Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden role of Chance in LIfe and in the Markets -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"This book is the synthesis of, on the one hand, the no-nonsense practitioner of uncertainty who spent his professional life trying to resist being fooled by randomness and trick the emotions associated with probabilistic outcomes and, on the other, the aesthetically obsessed, literature-loving human being willing to be fooled by any form of nonsense that is polished, refined, original, and tasteful. I am not capable of avoiding being the fool of randomness; what I can do is confine it to where it brings some aesthetic gratification."

I think you can speculate that he had resentment from romantic misfortune, with some evidence. — fdrake

He broke up with her and then wrote his greatest works trying to come to terms with what he'd done to her. He didn't resent women.

I agree that it can be overdone, as if use is some sort of holy grail. Obviously the concept of use is dependent on its negation: the useless, like the sight of a beautiful sky while you're busting rocks.

I wish pragmatists would find something less narrow-minded than "useful". — Ludwig V

Why does it strike you as narrow minded?

Ha! He was a proto-Heidegger.

I agree that the distinction between the role I'm playing and who I am is very important here. But I don't think it was specifically based on existentialism, though it's more than likely that Hannah Arendt would have discussed it in her writing on Eichmann's trial. — Ludwig V

I don't think existentialism is the source either. I'm speculating that it was part of the times some how. Kierkegaard's generation included Abraham Lincoln, who was driven by the same idea: that freedom is found in grasping that you're more than the role you're playing. There's also a similarity between Lincoln's beliefs and what Kierkegaard expresses in Repetition. Maybe it was an odd coincidence, or maybe existentialism is coming from some aspect of a shared cultural story arc.

It captured and reinforced the liberation experienced by many people as WW2 ended. — Ludwig V

Part of that was the Nuremberg trials in which Nazi soldiers were asked to explain their actions. According to folklore, they said they were soldiers, and they were doing as they were told. The basis for rejecting this answer from the Nazis is that it puts all the blame on the role these men were playing, as if they were nothing but the role.

Existentialism starts with a separation between the role you're playing and some other amorphous thing: call it Being, spirit, etc. The point is that you have a choice regarding the role you invest yourself in. You're something beyond any particular role. So the Nazi soldiers could have divested the role of soldier and become something else. It's from an existentialist standpoint that we reject racism, sexism, eugenics, religious intolerance, etc. We start morality from a focus on the subject.

Those who reject subjectivism are saddled with a foundation that welcomes racism, whether they realize that or not.

Thanks. I'm sightly familiar with nihilism. Not enough to have ever heard of positive nihilism. — Patterner

Nihilism starts when people stop grasping for distractions that keep them from facing the fact that "All is vanity.". All that stuff that keeps people struggling and fretting doesn't really mean anything.

From there, you can be happy about it because your heart has been unburdened, or you can be sad because... your heart has been unburdened.

Nihilist discussion groups spend a lot of time talking about both ends of it. Existentialism comes up for obvious reasons.

:up: It overlaps with positive nihilism.

Was Kierkegaard an existentialist? In what sense yes or no? — Corvus

He's been called the Grandfather of existentialism. He drew attention away from grand project building (like Hegel) to the experience of being alive: to that 'quality of being that comes to rest in the sanctuary of the form.'

Dude, you are so lucky. Soon you will be living in a tropical paradise. — Agree-to-Disagree

Yay me.

But there is room until the very last gasp for kindness and affection, and to make what adaptations one can... — unenlightened

:pray:

Among the things that peeped up from the dirt in my woodland garden this spring is a... tropical houseplant. Dude.

This was always my understanding - and, as with the Shapiro reference, I think its true. People f'ing it up doesn't change the basis. — AmadeusD

I think about that every time I vote, so I don't feel so bad. :grin:

I hope that is taught in schools everywhere, Frank. — Rob J Kennedy

I don't think it is. It's a secret.

what do you think would happen if every soldier refused their orders? — Rob J Kennedy

The war would end. That's actually how WW1 ended: a German mutiny. The French soldiers had also mutinied earlier, but the French government managed to get them back to the battlefield. The Russian soldiers also mutinied. It was a weird war.

It's not enough to just notice that soldiers have the power to mutiny. You need a culture that emphasizes that fact: that no one is locked into a role. You can be anyone. You can be the president, for instance. That was the guiding vision behind the creation of the USA. Martin Luther King Jr referenced that vision in a speech he gave on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Crazy, but true: the American vision is about freedom of identity. Voting is a ritual that broadcasts that ideal: that you're responsible for your government.

