Category: Religion, Myth, and Theology

  @John Dow

–“Me: “This notion that novelty doesn’t exist in an intelligible form seems rather ridiculous to me.”—

I didn’t say novelty didn’t exist. I said it’s always and everywhere reducible to the structure and terms I’ve outlined. There is a continuous evolution but it isn’t evolution outside of the bounds I’ve stated. Language is apparently infinitely descriptive but largely because we increase precision and generalize categories so that the scope of our concepts remains limited.

—“You would have to assume all forms of cognition have perpetuated themselves without change for eternity, or you would have to entirely reject the notion of mimetic cognition, but then how would you account for all of the empirical data supporting it?”–

There is only one form of cognition. Thats just a fact. We can alter the concentration of stimuli to the neocortex so that we limit exposure or access exposure of other facilities in the cortical hierarchy; and we can add experiences (relations) that create infinite combinations, but just like there are only up and down quarks in the but all elements are built upon combinations of them, and all molecules built of them, and all biochemistry built upon them and so on, that does not mean available operations at each scale are not enumerable. Same is for language. We invent increasingly complex combinations that combine increasingly complex experiences, but we do not invent new means of constructing them.

—“Surely you acknowledge that mimetic evolution occurs, not merely genetic evolution? How else could historically verifiable innovations in discourse like metaphors or new scientific paradigms emerge?”—

Well I don’t use literary pseudoscientific terms, but yes imitation and recombination in all means of expression from marks, to movements, to vibrations, to sounds occurs just like EVERY OTHER TECHNOLOGY we have and there is nothing different about it other than the low cost compared to material costs, which is why fashionable language is more fashionable among those lacking ability to express material change instead of signal change. And internally the information is all represented by the same means, just associated by physical connection to networks of neurons, connected to networks of nerves, that sense stimuli in very primitive terms. So I think what I see is that this is another of those examples where the fact that we can logically and physically describe the structure of any experience, that is not the same as experiencing it. And that’s true. That does not however translate into anything other than the conflation of complex experience and the deflation of cause of the experience into its constituent parts. So like aways I can say ‘when you feel x, it’s just y’. And you can say, ‘but that’s not the same’. Well, yes it is. its just the difference between describing how to play the piano and the experience of playing it once you know how. This is the eternal competition between bottom up construction, and top down experience. —“Dealing with the phenomenon of mimesis is incredibly important in the construction of epistemological theories, as mimesis is the most fundamental means by which language and therefore the capacity for intelligibility is transmitted, this is an empirical claim I am making here. Here are a few papers amongst hundreds on the subject as an example: https://journals.lub.lu.se/index.php/pjos/article/view/8842 https://www.degruyter.com/…/cogsem…/cogsem-2014-0002.xml”— As far as I know there is only one means of epistemology possible and thats free association, hypothesis, theory, repeat. it can’t be otherwise. That’s all our brains are capable of. I think you must mean something else. Not epistemology but deconstruction? Ok these papers are not science. Why not read the science instead of literary pseudoscience? Development is well documented and follows a predictable path as foundations are built from sensory, then motor, then social, then linguistic and the rational – because that’s the cortical hierarchy and how information develops from the back of the brain to the front (hopefully). Much of it governed by developmental success in utero and shortly after. Small variations in cortical structure produce vast variations in behavior – largely because most neural complexity is in suppression rather than computation. In other words we developed agency late (which is why we don’t eat our young and lizards do – no inhibitory structure (and no neocortex to have it in.) So again what you mean is that as we mature we might have greater developmental ability in the sensory (musicians), the physical (keanu reeves, natural athletes), or the emotional (prototypical hypersensitive chick), or in the social (salesmen), or in the frontal (mathematicians and philosophers). BUt the mistake is in thinking this isn’t just a lever from back of the brain to the front, and for some reason greater association and therefore attention to that region of the brain.

—“Me: “What you can do however, is create a epistemo-political discourse, and my point is that you can pack it with as many parameters as you like”—

Yes we can seek, and do seek, to create many associations both honest and dishonest, correspondent and not, possible and not, rewarding and not, expensive and not, as a way of capturing and holding attention, providing incentive for or against, and making promises or not. As far as I know all language is negotiation. +Attention +> Promise +> Meaning -> Due Diligence -> Warranty

—“…but ultimately in practice those parameters are only as good as the people enforcing them,”—

Q: What do you mean ‘enforcing them’. how is a parameter (all I know of is sense, relation, fact(measurement), value) enforced?

—“in fact they are contingent upon the interpretation of the people enforcing them. Do you have an actual argument against this precise notion?”—

Q: what do you mean ‘enforcing’? Do you mean habituating? Do you be the language, the meaning, or the behavior that reseals? What are you talking about?

