Fundamentally I think the core belief of metarationality is that epistemic circularity (a.k.a. the problem of the criterion, the problem of perception, the problem of finding the universal prior) necessitates metaphysical speculation, viz. we can’t reliably say anything about the world and must instead make one or more guesses to overcome at least establishing the criterion for assessing truth.
I don’t think that’s a problem. Any reasoning process needs an unquestioned “core”—that’s just as true for a person as for an automatic theorem prover. And different people’s “cores” seem to agree on observations a lot, making science possible.
You can decide to question any such principles, which is how they get formulated in the first place, as designs for improved cognition devised by an evolved mind that doesn’t originally follow any particular crisp design, but can impose order on itself. The only situation where they remain stable is if the decision always comes out in their favor, which will happen if they are useful for agents pursuing your preference. When these agents become sufficiently different, they probably shouldn’t use any object level details of the design of cognition that holds for you. The design improves, so it’s not the same.
Examples of such principles are pursuit of well-calibrated empirical beliefs, of valid mathematical knowledge, of useful plans, and search for rational principles of cognition.
I don’t know how to describe the thing that remains through correct changes, which is probably what preference should be, so it’s never formal. There shouldn’t be a motivation to “be at peace” with it, since it’s exactly the thing you turn out to be at peace with, for reasons other than being at peace with it.
Hmm, this seems sensible as far as it goes, but then how do you pick the unquestioned core? I imagine you’re thinking of this like picking the axioms of a system. And so long as you work only within the system you’re right that it doesn’t matter; where it becomes a big deal is when the choice of axioms influences how that system relates to things outside itself. That’s why we view it as worth considering, because sufficiently interesting systems that are consistent cannot also be complete.
The part of you that’s generating your thoughts is the unquestioned core. It’s too late to pick the unquestioned core, you already are the unquestioned core.
It’s only unquestioned for the moment, not unquestionable. You start from where you happen to be. That is as true of deep philosophy as of every other activity.
So jumping back in here, my original line of comment was towards cousin_it who seemed to be suggesting (to me) some choice of unquestioned core the way we pick axioms, rather than jumping past that to the real core, which I think is interesting and worthing saying a little about because the reasons for why it’s unquestionable (at least for a practical sense of questioning to which we can reasonably expect an answer) get at the heart of the epistemological issues I see as the root of the postrationalist worldview.
I’ve largely emphasized the problem of the criterion because that’s the formulation of this epistemological issue that has precedence in Western philosophy, but we see the same issue pop up in mathematics and logic as the problem of induction, in analytic philosophy as the grounding problem, and in Bayesian epistemology as the question of the universal prior. But given the direction of this discussion, I’d like to bring up the approach to it from the phenomenological tradition through the problem of perception.
The problem of perception is that, if we use our senses to learn about the world, then we cannot trust our senses to reliably provide us information about our senses. You’ve no doubt experienced this first hand if you’ve ever seen an optical illusion or felt imagined touches or had your smell and taste tricked by unusual combinations of ingredients into making you think you were eating something other than you were. Or our senses may have blind spots, the way you can’t directly look into the center of your own pupil because there’s a blindspot in the middle of your vision. And these are just the times we are able to notice something weird is happening; we literally don’t and can’t know about the things our senses my obscure from us.
If you practice meditation or phenomenological reduction, you’ll find there is a core loop you can’t bracket away of some thing observing itself (or rather in epoche you find you just keep bracketing the same thing over and over again without managing to strip anything further away). We don’t have to put a name on it, but some have called it pure awareness, consciousness, and the inner self. Epoche provides a way to see this thing analytically, and meditation provides a way to experience nothing but it (to experience nothing but experience itself).
So when clone of saturn says you already are the unquestioned core, this is what they are pointing at, something so small and hard and fundamental to how we know that we can’t question it in any meaningful way. And this exposes another way of seeing the difference between rationality and postrationality (or at least a difference of emphasis): the rationalist project seems to me to either deny this hard, unquestionable thing or make universal assumptions about it, and the postrationalist project sees it as a free variable we must learn to work with in different contexts.
The Tortoise’s mind needs the dynamic of adding Y to the belief pool when X and (X→Y) are previously in the belief pool. If this dynamic is not present—a rock, for example, lacks it—then you can go on adding in X and (X→Y) and (X⋀(X→Y))→Y until the end of eternity, without ever getting to Y.
