Thomas T Hills & Shamanism vs Lying

Professor Thomas T Hills has a brief article in Aeon asking 'what good is Shamanism?'. He thinks it has to do with catastrophic risk. My own view is that there is not much difference between the Shaman and the 'Shraman', or, indeed between Shraman and Brahman or, come to that, between priest-craft and any type of more or less academic ideology. Indeed, all transactions of sufficient import will have charismatic 'Schelling focal points' of one sort or another. Shamanism is simply a Racist term used by fools or charlatans.

Contra Hills, who speaks of 'Masters of Reality', I believe Knightian Uncertainty militates for 'Hannan Consistent' or other similar 'regret minimizing' heuristics or cognitive biases and, further, that every 'coordination game'- including risk pooling- can give rise to a 'discoordination game'- featuring 'hedging', costly signals and separating equilibria. A Shaman is an arbitrageur between coordination and discoordination games in line with a model elaborated by Conley & Nielson. But so is almost everybody else who has salience as Schelling focal in a coordination game of any sort.

I claim that robustness in mechanism design, which will Muth Rationally obtain under Chichilnisky & Heard 'Goldilocks' conditions, but not otherwise- requires 'ontologically dysphoric' preferences- i.e. a valorization of the notion that we are in the 'wrong' universe would be part and parcel of actually advancing a 'Presentist' moral agenda such that we fulfill a duty to make a better home of this world. Of course, I can't show this mathematically precisely because Knightian Uncertainty exists. But General Equilibria  must be 'anything goes' unless there is some ontologically dysphoric intensional 'anchoring' outside all compossible ways of being human on this earth.

Prof Hills' mathematical background perhaps explains the similarity I perceive between our views on Shamanism. His being an academic- and therefore, albeit merely programmatically, as stupid as shit- explains the divergence.

I will now look more closely at his article to establish whether any similarity actually obtains.

...there is a common theme to shamanism wherever it is practised: the use of spiritual (or shamanic) trance to facilitate journeys to a non-ordinary reality. Here, in this non-ordinary reality, the shamans do their work. According to the historian of religion Mircea Eliade writing in 1951, shamanism is the ‘technique of ecstasy’, involving the purposeful invocation and use of dreams and visions to solve problems.

Eliade's Romania was actually more primitive than the Calcutta he came to as a mining engineer. He repaid the hospitality of his bhadralok host, who was planning to settle in Paris after retirement, by seducing his under-age daughter. Eliade thinks she was married to a tree! He was as stupid as shit. But, in poetry, only the charlatan is genuine and Eliade was a Poundian mythopoeticist somewhat less evil or academically mischievous than Paul de Man.

My parents read Eliade- at any rate his shite was on the bookshelf- and people of their class did talk bollocks like Eliade when confronted with shamanic- or, indeed, any culturally unfamiliar- phenomena in a different part of India. This was because India wasn't yet a culturally unified country. So, though Granny would ensure that the Bon as well as Buddhist was fed and placated- though 'non-veg' ceremonies for the grandson must be done out of sight- Mummy and Daddy would talk stilted shite at cocktail parties in Gangtok. But, if I tried to use similar 'etic' language re. our own Tamil orthopraxy, I'd either have the black smacked off me or, after I got a phoren degree and White Wife, have had to conform to the orthodox Vadadesi Vadama Marxist Vulgate- which conserves the Caste System- as represented by Op Eds in the Hindu, or else leave the country and go clean toilets in the West. Siddhartha Varadarajan chose the former course. The man who didn't know what or who a 'Kurmi' was is now blasting Modi for his casteism!

The fact of the matter is that Shamanism, like talking shite about the coming Marxist Revolution, isn't really a technique of ecstasy. It is a boring and stupid way to pay the bills. As a Brahman, I was made to understand in no uncertain terms that even the subaltern 'kurrati' fortune-teller was more venerable than my LSE eschatology. My own ancestors had been brought up by them- because, during recessions in demand for their services, they sit things out in Brahman, or Vaishnav, or Jain, or Pirzada Muslim, homes. You can't understand the efflorescence of Pentecostal Christianity- which was giving our good friends in the Church such a headache!- till you accept that Shamanism is merely Shramanism without a Collidge edumication.

By this definition, shamanism is the landscape of the spirit-journey, populated by good and evil spirits and the souls of the deceased and yet-to-be-born.

Shamanism may be one type of sherpa- the shittiest- of this mountainous landscape. It isn't itself that landscape. I believe Marxian 'species man' has an ontologically dysphoric fitness landscape for purely mathematical, decision theoretic, reasons which it would be very boring to spell out. But that spirit landscape is even more boringly ideographic. This does not mean it can or should be ignored. But acknowledging it is best done on the basis of 'suhrit-prapti'- the gaining of the 'same-hearted'- and what follows is AA or Weight Watchers or Surviving Socioproctology or other such 'workshops' or sodalities. Magic is done in such places. There are Wizards there. But there are also many very ordinary people- men and women of sorrow- who are Messiahs absolving you of your original sin of being a superficial, self-involved, shithead of little use to man or beast.

Hills next waxes poetic- but to what purpose?

It is the place where mountains speak and Grandmother Skeleton points out which plants to eat when the dry season lasts too long.

Right! Coz the old woman who knows stuff like this aint called Granny. She is prancing around as a Shaman! How stupid is Hills? I am plenty stupid. But I've stayed in villages in East Africa and both the far North and South of India when the rains were delayed. Grannies- men tend to die young or have moved to the Cities- knew this stuff. They could tell when there would be a landslide or a drought or a flood. I suppose, everybody could- if they wanted to. But the Grannies had auctoritas- i.e. exercised residual control rights under an incomplete contract. Some stoned Shaman prancing around would have had no such thing.

In this form, shamanism is everywhere in the old ways of humans. Every tribal culture – alive or dead – has some broker of spiritual capital. The Indonesian Mentawai have their sikerei. The Inuit have their angakok. The Columbian Desana have their paye. The Mongolian Buryat have their böö. The American Sioux have their heyoka.

And all of them are on Craig's List offering esoteric spiritual services to those who don't mind driving down to Cricklewood or Peckham to access them. 

The sheer magnitude of our shamanic ancestry means one of two things: either shamanism originated once prior to the human diaspora some 70,000 years ago and has been preserved since, or it has arisen independently countless times in premodern human cultures.

Foolish. That's not what the maths says. There is no 'shaman' gene. There is no Waddington type 'canalization' here. One may as well speak of our 'Prostitute' or 'Pedant' ancestry. Is Hills a 'Manuvadi' casteist?

If we consider that preagricultural human societies are each experiments in how to run a village, with each competing in the evolutionary market of survival and reproduction, then we must ask: what good is shamanism?

Again, very foolish. Villages have to be interconnected by a pastoralist or other highly mobile caste or tribe. The reason I spick such gud Inglis is coz Brit-tin-pan-alleya ruled waves innit? It is still a fact that it is cheaper for an Indian businessman to buy stuff shipped through Singapore or Colombo than from across State borders. That is why India has not taken off economically.

My ancestors were shamans who, once they could constitute an endogamous group with a diversified portfolio of realty, and the provision of ontologically dysphoric, irreal positional goods, became ... urm ... indistinguishable from any other group which worked hard, saved money, talked high falutin bollocks, and refrained from masturbating while giving lectures or attending faculty meetings.

Hills is not an Econ guy. He is young. He wasn't a kid wot grew up in places where there were Sacred Kings and Apocalyptic Commissars and, though the two might play musical chairs all they liked, what remained was, to use Art Buchwald's words,  'sheep on the runway'.

The answer to the question 'what good is shamanism' is the same as the answer to the question 'what good are prostitutes or pedants?' These aren't jobs anybody wants to take. Yet they contain 'techniques of ecstasy' which enable their practitioners to differentiate themselves from each other for reasons of an entirely pathetic kind.

Prof. Hills takes a different view-

The answer is a lesson in both the psychology of problem solving and the construction of meaning.

Sadly, there is no 'psychology of problem solving'. There is merely the diminishing returns to a foolish academic availability cascade. As for the 'construction' or 'deconstruction' of meaning- just go fuck yourself okay? We have had it up to here with that type of shite. Fuck is wrong with you? You did some Math as part of your ascent to being a worthless credentialized cretin presiding over a Baumol cost-disease type Ponzi scheme only sustainable by sucking in furriners wot don't spick Inglis gud.

In order to get there, we first have to understand what the prominent explanations of shamanism are in contemporary anthropology.

But, contemporary anthropology is widely regarded as utter imbecilic shite by everybody including its practitioners.

These explanations all rely upon a common set of psychological and evolutionary principles, and these principles in turn explain the adaptive value of shamanism.

But these guys are even stupider than Economists or fuckers wot teach MBA students! Why not simply get on Skype and talk to an actual Shaman? It will turn out that his Guru is living in London or New York and Gwyneth Paltrow has already trademarked that dude's shite.

The market works that way. Aeon is a brave effort to keep the Academy from resigning itself to a but adversely selective 'signalling mechanism' fate. But, the method is meretricious. It is the process by which an Eliade becomes an 'emic' expert of a wholly fraudulent availability cascade. Why not simply say that Lobsang Rhampa was the greatest Tibetan Lama precisely coz he was actually a West Country plumber? Oddly, this claim is perfectly true. An uneducated guy with a broad accent, which neither Hills nor I have, prefigured the manner in which Tibetan Buddhism would cease to be 'magical' or 'shamanistic' and become the bedrock of a praxis of 'suhrit prapti' such that victims of sexual or other abuse could recover their sense of autonomy and thus Buddhist 'cetana'. 

Hills speaks of therapeutic practices without mentioning their close connection in the Medieval world with the spiritual and moral sciences. The fact is the Philosophically informed Physician- even charlatans like Malfatti and Freud- triumphed over the barber and apothecary. Only the former had a well developed theory of ecstasy and claimed to find it in, entirely fraudulent, scientific discovery.

One explanation holds that shamans are beta-versions of modern healers.

So, they are charlatans till they get lucky.  But this is the discovery process sanctioned by the F.D.A. Why not simply call every Steve Jobs a Shaman?

They treat everything from tiger bites to depression. Their expertise in medicinal plants and associated healing practices extends from the physical to the psychological. This happens because many tribal cultures do not differentiate between the material and mental in the same way that modern science often does. It is also well-known that many of the plants used by traditional healers have active properties and are used accordingly. But this explanation doesn’t say much about a key element in shamanic practice: the shamanic trance.

Nor does an explanation of modern Medicine which neglects the fact that it is a merely entrepreneurial discovery process characterized by large scale fraud. Trances are like availability cascades. They are a case of self intoxication by a Kavka toxin of a commercially useful and amour propre defending kind. Freud and Jung and Bruno Betthelheim were frauds. But Marcuse was a greater, for derivative, fraud. His propagandizing for liberative techniques of ecstasy culminated in Cohn Bendit's unmanly belle-lettrestic paroxysms sentimentalizing the rape of three year old girls who, truth be told, were just asking for it- indeed, by their bourgeois behavior, actively provoking and encouraging their own destruction as an oppressive, hegemonic, class.

A second prominent explanation is that shamans exploit human gullibility by taking advantage of psychological biases, such as the human fear of ‘dread risks’.

WTF? This isn't a 'psychological bias'. It is eminently rational. Econ theory says, in good times, you should invest in 'positional', 'reputational', 'epistemic' and soteriological assets as a hedge.

