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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Feb 14, 2018 - 02:42pm PT
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Hey Norton, you're missed in these parts!
We sure miss Obama, too, don't we? his oratory, thoughtfulness, integrity and style above all, I think. Such a class act.
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"Though the urge to join a violent insurgent or terrorist group may owe more to male bonding than to just-war theory, most of the combatants probably believe that if they want to bring about a better world, they have no choice but to kill people." -Pinker
"The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, self-refuting relativism, and suffocating political correctness. Many of its luminaries — Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, the Critical Theorists — are morose cultural pessimists who declare that modernity is odious, all statements are paradoxical, works of art are tools of oppression, liberal democracy is the same as fascism, and Western civilization is circling the drain." -Pinker
"A consilience with science offers the humanities many possibilities for new insight." -Pinker
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"The esteemed Prof. Pinker wants us to beware those who speak of 'scientism', then proceeds to show us exactly why that term was coined. Data, data, data! Data all the time, that's what will fix it!" -Commenter :)
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sempervirens
climber
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Feb 14, 2018 - 04:43pm PT
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The challenge is to nurture an appreciation for the fact that life is more than an exercise in data collection and processing, killing the silly fiction that if we only got the facts right, harmony, peace, wisdom and good tidings will be forthcoming
By all means, yes, kill that silly fiction. "Harmony, peace, wisdom and good tidings will be forthcoming", that's more like religion than it is like science. So if we're gonna kill fictions well... there are a few more popular fictions we can consider...
What it is to be human is so much more than mechanics, algorithms and data.
Agreed. Science is also much more than mechanics, algorithms, and data.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Feb 14, 2018 - 05:03pm PT
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"Resisters to scientific thinking often object that some things just can’t be quantified. Yet unless they are willing to speak only of issues that are black or white and to forswear using the words more, less, better, and worse (and, for that matter, the suffix -er), they are making claims that are inherently quantitative. If they veto the possibility of putting numbers to those claims, they are saying, "Trust my intuition." But if there’s one thing we know about cognition, it’s that people (including experts) are arrogantly overconfident about their intuition." -Pinker
Logically incoherent, and full of half truths and assumptions, to say nothing about all-or-nothing thinking, known in psychology as a "thought distortion."
The first and most glaring one is that presenting facts about phenomenon that cannot be quantified automatically makes one a "resister to scientific thinking." Not even. It also assumes that quantifying and "knowing" are selfsame. No cigar on that one either.
What's more, discussing the phenomenon of mind sans figures is not necessarily a matter of "making claims."
Take the simple experience of drinking a Coke. We can try and put a number to the taste of it per good or bad or stale or sparkling (all subjective terms), but this is hardly the same as measuring a book shelf or an atom.
The other thing is that Poor Pinker is looking at experience in terms of cognition, or evaluating things, whereas this is just the surface layer of mind studies, which sink below the content of experience, and start boring into perception itself, above and beyond WHAT we are perceiving.
Poor Pinker suffers from literalism. Nuanced thinker? Not so much...
Go figure, Pinker.
And this: "Science is also much more than mechanics, algorithms, and data."
Tell us more...
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sempervirens
climber
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Feb 14, 2018 - 05:32pm PT
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Well how 'bout exploration and discovery. What if some things could not be measured and quantified with current technology but can still be observed. The subjective effervescence of that coke might not be quantifiable but we can observe it some ways.
What if the periodic chart were developed before all the elements were even discovered and known to science, and yet some scientist predicted periodicity. That is pretty f*#king cool 'cause he couldn't measure the undiscovered elements but he thought they exist.
We cannot measure infinity. But we can go out into space to see what is there and measure how far we've gone even though we can't find its end. Later, with new technology, maybe we'll go further.
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WBraun
climber
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Feb 14, 2018 - 05:51pm PT
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We cannot measure infinity.
One can experience it immediately using the correct scientific method.
The modern brainwashed fools need to measure everything.
No wonder they are so clueless .....
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sempervirens
climber
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Feb 14, 2018 - 07:39pm PT
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One can experience it immediately using the correct scientific method.
