Beyond the Scientific Method: Shifting into the New Age
Cognitive evolution in humans
Cognition in humans as a group can be viewed in terms of distinct stages. In each of these stages, everyone tends to use the same thought processes which structure society. Whether these changes are causes or effects can be debated. The important thing is that with them comes a paradigm change in human experience.
The earliest humans that we know of were hunter gatherers who used basic tools and drew on cave walls. The way they thought can be speculated on from their paintings, which were generally of animals and other things directly from nature. There did not necessarily exist any rational component to their minds, at least about abstract ideas, because what they left were reflections of what they saw and experienced, without necessarily any meaning attached. Living conditions consisted of family groups in makeshift shelter (like caves).
The next identifiable change came with the development and/or refinement of spoken language, which we'll lump together with the development of the first primitive religions. The important change here is that no longer was the mind a quiet and peaceful place, but rather it became inhabited with discrete thoughts. These discrete thoughts could then be used for rational thoughts – comparing things, drawing basic conclusions. Larger social structures could form, totally changing living conditions.
With the development of written language, the state was able to form. Religious texts were written and they were also gathered together to form official dogmas (this is what society at large experienced from religion). Empires were built. Rational thinking and reasoning was developed, but it was an implied rather than explicit process. The official dogmas were full of reasoning, but very few realized this reasoning existed. Things were seen as good or evil, righteousness “just made sense”.
It is important to realize that the cognitive behaviors occur before humans really figure out what is happening. In the first case, paintings showed that there was some form of higher thinking at work, yet the individual didn't consciously have thoughts. Rather he just illustrated his view of the world in a painting.
In the second case, verbalized, discrete thoughts inside the mind were known, allowing a spoken language to exist to represent those thoughts. But the underlying process of reasoning was not known. Yet they used it to come to agreements to build societies and in their verbal grammar.
In the third case the idea of rationalization was known, and reasons could be written down for why God did this or that. But the objective, independent nature of reasoning was largely unknown to humans. There were Greek philosophers, mathematicians, and astronomers in that time, but nevertheless their ideas never spread to the larger population. Perhaps one reason was because the state actively suppressed such a change. They wanted a monopoly on reason.
In each of these three cases, more advanced cognitive processes were necessarily running subconsciously – unknown to man – to support the conscious processes he was using.
When people became aware of the explicit, fundamental, and independent existence of rational thought and deductive reasoning, the next great paradigm shift occurred, which is known as the Age of Enlightenment. As before, the human experience drastically changed with the technology this Age produced.
Since the rational mind finally become aware of its own existence, or at least its own independence, it created a system by which it could consciously create mental constructs (models) of the world: The scientific method. This method focused on harnessing deductive reasoning to allow even greater social and technological complexity than ever before.
Today, as in past times, there are subconscious cognitive processes which we depend upon but which humanity is unaware of collectively. When we become consciously aware of the implicit processes just beneath the surface of our thinking then we will again, as a group, experience another paradigm shift in our collective experience.
The scientific method: deductive vs abductive reasoning
The scientific method, as is widely understood today, is a process of exact deduction based on observations, hypotheses, predictions and experiments. It is an algorithm which, if run long enough, will eventually determine the unambiguous truth of any inquiry. It has proven itself over hundreds of years and given us the modern world we live in today.
However, there is a serious problem with the use of the scientific method today, just as in previous times there was a serious problem with the way reasoning was used. The problem is that the current scientific method is generally only useful, and in fact only valid, when used by institutions with potentially unlimited life spans. An institution such as a university or academic society can last for many generations, and certainly more than 70 man-years. That entity has the time and resources to properly traverse the scientific method algorithm, systematically proving or disproving hypotheses, until the final true understanding is arrived at.
Why isn't the scientific method valid on shorter timescales? The reason is that it's based on deductive reasoning.
Deductive reasoning requires a known premise, at which point it can generate a conclusion. One is therefore faced with either unquestioningly accepting a premise, or first proving the premise to be true. Unfortunately, to prove a premise is true would require induction (obviously deduction can't be used to prove itself). The problem with induction is that it doesn't prove anything. Over long time periods with simple data sets induction becomes more powerful, but it is significantly less useful when discussing a single human lifetime. The human experience is just too rich and unique, and lifetime just too short.
One may object that every human doesn't need to reinvent the wheel, and can simply draw upon the collective experience of humanity for his premises. By that argument, one should accept the basic world views of whatever society one grows up in, including whatever religion, philosophy, political ideology or other 'obvious thing' is given at the time. It is easy to see these views are very different, yet each is self-consistent as long as their precious premises aren't questioned. Therefore, there is no choice than accept that induction, deduction, and the scientific method are not the final destination of our cognitive evolution as a group. It is this conscious realization that causes the next paradigm shift. (Don't get too excited yet. Even though I just described it to you, it doesn't mean you necessarily 'get it'. In fact, the article has been written quite deductively so far!)
Lucky for us, as in previous times, pioneers have already broken through these barriers. The development of abductive reasoning allows us to overcome the problems the scientific method poses.
The basic idea of abductive reasoning is that no premise is assumed, and rather than a definite logical conclusion, we only ever end up with a number of probable conclusions. We aren't guaranteed to ever know the truth with complete certainty, all we're guaranteed is a best effort based on all data available to us.
Abductive reasoning can be understood as “the best guess based on everything you know”. Instead of hiding the fact that one is implicitly assuming some unproven premises, it is understood that the conclusions which are arrived at are only best effort, and can change as more data is received. A consequence of this is that different people generally arrive at different conclusions. More on that later
The practical, real-world, usefulness of abductive reasoning has made it attractive for use in artificial intelligence, computer science, and law.
The astute reader may realize that equating the scientific method with deductive reasoning could be flawed. However, as it is widely understood and implemented, it is an additive process – previous conclusions are almost always used as premises for future deductions. Philosophical circles have since broadened (i.e, fixed) the definition to include the missing abductive elements, however the awareness and even acceptance of this is not broad or universal.
The problem with society
The problem with society is that people have many irreconcilable points of view, and many who hold these irreconcilable points of view are also not able to tolerate others with contrary points of view. This leads to violence. For example, someone burns a Koran in a Mosque and the villagers grab the visiting foreigner and kill him.
Society can be viewed as simply the interaction of a number of peers in a network. Depending on belief system or ideology, these peers are clustered in groups and follow different protocols. However, when a node of one group tries to send an incompatible packet into another group, things simply blow up. There isn't any fault-tolerance in the different protocols.
We can start to see the problem a little more clearly: (1) different groups hold different (unprovable) premises which are offered to them by society, (2) they come to different, irreconcilable conclusions from these premises, and (3) they are unable to tolerate others with differences.
There is one more issue to look at, and that is the role of bias, intelligence, irrationality, and bigotry. One of the most common premises that individuals hold is that they are not biased, able to be tricked, irrational, or bigoted. As mentioned previously, the conscious realization that no premise can be proven leads to the shift. In this case, it is clear that the realization that one cannot necessarily know for sure if he is biased, easily tricked, irrational, or bigoted is profound and can indeed lead to some sort of fundamental shift. In this case the fundamental shift is necessarily towards tolerance of others no matter how much you know they are in error, or contradict your deeply held beliefs. It is also of self-observation and continual effort not to be bigoted. It's simply a consequence of properly recognizing hidden, unquestioned assumptions, and yet it leads from an easy certain world into an uncertain shadow world.
Some would say the problem with society is that people repeat things as truth which they don't in fact totally know are true. If there was just some minimal level of intellectual honesty our problems would be solved.
The issue is that people are convinced that what they know is totally true and what they say is certain. That is, until one day they wake up. Then they finally realize they were wrong previously, but luckily they have since figured it all out. Problem is, they're still completely wrong. Only the second part of the claim about intellectual honesty is correct. If one is intellectually honest, it has to be admitted that nothing is known for certain. So the solution is not just being really certain, it has to be something else. More on that coming up.
The cognitive model of society
As alluded to previously, society can be modeled as a peer-to-peer network. Each node is a person, and each person is a node. Information spreads throughout this network, and causes the network to do various things.
The current model is based on the Age of Enlightenment as well as from the previous age for some (groups of) people.
It goes like this: Each node has a belief system built up, layer by layer, reason by reason, upon some fundamental premises which is not observable by them. These people characteristically come with labels and have a figurehead or champion which they feel represents them or fights for them. It could be a politician or political party, a media figure, etc.
These champions hold the same basic premises as their followers, so the followers only listen to them, and all come to the same conclusions. Kind of like group-think. These champions I'll call broadcasters, and the nodes I'll call relays/receivers. New signals (ideas/opinions) are born from champion broadcaster nodes, and then quickly relayed through the network. With such a fixed-premises deductive reasoning system, this is expected. The champion node will quickly deduce the conclusion to any situation or new data in terms of their basic premises, then broadcast that pre-computed result to the follower nodes. The passive follower nodes will then robotically repeat the broadcasted signal everywhere. The robotic repetition isn't really a flaw of the node, rather it's just the result of the deterministic nature of deductive reasoning.
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.
Of course we all know our world is full of violence, injustice, and intolerance. Now you know it's because a passive network is being inundated with irreconcilable signals.
But does this not seem like a hopeless problem? Which signal is right, and how do we know which one to listen to? How many more wars will be fought until the right one is discovered? The answer is that none of the signals are right. Or more precisely, they're all right.
The new cognitive model of society
The fundamental problem is not an error in the transmitted information, but rather the receiver. The receiver assumes that it receives perfectly correct information from some sources (the champions), and perfectly incorrect information from other sources (conflicting repeater nodes).
With the conscious realization that no one is provably correct, then all sources simply become noisy inputs to the node. The node must first become fault-tolerant to be able to accept noise from its surroundings. Then it must process these noisy inputs, and generate its own less noisy output.
In other words, the new network is no longer a system of broadcasters (church, state, media) and relays/receivers (people). Every node is both a noisy broadcaster and a fault-tolerant receiver.
Ok, the way things currently work is easy to understand. But this new way seems abstract. What does it really mean?
Here's an example: You see a story about something on the news. You read about it online. You read people's theories. You hear your friends give you their opinion. You think about it in context of some book you read, maybe in sort of an allegorical way...maybe it was a fantasy book. You are also reminded of a certain movie. Moreover, you think back on your personal experience...what's happened to you in the past. So, when someone asks who on tv you agree with, what do you say? No one! You don't agree with anyone on what happened, although you take key elements from what other people have said. You have your own theory. 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. Then the person mentions some contradiction you didn't think of. No problem! You change your theory on the spot based on this new information. Or, depending on what they said, maybe you just discard the whole thing!
Now this person doesn't believe any of the subjective nonsense you just told them. In fact, you only said one thing that even made any sense...seemed somewhat plausible. They incorporate that one thing into their personal theory of what happened. Later that day, the person gives their own theory to someone else, which also has a tiny distorted piece of your theory in it.
There were two important things that just happened. The first one was that even though you may have just transmitted a massive amount of noise into the network, it didn't actually get beyond whoever you personally spoke to, except if they thought it was worth repeating. In order for signals to flow through the network, it has to pass the critical analysis of other people's brains.
The second important thing that happened was when the information got repeated to the next person, it was modified to the best of the next person's ability.
Essentially, a noisy signal was sent from one node to another. The second node received and filtered the noisy information, processed it, and retransmitted it. No longer is the network (society) a passive conduit for false information. It just became a distributed computer.
Certain ideas will propagate virally through the system. They will be things that fit the observations so well that they're either truth, or misinformation that nonetheless is really plausible. But that's ok. This misinformation explains the unexplainable, and it's a lot better than pretending things you can't explain don't exist. When the real truth is discovered, it will virally overtake the misinformation because it offers a better explanation.
Red vs blue networks
At first it may appear impossible for such a system to work. What kind of order can there be in society if everyone has their own version of everything? The first thing to realize is that this is exactly the system we currently have in place already. In fact there can be no other system. The difference is that instead of a bunch of passive nodes which don't realize they are receiving and retransmitting noisy information, each active node does realize it is receiving and transmitting noisy information. The passive network isn't aware of its own existence, whereas the active network is self-aware. It doesn't attempt to pretend its own inherent communications are perfect. It is self-aware, self-doubting, self-critical, and self-healing. This is the difference between a red network and a blue network.
A blue network is simply made up of blue nodes. A blue node (remember, a node is a person) is a passive node which receives a broadcasted signal and retransmits it without modifying it. It is a passive network and the information in it is easily controlled. It's almost transparent – inject a signal and watch it spread across the network, unmodified, almost instantly.
A red network is an active network made up of red nodes. Each node attempts to only transmit signals which represent it's best attempt to make sense of the information, with the understanding that it's likely not perfect. When a signal is injected into a red network, each node will distort the signal based on its unique point of view and abilities. It is almost opaque: injecting a signal yields an unpredictable and constantly adapting response. Whereas the blue network didn't realize what it was, the red network realizes each node has a unique and important role. And it will not destroy itself because of clever contradictory signals (opposing ideologies).
Like-minded people in this network will cluster together in groups, for example forums or message boards. Each forum focuses on certain topics. These communities of red nodes are really computers. The forum converges on common themes. These link into other forums (computers), which form into a large supercomputer. An interesting phenomena is that, while members of these forums each have their own personal opinions, they eventually converge so closely together that the end result is they've reached a much more accurate conclusion than would have been possible in a traditional passive network where each node has an identical but wrong conclusion.
People may say someone has taken the red pill if they subscribe to a certain fringe view of a certain event. This may be used as a litmus test by some. However, in general the test for a red node is whether they have any unquestioned assumptions.
How does one know if he is a red node or a blue node? Awake or asleep? Well, if one is a blue node then he can know for certain that he is a red node. This is probably what the majority of blue nodes believe. On the other hand, a red node can never know with certainty if he is indeed a red node. There will be continual self-observation, questions, and doubt. The more activated the node is, the more it will question itself. The more it will believe it's probably a blue node, self-decieved in some way, desperately looking for answers in pieces of trash lying on the ground. It's absolute personal responsibility. This is the unknown, and it will us lead to the next age of human experience.
It is a difficult path to take, but it directly follows from being honest and rejecting artificial intellectual constructs based on assumed premises. When an individual leaves nothing unquestioned, they are truly an activated node in a once dormant grid of human minds. Once this grid is switched on and humanity becomes a giant supercomputer, we will again have the comfort and certainty that the scientific method once promised us. Individually we can't achieve it, but as a group with our parallel theories and decision making, constantly converging in the right direction, eventually things will be collectively be known in an absolute way.
Revelation as the new communication method
The future will have less focus on systematic citation of sources and instead take on a more revelatory characteristic. In other words, instead of trying to prove things point by point as we do today, we'll simply say exactly what we think, in a bold manner, and let people take it or leave it. The most important justification for a proposal is that it's the best we've got. That's all we should feel obligated to prove. If there's no logic or self-consistency, people will simply ignore whatever we say. But if it contains an intuitive yet unspoken logic, it will be truth on a higher level than has ever been achieved before.
Humans have already mastered deductive reasoning and rational thought. We write computer programs! We are already aware of its objective value outside of any specific belief system. We are not in danger of falling back to previous error because we are more aware now than we were before.
Revelation is a step forward, not a step backwards. It's decentralized truth discovery. This document is nothing but a revelation. There are no sources, just influences. I made it all up. Take what you want, and leave the rest!
You don't seem to know how evolution works. Unless there's predators/diseases killing off people who use less abduction reasoning, or there's pressure to breed with people with abduction reasoning cognitive abilities, you can't talk about evolution happening.
The rest of the article is basically just hoping that memes that possess truth will spread more successfully as a rule. That just doesn't seem to be the case.
Go read about memes, i think you're trying to re-invent the wheel here.
I don't see what's the big step. People have been writing "revelations" and claiming stuff without facts or citations for ages, it's nothing new, and it's not becoming more valid/legit with time.
If Person A writes "I believe in X!" and Person B writes "I believe in Y because of experiment 1 done by Person C and experiment 2 done by Person D, their experiments can be found here", most people are going to find Person B is the one to listen to, until Person A can get his ass off his chair and either do those experiments himself, or citate people who did it and got results backing his position.
Of course you can take it or leave it, like you write in the end of your article. The problem is, anyone rational will immediately "leave it" where Person A is concerned.
Your whole premise that induction doesn't mean anything in the short term and that building on previous knowledge is not the final destination, is incorrect. Societies change, opinions change. Facts do not. If five reputable people say that an historical event happened in a certain way, there's no reason to doubt it. Those five people could be lying, they could be saying something happened because it benefits them and their ideas somehow, most certainly. However, since it's less probable that those five reputable persons are lying than the one person making a "revelation" peice, their stance will always logically be stronger, so the fact that they COULD be lying becomes irrelevant unless you can personally perform the induction.
I feel like this "revelation" approach could only ever apply to things that are indefinite and unanswerable. E.g. Philosophy. Anything definite needs proof. E.g. Physics. A philosopher can say "Look on the bright side of life" and we can take it or leave it, there is no right or wrong answer so it doesn't matter really. A physicist could say "gravity is a force exerted by any object with mass on another massive body, which is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them." With no experimental proof or at least mathematical evidence, and ideally both, isn't doing science, he is making shit up, regardless of whether or not he is right or wrong, accurate or inaccurate.
Trusting the majority of the population to simply identify the underlying logic in the truth would never work. It's too easy to sound convincing. The opportunity for a manipulative and convincing entity to take over would be far too open. If we could bottle up 100,000 people and instantly shift them over to this new brand of thinking I'd wager that within 20 years of living together in that society there'd be new religions and cults popping up like weeds, suffocating any real progress. We'd have 100 new scientology-like groups every week. A bold imagination and a salesman's charisma and you'd have yourself a huge following ezpz.
interesting perspective and a lot of good points! i am also hoping for a shift in consciousness and that i may be absorbed into the greater, now self-aware, blob.
The scientific method, as is widely understood today, is a process of exact deduction based on observations, hypotheses, predictions and experiments. It is an algorithm which, if run long enough, will eventually determine the unambiguous truth of any inquiry. It has proven itself over hundreds of years and given us the modern world we live in today.
Not true, I don't think at least. Science is inductive, not an exact deduction. Second it's not an algorithm, it's a heuristic because it doesn't always lead to an answer "unambiguously".
"Take what you want, and leave the rest!" leaving everything. I've got to say nice effort you put there. while I liked your idea I don't think it is quite accurate.
Long post but I was surprised that I read through all of it. Interesting and well written. Puts the modern social network in a different perspective. I prefer to avoid classifying the progression of "cognitive evolution" or any other social science theories into discrete stages. But I agree with the overall observation.
That's why to me, a person's intuition is so fundamentally important. Objective critical thinking can only take you so far before you need to make a personal judgement call. Intuition is intangible and not easily conveyed in argument, but it's really what separates us from computers. People's abilities as "red nodes" will vary considerably. The difficulty occurs when such networks regress to the mean. It's too hard to identify the radical genius who has better insight than the masses but is drowned out by volume.
And I am totally in support of writing freely without sources. That is the only way to come out with original ideas, and you will develop a much deeper and personalized understanding of a concept before you consider what others have said.
The scientific method, as is widely understood today, is a process of exact deduction based on observations, hypotheses, predictions and experiments. It is an algorithm which, if run long enough, will eventually determine the unambiguous truth of any inquiry. It has proven itself over hundreds of years and given us the modern world we live in today.
Not true, I don't think at least. Science is inductive, not an exact deduction. Second it's not an algorithm, it's a heuristic because it doesn't always lead to an answer "unambiguously".
One of many errors in the OP's post. While I appreciate the effort and thought in sharing such a lengthy write-up with everyone, there are a ton of assumptions that often turn out incorrect. The OP's "scientific method" is not in fact referring to scientific method but an idea perhaps best represented as logocentrism, or the pursuit of a structural account where one unifying idea/worldview can explain everything.
Yes a major flaw in the article is misunderstanding the scientific method. Everything we know about the world is in fact our best current theory, scientific knowledge is not made of unmoving truths.
Whilst accumulated knowledge is a house of cards, each card (piece of assumed knowledge) is constantly subject to review at a later date. We don't just continue to build mindlessly to create our own worlds of internal logic (that's philosophy)
Scientific method works by the process of disproving, not proving. It is impossible to prove something definitively, whilst it is possible to disprove something. For example - prove "its impossible for people to fly unaided" (maybe nobody has discovered how yet), but I can disprove "I can fly" (ok, do it).
I'm also pretty sure "cave men" actually had complex societies and communicated abstractly. Their simple cave drawings actually representative of a kind of spirituality. I also don't think many of them actually lived in caves (look around, how many suitable caves are there)
I guess the big distinction is that of group knowledge, accomplishments, and scientific methodology versus those at the individual level.
None of them are valid at, or transfer to, the individual.
What we have today is intellectual collectivism. It's cool that we have a heritage we share and can draw upon, but unless each and every individual takes responsibility for their own ignorance, we will eventually self-destruct as a group.
The scientific method and our collective knowledge is an effect, rather than a cause. It's an effect of a few individuals questioning themselves and everything around them, staying up at night, and having bitter battles over topics which most people at the time consider irrelevant.
There are too many people now to live off of the backs of (derive certainty about the world) the few (those who have uncertainty). This causes social polarization and wars when the certainty of the group is threatened. I know that statement seems like a false dichotomy, but whenever someone's certainty is challenged, there are really strong reactions.
I agree with your main theme, that more people should question the world around them rather than simply blindly accepting knowledge from authority figures, but that doesn't mean that we can't learn from one another, from generation to generation, and develop our collective knowledge as a species.
What you are asking for is a Humanist society. It won't happen any time soon though. What with governments ruled by religion, or fear of the general population. Organisations using misinformation to purposefully spread ignorance to further their own business interests (see cigarette companies/ oil companies etc), and media outlets which are simply propaganda machines.
We are still living in the dark ages as far as most people are concerned. It doesn't matter that people are carrying around IPads instead of books, if all they watch on them is funny videos of cats, and check their Facebook every 30 seconds.
On February 20 2013 07:20 fight_or_flight wrote: I guess the big distinction is that of group knowledge, accomplishments, and scientific methodology versus those at the individual level.
None of them are valid at, or transfer to, the individual.
What we have today is intellectual collectivism. It's cool that we have a heritage we share and can draw upon, but unless each and every individual takes responsibility for their own ignorance, we will eventually self-destruct as a group.
The scientific method and our collective knowledge is an effect, rather than a cause. It's an effect of a few individuals questioning themselves and everything around them, staying up at night, and having bitter battles over topics which most people at the time consider irrelevant.
There are too many people now to live off of the backs of (derive certainty about the world) the few (those who have uncertainty). This causes social polarization and wars when the certainty of the group is threatened. I know that statement seems like a false dichotomy, but whenever someone's certainty is challenged, there are really strong reactions.
"Intellectual collectivism" is no discrete or unique stage of human history - it's what we've had from start to end. Everything we know and possibly could have known was produced through language, which is inherently a social and collective process of informing our worldview (see: Jacques Derrida).
Boiling it down, what you're talking about is simply the need for independent and individual thinking, which is just a reiteration of the Enlightenment.
The only difference here is that you're trying to reconcile this with postmodernism's absolute relativism, which is quite odd because you're simultaneously assuming the truth of postmodern absolute relativism (otherwise there is no conflict with Enlightenment thinking that need be resolved) while also assuming its falsity (the only way for your solution to possibly work is if relativism is false, relativism directly rebuts the idea that we can somehow intuitively understand each other and reach common ground that way).
Then you offer a vague form of "intuitionism" as your solution, all the while putting the cart before the horse and justifying a lack of justification by appealing to the very principles of intuition at the same time.
On February 20 2013 07:20 fight_or_flight wrote: I guess the big distinction is that of group knowledge, accomplishments, and scientific methodology versus those at the individual level.
None of them are valid at, or transfer to, the individual.
What we have today is intellectual collectivism. It's cool that we have a heritage we share and can draw upon, but unless each and every individual takes responsibility for their own ignorance, we will eventually self-destruct as a group.
The scientific method and our collective knowledge is an effect, rather than a cause. It's an effect of a few individuals questioning themselves and everything around them, staying up at night, and having bitter battles over topics which most people at the time consider irrelevant.
There are too many people now to live off of the backs of (derive certainty about the world) the few (those who have uncertainty). This causes social polarization and wars when the certainty of the group is threatened. I know that statement seems like a false dichotomy, but whenever someone's certainty is challenged, there are really strong reactions.
So are you talking about Science or Governance? They require different modes of analysis and different philosophies. You seem to be jumping from one to the other without acknowledging this.
Also, do you know anything about statistics? Pretty much every scientific paper today is written with statistics in mind, and all scientific conclusions have a caveat of "this is with 95% certainty"; Bayesian statistics is a refinement on this, and is already prevalent among theorists (alas, not so much among practicioners).
Finally, your little graph is missing its y-axis. I cannot tell if you're trying to be pomo or you just left it off by accident; either way I have no idea what that graph is trying to tell me.
On February 20 2013 07:20 fight_or_flight wrote: I guess the big distinction is that of group knowledge, accomplishments, and scientific methodology versus those at the individual level.
None of them are valid at, or transfer to, the individual.
What we have today is intellectual collectivism. It's cool that we have a heritage we share and can draw upon, but unless each and every individual takes responsibility for their own ignorance, we will eventually self-destruct as a group.
The scientific method and our collective knowledge is an effect, rather than a cause. It's an effect of a few individuals questioning themselves and everything around them, staying up at night, and having bitter battles over topics which most people at the time consider irrelevant.
There are too many people now to live off of the backs of (derive certainty about the world) the few (those who have uncertainty). This causes social polarization and wars when the certainty of the group is threatened. I know that statement seems like a false dichotomy, but whenever someone's certainty is challenged, there are really strong reactions.
"Intellectual collectivism" is no discrete or unique stage of human history - it's what we've had from start to end. Everything we know and possibly could have known was produced through language, which is inherently a social and collective process of informing our worldview (see: Jacques Derrida).
Boiling it down, what you're talking about is simply the need for independent and individual thinking, which is just a reiteration of the Enlightenment.
The only difference here is that you're trying to reconcile this with postmodernism's absolute relativism, which is quite odd because you're simultaneously assuming the truth of postmodern absolute relativism (otherwise there is no conflict with Enlightenment thinking that need be resolved) while also assuming its falsity (the only way for your solution to possibly work is if relativism is false, relativism directly rebuts the idea that we can somehow intuitively understand each other and reach common ground that way).
Then you offer a vague form of "intuitionism" as your solution, all the while putting the cart before the horse and justifying a lack of justification by appealing to the very principles of intuition at the same time.
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.
On February 20 2013 07:48 deathly rat wrote: I agree with your main theme, that more people should question the world around them rather than simply blindly accepting knowledge from authority figures, but that doesn't mean that we can't learn from one another, from generation to generation, and develop our collective knowledge as a species.
What you are asking for is a Humanist society. It won't happen any time soon though. What with governments ruled by religion, or fear of the general population. Organisations using misinformation to purposefully spread ignorance to further their own business interests (see cigarette companies/ oil companies etc), and media outlets which are simply propaganda machines.
We are still living in the dark ages as far as most people are concerned. It doesn't matter that people are carrying around IPads instead of books, if all they watch on them is funny videos of cats, and check their Facebook every 30 seconds.
As I mentioned, I don't believe that a rational consensus is a logically self-consistent idea. I'm honestly not sure what a humanist society believes, but I think if it's basically based around the rejection of supernatural beings then it's distinctly different than what I'm discussing. In general, almost any descriptive labels imply some sort of intellectual construct which will imply some sort of rational consensus.
The only core value I can think of for a society based on what I'm talking about would be self-acknowledged ignorance about everything.
From a religious perspective it would be gnostic/ignostic. Ignostic from the intellectual standpoint, meaning that trying to debate or discuss it is meaningless. Gnostic (and I'm using my own definition of that word) from the standpoint of some inner spiritual knowledge which can't be described or communicated. (For this paragraph, I'm conjecting as always)
On February 20 2013 07:20 fight_or_flight wrote: I guess the big distinction is that of group knowledge, accomplishments, and scientific methodology versus those at the individual level.
None of them are valid at, or transfer to, the individual.
What we have today is intellectual collectivism. It's cool that we have a heritage we share and can draw upon, but unless each and every individual takes responsibility for their own ignorance, we will eventually self-destruct as a group.
The scientific method and our collective knowledge is an effect, rather than a cause. It's an effect of a few individuals questioning themselves and everything around them, staying up at night, and having bitter battles over topics which most people at the time consider irrelevant.
There are too many people now to live off of the backs of (derive certainty about the world) the few (those who have uncertainty). This causes social polarization and wars when the certainty of the group is threatened. I know that statement seems like a false dichotomy, but whenever someone's certainty is challenged, there are really strong reactions.
So are you talking about Science or Governance? They require different modes of analysis and different philosophies. You seem to be jumping from one to the other without acknowledging this.
Also, do you know anything about statistics? Pretty much every scientific paper today is written with statistics in mind, and all scientific conclusions have a caveat of "this is with 95% certainty"; Bayesian statistics is a refinement on this, and is already prevalent among theorists (alas, not so much among practicioners).
Finally, your little graph is missing its y-axis. I cannot tell if you're trying to be pomo or you just left it off by accident; either way I have no idea what that graph is trying to tell me.
Your post is very difficult to respond to. I think you're trying to understand from what context I'm basing my discussion off of so that you can apply a suitable framework to it.
The context is my own personal biased context. Apparently people (in the other thread) find that to be extremely arrogant, but I assure you it's not meant to be.
I view the abductive thought process, which I'm saying is required from a rigorous perspective, as creating unique conclusions based on an individual's experiences, etc. That's the context.
The scientific method is a special case of abductive reasoning tailored to scientific research with measurable phenomena via instruments. Political theories pull together various assumptions and scientific inferences, etc, to form a detailed analysis in a pretty specific area. It's also a special case of abduction where the inputs (assumptions) are all agreed on for any specific theory.
The problem is when the input assumptions are not agreed on or understood, which when talking about an individual level is going to be true. Everyone has different experiences and biases, and unless they stick to only established works, they will reach conclusions which cannot necessarily be reproduced by anyone else.
So, not to be arrogant, but you are reading my post wrong. You have to try to interpret what I'm saying in terms of whatever tools you have at your disposal: scientific and political theories, statistics education, etc. As you mentioned in your post, statistically a certain certainty is attached to most things. I'm trying to communicate ideas using logic and trying to explain my assumptions the best I can.
If we each have the goggles on I mentioned earlier, the very act of communication itself is no longer guaranteed. I'm trying to explain something objective to you, but neither of us sees the same image. If I described it in terms of a third party authority, we would both understand each other but then the accuracy of our discussion would depend on the third party being accurate. Sometimes the third party is more accurate than others (we have to figure that out for ourselves though), as is the case of scientific methodology when describing the physical world. But it's never totally right, and regardless, we don't necessarily know the accuracy of any given source.
So after that long-winded explanation, you basically have to get what you can get out of what I wrote and we'll both have called it a success if we can each learn a little bit from each other. Through communication, we're characterizing our own biases (at least that's one of my big goals here! re:the red network theory).
As far as the graph, the bars are showing that the subconscious parts of our brains are basically doing as much as the conscious parts and working at a higher-order level. From age to age, we are doubling our capabilities when the massive subconscious part becomes visible to us. So the axis is relative, the important thing is that it's doubling, there is no absolute scale. The probability distribution below has an area of 1 so no y-axis is needed. It's basically showing there is a spread of the population rather than necessarily everybody being at the same point. The exact shape of this distribution can be debated, I'm just trying to show that it exists (and it's not normal). It's actually a maxwellian distribution.
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
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.
I don't want to quote long posts, so here's a reply without quoting.
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.
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.
sam, let me say that I believe you are probably more intelligent than I am, and definitely know more about philosophy.
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...
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.
On February 20 2013 07:20 fight_or_flight wrote: I guess the big distinction is that of group knowledge, accomplishments, and scientific methodology versus those at the individual level.
None of them are valid at, or transfer to, the individual.
What we have today is intellectual collectivism. It's cool that we have a heritage we share and can draw upon, but unless each and every individual takes responsibility for their own ignorance, we will eventually self-destruct as a group.
The scientific method and our collective knowledge is an effect, rather than a cause. It's an effect of a few individuals questioning themselves and everything around them, staying up at night, and having bitter battles over topics which most people at the time consider irrelevant.
There are too many people now to live off of the backs of (derive certainty about the world) the few (those who have uncertainty). This causes social polarization and wars when the certainty of the group is threatened. I know that statement seems like a false dichotomy, but whenever someone's certainty is challenged, there are really strong reactions.
"Intellectual collectivism" is no discrete or unique stage of human history - it's what we've had from start to end. Everything we know and possibly could have known was produced through language, which is inherently a social and collective process of informing our worldview (see: Jacques Derrida).
Boiling it down, what you're talking about is simply the need for independent and individual thinking, which is just a reiteration of the Enlightenment.
The only difference here is that you're trying to reconcile this with postmodernism's absolute relativism, which is quite odd because you're simultaneously assuming the truth of postmodern absolute relativism (otherwise there is no conflict with Enlightenment thinking that need be resolved) while also assuming its falsity (the only way for your solution to possibly work is if relativism is false, relativism directly rebuts the idea that we can somehow intuitively understand each other and reach common ground that way).
Then you offer a vague form of "intuitionism" as your solution, all the while putting the cart before the horse and justifying a lack of justification by appealing to the very principles of intuition at the same time.
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!"
Llama, what a lucid and challenging post. I think you have two key points, and I'm going to answer the first part second and the second part first.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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).
You're talking about people not examining their own premises, but your response to sam seems to be an elaborate excuse to get out of reading intelligent people. I think the point is that you're clearly not giving it your best effort, because, with all due respect, your best effort would be reflecting with the help of the greats--the old ones and the current ones--not pontificating on a forum.
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.'
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.
EPT![[image loading]](http://s1.postimage.org/g0549udz3/paper.png)
. YAY.
