Curt Doolittle

Author: Curt Doolittle

  • Consequences: The Unloaded Language of Autistics

    [I]t is interesting, as an autistic, who thinks in almost entirely spatial terms, and who, for many, many years, as struggled to find a language for communicating those ideas in as unloaded form as I visualize them (and found it), to watch one’s own skill improve with constant practice, to the point where one sees all humans making similar mistakes using loaded language of convention that they do not understand except as loose associations. Whereas as an autistic a loose association is extremely uncomfortable, if not disturbing – something to be avoided at all costs. We lacked (prior to the work I’m doing) a language for communicating ‘loaded’ social concepts in unloaded form, and had to rely on the closest analogies available (physics and science) as proxies. But those analogies are only that – not descriptions, but analogies, and human behavior is not, like the physical universe, insulated from heuristic and constant changes in relations, methods, and properties.

    I have always been able to identify autistic speech, but it wasn’t until recently that I understood that we all do exactly the same thing – sense a reality that we have no words for, and cannot quite complete, and frustratingly use analogies unsuited to the application to express those ideas. These analogies are useful because they lack the loading that rather ‘poetic’ human discourse develops with use, like the marks in an old an still functioning machine part – still useful for the original purpose but no longer suitable for the fine work it was originally designed to produce.

    Normals do not shy from loaded speech – they revel in it. They use it to attempt to persuade or lie to one another that the world is, or should be one way or another. Truth is undesirable unless it advances that world view. And our world views are but representations that suit our reproductive strategies. Truth is for aristocracy.

    Is propertarianism but the logical consequence of attempting to solve autistic speech in the social sciences? Its Propertarianism – the formal logic of cooperation – merely the natural result of an autistic mind’s frustration at the inability to express ideas in unladen form? Am I just a genetic machine, probabilistically, if not deterministically, producing an available output given that the patterns developed in multiple fields of inquiry made such a leap possible given human ability to form parallels between patterns of limited difference?

    I don’t really like to think about life in those terms, because it’s dehumanizing. But I suspect that is closer to the truth than not.

    I wonder if propertarianism can help all autistics, as it can help normals. But I suspect that the truth it provides us with is further alienating.

    He who breeds wins, and the locusts breed better than the lions.

  • Looking From The Shoulders of Giants

    [N]o one in history has made it this far. Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that, sure. But it’s a more humbling recognition of the human condition than I want to really accept. And it feels a bit like standing on the edge of a canyon looking into the abyss. “What lies beyond here?”

    Why is the answer, in retrospect, so obvious, but the the near universal human desire to rail against such an answer, and resort to comforting imagination so passionate?

    I am getting my arms around it and I do understand how, I think, but I don’t understand WHY yet. And I think that while I can reason it out from the evidence, that scientists will need to determine whether or not its genetic.

    I always assume the HBD folks are overstating things. But I am beginning to think there is some truth to the ***tendency*** to bias very sophisticated ideas in certain directions just as strongly as we bias our behavior in justifying outright reproductive, and reproductively moral (reproductive strategy) directions.

    If so, we are far more automatons than I really would like us to be.

    I do not want all of our history of thought scientific, secular and mythical to be little more than a dance of justification to reach the nash equilibrium.

    Depressing.

  • Looking From The Shoulders of Giants

    [N]o one in history has made it this far. Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that, sure. But it’s a more humbling recognition of the human condition than I want to really accept. And it feels a bit like standing on the edge of a canyon looking into the abyss. “What lies beyond here?”

    Why is the answer, in retrospect, so obvious, but the the near universal human desire to rail against such an answer, and resort to comforting imagination so passionate?

    I am getting my arms around it and I do understand how, I think, but I don’t understand WHY yet. And I think that while I can reason it out from the evidence, that scientists will need to determine whether or not its genetic.

    I always assume the HBD folks are overstating things. But I am beginning to think there is some truth to the ***tendency*** to bias very sophisticated ideas in certain directions just as strongly as we bias our behavior in justifying outright reproductive, and reproductively moral (reproductive strategy) directions.

    If so, we are far more automatons than I really would like us to be.

    I do not want all of our history of thought scientific, secular and mythical to be little more than a dance of justification to reach the nash equilibrium.

    Depressing.

  • Popper's Cosmopolitanism

    POPPER’S COSMOPOLITANISM
    (worth repeating)

    [I] increasingly position Popper as trying to defend against the authoritarian use of science promoted by the (pseudo)scientific socialists. And his moral propositions are true, albeit not much of an advance on Socrates’ less elaborate one: that wisdom is knowing our ignorance, and being none-to certain of anything, that we are willing to coerce others to common ends.

