DocWatts

Thank you!

Hello fellow actualizers, thought I might share a write-up from my philosophy book, '7 Provisional Truths: How We Come To Know Things, And Why It Matters'. In this section, I explore the dichotomy between Absolutism and Relativism, while offering a more pragmatic 'middle way' for thinking about knowledge, grounded in the role that our minds play in constructing an experiential reality. Hope you enjoy! ___________________________________________________________________________________________ The Enactive Approach How can we navigate between the extremes of unyielding certainty and paralyzing skepticism? One method is to chart a ‘middle way’ that’s grounded in our lived engagement with the world. Mind you, this ‘middle way’ doesn’t mean finding a lukewarm compromise that’s halfway between these opposing sides. Rather, it involves rejecting the game entirely, and shifting to a new playing field with a fresh set of rules for thinking about certainty. Our name for this framework is Enactivism, and its course-correction emerges from acknowledging the active role that minds play in ‘bringing forth’, or enacting, an experiential world. Having left the old playing field behind, Enactivism threads a course between two traditional opponents: Absolutism and Relativism. The former contending that knowledge is strictly impersonal; perhaps best personified by the statement that ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’. While the latter attests that knowledge is inherently perspectival, meaning that it’s unavoidably interpreted through a set of individual and social circumstances. Our decision to name this framework Enactivism is no accident - 'enact' means to 'carry out' or 'bring to fruition'. The etymology of our term hints at its core hypothesis: that knowledge is constructed. The key insight? Knowledge doesn’t exist ‘out there’, as a fixed feature of some ‘neutral’ Reality. Nor does it emerge as a pure invention of an isolated mind. Instead, it arises at the intersection of mind, body, and environment, through a dynamic feedback loop we call world disclosure. The crux of world disclosure is that our minds give us an experiential Reality to live in that comes pre-arranged in terms of our needs and capacities. Enactivism extends this insight by showing that knowledge emerges from the relational process between a living body-mind and its environment. Far from being passive receptors for ‘external’ inputs, our mind works in tandem with our living body and our environment to actively construct an experiential reality. The most impressive part? Most of this occurs beneath conscious awareness - our minds' considerable effort to construct an intelligible reality is largely invisible to us And while this generative process can lead to reliable knowledge about Reality, what it can’t provide is absolute certainty. Our knowledge remains inseparable from our lived perspective within Reality, and the perspectives of living minds are necessarily bounded by biology. So does this condemn us to be forever isolated within our individual perspective? Far from it! As we’ll see, our shared evolutionary heritage makes possible stable forms of knowledge that are broadly applicable. An additional aspect of Enactivist epistemology lies in its insistence that Absolutist and Relativist accounts are true, but partial. What this means is that both viewpoints contain elements of truth, but are partial in the sense that they miss the dynamic interplay between observer and observed - how mind and world define and shape one another in a dynamic feedback loop. Armed with this insight, our Enactive approach will aim to synthesize aspects of these two opposing accounts, while rejecting key assumptions from both. Enactivism rejects the shared assumption that knowledge is primarily conceptual, and mostly a matter of holding beliefs. As we’ve seen, this is flawed because it fails to account for how nonconceptual ways of knowing and being are central to everyday life. Our extended survey on the centrality of Situated Coping for everyday forms of knowing and being was an articulation of this precise point. Another area where Enactivism parts way with both camps lies in another one of their shared blind spots: treating knowledge as disembodied. This oversight has direct implications for how perspectives shape knowledge; both Absolutism and Relativism miss the mark here, though for different reasons. Absolutism gets it wrong by ignoring how perspectives inevitably shape what counts as valid knowledge. While Relativism falls short by fixating on the social and cultural dimensions of knowledge, overlooking how our shared human perspective within Reality opens the door to forms of understanding that transcend individual and societal contexts. Lastly, Enactivism shatters a final cornerstone of these opposing views: that there's an absolute boundary between ourselves and the world. It rejects the notion that Reality can be neatly divided into an 'external' world of objects and an 'internal' world of experience. As we’ll see, this taken-for-granted divide dissolves under closer scrutiny. This perceived boundary typically masks a deeper assumption: that one of these domains - internal or external - is more ‘real’ than the other. We can see this in materialist perspectives that try to ‘explain away’ consciousness, arguing that minds are nothing more than an arrangement of matter and energy. On the flip side of the coin, certain spiritual perspectives contend that physical reality is a mere illusion created by our minds. Both instances are illustrative of reductionism - trying to ‘explain away’ a particular phenomena by conjecturing that it’s in fact a property of something else. As we’ll see, one of Enactivism’s core aims is to sidestep this tug-of-war over what’s ultimately ‘real’, in favor of a pragmatic perspective grounded in everyday experience. A guiding insight of this pragmatism could be summed up as: no unmediated access to Reality - that our embodied perspective within Reality is what’s ultimately ‘real’ for us. Precisely because it’s only through this perspective that we have access to a world of people, place, and things, theorizing about what Reality ultimately 'is' is beside the point - when what we actually care about is what Reality is for us. This shift in focus opens a more fruitful path forward. By questioning the fixed boundary between ourselves and the world, we can explore our interaction with these domains without falling into the trap of reductionism. Enactivism's key insight? The divide between 'self' and 'world' is mentally constructed - indeed, the world itself is indispensable to what minds are. With this groundwork in place, it becomes clear why Enactivism offers a compelling 'middle way' for thinking about certainty - without succumbing to a half-hearted compromise between two played-out extremes. Yet instead of a stubborn refusal to find anything of value in these camps, Enactivism reveals how their partial insights can be synthesized into a fresh perspective for reflecting upon our lived experience. The cornerstone of this synthesis? It lies in recognizing that while knowledge is perspectival, perspectives aren’t boundless - they’re grounded in a shared biological and evolutionary context. As a practical matter, there are fundamentals that human beings can and must be able to agree upon to have functional societies. In every society, people fall in love, have children, get sick, grow old, and die. While the meanings we attach to these experiences vary across cultures, their universality creates common ground for shared understanding. So that’s the gist of the Enactive approach. What’s to follow is a brief followup on the Absolutist and Relativist viewpoints which Enactivism offers itself as an alternative to. Our aim is to unearth the basic assumptions behind both viewpoints, while excavating the partial truths contained within. Lastly, we’ll tie this all together with a look at the meaning crisis that’s unfolding within the West, why this crisis calls for reconstructive epistemology, and how Enactivism can play a small but promising part in bridging these divides.

