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

[Eric Charles]

I think the effableness is a red herring. "Last night I ate spaghetti"
doesn't fully and completely explain exactly what happened last night...
but we all agree that I used words to describe a thing that is not
"ineffable". So far, no argument has been offered to demonstrate that
Dave's conversation with God is any more or less effable than my having
eaten spaghetti. Absent an argument to that effect, we are begging the
question by taking it as given that the two differ. I think the more
interesting issue that Dave's example brings up is our original issue
regarding monism, in its relation to the question "what is real?"

We all agree that that Dave could have been having a conversation with
something real or something not real, right? We can call the other option
"imaginary" or "illusory" or whatever else we want to call it, but we
recognize that people sometimes have conversations with those types of
conversational partners, so it is a live possibility.

I said in prior emails, we are in-particular talking about "monism" in
contrast to mind-matter dualism (and all variants of that particular
dualism), meaning that we reject that mental things and matter things are
made of two different stuffs.

So Dave is talking to God. Whether he is talking to something that is
"mental" or something "physical" is a post-hoc judgement. That is, we
discover that based on future experience, not based on the initial
experience, which is neutral with regards to that distinction. What later
experiences will allow us to determine if the conversational partner is
real? That is hard to specify when we are discussing a deity with ambiguous
properties, but the method must be in principle very similar to how we
would confirm or reject the reality of any other conversational partner.
How do you determine when a child has an imaginary friend versus a real
friend? You look for other consequences of the conversational partner.
Ultimately we look for convergent agreement by anyone who honestly inquires
into the existence of the conversational partner (i.e., the long term
convergence / pattern-stability, referenced earlier in the conversation).
The only thing we can't allow - because it is internally incoherent - is
for there to exist a "real" thing with "no consequences" that we could
investigate. So the "Deist" God, the instigator with no current effects, is
off the table a priori, because that is a description of a thing that
doesn't exist --- and also because Dave couldn't have had a conversation
with that. We could only be discussing a conception of God that can be
interacted with to certain ends, which means that some tractable means of
converging opinions one way or the other is possible.

As such: Dave's conversation with God is not in-kind difference from John's
seeing a bear in the woods: Both are equally effable/ineffable. Both have
the same question about the reality of the thing experienced. Both can be
subjected to the same types of analyses (I offered Peircian, Jamesian, or
Holtian options regarding the bear).


-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor
<echarles at american.edu>


On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 3:17 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> The thing being left out of this still seems, to me, to be constructive vs
> ... what? ... analytical explanation. Your larger document beats around
> that bush quite a bit, I think. But I don't think it ever names/tackles the
> point explicitly.
>
> When you say things like "explanations are based on prior explanations"
> and "depends on the understandings that exist between speaker and
> audience", you're leaving out THE fundamental ontology atop which it's all
> built ... the building of the experimental apparatus. Feynman's pithy
> aphorism applies: What I cannot create, I do not understand.
>
> Explanations facilitate replication. They tell you *how* to do the trick
> yourself. Descriptions can be explanatory, of course. But they can also be
> non-explanatory. And some explanations are more facilitating than others.
> (E.g. I can write out some obtuse math and print it on paper or I can hand
> you a floppy disk with some Matlab code on it.)
>
> But the foundation is that we all have the same basic hardware. And
> *that's* what explanations are built upon. Change the hardware and your
> explanation becomes mere description. ... E.g. take a big hit of LSD and
> many explanations become mere descriptions. The evolutionary biological
> content of your paper (as well as Figure 1.2[†]) seems like it's just
> crying out for something like "construction". Reading it feels like
> watching someone struggle for a word that's on the "tip of their tongue".
>
>
> [†] In particular, if I replace "is the model for" with *generates*, I get
> some sort of Necker cube flipping feeling.
>
> On 12/11/19 11:23 AM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> > [... the thought experiment being explaining an eraser falling behind a
> book ...]
> > Working through thought-experiments like the one above leads us to
> conclude that all descriptions, particularly satisfying ones, are
> inevitably explanatory and that all explanations are descriptive. And yet,
> you cannot explain something until you have something to explain – so all
> explanations must be based on prior descriptions. The only reasonable
> conclusion, if you take both of these claims at face value, is that all
> explanations are based on prior explanations! The distinction between
> description and explanation concerns their position in an argument, not
> their objectivity or subjectivity in some enduring sense.  Whether a
> statement is explanatory or descriptive depends upon the understandings
> that exist between the speaker and his or her audience at the time the
> statement is made. /Descriptions are explanations that the speaker and the
> audience take to be true for the purpose of seeking further
> explanations/.[1] <#_ftn1>
>
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
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