I'll address the primary discussion here on top and interleave the secondary parts.
The idealistic question of how I come to know that I have a real psychological experience is a red herring. What matters is, as you say, figuring out who we are and therewith how to act. This is why mirror neurons is such an attractive (false or not) concept. I think at least part of ContraPoints' exhibitionism is to contextualize the complexity of "who we are". I think most of us find it fun to pair silly jokes with deeper challenges/questions, just like she presents some relatively deep ideas waving those ridiculous fingernails around. She makes this rhetorical tactic obvious by switching and scaling up and down the rhetorical scaffold, turning black and white when restating an opposing argument, etc. A meta-argument being made both in ContraPoints' videos, the review of gustatory status' effect on moral judgment, and framing evo psychopathology inside evo psych are all pointing to the same rhetorical fallacy: we can't abstract away the context and formulate a universal *law*. These higher scales on the scaffold are NOT LIKE PHYSICS ... or perhaps not like an initiate's intuition of physics. Part of what the alt-right intellectuals (neoreactionaries) get wrong is their commitment to analysis, that the "problem", whatever it may be, can be diced up and the sub-problems can be solved individually, then a composite solution assembled from the sub-solutions. So, your solution to the pronoun problem "give up and call everyone 'everythey'" is similarly flawed. The real answer is more Taoist, give in to the complexity. Get in the river and go with the flow. The length and shape of one's fingernails both do and don't matter to the rhetoric being offered. Or as the Offspring put it: Come out and play! On 12/7/18 3:50 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > Oh, Yes. One comprehensive response. When are you going to move to Santa > Fe? We need you in the home parish. I will visit. I probably won't move back. The nose bleeds and permanent image of the sun burned into my eyeballs is enough to keep me hiding here amongst the trees. 8^) > On 12/7/18 8:51 AM, ∄ uǝʃƃ wrote:> Pronouns >> https://youtu.be/9bbINLWtMKI?t=1457 >> > */[NST==>I have to admit I was sort of charmed by this. I suppose, what I > mean by female, really, is a person with whom I can play my stupid-male > -white-sexist-1950’s-vintage social attachment and bonding games with, and > since I can’t really play those games with anybody, anymore, I perhaps should > start calling everybody “everythey” and be done with it. After all, every > person isn’t a body, either, right? They are, after all, human, and have a > soul and all that. Well, I don’t know. Everythey to their own opinion, I > guess. <==nst] /* > >> So, after my aborted attempt to learn about OOO > > */[NST==>We never did this, and it is my fault. I apologize, Glen. A > graduate student in CS at Clark started following me on RG the other day for > some reason. He says he’s hoping to be an expert in Object Oriented > Programing. Shall I put him on to you? <==nst] /* It's not your fault. I failed to find a use for OOO. That's my failure. And, no. I'm no better at OOP than I am at anything else I do. Bundles of expertise do not make an expert. >> (those coy objects) and its relationship to Latour, our descent into the >> slang of "adulting" (and Nick's conflation of language with biology > > */[NST==>At the risk of providing further evidence that I am an amnesic > geriatric narcissist, Could you take a few sentences, perhaps off line, to > remind me when I did that? mean, beyond the obvious fact that all –ologies > have to do with … um …words?<==nst] /* You asked the question: "Is having sex 'childing' or 'adulting'?" That question makes the same mistake ContraPoints accuses Ben Shapiro of making. Shapiro claims a pronoun's use is dictated by a person's biology, thereby conflating language with biology. Your question implies that a fluid neologism like "childing" or "adulting" must be determined by biology. ... or at least have some relationship to it. But it doesn't. As I tried to point out above by saying the higher scales on the scaffold are unlike the lower scales, the evolution of language need not be functionally dependent on the substrate. Langton used to call this a "logical layer of abstraction" and the interesting question is the extent to which each layer bleeds into it's neighboring layer (or layers 2 or more "hops" in or out). >> ), as well as my failed attempts to tease out how evolutionary psych is/can >> be abused by crypto-fascists like Peterson and Harris, > > */[NST==>I agree, Glen. I can never get my mind around the argument. The > extreme right and the extreme left seem to agree on something about biology > that is plain preposterous. What do they think will have been accomplished, > if, say, a biological explanation of teen-aged risky behavior is established. > What freedom will be lost. Who will be excused who shouldn’t be excused. > This example may be useful because we do, in fact, put teen-aged felons in > Juvy and usually give them a clean slate when they come of age. So, perhaps, > the extremes are hoping/fearing that rapists will be cut loose with a clean > slate after a few years in “Manny”. (That seems to have happened to this guy > Epstein who appears to have been pimping 14 year old girls to his friends.) > Is this the argument? In another biological domain, I am trying to > understand why Elizabeth Warren is in such deep shit for getting her DNA > done. If somebody offered me a million dollars to get my DNA done, I would do > it, Wouldn’t you? What does the world think that a biological explanation IS > that makes it so contentious.