Thanks for this, as it's especially relevant at our current moment: "[They] did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now [in 1946].” ― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45' In Weimer Germany's last free elections, not everyone casting ballots for the Nazis would have described themselves as a Nazi, and a lot of them didn't have any particular animosity towards Jewish people. What was far more common was that folks saw some personal advantage to throwing their lot in with vengeful nationalists, and were willing to downplay and excuse the monstrous things that Hitler and the Nazis were saying and doing at the time - just as people today are willing to downplay Trump's violent hateful rhetoric, his numerous crimes, the January 6th insurrection, and the Republican Party's ongoing coup attempt. Likewise, the vast majority of Trump supporters don't think of themselves as fascist enablers, but what they fail to recognize is that today's fascism couches itself in traditional American values, weaponized against out-groups within American society - just as Nazi fascism marketed itself in traditional German values, weaponized against the out-groups of its day. It's exactly this type of dynamic that the 'Banality of Evil' was referring to.

Thank you! Let's save our democracy!!

Most of my posts tend to be in the Intellectual Stuff and the Society & Politics sections, since that's closer to my areas of expertise. I do engage in vipassana meditation, but I'll fully admit that meditation isn't the main focus of my contemplative work. I've spent the last two years writing a book on introspective epistemology (a 'field guide' to construct awareness, as I pitch it), and I've been working with some other philosophically minded folks in metro Detroit to build an in-person metamodern forum (https://fluidityforum.org/vision/). Over the years I've diverged from Leo's particular approach to spirituality, since at some point I think you do need to step aside from your initial influences and forge your own path. My work focuses more on embodied phenomenology - basically, understanding how we create knowledge from within the limitations of our lived, human perspective within Reality; and what this means for our constructed sense-making frameworks. That said, there's still a lot that I agree with Leo about, but I'd say that we have very different areas of emphasis. Psychedelics isn't a focus of my work, though I fully recognize that they can be very useful for subjective consciousness expansion. I approach nondualism in a different way than Leo. And I also place less emphasis on frameworks like Spiral Dynamics, since I feel that in practice it's often used as a form of epistemological and sociological bypassing.

