Category: Epistemology and Method

REALITY

1 – Identity tests categories.

2 – Logic tests internal consistency.

3 – Action tests correspondence. (space, time, and causality)

4 – Rational action tests incentives – rational choice consistency.

5 – Reciprocity tests moral – rational exchange consistency

6 – Full accounting and limits test scope consistency.

7 – Narrative by analogy to perception describes reality – coherence (total consistency)

Reality is explained by narrative, and the narrative survives falsification by identity, logic, action, reason, reciprocity, and scope.

We test statements about the world by deflating each dimension and testing each for consistency.

Each sub dimension can only be tested by use of the next dimension.

The only native skill we possess is the test of “differences”. Because our brains use samples of inputs in combination with memory to predict results and alert us through new stimulation to the differences.

Our brains sample senses, provide certain services, the hierarchical (distilled) result of which are combined (conflated) through memory and backward propagation into ‘experience’.

It turns out that except in rare cases we ‘experience’ a fairly accurate model of the physical world – but an absurdly inaccurate model of the social world, and completely nonsensical model of our personal value to that world. All of which are precisely what is necessary to survive as sentient (feeling of changes in state) and conscious (self aware) life form when possessed of uncomfortable knowledge in a universe of consistent risk.

This is a much more simple way of explaining Hume, Kant, and the Phenomenologists.