Epistemological Hierarchy

[Donnadogsoth]

Below:  a list of items in ascending order of magnitude of faith needed to believe.  Comments or clarifications are welcome.

 

I exist

 

The World exists

 

1+1=2

 

Theory of Mind

 

Night follows Day

 

Boiling points lower with altitude

 

Dinosaurs existed and left fossil evidence behind

 

Politicians are usually bought

 

Jesus Christ existed

 

The Mainstream Media is controlled

 

The New Dark Age conspiracy exists

 

God exists

[HasMat]

I see this differently.

 

In the book "Sleight of Mouth" the most basic belief we have is called a reality strategy. This is how we transmute stimuli into experience. I think this is the most basic level of epistemology. How do you know you read the previous sentence I wrote? You probably have some trailing memory of having been reading this paragraph, and use that as a reference point.

 

After that I would go to Kant and his discussion of a priori. Experience is made of (synthesized by) 2 components: context and content. The most basic grip we can get on reality is the context, which is analytic. The overall experiences are synthetic (synthesized from content and context). The content is empiricism.

 

If something is intuitive (analytic), it is gleaned from the context.

If something is imaginable (synthetic), it is gleaned from experience.

If something is reasonable (empiric), it is gleaned from reason and MUST (should) be fact-checked against observation. (Pure reason, as in Critique of Pure Reason, would be the first half before its checked)

 

This is how we can perceive the world, compute it (or reverse-engineer), and then verify our conceptions are sane. Intuition leads to imagination leads to reason (3 thought forms).

 

An example of intuition: objects appear larger the closer they are.

An example of imaginable: image of person

An example of reasonable: person is near (idea) / stimuli occupying majority of field of view (empiric evidence)

 

Intuitive models are known regardless of content. Contextual knowledge is content-independent.

 

There is reason to discriminate on where knowledge comes from (a priori/synthetic/empiric), and cases to be made for why each is better/worse. When it comes to the future, imagining a specific "better world" is mostly about imagination. We bring a better world into existence by our dreams and visions. I don't think intuition nor reason have decent guesses here, just like prisoner's dilemma sucks. Deterministic models do not represent our known reality. Human progress is an inevitability and STRONGER than 'someone is going to ruin it for everyone'. This is a function of imagination beating reason/intuition. We can imagine a better world.

 

Pure determinism says we have no choice. Without choice there can be neither good nor evil. Does that match your personal experience in your heart, or what you have seen in the world? Determinism, the thought-form, fails the empiricism test. This is how science works: hypothesis creation, testing/observation, comparison. Determinism doesn't match my experience either. Determinists aren't empiricists, they are idealists when they pedestalize communal reality over their own subjective experience. Both forms are reality, not just the 1.

 

Back to your hierarchy, I think therefore I am (des cartes) is a reality strategy, not a proof. And if there is no freewill, your existence is not true. We take this as self-evident, but its logically impossible if you aren't a moral agent. Again, this fails basic experiential empirics. It is a deception.

[Kikker]

"I exist" doesn't require faith as it was logically deduced by Descartes (I think therefore I exist) and has been unsuccessfully challenged for 350 years.

The rest is simply the assumption that you can derive truth from your experiences, which requires you to "have faith".

Anything that requires more "faith" has to be outside of yourself and your experiences.

[Donnadogsoth]

I see this differently.

 

In the book "Sleight of Mouth" the most basic belief we have is called a reality strategy. This is how we transmute stimuli into experience. I think this is the most basic level of epistemology. How do you know you read the previous sentence I wrote? You probably have some trailing memory of having been reading this paragraph, and use that as a reference point.

 

After that I would go to Kant and his discussion of a priori. Experience is made of (synthesized by) 2 components: context and content. The most basic grip we can get on reality is the context, which is analytic. The overall experiences are synthetic (synthesized from content and context). The content is empiricism.

 

If something is intuitive (analytic), it is gleaned from the context.

If something is imaginable (synthetic), it is gleaned from experience.

If something is reasonable (empiric), it is gleaned from reason and MUST (should) be fact-checked against observation. (Pure reason, as in Critique of Pure Reason, would be the first half before its checked)

 

This is how we can perceive the world, compute it (or reverse-engineer), and then verify our conceptions are sane. Intuition leads to imagination leads to reason (3 thought forms).

 

An example of intuition: objects appear larger the closer they are.

An example of imaginable: image of person

An example of reasonable: person is near (idea) / stimuli occupying majority of field of view (empiric evidence)

 

Intuitive models are known regardless of content. Contextual knowledge is content-independent.

