DeCentSee

DeCent

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 02:32:00 +0000

DeCent was the name I'd planned for this blog. Unfortunately the blog name was already taken: so DeCentSee it will have to be instead. The play on "decent" I trust is obvious: the play on decentralize is key.

DeCentSee's purpose is to rescue essays posted online since the mid-1990s but persecuted as of the past couple of years. All materials were previously posted, all materials are copyright protected, the persecuted author temporarily not named here for his protection.

Astute readers will know who it is, and so would his persecutors should they chance to pay attention.

The first pieces I select for remounting are classics from the author's Thinking Tools collection.

Understand, I am remounting classic modules from an unpublished author whose domains were persecuted, forced off-line.

Much of the cream of them concerns epistemology, science, reason ... and were first digitized in the middle to late 1990s. I recommend that you start reading the files first posted here: that is, start at the bottom of the menu. Reverse blog chronology is the actual chronology.

The original posts were replete with cross reference links. Until they're working again, this version is unavoidably crippled. In time I hope to add an explanation of what went wrong with the author's right to speak.

Dates: I plan to revise the posts to indicate the date of original posting

thusly.

Scrapbooks: The author typically sketches something, posts it, redrafts it, reposts it ... As time passes effects of stylistic unity may suffer, but it's the content not the style that I care about in didactic writing. Where points are just strung I typically put them in a second file and called them a scrapbook. Her scrapbook additions will go below a full-width line like this one:

The Proper Study of Mankind

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 02:27:00 +0000

The Proper Study of Mankind: Man, Truth, Semantics, & Survival

2000 02

The proper study of Mankind is Man. At least so wrote Alexander Pope in the cap line to one of the most famous of his heroic couplets. From a post-Renaissance standpoint, the remark seems "obvious." Few today recognize the line’s stark contrast to the medieval view in which, for literate Christians, the proper study of Mankind is God. Of course that’s not quite right: God can’t be studied. The Bible can be studied, the Patristic Fathers can be studied ... but God is a mystery Christians have to accept, not reason about. The dichotomy of the Renaissance between sacred studies and Humanism has so saturated Western thought that many see that dichotomy as the only right and proper conflict.
I believe that the Church had one point on the money. Rather it becomes correct provided you rephrase it: "reasoning" in a natural language can lead you in circles: don’t trust it.
We shall return to that point but first let me try a different rephrasing. The proper study of Mankind is Truth. The medieval cleric might say, "Why, that’s the same thing. God is the Truth, the only Truth." Would a neo-Humanist claim that Man is the Truth? I suspect that the attitude most common these days is neither God nor the Truth matter; only Man counts. (1)

I no longer find God (2) to matter (there’s an Alan Watts-like pun there if you wish to notice it) and I no longer care much about Man, but I care very much about the Truth. Or am I still making a very Christian-like error? (What is Truth, said jesting Pilate ...[Bacon])

If one trained in Christian universals comes under the influence of Peter Abelard and his intellectual forebears and descendants, Occam, for example, Truth becomes still another thing one can’t study because it isn’t really "real." Let’s try rephrasing that. There is no Truth unless you mean Pleroma [Bateson], the physical universe, the territory itself [Korzybski]: what we describe and map, whether well or badly. That truth is unutterable not only according to Korzybski, but to Wittgenstein as well. The best we can have in the sentient subsets of Creatura-the universe of life, information, description ...-are descriptions of the territory not exposed as not corresponding to the "things" described. Genesis seemed true until Eritosthenes, Kepler, Copernicus, Darwin ... Man seemed true until Darwin, Freud, Morris, Diamond ... Newton seemed true until Einstein. Einstein seemed true until ... another decade or two had passed, until quantum problems arose, and now: until Ilya Prigogine reexamined the arrow of time ... (3)

What matters to me now isn’t God or Man or Truth, but good descriptions.

Why? For esthetic reasons? Certainly esthetics dominated much of my first six decades of life, but I don’t care much about that any more either. Even good descriptions I care about only on a temporary basis: I see them as, for the time being, essential to the survival of this once-complex Earth biosphere. Bad descriptions saturate the hubris of both sacred and Humanist kleptocrats. The latter hire scientists to make sure that the signal for their bad descriptions is strong and clear. They want matter studied assiduously, not the content of their signal rationally critiqued. I see Science as just as unreal as Truth: doubly so while "scientists" feed at funded troughs.

The current study that I see as potentially liberating is information. The purpose of this paper* is to suggest a series of ways in which information studies might better serve survival, might help to housebreak us so that the interplanetary and interstellar travel of my youthful dreams, if we survive to realize it, might not be a disaster for whatever system we clog.

*First written as a new introduction at Macroinformation [qv].

The most dangerous bad descriptions are those we inherit as sacred. One cannot with impunity look reasonably, try different descriptions, on a taboo object. Many of my contemporaries seem to believe that ridiculing sacred texts while vulgarizing their diction "proves" that they have no taboos. (4) No. The Bible isn’t the only set of descriptions we’ve been handed as sacred. I don’t mean Marx either. I don’t even mean Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes economics. Neither do I mean just media and advertising. Try the Humanities: philosophy, criticism ... the criticisms of literature, music, and the plastic arts.

Your author is self-taught in information as well as in science. Isolation, poverty, and ignorance handicap his study of even his most favorite subjects. If you can temporarily tolerate my diction not having been tested in any information fraternity, my not knowing many of the accomplishments or specialized applications of information studies, I plan to demonstrate ways in which the concept of information as I understand it can upgrade traditional critical arts the way a halogen lamp upgrades a candle. That too needs to be rephrased: by myself I can merely sketch some elements of possible demonstrations. I need feedback and collaboration, not to mention access to resources, before full scale demonstrations will be possible.

I now return to the point about not trusting reasoning done in a natural language and tie it to the trick I’ve tried here of phrasing and rephrasing. Don’t trust reasoning done in any particular artificial language either. There is a saying in the Middle East that important problems should be pondered at least twice: once drunk and once sober. My experience casts doubt on the wisdom of wine (I readily suggest that some degree of inebriation may inhibit the inhibition which blinds the trained intellect to much of the bulk of macroinformation-I similarly suggest that the intellectual suppression of women may in fact have contributed to their reputed intuition: they may be less inhibited by what’s actually, macroinformationally, in the subject); but I heartily endorse the binocular vision gained by synchronous descriptions. If you can "prove" something in, say, geometry, but can’t also prove it in algebra, in the lab, or in your garden, watch out. The Case of Synonymous Languages [Bateson] will loom large in Macro-Information.

As I "apologize" for the limited experience of my scientific diction, I should also confess to my near innumeracy. I can’t multiply or divide or even add very well (my interpretation "why" has been expressed elsewhere) (5), but I think in mathematical metaphors all the time. Thus, I seek feedback on my jargon: I will cooperate with any legitimate upgrade. Thus also, Macro-Information sorely needs collaboration from mathematical adepts who see Macro-Information’s potential. Similarly Macro-Information needs collaboration from artificial systems experts. On its feet, Macro-Information could itself become a field, one which will invite adepts of any field to bring their tools for review. From then on the upgrading may be mutual: a curator or a musicologist may bring us something precious we’d been missing.

(1) Man in this case means the hegemony with which we associate ourselves.
(2) Link to "gods, God, and god" coming
(3) Prigogine, Iyla, The End of Certainty, NY 1996, p. 1,passim.
(4) That’s like a NAZI thinking that kicking a Jew proves him to be fearless.
(5) Education, math, and Prigogine note coming.

Information

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:10:00 +0000

Information scientists conceived of information as inversely related to predictability. That was in the 1940s, and, typically, the scientists worked for the phone company. Norbert Wiener claimed that there was more information in a sequence of numbers we don't understand — 9, 37, 243 ... — than in a sequence we think we unerstand — 2, 4, 6, 8 ... Wiener further said that there was more information in a good sonnet (fourteen lines, ten syllables per line) than in the Manhattan White Pages. Claude Shannon defined information as "the inverse of the probability of the signal." Mathematically that's expressed H = -∑p_i log_ep_i.

Very good, very deep: information à la 1940s. For this thinker jack-of-many-sciences and teacher non-pareil Gregory Bateson absorbed what the phone company men said and went deeper, more simply. Bateson defined information as "any difference that makes a difference."

My own emphasis is on complex information. Emphatically I deny any equation between data and information. Data may be muddled; information may be ambiguous. The information in a paradox may be nigh infinite.

Waterman hails his persecuted author / scientist as deep on information, complex information in particular. Some of that author's writings are trying to slip back online. Check for examples at http://www.tnni.net/~macropk/, where complex information is termed macroinformation, or synformation: both coinages explained.

Consciousness

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:35:00 +0000

Consciousness: A big subject.

2000 09 23

Consciousness is another thing we’re so proud of without having a clear idea of what it is. Neither do we have a clear idea of its limits. I’m merely going to jot a few ideas on the latter. I ask this question: "How can a creature which claims to be conscious verify the claim without also verifying what there is to be conscious of?"

The first thing you need is a second perspective [qv].

We see that the Hellenes lived in a world of land, water, islands, more water, more land. Now we fly over the eastern Mediterranean, take satellite photos, make better maps. We see the Peloponnesis here, Turkey there, the sea connecting them or separating them depending on whether you have marine competence. Our consciousness of the area has many more reference points, a far greater variety of perspectives. In this respect, our twentieth-century consciousness of the geography is superior to Homer’s or Aristotle.

People have long sought a second perspective. God sees what you do, knows what you think. Santa too knows if you’ve been bad or good. Uncle Sam has eyes everywhere.
But even if all this were true, if Santa did know if we’ve been bad or good, if Uncle Sam had optic fibers in our rectum as well as in our bank, what does Uncle use for a second perspective? Well, he can use Santa. Santa uses God. Santa is only Saint Nick after all.
But that still leaves us little better off than the Hellenes with their cosmological problems; OK, Atlas holds up the world: what holds up Atlas? In other words, what does God have for a second perspective?
When God takes us for Judgment, we presume that we’ll have a better perspective on ourselves, the mortal coil sloughed off. How would Judgment Day be any better than night court if we were all still screaming our viewpoints. No, we presume we’d have a better perspective, God’s own perspective: that the damned would see, acknowledge, and honor their damnation; the saved would properly value their salvation.

Perception’s a tool that’s pointed on both ends.
Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

Which still just moves us from the world to Atlas’s shoulders. The joke has it that the seeker asked the holy man such questions."The strong man stands on a turtle’s back," answered the holy man. But the seeker then asks the holy man what supports the turtle. "It’s turtles all the way down," snaps the holy man."Turtles all the way down" is far from a satisfactory answer. Neither is it likely to be true.
Right here on earth, right here (9/23/0) in the final four months of the Twentieth Century, we have a choice of second perspectives. We have Hubbell’s observations and theory. We have an atmosphere free telescope in his name. Even the telescope itself has a series of perspectives: it can expose the film (the diode, the whatever it exposes) from one side of the earth’s orbit, wait six months, and expose the "same" view from the other. Our maps get better: which still leaves the question of how many turtles there are.
If a Hellene said, "I know Athens. I know the Peloponnesis. I know Syracuse. I know the sea between," I "know" what he’s talking about: I believe him. If he says, "I am conscious," I don’t know what to think: other than what I’ve just written.
My example is physical. That is, it’s geographical. Then I refer to a cosmological example, also physical: "world," strong man, turtle ... But people in our time know better than any shaman or wizard how minuscule a part of the cosmos physical reality is. Is a neutrino "physical"? Is experience? Is thought? Is time? ...
My Macroinformation Project is in the midst of developing my recommendation for a study that would clarify this somewhat: possibly as much as it’s possible to clarify it. Macroinformation cannot be perceived or pursued without a better classification system for existence. What do we mean my "world"? Is it physical? To what extent? How does it relate to time, to mass, to a whole series of things? Which set is the larger: the universe, or the cosmos? How does the latter relate to time, to mass, to a whole series of things? Is there any set greater than the cosmos? Does it include actual things only? or also possible things? Does it also include impossible things?
Until we can answer some of those things, until our answers have been rechewed and redigested, talk about consciousness is no more impressive than the Lakota sense that a few nomads were "the People" or that a section of high plains was "the world."
And God’s consciousness? I see him having exactly the same epistemological problems we have. Two year olds, the lot of us.

May the dark ignorance of sentient beings be dispelled.

Shambala community

Fact

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:27:00 +0000

2001 07 14

Fact: wow, is that ever a tricky concept! For starters I quote Nietzsche on the subject:There are no facts, only interpretations.OK, I’ll say a fast word. If ever there were a species that should be humble, it’s Homo sapiens sapiens. Humility, when it’s trundled out and displayed by a kleptocratic institution such as a church (has there ever been a church that didn’t represent some society that stole its territory? stole from the commons?) is typically a mask for pride: see how humble we’re being: while the true owner of this territory loves and forgives us. It’s very hard for kleptocratic citizens (virtually all of us) to confront the implications of the humbling but necessary science of semiotics: we see light; never things: form maps, have no direct contact with territory ... Our reality is symbolic, our symbols fallible.
Our concept of "fact" is a vanity that believes we can know, know easily, know in large numbers, what’s "real."
Charles Dickens made fun of people who thought they restricted their attention or their teaching to "facts." I’d like to see Karl Popper critique a Dragnet script where Joe Friday iterates "Just the facts, ma’am."
Ideally the fact is what’s irreducibly true, in correspondence with reality. Great. Now: can we know what that is? Unimpeachably? Irrefutably? Infallibly? Only if we burn the heretics before they can speak. And wholly, infrangibly, wall ourselves off from the Tao. Such a wall can be called "church," "government," "university department," "committee of scientists" ...

His lies were not fabrications.
They were a brilliantly devised distorting lens that turned facts into monsters,
yet left them looking like facts.
Le Carré

Did you ever notice how rarely "fact finders" publish dissent? The court keeps a record of dissenting judges, but dissenting fact finders are flushed from the fact finding task force. Where dissent is published, then the publishers are real scientists. When do we see them? One percent of one percent of one percent of the time?
Facts should be reviewed by the most (rationally) skeptical epistemologists. Would there by anything left firmly in the set? Now that residue should be honored. Known. Publicized.
Rots of ruck.

The facts, if not true, were well invented;
the arguments, if not logical, were seductive.
Anthony Trollope

Wittgenstein's comments are delicious:I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again "I know that that’s a tree," pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: "This fellow isn’t insane. We’re only doing philosophy."People get indignant when they hear that philosophers ever discussed whether or not you can prove that you exist. But indignation is no refutation. Lots of things that seem obvious from a distance get fuzzy or contradictory (or both) up close. The way to never need to prove anything is to never get close to anything. And if you do what you’re told, study what you’re told, when you’re told, then you’ll never even get close to the subject you’re supposedly studying.

For example: we all know that General Relativity was a hard theory to prove merely in terms of finding examples that agreed let alone finding examples that falsified it. We all know that Eddington set up an experiment that measured whether light was bent around a star by using a solar eclipse. We all know that the measurements "confirmed" Einstein’s theory. A long time passed between my first hearing that and my learning that three measurements were taken: one was more, one was less, and the third was way off. So the scientists said that it all agreed! (See Evidence [coming shortly].) Understand: I follow this stuff. The best I can in my poverty. The best I can without sacrificing good eating, good fishing, good loving, good sleep ... and lots of music. And I can’t provide you with the actual figures. Because I’ve never seen them. Oh, I don’t doubt I could find them. (Could I do the math if I did? Could I trust my agreement or disagreement?) I don’t have to. I recognize the pattern: it’s fuzzy.

Fact Scrapbook

Facts will never be agreed upon so long as objectives differ.

"Facts" have a social dimension. A fact will never be agreed upon so long as objectives differ. Dishonesty will jump to disagree, but honesty too may disagree. An entire culture may temporarily enforce an agreement, backed by school and church. Weeding false facts after that will be hard, very hard.
Objectivity may be unreachable by human nature, but kleptocracy adds to the difficulty: and all civilized men are kleptocrats.
Note however, as I shall illustrate in another module momentarily: kleptocracy involves not only theft we are helpless to do anything about — European ethnics sweeping aside indigenous ethnics in the Americas — but fresh active thefts contaminate the young as well as the old.

2002 08 30 The concept of fact inevitably and ineradicably has a semiotic fault line: Do we mean some irreducible quantum that’s true? Or do we mean some irreducible quantum that’s accepted as true?
And wouldn’t we have to be infallible to distinguish them?
Infallible? Social man? The kleptocrat? A costumed liar? A predator masked as a photosynthesizing scion of God?

