Small Plates

This is a collection of short things that contain a morsel or two:

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Epistemological Roundup

I want to try to lay out my epistemological stance as clearly as I can; mostly so that I understand it better myself. First of all, the whole matter is weird -- `queerer than you can imagine.' And it isn't going to get less weird. The weirdness derives partly but not entirely from the following built-in contradiction: I want to be able to say that no description or explanation, neither in words nor mathematical terms, can possibly make a perfect or indubitable match with the world, but, of course, this very statement purports to be an explanation or verbal utterance of exactly the disallowed kind! Never ever generalize! The existence of problems of self-reference points to the boundaries of logical and explanatory applicability.

How can the world follow laws? What could that "following" possibly entail? On the other hand, how can we avoid expressing our objections to that possibility as anything but a law? I have to perpetually remind myself: The world simply is -- paying no mind to our attempts to characterize it.

The very possibility of human knowledge appears to me on its face to be a highly dubious proposition, and yet we have mountains and mountains of stuff that seems to be knowledge, that seems to fill the bill quite well. I hope to develop here what I mean by the preceding sentence without resorting to hand-waving declarations, but at the moment it's hard to put my deep epistemological skepticism across in any enlightening way. Factual knowledge vs explanatory knowledge. I accept that which falls completely in the former camp and reject stuff clearly in the latter half. What about everything in between?

Science and measurement and repeatable predictability may be the key to spanning the chasm between a priori unknowability and apparent knowledge. Restricting our utterances to summaries of statistical and probabilistic regularities might also allow humans to bridge the divide. What passes for human knowledge seems to me to be essentially narrative in nature, while the territory isn't narrative at all. Statistical regularity seems to match the world much better than umpteen paragraphs of explanation. But, even after all the mitigating apologia, I'm still going to say that final interpretations and extensions of those measurements are necessarily incomplete and one-sided. That is, it's ultimately only metaphorical or subjective rather than unambiguous and objective to say anything like "Matter consists of 11-dimensional super strings" or "All spider behavior is hardwired in its tiny brain" or "Democracy is the best form of government" or "I believe in epistemological egalitarianism"

Ideas about this stuff have been rumbling around in my head for about 50 years, and my almost visceral desire is to achieve some sort of final disposition on the subject. Per Kurt Vonnegut, just as "the bird got to land," "(hu)man got to tell himself (s)he understand.'' So, in my old age, I seem to be finally settling on a kind of resolution of the issue, which, mundanely, focuses on a metaphorical extension of Fourier's Theorem. My "answer" is a bit like "Mentation is effective because just about anything would be." "All knowledge is Ptolemaic, and that's okay by an extension of Fourier's Theorem."

Unless you believe that "in the beginning was the Word," you probably believe that the human mind evolved from creature minds incapable of knowledge or even insight or opinion as we understand those words -- certainly if you carry the familial line back far enough (to, say, spiders). Language, for example, only arrived on the scene rather late. We probably also believe that knowledge, insight, and opinion are expressible through linguistic constructions (and not expressible in any other way). But human language is such a particular and seemingly arbitrary contraption. Had language evolved in sea creatures rather than animals living on the savannas, might not the whole structure of the particulars been very different? Does the elusive multidimensional world where parts are ultimately inseparable and the events simultaneous somehow really reduce to nouns and verbs, and can a truth really be expressed in the one-dimensional, syntactical and sequential stringing together of these phonemes? That would be odd indeed. The world itself would have to be language-like in some very deep way. You'd probably need to have a sort of God forcing that to be true: "In the beginning was the Word," pretty near. The map and the territory would have to share deep roots. BTW, I believe they do share deep roots , in a sense I discuss in other places, but still I have to aver that the map is not the territory. The implications of this assertion are huge! And totally unacceptable! The hugeness derives from the fact that everything we think we know would suddenly be grossly limited and diminished. The unacceptability is that we could no longer tell ourselves we understand. And we need to, right Kurt? "We now know the general structure of what a correct theory of human consciousness would look like." Good gawd!

