Other Titles > Neuropath
Countering the Argument with Thorsten
Cüréthañ:
Just love reading your posts Thorsten.
Would like to hear your post-WLW thoughts on Earwan metaphysics if you have the time/inclination.
Thorsten:
--- Quote ---Would like to hear your post-WLW thoughts on Earwan metaphysics if you have the time/inclination.
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I'm currently halfway through - I plan to write up anything interesting. Btw. - I wonder if anyone has a copy of my analysis note on languages in the first trilogy - I can't seem to find it on my new computer.
What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Thorsten on May 17, 2013, 06:53:28 am ---Well, the catch is making most sense - how do you define that?
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Lol, I'm not sure the linguistic statement of encapsulation is going to make the most sense of making most sense enough for either of us.
We're primarily invoking language games, which I'd like to avoid as much as possible but you tend to hit on those meriting distinction.
What happens in cases of understanding or, even, imagination? Neural accounts seem to deal with embodied cognition, embodied simulation, or some account of neurons.
For my personal coin, I've subscribed to the thought that unless we're a completely necessary component for the existence of the Multiverse, then Objective-Truth, the state of affairs as they truly are (Reductionism to it's holistic conclusions...) exists outside of a human account in sound. I mean, we more or less exist happily based on how much we maintain our habitable environment, our niche. I'm not necessarily advocating naturalist truth but living, and accounts of it, in more accord with the actual state of the Multiverse seems to have its dividends.
I'm sure this hasn't satisfactorily (another homage to making most sense) done us any good. Perhaps, you'd hazard a try?
For whatever reason, understanding seems to satisfy our curiousity? I might also suggest the idea of cognitive dissonance (I realize you've already mentioned this in allusion further along, forgive me) and its resolution is almost an epitome of making sense.
--- Quote from: Thorsten on May 17, 2013, 06:53:28 am ---Within a formal system (science), making sense is defined in terms of deviation from the data, given a hypothesis - so within the formal system I can decide what makes sense and what doesn't. However, that doesn't tell if the system makes sense.
Adopt a different formal system - comparison to scripture.
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What about language? In the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis (which was primarily asserted by a student of Wharf's), it's suggested that we can't account for the existence of phenomenon for which we do not experience or interact with linguistically (describing) in some way. There is another European aristocrat that posited much the same a hundred years earlier (can't for remember the name and I'd rather respond to your post, rather than walk ten feet to my bookshelf ;)).
Nonetheless, controversial and seems directly related to formal systems. How about the ways in which language warp our very perception of our environments (seeing more colours or feeling more or less emotions in relation to words in your language, cognition of time and space, or an example Wilshire brought up in chat the other day - which I will find as I'm starting to remember - about language and orientation, to which I'm still trying to figure out the neural riddle)?
--- Quote from: Thorsten on May 17, 2013, 06:53:28 am ---Is the Mona Lisa great art? is not a question you could address with a measurement or statistical analysis.
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I think you could get some interesting data in some pursuits here.
--- Quote from: Thorsten on May 17, 2013, 06:53:28 am ---I could go on with this, but I think you may spot where my problems with research in psychology and brain science reside...
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I'm not entirely sure. Again, it seems beyond the ken of the psychological or neuroscientific disciplines to practice their results; even someone like myself, fighting all the uphill battle's of being engaged with servicing the bureaucratic civilization of the Western Empire, is limited in their time (which it takes to effectively change neural architecture through practice).
People are fallible? Regardless, your disdain for many of these results seems to come down to inapplicable discussion on the part of the authors (which I find is a huge factor in how published scientists are perceived as quality researchers or not - bias at work, neh?).
--- Quote from: Thorsten on May 17, 2013, 08:30:10 am ---It all depends on what you prefer to call 'real' or 'illusionary'.
...
In contrast you (and Bakker) seem to be using the word 'illusion' here for something that is in a high-level effective theory (the mind as we ourselves would describe it, or psychology as used by Freud, Jung, Adler,...) but not in a low-level more fundamental theory (interactions among interconnected neurons).
This is, I think, a very important difference.
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I know this is a problem of presentation. For my part, and I'm near-perfect positive on Bakker's assertion, we're both doing readers a disservice by not explaining connotations. Illusory correlation is almost the quintessential human problem, if we are to be understood in terms of pattern-recognizing machines - we see correlation where there is in fact none.
This might actually serve as a crux for our conversation as it is precisely this, illusory of conscious sufficiency, that seem centered in Bakker's position concerning Blind Brain (I'm not sure where I've fallen in terms of the Argument here). There is no reasonable position that how we've decided the mind/brain relationship works, philosophically, in the humanities, will hold weight in the future, at all.
On the academic front, it's almost an inevitability. But as individuals - what I'm seeing certainly is a modicum of existential activity around me, what I feel may or may not relate to the sensation of air moving across my skin, or the table beneath my arms. Also, literally, the brain offers a taste of Neil's horror at all times, when what we experience seems to be a heuristic representation of our first experiences or a collection of average experiences, rather than actual experience as it's happening now: energetically, as a system, it seems to suggest that our brains conserve energy by imprinting and recycling experiences, such that, people surprise us when they do something outside our ken, we think they are acting differently, when it's simply outside our collection of experiences.
I've always found the German word Umwelt helpful. Basically, we perceive only what we can perceived. Which leaves for the unperceived...
--- Quote from: Thorsten on May 17, 2013, 08:30:10 am ---The world behaves as if there would be mass when seen at a certain scale, this is what gives meaning to the concept. The world behaves as if there would be an 'I' when seen at a certain scale. and this is what gives meaning to the concept.
If you want to limit 'real' to 'what is contained in our most fundamental theory only', you declare pretty much everything as illusion, and you're left with a description of the world in terms of operators acting on Fock spaces having certain commutation and anticommutations - which manifestly isn't what is real, but just describes how the real world behaves. So in essence nothing is real then. Doesn't lead anywhere in particular to accept only the fundamental as real.
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I certainly gather what you mean but I feel we've missed each other here. If the above doesn't offer some coherence, I'm not sure how to respond.
The onus is certainly not on either of us to imply that there exist conscious entities. I mean, I certainly feel, at this moment, that I am responsible for some of my actions but I am also aware "I am" simply a hole in the world... I am that portal between the trillions of connections within and the billions of connections without. I'm just here to ride along, figuring out what that means with as many humans as I can for as long as I can...
What Came Before:
Had the time to reread today. Cheers, Thorsten.
Also, Zombie Three-Seas is well and undead. aengelas pulled a Necromancer and raised our canon.
I think the post you are talking about is Incariol, what does it mean? but you can also see all your posts: Thorsten.
What Came Before:
Third paragraph should read "or some account of [mirror] neurons"... I'm sure I missed others.
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