<==nst] /* All 3 of these points mistake cultural posturing for biology. Using statistical inference to induce one's ancestry isn't at all about biology. It's about politics. That's why Warren's stunt is so obviously a stupid distraction (as was Trump's challenge in the first place). It's more pop TV theater and it stimulates an unpleasant gustatory reaction in most of us. The trick is that politicians *use* any tool for grift that might work. It doesn't matter what's true. What matters is whether it works. Predictive power trumps heuristic power, in politics and quantum mechanics. We have the postmodernists to thank for *teaching* us this reality and helping us find ways to mitigate against it. >> I stumbled on ContraPoints' channel. And despite the (false) claim that >> political correctness is somehow a constraint on free speech, I prefer to >> call people what they want to be called, rather than impute my own ideology >> into the world. Hence, the above video. > > */[NST==>The most salient impression that video made on me was not the gender > of the performer but the exhibitionism. I think this may be something about > my age. We once got a free subscription to wired and I had to put it out on > the porch with the perfumed New Yorkers. I just didn’t know how to engage > with it. To a non-octogenarian, is the performance on this video really > pursuant to the message? And what exactly was the message? <==nst] /* The message is that we don't have to dehumanize ourselves in the service of formal truth-telling. In fact, an abstracted, de-contextualized, dry, monotone presentation isn't merely boring. The fact that a buttoned-down antisceptic lecture IS boring, is an indicator that such a sterilized presentation is actually FALSE. Boring => false. Life is interesting and colorful. We've covered such issues on the list in the past, e.g. that what mathematicians do/think to come up with theorems and proofs doesn't really look much like the theorem-proof exposition we see in papers and books. Richard Feynman was a master at putting his (beyond the pale) understanding of physics into a living context. All good expositors do that. Good historians tell the TALES of the humans and human events, not simply listing the dates and events. Etc. That's the point of ContraPoints' exhibitionism. >> However, I found her statement interesting in the deeper sense of >> consciousness, qualia, obscenity, mind-reading, and the gen-phen map. I >> also recently stumbled upon this article, which I've only skimmed: > >> Reexamining the effect of gustatory disgust on moral judgment: A multi-lab >> direct replication of Eskine, Kacinik, and Prinz (2011) >> https://psyarxiv.com/349pk/ > > */[NST==>The general idea of this sort of literature is that in figuring out > who we are, and therefore how to act, we are constantly engaging in > abduction. So, if I can get you to do a thing that a psychopath might do, > you are more likely to conclude that you are a psychopath and do more things > like that in the future. So, if I go yuck when I make moral judgments, and > you make me go yuck, I am more likely to engage in a moral judgment. It has > a long history in the work of William James, i.e., the emotional behavior > precedes the emotional feeling, rather than the other way around. The amount > of literature supporting that paradigm is enormous, but yuck-inducement was a > particularly charming example, and I hate to see it go. > */<==nst] /* > >> To what extent do we escape solipsism simply due to our imagination that >> others have a real psychological experience? > > */[NST==>I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t ask you at this point how you come to > know that you have a real psychological experience. Or, for matter, what the > contrast=class might be: un unreal psychological experience. <==nst] /* It literally doesn't matter what "it" is. What matters is that whatever "it" is that I have, you probably also have "it". The purpose is to map myself to the other and vice versa. And such maps can exhibit both robustness and polyphenism. >> And even if we're all various types of realists and monists, to what extent >> does our collectively agnostic, methodological realism constrain the types >> of psychological experience we are capable of imagining? Can we ever really >> sympathize with a person like Hunter S. Thompson, > > */[NST==>Oh don’t get me started. Uncle Hunter was quite the life of family > parties. <==nst] /* > >> Aleister Crowley, or any arbitrary lone wolf domestic terrorist? I'd hope >> for answers to questions like this to come from evolutionary >> psychopathology. This is a decent book review here: > > > >> http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/03/book-review-evolutionary-psychopathology/ > > */[NST==>I liked the sound of this book and will certainly watch the movie > when it comes out. I couldn’t help think of the four types as Trump Clinton > Carter and Obama. None of these people give a nod to Nietzsche (Apollonian > vs Dionysian cultures) … these ideas weren’t invented yesterday … but since > I have never read any N. either (and won’t even hazard to spell his name > twice in the same sentence), who am I to say. <==nst] /* -- ∄ uǝʃƃ ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
