Seeing the world as being primarily made of objects isn’t an universal mode of thought. It’s the dominant mode in our Western society.
There’s a quote of Nicole Daedone’s book Slow Sex:
That one day in the kitchen changed my life. In Home Ec, we learned to cook by finding a recipe and following its instructions exactly. We were rewarded for this good behavior by getting a meal and a good grade. In my grandma’s world, we were getting into relationship with the food. Feeling it. Getting to know it. Learning how it wanted to be cooked.
My grandma was teaching me the most important lesson of cooking, but also of living: anything you really get into relationship with will reveal its secrets to you. All you have to do is stand in the kitchen with an open mind and heart, recognizing the honor of cooking food for your family. The recipe will come.
This is the description of a mindset where the food isn’t simply an object. That’s part of what Tantra is about. Slow Sex is a secular tantra book that doesn’t speak about tantra. Nonsexual tantra practice is also alot about relationships.
In addition to the relationship layer there’s also object vs background/enviroment. TDT cares more about the background of a decision then CEV and thus comes to different conclusions. As seeing the background as essential as the object is foreign to Western thought, EY has a hard time being understood by academic decision theorists as seen by the review that was linked to on LW recently.
Gestatlt therapy cares more about background as well.
I haven’t read this book, but I have both taken a Home Ec class (it’s where I first learned to cook!) and spent the next ~20 years regularly cooking/baking, and improving my skill at these things. On the basis of that experience, I can say that the two approaches / perspectives / mindsets / whatever, that you describe, are not the only possibilities; indeed, I would say that this distinction is very much a false dichotomy. There are other ways.
In fact, for at least some kinds of cooking (baking / dessert cooking, specifically), this part:
All you have to do is stand in the kitchen with an open mind and heart, recognizing the honor of cooking food for your family. The recipe will come.
… is entirely the wrong approach. It will reliably give you inferior results, compared to the approach I describe in the above-linked post. The correct approach is not exactly “follow a recipe precisely” either, but it is a good bit closer to that than to the “get into a relationship with food” one.
Now, for some kinds of cooking, this “touchy-feely” approach works better—this cannot be denied. But if you try (as the author of the cited book apparently does) to apply this lesson to life, in general, you run into trouble: what if “life” is more like baking a cake than it is like cooking a vegetable soup? Or, what if some situations are like the former, and other situations are like the latter? Feel-good platitudes about getting into relationships with things will give not you the answers to these questions…
There’s a lot of inferential distance from your way of thinking to the way of thinking towards which this points.
In particular you assume that the standards you use to judge something as an inferior result easily survive the ontological crisis that involved in going from one ontology to another.
I’ve now read the linked post. I’m confused about what relevance it has.
Are you saying that, once we stop looking at the world as a bunch of discrete objects and start seeing quantum fields, or whatever, instead, then it’s no longer trivial or even possible to say things like “this cake is delicious, but that cake is not”?
Or, are you using that sort of “ontological crisis” as an illustrative example only, but actually suggesting some different, unrelated, sort of ontology shift? If so, then what might this alternative ontology be, and why should we prefer it?
The article doesn’t posit that the any one frame of perception must be considered absolute, at the cost of others. Only that perception can be subdivided into various spheres, with some being more primary than others. However a person chooses to use that information is up to them. For some, it may be an irrelevant distinction.
With regards to liking or disliking cake, that would be a subjective evaluation.But subjectivity is as much a part of how a person experiences reality as the presence of objects around him, so being able to distinguish between what one likes and dislikes is not trivial, but I wouldn’t say that kind of theme has to do with the nature of perception that the article addresses, which is more about being able to run multiple levels of analysis of the reality in front of you. If someone likes cake, that’s fine, but that doesn’t stop some of the ingredients from being potentially dangerous to their health, for example. Can a person extend their perception to acknowledge that some of the ingredients on the box reasonably shouldn’t be present in food, instead of being myopic about their desires?
The thrust of the article is to point out that discernment is important. Whilst that may imply a needed ontology shift, none is being presented at the moment.
What standards do you[1] use to judge whether something is an inferior result?
If you bake a pie, and I bake a pie, and all our friends try both pies, and they think my pie is delicious but your pie is mediocre, or bad, is there some sense in which your pie is, nonetheless, not inferior?
What if, following my approach, I am able to bake ten desserts, all different, but all widely acknowledged to be delicious; whereas you, following your approach, can only bake ten different pies (some good, some not so great), and are at a loss as to how to make any of the other things I can make? Is there some sense in which your approach is not inferior?
What sort of alternative ontology would you apply to this scenario, and why?
