I'm writing a science fiction book that takes place mostly around Jupiter, and would love to hear more about this; if you found anything particularly interesting or unexpected or striking (especially visually), and whether it might transfer at all to e.g., Ganymede/Europa/Callisto.
Consider for a moment a world in which not every mind is as self-possessed and self-assured as yours.
Consider further a world in which there are many minds for whom sensitivity to being wrong is such a high priority, as you seem to want it to be, that they may try and avoid formulating stances or taking positions at all. Lest they be wrong.
Sometimes it can be helpful to have someone explain to you how you have to have some confidence in your own capacity for intuition, your own ability make decisions, in order to make anything happen.
I certainly won't argue that there are probably a lot of ineffective practitioners out there, but to me that speaks to the difficulty of the task, of tuning between insecurity and confidence and arrogance. It doesn't suggest to me the task, or the institution that is still in its earliest years of trying to formally study it, is fundamentally flawed.
> Consider further a world in which there are many minds for whom sensitivity to being wrong is such a high priority, as you seem to want it to be, that they may try and avoid formulating stances or taking positions at all. Lest they be wrong. [...] Sometimes it can be helpful to have someone explain to you how you have to have some confidence in your own capacity for intuition, your own ability make decisions, in order to make anything happen.
We all live in that world. These hypothetical individuals sound like people in desperate need of direction, not self-reflection. People don't go to therapists because everything's great and they're thinking clearly; therapists have a naturally-exploitable customer base.
Left to their own devices, these wayward souls tend to end up radicalized in some way. Your suggested approach sounds an awful lot like the outcome of grooming-- "I didn't tell you to do that. You wanted to do it." Make anyone spend enough time miring in their own confused thoughts and they'll start to normalize and rationalize whatever it is. No wonder we have so many gender-confused kids running around; they're exposed to the topic constantly. If that's what therapy amounts to, we can call off the labor shortage, because any accomplished child molester has the qualifications to do this job...I'm sure they need the work.
For some reason, doctors have little problem proscribing direct advice to ailing patients-- "you're dying because you won't stop eating cheesecake and smoking meth." Why are therapists so resistant to telling clients they're unlikable assholes and they need to fix their shit? Why the "need" for florid introspection that distracts from obvious problems, unless it's an intelligence-gathering exercise, looking for something else to blame or ideate? No other professional service works like this except fortune-tellers and the church (through confessionals) and their track record is about as effective. My mechanic doesn't wax poetic about thermodynamics, ask about the journeys I've been on with the vehicle and blame the engineers when my car doesn't start.
> It doesn't suggest to me the task, or the institution that is still in its earliest years of trying to formally study it, is fundamentally flawed.
My point remains: perceptions are subjective, are easily manipulated, and are frequently wrong. Eyewitness testimony is incorrect 50-fucking-percent of the time. This institution has already had scandals involving "discovery" of false memories and other manipulations of both its own personnel and the public. I've even had one insist I was molested despite no such attestations on my part (and it not being true). Psychiatrists have vouched for the perceived rehabilitation of rapists and murderers up for parole, who then immediately proceeded to rape and kill again within hours of release.
There are other peculiarities too, like insistence that hypersexuality is exclusively an artifact of abuse (and not at all precocious/excessive access to pornography), while sex addiction is not recognized at all in the DSM-V-- yet they'll offer to treat you for something they say doesn't exist. They like to tout the idea of all this domestic and sexual abuse going on based on what patients report, but it's not like they conduct any actual investigation-- they'll believe anything you tell them at face value (it's how Sybil got away with it for so long).
On that note, they've managed to legitimize what we used to call demonic possession as multiple/disassociative personality disorder. Here's an open challenge: prove it. So far, the highest-profile cases they've put forth have all been frauds, and it's so easy to act out the symptoms of that there are entire subreddits and hashtags dedicated to overprivileged children LARPing it. Why it's even still in the book, I cannot fathom.
It is junk science. They have some neat ideas about behavioral classification and CBT is as useful for humans as it is for dogs, but that's about it.
That's all good and peaceful until two peoples' intuitions collide.
What is the process for reconciliation?
These "nonsense questions" are usually derived from an effort to find a common denominator of things which a society may agree on, beyond its component individuals.
Personally, I don't see the issue. Perhaps you can help me understand? If two people / groups have different perspectives they can live and let live. If one person / group wishes to force it's view on the other then we have a problem, but nothing mysterious or metaphysical...
> If one person / group wishes to force it's view on the other then we have a problem
I would put it even more simply:
My view is that this valuable resource is mine. Your view is that this resource is yours.
How do we reconcile this?
edit: just in the interest of not seeming antagonistic, I'll elaborate further.
