[ExI] Uploading and selfhood (explication)

[Michael Miller]

Hi Jef, thanks for the criticism. I'm not 100% sure what it is you're saying, or to where precisely the critique is aimed. However, half of me wants to answer that it is indeed purely philosophical navel-gazing. That is largely what I'm interested in ;)

However the other half feels very tempted to respond thusly:  The attempt to find a full and developed understanding of the human condition - and especially one's own place within this - is necessarily the first step towards any kind of action. Pragmatism which is done without this first step having been correctly implemented will often lead to disastrous results. There are always assumptions behind any action, one of the philosopher's jobs is to bring those assumptions to light so they can be questioned. I definitely don't think that arbitrariness is part of the picture. I think the relocation of human consciousness within its domain of subjectivity (this word is becoming very overused and I fear is beginning to fail us, or at least me) is essential - the struggle for objectivity and the apparent desire to place 'minds' within an objective reality (rather than accepting the two as complementary poles of a single system) seems very dangerous and has lead
 to the belief that all of value can be described best by the scientific method.

I don't deny "reality", if this is your implication. I am not a solipsist. But, it is not here that the most important things happen. And neither is it in the individual mind. The most important arena is the point where minds meet and create the social strata, which is where meaning is generated, and our thoughts are conditioned by the interpersonal forces mediating between reality and the individual (because, none of us approach the world alone...we all exist within the sphere of culture which gives meaning to our thoughts).

But yes, point taken I think...this is one of the more abstract conversations I've had, but I still think how we go about forming our ideas of the world is of crucial importance to any kind of decision-making.

Mike

PS - Postmodernist mental masturbation. I quite like this. I think the pretend solidities of modernism needed to be challenged by a world-view slightly more fluid and dynamic. Mysticism only really succeeds when it ceases being vague and imbues a light bright enough to be guided by.

----- Original Message ----
From: Jef Allbright <jef at jefallbright.net>
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2008 3:54:28 PM
Subject: Re: [ExI] Uploading and selfhood (explication)

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 4:07 AM, Michael Miller <ain_ani at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I've been thinking more about this, and I think there is quite a deep
> misunderstanding between us that reflects a comment someone else made a
> while back - you're talking about ontology, whereas I'm talking about
> epistemology. This is why I keep trying to shake off the
> 'realist-antirealist' boxes, because they're irrelevant to what I'm talking
> about.

[Jumping back into this sandbox for just a moment.]

Michael, you're making a very important point -- crucial to
increasingly effective reasoning involving issues of meaning (value)
-- but your thinking strikes me as lacking an additional layer that
makes the difference between purely philosophical navel-gazing and
pragmatic modeling as a basis for effective decision-making.  Put
[too] simply, it is essential that while every agent's model of
"reality" is entirely subjective, this in no way entails
arbitrariness.  A metaphor that works for me is that we (as subjective
agents) are like the leaves of a tree of increasing possibility
connected by branches of increasing probability.  The root of that
tree represents the "reality" that we can never know.

To grasp this is to have a pragmatic (rather than "True")
understanding of the is/ought problem, and the crucial basis for
increasing agreement as to what must be considered increasingly
"right" or "moral" as we model the branches of that increasingly
objective tree supporting our increasing subjective explorations of
possibility-space.

Apologies in advance for what might appear to be excessively abstract.
 For the record, I abhor vague mysticism, relativism (in the strong
sense), and postmodernist mental masturbation.  So, you can infer that
I mean something other than what might appear to fit such categories.
It's just that this medium of discussion is miserably poor for
conveying complex contexts.

    "The purpose of abstracting is not to be vague,
     but to create a new semantic level in which one
     can be absolutely precise."

     - Edsger W. Dijkstra, _The Humble Programmer_

- Jef
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