Well, I wouldn’t say “guide”. RToT is simply a framework that lets us express epistemological concepts while avoiding self-referential paradoxes.
Paradoxically, we can also know of that which we don’t know, in a limited sense, which is how we can derive what we already know, which is based on that which informs us what we don’t know. So, the word KNOW does not denote knowledge, but assumes it. To know something is to assume it.
Well, this is a bit loose. To know something is to accept an unfounded assumption that allows you to derive said knowledge.
I’m kind of with Descartes on this one. If I think I can tell the difference, then I can. Trust your own brain over any “logic” suggested that contradicts it.
E-E-E-E-E-E-E-Emmanuel Kant was a real pissant
who was very rarely stable
Heidegger, Heidegger, was a boozy beggar
who could drink you under the table
David Hume could outconsume
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
who was just as sloshed as Schlegel
There’s nothing Nietzche couldn’t teach ya
‘Bout the raisin’ of the wrist
Socrates himself was permanently pissed
John Stuart Mill of his own free will
On a half a pint of chianti was particularly ill
Plato they say could stick it away
Half a pint of whiskey every day
Aristotle, Aristotle was a beggar for the bottle
Hobbes was fond of his dram
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart
“I drink, therefore I am” !
There’s nothing Nietzche couldn’t teach ya
‘Bout the raisin’ of the wrist -
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he’s pissed!!
Philosophically speaking, the only thing YOU can truly know is that YOUR mind exists. ALL else may be a perfect illusion.
Amazingly, I was given the answer to that one by a 13-year-old boy (I was college classmate of his brother, and we were having a bull session at their home at the time).
Quite simply, there is no possible distinction you can make between “reality” (whatever that means) and a perfect illusion – because the perfect illusion maps the underlying reality, albeit in an illusory code. But since you know nothing but the illusory code, you deal with the underlying reality through it as though it were real. And therefore it is real.
::: Looks forward to SM and ARL taking that apart piece by piece :::
Well - my reality is illusion. And so is yours, so take that grin off your face.
The monitor I see isn’t the monitor I’m looking at. It’s my brain’s interpretation of the way coloured light reflects and is emitted from the monitor. You will “see” it in a different way.
When I “sense” an object, I’m not actually experiencing that object. I’m experiencing a series of electronic and chemical impulses that cause my brain to react a certain way. My “reality” hence is different to your “reality”.
The question is to what extent we can prove that the realities coincide. What we’re showing here is that we can’t prove diddly-squat.
pan
Glad this made threadspotting, kabbes. 
Polycarp, because there is no way to tell the difference between what you call the “perfect illusion” and whatever reality is there, it is almost a moot point, wouldn’t you say?
But anyway, there was yet another point I was hoping to raise here that came into my mind recently (though I blieve SM is away for the week, so we’ll see what kabbes can do!).
Language is one, big, long, hairy tautology. Every word is defined in terms of every other word. Is it possible for us to accurately create a non-self-refrential mainframe based on any language?
It goes deeper than just stating that, “Every definition is a tautology.” Inside every tautology of a definition are a whole slew of tautologies. We look up a word in the dictionary. The definition is made up of words. If we then try and look up those words, one by one, we are led to another set of words that we must look up. And so on.
Language never bottoms out, in other words.
I have a hard time feeling that we can accurately describe a system of thought not based on circular reasoning at the base level. It is more than just semantics to say, “What do you mean by that.” We cannot simply “define” language… even a mathematical language which we would think avoids this problem, IMO, doesn’t and cannot because we understand it in terms of our language.
What am I, if anything, missing here? My uneasiness about RTOT styled epistemology is large.
This is largely where Descartes was coming from…that we could, essentially, doubt all evidence and all facts. We could even doubt what we were thinking, He felt, though, that we could not doubt that we were thinking.
This quote is illustrative of my feeling that when we model reality, reality is the model(that it makes no sense to say otherwise). Spiritus and I are likely to get into that one very soon, but anyone willing to open up a thread dedicated to it is welcome.
