Reality is alive: don't carve it
- status: braindump
- This is intended to be a sort of rebuttal to Eliezer's "Where to Draw the Boundaries?" article which (as far as I can tell) is what got rationalists talking about how to best "carve reality at its joints".
- The metaphor I think goes back to something about a skilled butcher being able to waste little effort by knowing where the knife could pass cleanly through.
- Many aspects of Eliezer's piece itself are spot on, but "Half the world's problems are caused by inappropriate metaphors.", and the carving metaphor doesn't make sense for complex systems.
- The rebuttal comes from a #systems thinking perspective. At the moment this page is mostly a collection of sources.
- The main source is from The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge, specifically this principle:
- (there were a few paragraphs I've edited out - read them "Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants" here)
- Something something right hemisphere something something
- This is related to how the left hemisphere sort of like assembles things from parts, and it's not that the right hemisphere's perspective is a "whole made of parts" but that it starts with the everythingness of everything before even considering how one might talk about dividing it
- What kinds of metaphors animate the living functioning system with all of its interactions?
- October 8th, 2020 After some further digesting I have come to some further clarity, that I'm not sure I would have understood at the time when I first coined Reality is alive: don't carve it
- Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, as a frame, is the same kind of cutting and it has a hydra effect that just makes more tangles.
- Michael "Valentine" Smith > maybe not cut, but still "penetrate"
- re penetrate - you can penetrate through to clarity, but you can't obviate the work of untangling
- Michael "Valentine" Smith April 18th, 2021 > or maybe a better way to point at untangling, in the sexual metaphor, is "seduce"
- foreplay necessary for penetration to be good!
- Sources:
- limits of reductionism
- Sarah says Russell Ackoff has a thing about managing messes
- from Already Free by Bruce Tift
- Nora Bateson's "Warm Data" concept
- that as I understand it is saying
- for complex systems, we can't separate the data from its context, sterilize it, and expect it to still be adequate for understanding what's going on
- from Engaging Iain McGilchrist: Ascetical practice, brain lateralization, and philosophy of mind (paywalled)
- > If we adopt a LH approach to the structure of the world, we look narrowly. Analytic discourse aims to break things down into constituent parts, clarify what the parts are“in themselves,”and reconstitute the entity in question by putting the bits together again. While this helps to understand a man-made entity such as a machine—since a machine is put together in the way this mode of understanding aims to simulate—it works only in a limited, and potentially misleading, way for organic entities where there are no separable elements, and where such elements as can be identified are not best understood in isolation.
- A quote from Aella
- like, a sense that the truth is lightly held and alive and wriggling, and to allow it to keep living instead of killing it in an attempt to understand what it's made of
- (Context)
- re: masculine/feminine, I still am not sure what exactly it is, but I think that poetry would scratch the 'missing' itch I'm feeling here
- but not just straight-up poetry, rather more... integrated poetry
- Not like "Here's a copypaste of something I wrote or a poem I like", but instead fused with the words people use to talk about things and tease things out
- light-touch-play-delight, like a game
- Also this tweet
16 linked references
November 23rd, 2021
- oooh, found a cutting metaphor that I actually like: the Gordian Knot
- here "cutting" refers to "refusing to accept others' assumptions about how a problem must be solved
- although wikipedia says
- > Both Plutarch and Arrian relate that, according to Aristobulus, Alexander the Great pulled the linchpin from the pole to which the yoke was fastened, exposing the two ends of the cord and allowing him to untie the knot without having to cut through it. Some classical scholars regard this as more plausible than the popular account.
- which suggests that even here, cutting doesn't work!
psychopaths
Too-pithy summary of my perspective. Written March 6th, 2020 › Existing Game A societies are places where psychopathic b…
- For more on how blame is a confusion, read Reality is alive: don't carve it
July 7th, 2021
- this tweet on you can't add or subtract something from a person relates to Reality is alive: don't carve it
March 2nd, 2021
- have thought for awhile that untangle seems like a good verb for sorting out internal and interpersonal stuff (vs eg "cut" or "hack" - see Reality is alive: don't carve it)
Self-Help Myth
- lots of things that are off about his frame, including the whole "hacking" concept - Reality is alive: don't carve it
February 18th, 2021
call with Qiaochu, co-reading PJ Eby's Self-Help Myth › Q > "mind-hacking" is just such a bad aesthetic. I really…
- hacking metaphor
- as a computer metaphor, either
- hostile (as in hacking a server)
- kludgy & fragile (as in hacking together a solution)
- as a physical metaphor
- violent/destructive (hacking with a knife, axe, or machete)
- but TOTALLY HACK AT THE MAP
- (I think? this seems right. relates to critique ideas, not people, etc)
February 12th, 2021
- this quote from Eugene Gendlin
- > Against Vivisection:
The reader may now check how well I have communicated up to now. Can you follow this specification?:
The most common sort of unhelpful inward activity today is not mere intellectualization or rationalization, nor even the same feelings over and over. Today the most common ineffective attempt to help oneself inside is what we now call "vivisection." One is very active "upstairs" in one's mind, drawing maps and attempting to understand one's trouble, thinking this, and thinking that, but instead of merely intellectualizing, one feels in one's gut every move one makes upstairs! Just about all these moves hurt.
Attending to These Hurts and Gut Feelings Generated by One's Own Cutting is Not Focusing, and Is Not to be Recommended!!
In the days when people were largely out of contact with their feelings, the map-making upstairs was mere intellectualizing. Now it is worse! That is your gut you are now cutting up, this way or that, as directed from your head.
The inward process we are specifying involves keeping quiet, and sensing the unease in the body, directly, whole as it comes, without putting ones maps, cuts, and distinctions on that. If you let your attention go directly to the bodily unease, you feel a little bit better.
Then let that make the map, let that sort itself into whatever parts or pieces it falls into on its own. But begin always with "that whole business" and not with anything you cut out of your living inside.
However well you think you have defined a problem, consider it as also undefined. Use what you have been calling it merely as a pointer, and call it "all that", whatever it may be and whatever may go with it, without first cutting it up and feeling the effects of this cutting.
February 11th, 2021
- Michael "Valentine" Smith > maybe not cut, but still "penetrate"
June 29th, 2020
- Something about addition is an inappropriate operation to perform on a human being or a world or really any real system, which itself is quite related to Reality is alive: don't carve it
- — 29 —
Do you want to improve the world?
I don't think it can be done.
The world is sacred.
It can't be improved.
If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it.
There is a time for being ahead,
a time for being behind;
a time for being in motion,
a time for being at rest;
a time for being vigorous,
a time for being exhausted;
a time for being safe,
a time for being in danger.
The Master sees things as they are,
without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way,
and resides at the center of the circle.
June 18th, 2020
- Holons are related to Reality is alive: don't carve it
- Also an excerpt from Romeo Stevens (mis)Translating the Buddha
- > We try to ascertain the aspects of objects that are stable, controllable, satisfying so that we can own, or associate with those aspects. We ignore or try to push away aspects of the objects that make us feel hopeless, helpless, worthless, empty. This carving up of objects has little to do with how they are in the world, so the mental stories we build out of these carved up objects are also incoherent. One way I’ve found helpful for spotting this is to notice that what is really happening in moment by moment experience is that I’m very rapidly doing a bunch of inferences on the object, and then throwing out the original data and only keeping the results of these inferences.
"may all beings be at ease"
- This relates to Reality is alive: don't carve it
"unnatural" is unnatural
- Reality is alive: don't carve it, related to unworkable carvings of boundaries more generally