Hills may not be aware that, in the heart of London, young Somali origin people have rational 'dread risks'. They get knifed or shot by others of their ilk. Their Mums send them back to Somalia for this reason. Because I was a kid in Kenya for 4 years, I know a bit about 'shamanism' in the Horn of Africa. But, Al Shabab aint shamanistic. It is the opposite.

These are risks that are essentially arbitrary, or outside of one’s control, but can nonetheless wipe out entire families or villages.

But this has always been true of every family or village anywhere. Why bring up 'Shamanism' which, historically is associated with demographic replacement?

Modern examples include plane crashes, terrorist attacks, nuclear meltdowns, pandemics and the like: events with low probability, but very high consequences.

Fuck off! Nuisances don't have abiding consequences. Hills isn't currently in any great fear that his foreskin will be chopped off or that he will be forced to grow a less unsightly beard.

The science shows that humans will pay a lot to minimise these risks, even if the associated consequences are more lethal over the long run.

Nonsense! Experience shows the regret minimizing strategy is to permit, nay actively invest in!,  the burgeoning of existential threats to all human existence. Either Hills is a cretin or he is playing to a cretinous gallery.

In this case, some anthropologists claim, the shamanic trance represents a kind of folk proof that shamans can protect people against dread risks. The shaman can interact with invisible forces and effectively neutralise them.

The problem here is that if you live in London or New York or Paris, you can actually order up some 'Muti Magic' as easily as you can order a Pizza.  Just for Google Ad Revenue, you can gawk or grok your fill of this shite without paying a penny.  For a few dollars more you can get an authentic mummified piece of a child sacrifice. So what? This is a police matter.

A third argument holds that shamans organise social groups around common beliefs.

As though nobody else does. The truth is Commerce is what does this most effectively.

These, in turn, lead to better outcomes for the group as a whole. For example, using the threat of magical retribution, the shaman can keep everybody from killing the last gazelle.

Fuck off! Shamans did not have Radio or Internet. They couldn't prevent rival groups from precipitating a 'tragedy of the commons'.  The last buffalo was killed coz the First Nations were militarily effective but created no 'incentive compatible' economic or legal mechanism.

This mitigates a ‘tragedy of the commons’ scenario, in which shared resources are overused and depleted.

But, we can see for ourselves that lawyers, not fucking Shamans, solved the problem long ago. Any way, Elinor Ostrom's Lake Victoria Coasians didn't rely on Shamans at all. Why write this ignorant tosh? How stupid does Hills think Aeon readers are?

Shamans can also unite the tribe around arbitrary decisions by making them sacred and putting everyone on the same page, thereby eliminating potential conflicts over where to hunt, what crops to plant, or whether to fight or flee a neighbouring tribe.

Legalistic hereditary priests and aristocrats and successful warlords do a far better job. Genghis Khan wasn't a fucking shaman was he?

This extends to organising groups around social-commitment ceremonies that enhance cooperation and create the soothing in-group vibrations common to traditions such as Thanksgiving and Hanukkah.

So, Jewish Rabbis are actually Shamans! And American institutions like Thanksgiving weren't created by guys named Washington or Lincoln but by dudes with sobriquets like 'weaves with spiders' who spent most of their time stoned out of their gourds!

The shamanic ability to organise social groups around common beliefs is certainly an advantage.

Really? Shamans can organize social groups can they? Should we elect a Shaman leader of the Labor Party so as to fight back against Bo Jo?

Shamans have the ability to be shamans. Guys who have the ability to organize  social groups very seldom have the ability to do a fuckin spirit journey to kill the totemic teddy bear of their elder sister who beats them mercilessly when they fuck up a domestic chore.

It might seem at first to be a somewhat weak evolutionary explanation, but in fact the opposite is true. Consider the following example. Up until the arrival of the Europeans, much of North America was home to peoples whose ancestors had crossed over the Bering Straits roughly 20,000 years before. But by the mid-1800s, Europeans were arriving in a steady drove, and the Native Americans were under serious threat. They needed to repel the invaders. But what was to be done?

This fucker doesn't get that we dun all got smartphones now. We know what happened. There was a militarily very successful First Nation military force at the heart of the Continent. But it was somewhat more shite than that of Whitey coz it was too exploitative and thus incentive incompatible.

In 1889, a Nevadan Paiute elder named Jack Wilson had a dream-vision of a sacred dance that would enlist the spirit armies of the dead. This dance would lead to the inevitable swallowing of White people by the Earth. It became known as the Ghost Dance.

So what? Back in 1857 some teenage South African girl- who was not a Shaman- got the Xhosa tribe to slaughter their cattle coz, like obviously dude, this will make dead warriors come back to life and kill Whitey.

All sorts of shite rebellions against Whitey or the powers that be, occurred around the same time. Was the Taiping rebellion 'shamanistic'? Its leader claimed to be the younger brother of Christ and some of the first English speaking Mandarins were initially his followers. What about the Boxer Rebellion? Is that Shamanistic? It coincided with the Maji Maji Rebellion. But, in both cases, we are speaking of ancient, highly elaborated, indigenous epistemic systems- not Shamanistic hi jinks. 

Hills's ignorance and eurocentricism causes us to consider him a fucking cretin. However, a careful perusal of his academic work would have the same effect.

The Ghost Dance was immensely attractive, and it united previously warring tribes from Oklahoma to California. With a common enemy and a belief in divine providence, the Native Americans organised themselves and their beliefs in a way that had never been seen before. They became a far more formidable force by working together rather than singly. This terrified the US government, and contributed to rising conflict, which eventually culminated in the Massacre of Wounded Knee in 1890.

How fucking ignorant is this guy? Does he not have access to the internet? Has he no common sense? The earlier First Nation domination of the American centre, achieved because of the higher productivity of its trained killers, was not incentive compatible. Look at the Economics. They could never do better than 50,000 fuckers who could fuck up any other fucker across a vast territory.  This did not 'alarm' anyone. Everybody made alliances and paid tribute so as to get their goods across the spine of the Continent. Then, the spine collapsed. Instead of guys who were great at killing people, you had cunts who liked dancing.

Though the Lakota were savagely killed by US soldiers, the Ghost Dance offers a powerful example of the potential strength of shamanism as a social organiser.

Fuck off! Being 'savagely killed' means 'not offering any effective fucking resistance'. During the Second World War plenty of White people were 'savagely killed' by other White People. But the Brits and the Americans and anybody else who didn't have a shite Army weren't 'savagely killed' unless they were cowardly- as happened to the Brits in South East Asia- or viciously attacked by marauding Iyengars of a type who exist entirely in my imagination.

But, if Hills can talk shite, why can't I? If the horrible joke of the 'Ghost Dance' offers a powerful example of some stupid shite this virtue signalling cunt is grandstanding with respect to, why not accept the fact that Ghost Dance was launched by true Red Indians- i.e. Marxist Iyers like me- against fucking Iyengars and their cohorts?

This is the problem with Racist shite. Anybody, including me, can adapt it to their own purposes.

But while this explanation for shamanism is heavily supported,

By people stupider than any shaman

it cannot be the entire explanation since there are many things that organise people: shared hunts, competitive sports, simple fireside songs.

But we don't need to be 'organized' to say 'Hills has shite for brains.  His academic papers are worthless'.
Why?
The thing is self evident. Still, the kinder thing is to support a Social dispensation where shitheads like him are simply ignored- unless they start masturbating in front of their students, in which case maybe they should be accommodated at a Think Tank, in not All Souls- as was the traditional practice.

So what exactly is the evolutionary added-value of shamanic trance and how in the world does it work?

Everybody has this 'trance' capacity. But so do poultry. Few peoples or Societies accept that there is anything 'shamanic' in their make up. Why? No President of a newly established Republic says 'We are a Barbarian Nation. We think Civilization sucks. We don't have Priests. We have Shamans. Kindly enter into Trade and Diplomatic Relations with us on the basis of mutual Voodoo and getting out of your gourd on Ayahuasca'.

Hills is a native English speaker. He is sensitive to the 'dhvani' or nuances of what he writes. Yet, for the benefit of Aeon, he says-

Here is a crucial clue: shamanism often arises among people exposed to uncertainty. A case in point is the recent rise of shamanism among the Buryat in Upper Mongolia. Following the collapse of socialism in 1989-91, the economic rug was pulled out from under the Buryat. This led to terrible poverty and starvation among a people whose cultural identity had largely been rubbed out over a series of generations. In this existential vacuum, the Buryat shamans blossomed like wildflowers as people sought new ways to control the uncertainty in which they had found themselves.

 There is a wide difference between an 'economic rug' and a fucking KGB/Gulag carpet. Knightian Uncertainty is what gives rise to incomplete contract theory.  There is a sizable literature on contract enforcement in post Soviet economies. Hills is a member of the Turing Institute. He is only pretending to be a wide eyed retard.

But shamanic powers are not seen as methods for defying the natural order, as one anthropologist found out when he tried to convince a shaman to engage in a rain ceremony, to which the shaman replied: ‘Don’t be a fool, whoever makes a rain-making ceremony in the dry season?’ Shamanism is not a method of controlling reality in defiance of one’s own experience. Shamanic peoples, just like the majority of Western Christians, prefer Western doctors when they can find them. Shamanism does not make one blind to the power of penicillin. Rather, it is only when visible technologies fail that people look for help from forces outside this world.

It is only when contract enforcement by the Government fails that shamen and mafias get intermediated.

To understand what shamanism adds, let’s take a step back and take a look at how minds, especially human minds, work.

We know how your mind works. It shits its academic diaper and proudly gets the result published in Aeon coz your Turing institute is shit.

All organisms require resources to keep themselves alive and to reproduce.

So we should cut off funding to your worthless Turing Institute.

This has led to one of the most prominent theories on the evolution of the mind. Put simply, the mind is a search algorithm.

Rubbish! The mind supplies the weightings for a m.u.w.a type, wholly mimetic, process. This stupid cunt didn't come up with any of the worthless shite he writes by himself. There is a multiplicative update weighting process- albeit of worthless academic availability cascades- going on in the background. Either that or this shithead used an AI to generate this worthless shite.

Minds make their living by being able to find things.

So do living things which lack minds. This fucker should know that.

Food, mates, a good place to hide, effective methods of revenge, and the means to reach your goals, whatever they may be – all of these and more are targets of the mind’s searching eye.

Fuck off. We rely on Tardean mimetics or otherwise outsource all this stuff. The mind does not have a 'searching eye'. It does however generate ontological dysphoric objects and values which, however, have reputational and 'endogenous learning' effects.

Whereas many animals use their brains to search in physical space, human minds (and those of some other animals) can search via simulation. That is, the brain can simulate potential future realities. This is possible because brains like ours encode a mental model of the world. By searching inside that mental model, we build narratives that tell us how to get from one place to another. Sometimes we do this backwards, by constructing counterfactual alternatives to explain how, if we had behaved differently, things might have gone. But just as often, we conjure up simulations to better understand how to influence outcomes in the future.

Really? So everybody in the financial markets has their own econometric model of the economy. Thus, there can be no bandwagon effects. Muth Rationality must prevail. How stupid is this cunt?

You might get only one chance to decide which house to buy, which partner to marry or what project to invest the next 10 years of your life in. Our brains allow us to solve these problems by projecting ourselves into alternative versions of these potential futures. This is called self-projection, which already starts to hint at the shamanic forces that might lie therein.

