First principles… for fun and prophet.

[LMNO]

So, since Fictokitty brought it up, I thought it might be interesting to go through the backstory one more time, and rephrase some of the main foundations we keep referencing in our own words.  If nothing else, it will keep me occupied for a few hours.

I'll begin with language, and why the ______ that can be told is not the true _______. 

One of the things language appears to be, as I understand it, is a series of agreed-upon symbols that represent common experiences.

To facilitate communication, many words describe either ideal or average things: a Leaf, for example.

So, based on this, two things begin to appear: First, practically every experiential thing in the universe is different; there is no "average" or "ideal" thing.  I can tell you I am holding a leaf, and that level of description might get us through a conversation, but I didn't truly communicate to you about what is in my hand.  I could go into more detail, but even if I went to great lengths to describe the leaf, I could never describe it completely. Each attempt at saying what it "is" assigns another inaccuracy.

Secondly, because we have posited that language is based on common experience, it is inadequate to describe a unique occurrence specifically experienced by only one person, such as an emotion, or an ecstatic experience.  The only way to describe it is by using words and concepts that (by definition) do not communicate individual experience, only common.  So in trying to communicate a unique experience, the instant we use words, we are not speaking about the true experience.

The danger, I feel, arises in at least two ways:  First, when someone decides that the inadequate descriptions are true, and are not just approximations.  If taken far enough, you can't really see why saying "All black people are rapists" is inaccurate and wrong.  The second danger is when people conclude that experiences which cannot be described are not true, and are dismissed, ignored, and attacked.  This creates a self-justifying loop, where only things within language are deemed true, and blinds people to non-linguistic experiences.



From the Chao te Ching, Chapter 32:

Chaos cannot be labeled,
Because it contains all labels.
Therefore, all definitions are incomplete.
It's Gödels, all the way down.

Order and Disorder unite,
And Illusion slips into Chaos.
When people learn language, labels begin.
With labels, one should know when to stop.
Knowing when to stop, the wise spags see the Illusion;
And are free to create as they see fit.

[Cain]

Some of my own notes on the topic, since I cannot be bothered to write them up into something internally coherent:

Apparent objectivity is made possible only by a habit of thought which willingly forgets or suppresses its own provisional status. To halt such a process by invoking some ultimate claim to truth is a tactic foreign to the deepest implications of structuralist thought. There is no final analysis, no metalinguistic method, which could possibly draw a rigorous line between its own operations and the language they work upon. Semiology has to recognize that the terms and concepts it employs are always bound up with the signifying process it sets out to analyse. Hence Barthes's insistence that structuralism is always an  activity, an open-ended practice of reading, rather than a 'method' convinced of its own right reason.

One way of describing this challenge is to say that Derrida refuses to grant philosophy the kind of privileged status it has always claimed as the sovereign dispenser of reason. Derrida confronts this pre-emptive claim on its own chosen ground. He argues that philosophers have been able to impose their various systems of thought only by ignoring, or suppressing, the disruptive effects of language. His aim is always to draw out these effects by a critical reading which fastens on, and skilfully unpicks, the elements of metaphor and other figural devices at work in the texts of philosophy. Deconstruction in this, its most rigorous form acts as a constant reminder of the ways in which language deflects or complicates the philosopher's project. Above all, deconstruction works to undo the idea – according to Derrida, the ruling illusion of Western metaphysics – that reason can somehow dispense with language and achieve a knowledge ideally unaffected by such mere linguistic foibles. Though philosophy strives to efface its textual character, the signs of that struggle are there to be read in its blind-spots of metaphor and other rhetorical strategies.

If language is radically metaphorical, its meanings (as Saussure was later to show) caught up in an endless chain of relationship and difference, then thought is deluded in its search for a truth beyond the mazy detours of language.

A word does not mean what it does 'naturally'; rather meanings arise on the basis of complex linguistic and cultural structures that differentiate between truth and falsity, reality and fantasy, and good and evil, and are inextricably tied up with value judgements and political questions, as well as with identity, experience, knowledge and desire.

