That quotation looked crazy to me too. But maybe it’s a way of saying “experience is analog, symbols are discrete”. Tuukka’s system looks like a case study in how a handful of potentially valid insights can be buried under a structure made of wordplay (multiple uses of “irrational”); networks of concepts in which formal structures are artificially repeated but the actual relations between concepts are fatally vague (his big flowchart); and a severe misuse of mathematical objects and propositions in an attempt to be rigorous.
When an ordinary crackpot does something like this, they’ve sealed themselves into an earnest personal theory of everything, and the only way out would be for someone smarter to come along, decode their work, and patiently isolate and explain all the methodological fallacies, something which never happens. Occasionally you get someone who constructs their system in the awareness that it’s a product of their own mind and not just an objective depiction of the facts as they were found—someone who knowingly creates a crackpot synthesis out of choice, rather than just being driven to do so by unexamined compulsions. That’s less pitiful, but it’s still annoying. I’m not sure where Tuukka lies on this spectrum.
ETA In retrospect I regret the somewhat abusive character of this description. But I believe the bitter fact to be that Tuukka needs help in precisely the sense that I said will never happen. Even though he talks about all sorts of very interesting topics, what he says about them is mostly idiosyncratic interlocking nonsense. The aspiration to discover and convey truth, in a hostile and uncomprehending environment, has produced, as if by perverse chemical reaction, a set of exterior traits which serve to repel precisely the people he wants to attract. Having written his sequel to Pirsig he now needs to outgrow that act as soon as possible, and acquire some genuine expertise in an intersubjectively recognized domain, so that he has people to talk with and not just talk at.
But maybe it’s a way of saying “experience is analog, symbols are discrete”.
It doesn’t seem likely to me. The quotation contains “continua” twice (I assume that would be the “analog”) but I can’t find anything that could be plausibly interpreted as referring to either discreetness or experience. How did you arrive to your suggested interpretation?
How did you arrive to your suggested interpretation?
The jargon of “knowledge by acquaintance” and “knowledge by description” comes from Bertrand Russell. Knowledge by acquaintance is “direct” or “experiential” knowledge, such as knowledge of a pain or other sensation that you’re having. Knowledge by description is second-hand knowledge obtained by processing a proposition, e.g. your knowledge of my pain on the basis of what I tell you about it.
What I was picking up on in Tuukka’s statement was that the irrationals are uncountable whereas the rationals are countable. So the rationals have the cardinality of a set of discrete combinatorial structures, like possible sentences in a language, whereas the irrationals have the cardinality of a true continuum, like a set of possible experiences, if you imagined qualia to be genuinely real-valued properties and e.g. the visual field to be a manifold in the topological sense. It would be a way of saying “descriptions are countable in number, experiences are uncountable”.
That quotation looked crazy to me too. But maybe it’s a way of saying “experience is analog, symbols are discrete”. Tuukka’s system looks like a case study in how a handful of potentially valid insights can be buried under a structure made of wordplay (multiple uses of “irrational”); networks of concepts in which formal structures are artificially repeated but the actual relations between concepts are fatally vague (his big flowchart); and a severe misuse of mathematical objects and propositions in an attempt to be rigorous.
When an ordinary crackpot does something like this, they’ve sealed themselves into an earnest personal theory of everything, and the only way out would be for someone smarter to come along, decode their work, and patiently isolate and explain all the methodological fallacies, something which never happens. Occasionally you get someone who constructs their system in the awareness that it’s a product of their own mind and not just an objective depiction of the facts as they were found—someone who knowingly creates a crackpot synthesis out of choice, rather than just being driven to do so by unexamined compulsions. That’s less pitiful, but it’s still annoying. I’m not sure where Tuukka lies on this spectrum.
ETA In retrospect I regret the somewhat abusive character of this description. But I believe the bitter fact to be that Tuukka needs help in precisely the sense that I said will never happen. Even though he talks about all sorts of very interesting topics, what he says about them is mostly idiosyncratic interlocking nonsense. The aspiration to discover and convey truth, in a hostile and uncomprehending environment, has produced, as if by perverse chemical reaction, a set of exterior traits which serve to repel precisely the people he wants to attract. Having written his sequel to Pirsig he now needs to outgrow that act as soon as possible, and acquire some genuine expertise in an intersubjectively recognized domain, so that he has people to talk with and not just talk at.
It doesn’t seem likely to me. The quotation contains “continua” twice (I assume that would be the “analog”) but I can’t find anything that could be plausibly interpreted as referring to either discreetness or experience. How did you arrive to your suggested interpretation?
The jargon of “knowledge by acquaintance” and “knowledge by description” comes from Bertrand Russell. Knowledge by acquaintance is “direct” or “experiential” knowledge, such as knowledge of a pain or other sensation that you’re having. Knowledge by description is second-hand knowledge obtained by processing a proposition, e.g. your knowledge of my pain on the basis of what I tell you about it.
What I was picking up on in Tuukka’s statement was that the irrationals are uncountable whereas the rationals are countable. So the rationals have the cardinality of a set of discrete combinatorial structures, like possible sentences in a language, whereas the irrationals have the cardinality of a true continuum, like a set of possible experiences, if you imagined qualia to be genuinely real-valued properties and e.g. the visual field to be a manifold in the topological sense. It would be a way of saying “descriptions are countable in number, experiences are uncountable”.