Fuck off! There was only one guy who was granted this power. It was Arjuna. Some Gandharva pressed 'chaksuchi vidya' on him. He refused to take it. But, since the Gandharva didn't take it back, the thing came back to haunt him when he was alienated from himself (Vishada Yoga).

There is a good reason we should prefer mimetics to cognitively costly simulation. However, deontics has a reputational effect which can secure rents under Knightian uncertainty. But this involves being sensible, not a Shaman. Pirzadas have this quality though descended from guys who ran around naked babbling nonsense. Charisma generates the chaos which extinguishes it, till an incentive compatible 'vow' or vinculum generis is hit upon.

Most academic availability cascades start off with the investiture of auctocritas, charisma, or shamanic status to a fool or charlatan. Thus, 'researchers' never know what they are looking for or how they would recognize it if they stumbled upon it by accident.

Consider the following. This stupid academic doesn't get that guys in villages spend a lot of time thinking 'what if the harvest fails?'. Mums keep thinking 'what if baby gets hurt or falls ill'.

He thinks you have to be a fucking Shaman, off your head on drugs, to worry about this stuff.

Sometimes, however, we don’t even know what we’re looking for. The threat of collective starvation from a bad harvest. The death of a child. The decimation of one’s entire village from a landslide. Such problems unravel the semantic connective tissue that holds reality together.

You fucking cretin! No 'semantic connective tissues' hold reality together. Wait and see what happens when your kid falls ill. You will run to the hospital just like a low IQ cunt like me. Your posh language won't save baby. Antibiotics might.

They don’t seem to play by the rules of our past experience. When that happens, humans need a ‘search engine’ that knows how to do what Google cannot: to generate search terms for a problem that they don’t yet fully understand.

Try this you cretin- type 'Mummy be ill and Doctors puzzled. What I do?' Google will give you lots of answers having to do with fucking over Extra Terrestrials or sodomizing Genies or outright lies about antibiotics and other such nostrums.

A 'search engine' is just asking a large bunch of guys. In the old days, in some places, a guy who could not be cured in his own village went to the town and set up his cot in the market square. Every quack would try to cure him hoping to get lucky and make their fortune thereby.

What the fuck does 'generate search terms' mean? Is it that smart people use technical jargon? But Aeon readers know that their Doctor uses such jargon when she picks up the phone to book you in with a specialist to find out why you have a pain in your butt despite the fact that you definitely did not shove anything in there coz you were bored and there was nothing good on Netflix.

When minds can’t find things, they engage with the random.

Really? You can't find your car keys and so, suddenly, your brain goes all random access? Does that happen to Hills? Is he lying or just shite at writing cogently?

A desert ant that can’t find its nest starts hunting randomly.

But that is rational! If we lose our keys we don't hunt randomly. We do so methodically. Why? Our brain is bigger than that of an ant.

When in 1898 the psychologist Edward Thorndike put hungry cats in puzzle boxes made to be super tricky to get out of, the cats scratched and clawed at everything – until they eventually, randomly, figured out how to escape. And when the human mind gets stuck on a problem it can’t solve, it starts adding noise to past solutions until it eventually hits on something that might work.

Does this cretin listen to himself? Cats aren't 'adding noise to past solutions'. Nor are humans- even expert Statisticians. I know there is a narrow class where something like this features in the heuristic. But it isn't 'noise' which is being added. It is a specific type of perturbation which is the opposite of noise because it has a direction and amplitude. It doesn't cancel itself out on average.

Everything this cretin is describing can be captured better by a regret minimizing m.u.w.a which is responsive to particular types of 'reset' thumps. But this has shit to do with Shamans or Hippies or Spirit Journeys or Dream Catchers or whatever.

There is an old computer algorithm called simulated annealing that helps to explain why this works. It simulates the method by which metal, when heated and cooled on a certain schedule, can be made harder. By heating it, one relaxes the crystal structure of the metal, allowing the randomness of jiggling atoms to literally explore the space of metallic configurations. When it is cooled after this temporary heating, the metal can find a more solid arrangement.

This cretin does not understand that the very word annealing already meant this long before there were computers. That's why the thing was a simulation. It showed that an old theory was plausible.

Writing for Aeon, this cretin is trying to make out he has something new to say and Science backs him up. The truth is, he is a cretin and the Science he references is shite.

Similar metaphors of high-temperature exploration are found throughout biological evolution. Some genes can alter their mutation rates in response to environmental heterogeneity in a process called evolvability. Bacteria can randomise their own genetic information by a stress-induced uptake of genomic material floating around in the soup they swim in. These evolutionary strategies insert randomness in direct response to uncertainty.

No they don't. The thing occurs in any case. Baldwinian evolution- at least of the Waddington, Dennett sort is not Lamarckian. I personally prefer to speak of co-evolved processes as drastically reducing Kolmogorov complexity. But this means Stochasticity and Knightian Uncertainty are fundamentally changed. Why? The fitness landscape has been artificially restricted. However, this is not a Global effect. Basically, your Stats go awry coz of Simpson's paradox. It looks like there is a local 'Maxwell Demon'. Maybe there is. But we can't know for sure.
This is Stats 101. When you are 17 and having your first pint of Beer, it all seems very cool. But not later on. Which is why Hills is writing about Shamans.

The mind’s use of randomness is how we think new thoughts and come up with creative solutions to vexing problems.

Nonsense! If this were true Lullian combinatorics would have made Newton and Einstein otiose. The Arab zairja would have enabled them to invent the atom bomb or time travel or whatever. But, the Umasvati, the Jain, would have gotten there first.

Why is this cretin writing this shite?

This is an inbuilt feature of minds such as ours, and one we don’t often notice. If you sit quietly and let your mind wander, you can get a glimpse of this randomness at work, as your daydreams put together odd combinations in a kind of Rube Goldberg approach to problem solving.
But we also use randomness more purposefully. For example, when we use practices such as the I Ching or Tarot card readings, we are engaging in a form of exploratory divination.

No we are not. Divination means being able to tell the future. Stupid fuckers who went in for that shite got defeated and overrun by people who had no time for such stupidity.

Such practices have been used for thousands of years to help people understand their problems by confronting them with meaningful but random interpretations.

Such practices have also been used for thousands of years to get people to drop their trousers and bend over. So what?

Appropriately used, these methods can help to escape one’s natural biases by being forced to consider alternative hypotheses.

So can being buggered to buggery.

These can, upon consideration, lead to new insights, especially in situations where there are no competing solutions.

But you now probably have AIDS and a prolapsed rectum. There is always a competing solution- viz. kick shamen and shawomen and every other quack in the goolies. Take their money. Beat them if they ask for it back. Then, give them a proper job so they can live with dignity.

Shamanism is a form of exploratory divination.

So is lying.

But this doesn’t yet explain the full extent of its power.

Because lying never explains the full extent of its power coz like it is so super awesome I can't even tell you about it- unless you can give me some more money and, like, your 12 year old daughter.

The final step towards understanding shamanism’s adaptive contribution also makes it clear why shamanism is such an effective social organiser, why it might offer an extra-strength placebo effect in psychosomatic healing, and why it can capture the tribe’s collective capacity for fear.

The 'final step' is lying your arse off. But everybody already has their boot stuck half way up it. So, why bother?

Shamans do this by accessing a particular part of the mind.

Coz their arse has a boot stuck up it. They have to find a very particular, not to say peculiar, part of the mind to stick with their story.

Through purposeful and yet exploratory investigation, shamans make lucid the mental associations that lurk quietly underneath our understanding of reality.

In other words, they fasten on stupid people and tell them what they want to hear.

As what the US ethnobotanist Terence McKenna in the 1980s called ‘astronauts of inner space’, shamans help to make explicit a part of our mind that is thousands, if not millions, of years old.

Just like liars.

No one did a more thorough job of explaining the characters that populate this inner space than the US literature scholar Joseph Campbell.

Campbell, at any rate, didn't have a PhD. He did fall for a Hindu Swami but his record of his Indian visit is as good as anything in V.S Naipaul. Still, the fucker was a gullible cretin. He thought Iyer boys like myself had our heads chopped off at our 'kuladevam' temple. We have our head shaved. That's all.

In The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Campbell set out the basic narrative figures that are common to countless cultures. The hero, the wise elder, the mother/sister/love-interest, the trickster, and the dark shadow are all themes that appear throughout humanity’s many stories and explanations of itself. The US filmmaker George Lucas used Campbell’s work as an inspiration for Star Wars (1977), which sheds interesting light on the elements of our narrative addiction. These narrative figures and the challenges they face are embodied in characters such as Luke (the hero), Obi-Wan (the wise elder), Leia (the mother/sister/love-interest), Han (the trickster), and Darth Vader (the dark shadow). In a deep psychological sense, these figures are the molecules of meaning that fuel human narrative.

That's a deep psychological sense? Try this one on for size, Hills you cretin- Psychologists have their heads up their arses. In a deep psychological sense, obviously. Incidentally, Han (the trickster) was too a fucking love interest. Initially he was into a 'bear'- that big Wookie whose dong was never shown- but then Luke turned out to be boring and Obi- an obvious pederast- became incorporeal. So Leia, who only got sexy once a lizard tongued her, had to stand in for her hard-bod bro. Much good it did her.

Shamanism uses in-built associations to construct meanings for which the mind has a natural affinity

Like lying.

For those fond of depth psychology, these characters are Carl Jung’s archetypes, the Rosetta Stone by which our unconscious mind makes sense of reality.

Does this cretin actually read what he writes? A Rosetta Stone is not a characteristica universalis. It merely presents the same text in two or more languages. If Life evolved by natural selection we know it must be the case that perception can't rely upon anything factorizable as a universal script. Why? Because then we would be too easy to hack. Regret minimization requires robustness such that a predator or parasite is baffled in the same way, and for the same reason, as a stupid pedant like Hills.

If you are an evolutionary psychologist, they are the survival and mating modules that compete for our attention (‘Is it a threat?’ ‘Is it an opportunity for love?’ ‘Is he someone I can trust?’ ‘Is this the end?’).

If you are an 'evolutionary psychologist' you are as stupid as shit. Why? Because you are a psychologist. Also your maths is crap and you smell bad and you probably think this article in Aeon is cool.

If you are a secular Buddhist who takes the practice of mindfulness as an opportunity to get a hawk’s-eye-view on the mind, then these are the vines on which the monkey mind swings.

Fair point. Secular Buddhists- like other Buddhists- are as stupid as shit.

In Why Buddhism Is True (2017), the US science writer Robert Wright combines these ideas to make clear the shoulder-sitting angels and devils of human motivation.

Good to know there are 'science writers' who make things clear about 'angels'.

Through the ritualised invocation of these mental spirits, shamanism makes these characters explicit.

But lying does a better job. Smelly old shamans biting the heads of chickens and getting high don't talk good English. What I want to hear is 'Your Mummy and Daddy are so proud you didn't fall into the trap of passing exams and getting a good job and not marrying a whore. Also your poetry is super excellent. OMG! The angel sitting on your right shoulder just told me that Mother Gaia is gonna give you a blow job coz u r such a special little boy! Incidentally, that devil sitting on your left shoulder is telling me you masturbate too much. Mother Gaia wants to get a full load of your spunk to swallow. So kindly quit tugging at your todger- at least during our sessions- and like build up some reserve of smegma under your tiny little foreskin coz Gaia, is French, and likes things cheesy.'

