WHY believe reality is intelligible?
The total is intelligible only if it's a system, all-inclusive, and perfectly integrated.
And perfect integration assumes that no two parts can each be different from the other without each entailing a difference in the other. Hence, perfect integration is possible only if all the parts are internally related by difference.
And without the constant influence of the implicit ideal of thought in the scientific search for connection beyond apparent irrelevance, that belief would probably have been dismissed a long time ago as fanaticism or even atheism.
Proof of the rationality of things is not logically possible, since it would assume that same supposedly independent rationality whose applicability is in question in trying to prove it.
But the question is not whether logic is applicable to some unexperienced object. It's whether our known world of persons and things can be understood or intelligibly construed.
If the known world of things and persons cannot be understood or intelligibly construed, then thinking is useless from the start, since the conditions of understanding could not possibly, in that case, be fulfilled. The question "Why?" would simply have no answer when it is asked about various arrangements in the system.
Even uncertainty about the answer would leave us permanently ignorant, not just about whether we can know reality, but whether there is any knowledge about reality.
Science and theory assume we can know reality. And at each successive step in thought when I ask why, I assume there's an intelligible answer, whether I find it or not.
But the desirability of something does not prove it exists. Any evidence that the world I'm trying to construe is a set of internally related parts must come from other more basic sources.
32.01
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Mind and Metasystem
Reflection is always trying to solve a problem.
To solve the problem, you have to know what the problem really is. But to know what the problem is, you have to know what questioning is. A question is a system of ideas that is trying to fix a problem in its own structure. Questioning clarifies the problem to figure out how to solve it.
Once the system of ideas is as complete as we can make it, we can construct theories. The more complete the system, the better, easier, and faster the solutions.
Wording the question well is part of the process of answering it. Very few can or do truly think. Many minds wander from the subject in hopeless reverie or they just get bored. They can't think about ideas. They may be tired or distracted or just not interested. Or they may be over-emotional. They might be insane, or just plain wierd. These things we pass by. They distort and disrupt by breaking in from the outside.
They have an importance, and some thinking is at the mercy of those factors. But thinking can can never surrender itself completely to the control of the subject-matter and it can be objectively logical, even though it can be influenced by instincts, desires, and feelings. If that were not the case, one could not know that influencing-factors fact itself.
If all thinking is governed by non-logical factors, then that statement itself is also governed by those non-logical factors, and that statement has no more claim on our acceptance than any other non-logical factor.
If we can't solve a problem, it's because of a lack of knowledge, creativity, or the will to inquire.
21.01
To solve the problem, you have to know what the problem really is. But to know what the problem is, you have to know what questioning is. A question is a system of ideas that is trying to fix a problem in its own structure. Questioning clarifies the problem to figure out how to solve it.
Once the system of ideas is as complete as we can make it, we can construct theories. The more complete the system, the better, easier, and faster the solutions.
Wording the question well is part of the process of answering it. Very few can or do truly think. Many minds wander from the subject in hopeless reverie or they just get bored. They can't think about ideas. They may be tired or distracted or just not interested. Or they may be over-emotional. They might be insane, or just plain wierd. These things we pass by. They distort and disrupt by breaking in from the outside.
They have an importance, and some thinking is at the mercy of those factors. But thinking can can never surrender itself completely to the control of the subject-matter and it can be objectively logical, even though it can be influenced by instincts, desires, and feelings. If that were not the case, one could not know that influencing-factors fact itself.
If all thinking is governed by non-logical factors, then that statement itself is also governed by those non-logical factors, and that statement has no more claim on our acceptance than any other non-logical factor.
If we can't solve a problem, it's because of a lack of knowledge, creativity, or the will to inquire.
21.01
Concrete Necessity and Human Insight
Of course we have not proved our view of the goal of thought. There can be no question of proof where the nature of proof itself is in question. All we can say is: Here is the standard and ideal that we actually use in thinking.
When we understand, it's always through a system. As our understanding grows more complete, it's always through a system of greater unity.
If the ideal seems unconvincing and artificial, consider its alternatives. Do they formulate better or worse what we mean by understanding? When we read a famous book called Ethics Geometically Demonstrated, most of us feel we are getting insight.
In the end this illumination is merely following associations.
But that explanation of understanding cannot itself be verified.
If we deny all degrees to necessity, and confine it to a set of the barest abstractions, not much insight remains. The genuineness of insight does not depend on ensuing changes in practice. Perhaps in a poem, a piece of music, or some religious experience an insight is gained that one hesitates to call understanding, because understanding has become so identified as something abstractly intellectual. But such insight is understanding, unique, limited in degree, but still with rights of its own. And to reject it as understanding on the ground of its concreteness is absurd.
