The Psychology Thread, I Guess...

[LimpyLoo]

I'm not unfamiliar with Buddhism, m7.

 

But I wasn't talking about your avatar. I was talking about the things you said in the 9/11 thread.

 

P.S. Did you actually read any part of this thread before coming in here and offering your perfectly-vague criticism? (How Buddha-like of you, btw)

[Real Human Bean]

Resurrecting interesting thread: how 2 not be a silly old fart

[Audioblysk]

My dreams mainly consist of me getting in awkward yet triumphant sexual encounters with girls I've never met...

 

Help me FreudLoo

[LimpyLoo]

My dreams mainly consist of me getting in awkward yet triumphant sexual encounters with girls I've never met...

 

Help me FreudLoo

Alright, so first let's establish some axioms/assumptions, because in order for me to give you good advice, you should know *why* I think it's good advice ('fiat' advice doesn't stick, which is why you had to 're-learn' lessons your parents allegedly already taught you):

 

-dreams are costly (from an evo-econ perspective), so they must be worth more than they cost, or else they would've been selected again, so let's tentatively assume they're important

-even cats and dogs have dreams (dude, your cat/dog genuinely dreams about you on a regular basis lol)

-dreams submit information to your cognitive system for troubleshooting (which is what the cognitive system is for, since it's basically a neural branch growing out of your motor system, so it walks/talks/quacks like some recursive process out of Godel, Escher, Bach, so your cognition basically evolved to modulate your motor output)

-dreams contain data-compressed patterns (because that was the best compromise between replaying your entire past every night, and not dreaming at all)

-these patterns are boiled-down 4-dimensional 'grid/place cell' patterns that your hippocampus seems to think is worth telling you about

-these 4-dimensional (read: space-time) patterns might best be described as 'personalities' or 'archetypes'

 

So okay, with those axioms in mind, let's take a look at your dream:

 

 

 

Your 'libido' wants to have 'sexual intercourse' with a 'woman'.

 

 

 

[LimpyLoo]

Resurrecting interesting thread: how 2 not be a silly old fart

I tend to avoid listening to western people (especially western journalists or science writers) talk about aging, since it's virtually always based on assumptions that I don't agree with. (Even the 'aging gracefully' stuff)

 

Here is the underlying assumption:

 

Life ends at 20/30/40, but hey you can still sit under the table and hope for scraps!

[LimpyLoo]

(Blysk yo, you gotta lay down some dream-details in order for me to lay down some dream-analysis)

[LimpyLoo]

Well look Blysk, I'll tell you how I look at the content of dreams:

 

Your dreams speak in primordial patterns/metaphors/personalities.

 

Your desires/wants/needs (e.g. goals you have for yourself and others, social connectedness, health, etc) determine which kinds of patterns your cognitive/limbic/perceptual/sensorimotor/etc systems care about, think about, watch films about, or dream about.

 

If you're having trouble with an 'archetype' in a dream, the cogsci-meets-Jung TL;DR is basically that your hippocampus is showing your cognitive system that you're improperly oriented towards one (or more) of these basic primordial patterns/metaphors/personalities.

[chenGOD]

 

Resurrecting interesting thread: how 2 not be a silly old fart

I tend to avoid listening to western people (especially western journalists or science writers) talk about aging, since it's virtually always based on assumptions that I don't agree with. (Even the 'aging gracefully' stuff)

 

Here is the underlying assumption:

 

Life ends at 20/30/40, but hey you can still sit under the table and hope for scraps!

I would have thought you of all people would like that article.

[LimpyLoo]

 

 

Resurrecting interesting thread: how 2 not be a silly old fart

I tend to avoid listening to western people (especially western journalists or science writers) talk about aging, since it's virtually always based on assumptions that I don't agree with. (Even the 'aging gracefully' stuff)

 

Here is the underlying assumption:

 

Life ends at 20/30/40, but hey you can still sit under the table and hope for scraps!

I would have thought you of all people would like that article.

Well, as I said: I dismissed it out of hand. Because we need low-grade heuristics to sort/filter things, so we aren't burdened by constant granular-level decisions about how to act, or what information might be valuable...

 

But now that I've gotten some further indirect evidence that the article is talking some sense, I will very happily read it.

[Real Human Bean]

Jolly good. It's not an in-depth read but the basic argument of Salt'n'Pepa - Push It is encouraging at least.


I'll bite re (fresh) dream interpretation:

I was told (just a voice, no visible lifeforms in the dream) and saw with my own eyes that there are not 1 moon but 3 with different orbits and when the moons all occasionally aligned there was a flash of light that took up my entire field of vision with the exception of the circle where the moons were.


 

[LimpyLoo]

That is a wild dream, first off!

 

So nevermind (for a moment) the fact that these happened to be moons, and just look at how they're acting: They're acting like things that need to be arranged in order for cool shit to happen.

 

The Alchemists thought that the world was fractal, and so you were apt to see scale-free self-referential analogies throughout nature...macrocosm-microcosm stuff.

 

Not a crazy claim when you realize your (sorry to blather on about this, but) hippocampus/memory is a sampler with two separate bit-rate and sample-rate inputs (grid/place cells) and the two inputs phase cancel and shit.

[Real Human Bean]

Interesting.
I've always had strong feelings towards fractals and the whole "macrocosm-microcosm stuff."

Will have to have a read about this grid/place brain sampler you're talking about.

Cheerz

[LimpyLoo]

John O'Keefe is all up in that hippocampal-coding game.

 

But yeah, "As above, so below" is the Alchemy axiom. (Seems to be true so far as I can tell.)

