Joel’s Hot Takes

The following catalog is intended as a sort of overview of many of the ideas in the essays at this site, albeit presented in a slightly provocative and wild-eyed manner. Naturally, the arguments and justifications are almost entirely left out:

The map is not the territory, except when it is. Even the best simulation isn't the real thing.

The territory is essentially unknowable, but is mysteriously tracked by simple explanations. Meaning is everywhere; meaning is impossible.

All Knowledge is Ptolemaic. The key to achieving a satisfying explanation is continual doubling down on arbitrary epicycles of description.

In thought, we necessarily take some aspect of the arbitrary, irreducible, idiopathic, brute world as it is and reduce it to a few simple explanatory principles, and then bludgeon reality into submission with those principles.

Deductive and inductive reasoning have an almost magical capacity to extend a thought beyond its starting place, but, because of the multiplication rule applied to imperfect assumptions, the further one extends one's reasoning, the greater the map-territory mismatch -- so stick closely to simple insights rather than extended reasoning.

The world is like a metaphor

I oppose philosophizing on philosophical grounds

The best argument may be the one that argues against its own validity. For example, "Never generalize" expresses a better idea than "Always generalize."

Superposition of theories developed from mutually contradictory assumptions can ameliorate or circumscribe the limitations of the Ptolemaic trap.

There's no such thing as nothingness. Duh! This fact points to the ultimate imperfection or contradiction of mapping. We cannot "understand" when we have nothing under us to stand on, when there is no background to bring the foreground into relief. To understand somethingness requires standing on nothingness, which is definitely not a thing!

All thoughts/ideas/explanations have foregrounds and backgrounds (aka assumptions), but the territory is indifferent to the distinction. What we call the foreground and the background ultimately have equal status.

The words explain, describe, express, and justify all refer to the idea of undoing the effect that the world has had on us and our state of consciousness.

The self is both bubble and beacon that says to the world, "Don't try to change me; in fact, why don't you act a little more like me."

We further the interests of the self by preserving the self by canceling out the outside world.

We further the interests of the self by creating disturbances to the bubbles of others.

Thinking is not about getting real; it's about getting even and about getting ahead.

In defending our interior space, we make the world over in our own image. In influencing others, we solidify, codify, concretize our own selfhood.

Explanation and rationalization are the same process. The self-serving aspect is never absent; it's fundamental.

The sensors used by selves always incorporate signal cancellation, which isn't an ideal method of decoding a signal. Duh. That is, if the process of perception is even partly about masking and undoing the effects of the outside world ("how can I understand this event so that it has no effect on me?"), then of course perception makes a poor medium through which to understand what's truly out there. Human understanding is in this sense self-limiting, even self-defeating.

All possible events have an equal nonzero tendency to manifest themselves at every moment. Contrary tendencies and especially the current state of things are all that are holding virtually all of them back. Singularly unopposed or incompletely opposed events happen. To create a novel thought, for example, just clear a path for it.

You ask "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Ha! Why is there so little rather than everything.

Things can happen by subtraction rather than addition of influences

The flow of X in one direction is the flow of anti-X in the opposite direction. Darkness and light have equal ontological status despite the assumptions of physics (which tends to say that darkness is a mere absence of light. Try thinking that light is the mere absence of darkness).

Energy is to force as information is to influence. Scalar and vector. Information/influence on the inside reflects energy/force on the outside.

What we call mental energy isn't energetic per se at all. It's about marshaling information to apply influence. Marshaling involves control and restraint rather than movement/energy. Thought happens spontaneously when mental chaos is held at bay. The LOGIC=LOGOS interpretation.

Memory isn't in the brain. Remembering is... Thoughts ain't not in the brain neither no how.

The past is more influential than the future only because of special cancellation.

Consciousness can't be an illusion, because only conscious beings can have an illusion. [There's a weird self-reference in that sentence.]

Does the world consist of agents and behavior (the view from the inside) or objects and laws (the view from the outside)? Both and neither. There is the world as seen from the outside in and the world as seen from the inside out. These views are utterly incompatible... and equally valid and useful in their contexts. I would change the epitome of yin from passive to "from the inside" and yang from active to "from the outside." The world doesn't have a yin and yang nature, but our maps necessarily do.

Identification is the basis of the empathy which leads to moral choices.

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Here's the umpteenth and best nutshell summary of my philosophical starting points and outlook:

•Logos=Logic: Despite some strong a priori reasons to disbelieve it, I have near total confidence in the ability of logic to correctly manipulate ideas. (There are a lot of ambiguous words there to be fudged elsewhere). To put it in a provocative form, logical structure is built into the natural structure of reality (which I identify with the Logos). Sadly, if you don't have this confidence in logic, you can't have justifiable confidence in any explanation -- all would be faith sans reason. That is, there's no alternative to this belief in logicality.

