I agree with Korzybski that our problems are representational. As extremely cognitively limited beings much of our progress stems from which sorts of problems we can easily represent and communicate about, such that a variety of humans can become interested and work on them. My unusual claim in this area is that we had an aborted attempt to transcend the modernist representations when they proved insufficient in the face of problems in foundational math, physics, philosophy of science, and politics (impossibility results in attempts at preference aggregation). The Martians made some progress, but the interruption+trauma of the world wars interrupted whatever intellectual tradition was generating them and we aborted mid paradigm shift to a newer representational language that, per Korzybski, would have represented these new paradigms in a new representational language conducive to parallelizing work on them. Instead we got post modernism slop and fell back. Quine was the last bit of real progress on philosophy of science. His main successful student, David Lewis, took a crack at the problem (including the frame problem) by trying to develop a representational notation for counter-factuals, but seemingly failed. We’re now stuck. We keep attacking the object level problems, like voting theorems, meta-ethics, and decision theory with the older, well developed representational languages of modernism and coming up with the same irremovable inconsistencies in different formats. I’m not sure what to do about this other than return to Quine and see if there are any promising dead branches.
LLM suggests:
The Dead Branch: Look to Gotthard Günther (poly-contextural logic) and Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form (1969). Spencer-Brown introduced a representational calculus based not on truth values (), but on the act of distinction itself. It allowed self-reference and time to enter the notation natively without causing the system to explode into Russell-style paradoxes.
My unusual claim in this area is that we had an aborted attempt to transcend the modernist representations when they proved insufficient in the face of problems in foundational math[...]
I think this would be worth working on (because of Löb) if we expected to have enough time, but plausible developments in logical induction should get within epsilon of perfect (in expectation), enough for the next few million years. Though, if you research just enough to write a document that makes the strategy semi-legible, work could be resumed if a credible long-term AI pause is implemented.
I agree with Korzybski that our problems are representational. As extremely cognitively limited beings much of our progress stems from which sorts of problems we can easily represent and communicate about, such that a variety of humans can become interested and work on them. My unusual claim in this area is that we had an aborted attempt to transcend the modernist representations when they proved insufficient in the face of problems in foundational math, physics, philosophy of science, and politics (impossibility results in attempts at preference aggregation). The Martians made some progress, but the interruption+trauma of the world wars interrupted whatever intellectual tradition was generating them and we aborted mid paradigm shift to a newer representational language that, per Korzybski, would have represented these new paradigms in a new representational language conducive to parallelizing work on them. Instead we got post modernism slop and fell back. Quine was the last bit of real progress on philosophy of science. His main successful student, David Lewis, took a crack at the problem (including the frame problem) by trying to develop a representational notation for counter-factuals, but seemingly failed. We’re now stuck. We keep attacking the object level problems, like voting theorems, meta-ethics, and decision theory with the older, well developed representational languages of modernism and coming up with the same irremovable inconsistencies in different formats. I’m not sure what to do about this other than return to Quine and see if there are any promising dead branches.
LLM suggests: The Dead Branch: Look to Gotthard Günther (poly-contextural logic) and Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form (1969). Spencer-Brown introduced a representational calculus based not on truth values (
I think this would be worth working on (because of Löb) if we expected to have enough time, but plausible developments in logical induction should get within epsilon of perfect (in expectation), enough for the next few million years. Though, if you research just enough to write a document that makes the strategy semi-legible, work could be resumed if a credible long-term AI pause is implemented.