Thoughts?

I believe, that where posiible, if we were all more responsible for our descisions, we would have a better world. — Rob J Kennedy

Do you mean that if the Nazi soldier took responsibility for his decisions, he'd go home and stop wrecking the world?

The answer to this question resonates on this thread. Of what value is a philosophical idea if it does not change lives? Or does philosophy as an approach to life live on mysteriously within endless discussions of Russell's paradox and something arising from nothing? Much of what I have read is inconsequential, like the pure mathematics I have enjoyed. — jgill

Yes. Where I've seen the OP discussed elsewhere, the issue is a psycho-social one rather than a quest to squeeze nuance out of jargon.

To be blunt - my specialist area - those who have answered "yes" to the question in the OP have thereby shown that they have not understood existentialism. — Banno

You could dwell on the right way to define it, but when a group of people has latched onto the word because it's become useful in their philosophical grappling, you can just let the meaning drift to whatever they mean by it.

So when you were in your 20s-30s did you ever wonder about the power of humans to choose who and what they will be? Or did the abysmal events of the 20th Century leave you hopeless?

There's presently a boom in discussions about existentialism vs nihilism on Reddit. Some of the best subreddits are closed to new members, but there are still good ones around.

which would make it "of" the object, but as a mapping of object behaviours to "rational awareness". — fdrake

The concept of perception has a logical feature that rules out one-to-one mapping, molding, or mirroring. As the parade of sights and sounds changes through time, it's supposed to be the same perceiver through all of it. Without that distinction between change and the unchanging, there will be no perception of time because world and perceiver would constantly track. There would only be the now, in which case none of the content of perception would have any meaning and there would be no memory of it.

If it's just that one is allergic to the historical, spiritual baggage surrounding the concept of the enduring perceiver, it can be visualized as a pattern produced by the brain. But if that is also deemed distasteful, the price for discarding the perceiver altogether is that there is neither direct nor indirect perception. I guess perception would become some sort of myth.

1. Shannon's model, developed for radios and telephones — for precisely this sort of transformation of energy types — is now applied to all physical interactions. So if the model entails indirectness, then everything is indirect. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Shannon was originally looking at noise on transmission lines. Noise is created by electromagnetism in the vicinity of a line. If it's a digital transmission, that means 1's might turn into 0's, and so forth. It's not about energy transformation per se. It's about degradation of information. That idea of information was picked up and exploded in various realms. I mean, there's no doubt that you hear a person on your phone indirectly. I don't think that fact impacts the meaning of information in other realms. If you think it does, could you explain why?

2. These different types of energy turn out not to always be sui generis types. There has been a lot of work unifying these. We still have multiple "fundemental forces," but the goal/intuition, is that these can be unified as well, like electricity and magnetism, or then electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force. — Count Timothy von Icarus

With a computer, the analog-to-digital (A/D) converter isn't transforming energy types. It's just sampling the analog signal and creating a digital stream that can be used to recreate an analog signal somewhere else. It's like if you heard someone and then mimicked them. Something like the A/D, then D/A conversion happened. That's what we imagine, anyway, looking at a human nervous system. The reason I brought this up was to just highlight the meaning of functionality. Mimicry can happen without any phenomenal consciousness. It's all functional. Phenomenality is an extra added bit. We don't know why it's there or where it comes from.

This would seem to leave too many relations as indirect. And if perception is an indirect experience of the world merely in the way that light has an indirect relationship with photosynthesis or sex has an indirect relationship with pregnancy, then the epistemological claims related to this sort of indirectness seem much less acute (maybe this is a feature, not a bug). — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is an interesting avenue to ponder. What's confusing is that you brought experience back into it. We don't know how experience is generated, or if it's even right to say that it is "generated." This argument will have to wait until there's a working theory of phenomenal consciousness (if we ever get that far).

Another wrinkle: wouldn't pain be the transformation of kinetic energy into electrochemical energy, and experience of our own pain thus also be indirect? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Pain is associated with electrical discharges that travel along sensory nerves into the central nervous system. A variety of things can trigger those discharges. A fair portion of an organism's reaction to pain is reflexive. Pain has the potential to alter behavior through conditioning , but again, this doesn't necessarily entail experience. Where there is memory of pain, that's obviously indirect access to the pain.

