A CRITIQUE OF PHILOSOPHY: AN ANALYSIS OF IDENTITY AS AN EXAMPLE OF THE PROBLEMS OF RATIONAL PHILOSOPHY VS EMPIRICAL SCIENCE AND TESTIMONIALISM
(very juicy good stuff in this post)
We demonstrate that we consider our lives our property (we retaliate gainst loss of monopoly control over them). We demonstrate that we consider our bodies our property (harm). We demonstrate that we consider our actions our property (liberty). We demonstrate that we consider our mates, offspring, and kin our property (kin selection). We demonstrate we consider what we have homesteaded (found), made (transformed), or obtained by trade (acquired) our property. We demonstrate that we treat those things in which we have obtained an interest in as our property(physical commons). We even demonstrate that we treat our norms, traditions, institutions, and myths as property in which we hold an interest (behavioral commons). And at present, there is conflict over, and we demonstrate an interest in information about us (privacy – although this appears to be inversely status driven).
James Ragsdale posted questions on identity, (and I work on this problem a bit), which asks:
—“Would you convert your brain to a digital version (still located in your skull), or upload your brain (to a computer), in order to escape death and achieve a longer conscious life (or a potential immortality)? Would that upload be you?”—
Now, my first reaction is the pseudoscientific term ‘to be’, which conflates experience, action, observation, and intention. This single question form is the origin of most nonsense (pseudoscientific) questions that appear philosophical but are just word games created by mixing the point of view: intentional, experiential, objective action, and observation. The verb to-be is a cheat word that allows the speaker to force suggestion into the arugment on behalf of the audience which creates confusion over the question, rather than over the problem itself.
Next we see this question:
—“A replicator reconstitutes you on Mars, but leaves the original you on Earth. Would you say that you exist on Earth and on Mars? “—
Like the use of the word ‘is’, the word ‘you’ conflates your physical body, the memories others have of your actions, the informational records of your actions, your memories of your thoughts and actions, and the value you hold (property) in monopoly access to the memories of your observations, thoughts, and actions.
So again, as is common in philosophy, which like religion, was developed as much to AVOID the truth (manners, ethics, morals and law), as it was to assist us in investigating the truth WITHIN the limits of manners, ethics morals and laws, this phrasing is a play on words that invokes suggestion (informational subsitution by the audience), by the use of the conflationary term “you”.
Today’s equivalent in the financial sector avoids casting blame. Today’s equivalent in political speech is political correctness. But why does philosophy maintain ancient forms of deception, and do philosophers fear the truth? Lets continue with identity and see if we can answer that question a little further on.
WHAT DO WE REFER TO IDENTITY?
I treat the statement ‘identity’ as an error that conflates:
– Demonstrated Status and Self-Perception-of-Status,
– Methods of decidability that we use to generate status and self-status for others and ourselves (demonstrations of contribution to group commons).
– Titles (‘Credit’. Or records of ownership to status-producing goods, ideas, narratives, and memories)
– Reputation (records in memory) of your behavior good and bad.
– Branding (our value to others) was much more important in history when marginal differences in knowledge were limited, and things like young eyesight and hearing, or mature strength, or maturing fertility, or family members provided us with value – because knowledge either rarely existed or was rarely difficult to discovered if someone else possessed it.
QUESTION 1: IDENTITY IS IN FACT, PROPERTY?
Identity is then an instrument of status measurement? So just as we could not measure the world without formulae, we could not measure and pursue status without identity?
QUESTION 2: MEMORIES ARE PROPERTY ?
Anyone fully knowing our mind eliminates our ability to negotiate with others, and knows our full catalogue of sins. This is even worse than problems of experience (inter-personal), reputation(gossip), and privacy (records), because it extends to our un-published(not-acted-upon) thoughts (free associations, dreams, fantasies, and thoughts of punishment and retaliation (memories).
Now sometimes it would be wonderful to have a twin with whom you shared identical interests. But at other times, depending upon one’s mental class (how many negative impulses you wrestle with), this can be information that we would not want others to know. (The Stoic Mind would be everyone’s friend in that world so much so that we would teach it as necessary as non-violence, and adherence to the law.) Or like privacy we would understand that all of us do silly things and none of us are free of sin, and as such these are not sins that we should ostracize over, but bad manners not for action in the commons. (The dating site that had members published is nothing more than a video game from all but .001 percent of users. Just as unfortunately social media is a simulation – a video game for many.)
But since ‘you’ existentially are the record of your actions observed by others, then you and your clones are no more than twins, once your memories, experiences, and interactions fork. Unless you can reintegrate those experiences you remain individuals.
But what happens to your ‘property’ when you’re cloned is somethingn else, isn’t it?
QUESTION 3: THE CENTRAL PROBLEM OF PHILOSOPHY?
I see this error throughout philosophy, which has been damaged by multiple separate movements: 1) the original greek idealism which failed to account for costs, and sought uniformity in excellence, rather than judgemental truth. 2) The Christian ethic, it’s idealism which failed to account for costs, and sought uniformity in submission rather than judgemental truth. 3) The middle-class idealistic signaling of victorian virtues which sought to imitate aristocratic airs (who did not admit to financial weakness). Victorian manners. 4) The Marxist-socialist utopian program which sought to invert this entire aristocratic history by demonizing such differences through various forms of critique, and the consequential postmodern (Christian Puritan) adoption of these techniques by the mainstream culture as an attempt to circumvent the frictions and political conflict created as heterogeneous people were no longer forced into the aristocratic order, natural law, the absolute nuclear family, individual productive responsibility, and concentrated in urban areas where normative tribalism is tolerable because of reduced interdependence.
Is philosophy just an antique method of deception, an arcane set of ‘manners’, where we can adhere to comforting ritual and learn a little bit without ever having to encounter the truth, where that truth might very likely provide us in the personal and social domain, like science in the physical world, answers we prefer not to have to face, deal with and act differently becasue of?
THE CENTRAL PROBLEM OF TRUTH
We can, for example, suggest that this is the purpose of philosophy over science, just as there remains a difference between religion and philosophy: Religion -> Philosophy -> Science -> Truth. Wherein Religion constrains our thought to the moral but not rational, Philosophy constrains our thought to the rational but not possible (the physical – including costs), and science in the past concerned itself with the physical but not costs. And where truth abandons the fear of the last of our religious idealisms: COSTS.
I find that through use of three extensions of philosophical argument:
1 – Operationalism: expression language that demands non-conflationary point of view (action), and therefore test of existential possibility;
2 – Costs and Full Accounting (avoidance of the frauds of i-suggestion, and ii-selective representation of information); and;
3- Objective Morality ( demand that all transfers are fully informed, productive, warrantied, voluntary, and limited to externalities of the same criteria);
The distinction between Religion, Philosophy, Science, and Truth is eradicated, as are the distinctions between all investigatory disciplines other than whatever subset of causes we are seeking to study.
And that almost all philosophical utterances and argumetns are asked as archaically, perhaps erroneously, (and perhaps dishonestly) as the philosophy considers truth claims under religious mysticism, and as the scientist considers truth claims under philosophical justificationism, and as the ‘Testimonialist’ (what I do) considers pseudoscientific statements by so-called ‘social scientists’ who if anything do not practice science.
Cheers
Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine
AUGUST 22