Saturday, December 4, 2010
A quick rumination on decision-making
1. When living, you are necessarily always acting.
2. In scenarios and cases involving decision-making, deciding not to act is not only a decision, it's an action -- if only a negative one.
3. By living, we are slaves to physics.
4. We can choose to what we are slaves, in some cases. If we must be enslaved, then logic currently appears to be a suitable master.
5. Even if we concede that relying on our senses to conclude that our senses are reliable is nonsensical, we still necessarily act on our senses continuously by merely existing.
6. Therefore, we must always act as though we believe that a given option is the most logical, even if we have no idea one way or the other, because "not acting" is still acting, and is often less logical than some other option. Note: This refers to instances in which one action appears more logical than the others -- not instances in which we don't even have leads derived from sensory input.
This illustrates the necessity of pragmatic action in life; just because I am humble and possess a finite, relative perspective of the world does not mean that I cannot make decisions to improve reality. I don't have to believe anything to be true in order to act as though I do. Furthermore, because action is an inevitable by-product of existing, that which is perceived as the most logical out of all potential actions will come to be the logical action, while all other actions, in spite of occupying a gradient of degrees of logicality, will come to all be illogical actions. This is because, even though these latter actions differ in to what extent they are logical, they all share the quality of having not been chosen.
Note, also, that my supposition that relying on my senses to conclude that my senses are reliable is nonsensical is itself relying on my senses, as is this very statement. In other words, there is an infinite regress of assumption that must necessarily be made in order to exist as an intelligent organism, so whether something is true is entirely irrelevant to how much work we should put into implementing it in our daily lives.
Posted by Leaving Society at 3:47 PM No comments:
Labels: epistemology, infinite regress of assumption, knowledge, logic, meme systems, memes, pragmatism
A note on the future directive of this blog
In the future, I will be making fewer posts on specific, derivative problems, even if they are fairly fundamental, as in the cases of suffering, the agenda of life, the eternal struggle between logic and sensation, etc. As previously stated, solving problems requires that we first solve the problem of being bad at solving problems -- in a word, meta-cognition. Actively and pragmatically refine cognitive processes and hardware, and you'll become much better at decision-making and problem-solving. Better yet, do this in iterative increments involving lots of testing for errors, and you'll be more likely to maximize your productivity. In short, it's more important to teach people how to arrive at conclusions than that they should arrive at your conclusions (bonus points if you don't ever draw any conclusions at all, given the inability to confirm your senses' reliability without relying on your senses, and instead merely act as though you draw conclusions out of practical necessity).
Plus, there are so many descendant problems all around us that, unless we work alongside those who process data using the same algorithms and mechanisms that we do, it doesn't matter whom we choose to support; we'll never get anything done. You can agree with liberals that the war in Iraq was a dumb idea, but that doesn't make you a liberal. Most people get something right, so declaring yourself a something-ist every time that you encounter a good idea is going to be quite tedious and time-consuming!
If you agree with someone, but have different reasons from him or her for your tentative conclusions, then your agreement is ultimately trivial. It is of no practical value to share commonalities when it comes to what you think, so long as you do not share commonalities when it comes to how you think. You may agree now, but if your mode of thinking allows you to change your mind, or if the other person uses his mode of thinking to arrive at an erroneous conclusion in another realm, then you are effectively wasting time by associating or working with him -- that is, unless you can help him see his errors, or vice versa.
So, then, let's get down to business: Bad memes prevent progress, and faulty cognitive agents and mechanisms prevent good memes from doing their jobs. Until we clean ourselves up, it doesn't really matter who agrees with whom -- we're all part of the problem.
Posted by Leaving Society at 3:12 PM No comments:
Labels: foundational solutions, logic, memes, meta-cognition
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