[FRIAM] quotes and questions

Wed May 18 15:12:09 EDT 2022

EricS -

I don't know if this (or anything else I babble about) is useful, but I 
offer it anyway in an (usually failed) attempt at succinctness.

I do believe that much if not all paradigm-transcending ideas begin as 
being indistinguishable from mysticism, perhaps by definition.  They 
exist *outside* of the extant paradigm and therefore are NOT grounded in 
it (or not obviously so).  I would suggest that something like mysticism 
is necessary (though far from sufficient) for paradigm 
shift/transcendence.   It seems like it always takes the 
work/perspective of hindsight to build a good path/bridge from the 
former to the latter, or maybe more apropos, build the latter more 
solidly on the foundations of the former?

My experience with (wild eyed) mystics who, in your idiom, use 
conviction in place of truth, seem to believe that if/since all previous 
paradigm shifts were triggered by mystical thinking, that *all* mystical 
thinking would yield paradigm shifts.   The ancient explorers, whether 
land-bridge crossers or polynesian boat folks, might well have 
sacrificed *many* expeditions for the very few required to people a new 
land.   The mystical mode may similarly have to sacrifice *many* to 
wandering aimlessly and uselessly in pursuit of red-herring phantasms 
for the few (e.g. Gallileo, Einstein, Godel, etc) who managed to 
recognize a pattern that was otherwise obscured by the *current 
paradigm* to all others.

A handful or so years ago I had two roomates who I shall call "oil" and 
"water" for illustration purposes.  "Oil" was very sincere but very 
*wrong* and today is still an anti-Vaxx-Q-Anon type.  The other was an 
Artist but one practiced/aligned-with rational thought and idioms.   I 
remember after one dysfunctional discussion (always superficially 
polite, but truly going nowhere), after Oil left the room Water said to 
me "Oil, I don't want to know what you *believe*, I want to know what 
you *think*".  It was painfully apropos as Oil was woefully prone to 
using the word "believe" (in the sense of "I think everyone should be 
able to believe what they want to") a lot and when she might use the 
world "think" she really meant it as a substitute for "believe" as well.

