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Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

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Steve Smith

Re: Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

Dave -

> 1) I am fascinated by the field of scientific visualization, using imagery to present complex data sets. Recently I "observed" the precise moment of sperm-egg fertilization. A whole lot was going on inside the egg cell boundary immediately upon contact (not penetration) with the sperm. The visualization was of thousands (millions?) of discrete inter-cellular elements breaking free from existing structures, like DNA strands, proteins, molecules and moving about independently. I could see several "fields" that were a kind of "probability field." These fields constrained both the movement of the various elements and, most importantly, what structures would emerge from their recombination. "Watching" the DNA strand 'dissolve" and "reform" was particularly interesting because it was totally unlike the "unzip into two strands, the zip-up a strand-half from each donor" visualization I have seen presented in animations explaining the process. Instead I saw all kinds of "clumps" form and merge into larger/longer "clumps" then engage in an interesting hula/belly/undulation dance to rearrange the structure into a final form. All of this "guided" by the very visible "probability fields;" more than one and color coded.
>
> Now, if I were a cellular biologist could I make use of this vision?
>
> Since I am not a cellular biologist and have no understanding of inter-cellular structures/dynamics/chemistry, nor any DNA knowledge, where did the imagery come from and why did it hang together so well?
>
> Was this experience just an amusing bit of entertainment" Or, is there an insight of some sort lurking there?

I have some complementary experiences.   In a lifetime of trying to
facilitate insight to scientists and engineers by building tools to help
them visualize (perceptualize) their models of physical (and sometimes
highly abstract) phenomena I have seen "a thing or two".   What I have
seen more than anything is those researchers/practitioners increase the
scope of their intuition when facilitated by
computer-mediated-representation of their data.

I have also seen naive false-positives generated in the process. In
fact, the most common experience I have had is when I might present a
scientist with a novel (to them) visualization, they see anomalies from
what they *expected to see* and they usually question *my*
systems/software.   If it is a mature system/tool I am using, it usually
turns out that these anomalies are exposing errors/bugs in *their*
systems (data collection, grooming, modeling). In the most rare (but
most useful?) case, it turns out to expose errors in their assumptions,
in the models themselves (not just the expression of them).   In the
very best case, the scientists came to me with an intuition, a
hypothesis and a rough model who needed to have those models coupled
back to there sensoria so that they could reinforce their own intuition
and/or invite colleagues into their hypothesis LONG before they had
everything nailed down.

On the flip side, another common experience was "false positives".
Often, simply applying mostly unmotivated interpolations to their
discretized data, I "accidentally" added (excess?) meaning to their
models.   Few sophisticated scientists make those mistakes, but
sometimes "wishful thinking" trumps "thoughtful awareness".

On the topic of "visualizing whirled peas"...   I have a lot of lucid
dreams, many of them about physical systems.   I reported here (and you
gave me a great Science Fiction reference) having months worth of lucid
dreams involving orbital mechanics and orbital mining/salvage.   I never
really imagined that these dreams were going to help me learn anything
revolutionary about orbital mechanics, at the very best, they either
provided me with loads of entertainment or perhaps *incremental*
improvements to *my* understanding of established orbital mechanics that
I have learned "the hard way" (studying the math).

Do you have any reason for believing that your visions of cellular
fusion/fission are giving you fundamental or extravagant insights (as
opposed to incremental refinements) than that "they hold together well"?

- Steve

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thompnickson2

Re: Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

In reply to this post by Prof David West

See Larding below.

By the way: my mail interface is taken to tucking some of my mail into a folder called "important" where, of course, I cannot see it. So, if I appear to go missing, don't hesitate to write me an unimportant message telling me that there are important ones awaiting me.

Of course I have n o I d e a what distinguishes an important message from an unimportant one.

As I said, see below: Oh, and dave, what I wrote below is TESTY. I don’t realty feel testy, I don’t really feel qualified to be testy. I think the rhetoric just got away with me. It has happened before and you have promised it doesn’t’ bother you, so I am counting on your grace-under-fire again.

Your friend ,

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Friday, March 6, 2020 2:00 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

thanks Glen,

I totally agree with you about dead white guys. [Except I have had face-to-face conversations with a couple of them :) ] I reference them not as a source of answers but in an attempt to find some kind of conceptual bridge for a conversation. But that might be totally counterproductive as it tends to introduce a propensity for forking the conversation.

Engaging with contemporary scientists is hard when it comes to drug-induced data sets / experiences. I hope to make some connections with contemporary researchers at the ICPR conference I mentioned but the focus there seems to be psycho-medical and related to the oxytocin article you posted, and my direct interests tend to diverge from that.

Perhaps something more direct might be useful. Two things, the second is mostly to tease Nick.

1) I am fascinated by the field of scientific visualization, using imagery to present complex data sets. Recently I "observed" the precise moment of sperm-egg fertilization. A whole lot was going on inside the egg cell boundary immediately upon contact (not penetration) with the sperm. The visualization was of thousands (millions?) of discrete inter-cellular elements breaking free from existing structures, like DNA strands, proteins, molecules and moving about independently. I could see several "fields" that were a kind of "probability field." These fields constrained both the movement of the various elements and, most importantly, what structures would emerge from their recombination. "Watching" the DNA strand 'dissolve" and "reform" was particularly interesting because it was totally unlike the "unzip into two strands, the zip-up a strand-half from each donor" visualization I have seen presented in animations explaining the process. Instead I saw all kinds of "clumps" form and merge into larger/longer "clumps" then engage in an interesting hula/belly/undulation dance to rearrange the structure into a final form. All of this "guided" by the very visible "probability fields;" more than one and color coded.

Now, if I were a cellular biologist could I make use of this vision?

[NST===>] I love this example. Every stain produces a new image and some stains are more revealing than others, in that the models they facilitate are more robust and enduring in their predictions. I stipulate that. I also stipulate that hitting an alarm clock with a sledge hammer MIGHT reveal robust and enduring information about alarm clocks. I just don’t think it’s likely. And there is the possibility that the clock wont be very accurate thereafter. That is the whole of my argument against drug -epistemology. So if you are NOT arguing that drug-epistemology is somehow superior to sledge-hammer epistemology, then we agree and we don’t have to argue any more.

Since I am not a cellular biologist and have no understanding of inter-cellular structures/dynamics/chemistry, nor any DNA knowledge, where did the imagery come from and why did it hang together so well?

Was this experience just an amusing bit of entertainment" Or, is there an insight of some sort lurking there?

[NST===>] I like the metaphor with stains. But just remember, if my memory serves me correctly, you don’t see jack shit when cells divide without the right stain. All such observations are of the Peircean type/; “If I do this, then I will get that.”

2) En garde Nick.

[NST===>] je me garde

Quoting Huxley, paraphrasing C.D. Broad — "The function of the brain, nervous system, and sense organs is, in the main, eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. This is Mind-At-Large.

[NST===>] Dave, even without my characteristic ill ease with dispositions (like gravity, for instance), this last sentence gives me the heebs. And the Heaves. It is either a definition of memory (=all that I experience as past at a moment) or it is non-sense. Or some kind of balmy article of faith.

But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive.

[NST===>] No. No animal has ever survived. No animal has ever tried to survive. No species has ever tried to survive. This is all foolishness pressed on us by Spencer. Even Darwin was leery of it. (and no I cannot cite text)

To make biological survival possible, Mind-At-Large, has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet."

[NST===>] I suppose one can make sense of this sort of talk by postulating a world outside of experience, but unless you postulate that this world beyond experience can in principle never affect experience, you end up with a contradiction because anything that effects experience in any way, however indirect, is, by definition, experienced.

Two personal experiences: 1) I tend to not notice when my glasses get cloudy from accumulation of dust and moisture until it is quite bad. I clean my glasses, put them on, and am amazed at how clear and detailed my perceptions are post-cleaning. A very dramatic difference.

[NST===>] Well of course. Cleaning glasses is a method that increases the predictive potential of your current visual experiences. If your argument is only that there are experiences I have not had which will surprise me if I have them, I agree, so we don’t have to argue about that any more, right?

And, 2) the proper dose of a hallucinogen (and/or the right kind of meditation) and my perceptions of the world around me, using all my senses, are amazingly clear and detailed in the same way as my visual perception was changed by cleaning grime from my glasses.

[NST===>] The innate school marm gives us little jolts of pleasure from time to time, usually in response to activities that please her. One of those jolts is a “sense of clarity.” If you break into her storeroom and steal her clarity candies, you will get the clarity-pleasure even while seeing muddily.

Now I grant you it’s possible you will see something more clearly. See above the sledgehammered clock argument.

I would contend that the drug (meditation) removed the muddying filter of my brain/nervous system/ sense organs just as the isopropyl alcohol removed the muddying filter of moisture-dust on my glasses.

I see the world as it "really" is.[NST===>]Well, that remains to be seen, right. It might be that the dust filters the light in such a way as to reveal structures that you cannot see through the cleaned glass. The proof is in the pudding … i.e., the proving out.

Now the tease: I would contend that I am more Apollonian than thou because I value Life, and more of Life, more directly, than you do. It is not varied experience I seek, but a direct, clear, complete, apprehension and appreciation of Life Itself.

[NST===>] Similarly, let it be the case that I had a dozen clocks and you told me you had hit them all with a sledge hammer; now, if you told me you had lied, and gave me back the 12^th clock in perfect working order, I would value it a lot more for having thought I had lost it.

davew

On Thu, Mar 5, 2020, at 4:58 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:

> It's not pesky for me in the slightest. I'm *very* interested. I

> haven't contributed because it's not clear I have anything to

> contribute.

> Maybe I can start with a criticism, though. It's unclear to me why you

> (or anyone) would delicately flip through crumbling pages of

> philosophy when there are fresh and juicy results from

> (interventionist) methods right in front of us? The oxytocin post

> really *was* inspired by this thread. But because you guys are talking

> about dead white men like Peirce and James, it's unclear how the science relates.

> My skepticism goes even deeper (beyond dead white men) to why one

> would think *anyone* (alive, dead, white or brown) might be able to

> *think* up an explanation for how knowledge grows. I would like to,

> but cannot, avoid the inference that this belief anyone (or any

> "school" of people) can think up explanations stems from a bias toward

> *individualism*. My snarky poke at "super intelligent god-people" in a

> post awhile back was

> (misguidedly) intended to express this same skepticism. I worry that

> poking around in old philosophy is simply an artifact of the mythology

> surrounding the "mind" and Great Men

> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory>.

> It seems to me like science works in *spite* of our biases to

> individualism. So, if I want to understand knowledge, I have to stop

> identifying ways of knowing through dead individuals and focus on the

> flowing *field* of the collective scientists.

> Of course, that doesn't mean we ignore the writings of the dead people.

> But it means liberally slashing away anything that even smells obsolete.

> Regardless of what you do post, don't interpret *my* lack of response

> as disinterest or irritation, because it's not.

> On 3/5/20 6:14 AM, Prof David West wrote:

> > And the key to my being a pest — is anyone else curious about these things?

> --

> ☣ uǝlƃ

> ============================================================

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> at St. John's College to unsubscribe

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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Prof David West

Re: Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

Nick,

I would assert that "I know you" if I can pick you out of a crowd given a 1 second glimpse of 1/100 of your profile. We do this kind of thing all the time.

I could not tell someone else how to replicate my "know how" which is an application of my "know you."

The "believe it very strongly" doesn't work, at least for me, because I believe little or anything. "Data" coming into my "perceptual/consciousness field" whether it happens on coffee at FriAM, or LSD in the desert, is equally provisional and generally suspect — and it usually stays that way.

Which reminds me, you never did tell my why doubt is painful.

Yes, this knowledge stuff is pretty confusing, which is precisely why I find it so fascinating.

davew

On Wed, Mar 4, 2020, at 7:51 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> Dave,
>
> How about:
>
> "I am familiar with X and can give a description of X that others will
> recognize"?
>
> Hmm! That would seem to apply to unicorns. Do I know unicorns?
>
> Naaaah! I am going back to my pragmaticism. To know something is just
> to believe it very strongly. Truth is irrelevant. So, the fact that
> you know that unicorns exist tells me absolutely nothing -- per se --
> about the existence of unicorns.
>
> So, I stipulate that acid experiences can give people firm beliefs and
> therefore knowledge in the limited sense above.
>
> But what about "know-how". It would seem to suggest another meaning.
> We used to have a TV that would go funny. I discovered that I could
> fix it by slapping it upside of the head. I knew HOW to fix the tv.
>
> To know how to achieve a goal is to believe in a procedure for fixing
> something, to be able to convey that procedure to another person, AND
> THAT PROCEDURE WORKS AS CONVEYED. So you know me only if you can give
> a description of me that would cause a third person to pick me out of a
> crowd?
>
> That could apply to god or unicorns, right? And does not imply the
> existence of either.
>
> I dunno, dave. This "knowledge" stuff is pretty confusing.
>
> N
>
> Nicholas Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
> Clark University
> [hidden email]
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
> Sent: Wednesday, March 4, 2020 8:30 AM
> To: [hidden email]
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation
>
> Nick,
>
> We assert "knowledge" all the time.
>
> You "know" that is is Friday morning and you need to be on your way to
> St. John's.
> Person X "knows" that Trump is an A __h_le.
> Everyone "knows' that the sun is 93 million (approximately, depending
> on position in orbit) million miles away.
> I "know" the sky is blue today, for the first time in three weeks.
>
> The other person is not the only one who believes in auras. I have seen
> them (and not under the influence). I might have a very different
> explanation and even a different perception, but that does not mean we
> both "know" them to exist.
>
> The problem with working understandings is their tendency to become
> working definitions and simply exclude anything inconvenient from being
> "known."
>
> Can you think of a working understanding that would allow both of the
> following sentences to be discussed on equal footing?
>
> I know Nick.
>
> I know God.
>
> davew
>
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 3, 2020, at 5:28 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
> > Two things, Dave,
> >
> > Peirce had actually 4 ways of knowing. Stubbornness, Authority,
> > Reasonableness, Experience, which he tries to treat with equal
> > respect, but his heart is obviously with the last. (The Fixation of Belief).
> > You make me wonder about the relation tween Peirce and that Vedic text.
> >
> >
> >
> > But this begs the most fundamental question raised by your post. What
> > is knowledge, other than belief, and what is belief other than that
> > upon which we are prepared to act? There is one member of our group
> > who, very much in the spirit of William James's altered states, wants
> > to work on aura's He has a tentative belief in aura's. When through
> > experiment and analysis he renders that belief "firm", does he then
> > have knowledge. Already he believes in the possibility of aura's. We
> > know that this is the case because of the effort he is willing to
> > expend in their demonstration. Does he have knowledge of the
> > existence of auras? Does he already know that aura's exist?
> >
> > I think problems with the very idea of knowledge lie at the core of
> > this discussion, and we need some sort of working understanding of
> > what we mean by it, if we are to precede.
> >
> > Nicholas Thompson
> > Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology Clark University
> > [hidden email] https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
> >
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
> > Sent: Tuesday, March 3, 2020 1:48 AM
> > To: [hidden email]
> > Subject: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation
> >
> > Epistemology, loosely speaking, is the “theory of knowing.” What can we
> > know; how do we know we know it; the difference between knowing that,
> > knowing how, and knowing about; and, issues of the “truth” of what we
> > know and/or justifications for thinking we know anything?
> >
> > An associated issue concerns how we come to acquire knowledge. Two
> > means of acquisition are commonly proposed: a priori (independent of
> > experience) and a posteriori (by experience).
> >
> > A Vedic text, Tattirtiya Aranyaka (900-600 BCE), lists four sources of
> > knowledge, roughly translated as: tradition/scripture, perception,
> > authority, and reasoning/inference. Of these the fourth and second seem
> > to map onto a priori and a posteriori.
> >
> > Scholasticism — exemplars include Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus, and
> > Thomas Aquinas — was concerned with integrating three of the Vedic
> > sources of knowledge: tradition/scripture (Christian theology),
> > authority (Aristotle and Plato), and reasoning/inference.
> >
> > Modern epistemology (and Peirce) seems to be concerned with two of the
> > sources: tradition/scripture (peer reviewed science journals) and
> > reasoning/inference.
> >
> > Claims to "know" something, in a naive sense of know, like "I know that
> > I am," "I know that I am in love," "I had the most interesting
> > experience at FriAM just now," mystical visions, kinesthetic “muscle
> > memory,” chi imbalance, and, of course, hallucinogen induced altered
> > states of consciousness.
> >
> > Is it possible to construct a theory of knowledge that could extend to,
> > incorporate, a wider range of experience and especially mystical and
> > psychedelic experience? If it was possible, would it be of value? If
> > possible and of value, what parameters could be set to limn the
> > resulting philosophy?
> >
> > davew
> >
> > ============================================================
> > 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
> >
> >
> > ============================================================
> > 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
> >
>
> ============================================================
> 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/
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>
>
> ============================================================
> 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
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> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>

Prof David West

Re: Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2

Frank,

it could be either. For trolling I would have to assume a particular form of intent and. like glen or steve pointed out, making that kind of assumption with this group would never occur to me.

