I really appreciate this, although less so the fact it is making me want to write an essay while I am in the middle of one... or two... or twelve?
Short version: I am annoyed about how the current discussion of consciousness and agency disdains "emergence" as a source of either or both. Emergence is specifically the creation of a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, is opaque wrt its end state from the start, often results in different end states from the same initial conditions, and produces outcomes that are no where encoded in the system.
Which sounds exactly like "its in there, somewhere, but we can't point to what it is, and probably it can't either." The whole materialist vs spiritualist divide about this strikes me as willfully obtuse. Can "spirits" not exist for things that are sufficiently complex? Are there only a fixed number of types of spirit and we know all of them? Do new spirits not get created ever?
At the same time the materialists seem hell bent on discounting any sort of spirit or agency that matters, everywhere. Can't measure it, must not be there. Perhaps more accurately "Don't want it to be there, must not be there." I can understand that as a response to "We can't eat cows! They are sentient conscious beings!" but the proper response is "That is not a sufficient justification to not eat something. Just ask a wolf." and not refusing that anything has a spirit.
I sympathise with materialists in that new agey types make wild, untestable assertions that can neither be falsified nor verified, which helps no one advance to more useful frames. Plus, materialism enables the kind of reliable predictions that mean I'm home writing this rather than decomposing somewhere below the last flight I was on. But materialists overreach when they claim to know beyond the how and insist that their method is sufficient to describe every what. Hard concur on your re-articulation of the essence here, by the way.
Agreed. I think it is rather a case of materialists having really terrible interlocutors on the other side, historically, and the new agey/woo woo scammers looked so bad that people over corrected. I suspect that after the whole COVID vaccine SCIENCE debacle that many will over correct the opposite way.
Come to think of it, the debate about whether viruses count as life forms reminds me a bit of the spirits debate. At some point if you get to a spot where many things don't fit any of your categories, you have to conclude your categories have the problem, not reality.
Yea... I am rather worried for my kids' future world, as the way things are going sooner or later there are not going to be a lot of people who can keep bridges and airplanes up. We might well see a lot of Soviet era style "Well, this used to work, but it broke and we are still waiting on the parts" sort of situations. Too much of wokeism is just cargo cult versions of actual work and production. As you say, promoting other cultural traditions that obviously don't work in the modern world (and didn't work so hot in the premodern, for that matter) is just a black hole for failure. There's a lot of good from earlier traditions that we have lost, but just grabbing everything that seems to have failed wholesale is a mistake too.
The over correction I am worried about, though, is among the non-woke. I think one of the biggest problems of the scientific institutions being corrupted is that people not just lose faith in the institutions, they start to think "maybe the process of science is the problem" entirely. Some people seem to be moving towards "Well, they lied about COVID, and climate change, and gods know what else. You know, it probably is Thor making lightning, after all. This science business is just a woke elite scam!"
Yes, that's exactly the sort of thing I had in mind. In general, I think people tend to blame the group or the people, something they can name, and not the behavioral mistakes in these sorts of cases. Then they, or some other group, start doing the exact same thing under another name, and they are blind to the problem because they only cared about the name. I think that is why people make the mistake of e.g. supporting communists because they hate fascists, only to find out the communists want basically the same thing the fascists did. Whoops.
Yea, I am willing to agree that humans assign consciousness, agency, personality, intent, whatever, some form of human-ness to lots of things where it isn't really proper. What bugs the hell out of me is the lack of recognition that it is all a matter of degree. Sure, my coat doesn't have much agency, but the cow it came from did. Yet a cow would make a really bad human. So there must be something that has agency that a cow would look at and think "Damn, if you were a cow, you'd be dumb as hell." Just saying "This has a soul. That doesn't have a soul." and calling it a day is deeply unsatisfying.
Sorry, didn't mean to argue either! :D (Been a shitty week arguing with people at work, might be bleeding in here.)
I think farmers (or anyone who spends a lot of time around animals) probably get it easier than those who spend all their time with objects. Cats understand shit, have intent, and know damned well when they are doing things you don't want them to. So do horses (and especially ponies...). Frogs have intent, but they don't seem to understand that humans have preferences outside of "wants to eat me/does not want to eat me." Chickens... I am not sure I have spent enough time with them to know that there is anything happening inside their heads other than a random number generator :D
And like you say, farmers don't have the luxury of the false dichotomy "It isn't at all like a human so it is ok to eat vs. It is like a human so it isn't ok." The answer is that it is human like in some ways, and it is ok to eat. Exactly as you say, you treat them well and with respect, but it is ok to eat them. That's their role in the world. What differentiates us from predators like wolves or lions is that we are nicer about it beforehand. (And don't start eating them before they are dead...)
Sometimes I think the biggest problem with modern philosophy and morality is the unexamined assumption that it can and should be easy.
I think in part, but one has to square egregores with materialism as well. I am fairly comfortable with the idea myself, although less with it being a separate entity from its people, but I expect there is a lot of ground work to be done connecting the dots for others. Or possibly my mind is just a mess from doing too much agent based modeling of complex systems :P
I was thinking about corporate personhood while writing the piece. And even brands. Lots is written about brands without ever really getting to the root of what a brand actually is. Someone could write a whole book about Apple on this basis, without ever mentioning products, logos or Steve Jobs.
It's also an open door to monotheism: if all of the the reasons across all of the agents are ultimately directed towards a single end, whether the agents know it or not, then you have a (Platonised) image of God
I really appreciate this, although less so the fact it is making me want to write an essay while I am in the middle of one... or two... or twelve?