—“Again, this is an operational claim about the practical application of fields of knowledge, namely that they are disciplinary and therefore reliant upon the adjudication of a discretionary authority”—

But that’s not true. Langauges develop by utility and convention in every discipline, and the terms rotate like any other. What you mean is that there is a paradigm, and one can enforce the paradigm and the terms that constitute measurements of relations in that paradigm. So was the church successful wth terms (only some). How have terms changed over time? (with utility) Why do we make up new terms (to serve as standards of weight and measure less open to migration) but they must adhere to the paradigm. Do individuals make these up? Not really, the evolve in a competitive market and the best terms survive. Why do they survive? Because they meet market demand for system of measurement within the paradigm they seek to discuss. I think what you might mean is that propaganda can create framing and with enough repetition people can be malformed by environmental saturation that they begin to operate on a different paradigm by suggestion. Now that’s not LANGUAGE that’s propaganda. And propaganda only works as long as it doesn’t contradict the interests of the group or impose a cost upon them for its use.

—“(this builds on from the notion that language emerges from mimetic transmission). “—

Again I don’t use pseudoscientific terms, but yes, language evolved from physical to proto-verbal to verbal to mark making, to symbol making and glypy making and now every grammar of constant relations we have. That says nothing about the fact that as I stated earlier it follows a tediously consistent set of rules (that I mentioned earlier) regardless and there isn’t a lot of novelty in it at all mostly because it’s almost impossible for novelties to survive competition when information is this cheap and free. I’d love an example other wise. The script business evolution and the novel evolution and mathematics, and now programming all of these languages folow the same geometric structure because all of tehm must produce testable tranactions and terms we ca reduce to analogies to expeiernce.

—“Your system is based upon the notion that you need to enforce a “full accounting” of operational testimony in public speech, “—

It means that if one is taken to court one must demonstrate having done due diligence or one is liable. That’s a very different thing from asking people to speak in operational prose.

—“someone will obviously need to do that enforcing and ultimately there must be a judge of last resort to solve disputes as to their findings.”—

WE do this every day in every court in the land. No matter what you say you er led to the same standard of liability for the externalities produce by your speech not what you intend. So we do this every day, Marketers make ads, people make promises, lawyers make contract, people testify, reporters writes stories, … we test this every day. The langauge and the law adapt so that the empirical result is reciprocal. Just like programming langauges. Just like disciplineary languages. Everyting in every language.

—-“I am literally pointing to how you yourself envisage your system being implemented and suggesting that it demonstrates my epistemological argument that authority precedes intelligibility,”—

The problem precedes intelligibility and the market solves the problem by empirical evidence of competitive tests and continuous reformation just like very other epistemelogical cycle known to man. The problem-solution competition is the authority and words are standards of measure that either serve their purpose in solving the problem or language adapts to do so. There is no observer in the mind. There is no authority in language, there is no decider of the language only dispute. This is how everything in the world works. Certain disciplines use certain terms because we have no term of art otherwise. Law in particular uses latin terms just like doctors do in order to prevent migration of the meaning of the term and this is reinforced by convention because harm may come otherwise. (My company managed the term library for Microsoft. We used an ocean of librarians. For years.) Many companies do this to protect brand and legal liability, and often to prevent consumer confusion. So for example most companies have style guide. But the market causes adaption to the style guide, just like it does the dictionary.

—that knowledge is a discipline which requires arbitration, that interpretation is unavoidably discretionary.”—

There is no structure for that arbitration. The MARKET does. People respond to the market. The only places that is different are where small organizations have legal liability otherwise. The evidence is langauges always rotate.

—“You: “If you mean how various narratives evolve in each culture and subculture, yes I have, and so have others, there is nothing magic to it. There are dozens of authors who have documented dozens if not hundred of cultures.” Well, you have assigned a utilitarian teleology to language, and then process everything through those economic parameters. “—

What i did in this and in al things is to create a value neutral system of measurement in operational terms. I used economic terms because it is a value netral system of measurement, and becasue economics correctly desribes all human behavior as negotiation on gains by incentives. What I think you mean is that deceit and gsrrm are cheap, fictions are cheap, and force is expensive, and payment is very expensive, and you are looking to preserve cheap means of coercion?

—“This is based upon the assumption that cognition exclusively a bio-machine programmed by evolution to pursue resource allocation as means to the end of genetic reproduction. “–

Well it is and has to be but that’s irrelevant. We evolved limbic system to provide incentives and we feel those incentives as emotions, but the underlying measurement of gains losses and probabilities is invisible to us because it is calculated very rapidly in parallel summarizing into an e motion. That does not mean it cannot be analyzed and described in economic language. It can. It may humiliate the author to have his poetry reduced to “he’s just retelling little red riding hood” but that’s just true.

—“Again, this is based upon the assumption that mimetics is simply an expression of genetic functions,”—

I don’t know what that means. I now that everything we express is an analogy to experience in just increasingly complex sets of relations – and has to be, and that those foundations are limited by a strict grammar lie all else in the universe.

—“my point however is the evidence suggests that mimetic structures exist as a distinct strata upon genetic machines,”—

If you mean paradigms and vocabularies in a continuous market of utility then yes. I don’t know hat else you mean.