It could have been an instance of insight like Huxley alludes to. That happens all the time with kids, especially perceptive ones, who have not been ruined by formal education and who still believe they can create new words that have the precise meaning they are conveying, without realizing that us educated folks have channelized our brains and see error rather than nuanced precision, yet subtle, meaning.

davew

On Thu, Mar 5, 2020, at 6:30 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:

Dave,

Was my memory of my then 7 year-old daughter confusing "oxytocin" and "oxymoron" an instance of trolling or the kind of experience you were alluding to in

"He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pre3ssure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were — a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence."

?

On Thu, Mar 5, 2020 at 8:59 AM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:
It's not pesky for me in the slightest. I'm *very* interested. I haven't contributed because it's not clear I have anything to contribute.

Maybe I can start with a criticism, though. It's unclear to me why you (or anyone) would delicately flip through crumbling pages of philosophy when there are fresh and juicy results from (interventionist) methods right in front of us? The oxytocin post really *was* inspired by this thread. But because you guys are talking about dead white men like Peirce and James, it's unclear how the science relates.

My skepticism goes even deeper (beyond dead white men) to why one would think *anyone* (alive, dead, white or brown) might be able to *think* up an explanation for how knowledge grows. I would like to, but cannot, avoid the inference that this belief anyone (or any "school" of people) can think up explanations stems from a bias toward *individualism*. My snarky poke at "super intelligent god-people" in a post awhile back was (misguidedly) intended to express this same skepticism. I worry that poking around in old philosophy is simply an artifact of the mythology surrounding the "mind" and Great Men <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory>.

It seems to me like science works in *spite* of our biases to individualism. So, if I want to understand knowledge, I have to stop identifying ways of knowing through dead individuals and focus on the flowing *field* of the collective scientists.

Of course, that doesn't mean we ignore the writings of the dead people. But it means liberally slashing away anything that even smells obsolete.

Regardless of what you do post, don't interpret *my* lack of response as disinterest or irritation, because it's not.

On 3/5/20 6:14 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> And the key to my being a pest — is anyone else curious about these things?

--
☣ uǝlƃ

============================================================
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--
Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
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Prof David West

Re: Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

Steve,

I really hope that I have not advanced any of the three types of false dichotomy you note.

I cite "authority" or "dead white guys" only because I think they have expressed an idea in a manner far more eloquently than I am able to express it, and my intent is never to say "this is so" but to always say, "if we take this seriously, these questions seem to arise, and might answers to those questions lead to interesting explorations and conversations?"

I would plead guilty to holding "rigorous science" to the same deconstructionist analysis as "vigorously asserted religion." But I would expect that analysis to reveal that "Science" does indeed have its dogma and that interferes with its own professed value system and "Method;" while "Religion" is almost totally Dogma and that creates so much interference that what little "method" is lost in the noise.

Is there a way to sift and sort a plethora of "radical ideas" into those worth further consideration and those that can safely be dismissed out of hand. Pushing them through the sieve of "established science" is not sufficient.

davew

On Thu, Mar 5, 2020, at 8:01 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

Dave -
As for me, I'm not irritated with your keeping these discussions going.
I *am* irritated with the larger (cross-domain, national/global) discussion of "Truthiness" and the various bimodal fallacies introduced thereby.
Science and the Scientific Method, for example, have built into them a certain kind of contingency which is as absolute as Religion's *lack of contingency* (Absolute Truth). This leads Creationists/PseudoSciencers/AntiSciencers/FlatEarthers/Deniers to use the truism from science "It's just a theory" as a bludgeon to beat out a hole in the conversation to plop down their received-knowledge and/or made-up-shit into, as if it were made of the same stuff as what it is displacing.
Conversely (and I think this is where you are prone to harp), the Establishment (you pick your domain: Science, Religion, Politics, Society and subdomain:Physics/Chemistry/Biology, Ibrahamic/Vedic/Pagan/Animist, Red/White/Blue/Green/Purple, Authoritarian/Libertine/Egalitarian/Anarchic) vs radical/progressive views on the same subjects yields a whole other false-dichotomy.
Just because an established authority said it doesn't make it right.
Just because an established authority said it doesn't make it *wrong*.
Just because all scientific breakthroughs were presaged by "radical ideas" doesn't mean that all "radical ideas" represent incipient genius.
Yet I often hear these arguments (barely concealed?) in the larger discourse...
I will try to follow this up with some questions/observations about PostModernism and a reflection on the ways it has been "weaponized" by the unlikely? folks like Stephen Bannon?
- Steve
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Prof David West

Re: Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

In reply to this post by gepr

glen,

As a "trained" academic writer I am forced to "justify" every assertion with voluminous footnotes proving some"Eminent Person" had the idea first. It was not uncommon to find one of those whose work provided multiple "connection points" and therefore "unified" my work.

But that is all crap.

I stopped writing "papers" a decade or two ago, and now only write essays. I do cite Eminences, but only to the extent that I think they say, more eloquently than I, what I want to say. Of course, that means I often twist or interpret their words for my convenience.

davew

On Fri, Mar 6, 2020, at 3:34 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:

> Interesting. I'm skeptical that it *unifies* your work so much as it
> *abstracts* your work into a fuzzy/vague thing that seems like it
> unifies your work. That's the risk with unification and what I call
> Grand Unified Models (GUMs). To produce an actual unification, you have
> to show the details for how the general model specializes into the
> fully operational particular models. If you can't do that *completely*,
> with no hand-waving, then it's not really a unification but an
> abstraction.
>
> I'm not anti-abstraction. But I find it useful to contrast the two. The
> ideas you advocate here, which you claim are Peircian, seem
> *unapplicable* to any detailed work. I haven't read much of your
> writing and am unfamiliar with the work being unified. So, I could be
> laughably wrong, here. But one litmus test I use, if/when I start to
> obsess over any single/unitary thing (like you obsess over Peirce), is
> to do a what-if exercise and pretend that unitary thing doesn't exist.
> Try to remove all the tendrils of that thing from whatever I do/think.
> If, once I've done that, the things I do/think remain and don't crumble
> away, then maybe it's a necessary obsession.
>
> It seems to me like we could get to what you want absent Peirce. His
> work is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. And in some situations,
> obsessing too much over nice-to-haves slows the travel to the
> destination.
>
> On 3/5/20 7:39 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
> > I write and think about Peirce, for instance, because his work connects several disparate threads in my own work which seemed unrelated until I read him. He unifies me. Talking to you guys helps me digest all of that.
>
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
> ============================================================
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> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Prof David West

Re: Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

In reply to this post by gepr

glen,

Much of what passes for "scientific visualization" is what you assert, pretty pictures and little else. I have all four of Tufte's books on visualization and find maybe half dozen examples that I think are actually profound and meaningful. The Menard map of Napoleon's invasion and retreat from Moscow, is one.

But I am thinking visualization more in terms of how imagery can convey information, often more efficiently, than prose. All those "squiggles" that you see in math texts, or Kekule's "sticks and letters" visualization of chemical bonds, are what I would hope for from visualization.

If there is a useful connection between a "visualized experience," a dream of Ouroboros, and a practical result, benzene ring model, would there be any kind of value in a technique that could "parse" the visualization for useful/suggestive content?

davew

On Fri, Mar 6, 2020, at 3:45 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:

> I hate visualization in the same way I hate poetry. In my work, I'm
> constantly fighting the "kids" who want visualizations for everything.
> I tell them once they understand the data, then they're free to
> visualize it any way they see fit ... like your mom telling you to eat
> your vegetables before dessert.
>
> A visualization takes lots of stuff (often high-dimensional data, but
> sometimes just lots of garbage that bears no resemblance to any kind of
> well-formed *space*) and funges it into an artistic thing that appeals
> to our (human) senses. It's like poetry in that some yahoo, maybe in
> the middle of eating a sandwich in New York City, goes into a fugue
> state, has some "high-dimensional" experience, then works like hell to
> put it into words. Then some other yahoo on the other side of the
> world, while doing gods know what, reads those words and has a
> different experience. How similar are the 2 experiences? Who knows?
>
> Now, if you take identical twins, who grew up as siblings, in the same
> small town, went to the same schools, married similar people, etc. Then
> one of them writes a poem and the other one reads it, my guess is their
> experiences will be similar.
>
> If a biologist writes a poem and another biologist reads the poem, my
> guess is they will have similar experiences. Any other configuration
> and all bets are off.
>
> On 3/6/20 12:59 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> > Now, if I were a cellular biologist could I make use of this vision?
> >
> > Since I am not a cellular biologist and have no understanding of inter-cellular structures/dynamics/chemistry, nor any DNA knowledge, where did the imagery come from and why did it hang together so well?
> >
> > Was this experience just an amusing bit of entertainment" Or, is there an insight of some sort lurking there?
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
> ============================================================
> 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
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>

Prof David West

Re: Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

Steve,

Your experiences suggest that a visualization can prompt insightful thinking and that is very cool. I also note the problems and issues you raise and do not discount them.

I have no reason to believe that my "conception vision" gave me any insights, fundamental or extravagant. I lack the background in cellular biology to "interpret" usefully.

What I am curious about are the discrepancies in what I "saw" and animations I have seen that supposedly demonstrate what is happening when two cells combine to form a third - ala conception. If I was able to transform my vision into a movie, show it to a cellular biologist, would they see the same discrepancies? Would they obtain an insights that could lead to a better understanding and perhaps novel approaches to genetic engineering?

The fact that the vision "held together" in some way, is simply a criteria I would use to sort visions that I would be willing to share with someone in an attempt to be helpful, and those that I retain for self-amusement.

The latter reminds me of Bennie Stokes in John Brunner's, Stand on Zanzibar, who is constantly watching the news feeds and muttering to himself, "Christ what an imagination I have."

davew

On Fri, Mar 6, 2020, at 4:59 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

> Dave -
>
> > 1) I am fascinated by the field of scientific visualization, using imagery to present complex data sets. Recently I "observed" the precise moment of sperm-egg fertilization. A whole lot was going on inside the egg cell boundary immediately upon contact (not penetration) with the sperm. The visualization was of thousands (millions?) of discrete inter-cellular elements breaking free from existing structures, like DNA strands, proteins, molecules and moving about independently. I could see several "fields" that were a kind of "probability field." These fields constrained both the movement of the various elements and, most importantly, what structures would emerge from their recombination. "Watching" the DNA strand 'dissolve" and "reform" was particularly interesting because it was totally unlike the "unzip into two strands, the zip-up a strand-half from each donor" visualization I have seen presented in animations explaining the process. Instead I saw all kinds of "clumps" form and merge into larger/longer "clumps" then engage in an interesting hula/belly/undulation dance to rearrange the structure into a final form. All of this "guided" by the very visible "probability fields;" more than one and color coded.
> >
> > Now, if I were a cellular biologist could I make use of this vision?
> >
> > Since I am not a cellular biologist and have no understanding of inter-cellular structures/dynamics/chemistry, nor any DNA knowledge, where did the imagery come from and why did it hang together so well?
> >
> > Was this experience just an amusing bit of entertainment" Or, is there an insight of some sort lurking there?
>
> I have some complementary experiences.   In a lifetime of trying to
> facilitate insight to scientists and engineers by building tools to help
> them visualize (perceptualize) their models of physical (and sometimes
> highly abstract) phenomena I have seen "a thing or two".   What I have
> seen more than anything is those researchers/practitioners increase the
> scope of their intuition when facilitated by
> computer-mediated-representation of their data.
>
> I have also seen naive false-positives generated in the process. In
> fact, the most common experience I have had is when I might present a
> scientist with a novel (to them) visualization, they see anomalies from
> what they *expected to see* and they usually question *my*
> systems/software.   If it is a mature system/tool I am using, it usually
> turns out that these anomalies are exposing errors/bugs in *their*
> systems (data collection, grooming, modeling). In the most rare (but
> most useful?) case, it turns out to expose errors in their assumptions,
> in the models themselves (not just the expression of them).   In the
> very best case, the scientists came to me with an intuition, a
> hypothesis and a rough model who needed to have those models coupled
> back to there sensoria so that they could reinforce their own intuition
> and/or invite colleagues into their hypothesis LONG before they had
> everything nailed down.
>
> On the flip side, another common experience was "false positives".
> Often, simply applying mostly unmotivated interpolations to their
> discretized data, I "accidentally" added (excess?) meaning to their
> models.   Few sophisticated scientists make those mistakes, but
> sometimes "wishful thinking" trumps "thoughtful awareness".
>
> On the topic of "visualizing whirled peas"...   I have a lot of lucid
> dreams, many of them about physical systems.   I reported here (and you
> gave me a great Science Fiction reference) having months worth of lucid
> dreams involving orbital mechanics and orbital mining/salvage.   I never
> really imagined that these dreams were going to help me learn anything
> revolutionary about orbital mechanics, at the very best, they either
> provided me with loads of entertainment or perhaps *incremental*
> improvements to *my* understanding of established orbital mechanics that
> I have learned "the hard way" (studying the math).
>
> Do you have any reason for believing that your visions of cellular
> fusion/fission are giving you fundamental or extravagant insights (as
> opposed to incremental refinements) than that "they hold together well"?
>
> - Steve
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> 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
>

Prof David West

Re: Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

Oooh fun ...

