DocWatts
Member-
Content count
2,203 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Posts posted by DocWatts
-
-
3 hours ago, Danioover9000 said:Thanks for your additional points. Yes a sudden drop in birth rates, say within 20 years, can create imbalances in age distribution in societies. I do think part of this problem comes from Neoliberalism, egalitarianism and feminism run amok. We actually need smaller, more limited democracies at this point if we can't replenish our numbers in the future.
Thanks! Sounds like we agree on neoliberalism running amok, and probably disagree on feminism and egalitarianism contributing to the problem in a major way (or perhaps you could explain what you mean by that, and also for the need for smaller and more limited democracies?)
My own perspective if that if you want to combat plummeting birth rates, you should make it easier for people to start and sustain families. Especially since the atomism of modernity has gutted many of the support systems people previously relied on for social support (such as tight knit communities and large extended families), little wonder that people aren't starting a family when things like buying a house are out of reach for a larger portion of millennials and zoomers.
-
The causes of plummeting birth rates in places like South Korea and Japan are well known: a famously dysfunctional work culture where people are expected to work an insane number of hours every week at thier jobs, and a lack of societal support and assistance for people who want to start families.
The latter is also very much an issue in places like the US - millennials and zoomers can thank the baby boomers for being the generation that pulled the ladder up after them. Lots of people in my generation would be more amenable to having kids if it were actually affordable to do so. Just a personal anecdote so take it with a grain of salt, but of the people I know who are under 40, the only ones that are actually having kids are couples who are affluent.
These are solvable issues, but beyond just getting legislating sensible policies, in places like Japan and Korea they would also involve a process of shifting entrenched cultural norms, which is neither a quick nor a painless process.
-
While a drop in birth rates isn't necessarily a problem, it becomes one when it happens over a short period of time. This is because a sudden drop in birth rates end up creating a very imbalanced age distribution in a society, where you have lots of elderly people who rely disproportionately on social support programs (such as public health care), who can't work. Which puts a tremendous burden on the working age population to support this segment of society.
Additionally, this can also lead to a situation where a society effectively ends up as a geritocracy, with young and middle aged people struggling to break into positions of leadership and power that have been monopolized by an out of touch older generation.
-
If we're talking about the type of Stage Red/Stage Blue Islam that exists in places like Afghanistan, probably not.
But fortunately there's nothing inherently special about Islam that makes it incapable of being practiced in an SD- Orange/Green way. Hell, the governor of Michigan that I voted for in the Democratic Primary was a progressive candidate who was also a practicing Muslim, so there's no reason in principle why Islamic values can't be reconciled with Western pluralism.
-
55 minutes ago, Scholar said:This is not necessarily true, see the post above where I describe self-perpetuating dynamics.
There is a reason for Israeli policy. While some of it is irrational right wing nonsense (which also has it's causes), much of it simply is a result of the dynamic at play. If you are going to pretend Israel is an all powerful god like entity that will not be biased towards itself then you are not engaging with reality in a way that will lead to positive outcomes for anyone. You should take some time and read up on the history of the conflict and what lead up to the decisions being made, from a perspective that is biased towards Israel.
You're literally 'both-sides'-ing an apartheid regime under a false pretense of neutrality. While it's legitimate to point out that groups like Hamas are bad actors who are making the situation worse, there's no version of Reality where the power dynamics aren't overwhelmingly in favor of the Israeli state over the captive Palestinian population that's being held under a military occupation.
-
1 hour ago, PurpleTree said:I like the term islamo-fascists for the extremists. There should also be a good term for the extremists on the other side
It's also a simple recognition that a violent, ethnocentric cult of nationalism isn't the exclusive purview of any particular region or people, but can spring up anywhere if the social conditions are conducive to it. One doesn't have to look far to see how there are elements of this on the Israeli side as well among the far right.
-
23 minutes ago, Scholar said:You are moralizing again. This is irrelevant.
The major reason for this isn't just trauma, but ideological indoctrination by islamist actors. They are making the problem 10x worse.
You can have valid frustration, and then bad faith actors who exploit that valid frustration not in the interest of the population itself but in the interest of their own goals. This is what is occuring in gaza under Hamas. It makes peace simply impossible, independent of how Israel acts.
Thing is, I don't disagree that what's going on is a combination of collective trauma and indoctrination by bad faith actors who are making the problem worse.