 

There is reason to discriminate on where knowledge comes from (a priori/synthetic/empiric), and cases to be made for why each is better/worse. When it comes to the future, imagining a specific "better world" is mostly about imagination. We bring a better world into existence by our dreams and visions. I don't think intuition nor reason have decent guesses here, just like prisoner's dilemma sucks. Deterministic models do not represent our known reality. Human progress is an inevitability and STRONGER than 'someone is going to ruin it for everyone'. This is a function of imagination beating reason/intuition. We can imagine a better world.

 

Pure determinism says we have no choice. Without choice there can be neither good nor evil. Does that match your personal experience in your heart, or what you have seen in the world? Determinism, the thought-form, fails the empiricism test. This is how science works: hypothesis creation, testing/observation, comparison. Determinism doesn't match my experience either. Determinists aren't empiricists, they are idealists when they pedestalize communal reality over their own subjective experience. Both forms are reality, not just the 1.

 

Back to your hierarchy, I think therefore I am (des cartes) is a reality strategy, not a proof. And if there is no freewill, your existence is not true. We take this as self-evident, but its logically impossible if you aren't a moral agent. Again, this fails basic experiential empirics. It is a deception.

 

Are you arguing that memory is essential for meaning?--that no thing--no content--we can experience means anything (and thus is epistemologically irrelevant) without a remembered context to refer it to?  If we eat, for example, we remember our hunger and our desire for good food and to some extent the associations, good and bad memories we have with those desires and urges.  If we had no memory, we would eat machinelike, satisfying a basic but unconscious urge. Ergo memory=meaning.

 

If this is the case, and if we take your statement about “I exist” being a reality strategy, then we could invert the list I gave and place “God exists” at the top, for the reason that if meaning is a reality strategy and we seek maximum meaning, we have to believe in the existence of a God. The existence of self would become the least important thing in one's reality strategy, the least meaningful, in other words.

[HasMat]

Are you arguing that memory is essential for meaning?--that no thing--no content--we can experience means anything (and thus is epistemologically irrelevant) without a remembered context to refer it to?  If we eat, for example, we remember our hunger and our desire for good food and to some extent the associations, good and bad memories we have with those desires and urges.  If we had no memory, we would eat machinelike, satisfying a basic but unconscious urge. Ergo memory=meaning.

 

If this is the case, and if we take your statement about “I exist” being a reality strategy, then we could invert the list I gave and place “God exists” at the top, for the reason that if meaning is a reality strategy and we seek maximum meaning, we have to believe in the existence of a God. The existence of self would become the least important thing in one's reality strategy, the least meaningful, in other words.

I would argue that meaning is not the objective of epistemology, and that putting god at top to derive higher meaning is misguided. Find meaning AFTER epistemology, not during. I would rather that we strip off layers of potential error and ask what remains, ala des cartes. When adding them back, we recognize we are adding a filter that makes derived knowledge more suspect, and of a qualitatively inferior nature.

 

I don't think the essence of identity involves god. I think it's about personal control. We differentiate between what our will effects, and what is independent. This is the great realization of 2 year old children.

 

The first thing we develop is a reality strategy (weighting inputs for truth level), the second is a dividing line within reality between self and other (identity). We decide we exist at the same time we recognize things being outside 'us'.

 

God, as a concept, is a member of the set 'other', and can't be conceptualized until after we accept the premise that we exist.

 

Determinism (monism of any stripe as well) makes identity a farce. There are no non-arbitrary distinctions of self in a determinism reality: all causal mechanisms are universal in nature and don't map to individuals in unique manner. Saying a set of matter is a human child is as true as saying a group of trees is a forest. It's a conceptual distinction that has no seam, no conceptually absolute points to serve as landmarks, around which to name a self. Determinism, as a conception of identity, undermines any further certainty of truth because it is precludes personal identity, and is the edifice all later knowledge relies on. Therapists are asking "tell me about your mother" because this colors how we see ourselves and what caused us to be.

 

Here are the landmarks I see Re: identity: freewill (causal magic), spatial contiguity (parts have direct access to each other, and claim to a non-collapsed area), material form (parts or subject that gets acted upon). Determinism only allows for spatial contiguity and material form. These are decent markers to determine possession (as in property rights) but insufficient to produce identity, because these ultimately have a predetermined outcome that precedes self-awareness and is traced to external causes. Identity requires process, locale, content. All 3 are required to box in non-temporary non-arbitrary identity/self-ownership.

 

Identity is a necessary pre-text of all secular ethics. But identity requires freewill. This is why some argue a secular ethic is impossible (because most secularists deny a ghost in the machine), and how Stefan (by omitting a proof of identity) is able to make one. Once you accept identity then a logical ethic is possible.

