The problem of functional self-deception is why I talk about *efficient* self-deception: it is precisely because it can be so functional that it is so common. There is, however, a problem if a society is systematically raising the level of efficient self-deception. Particularly among elites. As the self-deception may be efficient for them but disastrous for others, or the wider society.
I also like Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying’s notion of literally false but metaphorically true: beliefs adherence to which is a selection advantage.
Which brings us back to reality tests, which science is unusually good at (a relative judgement: see, for instance, the replication crisis) and humanities and social sciences can be remarkably bad at. In recent times, getting worse because the level of efficient self-deception has been rising.
Love the poem.
As for defining sex and women, all biological categories are fuzzy to some degree but sex is nowhere near as fuzzy as is regularly being claimed.
Feminism suffers from the two lies problem (1) the lie that you need a special ideology to liberate women and (2) the lie that the problem is male oppression. As these have both become more untrue over time, feminism has tended to become more toxically unreal over time. Its tendency to valorise its own group and to not be able to handle biological constraints intelligently are also very unhelpful tendencies.
Can we discuss postmodernism without being aware that Leotard, Foucault, Derrida etc. were dedicated to pulling the rug out from under Western culture and power? They saw that class struggle had failed to deliver the "revolution" so society needed to be polarized in another way. Viva la Differance as Derrida might have said. The media are now the battleground of polarization, from literary criticism to wokeism.
Postmarxists/postmodernists are sure that eventually it must be feasible to break the Western democracies. The utopia of government by the people's tyrants in the mould of Xi Jinping must be near.
This was a fascinating and insightful essay. I wonder if the coherence horizon has implications for the nature of reality. Neither consciousness nor language are capable of really encapsulating it; at the same time, literally false traditions can be functionally true. Which then is the deeper truth? Logos or mythos? Or is that the wrong way to think about the question - better perhaps to think of both being true in their own sense, with a larger, more unified and mature conception of truth found in their unity or superposition?
Which is more a question of our grasp of reality, rather than reality itself. I do not agree with Rorty’s scepticism about truth. But that not-true claims can be functionally effective, even highly effective, points to how we have not evolved to be veridical perceivers, but functionally effective ones. How much of being an effective actor within a social context do we wish to trade-off against being a veridical one?
Part of the answer being “functional for whom? And in what circumstances?”
It's absolutely a question of our understanding of reality ... although, to continue the recursive theme, reality necessarily includes our ability to understand it, and the way we understand it.
I do think that the current epistemic dispensation within the ruling elite assigns far too much weight to social utility - namely, their social advantage - and deprecates concordance with reality (however defined) to a pathological degree, e.g. the luxury beliefs you noted in your previous essay, as well as the content-free verbiage favored by most official communications.
I partly blame mainstream economics for that, which puts far too much weight on efficiency compared to resilience (supply chains anyone?). When biological organisms economise (i.e. seek efficiency) in order to be resilient.
The multiplication of pseudo knowledge in other disciplines is even more to blame, but economists are not entirely innocent.
And so it was that I realized you have your own substack, which I have naturally subscribed to without yet reading, because it is obviously going to be worth reading.
The acceptance that any analysis of perception or consciousness will be recursive is incorrect. Even Aristotle realised that the apparent recursion meant that something else was happening other than flows from place to place in the brain. This article explains what is happening provided the reader can overcome their initial prejudices about recursion:
The problem of infinite regress in the philosophy of mind is due to missing an independent direction for arranging events. We know we are doing this when we use words such as "emergentism". As an example the one dimensional representation of the letter O might be: .___._.___ .___.___ ._.___. This is not the same as an "O". If we stack the five sets of dots the letter O "emerges" in two dimensions. Certainly we can compute with a one dimensional representation of an O but we cannot have the real O unless we use at least two dimensions.
There is at least one dimension missing from the usual attempts at an ontology of consciousness: time. The extended present moment is not specious. It exists in all of us and allows whole morphemes to be present.
The standard argument against the "specious" present is that the future cannot be present now but that only applies to the future and present of events occurring at the same place. If time exists as a direction for arranging events then it is feasible that future and present events could be co-existent at another place. Several authors have spotted that four dimensional pseudo-euclidean geometry permits observation points that could host connections between events at different times but the idea has never gained traction.
The religious significance of these musings is that the reality of being human might be largely geometrical, where time is an existent direction for arranging events (how much could you know at any instant if this were not the case?). Perhaps the Buddhists are right: considering processes to be important might be a delusion because they are no more than a support for the bodily machine that hosts our consciousness. Gaming others would then be absurd behaviour by the ignorant.
I am only half way through Carlo Rovelli’s ‘The Order of Time’. I might have a better answer after I finish it. From what he says, nothing might be a thing. Everything is rather an event; a becoming rather than being. Surprisingly, most of physics doesn’t need a time dimension, until you get to heat.
We act to achieve certain becomings and avoid others. Buddhism seeks to liberate us from the treadmill of becomings. A manifestation of the way karmic cultures dive into consciousness rather than away from it. Descartes, after all, seeks to use consciousness as an anchor to explore outer reality, not as an inner path to deeper reality. Though Donald Hoffman’s icon theory of perception (which I don’t agree with) has more of a feel of the latter.
As it happens, I believe one of the problems of mainstream economics is it does not wrestle with time enough. Including being too focused on efficiency and not enough on resilience and threshold effects. (Supply chains anyone?)
None of which really answers your question. I will have to mull some more. And finish Covelli’s excellent book. (Which is beautifully clearly written.)
Both observation and inference, surely. I have never been keen on the Kantian distinction between phenomenal and noumenal. (I am afraid I am not keen on Kant generally.) I found Rovelli to be very perceptive about evidence and experience and the complexities of their interaction.
The deep problem in philosophy of mind is "naive realism" - the idea that what we see is a direct image of the world. Rovelli does not address this problem but seems to assume that our Experience is on a direct route that simply funnels data through the brain and back out into the world (ie: he is a naive realist).
When you look at this screen there are two sets of things happening. The first is reflexes so that your pupils might constrict and you will have saccades to gather data from small areas. The second is that you integrate the saccadic data into a virtual reality. The virtual reality is at least 0.5 seconds late compared with the objective state of the image.
This means that our current Experience already contains decohered data. A wavefunction of electrons will decohere the moment a photon from it hits the eye, at least 0.5 secs before it is observed.
"As we are story-loving beings inclined to connect intentions directly with outcomes, it can be hard for us to keep clear that what is structured in a way that has an effect may not be intended (consciously or otherwise) to have that effect."
You have touched on something very interesting here. I could never figure out what other people always seemed to somehow effortlessly know - which is the intentions behind an action. Since I could never be certain of my own intentions, I never knew how other people could be certain of their own intentions, not to mind other people's. And yet what people intend is such a common, but to me mysterious, subject of conversation, that I had to conclude that I must suffer from some sort of "intention" equivalent of colour blindness.
In particular, I have never known what to make of the idea that harm caused can be mitigated by the fact that a person had good intentions.
The problem of functional self-deception is why I talk about *efficient* self-deception: it is precisely because it can be so functional that it is so common. There is, however, a problem if a society is systematically raising the level of efficient self-deception. Particularly among elites. As the self-deception may be efficient for them but disastrous for others, or the wider society.
I also like Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying’s notion of literally false but metaphorically true: beliefs adherence to which is a selection advantage.
Which brings us back to reality tests, which science is unusually good at (a relative judgement: see, for instance, the replication crisis) and humanities and social sciences can be remarkably bad at. In recent times, getting worse because the level of efficient self-deception has been rising.
Love the poem.
As for defining sex and women, all biological categories are fuzzy to some degree but sex is nowhere near as fuzzy as is regularly being claimed.
Feminism suffers from the two lies problem (1) the lie that you need a special ideology to liberate women and (2) the lie that the problem is male oppression. As these have both become more untrue over time, feminism has tended to become more toxically unreal over time. Its tendency to valorise its own group and to not be able to handle biological constraints intelligently are also very unhelpful tendencies.
Can we discuss postmodernism without being aware that Leotard, Foucault, Derrida etc. were dedicated to pulling the rug out from under Western culture and power? They saw that class struggle had failed to deliver the "revolution" so society needed to be polarized in another way. Viva la Differance as Derrida might have said. The media are now the battleground of polarization, from literary criticism to wokeism.
Postmarxists/postmodernists are sure that eventually it must be feasible to break the Western democracies. The utopia of government by the people's tyrants in the mould of Xi Jinping must be near.
Enjoyed this in a head-exploding kind of way (if that makes sense).
It absolutely does. :)
This was a fascinating and insightful essay. I wonder if the coherence horizon has implications for the nature of reality. Neither consciousness nor language are capable of really encapsulating it; at the same time, literally false traditions can be functionally true. Which then is the deeper truth? Logos or mythos? Or is that the wrong way to think about the question - better perhaps to think of both being true in their own sense, with a larger, more unified and mature conception of truth found in their unity or superposition?
Which is more a question of our grasp of reality, rather than reality itself. I do not agree with Rorty’s scepticism about truth. But that not-true claims can be functionally effective, even highly effective, points to how we have not evolved to be veridical perceivers, but functionally effective ones. How much of being an effective actor within a social context do we wish to trade-off against being a veridical one?
Part of the answer being “functional for whom? And in what circumstances?”
It's absolutely a question of our understanding of reality ... although, to continue the recursive theme, reality necessarily includes our ability to understand it, and the way we understand it.
I do think that the current epistemic dispensation within the ruling elite assigns far too much weight to social utility - namely, their social advantage - and deprecates concordance with reality (however defined) to a pathological degree, e.g. the luxury beliefs you noted in your previous essay, as well as the content-free verbiage favored by most official communications.