I also stipulate that hitting an alarm clock with a sledge hammer MIGHT reveal robust and enduring information about alarm clocks.

Let me twist this example a bit to make what I think might be a valid way to assert a "benefit" of drug-epistemology over sledge-hammer.

I must start a bit afield with a quote from Plato and a Taoist koan:

[First,] perceiving and bringing together under one Idea the scattered particulars, so that one makes clear the thing which he wishes to do... [Second,] the separation of the Idea into classes, by dividing it where the natural joints are, and not trying to break any part, after the manner of as a bad carver... I love these processes of division and bringing together, and if I think any other man is able to see things that can naturally be collected into one and divided into many, him I will follow as if he were as a god.

- Plato

"A Taoist butcher used but one knife his entire career without the need to sharpen it. At his retirement party the Emperor asked him about this extraordinary feat, The butcher stated, "Oh, I simply cut where the meat wasn't."

Now this leads to a problem of decomposition - breaking up a large and complex problem into tractable sub-problems. Software engineering uses a sledgehammer epistemology of data structures and algorithms to accomplish this decomposition with results that are horrific. In contrast, a "vision" induced, daydreaming about biological cells and cellular organisms led to the insight that cells are differentiated from each other by what they do, not what they are. So software modularity might be based on behavior. Far superior results in myriad ways.

If we take C.D.Broad and Huxley seriously, mescaline reveals "more of reality" than typically available to our conscious minds. I would assert and be willing to defend that at least that sort of drug-epistemology could enhance our ability to actually see "where the meat wasn't" and therefore enhance our ability to decompose large complicated systems (maybe even complex systems) in tractable sub-problems.

* * * * * * *

My vision was not based on a stain, nor was it of cells dividing - it was an inter-cellular dissolving and recombining of inter-cellular elements, proteins etc., into other inter-cellular elements such that when the cell did eventually divide its internals were radically different. What I "saw" would more likely inform a genetic engineer than someone investigating cell division stuff.

* * * * * *

Sorry for making you ill, but it is your interpretation that is at fault.

You might remember the early days of Cinerama movies. They would start the movie showing a scene, like flying through the Grand canyon, then suddenly expand the displayed rectangle, the size of a traditional movie screen, into the full height and width of the Cinerama screen.

It was still just a movie, but the experience of the movie was enhanced? with sensations of vertigo, movement, detail, etc.

What Broad and Huxley suggest is that experience is "filtered" by the organism and that filtering reduces experience to the dimensions of a pre-Cinerama movie. Huxley then asserts that mescaline turns experience into Experience.

We are all experience monists here, but some of us are making the claim that there can be, at minimum, quantitative differences among experiences (something akin to the increase in pixel density and 8 versus 64 bit representation of the color of each pixel) and, at least the possibility of qualitative differences, e.g. the vertigo of Cinerama.

And, those differences are attainable via various means. Not just drugs.

So my assertion of "Apollonian-er than thou" is a claim that I experience "life" in "Cinerama" and you in "cinema multiplex standard screen."

davew

On Sat, Mar 7, 2020, at 5:53 AM, [hidden email] wrote:

See Larding below.

By the way: my mail interface is taken to tucking some of my mail into a folder called "important" where, of course, I cannot see it. So, if I appear to go missing, don't hesitate to write me an unimportant message telling me that there are important ones awaiting me.

Of course I have n o I d e a what distinguishes an important message from an unimportant one.

As I said, see below: Oh, and dave, what I wrote below is TESTY. I don’t realty feel testy, I don’t really feel qualified to be testy. I think the rhetoric just got away with me. It has happened before and you have promised it doesn’t’ bother you, so I am counting on your grace-under-fire again.

Your friend ,
Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Friday, March 6, 2020 2:00 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

thanks Glen,

I totally agree with you about dead white guys. [Except I have had face-to-face conversations with a couple of them :) ] I reference them not as a source of answers but in an attempt to find some kind of conceptual bridge for a conversation. But that might be totally counterproductive as it tends to introduce a propensity for forking the conversation.

Engaging with contemporary scientists is hard when it comes to drug-induced data sets / experiences. I hope to make some connections with contemporary researchers at the ICPR conference I mentioned but the focus there seems to be psycho-medical and related to the oxytocin article you posted, and my direct interests tend to diverge from that.

Perhaps something more direct might be useful. Two things, the second is mostly to tease Nick.

1) I am fascinated by the field of scientific visualization, using imagery to present complex data sets. Recently I "observed" the precise moment of sperm-egg fertilization. A whole lot was going on inside the egg cell boundary immediately upon contact (not penetration) with the sperm. The visualization was of thousands (millions?) of discrete inter-cellular elements breaking free from existing structures, like DNA strands, proteins, molecules and moving about independently. I could see several "fields" that were a kind of "probability field." These fields constrained both the movement of the various elements and, most importantly, what structures would emerge from their recombination. "Watching" the DNA strand 'dissolve" and "reform" was particularly interesting because it was totally unlike the "unzip into two strands, the zip-up a strand-half from each donor" visualization I have seen presented in animations explaining the process. Instead I saw all kinds of "clumps" form and merge into larger/longer "clumps" then engage in an interesting hula/belly/undulation dance to rearrange the structure into a final form. All of this "guided" by the very visible "probability fields;" more than one and color coded.

Now, if I were a cellular biologist could I make use of this vision?
[NST===>] I love this example. Every stain produces a new image and some stains are more revealing than others, in that the models they facilitate are more robust and enduring in their predictions. I stipulate that. I also stipulate that hitting an alarm clock with a sledge hammer MIGHT reveal robust and enduring information about alarm clocks. I just don’t think it’s likely. And there is the possibility that the clock wont be very accurate thereafter. That is the whole of my argument against drug -epistemology. So if you are NOT arguing that drug-epistemology is somehow superior to sledge-hammer epistemology, then we agree and we don’t have to argue any more.

Since I am not a cellular biologist and have no understanding of inter-cellular structures/dynamics/chemistry, nor any DNA knowledge, where did the imagery come from and why did it hang together so well?

Was this experience just an amusing bit of entertainment" Or, is there an insight of some sort lurking there?
[NST===>] I like the metaphor with stains. But just remember, if my memory serves me correctly, you don’t see jack shit when cells divide without the right stain. All such observations are of the Peircean type/; “If I do this, then I will get that.”

2) En garde Nick.
[NST===>] je me garde

Quoting Huxley, paraphrasing C.D. Broad — "The function of the brain, nervous system, and sense organs is, in the main, eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. This is Mind-At-Large.
[NST===>] Dave, even without my characteristic ill ease with dispositions (like gravity, for instance), this last sentence gives me the heebs. And the Heaves. It is either a definition of memory (=all that I experience as past at a moment) or it is non-sense. Or some kind of balmy article of faith.

But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive.
[NST===>] No. No animal has ever survived. No animal has ever tried to survive. No species has ever tried to survive. This is all foolishness pressed on us by Spencer. Even Darwin was leery of it. (and no I cannot cite text)
To make biological survival possible, Mind-At-Large, has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet."
[NST===>] I suppose one can make sense of this sort of talk by postulating a world outside of experience, but unless you postulate that this world beyond experience can in principle never affect experience, you end up with a contradiction because anything that effects experience in any way, however indirect, is, by definition, experienced.

Two personal experiences: 1) I tend to not notice when my glasses get cloudy from accumulation of dust and moisture until it is quite bad. I clean my glasses, put them on, and am amazed at how clear and detailed my perceptions are post-cleaning. A very dramatic difference.
[NST===>] Well of course. Cleaning glasses is a method that increases the predictive potential of your current visual experiences. If your argument is only that there are experiences I have not had which will surprise me if I have them, I agree, so we don’t have to argue about that any more, right?
And, 2) the proper dose of a hallucinogen (and/or the right kind of meditation) and my perceptions of the world around me, using all my senses, are amazingly clear and detailed in the same way as my visual perception was changed by cleaning grime from my glasses.
[NST===>] The innate school marm gives us little jolts of pleasure from time to time, usually in response to activities that please her. One of those jolts is a “sense of clarity.” If you break into her storeroom and steal her clarity candies, you will get the clarity-pleasure even while seeing muddily.

Now I grant you it’s possible you will see something more clearly. See above the sledgehammered clock argument.

I would contend that the drug (meditation) removed the muddying filter of my brain/nervous system/ sense organs just as the isopropyl alcohol removed the muddying filter of moisture-dust on my glasses.

I see the world as it "really" is.[NST===>]Well, that remains to be seen, right. It might be that the dust filters the light in such a way as to reveal structures that you cannot see through the cleaned glass. The proof is in the pudding … i.e., the proving out.

Now the tease: I would contend that I am more Apollonian than thou because I value Life, and more of Life, more directly, than you do. It is not varied experience I seek, but a direct, clear, complete, apprehension and appreciation of Life Itself.
[NST===>] Similarly, let it be the case that I had a dozen clocks and you told me you had hit them all with a sledge hammer; now, if you told me you had lied, and gave me back the 12^th clock in perfect working order, I would value it a lot more for having thought I had lost it.

davew

On Thu, Mar 5, 2020, at 4:58 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> It's not pesky for me in the slightest. I'm *very* interested. I
> haven't contributed because it's not clear I have anything to
> contribute.
>
> Maybe I can start with a criticism, though. It's unclear to me why you
> (or anyone) would delicately flip through crumbling pages of
> philosophy when there are fresh and juicy results from
> (interventionist) methods right in front of us? The oxytocin post
> really *was* inspired by this thread. But because you guys are talking
> about dead white men like Peirce and James, it's unclear how the science relates.
>
> My skepticism goes even deeper (beyond dead white men) to why one
> would think *anyone* (alive, dead, white or brown) might be able to
> *think* up an explanation for how knowledge grows. I would like to,
> but cannot, avoid the inference that this belief anyone (or any
> "school" of people) can think up explanations stems from a bias toward
> *individualism*. My snarky poke at "super intelligent god-people" in a
> post awhile back was
> (misguidedly) intended to express this same skepticism. I worry that
> poking around in old philosophy is simply an artifact of the mythology
> surrounding the "mind" and Great Men
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory>.
>
> It seems to me like science works in *spite* of our biases to
> individualism. So, if I want to understand knowledge, I have to stop
> identifying ways of knowing through dead individuals and focus on the
> flowing *field* of the collective scientists.
>
> Of course, that doesn't mean we ignore the writings of the dead people.
> But it means liberally slashing away anything that even smells obsolete.
>
> Regardless of what you do post, don't interpret *my* lack of response
> as disinterest or irritation, because it's not.
>
> On 3/5/20 6:14 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> > And the key to my being a pest — is anyone else curious about these things?
>
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
> ============================================================
> 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
>

============================================================
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
============================================================
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/
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Prof David West

Re: Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

Oh, BTW, I didn't notice any testiness.

On Sat, Mar 7, 2020, at 5:53 AM, [hidden email] wrote:

See Larding below.

By the way: my mail interface is taken to tucking some of my mail into a folder called "important" where, of course, I cannot see it. So, if I appear to go missing, don't hesitate to write me an unimportant message telling me that there are important ones awaiting me.

Of course I have n o I d e a what distinguishes an important message from an unimportant one.

As I said, see below: Oh, and dave, what I wrote below is TESTY. I don’t realty feel testy, I don’t really feel qualified to be testy. I think the rhetoric just got away with me. It has happened before and you have promised it doesn’t’ bother you, so I am counting on your grace-under-fire again.

Your friend ,
Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Friday, March 6, 2020 2:00 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

thanks Glen,

I totally agree with you about dead white guys. [Except I have had face-to-face conversations with a couple of them :) ] I reference them not as a source of answers but in an attempt to find some kind of conceptual bridge for a conversation. But that might be totally counterproductive as it tends to introduce a propensity for forking the conversation.

Engaging with contemporary scientists is hard when it comes to drug-induced data sets / experiences. I hope to make some connections with contemporary researchers at the ICPR conference I mentioned but the focus there seems to be psycho-medical and related to the oxytocin article you posted, and my direct interests tend to diverge from that.

Perhaps something more direct might be useful. Two things, the second is mostly to tease Nick.

1) I am fascinated by the field of scientific visualization, using imagery to present complex data sets. Recently I "observed" the precise moment of sperm-egg fertilization. A whole lot was going on inside the egg cell boundary immediately upon contact (not penetration) with the sperm. The visualization was of thousands (millions?) of discrete inter-cellular elements breaking free from existing structures, like DNA strands, proteins, molecules and moving about independently. I could see several "fields" that were a kind of "probability field." These fields constrained both the movement of the various elements and, most importantly, what structures would emerge from their recombination. "Watching" the DNA strand 'dissolve" and "reform" was particularly interesting because it was totally unlike the "unzip into two strands, the zip-up a strand-half from each donor" visualization I have seen presented in animations explaining the process. Instead I saw all kinds of "clumps" form and merge into larger/longer "clumps" then engage in an interesting hula/belly/undulation dance to rearrange the structure into a final form. All of this "guided" by the very visible "probability fields;" more than one and color coded.

Now, if I were a cellular biologist could I make use of this vision?
[NST===>] I love this example. Every stain produces a new image and some stains are more revealing than others, in that the models they facilitate are more robust and enduring in their predictions. I stipulate that. I also stipulate that hitting an alarm clock with a sledge hammer MIGHT reveal robust and enduring information about alarm clocks. I just don’t think it’s likely. And there is the possibility that the clock wont be very accurate thereafter. That is the whole of my argument against drug -epistemology. So if you are NOT arguing that drug-epistemology is somehow superior to sledge-hammer epistemology, then we agree and we don’t have to argue any more.

Since I am not a cellular biologist and have no understanding of inter-cellular structures/dynamics/chemistry, nor any DNA knowledge, where did the imagery come from and why did it hang together so well?

Was this experience just an amusing bit of entertainment" Or, is there an insight of some sort lurking there?
[NST===>] I like the metaphor with stains. But just remember, if my memory serves me correctly, you don’t see jack shit when cells divide without the right stain. All such observations are of the Peircean type/; “If I do this, then I will get that.”

2) En garde Nick.
[NST===>] je me garde

Quoting Huxley, paraphrasing C.D. Broad — "The function of the brain, nervous system, and sense organs is, in the main, eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. This is Mind-At-Large.
[NST===>] Dave, even without my characteristic ill ease with dispositions (like gravity, for instance), this last sentence gives me the heebs. And the Heaves. It is either a definition of memory (=all that I experience as past at a moment) or it is non-sense. Or some kind of balmy article of faith.