—“in a way analogous to software’s relationship to the hardware it is inscribed upon.”—

Well you just made my point about limited variation in grammars and senses producing nearly unlimited but bounded variation. Nothing on a computer cannot be explained operationally. Same for people, and their stories and their feelings If you read ancient text its very obvious that the only difference is the increasing precision and decreasing context of the language themselves. Otherwise same shit every day in every civlization. I discovered cuneiform when young and was so desperate to see it at the London museum. when i finally found a translation it might ave been said by a gang banger. It’s just repetitive trash talking. Not some deep wisdom. Famous story, not sure if it’s Ur? but found a brick. Inscribed was ‘All men are fools” in Akkadian. The problem with reading early greek is that the language is too young to have developed sufficient precision to compete with context. English is the opposite.

—“Software tells hardware what to do, in the same way mimesis tells the body what to do,”–

Well that’s not true. software is deterministic. Every single thing people do is predictive (a guess and the information is constantly self organizing to adapt to market demand (reality) for action.) Because we predict we can combine probabilities and develop new variations on sequences of actions and computers can’t. This error proneness is why we aren’t deterministic (we have limited free choice) we lack the info to do otherwise.

—“genetics merely ensures that neurons are receptive to mimetic inscription, it does not in itself generate the structure of semiotic cognition.”–

Thats nonsense. neurons do one thing. On and off. Just like a computer transistor, just vastly more complex in vast parallel in a vast division of labor. they survive (are fed) by attention, when they successfully predict an action or reaction, very fast. But they only have our senses for variable, and those variables are only on off and frequency. Our brains build up sequences (everything is retained as a predictive sequence, not a fact, again demonstrating competition), and use them to predict moment by moment in a continuous sensory stream. And while you’re in the womb your brain develops because nerves are all the same, your brain develops based on what sensors and motors or internal relations it’s connected to (thats’ all the types of neurons we have – those three) So the vocabulary and grammar of human beings is entirely dependent upon their physical structure the sensations we can concentrate in the brain, and the evolution of successful sequential predictive relations, to self organize. For example touch at the tips of your fingers isn’t ordered in the brain they learn their order by use – by survival in the market for successful prediction resulting in attention. We can imitate anything another an experience if it can be reduced to an analogy of existing experience. But those experiences are limited Fore example it is very hard to imagine being an octopus, or a bee, and fairly easy a dog – they are like us, but lacking other than rudimentary sequence planning.

—“This particular argument I am making is therefore in this sense a scientific one, and it implicates the sociological strata as non-reducible to the biological. “—

That’s patently false. You can’t think of anything I can’t explain which is why it’s extremely frustrating to religious people to understand the mammalian or reptilian triviality of their most valued experiences. Now to reduce them to these functions is only to say that they are operationally explicable, and consists entirely of explainable physical phenomenon. but ehe experience of conflating all one’s senses, all one’s memories, all the predictions from those memories, and the continuous cyclical switching attention between different functions while the hippocampus is trying to organize an episodic memory for rehearsal and later recall is simply inaccessible to self introspection. SO just because you can’t disambiguate experience with introspection (you can’t) that doesn’t mean we can’ explain what’s creating the conflationary (ambiguously related) experience itself. We can. And just as finding out we weren’t he center of the universe, or even important in it, and that we are a rare but deterministic output of a calm planet with a rotating iron core, over four billion years, it’s exasperating to those of you who have built up expectations of wonder, that are in fact, only wondrous because of our inability to introspectively analyze what it is our brains are doing in unbelievable parallel at unbelievable speed for a mere 100 watts of power.

—“And perhaps more profoundly it implicates a meta-scientific argument, that shared intelligibility is contingent upon the social relation of authority,”—

Intelligibility is dependent upon the survival of paradigms and attendent vocabularies to solve daily problem of daily life at all scales, just like all knowledge and there is no such thing as an authority, only anchors that slow change (like the dictionary and english spelling) while the market runs onward continuously adapting to continuously evolving human demand. The only thing that can alter it is the saturation of the environment with stimuli that is more endemic than the related stimuli – which is why it’s easy to demonize a remote enemy but very hard to persist the paradigm, vocabulary, and belief, that you can fly. That’s why religions work. False promise of untestable benefit, or benefit taht cannot be obtained, for paying the priesthood, limiting status deltas, and prohibiting alternate standards of behavior. Thankfully we invented rational law instead. Unthankfully we invented credit and credit scores, and unthankfully social scores are coming.

—“and therefore contains an arbitrary component. This doesn’t mean we have to dismiss the notion of sense imposing itself upon us from outside language as “reality”, simply that our apprehension of it emerges from a creative process of trial and error socially arbitrated by authority.”–

So again, (a) authority is a trivial if not non-existent influence on language but sure as hell is on behavior, (b) market demand for utility to compete in the group against other groups does determine paradigm and language, most of which is to adapt to law and custom and strategy (c) We can easily use propaganda but there are limits and those limits tend to be un-testable, and therefor change our behavior by externality, rather than on the subject at hand. (c) none of us like reducing our ‘undiscovered valleys’ open for our continued investigation and reward, shown to be not a masterpiece but a coloring book (c) you are like many fans of literature, under the impression that words are some sort of magic or hold some persuasive power, and the y only do if it provides people returns and survives in a market for returns. (c) All human be havior can be reduced to value neutral incenties described ineconomc language because humans only act by incentives.