I love it in the fiction of Stephen Hunter when a "fact" firmly established in novel N becomes exposed in novel N + n to be false. Little is as it seems. I'm reminded of the Twain novel where the racists discover that they themselves are of mixed blood. Once again King Oedipus discovers that he's the murdering motherfucker he's looking for!

2001 10 18 I think Nietzsche’s point must be accepted: there are no facts, only interpretations. We must satisfy ourselves with interpretations, know that our reason is relative only, but strive to achieve honest consensus of interpretation. Interpretations must be reviewed by each generation and after each paradigm shift. Dogma must die.

2002 09 11 In kleptocracies it’s the state that decides what the "facts" are. But how truthful are governments? How sophisticated their epistemology? How disinterested? How routinely do governments falsify [qv] their beliefs?

2005 10 14 Consider the social dimension of the concept fact: if something is true, but no one in the society believes it, can it be a "fact"? Fact implies social acceptance, does it not?
What’s more common than for opinion, particularly mistaken opinion, even deliberately mistaken opinion, to parade as fact?

I remember thrilling to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series when it was first broadcast. But he drove me crazy when he said, Dr. Carl, "Evolution is fact!" No, no, no, that’s the worst kind of epistemological confusion. Evolution is theory. Evolution is great theory, one of the best ever, especially after a century and a half of improving tinkering; but theory and fact are of different existential species.

It doesn’t matter how many of the "facts" are actually fiction so long as the story is true.

Perspective

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:43:00 +0000

Perspective (as a Thinking Tool)

2006 05 20

Anyone, especially anyone since the Renaissance, will have some perspective on the concept of perspective. For more than a decade now references to the concept, uses of the concept, developments of the concept ... have been accumulating around Waterman’s personal domains: especially at Macroinformation. [link not yet added]

Today, wanting to add a few more points, it comes to me as a surprise that I don’t already have a perspective section at [Waterman]’s domains: at least not under that specific name. The points I am about to sketch may well however wander all over, enter into different areas. Hell, Shakespeare made any number of points, references ... in any number of plays: but the play wasn’t called Revenge or Love ... it was called Hamlet ... or Macbeth, or Othello ... or Romeo and Juliet, or Antony and Cleopatra ... I organize somewhat — more than somewhat; you organize it the rest of your way, for your purposes.
(Naturally, the results may then get moved, further developed, revised ... in a different setting: perspective again!)
Medievals painted things in a flexible time/space. Things were composed, organized hierarchically, according to an orthodoxy of organization. The Nativity, the Passion, the Resurection ... and St. Somebody might all be organized into one picture. The Renaissance painted things as they appear to a given viewer. The viewer is out of the picture, in front of the picture. Something important was in or near the center of the picture. Other things receded toward a horizon. Neither Einstein, nor Plank, nor Godel ... were in the picture.
Last evening I watched an interview with Jim Carrey and Michel Gondry concerning the making of the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. One sequence showed how Gondry had avoided special effects, computer graphics ... done everything he could just with the camera, and with altered sets. Thus Carrey’s Joel, getting his memory of Winslet’s Clementine erased, tries escaping to areas of his memory not pre-mapped for Clementine: to hide some vestige of her after all. Thus we see him as a child, sitting on the kitchen floor, under the table, as his mother walks about. The shot shows the mother normal, adult size. Now: how do we show Carrey, a tallish guy, child-size? Build a reverse-perspective set.
Carrey and Gondry demonstrate. Carrey stands at the camera end of the table: familiar size. He walks away from the camera along the table’s side: and walks and walks, getting smaller and smaller in our minds’ eye as he does so. At the far end of the table, crouching to the floor, he is child size: but still dressed as day-to-day adult Jim Carrey. On the flat screen we see a "table." Everything looks "normal": so we assume the table is an ordinary breakfast table, maybe three and a half, four feet long. Not so. The set is huge, the table is very long: specially built, the set specially painting to mislead us.
Gregory Bateson reports being introduced to the same phenomenon by its modern developer. Pictures of the trick can be found in elementary to advanced psychology books. The set was rigged, the mind sees it as normal: and therefore distorts normal things disrupted by the setting.
Now: here: look at the night sky, away from city lights, with as little pollution as possible. Lots of stars, right? There are the familiar constellations. On a clear night sit on the beach at Bahia Honda. Look up. You see a sky not that dissimilar from what our ancestors who painting the caves at Lascaux saw. We don’t know what constellations they saw, how they named them, what stories they told about them. But for my purposes now, let’s just use the stories and names inherited in the west. There’s Orion, there’s Cassiopeia, there’s the Big Bear ... The majority of contemporaries in such a circumstance will see the night sky very much the way the medievals saw it, the way Ptolemy saw it: far away, all a fixed distance away.
We see that some stars are bigger than others, some brighter than others. How many of us, sitting on the beach, also think that what we’re seeing is vast distances away? no two objects likely to be the same distance away?
How many of us will also realize that the stars we’re seeing are all relatively close to us: or we wouldn’t be able to see them? All those points of light ... look infinite in number. Actually, they’ve been counted: at least estimated. The human eye can see about two thousand stars. What about the billions and billions that Dr. Carl reverently evokes? and they’re just in this galaxy! home base for us on earth.
Now: take just Orion. Take just the main few stars along his supposed belt. How far away are they? Number them left to right, 1, 2, 3. Sure they have names, but we don’t need to know them for this point. How far away is star #1? Is star #2 closer? or further? How much closer? how much further? star #3? ...
Now: imagine yourself in the Andromeda galaxy, looking toward the Milky Way. Could it be meaningful to talk about looking toward Orion? Would Orion have a belt? Would those three stars, if you could see them at all from Andromeda, seem to line up?
(In the same context, consider my often iterated, Bucky-Fuller-type point: most contemporaries still see and feel and "think" of the sun as rising, or setting; not themselves as grounded by gravity on a spinning planet orbiting around a sun making its own movements among its galactic neighbors, the whole galaxy doing who knows what in relation to other galaxies, all in who knows what kind of a universe.)

People have long seen, or tried to see, or imagined they saw, or gotten irate at people who see ... God’s hand in the universe: God’s hand on the flower, God’s hand on the pretty girl, God’s hand on the eyeball ... Dr. Carl refused to. Dr. Carl wanted the universe, if intelligently designed, to spell out the number π, or e ... in the stars. (Guys like me think, You idiot, π and e are spelled out: in everything!)
(In a story by James Blish earth-civilized man gets a signal from another galaxy that seems to be intelligible. It gets deciphered as what seems to be a set of blue prints for building a better listening device. Humans build it, turn it to the source. An ear-slitting Beep is emitted by the machine: and nothing else. A long time passes before anyone figures out that the beep was full of information. Indeed, it contained what seemed the sending civilization’s entire library of know-how.) (Waterman adds that even as we sequence the last human chromosome, however much we learn, we still have no idea of what we’re missing.)
Indeed it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to learn that answers to any question are coded into any bacterium. All possible wisdom could be hidden in zero. Absolute black might map the cosmos.
Now: how can we get a perspective on the cosmos? on our place in it? (Is "perspective" an appropriate metaphor?)
Not the first, but the best, thing to try is science. Try to make your knowledge responsible to experience, to facts (what are facts? [link not yet added] to reasoned skepticism ...) You can try mysticism too. (Good luck.) (Or mysticism will try you.)
My Games We Play [link not yet added] piece asks, "How does one know what (meta) game(s) one is in? I answer:One Don’t!
Any two points can be connected by a line. (Think of all of those words in quotes, think of all words in quotes.) Any line between two points can be extended to a third point, and a fourth ...
In the past we wanted lines to be "straight." (Ha, ha.) (Bucky said that a straight line is the shortest distance between any two points, the shortest distance is that followed by a lightning bolt: therefore, the straightest real line is zigzag.)

the quickest, but not necessarily the shortest, route

(But, we’re all still in the stone age. Our minds see the sun rise, our minds want to see lines as "straight.")
Picture a line from your eye (imagining your eye as a point (ha, ha)) to star #1, at your "left," in Orion’s belt. Now: extend that line to Andromeda (all the time thinking of star #1 as a point, of Andromeda as a point: millions of billions of stars as a point. Ha, ha). Next draw a line from your eye to star #2 in Orion’s belt, continue that line to Andromeda. Do the same for star #3.
Learn the relative positions of those three stars in the Milky Way Galaxy: from earth, from Andromeda. Compare the wacky angles they have to make relative to the line: part 1.
NOW: imagine lights, bright strontium say (to distinguish them from the "white" stars), at the Andromeda points of those three lines. Try to picture those three strontium points as seen from the third universe parallel to this universe’s "left" in the M theory cosmic "bread loaf."
Don’t be stupid, Waterman: No information travels sideways between parallel universes. (Hell: no information reaches the whole of THIS universe! All is shaded into cones of information, of light ...)
Oh, hell. Try to imagine it anyway. (You’ll be little worse off than scholastics, cosmologists, theologians ... from any previous age.)
NOW:
Does the shape remind you, us, of anything? Could it be spelling π?
Draw such lines from each of the stars in Orion. Could the points be making a new constellation? Could the points be "spelling" eloi? In Greek? in Arabic? Could be points be spelling baraka? or agapé? some theorem?
Could we force them to? like Tolstoy’s Pierre forcing "Napoleon" to code the number of the Beast of Revelations?

Who knows what cosmic screen saver pattern we’re making: from the right distance?

What if lines extended from Orion to Andromeda, seen from some parallel universe, spelled Fuck You?
If lines from Orion don’t maybe lines from Virgo do.
If lines from Virgo, seen in Andromeda from the third universe to the left, don’t, maybe lines from Virgo do, seen from the fourth universe to the right.
Or maybe we need to see them projected into some other galaxy.
Imagine that we actually find some "message," by this or other means: did "God" do that? Or, with Hamlet, are we seeing camels in clouds?

I was six or seven when WW II wound down. In the later 1940s missionaries spoke at my church about efforts to help the beleaguered people of a battered and disrupted Europe. In particular stories of goods-drops into the Netherlands struck me. In the seventh grade, 1950,1951ish, I wrote a story about it..
The planes dropped flour sacks. People on the ground saw them coming, were hungry for them. People on the ground saw them as floating toward them, like feathers. In the first drops some people on the ground tried to catch the flour sacks. Splat.
If you dropped a flour sack and a scale, and mid-air the scale somehow got under the flour sack, both falling together, the flour sack would weigh nothing, would register nothing on the falling scale: light as a feather. Ah, but the flour sack still had the same mass as it had in the plane, as it had back at the airport, as it would have once it landed: twenty pounds, ten pounds, twenty-five pounds ... That mass would retain the momentum for that mass. Splat.
Is this a question of perspective? Sure. Why not?
How about these considerations:
Boiling water registers one hundred degrees Centigrade of thermal energy: by definition, 212 Fahrenheit. But heating water, when it reaches 100 degrees, does not necessarily start to boil. Water may reach 100 degrees, 101, 102 ... or 100 and some fraction, before it actually commences boiling. Extra energy is needed for it to transform state. Once that state is reached, the water reduces to 100 degrees, and maintains that thermal energy while boiling: under normal atmospheric pressures.
The vaporization of the water, present at all temperatures, quickens, rapidly, with boiling. Water escapes from the water as steam. What’s the thermal energy of steam? 100 degrees? (212?) No, no. Don’t touch. Much more energy is present in the steam than in the boiling water.
The same with ice. When the temperature of water falls to zero (or to 32 degrees Fahrenheit) it may begin to get ready to freeze into ice: but, once again, extra energy must be removed for it to happen: and again, normal atmospheric pressures are assumed.
A TV science doc just showed how lakes may form under a glacier. Under the pressure from the glacier the oppressed water has a hard time freezing. Energy with no way to go anywhere, to do anything, is stored under the ice. Kaboom. The glacier can explode!PS. The doc was about some geological anomaly somewhere out west. Geologists couldn’t explain the anomalies. Some guy hypothesized that the features came from water running rapidly. The geologists of the time were committed to their slow and gradual paradigms. Pooh-pooh. They dismissed their colleague’s hypothesis.
One geologist whispered to his neighbor: "I know where Yo-Yo’s water came from." (An exploding glacier.)
Why didn’t he say it out loud? So Yo-Yo could hear him?
No. Academics are content with the status quo. Galileo’s experience was no anomaly.

If academics are slow to learn, resisting —
reluctant to leave the paradigms
that formed their Linus security blanket as students —
how much more slow, reluctant, and resisting
will be the public? the priests? the governors?

If Waterman, Al-Queida ... David Copperfield, god, or the devil wants to hit us with something we’ll never see coming, something easy for the knowing to find, ubiquitous, all around, energy with no place to go would be a good source.
Perspective? Sure it’s perspective.

the skin-heads? the fascists?
those who didn’t and don’t support FLEX?
[link not yet added]

Authority

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:40:00 +0000

2008 07 16

(Note: Authority is a major topic for Waterman's persecuted author, as it had been for many a predecessor, including Chaucer and Shakespeare as that author's interrupted doctoral thesis had demonstrated. But this little fragment is all that had to date appeared among his Thinking Tools. Many more though will follow: if time and life permit.)

Take Aristotle for example. Aristotle was very smart, I don’t doubt it. He was Alexander the Great’s teacher, and Alexander was very smart. He was Alexander the Great’s teacher because he’d been passed over for promotion at Plato’s academy when Plato died. (Isaac Asimov explained: "Nobody likes a know-it-all.") (Aristotle was also supposed to be a dandy (in bad taste), very mannered, very affected. Ergo: he was hated at Plato’s Academy: though everyone would have conceded he was very smart.)
(Note: university promotions are not directly related to intelligence (but to social adaptation).)
But: Aristotle wrote lots and lots on lots and lots of things. Some of that writing survived (partly because of Alexander (and Alexander’s buddy Ptolmey, who took over Egypt for Greek culture, Cleopatra’s great...grand daddy).
Thus: Aristotle and his writings formed a big part of the library of the Church, once the Church added a secular MS or two to its library of holy writ. (Note: the Church’s library may not have been universal, but it did have a library!)
Church epistemology was based largely on authority. Science though, based more on evidence, more on digested experience, than on authority, got a toe-hold, and climbed a bit: over the Church’s weakening body. Science, in the person of such inspired experimenters as Galileo, took Aristotle to the cleaners.
That quick background was necessary to arrive at my point. Here it is:
Dictum after dictum of Aristotle that was testable finally got tested: and was proved false. Aristotle proves to have been wrong on just about everything testable.
What did the secular authorities (the universities) do? Why they continued to teach everything Aristotle said (that wasn’t disproved) as "gospel"!!! Aristotle, on everything testable, is in the trash. (Very smart, but NOT true.) Aristotle, on everything not testable: ethics, esthetics ... is still (Medieval, Renaissance, Post-Renaissance) holy writ.
PS: My theory of Macroinformation, had I been able to develop it, might have introduced a bit of objectivity into esthetics. Perhaps we could have started to take Aristotle to the cleaners there too. Perhaps that’s "why" I’ve had no allies in that endeavor.

Knowledge

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 20:55:00 +0000

Opinion which is in accord both with experience and theory is called knowledge.
Waterman echoing Sagan

Knowledge is local; ignorance universal.

Waterman to bkMarcus: 2003 03 07: current simmer on "knowledge":
"Knowledge" is possible only in a group; God, alone in the universe, can have no knowledge; Yahweh, chief at a committee, can. But then the knowledge is based on some quorum of agreement, the agreement based on some other quorum of common epistemology ...

Illusion, the Maya of the gods (and men): all of Sentiens [email prose here: the meaning should be graspabe despite gaps in standard English.]

Science seems like such a good epistemology: evidence, theory, but it only works looking backwards: Yes, I see how Galileo was "right", how the professors and the cardinals were prejudiced ...
Yes, I see how kleptocratic Caesar, Herod, the Sanhedrin, Pilate ... were; but what make’s Jesus’ epistemology infallible? Universal agreement not to examine it closely.
Look for science in your own milieu, where? No communication, no willingness to examine evidence, argument: everyone too busy saying they do (while conspicuously avoiding it) to look, to think. Macroinformation, e.g. Reich, Leary ... And there’s no telling what else.