My point is that the way you undercut extremism is by actually addressing the desperate social conditions that are fueling groups like Hamas, which is the direct result of Israeli policy. And thus primarily the responsibility of the Israeli state and the international community to address, rather than that of a captive population with very little power to change things on thier own.
Also, some people seem to be under the impression that Israel would somehow be incapable of defending itself if a two state solution is adopted. Which of course is ridiculous, as its one of the most formidable militaries in the world (and not to mention a nuclear power that's also backed by the United States), and a two state solution wouldn't change that.
-
22 minutes ago, Scholar said:But this is not true, see the polling data and my post expanding on the idea of naive empathy. This kind of thinking is what adds conflict and harm, because it lacks an understanding of human nature and self-perpetuating dynamics.
And what I'm saying is that these polls are being asked in the context of a people who are currently undergoing a highly traumatic experience (being the victims of a genocide). I'm sure if you were somehow able to poll American soldiers over what they thought should happen to Japan while those soldiers were in midst of a death march after falling into captivity of the Japanese military, you'd get similar results to the polls you mentioned.
-
23 minutes ago, PurpleTree said:That also we don’t know for sure
True. So let me rephrase that: we have very good evidence to believe that given the options that are available, it would offer the best avenue for massively de-escalating the conflict, and in the long run would offer the best chance at lasting peace for both sides in this conflict.
Creating tolerable and humane living conditions for Palestinians, and giving them the possibility of a hopeful future, is the most reliable way of undercutting the appeal of death-cult organizations like Hamas. Under the status quo there's zero reason for a Palestinian suffering under Israeli apartheid to be hopeful for a better future. Hardly surprising that these social conditions fuel extremism.
-
The amount of black and white thinking on his topic from both sides is dispiriting to see. Two things can be true at once: that the Israeli state is commiting a genocide against its occupied Palestinian population, and that Hamas is an Islamo-fascist organization that would be just as brutal if they were in a comparable position of power to the Israeli state. So what we have is a monstrous apartheid regime in conflict with a brutal terrorist organization of their own making (as the Israeli state created the inhumane social conditions that were wipe for desperate Palestinians to turn to Hamas), with innocent civilians on both sides suffering as a result.
Make no mistake though, though both sides in this conflict are awful, Israeli has virtually all of the power in this situation. If they agreed to the two state solution compromise this conflict would effectively be over.
-
Another aspect to this is what Ken Wilber and others have called the 'performative contradiction' of the Green-meme. Originally this was a critique of postmodernism specifically, but it one doesn't have to stretch it too much to appreciate its validity for how cultural relativism is sometimes practiced at Green.
Basically the 'contradiction' comes from a Green allergy to hierarchical qualitative distinctions (ie the idea that some expressions of culture can said to be 'better' or 'worse' than others). To list an admittedly extreme example, this can take the form of the Green-meme painting western critiques of how women and LGBTQ people are treated in middle eastern countries as a form of 'Islamaphobia' or even 'neo-colonialism'.
Additionally, this also leads to a type of developmental blindness, due to a suspicion of developmental models such as Spiral Dynamics. Or more generally, an aversion to grand narratives that assert that some people or cultures are more 'developed' than another.
The intentions behind this are good, as these type of hierarchial distinctions have very often led to the creation of oppressive power hierarchies around things like race, religion, and gender (such as 'the white man's burden thar Europe used as a moral justification of colonialism, under the guise of 'bringing civilization' to the areas they were looting).
The 'contradiction' comes from denying that qualitative distinctions between different types of cultural practices exist while at the same time clearly advocating for thier own egalitarian values (that they clearly think are superior to the dominator hierarchies they rally against - and rightly so!). It's 'performative' in the sense that the contradiction is obfuscated, never adequately acknowledged or addressed.
-
I would highly recommend Overthink. The two hosts two a very good job at discussing complex and nuanced things in an accessible way. I found their videos quite helpful when I was first delving into phenomenology in a serious way
-
On 9/10/2023 at 0:25 PM, Carl-Richard said:I mean, considering how metaphysics and spirituality aren't exactly science, Actualized.org is at least not very scientific. That said, Leo doesn't present his claims about metaphysics and spirituality as if they were scientific, so it's not pseudoscience. If we're strictly talking about misinformation and inaccurate reporting, that would certainly apply to the forum. As for Leo's videos and blog posts, maybe not so much.
