All hail confirmation bias!

[David Eric Smith]

Hi Steve,

I agree with what you say below, and had a similar reaction to reading Ortega.  From today’s perspective and my own scientific experience set, it would rarely seem natural to me to think of a complex human function as a novel and irreducible thing.  We can see so many areas of cognition develop as accretions along the sequence versebrate/mammal/primate/human, with sometimes re-organizations at various partitionings.  Also as you say, if we didn’t want to somehow bound the problem at things that are cognitive in the fast/neurological sense, the nesting of response phenomena could be pushed almost arbitrarily far back.

Glen’s ponts about the many problems of my ad hoc “painted window” metaphor are also points I entirely agree with.  As someone who likes and frequently recommends the Conant and Ashby control-theorist’s way of talking about implicit models in control loops, I very much like the project of understanding how much freedom there is for model representations.


If Ortega had been writing today rather than in the early decades of the 20th century, and if he had been a professional cognitive scientist at least in greater admixture with being a political philosopher and (maybe somewhat) historian, I wonder in how far he would have needed a different argument structure.  He seems to me clearly an advocate of reason, so I don’t think he would have rejected any of these things that we now know.

At the same time, any time I pick up a a new person and try to listen to him, I am aware that all good writing is done to a purpose, and the need to be finite (preferably short) makes all such constructions unsatisfactory in important ways.  To other purposes, a writer of the same logical style as Ortega may (probably would) not have wanted to draw a dividing line between man:builder-of-stories and the rest of the animals. I assume Ortega’s purpose is to get somewhere near the center of a characterization that makes self-destructive and world-destructive behavior comprehensible and thus something we can try to find ways to deal with.  The characterization of such behavior as “irrational”, while always available based on what one chooses to cast as rationality, may not be particularly helpful in finding remedies.  That frame is closer to the common-behavior way we always wrap a narrative around conflicts, lecturing (in our own minds) the people we are in conflict with about why what they are doing is bad and we would never want to do that, and don’t want them to do it.  One can say “good people should try to be rational; you are being irrational and I don’t see how any person could be good and could choose to behave as you are”.  Well, okay, but then what?  I assume Ortega is trying to put forward a frame that offers a “then what”.  From my short reading of commentary, I think he has a whole philosophy around these things, which is developed across several books.  But I am hopelessly far from following up the rest of it.

