Thursday, 28 March 2024 ------------------------ Hello. All is well. I had a little trouble falling asleep yesterday as my temperature was higher than usual, luckily, I still woke up today feeling refreshed and closer to recovery. A runny nose is the main symptom remaining. In chapter six, we discuss the validity of testimony as knowledge. Testimony is passing information between people through speech, gestures, or writing. At one end of the spectrum, people argue that testimonial knowledge is always uncertain, that only perceptual knowledge is reliable. We understand that perception is a simulation by the brain, so I don't find that appealing. On the other end, you have the direct view of testimony. From what I understand, this view is more open to accepting testimony. That testimony is a fundamental part of humans to gather knowledge as a collective. In between these ends, there's reductionism. This view sees testimony as a hint or clue I guess, and by inference you can gain knowledge from it. This inference is a process where you use reasoning to determine the contents of testimony and its validity, such as matching with experience, determining integrity and motives of testifier, accounting for witnesses and opposing testimonies. There's local and global reductionism. I gathered that global reductionism is inferring with your life experiences. As you get older, you build up experience to match testimony with. Local is more about the testifier, in the moment, as in if they're competent and trustworthy. In the end of the chapter, they mention Edward Craig, who says knowledge is a concept we created to deal with finding what sources of testimony are valid. The knowers are those who are good informants. In practice, our ability to survive improves if we can build experience from others. I don't know his full theory, I only got a small glimpse here, but I think I like this way of seeing what knowledge is. Keeping in mind of how the brain works, I think we have a strong urge for wanting certainty. In this book, I get a sense that people are on a quest to discover the means to know absolute true, unbounded knowledge. I like viewing knowledge in a practical manner. That it's no more than our best attempt to understand reality. That's why knowledge can't exist without boundaries. To think otherwise, is to mock god. Before when I took life too seriously, what I call mocking god, pained me as I felt alienated for staying in uncertainty. As I get a better understanding of how we work, I find more understanding of why we seek absolute certainty, that it's simply the brain trying to make sense of reality, nothing more. To think otherwise, is for myself to believe humans have some divine, out of this world, mechanism to make sense of reality. I therefore don't lay any contempt in the saying that people mock god. I just find it funny because usually it's the other way around right? Those playing god, calling blasphemy on those who in fact respect god, those who do not claim to know the words of god. While I find myself less prone to needing certainty to the extent I see in others, I still find myself in need of having control, that I fear losing control of something. In fact, I find myself to need more control than most other people. Perhaps because I can't find certainty in what others accept as being certain, I live in more uncertainty which leads to needing control. Is death more scary if you're more uncertain of its nature? Perhaps you can stay in uncertainty, but you can still be scared of it. My current explanation is that my brain is unable to find certainty which forces me to live in uncertainty whether I'd like to or not. But I'm still able to perceive the world with fear irrationally, as in not serving me. I'm still able to adopt social realities and find one more normal than the other. I'm still able to adopt narrow perspectives, like finding my life story the most important thing. But, being forced to embrace uncertainty can turn out to be a good thing I believe. What if you don't need certainty to feel comfortable? For me that idea has sounded too idealistic, as in grounding yourself in the fact you're experiencing life as a human, you must accept that there's biological driving forces within you that you can't escape. My view has changed to believe that I'm not as limited as I once thought I was, at least if I'm in the correct environment. I still don't know how pressures from environment affect this. I have an idea that you can build up resilience to some extent. Can you face any chaos or terror with peace? Maybe. An example, I find myself less scared of dying lately but to which extent do I still fear prolonged torture? Not as in I'd foolishly seek it out but that I don't let the fear of that make me act in a way that I don't want to. I need data, haha. Could be interesting to find ways to experience torture without harming oneself, at least physically, though that line (physical/mental) is less clear than we may think, as we've learned. Anyhow, I still feel I have lots to learn and don't feel any urge to try anything, you know, curiosity killed the cat or some saying like that. Who knows, I'll probably encounter torturous situations in my normal life anyway. Back to not fearing uncertainty, funny thing, that belief has only come about from perceptual knowledge and not testimonial knowledge for me. It makes me think of what is the difference between perceptual/experiential and testimonial/intellectual knowledge? Intellectual knowledge is something we can understand in an abstract sense, but that you can't fully associate with tangible senses perhaps? Testimonial knowledge is in abstract form. Technologies such as audio and video are ways to share information by more perceptual, tangible senses. Because of how the brain works, some knowledge cannot be acquired if it's not associated with tangible senses. One thing I can think of is affective feeling. It seems we associate affective feelings more strongly to more tangible senses. I think this is again a testament to how fallible our idea of rational thinking is. We don't realize how the affective association we have to knowledge determines the value we give it. And it makes perfect sense as we talked about in the book about construction of emotions. Affect is meant to guide us to survive as best we can. It could be seen as the thing I called the currency in one of my first writings, measuring the value of beliefs in terms of regulating body / keeping us alive. However, we do seem to apply affect to more abstract concept. Is that because those abstract concepts at times trigger more tangible senses with affective associations? That seems likely. You can more easily joke about tragedies you don't have more tangible senses associated with. Why history seems to repeat itself because of the limitations of testimonial knowledge. While it seems advancements in technology could help this gap, it also brings some scary thoughts about being able to brainwash people. But can humans move on from using affective feeling to judge beliefs? It seems like we need to acknowledge this limitation in order to be less confused and find solutions that can help serve us better when we are dealing with evermore complexity. It makes me think about the current focus and progress of artificial intelligence. It's not something I've paid much attention to yet, but I've seen headlines about aligning it with humans' values. That's definitely something I'm interested in looking into. It seems tricky, as I guess ideally we want it to serve us but not fall into the same limitations we have. It seems impossible when you think about it. I guess it can help us spot flaws in what we value, but in the end, at some point we have to give it some of our values. Unless we want to fully pass on the torch to a higher being which seems unlikely. I doubt we'll create anything of that magnitude in the near future. While technological evolution is relatively fast compared to biological evolution, what are the safety mechanisms to ensure resilience if something goes wrong? Biological evolution may have only worked in the long run because of its slow and diverse process. We don't have a long track record for technological evolution, and it seems we've been close to blowing ourselves up quite a few times with it, haha. I guess the most likely scenario is that it'll advance our current way of doing things. An issue could be a subsystem's goal is maximized, killing off diversity and the overall resilience of the system / society. One can hope it'd lead to breakthroughs in advancing technology to allow economic growth to not have catastrophic consequences, if we're unable to restructure / not continue business as usual. Perhaps it will force the restructuring if we end up with a lot of frustrated players unable to compete. No matter what, it seems a lot is going to change in the next decade. With high certainty, I think being adaptive is probably the one skill that'll be important to have. Trying to fight change may be a hopeless endeavor, that seems to be what history tell us. One must emotionally come to terms with the fact that nothing is forever. To come to terms with that may not be the right way to look at it. It may just be a matter of aligning your perception with reality, but of course, it's a long journey of sustained pain and effort to achieve, especially the more you're attached to a particular story. You may only dare to embark on this journey once you've suffered enough from loss and confusion. But it's not to say there isn't some value in attaching oneself to a story. It may be a practical, performant method to utilize human functions to achieve a goal, the cost being that it may attach to easily to poor perceptions, but the performance and reduced cost benefits outweigh that. I think there's some truth to that but as you have to deal with more complexity this method starts to fail as simplified stories fail to guide you through a complex reality. That's enough yapping for one day though, see you later.