The government denies knowledge.
The X Files

Brian replied:The Wittgensteinian argument against monotheism ...2003 03 08 Waterman asked:Are you telling me that I’ve duplicated a Ludwig argument? Neat-o. I wonder if I read it.
All I know is it just came to me: not for the first time, but this time kicking me hard in the shins.Brian replied:No, I didn’t mean to imply that Ludwig himself ever made that argument. I meant to say that your statement that "’knowledge’ is possible only in a group" is not at all obvious or intuitive — not to the modern Western mind, at least. It is a position that Ludwig slapped Western philosophy into, and it’s why he’s considered such an important 20th-century intellectual: someone who turned the accepted wisdom on its head.
You start with Wittgenstein (whether intentionally or not) and then derive a disproof of God-The-Knower.
I agree that God-The-Knower is impossible in a Wittgensteinian epistemology.
Freshman year, in Intro Philosophy, I did something similar by combining a Korzybskian epistemology of maps and territories with a Cartesian understanding of God as infinite. I have only in recent years come to recognize the invisible assumption in my own disproof.
The nature of a Map is to filter out and organize a subset of the overwhelming information from the Territory for a finite purpose. Maps are finite tools for finite users, surrounded (for all we know) by the infinite — or at least the much-larger-than-we-finites-can-handle.
If God is infinite and everywhere, God has no use for Maps. Either God is the Territory, or God "knows" the Territory in infinite perfection.
But my understanding of "knowing" is Korzybskian — it’s all about Maps, not about Territories. To Know something is to have Maps, to depend on Maps.
Therefore God, who/which cannot make use of maps, cannot be said to "know" anything. This is not a disproof of God, per se, but it is a disproof of a personal God. Whatever God is, God isn’t a person. And therefore one cannot have a personal relationship with God. Descartes’ proof (whose fallacy it took me years and years to identify) was a proof of an infinite Territory that he called God. I did not see how it saved Jehovah at all — - and as far as I know, Descartes himself, and certainly his readers, did not distinguish God from Jehovah.
N.B., The invisible assumption I was making is that there can only be one infinity. In other words, two infinite things must be co-extensive. So an infinite God must in some sense be (or at least coextensively occupy) an infinite Territory — and therefore be unable to use any Map of that Territory. I now see the two statements "God is infinite" and "God is everywhere" as quite distinct, whereas at the time I saw them both as equivalent to "God is everything."

Men think women should be protected by not knowing.
Wilde

I trust the reader already knows Korzybski on distinguishing map from territory, Gregory Bateson on the subject, Wittgenstein, of course, Waterman’s piece on "map / territory, mental modeling" and Brian’s earlier note [link not yet added].

Knowledge is always local. We never know all else it might connect to.

Brian to Waterman emailOne has to address questions of knowledge before one can even begin to address questions of science.

Some of the later entries that string along here scrapbook fashion belong more in my Teaching / Society section than in my Teaching / Thinking Tools. Oh well: if I had a staff, I’d shuffle a lot. Meantime:

I agree: there are some topics on which some humans have reliable knowledge, even wisdom. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that therefore there must be humans with knowledge on any topic. Knowing the Apennines doesn’t mean you know the Alps. Knowing how to cook for two doesn’t make you able to cook for six billion. Knowing how to make a speech doesn’t make you able to rule the Reich.

Tautology, Experience

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 13:58:00 +0000

2003

Gregory Bateson defined explanation as the mapping of experience onto a tautology.

Other key words here: rationalism, empiricism ...

I quote an email from bkMarcus of 2003 11 14 (the setting follows):You quoted [The Bateson definition of explanation] for years, and for years I didn’t get it.

I think, however deliberately GB might have defined his terms, that he picked the wrong words to convey that idea.

I wish GB hadn’t used the word ’tautology’ — which has the connotation now of circular reasoning, i.e., meaningless formalism.

As I now understand it, tautology (in GB’s usage) just means a logically self-consistent model. And an explanation is a consistent mapping of (a posteriori) experience onto a self-consistent (a priori) model, thus giving us a consistent overall model for our experience, or rather, for a subset of our experience.

This goes a long way to identifying the rift between rationalism and empiricism over the past few centuries. The debate, as I now understand it — having shifted my own emphasis from a [Waterman]- and Bateson-influenced (British) empiricism toward a more (continental) rationalism — is about how far we can get in the a priori realm before we have to appeal to experience.

I now believe that experience plays a greater role in checking our logic than it does in helping us to choose between otherwise equally logical models. And the emphasis in research seems to be so much on data, that logic feels like it’s been left behind, seen as necessary but not really important. (Which means that its necessity is itself sometimes ignored.) [emphasis added]Brian and I were corresponding about my debut consumption of The X Files, a TV series he had followed with interest while I remained virgin to it. I finally got Season I, episodes 1-4 (1993) on DVD, and notified him of my exposure: mocking the show’s man-in-the-street ignorance of science. Poor Gillian Anderson has to play a woman with degrees in physics and medicine who yet doesn’t seem to understand the first thing about science. Naturally, I iterated a few Bateson citations.

Waterman quotes Bateson’s definition of explanation in several places. Additionally, it will come up in a number of random quote generators. Only today with Brian’s response do I see a pressing need to additional comment: and, for the moment, I allow Brian’s own comment to suffice. His contrast between English and Continental empiricism certainly deserves additional consideration as does the entire subject (or set of subjects). Thus there’s room for plenty more here: but not today.

Skepticism

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 18:05:00 +0000

1999

Rational vs. Prejudicial Skepticism

My biographical narrative declares disciplined skepticism to be a close ally of reason. I expatiated only briefly in the following note, adding that the subject warranted its own module:Rational skepticism is the systematic testing of theories. First, examples in support of the theory must be found. Then, examples contradicting the theory must be sought with diligence. If so much as one example is found, the theory isn’t necessarily dead, but does need more work. If the theory can’t be recast to include the contradiction, then it is dead.

The old saw has it that "the exception proves the rule." I have yet to meet one person who quotes that cliché who doesn’t also have its meaning backwards. "Prove" once meant "test" or "put to the test." Meanings modify: sometimes reverse. In modern English the phrase should be "the exception disproves the rule." Or: the exception proves the rule to be false, automatically demoting it to a mere generalization. (There are links to alternate arguments in my piece on Proof above.)

I met a woman last year who told me that she was "skeptical." She wanted to hear "both sides," then make up her mind. Most issues have far more than two sides. But this particular point at issue could well be seen in that binary light: one side was in harmony with fact and theory; the other, a populous anger at fact and theory. She sided with the latter. That, my dear, is not skepticism. That is stubbornness. Credulity. What Ursula K. LeGuin has termed "a will to incredulity." Parading under the false mask of seeming reasonableness.Since then I’ve added more on all those points. Once I’ve made better headway with Macroinformation [will link soon], I’ll return and dedicate myself to this important subject. In the meantime I’ll only say that rational skepticism must be distinguished from other skepticisms. Rational skepticism is an essential ingredient of the scientific method. Other skepticisms are essential ingredients of superstition, kleptocracy ...

I offer only this brief hint toward illustration. Galileo learned of the possibility of telescopes, Galileo made a telescope, Galileo observed moons around Jupiter. Both his fellow "scientists" and the Church were skeptical: Church tradition (and therefore intellectual tradition) said only the Earth has satellites. The experts were so skeptical of Galileo’s evidence that they wouldn’t look at it. That is not rational skepticism, that is just plain homeostasis.

Galileo
Mistrusting both opinion and testimony is legitimate skepticism. (Reason requires evidence and evidence-compatible theory together with a diligent search for flaws in both the evidence and the theory.) Refusing to consider the evidence or to hear the theory is NOT skepticism: it’s stubborn stupidity; it’s prejudice (possibly mixed with hostility); it’s being pig-headed.

Skepticism betrays a faith in intellect.

Both types of skepticism are of course survival strategies. The latter are characterized by being typically unconscious; conscious reasons typically rationalizations, irrelevant. But that is a subject that should have its own indexed file.

Since writing the preceding I have had the most delicious time with Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising in which, prefatorily to reprising Leary’s Eight Circuit model of mentality, Wilson presents the human mind as containing a Thinker and a Prover: and "Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves."

Such minds, Wilson continues, can "prove" that the poorest Jew in 1930 Berlin is secretly a millionaire usurer. (As with other labels he uses for the eight circuits, the terms are mislabelings: "the Thinker" has no competence with thinking and "the Prover" is unacquainted with both scientific and mathematical "proof".

Any faith system can "refute" any amount of evidence simply by being aggressively "skeptical" about it.
Galileo saw satellites around Jupiter. Not possible said the Church and fellow astronomers with their eyes closed.

Cheap versus Expensive Skepticism

In other words there’s cheap skepticism and there’s expensive skepticism. The smoker hears that tobacco is harmful, especially where burning paper raises the temperature of the smoke, especially when the companies juice the narcotic effect. I don’t believe it, says the smoker: without learning the evidence, without learning how to interpret it, without checking any facts. That’s cheap: in the short run at least: free for the moment, maybe fatal eventually.

Then there’s the expensive kind: where you do have to develop skill with some thinking tools, tune up your epistemology, do some checking. There’s no limit to how expensive good skepticism can become. (In some cases it can render one anti-social, unemployable ... Hermits can choose their hermitage, or hermits can be made: isolated.) (Trouble is in such cases, it doesn’t do anyone any good. If intelligence isn’t contagious, honesty may be: people avoid catching it. No one listens to a mental leper. (till sometimes centuries after they’re dead.)

Evidence

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 14:42:00 +0000

Evidence Is Non-Existent without Theory

2001 08 11

Throughout these files, in one way or another, I iterate variations of the point:Societies are based on agreement within the group;
Science is based on agreement with the evidence.But what is evidence? What I want to say today even though I don’t have time to develop it ideally, is, as I say about so many core concepts, the concept of evidence, like the concept of "fact," the concept of "truth," is tricky. There’s no such thing as evidence apart from some theory of knowing. Evidence is subordinate to epistemology, not epistemology to evidence.

Nietzsche said that there are not facts, only interpretations: I expand the same observation to evidence.

Eddington pleased Einstein and his supporters when he took measurements of light from a momentarily eclipsed star as evidence. The theory was that no demon was faking the information far from the magician-polluted earth. On earth the rest of us are pleased to see the lady sawn in half: knowing that the evidence is magician-polluted. Einstein wanted not to be fooled; we want only to be fooled. But there’s no proof that Einstein (and Jesus ... and you ... and me ... aren’t fooled also.

That’s why we must know our epistemology before our claims to know anything are ’ought but laughable.

And of course I agree with Eddington and Einstein. We don’t know that no demon is fiddling the star light; but we do know that six billion demons are fiddling everything filtered to us through society.

Individuals may be honest: for occasional moments. But are societies ever honest? even for a moment?If I can practice my FreeHand skills enough I’ll attempt a cartoon (or a series) for illustration. Meantime: police departments have evidence rooms, the FBI has evidence rooms ... The trouble is, they’re manned by workers for the state. The Church’s evidence rooms are manned by workers for the Church.

Picture a big NY bank. Billions of dollars worth of gold is kept in subterranean vaults. The vaults have cages. The cages are labeled: USA, Great Britain, France ... Cayman Islands ... Washington wants to give England X million dollars. Some guy in the NY bank loads so much gold onto a wagon in the US cage, wheels it out, opens the GB cage, wheels it in, stacks the gold.

Now imagine the Platonic Original Evidence Room for Kleptocracies. There’s a cage for Baal, a cage for Yahweh ... a cage for the Temple of Solomon, for the Vatican ... for the FBI ... for Blackwell, for Copperfield ... And in small print somewhere there’s a little sign that says Acme Toy Co. The idea of evidence in a centralized information system is laughable. At Judgment Day if God points to evidence lying undisturbed in the universe, listen. If God has minions truck out "evidence" kept in an evidence bag in a vault in heaven (or hell), stop taking God seriously: you’re still in LaLa Land.

I want to add that science tries, or is supposed to try, to take its evidence from Pleroma, the scientific assumption being that Pleroma is distinct (and interference-free) from Creatura/Sentiens. (See my Existential Sets [to be remounted ASAP].)Wouldn’t it be nice if we had some objective referent: the Teutonic Ordeal by Water, for example: if you stay drowned, you’re innocent. The Indonesian Celestial Judgment may be better since it gave the innocent a chance to survive. I’d go into my one of the pair of Towers of Torture at any time if I were only convinced that Church or State, yes, or Public Science, would fairly ascend to the other: no cheating.

Whoever came down last would inherit the earth. And the starlight.

I’ll tell you what I’d like to see: a Celestial Trial between God and Satan. See who comes down first front his tower of torture. In science, we don’t know the outcome until we’ve gathered the evidence; in faith, we know the "final results" in advance. Notice how conspicuously human decision-making institutions (justice systems, etc.) are institutions of faith masked as evidence-based. Human beings allow this year’s rutting battles supervised by last year’s winners. No. The King of the Wood (see Frazer) had only one claim to divinity: he killed the previous king. The present king must be vulnerable to the next king or it’s a farce: a staged farce.

I am pleased (and not at all surprised) to discover that Timothy Ferris makes wonderful science documentaries. His Life Beyond Earth led me to seek out his Creation of the Universe which I only just now finished my first viewing of. He argues that modern science is based in, analogous with, monotheism: one God, one set of physical laws: invariants: principles.

Knowledge is based in belief. But knowledge isn’t necessarily truth. The truth may be something else again. Though I sure hope not.

Falsification

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 19:51:00 +0000

2000 07 05

Falsification is the heart and soul of science.

Everything that has been thoroughly falsified —
the falsification failing —
May be regarded as provisionally true.
Everything that hasn’t been thoroughly falsified —
no chance to fail —
should be regarded as probably false.
If your models of reality don’t well map reality, don’t jibe smoothly with experience, make better models, redraft your maps: from scratch if necessary.

This wisdom is not natural to human individuals. Science is rare. No individual can be a "scientist" 100% of the time.
This wisdom is anathema to societies. Societies routinely stretch the bottom of their budget to buttress beliefs that have bumped against experience. Where the university has invested in Newtonian physics, it will resist relativity. Where the university has invested in relativity physics, it will resist quantum incompatibility. Where the Temple has elected its Sanhedrin, it will resist Christ. And where the Temple has accepted the rule of Caesar — and which temple has not, it will compromise. Caiaphas can interrupt and contradict Jesus, Pilat can judge Jesus without any obligation to demonstrate understanding of what Jesus says: only what Caesar says.

The middle part of the previous paragraph instantly distanced the religious, the latter part alienated the scientists. That’s tough, I hold to the relationship, the apotheosis of reason doesn’t suspend homeostasis.
Besides, Michael Behe claims that most scientists do believe in god (the god of order, the god of design), and I suspect that Behe is right: in more than one thing.
Anyone still here: please understand: I use Christ as a symbol, and Jesus too. There’s no dogma in my meaning. There’s a little bit of "Christ" in any revolutionary, any ugly duckling, anyone blocked from the table. I don’t mean that there is an independent thing, immortal, infallible, and 100% a Christ. And I certainly don’t mean that a man called Jesus and crucified two thousand years ago was the only one to try to upgrade a church, a culture, and get kicked in the face.

Science too is based in belief, but science contrasts with religion in that science is supposed to welcome new maps whereas churches are fortified against review.

The Wason Test illustrates the matter with efficiency: Human beings naturally look for examples in support of their ideas. Modern reason supports this tendency. Modern reason however also adds a requirement that is not natural to our species: falsification. Peter C. Wason designed a simple test which illustrates the principle better than any prose I’ve yet encountered.Imagine that the tester has a deck of cards. He places four of them on a table before you. The faces of the four read:

You are told a rule claimed for the stack. "If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side." Your challenge, given just the four cards in front of you, is to sayA) which cards, if any, must be turned over to test the validity of the rule?

B) why?
The best answer will identify the minimum number: nothing missing, nothing extraneous. (Notice that the sample cards are not random but are an algebra of representation. Any possible card from the stack, if indeed the stack relates to the rule, is logically represented by the four samples: vowel / consonant; even number / odd number.)

Of Wason’s one hundred twenty-eight college graduate candidates, only five got it right. Furthermore, a number of those who didn’t failed likewise to understand the answer once given. I have showed this test to a number of people and my percentage of right answers thus far is worse than Wason’s. When I first saw the test (in Morton Hunt’s Universe Within), I was wrong for a good several seconds before I saw it, and, I confess, that occurred chronologically well after the moment claimed in my biographical narratives for my conversion from faith in a magical universe to a recognition of and admiration for modern reason. As I say in the module referred to, no one is rational all the time.

But of course I’ve already given the key to the answer: falsifiability. Let’s consider each of the candidate cards in turn.

Card #1: A. Yes it does have to be checked. If it has an even number on the other side, that one card supports the rule. We turn it to confirm the rule. A proof must have evidence on its side. If the A card has an odd number on the verso, then the rule is refuted.

Card #2: D. This card does not need to be turned. The rule says nothing about cards with letters other than vowels. The D card is irrelevant to the rule in question.

Card #3: 4. This card also does not have to be turned. The rule restricts what may be opposite a vowel; the rule does not restrict what must be opposite an even number. The 4 card too is irrelevant to the rule in question.

Card #4: 7. Yes. If the verso of the 7 card has a vowel, then the rule is false. The A must be turned as part of the process of confirming the rule: the 7 must be turned to falsify the rule. Confirmation is only half of the process.
Did you learn this reasoning in school? Neither did I. Did you learn it in Church? Not likely. Do you imagine that your science teacher could answer it correctly? I don’t. Schools in a democracy reflect and reinforce the errors of the majority.
(Schools in a tyranny reflect and reinforce the errors of the ruling class.) Has there ever been a school that represented reason? None that I’d name with confidence. Is MIT or Cal Tech or Stanford an exception? It would be easy to find confirming evidence, but are you welcome to investigate all evidence to falsify it? Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann says he achieved his Ph.D. in physics at Yale without having learned the essence of science. He reports that it was at MIT that he learned it, but he was at the time in a post-doc program and it was an individual he learned it from, not the institution. He witnessed something rare: a scientist, confronted with evidence falsifying his theory, changed his mind! Right in front of his colleagues!

The Wason Test has been discussed at my home page for upwards of five years now: nearly the entire life of the home page [b. 1995]. It’s long overdue for it’s own module. Meantime references have budded in a number of other modules.

Food for Thought

Today the following arrived from James Winter, HUM.net, UCLA:I happened across your page with the Wason Test. I’m not quite sure
what your remarks about it concerning falsifiability are (though I am
familiar with Popper’s criterion of falsifiability for science), but, as
I understand the test, it is not presented correctly.

Perhaps I missed it, but the ’tester’ is supposed to specify that each card you see on the table has a letter on one side and a number on the
other. Then you are told the rule and asked which cards need to be
turned over in order to see if the rule is complied with.

In your example, then, the cards that would have to be turned over would
be the ’A’ card and the ’7’ card (which is what you say as well — but your explanations for why this is so seem a bit confused to me). Anyway, this test is used by psychologists interested in rationality,
and is supposed to be evidence for one way in which humans
systematically reason irrationally. What the test actually tests for is
one’s ability to understand conditional statements (like the rule for the
cards). The most common way of misunderstanding a conditional is to
treat it as a biconditional (if and only if, rather than if).

You may know this, but Popper’s criterion of falsifiability (as a
criterion for whether a theory should be counted as scientific, or as a
criterion for acceptance of a theory) has major difficulties, well
recognized by philosophers of science. For most scientists themselves,
however, who are familiar at all with philosophy of science, still
(unfortunately) think Popper got it right. (They would do well to keep
up with the times!)

Hey! How come no one else has challenged me since? Do I have it right? Have I kept up with the times? (Are the times necessarily right?) Urges for new modules militate against my perfecting older siblings.
I’ll be back to comment once I’ve finished wrestling with still another new introduction at Macroinformation. For the moment I observe that I’ve alluded to the Wason Test in many places at Waterman, but this is the only one I’ve edited with some care. That letter gave no URL, so I don’t know if this is the presentation he saw. In time I’ll delete or fix the others.

Yesterday I went Wason surfing again and found hundreds of entries, one of which discussed a variant of the four card problem in terms of traditional logic. I couldn’t follow the damn argument: it was written in "logic," not in plain English. I’m well aware of the importance of artificial languages and specialized disciplines. My Macroinformation discusses the topic at growing length. If survival requires virtuosity on the violin then we should all start fiddling, knowing that failure means not even Heifitz will have grandchildren. But I insist that mastery of formal logic isn’t necessary. Simple English can do it. Forget the goddam Aristotelian syllogisms and just absorb Popper / Wason: pick up the habit of seeing things in terms of falsifiability. Reverse your field with regard to the idea of "proof." Know that all talk of proof
that doesn’t constantly refer to relevant tautologies is fraud: the practice of magician-priest-confidence men performing routine illusions for jossers whose principle will is to be fooled.

Notes

Opaque Majority:
3.9% got it right: some portion of the balance, all educated, couldn’t understand why the right answer was right. My neighboring piece on semiotics, semantics, and most especially Korzybski’s map / territory distinction refers to Gregory Bateson’s report that psychologists have found the species at large incapable of making this basic semiotic distinction. I quote part of my note there:
I wish I had a million dollars so I could offer it as a prize to anyone who could devise a test for map/territory distinctions as clear, simple, and compelling as the Wason Test. Give the two tests together as a double barreled blast against Homo sapiens sapiens’ self-description.

Logic

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:05:00 +0000

1998 07 12

There’s far more than one kind of logic."I understand you," one guy says to another in John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959).
Wham! He cold-cocks him.That scene can be analyzed as literature, drama, cinema, sociology, psychology, pathology, zoology ... How about as logic?

(Within a year of writing the above I was analyzing such scenes as macroinformation!)

On the one hand we may see a non sequitur. Yet the same data can be seen as an enthymeme: a syllogism in which the a premise (or the conclusion) is left unexpressed. We see the conclusion: he hits him. How many premises were left out? How many links are missing from this logical chain?

Syllogism: deductive reasoning. "An argument the conclusion of which is supported by two premises, of which one (major premise) contains the term (major term) that is the predicate of the conclusion, and the other (minor premise) contains the term (minor term) that is the subject of the conclusion; common to both premises is a term (middle term) that is excluded from the conclusion." (Random House Unabridged)All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Socrates is mortal.That’s a famous one. What good is it? Do we need logic to know that’s he’s dead? Isn’t history enough? Didn’t we kill him? (Or just as good: force him to kill himself?) Would we have done so if we had thought it impossible?

I suspect anyone can see that this has something to do with reason: how connected is it to intelligence? What does it have to do with survival?

Are truth and logic connected in any inevitable way? How about the major premise above? All men are mortal. Is it true? What about Jesus? Why don’t we hear a chorus of protests from Christians in logic classes? What about Socrates? Isn’t he too immortal after all? Yet we did kill him. Just as we killed Jesus half a millennium later.

OK. That’s a different kind of immortality. Let’s admit that both Socrates and Jesus were mortal. What about you and me? Just because everybody else seems to have died doesn’t prove and you and I will. Isn’t that more properly a prediction than a conclusion?

How is "All A is C; all B is A; therefore all B is C" going to help us when there’s nine or twenty billion people instead of five: no food, no forests, no air, no ozone layer ... the unscreened sun making everyone go blind and get cancer ... no fish, no birds, all major cities but Denver are under the sea, and a half-dozen new plagues hit all at once? How many of us are going to be immortal in heaven when there’s no one left on earth to burn candles? when we’ve followed the dodos and the whales and the manatees down the drain we had a major part in widening?

Will Sherlock Holmes help us? Didn’t Arthur Conan Doyle have him forever talking about deduction? Did any of his conclusions actually flow inevitably from any of his premises? He sees calluses on a guy’s hands, mud on his boots ... Sherlock gives Scotland Yard the guy’s trade, his address, his height and weight, what he had for supper, his astrological sign ... all sure fire stuff for a sufficiently gullible grand jury.

You’ve read Doyle. Now try reading Bertrand Russell. Alfred North Whitehead. Ludwig Wittgenstein. Aspire to that. Or are we ready for Armageddon?

Now try Gregory Bateson. Make your reading honest. Actually try to see how humans actually think. Reading Frazer too will help. It ain’t like Aristotle said. But now maybe there won’t be an Armageddon.

A human usually sets the premises in place
before activating the logic process.
Leonard Shlain

Where logic has been placed in relation to the other academic disciplines has changed in the last century and may change again. Many had regarded it as a part of philosophy. Some moved it over with math. I place it outside my competence: as I’ve already confessed, the school system permanently crippled my math aptitude. But I follow the expertise of select others more than well enough to point still others in a few good directions: especially when it comes to caveats.

My Primer lists the contents of Gregory Bateson’s Every Schoolboy Knows. The title to this chapter of Mind and Nature is of course ironic (as wasn’t it also when Dr. Johnson was forever saying it?): few schoolboys know the points Bateson made (or Johnson). The rational competence of adults, including teachers, including science teachers, including our political and industrial leaders, isn’t much greater. I emphasize this because I believe that Armageddon will come all too soon unless such knowledge becomes general. For this piece, I quote the whole of Bateson’s point #13:
Logic is a poor model of cause and effect.
We use the same words to talk about logical sequences and about sequences of cause and effect. We say, "If Euclid’s definitions and postulates are accepted, then two triangles having three sides of the one equal to three sides of the other are equal each to each." And we say, "If the temperature falls below 0 degrees C, then the water begins to become ice."

But the if. . . then of logic in the syllogism is very different from the if . . . then of cause and effect.

In a computer, which works by cause and effect, with one transistor triggering another, the sequences of cause and effect are used to simulate logic. Thirty years ago, we used to ask: Can a computer simulate
all the processes of logic? The answer was yes, but the question was surely wrong. We should have asked:
Can logic simulate all sequences of cause and effect! And the answer would have been no.

When the sequences of cause and effect become circular (or more complex than circular), then the description or mapping of those sequences onto timeless logic becomes self-contradictory. Paradoxes are generated that pure logic cannot tolerate. An ordinary buzzer circuit will serve as an example, a single instance of the apparent paradoxes generated in a million cases of homeostasis throughout biology. The buzzer circuit is so rigged that current will pass around the circuit when the armature makes contact with the electrode at A. But the passage of current activates the electromagnet that will draw the armature away, breaking the contact at A. The current will then cease to pass around the circuit, the electromagnet will become inactive, and the armature will return to make contact at A and so repeat the cycle.

If we spell out this cycle onto a causal sequence, we get the following:If contact is made at A, then the magnet is activated.
If the magnet is activated, then contact at A is broken.
If contact at A-is broken, then the magnet is inactivated.
If magnet is inactivated, then contact is made.

This sequence is perfectly satisfactory provided it is clearly understood that the if. . . then junctures are causal. But the bad pun that would move the ifs and thens over into the world of logic will create havoc:

If the contact is made, then the contact is broken.
If P, then not P.

The if . . . then of causality contains time, but the if . . . then of logic is timeless. It follows that logic is an incomplete model of causality.

Coming next: inference, deduction, induction, abduction ...

I apologize that so much time has elapsed since I opened this file without my being able to get back to finish it. I can’t fix it now either but I do need to park the following somewhere. The following style doesn’t belong among my Thinking Tools modules but I’m not yet sure how to merge it among my Social Pathologies.
Logic is very important. Without logic how would the "white" man ever have justified enslaving the "negro"? How would the Church ever have justified burning the heretics? A St. Paulian contempt for reason is also helpful.

One’s hope was in the weakness of logic.
Howards End

Notes

Wham!: human logic in film

Go fuck yourself with your logic.
Alphaville

I wonder if the makers of The Pope of Greenwich Village saw the Cassavetes film mentioned above. Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts continued Hollywood’s tradition of excellence in portraying dumb hoods and hebetudinous street people. The Rourke character gets his cousin Paulie to stand still in front of him: Listen to me. Are you paying attention? Wham! Smack!
My favorite layering of dialogue, logic, and assault though is the scene in Farewell My Lovely where Kate Murtaugh’s Amthor has had Robert Mitchum’s Philip Marlowe sapped and doped. She has him brought to a chair. "You’re a stupid man with a stupid job on a stupid case." Her fat body towers over his wrinkled and weary slump. "I get it," he concludes: "I’m stupid."
Amthor hauls off and slaps him a good one. Marlowe flows what energy he has into a big right fist. Up from practically floor level come his knuckles. Pow! Right in the kisser.

You’re not too bright, are you? I like that in a man.
Farewell My Lovely

Here we have an identity wittily parading as an inference: a seeming deduction.
I loved Jean-Luc Godard’s work, in the 1960s especially, but I never saw Alphaville till last night. Godard’s scripts are routinely rich in the kind of nitwit pseudo-profundities the French seem to specialize in, never richer than here, and the Eddie Constantine character’s obscenity is most refreshing: though not half as refreshing as the macroinformational intersticing via closeups of Ana Karina!

Compare my sequences above — I understand you / POW and Pay attention / POW with the following gem from Kieslowski’s White: Karol, the abused hairdresser, has eavesdropped on his bosses, beaten them to the buy for their hot land deal. They thought he was asleep, they were wrong. "You son of a bitch!" they address him. "No," he says: "I really need the money."
Is this a non sequitur? or a brilliant chain of sound reasoning?
We then learn that the reason Karol needed the money so desperately that he is forced to become rich was because it was the only way he could think of to exact revenge on his abusive wife: a fasinating love/hate mutuality.

Thought vs. Armageddon
I look for such reading "all the time." I believe I find such: fairly regularly. I’ve found several more since writing the above not that long ago. Jared Diamond, Michael J. Behe, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary ...
Either my standards aren’t as high as I pretend or maybe we’re not quite as brain dead as the behavior of the majority would suggest.

Theory: Tested Hypothesis

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:25:00 +0000

2001 03 28

Theory is the highest form of knowledge
a sentient creature can aspire to.

To the man in the street, theory is an untested idea: lame-brained, more likely than not. In science, theory is the highest epistemological state rational man can reach. Theory is cybernetic, always being refined, occasionally revolutionized. So long as disproof is diligently and honestly sought, theory zeroes in toward the truth. Yes, I say "toward." Zeno’s paradox holds in this case: you can never actually get there. Neither do you need to. Approximate is more than good enough. Deceiving yourself about the possibilities of exactness is less than good enough. If we keep it up, I fear it will be catastrophic.

There’s a mistake right there. I leave it as humor. Zeno’s paradox does not apply. It’s rather the case that knowledge and truth are of different logical types. The truth is the set of events in space/time; knowledge is our description(s) [see Thinking as Mental Modeling] of patterns that we see there. The first is territory: the second is map; the map can never be the territory. (Unless you’re Steven Wright: on his map "one mile equals one mile. .... I live at E-4.")

As Gregory Bateson argues, a theory can never be "proved." The best it can do is be in accord with all known evidence. What conflicting evidence or better hypothesis may appear tomorrow no one can know.

A couple of years ago I sat in on a friend’s class at the local community college. "But that’s just theory," a woman complained. My line above, "theory is the highest epistemological state rational man can reach," adds only the word "rational" to my response. No one wanted to hear that. I failed to sense understanding even from the professor. No. We want the Truth. We want it easy. Predigested. Delivered down our throats by indefatigable parents who never expect us to grow up and let them get on with their own feeding.

Hypothesis
The man in the street’s "theory" is the scientist’s "hypothesis." An hypothesis is an idea which hasn’t yet been tested or is only initially being tested.

Isaac Asimov gave a good example. I paraphrase. A man stands in his yard. He has the crazy idea that if he starts walking in a net-straight line, he’ll eventually return to his starting point: from the other direction! Talk about lame-brain! That’s as far from common sense as you can get. But were he able to do so, swimming, climbing, crawling as necessary, somehow sustaining himself and correcting for deflections, he will indeed rearrive at his yard and from the other "direction." His hypothesis graduates to theory: traveling over the surface of the planet, the result is the same (almost) as if the earth were spherical!

Now the new theory has to be tested further. One example in its favor is merely a start. Others have to be allowed, even challenged, to do the same. Still the man (and his new colleagues) need to stretch their imaginations afresh, looking for disproof. The theory becomes comfortable once other tests show the same conclusions: send a rocket away from the earth and take a photograph. There, it’s curved. Supporting evidence. Go half-way to the moon. There: it’s oblately spheroid. (Actually, if you thought it was a sphere, that corrects your hypothesis, improves your theory.)

The theory is now as solid as you could wish. Still it is not "proved." It’s still based on a whole stack of assumptions not provable. Perhaps some demon put you into a trance where you only believed that you had traveled over the surface. The same or other demons could have deceived your colleagues in their tests. Maybe God doctored the photographs from space. Maybe the astronauts too were deceived. Even science is based on faith: a faith that evidence and reason can be trusted. And that if you can’t detect the demon, maybe there is no demon.

I’ve been enjoying materials from a few other web sites recently where theory is occasionally discussed. RAWilson.com and DieOff.com are examples. Jay Hanson’s Brain Food newsletter from DieOff.com inspired an addition to this module which I now wish to expand. So I’ll move that material to a new module.

This needs to bud and bud again, even before I’ve returned to do a better job with any part of it: theory especially. In particular I shall make separate files for theory and for hypothesis. Then I’ll split a file from Hypothesis exampling an untested theory of my own: Budget: an asymmetrical flow: though diagnosis influences budget, once budgeted the budget will influence the diagnosis far more than the symptoms will determine the diagnosis and influence the budget.

Diagnosis

< — — — — >

Budget

infrastructure
science
institutional structure, executive flow chart

My hypothesis is as yet untested because I just thought of it this hour. Yet, if I didn’t believe evidence would be easy to find (and unnecessary to manufacture), I wouldn’t (I hope) have both thought of it and taken it seriously enough to jot here.