Thank you for this. The number of people simping for an OBVIOUS authoritarian grifter in what's supposedly a conscious politics forum has been disappointing. The immaturity, equivocation, whataboutism, and excuses are more reflective of what I would expect to see in a Facebook comment section, or from talking to low-information voters. It's certainly not evident of people who've put in the work to have a solid grasp of epistemology, that's for damned sure.

All that LGBTQ want is to be able to do their business, wash their hands, and go back to whatever it was they were doing without being threatened or harassed. This a total non issue. The only reason it's being harped on is to deny trans people access to public spaces. Trans bathroom panic is the modern equivalent of the 'whites only' water fountain.

Howdy! Thought I might share this write-up I did on the origins of modern science, which delves into how our intuitions about relevance (what is and isn't considered important for a particular problem) inform our problem solving frameworks. This write up is prelude to a deconstruction of scientific realism for the philosophy book I've been writing, 7 Provisional Truths. Enjoy! _______________________________________________________________ Horizons Of Relevance The crux of empiricism's staying power, in both its early and scientific incarnations, stems from its broad applicability to a wide range of practical problems. The key to this versatility? It’s tied to why our problem-solving frameworks are useful to us in the first place. Just as tools empower us to shape raw materials into desired forms, methodologies such as empiricism equip us to steer events towards desired outcomes. Put simply, a methodology is a structured, replicable practice for guiding actions towards an intended purpose. When working as intended, the guidance that these frameworks provide isn’t arrived at by happenstance. It instead follows from successfully pinpointing what’s relevant for a particular problem. While pinning down what’s pertinent to a given goal may sound straightforward, it can be deceptively complex. Our lifetime of experience with everyday tasks tends to mask the formidable challenge of discerning relevance in situations where we lack this expertise. The process of determining what's salient - that is, what stands out as important - for a given purpose is known within cognitive science as relevance realization. While it’s yet to become a household term, relevance realization exposes a pivotal aspect of our problem-solving that's easily overlooked in folk-epistemology. The development of germ theory aptly exemplifies many of these challenges. It shines a spotlight on how our intuitions of salience can be highly misleading, while revealing the ease with which outcome-determinative factors can elude the untrained eye. While it’s become common sense that diseases are transmitted by germs spread through bodily fluids and contaminated material, this wasn’t evident to anyone just a few centuries ago. The existence of microorganisms, not to mention their power to disrupt our bodily processes, isn’t an inference that’s readily drawn from surface-level observation. The barrier to connecting these dots can be traced back to the environmental context that our perceptual abilities are adapted to. In essence, our sensory systems are evolutionarily calibrated to an intuitive, human-centric scale. Think of this perceptual baseline as the person-sized ‘factory setting’ to which our experience of both space and time is instinctively attuned. To borrow and extend a term from meteorology, let’s call this anthropocentric frame of reference the mesoscale (from the ancient Greek words for 'middle' and 'size'). So what’s the link between the mesoscale and our intuitions about relevance? The connection is that it’s our perceptual canvas for drawing inferences from our embodied experience. Though our intuitions of relevance are formed at the mesoscale, this anthropocentric realm is just a tiny slice of Reality. Venturing beyond this familiar domain poses a number of unique challenges, beyond the fact that phenomena become difficult to observe and manipulate as the scale shifts away from our day-to-day perspective. At extremely small and large scales, everyday phenomena can behave in very counterintuitive ways. Take water, for instance. While its behavior is well accounted for at the mesoscale, from an ant’s point of view water becomes a sticky, globule-like substance with significant surface tension. And from a planetary vantage point, its currents shape the climates of entire continents as it circumnavigates the globe. Moreover, we often fail to grasp how day-to-day phenomena are intrinsically linked to processes operating at temporal and spatial realms vastly smaller or larger than our habitual frame of reference. Returning to our water example, for most of human history it would have taken a feat of imagination to connect the ocean tides to the invisible pull of the distant moon and sun. That is, until Newton's field guide to universal gravitation upended our cosmic perspective. By the same token, attributing the air that we breathe to the waste products of tiny, invisible creatures in the oceans would have seemed equally far-fetched. Then imagine Leeuwenhoek’s surprise at his chance encounter with microbes from tinkering with glass lenses - and how this discovery would go on to change the world. The basic takeaway is that our habitual intuitions about relevance are tightly bound to the mesoscale that serves as our stage for daily life. While early empiricism probed the limits of this human-sized backdrop, venturing beyond its comfortable boundaries requires highly specialized techniques. Which brings us to the innovations that the scientific method brought to empiricism - and how its transformation of daily life propelled this methodological toolkit into a bona fide folk-theory of Reality. But before we part the veil of scientific realism, it will be