Apr 17, 2020, 5:52 PM
A JOURNEY: A REFLECTION: I STARTED ON WHAT WOULD BECOME P IN 1990 – JUST A FEW YEARS AFTER GIVING UP ON AI.
Interesting. Memory was off. Thought it was 92. But notes. I started working on a universal language of ethics and politics in the summer of 1990 as the prelude to the iraq war. I was frustrated by the inability of conservatives and libertarians to speak in rational and scientific rather than moral language. During the next few years the democratic party fully abandoned pretense and resorted to using an Alinsky technique of just getting on the television and repeating talking points without ever answering questions. This is what generated demand for fox news to evolve into a full time opponent to full time left wing media. This is how Bill O’Reilly made his reputation. He wouldn’t put up with it and the entire news media edifice followed his strategy.
This afternoon I was trying to figure out when I gave up on AI, and it was in 86/87. I’d sold a biz. Was taking classes trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. And so I spent the next few years on my new relationship, moving us, and working on a legal research automation startup that consumed all my time. But I didn’t realize how quickly I’d gone back to researching in my part time. What I realized later is that I succeeded in business because it was my emotional substitute for warfare, and to pay for a wife, our travel, and my intellectual pursuits.
So in retrospect, I can see the logical progression of my thought from study of military weapons, to study of the american revolution and constitution (very young), to science fiction, to study of military history, to writing conservative propaganda, to writing games and game ai, to ai solving the problem of ai in general, to legal automation, to wanting to solve the problem of conservative and libertarian thought, to economics, to the ‘aha’ moment when I heard hoppe reduce social science to property rights, and from there to constitutions, to solving the problem of lying in public and law, to solving the question of truth, to re-solving the question of the foundations of mathematics, and then to all the rest, including the failure of the operational movement, to psychology as acquisition, sociology as the combination of reciprocity and tripartism, the grammars, and finally markets in everything, group strategy, market government, trifunctionalism and finally religion.
Some people do understand what I’ve done, which is the formal operational logic of human sciences: metaphysicas, psychology, sociology, group strategy, and politics. Most have no idea what i’ve done here. Or what it means for man. That’s ok. I’m pretty confident that in the future students will learn P just like they learn every other science.
It’s an interesting project that’s consumed most of my life, or put differently, has been the somewhat deterministic totally involuntary process of combining an accident of being born in a time period of invasion by hostiles, a very unpleasant childhood, a touch of autism, a touch of ocd-thinking from autism, a bit too much dominance expression, resulting love of competition and working hard, and the relentless desire to create.
I can’t figure out if I should have forgotten the pursuits of women and success and just focused on my intuitions, but I would not have accumulated the life experiences necessary to understand the vast differences in humans across the spectrum of ability from ordinary workers, to adequate professionals, to fortune ceo’s to politicians, to intellectuals, to the financial puppet masters that are the most evil demons of all.
I just know that sitting in church at the age of twelve I had two ideas: first that I must remember into adulthood that at such an age children are able to have their own ideas and must be listened to even if it is effort. And second that if god would help me create the wealth necessary, I would build him a church. And as a proper autistic I set that as my mission in life and never varied. It wasn’t until late adulthood I understood that while I’d envisioned a building, it was a very different god, who wanted a very different church, in a very different religion, that united all our people, whether scientific, rational, or spiritual, and that ‘religion’ would amount to little more than truth in the physical, natural, and evolutionary laws, and the debt to nature, ancestors, heroes who got us here.
When we ask whether we have free will, the question is rather ridiculous. The question is how much choice do we have given our genes, our family condition, or local circumstances, our civilizational age, and the indoctrination, education, and skills we ‘suffer’ as we navigate with a few pounds of gelatinous mass in our skulls through a few productive decades of life, before that time is lost to us, our faculties are lost to us and we add ourselves to the creditors we call ancestors, civilization, and history.
The answer to our degree of choice? I’m not sure. It’s more than none, more than some, but less than we wish. And the answer as in all things is to choose what is compatible with physical natural and evolutionary law, and to make as few bad choices as possible, because we rarely know the good once until late.
Note to self: Be cautious what deal you make with gods.