 

Monists who believe in freewill just haven't explored identity to its conclusion. If only universal causes then only universal agency. A unity of causation, space, matter (and ultimately responsibility). Monist identity (of space and matter) is missing that 3rd required leg to produce actual identity for discrete individuals. For monists, the Big Bang differentiated space and matter into a duality from a singularity, but did not differentiate First Cause into anything other than permanent universal physical laws. Their causality is a unity of universal forces, not a cataclysmic explosion of First Cause into innumerable elements.

 

When 2 parts of a 3 element set are unique, but the 3rd is fungible, it is a contiguous set. It's a single body with 2 sets of spiny protrusions. Nobody can be morally responsible under that schema. Each individual is really just an extension of the whole, and perceptions of individuality are the result of limited thinking. Spines inability to see its a protrusion from a larger mass don't make them separate.

 

Besides reality strategy, all other epistemology comes after awareness of the above. Causation, space, and matter are the physical elements our senses give us of reality, chunking into cohesive agencies is job #1.

 

Epistemologically I think the next important objective is God, but I don't think its the next knowable thing for mortals born in a fallen world. Once you realize you exist and aren't omnipotent, the next job is finding out what other agencies exist, and your pecking order, and how to helpfully integrate with, improve, or otherthrow that power structure. If God makes a rule that voting for Hillary Clinton will earn you an eternity of being ass-raped in hell, it doesn't much matter if that rule is ethical (in determining whether you should obey it). You just obey it to avoid consequence, because you love yourself and don't want your self to be ass-raped in hell for eternity.

 

I think the big error most atheist make is strawmanning god from parts gathered from less intelligent theists. God doesn't make rules about voting for Hillary getting you hell. He makes rules about NAP, and encourages benevolence. The same stuff Stefan advocates. Meanwhile Stef is slaying strawman gods, up to and including Zeus, but especially the god of the old testament book. To be fair, he has quit doing that as much.

 

Social worlds are arbitrary and relative. They are fortresses built in the sky from the aggregate preferences of many freewills. I think this is the next epistemological truth we can obtain after identity.

1. reality strategy

2. identity

3. social worlds

4. rationality

5. morality

 

The populism of science and the strangle-hold of peer-review are baked into reality. We can't get a more close view of rational truth than social perception. Who will watch the watchers? Rational truth is always filtered thru social world.

[dsayers]

Below:  a list of items in ascending order of magnitude of faith needed to believe.  Comments or clarifications are welcome.

Faith is not analogue. An objective claim is either verifiable or it is not.

[Donnadogsoth]

Faith is not analogue. An objective claim is either verifiable or it is not.

 

What entries on the list given would you say are verifiable?

[HasMat]

Faith is not analogue. An objective claim is either verifiable or it is not.

Objectivity is existentially defined as viewpoint invariance. The same thing will occur/appear regardless of who/when its observed, if done exactly the same way. This is measured by having 2 separate sentient witnesses. The creation of 2 witnesses is a social world. Science does peer review and tries to repeat tests to accomplish this.

 

Objectivity is a social construct. This is why global warming enjoys high truthiness, along with much of the liberal cultural trappings. All the major companies are bowing to the feminist and BLM dogmas.

 

At a certain point of social proof, truth doesn't even matter.

 

For a claim to be regarded as falsifiable it must be easily done by an average joe. Stuff they do at the hadron collider are not falsifiable by independent witnesses. Everyone they let near that thing is on board with their basic beliefs about reality.

 

The more basic fact about reality is that it is ITSELF relative, as in the general theory of relativity. The whole thing is subjective. Just like values within social worlds. It's subjective turtles all the way down.

 

Objectivity is just what monads call data inside their own frame. To all other observers its subjective. You might say you objectively exist, but can you pass any/every Turing test? Your existence is subjective to all but you.

 

When Plato looks at shadows on the cave wall, he thinks of them as subjective phantoms of what is really there. To anything not inside a thing, access to internal data is reliant on the honesty of the monad in question (and its limited grasp of language).

 

Peer communicated truth is epistemologically subjective. It's a social product.

[dsayers]

Objectivity is a social construct.

...is an objective claim. Performative contradiction.

 

How does one construct something that is valid with or without them?

 

I also noticed you used very specific words to communicate ideas.

[rosencrantz]

Everyone they let near that thing is on board with their basic beliefs about reality.

 

 

What are those basic beliefs?

[Donnadogsoth]

reality strategy:  I exist

 

identity/others:  Theory of Mind, The World exists

 

social worlds: Politicians are usually bought, The Mainstream Media is controlled, The New Dark Age conspiracy exists

 

rationality: 1+1=2, Night follows Day, Boiling points lower with altitude, Dinosaurs existed and left fossil evidence behind

 

morality: God exists, Jesus Christ existed