If I accept the ideal of concrete necessity, these varying insights are legitimized, ordered, and appraised. If I accept any other, some insights must be excluded.
32.24
When we understand, it's always through a system. As our understanding grows more complete, it's always through a system of greater unity.
If the ideal seems unconvincing and artificial, consider its alternatives. Do they formulate better or worse what we mean by understanding? When we read a famous book called Ethics Geometically Demonstrated, most of us feel we are getting insight.
In the end this illumination is merely following associations.
But that explanation of understanding cannot itself be verified.
If we deny all degrees to necessity, and confine it to a set of the barest abstractions, not much insight remains. The genuineness of insight does not depend on ensuing changes in practice. Perhaps in a poem, a piece of music, or some religious experience an insight is gained that one hesitates to call understanding, because understanding has become so identified as something abstractly intellectual. But such insight is understanding, unique, limited in degree, but still with rights of its own. And to reject it as understanding on the ground of its concreteness is absurd.
If I accept the ideal of concrete necessity, these varying insights are legitimized, ordered, and appraised. If I accept any other, some insights must be excluded.
32.24
Thursday, August 05, 2010
Happy Birthday
May your joys today be many
And all your cares be few,
And all the years that lie ahead
Be perfect just for you.
Happy Birthday
And all your cares be few,
And all the years that lie ahead
Be perfect just for you.
Happy Birthday
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
Thursday, June 17, 2010
The State of the Artificial
In a sense, artificial intelligence boils down to a set of IFs matched to a set of THENs, with a response rule. If the user types or (eventually, a few years from now maybe) speaks x, the program responds with y. The IFs are simply a collected inventory of remarks to build the bot's mind, which will eventually function generatively as well as merely responding with straightforward statements, questions, and inferences. And this will eventually be done in a way that is indistinguishable from a human. . . .
I've been monitoring new voices as they come out, but that Mike16 is awfully close to being indistinguishable from a real human person speaking. Bandwidth is the problem for chatting in voice, understanding natural language is the biggest programming problem, but speaking it back to the user is getting very good.
An artificial intelligence program can include self-coding, analysis of universals, and metatheoretic analysis, but so far this type of thing is in its infancy, basically limited to strings of keywords, although that itself can be quite effective. I'm working on a theistic philosophy bot, but the basics can be quite tedious since you have to deal with the entire set of more realistically possible first and second moves in conversations. For example, think of a bot asking the user "Does God exist?" or "Do you believe in God?" You first have to think of all the usual or typical responses, and then provide responses for each one. But then comes the second user response to your first response, so you have to build secondary responses to those, etc. For a stunning example of what happened when a real person conversed with one of the first chatterbots in the mid-60s, check out http://www.cheapersunglass
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
God and Other Unquestioned Authorities
The ultimacy and decisiveness of reason is itself just as vulnerable as the existence of God. That one ought to “justify” one’s thought is to me just another religious-like commandment. If someone does not buy into the god-level authority of reason, especially pertaining to universal and ultimate domains of predication themselves, there is no possible logically prior inferential warrant.
Only assuming logic and reason makes logical priority possible and necessary, so there is nothing possibly logically prior, in the sense of more inferentially basic, if logic itself is questioned. One can end up *appealling* to some kind of pragmatics of intellectuality, but that’s not a logical appeal unless it is simply begging the question all over again: namely, whether logic or general reason have any god-like authority over one’s thinking, and this is just as questionable in any other proposed authority, hardly limited to the God belief.
These points and any other possible points that I am making in this writing are themselves subject to the same problems, since they too depend on a wholesale acceptance of some core of a logical/rational ideal, nonlocal obligation relations between rational standards and each mind, the preferential value of inquiry, reason, etc.
But at that level what can be argued against them, and what need is there to justify them?
Only assuming logic and reason makes logical priority possible and necessary, so there is nothing possibly logically prior, in the sense of more inferentially basic, if logic itself is questioned. One can end up *appealling* to some kind of pragmatics of intellectuality, but that’s not a logical appeal unless it is simply begging the question all over again: namely, whether logic or general reason have any god-like authority over one’s thinking, and this is just as questionable in any other proposed authority, hardly limited to the God belief.
These points and any other possible points that I am making in this writing are themselves subject to the same problems, since they too depend on a wholesale acceptance of some core of a logical/rational ideal, nonlocal obligation relations between rational standards and each mind, the preferential value of inquiry, reason, etc.
But at that level what can be argued against them, and what need is there to justify them?