> Try experiencing red without visualizing it, naming it or imagining associated objects.
can be commanded to be done without being able to objectively qualify what exactly is occurring when one 'experiences' red?
How does one know when 'has experienced red' has occurred? How are they able to qualify this as a comparative to 'has not experienced red'? When I read this it honestly sounded like the author was telling me to find god.
Snarky commentary aside, while I think this is an interesting picture for the descriptions of thought, the processes for reasoning about software complexity can develop independently without fitting any of these models, and those heuristics will modulate and mold the adaptive abilities of the developer on a similar scale of overall improvement.
> These phenomena will slowly start to convert from being some “runaway kids”, living in the shadows never lit by consciousness, into “rightful citizens” of the psychical space, with overall balancing and efficiency-improving effects.
This scares the crap out of me and would make me want to run like all hell. You can learn and teach thinking using multiple techniques and you can teach those techniques without enforcing a clear right and wrong. Instead, trust that the experience and influence of the world marching along to the beat of time will help direct people better than an authoritative command on what reduces software complexity and what does not. The summation of a lot of 'wrong' might wind up being one big 'right'.
The funny thing really is that when one uses the a reasoning system to reason about their reasoning, assuming they are reasoning with the correct reasoning, they often wind up contradicting themselves.
The only thing I subjectively see in the value of music is the lengthy amount of time that the formalism of it's language has survived. Otherwise I typically listen to the same songs on repeat until they have turned into a drone like noise for me to block out the rest of the noise in the world. Sometimes I do appreciate variation in music, and I have spent a lot of time devoted to studying classical music. But still, a particularly well known sonata might as well be a recursively constructed formalism of white noise to me, because that is how I remember the piece. It is beautiful in that regard, but I just do not consider myself educated enough in music to understand anything about it otherwise.
I find code and mathematics to be much more delicate, intricate, fundamental; to my own personal comprehension. I remember playing the piano a couple of times to think about how a computer might experience the progression of it's thoughts. The thing with creativity is it has no walls.
Measurements that are qualitative are much more tricky to deal with than quantitative measurements.
When I read words like 'hollow self esteem' I feel like I am reading a poem, not scientific data. Hollow self esteem means 'self esteem that lacks social validation', but when we define self esteem clearly in terms of social validation with relations that show the distribution of 'when the social validation occurs in terms of time' and 'how much social validation is given' versus 'how much social manipulative ability is granted' then people in society start to become definable and moveable like machines. What is the point of existing as a human being when life can be plotted?
If I define my self esteem through a single data point in my past, can you really compare that to someone who defines their self esteem by each day as it unfolds? Can you really measure self esteem when everyone's self esteem is dependent on comparisons of self analysis versus social analysis?
Culture defines culture. Social groups define social groups dynamically as the group is processing and composing information. Data is almost the same as theory when it comes to psychology. I personally find it all ridiculous and believe that people need to have balance between the methods of science and understanding and seeking their own personal truths. People have the potential to be more than what language and mathematics can convey, but this makes many people uncomfortable, because it's not definable. What isn't definable always seems to get filtered through a lens of religious, dogmatic belief in the scientific community. If it can't be measured, it doesn't exist. But it does exist. The problem is that scientific, mathematical language does not measure the effect of itself.
You claim that you know that something that can't be measured does exist. If you haven't just made up that claim, that implies that you have somehow detected the existence of that thing. What you might not be aware of is that in the eyes of a scientist that makes you into a "measuring apparatus" for the thing that you claim cannot be measured. In order for a scientist to consider something unmeasurable, it cannot have any influence on the natural world, as that would be a measurable effect. Making you utter or type a claim about the existence of something is an influence on the natural world that can be measured, so if you making that claim is actually causally connected to the thing (as opposed to made up by you), that would make the thing measurable.
I don't think you understand that you can't control what information and processes are dynamically influenced and what components are static and unchanging. The methodology of science can be subject to the same level of analytical inspection and rigor that the scientific methodology itself upholds.
You hold science as a constant and shape the world around that lens. What happens when science starts to take itself apart, when it starts to redefine itself, analyze itself, study itself?
Keep down-voting me if you like. All I really know is that I have more questions than I have answers, and I don't think that is a bad thing.
Science on science, it's a thing. Also named Theory of Science, it studies Science from a philosophical view and brings up questions like "If we have measured something to be the same 10000 times, can we be sure it will be same the 10001st time?"
What happens when you do that? Well, for me what happens is the realization of the value of being pragmatic. Truth is, like Descartes said, we can't really know anything but our own existence, and depending on your definition of existence, even that can be questioned. But what is the value in that? Now when I know I know nothing, is it a good basis to live my life upon?
