those frames in mind, I guess, as a statement of your
personal reason for being interested in the topic... but ultimately they
are all asking the same questions, and if we thought about them that way it
would be an improvement.
<echarles at american.edu>

On Thu, Sep 16, 2021 at 3:09 PM uǝlƃ ☤>$ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> I doubt I'll make it to vFriAM tomorrow. My schedule hasn't been conducive
> lately. So, I'll take the nugget in your text below that I can reply to
> best. My claim is *not* that the distinction between phenomena and
> epiphenomena is relative to a point of view. That's *your* claim, not mine.
> My claim is that epiphenomena do not exist. They are figments of your
> imagination ... or, more generously, your calculus for analyzing the world.
> They are purely *formal*, syntactic things with no correlate in the world.
>
> If we can carry multiple frames around with us, we can swap them in and
> out and rank them according to which frames produce more or fewer
> epiphenomena. Those that produce fewer should be prioritized over those
> that produce many. In that, I think, we agree. If we refuse to carry around
> multiple frames, then we're (preemptively) stuck with whatever one we've
> landed on. But none of this should be taken as a claim that epiphenomena
> exist, only as an indicator for how articulated and complete our frame is
> ... i.e. its fidelity to what does exist.
>
> Re: your claim that monism unifies epistemology and ontology -- I've cited
> Wolpert's "Limits of Inference" several times and I doubt citing it again
> will be helpful. But if we think of all the ways we can think about the
> universe as part of the universe, then we can see that there might be a
> smaller set of ways to think that have high fidelity than the number of
> ways that have low fidelity. Wolpert's argument is that there can be only 1
> maximally faithful way to think. It's a strong argument. It's stronger than
> Rosen's argument that there does not exist a "largest model". But, to me,
> both are monist; and both lower the number of epiphenomena.
>
>
>
> On 9/16/21 11:41 AM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> > Are we mixing up monadism with monism?  I think the
> epistemic/ontological distinction fails under monism.  Either everything is
> ontological or everything is epistemic, and in any case there is no
> in-principle distinction to be made between them.
> >
> > Under peirce's triadic monism all experience is cognition (yes, even
> body experiences) and all cognition is in signs, themselves having always
> three "arguments".  (Sorry, =? Variables,
> things-you-have-to-have-there-or-the-expression-is-incomplete. ) So, not
> only is there a point of view in every proposition, the proposition is
> incomplete until the point of view is made explicit, or at least well
> understood between the propositor and the propositee.   Asserting that the
> phenomenon/epiphenomonon distinction is relative to a point of view is no
> challenge to that distinction.  The whole discussion concerns the shifting
> of frames and the search for a frame that will hold them both.  So, I don't
> dispute your relativism;  I just insist that it's already built into my
> line of thought.  And sometimes I sense that you NEED ME TO BELIEVE that
> there is only one reality and that it is mine.  That's not what a Peircean
> monism asserts.  Even mine.
> >
> > Since  you assert that you disagree and yet there is no way I can
> steel-man your position that is incompatible with this relativistic monism,
> I need to talk to you.  So, tomorrow, around ten am your time, I will
> extricate myself from the Mosquito Infested Bog, and try to reach Vfriam
> from my car.   We'll see how that goes.
> >
> > If we can get beyond a "relativisticker that thou" pissing contest, I
> would like to go on and discuss this difference between body knowledge and
> brain knowledge as if the brain were not, after all, a part of the body.
> (Sorry, that was a bit of straw=manning, for which I need to apologize, but
> for clarity, need not delete).  Your actual distinction was between
> Cognitive knowledge and Body knowledge.  Many people (perhaps not you) want
> to treat this as an entirely different kind of knowledge, and I think a lot
> of evil can spring from such a radical differentiation.  For me, it is once
> again an instance of frame shifting and the search for a frame that will
> embrace both the "cognitive" and the "somatic" frame.  I would frame them
> both as modes of experience, say, urgent and reflective.  Which of these
> modes of experience "proves out" then becomes an empirical question.
> Writing this, I now see that built into my thinking is the idea that a kind
> of hyper-reflective experience (science?) is the ultimate test of the truth
> of all experience.  Dave, I guess will challenge this with all his will.
> But I will counter that it is not that dreams cannot reveal truths, it is
> that, a dream that has revealed a truth, will prove out in the long run.
> Thus, if you dreamt of unicorns in your flower beds last night, you will
> either find unicorn foot prints in the soft turf around your petunias when
> you wake up or recognize that petunias make you horny.  Either of those,
> for me, would constitute a truth, one about unicorns, the other about you.
> >
> > Of course we can always fall back on the Shirley/Kaye distinction, that
> I valorize the search for stability while you valorize embracing chaos.  I
> would of course try to find a stable frame that would embrace these both
> (the Apollonian/Dionesian distinction, for instance) which effort, I guess,
> you would have to resist.
> >
> > Hope to see you tomorrow.
> >
> > Nick
> > Nick Thompson
> > ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
> > https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
> > Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2021 1:40 PM
> > To: friam at redfish.com
> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the cancellation arc
> >
> > Since I'm bored with this webinar, I figured I'd type up some more troll
> food:
> >
> > The _epi-_ prefix basically means "near". So a phenomenon is, somehow,
> ontologically localized and an epiphenomenon is epistemically distant. But
> that "secondary" phenomenon need not be ontologically distant, which is
> where the causality problems with epiphenomena enter the discussion. Frank
> raised these causal problems nicely awhile back with the discussion of
> colliders and forks.
> >
> > Being agnostic, in contrast to a metaphysical commitment to, say,
> reductionism or monism, I defer judgement on the modeling relation, the
> strength of the map between epistemic and ontological structures. This is
> why Nick's attempt to "turn the tables" on me, by suggesting that my
> rejection of epiphenomena is, itself, a perspective, fails. The admission
> that any 1 ontology can submit to analysis by multiple epistemic structures
> allows me to tolerate monists. And the admission that any 1 epistemic
> structure might effectively analyze multiple ontological structures, allows
> me to tolerate pluralists.
> >
> > A rejection of epiphenomena is a preservation of decoupled epistemology
> and ontology. An acceptance of epiphenomena is a registration, a parsing of
> the world according to a scoped epistemic structure. I go just a tad
> further and argue that such registration is preemptive in that it precludes
> the analysis of that same ontology by alternative epistemic structures.
> >
> > I'd be OK if someone objected to the preemptivity assertion. Some people
> are open-minded and cognitively endowed enough to swap their frames in and
> out at will. But *I* am neither that open-minded, nor cognitively endowed.
> I'm an agnostic *because* I recognize that limitation in myself. But I've
> never seen someone successfully argue that their, singular, identified
> epistemic frame is The capital T way to register/parse the world.
> >
>
> --
> "Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
> ☤>$ uǝlƃ
>
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