Theory of Human Experience

[Requia ☣]

I have another one:  "It's more complicated than that."

That's mine not Kai's dammit. 

On the blink thing, most people do not change their minds but go with initial judgment most of the time.

Its more complicated than people make, most is not all.

People also do this not because it is a good idea, but because they are monkeys.  Lots of little biases (notably confirmation and selection bias) override the tiny pea sized part of the brain that controls rational thought biases that lean in the other direction.

[LMNO]

Well siggy, if you want to get into it, sure.

Posit:  All human experience can be described with broad enough statements, and these statements can be formulated in a way that is relevant and useful. 

While I can see your reasoning (all humans are made up of roughly the same stuff, and live on the same planet, so there has to be a group of "similar experiences" (e.g. gravity) and a group of "impossible experiences" (e.g. breathing underwater); therefore there should be a statement broad enough to capture the former group while excluding the latter), such statements lead us into the familiar territory of "shit happens", "all is One", and "this too shall pass".  Which is to say, functionally useless.  Because while the range of possible human experience is less than infinity, it is still larger than any meaningful statement can be created.  Any statement that is broad enough to cover the entirety of human experience can't be useful. 

I'd like to point out that you sort of shot yourself in the foot with your use of the word "All", in that any statement that excludes an aspect of the human experience violates the initial premise.  Your premise might work if you narrowed your scope to a single culture... but even then, there is enough variation that none but the vaguest nods to an experience can be made.

Incidentally, your use of "Blink" is flawed as well, because that discusses decisions made in situations where you already have knowledge and experience regarding the situation; for example, the firefighter who can recognize a dangerous situation without stopping to think it through, the basketball player who scores without setting up the shot, or the art historian who can tell a fake before any tests are made.  The premise of "Blink" doesn't work in situations where the subject is completely ignorant or unaware of the nature of their situation.  In those instances, it is a much better idea to try to understand what's going on, because any snap judgment you make will be based upon flawed fundamentals, and could be extremely dangerous. 

For example, take a person whose only knowledge of fire prevention comes from camping: At the end of the night, he takes a big bucket of water, and dumps it on the hot coals, effectively snuffing the fire completely and absolutely.  One day, he's cooking a whole lot of bacon at home, and the grease catches fire.  He runs to the living room, grabs the large vase off the table, discarding the flowers as he dashes back to the kitchen and throws the water at the fire.

Skip ahead to about the 1:55 mark.



Would you like me to address your other points, as well?

[Kai]

My inspiration for this was the neuroscientist Dr. Ramachandran, who said

It is ironic that most scientific discoveries come not from brandishing (or sharpening)
Occam's razor — despite the view to the contrary held by the great majority of scientists and
philosophers — but from generating seemingly ad hoc and ontologically promiscuous conjectures
which are not called for by the current data.

Theres a whole lot of cognitive bias in that statement, particularly of the same sort as astrology uses, forget the failures and focus on the few successes. Yes, accident plays a key role in many discoveries, but "ad hoc and ontologically promiscuous conjectures" do not. Example: the discovery of peninicillin required an accidental contamination of bacterial cultures by Penicillium. This has happened before, but because Fleming was such an excellent observer and kept perfect records of everything that went on in his lab, he saw this as interesting. The observation was, this mold is showing up in my bacterial cultures, and the bacteria seem to be eliminated by it. His question: why and how? Thus followed some wonderfully elegant experiments and isolations which lead to the production of the antibiotic.

Science, all science, requires two parts: induction and deduction. Induction is the movement from specific observations to general rules. Deduction is testing of general rules by predicting and finding specific observations that either corroborate or falsify those rules. The new observations lead back to induction again. The whole process works in a spiralling motion, where the spiral gets tighter and thus the general rules become closer to actual reality. This process is called reciprocal illumination, a series of observing, checking, testing, rechecking, and so on. It can be compared to Hegel's Dialectic. In such a system, ad hoc hypotheses are the WORST thing you can insert, because then you don't know if your results actually show what you claim.

[LMNO]

Also, if I understand it correctly, Occam's Razor is not a method, it's a guideline; what's more, it's often misunderstood.

"Simpler answers are better" is not the same as "use as few assumptions as possible".  A lot of unusual discoveries have been made because of bizarre "what if" moments, but they didn't come out of the blue, they arrived there because any other way would add to the complexity.

For example, Einstein decided that Maxwell's equations for the speed of light were correct, and made the assumption that C wasa constant; in doing so, he had to develop special relativity because otherwise, nothing made sense.  Rather than try to develop theories about the "ether" that other scientists were doing, he realized that it would, in fact, be simpler if he treated light as a constant, and re-think the old definitions of space and time.  In doing so, he made both the experimental and theoretical data align, without bringing in any new assumptions.

[Cramulus]

Posit:  All human experience can be described with broad enough statements, and these statements can be formulated in a way that is relevant and useful. 

I would agree in broad general sense.

However sometimes we have very specific experiences which need more space to explain. And modeling all of human experience in a relevant way is going to require a lot of broad statements.

