METAPHYSICS
I am pretty sure that there exist no branches of anything in philosophy per se, but simply dimensions of reality, and the methods we invent for testing those dimensions.
Those methods either succeed in providing means of testing the dimensions of reality or not.
Source date (UTC): 2017-07-04 15:07:00 UTC
PROPERTARIANISM AND TESTIMONIALISM: OPERATIONALIZING KANT
(extremely important)
by Joel Davis
Kant’s epistemology can be broken down as a solution to the loss of a coherently functional conceptualization of our experience necessitated by adopting the extreme skepticism which emerges from Hume’s pure empiricism.
Hume got so deep into empiricism that he rendered causality itself unknowable (as we merely sense variance over time, and impose the unfalsifiable concept of causal relations onto variance), Kant recognized the problem raised by Hume as pertaining to more than merely causality, but in fact to the concept of relative coherence itself.. On what basis can we empirically verify that the “thing-in-itself” is coherent? Kant then correctly realized that comprehensible experience can only emerge from conceptual coherence, thus necessitating the imposition of concepts like causality, the laws of logic and mathematics, and relative temporality and spatiality.
Therefore, to Kant, we can not verify whether reality (the ‘thing-in-itself’) is coherent as we can’t perceive causal, logical, mathematical, temporal or spatial incoherence, thus we would impose coherence onto it to experience it anyway. However, this does not devalue rationality or empiricism, it merely articulates the function of experience – the categorization of perceived variance functions relative to conceptual/ideal definition (what Curt Doolittle describes as categorical consistency and scope consistency if done commensurably).
Kant of course took hundreds of pages to say what I just said in a couple paragraphs, why? Because I think operationally.
The best concept of ‘the truth’ we can generate emerges from operationalizing conceptual coherence by discovering functionally relative correspondence via the commensurable definition of experiential variance and convergence.
That commensurablity emerges from measuring the temporal variance of sensory phenomena relative to abstract limits (what Curt Doolittle calls existential consistency).
I also hold that just as Curt Doolittle’s epistemology operationalizes Kant’s epistemology as a functional measurement of thinking and speaking in maximum coherence (Testimonialism), Curt Doolittle’s ‘Natural Law of Reciprocity’ operationalizes Kant’s categorical imperative as a functional measurement of interpersonal relations. But, that piece of writing that will have to wait for when I have the time.
Source date (UTC): 2017-07-04 07:26:00 UTC
by Propertarian Frank
(1) Language and human action are inseparable, i.e. one cannot understand language separately from action (this reveals most of philosophy to be contentless)
(2) Names make sense exactly to the extent and via the structure they refer to actions (spectrum of measurements determine the scope and limits of names)
(3) Commensurability is the best language can do, because:
(i) To discern is an ACT of measurement
(ii) Indiscernible things are informationally null
(iii) Ergo one can only fully convey (without informational loss) names discernible to one’s interlocutor
(iv) Ergo we can only talk in dimensions of commensurability (measurements both parties can enACT)
Apply (i-iv) reflexively (talking to oneself): informational content in conceptualization is determined by the set of novel measurements (and ways thereof: meta-measurements or measurement-measurements, recursively) introduced.
In other words, commensurability exhausts the reach of language.
In other words, magic don’t real.
Source date (UTC): 2017-07-04 06:23:00 UTC
It is *soooo* much easier to discuss philosophical ideas using mathematics than it is language. The problem is, ordinary folk don’t know enough of mathematics, so you can’t reach them.
Thankfully Property is a good enough proxy. It’s the unit of commensurability in a division of perception, cognition, knowledge and labor.
The problem with property is you can try to guild rally and shame using it. And that’s almost impossible with positional numbering. 😉
Source date (UTC): 2017-07-03 10:06:00 UTC
—“HOLY SHIT. I just realized that the trivium was a method of teaching strict construction.”—Ryan Williams
Yep. Now, please try to argue that the left removed it from the cirriculum for any reason other than to make their lies possible?
You want to dumb down a population? remove it’s central method of truth telling. Grammar, logic, rhetoric.
Source date (UTC): 2017-07-03 04:57:00 UTC
by Joel Davis
I would add, that “defining the relative variance/convergence between concepts incommensurably” seems to “expand the definition of the experiential context beyond commensurable relativity between its components”.
So, I guess I am rendering the whole correspondence vs. coherence epistemological dichotomy as mutual failure to establish commensurable context.
All you need to do is operationalize their refutations of one another relative to the perciever, and then the conclusion that correspondence is merely coherence with experience becomes apparent. Which I guess leaves Hegelians with the dubious honour of discovering the most sophisticated articulation of coherence with non-experience 😂
Curt Doolittle I think I have figured out what you have achieved as a philosopher on an even more profound level..