Hey - I felt that if any thread deserved a special mention, this one did. Spiritus and arl discuss the undiscussable. Unmissable.
Now. Where to start.
'k first the model thing. When you model a situation, you attempt to strip out the unnecessary detail. Thus if we are modelling the force of gravity on a ball, we don’t need to know that the ball is blue.
The more sophisticated the answer we need, the more detail we need to put into our model. For example, high school mechanics will model a car as a point, or possibly a ball. However when theoretical physicists start worrying about turbulent airflow they need to consider its actual shape.
So far, so you knew. What’s my point? Well, this: the complexity needed for a useful model grows faster than the complexity of the system being modelled.
Now that is a very woolly and non-rigorous phrase, but I hope you’ll accept it. It is, after all, intuitive and so at least not particularly controversial.
There is a branch of maths devoted to studying models and it is a branch I am woefully unacquainted with. Nevertheless two results I do know. The first is the sentence above (made more rigorous). The second regards the modelling of reality (and finally we come back to the thread).
It seems that what with the universe being infinite and all (cough cough), it cannot be modelled with anything less complex than itself. That means that any model we make of “true” reality must be that reality. Bummer, eh?
So, your quote
turns out to be quite true.
(I note however that isn’t what Spiritus was saying. Ol’ SM was saying that whenever you model something less complex than total reality, the model is not the thing. And this is true too.)
Anyway, to complete the thought - since any complete model of reality is reality, if we have a successful total illusion indistinguishable from reality it must be reality.
I think.
I think that this is what you were saying in response to Polycarp. But I wanted to spell it out a little more.
Of course just because it is reality, it doesn’t mean that our perception of it is reality. Because our perception is little more than an incomplete model of reality. And this is the point I was trying to bring out with my last post.
And so to the other point you made:
Succinctly put. Funny enough, I agree with this. What is more it is one of those annoying little problems I myself have wasted considerable time worrying about. Here’s another related thought: how do I know that the language I am using is the same as the language you are using? It’s all illusion anyway (see my last post) and the potential layers for misinterpretation of reality are manyfold.
I guess that all language starts with the nouns. I see a tree - I call it a tree. Somewhere along the line we form an agreement that the tree is called a tree. There is, of course, a problem right there in the fact that the word “tree” is not a tree, merely linguistic currency that stops us from having to go fetch a tree to show what we are talking about every time we want to talk about trees. But my brain’s neural impulse reaction to the light reflecting from the tree may be totally different to yours for all I know. Our experience of the tree will be different and the word is insufficient to portray that experience.
But assuming that we are able to name the nouns, verbs are presumably next. Then adjectives and adverbs, pronouns and so on. This way they are all defined in concrete terms rather than in terms of eachother. (I can show you what “run” means, I don’t have to define it in terms of other words.)
In summary: whilst my dictionary might claim that a tree is a “perennial plant with a single woody self-supporting stem or trunk usually unbranched for some distance above ground”, this is only because it is incapable of extending a finger and pointing at a tree.
And so the cycle is broken. Probably.
The language of maths works in a similar way, except that the axioms are more explicit. Elementary definitions are built on those axioms and further definitions branch from there.
But we do need those axioms, just as we need the actual tree. I rather think this is the point, no? That epistimologies cannot exist within themselves as complete and consistent. That a set cannot contain itself. That one cannot use an epistimological member to determine the epistimology. It seems to me in what you have said, arl, that you are comfortable with this - you just don’t realise it yet.
pan
(ps apologies for the relative lack of coherance. Sadly I am no Spiritus when it comes to these explanations)
Hmm. No doubt we’ve started mucking things around again, largely thanks to my form of thought which, in itself, is somewhat mucky. You do explain things well enough, though.
