David Deutsch ↔ McGilchrist's brain hemisphere model
- Other people who may have interesting thoughts on this
- @mindmeanings
- @JakeOrthwein
- who has also written a David Deutsch ↔ Meaningness bit
- @CallumFlack
- Outline of thoughts
- Resonances
- Both McGilchrist & Deutsch hold that both reductionism & holism* are limited perspectives
- [BoI, ch5]
- > While I am on the subject of bad philosophical doctrines with moral overtones, let me add holism, a sort of mirror image of reductionism. It is the idea that the only valid explanations (or at least the only significant ones) are of parts in terms of wholes.
- [TMAHE, various sources on reductionism]
- McGilchrist doesn't actually mention holism by name, though frequently refers to the right hemisphere as holistic
- but it seems there's kind of a naive holism
- that Deutsch points out [BoI, ch5] is anti-science
- and McGilchrist clearly isn't coming from there
- contrasted with a kind of holism that isn't about parts in terms of wholes but about...
- nathanfillion.gif
- something much more intertwingled
- politics - idea and its opposite can both be good
- Popperian piece about value of majority government for avoiding compromise
- McGilchrist's notion of department of inverse policy
- fallability
- @JakeOrthwein: This bit from McGilchrist seems very Popperian. Definitely seems possible to square him with the conjecture/criticism view of knowledge. Don’t know re: universality.
- Dissonances
- One is a basic difference in stance, re "criticism"
- Critical Rationalism is, well, founded on criticism
- McGilchrist's first paper is literally titled "Against Criticism"
- these are slightly different meanings but far from irrelevant
- ...
- effect of criticism on culture... undermines solidarity & cohesiveness in groups
- CR has a kind of motte-bailey between criticism & feedback
- feedback from a systems perspective is constant and relentless (although you can ignore it)
- any dialogue is full of feedback, even if it has no criticism
- straw-CR: "you need to be able to criticize institutions"
- << what about other kinds of feedback
- straw-CR: either
- those are technically criticism too
- feedback that's not criticism is irrelevant
- CR, as a rationalism, necessarily makes rationalist errors
- though fewer than some
- very idealistic & sort of quasi-eternalistic
- although again a kind of figure-ground thing here... it's eternalistic about not-knowing, sort of
- interesting thread by Chapman about how rationalism has been debunked for a long time but nobody had
- something about the relationship to paradox & parallax
- models in tension rather than one is an error
- concept of evil - but how are you relating with your concept of evil?
- CR - due to lack of knowledge
- McG resonates more with Carse
- section 31
- the whole thing about what has happened during and since the scientific revolution
- whole thing about Deutsch not getting the transition phase
- "progress" as having LH flavor
- Architecture-independence & computation & Universality
- I tweeted about excerpts from McG and got
- UnivEx profoundly confused as an idea
- people bake in all sorts of weird assumptions
- this is something that Eliezer gets
- naive concept of AI is very LH-centric
- UnivEx is a bit better, but still missing
- nebulosity
- situatedness & embodiment
- if it was as simple as universal explainer, the thing would either WORK or NOT
- brain injuries (strokes etc) would not cause the kind of utterly bizarre effects that you see
- oh, apparently I tweeted this and got a reply
- reply:
- When a computer breaks, shit can get weird, too: the fan keeps running, or the housing gets really hot, or it randomly flashes bright colors, some keys work while others do not, it keeps beeping for no apparent reason, it runs all programs fine except the calculator app... etc.
- ahh but the reply misses the point. almost none of the things there are relevant to the actual cognition etc
- like they're mostly just on the physical dimension, and inasmuch as physical damage would undermine a the calculator running....... it wouldn't prevent installing a different calculator app, or reinstalling the app in a different location on the hard drive (maybe there's an issue with that sector)
- moreover, either he didn't read or didn't understand the details of what I said, because the weirdness is at a totally difference scale
- so maybe a different way to put this is that if you were running a universal explainer (should such a thing exist as a fungible concept) on a computer, and you damaged the computer, it would either cease to be a universal explainer or not.
