But my impression is that, while Valentine has expressed approval of your post and said that he feels understood and so forth, he thinks there are important aspects of Looking/enlightenment/kensho/… that it doesn’t (and maybe can’t) cover.
Doesn’t: yes, for sure.
Can’t: mmm, maybe? I expect that by the end of the sequence I’m writing, we’ll return to Kaj’s interpretation of Looking and basically just use it as a given — but it’ll mean something slightly different. Right now, I expect that if we just assume Kaj’s interpretation, we’re going to encounter a logjam when we apply Looking to the favored LW ontology, and the social web will have a kind of allergic reaction to the logjam that prevents collective understanding of where it came from. Once we collectively understand the structure of that whole process, we can smash face-first into the logjam, notice the confusion that results, and then make some meaningful progress on making our epistemic methods up to tackling serious meta-ontological challenges. At that point I think it’ll be just fine to say “Yep, we can think of Looking as compatible with the standard LW ontology.” Just not before.
Doesn’t: yes, for sure.
Can’t: mmm, maybe? I expect that by the end of the sequence I’m writing, we’ll return to Kaj’s interpretation of Looking and basically just use it as a given — but it’ll mean something slightly different. Right now, I expect that if we just assume Kaj’s interpretation, we’re going to encounter a logjam when we apply Looking to the favored LW ontology, and the social web will have a kind of allergic reaction to the logjam that prevents collective understanding of where it came from. Once we collectively understand the structure of that whole process, we can smash face-first into the logjam, notice the confusion that results, and then make some meaningful progress on making our epistemic methods up to tackling serious meta-ontological challenges. At that point I think it’ll be just fine to say “Yep, we can think of Looking as compatible with the standard LW ontology.” Just not before.
Interesting. Let’s see what the sequence holds...