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Explaining Bakker

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Bakker User:
Don't ask me how, but I got hold of a couple of neurolinguistics researchers, and attempted to present some of Bakker's work to them.

One I had read Notes Toward A Post-Normative Philosophy.

He replied by email:


--- Quote ---I don't understand it myself. None of the terms Bakker uses are familiar to me from the literature, and his writing is extremely dense and confusing. He presents no clear cognitive model, no contrasting hypotheses and no ways of testing them. This just doesn't look like good science to me, and while I'm open to new ideas they must be conveyed in a way I can understand. If Bakker is a scientist he should write like one: clearly and succinctly. If he is not, then he should make an effort to talk to scientists in their own language so long as he wishes to be understood.
--- End quote ---

Another I read (in person) some excerpts from Bakker's old lecture Semantic Apocalypse, as well as some TPB posts for supplement and clarification.

To paraphrase:


--- Quote ---She: This is so amazing!
I: *sub rosa fist-pump*
She: None of this makes any sense!
I: Well, he is a philosopher.
She: Usually, when I read philosophy I can understand it.

...

I: *explaining the gist of the Blind-Brain Hypothesis.*
She: He's not even a scientist. Does he have any evidence for this?
I: Well, if you would just read these essays...
She:  :o  :-\
I: Alright, how about this blog post...

...

She: This Bakker guy seems to be taking the obvious and coming to really weird conclusions from it.
She: I don't think I'm his part of his target audience. 
--- End quote ---

Well, Bakker loves to go on about how he's actually arguing with his writing, putting across important ideas to unlike-minded audiences, and so on.

And yet, if no one understands what the fuck he's talking about... Perhaps he should tone down the diction?

I myself must admit that I understand little of Bakker's posts and essays beyond their main point, especially his writings of the past year-and-a-half. I'm often mystified by his terminology, analogies, and thought process. I used to attribute this to my own stupidity, but these guys quoted above are legitimate scientists...

Thoughts? Does Bakker just make perfect sense to you all?

If not, perhaps we could collectively back a strongly-worded email advising him to tone down his obscurantist language if he actually wants to promulgate his ideas beyond like, a thousand fans and fellow crackpots?

Callan S.:
There was this bus ticket information guy at the bus stop the other day - supposedly to give out new information (mostly about them scraping paper tickets, the butt heads). I tried asking him another question about the zone we were in, when using a ticket machine.

It was really quite facinating how he fluidly veered around the fact that he didn't have a clue, even as he wore the big blue jacket of the company in question.

How good people are at avoiding saying they don't know.

Your first example

--- Quote ---This just doesn't look like good science to me, and while I'm open to new ideas they must be conveyed in a way I can understand.
--- End quote ---
is taking the easy way out - he's trying to appear reasonable by wanting the whole thing, with complete research and writing up, explained to him. Or he'll ignore it. He's not treating it as an opportunity to start research himself, he just wants someone else to do all the research, then present it to him. In a way it's alot more open minded than most because I think he would listen to it when presented in the form he refers to. But in another way it ignores question marks as any kind of opportunity. He wont say 'Well, there are some question marks there, but I aint got the time to chase them up (there's a universe full of question marks and I have my own to pursue)'. Everyone wants to think they have good reason to ignore something, so he invents a good reason. Ironically, it's a symptom of heuristic compression itself - the compression being to cut off any 'I wonder' question marks (they eat up calories like the Dickens!) and instead to go with 'no, there's no reason to think about that'.


--- Quote ---She: None of this makes any sense!
--- End quote ---
I see this alot - you say something complicated, but even if you stuck 'the sky is blue' in the middle of it, the person would still say EVERYTHING you said made no sense! 'The sky is blue' made no sense?  'Heuristic compression' isn't that complex to grasp. Perhaps applying it to the brain is, but then again understanding refraction of light is complicated as well. But no acknowledgement of even part of the document making sense.

Pride is the main issue here. No one wants to take a random document out of the blue and let it shame by them acknowledging 'hey, some bits make sense, so there's some legitimacy to it, but I don't understand alot of it - oh, I guess that reduces my hard earned legitimacy somewhat?'. Who wants to hand over their legitimacy to a random scrap of paper? Really?

And so I complete my knocking of the readers...

I think spare times a thing. Were talking question marks which may be of interest to pursue. Someone who's schedule is full (or atleast they think it's full) obviously doesn't have any time left for new question marks. Though they most likely wont admit it.


--- Quote ---Thoughts? Does Bakker just make perfect sense to you all?
--- End quote ---
I've studied other models who's texts made more sense years after the first read - like the gamist/simulationist/narrativist theory of roleplay inclination, for example. If you're a long term roleplayer that might seem utterly alien from first contact.

But there I go avoiding saying I don't understand it/cannot full model all of it that is described.

Perhaps we could break it down to the question marks that, whether we grasp the question right or not, we find the question interesting.

Bakker User:

--- Quote ---How good people are at avoiding saying they don't know.
--- End quote ---

That's rather unfair, and avoids much of their responses.


