It took me a few hours to find this thread like a kid rummaging through a closet not knowing what he is looking for.
As my handle indicates, I am Lloyd. Not much I think is worth saying about myself but I would like to ask a few questions to see what interests readers here, if anyone reads this, and present a sample of where my thinking may come from.
Considering the psychological model of five senses we are taught since grade school is there a categorical difference in our ability to logically perceive that 2+2=4 vs perceiving the temperature is decreasing? The deeper question being is the realness of logic (and possibly other mental faculties not being considered here) the same as the realness of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch? There are questions which unfold from considering logic as a ‘sense’, but I wish to clarify this question first.
I have not found any proponent of a physical view of the universe as fundamentally alive rather than dead. Is there someone who has proposed, for example, that the stars are living and thus self-directing and the observations of galaxies may be that stars are purposefully forming these structures under their own will much like we form cities? Or maybe the idea that stars induce gravity and feed off of a source of energy from the subatomic regime? Or that different star systems may be fundamentally different on a quantum level like blood types? I mean the language is filled with terms like birth, death, and life, but it sounds like they are disconnected from their biologically meaning altogether.
Does anyone ever discuss the post-industrial society, no, not right question. Why is it that the discussion of post-industrial society is what it is? For example, in mainstream storytelling post-industrial=post-apocalyptic for much of what I have seen. There is Gene Roddenberry who cast post-industrial society as being rescued by aliens. There are Orwell and Huxley who left the world to be forever locked in an industrial nightmare. Zombies. Am I to understand that the culture’s mind has settled on imaging the industrial society as its death?
Why is it that the discussion of post-industrial society is what it is?
This was the hardest of your questions to get a grip on. :-) You mention disaster fiction, Star Trek, 1984, and Brave New World, and you categorize the first two as post-industrial and the second two as bad-industrial perpetuated. If I look for the intent behind your question… the idea seems to be that visions of the future are limited to destruction, salvation from outside, and dystopia.
Missing from your list of future scenarios is the anodyne dystopia of boredom, which doesn’t show up in literature about the future because it’s what people are already living in the present, and that’s not what they look for in futurology, unless they are perverse enough to want true realism even in their escapism, and experienced enough to know that real life is mostly about boredom and disappointment. The TV series “The Office” comes to mind as a representation of what I’m talking about, though I’ve never seen it; I just know it’s a sitcom about people doing very mundane things every day (like every other sitcom) - and that is reality.
If you’re worried that reality might somehow just not contain elements that transcend human routine, don’t worry, they are there, they pervade even the everyday world, and human routine is something that must end one day. Human society is an anthill, and anthills are finite entities, they are built, they last, they are eventually destroyed. But an anthill can outlive an individual ant, and in that sense the ant’s reality can be nothing but the routine of the anthill.
Humans are more complex than ants and their relation to routine is more complex. The human anthill requires division of labor, and humans prepared to devote themselves to the diverse functional roles implied, in order to exist at all. So the experience of young humans is typically that they first encounter the boredom of human routine as this thing that they never wanted, that existed before them, and which it will be demanded that they accept. They may have their own ideas about how to spend the time of their life, or they may just want to be idle, but either way they will find themselves at odds with the social order to which they have been born. There are places in the social ecosystem where it works differently, but this is how it turns out for many or even most people.
So my thesis is really that boredom is the essence of human life, human society, human history, and human experience. Note well: the essence of human reality, not of reality as a whole, which is bigger than human beings. I will also say that boredom was the essence of preindustrial life as well as of industrial life, and also of any postindustrial life so long as it is still all about human beings. Some people get not to live boring lives, and wonder and terror can also just force themselves upon humanity in a certain time and place; and finally, I should add that people can live amid the boredom and not be bored, if they are absorbed in something. Our Internet society is full of distractions and so the typical Internet citizen is not just flatly bored all the time, they will be in a succession of hyper moods as they engage with one thing after another. But most of it is trivia that has no meaning in the long run and that is why it’s reasonable to say that it adds up to boredom.
All these non-boring stories about the future are partly expressive of reality, but they are also just distractions from the boredom for the people who consume them. Apocalypse doesn’t solve the problem of giving me a happy free life, but it does solve the problem of boredom! Salvation by aliens is an instance of something exciting and non-boring coming from outside and forcing itself upon us. Huxley and Orwell’s worlds actually are boring when they’re not oppressive or dissipative, so in that sense they resemble reality.
Some people in some times aren’t born to boredom. What this really means is that there’s some form of instability. Either it’s the instability of novelty, that eventually settles down and becomes a new boredom, or it’s the instability of something truly dreadful. Our favorite instability on this site is artificial intelligence, which is a plausible candidate for the thing that really will end “human reality” and inaugurate a whole new Something. There may be a cosmic boredom that eventually sets in on the other side of the singularity, but for now, dealing with everything implied by the rise of AI is already more than anyone can handle. (There may be people out there who are thinking, I can think about the possibilities of AI with equanimity, so I can handle this. But no-one’s in charge, the situation is completely out of any sort of consensual control, and in that practical sense the human race isn’t “handling” the situation.) There are many other ways to avoid boredom, for example the study of the universe. The main challenge then is just convincing the human race to allow you to spend all your time doing this.
But the original question was about the culture’s own image of the future. My thesis is that adults generally know in their bones that their lives are boring, and that fact is itself so familiar as to be boring, so there’s no market for stories which say the future itself will also be boring. You’re finding the available non-boring narratives unsatisfactory—they’re either dystopian or involve wishful thinking. But the problem here is whether there’s a viable collective solution to boredom, or whether every such solution will be just another type of Watchtower-like unrealism (I mean the little magazine circulated worldwide by Jehovah’s Witnesses, in which future life is an agrarian paradise with the sort of nonstop happiness you only see in TV commercials). I should emphasize that the narratives which dominate the part of the culture that is concerned with the practicalities of the future, such as politics, do not try to solve the boredom problem, that’s not remotely on the agenda and it would be considered insanely unrealistic. Realistic politics is about ensuring that the social machine, the division of labor, continues to function, and about dealing with crises when they show up. So it might be regarded as depressing rather than boring.
I can’t say that the problem of collective boredom concerns me very much. Like other singularity fans, I have my hands full preparing for that future event, which probably is the end of the boredom as we know it. The task for you may just be to come to grips with your own difference from everyone else, accept that most people will end up in some boring but functionally necessary niche, and then try to make sure that you don’t end up like most people.
I think you got a grip on the gist. I didn’t mention boredom in my question but you went straight to where I have been in looking at the topic. But I do not think there is reason to believe boredom is a basic state of human life indicative of how it has always been. I think it may be more related to the industrial lifestyle.
Take the 2012 Mayan calendar crap. Charles Mann concludes his final appendix in “1491” with a mention of the pop-phenom, “Archaeologists of the Maya tend to be annoyed by 2012 speculation. Not only is it mistaken, they believe, but it fundamentally misrepresents the Maya. Rather than being an example of native wisdom, scholars say, the apocalyptic ‘prophecy’ is a projection of European values onto non-European people.” The apocalypse is the end of boredom for a bored people.
I personally do not like the boring, as you suggested, I have come to grips with that and live accordingly.
Don’t tell anyone, but I’m not immune to 2012-ism myself. At the very least, that old Mayan calendar is one of the more striking intrusions of astronomical facts into human culture; it seems to be built around Martian and Venusian cycles, and the precession of Earth.
So part of being new here...the karma thing. Did you just get docked karma for the assertion you are into 2012-ism? I didn’t do it. Is there a list of taboos? I got docked for a comment on intuition (I speculate that is why).
There’s no list. In general, people downvote what they want to see less of on the site, and upvote what they want to see more of. A −1 score means one more person downvoted than upvoted; not generally worth worrying about. My guess is someone pattern-matched MP’s comment to fuzzy-headed mysticism.
The idea of ‘what you want to see less of’ is fairly interesting. On a site dedicated to rationality I was expecting that one would want to see:
-the discussion of rationality explicitly = the Sequences
-examples of rationality in addressing problems
-a distinction between rationality and other thinking processes and when rational thinking is appropriate (ie- the boundaries of rationality)
It would be a reasonable hypothesis—based on what I have seen—that the last point causes a negative feedback. MP demonstrated a great deal of rationality (and knowledge) in addressing the questions I raised in the first post. Given this, I find it intriguing that he is captivated in any way by 2012ism. Anyway, I would expect upvotes for any comment that clarifies or contributes to the parent, downvotes for comments which obscure, and nothing for humor or personal side notes (they can generate productive input and help create an atmosphere of camaraderie).
