Can’t we just agree with Nietzsche that the ‘real’ and the ‘true’ are themselves only kinds of useful fictions?
— Joshs

Really? Is that true? — Banno

I think there's a way out of this deadlock.

It is overwhelmingly likely that my interpretation of a llived situation is in someway mischaracterizing it. If you think about it, this isn't radical at all. It just makes sense. We're always adapting to situations, which means we have limited information going-in, and are continually, constantly, updating.

Because of that, it behooves me to pay close attention and try to skirt my own preconceptions to a reasonable extent. Doing this requires art, or phronesis, or some such: I don't doubt the cat's on the mat, or that gravity doesn't apply the next county over, but as I move from the set of things certain toward the Great Uncertain, I arrive at some point that is somewhere in the middle. That's the spot to live in.

There are lots of different kinds of games, and there is no meta-rule to tell us what rule to follow in any given situation. I think a useful way to approach Nietzschean discussions of truth is to realize the game here is no longer: 'assert truth-apt propositions about reality' but is something more like 'how do we cultivate a fluid meta-relationship to the way in which we judge our own claims.' (i.e. it's very clear, at least to me, Nietzsche would be happy to say the cat's on the mat - that's not what he's on about.)

There isn't any contradiction (though, yes, there is when Nietzsche is too casually cited as a cheat-code for Pure Relativism)

Agreed. That's why I posted about the desert, and letting others manage my money for me. Does that make me ignorant, in having never heard of the financial BlackRock? Maybe so, but I'm not losing any sleep over it. — James Riley

I wouldn't lose sleep, no - like I said I don't think it says anything about someone to know or not know about blackrock.

@James Riley I responded to fishfry because I watched a Spencer Tracy movie recently, and he mentioned a movie with Spencer Tracy. It didn't respond to the OP because it wasn't a response to the OP - it was a straightforward response to the post it responded to. I know about blackrock. I don't think it says anything about someone to know or not know about it.

P.S. I don't know where you get "disdainful" from. I merely said I had not chosen to invest the time and resources to become as expert at what they do as they are. Like Covid, or a thousand other pursuits. — James Riley

They get latte's delivered to their cubicles, donning nice suit and tie, extending pinkies over wine and cheese, groveling before their overlords with overtime, and secretly wishing they were me. Or not. Their choice. — James Riley

Right - that's why I don't get the import of the story - you were hiking, and you don't manage your money only because people you don't respect will instead. Ok - I believe you that's a fair description, but I'm not sure what to take from it. Is the post supposed to telegraph something about your character, and how you focus on what matters?

What would you do if they collectively stopped choosing to do this thing you find so disdainful?

I went on a 100 mile trek through the Owyhee Desert once. I passed through a region called Black Rock. When it comes to money, I let my fund managers handle the investments. I've spent as much time and money making myself an investment guru as I have in making myself an expert on Covid and the vaccines: None. — James Riley

You're blessed to be in a position where you can rely on others to manage your money while you focus on stuff more important to you. Hopefully the people (the grunts in the company) managing your money are also able to carve out time to pursue spiritual things. I can't quite grok the moral of what you've said, or why you tagged me, but your lack of time-investment in those things is predicated on others investing time in them.

@counterpunch

Maine? At once both the place to wish for and to be careful about what you wish for. csalisbury can be found there, try PMing him. — tim wood

I recently moved from Portland to the (cheaper) foothill wilds of the north, but, if it is portland, maine, I'd be down to answer any questions about what it's like there (from my limited perspective)

Somehow I'd never (to the best of my memory) seen any movie with Spencer Tracy until I caught a snippet of Inherit the Wind on TCM the other day. Wasn't super into the movie, but goddamn could that guy act. It's like method-before-method (and in some ways less pretentious.) 99% of people in old movies seem like hypnotized robots - but he's amazing. News to no-one but me, but still good news nonetheless.

Jim Gauer, author of Novel Explosives. — Manuel

Added to my reading list. :up:

Fair pushback on Mason & Dixon - I'll admit I haven't finished it (a few attempts, always faltered in the first section.) I will say: regardless of anything else I've said, I appreciate Pynchon's prose enormously (In M&D, also in ATD, which I also started, but didn't finish.) He crafts sentences beautifully. I think, for me, it's just the nth time the characters are in a scene where the characters are realizing that there's an 'other world' with subversive sexual/sensory/power-relational stuff, and the piling-clauses are pointing to the intricacy of that world, and how it subtends the visible world - at a point I want to just yell - yes, we've had this conversation many times! I get it, man! It's spelled out in the first scene of your first book!

At the same time I'm a huge Melville fan, and he does this stuff too - there's no accounting for where and why you'll cut slack.

That's an interesting take on Wallace. Again, going back to D.T Max, he was asked at one point, I think it was in an interview, about one scene in Wallace's article on the cruise ship. Wallace was looking at the ocean and he was saying that the ocean was vast, dark and empty. Don't quote me strictly on that. But I believe he said something to that effect.

Max asks, was that Wallace simply describing what the ocean felt like to him or was that his depression talking? I don't know. What you say about Wallace constantly tormenting himself reminds me of that.

And I think this is true. It's hard to explain Wallace better than he explains himself, but I think one can say that his acute and amazing powers of observation and detail must have applied to everything, not only his short stories or his books, but to himself too. It's the price he had to pay for the gift he had.

Nevertheless, I still think sincerity is sincerity and that can be used in a perverse manner too. But by now, given how much literature has expanded, it's just extremely hard to come up with something new to say something tried and true in an original manner. So it's said "naively" as it were, and can come off as cliched. Too bad, but, then again, this is person-dependant. What I find to be just cheesy sentimentalism, others find profound. And what I find deep others find verbose or obscurantist. Oh well. — Manuel

I think the importance of 'vibe' is underestimated when it comes to literature (vibe is close to 'style', but its not quite style). Everything's been said, it's said, and maybe that's true - but still when you're chilling with friends (or having real talks with friends) its both an example of a thing thats happened a million times, and also incredibly much a never-happened-before flow. Good lit writers channel that unique flow using their hard-won technical skill and create a book. (some that come quickly to mind: Dubliners & Portrait of the Artist & Ulysses, To The Lighthouse, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, Sutree, Remembrance of Things Past, Chekhov's short stories.)

coming-up with something new is hard/impossible because 'coming-up-with' is willing-the-new & you can't will flow. Good literature is flow married to technique. Novelty's a side-effect, like happiness. If you target happiness or novelty, you'll crash. Pursuing other stuff makes the rest come naturally, flow out organically.

