Curt Doolittle

Category: Epistemology and Method

  • WHY NATURALISM? (GEM) The reason I advocate epistemic naturalism in all fields o

    WHY NATURALISM?

    (GEM)

    The reason I advocate epistemic naturalism in all fields over platonism in all fields, is not ideological or preferential or even metaphysical. It’s because I think that epistemic naturalism is as important as are objective truth, contract, the rule of law, the balance of powers, accounting, money and prices, for the survival and prosperity of man. Truth is truth. Expediency is expediency. Causality is different from consequence. And if people do not know that, they believe in magic.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-22 03:28:00 UTC

  • What Are The Biggest Unsolved Intellectual Problems In The World Today?

    1) If we are to supply money to the economy, how do we know how much? When are we causing more distortion than good?
    2) There is something wrong with the standard model.  What is the theory of the universe? The theory of ‘everything’?
    3) What is the human population load bearing capacity of the planet? What is the next malthusian limit?
    4) Is our progress since the industrial revolution little more than capturing hydrocarbons?  And if so, what happens when they’re gone?
    5) Our anti-bacterial technology is losing effectiveness, and we still have not found an anti-viral solution.
    6) Is Modern Monetary Theory possible, or will it produce perpetual, and destabilizing inflation?
    7) We still have not solved the mind-body problem to everyone’s satisfaction. What is the answer?
    8) What’s ‘after democracy’?  Because democracy apparently has very hard limits to where it will function, and seems to be of limited use outside of a small number of countries.
    9) Is diversity really a good?  It doesn’t look like it.  And how do we solve that?
    10) The problem of transhumanism: what does this mean for us?
    11) The problem of the technological singularity.
    12) What will happen if we have fully taken advantage of industrialization and we have half of the world’s population permanently poor and living in slums?

    https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-biggest-unsolved-intellectual-problems-in-the-world-today

  • What Are The Biggest Unsolved Intellectual Problems In The World Today?

    1) If we are to supply money to the economy, how do we know how much? When are we causing more distortion than good?
    2) There is something wrong with the standard model.  What is the theory of the universe? The theory of ‘everything’?
    3) What is the human population load bearing capacity of the planet? What is the next malthusian limit?
    4) Is our progress since the industrial revolution little more than capturing hydrocarbons?  And if so, what happens when they’re gone?
    5) Our anti-bacterial technology is losing effectiveness, and we still have not found an anti-viral solution.
    6) Is Modern Monetary Theory possible, or will it produce perpetual, and destabilizing inflation?
    7) We still have not solved the mind-body problem to everyone’s satisfaction. What is the answer?
    8) What’s ‘after democracy’?  Because democracy apparently has very hard limits to where it will function, and seems to be of limited use outside of a small number of countries.
    9) Is diversity really a good?  It doesn’t look like it.  And how do we solve that?
    10) The problem of transhumanism: what does this mean for us?
    11) The problem of the technological singularity.
    12) What will happen if we have fully taken advantage of industrialization and we have half of the world’s population permanently poor and living in slums?

    https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-biggest-unsolved-intellectual-problems-in-the-world-today

  • No. I don’t know anything. I just make arguments. Like any other intellectual ma

    No. I don’t know anything. I just make arguments. Like any other intellectual makes arguments. We don’t choose whether our arguments are true or not. We try to construct them as honestly as possible, if we are honest with ourselves, and then see wether, like so many experimental products, they survive in the market for criticism. I get a little frustrated with people who assume one moral bias or strategy is preferential to all. I ‘think’ I’m right. But I don’t know. I can just follow the only strategy that seems to work: prosecute a set of ideas until they succeed or fail. The minute you try to persuade an audience rather than test your ideas to see if they fail, you’ve stopped acting as a scientist and started acting as an advocate. It is probably possible to advocate what you think may be true. But the minute you claim you’re right, then, well, that’s not advocacy that’s politics.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-11 16:38:00 UTC

  • INFINITY Out of the three possible definitions of infinity that i can understand

    INFINITY

    Out of the three possible definitions of infinity that i can understand today, I am going to choose to define infinity as the point at which the last marginally different value is followed by a marginally indifferent different value. Ie the first marginally indifferent value. More simply as the smallest unit which would affect change in state. Or as stated traditionally as a “limit.”