I saw the thread on elitism somewhere and noted that the idea of elitism and the karma system are intertwined. It seems a simple explicit description of karma and what it accomplishes may be a good thread for a top member to start. - if it exists already I was implying I sought it in my request for a ‘list of taboos’. It may or may not be a good idea to tell people criteria for up/down-voting, but is there a discussion about that?
Different people want to see, and want to avoid seeing, different things. The net karma score of any given comment is an expression of our collective preferences, filtered extremely noisily through which subset of the site happens to read any given comment.
I would prefer LW not try to impose voting standards beyond “upvote what you want, downvote what you don’t want.” If we want a less croudsourced value judgment, we can pay someone we trust to go through and rate all the comments, though I would not contribute to that project.
people downvote what they want to see less of on the site
Or something they disagree with strongly enough. Or if they dislike the poster. Some just press a wrong button. Some have cats walking on keyboards. If you get repeatedly downvoted to −3 or so, then there is a cause for concern.
physical view of the universe as fundamentally alive rather than dead … stars are living and thus self-directing
Since life is considered a solved problem by science, any remaining problem of “aliveness” is treated as just a perspective on or metaphor for the problem of consciousness. But talking about aliveness has one virtue; it militates against the tendency among intellectuals to identify consciousness with intellectualizing, as if all that is to be explained in consciousness is “thinking” and passive “experiencing”.
The usual corrective to this is to talk about “embodiment”. And it’s certainly a good corrective; being reminded of the body reintroduces the holism of experience, as well as activity, the will, and the nonverbal as elements of experience. Still, I wouldn’t want to say that talking about bodies as well as about consciousness is enough to make up for the move from aliveness to consciousness as the discursively central concept. There’s an inner “life” which is also obscured by the easily available ways of talking about “states of mind”; and at the other extreme, being alive is also suggestive of the world that you’re alive in, the greater reality which is the context to all the acting and willing and living. This “world” is also a part of cognition and phenomenology that is easily overlooked if one sticks to the conventional tropes of consciousness.
So when we talk about a living universe, we might want to keep all of that in mind, as well as more strictly biological or psychological ideas, such as whether it’s like something to be a star, or whether the states and actions of stars are expressive of a stellar intentionality, or whether the stars are intelligences that plan, process information, make choices, and control their physical environment.
I think pondering whether the stars are intelligences isn’t a bad hobby to have, it’s the sort of obscure reaching for the unknown which over time can turn into something real and totally new. But know and study your predecessors, especially their mistakes. If you’re going to be a crackpot, try at least to be a new type of crackpot, so that humanity can learn from your example. :-)
That is an impressive collection of links you put together. You have provided what I was looking for in a greater scope than I expected. The Star Larvae Hypothesis and Guy Murchie express the eccentricity in thought I was hoping someone would have knowledge of. I like to see the margins, you see. How did you come to all those tidbits? It took me a single question on this forum for me to get that scope and for that I owe you some thanks. I really do not have much of a hobby in pondering the intentions of stellar beings, but in coming up with queries that help me find the edges, margins, or whatever of this evolved social consciousness I am part of.
I do find it interesting that someone would be able to compile those links. Was this a personal interest of yours at some time or part of a program of study you came across? Or do you have some skill at compiling links that is inexplicable?
Whether there is a “logic-sense” is a question about consciousness so fundamental and yet so hard that it’s scarcely even recognized by science-friendly philosophy of mind. Phenomenologists have something to say about it because they are just trying to characterize experience, without concern for whether or how their descriptions are compatible with a particular scientific theory of nature. But if you look at “naturalist” philosophers (naturalism = physicalism = materialism = an intent that one’s philosophy should be consistent with natural science), the discussion scarcely gets beyond the existence of colors and other “five-sense” qualities.
The usual approach is to talk as if a conscious state is a heap of elementary sense-qualia, somehow in the same way that a physical object could be a pile of atoms. But experience is about the perception of form as well, and this is related to the idea of a logic-sense, because logic is about concepts and abstract properties, and the properties of a “form” have an abstractness about them, compared to the “stuff” that the form is made from.
In the centuries before Kant and Husserl, there was a long-running philosophical “problem of universals”, which is just this question of how substance and property are related. How is the greenness in one blade of grass, related to the greenness in another blade of grass? Suppose it were the exact same shade of green. Is it the same thing, mysteriously “exemplified” in two different places? If you say yes, then what is “exemplification” or “instantiation”? Is it a new primitive ontological relation? If you say no, and say that these are separate “color-instances”, you still need to explain their sameness or similarity.
With the rise of consciousness itself as a theme of human thought, the problem has assumed a new character, because now the greenness is in the observer rather than in the blade of grass. We can still raise the classic questions, about the greenness in one experience and the greenness in another experience, but the deeper problem is whether we are even conceiving of the basic facts correctly. Experience isn’t just “green stuff happening” or “round stuff happening”, it’s “green round stuff happening to my hand, eyes, and mouth” (if I’m eating an apple), it’s “happening to me ” (whoever and whatever “I” am), it’s “green round stuff being experienced as green and round”—and that little word “as” sums up a whole dimension of consciousness that the focus on sense-qualia obscures; the aspect of consciousness known as its “intentionality”, the fact that an experience is an experience “of” something or “about” something.
Names can be useful. The sense that “stuff is happening to me” has been called apperception. (That’s jargon that you won’t see on LW. Jargon that you will see, that comes at the same phenomenon from a different angle, is indexicality, the me-here-now component of an experience. One also needs to distinguish between me-here-now experienced or conceptualized in terms of difference to other “me-here-now”s, and me-here-now as simply another component of an experience, even if you’re not thinking about other people at the time. Apperception is more about this second aspect, whereas discussions of indexicality tend to puzzle over what it is that distinguishes one person, as a locus of experience, from another—they’re both “me” to themselves, but ontologically they are two entities, not one.) If there is a logic-sense, then it is presumably at work both in intentionality and in apperception; in fact the latter appears to contain a sort of indexical intentionality, the logic-sense applied to the perceiving self.
Two other very different perspectives: First, in Objectivism, you will see “concept formation” discussed as “measurement omission”. The idea being that a concept is a perception with something removed—the sensory and indexical particularities. It doesn’t quite deal with the ontological problem of what “instantiation of a property” is in the first place, but it highlights a psychological and cognitive/computational aspect.
Second, for the five senses, there are sense organs. If there is a logic sense, one should ask whether there’s a logic organ too. Here the neurocomputational answer is going to be that it’s a structure in the brain which has the outputs of sense organs as its inputs. This answer doesn’t do away with the miasma of dualism that hangs over all functionalist explanations of experience, but it does plausibly mimic the causal dependence of higher-order experience on raw experience.
Finally, I’ll point out that the nature of logic and a logic-sense is tied up with the nature of being and our awareness of it. We have a sense that reality exists, that individual things exist, and that they are a certain way. If you can stand to read something like Heidegger’s historical phenomenology of Being, you’ll see that grammar and logic have roots in a certain experience of being and a certain analysis of that experience, e.g. into “thatness” and “whatness”, existence and essence: that a thing is, and what a thing is. These perceptions and distinctions were originally profound insights, but they were codified in language and became the everyday tools of the thinking, wilful mind. Heidegger’s work was partly about recovering a perception of being prior to its resolution into existence and essence, out of a conviction that that is not the end of the story. The problem with trying to think “beyond” or “before” subject-predicate thinking is that it just turns into not thinking at all. Is there intellectual progress to be had beyond the raw observation that “Something is there”, if you don’t “apply concepts”, or is the latter simply an essential condition of understanding? Et cetera, ad infinitum.
Thanks for addressing all three of the questions. Your ability to expound on such a variety of topics is what I was hoping someone in this forum could do. Quite insightful.
This post reads very much like a stream-of-consciousness dump (the act of writing everything that crosses your mind as soon as you become aware that you’re thinking it, and then just writing more and more as more and more thoughts come up), which I’ve noticed is sometimes one of those non-rules that some members of the community look upon unfavorably.
Regarding your questions, it seems like many of them are the wrong question or simply come from a lack of understanding in the relevant established science. There may also be some confusion regarding words that have no clear referent, like your usage of “realness”. Have you tried replacing “realness” with some concrete description of what you mean, in your own mind, before formulating that question? If you haven’t, then maybe it’s only a mysterious word that feels like it probably means something, but turns out to be just a word that can confuse you into thinking of separate things as if they were the same, and make it appear as if there is a paradox or a grand mysterious scientific question to answer.
Overall, it seems to me like you would greatly benefit from learning the cognitive science taught/discussed in the Core Sequences, particularly the Reductionism and Mysteriousness ones, and the extremely useful Human’s Guide to Words (see this post for a hybrid summary / table of contents). Using the techniques taught in Reductionism and the Guide to Words is often considered essential to formulating good articles on LessWrong, and unfortunately some users will disregard comments from users that don’t appear to have read those sequences.
