I get your point, and I don’t disagree with the main thrust of it (assuming I’ve understood you). But the senses are definitely, in general, deprived. Compare your time at ILP with time spent on a hike in a true forest, or at the ocean.
Well there’s gross mental states and subtle mental states. And there’s gross states that are masked. And subtle mental states that are dramatized.
Behaviorists are content to wear blinders, and ignore some kinds of data. Imagine a behaviorist at ILP - so easily fooled. You could write something perfectly nice, and they’d be naive enough to think you actually felt nice when writing it.
I just feel the need to force every discipline to come on out and explain the whole universe with something derived from it’s basic principles. Like what you say about some people being content to ignore some data. Let’s just go ahead and press that issue and see if we can’t come up w/ a less-flawed rule or something.
Sounds reasonable. Unless someone, say a behaviorist, says “let’s start with such-and-such assumptions, and see where that leads”. I think that’s ok. More and more I’m thinking life is just one big experiment, but you never get to reach any conclusions.
I’m sure of far more than that, but I can and do change my mind. I don’t think of knowledge as a fixed state - I think of knowledge as something you do. So the whole idea of 98% sure, or whatever, seems kind of nonsensical to me. I don’t think you have to restrict yourself to x=x.
I think this may be one of the inconspicuous consequences, like digging ourselves into a hole without realizing it. However, one of the reasons why people get ‘addicted’ to internet is because this kind of medium (constant inflow of new information) provides our brains with constant surge of dopamine release. Same with video-games. In fact, I would argue that video game addiction can be seen as a (misplaced) dopamine addiction. One of the goals of video-game addiction rehab centers in Korea is to, as they put it, to “re-establish emotional bonds with the real world”, and most of that is achieved by engaging people in real life activities (camping, outdoor team sports, and other hands-on group activities).
There’s a documentary in the rise of gaming addiction in Korea. The rise in addiction is contributed to several factors, one of which is the isolation (and ensuing psychological disturbances) of the individual in the industrialized society. The warning there is that what is happening now in Korea, and the problems Koreans are facing now, is very likely to start happening in the rest of developed world, sooner or later.
South Korea: Caught in the Web youtube.com/watch?v=Yfm-2rEoDg4