AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
It seems to me that subjectivity and objectivity need to be balanced and integrated. Too much emphasis on the objective, and you get eliminativism or gradgrindism or Rationalism. Too much emphasis on the subjective and you get the rancid aspects of postmodernism and whatever it is that seems to afflict the younger generation, a kind of toxic emotional entitlement.
In short, Sapolsky is an eliminativist with regards to agency, choice, responsibilty, anything like that (not clear whether he is a mental eliminativist, I suspect not). Those things aren't real and we should learn. toget along without them (Sapolsky at least as frank about how it seems impossible to actually do that)
A more systematic argument: Vaster than ideology | Meaningness. Give him the benefit of the doubt, he is not against value as such, just against dumb models of value, against eternalist theories of value that place it at the solid foundations of the cosmos rather than just some stuff we use in our messy lives and necessarily improvise as we go along.
You committed to a system because much of it is true and good and useful. You don’t need to abandon your system immediately, or even at all.2 You can own it, instead of its owning you. You can continue to use it as a way of thinking, feeling, and acting—instead of its using you.
This seems half-right, half achingly naive and false. Its more accurate to say that ideologies are part of the material we use to construct ourselves. We are more intertwined with them than the language above indicates. He's thinking of things like Marxism or Catholicism; I'm thinking more of things like the bourgeoise individualism that is the actual ideology of our social stratum.
Also here
The culture war’s justification for itself is that Americans are profoundly split over fundamental values. This is a lie. Mostly everyone wants the same things; but we can’t get them because the Other Side will block any action to bring them about. Everyone urgently wants the healthcare system fixed, but for exactly that reason Mooglebook AI whips the Other Side into a frenzy of opposition
Hm OK that is not against values as such, only that they are different. Let's call that conflict-eliminativism (see conflict theory ). He believes in ethics, more or less, so value is implied.
That is to say, my position is the opposite of eliminativism, which is explicitly nihilistic, it claims that minds and mind-like things aren't real, including agency (I guess Skinnerian behaviorism is the psychological analog). I on the other hand think minds are perfectly real, in their own fashion, and want to explore their relationship to materiality
Only I don't think of it as a Flip, a transition from one hard belief system to another. Maybe it's just me, my background after all is not in real science but in computer hacking, which is culturally close to science but not quite the same thing. So my materialism has never been the dumb kind (eliminativism), and I've never felt a need to flip it, I just want to extend it.
First, let me say I hate this passage, and others like it, that are effectively eliminativist . Also the claim for "the modern scientific view". This is, more or less the same thing the Weird Studies guys believe – that science is incompatible with the human soul. That makes them enemies of science (or of materalism at least) while Minsky is its friend, but it seems to me that both of these positions involve a misunderstanding of the place of science. Science is not superior to your internal experience, it can't override it.
A distant relative of eliminativism, an acephalous refactoring means deliberately subverting ordinary patterns of leadership, substituting either anarchy or a diffuse system of control. The Occupy Movement is the most visible recent example of an attempt to create a leaderless structure, along with a vocabulary and technology of doing so (eg, the mic check). While that is an explicit attempt to create a leaderless structure; another more cognitive form of acephalous refactoring is to train oneself to see that despite the hierarchical control structures of a corporation or other organization, people really act on their own and for their own interests. A presidential election may seem to be extremely important, but the president does not run the country, CEOs don’t run their corporation, and generals don’t run their armies. But it takes deliberate effort to see that.
There are various kinds of philosophical eliminativism, the most common being a philosophy of mind that holds that mental things (including consciousness, qualia, experience, and I guess ideas and concepts more generally) are not "real", whatever that means. Only physical things like electrons and the wavelengths of light are real. Concepts, emotions, and feelings and the like are mere folk psychology. Psychology is in a prescientific state, burdened by wrong ideas that are akin to caloric or phlogiston or alchemical humors, destined to be replaces by something realer when learning advances to a true scientific understanding.
This honestly makes no sense to me, which means maybe I don't truly understand the eliminativist position. Obviously things like "three" and "the aroma of frying garlic" and "democracy" are perfectly real, because we can refer to them and make sensible statements about them. They may not in all cases have a clear-cut material embodiment, but that is not the same thing. Why would you eliminate them? What are you going to replace them with, uninterpretable patterns of neural firing? How would that be an advance?
The name itself has an ominous ring. We know what what eliminativism means in politics and it isn't pretty. Eliminative materialists are not bent on genocide, but there is something oppressive and colonialist in their worldview, how they privilege a supposedly objective science over subjective lived experience (see bird's eye view vs. frog's eye view). I would rather not have my folk psychology eliminated, thank you very much.
I consider myself a materialist but this kind of materialism gives us a bad name. The point of materialistic or naturalist view of mind is not to eliminate it, but to explain it, to figure out how it is implemented and embodied in our physical brains and bodies, or in computational systems. You can't do that by discarding mental concepts just because they are "folk".