11.10.08
Posted in art, epistemology, ethics, language, logic, metaphysics, mind, ontology, philosophy, preterphysics, science at 4:12 pm by nogre
What follows is the second part of my metaphysics, which includes the basic outline of just about everything in this world: nature, science, ethics, language and more. Again it is impossibly short, but the overall structure is correct, so you get a flavor of how I think about everything non-preterphysical.
————
1 Metaphysical Ontology
1.1 Undisciplined Substances
To be disciplined is to take other people’s ontological position into consideration. Since it is impossible, without being crazy, to do otherwise, what is meant by `undisciplined’ is the minimal position: to take other people’s ontological position into consideration as little as possible.
1.1.1 Objects, Processes and Nature
Objects cannot exists alone. To observe an object, to recognize its existence, requires observing some process that the object is part of. Rational beings can lose their rationality; the process of losing rationality identifies a rational being, because the process could not occur without the existence of one.
Objects and processes are what make up Nature.
1.1.2 Words, Descriptions and Language
Words cannot exist alone; they are inseparable from descriptions. For a word to exist is for that word to be part of some description. Without being part of a description, a word is indistinguishable from anything else.
Words and descriptions are what make up Language.
1.1.3 Commitments, Values and Responsibility
Commitments cannot exist alone; they are inseparable from values. Values are how commitments are ranked. Without values all commitments are equal, and hence non-existent.
Commitments and values are what make up Responsibility.
1.2 Disciplined Substances
When you take other people into consideration when considering substance, then you have disciplined substance.
1.2.1 Science, Art and Craft
When we describe objects and processes in a disciplined way then we are describing nature scientifically. This means that the objects and processes are described in a way that is not limited to a particular person or place.
Craft is a level of discipline that is not as universalized: when you describe nature such that it refers to a group of people or various places, then you are describing craft.
1.2.2 Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric
When we describe words and descriptions in a disciplined way then we are are talking about the language’s grammar. This means that the words and descriptions are described in a way that is not limited to a particular description. If we are describing features that all languages have, then this is called logic.
Rhetoric is a level of discipline that is not as universalized: when you describe grammar such that it refers to a group of words or descriptions, then you are describing rhetoric.
1.2.3 Ethics, Worldview and Society
When we describe commitments and values in a disciplined way then we are talking about ethical responsibilities. This means that the commitments and values are described in a way that is not limited to a particular person or place. If we are describing features that all ethics have then this is a worldview.
Society is a level of discipline that is not as universalized: when you describe ethics such that it refers to a group of commitments or values, then you are describing a society.
File translated from TEX by TTH, version 3.79. On 10 Nov 2008, 14:59.
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10.25.08
Posted in epistemology, metaphysics, ontology, philosophy, preterphysics at 3:07 pm by nogre
A word of explanation before the actual text. Besides never setting out to write something like this, I think it is at best good; likely not too bad. Perhaps it is horrible, but all these determinations I leave to others. I wrote it because I felt there was nothing else to be done, and it is the best I can do at the moment.
So what did I write? The best way to describe the Prologue is to make a comparison to Descartes Cogito. I set out the barest basics for what I believe can be used as a foundation for knowledge and inquiry, and for what exists in general. And all in less than a page…
1 Prologue: Insanity
If am insane, then I have a problem. If I believe that I am insane, then there is nothing to be done because I am irreparably damaged and won’t be able to learn or understand anything.
I do not believe myself insane.
1.1 Substances
If I affirm the previous sentence then I may infer a few things:
- Descriptions and words exist, else I wouldn’t have been able to make the above statement; I wrote it.
- Commitments exist, else I wouldn’t have been able to affirm the above statement; I’m committed to it.
- Something other than words, descriptions and commitments exist, else I wouldn’t have had anything to describe or commit to.
These three existential statements are inferred from affirming that I am not insane. So if you say you are not insane then you can also be said to believe in commitments, descriptions, and other objects.
