Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

[Steve Smith]

On 6/5/23 12:24 PM, glen wrote:
I try to be careful about my allusions to "openness". I attribute 
(perhaps wrongly) the openness of science to Critical Rationalism 
(Popper, but better described by David Miller). Good (and bad) ideas 
can come from *anywhere*. 
The "problem with having an open mind is that just about anyone can pour 
just about anything into it" ?
Even those miracle people like FGJ Perey can come up with bad ideas. 
My (false) dichotomy between nonsense and abductive triggers might be 
problematic. But that's just a distraction. The real point is about 
the interstitial spaces *between* models, not the models or the ground 
they cover.


I think this is what I was trying to gesture/allude to with the 
"superposition"  of models...   they are intrinsically "incompatible" 
else they would be all part of the same model or "meta-model", no?   But 
how to characterize these "implied spaces"?   I think we spoke offline 
of implied spaces and spandrels recently?


A novelist/friend of mine (Walter Jon Williams) from ABQ wrote his 
version of it 20 years ago?  A lot of great ideas in there, but no 
answers to the James/Husserl superposition I don't think...


Maybe H and J first have a "learning session" with NLP and in fact 
convince one another of their complementary spaces/viewpoints... a sort 
of "Gift of the Magi" updated for the cybernetic era?  Maybe I should 
ask GPT4 to "write a short story on the theme of GoM using James and 
Husserl as the main characters but in the style of Stanislaw Lem's /Le 
Cyberiad/?"




   Aristide, a semi-retired computer scientist turned swordsman, is a
   scholar of the implied spaces, seeking meaning amid the accidents of
   architecture in a universe where reality itself has been sculpted
   and designed by superhuman machine intelligence. While exploring the
   pre-technological world Midgarth, one of four dozen pocket universes
   created within a series of vast, orbital matrioshka computer arrays,
   Aristide uncovers a fiendish plot threatening to set off a nightmare
   scenario, perhaps even bringing about the ultimate Existential
   Crisis: the end of civilization itself. Traveling the pocket
   universes with his wormhole-edged sword Tecmesssa in hand and
   talking cat Bitsy, avatar of the planet-sized computer Endora, at
   his side, Aristide must find a way to save the multiverse from
   subversion, sabotage, and certain destruction.


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Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

[glen]

I try to be careful about my allusions to "openness". I attribute (perhaps 
wrongly) the openness of science to Critical Rationalism (Popper, but better described by 
David Miller). Good (and bad) ideas can come from *anywhere*. Even those miracle people 
like FGJ Perey can come up with bad ideas. My (false) dichotomy between nonsense and 
abductive triggers might be problematic. But that's just a distraction. The real point is 
about the interstitial spaces *between* models, not the models or the ground they cover. 
I would never ask whether James and/or Husserl are correct. But asking whether they're 
talking about the same thing is a good question.

The backend of the LLMs seem like mere validation, to me. What's more important is whether the 
weights and structure of the underlying system span the space of the (natural) language. Let James 
and Husserl be language models, J and H, themselves. The way J would determine if H is talking 
about the same thing J is talking about is by talking. When the language expressed by H is enough 
*like* the language expressed by J, then J will say "yes". If the expressions stably 
remain dissimilar, or explode in dissimilarity, then J will say "no".

Objectively, if J and H are capable of "online learning", then we might be able 
to do some kind of similarity measure of their language before they interacted. Then let 
them yap with each other for, say, 1000 iterations. And measure the [dis]similarity 
between their expressions at time 0 and their post-interactive expressions. Maybe H 
brainwashes J such that d(H0,H1) = 0, but d(J0,J1) = d(J0,H0) ... or vice versa.

On 6/5/23 10:45, Steve Smith wrote:

If/when/as AI (such a broad term, no?) can be used in the mode you describe here somewhat 
transparently I would likely be open to an "augmented intuition" mode of use

and as a point of gratuitous contention, how *does* one tell the difference between "stupid 
nonsense" and "an abductive candidate for experimental research"?   Is there truly a 
qualitative difference (in the world) or is that an artifact of our own judgement(s) based on some 
quantitative threshold(s)?

Your description of "T" Truth as a spanning kernel for a plurality of theories and models feels quite apt and 
the way I took the name of the Docuseries "Closer to Truth", very assiduously avoiding the specific "the 
Truth"...   and implying an "asymptotic" approach not a collision course.

As I look at the (near) decomposable systems and map it onto (near) spanning trees within 
process-relation networks of those systems I imagine these LLM training exercises 
building/finding highly connected clusters (like ganglia in vertebrate neural systems) 
which fundamentally reflect what KellyAnne Conway so naively claimed as "alternate 
realities".

If there is a singular capital T Truth (or capital R Reality) then it is 
probably at most apprehended by finite beings (who have not achieved Satori, 
nod to DaveW) as the superposition of many sub-complete T' (or R') descriptions?

- Steve

On 6/5/23 10:18 AM, glen wrote:

But this misses the point, I think. And, in fact, I think it's a mistake to focus too 
much on (natural) language models at all, even for things that *seem* to be all about 
language, like philosophy. I'm most interested in the concept of an embedding 
. Ideally, I'd like to be able to query 
a modeling system (e.g. decoding/encoding transformers) for a (vector) space that 
(accurately) encodes *both* James and Husserl. Then that would help satisfy Marcus' 
and EricS' task to see if there are gaps between them, or not.

The problem has nothing to do, really, with how much one might have to 
read/think in order to understand anything. Understanding is a delusion. What 
matters is the differences and similarities between any 2 or more things 
(processes, devices, systems, whatever 'thing' might mean).

These automatic modelers (like the transformers) might help us do that. As for some kind 
of "ground truth", something that might provide a foundation like the 
physicists seem to think they have, if our automatic modeling device is capable of 
embedding all (or most) of all the models surrounding us (over time, space, and 
individual theorists or collections of theorists), then we can experimentally test for 
kernels/bases that can span *most* of those theories/models. If such a kernel exists, 
then it is a candidate for the capital T truth, and any theory/model that is not spanned 
by that kernel is either stupid nonsense or an abductive candidate for experimental 
research.