Take care,

Eric

> On Jul 29, 2019, at 12:56 PM, Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Eric -
>
> Great weigh-in as usual!
>
>> Since in every “now” there is a need to navigate some choice of what
>> to do, and since the experience of each now is constantly being
>> superseded by the following now, the need to be constantly
>> constructing an experiential edifice is the relentless driver of human
>> nature and behavior.  The awareness that there is such an edifice, and
>> that it is something constructed, seems very close to Husserl’s
>> arguments that (in my language) we think of experience as a
>> transparent window through which we passively receive a reality, but
>> it is more like a painted surface on which we are constructing things
>> we believe to be co-registered with something outside the window.  The
>> assertion that we can only look at our own painting, and that it is
>> our nature to be unable to see it as our own painting, because to
>> function we need to use it as a transparent thing seen “through”, are
>> I think Husserl’s conception of what “experience” (or Experience) is
>> distinct from some list of “propositions that are true”.  These
>> frameworks of experience, as a system from which one can extract
>> choices, seem to be what Ortega is calling “the World” for each of us,
>> or in a zeitgeist carried by a generation.
>
> I appreciate the subtlety and thoroughness of this description but want
> to seek some parallax between the experience of "homo sapiens" and any
> other perceiving consciousness.   I do believe that humans (and perhaps
> other species like cetaceans and elephants and apes) have a significant
> self-awareness *capability* which helps us stand somewhat apart from the
> other creatures (including plants, micorbiota, etc.).   We *can* know
> something of *how we think we know what we know* and even have a sense
> of *knowing that there are things we don't know* up to and including the
> stunning incompleteness of formal systems as exposed by Kurt Godel.
>
> Life itself (consciousness) seems to be a self-organized collection of
> coherence-maintaining, gradient-seeking self-perpetuating subunits.  
> Each subunit (whether it be individual organism, colony, tribe, culture,
> species, etc.) seems to have as it's main (only?) tactic a skill at
> predicting it's environment as a phase space of relevant qualities...
> sense organs, hormonal/endocrinal systems, appetites, desires, hopes,
> fears, dreams, stories, disciplines of knowledge, religions, all seem to
> be artifacts contrived to support effective prediction of the subunits
> trajectory.    To the extent that the only sure thing (besides taxes) in
> life is death, all these trajectories ultimately terminate in the
> decoherence of the individual, whether that be you or me, the mosquito I
> just smooshed on my arm, the multi-element organism that is the aspen
> grove on the side of the mountain or the Roman (or US) Empire, the
> project is a failure.  On the other hand, these multiple trajectories
> are perhaps illusory (at least in their distinctness) and join together
> in a piecewise plurality of trajectories...  which when admitting the
> smallest/simplest (dancing quarks?) to the largest, most complex
> (supergalactic clusters?) into this description, becomes "the World".
> Yet each subsystem with a "map of the world" embedded in itself (e.g.
> somewhere among the state-space of the 302 nerve-cell system of C.
> Elegans or the ~40,000 cells dancing biochemically within a tardigrade).  
>
> We watch other species make what appear to be devastatingly bad
> decisions for themselves (as individuals or groups... like lemmings, or
> suicidal drone-bees, or beaching pilot whale pods) but with enough
> introspection and study can usually discover how these "bad decisions"
> are "adaptive" at *some level*.  
>
> Of course "we humans" seem more psychotic than most with our incessant
> warfare and polluting/collapsing our local (now unto global) ecosystems,
> etc.  To whatever extent we are "the first of our kind" it seems very
> optimistic to imagine that we are likely to "get it right" the first
> time.   How many "living fossils" were "the first of their kind"?   Were
> they more likely all but a fluke side-shoot of a "good idea turned bad"
> which happened to find/maintain a niche for itself in the larger milieu?
>
>
>>  I find the discussion interesting because I see it as an effort to
>> give a concept decomposition to dimensions of cognition or awareness.
>>  Even If being unaware of Experience in this sense is not an important
>> source of error, we seem to have little concept system to discuss
>> empirically what the aware state “is”, and I wonder if the thing
>> Husserl and Ortega are after goes part of the way to supplying one
>> relevant such concept.
>
> Very fascinatingly packed set of observations... I hope there is more
> conversation here to try to help me unpack it more.
>
> - Steve
>
>
>
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[David Eric Smith]

Hi Nick,

Yes, agreed.  I won’t lard, but will try to flag a couple of points (and to stay brief…)

[NST==>”should chose to throw it away”:  This sentence chilled my heart as no sentence has done in a very long time.  We are in an age, now, when we are choosing to throw the enlightenment away.  There must be a thousand books on the origins of the enlightenment; how many are there on the origins of its jettisoning.  Don’t we need to be reading them urgently? <==nst] 

Maybe 20 years ago, Walter Fontana first recommended this book to me as one that had influenced his thinking, and that he saw coming back into currency today.  Maybe 20 years ago one needed some subtlety to be sensitive to the similitude (though Philip K. Dick did it pretty good job all the way back in the 1960s), but today the echos are deafening.

Two related comments together:

[NST==>This works, but I am having a little trouble with distinguishing it from what you wrote above, which seemed also to work.  <==nst] 

[NST==>But doesn’t it make a difference if those choices turn out well for us, and doesn’t that take us back to what you wrote above? <==nst] 

I think the distinction is between what criteria for truth the contents of the system may or may not meet, versus what kind of entity the system “is”, as a thing we try to empirically characterize, comprehend, and figure out how to manage.  This is where I see the main concerns of the pragmatists (better, the pragmaticists, as Pierce tried to protect a name for his original construction from James and later such complete philistines of instrumentalism as Rorty) as being somewhat different from the main concerns of the phenomenologists.  The latter seem to me to have a more explicit overlap with empirical psychology, while the former seem more concerned with an analysis of what scientific method is or could be as a next edifice in human behavior and society.  (Of course, both are philosophers and want to deal with the “real” or the “true”; my previous statements only address the senses in which they overlap with more modest domains I feel I can comment on.)

I think Ortega is trying to start the book by saying “Don’t put too much stock in your belief that it _should_ `make a difference if those choices turn out well' or badly”.  We can see that choices many people will agree are bad after the fact are still made — sometimes on large scale and with great commitment — by the same people beforehand.  And never forget that many nazis were unreformed at the end of the second world war in the defeat of Germany.  Therefore first try to get a correct causation of why the things that we see happening do happen.  We can always come back afterward to how that causation relates to our prior beliefs about what should matter.

