Curt Doolittle

Theme: Grammar

  • AN OPERATIONAL DEFINITION OF “MEANING” Meaning: the experience produced by the i

    AN OPERATIONAL DEFINITION OF “MEANING”

    Meaning: the experience produced by the interaction between memory and stimuli caused by human action in time. This definition survives criticism even if the action is purely passive observation. All symbols for meaning are constructed from some set of analogies to experience. These constructs evolve through repetition and loading, until their constituent causal relations are lost, and all that remains is the habituated experience caused by the term. At which point ‘meaning’ is a purely experiential, rather than constructive. At that point, reason no longer can be said to apply. If one cannot explain something in analogies to experience, where analogies to experience are statements in operational language, one does not understand the terms one uses. They are merely experiential metaphors, used to transfer experiences rather than causal properties independent of experiences.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-24 09:34:00 UTC

  • “Mathematics, as a discipline created by human beings, has some ‘meaning’ with i

    “Mathematics, as a discipline created by human beings, has some ‘meaning’ with it which cannot be reduced to mere sequence of logical symbols. We can understand mathematics not by transforming mathematical proofs into logical symbols and checking that there is no mistake applying logical rules, but by understanding the ‘meaning’ indicated by the theorems. Thus, the mental world of mathematics can also be explained by the function of metaphors, our brain’s inferring mechanism. This is the idea shared by G. Lakoff and R.E. Nunez”

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-23 17:20:00 UTC

  • WERE THE CONSERVATIVES RIGHT ALL ALONG? (interesting) We cannot, like mathematic

    WERE THE CONSERVATIVES RIGHT ALL ALONG?

    (interesting)

    We cannot, like mathematicians tried to do, define something into existence. We can define rules of deduction, but not define something into existence. Truth consists of correspondence and cause, not definition. Definitions are our choice. Truth is not. That is the entire purpose of ‘truth’ – that which we cannot choose.

    So, if instead of some artificial scheme, we understand that PROPERTY is nothing but what remains, after we suppress all possible DISCOUNTS, by every means possible. Then, does that mean that the conservatives were right all along?

    That, since discounts, as a spectrum, are suppressible by a spectrum of actions which include the organized threat of violence, ostracization, boycott, reduction of opportunity, and the consequential limits on consumption, then the conservatives, correctly value NORMATIVE CONFORMITY TO SUPPRESSION OF DISCOUNTS, and that the model of property articulated by rothbard, taken as it was from the low trust society he was familiar with,

    In effect, Rothbard’s ethics are an attempt to preserve ‘cheating’ as a viable means of profiting from others, whereas conservative, aristocratic, ‘high trust’ ethics are an effort to suppress ALL cheating. Rothbard masks this cheating by stating that competition will suppress such cheating. But empirically, and praxeologically, this is demonstrably and logically false. So what are we left with no possible conclusion that either he committed a significant error or, that Rothbard’s ethics are an attempt, intentionally, to preserve cheating: which is precisely what the left correctly argues – albeit in their amateurish terms.

    The formation of a government, which is a monopoly that suppresses violence and theft, and then by taxation, suppresses free riding on the government’s suppression of violence, then, as a consequence, because of its monopoly, only displaces free riding with rents.

    The formal question remains the same, which is that rule of law, or liberty, is a prohibition on discretionary compulsion, but is only possible by the prohibition of all discounts. And the only possible means of both suppressing discounts, and preventing the conversion of free riding into rents, is to rely on competition for the suppression of these discounts.

    That is, I think, the fundamental equilibrial analysis of political order.

    The sequence is:

    1) Suppression of discounts results in property rights.

    2) Property rights lead to the division of labor, and prosperity.

    3) Property (capital) and prosperity lead to greater opportunity for discounts.

    4) The cost of suppressing discounts increases demand for specialized suppression.

    5) The specialized suppressing discounts leads to free riding (fee avoidance)

    6) The specialized suppression of free riding (taxation) leads to opportunity for rent seeking.

    7) Opportunity for rent seeking leads to bureaucracy.

    8) Bureaucracy leads to subjugation and expropriation.

    9) Expropriation leads to circumvention (Religiosity, black markets, tax evasion, nullification, secession and revolt and revolution)

    10 (fragmentation)

    The only solution is rule of law: no state, merely laws, and judges who resolve disputes. Governments must be local and under direct democracy. Everything else provided competing firms.