1.2 Discipline
Being irreparably damaged is the same as being insane; if damaged you’re incapable of understanding what others can understand. Therefore if you deny that you are insane then you deny that you are damaged.
Anyone who asserts that they are not damaged, not insane, is committed to an ontology that everyone who is sane will understand.
If it were false, i.e. you claim you are not insane and you are committed to an ontology that some who are sane cannot understand, then those who you say cannot understand are damaged in some way becaues they cannot understand but are also not insane. However, claiming that someone is incapable of understanding but not insane is nonsense.
Therefore there is no preferential ontological perspective: ontology is relative to the sane. All sane people are equal in the sense that they can understand each other, are reasonable, when researching the kinds of things that exist. This is not to say that there won’t be disagreements or that understanding will not take time and effort, but that there is no third option of being niether sane nor insane. Either you understand and can be understood or you do not and cannot. and this space between sanity and insanity will be dealt with in the section on preterphysics.
File translated from TEX by TTH, version 3.79. On 25 Oct 2008, 14:43.
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09.24.08
Posted in epistemology, game theory, logic, philosophy at 11:11 am by nogre
What are quantifiers? Quantifiers have been thought of things that ‘range over’ a set of objects. For example, if I say
There are people with blue eyes
this statement can be represented as (with the domain restricted to people):
∃x(Bx).
This statement says that there is at least one person with property B, blue eyes. So the ‘Ex’ is doing the work of looking at the people in the domain (all people) and picking out one with blue eyes. Without this ‘∃x’ we would just have Bx, or x has blue eyes.
This concept of ‘ranging over’ and selecting an individual with a specific property out of the whole group works in the vast majority of applications. However, I’ve pointed out a few instances in which it makes no sense to think of the domain as a predetermined group of objects, such as in natural language and relativistic situations. In these cases the domain cannot be defined until something about the people involved are known, if at all; people may have a stock set of responses to questions but can also make new ones up.
So, since the problem resides with a static domain being linked to specific people, I suggest that we find a way to link quantifiers to those people. This means that if two people are playing a logic game, each person will have their own quantifiers linked to their own domain. The domains will be associated with the knowledge (or other relevant property) of the people playing the game.
We could index individual quantifiers to show which domain they belong to, but game theory has a mechanism for showing which player is making a move by using negation. When a negation is reached in a logic game, it signals that it is the other player’s turn to make a move. I suggest negation should also signal a change in domains, as to mirror the other player’s knowledge.
Using negation to switch the domain that the quantifiers reference is more realistic/ natural treatment of logic: when two people are playing a game, one may know certain things to exist that the other does not. So using one domain is an unrealistic view of the world because it is only in special instances that two people believe the exact same objects to exist in the world. Of course there needs to be much overlap for two people to be playing the same game, but having individual domains to represent individual intelligences makes for a more realistic model of reality.
Now that each player in a game has his or her own domain, what is the activity of the quantifier? It still seems to be ranging over a domain, even if the domain is separate, so the problem raised above has not yet been dealt with.
Besides knowing different things, people think differently too. The different ways people deal with situations can be described as unique strategies. Between the strategies people have and their knowledge we have an approximate representation of a person playing a logic game.
If we now consider how quantifiers are used in logic games, whenever we encounter one we have to choose an element of the domain according to a strategy. This strategy is a set of instructions that will yield a specified result and are separate from the domain. So quantifiers are calls to use a strategy as informed by your domain, your knowledge. They do not ‘range over’ the domain; it is the strategies a person uses that take the domain and game (perhaps “game-state” is more accurate at this point) as inputs and returns an individual.
The main problem mentioned above can now be addressed: Instead of predetermining sets objects in domains, what we need to predetermine are the players in the game. The players may be defined by a domain of objects and strategies that will be used to play the game, but this only becomes relevant when a quantifier is reached in the game. Specifying the players is sufficient because each brings his or her own domain and strategies to the game, so nothing is lost, and the domain and strategies do no have to be predefined because they are initially called upon within the game, not before.
I don’t expect this discussion to cause major revisions to the way people go about practicing logic, but I do hope that it provides a more natural way to think about what is going on when dealing with quantifiers and domains, especially when dealing with relativistic or natural language situations.
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08.18.08
Posted in Independence Friendly logic, Relativity, Special Relativity, biology, epistemology, evolution, fitness, logic, measurement, mind, philosophy, physics, science, technology at 1:26 pm by nogre
I just returned from a cruise to Alaska. It is a wonderful, beautiful place. I zip-lined in a rain forest canopy, hiked above a glacier, kayaked coastal Canada and was pulled by sled-dogs. Anywho, as on many cruises, there was a casino, which is an excellent excuse for me to discuss probability.
What is probability and where does it come from? Definitions are easy enough to find. Google returns:
a measure of how likely it is that some event will occur; a number expressing the ratio of favorable cases to the whole number of cases possible …
So it’s a measure of likelihood. What’s likelihood? Google returns:
The probability of a specified outcome.
Awesome. So ‘probability as likelihood’ is non-explanatory. What about this ‘ratio of favorable cases to the whole number of cases possible’? I’m pretty wary about the word favorable. Let’s modify this definition to read:
a number expressing the ratio of certain cases to the whole number of cases possible.
Nor do I like ‘a number expressing…’ This refers to a particular probability, not probability at large, so let’s go back to using ‘measure’:
a measure of certain cases to the whole number of cases possible.
We need to be a bit more explicit about what we are measuring:
a measure of the frequency of certain cases to the whole number of cases possible.
OK. I think this isn’t that bad. When we flip a fair coin the probability is the frequency of landing on heads compared to the total cases possible, heads + tails, so 1 out of 2. Pretty good.
But notice the addition of the word fair. Where did it come from, what’s it doing there? Something is said to be fair if that thing shows no favoritism to any person or process. In terms of things that act randomly, this means that the thing acts in a consistently random way. Being consistently random means it is always random, not sometimes random and other times not random. This means that fairness has to do with the distribution of the instances of the cases we are studying. What governs this distribution?
In the case of of a coin, the shape of the coin and the conditions under which it is measured make all the difference in the distribution of heads and tails. The two sides, heads and tails, must be distinguishable, but the coin must be flipped in a way such that no one can know which side will land facing up. The shape of the coin, even with uniform mass distribution, cannot preclude this previous condition. Therefore the source of probability is the interdependence of physical conditions (shape and motion of the coin) and an epistemic notion (independence of knowledge of which side will land up). When the physical conditions and our knowledge of the conditions are dependent upon each other then the situation becomes probabilistic because the conditions preclude our knowing the exact outcome of the situation.
It is now time to recall that people cheat at gambling all the time. A trio of people in March 2004 used a computer and lasers to successfully predict the decaying orbit of a ball spinning on a roulette wheel (and walked out with £1.3 million). This indicates that after a certain point it is possible to predict the outcome of a coin flipping or a roulette ball spinning, so the dependence mentioned above is eventually broken. However this is only possible once the coin is flipping or the roulette ball is rolling, not before the person releases the roulette ball or flips the coin.
With the suggestion that it is the person that determines the outcome we can expand the physical-epistemic dependence to an physical-epistemic-performative one. If I know that I, nor anyone else, can predict the outcome until after I perform a task, then the knowledge of the outcome is dependent upon how I perform that task.
This makes sense because magicians and scam artists train themselves to be able to perform tasks like shuffling and dealing cards in ways that most of us think is random but are not. The rest of us believe that there is a dependence between the physical setup and the outcome that precludes knowing the results, but this is merely an illusion that is exploited.
What about instances in which special training or equipment is unavailable; can we guarantee everyone’s ability to measure the thing in question to be equal? We can: light. Anyone who can see at all sees light that is indistinguishable from the light everyone else sees: it has no haecceity.
