We are all individuals!

(I attempt at haiku)

I pause from pithy
prose and my dry doggerel
to write bad haiku
--------

Ages pass it seems
until the one asks you how
you have felt lately
---------

A jaundiced moon beamed
down on old 101
and she rode with me
----------

I watched her recede
and walk away out of sight
the sun was way harsh
-----------

Mid happy chatter
I rise for a quick breath
of isolation
-----------

Thought that burns right through
the fabric of a subject
like a cigarette

Have hit a dry spell w.r.t. evocative thought. Might take a break from the parables, hyperbole... ellipses too, and stick to some laconic sections for a while.

Sheep in Scotland, and bullet-biting

"I've burned my own house down, the torch is in my hand.
Now I'll burn down the house of anyone who wants to follow me" -- The Bijak, Kabir


A philosopher-joke runs like this:

An engineer, an experimental physicist, a theoretical physicist, and a philosopher were hiking through the hills of Scotland. Cresting the top of one hill, they see, on top of the next, a black sheep. The engineer says: "What do you know, the sheep in Scotland are black." "Well, *some* of the sheep in Scotland are black," replies the experimental physicist. The theoretical physicist considers this for a moment and says "Well, at least one of the sheep in Scotland is black." "Well," the philosopher responds, "on one side, anyway."

You will notice it is possible to go further in the one-up-man-ship game emphasized in the joke. For instance, a philosopher' (or a pseudo-quantum-collapse-philosopher, if you will) may say "One side of the sheep is black when you look at it".

Let us go exactly opposite to the trend highlighted in the joke in analysing it. What the joke captures is a tendency I often encounter: the tendency to steer clear of that beast called falsifiability. Notice how the 'hierarchical heros' of our joke steer ever so clear of abstraction and universalizing, and by doing so, carefully disentangle themselves from falsifiability.

Notice however, that falsifiability is intimately coupled with hypothesis-building, and by consequence - learning something new, above-and-beyond what is experientially true at this point. A non falsifiable statement is content-free, contains no new information, or doesn't impinge on the real world.

Metaphorically speaking, it behooves us to leave our safe havens of terra firma and step on the rocky boats of falsifiable hypotheses, if we ever intend to discover unknown and exotic worlds.

Bite the bullet. It holds the sweet juice of anagnorisis.

For those who came in late to the postmodern party..

One common pattern that executes itself repeatedly in human history is the following loop:

Step 1. Individual (small-collection) nonconformism with prevailing philosophies and establishments.
Step 2. A successful nonconformist movement gaining establishment status.
Step 3. A different counter-culture looping back to Step 1.

The transition from Step 1 to Step 2 is curious. This is where large numbers of individuals consider themselves unique in their nonconformism. This is where people are occasionally surprised to learn that there already is an 'ism' in prevalent language for their espoused brand of antiestablishmentarianism.

One such contemporary phenomenon is self-proclaiming (in a sense) definition-defying postmodernism. (Although, I believe that it is now generally considered that we have left the postmodern era behind us, or are in the process of doing so.)

The following are excerpts from Paul Newall's introduction to postmodernism:

" ... we could say that postmodernism is skeptical of theoretical viewpoints that are foundational (as we discussed in our fifth article) or grounded in some way, and critical of theory in general. Sometimes a distinction is made along the following lines:
Affirmative postmodernists: theory needs to be changed, rather than rejected
Skeptical postmodernists: theory should be rejected, or at least subject to severe critique ..."

"... Although we must be careful to over generalization or oversimplification, opposing modern to postmodern we have:

Structure opposed to anarchy

Construction opposed to deconstruction

Theory opposed to anti-theory

Interpretation opposed to hostility toward definite interpretation

Meaning opposed to the play of meaning or a refusal to pin down

Metanarratives opposed to hostility toward narratives

The search for underlying meaning opposed to a suspicion (or certainty) that this is impossible

Progress opposed to a doubt that progress is possible

Order opposed to subversion

Encyclopedic knowledge opposed to a web of understanding ..."