    And like all cosmopolitans he is ALSO, at every moment resisting anglo empiricism, political truth, and the requirement that we contribute to the commons. Like the rest, he seems to want to preserve ethical dualism, central to the cosmopolitan mission. Whereas objective truth is a political construct, cosmopolitan truth is not – it is either authoritarian on one hand, or dualistic, preserving choice independent of objective truth, but never political. (This is a really complicated and really fascinating line of thought I’m working on, and I haven’t reduced it to something tolerably digestible yet. But as someone else said, I think it’s a superior to the Hegelian hypothesis of cultural differences.)

    But like all the cosmopolitans, Popper seems to have resorted to their strange fascination with getting it only half right, and fudging the rest with elaborate conflation of existence, experience, and objective experience through the mere use of experiential language. This is very consistent with jewish literature, which is the most sophisticated justificationary philosophy humans have ever invented. Muhammed couldn’t rely on the same intellect so he just reduced the same ideas to authoritarian commands. The Chinese wrote in hedged moralisms justified by harmony (balance) – but they honestly could not solve the problem of politics, because the very idea was an anathema. The europeans celebrate aspirational falsehoods (democracy) in part because politics is an aristocratic status signal – and in most of the west, participation and contribution mandatory.

    I see what the cosmopolitans are doing now, but I am not sure how it’s possible. I mean, in Heidegger you can see it and in Kant you can see it, but in both cases it’s in the aristotelian sense: objective. These are products brought to market. Cosmopolitan ideas are authoritarian prognostications positioned as truths. While all of the cosmopolitans retain subjectivity by verbal conflation.

    I want to ask Agassi about this because he dances all around the subject in his recent book, which I’ve read, twice now, but I think I might piss him off. (Honestly I got more out of his analysis of popper’s context than all other writers combined. It’s literally delicious to read. I dont think I really understood Feyerabend’s motives until I read Agassi.)

    So, I think, probably within a year or at the outside two, I will figure out they how, what and why, of the technique they are using, and I can put an end to that form of obscurantism too. Not that I care about Popper, but because of all the less noble applications of that technique.

    Curt.

  • Popper’s Cosmopolitanism

    POPPER’S COSMOPOLITANISM
    (worth repeating)

    [I] increasingly position Popper as trying to defend against the authoritarian use of science promoted by the (pseudo)scientific socialists. And his moral propositions are true, albeit not much of an advance on Socrates’ less elaborate one: that wisdom is knowing our ignorance, and being none-to certain of anything, that we are willing to coerce others to common ends.

    And like all cosmopolitans he is ALSO, at every moment resisting anglo empiricism, political truth, and the requirement that we contribute to the commons. Like the rest, he seems to want to preserve ethical dualism, central to the cosmopolitan mission. Whereas objective truth is a political construct, cosmopolitan truth is not – it is either authoritarian on one hand, or dualistic, preserving choice independent of objective truth, but never political. (This is a really complicated and really fascinating line of thought I’m working on, and I haven’t reduced it to something tolerably digestible yet. But as someone else said, I think it’s a superior to the Hegelian hypothesis of cultural differences.)

    But like all the cosmopolitans, Popper seems to have resorted to their strange fascination with getting it only half right, and fudging the rest with elaborate conflation of existence, experience, and objective experience through the mere use of experiential language. This is very consistent with jewish literature, which is the most sophisticated justificationary philosophy humans have ever invented. Muhammed couldn’t rely on the same intellect so he just reduced the same ideas to authoritarian commands. The Chinese wrote in hedged moralisms justified by harmony (balance) – but they honestly could not solve the problem of politics, because the very idea was an anathema. The europeans celebrate aspirational falsehoods (democracy) in part because politics is an aristocratic status signal – and in most of the west, participation and contribution mandatory.

    I see what the cosmopolitans are doing now, but I am not sure how it’s possible. I mean, in Heidegger you can see it and in Kant you can see it, but in both cases it’s in the aristotelian sense: objective. These are products brought to market. Cosmopolitan ideas are authoritarian prognostications positioned as truths. While all of the cosmopolitans retain subjectivity by verbal conflation.

    I want to ask Agassi about this because he dances all around the subject in his recent book, which I’ve read, twice now, but I think I might piss him off. (Honestly I got more out of his analysis of popper’s context than all other writers combined. It’s literally delicious to read. I dont think I really understood Feyerabend’s motives until I read Agassi.)

    So, I think, probably within a year or at the outside two, I will figure out they how, what and why, of the technique they are using, and I can put an end to that form of obscurantism too. Not that I care about Popper, but because of all the less noble applications of that technique.

    Curt.

  • Popper's Cosmopolitanism

    POPPER’S COSMOPOLITANISM
    (worth repeating)

    [I] increasingly position Popper as trying to defend against the authoritarian use of science promoted by the (pseudo)scientific socialists. And his moral propositions are true, albeit not much of an advance on Socrates’ less elaborate one: that wisdom is knowing our ignorance, and being none-to certain of anything, that we are willing to coerce others to common ends.