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Double Dual

Talking on the phone: We speak, creating vibrations of varying pressure in the air that spread out spherically. The vibrating air strikes a diaphragm in the mouthpiece's microphone and makes it vibrate. A magnet attached to the center of the diaphragm is thus set in motion, producing an electromagnetic wave. This sets up a varying current in an attached wire, which by various means (analog land line, amplification, digital cell transmission, etc.) travels to another phone. (This is the dual of the speech). The varying current in the second phone creates magnetic field that moves a diaphragm in the second phone. The diaphragm moves the air that creates a sound in the listener's ear. (This is the double dual.) The key here is this extraordinary relationship between electricity and magnetism (and between sound and vibration). The mic/speaker makes a signal and then another speaker/mic makes a sound. One disturbance creates the other (or is encoded in it) which recreates the other ad infinitum.

sound wave -> jiggled magnet/diaphragm -> e-m wave -> jiggled magnet -> sound wave. Sounds are detected and produced by the same apparatus -- a diaphragm (or magnet on a membrane). This diaphragm setup is a self-inverting function which is rather remarkable and metaphorically significant to me.

Now, let's push the endpoints of the communication process further back at both ends -- into the heads of people. One has an idea to express or communicate. That idea (or chunk of meaning) presumably must be translated into language and spoken (on one end) and heard and finally translated back into meaning (on the other end). The brain device, if you will, that turns meaning into language doesn't seem necessarily to be identical to the one that reverses the process (as in the diaphragm setup), but it certainly seems to be closely tied. From a mechanical point of view, how could it be? They are doing different things. Stroke victims can seemingly possess one but not the other. On the other hand, one without the other is useless; the two abilities must have co-developed. This translation (encode and decode) system may be metaphorically linked to the electromagnetic, self-inverting phone apparatus.

Meaning in head 1 -> Chomskian encoding apparatus ->linguistic expression -> emitted signal (spoken words) -> received signal in head 2 -> decoding apparatus -> meaning in head 2.

The metaphor suggests that the encoding and decoding apparatuses ARE the same thing and that encoding and decoding are a self-inverting function. Apply it once and meaning becomes words, but apply it to words and the meaning comes out again -- the dual and the double dual.

Not really sure what my point is, but I'm pretty sure I have one. My World of Describers model of experience has a similar self-inversion. The deformation of the bubble (experience) is counteracted by de-scription that undoes the deformation and produces a seeming return to the steady state, perhaps accompanied by consciousness. Description is to consciousness as electrical wave is to magnetic wave as translating from meaning to signal is to translating from signal to meaning. This doesn't quite make sense, but the right metaphor is in there somewhere.

Meaning certainly goes with consciousness and signal seems to go with de-scription/ex-planation

Things act on themselves in a categorically different way than they act on everything else.

Recursiveness is so important and so resists narrative description/understanding

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Bottom Lines

Look, philosophical knowledge is an oxymoron, okay? I guess in one very real way, the world simply is: "It" is oblivious to our crazy attempts to epitomize it or even just make a truly general statement. In our attempts to make maps, we find that things are way too self-referential, recursively generated, arbitrarily arranged, and "queerer than we can imagine" to come to any final conclusions. Linear subject-object reductions can't contain it all. Still, we carry on and say what we can in the face of these obstacles. We employ epicycles on our epicycles and sometimes achieve impressive results (for a bunch of apes).

At the bottom of my humble philosophical project -- to find things we can reasonably do -- there's insight cultivation and assumption-switching. The assumption-switching part acts like lateral thinking to help us unblock the antijump muscles to generate those insights. We exploit any cracks we find in the cosmic egg, any metaphorical resemblances we find in the world, then let go and move gently down the stream -- rather than grasping the metaphor ever more firmly and bludgeoning the world with that sledgehammer until the world surrenders. The best we can hope for, I posit, is the loose and freewheeling superimposition of these mini-revelations, hoping that some may be less mini than the others.

Before moving any further, I ought to give examples of assumption switches:

Things stay the same unless something causes them to change. vs. Things change unless they are prevented from doing so. Or everything is trying to happen at once but failing mostly

Events in the present are determined by events in the past. vs. The state of a system is attracted toward certain pre-existent preferred future states (states of least energy, etc.)