Were my hypothesis tested, and were a preponderance of evidence found to support it, it would promote to Theory.

All such promotions are temporary, provisional, subject to further review, analysis, new information. (Unfortunately, mis- and dis-information can also be new.)

I’ve just mentioned elsewhere but must repeat here, state-run NASA has just been caught censoring its scientists, instructing them to stroke the public’s confusion about theory by emphasizing that evolution is "just a theory." Is science possible under a government? Governments butter their bread with superstition, with fear, with ignorance.

One thing seems clear: big science is possible only with government. But then the big scientists get treated like school children. Oh well: they asked for it.

Notes

Delivered: Straight lines
Yeah, we want a greased shot straight onto God’s lap. But God may not have a lap. Neither is a straight line what so many of us have been told. (Actually, a "straight line" is what ever you define it to be.) Mathematicians change their definitions. Some schools start catching up within mere years; others not for decades: perhaps not for centuries.
>Bucky Fuller told a small group of us, "’A straight line is the shortest distance between two points’ ... and the shortest distance between two points is a zigzag." He waited for the jaws to drop. "Think of a lightning bolt. It’s in a hurry to neutralize it’s charge. Do you think nature would choose an inefficient path?"

Paraphrase: the limits of Waterman’s accuracy
I work the best I can without adequate reference to a library. That includes my own, the better part of which is, and has been for years, jumbled three deep in a shed intended to house my friend’s tools. Before my most recent disasters, I had half of it organized on shelves in a non-waterproof Florida room. Many of those are now so mildewed they can’t be opened, let alone read.
I can’t be sure I own the Asimov I refer to and wouldn’t spare the time to search its pages if it were here on my desk. A paraphrase is better in an emergency. Whether we have twenty days or twenty decades to go before we have to pay the ultimate price for our foolishness I can’t know. But the emergency is now. If it’s not too late already. If it is, then it doesn’t matter what any of us do. I still chose to do the same thing: amuse myself — as though it could help us.
By the way, I hear that Auerbach wrote his Mimesis in prison without any reference to books. Yet it’s dense with quotes. All from his head.

Simplicity in Science

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:43:00 +0000

1997 11 02

Occam's Razor: The Law of Sufficient Reason
AKA:Law of Simplicity
Law of Economy
Law of Parsimony
Survival depends on decision making. Where our decisions are based on knowledge, our chances are optimal. But there are far more circumstances in which our knowledge is fragmentary than there are circumstances in which our knowledge is complete and reliable. Decisions have to be made anyway and sometimes right away, even if the decision must be based on a guess. If you and your family are cowering in a cave and you suddenly smell tiger, hear a growl, feel hot feline breath on the back of your neck, you don't rebuild the fire for a better look; you scream "tiger" and try to flee.

A mother hears a crash in the pantry. She comes in from the yard and finds that a dinette chair has been drawn into the pantry, a cabinet door is open, and the cookie jar lies smashed on the linoleum. Junior is no where to be seen. The possibilities of what could have happened are far more numerous than a committee of sit-com writers could invent. Thus far, there's no way to prove that it didn't all come about by astronomically improbable, but not impossible, quantum randomness. But the mother doesn't bother her imagination. "Junior," she calls in her most scolding tone.

The simplest answer may be the best.
Spirit of Occam

It's the bottom of the ninth, seventh game of the World Series, the catcher's attempt at a tag at the plate screens the umpire's view. The third base umpire has fallen trying to stay clear of the third baseman's fielding. "Safe," the umpire calls. It doesn't matter what the replays might show. The game would have few sponsors at five hours of mostly the backs of the umpires conferring over a replay monitor.

What do we do where knowledge is partial? (As it always is!) We make a decision. How about when knowledge is divided? (As it usually is.) How do we decide among contending ignorances? The 14th-century philosopher William of Occam (defender of nominalism) decided in favor of simplicity with the dictum, "entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity." Manhattan Project mathematical wizard Richard Feynman applied Occam's Razor when answering whether he believed in UFOs. When you don't know but have to decide, chose what seems to be the most reasonable candidate, he said. It's "more reasonable to believe that UFOs are the result of the known, irrational behavior of terrestrials than the unknown, rational behavior of extraterrestrials."

In the absence of knowledge, you seek out likelihoods.

A Conspiracy of Paper

Seek simplicity and distrust it.

Whitehead

Epistemologythe pattern that connects

Bateson

Notes

Decision
I notice advice that Vice President Al Gore has on the subject: "Resistance to seeing the strategic threats often focuses on the lack of complete information and perfect understanding. We should acknowledge that we will never have complete information. Yet we have to make decisions anyway; we do this all the time. And one way we draw conclusions from incomplete information is be recognizing patterns."
Earth in the Balance, 1992

A better look
There's an ad on TV these days depicting a couple grateful for some motorist protection system they've bought into. They narrate getting a flat while traveling and finding the car surrounded by rattlesnakes. They hate snakes, the woman iterates. They pushed a button and within seconds OnStar had dispatched a tow truck.
I didn't hear them report their warning about the rattlesnakes to the dispatcher or to the towing service. I didn't hear any discussion of whether a herpetologist should accompany the truck to confirm the couple's identification before work proceeded. They cared about their safety and convenience: didn't they care about the safety of the workers? No: all we're supposed to understand is that they hate snakes, rattlesnakes can be dangerous; therefore, any snake they see is a rattlesnake. The ad didn't confirm that there was a single snake there of any species: how do we know they didn't see a bit of bicycle tube and decide it was a rattlesnake? A whole nest of rattlesnakes? No: you're fearful? You get your guard up.
How much time did the US spend falsifying fears of Germans, Japanese, Communists ...? No: we just went to war. Shoot first, ask questions later.
While here, I'll tell you: this decade, I've lived in rattlesnake country, very close to a variety of water moccasin habitats. I've spent those ten years looking for rattlesnakes. I've found one. What made that couple so lucky when they weren't even looking?
I haven't fished much since getting whole hog into this home page, but before I got the Mac and got on-line, I spent time on or in the water every day. In the warm months I'd likely be in the water, the weediest part, up to my neck, lobbing my fly to places lunkers might hide. Back at the ramp, every kid has just seen a moccasin. Funny: I was just out where they live: didn't see one.
On land, I'm looking for rattlesnakes. In the water, I'm certainly not looking for moccasins! And if I were, I'd be looking for them in the worst way, least likely of success. They hear, feel, smell me coming: they hunt or bask or whatever somewhere else. Snakes come up to me when I've got a string of bluegills tied to my bathing suit: but they're brown banded water snakes. So far, the moccasins don't want trouble.
Biking round Highlands Hammock provided my one view of a rattler. I'm pedaling, oh, maybe ten miles an hour. Ah, a snake. I pedal right up to it for a look-see. Whoops! The snake rears back, ready to strike. I see the black diamonds and hear the warning of the rattle close to the same time. I veer my naked calf out of its range, stop, oh, ten feet away, turn, and watch. The diamondback can't see me at all at that range. Slowly, he calms down and resumes advancing, cautiously, across the road. Once on the other side though: whoosh! into the undergrowth.
He didn't want a piece of me any more than I wanted a piece of him. And he ventured onto the asphalt the way a debutante who took the wrong subway would venture into Harlem: very cautiously, painfully cautiously.
A ranger/life guard at Manatee Springs State Park once offered to share a catch of crawdads with me. Sure, I said. It turned out he hadn't caught them yet. He lowered himself into the spring and began sifting through the hydrilla. Brown banded water snakes poured out, biting him on the way. "Oh, they don't hurt," he said as he put a handful of crawdads into a paper cup. He showed me his hands and wrists: looked like a junkie: dozens of little skin pricks all over both hands, the majority half-healed. No sweat to him? No sweat to me either.

Umpire's Call
Email exchange:
Did the umpire call an out because the runner was out, or was the runner out because the umpire said so?
The runner is out because the umpire says so. The truth isn't the judge.

Spectra

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:40:00 +0000

2000 12 08

Common metaphors are commonly irresponsibile with regard to topology. (Relates to Edges, Boundaries ... Whole/Part ...)

Simple logic categorized Yes/No, True or False for many things. Alternately we view some things as ranging over a series of values. Things we measure carefully often turn out to have values measurable as decimal fractions: the average family has N.n children. Something we look at very carefully, like the number π upon examination brings us up short. Why, it's irrational: the decimal fraction seems to be infinite.

I believe that many of the things we tend to look at as True/False would be better looked at as decimal fractions. Take a concept such as sentience for example: or consciousness.

Is a rock sentient? No. It's false that a rock is sentient. How about a bacterium? No: false. But shouldn't our knowledge perhaps be absolute before we make that judgment with certainly? Ilya Prigogine suggests that we forget about certainty and stick with what we can know.

Are human beings sentient? Yes. That one's true: human beings are sentient. OK. Now: now sentient are we? Absolutely? How about the human being kept in a box in a "school" for retards? How about the human being in a coma in the hospital? How about the human being watching TV? What about the kid receiving communion for the first time? How about the adult receiving communion for the N^th time? don't decimal fractions apply: even though (I find) it obvious that we can't determine exactly what that decimal fraction is?

One last thought for the moment: Estimate a range of values for human sentience. Now estimate a range of values for possible sentience: zero to what?

Finally: how do they compare? Do you believe humans are 98.7% sentient? Or 0.00029 sentient?

I believe human society would benefit if these questions were asked routinely of institutions as well as concepts. Is justice uniformly served by Justice Departments? What decimal fraction of the time is "Science" scientific? How routinely do universities serve "the pursuit of truth"? How much of Democracy silences the voices of critics? What portion of the time does this or that church serve "God"? All? Half? Zero?

I trust the reader recognizes that we tend to accord assumptions of uniformity to institutions that we'd never dream of assuming for individuals. Little Billy lies 0.10 of the time; the government never: the government's truthfulness is 00.0n.

Once I start to do more with this section, make sure I devote some space to "order" as a direction along a spectrum, not a "thing."

Order: a reduction of choices

On Proof

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:14:00 +0000

1997 10 13

Reason, supported by experience, differs from traditional authority in its open admission that the evidence must be wholly visible to all. The results of an experiment in science are validated only after other experiments in other laboratories by other scientists come up with the same result. All their results will still be invalidated if some future experiment or inquiry challenges those results. Anyone may make the challenge.

Science can disprove theories ...
science can improve theories ...
science can never prove theories.
Gregory Bateson

Authority, in contrast, plays a concealed hand. Its reasons are kept in a "black box." Too arcane for mere mortals. (A great deal has been posted at my home page since the original note was processed. (See Waterman on Shakespeare's Sonnets in particular.)

(Governments play it both ways. Our congress is open. The records are public. But then they go into committees. They meet in chambers. The Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA ... work in black boxes.)

The word proof is ambiguous in a way not commonly understood. Science can prove a theory in the 1) progressive-proof sense of "Well, here are some reasons to believe it," and in the 2) experiential sense of "test it further." But science (a mere branch of reason) can not prove it in the tautological sense of quod erat demonstrandum. There can be no experiential tautologies.

All reason can do is to argue what seems reasonable.
(echoing Feynman)

Furthermore, with respect to sense 1), showing examples and reasons in support of a theory is simply the first step in rational theorizing. In order to be in accord with up to date reason, all reasonable effort must be taken to disprove the theory before it should be taken seriously. (See the Wason Test, just coming up.)

Proof is an idol before which the mathematician tortures himself.
Sir Arthur Eddington

Human Hubris: Mathematical, Political, Theological

Once upon a time man believed that he could make the rain rain, the sun rise (both ideas based on naive models of the universe). Primitive man, further along in time (like now), believes he can prove things: in a court, by law, on a blackboard, at an altar. Is a mathematician's faith in the logic of his brotherhood charming? or embarrassing?

Disproof trumps proof.

Once upon a time we came to no longer trust our own individual, amateur magic. We transferred our trust to the shaman. Then we trusted that we could divine the nature of the god, control him; then we trusted the sorcerer in black robes, the chief sorcerer in gold silk. Now we can't trust ourselves to know our own enemies: the shaman in the White House has to tell us who our enemies are: and he too trusts the magician at the blackboard.

A primate has to trust her perceptions or she'll fall from the tree, fall on the ground, starve. I trust my own perceptions well enough not to fall out of bed more often that not. But to extrapolate that trust to a belief that mortal predators can know God, can know Truth, can Prove things ... That's a bit much.

Proof Scrapbook

2000 07 20 The magician saws the lady in half, the audience sees two halves, that proves that the magician has magic.
Then somebody says maybe it’s dummy legs in the other box, find dummy legs, that debunks it.

Now the magician saws the lady in half, the audience sees the sawed legs move, that proves that the magician has magic.
Then somebody says maybe it’s marionette legs in the other box, find marionette legs, that debunks it.

Now the magician saws the lady in half, the audience sees the sawed toes wiggle, that proves that the magician has magic.
Then somebody says maybe it’s a different assistant’s legs in the other box, find different assistant’s legs, that debunks it.

The magician starts using the assistant’s twin sister for the legs: a debunker in the audience getting DNA samples from the legs by laser is temporarily fooled.

Point: only fools and magicians talk about proof outside the strict limits of a tautology. See Gregory Bateson: "Science never proves anything."

2001 08 31 It took the inventor of what has been called the greatest mathematical discovery ever — the Mandelbrot Set — to get people to see something that should have been obvious once the telescope and microscope were invented: one’s measurement of the length of a coastline will be determined by the length of one’s ruler. A roadrunner, a snail, and a nematode would each get radically different readings for say the perimeter of a rock: or the coast of Maine. OK, you can’t get a nematode to cover the coast any more than you can get a boy to make one turn of the Rubik cube each second for two hundred and fifty million years — without sleeping, without eating, without a Christmas vacation — but get the point anyway. I intrude those examples onto Mandelbrot simply in order also to warn us of the practical absurdity of much of the mathematical imagination. Mandelbrot merely talked about men using different length rulers. If your ruler is three Angstrom units you’ll get a very different reading for the coast of the main British island than if you’re walking, wading, climbing, swimming, sailing, flying ... around the coast with a yard stick. The truth seems to be fractal and the fractal seems to be infinite.
Any coastline is infinite in "length."

2003 04 04 One possible translation: Tautologies (such as two-dimensional geometry) don’t map well onto actual experience.

I now wish to generalize Mandelbrot’s principle to the concept of proof. The possibility of "proof" of an issue will depend on the sophistication of your epistemology. The Egyptian priests proved whatever they wanted to prove about the god Ra by turning staffs into snakes. Or was that Moses proving something about Yahweh? The shaman can prove to his people that the missionary is a devil. Had the missionary time to convert the people, the missionary could have proved to them that their shaman had only superstition and no magic. Had the Waterman of 1960 been in England in the 1860s, Thomas Huxley could have proved Darwin to him while he was failing to prove it to Bishop Wilberforce. Had the Waterman of 2001 been in England in the 1860s, he might have been able to prove to Huxley that Huxley didn’t have Darwin quite right. Of course it’s even more unlikely that Huxley in 1860 would have listened to a Waterman from 2001 than that Waterman from 2001 would have been in England in 1860.

Of course once you’ve read Gregory Bateson’s Mind and Nature, you won’t pay any mind to anyone talking about proof unless they’re quite specific about the tautology being referred to. The Euclidean proof is no good with a different set of axioms. The jury’s proof is no good with a different set of "facts."

I still say that short of that sophistication, where the proof has no meaning apart from a specific tautology, the tautology never being demonstrably the same as the universe, there is an infinity of possibilities of proofs for lesser tautologies.

What about still more sophisticated epistemologies? Time will tell. Or not.

2003 03 13 bkMarcus just sent an email with a wealth of links taking a variety of positions with regard to the old saw that "the exception proves the rule."In the phrase, "the exception proves the rule" does "proves" mean TESTS?

(Yes & No):
"Vin’s hypothesis that the relevant sense of ’prove’ is closer to ’proof’ (v): ; "
[But then the page also cites the legal etymology that the OED does.] [Waterman adds: I link the following URLs when I can, meantime you can copy and paste.]
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nchang/personal/exception.html

(Yes):
"This phrase now obtains a diametrically opposed meaning to its original intent,
where proves meant breaks."
http://livingcode.manilasites.com/discuss/msgReader$332

(No):
"The common misconception is that ’proves’ in this phrase means ’tests’.
That is *not* the case..."
http://alt-usage-english.org/intro_c.shtml#exceptionprovestherule

(No):http://www.greenapple.com/~words1/070599.html#exception

(Yes):http://www.bartleby.com/68/30/2330.html

(Yes):http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=prove

— -cut here — -
The YES position is that to prove meant to proof or to test and that therefore the
common usage is not just wrong but backwards!