But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive.
[NST===>] No. No animal has ever survived. No animal has ever tried to survive. No species has ever tried to survive. This is all foolishness pressed on us by Spencer. Even Darwin was leery of it. (and no I cannot cite text)
To make biological survival possible, Mind-At-Large, has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet."
[NST===>] I suppose one can make sense of this sort of talk by postulating a world outside of experience, but unless you postulate that this world beyond experience can in principle never affect experience, you end up with a contradiction because anything that effects experience in any way, however indirect, is, by definition, experienced.

Two personal experiences: 1) I tend to not notice when my glasses get cloudy from accumulation of dust and moisture until it is quite bad. I clean my glasses, put them on, and am amazed at how clear and detailed my perceptions are post-cleaning. A very dramatic difference.
[NST===>] Well of course. Cleaning glasses is a method that increases the predictive potential of your current visual experiences. If your argument is only that there are experiences I have not had which will surprise me if I have them, I agree, so we don’t have to argue about that any more, right?
And, 2) the proper dose of a hallucinogen (and/or the right kind of meditation) and my perceptions of the world around me, using all my senses, are amazingly clear and detailed in the same way as my visual perception was changed by cleaning grime from my glasses.
[NST===>] The innate school marm gives us little jolts of pleasure from time to time, usually in response to activities that please her. One of those jolts is a “sense of clarity.” If you break into her storeroom and steal her clarity candies, you will get the clarity-pleasure even while seeing muddily.

Now I grant you it’s possible you will see something more clearly. See above the sledgehammered clock argument.

I would contend that the drug (meditation) removed the muddying filter of my brain/nervous system/ sense organs just as the isopropyl alcohol removed the muddying filter of moisture-dust on my glasses.

I see the world as it "really" is.[NST===>]Well, that remains to be seen, right. It might be that the dust filters the light in such a way as to reveal structures that you cannot see through the cleaned glass. The proof is in the pudding … i.e., the proving out.

Now the tease: I would contend that I am more Apollonian than thou because I value Life, and more of Life, more directly, than you do. It is not varied experience I seek, but a direct, clear, complete, apprehension and appreciation of Life Itself.
[NST===>] Similarly, let it be the case that I had a dozen clocks and you told me you had hit them all with a sledge hammer; now, if you told me you had lied, and gave me back the 12^th clock in perfect working order, I would value it a lot more for having thought I had lost it.

davew

On Thu, Mar 5, 2020, at 4:58 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> It's not pesky for me in the slightest. I'm *very* interested. I
> haven't contributed because it's not clear I have anything to
> contribute.
>
> Maybe I can start with a criticism, though. It's unclear to me why you
> (or anyone) would delicately flip through crumbling pages of
> philosophy when there are fresh and juicy results from
> (interventionist) methods right in front of us? The oxytocin post
> really *was* inspired by this thread. But because you guys are talking
> about dead white men like Peirce and James, it's unclear how the science relates.
>
> My skepticism goes even deeper (beyond dead white men) to why one
> would think *anyone* (alive, dead, white or brown) might be able to
> *think* up an explanation for how knowledge grows. I would like to,
> but cannot, avoid the inference that this belief anyone (or any
> "school" of people) can think up explanations stems from a bias toward
> *individualism*. My snarky poke at "super intelligent god-people" in a
> post awhile back was
> (misguidedly) intended to express this same skepticism. I worry that
> poking around in old philosophy is simply an artifact of the mythology
> surrounding the "mind" and Great Men
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory>.
>
> It seems to me like science works in *spite* of our biases to
> individualism. So, if I want to understand knowledge, I have to stop
> identifying ways of knowing through dead individuals and focus on the
> flowing *field* of the collective scientists.
>
> Of course, that doesn't mean we ignore the writings of the dead people.
> But it means liberally slashing away anything that even smells obsolete.
>
> Regardless of what you do post, don't interpret *my* lack of response
> as disinterest or irritation, because it's not.
>
> On 3/5/20 6:14 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> > And the key to my being a pest — is anyone else curious about these things?
>
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe
> at St. John's College to unsubscribe
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> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>

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thompnickson2

Re: Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

In reply to this post by Prof David West

Dave,

What you write below is awfully Peircean, no?

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, March 7, 2020 2:15 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

Steve,

I really hope that I have not advanced any of the three types of false dichotomy you note.

davew

On Thu, Mar 5, 2020, at 8:01 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

Dave -
As for me, I'm not irritated with your keeping these discussions going.
I *am* irritated with the larger (cross-domain, national/global) discussion of "Truthiness" and the various bimodal fallacies introduced thereby.
Science and the Scientific Method, for example, have built into them a certain kind of contingency which is as absolute as Religion's *lack of contingency* (Absolute Truth). This leads Creationists/PseudoSciencers/AntiSciencers/FlatEarthers/Deniers to use the truism from science "It's just a theory" as a bludgeon to beat out a hole in the conversation to plop down their received-knowledge and/or made-up-shit into, as if it were made of the same stuff as what it is displacing.
Conversely (and I think this is where you are prone to harp), the Establishment (you pick your domain: Science, Religion, Politics, Society and subdomain:Physics/Chemistry/Biology, Ibrahamic/Vedic/Pagan/Animist, Red/White/Blue/Green/Purple, Authoritarian/Libertine/Egalitarian/Anarchic) vs radical/progressive views on the same subjects yields a whole other false-dichotomy.
Just because an established authority said it doesn't make it right.
Just because an established authority said it doesn't make it *wrong*.
Just because all scientific breakthroughs were presaged by "radical ideas" doesn't mean that all "radical ideas" represent incipient genius.
Yet I often hear these arguments (barely concealed?) in the larger discourse...
I will try to follow this up with some questions/observations about PostModernism and a reflection on the ways it has been "weaponized" by the unlikely? folks like Stephen Bannon?
- Steve
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thompnickson2

Re: Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

In reply to this post by Prof David West

Larding below

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, March 7, 2020 2:23 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

glen,

As a "trained" academic writer I am forced to "justify" every assertion with voluminous footnotes proving some"Eminent Person" had the idea first.

[NST===>] I would call this, “Tracing my ideas back to their foundations.” It’s like finding af chest of ancestral letters in your attic and loosing your self while reading them amongst the dust fuzzies, the cobwebs, and the dad wasps. Also, to be brutally honest, I really love it when some body finds something I wrote a quarter of a century ago and relates it to something they are currently doing. It melts my metaphorical heart.

It was not uncommon to find one of those whose work provided multiple "connection points" and therefore "unified" my work.

But that is all crap.

[NST===>] Naw. Come on Dave. Now you are capitulating to ANTI-academia, which occasionally is alive and well on this list. The experiences of unity one gets from reading long forgotten texts has no LESS potential for illumination than trips to acid-land. So, it’s not CRAP.

I stopped writing "papers" a decade or two ago, and now only write essays. I do cite Eminences, but only to the extent that I think they say, more eloquently than I, what I want to say. Of course, that means I often twist or interpret their words for my convenience.[NST===>] Yeah. I do this too. But I’m not sure I am proud of it. My son is a Wittgenstein scholar and he rightly shudders when I quote W. without fully understanding what was meant by the words in the context in which they actually appeared. Never mind their place in the biography of W. I don’t think we sloppy scholars ought to be put to death, but I do think we should be a bit humble about what we do.

davew

On Fri, Mar 6, 2020, at 3:34 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:

> Interesting. I'm skeptical that it *unifies* your work so much as it

> *abstracts* your work into a fuzzy/vague thing that seems like it

> unifies your work. That's the risk with unification and what I call

> Grand Unified Models (GUMs). To produce an actual unification, you

> have to show the details for how the general model specializes into

> the fully operational particular models. If you can't do that

> *completely*, with no hand-waving, then it's not really a unification

> but an abstraction.

> I'm not anti-abstraction. But I find it useful to contrast the two.

> The ideas you advocate here, which you claim are Peircian, seem

> *unapplicable* to any detailed work. I haven't read much of your

> writing and am unfamiliar with the work being unified. So, I could be

> laughably wrong, here. But one litmus test I use, if/when I start to

> obsess over any single/unitary thing (like you obsess over Peirce), is

> to do a what-if exercise and pretend that unitary thing doesn't exist.

> Try to remove all the tendrils of that thing from whatever I do/think.

> If, once I've done that, the things I do/think remain and don't

> crumble away, then maybe it's a necessary obsession.

> It seems to me like we could get to what you want absent Peirce. His

> work is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. And in some situations,

> obsessing too much over nice-to-haves slows the travel to the

> destination.

> On 3/5/20 7:39 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> > I write and think about Peirce, for instance, because his work connects several disparate threads in my own work which seemed unrelated until I read him. He unifies me. Talking to you guys helps me digest all of that.

> --

> ☣ uǝlƃ

> ============================================================

> 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

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thompnickson2

Re: Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

In reply to this post by Prof David West

Ok, so we need to get our metaphor’s straight, here.

The sledge hammer is meant to be an experience-randomizer. To the extent that sledge hammers do predictable things to clocks, it fails for me as a metaphor. Once my Sledge Hammer has struck my clock, there should be no relation between the positions of the pieces of the clock before the blow and after. But even granting its limitations, I don’t think my Sledge Hammer is an appropriate metaphor for your complaint about ordinary software. I think you are talking about a bull-dozer. Like a Sledge Hammer, a Bulldozer does not care for the structure of whatever it encounters; but unlike my Sledge Hammer, it imposes a highly predictable order of its own. Neither the Sledge Hammer nor the Bulldozer are like the Taoist Butcher, who clearly cares for .the structure of what he cuts.

So, what we are arguing about can be construed as an argument about which metaphor is most aptly applied to taking drugs. I am arguing for the Sledge Hammer. Sledge Hammers have their uses. I have always imagined that electroshock therapy is a kind of sledge hammer, although perhaps it is more like a bulldozer, returning the brain to factory settings. Bulldozers are very useful in that they create a structure on which other things can easily be built. You might be arguing that drug-taking is a bull dozer. Or you might be arguing that drug-taking is more like the Taoist butcher, in that it reveals the structure of what is already there. It is like a microscopist’s stain. But to make that metaphor work, you have to grant to the drug, or to the person who administers it, the wisdom and experience of the butcher who has become so familiar with meat that he can, without thinking about it, see where the meat isn’t. Now you are in Castenada territory, the territory of faith.

Thanks, as always, Dave, for your generosity of spirit. By the way, some keen-eyed observer may detect something seriously awry in my metaphorical proceeding above. Presumably we both agree that the brain is a device that tells us something about something else, not about itself. Dubious as I am that a sledge hammer can tell us anything about the structure of clocks, I am even MORE dubious that it can tell us anything about the structure of time. The Taoist Butcher metaphor seems to work in a different way. To make it consistent, we would have to have the Taoist Butcher dissect HIMSELF in order to discover the structure of meat.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, March 7, 2020 3:37 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

Oooh fun ...

I also stipulate that hitting an alarm clock with a sledge hammer MIGHT reveal robust and enduring information about alarm clocks.

Let me twist this example a bit to make what I think might be a valid way to assert a "benefit" of drug-epistemology over sledge-hammer.

I must start a bit afield with a quote from Plato and a Taoist koan:

- Plato

* * * * * * *

* * * * * *

Sorry for making you ill, but it is your interpretation that is at fault.

It was still just a movie, but the experience of the movie was enhanced? with sensations of vertigo, movement, detail, etc.

And, those differences are attainable via various means. Not just drugs.

So my assertion of "Apollonian-er than thou" is a claim that I experience "life" in "Cinerama" and you in "cinema multiplex standard screen."

davew

On Sat, Mar 7, 2020, at 5:53 AM, [hidden email] wrote:

See Larding below.

By the way: my mail interface is taken to tucking some of my mail into a folder called "important" where, of course, I cannot see it. So, if I appear to go missing, don't hesitate to write me an unimportant message telling me that there are important ones awaiting me.

Of course I have n o I d e a what distinguishes an important message from an unimportant one.

As I said, see below: Oh, and dave, what I wrote below is TESTY. I don’t realty feel testy, I don’t really feel qualified to be testy. I think the rhetoric just got away with me. It has happened before and you have promised it doesn’t’ bother you, so I am counting on your grace-under-fire again.

Your friend ,
Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Friday, March 6, 2020 2:00 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

thanks Glen,

I totally agree with you about dead white guys. [Except I have had face-to-face conversations with a couple of them :) ] I reference them not as a source of answers but in an attempt to find some kind of conceptual bridge for a conversation. But that might be totally counterproductive as it tends to introduce a propensity for forking the conversation.

Engaging with contemporary scientists is hard when it comes to drug-induced data sets / experiences. I hope to make some connections with contemporary researchers at the ICPR conference I mentioned but the focus there seems to be psycho-medical and related to the oxytocin article you posted, and my direct interests tend to diverge from that.

Perhaps something more direct might be useful. Two things, the second is mostly to tease Nick.

1) I am fascinated by the field of scientific visualization, using imagery to present complex data sets. Recently I "observed" the precise moment of sperm-egg fertilization. A whole lot was going on inside the egg cell boundary immediately upon contact (not penetration) with the sperm. The visualization was of thousands (millions?) of discrete inter-cellular elements breaking free from existing structures, like DNA strands, proteins, molecules and moving about independently. I could see several "fields" that were a kind of "probability field." These fields constrained both the movement of the various elements and, most importantly, what structures would emerge from their recombination. "Watching" the DNA strand 'dissolve" and "reform" was particularly interesting because it was totally unlike the "unzip into two strands, the zip-up a strand-half from each donor" visualization I have seen presented in animations explaining the process. Instead I saw all kinds of "clumps" form and merge into larger/longer "clumps" then engage in an interesting hula/belly/undulation dance to rearrange the structure into a final form. All of this "guided" by the very visible "probability fields;" more than one and color coded.

Now, if I were a cellular biologist could I make use of this vision?
[NST===>] I love this example. Every stain produces a new image and some stains are more revealing than others, in that the models they facilitate are more robust and enduring in their predictions. I stipulate that. I also stipulate that hitting an alarm clock with a sledge hammer MIGHT reveal robust and enduring information about alarm clocks. I just don’t think it’s likely. And there is the possibility that the clock wont be very accurate thereafter. That is the whole of my argument against drug -epistemology. So if you are NOT arguing that drug-epistemology is somehow superior to sledge-hammer epistemology, then we agree and we don’t have to argue any more.

Since I am not a cellular biologist and have no understanding of inter-cellular structures/dynamics/chemistry, nor any DNA knowledge, where did the imagery come from and why did it hang together so well?

Was this experience just an amusing bit of entertainment" Or, is there an insight of some sort lurking there?
[NST===>] I like the metaphor with stains. But just remember, if my memory serves me correctly, you don’t see jack shit when cells divide without the right stain. All such observations are of the Peircean type/; “If I do this, then I will get that.”