(this is actually my criticism of later-pynchon. I think V is far and away his best book - the language is alive and vibrant, and the intellectual obsessions are a backbone instead of a smothering atmosphere. . Crying and Gravity's Rainbow are very good, but not quite as good (debatable, even to myself)- everything after (in my opinion) is just automated will, style & erudition (and I think this is why automation/control as evil plays a theme so much in Pynchon's work - projective). Mason & Dixon's period-specific riffs seem legit until you read him riffing on youth-culture in the same way in Bleeding Edge. It's a weird eye-opening moment when he begins to riff in his encyclopedic, knowing way on something you actually know. You realize the superficiality viscerally & then its hard to trust him on other periods. Since it's always night in the library's reading-room, the reclusive genius has to simulate the light.)

I feel you, but how do you personally massage those knots I gestured toward in an earlier post, knots I imagine you're long familiar with? Namely: that 'bayesian' thing I mentioned of how there seems to be a constant (invariance) in scientific and historical progress where what we think we know now proves a hard misframe ( though, granted, a misframe that dialectically lays the conditions for a new frame)

I absolutely respect your devotion to mitigating clearly-defined evils (to say you're doing much more than me to help others would be a wild understatement) - but how do you sustain your pinpointing of (biologically based, and so capable-of-being-engineered-out) evil against, say, the knocking-down-chesterton's-fence argument? What I'm trying to get at is, it feels to me you have full faith in the current scientific framing (an end of scientific framing ala the much discussed political 'end of history') Is that fair?

The world is as it is now and what is in the past is in the past, I guess. I'm just saying that there was something to The New Sincerity that people shouldn't have let go of. — thewonder

I very much agree. My feeling/stance (which is reductionary, as all relations to past movements inescapably are) is that New Sincerity, as a reaction to ironic saturation, often (perhaps inevitably) defined itself against that ironic saturation - and that led many (though not all) spiritual members of the movement to trade too heavily in ideas and performative rhetoric/style. Many, but not all. And even for the many, they weren't only doing this. I agree with you that there is a lot that's good there.

So: I think that sincerity (being-in-a-spiritual-and-emotional-place of sincerity) is something that happens at the level of being, rather than belief. Believing in sincerity is a good re-orientation, but getting to that state is arduous - and requires concrete practices (say: meditation, artistic mastery, community participation, so forth).

Again using my admittedly overly-broad brush, I think new sincerity could find new life by (gradually, patiently) incarnating its marquee ideas, if that makes sense.

(aside: your posts on this thread brimming with lived specificity (as with the salem example) are wonderful & lovely to read. There's a lot I'd like to better respond to, but I have limited bandwidth this week. Quickly, I find it serendipitous that you mention post-rock as a litmus test; I had a bit of an argument with a friend over Godspeed You! Black Emperor a few days ago- i was defending that style.)

@thewonder

To be honest, it's my lack of genuine emotional state that I rebel against more than anything else. I care more to be let to feel as I should about the world than anything else. Everything, it seems, stands in my way.

right, yes, absolutely. Bracketing all the hip references (which, i feel you) - its just - idk a possibility of something real that can sustain. thats a species of faith.

The worst source of severe and readily avoidable suffering in the world is simply remedied. Without slaughterhouses, the entire industrialized apparatus for exploiting and murdering sentient beings would collapse. What's needed isn't Zen-like calm, but a fierce moral urgency and vigorous political lobbying to end the animal holocaust. By contrast, reprogramming the biosphere to eradicate suffering is much more ambitious in every sense. Yes, the "regulative idea" of ending involuntary suffering should inform policy-making and ethics alike. And society as a whole needs to debate what responsible parenthood entails. People who choose to create babies "naturally" create babies who are genetically predisposed to be sick by the criteria of the World Health Organization's own definition of health. By these same criteria, most people alive today are often severely sick. Shortly, genetic medicine will allow the creation of babies who are predisposed to be (at worst) occasionally mildly unwell. A reproductive revolution is happening this century; and the time to debate it is now. — David Pearce

Zen-like calm doesn't preclude fervent participation.

(I'm laying myself bare to criticism - wouldn't be surprised if there's a revisionist account of Thích Quảng Đức I don't know.)

But fervency bred from calm here-and-now feels strong to me. I vibe with that, it feels right. No arguments really now: I'd have to pivot to literature. But that's why I mention that I've also gone deep into antinatalism - that suggests we've both touched the harsh nerve of pain, really touched it, and realized how frame-shatteringly painful real pain is.

But couldn't someone ingenuously frame transhuman as a reflexive reaction (perfect inversion) of holding your hand to the coals and pulling it back (a world - *hands pulling back* - where hands will never be burnt?)

It's cool/interesting to me you found the M*A*S*H* section of Infinite Jest particularly moving/sympathetic. I did too. It's not a section that almost ever comes up in discussions of the work, or author.

My DFW background:

I did a report on 'postmodernism' in high school (because it seemed mysterious and exotic) and through that found Infinite Jest. To say it blew my teenage mind would be an understatement - I went into DFW hard between 17 and 25 (read & watched almost everything, with the significant exception of Broom of the System.) (also @Manuel got pynchon-pilled at the same time, though I never went quite as deep into him.)

Perhaps predictably, I then eventually reacted dramatically against DFW and more or less avoided him and his stylistic followers for a while. Now I'm sort of in the middle.

