- May 2024
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this is whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness
for - key insight - Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness - adjacency - fallacy of misplaced concreteness - climate denialism - mistrust in science - polycrisis - Deep Humanity
- the worry for Goethe and whitehead is that
- we forget sometimes with the typical scientific method that = we can only ever apply concepts derived from our empirical experience
- and so if we're trying to understand experience as if it were really
- an illusion produced by
- collisions of particles or
- brain chemistry or
- something that we can never in principle experience
- an illusion produced by
- what we're doing is
- applying concepts derived from our experience
- to an imagined realm that
- we think is beyond experience
- but it's not
- This is Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
key insight - Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness - This helps explain the rising rejection of science from the masses. I didn't realize there was already a name for the phenomena responsible for the emergence of collective denialist behavior
adjacency - between - fallacy of misplaced concreteness - increasing collective rejection of science in the polycrisis - adjacency statement - Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness exactly names and describes - the growing trend of a populus rejection of climate science (climate denialism), COVID vaccine denialism, exponential growth of conspiracy theory and misinformation - because of the inability for non-elites and elites alike to concretize abstractions the same way that elite scientists and policy-makers do - Research papers have shown that the knowledge deficit model which was relied upon for decades was not accurate representation of climate denialism - Yet, I would hold that Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concretism plays a role here - This mistrust in science is rooted in this fallacy as well as progress traps - Deep Humanity is quite steeped in Whitehead's process relational ontology and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness requires mass education for a sustainable transition - This abstract concreteness is everywhere: - Shift from Ptolemy's geocentric worldview to the Copernican heliocentric worldview - Now we are told that the sun is not fixed, but is itself rotating around the Milky Way with billions of other galaxies - scientific techniques like radiocarbon dating for dating objects in deep time - climate science - atomic physics - quantum physics - distrust of vaccines, which we cannot see - Timothy Morton's hyperobjects is related to this fallacy of misplaced concreteness. - "Seeing is believing" but we cannot directly experience the ultra large or ultra small. So we have scientific language that draws parallels to that, but it is not a direct experience. - - Those not steeped in years or decades of science have the very real option of feeling that the concepts are fallacies and don't hold as much weight as that which they can experience directly, even though those concepts have obviously produced artefacts that they use, like cellphones, the internet and airplanes.
- the worry for Goethe and whitehead is that
Tags
- adjacency - fallacy of misplaced concreteness - climate denialism - mistrust in science - polycrisis - Deep Humanity
- climate change - knowledge deficit model - Whitehead
- science communication - climate change - Whitehead - fallacy of misplaced concreteness
- Making the abstract real
- misplaced concreteness
- key insight - Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness
- adjacency - Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness - Timothy Morton's hyperobjects
Annotators
URL
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- Mar 2024
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www.phenomenalworld.org www.phenomenalworld.org
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for - liberal blind spot - Chris Yates - book - liberalism and the challenge of climate change - adjacency - liberalism - individual liberty - progress - bond spot - political polarization - fuel for the right -hyperobjects
Summary - This short article contains some key insights that point to the right climate communication strategy to target and win over the working class - Currently, climate communications speak to elitist values and is having the opposite effect - The working class farmer protests spreading across the EU is a symptom of this miscommunication strategy - as is the increasing support and ascendency of right wing political parties - Researcher and author Chris Yates is in a unique position with one foot in each world - He articulates his insightful ideas and points is in the right direction to communicate in a way that reaches the working class
comment - the figure 4 graph is an example of carbon inequality
Example - carbon inequality - see figure 4
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it reveals that it’s those immediate experiences of the environment rather than global atmospheric concentrations of CO2 that affect people’s ideas about climate.
