A very well executed essay, as usual. I have no idea what motivates you to
assemble such essays. But I love 'em. I apologize in advance for the below
being nothing but social commentary.
1: definiteness, boundedness, fallibility, and playing other people's games [cf
⛧]
Everyone seems "schematic" to me. They're persnickety about some terms in any sentence
and "don't care" about other terms. Depending on who they are, they have different coping
mechanisms for those who care about the terms they don't care about. E.g. ivory tower types will
appeal to authority (read Marx, learn QM, etc.). Common-sensers will claim their don't care terms
are obvious or brute facts. Etc. And within those demographics, there are different ways people
handle it when others continue to pick at the don't care terms. Some are triggered. Some simply
walk away claiming they're bored. Etc.
This is where your mention of renormalization and decoupling are rhetorically useful. Where
one chooses to bind their sentences defines the evolution of the discussion. The more
complicated the binding, the more dorky the discussion. The ruleset for Dungeons &
Dragons is a great foil, there. What's more dorky than arguing about when one can use, say,
"inspiration" as a modifier to one's die value? In any of these conversations where
you don't have a relatively full conception of your collaborator's game, the moral imperative
that you should be fallibilist reduces to being willing to play a schematic game where you
don't know which terms are definite and which terms are variable. For my part, the
interesting discussions are those playing infinite or meta- games, but mostly because only a
tiny fraction of us are even capable of keeping track of which terms are definite and which
terms variable. When I discuss things with those freaky, freakishly high cognitive powered,
people, it becomes a conversation about reality and what we can[not] know about it. But those
conversations aren't qualitatively different from conversations with less powered people if
you view them all as schematic.
2: completeness - a world without inference [cf ⛤]
It seems you mean something like completeness of inference, whereas I'm thinking of something like an oracle, a
completeness of "facts", an answer for every question. There's no (or little) requirements on relationships
between "facts". Oracles aren't required to be consistent. Obviously, the facts and inference are related.
But I think the essence of paraconsistency lies in the weakened implication operator, which results in a separation of
one "fact" from another ... the convexity (or lack thereof) of the space of "facts". You can't get
there from here.
3: Good Manners - tell your collaborators about your vocal/cognitive ticks
I try to do this. But I always fail. There's a kind of Gödelian problem in such attempts
... where the description of a concrete object takes up more space than the object
itself. So I usually give a blunt citation to a Colleen Green lyric: "Once you get
to know me, you won't love me anymore." But I admit at least the attempt buys you
some rhetorical capital that you can later spend in order to punt on your don't care
terms.
Anyway, thanks again. Good stuff.
[⛧] Relevant snipped exceprts: "If one is going to be fallabilist, one should be
fallabilist in everything. [...] But consistency as we actually require it is only ever
possible for systems that are bounded in some way (usually by being finite, but maybe
there are cases where countability is enough of a bound), [...] Apparently, the fact that
in the scientific worldview we haven’t had yet to give up a precept of definiteness. We
had to do some serious conceptual innovation in QM to be able to retain the precept but
take away what we had unwittingly taken to be one of its foundations. But will we be
able to do so forever? [...] Reductionism, in the sense of renormalization and
hierarchies of phase transitions, provides a remarkable way of combining both
approximation and projection. But the notion of “convergence in concept systems”
purports to refer to qualitative things of indefinitely open types. [...] That leaves us
with Peirce’s asymptotic formulation of truth as a degenerate placeholder term, it seems
to me."
[⛤] Relevant snipped exceprts: "But consistency as we actually require it is only
ever possible for systems that are bounded in some way (usually by being finite, but
maybe there are cases where countability is enough of a bound), and as long as any finite
description remains outside a full unification-of-everything, we probably have to regard
it as incomplete."
On 10/19/24 04:13, Santafe wrote:
I wanted to use Glen’s post below as the excuse for a self-indulgence, but the
gods of time will of course not forgive me for doing it. So I behaved for a
day or two...
TL/DR
Let me say something about the little part of not wanting to do anything to
endorse metaphysics (the final line in Glen’s post):
What would I put in its place, for all the things that we do but can’t justify,
except that we seem to “need” to do them to hold together any structured
reasoning?
I want to say there is something like a Principle of Good Manners, which
consists of warning your interlocutor what kind of conversation he is about to
end up in with you. Avoid terms like “belief”, or “synthetic a priori” as used
in metaphysics. “Belief” is a promise to do cognitive psychology one isn’t
nearly capable of doing and probably doesn’t even intend to do. Metaphysics
feels to me too close to a retreat back into religious attitudes. But at least
one can try to have a little self-awareness about how one behaves.
For me the self-introduction/caveat would roll out something like:
I engage in a kind of discourse that:
1. Has a place for some term: “the world”;
2. Grants a construction: “the world” “is” [something] as the only definite
construction I know is in the discourse
3. The construction 2 is supposed to entail some kind of definiteness
4. All the rest has to be figured out, and will be referred to with provisional
usages, in the usual sense of empiricist science.
I mean this to somewhat systematize what the scientific realist view amounts
to, and also what pragmatist approaches to estimation amount to, in the form of
accounts of my own behavior. I will note that I believe the point 3 to be a
continuous extension of what every molecule in my body, and all my cognitive
routines, is already doing (i.e. a form of naive induction, because that is all
a finite system is capable of doing).