I haven't read E Unibus Pluram since I was an undergrad (about a decade ago.) I was struck by it then, and I still think the argument largely holds up. At the same time I've become more skeptical of DFW's sweeping, prophetic diagnoses - it's less clear to me now whether Wallace is diagnosing an illness of the culture-at-large, and whether he's describing the degree to which particularly self-conscious, self-doubting people (like me, and it seems most DFW fans) find especial difficulty in that culture.

The last story in the collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, entitled 'Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XXIV)' captures in a nutshell what I think is the driving concern of Wallace's work (and life) - it's a dark parable for the psychological experience of having a mean, mocking, imaginary idea of yourself uncharitably caricaturizing you constantly - running in parallel to whatever you're doing. I imagine this sort of thing exists on a spectrum, and everyone experiences it to some degree, but DFW is so far on one end of the spectrum (as I was, and often am still) that it profoundly colors everything he does - at times becoming claustrophobic. One critic of Infinite Jest (can't remember who, or where) described the reading experience as being trapped in a flourescently-lit room with a brilliant neurotic ceaselessly verbalizing his demons. I liked IJ, but I can't say that critic is totally wrong.

Back to the quote in the OP - on the face of it, I think he's absolutely right. But there was always something a little phony in how 'New Sincerity' played out. It kept the self-consciousness (quietly, implicitly) and self-consciously performed sincerity. I think Brief Interviews, among other things, is a nervous breakdown about how even if you're attracted to sincerity, and trying to enact the idea of it - you can find yourself, against your will, using that idea to take advantage of others.

I think Wallace was right in his instincts in IJ - he imagines Gately refusing anaesthetic and accepting suffering. But I don't think he (or most of the sincerists) could really give up the anaesthetic of having an arch, distanced place to return to for safety. So I guess : I think the general idea of the passage in the OP is right - but I think its still mostly about ideas and persuasion. It has Wallace's powerful rhetorical energy in service of an idea. But I think what is really needed is practical techniques for people who suffer from the psychological thing parabalized in ''Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XXIV).' DFW knew that it was about facing suffering, and avoiding ironic distance - but he so often left it in the realm of ideas (balanced with photoreal observation) - what he never really seemed to explore was methods from getting from the pomo thing to sincerity. And I think that's why 'the new sincerists' often feel too calculating.

They are no other!

And let all men say what they will, so long as such are rulers as call the land theirs, upholding this particular propriety of mine and thine, the common people shall never have their liberty, nor the land be ever freed from troubles, oppressions, and complainings, by reason whereof the Creator of all things is continually provoked...
— Gerald Winstanley

https://www.diggers.org/digger_tracts.htm

But there you go; as white and Christian and historical as you could possibly wish for, and within a cannon shot of where I was born. — unenlightened

I let my vindictive self loose on the forums again. :confused:

I don't require white & christian stuff - while I like much in the christian framework, its only one of many frameworks I find helpful, and I integrate it with other stuff. (even now, repentant, I have to point out that my recent upsurge of christian-talk was to reply, in the same genre, to the christian tack you introduced on the other thread.) And it seems to me - though I'm not well-schooled- that there is a lot really good native american thought on these matters; I'm only objecting to projecting onto a non-western culture (over-and-above what they actually say) the inverse of the dominant threads of western culture

Now that I've defended my honor, I do apologize for the way I came into this thread.

Allow me to pass over where we agree and focus on where we may differ. Each of us must come to terms with the pain and grief in our own lives. Often the anguish is very personal. Uniquely, humans have the ability to rationalise their own suffering and mortality. Rationalisation is normally only partially successful, but it’s a vital psychological crutch. Around 850,000 people each year fail to "rationalise" the unrationalisable and take their own lives. Millions more try to commit suicide and fail. Factory-farmed nonhuman animals lack the cognitive capacity and means to do so.

However, rationalisation can have an insidious effect. If (some) suffering has allegedly been good for us, won’t suffering sometimes have redeeming features for our children and grandchildren – and indeed for all future life? So let’s preserve the biological-genetic status quo. I don't buy this argument; it’s ethically catastrophic. For the first time in history, it's possible to map out the technical blueprint for a living world without suffering. Political genius is now needed to accelerate a post-Darwinian transition. Recall that young children can't rationalise. Nor can nonhuman animals. We should safeguard their interests too. If we are prepared to rewrite our genomes, then happiness can be as "finely-tuned" and information-sensitive as we wish, but on an exalted plane of well-being. Transhuman life will be underpinned by a default hedonic tone beyond today’s “peak experiences”.

One strand of thought that opposes the rationalising impulse is represented by David Benatar's Better Never To Have Been, efilism and “strong” antinatalism:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#main
Alas, the astute depressive realism of their diagnosis isn't matched by any clear-headedness of their prescriptions. I hesitate to say this for fear of sounding messianic, but only transhumanism can solve the problem of suffering. Darwinian malware contains the seeds of its own destruction. A world based on gradients of bliss won’t need today's spurious rationalisations of evil. Let’s genetically eliminate hedonic sub-zero experience altogether. — David Pearce

While I do have some eccentric sprititual/metaphysical beliefs, I'm going to do my best to bracket them here. They help me in my own life, but when talking ideas I don't want to use them as dei ex machina. If those eccentric beliefs are legit, they should be able to deal with whatever happens in rational argument.

So:

I think you make a good point: if I look at my life and my suffering, and spin a narrative where I had to suffer what I did in order to get where I am now (i.e. a state I find better than where I was before) then doesn't that lead to me suggesting that others go through similar suffering?

I agree, right away, that such a line of thought is abhorrent.

I shift it this way:

Instead of saying, e.g. 'you too have to suffer corporal punishment, as I did,' I would, if I had kids, understand they're entering into a dicey space, and convey to them (through all the means parents have) 'you are loved, but shit's going to be hard. You're going to need to learn to feel and make sense of suffering/hurt/pain/heartbreak'

The meaning isn't in the particular suffering. Meaning is produced through a stance, or mode-of-being - what will come will come; what I have to do, over time, is learn how to make sense of it. I have to cultivate a meta-capacity for undergoing and recovering from suffering.

