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Shade of Achilles's avatar

What would you say are some of the consequences for eg political thought arising from this model as opposed to alternative models of cognition?

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Jonathon's avatar

It suggests that any given political situation is an organic outgrowth of the function of the substrate system, not necessarily the result of some kind of Hegalian dialectic, and solutions to political problems should be sought upstream on what causative chains can be identified.

I.e. we need more strong goodlooking smart people.

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Shade of Achilles's avatar

'we need more strong goodlooking smart people.'

Ha yes ok

It's kind of anti-Cartesian then: body and mind are indivisible whole, intuition truer and more fundamental than 'learning' etc.

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Shade of Achilles's avatar

...or any other domain of action you'd care to consider; doesn't have to be politics

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Jonathon's avatar

Radioactivity is likely to be directly driven by the impact of subatomic particles, rather than some kind of probabilistic force.

Speciation is likely to be driven by some kind of real intervention not currently observable in the wild.

Basically anything assumed to be stochastic must have some kind of real driver.

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Shade of Achilles's avatar

'Basically anything assumed to be stochastic must have some kind of real driver.'

So the conclusion is that there must be a god (or gods)--right?

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Jonathon's avatar

This model weaves god into the fabric of reality as its cognitive aspect, but doesn't attribute all things to conscious acts of agency.

I think speciation specifically might be driven by some kind of interaction with the environment.

Look at these...

Wipipo monkeys:

https://www.google.com/search?q=barbary+macaque&sca_upv=1

Japanese monkeys:

https://www.google.com/search?sca_upv=1&q=japanese+macaque&udm=2

Indian monkeys:

https://www.google.com/search?sca_upv=1&q=indian+monkey&udm=2

Don't they look a bit like the native humans?

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Shade of Achilles's avatar

Having thought about it a bit more I think I see what you mean (I could be completely wrong/pseud's corner here but let me try).

Something like: the nature of reality is not to be sought in 'chance' interactions of parts of things. These are discoverable only by abstractions arrived at via formal modelling, based on numerous assumptions as to the nature of both 'chance' and the division of the parts--some or all of which could be wrong. Reality is instead intuitvely observable, because it is brought about by the interactions of *unified* entities, irrespective of whether their wholeness results from 'chance' events.

PS: yes, I did just read Briggs' latest entry. He's rippin you off man.

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Jonathon's avatar

Yes. I'm claiming 100% conservation of information (vectors, mass, charge, etc.) to go with conservation of energy, so chance can't exist, though I leave room for agency with all the "insofar"s.

Reality is indeed intuitively observable, even to bacteria, some of which are so smart that they have built enzymes to digest plastic.

As to *why* reality is observable, I don't quite understand what you mean by unified... the loci? I think the answer has something to do with the fact that we are made of the same fundamental stuff, though I haven't been able to figure it out properly yet.

As for Briggs, if he did read this and find it stimulating then I'm rather flattered.

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Aug 9
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Jonathon's avatar

Hi, thank you for your kind comment and compliment! It's okay about the unsubs, one can't please everybody.

I haven't had a formal education in any of those fields but I read a lot of late 19th-/early 20th-century science treatises by the likes of Faraday, Heaviside, Thomson, Tesla, and other greats in my study years, which impressed upon me the importance of having a robust understanding of natural phenomena, free of the cowardly sophistry that characterises the Copenhagen interpretation.

Meanwhile I'm the literal son of a preacher man.

This article represents an attempt to resolve the inner controversy that resulted.

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Aug 9
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Jonathon's avatar

It would be most interesting if there really was a way to finally address the makeup of reality. Why not write a post about it?

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Aug 11Edited
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Jonathon's avatar

Thoughts off the top of my head:

1. Too much detail can be confusing and hard for a reader to integrate. Best to keep writing sleek and to the point imo.

2. In proceeding from the micro scale one invariably encounters the question “what makes these parts real?” and I think the answer is invariably their being part of reality itself, unless the argument is to be made that somehow things made themselves real independently. Like Gödel showed, axiomatic theories have their limits. So ontology has to work from the outside in so to speak.

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