This lack of distinguishability, lack of haecceity (thisness), is not merely a property of the photon but a physical characteristic of humans. We have no biology that can distinguish one photon from another of equivalent wavelength. To distinguish something we have to use a smaller feature of the thing to tell it apart from its compatriots. Since we cannot see anything smaller, this is impossible. Nor is there a technology that we could use to augment our abilities: for us to have a technology that would see something smaller than a photon would require us to know that the technology interacted at a deeper level with reality than photons do. But we cannot know that because we are physically limited to using the photon as our minimal measurement device. The act of sight is foundational: we cannot see anything smaller than a photon nor can anything smaller exist in our world.
The way we perceive photons will always be inherently distributed because of this too. We cannot uniquely identify a single photon, and hence we can’t come back and measure the properties of a photon we have previously studied. Therefore the best we will be able to accomplish when studying photons is to measure a group of photons and use a distribution of their properties, making photons inherently probabilistic. Since the act of seeing light is a biological feature of humans, we all have equal epistemological footing in this instance. This means that the epistemic dependence mentioned above can be ignored because it adds nothing to the current discussion. Therefore we can eliminate the epistemic notion from our above dependence, reducing it to a physical-performative interdependence.
Since it is a historical/ evolutionary accident that the photon is the smallest object we can perceive, the photon really is not fundamental to this discussion. Therefore, the interdependence of the physical properties of the smallest things we can perceive and our inherent inability to tell them apart is a source of probability in nature.
This is a source of natural randomness as well: once we know the probability of some property that we cannot measure directly, the lack of haecceity means that we will not be able to predict when we will measure an individual with said property. Therefore the order in which we measure the property will inherently be random. [Assume the contradiction: the order in which we measure the property is not random, but follows some pattern. Then there exists some underlying structure that governs the appearance of the property. However, since we are already at the limit of what can be measured, no such thing can exist. Hence the order in which we measure the property is random.]
————–
If I were Wittgenstein I might have said:
Consider a situation in which someone asks, “How much light could you see?” Perhaps a detective is asking a hostage about where he was held. But then the answer is, “I didn’t look.” —— And this would make no sense.
hmmmm…. I did really mean to get back to gambling.
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07.24.08
Posted in epistemology, philosophy at 12:47 pm by nogre
The Gettier argument (and its descendants) run thusly…
Someone thinks they know x.
However, due to factor y, they do not know x.
These sorts of thought experiments are used regularly to undermine different accounts of knowledge. Generally I think they are effective but there is one gray area that is under-appreciated.
When the thought experiment is introduced, it is generally assumed to be unproblematic: whoever is setting up the thought experiment is defining the situation and generally is allowed to do so as he or she pleases. However, in setting up a thought experiment that has to do with knowledge, we are inherently assuming an ability to create thought experiments. This means we are presupposing knowing how to do something order to analyze knowledge in general.
In this instance, due to the self reflexive nature of epistemological research, we are forced to accept a presupposition of knowledge of thought experiments when trying to explain knowledge. Therefore Gettier-style thought experiments beg the question by analyzing Knowledge while making you implicitly presuppose a form of knowledge.
Unless you are a skeptic, you are probably thinking that no one is denying that we have knowledge; we just can’t explain it yet. Gettier merely was pointing this out. Therefore it is fine that we have the knowledge of how to have thought experiments and the Gettier-style thought experiments stand as testament to the failure of the Justified-True-Belief account of knowledge.
As I said above, for the most part I agree. I say ‘for the most part’ because just about all the theories of knowledge I have seen don’t take presupposed knowledge as a problem that has to be dealt with, just explained. Hence the big upshot is: If an epistemology came along that started off by explaining thought experiments (and presupposed knowledge in general), then that theory would be a step ahead of Gettier. With a theory of presupposed knowledge you would have the opportunity to prevent Gettier-style thought experiments from becoming problematic. (Those theories would be able to have a retroactive thought-experiment abortion, a la The Terminator.)