While language is able to compress complex ideas down into very dense symbols, there is data loss when you compress. You have to gloss over some nuances. So I'd say that broad statements about human nature can be accurate and relevant, but not comprehensive.

[Kai]

Also, if I understand it correctly, Occam's Razor is not a method, it's a guideline; what's more, it's often misunderstood.

"Simpler answers are better" is not the same as "use as few assumptions as possible".  A lot of unusual discoveries have been made because of bizarre "what if" moments, but they didn't come out of the blue, they arrived there because any other way would add to the complexity.

For example, Einstein decided that Maxwell's equations for the speed of light were correct, and made the assumption that C wasa constant; in doing so, he had to develop special relativity because otherwise, nothing made sense.  Rather than try to develop theories about the "ether" that other scientists were doing, he realized that it would, in fact, be simpler if he treated light as a constant, and re-think the old definitions of space and time.  In doing so, he made both the experimental and theoretical data align, without bringing in any new assumptions.

Correct. Parsimony is a guideline for reaching the hypothesis with the least assumptions. It can also be thought of as the maximization of congruence and consistency between data (like Einstein made the experimental and theoretical data align). It's not that the simplest answer is better or more often correct (although the latter may be the case), its that the simplest answer requires the least convolutions in testing. The most parsimonious answer changes depending upon what initial observations are available. For example, if I discovered a previously unknown morphological homologue in a group of interest, this new evidence may change the formation of the most parsimonious tree, because either that character would be inconsistent with the branching pattern, or incongruent with the other previously known characters.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Posit:  All human experience can be described with broad enough statements, and these statements can be formulated in a way that is relevant and useful. 

It may be possible to create a 'generic'' model which can describe most of human experience in a way that may be useful for some things. We can consider most models in psychology as attempts to create such a thing. However, as Freud, Jung, Spock and all the others have shown us, these models are prone to error, based on the neurological system/programs of the models observer/creator.

"All human experience" is a pretty large chunk of information to try to manipulate into a single model. It may be possible, but I'm not sure its practical.

As far as I can tell any attempt at an 'All-in' model of human experience would necessarily require one very important factor:

Any described observation or experience by humans are necessarily incomplete without including the neurological system of the observer (or the individual experiencing) and the person doing the describing. This is true for eyewitness testimony, unverifiable personal gnosis and "objective" observations by scientists. An observation by a psychologist, for example, must include the neurological state of the patient AND the neurological state of the doctor (see Freud).

[Jasper]

Revisions:

The theory has to have blurry edges.  Outliers to human experience are common. In fact any theory of human experience must account for the high degree of idiosyncrasy.
The goal of any such theory would be to fit the scientific data of human existence, as well as the subjective states we experience.  The objective of this theory should be to assemble a coherent picture of  the meaning of human experience.


More later, class is starting. 

[LMNO]

The problem with that is that I see the Gaussian curve as extremely shallow-- not just metaphorically, but in practice.  What I mean is that, rather than a huge bump and a small tail, it would have a very small bump and an extremely long tail... The variations of human experience are so large that cutting off the tail at an arbitrary point would not only be, well, arbitrary, but would also exclude a large number of people.


This is one of the reasons that I believe any general statement made about all of human experience must also be too vague to be of use.

[Kai]

Revisions:

The theory has to have blurry edges.  Outliers to human experience are common. In fact any theory of human experience must account for the high degree of idiosyncrasy.
The goal of any such theory would be to fit the scientific data of human existence, as well as the subjective states we experience.  The objective of this theory should be to assemble a coherent picture of  the meaning of human experience.


More later, class is starting. 

If outliers are common to human experience, how useful are generalizations?

What data? Who's subjective states?

You assume there exists a coherent picture of meaning. Who's meaning?

[Triple Zero]

The problem with that is that I see the Gaussian curve as extremely shallow-- not just metaphorically, but in practice.  What I mean is that, rather than a huge bump and a small tail, it would have a very small bump and an extremely long tail... The variations of human experience are so large that cutting off the tail at an arbitrary point would not only be, well, arbitrary, but would also exclude a large number of people.


This is one of the reasons that I believe any general statement made about all of human experience must also be too vague to be of use.

well, there are other distributions than Gaussians. one is even named after it's "long tail".

remember that Gaussian distributions are (usually?) formed by the Strong Law of Large Numbers, that is, if the random variable is the result of adding up loads of independent tiny other random variables. this is not always the case.

[Kai]

And thus, people become statistics.

[Golden Applesauce]

Revisions:

The theory has to have blurry edges.  Outliers to human experience are common. In fact any theory of human experience must account for the high degree of idiosyncrasy.
The goal of any such theory would be to fit the scientific data of human existence, as well as the subjective states we experience.  The objective of this theory should be to assemble a coherent picture of  the meaning of human experience.


More later, class is starting. 

If outliers are common to human experience, how useful are generalizations?

What data? Who's subjective states?

You assume there exists a coherent picture of meaning. Who's meaning?

The meaning of the phrase "the human experience.", is what I think he meant there.

[Kai]

Who's meaning of the phrase human experience are we talking about here?

[Golden Applesauce]

Who's meaning of the phrase human experience are we talking about here?

English speakers?