[FRIAM] McCarthy v Peirce

[glen]

It's been mulled over. E.g.

What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine?
https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.03886v1

"Experience" seems, by definition, hopelessly fragile to context. If your experience is similar to someone else's experience, then you're in a cult. Get out! There's nothing more frightening than a commitment to a common experience. What I'm looking for are things I can't imagine, not things other people imagine, much less things other people are committed to.

The idea came up recently that we might want to implement a virtual reality (VR) interface to allow a user to walk a graph. My 1st reaction was to draw the (false) distinction between the Eulerian vs Lagrangian point of view (maybe translated to subjective experience: as if you're a point in space versus as if you're a particle in space). VR seems, to me, hopelessly Eulerian. Simultaneously (well, interleaved with), I was listening to a podcast "analyzing" the Nick Cage movie "Color Out of Space". I read the Lovecraft story within the last decade, though I can't remember when. But the movie was pretty good. Anyway, when you, as a point in space, look out at a sub-graph of which you're not a member, can't resist being arrogant/tribal about the sub-graph of which you are a member ... a kind of temporal/spatial bias. But if you look at the largest sub-graph you can (every visible node and edge from you as a node, everything that you are not, minimizing the sub-graph you're in) and watch that largest sub-graph morph and flicker, you can't help but feel the Cosmic Horror. Lovecraft's racism was rooted in his admission that the world is larger than whatever Norms you may be habituated to. Reduce the diversity of the experiences and you homogenize the world to its least common denominator.

Monism, in this context, looks to me like Cosmic Horror. I'd prefer to embrace my smallness and avoid pretending to Cosmic Homogeneity ... aka I wouldn't want to be a member of any group that would have me as a member.

On 7/10/23 10:37, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
> In the following lines, the patient character expresses an opinion on the central issue of Pragmat[ic]ism.
> 
> /Patient:] …The world you live in is shored some up by a collection of agreements.Is that something you think about?The hope is that the truth of the world somehow lies in the common experience of it.Of course the history of science and mathematics and even philosophy is a good bit at odds with this notion.Innovation and discovery by definition war against the common understanding.One should be wary.What do you think? [pp 91-2]/
> 
> I am not going to comment.I just thought you might like to have the quote to mull over.


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