On 5/17/22 2:10 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> I thought, Glen, that Marcus’s request for “scrutiny” was after a (modestly) different point.
>
> Marcus, you seem to be able to distill things that can bother me for years, without my being able to articulate them.
>
> This notion of fervor-as-truth is what has been bothering me too.  I have struggled to find the common-language words that get closest to it.  I understand why the feeling / thinking dichotomy exists in English lexicaliztation, but it is so ancient and tropified that I am reluctant to inherit all its baggage.
>
> Words I could come up with:
>
> 1. Conviction.  This is somehow a “feeling” word.  But it is particularly the “feeling” that whatever you are currently about is profoundly “real” or “right” or (I would say at the end, only) “satisfying”.
>
> Now historically, conviction seems to have been a measure of truth for many.  For those (and I am in conversation with some) who think medieval mysticism was a far greater achievement than the enlightenment — and after the world collapses back into sheer brute predation, we will return to the age when that is the highest human attainment — that is the profound “apprehension of reality” that mere “thinking” has missed.  There is a fervor among the religious, the mystically inclined, the psychedelists, and the “contemplatives” (their own term; I tend to lump them with the religious, just parting from the power-politics accretions of the latter), that seems to me to mainly be anchored in this view.
>
> But now we need to get to why the enlightenment seemed necessary to some, from a cultural background in mysticism.  There seem to be more than one kind of conviction.
>
> 2a. Delusion.  This is the conviction of the schizophrenics, who by some argument, we want to say are not attached to “the real reality”, but who would strongly protest otherwise (again, I have conversations in which this has happened).
>
> 2b. “Insight”, for lack of a better word.  This could be sub-categorized, but it has something to do with having ideas that might tend to pan out in a Peircian sense, but more importantly, that are somehow anchored to the world in such a way that it is not entirely accidental that they should pan out.
>
> The reason we wanted to not leave the matter at the level of conviction, is that it doesn’t obviously give us a way to distinguish the cases 2a and 2b, whereas there seem to be other approaches that help.
>
> Now, I have been in these discussions for enough years to know that the ones on the other side of this position can argue, essentially forever, why what I have just said is not only wrong, but so missing the point that it is “not even wrong”.  And they are professional debaters, so the one thing they and I seem able to agree on is that we can demonstrate that language on its own is never strong enough to settle any skew in points of view.  It just goes in circles forever, with no productive impact on either side.  They will go on about how mysticism had its intersubjectivity just like science has, so there is no difference there.  And that the mystics were always the smartest of people in their time, and the various “wisdom traditions” have been accumulating cultural memory for millennia, so they _must_ have much more of truth about them than any mere single person will have in a working argument, so one should grant the argument from authority.  Etc.
>
>
> Given, then, that we all know what it is like to feel states of conviction, but we also routinely make distinctions between patterns that we think are delusion and patterns that we think are insightful (or plausibly so), what to do?  It seems to me it would be silly to deny that humans have this dimensionality of experience, or to assert that in any adequate sense we can encapsulate the whole spectrum into either one of its poles.  But I also strongly agree with and appreciate Glen’s framing, which seems very clean and valid, that merely asserting incompleteness doesn’t really move any fuller understanding forward.
>
> Eric
>
>
>> On May 18, 2022, at 2:01 AM, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I think Roger Penrose and Robert Rosen are fairly good examples of how to go about making the objection. Gerald Edelman comes close, too, with "reentrant" networks (which lead to Tononi's IIT). There are lots of others in various domains.
>>
>> The idea being that you best formulate your objection to the status quo by the painstaking work of constructing your counter example. The relatively blank accusation of inadequacy isn't good enough because your objection is too easily written off with a parade of whataboutist other things. What about gpt3? What about paraconsistent logics? What about <fill in your own obscure thing>? Both Penrose's and Rosen's formulations have fallen out of favor. But that's a good thing. They did the work that promoted serious criticism. Penrose's and Rosen's good criticism begat good criticism. (Sure, both were ridiculed by the peanut gallery. But even sneers from the peanut gallery demonstrate engagement.)
>>
>> It's not clear to me how to formulate a good criticism without first pretending [⛧] you believe what you intend to criticize. Part of the problem with requiring scrutiny into the objector is that the necessary pretension invites accusations of hypocrisy and ad hominem. E.g. it's irrelevant whether Rosen was actually facile with metamath or category theory. So, scrutiny into the objector isn't the issue. But it's close. We do need to see enough to help the objector decide her case. What was Rosen *trying* to do? Why did he think category theory would help? Etc. Robert resisted his cult following to some extent. His daughter, unfortunately, didn't resist it very well, despite her good intentions. Like Peirce, though, Rosen got too hung up on arguing about words, facilitating that cultish air.
>>
>>
>> [⛧] "Pretending" isn't the best word, here. I mean something more like "suspending disbelief" or "steelmanning". But I'm using "pretend" because it evokes the *play* we do, especially as children. When Renee's granddaughter pretends her Barbie dolls are real people, she's not "faking it", "posturing", "suspending disbelief", or anything of the sort. She's actually inside the domain, living inside the pretension.
>>
>> On 5/17/22 09:18, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>> A problem I have with accepting Dave’s view is that it allows the person making a claim to not be subject to scrutiny,  Because, well, they feel that way so it must be true.   That there is some point at which precision impedes accuracy.  It is a recipe for the proliferation of cult leaders.
>>>> On May 17, 2022, at 7:55 AM, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Right. This is why the wet monkey theory (along with many other false but useful for manipulation heuristics) fails to capture anything important about "groupthink". We can re-orient Dave's no-largest-model objection toward any just-so manipulative rhetoric. Of course the choice of language biases the description written in it! Sheesh. And, yes, it's important to make that clear to any novice entering whatever domain. Pluralism (or parallax) of languages is one mitigation tactic. But another common one is basic error-checking, the social process of saying out loud your construction and listening as others criticize, deconstruct, or outright ridicule it. Spend too much time stewing in your own juices and your constructs become private. Spend too much time socializing with those who agree and your constructs become groupthink. Nick likes to say he's grateful for anyone who reads his writing. But the actual good faith action is to criticize it. Reading it is like nodding politely with the occasional "ah", "yes", "uh-huh" while someone tells you their boring story. Engagement is the real objective. Reading is a mere means to that end. And disagreement is demonstrative engagement.
>>>>
>>>> But [dis]agreement isn't well-covered by "contrarian", "oppositional", or "adversarial". Dualism is just one form of foundationalism. Monism < dualism < trialism < quadrialism < ?. 4 forces? 17 objects? 3 types of object? Who cares? Those particular numbers are schematic in the larger discipline of disagreement. The foundation is important. But getting hung up on the particular number/value misses the forest for the trees. Arguing over the number of things in the foundation is akin to arguing about the meanings of words. In the spirit of "not even wrong", it's not even sophistry.
>>>>
>>>>> On 5/16/22 14:41, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>>> Glen writes:
>>>>> < Of course, we *could* be working our way into a fictitious corner. (E.g. the just-so story of the wet monkey thing <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.patheos.com%2fblogs%2funreasonablefaith%2f2009%2f08%2fwet-monkey-theory%2f&c=E,1,-cHQRn1fLStevDlpWFP8gX5uCn2HIrbZusQ87TdMjT9lRW8vEYPCU_FULrOoR0o0XoEd-Y6N7FyOb4n6j1IFrpKXgy2jZyCquCkv9LHZ-KLfQA,,&typo=1>, where all the kids who believe in the ability of formalism(s) to capture the world are simply thinking inside the box.) But what's the likelihood of that? I claim vanishingly small. >
>>>>> Using the Standard Model, applied physicists and engineers build careers and do useful work.   Are they thinking in a box?   Perhaps.  But there are also physicists who are obsessed with poking holes in it and generalizing it.
>>
>> -- 
>> Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙
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