Help Me, Captain Philosophy!

[dr_tectonic]

I took a relatively interesting philosophy quiz (here) that characterizes me as a metaphysical Realist, an epistemological Subjectivist, and an ethical Utilitarian.

The corresponding viewpoints aren't a horrible match -- they're better than the subcategories listed under the polar opposite "Reductionist/Absolutist/Relativist" type, but still, there were a bunch of questions where none of the answers really fit what I believe. There are lots of these questions to which my answer is really mu -- either the question is ill-posed, or there's not enough context to give a proper answer.

So, not that I actually expect anybody on my flist can answer the question, but: Can you help me find a label for my philosophical outlook?

In a nutshell, here's what I think. There are two kinds of thing in the world: physical things, and informational things. A rock is physical; a 30-60-90 triangle is informational. Your mind is software (informational) that runs on the hardware of your body (physical). Part of your mind is a model of the objective physical universe; this model is imperfect, being fed by your imperfect perceptions of the universe, but there's an isomorphism between model and reality.

Here's the part that seems to be unconventional: I've come to believe that statements about physical things are qualitatively different than statements about informational things. In particular, boolean truth is applicable only to purely informational propositions. Statement about physical things evaluate to what I'll call "floating-point truth".

So what is that? Property dualism? Fuzzy-logic Aristotelianism? Any ideas?

Comments

[bryree.livejournal.com]

It is a dualism...Hmmm...I shall puzzle on it during Merchant.

[bryree.livejournal.com]

OK. Not a dualism as I read more. That would seem to require the teo types of things to be more opposed than relational, as they seem to be for you. Would informational things exist in ways at all analogous to the existance of spiritual things in other philosophies, as you understand them?

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... Mostly not, I think. My understanding of other philosophies is too shaky to say for sure, but some examples of informational things include: numbers, words, Hamlet, Beethoven's 9th, this blog, digital photos, taxonomic classifications, emotions, and your mind.

Some of those may be analogous to things conventionally regarded as spiritual, but I think most are not.

[bryree.livejournal.com]

It is unclear to me whether or not informational things 'exist' independently of Physical things. Sure, the statements we can make about them are qualitatively different, and they can exist independently of one another - but to what extent? It seems in your worldview that informational things, though independent of physical things in some ways, are ontologically bound to the physical.

For instance: You can have 'triangle' or 'book' without pysical objects defining them, but what if there were not (ever) physical things? Would there still be 'triangle' or 'book' or 'three?' It seems I would not. Do I have an accurate understanding? Or ask a cogent question? ;)

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Well, but contrariwise, could you have physical things if there were no informational things? Would there still be [this apple here] without there being a 'one' or a 'here'?

I think a universe without either one is sufficiently outside our understanding that I don't think we can sensibly say anything about it...

It's like matter and energy. Does a universe with only one, and not the other, make any sense to us?

[dpolicar]

Well, hrm.

I can't quite tell if you're a dualist or just making a noise like one.

When you say that the mind is an informational thing that runs on the physical hardware of your body and that these are "two distinct types of things", do you really mean to say that there is something added to create a mind over and above a particular arrangement of states of the physical components of the body?

Or when you say "informational thing" here are you referring simply to a pattern of physical things?

Perhaps more simply, if I take three rocks and arrange them at the vertices of a 30-60-90 triangle, have I created a new thing? Or have I "merely" arranged existing things according to a new pattern?

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

I think what I mean is that a particular arrangements of states of physical components can instantiate an informational entity. But an informational thing has properties independent of its instantiation, and could be instantiated in a different medium.

After you move the rocks, there's a triangle there that wasn't there before. I think 'create' is an appropriate verb for that, but we have to be careful. You didn't create the abstract 30-60-90 triangle pattern, you arranged existing things to make a physical version of the pattern.

[dpolicar]

Yeah, OK. I think I would say you're not a dualist, except perhaps a semantic one in that you insist on using the word "thing" to describe patterns. Which I can't really blame you for, since "thing" is such a slippery word anyway.

Or, at least, if you're a dualist, so is everybody else who is even remotely living on the same planet as me.

[dpolicar]

Incidentally, if you care, I am apparently: N-A-R
You scored 66% Non-Reductionism, 55% Epistemological Absolutism, and 22% Moral Objectivism!

That said, the test irritated me.

[0nce-and-future.livejournal.com]

Funny - I think in conversation you and I share a lot of similar philosophical/metaphysical traits... but I somehow come up with (in the quiz) as:

You are an N-A-O: a metaphysical Non-Reductionist, an epistemological Absolutist, and a moral Objectivist.

So clearly there are not enough questions asked.

I like Dan Simmons definition of µ by the way... "unask the question"

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I want to unask the question. More often I just want more details.

[ocschwar.livejournal.com]

Perhaps if you went on the Jerry Springer show they'd help.

[toosuto.livejournal.com]

That's awesome!

[madbodger.livejournal.com]

No idea what to call it, but was thinking along those lines while considering changes to a
complicated computer program using a state machine to model memory transfers.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Is this Platonic Realism? The basic duality between ideas and forms?

Possibly also elements of General Semantics, in its "map-is-not-the-territory" notions. And "General Semantics stresses that reality is not adequately mapped by two-valued (Aristotelian) logics."

(And I'll add that I think it's unfortunate, the reputation that General Semantics has been left with. If only it had not inspired neuro-linguistic programming and Dianetics... there are some neat ideas there.)

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's Platonic Realism, because while we've got a similar distinction, Plato's Allegory of the Cave is just wack.

The General Semantics thing is interesting, but it looks like the founder went overboard with his ideas...

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Plato's Allegory of the Cave is just wack

Really? I think it works, as allegory.

Guess I'll defer to ng_nighthawk's better epistemological investigations and add a *shriug* :)

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

It's the idea that form is primary, and the physical universe is just a bad copy of some perfect abstract form. That's a totally goofy idea.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

In itself, yes.

Personally, I like a nice balance between Platonic Realism and General Semantics; on the one hand, the form is primary and more pure than the percieved world, on the other, the form cannot accurately and totally describe the real.

Yay, self-contradictory mental models.

[walrusjester.livejournal.com]

You're being too scientific and not egotistical enough. Call it Beemerism, write a book of the same title, go on the lecture circuit and establish a personality cult.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Smacks of effort. =)

Bee-tarianism

[boat-of-car.livejournal.com]

Congratulatins, you've been selected to be the new guru of a new branch of boatarianism ! We'll call it Tectonicism (tek-tahn-ih-sis-em), people who follow it will be tecolics (teh-caw-liks) (or prestecarians).

tectonicism is the third branch of the Boatarian tree- the first two being of course, orthodox Boatoxy and Avian Boatarianism.

But seriously- The thing I find most interesting is that you seem to have taken elements from parts of your own experience that probably most people wouldn't bother to translate (transliterate) into a belief structure. Yes, duality, aristoteliansim (?)...and of course, pure Beemer. right bloody on, i say.

Re: Bee-tarianism

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Well, y'know, I've been working on my belief structures for a long time now. It's an ongoing project. =)

[ng-nighthawk.livejournal.com]

So I think I need more data to map your thoughts to existing lines of philosophy. Questions:

1. How do informational things map to physical things? Is this mapping objective (there is an a priori relationship between them), subjective (the relationship between them is constructed by the observer), or do those terms not apply?

To be clear, you don't have to be Platonic to make the relationship objective--you could clearly say that informational things exist only because of our experience with physical things, ergo physical things are the first cause of informational things, because even if some informational things are generated from other informational things, you can always trace them back to physical things. That's a reversal of Plato's concept of the informational things being the model from which physical things are made, but it remains an objective relationship.

2. Do informational things exist outside of an individual mind? Do they exist outside of minds in general? A few example positions (not even remotely comprehensive):

--Informational things exist within each human mind. While two people may have access to very, very similar informational things, they are not actually the same informational thing.
--Informational things can be transmitted intact, assuming good transmission, from person to person and thus the same object can exist in multiple minds. However, if all life were to end, informational things would cease to exist.
--Informational things, being derived from physical things, all have some existence outside of human minds. Even if all life were to end, assuming life were to exist again with a fresh start, these same information things could be rediscovered from the physical things that generated them in the first place. Ergo, informational things are not dependent on human minds to exist.

3. Can you derive a statement about informational things from a statement about physical things, or vice-versa?

Answer these three things, and I think I can place you in an existing framework, or identify that you match none I've heard of. :)

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Excellent!

1) The relationship is objective, but the mapping can be imperfect. Evaluation of an imperfect mapping is subjective. Subjectivity also comes into play when the informational thing is a referent to a physical thing with fuzzy boundaries.

2) Informational things exist outside of minds. If there are three trees on a hill, it's an instance of three-ness, whether anyone counts them or not. In a sense, they don't even depend on a physical thing to instantiate them, but exist in a kind of potential form independent of the physical universe. But the number of potential informational entities is infinite, and so they need to be intantiated to be anything other than a drop in the vast undifferentiated sea of potential, so "exist" isn't really the right word.

3) Whether you can derive statements about informational things from statements about physical things, or vice-versa, depends on the quality of the mapping between them. If the mapping is good, you can derive new statements that are also good, although the imperfections multiply as you go along.

Strictly speaking, statements are informational things that relate other informational things to one another, so you can only make statements about physical things by relating the correponding informational referents. However, you can have two physical things with a relationship that maps to an informational thing, and by changing the physical relationship while preserving the mapping, discover/create a derived informational thing. That's what happens when you use a slide-rule.

Does that make sense? It coalesces as I go, and I may make errors, so speak up if I say something dumb.

[ng-nighthawk.livejournal.com]

Forgive me if I seem to be taking the easy, socratic way out by only asking questions. So far so good.

4. When you are mapping between informational and physical things, is that map an informational thing, or another kind of thing altogether?

5. When you say that evaluation of an imperfect mapping is subjective, do you mean to say (given informational thing A and physical thing B):

It is an objective truth whether or not A has a direct relationship with B. However, to discern this relationship would require a complete perception of B which I can never be certain I have achieved; therefore we create maps to represent the relationship that we know to exist, though these maps are based only on the viewpoints we have accomplished. We may at any time gain a new perspective which forces us to alter our subjective maps to move closer to the objective relationship that exists. At no point can we be certain that we our map shows the entire relationship, but we can easily reach a point where we are certain enough to rely on the map to make decisions.

I think you are using map and relationship interchangeably above, but I wonder if you would find the distinction I just made antithetical to your statements or, semantics aside, in agreement with them.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

4) I think it is another kind of thing altogether. You can create an informational thing that refers to the mapping, but the mapping itself is something deeper. The mapping is the instantiation of the informational thing in physical form. It's a realization, not just another reference.

5) That's fairly antithetical. I'm actually using "relationship" and "mapping" in distinct senses above.

In a great many cases, it's easy to determine whether physical thing A is an instance of informational thing B. There's always room for a sliver of doubt, but it's generally not hard to get below the threshold where we regard that sliver of uncertainty as negligible.

It's in the cases where part of the mapping is starting to break down that subjectivity comes into it. If I have three books sitting on my coffee table, it's clear that that's an instance of the informational entity '3 books'. We have complete correspondence between the informational thing and the physical thing, with (practially speaking) no room for argument.

But if I have two whole copies of Hamlet and a loose stack of pages from the first three acts... now it's harder to say. It's still 3, but the 'books' part is a little broken. Is it still a book when half of it is gone? When the pages are unbound? Does it matter that Hamlet is a play, not a novel? The mapping is flawed, the correspondence is partial, and the question of whether the physical thing still counts as an instantiation of the informational thing becomes subjective.

[ng-nighthawk.livejournal.com]

My first point of contention: it seems to me that in this case--the Hamlet example--you have certain elements of the informational thing that apply to the physical thing. However, I don't think it's really a subjective choice.

It seems to me that the informational object of "book" differs between two observers. Both agree that works of literature are on the table, both agree that three distinct pieces are there, both agree that one is unbound, and both agree that the work in question is a play. Now, what are the critical components of the informational object "three books" that allow the mapping to take place?

If the two people agree on what is critical about "three books" to make it map to an object, they will agree on whether what they see is three books. If they can't agree on what constitutes a map to the physical object, are they really talking about the same informational object?

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

They are talking about the same thing. Generally speaking, everyone means the same thing when they talk about books. The thing is, "book" is an object with fuzzy boundaries.

Most things (physical and informational) have fuzzy boundaries. Some are fuzzier than others. (Things that aren't fuzzy are incredibly rare.) For informational objects, the more referential the object, the fuzzier it is.

Most of the time, fuzziness doesn't matter. This is just a case where the context exposes the fuzziness, and makes the correspondence between informational and physical objects difficult to evaluate.

It's not that the two observers have fundamentally different notions of the concept "book". If you gave them the option, they'd probably both say "there are two books, and one partial book". But if the question is constrained to "are there 3 books, yes or no?" they have to take the partial correspondence and resolve it to either "book" or "not book", and to do that, they each have to move outside the non-fuzzy core of "bookness" and start invoking the network of other informational objects that constitutes their mental model of the universe, and those networks will differ, even though they have a great many components in common. Small differences will compound, the fuzziness multiplies, and you can end up with different answers.

The very notion of two things being "the same" is itself fuzzy. How fuzzy depends on the fuzziness of its operands.

[ng-nighthawk.livejournal.com]

(side note: if this stops being interesting, stop at any time, no offense taken)

This is interesting in itself: the idea of people dealing with the fuzziness of things in their world by "invoking ... their mental model of the universe."

Can you describe how this is done? Does this allow people to resolve fuzziness into distinction, or does it allow them to trick themselves that they resolve fuzziness when really they have no idea, or does it allow people to think "fuzzily" without the need to resolve the borders? In your example, it seems that it allows them to decide border cases, which seems to point toward an apparent resolution of the fuzziness of the borders based on these larger models.

Feel free to use or drop the three books example, whatever is useful.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Well, let me start by saying this is nothing strange or special. It's what you do all the time whenever you need to resolve an ambiguity. You just take the cloud of features that makes up the definition of a conceptual category, compare it to the features you observe on a physical thing, and see how well they match.

So (to blatantly rip off my example from someone else's blog), if you see something skittering through your kitchen out of the corner of your eye, and you think "is that a rat?" you take a better look at it (after pausing the TiVo) and compare: it's a small rodent, but look, it's got the wrong kind of tail. It's a squirrel, not a rat. The vast majority of the time, the matching is easy and obvious, so fuzziness doesn't matter.

Now, consider a fuzzier case: there's a big juniper in your yard. Is it a bush, or is it a tree? It's hard to tell. We could probably make a determination, but we don't need to if all we want to do is trim the thing; whether it's a tree or a bush is irrelevant. So we can handle fuzziness without addressing it in some cases.

In other cases, we have to resolve the ambiguity in order to make a decision or some such. And the need provides important context for the resolution, because if we didn't have a need to resolve it, we could just leave it ambiguous and address it in its naturally fuzzy state, right?

The stack of Hamlet pages on the coffeetable can be matched against any number of patterns. The ambiguity in matching it against the "book" pattern only matters if the question "is it a book?" has somehow been asked, implicitly or explicitly, in a way that does not allow "sort of" as a valid answer.

[Aside: I'm starting to think that the correct answer to many (most?) philosophical conundrums is "that's a bad question, because it depends on context that hasn't been provided".]

So let's consider this situation: Alan says to Bob "hey, would you go and grab the books off my coffeetable?" Bob sees two regular books and a stack of loose pages. Did Alan mean to grab that, too? Is that "a book"? The answer depends on context. If Bob knows that Alan is editing a manuscript, he might decide yes. If Alan is shelving things on a bookshelf, he might decide no. It depends on the circumstances surrounding the question.

If the immediate circumstances don't help, then Bob will start pulling on broader context, drawing on his personal understanding of the universe. If he works at a bookstore, the aspect of books as "things that are bound" comes more easily to mind for him, and he decides that the unbound pages are not a book. If he's been sorting through letters and forms all day, the aspect that is "a lengthy collection of text" might be prominent, and he decides yes, it is.

Now, in neither case has the fuzziness gone away. All that's happened is that Bob was constrained to deal with a borderline case in an all-or-nothing way, so he evaluated it in that context to determine whether the mapping between physical object and informational object held. When exterior context was insufficient to resolve the ambiguity, he called on his mental model of the universe to get more context so that he could make a subjective decision. In a different context, he might come to a different decision. A different person in the same context might come to a different decision.

The fuzziness remains, it's just a way of treating it as if resolved in a particular context.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Dang! Wrong icon!

[drdeleto.livejournal.com]

Sometime in the last couple of years I've gone through a shift where I read questions like those in the quiz and my only honest response is, "How the hell would I know?" Constructing a personal philosophical worldview, much less defending it, just seems entirely impractical. Much of this comes from reading the stuff (far more seriously than I ever did in college) and realizing that I am pretty much incapable of doing that kind of heavy intellectual lifting. There's something freeing in coming to this conclusion and, for lack of any more accurate description, letting other, more qualified people do the thinking for you.

Taking my best stab at the questions, I think I was a Non-Reductionist/Absolutist/Objectivist, although some of the phenomenologist answers held some appeal.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

It perplexes me that you feel you can't do that kind of thinking.

I'd be interested to know about how you decide who's more qualified and worth delegating to.

[drdeleto.livejournal.com]

Well, reading, say, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason--or, heck, even a thorough summary of it--my response is basically, "Gosh, he's addressing a lot of really important stuff here, half of which I've never considered. Some of it sounds right to me. Some of it sounds wrong. But his argument is clearly stronger than anything I could put together. Other philosophers have spent their careers analyzing where Kant went wrong, so I'm unlikely to accomplish remotely as much as they have. Probably don't even have time to read them. But, no denying this is important stuff. Really would love to get a handle on it... I need a sandwich."

It's not that I could never assert a proposition against Kant, where I think he's wrong. It's just unlikely to be anything other than a statement of preference. "I don't like that idea; I prefer this one." Which, philosophically speaking, is mostly useless. I'd have to be able to back it up beyond "It's my experience..." That's where the heavy lifting comes in, and I certainly don't have a heavy-lifting kind of mind. Chance that I don't really know what I'm talking about: 99.9%

So, yeah, when it comes to delegating my thinking... Well, that's the rub, isn't it? I guess part of it is just a constant trial of ideas against other ideas, and part of it is finding a source that you trust for reasons that have not really anything to do with the intellectual content of their arguments.

[drdeleto.livejournal.com]

I thought of a much better way to state this last point: These days I look for sources of wisdom more than intellectual rigor.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

You know, that matches my experience a lot, too. Books that have impact on my 'philosophical' life these days are much more likely to make me feel fulfilled spiritually than intellectually.

Pat Loring's book Listening Spirituality is not philosophically deep, but had a profound effect on my prayer practice, for example.

[Hmm. NOw that I think about it, this may not match what you were saying...]

[eto-theipi.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of the Orb track OOBE, which contains a sample... "...created a world of the mind, of the intimate imagination, which is as real in its way as any actual country on the map. Sir Karl Popper, in one of his most important papers, calls it 'the third world,' or 'world three.' The first world is the objective world of things. The second world is my inner, subjective world. But, says Popper, there’s a third world, the world of objective contents of thoughts. Teilhard de Chardin calls this third world the noosphere, that is, the world of the mind."

Your lj-net icon is rad, by the way.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Your lj-net icon is rad, by the way.

Thanks! It's a little Processing sketch. I'm trying to figure out how to make it display clusters in a clever way. Most people's friends networks are dominated by a single, large, well-connected cluster that doesn't display very well with that algorithm.