Curt Doolittle

Form: Sketch

  • PROPERTARIAN METAPHYSICS (DRAFT / SKETCH: I have to start somewhere) Not “Popper

    PROPERTARIAN METAPHYSICS

    (DRAFT / SKETCH: I have to start somewhere)

    Not “Popperian”. But “Propertarian”. 🙂 I drafted this before writing the reposted-bit that follows. I have to find a way to tie all of this together. So it might take me a few more tries.

    World (1) Monism : That there exists a single objective, physical reality (physicalism). This objective world exists independently of us. Our actions take place in this world. Our process of thinking takes place in this world. However, the experience of thinking does not take place in this world, because experience is our reaction to the changes in state of our perceptions interacting with our memories in real time. The concept of categories and change in state has no meaning without memory to detect that change. The human body exists here. The act of counting and measuring exists here.

    World (2) Cartesian Dualism – Thoughts: The world of our minds that is caused by the change in state of memory by our senses, perceptions, and thoughts. Our minds are fraught with cognitive bias and error, and without testing against the real world (1) the are indistinguishable from dreams. Whatever information exists here exists only as long as the conscious mind of the individual can access and make use of those memories. THE INDIVIDUAL exists here because his memories do. Memories of what PROPERTY an individual OWNS exists here. In fact, we might argue that that is most of what exists here. Our thinking consists of three parts: stimuli whose workings are imperceptible to us, feelings that we react to changes in the state of, or anticipated state of PROPERTY, and the conscious created by changes in he presentation of the world to our senses by a combination of stimuli and memories.

    World (3) Popper’s Third World – External Representation: The world of the conscious construction: artifacts of our minds (formulae, symbols, language, movement of our bodies, writing, formula, arithmetic, mathematics, designs, tools, arts, and complex constructions.) The things that STORE the results of our thoughts. Given the limited ability of our memories to store concrete items, this category of marks, symbols, records, formulae, designs, narratives allows us to remember, compare, calculate, store, retrieve, copy and share ideas with one another. Once information is stored in these symbols, much of it will exist as long as someone exists to make use of it. CONTRACTS exist here.

    World (4) Dastafshan’s Fourth World – Social Consequences: The world of the social construction of reality (unconscious collective concepts, processes and consequences, morals and norms – those things that only exist by social interaction and cooperation – unintended, self-organizing, unconscious rules and ideas that we understand in retrospect but do not intentionally create. ie: ‘gods’ live here. And the principles that determine PROPERTY distributions in any group exist here. 🙂 Without constant use, human action, and interaction between humans, this information will cease to exist.

    Note that Ali Dastafshan’s Fourth World isn’t part of common philosophical discourse. And I am not necessarily framing the fourth world as he would have me do, but perhaps as E.O. Wilson would. But, I think this definition is in terms more likely to be understood by those of us with exposure to analytical philosophy.

    CONTRA METAPHYSICAL LANGUAGE

    Now, how do I convert these categories into operational language?

    Unfortunately, the only efficient way of expressing philosophical ideas as necessities is to structure them as syllogisms as the greeks did, or as riddles – as Lao Tsu was a master of.

    The only way to express scientific statements is through operational language. Because correlation between actions and facts, and therefore between theory and actions that determine facts, is the test of operational language. Without which causal relations are indeterminate.

    The only way to express human actions as necessary is praxeologically. Because the equivalent of logical non contradiction is the test of rational incentives.

    Unfortunately, instead of a necessary test, praxeology was proposed as a system of apodeictic certainty from which deductions could likewise be certain.

    There are two problems with that approach. The fist is the problem that plagues any logical system, which is that such certainty requires completeness. The second is the completeness is impossible. The impossibility of completeness is what causes the apparent paradoxes in mathematics and the first order logic of set theory.

    The problem that causes a separation of mathematics and logic from science in socio-economics occurs largely due to the use of symbolic proxies without accompanying statements that are articulated in praxeological or operational language: there is a very great difference between “given a set … “, and describing how to create a set of anything, including linguistic permutations.

    As for absurdities of logic, assuming a finite universe, or even an actionably finite universe, any category we name thereby defines the remainder. Any set diminishes the remainder. And all contradictions are tautologies.