instructive to touch upon the historical contingencies that gave birth to modern science. Lest we forget, the scientific method wasn’t an inevitability, and its successes were far from guaranteed. Instead, the achievements that would propel the popular image of science from a specialized mode of inquiry into a de facto ‘theory of everything’ weren’t preordained. Far from mythological depictions of science as a universal cipher to ‘life, the universe, and everything’, it’s important to keep in mind that the science method was invented - not ‘discovered’. In keeping with our theme that our human perspective within Reality is an essential feature of our problem solving frameworks, the story of science can be traced to a specific time and place that was ripe for an epistemological revolution. The Historical Foundations Of Modern Science The iterative toolkit that would become modern science found its initial foothold in 16th and 17th century Europe, amidst a convergence of highly contingent social factors. A Pandora’s Box of socially disruptive forces was busy uprooting European civilization from feudalism, which had taken root in the ruins of the Western Roman Empire. The prevailing social order, consisting of subsistence farmers bound in hereditary service to a military aristocracy, had been devastated by the Black Death - a civilizational apocalypse that wiped out a third of Europe’s population. Carried by flea-infested rats who’d made themselves at home amidst the open-sewers and waste-filled streets of European towns and cities, the fetid conditions of daily life were ripe for this plague to spread its tendrils into every corner of society. Sparing neither cities nor countryside, Europe experienced rapid depopulation over just a handful of years, shattering the demographic foundations that had sustained feudalism for centuries. With laborers now worth their weight in gold, centuries of feudal bondage began to crumble, sowing the seeds of a transformative zeitgeist which would go on to change the world. From feudalism's ashes, a new social order was coalescing around a form of economic activity that historians would later term mercantilism. Driven by commercial interests and secured by maritime power, cosmopolitan exchange was the lifeblood of this new order, flowing into Europe from the New World. Of course, this early form of globalization bore little resemblance to ‘peaceful exchange’ - it was enforced with brutal systematicity through guns, germs, and steel. Alongside these developments, the Protestant Reformation had loosened the Catholic Church’s iron grip over European thought, undermining its ability to suppress knowledge perceived as a threat to its authority. This decentralization of knowledge was accelerated by the printing press, which opened the doors to a dissemination of information on an unprecedented scale. Ancient Greek empiricism, preserved as an incidental byproduct of European monastic transcription and Islamic scholarship, was finding a new audience amongst an emerging stratum of society eager for practical knowledge. An ascendant entrepreneurial class, unshackled from centuries of feudal constraints, found its interests increasingly served by empirical proofs over appeals to authority. To that end, military competition amongst rival European powers had created a practical need for what we would now call ‘Research and Development’, entailing a far more rigorous approach for how ideas are tested against reality. In sum: it would be a mistake to think of the development of science as inevitable. Quite the contrary: it was driven by practical problems which emerged due to a convergence of historical contingencies. The impetus behind the invention of science can be traced to limitations of early empiricism, which was proving inadequate as the problems it was applied to became increasingly complex. The crux of these shortcomings is that pre-scientific empiricism was calibrated to search for patterns of relevance within our person-sized mesoscale. In itself, there’s nothing surprising in this limitation, since the mesoscale is the obvious place to begin probing for clues in lieu of additional information that points elsewhere. But lest we paint a misleading picture, let’s make sure to give early-empiricism its due before moving forward; for it was able to accomplish quite a lot within this narrow, person-sized slice of reality. Beyond setting the stage for modern science, its success in probing this everyday domain brought us the principles behind many ideas and technologies that we still rely upon today. Agriculture, mathematics, navigation, and wheeled transport are testaments to this legacy. These noteworthy achievements notwithstanding, compared to its later scientific variant, the scope of problems that early empiricism was effective for was reaching a perceptual ceiling. The crux of the matter is that there’s nothing inherently special about the mesoscale, beyond the fact that it’s what our perceptual system and intuitions are calibrated for. And as we’ve seen, what affects us on the mesoscale can have explanations that are invisible to us from this perceptual default. And with that, we wrap this lightning tour of the historically contingent origins of modern science. As we’ve seen, empiricism was a notable expansion in our problem-solving repertoire, applicable to a host of day-to-day domains. But it would pale in comparison to the profound shift that occurred as the scientific method emerged. As we’ll see, its unprecedented operational success in transforming virtually every aspect of daily life would inadvertently birth a strange metamorphosis. What began as a more rigorous iteration of empiricism would be gobbled up, bit by bit, by tacit Transcendental assumptions that are outside of what science itself can provide evidence for. In our next section, we'll pull back this veil of scientific realism to reveal the more nuanced relationship between our models and the Reality they approximate.