•The Assumption Assumption: In a way inspired by the Euclidean tradition, I believe that explanations of all sorts -- all examples of logical reasoning -- are based on assumptions, even those that successfully appeal to measurable facts. We don't always formalize our logical explanations so that we can see these assumptions being directly appealed to; nonetheless, they are in there upon analysis. Paradoxically, there's no alternative to the assumption assumption, and my contention is that this fact is underrated in the belief systems of ordinary people and scholars alike. I've never really tried to demonstrate this contention, but thinkers rarely say anything approaching "Statement A is true, at least given the alpha set of assumptions." That is, there's no nod to context.

•The AND Rule: Based on my tenuous understanding on the evolution of mind/language/intelligence and the subtle and unresolvable nature of the map-territory distinction, I have come to believe that no assumption or set of assumptions is correct in any final way; we are, after all, just a bunch of talking apes. Each such set of assumptions only provides some limited level of simian insight into reality (along with a complementary amount of transcendent uninsightfulness), and allows some level of extension through logical deduction. But as we extend those deductions, the more we appeal to underlying assumptions, the more their inherent uninsightfulness is amplified. Ultimately uninsightfulness will prevail. Thus, I am a believer in brief but punchy explanatory strategies (such as a list of hot takes).

•Fourier Philosophy: We can easily be fooled into believing the ultimate correctness of our monolithic set of assumptions because of the power of Fourier's Theorem, which at least metaphorically means that all data sets can be accounted for using simple off-the-shelf strategies rather than Laws of Nature writ large. Simple doubling-down strategies (Ptolemaic epicycles) can bring our explanations into alignment with the facts, measurable and otherwise. In fact, Fourier guarantees that such a strategy can work as well as we please in the long run -- if you swallow my assertion that this is no mere metaphor. Since we are all fish swimming in a Ptolemaic ocean of sinusoidal waves, we can't perceive the water. All explanations are Ptolemaic.

•Assumption Switching: Given this state of affairs, we ought to be able to judiciously reverse some cherished assumptions to produce new Ptolemaic explanations. That is, for example, we can exchange "nothing changes without a cause" for "nothing stays the same without a cause." And we can thus construct whole new explanatory "galaxies" that contradict the standard one yet still exhibit high levels of insightfulness, meaning that they can be brought into line with the facts. Now, all hell can break loose. Almost anything goes, and everything you know is wrong! This idea is partly inspired by non-Euclidean geometry. Assumption-switching is what the antijump metaphor is all about.

•Both-and-Neither Universe: Further, I believe that a thoroughgoing both-and-neither space of explanatory galaxies can begin to circumscribe the range of possible truths, which can at least partly preserve our deep wish that we can approach truth through theory. I picture this space as the H-fractal that represent recursively connected continua extending from one assumption to its opposite.

•Statistical vs. Narrative Truth: The above scenario can get very hard to understand very fast. Instead of promulgating several equally "true" explanations and explanatory galaxies that inevitably contradict each other and so can only be meaningfully combined in a sequential fashion, another quasi-independent path can be followed -- radical factism (terrible name!) that espouses entirely uninterpreted statistical truths over the narrative truths that we evolved to believe in and reason with. This choice presents no insurmountable issues for machines (and is perhaps built into LLMs) but plenty of big problems for humans and other organic minds (according to me)

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1. METATHEORY: The efficacy of human explanation is both much greater than we can logically justify [the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics] and much less than we intuitively judge it to be [map-territory confusion]. There has to be a kind of arbitrariness about explanations (as illustrated by my reinterpreted Fourier Theorem), but we can't easily see it. That is, our explanatory narratives are made-up stories, but we can't help but believe them. Ultimately, facts or statistical truths must trump our descriptions and explanations and narratives, but the human mind seems to be built for narrative explanation rather than Bayesian inference. For one thing, we are far more likely to believe a set of facts when we have a satisfying narrative built around them. If narratives are sufficiently satisfying and deep-seated, they will blind us to contradictory facts. All of the above applies to all of the above.

My epistemology is a sort of extreme skepticism. So extreme that it can't be logically valid. If it were valid, logic would not be valid. A contradiction! That is, I'd have to express my skepticism in the form of an explanation or justification, and the ultimate validity of explanation and justification I deny. I even deny the idea of denial. My denial would be in the realm of mapmaking and thus invalid. It is what it is what it is. Which it isn't. The map is not the territory.