insight - hyperobjects
Comment - This of why a Deep Humanity approach that identifies and clarifies the fundamental issues is so important
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- Dec 2023
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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there are good stories and bad stories uh good stories I mean this is very on a very very simplistic level but good stories 00:13:23 benefit people and bad stories can create you know Wars and genocides and and the most terrible crimes in history were committed in the name of some fictional story people believed very few 00:13:38 Wars in history are about objective material things people think that we fight like wolves or chimpanzees over food and territory this is not the case 00:13:52 at least not in the modern world if I look for instance at my country which is at present in at War the Israeli Palestinian conflict is not really about food and territory there is enough food 00:14:04 between the Jordan and Mediterranean to feed everybody there is enough territory to build houses and schools for everybody but you have two conflicting stories or more than two conflicting 00:14:17 stories in the minds of different people and they can't agree on the story they can't find a common story that everybody would be happy with and this is the the Deep source of the conflict
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for: stories - consequences of good and bad stories, inisight - war and genocide - when people violently disagree on stories,
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insight
- disagreement of stories
- not just wars, but climate change skeptics believe a different story than environmentalists
- hyperobjects and evolution play a role as well in what we believe
- disagreement of stories
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- May 2022
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www.usmcu.edu www.usmcu.edu
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Recognizing that the CEC hyperthreat operates at micro and macro scales across most forms of human activity and that a whole-of-society approach is required to combat it, the approach to the CEC hyperthreat partly relies on a philosophical pivot. The idea here is that a powerful understanding of the CEC hyperthreat (how it feels, moves, and operates), as well as the larger philosophical and survival-based reasons for hyper-reconfiguration, enables all actors and groups to design their own bespoke solutions. Consequently, the narrative and threat description act as a type of orchestration tool across many agencies. This is like the “shared consciousness” idea in retired U.S. Army general Stanley A. McChrystal’s “team of teams” approach to complexity.7 Such an approach is heavily dependent on exceptional communication of both the CEC hyperthreat and hyper-response pathways, as well as providing an enabling environment in terms of capacity to make decisions, access information and resources. This idea informs Operation Visibility and Knowability (OP VAK), which will be described later.
Such an effort will require a supporting worldwide digital ecosystem. In the recent past, major evolutionary transitions (MET) (Robin et al, 2021) of our species have been triggered by radical new information systems such as spoken language, and then inscribed language. Something akin to a Major Competitive Transitions (MCT) may be required to accompany a radical transition to a good anthropocene. (See annotation: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.frontiersin.org%2Farticles%2F10.3389%2Ffevo.2021.711556%2Ffull&group=world)
If large data is ingested into a public Indyweb, because Indyweb is naturally a graph database, a salience landscape can be constructed of the hyperthreat and data visualized in its multiple dimensions and scales.
Metaphorically, it can manifest as a hydra with multiple tentacles reach out to multiple scales and dimensions. VR and AR technology can be used to expose the hyperobject and its progression.
The proper hyperthreat is not climate change alone, although that is the most time sensitive dimension of it, but rather the totality of all blowbacks of human progress...the aggregate of all progress traps that have been allowed to grow, through a myopic prioritization of profit over global wellbeing due to the invisibility of the hyperobject, from molehills into mountains.
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hyperobject
as per professor Timothy Morton and his book "Hyperobjects" https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/hyperobjects
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Annotators
URL
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- Nov 2021
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www.annualreviews.org www.annualreviews.org
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Fundamental features of human psychology can constrain the perceived personal relevance and importance of climate change, limiting both action and internalization of the problem. Cognitive shortcuts developed over millennia make us ill-suited in many ways to perceiving and responding to climate change (152), including a tendency to place less emphasis on time-delayed and physically remote risks and to selectively downplay information that is at odds with our identity or worldview (153). Risk perception relies on intuition and direct perceptual signals (e.g., an immediate, tangible threat), whereas for most high-emitting households in the Global North, climate change does not present itself in these terms, except in the case of local experiences of extreme weather events. Where strong concern does exist, this tends to be linked to care for others (154) combined with knowledge about the causes and possible consequences of climate change (155).
This is indeed a problematic feature of human evolution. It has given rise to what Timothy Morton refers to as "hyperobjects", objects of such vastness in space and time that it defeats human mechanisms of perception at local scale: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/hyperobjects https://hyp.is/xROjpD_jEey4a6-Urbh4_Q/www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/timothy-mortons-hyper-pandemic
This psychological constraint is worth demonstrating to individuals to illustrate how we construct our values and responses. These constraints can be demonstrated in a vivid way within the context of Deep Humanity open source praxis BEing journeys.
As in the New Yorker interview with Morton, we can take Deep Humanity participants on BEing journeys, walkabouts to identify hyperobjects.