2) En garde Nick.
[NST===>] je me garde

Quoting Huxley, paraphrasing C.D. Broad — "The function of the brain, nervous system, and sense organs is, in the main, eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. This is Mind-At-Large.
[NST===>] Dave, even without my characteristic ill ease with dispositions (like gravity, for instance), this last sentence gives me the heebs. And the Heaves. It is either a definition of memory (=all that I experience as past at a moment) or it is non-sense. Or some kind of balmy article of faith.

But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive.
[NST===>] No. No animal has ever survived. No animal has ever tried to survive. No species has ever tried to survive. This is all foolishness pressed on us by Spencer. Even Darwin was leery of it. (and no I cannot cite text)
To make biological survival possible, Mind-At-Large, has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet."
[NST===>] I suppose one can make sense of this sort of talk by postulating a world outside of experience, but unless you postulate that this world beyond experience can in principle never affect experience, you end up with a contradiction because anything that effects experience in any way, however indirect, is, by definition, experienced.

Two personal experiences: 1) I tend to not notice when my glasses get cloudy from accumulation of dust and moisture until it is quite bad. I clean my glasses, put them on, and am amazed at how clear and detailed my perceptions are post-cleaning. A very dramatic difference.
[NST===>] Well of course. Cleaning glasses is a method that increases the predictive potential of your current visual experiences. If your argument is only that there are experiences I have not had which will surprise me if I have them, I agree, so we don’t have to argue about that any more, right?
And, 2) the proper dose of a hallucinogen (and/or the right kind of meditation) and my perceptions of the world around me, using all my senses, are amazingly clear and detailed in the same way as my visual perception was changed by cleaning grime from my glasses.
[NST===>] The innate school marm gives us little jolts of pleasure from time to time, usually in response to activities that please her. One of those jolts is a “sense of clarity.” If you break into her storeroom and steal her clarity candies, you will get the clarity-pleasure even while seeing muddily.

Now I grant you it’s possible you will see something more clearly. See above the sledgehammered clock argument.

I would contend that the drug (meditation) removed the muddying filter of my brain/nervous system/ sense organs just as the isopropyl alcohol removed the muddying filter of moisture-dust on my glasses.

I see the world as it "really" is.[NST===>]Well, that remains to be seen, right. It might be that the dust filters the light in such a way as to reveal structures that you cannot see through the cleaned glass. The proof is in the pudding … i.e., the proving out.

Now the tease: I would contend that I am more Apollonian than thou because I value Life, and more of Life, more directly, than you do. It is not varied experience I seek, but a direct, clear, complete, apprehension and appreciation of Life Itself.
[NST===>] Similarly, let it be the case that I had a dozen clocks and you told me you had hit them all with a sledge hammer; now, if you told me you had lied, and gave me back the 12^th clock in perfect working order, I would value it a lot more for having thought I had lost it.

davew

On Thu, Mar 5, 2020, at 4:58 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> It's not pesky for me in the slightest. I'm *very* interested. I
> haven't contributed because it's not clear I have anything to
> contribute.
>
> Maybe I can start with a criticism, though. It's unclear to me why you
> (or anyone) would delicately flip through crumbling pages of
> philosophy when there are fresh and juicy results from
> (interventionist) methods right in front of us? The oxytocin post
> really *was* inspired by this thread. But because you guys are talking
> about dead white men like Peirce and James, it's unclear how the science relates.
>
> My skepticism goes even deeper (beyond dead white men) to why one
> would think *anyone* (alive, dead, white or brown) might be able to
> *think* up an explanation for how knowledge grows. I would like to,
> but cannot, avoid the inference that this belief anyone (or any
> "school" of people) can think up explanations stems from a bias toward
> *individualism*. My snarky poke at "super intelligent god-people" in a
> post awhile back was
> (misguidedly) intended to express this same skepticism. I worry that
> poking around in old philosophy is simply an artifact of the mythology
> surrounding the "mind" and Great Men
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory>.
>
> It seems to me like science works in *spite* of our biases to
> individualism. So, if I want to understand knowledge, I have to stop
> identifying ways of knowing through dead individuals and focus on the
> flowing *field* of the collective scientists.
>
> Of course, that doesn't mean we ignore the writings of the dead people.
> But it means liberally slashing away anything that even smells obsolete.
>
> Regardless of what you do post, don't interpret *my* lack of response
> as disinterest or irritation, because it's not.
>
> On 3/5/20 6:14 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> > And the key to my being a pest — is anyone else curious about these things?
>
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe
> at St. John's College to unsubscribe
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Steve Smith

Re: Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

Nick -

Yesterday we went to the documentary "Fantastic Fungi" at CCA and I highly recommend it to you. It is relatively short (just over an hour) but did not feel that way.

While it was nominally about fungi the Kingdom, it was primarily about human's relationship to fungi and in particular the medicinal and entheogenic properties experienced/observed/imagined in very contemporary terms. MIchael Pollan and Andrew Weil both have prominent roles as interviewees.

Without attempting a full summary or risking "spoilers", I can say that there were at least a few questionable claims made, but overall it felt level and somewhat objective. You won't go away feeling like you were smashed by a sledgehammer, nor do I think you will run out looking for a source for 'shrooms. Others might (the latter). It may provide more reference for you to appreciate the arguments for why humans might be positively influenced by ingesting such things.

I have heard others (who are inclined this way) that the movie is best experienced while microdosing psilocybin. I settled for nutritional yeast on my popcorn... yum(ami).

- Steve

On 3/7/20 10:35 AM, [hidden email] wrote:

Ok, so we need to get our metaphor’s straight, here.

The sledge hammer is meant to be an experience-randomizer. To the extent that sledge hammers do predictable things to clocks, it fails for me as a metaphor. Once my Sledge Hammer has struck my clock, there should be no relation between the positions of the pieces of the clock before the blow and after. But even granting its limitations, I don’t think my Sledge Hammer is an appropriate metaphor for your complaint about ordinary software. I think you are talking about a bull-dozer. Like a Sledge Hammer, a Bulldozer does not care for the structure of whatever it encounters; but unlike my Sledge Hammer, it imposes a highly predictable order of its own. Neither the Sledge Hammer nor the Bulldozer are like the Taoist Butcher, who clearly cares for .the structure of what he cuts.

So, what we are arguing about can be construed as an argument about which metaphor is most aptly applied to taking drugs. I am arguing for the Sledge Hammer. Sledge Hammers have their uses. I have always imagined that electroshock therapy is a kind of sledge hammer, although perhaps it is more like a bulldozer, returning the brain to factory settings. Bulldozers are very useful in that they create a structure on which other things can easily be built. You might be arguing that drug-taking is a bull dozer. Or you might be arguing that drug-taking is more like the Taoist butcher, in that it reveals the structure of what is already there. It is like a microscopist’s stain. But to make that metaphor work, you have to grant to the drug, or to the person who administers it, the wisdom and experience of the butcher who has become so familiar with meat that he can, without thinking about it, see where the meat isn’t. Now you are in Castenada territory, the territory of faith.

Thanks, as always, Dave, for your generosity of spirit. By the way, some keen-eyed observer may detect something seriously awry in my metaphorical proceeding above. Presumably we both agree that the brain is a device that tells us something about something else, not about itself. Dubious as I am that a sledge hammer can tell us anything about the structure of clocks, I am even MORE dubious that it can tell us anything about the structure of time. The Taoist Butcher metaphor seems to work in a different way. To make it consistent, we would have to have the Taoist Butcher dissect HIMSELF in order to discover the structure of meat.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam [hidden email] On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, March 7, 2020 3:37 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

Oooh fun ...

I also stipulate that hitting an alarm clock with a sledge hammer MIGHT reveal robust and enduring information about alarm clocks.

Let me twist this example a bit to make what I think might be a valid way to assert a "benefit" of drug-epistemology over sledge-hammer.

I must start a bit afield with a quote from Plato and a Taoist koan:

[First,] perceiving and bringing together under one Idea the scattered particulars, so that one makes clear the thing which he wishes to do... [Second,] the separation of the Idea into classes, by dividing it where the natural joints are, and not trying to break any part, after the manner of as a bad carver... I love these processes of division and bringing together, and if I think any other man is able to see things that can naturally be collected into one and divided into many, him I will follow as if he were as a god.

- Plato

"A Taoist butcher used but one knife his entire career without the need to sharpen it. At his retirement party the Emperor asked him about this extraordinary feat, The butcher stated, "Oh, I simply cut where the meat wasn't."

Now this leads to a problem of decomposition - breaking up a large and complex problem into tractable sub-problems. Software engineering uses a sledgehammer epistemology of data structures and algorithms to accomplish this decomposition with results that are horrific. In contrast, a "vision" induced, daydreaming about biological cells and cellular organisms led to the insight that cells are differentiated from each other by what they do, not what they are. So software modularity might be based on behavior. Far superior results in myriad ways.

If we take C.D.Broad and Huxley seriously, mescaline reveals "more of reality" than typically available to our conscious minds. I would assert and be willing to defend that at least that sort of drug-epistemology could enhance our ability to actually see "where the meat wasn't" and therefore enhance our ability to decompose large complicated systems (maybe even complex systems) in tractable sub-problems.

* * * * * * *

My vision was not based on a stain, nor was it of cells dividing - it was an inter-cellular dissolving and recombining of inter-cellular elements, proteins etc., into other inter-cellular elements such that when the cell did eventually divide its internals were radically different. What I "saw" would more likely inform a genetic engineer than someone investigating cell division stuff.

* * * * * *

Sorry for making you ill, but it is your interpretation that is at fault.

You might remember the early days of Cinerama movies. They would start the movie showing a scene, like flying through the Grand canyon, then suddenly expand the displayed rectangle, the size of a traditional movie screen, into the full height and width of the Cinerama screen.

It was still just a movie, but the experience of the movie was enhanced? with sensations of vertigo, movement, detail, etc.

What Broad and Huxley suggest is that experience is "filtered" by the organism and that filtering reduces experience to the dimensions of a pre-Cinerama movie. Huxley then asserts that mescaline turns experience into Experience.

We are all experience monists here, but some of us are making the claim that there can be, at minimum, quantitative differences among experiences (something akin to the increase in pixel density and 8 versus 64 bit representation of the color of each pixel) and, at least the possibility of qualitative differences, e.g. the vertigo of Cinerama.

And, those differences are attainable via various means. Not just drugs.

So my assertion of "Apollonian-er than thou" is a claim that I experience "life" in "Cinerama" and you in "cinema multiplex standard screen."

davew

On Sat, Mar 7, 2020, at 5:53 AM, [hidden email] wrote:

See Larding below.

By the way: my mail interface is taken to tucking some of my mail into a folder called "important" where, of course, I cannot see it. So, if I appear to go missing, don't hesitate to write me an unimportant message telling me that there are important ones awaiting me.

Of course I have n o I d e a what distinguishes an important message from an unimportant one.

As I said, see below: Oh, and dave, what I wrote below is TESTY. I don’t realty feel testy, I don’t really feel qualified to be testy. I think the rhetoric just got away with me. It has happened before and you have promised it doesn’t’ bother you, so I am counting on your grace-under-fire again.

Your friend ,

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West

Sent: Friday, March 6, 2020 2:00 AM

To: [hidden email]

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

thanks Glen,

I totally agree with you about dead white guys. [Except I have had face-to-face conversations with a couple of them :) ] I reference them not as a source of answers but in an attempt to find some kind of conceptual bridge for a conversation. But that might be totally counterproductive as it tends to introduce a propensity for forking the conversation.

Engaging with contemporary scientists is hard when it comes to drug-induced data sets / experiences. I hope to make some connections with contemporary researchers at the ICPR conference I mentioned but the focus there seems to be psycho-medical and related to the oxytocin article you posted, and my direct interests tend to diverge from that.

Perhaps something more direct might be useful. Two things, the second is mostly to tease Nick.

1) I am fascinated by the field of scientific visualization, using imagery to present complex data sets. Recently I "observed" the precise moment of sperm-egg fertilization. A whole lot was going on inside the egg cell boundary immediately upon contact (not penetration) with the sperm. The visualization was of thousands (millions?) of discrete inter-cellular elements breaking free from existing structures, like DNA strands, proteins, molecules and moving about independently. I could see several "fields" that were a kind of "probability field." These fields constrained both the movement of the various elements and, most importantly, what structures would emerge from their recombination. "Watching" the DNA strand 'dissolve" and "reform" was particularly interesting because it was totally unlike the "unzip into two strands, the zip-up a strand-half from each donor" visualization I have seen presented in animations explaining the process. Instead I saw all kinds of "clumps" form and merge into larger/longer "clumps" then engage in an interesting hula/belly/undulation dance to rearrange the structure into a final form. All of this "guided" by the very visible "probability fields;" more than one and color coded.

Now, if I were a cellular biologist could I make use of this vision?

[NST===>] I love this example. Every stain produces a new image and some stains are more revealing than others, in that the models they facilitate are more robust and enduring in their predictions. I stipulate that. I also stipulate that hitting an alarm clock with a sledge hammer MIGHT reveal robust and enduring information about alarm clocks. I just don’t think it’s likely. And there is the possibility that the clock wont be very accurate thereafter. That is the whole of my argument against drug -epistemology. So if you are NOT arguing that drug-epistemology is somehow superior to sledge-hammer epistemology, then we agree and we don’t have to argue any more.

Since I am not a cellular biologist and have no understanding of inter-cellular structures/dynamics/chemistry, nor any DNA knowledge, where did the imagery come from and why did it hang together so well?

Was this experience just an amusing bit of entertainment" Or, is there an insight of some sort lurking there?

[NST===>] I like the metaphor with stains. But just remember, if my memory serves me correctly, you don’t see jack shit when cells divide without the right stain. All such observations are of the Peircean type/; “If I do this, then I will get that.”

2) En garde Nick.

[NST===>] je me garde

Quoting Huxley, paraphrasing C.D. Broad — "The function of the brain, nervous system, and sense organs is, in the main, eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. This is Mind-At-Large.

[NST===>] Dave, even without my characteristic ill ease with dispositions (like gravity, for instance), this last sentence gives me the heebs. And the Heaves. It is either a definition of memory (=all that I experience as past at a moment) or it is non-sense. Or some kind of balmy article of faith.

But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive.

[NST===>] No. No animal has ever survived. No animal has ever tried to survive. No species has ever tried to survive. This is all foolishness pressed on us by Spencer. Even Darwin was leery of it. (and no I cannot cite text)

To make biological survival possible, Mind-At-Large, has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet."

[NST===>] I suppose one can make sense of this sort of talk by postulating a world outside of experience, but unless you postulate that this world beyond experience can in principle never affect experience, you end up with a contradiction because anything that effects experience in any way, however indirect, is, by definition, experienced.

Two personal experiences: 1) I tend to not notice when my glasses get cloudy from accumulation of dust and moisture until it is quite bad. I clean my glasses, put them on, and am amazed at how clear and detailed my perceptions are post-cleaning. A very dramatic difference.

