Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q38,59

Main entry

3859. Q3859/Q38,59

      materialist inversion and math

      -> gosh my rants on this topic got so long I think they need their own page just for them.

From Idealism to math

618. Q618/Q618

     Language is logic is math

     / Mathematics, formal logic, and language are all ultimately the same thing -> they're all steps in the process from basic signal-response instincts to Idealism to Materialist models of reality. I know this sounds crazy at first but really, this proposition puts to bed the whole question of whether math is some sort of special thing inherently connected to the universe or the universe 'runs on math'. I've heard versions of that so many times and it's silly every time. when you realize that language is basically math but less efficient, you start to realize that it would be ridiculous (for somebody whose sense of irony hasn't been killed by the Bible talking about "the word") to say that physics and English are connected, or physics and German are connected, or physics and Japanese are connected. because, like, all languages contain ontological objects consisting of a word or phrase and a model of something that goes under it, and some ontological models can be more objectively accurate to a particular phenomenon, so if language was inherently connected to reality, then some languages would be inherently superior to others and there would be languages it would be worth getting rid of. you think about that idea for even five seconds and it's very difficult to imagine any particular language actually being the superior language everyone should have to use; which language would it even be when there are hundreds or thousands of languages and each language contains so many models of things? but there is no such thing as a language, literally referring to a language made of speech and words, which is universal and is not particular and is not connected to a culture, because even international auxiliary languages are spoken by particular groups of people who would become the "Esperanto culture". no human language can be generic, and no human language can be the most superior language, so no human language at all, by virtue of being a language, can be the inherent way that physics functions. but all natural languages are actually made of math, because all languages are made of a sort of crude second-order logic they use to express ontological models, and formal logic is a form of math which can actually be modified into many forms, conceivably even one broad enough to cover all the basic things language does. this does imply something people don't usually think about: that there is not just one continuous math, and that maths start out as separate plural bodies of math. however, math is different from natural languages in that the way things are defined is not subjective, and comes with objective rules; 1 + 1 = 2 for particular sets of reasons. plural bodies of math can be combined into larger bodies of math or even into a single large but technically countable body of math. this is how math can become the only "language" that is universal — because subjective cultural understandings that are arbitrary but required in a particular region cannot be mandatory, or at least cannot remain mandatory, in the process of how bodies of math are combined. so human beings start with calls or words associated with objects and then create language and then create Idealism as a bad explanation of how complex processes work and then create logic and then create math, and math is the final explanation not because there is anything special about it but simply because all the fuzziness in all the previous forms of communication about causality and ontology dropped out and communication about causal processes became maximally precise, to this point it was either exactly as precise as it needed to be or allowed for a lot more unnecessary levels of precision; the goal was met. mathematics was put together because people physically needed to communicate and understand causality and created a tool for that need, not because people simply desired to conquer and change reality.
618. Q618/Q618 If you halve an object infinitely, you will never get to zero -> partially false. it depends on whether it's a real-life physical object or a theoretical object.
     I saw a forum thread today where a university student was trying to understand why an asymptote that tends toward infinity or zero doesn't get there. [1] and suddenly, I had an insight that I think I've also had before. asymptotes can actually be total nonsense. according to the rules of math some graphs have to produce them, but they only make sense in the real world when they are applied to a situation where the rules of the graph and the rules of the real world are the same. many times — now, you can't really say for certain this is true in every case — asymptotes reflect a graph not being under the real limits physical systems are under which in fact cut off a result before it really becomes infinitely big or infinitely small. many times the asymptote in an equation is a genuine singularity. so, the student's intuition wasn't necessarily wrong. in some situations it would be perfectly fine to say "but this quantity won't just get infinitely smaller without getting to zero, will it?", as with that one puzzle where you can supposedly make the chocolate bar smaller and smaller but it stays the same size, unlike how a material object would behave. in other situations, it's okay that the equation has a strange singularity in it, and you should use it as is. the thing about math is that it is an absurdly precise tool that is more precise than real life in its number of possibilities for how to model things and you really have to know how to apply it in order to use it well.

Materialism and science

618. Q618/Q618

     Applied sciences are Materialisms

     / "Applied sciences" are not actually science, but named Materialist philosophies; the scientific method or various versions of it are the only thing which are science, and the scientific method is used to compile bodies of facts separate from it itself that become named Materialist philosophies such as biology and geology / You aren't a "rationalist", or a "science fan" — you're a Materialist ->
     

     this is partly a matter of definitions, but there are big advantages to dividing things this way, such that "the scientific method" is the only thing that's science and all "named Materialisms" are a separate thing that Science creates. it's no longer possible to vilify science. it does become possible to vilify Materialisms. but it also becomes possible to separate one Materialism from another Materialism, and start showing that some parts of some Materialisms are actually inaccurate, making it harder for people to try to reject every bit of all of the Materialisms at once.
     I think this is the route people have to take if they want people to keep from splitting into multiple Communist internationals, or multiple non-Marxist philosophical factions. referring to all knowledge about the natural world as Materialism will slowly get people to agree onto the same bodies of knowledge about physics, biology, and other phenomena, which will also slowly draw them onto the same broad category of ideology generated out of those basic assumptions.

