Well I do. The following Venn diagram describes the basic concepts of the theory. As far as we are being rational, classical quality means references and romantic quality means referents. The referents are sense-data, and the references are language. You may ignore the rest of the graph for now.
The following directed graph expresses an overview of the categories the metatheory is about. Note how some of the categories are rational, and others are irrational. The different categories are created by using two binary variables. One of them denotes whether the category is internalistic or externalistic, and another one whether it is rational or irrational. The arrows denote set membership. I like to think of it as “strong emergence”, but formally it suffices to say it is set membership. In the theory, these categories are called continua.
Instead of using the graph we could define these relationships with formal logic. Let us denote a continuum by {{k}_{l}{S}} so that k denotes external metaspace and l denotes rationality.
kveebarpRightarrow{{k}_{l}{S}}in{_{p}{q}{S}}
Each continuum can be split into an arbitrary amount of levels. The four continuums also form reciprocal continuum pairs, which means that the referents of each continuum are the same as the referents of some other continuum, but this continuum orders the references to those referents differently. Ordering of references is modeled as subsethood in the following directed acyclic graph:
Note that in the graph I have split each continuum into four levels. This is arbitrary. The following formula defines m levels.
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That is the structure of the theory. Now, as for theorems, what kind of theorems would you like? I’ve already arrived at the conclusion that knowledge by description consists of members of the rational continua, and knowledge by acquaintance (aka. gnosis) consists of members of the irrational continua. But that is mainstream philosophy. Maybe you would be more interested of a formal model of “maps” and “territories”, as these concepts are used frequently by you. Yudkowsky says:
Of course, it is a severe error to say that a phenomenon is precise or vague, a case of what Jaynes calls the Mind Projection Fallacy (Jaynes 1996). Precision or vagueness is a property of maps, not territories. Rather we should ask if the price in the supermarket stays constant or shifts about. A hypothesis of the “vague” sort is a good description of a price that shifts about. A precise map will suit a constant territory.
In the LW lingo, continua are “maps” and romantic quality is the “territory”. Maps that form reciprocal pairs are maps about the same territory, but the projection is different—compare it to polar coordinates as opposed to rectangular coordinates. Two maps that do not form reciprocal pairs are about different territories. The different territories could could be called natural and transcendental. Insofar as we are being rational, the former is the domain of empirical science, the latter the domain of pure maths.
The merit of this theory is that irrational things, which are called subjective or mystical, are defined in relation to rational things. The ontology of irrational things is constructed by ordering the references to the referents oppositely than they are ordered in the ontology of rational things. You can see the inversion of order from the latter graph. As you can see, subjective references consist of various kinds of beliefs, and mystical references consist of various kinds of synchronicities. These are irrational, which roughly means that no argument suffices to justify their existence, but their existence is obvious.
Your theory seems completely arbitrary to me and I can only stare in perplexity at the graphs you build on top of it, but moving on:
I’ve already arrived at the conclusion that knowledge by description consists of members of the rational continua, and knowledge by acquaintance (aka. gnosis) consists of members of the irrational continua. But that is mainstream philosophy.
Really? Maybe you should restate it all in mainstream terms and you won’t look crazier than a bug in a rug.
Incidentally, would I be correct in guessing that Robert Pirsig never replied to you?
That quotation looked crazy to me too. But maybe it’s a way of saying “experience is analog, symbols are discrete”. Tuukka’s system looks like a case study in how a handful of potentially valid insights can be buried under a structure made of wordplay (multiple uses of “irrational”); networks of concepts in which formal structures are artificially repeated but the actual relations between concepts are fatally vague (his big flowchart); and a severe misuse of mathematical objects and propositions in an attempt to be rigorous.
When an ordinary crackpot does something like this, they’ve sealed themselves into an earnest personal theory of everything, and the only way out would be for someone smarter to come along, decode their work, and patiently isolate and explain all the methodological fallacies, something which never happens. Occasionally you get someone who constructs their system in the awareness that it’s a product of their own mind and not just an objective depiction of the facts as they were found—someone who knowingly creates a crackpot synthesis out of choice, rather than just being driven to do so by unexamined compulsions. That’s less pitiful, but it’s still annoying. I’m not sure where Tuukka lies on this spectrum.
ETA In retrospect I regret the somewhat abusive character of this description. But I believe the bitter fact to be that Tuukka needs help in precisely the sense that I said will never happen. Even though he talks about all sorts of very interesting topics, what he says about them is mostly idiosyncratic interlocking nonsense. The aspiration to discover and convey truth, in a hostile and uncomprehending environment, has produced, as if by perverse chemical reaction, a set of exterior traits which serve to repel precisely the people he wants to attract. Having written his sequel to Pirsig he now needs to outgrow that act as soon as possible, and acquire some genuine expertise in an intersubjectively recognized domain, so that he has people to talk with and not just talk at.
But maybe it’s a way of saying “experience is analog, symbols are discrete”.
It doesn’t seem likely to me. The quotation contains “continua” twice (I assume that would be the “analog”) but I can’t find anything that could be plausibly interpreted as referring to either discreetness or experience. How did you arrive to your suggested interpretation?
How did you arrive to your suggested interpretation?
The jargon of “knowledge by acquaintance” and “knowledge by description” comes from Bertrand Russell. Knowledge by acquaintance is “direct” or “experiential” knowledge, such as knowledge of a pain or other sensation that you’re having. Knowledge by description is second-hand knowledge obtained by processing a proposition, e.g. your knowledge of my pain on the basis of what I tell you about it.