I can grasp that, largely, language might be (and probably is) constructed and referential to real world objects, and that dictionaries are largely a matter of convenience, based on a number of assumptions about what people have first-hand experience in rather than the definitive version of expression (and who would have thought that we would not call a dictionary definitive @ SDMB??)
I largely feel that much is learned through “point and [mentally]click” teaching. This is a tree, or a cow, or a bad Elvis impersonator. The words are merely sounds, to be sure, whose only criteria be that they are consistent to the referred objects.
But when we speak of things noncorporeal, like thought, thought structures, reasoning, epistemology, ontology, and all things New York (ha-ha), we run out of things to point at or with.
The realist platform of concept formation is a shakey one, I think, when it comes to the immaterial things. (I also think that adjectives are much more abstract than verbs, and might be a bit difficult to point to if possible at all).
Try it on yourself, actually. Tell yourself, “This is me thinking,” but say it out loud, as if explaining it.
“This is me thinking.”
“What, you mean talking while moving your hands?”
“No, no. Thinking, with your head.”
“So thinking is a synonym for talking?”
“No, no. What you tell yourself without talking.”
“But you just said, ‘This is me thinking.’ So you weren’t thinking, were you, if thought is what you tell yourself without talking?”
The exasperation level of a literal, realist conversation about abstract principles is one that, I feel, is largely beyond my patience. I got so annoyed just thinking about having that conversation, nonetheless typing it out.
At any rate, I don’t feel that philosophy can be placed on such a secure foundation. There is nothing to point to apart from the dictionary itself. As such, we’re basing our epistemology on such a foundation as tautological definitions, not a realist/material platform.
Well, let me correct that. It can be put on a very secure platform by forcing it to do something that the language we created with cannot do: we can make it be non-self-referential. But then we have, at the base level, began to model understanding of abstract principles poorly IMO. (how do you know this, though? shut up shut up shut up :))
It may also be put on a secure platform by accepting the tautologies there, along with the problems they bring. I choose this latter option, really. It may be useful to argue about systems styled after the theory of types and order and such, but I feel that it is largely illusory to assume this is removing any of the problems we find with circularity.
I guess this leads me to a tie-in with the morality thread that died, I felt, prematurely. I mentioned that with my semi-rigid morality, if there was ever a conflict between me and the system, I was wrong. Interestingly enough I seem to be arguing the opposite here. Not intentionally, but I am stating that our epistemology should reflect our own thoughts (unless we devise one which has nothing to do with thought, not my cup of tea). To parallel my other argument, though, the largely successful style of RToT set theory should lead me to conclude that we should, in fact, change the way we intuitively form concepts.
Thank Eris I don’t have children, I swear. They would probably become my philosophical guinea pigs. 
But then I could cite myself… “As I have conclusively demonstrated with my own children, contructing an explicit epistemology without self-referentiality leads to, at the individual level, a propensity for animal abuse and vegetarianism. Since these are largely incompatible, I conclude that such a method of thought structure is not appropriate to man.” haha
Though not, it seems, in time to enjoy my first appearance in threadspotting. sigh Timing never was my forte.
on perfect illusion
This really becomes a question of phenomenology. We directly perceive only neurological signals. Thus, illusion == reality can be interpreted on multiple levels. Assume that our perceptions are directly manipulated to perfectly simulate the “objective Universe”.
