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    • 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.
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  • Weird Studies

    • Weird Studies/William James

    02 Aug 2022 - 25 Sep 2022
    Open in Logseq
      • I didn't know William James wrote a lot on psychic (paranormal) stuff.
        • The bizarre fact that psychical research has made little progress since its inception lays the ground for an engaging discussion on the limits of the knowable.
          • uh huh
      • "That's a problem for future Homer. Man, I don't envy that guy." (see future self )
      • These visions are both 'real' and 'unreal' (in a strictly materialistic sense). They emanate from the 'world soul' and the individual counterpart, the intuitive ego. They are an integral part of our existence which manifest themselves in different guises, based upon the prevailing culture of the percipients.
        • Interesting choice of words and I am trying to understand how something can be both real and unreal. What does that even mean? Well, fictional characters are obviously both unreal and real. Are UFOs etc to be understood in that light, as a kind of living fiction, a story that is so powerful it achieves a kind of reality?
          • If that were all that was meant, well, then there wouldn't be any real conflict with materialism, would there? Science may disdain the modes of fiction and narrative, but it cannot deny the fact that those things exist.
      • Around 1:13, JFM makes a kind of metaphysical argument: the laws of physics themselves have emerged from a larger chaos by a selection process (he cites Sheldrake, but I'm pretty sure there are more respectible proponents of something like this – Tegmark maybe?). And that they are more like habits than laws, and the underlying chaos can break through at any time and break them, hence the paranormal.
        • I really have to suppress an instinctive sneer – not even sure why. I get the feeling that these people really don't understand how scientific laws work. Why I think I know better, I couldnt' say. Just because I hung around MIT for decades? I was a programmer, not a scientist, and I have no special insight into the nature of the natural.
        • Anyway, once I am done sneering I can say, that's an interesting POV.
      • But pure chaos is literally incomprehensible, so we can't even see it. Connects to Hyperchaos
      • Synchronicity is acausal so can't have a principle. Well they are pretty direct about embracing the paradoxes
      • "the aleatory nature of intelligibility itself"?
      • Deleuzean quasi-causes, distinct from material cause (Suggests BC Smith to me)
        • As usual, I want to scream up and down and tell these people how computers work, because they are precisely tools that let you seamlessly combine material and semantic causation.
      • Confusing proabilistic and causal analysis. Even if synchronicities are acausal, they can't escape the laws of probability. What could that even mean? I think I might be able to stretch and come up with a version of what he's saying that makes sense ... well ... sorry, no I can't. Except that singular things happen that can't be analyzed probablistically because they are so singular. OK, maybe that's where my mind meets his.
        • Means "world as expression", ok, now it's just theism I guess. Blah.
        • "It's very hard to be clear" well I'll say, talking about these metaphysical abstractions is kind of absurd actually.
        • Ultimately there is no reason for anything, its a gratuitious (gift, or grace).
      • "doomed to enchantment" OK