[ExI] Filtering Digests

[Jef Allbright]

On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 12:44 AM, Anna Taylor <femmechakra at yahoo.ca> wrote:

>   Like Jef said, maybe it's all subjective, maybe it won't amount to anything but a mere great listening but I find that highly unlikely.

Anna -

My point about subjectivity is not that everyone has their own
subjective view of "the meaning" of things, but that all meaning is
necessarily subjective. From a putatively objective god's-eye view,
there is no meaning, but only what is.  Subjectivity entails not
merely knowledge that is approximate and incomplete, but knowledge
with *meaning*, due to the model's causal relationship with the course
of development and present state of the agent within a given
environment of interaction with "reality."

An effective understanding of subjectivity is essential for a coherent
theory of values, self, and moral agency.  The practical value of this
(yes, philosophical) metaethical understanding consists in its
coherence: in the elimination of effort wasted in pursuit of moral
absolutes, whether based on instinct, supposed providence, perceived
virtue, expected consequences, etc.,  and the resultant improved focus
of attention, and thus effort, on (1) an increasingly effective model
of fine-grained hierarchical values coherent over increasing context
of meaning-making, and (2) increasingly effective instrumental methods
in principle, promoting those values over increasing scope of
consequences.

It's an evolutionary process.  It's always ongoing in the natural
self-organizational tendency toward selection for increasingly
synergistic locally dissipative structures.  But it's only recently
that we've become aware enough of our place within the system to focus
not just on getting what we think we want, but on improving the
process of knowing what we want and how better to get it.

------------

As for email filtering, I have hundred of "filters", classifying by
topic and sub-topic and then ranking according to salience.  I don't
simply dump anyone's posts in the bit-bucket, but there is a strong
tendency for certain email to end up near the bottom and never get
read.

- Jef