Yes. That is the logical induction I was talking about.
dsatan
Karma: 50
If you’re so interested in logical induction, aren’t you already assuming that classical mathematics is The One True Logic? Why is that? Why not look at ordinary mathematics internal to a topos and then ask what logical induction looks like for that?
And as for reflection, a topos with a NNO has (higher order) primitive recursion so your claim about not having reflection is confusing.
And lastly, your title doesn’t match your thesis. All you show is that you can’t directly do probability in toposes. Category theory is extraordinarily useful for many areas of mathematics in general, and is more than just a language. See Beck’s monadicity theorem, the adjoint functor theorem, the small object argument, Gabriel Ulmer duality, and so on for nontrivial results in category theory.
Maybe you shouldn’t base your entire identity around doing probability theory. At the very least, epistemology spills far beyond the purview of probability theory.
I think an important point here and with noticing a lot of things in general, is that the taste of lotus is somatically present—you can feel it in your body. I think that if one practices becoming attuned to the physical sensations in your body then a lot of things become available to Noticing. There is just *so much* that goes on in the body when you do things. This is a generalization of a key insight of Focusing—it’s not just beliefs that you can get a handle on through your body. Action and decision are present there too (initiate the action of touching a hot stove or the soup in someone else’s bowl and see what happens; compare “reach for that pen” with “stand up and do a backflip”; the Alexander Technique deals with objects in this layer too). In particular, the pull of the social web can be felt here, as well as a lot of social stuff in the moment like status (see Impro).
As someone who independently came across this, the generative seed for this idea was using Focusing on why I kept scrolling down on Facebook (which I’m happy is an example here).
Crushing what I say into some theory of bayesian epistemology is a great way of destroying the meaning of what I say.
But to try to fit it into your theory without losing as much information as your attempt: humans, by the evolved structure of our brains, especially by the nature of human perception and decision making, have a built in ontology—the way we cut out things in our perception as things, and the way we see them as being things which are relevant to our involvements in the world. You can’t get rid of it, you can only build on top of it. Mistakenly taking reductionistic materialism as ontology (which is not an action you can take short of completely changing the fundamental structure of your brain) only adds its complexity on top of the ontology that is already there. It’s like using a windows emulator to do everything instead of using the OS the emulator is running in.
If you tried to turn your statement into an actual mathematical statement, and tried to prove it, you would see that there is a large gap between the mathematics and the actual psychology of humans, such as yourself.
I think one of the biggest things Peterson has to offer is a way out of many of the fake frameworks that rationalists hold, by offering a fake framework which takes Being as primary, and actually being able to deal with Being directly (which becomes possible with a fake framework which permits the concept of being) is a pathway to Looking.
Parent commenter is doing some pretty serious cherry picking. 2) and 3) can basically be ignored. 2) comes from a 2013 deleted tweet which the parent commenter has pulled off of archive, and 3) from a 2011 debate which is anyways misrepresented by the parent commenter. He never lays out something that can unambiguously be taken to be quantum mysticism, even though he starts out talking about copenhagen. “consciousness creates reality” does actually correspond to a reasonable position which can be found by being a little charitable and spending some time trying to interpret what he says. 1 and 4 depend on his rather complex epistemology, “I really do believe this though it is complicated to explain,” he prefaces the DNA comment with.
I would be much more concerned if something like 2) were something he repeated all the time rather than promptly deleted, and was central to some of his main theses.
When is something a misinterpretation of sensory input? When the interpretation is not rendered in terms of the laws of physics which your alternative implies or...?
A better hypothesis is “in a metaphysics which takes Being as primary, which is not in any way contrary to science (since science does not imply a metaphysics like scientific realism or reductive and eliminative materialism), mystical experience is permissible and not contrary to anything we know”.
It’s hard to get Peterson second-hand. I recommend actually watching some of his lectures
While Peterson is a bit sloppy when he talks about truth, the notion of truth that he is working with is not simply his own construction to write some bottom line. There is a lot of literature of pragmatist analyses of truth and belief that roughly align with what he is saying and I would consider closer to what is the nature of truth (truer about truth) than the correspondence theory of truth presented in the sequences.
I recommend Peirce’s Making our Ideas Clear, Putnam’s Corresponding with Reality, and James’s The Will to Believe. Peirce and James can easily be found free online by searching and I can PM you Putnam if you want it.
All of those frameworks are fake in the sense that introvert isn’t a basic physical entity the same way an up quark is.
The reductive materialism implicit in this is as fake as introverts—possibly even more fake because unless you have a particle accelerator on hand, “everything is made of quarks” translates 100% to hypotheticals rather than anything you can actually do or see in the world; and in the presence of a particle accelerator, that 100% is reduced by epsilon.
There are a lot of different people who talk about similar thing. Impro was mentioned. There’s also Jung. They are probably interrelated and have similar influences. I’d be very wary of Chaos Magick in who it seems to explicitly break down useful psychic walls for the sake of freedom and power (eg. rejecting virtue).
Pretty sure I have a handle on it now.
Ah, I remember having the distinct impression of drawing a blank when reading that sentence. Your further description helps, but it’s feeling a little vague. I think I can kind of see it in my memory of past interactions, but I don’t think I have enough of a handle on it that it seems like I could have done much differently. The referent of “not-knowing,” and what it is not-knowing of is fuzzy/not so clear to me (though as I am writing all of this, it is becoming clearer and clearer). Is it not-knowing of how the scene will unfold? Of what the scene is? Of the roles we are playing? All of the above?
This does give me something that I can pay attention for in future social situations though and I’m pretty sure I can discover how to look at these things now, especially to see if I can achieve any of this:
After a while, I claim, you can sort of “get” what the underlying patterns are, and how to act on them from outside your character. And how to lean into your character in order to produce the right effects on the web strands around you. And where you, the player, have room to reach for and tug on a different role for yourself. And what the consequences are for the web as a whole.
In my usage, “fake” doesn’t necessarily mean “wrong”. It means something more like “illusory”. The point of a framework, to me, is that it pumps intuition and highlights clusters and possible Gears. But all of that is coming from your mind, not the territory.
Like, it’s worth remembering that you don’t see molecules. When you look at a glass of water and think “Oh, that’s dihydrogen monoxide”, if you can’t tell that that’s a thought you’re adding and not what you’re seeing, then it’s very easy for you to get confused.
I’d just like to point out that this leads to a interpretation of map and territory that is really weird from the perspective of the bayesian-skeptical correspondence theory given in the sequences. If I were to give a name pointing at what this metaphysics is, I’d say something like “direct realism”. This is not to say that it is wrong.
Supposing I know how to Look, when and where do I Look, and what might I see? For my own purposes, I want to get a better idea of what my own role Looks like, see where I can move within the slack that I have, and see where tension in the web is coming from so that I can create more slack if needed.
I understand, thank you.
I really really don’t think you have. And I really think that this interaction has been a net negative for you. You have not demonstrated at any point that you have understood me. You have, in fact, failed to engage with me at all save to dismiss what I’ve written out of hand and call it absurd. Do you realize how stressful this interaction has been for me? How I am putting myself out there and you just attack in poor faith? I don’t really get the sense that you are even trying to understand me. This comment of yours makes me feel dismissed, as if you think I’m just some crazy person and you want to get away and ignore me but do so politely.
I do not feel that everything has been said, that there are things I need to clarify. So I will:
My critique of that train of thought originating from lesswrong comes in two parts. The first is interpretation, the second is turning inwards and looking at the gears of how that interpretation actually works and behaves in the mind. To look at what it actually does rather than just what it says.
The interpretive part is this (slightly edited):
The image we are given in the sequences, in map and territory and in epistemology 101, is that light hits a thing, reflects off of your shoe, hits your retina, a signal is sent down some optical pathways, and you experience seeing your shoe. Note that there are many parts of this causal pathway that can be disrupted or corrupted. So you have the reality out there, and the person experiencing in their brain, and there is always a possibility for a causal disconnect between the territory out there, and the maps in the brain.
Since there is always a possibility of somthing interfering with that causal connection, in a way that is not observable from the perspective of the agent, no belief should have probability 1. Since believing something being real is a belief, we must conclude that the probability of something being real cannot be 1. So when we look at something, even though we have the immediate and unshakeable experience of there being a real thing, that is simply the brain truncating the precision on the probability to 1, creating a map out of sensory input. Those things that you experience are not actually the real thing, they are only the brain’s maps of the actual real things out there in inaccessible reality.
