Representationalism

Main Article: What is Subjectivity? - Blithering Genius

Wikipedia: Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy)

A subject is a being who has a unique consciousness (will and awareness) and/or unique personal experiences, or an entity that has a relationship with another entity that exists outside itself (an object).

An object is a philosophical term often used in contrast to the term subject. A subject is an observer and an object is a thing observed.

A subject has a mind. Something is “subjective” if it is mind-dependent or perspective-dependent. Subjectivity is not random or arbitrary. Subjectivity is a concept for describing properties of the mind, like knowledge, truth, emotions, value, will, awareness, etc.

A subject can be viewed as both a subject and an object. Philosophy and psychology are the self thinking about itself. This is achieved by viewing subjects from the perspective as if they were objects.

The conditions of being a subject within objective reality:

• Biological Desires for sustaining the subject’s life.
• Truth and Knowledge that provides only a limited scope of reality.
• Free Will (Deterministic as an object, “free will” as a subject)
• Limited lifespan with eventual mortality where all biological processes cease to continue.
• Designed to reproduce (a consequence of evolution).

We cannot understate how important the Subject | Object Dichotomy and its implications are for forming an accurate and coherent philosophy and understanding of the world.

Note: It seems that it’s easier to learn the subject | object dichotomy inductively rather than deductively, i.e. by learning the more specific applications, and only then looking at the big picture.

Further Reading: Wikipedia: Neurodiversity

Further Reading: The Typical Mind Fallacy - LessWrong

Thought is defined as any mental process that the mind can consciously think about.

• Concept
  • Abstract Concept
  • Concrete Concept
    • First-Level Concepts
    • Higher-Level Concepts
      • Concepts of Consciousness
• Conjecture
• Decision
• Definition
  • Lexical (Dictionary) Definition
  • Stipulative Definition
  • Theoretical Definition
  • Operational Definition
  • Precising Definition
  • Ostensive Definition
  • Intensional Definition
    • Genus–Differentia Definition
  • Extensional Definition
    • Ostensive Definition
    • Enumerative Definition
  • Recursive Definition
  • Persuasive Definition
• Explanation
• Hypothesis
• Idea
• Logical argument
• Logical assertion
• Mental image
• Sensory Input
• Percept / Perception
• Emotions
  • Meditation
    • Meditation is the practice of training one’s attention to achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm state. Focus awareness meditation is the practice of focusing one’s attention on just one thing, such as breathing.
• Premise
• Proposition
• Syllogism
• Theory
• Thought Experiment
• Imagination

Note: I still have more thinking to do regarding how each of these are defined and what should be included in this list.

Wikipedia: Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Types of Intelligence

Logical-Mathematical Intelligence

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Musical-Rhythmic Intelligence

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Visual-Spatial Intelligence

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Verbal-Linguistic Intelligence

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Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence

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Interpersonal Intelligence

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Intrapersonal Intelligence

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Raven Paradox - Wireless Philosophy

Even though there are lots and lots of wrong philosophical positions, it is still important to know them, the arguments in favor of them, and why they are all wrong because this helps us to better understand the correct philosophical positions by contrast. Due to the nature of belief networks, the only way to determine the best philosophical positions is to rigorously argue them back and forth until we inductively determine the best ones.

The Sorites Paradox: If a heap is reduced by a single grain at a time, the question is: at what exact point does it cease to be considered a heap?

The Sorites Paradox is related to the Raven Paradox. The proposed solutions (including ones by analytic philosophers) to Sorites Paradox don’t actually solve it. They’re just playing language games.

