2021 03 04 - lydgate/mindmeld GitHub Wiki

Can we measure the quality of ideas, or their veracity? How do we know an idea is the "right" one?

• they aren't true to the degree that they can be "proven" in any way (including through the scientific method)
• but they DO need to be useful; this may be the key criterion
• categories can be useful and constructive without being "absolute" and proven true
  • related to the notion that even bad or wrong ideas can be useful if they spawn better conversations and further ideas
  • for example: Joseph Weber (physicist pioneered something about "gravitational wave astronomy") was completely and utterly wrong about something very important, and remained so, and yet the (wrong) idea he popularized was very useful for the field, providing the trigger and rationale for others to pursue ideas that were, eventually, right. This also relates to the idea of the "lone genius" vs the "lone idea" that emerges through selection pressures to be the correct one. Feynman is another example of someone who talked explicitly about being wrong, but in useful ways to help bridge his intellectual efforts and provide some target, after which this wrong idea would be discarded for better ones that won out.
    • see Michael Nielsen's blog post about this: https://michaelnielsen.org/blog/is-there-a-tension-between-creativity-and-accuracy/

Systems of thought that support or help scaffold systematic questioning of conventional models of "truth":

• Taoism
• Reversals
• Zhuangzi: As soon as you try to prove something, you've disproved it in that process of investigation

Additional wayword thoughts related:

• We currently tend to favour Yang "factors" or ways of thinking
• There's currently an imbalance (favouring the left hemisphere); obviously seen Jaynes and McGilchrist

Basic principles that are probably not true (a list that will be updated They're wrong about):

• there is no truth at all; more specifically:
  • there are probably no laws of physics that stand across all levels of observation
  • the scientific method is likely not the best way to approximate "truth"
• self harm/cutting could actually be adaptive rather than pathological; (B: what if inflammation is desirable if you're likely to be in a gang shootout or something; The point of vaccines is to prime the immune system to have a much stronger response later? Slavich says that NSSI produces more cytokines which increase neural threat activity. If your brain knows (but your body doesn't) that you're about to fight, it might make sense to be more awake, alert, wary)); cutting, triggering the physiological alarm bells, could efficiently prepare the system to take on the anticipated threat

How can you prove that something is true?

• Through some form of observation that must be contexualized
• all dichotomies are false (and hysterically, that is binary/dichotomous)
• objective methods are bullshit/non-existent; even the "hardest" of the sciences, physics, has established that all scientific observation of reality is subjective at its core
• these insights and much more connected to Verala and his progenitors' development of neuro-phenomenlogical methods: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-17103-6_2 -"Phenomenology has attracted great interest from the neurosciences because of its “embodied” analysis of experience, which distinguishes between the body as objectivity [Körper]—spatio-temporally determined and given to subjectivity—and the body as a lived body [Leib]—the “bearer” of an ego as well as a physical body. In the latter sense of the word, “body” refers to the body as the organ of perception because it serves constituent functions, allowing the very access to objects and to others, making the possession of an objective world possible. The lived body also reveals itself as an intentional body in a preeminent way in experiencing pain because it is the person, as an intentional unity, who suffers, and it is not possible to assimilate the sufferer to a neurovegetative third person level. Therefore, motivational connection becomes the fundamental law by which the unity of the entire psychic is comprehended, including the passive strata of the soul, association, feelings, and impulses. The concept of phenomenology and evidence of selfhood as a whole would not lend itself to being assimilated within the program of neurophenomenology, which reduces the phenomenological method to a first-person introspectionist gaze, whose reports must reach a synthesis, find their correlation and their mutual validation with the data provided by third-person neurological studies. On the contrary, phenomenology makes it patent that consciousness does not present any physical localization, but is a “sphere” of convergence of human operations alien to the “first- or third-person” distinction."

Practices that promote non-dichotomous thinking:

• Playful exercise with contrarian ideas: practice radical detachment
• Change your mind, and then change it again, providing "evidence"
• Practice reversals, iterate repeatedly; observe emotional attachment that emerges for a position, reverse again; reflect on the heaviness of an idea, as the reversal becomes more difficult to actualize by virtue of coming closer to "truthiness" (although this will always be probabilistic)
• build simple systems with trial and error learning (e.g., musical pieces, coding, poetry in constrained verse) and note feedback mechanisms, variability that moves to stability, error correction, speed of feedback, sensitivity to initial conditions and the impact of perturbations