Curt Doolittle

Source: Facebook

  • PERFECTION (on emotions vs actions) –“Emotions and actions are categorically di

    PERFECTION

    (on emotions vs actions)

    –“Emotions and actions are categorically distinct. They rely upon, and inform each other. We need the relevant concepts in order to understand the behavior we witness, but we also need the experience and hermeneutical capacity to properly apply the concepts.”

    “For an emotive state or disposition to casually play a role towards or in an action does not mean it itself constitutes an action, no more than a reason itself is an action. There are motives for actions we do not actualize, as there are behaviors we engage in concurrent or complimentary with motives we may have but are in fact not acting on. “

    “People desire us to act in certain ways because within certain social situations we conceptually and hermeneutically understand those actions as bearing meaning conducive to our interests, demands, or ‘narratives’. ” — Skye Stewart

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-29 10:58:00 UTC

  • I really do like the idea of a limit to computation, I think the Anthropic princ

    http://hplusmagazine.com/2013/12/27/video-friday-brainfood-seth-lloyd-on-the-universe-as-quantum-computer/While I really do like the idea of a limit to computation, I think the Anthropic principle, strong especially, but weak as well, is religion, not science. I don’t yet see any evidence that measurement or observability is always within our grasp, nor that determinism is sufficient that deduction can serve to render the unobservable predictable, other than for general rules. It’s not that it isn’t, it’s that I don’t yet grasp why it’s necessary, and unless it’s necessary, such statements are far closer in structure to prior anthropocentric ideas than those that have disabused anthropocentric ideas. So I can’t really state it. I would argue possibly instead, that any mind capable of introspection, which can make use of sufficient instrumentation to detect causal relations, can reduce those causal relations to analogies to experience. This basically argues that intelligence and instrumentalism are capable of perceiving any reasonably deterministic order. I am extremely suspicious of the argument that the rules of the universe are fungible. And it appears instead, that we fail to understand the properties of the universe and as such our model will suit nearly any math we throw at it. For this reason, we know our model is wrong. I suspect that because our model is wrong, so is the anthropic principle.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-29 10:53:00 UTC

  • In our family, thanks to my mother, “I love you” cost emotional pence – easily e

    In our family, thanks to my mother, “I love you” cost emotional pence – easily earned, easily given. So there were always a lot of pence around to be had. In some families, those same words are far more scarce – emotional Ben Franklins. And the aren’t just lying around everywhere. 🙂

    I like our way better. 🙂

    Love is cheap, and like money, the more you use it the more there is in circulation, and the wealthier everyone becomes.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-29 10:25:00 UTC

  • Does anyone else lose a pair of glasses per quarter? Sigh. I buy two to four pai

    Does anyone else lose a pair of glasses per quarter?

    Sigh. I buy two to four pair at a time.

    Elves. Must be elves.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-29 08:48:00 UTC

  • ADVICE FOR ACTIVISTS: MASTER YOUR NICHE – DON’T TRY TO MONOPOLIZE THE DIALOG Eve

    ADVICE FOR ACTIVISTS: MASTER YOUR NICHE – DON’T TRY TO MONOPOLIZE THE DIALOG

    Every person can participate in political discourse if he works within his abilities, using the form of political discourse that he is capable of.

    Each “Degree Of Political Argument” requires greater understanding of the speaker and the audience. But given the distribution of knowledge and ability in the population, any political argument that is successful, must satisfy one or more argumentative demographics, using the language of argument available to that demographic.

    The art in creating advanced rhetoric is to satisfy the needs of each ‘argumentative demographic’.

    Unfortunately, the fantasy that we are all capable of the same degree of thought is counter-factual. We are not. As such no argument is sufficiently persuasive unless it satisfies the constraints of the majority of most argumentative demographics.

    Contrary to popular intellectual self aggrandizement, less sophisticated arguments, because they affect a larger number of people, are more influential than more sophisticated arguments.

    Scientists discover facts, philosophers integrate them into the base of knowledge, public intellectuals convert them into ideology, people elect politicians, and politicians convert them into policy.

    SECTION 1 – METHODS OF ARGUMENT

    I. PERSONAL – (SOLIPSISTIC)

    1) EXPRESSIVE (emotional agreement or disagreement): a type of argument where a person expresses approval or disapproval based upon his emotional response to the subject.

    II. INTERPERSONAL – PERCEPTIBLE WITHOUT INSTRUMENTATION

    2) SENTIMENTAL (biological): a type of argument that relies upon one of the five (or six) human sentiments, and their artifacts as captured in human traditions, morals, or other unarticulated, but nevertheless consistently and universally demonstrated preferences and behaviors.

    3) MORAL (normative) : a type of argument that relies upon a set of assumedly normative rules of whose origin is either (a)socially contractual, (b)biologically natural, (c) economically necessary, or even (d)divine.

    7) PROPERTARIAN (Causal) A rationally articulated argument that, by reducing all actions to statements of property and its voluntary and involuntary transfer, within a specified portfolio of property rights, renders all moral, ethical and political questions commensurable, by subjecting all transfers to sympathetic testing of incentives, ethics, and morality.

    III. POLITICAL – IMPERCEPTIBLE WITHOUT INSTRUMENTATION

    4) HISTORICAL (analogical): A spectrum of analogical arguments – from Historical to Anecdotal — that rely upon a relationship between a historical sequence of events, and a present sequence events, in order to suggest that the current events will come to the same conclusion as did the past events, or can be used to invalidate or validate assumptions about the current period.

    5) SCIENTIFIC (directly empirical): The use of a set of measurements that produce data that can be used to prove or disprove an hypothesis, but which are subject to human cognitive biases and preferences. ie: ‘Bottom up analysis”

    6) ECONOMIC: (indirectly empirical): The use of a set of measures consisting of uncontrolled variables, for the purpose of circumventing the problems of direct human inquiry into human preferences, by the process of capturing demonstrated preferences, as expressed by human exchanges, usually in the form of money. ie: “Top Down Analysis”. The weakness of economic arguments is caused by the elimination of properties and causes that are necessary for the process of aggregation.

    IIII. SYNTHETIC – (AUTISTIC)

    8) ANALYTIC / RATIONAL (Comprehensive: Using all above): A rationally articulated argument that makes use of propertarian, economic, scientific, historical, normative and sentimental information to comprehensively demonstrate that a position is defensible under all objections.

    SECTION 2. SOURCES OF ARGUMENT

    1) GENETIC INTUITION

    2) NORMATIVE INTUITION

    3) RELIGIOUS ARGUMENT

    4) IDEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

    5) PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENT

    6) SCIENTIFIC ARGUMENT

    7) REALITY AS IT EXISTS INDEPENDENT OF OUR PERCEPTIONS

    —Note for refinement—

    1) Injunction : “if you want to know this you must do this.” Scientific knowledge is paradigm dependent (instrumentalist paradigms) (paradigm people)

    Propertarianism: instrumentalism. (a) You must create instruments (logical or physical) to record what you cannot currently experience. (b) all paradigms are instrument-dependent, and changes in paradigms are changes in instruments.

    2) Apprehension : experience (empirical/observable)

    Propertarianism: reducible to either experience or analogy to experience.

    3) Confirmation : falsifiability

    Propertarianism: additional criteria that any action is subject to praxeological testing of the rationality of incentives.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-29 08:13:00 UTC

  • (artificial intelligence) Just had a thought. Scary cool. If I finish propertari

    (artificial intelligence)

    Just had a thought. Scary cool.

    If I finish propertarianism, it is now possible to create both an AI, and to give it moral and ethical rules that it cannot violate. It cannot violate them through self deception via self obscurantism either.

    wow…. Gotta put out a short story on that fairly quickly. Don’t have time tho.

    THAT IS IT!!!!!

    In college I wrote software that simulated an intelligent ‘tank’, using emotional rewards, and sixteen different emotions. But my problem was I just could not figure out how to tune rules for the emotions to produce the right behavior. I couldn’t come up with consistent rules……….

    Property is a consistent rule. Property=morality. But property RIGHTS are distributed among groups differently, because different groups use different property rights structures to suit needed reproductive strategies given local structures of production, and given local competitors in production.

    So like any ‘technology’ property rights are paradigmatic: the structure of production, the structure of reproduction (the family) and the structure of property rights that allow cooperation within that paradigmatic structure.

    I don’t like the paradigm argument because it’s too closely related to ‘belief’ and not closely enough related to instrumentalism.

    MORE RECENTLY – RUNCIBLE

    We were thinking of a new company using a new programming technology and spatial manifolds to store complex data. This could use existing technology even if new forms of programming.

    The problem none of us could solve was the data structure. Language is very problematic because of its complexity and loading. But, all language can be reduced to statements of property, property rights, and voluntary or involuntary transfer.

    Property is the data structure.

    PROPERTY IS THE UNIVERSAL COMPUTATIONAL DATA STRUCTURE.

    Is this the underlying problem that my subconscious autistic mind has been fighting with for decades?????????? Is this the ‘problem’ that that frustrating enormous obsessive machine in my head ‘senses’ but could not solve? That will nearly kill me if I don’t keep it fed with problems related to it?

    I know that my psychological motivation comes from a combination of obsessive autism, the need to understand, and the desire to prevent conflict.

    But …. But I think this might be what I was intuitively searching for…… I’ve been carrying this frustration for decades… and I think this is it.

    It was very smart not to rush my book this year. I am very close now to a compact argument. The last science so to speak.

    Hmmm….

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-29 07:47:00 UTC

  • Just Read: The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized by Owen Flanagan. Excel

    Just Read: The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized by Owen Flanagan. Excellent read. It’s personal and psychological, not civic and political. So from that perspective I can understand it. Not my area or area of interest, but I get it. Thanks Adam.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-28 18:11:00 UTC

  • Question: Is feeling = doing? Or is feeling != doing? (Where doing=acting)

    Question: Is feeling = doing? Or is feeling != doing? (Where doing=acting)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-28 18:05:00 UTC

  • (sketch) (morality of logical methods) Infinity is a property of the set. It’s i

    (sketch) (morality of logical methods)

    Infinity is a property of the set. It’s imaginary. Operations are not imaginary, nor infinite. Operations, even imaginary operations, must be performed. I cannot perform any operation indefinitely, and so no operation can be performed infinitely.

    Likewise, no infinite set can be constructed. It can however be imagined we are told. But this is not true. No human imagination can demonstrate infinity. We can only construct imaginary operations where the scale is greater than our perception.

    We can imagine the flight of an arrow, and when we imagine infinity we do precisely the same operation. The arrow leaves our vision, the scope of measurement leaves our imagination. The trajectory is all we remember in either case.

    Even in the vaulted pairing off examples we are not measuring the size of anything, because for anything beyond our perception, that size is unimaginable. Instead, we generate more operations more frequently with some pairing offs, than we do with other pairing offs. So we may say that the operational members of any function, occur with greater frequency or higher density, but we cannot make an argument as to size, since no end is possible in the infinite, but no infinite is possible.

    The net result is that mathematicians arbitrarily alter scale, because while mathematical relations are constant, the scale is arbitrarily defined, and its correspondence with reality is likewise arbitrarily defined. As such, all mathematicians do is alter the PRECISION of any model at whim.

    The reason is that scales are utilitarian. In the sense of measuring real world objects, such scales are limited by some meaningful amount of precision. If I cut a piece of wood or metal there is some limit to the necessity of precision, and that precision determines the point of demarcation between one unit and another.

    Mathematics cannot rely on externally defined precision so they rely on sets and the excluded middle to accommodate what is in reality their arbitrary use of precision, given their arbitrary use of scale.

    I actually find this kind of cute really. Like children inventing magical causes.

    But it’s not cute. It’s magian really, and this kind of magical nonsense, or platonic fantasizing has created the pretense of mysticism that partly drowned the 20th century.

    If we can hold the inquisition responsible for burning witches out of mystical ignorance, can we hold mathematicians and physicists responsible for the mysticism that was the 20th century? Or do we blame it on the introduction of the proletarians to the demands of education and the work force?

    I don’t know who to blame. I just want to fix the problem.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-28 18:03:00 UTC

  • “Do not sleep on high, luxurious beds” Ok. Is this a sort of asceticism? ‘Cause

    “Do not sleep on high, luxurious beds”

    Ok. Is this a sort of asceticism? ‘Cause I think it’s a really weak rule as its written….. lol

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-28 17:30:00 UTC