BWE wrote:Damn.

The Demon of Sax

As far as I can remember I just got off a four day blackout drunk and came home to find my family huddled in a bedroom with a rattling space heater keeping them alive in a two day stretch of 35 degree below Fahrenheit weather. I couldn't figure out why all my wife's plants had keeled over and frozen to the living room floor. House was covered in soot; the furnace blew up on the first day of my vacation. The wall between living room and kitchen was completely destroyed and laying in a pile between the rooms. This was the result of my wife and I doing speed one night and deciding that 2:00 am was a real good time to remodel our home.

My wife was angry. Damned women! She left the day after I did some strange new drug (biphetamine) which set off a two week long period of chronic panic attacks. So the shrink gave me Valium and I slept on the couch in the soot, wearing winter gear for a week. My friends tried to get me up and communicate but I was unresponsive except for glares and threats.

Minnesota's hunting season began. They bodily picked me up and threw me in a truck and hauled me to the Sax Swamps of the North Country. They had had enough of my shit. We awaited hunting season which began in the morning at 6am by taking a bunch of acid and drinking whiskey mixed with KoolAid. Really fucking bad shit that was. The next morning we loaded high powered rifles, donned bunny boots and other winter gear and headed off into the swamp to kill some Bambi.

So. All that just to convince you that I was quite clear-headed and ready for a real epiphany on my road to enlightenment.

The Sax swamps are now broken by a few highways and dirt roads and it's between Duluth and Virginia on the Iron Range. It's the beginning of a hundred mile bog which is said to have taken every life that attempted a crossing. The trees floated around you as you walked on the bog. Very eerie. It was a thick gray and foggy day. About 25 below zero. We all split up and met later that day. Each of us had an experience that looked worse on our faces than if we had seen a ghost. I saw what seemed to be a ten foot tall Banshee and the rest had one thing or another that freaked them out. We were absolutely clutched with dreadful fear.

This had happened before to the father of one of the group and several other tales of dread emerged about the area.

So I explained to them that what we had here is an ancient demon that haunted this swamp. It made incredible sense to each of us.

Now I think I made a true statement. I was an atheist at the time and did not believe in spooks. Never did and never will. Yet, there is a demon out there.

Now regarding your post. It was a good amazing. It's a perspective on these myths and models that I rather like.

So we could talk about the demon. Was there Really a demon? What would it mean for a demon to be 'really'?

BWE wrote:Curious to know what you found amazing and about the.demon of the.sax swamp.

what perfect timing you have.

Regarding was there a demon: it depends on your purposes. If you want to go catch or manipulate that demon and use it for physical purposes, you will probably be unsuccessful. That is where religion goes south too.

he names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity;
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood;
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounc’d that the Gods had order’d such things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.
~W. Blake

BWE wrote:Still and all, he is much easier to understand when his purpose is understood. His metaphysics even. If reality is explained by schematic based mechanical understanding in your metaphysics, a generally materialist perspective, then you will go about making mechanical schematics to explain and understand reality. Knowing that, or, I should say, assuming that, there is no need to buy the metaphysical assumptions at all since they can be borrowed and returned by instead of agreeing or disagreeing, taking the information as an attempt to fulfill a purpose. Then, when you come upon another person who has a new age perspective or whatever, you don't have to reject the stuff they may have of value buried among the piles of crap because you don't have to carry their baggage, all you have to do is figure out what purpose they have adopted and examine their statements in light of how well they achieve their purpose.

The organism which gives birth to the I has motive. If we view information in terms of motive rather than metaphysics, what "is" or ontology, then there is nothing to argue about except whether or not a model works to achieve a purpose. It was largely that idea which popped into my head all of a sudden one day which made me see religion in a new light and to recognize that there is much value in a lot of the 'sages' or whatever they are. If the purpose is finding peace in your own skin, you read the ideas differently than if the purpose is explaining how to build a bomb or bridge or whether or not to have gay sex. Dennett has as his purpose, clearly stated in several places, to understand life by knowing how to engineer it.

I'm in the middle of Life of Pi, BTW. Always meant to watch it and your post inspired me.