    This definition does not require we stipulate any platonic infinity. It simply states that the value is unknown, and for our purposes indifferent to the calculation.

    In practice, this is the operational definition as applied in practice in scientific experiment and argument.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-08 09:06:00 UTC

  • TRUTH AND ETHICS IN ARGUMENT In my quest to cleanse libertarianism of platonism,

    TRUTH AND ETHICS IN ARGUMENT

    In my quest to cleanse libertarianism of platonism, and possibly put at least one nail in the coffin of Postmodern thought, Ive come up with two avenues of argument :

    1) Operational language: Operational language (action) forces us to distinguish between platonic and real. The moment something must be described as actions, it becomes scientific. If it is not described as actions, and observable actions, then it’s not. It’s fantasy. (Platonic)

    2) Ethics: I am pretty sure the requirement to speak in operational language is not a matter of ‘truth’ but of ‘ethics’. In other words, its unethical not to speak in operational language, precisely because it allows us to confuse the platonic and the real. This approach is consistent with the ETHICAL constraint libertarians demonstrate as a preference: the visibility of voluntary and involuntary transfers.

    It is much easier to argue using BOTH of these lines of argument at the same time. Mathematical and logical platonists can have their cake imaginary cake, but they can’t actually eat it. Because if you use mathematical and logical platonism to cross the line into economics and politics, you’re now a crook. Worse, you’re advocating thievery.

    In this case, the first platonic argument that I want to kill off is the constraint that ‘magical numbers’ (infinity) and magical sets ‘infinite sets’, place constraints on theories. (They don’t) Semantic ally meaningful combinations open to sympathetic testing are very low in number. And as I’ve said elsewhere, our problem in the construction of theories is one of words, but cognitive bias, instrumentation and measurement.

    Kenneth Allen Hopf has helped me with this argument, by positioning Popper’s advice as moral, or perhaps more narrowly, ethical. Just as, I would argue, is Nassim Taleb’s improvement on Popper, and Poincaire, and perhaps those of Mandelbrot as well.

    This school of thought is called ‘finitism’ in mathematics. The finitist movement stalled with Russell, Cantor and set theory, at which point it became impossible without using operational language, to prove finitism. So mathematical and set theory today is platonic. Most mathematicians and logisticians are platonists.

    Of course, I’m working on moral and ethical theory, because any political system must rely upon some ethical basis, or it’s not logical to discuss ‘politics’ (persuasion) – it’s just engineering of human beings as if they’re cattle.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-06 14:07:00 UTC

  • As far as I know, current set theory is still in conflict with finitism but neit

    As far as I know, current set theory is still in conflict with finitism but neither argument is provable. We can only prove that finitism has no answer to set theory.

    As far as I know, infinity is not a measurement, and not rational concept – it is a purely platonic concept.

    As far as I know there is nothing that we can knowingly (scientifically) demonstrate is infinite – very large, unmeasurable, inestimable, but not infinite unless we discuss actions.

    As far as I understand, most of the problem with these discussion is metaphysical: confusing the platonic INSTRUMENTS, with physical MEASUREMENTS.

    For purpose of INSTRUMENTATION, (deduction) we (arguably, foolishly) rely on infinitudes of various kinds. But for purpose of measurement, we cannot actually perform any infinite measure because I cannot take an infinite measure, nor can I infinitely repeat a series of measures.

    That mathematical DEDUCTION uses the same symbols as arithmetic measurement is confusing. We must deduce many measurements because direct measurement is impractical. That is largely, the value of both geometry (fixed measurement) and calculus(relative measurement). But there still is a metaphysical difference between measurements (real) and deductions (unreal) despite the fact that mathematical deductions are much more trustworthy than linguistic deductions, because they are less open to variance, because numbers are, more uniquely identifiable, less loaded and more precisely ordered than linguistic statements.