[cwmbrancity]

grids are interesting cos they turn up in Neolithic tomb art/motifs, ie new-stone age era of prehistory where abstract art was one of the few codified communication processes beyond spoken word/oral histories (and probably reincorporated there too)

 

the official cognitive-archaeological interpretation is of a symbol relaying 1st phase altered state of perception shift, possibly incorporating a shaman/religious figure-head(s) & any number of ways of achieving altered states of consciousness

 

it replicates a tiered cosmos world-view/belief structure, which was nice

 

 

[caze]

 

TL;DR = their positions amount to "my naive phi-sci axioms are the correct ones, so look no further lol"

 

 

no, they don't. I guess this means of the two options I presented you with before, you're going with option two.

 

your attempts to 'take them on one at a time' seem to rely on a bunch of articles filled with what mostly appear to be strawman arguments, or criticisms unrelated to scientism at all (lots of ad hominem). most claims of scientism seem to present these people as believing in a very naive form of physical realism (and a correspondingly naive notion of 'absolute truth') which they clearly do not believe if you actually bother to properly read anything they write.

 

can you find a single statement from Dawkins say, that does a good job of demonstrating his supposed scientism?

 

this is a good article which I think represents something a lot closer to what these folks actually believe: 

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/bielefeld_final_rev.pdf

 

(apologies for the delay, had ignored this thread after my last post)

[LimpyLoo]

Resurrecting interesting thread: how 2 not be a silly old fart

Great article! (2/3rds through atm)

 

Yeah man, that's my jam.

(IMO the cognitive system's just a calculator-watch on the limbic system's wrist.)

 

Thanks for posting this, cheers

[LimpyLoo]

 

TL;DR = their positions amount to "my naive phi-sci axioms are the correct ones, so look no further lol"

 

no, they don't. I guess this means of the two options I presented you with before, you're going with option two.

 

your attempts to 'take them on one at a time' seem to rely on a bunch of articles filled with what mostly appear to be strawman arguments, or criticisms unrelated to scientism at all (lots of ad hominem). most claims of scientism seem to present these people as believing in a very naive form of physical realism (and a correspondingly naive notion of 'absolute truth') which they clearly do not believe if you actually bother to properly read anything they write.

 

can you find a single statement from Dawkins say, that does a good job of demonstrating his supposed scientism?

 

this is a good article which I think represents something a lot closer to what these folks actually believe:

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/bielefeld_final_rev.pdf

 

(apologies for the delay, had ignored this thread after my last post)

 

1) Caze, I posted actual transcripts from actual interviews of the actual people in question. (E.g. How was the NDT Nerdist excerpt a 'strawman')? Yes, I posted some thinkpieces *on top of* actual transcript excerpts, and an annoying super-cut of LK, and a video of Bill Nye...

 

It doesn't sound like you entertained my argument, it sounds like you just scanned it looking for excuses to dismiss it.

[caze]

 

1) Caze, I posted actual transcripts from actual interviews of the actual people in question. (E.g. How was the NDT Nerdist excerpt a 'strawman')? Yes, I posted some thinkpieces *on top of* actual transcript excerpts, and an annoying super-cut of LK, and a video of Bill Nye...

 

It doesn't sound like you entertained my argument, it sounds like you just scanned it looking for excuses to dismiss it.

 

 

you didn't make an argument, you just posted some quotes and links (and no video of Bill Nye that I can see).

[LimpyLoo]

So, you wouldn't agree that (e.g.) NDT and LK have rather negative views of philosophy?

[caze]

So, you wouldn't agree that (e.g.) NDT and LK have rather negative views of philosophy?

 

Whether they do or not isn't really relevant to whether they're wallowing in scientism or not.

[chim]

[LimpyLoo]

 

So, you wouldn't agree that (e.g.) NDT and LK have rather negative views of philosophy?

Whether they do or not isn't really relevant to whether they're wallowing in scientism or not.

 

Let's define 'Scientism' again so we don't let the fish slip out of our fingers:

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

 

Scientism is a belief in the universal applicability of the scientific method and approach, and the view that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or the most valuable part of human learning—to the exclusion of other viewpoints.

 

Scientism is the idea that there aren't even any philosophical axioms to be squabbling about, so everyone should just hush up and look at the data.

 

(Did you read the paragraph I posted from the NDT Nerdist podcast? Because I'd be happy to post it again, and we can go through line by line and you can tell me how nope, he really respects philosophy and thinks more young people should be interested in it...)

[caze]

Scientism is the idea that there aren't even any philosophical axioms to be squabbling about, so everyone should just hush up and look at the data.

 

(Did you read the paragraph I posted from the NDT Nerdist podcast? Because I'd be happy to post it again, and we can go through line by line and you can tell me how nope, he really respects philosophy and thinks more young people should be interested in it...)

 

whether they respect philosophy or not has nothing to do with whether they engage in scientism or not. their own ideas on epistemology are all that are important, if you have any argument to make against those, then please go ahead and make it.

[LimpyLoo]

Do you agree that science is predicated on philosophical axioms?

Do you agree that some people don't know those axioms exist?

(that is what 'scientism' is...I don't understand how you'd think scientism has nothing to do with philosophy...that's *all* it has to do with)

[caze]

Do you agree that science is predicated on philosophical axioms?

Do you agree that some people don't know those axioms exist?

(that is what 'scientism' is...I don't understand how you'd think scientism has nothing to do with philosophy...that's *all* it has to do with)

 

You think these people are ignorant of basic philosophy of science? lol.

 

And I never said scientism has nothing to do with philosophy, I said it has nothing to do with whether they had disrespected (or had negative views on) philosophy or not. Having negative views on the practice of philosophy (or some subset of it, to be more accurate), is very different to discounting rational enquiry in a broader sense than simply the scientific method.

 

I'll say it again, their own ideas on epistemology are all that are important, if you have any argument to make against those, then please go ahead and make it.