This ^
Also, it should really be emphasized that healthy epistemic hygiene involves cultivating good heuristics for the specific domains in which a person or organization is credible / insightful, and where they should be taken with a grain of salt.
I would hope that anyone who's gotten value out of Leo's work uses it as a launching pad to explore spirituality/philosophy/sociology on their own. For what it's worth, this isn't just true of Leo but I'd say the same of Ken Wilber, John Verveake, or anyone else whose work I've gotten value out of.
-
I sometimes wonder if the replication crisis is a consequence of the inherent limitations of trying to apply empiricism to a qualitative domain. People aren't deterministic entities, so it's hardly surprising that an outside-in approach to why we do the things we do is going to be messy (mind you that doesn't necessarily mean invalid; just messy).
-
I thought I might share another snippet from the philosophy book that I'm working on, which is a 'guided tour' to how minds acquire knowledge.
In this section, I delve into why machine learning algorithms like ChatGPT aren't actually capable of understanding anything, by highlighting some of the differences between computers and living minds. And why the sci-fi idea of 'uploading' our minds to a computer interface will is a fantasy. I also explore some of the ethical issues that come with trying to create AIs that have human-like capacities
______________________________________
[What Artificial Intelligence Can Teach Us About Living Minds]
As of the time of this book’s writing in 2023, machine learning algorithms such as ChatGPT have advanced to the point where their responses to questions can correspond to an impressive degree with how human beings use written language. ChatGPT’s ability to incorporate context in conversationally appropriate ways makes interacting with these models feel uncannily natural at times. Of course, training an AI language model to interact with humans in ways that feel natural is far from an easy problem to solve, so all due credit to AI researchers for their accomplishments. Yet in spite of all this, it’s also accurate to point out that artificial intelligence programs don't actually understand anything. This is because understanding involves far more than just responding to input in situationally appropriate ways. Rather, understanding is grounded in fundamental capacities that machine learning algorithms lack. Foremost among these is a form of concernful absorption within a world of lasting consequences; i.e., capacity for Care. To establish why understanding is coupled to Care, it will be helpful to explore what it means to understand something.
To understand something means to engage in a process of acquiring, integrating, and embodying information. Breaking down each of these steps in a bit more detail : (1) Acquisition is the act of taking in or generating new information. (2) Integration involves synthesizing, or differentiating and linking, this new information with what one already knows. (3) Embodiment refers to how this information gets embedded into our existing organizational structure, informing the ways in which we think and behave. What’s important to note about this process is that it ends up changing us in some way. Moreover, the steps in this sequence are fundamentally relational, stemming from our interactions with the world.
While machine intelligence can be quite adept at the first stage of this sequence, owing to the fact that digital computers can accumulate, store, and access information far more efficiently than a human being, it’s in the latter steps that they fall flat in comparison to living minds. This is because integration and embodiment are forms of growth that stem from how minds are interconnected to living bodies. In contrast, existing forms of machine intelligence are fundamentally disembodied, owing to the fact that digital computers are organized around wholly different operating principles than that of living organisms.
For minds that grow out of living systems, interconnections between a body and a mind, and between a body-mind and an environment, is what allows interactions with Reality to be consequential for us. This is an outcome of the fact that our mind’s existence is sustained by the ongoing maintenance of our living bodies, and vice versa. If our living bodies fail, our minds fail. Likewise, if our minds fail, our bodies will soon follow, unless artificially kept alive through external mechanisms.
Another hallmark of living systems is that they’re capable of producing and maintaining their own parts; in fact, your body replaces about one percent of its cellular components on a daily basis. This is evident in the way that a cut on your finger will heal, and within a few days effectively erase any evidence of its existence. One term for this ability of biological systems to produce and maintain their own parts is autopoiesis (a combination of the ancient Greek words for ‘self’ and ‘creation’).
The basic principles behind autopoiesis don't just hold true for your skin, but for your brain as well. While the neurons that make up your brain aren’t renewed in the same way that skin or bone cells are, the brain itself has a remarkable degree of plasticity. What plasticity refers to is our brain’s ability to adaptively alter its structure and functioning. And the way that our brains manage to do this is through changes in how bundles of neurons (known as ‘synapses’) are connected to one another. How we end up using our mind has a direct (though not straightforward) influence on the strength of synaptic connections between different regions of our brain; which in turn influences how our mind develops. Accordingly, this is also the reason why the science fiction idea of ‘uploading’ a person’s mind to a computer is pure fantasy, because how a mind functions is inextricably bound with the network of interconnections in which that mind is embodied.