- aha! yes, it illustrates the contradiction by pointing at how by reifying architecture-doesn't-matter universal computer, it creates an all-or-nothingness, which then contradicts what we know about how weird shit can get from brain injuries & strokes
- externalities etc
- the idea that your solutions can create not just more problems but *worse* problems
- Figure-ground shifts
- [ relates to "Deutsch as best pitch for why LH needs to own a RH" ]
- [defn of emergence]
- framing of everything as problem-solving
- you're outside the problem
- vs Kegan's "the problems solve you"
- (Popper maybe less confused - "fall in love with a problem" is relational)
- he was writing in 20s-60s, etc
- context
- co-creating
- generating the source of the problem by how you're relating to <whatever>, both intellectually & emotionally
- (relates to post-regret etc)
- [relation to constructivism & effects of concepts on perception]
- aboutness↔withness
- fixingness - post-fixing
- ~"any institution that closes off the opportunity to correct errors, is bad"
- ~Bateson "without feedback any system goes insane"
- Other stuff about David Deutsch
- Lack of criticism & creativity from Deutsch-followers
- Deutsch critiques the noble savage image, but doesn't seem to have any explanation for what is of interest/use/value/meaning of older ways of meaning-making
- (ie what de Quincey would call "pre-conquest" cultures)
- Continuum Concept says a bunch of things that I think Deutsch doesn't have good explanations for
- re machetes
- resonance around not coercing kids, but different frame
- "oh no, preventing danger"
- but you never get to understand what happens if you don't prevent the danger
- threats as working through counterfactuals
- which connects with the cassava thing too! (in a sort of different thing)
- the culture is not-even-coercive-in-the-first-place
- you could frame it as Pepe criticizing Cesar by saying "look how we do it and how happy we are" but that would be missing the point!
- "unconscious conjectures" about how he wants to live?
- totally different meaningmaking frame
- so in terms of anti-rational memes, what are the memes here?
- Cesar behaving differently on the action-level (not gardening)
- and yet he was encouraged, on a meaning-level meme, to active from a place of enjoyment
- (and which there clearly are things of value!)
- (otherwise you wouldn't have the observation in early colonial America that European settlers would run away from their families to join the indigenous people (and would run again if rescued!) but not the reverse in the same way)
- what I find myself concluding in relating David Deutsch & Continuum Concept says a bunch of things that I think Deutsch doesn't have good explanations for
- is that there must be a stable possibility of an anti-rational memeplex that isn't based on traumatizing people, and that this is how things functioned in many (most? all?) prehistoric cultures and many tribes etc like the Tauripan in the Cesar story
- so it's still a static society
- but... yeah. this is what is pointed at by H1 vs H2, tribal vs empire, etc
- my previous model was just that this had something to do with pure punishment vs double-binds, but reading the Pepe/Cesar story I feel clear that it must be something where there isn't punishment on the meta-level
- Call between me & @CallumFlack
- talking about On Dialogue by David Bohm
- C: doesn't Deutsch critique Bohm?
- M: yeah
- (similar to Finite & Infinite Games by James Carse)
- Deutsch saying "the best way to deal with silly ideas is to take them seriously, and just try to explain how they could work"
- C: reading Deutsch and then your suggestion to read McGilchrist... set me on a whole path for the last 18mo
- haven't connected with any kind of rationalist subculture or anything
- have been very far from that world
- C: what theory is, theorizing is not
- what bullshit is, bullshitting is not
- M: I love this ^
- M: holism - Bohm
- both relativity & quantum mechanics have a kind of inseparability
- Korzybski:
- C: hall of mirrors - replacing thing with re-presentation
- twitter as commenting on the world but not being the world
- M: but being the world in a different sense!
- C: next thing I'm going to be reading is some Alfred North Whitehead
- pre-linguistic stuff
- M: not pre-interpretational
- C:... british electronica in the 90s ...fridge noises
- Autechre - Warp Tapes 89-93
- M: Bohm & truth vs meaning
- C: Deutsch's bit on explanations connects with meaning vs truth
- like if you have a model, you don't need to run the experiment to know that eating a kilo of grass daily for a month won't turn you into a grasshopper
- C: aesthetic arrest
- M: PCT & disrupting objectifier layer - thingness isn't conceptuality
- C: stan brakhage films
- C: I do a similar thing with my kids, we find random objects and try to come up with stories
- although I guess that's not on the level of objects, but more like on the level of meanings
- Other stuff
- Jake Orthwein > But in the Deutschian view, the inexplicit and nebulous can in principle be made explicit and precise. In the McGilchrist view, this can’t be done without loss of meaning. Fallibilism doesn’t get you irreducible nebulosity.
2 linked references
November 13th, 2021
- the human may be able to understand every phenomenon, and in that sense be a universal explainer
- but it can't have every experience, or see the world from every perspective