I’d be happy to help you a bit with those questions, but I won’t try to do so immediately in case you’d prefer to find the solutions on your own (be it answers or simply dissolving the questions into smaller parts, or even noticing that the question simply goes away once the word problems are taken away).
I will tend to violate mores, but I do not wish to seem disrespectful of the culture here. In the future I will more strictly limit the scope of the topic, but considering it was an introduction...I just wished to spread out questions from myself rather than trivia about myself.
I don’t think I am asking the wrong question. Such is the best reply I can formulate against the charge. As for my understanding of the established science, I thought I was reasonably versed, but in such a forum as this I am highly skeptical of my own consumption of available knowledge. But from experience, I am usually considered knowledgeable in fields of psychology I am familiar with the textbook junk like Skinner, Freud, Jung, etc.. and with,e.g., Daniel Dennett, Aronson, and Lakoff , but that doesn’t make me feel more or less qualified about asking the question I proposed. In astoronomy I have gone through material ranging from Chandrasekhar to Halton Arp, and the view that the stars are subject to, rather than direct gravitational phenomena is prevalent, i.e., stars act like rocks and not like living beings.
Please elaborate on how ‘realness’ is unclear in its usage. I would like to know the more acceptable language. The concept is clear in my mind and I thought the diction was commonly accepted.
If the subjects I have brought up are ill-framed then I would be happy to be directed to the more encompassing discussion.
I have browsed much of what you directed me to. The structure of this site is a bit alien to my cognitive organization, but the material contained within is highly familiar.
Alright, let’s start at the easy part concerning those questions:
Considering the psychological model of five senses we are taught since grade school is there a categorical difference in our ability to logically perceive that 2+2=4 vs perceiving the temperature is decreasing?
Yes. In a large set of possible categorical distinctions, they are in different categories. The true, most accurate answer is that they are not exactly the same. This was obvious to you before you even formulated the question, I suspect. They are at slightly different points in the large space of possible neural patterns. Whether they are “in the same category” or not depends on the purposes of the category.
This question needs to be reduced, and can be reduced in hundreds of ways from what I see, depending on whether you want to know about the source of the information, the source of our cognitive identification of the information/stimuli, etc.
The deeper question being is the realness of logic (and possibly other mental faculties not being considered here) the same as the realness of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch?
“Sight” is a large mental paintbrush handle for a large process of input and data transfer that gets turned into stimuli that gets interpreted that gets perceived and identified by other parts of the brain and so on. It is a true, real physical process of quarks moving about in certain identifiable (though difficultly so) patterns in response to an interaction of light with (some stuff, “magic”, I don’t know enough about eye microbiology to say how exactly this works). Each step of the process has material reality.
By contrast, it is experimentally verifiable—there is an external referent within reality—that two “objects” put with two “objects” will have the same spacetime configuration as four “objects”. There is a true, real physical process by which light reflected on something your mind counts as “four objects” is the exact same light that would be reflected if your mind counted the same objects as “two objects” plus “two other objects”. “2 + 2 = 4” is also a grand mental paintbrush in a different language using different words—mathematics—to represent and point to the external referent of what you observe when two and two are four.
At this point, I no longer see any mysterious “realness” in either concept. One is a reliable, predictable pattern of interactions between various particles, the other is a reliable, predictable pattern of interactions between various particles. At the same time, on a higher level of abstraction, one is seen some way to identify expected “number” (another giant mental paintbrush handle) of things, while another is some way in which our minds obtain information about the outside world and gather evidence that we are convinced is entangled with large patterns of other particles through causality.
If I’m going too fast on some things or if you dislike my potentially-very-condescending tone of writing, my apologies and please mention it so that I can adjust my behavior / writing appropriately.
The other questions afterwards become progressively much harder to work on without a solid grounding in reductionism and other techniques, and in particular for the first interrogation on a “fundamentally alive” universe, is very much at the edge of my current comfort-zone in terms of ability to reduce, decompose, dissolve and resolve questions.
Unfortunately, there are also a great many things that might get in the way of resolving these questions—for an absurd example, if you hold a strong, unshakable belief that there is a huge scientific conspiracy hiding the “fact” that outer space does not exist and everything above the sky is a hologram while earth is actually one giant flat room (rather than a round ball) that warps around in spacetime to make us believe that it’s round, then I’m afraid I would likely find myself very much at a loss as to how to proceed in the discussion.
Edit: As for the stream-of-consciousness matter, it’s not about the widespread coverage of subject(s), but more a comment on the writing style / continuity. Basically, more organized writing and words with clearer delimitation, continuation, and links between topics / sub-topics that don’t have a continuous progression are indicators of a more in-depth analysis of one’s own words and thoughts, while the stream-of-consciousness style is more difficult for the readers when engaging in conversations that seek to attain a higher degree of truth.
I understand that categories are mental constructs which facilitate thinking , but do not themselves occur outside the mind. The question meant to find objections to the categorization of logic as a sense. Taken as a sense there is a frame, the category, which allows it to be viewed as analogous to other senses and interrelated to the thinking process as senses are. In the discussion concerning making the most favorable choice on Monty Hall the contestant who does not see the logical choice is “blind”. When considering the limits of logical reason they can be be seen to possibly parallel the limits of visual observation- how much of the universe is impervious to being logically understood?
No need to address qualia.
Will try to constrain myself to more concise, well-defined queries and comments.
I don’t think there’s a difference between the human sense of logic and the other senses, I agree with you there. Just as it’s impossible to tell whether or not you’re a brain in a vat, it’s also impossible to tell whether or not you’re insane. Every argument you use to disprove the statement will depend on the idea that your observations or thought processes are valid, which is exactly what you’re trying to prove, and circular arguments are flawed. This doesn’t mean that logic isn’t real, it just means that we can’t interpret the world in any terms except logical ones. The logical ones might still be right, it’s just that we can never know that. You might enjoy reading David Hume, he writes about similar sorts of puzzles.
It doesn’t matter whether or not logic works, or whether reality is really “real”. Regardless of whether I’m a brain in a vat, a computer simulation, or just another one of Chuang Tzu’s dreams, I am what I am. Why should anyone worry about abstract sophistries, when they have an actual life to live? There are things in the world that are enjoyable, I think, and the world seems to work in certain ways that correspond to logic, I think, and that’s perfectly acceptable to me. The “truth” of existence, external to the truth of my everyday life, is not something that I’m interested in at all. The people I love and the experiences I’ve had matter to me, regardless of what’s going on in the realm of metaphysics.
I don’t quite understand what you’re saying about vitalism. I don’t know what the word “life” means if it starts to refer to everything, which makes the idea of a universe where everything is alive seem silly. There’s not really any test we could do to tell whether or not the universe is alive, a dead universe and an alive one would look and act exactly the same, so there’s no reason to think about it. Using metaphors to explain the universe is nice for simplifying new concepts, but we shouldn’t confuse the metaphor for the universe itself.
I’m not really in the mood for discussing literature or trying my hand at amateur psychoanalysis, I’ll leave that last question for someone else to try their hand at, if they decide they want to.
I think the sequences will help you out. I recommend that you start with the sequence on words and language, and then tackle metaethics. It could be a lot of work, but they make an interesting read and are very amusing at times. Regardless, we’re glad you’re here!
Just as it’s impossible to tell whether or not you’re a brain in a vat, it’s also impossible to tell whether or not you’re insane.
Well, it’s possible to tell that I’m insane in particular ways. For example, I’ve had the experience of reasoning my way to the conclusion that certain of my experiences were delusional. (This was after I’d suffered traumatic brain damage and was outright hallucinating some of the time.) For example, if syndrome X causes paranoia but not delusions, I can ask other people who know me whether I’m being paranoid and choose to believe them when they say “yes” (even if my strong intuition is that they’re just saying that because they’re part of the conspiracy, on the grounds that my suffering from syndrome X is more likely (from an outside view) than that I’ve discovered an otherwise perfectly concealed conspiracy.
It’s also possible to tell that I’m not suffering from specific forms of insanity. E.g., if nobody tells me I’m being paranoid, and they instead tell me that my belief that I’m being persecuted is consistent with the observations I report, I can be fairly confident that I don’t suffer from syndrome X.
Of course, there might be certain forms of insanity that I can’t tell I’m not suffering from.
The forms of insanity that you can’t tell if you’re suffering from invalidate your interpretation that there are specific kinds of insanity you can rule out, no? Mainly though, I was aware that the example had issues, but I was trying to get a concept across in general terms and didn’t want to muddle my point by getting bogged down in details or clarifications.
The forms of insanity that you can’t tell if you’re suffering from invalidate your interpretation that there are specific kinds of insanity you can rule out, no?