Things set processes in motion vs. Things are nothing but stable processes.

The deepest background of physical space is a passive void in which things and processes play out their interactions. vs. Space is a plenum which is inseparable from the phenomena of the world.

Behind everything is nothingness. When we remove the things of the world, nothingness remains. vs. There is no completely consistent way to represent absence. Nothingness is necessarily part of maps but not part of the territory. In other words, there is no such thing as nothingness. Duh.

Every event A is caused by some set of events A'. vs. Coincident events, A and A', arise mutually.

Perception is the passive reception of a separate outside world. vs. Conscious perceptions are exchanges.

Consciousness is an epiphenomenon of materialistic processes. vs. Matter is all information and influence, and thus consciousness of a type is a fundamental aspect of all events and is in on the ground floor of existence.

To understand a process or an object look to its components. vs. To understand a process look to the wholes of which it is part. That is, look at its place in its context.

Forms perpetuate themselves through competition. vs. Forms perpetuate themselves by becoming indispensable parts of eco-systems

All but the most fundamental things are made of more primitive components. vs. Things participate in their own development.

If a statement is true, its opposite must be false. vs. Since the world is too rich to be subsumed by any single formal theory, the fullest description of the world involves complementary theories with contradictory assumptions (including the superposition of the two theories generated from these contradictory assumptions) If this statement constitutes a formal theory then it can be applied to itself repeatedly, implying a very messy world indeed.

Ultimately, nothing should be immune to an assumption switch, but in expressing my humanness I'm sure I've exempted many things. One that sticks out at the moment is the finality of my attachment to "The Map is not the Territory" or "The world simply is." Of course one can and must look at alternatives:

•The map is loosely tied to the territory (via Ptolemaic theoretical constructs)

•The map is tightly tied to the territory (via ever-true, evergreen theoretical constructs)

•The map is the territoy (via mutual creation by God ala Let there be light)

The world exists independently of the maps we have made to describe it. vs. The world is part of the process of description and thus consists in maps of a sort.

If one of the most fundamental activities of existence is description/explanation, as I claim, and the residues and echoes and imprints and fossilized remains of those living maps are floating around everywhere among the monads, then they might themselves constitute a big part of the dark matter that's out there. Mapmaking becomes territorymaking. Does this mean that the world can be molded to conform to our beliefs by making conducive maps? Well, sure. Definitely in the lowercase sense, but it surely doesn't mean that we can make of the world what we will. The world is our oyster but not our indentured servant.

What do we want from our minds? Maybe insights (A) plus the tools to exploit those insights (B).

A. Find or cook up correspondences, connections, metaphorical relationships. "This situation is kind of like that situation. In the old situation my first thought was to try this procedure. Is there an identical or cognate procedure to carry out here?"

B. Exploit the insights to get a sense of confidence and familiarity and predictability in some context. Contexts like

i. interpersonal relationships.

ii. engineering problems

iii. public policy

iv. cooking

v. growing crops/hunting prey

Another bottom line for me, it seems, that provides a background for meaning scepticism, is the fact of evolution. Earlier I referred to us as apes, and I find it impossible to question the idea that humans and thus human minds and human knowledge come from relatively humble origins and developed through a haphazard, historical process. The idea of knowing anything really is totally an act of hubris unless you equally ascribe that knowing to fish, insects, bacteria. By "knowing," I mean having final and correct explanations for things -- things like the significance of clouds or how to manage a baseball team or that democracy is the fairest and best form of governance.

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The Multiplication Rule of Argumentation

In my view, the assumptions that form the basis of all logical arguments ought not to be fixed. No set of assumptions is correct or even ideal; each might accompany a sort of insight into a situation which has a certain degree of legitimacy or validity -- never 100% (percentages don't really apply). In this view, by the way, logic itself is thought to be perfectly legitimate --except under certain situations of self-reference -- although that fact is a profound MT mystery that I won't try to address here(see Logic=Logos). Perfectly legitimate means that the output of a logical operation is just as valid as the input -- logic preserves validity. Except in the way I'm about to outline.