The phrase that once came into my mind to describe this requirement, is that a mind must be created already in motion. There is no argument so compelling that it will give dynamics to a static thing. There is no computer program so persuasive that you can run it on a rock.
And this (I then replied) relies on the notion that by unwinding all arguments and their justifications, you can obtain an ideal philosophy student of perfect emptiness, to be convinced by a line of reasoning that begins from absolutely no assumptions.
But who is this ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness? Why, it is just the irreducible core of the ghost!
And that is why (I went on to say) the result of trying to remove all assumptions from a mind, and unwind to the perfect absence of any prior, is not an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness, but a rock. What is left of a mind after you remove the source code? Not the ghost who looks over the source code, but simply… no ghost.
So—and I shall take up this theme again later—wherever you are to locate your notions of validity or worth or rationality or justification or even objectivity, it cannot rely on an argument that is universally compelling to all physically possible minds.
I find it difficult to know what to make of the concrete statements here, because they seem so obviously false.
You’ve no doubt experienced this first hand if you’ve ever seen an optical illusion
It is by our senses that we know that these things are optical illusions.
you can’t directly look into the center of your own pupil
You can do just that in a mirror. BTW, the blind spot is not in the middle of the visual field. but off to the side. It is easy to see it, though, by closing one eye and attending to where the blind spot in the other eye is. When the optician shines an ophthalmoscope into my eye, I can see the blood vessels in my own retina.
we literally don’t and can’t know about the things our senses my obscure from us.
Our senses fail to show us X-rays, atoms, the curvature of space-time, and anything happening on the other side of the world. but we can very easily know about these things, by clever use of our senses and tools, tools that were created with the aid of the senses.
So, all of the above quotes appear to be obviously, trivially false. Is there some other interpretation, or are they mere deepities?
the postrationalist project sees [the unquestioned core] as a free variable we must learn to work with in different contexts.
I remain sceptical about this unquestionable core. The argument for its existence looks isomorphic to the proof of God as first cause, first knowledge, and first good. But I’ll leave that aside. What constitutes working with it?
So, all of the above quotes appear to be obviously, trivially false. Is there some other interpretation, or are they mere deepities?
My point is that our naive use of our senses often deceive us. This is not meant as a line of evidence in support of my position, but an evocative experience you’ve probably had that is along the same lines as the thing I’m gesturing at. It is of course different in that we know those things are illusions because it turns out we have more information than we initially think we do, so I am more interested here in the experience of finding that you ask your senses for information about the world and get back what turns out to be misinformation so you have something concrete the grasp onto as a referent for the kind of thing I’m pointing at when I make the more general point about the problem of perception.
Thank you for correcting me on the blind spot thing.
I remain sceptical about this unquestionable core. The argument for its existence looks isomorphic to the proof of God as first cause, first knowledge, and first good. But I’ll leave that aside. What constitutes working with it?
It is related, but only because it’s the existence of the unexaminable core that creates the free variable that allows us to pick the leap of faith we want to take, be it to God or something else. In fact this is what I would accuse most rationalists of: taking a leap of faith to positivism (that we can establish the truth value of every assertion, or more properly because rationalists are also Bayesians the likelihood of the truth of every assertion), even if it’s done out of pragmatism. Working with the unexaminable means remaining deeply skeptical that we know anything or even can know anything and considering the possibility that we are deeply deluded. Most of the time this doubt ends up working out in favor of rationality, but sometimes it seems to not, or at least you’re less certain that it does. This invites us to reconsider our most fundamental assumptions about the world and how we know it and be less sure that things are as they seem.
It is by our senses that we know that these things are optical illusions.
By only looking through the visual sense we are able to see things that are. What comes as confusing and “illusion” like is when we use a sense of thoughts/conceptualisation to interpret the visual information.
The optics in that article are completely wrong. To a first approximation, a mirror of a given size shows the same amount of your face independently of how far or near you hold it. It does not blur anything when held very near; it is your eyes that are unable to focus that near. The rest is woo.
I have no idea how this happened. We appear to have different experiences.
the same amount of your face independently of how far or near you hold it.
I’d make one clarification to say, the mirror shows a reflection. The mirror also changes apparent size depending on the distance from the eyes. Now eyeballs obviously don’t bend physics to produce experience which is why I say apparent size. I suppose I could say visual size instead..