So what is amazing is the perspective of leaving out the metaphysics or ontology or whatever you like to name it.

BWE wrote:Regarding was there a demon: it depends on your purposes. If you want to go catch or manipulate that demon and use it for physical purposes, you will probably be unsuccessful. That is where religion goes south too.
...

As long as we don't expect the information to get up and walk on water or perform a Rapture it's safe to talk of Demons and Myths. Archetypes of humans are incredibly rich and sometimes even useful. All of the guys in that cabin were undergoing deadly crises of life at the time. That area actually killed people because it was deadly on it's own. It was the perfect collusion of time and sapien and place, for the demon to occur. I also take a sense of history from a place and in some way connect to all of what happened before and all of what will. This is the nature of good demons and fairies and such.

We can take it all apart mechanically or reductively if we like but when we are sitting there with our pile of mechanical facts all in a heap on the floor, it should occur to us rightly, that the thing no longer works at all.

Exactly. There is no part called "running" in the shop manual for a car.

Finding the.right word is difficult in different situations, whether it should be metaphysics, ontology, paradigm or some other word. In each case the term offers the.flexibility to include the approach of not adopting it. But I think that really is recursively different. I also think that is what buddha.found. And jesus too for.that matter. There is a profound effect on all ideas when they run through a filter which strips them of ontology.

Here is the part often missed.

But first I didn't get into the aftermath of the demon experience. Got tired of writing the post. It had a profound affect on us and for me it taught me about the nature of Myth.

Now the missed part. For me a scientisimist and a physicalist if someone had told be about that demon I would get this butt clenchy feeling as I waited for the Woo Shoe to drop. You see this cuts both ways.

If someone comes up with a wooified story about demons or gods or whatever and they apply some level of reification to the myth then they have done EXACTLY what the scientific reductionist does when he ends up with a pile of gray facts. Religious myths are insipid and stupid. I like quality myth.

Physicalism, if you take it to it's ultimate conclusion, is not stupid and not insipid. It just keeps on giving. It's a myth of course but one that never gets found out false; so it seems. It's all good as long as you don't resort to the same sort of mistake as the Woo. Making generalizations or reducing it to some singular causative reduction.

I like to roll all the layers of perspective together. Have my woo and dissect it too.

I think you really mean the scientific method and instrumentalism rather than physicalism. One is about models and the other is about ontology. Once you assume a metaphysics, you're locked in. Suddenly there are right answers that are external to your purposes and needs.

Also, the butt-clenchy part is the ontologic challenge. Once you actually drop that part, the ill effects go away too. It's sort of amazing how suffering really is uniquely about attachment. Once you recognize that attachment is to ontology primarily, suddenly it makes sense when someone uses the phrase "atheism becomes a religion" or whatever terms challenge your metaphysics.

Once you drop the metaphysical requirements, it becomes possible to see the information which is available in the.statement. But if you reject it out of hand you are literally obscuring information from yourself on purpose. There is no difference whether you are a rational skeptic or a fundy yec. Morton's demon is about how ontology forces us to blind ourselves to actual information in the service of belief.

BWE wrote:I think you really mean the scientific method and instrumentalism rather than physicalism. One is about models and the other is about ontology. Once you assume a metaphysics, you're locked in. Suddenly there are right answers that are external to your purposes and needs.

I like to reassign the word physicalism. It's a pretty word and I don't want to give it to it's bastardized version of making universal claims. I can make a claim of physicalism for the locality in which I exist and then form a a potentially infinite set of propositions as science or even common sense. I have little worry that I will make a mistake by assuming physicalism locally And if I do then I'll just go with it.

Instrumentalism and scientific method is for the labs and it misses far too much and veers far too close to reductionist gray for me. For me my physicalism can easily subsume even the demons of Sax. Its as rich as the cosmos and it lives in my back yard.

Have you read much on object oriented philosophy?

BWE wrote:Also, the butt-clenchy part is the ontologic challenge. Once you actually drop that part, the ill effects go away too. It's sort of amazing how suffering really is uniquely about attachment. Once you recognize that attachment is to ontology primarily, suddenly it makes sense when someone uses the phrase "atheism becomes a religion" or whatever terms challenge your metaphysics.

Once you drop the metaphysical requirements, it becomes possible to see the information which is available in the.statement. But if you reject it out of hand you are literally obscuring information from yourself on purpose. There is no difference whether you are a rational skeptic or a fundy yec. Morton's demon is about how ontology forces us to blind ourselves to actual information in the service of belief.

What I reject is any belief in anything that humans can articulate. I am a true atheist. A true non-believer. I get that feeling when they threaten to ram their beliefs up my ass for a miserable half an hour. I don't need that.

BWE wrote:I think you really mean the scientific method and instrumentalism rather than physicalism. One is about models and the other is about ontology. Once you assume a metaphysics, you're locked in. Suddenly there are right answers that are external to your purposes and needs.

I don't get what you keep saying about models. Of course the model isn't the reality, it would be a poor model if it was (like the map that was an exact duplicate of the territory). But that doesn't mean that maps don't tell us about reality, even about how reality really is.

The real world doesn't have contour lines every fifty feet of elevation. But that doesn't mean the map Is lying to us or that it is in some sense only correct for people who care about altitude. It is perfectly possible for it to represent the world correctly (or incorrectly).

If I ask about the altitude of a nearby hill I expect an answer that is "external to my purposes and needs." Or perhaps a better way of putting it is that there are uncountably many purposes to which that information could be put and I can phrase the question unambiguously without specifying which (if any) I have in mind.

SpeedOfSound wrote:

BWE wrote:Also, the butt-clenchy part is the ontologic challenge. Once you actually drop that part, the ill effects go away too. It's sort of amazing how suffering really is uniquely about attachment. Once you recognize that attachment is to ontology primarily, suddenly it makes sense when someone uses the phrase "atheism becomes a religion" or whatever terms challenge your metaphysics.

Once you drop the metaphysical requirements, it becomes possible to see the information which is available in the.statement. But if you reject it out of hand you are literally obscuring information from yourself on purpose. There is no difference whether you are a rational skeptic or a fundy yec. Morton's demon is about how ontology forces us to blind ourselves to actual information in the service of belief/quote]

What I reject is any belief in anything that humans can articulate. I am a true atheist. A true non-believer. I get that feeling when they threaten to ram their beliefs up my ass for a miserable half an hour. I don't need that.

Yeah. Me too. That's why I always look at purpose. If I don't share the purpose, I don't need the information. When someone else's purpose has to do with convincing me to adopt their ontology, I can safely disregard the information. I can, however, if I am interested, look at their information and try to.assess how well it or just how it helps acheive the.purpose of convincing anyone to adopt that metaphysics.

But most people have a tough time.identifying their own purpose so a loop can ge built in to the process if I end up believing my assessments as 'truth' then I am just on the road to.generating a new.metaphysics to trap myself within.

Chris, it's going to take access to a.keyboard and monitor to respond to your past few posts but I will get to it.

Chrisw wrote:

BWE wrote:I think you really mean the scientific method and instrumentalism rather than physicalism. One is about models and the other is about ontology. Once you assume a metaphysics, you're locked in. Suddenly there are right answers that are external to your purposes and needs.

I don't get what you keep saying about models. Of course the model isn't the reality, it would be a poor model if it was (like the map that was an exact duplicate of the territory). But that doesn't mean that maps don't tell us about reality, even about how reality really is.

Two things. First. I think I was unclear. Instrumentalism is about building models and models are about navigation. Physicalism is about privileging a particular type of model over other types. In any situation where a particular type of model is privileged, purpose is fit to what can be modeled using that type of model.

My point is that the.scientific method does not need to privilege physicalism, it just does because the physical realm is distinct in that we can share certain kinds of measurement of it between people. The scientific method doesn't need to privilege any ism at all. It is just a method for fitting purpose to models and improving those models based on their purpose.

If your purpose is happiness though, for example, a physicalist ontology will suggest a physiological solution. A physical intervention in the system which is supposed to produce happiness. And that endeavor fails entirely because happiness is not a single physical state. There are some things which you could use from a physicalist model to aid your purpose, tweak the machine to facilitate a state where some barriers are removed. For example, valium can change the.system to reduce anxiety but it is a temporary fix. Too much or too long and everything else goes to hell.

