First, thanks for your detailed comments. This kind of direct engagement with the ideas as stated helps me a lot in figuring out just what the heck it is I’m trying to communicate!
Question: what actually is the definition of “axion”? How do I tell whether a given (kind of) thing is one?
First, quick note, “axia” is actually the singular, and I guess the plural in English should be either “axies” or “axias”, but I share your intuition that it sounds like a plural so my intent was to use “axia” as a mass noun. This would hardly be the first time an Anglophone abused Ancient Greek, and my notion of “correct” usage is primarily based on wikitionary.
Axia is information that resides within a subject when we draw a subject-object distinction, as opposed to evidence (I’ll replace this with a Greek word later ;-)) which is the information that resides in the object being experienced. This gets a little tricky because for conscious subjects some axia may also be evidence (where the subject becomes the object of its own experience) and evidence becomes axia (that’s the whole point of updating and is the nature of experience), so axia is information “at rest” inside a subject to be used as priors during experience.
the consequences for me of thinking there is a hungry tiger in the room are very different from those of wishing there were one, for instance. So we have these things that are diverse but have some common features, and this is equally true whether you give them different names like “belief” and “desire” or call them all “axia”. I’m not really seeing much practical difference,
To me the point is that beliefs, desires, and the rest have a common structure that let us see the differences between beliefs, desires, etc. as differences of content rather than differences of kind. That is, beliefs are axia that contain information that describe claims about the world and desires are axia that contain information that describe claims about how we would like the world to be. That I can describe subclasses of axia in this way obviously implies that their content is rich enough that we can identify patterns within their content and talk about categories that match those patterns, but the important shift is in thinking of beliefs, aliefs, desires, etc. not as separate kinds of things but as different expressions of the same thing.
Maybe that seems uninteresting but it goes a long way in addressing what we need to understand to do philosophical work, in particular how much stuff we need to assume about the world in order to be able to say useful things about it, because we can be mistaken about what we really mean to point at when we say “belief”, “desire”, etc. but are less likely to be mistaken when we make the target we point at larger.
Perhaps we can try an actually concrete example? Suppose there is a thing I need to do, which is scary and bothersome and I don’t like thinking about it, so I put it off. I want to understand this situation. I could say “I believe that I need to do this, but I alieve that if I pay attention to it I will get hurt and that if I ignore it it will go away”. What would you have me think instead, and why would it be better? (One possibility: you want me to classify all those things as axia and then attend to more detailed specifics of each. If so, I’d like to understand why that’s better than classifying them as aliefs/beliefs and then attending to the more detailed specifics.)
So you seem to already get what I’m going to say, but I’ll say it anyway for clarity. If all these things are axia, then what you have is not a disagreement between what you believe and what you alieve and instead straight up contradictory axia. The resolution then is not a matter of aligning belief and alief or reweighting their importance in how you decide things, but instead to synthesize the contradictory axia. Thus I might think on why do I at once think I need to do this but also think it will hurt and hurt can be avoided by ignorance. Now these claims all stand on equal footing to be understood, each likely contributing something towards the complete understanding and ultimately the integration of axia that had previously been left ununified within you-as-subject.
The advantages are that you remove artificial boundaries in your ontology that may make it implicitly difficult to conceive of these axia being integrateable and work instead with a general process of axia synthesis that can be trained and reused in many cases rather than just in those between axia we can identify as “belief” and “alief”.
First, thanks for your detailed comments. This kind of direct engagement with the ideas as stated helps me a lot in figuring out just what the heck it is I’m trying to communicate!
First, quick note, “axia” is actually the singular, and I guess the plural in English should be either “axies” or “axias”, but I share your intuition that it sounds like a plural so my intent was to use “axia” as a mass noun. This would hardly be the first time an Anglophone abused Ancient Greek, and my notion of “correct” usage is primarily based on wikitionary.
Axia is information that resides within a subject when we draw a subject-object distinction, as opposed to evidence (I’ll replace this with a Greek word later ;-)) which is the information that resides in the object being experienced. This gets a little tricky because for conscious subjects some axia may also be evidence (where the subject becomes the object of its own experience) and evidence becomes axia (that’s the whole point of updating and is the nature of experience), so axia is information “at rest” inside a subject to be used as priors during experience.
To me the point is that beliefs, desires, and the rest have a common structure that let us see the differences between beliefs, desires, etc. as differences of content rather than differences of kind. That is, beliefs are axia that contain information that describe claims about the world and desires are axia that contain information that describe claims about how we would like the world to be. That I can describe subclasses of axia in this way obviously implies that their content is rich enough that we can identify patterns within their content and talk about categories that match those patterns, but the important shift is in thinking of beliefs, aliefs, desires, etc. not as separate kinds of things but as different expressions of the same thing.
Maybe that seems uninteresting but it goes a long way in addressing what we need to understand to do philosophical work, in particular how much stuff we need to assume about the world in order to be able to say useful things about it, because we can be mistaken about what we really mean to point at when we say “belief”, “desire”, etc. but are less likely to be mistaken when we make the target we point at larger.
So you seem to already get what I’m going to say, but I’ll say it anyway for clarity. If all these things are axia, then what you have is not a disagreement between what you believe and what you alieve and instead straight up contradictory axia. The resolution then is not a matter of aligning belief and alief or reweighting their importance in how you decide things, but instead to synthesize the contradictory axia. Thus I might think on why do I at once think I need to do this but also think it will hurt and hurt can be avoided by ignorance. Now these claims all stand on equal footing to be understood, each likely contributing something towards the complete understanding and ultimately the integration of axia that had previously been left ununified within you-as-subject.
The advantages are that you remove artificial boundaries in your ontology that may make it implicitly difficult to conceive of these axia being integrateable and work instead with a general process of axia synthesis that can be trained and reused in many cases rather than just in those between axia we can identify as “belief” and “alief”.