Knowing how to solve the Sorites Paradox is helpful for understanding:

• The Emergence of Consciousness
• Races as Clusters of Genes
• Dialect Continuums
• The Ship of Theseus
• Slippery Slope Fallacies
• Wittgenstein’s Concept of Family Resemblance

• Many other things

• An idea is anything that you can possibly think of.
• A concept is similar to an idea, but different since it has a term/headword/lexeme to specifically identify it.
• Concepts also usually exist within systems and frameworks that relate other concepts together for the brain’s model understanding of the whole framework.
  • Every concept has an implicit (or explicit if more conscious) definition in our brains.
  • Every concept has a definition
• All properties are technically concepts by this definition since we can think about them.
  • Properties are simpler concepts that can be identified as being parts of more complex concepts.
    • Properties are used to define complex concepts.
• Complex concepts may be defined by properties as part of their definition, and properties have their own definitions.
  • So the definition of complex concepts that are defined by properties is really just a definition composed of other definitions.
  • If more complex concepts are described in simpler and simpler terms until there are no properties left to describe them, definitions that are free from properties are used instead.
• At some point, things just can’t be more simply described, so definitions are used to communicate what our brains are indescribably and abstractly thinking about.
  • Definitions have two purposes:
    • To explain things that we don’t understand.
    • To provide concrete descriptions of what we are talking about.
  • Every known concept and property has a definition in our brain, even if we can’t verbally describe it.

See: The Role of Concept Formation in the Reasoning Process.

To put it most concisely, the reason why objective truth does not exist is that it’s not possible to have absolute, omniscient knowledge of reality. Conscious minds can only have subjective, perspective-dependent models of objective reality. No proposition can ever be truly be labeled as “objectively true” because it’s always possible to be wrong about that said propositions if further knowledge of reality invalidates that proposition’s truth value assignment. Truth is essentially the same thing as knowledge, because whatever people know is what they will assert to be “true”.

There is no foundation for truth, any more than there is a biggest number.

• Suppose that X is the biggest number. Now add 1 to X. X + 1 is bigger than X. Thus, X is not the biggest number.
• Suppose that F is the ultimate foundation of truth and value. Now question F. Thus, F is not the ultimate foundation of truth and value.

(From Lucifer’s Question by Blithering Genius)

“There is no truth.”

This is a valid performative contradiction. Whether truth is subjective or objective, saying this statement contradicts itself.

“(The truth is that) There is no objective truth.”

This is not a true performative contradiction since truth is relative by definition. For that reason, asserting this statement does not have to assume that propositions are objectively true. It can be more clearly shown why there is no contradiction in this statement if we rephrase the statement with two other statements that have equivalent meaning:

“There is no objective truth.” = “Nothing is objectively true.”

“Nothing is objectively true.” = “All truth is relative.”

A common theme among mastering different academic fields is to understand the finer details of something. The goal of mastery is make all the tiny, implicit details explicit and rigorous. Examples:

• For math, everything must be rigorous and verbose. One reason is to avoid assuming things that need to be proven
• In programming, telling instructions to the computer often requires lots of tiny steps we would never think about.
• When learning a foreign versus a natural language, one must be aware of lots of small details often overlooked by natives.
• For physics, all small details must be considered when calculating physics problems, though they are often ignored in idealized models and situations used for teaching physics concepts.

A common phrase that many people utter for asserting the supposed obviousness of objective truth is “The sky is blue”, but this is ironically a great example for demonstrating how truth is all about information compression. For one thing, the sky isn’t always blue. Sometimes, it has orange/sunset colors, sometimes it’s gray when it’s cloudy and raining outside, sometimes it’s pitch black at night, and it can even appear red during wildfires, yellow near hurricanes, or white if there’s nothing but clouds. Since Truth is information compression, saying that “the sky is blue” omits the information that the sky isn’t always blue all the time (because it’s the simplest statement we can say about the sky’s color), even if it may be the case that the sky is blue most of the time.

Furthermore, the vast majority of the world’s languages don’t make a native distinction between blue and green, most likely because the human eyes have fewer blue cones for detecting blue light within them, in comparison to the number of red cones. Many languages don’t even have a native word for “blue/green”. And to make things even more complicated, Russian makes a native three-way distinction between green, light blue, and dark blue.

• Green = зеленый
• Light Blue = голубой (also incidentally the term for gay)
• Dark Blue = синий

So, Russians would say that the sky is “light blue” or “cyan”, instead of just “blue”, if they are making the simplest, most information-compressed statement about the sky’s color.

The two main takeaways here regarding the complexity of truth are: 1. truth exists at different levels of provided information, and 2. the specificity/ambiguity of language affects the truth values of propositions. If we insist that the statement “the sky is blue” is definitively and unquestionably true, then we are omitting important information about the sky and choosing to be willingly misleading about it. Since the Correspondence Theory of Truth is unable to account for situations where a subject believes a proposition to be true when it’s actually false given more information about reality, this implies that it’s not sufficient enough for understanding the true nature of truth.

