No, I will not take that book. It doesn't seem to have what I am looking for when I want to read a book. I am not looking for truths or 'satisfaction', but for emotion and beauty. I guess that 'The Book of Imperfect Knowledge' could help me out in a lot of things, but I doubt it will make me cry, sad, nostalgic, melancholic, etc. I think literature is an art, and I leave to each person their own path to experience those emotions. On the contrary, that kind of book could be boring and rigid.

I would be bothered if this book were shared with others precisely. It would be an attack on their emotions. I do not consider it a privilege to hold a book such as this one in my hands or someone's else. It could be even dangerous, because it removes the information from other books and lectures, leading people to live under only one perspective.

More than undergo a spell, it would be a curse.

I already have "imperfect knowledge" so I'd lose much more than I'd gain from the deal. And my memory is limited enough, I don't need to further handicap myself with a "spell" (i.e. curse). Last but not least, I suspect magic – even if there was such a thing – doesn't ever solves more (intractable, impossible) problems than it creates.

Hmm, well, I didn't mean to exclude all forms of reading for entertainment. We could say that the Book also furnishes with tons of lovely fiction stories you will enjoy. Poetry books, etc. They won't correspond to the feelings any real author wants to express, but the prose will be excellent.



Ah, but does your current imperfect knowledge satisfy you? Aren't there some questions you're really itching to get a plausible answer on?

Of course, it's possible we wouldn't be satisfied with the answers of the book precisely because they aren't true. In which case it seems like we want to "know" and not just to have "know-how." The truth being its own sort of goal.

Chat GPT, thou art a woman.

Ah! I understand you better now.

They won't correspond to the feelings any real author wants to express, but the prose will be excellent. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I still don't see it as reliable. I don't know if it will really satisfy my emotions. I am not asking for 'perfect' prose, but to cry, laugh or be afraid. The 'Book' seems to be an artificial product created for quick consumption rather than be savoured. By the way, if one of the requirements is 'no longer retain' any information from any other books, lectures or films, don't you see it as twisted? I see this book holds an obscure trap.

I have to accept that it is impossible to do everything I wish. So, a book which is 'capable' of helping me out is suspicious to me. I feel like I would leave my soul to the Book and let it think for me.

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

Will it satisfactorily answer questions like: ‘Is there a god? What is the meaning of life? How do I achieve happiness in life?’ If so, then it isn’t just a book you’re taking about, it’s my interaction with unfolding events in response to what I read. 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. Knowledge isnt static factoids, it is a way of navigating through life in a fashion that makes the unfolding flow of events coherent, consistent, familiar, integral.It is events as they confirm or disappoint my expectations which decide the relative validity of my conceptions, not the in-itself content of a book What one is exposed to in a book is only a small ingredient, a starting point or catalyst , for that process. If a ‘lying’ book inspires me to make sense of actual experience in the world in a way that is useful and predictive for me, then that book was my source of bonified truth.

That sounds right. In this way we have any number of books being seen as helpful, inspired or revelatory, from Mein Kampf to You Can Heal Your Life. One person's 'lying' book is another person's indispensable truth.

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?

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

Our social environment certainly provides opportunities we can draw upon, as well as constraints limiting what we can make of our world, but I think most of what affords or constrains creative movement is located on the subjective side of the self-world hinge.

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

I voted yes to wanting it, but no if everyone else did. As I understand it, the invention the book came up with would do what I wanted, but not necessarily for the reasons it gave. So, if I ask the book how to invest in crypto and make easy millions, I will succeed, but I won't really know why? If so, the book is completely overpowered, it would be equivalent to a superpower, easy yes.

I don't want anyone else to have one though, that would diminish the value of mine greatly.

It seems this is one of these questions that everyone chooses so that they can give a wonderfully poetic answer to reaffirm our real-world values. I wonder, would anyone really pass up such utility and power for virtue if the choice was real, and not just a question that "reveals" the type of person one is.

It rather sounds to me like a magic book which can resolve any empirical question, and essentially give you perfect empirical knowledge. The imperfection seems to lie with the metaphysical truth of that knowledge, but that isn't particularly relevant in practice. So it just seems to much of a boon to turn down, though I wouldn't force it on everyone.

I am so proud of everyone here showing their support for the preservation of "all other books/sources". Bravo :cheer:

:100: :snicker:

it seems to me this is a book of "conspiracy theories" or a book of "personal biases, fantasy, fiction or delusion" because it tells you what you want to hear. Not what is actually true.