What people should keep in mind is that the apt historical comparison at this point is the rhetoric and tactics the Nazis were using to destroy Weimer democracy in the early 1930s, while they still had some constraints on their behavior (just like American fascism is working to subvert the constraints that are imposed upon them by American democracy). It's unfortunate that the type of folk-history that's common here in the 'States mostly mostly glosses over how the Nazis were able to subvert democracy, with most of the focus going to the horrific things they did while they were in power (which is obviously very important, but less instructive for where we're at now). (To that end, I would HIGHLY recommend 'The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic' by Benjamin Carter Hett as a resource for anyone who wants an in-depth account of this).

The racism on display was so ugly and blatant that the public relations teams for the RNC (!!) are working overtime to backpedal from the rhetoric here. Puerto Ricans (who I remind you are American citizens) were literally referred to as 'garbage' by an RNC vetted 'comedian', reading from a teleprompter. Mind you, this is coming on the heels of Trump literally praising Hitler, endorsing a self-described 'black Nazi' for governor of North Carolina, calling immigrants 'vermin', referring to American citizens who oppose his dictatorial plans as 'the enemy within', and openly stating that he wants to deploy the military against United States citizens. Short of Trump stepping on stage in front of a swastika and calling for a final solution to the 'illegals' problem, it's hard to think of how the historical parallels could be made any more blatant at this point.

Welp, wasn't expecting a full-blown reboot of the infamous infamous 1939 Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden as Trump's 'October Surprise' (just a week before the election, no less), but we find ourselves living in strange times.

YouTube has had a longstanding policy of demonitizing and delisting videos for controversial topics that aren't palatable to advertisers (meaning they're on the site, but they won't show up in your Recommended feed). I've seen vids on topics such as suicide and the Holocaust get delisted. Ever notice a video title with 'N*zi' instead of 'Nazi' in the title? That's that the algorithm at work. Little surprise if Rogan's three hour pow-wow with a rapist who launched a violent coup against our government is deemed 'controversial' by the algorithm.

This ^. From their point of view, Trump is stern father figure who's fighting to protect their way of life from encroachment by a host of perceived enemies who aren't deserving of equal treatment (immigrants, LGBTQ people, etc). It's a form of aggrieved entitlement, born of fears about a loss of social status. Read about the psychology of what was going through the heads of people defending white supremacy in the Confederacy and Jim Crow apartheid state that followed, and you won't be far off.

Hi, MrTruf. In the event of Trump victory, I plan to stay engaged, build grass roots support for midterm elections on the local and state level, push my local representatives to resist implementing discriminatory federal policies towards marginalized people in my state, support the shit out of pro-democracy organizations like the ACLU which will be working to protect American citizens from having their rights and freedoms stripped away. Also take steps to protect myself and people I care about from state sponsored violence, if it comes to that.

Holding Trump's inner circle and the stochastic terrorists he's inspired accountable for flagrantly criminal actions isn't an iron first, it's the bare minimum for adhering to the Rule Of Law, essential for any functioning democracy. Donald Trump getting to effectively be above the law because he's got a violent Cult behind him sets a ruinous precedent. It's the equivalent of letting Hitler and his brown-shirts off the hook for trying to overthrow the Weimer government in his Beer Hall Putsch (in reality, Hitler got off the hook with a short, relatively comfortable prison sentence) - and we saw how that turned out. What's supposed to happen within a democracy is that when a political party loses, it's supposed to go back to the drawing board, figure out what went wrong, and figure out how to garner enough public support to win the next. Instead of changing course and moderating its views to be more palatable to ordinary Americans, the modern Republican Party has decided that they'd be better of ending democracy rather than competing for power within democracy.