AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Convo with Nathan Seckinger on solipsism. "the existence of other minds is always inferred". JFM violently disagrees. Somehow implies telepathy? Two ways of knowing, gnosis (from the inside) or via external observation. Sure.
n-gon to circle. infinities. qualitiative differene "I don't care what the math people tell me" except I think they'd agree. Counting crows. Not sure what the point is. Yes melodies and crows need context for interpretation, that doesn't require any particular theory of time. He's just wrong, no sense of how computation or signal processing works. Grump.
PF book Dig and the obscure guy he focuses on. Cornelius Cardew. Private Art.
Bergson against both materialism and idealism (that sounds good)]
At 1:01.20, an exact moment where I part ways with JFM. He's talking about relationships, I/Thou, two people acknowledging each others' reality and the shared incomprehensible world – that's all good. Then he goes and says "that has to be supernatural". Really disagree but I guess that's old news.
Chesterton, ghosts, skepticism etc. Yawn. PF hates argumentation, thinks its boring. JFM likes it better
Managed to avoid defining the wedge, but there's a Part 2 coming up And from the notes:
At the thin end of the Wedge, the focus is on subjective experience: how it felt, what it was like, and its personal significance. At the thick end, the emphasis shifts to what actually happened, independent of how it was experienced.
OK at the very start a small annoying error: conflating statistical view with external views. Or maybe not a conflation, maybe its valid.
Magic as game, like Monopoly. You play by the rules, you become part of this imaginal (yet real) world.
Intuition vs Intellect. This makes me want to scream and go all Minsky-berserker (NO you do not have any direct unmediated access to reality, sorry)
Except – ok, as a mechanistic psychologist, easy to say that. But as a person – you are not a homunculus at the end of a signal-processing pipeline, you are the whole pipeline and more, and you do have direct experience with reality, even if is not representable.
Sigh. Feel like I can see this stuff more clearly than most (I may be deluded about that) but can't quite express the insight in a way that is useful or understandable. I sort of try (eg We Are Software) but.
Direct intuition has an I/Thou quality, both are different kinds of relationship. Representationalism is kind of I/It, I/Thou is – something else.
me: direct experience is something we never really have access to. Or rather, we don't have verbal access, we need to turn off the babble and then its whatever is left.
JFM: can we not have a sophisticated idea of spirit? Must they be Cartoon ghosts or none at all?
Interpretation is thin-end, explanation is thick-end.
Explanation as total so impossible. Think he misses the role of partial explanations