Peirce’s pragmatist conceptions of both meaning (all conceivable effects with
practical bearing) and truth (what survives in the long run) are from the start
declared as asymptotics. Since I don’t mind referring to ensembles with
infinitely many members in math, I don’t mind using those cases as metaphors
for what I might imagine doing with meaning or truth, so I don’t reject
asymptotic formulae. For meaning, I can imagine a kind of infinite collection
to which it points, though Peirce’s way of saying it is hard to ever
operationalize. Since we don’t know what “conceiving of an effect” is, it is
hard to do much with expressions like “all the effects that might conceivably
have practical bearing”. But in a world where people dream up formal systems,
bind them somehow to embodied actions in the phenomenal world, and then test
for commutativity of the diagram that has, as its legs, derivations,
predicates, predictions etc. in the formal layer, bindings of both
condition-terms and outcome-terms through personal/social/practicial/embodied
cognition to choices and actions, and realization of outcomes in “the world”, I
can talk about all the collections of claims and outcomes that might be
propagated by somebody who dreams up a concept term for something, and say that
the estimators for Peirce’s notion of meaning (all the effects _actually
conceived of_ by somebody at some place or time from the object that some
concept term is supposed to be bound to) are estimators for a certain concept
of realized meaning as an infinite ensemble of histories of realized
consequences. Unwieldy, but not manifestly incoherent.
The interesting question for me is whether trying to do the same thing for
“truth” always leads to a degeneration of the term to something one must regard
as a placeholder. That doesn’t mean it can be dispensed with; it regards that
we then ask what is the role of placeholder terms in our thought and behavior.
(This is what I meant in the other post about triangulation, toward which I
wasn’t going to dump more words.)
The difficulty with attaching careful language to Peirce’s formulation for
truth, for anything else besides estimators, is that his whole way of speaking
supposes there could be any indefinitely stable forms of characterization by
people in the composite of the formal systems they dream up and try to
articulate, and the ways they bind them in lived experience to choices and
actions in nature. I don’t think that assumption works in any easy way. If
one is going to be fallabilist, one should be fallabilist in everything. So it
is not only that some concrete prediction might be wrong (the diagram through
the formalism, the bindings, and the realization can’t be made to commute):
that can certainly happen, e.g. in predictions from Cartesian space-x-time that
don’t have Lorentz invariance where Minkowski spacetime does, or flat
spacetimes versus curved ones for actual space (the flat ones are wrong).
Those are the kinds of simple cases that Peirce and later Popper wanted to
codify. They live in the world of estimators, and the ways that properties we
find in the world, like successive approximation, projection to aspects of a
phenomenon, and reductionism, imbue with practical meaning as they allow us to
quite deeply replace concept systems but merely refine quantitative
predictions. All that works fine, but it seems done to me, and not so
interesting to talk about.
Glen mentions the roles of consistency versus completeness in relation to
truth-concepts, and says that in the world of estimation one requires
consistency and relinquishes completeness. I agree, and I think we are forced
to this. w.r.t. nature, it is not clear what “complete” ever means (though who
knows; there could be fixed-point results in something someday that allow such
meaning). But consistency as we actually require it is only ever possible for
systems that are bounded in some way (usually by being finite, but maybe there
are cases where countability is enough of a bound), and as long as any finite
description remains outside a full unification-of-everything, we probably have
to regard it as incomplete.
But the other thing — the open-ended portfolio of what can ever be proposed for
concept terms, and how they can be bound in experience to activity in the world
and also to organizations in reasoning — looks like something that Peirce’s and
Popper’s language turns its back on like a monster under the bed; having
suggested that it exists, but in a language that precludes their ever being
able to look at it directly.
The star example for this, of course, is quantum mechanics. I objected to
DaveW that this wasn’t a reversion to Bishop Berkeley (unless he somehow
invented the particularity of QM and didn’t tell anybody), though the religious
will always claim that any interesting and challenging problem anybody else
faces shows that they (the religious) were right all along. But if I
(intensely) dislike the habit of talking about QM as if “It was all about me,
after all!”, what would I replace it with?
WIth this: In classical physics, there was this notion of “a state” (meaning, a
state of the world). What did that “state” stand for? Doesn’t matter; we are
going to do computations about quantities we call “observables”. “State” is
sort of a placeholder term.
Then the phenomena with quantum coherence and superposition are discovered, and
we construct a new math to handle them. That math also has two terms: “state”
and “observable”, but now it requires that those terms are quite different, and
that they relate to each other through some projection operator, which one can
take as a gloss for “measurement”, or try to derive constructively through
docoherent-histories methods, etc.
From hindsight, we realize that “state” in classical mechanics wasn’t totally
a placeholder; we know something about what we meant by it. We were
identifying a classical “state” with “a collection of definite values for all
observables”.
Now both classical and quantum notions of “state” are still partly placeholder
terms, but they are both made partly meaningful by the contrast between them,
in that the classical state is coextensive with a collection of definite values
for observables, and the quantum state is related to observables only through
projection operators, which can generate distributions over their values.