    If infinite sets are not possible except platonically, then we are merely engaging yet again in another conversation about the number of angels that may dance on heads of pins. There is quite an argument going on that Cantor is playing a parlor game, and that between Cantor, Marx, Russell and Freud, is an unconscious conspiracy to replace religious mysticism with logical platonism. (I am one of the people who thinks this.)

    It is necessary for us to make practical use of infinitudes because in practice, in engineering, in physics, distance from any event reduces all effects to a relative constant. Therefore, in practice, while the .99999… does not equal 1 EVER, we can create no measurement that can distinguish between the two. So the platonic concept .9999…. is equal to the measurement 1. Even if the point on any line represented by .9999… never equals 1. EVER, unless we change the meaning of .999999… (Which is really what set theorists do.)

    However, one of the most convenient tricks in any discourse is to confuse the ideal, the platonic, practical, and the real. And unless you know which set of concepts are being used for which purpose its pretty easy to fall into the trap of confusing platonic idealism, with pragmatic platonism, with pragmatic instrumentalism, measurements, and objective reality in real time.

    I suspect my suspicions will be confirmed. And that these silly arguments to logical authority are little more than modern scripture.

    The only platonic test is articulating something in Operational Language open to observation.

    But at least I know why modern scripture is necessary: to preserve moral relativism. (Yes, that’s what I think)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-06 07:31:00 UTC

  • SETS AND NONSENSE : THE PERCEPTION OF INFINITE SEMANTICALLY MEANINGFUL SETS IS A

    SETS AND NONSENSE : THE PERCEPTION OF INFINITE SEMANTICALLY MEANINGFUL SETS IS A COGNITIVE BIAS

    I have been working with computers for a long time.

    Computers are very good with sets of things and teaching you how to work with them. Relational databases are even better at teaching you the algebra of sets than programming languages. Compilers are very good at teaching you about semantics.

    And trying to write games that have some semblance of intelligence not immediately deducible as trivial dumb patterns. Or writing software that can produce reasonably articulate legal arguments from limited data. Or trying to represent semantic clouds of related terms teaches you something very basic about language:

    That there are actually very few sentences that are not nonsense compared to the number of sentences that are sensible.

    If one accumulates knowledge from many different disciplines, it becomes rapidly apparent that the number of concepts shared by these domains is limited and that the perception of vast knowledge is an illusory artifact of disciplinary methodological loading – most of which is erroneous and caused by ignorance of these greater patterns, or various forms of social and normative loading, or the natural brevity that emerges in any population over time. Worse, no small part of current language consists of loading meant to signal social position or create priestly mysticism to preserve status cues.

    One of our cognitive biases is to assume when we discover something new,

    Mystical statements were not false if they achieved the purpose of getting non-kin to treat each other as kin.

    They may have been allegorical but they were not false. They produced the desired outcome of uniting disunited people by getting them to extend kin-trust to non-kin.

    The externality produced by that allegory was pretty dangerous it turned out. But until trade became pervasive, the need to extend trust in order to trade and operate a division of labor was insufficient to produce the level of trust that religion did.

    We did not become enlightened because we wanted to, but because trade required that we did. And morality could be enforced by trade and credit rather than religion which threatens ostracization and death, and law which threatens punishment. Instead the ability to consume, compete for status and mates or feel the pressure of degrading status made very granular control of moral behavior possible – for nearly everyone, at very low cost, and producing a virtuous cycle of declining prices.

    While we might create very vast and highly loaded languages, the fact of the matter, is that all language is allegory to experience. There is little or nothing that cannot be expressed with a thousand words. The primary challenge is that complexity using that limited vocabulary overwhelms short term memory. So loading using complex words. Like symbols or measurements, allows us to stuff ideas into short term memory and create faster “meaning” in each other’s minds, in the three second window of our processing cycle for those who are already familiar with the topic.

    In this sense, while we use complex words with heavy loading for brevity and status signaling, the concepts that we can convey require analogy to experience, and analogy to experience requires few words.

    Where am I going with this?

    The number if meaningful sentences is fairly small. The number if meaningful narratives has been known to be small for some time.

    The need to restate narratives in the current context is high.

