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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Mar 15, 2018 - 12:35pm PT
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We need to place our attention on this or that at the exclusion of all else if we are to conduct close, discursive study.
I'd say, sometimes yes, sometimes no.
It seems to me we sometimes get the best insights into something (eg, a problem or solution) by shifting between and among a number of referential frames (e.g., categories or disciplines).
It seems to me there is a skill, otherwise art, to this kind of shifting (between framings). Another subject that could be introduced, imo, as early as junior high in public schooling.
...
For those who haven't followed the plot, they disagree on the dangers of AI, the conceptions relating to "free will", the scale of the dangers of terrorism and something else that's fundamental I think - that I cannot recall right now, lol.
Oh yes, the fourth was the role or value of "so-called" humanism in our lives (esp in the lives of those who embrace the materialistic scientific worldview).
Here's Harris recently in a dialog with Douglas Murray: "What is life good for? We have to individually and collectively solve that koan. I would completely grant you that atheism on its own, or secularism on its own, or even humanism on its own doesn't give you that."
Meanwhile, Pinker, in his latest book, cited humanism as one of the four principal components of the Enlightenment movement. (The others being reason, science and progress.)
In Pinker's work, humanism, in particular moral humanism, is cited as a set of principles; while in Harris' context above, I think he had in mind humanism more as a belief system or secular church.
I could identify (like Nature here at ST, I think) with the term secular humanist but I've never gone so far with it to consider secular humanism my overall belief system. In my view, it simply doesn't cover enough in interesting, inspiring ways; in other words, it's not engaging enough.
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Mar 15, 2018 - 01:00pm PT
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^^^Zanshin
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WBraun
climber
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Mar 15, 2018 - 01:02pm PT
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Fruitloops says; "Try imagining time."
Proves, without doubt, he's a mental speculator and a guesser, terrible scientist.
Can't do the experiment. Just guesses his way thru everything and waits for Sam Harris and Pinker to tell him how to think.
God IS Time an absolute fact .... kālo smi loka-ksaya-krt pravrddho (Time I am)
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Mar 15, 2018 - 01:21pm PT
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For once, I agree with this Fruity.
You have basically described the process of applied subjective adventures.
Contrary to what many believe, I am not anti-science or anti-discursive, and because I originally came from a Sufi background in terms of techniques, I view humankind as a largely if not almost entirely determined machine. Every effort to try and figure out what subjectivity IS, or what experience IS, or how perception works, involves the brain trying to reckon it's own vantage point from within that vantage point. What's going on is a Strange Loop, and the challenge is to become aware of being in one.
I won't go into this rabbit hole, but so far as I can tell and from what others have said in this regards, you have to simply sit in awareness (frame of reference) till by luck and accident the the difference between awareness and determined brain generated content is directly experienced. Basically, becoming aware of the matrix, or being caught in the Strange Loop. Then from there you change perspective and start reckoning what the hell just went on. Then you do it again, over and over till the tiny crack grows.
This toggling between reference points is the basis of the whole process.
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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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Mar 15, 2018 - 01:29pm PT
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Check out the changing demographic at the Harris Pinker conversation in LA last night.
Young people!!!!
Fake News. That is a Star Trek convention.
(4) The Star Trek universe as a referential frame lies outside the Christian universe as a referential frame.
See? You need to read between the lines.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Mar 15, 2018 - 06:12pm PT
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HFCS: HFCS: (1) Mars as a referential frame lies outside Earth as a referential frame.
(2) Your house as a referential frame lies outside my house as a referential frame.
(3) Algebra as a referential frame lies outside Latin as a referential frame.
(4) The Star Trek universe as a referential frame lies outside the Christian universe as a referential frame.
Narrow. Very narrow.
What lies outside of your frame of reference is that which you don’t understand. Try showing some empathy with that.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Mar 15, 2018 - 06:30pm PT
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Here’s a postmodern image that showed up when my satellite dish got interfered with this morning.
Note the multiple perspectives, the chopped messaging, the different talking heads, the partialities, the ghost-like presence of different images / perspectives about (apparently) the same issue. This is not unlike what’s going on all around us. We see, but what we see is incomplete and fragmented. We get a gist, but looked at closely, we question the gist. We can see that we’re constructing, projecting, forcing meaning.
The only way to get some clarification is to back-out of the context we think we’re in.
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Mar 15, 2018 - 07:50pm PT
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I view humankind as a largely if not almost entirely determined machine.
I'm sorry.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Mar 16, 2018 - 08:49am PT
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"I view humankind as a largely if not almost entirely determined machine..."
This is good, no?