The proof of all these puddings, however, is always in the eating.  Can we do anything with this that steers the world back from the cliff, if we have read it?

All best,

Eric

On Jul 29, 2019, at 10:35 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

As often, I am overwhelmed by what you write.  Makes me wish I were younger.  Still, I was able to muster a couple of “lardings” below: 

 

nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Monday, July 29, 2019 6:16 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!

 

Hi Nick,

 

The part of the book that prompted me to forward it to the list was most of the first 3 (short) chapters.

 

I think there are two parallel discourses going on, which are not about the same thing, and which probably are not incompatible, but which also may not be part of a cognitively unified sense of understanding.

 

One thread concerns the choice or construction of whatever specifics we wish to regard as “true”, and what we take to be the source of confidence in those choices.  For Pierce’s characterization of scientific method, inter-subjective observation and stress-testing, etc., as the distillation of the better parts of common empirical practice, all of what you say in your later paragraph is stuff I agree with and think is correct.

[NST==>So, the question is, what are the cues in experience for experiences that are likely to endure.  <==nst] 

 

The other thread, which is where I think Ortega is writing, is closer to the phenomenologists, as represented (to the extent that I understand the approach) in Husserl.  In the early chapters, to set up a system for understanding why countries that had undergone the enlightenment would choose to throw it away, 

[NST==>”should chose to throw it away”:  This sentence chilled my heart as no sentence has done in a very long time.  We are in an age, now, when we are choosing to throw the enlightenment away.  There must be a thousand books on the origins of the enlightenment; how many are there on the origins of its jettisoning.  Don’t we need to be reading them urgently? <==nst] 

Ortega argues that the Homo sapiens characterization of man is slightly off the point.  For his purposes, man is not all that good at knowing very much, nor is the knowing the most central thing that sets him apart.  Instead, Ortega argues, a better starting point in thinking about what humans are is the relentless need to construct a domain of experience that gives guidance in what to do next.  Since in every “now” there is a need to navigate some choice of what to do, and since the experience of each now is constantly being superseded by the following now, the need to be constantly constructing an experiential edifice is the relentless driver of human nature and behavior. 

[NST==>This works, but I am having a little trouble with distinguishing it from what you wrote above, which seemed also to work.  <==nst] 

 The awareness that there is such an edifice, and that it is something constructed, seems very close to Husserl’s arguments that (in my language) we think of experience as a transparent window through which we passively receive a reality, but it is more like a painted surface on which we are constructing things we believe to be co-registered with something outside the window.  The assertion that we can only look at our own painting, and that it is our nature to be unable to see it as our own painting, because to function we need to use it as a transparent thing seen “through”, are I think Husserl’s conception of what “experience” (or Experience) is distinct from some list of “propositions that are true”.  These frameworks of experience, as a system from which one can extract choices, seem to be what Ortega is calling “the World” for each of us, or in a zeitgeist carried by a generation.

[NST==>But doesn’t it make a difference if those choices turn out well for us, and doesn’t that take us back to what you wrote above? <==nst] 

 

I am taking my characterization of Husserl’s position at second hand from people who have put in time with him that I have not, but I think he argues that for Experience, in this formal sense, to occupy a place outside awareness and to not be recognized as its own thing in our thought system, is a source of distortion or potential inconsistency.  I don’t know in how far that is true, since I don’t think Husserl, or Ortega, or anybody modern, has an important objection to the Piercian system for choosing which things to label “true” about empirical matters.  I find the discussion interesting because I see it as an effort to give a concept decomposition to dimensions of cognition or awareness.  Even If being unaware of Experience in this sense is not an important source of error, we seem to have little concept system to discuss empirically what the aware state “is”, and I wonder if the thing Husserl and Ortega are after goes part of the way to supplying one relevant such concept.

 

This is not my day job, and thank god for that, so all of the above is “grain of salt” commentary.  Fortunately, the books exist as things-in-themselves, and anybody can start fresh with them.

[NST==>Thanks, Eric, for taking a shot at it.  I see all these positions as groping toward an experience-monism of some sort, and that seems the only kind of position that makes any damned sense at all. <==nst] 

 

Best,

 

Eric

 

 

 

On Jul 29, 2019, at 12:00 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Eric, 

 

Can you direct me to any particular passages or chapters in the book?   I am unlikely to read the whole thing, but I want to know your thought. 