Sometimes the truth is a hard pill to swallow. Sometimes knowledge and facts hurt. But they're valid whether we like it or not. This book would cherry pick only the explanations one likes disregarding information that is accurate yet unsavoury.

However if it offers solutions to problems without giving you the correct interim reason for it, it is still interesting. It's practical and can serve to do useful work even if you don't understand why in a coherent or uniform scientific way. Then it is akin to getting the right outcome regardless of the input.

Getting a cure for all cancers, even tho it involved peeling a banana 8 times and spinning in circles while reciting your favourite poem backwards, because thiis is the method that pleased you most.

You would be forfeiting actual sensible stepwise reasoning for spontaneous, miraculous and inexplicably Correct outcome.

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.

So in the end the question is really do you want true knowledge of how things work but without the guarantee of immediate desired outcome, or do you want the security of all needs met, without knowing how they came to be. So it's like do you want to be spoon fed like a child or do you want to put in the work to figure out the solutions yourself even if this comes with the risk that you may fail.

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

The way I understand it, the book would give you an entirely "correct" understanding of all laws of nature, just that the set of laws would have as little as possible to do with the real underlying reality.

But, seeing as this underlying reality is in any case inaccessible to us, that doesn't seem to me that big of a drawback.

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.



I think you have nicely framed the core issue I wanted to get at. Does our inability to find truth, even in an approximate form — our being stuck "in illusion" — rob our lives of a sort of meaning?

In a twist on the "experience machine," a psychologist once told participants this story:

"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.

Suprisingly, even in this version, which means leaving everything you know, most people chose to leave. If told that they were a rich, famous artist in their real life, only slightly more people choose the "real world," then if they are told nothing. If they are told they are a prisoner in a maximum security prison, fewer people choose to leave the machine, but a decent number, over a third if I recall correctly, want the "real" even in this case.

Of course, given such an experience, I'm afraid I'd have to always doubt that my "real world," is actually just another fake world. This is something Plato doesn't adequately address in the Republic IMO. Given we were mislead by the shadow puppets, then mistook the reflections for the things themselves, 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.

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

I thought that’s what I had done by arguing that if the knowledge the book imparted to you proved its value through your successful anticipation of many subsequent events in your life, then it is true for you. But notice that my reply deconstructs the Cartesian metaphysical assumptions embedded in your hypothetical about the ‘real’ and the ‘true’, the simulated and the actual. 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.

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

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.
The point of desire and freedom is not settling for the pain and suffering of meaning incoherence and confusion. Of course, we only ever ‘settle’ for such conditions of being when we believe that the alternative forms of construing available to us would make the world appear even more incoherent to us. 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 ( a way that WORKS pragmatically in our lives). And why shouldn’t we, since a flexible approach is a creative approach that has built into it the continual possibilities of self-reinvention?

"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

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), but an inextricable dance between the two. The creepiness of your hypothetical does not derive from the power of science but from the power of a certain pervasive mythos of science.

Question 1: Do you take the book? Why or why not? — Count Timothy von Icarus

No, thank you. I don't even keep all my socks in one drawer; a single source of unreliable information would be worse than having to rely on experience alone. Reliable manuals on how to do things are readily available, and those people who require answers that correspond to their opinion already have their broadcast media. I see the magic book as superfluous.

Question 1: Do you take the book? Why or why not? — Count Timothy von Icarus

No. The cost is too high. There is nothing magical about a book that assures our ignorance. We already have such books.

Interesting, I didn't totally catch that the first time.

To modify Hamlet a bit, "there is nothing true or false, thinking makes it so."

Well, I see nothing necessarily objectionable there. What could it mean for something to be true if falsity is not a possibility? But 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.

But notice that my reply deconstructs your Cartesian metaphysical assumptions

I'm not sure what's supposed to be Cartesian here? The idea that a rock and knowledge of "the rock" are not the same thing doesn't seem to necessitate anything like the mind/body dualism Descartes is most famous for. I was thinking in terms of the simple observation that our view of things depends on our perspective and that multiple subjects can have different experiences of what is, in some respect, the same thing.

So, we might say the truth of a thing is the whole, the grand total of all observations of it, all relations that obtain relevant to that thing. This doesn't require dualism, but rather precludes dualism. The unified whole is the truth, the partial revisions of the subject merely a part of the truth. The truth is the whole process, not any one "moment" of the process, e.g. my current conception of the truth of x at time t.

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.

I'm with you on truth here, in that it is processed, but on the real? I'm not sure.