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by invalidating my interpretation. If you mean that, because there are forms of insanity I can’t tell if I’m suffering from, there are therefore no forms of insanity that I can rule out, then no, I don’t think that’s true.
And, please don’t feel obligated to defend assertions you don’t endorse upon reflection.
If you mean that, because there are forms of insanity I can’t tell if I’m suffering from, there are therefore no forms of insanity that I can rule out, then no, I don’t think that’s true.
Well, for example, consider a form of insanity X that leads to paranoia but is not compatible with delusion.
Suppose ask a randomly selected group of psychologists to evaluate whether I’m paranoid and they all report that I’m not.
Now I ask myself, “am I suffering from X?”
I reason as follows:
Given those premises, if I am paranoid, psychologists will probably report that I’m paranoid.
If I’m not delusional and psychologists report I’m paranoid, I will probably experience that report.
I do not experience that report.
Therefore, if I’m not delusional, psychologists probably have not reported that I’m paranoid.
Therefore, if I’m not delusional, I’m probably not paranoid.
If I suffered from X, I would be paranoid but not delusional.
Therefore, I probably don’t suffer from X.
Now, if you want to argue that I still can’t rule out X, because that’s just a probabilistic statement, well, OK. I also can’t rule out that I’m actually a butterfly. In that case, I don’t care whether I can rule something out or not, but I’ll agree with you and tap out here.
But if we agree that probabilistic statements are good enough for our purposes, then I submit that X is a form of insanity I can rule out.
Now, I would certainly agree that for all forms of insanity Y that cause delusions of sanity, I can’t rule out suffering from Y. And I also agree that for all forms of insanity Z that neither cause nor preclude such delusions, I can’t rule out suffering from (Z AND Y), though I can rule out suffering from Z in isolation.
a form of insanity X that leads to paranoia but is not compatible with delusion.
But how would a possibly insane person determine that insanity X is a possible kind of insanity? Or, how would they determine that the Law of Noncontradiction is actually a thing that exists as opposed to some insane sort of delusion?
Now, if you want to argue that I still can’t rule out X, because that’s just a probabilistic statement, well, OK. I also can’t rule out that I’m actually a butterfly. In that case, I don’t care whether I can rule something out or not, but I’ll agree with you and tap out here.
But if we agree that probabilistic statements are good enough for our purposes, then I submit that X is a form of insanity I can rule out.
I was talking about how we should regard unknowable puzzles (ignore them, mostly), like the butterfly thing, so I thought it was clear that I’ve been speaking in terms of possibilities this entire time. Obviously I’m not actually thinking that I’m insane. If I were, that’d just be crazy of me.
Also, this approach presumes that your understanding of the way probabilities work and of the existence of probability at all is accurate. Using the concept of probability to justify your position here is just a very sneaky sort of circular argument (unintentional, clearly, I don’t mean anything rude by this).
how would a possibly insane person determine that insanity X is a possible kind of insanity?
Perhaps they couldn’t. I’m not sure what that has to do with anything.
Also, this approach presumes that your understanding of the way probabilities work and of the existence of probability at all is accurate. Using the concept of probability to justify your position here is just a very sneaky sort of circular argument
Sure. If I’m wrong about how probability works, then I might be wrong about whether I can rule out having X-type insanity (and also might be wrong about whether I can rule out being a butterfly).
Perhaps they couldn’t. I’m not sure what that has to do with anything.
I didn’t think that your argument could function on even a probabilistic level without the assumption that X-insanity is an objectively real type of insanity. On second thought, I think your argument functions just as well as it would have otherwise.
If it’s not an objectively real type of insanity, then I can certainly rule out the possibility that I suffer from it. If it is, then the assumption is justified.
I raised this pov of logic (reason or rationality when applied) because I saw a piece that correlates training reason with muscle training. If logic is categorical similar to a sense then treat it metaphorically as such, I think. Improving one’s senses is a little different than training a muscle and is a more direct simile. Then there is the question of what is logic sensing? Sight perceives what we call light, so logic is perceiving ‘the order’ of things? The eventual line of thinking starts questioning the relationship of logic to intuition. I advocate the honing of intuition, but it is identical in process to improving one’s reason. The gist being that intuition picks up on the same object that logic eventually describes, like the part of vision which detects movement in the field that is only detailed once the focal point is moved upon it.
As for vitalism, the life I speak of is to extend one’s understanding of biological life—a self-directing organism—to see stars as having the same potential. The behavior of stars, and the universal structure is constrained in the imagination to be subject to the laws of physics and the metaphor for a star in this frame is a fire, which is lit and burns according to predictable rules regarding combustion. The alternative is to imagine that the stars are the dogs, upon which the earth is a flea, and we are mites upon it. Why does this matter? I suppose it is just one of those world-view things which I think dictates how people feel about their existence. “We live in a dead universe subject to laws external to our being” predicates a view which sees external authority as natural and dismisses the vitality within all points which manifest this ‘life’. I think the metaphor for the universe is closely tied to the ethos of the culture, so I raised this question.
I’m not sure what you mean by “self-directing”. As I see it, “life” is yet another physical process, like “combustion” or “crystallization” or “nuclear fusion”. Life is probably a more complex process than these other ones, but it’s not categorically different from them. An amoeba’s motion is directed, to be sure, but so is the motion of a falling rock.
An amoeba acts on its environment where a rock behaves according to extrernal force. Life also has the characteristic of reproduction which is not how processes like combustion or fusion begin or continue. There are attempts to create both biological life from naught and AI research has a goal which could be characterized as making something that is alive vs a dead machine—a conscious robot not a car. I recognize that life is chemical processes, but I, and I think the sciences are divided this way, a categorical difference between chemistry and biology. My position is that physics and chemistry, eg, do not study a driving component of reality—that which drives life. If biological life is to be called >>complexity of basic chemical processes then what drives the level of complexity to increase?
Is there a thread or some place where your position on life is expounded upon? If life is to be framed as a complex process on a spectrum of processes I could understand, provided the definition of complexity is made and the spectrum reflects observations. In fact, spectrums seem to me to be more fitting maps than categories, but I am unaware of a spectrum that defines complexity to encompass both combustion and life.
An amoeba acts on its environment where a rock behaves according to extrernal force.
The rock acts on its environment as well. For example, it could hold up other rocks. Once the rock falls, it can dislodge more rocks, or strike sparks. If it falls into a river or a stream, the rock could alter its course… etc., etc. Living organisms can affect their environments in different ways, but I see this as a difference in degree, not in kind.
Life also has the characteristic of reproduction which is not how processes like combustion or fusion begin or continue.
Why is this important ? All kinds of physical processes proceed in different ways; for example, combustion can release a massive amount of heat in a short period of time, whereas life cannot. So what ?
...as making something that is alive vs a dead machine—a conscious robot not a car.
Are we talking about life, or consciousness ? Trees are alive, but they are not conscious. Of course, I personally believe that consciousness is just another physical process, so maybe it doesn’t matter.
My position is that physics and chemistry, eg, do not study a driving component of reality—that which drives life.
Technically they do not, biology does that (by building upon the discoveries of physics and chemistry), but I’m not sure why you think this is important.
then what drives the level of complexity to increase ?
I don’t think that complexity of living organisms always increases.
Is there a thread or some place where your position on life is expounded upon?
Well, you could start with those parts of the Sequences that deal with Reductionism . I don’t agree with everything in the Sequences, but that still seems like a good start.
As for vitalism, the life I speak of is to extend one’s understanding of biological life—a self-directing organism—to see stars as having the same potential.
I don’t believe that even biological life is self-directing. Additionally, I don’t understand how extending one’s understanding of biological life to everything can even happen. If you expand the concept of life to include everything then the concept of life becomes meaningless. Personally, whether the universe is alive, or not, it’s all the same to me.
The behavior of stars, and the universal structure is constrained in the imagination to be subject to the laws of physics and the metaphor for a star in this frame is a fire, which is lit and burns according to predictable rules regarding combustion.
When you say that this behavior is “constrained in the imagination”, you’re not trying to imply that we’re controlling or maintaining those constraints with our thoughts in any way, are you? That doesn’t make sense because I am not telekinetic. How would you know that what you’re saying is even true, as opposed to some neat sounding thing that you made up with no evidence? What shows that your claims are true?
The alternative is to imagine that the stars are the dogs, upon which the earth is a flea, and we are mites upon it. Why does this matter? I suppose it is just one of those world-view things which I think dictates how people feel about their existence.
If this is just an abstract metaphor, I’ve been confused. If so, I would have liked you to label it differently.