 

I rummaged around in the Books.google site for a bit and found this: 

 

<image002.jpg>

 

If so, I don’t think I was saying anything this profound.  I was just trying to get in on the ground floor of the “skepticaller-than-thou” battle I saw developing.  

 

There are either, or there are not, consistencies in our experiences, in my experiences, in your experiences, and in those we represent to one another.  If there are not, then we have nothing to talk about, and all talk is meaningless.  If there are,  If somebody cares to call these, the world, then all power to them.  To announce that something is “the world” or “the real” or “true” or “exists outside experience” is only to announce that someday the speaker believes people will come to agree on it, the way we have come to agree on so many things in the last 300 years of science.  If we share that belief, that’s one heluva heuristic, and it is the heuristic that makes science possible, but it is, after all, only a heuristic.  I deplore a skepticism that drinks only 9/10ths of the potent, and then puts the glass down, burps, and walks away with a smug look on its face.

 

Nick  

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Sunday, July 28, 2019 5:19 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!

 

I think Ortega y Gasset had things to say about that in Man and Crisis.

 

I haven’t read enough to know yet whether I think his take is important.  But it would be hard to find someone who picked up the question in terms more identical to those that Nick uses below to frame it.

 

Eric

 

 

 

> On Jul 28, 2019, at 3:23 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

> 

> While we're getting rid of concepts, let's just get rid of this foolish, unsubstantiated concept, "the world."  What sort of heuristic is THAT? 

> 

> N

> 

> Nicholas S. Thompson

> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University 

> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

> 

> -----Original Message-----

> From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A 

> Smith

> Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2019 11:41 AM

> To: [hidden email]

> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!

> 

> I KNEW that confirmation bias was a problem and NOW this confirms it!

> 

> I TOLEYA!

> 

> On 4/24/19 5:25 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:

>> Our World Isn't Organized into Levels 

>> https://philpapers.org/rec/POTOWI?ref=mail

>> 

>>> In my view, our adherence to the levels concept in the face of the 

>>> systematic problems plaguing it amounts to a failure to recognize 

>>> structure we’re imposing on the world, to instead mistake this as 

>>> structure we are reading off the world. Attachment to the concept of 

>>> levels of organization has, I think, contributed to underestimation 

>>> of the complexity and variability of our world, including the 

>>> significance of causal interaction across scales. This has also 

>>> inhibited our ability to see limitations to our heuristic and to 

>>> imagine other contrasting heuristics, heuristics that may bear more 

>>> in common with what our world turns out to actually be like. Let’s 

>>> at least entertain the possibility that the invocation of levels can mislead scientific and philosophical investigations more than it informs them. I suggest that the onus is on advocates of levels of organization to demonstrate the well-foundedness and usefulness of this concept.

> 

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

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> 

> 

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Frank Wimberly-2]

I mentioned that this discussion depresses me.  I felt obligated to think about why.  It has to do with banal, quotidian, personal matters.  Policies that I have developed based on beliefs held for decades no longer seem to work.  That is, they no longer serve to make me "happy".  I'm thinking of stupid things like what to do while driving or eating breakfast.  Or interacting with children (I have five grandchildren).  

I read Ortega y Gasset in fragments when I was taking Spanish classes in highschool and college.  But I don't recall being particularly impacted.  

Some of the "policies" are probably best understood as OCD symptoms but not ridiculous ones like those that involve magical thinking.  It's just that things that used to work no longer do.  The world is changing.  This all may have to do with reaching old age.  Someone suggested that my acquiring a Porsche was a sign of a midlife crisis.  I said that it was more like an end-of-life crisis.  Not that I expect to expire in the near future.  The Posche doesn't charm me the way it would have years ago.

Anyway, time for tennis...

On Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 4:01 AM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Nick,

Yes, agreed.  I won’t lard, but will try to flag a couple of points (and to stay brief…)

[NST==>”should chose to throw it away”:  This sentence chilled my heart as no sentence has done in a very long time.  We are in an age, now, when we are choosing to throw the enlightenment away.  There must be a thousand books on the origins of the enlightenment; how many are there on the origins of its jettisoning.  Don’t we need to be reading them urgently? <==nst] 

Maybe 20 years ago, Walter Fontana first recommended this book to me as one that had influenced his thinking, and that he saw coming back into currency today.  Maybe 20 years ago one needed some subtlety to be sensitive to the similitude (though Philip K. Dick did it pretty good job all the way back in the 1960s), but today the echos are deafening.