This fundamental circularity between our autopoietic living body and our mind is the foundation of embodied intelligence, which is what allows us to engage with the world through Care. Precisely because autopoietic circularity is so tightly bound with feedback mechanisms that are inherent to Life, it’s proven extraordinarily challenging to create analogues for this process in non-living entities. As such, it’s yet to be demonstrated whether or not autopoietic circularity can be replicated, even in principle, through the system of deterministic rules that governs digital computers. Furthermore, giving machine learning models access to a robotic ‘body’ isn’t enough, on its own, to make these entities truly embodied. This is because embodiment involves far more than having access to and control of a body. Rather, embodiment is a way of encapsulating the rich tapestry of interconnections between an intelligence and the physical processes that grant it access to a world (keeping in mind that everything that your body does, from metabolism to sensory perception, is a type of process).
For the sake of argument, however, let’s assume that the challenges involved in the creation of embodied artificial intelligence are ultimately surmountable. Because embodiment is coupled to a capacity for Care, the creation of embodied artificial intelligence has the potential to open a Pandora’s box of difficult ethical questions that we may not be prepared for (and this is in addition to the disruptive effects that AI is already having on our society). Precisely because Care is grounded in interactions having very real consequences for a being, by extension this also brings with it a possibility for suffering.
For human beings, having adequate access to food, safety, companionship, and opportunities to self actualize aren’t abstractions, nor are they something that we relate to in a disengaged way. Rather, as beings with a capacity for Care, when we’re deprived of what we need from Reality, we end up suffering in real ways. Assuming that the creation of non-living entities with a capacity for Care is even possible, it would behoove us to tread extraordinarily carefully since this could result in beings with a capacity to suffer in ways that we might not be able to fully understand or imagine (since it’s likely that their needs may end up being considerably different than that of a living being).
-
If you haven't read it already and are up for a lengthy and very in depth read, Ken Wilber's works contextualize science in a very insightful and penetrating way. In particular, I'd recommend 'Eye To Eye : The Quest For A New Paradigm' and 'Sex, Ecology, Spirituality'.
Part of why I found those works useful is that he doesn't just deconstruct science, but he also takes the necessary next step of reconstructing science and integrating it into a holistic meta-epistomology which also includes philosophy and spirituality.
Additionally, I'd also highly recommend 'The Embodied Mind : Cognitive Science and Human Experience ' by Varella, Thompson, and Roach for the way it reconstructs (specifically cognitive science) beyond a materialist framework (while of course deconstructing scientism). If you're familiar with the work of John Verveake, this book offers an in depth exploration of many of the same topics and paradigms that he discusses.
'Science Ideated' by Bernardo Kastrup is also a good read, though it's also tied to an objective idealism framework (which you may or may not find valid - for myself I find his insights useful, even if I find myself questioning 'grand metaphysical frameworks')
-
20 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:If you read my elaboration above, the author was actually presenting arguments for why the bolded statements are unreasonable. My problem with him was not his arguments per se, but his overall conclusion (i.e. that you should adopt a realist language game: "theories are pointing at truth!"). My frustration is partially that I feel less and less that there is just one true way to talk about things, but also that I value the relativist language game a bit more.
Thanks for the clarification! For my part, I find it highly useful to tie considerations of 'truth' to a purposive context. Which is to say, that truth is always truth for someone, and that it has an intersubjective component to it. The most valid truths are the ones that hold true for many different intersubjective perspectives, and are stable across many different types of contexts. Additionally, physical and biological laws place bounds on what can be subjectively true for a given observer. No amount of subjective conviction will let someone walk on the ceiling, or allow someone to arrange a successful human society around emulating the behavior patterns of bees.
My own frustrations with extreme forms of relativism is when that paradigm conflates the intersubjective component of truth with arbitrariness . Certainly arbitrariness can be an aspect of how dominator hierarchies construct a weaponized version of 'The Truth', but that's a very partial understanding of how truth is constructed. To me, this seems like another instance of the 'performative contradiction' of postmodernism, since I have trouble believing that folks who argue thier relativist position with conviction believe that their own views aren't any better or worse than the dominator hierarchies they detest.
