Theme: Truth

—-“Most of the time I see you post something, and a natural consequence of my personality is to ask “How did you go about this? [but you don’t go into enough detail, and I want to learn, becuase I sense ‘something is not right’ in what I have been taught”. —- A friend

I heavily edited the end there so that I could quickly get the point across.

It’s very simple from my end. I can only afford to do so much one on one tutorial so to speak. And when I do, I want to make sure (a) i’m informing others as I’m doing it, rather than just you, and (b) i’m improving my skill by doing it. Otherwise it is a sunk cost for me and I’m very conscious of my time left on this earth and the amount of work I have left to do.

There are very simple things I talk about, and very complex things.

I see no problem in explaining western civilization using a very small number of ideas that I think people can understand if they have a bit of reading and education behind them, and if they want to think hard a bit for a while.

But I think it is very, very, very hard to explain epistemology to people.

And while it is personally one of my favorite topics because it is one of the hardest philosophers have dealt with, and probably one of my more important insights, I actually don’t think it is possible (or a good use of my time anyway) to get into comparative truth with most people at the epistemological level. I think it’s FINE at the group evolutionary strategy level so that we can differentiate between parasitism and production between peoples. But you know, you just don’t need to know that stuff, and … it’s only useful for the category of problems i’m solving

All you need to know is that when you justify reasoning, a moral action or legal action, that’s because you are trying to demonstrate honesty, morailty and due diligence – that you are cooperating.

But when you are talking about discovering a truth rather than adhering to a rule, we cannot ‘justify’ truth statements. We must see if they survive all forms of criticism – we must see if they survive in the battle of ideas. This is how we discover truth candidates.

We create proofs in math and logic and programming to show that we adhered to the rules. We create rational, moral, and legal justification to show that we adhere to the rules. Why? Because the rules are very simple and well known: the causal density of the rules is fairly low).

When we conduct scientific inquiry in the social or physical world, the rules (the causal density of reality) is very high. So we the size of the problem is very different, and we must test not our intentions, not the rules we followed, but everyting regardless of our intentions.

But we evolved as social creatures and we lived cooperative lives that required us to communicate in the language of cooperation, and to discuss things that were actionable and perceivable at human scale.

So in the 19th century as we developed many tools and techniques and logics, and equations, we had to change our thinking from spending most of our time in the logic of cooperation: justification, to the logic of ‘everything bigger than that’, meaning science.

In other words, we humans moved from a world of JUSTIFIABLE RULES at human scale, to a world of THEORIES at post-human scale. And frankly we have not evolved for it.

So we are still in the process of converting people from thinking in simple human scale terms of justifications of those things we can act upon and experience, to participating in a society consisting of things we largely cannot perceive or act upon, except in very subtle ways.

So the ‘alienation’ we experience in post village, post-tribal, post-familial civilization is caused not only by the movement of people to capital instead of capital to people, and the loss of all those human relationships that allow us to rely upon instinctual justification of our actions, but we live in a market society where there is very little feedback, and we think in concepts of very large scale, and we (almost all of us) lack the education necessary to THINK at large scale sufficiently to understand how we fit into that vast but alienating world.