Two related comments together:

[NST==>This works, but I am having a little trouble with distinguishing it from what you wrote above, which seemed also to work.  <==nst] 

[NST==>But doesn’t it make a difference if those choices turn out well for us, and doesn’t that take us back to what you wrote above? <==nst] 

I think the distinction is between what criteria for truth the contents of the system may or may not meet, versus what kind of entity the system “is”, as a thing we try to empirically characterize, comprehend, and figure out how to manage.  This is where I see the main concerns of the pragmatists (better, the pragmaticists, as Pierce tried to protect a name for his original construction from James and later such complete philistines of instrumentalism as Rorty) as being somewhat different from the main concerns of the phenomenologists.  The latter seem to me to have a more explicit overlap with empirical psychology, while the former seem more concerned with an analysis of what scientific method is or could be as a next edifice in human behavior and society.  (Of course, both are philosophers and want to deal with the “real” or the “true”; my previous statements only address the senses in which they overlap with more modest domains I feel I can comment on.)

I think Ortega is trying to start the book by saying “Don’t put too much stock in your belief that it _should_ `make a difference if those choices turn out well' or badly”.  We can see that choices many people will agree are bad after the fact are still made — sometimes on large scale and with great commitment — by the same people beforehand.  And never forget that many nazis were unreformed at the end of the second world war in the defeat of Germany.  Therefore first try to get a correct causation of why the things that we see happening do happen.  We can always come back afterward to how that causation relates to our prior beliefs about what should matter.

The proof of all these puddings, however, is always in the eating.  Can we do anything with this that steers the world back from the cliff, if we have read it?

All best,

Eric

On Jul 29, 2019, at 10:35 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

As often, I am overwhelmed by what you write.  Makes me wish I were younger.  Still, I was able to muster a couple of “lardings” below: 

 

nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Monday, July 29, 2019 6:16 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!

 

Hi Nick,

 

The part of the book that prompted me to forward it to the list was most of the first 3 (short) chapters.

 

I think there are two parallel discourses going on, which are not about the same thing, and which probably are not incompatible, but which also may not be part of a cognitively unified sense of understanding.

 

One thread concerns the choice or construction of whatever specifics we wish to regard as “true”, and what we take to be the source of confidence in those choices.  For Pierce’s characterization of scientific method, inter-subjective observation and stress-testing, etc., as the distillation of the better parts of common empirical practice, all of what you say in your later paragraph is stuff I agree with and think is correct.

[NST==>So, the question is, what are the cues in experience for experiences that are likely to endure.  <==nst] 

 

The other thread, which is where I think Ortega is writing, is closer to the phenomenologists, as represented (to the extent that I understand the approach) in Husserl.  In the early chapters, to set up a system for understanding why countries that had undergone the enlightenment would choose to throw it away, 

[NST==>”should chose to throw it away”:  This sentence chilled my heart as no sentence has done in a very long time.  We are in an age, now, when we are choosing to throw the enlightenment away.  There must be a thousand books on the origins of the enlightenment; how many are there on the origins of its jettisoning.  Don’t we need to be reading them urgently? <==nst] 

Ortega argues that the Homo sapiens characterization of man is slightly off the point.  For his purposes, man is not all that good at knowing very much, nor is the knowing the most central thing that sets him apart.  Instead, Ortega argues, a better starting point in thinking about what humans are is the relentless need to construct a domain of experience that gives guidance in what to do next.  Since in every “now” there is a need to navigate some choice of what to do, and since the experience of each now is constantly being superseded by the following now, the need to be constantly constructing an experiential edifice is the relentless driver of human nature and behavior. 

[NST==>This works, but I am having a little trouble with distinguishing it from what you wrote above, which seemed also to work.  <==nst] 

 The awareness that there is such an edifice, and that it is something constructed, seems very close to Husserl’s arguments that (in my language) we think of experience as a transparent window through which we passively receive a reality, but it is more like a painted surface on which we are constructing things we believe to be co-registered with something outside the window.  The assertion that we can only look at our own painting, and that it is our nature to be unable to see it as our own painting, because to function we need to use it as a transparent thing seen “through”, are I think Husserl’s conception of what “experience” (or Experience) is distinct from some list of “propositions that are true”.  These frameworks of experience, as a system from which one can extract choices, seem to be what Ortega is calling “the World” for each of us, or in a zeitgeist carried by a generation.