In so doing, it offers us the opportunity to make sense of our reality in the mental light of forces that are hard-wired into our understanding.

So, 'forces are hard-wired into our understanding' are they? That's what Professors of Psychology at Warwick believe, is it? This man is a Fellow of the Turing Institute. How come he is more stupid and ignorant than I am? Does it have to do with having to spend time in Warwick? Or is this tosser just trying to ingratiate himself with Aeon readers- most of whom are very elderly or, like me, are employed cleaning public toilets- or were till it was discovered they smelled better in our absence?

An evolutionary bias towards seeking out the safety of mother figures, avoiding enemies, respecting the wisdom of our elders, and for seeing ourselves as the heroes of own adventures is a powerful advantage over creatures that might fail to make such associations.

Very true! That is why, if I am attacked by a lion or a deadly virus, I can be sure of prevailing.

As a form of exploratory divination, shamanism uses these in-built associations to construct meanings for which the mind has a natural affinity.

Which is why being a liar is actually a noble profession.

There is little that is as important as this constructed meaning. Research consistently finds that experiencing a coherent and meaningful life is one of the strongest predictors of our wellbeing. By meaningful, I mean having a story to tell, a higher reason as to why one thing happened and not another. This makes us feel good and helps us to act in ways that are consistent with our higher goals, instead of pursuing more short-term pleasures.

Very true. Writing Mein Kampf sure made Hitler much more self-confident.

In his memoir Black Elk Speaks (1961), the spiritual leader and sacred clown (heyoka) of the Oglala Sioux put it like this:
When a vision comes from the thunder beings of the West, it comes with terror like a thunderstorm; but when the storm of vision has passed, the world is greener and happier… You have noticed truth comes into this world with two faces. One is sad with suffering, and the other laughs; but it is the same face, laughing or weeping … as lightning illuminates the dark, for it is the power of lightning that heyokas have.

Bullshit! Some White dude wrote this shite. He said a Red Indian told it to him. But, the First Nations had known English for a long time. The fact is talking to Paul Brunton changed what Ramana Maharishi had to say- as my family knows full well. This 'Black Elk' dude was ahead of us, not behind.

By contrast, British working class schizophrenics say things which sound more authentically 'mantic'. Hills should write their testimonies up as the narratives of 'fat cow' or 'ginger menace'.

To gain mastery over reality is to create a mythology worth living for.

Fuck off! If I had mastery over reality I'd marry Beyonce and travel around the universe farting in the faces of the Galactic Overlords. Fuck I'd bother with creating a mythology for?

Your head is the space from which all meaning derives.

But your arsehole is the sphincter from which all your maunderings arise.

It is the shaman’s role to shine light on that meaning in order, like a wind-up doll, to make you go.

To the toilet on their flashlight.

Hills is a terrible writer. He has no ideas. Thus he is eager to prostitute himself. No doubt he has some terrible book to shill.

R.G Collingwood & the bankruptcy of History

R.G Collingwood wrote in his auto-biography-

The reason why the civilization of 1600–1900, based upon natural sci-
ence, found bankruptcy staring it in the face was because, in its passion for ready-made rules, it had neglected to develop that kind of insight which alone could tell it what rules to apply, not in a situation of a specific type, but in the situation in which it actually found itself. It was precisely because history offered us something altogether different from rules, namely insight, that it could afford us the help we needed in diagnosing our moral and political problems.

Bankruptcy arises when expenditure is inelastic to a negative income shock and this is common knowledge. If it isn't common knowledge, an insolvent enterprise can continue to trade. The point about the natural sciences, or their commercial applications, is that elasticity is guaranteed by exit and entry. Unnatural sciences- like Metaphysics and Ethics and 'Political Economy'- do not have this characteristic. More time and effort may be expended on them, the less utility they generate. This is entirely proper because their stock in trade is non-rival, ontologically dysphoric, and thus not subject to scarcity. However, their propagation, because it uses up scarce resources, can fold up like a Ponzi scheme the base of whose pyramid can no longer, by common knowledge, burgeon and expand.

Income shocks arise because 'depreciation' was not properly covered. In other words, the stock of assets was not replenished and diversified in a manner such that, under some adverse contingency, it could generate the same income. Sadly, history offers no insight whatsoever into how rapidly current assets will depreciate and what assets will be most productive going forward. One good rule is 'let bygones be bygones'. Don't allow current decisions to be affected by money you have already spent. On the other hand, don't underestimate the amount you need to spend to cover depreciation of current assets.

Tzarist Russia was not spending enough on killing dissidents and projecting power across its borders. It relied on the true enough 'historical knowledge' that its people could always be crushed and that it could use 'human wave' tactics to ultimately prevail over its neighbors. What it didn't calculate on was that that though this 'historical knowledge' would be vindicated, it would be under the reign of Bolsheviks, not the descendants of Boyars.

France, more stupidly yet, failed to develop an offensive doctrine- preferring to let the Russians do the heavy work as if the year was 1848 and Nicholas I was still on the throne. It made the same mistake in the 1930's.

With hindsight, the French bourgeoisie would gladly have paid higher taxes and accepted lower disposable income in order to protect their wealth. As the smaller power, they needed an offensive doctrine fearsome enough to act as a deterrent. Otherwise the war would be fought on their soil.

Both Britain and France needed to turn their diverse colonial populations into military assets effective against European powers. However, sentimental racism got the better of them. In any case, they had not endeared themselves to their subjects and feared that once dusky folk got used to bayoneting Whitey in faraway lands, they might make a habit of it on returning home. But, this was a childish fear.

Collingwood lived to see Britain become all but bankrupt because Winston Churchill took a shilling of Income Tax rather than refurbish the Navy and abandon the 'ten year rule'- i.e. the notion that peace would prevail for the foreseeable future. This, not Gandhi's shenanigans, ended the Empire. One would have thought Churchill would have remembered the excellent seamanship displayed by the Japanese Navy in the Meditteranean in 1917 and 1918. This should have shaken up his complacency. It should have caused him to change his attitude towards India. But, no- and though his 'historical knowledge' was vindicated, and he did return as Prime Minister, Power had slipped from the grasp of his class. Indeed, Europe had been provincialized and rendered a Protectorate. Paramount Power resided elsewhere.

What was the 'philosophical' cause of this remarkable shift? Collingwood, had he lived to Russell's great age, might have said that Europe's mistake was to think knowledge was transparent. Intuition could directly grasp its object. Some 'ideal part' supposedly subsisted in every judgment.  Frege type Truth Values, not coordination and discoordination games, were Semantics' central concept. God, to put the matter briefly, suffers not children to come to Him via a baptism of lies.

Collingwood whose method, unlike Foucault's, was genuinely archaeological, might have remained in the same rut as his colleagues had not the outbreak of War, and his own engagement in it, given him the peace and quiet he needed to formulate a less puerile notion of Knowledge. As he says in his autobiography- ' A man whose mind is always being stirred up by philosophical teaching can hardly be expected to achieve the calm, the inner silence, which is one condition of philosophical thinking'.

Descartes, holed up in a oven, resting from the rigors of battle, established the cogito. Collingwood, an Intelligence officer in a frozen war of attrition, could share no such illusion. But whereas Descartes was wrong because the true Scientific Method represented the triumph of the devil of algebra over the angel of geometry, Collingwood's equal and opposite error was that interrogation's hysteresis uncovering angel could avail aught against the good soldier Schweick of ergodic Economics.                                                             

The Oxford ‘realists’ talked as if knowing were a simple ‘intuiting’ or a simple ‘apprehending’ of some ‘reality’. At Cambridge, Moore expressed, as I thought, the same conception when he spoke of the ‘transparency’ of the act of knowing; so did Alexander, at Manchester, when he described knowing as the simple ‘compresence’ of two things, one of which was a mind. What all these ‘realists’ were saying, I thought, was that the condition of a knowing mind is not indeed a passive condition, for it is actively engaged in knowing; but a ‘simple’ condition, one in which there are no complexities or diversities, nothing except just the knowing. They granted that a man who wanted to know something might have to work, in ways that might be very complicated, in order to ‘put himself in a position’ from which it could be ‘apprehended’; but once the position had been attained there was nothing for him to do but ‘apprehend’ it, or perhaps fail to ‘apprehend’ it.

The Good Soldier Schweik is always beforehand in occupying the Schelling focal ground which is the solution to a coordination problem. He has put himself in the position to apprehend everything and yet to do as he pleases with impunity because it is clear that he has apprehended nothing. He is just a simple soldier and, anyway, don't you know there's a war on? We must make do and mend. Don't court martial the fellow, send him to the front or promote him to the rear or attach him to the General's entourage.

This doctrine, which was rendered plausible by choosing as examples of knowledge statements like ‘this is a red rose’, ‘my hand is resting on the table’, where familiarity with the mental operations involved has bred not so much contempt as oblivion, was quite incompatible with what I had learned in my ‘laboratory’ of historical thought. The questioning activity, as I called it, was not an activity of achieving compresence with, or apprehension of, something; it was not preliminary to the act of knowing; it was one half (the other half being answering the question) of an act which in its totality was knowing.

That questioning activity was always and everywhere the concern of the school master or the second lieutenant. It was subaltern. The good student was a Schweik and Schweikism was the too knowing method of knowing absolutely nothing and thus avoiding being cashiered for so obviously incarnating the ideal of the tabula rasa.

I have tried to state the point as it appeared to me at the time. I was well enough trained in ‘realist’ methods to know exactly what a ‘realist’ would have said in answer to my statement of it. But Cook Wilson himself had said to me once: ‘I will say one thing about you: you can see the obvious.’ And it was obvious to me that such an answer would have been no more than an attempt to argue the hind leg off a donkey.

So Collingwood too was, if not himself the good soldier Schweik, then a cog in the machine that produced that eternal survivor of Europe's wars over shite whose secret of immortality was that even total war of an ideal type must conserve universal shiteness as the condition of its own voir dire.

Britain's long peace- from 1815 to 1914- was punctuated, for Collingwood, by a monstrosity- the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park which had been designed by a relative of his. Collingwood, a Classicist whose father had been close to Ruskin, does not tell us what he found objectionable in Scott's ciborium's orientalised Gothicism weighted down by imagery of a frankly boosterish and industrial kind, but he says it struck him as ominous in the manner of Wordsworth's old leech-gatherer. What had begun in Athenian or Elizabethan rapture can only culminate in a Utilitarian firmness of mind which, itself made obsolete by an unearned opulence, gives way to a sense of having senilely survived all that was worthwhile in the World's eternal war. Poetry is more philosophic than History but-
'We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;
'But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.'

Collingwood from being the hero of 'Swallows & Amazons', had become a clerk in the Admiralty grimly surveying Europe's Gotterdammerung.

A YEAR or two after the outbreak of war, I was living in London and working with a section of the Admiralty Intelligence Division in the rooms of the Royal Geographical Society. Every day I walked across Kensington Gardens and past the Albert Memorial. The Albert Memorial began by degrees to obsess me. Like Wordsworth’s Leech-gatherer, it took on a strange air of significance; it seemed
Like one whom I had met with in a dream;
Or like a man from some far region sent,
To give me human strength, by apt admonishment. 

Everything about it was visibly misshapen, corrupt, crawling, verminous; for a time I could not bear to look at it, and passed with averted eyes; recovering from this weakness, I forced myself to look, and to face day by day the question: a thing so obviously, so incontrovertibly, so indefensibly bad, why had Scott done it? To say that Scott was a bad architect was to burke the problem with a tautology; to say that there was no accounting for tastes was to evade it
by suggestio falsi. What relation was there, I began to ask myself, between what he had done and what he had tried to do? Had he tried to produce a beautiful thing; a thing, I meant, which we should have thought beautiful? If so, he had of course failed. But had he perhaps been trying to produce something different? If so, he might possibly have succeeded. If I found the monument merely loathsome, was that perhaps my fault? Was I looking in it for qualities it did not possess, and either ignoring or despising those it did?

The answer to Collingwood's question supplies itself readily enough. Scott was not really an auteur. What we have is a turkey because the coordinative effort required by this Victorian enterprise lacked a synoptic vision. Squatting where it does, it is the reverse of Gothic. By assimilating Humility to Temperance, it is brazenly un-Christian. In its stab at heteroclite Oriental magnificence, it achieves merely a gorbellied Municipal complacency. Albert is not an Adonis or Endymion but rather a pinchbeck memento for Windsor's thrifty Widow.

During the War, in the course of my meditations on the Albert Memorial, I set myself to reconsider this ‘realist’ attitude towards the history of philosophy.
Was it really true, I asked myself, that the problems of philosophy were, even in the loosest sense of that word, eternal? Was it really true that different philosophies were different attempts to answer the same questions?

Prince Albert had foreseen that any statue of himself would be an artistic monstrosity inviting derision and ridicule. His friends thought a fitting memorial for him would be the establishment of a University.  In 1907, this vision was realized by the granting of a Royal charter to Imperial College- still one of the top Scientific Research establishments in the world. Albert has been redeemed because passersby can see on their smartphones that the Prince's true memorial lies elsewhere. For people from the sub-continent, this may be in the products of the subtle mind of Abdus Salam not some bulky sari clad marble lady, with boulders for breasts, astride a crushed elephant of extraordinary and dispiriting ugliness.
There will always be 'open' questions in Mathematics and the Sciences. In this sense, they are eternal and give scope, according to Collingwood himself, to Philosophy's 'distinctions without a difference'. What is lacking is any 'ideal' element in these questions. Voir dires exist so Schweick can be a good soldier for all eternity.

I soon discovered that it was not true; it was merely a vulgar error, consequent on a kind of historical myopia which, deceived by superficial resemblances, failed to detect profound differences.

Collingwood is speaking of the shite talked by people like himself. However, everybody knew it was shite. They did not avoid it because it 'failed to detect profound differences' but because it is unpleasant to step on a turd.

The first point at which I saw a perfectly clear gleam of daylight was in political theory.

Which nobody does not know is a steaming pile of shite. It is not possible to glimpse daylight in a turd.

Take Plato’s Republic and Hobbes’s Leviathan, so far as they are concerned with politics. Obviously the political theories they set forth are not the same. But do they represent two different theories of the same thing?

Yes. Both are totalitarian shite. If you find this noisome stuff is coming out of any orifice of yours, you need more fiber in your diet. Eat grass instead of dog turds.

Can you say that the Republic gives one account of ‘the nature of the State’ and the Leviathan another? No; because Plato’s ‘State’ is the Greek πóλις, and Hobbes’s is the absolutist State of the seventeenth century.

So what? Hobbes' State had to grow out of the hegemony of some Polis or the other. The 'absolutist' State is fractally Platonic even if ruled by a Prince. Anyway, both are 'ideals' of an incompossible, utterly shite, type. Their being logically incoherent means, by ex falso quodlibet, anything can be said, with equal truth, about them. Shit can be produced by eating shit. But it is wiser not to eat shit in the first place. Avoid the ‘questioning activity’ in knowledge. Do something useful or else simply play with yourself till somebody else does so.

David Lewis's infallible Psilosophy

David Lewis's paper 'Elusive knowledge' assumes that knowledge can be, not a Tarskian primitive term- i.e. something undefined within a specific universe of discourse- but a term defined in terms of infallibility across all possible worlds. The problem here is that since 'infallibility' has become the undefined term- whose necessary conditions are unknown- how can we know when its conditions are met? In any case, why have a discourse whose primitive term is infallibility? What use would it be? In ordinary speech we ask questions like 'do you know how to drive a car?' or 'do you know Sanskrit?' We don't ask questions like 'is this car infallible?' or 'are Sanskrit sentence infallibly comprehensible?' Why is this? The answer is that a guy who says 'this car is infallible. Even if all its wheels fall off, you can still drive it' is clearly either lying or does not know what he is talking about.  I mention Sanskrit because I once wrote a blogpost about a guy who claimed that all sentences in Paninian Sanskrit are infallibly comprehensible!

It is easy enough to check if a guy really knows how to drive a car or speak Sanskrit. That is why 'knowledge' is a good primitive term for a universe of discourse. Infallibility, on the other hand, is a terrible primitive term because nothing about it can be known- at least not infallibly.

Lewis wrote-

no sooner do we engage in epistemology - the systematic philosophical examination of knowledge - than we meet a compelling argument that we know next to nothing. The sceptical argument is nothing new or fancy. It is just this: it seems as if knowledge must be by definition infallible.

If it is a primitive term then, by definition, it has no definition. It may be anything at all. One can't say.

If you claim that S knows that P, and yet you grant that S cannot eliminate a certain possibility in which not-P, it certainly seems as if you have granted that S does not after all know that P.

A thing may seem one thing and be another.

To speak of fallible knowledge, of knowledge despite uneliminated possibilities of error, just sounds contradictory. 

Sounding contradictory does not make it actually contradictory.

Substitute, in the above, 'physics' for 'epistemology' and 'scientific' for 'philosophical' and 'P' for 'the force of Gravity' and look at the result.

no sooner do we engage in physics - the systematic scientific examination of forces - than we meet a compelling argument that we know next to nothing. The sceptical argument is nothing new or fancy. It is just this: it seems as if knowledge must be by definition infallible. If you claim that S knows something about the force of Gravity, and yet you grant that S cannot eliminate a certain possibility such that the force of Gravity does not exist, it certainly seems as if you have granted that S does not after all know anything about the force of Gravity. To speak of fallible knowledge, of knowledge despite uneliminated possibilities of error, just sounds contradictory.

I think guys at NASA knew a lot about gravity. They may also have known that there may have been a time when the force of Gravity did not exist. Indeed, it may be that there is some probability that the force of Gravity might cease to exist either locally- permitting the use of anti-grav devices like the 'hover-board' in Back to the Future- or at the cosmological level. But this does not mean that nothing is known about Gravity.

It is a different matter to say that Physics has no a priori truths. Armchair physics does not become knowledge till experiment or experience confirms that the new theory has superior predictive power and makes possible the invention of very useful new devices.

What is true of Physics must also be true of metaphysics because unless the latter can come up with new knowledge in the former, it has not gone beyond physics at all. It is merely nonsense. It is no good saying- 'Metaphysics tells us which Physics theory are licit'- because the historical record shows no such thing. At one time, it might have seemed otherwise- Einstein, at a certain stage, certainly spoke like a philosopher - but no philosopher has actually contributed anything at all to physics for 200 years. Mathematicians- sure. Artists of various types- arguably so. Philosophers? Don't be silly.

As Chad Orzel puts it-

When physicists like Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawking speak dismissively of philosophy, they're usually talking about stuff in the "this offends my vague intuitive sense of how the universe ought to operate" mode of Einstein's later dissatisfaction with quantum mechanics (and to the outsider, vague intuitive dissatisfaction can seem like a major component of a lot of academic philosophy). 

It's worth noting that both of these approaches have some use. The rigorous and precise thinking that led to relativity is obviously very useful and important to physics. The fuzzier sort of philosophizing that Einstein and Bohr were prone to is also useful, albeit indirectly (in joking physics jargon, it's second-order useful)-- their poking at ideas around the philosophical foundations of quantum physics didn't produce much that was directly useful, but did provide some inspiration for later thinkers like Bell. Bell was able to provide the rigor and precision that Bohr and Einstein's arguments lacked, and express the key concepts in clear mathematics that help drive the modern revolution in quantum technology.

Before returning to David Lewis's paper, I would like to introduce a highly useful distinction- that between a cheese knife that cuts cheese and a cheese knife which is made of cheese. If you want cheese but have none you may prefer the gift of the latter type of cheese knife. On the other hand, if your task is to sample and score hundreds of different consignments of cheese, you may find a particular, non-edible, type of cheese knife a godsend.

Not let us consider a situation where there is no knowledge but lots of skepticism. You may want something which is known to cut into skepticism in an infallible manner. The reverse would be the case where there is plenty of knowledge and no skepticism. In that case you would prefer a tool which cuts into knowledge so that room for skepticism is cleared.

Philosophy, as defined by Socrates, is not knowledge but the love of knowledge. It may inflate a great many sex-dolls for its own pleasure. But such pleasure is not love. It may be that a sharper type of prick is needful so as to deflate these too numerous sex dolls and thus clear a path to something worthier of one's affection.

Davis began his essay by saying we have abundant-too-abundant knowledge which it would be absurd to express philosophical skepticism about. However, it pays smart people to be skeptical, to some practical end, of this 'everyday' knowledge. It is the secret to technological innovation and entrepreneurial or artistic success.

Davis then says 'it is a Moorean fact that we know a lot'- i.e. ' we know we know a lot better than we know the premises of any philosophical argument to the contrary.' But this is only because we know 'the premises of any philosophical argument' are as stupid as shit. Moorean facts only exist by virtue of our knowledge that what Moore was engaged in was psilosophy- 'slender wisdom'- or stupid shit.

Davis ends the first page of his essay thus-

 We never have infallible knowledge. 

Never - well, hardly ever. Some say we have infallible knowledge of a few simple, axiomatic necessary truths; and of our own present experience. They say that I simply cannot be wrong that a part of a part of something is itself a part of that thing; or that it seems to me now (as I sit here at the keyboard) exactly as if I am hearing clicking noises on top of a steady whirring. Some say so. Others deny it. No matter; let it be granted, at least for the sake of the argument. It is not nearly enough. If we have only that infallible knowledge, yet knowledge is by definition infallible, then we have very little knowledge indeed - not the abundant everyday knowledge we thought we had. That is still absurd.

So we have a reductio ad absurdum here. We granted something for the sake of argument and reached an absurd conclusion. So we ought not to grant that thing even for the sake of argument because to do so is silly.

Knowledge is fallible. We may have some provisional axioms and primitive terms to get going- at least pedagogically speaking- but those axioms are not irrefragable, nor are those primitive terms well defined at some higher 'meta' level of discourse.

Lewis waxes histrionic at this outcome-

So we know a lot; knowledge must be infallible; yet we have fallible knowledge or none (or next to none). We are caught between the rock of fallibilism and the whirlpool of scepticism. Both are mad! Yet fallibilism is the less intrusive madness. It demands less frequent corrections of what we want to say. So, if forced to choose, I choose fallibilism. (And so say all of us.) We can get used to it, and some of us have done. No joy there - we know that people can get used to the most crazy philosophical sayings imaginable. If you are a contented fallibilist, I implore you to be honest, be naive, hear it afresh. 'He knows, yet he has not eliminated all possibilities of error.' Even if you've numbed your ears, doesn't this overt, explicit fallibilism still sound wrong?