I think this scales from -100 to n-1 (where n is a state where there is no suffering at all.)

in raising my kids I simulatenously
(1) aim to reduce their suffering
&
(2) cultivate their capacity to work through suffering.

But, as you correctly point out, some shit is so fucked up, this doesn't work:

There are overwhelming sufferings - traumas - that so flood the victims, knocking over all their sense-making categories, that there's no nice, neat way to wrap it up. I don't see suicide as a weakness of will, or failure to make sense as one should - I see, usually, justified desperation in the face of irremediable suffering, psychological or social double binds, etc. I had a nervous breakdown in my twenties, spent some time in a psych ward - and the chaotic pain you see there blasts away moral and religious categories of suffering in an instant. You don't forget it.

So I'm not fetishizing suffering either. I was once an antinatalist - and while I only am familiar with Benatar through osmosis, I once went deep into Schopenhauer, Beckett & (to a lesser extent) Cioran. I'm coming at this from the lens of : Ok, we're in it; and, being in it, how to proceed?

My concern is in some ways about (dialectical) tempo. I have reservations about too readily positing a suffering-free state from a suffering-saturated state. One way to look at this is from a Bayesian lens. As a student of history, one of my (strong) priors is that utopian projects tend to be inverted mirrors of present-suffering, and so create new forms of suffering in doing away with the old (they can see how to reverse present suffering, but, understandably, can't anticipate the conditions and flavor of future suffering.)

To me, this seems like a historical hard-limit: you only know what you know now. Now my position isn't that we should never knock down Chesterton's Fence( Besides, I think its inevitable - beyond good and evil, as a matter of history - that all fences eventually come down) but I also doubt strongly that we can know now what we're knocking down, and the ramifications of that breaking-down, when the state of scientific knowledge and historical reality is accelerating at breakneck pace. It's not that I don't think not-suffering wouldn't be better - it's that thinking we know what that would mean now seems unlikely. again, back to Bayes - our understanding shifts dramatically, again and again. The historical evidence is overwhelming: what we think we understand now is likely only a scaffolding to another paradigm shift. The people in the (recent!) past couldn't know then the frame-shattering things we know about neuroscience now. But we can't know now what the people in (not-too-distant!) future will know. And that future-knowing will likely not be simply a filling-in-the-gaps in our current paradigm, but an overturning of our paradigms altogether. (its possible not - but we would need realllllly strong philosophical reasons to overturn the priors we get studying how these things tend to unfold historically.)

I agree that reducing suffering (and increasing flourishing) is the best orienting, regulative idea, for our ethics, but implementation will have to unfold gradually (or at least in tandem with our understanding) - and because of that, I think our best bet is to cultivate a focus - really cultivate a focus -on the here-and-now, and only then tentatively venture out toward widening time horizons (and how far out can we really see?)

@unenlightened@Banno
I think we should all be cautious of taking up another people as reservoir for our moral ideals & fantasies. This stuff sucks for actual indigenous people. Imagine you're a 16 year old native dude trying to chill, doing normal teenage stuff, passing a bowl. Everyone get's baked - 'dude... chris is native. he knows that real land shit. Tell them Chris!" and now Chris is stuck in that role. A shrewd dude can deftfully maneuver out with a mix of self-irony and assertive push-back, but that's not easy, and its a dumb onus to put on people. (my examples tame, really Imagine being a native girl in the matrix of such fantasies at a party.)

(These are my own example, but Tommy Orange (Cheyenne/Arapaho) captures the idea better in his book 'There, There'. )

Anyway:

The Chief Seattle Reply is bullshit - and that shouldn't be a surprise.

As Gilles Deleuze said, 'If you're trapped in the dream of the other, you're fucked'

Well on this thread I can perhaps present my position more clearly. The Academy resides on route 66 despite its monastic origins. So I grant your point for the reformation of the academy, simply noting how 'Jackal' that is. But down here on highway 61 where we get the killing done, and the dissolution of the monasteries and so on, there are no grades, and no tenure on offer. Say a true word or go straight to hell, as the Zen masters put it.

Science (as opposed to and distinct from the academy) only works if it is pursued religiously, and if it doesn't work, it's a steaming pile. So likewise, I am all for reforming the safeguarding policies of the Catholic church, but if the priests don't keep the faith, there is nothing left, and the congregation will drift away to some conspiracy theory that brings them comfort. — unenlightened

I'm with you that academia is something different from science. At the same time most of scientific practice requires significant funding. This is an extreme example, but: while it's possible to go into great solitude to meditate and pray, it is not possible to build the Large Hadron Collider this way. And whil there are solitary regions of science- say, Einstein doing gedanken experiments in the patent office - even these solitary pursuits bloom out of - and require verification by - the whole intricate expensive, apparatus of equipment, peer-review etc. (I'm sure scientists, if any were to see this, would probably roll their eyes at how clunky my understanding is...but the general idea I think is right.)

I agree that none of this works if its only institutions, and no one believes or cares if the findings are accurate. But we're all really good at self-deception, and I think people skillfully and effortlessly rationalize slippages as being ultimately in service of truth. I think a perhaps useful analogy is a relationship: you can have real faith in the relationship, and true love for the other person, but that is a guiding light that orients you while you go through the difficult work of figuring out what the snares and difficult patterns of any relationship are, and how to work together to overcome them. In failing relationships, you often have people who still have faith in (a progressively abstract idea of) their love, even as they're unconsciously choosing to rationalize (or ignore) problems that feel too intractable to overcome.

