Curt Doolittle

Category: Epistemology and Method

  • RT @muscleforlife: Normalize saying, “I don’t know enough about this to have a s

    RT @muscleforlife: Normalize saying, “I don’t know enough about this to have a strong opinion.”

    Source date (UTC): 2023-08-13 20:11:26 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1690818365692989441

  • RT @whatifalthist: I often hear the argument “reality is what we want it to be”.

    RT @whatifalthist: I often hear the argument “reality is what we want it to be”. “If we all want something we can make it happen”.

    I don’…

    Source date (UTC): 2023-08-11 01:39:49 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1689813840156889088

  • Ask them to make any seemingly controversial philosophical statement without the

    Ask them to make any seemingly controversial philosophical statement without the use of the verb to be, and with the requirement of complete sentences, and ‘satisfaction of continuous recursive disambiguation’.
    Then ask them if words mean something, or if people mean to…

    Source date (UTC): 2023-08-10 18:53:27 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1689711573185560576

    Reply addressees: @DjangoMcLaren

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1689709626575536128

  • Ask them to make any seemingly controversial philosophical statement without the

    Ask them to make any seemingly controversial philosophical statement without the use of the verb to be, and with the requirement of complete sentences, and ‘satisfaction of continuous recursive disambiguation’.
    Then ask them if words mean something, or if people mean to communicate something with words, which serve as loose measurements open to ambiguity.
    😉

    Source date (UTC): 2023-08-10 18:53:26 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1689711573068091394

  • There are two branches of philosophy, literary(platonic), and natural(aristoteli

    There are two branches of philosophy, literary(platonic), and natural(aristotelian). Natural philosophy evolved into empiricism and science. Even the continental vs analytic divide still follows this demarcation. Why? west germanic is a practical military culture of farmers, and English is a legal, commercial, and scientific language of administration of scale reinforced by the Normans and the sequence of revolutions in innovation that followed the restoration of the classics (aristotle) to Europe as intellectuals fled the fundamentalist shift in Islamic countries. The english invented the modern state, and rolled the church into the state, creating a pervasive culture of empirical administration. The french were the most backward and corrupt government in Europe, most in league with the church and ever desirous of transferring the power of papacy and rome to France. With the english revolution in empiricism, france rebelled against it and sought something closer to church rule to enforce conformity with state socialism. The germans sought to replace the independence of the individual interpretation of the bible under protestantism with a new form of reason(kant). the jews( Mendelsohn) reformed their laws somewhat to be rational rather than supernatural. Then abandoned them in favor of marxism and socialism. The russians ever desirous of mirroring french authoritarianism, and much more mystical and superstitious as a people, favored literature of suffering instead of moral rationalsm of the germans, the optimistic moralism of the french, and the procedural morals of the English. Everyone resists modernity invented by the English because everyone was less developed at the time it was invented by the English – and all civilizations double down on their priors.

    Just as you, wish to double down on yours. 😉

    There is nothing left in philosophy that is not better done by science – albeit it requires more knowledge.

    Reply addressees: @univcompass

    Source date (UTC): 2023-08-10 18:49:40 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1689710622357766144

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1689699323343163392

  • Different standard. A standard refers to the rigor of the methodology and the pe

    Different standard. A standard refers to the rigor of the methodology and the permissible dimensions
    Rationalism(Kant) is a higher standard than philosophy(Plato), just as empiricism a higher standard than rationalism.

    Source date (UTC): 2023-08-10 17:22:52 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1689688777327800322

    Reply addressees: @univcompass

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1689683366650552334

  • “Q: Curt: What’s your definition of Philosophy?”– I use, and we at NLI use, the

    –“Q: Curt: What’s your definition of Philosophy?”–

    I use, and we at NLI use, the methodology of “Disambiguation by enumeration, serialization, and operationalization into a system of measurement”.

    The series of wisdom literatures consists of:
    Mythology(Suggestion, myths, anthropomorphism, counting) >
    … Religion(Command, parables, rules, arithmetic) >
    … … Philosophy(Justification, literature, sets, reason, geometry) >
    … … … Empiricism (Falsification, history, rationalism algebra)>
    … … … … Science (Testimony, logic, instrumentation, calculus)>
    … … … … … Operational Logic (Demonstration, first principles, computation, adversarial simulation)

    Disambiguation by Limits
    Therefore, via disambiguation, a wisdom literature is defined by its limits, and its limits by what it is not.

    Sequence
    This disambiguation (evolutionary series) describes the arc of anthropomorphic and anthropocentric to the opposite, in which man is merely another product of evolutionary computation of continuous recursive disambiguation of disorder into by the simple laws of the universe.

    The Cause of the Sequence
    The evolution of wisdom literatures consists of the gradual replacement of ignorance, anthropocentrism and storytelling with knowledge, materialism(the irrelevance of man), and measurement.

    Philosophy’s Position In the Sequence
    Philosophy, or what is most often termed ‘fantasy moral literature’ in the imitators of Plato, is a bridge between religion and rationalism. And Epicurus and Aristotle the bridge between socratic philosophy and empiricism (natural philosophy).

    Religion and Philosophy also imply the search for the good. Empiricism, Science, and Operationalism imply the search for truth with which we may then consider the good.

    At the present time, as far as I know, we have completed the disambiguation of philosophy and science such that the domain of truth is produced by science and operationalism, but that the choice of good is determined by philosophy and history, and theology is but a test of the durability of a claim of the good over centuries.

    The Unambiguous Definition of Philosophy
    The unambiguous definition of philosophy is the production the reduction of ignorance, error, presumption, and bias, through a systematic method, consisting of critical skepticism (testing), disambiguation, and decomposition (analysis), necessary to study, (falsify), causes and consequences of the fundamental questions, concepts, and principles of everyday life and of nature, encouraging us to investigate what we are ignorant of or err upon, resulting in the pursuit of improving human individual and group understanding, valuation, and choice, and justifying that knowledge to others, so that it might spread for personal and collective advantage.

    Differences
    Philosophy differs from Religion in that it seeks to advance the human condition through increasing knowledge, agency, and ability, while theology seeks to produce consistent behavior regardless of knowledge, agency, and ability. This is why religious communities advance more slowly than philosophical, and philosophical more slowly than scientific.
    But it’s also why theology, then philosophy, then empiricism, then science, then operationalism place increasingly costly burdens on the individual’s ability to obtain and make use of increasingly complex knowledge, that is increasingly difficult to comprehend.
    Ergo we not only require theology, philosophy, science, and operationalism for increases in precision, but for teaching incrementally, and for graceful failure by those lacking ability to learn increasingly abstract complexities.

    Cheers
    Curt Doolittle
    The Natural Law Institute
    The Science of Cooperation

    Reply addressees: @univcompass

    Source date (UTC): 2023-08-10 16:14:15 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1689671510946881536

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1689649092463669248

  • Q: “Curt, would it be fair to label you a materialist?”– I tend to interpret ph

    –Q: “Curt, would it be fair to label you a materialist?”–

    I tend to interpret philosophical terms a pseudoscientific, and only slightly better than supernatural. That said our ancestors (philosophers) didn’t understand neuroscience.

    So, when you say ‘materialism’ I know what that means. But it’s also a confusion between the existence of nouns (states) and verbs (processes).

    Consciousness, imagination, and even qualia are terribly simple but philosophers lacked the knowledge to comprehend them.

    Today we know how the brain works – pretty completely. And with AI currently demonstrating how simple associations produce emergent complexity, we’ve proved that yes, the world is governed by a very simple set of laws, and that our human experience is ‘material’ in the sense that we have legs (state), but we can run with them (process). Human experience consists of processes, almost all of which is simply the effect of a vast hierarchy of fragmentary memory.

    Does that eliminate the spiritual (instinct and intuition), or does that eliminate the mythological (cognitive and emotional)? Well, not really. It only eliminates the pretense that such concepts have any form of existence other than in the collective of human minds. And that it turns out that’s enough. If gods and such are emergent from our collective minds, that would carry more viability than gods brought us into being and hold dominion over the universe, despite the obvious evidence to the contrary – especially given the long list of dead gods.

    Reply addressees: @nitaabb99430819 @jrayrealhealth @univcompass

    Source date (UTC): 2023-08-10 03:00:51 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1689471846175940610

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1689467379133157377

  • I Capture notes. (note how frequently brad teases me about how much I write down

    I Capture notes. (note how frequently brad teases me about how much I write down.) Then we write it all down in declarative prose, and yes, largely memorize it. While the vast scope of the work seems impossible to hold in your head (it is), methodology and the the list of first principles isn’t that large, and so it’s rather easy to reconstruct everyday questions and answers using those principles. I think Brad explains it best as it’s more the process of unlearning what we’ve learned that’s false (sort of like theology) and replacing it with what’s true. So you don’t try to memorize it as much as work with it enough (like math and physics and programming) so you develop the intuition.

    Reply addressees: @FarajRashi93307

    Source date (UTC): 2023-08-09 19:56:40 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1689365097825628161

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1689362214652690432

  • Q: “Curt: Does your work tie into or run parallel to Langan’s work at all?”– In

    –Q: “Curt: Does your work tie into or run parallel to Langan’s work at all?”–
    In abstract terms the way I explain it, is that he is trying to produce the unification of math, science, philosophy and theology with a narrative analogy. Whereas I treat those different disciplines…

    Source date (UTC): 2023-08-09 07:17:25 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1689174022846611456

    Reply addressees: @AryanChadG

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1689065824332783617