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What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

nautil.us

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Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#31

Post by adamisom »

club_tropical wrote: post #3

Behold, one of the most dangerous and toxic forms of stupid: the LABCOAT-FLASHER. Do not fall for the verbal trickeries and hypotheticals - they are the syntactic sugar masking various POISONS: 1) There is no “you” that is meaningfully apart from “your brain”. This trickery is meant to dissociate you from your body and backdoor sneak-in the labcoat-flasher as a co-conspiritor against yourself. It is every bit as gasl…

Wow, for a diatribe on bad-faith, this is precisely that. e.g. You say the labcoat-flasher doesn't really believe in egalitarianism either... People profess desires to be a certain way (sometimes 'moral' sometimes not) despite not being that way, but we don't call that "fake"; humans are complex, and the point of adopting any higher-order principle (again, whether 'moral' or not) is that your actions start... pointing in that direction more. Incrementally so, not absolutely. Truly, every sentence you wrote could be similarly torn apart, but it's not worth my time.

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#32

Post by User23 »

pixl97 wrote: post #21
club_tropical wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) It sounds from what you write that you agree, even if reluctantly so, because "there is no diff". For completeness sake, I want to clarify that I believe in something far stronger than your reluctant resignation: that the whole conscious/subconscious separation, the body/head/hormone separation, that these are all artificial and wrong categorizations. There is one you, the whole you, no part meaningfully separable…

2b) You drop a bottle on a biking trail. Do you clean it up? I mean, you likely won't get caught or in trouble if you don't, but you're apt to cause other humans harm by increasing the risk they'll get a flat tire. You drop a bottle off the edge of a cliff. Do you clean it up? Most people would not, the time and risk of getting to where the bottle is, is high versus the risk of someone being hurt by it. I believe you…

Why does nearly everyone return shopping carts?

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#33

Post by lostmsu »

coldtea wrote: post #15
lostmsu wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously false statement, given the genre of fiction. Also, objective impossible is wildly different from any individual subjective one.

> Obviously false statement, given the genre of fiction. Obviously we are aware of the genre of fiction. Or science fiction for that matter. Or superhero comics, or supernatural stories, and so on. So my point wasn't that e.g. vampire fiction doesn't exist or isn't interesting to writers and reader. But nothing in the genre of fiction is really about the impossible. That is just metaphor and plot device for what was,…

Art is background. Without background Romeo and Juliet is just "love could be a strong feeling", and Back to the Future is "time travel has an unsolved grandfather paradox".

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#34

Post by avgcorrection »

User23 wrote: post #30
club_tropical wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) It sounds from what you write that you agree, even if reluctantly so, because "there is no diff". For completeness sake, I want to clarify that I believe in something far stronger than your reluctant resignation: that the whole conscious/subconscious separation, the body/head/hormone separation, that these are all artificial and wrong categorizations. There is one you, the whole you, no part meaningfully separable…

> There is one you, the whole you, no part meaningfully separable from the other, not "diff"able, because the hormones are not some external force acting on The Real You (TM) but a physical manifestation of The One You (TM). If you manipulate body/head/hormones, you literally change The One You, to varying degrees depending on the intervention, obviously. Incidentally this is exactly Catholic teaching on the human pe…

> In fact I find it striking how in line with traditional Christian philosophy your judgments are.

I find it not surprising that someone would latch onto a description of non-duality as something curiously “in line” with a particular religion.

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#35

Post by lo_zamoyski »

jasmer wrote: post #28
club_tropical wrote: post #3

Behold, one of the most dangerous and toxic forms of stupid: the LABCOAT-FLASHER. Do not fall for the verbal trickeries and hypotheticals - they are the syntactic sugar masking various POISONS: 1) There is no “you” that is meaningfully apart from “your brain”. This trickery is meant to dissociate you from your body and backdoor sneak-in the labcoat-flasher as a co-conspiritor against yourself. It is every bit as gasl…

The premise of the article is a bit more simple: things we can imagine more clearly, have more meaning to us. It's very simply articulated using concept of 'describing' vs. 'seeing' vs. 'doing'. It's hard for us to empathize with soldiers fighting wars, or refugees fleeing them - but when someone shows us pictures, or better yet, tells us their authentic story, it becomes visceral, and therefore we give legitimacy to…

Indeed, that was a strange diatribe that seems to go way beyond the content of the article (which does flirt with some neurobabble and dubious philosophy here and there, I opine, but I see nothing that would merit the terror-laden response of the OP). If we focus on the central claim concerning imagination and discard the rest, we can still have an interesting discussion. Worth mentioning is John Henry Newman's "A Grammar of Assent"[0] which begins precisely with a discussion of what he called notional and real assent which relate how we assent to propositions with what you might call the associated "vividness" of experience.

[0] https://www.newmanreader.org/works/grammar/

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#37

Post by MadScott »

"Lee and his colleagues confirmed this by looking at people’s brain activity with an fMRI when they’re making decisions about the future. They used a brain decoder to detect a “neural signature of the vividness of prospective thought”

What twaddle. fMRI will tell you quite a bit about blood flow etc. but "brain decoder" is bullshit. It's like taking a thermal image of the primary PCB and saying you've just backed all of the operating system and secondary code out of the image.

The author will continue to push the button, write down the number and have a career, but imagine the future harm they're doing by furthering such an appallingly fraudulent approach.

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#38

Post by lo_zamoyski »

antiterra wrote: post #23
pessimizer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need to hear a restatement of 3) that doesn't rely on the word "equal" or "egalitarian" without defining them in the context of the argument you're making. What does it mean to say that everyone is or isn't "equal?" Are you trying to say that people are distinct (i.e. there is more than one person)? Are you trying to say that people aren't the same height, and there are others insisting that they are? What are you…

Right, I can think my child is abstractly ‘equal’ to another person’s child but also not feel as much ownership for their well being. I think what the commenter is saying is similar to a reductio ad absurdum of what it would be like if every child was of equal direct importance and priority to you. It, however, doesn’t address what would happen if everyone in a community voluntarily had this concern nominally and the…

Putting the OP's comment aside, what is this abstract "equality"? We seem to be quite confident in announcing this proposition and affirming it in the public square, but how many people can actually tell you what this equality concerns? (Mind you, I am NOT claiming there is no sense in which human persons may be said to be equal. I am merely raising the issue that many people don't seem to know despite the confident assertions to the contrary and that lots of weird political hay has been made claiming some nebulous kind of "equality" that resists any kind of examination or analysis.)

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#39

Post by joe__f »

MadScott wrote: post #37

"Lee and his colleagues confirmed this by looking at people’s brain activity with an fMRI when they’re making decisions about the future. They used a brain decoder to detect a “neural signature of the vividness of prospective thought” What twaddle. fMRI will tell you quite a bit about blood flow etc. but "brain decoder" is bullshit. It's like taking a thermal image of the primary PCB and saying you've just backed all…

I've seen people make that analogy before and I do think it has merit. As far as I'm aware it's pretty much the standard approach in neuroscience though and not special to these authors

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#40

Post by menotyou »

I am an aphant, I can not imagine anything.

While I can appreciate to have a good income and always had good paying jobs, I was never really interested in making a career and becoming filthy rich. Possibly because I can not imagine myself in this situation.

On the other hand I was always better then others on making long term strategic plans.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

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