The real world doesn't have contour lines every fifty feet of elevation. But that doesn't mean the map Is lying to us or that it is in some sense only correct for people who care about altitude. It is perfectly possible for it to represent the world correctly (or incorrectly).

If I ask about the altitude of a nearby hill I expect an answer that is "external to my purposes and needs." Or perhaps a better way of putting it is that there are uncountably many purposes to which that information could be put and I can phrase the question unambiguously without specifying which (if any) I have in mind.

but if you want physical information, your purposes are by definition, physical. Don't consult a psychogist for engineering help. There is, in a perfect world of information, a perfect transform between any two maps. But since we don't have perfect information, we are stuck using models to acheive our purposes regardless of their fit with other models. If we can identify our purpose and leave the metaphysical baggage, there is no danger in any map. If not, there is danger, or at least unnecessary limits and self imposed suffering, in every map, rational or no.

I just caught how you are using physicalism, sos. In that sense, yes, I agree. Isms are always going to.suffer strawmen just from rigidity. When I am on top of my game, I try to use language without them altogether. But as long as the trap of isms is clear, I guess it doesn't really matter which ism you tend to favor.

Mine is probably buddhism though I'm not a buddhist really. The other is instrumentalism because Dewey was the first philosopher who really resonated with me. That and I spent a lot of years involved with public education and still carry the flag of my mini crusade to make it a felony offense to offer private grants to public education and to completely liquidate the gates foundation and forbid any of its members to ever engage in philanthropy again.

zoon wrote:

DavidMcC wrote:

zoon wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:
Classifying a neuron by presumed function is bad. Misleading. We don't need this kind of trouble in the public's perception of neuroscience.

Why did you hide under a chair when you said it? Yup!

I hid under the chair because you had expressed an aversion to mirror neurons, which I still don’t entirely understand. Aren’t they like Hubel and Wiesel’s single neurons in the brain which fired when particular patterns were shown to the animal? It doesn’t necessarily mean that they are in themselves different from other neurons, just that they come at the end of particular sequences of processing. Do you consider the experimental findings of the mirror neuron researchers interesting, but you think they should have presented them differently, or do you find the experiments useless?

Neural function makes sense in terms of the operation of the neural circuit of which they are a part, but this must be carefully distinguished from the function of the circuit. Thus, whilst Speed is correct in a way, it is not meaningless to consider neural function WITHIN the circuit. This can be clearly seen in retinal circuitry,m for example:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130807134241.htm

...
In this study, the researchers identified a new class of bipolar cells, which relay information from photoreceptors to ganglion cells. However, further study is needed to determine this cell type's exact function.
...

Thank you, yes, I suspect SpeedOfSound wouldn’t mind mirror neurons if discussion of the term was kept to Wikipedia’s definition: “A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another”. This is a limited experimental finding from electrodes in brains, which doesn’t give any further information about whether or not those neurons are of a special kind or not, or what neural circuits they are a part of. In fact, very little still seems to be known in spite of a decade of effort – Wikipedia again: “Despite the excitement generated by these findings, to date, no widely accepted neural or computational models have been put forward to describe how mirror neuron activity supports cognitive functions such as imitation.” “Mirror system”, as SpeedOfSound says, is a better term for other experimental findings, such as which parts of the brain light up both when an action is performed and when it is watched.

My beef with Speed was only his inappropriately general opposition to use of the phrase, "neural function".

DavidMcC wrote:...
My beef with Speed was only his inappropriately general opposition to use of the phrase, "neural function".

never said that
My beef was with 'mirror neuron'

SpeedOfSound wrote:

DavidMcC wrote:...
My beef with Speed was only his inappropriately general opposition to use of the phrase, "neural function".

never said that
My beef was with 'mirror neuron'

So, what did you mean by this:

SpeedOfSound wrote:Classifying a neuron by presumed function is bad. Misleading. We don't need this kind of trouble in the public's perception of neuroscience

I took it to mean that you think that only neural circuits have functions, not neurons.