[NST===>] Well of course. Cleaning glasses is a method that increases the predictive potential of your current visual experiences. If your argument is only that there are experiences I have not had which will surprise me if I have them, I agree, so we don’t have to argue about that any more, right?

And, 2) the proper dose of a hallucinogen (and/or the right kind of meditation) and my perceptions of the world around me, using all my senses, are amazingly clear and detailed in the same way as my visual perception was changed by cleaning grime from my glasses.

[NST===>] The innate school marm gives us little jolts of pleasure from time to time, usually in response to activities that please her. One of those jolts is a “sense of clarity.” If you break into her storeroom and steal her clarity candies, you will get the clarity-pleasure even while seeing muddily.

Now I grant you it’s possible you will see something more clearly. See above the sledgehammered clock argument.

I would contend that the drug (meditation) removed the muddying filter of my brain/nervous system/ sense organs just as the isopropyl alcohol removed the muddying filter of moisture-dust on my glasses.

I see the world as it "really" is.[NST===>]Well, that remains to be seen, right. It might be that the dust filters the light in such a way as to reveal structures that you cannot see through the cleaned glass. The proof is in the pudding … i.e., the proving out.

Now the tease: I would contend that I am more Apollonian than thou because I value Life, and more of Life, more directly, than you do. It is not varied experience I seek, but a direct, clear, complete, apprehension and appreciation of Life Itself.

[NST===>] Similarly, let it be the case that I had a dozen clocks and you told me you had hit them all with a sledge hammer; now, if you told me you had lied, and gave me back the 12^th clock in perfect working order, I would value it a lot more for having thought I had lost it.

davew

On Thu, Mar 5, 2020, at 4:58 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:

> It's not pesky for me in the slightest. I'm *very* interested. I

> haven't contributed because it's not clear I have anything to

> contribute.

>

> Maybe I can start with a criticism, though. It's unclear to me why you

> (or anyone) would delicately flip through crumbling pages of

> philosophy when there are fresh and juicy results from

> (interventionist) methods right in front of us? The oxytocin post

> really *was* inspired by this thread. But because you guys are talking

> about dead white men like Peirce and James, it's unclear how the science relates.

>

> My skepticism goes even deeper (beyond dead white men) to why one

> would think *anyone* (alive, dead, white or brown) might be able to

> *think* up an explanation for how knowledge grows. I would like to,

> but cannot, avoid the inference that this belief anyone (or any

> "school" of people) can think up explanations stems from a bias toward

> *individualism*. My snarky poke at "super intelligent god-people" in a

> post awhile back was

> (misguidedly) intended to express this same skepticism. I worry that

> poking around in old philosophy is simply an artifact of the mythology

> surrounding the "mind" and Great Men

> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory>.

>

> It seems to me like science works in *spite* of our biases to

> individualism. So, if I want to understand knowledge, I have to stop

> identifying ways of knowing through dead individuals and focus on the

> flowing *field* of the collective scientists.

>

> Of course, that doesn't mean we ignore the writings of the dead people.

> But it means liberally slashing away anything that even smells obsolete.

>

> Regardless of what you do post, don't interpret *my* lack of response

> as disinterest or irritation, because it's not.

>

> On 3/5/20 6:14 AM, Prof David West wrote:

> > And the key to my being a pest — is anyone else curious about these things?

>

>

> --

> ☣ uǝlƃ

>

> ============================================================

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Prof David West

Re: Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

Nick,

At times I think so — hence my motivation to learn more. At other times absolutely not because I reject his sieve as being to exclusionary.

A conundrum.

davew

On Sat, Mar 7, 2020, at 5:10 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

Dave,

What you write below is awfully Peircean, no?

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, March 7, 2020 2:15 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

Steve,

I really hope that I have not advanced any of the three types of false dichotomy you note.

I cite "authority" or "dead white guys" only because I think they have expressed an idea in a manner far more eloquently than I am able to express it, and my intent is never to say "this is so" but to always say, "if we take this seriously, these questions seem to arise, and might answers to those questions lead to interesting explorations and conversations?"

I would plead guilty to holding "rigorous science" to the same deconstructionist analysis as "vigorously asserted religion." But I would expect that analysis to reveal that "Science" does indeed have its dogma and that interferes with its own professed value system and "Method;" while "Religion" is almost totally Dogma and that creates so much interference that what little "method" is lost in the noise.

Is there a way to sift and sort a plethora of "radical ideas" into those worth further consideration and those that can safely be dismissed out of hand. Pushing them through the sieve of "established science" is not sufficient.

davew

On Thu, Mar 5, 2020, at 8:01 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
Dave -
As for me, I'm not irritated with your keeping these discussions going.
I *am* irritated with the larger (cross-domain, national/global) discussion of "Truthiness" and the various bimodal fallacies introduced thereby.
Science and the Scientific Method, for example, have built into them a certain kind of contingency which is as absolute as Religion's *lack of contingency* (Absolute Truth). This leads Creationists/PseudoSciencers/AntiSciencers/FlatEarthers/Deniers to use the truism from science "It's just a theory" as a bludgeon to beat out a hole in the conversation to plop down their received-knowledge and/or made-up-shit into, as if it were made of the same stuff as what it is displacing.
Conversely (and I think this is where you are prone to harp), the Establishment (you pick your domain: Science, Religion, Politics, Society and subdomain:Physics/Chemistry/Biology, Ibrahamic/Vedic/Pagan/Animist, Red/White/Blue/Green/Purple, Authoritarian/Libertine/Egalitarian/Anarchic) vs radical/progressive views on the same subjects yields a whole other false-dichotomy.
Just because an established authority said it doesn't make it right.
Just because an established authority said it doesn't make it *wrong*.
Just because all scientific breakthroughs were presaged by "radical ideas" doesn't mean that all "radical ideas" represent incipient genius.
Yet I often hear these arguments (barely concealed?) in the larger discourse...
I will try to follow this up with some questions/observations about PostModernism and a reflection on the ways it has been "weaponized" by the unlikely? folks like Stephen Bannon?
- Steve
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Prof David West

Re: Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

"tracing ideas to foundations" — valuable, humbling, essential.

"crap" — pro forma scholarship only because "The Committee" demands it is crap. The experiences one has when rummaging around the attic of long forgotten texts; the experience of "the serendipity of the stacks" and the insights, illuminations, connections arising from that experience is certainly equal to any drug-mediated experience.

The problem, for me, I know how to weave a tapestry of understanding, of meaning if you will allow, from rummaging / stacks experiences, but have not figured out how to integrate the experiential threads arising from altered-states mediated experience. My tapestry looks like it has a bad case of moths.

"sloppy scholars" even in essay form, I try to be conscientious about whose shoulder's I am standing on, and I try to juxtapose quote and interpretation of quote with the standing caveat, "I might be misunderstanding here, but ..."

davew

On Sat, Mar 7, 2020, at 5:28 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

Larding below

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, March 7, 2020 2:23 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

glen,

As a "trained" academic writer I am forced to "justify" every assertion with voluminous footnotes proving some"Eminent Person" had the idea first.
[NST===>] I would call this, “Tracing my ideas back to their foundations.” It’s like finding af chest of ancestral letters in your attic and loosing your self while reading them amongst the dust fuzzies, the cobwebs, and the dad wasps. Also, to be brutally honest, I really love it when some body finds something I wrote a quarter of a century ago and relates it to something they are currently doing. It melts my metaphorical heart.
It was not uncommon to find one of those whose work provided multiple "connection points" and therefore "unified" my work.

But that is all crap.
[NST===>] Naw. Come on Dave. Now you are capitulating to ANTI-academia, which occasionally is alive and well on this list. The experiences of unity one gets from reading long forgotten texts has no LESS potential for illumination than trips to acid-land. So, it’s not CRAP.

I stopped writing "papers" a decade or two ago, and now only write essays. I do cite Eminences, but only to the extent that I think they say, more eloquently than I, what I want to say. Of course, that means I often twist or interpret their words for my convenience.[NST===>] Yeah. I do this too. But I’m not sure I am proud of it. My son is a Wittgenstein scholar and he rightly shudders when I quote W. without fully understanding what was meant by the words in the context in which they actually appeared. Never mind their place in the biography of W. I don’t think we sloppy scholars ought to be put to death, but I do think we should be a bit humble about what we do.

davew

On Fri, Mar 6, 2020, at 3:34 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> Interesting. I'm skeptical that it *unifies* your work so much as it
> *abstracts* your work into a fuzzy/vague thing that seems like it
> unifies your work. That's the risk with unification and what I call
> Grand Unified Models (GUMs). To produce an actual unification, you
> have to show the details for how the general model specializes into
> the fully operational particular models. If you can't do that
> *completely*, with no hand-waving, then it's not really a unification
> but an abstraction.
>
> I'm not anti-abstraction. But I find it useful to contrast the two.
> The ideas you advocate here, which you claim are Peircian, seem
> *unapplicable* to any detailed work. I haven't read much of your
> writing and am unfamiliar with the work being unified. So, I could be
> laughably wrong, here. But one litmus test I use, if/when I start to
> obsess over any single/unitary thing (like you obsess over Peirce), is
> to do a what-if exercise and pretend that unitary thing doesn't exist.
> Try to remove all the tendrils of that thing from whatever I do/think.
> If, once I've done that, the things I do/think remain and don't
> crumble away, then maybe it's a necessary obsession.
>
> It seems to me like we could get to what you want absent Peirce. His
> work is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. And in some situations,
> obsessing too much over nice-to-haves slows the travel to the
> destination.
>
> On 3/5/20 7:39 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
> > I write and think about Peirce, for instance, because his work connects several disparate threads in my own work which seemed unrelated until I read him. He unifies me. Talking to you guys helps me digest all of that.
>
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
> ============================================================
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Prof David West

Re: Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

Ignore the software thing — an example of cross-talk between two unrelated conversations that happens because so much of my neural network is still twisted-pair copper instead of LSD-Fiber.

I clearly missed your sledgehammer metaphor. I think, however, it might reveal a fundamental difference in perspective. You seem to see the taking of a drug (and drugs are not the only or even the most important means available) as destructive of an orderly experience processor (an experience-randomizer); and I see such taking as "oiling the machinery to make it run more efficiently."

But the key metaphor — one you admit is different in kind — from the others, is the Taoist butcher and you are correct that I am suggesting drugs (other means available) augment perception/awareness in very roughly a manner akin to the way that telescopes and microscopes augment our perception/awareness capabilities.

The self-referential feedback loop you allude to is very real. But it takes us, not to Castenada-land, but to Buddha-land or to Wheeler(et.al. combining information and quantum theories)-land where the Universe is Experiencing Itself as experiencing itself (faith); or the Universe Computing Itself computing (supposedly, science).

What you see as paradox, I see as confirmation. A metaphor that provides a perspective that facilitates bringing together fibers from multiple sources and finding the consistencies among them, so as to create threads, from which my tapestry.

davew

On Sat, Mar 7, 2020, at 6:35 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

Ok, so we need to get our metaphor’s straight, here.

The sledge hammer is meant to be an experience-randomizer. To the extent that sledge hammers do predictable things to clocks, it fails for me as a metaphor. Once my Sledge Hammer has struck my clock, there should be no relation between the positions of the pieces of the clock before the blow and after. But even granting its limitations, I don’t think my Sledge Hammer is an appropriate metaphor for your complaint about ordinary software. I think you are talking about a bull-dozer. Like a Sledge Hammer, a Bulldozer does not care for the structure of whatever it encounters; but unlike my Sledge Hammer, it imposes a highly predictable order of its own. Neither the Sledge Hammer nor the Bulldozer are like the Taoist Butcher, who clearly cares for .the structure of what he cuts.

So, what we are arguing about can be construed as an argument about which metaphor is most aptly applied to taking drugs. I am arguing for the Sledge Hammer. Sledge Hammers have their uses. I have always imagined that electroshock therapy is a kind of sledge hammer, although perhaps it is more like a bulldozer, returning the brain to factory settings. Bulldozers are very useful in that they create a structure on which other things can easily be built. You might be arguing that drug-taking is a bull dozer. Or you might be arguing that drug-taking is more like the Taoist butcher, in that it reveals the structure of what is already there. It is like a microscopist’s stain. But to make that metaphor work, you have to grant to the drug, or to the person who administers it, the wisdom and experience of the butcher who has become so familiar with meat that he can, without thinking about it, see where the meat isn’t. Now you are in Castenada territory, the territory of faith.

Thanks, as always, Dave, for your generosity of spirit. By the way, some keen-eyed observer may detect something seriously awry in my metaphorical proceeding above. Presumably we both agree that the brain is a device that tells us something about something else, not about itself. Dubious as I am that a sledge hammer can tell us anything about the structure of clocks, I am even MORE dubious that it can tell us anything about the structure of time. The Taoist Butcher metaphor seems to work in a different way. To make it consistent, we would have to have the Taoist Butcher dissect HIMSELF in order to discover the structure of meat.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, March 7, 2020 3:37 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

Oooh fun ...

I also stipulate that hitting an alarm clock with a sledge hammer MIGHT reveal robust and enduring information about alarm clocks.

Let me twist this example a bit to make what I think might be a valid way to assert a "benefit" of drug-epistemology over sledge-hammer.

I must start a bit afield with a quote from Plato and a Taoist koan:

[First,] perceiving and bringing together under one Idea the scattered particulars, so that one makes clear the thing which he wishes to do... [Second,] the separation of the Idea into classes, by dividing it where the natural joints are, and not trying to break any part, after the manner of as a bad carver... I love these processes of division and bringing together, and if I think any other man is able to see things that can naturally be collected into one and divided into many, him I will follow as if he were as a god.
- Plato

"A Taoist butcher used but one knife his entire career without the need to sharpen it. At his retirement party the Emperor asked him about this extraordinary feat, The butcher stated, "Oh, I simply cut where the meat wasn't."

Now this leads to a problem of decomposition - breaking up a large and complex problem into tractable sub-problems. Software engineering uses a sledgehammer epistemology of data structures and algorithms to accomplish this decomposition with results that are horrific. In contrast, a "vision" induced, daydreaming about biological cells and cellular organisms led to the insight that cells are differentiated from each other by what they do, not what they are. So software modularity might be based on behavior. Far superior results in myriad ways.

If we take C.D.Broad and Huxley seriously, mescaline reveals "more of reality" than typically available to our conscious minds. I would assert and be willing to defend that at least that sort of drug-epistemology could enhance our ability to actually see "where the meat wasn't" and therefore enhance our ability to decompose large complicated systems (maybe even complex systems) in tractable sub-problems.

* * * * * * *

My vision was not based on a stain, nor was it of cells dividing - it was an inter-cellular dissolving and recombining of inter-cellular elements, proteins etc., into other inter-cellular elements such that when the cell did eventually divide its internals were radically different. What I "saw" would more likely inform a genetic engineer than someone investigating cell division stuff.

* * * * * *

Sorry for making you ill, but it is your interpretation that is at fault.