It’s an important lesson, though, what just happened cognitively. We had supposed
in our language, and spent lifetimes tattooing into our “understanding", that
for “the world” to have definiteness, the values of observables had to have
definiteness. Had anyone asked, we might have said that it was unthinkable to refer
to a definite world that didn’t have, at all times and for all observables, definite
values. But that would have been the same error as Kant’s, who figured that
Cartesian/Euclidean space-x-time was the only thing thinkable. The successful
formulation of QM has retained a notion of the definiteness of the world in the term
“state” in a form that doesn’t depend on definiteness of values for observables. It
is thinkable, by people like Scott Aaronson who do this for a living, and I think
for people like Jim Hartle and Murray and others. But “being thinkable” is this
complex thing about what we tattoo into our cognitive bindings, and most old people
could never really expunge their classical tattoos, and so they spend the rest of
their lives objecting to the new system. Some of them went back into the religious
quasi-solipsist framing (Yay — the world depends on my consciousness!), as the
component in their worldview (in the negative sense of Weltanschauung) that was
vague enough not to lead them into explicit contradictions with the phenomena. But
that is not in QM; that’s what they were able to make of QM when it was offered to
them to practice. Others could grow into the practice in better ways. It reminds
me of Pidgin-Creole transitions in language. Oldsters who may coin a trade language
are too late to make it grammatically rich, but a generation that grows through the
right developmental stages can do so.
I should note that, as a corollary to the aim for fallibilism in everything, I
can say what it means w.r.t. the premise of scientific realism. There are
people who think it is somehow underhanded to say “I am going to speak in a
certain way, though I may not really believe it”. I said above that the
Principle of Good Manners compels me to tell you some things about my way of
speaking, which I have ways to know (being available to my own observation)
that you may not yet (not having had to deal with me). I can observe that I
talk this way, without claiming to understand why I do so, and thus not having
to talk about what “I believe”, or even to suppose that that term refers to
anything. What then supports my continuing to use this kind of discourse, as
evidenced by my behavior? Apparently, the fact that in the scientific
worldview we haven’t had yet to give up a precept of definiteness. We had to
do some serious conceptual innovation in QM to be able to retain the precept
but take away what we had unwittingly taken to be one of its foundations. But
will we be able to do so forever? Can’t say. Right now, we treat spacetime
through the concepts of a definite geometry, and general relativity is doing a
great job, at least to a quite fine precision, in characterizing it. But just
the fact that that concept doesn’t have a way to be superposable seems to cause
a mathematical incoherence for models of universes that have black holes in
them, and the incoherence isn’t telling us what, if anything, should be put up
that might resolve it. If I can’t speak in the discourse of scientific
realism, I don’t know what I might use in its place, since the whole religious
thing is distasteful enough to me that I would probably refuse to use it out of
plain stubbornness. But I certainly see that the realist discourse has to be
regarded as provisional, if I am to talk of these things (including,
reflexively, the language of the talking) in a way that isn’t manifestly
inconsistent.
Anyway, to stay close to the point: I don’t think a true pragmatist wants to
foreclose the possibilities for conceptual understanding of the world that will
ever be reachable by people. But that means Peirce’s gesture toward a stable
_conceptuatlization_ of the world is probably non-realizable. And that a
notion of what “convergence” in conceptualizations of the world might stand for
is an awkward metaphor. The only place where we can coherently say what we
mean by “convergence” is in respect to either quantity (by successive
approximations), or perhaps projection (some phenomenal aspects considered,
others put aside and incorporated later, as was done for the nature of
electrons between J.J. Thompson’s cathode-ray picture and Bohr’s early and
largely uninterpreted (and internally incoherent) atomic-state picture).
Reductionism, in the sense of renormalization and hierarchies of phase
transitions, provides a remarkable way of combining both approximation and
projection. But the notion of “convergence in concept systems” purports to
refer to qualitative things of indefinitely open types. Clearly the metaphor
inherent in the only ways we know to use “convergence” for now doesn’t extend
to cover qualitative change, and it’s not clear what idea we want to create
that would carry the right things from the metaphor of convergence to actual
ex-ante-unknown ensembles of conceptual innovations.
That leaves us with Peirce’s asymptotic formulation of truth as a degenerate
placeholder term, it seems to me.
And I will again not try to go off into the role that such placeholder terms
seem to have in cognition, being treated as definite and fixed at the same time
as we can even be self-aware that we have no operational definition to put
behind them.
Anyway… that’s the rumination that I would try to put behind the other
truncated comments, if pushed to explain why I make them.
Eric
On Oct 16, 2024, at 1:55 PM, glen <geprope...@gmail.com> wrote:
Awesome summary! So my demon has always been whether or not the theory of truth
(distinguishable from the theor[y|ies] of estimation) allows for inconsistency.
I.e. I'm looking for shared values in the understanding of what is true.
Drive-by shootings suggesting nothing's real or there is no truth or whatever
are fine for the pub, but not sustainably interesting. I tend to boil it down
to the 2 values of consistency and completeness. A theory of truth must be able
to say something about every possible claim. But I'm willing to sacrifice
unity/consistency. In the theory used to estimate, I land the other way.
Consistency is primary and completeness merely nice to have.
And this seems to put me at odds with most of (the tiny bit I've read on)
others' search for a theory of truth, which seem to me to allow for cavalier
estimation, whatever gets you where you need to go, versus fetishistically
consistent truth.