On 6/4/23 18:48, Frank Wimberly wrote:

As one of the few, if not the only, person who has been a full time employee of a philosophy 
department for multiple years, I am quick to defend my former colleagues.  Read "Actual 
Causation and Thought Experiments" by Glymour and Wimberly in J. K. Campbell, M. 
O'Rourke & H. S. Silverstein (eds.), Causation and Explanation. MIT Press

You

Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

[Marcus Daniels]

One might guess that we have independent minds because of the risk of a shared 
mind going mad.   Oh wait, people are going mad anyway.

From: Friam  On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, June 5, 2023 11:14 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism



What expertise I have is often manifest by a gut instinct that something is a 
bad idea.   I’m curious what daydreaming or brainstorming is like with gut 
feelings informed by all the things GPT systems have seen.To me that sounds 
much more efficient than trying to communicate with Siri or fumbling with a 
keyboard (even though I’m a fairly fast typist).   That’s a high latency 
connection that requires coding and decoding language.  What is dreaming like 
with an integrated GPT-like database?

unfortunately you are singing my song here... or dreaming my dreams.  This too 
compels me (or at least my ego?)...

For many years, I have felt that my own voracious appetite for the written, 
crafted, and produced creative constructions of others (aka literature, art, 
pop fiction, pop media, etc) has been "dreaming other people's dreams" and the 
nature of wireless streaming video into the 50" diagonal box in my living room, 
the 5" diagonal mobile phone in my hand, and the 360 degree stereographic 
sensorium of my Oculus  has jacked it up to a new level...

Our brains were (maybe) wired/evolved to stare into a flickering fire (or at 
the shadows thrown on the cave wall) and tell one another stories handed down 
and around, embellished, superposed, morphed, hyperbolized, personalized over a 
lifetime.   Surely Kokopelli's greatest gift to each village he entered was the 
gift of new ideas hidden in familiar but not stories?  That and (if the more 
salacious stories hold) the gift of an outsider's genetic material into the 
community.  The hard-goods or even seeds he might have carried in his 
Santa-esque backpack are qualitatively the same?

I am not *nearly* thoughtful enough about the schlock I consume... ranging from 
doomscrolling GoogleNews and YouTube to several high-production-quality 
Hollywood movies (blockbuster or not) a similar number of Indie flicks (often 
as high of quality surprisingly) and one or more ongoing Streaming Series.   In 
between all that passive "lean back" consumption (coupling?) I read a *lot* of 
long-form journalism and roughly as much Educated-Lay level professional 
sci/tech papers which impinge on my professional (and now more broadly 
personal) interests.

Following Piaget's theory of structural learning, I expect this either 
confronts my brain with regular "refactorings" or requires a lot of 
deprecation/pruning of things I "thought I knew".  I suspect if I were to go 
back and review the FriAM archives and my own (or anyone else's) text here I 
could find inflection points in the underlying "models" I was operating on at 
the time.  With enough time, the new models/patterns seem to be resolvable with 
the old ones in some kind of "meta-pattern* which can itself be a pattern 
worthy of abstracting/refactoring?

 Referencing Glen's references to "diachronic" vs "episodic" I am left with the 
feeling that these are "naturally" composed episodes with internal 
diachronicity but (for some more than others) also strung together 
diachronically to some extent?

Given that it is our "gut instincts", what if our AI were to engineer our gut 
biome to carry all that extra information and every meal is like a system 
update?




From: Friam <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> On 
Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, June 5, 2023 8:13 AM
To: friam@redfish.com<mailto:friam@redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism


Marcus -

Even though I play the Luddite most of the time, I am in fact fascinated with 
the possibilities of post/transhumanism, at least in the sense that it feels 
"inevitable".   With the implied magnitude of qualitative change in Homo 
this-n-that to Homo postHomo or maybe Homo Cyborgis or quite possibly Homo 
goneBabygoneNevertobeSeenAgain along with all mammalian/warm-blooded/vertebrate 
life, depending on our overshoot, it seems worth a second thought or two as to 
what we *might* have some control over.



We are about to enter a chaotic maelstrom of change, and while that can seem 
hopeless, I do believe that extreme sports enthusiasts are very precise about 
the line they enter their maelstroms from/on.  (Surfing, skiing, 
Niagra-Falls-Barrel-Diving... etc)



Regarding the augmentation of LLMs...  we were all born in a time of huge 
augmentation in the form of libraries and books and most saliently perhaps 
reference books for our language (dictionary, encyclopedia, etc) and reference 
books to our myriad specialties (Technical Libraries).  *IN* my lifetime I have 
participated in the digitization of most if not all of that

Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

[Steve Smith]

What expertise I have is often manifest by a gut instinct that 
something is a bad idea.   I’m curious what daydreaming or 
brainstorming is like with gut feelings informed by all the things GPT 
systems have seen.    To me that sounds much more efficient than 
trying to communicate with Siri or fumbling with a keyboard (even 
though I’m a fairly fast typist).   That’s a high latency connection 
that requires coding and decoding language.  What is dreaming like 
with an integrated GPT-like database?


unfortunately you are singing my song here... or dreaming my dreams.  
This too compels me (or at least my ego?)...


For many years, I have felt that my own voracious appetite for the 
written, crafted, and produced creative constructions of others (aka 
literature, art, pop fiction, pop media, etc) has been "dreaming other 
people's dreams" and the nature of wireless streaming video into the 50" 
diagonal box in my living room, the 5" diagonal mobile phone in my hand, 
and the 360 degree stereographic sensorium of my Oculus  has jacked it 
up to a new level...


Our brains were (maybe) wired/evolved to stare into a flickering fire 
(or at the shadows thrown on the cave wall) and tell one another stories 
handed down and around, embellished, superposed, morphed, hyperbolized, 
personalized over a lifetime.   Surely Kokopelli's greatest gift to each 
village he entered was the gift of new ideas hidden in familiar but not 
stories?  That and (if the more salacious stories hold) the gift of an 
outsider's genetic material into the community.  The hard-goods or even 
seeds he might have carried in his Santa-esque backpack are 
qualitatively the same?


I am not *nearly* thoughtful enough about the schlock I consume... 
ranging from doomscrolling GoogleNews and YouTube to several 
high-production-quality Hollywood movies (blockbuster or not) a similar 
number of Indie flicks (often as high of quality surprisingly) and one 
or more ongoing Streaming Series.   In between all that passive "lean 
back" consumption (coupling?) I read a *lot* of long-form journalism and 
roughly as much Educated-Lay level professional sci/tech papers which 
impinge on my professional (and now more broadly personal) interests.