-
On 9/3/2023 at 6:08 PM, Carl-Richard said:Do you agree or disagree with the following statements? Why?:
1. "Scientific knowledge is purely the product of social forces, power struggles, and politics. The natural world has no role in the construction of scientific knowledge".
I'll just respond to the first one for now, since it seems to be a good encapsulation of the problems that I see with this author's take on science.
Seems to me this is an instance of taking a partial truth (that scientific knowledge is of course intertwined with power politics and the peculiarities of culture), and absolutizing it.
From these statements, I get the sense that the author is taking a postmodern framework and applying some of its valid insights in a very un-nuanced way.
If the natural world played no role in scientific knowledge, science wouldn't work. If cultural preferences take you too far away from the natural world, it begins to obstruct the ability to do science. The fact that Nazi ideology considered much of the 20th century advances in physics as illegitimate 'jewish science' goes a long way in explaining why they were never able to develop atomic weapons.
Additionally, the author seems to be fundamentally confused about what a Construct is. A Construct is simply a category or boundary that our minds create and sustain, that’s coupled to some observation about ourselves or our world. While Constructs can of of course can vary in the degree of validity that they have, just because something is Constructed doesn't (necessarily) mean that it's arbitrary or 'imaginary'.
For instance, gender is of course socially constructed, but it's real in the sense that it has a profound influence on individuals and societies. It's tied to something real in that it's how biological sex gets expressed in individuals and cultures.
-
On 8/17/2023 at 10:59 AM, Samjc543 said:Also here is an interesting conversation between Nora and Daniel Goertz where they debate this further. There are no easy answers in this conversation.
Thanks for the share! Haven't gotten around to watching to Dave Snowden's critique just yet, but I thoroughly enjoyed the discussion between Daniel and Nora. It was interesting to see what Ken Wilber calls the 'performative contradiction' of postmodern relativism in full effect in Nora's critiques (i.e, "hierarchal qualitative distinctions are bad, except for my own view which is qualitatively better than the hierarchal views that I'm critiquing") - as Daniel (correctly) points out.
While I do think that postmodernism has some substantive critiques on how stage theory can be misused, it seems like a rather severe case of throwing the baby out with the bath water. Kind of like throwing out science because of scientism, or sprituality because of religious fundamentalism.
-
I would also highly recommend his discussion with John Verveake, for two different but very interesting approaches for challenging reductionist paradigms in physical sciences.
-
On 7/31/2023 at 0:31 PM, martins name said:We have gained this wisdom from co-evolving with the real world for 3.7 b years. AI fundamentally doesn't have the same life experience as our DNA does and I don't see a way around that for AI. Humans are irreplaceable. AI must always be our tool.
Thoughts?
To add on to that, AI learning algorithms don't actually understand anything, as understanding involves far more than responding to input in situationally appropriate ways. In particular, understanding is grounded in a capacity for Care, which non-living entities lack - for exactly the reasons you outline.
The main difference is that living beings have 'skin in the game' as far as their relationship with Reality is concerned, while non-living entities don't have survival needs to give their actions meaning and consequences.
-
2 minutes ago, PlayOnWords said:What are the essential Ken Wilber books for studying his Integral Theory? After a quick google search it seems there isn't just one book, want to make sure I don't miss a beat.
Sex, Ecology, Spirituality is his most comprehensive book on the subject. While A Theory of Everything is a good, short introduction to Integral Theory.
-
Hello again! So I thought I might share another snippet from the philosophy book I'm writing, which is a 'guided tour' to how minds acquire valid knowledge about Reality. A central focus of the book is how our minds turn Reality into a meaningful world for us to reside in through a process I'm calling world disclosure.
In this section I'm articulating a phenomenological approach to ontology (ontology is the study of Being, and phenomenology is a way of scrutinizing our direct experience), and contrasting it to what I'm dubbing a 'metaphysical approach' which tends to misconstrue Being as a type of substance that things are 'made out of'. Much of this is a synthesis of insights from ontological phenomenology and embodied cognition, with a peppering of my own thoughts sprinkled in throughout.As always, thoughts and feedback are very welcome.
