“Looking from the outside such statements often seem to hinge upon entire mountains of nonsense”
I think it’s all nonsense, and that some nonsense is just more useful than other nonsense.
But it doesn’t confuse me why we don’t attempt to identify or reduce nonsense, nor does it confuse me why we don’t agree on what’s useful. We can thank our stupidity for this, and we’re stupid because we’re healthy. Hear me out here.
All this nonsense is actually ourselves, and “useful” means “useful for me”. So any truly objective thinking would require that we were without ego and sense of self, because only in this state would we stop prioritizing our own existences and preferences. Whenever you attack a specific persons nonsense, that person will feel as he is under attack, because he is.
Being objective, correct, logical, etc. is simply preferring that which isn’t human above that which is human. It’s no wonder that most people aren’t capable of this. We evolved specifically to stay alive, only people who are sick in the same manner that we are, are capable of being so “rational” that they might destroy themselves.
What’s the best we can do here? Perhaps it’s considering all human beings to be valuable. It’s the least egoistic perspective which still has subjective preferences (and thus considers life to be worth more than death). But even here, we can’t consider everything human to be equal, for there are human aspects that we find more desirable than others, e.g. I would like to reduce aggression, and then convice myself that this egoistic preference of mine is somehow objectively correct, rather than the desire for the growth of people who think and value like I do. Only by deceiving myself like this can I bring myself to prevent the existence of people who offend me or who are otherwise a danger to myself (and this includes people who are better than me!), and still believe that I’m a good person acting selflessly.
Of course, this comment is all nonsense. I’m just learned in similar nonsense to everyone else, so there’s a sort of coherence between people which is easily confused for some sort of objective correctness (rather than the shared subjectivity that it is). Of course, even logic and mathematics has zero relation to reality. Math is a set of paths from assumptions to their conclusion, and in the same way, answers relate to questions pair-wise. And these pairs rely solely on eachother, and it’s the same whenever you have neither or both. They’re zeros which has been expanded to some plus and minus which add up to said zero. This is why “solving” anything destroys it.
The difference in proxies for brain activity when speaking or doing nothing is marginal.
Non-conceptual acts from parachuting and sex to running and climbing likely result in more activation than speaking, they also tend to be more memorable and most people find them more desirable than talking to others, let alone to themselves.
Ultimately, this is subjective, of course, and if you tell me that your conceptual maps and word ladened narratives are important for who you are, I will of course grant that to you.
My personal impression is that they aren’t, they are quite important for what I do to be useful in society but that is like saying that, as a taxi driver, my car is a core part of who I am, which is also fair, but you know what they say, it’s sometimes good to just get out of the car.
For reference, this post was motivated by failure modes I see among capital R rationalists, scientists, philosophers, and other “many word many symbol” people—I don’t think the issues I point to would affect “normal” people as much. Normal people have reasonably good mechanisms to decouple from conceptual thinking, they might have a conceptual issue or two, but usually nothing that affects their quality of life that much.
Of course, you can interpret it the other way around too
That sounds about right, words and language are just communication of something, it’s stored quite differently in the brain. My point was that we’re communicating things which we identify with and which we have made part of ourselves. You know how LLMs sometimes dream or hallucinate? I like to think of people as more consistent versions of that. Language is like a nonsense protocol which people can make sense of simply because we share it. Isn’t DNA the same? DNA is useful to itself, but whatever is encoded in DNA doesn’t really say anything about reality external from the DNA. But none of this is a problem unless two different contexts conflict.
And yeah, I was mostly agreeing. I just think the idea can be taken much further. Possibly so far that it cancels itself out again.
I suppose that some intelligent people tend to confuse their mental model with reality itself. This is the type which are a little too logical for their own good, and they tend to have difficulties with whatever isn’t rigid and unambiguous, relationships included. I think that there’s fewer problems for intuitive types, since intuitive thinking is flexible and quite a lot faster. They realize that language is a tool for doing various things, rather than something valuable in itself. To demand “correct language” to the extent that it hinders communication would be an example of Goodhart’s law.