"... Another telling criticism is to note that to be anti-theory is still to have a theory; that is, the theory that we shouldn't have a theory. Rejecting the need for criteria (whatever their purpose) is still a criterion. Is it possible to be as playful as some suggest, not holding beliefs or methodological approaches and instead refusing to define or pin down narratives? How lightly can we hold our ideas before we end up either holding nothing at all or become certain of them without realising it? ..."

"... Are long, complicated words being used as part of a specialist language or because postmodernists have nothing of consequence to say and want to hide this fact behind their rhetoric? Often the answer is a matter of opinion, or of saying that even a difficult writer can sometimes offer a comment clearly enough to raise an eyebrow before plunging back into a thicket of terminology. Since a key assumption of this series is that anything worth saying can be said clearly, it may be that some people are reluctant to wade into postmodernist thinking for fear that their time will be wasted; unless the writer is composing his thoughts merely for the amusement of himself and a few select friends, this is a difficulty that still restricts the impact that postmodern ideas can have. ... "

The following are excerpts from Richard Dawkins' polemic on postmodernism: Postmodernism Disrobed reviewing the book "Intellectual Impostures"

Quoting Medawar: "... Style has become an object of first importance, and what a style it is! For me it has a prancing, high-stepping quality, full of self-importance; elevated indeed, but in the balletic manner, and stopping from time to time in studied attitudes, as if awaiting an outburst of applause. It has had a deplorable influence on the quality of modern thought . . . "

and

"... No doubt there exist thoughts so profound that most of us will not understand the language in which they are expressed. And no doubt there is also language designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought. But how are we to tell the difference? What if it really takes an expert eye to detect whether the emperor has clothes? In particular, how shall we know whether the modish French 'philosophy', whose disciples and exponents have all but taken over large sections of American academic life, is genuinely profound or the vacuous rhetoric of mountebanks and charlatans? ..."

The following link leads you to a new, automatically generated "postmodern" article, each time: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

The postmodern mara-dragon has slippery and multi-speckled skin of indeterminate colour. It is said to spew flames of rhetoric with a hiss that is said to sound like "Who is to say?".

The postmodern Rainman writes up a self-referenced, anti-structural, high-style null-truth-value (what is that?) interpret-me-if-you-dare write-up and gloats to his brother: "I made a falutin'! ".

Upon encountering passive and active resistance, and apathy regarding my persistent (- but I will be the first to note, of questionably formal precision -) focus on logic, rationality, limits, formalism: I ponder some more on the relationships of the above to emotions, building of opinions and changing of minds.

It was said that logic, formalism, rationality and evidence are all fine and dandy, but they do not comprise what it takes to influence minds into doing XYZ. It was said that people make up their minds, change them et. al. based on emotions and no strength of logic will get Joe/Jane to do something they wouldn't do if it weren't for another's influence. In other words, an appeal to people's reason is inconsequential. Shouting against the wind. Also, who is to say nonformal, haphazard, inconsistent or whimsical means, methods and frameworks do not contain truth or do not offer equally valid approaches at getting at answers.

There is a lot of truth in the above statements, and they contain little I would disagree with if presented as such. However, I have to state where logic, formalism, demonstration of evidence, appeal to reason etc. do play a role. Perhaps I will present this as a laundry list.

