Are You Dreaming that You're Living in a Simulation?

 https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf

Had more fun reading this and discussing it with students than I have had with anything I've read in a while. It certainly stimulates conversation. It's true this is simply a complex variation on, "If we're living in God's dream, what happens if he wakes up?" Or, perhaps it's the 21st Century's version of Plato's Cave. As grounded in science as it might be--or at least as we're led to believe, since that might simply be part of the simulation--it can't hide that it's idealism in new wine skins. (Parse that allusion out.)

Mindful Sports Performance Enhancement

“This is the true athlete – the person in rigorous training against false impressions. Remain firm, you who suffer, don’t be kidnapped by your impressions! The struggle is great, the task divine – to gain mastery, freedom, happiness, and tranquility.” Epictetus

MSPE is so new when I typed the term into Wikipedia I received the following: The page "Mindful sport performance enhancement" does not exist. You can ask for it to be created, but consider checking the search results below to see whether the topic is already covered.

So, even though its sufficiently off the beaten track as walked by social media that it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, sports psychologists are doing research in the field. (Does it only qualify as a field if it has a Wikipedia page?) I've posted some academic articles here so I can come back and do a little reading when I have the time: 

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12671-014-0360-9

http://journals.humankinetics.com/doi/abs/10.1123/jcsp.3.4.357

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10942-006-0023-4

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2182/cjot.2011.78.1.7

http://psychology.cua.edu/res/docs/Kaufman-et-al-JCSP-2009.pdf

http://boazfeldman.com/EN/Sports_Enhancement_files/One_Year_Follow-Up_of_Mindful_Sport_Performance_Enhancement_-_MSPE_-_With_Archers_Golfers_and_Runners.pdf

http://www.thetrueathleteproject.org/uploads/3/1/3/9/31399101/jcsp_mspe_for_runners.pdf
The pop-psych version: http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2017/12/make-better-decisions/http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2017/12/make-better-decisions/

Aristotle on the Senses

Plato distrusted the senses. That's at least one of the points he was making in the Allegory of the Cave. In the opening of  Metaphysics Aristotle takes the opposite tack. For him, the senses, and especially the sense of sight, provides evidence of our desire to know, in other words, are the evidence of, if not the basis for, a thirst for knowledge, perhaps even philosophy:  


"ALL men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things." 

Currently listening to Augustine's "Confessions." In Book Ten he writes about the "Lust of Sight," by which he seems to be wary of "the beautiful," which was so much a part of Greek philosophy. The problem for Augustine was that what was good in the physical world might actually take our attention away from the God who created the good. He admitted that he was never sure whether he loved the good or loved the God behind the good. 

This strikes me as an almost impossibly high bar, and Augustine takes the only way out, which is to deny himself goods, or at least too much of any one good, to guard against losing sight of God. For instance, he wrote about taking care only to eat enough to sustain the health of his body. 

His ideas hark back to Plato, since he has made a distinction between what we can see and what we cannot, and what we cannot is better than what we can. His visible is a gift from God, and reflects his goodness, even though not as . . . at question is whether a reflection is a major distinction from an imitation. 

Was Descartes the First Hippy?

"But I believed that I had already given sufficient time to languages, and likewise to the reading of the writings of the ancients, to their histories and fables. For to hold converse with those of other ages and to travel, are almost the same thing. It is useful to know something of the manners of different nations, that we may be enabled to form a more correct judgment regarding our own. [Consequently], as soon as my age permitted me to pass from under the control of my instructors, I entirely abandoned the study of letters, and resolved no longer to seek any other science than the knowledge of myself, or of the great book of the world."

Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences. Rene Descartes

Reconceptualizing Ethos, Logos, Pathos

"Mosquito battle gets political: Genetic engineering plan raises fears of 'Jurassic Park' invasion"

https://projects.jsonline.com/news/2017/10/5/mosquito-battle-gets-political.html
 


This article discusses the ongoing controversy over releasing genetically modified mosquitoes in Key West, Florida, to combat the spread of mosquito born disease. As the sub-title suggests, people have equated genetic engineering with the movie Jurassic Park.


Explaining resistance to the plan, James Lavery, the Hilton Chair in Global Health Ethics at Emory University, admits, “We have this kind of arrogance as scientists that once the findings will speak for themselves, then everything will change." He adds, “I always say that stories trump data and relationships trump stories. Scientists just sort of believe  that their data should prevail at all times because it’s science, but we know from policy that that’s just not the way it works.”

Is it too much to match Lavery's terms--data, stories, relationships--with logos, pathos, ethos? If we do, what does that get us?

We certainly get a different way of thinking of these three terms than the standard interpretation from Aristotle. Logos matches data pretty well, though we know the term meant much more than this to the Greeks. Pathos in this quotation becomes stories, and the ways they move us. I can remember crying when Old Yeller died, even though I knew the dog playing Old Yeller in the movie didn't actually die, that since I saw the movie years after it was filmed, had probably already been dead for years. But, that data didn't matter to me. I cried. That's what stories do to us, they move us, not necessarily in tandem with the data, though not necessarily against it either. In science, according to Lavery, there often isn't any story at all; therefore, the data has almost no impact. We might go as far as to say that it doesn't even have logos, if by logos we mean that connection between reality and the intellect contained in that companion word, nous, also critical to Greek ideals. Ethos, in this rewriting, takes on a stronger position in the digital age even than it did for the Greeks. In the Polis, all interaction was built on strong personal connections that aren't sufficiently captured by the word, "friendship." Everyone knew from long experience almost everyone they came into contact with. In the multicultural, digital, social networked age we live in, our range of acquaintances is broad--and confused, fuzzy, often as in the case of celebrities, entirely fictional. Because these relationships are so small in comparison to society as a whole, and how we number who to include in the category "relationships" has become so tenuous, ethos has become even more powerful for us than it was for the Athenians, yet potentially so much more deceiving. Add the way so many of us only follow internet news that supports our preconceptions and you have a formula for belief in conclusions with no premises as all.

