Papus79 wrote: ↑December 16th, 2018, 5:33 pm
It seems like part of the problem is that this is high-velocity territory for wish fulfillment. New thought was big on people manifesting things with their thoughts.
Ah -- I hadn't intuitively considered this even though I'm familiar with the creative visualization stuff. I think this thoroughly answers my question of why it attracts crazy people. I appreciate the references as well, they both look interesting reflections on the occult. I get the appeal -- Carnegie Secret stuff, or just watch Jim Carrey tell his story about how he wished for a bicycle and it appeared in his living room a few weeks later. But occultism has a long history of course -- is this variant really all that different from a layman's use of prayer through the ages or an ancient Chinese emperor consulting the I Ching? I'll have to check out those books with some interest.
I've gotten quite familiar, especially when I watch politics, of the tendency of anyone with an extreme position to reliably double-down whenever confronted.
Yep -- fight or flight, baby, and how many testosterone-fueled extremists do you think are going to back down from a fight?
Also, a really odd and oblique example but something that shows bizarre sorts of social conformity - try going on something like a music share site on Facebook and try posting something that you know is by very good musicians, something that's not particularly well known, and watch how many songs like that you can post that get 0 likes and 0 replies. It seems like there are certain aspects of human behavior where it seems like the people who dip out of them are a very small percentage and most people have a way of doing the same thing without thinking about it - to such a degree that it creates a boundary that, when crossed, really seems to go to infertile and ineffective places for seemingly arbitrary reasons.
Some degree of this phenomenon you're describing is probably covered by the
familiarity heuristic. I'm not sure if Kahneman covers it directly in Thinking Fast and Slow but it's definitely inspired by his whole System 1 - System 2 bit, where it takes active thoughtful work from system 2 of our mind to overcome the initial gut-reaction of System 1. I'd be surprised if there's not a coherent explanation for it somewhere in evolutionary biology -- it seems intuitive to me that a natural propensity towards familiarity is related to tribalism and kin selection, which can be quite beneficial protective traits when civil society is not a guarantee. People or animals who you've seen many times are less likely to be a predator who will murder you first chance they get. Too bad this whole system has gotten co-opted by political shills and the advertising industrial complex nowadays. Also, openness to experience is considered one of the Big 5 personality traits, so there's probably a decent degree of variability between groups based on the kind of personalities that a certain group attracts.
For the number of people who make up their minds on politics based on what some talking head has offered, without checking the source at all, and who'll reliably tow that line and ignore anyone whose offering articles, interviews with that person or group of people, admittedly I can't understand how that works. When I have to make a best guess as to why they're like that, especially if they have enough time on their hands and interest to even try debating people who disagree with what they were fed, the only way I can come up with a logical pathway for that is some level of self-interest that they have in defending a social structure, a particular strategic situation they have economically maybe, but whatever it is something else is more important to them than the truth on that particular issue. Politics being such a basket of individual and group special interests seems like it's filled with that and even tends to add more of that to whatever sector of life that it touches.
I think it's pretty ironic that the same blind trust in television news anchors that enabled Edward R Murrow to help America overcome McCarthyism is now being used to spread echo chambers and McCarthyism 2.0 on both sides of the aisle. Ever since the Fairness Doctrine went down in the late 1980s and the 24-hours news cycle began a few decades ago, anyone who follows the news on a regular basis is basically simulating the evolutionary equivalent of being constantly under threat by predators.
My personal theory is that this whole terrifying trend of epistemic closure we're observing is just an unfortunate part of the evolution of identity that's been happening. For centuries, the average person was who they were by virtue of birth, essentially based on your father's profession or wherever your family could afford to send you to get you apprenticed or schooled. Your family might spend its whole existence generation after generation in the same 50-mile radius. In the modern world we have lost that familiar certainty, and I hypothesize that in a world without elders, where progress happens obscenely quickly and with the decline of small communities with tight family bonds, and especially considering the isolating effects of technology, people are now searching desperately for the kind of belonging and validation that can sometimes be provided by holding a certain worldview. When adopting a political position as part of our identity, every time our way of thinking gets validated we get a little dopamine hit that I think over time starts to simulate something closer to addiction than recognition of the truth.
Regarding the bit about the proliferation of politics and special interests in particular, are you familiar with Adam Curtis's documentaries? They're available for free on
Thoughtmaybe, and I think The Mayfair Set covers capitalism's subsumption of government directly, but The Power of Nightmares covering the rise of the Neocon movement and his coverage of Murdoch may be connected as well. Curtis gets Malcolm Gladwell-type criticism in that he cherry picks stuff to support his overall narrative, but I think his stuff and Gladwell's are worthwhile regardless. But the problem of concentrated benefits with diffuse costs is one that I think might end up cannibalizing capitalism itself if we can't find a way to get it under control. I'm currently reading Jane Mayer's Dark Money and it's... depressing, to say the least.
I think the left and right dogmatism is a good way to put that - ie. science needs to be able to defend itself against both sorts of thinking. The race realism stuff is just the right-wing variant of it. Historically I have heard a fair amount about racialist beliefs in science, apparently it took WWII for the world to really take seriously how big of a problem racism is (which is both sick and sad). There are probably a lot of details we may have wrong in biology and evolutionary psych but there are clearly areas where their validity gets continuously compounded with each visit or visit to adjacent territories that researchers make.
I agree. I think as a society it's pretty clear that we have not yet reached a baseline maturity to handle the gift of communication at lightspeed that the internet has bestowed upon us. The kind of nonsensical outrage you are talking about hinders science, it hinders politics, and it can even hinder personal well-being -- take the brigading of social media bullying in schools today, for example.