Following Piaget's theory of structural learning, I expect this either 
confronts my brain with regular "refactorings" or requires a lot of 
deprecation/pruning of things I "thought I knew".  I suspect if I were 
to go back and review the FriAM archives and my own (or anyone else's) 
text here I could find inflection points in the underlying "models" I 
was operating on at the time.  With enough time, the new models/patterns 
seem to be resolvable with the old ones in some kind of "meta-pattern* 
which can itself be a pattern worthy of abstracting/refactoring?


 Referencing Glen's references to "diachronic" vs "episodic" I am left 
with the feeling that these are "naturally" composed episodes with 
internal diachronicity but (for some more than others) also strung 
together diachronically to some extent?


Given that it is our "gut instincts", what if our AI were to engineer 
our gut biome to carry all that extra information and every meal is like 
a system update?





*From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Steve Smith
*Sent:* Monday, June 5, 2023 8:13 AM
*To:* friam@redfish.com
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

Marcus -

Even though I play the Luddite most of the time, I am in fact 
fascinated with the possibilities of post/transhumanism, at least in 
the sense that it feels "inevitable".   With the implied magnitude of 
qualitative change in Homo this-n-that to /Homo postHomo /or maybe 
/Homo Cyborgis/ or quite possibly Homo goneBabygoneNevertobeSeenAgain 
along with all mammalian/warm-blooded/vertebrate life, depending on 
our overshoot, it seems worth a second thought or two as to what we 
*might* have some control over.


We are about to enter a chaotic maelstrom of change, and while that 
can seem hopeless, I do believe that extreme sports enthusiasts are 
very precise about the line they enter their maelstroms from/on.  
(Surfing, skiing, Niagra-Falls-Barrel-Diving... etc)


Regarding the augmentation of LLMs...  we were all born in a time of 
huge augmentation in the form of libraries and books and most 
saliently perhaps reference books for our language (dictionary, 
encyclopedia, etc) and reference books to our myriad specialties 
(Technical Libraries).  *IN* my lifetime I have participated in the 
digitization of most if not all of that matter as well as adapting the 
professional and plebian workplaces to those changes, whilst adapting 
our personal lives (e.g. handheld device connected to the "global 
brain" 24/7) to those changes.   We can all probably conjure a 1000 
utopian/dystopian vignettes supporting/undermining any determination 
o

Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

[Steve Smith]

If/when/as AI (such a broad term, no?) can be used in the mode you 
describe here somewhat transparently I would likely be open to an 
"augmented intuition" mode of use


and as a point of gratuitous contention, how *does* one tell the 
difference between "stupid nonsense" and "an abductive candidate for 
experimental research"?   Is there truly a qualitative difference (in 
the world) or is that an artifact of our own judgement(s) based on some 
quantitative threshold(s)?


Your description of "T" Truth as a spanning kernel for a plurality of 
theories and models feels quite apt and the way I took the name of the 
Docuseries "Closer to Truth", very assiduously avoiding the specific 
"the Truth"...   and implying an "asymptotic" approach not a collision 
course.


As I look at the (near) decomposable systems and map it onto (near) 
spanning trees within process-relation networks of those systems I 
imagine these LLM training exercises building/finding highly connected 
clusters (like ganglia in vertebrate neural systems) which fundamentally 
reflect what KellyAnne Conway so naively claimed as "alternate realities".


If there is a singular capital T Truth (or capital R Reality) then it is 
probably at most apprehended by finite beings (who have not achieved 
Satori, nod to DaveW) as the superposition of many sub-complete T' (or 
R') descriptions?


- Steve

On 6/5/23 10:18 AM, glen wrote:
But this misses the point, I think. And, in fact, I think it's a 
mistake to focus too much on (natural) language models at all, even 
for things that *seem* to be all about language, like philosophy. I'm 
most interested in the concept of an embedding 
. Ideally, I'd like to be able 
to query a modeling system (e.g. decoding/encoding transformers) for a 
(vector) space that (accurately) encodes *both* James and Husserl. 
Then that would help satisfy Marcus' and EricS' task to see if there 
are gaps between them, or not.


The problem has nothing to do, really, with how much one might have to 
read/think in order to understand anything. Understanding is a 
delusion. What matters is the differences and similarities between any 
2 or more things (processes, devices, systems, whatever 'thing' might 
mean).


These automatic modelers (like the transformers) might help us do 
that. As for some kind of "ground truth", something that might provide 
a foundation like the physicists seem to think they have, if our 
automatic modeling device is capable of embedding all (or most) of all 
the models surrounding us (over time, space, and individual theorists 
or collections of theorists), then we can experimentally test for 
kernels/bases that can span *most* of those theories/models. If such a 
kernel exists, then it is a candidate for the capital T truth, and any 
theory/model that is not spanned by that kernel is either stupid 
nonsense or an abductive candidate for experimental research.


On 6/4/23 18:48, Frank Wimberly wrote:
As one of the few, if not the only, person who has been a full time 
employee of a philosophy department for multiple years, I am quick to 
defend my former colleagues.  Read "Actual Causation and Thought 
Experiments" by Glymour and Wimberly in J. K. Campbell, M. O'Rourke & 
H. S. Silverstein (eds.), Causation and Explanation. MIT Press


You don't have to read thousands, or even hundreds, of pages to be 
able to grok that paper.


---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Sun, Jun 4, 2023, 7:30 PM David Eric Smith > wrote:


    So there’s a rather concrete way in which one can imagine 
ChatGPT’s being particularly useful as a time-saver.


    I have heard it said (and find it persuasive), that philosophy is 
different from physics because what philosophers want to do and 
settle for being is different from that for physicists.


    A physicist can pick up F = ma and start from there to get 
something done.


    Each philosopher is, in a sense, a new beginning of the universe, 
and you are expected to read thousands of pages of his composition to 
be permitted to engage with him. That is a good barrier to exclude 
pretty-much-everbody from most conversations.


    But there are specific topics on which engaging with this group 
is a game of whack-a-mole, and it would be _so_ satisfying to catch 
that damned mole far enough out of the hole to pin him down to the 
board for once.


    It is on this point:

    Summarizing what, as Marcus rightly says, as been repeated 10^n 
times before, CGTP quotes:


    At the core of radical empiricism is the concept of "pure 
experience." According to James, pure experience refers to the 
immediate, unmediated apprehension of reality, devoid of any 
conceptual or interpretative filters. It involves experiencing the 
world as it is, without imposing preconceived notions or theories 
onto the experience.