You might remember the early days of Cinerama movies. They would start the movie showing a scene, like flying through the Grand canyon, then suddenly expand the displayed rectangle, the size of a traditional movie screen, into the full height and width of the Cinerama screen.

It was still just a movie, but the experience of the movie was enhanced? with sensations of vertigo, movement, detail, etc.

What Broad and Huxley suggest is that experience is "filtered" by the organism and that filtering reduces experience to the dimensions of a pre-Cinerama movie. Huxley then asserts that mescaline turns experience into Experience.

We are all experience monists here, but some of us are making the claim that there can be, at minimum, quantitative differences among experiences (something akin to the increase in pixel density and 8 versus 64 bit representation of the color of each pixel) and, at least the possibility of qualitative differences, e.g. the vertigo of Cinerama.

And, those differences are attainable via various means. Not just drugs.

So my assertion of "Apollonian-er than thou" is a claim that I experience "life" in "Cinerama" and you in "cinema multiplex standard screen."

davew

On Sat, Mar 7, 2020, at 5:53 AM, [hidden email] wrote:
See Larding below.

By the way: my mail interface is taken to tucking some of my mail into a folder called "important" where, of course, I cannot see it. So, if I appear to go missing, don't hesitate to write me an unimportant message telling me that there are important ones awaiting me.

Of course I have n o I d e a what distinguishes an important message from an unimportant one.

As I said, see below: Oh, and dave, what I wrote below is TESTY. I don’t realty feel testy, I don’t really feel qualified to be testy. I think the rhetoric just got away with me. It has happened before and you have promised it doesn’t’ bother you, so I am counting on your grace-under-fire again.

Your friend ,
Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Friday, March 6, 2020 2:00 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

thanks Glen,

I totally agree with you about dead white guys. [Except I have had face-to-face conversations with a couple of them :) ] I reference them not as a source of answers but in an attempt to find some kind of conceptual bridge for a conversation. But that might be totally counterproductive as it tends to introduce a propensity for forking the conversation.

Engaging with contemporary scientists is hard when it comes to drug-induced data sets / experiences. I hope to make some connections with contemporary researchers at the ICPR conference I mentioned but the focus there seems to be psycho-medical and related to the oxytocin article you posted, and my direct interests tend to diverge from that.

Perhaps something more direct might be useful. Two things, the second is mostly to tease Nick.

1) I am fascinated by the field of scientific visualization, using imagery to present complex data sets. Recently I "observed" the precise moment of sperm-egg fertilization. A whole lot was going on inside the egg cell boundary immediately upon contact (not penetration) with the sperm. The visualization was of thousands (millions?) of discrete inter-cellular elements breaking free from existing structures, like DNA strands, proteins, molecules and moving about independently. I could see several "fields" that were a kind of "probability field." These fields constrained both the movement of the various elements and, most importantly, what structures would emerge from their recombination. "Watching" the DNA strand 'dissolve" and "reform" was particularly interesting because it was totally unlike the "unzip into two strands, the zip-up a strand-half from each donor" visualization I have seen presented in animations explaining the process. Instead I saw all kinds of "clumps" form and merge into larger/longer "clumps" then engage in an interesting hula/belly/undulation dance to rearrange the structure into a final form. All of this "guided" by the very visible "probability fields;" more than one and color coded.

Now, if I were a cellular biologist could I make use of this vision?
[NST===>] I love this example. Every stain produces a new image and some stains are more revealing than others, in that the models they facilitate are more robust and enduring in their predictions. I stipulate that. I also stipulate that hitting an alarm clock with a sledge hammer MIGHT reveal robust and enduring information about alarm clocks. I just don’t think it’s likely. And there is the possibility that the clock wont be very accurate thereafter. That is the whole of my argument against drug -epistemology. So if you are NOT arguing that drug-epistemology is somehow superior to sledge-hammer epistemology, then we agree and we don’t have to argue any more.

Since I am not a cellular biologist and have no understanding of inter-cellular structures/dynamics/chemistry, nor any DNA knowledge, where did the imagery come from and why did it hang together so well?

Was this experience just an amusing bit of entertainment" Or, is there an insight of some sort lurking there?
[NST===>] I like the metaphor with stains. But just remember, if my memory serves me correctly, you don’t see jack shit when cells divide without the right stain. All such observations are of the Peircean type/; “If I do this, then I will get that.”

2) En garde Nick.
[NST===>] je me garde

Quoting Huxley, paraphrasing C.D. Broad — "The function of the brain, nervous system, and sense organs is, in the main, eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. This is Mind-At-Large.
[NST===>] Dave, even without my characteristic ill ease with dispositions (like gravity, for instance), this last sentence gives me the heebs. And the Heaves. It is either a definition of memory (=all that I experience as past at a moment) or it is non-sense. Or some kind of balmy article of faith.

But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive.
[NST===>] No. No animal has ever survived. No animal has ever tried to survive. No species has ever tried to survive. This is all foolishness pressed on us by Spencer. Even Darwin was leery of it. (and no I cannot cite text)
To make biological survival possible, Mind-At-Large, has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet."
[NST===>] I suppose one can make sense of this sort of talk by postulating a world outside of experience, but unless you postulate that this world beyond experience can in principle never affect experience, you end up with a contradiction because anything that effects experience in any way, however indirect, is, by definition, experienced.

Two personal experiences: 1) I tend to not notice when my glasses get cloudy from accumulation of dust and moisture until it is quite bad. I clean my glasses, put them on, and am amazed at how clear and detailed my perceptions are post-cleaning. A very dramatic difference.
[NST===>] Well of course. Cleaning glasses is a method that increases the predictive potential of your current visual experiences. If your argument is only that there are experiences I have not had which will surprise me if I have them, I agree, so we don’t have to argue about that any more, right?
And, 2) the proper dose of a hallucinogen (and/or the right kind of meditation) and my perceptions of the world around me, using all my senses, are amazingly clear and detailed in the same way as my visual perception was changed by cleaning grime from my glasses.
[NST===>] The innate school marm gives us little jolts of pleasure from time to time, usually in response to activities that please her. One of those jolts is a “sense of clarity.” If you break into her storeroom and steal her clarity candies, you will get the clarity-pleasure even while seeing muddily.

Now I grant you it’s possible you will see something more clearly. See above the sledgehammered clock argument.

I would contend that the drug (meditation) removed the muddying filter of my brain/nervous system/ sense organs just as the isopropyl alcohol removed the muddying filter of moisture-dust on my glasses.

I see the world as it "really" is.[NST===>]Well, that remains to be seen, right. It might be that the dust filters the light in such a way as to reveal structures that you cannot see through the cleaned glass. The proof is in the pudding … i.e., the proving out.

Now the tease: I would contend that I am more Apollonian than thou because I value Life, and more of Life, more directly, than you do. It is not varied experience I seek, but a direct, clear, complete, apprehension and appreciation of Life Itself.
[NST===>] Similarly, let it be the case that I had a dozen clocks and you told me you had hit them all with a sledge hammer; now, if you told me you had lied, and gave me back the 12^th clock in perfect working order, I would value it a lot more for having thought I had lost it.

davew

On Thu, Mar 5, 2020, at 4:58 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> It's not pesky for me in the slightest. I'm *very* interested. I
> haven't contributed because it's not clear I have anything to
> contribute.
>
> Maybe I can start with a criticism, though. It's unclear to me why you
> (or anyone) would delicately flip through crumbling pages of
> philosophy when there are fresh and juicy results from
> (interventionist) methods right in front of us? The oxytocin post
> really *was* inspired by this thread. But because you guys are talking
> about dead white men like Peirce and James, it's unclear how the science relates.
>
> My skepticism goes even deeper (beyond dead white men) to why one
> would think *anyone* (alive, dead, white or brown) might be able to
> *think* up an explanation for how knowledge grows. I would like to,
> but cannot, avoid the inference that this belief anyone (or any
> "school" of people) can think up explanations stems from a bias toward
> *individualism*. My snarky poke at "super intelligent god-people" in a
> post awhile back was
> (misguidedly) intended to express this same skepticism. I worry that
> poking around in old philosophy is simply an artifact of the mythology
> surrounding the "mind" and Great Men
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory>.
>
> It seems to me like science works in *spite* of our biases to
> individualism. So, if I want to understand knowledge, I have to stop
> identifying ways of knowing through dead individuals and focus on the
> flowing *field* of the collective scientists.
>
> Of course, that doesn't mean we ignore the writings of the dead people.
> But it means liberally slashing away anything that even smells obsolete.
>
> Regardless of what you do post, don't interpret *my* lack of response
> as disinterest or irritation, because it's not.
>
> On 3/5/20 6:14 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> > And the key to my being a pest — is anyone else curious about these things?
>
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
> ============================================================
> 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
>

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thompnickson2

Re: Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

In reply to this post by Prof David West

Dave,

Some really good metaphoring in what you wrote. Please see larding, below:

Daylight Saving in NM. Ugh.

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Sunday, March 8, 2020 1:41 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

"tracing ideas to foundations" — valuable, humbling, essential.

davew

On Sat, Mar 7, 2020, at 5:28 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

Larding below

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, March 7, 2020 2:23 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

glen,

As a "trained" academic writer I am forced to "justify" every assertion with voluminous footnotes proving some"Eminent Person" had the idea first.
[NST===>] I would call this, “Tracing my ideas back to their foundations.” It’s like finding af chest of ancestral letters in your attic and loosing your self while reading them amongst the dust fuzzies, the cobwebs, and the dad wasps. Also, to be brutally honest, I really love it when some body finds something I wrote a quarter of a century ago and relates it to something they are currently doing. It melts my metaphorical heart.
It was not uncommon to find one of those whose work provided multiple "connection points" and therefore "unified" my work.

But that is all crap.
[NST===>] Naw. Come on Dave. Now you are capitulating to ANTI-academia, which occasionally is alive and well on this list. The experiences of unity one gets from reading long forgotten texts has no LESS potential for illumination than trips to acid-land. So, it’s not CRAP.

I stopped writing "papers" a decade or two ago, and now only write essays. I do cite Eminences, but only to the extent that I think they say, more eloquently than I, what I want to say. Of course, that means I often twist or interpret their words for my convenience.[NST===>] Yeah. I do this too. But I’m not sure I am proud of it. My son is a Wittgenstein scholar and he rightly shudders when I quote W. without fully understanding what was meant by the words in the context in which they actually appeared. Never mind their place in the biography of W. I don’t think we sloppy scholars ought to be put to death, but I do think we should be a bit humble about what we do.

davew

On Fri, Mar 6, 2020, at 3:34 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> Interesting. I'm skeptical that it *unifies* your work so much as it
> *abstracts* your work into a fuzzy/vague thing that seems like it
> unifies your work. That's the risk with unification and what I call
> Grand Unified Models (GUMs). To produce an actual unification, you
> have to show the details for how the general model specializes into
> the fully operational particular models. If you can't do that
> *completely*, with no hand-waving, then it's not really a unification
> but an abstraction.
>
> I'm not anti-abstraction. But I find it useful to contrast the two.
> The ideas you advocate here, which you claim are Peircian, seem
> *unapplicable* to any detailed work. I haven't read much of your
> writing and am unfamiliar with the work being unified. So, I could be
> laughably wrong, here. But one litmus test I use, if/when I start to
> obsess over any single/unitary thing (like you obsess over Peirce), is
> to do a what-if exercise and pretend that unitary thing doesn't exist.
> Try to remove all the tendrils of that thing from whatever I do/think.
> If, once I've done that, the things I do/think remain and don't
> crumble away, then maybe it's a necessary obsession.
>
> It seems to me like we could get to what you want absent Peirce. His
> work is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. And in some situations,
> obsessing too much over nice-to-haves slows the travel to the
> destination.
>
> On 3/5/20 7:39 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
> > I write and think about Peirce, for instance, because his work connects several disparate threads in my own work which seemed unrelated until I read him. He unifies me. Talking to you guys helps me digest all of that.
>
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
> ============================================================
> 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
>

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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thompnickson2

Re: Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

In reply to this post by Prof David West

OOOPS. Forgot the larding.

Let’s see if we can agree on something, put it in the bank of things we agree upon.

“Most creativity arises from the dialectic between discipline and ill-discipline. Without the regiments of nucleotides marching in good order, evolution does not occur; without the sledgehammer effects of radiation on the genome, evolution does not occur. With out the rhyme scheme, the poem does not get written; without the violations of the rhyme scheme, poetry does not develop. Without the Committee, the student drifts; without the restlessness of the student, scholarship stultifies. Without the Apollonian, the conversation spins off into confusion; without the Dionysian, it stultifies. No one of us alone holds the key to creation. “

Larding below.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

"tracing ideas to foundations" — valuable, humbling, essential.

[NST===>] Thanks for that.

and the insights, illuminations, connections arising from that experience is certainly equal to any drug-mediated experience.

davew

On Sat, Mar 7, 2020, at 5:28 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

Larding below

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, March 7, 2020 2:23 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

glen,

As a "trained" academic writer I am forced to "justify" every assertion with voluminous footnotes proving some"Eminent Person" had the idea first.
[NST===>] I would call this, “Tracing my ideas back to their foundations.” It’s like finding af chest of ancestral letters in your attic and loosing your self while reading them amongst the dust fuzzies, the cobwebs, and the dad wasps. Also, to be brutally honest, I really love it when some body finds something I wrote a quarter of a century ago and relates it to something they are currently doing. It melts my metaphorical heart.
It was not uncommon to find one of those whose work provided multiple "connection points" and therefore "unified" my work.

But that is all crap.
[NST===>] Naw. Come on Dave. Now you are capitulating to ANTI-academia, which occasionally is alive and well on this list. The experiences of unity one gets from reading long forgotten texts has no LESS potential for illumination than trips to acid-land. So, it’s not CRAP.