One idea that's gaining a lot of steam in scientific circles is pre-registration of studies. That means you let everyone know in advance when you're going to do a study, and exactly what your methodology will be. The idea, as far as I understand it, is that it prevents doing multiple studies until you get the results you're looking for, or adjusting methodology when you get the data to better suggest meaningful findings. (I don't think this is mostly scientists lying for prestige. I think it's usually more a matter of self-deception. You're going to get a ton of noise when you do studies, especially if statistics are involved, and I think they see it as trying to frame the findings to best convey what they believe the data imperfectly shows.) With things like pre-registration, you have a community working together to collectively overcome the traps they've got caught up in. This doesn't seem to be enough yet - but it's that kind of thing that seems like the way out : institutional reforms that come out of dedication to the ideal of science.

To tie it back to the thread's operative metaphor - travel (and sacrifice) usually requires taking a whole bunch of different roads

In plainspeak - I've liked your posts for a long time. I sign on a lot when angry and confrontational, or provocational, unfortunately. That isn't today, but it is recently, and when I do that, I tend to go for the posters who can respond best. Also asking for help, in some ways. I don't want you to have a funeral. I agree that sacrifice is central to virtue, as well, and I also think its very sad sometimes, but inevitable, and beautiful at the end.

-and I still think fixing academia requires restructuring academic incentive structures. But that is for the other thread.

My own thread referenced so disdainfully in an OP - what to do? I weighed whether to respond. I attempted some augury during my daily woods-wallk ( a chickadee, some crows) but since I don't know how augury works, I've had to rely on other means.

Luckily those other means were forthcoming. Two on-the-nose synchronicities today.

(1)There's a long lecture series I'm listening to, and today happened to be the episode on Christianity. The lecturer devoted about 1/3 of that to the discussion of agape, about 2/3's of that to 1 Corinthians 13.

(2) One of my daily rituals is to hit up a random-bible verse website and then read the full chapter that verse is from. Some days you get page-long censuses of tribes, but today, I shit you not, I got Romans 4 - Paul's take on Abraham

A preponderance of well-arrayed tea leaves incentivizes me to respond.
****

The first thing I would say is that I'm confused at the intensity of this moral reaction if its simply in response to my thread. That thread was about the systematic misuse of surveys in academia; this thread, which cites mine disapprovingly, is about willingness-to-sacrifice-children as proof of moral character. (and I'm not sure if it's intentionally leaning-into the Kierkegaard stuff I mentioned on the other thread, or if its a coincidence.)

But the second thing: I just don't follow your OP - I get the threads of

[true moral courage versus moral mercantilism ( cost-benefit etc)]

[hippy hedonism versus the moral path]

[pop culture mythology]

& I feel the tone of the loom

but the last few paragraphs confuse me, and I don't think its just because I lack the moral character to grasp them. I think the general meme-y reaction is because of that - it's hard to parse the point.

----

We're both given to a sort of peacocking, i think. We both do it, the OP was doing it, and I've responded by doing it. I think we should cut through it here though, if we can. How would you sum up the OP in a few sentences? I promise to respond myself in a few sentences, in plainspeak.

My father, a man of at least a few peculiarities, kept on a shelf in the basement a large piece of gristle cut from some bone. I cannot pretend to know his entire thought, but he appeared to be fascinated to some degree - that led him to keep the thing - with the sheer potential for chewability that it represented. Because I threw it away after he died, I know a) it never dried out, and b) he never actually tried it.

Two thoughts come to mind. One is about the life of an intelligent young man living in colonial America, more specifically near Boston c. 1750 - no one in particular. His range the books nearby he could borrow and read, how far either his horse or his legs could take him, and the quality of his neighbors. In that place at that time those resources would have been relatively large and great. But what he would have had foremost is his self. and that largely undistracted except by the disciplines that life would have imposed. Which led soon enough to Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, et al.

And the other of course the chewability of philosophy, so-called by the one chewing and not to be gainsaid. All the possibilities in potentia of that somewhat idyllic life present even now, and more and better. But at a risk of distraction. Working the jaws can be immensely satisfying, but for nutrition there must be the right stuff between them. — tim wood

:up: :strong:

My bailiwick was outreach in high risk settings. I decided I would try a behavioral test in a high risk setting (an adult book store's basement cruising and video area). The idea was that I would propose oral sex first, and then see if they were willing to use a condom. Whether they were or not willing, was beside the point, because I didn't plan on giving a blow job in either case. As it happened, the first guy I tried this out on didn't appreciate the bait and switch, and forced me to carry through. He was bigger than me, so... In other settings--like the gay bathhouse--the participant observer approached worked better. The upshot was pretty much what we expected. A significant number of men were not willing to use condoms consistently. — Bitter Crank

Ha, love it. Well the idea of the gonzo approach anyway (that experience sounds brutal, man)

And I do take your point that all surveys have substantial 'baked-in' problems that are probably unavoidable. Your examples are good. I think more than anything, my uneasiness with the phenomenon in the OP is the factory-approach, and the fact that many people are taking hundreds, if not thousands surveys a year. I think that once you have a population of professional survey takers, churning them out, you're messing with something fundamental, but its harder to nail what that is precisely.

I regret taking the tone that I did above. I was discomfited by the introduction of a moral absolutism lens, and concerned that we were beginning to get into a point-scoring dynamic, one which I admittedly was contributing to.

There's a lot to say about the bible verse you quoted, 1 Corinthians 13:2. My understanding of that verse is that love is central to christianity. All of the other virtues are empty if they're not enlivened by love. Love is a translation of 'agape' which is theologically complex. As I noted above, it is also sometimes translated as 'charity.' Agape/love/charity has a lot to do with the way we treat those we live with. We should love our neighbor as ourselves, & a big part of that is judging not, lest we be judged & casting the beam out of our own eye before casting the mote out of our brother's. We should be charitable in understanding others. It would be a bad application of Agape to react to bad goings-on in town by showing that others aren't saintlike.

In general I think it's good practice on the one hand to minimize any blame of a situation when focusing on our own mistakes (because this takes power away from us, and reinforces learned helplessness) but, on the other hand, to maximize the role situational factors play when approaching the mistakes of others. Doing this first - another word for this is compassion, or empathy - will better allow that person to then, hopefully, cultivate their own ascension out of learned helplessness - that is, empower them. This is not hard-and-fast, its a loose rule that itself changes dependent on the situation. I think this is what Christianity at its best helps with - its very concerned with the understanding that we and others will fail, and developing ways to heal those ruptures.