    What the HELL does anyone think thi

Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

[Marcus Daniels]

What expertise I have is often manifest by a gut instinct that something is a 
bad idea.   I’m curious what daydreaming or brainstorming is like with gut 
feelings informed by all the things GPT systems have seen.To me that sounds 
much more efficient than trying to communicate with Siri or fumbling with a 
keyboard (even though I’m a fairly fast typist).   That’s a high latency 
connection that requires coding and decoding language.  What is dreaming like 
with an integrated GPT-like database?

From: Friam  On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, June 5, 2023 8:13 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism


Marcus -

Even though I play the Luddite most of the time, I am in fact fascinated with 
the possibilities of post/transhumanism, at least in the sense that it feels 
"inevitable".   With the implied magnitude of qualitative change in Homo 
this-n-that to Homo postHomo or maybe Homo Cyborgis or quite possibly Homo 
goneBabygoneNevertobeSeenAgain along with all mammalian/warm-blooded/vertebrate 
life, depending on our overshoot, it seems worth a second thought or two as to 
what we *might* have some control over.



We are about to enter a chaotic maelstrom of change, and while that can seem 
hopeless, I do believe that extreme sports enthusiasts are very precise about 
the line they enter their maelstroms from/on.  (Surfing, skiing, 
Niagra-Falls-Barrel-Diving... etc)



Regarding the augmentation of LLMs...  we were all born in a time of huge 
augmentation in the form of libraries and books and most saliently perhaps 
reference books for our language (dictionary, encyclopedia, etc) and reference 
books to our myriad specialties (Technical Libraries).  *IN* my lifetime I have 
participated in the digitization of most if not all of that matter as well as 
adapting the professional and plebian workplaces to those changes, whilst 
adapting our personal lives (e.g. handheld device connected to the "global 
brain" 24/7) to those changes.   We can all probably conjure a 1000 
utopian/dystopian vignettes supporting/undermining any determination of whether 
this is "for the good" or not.   I'm almost completely habituated to this 
"modern era" but old enough to still have intellectual inertia making paper 
maps, newspapers, magazines, etc.  at least *quaint* items if I almost always 
defer to the other.  I recently gifted my 1903 Blackies Encyclopedia set to a 
HS History teacher to use in his classes to give his students a snapshot of 
time *in the original text and atoms* for whatever that is worth.



I'm not likely to be an early adopter of neural interfaces (unless I face an 
acute disability in that area) but I am already a fairly regular 
GPT4-whisperer.  I can't say it has improved any of the practical aspects of my 
life (yet), but it has been an interesting correspondent in the way I usually 
burden *this group* with my maundering speculations.   GPT4 is infinitely 
patient, broadly and deeply informed, and only occasionally fails to provide me 
with some interesting feedback.



I recently funded a Kickstarter for a powered exoskeleton (Lower extremety 
only) which may return to me a little more mobility than megadosing NSAIDS and 
velcro-strapped stabilization belts for my hips...   I don't know that this 
will be anything more than a novelty or if it will be as (relatively) good as 
the Oculus (I've been playing with VR since before it was called that and was 
totally blown away by the "value" Oculus represents).





- Steve
I don't mean "we" as in FRIAM, I mean "we" as in nations.   A benefit of 
capturing knowledge with LLMs, or similar technology, is that people wouldn't 
need to be educated about the same material over and over, especially if these 
systems are integrated into our neural systems.  Why not have individuals 
inherit a common database so that their lives can be spent on differentiated 
activities?   There's so little that tie together individuals besides their 
fears and superstitions.  When I see chatGPT emit passable conversations like 
this, it seems kind of absurd to waste years of a young person's time covering 
the same old ground.  (Actually, it already seems that way to me.) Countries 
like Israel and Greece have mandatory military service.  Some believe this 
instills in them values greater than themselves.  In this case of the Borg, 
care of the collective is care of the self and vice versa.  The common practice 
in the open source LLM community of fine tuning pre-trained LLMs is so much 
more efficient than what humans do to educate.

From: Friam <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> on 
behalf of Jochen Fromm <mailto:j...@cas-group.net>
Sent: Sunday, June 4, 2023 3:17 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
<mailto:friam@redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Radical

Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

[glen]

But this misses the point, I think. And, in fact, I think it's a mistake to focus too 
much on (natural) language models at all, even for things that *seem* to be all about 
language, like philosophy. I'm most interested in the concept of an embedding 
. Ideally, I'd like to be able to query 
a modeling system (e.g. decoding/encoding transformers) for a (vector) space that 
(accurately) encodes *both* James and Husserl. Then that would help satisfy Marcus' 
and EricS' task to see if there are gaps between them, or not.

The problem has nothing to do, really, with how much one might have to 
read/think in order to understand anything. Understanding is a delusion. What 
matters is the differences and similarities between any 2 or more things 
(processes, devices, systems, whatever 'thing' might mean).

These automatic modelers (like the transformers) might help us do that. As for some kind 
of "ground truth", something that might provide a foundation like the 
physicists seem to think they have, if our automatic modeling device is capable of 
embedding all (or most) of all the models surrounding us (over time, space, and 
individual theorists or collections of theorists), then we can experimentally test for 
kernels/bases that can span *most* of those theories/models. If such a kernel exists, 
then it is a candidate for the capital T truth, and any theory/model that is not spanned 
by that kernel is either stupid nonsense or an abductive candidate for experimental 
research.

On 6/4/23 18:48, Frank Wimberly wrote:

As one of the few, if not the only, person who has been a full time employee of a philosophy 
department for multiple years, I am quick to defend my former colleagues.  Read "Actual 
Causation and Thought Experiments" by Glymour and Wimberly in J. K. Campbell, M. 
O'Rourke & H. S. Silverstein (eds.), Causation and Explanation. MIT Press

You don't have to read thousands, or even hundreds, of pages to be able to grok 
that paper.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Sun, Jun 4, 2023, 7:30 PM David Eric Smith mailto:desm...@santafe.edu>> wrote:

So there’s a rather concrete way in which one can imagine ChatGPT’s being 
particularly useful as a time-saver.

I have heard it said (and find it persuasive), that philosophy is different 
from physics because what philosophers want to do and settle for being is 
different from that for physicists.

A physicist can pick up F = ma and start from there to get something done.

