[FRIAM] At the limits of thought

[uǝlƃ ☣]

Excellent! Such credit tracking is something I've always wished I were competent at. I look at all these publications of people I respect and see hundreds of items in the references and my imagination runs wild with how much work they had to do to track down where any given idea came from. Renee's fond of exclamations like "They're so talented!" when watching some musician or somesuch (e.g. this guy https://youtu.be/4LFcNd-psRA). My refrain consists of "Talent is an illusion. What you see is the result of a ton of work." It's a song we sing a lot. I'll gladly cop to being lazy. >8^D

I noticed that Jon hid (too well) his answer to Dave's comment about modes of knowledge acquisition. Assuming I'm not imputing it, the idea is that these modes are not necessarily isolated or disjoint, and possibly not even countable. Each agent could comprise 1 mode or a set of modes. But the important part comes down to the idea that the agent (and/or its modes) derives from the world. So, it takes "context matters" to an extreme. The very fact that Dave identifies 5 "ways of knowing" should be derivable from the world (in particular, the slice of the world Dave's experienced). Ontologically, if the world were something other than what it is, an agent like Dave might identify only 1 or hundreds of modes instead of 5. Epistemologically, a different agent might identify 4 or 6 ways of knowing with or without overlap of Dave's 5. If Dave laments the (apparent) fact that everyone's become a scientismist, it may be because the world is expressing scientism through the agents it produces.

To me, the issue boils down to the expressive power of the mode. My favorite meta-mathematician is Raymond Smullyan, who competently wrote on all sorts of topics, including something akin to panpsychism. Are his explorations of circularity in logic the same or a different mode from his rejection of traditional Christianity because Hell is unchristian? I have no idea. But it should be clear that Smullyan is both a product of his environment and an encapsulation of some sort of spark/twitch that differs from most of us. Which came first? The egg, of course.

On 4/27/20 1:43 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
>> I call Twitch, which someone (on this list) pointed out to me was discussed in Warren's All the King's Men, arguably my favorite novel.
> 
> 
> It was I.  My narcissism requires that I receive the recognition I deserve.

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