Questions of knowledge, expectation, intention, consciousness are the ultimate expressions of the sorts of self-reference that lead to the classical and modern paradoxes of logic -- from Epimenides to Russell to Godel to x=-1/x. Thus, they will never be answerable in their own context, the logical landscape, but instead require the "imaginary" plane. This is what the both-and-neither fractal is intended to account for; a sort of meta-logical landscape. At minimum, we must acknowledge the necessarily incommensurable status of the view from the inside and the view from the outside.

2. THEORY (taking the above metatheory into account): Explanatory schemes with any legitimacy can be conceived as points in a conceptual space (the both-and-neither fractal) connected by continua that represent assumption switches. Each endpoint represents a completed point of view -- a mass of logical deductions and inductions based on a given self-consistent set of assumptions {A1} constructed to account for some specific set of facts {F1}. These assumptions necessarily have "side effects": newly deduced facts {S1} that go beyond the mere boundaries of {F1}. That is, {A1} implies {F1} union {S1}).

{S1} is of great interest if all or some of its elements are consistent with the actual world. That would be our ultimate validation for taking on {A1}. By altering or even contradicting one assumption or another (i.e. moving around in the conceptual-assumption space and resulting in {A2}), and then trying to account for the same set of facts {F1}, a new tree of deductions develops that will intentionally include {F1} and other side effect facts {S2} which will almost certainly differ greatly from {S1}. See the Both and Neither diagram. If my hunch is correct, both set {S1} and set {S2} will include much that seems intuitively or factually correct even if individual elements of S1 and S2 are mutually exclusive. See "the flow of x in one direction is a flow of anti-x in the opposite direction." No one point in the space is a be-all and end-all. The fullest picture is achieved by moving fluidly through the space of points. There is no correct set of assumptions. Example. Things change and things stay the same. This is a simple observed fact. We might take the assumption "things change spontaneously unless they are prevented from doing so" or we could take the opposite tack "things stay the same unless something forces them to change."

3. MODEL (taking the above theory into account): The Bubble and Beacon model posits multilayered selves as the primary objects of reality, influence as the primary substance, and consciousness as the primary condition. An important assumption switch involved here has to do with the prime directive of the selves: either "The self must preserve itself" or "The self must reproduce/extend itself." From the Bubble perspective, the prime motivation is to preserve and reinforce the self and maintain its steady state by trying to undo the effects of the outside world (non-self), just as a bubble's internal pressure undoes disruptions to its naturally spherical state. In the Beacon case, the self is more interested in disturbing the bubbles of others, to expand or reproduce the self, to have an influence. Put your own spin on the incoming influence and "reflect" it as an atom absorbs a photon and releases one of its own.

These two perspectives, by the way, encompass the two most typical kinds of pathological "selfishness": creepy self-protection and dickish manipulation. I also believe they can be naturally extended to subsume ostensible selflessness by defining selves more inclusively -- the protection and clout of my family, my nation, my species, my galaxy. That is, even apparent selflessness is selfish in this way. My claim is that these two prime directives (Bubble & Beacon) are remarkably consistent and can each account for many of the same facts we see in the world ranging from the laws of physics to human relationships. See The Allegory of the Cafe. That is, they are complementary and quasi-equivalent perspectives -- self-protection and self-extension are, surprisingly, two sides of the same coin. In defending our space, we make the world over in our own image. At the same time, in influencing others, we solidify, codify, concretize our own selfhood. The Beacon's message of "Be like me" has the same effect as the Bubble's note-to-self "Stop becoming like them."

I put a lot of weight on a series of ideas where the connections will probably seem tenuous to philosophically minded readers (see below). Maybe I can strengthen those connections

1) selves are like bubbles ->

2) their shapes are distorted by unspecified bombardment of influence from other selves, from subselves, from superselves, from nonselves->

3) consciousness is consciousness of those distortions. In an act of self-preservation, selves push back on the distortions->

4) in the case of actual bubbles, the pushing back is a simple matter of internal air pressure that seeks equilibrium. In the case of selves, the pushing back is by my lights an odd combination of things which I may metaphorically group together under the banner of description, explanation, expression, justification:

a) if the distortions are physical (being knocked off balance by the wind, being injured in a fall, being pushed aside by a person in a hurry) there is one suite of responses (planting one's feet to maintain balance, healing, getting back on your own path)

b) if the distortions are mental (hearing a friend's opinion, feeling intimidated, seeing an ad for the next fashionable thing) a different set of behaviors kick in -- explanation (returning to flatness), description (unwriting), expression (rejecting what presses), justification (evening up).