The NO position is that the origin of the phrase is in old English law, in which case
the exceptions and rules being referred to are legal and artifactual, not natural.

So either way, the common usage is wrong.2003 04 23 Brian also recently teased an important concept upward in my vocabulary toward regular usage: model theism. I was making some generalization about "religious" people, specifying that I meant the congregation of a secular faith like democracy (or Communism) as well as any particular superstition (that is, any untested or ill-tested body of beliefs), and Brian paused me to make sure I wasn’t going to add anything about my recent Illichian / Durkheimian jag about people believing that they can distinguish reliably between sacred and profane. He then said, "Oh, you mean model-theism." Ah. Now had I been familiar with that term a few years ago, I might not have had to invent my own term Cartamania! Yes, exactly, I answered: belief that your thought-model is Real.

So, what I’d been building toward saying to Brian had to do with what I’ve already said in this file, recapitulating Bateson’s iteration in Mind and Nature: science never proves anything: and tagging on the Waterman whipping-horse, it’s only the religious, the faithful — lawyers, priests ... and their Blackshirts, who knee-jerk demand proof at the drop of a hat.Can you prove that? Of course not. No rational man can prove anything. One can merely argue its reasonableness.I repeat Richard Feynman’s point: all we have is belief. The question is: have our beliefs been groomed for their reasonableness?

2004 12 14 I’m just beginning Simon Singh’s Fermat’s Enigma [NY, 1998]. Singh distinguishes scientific proof from mathematical proof: experiential proof from logical proof. Mathematics has always struck me as hubris-filled. Sure I marvel at Pythagoras’s Theorem. Sure I can’t refute any of the famous theorems (neither have I spent thirty seconds trying). But what do I know? I remain reluctant to trust the reasoning of any mortal creatures (and any supposed immortal entities) too far.

I trust logic about two whits more than I trust theology.
I trust experience three or four whits more. I don’t trust anything completely:
not evolution, not the universe, and not any deity: certainly none man-made.

The teacher makes a generalization: No two snowflakes are alike. Has she really examined every single snowflake? in the whole universe? Haven’t most of them melted before she could see them? Aren’t most of the remainder locked in ice where she can’t see them? Did she have a proof? Was it logical or experiential?

I’m with the scientific proof: the fallible kind.

Proof requires agreement on a set of axioms.
Anti-state.com

2005 05 21 from a different blog piece on OriginalityScience can prove error, not truth.
Plagiarism can be proved, originality cannot.
Theft can be proved; not ownership.
One could prove that the devil isn’t God,
God himself could not prove that God is God.2008 06 22 We can never prove that a theory is true: all we can do is declare that we have as yet noticed no evidence to contradict it. What new evidence may get noticed tomorrow can never be known: except by Authority which can proscribe anyone mentioning new evidence.

On Reason

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 16:33:00 +0000

1998

There are many more than one kind of "reason": though only one small set is state of the art reason.

You argue with your wife. Each of you believes the other to be unreasonable. Is one wrong and the other right? Could both of you be right? How about: could both of you be wrong? You've got to define reason, always allowing that different interests will have different definitions.
"Stop being reasonable. That's a mistake. Try being philosophical. ...
"I mean philosophy in its practical sense, of course. You can be reasonable as hell and still be a damned fool."

Piers Anthony

Refreshing as that dialogue is, I hope the visitor sees that a different reason is being referenced. That's the "reason" we all grew up with; not the reason we must learn.Who doesn't believe himself to be reasonable? I've narrated how my Sunday School teacher feared what would happen to my faith when I reached eighteen and went to college. I believe he feared I'd learn a conflicting reason. Surely he didn't believe his own reason was unreasonable.

In The Meaning of Meaning, Ogden and Richards argued that the closer a word was to the core of a language, the more impossible it was to define. It's easy to define a "button"; hard to get at the essence of "beauty." It becomes more complicated when words get drafted by specialties. My high school physics teacher defined "work" as "force" through "distance." Then she told us that if we pushed against a wall all day long but the wall stayed where it started, we weren't doing any "work." We were confused. Even indignant. It was years before I could pinpoint and articulate her error: the physicists can follow any definition they want; but they don't own the common language. The physicists could mean what they mean; so too could we mean what we meant. Let them police their own halls, not ours.

Artificial languages have no authority in natural languages.
And natural languages have no authority. Period.
(In English, "two plus two" "means" "four." In some other language the same sounds could be nonsense or could mean "salt," or something we don't have a concept for, let alone a word. Is it our business to "correct" them? Is it theirs to "correct" us?)

It's trickier yet with a word like Reason. Reason is in the common language. And has been taken up by many specialties. It's my argument throughout Waterman's domains that reason is one word for which we'd all do well to know some of the specialists' meanings. Laissez-faire is fine until the doing-their-own-thing of some endangers the life of all. For some time now I've been convinced that the behavior of most is a danger to all.

(Democracy, the deifying and ratifying of the majority, may kill everything faster than any horde of priests, Huns, Mongols, or Communists ever could.)

Scientists form a group which talks about its devotion to truth. So do any number of groups, including religions and political parties. Like the rest of us, scientists sometimes posture and bluster about it. Like the liberal arts scholars, the religions, and the political parties, scientists also garner evidence in support of their views. How then are they different? Ah! As cited in more than one elsewhere of Waterman's domains, scientists comprise the only group (correct me if you know of another) which makes a habit (as well as a virtue) of going out of its way to disprove their theories, to find fault with their evidence. It's only so long as all such efforts fail that a theory is accepted.

When I can I'll return here to go over the relationship between reason and logic, basic types of reasoning: deduction, induction, abduction ... homeopathic logic, etc.

Notes
(Reason Scrapbook follows below Notes)

Wrong:
The idea of being right can have little substance unless you also have what most of us naturally lack: the idea that we can be wrong. Human beings trust the authorities recognized since the cradle. Science gives us the difficult idea that there is no authority but the evidence: evidence interpreted by theories that must constantly be tested for their wrongness. (That's what was missing in the epistemology I learned in Sunday School.)
Peter Wason distilled this idea into a very simple test.
What Murray Gell-Mann reports not discovering, or even looking for, until he was doing post-doc work at MIT, was an important scientist changing his mind in the face of new evidence. (A superior interpretation of old evidence amounts to the same thing in this context.)
What most of us do when the facts are against us is stonewall. Equivocate. Bluster. Invent new lies. Hire a new image manager.
This needs to develop into an "essay" of its own.

Four: language games
Those of you who know Wittgenstein's work will not only recognize the point as his, but will identify the example as an homage.

Specialties: changing definitions
Korzybskian semantics apply with even more urgency in the case of specialties. Korzybski used his own book as an example. He published Science and Sanity in 1933. Each of his contributions should be understood to carry a little flag: science₁₉₃₃. It would take longer than the age of the universe to read a single word with all the flags needed to approach precision: even "1933" is very rough. My own name and this date (to the nanosecond) together with this URL should be added to my own reference.
Heraclitus said that you cannot put your foot into the same river twice. Not only it is different water flowing by, but the channel too will have changed, if only by a grain of sand. He could have added that you can't put the same foot into the same river twice. Exhaled, we are quantitatively different than when inhaled: by around a trillion air molecules. If we could solve the meaning of the patterns of our firing of neurons, I bet we'd see that we are qualitatively different as well.
Let me give a few examples somewhat more obvious:
Take architecture. An ancient Egyptian architect would understand stone, even post and lintel stone. He'd be thrown by domes. What would he think he was looking at if he saw Chartres? What would the builders of Chartres think if they saw steel and glass architecture? Or the cantilevered concrete of Frank Lloyd Wright?

(As already said elsewhere, I sure didn't know what I was seeing on encountering a Ken Snelson needle tower: and wouldn't know till a decade later when Bucky Fuller explained it to me.)

Take gravity. Your average person still thinks it means "what goes up must come down." But your average cave man believed that. So what did Newton discover? That all matter is mutually attractive. So what about Einsteinian gravity? A group of three people — a banker, a high school physics teacher, and a hyperstring theorist are likely to mean different things by gravity. The banker isn't likely to know to say gravity_{stone age}. The teacher might know to say gravity_Newtonian. The hyperstring guy will definitely know to say gravity_quantum.

Only: imperfect theories
Only math can be brief and accurate (or Shakespeare) at the same time. I've simplified my presentation and put the disclaimer here.
The greater the theory, the more important, the more likely it is to have holes yet nevertheless be accepted by rational people as Theory. The originator of the hypothesis may know of the holes. The defenders of the theory may legitimately say that they believe that additional tests or a few minor alterations will fix it.
If theories had to fit my simplified presentation "perfectly," we'd have very few of them.
Evolution is an example of a theory still rife with problems where there's still no serious doubt as to it's "essential" correctness.

River: abstract vs. concrete
That's if we're nominalists. If we're Realists, then we must understand the river to be not the flowing water we put our foot into, but something abstract. In that case, we couldn't ever put our foot into different rivers: difference would exist only in the illusions of shadows.

Reason Scrapbook

Reasoning can be no better
Than the theory reasoned with

The legislature "defines" what constitutes "reasonableness." The natural languages have been around a lot longer than any legislatures. A number of specialties have differing methods for determining what words mean. Then there are the specialized, artificial languages. Specialists there define terms. There’s an analogy with legislatures, except that the specialists emerge (theoretically) from among peers; they are not elected by the general public. Only in specialized languages can meanings be autocratically updated.

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
G K Chesterton

I use the term reason liberally at this home page, typically specifying "modern reason." Let me review what I mean by it: what I believe a plurality should come to mean by it. I begin by repeating two references ubiquitous at Waterman: Gregory Bateson and Peter C. Wason.

The Wason Test has devised a simple way to determine whether people have added the concept of "falsification" to their "common sense." By Waterman’s standards, if you haven’t, you aren’t reasonable: regardless of what the law says. You must look for evidence in support of your hypotheses: what we all do naturally: but you must also seek evidence against your hypothesis. Goes against the grain, doesn’t it?

Gregory Bateson opened his magnificent Mind and Nature with an exquisite list of "things" every school boy ought to know: elementary ideas relevant to evolution and to almost any other biological or social thinking ...entropy, sacrament, syntax, number, quantity, pattern, linear relation, name, class, relevance, energy, redundancy, force, probability, parts, whole, information, tautology, homology, mass (either Newtonian or Christian), explanation, description, rule of dimensions, logical type, metaphor, topology ...
I reread Bateson’s list for the first time in years as I copy it (having read it many times previously, recognizing its excellence on my first reading in 1979) and see even more than I already knew that those terms are very much what Waterman's Thinking Tools are concerned with. I say that if you would be reasonable by contemporary standards if you can account for terms such as those above in a way that would be recognized as adequate by the specialists. If you can’t, I say you are not up to snuff, are a bad teacher, a poor parent, an irresponsible citizen.

Any man will listen to reason for a while, but when the passions rise,
reason is as quickly forgotten as the graffiti in a shit house.
Robert Anton Wilson

If mankind wished to survive (rather than to die rich), I believe we should make competence with both the Wason Test and Bateson’s list criteria for citizenship. A lot of Ph.D.s would no longer be allowed to vote. Almost no congressmen would be allowed to remain in office. Courtrooms would be closed to many judges and lawyers. A vast majority of teachers would be swept from the lectern to the students’ seats (or out the door if no teacher (as is likely) qualifies).I wrote "should be swept ..." How can a philosophical anarchist say such things? Well, I don’t mean by any kleptocratic authority. And we have no reason to expect "God" to do it. How about by "Nature"? by "evolution"?

If a coalition of scientists and philosophers ever grouped together, all passing the Wason Test, I might reconsider my position against both coercion and genocide. A great crime by a few, should it prolong human survival till the remainder might evolve into something more viable, might be one time that an end might justify a means.

Fact ... Evidence ... Proof ...
Such concepts require an epistemology at least roughly agreed upon.

I am for certain kinds of reason, am contemptuous of certain other kinds, am victim to all kinds ... want to distinguish among kinds. I plan to add a Reason folder to my Society directory, caricaturing the only kind of reason many of us ever encounter: rationalization, justification (for state misbehaviors), "reason" used to interrupt or confuse thought, to cover for lack of thought, to impose decisions without analysis ...

Duality: Binary Semantics

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 16:17:00 +0000

Good & Evil. God & Satan. Life & Death. Flesh & Stone. Ideal & Real. Isn't every culture filled with dualities?

One, two, three ... Every human culture can count to three. Ancient Chinese artists knew that if you subdivide larger groups into smaller groups, the viewer's eye/mind system can take it in. Put three geese here, four nearby. The viewer will see three-geese plus slightly more than three: 3 + (3+1) = 7!

(Don't tell me that few ancient Chinese took algebra. Stone age children learned that much algebra just by being what they were and looking around. It's easily established that simple calculations go faster than counting. Besides, counting can miscount past three. Simple calculations are much faster and infinitely more reliable. We all do it. Even the kid who's failing algebra does so only after making a few simple calculations that assure him that he's safe to do so, and perhaps better off.)

The first group of geese in our Chinese scroll forms a triangle no matter how the geese are clumped. Ditto for the second — only there the polygon has four angles and four edges. See the two together: it's another triangle.

A painting with seven geese can't be taken in; a painting where the seven form a triangle of two unequal components can be "seen" by a six year old. Artists don't waste their time with eight. It's too much for the human mind. Maybe God could see it, but few of our representations are ever really for Him.

(We're told of Eight Wonders of the Ancient World. There's an eight. So what am I talking about? Seven is the minimum number greater than the two threes we can see. Eight is the minimum number greater than that. Therefore, each of our primitive minds automatically understands:
an astounding number.
It's like raining for forty days and forty nights. Or fasting for forty days and nights in the desert (or wandering or praying). What the "forty" means is a number greater than you can reliably count, calculate, or comprehend. The Romans said a thousand. We say millions. It means the same thing. It's nothing but a linguistic form of inflation.

The experienced backgammon player doesn't have to count his moves. Odd numbers go to an opposite color point; even rolls stay on the same color. Six is a single quadrant away: just go to the same relative point. The novice chess player soon sees how the queen's power radiates over the board; only the experienced chess player sees how the knight can feint here, only to suddenly appear there! The chess player is still sub-dividing his world into manipulable components.

Now: is reality divided into triangles and lines and the little inversible-Ls of the chess knight? Are numbers "true"? Is there an identity between how we see and how the "laws" of the universe actually function?

If not, might there at least be an analogy?

It's my position that we can't know altogether what's true, but that we can know some part of how we perceive and understand things. Monists are forever seeing things as One. In general, the religious impulse is an urge to unify. It's certainly my urge (or has been most of my life) (though not always).

But unification can only go so far. If you make everything the same, then you can't tell anything apart. Information, as Gregory Bateson teaches, is perceived difference. No difference would be the thermodynamic heat death cosmologists have been frightening us with. Total entropy. The end of information.

Monists, like the Scholastic Realists are annoyed by people who see more difference than they, the Monists, like.

One / Many. Continuity / Discontinuity.

St. Thomas Aquinas saw "chair"; Abelard saw this chair and that chair. Aquinas saw "Man"; Abelard saw Alison, Geoffrey, and John. But Aquinas too could address John when he walked into the room. Bertrand Russell was one modern nominalist who annoyed twentieth-century monists by emphasizing the discontinuities of the universe.

Drivers-training vehicles have dual controls. On the road, the public is in the least danger with vehicles having only one set of controls: no matter how drunk a particular driver may be. Even democracies assign one captain to a ship. Even democracies have one executive "at the top." Even modern democracies don't want two hundred and fifty million people all talking at once. You couldn't hear anybody.

I don't doubt that in the earliest days of religion (My piece on Magic argues that) man first invented only one god. But then he found more than one trouble. And the one god wasn't always handling it satisfactorily. By one or two thousand BC who could blame the Jews for wanting a Chief Executive? By then even the Chinese had come to believe that all their gods were merely facets of Hung Ti. From a polynomial standpoint, the Trinity of Christianity is a clear evolutionary advance over the simple monotheism of Judaism. Humans will never be emotionally or perceptually ready for George Gamow's 1, 2, 3 ... Infinity. Lao Tsu was as wise as Homo sapiens can (as a group) get when he wrote:
From One comes Two
From Two comes Three
From Three comes Many.
I've long taken the title of Gamow's book to be a translation of those words from the Tao Te Ching. Though, for myself, I Christianize them: From Unity comes Duality. From Duality comes Trinity. From Trinity comes Infinity.

But let's leave unity, trinity, and infinity alone for a moment. I mount this piece today because I suddenly saw a pedagogically graphic use for duality, one custom suited to my current teaching here.

