The Seniority of the Rachis

luka

Well-known member
That's one of the more potent lessons I've learned here, how much I've been relying on bigger words instead of trying to extract from them a more intuitive way of conveying things.

That said, every once in a while, a crutch may be necessary to get to the next step. Even if its just hastening a process that would otherwise get there.

But here is another point, regarding how these larger cosmic processes accelerate. There seems to be a pattern, from what I can tell, in which higher-order mechanisms hasten their own production. To wander into hostile scientific territory: enzymes hasten chemical reactions that would otherwise take 100x, 1000x, 1,000,000x as long if they were left to "chance".

Similarly, human consciousness, namely its knack for technology, hastens the organization of matter, which would otherwise take billions of years to achieve a formation with a complexity equivalent to, say, a laptop. Even much cruder than that.

this is similar to the familiar suggestion that the future loads the dice of the present to make itself inevitable.
 

catalog

Well-known member
i never did the whole course but i like the way he breaks things down to quite simple methods which reveal your biases. there's a youtube somewhere where he talks about how one of his favourite teaching methods was to ask the class to write down what they saw in the lobby before the class started, and they all write different things.
 

luka

Well-known member
i have to admit i dont think i ever did the exercises. i just thought, yeah yeah yeah i know what youre trying to illustrate or i thought, that one sounds to hard.
 

catalog

Well-known member
it will change his life, be the key to the garden of delights and he will become the prophet we all need.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
From the first chapter of Prometheus Rising, "The Thinker and the Prover"

In the long run, we are hopefully approximating closer and closer to "objective Truth" over the centuries.

In the short run, Orr's law always holds: Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove.'

And if the Thinker thinks passionately enough, the Prover will prove the thought so conclusively that you will never talk a person out of such a belief, even if it is something as remarkable as the notion that there is a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft ("GOD") who will spend all eternity torturing people who do not believe in his religion.

And from the start of chapter 2, "Hardware & Software: The Brain and its Programs" (where I am now)

We will, throughout this book, consider the human brain a kind of bio-computer—an electro-colloidal computer, as distinct from the electronic or solid-state computers which exist outside our heads.

Please note carefully and long remember that we have not said that the human brain is a computer. The Aristotelian idea that to understand something you must know what it is has been abandoned in one science after another, for the pragmatic reason that the simple word "is" introduces so many metaphysical assumptions that we can argue forever about them. In the most advanced sciences, such as mathematical physics, nobody talks about what anything is anymore. They talk about what model (or map) can best be used to understand whatever we are investigating
 

luka

Well-known member
RAW suffered from naive scientism. Edging closer to objective truth is a a nonsense. Computer-brain analogies are seductive but generally best avoided.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Well I think the quotes he put around it suffice here, and what what he meant was that our map approximates the territory with ever greater precision. I think the issue largely lies in the language of "subjective" "objective", seeing as by the time "objectivity" would be reached, there would be no subjectivity, through comparison to which objectivity would have any meaning, no?

There is no objective reading - because a reading here entails a finite approximation of infinity - but rather objectivity marks a horizon built into our metric for map-accuracy, no? I'd hope Wilson would have known this, and that his quotes around objective indicate such.

Like @suspendedreason 's Kullback-Liebler point. That is, we approach a state in which our awareness of the cosmos becomes the cosmos, or in other words a state in which our ability to predict the unfolding/development of matter/energy is able to keep up with the moment-by-moment, iteration-by-iteration, practically discrete developments of matter.

Thing is, we might not be able to say that such a state could qualify as existing, seeing as we could very well be indistinguishable from our environment. Our being would be our world, no?

Perhaps Wilson uses scientistic language here, language that I think he effectively distances himself from, but for him to be wrong necessarily means that we cannot get better at anything.

And sure, I suppose that better is relative - maybe there are people out there who think the view from the base of the mountain is better than the view from the peak. But its also not difficult to see how outlandish such a view is - as if it is merely trying to prevent a consensus.
 
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