Short version: I am annoyed about how the current discussion of consciousness and agency disdains "emergence" as a source of either or both. Emergence is specifically the creation of a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, is opaque wrt its end state from the start, often results in different end states from the same initial conditions, and produces outcomes that are no where encoded in the system.
Which sounds exactly like "its in there, somewhere, but we can't point to what it is, and probably it can't either." The whole materialist vs spiritualist divide about this strikes me as willfully obtuse. Can "spirits" not exist for things that are sufficiently complex? Are there only a fixed number of types of spirit and we know all of them? Do new spirits not get created ever?
At the same time the materialists seem hell bent on discounting any sort of spirit or agency that matters, everywhere. Can't measure it, must not be there. Perhaps more accurately "Don't want it to be there, must not be there." I can understand that as a response to "We can't eat cows! They are sentient conscious beings!" but the proper response is "That is not a sufficient justification to not eat something. Just ask a wolf." and not refusing that anything has a spirit.
I sympathise with materialists in that new agey types make wild, untestable assertions that can neither be falsified nor verified, which helps no one advance to more useful frames. Plus, materialism enables the kind of reliable predictions that mean I'm home writing this rather than decomposing somewhere below the last flight I was on. But materialists overreach when they claim to know beyond the how and insist that their method is sufficient to describe every what. Hard concur on your re-articulation of the essence here, by the way.
Agreed. I think it is rather a case of materialists having really terrible interlocutors on the other side, historically, and the new agey/woo woo scammers looked so bad that people over corrected. I suspect that after the whole COVID vaccine SCIENCE debacle that many will over correct the opposite way.
Come to think of it, the debate about whether viruses count as life forms reminds me a bit of the spirits debate. At some point if you get to a spot where many things don't fit any of your categories, you have to conclude your categories have the problem, not reality.
Yea... I am rather worried for my kids' future world, as the way things are going sooner or later there are not going to be a lot of people who can keep bridges and airplanes up. We might well see a lot of Soviet era style "Well, this used to work, but it broke and we are still waiting on the parts" sort of situations. Too much of wokeism is just cargo cult versions of actual work and production. As you say, promoting other cultural traditions that obviously don't work in the modern world (and didn't work so hot in the premodern, for that matter) is just a black hole for failure. There's a lot of good from earlier traditions that we have lost, but just grabbing everything that seems to have failed wholesale is a mistake too.
The over correction I am worried about, though, is among the non-woke. I think one of the biggest problems of the scientific institutions being corrupted is that people not just lose faith in the institutions, they start to think "maybe the process of science is the problem" entirely. Some people seem to be moving towards "Well, they lied about COVID, and climate change, and gods know what else. You know, it probably is Thor making lightning, after all. This science business is just a woke elite scam!"
Yes, that's exactly the sort of thing I had in mind. In general, I think people tend to blame the group or the people, something they can name, and not the behavioral mistakes in these sorts of cases. Then they, or some other group, start doing the exact same thing under another name, and they are blind to the problem because they only cared about the name. I think that is why people make the mistake of e.g. supporting communists because they hate fascists, only to find out the communists want basically the same thing the fascists did. Whoops.
Yea, I am willing to agree that humans assign consciousness, agency, personality, intent, whatever, some form of human-ness to lots of things where it isn't really proper. What bugs the hell out of me is the lack of recognition that it is all a matter of degree. Sure, my coat doesn't have much agency, but the cow it came from did. Yet a cow would make a really bad human. So there must be something that has agency that a cow would look at and think "Damn, if you were a cow, you'd be dumb as hell." Just saying "This has a soul. That doesn't have a soul." and calling it a day is deeply unsatisfying.
Sorry, didn't mean to argue either! :D (Been a shitty week arguing with people at work, might be bleeding in here.)
I think farmers (or anyone who spends a lot of time around animals) probably get it easier than those who spend all their time with objects. Cats understand shit, have intent, and know damned well when they are doing things you don't want them to. So do horses (and especially ponies...). Frogs have intent, but they don't seem to understand that humans have preferences outside of "wants to eat me/does not want to eat me." Chickens... I am not sure I have spent enough time with them to know that there is anything happening inside their heads other than a random number generator :D
And like you say, farmers don't have the luxury of the false dichotomy "It isn't at all like a human so it is ok to eat vs. It is like a human so it isn't ok." The answer is that it is human like in some ways, and it is ok to eat. Exactly as you say, you treat them well and with respect, but it is ok to eat them. That's their role in the world. What differentiates us from predators like wolves or lions is that we are nicer about it beforehand. (And don't start eating them before they are dead...)
Sometimes I think the biggest problem with modern philosophy and morality is the unexamined assumption that it can and should be easy.
I think in part, but one has to square egregores with materialism as well. I am fairly comfortable with the idea myself, although less with it being a separate entity from its people, but I expect there is a lot of ground work to be done connecting the dots for others. Or possibly my mind is just a mess from doing too much agent based modeling of complex systems :P
I was thinking about corporate personhood while writing the piece. And even brands. Lots is written about brands without ever really getting to the root of what a brand actually is. Someone could write a whole book about Apple on this basis, without ever mentioning products, logos or Steve Jobs.
I have a wonderful insight/fever dream I need to write up. I have often wondered if it had an audience, but you will love it :)
You're going to have to write that, now
It's also an open door to monotheism: if all of the the reasons across all of the agents are ultimately directed towards a single end, whether the agents know it or not, then you have a (Platonised) image of God
Ah, but you're writing cool fiction and even though I've got a good plot idea I just can't write it. It all balances out.