Each philosopher is, in a sense, a new beginning of the universe, and you 
are expected to read thousands of pages of his composition to be permitted to 
engage with him. That is a good barrier to exclude pretty-much-everbody from 
most conversations.

But there are specific topics on which engaging with this group is a game 
of whack-a-mole, and it would be _so_ satisfying to catch that damned mole far 
enough out of the hole to pin him down to the board for once.

It is on this point:

Summarizing what, as Marcus rightly says, as been repeated 10^n times 
before, CGTP quotes:

At the core of radical empiricism is the concept of "pure experience." 
According to James, pure experience refers to the immediate, unmediated apprehension of 
reality, devoid of any conceptual or interpretative filters. It involves experiencing the 
world as it is, without imposing preconceived notions or theories onto the experience.

What the HELL does anyone think this is supposed to refer to?  I am not 
asking whether it actually does refer to anything, but rather what anyone 
believes he is saying by it.

And I can ask that in a rather concrete way.  Were James to engage with 
Husserl, would he claim that the access to the “immediate apprehension” is by 
way of the same portal as Husserl’s epoche?

I ask because they set themselves up to make a particular style of 
assertion.

By analogy, we have seen that human bodies can do things like Amanars and 
any of the 4 Bileses (which should have been 5, and would have been were it not 
for COVID).  But that doesn’t mean every human body can do any of them.  There 
is rather a lot of specific training that goes into becoming one of the bodies 
that can do any of this.

The various “internal” experience-focused philosophers present these things 
as doable, but technical and particular and requiring training.

But if you then ask what that is about, you get either a demand to follow 
several thousand pages in each person’s formulation, or the kind of cloudy 
motivational life-coach speech that almost all of the CGPT summary is composed 
of.  (Reminds me of something I once heard said of chimp speech: if you aren’t 
there working with them, you cannot anticipate how mind-numbingly repetitive it 
is).

So rather than asking “what it is” (the skill or whatever), I can ask “If 
they were arguing with each other, w

Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

[Steve Smith]

Marcus -

Even though I play the Luddite most of the time, I am in fact fascinated 
with the possibilities of post/transhumanism, at least in the sense that 
it feels "inevitable".   With the implied magnitude of qualitative 
change in Homo this-n-that to /Homo postHomo /or maybe /Homo Cyborgis/ 
or quite possibly Homo goneBabygoneNevertobeSeenAgain along with all 
mammalian/warm-blooded/vertebrate life, depending on our overshoot, it 
seems worth a second thought or two as to what we *might* have some 
control over.



We are about to enter a chaotic maelstrom of change, and while that can 
seem hopeless, I do believe that extreme sports enthusiasts are very 
precise about the line they enter their maelstroms from/on.  (Surfing, 
skiing, Niagra-Falls-Barrel-Diving... etc)



Regarding the augmentation of LLMs...  we were all born in a time of 
huge augmentation in the form of libraries and books and most saliently 
perhaps reference books for our language (dictionary, encyclopedia, etc) 
and reference books to our myriad specialties (Technical Libraries).  
*IN* my lifetime I have participated in the digitization of most if not 
all of that matter as well as adapting the professional and plebian 
workplaces to those changes, whilst adapting our personal lives (e.g. 
handheld device connected to the "global brain" 24/7) to those 
changes.   We can all probably conjure a 1000 utopian/dystopian 
vignettes supporting/undermining any determination of whether this is 
"for the good" or not.   I'm almost completely habituated to this 
"modern era" but old enough to still have intellectual inertia making 
paper maps, newspapers, magazines, etc.  at least *quaint* items if I 
almost always defer to the other.  I recently gifted my 1903 Blackies 
Encyclopedia set to a HS History teacher to use in his classes to give 
his students a snapshot of time *in the original text and atoms* for 
whatever that is worth.



I'm not likely to be an early adopter of neural interfaces (unless I 
face an acute disability in that area) but I am already a fairly regular 
GPT4-whisperer.  I can't say it has improved any of the practical 
aspects of my life (yet), but it has been an interesting correspondent 
in the way I usually burden *this group* with my maundering 
speculations.   GPT4 is infinitely patient, broadly and deeply informed, 
and only occasionally fails to provide me with some interesting feedback.



I recently funded a Kickstarter for a powered exoskeleton (Lower 
extremety only) which may return to me a little more mobility than 
megadosing NSAIDS and velcro-strapped stabilization belts for my 
hips...   I don't know that this will be anything more than a novelty or 
if it will be as (relatively) good as the Oculus (I've been playing with 
VR since before it was called that and was totally blown away by the 
"value" Oculus represents).





- Steve

I don't mean "we" as in FRIAM, I mean "we" as in nations.   A benefit 
of capturing knowledge with LLMs, or similar technology, is that 
people wouldn't need to be educated about the same material over and 
over, especially if these systems are integrated into our neural 
systems.  Why not have individuals inherit a common database so that 
their lives can be spent on differentiated activities?   There's so 
little that tie together individuals besides their fears and 
superstitions.  When I see chatGPT emit passable conversations like 
this, it seems kind of absurd to waste years of a young person's time 
covering the same old ground.  (Actually, it already seems that way to 
me.) Countries like Israel and Greece have mandatory military service. 
 Some believe this instills in them values greater than themselves. 
 In this case of the Borg, care of the collective is care of the self 
and vice versa.  The common practice in the open source LLM community 
of fine tuning pre-trained LLMs is so much more efficient than what 
humans do to educate.


*From:* Friam  on behalf of Jochen Fromm 


*Sent:* Sunday, June 4, 2023 3:17 PM
*To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 


*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism
Discussions with large language models are new. But you are right, we 
had discussions of similar topics before. Maybe I was hoping I could 
inspire Nick and/or Eric to write a summary of their ideas and what we 
have discussed before ( such as the solution to the hard problem of 
consciousness, the nature of subjective experience and what it has to 
do with path dependence, complexity science and James' radical 
empiricism ).


-J.


 Original message 
From: Marcus Daniels 
Date: 6/4/23 9:54 PM (GMT+01:00)
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 


Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

The conclusion I draw is that these 

Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

[Prof David West]

What James is talking about / alluding to:

  A - Hallucinogens (which he did experience) where the "preconceived notions 
of theories" are disrupted, and one gropes to make sense of what is 
apprehended. But, this is only a partial example as multiple perceptual 
filters, "oh wow the colors, the colors," are still present.