In other parts of 1 Corinthians 13 we are told that Love is not proud, boastful, self-seeking, easily angered, seeking to dishonor others and so forth. But any close - or even unclose - reading of Paul's letters shows that Paul is very much all of these things. That could mean, as in certain atheist readings, that the bible is contradictory and should be tossed out. We might also say that Paul is a brilliant, but flawed interpreter of the gospels, and the Jesus event, and let that inflect our understanding of the new testament, so that we are less likely to see it as perfect whole . We could also apply both the gospels and Paul's own insights to our relationship with Paul's letters, and scripture in general. There are a lot of different approaches.

For these reasons, and others, I was frustrated with your post responding with that single verse, because while you meant it as a proof that my claim that you were taking a narrow of christianity was wrong, the post itself seemed to be another example of that narrow view of Christianity. And it also felt like that verse, particularly, suggested a very different approach to the problem in the OP than the one I took you to be taking.

I think that character, like any virtue, is not something one either has or doesn't, but is something cultivated with many zigs and zags. It can create problems, ifwe say that someone who allows themselves to be manipulated lacks character full stop. For instance, is a woman in an unpleasant situation who gives in to sexual requests in order to escape that situation, allowing herself to be manipulated, demonstrating a lack of character? Is this the same situation as the one in the OP? Of course not, but that's the point - applications of moral judgments require a lot of finesse.

Another figure who comes to mind when I think of stark, absolute approaches to Christianity is Kierkegaard. A key fact about Kierkegaard is that he was independently wealthy, he was removed from the thorniest, existential aspect of the more fundamental incentive-structures.

Now, look, certainly character does play some role in this whole thing. When I say I'm not looking to impugn character, I'm signalling what I think is the bigger factor at play. Certainly, a scientist may not play ball, and not get published - and that is good for him! But then the rest of us are still getting the stuff that is published. So while we might esteem him for his resistance, it's not changing the system that determines what sort of stuff gets published - and the OP was about that problem, not about the souls of individual scientists. I think soul-stuff is very important, don't get me wrong, but this thread isn't focused on that.

I hope that clarifies what I'm trying to say a bit.

I think it's better not to go down this kind of path. If you're interested in what that verse may mean in the context of a lived faith - e.g. why its translated sometimes as 'charity', sometimes as 'love' - or the relationship between scripture, tradition and interpretation in general- I would recommend diving into the literature, there's a lot of interesting stuff.

To go back to the main point, I think its easy to call-out failure, and much harder and more interesting to figure out why failure happens. I'd invite you to think about the implications of the relationship between character and manipulation you describe when applied generally. It's a slippery slope.

:up: Solid link. I found going through the other comments on that thread is fascinating too. Like how one person objects to the author's point (as made in the OP ,above the one you quoted) on the grounds that ridiculing bad studies is objectionable because it won't help make things better. Some people agree. Then some others say that mockery is necessary, because other means won't work, you have to sort of punch through the over-politeness. And then back and forth. It's cool to see in real time why its such a struggle to actually change things. The emotional tone is high, and you can see the defenses against change play out

I think that's a narrow idea of what Christianity is (though maybe close to extreme puritans like Jonathan Edwards...but even he would be less strict). Grace, atonement, forgiveness, redemption (among others) are important concepts in Christianity, but those concepts don't make sense if 'sinning' is grounds for immediate excommunication.

If you can be ordered about by incentive structures, you have no character. Character is that which resists manipulation — unenlightened

If character's the ability to resist manipulation (this is a reallyslippery slope though...) then character's on a spectrum. It may be true (i'm not sure) that saints with extreme self-determination + capacity for suffering can remove themselves entirely from incentive structures, but sainthood would be a high bar to clear in order to do labwork. When I say I don't want to impugn their character, I don't mean 'I think that scientists have better developed character than 99.99% of the population.'

-

Exactly - and that's part of what of is so flagrant about this. The replication crisis is The Big Topic in psychological circles -& has been for a pretty long while at this point! It's not just that the approach is bad for the reasons in the OP - it's that those doing it can't plead ignorance. Everyone (in these circles) knows there is a crisis of replication - yet they're, many of them, still hacking the system for flashy results.

I don't want to impugn the character of the researchers, because I don't think the problem comes down to character. It feels like this is when you really know its bad - everyone knows something is wrong - but the incentive structures push people to keep doing this stuff nevertheless. It's this weird zombie thing. I wonder what would really crash it, and force a meaningful restructuring?

(I occasionally, if in a particularly 'Jesus, c'mon!' mood, leave a comment in the study to these effects, but as good as it feels, I suspect that probably won't heal the sickness)

However, here is a counterargument. Transhumanism at its best aims to promote the well-being of all sentience, or at least all sentience in our forward light-cone. I take a range of pills and potions, and intend to be symbolically cryothanased aged 75 or so with a view to reanimation, but it's not as though I anticipate seeing the Promised Land with any great confidence – quite aside from my scepticism about the metaphysics of enduring personal identity. Rather, our responsibility as intelligent moral agents is to try to ensure that future beings don't suffer in the way that human and nonhuman animals do today. We’re stepping-stones. No one should have to undergo the ravages of aging, witness the death of a loved one, experience psychological illness, or undergo the mundane frustrations and disappointments of Darwinian life. No sentient being should be factory-farmed, perish in the death factories, or starve or fall victim to a predator in Nature. The fact that many / most / all of us will never personally live to see the glorious future of sentience doesn't diminish our obligation to work to that end. — David Pearce

I very much like the emphasis on a general happiness that goes beyond one's own, the idea of the present as a stepping stone to the future. I can definitely see how my post - and references - seemed to emphasize personal happiness - but I'm coming at it from another angle. I've experienced rather harsh psychological illness, and the passing of my mother when I was 25. All of this was - and sometimes continues to be - devastating. But at the same time....I was kind of an asshole before then. And it was going through those experiences, real suffering, that allowed me to shift-tracks from a kind of self-centered hedonism and cultivate something like empathy (partially, I'm still often an asshole, but a little less so)

Now, maybe this is a Stockholm-Syndrome approach: suffering scooped me up and, having no other psychological choice, I was gaslighted into loving it. I can see that take; I don't think it's true....though, to be fair, that's just what the stockholm syndrome'd person would say.