I've been writing here and there about definition, about ambiguity. Take justice for instance. On the one hand, everyone has his own imagined ideal of justice: your enemies under thumb-screws; your daughter married to Prince Somebody; Palestine back in the hands of ... name your group. On the other hand, we have OJ Not Guilty; the mass murder legally insane and not responsible, therefore Not Guilty of Counts 1, 2, & 3; your wife with a new boyfriend so now she gets the Rolls, the Steinway, both the house in Vermont and the condo in Monaco, plus $8,000 per month ...

Justice
What you want versus what you get
Your ideal versus what the judge says.

To chart an ambiguity I TRY an example I've already discussed elsewhere:

Work
The physicists' specialized meaning versus The Common Language
force through distance versus Monday to Friday
... what you do in the garden, what you do in your work shop, what you're doing when you push against a wall (even if the wall doesn't move) ...Duality: Binary Semantics

Good & Evil. God & Satan. Life & Death. Flesh & Stone. Ideal & Real. Isn't every culture filled with dualities?

One, two, three ... Every human culture can count to three. Ancient Chinese artists knew that if you subdivide larger groups into smaller groups, the viewer's eye/mind system can take it in. Put three geese here, four nearby. The viewer will see three-geese plus slightly more than three: 3 + (3+1) = 7!

(Don't tell me that few ancient Chinese took algebra. Stone age children learned that much algebra just by being what they were and looking around. It's easily established that simple calculations go faster than counting. Besides, counting can miscount past three. Simple calculations are much faster and infinitely more reliable. We all do it. Even the kid who's failing algebra does so only after making a few simple calculations that assure him that he's safe to do so, and perhaps better off.)

The first group of geese in our Chinese scroll forms a triangle no matter how the geese are clumped. Ditto for the second — only there the polygon has four angles and four edges. See the two together: it's another triangle.

A painting with seven geese can't be taken in; a painting where the seven form a triangle of two unequal components can be "seen" by a six year old. Artists don't waste their time with eight. It's too much for the human mind. Maybe God could see it, but few of our representations are ever really for Him.

(We're told of Eight Wonders of the Ancient World. There's an eight. So what am I talking about? Seven is the minimum number greater than the two threes we can see. Eight is the minimum number greater than that. Therefore, each of our primitive minds automatically understands:
an astounding number.
It's like raining for forty days and forty nights. Or fasting for forty days and nights in the desert (or wandering or praying). What the "forty" means is a number greater than you can reliably count, calculate, or comprehend. The Romans said a thousand. We say millions. It means the same thing. It's nothing but a linguistic form of inflation.

The experienced backgammon player doesn't have to count his moves. Odd numbers go to an opposite color point; even rolls stay on the same color. Six is a single quadrant away: just go to the same relative point. The novice chess player soon sees how the queen's power radiates over the board; only the experienced chess player sees how the knight can feint here, only to suddenly appear there! The chess player is still sub-dividing his world into manipulable components.

Now: is reality divided into triangles and lines and the little inverted-Ls of the chess knight? Are numbers "true"? Is there an identity between how we see and how the "laws" of the universe actually function?

If not, might there at least be an analogy?

It's my position that we can't know altogether what's true, but that we can know some part of how we perceive and understand things. Monists are forever seeing things as One. In general, the religious impulse is an urge to unify. It's certainly my urge (or has been most of my life) (though not always).

But unification can only go so far. If you make everything the same, then you can't tell anything apart. Information, as Gregory Bateson teaches, is perceived difference. No difference would be the thermodynamic heat death cosmologists have been frightening us with. Total entropy. The end of information.

Monists, like the Scholastic Realists are annoyed by people who see more difference than they, the Monists, like.

One / Many. Continuity / Discontinuity.

St. Thomas Aquinas saw "chair"; Abelard saw this chair and that chair. Aquinas saw "Man"; Abelard saw Alison, Geoffrey, and John. But Aquinas too could address John when he walked into the room. Bertrand Russell was one modern nominalist who annoyed twentieth-century monists by emphasizing the discontinuities of the universe.

Drivers-training vehicles have dual controls. On the road, the public is in the least danger with vehicles having only one set of controls: no matter how drunk a particular driver may be. Even democracies assign one captain to a ship. Even democracies have one executive "at the top." Even modern democracies don't want two hundred and fifty million people all talking at once. You couldn't hear anybody.

I don't doubt that in the earliest days of religion (My piece on Magic argues that) man first invented only one god. But then he found more than one trouble. And the one god wasn't always handling it satisfactorily. By one or two thousand BC who could blame the Jews for wanting a Chief Executive? By then even the Chinese had come to believe that all their gods were merely facets of Hung Ti. From a polynomial standpoint, the Trinity of Christianity is a clear evolutionary advance over the simple monotheism of Judaism. Humans will never be emotionally or perceptually ready for George Gamow's 1, 2, 3 ... Infinity. Lao Tsu was as wise as Homo sapiens can (as a group) get when he wrote:
From One comes Two
From Two comes Three
From Three comes Many.
I've long taken the title of Gamow's book to be a translation of those words from the Tao Te Ching. Though, for myself, I Christianize them: From Unity comes Duality. From Duality comes Trinity. From Trinity comes Infinity.

Learning

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 15:00:00 +0000

Hard Learning, Soft Learning

2000 10 14

I'm afraid this file will have to be a place-marker till I can make time to develop it properly. The goal is first to distinguish between hard learning and soft learning: then to review Gregory Bateson's meta levels of learning: learning₀, learning₁,learning₂ ... [Waterman has access to lots of material on the latter meta levels: keep watching, it will be readded. Meantime, curse the forces that knocked it offline in the first place.]

You see the toddler near the stove. "No, no. Hot, hot." If the kid backs off, that's soft learning. Much of the mind's computing for it is done in the fore-brain.

You're talking on the phone. The kid is left to his own devices. He burns his hand off. He never goes near the stove again, won't even come into the kitchen. That's hard learning. The fore-brain isn't needed in the computations.

Some things simply cannot be taught;
they can only be learned.
Robert Anton Wilson

Hard learning may well be fatal. Fatal or not, it may still be effective. Monitor the biosphere: if the same error kills enough species, over time you'll see fewer new species with that error. Nature is not stupid, however "unconscious."

Experience teaches effectually, but brutally.
Frederic Bastiat

If we crash but some few survive, maybe those few will avoid overpopulation, surplus food, environmental degradation, kleptocracy ... in future. If not (but there's a biosphere left), other species will evolve. Maybe there will be some other monitor noticing the degree to which they learn the lesson.

The illiterate of the 21^st century
will not be those who cannot read and write,
but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
Toffler

Notes

Toddler Near the Stove:
I was sixty-three and a half before I discovered a wonderful antecedent to my own example. See Relations Between Parents and Children by Clara Dixon Davidson [from Liberty #235, pp.3-4]. You'll find it at a site for Benjamin R. Tucker.

Learning Scrapbook

Existing learning limits new learning.

2005 12 14 I repeat from the file (not yet mounted) on Aptitude:Bucky Fuller told me a story I’ll repeat here. He told me that the Army had some committee that had some slush fund, a few extra million dollars beyond anything needed for payroll, tanks, or ammo. The army committee wanted to use its extra cash benefit genius: the army recognizing that success was somehow correlated to intelligence, and "genius" we all know is some super form of intelligence. Now the military had already influenced millions and millions being donated to MIT, to Stanford RI, etc. This time they wanted to try something different. So the Army used part of its millions to hire consultants to advise them on the disposal of their surplus. The consultants researched the problem. The consultants went to recognized geniuses, people with patents the Army respected for example — maybe some guy with a better transistor — and asked outright: "how come you’re so smart?"
The consultants concluded that the common thread seemed to have something to do with small Liberal Arts colleges and with anonymous instructors, not with tenured faculty. In other words, the Army got more than one answer that went something like, Well, I went to Hamilton College, and I remember one day in Freshman English the instructor, reading Frost’s poem about snow in the woods, said ...
So what did the Army do? They gave another couple of million to MIT and SRI!
Bucky grinned. "They refused to learn what they had learned."

2002 03 03Does "God" learn?
Does evolution learn? Do species?
(See how much easier the question is if it’s phrased in lower-case?)
If God is perfect, then what is there for him to learn? Ditto the biosphere, ditto the universe.
Lacking a sophisticated sense of topology as well as cosmology, theology has hitherto been a profession for dimwits (i.e., some of the smartest people in (ahem) civilization).
The idea that learning may be appropriate (and possible) for more than babies undercuts Manichean-Christian dualism more deeply than even Bishop Wilberforce (or Huxley), even William Jennings Bryan (or Darrow), realized.

Now, very fast. Learning₀ is learning that the genome has accomplished: the female bird knows how and when to make an egg; the male mosquito knows how and when to find a female ...
Learning₁ is accomplished by the phenotype: how to tie your shoelaces, how to read ...
Learning₂ is as different from Learning₁ as depth is from length. Meta levels are mutually orthogonal. Learning₂ is learning-to-learn. No, it’s not what you do in school: that’s 99.99% Learning₁.
Gregory Bateson’s example is exquisite. Animal handlers had taught a female cetacean a bevy of tricks. Accomplishment, and thereafter, repetitions, were rewarded with fish. One day the handlers wondered if they could get the porpoise to do something new. They signaled for the tricks, got them, but gave no reward. The porpoise got so agitated (wouldn’t you?), they put her back in her pen. After a time her agitation there increased dangerously: they let her back into the big tank: where she performed a series of new behaviors including behaviors never before observed. That porpoise was a Newton.
I attribute Learning₂ to Newton, to Shakespeare: on occasion. Mostly I see such geniuses as having been exceptionally good at Learning₁. I attribute Learning₂ to myself on occasion. (You of course may have your own opinion.) I certainly attribute Learning₂ to Gregory Bateson.
Learning₃ would be learning-to learn-to learn. Who or what does that? "god"! Evolution! (Perhaps.) Perhaps the biosphere itself. Jesus? Jehovah? I doubt it.
I agree with Bateson that schools harm us and themselves by imagining that Learning₂ is what they engage in. Jared Diamond spends his career in Borneo. He has a post at the University of California. He publishes scintillating new theories. Who should take credit? UCA? Or god? Or Diamond (and Darwin) alone?

Bateson’s levels of learning and Bateson’s soft vs. hard learning also get mentioned at Macroinformation. [links not yet added] I’ll be giving them more and better treatment there before I return to make many improvements here, much of the two sites destined eventually to merge.

There’s always one important question in evolution:Will learning take place in time?

Thinking Tools Primer

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 21:49:00 +0000

Reason & Knowledge

A primer on thinking and the tools of thought was long my cherished goal: till 1998 when I mounted my first draft of this file. My work to date is a couple of steps, not the goal accomplished. Mainly, I've tried to highlight key parts, especially if I find that the majority has missed those keys. This is another step. In this endeavor I stand (or kneel) on the shoulders of others.

In the second chapter of Gregory Bateson's Mind and Nature, 1979, this reader found a more complete (and wise) coverage of the subject than he'd ever dreamed of. "My" primer would be good if I did no more than list the subject headings of his chapter:

Science Never Proves Anything.
The Map is Not the Territory, and the Name is Not the Thing Named.
There is No Objective Experience.
The Processes of Image Formation are Unconscious.
The Division of the Perceived Universe into Parts and Wholes Is Convenient and May Be Necessary, But No Necessity Determines How It Shall Be Done.
Divergent Sequences Are Unpredictable.
Convergent Sequences Are Predictable.
"Nothing Will Come of Nothing."
Number Is Different from Quantity.
Quantity Does Not determine Pattern.
There Are No Monotone "Values" in Biology.
Sometimes Small is Beautiful.
Logic Is a Poor Model of Cause and Effect.
Causality Does Not Work Backward.
Language Commonly Stresses Only One Side of Any Interaction.
"Stability" and "Change" Describe Parts of Our Descriptions.

Rudy Rucker's Mind Tools would be better if it showed knowledge of that earlier work.

Bateson refers (as do I regularly) to Alfred Korzybski's Science and Sanity, Lancaster PA, 1933.

My preparedness to read these books comes not from my college or graduate training nearly so much as from an adulthood of reading the great science teachers: Isaac Asimov, Nigel Calder, Carl Sagan, Jacob Bronowsky, Timothy Ferris, Stephen J. Gould ... That's a step beyond my youthful reading of science fiction, especially that fiction which has real science and real philosophy in it: Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke ...

Some science journalism is very good. James Gleick's Chaos and M. Mitchell Waldrop's Complexity are examples. Sir David Attenborough and James Burke have shown how great TV can be.

More and more scientists are joining the effort to communicate to the general public. Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, Murray Gell-Mann's The Quark and the Jaguar, Michio Kaku's Hyperspace, Donald Johanson's Lucy ... (By no means is this in chronological order) Fred Hoyle's The Intelligent Universe, Desmond Morris' The Naked Ape and The Human Zoo ... Heinz Pagels had several readable books on physics. All of the Leakeys communicated their physical anthropology responsibly, right down to son Richard. Brian Greene joins the parade with The Elegant Universe.

... systems of interactions coupled to a medium
Denis Wood

Architects and planners can know and teach scientific wisdom as Ian McHarg's Design with Nature proves. (He cites Loren Eisley whose science is so spiritual this spiritualist can't read him.)

Timothy Ferris edited The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics, 1991, giving easy access to writings by Richard Feynman, George Gamow, Turing, Mandelbrot, von Neumann, Einstein, Dirac, Dyson, Curie, Popper ...

Nothing in my experience however is more complete than Viscount Ilya Prigogine's The End of Certainty. I've started to extract some basic aspects of it, but unless you've read a good part of what I have, I can't imagine what you'll make of the original.

How do you know he loves you?
I just know it.

Personal Background

I was probably nineteen, possibly twenty, before I first heard the word epistemology. But I had an inkling of the concept since childhood. No, not from my lawyer father. Certainly not from pubic school. At church summer camp the apprentice minister asked us teenagers, "Why are we Presbyterians?"

"Because our parents are," immediately answered a healthy looking girl from New Rochelle. The apprentice had gotten off on the wrong foot. (Because that's the church that was a block and a half walking distance, I thought silently. Our real church, the Episcopal, would have required my parents to get up an hour earlier to drive us to Sunday School. Then wait around for an hour. This one's down the block and we kids can walk there on our own.)

My early Sunday School teacher had asked it right:Why are we Christians?
Nguh? Wide-eyed expectation from the snakes-and-snails-and-puppy-dog-tails celebrants.

"Because we have witnesses!" Mr. Dade had all of my attention. (He was introducing us to the concept of Witness.) "Because the disciples saw Christ resurrected. Jesus even invited them to examine his wounds. Thomas doubted till he put his finger into the holes in his flesh." The sum of the rest was that they told others, who told their children, who told their children, etc., to his Sunday School teacher telling him: and now he was telling us. Two thousand years of tellings sounded a little strained even to my childish mind, but I swallowed it.

(Gregory Bateson reports that Catholics in particular have a greater than average awareness of epistemology. He also reports the extraordinary oddity that many people, encountering epistemological questions, mistake them for authoritarianism!)

People have been mutilated if not burned at the stake for having too nice a sense of reasoning to suit the powerful. Reasoning has never been brought to a higher state than by the heirs of the Medieval heretics who founded modern epistemology and its close relative, science.

Epistemology is that branch of philosophy which investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge. Alfred Korzybski suggested that philosophy should be sub-divided and then fenced: epistemology itself should be studied with all diligence; the rest should be reclassified amid the history of human pathology! (I've long seconded his view.)

Next, I'll review some of the non-common sense aspects of the scientific method: principally, falsifiability; but also, the steps from hypothesis to theory, the nature of evidence, data, fact ... the difference between fact and theory ...
(See also Heinrich Scholz.)

Before taking a break I wish to emphasize the public, open-air nature of science. There's a limit to one's social utility if one doesn't know reason. Modern reason is open: no back rooms, no sub-rosa decisions allowed. The liability of limited social utility skyrockets in a crisis. (And I am convinced that we ain't seen nothing yet when it comes to crisis.)

Everyone has some epistemological awareness. Why do you think the stage illusionist makes such a point of inviting people from the audience to examine some property? The illusionist himself will firmly, audibly rap some solid part of his rigged apparatus: knowing that the audience, though it has some epistemological awareness, has a very low epistemological awareness. Of course the magicians are beginners compared to the ad men. We are predators. Our prey includes each other: especially in the area of influence (economics, politics, etc.)