I don’t understand why vitalism would make the universe seem like a better place to live. I’m also reluctant to label anything true for purposes other than its truth. Even if vitalism would make the universe seem like a better place to live, if our universe is not alive, then it doesn’t make sense to believe in it. Belief is not a choice. If you acknowledge that the universe isn’t alive then you lose the ability to believe that the universe is alive, unless you’re okay with just blatantly contradicting yourself.
“We live in a dead universe subject to laws external to our being” predicates a view which sees external authority as natural and dismisses the vitality within all points which manifest this ‘life’. I think the metaphor for the universe is closely tied to the ethos of the culture, so I raised this question.
I don’t understand why you think determinism is bad. I like it. It’s useful, and seems true.
You say that your view says that life is the source of the way things behave. Other than the label and the mysteriousness of its connotations, what distinguishes this from determinism? If it’s not determinism, then aren’t you just contending that randomness is the cause of all events? That seems unlikely to me, but even if it is the case, why would viewing people as controlled by “life” and mysterious randomness be a better worldview than determinism? I prefer predictability, as it’s a prerequisite for meaning and context, as well as pragmatically awesome.
It took me a few hours to find this thread like a kid rummaging through a closet not knowing what he is looking for.
As my handle indicates, I am Lloyd. Not much I think is worth saying about myself but I would like to ask a few questions to see what interests readers here, if anyone reads this, and present a sample of where my thinking may come from.
Considering the psychological model of five senses we are taught since grade school is there a categorical difference in our ability to logically perceive that 2+2=4 vs perceiving the temperature is decreasing? The deeper question being is the realness of logic (and possibly other mental faculties not being considered here) the same as the realness of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch? There are questions which unfold from considering logic as a ‘sense’, but I wish to clarify this question first.
I have not found any proponent of a physical view of the universe as fundamentally alive rather than dead. Is there someone who has proposed, for example, that the stars are living and thus self-directing and the observations of galaxies may be that stars are purposefully forming these structures under their own will much like we form cities? Or maybe the idea that stars induce gravity and feed off of a source of energy from the subatomic regime? Or that different star systems may be fundamentally different on a quantum level like blood types? I mean the language is filled with terms like birth, death, and life, but it sounds like they are disconnected from their biologically meaning altogether.
Does anyone ever discuss the post-industrial society, no, not right question. Why is it that the discussion of post-industrial society is what it is? For example, in mainstream storytelling post-industrial=post-apocalyptic for much of what I have seen. There is Gene Roddenberry who cast post-industrial society as being rescued by aliens. There are Orwell and Huxley who left the world to be forever locked in an industrial nightmare. Zombies. Am I to understand that the culture’s mind has settled on imaging the industrial society as its death?
This was the hardest of your questions to get a grip on. :-) You mention disaster fiction, Star Trek, 1984, and Brave New World, and you categorize the first two as post-industrial and the second two as bad-industrial perpetuated. If I look for the intent behind your question… the idea seems to be that visions of the future are limited to destruction, salvation from outside, and dystopia.
Missing from your list of future scenarios is the anodyne dystopia of boredom, which doesn’t show up in literature about the future because it’s what people are already living in the present, and that’s not what they look for in futurology, unless they are perverse enough to want true realism even in their escapism, and experienced enough to know that real life is mostly about boredom and disappointment. The TV series “The Office” comes to mind as a representation of what I’m talking about, though I’ve never seen it; I just know it’s a sitcom about people doing very mundane things every day (like every other sitcom) - and that is reality.
If you’re worried that reality might somehow just not contain elements that transcend human routine, don’t worry, they are there, they pervade even the everyday world, and human routine is something that must end one day. Human society is an anthill, and anthills are finite entities, they are built, they last, they are eventually destroyed. But an anthill can outlive an individual ant, and in that sense the ant’s reality can be nothing but the routine of the anthill.
Humans are more complex than ants and their relation to routine is more complex. The human anthill requires division of labor, and humans prepared to devote themselves to the diverse functional roles implied, in order to exist at all. So the experience of young humans is typically that they first encounter the boredom of human routine as this thing that they never wanted, that existed before them, and which it will be demanded that they accept. They may have their own ideas about how to spend the time of their life, or they may just want to be idle, but either way they will find themselves at odds with the social order to which they have been born. There are places in the social ecosystem where it works differently, but this is how it turns out for many or even most people.
So my thesis is really that boredom is the essence of human life, human society, human history, and human experience. Note well: the essence of human reality, not of reality as a whole, which is bigger than human beings. I will also say that boredom was the essence of preindustrial life as well as of industrial life, and also of any postindustrial life so long as it is still all about human beings. Some people get not to live boring lives, and wonder and terror can also just force themselves upon humanity in a certain time and place; and finally, I should add that people can live amid the boredom and not be bored, if they are absorbed in something. Our Internet society is full of distractions and so the typical Internet citizen is not just flatly bored all the time, they will be in a succession of hyper moods as they engage with one thing after another. But most of it is trivia that has no meaning in the long run and that is why it’s reasonable to say that it adds up to boredom.
All these non-boring stories about the future are partly expressive of reality, but they are also just distractions from the boredom for the people who consume them. Apocalypse doesn’t solve the problem of giving me a happy free life, but it does solve the problem of boredom! Salvation by aliens is an instance of something exciting and non-boring coming from outside and forcing itself upon us. Huxley and Orwell’s worlds actually are boring when they’re not oppressive or dissipative, so in that sense they resemble reality.
Some people in some times aren’t born to boredom. What this really means is that there’s some form of instability. Either it’s the instability of novelty, that eventually settles down and becomes a new boredom, or it’s the instability of something truly dreadful. Our favorite instability on this site is artificial intelligence, which is a plausible candidate for the thing that really will end “human reality” and inaugurate a whole new Something. There may be a cosmic boredom that eventually sets in on the other side of the singularity, but for now, dealing with everything implied by the rise of AI is already more than anyone can handle. (There may be people out there who are thinking, I can think about the possibilities of AI with equanimity, so I can handle this. But no-one’s in charge, the situation is completely out of any sort of consensual control, and in that practical sense the human race isn’t “handling” the situation.) There are many other ways to avoid boredom, for example the study of the universe. The main challenge then is just convincing the human race to allow you to spend all your time doing this.
But the original question was about the culture’s own image of the future. My thesis is that adults generally know in their bones that their lives are boring, and that fact is itself so familiar as to be boring, so there’s no market for stories which say the future itself will also be boring. You’re finding the available non-boring narratives unsatisfactory—they’re either dystopian or involve wishful thinking. But the problem here is whether there’s a viable collective solution to boredom, or whether every such solution will be just another type of Watchtower-like unrealism (I mean the little magazine circulated worldwide by Jehovah’s Witnesses, in which future life is an agrarian paradise with the sort of nonstop happiness you only see in TV commercials). I should emphasize that the narratives which dominate the part of the culture that is concerned with the practicalities of the future, such as politics, do not try to solve the boredom problem, that’s not remotely on the agenda and it would be considered insanely unrealistic. Realistic politics is about ensuring that the social machine, the division of labor, continues to function, and about dealing with crises when they show up. So it might be regarded as depressing rather than boring.
I can’t say that the problem of collective boredom concerns me very much. Like other singularity fans, I have my hands full preparing for that future event, which probably is the end of the boredom as we know it. The task for you may just be to come to grips with your own difference from everyone else, accept that most people will end up in some boring but functionally necessary niche, and then try to make sure that you don’t end up like most people.
I think you got a grip on the gist. I didn’t mention boredom in my question but you went straight to where I have been in looking at the topic. But I do not think there is reason to believe boredom is a basic state of human life indicative of how it has always been. I think it may be more related to the industrial lifestyle.
Take the 2012 Mayan calendar crap. Charles Mann concludes his final appendix in “1491” with a mention of the pop-phenom, “Archaeologists of the Maya tend to be annoyed by 2012 speculation. Not only is it mistaken, they believe, but it fundamentally misrepresents the Maya. Rather than being an example of native wisdom, scholars say, the apocalyptic ‘prophecy’ is a projection of European values onto non-European people.” The apocalypse is the end of boredom for a bored people.
I personally do not like the boring, as you suggested, I have come to grips with that and live accordingly.
Don’t tell anyone, but I’m not immune to 2012-ism myself. At the very least, that old Mayan calendar is one of the more striking intrusions of astronomical facts into human culture; it seems to be built around Martian and Venusian cycles, and the precession of Earth.
So part of being new here...the karma thing. Did you just get docked karma for the assertion you are into 2012-ism? I didn’t do it. Is there a list of taboos? I got docked for a comment on intuition (I speculate that is why).
There’s no list. In general, people downvote what they want to see less of on the site, and upvote what they want to see more of. A −1 score means one more person downvoted than upvoted; not generally worth worrying about. My guess is someone pattern-matched MP’s comment to fuzzy-headed mysticism.