It’s a feature of mirrors I am familiar with already. But just to please you, I got out a 2-inch-wide circular mirror and did the experiment, and it is as I said and knew it would be.
Exercise: How large was the circular area of my face that I saw in it?
You really did me a confusing moment. I double checked for myself and then asked someone else too after this response.
I don’t know how it’s possible to get your results. The science of the inverse square law alone should anticipate experience.
If we live in universes with different laws of physics, that’s fine. Carry on!
In response to the question: that
A. depends on how far away the mirror is.
B. And what scale you use to measure it.
C. What the frame of reference is for a measurement.
D. If you are measuring your “face” or the reflection.
I don’t know how it’s possible to get your results. The science of the inverse square law alone should anticipate experience.
This has nothing to do with the inverse square law, which relates the intensity of light to distance from the source. It’s geometrical optics: the paths the light takes.
Whether it’s a problem depends on what you are doing: if you are making strong or exclusive claims to know the truth, it is a problem, if you are modest and/or relativistic, much less so.
I don’t think that’s a problem. Any reasoning process needs an unquestioned “core”—that’s just as true for a person as for an automatic theorem prover. And different people’s “cores” seem to agree on observations a lot, making science possible.
You can decide to question any such principles, which is how they get formulated in the first place, as designs for improved cognition devised by an evolved mind that doesn’t originally follow any particular crisp design, but can impose order on itself. The only situation where they remain stable is if the decision always comes out in their favor, which will happen if they are useful for agents pursuing your preference. When these agents become sufficiently different, they probably shouldn’t use any object level details of the design of cognition that holds for you. The design improves, so it’s not the same.
Examples of such principles are pursuit of well-calibrated empirical beliefs, of valid mathematical knowledge, of useful plans, and search for rational principles of cognition.
I don’t know how to describe the thing that remains through correct changes, which is probably what preference should be, so it’s never formal. There shouldn’t be a motivation to “be at peace” with it, since it’s exactly the thing you turn out to be at peace with, for reasons other than being at peace with it.
Hmm, this seems sensible as far as it goes, but then how do you pick the unquestioned core? I imagine you’re thinking of this like picking the axioms of a system. And so long as you work only within the system you’re right that it doesn’t matter; where it becomes a big deal is when the choice of axioms influences how that system relates to things outside itself. That’s why we view it as worth considering, because sufficiently interesting systems that are consistent cannot also be complete.
The part of you that’s generating your thoughts is the unquestioned core. It’s too late to pick the unquestioned core, you already are the unquestioned core.
It’s only unquestioned for the moment, not unquestionable. You start from where you happen to be. That is as true of deep philosophy as of every other activity.
So jumping back in here, my original line of comment was towards cousin_it who seemed to be suggesting (to me) some choice of unquestioned core the way we pick axioms, rather than jumping past that to the real core, which I think is interesting and worthing saying a little about because the reasons for why it’s unquestionable (at least for a practical sense of questioning to which we can reasonably expect an answer) get at the heart of the epistemological issues I see as the root of the postrationalist worldview.
I’ve largely emphasized the problem of the criterion because that’s the formulation of this epistemological issue that has precedence in Western philosophy, but we see the same issue pop up in mathematics and logic as the problem of induction, in analytic philosophy as the grounding problem, and in Bayesian epistemology as the question of the universal prior. But given the direction of this discussion, I’d like to bring up the approach to it from the phenomenological tradition through the problem of perception.
The problem of perception is that, if we use our senses to learn about the world, then we cannot trust our senses to reliably provide us information about our senses. You’ve no doubt experienced this first hand if you’ve ever seen an optical illusion or felt imagined touches or had your smell and taste tricked by unusual combinations of ingredients into making you think you were eating something other than you were. Or our senses may have blind spots, the way you can’t directly look into the center of your own pupil because there’s a blindspot in the middle of your vision. And these are just the times we are able to notice something weird is happening; we literally don’t and can’t know about the things our senses my obscure from us.
If you practice meditation or phenomenological reduction, you’ll find there is a core loop you can’t bracket away of some thing observing itself (or rather in epoche you find you just keep bracketing the same thing over and over again without managing to strip anything further away). We don’t have to put a name on it, but some have called it pure awareness, consciousness, and the inner self. Epoche provides a way to see this thing analytically, and meditation provides a way to experience nothing but it (to experience nothing but experience itself).
