Motions of Meaningness

This is a riff on David Chapman's forever incomplete Meaningness html book. Knowing what the hell that is not required, or beneficial really. I just steal borrow his terminology to point at a neat pattern that would probably better suit a series of twitter postings.

Epistemic Status: I writing this late at night; expect moderate incoherence.

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When you ask people 'what's the meaning of life', there are two common answers, and a few uncommon ones I think I saw mention in Chapman's site but forgot too much about to even find the reference again. Nihilism is the total denial of true meaning. Eternalism is Chapman's coinword for what's basically anti-nihilism. They are mirror images in two ways, the one illustrated in his site, which is they they are (mostly) motivated by fear of each other, acting like something of a distributed sorting algorithm for people's emotional proclivities.

The other way is simply in terms of connections. Meaning in logical systems is about isomorphism. This meshes quite well with the intuitive impression of meaning in most cases, where something can be thought of as meaningful if it maps onto something more familiar, in some kind of structure preserving map. These words are meaningful because they map onto concepts in your heed, for instance.

Switching tracks, let me tell you about this idea stewing about in my head for the longest: deep symbolism. Sometimes I wonder about what types of things are intrinsic the humanity and the environs we inhabit, and produce images that are invariant over time and space. Concepts, narratives, images, that all emerge naturally from our neural makeup. Attractors in mindspace. Call these things, if they exist at all, 'deep symbols'.

Occaisionally when checking a musical album, for example, I'll wonder about what deep symbol I'm brushing up against. I think about whatever thoughts/ideas are expressed in the music, and wonder about what paradigm I can fit them into, that would have this particular piece of culture fall out as a specific instance.

At least one time, which prompted this post, I'll have the self-awareness to realize what I'm doing. I'm reaching for meaning; this is what meaning-search feels like from inside. And this gives me a nice, neat analogy for the eternalism/nihilism split: eternalism is the insistence that there is very simple, elegant conceit which you have a structure preserving mapping of everything in existence onto this very simple thingy and isn't it nice?

(fans of Unsong, this is basically what adam kadmon (pls let me have spelled that right) is)

Nihilism is the exact opposite. It sees the world through the lens of a metaphorical sensory processing disorder where everything is noise. No patterns, no regularity, etc. This may or may not be how SPDs actually work, but it's a conceit that's gotten into my head and stuck around.

Even simpler: nihilism is a graph with no connections, and eternalism is a completely-connected graph.

None of this is how reality looks like, when you get down to it. It's a delicate interplay of order and randomness, a transcendental number rather than a integer or a undefinable and real number.

I hope at least I can help other feel and notice this same reaching for insight, for small-m meaning that happens to me from time to time.

Hierarchy of Conventions

Epistemic Status: Useful & Likely

This concept frequently comes up when I explain this idea to my friends, so I'm primarily writing this so I have a convenient place to link them the next time I have to explain it.

first rung: 'useful'

The levels of my hierarchy are essentially systemic safety nets; anything that falls through the first level is tested against the second level and so on. The requirements get progressive more lax to cast the net wider and wider.

At the first level, we must ask ourselves 'is this convention useful'. This is the highest, strictest and most salient level, dealing with all 'important' conventions. Here, we have Newtonian Mechanics, folk theories of mind, most (vertically transmitted) religions, etc.

The property of interest here is that while these cultural inventions really (in the Chapman sense of 'really' denoting 'in some sense') reflect structures in the real world. The gotcha here is that things first go the a homomorphism-distorting utility calculus.

I'll unpack that last bullet of jargon. A homomorphism is an algebraic equivalence which essentially means a isomorphism that preserves structure. A function like x^2 or 7x map most xs onto different numbers than themself (that is, 3 becomes 9 or 21, 7 becomes 49, etc.), it preserves several useful relations, such as the total ordering '>'.

It has been neatly demonstrated (Quanta article, paper) that, generally speaking, homomorphism-preserving internal representations of the external world, i..e. beliefs structures that accurately map reality, are not evolutionary viable, particularly when computations are expensive (i.e. always).