[NST==>But doesn’t it make a difference if those choices turn out well for us, and doesn’t that take us back to what you wrote above? <==nst] 

 

I am taking my characterization of Husserl’s position at second hand from people who have put in time with him that I have not, but I think he argues that for Experience, in this formal sense, to occupy a place outside awareness and to not be recognized as its own thing in our thought system, is a source of distortion or potential inconsistency.  I don’t know in how far that is true, since I don’t think Husserl, or Ortega, or anybody modern, has an important objection to the Piercian system for choosing which things to label “true” about empirical matters.  I find the discussion interesting because I see it as an effort to give a concept decomposition to dimensions of cognition or awareness.  Even If being unaware of Experience in this sense is not an important source of error, we seem to have little concept system to discuss empirically what the aware state “is”, and I wonder if the thing Husserl and Ortega are after goes part of the way to supplying one relevant such concept.

 

This is not my day job, and thank god for that, so all of the above is “grain of salt” commentary.  Fortunately, the books exist as things-in-themselves, and anybody can start fresh with them.

[NST==>Thanks, Eric, for taking a shot at it.  I see all these positions as groping toward an experience-monism of some sort, and that seems the only kind of position that makes any damned sense at all. <==nst] 

 

Best,

 

Eric

 

 

 

On Jul 29, 2019, at 12:00 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Eric, 

 

Can you direct me to any particular passages or chapters in the book?   I am unlikely to read the whole thing, but I want to know your thought. 

 

I rummaged around in the Books.google site for a bit and found this: 

 

<image002.jpg>

 

If so, I don’t think I was saying anything this profound.  I was just trying to get in on the ground floor of the “skepticaller-than-thou” battle I saw developing.  

 

There are either, or there are not, consistencies in our experiences, in my experiences, in your experiences, and in those we represent to one another.  If there are not, then we have nothing to talk about, and all talk is meaningless.  If there are,  If somebody cares to call these, the world, then all power to them.  To announce that something is “the world” or “the real” or “true” or “exists outside experience” is only to announce that someday the speaker believes people will come to agree on it, the way we have come to agree on so many things in the last 300 years of science.  If we share that belief, that’s one heluva heuristic, and it is the heuristic that makes science possible, but it is, after all, only a heuristic.  I deplore a skepticism that drinks only 9/10ths of the potent, and then puts the glass down, burps, and walks away with a smug look on its face.

 

Nick  

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Sunday, July 28, 2019 5:19 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!

 

I think Ortega y Gasset had things to say about that in Man and Crisis.

 

I haven’t read enough to know yet whether I think his take is important.  But it would be hard to find someone who picked up the question in terms more identical to those that Nick uses below to frame it.

 

Eric

 

 

 

> On Jul 28, 2019, at 3:23 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

> 

> While we're getting rid of concepts, let's just get rid of this foolish, unsubstantiated concept, "the world."  What sort of heuristic is THAT? 

> 

> N

> 

> Nicholas S. Thompson

> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University 

> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

> 

> -----Original Message-----

> From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A 

> Smith

> Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2019 11:41 AM

> To: [hidden email]

> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!

> 

> I KNEW that confirmation bias was a problem and NOW this confirms it!

> 

> I TOLEYA!

> 

> On 4/24/19 5:25 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:

>> Our World Isn't Organized into Levels 

>> https://philpapers.org/rec/POTOWI?ref=mail

>> 

>>> In my view, our adherence to the levels concept in the face of the 

>>> systematic problems plaguing it amounts to a failure to recognize 

>>> structure we’re imposing on the world, to instead mistake this as 

>>> structure we are reading off the world. Attachment to the concept of 

>>> levels of organization has, I think, contributed to underestimation 

>>> of the complexity and variability of our world, including the 

>>> significance of causal interaction across scales. This has also 

>>> inhibited our ability to see limitations to our heuristic and to 

>>> imagine other contrasting heuristics, heuristics that may bear more 

>>> in common with what our world turns out to actually be like. Let’s 

>>> at least entertain the possibility that the invocation of levels can mislead scientific and philosophical investigations more than it informs them. I suggest that the onus is on advocates of levels of organization to demonstrate the well-foundedness and usefulness of this concept.