The idea of ‘what you want to see less of’ is fairly interesting. On a site dedicated to rationality I was expecting that one would want to see:
-the discussion of rationality explicitly = the Sequences
-examples of rationality in addressing problems
-a distinction between rationality and other thinking processes and when rational thinking is appropriate (ie- the boundaries of rationality)
It would be a reasonable hypothesis—based on what I have seen—that the last point causes a negative feedback. MP demonstrated a great deal of rationality (and knowledge) in addressing the questions I raised in the first post. Given this, I find it intriguing that he is captivated in any way by 2012ism. Anyway, I would expect upvotes for any comment that clarifies or contributes to the parent, downvotes for comments which obscure, and nothing for humor or personal side notes (they can generate productive input and help create an atmosphere of camaraderie).
I saw the thread on elitism somewhere and noted that the idea of elitism and the karma system are intertwined. It seems a simple explicit description of karma and what it accomplishes may be a good thread for a top member to start. - if it exists already I was implying I sought it in my request for a ‘list of taboos’. It may or may not be a good idea to tell people criteria for up/down-voting, but is there a discussion about that?
Different people want to see, and want to avoid seeing, different things. The net karma score of any given comment is an expression of our collective preferences, filtered extremely noisily through which subset of the site happens to read any given comment.
I would prefer LW not try to impose voting standards beyond “upvote what you want, downvote what you don’t want.” If we want a less croudsourced value judgment, we can pay someone we trust to go through and rate all the comments, though I would not contribute to that project.
Or something they disagree with strongly enough. Or if they dislike the poster. Some just press a wrong button. Some have cats walking on keyboards. If you get repeatedly downvoted to −3 or so, then there is a cause for concern.
Since life is considered a solved problem by science, any remaining problem of “aliveness” is treated as just a perspective on or metaphor for the problem of consciousness. But talking about aliveness has one virtue; it militates against the tendency among intellectuals to identify consciousness with intellectualizing, as if all that is to be explained in consciousness is “thinking” and passive “experiencing”.
The usual corrective to this is to talk about “embodiment”. And it’s certainly a good corrective; being reminded of the body reintroduces the holism of experience, as well as activity, the will, and the nonverbal as elements of experience. Still, I wouldn’t want to say that talking about bodies as well as about consciousness is enough to make up for the move from aliveness to consciousness as the discursively central concept. There’s an inner “life” which is also obscured by the easily available ways of talking about “states of mind”; and at the other extreme, being alive is also suggestive of the world that you’re alive in, the greater reality which is the context to all the acting and willing and living. This “world” is also a part of cognition and phenomenology that is easily overlooked if one sticks to the conventional tropes of consciousness.
So when we talk about a living universe, we might want to keep all of that in mind, as well as more strictly biological or psychological ideas, such as whether it’s like something to be a star, or whether the states and actions of stars are expressive of a stellar intentionality, or whether the stars are intelligences that plan, process information, make choices, and control their physical environment.
People do exist who have explored these ways of thought, but they tend to be found in marginal places like science fiction, crackpot science, and weird speculation. Then, beyond a specific idea like living stars, there are whole genres of what might be called philosophical animism and spiritual animism.
I think pondering whether the stars are intelligences isn’t a bad hobby to have, it’s the sort of obscure reaching for the unknown which over time can turn into something real and totally new. But know and study your predecessors, especially their mistakes. If you’re going to be a crackpot, try at least to be a new type of crackpot, so that humanity can learn from your example. :-)
That is an impressive collection of links you put together. You have provided what I was looking for in a greater scope than I expected. The Star Larvae Hypothesis and Guy Murchie express the eccentricity in thought I was hoping someone would have knowledge of. I like to see the margins, you see. How did you come to all those tidbits? It took me a single question on this forum for me to get that scope and for that I owe you some thanks. I really do not have much of a hobby in pondering the intentions of stellar beings, but in coming up with queries that help me find the edges, margins, or whatever of this evolved social consciousness I am part of.
I do find it interesting that someone would be able to compile those links. Was this a personal interest of yours at some time or part of a program of study you came across? Or do you have some skill at compiling links that is inexplicable?
It’s a bit of both.
Whether there is a “logic-sense” is a question about consciousness so fundamental and yet so hard that it’s scarcely even recognized by science-friendly philosophy of mind. Phenomenologists have something to say about it because they are just trying to characterize experience, without concern for whether or how their descriptions are compatible with a particular scientific theory of nature. But if you look at “naturalist” philosophers (naturalism = physicalism = materialism = an intent that one’s philosophy should be consistent with natural science), the discussion scarcely gets beyond the existence of colors and other “five-sense” qualities.
The usual approach is to talk as if a conscious state is a heap of elementary sense-qualia, somehow in the same way that a physical object could be a pile of atoms. But experience is about the perception of form as well, and this is related to the idea of a logic-sense, because logic is about concepts and abstract properties, and the properties of a “form” have an abstractness about them, compared to the “stuff” that the form is made from.
In the centuries before Kant and Husserl, there was a long-running philosophical “problem of universals”, which is just this question of how substance and property are related. How is the greenness in one blade of grass, related to the greenness in another blade of grass? Suppose it were the exact same shade of green. Is it the same thing, mysteriously “exemplified” in two different places? If you say yes, then what is “exemplification” or “instantiation”? Is it a new primitive ontological relation? If you say no, and say that these are separate “color-instances”, you still need to explain their sameness or similarity.
With the rise of consciousness itself as a theme of human thought, the problem has assumed a new character, because now the greenness is in the observer rather than in the blade of grass. We can still raise the classic questions, about the greenness in one experience and the greenness in another experience, but the deeper problem is whether we are even conceiving of the basic facts correctly. Experience isn’t just “green stuff happening” or “round stuff happening”, it’s “green round stuff happening to my hand, eyes, and mouth” (if I’m eating an apple), it’s “happening to me ” (whoever and whatever “I” am), it’s “green round stuff being experienced as green and round”—and that little word “as” sums up a whole dimension of consciousness that the focus on sense-qualia obscures; the aspect of consciousness known as its “intentionality”, the fact that an experience is an experience “of” something or “about” something.
Names can be useful. The sense that “stuff is happening to me” has been called apperception. (That’s jargon that you won’t see on LW. Jargon that you will see, that comes at the same phenomenon from a different angle, is indexicality, the me-here-now component of an experience. One also needs to distinguish between me-here-now experienced or conceptualized in terms of difference to other “me-here-now”s, and me-here-now as simply another component of an experience, even if you’re not thinking about other people at the time. Apperception is more about this second aspect, whereas discussions of indexicality tend to puzzle over what it is that distinguishes one person, as a locus of experience, from another—they’re both “me” to themselves, but ontologically they are two entities, not one.) If there is a logic-sense, then it is presumably at work both in intentionality and in apperception; in fact the latter appears to contain a sort of indexical intentionality, the logic-sense applied to the perceiving self.
Two other very different perspectives: First, in Objectivism, you will see “concept formation” discussed as “measurement omission”. The idea being that a concept is a perception with something removed—the sensory and indexical particularities. It doesn’t quite deal with the ontological problem of what “instantiation of a property” is in the first place, but it highlights a psychological and cognitive/computational aspect.
Second, for the five senses, there are sense organs. If there is a logic sense, one should ask whether there’s a logic organ too. Here the neurocomputational answer is going to be that it’s a structure in the brain which has the outputs of sense organs as its inputs. This answer doesn’t do away with the miasma of dualism that hangs over all functionalist explanations of experience, but it does plausibly mimic the causal dependence of higher-order experience on raw experience.
Finally, I’ll point out that the nature of logic and a logic-sense is tied up with the nature of being and our awareness of it. We have a sense that reality exists, that individual things exist, and that they are a certain way. If you can stand to read something like Heidegger’s historical phenomenology of Being, you’ll see that grammar and logic have roots in a certain experience of being and a certain analysis of that experience, e.g. into “thatness” and “whatness”, existence and essence: that a thing is, and what a thing is. These perceptions and distinctions were originally profound insights, but they were codified in language and became the everyday tools of the thinking, wilful mind. Heidegger’s work was partly about recovering a perception of being prior to its resolution into existence and essence, out of a conviction that that is not the end of the story. The problem with trying to think “beyond” or “before” subject-predicate thinking is that it just turns into not thinking at all. Is there intellectual progress to be had beyond the raw observation that “Something is there”, if you don’t “apply concepts”, or is the latter simply an essential condition of understanding? Et cetera, ad infinitum.
Thanks for addressing all three of the questions. Your ability to expound on such a variety of topics is what I was hoping someone in this forum could do. Quite insightful.
Hello! Welcome to LessWrong!