To refresh your memory:

If 1/2 the cards in a deck are red, and 3/13 of the cards are picture cards, then the probability that a randomly drawn card is a red AND a picture card is 1/2 x 3/13 = 3/26. In general, if events A and B happen independently of each other then:

P(A and B)= P(A) x P(B)

Now, suppose you have a very good set of premises where each such premise is, say, 98% legitimate. I don't think it's actually possible to correctly assign a number like that, but I will do so for the sake of illustration. In any linear logical argument, one must, between the steps of pure logic, repeatedly invoke one of the premises or some lemma or corollary already arrived at. My informal claim is that each such invocation multiplies the ultimate validity or certainty of the argument by .98 or less. After n such steps, the validity of the nth statement is .98 to the nth power. If n is even just 20, validity is down to a mere .667. After 50 appeals to premises (not a particularly long argument), the validity would be .364. I hope you see the parallel to the AND rule above. Iteration of imperfect assumptions amplifies those imperfections according to a simple and standard law of probability. Premise A (.98) along with lemma B (.92) imply theorem C (.98 x .92 = .9016). That the probability that both A an B are true (or apply perfectly in this case) is .98 x . 92 = .9016

Before I try to invent a simple example (ugh!), let me clarify one thing. Because logical operations are perfectly valid (LOGOS=LOGIC), the 50th step cleaves to the premises perfectly so that contradictions will not arise unless they are inherent in the premises. However, the imperfection of the premises means the 50th step cleaves to the real with only .364 validity. Again, the assignment of numbers here is arbitrary and used only for illustrative purposes. Don't try this at home.

It may be that the axioms of Euclidean geometry are far better than .98 valid so that the theorems preserve great validity to the "true" geometry of nature, but repeated logic appeals in political or economic or moral or scientific arguments will slowly exaggerate or amplify the errors of the premises. The errors to which I refer may owe to incompleteness, excessive simplicity, one-sidedness, the illusion of objectivity, biases of perception, etc. or just the mismatch between maps and territories. Perhaps error therefore is an odd way to say it. What I mean is "uninsightfulness." Ordinarily, the existence of error implies the existence of correct solutions, and that's not the case here: All premises have limited insight into reality since reality is ultimately not a theoretical construction. It isn't a construction at all; it just is. That is, the map is not the territory.

This multiplication rule is my simple way to justify my dissatifaction with elaborate philosophical (or other) constructions and arguments. The best stuff is always near the beginning, near the expression of insights with a few suggestive implications. Strike quickly and move on because there will be diminishing returns and accelerating error. Take what you can from these insights but don't expect too much. Don't expect a finished theory to preserve much validity of the original insight. (I'm thinking for some reason of my struggles to follow Bergson's and other philosophers elaborate threads here. Too many therefores!)

I might say that the brain is like a computer. Yes, intriguing. Both brains and computers are sometimes used in similar ways to sort through information. Both minds and electronic circuitry are good at logical operations. In fact, I can't think of anything else that is good at logical operations. We've got an insightful premise here. I can extend the premise in either direction: I can propose a fact about brains and see how it applies to computers, or I can look at how a computer works and suggest that a brain works similarly. But the premise isn't perfect.

The brain is also unlike any computer you've ever seen. It's: wetware, has no CPU, has no memory chips, is hard to program, makes lots of errors in simple programmable computations, rarely crashes or reboots, requires rest, gets tired, gets distracted, has moods and feelings that directly effect its outputs, feels as if it is conscious and unique rather than dead as a doorknob .

The brain is also like other machines. A radio is full of capacitors qua amplifiers and can tune into different stations. A telephone switching system relays information in organized ways. A factory turns raw materials into finished products. It's also like a spindle in that it makes disparate fibers into a single thread of argument or stream of consciousness. Gosh, where did I see the mind as spindle metaphor these many years ago (jeremy Bernstein?)? If thread-making were the latest high tech development rather than digital computation, it might seem to be the last word in mind metaphors.