You operationalized Kant.
Source date (UTC): 2017-07-03 04:03:00 UTC
by Joel Davis
I have been thinking about testimonialism a lot and I have come to the conclusion that testimonialism is less about “the truth” than it is about humility (and if it isn’t, it should be).
Testimony functions by subdividing experiential contexts into conceptual components via the commensurable definition of relative variance, and/or uniting conceptual components into experiential contexts via the commensurable definition of relative convergence, to enable and expand (in the case of testimony) the commensurable conceptualization of experiential contexts between communicators.
Non-testimony functions by misrepresenting a concept as a component of an experiential context it did not derive from by either:
– Defining the relative variance/convergence between concepts incommensurably. (Operational non-correspondence)
or
– Expanding the definition of the experiential context beyond commensurable relativity between its components. (Operational incoherence)
I can break this down into normiespeak..
Rather than telling me “what is”, tell me how it seems, because no matter “what is”, you can only ever perceive how it seems, as to find out that what it really “is” is different to how it seems, seems really only for it to now seem different.
Therefore to believe that how it seems is how it is, seems rather arrogant to me.
Source date (UTC): 2017-07-03 03:41:00 UTC
I think Zachary Davidson is objecting to my PROCESS, which consists of iterative attempts to construct proofs of existential possibility or impossibility, and to attract criticism, and to repeat, until by using a competition between the proofs of possibility and impossibility, and criticism, only the possible (truth candidates remain). And that’s just how science works through iterative exploration.
Because all he is criticizing is my use of contrasts and measurements to quash ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, fictionalism and deceit.
And he is criticizing that effort in order to preserve the utility of lying on the one hand and the use of lie and ritual to produce chemical reward, and the addiction behavior that is produced by self deception, and then avoidance of the combination of un-anchoring, cost of abandoning intuition (the animal), relief from the burden of reason, relief from the burden of learning, relief from the burden of adaptation, relief from the burden of constant reorganization of cooperation.
I mean. He works hard to preserve the lie and the feeling of success he gets from the lie, in contrast to his competitive success in reality. In other words, he wants to find escape from evidence of his reproductive disutility, and reward for it. He wants to make a failing a virtue.
Source date (UTC): 2017-07-02 12:17:00 UTC
—“You’re saying all mathematical statements are true or false but the liar paradox is one example of an ordinary language sentence which hasn’t got a truth-value, right? Well, stated that way, I’d say you’re right about all of that, but are you also saying that the liar sentence expresses a proposition? That might be the part where it starts to get problematic.”—
Good question.
In short, we can ask a question, or we can assert an opinion, conflate the two, or we can speak nonsense. And only humans (so far) can ask, assert, conflate, and fail at all of them. But out of convenience, we subtract from the real to produce the ideal, and speak of the speech as if it can act on its own.
Just to illustrate that the test we are performing (context) limits both what we are saying and what we can say. From the most decidable to the least:
1 – The mathematical category of statements, (tautological) single category. (relative measure)
2 – The ideal category of statements, (logical) multiple categories. (relative meaning)
3 – The operational category of statements (existential possibility)
(sequential possibility )
4 – The correspondent (empirical) category of statements. all categories. ( full correspondence )
5 – The rational category of statements ( an actor making rational choices) (‘praxeological’)
6 – The ‘moral’ category of statements ( test of reciprocity)
7 – The fully accounted category of statements (tests of scope)
8 – The valued (loaded) category of statements. (full correspondence and loaded with subjective value)
9 – The deceptive category of statements (suggestion, obscurantism, fictionalism, and outright lying.
We can speak a statement in any one or more of these (cumulative) contexts.
So for example, statements are not true or false or unknowable, but the people who speak them speak truthfully, falsely, or undecidedly. So performatively (as you have mentioned) only people can make statements.
However, to make our lives easier, we eliminate unnecessary dimensions of existence unused in our scope of inquiry, and we conflate terms across those dimensions of existence, and we very often don’t even understand ourselves what we are saying. (ie; a number consists of a function for producing a positional name, from an ordered series of symbols in some set of dimensions. Or, only people can act and therefore only people can assert, and therefore no assertions are true or false, the person speaking speaks truth or falsehood. etc.)
This matters primarily because no dimensional subset in logic closed without appeal to the consequence dimensional subset. In other words, only reality provides full means of decidability.
Or translated differently, there just as there is little action value in game theory and little action value in more than single regression analysis, there is little value after first order logic, since decidability is provided by appeal to additional information in additional dimensions rather than its own. Which is, as far as I know, the principal lesson of analytic philosophy and the study of logic, of the 20th century.
