Philosophical Research:MDem/5.1r/1211 chiaotzu
> [Aron] ... John Stuart Mill held that mathematical truths were discovered through empirical research.
aron is right, we teach arithmetic because it models reality [*ft] the alternative theory is that arithmetic is an arbitrary ontology we made everybody learn, which is to say it's mandatory culture, and it's correct because you correctly predict somebody's mind in order to hold society together. but if that were true you'd never know what people think to be true - vegeta can just choose to punch chiaotzu no matter what he says. he doesn't ever have to grant that anything is correct. if vegeta is smart objective morality forbids this, but nobody said vegeta is smart.
Chiaotzu versus the world's hardest math test[edit]
it's very, very important that there is such a thing as objectivity. and you know why?
let's take the scene in _Dragon Ball_ where Chiaotzu is at the worldwide tournament and Krillin decides to throw him off by posing him a math problem.
now let's say we inexplicably replace Krillin with Vegeta. chiaotzu is under the impression he was going to fight Krillin but for some weird reason he didn't have that correct and now Vegeta is staring him down. Vegeta somehow overheard or figured out Krillin's strategy. But he is not feeling merciful today. So, he poses Chiaotzu an arithmetic problem. But there is a twist. He has no intention of recognizing the correct answer. No matter what Chiaotzu says or does his plan is to immediately thrash the little porcelain gyōza boy through the earth. it doesn't matter if Goku is furious at this or Krillin is horrified. they can't Freely Will what Vegeta does. the Vegeta effect has no mercy. when you roll a twenty-sided die, it lands on what it lands on. [*db]
the worst thing about this scenario is that it could happen to anybody. perhaps real life isn't generally full of Saiyans or dramatic tournaments, but the one thing that /is/ for sure is it is full of Vegeta effects. if we take it for granted that nothing about reality can be perceived except through a bunch of unreliable sense information and arbitrary sign-associations scribbling down in a telephone game what people unreliably saw, then it is very easy to end up with a view of reality where nobody is actually required to recognize statements that happen to be true as correct. if reality cannot be distinguished from the inner experiences of particular individuals, then the act of interacting with any other individual _mediates reality_, and allows any other particular individual to arbitrarily decide and dictate what reality is for anyone who interacts with them and refuse to recognize anything else as reality but their own arbitrary definitions. yet, we all know that this virtualized, created reality is not reality, because if anybody is stuck in such a relationship, they can always break it and be alone, and begin to experience the most basic, least-mediated form of reality that anyone can experience. reality cannot be equal to what any particular individual thinks it is, or there would be millions of realities all existing in contradiction at once, a thousand-million separate universes somehow overlapping each other and interacting with each other. and, while there are some senses in which someone could try to argue that this _is_ the case, that particular phenomenon of _locality_ is not what is being referred to here. it can be the case that one tree grows apples and one tree grows pears, and each patch of grass holding each tree contains different local facts, but it cannot be the case that because somebody is standing next to the tree growing apples the other tree is then growing apples. regardless of any individual person or any individual tree, it has to be that models of _reality_ are a different thing from models of _individual experience_ or _individual meaning_.
mathematics is not just something we made up. in one sense it _is_ something we made up, but it's also something we made up for very specific reasons. human beings made up mathematics largely _as a model of reality_ — a kind of language for explaining _what is real_ and _how things relate to each other_. it is fully possible to make up forms of mathematics that do not correspond to anything in reality, just like it is possible to make up a word like "unicorn" that doesn't refer to any real object, or a statement like "in a galaxy far far away, the dragon sat in the garage". in this sense, mathematics is merely another form of ontology, just like any particular person's definitions of words are an ontology and any particular constructed fictional narrative is an ontology; an ontology is just a bunch of rules for how defined sets of things consistently connect to each other. however, there are reasons we create ontologies. every time people draw out a bunch of nodes and connect them through relationships, creating an ontology, there is some particular purpose that that ontology serves. even fiction is not totally arbitrary. there is a certain kind of objectivity to fiction, where no matter who reads it and comes up with interpretations of it there are always a few situations where there are correct interpretations of how the fictional universe goes together or what each character would do, and incorrect interpretations which would not be able to properly continue the fictional universe. this is to say, the fictional universe has particular themes and statements it makes about itself which individual reader interpretations cannot erase — at least not without generating an entirely separate work of fiction. even a fictional universe is an ontological model of something; it is a self-consistent ontological model of itself. likewise, language is an individualized ontological model of all imaginable concepts and particular individuals' understandings of the boundaries between concepts. mathematics is an ontological model of all imaginable ways to take data structures and put them into functions. specialized fields of mathematics define particular kinds of data structures and functions and how each of these relate to each other or produce each other. in one sense, one could say that all language is actually just an especially easy to understand form of mathematics, because all mathematics describes simple descriptions of things (data structures) combining together in some specific way (a function or operator), and language also does more or less the same thing. what is the real difference between the word "and" and a plus sign, or the word "without" and a minus sign, or the phrase "fractured across" and a division sign? the division sign oversimplifies the concept of breaking by assuming things will break into equally-sized pieces, but otherwise there is no real difference; many simple linguistic statements can be expressed as mathematical operations, and many mathematical operations can be expressed as simple sentences.