• We are minds that do not start out with complete knowledge of everything. In other words, we need to learn to fill in the incompleteness in our knowledge.
• We need to exchange information in order to learn.
• If it were true that one needs to influence a mind in a write-only (or more write-only than read-write) fashion, then a formal system that uses logic, reasoning to build on established ideas and principles is probably not the most effective instrument.
• I am more interested in the "read" part of "read-write" than in the "write" part.
• The "read" part of "read-write" is important. This is what enables learning.
• For the read part of read-write to be effective, demagoguery is not the right instrument. The below bullet-points on this.
• If my mind were to provably advance in knowledge-update, it has to convey information to another mind in clear, transparent ways where the path traversed to labels are visible to the other mind. Elaboration in next bullet.
• When a held position and its motivations are transparently exposed to another mind, that is when the other mind can offer checks and guidelines to further knowledge-update to my own mind. By occluding the traversed paths i.e. introducing any non-transparency, I may protect myself from criticism, but I will be stubbing out learning along that unexposed vector.
• The above bullet point means that while an argument by emotion, or to emotion, such as appeal to emotion may hold truth value and may convey truth to a mind, this truth value may not be establishable in a framework where the path-transparency is guaranteed. In other words, this truth that may be felt is not provable leading to lack of transparency, leading to lack of utility in further guaranteeable knowledge update.
• This is why, while a statement such as "I'll vote for Clinton, because I feel good about her" may hold intrinsic appeal and may be above reproach, and that is how people may decide on their voting, its intercommunicability-value with another mind is low. Lack of transparency means lack of communicability on a commonly establishable basis.
• The role of logic, formalism and reasoning is to provide a framework which if accepted by minds engaging in answer-seeking, lead to establishable ideas the trails to which remain transparent, and further provide transparent trails to other ideas following the same system that led to the labeling of intermediate nodes.
• This, in my opinion is the value of reasoning and frameworks. It is "establishability" of meaning that can be held common across minds.

Daniel Dennett: The self as a center of narrative gravity

Autopiloting, Bonsai minds and a Yodaism

"Boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon? "


We like the comfort of our beliefs and positions. They are our old friends. We have spent a lot of time coochi-cooing with them, ironing out every annoying crease of disformity. Using the chisel of cognitive dissonance, we have sculpted our mind for maximum fit with the undulations of our container beliefs, like a bonsai plant.

No wonder then, new beliefs and new ways of thought appear unpleasant, and rightly so, need to be extensively studied and checked for contaminants under the torchlight of logic, before sweet, happy uptake. Yet, like John Lennon said "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans", we do not step outside life, the universe* and everything, while we happily evaluate options.

We continue to make choices, execute decisions based on our current philosophies - considered, happened upon, underevaluated et. al.- the only thing common to them is we have grown comfortable to them - and reap the benefits/pay the price for the consequences.

Waiting to commit to a (any) school of thought is in consequence, an endorsement of our subscribed (by default) school of thought (which may not have been subjected to the same rigour to which the new school is subjected). (This is different from the argument by verbal skullduggery that starts with "Atheism is also a religion because it is the belief in non-existence of ..." and so on.) There is safety in (default) loyalty to our beloved beliefs, but this safety comes at a price.

The fence is illusory. Do or not do. There is no fence.




* Archimedes said "Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth". Change "earth" to "universe", and 'Houston, we have a problem!'

Prof. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on flow

the meditation on mara

mara is the omega to the alpha. Agent Smith to Neo. Mr. Nobody the busybody. The serpent seducing you to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The tail of the Ouroboros that has to be consumed to complete the circle of life.

mara is always at hand when you need him and when you don't. He has handy easy-to-understand low negentropic answers to every question you have thought of, and to those you haven't yet thought of.

He speaks of random walks in the dance of rationality. Of destinations the bridges to where have long been burnt.

Your refusal to commune with him is what he wants. Or maybe not. Call him in for a tete-e-tete and ask Ananda to make some tea.

Jessica L. Lakin, Tanya L. Chartrand: Need for inclusion with in-groups, nonverbal behaviour, reaction to exclusion, nonconscious mimicry

"Exclusion from social groups has negative emotional, psychological, and behavioral consequences. Yet it also seems important to explore the potential positive consequences; perhaps after exclusion, individuals engage in behaviors that help them affiliate with new people or re-establish themselves in the excluding group. The research described here demonstrates an affiliative behavior that occurs after exclusion – nonconscious behavioral mimicry."

Some dogs do not want to have their day: Learned helplessness

this post has no title - nonduality: muness: superficiality in fiction

"In The Simpsons episode Itchy and Scratchy Land during a robot attack Lisa attempts to defeat the robots with the liar paradox only to find they have already been introduced to it unlike Homer who go crazy trying to figure it out."