> 

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[gepr]

Steve and I discussed some of this sort of thing awhile back. I argued that the loss of both individual and collective plasticity over time might be the core selection criterion.  In times of fat diversity in the environment, it's helpful to have diverse and tightly coupled estimators (thanks to Eric for bringing up Ashby again). Like a broken record, I tend to support both recreational and therapeutic uses of plasticity-increasing behaviors.

Then again, I just engaged in an argument between me, a Brexiteer, and a Remainer about the benefits of the inertia-preserving EU in times of high environmental stresses (like climate-driven migration). I see Brexit as a plasticitiy-increasing move. Yes, it will allow the UK more degrees of freedom to succeed or fail. But it also (further) opens the UK, Europe and the whole world to more bad behavior (like autocracy, organized crime, human trafficking, etc.).

On a personal level, when we crack apart our fossilized policies and habits, we run the risk of going downhill quickly ... which is kinda-sorta what I've done since my cancer therapy. Luckily, I never had any sense that my policies and habits "worked" in the first place. I've always felt like a wisp experiencing whatever, at the mercy of my surroundings.

On 7/30/19 6:38 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> I mentioned that this discussion depresses me.  I felt obligated to think about why.  It has to do with banal, quotidian, personal matters.  Policies that I have developed based on beliefs held for decades no longer seem to work.  That is, they no longer serve to make me "happy".  I'm thinking of stupid things like what to do while driving or eating breakfast.  Or interacting with children (I have five grandchildren).
>
> I read Ortega y Gasset in fragments when I was taking Spanish classes in highschool and college.  But I don't recall being particularly impacted.
>
> Some of the "policies" are probably best understood as OCD symptoms but not ridiculous ones like those that involve magical thinking.  It's just that things that used to work no longer do.  The world is changing.  This all may have to do with reaching old age.  Someone suggested that my acquiring a Porsche was a sign of a midlife crisis.  I said that it was more like an end-of-life crisis.  Not that I expect to expire in the near future.  The Posche doesn't charm me the way it would have years ago.


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[Frank Wimberly-2]

Thanks, Glen.  Maybe, with age, the denial of being a wisp becomes less effective.

On Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 11:34 PM glen∈ℂ <[hidden email]> wrote:

Steve and I discussed some of this sort of thing awhile back. I argued that the loss of both individual and collective plasticity over time might be the core selection criterion.  In times of fat diversity in the environment, it's helpful to have diverse and tightly coupled estimators (thanks to Eric for bringing up Ashby again). Like a broken record, I tend to support both recreational and therapeutic uses of plasticity-increasing behaviors.

Then again, I just engaged in an argument between me, a Brexiteer, and a Remainer about the benefits of the inertia-preserving EU in times of high environmental stresses (like climate-driven migration). I see Brexit as a plasticitiy-increasing move. Yes, it will allow the UK more degrees of freedom to succeed or fail. But it also (further) opens the UK, Europe and the whole world to more bad behavior (like autocracy, organized crime, human trafficking, etc.).

On a personal level, when we crack apart our fossilized policies and habits, we run the risk of going downhill quickly ... which is kinda-sorta what I've done since my cancer therapy. Luckily, I never had any sense that my policies and habits "worked" in the first place. I've always felt like a wisp experiencing whatever, at the mercy of my surroundings.

On 7/30/19 6:38 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> I mentioned that this discussion depresses me.  I felt obligated to think about why.  It has to do with banal, quotidian, personal matters.  Policies that I have developed based on beliefs held for decades no longer seem to work.  That is, they no longer serve to make me "happy".  I'm thinking of stupid things like what to do while driving or eating breakfast.  Or interacting with children (I have five grandchildren).
>
> I read Ortega y Gasset in fragments when I was taking Spanish classes in highschool and college.  But I don't recall being particularly impacted.
>
> Some of the "policies" are probably best understood as OCD symptoms but not ridiculous ones like those that involve magical thinking.  It's just that things that used to work no longer do.  The world is changing.  This all may have to do with reaching old age.  Someone suggested that my acquiring a Porsche was a sign of a midlife crisis.  I said that it was more like an end-of-life crisis.  Not that I expect to expire in the near future.  The Posche doesn't charm me the way it would have years ago.


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