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 Free Will is more important than science

618. All philosophy is subjective

     / (9k) -> statement that "philosophy" in general is distinct from "applied science". sounds annoying until you realize that the moment philosophy becomes Materialism is the moment it crosses over from subjective to objective and from philosophy to science. then you realize this statement is backhandedly true and very important.
618. Q618/Q618

     the best conceivable pizza

     / (9k) -> ... it is.... so hard to get people to understand the concept of Materialism if they don't already understand it. I really think using fiction and hard fictional rules may be one of the best ways because it sits perfectly in that bourgeois niche of the rules to participate in an industry being the eternal law of the universe where a lawyer can't possibly question the assumptions of Law but they can question any other statement you throw at them including whether people are brains in vats. ... I'm pretty sure that this extends past employees and contractors who literally have to follow the rules of their own job into things like fandoms and all levels of art criticism — firmly root something within the established rules of a particular real-life industry, and nobody will ask stupid questions any more.
     

     I pointed that out before. I thought it was a function of art being tied to countable groups of people who were its audience that had silent membership requirements. but I think you could go a little deeper by looking up toward the nation-wide scale of capitalist society. why are the rules of one trade the ironclad law of the universe? because people earning money is how they survive. whatever earns you money and protects your physical body becomes what is "materially real", while it becomes that nothing else is real. if a particular country's currency ceased to buy anything then something else would become "material reality" depending on exactly what thing it was people's ontology of how to survive was built around then. ...

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 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 doing scientific research and even to a large extent the production of new Materialist knowledge becomes irrelevant to society, but the application of old Materialism that has already been collected 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 many real meanings of that phrase is "philosophy" or "philosophical deduction", which, in the case 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 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, because judiciously using and applying science is much more important than recording more 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. applied Materialism / empirical Materialism (field of study which records verifiable empirically-observed statements about material reality) / field of science (generic) -> the motif of a series of statements about material reality which was recorded by a field of applied science or some similar discipline. within this motif, "biology", "physics", "paleontology", "archeology", and "population dynamics" would be considered 'applied Materialisms' as opposed to 'instances of science'. "psychology" would also be considered an applied Materialism, although it might or might not be considered an eclectic Materialism. "mathematics" would not itself be considered an applied Materialism because it is simply a set of rules and does not operate empirically. by this definition mathematics would lie within metaphysics or something like that, but it would be considered the most precise form of metaphysics ever invented which is possible to collapse into physics into some situations where it accurately models reality.
618. conflict between empirical materialism and dialectical materialism -> I had so much trouble putting this into words until now. here it is. the reason that you have to correct dialectical materialism for accuracy to historical events no matter how strange the events are is this. it's not about some abstract Ideal of "historical accuracy" or "inclusivity" or "kindness", all of which can turn subjective and in the process become a vector for bigotry. nor even an abstract Ideal of "the proletariat" or "seeing from below", which can also turn subjective and lead to conflicts between named Marxisms. it's about the simple fact that dialectical materialism and applied Materialisms including applied sciences and observed history should match. it's really that simple. dialectical materialism is an attempt to elaborate on all applied or empirical materialisms, vaguely similar to the way that quantum physics elaborates on Newtonian physics. the models must line up. if the models do not line up, dialectical materialism becomes potentially invalid and there must be a new materialism proposed to unify all the other empirical Materialisms. the worst case scenario is dialectical materialism getting thrown out like string theory but something else appearing. the worst case scenario will basically never be the replacement being an Idealism.
     this is the reason I'm confident in meta-Marxism and I really doubt there's any going back to something that isn't either violet Marxism, crimson Marxism, or orange Marxism. there is a particular thing about all future political theories that must be true: they must unify all applied or empirical Materialisms. anarchism cannot do that.

618. unifying relativity & quantum

     (Marxism) / unifying relativity and quantum mechanics / (9k) -> the motif of unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics, taken literally as it is, but then applied to the new context of unifying different conflicting Marxisms or unifying all applied sciences by making dialectical materialism the new unified theory that ties together almost all applied Materialisms such that, for instance, natural sciences and social sciences are no longer meaningfully separate, and the faint ties between social sciences, relativity, and quantum mechanics are made clear.
618. The goal of Marxism is to unify all applied Materialisms / The goal of Marxism is to unify all applied Materialisms, including relativity, quantum mechanics, chemistry, biology, ecology, paleontology and evolutionary biology, climate science, population dynamics, animal ethology, the analysis of political factions as material objects, the study of ancient settlements (archeology or anthropology), history as the study of feudal orders and warring states periods, applied game theory, empiricist philosophy, the scientific method, and the meta-ontological analysis of systems of logic and reasoning as they apply to applied sciences and representational art; wherever there are small gaps in unifying these fields, Marxism must show that it is capable of creating a fine-grained materialism that can fill in all these gaps and show how overlooked small-scale or large-scale relationships are producing the unexpected patterns that make one field of Materialism not match another field; the test of dialectical materialism is its ability to unify all applied Materialisms as cleanly as is actually possible including applied sciences and diverging applied versions of dialectical materialism ->
     a blatantly Idealist philosophy and Marxism not matching does not mean that Marxism has failed. a Materialist philosophy showing up with empirical observations that don't match Marxism is a greater problem. one variant of Marxism not matching another variant of Marxism does mean Marxism has failed, because if Marxism is functioning then Marxism and Marxism should always overlap and only eclectic Materialisms should be expected not to. sectarianism existing is vastly closer to proving "Communism doesn't work" than anything any center-Liberal or Tory has ever said. so we should all seriously think about that. the day all the Marxisms match and with little correction draw the same conclusions about each other as a particular Marxism draws about itself, we will be a lot closer to defeating capitalism than we ever were. the day all the Marxisms correctly predict what all the blue and charcoal anarchisms are trying to do enough to actually stop them from supporting imperialism in their quest to be anti-imperialist might just be the day Marxism actually wins.

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

      / 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 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 ... 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 / (9k)

Ideology codes

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