    For these reasons science has displaced both philosophy and logic. It has not displaced mathematics, because math can be used in the context of natural science and therefore externally constrained by context.

    Likewise the only way to externally bind logic and philosophy to reality is to require use of operational language.

    And the operational language of human action is constructed through praxeological expression. Praxeology exposes all statements to sympathetic testing. Without praxeological expression any statement is platonic: not real.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-29 07:05:00 UTC

  • (A collection of thoughts about this problem, not an argument.) 1) SYMBOLS ARE A

    (A collection of thoughts about this problem, not an argument.)

    1) SYMBOLS ARE ANALOGIES

    It is possible to speak universal statements.

    It is possible to record universal statements as symbols.

    It is possible to manipulate relations between symbols while retaining ratios.

    We can use numbers to represent quantities, but numbers are not limited in use to quantities, just as sets of objects are not limited to the property of their count alone.

    We can use symbols to describe categories arbitrarily and at whim – they are categories: analogies.

    We can describe possibilities in time and therefore constrain those analogies by temporal dimension.

    We can count things that exist in reality and are constrained by measurement, and we can perform actions in reality constrained by practical effort. But actions exist, and symbols are just imprecise analogies to existence.

    It is not possible to perform universal actions.

    When we use the terms ‘universal’ and ‘infinite’ we refer to two possible meanings: a) the set of all X, the quantity of which we do not know, and b) an infinite quantity of X’s, the quantity of which we cannot know and cannot count.

    ‘Universal’ can refer to an unknown quantity. But it cannot refer to an infinite quantity. Because infinite quantities cannot exist in reality, only symbolically. We can error in our definition and create the error of infinite objects, but that is all.

    “Infinite anything” is an error. It is the quantitative opposite of ‘division by zero’. We can write division by zero. We can write infinite quantities, but we cannot perform division by zero and infinite quantities cannot either exist or be made to exist in reality despite that we can express them symbolically. We can’t even ‘have’ zero anything except by analogy, because to ‘have’ something means having at least ‘one’.

    We use infinite sets in mathematics as a shortcut for our ignorance – because they can exist symbolically even if they cannot exist quantitatively.

    Making universal statements and using universal symbols is an acknowledgement of our performative ignorance.

    It is a logical error to confuse performative ignorance with possibility. To confuse logical, symbolic allegorical possibility with quantitative or performative possibility.

    Universal and infinite statements are analogies, not facts.

    2) PERFORMATIVE TRUTH

    If we agree on the definition of the room, people, and brown hair, it is possible to know both how many people ARE in the room, and how many people CAN be in the room. Any possibility of error is either an error in the definition of the room, or an error in the definition of ‘people’, or an error in our measurements. This is not a question of externalities for the purpose of action. And the problem with scientific theories is the problem of externalities (what we dont know), what we have selected, and omitted from selection, and our performative errors.

    Information loss exists only because we articulate a theory. Not because the performative actions in the real world would lose such information. OUr actions in reality retain the relations to all other physical properties and entities in the universe. Our ‘rules’ or statements do not.

    Ludic fallacies for example, argue that probabilities we can measure can produce risks measurements, but very few real world phenomenon are sufficiently closed domains.

    3) RECIPES VS THEORIES

    There is a very great difference between the errors that it is possible to create with symbols because they are ANALOGIES, and the performance of actions themselves. The question comes down to whether, when we say we have a theory, we are describing actions (a recipe) which produce specifically desired ends, or general statements (descriptive rules) that purport to describe as yet unknown circumstances.

    Science progresses by producing recipes, and people improve those recipes. Theories are inductive tests that produce new recipes. But theories are just analogies, and recipes are prescriptions for performative action. I think it is a mistake to confuse the difference between symbols which are analogies, and actions which are recipes.

    Rules are general and open to symbolic error. Recipes are functional and open to perforative error. But recipes make no broader claim than that they should produce desired ends if you make no performative error.

    When we talk about the physical sciences we are discussing a vastly unknown territory where we do not understand the basic mechanics well enough to relate our different sets of symbolic tools and rules to each other. But at some point it is both possible and likely we will discover how to do this – because the universe does it so to speak. We simply lack the tools to observe it.

    The failure to demarcate between actions, recipes, rules and symbols is just another kind of platonism in the benign sense, or mysticism in dangerous sense.

    4) WORLDS AND THEORIES AS PLATONIC OR MAGIC

    “We can never know. We can just keep trying.” We must keep pace with the Red Queen. But it turns out that trying produces recipes that work, and that we can indeed make general statements about recipes in order to help us understand how to make new and improved recipes.

    The discussion of theories is a little too close to platonic or magian error, for adult conversation.

    The practical difference is that if we must err on one side or the other: between closed mind and open mind, that the theoretical approach functions as a positive bias in favor of experimentation in the human mind, and the skeptical approach functions as a negative bias in favor of conservation.

    And I am not sure that, like many things we create elaborate artifices to justify, much of symbolic reasoning is anything other than an attempt to alter our innate cognitive bias.

    That’s a laudable objective, but not if we create a new form of mysticism while we’re at it. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-15 03:49:00 UTC

  • (PERSONAL: NOTE: EDITED FOR CLARIFICATION) Someone smarter than I am will have t

    (PERSONAL: NOTE: EDITED FOR CLARIFICATION)

    Someone smarter than I am will have to take on the burden of creating a symbolic logic of action in disequilibrium. But I suspect that we already have it, in the scientific method. And that the attempts to conjoin formal logic of certainty with critical rationalism in science are operationally distinct fields.

    That isn’t saying it’s not possible. Its saying that we haven’t done it, and that Quine’s criticism of Popper is false.

    On the other hand, it is entirely possible that I don’t understand something, since I don’t have a lot of respect for formal logic as having application to actions. And, as a political economist, and philosopher of action, my priorities are different. SInce I don’t respect it, I haven’t spent much time studying it.

    It reminds me of war games and chess. They are, to some degree Ludic fallacies. Wars are won by precisely those criteria that war games and chess present as constants: informational asymmetry: deception, misinformation, and incomplete information, combined with differences in velocity and the concentration of forces. I gave up on both those enterprises for the same reason: as structured they are puzzles not problems.

    There is a difference between puzzles and problems. I view formal logic as an interesting puzzle, but political economy as a material problem.

    This is just a preference after all. I’m not making a moral argument. I’m simply taking the position that the physical sciences and formal logic are easier to solve than economic problems. The universe equilibrates. But human beings are RED QUEENS: we are always trying to outrun it by outwitting it, and that means we must seek to create disequilibria.

    That is a different way of saying that we must constantly battle ‘the dark forces of time and ignorance’ in order to stay alive on the universe’s treadmill by seeking and creating disequliibria both with nature and with each other.

    Certainty then, in any sense, despite the ease that would bring to our minds, by obviating the constant need for problem solving, would in fact, result in our extinction.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-14 11:17:00 UTC

  • SYMMETRY WARRANTY EXTERNALITY Bring libertarian ethics out of Rothbard’s ghetto

    SYMMETRY

    WARRANTY

    EXTERNALITY

    Bring libertarian ethics out of Rothbard’s ghetto and back to the aristocracy whence it came.

    Voluntary exchange isn’t enough. Its ghetto liberty. Aristocracy requires symmetry warranty, and prohibition on externality.

    Without these three ethical properties, voluntary exchange alone is a license to commit fraud.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-02-15 19:39:00 UTC

  • INSTITUTIONAL REQUIREMENTS FOR THE ARISTOCRATIC EGALITARIAN SOCIAL ORDER WE CALL

    INSTITUTIONAL REQUIREMENTS FOR THE ARISTOCRATIC EGALITARIAN SOCIAL ORDER WE CALL WESTERN CIVILIZATION (rough sketch)

    PROBLEM

    Faced with numerical inferiority, but capable of producing sufficient calories, how does a group successfully compete? (Whether for advancement in consumption or preservation of consumption)

    ANSWER

    Excellence, Meritocracy. Coordination, Adaptation, Speed, Technology, Concentration Of Resources. .

    STRATEGY

    I. Create a competitive organization capable of continuous improvement and which will remain competitive over the long term.

    II. Provide a means of enfranchisement by demonstrated ability to cooperate with, and to compete on behalf of, the organization.

    III. Prevent the concentration of the power to alter the egalitarian order for personal gain.

    IV. Prevent the concentration of the power to define property rights and allocate property as a means of altering the egalitarian strategy.

