[FRIAM] [EXT] Re: A pluralistic model of the mind?

[uǝlƃ ☣]

It seems like you're asking a question with the ???? at the end. But it's unclear to me what the question is.  If the question is:

Can a thing-occurance exist/be-real even if any attempt to describe it in any language will be a false description?

Phrased that way, it's unclear how anyone could say "No". I enjoy quoting Gödel's interpretation of what von Neumann said [†] to demonstrate one way that could happen:

von Neumann: But in the complicated parts of formal logic it is always one order of magnitude harder to tell what an object can do than to produce the object.

Gödel: However, what von Neumann perhaps had in mind appears more clearly from the universal Turing machine. There it might be said that the complete description of its behavior is infinite because, in view of the non-existence of a decision procedure predicting its behavior, the complete description could be given only by an enumeration of all instances. Of course this presupposes that only decidable descriptions are considered to be complete descriptions, but this is in line with the finitistic way of thinking. The universal Turing machine, where the ratio of the two complexities is infinity, might then be considered to be a limiting case of other finite mechanisms. This immediately leads to von Neumann's conjecture.

By this reasoning, it's relatively easy to see why *any* description will fall short of the thing described, at least in this levels-of-types conception.



[†] Or what Burks says Gödel said anyway -- Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata

On 12/11/19 1:58 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> 
> Last summer I spoke with God. The effects were profound and obvious to all. Many of the effects, measured with MRI and encephalographic devices, were quantifiable. I spoke of my experience, as best as I could, recognizing that whatever words I used told but part of the story. Other's experience of me changed as well - they uniformly and consistently experience me, not as the fun loving drunken whoring party guy, but only as the pious jackass that was the inevitable and most profound effect of my experience.
> 
> God is therefore real and extant?
> 
> But wait ...
> 
> I did not really speak with God. That word and all the other words, and the framing of the effects, piety replacing ribaldry, came after the fact, a post hoc rationalization/interpretation/articulation of "something." And, of course, the form of all those words and effects is but an artifact of the culture (and maybe the Jungian collective unconscious) within which I was raised.
> 
> There was "An Experience;" but even that label, those two words, is false-to-fact. What "Was" had no bounds, in time or space and, in fact continues (and predated) the implied bounded context inherent in the meaning of 'an experience'. There is an implied relation between the "Experience" and an ego, an "I:" 1) the "Experience" was apart from "I," 2) "I" was part of the "Experience," 3) "I" perceived/sensed the "Experience."  None of these implied relations are accurate or complete, or even differentiable from each other.
> 
> There was a Real, Existing, Thing. "It" was effectual; in that patterns of brain waves and detectable activity in different parts of the brain before and after "It" are measurable and comparable. Behavior and experience — from the "inside" — was altered dramatically, in the sense of the "color," the filtering lens, the 'fit" of interpretations of individual experiences is dramatically altered. Experience — of others on the "outside" —  is altered as well, although often not expressible beyond, "there's something different about you, can't put my finger on it, but ... "
> 
> Not only was the "Thing" effectual, it is, within statistical limits, possible to predict the nature and degree of the effects that ensue from "Thing-Occurrence." Moreover, it is possible to establish an "experimental context" whereby others can "experience" the "Thing" and thereby confirm the prediction of effects.
> 
> "Thing-Occurrence" ---> partially predictable, measurable (sometimes quantifiable) effects ---> "Thing is Real/Existing?
> 
> Despite being, in every way ineffable —  in that no words capture its totality and any words used, in any naturally occurring human language, are false-to-fact.
> 
> ????
> 
> dave west
> 
> 
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2019, at 6:10 AM, Eric Charles wrote:
>> Ok.... I'm going to try to do a better take on the "ineffable" issue. I want to start by admitting that there is some sense in which ANYTHING I want to describe is never fully described by the words I use, in some reasonable use of the word "fully." If I see a turtle, and I tell you that I saw a turtle, I haven't provided you with a full description of exactly what the experience was like. So, I'm willing to admit that... but I'm not convinced there is anything deeper than that about Nick's inability to express his "feelings" to his granddaughter... and with that out of the way I will return to what I think is the broader issue.
>>
>> Real / existing things have effects. That is what it is to be real / to exist. If someone wants to talk about something that exists but have no effects, they are wandering down an rabbit hole with no bottom, and might as well be talking about noiseless sounds or blue-less blue. 
>>
>> The pragmatic maxim tells us: " Consider what effects... we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object." So anything we conceive of is, in some sense, a cluster of effects, and so everything "real" is _in principle_ conceivable. And to the extent anything can be expressed adequately - whether by words or any other means of expression - concepts can be expressed, and so anything real can be expressed.
>>
>> However, i'm not sure the effability is really the important part. The bigger question was about epistemology and ontology. But the pragmatic maxim covers that as well. Things that have effects are _in principle_ we may presume there are many, many effects that we don't yet have the means to detect, but anything that has effects could, under some circumstances, be detectable. So the limits of what _is_ are the same as the limits of what can in principle be known. Postulation of things that are existing but which can't, under any circumstances, be known is internally contradictory. 
>>
>> Was that a better reply? It felt more thorough at least...

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