[ul]
[li]The neurological signals we interpret are identical. Our directly perceived reality is unchanged.[/li][li]The “picture” our brains create to explain the neurological signals remains unchanged. This “illusion” is independent of the cause of our neurological signals, so long as the content remains the same. This reality is illusion in either case.[/li][li]The objective referent for our perceptions is changed (assuming that we are not currently living in an illusion, of course). We have no way of ever determining this. At this level, “illusion” is not “reality” to the extent that our illusion does not correspond (even as a simplified model) to the referent for our neulogical signals.[/li][/ul]
On language
I recently read Borges Harvard lectures on poetry, so I find his ideas are fresh in my mind. The idea that every word is a tautology is a fallacy borne of the modern dictionary. In a way, it is related to Whitehead’s Fallacy of the Perfect Dictionary. [sub]digression – arl, if you haven’t delved into process philosophy/theology yet, you might find it entertaining.[/sub]
We cannot truly know how the first words were devised. The noun explanation seems intuitive, but so do explanations for emotive signals, abstract labels (danger!), etc. Further abstract concepts can evolve in a number of ways. If you enjoy etymology, you will soon find that many concrete nouns become abstracted to represent a particulkar quality of the original. Threat, for instance, began as an Old English word for “an angry crowd”. the same process is seen in the increasingly abstract adjectives: glad once meant “polished”, dreary meant bloodstained. It is an open question whether when an old Norseman said thunor he meant the rumbling sound or the god. If every word is a metaphor, is the hammer-wielding god the symbol or the symbolized?
I would argue that both meanings are metaphorical. When we utter a semene (an ugly word, but I do not agree that words are the basic unit of linguistic meaning) we are using the sounds to symbolize a mental image. That image may be concrete or abstract. In poetry, the image will also carry an emotive content. The dictionary leads us to emphasize only the first: language as a symbolic algebra. But I think the poetic values should not be minimized. In fact, I think the unity of emotion & image that poetry strives for is closer to the heart of language than the integrated symbolism of the dictionary.
I find myself having to avoid a long digression into aesthetics, so let me just observe that hearing my wife say I love you has everything to do with emotional impact and nothing to do with ontological questions of identity. Words are symbols; they can also be triggers.
Language bottoms out, in other words, in shared memories. Or communication does, at least. Someone once said that music is a language which can be used, can be understood, but cannot be translated. At its deepest level, language is the same. Dictionaries and etymologies and symbolic algebras are frameworks we have built to translate the untranslateable. (i.e represent our internal mental state in a manner someone else can interpret accurately, precisely and in detail.)
On models
The question of complexity is an interesting one, kabbes. I am also woefully unread in model theory, but I am confused by the result you mention. Perhaps it has to do with the definition of complexity. The little model theory I am acquainted with includes the Model Existence Theorem which states that any consistent first order logic has a finite model. Now, ZF (which, IIRC, underlies model theory, too) specifically demonstrates the existence of uncoutable sets. So, if ZF is consistent it has a countable model which proves the existence of uncountable sets.
Really, I can’t go much deeper into model theory without research. I am interested in the idea of models necessarily increasing in complexity faster than the complexity of the system being modeled, though. Can you point me to the result? I think immediately of fractal geometries and strange attractors, which seem to run counter to the idea, so my curiosity is aroused.
As to the model==modeled idea, I would simply point out that the necessity for infinite complexity in a model does not require the model to be identical to any particular infinite system. Unless, of course, you want to argue that only one infinitely complex system can exist.
arl
I remain perplexed at your resistance to RToT. When I read your arguments I keep imagining that you are saying: see, RToT doesn’t let us find a firmly grounded epistemology! We should abandone it for a muddled language that we can pretend is firmly grounded.
But I have never set forth RToT as the means for finding a perfectly grounded epistemology. In fact, I have quite explicitely argued that no such grounding is possible. RToT simply provides a framework in which that result can clearly (I thought – shows what I know, eh? ;)) be seen.
[ul]
[li]RToT eliminates nothing from ZF except for the paradoxes of self-referentialism.[/li][li]RToT cannot get you to a secure epistemology.[/li][li]Circular reasoning is not a secure basis for knowledge.[/li][li]Therefore, classical set theory cannot get you to a secure epistemology either.[/li][/ul]
You, it seems, wish to argue that the third premise is incorrect – that circular reasoning is a secure basis for knowledge. I do not know why you wish to argue this, for I doubt seriously that you agree with the consequences of such an inclusion. From the outside, it seems that you are so upset by the idea that it isn’t possible to develop a secure basis for epistemology that you will accept all manner of sloppiness in order to escape it. I am tempted to suggest you learn arabic, since the Koran is as securely based a circular epistemology as I know.