DavidMcC wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:

DavidMcC wrote:...
My beef with Speed was only his inappropriately general opposition to use of the phrase, "neural function".

never said that
My beef was with 'mirror neuron'

So, what did you mean by this:

SpeedOfSound wrote:Classifying a neuron by presumed function is bad. Misleading. We don't need this kind of trouble in the public's perception of neuroscience

I took it to mean that you think that only neural circuits have functions, not neurons.

Oh that. Neural function is not what I said.

I said that calling a certain neuron a 'mirror neuron', based on some function it has in a specific case, is bad. The neuron is not a special type and these neurons fire for other reasons too. There is an implication that the general public will take to mean that we have found special neurons that have to do with empathy. It's not the case soe we should shut the fuck up about mirror neurons and rather say:

A network of neurons fires not only when I am doing or planning a movement but when I watch someone else do it.

Worded that way it's hardly surprising and not even worthy of a newspaper story. That is why they invented this bullshit. They needed to fill some columns.

SpeedOfSound wrote:

DavidMcC wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:

DavidMcC wrote:...
My beef with Speed was only his inappropriately general opposition to use of the phrase, "neural function".

never said that
My beef was with 'mirror neuron'

So, what did you mean by this:

SpeedOfSound wrote:Classifying a neuron by presumed function is bad. Misleading. We don't need this kind of trouble in the public's perception of neuroscience

I took it to mean that you think that only neural circuits have functions, not neurons.

Oh that. Neural function is not what I said.

I said that calling a certain neuron a 'mirror neuron', based on some function it has in a specific case, is bad. The neuron is not a special type and these neurons fire for other reasons too. There is an implication that the general public will take to mean that we have found special neurons that have to do with empathy. It's not the case soe we should shut the fuck up about mirror neurons and rather say:

A network of neurons fires not only when I am doing or planning a movement but when I watch someone else do it.

Worded that way it's hardly surprising and not even worthy of a newspaper story. That is why they invented this bullshit. They needed to fill some columns.

As you say, it’s entirely to be expected that some neurons somewhere in our brains would fire both when we carry out an action and when we see someone else do it, given that we do recognise other people’s actions and our own as similar. (According to Wikipedia, 'The discovery was initially sent to Nature but was rejected for its "lack of general interest".') However, I think most people would have expected that this was happening in the parts of the brain dealing flexibly with abstract reasoning, the surprising thing about the experimental findings was how low level and how stable the networks for that particular aspect of social cognition are. They were first discovered in the premotor cortex, which is not usually expected to be social, and they were found in macaque monkeys, which are some way from humans. The neuron which is in contact with the electrode and firing both for another individual’s action and its own, does so repeatedly for the same action, while another neuron, picked up by another electrode, fires repeatedly for another action. You say: “The neuron is not a special type and these neurons fire for other reasons too”; this may well be the case, but I don’t think enough is known to be sure as yet. (Again quoting Wikipedia: “According to scientists such as Hickok, Pascolo, and Dinstein, it is not clear whether mirror neurons really form a distinct class of cells (as opposed to an occasional phenomenon seen in cells that have other functions)”.)

I agree they were over-hyped by some people, and things have calmed down since, but it was neuroscientists like Ramachandran rather than the general public who got excited.

SpeedOfSound wrote:

DavidMcC wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:

DavidMcC wrote:...
My beef with Speed was only his inappropriately general opposition to use of the phrase, "neural function".

never said that
My beef was with 'mirror neuron'

So, what did you mean by this:

SpeedOfSound wrote:Classifying a neuron by presumed function is bad. Misleading. We don't need this kind of trouble in the public's perception of neuroscience

I took it to mean that you think that only neural circuits have functions, not neurons.

Oh that. Neural function is not what I said.

I said that calling a certain neuron a 'mirror neuron', based on some function it has in a specific case, is bad. The neuron is not a special type and these neurons fire for other reasons too. There is an implication that the general public will take to mean that we have found special neurons that have to do with empathy. It's not the case soe we should shut the fuck up about mirror neurons and rather say:

...

OK, but I am sure SOMEONE (maybe temporarily) expressed doubt that it is meaningful to even talk of neural function, as opposed to neural function. It must have been either BWE or zoon.