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Will_Newsome comments on I'm becoming intolerant. Help. - Less Wrong Discussion

26 Post author: loup-vaillant 30 June 2011 03:30PM

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Comment author: Will_Newsome 02 July 2011 08:10:41PM *  0 points [-]

Long-winded reply: I think it's not uncommon for folk to have kinestheticly-experienced conceptual aesthetics or decision-making processes. "That doesn't feel quite right" is commonly heard, as is the somewhat-ambiguous "Sorry, I just don't feel like going out tonight". Anyhow, others' apparent confidence in seemingly inelegant ontologies very distincly activates a lot of my thinking qualia. For example, if I hear a person resignedly accepting a uniform prior over vaguely defined objects in the mathematical universe hypothesis. The really fundamental feeling there is that it's just doesn't fit... I picture it in my head as an ocean of improper prior-ness flooding the Earth because some stupid primordial being didn't have enough philosophical aesthetics to realize that the mathematics shouldn't look like that, objectively speaking. And it feels... it just feels wrong. Often an idea or a hypotheses feels grinding, and sometimes it feels awkward, but most of the time things just feel not-right, inharmonious, off-kilter, dukkha. Sorry, very little sleep this week, not particularly coherent.

Edit: Not sure if this matters at all, but I think that I wouldn't be able to do clear timeful/timeless reasoning if I didn't have access to those intuitions. I also doubt that I could grok the concepts of statistical mechanics. That said, I really don't understand things like algebra or geometry... it must be something to do with implicit-movement, static things just don't work. (Edit: Mixtures and measures, logarithms, symmetric limits, proportionality, physical dimensionality, raw stuff of creation, creation self-similarity, causal fluid, causal structure... it's like crack.) I think that's why I love ambient/timeless control so much, it lets me think about Platonic objects using my flow-structure intuitions, which is cool 'cuz the Forms are so metaphysically appealing. I'm getting an fMRI soon and doing a whole bunch of cognitive tests soon, maybe that'll give a hint.