    And like all cosmopolitans he is ALSO, at every moment resisting anglo empiricism, political truth, and the requirement that we contribute to the commons. Like the rest, he seems to want to preserve ethical dualism, central to the cosmopolitan mission. Whereas objective truth is a political construct, cosmopolitan truth is not – it is either authoritarian on one hand, or dualistic, preserving choice independent of objective truth, but never political. (This is a really complicated and really fascinating line of thought I’m working on, and I haven’t reduced it to something tolerably digestible yet. But as someone else said, I think it’s a superior to the Hegelian hypothesis of cultural differences.)

    But like all the cosmopolitans, Popper seems to have resorted to their strange fascination with getting it only half right, and fudging the rest with elaborate conflation of existence, experience, and objective experience through the mere use of experiential language. This is very consistent with jewish literature, which is the most sophisticated justificationary philosophy humans have ever invented. Muhammed couldn’t rely on the same intellect so he just reduced the same ideas to authoritarian commands. The Chinese wrote in hedged moralisms justified by harmony (balance) – but they honestly could not solve the problem of politics, because the very idea was an anathema. The europeans celebrate aspirational falsehoods (democracy) in part because politics is an aristocratic status signal – and in most of the west, participation and contribution mandatory.

    I see what the cosmopolitans are doing now, but I am not sure how it’s possible. I mean, in Heidegger you can see it and in Kant you can see it, but in both cases it’s in the aristotelian sense: objective. These are products brought to market. Cosmopolitan ideas are authoritarian prognostications positioned as truths. While all of the cosmopolitans retain subjectivity by verbal conflation.

    I want to ask Agassi about this because he dances all around the subject in his recent book, which I’ve read, twice now, but I think I might piss him off. (Honestly I got more out of his analysis of popper’s context than all other writers combined. It’s literally delicious to read. I dont think I really understood Feyerabend’s motives until I read Agassi.)

    So, I think, probably within a year or at the outside two, I will figure out they how, what and why, of the technique they are using, and I can put an end to that form of obscurantism too. Not that I care about Popper, but because of all the less noble applications of that technique.

    Curt.

  • Popper’s Cosmopolitanism

    POPPER’S COSMOPOLITANISM
    (worth repeating)

    [I] increasingly position Popper as trying to defend against the authoritarian use of science promoted by the (pseudo)scientific socialists. And his moral propositions are true, albeit not much of an advance on Socrates’ less elaborate one: that wisdom is knowing our ignorance, and being none-to certain of anything, that we are willing to coerce others to common ends.

    And like all cosmopolitans he is ALSO, at every moment resisting anglo empiricism, political truth, and the requirement that we contribute to the commons. Like the rest, he seems to want to preserve ethical dualism, central to the cosmopolitan mission. Whereas objective truth is a political construct, cosmopolitan truth is not – it is either authoritarian on one hand, or dualistic, preserving choice independent of objective truth, but never political. (This is a really complicated and really fascinating line of thought I’m working on, and I haven’t reduced it to something tolerably digestible yet. But as someone else said, I think it’s a superior to the Hegelian hypothesis of cultural differences.)

    But like all the cosmopolitans, Popper seems to have resorted to their strange fascination with getting it only half right, and fudging the rest with elaborate conflation of existence, experience, and objective experience through the mere use of experiential language. This is very consistent with jewish literature, which is the most sophisticated justificationary philosophy humans have ever invented. Muhammed couldn’t rely on the same intellect so he just reduced the same ideas to authoritarian commands. The Chinese wrote in hedged moralisms justified by harmony (balance) – but they honestly could not solve the problem of politics, because the very idea was an anathema. The europeans celebrate aspirational falsehoods (democracy) in part because politics is an aristocratic status signal – and in most of the west, participation and contribution mandatory.

    I see what the cosmopolitans are doing now, but I am not sure how it’s possible. I mean, in Heidegger you can see it and in Kant you can see it, but in both cases it’s in the aristotelian sense: objective. These are products brought to market. Cosmopolitan ideas are authoritarian prognostications positioned as truths. While all of the cosmopolitans retain subjectivity by verbal conflation.

    I want to ask Agassi about this because he dances all around the subject in his recent book, which I’ve read, twice now, but I think I might piss him off. (Honestly I got more out of his analysis of popper’s context than all other writers combined. It’s literally delicious to read. I dont think I really understood Feyerabend’s motives until I read Agassi.)

    So, I think, probably within a year or at the outside two, I will figure out they how, what and why, of the technique they are using, and I can put an end to that form of obscurantism too. Not that I care about Popper, but because of all the less noble applications of that technique.

