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

[Steven A Smith]

FriAMsketeers and Correspondents en Ineffablia -

I am traveling in Sweden right now where every other young man I meet is
named "Torbjorn"  which roughly translates to "Thunder-Bear" or more
specifically "god-of-thunder/bear".   In every case, I actually do feel
as if I have spoken with a God and a Bear... it is in the ineffable
quality that separates our cultures and our generations (they are mostly
of the X/Z), and the things that are hard to say the same way in both
Swedish or English or as we mostly use "Svenglish". 

My geneology says I am from Germany/Poland/Scotland but my DNA says I am
95% Scandanavian and 5% North African...  not a hint of Neanderthal, and
I do not believe anyone has sequenced the Sasquatch/Yeti, so how would
we know about that?   I did see a cousin to the Loch Nesse monster
yesterday, but it was a sculpture made of scrap Iron, or that was how I
interpreted it, it might have been Ouroborous herself.   Perhaps the
fondness for adding wild mushrooms to the borscht here has something to
do with all of these visions?

Merle has arranged the meetings here regarding the acute implications of
the Anthropocene... nominally the Climate and Complexity Science.
Stephen and Stu were the "headliners" from the Santa Fe contingent . I
call it The END of the Anthropocene (if/when/as we drive off a cliff of
our own making) or "A Grand Unified Theory of Endogenous Existential
Threats" (tongue planted obliquely in cheek).   We did do our part to
rush the upheaval of sequestered Dino-carbon into the atmosphere to the
tune of 3-4 tonne each, so go figure?   I also stopped in at Parliament
to channel Greta last Friday...   I turned the "AT" in my "Make America
Great Again" cap upside down so it now reads "Make America GreTA Again"
which seems ever more grounded and hopeful than what we have been up to
these past few years... 

I also have been meeting with Steen Rasmussen in Copenhagen (an early
ALife colleague some of you may know) and one of the founders of
Mapillery in Maimo.   Both live as if they want to prevent an Abrupt End
of the Anthropocene, as many here seem to do.   Public transportation is
very good and with the apparently warmed climate, what should be dead of
winter feels more like a cold Springtime.   Bicycles in the cold rain
everywhere.   Next I move forward to Amsterdam where I will visit our
own Jenny Quillien and the current correspondent Dave West where we will
either speak to God, a Bear, or perhaps just Eat Spaghetti...  in the
reflection of the shadow of the presence of the spirit of Christopher
Alexander.  Throughout the entire visit I expect there will be an
ineffability he would call "the quality without a name".   We will
probably not speak of it, and rather speak "of Cabbages and Kings" or
Humpty Trumpty and all his horses and women who will patently not put
anything together again.

Jet lag leads to sleep deprivation which in fact seems to enhance my
awareness the ineffable.  And FriAMPhilosophy only adds to that.

Carry On!

- Steve

On 12/12/19 5:15 AM, Eric Charles wrote:
> 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
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 3:17 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com
> <mailto: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
>     <mailto: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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