But even “correct” language is just that, language. I suppose the best way I can explain this is, and I should have said this to begin with: Human life is itself a context. Most are under the impression that individual and subjective things are nonsense, while everything formal is objective and correct. I propose that everything only covers a limited context, and that some of these contexts merely cover a larger scope. I also propose that it’s not possible to create anything with an infinite scope, so at best we can create something universal in the case that it applies to our universe, but this is still a finite context. If you think about the world in this manner, avoiding concepts like ‘infinite’, ‘true’ and ‘real’, making sense of the world becomes a lot easier. And contexts conflict with (contradict) eachother, and higher consistency can be reached by solving contradictions. But every time you do this, something specific is destroyed, and everything is some degree of specific, so it’s entirely possible to destroy everything. With every generalization, you cover a larger scope but your generalization gets thinner and less rich. If you increase depth, you decrease width and vice versa. The nonsense of people is that which is unique to themselves and conflicts with other people, and the nonsense of humanity is our shared errors which conflict with logic, and logic is just a limited axiomatic system when viewed from the outside. But resolve these conflicts, and you’ll be left with nothing. The person is no more, humanity is no more, and if math requires universality, then math would have refuted itself as well. It’s not just us which look silly from an outside perspective, everything does, and I don’t recommend destroying any of it for that reason.
Sorry for being verbose, it’s difficult to explain my view (the lessons I learned the hard way by being stupid) in just a few words, haha. If you want a saner engagement with your post I’m afraid you have to wait for other people to post
Ok, I think I better see your point, one thing I’m not sure you are on board with is that unique language can come from:
Direct experience of the world—or linguistic thinking about a memory (sky here has green~ish tint before a storm)
Linguistic thinking -- with several nested layers of recursion (what is <abstract concept>)
Ultimately there’s no hard line between the two but in practice, this seems quite relevant. Statements that come from 1) seem usually ok , and statements that come from 2) usually seem maladaptive.
Isn’t that unique composition of language? If you consider descriptions of the world to be something like a linear combination of words (or the impression they map to in your mind), then language can be said to span/cover some intrepretation of experiences.
I agree with you, and linguistic thinking is certainly the more reductive one.
But aren’t they both mistaken? As soon as anything is put into words, or encoded in logic for that matter, it has already been severely reduced and lost its connection to reality.
Difficult questions are basically syntax errors, loaded questions, self-contradicting statements, or statements with mistaken assumptions baked into them. But more importantly, I don’t think that even correct language has much in common with reality. We have no reasons to assume that the words we’ve come up with have the expressive power needed to align with reality, and it might be the case that no such words can’t exist.
You might be arguing that the meaning or concept behind a word is valid, and that manipulating these underlying things can allow us to understand the world. I suppose that this understanding of the world is correct enough to be useful, but I doubt that there’s any formal equivalence between even our intuitions and “reality”. As I see it, “getting out of the car” allows one to live a genuine human life, but it still doesn’t allow one to move outside the scope of human.
“Looking from the outside such statements often seem to hinge upon entire mountains of nonsense”
I think it’s all nonsense, and that some nonsense is just more useful than other nonsense.
But it doesn’t confuse me why we don’t attempt to identify or reduce nonsense, nor does it confuse me why we don’t agree on what’s useful. We can thank our stupidity for this, and we’re stupid because we’re healthy. Hear me out here.
All this nonsense is actually ourselves, and “useful” means “useful for me”. So any truly objective thinking would require that we were without ego and sense of self, because only in this state would we stop prioritizing our own existences and preferences. Whenever you attack a specific persons nonsense, that person will feel as he is under attack, because he is.
Being objective, correct, logical, etc. is simply preferring that which isn’t human above that which is human. It’s no wonder that most people aren’t capable of this. We evolved specifically to stay alive, only people who are sick in the same manner that we are, are capable of being so “rational” that they might destroy themselves.
What’s the best we can do here? Perhaps it’s considering all human beings to be valuable. It’s the least egoistic perspective which still has subjective preferences (and thus considers life to be worth more than death). But even here, we can’t consider everything human to be equal, for there are human aspects that we find more desirable than others, e.g. I would like to reduce aggression, and then convice myself that this egoistic preference of mine is somehow objectively correct, rather than the desire for the growth of people who think and value like I do. Only by deceiving myself like this can I bring myself to prevent the existence of people who offend me or who are otherwise a danger to myself (and this includes people who are better than me!), and still believe that I’m a good person acting selflessly.
Of course, this comment is all nonsense. I’m just learned in similar nonsense to everyone else, so there’s a sort of coherence between people which is easily confused for some sort of objective correctness (rather than the shared subjectivity that it is). Of course, even logic and mathematics has zero relation to reality. Math is a set of paths from assumptions to their conclusion, and in the same way, answers relate to questions pair-wise. And these pairs rely solely on eachother, and it’s the same whenever you have neither or both. They’re zeros which has been expanded to some plus and minus which add up to said zero. This is why “solving” anything destroys it.
The difference in proxies for brain activity when speaking or doing nothing is marginal.
Non-conceptual acts from parachuting and sex to running and climbing likely result in more activation than speaking, they also tend to be more memorable and most people find them more desirable than talking to others, let alone to themselves.
Ultimately, this is subjective, of course, and if you tell me that your conceptual maps and word ladened narratives are important for who you are, I will of course grant that to you.