The modern brainwashed fools need to measure everything.
Werner, Maybe you've misunderstood. I did not say we need to measure it. Experience it however you like. Fine. I was asked to tell about why science is more than "mechanics, data, and algorithms". Try to keep up, will ya.
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WBraun
climber
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Feb 14, 2018 - 07:45pm PT
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We cannot measure infinity.
There are 4 words in that statement.
I commented on those 4 words alone.
My comment had nothing to do with YOU personally.
Try and keep up, please .......
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Feb 14, 2018 - 07:55pm PT
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“Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.”
~ Rumi
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Feb 14, 2018 - 09:53pm PT
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It would seem that Poor Pinker is as lost as those who wander the labyrinth of Dennett's Folly.
;>(
(Infinities are measured or described by their cardinalities)
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Feb 14, 2018 - 10:03pm PT
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(Infinities are measured or described by their cardinalities)
How cooll is that! Pray tell more...
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Feb 15, 2018 - 08:14am PT
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Well how 'bout exploration and discovery. What if some things could not be measured and quantified with current technology but can still be observed. The subjective effervescence of that coke might not be quantifiable but we can observe it some ways.
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How about exploration and discovery of what CAN'T be observed, namely our direct experience.
It's curious how some seem to struggle making the simple distinction between observing, and WHAT is observed, between experience and content.
In what sense might we observe "subjective effervescence" itself as an observable phenomenon?
What this really boils down to is an epistemic discussion, as stated by Pinker's use of the word "intuition." That is, "a thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning."
For starters, it is not axiomatic that direct knowing comes by way of a "feeling." When Nagel wrote about what it is like to be a bat, that "like" involves much more than one's emotional tones during the experience.
But the crucial point is that the subjective adventures are always a matter of exploration and discovery. The challenge is that the exploration stage deals with unobservable phenomenon, requiring one to spend a lot more time in subjective exploring mode and tinkering with perception than simply isolating out an external object or force and pulling a measurement. Then after the exploration, you start drawing conclusions, offering them up for peer review (the advantage of practicing in a group with a trained leader). This is not at all a process of trying to "do science without instruments" but there is a "conscious reasoning" phase that Pinker leaves out simply because he is not jiggy with the process.
Cool thing is the process doesn't really get lift off till the stuff or content of experience becomes secondary to being aware of it, and then boring into the phenomenon of awareness itself.
I actually like Pinker, and his videos are full of useful information but it's my sense of it that he isn't perceptually cognizant of his own mode of inquiry, which always hinges on narrow focused investigation of an external object or phenomenon. Like focusing on a tree instead of holding an open focus (like setting a lens on infinity) on a panorama.
To learn about subjectivity itself, you have to vary your modes of perception or you end up with a narrow take during the exploration phase, like studying one bandwidth on an EEG. The info you get will be "true," but its discrete. You want a global take because the phenomenon is neither discrete, digital or static. Pinker's mode will give you the psychological version of rest mass of a particular aspect of consciousness, but my sense is that he is not even looking at consciousness itself, but content.
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sempervirens
climber
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Feb 15, 2018 - 08:44am PT
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How about exploration and discovery of what CAN'T be observed, namely our direct experience.
It's curious how some seem to struggle making the simple distinction between observing, and WHAT is observed, between experience and content.
In what sense might we observe "subjective effervescence" itself as an observable phenomenon?
What this really boils down to is an epistemic discussion, as stated by Pinker's use of the word "intuition." That is, "a thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning."
For starters, it is not axiomatic that direct knowing comes by way of a "feeling.
Yes, explore and discover what can't be observed if you like. I have no issue with that. Learn, discover, and enjoy it however we can. The joy of life, eh.
Distinguish between observing and the object being observed or between content and experience. I am not struggling with that. I can experience drinking the coke and observe its sparkle.
Well, effervescence might be quantifiable in some way, but since you used subjective effervescence as an example, I did too, just an example. Can't you watch it, taste it, hear it? That would be observing, so in that sense we can observe. Perhaps your question is rhetorical, but there is an answer.
I'm not addressing Pinker because I haven't read his work.