618. Q618/Q618 Science is more important than Free Will / Materialism or determinism is more important than Free Will because these categories of models do more to explain reality and are more empowering
618. Q618/Q618 Free Will is more important than science -> I would have bristled at this years ago, but now I have a complicated reason for saying.... actually, maybe it is. you know why? because Free Will isn't the thing it thinks it refers to. there is a point where science and even to a large extent the production of new Materialist knowledge becomes irrelevant to society, but the application of old Materialism still remains relevant. but even if you could shut off the process of science production without harm you would still have use for the mysterious and unspecified thing the phrase "free will" is vaguely gesturing at. I think one of the real meanings of that phrase is "philosophy" or "philosophical deduction", which, when old bodies of Materialism are being applied, checks out. if somebody like Žižek said that philosophy was more important than science I don't think even I would believe him, but when Materialist philosophy is considered a form of philosophy and fully examined, I think things change greatly, and it can be that philosophy becomes more important than science.

Truth values, and signifiers as cultural prejudices

618. Q618/Q618

     Kantianism explored race & IQ

     / Kantianism is actually an IQ test / When Kant speaks of "reason", what he is referring to is the concept that human actions do not have truth-value categories of Good or Evil, but Smart or Not Smart, which in turn unfortunately means that what Kant is trying to identify as "rationality" or "reason" is contingent on what surrounding clusters of people subjectively believe to be intelligent behavior, which is potentially contingent on people's own racist or xenophobic conceptions of which countable cultures and cultural practices seem intelligent or unintelligent to them / (9k) ->
     

     it hit me today. the concept of claiming that reason and ethics are the same thing is basically the same as the concept of trying to replace Good / Evil with Smart / Not Smart. it makes sense in light of a crude, Feuerbachian type of Materialism where you try to discredit the notion of Good and Evil being cosmic or universal starting by showing that the universe is regular and logical and doesn't really have 'opinions' as much as mindless patterns. surely anyone will stop doing bad things if only you can show they are Not Smart. only.... it's actually rather subjective what actions are smart and what actions aren't. it's a somewhat better way to define Truth or Falsity of human actions than the circular categories of Good and Evil in that you can actually debate it a while with real arguments and maybe come to a conclusion. but it gets thwarted by the existence of contradictory plural sociophilosophies forming and each thinking they're correct such as Stalin's Marxism versus Trotskyism. both of those factions think that they're on the side of Smart and will make the decisions that go down as the materially best decision in later history books, but they don't have enough information to know which one is actually better, so they senselessly fight each other to reach an answer and in that conflict they both choose an outcome which is undesirable and could not logically be the Smart decision.
     so why does this happen? well, thinking of it as either Stalin versus Trotsky or center-Liberals versus anarchists, the two factions try to aim to have the Smartest statements in order to be the most legitimate regime, but they don't realize that Smart isn't really a fully objective truth value, it's largely cultural much like Good and Evil were, where some people will try to single things out as Not Smart just because they don't like them. the phenomenon of "Enlightenment rationality turning against brown people" does happen, but absolutely not for the reasons people think it does. it doesn't happen because people have "assumptions" or "aren't Inherently Multicultural enough" (which are both Idealist characterizations of what a racist is). it happens because Smart does not function well as a truth value — because the sign called Smart is stuck on subjectively as people arbitrarily decide on the spur of the moment what it means. this is very inconvenient for fields like queer theory to recognize because they want to say that "subjectivity" creates cultures and marginalized identities are legitimate because people in a local countable culture defining signifiers nearly any way they want is legitimate. but you really can't just define signifiers however you want, not as an individual and not as a culture, because that is how people become prejudiced. think about it: you cannot create art and arbitrarily decide what Blackness is, to some extent you must represent Black history and Black experiences representationally and realistically, using a materially correct model of what happened. if there was such a thing as a moral vanguard, then the moral vanguard would never consist of people who think Subjects can define signifiers however they want; that process simply will never be moral, speaking descriptively about whether people will ever definitively decide it is.

Related

4059. Q4059/Q40,59

      Math can save Trotsky

      / Mathematics can save Leon Trotsky, because morality never will / No moral argument will ever vindicate Trotskyism, whether it is based on the character of Trotskyist parties as Leninists, based on the justifiability of the Trotskyite conspiracy, or based on the "corrupt" or "tyrannical" character of Stalin's party, because the behavior of Trotskyists is not at all comprehensible based on moral frameworks, and any moral framework Stalin-followers may attempt to come up with will invariably cast early Trotskyism as immoral; however, if Trotskyism is taken to be a strictly amoral force in the world rather than an Evil one, then the behavior of Trotskyism can become comprehensible to everyone outside Trotskyism including Stalin-followers, and there is some possibility that Trotskyism can finally be vindicated or forgiven as the bizarre inanimate force of nature it is as people realize that in the end it did not actually have intentions per se in its collision with other Marxisms much less wilful or malicious intentions to destroy them for its own gain when it could have chosen not to; sheer existential-materialist analysis of separate Marxist parties as a contradiction can solve the problem through descriptive mathematical models of behavior where neither language nor most forms of logic or argumentation could solve it -> it's conceptually funny imagining somebody trying to argue this in court, but thankfully that's not the way that Marxism rolls and people generally know on some level that Marxism exists in something of an anhierarchic collision of nations and parties that has to work itself out other ways than an arbitrarily thrown-together special argument ground inside bourgeois class rule.

Ideology codes

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