(plus I have a unfair cheat: reincarnation. You mention above metaphysical scepticism about personal identity. I have that scepticism too and have plunged into some of the literature. Doing so has led me to believe in a very qualified kind of reincarnation (not that I'll get my mom back, or that she'll ever be her again ---I've read too many horror stories about rogue alchemists not to know that the desire to resurrect the dead only breeds monsters). Her personal identity ended when she died. But she was blocked by certain harsh emotions and hardened habits, and was released from that...contraction of being, so to speak, into the opener space)

But in general I really do think that there may be something to the old idea that undergoing suffering is a condition for a more finely-tuned happiness. I know that that's a cliche on the face of it (maybe even a particularly pernicious culturally-implanted one!) but I think there is also a robustness to certain ways of approaching it that go beyond the cliche.

To flesh that out would go beyond the scope of posting on here, but the tldr is:

What I meant in my first post isn't that we should prioritize our own happiness at the expense of the future inhabitants of our lightcone, but something like : happiness could be the gradual unfurling that comes when a community agrees to focus on the here and now - which focus means confronting and working-out deferred, repressed suffering ...kneading it out, undergoing it- the future happiness coming organically through the kneading, like the relief from tension in a muscle. I'm thinking of like the serenity after a good, full cry. At the same time you reach catharsis you realize: I need to be a kinder person, and I now have a sense how to. It's the same thing.

I know this might seem wishy-washy! But there's a lot to recommend it - only time and space constraints allow only a quick and simple suggestive pointing.

Yeah I feel you, I went through a lot of that in the response posts.

@David Pearce

(apologies if I'm treading already trodden-ground, I'm coming to the thread late)

There's a story by Henry James I've always liked called The Beast In the Jungle. That story is about a man who, for as long as he can remember, was always convinced that somewhere in his future lay a terrible event. He didn't know what it was, only that it would be horrible. He has trouble expressing it to anyone, but eventually meets a woman who is very sympathetic to him. The story chronicles their meetings over the years, with her attentively, consolingly listening to his fears of the beast. Eventually she dies, and while standing at her grave he's struck with an intense flashing memory of their whole friendship - he realizes that the whole time she was trying to express her love for him through sympathizing with him, and that he never actually saw it, focused as he was on the beast. And, of course, that's when 'the beast' hits him - that is the beast.

That's a story about focus on a bad/sad thing. He lives his life in preparation/constant thinking about the bad thing, and in doing so misses everything else. But I often worry that a version of it might hold for transhumanist visions of the future.

Might it be the case that in focusing attention on an 'outside' ( a future, elsewhere, later) where the anti-beast (the very good) will happen -where it will be given to us wrapped and perpetually +100 - we're drawing attention away from learning how to see the modest +n's in life, and learning how to cultivate them into n+1s? Maybe experiencing +100s is inseparable from learning to recognize and cultivate +1s, here and now, struggling with them?

I have trouble not thinking in narrative terms, and when I go into periods where I think a lot about future happiness, these periods usually terminate with me daydreamily 'seeing' the story of my life as someone focusing on a distant happiness while all the possibilities of that happiness passed me by. In the daydream story, I realize that the +100 has to begin with a +1 here I never began to cultivate, because I was focused on the +100 there.

When I'm in those phases I'm always haunted by this Rilke line

"A wave swelled toward you
out of the past, or as you walked by the open window
a violin inside surrendered itself
to pure passion. All that was your charge.
But were you strong enough? Weren’t you always distracted
by expectation"

Isn't there a danger that in entertaining transhumanism, we're always 'distracted by expectation' in just this way? (though you can also imagine in act II of such a story, there's always someone would come in and moralize in just this way)

Yeah, good evolutionary thought, from what little I know of it, seems much, much more nuanced than what I've been talking about so far on here. Ecological systems approaches, to meet you, do seem particularly interesting to me, but I haven't dug in too deep (largely because I've got no math, and it seems like there's a lot of math involved. I always get a tinge of envy when people like @fdrake get into the nuts and bolts of this kind of stuff.)

Speculatively: it feels to me like once you take that first step, and realize there's no good theoretical reason to privilege the species-level - then you can zoom in and out of different levels (i.e. a whole is always a part of a bigger whole ---and the part of any whole is itself a whole made up of other parts...cells-individuals-species-ecosystems-...[whatever an ecosystem of ecosystems is?])

Then you can see, emerging from the mist, a kind of generalized evolutionary theory : the state-of-things-in-general, in leading to the next state-of-things-in-general, will need to retain certain features, while losing others. Genetics, in this case, are just one part (a super important part, to be sure) of this whole story.

My response to this is probably shallow but I agree with you about the overuse and misplaced use of evolution/Darwinism. I also include neuroscience in this as every second person now seems to crib pop nonsense about behavior based on some random magazine understanding of neuroscience. The savannah and neuroplasticity have a lot to answer for. — Tom Storm

Ha, yeah exactly. This thread, tbh, is 90% a philosophy forums version of a cranky Andy Rooney reaction to just the kind of thing you're talking about. This isn't a criticism of evolutionary theory in general, it's more about its sloppy applications.

