They won't correspond to the feelings any real author wants to express, but the prose will be excellent. — Count Timothy von Icarus
This book will answer any questions you ask of it to your satisfaction. It can tell you how to do things that you want to do well enough to get them done, and it will also explain phenomena to you such that you are happy with the explanations — Count Timothy von Icarus
A book may say any number of things I initially find wonderful and revelatory, but it will have no effect on my life until I put this knowledge to the test in terms of determining how well it allows to me to anticipate events over time. Only that will determine their relative truth or falsity for me. — Joshs
Is there anything more you can say about this process? What do you think is the connection between one person making a book 'work' and another not? Is it a mixture of factors like socialisation, values and personality? Are our anticipatory selves (for want of a better term) built and rebuilt by our ongoing relationship to the world and how we are socialised? — Tom Storm
It can tell you how to do things that you want to do well enough to get them done, and it will also explain phenomena to you such that you are happy with the explanations. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Its hard to say then whether one wants to book. On one side it will never allow them to understand correctly the relationships between things in physics, chemistry and biology as they are, but it would still allow progress of a form. It would provide for all needs. — Benj96
Honestly, I'm surprised no one has proffered up: "if it tells you how to do everything you want and satisfies inquiry then it is telling you the truth." You could simply object to the supposition that it really lies to you. — Count Timothy von Icarus
how do we ever know when we've reached bedrock?
But, per Hegel's more fallibilist system, maybe the point is in going beyond the given. In never settling. All questioning is itself, "moments in the Absolute," after all. — Count Timothy von Icarus
"You wake up in a lab, in a new body. The doctors tell you that you had voluntarily plugged into a machine that would simulate a life for you, a better life. All your friends and family, those are part of the simulation. They wake you up every 10 years and ask you if you are satisfied and if you want to go back, then wipe the memory of waking from your mind if you do go back."
The question is, do you wake up to the "real world," or go back. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Question 1: Do you take the book? Why or why not? — Count Timothy von Icarus
Question 1: Do you take the book? Why or why not? — Count Timothy von Icarus
But notice that my reply deconstructs your Cartesian metaphysical assumptions
Rather than thinking these notions in terms of correspondence between subject and independently real objects, it defines the truth and the real on the basis of the ongoing success of our construals of the world in making sense of, predicting and ordering, in a harmonious and coherent way, the continually changing nature of the flow of new experience.
Bedrock isn’t defined by what is independently ‘real’ in itself, apart from us, but by what makes sense to us in as harmonious a way as possible relative to our ways of construing the world. This bedrock of anticipatory understanding is an endless struggle, because the goal is nether out there in the world nor inside of us, but in the reciprocally re-adjusting coordination between the two.
On the other hand, we generally settle for whatever guide for proceeding through life allows us to make sense of it in an open-endedly harmonious and robustly flexible way. And why shouldn’t we, since a flexible approach is a creative approach that has built into it the continual possibilities of self-reinvention?
The reason most choose to wake up is that they buy into the matrix metaphysics of a Cartesian ‘real’ world. If reality is assumed to be some independent thing in itself, then surely our ‘simulated’ happiness is a cheap knock-off of the real thing, depriving us of a richer, deeper, more meaningful quality of experience. This is how most of is were taught to think about the real and the true. It doesn’t occur to us that experience is neither invented (simulation) nor discovered (empirically true reality), it an inextricable dance between the two.
Honestly, I'm surprised no one has proffered up: "if it tells you how to do everything you want and satisfies inquiry then it is telling you the truth." You could simply object to the supposition that it really lies to you. — Count Timothy von Icarus
This book will answer any questions you ask of it to your satisfaction — Count Timothy von Icarus
I don't think the primary motivation has to do with "happiness," per say. The whole premise of the Experience Machine is the it will make you happy, and yet people turn it down. I suspect that people are skeptical of the Machine because it means being heavily determined by that which lies outside us. It lies outside us and we have no way to learn about it.
It's a lack of freedom then, not a lack of pleasure or happiness. — Count Timothy von Icarus
it also seems that states of affairs must precede knowledge of them. If I am to know I am mad, I have to be mad; if we are to discover a new superconductor, it needs to be able to act as a superconductor. — Count Timothy von Icarus
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