This post reads very much like a stream-of-consciousness dump (the act of writing everything that crosses your mind as soon as you become aware that you’re thinking it, and then just writing more and more as more and more thoughts come up), which I’ve noticed is sometimes one of those non-rules that some members of the community look upon unfavorably.
Regarding your questions, it seems like many of them are the wrong question or simply come from a lack of understanding in the relevant established science. There may also be some confusion regarding words that have no clear referent, like your usage of “realness”. Have you tried replacing “realness” with some concrete description of what you mean, in your own mind, before formulating that question? If you haven’t, then maybe it’s only a mysterious word that feels like it probably means something, but turns out to be just a word that can confuse you into thinking of separate things as if they were the same, and make it appear as if there is a paradox or a grand mysterious scientific question to answer.
Overall, it seems to me like you would greatly benefit from learning the cognitive science taught/discussed in the Core Sequences, particularly the Reductionism and Mysteriousness ones, and the extremely useful Human’s Guide to Words (see this post for a hybrid summary / table of contents). Using the techniques taught in Reductionism and the Guide to Words is often considered essential to formulating good articles on LessWrong, and unfortunately some users will disregard comments from users that don’t appear to have read those sequences.
I’d be happy to help you a bit with those questions, but I won’t try to do so immediately in case you’d prefer to find the solutions on your own (be it answers or simply dissolving the questions into smaller parts, or even noticing that the question simply goes away once the word problems are taken away).
I will tend to violate mores, but I do not wish to seem disrespectful of the culture here. In the future I will more strictly limit the scope of the topic, but considering it was an introduction...I just wished to spread out questions from myself rather than trivia about myself.
I don’t think I am asking the wrong question. Such is the best reply I can formulate against the charge. As for my understanding of the established science, I thought I was reasonably versed, but in such a forum as this I am highly skeptical of my own consumption of available knowledge. But from experience, I am usually considered knowledgeable in fields of psychology I am familiar with the textbook junk like Skinner, Freud, Jung, etc.. and with,e.g., Daniel Dennett, Aronson, and Lakoff , but that doesn’t make me feel more or less qualified about asking the question I proposed. In astoronomy I have gone through material ranging from Chandrasekhar to Halton Arp, and the view that the stars are subject to, rather than direct gravitational phenomena is prevalent, i.e., stars act like rocks and not like living beings.
Please elaborate on how ‘realness’ is unclear in its usage. I would like to know the more acceptable language. The concept is clear in my mind and I thought the diction was commonly accepted.
If the subjects I have brought up are ill-framed then I would be happy to be directed to the more encompassing discussion.
I have browsed much of what you directed me to. The structure of this site is a bit alien to my cognitive organization, but the material contained within is highly familiar.
Please help me with the questions.
Alright, let’s start at the easy part concerning those questions:
Yes. In a large set of possible categorical distinctions, they are in different categories. The true, most accurate answer is that they are not exactly the same. This was obvious to you before you even formulated the question, I suspect. They are at slightly different points in the large space of possible neural patterns. Whether they are “in the same category” or not depends on the purposes of the category.
This question needs to be reduced, and can be reduced in hundreds of ways from what I see, depending on whether you want to know about the source of the information, the source of our cognitive identification of the information/stimuli, etc.
“Sight” is a large mental paintbrush handle for a large process of input and data transfer that gets turned into stimuli that gets interpreted that gets perceived and identified by other parts of the brain and so on. It is a true, real physical process of quarks moving about in certain identifiable (though difficultly so) patterns in response to an interaction of light with (some stuff, “magic”, I don’t know enough about eye microbiology to say how exactly this works). Each step of the process has material reality.
If you are referring to the “experience”-ness, that magical something of the sense that cannot possibly exist in machines which grants color-ness to colors and image-ness to vision and cold-ness and so forth, you are asking a question about qualia, and that question is very different and very hard to answer, if it does really need an answer at all.
By contrast, it is experimentally verifiable—there is an external referent within reality—that two “objects” put with two “objects” will have the same spacetime configuration as four “objects”. There is a true, real physical process by which light reflected on something your mind counts as “four objects” is the exact same light that would be reflected if your mind counted the same objects as “two objects” plus “two other objects”. “2 + 2 = 4” is also a grand mental paintbrush in a different language using different words—mathematics—to represent and point to the external referent of what you observe when two and two are four.
At this point, I no longer see any mysterious “realness” in either concept. One is a reliable, predictable pattern of interactions between various particles, the other is a reliable, predictable pattern of interactions between various particles. At the same time, on a higher level of abstraction, one is seen some way to identify expected “number” (another giant mental paintbrush handle) of things, while another is some way in which our minds obtain information about the outside world and gather evidence that we are convinced is entangled with large patterns of other particles through causality.
If I’m going too fast on some things or if you dislike my potentially-very-condescending tone of writing, my apologies and please mention it so that I can adjust my behavior / writing appropriately.
The other questions afterwards become progressively much harder to work on without a solid grounding in reductionism and other techniques, and in particular for the first interrogation on a “fundamentally alive” universe, is very much at the edge of my current comfort-zone in terms of ability to reduce, decompose, dissolve and resolve questions.
Unfortunately, there are also a great many things that might get in the way of resolving these questions—for an absurd example, if you hold a strong, unshakable belief that there is a huge scientific conspiracy hiding the “fact” that outer space does not exist and everything above the sky is a hologram while earth is actually one giant flat room (rather than a round ball) that warps around in spacetime to make us believe that it’s round, then I’m afraid I would likely find myself very much at a loss as to how to proceed in the discussion.
Edit: As for the stream-of-consciousness matter, it’s not about the widespread coverage of subject(s), but more a comment on the writing style / continuity. Basically, more organized writing and words with clearer delimitation, continuation, and links between topics / sub-topics that don’t have a continuous progression are indicators of a more in-depth analysis of one’s own words and thoughts, while the stream-of-consciousness style is more difficult for the readers when engaging in conversations that seek to attain a higher degree of truth.
Thanks for clarifying.
I understand that categories are mental constructs which facilitate thinking , but do not themselves occur outside the mind. The question meant to find objections to the categorization of logic as a sense. Taken as a sense there is a frame, the category, which allows it to be viewed as analogous to other senses and interrelated to the thinking process as senses are. In the discussion concerning making the most favorable choice on Monty Hall the contestant who does not see the logical choice is “blind”. When considering the limits of logical reason they can be be seen to possibly parallel the limits of visual observation- how much of the universe is impervious to being logically understood?
No need to address qualia.
Will try to constrain myself to more concise, well-defined queries and comments.
Hiya!
I don’t think there’s a difference between the human sense of logic and the other senses, I agree with you there. Just as it’s impossible to tell whether or not you’re a brain in a vat, it’s also impossible to tell whether or not you’re insane. Every argument you use to disprove the statement will depend on the idea that your observations or thought processes are valid, which is exactly what you’re trying to prove, and circular arguments are flawed. This doesn’t mean that logic isn’t real, it just means that we can’t interpret the world in any terms except logical ones. The logical ones might still be right, it’s just that we can never know that. You might enjoy reading David Hume, he writes about similar sorts of puzzles.
It doesn’t matter whether or not logic works, or whether reality is really “real”. Regardless of whether I’m a brain in a vat, a computer simulation, or just another one of Chuang Tzu’s dreams, I am what I am. Why should anyone worry about abstract sophistries, when they have an actual life to live? There are things in the world that are enjoyable, I think, and the world seems to work in certain ways that correspond to logic, I think, and that’s perfectly acceptable to me. The “truth” of existence, external to the truth of my everyday life, is not something that I’m interested in at all. The people I love and the experiences I’ve had matter to me, regardless of what’s going on in the realm of metaphysics.
I don’t quite understand what you’re saying about vitalism. I don’t know what the word “life” means if it starts to refer to everything, which makes the idea of a universe where everything is alive seem silly. There’s not really any test we could do to tell whether or not the universe is alive, a dead universe and an alive one would look and act exactly the same, so there’s no reason to think about it. Using metaphors to explain the universe is nice for simplifying new concepts, but we shouldn’t confuse the metaphor for the universe itself.
I’m not really in the mood for discussing literature or trying my hand at amateur psychoanalysis, I’ll leave that last question for someone else to try their hand at, if they decide they want to.
I think the sequences will help you out. I recommend that you start with the sequence on words and language, and then tackle metaethics. It could be a lot of work, but they make an interesting read and are very amusing at times. Regardless, we’re glad you’re here!
Well, it’s possible to tell that I’m insane in particular ways. For example, I’ve had the experience of reasoning my way to the conclusion that certain of my experiences were delusional. (This was after I’d suffered traumatic brain damage and was outright hallucinating some of the time.) For example, if syndrome X causes paranoia but not delusions, I can ask other people who know me whether I’m being paranoid and choose to believe them when they say “yes” (even if my strong intuition is that they’re just saying that because they’re part of the conspiracy, on the grounds that my suffering from syndrome X is more likely (from an outside view) than that I’ve discovered an otherwise perfectly concealed conspiracy.