    Note: Human biological predisposition to constrain alphas. And this predisposition varies between genders, racial groups and classes.

    Build and encourage alphas. Constrain alphas through enfranchisement and egalitarian prohibition of power.

    TACTICS

    1) Provide a means for discouraging conflict and encouraging cooperation by providing a means for the resolution of conflict.

    Note: Independent judges under the common law.

    2) Define property and a portfolio of property rights and obligations as a means of facilitating cooperation and preventing conflict.

    Note: A constitution, oral or written, that enumerates rights, obligations and processes. And which applies equally to all enfranchised.

    3) Provide a means of imposing a monopoly on the definition of those property rights, thereby creating a market.

    Note: a competition between systems of property rights must result in the theft of either personal property, common physical property, common formal institutional property, or that form of common informal property called norms.

    4) Provide a means of concentrating capital for the production of commons for the purpose of improving the competitiveness of the market.

    Note: Governance is the concentration of capital in support of expanding the market, not lawmaking.

    5) Provide a means for preventing the privatization of the commons either directly or indirectly.

    Note: Prevent cheating, indirect involuntary transfer. Use Contractualism instead of legalism. Use contracts not laws.

    6) Provide for a means of distributing dividends to shareholders as a means of preventing involuntary transfer of shareholder value.

    Note: prevent cheating and encourage both membership and conformity by limiting dividends to the enfranchised only.

    Note: Property rights are earned by respecting them.

    =========

    Needs a lot of work. Good first sketch.

    One very interesting insight.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-18 19:20:00 UTC

  • ETHICS : PRAXEOLOGY AND THE EQUILIBRIA OF VOLUNTARY TRANSFER COMPENSATE FOR LACK

    ETHICS : PRAXEOLOGY AND THE EQUILIBRIA OF VOLUNTARY TRANSFER COMPENSATE FOR LACK OF CARDINALITY IN SUBJECTIVITY

    The structural problem with the discipline of ethics, and perhaps philosophy in general, which is understandable given its period of origin, is not so much it’s lack of measurement – which given the ordinal nature of preferences is irrelevant – but it’s lack of equilibrial concepts with which to compensate for lack of measurement – even if it does account for externalities, albiet differently in european, asian and magian frameworks. This absence manifests itself in ideal types, general rules, and attempts at statements of perfection. When in fact, the ‘golden mean’, which Aristotle gave us, teaches us to consider ideas on a spectrum. Ideas with optimums can be compared with each other. Furthermore, voluntary and involuntary transfers – which are the source of all human cooperative behavior – can be used to inform us about whether our optimums will be demonstrably true, or ideological falsehoods.

    Ethics without praxeology is idealism, not analysis. Ethics without equilibrial forces of property, voluntarily transferred, is simply deception.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-11-04 06:55:00 UTC

  • Spectrum Blindness: The Frequency Of Concepts, And Conceptual Networks As Production Cycles

    Time Preferences form a spectrum, from the very short (high), to the very long (low) — just as do frequencies of light. As one’s [glossary:time preference] increases in length (lowers), and the ability to perceive abstracts must necessarily increase. As one’s ability to perceive abstracts decreases, time preference also must necessarily decrease (lower). On average we all see a similar portion of the spectrum. Some the shorter and lower, some the longer and higher. Concepts are the equivalent of production cycles. And concepts of different lengths are incommensurable. Therefore human beings habituate and reinforce their time preferences, until they can no longer recognize or attribute value to concepts in the other portions of the spectrum. At that point of habituation, [glossary:Time Preference] becomes [glossary:Time Bias]. So for genetic, environmental, cultural, pedagogical, and habitual reasons, people are effectively ‘color blind’ to different areas of the conceptual spectrum. We cannot value each other’s time preferences because of our Time Biases. We are unable to. It is impossible to. [glossary:Time Bias] is the great unspoken problem with cognitive biases. Because cognitive biases are largely universal – equal among all people. But time bias creates social classes, and creates economic classes. This is one of the reasons that people cannot come to consensus in large numbers. There is no harmony on means even if there is some harmony on ends. —- NOTE: Perhaps I should separate out the different properties of Time Preference (high/low- emotive) from Time Preference Capacity (iq), and Realized or Habituated Time Preference ( the result). I will have to ask David for advice on whose writings to approach other than Banfield’s.