Personally I default to my stated epistemological position. Still, for those who disagree with me (and as far as I can tell that is everyone but, like, 3, if I am lucky and it’s a good day), I offer this argument/ suggestion in hopes that it is useful.
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07.10.08
Posted in epistemology, philosophy at 9:48 am by nogre
The statement, “Either something happened or something didn’t happen,” is immune to skepticism.
If a skeptic tries to doubt it, then something has happened, making the statement true. If no one doubts it and nothing happened, then the statement is again true. Therefore you may have absolute certainty that something has or has not happened.
Moreover, this statement has it’s uses: I can imagine mothers all over the country trying to impress upon their teenagers to refrain using the word ‘like’. “Either something happened or something didn’t happen. Nothing ‘like happened’.”
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07.08.08
Posted in epistemology, mind, philosophy, wittgenstein at 3:16 pm by nogre
Justified true belief does not yield knowledge, and everyone should know this by now. Beyond Gettier’s argument, is this tack I heard given by Jaakko Hintikka:
You may believe something, fine, and have whatever justifications you wish. But how do you know the thing is true?
The point he was making was that far beyond the issue of problems in having the right sort of justifications is the problem of having truth as well. Whenever the Justified-true-belief scheme is used for knowledge the truth of the thing in question is whitewashed over: all the focus is put on the justification and the truth is assumed to exist separately.
For example if I make a claim P, then I clearly believe P, I will need to give justifications x, y, z, etc., and P needs to be true for me to count P to be part of my knowledge. The first two conditions are easy enough for me to demonstrate according to some standards, even if skepticism is still an issue. However, I, nor anyone else, has any ability to demonstrate the truth of P in ways over and above whatever I have given as my justification. Therefore Justified-true-belief reduces to Justified-belief, which no one accepts as knowledge.
Between this argument and Gettier, I see the Justified-true-belief scheme of knowledge as beyond saving. To recover some sense of knowledge, we can focus on this idea:
If you know something, then it is not possible to be mistaken.
There are two ways of dealing with this conditional. First, you can make your definition of what it is to know something always correspond with whatever you cannot be mistaken about. Besides being ad hoc, this sliding scale for knowledge does not correspond very well with what we generally take to be knowledge.
Secondly, we can make what it is not possible to be mistaken about correspond to our knowledge. Although you have already called foul, hear me out. If you were to find out certain things were wrong you might start to doubt your own sanity. For example if you were to find out all the basic things you ‘know’ were wrong - there is no such place as the United States, water is not comprised of oxygen and hydrogen, subjects and verbs are one and the same, you are currently not reading, etc., - you would have reason to worry (at least I would).
Therefore I suggest that knowledge is comprised of things that if they were to be false, then we would not be able to claim we were sane. This definition makes a distinction between things we can be mistaken about and things we cannot be mistaken about. To be mistaken about this second type of thing would entail an unacceptable consequence: if you are insane then you cannot claim to have knowledge.
Is this ad hoc, as above? No, because the definition of what would classify you as insane does not refer to knowledge specifically. For example take the statement, “If x, y and z are false then I am crazy.” No mention of knowledge whatsoever. Therefore this definition is not ad hoc.
Does this definition of knowledge correspond to our intuitions? Very much so: it is based specifically upon the everyday experiences we have and our most established theories of the world.
What about skepticism: can’t we always be mistaken? The skeptic here is asking us to imagine the unimaginable. If we do as the skeptic asks, then we would be required to imagine ourselves to be insane and tell the skeptic what we think as insane people. I can’t do this- I don’t even have a guess as to how to go about trying to do this.
In the end you are wagering your sanity in order to have a claim to knowledge. However, there is no danger in this bet because you hold all the cards: you know what you can imagine to be different. Therefore you gain a theory of knowledge and lose nothing.
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