Wilson, Robert Anton, Quantum Psychology, Tempe AZ, 1990 is the best epistemological primer I've encountered since Gregory Bateson knocked my socks off with the opening questions of Mind and Nature. I'm embarrassed that this my Thinking Tools directory is not yet that simple or comprehensive. Then again, I presume Wilson can pay his rent, isn't publicly shunned to the degree I am, doesn't have to scramble and dissemble to get medication for simple, known, disorders ... On the other hand, the Wilson work would be better still if it knew of my work: particularly Macroinformation.

from 1998

For a few years now I've been aware of titles like The Third Chimpanzee and Why Is Sex Fun? without having registered the name Jared Diamond. It was my son's reading a blurb on Guns, Germs, and Steel that brought the name to my attention, my son emailing me that someone else seemed to be making points very parallel to many of my own and that he was getting published.

By the time my son was ten or so I was explaining to him the relationship between the development of navigation in the north and the accident of it being the north that has a pole star. I further speculated that that focus would have aided northern imaginations in other astronomical pursuits including the invention of the sun dial (since northerners can more readily imagine a "focus" in the sky, an axle). Nigel Calder's syntheses, for example, had helped me formulate other imaginings about origins. But I never ever saw Diamond's latitudinal correlations. That is, Eurasia's ample breadth fostered the colonization of techniques such as agriculture, animal husbandry, warfare ... more readily than the longitudinal layout of Africa and the Americas. Changing climates is a barrier to cultural propagation. Wow.

Now I find great hypotheses per chapter. His relating gazelle stotting to chemical abuse to mating strategies — both dangerous, one misguided — is just one example of a fabulous series I'll die happy if I never reach the end of. (2004 07 11 Leonard Shlain has inspired me to think of an alternative explanation which I'll post soon.)

I give myself a rhetorical (at least attitudinal) edge; but he's an actual scientist. I inherit what data I don't live; he goes out and gets it. (Of course he must have the carfare.) Not that we're in competition — we converge.

I'm way overdue to continue the top part of this piece, but if you browse Waterman's domains, you'll see what I've been busy doing. So many great teachers belong here I haven't gotten around to including. Bucky Fuller has a(n incomplete) module of his own. That, I'm proud to say, was a personal contact. One exhilarating, however bewildering, three-day-weekend with Gordon Pask was unforgettable. I'm only now discovering Heinz von Foerster's influence on me (through Illich).

My work I keep emphasizing flows from Korzybski. My connection to Korzybski was made through Gregory Bateson. Now I discover that others have been doing excellent work on semiotics and epistemology: Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, the folks at deoxy.org ...

Notes

Gregory Bateson: Mind & Nature
Quoting from the Introduction of Gregory Bateson's Mind and Nature:... It became monstrously evident that schooling in this country and in England and, I suppose, in the entire Occident was ... careful to avoid all crucial issues ... Official education was telling people almost nothing of the nature of all those things on the seashores and in the redwood forests, in the deserts and the plains. Even grown-up persons with children of their own cannot give a reasonable account of concepts such as entropy, sacrament, syntax, number, quantity, pattern, linear relation, name, class, relevance, energy, redundancy, force, probability, parts, whole, information, tautology, homology, mass (either Newtonian or Christian), explanation, description, rule of dimensions, logical type, metaphor, topology, and so on. What are butterflies? What are starfish? What are beauty and ugliness?

If you haven't already read, digested, and reread that great book, what business have you here? Go. Find it. Try to understand everything in Chapters One and Two before proceeding to Chapter Three. Or read it any way you want. Just read it.

Epistemology

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 18:10:00 +0000

the pattern that connects
Gregory Bateson

Epistemology:a branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature,
methods, and limits of human knowledge

Random House Unabridged

Epistemology has been my hobby ever since my Sunday School teacher offered us "reasons" for our beliefs.We know that Jesus is our Savior because of all the Witnesses: Thomas put his finger through the hole in Jesus' hand. "Doubting" Thomas told so-and-so who told so-and-so et cetera: who told the pope ... who told Luther ... who told the king ... who told my grandfather, who told my father, who told me ...
As a note to my biographical narrative states, it's not very sound epistemology, but it is epistemology.

I know he loves me because he told me so.

Epistemology is not popular. It's rarely taught or even mentioned under that name. My Sunday School teacher certainly didn't mention the word. I doubt that he knew the word. At sixty, still trying to save us from ourselves, still utterly without any discernible success, popularity is the last thing I can worry about. I call it by it's name because I see our chances of continuing to survive without a conscious and critical apprehension of epistemology as vanishing toward zero.

Philosophy should be divided in two:
epistemology and all else.
Epistemology should be studied
with all diligence.
The rest should be classified with
the history of human pathology.

Alfred Korzybski (paraphrase)

Development of this most important directory (Epistemology, Thinking Tools ...) has been scanted while I simultaneously develop the rest of my home page, my writing, my biography, and my commentaries making one picture. The whole of the home page has been in turn scanted while I've concentrated on developing my Theory of Macroinformation. You'll find epistemological concerns and comments throughout my work.

The system's not in the parts, it's in the pattern.
Denis Wood

Epistemology is very hard to think or write about directly. Yet anyone with a developed epistemological sense will readily see that it is the core subject underlying this home page. Yet I didn't mount so much as a scrap of this module till a few months ago after scribbling a few words to my son via email. Today isn't the day either except to note a point the proper essay will eventually develop:

Epistemology isn't a subject to be learned and then you've got it, then you have authority. There's no simple "answer" that once you've got it, you've got it. Epistemology offers no algorithm that can be learned mechanically. Epistemology studies ways of "knowing." That is, it studies ways of believing about knowledge. Epistemology can show how some ways are primitive, inadequate, immature. Epistemology can not say: this way is right. Now you'll be infallible.

As my Truth and Reason module argues, epistemology, like science, like reason, can expose faulty reasoning but cannot prove its own reasoning to be valid. Epistemology is not a tautology. Tautologies like geometry have methods of reasoning. The scientific process offers methods of procedure, methods of reasoning. The methods of both are part of epistemology. Epistemology is not a sub-set of science; science is a sub-set of epistemology.

Epistemology is thought of as a sub-set of philosophy. I follow Korzybski: all philosophy which is not epistemology is so much cant.

There is something fascinating about science.
One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Mark Twain

Epistemologies can be compared the way Gamow infinities can be compared. We can say one is "stronger" but cannot specify the entire contents of either. Unlike infinities, what can be estimated with confidence about epistemologies are their comparative limits. Jean Piaget showed that children "know" their world differently than do adults. People who have studied biology know the world differently than do people who haven't. Jared Diamond points out that physiologists know biology differently than do evolutionary theorists. People who have studied Korzybskian semantics know semantics differently than do people who use the word only to wriggle away from responsible speech.

Do we want a child's way of knowing while supervising a white water raft trip on the Colorado? Do we want a physiologist's expertise on cellular mechanisms when tying to explain the evolutionary function of death? Do we want the "wisdom" of the marketplace (a place which includes the White House as well as Madison Avenue) to determine the fate of the biosphere?

My work I keep emphasizing flows from Korzybski. My connection to Korzybski was made through Gregory Bateson. Now I discover that others have been doing excellent work on semiotics and epistemology: Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, the folks at
deoxy.org ...

from 1996

Notes

Epistemology not Popular:
My lawyer recently told me with regard to a civil suit that if I mentioned epistemology, the jury would see to it that I didn't get any money. How else was I to establish my character? The bully had attacked me, left me in my blood and broken teeth, then called the police to say I had attacked him. The philosopher, saint, and reformer attacks the redneck? Physically?

Wholes / Parts

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 18:00:00 +0000

A member of a set is not the set. A set cannot be a member of itself.

I don't know formal math or formal logic, so I don't know how it's usually phrased, but I know there are such rules.

I mean these modules to be components of a world view. Some have developed far enough to be independent essays. Others are hardly more than notes: work in progress: mini-modules toward a module, toward an essay, the essays all structuring a system, an epistemological system. Some of the parts I believe are good enough to be fractal. That is, the part — through self-similarity across scale — hints of the whole.

Well, for today a fractal part is as far as I expect to get. I don't start at a beginning: I just sketch one middling part of such an essay.

Umpires can't expect to see every detail on a field of action: they just have to make a call. Science knows it can't have all the evidence: that's why the highest state of its knowledge will always be theory, never proof. The law is recent, shallowly evolved, still mostly feudal in its epistemology. The law talks freely about "proof." Religious don't need proof; not even good evidence: they know.

A Greek (as in ancient Greece) has had wisdom attributed to him for saying count no man happy until he's dead. No subsequent experience with the man can then refute you. My "explanation" of the comment relates the view to the (ongoing) evolution of reason.

In contrast, the religious of the familiar monotheism say that God is good.

And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

Genesis 1,10

My glossary initiates the argument that good and bad are neither things nor places, but rather directions along a spectrum. If a thing is called good, it can only be in relation to some other thing or things that the speaker is judging to belong further back on the negative side of the spectrum. Good can have meaning only in relation to something else being compared: either implicitly or explicitly.

I say ... we say Beethoven is a great composer. We say Beethoven's Symphony #7 is a great symphony. We are moved by it. Transported. We feel strong emotions, some of them identifiable. We feel profound, alternately tranquil and exalted ... We know that other symphonies do not move us so.

But what if Beethoven's 7^th were the only symphony, the only music, that we knew? What sense would it make to call it great? Whether of not it made us feel profound, whether or not Beethoven wrote it, whatever name we called it, it would really be the music.

So what is God seeing as "good" in his creation? The whole of it? Wouldn't that be like saying I'll put waves in the ocean and they'll be all crests, no troughs? Or is God seeing the Earth and the Seas to be good in relation to what he'd done a verse of two earlier? The Seas and the Earth are good compared to what I did with the Earth and the Heaven. Or might he be saying The Earth, with its Earth and Seas, is good compared to what I did with Mars: just Mars and those stupid Mars canals. Or is he saying This whole creation: light/dark, Heaven/Earth, Earth/Seas, is better than that Creation I made last week?

How can work be "good" if there is no other work for comparison? Unfortunately for our familiar monotheism, the same problem applies to God Himself. We say that God is good. Compared to what? To what other God that is. Surely he wasn't comparing Himself to us: at the time to which the utterance is attributed, He hadn't made any creatures yet, let alone man.

The God of the early Old Testament presents Himself as Chairman of a committee, not the only entity of pre- ... Pre-what? Pre-existence? How can you have an entity before the possibility of entity? No, Heaven and Earth cannot have been the start of the cosmos, perhaps not even the start of the universe. (Forget astronomy-based cosmology: this criticism is strictly internal: based on reading the text itself.) The later Bible presents Him as the only God. Then how can he be "good"?

Other latter day theology has it that God is as it were the definition of good. So killing everything except Noah and some representative pairs was good. Telling Abraham to kill his only son with his own hands, tormenting Job, watching John beheaded ... are all good. Did He enjoy the crucifixion? Sure, and by definition it was good. (If he didn't "do" it, he still planned it.) Then why aren't we good too? It was good for the Jews to kill Canaanite and Philistine. So why wasn't it good for the Nazis to kill the Jews and the fags?

Well, this hasn't taken the direction I'd thought when I typed the title an hour ago. I'll fix it later. For now I'll just hook back to our wise Greek and his saw. The Greeks were beginning to see the importance of evidence. Can there have been any Cro-Magnon at Lasceaux who didn't see the importance of evidence? I believe that civilized man invented blindness to evidence. Otherwise, how could the parasites rule the food producers? What civilized institution could withstand a consciousness of evidence? Catholics honor the "honesty" of Jesus at the Temple: then repress any further honesty. Protestants honor the "honesty" of Luther's reading: then ditto. Scientists honor the honesty of Galileo while themselves looking an awful lot like a Catholic or Lutheran Church to me. Sure they have "honest" readings: their own. How well do they countenance challenging readings? "Galileo" isn't just in the past. Look beyond the whitewashed stories of Srinivasa Ramanujian in Good Will Hunting and TIME's recent paragraph. Soon I'll report my own experience with scientists in relation to my Macroinformation.

But back to God and the wise Greek:
We say that God is good. But he's not dead. So how can we tell? OK, Nietzsche says he's dead. The religious say He Liveth. If He liveth, then the evidence isn't all in yet. If what He does is good by definition, and if He did all the things the Bible says He did, then why isn't it good when we do the same things: commit genocide, specicide (not all the millions of species can have been gathered by Noah), break promises ...? Why are we so hard on nest parasitism, birds that lay their eggs in another's nest to gain free and unwitting foster care? Didn't God do the same with poor Mary? Wasn't it his kid he put there, not hers?

If God planned Jesus' actions, or even so much as knew what would happen, and Jesus said he was coming right back with an emphasis such that early Christians didn't believe they even had to reproduce any more, and two thousand years later, we're still waiting, still waiting ... Imagine a divorce case: OK, the husband says, I'll pay alimony. Two thousand years later the kids are barefoot, the woman went into an inanition coma 1999.9 years ago. Before the judge, she'd been so grateful: Oh, thank you, Your Honor. Thank you, dear ex-husband. How thankful should she be now in her coma with all her barefoot kids? All she got was a promise. So where's the actual money?

I started with these very examples in mind but somehow didn't marshal them to my (I insist) very important title very well. I'll make the connections better next time. Meantime, why not make them yourself?

from 1998

Understanding

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 17:24:00 +0000

Trying to understand
Beckett's Watt

Understanding: Can There Be a Consensus?

Anyone reading this has probably been in a school environment. So you know: the decision of whether the student understands the math is up to the teacher, not the student: or the student's parents. The test doesn't go:"Bobby, do you know the sum of two and two?"
"Yes, Ma'am, I do."
"Fine, Bobby. Your word is good enough for me. There's no need to demonstrate."
No. It goes"Bobby, show me your calculation for the sum of two and two."
"2 + 2 = 4."
"Very good, Bobby. That's correct."

Whether or not Bobby understands arithmetic, the teacher takes that answer as a demonstration that Bobby "knows" at least that
formula.

Now: Is that pattern generally true throughout the society? Not at all. Certainly not in my experience. In our version of kleptocracy it's the certified "expert" who decides what you understand and also what he understands. The relationship is not symmetrical. The testing is never two way. The sergeant can "make" you understand him;
there's no way for you to make the sergeant understand
you.

The sergeant can "make" you understand him; there's no way for you to make the sergeant understand
you.

Notes

Bobby & Math Teacher:
Neither does the test go, "Bobby, do you know the sum of two and two?" with Bobby's parents interrupting, "Yes, he does." Neither would the teacher say, "Oh, thank you Bobby's father and Bobby's mother: I'll take your word for it too." No: public education assigns ignorance to the parents: the parents' ignorance no more verified than the teacher's expertise: or the state's to judge either.

Make the sergeant understand you:
Unless you carry your own nuclear deterrent: another area where the state monopolies remain unbroken. We now have that private-nuclear-deterent concept however thanks to novelist Ken MacLeod.

Lex Lingus Elasticus

watermac@live.com (Waterman) — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 16:47:00 +0000

When one concept in a natural language tightens its meaning other concepts compensate by loosening.

Back in the early days of Mad and Panic comics, one of them had a page lampooning comic book ads. One of the ads was illustrated by a pair of cartoons of a fat lady before and after donning the product: a corset. The "before" lady was as fat as only the illustrators of those great graphic originals could make her: she was ringed with fat rolls something like the Michelin tire man. The same fat "lady" — same cartoon lips, eyes, jowls and rolls of fat, in the "after" illustration, was as svelte as any of the belles in Gone with the Wind from her pubis to her bosom, but all that didn't fit had ballooned horribly. Fifteen chins had become thirty-six. Her belly was redistributed down to her already frightening thighs. The rest of her torso oozed up and out from her bodice like oatmeal cooked in too small a pan.

I asked Ann Gaines of EC Publications if I could get a scan of it to share with you here. She didn't recognize it to be from Mad. So it must have been Panic. Or Cracked. One of the imitators. (I'd kept my old Mads for decades through dozens of moves, many of them from one elevatorless sixth-floor walk-up to another. (Ah, student days. Mine have never ended.) But I finally yielded to my wife's importuning, shuttling from Maine back to New York in 1969 or 1970, and recycled them.)

The linguistic illustration I'd had in mind was Thomas Jefferson's declaration that all men were created equal, made while he kept slaves. How do we scan that, Jeff? by making it all the more arbitrary who qualifies as "man." What tyrant couldn't make the same claim so long as he controlled the definition of the terms? All men were equal in bad King John's day so long as you exempt the king on the one side (as being divine) and the peasants on the other side (as being animals).

This piece spun off from one of my 1997 Thinking as Mental Modeling pieces though the thoughts were worked out in the 1960s. The universities didn't understand a word I said then, and they haven't since.
The context in the Mental Modeling piece was credit: the government and the banks can define your "credit" as whatever they've written down about you. The terms are neither fixed nor necessarily true.