Really, though, I think you know better.
Typos abound in the above, but sememe is an ugly enough word by itself; it didn’t need my fat fingering.
You and me both remain perplexed at that. As well, it sure does seem like that’s what I’m saying. Thing is, I’m not sure what I’m saying. I know that circular reasoning is not something I would find acceptable on any other level of rational discourse. I don’t necessarily want self referentialistic ideas, don’t get me wrong, I’m just having a hard time seeing that they are possible to avoid. I think I’m not tackling the issues correctly, but its hard to be sure. I “get” most of it, in the way its been explained, and yet I am still uncomfortable with it. :shrug:
And I thought the language one was a winner for sure.
But you clearly feel we gain something from avoiding self-referentialism. I am not clear on why an unsupportable assertation is any “better” or “more clear” than a self-defining statement. I cannot reconcile that allowance of circularity with my distaste for it in other areas of discourse, so I’m really arguing against myself here in as many ways as one can.
[li]RToT eliminates nothing from ZF except for the paradoxes of self-referentialism.[/li][li]RToT cannot get you to a secure epistemology.[/li][li]Circular reasoning is not a secure basis for knowledge.[/li][li]Therefore, classical set theory cannot get you to a secure epistemology either.[/li]
These points almost make me think of the idea behind "If we include the axiom of choice, we will make no more errors than we have already committed without the axiom of choice.
What clarity do we gain?
Hmm. If I’ve said that than I do retract it. This is another “more honest math” problem here. I had the feeling that language is circular, and so anything we “know” is also circular.
But I’m not sure I wish to put forth that opinion, OR it’s opposite, anymore. The issue is really muddling my mind, haha. I’m not completely certain that language is a construct that bottoms out… we can certainly say that it isn’t RToT styled.
Or not.
Hey, you are not the first. The problem I have always seen with the “words are defined by other words” position (apart from the counter-reasoning above) is that it can have no beginning. Unless you buy the “Adam was created knowing language” idea, of course. Words defined by words seems guaranteed to be a late stage development in language.
I’m afraid you have the analogy reversed. It would more accurately be: If we accept the axiom of choice, we are guaranteed to make errors. If we do not, we can either accept the conditional nature of our knowledge or make other errors.
The clarity we gain (we? Maybe I should stop using that word) is the ability to recognize when the errors creep into our reason.
Well, I disagree strongly with the first part – the fact that languages exist seems to conclusively demonstrate that they “bottom out” at some point in human social development. Certainly, in infant development we see the early uses of “high level language” as labeling activities, but we see the early uses of vocalization as emotive signals. Neither of those are circularly dependent upon a lexicography.
No argument on the second point, though. If natural languages conformed to RToT then this statement would not be in english.
Pulled out my philosophy texts. No detailed discussion of Russell’s Theory of Types. [Praise the goddess… I’m certain I wouldn’t be up to it. ]
My understanding though, is that RToT was a failed attempt to resolve Russell’s paradox (the one with the set of all sets that are not members of themselves… so hard… MEGO). And that Godel destroyed the whole enterprise by proving that all mathematical systems must contain true statements (read: assumptions) that cannot be proved within the system. (Source: Philosophy for Beginners (Osborne’s softbound comic book, thank you thank you).)
What is unclear to me is why certain assumptions (eg a=a ) can’t simply be taken as given: must they really be considered “unsupportable”? Now, admittedly my understanding is that this approach doesn’t work very well in practice: both Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometric systems both make assumptions (about parallel lines) that are not self-evident. I don’t know whether conventional set theory makes analagous not-entirely-intuitive assumptions.
On a different note, might a contingent epistemology work? i.e. “for those who believe assumptions A, B and C, it follows that D, E and F obtain.” Hm. Maybe that’s a “non-grounded epistemology”, by definition.
Ah, I’m probably missing the point somewhere.
Nope.
RToT does, in fact, remove (not resolve) the Russell Paradox, along with other paradoxes of semantic or syntactic self-reference. What Russell failed to do was show that the RToT, by itself, provided a sufficient basis for a Peano axiomitization of arithmetic. It was a magnificent failure, though. There’s a reason that Principia Mathematica remains a seminal work even though most logicians and mathematicians disagree with the “result”.
Godel did not, by the way, prove that all mathematical systems contain valid statements which are unproveable. The requirements for expressing a Godel statement are fairly precise and have not, to my knowledge, been demonstrated as a general solution across all maths.
Russell’s failure to find a purely logical basis for arithmetic, BTW, provides a nice echo for my own contention that it is not possible to find a purely logical basis for epistemology.
Yep. So long as we understand that our framework is entirely dependent upon our beginning assumptions, and that those assumptions are unsupported and unsupportable epistemologically, then we are fine.
Personally, I find that it helps keep some of my more hubristic tendencies under control. As a general principle, I think it would do wonders to control fanaticism in all its forms. Of course, fanatics rarely start from a position of philosophical examination . . . . sigh So much for my Nobel Peace Prize.
First of all - arl, I am sorry that I never replied to your reply to my post. I can only plead that I didn’t see it until Spiritus brought this back to the surface.
And a welcome back to him it is from me, too.
Saying that, I think that Spiritus has said everything about language that I would have wanted to say, so I’ll leave it there.
Lets look at models for a sec instead, shall we?
Oh yah. Certainly I appreciate that result. I think we do have a definitional problem though and I think it comes from the difference between the complexity in creating a model and the complexity of paramters that model needs in order to provide arbirarily accurate predictive results. As the desired criterion for predictive power becomes more complex in terms of the accuracy required then number of input parameters approaches the number of outputs asymptotically, or something like that.
Now for the life of me I can’t remember how the criteria complexity is defined. This was a bewildering touch on a bewildering subject at the end of a bewildering lecture course. Furthermore I never had to revise the *^&*ing thing and as such you may be best to treat my info almost as hearsay evidence. I hopefully shoved “Model complexity” into Google and the results such as this indicate that the mathematical community aren’t that sure how to define it either.
Yeah - I think you’re being a good little pure mathematician though and thinking of derived complexity rather than implied complexity. You can make an arbitrarily complex fractal from a remarkably simple equation alright, but I don’t think that you can start with an arbitrarily complex desired result and derive an arbitrarily simple equation that will generate it. Or something like that.
Hands up time - you’re questioning me about 3 year old poorly understood maths and I have no references to look up. I could well be wrong. Sorry for muddling a fine debate with possibly misleading info.
Hmm… I’m not merely talking about an infinitely complex system though. I think there is confusion between my talking about the predictive power of the inputs vs your talking about the complexity of the output. I’m talking about an infinitely predictive model. Since my maths is failing me, I’ll try an example.
Take meterology as a pretty good example. To a large extent we understand how the weather works. The model itself is at least a reasonably simple example of simple dynamic equations. However chaotic effects mean that you need very detailed information to make any worthwhile predictions. To improve your prediction you need to improve your input data by a greater extent than the effect will be on the output. The law of diminishing returns. Your point of view: this is not an infinitely complex model since the input equations are not infinitely complex. My point of view: to produce arbitrarily detailed results you need arbitrarily detailed parameters. The complexity of the parameters needed grows faster than the complexity of the result.
I hope that I have correctly summed up your previous argument - or have I missed your point?
My point is then, analogous to the meteorological example, the universe in its entirity is the most complex set of outputs imaginable. The inputs needed to provide the outputs are nothing less than the whole universe. As such the model of the universe is the universe.
This doesn’t preclude our personal experience being an illusion. But it does preclude the whole universe being its own illusion.
Or to put it another maybe less controversial way - nothing exists outside the universe. If it did, it would also be part of the universe.
pan