“What is more wholesome than any particular belief is integrity of belief.” Charles Sanders Peirce

I would love to let this statement stand on its own. Yet, I know that sound bites don't incline us to to any sort of complex thinking. And as short at it is; this sentence is very complex.

Sound bites allow too much room for interpretation, they take the words, not only out of the context of the surrounding words, but out of the context of the writer's ideas and into any unexplored context that fits only tangentially. A couple of examples of re-contextualization might suffice to show what I mean. 

George Santayana’s succinct and oft (too oft) quoted, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (The Life of Reason 1 284) is usually interpreted as referring to history. Those who cannot remember the Holocaust are in danger of repeating similar atrocities. Those who cannot remember Trump may be convinced by another demagogue. As true as these statements might be, they couldn't be further from the point Santayana was trying to make. In The Life of Reason, he was writing a history, it is true, but about a history of reason, of ideas, and of the progress of philosophy. There are moments that it feels like he is writing a progressivist evolution of rationality--from Plato to Hume to Kant, Parmenides and Heraclitus to Russell (a bit of irony, there). There are other moments, and this is what I think he was really saying in this quotation, when it feels like he is writing about the give and take of pluralism and monism, realism and idealism, and cautioning us against ignoring previous thinkers lest we simply repeat their words rather than add to the conversation. He cautioned us against constantly starting over. To remember the past means to know what Kant thinks so we can build on those ideas, take the conversation a little further.

“The exception that proves the rule.” I’m going to let Mental Floss handle this one. Sure this online newsletter has articles like, “10 Fascinating Facts about Airplane Bathrooms.” But its categories, “Change Matters,” “Science,” and “History,” can be entertaining as well as informative, without playing to the lowest common denominator, which admittedly, can be quite low on the internet. http://mentalfloss.com/article/52698/how-does-exception-prove-rule The explanation on this site is essentially what Hegel argues in An Introduction to the Philosophy of History. It occurs to me that the explanation found in Hegel and Mental Floss applies well to cultural rules, but that the opposite explanation, that an exception proves the rule is flawed and needs to be revised, applies well to natural rules, that is, science.

So, back to Peirce's statement. If we don't take his words out of context, what can we do with the idea that, "What is more wholesome than any particular belief is integrity of belief"?

We could start with "particular beliefs" since that part of the sentence seems self evident, and thus is suspect. We all know what beliefs are. Those are ideas, concepts, data, facts, that we accept, sometimes without question, often as being self evident, or at least believed for so long that we have lost track of how and why we believed them; we simply do. Often, those beliefs, the origins of which we've lost track of, are inherited. Our reason for believing them traces back, if we could trace them back, to being told by a parent, teacher, or other authority, and rests on nothing else.

Sometimes these beliefs rest comfortably at the conclusion of a lengthy chain of propositions or data. All too often, our propositions have been constructed after we already believe as a way of rationalizing this belief. (Though Bertrand Russell doesn't make this connection himself, in "On Propositions" his term "telescoped beliefs" refers to propositions which move from premise to conclusion without any intervening steps, a visible marker of accepted/rationalized belief.) Further causing difficulty is that any belief may trace back to an accepted belief, even though we can now claim logical reasons for that belief. Even a belief in logic as an acceptable tool for testing beliefs is itself a belief. Thus, the whole idea of beliefs gets rather murky. We need another way of testing beliefs than that we actually have them and can in some way defend them.

For Peirce, so immersed as he was in science, we might simply identify science and the logical precepts of science as a means of establishing the integrity of a belief. Of course, if we're going to follow the syntax of Peirce's statement, and Peirce was always precise in his statements (not always easy to read, but for anyone who is willing to invest the time, precise), he's not talking about integrity of a particular belief, but integrity of belief itself as a concept, or perhaps in the vein of pragmatism, belief as a method.

Perhaps this is where integrity of beliefs comes in, as a means of testing, if not the validity of believes, the value of beliefs. For a belief to have integrity, we must have a clear concept of several aspects of that belief:

First, we must have some idea of the why of that belief, at least in terms of why we hold that belief. Logical support isn't sufficient, since logic has to do with the validity rather than value.

Second, what we gain from that belief, James's much quoted (misquoted) "cash value." Many of our beliefs are self-serving, so much so that it's difficult to find a belief that is not. A more important question, at least in terms of integrity, is this: What sort of person might I become over time as a result of believing that particular belief? What self-conceptions, what strength or weakness of character might result from that belief and the actions and consequences of that belief? Integrity of belief forces us to question the causality between belief and character as the most significant consequence of any belief. Can we clearly trace causality between the two, or are they intertwined, reciprocal in a way suggested by the word ethos? Integrity of belief requires us to at least consider these questions even if they do not have a clear answer.

Third, how do these beliefs affect other beliefs? This is a key point James goes over often enough that I need not belabor it here. I'll only quote James once: "The truth of ‘God’ has to run the gauntlet of all our other truths. It is on trial by them and they on trial by it. Our final opinion about God can be settled only after all the truths have been straightened themselves out together” (Pragmatism 52).

From my perspective, and I admit how personal this perspective is (another marker of integrity of belief,) I don't see us ever straightening all beliefs out. A perspective that leads us to the final, and perhaps most important aspect of integrity of beliefs, understanding my own fallibility. This is a critical concept in pragmatism, one that answers Russell's early complaints against it, that just as I conceive of myself as capable of thoughtful belief, I must see the other person as just as thoughtful, just as capable, and remember that I am as fallible as anyone, and temper my beliefs against my fallibility rather than someone else's.