@Eliezer, some interesting points in the article, I will criticize what frustrated me:
> If you see a beaver chewing a log, then you know what this thing-that-chews-through-logs looks like, > and you will be able to recognize it on future occasions whether it is called a “beaver” or not. > But if you acquire your beliefs about beavers by someone else telling you facts about “beavers,” > you may not be able to recognize a beaver when you see one.
Things do not have intrinsic meaning, rather meaning is an emergent property of things in relation to each other: for a brain, an image of a beaver and the sound ”beaver” are just meaningless patterns of electrical signals.
Through experiencing reality the brain learns to associate patterns based on similarity, co-occurence and so on, and labels these clusters with handles in order to communicate. ’Meaning’ is the entire cluster itself, which itself bears meaning in relation to other clusters.
If you try to single out a node off the cluster, you soon find that it loses all meaning and reverts back to meaningless noise.
> G1071(G1072, G1073)
Maybe the above does not seem dumb now? experiencing reality is basically entering and updating relationships that eventually make sense as a whole in a system.
I feel there is a huge difference in our models of reality:
In my model everything is self-referential, just one big graph where nodes barely exist (only aliases for the whole graph itself). There is no ground to knowledge, nothing ultimate. The only thing we have is this self-referential map, from which we infer a non-phenomenological territory.
You seem to think the territory contains beavers, I claim beavers exist only in the map, as a block arbitrarily carved out of our phenomenological experience by our brain, as if it were the only way to carve a concept out of experience and not one of infinitely many valid ways (e.g. considering the beaver and the air around and not have a concept for just a beaver with no air), and as if only part experience could be considered without being impacted by the whole of experience (i.e. there is no living beaver without air).
This view is very influenced by emptiness by the way.
@Eliezer, some interesting points in the article, I will criticize what frustrated me:
> If you see a beaver chewing a log, then you know what this thing-that-chews-through-logs looks like,
> and you will be able to recognize it on future occasions whether it is called a “beaver” or not.
> But if you acquire your beliefs about beavers by someone else telling you facts about “beavers,”
> you may not be able to recognize a beaver when you see one.
Things do not have intrinsic meaning, rather meaning is an emergent property of
things in relation to each other: for a brain, an image of a beaver and the sound
”beaver” are just meaningless patterns of electrical signals.
Through experiencing reality the brain learns to associate patterns based on similarity, co-occurence and so on, and labels these clusters with handles in order to communicate. ’Meaning’ is the entire cluster itself, which itself bears meaning in relation to other clusters.
If you try to single out a node off the cluster, you soon find that it loses all meaning and
reverts back to meaningless noise.
> G1071(G1072, G1073)
Maybe the above does not seem dumb now? experiencing reality is basically entering and updating relationships that eventually make sense as a whole in a system.
I feel there is a huge difference in our models of reality:
In my model everything is self-referential, just one big graph where nodes barely exist (only aliases for the whole graph itself). There is no ground to knowledge, nothing ultimate. The only thing we have
is this self-referential map, from which we infer a non-phenomenological territory.
You seem to think the territory contains beavers, I claim beavers exist only in the map, as a block arbitrarily carved out of our phenomenological experience by our brain, as if it were the only way to carve a concept out of experience and not one of infinitely many valid ways (e.g. considering the beaver and the air around and not have a concept for just a beaver with no air), and as if only part experience could be considered without being impacted by the whole of experience (i.e. there is no living beaver without air).
This view is very influenced by emptiness by the way.