--- Quote from: Researchers ---1. I don't understand it myself. None of the terms Bakker uses are familiar to me from the literature, and his writing is extremely dense and confusing. He presents no clear cognitive model, no contrasting hypotheses and no ways of testing them. This just doesn't look like good science to me, and while I'm open to new ideas they must be conveyed in a way I can understand. If Bakker is a scientist he should write like one: clearly and succinctly. If he is not, then he should make an effort to talk to scientists in their own language so long as he wishes to be understood.

2. Usually, when I read philosophy I can understand it.
--- End quote ---

Their issue here seems primarily to be with Bakker's language and the way he presents his ideas.


--- Quote ---is taking the easy way out - he's trying to appear reasonable by wanting the whole thing, with complete research and writing up, explained to him. Or he'll ignore it.
--- End quote ---

My impression is that a mere rewording of Bakker would be more fruitful than these sorts of aspersions.


--- Quote ---Pride is the main issue here. No one wants to take a random document out of the blue and let it shame by them acknowledging 'hey, some bits make sense, so there's some legitimacy to it, but I don't understand alot of it - oh, I guess that reduces my hard earned legitimacy somewhat?'. Who wants to hand over their legitimacy to a random scrap of paper? Really?
--- End quote ---

Is one obliged to respect what seems to one like incoherent ramblings? Which is more effective in writing, engagement or alienation? At any rate, neither you nor I can rebuke another for perceived pridefulness without coming off, as Bakker might put it, as "Hitler condemning Jesus Christ for hatefulness".

Ultimately, it's likely my fault - even what I understand of Bakker... the thing is, to begin to understand Bakker one really must read him extensively. I just haven't selected the appropriate excerpts, most likely. Also, I had read these Bakker pieces in the links multiple times and very closely, which probably wasn't passed along for the recipient of my little presentation or in the evident 20 minutes that the other one took to read and respond to the TPB post (judging by email response time).

I'll try a different approach with these two next time - if they'll humor me again. I'm currently starting to read Bakker's critical essay on the BBT, which hopefully will be written in a manner more appropriate to this type of reader; I'll reiterate the basic concept and as much of the 'rigorous proofs' as I'm able, and direct them to the thing itself to judge on their own time. Moreover, I'll adopt some of your language and ask:

1. Whether there's not anything in my expatiation or in Bakker's writings directly which they can more or less grasp.
2. Whether any of it seems interesting to consider (given their purviews) from Bakker's or even another's/their own perspective.
3. Whether there's not anything insightful or plausible in Bakker's evidences, given what they know about the brain.

I'll try that out next week, if possible.

Also, I ought to have noted that one of the above is not actually a native speaker of English! You can probably guess which one: they complained that "wow, my vocabulary is not that big"...

Wilshire:
I think the opinions of your scientists seems reasonable. I'm not going to say I have spent any reasonable amount of time looking into Bakker's philosophies, but from what I have looked at, I can say that I felt similar to your quoted opinions. I, however, and just some guy off the street. One would hope that someone that is, more or less, in the field of study that the paper was written about, would be able to more fully grasp what the hell was going on.

Though the credentials of your readers may be important. I don't know what the paper(s) were about, and I don't know how much a 'neruolinguistic researcher' would know about it. However, what I can say is that Bakker does not write scientifically, and the people in the scientific community expect a certain kind of writing. I don't know how much Bakker claims to be a scientist, but he certainly isn't doing 'science' on a day to day basis. Philosophy and science can be more or less similar depending on how theoretical ones research is. I would imagine that your readers, since they are doing research (which I take to me actually doing experiments and developing working models of theories) that philosophy is not close to heart. Practical science, outside the realm of purely theoretical stuff, is not much like philosophy, and the practitioners would not appreciate something like the texts written by Bakker.

This is because, like they said, he isn't a scientist. I'm sure he could write something that could be more comprehensible for a scientific audiance, but from what I've seen, most of his work is not for them. Its for the philosophers. His papers are not scientific papers.

Go to google scholar or something similar and look up a journal article regarding something scientific.  You'll find a very similar design in all of them. They will start with an abstract, then go into their hypothesis, then a theory section, then their apparatus and method for testing, data and discussion, and finally the conclusions they came to. There will also be an appendix section.

There is not a lot of fluff. Not a lot of confusing dialect and complex sentence structure. The only thing that may be confusing are the terms that are very specific to the research itself, and these things are usually explained in the appendix, accompanied by all the references they used for their work.

Peer-reviewed scientific journal articles go through a rigorous process to get published, and their findings are typically more accurate and more reliable than textbooks or papers, since those can be written by just a few people and hold no obligation to be accurate.

I'm just trying to say I can understand the stance of the your scientists. Bakker is a philosopher not a scientist, and grabbing any random scientist from the street and asking them to interpret his writing will probably yield you the same result over and over again.

Bakker User:
A very reasonable assessment; my only complaint is that it condemns Bakker to irrelevance - unless he's not really a post-posterity writer...

Although, perhaps I should have been more careful with my labels. While I did approach them in their capacity as such, they certainly do their fair share of theoretical work in syntax and semantics, from what I've learned, though one more so than the other (who is a full-on cognitive scientist). For the she, in fact, neurolinguistics is more of a sideshow, and one of her degrees is an MPhil in Linguistics; then again, I do recall her saying:


--- Quote ---Wow, I really don't know philosophy...
--- End quote ---

She didn't even believe there was such a thing as neurophilosophy until I wiki'd it for her.

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