Non-monotonic reasoning (e.g. Bayesian) seems to be THE type of reasoning for
curating estimators. But we don't seem to spend much time/effort filling out
the space of ways to do non-monotonic reasoning (cf Gelman's multiverse
analysis). We seem to accidentally land on something that works well enough and
run with it like a hammer chasing nails. But from what little I know of
science, progress is driven by consistency and transparency of methods, a
well-regulated journey, regardless of the properties of the destination. The
translation of the need for consistency from estimation to truth seems like a
metaphysical, almost mystical, commitment.
On 10/16/24 09:27, Santafe wrote:
Too many glosses on the word “truth”. Any of them is game, but with so many in
play, and registers constantly being shifted, tracking a sentence becomes
fraught most of the time. And statements that are central to the concept for
one register would be not only inapt, but false or non-sequitur in another.
All that is fine if the goal is entertainment, competition, blasts of
indignation, or whatever-else. But if the goal is to get clearer on something
about which one was not clear, the overloading is an impediment (recalling
Johnson’s literal stone). (That is never a setback for anyone who never lacked
clarity on anything and thus doesn’t need anything; that cup is already full.)
I think there are good takes on Peirce from a modern perspective, that were
suspected or suggested by him, but probably not available with late
19th-century experience, and probably not to someone with as mechanical a turn
of mind as Peirce’s.
One can ask what it means to say that a word is to index some concept, and that
some concept is different from another in what we want from it.
In that spirit, I think that in logic and in description of life, there are two
concepts that are not the same in kind, one of which I would tag with “states
of factual knowledge”, and the other with “truth”, as I would want to develop
the term in a modern re-try of pragmatism as Peirce was headed toward it.
There are lots of little technical details along the way, where one has to
state what one wants to inherit from some historical figure, and what not, or
what one wants to assert, irrespective of whether somebody else did before or
not.
It strikes me that the things pragmaticism (I will use Peirce’s word to make
explicit that his, at this time, is the one I am after) got right are that we
need 1) a theory of meaning, and 2) a theory of truth, which one has to have
some theory of meaning and probably other schemata to articulate. The
pragmatic maxim, as a theory of meaning, is fine as a historical placeholder,
and I’m not putting a lot of time into that now, so won’t worry about whether
or how it might need modern updates. All the work on embodiment, and maybe
some of what goes under the heading “enactivism” is probably a useful source of
examples and ideas.
I would argue that what we should want from a modern pragmatism in regard to
truth can be expressed through the following metaphor: the concept behind
“states of factual knowledge” stands in relation to the concept behind “truth”
something like the concept behind “sample estimator” stands in relation to
“underlying generative value” in the practice of statistical inference over
stochastic processes. Even in cases where the two are quantified and
represented in the same kinds of units, they are two very different concepts.
There is a lot more that needs to be said to triangulate what role that
“truth”-tagged concept is playing, in cognition and language, including the
depths that we don’t have good concept systems to articulate; here I want to
acknowledge the need for it but not dump more words in that direction.
My goal in the second-preceding paragraph is to go in the direction of the
_meaning_ I want from the concept tagged by “truth” (in this register).
Stipulating what one wants from the meaning of something does not entail that
you have a route to obtain a value for it. So if Peirce thought (a rather
Panglossian caricature) that states of knowledge converge in some reliable way
toward asymptotically enduring fixed points, I would certainly not want to
inherit that belief (or really, any belief). But I would know, as a Modern,
that we have all sorts of experience with statistics that meander and do or do
not converge, the rates of convergence if they do, the difficulty of search and
the likelihood of success in search problems by one or another algorithm, the
difficulty of selection or of preservation of something even if one happens
upon it, and so on. And not particularly wanting to have beliefs, I very much
want to be able to frame those kinds of questions and try to extract answers.
Everything we have learned in one or another narrow, technical and in that
sense artificial domain, strikes me as something we should expect to have a
place in trying to understand the dynamics of states of factual knowledge.
Again, I would expect the applications to look something like the application
of Bayesian Model Selection to the real-world acts of adopting or rejecting
various partial and conflicted phenomenological theories. In rare cases, the
problem is so constrained that one can use the formal model somewhat literally
or even quantitatively; in many others, it is a sort of metaphor or an even
weaker cartoon, but still suggests a kind of structure to look for in the
dynamic realized in the real world.
Any of the above, however, only follows if the people involved share certain
goals in the exchange of language, and that is not at all assured since people
can and do have many quite distinct and even non-overlapping goals.
There are communities that regard self-negating speech as not only inescapable,
but privileged. I found myself wondering yesterday whether post-modernism
should be seen as along the path to enlightenment (NOT the European kind!). I
don’t think any of what I said above can be regarded as even meaningful, and
certainly not worth engaging in, from a prioritization of self-negating speech.
There is speech as sabotage; what I regard Kellyanne as having discovered as
her path to self-importance; a thing she appeared to want when she was young
but did not see a route to achieving through the conventional channels. And of
course, the advocate for the saboteur will say (invoking the original
saboteurs) that that person is a resistance fighter against whomever we are
aggrieved at.
There is the weird case of Rorty, who for me marks the full decadence of
Peirce’s hope for a theory of truth into its energetic and spiteful negation.