Direct knowing may not come by way of feeling, Ok, I have no issue here either.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Feb 15, 2018 - 08:52am PT
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Speaking/Posting of Pinker...
“Dear Professor Pinker, What advice do you have for someone who has taken ideas in your books and science to heart, and sees himself as a collection of atoms? A machine with a limited scope of intelligence, sprung out of selfish genes, inhabiting spacetime?” -student
Enlightenment Now (2018)
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Feb 15, 2018 - 10:49am PT
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Can't you watch it, taste it, hear it? That would be observing, so in that sense we can observe. Perhaps your question is rhetorical, but there is an answer.
Well, you're boring into it now, IMO.
You have to be VERY specific to tickle this stuff apart, because our tendency to conflate awareness and content, subjective and objective, are so automatic. Truth is, none of this is rhetorical. That would imply that the conflation is real. In the broader sense they are the same, but in the sense that we are using here, attempting to make know what the hell is going on, distinctions are essential.
For starters, when you say, "watch it, taste it, hear it," what, specifically are you referring to with "it?"
You can watch the bubbles (external) in the glass, but you can't watch the taste (internal). You can hear the bubbles (external) in the glass, but you can only be aware of experiencing the bubbles on your tongue and in your mouth (internal sensations).
Why, because we can't properly "observe" the experience of bubbles because we can't escape awareness to some other point of view outside of awareness, from which we can observe the experience as an external phenomenon. Later attempts to objectify the experience of bubbles in our mouth do not transmute the original subjective reality to an external objective thing or phenomenon. We are merely attempting to build a rational, representative map based on our direct experiential in the subjective realm. We are making clear the difference between internal and external.
This is how one works their way out of the matrix. One way to define the matrix is to look at all of this as existing in a kind of diametric or whereas inner and outer, subjective and objective are complimentary or the yin and yang constituting a unified reality in which the one is dependent on the other. But with this (which goes against the belief in an independent, stand alone universe), we are still left with the question of what enables these phenomenon to comprise a seamless, unified whole.
IME, awareness does that - the only phenomenon that in and of itself has no qualities, aspects, or edges whatsoever. That which we cannot get out of to observe because "we can't kiss our own lips."
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Feb 20, 2018 - 12:21pm PT
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[Click to View YouTube Video]
"Living voluntarily among ice and high mountains, seeking out anything strange and questionable in existence, everything so far placed under a ban by morality. The ice is near, the solitude tremendous, but how serenely all things lie in the light, how freely one breaths, how much one feels lies beneath oneself".
Pinker is a witty guy...
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Feb 20, 2018 - 02:33pm PT
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"My focus in the rest of this chapter is on a hostility to science that runs even deeper.
Many intellectuals are enraged by the intrusion of science into the traditional territories of the humanities, such as politics, history, and the arts. Just as reviled is the application of scientific reasoning to the terrain formerly ruled by religion: many writers without a trace of a belief in God maintain that it is unseemly for science to weigh in on the biggest questions. In the major journals of opinion, scientific carpetbaggers are regularly accused of determinism, reductionism, essentialism, positivism, and, worst of all...
...a crime called scientism.
This resentment is bipartisan."
Source: Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now, Ch 22, "Science"
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"Scientific knowledge eradicated smallpox, a painful and disfiguring disease which killed 300 million people in the 20th century alone. In case anyone has skimmed over this feat of moral greatness, let me say it again: scientific knowledge eradicated smallpox, a painful and disfiguring disease which killed 300 million people in the 20th century alone." -Pinker, Enlightenment Now
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Feb 20, 2018 - 04:04pm PT
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I like the archetypes in American Gods. Ian McShane is particularly impressive as Odin.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Feb 20, 2018 - 07:54pm PT
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...a crime called scientism.
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Not so much a crime, rather ignorance masquerading as final truth. Psychologically speaking, scientism is driven by the same all-or-nothing thinking we find in religious fundamentalism, whereby measurements have replaced the "Good Book" and adherents are loath to accept or even suspect any limitation on their mode of inquiry, the mere thought being a kind of heresy owing to "data" and predictions.
Thar she blows...
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