_________________________________________________________________________
BEING : WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?
As we continue onwards through this first part of our 'guided tour', what remains is to tie what we’ve learned about world disclosure to the directness of our lived experience within the world. To that end, what we’ll be piecing together over the following pages is an investigation into Being. If your eyes glazed over at the mention of such a seemingly abstract subject, I’m right there with you dear reader. But if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to make a case as to why an exploration of this subject doesn’t have to be a form of armchair navel-gazing that’s disconnected from everyday life. Rather, our own approach will be rooted in uncovering how an understanding of Being is foundational for comprehending Reality, and how this primordial form of knowledge connects to our ability to navigate daily life. What we’ll come to discover is that far from being superfluous to the concerns of daily life, Being is instead a direct consequence of our concernful absorption within a world that matters to us.
To illustrate what it is that an understanding of Being actually does for us, let’s return to our guiding metaphor of how our minds create homes for us within Reality. When we think of what a home is, what sorts of feelings do we normally associate with it? Well, for those of us who are fortunate enough to have a relatively healthy living situation, a large part of what we tend to associate a home with is a sense of comfort and familiarity. Another way of stating this is that homes are a place that we can feel at ease within the world. Think of the effortlessness with which you’re able to perform hundreds of ordinary interactions in your home every single day, whether that’s turning on a light switch, brushing your teeth, or grabbing a snack from the kitchen. Actions that we’re so habituated to that they’re for all intents automatic.
Well there’s a good reason for this, and much of it has to do with how world disclosure grants us access to a prereflective and nonconceptual form of understanding which makes all of this exceedingly easy for us. For what’s imparted through a world that’s disclosed to us in terms of our interests and capacities is a an understanding of Being. Being can be thought of as the most foundational type of knowledge that it’s possible to have about Reality, since it’s what allows us to make basic discernments about what we come across within the World. It’s through Being we’re able to understand a tree as a tree or a person as a person, in a direct and immediate way.
As to what understanding a tree as a tree or a person as a person actually means, it’s that trees and people are disclosed to us in our lived experience as distinct entities that we can relate to in some way, whereby they can become meaningful for us. When we mention an understanding of Being, this is what we’re referring to.
Importantly, when we speak of the Being of trees or people we are not referring to the particular substances these entities happen to be made of (in the way that molecules are made of atoms, for instance). This is because Being isn’t a substance. Rather, it’s far more accurate to think of Being as a form of understanding for a particular someone. Or to put it another way, Being is an aspect of how we experience Reality; and because of this, it can’t exist outside of the immediacy of our lived experience anymore than our thoughts and emotions could.
The misconstrual of Being as synonymous with ‘what things are made of’ is at the heart of the metaphysical approach to ontology, which attempts to explain Being from an ‘outside-in’ vantage point. And while understanding what things are made of is of course very useful knowledge to have, this represents just a small aspect of what Being is all about. This is because our observations about what things are made of is itself derived from a far more foundational form of knowledge which allows people, places, and things to be comprehensible as distinct entities in the first place.
The advantages of a world that’s disclosed to us through Being is that it allows us to understand a great deal about the world around us prior to any conscious effort or deliberation on our part. Indeed, this primordial way of relating to the world normally functions so well that it tends to be invisible to us in our daily lives, in that it forms the basis of the tacit knowledge that’s foundational for navigating daily life.
For instance, assuming that you don’t suffer from prosopagnosia, or face blindness, have you ever wondered how you’re able to instantly and effortlessly recognize the faces of your friends and family? Or how, when you’re surveying the contents of an unfamiliar dining room table, the question of which objects are food and which aren’t is normally so immediately obvious that you never even think to question it? Or that interacting with doorknobs and chairs and eating utensils is normally so automatic that our interactions with these items tend to be transparent and invisible to us?
If we want to understand how such a wide range of interactions are so exceedingly easy for us, recall for a moment the guiding metaphor of this chapter, that minds turn Reality into a home for us through world disclosure. Also recall that the primary function of world disclosure is to create meaningful worlds that come pre-arranged in terms of our needs and capacities. Being, then, is the means by which the things we encounter within Reality become meaningful for us. Which is to say that doorknobs and tables and cups aren’t just “neutral” things we happen to come across within a bare Reality. Rather, our understanding of the Being of these entities makes them meaningful to us.