In terms of the Plantinga argument (which - my own quick and dirty aside - sounds very close to Husserl's argument against who he called the 'psychologists' of his day) I half-agree with it. I think you can't explain truth away as adaptive advantage on pain of inconsistency, since you undermine the very argumentative route you took to explain truth away as adaptive advantage - (this is what Jordan Peterson tries to do, and when someone challenged him on it along these lines, he tailspun very quickly.) But I do think (as in my response above to Janus) that you can have an explanation for how something comes into being, without that explanation of its origins being able to explain emergent, autonomous logics. That may be what Plantinga is saying too though, I'm not sure, but I just want to say I think you can have both evolutionary theory and independent criteria of truth and falsity.

Once there is society and culture, then there is a network of intentionallity and agendas that create quite different, more volatile, selection pressures than the natural environment alone does.

I don't think there are any clear correlations between the existence of beliefs, or practices, and their survival efficacy (even if they could be thought to bestow an increased chance of survival). — Janus

Yeah, I agree. And I think this is why casual, psychological uses of evolution are often so misplaced. There's often this unquestioned drive to distill some psychological phenomenon to a n early human essence (so you so very often hear something like: 'our brains developed to the thing they are now, before agriculture etc'). In some cases, fair enough. But in others there's a cutting-away of all of that social and cultural complexity as though it can't really factor into the real explanation, because it doesn't get into the biology of the brain of a hunter-gatherer.

The idea with the evolutionary cartesian demon is that if you take that same approach, if you reduce everything to the adaptive biology of the brain as an already more-or-less-finished product on the savannah, you're cutting off the limb you're standing on. You have to understand the scientific method and process as, in some way, autonomous from the biology of the brain. We can understand when things satisfy scientific criteria for reasons other than adaptive fitness. But if you do that for the scientific method, there's also no reason, in principle, why it can't hold of other things we do.

Let me try to explain. I think that if you have strong aesthetic and moral values, you also need a good understanding of how stuff works to live in accordance with them. To take a pulpy, simplified example: If I'm a detective who's trying to prevent suffering in my community, I'm going to be much more effective at doing that if I don't begin, say, with a worldview of general harmony that is only occasionally punctuated by the base actions of the lower class. I might miss the fact that a lawyer or priest is guilty of sex crimes, because it doesn't gibe with my understanding. I need to follow the evidence where it leads me in order to effectively reduce suffering. (Now obviously you don't have the worldview I imputed to the detective, but thats just a particular illustration of the general idea)

At the far extreme, letting aesthetic and moral values dictate your understanding of stuff leads you into Don Quixotism.

The problem with it is that it is reductive, in that the only criterion for what constitutes a successful outcome is that of surviving and procreating. It doesn’t say anything about what is good, aesthetically or morally, but only what works, from the purported aim of surviving. Arguments can be made that it favours altruism and that kindness is more effective than cruelty, but they seem highly artificial to me. — Wayfarer

It seems like here you're taking 'success' as a moral term, when the evolutionary theorist just isn't using it that way. Now, I also think that people who use evolutionary theory as the ground of their morality are confusing domains as well. But that's another thing.

But my beef here isn't a moral one, at least not directly. It's that many overly-simple, naive uses of evolution qua description of how things work (especially when it comes to psychology) actually limit understanding of how things work, independent of morality.

That’s pretty well what Donald Hoffman says. — Wayfarer

Yeah, Hoffman was one of the ones I was thinking of when I said 'We don't have to imagine it' - but I didn't want to cite him explicitly only because I've merely heard a single podcast interview with him and haven't read his boo. He seems like a smart, rounded guy and I wouldn't be surprised if he engages with the thornier theoretical aspects in his work.

On the general point of the OP, I agree that evolutionary theory has become the de facto ‘theory of everything’ as far as humanity is concerned. Where once we had the myth of the fall, we now have the scientifically-sanctioned theory of evolution by natural selection. The problem with it is that it is reductive, in that the only criterion for what constitutes a successful outcome is that of surviving and procreating. It doesn’t say anything about what is good, aesthetically or morally, but only what works, from the purported aim of surviving. Arguments can be made that it favours altruism and that kindness is more effective than cruelty, but they seem highly artificial to me. — Wayfarer

Well, when we're talking about biology, we wouldn't want to interpret evidence, and create models, based on whether they satisfy our aesthetic and moral values. I'm not trying to morally appraise evolutionary models - that seems like mixing up domains, right? I want - and expect - the work of scientists to satisfy scientific criteria. I do get what you're saying, but I think we're coming at this from very different angles.

Unfortunately astrology has a bad reputation, but if you delve into for the symbolism instead fortune telling, it's pretty fascinating.

So if you're sitting across from your boss, is it a mentor and student? Is it a father and son? Is it that you're the fool on the hill and he or she is the city folk?

And relationships can be star crossed. He's supposed to be a mentor, but he lacks confidence.

One way to advance off the savannah to a world with Starbucks, anyway. Speaking of which, is the boss Captain Ahab? :grimace: — frank

I've found that astrology (& tarot etc) are really good ways to get a conversation going in groups that otherwise have trouble articulating their feelings and thoughts about their life-situation. Whether its 'true' or not, it offers a safe-conversational space to talk about things, in part because its often half-tongue-in-cheek which loosens people up if theyre used to conversations about real shit being deadly serious and so to be avoided.

But, yeah, there's also a huge archetypal layer to psychology and you can often get a much more fine-grained understanding of people's psychological experience of interpersonal stuff by going into narrative mode and asking if they think of a difficult boss more like an Ahab, or a Fagin, or a Leslie Knope (or whatever shared cultural touchstones you have)- they say ahh its some of all of that, but, let me see, its more like, how do I put it - and then, they begin articulating something they haven't quite thought out.

Obviously there's no reason why evolutionary thought can't, in principle, shed light on the complex, nuanced ways in which we experience and articulate stuff like this. But it is often the case that it seems like the evolutionary explanation is pretending these layers don't exist, or are somehow irrelevant. Which leads to the philosophical point that even if something is an 'illusion', you have to account for the reality of the illusion to have a real explanation.

But I also want to note that there are plenty of sharp evolutionary theorists, but, again, its the cultural function of evolutionary explanation as a hyperlinked anchor-point that stops exploration that I'm beefing with.