The writers of The Simpsons imagined a Homerian brain going crazy upon encountering the liar paradox. However this does not demonstrate to me the dumbness of the H-brain. Unsmartness, perhaps. By going loopy over the paradox, Homer's mind redeems itself quite well imo and demonstrates its nondumbness. A truly dumb H-brain (Homer*) may (I am speculating here) not see the paradox at all; in any case, may not consider it even slightly noteworthy. I would have Homer* go looking for donuts or something, upon encountering the paradox.

One instance of the failure to self-diagnose the fallacy of composition that I have come across in a real conversation is this: Person X that I am conversing with says "Anything you observe in the universe has a cause/has something else outside of it/there was a time before which the thing existed. There has to be a cause for the universe/there is something else outside of it/there was a time before which the universe existed." This fallacy is very common, but this example is one of the classic ones.




Check out these two portentous videos: Reassembling modular robot, Replicating robot

Origins of bungee jumping (I haven't done any research on any competing claims.)

A paper on effective rationality

Prof. Axelrod on the evolution of cooperation

Right afterwards, when the Buddha had retired for the night, Govinda turned to Siddhartha and spoke eagerly: "Siddhartha, it is not my place to scold you. We have both heard the exalted one, we have both perceived the teachings. Govinda has heard the teachings, he has taken refuge in it. But you, my honoured friend, don't you also want to walk the path of salvation? Would you want to hesitate, do you want to wait any longer?" #




“Men nearly always follow the tracks made by others and proceed in their affairs by imitation.” -- Machiavelli

“When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. ... A society which gives unlimited freedom to the individual, more often than not attains a disconcerting sameness.” -- Eric Hoffer


Informational conformity
Sensation transference





Siddhartha awakened as if he had been asleep, when he heard Govinda's words. For a long tome, he looked into Govinda's face. Then he spoke quietly, in a voice without mockery: "Govinda, my friend, now you have taken this step, now you have chosen this path. Always, oh Govinda, you've been my friend, you've always walked one step behind me. Often I have thought: Won't Govinda for once also take a step by himself,without me, out of his own soul? Behold, now you've turned into a man and are choosing your path for yourself. I wish that you would go it upto its end, oh my friend, that you shall find salvation!" #

#Siddhartha, Chapter 3

Taylor and Brown defend their position that


"
...self-aggrandizing self-perceptions, an illusion of control, and unrealistic optimism are widespread in normal human thought ... ... maintain that these "illusions" foster the criteria normally associated with mental health...
"

and conclude that

"
...work on illusions and mental health has gone beyond the simple questions of "Do illusions exist and are they associated with mental health?" The questions we should be asking now are, "When are positive illusions most in evidence?", "Do they ever compromise mental health, and if so, when?", "Are there conditions when they damp down or disappear altogether?", and "Do such conditions address the paradox of how people can hold positive illusions about themselves, their world, and their future while still coping successfully with an environment that would seem to demand accurate appreciation of its feedback?" On these questions, recent research suggests that progress is being made.
"

Interesting questions all; I look forward to unearthing more findings.

Rationality, not!

[This is a follow up to an earlier post, where I said I was looking for a more comprehensive discussion regarding rationality. Conversation at that point focused on the relevance to "real life" of rationality research, as well as applicability, generality and conclusivity of research findings. This review addresses these subjects.]

Extract:

"SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
Various arguments have been made disputing the accumulation of findings that show people systematically violating fundamental normative principles of reasoning, judgment, and decision. This review suggests that the violations cannot be dismissed as either random or trivial, nor can they be attributed to experimenters’ misinterpretation of answers that are actually appropriate to alternative, valid interpretations of the problems. The systematic and well-documented findings cannot be attributed to simple computational limitations, nor does it appear that inappropriate types of questions are being asked or inappropriate norms applied. The compelling nature of the rationality critique is having an ever greater impact on work in neighboring disciplines, most notably in the increasing popularity of behavioral economics (Rabin 1998, Sunstein 2000, Thaler 1992, 1993). It may eventually help alter the social sciences’ view of the human agent. "