Theme: Decidability

–“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

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