Anyway, I see where your headed, you're saying the idea of indirectness, once introduced, will quickly generalize.

Are we to say that ghosts are not real for us, but real for them? Are we then saying that people speak of fake ghosts? That sounds strange, but it may be true. — Manuel

We still talk about the psyche, which is another word for ghost or geist:

"Geist (German pronunciation: [ˈɡaɪst] ⓘ) is a German noun with a significant degree of importance in German philosophy. Geist can be roughly translated into three English meanings: ghost (as in the spooky creature), spirit (as in the Holy Spirit), and mind or intellect. Some English translators resort to using "spirit/mind" or "spirit (mind)" to help convey the meaning of the term." -- here

I'm guessing it starts with the idea of an abiding persona that dwells in an ever-changing body. In the Epic of Gilgamesh (around 5000 years old), Gilgamesh learns about the disembodied psyche of his friend through a dream. Back then, they thought dreams were messages. Anyway, even if you don't believe in ghosts, you probably think in terms of continuity of the self over time. That means you're just one step away from believing in ghosts.

Sorry, I don't mean to be oblique. It's that I think accusations of dualism really depend heavily on the exact formulation involved, so I don't want to be overly direct because I don't think it's always an issue. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I misunderstood, then. It sounded to my ears like: "I sniff an attempt to smuggle in communism, so it's bad." We didn't get the argument for why communism was necessarily being smuggled and why that would be bad. :grin:

It comes down to what makes experience indirect, what makes the relationship between people and lemons vis-á-vis seeing yellow different from the relationship between people's breathing and air vis-á-vis oxygenating blood. If that difference just is that one is phenomenal, and that a relations involving phenomenal experience is what makes it indirect, then that looks a lot like mind having its own sorts of sui generis causal relations, essentially being a different substance from other entities, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ha! I'm a respiratory therapist, so I spend a fair amount of time trying to oxygenate blood. The physiological aspects of breathing are similar to the functional aspects of sight. There's a voluntary aspect to both: you can hold your breath and you can direct your line of sight, but for the most part each travels along involuntary tracks. Sight has that second layer of phenomenality, though. Oxygenation doesn't. A person can be profoundly hypoxic and feel nothing out of the ordinary (for a few seconds). Following that, they'll just feel bad with a sense of alarm as the body tries to compensate.

Why do we have the experience of sight on top of visual functionality? That's presently unknown. If a person sees in that a reason to embrace duality, that's because they were dualist to begin with.

Without a way to specify the "indirectness" it seems to reduce to "being phenomenal is indirect because phenomenal awareness is a special type of relation," which is where a sort of dualism seems to come in, along with begging the question. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If there was no such thing as phenomenality and all humans had was the functions of consciousness (without any accompanying awareness), there would still be indirectness to it, in the same way that a computer's data collection is indirect. If a computer listens to the sound of a bird, it converts the analog frequencies to a digital stream and subsequently manipulates that stream. From what we know about the nervous system, it appears that something like that is happening in the brain. Obviously the preceding statements indicates that scientists have quite a bit of confidence in their own brains' ability to accurately construct the world. Still, what they're describing is indirect realism.

3. Ancient peoples coherently talked about their mental states.
4. Ancient peoples did not coherently talk about their brain states.
5. Therefore, mental states are not identical to brain states. — RogueAI

I think it works in the vein of the conceivability of a distinction. The stakes are just about who has the burden of proof regarding reduction.

Talk of Superman is not the same as talk of Clark Kent. — fdrake

The two have the same extensional definition, so there's a sense in which talk of one is talk of the other.

I think there is a more general concern that the "indirect" term is smuggling dualism in. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You tend to do these oblique attacks instead of swapping argument for argument. I'd rather you set out why indirect realism is necessarily dualist (property dualism? substance dualism?) rather than imply it as a concern. Maybe it's just a difference in style.

Yes, perhaps. I meant it as an intermediary between the "thinking" aspect of consciousness (that interprets and makes use of phenomenal experience) and the external world.