    But the number of theories active at any time is quite small. With the illusion of large numbers a cognitive bias, and most theories merely justifications for preferences masquerading as theories.

    There just aren’t that many theories. And thats in no small part because we are very good at killing theories.

    We are super predators after all.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-04 11:02:00 UTC

  • ON THE SHALLOWNESS OF PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENT On Maverick Philosopher (blog) Bill

    ON THE SHALLOWNESS OF PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENT

    On Maverick Philosopher (blog) Bill Vallicella argues that Philosophical problems are deep by listing the common philosophical questions: “What is (the nature of) X? What is knowledge? What is consciousness? What is the self? What is free will? What is causation? What are properties? What is motion? Time? Existence?” And then he goes on to describe how these questions are ‘deep’ and complex.

    However, notice that the are all stated as ‘is’ questions: metaphysical questions made nonsensical by the magical word ‘is’. Yet, if these questions were asked in operational, scientific, language, they would be stated as “when we use the term knowledge, what examples do we refer to, and what do they have in common?” Or “When we use the term ‘time’, what experience do we refer to?” Or “given that we experience something we call the passage of time, what causes us to possess this experience.”

    Nothing ‘is’. We experience things that we manufacture independent of the physical world. We experience things directly. We experience things through the narrative of others – in many forms. We experience things through instrumentation and measurement. Experiences are changes in state of physical sensations, and of the physical sensation of changes in memory.

    Properties are patterns that increase or decrease inclusion in a concept. A concept is a set of related patterns. EAch of which is a set of related patterns – all of which is represented by sets of physical neural relations. And all of which are created through one of the experiences above. And as such our concepts are limited to those things which we can reduce to some complex set of experiences.

    All of the phenomenon Vallicella lists are trivial concepts before science and impossible concepts before philosophy, because the instrumentation available to the physical sciences is greater than our ability to perceive our inner workings without science.

    The interesting question of consciousness, (Having had many episodes of losing consciousness and regaining it myself) is that it slowly emerges from complex layers of stimuli. But what is obvious to the person experiencing it, is that the part we call ‘me’ seems to coalesce, but once it does, and we are ‘aware’ of the passage of internal time, it ‘feels’ consistent with ‘the experience of being me’ prior to the availability of either external sensations, or memories. The ‘me’ personality feels emotionally consistent regardless of state. (At least in me it does. And that ‘me’ sense has been the same since childhood.) Then as memory starts to come back, we become the complex creatures that we are, because of our memories. Until we are able to process information around us in physical reality.

    This tells us most of what is useful. (And it probably explains why psychedelic drugs appear to help people with psychological disorders obtained from behavior (experiences), but not disorders obtained from physical defects (say, schizophrenia). That’s because the ‘i’ can be separated from the experience of a traumatic memory, long enough to objectively correct the emotional relationships caused by the memory (or memories).

    That diversion aside, the problem plaguing philosophy is the same one that has plagued it since Kant: the desire to find something mystical there, that does not exist, most of the time, by the artful use of language to construct paradoxical puzzles that are computationally difficult for humans to solve because they are framed as problems with a solution, but in fact are nothing more than arbitrary artifacts of imprecise language that remains from our mystical past – largely religious dialog.

    The cure for most philosophical puzzles is the use of operational language.

    Like most puzzles, philosophy’s metaphysical questions consist largely of parlor games created by very bright people who may or may not have been aware of what it was that they were doing. Infinite sets, and all that derives from them included.

    Philosophy is, at least today, useful in understanding the evolution of human thought – primarily so that we do not repeat past errors – and for assisting us in interpreting the findings of the physical and economic sciences.

    That’s it. Science and Economics Won.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-03 17:07:00 UTC

  • THERE IS NO REASON THAT VIRTUE, RULE AND CONSEQUENTIALIST ETHICS CAN’T CONTAIN T

    THERE IS NO REASON THAT VIRTUE, RULE AND CONSEQUENTIALIST ETHICS CAN’T CONTAIN THE SAME INFORMATION, AND PRODUCE THE SAME RESULTS

    In fact, that’s probably the only measure of any ethical statement.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-02 04:07:00 UTC