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0 pointsKednicma5y ago0 comments

You're right that I'm thinking of very basic criticisms. In particular, there's zero evidence that humans aren't p-zombies [0] and no definitive rejection of the Dodo Bird hypothesis [1]; in combination, this suggests that psychologists are both wrong to imagine that there's anything interesting going on inside of a human's mental states, and also wrong to try to classify those mental states into appropriate and inappropriate states. Instead, what ends up getting studied is society's own idea of what ought to be happening inside our homoncular Cartesian theater [2].

Given these foundational issues, it's folly to try to support Big Five or any other descriptive model just by saying that it's a good fit for the numbers. Any principal component analysis will find something which factors out as if it were a correlative component. This dooms Big Five just as reliably as it dooms g-factors or Myers-Briggs or any other astrology-like navel-gazing.

(If you want an example of actual five things showing up again and again and again, mathematics has examples [3][4][5], but it turns out that when actual five things show up, then the reaction is not to serenely admire the correlation, but to admit terror before cosmic uncertainty. Psychologists do not seem to go insane and kill themselves like statistical mechanics or set theorists; have they really seen the face of god?)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_theater

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_classification

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monstrous_moonshine

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_finite_simpl...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

0 comments

friendlybus5y ago

There's also zero evidence that humans are p-zombies, and plenty of criticism that p-zombies don't work as a thought experiment.

It's a pretty big leap to throw away consciousness on the back of equal outcomes in psychotherapy. There are partial rejections of the Dodo bird verdict in your link.

The Cartesian theatre doesn't account for the mind's ability to imagine things that never were. As soon as you account for that via some emergent material property we have an opening to inject the properties of consciousness back into the discussion.

It's easy to say that the Big Five's cross-cultural statistical correlations are not good enough to describe people, though to dismiss it entirely off your grounding is not really going to work?

Repetition of natural structures is common. Many idealised aesthetic styles rely on that, like the Fibonacci spiral. Why would a fixed and repetitive uncertainty be any less terrifying that any other kind of uncertainty? We don't know what's before the big bang or what colour people really see in their mind when we say red.

KednicmaOP5y ago

I don't really think that you're cogent here; it seems like you just wanted to say things which stand in opposition.

While it's true that there's no empirical evidence within humans for the question of p-zombies, Occam's Razor neatly shows that the world without souls is the simpler one; both worlds look just like ours, but one of them requires all of these additional unfalsifiable unverifiable claims about souls and consciousness and inner experiences and etc.

The Dodo Bird's strength comes from the multitude of different models of therapy which have existed over the decades. We know, from history, that the memes of psychotherapists leaked out into popular culture and slowly altered how we talk about thinking. Nonetheless people are more neurotic (more diagnosed with mental disorders) than ever before! So the memes of psychotherapy do not on their own decrease mental disorders. People will look back on our current decade and think how silly we were to focus on "medications", "hormones", "chemical imbalances", "neurotransmitters", etc. just like we now think it's silly to focus on "repressed memories", "dream interpretation", "hysteria", "oedipal urges", etc.

Humans cannot imagine anything completely novel. Every thought which a human ever has is unoriginal and hopelessly tied to the human experience. This is known as the anthropic bias and has been known about for millennia. If you believe in souls, you have an uphill battle in terms of evidence, including here.

Please stop believing in souls. There's no evidence for it and it turns your arguments to mush.

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