So perhaps it is more accurate to say that we are directly cognisant of phenomenal experience and through that indirect cognizant of distal objects. — Michael

I think that about sums up the prevailing outlook of our time. I lean toward the notion that all three: the phenomenal, the conceptual (by which we make sense of the flood of incoming data), and the Big Kahuna: the self, are all products of analysis, where we draw back from experience and pick it apart. In the midst of living experience I think those three are kind of fused.

What does this mean? It is often repeated, but how close does the Tractatus map to the writings of Schopenhauer? — Fooloso4

It's not a matter of mapping. In the Tractatus his very wording tells us we're in the setting of the WWR (although I have to note that I'm not in a mood to write an essay on that, so if you disagree, that's fine). He's not a disciple of Schopenhauer. He's solving a problem left behind by him.

Phenomenal experience is the intermediary — Michael

I think the very idea of an intermediary is a red herring. What's really at stake is whether phenomenal experience alone informs us about the world around us. It very clearly does not.

Ever since we discovered the anatomy of sensory apparatus, the only way to argue for direct realism is to equivocate.

while having good stuff in it, is also in some respects, a step down form the Tractatus. — Manuel

Yep.

And introduces new (bigger?) problems, like why did the conveyor belt come back with six dots rather than three? And why/how do things cease to exist when we turn around and come back into existence when we turn back? — Michael

The basic idea is that explanations are post hoc. You place the event in a historical context as in dreams. Explaining the six dots is not a challenge to this kind of idealism. The challenge is solipsism.

If you can measure how parsimonious a model is, then it wouldn't matter much what a community thinks. I think in this case, it's probably provable (not by me) that A is more parsimonious than B, because it takes fewer bits to describe a universe where A is the case than B. — flannel jesus

A couple of problems with (A) are Zeno's Paradox and the problem of induction. Fewer bits with a few giant holes.

I don't understand this. There is a difference between something continuing to exist and something ceasing to exist and then coming back into existence. — Michael

I meant there's no difference in terms of the force of the supporting argument. In both cases, it's a matter of taste. I think that's what you're disputing here:

Presumably one of us is wrong. Either (A) is more parsimonious or (B) is more parsimonious. I'm not sure that reason is relative. — Michael

I think the reason (A) seems parsimonious is that it conforms to a standard narrative, one we develop spontaneously in early childhood. (B) solves (or appears to solve) a number of philosophical problems, which is why it shows up perennially.

I would say that (A) is the more parsimonious explanation and so should be favoured, unless there's actual evidence to the contrary. — Michael

That's a good answer. But say a community finds (B) to be more parsimonious. They would advise you to accept (B) unless there's actual evidence to the contrary.

The point is: fundamentally, there's no difference.

There is no "right way up". There's just the way things seem to you and seem to me, determined entirely by how our bodies respond to stimulation. — Michael

Think of two scenarios:

A. Contemporary science starts with the assumption that each person is a body responding to stimulation (and simultaneously altering the environment). The image is similar to a computer arrayed with analog to digital converters. The question scientists grapple with is how the computer is creating a seamless experience out of the flood of data.

B. Now compare this to Berkeley's view: the "stuff" isn't even out there until we turn our gazes upon it.

What draws one to accept A over B?

I don't really know what environment you're talking about. I've been focusing more on the evolution of ideas. I'll defer to your knowledge of 20th Century anti-realist environments. :up:

Wittgenstein is a product of his time, and the thing in philosophy at that time was to call all sorts of things "meaningless. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There are a number of ways to interpret the Tractatus. Some of the contemporary interpretations see it as a rejection of metaphysics. The idea is that there's a way of philosophizing that seems meaningful, but on closer inspection, it's a misuse of language.

Wittgenstein didn't really call "all sorts of things" meaningless. He liked the idea that meaning is found in language use (as opposed to being revealed by dictionaries, for instance.) As much as Wittgenstein talked about rule following, Kripke found in his writings reasons to reject the idea that meaning arises from it. It's fun to think about what paths unfold from there.

I don't think any rough equating of the thing-in-itself with that of which we cannot speak will suffice here. — Banno

I agree.

Wittgenstein had an infamous disregard for the history of philosophy. Some might say this was in order to think things through without prejudice; others that it was in order to claim credit for the ideas of others. — Banno

You can't really read the Tractatus without picking up on the way he's addressing Schopenhauer, though.

But Kant does not loom large either in Wittgenstein's own accounts of his influences, — Banno

Kant was Schopenhauer's primary influence. The same basic ideas were probably rolling around?