I partly blame mainstream economics for that, which puts far too much weight on efficiency compared to resilience (supply chains anyone?). When biological organisms economise (i.e. seek efficiency) in order to be resilient.
The multiplication of pseudo knowledge in other disciplines is even more to blame, but economists are not entirely innocent.
https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/zen-and-the-art-of-flow
And so it was that I realized you have your own substack, which I have naturally subscribed to without yet reading, because it is obviously going to be worth reading.
The acceptance that any analysis of perception or consciousness will be recursive is incorrect. Even Aristotle realised that the apparent recursion meant that something else was happening other than flows from place to place in the brain. This article explains what is happening provided the reader can overcome their initial prejudices about recursion:
"Our Reality": http://www.thereandwhere.com/antsand.html
Some food for thought:
The problem of infinite regress in the philosophy of mind is due to missing an independent direction for arranging events. We know we are doing this when we use words such as "emergentism". As an example the one dimensional representation of the letter O might be: .___._.___ .___.___ ._.___. This is not the same as an "O". If we stack the five sets of dots the letter O "emerges" in two dimensions. Certainly we can compute with a one dimensional representation of an O but we cannot have the real O unless we use at least two dimensions.
There is at least one dimension missing from the usual attempts at an ontology of consciousness: time. The extended present moment is not specious. It exists in all of us and allows whole morphemes to be present.
The standard argument against the "specious" present is that the future cannot be present now but that only applies to the future and present of events occurring at the same place. If time exists as a direction for arranging events then it is feasible that future and present events could be co-existent at another place. Several authors have spotted that four dimensional pseudo-euclidean geometry permits observation points that could host connections between events at different times but the idea has never gained traction.
The religious significance of these musings is that the reality of being human might be largely geometrical, where time is an existent direction for arranging events (how much could you know at any instant if this were not the case?). Perhaps the Buddhists are right: considering processes to be important might be a delusion because they are no more than a support for the bodily machine that hosts our consciousness. Gaming others would then be absurd behaviour by the ignorant.
Then again...
I'm sure Lorenzo will be along to comment when he wakes up (he's in Australia, so asleep right now).
I am only half way through Carlo Rovelli’s ‘The Order of Time’. I might have a better answer after I finish it. From what he says, nothing might be a thing. Everything is rather an event; a becoming rather than being. Surprisingly, most of physics doesn’t need a time dimension, until you get to heat.
We act to achieve certain becomings and avoid others. Buddhism seeks to liberate us from the treadmill of becomings. A manifestation of the way karmic cultures dive into consciousness rather than away from it. Descartes, after all, seeks to use consciousness as an anchor to explore outer reality, not as an inner path to deeper reality. Though Donald Hoffman’s icon theory of perception (which I don’t agree with) has more of a feel of the latter.
As it happens, I believe one of the problems of mainstream economics is it does not wrestle with time enough. Including being too focused on efficiency and not enough on resilience and threshold effects. (Supply chains anyone?)
None of which really answers your question. I will have to mull some more. And finish Covelli’s excellent book. (Which is beautifully clearly written.)
Rovelli writes well but does not give due consideration to the phenomenal and noumenal. Is science about observation or inference?
Both observation and inference, surely. I have never been keen on the Kantian distinction between phenomenal and noumenal. (I am afraid I am not keen on Kant generally.) I found Rovelli to be very perceptive about evidence and experience and the complexities of their interaction.
https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/zen-and-the-art-of-flow
The deep problem in philosophy of mind is "naive realism" - the idea that what we see is a direct image of the world. Rovelli does not address this problem but seems to assume that our Experience is on a direct route that simply funnels data through the brain and back out into the world (ie: he is a naive realist).
When you look at this screen there are two sets of things happening. The first is reflexes so that your pupils might constrict and you will have saccades to gather data from small areas. The second is that you integrate the saccadic data into a virtual reality. The virtual reality is at least 0.5 seconds late compared with the objective state of the image.
This means that our current Experience already contains decohered data. A wavefunction of electrons will decohere the moment a photon from it hits the eye, at least 0.5 secs before it is observed.
"As we are story-loving beings inclined to connect intentions directly with outcomes, it can be hard for us to keep clear that what is structured in a way that has an effect may not be intended (consciously or otherwise) to have that effect."
You have touched on something very interesting here. I could never figure out what other people always seemed to somehow effortlessly know - which is the intentions behind an action. Since I could never be certain of my own intentions, I never knew how other people could be certain of their own intentions, not to mind other people's. And yet what people intend is such a common, but to me mysterious, subject of conversation, that I had to conclude that I must suffer from some sort of "intention" equivalent of colour blindness.
In particular, I have never known what to make of the idea that harm caused can be mitigated by the fact that a person had good intentions.