thus, while ontologies are not necessarily "eternal truths" that are ironclad against any new observations of the reality that informed them, one thing is very clear: the point of ontologies is to be objective. the point of creating ontologies is that once they are created, they are no longer contained inside specific individuals perceiving reality through individualized memories and observations, and instead the model becomes its own entity contained in its own "head". the new "head" perceives through a great many individuals instead of one. like any of the original individuals it can sometimes end up seeing things incorrectly, because it does not have all the information about reality ever to exist, but this is not to say it is not perceiving reality at all. at certain points, perceiving more facts about reality will become difficult because of phenomena like relativity and the fact that when reality consists of separate objects we simply would not have the inner experience of being every object in reality unless our consciousness existed throughout the whole universe at once. the mere fact that human beings have not _totally failed to perceive relativity at all_ and have given it a name within the natural sciences is already a good indicator that some day relativity will eventually be understood. at certain moments, ontologies reach their breaking point because expanding them any more requires a serious paradigm shift. however, if we wish to keep learning and become able to explain everything around us, this is exactly the kind of event we should expect to eventually happen: in order to jump over the great gap of relativity, any particular ontology we are using will simply rebuild itself from the ground up back up to the same principles it already had yet now with enough power to explain the things that were previously thought to be outside it. if scientists want to unify gravity and quantum mechanics, one of these scientific ontologies has to be rebuilt from the ground up to the point it can explain the other one. if Marxists want to end the division between Stalin Thought and Trotskyism, they need to deconstruct both named Marxisms down to the most fundamental building blocks of all societies until they have a meta-Marxist theory which can descriptively explain the emergence and existence of both kinds of movements, and how each named Marxism can plan around or understand other Marxisms in order to eventually unify the movements. if Toriyama's team wants to combine the ontologies of various _Dragon Ball_ movies into a single ontology in order to produce _Dragon Ball Super_, it requires revisiting all the individual ontologies. and in the case of so-called matters of "culture" and "cultural identity", the same kind of great leap is required. if you want to end the conflict between racists or various kinds of prejudices and minority demographics, people are going to have to break down and reconstruct every single one of the philosophical tools they use to understand "culture", "identity", "freedom", "experience", "empathy", "heritage", "faith" or "patriotism", "right and wrong", "common sense", "democracy", "discourse", "philosophy", "logic", "ideology", "bias", "the individual", "the collective", and "the society" to be able to ultimately get to the point that either former bigots can rebuild an accurate ontology of everyone that is not them, or progressives can rebuild a complete and extensive ontology of former bigots that enables them to be deprogrammed. nobody alive today properly estimates the size of this task, which if completed might possibly obsolete every single existing philosophy book and redefine every single slightly-uncommon word frequently used to explain society on microblogs and news shows. it is common to act as if "getting rid of racism" is somehow trivially easy compared with constructing an entire Material System of Bolshevism, but the true price tag of accomplishing that task is this. to make this choice is to choose the task sitting at a magnitude of one million before the task all the way down at ten thousand. worse yet, we might not actually have a choice. with the United States fragmented into such small populations, the gap of relativity between one population with one ontology and another population with another ontology is bound to hit a lot sooner, forcing that gigantic paradigm shift from the "classical" to the "quantum" to come faster.
said another way, even if Chiaotzu knew his addition no amount of arithmetic would prepare him for the horrible possibility his opponent will turn out to be Vegeta and behind that mental event horizon lies a great bottomless darkness he cannot comprehend.
ontologies cannot be something we "merely" made up because if that were true, they would only be useful _because_ other people honor them but if that were true and it were ever the case that somebody spontaneously chose _not_ to honor them, that person would gain power proportional to how important it is to us that they cooperate. the more we need somebody, the more power they would have over us, because if reality is what people say, then the people we know get to determine our reality. thankfully, we know this is not true. anyone can detach from bad relationships and reconstruct reality all on their own. to some small extent, nobody really even _has_ to be part of a society. given enough patience to update our understandings, we all have the ability to construct accurate ontologies of how reality goes together without consulting anyone else. so how and why is it that we choose not to be alone, even though in theory being in society could sometimes be worse? because we know that when people _accept_ each other's understandings of reality and converge onto the same understandings, it is not totally arbitrary. we know that when people converge together, there are objective reasons each of these convergent ontologies are created and that these convergences happen.
[*db] For anyone who is not familiar with _Dragon Ball_, the reason this is a counterfactual scenario is that this plot originally happens in the first era of _Dragon Ball_ well before Vegeta is introduced.
[*YPS] "A snippet from my visit to Baptist Theological Seminary". Ra, A [@AronRa]. (10 April 2017 / r. 19 March 2025). time 26:01-27:07. [Video]. YouTube. Quoted in "Philosophistry" (Ra 2017). (12 April). AronRa.com. [Blog article explaining video]. <youtube.com/watch?v=KDAvQhV-DLw> <aronra.com/philosophistry/>