    Curt.

  • Existential, Experiential, and Objective

    ON THE EXISTENTIAL, EXPERIENTIAL, AND OBJECTIVE (OBSERVABLE)
    (worth repeating)

    [H]umans are usually, when not defective, capable of reasoning – meaning comparing and contrasting properties, methods and relations, then forecasting, then ranking and choosing – usually without much introspective requirement – although our abilities to do so differ vastly. Very often we use language to organize these thoughts, which then frames the thoughts themselves by the language available to the speaker.

    One can be sentient (aware of changes in state of memory) and willing, but not able to make rational judgements. (see Sacks). One’s rational judgements can be internally consistent, and therefore self-justifiable as rational, but externally non-correspondent (false) and therefore objectively non-rational. (or more easily stated, an individual may be too incompetent or ignorant to make an objectively rational assessment.)

    So while we use the term ‘rational’ categorically, we cannot ‘cheat’ and because of that verbalism, conflate the existence, the experience, and the measure. This is also the technique used by the postmoderns, of whom Heidegger is the most advanced, in their attempt to restate truth as experiential rather than objective. For him, Being is experiencing, not acting. This is an elaborate defense of hedonic ignorance. The most anti-rational set of ideas yet made.

    It is possibly not obvious that advocating both Popper’s Platonic Truth, and your above statement that we “ARE” rational (which is also an obscurant use of the verb to-be) with as Experiential Truth, is itself a contradictory definition of Truth. We may use language to mask the point of view, but points of view are different: existential, experiential, and objective are three different points of view.

    (I suspect this might be brain-frying, because I have to actually pay attention when I’m writing it myself this morning) lol Operational language, constant awareness of the ‘fungibility’ of empty verbalisms, has helped me avoid these mistakes.

  • Existential, Experiential, and Objective

    ON THE EXISTENTIAL, EXPERIENTIAL, AND OBJECTIVE (OBSERVABLE)
    (worth repeating)

    [H]umans are usually, when not defective, capable of reasoning – meaning comparing and contrasting properties, methods and relations, then forecasting, then ranking and choosing – usually without much introspective requirement – although our abilities to do so differ vastly. Very often we use language to organize these thoughts, which then frames the thoughts themselves by the language available to the speaker.

    One can be sentient (aware of changes in state of memory) and willing, but not able to make rational judgements. (see Sacks). One’s rational judgements can be internally consistent, and therefore self-justifiable as rational, but externally non-correspondent (false) and therefore objectively non-rational. (or more easily stated, an individual may be too incompetent or ignorant to make an objectively rational assessment.)

    So while we use the term ‘rational’ categorically, we cannot ‘cheat’ and because of that verbalism, conflate the existence, the experience, and the measure. This is also the technique used by the postmoderns, of whom Heidegger is the most advanced, in their attempt to restate truth as experiential rather than objective. For him, Being is experiencing, not acting. This is an elaborate defense of hedonic ignorance. The most anti-rational set of ideas yet made.

    It is possibly not obvious that advocating both Popper’s Platonic Truth, and your above statement that we “ARE” rational (which is also an obscurant use of the verb to-be) with as Experiential Truth, is itself a contradictory definition of Truth. We may use language to mask the point of view, but points of view are different: existential, experiential, and objective are three different points of view.

    (I suspect this might be brain-frying, because I have to actually pay attention when I’m writing it myself this morning) lol Operational language, constant awareness of the ‘fungibility’ of empty verbalisms, has helped me avoid these mistakes.

  • No. More. Guilt.

    [I] wish I could bottle the experience of the transformation of life in the early 80’s after the tragedy of the 60-77 period. Star wars started the new positive mythos. Reagan restored confidence, discourse and hope. Gibson and Scott gave us visions of a technological rather than warfare future. Technology promised economic opportunity. Studios produced moral movies with white characters, a hint of pagan magic and christian justice, after a decade of degeneracy.

    That brilliance lasted through the 2001 collapse, and the 2002-2008 period that followed was but a temporary interwar peace funded by transfer of excesses into the housing market – America’s most important and nearly exclusive industry.

    I knew the end was nigh because our advantages were consumed.

    We have made moral and yet self destructive and world harming policies since the first world war.

    We are not the worlds parent. We cannot defend Brittania – something she herself would not do. We cannot defend europa. Had the world degenerated into the poverty of communism and had we crushed the communists and socialists at home with the ruthless violence they deserved, then we would still be the wealthiest people on earth, and the rest still wallowing in socialist poverty.

    But we killed europa to constrian germany against the moral corruption of england, and we sacrificed ourselves to constrain communism.

    All so that we would not feel guilty crushing local socialists, most of whom we had only recently allowed to immigrate.

    No. More. Guilt. It drives us to actions we are indeed guilty for.