Hard to distinguish true cause and effect outcomes from placebo outcomes
Discussion
There's one way to test it and see it... on yourself. ☝🏻🐸
But my subjective experience cannot prove anything 😂
I sometimes am not sure I'm following these types of vague conversations, but gonna drop this here anyway. If the mind reflects/codes reality well, then it can draw practical conclusions just from deduction alone.
Maybe this has nothing to do with convo though, have been dipping in and out as I run around
nostr:note1uyt9l6t4a2m7vlvhpa8lp6p5kjk6qzeafu0v47xtd4ah9tnzyjsqzetg5h
I'm very interested in the Goethe quote. A little bit of context? 👀👀
nostr:npub1m3xdppkd0njmrqe2ma8a6ys39zvgp5k8u22mev8xsnqp4nh80srqhqa5sf would be your man. I'd simply connected his note to something else I had read a while back, but it's more clear in his note
This is basically saying we predict certain outcomes and then verify them in reality. But sometimes we can form the wrong conclusions like saying that cow piss will cure a disease. Some people believe that cows are sacred and its urine has medicinal properties. This belief can actually heal you, which is the placebo effect. Even though these people may consistently see their predictions come true, it’s not a true cause and effect relationship because cow urine doesn’t actually cure you of disease.
Yes to first part. And know what you mean about placebo but think that's separate from point of diagram. I interpreted it as the feedback you get from nature refines your formal system, which tunes its predictions, etc.
The connection to convo here, as I said may be a bit forced, it's just on my mind lately i guess.
I can’t help but think of barbaric tribes that would continuously sacrifice humans to the sun god and find that the weather coincidentally improves. The problem is that eventually, on a long enough timeframe, the weather eventually does improve. So they find reasons for why it takes 3 humans instead of 5. And it’s usually based on factors you can’t measure like this one is a virgin or that one is pure of heart or beautiful.
fwiw Rupert Sheldrake speculates about the complexity of the human brain vs other entities in the universe, and then goes on to point out that stars are much more complex than the human brain. He then speculates there could be information transmitted by the sun to humans. And others who work with NASA then discuss the human dna as a possible receiver (see “tyler” in Diana Walsh Pasulka’s book, American Cosmic) 
Its a very dense book but also well written 😵💫🫣 if you spend some time with it the ideas come into focus. There's lots of gold there.
My interpretation goes something like this, which relates to earlier ideas in the book.
There is the Natural world, and there is Our (first person) world.
We can only understand the Natural world through our first person sensations. Our senses activate from the differences we feel and the relationships we've mapped (approximate cause and effect) between sensations. In actuality what it means is that we can't grasp causality in the natural world, but the cause and effect of sensations. I see clouds in the sky and expect to feel wet if I'm outside.
If the world was uniform, there is nothing to observe. Also, because we observe the world through our senses, we are limited at getting to any fundamental Truths.
The interesting thing happens when we move from working with direct sensations and use those relationships in isolation. Formal systems take the relationships we've acquired from our senses into sets of rules to experiment around with for their own sake. And because formal systems ultimately come from abstracting our sensations, they aren't Natural. Anything 'rule' based is not actually natural, but instead an approximation. Its important to recognize the map isn't the territory, confusing the two gets problematic whenever we use the rules derived on the map that don't actually exist in the real world. At the same time, we should be creating and using effective maps.
Have to run but thanks for the summary. Will have to reread
Good summary, thanks again. I had found a copy later and cracked it open - dense indeed! Thought I had the wrong book and a math book instead.
The connection from reality to the systems of thought we construct is I guess what vaguely connected this to the original conversation above. Hard for me to make connection concisely or probably at all, so will leave it there.
I'd call it a philosophy book grounded in math, with ideas related to computation and biology. It's taken me a while to even approach it, because i assumed I needed to understand all the math and formulas involved. But no, not really. You really have to skim through each dense section, skip around through the chapters, multiple times over multiple occasions to partially digest it 🤣
If you want to start off, the new chapters provide nice background - Foreword, prefaces, prolegomena. The Autobiographical Reminiscences and "The Devil's Advocate" story are really incredible additions that bring in the human aspect of Rosen as a scientist. Overall, the Springer Second edition really is a tour, bringing together a dense work while also pointing out the philosophy it opens.
Taking in the cow piss without a strong belief is weak. It's just low tier animal fetish.
Now, if you want to explore on why the Indians consider the cow holy you have to sit down with the curry people. It's not my place to shit on Hinduism or whatever they have going on over there.
What I would mention tho is some big dick energy from a cool orthobro. It goes something like this: if fasting was only about eating, then cows would be holy.