Building on this idea that no set of premises is perfect, I have suggested that by explicitly reversing the assumptions is some orderly way we can can get a fuller picture of reality. And by carrying this reversal process to its natural ends we may be able to arrive at a set of maps that circumscribe the territory (if not epitomize it precisely), and that's the best we can hope for. See my both-and-neither diagram.

It is often the case that A and ~A both hold but under different conditions and perspectives. It is human nature to sometimes take one of these two and mark it as natural or default and in no need of explanation while marking the other as the object of explanation. A brief example: What is the nature of motion? Without any motors, the planets keep going and going. On the other hand, here on Earth motions seem to want to come to an end. Balls roll to a stop, projectiles return to earth, living things die. That is, both persistent motion and inexorable stopping happen. The former under rarefied conditions, and the latter in day to day life. Aristotle took stopping or motionlessness as fundamental and held that motion requires impetus. Remove the constant application of impetus and motion ends. Going is artificial and temporary, and standing still is natural and eternal. On the face of it, this seems to be a reasonable premise. We give the tin can an impetus by kicking it. It moves, but unless we keep kicking it down the road, it quickly stops. You can build up a theory based on this first step. The burden of proving that theory correct amounts to accounting for the behavior of the heavenly sphere and for the difference between the tin can sliding a long time on ice and grinding to a halt on a dirt road. Aristotle developed such a theory and it stood for 2000 years. Then Newton came along.

One of his most astounding intuitive leaps was to challenge this common sense idea of motion. His first law: An object in constant motion will remain in constant motion unless acted on by a force. This is the falling apple insight. Once things are going, they'll keep going unless something stops them. This is the opposite of Aristotle's assumption. Newton has to account for the ball rolling to stop. (And he did so by saying that friction applies a force.)

Anyway, as I said, when two different conditions hold (constant motion and stopping), it's usual that one be assumed to be the default state and the other the subject of explanation. From the longer view, both and neither are the default. Newton's version supplanted Aristotle's because it gave a more comprehensible and mathematizable account. It is seen as a correction to the former erroneous view. According to my stated thesis, that might not be the case; a superimposition of Newton's view and some (possibly improved) version of Aristotle's view could give a fuller (read better) account of reality. I haven't given any reason yet why the Aristotelian account adds anything to Newton's, but I'm committed to the idea that it can.

Back to the multiplication rule.

My use of uninsightfulness above reminds me of the word unsatisfactoriness that is often nowadays given as the best translation of the Buddhist term dukkha (rather than its older translation as suffering or desire), and I think the connection is a good one. From Wikipedia:

While the term dukkha has often been derived from the prefix du ("bad" or "difficult") and the root kha, "empty", "hole", a badly fitting axle-hole of a cart or chariot giving "a very bumpy ride", it may actually be derived from du?-stha, a "dis-/ bad- + stand-", that is, "standing badly, unsteady", "unstable".

The bumpy road imagery is similar to my de-scribe/ex-plain/ex-press construction. An uninsightful explanation like an off-center axle hole doesn't give a smooth ride. We may need to add some epicycles to it to smooth things out -- or better centering to begin with. The Buddha would say that no amount of axial craftsmanship will ever eiliminate all the bumps, so abandon the wheel (of reincarnation?), sit in one place (under a bodhi tree, maybe), transcend the road itself, and fly. So dukkha is the condition of constantly striving to smooth out all the disturbances to one's bubble -- and meditation might be a technique for ending that striving while at the same time perhaps tuning out the disturbances which might allow one to see without ex-planation?

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An Antijump Physics Fantasy

Space itself, far from being a void or vacuum, emits fantastic amounts of em-like force almost all of which is vector-wise canceled out by the similar emanations of neighboring points so that almost none of this spontaneous fecundity or plenum is realized (becomes part of the explicate order), although there might be extraordinary imbalances on a very small scale. This is Bohm's quantum potential. Imagine a sea of little vectors pointing randomly in all directions, summing to zero almost everywhere. Remember that, as in the hollow earth analogy, cancellation is not annihilation.