It’s also possible to tell that I’m not suffering from specific forms of insanity. E.g., if nobody tells me I’m being paranoid, and they instead tell me that my belief that I’m being persecuted is consistent with the observations I report, I can be fairly confident that I don’t suffer from syndrome X.
Of course, there might be certain forms of insanity that I can’t tell I’m not suffering from.
The forms of insanity that you can’t tell if you’re suffering from invalidate your interpretation that there are specific kinds of insanity you can rule out, no? Mainly though, I was aware that the example had issues, but I was trying to get a concept across in general terms and didn’t want to muddle my point by getting bogged down in details or clarifications.
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by invalidating my interpretation. If you mean that, because there are forms of insanity I can’t tell if I’m suffering from, there are therefore no forms of insanity that I can rule out, then no, I don’t think that’s true.
And, please don’t feel obligated to defend assertions you don’t endorse upon reflection.
Why not?
Well, for example, consider a form of insanity X that leads to paranoia but is not compatible with delusion.
Suppose ask a randomly selected group of psychologists to evaluate whether I’m paranoid and they all report that I’m not.
Now I ask myself, “am I suffering from X?”
I reason as follows:
Given those premises, if I am paranoid, psychologists will probably report that I’m paranoid.
If I’m not delusional and psychologists report I’m paranoid, I will probably experience that report.
I do not experience that report.
Therefore, if I’m not delusional, psychologists probably have not reported that I’m paranoid.
Therefore, if I’m not delusional, I’m probably not paranoid.
If I suffered from X, I would be paranoid but not delusional.
Therefore, I probably don’t suffer from X.
Now, if you want to argue that I still can’t rule out X, because that’s just a probabilistic statement, well, OK. I also can’t rule out that I’m actually a butterfly. In that case, I don’t care whether I can rule something out or not, but I’ll agree with you and tap out here.
But if we agree that probabilistic statements are good enough for our purposes, then I submit that X is a form of insanity I can rule out.
Now, I would certainly agree that for all forms of insanity Y that cause delusions of sanity, I can’t rule out suffering from Y. And I also agree that for all forms of insanity Z that neither cause nor preclude such delusions, I can’t rule out suffering from (Z AND Y), though I can rule out suffering from Z in isolation.
But how would a possibly insane person determine that insanity X is a possible kind of insanity? Or, how would they determine that the Law of Noncontradiction is actually a thing that exists as opposed to some insane sort of delusion?
I was talking about how we should regard unknowable puzzles (ignore them, mostly), like the butterfly thing, so I thought it was clear that I’ve been speaking in terms of possibilities this entire time. Obviously I’m not actually thinking that I’m insane. If I were, that’d just be crazy of me.
Also, this approach presumes that your understanding of the way probabilities work and of the existence of probability at all is accurate. Using the concept of probability to justify your position here is just a very sneaky sort of circular argument (unintentional, clearly, I don’t mean anything rude by this).
Perhaps they couldn’t. I’m not sure what that has to do with anything.
Sure. If I’m wrong about how probability works, then I might be wrong about whether I can rule out having X-type insanity (and also might be wrong about whether I can rule out being a butterfly).
I didn’t think that your argument could function on even a probabilistic level without the assumption that X-insanity is an objectively real type of insanity. On second thought, I think your argument functions just as well as it would have otherwise.
If it’s not an objectively real type of insanity, then I can certainly rule out the possibility that I suffer from it. If it is, then the assumption is justified.
Thanks for the welcome.
I raised this pov of logic (reason or rationality when applied) because I saw a piece that correlates training reason with muscle training. If logic is categorical similar to a sense then treat it metaphorically as such, I think. Improving one’s senses is a little different than training a muscle and is a more direct simile. Then there is the question of what is logic sensing? Sight perceives what we call light, so logic is perceiving ‘the order’ of things? The eventual line of thinking starts questioning the relationship of logic to intuition. I advocate the honing of intuition, but it is identical in process to improving one’s reason. The gist being that intuition picks up on the same object that logic eventually describes, like the part of vision which detects movement in the field that is only detailed once the focal point is moved upon it.
As for vitalism, the life I speak of is to extend one’s understanding of biological life—a self-directing organism—to see stars as having the same potential. The behavior of stars, and the universal structure is constrained in the imagination to be subject to the laws of physics and the metaphor for a star in this frame is a fire, which is lit and burns according to predictable rules regarding combustion. The alternative is to imagine that the stars are the dogs, upon which the earth is a flea, and we are mites upon it. Why does this matter? I suppose it is just one of those world-view things which I think dictates how people feel about their existence. “We live in a dead universe subject to laws external to our being” predicates a view which sees external authority as natural and dismisses the vitality within all points which manifest this ‘life’. I think the metaphor for the universe is closely tied to the ethos of the culture, so I raised this question.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
I’m not sure what you mean by “self-directing”. As I see it, “life” is yet another physical process, like “combustion” or “crystallization” or “nuclear fusion”. Life is probably a more complex process than these other ones, but it’s not categorically different from them. An amoeba’s motion is directed, to be sure, but so is the motion of a falling rock.
An amoeba acts on its environment where a rock behaves according to extrernal force. Life also has the characteristic of reproduction which is not how processes like combustion or fusion begin or continue. There are attempts to create both biological life from naught and AI research has a goal which could be characterized as making something that is alive vs a dead machine—a conscious robot not a car. I recognize that life is chemical processes, but I, and I think the sciences are divided this way, a categorical difference between chemistry and biology. My position is that physics and chemistry, eg, do not study a driving component of reality—that which drives life. If biological life is to be called >>complexity of basic chemical processes then what drives the level of complexity to increase?
Is there a thread or some place where your position on life is expounded upon? If life is to be framed as a complex process on a spectrum of processes I could understand, provided the definition of complexity is made and the spectrum reflects observations. In fact, spectrums seem to me to be more fitting maps than categories, but I am unaware of a spectrum that defines complexity to encompass both combustion and life.
The rock acts on its environment as well. For example, it could hold up other rocks. Once the rock falls, it can dislodge more rocks, or strike sparks. If it falls into a river or a stream, the rock could alter its course… etc., etc. Living organisms can affect their environments in different ways, but I see this as a difference in degree, not in kind.
Why is this important ? All kinds of physical processes proceed in different ways; for example, combustion can release a massive amount of heat in a short period of time, whereas life cannot. So what ?
Are we talking about life, or consciousness ? Trees are alive, but they are not conscious. Of course, I personally believe that consciousness is just another physical process, so maybe it doesn’t matter.
Technically they do not, biology does that (by building upon the discoveries of physics and chemistry), but I’m not sure why you think this is important.
I don’t think that complexity of living organisms always increases.
Well, you could start with those parts of the Sequences that deal with Reductionism . I don’t agree with everything in the Sequences, but that still seems like a good start.
I don’t believe that even biological life is self-directing. Additionally, I don’t understand how extending one’s understanding of biological life to everything can even happen. If you expand the concept of life to include everything then the concept of life becomes meaningless. Personally, whether the universe is alive, or not, it’s all the same to me.
When you say that this behavior is “constrained in the imagination”, you’re not trying to imply that we’re controlling or maintaining those constraints with our thoughts in any way, are you? That doesn’t make sense because I am not telekinetic. How would you know that what you’re saying is even true, as opposed to some neat sounding thing that you made up with no evidence? What shows that your claims are true?
If this is just an abstract metaphor, I’ve been confused. If so, I would have liked you to label it differently.
I don’t understand why vitalism would make the universe seem like a better place to live. I’m also reluctant to label anything true for purposes other than its truth. Even if vitalism would make the universe seem like a better place to live, if our universe is not alive, then it doesn’t make sense to believe in it. Belief is not a choice. If you acknowledge that the universe isn’t alive then you lose the ability to believe that the universe is alive, unless you’re okay with just blatantly contradicting yourself.
I don’t understand why you think determinism is bad. I like it. It’s useful, and seems true.
You say that your view says that life is the source of the way things behave. Other than the label and the mysteriousness of its connotations, what distinguishes this from determinism? If it’s not determinism, then aren’t you just contending that randomness is the cause of all events? That seems unlikely to me, but even if it is the case, why would viewing people as controlled by “life” and mysterious randomness be a better worldview than determinism? I prefer predictability, as it’s a prerequisite for meaning and context, as well as pragmatically awesome.
I really do strongly suggest that you read some of these: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences#Major_Sequences
You seem to be confusing your feelings with arguments, at some points in your comments.