Metaphysics vs Paradigms: The Lesson.


May 3, 2020, 12:47 PM

  1. Language consists of measurements organized into transactions and sets of transactions. We cannot speak in anything other than measurements of sense-perception-auto-association.

  2. We refer to each internally consistent system of measurement as “metaphysics” if we are using platonic (imaginary) vocabulary, and “paradigm” if we are using the descriptive (existential) language paradigm.

  3. Metaphysics = Language Paradigm = Internal Constant relations independent of external correspondence, operational possibility, rational choice, reciprocity, limits, scope, accounting, warrantability, competitive surval.

  4. Description = Language Paradigm consisting of Realism, Naturalism, Operationalism, internal consistency, external correspondence, operational possibility, rational choice, reciprocity, limits, scope, accounting, warrantability, competitive surval.

  5. Narratives create imaginary world models that assist us in calculating by the most primitive means available to us: empathy, sympathy, and imitation. Archetypes personify instincts. Plots are formulae which teach us the consequences of following our instincts in in different conditions in the pursuit of ends – and most parables teach us the crime of either hubris or cowardice or laziness.

  6. We learn in generations of cognitive development from fairy tales to myths and legends, to heroic histories, to norms, manners, ethics morals, and traditions, to the dance of mating an family, to the various sciences, to the multitude of skills we use to apply them. Each of these generations requires greater agency and agency greater ability. Likewise we have theology, philosophy and the sciences. Likewise we have imitative, rule based, and outcome based ethics. Likewise we have an age of choice, age of consent, age of maturity, and age of political influence.

  7. There is only one most parsimonious system of measurement of physical, natural, and evolutionary laws of action. That language is what we call the formal(logical), physical(non-sentient), and social (sentient, action) sciences.

  8. That most parsimonious system of measurement of physical, natural and evolutionary laws of action, cannot capture the sense, perception, and associative experience. It can only EXPLAIN the experiential and associative to prevent ERROR and DECEIT by the experiential and associative.

  9. All other systems of measurement vary from that most parsimonious paradigm. Each variation from that most parsimonious paradigm produces costly consequences for the individual, those who associate with the individual, the society that is affected by them, and the polity that includes them, and under some conditions the world.

  10. People have explicable incentives for a) varying from that most parsimonious paradigm. b) choosing a fictional narrative (parables, stories, networks of parables and stories (mythologies), as means of decision (choice) making. c) habituating the degree of separation of conflation the parsimonious paradigm (real unknown), experienced (real known) from the fictional paradigm (imagined).

  11. Our brains develop our minds in a predictable hierarchy from the sensory to the physical to the interpersonal to the rational, and the impulsive, normative, and considered, at varying rates. The degree of ‘friction’ due to developmental failures in our ability to learn each step in that hierarchy determines the degree of complexity we use for our ‘resting state’. Some of us more sensory, some more physical, some more imaginary, some more social, and some more rational resting states (our normal). And we are more or less able to express agency, or vulnerable to sedation givne our lack of agency dependent upon that resting state.

  12. We are all subject to involuntary defect (psychosis, schizophrenia), voluntary defect (sedatives, psychedelics stimulants) invent and construct addiction to because cognitive agency is costly in the face of uncertainty, amplified by one’s failures to reduce costs of calculating successful actions, amplified by one’s failures of prediction of outcomes, amplified by one’s competitive failures in the familial, social, economic and political marketplaces, and by amplified others rejection and low status in those marketplaces. The solution of course is to lower one’s demands to suit one’s market value (epicureanism), and to learn to insulate one’s self from market pressures (stoicism, buddhism, christianity). The problem being that most of us maintain biological demand for social interaction and membership so that we seek means of sedation by escape, psychological construction, social construction, or changing our social circumstance, or improving our agency and market value so that we are more competitive.

  13. We differ in cognitive ability, meaning we differ in the dependence upon a) physical sense-perception and auto association b) intuitionistic auto-associative valuation and subsequent emotional response c) prediction of social (empathic/short/interpersonal) and physical (physical/long/political) permutations, d) regulation of those predictions by direction of attention to differing predicted experiences and states, e) agency in selecting which of those regulated predictions we will permute upon in order to produce a desired outcome, f) skill in calculating (imputing, calculating and computing) the means of achieving those ends. Ergo we differ in demand for mindfulness (relief from competitive pressures), and our means of obtaining mindfulness.