I find myself closer to where Robert Sapolsky and Sam Harris are on free will, ie. the inputs and processor are given to us, OTOH it seems like economics are still a pretty big dust storm where you do have some people who really know what they're talking about (I like listening to Mark Blyth when I can for example) but there are also all kinds of other people who either think they know what they're talking about or want to sell you or the public at a large something beneficial to their employers. Paraphrazing something Mark mentioned in one of his lectures about everyone running on insane games in economics that they know will come crashing down (like overleveraging and doing dodgy things with derivatives) any business that knows that it'll bring disaster and doesn't play along will lose out and go out of business because the machine that creates the delusion has deep enough pockets to finance it for years.
I think a lot of hard science types look down on the social sciences, and maybe despite my interest in philosophy I can count myself in that camp as well. Not only because academia's perverse incentives make it hard enough for anyone to learn anything for real -- I mean, just look at the replication crisis that happened in psychology -- but there's something that simply doesn't sit right with me intuitively when we attempt to apply the scientific method to a target as decidedly unscientific as human decision making.
Regarding your bit about Blyth, who is new to me and seems like someone who I might be interested in, a similar point is referenced in the Big Short, where Steve Eisman (Steve Carrell's Mark Baum character in the movie adaptation) recounts why he stopped considering himself a conservative. "When you’re a conservative Republican, you never think people are making money by ripping other people off." But then he discovered the world of consumer finance, which is basically an entire industry devoted to ripping people off. The free market is a great idea if everybody is playing fair, but due to the tragedy of the commons, all it takes is a couple gambling asshole derivatives traders for the Nash Equilibrium to shift everyone's best position into blow up the economy. So now I pretty much boil over anytime someone tries to tell me how great of an idea deregulation was -- and the blame is on both sides. Clinton and Obama were just as guilty as Reagan or the Bushes, let alone the cheeto in chief we've got now in America.
Maybe giving a tell to where I find my thinking politically - I really appreciate a lot of what Bret and Eric Weinstein and Heather Heying are doing these days because they're covering evolutionary psychology, economics, politics, and covering a lot of what I'd consider to be validly overlapping ground in places where certain professional disciplines had set up 'out of bounds' flags for people outside their territory, for example Heather mentioned that biologists were told by the social sciences that they were free to apply it to animals but not to people and she (as well as Bret by his own demonstration on these topics) considers that a big mistake.
I'm reasonably sympathetic here. I think liberals can be just as bad as conservatives when it comes to dogma, and I am wary about how easily the oppressed can become the new oppressors. I'm all for the intersubjectivity movement, but probably would echo Obama on what happened at Evergreen specifically:
"I've heard of some college campuses where they don't want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don't want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal toward women," Obama said. "I've got to tell you, I don't agree with that, either. I don't agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view."
My thoughts on that basically conclude along the lines of Jung's bit about how some problems can't be solved -- only outgrown. I think these technologies are so new and some old disempowered movements just beginning to wield them with force that we have not developed a culture of maturity around them. But I think the maturity or restrictions will come with time, for better or for worse. We will outgrow these problems into big fat new existential issues when the next transformative technology comes around. Or we will blow ourselves up or boil ourselves via climate change and start from scratch regardless.
Our biggest problem there is getting a handle on subjectivity. Our handle seems to range from mystical to religious to popular psychological models and each one gets varying mileage case by case. The challenge panpsychism has in my opinion is it's pointing a finger in the right direction and giving us a way to make sense of there being a subjective aspect in nature but as of yet it doesn't give us that hook or that bridge where we can go back and quantify the shape of the container and figure out, for example, what it would mean or look like for electrons to be conscious. Also if conscious - what kind of consciousness? For good reason we're somewhat uncomfortable with things we can't substantiate and while we do leave the floor open to speculation we tend not to let things into mainstream consciousness (especially if they upset a lot of apple carts) unless we've been able to bridge that gap. This is probably where panpsychism as a model will have to start yielding more information in the laboratory and in a different way than 'is it real' - it will also need to give us tools that we didn't have without that model and new inroads to examine nature to get further testable results.
Sure, I think this is reasonable. I think we're of a similar mind in the belief that exploration into panpsychism might not be pseudoscience, and probably share the expectation that we are far, far, far away from anything resembling a useful result. Even if we found a researcher who discovered something monumental, we'd probably do an Ignaz Semmelweis on the guy and send him straight to the loony bin. Science relies on repeated observation and replication -- these are simply not useful tools to explore phenomena that can't be well observed or phenomena exceeding a certain degree of variation at the individual level. I just like to support open minds on the subject when I can, as long as those minds aren't too divorced from reality. Greta's opinions on this subject basically mirror my own right now. I admit I myself have had some seriously strange experiences along the lines of Jung's acausal principle that have led me to really believe first-hand that truth is stranger than fiction, so I may not be a totally unbiased participant in the conversation.
In terms of the consciousness of non-human stuff, I like to defer to pragmatic theories like the one put forward by Francis Heylighen's
anticipation control theory of mind. Basically he proposes a kind of duck-typing -- if it's an emergent phenomena that does all the anticipation and control functionality that consciousness appears to be intended to do, we might as well just call it consciousness. I think his whole bit with the global brain is pretty compelling and fun to think about, though certainly I'm not about to argue that it's well substantiated by any means.
You may have a heart of gold, but so does a hard-boiled egg.