Philosophical Research:Main Page

Ever heard of a game where you add any two concepts together?
You probably have. But, what if the game actually made sense? What if, you know, it was actually based on the interactions of the objects involved instead of turning every combination of two terms into a bad pun? LLMs can't do that. Not in an era where computers can render entire rooms of objects with different simulated materials through collision boxes and raytracing.

The problem? At any given moment, language is inherently static. Language can never touch grass. Language can never actually go outside and test itself against the world. Ask a book a question and all it can practically do is respond with what terms or concepts are strongly connected to other arbitrary concepts. But what if we were to fix only two things about language? Get rid of the words. Get rid of the rigid connections. Now what is left is an empty beaker in which nameless yet meaningful lumps of stuff constantly run into each other and connect in only the ways that make sense. When the drops trace understandable paths into bigger things we write them down. If the paths are a bit wrong we run the reactions again. Seed. Caryopsis. Stalk. Chlorophyll. Grass. Keep the paths going, keep the local graphs of concepts in interaction with each other, and before you know it, a simple net of lines on paper can touch grass. It only requires the willingness to learn, in the way language itself cannot.

Lithographica is three things: a catalog of signifiers and objects, a research notebook, and an old-school simulation of discovery processes and philosophies. The word "processes" in the plural is important — every reasonable route to land at one thing from another which feels worth noting is traced through separately. Different tracks of reasoning are coded into different parallel propositions; different philosophies or fields of knowledge may be coded in different colors. Everything begins with one big, weird treasure hunt to find particular motifs and observations that really matter. You pin them up on a board. You break seemingly-simple units down into constellations of smaller dots and begin connecting the dots. You make several constellations into a bigger constellation. Ultimately, you will learn not just how to reason, but how all of us already reason, and how each of those forms of reasoning part from properly understanding the ongoing tumult of objects and processes they came out of. You may be surprised at how precise the processes of language can be if only they were used for good. But when things get tough, or you simply want a break to make things the way you want to, you can also create your own graph file with anything in it. Analyze the rhetorical or narrative structure of existing works, or put up your own speculative "thesis" consisting of articles, essays, or short stories where the purpose of your maps is not to get lost. Or do both.

Sometimes this thing is a tool. Sometimes it's an educational game. Sometimes it's a glorified bibliography where the sources that would go at the bottom of a Wikipedia page steal the spotlight and make you actually go read. This thing is not here to lecture you with one big waterfall of sometimes chewed-up statements a bunch of experts over in some hidden tower somewhere once said, it's here for the actual messy process of learning. (With a tiny side of spreadsheets.)

Combine fire with lizard, combine milk with tea, combine set theory with the axiom of choice, combine Dragon Ball with workers' movement to get galactic Trotskyism. The future is in your hands. You only have to take up your torch and find it.

Ontology project (Main / Ontology:)

• User:Reversedragon/FirstNineThousand - Items/Lexemes prototype, from Q1 to approximately Q12000
  • Special:NamespaceInfo Special:Search - namespace debug
• Properties - characteristics used to add information to Items
• Ontology pages
  • Category:Fake Item lists
  • Category:Hue-format fake Items
  • https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Links - saving to put on a Help: page

Thesis portals

• Category:Thesis portals - landings for collected research notes or writings
• Philosophical Research:Molecular Democracy drafts - the first thesis portal to exist, which was/is used to inspire Ontology entries and test the site
• Vidak's corner (user page)
  • Substack articles - Category:The Subtle Dialectician
  • The People's Permacomputer Project - Philosophical_Research:The_People's_Permacomputer_Project
    • Phase Three Results - Philosophical_Research:PPP_Phase_3_Results

Extensions that need to be installed or enabled

• details/summary - unsure whether hiding Properties with Gadgets is a better idea
• HTML Tags - enable <section> tag
• Recover data from Properties
  • (Wikibase is slated to be removed when the Entity data is recovered, which will simplify the rest of the setup)