    CHEERS

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-07 06:54:00 UTC

  • IN THIS STRANGE LITTLE BIT OF LANGUAGE, BROUWER PROVIDES THE ANSWER TO PLATONIST

    IN THIS STRANGE LITTLE BIT OF LANGUAGE, BROUWER PROVIDES THE ANSWER TO PLATONISTS.

    (emphasis mine)

    “…mathematics is an essentially languageless activity of the mind having its ***origin in the perception of a move of time.*** This perception of a move of time may be described as the falling apart of a life moment into two distinct things, one of which gives way to the other, but is retained by memory. If the twoity thus born is divested of all quality, it passes into the empty form of the common substratum of all twoities.” — Brouwer.

    Genius.

    NELSON’S CRITIQUE

    –“Since the advent of digital computers, attention has turned from effective methods — functions computable in principle – to feasible algorithms and programs. There is strong evidence that polynomial time functions provide the correct formalization of the intuitive notion of a feasible computation, and unlike the situation for recursive functions there is a purely syntactical characterization of polynomial time functions. I am convinced that intuitionism reformulated in this context will become a powerful practical method for constructing and verifying feasible algorithms, and that Kleene’s realization predicate will provide an incisive tool for

    analyzing problems concerning interactive programs.”– Nelson.

    https://web.math.princeton.edu/~nelson/papers/int.pdf

    CURT: These are different contracts, for utility not different truths.

    As far as I can tell, if it is not computable it is questionable. But I need to learn more.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-04 18:00:00 UTC

  • One of those interesting problems with ideation is that in intellectual discours

    One of those interesting problems with ideation is that in intellectual discourse we use the names of thinkers, their books (usually one idea), their quotes, and the inherited terminology from their works and the discussions of their works. Most of which, in philosophy, are reduced to ‘isms’.

    The problem of innovative argument then, can be solved as did all those philosophers who invent terms. Or it can be solved by altering the properties of those terms. Or it can be solved by rearranging the relationships of those terms. But in general, we are asked by convention to use extant terms.

    This does assist in comprehension, and accessibility and the effort to test any new theory. However, it also runs up against paradigmatic investment.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-03 11:06:00 UTC

  • THREE POINTS PROVE A LINE – IN PHILOSOPHY TOO In propertarian methodology I have

    THREE POINTS PROVE A LINE – IN PHILOSOPHY TOO

    In propertarian methodology I have explicitly argued in favor of an expanded version of the golden mean: that is that definitions of states or objects or properties are not testable unless they are described in the context of a spectrum (or axis), either end of which the concept fails to meet the criteria of the axis.

    This habit, like equilibrial thinking, is not terribly natural. Humans tend to gravitate to the simplest mode of comparison: ideal types, just as they tend to gravitate to finite states instead of equilibrial thinking.

    So, whenever I define something I try to construct the axis.

    In the propertarian method, what little I’ve written about it, in the few examples, I suggest the simple method of collecting as many related terms as possible, and arranging them into axis by playing what thing is like the other and not games so to speak.

    This allows us to construct the equivalent of supply demand curves for human concepts and behaviors.

    I find that most philosophical error comes from either:

    (a) failure to state human concepts as human actions (as if they are geometric, or platonic, rather than praxeological).

    or

    (b) definitions (like ‘knowledge’) that are specious by construction, because they describe a fixed state rather than a spectrum.

    or

    (c) Failure to account for equilibrial processes

    or

    (d) Failure to account for opportunity costs.

    This (geometrization) is a curable habit in human cognition, by training us to be less solipsistic and increasingly sympathetic and then autistic in our understanding of the world.

    Now, this might be a little deep for the mind to grasp, but the reason we make these mistakes can be accounted for by a particular spectrum as well:

    The Increasing Abstraction Of Point Of View:

    1) Self (solipsism) – Awareness

    2) Other (the insight of introspection) – Comparison

    3) Categories (the insight of numbers) – Numbers

    3) Relationship (the insight of geometry) – Measurement

    4) Independence from the self (the insight of calculus) – Motion

    5) Equilibria (the insight of economics and physics) – Systems

    6) Opportunity (differences in multiple ‘worlds’) – Possibilities

    Each of these increasingly complex ideas places a higher burden on us by requiring that we make comparisons against less perceptible and intuitive objects of consideration.

    A loose spectrum is more precise than the most precise definition, whose spectrum must be assumed.

    This is the value of the “golden mean” in virtue, but it is a generic test of any concept: if you don’t state the properties of the spectrum, you must assume them.