I assert that resolving conflicts like this requires either direct violence, or deference to some external framework. That external framework often defines terms like "just" and "right" and "good" and "true". These terms are kind of "meaning flywheels" since they don't have direct correlation to physical things. You spin them up by giving them continuous impulses of examples and then they carry the abstracted sense of meaning in themselves, becoming almost qualia-like. You don't know all the examples anymore you just know more or less what is "just".
This process is an act of mystification; you separate the meaning from the direct examples, and push it into a layer of linguistic abstraction.
Any measurement against those ideas then becomes a engagement with the mystic. You simply know "what is just". Any perception that these things can be rationally defined or deduced is simply the hangover from the older, mystical systems that impelled the original flywheels of meaning.
Any number of ways. What's the issue here? This "problem" is commonplace. Even my dogs experience it, and they don't need metaphysics to resolve the tension!
If you want an abstract rule to follow that always works and is "just" come out and say so.
Personally, I'm partial to certain solutions and feel they're "more just" than alternatives I've considered, but ultimately they're just stories I like. I'm building some sort of Quine-ean web. What stays and what goes is an aesthetic choice. I'm cultivating something. There's nothing more to it than that... Just a life to author and reflect on.
I'm not saying I want it, I'm saying it is an ingredient to the function and survival of a society, especially as the number of members of a society grows and diversifies.
This whole discussion highlights my original point. We're talking nonsense.
> This process is an act of mystification; you separate the meaning from the direct examples, and push it into a layer of linguistic abstraction.
What does this even mean? What is "an act of mystification?" What does it mean to "push something into a layer of linguistic abstraction?" And who the hell is Quine and what does a web have to do with anything?
Anyway, it's great fun! I just wish we were sitting in comfy chairs with a drink...
With that said, back to the fun. I think you're suffering from binary thinking. In the event that two people want the same thing there are many options available. And even more stories that could be spun to justify them. "It's only just that..." or "I came first" or "We've always done it that way".
If we take the absolute worst case: zero sum, fleeing isn't an option, then it's a fight to the death. We all know this to be the case intuitively -- no mysticism involved. Fight or flight is deeply embedded inside us. Again, my dogs aren't confused by this dilemma. This is part of living authentically.
I think society survives and flourishes when it keeps such cases to a minimum. It's why things such as a the rule of law, democracy, human rights, and so forth have arisen.
Thanks for this thought provoking discussion! Sadly my lunch break is over~
I would assert that it should serve as a memento mori against too much confidence in your priors. And a reminder of the value of Russellian "Hypothetical Sympathy", an encouragement to examine your priors, and see whether you disagree with something because of a glitch in its proof, or a lack of understanding (or a rejection) of the assumptions that it began with.
In my opinion, one of the key blindspots is that most of the people in this community are living right within the center of power of the world's current largest and most powerful empire, and that tends to give you a certain set of priors which are very hard to shake. Effective altruism originally took those assumptions and said, "we need to extend the incredible bounty we've been given to those who aren't living at the epicenter of global power." And then it evolved into "We're currently the most powerful force on the planet, but what if a more powerful force that we create dismantles us!" Just the War of the Worlds argument but without Wells's self awareness that he was critiquing imperialism. Now post-rationalism is just the same old argument of "our society is collapsing because we've lost touch with our traditions." Etc. etc.
If you find this subject interesting, the different ways the sort of post-enlightenment intellectual diaspora has begun to try and chase fundamental "meaning" again (after realizing perhaps they could not arrive at it by deduction), and the deeper nature of "religion" beyond the thing your parents used to drag you to on Saturday/Sunday, the author of this piece, Burton, also has a book called Strange Rites.
I've always enjoyed the lighthearted analysis of the Nietzchean "God is Dead" moment as asking:
"Yes, God is Dead. Congratulations; that was the easy part. Now what?".
He had is own answer of course, but, as the characters in this piece have discovered, it's not necessarily an effective one.
edit: ah they mention the book in the postscript of course.
These people somehow passed existentialism by entirely. Nietzsche was just the beginning of a whole wave of thought bent towards grappling with a meaningless world. It's so philosophically impoverished to commit yourself to "rationalism" and then immediately begin rebuilding religious ritual without ever applying your vaunted reason to actually dealing with the absurd head-on.
Yeah, I'm not sure whether they passed it or just never got to it. To be fair I guess, it's not exactly what I would call a productive philosophy, if your goal is "productivity" (by some material definition) and not the act of philosophy in and of itself.
I feel like they looked in the mirror, saw only themselves, and decided what was needed was a better mirror, because there must be something else there.
It's got that distinctly rationalist style of writing where they dedicate loads of words to these grand overly-detailed models and then skim over the places in their argument where they actually need to be rigorous. The entire argument behind one of the book's most important claims—that it's impossible for meaning to be subjective—seems to be left as implied by an anecdote about gambling at a casino. I haven't even been able to find a definition of "meaning" anywhere, so the implications of that anecdote end up being really difficult to parse.