My answer to that is no, it's not a good basis to stand on. Instead I choose to approach it pragmatically, or as an engineer if you prefer, "I accept my perception of reality* as real" and "a useful fact is information that can somehow be used to predict the future"
But then, I tend to like answers more than questions, I guess it comes included with my engineering degree.
* Not meaning that everything I perceive in a given moment has to be real, rather that my understanding of the world is my best guess of how things are.
I'm not sure what you are trying to tell me, but I certainly don't hold science as a constant.
Also, I didn't down-vote you. And I agree that not having answers is not a bad thing--what is bad, though, is making up an answer instead of just accepting the lack of knowledge, or insisting that current lack of knowledge means permanent lack of knowledge.
I wasn't directing that at you, just in general. I really do try to create one part of an intelligent dialogue on these forums, but it is incredibly frustrating to have experienced variations of ways of perceiving information, without having the capacity to express the issue in a way that anyone is willing to listen to, and then be down-voted on top of that, which feels like being silenced.
> insisting that current lack of knowledge means permanent lack of knowledge.
The alternative to that is that there is a limit to knowledge, that it is possible for all things to be known. And even if humanity does hit that point, I think at that point, it becomes a choice to choose whether to believe all things are known, or to believe that some things are not yet known.
I would suggest that there might be things that we will never figure out, but for which we will never know that we will never figure them out.
Also, belief is not a choice, by definition. Belief comes from being convinced. You cannot choose to be convinced, either you are or you are not, change only comes due to new information or new ideas, but never due to a deliberate decision to be convinced of something else. You can decide to pretend a different belief, but you cannot decide your actual belief.
What if my belief has always defaulted on silence, no thought?
It's just the opposite of the confidence in always yielding a conclusion. When I work with science, I ere on the side of hesitance, and I always believe that hesitence will be there.
I think some of my beliefs about believing are stronger than my actual beliefs. This conversation has become too overgeneralized to say anything useful aside from the ways the mind simplifies, reduces, and applies pattern derived from observation.
I don't understand the strong reaction in 'knowing'. I always feel like I have to know everything all at once, in order to truly suggest that I know anything, and since I can not know everything, I only have a very vague guess of knowing some things, which are continually subject to the same analytic deconstruction and reconstruction. Ideas are broken down and rebuilt over and over and not a single one of them is a complete picture. That's what I observe in my mind and in dialogue outside of my mind. I don't have to believe anything about it because it's a direct observation. It just comes down to how angry, 'strong', assertive, or authoritative people sound, and I find that ridiculous. It's like being human is a stupid joke.
> What if my belief has always defaulted on silence, no thought?
Well, if you haven't thought about something, you presumably don't believe it? (Not to be confused with believing the negation, which you presumably also wouldn't believe in that case.)
> This conversation has become too overgeneralized to say anything useful aside from the ways the mind simplifies, reduces, and applies pattern derived from observation.
Well, feel free to be more specific?
> I don't understand the strong reaction in 'knowing'. I always feel like I have to know everything all at once, in order to truly suggest that I know anything, and since I can not know everything, I only have a very vague guess of knowing some things, which are continually subject to the same analytic deconstruction and reconstruction.
I think I would agree. That's why I consider the question of knowledge (in the sense of being ultimately sure about the truth of something) ultimately uninteresting. What actually matters is what you believe (that is, what you act on) because you cannot avoid interacting with the world, and you will do so based on you beliefs, whether they reflect ultimate truth or not.
> Ideas are broken down and rebuilt over and over and not a single one of them is a complete picture. That's what I observe in my mind and in dialogue outside of my mind. I don't have to believe anything about it because it's a direct observation.
Well, I think that that's questionable. On the one hand, semantically, considering something you observed directly to be true still is a belief, even if a well-founded one. One can believe things by blind faith or due to direct observation, or for many other reasons, some good, some bad. On the other hand, I would be cautious with the term "direct observation": There is a ton of indirection between your brain thinking a thought and the "reality" outside the brain causing the thought, and conceptually there isn't really all that much difference between observing another brain by means of that brain causing the body it's in to create sound waves, causing your eardrum to vibrate, causing nerve signals in your brain, and the same with an MRI machine observing the same brain and feeding its images through your eyes into your brain, both are ultimately pretty indirect, even if one of the scenarios uses only natural machinery to achieve the result, so artificial machinery is not necessarily any worse at producing a reliable perception of the world than natural bodies, and you have to believe quite a few things in both cases, be it about larynxes, air, sound waves, and ears, or about MRI machines, light, and retinas.
> It just comes down to how angry, 'strong', assertive, or authoritative people sound, and I find that ridiculous.