In this fantasy, photons are released not by stimulation or force but by developing asymmetries -- through alignment of vectors. In this case, imagine the little arrows becoming aligned like iron filings around a magnet. That is, in my fantasy, an apparent light source, say an electric bulb, can alternatively be described as a magnet-like attractor that aligns the pre-existing but chaotic vectors, creating an uncanceled path of vectors pointing in one direction -- which has the same reality as what we think of as an expanding spherical threshold of light.

The outward flow of x, is synonymous with the inward flow of anti-x -- where anti-x has to be carefully considered/defined. The simplest image to illustrate x flow and anti-x flow is a vacuum cleaner nozzle placed on a dirty floor. The inward movement of air and dust into the nozzle is simultaneous and co-extensive with the outward movement of the frontier of dustfree floor.

x is air/dust inward

anti-x is cleanness outward

Likewise

x is photons outward

anti-x is "magnetic" vector alignment inward

the difference between the implicate and explicit orders is a matter of cancellation. Cancelled things exist but are unexpressed or inexplicit. Cancelled = enfolded

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Connection and Separation

It seems to me there are 1000 different characterizations that the world appears to be 100% about. One of the 1000 -- near the top of my list -- is the dichotomy of connection and separation. We can never achieve total connectedness (i.e. union) with others nor total separateness (i.e. sovereignty/isolation) from them. That ultimate nonbinary quality implies a constant movement toward one and then the other. From love, empathy, and generosity to willfulness, selfishness, and cruelty, from yang to yin, etc.. Connection can give pleasure but the simultaneous impossibility of achieving final union brings pain. Separation breeds healthy detachment but the simultaneous impossibility of achieving final insularity or selfhood leads to feelings of loneliness and emptiness. Our self-other relationships are always in need of rebalancing and that can be hard given the current circumstances, preexisting relationships, or the scars left by painful outcomes. Balance can be lasting and adaptable or fleeting. This all fits nicely with my image of nested selves and fluctuating identifications.

Watching the lovely film "Past Lives" has brought this all up for me.

As in all circumstances, humans develop narratives that make the difficulties of the ongoing struggle between connection and separation more bearable and palatable. The simple word bittersweet and its evocations are themselves strangely comforting for me in this regard -- in can draw out literal nostalgia. One narrative used in the film involves inyeon, an ostensibly Buddhist concept of fate and intertwining strands of connection and separation experienced through our countless past lives. It provides a comforting thought that there is nothing to be done about the melancholic and bittersweet feelings of life. It was ever thus and will always be. Maybe in the next go-round things will resolve more satisfyingly. "See you then."

So, we have a choice between connection with pain, on the one hand, and sovereignty with emptiness, on the other. Every romantic comedy urges us to find the former pair superior. The pleasure of connection might beat the pleasure of sovereignty for most folks, but does pain beat emptiness? Ask the Buddha. Balancing and accepting all of the above is the royal road, I suppose.

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Self-Interest Corrupts

This is intended to bring to mind the phrase "power corrupts." I've posited this latter phrase as one almost everyone can agree on: The liberal, for example, wants to limit the power of corporations or people in corporations for fear that their monopolistic status will change their behavior from public service to abuse, and the conservative wants to limit the power of governments for the same reason. Anyway, power itself, without an underlying self-interest (defined broadly enough), isn't inherently corrupting. Power in a vacuum is just potential. [If I have the power to compel random people say the word "banana" through some sort of mind trick, that won't corrupt me unless I find a way to derive benefit from exercising that power. Then again maybe I would inherently derive pleasure from controlling the behavior of others.] It's only when unequal power meets self-interest that corrupt actions are propagated. Is self-interest then itself, without power, corrupting. I'd say yes, if we can extend our idea of corruption back to include corrupt thoughts rather than merely corrupt actions. That is, I'm really just saying something everyone knows; our self-interest corrupts our explanations for things, makes us more apt to believe in ideas that benefit us. And even if we don't quite believe them, we're more willing to lie about it.

We could say that the corrupting influence of self-interest makes the existence of unequal power dangerous

Follow the money -> follow the self-interest