And this captures the 'utility calculus' part of it as well; the distortions is caused simply by the fact that usefully non-homomorphic representations are generally 'better' than their undistorted alternatives.

But I digress. It's be instructive to point to things that are patently not in this category. These are Quantum Mechanics/General Relativity, the consensus neurology/psychology/sociology, etc.

second rung: 'accurate'

The next level catches anything which isn't useful per se, but accurately respects reality. Everything I mentioned at the end of the last sections falls here. 

You might have noticed that the first rung is relative; generalizations like 'bigger brains mean higher intelligence' are useful when describing populations and averages, but hopelessly imprecise for describing individual people. In fact, accuracy becomes usefulness whenever the domain of interest is scientific.

The second rung is equally nebulous in a distict way; where what is 'useful' mutates whenever the domain of interest changes, what is 'accurate' varies as time. As the canonical example of this: Newton's Mechanics was accurate centuries ago, but not now.

third rung: 'convenient'

This is an even more nebulous rung. 'Convenient' is anything where you can do it anyway you want, but some ways are just plainly easier. In linear algebra, you can describe vectors by translating your vector space by any constant amount you like, and the calculations are equivalent. But still, A translation by +2,-8 or 0,+5 are much more convenient than (say) +(pi),-sqrt(3) or -e,+8/9.

I'd guess the main thing making this a distinct category from usefulness is that for usefulness, you can do it a different way, and you get a different answer. GR gives slightly different answers than NM, (and by the accuracy criterion is slightly different in the right way), but there is a reason we use NM for things like mundane trajectory calculations, and we'll define that reason by that and denote it 'usefulness'.

Likewise, there is a reason we do our calculations in base ten rather than base three or base phi, and we'll define the reason by that and denote it 'convenience'.

fourth rung: 'convention'

This is finally where everything has fallen through and any framework is neither especially useful, especially accurate, nor especially convenient. This is the domain of ISO standards, certain cultural artifacts, whether we spell it 'color' or 'colour'.

fifth rung: may god have mercy on your souls

Another Argument Against Solipsism

Epistemic Status: Likely

i.

I like to think most of us are familiar with the cognitohazard called 'solipsism'. Most of us likely had a run in with this during some I'm14AndThisIsDeep phase where we were intelligent enough to produce such dangerous ideas like solipsism and determinism, but not intelligent enough to produce the counter-arguments.

Given this blog's vague association with the rationalist and post-rationalist memeplexes, I think there's a good chance you're already over solipsism if you ever contracted it, but hey, there's a chance I could successfully put a anti-solipsism meme in circulation, and there's also some more insidious forms of solipsism affecting philosophy of mind that I'd like to address with this.

First, some preliminaries. I'll define common solipsism or 'type 1 solipsism' as the assertion that you alone are conscious or (in a weaker form) that you alone are certainly aware (other people are merely possibly aware). The second relevant form is more sophisticated, I'll call it systems solipsism or 'type 2 solipsism'. It is the assertion that consciousness resides in certain structures of dynamic systems. Later on I'll argue against this proposition, and sketch an alternative.

(you may wonder why I lumped two unrelated positions into one term. Part of this is rhetorical, and a part of it is laziness. I can defend it by pointing out that both positions ignore certain realities of consciousness, but that's just a rationalization)

Anti-Perfect Objects

Epistemic Status: likely; I probably didn't make obvious mistakes, but I doubt this concept is anything more than an encapsulation of something trivial.

I.

To me, Cantor's diagonal argument is pretty good as an intro to what antiperfection is all about. If you hang out in the geek aisle long enough, you'll see it. Given that you're reading a blog as obscure as this one, I'm sure you've probably already seen it. I hope, because I'm writing a cliff notes version and it's going to be mangled to heck.

Seriously, look it up, if you need to.

Anyway, Cantor worked with a notion called 'cardinality', and applied to infinite sets. He discovered that most infinities we know about are really the same infinity, albeit with fake glasses and a mustache.