I don’t know how to stack him in this menagerie. He and Kellyanne are clearly
both smart, and Rorty is very smart in many dimensions. My understanding is
that, in personal life, they both are/were also gracious and decent in their
treatment of people. Rorty’s social-justice aims were also, to my eye,
well-chosen and insightful. But Rorty is not on a mere campaign of sabotage,
and his tool isn’t merely random obstruction to derail anybody else’s attempt
to make any point. He has much more structure. Yet to my eye the gambit is
still logically pretty empty. Peirce wanted something from the word “truth”,
and he got however far he could toward articulating what he hoped for. Rorty
simply declares, obiter-dictum, that the same word will be used henceforth as
whatever is an obstacle to social-justice utilitarianism (crucially, as Rorty
analyzes what the utility is and what serves it; aka among other things he is
an intellectual bully), and it has no other or actual meaning. Where Peirce
used Pragmatism as aiming at a theory of meaning and a theory of truth, Rorty
simply re-glosses Pragmatism as a synonym for social-justice utilitarianism.
Obviously, as a social practice, one can do that, and if the tribe that likes
that usage can kill all the members of the tribe that disagrees with it, the
dead ones can’t be said to have “achieved” anything. (The others are inclined
to say they haven’t “won” anything, but I don’t think the dead ones were after
“winning”; rather “achieving”.) But simply refusing to engage somebody else’s
project by reglossing the term and declaring eminent domain over it isn’t
interesting. We already have a term for utilitarianism, from Mill, and the
social-justice version of it is a sub-variant (not even all that sub).
So I don’t know. I think there is stuff to do. But only if one wants to do
that, instead of some other thing.
Eric
On Oct 16, 2024, at 10:26, glen <geprope...@gmail.com> wrote:
I think I agree with Jon, here. But I'd word it (very) differently. And although Marcus' response is in
Eric's vein, it only targets "close to the metal"/brute facts, not derived facts (with variation on
both "facts"/primitives and "derivations"/logics).
While I'm an avowed pluralist, my commitment isn't to an infinity of truths or, worse,
the undefinedness of truth. Maybe there are trillions of truths (allowing for each
biological organism to have "their truth", uniquely). But to go so far as to
suggest there are infinite truths or that truth is undefined is a bridge too far. That
would be like arguing there are no such things as parallel lines in any spatial system,
no agreement to be had no matter what the context.
My confidence in a plurality is bounded to a few, I think, N≥3 or so, but maybe something
closer to "N=7±2", reflecting something like the affordance of sensemaking
minds. And to be clear, that small set of N truths can wander in some kind of Peircian
sense, I guess, except without assuming it'll monotonically converge to a
static/permanent set of N fixed member truths.
In this wandering space of paraconsistent logics, we may still follow the
framework Eric sets out. Truth(s) can be something like moments or high order
stabilities that allow us to settle contested claims, even if only temporarily.
But here I see more of a tie between truth and law ... maybe, deep down, my
antipathy toward evolutionary psychology is simply that the discipline is too
young? Social convention comes from somewhere ... somewhere bound to reality,
even if the binding is through a wobbly causal network with randomness at every
node. Can convention be completely unbound to truth? That seems like an extreme
claim to me.
On 10/15/24 12:28, Jon Zingale wrote:
FWIW, I think Eric is correct to highlight the relationship between being
*increasingly promulgated to the semi-divine stature* and the disappearance of
*demos*. However, I am resistant to a characterization that renders demos as
*abstract* rather than *virtual*. I am resistant to the idea that demoi are
implemented rather than immanent. While there may come a day where master-slave
relations become complete and fully actualized and demos (relegated to the
abstract) is solely manifested via deputization, I maintain a level of
wishful-hoping that for as long as we engage one another, demos de facto exists
and immanently so.
This subtlety, for me, parallels on the one hand, the ontological status of
infinitesimals in founding the differential calculus, and on the other,
discussions I am having with Nick around the nature of *facts*. To my mind,
disinformation isn't simply the overturning of truth values intension with a
concept. Rather, disinformation campaigns (like other forms of fascism) aim to
atomize networks of relations. Atomization can happen at various levels,
sometimes at the level of the ideas and at other times at the level of
repositories. Demos, like concept, is inherently non-discrete even if only
nilpotent. In the end, I suppose both that the denial of demos is expensive and
that collective perceptions can stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent.
On 10/15/24 12:14, Marcus Daniels wrote:
Jump out of your car when driving on the freeway or inject bleach to kill the
COVID, and enjoy Your Truth.
On 10/15/24 11:02, Prof David West wrote:
Eric,
Going all postmodern on you — there is no such thing as *Truth*, only
*Somebody's Truth*.
This is painfully evident at the moment in the fallacy of "fact checking," all the assertions of
"misinformation," and "follow the science."
I do not see totalitarians of any stripe engaged in 'destroying' the truth;
only in demanding that *Their Truth* is the one and only *Truth*.
And, totalitarians are not the only ones engaged in this endeavor—everyone who
has or wants to have power of whatever degree does the exact same thing.
davew
On Tue, Oct 15, 2024, at 12:39 PM, Santafe wrote:
You know, I don’t mind the phrase “above the law”. It may not be
tailored to lower-level mechanistic arguing about one or another case,
but it acknowledges a system context in which a society will operate
under some kind of hierarchy of prerogatives.
I don’t normally think about law in such hierarchies, and do more often
about truth. But I think similar arguments are appropriate for both,
with certain modulations.