B- Satori (which I do not think James claims to have experienced but was aware 
of others making the claim) where there is no separation between "self" and 
"universe." But, in this instance the term "experience" is nonsensical because 
the implied experiencer does not exist.

C- Hallucinogens and satori (incidental and ephemeral Satori) which is an 
'additive" experience as described by Huxley with mescaline—a kind of 
"extra"—ordinary experience.

As to agreement with Husserl: not "same" but "similar" in a faceted way.

davew


On Sun, Jun 4, 2023, at 7:29 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> So there’s a rather concrete way in which one can imagine ChatGPT’s being 
> particularly useful as a time-saver.
> 
> I have heard it said (and find it persuasive), that philosophy is different 
> from physics because what philosophers want to do and settle for being is 
> different from that for physicists.
> 
> A physicist can pick up F = ma and start from there to get something done.
> 
> Each philosopher is, in a sense, a new beginning of the universe, and you are 
> expected to read thousands of pages of his composition to be permitted to 
> engage with him. That is a good barrier to exclude pretty-much-everbody from 
> most conversations.
> 
> But there are specific topics on which engaging with this group is a game of 
> whack-a-mole, and it would be _so_ satisfying to catch that damned mole far 
> enough out of the hole to pin him down to the board for once.
> 
> It is on this point:  
> 
> Summarizing what, as Marcus rightly says, as been repeated 10^n times before, 
> CGTP quotes:
> At the core of radical empiricism is the concept of "pure experience." 
> According to James, pure experience refers to the immediate, unmediated 
> apprehension of reality, devoid of any conceptual or interpretative filters. 
> It involves experiencing the world as it is, without imposing preconceived 
> notions or theories onto the experience.
> 
> What the HELL does anyone think this is supposed to refer to?  I am not 
> asking whether it actually does refer to anything, but rather what anyone 
> believes he is saying by it.
> 
> And I can ask that in a rather concrete way.  Were James to engage with 
> Husserl, would he claim that the access to the “immediate apprehension” is by 
> way of the same portal as Husserl’s epoche? 
> 
> I ask because they set themselves up to make a particular style of assertion. 
>  
> 
> By analogy, we have seen that human bodies can do things like Amanars and any 
> of the 4 Bileses (which should have been 5, and would have been were it not 
> for COVID).  But that doesn’t mean every human body can do any of them.  
> There is rather a lot of specific training that goes into becoming one of the 
> bodies that can do any of this.
> 
> The various “internal” experience-focused philosophers present these things 
> as doable, but technical and particular and requiring training.
> 
> But if you then ask what that is about, you get either a demand to follow 
> several thousand pages in each person’s formulation, or the kind of cloudy 
> motivational life-coach speech that almost all of the CGPT summary is 
> composed of.  (Reminds me of something I once heard said of chimp speech: if 
> you aren’t there working with them, you cannot anticipate how mind-numbingly 
> repetitive it is).  
> 
> So rather than asking “what it is” (the skill or whatever), I can ask “If 
> they were arguing with each other, would they even assert to each other, each 
> with his supposed privileged appreciation of the mysteries, assert or deny 
> that they are referring to the same thing.
> 
> This might allow us to not have to approach the full body of philosophical 
> literature as if each corpus were Sui generis.  
> 
> Eric
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> On Jun 5, 2023, at 2:43 AM, Jochen Fromm  wrote:
>> 
>> ChatGPT now allows sharing conversations. I've asked it about William James 
>> book "Essays in Radical Empiricism"
>> https://chat.openai.com/share/375aef4e-a8d6-467e-8061-bd85b341c46b 
>> 
>> 
>> -J.
>> 
>> -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom 
>> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fbit.ly%2fvirtualfriam&c=E,1,4Ej-3WkzCsdOezlOTkNab8YSgaX0yBT2eojMrJ5Omb3C9jhx2WvM4dgLzpGaWvUDS5G11eH0hi6f2CP8LuQiU78N4nd8_nDmSPnY

Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

[David Eric Smith]

Very good Frank.

Smacked for making generalizations.  As it should be.

Eric


> On Jun 5, 2023, at 10:48 AM, Frank Wimberly  wrote:
> 
> As one of the few, if not the only, person who has been a full time employee 
> of a philosophy department for multiple years, I am quick to defend my former 
> colleagues.  Read "Actual Causation and Thought Experiments" by Glymour and 
> Wimberly in J. K. Campbell, M. O'Rourke & H. S. Silverstein (eds.), Causation 
> and Explanation. MIT Press
> 
> You don't have to read thousands, or even hundreds, of pages to be able to 
> grok that paper.
> 
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
> 
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
> 
> On Sun, Jun 4, 2023, 7:30 PM David Eric Smith  > wrote:
>> So there’s a rather concrete way in which one can imagine ChatGPT’s being 
>> particularly useful as a time-saver.
>> 
>> I have heard it said (and find it persuasive), that philosophy is different 
>> from physics because what philosophers want to do and settle for being is 
>> different from that for physicists.
>> 
>> A physicist can pick up F = ma and start from there to get something done.
>> 
>> Each philosopher is, in a sense, a new beginning of the universe, and you 
>> are expected to read thousands of pages of his composition to be permitted 
>> to engage with him. That is a good barrier to exclude pretty-much-everbody 
>> from most conversations.
>> 
>> But there are specific topics on which engaging with this group is a game of 
>> whack-a-mole, and it would be _so_ satisfying to catch that damned mole far 
>> enough out of the hole to pin him down to the board for once.
>> 
>> It is on this point:  
>> 
>> Summarizing what, as Marcus rightly says, as been repeated 10^n times 
>> before, CGTP quotes:
>> At the core of radical empiricism is the concept of "pure experience." 
>> According to James, pure experience refers to the immediate, unmediated 
>> apprehension of reality, devoid of any conceptual or interpretative filters. 
>> It involves experiencing the world as it is, without imposing preconceived 
>> notions or theories onto the experience.
>> 
>> What the HELL does anyone think this is supposed to refer to?  I am not 
>> asking whether it actually does refer to anything, but rather what anyone 
>> believes he is saying by it.
>> 
>> And I can ask that in a rather concrete way.  Were James to engage with 
>> Husserl, would he claim that the access to the “immediate apprehension” is 
>> by way of the same portal as Husserl’s epoche? 
>> 
>> I ask because they set themselves up to make a particular style of 
>> assertion.  
>> 
>> By analogy, we have seen that human bodies can do things like Amanars and 
>> any of the 4 Bileses (which should have been 5, and would have been were it 
>> not for COVID).  But that doesn’t mean every human body can do any of them.  
>> There is rather a lot of specific training that goes into becoming one of 
>> the bodies that can do any of this.
>> 
>> The various “internal” experience-focused philosophers present these things 
>> as doable, but technical and particular and requiring training.
>> 
>> But if you then ask what that is about, you get either a demand to follow 
>> several thousand pages in each person’s formulation, or the kind of cloudy 
>> motivational life-coach speech that almost all of the CGPT summary is 
>> composed of.  (Reminds me of something I once heard said of chimp speech: if 
>> you aren’t there working with them, you cannot anticipate how mind-numbingly 
>> repetitive it is).  
>> 
>> So rather than asking “what it is” (the skill or whatever), I can ask “If 
>> they were arguing with each other, would they even assert to each other, 
>> each with his supposed privileged appreciation of the mysteries, assert or 
>> deny that they are referring to the same thing.
>> 
>> This might allow us to not have to approach the full body of philosophical 
>> literature as if each corpus were Sui generis.  
>> 
>> Eric
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On Jun 5, 2023, at 2:43 AM, Jochen Fromm >> > wrote:
>>> 
>>> ChatGPT now allows sharing conversations. I've asked it about William James 
>>> book "Essays in Radical Empiricism"
>>> https://chat.openai.com/share/375aef4e-a8d6-467e-8061-bd85b341c46b 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> -J.
>>> 
>>> -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
>>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>>> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom 
>>> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fbit.ly%2fvirtualfriam&c=E,1,4Ej-3WkzCsdOezlOTkNab8YSgaX0yBT2eojMrJ5Omb3C9jhx2WvM4dgLzpGaWvUDS5G11eH0hi6f2CP8LuQiU78N4nd8_nDmSPnYUPlAc6HvS3mraZcO1Qss&typ

Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

[Marcus Daniels]

I don't mean "we" as in FRIAM, I mean "we" as in nations.   A benefit of 
capturing knowledge with LLMs, or similar technology, is that people wouldn't 
need to be educated about the same material over and over, especially if these 
systems are integrated into our neural systems.  Why not have individuals 
inherit a common database so that their lives can be spent on differentiated 
activities?   There's so little that tie together individuals besides their 
fears and superstitions.  When I see chatGPT emit passable conversations like 
this, it seems kind of absurd to waste years of a young person's time covering 
the same old ground.  (Actually, it already seems that way to me.) Countries 
like Israel and Greece have mandatory military service.  Some believe this 
instills in them values greater than themselves.  In this case of the Borg, 
care of the collective is care of the self and vice versa.  The common practice 
in the open source LLM community of fine tuning pre-trained LLMs is so much 
more efficient than what humans do to educate.

From: Friam  on behalf of Jochen Fromm 

Sent: Sunday, June 4, 2023 3:17 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

Discussions with large language models are new. But you are right, we had 
discussions of similar topics before. Maybe I was hoping I could inspire Nick 
and/or Eric to write a summary of their ideas and what we have discussed before 
( such as the solution to the hard problem of consciousness, the nature of 
subjective experience and what it has to do with path dependence, complexity 
science and James' radical empiricism ).

-J.


 Original message 
From: Marcus Daniels 
Date: 6/4/23 9:54 PM (GMT+01:00)
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism


The conclusion I draw is that these conversations have all occurred before.  So 
I wonder, why have them?



From: Friam  On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm
Sent: Sunday, June 4, 2023 10:44 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism



ChatGPT now allows sharing conversations. I've asked it about William James 
book "Essays in Radical Empiricism"

https://chat.openai.com/share/375aef4e-a8d6-467e-8061-bd85b341c46b



-J.


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Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom 
https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
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Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

[Frank Wimberly]

As one of the few, if not the only, person who has been a full time
employee of a philosophy department for multiple years, I am quick to
defend my former colleagues.  Read "Actual Causation and Thought
Experiments" by Glymour and Wimberly in J. K. Campbell, M. O'Rourke & H. S.
Silverstein (eds.), Causation and Explanation. MIT Press

You don't have to read thousands, or even hundreds, of pages to be able to
grok that paper.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Sun, Jun 4, 2023, 7:30 PM David Eric Smith  wrote:

> So there’s a rather concrete way in which one can imagine ChatGPT’s being
> particularly useful as a time-saver.
>
> I have heard it said (and find it persuasive), that philosophy is
> different from physics because what philosophers want to do and settle for
> being is different from that for physicists.
>
> A physicist can pick up F = ma and start from there to get something done.
>
> Each philosopher is, in a sense, a new beginning of the universe, and you
> are expected to read thousands of pages of his composition to be permitted
> to engage with him. That is a good barrier to exclude pretty-much-everbody
> from most conversations.
>
> But there are specific topics on which engaging with this group is a game
> of whack-a-mole, and it would be _so_ satisfying to catch that damned mole
> far enough out of the hole to pin him down to the board for once.
>
> It is on this point:
>
> Summarizing what, as Marcus rightly says, as been repeated 10^n times
> before, CGTP quotes:
>
> At the core of radical empiricism is the concept of "pure experience."
> According to James, pure experience refers to the immediate, unmediated
> apprehension of reality, devoid of any conceptual or interpretative
> filters. It involves experiencing the world as it is, without imposing
> preconceived notions or theories onto the experience.
> What the HELL does anyone think this is supposed to refer to?  I am not
> asking whether it actually does refer to anything, but rather what anyone
> believes he is saying by it.
>
> And I can ask that in a rather concrete way.  Were James to engage with
> Husserl, would he claim that the access to the “immediate apprehension” is
> by way of the same portal as Husserl’s epoche?
>
> I ask because they set themselves up to make a particular style of
> assertion.
>
> By analogy, we have seen that human bodies can do things like Amanars and
> any of the 4 Bileses (which should have been 5, and would have been were it
> not for COVID).  But that doesn’t mean every human body can do any of
> them.  There is rather a lot of specific training that goes into becoming
> one of the bodies that can do any of this.
>
> The various “internal” experience-focused philosophers present these
> things as doable, but technical and particular and requiring training.
>
> But if you then ask what that is about, you get either a demand to follow
> several thousand pages in each person’s formulation, or the kind of cloudy
> motivational life-coach speech that almost all of the CGPT summary is
> composed of.  (Reminds me of something I once heard said of chimp speech:
> if you aren’t there working with them, you cannot anticipate how
> mind-numbingly repetitive it is).
>
> So rather than asking “what it is” (the skill or whatever), I can ask “If
> they were arguing with each other, would they even assert to each other,
> each with his supposed privileged appreciation of the mysteries, assert or
> deny that they are referring to the same thing.
>
> This might allow us to not have to approach the full body of philosophical
> literature as if each corpus were Sui generis.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jun 5, 2023, at 2:43 AM, Jochen Fromm  wrote:
>
> ChatGPT now allows sharing conversations. I've asked it about William
> James book "Essays in Radical Empiricism"
> https://chat.openai.com/share/375aef4e-a8d6-467e-8061-bd85b341c46b
> 
>
> -J.
>
> -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom
> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fbit.ly%2fvirtualfriam&c=E,1,4Ej-3WkzCsdOezlOTkNab8YSgaX0yBT2eojMrJ5Omb3C9jhx2WvM4dgLzpGaWvUDS5G11eH0hi6f2CP8LuQiU78N4nd8_nDmSPnYUPlAc6HvS3mraZcO1Qss&typo=1
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Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