I am not quite sure what you are trying to say with that, but I guess that science is the best way we know that avoids just that as far as possible by making it as easy as possible for anyone to reproduce an observation (at least that's the ideal ...).
> It's like being human is a stupid joke.
Well, from some perspective, maybe? I guess the solution is to adopt a different perspective? Like: Well, yes, ultimate knowledge seems to be unattainable--but why does that matter? It's a philosophical curiosity, interesting to think about, but ultimately it doesn't prevent you from improving your model of the world and interacting with the world. Your model predicts that the chair you sit on will hold you up, and it does, you don't get hurt and can sit comfortably--does it matter whether the existence of the chair is some ultimate truth or maybe "just" an illusion?
I already agree with you and I have from the start. I have no interest in talking, because it is obvious that I can not communicate effectively and fluidly, on the internet. Thank you for the conversation, but this is the same circle of thought as it has always been, and it never seems to change.
Have they ever done this study on people who have never drank alcohol and are healthy? It seems biased that the only group of 'non-drinkers' are people that are former drinkers.
I don't agree with that. If you understand the mathematics and computational foundations, then you already have the depth of programming languages in an abstract form. You might choose to pick up new languages because you want to learn how others elegantly can solve the same problem on a different level of the machine.
Then you can apply similar techniques in whatever language paradigm you have to work in, while also understanding the pros and cons of such a thing (are you just mimicking the paradigm or on what gradient is the implementation correct? What can you assume now from tweaking the language?)
A programming language is not really a separate thing from the machine. It's useful to think about them in this way because it makes the knowledge simple and easier to make fast assumptions given some 'correct usage' of the language with regard to the specification and design of it.
It's just different stuff that each programmer has to pick up as they go. Everyone who is building anything has to do some thinking while they are building and do some remembering while they are building.
I find when you reduce all technology to this level, it becomes very hard to determine what proficiency is. Every bit of knowledge and piece of experience is potentially valuable at the same level.
I don't think people are static objects. Even if you've come into contact with one of these "types" of people, chances are that they are living on a meager amount of energy.
When people are energy drained, they are either in poor health mentally, emotionally, socially, or physically.
They might have expended an extraordinary amount of energy into something with no compensation. They might have broken their bodies, minds, and hearts over the kind of work they do.
The human evaluation of what constitutes as value added to society is not perfect. The human evaluation of what to do is not perfect. Sometimes people just don't know what to do.
Also, social pressure shouldn't be the motivator. That's motivation that comes from fear. It is literally like living solely for the sake of dying, and all I can do is feel a tremendous amount of pain for people if they experience such a thing.
I think that is one possible perception, but I could argue the same for the existence of 'chaos' or 'randomness' and make the same point.
Do things succeed because they adapt correctly over a given time frame or do they succeed because the adapt correctly over a given time instance. The evaluation of whether competition successfully denotes success is limited to the scope of variables that the competition tests. If those variables cease to be indicative of success, then we have a lot of stuff that appears like it won the war, when in actuality it only won a very small subset of selective battles, much of what we only arbitrarily correlate to success (because without reproducing the conditions exactly, the data and information we can derive about the past is limited and/or subject to malleability).
We've evolved this far because we did. It's survivor bias.
It is entirely likely that there exist good things that are adapted for everything they purport to be, aside from competitive environments. If competition is eliminated, we can at least begin to separate the variables that are a function of the competitive process, and the variables that denote skill.
It is not necessary that we leave the survival of culture and ideas up to the same primitive mechanisms that determine whether a fish with smaller gills reproduces in a shallow pool rather than a deeper one - and make the inference that because it does survive, that it was because of the depth of the pool, and not because of the lack of sharks. Just because it has worked so far does not mean it will continue to work. Competition can cause emotions to control direction rather than objectivity over the data as it exists. When people want to win just because they want to win, .. Then competition becomes a measurement of competition, and not of the things it purports to select for.
The upswing of awesome sounds like a great way to prepare yourself to build things that are 90% correct with a 10% catastrophic failure rate.
I really try to keep a more emotionally neutral stance on all of my code and my abilities. If I want to indulge in arrogance I philosophize.
In the end, it's the same thing over and over again. Symbols swapping with others symbols denoting some kind of esoterically tangible, but ultimately fleeting, meaning.
It'd be nice to not feel perpetually stuck in the desert of despair though. I used to think being there meant I was learning stuff, because I had intuitively learned from repeat failure that after failure comes success. Turns out you can think about yourself plodding along at a steady pace, with no comparison to anyone else, as long as you stop assuming that there exists a clear, coherent, ordered organization to knowledge.