My personal impression is that they aren’t, they are quite important for what I do to be useful in society but that is like saying that, as a taxi driver, my car is a core part of who I am, which is also fair, but you know what they say, it’s sometimes good to just get out of the car.
For reference, this post was motivated by failure modes I see among capital R rationalists, scientists, philosophers, and other “many word many symbol” people—I don’t think the issues I point to would affect “normal” people as much. Normal people have reasonably good mechanisms to decouple from conceptual thinking, they might have a conceptual issue or two, but usually nothing that affects their quality of life that much.
Of course, you can interpret it the other way around too
That sounds about right, words and language are just communication of something, it’s stored quite differently in the brain.
My point was that we’re communicating things which we identify with and which we have made part of ourselves.
You know how LLMs sometimes dream or hallucinate? I like to think of people as more consistent versions of that.
Language is like a nonsense protocol which people can make sense of simply because we share it. Isn’t DNA the same? DNA is useful to itself, but whatever is encoded in DNA doesn’t really say anything about reality external from the DNA. But none of this is a problem unless two different contexts conflict.
And yeah, I was mostly agreeing. I just think the idea can be taken much further. Possibly so far that it cancels itself out again.
I suppose that some intelligent people tend to confuse their mental model with reality itself. This is the type which are a little too logical for their own good, and they tend to have difficulties with whatever isn’t rigid and unambiguous, relationships included.
I think that there’s fewer problems for intuitive types, since intuitive thinking is flexible and quite a lot faster. They realize that language is a tool for doing various things, rather than something valuable in itself. To demand “correct language” to the extent that it hinders communication would be an example of Goodhart’s law.
But even “correct” language is just that, language.
I suppose the best way I can explain this is, and I should have said this to begin with: Human life is itself a context. Most are under the impression that individual and subjective things are nonsense, while everything formal is objective and correct. I propose that everything only covers a limited context, and that some of these contexts merely cover a larger scope. I also propose that it’s not possible to create anything with an infinite scope, so at best we can create something universal in the case that it applies to our universe, but this is still a finite context.
If you think about the world in this manner, avoiding concepts like ‘infinite’, ‘true’ and ‘real’, making sense of the world becomes a lot easier.
And contexts conflict with (contradict) eachother, and higher consistency can be reached by solving contradictions. But every time you do this, something specific is destroyed, and everything is some degree of specific, so it’s entirely possible to destroy everything. With every generalization, you cover a larger scope but your generalization gets thinner and less rich.
If you increase depth, you decrease width and vice versa.
The nonsense of people is that which is unique to themselves and conflicts with other people, and the nonsense of humanity is our shared errors which conflict with logic, and logic is just a limited axiomatic system when viewed from the outside. But resolve these conflicts, and you’ll be left with nothing. The person is no more, humanity is no more, and if math requires universality, then math would have refuted itself as well.
It’s not just us which look silly from an outside perspective, everything does, and I don’t recommend destroying any of it for that reason.
Sorry for being verbose, it’s difficult to explain my view (the lessons I learned the hard way by being stupid) in just a few words, haha. If you want a saner engagement with your post I’m afraid you have to wait for other people to post
Ok, I think I better see your point, one thing I’m not sure you are on board with is that unique language can come from:
Direct experience of the world—or linguistic thinking about a memory (sky here has green~ish tint before a storm)
Linguistic thinking -- with several nested layers of recursion (what is <abstract concept>)
Ultimately there’s no hard line between the two but in practice, this seems quite relevant. Statements that come from 1) seem usually ok , and statements that come from 2) usually seem maladaptive.
Isn’t that unique composition of language? If you consider descriptions of the world to be something like a linear combination of words (or the impression they map to in your mind), then language can be said to span/cover some intrepretation of experiences.
I agree with you, and linguistic thinking is certainly the more reductive one.
But aren’t they both mistaken? As soon as anything is put into words, or encoded in logic for that matter, it has already been severely reduced and lost its connection to reality.
Difficult questions are basically syntax errors, loaded questions, self-contradicting statements, or statements with mistaken assumptions baked into them. But more importantly, I don’t think that even correct language has much in common with reality. We have no reasons to assume that the words we’ve come up with have the expressive power needed to align with reality, and it might be the case that no such words can’t exist.
You might be arguing that the meaning or concept behind a word is valid, and that manipulating these underlying things can allow us to understand the world. I suppose that this understanding of the world is correct enough to be useful, but I doubt that there’s any formal equivalence between even our intuitions and “reality”. As I see it, “getting out of the car” allows one to live a genuine human life, but it still doesn’t allow one to move outside the scope of human.