This is great. The PKD quote about reality not going away when you stop believing in it also came to mind for me in orienting to the reflexivity thing.
It seems to me that we need a similar quote that captures the way self-fulfilling things also have a reality to them. I almost stop wanting to talk in terms of truth and more in terms of... stability? Reflexive stability? Of which singular objective truth is a degenerate case.
I talk a lot about "trust as what truth feels like in first person"; to some extent trust might be this thing; it can have this reflexive stability property.
But here we potentially get multiple mutually-exclusive attractors, none of which is more true than the others, but if we can relax our current view enough to consider the other possibilities, we can assess them not in terms of their stability property but in terms of their usefulness to us. At which point two different people/groups might have two different coherent attractors. It opens up a pretty big can of worms, but it's also exciting in terms of true plurality—not relativism where things can't be compared/judged, but allowing for different standards of comparison/judgment, within which some things ARE better/worse.
I really liked reading this, thanks for writing it! "One of these ideas will die in the crucible of looking at reality" was a very evocative sentence for me that really got me looking around at everything with fresh eyes
This is great. The PKD quote about reality not going away when you stop believing in it also came to mind for me in orienting to the reflexivity thing.
It seems to me that we need a similar quote that captures the way self-fulfilling things also have a reality to them. I almost stop wanting to talk in terms of truth and more in terms of... stability? Reflexive stability? Of which singular objective truth is a degenerate case.
I talk a lot about "trust as what truth feels like in first person"; to some extent trust might be this thing; it can have this reflexive stability property.
But here we potentially get multiple mutually-exclusive attractors, none of which is more true than the others, but if we can relax our current view enough to consider the other possibilities, we can assess them not in terms of their stability property but in terms of their usefulness to us. At which point two different people/groups might have two different coherent attractors. It opens up a pretty big can of worms, but it's also exciting in terms of true plurality—not relativism where things can't be compared/judged, but allowing for different standards of comparison/judgment, within which some things ARE better/worse.
Huh this quote from Jay's Reflexivity article is an okay first candidate for alternate quote:
> “Some things have to be believed to be seen.” —Ralph Hodgson
...implied is that these things *are real*.
I really liked reading this, thanks for writing it! "One of these ideas will die in the crucible of looking at reality" was a very evocative sentence for me that really got me looking around at everything with fresh eyes