No it doesn't. We believe we evolved under Knightian Uncertainty. We can't specify all possible states of the world. Hence we can't 'eliminate all possibilities of error'. Instead, we can pursue regret minimizing strategies which feature error correcting mechanisms.

Better fallibilism than scepticism; but it would be better still to dodge the choice.

By not talking about it.

I think we can. We will be alarmingly close to the rock, and also alarmingly close to the whirlpool, but if we steer with care, we can -just barely - escape them both.

It is this claim which I will show to be foolish.

Maybe epistemology is the culprit. Maybe this extraordinary pastime robs us of our knowledge.

Or maybe the thing is silly.

Maybe we do know a lot in daily life; but maybe when we look hard at our knowledge, it goes away. But only when we look at it harder than the sane ever do in daily life; only when we let our paranoid fantasies rip.

So being mentally ill is a good qualification for this line of work.

That is when we are forced to admit that there always are uneliminated possibilities of error, so that we have fallible knowledge or none.

Who is forcing us to admit anything? Why not plead the Fifth or plead with your inquisitor for a fifth of whiskey in return for mouthing whatever nonsense it is he wants to hear?

Much that we say is context-dependent, in simple ways or subtle ways.

That which isn't being sententious nonsense simply.

Simple: 'it's evening' is truly said when, and only when, it is said in the evening.

Nonsense. There is a poem by Faiz titled 'The Dawn of Independence Day' which depicts it as the final guttering gloaming or gotterdammerung of all that had been most glorious about the Freedom struggle. Faiz, of course, was speaking from Lahore. For India, whose Freedom came at Midnight, it might have been more truly said that the dusk of the 14th of August was not 'Sandhya' but 'Suprabhata'.

Maybe ascriptions of knowledge are subtly context-dependent, and maybe epistemology is a context that makes them go false.

And maybe 'ascriptions of knowledge' are worth as much as ascriptions of virginity to a prostitute made by her elderly son and pimp. Maybe 'epistemology' is about as worthwhile as 'Development Studies' or 'Post Colonial Theory' or any other such Credentialist Ponzi scheme preying upon cretins.

Then epistemology would be an investigation that destroys its own subject matter. If so, the sceptical argument might be flawless, when we engage in epistemology - and only then! 

Skeptical arguments are flawed unless they make room for something better. Utility, instrumental value, is the lustre the lapidary adds to the diamond such that what was a flaw is now a facet.

If you start from the ancient idea that justification is the mark that distinguishes knowledge from mere opinion (even true opinion), then you well might conclude that ascriptions of knowledge are context-dependent because standards for adequate justification are context-dependent.

This is exactly what happens in first order, utile, discourses. There is a quality of economia- good faith, give and take- which is the opposite of Akrebia- which foolishly stipulates for a higher standard of precision than the subject matter is capable of yielding.

Thus, if we are judging cheeses, we may be able to reach a good faith consensus that, for example, Camembert is superior to Kraft. However, if some 'molecular gastronomist' enters the fray and begins arguing, on the basis of abstruse speculations regarding the impact of cosmic radiation upon cheeses stored on board an interstellar vessel, we would have to entertain the possibility that Kraft might superior to Camembert under those circumstances. But, by then, genuine cheese lovers would be cheesed off. They'd stop caring about judging cheeses and stick to just gorging on the ones they like in a solipsistic rapture that is mute if not morose.

Something like that has already happened to Literature. When was the last time you bought a book because it won the Booker or the Nobel? If anything, the accolade is a turn off.

As follows: opinion, even if true, deserves the name of knowledge only if it is adequately supported by reasons;

My opinion that the neighbor's cat is soooo cute, even if true, does not deserve the name of knowledge though I have reason enough for my claim- and video evidence to back it up- because few people are interested in me or my slender means of attaining a rejoicing heart.

to deserve that name in the especially demanding context of epistemology, the arguments from supporting reasons must be especially watertight;

I suppose another way of saying this is 'Epistemological arguments must have a mathematical representation with 'univalent foundations'. In other words, they must be formalizable in a manner that permits relatively quick, algorithmic, error checking. Godel's proof of God is an example of a metaphysical argument which has been refuted by a computer.

I see no great difficulty in accepting that Epistemology, even when inquiring into its own proper foundations, might have a novel logical, and therefore mathematical, representation which is highly utile.

but the special standards of justification that this special context demands never can be met (well, hardly ever).

How do we know? It does appear that Logic has developed a great deal and the thing is certainly useful. Voevodksky 'univalent foundations' approach too seems useful and productive for Mathematics. Judea Pearl's work does help ordinary people toiling in applied fields. Why can't this sort of progress continue without occasioning histrionics or scandal? A certain amount of Epistemology 'pays for itself' in diverse fields just as Maths 'pays for itself' in those same fields. Why shouldn't Epistemology be like the Foundations of Mathematics- which currently appears to 'pay for itself' in spades?

Surely, there has been some progress in the subject? At least some types of arguments are known to be fallacious regardless of context.

Lewis, still in histrionic vein, asserts otherwise

In the strict context of epistemology we know nothing, yet in laxer contexts we know a lot.

Surely, the fact that we don't consider a trial by combat to be an effective way of deciding between theories in Physics means we do know something 'in the strict context of epistemology'?

But I myself cannot subscribe to this account of the context-dependence of knowledge, because I question its starting point. I don't agree that the mark of knowledge is justification.  First, because justification is not sufficient: your true opinion that you will lose the lottery isn't knowledge, whatever the odds.

But that opinion is not fully specified. 'In my opinion, I won't win' may mean 'the lottery is rigged, I can't win' or it may mean 'In my opinion, the odds are against me' or even 'if my ticket wins, I'll still lose because I'd have died in the meantime.'

Suppose you know that it is a fair lottery with one winning ticket and many losing tickets, and you know how many losing tickets there are. The greater the number of losing tickets, the better is your justification for believing you will lose. Yet there is no number great enough to transform your fallible opinion into knowledge - after all, you just might win.

So, your opinion is a statement about likelihood and true enough in this case.

No justification is good enough - or none short of a watertight deductive argument, and all but the sceptics will agree that this is too much to demand?

'Good enough' is an economic notion. Akrebia may have no truck with it- but Akrebia misleads. It can cause any discourse- even that regarding cheese fondling- to crash.

Second, because justification is not always necessary. What (non-circular) argument supports our reliance on perception, on memory, and on testimony? 

A 'buck stopped' protocol bound juristic process- like that of the Law Courts- may solve a coordination problem in a manner which 'pays for itself'. This process may rely on 'perception', 'memory' and 'testimony'. Each may be fallible in the manner that the Law itself is defeasible. Nevertheless, the thing is useful.

And yet we do gain knowledge by these means. And sometimes, far from having supporting arguments, we don't even know how we know. We once had evidence, drew conclusions, and thereby gained knowledge; now we have forgotten our reasons, yet still we retain our knowledge. Or we know the name that goes with the face, or the sex of the chicken, by relying on subtle visual cues, without knowing what those cues may be.

What was a 'white box' may become a 'black box' because the 'instruction manual' was lost. However, if we have a good Structural Causal Model then we can, by some inspired tinkering, turn the black box white again.

The link between knowledge and justification must be broken.

Said no jurist ever when it comes to establishing guilt.

But if we break that link, then it is not - or not entirely, or not exactly - by raising the standards of justification that epistemology destroys knowledge.

It is precisely that. Akrebia is about applying a higher standard than is reasonable given the subject matter. The Courts would cease to be useful if they constantly raised the burden of proof, for example by demanding that DNA evidence be dismissed because of the possibility of there being a secret cloning facility under the Kremlin which seeks to play havoc with out justice system by framing innocent citizens.

I need some different story.

A story can 'pay for itself'- as J.K Rowling has found out. A story which can't pay for itself- like a Single Woman who tells herself she can pay the bills by using Witchcraft or Wizardry- is just a stupid lie.

Can Lewis's new story 'pay for itself'? Let us see.

To that end, I propose to take the infallibility of knowledge as my starting point.

How do you infallibly know that you do any such thing? Maybe what you are actually proposing is something very indecent to the Hypokeimenon of the Nicaraguan horcrux of the neighbor's cat. Prove otherwise Lewis or face the wrath of Chairman Meow! Oh. I see. My warning has come to late. Lewis is dead. All hail, Meow the Merciless!

Must infallibilist epistemology end in scepticism?

Not infallibly. D'uh!

Not quite. Wait and see. Anyway, here is the definition. Subject S knows proposition P iff P holds in every possibility left uneliminated by S's evidence; equivalently, iff S's evidence eliminates every possibility in which not-P.

But proposition P is not infallibly known to always be P unless it itself that proposition in which case every S's evidence eliminates it unless S is as stupid as shit.

The definition is short, the commentary upon it is longer. In the first place, there is the proposition, P.

Not infallibly. Indeed, most of the time there is no such proposition because nobody is stupid enough to formulate it. Indeed, it may be that it can't be formulated save within a stupid availability cascade which is wholly evanescent.

What I choose to call 'propositions' are individuated coarsely, by necessary equivalence.

So are what you chose to call cats or their Nicaraguan horcruxes.

For instance, there is only one necessary proposition.

Which no one has ever found necessary.

It holds in every possibility; hence in every possibility left uneliminated by S's evidence, no matter who S may be and no matter what his evidence may be.

But only because ex falso quodlibet. From what is false, everything necessarily follows.  Thus is the inexorable will of All Merciless Chairman Meow!

So the necessary proposition is known always and everywhere.

By nobody and nothing.

Yet this known proposition may go unrecognised when presented in impenetrable linguistic disguise, say as the proposition that every even number is the sum of two primes.

A proposition is what it says it is. There is no 'linguistic disguise' in the above. To say 'even numbers are divisible by 2 with no remainder' and 'even numbers are the sum of two primes' are not disguised versions of each other. An odd number may be the sum of two primes but is not divisible by 2 with no remainder.

Likewise, the known proposition that I have two hands may go unrecognised when presented as the proposition that the number of my hands is the least number n such that every even number is the sum of n primes. (Or if you doubt the necessary existence of numbers, switch to an example involving equivalence by logic alone.) These problems of disguise shall not concern us here. Our topic is modal, not hyperintensional, epistemology.  

If your epistemology has 'univalent foundations' intensionality or hyperintentionality coincides with modality. The plain fact is Lewis has no hands. He is dead. Had he encountered a shark prior to dying it would have been a known proposition that he had two..no, wait, just one hand...cancel that, Lewis has no hands and...fuck... no head either. Jeez I'm gonna barf.

 Next, there are the possibilities. We needn't enter here into the question whether these are concreta, abstract constructions, or abstract simples. Further, we needn't decide whether they must always be maximally specific possibilities, or whether they need only be specific enough for the purpose at hand. A possibility will be specific enough if it cannot be split into subcases in such a way that anything we have said about possibilities, or anything we are going to say before we are done, applies to some subcases and not to others. For instance, it should never happen that proposition P holds in some but not all sub-cases; or that some but not all sub-cases are eliminated by S's evidence.

This is like specifying that a configuration space can't co-evolve with anything within it. Why would human beings- whose configuration spaces co-evolve with them precisely because they are included in them- want to stipulate for anything so stupid?