    In most of western philosophy, like all philosophy, despite being rational, the assumptions are unstated. The virtues are stated but without axis. The logics are stated but without axis.

    But one needs axis. We are terrible at conceiving more than one flight of an arrow. But We are terrible at it. But no question of consequence consists of a single arc.

    And no definition consists of a single state.

    Because no such arcs or states are sufficiently testable, and therefore are loaded with metaphysical assumptions.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-31 06:42:00 UTC

  • Propertarianism : The Formal Logic of Cooperation

    (There we go. Today was a milestone.) Universally descriptive, universally commensurable logic of ethics. We no longer must rely on moral or rational argument in advocacy of moral, ethical or political preference. We can rely on ratio-scientific argument under which illustrates the multitude of thefts, or suppression of thefts, being conducted in any action. Propertarianism, the logic of property, is the formal logic of cooperation.

    • Terminology
    • Grammar
    • Compactness
    • Explanatory power
    • Testability and Falsifiability (via Praxeology)

    Praxeology, when corrected under Propertarianism by the enumeration of all types of property demonstrated by human action, is scientific because it consists in the universal, test of rationality of incentives, by means of sympathetic experience. Private Property as the result of the suppression of discounts. The suppression of discounts leaves the only possible human cooperation as fully informed, warranted, voluntary exchange. And the only possible means of competition, the quality and price of the production of goods and services. Cause. Private property is a consequence of the organized application of violence for the purpose of suppressing all discounts, in all human action, regardless of sphere.

  • Propertarianism : The Formal Logic of Cooperation

    (There we go. Today was a milestone.) Universally descriptive, universally commensurable logic of ethics. We no longer must rely on moral or rational argument in advocacy of moral, ethical or political preference. We can rely on ratio-scientific argument under which illustrates the multitude of thefts, or suppression of thefts, being conducted in any action. Propertarianism, the logic of property, is the formal logic of cooperation.

    • Terminology
    • Grammar
    • Compactness
    • Explanatory power
    • Testability and Falsifiability (via Praxeology)

    Praxeology, when corrected under Propertarianism by the enumeration of all types of property demonstrated by human action, is scientific because it consists in the universal, test of rationality of incentives, by means of sympathetic experience. Private Property as the result of the suppression of discounts. The suppression of discounts leaves the only possible human cooperation as fully informed, warranted, voluntary exchange. And the only possible means of competition, the quality and price of the production of goods and services. Cause. Private property is a consequence of the organized application of violence for the purpose of suppressing all discounts, in all human action, regardless of sphere.

  • THE DIALECTIC IS BETWEEN OUR FRAGILE MINDS AND OBJECTIVE REALITY… And that deb

    THE DIALECTIC IS BETWEEN OUR FRAGILE MINDS AND OBJECTIVE REALITY…

    And that debate is conducted in four languages, each of which supplies only one quarter of the solution, but togehter, explain all.:

    THE FOUR MORAL SCIENCES

    1) Reason = The instrumental logic of Perception.

    2) Mathematics = The instrumental Logic of Relations

    3) Physics (Science) = The instrumental logic of Causes

    4) Property (Economics) = The instrumental logic of Cooperation

    We have spent more than a century trying to construct morality as a science, without grasping that the scientific method is in fact, moral philosophy.

    You don’t need to go to a place if you’re already standing there.

    We were standing there all the time.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-18 06:56:00 UTC

  • ENGLISH TERMINOLOGY: NAMES FOR MEALS Breakfast: first morning meal “Break the Fa

    ENGLISH TERMINOLOGY: NAMES FOR MEALS

    Breakfast: first morning meal “Break the Fast”.

    Brunch : Late morning breakfast, usually on weekends after sleeping late.

    Luncheon: Large noon meal eaten with a group (formal)

    Lunch: Small mid-day meal, or at any time of day (informal)

    Dinner : The major meal of the day, whether at noon or night, eaten with others.

    Tea : mid afternoon snack between noon and evening.

    Supper : A casual family meal eaten in the kitchen, or small late night meal.

    In most of our history, the mid day meal was the largest, because light was available. Once we began to work outside of the home and farm, the large meal was pushed into the evening. As electric lights made food preparation possible, the big meal of the day has moved into the evening for most of us (unfortunately).

    Basically, counter to american propaganda, one big meal a day is sufficient, and four other meals of smaller size are probably the best for you.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-16 13:27:00 UTC