That is the whole of the interpretive part. The rest is taking that whole interpretation as an object and look at what it actually does in the mind. Looking at the gears of the interpretation. If you think I’ve misinterpreted the sequences, then it is these two paragraphs here that you must talk about, not any of the rest, because the rest is not interpretation. The way to argue against the rest of that (given agreement about interpretation here) is to actually look at what it is doing in the mind and demonstrate that it is different from my account.
a) I was saying things that I believed, but not all things you can do with words is to state true propositions. “Go wash the dishes” is not true. “Go to the kitchen and see what’s in the sink” is also not true. That is a type error. There is also a sense in which “the thing in the sink is what I call a knork” is not true if “knork” is not a word used by anyone but the person who is telling you that that think is a “knork”—if there is no larger social context for that to contradict. That last one is what I’m doing with action fields.
b) It was getting you to do things, and then pointing at the things that you subsequently experienced in doing those things. I’m trying to get you to have the realization that those things are things that are there. I’m also trying to get you to realize that those things are actually important.
So for example, the personal bubble is a thing, which is just there in the same sense as chairs are just there, which (almost) everyone has, and (almost) eveeryone has an implicit understanding of in the sense that they know how to navigate personal space and they can understand when people are too close. But they don’t stop and actually look at the thing which is the personal bubble itself and look at its experiential mechanics.
To give you an understanding of what I mean by just there, I have to point. It is not an idea so I can’t just tell you what it means, I have to get you to see it. Actually go and pick up an object somewhere around you (actually do this, don’t imagine what it’s like to do this). See how you have this immediate impression of how it being there, existing, in your hand. This immediate impression is what I mean by just there. Notice how it itself is not an idea that I can communicate to you in language. It’s something that I have to get you to experience and then point to that experience.
Back to the personal bubble, if you actually do the things that I said, which are designed to make the personal bubble come out and be tangible, you will notice that it is just there. It is just there in the same sense as whatever object you picked up was just there, but it is hard to see, like say how a certain sort of waterfowl might be hard to spot in tall brush unless you have lots of experience hunting it and spotting it.
(edit) If you were to immediately do something like say “that’s just a socially constructed phenomenon” or “that’s just something injected into my map by my brain”, you are turning your attention away from that thing and to an idea. Notice what those two “explanations” do in your mind. Where it leads your attention, and the way it gets you conceiving of things. Notice the movements in your mind between actually experiencing the thing and giving that explanation. Notice how I am again mostly getting you to do something, not making truth claims.
What is the metaphyiscal nihilism problem… Do you know the person Shminux? (edit) He’s a lesswronger from way back. He avoids unsig “real”, and “true”, and things of that sort for this very reason. His catchphrase is “it’s just a model”.
And I’m quite confident that you’ve misinterpreted or don’t understand about 70% of what I’ve said, but your rejection is all “this is absurd” so it’s hard to get anything to grab onto there.
(Edit) the entirety of my response was a mistake. You’ve dratically missed the point of all that I’ve said, missed what I was doing and latched on to only the propositional content of those sentences that I wrote. Now you’ve taken this misunderstanding as licence to reject the whole thing.
In my experience with meditation literature, and with the sort of tech bro who takes acid, becomes enlightened in some way and becomes a metta bro, the “ontologies” or explanatory frameworks that they use are most always very bad and deeply incorrect and in some cases can lead people to very dark places for a long time. However they only provide interpretation and articulation of insight, or practice instructions for finding the insight in the first place, and are not the same as that insight. I do think the various insights are still valuable, and that they are necessary (but clearly quite insufficient) for doing good philosophy (eg. finding better explanatory frameworks, among many other things).
I would say that the main benefits of enlightenment are that I have cleared out a bunch of inefficient wasted motion in my mind, a sort of mental sludge, and I have direct access to a bunch of tools for more directly working with my emotions, motivations, beliefs and thoughts and as a consequence I am a lot more sane than I was six years ago when all that was fresh. Sane in the sense of being more emotionally regulated, and a more moral person, which is more important to me, but I would also claim in the classic LW sense of having less wrong beliefs as well I guess
I also now have a philosophy that is actually practically useful in my day to day life, doesn’t make me miserable, and doesn’t function as a distraction, and meditation was necessary for this. However it is somewhere so alien to LW that you’d probably lump me in with the very bad and deeply incorrect philosophies. However, I think it was because I had already moved somewhere else from LW philosophy before getting deeper into meditation that I ended up with a partial philosophy which is roughly correct on the parts that it covers. I think the scientismic “ontologies” in which LW’s is included directly lead to bad places in their interaction with meditation.
So idk. I think it’s good, I don’t know how to direct you towards the path that I went down unless you want to engage in tens of thousands of words between us, or in a similar amount of words in works of philosophy. I find the literature unsatisfying and I’m bad at writing.
There are risks, and it’s also necessary if you want to go down certain paths seeking knowledge. ymmv