I stopped writing "papers" a decade or two ago, and now only write essays. I do cite Eminences, but only to the extent that I think they say, more eloquently than I, what I want to say. Of course, that means I often twist or interpret their words for my convenience.[NST===>] Yeah. I do this too. But I’m not sure I am proud of it. My son is a Wittgenstein scholar and he rightly shudders when I quote W. without fully understanding what was meant by the words in the context in which they actually appeared. Never mind their place in the biography of W. I don’t think we sloppy scholars ought to be put to death, but I do think we should be a bit humble about what we do.

davew

On Fri, Mar 6, 2020, at 3:34 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> Interesting. I'm skeptical that it *unifies* your work so much as it
> *abstracts* your work into a fuzzy/vague thing that seems like it
> unifies your work. That's the risk with unification and what I call
> Grand Unified Models (GUMs). To produce an actual unification, you
> have to show the details for how the general model specializes into
> the fully operational particular models. If you can't do that
> *completely*, with no hand-waving, then it's not really a unification
> but an abstraction.
>
> I'm not anti-abstraction. But I find it useful to contrast the two.
> The ideas you advocate here, which you claim are Peircian, seem
> *unapplicable* to any detailed work. I haven't read much of your
> writing and am unfamiliar with the work being unified. So, I could be
> laughably wrong, here. But one litmus test I use, if/when I start to
> obsess over any single/unitary thing (like you obsess over Peirce), is
> to do a what-if exercise and pretend that unitary thing doesn't exist.
> Try to remove all the tendrils of that thing from whatever I do/think.
> If, once I've done that, the things I do/think remain and don't
> crumble away, then maybe it's a necessary obsession.
>
> It seems to me like we could get to what you want absent Peirce. His
> work is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. And in some situations,
> obsessing too much over nice-to-haves slows the travel to the
> destination.
>
> On 3/5/20 7:39 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
> > I write and think about Peirce, for instance, because his work connects several disparate threads in my own work which seemed unrelated until I read him. He unifies me. Talking to you guys helps me digest all of that.
>
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
> ============================================================
> 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
>

============================================================
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
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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

thompnickson2

Re: Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

In reply to this post by Prof David West

But Dave, I don’t understand your faith that drugs are a Tao-ist butcher, rather than a sledgehammer. Do you stipulate that feelings of well-being, wisdom, insight, etc. can be neurologically divorced from the facts thereof? So, the presence of such feelings does not constitute sufficient evidence of the facts, right? Now remember, I have stipulated to the value of the sledgehammer, and admitted that the position I am taking in this argument arises from in part an from a fear of having my brain sledged. So “potential benefits of sledgehammering” are irrelevant to our PRESENT argument, unless, of course we want this whole vast, tortured, philosophical argument to boil down to the fact that you like being sledge-hammered and I don’t. Apart from the fact that you LIKE taking drugs, what is the EVIDENCE that it constitutes a method of gathering knowledge less chaotic than electro-shock therapy. How does sledging your clock with drugs systematically reveal something about time? Or are you ready to try ECT?

I apologize for all the typos in my previous messages. My macular pucker makes it hard sometimes to see the words as they are, but Bill Gates does not have macular pucker, so there is really no excuse.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Sunday, March 8, 2020 3:10 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

Ignore the software thing — an example of cross-talk between two unrelated conversations that happens because so much of my neural network is still twisted-pair copper instead of LSD-Fiber.

davew

On Sat, Mar 7, 2020, at 6:35 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

Ok, so we need to get our metaphor’s straight, here.

The sledge hammer is meant to be an experience-randomizer. To the extent that sledge hammers do predictable things to clocks, it fails for me as a metaphor. Once my Sledge Hammer has struck my clock, there should be no relation between the positions of the pieces of the clock before the blow and after. But even granting its limitations, I don’t think my Sledge Hammer is an appropriate metaphor for your complaint about ordinary software. I think you are talking about a bull-dozer. Like a Sledge Hammer, a Bulldozer does not care for the structure of whatever it encounters; but unlike my Sledge Hammer, it imposes a highly predictable order of its own. Neither the Sledge Hammer nor the Bulldozer are like the Taoist Butcher, who clearly cares for .the structure of what he cuts.

So, what we are arguing about can be construed as an argument about which metaphor is most aptly applied to taking drugs. I am arguing for the Sledge Hammer. Sledge Hammers have their uses. I have always imagined that electroshock therapy is a kind of sledge hammer, although perhaps it is more like a bulldozer, returning the brain to factory settings. Bulldozers are very useful in that they create a structure on which other things can easily be built. You might be arguing that drug-taking is a bull dozer. Or you might be arguing that drug-taking is more like the Taoist butcher, in that it reveals the structure of what is already there. It is like a microscopist’s stain. But to make that metaphor work, you have to grant to the drug, or to the person who administers it, the wisdom and experience of the butcher who has become so familiar with meat that he can, without thinking about it, see where the meat isn’t. Now you are in Castenada territory, the territory of faith.

Thanks, as always, Dave, for your generosity of spirit. By the way, some keen-eyed observer may detect something seriously awry in my metaphorical proceeding above. Presumably we both agree that the brain is a device that tells us something about something else, not about itself. Dubious as I am that a sledge hammer can tell us anything about the structure of clocks, I am even MORE dubious that it can tell us anything about the structure of time. The Taoist Butcher metaphor seems to work in a different way. To make it consistent, we would have to have the Taoist Butcher dissect HIMSELF in order to discover the structure of meat.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, March 7, 2020 3:37 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

Oooh fun ...

I also stipulate that hitting an alarm clock with a sledge hammer MIGHT reveal robust and enduring information about alarm clocks.

Let me twist this example a bit to make what I think might be a valid way to assert a "benefit" of drug-epistemology over sledge-hammer.

I must start a bit afield with a quote from Plato and a Taoist koan:

[First,] perceiving and bringing together under one Idea the scattered particulars, so that one makes clear the thing which he wishes to do... [Second,] the separation of the Idea into classes, by dividing it where the natural joints are, and not trying to break any part, after the manner of as a bad carver... I love these processes of division and bringing together, and if I think any other man is able to see things that can naturally be collected into one and divided into many, him I will follow as if he were as a god.
- Plato

"A Taoist butcher used but one knife his entire career without the need to sharpen it. At his retirement party the Emperor asked him about this extraordinary feat, The butcher stated, "Oh, I simply cut where the meat wasn't."

Now this leads to a problem of decomposition - breaking up a large and complex problem into tractable sub-problems. Software engineering uses a sledgehammer epistemology of data structures and algorithms to accomplish this decomposition with results that are horrific. In contrast, a "vision" induced, daydreaming about biological cells and cellular organisms led to the insight that cells are differentiated from each other by what they do, not what they are. So software modularity might be based on behavior. Far superior results in myriad ways.

If we take C.D.Broad and Huxley seriously, mescaline reveals "more of reality" than typically available to our conscious minds. I would assert and be willing to defend that at least that sort of drug-epistemology could enhance our ability to actually see "where the meat wasn't" and therefore enhance our ability to decompose large complicated systems (maybe even complex systems) in tractable sub-problems.

* * * * * * *

My vision was not based on a stain, nor was it of cells dividing - it was an inter-cellular dissolving and recombining of inter-cellular elements, proteins etc., into other inter-cellular elements such that when the cell did eventually divide its internals were radically different. What I "saw" would more likely inform a genetic engineer than someone investigating cell division stuff.

* * * * * *

Sorry for making you ill, but it is your interpretation that is at fault.

You might remember the early days of Cinerama movies. They would start the movie showing a scene, like flying through the Grand canyon, then suddenly expand the displayed rectangle, the size of a traditional movie screen, into the full height and width of the Cinerama screen.

It was still just a movie, but the experience of the movie was enhanced? with sensations of vertigo, movement, detail, etc.

What Broad and Huxley suggest is that experience is "filtered" by the organism and that filtering reduces experience to the dimensions of a pre-Cinerama movie. Huxley then asserts that mescaline turns experience into Experience.

We are all experience monists here, but some of us are making the claim that there can be, at minimum, quantitative differences among experiences (something akin to the increase in pixel density and 8 versus 64 bit representation of the color of each pixel) and, at least the possibility of qualitative differences, e.g. the vertigo of Cinerama.

And, those differences are attainable via various means. Not just drugs.

So my assertion of "Apollonian-er than thou" is a claim that I experience "life" in "Cinerama" and you in "cinema multiplex standard screen."

davew

On Sat, Mar 7, 2020, at 5:53 AM, [hidden email] wrote:
See Larding below.

By the way: my mail interface is taken to tucking some of my mail into a folder called "important" where, of course, I cannot see it. So, if I appear to go missing, don't hesitate to write me an unimportant message telling me that there are important ones awaiting me.

Of course I have n o I d e a what distinguishes an important message from an unimportant one.

As I said, see below: Oh, and dave, what I wrote below is TESTY. I don’t realty feel testy, I don’t really feel qualified to be testy. I think the rhetoric just got away with me. It has happened before and you have promised it doesn’t’ bother you, so I am counting on your grace-under-fire again.

Your friend ,
Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Friday, March 6, 2020 2:00 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

thanks Glen,

I totally agree with you about dead white guys. [Except I have had face-to-face conversations with a couple of them :) ] I reference them not as a source of answers but in an attempt to find some kind of conceptual bridge for a conversation. But that might be totally counterproductive as it tends to introduce a propensity for forking the conversation.

Engaging with contemporary scientists is hard when it comes to drug-induced data sets / experiences. I hope to make some connections with contemporary researchers at the ICPR conference I mentioned but the focus there seems to be psycho-medical and related to the oxytocin article you posted, and my direct interests tend to diverge from that.

Perhaps something more direct might be useful. Two things, the second is mostly to tease Nick.

1) I am fascinated by the field of scientific visualization, using imagery to present complex data sets. Recently I "observed" the precise moment of sperm-egg fertilization. A whole lot was going on inside the egg cell boundary immediately upon contact (not penetration) with the sperm. The visualization was of thousands (millions?) of discrete inter-cellular elements breaking free from existing structures, like DNA strands, proteins, molecules and moving about independently. I could see several "fields" that were a kind of "probability field." These fields constrained both the movement of the various elements and, most importantly, what structures would emerge from their recombination. "Watching" the DNA strand 'dissolve" and "reform" was particularly interesting because it was totally unlike the "unzip into two strands, the zip-up a strand-half from each donor" visualization I have seen presented in animations explaining the process. Instead I saw all kinds of "clumps" form and merge into larger/longer "clumps" then engage in an interesting hula/belly/undulation dance to rearrange the structure into a final form. All of this "guided" by the very visible "probability fields;" more than one and color coded.

Now, if I were a cellular biologist could I make use of this vision?
[NST===>] I love this example. Every stain produces a new image and some stains are more revealing than others, in that the models they facilitate are more robust and enduring in their predictions. I stipulate that. I also stipulate that hitting an alarm clock with a sledge hammer MIGHT reveal robust and enduring information about alarm clocks. I just don’t think it’s likely. And there is the possibility that the clock wont be very accurate thereafter. That is the whole of my argument against drug -epistemology. So if you are NOT arguing that drug-epistemology is somehow superior to sledge-hammer epistemology, then we agree and we don’t have to argue any more.

Since I am not a cellular biologist and have no understanding of inter-cellular structures/dynamics/chemistry, nor any DNA knowledge, where did the imagery come from and why did it hang together so well?

Was this experience just an amusing bit of entertainment" Or, is there an insight of some sort lurking there?
[NST===>] I like the metaphor with stains. But just remember, if my memory serves me correctly, you don’t see jack shit when cells divide without the right stain. All such observations are of the Peircean type/; “If I do this, then I will get that.”

2) En garde Nick.
[NST===>] je me garde

Quoting Huxley, paraphrasing C.D. Broad — "The function of the brain, nervous system, and sense organs is, in the main, eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. This is Mind-At-Large.
[NST===>] Dave, even without my characteristic ill ease with dispositions (like gravity, for instance), this last sentence gives me the heebs. And the Heaves. It is either a definition of memory (=all that I experience as past at a moment) or it is non-sense. Or some kind of balmy article of faith.

But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive.
[NST===>] No. No animal has ever survived. No animal has ever tried to survive. No species has ever tried to survive. This is all foolishness pressed on us by Spencer. Even Darwin was leery of it. (and no I cannot cite text)
To make biological survival possible, Mind-At-Large, has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet."
[NST===>] I suppose one can make sense of this sort of talk by postulating a world outside of experience, but unless you postulate that this world beyond experience can in principle never affect experience, you end up with a contradiction because anything that effects experience in any way, however indirect, is, by definition, experienced.

Two personal experiences: 1) I tend to not notice when my glasses get cloudy from accumulation of dust and moisture until it is quite bad. I clean my glasses, put them on, and am amazed at how clear and detailed my perceptions are post-cleaning. A very dramatic difference.
[NST===>] Well of course. Cleaning glasses is a method that increases the predictive potential of your current visual experiences. If your argument is only that there are experiences I have not had which will surprise me if I have them, I agree, so we don’t have to argue about that any more, right?
And, 2) the proper dose of a hallucinogen (and/or the right kind of meditation) and my perceptions of the world around me, using all my senses, are amazingly clear and detailed in the same way as my visual perception was changed by cleaning grime from my glasses.
[NST===>] The innate school marm gives us little jolts of pleasure from time to time, usually in response to activities that please her. One of those jolts is a “sense of clarity.” If you break into her storeroom and steal her clarity candies, you will get the clarity-pleasure even while seeing muddily.

Now I grant you it’s possible you will see something more clearly. See above the sledgehammered clock argument.

I would contend that the drug (meditation) removed the muddying filter of my brain/nervous system/ sense organs just as the isopropyl alcohol removed the muddying filter of moisture-dust on my glasses.

I see the world as it "really" is.[NST===>]Well, that remains to be seen, right. It might be that the dust filters the light in such a way as to reveal structures that you cannot see through the cleaned glass. The proof is in the pudding … i.e., the proving out.

Now the tease: I would contend that I am more Apollonian than thou because I value Life, and more of Life, more directly, than you do. It is not varied experience I seek, but a direct, clear, complete, apprehension and appreciation of Life Itself.
[NST===>] Similarly, let it be the case that I had a dozen clocks and you told me you had hit them all with a sledge hammer; now, if you told me you had lied, and gave me back the 12^th clock in perfect working order, I would value it a lot more for having thought I had lost it.

davew

On Thu, Mar 5, 2020, at 4:58 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> It's not pesky for me in the slightest. I'm *very* interested. I
> haven't contributed because it's not clear I have anything to
> contribute.
>
> Maybe I can start with a criticism, though. It's unclear to me why you
> (or anyone) would delicately flip through crumbling pages of
> philosophy when there are fresh and juicy results from
> (interventionist) methods right in front of us? The oxytocin post
> really *was* inspired by this thread. But because you guys are talking
> about dead white men like Peirce and James, it's unclear how the science relates.
>
> My skepticism goes even deeper (beyond dead white men) to why one
> would think *anyone* (alive, dead, white or brown) might be able to
> *think* up an explanation for how knowledge grows. I would like to,
> but cannot, avoid the inference that this belief anyone (or any
> "school" of people) can think up explanations stems from a bias toward
> *individualism*. My snarky poke at "super intelligent god-people" in a
> post awhile back was
> (misguidedly) intended to express this same skepticism. I worry that
> poking around in old philosophy is simply an artifact of the mythology
> surrounding the "mind" and Great Men
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory>.
>
> It seems to me like science works in *spite* of our biases to
> individualism. So, if I want to understand knowledge, I have to stop
> identifying ways of knowing through dead individuals and focus on the
> flowing *field* of the collective scientists.
>
> Of course, that doesn't mean we ignore the writings of the dead people.
> But it means liberally slashing away anything that even smells obsolete.
>
> Regardless of what you do post, don't interpret *my* lack of response
> as disinterest or irritation, because it's not.
>
> On 3/5/20 6:14 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> > And the key to my being a pest — is anyone else curious about these things?
>
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
> ============================================================
> 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
>

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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
============================================================
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

============================================================
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

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