Structuralism's understanding of the world, then, is that everything that constitutes it – us and the meanings, texts and rituals within which we participate – is not the work of God, or of the mysteries of nature, but rather an effect of the principles that structure us, the meanings we inhabit and so on. The idea is that the world without structures is meaningless – a random and chaotic continuum of possibilities. What structures do is to order that continuum, to organize it according to a certain set of principles, which enable us to make sense of it. In this way, structures make the world tangible to us, conceptually real, and hence meaningful.

For Saussure language is not simply a system for naming a reality which pre-exists it. Turning that notion on its head, Saussure argued instead that language is in fact a primary structure – one that orders, and therefore is responsible for, everything that follows. If this is so, then it seems fairly straightforward that different languages will divide, shape and organize the phenomenal world in different ways. While this understanding of language allows us to see cultures other than 'our' own as relatively different, by implication it must also show us that the culture we claim as 'ours' is in turn neither natural nor inevitable. That is, it demands that we recognize as  structurally produced the culture which seems to us most obvious, most natural and most true. What Saussure's work gave to structuralism, then, was an account of language as a primary structure, a system of signs whose meanings are not obvious, but rather produced as an effect of the logic internal to the structural system that language is.

The primary property of language is that it differentiates. We can confirm that vocabulary is not acquired simply by pointing to referents (things in the world) when we remember that later the child will go on to learn to use words such as 'justice' and 'honesty'. If abstract values are not learnt from referents in the world, what about words that name nothing material, but are crucial, even so, to the process of reasoning, such as 'because', 'although', and 'if'? There is nothing for them to correspond to.  Does language name ideas, then? Poststructuralism would say not. On the contrary, ideas come into sharp relief for us when we learn the meanings of the terms.

Language – or signifying practice – does not belong to individuals.  Instead, it already exists before we are born into a world where people reproduce it all round us. Though it constantly changes, these modifications prevail only to the degree that they are shared. In that sense, meanings belong to other people. Lacan calls language 'the Other'. If I opt to hijack it for purely private purposes, I must expect to be seen as psychotic.

[LMNO]

...And of course, this can also relate to the Zen gambit of silently pointing to random things when asked a question.

[Kai]

Language – or signifying practice – does not belong to individuals.  Instead, it already exists before we are born into a world where people reproduce it all round us. Though it constantly changes, these modifications prevail only to the degree that they are shared. In that sense, meanings belong to other people. Lacan calls language 'the Other'. If I opt to hijack it for purely private purposes, I must expect to be seen as psychotic.

Or specially enlightened, but only if you can take those purely private purposes and turn them into something you can communicate. That just goes back to what you already said though. I just talked myself into a circle.

[Captain Utopia]

So, since Fictokitty brought it up, I thought it might be interesting to go through the backstory one more time, and rephrase some of the main foundations we keep referencing in our own words.  If nothing else, it will keep me occupied for a few hours.

I'll begin with language, and why the ______ that can be told is not the true _______. 

One of the things language appears to be, as I understand it, is a series of agreed-upon symbols that represent common experiences.

To facilitate communication, many words describe either ideal or average things: a Leaf, for example.

So, based on this, two things begin to appear: First, practically every experiential thing in the universe is different; there is no "average" or "ideal" thing.  I can tell you I am holding a leaf, and that level of description might get us through a conversation, but I didn't truly communicate to you about what is in my hand.  I could go into more detail, but even if I went to great lengths to describe the leaf, I could never describe it completely. Each attempt at saying what it "is" assigns another inaccuracy.

I don't understand the absolutism. Why would you _need_ to describe it completely? If you _could_ describe it completely, what would that achieve?

Wouldn't it be easier to say everything has a probability greater than zero, and less than one? Including our understanding of what each other means?

Secondly, because we have posited that language is based on common experience, it is inadequate to describe a unique occurrence specifically experienced by only one person, such as an emotion, or an ecstatic experience.  The only way to describe it is by using words and concepts that (by definition) do not communicate individual experience, only common.  So in trying to communicate a unique experience, the instant we use words, we are not speaking about the true experience.

If you cannot be sure that you _know_ what the true experience is, then why does it matter? Isn't this entropy/selection?

The danger, I feel, arises in at least two ways:  First, when someone decides that the inadequate descriptions are true, and are not just approximations.  If taken far enough, you can't really see why saying "All black people are rapists" is inaccurate and wrong.  The second danger is when people conclude that experiences which cannot be described are not true, and are dismissed, ignored, and attacked.  This creates a self-justifying loop, where only things within language are deemed true, and blinds people to non-linguistic experiences.