We know we evolved by natural selection. This means that, on our own family tree, there was some 'sub-case' where a mutation falsifying 'P' occurred.

Socrates himself speaks of the 'palinode' as the method of Philosophy which saves it from the tedious labyrinth of Sophistry.

It Epicurean atoms can swerve, why can't our Epistemological phantoms?

It is a Moorean fact that Lewis type 'knowing' is fallible. We expect that some 'sub-case' will emerge which can't be eliminated by S's evidence iff S is as at least as smart as us. That's why we fund Scientific Research Programs. Otherwise, we might as well use tax-payers' money to fund the Church of the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbour's cat on an equal basis with NASA. Even so, a new 'P' will arise- by the Grace of All Merciless Chairman Meow, to the Glory of whose name all Praise properly belongs.

But we do need to stipulate that they are not just possibilities as to how the whole world is; they also include possibilities as to which part of the world is oneself, and as to when it now is. We need these possibilities de se et nunc because the propositions that may be known include propositions de se et nunc. 

Either genidentity exists- i.e. a being exists through time in which case a proposition known at time x which is discarded at time x+1 is considered to have failed- or else we live in a momentary 'kshanikavada' universe. In that case, as the Buddha said, only intention exists albeit ephemerally. De se et nunc knowledge is an intention of an atomic type. But it has no intensional form. Why because complex things can't exist. They are delusive simply.

For Buddhism this permits a distinction between de se et nunc omniscience (similar to the kaivalya of the Jains) with no further intention of any sort which characterizes the pratyeka Buddha, and the de se et nunc intention to postpone salvation by a pratyeka who decides to be a Boddhisattva.

Jainism gets round this type of problem by adopting something like a cautiously instrumental 'fuzzy logic' (syadvada) and considering 'essence' to be co-evolving (parninami dhravya). Hinduism- but don't get me started on Hinduism. I must hearken to Chairman Meow.

Not only do I know that there are hands in this world somewhere and somewhen.

You don't know this infallibly.

I know that I have hands, or anyway I have them now.

Not infallibly. They may have been amputated and you suffer from phantom limb syndrome. Alternatively, you may have been hypnotized.

Such propositions aren't just made true or made false by the whole world once and for all. They are true for some of us and not for others, or true at some times and not others, or both.

Why not go the whole Vedanta or Anekaanthavada hog? Why not say it is true because false for some of the all which defines us as each other while Chairman Meow purrs the Cosmos into existence?

Further, we cannot limit ourselves to 'real' possibilities that conform to the actual laws of nature, and maybe also to actual past history.

Sure we can. There may indeed be a 'total reflective equilibrium' for co-evolved systems though we know, from the theory of complexity and computability, that the thing is inaccessible algorithmically. Indeed, it is a Moorean fact that if the Universe is a 'block' then there is a unitary operator such that ergodicity obtains. This too is an equilibrium concept. Philosophy could, like Samuelson's Economics, say 'our subject has content so long as such ergodicity obtains. It is the 'total reflective equilibrium' we try to describe'.

For propositions about laws and history are contingent, and may or may not be known.

Indeed. Most would be radically 'uncertain' and feature undecidable parameters with respect to our event ontology.

Neither can we limit ourselves to 'epistemic' possibilities for S - possibilities that S does not know not to obtain.

Indeed. But Lewis's next line is wrong

That would drain our definition of content.

What drains a definition of content is its not using 'primitive terms'. The fact that S is a cretin is irrelevant. Lewis refused to accept 'knowledge' is the primitive term for Epistemology. That is why he is now leading us down the garden path.

Assume only that knowledge is closed under strict implication. (We shall consider the merits of this assumption later.)

We can't make any such assumption in good faith. Why?  We know enough math to understand that we have only a dim inkling of what 'closed' actually means. 'Implication' is even more complicated. It is likely that 'clopen' is closer to what Lewis meant- or else he was talking nonsense simply.

Remember that we are not distinguishing between equivalent propositions.

And thus setting ourselves up for a pratfall. Lewis didn't actually give us any examples of equivalent propositions. They were simply propositions he, falsely, believed to be equally true.

Then knowledge of a conjunction is equivalent to knowledge of every conjunct.

Yes, yes, baba! For at least twenty-five centuries the Jain have been saying that to know one thing fully is to know all things because everything is related. That's why no thing can be known fully or defined in other than Tarskian primitive terms without creating an infinite regress.

Even Hegel- who had some Christian blood in his veins- said something similar. However, that's the reason that Jainism for a good purpose, but also Hegelian shite for a bad one, has a dynamic ontology and a non binary logic.

P is the conjunction of all propositions not-W, where W is a possibility in which not-P.

Not if P is an impredicative proposition of a certain type.  Nor can it be known that P is not impredicative unless everything is defined in terms of Tarskian primitives.

The Nicaraguan horcrux of the neighbour's cat is the conjunction of all horcruxes which are not Nicaraguanly feline and neighbourly to myself. Harry Potter destroyed all the other horcruxes. So let us all sing Hosanna to Chairman Meow!

That suffices to yield an equivalence: S knows that P iff, for every possibility W in which not-P, S knows that not-W.

Telling stupid lies suffices for any purpose answered by telling even less utile stupid lies. The problem here is that if P does not feature primitive terms, or things defined in terms of such primitive notions, then it is 'anything goes.' I have equal warrant for saying P- like every other proposition- affirms a unvocal truth about the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbour's cat. You may still cling to your interpretation of P. But, epistemologically speaking, there is no difference between us.

In the real world, we know we live under Knightian uncertainty and that it is an epistemological error- and a big fucking methodological boo boo, not to say recipe for 'weapons of financial mass destruction' - to speak as if we have access to objective probability distributions absent an unitary generator of ergodicity.

Akrebia can have its 'total reflective equilibrium' after some invisible hand has tossed off the (non-local Bell) 'End of History' but Economia must milk that steer to some more utile end. After all, paideia is but vatsalya. Lewis's subject was but a Pedagogy. And that means milking cows so neoteny may be prolonged.

Contraposing and cancelling a double negation: iff every possibility which S does not know not to obtain is one in which P. For short: iff P holds throughout S's epistemic possibilities. Yet to get this far, we need no substantive definition of knowledge at all!

Coz we are on the same footing as votaries of the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbour's cat. Knowledge ought not to have a 'substantive definition' for Epistemology-  though it may do so for passing the test (known as 'the Knowledge') to become a black cabbie in London- precisely because it must remain an 'undefined term'- like 'Choice' for Econ or Decision theory- in order to forfend against outright idiocy.

To turn this into a substantive definition, in fact the very definition we gave before, we need to say one more thing: S's epistemic possibilities are  every possibility; hence in every possibility left uneliminated by S's evidence, no matter who S may be and no matter what his evidence may be.

The possibility that Possibility itself is but the purring of my neighbour's cat- amplified through Time and Space by her Nicaraguan horcrux- is, by Lewis's own logic, equivalent to the proposition that all possibilities have a unitary ergodic generator. This means every S must immediately bow down to Chairman Meow!

So, next, we need to say what it means for a possibility to be eliminated or not. Here I say that the uneliminated possibilities are those in which the subject's entire perceptual experience and memory are just as they actually are.

Lewis is assuming that 'perceptual experience and memory' are functionally linked to the set of epistemic possibilities. This need not be true. Some epistemic possibilities may be purely random. Furthermore, epistemic possibilities may be multiply realizable for quite different reasons- e.g. mimetic effects or simple error. If cognitive operations are costly then it is likely that most 'epistemic possibilities' have no functional link to perceptual experience and memory. We don't bother devoting much thought to stuff that scarcely matters to us.

There is one possibility that actually obtains (for the subject and at the time in question); call it actuality.

Why only one? Several possibilities may correspond to one cognitive state.

Then a possibility W is uneliminated iff the subject's perceptual experience and memory in W exactly match his perceptual experience and memory in actuality. (If you want to include other alleged forms of basic evidence, such as the evidence of our extrasensory faculties, or an innate disposition to believe in God, be my guest. If they exist, they should be included. If not, no harm done if we have included them conditionally.) Note well that we do not need the 'pure sense-datum language' and the 'incorrigible protocol statements' that for so long bedevilled foundationalist epistemology.

But we do need a very silly belief that there is a strict functional relationship between something abstract and fundamentally useless like 'epistemic possibilities' and something which evolved on an uncertain fitness landscape- viz. the human brain. What survival value would the human mind gain by displaying this functional relationship? We could easily show that it would be safer not to have it at all so as to baffle a predator or parasite and to execute regret minimizing strategies in a timely manner.

It matters not at all whether there are words to capture the subject's perceptual and memory evidence, nothing more and nothing less.

But this means this doctrine can never be tested.

If there are such words, it matters not at all whether the subject can hit upon them. The given does not consist of basic axioms to serve as premises in subsequent arguments. Rather, it consists of a match between possibilities.

These are not real possibilities but just something invented for the purpose of armchair philosophy. What survival value do they have? If they don't have survival value then one could say that S could be a cat or a rock or a certain shade of purple which briefly appears on a distant planet.

If what you say of a human mind can't be tested and could be said with equal truth of a rock or a hue of purple, then you are talking nonsense.

When perceptual experience E (or memory) eliminates a possibility W, that is not because the propositional content of the experience conflicts with W. (Not even if it is the narrow content.) The propositional content of our experience could, after all, be false. Rather, it is the existence of the experience that conflicts with W: W is a possibility in which the subject is not having experience E. Else we would need to tell some fishy story of how the experience has some sort of infallible, ineffable, purely phenomenal propositional content. .. Who needs that? Let E have propositional content P. Suppose even - something I take to be an open question - that E is, in some sense, fully characterized by P. Then I say that E eliminates W iff W is a possibility in which the subject's experience or memory has content different from P.

Even if the subject is a rock or a shade of purple.

I do not say that E eliminates W iff W is a possibility in which P is false. Maybe not every kind of sense perception yields experience; maybe, for instance, the kinaesthetic sense yields not its own distinctive sort of sense-experience but only spontaneous judgements about the position of one's limbs. If this is true, then the thing to say is that kinaesthetic evidence eliminates all possibilities except those that exactly resemble actuality with respect to the subject's spontaneous kinaesthetic judgements.

Yet we often stumble or suffer other accidents because our kinaesthetic sense is only as good as it has to be to endow some survival value on our fitness landscape.

In saying this, we would treat kinaesthetic evidence more on the model of memory than on the model of more typical senses.

Because memory is notoriously infallible.

Finally, we must attend to the word 'every'. What does it mean to say that every possibility in which not-P is eliminated?

Nothing at all because this statement applies equally to rocks and shades of purple.

An idiom of quantification, like 'every', is normally restricted to some limited domain.

Idioms are normally restricted to utlile domains by sensible people. Failure to do so, results in this sort of nonsense.

If I say that every glass is empty, so it's time for another round, doubtless I and my audience are ignoring most of all the glasses there are in the whole wide world throughout all of time.

Why say every glass is empty? It is enough that some are emptying for it to be wise to order another round. What is important here is that someone order and pay for it.

They are outside the domain. They are irrelevant to the truth of what was said. Likewise, if I say that every uneliminated possibility is one in which P, or words to that effect, I am doubtless ignoring some of all the uneliminated alternative possibilities that there are. They are outside the domain, they are irrelevant to the truth of what was said.

What 'truth' is being spoken when you say something which could equally apply to a rock or a shade of purple?

