(FB 1547142603 Timestamp)
—“What is it that we mean by “metaphysics”? Is it the reverse-engineering of human cognition? Is it really so useless to try to reverse-engineer the mind? I could accept something of the sort of: “doing metaphysics even of the sort of naturalistic inquiry that you profess requires the sort of social institutions or commons that would be too vulnerable to parasitism”.”— Adam Voight
Short Answer: Metaphysics is looking for means of cheating.
What I think we call metaphysics is the discipline of trying to create a fictional narrative that justifies our means of survival, competition, prospering, and signaling given our abilities, means, and conditions. So an ‘ontology” (paradigm) that ‘lets me get what I want’. Where my approach is ‘here is the paradigm’ now negotiate within it for what you want, don’t make an excuse that what you want is ‘good’ so that you can engage in all sorts of discounting (cheating).
The rest of the ontologies (paradigms) are just networks on top of that base ontology (paradigm) of human action (perception, cognition, memory, calculation, speech, negotiation, action).
Well, I mean I worked on AI, and now we have cognitive science, and we have language that expresses the content of the mind, so it’s pretty easy.
I mean, I think I have a pretty good understanding of how the mind works, and I’ve come to understand it’s actually not complicated, it’s just an emergent phenomenon of enough hierarchical memory, and the devotion of so much of that memory to the continuous production of serialized speech so that we can negotiate cooperation with others, because cooperation produces such ridiculously outsized returns on calories that language and cooperation are more valuable than any other caloric expenditure.
In my book I teach that the human body, intuition, and mind provide a the system of measurement we work with because it is all that we can work with because it is the only comparisons we are able to make – and that all language consists of measurements culminating in transactions.
The question is only the precision of those measurements on the one hand, the correspondence of those measurements, and the ignorance, error, bias, and deceit in those measurements.
I then use that system of measurement (operational language) to provide commensurability, and reframe all human experience, knowledge, and disciplines in that commensurable language.
Then I document every known method of deflating language to produce increased precision and decreased opportunity for conflation.
Then I document every known method of inflating language to engaging the masking of ignorance, and the generation of error, bias, and deceit.
Then I account for costs.
In other words the Metaphysics of Action turns out to be the only non-false model. The metaphysics of speech limited to action turns out to be the only non-false model. And the tests of costs whether at the physical or human level turns out to be the only non-false model.
This turns out to be what we do in court already when prosecuting a crime.
Which is why the west developed reason, empiricism, science: it all evolved out of our natural common law of sovereignty.
The moment you base your cognitive hierarchy on sovereignty (the individual) then there is no conflation available by which to ignore costs. This sentence is very profound. if you base it on anything else you invite (make excuses for) the unaccountable, adn the undecidable, leaving room for authoritarian or communal calculation.
This hierarchy of concepts is quite important really. It explains why so many thinkers went off the rails and why there is a proliferation of incommensurable ‘fictions’ in philosophy and theology and opinion.
“How can I cheat others?”
“How can I use cheating to rally large numbers of others?”
“How can I use cheating and rallying large numbers to obtain power?”
I see history as a few people trying to create truth and productivity, a lot of people lying and cheating, and a lot more trying to get by with the lies, cheating, and stealing that they can get away with in the current context.
Because I study science and the law and economics and not philosophy ,theology, literature, or what passes for history but is largely propaganda.