What (re. power) do we want from truth in a society? We want truth to
stand as a referee over all contesting claims. This is why
authoritarians, but even more totalitarians, have as a first-line
priority the killing of truth. Not just evading it or disregarding it,
but publicly setting it on fire, to make the point that there will be
_no_ referee over the exercise of power by whoever happens to be
holding it. Arendt has some wonderful passages on the way the Nazi
movement was, from before its takeover through its ending, a project of
substituting fictitious worlds for the real world in the lives of their
followers. This (now coming from me, not Arendt) is why the hopeful
totalitarian doesn’t tell borderline lies or ambiguous lies; he tells
extravagant, absurd lies, to make the point that any holdout hope for
truth will be ground up and blown away in the movements movement.
The fragility of a role for truth in a society is that a commitment to
it has to be a kind of escrow. The society has to grant truth
legitimacy and authority, and then the various members have to be
confined within that commitment when their own interests would motivate
them to escape it. Ulysses at the mast, or something like that.
Rawls’s veil of ignorance.
The question of what law is, and who it is answerable to, is different
because it is entirely conventional, unlike truth which has a very
individually-judgeable aspect. But will the society’s legitimated
notion of “law” be a tool for use by a king? By specifically the
God-Emporer (Mao or, increasingly, Xi) or Louix IV or Napoleon? Will
it be a tool for use by the holder of an office (Putin? Trump “if
you’re the president they (SCOTUS) let you do it”)? Or is
law-the-system claimed or intended to have prerogatives above those of
specific persons, or of offices w.r.t. their occupants, and if so, in
what is that prerogative vested? The charateristically vague notion of
a “democracy” supposes that there should be some abstract entity — the
“demos” — in which the prerogative of law is vested. But since
abstract entities don’t operate in the material world, what we have is
some edifice of institutions etc. that is meant to suitably instantiate
a “demos”. We can complain about all the ways an actual, realized
system fails to instantiate a demos well, or is aimed at a wrong
concept of one. But that complaint is different from the distinction
that, as the Maoist government promulgated him as increasingly
semi-divine, there was no concept of a “demos” at all that had
prerogatives above him.
I think we lose that relevant notion of hierarchy of prerogatives if we
abandon the “above” in “above the law”.
Lot of hair-splitting for no substance; I know…
Eric
On Oct 15, 2024, at 12:22, glen <geprope...@gmail.com
<mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:
I agree. We're dancing around the meaning of "above the law" and it's a
terrible phrase. But people use it. So you have to have some way to parse it (again,
based on the *rest* of whatever it is someone says). Hardline positions like what Jochen
and Dave are taking can help develop such parsing strats, at least they help me.
On a similar note, this article was very interesting to me because of both my long-term interest in
"mindreading" (which I'll now call "mentalizing", I guess) and my more recent
interest in replacing things like ontologies with LLMs:
Defining key concepts for mental state attribution
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-024-00077-6
<https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-024-00077-6>
On 10/15/24 09:11, steve smith wrote:
I hope I'm not (just) muddying the water here, but I think "buffered from the remedies of
law" might be better than "above the law"? I think it applies not to just the
wealthy and powerful but to other ideosyncratic reasons like obscurity, anonymity,
unpredictable-behaviour, etc...
On 10/15/24 9:00 AM, glen wrote:
Well, OK. I agree with the gist. But rather than target Congress, the Admin, and
bureaucrats, I'd target wealthy people, whatever their day job might be. There are people
mostly above the law. Musk is one of them. But more importantly, there's a couple of
handfuls of companies that own the world: Blackstone, KKR, Carlyle, Bain, etc. To boot,
those companies "are people", are effectively immortal, and can't seriously be
punished for any crime they might commit.
And this point is definitely a systemic one. Even if every single member of the
entire government were biased against those who wield this power, the system
has too many weak points to hold them accountable. When faced with a super
villain like Musk, it takes a champion (at least one, but more often a team) to
counter-game the system (e.g. Whitehouse, Warren, Wyden, etc.). And the
champions usually eventually succumb to biology or corruption.
On 10/14/24 15:52, Prof David West wrote:
True, citing exceptions to specific laws does not indict the */system/*: /"We mean
the entire legislative, executive, and judicial enterprise."/
However, the way the phrase,/"no one is above the law,"/ is popularly used,
especially now and in the political context, it is not a systemic assertion, but a
personal one: hold X accountable because no one is above the specific law that X
ostensibly violated. _I will accept chastisement for being equally sloppy in usage_.
Also, I would argue that the system has been corrupted to such a point that a
whole class of people in particular roles are above the law systemically:
- Congress abdicated its responsibility to enact laws, ceding it to bureaucrats.
- Those same bureaucrats usurp the role of the judiciary by indicting and
trying those who violate their laws (and they are laws, including criminal
felony laws), crafting their own rules of evidence and procedure, and
determining guilt or innocence with no recourse to the 'Systems' judiciary.
- If you include the explosion in use of 'executive decree'; you might argue
that a substantial part of the executive branch of government in the U.S. is
'above the law'.
davew
On Mon, Oct 14, 2024, at 12:15 PM, glen wrote:
I think that was Jochen that said it, not Russ. But your refutation is
either a fallacy of ambiguity or composition. By "the rule of law", we
don't mean the rule of any particular law ... like a city statute
against walking your alligator down the street or whatever. We mean the
entire legislative, executive, and judicial enterprise. Of course,
particular slices of the population are exempt from some particular
law. E.g. London cabbies used to be allowed to urinate wherever without
regard to the typical laws governing such. That doesn't imply that
London cabbies are "above the law". I suppose you could say they're
above that particular set of laws. But "exempt" isn't synonymous with
"above", anyway.