So when clone of saturn says you already are the unquestioned core, this is what they are pointing at, something so small and hard and fundamental to how we know that we can’t question it in any meaningful way. And this exposes another way of seeing the difference between rationality and postrationality (or at least a difference of emphasis): the rationalist project seems to me to either deny this hard, unquestionable thing or make universal assumptions about it, and the postrationalist project sees it as a free variable we must learn to work with in different contexts.
The idea clone of saturn stated is discussed in the sequences, in Created Already In Motion:
And in No Universally Compelling Arguments:
I find it difficult to know what to make of the concrete statements here, because they seem so obviously false.
It is by our senses that we know that these things are optical illusions.
You can do just that in a mirror. BTW, the blind spot is not in the middle of the visual field. but off to the side. It is easy to see it, though, by closing one eye and attending to where the blind spot in the other eye is. When the optician shines an ophthalmoscope into my eye, I can see the blood vessels in my own retina.
Our senses fail to show us X-rays, atoms, the curvature of space-time, and anything happening on the other side of the world. but we can very easily know about these things, by clever use of our senses and tools, tools that were created with the aid of the senses.
So, all of the above quotes appear to be obviously, trivially false. Is there some other interpretation, or are they mere deepities?
I remain sceptical about this unquestionable core. The argument for its existence looks isomorphic to the proof of God as first cause, first knowledge, and first good. But I’ll leave that aside. What constitutes working with it?
My point is that our naive use of our senses often deceive us. This is not meant as a line of evidence in support of my position, but an evocative experience you’ve probably had that is along the same lines as the thing I’m gesturing at. It is of course different in that we know those things are illusions because it turns out we have more information than we initially think we do, so I am more interested here in the experience of finding that you ask your senses for information about the world and get back what turns out to be misinformation so you have something concrete the grasp onto as a referent for the kind of thing I’m pointing at when I make the more general point about the problem of perception.
Thank you for correcting me on the blind spot thing.
It is related, but only because it’s the existence of the unexaminable core that creates the free variable that allows us to pick the leap of faith we want to take, be it to God or something else. In fact this is what I would accuse most rationalists of: taking a leap of faith to positivism (that we can establish the truth value of every assertion, or more properly because rationalists are also Bayesians the likelihood of the truth of every assertion), even if it’s done out of pragmatism. Working with the unexaminable means remaining deeply skeptical that we know anything or even can know anything and considering the possibility that we are deeply deluded. Most of the time this doubt ends up working out in favor of rationality, but sometimes it seems to not, or at least you’re less certain that it does. This invites us to reconsider our most fundamental assumptions about the world and how we know it and be less sure that things are as they seem.
No that would be a reflection.
http://www.headless.org/experiments/the-mirror.htm
By only looking through the visual sense we are able to see things that are. What comes as confusing and “illusion” like is when we use a sense of thoughts/conceptualisation to interpret the visual information.
The optics in that article are completely wrong. To a first approximation, a mirror of a given size shows the same amount of your face independently of how far or near you hold it. It does not blur anything when held very near; it is your eyes that are unable to focus that near. The rest is woo.
Did you do the experiment?
I just tried it, and Richard Kennaway is right.
I have no idea how this happened. We appear to have different experiences.
I’d make one clarification to say, the mirror shows a reflection. The mirror also changes apparent size depending on the distance from the eyes. Now eyeballs obviously don’t bend physics to produce experience which is why I say apparent size. I suppose I could say visual size instead..
It’s a feature of mirrors I am familiar with already. But just to please you, I got out a 2-inch-wide circular mirror and did the experiment, and it is as I said and knew it would be.
Exercise: How large was the circular area of my face that I saw in it?
You really did me a confusing moment. I double checked for myself and then asked someone else too after this response.
I don’t know how it’s possible to get your results. The science of the inverse square law alone should anticipate experience.
If we live in universes with different laws of physics, that’s fine. Carry on!
In response to the question: that A. depends on how far away the mirror is. B. And what scale you use to measure it. C. What the frame of reference is for a measurement. D. If you are measuring your “face” or the reflection.
This has nothing to do with the inverse square law, which relates the intensity of light to distance from the source. It’s geometrical optics: the paths the light takes.
How big was your mirror, and how much of your face did you see in it?
No one can convert? No once can reflect on their limitations?
What clone of saturn said.
Whether it’s a problem depends on what you are doing: if you are making strong or exclusive claims to know the truth, it is a problem, if you are modest and/or relativistic, much less so.