How do you deal with disagreements? When people first began to argue over whether or not the Earth revolves around the Sun or vice versa, surely there was, in some sense, a relationship between the two (Sun and Earth) that obtained before anyone was satisfied with their understanding of the matter? States of affairs aren't true or false, but we can later formulate descriptions of them that can be true or false.

If we were all solipsists, and did not believe in the truth of any experiences save our own, it seems there must still be a "truth of the matter." Either others would have experiences, and each solipsist would be wrong, or only one individual would have experiences, and that individual would be correct. Otherwise, it seems like there would be as many worlds as there are observers, and I'm not sure how such discrete worlds would come to be unified when one observer comes to "know" or believe that another's experience truly exist.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something here, but it seems to go beyond dualism into a voluminous plural[l]ism. And yet, if each world exists, and they interact, then they are actually part of a whole.

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.

How does this avoid the problem of multiple, sometimes contradictory truths? Or does it?

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?

Sure. But a partial and powerful motivator for the social endeavour that is "the search for truth," (science, philosophy, etc.) is that knowledge allows for causal mastery. And even though the correspondence idea of truth is in some ways deeply flawed (is science really a search for "truth?"), here it shows its pragmatic merit. The quest for the "true description," is tied up in the fact that knowing such a description shows you how you can edit it, the leverage points that exist for enacting an individual or collective will. I think this is sort of what your were getting at too.

Correspondence gets on well enough popularly because it does describe something deep about the world, that there is a difference between what we accept as true about the world and how the world reacts. But it's an incomplete description.

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.

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.

The fear is that, if the Machine is always working to guide us towards a happy state, towards pleasure, we won't develop or transcend. We cannot go past ourselves because the machine is posterior to our experiences.

But the sort of constant questioning you describe is what people want. I don't think it can be reduced to another desire in a straightforward way though. To question is to be going beyond what one already is, to go beyond current beliefs and desires, to transcend the current limits of the self.

In "The Dark Night of the Soul," Saint John of the Cross describes a period of purgation, where the senses are dulled and nothing brings joy to the soul. Event spiritual pursuits and contemplation no longer bring joy. Desire dies, sensuousness becomes muted. He describes it an an extreme "aridity."

This is an emptying, a letting go of all desire, and a letting goal of all concrete attachment to the sensuous world in preparation for the beatific vision, which is not one of pleasure, but of total oneness with all, through the One who is all.

That his work became a classic, and that similar guides are so popular among Sufis, in Zen, etc. bespeaks to me a sort of yearning for going beyond all desire, its own sort of desire, but a self-annihilating one. The machine is offensive to this drive because it seems to set limits on transcendence.

But I suspect some mystics might actually take the machine. If your life in the machine gives you more space for preparation, it can't hurt. It too can be transcended.

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

That the book will lie to me is not a supposition of mine, insofar as I’m categorically informed of the inevitability of it beforehand.

The book telling me to my satisfaction how to do stuff and satisfying my inquiries, and by which I’m being lied to, does nothing but cause me to question my own judgement with respect to how I consider myself satisfied on the one hand, and on how knowing how to do something will sufficiently relate to my experience when I actually do it, on the other. Combine those two, and I should find no measure of truth at all in the book, and questionable measure in some respects in myself.
————-

This book will answer any questions you ask of it to your satisfaction — Count Timothy von Icarus

Magical indeed. It’s possible I won’t even know what questions to ask until immediately before I ask them, which requires a mere book to infinitely anticipate. Which would cause me to wonder if I’m asking a book, or something else entirely. Even supposing that me asking a book is a euphemism for just looking in the book for whatever question I have, presupposes the book….or whatever it is…..contains every single question possible to be asked of it.

I wouldn’t worry about the spell; I’d have already backed slowly away, from the mysterious old woman and her lying book, forever giving mystery and magic a very wide berth.

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

I am linking norm-based goals, purposes and motives with anticipatory sense-making, and the latter with pleasure and happiness. Happiness is just another way of talking about successful anticipatory sense-making in relation to prior schemes of expectation, even though we still tend to think of our emotions as arbitrary drives cut off from reason. This sense-making is our overarching motivation in life.

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

Why not think of ‘knowledge of’ states of affairs as a kind of interaction with the world that co-produces what it represents? Our questions about the world are always loaded questions, projecting our presuppositions into states of affairs. And the answers the world gives us are responses to those loaded questions, communicated within the grammar of our formulations. Whether those states of affairs validate or disappoint our expectations is a function of their role within the intersubjective discourse of science, including the way our apparatuses of measurement define and organize phenomena.

Chat GPT, thou art a woman. — unenlightened

Aye.
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