100% agreed.

From the Chao te Ching, Chapter 32:

Chaos cannot be labeled,
Because it contains all labels.
Therefore, all definitions are incomplete.
It's Gödels, all the way down.

If X is the set of everything which have (assumed complete) labels, and does not have a label itself other than a (assumed incomplete) label Y. Then that says nothing about label Z which refers to the set of all labels which we cannot prove to be complete definitions. I call Z chaos. Checkmate

The middle seems to be missing, and I don't understand Gödels. That latter part may be evident by the last paragraph.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I don't understand the absolutism. Why would you _need_ to describe it completely? If you _could_ describe it completely, what would that achieve?

No one is saying that you NEED to, only that such a map or model is simply non-existent. You may want to read some Jean Baudrillard, I think he does a good job of covering the concept:

Not as detailed as his books, but here's a bit of his view: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html

[Captain Utopia]

No one is saying that you NEED to, only that such a map or model is simply non-existent. You may want to read some Jean Baudrillard, I think he does a good job of covering the concept:

Not as detailed as his books, but here's a bit of his view: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html

It's going to take me a while to chew through that, but thanks for the link.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

No one is saying that you NEED to, only that such a map or model is simply non-existent. You may want to read some Jean Baudrillard, I think he does a good job of covering the concept:

Not as detailed as his books, but here's a bit of his view: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html

It's going to take me a while to chew through that, but thanks for the link.

Keep in mind, Jean is arguing that the map has 'replaced' the territory in modern society... the simulation has replaced the actual. However, his argument works well to flesh out the whole map/territory dichotomy.

[LMNO]

I don't understand the absolutism. Why would you _need_ to describe it completely? If you _could_ describe it completely, what would that achieve?

You don't need to.  Communication still functions even though descriptions are incomplete.  The point is that language is innaccurate, yet most people treat it as "true".  So, "the ___ which can be told is not the true ___."

Wouldn't it be easier to say everything has a probability greater than zero, and less than one? Including our understanding of what each other means?

Why would that be easier?

Secondly, because we have posited that language is based on common experience, it is inadequate to describe a unique occurrence specifically experienced by only one person, such as an emotion, or an ecstatic experience.  The only way to describe it is by using words and concepts that (by definition) do not communicate individual experience, only common.  So in trying to communicate a unique experience, the instant we use words, we are not speaking about the true experience.

If you cannot be sure that you _know_ what the true experience is, then why does it matter? Isn't this entropy/selection?

Because, if people believe language to be true, then they will take the false description of the unique event as true.

I don't understand Gödels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems

Simply put, a system cannot be both complete and consistent.  In any consistent system, there will be truths that cannot be proven.  See Godel, Escher, Bach for more detail.

The passage is also a pun on the RAW story about the woman who believed the world was resting on the back of a turtle, which was on the back of another turtle, and then it was "turtles, all the way down".

Gödels - turtles. 

[Captain Utopia]

I don't understand the absolutism. Why would you _need_ to describe it completely? If you _could_ describe it completely, what would that achieve?

You don't need to.  Communication still functions even though descriptions are incomplete.  The point is that language is innaccurate, yet most people treat it as "true".  So, "the ___ which can be told is not the true ___."

If the sender never knows the degree of accuracy of any element of information before they communicate it, what more does it tell us that the receiver may not be able to translate it to the same degree of accuracy as the receiver beheld?

Wouldn't it be easier to say everything has a probability greater than zero, and less than one? Including our understanding of what each other means?

Why would that be easier?

Because it sounds to me that it would be easier to remember - nothing being absolutely true, nor absolutely false is kinda catchy and long explanations tend to get lost in translation. It also applies to itself, and avoids the problems of infinite recursion.

Secondly, because we have posited that language is based on common experience, it is inadequate to describe a unique occurrence specifically experienced by only one person, such as an emotion, or an ecstatic experience.  The only way to describe it is by using words and concepts that (by definition) do not communicate individual experience, only common.  So in trying to communicate a unique experience, the instant we use words, we are not speaking about the true experience.

If you cannot be sure that you _know_ what the true experience is, then why does it matter? Isn't this entropy/selection?