Carl Sagan spoke of "our machinery of life", no? Biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, neuroscience - essentially everything under the hood - teach us about "our machinery of life" that ultimately confers our physiological functions, homeostasis and behavior, no?
Equipped with this modern understanding (as opposed to 2,000 year old understanding) - are there adjustments to make in living and thinking relatively to how our ancestors lived and thought. Yes of course. But it's worth it, no?
Study Pinker's book, Enlightenment Now. Study history. The past wasn't always the good old days.
As Pinker emphasized in his EN again and again, entropy (evolution's side kick) and not Satan and Original Sin (old school) is fundamentally why sh#t happens and things fall down. Yet currently what fraction of the American public, say, could give you a correct explanation of what entropy is (with supporting detail)? What fraction do you think? I venture a guess: less than 15%. So there is much room still for growtn in wisdom at the hands of educators. Therein, apart from all the progress already made, lies the hope.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Mar 16, 2018 - 09:19am PT
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Per determined machines, the fact is, you're not going to change the way the brain churns out content and fashions the world around us. The trick is to change our relationship to it. Problem is, any effort to do so is simply the brain trying to change itself, and that leads into the rabbit hole.
At the Robbins Memorial last week I was talking with Ed about this and he mentioned the idea of abiding with the machine till the machine broke. IME, what happens is that our enmeshment to the machine (the ultimate map maker) is what breaks, but we cannot direct this process, we can only be still and present as we slowly become aware and awaken to living in a map, or brain generated interpretation of our life.
Learning how to intake life below the level of language is key here, otherwise all we really see is the map, the interpretation. But any attempt to try and do so is doomed to stall out, probably sooner than later. This is "tricky" only insofar as you are trying to direct the process and get an outcome.
So there is no specific technique to roust our way out of the matrix, so to speak, only methods that set the table for it to happen on its own. But there are exercises that seem to move us along. The most universal is to simply observe "our" (figuratively speaking) assumption that there is an entity called "me" or "I" to which reality (every damn thing, both subjective and objective) happens, the experiencer of experience, the imagined focal point or "self" in which reality converges in consciousness.
No one has ever been able to find "it."
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WBraun
climber
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Mar 16, 2018 - 09:30am PT
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change ... our .... relationship .... to .... it (brain)
Saying our .... is saying one is independent of the material brain.
Thus "I" the individual, the operator of the material organic machine is not the brain, mind or the body.
Yet the gross materialists spend all their time studying the material body machine and not the operator of the machine due to their poor fund of knowledge of life itself.
The foolish logic of the gross materialist when their car dies they think they themselves are dead ......
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Mar 16, 2018 - 09:32am PT
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Saying our .... is saying one is independent of the material brain.
...figuratively speaking, WB.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Mar 16, 2018 - 11:32am PT
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We're not "just" biologic machines but much much much more...
Find someone to hug you the way Steven Pinker hugs Sam Harris!
:)
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Mar 16, 2018 - 02:28pm PT
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Thanks, Mark.
The Harris Pinker meet-up, as you can see, wasn't your typical... atheist meeting...
or secular humanist meeting...
Times are changing!
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Mar 16, 2018 - 03:53pm PT
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Krauss is a brilliant theoretical physicist. If you don’t believe me, just ask him.
The notion that someone skilled at calculations and taking a big view is automatically fluent in the rest of life is the earmark of an ignoramus. I used to hold up meditation masters in much the same way till, on occasion, I saw the drunkenness, arrogance, sex addict sides of "famous" folk and realized it's all humans on this bus, and a percentage in all fields are creeps, liars and cranks.
As I was saying earlier, the approach to take is "principals above personalities." That means you never personalize the behavior of the next "genius," take what you want and leave the rest, never letting the person's personality stop you from gleaning valuable stuff. Feynman was notorious for hanging out in strip clubs, but look at all the interesting material he covered.
Not to let Krauss off the hook ...
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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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Mar 16, 2018 - 04:54pm PT
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Ah yes, the cult of personality.
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Mar 16, 2018 - 05:15pm PT
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Feynman was just appreciating and deepening his understanding of the summary dance of particle physics...
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Mar 16, 2018 - 05:33pm PT
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"As I was saying earlier, the approach to take is "principals above personalities." That means you never personalize the behavior of the next "genius," take what you want and leave the rest, never letting the person's personality stop you from gleaning valuable stuff."
Yes, my term for this is... ad ideam (cf: ad hominem)... to the idea.
...
https://xkcd.com/1968/
"I'm often compared to Jordan Peterson - Canadian psychologist, Harvard prof, P in-C, takes evolution seriously - but our styles and philosophies couldn't be more different. We'll explore them in a dialogue at some point soon." - Steven Pinker
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