Earlier we gave a brief explanation of how our worlds contain affordances for us to interact with the things we come across in particular ways. In that chairs offer affordances for sitting, cups offer affordances for drinking, and so on. It’s precisely because we understand the Being of chairs and cups, that these entities are meaningful to us in some way, that the affordances which arise out of these entities are possible at all.
For something to be meaningful to us, it must be both intelligible, or clearly identifiable as a distinct type of thing, and it must be relevant to us in some way. (For our present purposes, we can also think of ideas, processes, and events as types of ‘things’). Yet the truth of the matter is that the vast majority of things that we could conceivably encounter within Reality fulfill neither of these criteria; thus they tend to be excluded from the types of world disclosure we normally experience.
Scientific knowledge tells us that we live in a Reality that’s saturated with radioactive decay, subatomic particles, and relativistic time dilation. And that’s all true enough. But in the vast majority of situations that we encounter throughout the course of daily life, these aspects of Reality are not usually connected to our interests and capacities, and may as well not even exist as far as our lived experience is concerned.
This begins to make a good deal of sense when we realize that experiential worlds which are disclosed to us in terms of Being serve an important survival function. The role that Being plays within world disclosure is that it allows us to quickly and easily make basic discernments about what we come across within the world. And it’s only because world disclosure creates homes for us within Reality that come pre-arranged around our particular survival adaptations that Being can function in this way.
If our ancestors didn’t have access to an understanding of Being that let them quickly and easily understand what aspects of their local Reality were relevant to their survival, we wouldn’t be here today. As wonderful as our rational faculties are, the truth is that rational deliberation is far too slow and cognitively expensive to be of much help when a predator is jumping out at you from the bushes.
With this adaptive purpose in mind, we can perhaps better understand how Being is referring to something altogether different than what ‘things are made out of’. In particular, the mistake that metaphysical approaches which treat Being as a substance are making is a type of category error. Category errors occur when something is mistaken for a fundamentally different type of thing than what it truly is. Perhaps my favorite example of a category error comes from possibly apocryphal stories of audiences reacting with panic at film depictions of oncoming trains, back when the technology for motion pictures was brand new.
As our phenomenological account has hopefully made more clear, Being is really just an aspect of our lived experience that arises out of our interactions with Reality. Similar in some ways to how sense perception is an aspect of our lived experience that arises from the interaction between a body-mind and its environment. Nothing more, nothing less.
THE CARE THAT BINDS
Having familiarized ourselves with the role that Being serves in our daily lives, we can at last delve down to the core foundation upon which Being rests, which is a capacity for Care. What Care refers to is our concernful absorption within a world whose outcomes matter to us. So far we’ve explored at length the role that residing within a meaningful world plays in our ability to navigate Reality. As we wrap up this first leg of our journey, we’ll be exploring how a capacity for Care serves as the canvas upon which all forms of meaning are painted. And along the way we’ll also uncover how this capacity is indispensable to our survival.
-
1 hour ago, Nilsi said:That much should be obvious.
The even deeper problem is the implicit teleology in such models.
Such an all encompassing and universalized ideal like "Stage TURQOISE" is the most dangerous of ideas. This is Marx's utopia all over again - literally!
In some parallel universe, Ken Wilber went on to enact a Spiral Dynamics Stalinism, while people like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate are suffocating away in the gulag.
Here's the thing though, for someone who jumps into Stage Theory without a solid epistemological foundation, it's not obvious. For someone to even recognize that they're absolutizing a Stage Model requires a good understanding of how paradigms work, which is far from a given.
I agree with you about the problematic implicit teleology of such models. For Spiral Dynamics in particular, my view is that model would be much better off without the Turquoise Stage, since there's not a cultural paradigm for it to be expressed through (like there is in modernism, postmodernism, and metamodernism)
in Intellectual Stuff: Philosophy, Science, Technology
Posted · Edited by DocWatts
Despite his earlier essays on the subject, in his actual advocacy of effective altruism, Peter Singer clearly puts much more of the onus for charitable giving on affluent people than on someone living in the States making $30k a year.
In his book on effective altruism, The Life You Can Save, he recommends progressive giving guidelines that scale with income (similar to how income taxes scale with income), which starts at around %1 for someone who makes above $40k a year. For my part, this seems very reasonable.