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Joe Shirley's avatar

This is a big deal, thanks for writing about it so thoroughly. You and your readers would likely appreciate Roger's Bacon's post from yesterday, Epistemic Hell (https://www.theseedsofscience.pub/p/epistemic-hell). Both of you are zooming in on the void at the heart of the field, the absence of a clear paradigm with clearly-defined entities, relationships and contexts that can guide engagement.

In Kuhn's words, "In the absence of a paradigm or some candidate for paradigm, all of the facts that could possibly pertain to the development of a given science are likely to seem equally relevant. As a result, early fact-gathering is a far more nearly random activity than the one that subsequent scientific development makes familiar. Furthermore, in the absence of a reason for seeking some particular form of more recondite information, early fact-gathering is usually restricted to the wealth of data that lie ready to hand."

For me, this speaks to the strong need to look for data outside what lies "ready to hand." And especially, the place to look for that data, I believe, is at the heart of the matter: right in the thick of subjective experience itself. How can we observe subjective experience in a way that enables us to bridge the subjectivity barrier and come away with data that can reliably reveal patterns upon skillful analysis? (I don't think surveys are the way to go.)

I've been working on this for quite some time, and will be ready in a few weeks to release the first volume presenting an innovative methodology that provides the beginning for such disciplined, scientific observation of subjective experience. I won't say more about it here -- I'm laying it out gradually in my 'stack. But I will say that it does point to a significant possibility for a new paradigm in the form of a field dimension of conscious experience.

Keep doing what you're doing, Ethan. I appreciate your essays!

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Tom Rearick's avatar

So many paradigms are based on metaphors. Metaphors are not physical models but literary devices that replace a complex domain (psychology/brains) with a familiar domain (computer science/computers). It hides more differences between the two domains than it reveals similarities. The human brain is so complex and so unique in the world that any single model or metaphor will ultimately fail. For a review of metaphors used to describe cognition, see https://tomrearick.substack.com/p/metaphors-we-think-by.

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