The Dawdler's Philosophy

A first for the Dawdlers, they speak to a third person. No longer are they experiencing what it’s like to be a duo. Keith Frankish is here to tell them their duality is but a mere illusion and he is the proof! Something like that.

Enjoy their conversation with Dr. Frankish as Harland and Keith plumb the depths of their degrees of eliminitivism on consciousness.

Song: Ritual of a Take

Artist: Fresh Cut Orchestra

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose…

Been a bit, but the Dawdlers are back. And, yes, things change but we’re still the same ol’ Dawdlers. Yer welcome.

This week enjoy our exploration of some mind bending philosophical musings from philosopher Nelson Goodman. Ryan thinks a scientific orientation can help. Harland thinks philosophy can find more problems for him. Nelson thinks these are just versions.

00:02:00 – Introduction to the topic // Equations grazing in a field // Worldmaking

00:42:20 – Versions // Memes and “felt stubbornness” // Conservatism and progressivism // Change is required for stasis and safe is dead

01:00:07 – Grue // Metamorphosis // The “two cultures” tension (aka, “science vs. philosophy”) // Science and philosophy can undermine each other’s independence

01:36:15 – Choke by Sonn

“To remain the same in function, animals must change their form.” - Stephen Jay Gould, 1979

Gould wrote the quote above a couple times in different articles. Ryan likes it because he thinks it can apply to systems in general. Thus, to remain the same in function, systems should change their structure provided there are changes in their throughput.

In organisms this happens with changes in scale. To get bigger and taller on Earth’s surface, an animal’s legs must also get thicker. Otherwise, gravitational acceleration will break them as they buckle under the mass of the body above.

But nature does not ask a five gram shrew to stand as tall as a ten foot elephant either. Its muscles could hardly move its legs. Yet sometimes, society asks its citizens to do similar feats by moralizing the damn prosocial empaths into feeling as if they’re not doing enough.

Well, to that, *we* say, “Enough!” Enjoy this bitchfest about personal accountability.

-Dawds

Song: How I’ve Missed You; Artist: TIM

Times change and the recent past can sometimes become obsolete as the gaze of the mainstream world focuses on its new moment. But it wasn’t long ago when Richard Dawkins was calling for “militant atheism” and Dubya Bush stood on an aircraft carrier in front of a banner that read “Mission Accomplished”. Heck, there was a time when the 90’s did a collective eye roll at the 80’s. Tigers once roamed Ireland’s economy and it was *Columbia* that was unstable while Venezuela was a working democracy.

In this episode, Ryan brings to the table a recent exchange between two evolutionary biologists, David Sloan Wilson and Massimo Pigliucci (https://letter.wiki/conversation/34). These two have been involved in much development of the field and it’s always a treat to see such engagement about topics not so completely related to the present moment. This time, the two VIPs spar over the application of multi-level selection theory to cultural evolution and the Dawdlers attempt to explore it further.

That said, we are the Dawdlers and we can be goofy and silly and, well, not always super charitable. But, Ryan at least, hopes listeners think of our takes and views the way a comedian’s impression of another person is sometimes a sign of appreciation and not scorn.

Let yourself be bashful, we’re flirting with a mode of discourse seen much less these days. 

00:03:20 – Ryan’s nostalgia for this episode’s context // A disagreement between David Sloan Wilson and Massimo Pigliucci on Twitter and Letters.wiki

00:09:10 – The letters // Ancient Greek alerts // Guilt trips and gadflies

00:20:56 – Massimo opens the doors for a bigger picture // What is reproduction? What is a group? What is an individual? Whence memes?

00:37:49 – A fidelity and permeability framework for evolutionary change // Harland is having a difficult time understanding Ryan’s genius

00:58:39 – MLS1 and MLS2 // Penguin huddles // Perhaps the Peloponnesian War is an MLS1 scenario

01:13:36 – Conscious volitional decision making

01:17:31 – “Falling Fast” by Cheeki

Everything is unique, yet almost everything is ignored. Herein may lie the crux of history as we fashion it for our purposes.

Repeatability is a most productive bias.

Life may be meaningless, but is it hopeless?

This week the Dawdlers do a little Short on depression. Don't?...enjoy this?

This week the Dawdler's take a step back from the previous weeks and dig down behind to examine an example of a general conceptual framework for thinking about systems, identity, and conflict - evolution, memes, and perspectivism; while they examine Anatol Rapoport's 1974 book Conflict in Man-Made Environment.  

There’s a poem by Portia Nelson called “There’s a hole in my sidewalk”. In it, she keeps going down the street, falls in the hole in the sidewalk, and struggles to get out. The poem is about repeating patterns that ultimately hurt you. The punchline? Walk down another street.

In this episode, we Dawds discuss sociopolitical revolutions and the effectiveness of protests and movements that hope to precede them. We meander through various texts and ideas that have come about from the study of such historically significant (and insignificant) events.

But in the end there are more questions than answers.

-Dawdlers

00:02:56 – Ryan starts it off with some anecdotal shlock about protests he’s seen // A proportional analogy // Power, etc.

00:25:05 - The Arab Spring and Occupy movements // The effectiveness of protest

00:37:53 – Understanding revolution // A unified theory of revolution // New approaches to protest // Memes as the leaders

01:14:17 – Structuralism // Median age theory of revolution // Resource enrichment episodic synchrony (again and again!!) // Early 20th Century high school movement

01:36:56 – Socrates on democracy

01:48:58 – The Sunflower Revolution // vTaiwan // Consensus making

02:02:53 – Breaking the cycle // What do we want?

Who's interested in current events!? This week, the Dawdlers talk about the Slavoj Zizek/Jordan B. Peterson "debate": Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism. ...and there's not much else to say! So, declaw your lobsters and have a listen!