What I was picking up on in Tuukka’s statement was that the irrationals are uncountable whereas the rationals are countable. So the rationals have the cardinality of a set of discrete combinatorial structures, like possible sentences in a language, whereas the irrationals have the cardinality of a true continuum, like a set of possible experiences, if you imagined qualia to be genuinely real-valued properties and e.g. the visual field to be a manifold in the topological sense. It would be a way of saying “descriptions are countable in number, experiences are uncountable”.
Well I do. The following Venn diagram describes the basic concepts of the theory. As far as we are being rational, classical quality means references and romantic quality means referents. The referents are sense-data, and the references are language. You may ignore the rest of the graph for now.
The following directed graph expresses an overview of the categories the metatheory is about. Note how some of the categories are rational, and others are irrational. The different categories are created by using two binary variables. One of them denotes whether the category is internalistic or externalistic, and another one whether it is rational or irrational. The arrows denote set membership. I like to think of it as “strong emergence”, but formally it suffices to say it is set membership. In the theory, these categories are called continua.
Instead of using the graph we could define these relationships with formal logic. Let us denote a continuum by {{k}_{l}{S}} so that k denotes external metaspace and l denotes rationality.
kveebarpRightarrow{{k}_{l}{S}}in{_{p}{q}{S}}
Each continuum can be split into an arbitrary amount of levels. The four continuums also form reciprocal continuum pairs, which means that the referents of each continuum are the same as the referents of some other continuum, but this continuum orders the references to those referents differently. Ordering of references is modeled as subsethood in the following directed acyclic graph:
Note that in the graph I have split each continuum into four levels. This is arbitrary. The following formula defines m levels.
That is the structure of the theory. Now, as for theorems, what kind of theorems would you like? I’ve already arrived at the conclusion that knowledge by description consists of members of the rational continua, and knowledge by acquaintance (aka. gnosis) consists of members of the irrational continua. But that is mainstream philosophy. Maybe you would be more interested of a formal model of “maps” and “territories”, as these concepts are used frequently by you. Yudkowsky says:
In the LW lingo, continua are “maps” and romantic quality is the “territory”. Maps that form reciprocal pairs are maps about the same territory, but the projection is different—compare it to polar coordinates as opposed to rectangular coordinates. Two maps that do not form reciprocal pairs are about different territories. The different territories could could be called natural and transcendental. Insofar as we are being rational, the former is the domain of empirical science, the latter the domain of pure maths.
The merit of this theory is that irrational things, which are called subjective or mystical, are defined in relation to rational things. The ontology of irrational things is constructed by ordering the references to the referents oppositely than they are ordered in the ontology of rational things. You can see the inversion of order from the latter graph. As you can see, subjective references consist of various kinds of beliefs, and mystical references consist of various kinds of synchronicities. These are irrational, which roughly means that no argument suffices to justify their existence, but their existence is obvious.
How do you like it?
Your theory seems completely arbitrary to me and I can only stare in perplexity at the graphs you build on top of it, but moving on:
Really? Maybe you should restate it all in mainstream terms and you won’t look crazier than a bug in a rug.
Incidentally, would I be correct in guessing that Robert Pirsig never replied to you?
That quotation looked crazy to me too. But maybe it’s a way of saying “experience is analog, symbols are discrete”. Tuukka’s system looks like a case study in how a handful of potentially valid insights can be buried under a structure made of wordplay (multiple uses of “irrational”); networks of concepts in which formal structures are artificially repeated but the actual relations between concepts are fatally vague (his big flowchart); and a severe misuse of mathematical objects and propositions in an attempt to be rigorous.
When an ordinary crackpot does something like this, they’ve sealed themselves into an earnest personal theory of everything, and the only way out would be for someone smarter to come along, decode their work, and patiently isolate and explain all the methodological fallacies, something which never happens. Occasionally you get someone who constructs their system in the awareness that it’s a product of their own mind and not just an objective depiction of the facts as they were found—someone who knowingly creates a crackpot synthesis out of choice, rather than just being driven to do so by unexamined compulsions. That’s less pitiful, but it’s still annoying. I’m not sure where Tuukka lies on this spectrum.
ETA In retrospect I regret the somewhat abusive character of this description. But I believe the bitter fact to be that Tuukka needs help in precisely the sense that I said will never happen. Even though he talks about all sorts of very interesting topics, what he says about them is mostly idiosyncratic interlocking nonsense. The aspiration to discover and convey truth, in a hostile and uncomprehending environment, has produced, as if by perverse chemical reaction, a set of exterior traits which serve to repel precisely the people he wants to attract. Having written his sequel to Pirsig he now needs to outgrow that act as soon as possible, and acquire some genuine expertise in an intersubjectively recognized domain, so that he has people to talk with and not just talk at.
It doesn’t seem likely to me. The quotation contains “continua” twice (I assume that would be the “analog”) but I can’t find anything that could be plausibly interpreted as referring to either discreetness or experience. How did you arrive to your suggested interpretation?
The jargon of “knowledge by acquaintance” and “knowledge by description” comes from Bertrand Russell. Knowledge by acquaintance is “direct” or “experiential” knowledge, such as knowledge of a pain or other sensation that you’re having. Knowledge by description is second-hand knowledge obtained by processing a proposition, e.g. your knowledge of my pain on the basis of what I tell you about it.
What I was picking up on in Tuukka’s statement was that the irrationals are uncountable whereas the rationals are countable. So the rationals have the cardinality of a set of discrete combinatorial structures, like possible sentences in a language, whereas the irrationals have the cardinality of a true continuum, like a set of possible experiences, if you imagined qualia to be genuinely real-valued properties and e.g. the visual field to be a manifold in the topological sense. It would be a way of saying “descriptions are countable in number, experiences are uncountable”.
Unless I missed something, I’m only seeing one out of the three things he was stating were necessary.