I don't think the SCOTUS ruling on immunity claims the President is
above the law, contrary to the implications of the left's rhetoric,
only that they're exempt from some/most/all laws when executing the
role of their office. It's bad. But it's not bad in the way the
rhetoric implies.
On 10/14/24 09:27, Prof David West wrote:
Sorry Russ, but /"Nobody should be above the law if the rule of law has any meaning
in a democratic society,"/ is an absurd idea.
Assuming the US is a democratic society (in some sense), I would defy you to find any
existing law that does not have exceptions that place someone, in some role or in some
cirsumstance, "above" that law.
davew
On Mon, Oct 14, 2024, at 8:58 AM, John Kennison wrote:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com
<mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>>> on behalf of Marcus Daniels <mar...@snoutfarm.com
<mailto:mar...@snoutfarm.com> <mailto:mar...@snoutfarm.com <mailto:mar...@snoutfarm.com>>>
*Sent:* Tuesday, July 16, 2024 3:02 PM
*To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com <mailto:friam@redfish.com> <mailto:friam@redfish.com
<mailto:friam@redfish.com>>>; russ.abb...@gmail.com <mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com> <mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com
<mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com>> <russ.abb...@gmail.com <mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com> <mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com
<mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com>>>
*Subject:* [EXT] Re: [FRIAM] tolerance of intolerance
I don’t think that’s fair. It depends on the opponent and what they represent
both in terms of ideology and the sociological phenomenon they are a part of.
*From:*Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>
<mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>>> *On Behalf Of
*Jochen Fromm
*Sent:* Tuesday, July 16, 2024 11:52 AM
*To:* russ.abb...@gmail.com <mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com> <mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com
<mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com>>; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com
<mailto:friam@redfish.com> <mailto:friam@redfish.com <mailto:friam@redfish.com>>>
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] tolerance of intolerance
A president who murders his opponents would not be better than an evil dictator
in an authoritarian state. Putin's opponents like Navalny, Litvinenko and
Nemtsov were all brutally poisoned and/or murdered.
But you are right, this possibility exists after the recent decision of the
supreme court. It seems to be a result of democratic backsliding. Nobody should
be above the law if the rule of law has any meaning in a democratic society.
-J.
-------- Original message --------
From: Russ Abbott <russ.abb...@gmail.com <mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com> <mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com
<mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com>> <mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com <mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com>
<mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com <mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com>>>>
Date: 7/16/24 7:48 PM (GMT+01:00)
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com <mailto:friam@redfish.com>
<mailto:friam@redfish.com <mailto:friam@redfish.com>> <mailto:friam@redfish.com <mailto:friam@redfish.com>
<mailto:friam@redfish.com <mailto:friam@redfish.com>>>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] tolerance of intolerance
Why has no one pointed out the possibility that if Trump wins, Biden could take
advantage of his newly declared immunity and have him assassinated?
-- Russ
On Tue, Jul 16, 2024, 6:24 AM glen <geprope...@gmail.com <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com> <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com
<mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>
<mailto:geprope...@gmail.com <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>>>> wrote:
Yeah. It's one thing to wish it or want it. It's another to think more in
Marcus' terms and come up with a more complex strategy not involving stupid 20
year olds and no violence at all. I still hold out hope for my own personal
conspiracy theory. Biden becomes the nominee. After the convention fades, the
Admnistration announces Biden has gone to the hospital for bone spur surgery.
Kamala takes over temporarily and campaigns furiously for Biden-Harris. Biden
is re-elected. Biden recovers and gets through the Oath (fingers crossed). Then
he goes back to the hospital with some minor thing like a dizzy spell. Kamala
takes over again. Biden's condition worsens. First Female President. Biden
recovers and becomes America's Grandpa.
Come on Deep State. Make it happen. 8^D
On 7/15/24 17:30, Russ Abbott wrote:
I wonder what Scott's response would have been to those of us who, in response
to the shooting, thought: better luck next time.
On 7/15/24 17:28, Marcus Daniels wrote:
It ignores the option of doing things quietly and indirectly.
