Source: Facebook

—“WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSAL MORAL GRAMMAR?”—

(probably important)

Well, while I agree that for our level of intellectual capacity that we practice an {actor, verb, noun} grammar, and that such a grammar, similar to logic but evocatively rather than critically allows us to speak and transfer experiences by association, in increasingly complex sets, which the audience consistently re-sorts to produce something sensible tot hem, I also think the presentation is pseudoscientific, and that all human emotions(self) and moral intuitions (others) are reducible to changes in the state of inventory of one asset or another, across a very broad set of assets from the informational, to the habitual, to the normative, to the institutional, to the physical, to kin, to body and life.

The universe is telling us something very clearly: it’s very simple. As part of the universe, the human mind is a very simple thing, which achieves the appearance of complexity through sheer numbers and layers of neurons. We are part of the physical universe. We are bound by its laws. The most basic of those laws is that we must conserve energy to persist our lives, our kin, and our offspring, while at the same time transforming the universe’s current condition into one that is our benefit.

Our problem in understanding our minds, is not discovering complexity, but discovering simplicity, by removing our imaginary content, error, bias, justification, wishful thinking, suggestion, loading and overloading, and deceit from our ideas – each of which is produced by free association. Albeit, the mathematics (measurement) of that free association appears to be as difficult for us to measure as is the subatomic universe.

Nature does not need to reduce memory to verbal symbolism in order for us to act. We need to reduce memory to verbal symbolism to perform an inexpensive means of communicating complex memories.

We need to reduce memory to a model only in so far as we wish to understand our limits of communication. And we need to understand the limits of our communication in order to eliminate error bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, loading and overloading, justification, and deceit from those communications.

We cannot necessarily increase the density of information except through habituation (practice). Yet we can reduce the error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, loading, overloading, pseudorationalism, pseudoscience, justification, and deceit from it. Which appears to be the only remaining purpose of philosophy that is not possible to produce by other, superior means.

The Universe is Simple.

We Imagine by free association.

We test for possibility by ‘wayfinding’

We launder possibility by criticism.

We use criticism to perform due diligence against:

1 – Ignorance and Error,

2 – Bias, Wishful Thinking, Suggestion, Moral Loading and;

3 – Overloading, Justification, Obscurant Mysticism, Pseudorationalism, Pseudoscience, and;

4 – Information hiding and outright Deceit.

We perform due diligence by testing for consistency (determinism):

1 – categorical (identity / properties)

2 – logical (internal consistency / verbal / sets)

3 – relational (relational consistency / mathematical / logical instruments )

4 – empirical (external correspondence / physical instruments )

5 – existential (existential possibility / operational language )

6 – moral (volitional possibility / subjective testing of rational voluntary exchange)

7 – fully accounted, parsimonious and limited (that we have fully accounted for that which we speak of and that we include nothing that we do not speak of.

If we have performed this due diligence, and warranty that we have done so, (‘skin in the game’) then it is quite difficult to speak falsely.

Meaning != Truth. Meaning = Justification of prior knowledge. That is all we can say.

It says nothing about the truth of any proposition.

This is the central failure of philosophical inquiry: justificationary meaning over critical truth.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine