Curt Doolittle

Source: Original Site Post

  • Universal Grammars of Action and Experience

    [I] think that any set of symbols in any form, capable of reconstructing the requisite experience of reality allows for some degree of truth communication between humans, superhumans, human-made-machines, and if they exist, aliens capable of action and communication.

    I have a hard time imagining that a basic instruction set is not accessible to any sentient creature capable of acting in reality. That’s because most of what we wish to communicate is state change, and I can easily see a universal grammar of state change in the physical world, just as easily as I can see a universal grammar of mathematical operations. Actions produce state changes.

    What I can’t see is a universal grammar of subjective experience. It is hard enough to communicate across cultures and languages. I can see “in my interests” and “against my interests” as well as the plural “our interests”. It appears to be possible to create a universal grammar of emotion among earth’s creatures, because it is a very simple thing. So maybe a universal grammar is possible (now that I think about it, I think I might be able to do it.) (Damn…. I just gave myself more work to do.)

  • Man Creates Truth

    [M]AN CREATES TRUTH. TRUTH MUST BE SPOKEN. ALL ELSE IS JUST EXISTENCE. You see, the statement ‘full of truth’ is an existentially impossible statement. The universe exists. Truth must be stated. Error, bias, imagination, wishful thinking,  and deception can be removed from our utterances. I use the term “Truthful” for warrantied speech. It is not so much that ‘Truthful’ speech is full of truth, but that it is laundered of error, bias, imaginary content, wishful thinking, and deception. So our utterances can never ‘be full of truth’. Truth is constructed. It does not exist prior to its construction. Truth is a product of man’s action. Everything else is just existence. Source: (1) Curt Doolittle – MAN CREATES TRUTH. TRUTH MUST BE SPOKEN. ALL ELSE…

  • Man Creates Truth

    [M]AN CREATES TRUTH. TRUTH MUST BE SPOKEN. ALL ELSE IS JUST EXISTENCE. You see, the statement ‘full of truth’ is an existentially impossible statement. The universe exists. Truth must be stated. Error, bias, imagination, wishful thinking,  and deception can be removed from our utterances. I use the term “Truthful” for warrantied speech. It is not so much that ‘Truthful’ speech is full of truth, but that it is laundered of error, bias, imaginary content, wishful thinking, and deception. So our utterances can never ‘be full of truth’. Truth is constructed. It does not exist prior to its construction. Truth is a product of man’s action. Everything else is just existence. Source: (1) Curt Doolittle – MAN CREATES TRUTH. TRUTH MUST BE SPOKEN. ALL ELSE…

  • Can The Truth Be A Commons?

    (Interesting)

    —“Truth telling is commons, but truth is not commons?”—

    [L]et me state this clearly:

    “The act of habituating truth-telling as both a normative behavior and skill is an expensive normative commons (asset) for a population to construct.” 1) How does truth telling exist? The commons of truth telling exists as both demonstrated habit, and in the institutional means for its inter-temporal and intergenerational persistence: testimony, jury and law. 2) How does truth exist? I put it this way: that information can be treated as a commons, and we can protect the informational commons just as we do every other commons both physical and normative. So when we propose the statement ‘is the truth a commons?’ we are stuck with whether can we treat the truth as a commons. That requires we define truth, which as far as I know, can consist only of the extant history of truthfully constructed statements. If we protected those statements, then that’s not logical. Because we do not in fact know whether they are true, only that they are truthfully constructed. 3) So our only choice then is to require that only truthful statements enter into the commons, and then let the best surviving statements rise and the lesser fall. Just as we require only non-harmful products enter into the market for goods and services and allow them to rise and fall. There is no truth that can exist as a commons. There can exist only truthfully constructed statements. And we cannot protect those statements since it’s counter-productive. We can only prohibit ‘polluting’ them like all other commons. Cheers. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine.

  • Can The Truth Be A Commons?

    (Interesting)

    —“Truth telling is commons, but truth is not commons?”—

    [L]et me state this clearly:

    “The act of habituating truth-telling as both a normative behavior and skill is an expensive normative commons (asset) for a population to construct.” 1) How does truth telling exist? The commons of truth telling exists as both demonstrated habit, and in the institutional means for its inter-temporal and intergenerational persistence: testimony, jury and law. 2) How does truth exist? I put it this way: that information can be treated as a commons, and we can protect the informational commons just as we do every other commons both physical and normative. So when we propose the statement ‘is the truth a commons?’ we are stuck with whether can we treat the truth as a commons. That requires we define truth, which as far as I know, can consist only of the extant history of truthfully constructed statements. If we protected those statements, then that’s not logical. Because we do not in fact know whether they are true, only that they are truthfully constructed. 3) So our only choice then is to require that only truthful statements enter into the commons, and then let the best surviving statements rise and the lesser fall. Just as we require only non-harmful products enter into the market for goods and services and allow them to rise and fall. There is no truth that can exist as a commons. There can exist only truthfully constructed statements. And we cannot protect those statements since it’s counter-productive. We can only prohibit ‘polluting’ them like all other commons. Cheers. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine.

  • Language, Like Genes and Traditions….

    [T]he Good, the useless and the bad.

    —“But my experience is that language, like traditions, and genes, grows to contain useful, useless, and damaging content.”— Curt

    Source: Curt Doolittle

  • Language, Like Genes and Traditions….

    [T]he Good, the useless and the bad.

    —“But my experience is that language, like traditions, and genes, grows to contain useful, useless, and damaging content.”— Curt

    Source: Curt Doolittle

  • Operationalism is a Means of Falsification

     [A] criticism from Bruce, on my failure to make clear that Operationalism is a means of conducting a test of falsification.

    –“This monotheistic passion for reduction to operations seems to lead to cul-de-sacs.”— Bruce Caithness

    Bruce,

    1) Operationalism is an attempt at falsification. Just as in math, if we can construct a statement through operations then it is existentially possible. Just as in economics, if we can reduce an economic statement to a sequence of rationally executable decisions. Just as in science, if we can reduce a test to a repeatable sequence of operations, and if we can reduce our measures to those that are possible then the test is existentially possible, assuming determinism in the universe and therefore the constancy of that which we measure (without which no science ,and no theory, can be possible).

    If I conduct tests of identity, internal consistency, external correspondence, repeatability, full accounting, parsimony (limits), existential possibility, objective morality (voluntary transfer), then I have laundered imaginary content from my statements. This is what science consists in: identifying existential information and eliminating imaginary information.

    If I have performed the due diligence to launder by speech of imaginary information, then I speak as truthfully as is possible. I may indeed speak the most parsimonious testimony possible (the truth) or I may not – a matter of error at one end of the possibilities, or of imprecision at the other end.

    I can warranty that I have performed that due diligence by stating that I speak truthfully: I give testimony in public, as to the truthfulness of my speech.

     

    2) One can speak truthfully, and warranty that one speaks truthfully. If one speaks in e-prime (specifying means of existence), and in operational definitions (rather than experiences), it is extremely difficult to articulate an idea that still contains imaginary content.

     

    3) Rather than “leading to cul-de-sac’s” I suspect that this is the completion (or repair) of the critical rationalist research program and the most important invention in philosophy since the failure of that program.

    Just is what it is. I just did a good yeoman’s labor. But between explanatory power, and parsimony it’s a pretty powerful theoretical structure, and it’s pretty hard to defeat it.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine

  • Operationalism is a Means of Falsification

     [A] criticism from Bruce, on my failure to make clear that Operationalism is a means of conducting a test of falsification.

    –“This monotheistic passion for reduction to operations seems to lead to cul-de-sacs.”— Bruce Caithness

    Bruce,

    1) Operationalism is an attempt at falsification. Just as in math, if we can construct a statement through operations then it is existentially possible. Just as in economics, if we can reduce an economic statement to a sequence of rationally executable decisions. Just as in science, if we can reduce a test to a repeatable sequence of operations, and if we can reduce our measures to those that are possible then the test is existentially possible, assuming determinism in the universe and therefore the constancy of that which we measure (without which no science ,and no theory, can be possible).

    If I conduct tests of identity, internal consistency, external correspondence, repeatability, full accounting, parsimony (limits), existential possibility, objective morality (voluntary transfer), then I have laundered imaginary content from my statements. This is what science consists in: identifying existential information and eliminating imaginary information.

    If I have performed the due diligence to launder by speech of imaginary information, then I speak as truthfully as is possible. I may indeed speak the most parsimonious testimony possible (the truth) or I may not – a matter of error at one end of the possibilities, or of imprecision at the other end.

    I can warranty that I have performed that due diligence by stating that I speak truthfully: I give testimony in public, as to the truthfulness of my speech.

     

    2) One can speak truthfully, and warranty that one speaks truthfully. If one speaks in e-prime (specifying means of existence), and in operational definitions (rather than experiences), it is extremely difficult to articulate an idea that still contains imaginary content.

     

    3) Rather than “leading to cul-de-sac’s” I suspect that this is the completion (or repair) of the critical rationalist research program and the most important invention in philosophy since the failure of that program.

    Just is what it is. I just did a good yeoman’s labor. But between explanatory power, and parsimony it’s a pretty powerful theoretical structure, and it’s pretty hard to defeat it.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine

  • Q&A: “Is The Soul Property?”

    Q&A: “Curt, What do you say about soul? And its relation to property?” – Mahmoud B. [Y]our indisputable Property is that which you act to obtain without forcing involuntary transfers upon others. Meaning: without {violence,theft, fraud, suggestion, obscurantism, omission, indirection (externality), free riding, socializing losses and privatizing commons, conspiracy, conversion, immigration, war, conquest, and genocide.}

    • You may act to construct your life.
    • You may act to construct your kin.
    • You may act to construct cooperative relations.
    • You may act to construct your reputation.
    • You may act to construct private property
    • You may act to construct common physical property.
    • You may act to construct normative property (by forging opportunity)
    • You may act to construct institutional property (by bearing costs of such things as military service, jury duty, emergency services, and ‘policing’ the preservation of life and property.)

    Your soul, if you believe in such things, and act as if you believe in such things, is, like reputation, something you must constantly bear costs to maintain. As such since you have born costs for both physical and normative constructs, and have done so morally – without the imposition of costs upon others – they are by definition your property. EXISTENCE Now, the manner in which your soul may or may not exist is somewhat challenging, because it can only knowingly exist as an analogy: a form of anthropomorphization of the record of one’s actions recorded in memories of people, physical marks on reality, and the long term consequences of events in the physical world. In this sense your ‘soul’ good or ill, does persist, just as the interaction of molecule of water affects all those around it. (the theory that water has memory is a useful analogy.) So for those who wish to preserve the traditional behavior and traditional anthropomorphism in a manner that we can say may or may not be scientific, we can suggest that primitive man intuits his soul as his thoughts and actions, just as we intuit the persistence of our genes through reproduction. To take it further, we can (and we will very likely never disprove this so it’s useful for religious folk), we can work with what is called quantum mysticism. That is, that your thoughts take place in physical space and time and affect the universe around you. So even your thoughts affect the universe. The thing is, the concept of a soul (an accounting of your life) is a useful one. It seems to produce good outcomes. [Y]ou should not take this argument as terribly firm support for monotheism, but as a purely normative exercise in the economically beneficial results of providing an intuitive means of behavioral accounting in which individuals can resist cooperating with others on matters of ill intent under the correct presumption that the consequences of thought and action are kaleidic and infinite, and that one cannot be forced for any reason into immoral actions (those that impose costs upon others property.) Not all of us are above 125 in intelligence, and we require such analogies for both pedagogical purposes and for use by those who cannot grasp either rational or scientific arguments. The same is true for ethics. We need virtue (imitative), rule, and outcome based ethics, because we have young and simple, adult but not wise, and wise and experienced people in the world. We are unequal. As unequals we need unequal tools. I hope this helps you. As far as I know this argument will survive all current criticism. Existentially, your soul does exist as a record of your actions in the universe, and primitive man could not articulate such ideas. If you want to get into reincarnation then I cna’t help you. Neither can the Dali Lama. He knows it’s a great argument because it is untestable. As you may see, I am trying to provide a means of reformation to the main religions while at the same time undermining those parts of religion that are false, lies, or harmful. But I am not hostile to religion: myth and ritual. Personal religion is a good thing (having been near death at least three times myself). I hope that this answered your question. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine.