Intro to Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy

Mental Models

I've been engaged in productive philosophical discussions with Andrius Kulikauskas of Math 4 Wisdom (M4W), a set of partially overlapping study groups and other committees centered around a philosophical language known as Wondrous Wisdom.

Wondrous Wisdom may be grappled with as a stash of cognitive frameworks, ways of organizing core concepts to reflect workflows and progressions. I recommend visiting the Wondrous Wisdom Wiki for more details (visit Vocabulary). 

My frameworks here were influenced and inspired by the ones Andrius has come up with.

The All Seeing Eye represents the sense that we're being watched over or supervised or judged, and we extrapolate that sense to where "even Lucifer feels watched" i.e. no matter how high a demon or angel may consider themselves to be, there's always a sense they're being observed, perhaps by a yet higher consciousness.

The idea of God might be summarized by the meme "every being senses a super being" i.e. a sense of a yet higher self, up to final Self as an omega terminus (alluding to Teilhard de Chardin).

Those not subscribing to God talk may prefer to see Future Humanity as this higher consciousness i.e. future versions of ourselves with the benefit of a lot more hindsight. Others project higher intelligence in the form of ETs, or simply wiser folks, teachers of various kinds, saints and bodhisattvas.

The Unconscious is an endless cornucopia of raw material for dialectical debates, of constant back and forth, is a kind of battleground. 

How else could the ego star as a warrior if not against the backdrop of some polarized space of good vs evil. Without a gradient and a sense of "higher ground" there's nothing to fight for.

The "three minds" in this picture are: the unconscious (peripheral); the conscious (the focus: me within the world) and consciousness (the observer storyteller with its sense of a greater intelligence shining from "behind" or "above").  

Plato's Cinema is of course Plato's Cave, wherein the observer is watching "the movie of my life" meaning some hero's journey in the Joseph Campbell sense. The star (focus) of the show is some "me" surrounded by a "not me" world (environment) that's nevertheless tuned in and therefore part of the world of everyday experience. 

The Unconscious the presently untuned and is peripheral to Conscious content and continually percolates inward, synergizing with existing content, sometimes in surprising ways. 

The Unconscious sometimes comes across as communicating intuitions from that higher self, as the All Seeing Eye is its source as well.

Sometimes and ego may feel overwhelmed by a welling up of unconscious material. The ego is akin to the captain of a ship on sometimes stormy seas, seas inhabited by deep-dwelling unknown creatures.

How do we make mental models in the first place? They form in stages. 

What's new first appears as some "whatson" that needs to be turned in to ascertain its nature and reality, existence itself being a first attribute to test for. "Is this just a mirage?" is a beginning stage question, or "is it real?"  We need to know WHAT "it" is even was we figure out if it's real or not. 

WHAT turns to WHETHER.

Depending on WHETHER something is real (nonfiction) or not (fiction), we will look at HOW and WHY somewhat differently. 

Fictional motives (world domination) and posited mechanisms (anti-gravity engines) may be attributed to the fictional UFO UAPs, whereas a non-fictional Chinese weather balloon will generate more mundane reality-fitting explanations.

A main idea here is we're always updating and revising our mental models. By interrogating them and figuring out key ways to verify or invalidate various aspects of them, we feed an iterative process. 

Sometimes a mental model will go "pop" like a balloon, meaning it will become suddenly unbelievable. We can't always go back and make ourselves believe what we no longer believe.  Systems come and go i.e. they come with a half life.  

Every system is a ticking time bomb until its pull date, one might say. Some have lasted thousands of years, passed down from generation to generation. However, given their context keeps changing, it's usually difficult to claim a system has "stayed the same" even within a single generation.  Systems keep morphing, to keep up with the times they're in.

Enabling Societal Debate: Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge Engineering Study Group

Ant colonies accomplish internal communications by means of pheromones, chemical signatures which spread at the speed of smell. 

In this and similar meetups of the Knowledge Engineering Study Group, we fleshed out more of the biology around ants, likewise a way to appreciate the current state of bioinformatics as a discipline

For more meeting notes and links, check the M4W Coda.

Dance Music

Eisenfunk - Pong

Intro to Symbolic Dynamics

:: from the SyllabusGames channel ::

A TrimTab Presentation

David Koski on the BEAST modules

The US Civil War: A Study in Failed Social Engineering

A central thesis of The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand, is that Pragmatism is in part a reaction to Dogmatism, where the latter typifies a mindset unable to avoid a Civil War. People pay too high a price for principle, based on a sense of self-righteousness. Not pragmatic.

What had failed to prevent the US Civil War was in particular the Bible, used to inflame and promote zealotry on all sides. Everyone grew up learning from it, and all Sunday school programming derived from it, yet when push came to shove, a Bible-oriented upbringing (i.e. one's training in Christianity) didn't show the way out, and mayhem ensued. 

Cain rose against Abel as a great union (a federation), an experiment in social engineering if there ever was one, tore in half. So maybe the Bible didn't have all the answers? Enter pragmatism.

Even among theologians, a healthy skepticism arose: leaning on the saints, on the gospels, on the ancient Greeks (especially Aristotle) for all one's thinking could only be out of laziness. Times change. The new mantra: think for yourself. That's reliable because, per Transcendentalism (as well as Quakerism): you have your God within you (St. Aquinas had said much the same thing).

Emerson's exhortations seemed to awaken a universal capacity lurking within the soul of everyman (to use a sexist vocabulary), whereas Whitman conveyed that freeing sense of a blank slate, or at least a new one, a fresh canvas, full of promise and adventure, a new world. A world without the blemish of slavery.

Fast forward to our day and say we're in a Palestinian Studies class. The analogies are clear, as the headlines today are about the illegitimacy of forced displacement (what happened to many of these families in the first place) versus whether families have an inherent freedom to escape from harm's way. 

If Gaza has been an open air prison, then why not give everyone a travel pass and tickets to some New Gaza of their choice, with those remaining the ones choosing to hold the fort, until sanity returns to the region? Help everyone stay in touch. Open the system to other refugee populations as well, as we boot up a system of routing hubs especially designed to help out in emergency situations.

That may sound like a kind of Zionism, this proposal to facilitate establishing Palestinian colonies elsewhere (so "ethnic cleansing" then?), including well outside of West Asia. How about in Cuba for instance, at a place called Guantanamo, now used for R&R. Keep it a fun place, while putting it to a serious good use. Lose the "bad neighborhood" reputation built up for it by the torture taxi club. 

In considering all these issues, remember how President Lincoln thought: he was very open to the idea of Blacks leaving en masse, for Liberia, for Central America, for Haiti. So were a lot of the abolitionists.  End slavery; send them home. But Lincoln didn't want to "send" people against their wills. He might have been prophetic in many ways, but he didn't have twenty-twenty foresight; almost no one does. Not all of the time. If the opportunity were properly presented...

Obviously, once you've invested your heart and soul in Alabama or Tennessee or whatever, it's not that easy to want to move anywhere else. But think of how part of the allure of the US military is the opportunities it offers to see the world. Some people will be up for it, especially if free to come back, if only for visits. The new libertarianism posits each human is born with an inherent right to explore the planet; and nation-states are not intended as barriers to this human right so much as facilitators thereof.

As a Palestinian, opting for a stint or tour in Jordan or Kuwait was never seen as conceding that Palestine is no longer innately a state, if only a diaspora state, much like Kurdistan, or Tibet are. Or Intel and Hilton.

Palestine persists, but not as a synonym for any other entity. 

Palestine is not a caliphate, nor necessarily an ethno-state of any kind, which is how it manages to realistically aspire to provide a safe haven to a great many ethnicities, like the USA hopes to, and China, including new Islamic sects indigenous to North America, perhaps with histories tracing back to Black Panthers and Malcolm X in some cases. 

New branches of Judaism are welcome as well. These world religions are all good at getting along with each other, especially when they're not merely real estate agents and property management companies in disguise, using religion as more acceptable packaging or as a tax dodge.

What I'm suggesting is that nextgen North Americans (and not only them) would benefit by using current events in West Asia to inform their own developing views of the US Civil War, which is quite a bit further back in time and sometimes much obscured by the gases and dusts of intervening generations. The thought patterns remain important. Read more Octavia Butler maybe?

I underline "North Americans" because it's a history that's already readily accessible to you if you live here, through monuments (Statue of Liberty) and movies, and because "Refugees Я Us" i.e. accommodating refugees, migrants, people on the move, is part of our destiny, our role, as denizens of a New World, as polyglot pioneers from all genetic and epigenetic lineages. 

We wish to not fail hard as social engineers of our own futures, and we study history to learn from our track record as hominids etc. We see mistakes, and successes. We've been smart sometimes too.