Because, if people believe language to be true, then they will take the false description of the unique event as true.

If that person takes nothing as being absolute (true or false), then they can't fall into that trap. Let them test for themselves whether anything is absolutely true or absolutely false. Low probability is not equal to zero probability.

I don't understand Gödels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems

Simply put, a system cannot be both complete and consistent.  In any consistent system, there will be truths that cannot be proven.  See Godel, Escher, Bach for more detail.

Thanks for the link, I took some time out today to work through it. I tried rewriting it in E-Prime, but it started to fall apart.

I have a shitty theorem of my own in response: You are one human. You take a shit. There's now one human and one shit where before there was only one human. Where did the shit come from? Are you any less of a human? No - you are still one human. The opposite seems true - if you didn't ever shit, you would be less of a human. Natural numbers are shit, and as far as the observable universe seems to be concerned, non-existent.

So I still don't see how Godel applies :-/

The inability to determine absolutes is not an inability to determine relative truths. In terms of "______ that can be told is not the true _______", then what does it matter? If the nearest we can get to a truth is to say that every definition in our universe can be categorised somewhere between "almost certainly not" and "almost certain", then what's the harm with running with that?

This originally came about in the context of mapping out mindfucks - weak mindfucks leading to the ability to be mindfucked by the next level of mindfucks and so on, continuing in greater levels of sophistication. If I'm still totally off-base then if you could explain it in terms of why the mindfuck map idea wouldn't work, then I might understand it more quickly.

[Kai]

But we aren't. And we can't. The Ultimate, whatever you may call it, is such because it is largely unknowable. If you believe in ultimates anyway. You can talk about it somewhat but ultimately (hehe) you must understand your words fall far short of real description. Symbols will never be completely adequate, and for something as near to unknowable as what we may or may not be discussing symbols like words aren't really going to cover it.

Note, the verse continues after "the tao that can be spoken of"

It goes something like: when you allow it to be nameless, it is the root of existence, but often you have to talk about it to avoid barstools. It should be understood that what you're talking about isn't true reality, just your filtered approximation. (damn this sounds too much like platos cave; understanding again that there is no eidos removes us from that particular philosophical quandry)

[LMNO]

Wouldn't it be easier to say everything has a probability greater than zero, and less than one? Including our understanding of what each other means?

Why would that be easier?

Because it sounds to me that it would be easier to remember - nothing being absolutely true, nor absolutely false is kinda catchy and long explanations tend to get lost in translation. It also applies to itself, and avoids the problems of infinite recursion.

If you're trying to open this up to Maybe Logic, then I'm ok with that.  However, the way you're approaching it is still two-sided:  After all, 86% true is a lot different than 51% true.  Simply saying "neither True nor False" offers no insight, and even less clarity.

[Captain Utopia]

Wouldn't it be easier to say everything has a probability greater than zero, and less than one? Including our understanding of what each other means?

Why would that be easier?

Because it sounds to me that it would be easier to remember - nothing being absolutely true, nor absolutely false is kinda catchy and long explanations tend to get lost in translation. It also applies to itself, and avoids the problems of infinite recursion.

If you're trying to open this up to Maybe Logic, then I'm ok with that.  However, the way you're approaching it is still two-sided:  After all, 86% true is a lot different than 51% true.  Simply saying "neither True nor False" offers no insight, and even less clarity.

Ah - it has a name! I agree, but you do present a strawman. I think there's a lot you can do when you start mapping out "truths" relative to each other with no absolutes, not least because then you start invoking an Emergent process - and if Godel is right, then the "truth" of that process is not describable in our system of truths where we can perceive no absolutes directly.

[LMNO]

No, godel would say that there are some "truths" that cannot be determined by the system.  However, since Maybe Logic is a philosophy rather than an equation, Godel does not apply.

[Captain Utopia]

I'm happy if Godel doesn't apply, I brought it up because it does seem to match our expectations of what the participants of an Emergent process could or couldn't observe. If Maybe Logic is limited to philosophy then I'll back away from that connection - it seems to me that if you believe X is ~81% "true" with regards Z, and Y is ~56% "true" with regards Z, then there are statistical functions you can apply to make decisions when your entire probability scale is determined relativistically?