There exists such a thing in school, or at least the commentary on a topological sorting would have you believe. Technology doesn't always develop and get released in school though. Sometimes it develops in webs that are can not be causally described, because thought and skill do not necessarily travel in measurable directions, nor is their instantiation completely definable/observable.
People apply too many theoretical concepts to describe, dictate, and organize reality without understanding the effect on perception.
You've made an interesting comment. I've felt the same way about some of the things you've mentioned, such as
"In the end, it's the same thing over and over again. Symbols swapping with others symbols denoting some kind of esoterically tangible, but ultimately fleeting, meaning."
I feel that way about all the different languages, new ones or old. Just different symbols that distill down to machine instructions.
My question to you, how do you approach learning? Learning new things and marking your progress?
What gives you the satisfaction that you've made progress in "learning" a given topic?
> My question to you, how do you approach learning? Learning new things and marking your progress? What gives you the satisfaction that you've made progress in "learning" a given topic?
I don't know. Right now I am learning how to not know when I am learning, because I have determined that measuring learning in any form can often be a barrier that actually prevents me from learning.
Thanks for writing this. Over the last 4 years I switched from studying computer science with applications in mathematics, to studying math and symbolic logic with applications in computation. I did this alone, without interacting with anyone in the field. I thought I was going insane because of how many direct 'abstract' connections there are from computer science to mathematics and back again. I know these abstract connections exist as words in the world, but many times it feels like I have to go hunt for the word when I already have the idea.
I haven't really found any real world applications of the concepts I've learned, aside from having to hold a meticulously constructed symbolic reasoning world inside my head for a really long time without observational reality confirming it's correctness as a model to describe all things. This makes me pretty good at programming things that are incompletely described, I think, but also explains why Tarski said he was the only sane logician.
I never really hear about autodidacts talking about their experience. It can be really rough most of the time. I literally think it's just luck that I stumble across the right words. I also think it's luck when I manage to understand things and make a connection between them. I have managed to connect such disparate symbols together and maintain that connection strongly for long periods of time (with absolute conviction), that it all really seems like magic when it does work. But, giants, shoulders, yada yada.
> meticulously constructed symbolic reasoning world (...) connect such disparate symbols together and maintain that connection strongly for long periods of time
The construction and maintenance of my psychology using mathematics and symbolic logic to model, explain, extrapolate, analyze, and manipulate it.
I use computer science to explain psychology, in a way the makes the person being judged correct, instead of requiring their behavior to be altered based on personal opinion.
Imagine you have two conflicting sets of data from observation in your mind, and you have to process this data quickly. Taking an arbitrary and insufficient amount of data is selective and results in bias. Over time this results in contradiction even though both instances of inference are correct with regards to the logical model they rely on, and the data fed to the model. Now imagine that you received this data because over a short period of time, you have experience such a wide range of life experience that your observations allow you to collect both sets of data simultaneously and with correctness. Both data models model the world correctly, but when separated into distinct models of 'knowing things' instead of 'one confusing mass of data', you get contradiction.
So imagine someone endures trauma in their life, and has their mind molded in a specific way based on the current state of psychology, because over time the thoughts in the patients mind are shortly transformed to the thoughts in the therapists mind. Psychology did not experience the trauma, so how can psychology have an opinion on the consequences of bad things happening?
Making inferences adds to data and alters future data models and inferences. How people are judged while they are being 'helped' affects whether that help harms or helps them. I was in a group therapy for victims of domestic abuse and my "counselor" told me that she hated people like me.
> Try experiencing red without visualizing it, naming it or imagining associated objects.
can be commanded to be done without being able to objectively qualify what exactly is occurring when one 'experiences' red?
How does one know when 'has experienced red' has occurred? How are they able to qualify this as a comparative to 'has not experienced red'? When I read this it honestly sounded like the author was telling me to find god.
Snarky commentary aside, while I think this is an interesting picture for the descriptions of thought, the processes for reasoning about software complexity can develop independently without fitting any of these models, and those heuristics will modulate and mold the adaptive abilities of the developer on a similar scale of overall improvement.
> These phenomena will slowly start to convert from being some “runaway kids”, living in the shadows never lit by consciousness, into “rightful citizens” of the psychical space, with overall balancing and efficiency-improving effects.
This scares the crap out of me and would make me want to run like all hell. You can learn and teach thinking using multiple techniques and you can teach those techniques without enforcing a clear right and wrong. Instead, trust that the experience and influence of the world marching along to the beat of time will help direct people better than an authoritative command on what reduces software complexity and what does not. The summation of a lot of 'wrong' might wind up being one big 'right'.
The funny thing really is that when one uses the a reasoning system to reason about their reasoning, assuming they are reasoning with the correct reasoning, they often wind up contradicting themselves.