Glen -
Your use of "regret" is a dead giveaway to your narrativity. A regret operator (even in formal settings) is only useful in contexts that assume both free-will and narrativity.I don't know that *I* experience a lot of regret, mostly because I recognize that anything I might "regret" in my own life fits squarely in the realm of "it seemed like a good idea at the time", even if my imagination/memory might be prone to frame it as something I might have decided/felt/acted otherwise on. I *do*, however, recognize that the use of the "regret operator" is pretty pervasive in common discourse (codes) and therefore likely in world-view (modes). Your (constructive) criticism of these modes and codes continues to be helpful (if I have any free will which seeks or accepts help in it's actions).
Marcus' link citing our oft-discussed use of psychedelics to raise the "heat" in our "annealing" minds also targets that narrativity and regret operators. There's no reason to have a regret operator *unless* you can change your ephemeris with interventions like, say, a massive dose of LSD or a 3 day stay in an isolation tank.
I believe the (imagined?) utility of a regret operator fits squarely in the camp of "free will". And in it's application in the present-future decisions one might make. I certainly consider it in the present all the time, even if I don't so much in the past? I find myself thinking "I seem to have a spectrum of alternative choices to make right now and some of them seem like they would lead to regrets" so will likely avoid them out of hand, even if I never get around to experiencing regret as such. Various interventions (alcohol, meditation, discussion with an adversary etc) might reduce the set of "avoid out of hand" contemplations, some through your "heat of annealing" analogy and some more through more deliberate hill-climbing. Again, free-will. Maybe what I percieve as deliberate hill-climbing is just the natural consequence of "heat" in an obscured dimension? The language of Physics and Chemistry lie entirely there if the language of Biology and Sociology seem to admit/assume will and free-will.
one of my more favorite tautologies: "Life is that which wills to live amongst that which wills to live" (my misquote of Albert Schweitzer).
But Nick, EricC, Jon, and I have discussed (ad nauseum) the difference between pragmati[ci]sm, where Peirce (vs the other American Pragmatists) still carries some sort of anti-nominalist/foundationalist idealism. I think the existence of a regret operator in your reflective thought may depend on that deeper structure more than it depends on conceptions of free-will and narrativity.I could probably use more help unpacking this... Or maybe I just haven't read these conversations astutely enough (no regrets though!).
In a *very* open context, where not only the machinery changes as it chunks along, but the objective[s] change[s] through the iteration, regret can become locally scoped ... e.g. rather than an octogenarian regretting what they did when they were 20, one might only regret what one did 10 minutes ago but not regret the events of years ago. With such a tightly scoped regret, we can approach self-identified episodic personalities without being anti-nominalist/foundationalist. The foundation of that locally coherent self is simply "smaller" ... more particular, less general, more context dependent than full narrativity.
I think this is a good (temporal) expose of the local/global nature of emergence? Global order from local interactions? References SteveG's reflections about "believe in the collective" as I understand it.
As a sexegenarian, I find it hard to remember/understand the context of my dodecagenarian self well enough to have any proper regrets about actions/decisions made then. I agree that it is more coherent for me to go back through these missives I offer up here before (or after) I send them and have regrets (changes if I do it before I hit send) due to the temporal (and therefore hamming/network distance in the adjacent possible?) proximity than the former example. Maybe this is just another example of being stuck in the "illusion of free-will and narrativity"?
- Steve
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