The actual best answer to what color the sky is that it depends on the location, the time of day, and the atmospheric conditions, but people don’t typically say that because it requires more words (information) to say. The other reason is that the phrase that the sky is blue has been repeated so many times is that most people’s minds are classically conditioned to believing that it’s obvious statement.

Note: Technically speaking, what we experience as “blue” isn’t really a property of reality. Blue is just a color that we experience as a qualia, so this probably isn’t the best example of information compression being applied towards reality. But the next example certainly is.

Another example of an oversimplified truth is stating that the Earth is a sphere. The Earth is technically better described as an oblate spheroid since the speed at which the Earth rotates causes the mass around the equator to be farther away from the center of the Earth, compared to all other points around the Earth. Since the Earth is close enough to being shaped like a sphere, and since spheres are a more familiar concept that is easier to understand, nearly everybody refers to Earth as being a sphere in casual discourse.

Propositions can also be “mostly true”, “somewhat/kind of true/false”, or “mostly false”. In these situations, it is either the case that:

1. Some of the proposition’s components are true while the other components are false, or
2. There is too much information compression of reality to the extent that the proposition model reality very inaccurately, or
3. Both [1] and [2] to some extent each.

Among the first conceptions of the Earth’s position in space was Ptolemaic system and epicycles. Further knowledge revealed that the Earth actually orbits the Sun, and the Heliocentric Model was formed. Later, the center of the Milky Way Galaxy was discovered, and it was realized that we live in an ever expanding, unimaginably huge universe.

Each of these different conceptions of Universe not only vary by their accuracy, but also by the amount of information gathered about objective reality that is compressed into the mental models formed from sensory experience. Even if the Ptolemaic Model is clearly wrong with the modern knowledge that we now have about the Universe, it was formed during a time when people could only gaze at the stars and notice that the stars in the sky would vary depending on the time of day and time of year. So if that’s the only information we have to base our model of the Universe on, that model is still “true” according to that limited sensory experience of the Universe. When more information is gathered about the Nature of the Universe, the simpler model becomes false because we have more information to make a truth judgment that is more representative of reality.

TED Talk: Computer Scientist Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty.

A small sampling of all the inaccurate thoughts ever brainstormed in history is:

• The universe is controlled by a powerful all-mighty god?
• The universe revolves around the Earth?
• The universe is composed of earth, water, air, and fire?
• The species of the world developed according to creationism?
• The Earth is flat?
• The brain is responsible for blood circulation and the heart is responsible for our thinking and thoughts?
• The bones in an embryo are the first structures to develop?
• The expansion of the universe is slowing down due to gravity?
• The great dinosaur extinction was caused by a violent volcano?
• The best system to guarantee human rights is communism?
• Supernatural gods are responsible for the sun, moon, and every other unexplained phenomenon in this universe?

We must keep in mind that all these inaccurate beliefs were formed from incomplete models of reality.

Arguments Why The Platonic Realm Does Not Exist:

• The Platonic Realm doesn’t have any explanatory power. The representationalist theory of knowledge is able to explain just as much about epistemology or metaphysics, while also being more parsimonious. Representationalism proposes that our subjective models of objective reality and the associated sensory data and reasoning that generates said models are stored completely within systems of reasoning that exist within our own minds.
• Why does a Platonic Realm containing every possible pattern have to exist, when we can instead understand that patterns are information stored in the brain about the characteristics and relations about many different things (genes, mathematical structures, etc) that exist within the physical world?
• If the Platonic Realm doesn’t exist physically, then where does it exist?
• Where is the empirical evidence that the Platonic Realm exists?
• Where is the empirical evidence that ontological primitives exists?
• How do we have access to the Platonic Realm?
• Why do we have unequal access to all the propositions in the Platonic Realm?
• If there is a Platonic Realm, then why are so many situations where we can’t perfectly model natural phenomena?
• How would Platonists verify truth propositions under their theory of truth? Anytime someone asserts that a statement is “true”, they’re implicating the subject-object dichotomy, because they’re asserting that the statement is true according to their mental model of reality.
• How are the arguments in favor of the Platonic Realm any different from the fallacious Transcendental Argument for God (TAG)? The TAG proposes that there has to be a God for us to understand anything, and Platonists are arguing that there has to be a Platonic Realm for us to have knowledge.
• If we should assume that there are aspects of reality that are not empirically observable without evidence for their existence (e.g. the Platonic Realm), how is this any different from arguing that we should believe in an omniscient omnipotent God, when God is not empirically observable either (under the most common definitions of “God”)?
• Believing in a Platonic Realm does not prevent an infinite regress of knowledge, since it’s actually an Inverse Homunculus Fallacy.
• You don’t solve the problem of meaninglessness by attaching it to an ontology that’s assumed to exist. You give terms meaning by grounding them in embodied experience.
• The methods that we use to understand, explain, and present mathematics (e.g. the mathematical notations, symbols, equations, proofs, the graphing and visuals, etc) are clearly invented. For example, most people use Arabic numerals to represent numbers nowadays, but in the past, they also could’ve been represented using Roman numerals or abacuses. Likewise, the Newtonian notation for differentiation was the first to be invented, but Leibniz notation and other notations were later invented for representing differentiation more efficiently. There’s also many different ways to visually represent mathematical phenomena and do mathematical reasoning, and it’s widely accepted that there are often multiple different ways to arrive at the correct answer. These all suggest or imply that mathematics exists in the mind, not objective reality.
• It’s true that Mathematics is applicable to many different fields of science and knowledge in the real world, but I’m not convinced that this implies that mathematics is built into the nature of the Universe. Whenever mathematics is used to model reality, a parsimonious set of axioms is proposed and theorems are derived to create a mathematical theory(ies) for modeling real world phenomena. Whenever axioms don’t model a particular phenomenon correctly, mathematicians simply add, remove, or change the axioms until they’re able to model the phenomenon correctly. If many, many different sets of axioms must be formulated to model everything within objective reality, this seems to imply that mathematics is actually built into the mind, rather than being a property of the Universe. Human minds are fully responsible for adapting mathematics to model reality, however they perceive it.

Believing in a Platonic Realm only creates more unanswered questions than it solves. Occam’s Razor is sufficient to conclude that the Platonic Realm simply doesn’t exist, since it’s easier to explain truth as being a model representation of reality.

Arguments Why The Platonic Realm Does Exist:

• It supposedly gives explanatory power for proving or disproving existential and universal propositions within certain frameworks.
• A Platonic Realm is supposedly necessary in order to prevent an infinite regress of knowledge.
• Gödel’s Completeness Theorems allegedly affirm the existence of unfalsifiable and undecidable statements.

Arguments Why The Existence of the Platonic Realm Is Unfalsifiable:

• The nature of truth makes it impossible to prove whether some statements are true or false. Humans also have limited knowledge of reality.
• Neither side has any arguments that definitively disprove the other’s claims. Both sides make appeals to intuition.
  • Note: I actually agree with this argument, but I don’t believe that it disproves the representationalist, cognitive natalist theory. I believe that all knowledge is ultimately based on intuition, so the most rational thing to do must be to accept the theory with the most persuasive arguments, and hence the greatest intuition.

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The Wikipedia Theory of Truth proposes that Wikipedia is more likely (but not guaranteed) to be correct than most opinions out there. The justification is that Wikipedia was created by a consensus of dozens to hundreds or even thousands of well-educated people who tend to be smarter than the average person, and are presumably “experts” in their own fields, since many are members of Academia.

For January-November of 2021, this was more or less the theory of truth that I operated under until I read Blithering Genius’s essay, Why Most Academic Research Is Fake. At that point, I realized that Wikipedia can’t be trusted because Academia is not infallible. In fact, Academia is rigged and as susceptible to ideological biases as any other person out there. When I went through this phase, I was probably the most humanist/leftist that I had ever been at any other point in my life, but I’m glad that I eventually saw through it and corrected my beliefs. Since then, I’ve also written my own essay that elaborates on the problems with Academia.