  14. The difference in individual family, class, and group ability is not superiority but accumulated defects due to genetic load due to survival of defects under monogamy, familism, pastoralism, agrarianism, industrialism, and lack of selection pressures, combined competing with those who continuously suppress genetic load by continuous selection pressure, which produces evolution of neotonic maturity, rational agency, and calculative ability as a consequence.

  15. We have however discovered the genes for improving heart, muscle, lungs, and remove defects from liver, kidney, and stomach. So it is possible in the future to both add innovations and remove defects. Even if man’s continues dysgenic reproduction means we cannot control negative selection pressures (increasing genetic load) we can still speciate with elites by selective breeding (classes) and by selective genetic manipulation (positive eugenics).

  16. There is no false equivalency. There is the most parsimonous science(calculation)(action) and fiction (theorizing) (imagination) and metaphysical (conflation and deceit).There is no extant metaphysical – only the imaginary. There is but most parsimonious – the truth – the rest is different degree of error, bias, wishfulthinking and deceit.

17 If that experience is unorganized the psychotic (rational ), schizophrenic(social), or psychedelic (experiential). If organized the fictional(fictions). if locally ritualized the cult. If socially constructed the religion. if chemically induced: the drug addiction. These are all imaginary. These are all addictions. They are all falsehoods. They are all admissions of failure. Instead there is the fictional, the historical, the wisdom literature of the centuries, and the sciences whether formal, physical(physics, chemistry, biology), or sentient (language, psychology, sociology).

  1. Metaphysics = Addicts. Just addicts. Nothing more. We need only determine the reason for the addiction, and the method of addiction, but these are addictions, and addicts ‘disposable’ at best, and ‘cancer’ at worst.
  2. There is every good reason to either remove addicts from public discourse and influence, on one hand, and to follow Duerte if they get out of hand on the other. This is what houses of government by demonstrated achievement accomplish, and what prohibition on addictions prevents from influencing those houses.

  3. Addicts will stop at nothing to justify their addiction. They will export the costs of their addiction. To the limit of the adult tolerance for bearing the costs of it.

At present we need to imitate duterte and clean house.


One response to “Metaphysics vs Paradigms: The Lesson.”

  1. Hi guys! Most of my work consists in using Aristotelean metaphysics on evolutionary ethics. Even though I do not really question the ultimate status of Aristotle’s metaphysics in my writing and just assume that it is obviously true, I have always assumed that what Curt is saying here is true. I am not sure if I can get away with this, but that it how I roll. I just do not see how we can just assume that our categories are true as such without bracketing them in Curt’s assumptions above.

    Ultimately, our articulations of our metaphysical theories are just subject to the ultimate arbitration of natural selection; in this sense I reverse Aristotle’s privileging of theory over praxis. Unless you think that God has directly wired his mind to ours, then there is no way that you can get around this. It does not really destroy the validity of metaphysical thought, rather it only revises our meta-metaphysics — i.e. our conception of what it is that we are doing when we attempt to articulate our fundamental categories. It seems that if metaphysics is nothing more than some feature of our own natural neural OS, then this guarantees that there must be some fundamental basis or nature to it, even if it might be impossible to come to a final definitive articulation of it from within its own functionality.

    Anyway, I just want to say that you can be an avid metaphysician like myself and still agree with Curt’s approach. I also agree with his “praxis first” approach, where we get the law going FIRST and then let the more fundamental theories come when they may. In this sense praxis is primary rather than theory, which is what Aristotle prioritizes.

    Thanks for the great blog posts, Curt! This really helps those of us who cannot think while on FB.

    P.S.: For the curious: “My work”, seeks to adapt Foot’s “natural goodness” theory to Millikan-style selected-effects accounts of biological function. Unlike earlier views, I want to use gene-level selection, which I think deals with the objection from moral revisionism (as found in Odenbaugh, 2015 “Nothing in morality makes sense except in the light of evolution?”).

    Some of the basic ideas that make this up are already in my blog at adamvoight,wordpress.com

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