[David Eric Smith]

So there’s a rather concrete way in which one can imagine ChatGPT’s being 
particularly useful as a time-saver.

I have heard it said (and find it persuasive), that philosophy is different 
from physics because what philosophers want to do and settle for being is 
different from that for physicists.

A physicist can pick up F = ma and start from there to get something done.

Each philosopher is, in a sense, a new beginning of the universe, and you are 
expected to read thousands of pages of his composition to be permitted to 
engage with him. That is a good barrier to exclude pretty-much-everbody from 
most conversations.

But there are specific topics on which engaging with this group is a game of 
whack-a-mole, and it would be _so_ satisfying to catch that damned mole far 
enough out of the hole to pin him down to the board for once.

It is on this point:  

Summarizing what, as Marcus rightly says, as been repeated 10^n times before, 
CGTP quotes:
At the core of radical empiricism is the concept of "pure experience." 
According to James, pure experience refers to the immediate, unmediated 
apprehension of reality, devoid of any conceptual or interpretative filters. It 
involves experiencing the world as it is, without imposing preconceived notions 
or theories onto the experience.

What the HELL does anyone think this is supposed to refer to?  I am not asking 
whether it actually does refer to anything, but rather what anyone believes he 
is saying by it.

And I can ask that in a rather concrete way.  Were James to engage with 
Husserl, would he claim that the access to the “immediate apprehension” is by 
way of the same portal as Husserl’s epoche? 

I ask because they set themselves up to make a particular style of assertion.  

By analogy, we have seen that human bodies can do things like Amanars and any 
of the 4 Bileses (which should have been 5, and would have been were it not for 
COVID).  But that doesn’t mean every human body can do any of them.  There is 
rather a lot of specific training that goes into becoming one of the bodies 
that can do any of this.

The various “internal” experience-focused philosophers present these things as 
doable, but technical and particular and requiring training.

But if you then ask what that is about, you get either a demand to follow 
several thousand pages in each person’s formulation, or the kind of cloudy 
motivational life-coach speech that almost all of the CGPT summary is composed 
of.  (Reminds me of something I once heard said of chimp speech: if you aren’t 
there working with them, you cannot anticipate how mind-numbingly repetitive it 
is).  

So rather than asking “what it is” (the skill or whatever), I can ask “If they 
were arguing with each other, would they even assert to each other, each with 
his supposed privileged appreciation of the mysteries, assert or deny that they 
are referring to the same thing.

This might allow us to not have to approach the full body of philosophical 
literature as if each corpus were Sui generis.  

Eric





> On Jun 5, 2023, at 2:43 AM, Jochen Fromm  wrote:
> 
> ChatGPT now allows sharing conversations. I've asked it about William James 
> book "Essays in Radical Empiricism"
> https://chat.openai.com/share/375aef4e-a8d6-467e-8061-bd85b341c46b 
> 
> 
> -J.
> 
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Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

[Steve Smith]

All art is derivative, so why bother... really?


On 6/4/23 1:53 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:


The conclusion I draw is that these conversations have all occurred 
before.  So I wonder, why have them?


*From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Jochen Fromm
*Sent:* Sunday, June 4, 2023 10:44 AM
*To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 


*Subject:* [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

ChatGPT now allows sharing conversations. I've asked it about William 
James book "Essays in Radical Empiricism"


https://chat.openai.com/share/375aef4e-a8d6-467e-8061-bd85b341c46b

-J.


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Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

[Jochen Fromm]

Discussions with large language models are new. But you are right, we had 
discussions of similar topics before. Maybe I was hoping I could inspire Nick 
and/or Eric to write a summary of their ideas and what we have discussed before 
( such as the solution to the hard problem of consciousness, the nature of 
subjective experience and what it has to do with path dependence, complexity 
science and James' radical empiricism ).-J.
 Original message From: Marcus Daniels  
Date: 6/4/23  9:54 PM  (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity 
Coffee Group  Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism 

The conclusion I draw is that these conversations have all occurred before.  So 
I wonder, why have them?
 


From: Friam  On Behalf Of
Jochen Fromm
Sent: Sunday, June 4, 2023 10:44 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism


 

ChatGPT now allows sharing conversations. I've asked it about William James 
book "Essays in Radical Empiricism"


https://chat.openai.com/share/375aef4e-a8d6-467e-8061-bd85b341c46b


 


-J.


 




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Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

[Marcus Daniels]

The conclusion I draw is that these conversations have all occurred before.  So 
I wonder, why have them?

From: Friam  On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm
Sent: Sunday, June 4, 2023 10:44 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

ChatGPT now allows sharing conversations. I've asked it about William James 
book "Essays in Radical Empiricism"
https://chat.openai.com/share/375aef4e-a8d6-467e-8061-bd85b341c46b

-J.

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[FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

[Jochen Fromm]

ChatGPT now allows sharing conversations. I've asked it about William James 
book "Essays in Radical 
Empiricism"https://chat.openai.com/share/375aef4e-a8d6-467e-8061-bd85b341c46b-J.-. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
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