(Disclaimer: I have not yet read the linked post by Wei Dai; I will comment further when I’ve done so. UPDATE 2019-02-01: I’ve read it now, see sibling comment.)
[1] Or, if not you, then whoever subscribes to the mindset in question (whom you are representing in this conversation).
Seeing the world as being primarily made of objects isn’t an universal mode of thought. It’s the dominant mode in our Western society.
There’s a quote of Nicole Daedone’s book Slow Sex:
This is the description of a mindset where the food isn’t simply an object. That’s part of what Tantra is about. Slow Sex is a secular tantra book that doesn’t speak about tantra. Nonsexual tantra practice is also alot about relationships.
In addition to the relationship layer there’s also object vs background/enviroment. TDT cares more about the background of a decision then CEV and thus comes to different conclusions. As seeing the background as essential as the object is foreign to Western thought, EY has a hard time being understood by academic decision theorists as seen by the review that was linked to on LW recently.
Gestatlt therapy cares more about background as well.
I haven’t read this book, but I have both taken a Home Ec class (it’s where I first learned to cook!) and spent the next ~20 years regularly cooking/baking, and improving my skill at these things. On the basis of that experience, I can say that the two approaches / perspectives / mindsets / whatever, that you describe, are not the only possibilities; indeed, I would say that this distinction is very much a false dichotomy. There are other ways.
In fact, for at least some kinds of cooking (baking / dessert cooking, specifically), this part:
… is entirely the wrong approach. It will reliably give you inferior results, compared to the approach I describe in the above-linked post. The correct approach is not exactly “follow a recipe precisely” either, but it is a good bit closer to that than to the “get into a relationship with food” one.
Now, for some kinds of cooking, this “touchy-feely” approach works better—this cannot be denied. But if you try (as the author of the cited book apparently does) to apply this lesson to life, in general, you run into trouble: what if “life” is more like baking a cake than it is like cooking a vegetable soup? Or, what if some situations are like the former, and other situations are like the latter? Feel-good platitudes about getting into relationships with things will give not you the answers to these questions…
There’s a lot of inferential distance from your way of thinking to the way of thinking towards which this points.
In particular you assume that the standards you use to judge something as an inferior result easily survive the ontological crisis that involved in going from one ontology to another.
I’ve now read the linked post. I’m confused about what relevance it has.
Are you saying that, once we stop looking at the world as a bunch of discrete objects and start seeing quantum fields, or whatever, instead, then it’s no longer trivial or even possible to say things like “this cake is delicious, but that cake is not”?
Or, are you using that sort of “ontological crisis” as an illustrative example only, but actually suggesting some different, unrelated, sort of ontology shift? If so, then what might this alternative ontology be, and why should we prefer it?
The article doesn’t posit that the any one frame of perception must be considered absolute, at the cost of others. Only that perception can be subdivided into various spheres, with some being more primary than others. However a person chooses to use that information is up to them. For some, it may be an irrelevant distinction.
With regards to liking or disliking cake, that would be a subjective evaluation.But subjectivity is as much a part of how a person experiences reality as the presence of objects around him, so being able to distinguish between what one likes and dislikes is not trivial, but I wouldn’t say that kind of theme has to do with the nature of perception that the article addresses, which is more about being able to run multiple levels of analysis of the reality in front of you. If someone likes cake, that’s fine, but that doesn’t stop some of the ingredients from being potentially dangerous to their health, for example. Can a person extend their perception to acknowledge that some of the ingredients on the box reasonably shouldn’t be present in food, instead of being myopic about their desires?
The thrust of the article is to point out that discernment is important. Whilst that may imply a needed ontology shift, none is being presented at the moment.
https://wiki.obormot.net/Archive/WhatIsWrongWithOurThoughts
What standards do you[1] use to judge whether something is an inferior result?
If you bake a pie, and I bake a pie, and all our friends try both pies, and they think my pie is delicious but your pie is mediocre, or bad, is there some sense in which your pie is, nonetheless, not inferior?
What if, following my approach, I am able to bake ten desserts, all different, but all widely acknowledged to be delicious; whereas you, following your approach, can only bake ten different pies (some good, some not so great), and are at a loss as to how to make any of the other things I can make? Is there some sense in which your approach is not inferior?
What sort of alternative ontology would you apply to this scenario, and why?
(Disclaimer: I have not yet read the linked post by Wei Dai; I will comment further when I’ve done so. UPDATE 2019-02-01: I’ve read it now, see sibling comment.)
[1] Or, if not you, then whoever subscribes to the mindset in question (whom you are representing in this conversation).