Or as I might restate it, we regress into deeper idealism through methodological specialization than is empirically demonstrable in value returned. Then we export these ‘ideals’ as pseudosciences to the rest of the population. This leading to wonderful consequences like the copenhagen consensus. Or the many worlds hypothesis, or String Theory. Or keynesian economics. Or the (exceedingly frustrating) nonsense the public seems to fascinate over as a substitute for numerology, astrology, magic, and the rigorous hard work required
FOUNDATIONS OF LOGIC
The foundations of logic like those of mathematics are terribly simple as subsets of reality. But by doubling down in the 19th and 20th centuries all we have found is that we say rather nonsensical terms like ‘the axiom of choice’ or ‘limits’ rather than ‘undecidable without appeal to information provided by existential context’. After all, math is just the discipline of scale independent measurement, and the deduction that is possible given the precision of constant relations using identical unitary measures. Logic is nothing more than than set operations. Algorithms are nothing more than sequential operations restoring time. Operations are nothing more than algorithms restoring physical transformation, time and cost. etc.
As a consequence, I find most of this kind of terminological discourse … silly hermeneutics. As Poincare stated ‘that isn’t math its philosophy’. Or as I would say, ‘with platonism we depart science and join theology. It may be secular theology in that it is ideal rather than supernatural, but it is theology none the less’.
it is one thing to say ‘by convention in math (or logic or whatever dimension we speak of) we use this colloquialism (half truth) as a matter of convenience. It is not ‘true’ as in scientifically true. It is just the best approximation given the brevity we exercise in simplifying our work.
There exists only one possible ‘True’: the most parsimonious and correspondent testimony one can speak in the available language in the given context. Everything else is a convention.
Ergo, if you do not know the operational construction of the terms that you use, you do not know of what you speak. That does not mean you cannot speak truth any more than monkey cannot accidentally type one of the Sonnets.
This is why the operationalist movement in math we call Intuitionism failed.
Anyway. Well formed (grammatically correct) statements in math may or may not be decidable but our intention is to produce decidable statements. In symbolic logic, well formed (grammatically correct) statements may or may not be decidable. in logic (language), well formed (grammatically correct) statements are difficult to construct because of the categorical difference between constant relations (ideals in math), constant categories (ideals in formal logic), and inconstant categories (ordinary language). Furthermore the process of DEDUCTION using premises (or logical summation) limits us to utility of true statements. Ergo for that purpose statements can only evaluate to true or not-true (including false and undecidable). While for the purpose of INDUCTION (transfer of meaning by seeding free association, or the construction of possibility by the same means) seeks only possibility or impossibility not truth or falsehood.
Now. I have written far too much already, so I won’t try to increase the precision of what I’ve written, but hopefully the answer is the same:
How can you claim to make a truth proposition and demand precise language when your premises are mere demonstrably falsehoods used by convention?
Source date (UTC): 2017-07-02 10:58:00 UTC
Observation is limited to reduce our costs.
Memory is limited to reduce our costs, improve our speed of recall, and maximize our storage.
Reconstruction of experience is limited to that which is necessary for action.
Reconstruction requires stimuli necessary to access memory – it’s fragmentary.
Free association (imagination) is useful in searching for opportunities thereby reducing our costs.
To say that the observed world is a fiction is very hard to agree with since we can sense and perceive pretty much the full range of the universe where actions and reactions are possible for man. It would be a wasted cost (evolutionary drag) for us to sense and perceive that which we cannot act upon.
To say our values and judgements of that world are INCONSISTENT is evidenced by the effects of different drugs and circumstances on the interpretation of every phenomenon. To say they are false is something else it is hard to agree with. Since we readily reinterpret those perceptions when returning to normal state.
To say that our MODELS of reality are questionable, is highly variable by individual, and that’s demonstrable in all walks of life. For some people, modeling is exceptional. To say that our imaginations are fantasy, that’s true. To say that some people’s models are but fantasy that’s true.
To say ‘consciousness’ is an illusion is something I have to deny for the simple reason that I have a multi-decade experience with frequently losing consciousness under the right (not rare) conditions. And each stage of ‘awareness’ is relatively obvious. There is a base ‘you’ which may or may not be in the lower or mid-brain, that awakens slowly as more and more information is available to it as you return to consciousness by full use of your senses and memories, generating some semblance of a model of yourself in the world. Now, that base consciousness doesn’t do much more than wait and feel and react, but in my experience, it is definitely ‘me’ with my memories and current context, continually altering ‘me’ through various stages, which I notice are less happy and more skeptical as each stage begins to fully participate. I assume that ‘me’ is ‘womb me’. So for me, this isn’t a theory. it’s an experience I go through with painful frequency. (I have asthma and allergies and when coughing and changing body position causes me to faint if I don’t manage it. It’s called “Syncope” )
Source date (UTC): 2017-06-30 14:21:00 UTC