But, of course, I am not entitled to ignore just any possibility I please. Else true ascriptions of knowledge, whether to myself or to others, would be cheap indeed. I may properly ignore some uneliminated possibilities; I may not properly ignore others. Our definition of knowledge requires a sotto voce proviso. S knows that P iff S's evidence eliminates every possibility in which not-/' - Psst! - except for those possibilities that we are properly ignoring.

Pragmatics does indeed work in this way but it has a pragmatic, utile, end. Imprecision in language does not matter because it is being used in an imperative action guiding way to some mutually beneficial purpose.

Lewis may believe that some useful purpose is served by telling a story about how he has found a workaround for a purely imaginary problem- viz steering between the Scylla of Infallibility with the Charybdis of Skepticism- but both are as mythical as the monsters in Homer.

Unger suggests an instructive parallel.  Just as P is known iff there are no uneliminated possibilities of error, so likewise a surface is flat iff there are no bumps on it. We must add the proviso: Psst! - except for those bumps that we are properly ignoring.

What bumps can be safely ignored is a question for structural engineers or architects or other such experts with an idiographic understanding of what is required or what is at stake.

Else we will conclude, absurdly, that nothing is flat. (Simplify by ignoring departures from flatness that consist of gentle curvature.)

Algebraic geometry is a nomothetic discipline of great utility. This is not the path it takes. Why should philosophy be different? Is it not already considered a worthless discipline? Why provide more ammunition to its critics?

We can restate the definition. Say that we presuppose proposition Q iff we ignore all possibilities in which not-Q. To close the circle: we ignore just those possibilities that falsify our presuppositions. Proper presupposition corresponds, of course, to proper ignoring. Then S knows that P iff S's evidence eliminates every possibility in which notP - Psst! - except for those possibilities that conflict with our proper presuppositions.

Wonderful! We can say that a rock on Mars knows the purple hue of twilight on a planet in a distant galaxy because its evidence eliminates every possibility in which this is not the case. This is thanks to our proper presupposition that Lewis was a smart guy who said smart stuff.

The rest of (modal) epistemology examines the sotto voce proviso. It asks: what may we properly presuppose in our ascriptions of knowledge? Which of all the uneliminated alternative possibilities may not properly be ignored? Which ones are the 'relevant alternatives'? - relevant, that is, to what the subject does and doesn't know.

There is only one proper presupposition when it comes to ascriptions of knowledge viz that it involves a sentient being who makes better choices thanks to that knowledge.

In philosophical terms, this means treating knowledge as a 'primitive notion' which must be left undefined.

In reply, we can list several rules. 1~ We begin with three prohibitions: rules to tell us what possibilities we may not properly ignore. First, there is the Rule of Actuality. The possibility that actually obtains is never properly ignored; actuality is always a relevant alternative; nothing false may properly be presupposed. It follows that only what is true is known, wherefore we did not have to include truth in our definition of knowledge. The rule is 'externalist' - the subject himself may not be able to tell what is properly ignored. In judging which of his ignorings are proper, hence what he knows, we judge his success in knowing - not how well he tried.

Lewis wrote a paper called 'Megethology is Mathematics'. It was shit. Mathematicians aren't saying 'wow, that bloke Lewis sure opened up a lot of new vistas for us.' How the fuck can a bunch of stupid wankers who have made no contribution to Maths or Science apply an 'externalist' rule?

Externalist rules are fine and dandy for an omniscient being. Currently, we don't know whether an omniscient being is 'compossible'. Just as Econ had to get rid of 'externalist theories of value'- like the Marxian one- so too must every other discipline. The thing is garbage.

When the Rule of Actuality tells us that actuality may never be properly ignored,

This is a silly rule. There are all sorts of aspects to 'actuality' which are far beyond our ken. We can and should ignore such aspects till technology improves.

we can ask: whose actuality? Ours, when we ascribe knowledge or ignorance to others? Or the subject's? In simple cases, the question is silly. (In fact, it sounds like the sort of pernicious nonsense we would expect from someone who mixes up what is true with what is believed.) There is just one actual world, we the ascribers live in that world, the subject lives there too, so the subject's actuality is the same as ours.

Lewis is being silly. When we model the behavior of others we use idealized 'representative agents' who don't exist in actuality. The reason he has to pretend that 'Actuality' can be known, and having been known, can be most reprehensibly ignored is because he wouldn't accept that knowledge should be a primitive term. He tried to define it in terms of infallibility and ended up talking nonsense.

But there are other cases, less simple, in which the question makes perfect sense and needs an answer. Someone may or may not know who he is; someone may or may not know what time it is. Therefore I insisted that the propositions that may be known must include propositions de se et nunc; and likewise that the possibilities that may be eliminated or ignored must include possibilities de se et nunc.

A quite common de se et nunc knowledge is that all the other human beings have been killed and replaced by demons or evil robots. Indeed, it may be that all de se et nunc knowledge is radically ontologically dysphoric- there is no world we share in common because Evolution itself has found that ontological dysphoria is regret minimizing and has survival value.

Now we have a good sense in which the subject's actuality may be different from ours. I ask today what Fred knew yesterday. In particular, did he then know who he was? Did he know what day it was? Fred's actuality is the possibility de se et nunc of being Fred on September 19th at such and-such possible world; whereas my actuality is the possibility de se et nunc of being David on September 20th at such-and-such world.

But if so, Fred's actuality is also the possibility de se et nunc of suckling the hypothetical cock of the Nicaraguan horcrux of the neighbor's cat. This the problem with talking high falutin' shite. Others can get in on the act.

So far as the world goes, there is no difference: Fred and I are worldmates, his actual world is the same as mine. But when we build subject and time into the possibilities de se et nunc, then his actuality yesterday does indeed differ from mine today.

Only because Chairman Meow has willed it so. All hail, Meow the Merciless!

 Next, there is the Rule of Belief A possibility that the subject believes to obtain is not properly ignored, whether or not he is right to so believe.

Again, a silly rule. We have inconsistent beliefs. I think Mum's cooking is the best but this belief of mine should be ignored in choosing a restaurant to dine at.

Next, there is the Rule of Resemblance. Suppose one possibility saliently resembles another. Then if one of them may not be properly ignored, neither may the other.

Garbage! A professional Donald Trump impersonator saliently resembles POTUS. However, we can safely ignore the possibility that the leader of the Free World is handing out canapes at our office party.

Why is Lewis writing this shite? Let us see-

It is the Rule of Resemblance that explains why you do not know that you will lose the lottery, no matter what the odds are against you and no matter how sure you should therefore be that you will lose. For every ticket, there is the possibility that it will win. These possibilities are saliently similar to one another: so either every one of them may be properly ignored, or else none may.

Nonsense! The lottery may have been fixed in advance by a crime syndicate. It is silly to have a 'Rule of Resemblance' when we can't know that 'salient similarity' arises from a unitary generator of ergodicity.

The Rule of Resemblance also is the rule that solves the Gettier problems: other cases of justified true belief that are not knowledge. (1) I think that Nogot owns a Ford, because I have seen him driving one; but unbeknownst to me he does not own the Ford he drives, or any other Ford. Unbeknownst to me, Havit does own a Ford, though I have no reason to think so because he never drives it, and in fact I have often seen him taking the tram. My justified true belief is that one of the two owns a Ford.

This is not a justified true belief. Most people lease cars nowadays.

But I do not know it; I am right by accident.

As a person who simply guessed would have been right.

Next, there is the Rule of Reliability. This time, we have a presumptive rule about what may be properly ignored; and it is by means of this rule that we capture what is right about causal or reliabilist theories of knowing. Consider processes whereby information is transmitted to us: perception, memory, and testimony. These processes are fairly reliable.  Within limits, we are entitled to take them for granted. We may properly presuppose that they work without a glitch in the case under consideration. Defeasibly - very defeasibly! - a possibility in which they fail may properly be ignored. 

Why not just ignore all these Rules? They are silly. Lewis has only introduced them to give a semblance of reasoning to an unreasonable project.

Don't you smell a rat? Haven't I, by my own lights, been saying what cannot be said? (Or whistled either.) If the story I told was true, how have I managed to tell it? In trendyspeak, is there not a problem of reflexivity? Does not my story deconstruct itself? I said: S knows that P iff S's evidence eliminates every possibility in which not-PPsst! - except for those possibilities that we are properly ignoring. That 'psst' marks an attempt to do the impossible - to mention that which remains unmentioned. I am sure you managed to make believe that I had succeeded. But I could not have done.

Nobody could believe Lewis succeeded. Most people understand that knowledge is the proper primitive notion for Epistemology. They can't be taken by puerile assertions and a delusive Akrebia featuring a whole bunch of silly rules.

Consider the following-

 A problem due to Saul Kripke turns upon the closure of knowledge under implication. P implies that any evidence against P is misleading. So, by closure, whenever you know that P, you know that any evidence against P is misleading. And if you know that evidence is misleading, you should pay it no heed. Whenever we know - and we know a lot, remember - we should not heed any evidence tending to suggest that we are wrong. But that is absurd. Shall we dodge the conclusion by denying closure? I think not.

This is silly. We all understand that our minds can become 'closed', we get infected by 'group-think', because of our faith in a particular type of knowledge. Thus we need to sit up and pay attention when an experiment falsifies our received wisdom. Since 'knowledge' is a primitive notion, we don't need to say anything about whether or not it is closed under implicature. We just need to junk the old model and find a new one which can lead to new discoveries or innovations.

Lewis ends thus-

In trying to thread a course between the rock of fallibilism and the whirlpool of scepticism, it may well seem as if I have fallen victim to both at once.

No. It seems you refused to accept that knowledge is a primitive notion and so wrote worthless shite featuring definitions of it.

For do I not say that there are all those uneliminated possibilities of error? Yet do I not claim that we know a lot? Yet do I not claim that knowledge is, by definition, infallible knowledge? I did claim all three things. But not all at once! Or if I did claim them all at once, that was an expository shortcut, to be taken with a pinch of salt. To get my message across, I bent the rules. If I tried to whistle what cannot be said, what of it? I relied on the cardinal principle of pragmatics, which overrides every one of the rules I mentioned: interpret the message to make it make sense - to make it consistent, and sensible to say.

The cardinal rule of pragmatics is not to listen when people start shitting higher than their arsehole.

When you have context-dependence, ineffability can be trite and unmysterious. Hush! [moment of silence] I might have liked to say, just then, 'All of us are silent'. It was true. But I could not have said it truly, or whistled it either. For by saying it aloud, or by whistling, I would have rendered it false. I could have said my say fair and square, bending no rules. It would have been tiresome, but it could have been done. The secret would have been to resort to 'semantic ascent'. I could have taken great care to distinguish between (1) the language I use when I talk about knowledge, or whatever, and (2) the second language that I use to talk about  the semantic and pragmatic workings of the first language.

So knowledge would be undefined for Epistemology, though it would have a meta-language in which types of knowledge would be distinguished and analyzed. This would not involve any histrionic talk of the Scylla of Infallibility or Charybdis of Skepticism.

If you want to hear my story told that way, you probably know enough to do the job for yourself. If you can, then my informal presentation has been good enough.

But the story is stupid. If we rewrote it properly, the sensational element would disappear. It would just be a boring piece of hackwork which might get one a gig as a pedagogue enviously teaching s kids who will make ten times your salary within a decade.