Hyperobjects are also cognitive and highly abstract in nature. This is a clue to another idea that could be enlightening to understanding the problematic context of appreciating hyperobjects such as climate change, and that is the idea of Jakob Von Uexkull's Umwelt:
"Uexküll was particularly interested in how living beings perceive their environment(s). He argued that organisms experience life in terms of species-specific, spatio-temporal, 'self-in-world' subjective reference frames that he called Umwelt (translated as surrounding-world,[9] phenomenal world,[10] self-world,[10] environment[11] - lit. German environment). These Umwelten (plural of Umwelt) are distinctive from what Uexküll termed the "Umgebung" which would be the living being's surroundings as seen from the likewise peculiar perspective or Umwelt of the human observer. Umwelt may thus be defined as the perceptual world in which an organism exists and acts as a subject. By studying how the senses of various organisms like ticks, sea urchins, amoebae, jellyfish and sea worms work, he was able to build theories of how they experience the world. Because all organisms perceive and react to sensory data as signs, Uexküll argued that they were to be considered as living subjects. This argument was the basis for his biological theory in which the characteristics of biological existence ("life") could not simply be described as a sum of its non-organic parts, but had to be described as subject and a part of a sign system.
The biosemiotic turn in Jakob von Uexküll's analysis occurs in his discussion of the animal's relationship with its environment. The Umwelt is for him an environment-world which is (according to Giorgio Agamben), "constituted by a more or less broad series of elements [called] "carriers of significance" or "marks" which are the only things that interest the animal". Agamben goes on to paraphrase one example from Uexküll's discussion of a tick, saying,
"...this eyeless animal finds the way to her watchpoint [at the top of a tall blade of grass] with the help of only its skin’s general sensitivity to light. The approach of her prey becomes apparent to this blind and deaf bandit only through her sense of smell. The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, works on the tick as a signal that causes her to abandon her post (on top of the blade of grass/bush) and fall blindly downward toward her prey. If she is fortunate enough to fall on something warm (which she perceives by means of an organ sensible to a precise temperature) then she has attained her prey, the warm-blooded animal, and thereafter needs only the help of her sense of touch to find the least hairy spot possible and embed herself up to her head in the cutaneous tissue of her prey. She can now slowly suck up a stream of warm blood."[12]
Thus, for the tick, the Umwelt is reduced to only three (biosemiotic) carriers of significance: (1) The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, (2) The temperature of 37 degrees Celsius (corresponding to the blood of all mammals), (3) The hairiness of mammals." ( From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Johann_von_Uexk%C3%BCll)
The human umwelt limits us to a relatively small range of sensed signs. CO2 particles is not one of them. We rely on scientific narratives but these are far removed from direct sensing, into the field of conceptualization and abstraction. We have evolved to respond to danger that is sensed, less so to danger that is conceptualized.
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www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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The next day, I assumed we would begin our quest to find signs of hyperobjects in and around the city of Houston
This would make an excellent Stop Reset Go (SRG) Deep Humanity (DH) BEing Journey
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- Oct 2020
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ethanmarcotte.com ethanmarcotte.com
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Robin brings a helpful name to this problem, by way of the philosopher Timothy Morton: hyperobject. A hyperobject is an entity whose scale is too big, too sprawling for any single person to fully appreciate their scale. Climate change, financial markets, socioeconomic classes, design systems—they’re systems we move through, but their scale dwarfs our own.
hyperobject
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- Jan 2020
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www.hcn.org www.hcn.org
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Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University in Houston. He is the author of Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality and Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End Of The World.
want to read these
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Or global warming. I can’t see or touch it. What I can see and touch are these raindrops, this snow, that sunburn patch on the back of my neck. I can touch the weather. But I can’t touch climate. So someone can declare: “See! It snowed in Boise, Idaho, this week. That means there’s no global warming!” We can’t directly see global warming, because it’s not only really widespread and really really long-lasting (100,000 years); it’s also super high-dimensional. It’s not just 3-D. It’s an incredibly complex entity that you have to map in what they call a high-dimensional- phase space: a space that plots all the states of a system. In so doing, we are only following the strictures of modern science, laid down by David Hume and underwritten by Immanuel Kant. Science can’t directly point to causes and effects: That would be metaphysical, equivalent to religious dogma. It can only see correlations in data. This is because, argues Kant, there is a gap between what a thing is and how it appears (its “phenomena”) that can’t be reduced, no matter how hard we try. We can’t locate this gap anywhere on or inside a thing. It’s a transcendental gap. Hyperobjects force us to confront this truth of modern science and philosophy.
A short, and very cogent argument here.
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