On 7/15/24 16:46, glen wrote:
[Scott's] Prayer
https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fscottaaronson.blog%2f%3fp%3d8117&c=E,1,irEARj2UuX0io2vsvo5UtQltYddWunshQQtMQfJZHxfHRYf3FJxoInm0IYVm9IwI4psALvtsK1hXymeqyUC5R_tfW5jZF7zWWQQ1odUIr2o6avItdKxsAJw,&typo=1
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fscottaaronson.blog%2f%3fp%3d8117&c=E,1,irEARj2UuX0io2vsvo5UtQltYddWunshQQtMQfJZHxfHRYf3FJxoInm0IYVm9IwI4psALvtsK1hXymeqyUC5R_tfW5jZF7zWWQQ1odUIr2o6avItdKxsAJw,&typo=1>
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fscottaaronson.blog%2f%3fp%3d8117&c=E,1,QL0WRnoyblSkIf4AvUE9OJjbfulLIAmV4kaOMzv6lQXTwCmW2EkBdX41PHQpVDSu-p7sRh4gsqE26d1Giz5pL5Nj5av4laZQ11Mt76uPpQE,&typo=1
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fscottaaronson.blog%2f%3fp%3d8117&c=E,1,QL0WRnoyblSkIf4AvUE9OJjbfulLIAmV4kaOMzv6lQXTwCmW2EkBdX41PHQpVDSu-p7sRh4gsqE26d1Giz5pL5Nj5av4laZQ11Mt76uPpQE,&typo=1>>
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fscottaaronson.blog%2f%3fp%3d8117&c=E,1,NLO_67atoq3F2A4fB5urAh8xb9NkFr6meKf_b2Ya-AZDIOD9qAQghy5M1IF_Q05hIzoBKb18k6r7vb4BiGopaOxkFFYtJyPv-EeoOVuU&typo=1
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fscottaaronson.blog%2f%3fp%3d8117&c=E,1,NLO_67atoq3F2A4fB5urAh8xb9NkFr6meKf_b2Ya-AZDIOD9qAQghy5M1IF_Q05hIzoBKb18k6r7vb4BiGopaOxkFFYtJyPv-EeoOVuU&typo=1>
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fscottaaronson.blog%2f%3fp%3d8117&c=E,1,VkCRM_BeShuRcsrz7BIuFbLjt-HSBDroXWGmBOeDO6BmTy31h_kdbYCzyPKN_Rg0M2BUO3p_mBX6qdrZ3C3Q5zqIGvcu2DuESkkHbT0_HJ1D7RPe8Dij&typo=1
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fscottaaronson.blog%2f%3fp%3d8117&c=E,1,VkCRM_BeShuRcsrz7BIuFbLjt-HSBDroXWGmBOeDO6BmTy31h_kdbYCzyPKN_Rg0M2BUO3p_mBX6qdrZ3C3Q5zqIGvcu2DuESkkHbT0_HJ1D7RPe8Dij&typo=1>>>
I'm currently surrounded by people who believe intolerance is properly not tolerated. Scott's message, here, seems extraordinary Christian, to me. (Real Christian, not the Christianism displayed in things
like megachurches and whatnot cf
https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fraymondsmullyan.com%2fbooks%2fwho-knows%2f&c=E,1,mlWEnEdNzLv04QI10AIP0LMUOn93iXch1nMegLlQPAOq-cYBIqujJW4gdYUEuQTKpPUzp1ea879JC3t5SphDwTnV7qr07N3d5N_qWLqcAjurOEOKwUZoDA,,&typo=1
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fraymondsmullyan.com%2fbooks%2fwho-knows%2f&c=E,1,mlWEnEdNzLv04QI10AIP0LMUOn93iXch1nMegLlQPAOq-cYBIqujJW4gdYUEuQTKpPUzp1ea879JC3t5SphDwTnV7qr07N3d5N_qWLqcAjurOEOKwUZoDA,,&typo=1>
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fraymondsmullyan.com%2fbooks%2fwho-knows%2f&c=E,1,9VLze-Ya03T3kg-RkUd0H2MT8KzhjXM1_P3mWd2yhwzMisAO6YtkAVx_s8XT8vXCkAhdFAGojgJWrOEnJm3bqkoFhlRobx71sav3C5aNAQ,,&typo=1
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fraymondsmullyan.com%2fbooks%2fwho-knows%2f&c=E,1,9VLze-Ya03T3kg-RkUd0H2MT8KzhjXM1_P3mWd2yhwzMisAO6YtkAVx_s8XT8vXCkAhdFAGojgJWrOEnJm3bqkoFhlRobx71sav3C5aNAQ,,&typo=1>>
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fraymondsmullyan.com%2fbooks%2fwho-knows%2f&c=E,1,kd1puIuKqRwYLdYLvOGXWmcK8yvoq-6V6UyCgEYrWEMcCgau9Jh9EDf4mId5w8MTz65ekcYWJKhQArb0V_-b-5JigQzIBkIaSINdHdVQGa-sdMe-lAQ,&typo=1
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fraymondsmullyan.com%2fbooks%2fwho-knows%2f&c=E,1,kd1puIuKqRwYLdYLvOGXWmcK8yvoq-6V6UyCgEYrWEMcCgau9Jh9EDf4mId5w8MTz65ekcYWJKhQArb0V_-b-5JigQzIBkIaSINdHdVQGa-sdMe-lAQ,&typo=1>
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fraymondsmullyan.com%2fbooks%2fwho-knows%2f&c=E,1,NurRTSqj5GjO0P5dvBQvndqnW4TBWCCpQjK5xVXcDuHkiaqJ1XOtzFeGSRgp5MO9z3vTP4RZWXFMT7rTd68npa8dNPeUXmmgquZsMXu1Aw,,&typo=1
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fraymondsmullyan.com%2fbooks%2fwho-knows%2f&c=E,1,NurRTSqj5GjO0P5dvBQvndqnW4TBWCCpQjK5xVXcDuHkiaqJ1XOtzFeGSRgp5MO9z3vTP4RZWXFMT7rTd68npa8dNPeUXmmgquZsMXu1Aw,,&typo=1>>>).
This faith that "going high" will, in the long run, win out, seems naive to me. The temptation to "hoist the black flag and start slitting throats" isn't merely a thresholded reaction,
it's an intuitive grasp of the iterated prisoner's dilemma, tit-for-tat style strategies, and Ashby's LoRV. But I'm open to changing my mind on that. Maybe I'm just too low-brow?
--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
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