EPTThis isn't a step forward--it's a huge step backward
[Thesis] Beyond the Scientific Method: Shifting in - Page 2
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Shady Sands
United States4021 Posts
This isn't a step forward--it's a huge step backward | ||
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fight_or_flight
United States3988 Posts
On February 21 2013 16:01 Shady Sands wrote: So... a peer-based network with distributed knowledge discovery? That leads to a reputation-based marketplace, in which case most questions of truth will be evaluated as a set of extended ad hominems. This isn't a step forward--it's a huge step backward Good observation. We'd essentially be going from the enlightenment age back to the modern age (according to the graphic) where dogmas prevailed. After all, religious revelations were essentially distributed truth discovery, were they not? However one key thing I think you're missing is the implications of abductive reasoning. As I described in post #19, it breaks consensuses (both religious and rational ones) and creates a weird relationship between relative and absolute truth. From the conspiracy theorist perspective, it would equate to paranoia. So this reputation-based marketplace wouldn't exist except at a local level such as friends you respect. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
You should spend a little more time reading and a little less time writing theories. | ||
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Ianuus
Australia349 Posts
About your example with the glasses: This is already what science is about. When you base definitions on maths and logic, how the thing being defined behaves under circumstances is more important than what it actually is. We might not know what the thing is in essence, but what we do know is that there is a consistent set of rules under which they behave. Because of this consistency of behaviour, we do not run into the problem of a mismatch between relative and absolute truths - while we never see the absolute truth, relative truths are usually well-behaved and consistent for each observer, and for most exceptions or discrepancies, we have a reasonable idea of why they deviate from expectation. In reply to your reply to me: The point isn't whether or not I'm applying my own context to your OP; it is that political science and natural science have very different contexts of their own. You mentioned the cave thingy before - I'm saying that political science and natural science have different absolute truths and teleologies, and as such they shouldn't be analysed the same way, regardless of my own context. To put it bluntly, science is about finding out natural "truths" (which while not being absolute platonic truths, they are accurate models of the projections on the cave's walls and thus "truths" in a bundle theory-y way), while political science is about how best to find compromise - the fundamental problem of government is how to aggregate individual preferences (based on human nature) into a social one (based on overall utility maximisation). Thus, while an ideology might work well for natural science, it might not work at all for political science. I think your hope of everyone "working it out for themselves", while being a useful bayesian perspective for scientists, is against human nature, against evolutionary theory and will remain nothing but a distant ideal when applied to the general populace - that is useless for the teleology of politics. P.S. Don't listen to sam. One of the best ways to learn is to summarize your ideas, then get your argument picked apart by total strangers on the internet. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
On February 21 2013 20:27 Ianuus wrote: P.S. Don't listen to sam. One of the best ways to learn is to summarize your ideas, then get your argument picked apart by total strangers on the internet. Look, OP. You're obviously pretty intelligent, with a bent for theory. Great! But you're kind of ignorant, and you're trying to reinvent the wheel. And your wheel is a triangle. But the kind of stuff you're thinking about? Historical periodization? Stage theories of consciousness? Ideology? Memes? great. (we'll leave out the faux-rational bayesianism) But you just should learn more about what people have already thought about this kind of thing. For example, you have something called a "modern" period which is followed by "the age of enlightenment." Well, ok, but everybody else in the world thinks about the modern period as coming after the enlightenment. So what do you mean by these things? What sort of notable thinkers and revolutionary events should I associate with these transitions in human history? When you talk about the discovery of rationality, who are you talking about? Descartes and Bacon? or Freud and Darwin? Those are totally different moments. You should, however, read Althusser on the "Ideological State Apparatus," you would get a big kick out of that. I feel like this whole "conspiracy theorist" thing is just you writing theories without bothering to do research and think about actual intellectual history. | ||
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fight_or_flight
United States3988 Posts
But I really think you are missing the mark on this entire discussion. These documents are empirical, not theoretical. They are describing observations about how my own brain works as well as a group of people that I've had contact with. To assume that one can understand and control the processes of his own mind is a big mistake. Your answer to me is that I simply need to get more educated and what I've written is not quite right (ie it's wrong), but a good effort. You have to understand something though. What your post tells me is that I am a little ignorant and there are probably some ideas I am missing, but here's the key thing: Even though I know my theory is wrong or incomplete does not mean I don't use it! This is my own empirical synthesis. It's the best that I've come up with. There is no other more certain thing I can fall back onto. I know there are some ideas out there, but I don't know what they are and therefore I can't say anything about or how they relate to observations I've made. I could indeed use a meta analysis where I say "my observations of this person tell me he knows more about my reality than I do, therefore, I shall abandon my own synthesis and accept his synthesis/conclusions (which I might not even understand) because the ultimate conclusion of my synthesis is his synthesis is superior". I'm never going to be as educated as you in this area, sam. And you are never going to be as educated or intelligent as the top philosophers of today. I'm simply going to have to accept that I'm wrong, and give my best effort. I have no other choice. I have to go with my empirical self-observation over the meta observation. Both are wrong but one is less wrong. (and perhaps one version is more self-aware?) 99% of people choose to go with the meta analysis, and that is the difference between the "Age of Enlightenment" people and "New Age" people in my chart. Is it even a conscious choice between going with the meta analysis and your own analysis? All bets are off... | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
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fight_or_flight
United States3988 Posts
On February 22 2013 13:57 sam!zdat wrote: oh, i guess you're probably right. keep on truckin You just used abductive reasoning. You threw out all the bayesian analysis stuff, and quickly, on the fly, determined that responding wasn't worth the effort. Become aware of what you just did and accept that about yourself. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
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fight_or_flight
United States3988 Posts
On February 22 2013 14:24 sam!zdat wrote: what do you want me to say man I'm here to teach and learn. Just tell me something that blows my mind. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
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LlamaNamedOsama
United States1900 Posts
On February 21 2013 15:10 fight_or_flight wrote: Thanks for the thoughtful replies. The core of both of my papers is that the only truly logical thought process is abductive reasoning. The rest of the words are about why that is, what it looks like, and what conclusions it leads to. Abductive reasoning is truly a rigorous and logical process. It's not meant to be a vague form of intuitionism. You can read the details here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ The whole point is that there is an absolute truth, but none of us will ever know what it is for sure. This is not relativism. So 1) The only defensible form of reasoning is abductive reasoning 2) Abductive reasoning, if applied correctly, will generally produce different conclusions for different people 3) The absolute truth is real and exists, but it can only ever be approximated Therefore, the idea of a rational consensus ceases to exist. I hope the interplay between absolute and relative truth can be seen here. Absolute truth exists, but to actually find it is a personal accomplishment, and it can't necessarily be communicated. For example, lets say each person has goggles made of uniquely distorted glass - shape, color, polarization, diffusion, and they change over time - you name it, these are some f*cked up goggles (they represent our biases). Furthermore, we all stand in different fixed positions and see different perspectives of each shape (that represents our personal experiences). We all look at a real object object (absolute truth). One person, an authority figure, says the object is a perfect cube with circles drawn on each face. I see a pyramid, you see a sphere, and someone else sees a prism. Well, if each person uses flawed deductive reasoning, they will define what they see as a cube with circular faces. Everyone agrees that's what it is. But then when the next object comes along, he says it's something else. Well, then you find an authority figure that has similar distortions in his goggles as yours, and join him and his group of people. In reality, you have to equally listen to everyone's account of what they see. It's all wrong (relative) but over time it can potentially be integrated into something that's actually pretty close to the truth. But this truth you discover on your own is only applicable to you: they give you the transfer function of your goggles, and is dependent on the people around you, their physical positions, how well they account for their own goggles, etc. The last paragraph above represents abductive reasoning, and yields a potentially statistically close absolute truth but at some level an inherently personal and non-communicable version of it. Again, this isn't intended to be understood as some kind of intuitive shortcut. It's the only rational approach, in my view. The link above helps support this. The reason I criticize your model of abduction is that abduction is fundamentally about best explanations, and your position veers away from 'best explanation' to 'best intuition.' Part of this is your lack of clarification regarding what it means to 'explain,' what you mean by knowledge/epistemology, what you mean by this ultimate truth that we are pursuing. For instance: When these passive follower nodes, in different premises groups, try to communicate with each other, conflict will occur. There can be no reasoning, no resolution to this conflict. After all, it is ultimately reasoning based on unquestioned fundamental differences, which is really no reasoning at all. This is the Age of Enlightenment shortfall here. It's a situation where people understand the objective and independent nature of reason itself, outside of a dogma, but they fail to be consciously aware of the extra step that their brain is taking just beneath the surface – their unquestioned, unprovable assumptions. "There can be no reasoning" - what is that supposed to mean? What do you mean by reasoning? Isn't abduction a form of reasoning? Are you defining reasoning here as deduction? You could say that I was using abduction by understanding your reference to "reasoning" as a common-use term of "understanding," which I link to the notion of explanation, and hence, abduction. You see now why I might read a contradiction between the claim that "there can be no reasoning" and yet "abduction allows reasoning" when you perhaps are using two different senses of reasoning (the former, deduction, the latter, abduction). This is further complicated by the fact that you are equating deduction and the scientific method, when science uses a fundamentally inductive process. What you are referring to is not the scientific method but assumptions that underly even the scientific method, a logocentric vision of truth and the world, and this very logocentricism is deductive and provides the very possibility of having a scientific worldview at all. Now, here is a line that stuck out to me: You explain it, give what justifications you have, but some parts of it you don't justify at all. It's just a gut feeling, what you really think based on everything you know. If you're really giving your best explanation, it seems like you ought to explain everything that you can. But when you term abduction as "just a gut feeling," I see your argument veering towards vague intuition. When you assert that people have to give their best effort to explain, we have high expectations (as we should) for what effort is to be considered best, and the passive language of your post (saying that the ideas will propagate themselves, rather than people better explaining and better propagating more truthful ideas) seems to be problematic. This is also worsened by the way you explain abductive reasoning, which seems to take all sources of information as equally valid, when "best explanation" implies that some explanations are inherently better than others. IE the line: The answer is that none of the signals are right. Or more precisely, they're all right. Again: "right"? What you mean is that there is truth for a person to gain from that, but the way you phrase it implies that every source of information is equally true or transmits truth in the same way (again going back to your inarticulation of epistemology), and again makes me think you're talking about absolute relativism. Perhaps this issue is performatively compounded when you do nothing to address current ideas on the subject (for example, sam's concern). While "best effort" might be a sound position to take, if you're not going to provide your own best effort to clarify your important terms and address some of the ideas that have developed before you, you're going to lack a lot of credibility. Your whole point is that we draw inspiration from countless sources of inspiration - citing a big philosopher doesn't mean that you're totally depending on his/her conclusions and assuming their absolute fact - it just means you made the basic effort of getting informed or knowledgeable about your subject before presenting your conclusion as it is. Now, you acknowledge the fact that of course your conclusion is going to be limited and flawed, which is fine. But it's one thing to come to a conclusion, and it's another to blog it as a thesis to actively share with others. Even if you don't assert that such a blog is a final conclusion (which I agree does not happen by blogging or actively sharing it), there is a greater expectation of 'effort' given in providing research. This is perhaps a finer point to be made in the process of explanation, a micro-scale quality of what I (and arguably, reasonable people in general) see to be as a proper explanation. An explanation asserted as an academic thesis, a lengthy one at that, one that purports to talk about grand issues of human scale such as history and evolution, should have certain interaction with previous philosophers who provided similar ideas of scale. You're certainly knowledgeable enough to know a decent amount of abduction and to know about good sources of the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, so I'd expect you to be able to cover at least some basic philosophical background, or at least give me some proper grounding and precision with your ideas. This lack of precision also fueled my claim that you seemed to be appealing to an intuition while putting the cart before your horse. If you're not explaining your model of epistemology it seems like you're expecting me to "draw my best inference" of what vision of epistemology you had, which is problematic given that epistemology is inherently intertwined with abduction and thus necessary to explain it. And finally, even if your abduction argument is perfect on its own merits, your historical analysis is pretty bad... Your careless use of 'modernity,' was one point that stuck out to me (an issue sam pointed out earlier), and I still say that this is all stuff we've already seen. An underlying vein for abduction is its conception of absolute truth and knowledge (as you point out, that there is absolute knowledge but that it is out of our reach - we pursue it as best we can, but given this understanding we cannot rest assured with our conclusions and must repeatedly offer better and better explanations and efforts to find better explanations). But the idea of human beings as creatures that find their own existence problematic, as not only conscious creatures via knowledge but self-conscious creatures in the way they process knowledge, was well hashed out by Hegel (Heidegger of course building on this understanding), and perhaps even Kant in his famous motto of the Enlightenment: "Have the courage to use your own understanding!" | ||
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fight_or_flight
United States3988 Posts
On February 22 2013 15:28 LlamaNamedOsama wrote: Perhaps this issue is performatively compounded when you do nothing to address current ideas on the subject (for example, sam's concern). While "best effort" might be a sound position to take, if you're not going to provide your own best effort to clarify your important terms and address some of the ideas that have developed before you, you're going to lack a lot of credibility. Your whole point is that we draw inspiration from countless sources of inspiration - citing a big philosopher doesn't mean that you're totally depending on his/her conclusions and assuming their absolute fact - it just means you made the basic effort of getting informed or knowledgeable about your subject before presenting your conclusion as it is. Now, you acknowledge the fact that of course your conclusion is going to be limited and flawed, which is fine. But it's one thing to come to a conclusion, and it's another to blog it as a thesis to actively share with others. Even if you don't assert that such a blog is a final conclusion (which I agree does not happen by blogging or actively sharing it), there is a greater expectation of 'effort' given in providing research. This is perhaps a finer point to be made in the process of explanation, a micro-scale quality of what I (and arguably, reasonable people in general) see to be as a proper explanation. An explanation asserted as an academic thesis, a lengthy one at that, one that purports to talk about grand issues of human scale such as history and evolution, should have certain interaction with previous philosophers who provided similar ideas of scale. You're certainly knowledgeable enough to know a decent amount of abduction and to know about good sources of the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, so I'd expect you to be able to cover at least some basic philosophical background, or at least give me some proper grounding and precision with your ideas. This lack of precision also fueled my claim that you seemed to be appealing to an intuition while putting the cart before your horse. If you're not explaining your model of epistemology it seems like you're expecting me to "draw my best inference" of what vision of epistemology you had, which is problematic given that epistemology is inherently intertwined with abduction and thus necessary to explain it. And finally, even if your abduction argument is perfect on its own merits, your historical analysis is pretty bad... Your careless use of 'modernity,' was one point that stuck out to me (an issue sam pointed out earlier), and I still say that this is all stuff we've already seen. An underlying vein for abduction is its conception of absolute truth and knowledge (as you point out, that there is absolute knowledge but that it is out of our reach - we pursue it as best we can, but given this understanding we cannot rest assured with our conclusions and must repeatedly offer better and better explanations and efforts to find better explanations). But the idea of human beings as creatures that find their own existence problematic, as not only conscious creatures via knowledge but self-conscious creatures in the way they process knowledge, was well hashed out by Hegel (Heidegger of course building on this understanding), and perhaps even Kant in his famous motto of the Enlightenment: "Have the courage to use your own understanding!" Basically what you're saying here is that the essay perhaps needlessly suffers from lack of precision and a sound body of research to refine it and boost credibility. Why write it at all and share it in this way? What's the point? (It's a valid question and it made me think) The answer is the intended audience. If the thesis is correct and this really is some sort cognitive change, could I really cause such a change to occur by writing an academic paper? (That could potentially be theoretically impossible.) This is actually mostly written for people who already employ such thought processes but don't know it. It's designed to help them more consciously realize what they are doing. The hope is that they will be encouraged to continue doing so and be more precise in what they do. To add all the complexity of a real academic paper would make it more difficult to communicate ideas to the desired group while not truly being satisfactory (not even counting my limited abilities) to the other group. As far as "converting" or "persuading" people, I intend to do that not through papers but rather through personal interaction. I'm just going to use my own thought processes in daily life and perhaps other people's brains will catch on and make the jump. | ||
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fight_or_flight
United States3988 Posts
On February 22 2013 15:28 LlamaNamedOsama wrote: The reason I criticize your model of abduction is that abduction is fundamentally about best explanations, and your position veers away from 'best explanation' to 'best intuition.' I think this is essentially the second main point you have. When forming an abductive explanation, what is the best method to use? Well obviously it's highly debatable because explanations are just guesses, so you have to make the right guesses then evaluate which one is the best. What is the procedure defined for choosing such guesses? There isn't any singular correct one that I'm aware of. Basically you have to develop your own methods based on your past experiences. Some people will be explicit, others will be more intuitive. If you criticize an intuitive method, that's great. Use the tools at your disposal as long as you are aware you are using non-exact methods to get to a non-exact result. The way I've done it is to use self-observation to learn how I reason from a third person perspective. I've realized that a lot of it is intuitive, and I can't be sure that my so-called objective thinking isn't really using that method anyway. So I don't think there's much I can do about it except be aware of it. I see it as more of a passive phenomenon that I have limited control over (and if I pretend it's not there I have zero control over it). So I'm not necessarily advocating intuition, but what I am doing is pointing out that if you do in fact use intuition and you aren't aware of it, that's going to do much more harm than good. If you are aware of it but can't help but use it, then it's being honest. Is anyone truly unbiased, objective, and 100% intellectual? I don't know. So I'm advocating honesty rather than intuition. On February 22 2013 15:28 LlamaNamedOsama wrote: Part of this is your lack of clarification regarding what it means to 'explain,' what you mean by knowledge/epistemology, what you mean by this ultimate truth that we are pursuing. For instance: "There can be no reasoning" - what is that supposed to mean? What do you mean by reasoning? Isn't abduction a form of reasoning? Are you defining reasoning here as deduction? You could say that I was using abduction by understanding your reference to "reasoning" as a common-use term of "understanding," which I link to the notion of explanation, and hence, abduction. You see now why I might read a contradiction between the claim that "there can be no reasoning" and yet "abduction allows reasoning" when you perhaps are using two different senses of reasoning (the former, deduction, the latter, abduction). This is further complicated by the fact that you are equating deduction and the scientific method, when science uses a fundamentally inductive process. What you are referring to is not the scientific method but assumptions that underly even the scientific method, a logocentric vision of truth and the world, and this very logocentricism is deductive and provides the very possibility of having a scientific worldview at all. When I say "there can be no reasoning", what I mean is that I don't hold much value in debates. I've almost never seen a debate actually change someone's mind. I think it can be seen by viewing almost any thread. The thing is, debate doesn't necessarily work for abductive reasoning, because the assumptions each individual holds will be unique. Two people can't debate unless they hold the same assumptions/premises. It doesn't mean their reasoning is flawed.....I guess I wrote that in an unclear manner. "There can be no common reasoning between two people" would have been more accurate. Obviously there can be reasoning/debate between two people who hold the same premises and use deductive reasoning, but if people disagree and they both use deductive reasoning, debate doesn't really work because usually the premises themselves need to be debated (and again, they aren't determined through deductive reasoning). Sorry for saying there can't be "reasoning" when "debate" would have been more accurate. On February 22 2013 15:28 LlamaNamedOsama wrote: Now, here is a line that stuck out to me: If you're really giving your best explanation, it seems like you ought to explain everything that you can. But when you term abduction as "just a gut feeling," I see your argument veering towards vague intuition. When you assert that people have to give their best effort to explain, we have high expectations (as we should) for what effort is to be considered best, and the passive language of your post (saying that the ideas will propagate themselves, rather than people better explaining and better propagating more truthful ideas) seems to be problematic. One key point was that not all parts of the conclusions you draw necessarily need to have explicit reasons. Notice I didn't say the entire argument was based on a gut feeling, but only a part of it. It should be presumed that the weight that a gut feeling holds is probably pretty low, so the conclusion is known to be pretty iffy. We all use this in our lives to some extent, we just don't realize it because the weight we attach to it is low. It doesn't mean it's not a valid method to use though. Another purpose of that statement was to provide a self-observation opportunity for the intended audience. Even if it's not a major part of the reasoning, it is actually very important that we can identify the reasoning we're using whenever we do use it. If we can catch thought process in the third person by keying off small things like this, then we can develop a more general ability to do so. On February 22 2013 15:28 LlamaNamedOsama wrote: This is also worsened by the way you explain abductive reasoning, which seems to take all sources of information as equally valid, when "best explanation" implies that some explanations are inherently better than others. IE the line: Again: "right"? What you mean is that there is truth for a person to gain from that, but the way you phrase it implies that every source of information is equally true or transmits truth in the same way (again going back to your inarticulation of epistemology), and again makes me think you're talking about absolute relativism. Abduction is fundamentally a data-driven process, so we can't use our critical mind to throw data away. Any signals from our environment have to be accepted as true and allowed to coexist all at once. From that point, a separate process can build up the explanations in parallel. These conflicting explanations are allowed to coexist as well. Even when we choose "the right explanation", all the other ones are sitting there in the background as potentially being true. So when I say "true", think about a quantum particle that is a superposition of both true and false states at the same time. You reserve judgement until the observation is made, then you know if the quantum particle is true or false. Likewise, you reserve judgement / suspend disbelief / assume everything is "true" until such time an actual decision is made (analog to observation of the particle). | ||
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Roe
Canada6002 Posts
On February 22 2013 14:32 sam!zdat wrote: oh, idk man, nothing matters, i recommend getting a career and buying some stuff to make you happy sounds boring. why would you recommend a boring life? | ||
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ikl2
United States145 Posts
So, I'm going to echo his advice. It's great that you have some interest in ideas, but don't take the lazy way out. Do the hard work, read complicated and interesting books (which doesn't entail that you have to accept everything they say--that's a bizarre response...), and you'll actually learn something. Edit: More substantively, I don't entirely understand the cognitive difference between your average Greek and my neighbors. My neighbors have fancier toys, but I'm not sure that they're aware of the 'objective nature of reason.' | ||
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fight_or_flight
United States3988 Posts
I find it interesting how, until the age of about four, one is self-aware but not aware that others are as well. In other words, I'd say the brain views everything as a single mind. In a similar manner I think there is another step, something like the brain thinking that while awareness/minds are broken down into many individuals, there is some sort of universal set of knowns and unknowns. I think the realization that there is no certainty about what's known or unknown is a big development that occurs. This isn't the same as saying there isn't absolute truth. It's saying that certainty about what's known and not known is relative/subjective. Furthermore, assuming this is not so is an error. | ||
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