For instance, an infinite set like 0,1,2,3,4... (naturals) is equivalent to itself sans one element, e.g. 1,2,3,4,5... (counting numbers) Then, by induction, we see an infinite set is equivalent to itself sans infinity elements, for instance 2,4,6,8... (evens).

It also means it's equivalent to itself plus infinite elements, so ...-1,0,1... (integers) are equivalent as well.

It keeps going. An infinite set is equivalent to itself times infinity elements. The .25, .5, ,75 rationals are equivalent as well! The proof is outside the scope of this article, mostly because I forgot bits of it and it'll take cognitive effort to recover them.

Ok, so what's not equivalent to the natural numbers?

The reals, as it happens.

Here's the crux of it's relevance: the diagonal arguments says, suppose there reals were denumerable (read: countable). Then we list them out in some ordering. The reals are infinite sequences of converging rationals, so we have a list a items with infinite elements each. For convenience, suppose we just convert that to a binary representation in its stead.

So: just take the first digit of the first sequence, and flip that bit. Add it to the sequence we're constructing. Now, take the nth bit of the nth sequence, and flip that bit. Append that to the sequence.

For obvious reasons, this sequence can't be on the list. QED

you can stop skimming now i mean: II.

Now, I consider this a good enough example of a antiperfect construction. The essential insight is that of the special case which defeats the general theorem. The antiperfect lies close enough to the normal that it prevents regularities of the normal from becoming universally true. It kills theorems just by existing.

This doesn't mean antiperfect objects are objectively well-defined, or that they are a minority in a set. An antiperfect object is always antiperfect relative to some fledgling conjecture. And from the Diagonal Argument above, you can see the antiperfect objects good just as easily be the majority in a set.

But in a sense, the diagonal argument itself is kinda antiperfect, because most prototype of my minds category of 'antiperfections' have antiperfections are special cases that are unique in that the generalization they refute is more or less true for the rest of the set.

Consider that famous proof of the Halting Problem's uncomputability. If we did have a program which solves the halting problem, then we could feed a bizarro implementation of that program which halts iff the given program doesn't, and vice versa.

Now we ask ourselves what the output will be when we feed this program its own source code, and are forced to admit a contradiction.

What it's interesting about this is that the proof just says the problem is generally undecidable, because a very specific input can't be decided by any would-be implementation. You very well could implement a program which decides on most programs, but it just isn't universal. Its deserved titled would be stolen by the antiperfect programs.

III.

I'm probably overstepping the bounds of my theory here, but I also think antiperfection is a way to think about uncanny valley effect.

At least, a new perspective. Uncanny valleys are antiperfect in the sense that the uncanny faces are close enough to ideal to be recognizably human, but far from it enough to be disturbing.

There's a good chance I'm missing something though, because the uncanny valley doesn't really effect me that much. The above image is pretty common in popular treatments of this valley, and honestly, I don't get what's so creepy about it. I'm just weird.

Several Case Studies of Metamathematics in Everyday Life

I have no idea why I think it's a good idea to post this, but it's been on my mind lately.
Corrections, qualifications, and suggestions welcome.

Gödel's Incompleteness

• "Are you crazy if you think you're crazy?"
• Free will.

Chaitin's Incompleteness

• Poe's Law.
• The tension between Watsonian and Doylist explantions?

Tarski's Incompleteness

• Squabbles about the meaning of words.
• Linguistic paradoxes (ofc)

Löb's Theorem

• The notion of a chaotic feature of the environment.
• Hypnosis (example)
• The self-fulfilling prophecy of self-modelling (explanation).
• "Your belief in that makes it so." Stuff like this, and "A Question of Timidity" from this.

Fixed Point Theorem

• Being meta. (e.g. metahumor, etc.)

The Halting Problem

• Telling if a deadfic is really dead, maybe.
• Free will (again)

How to Fight Fate

Epistemic Status: Likely

i.

Imagine you're in one of those ancient tragedies. Y'know, the ones with prophecies and fate and stuff.

Yeah, I know, prophecy is so last paradigm and considered harmful and so on. Just stick with me here.

Suppose you're walking down the road, minding your own business, and you happen to walk by some two-bit oracle. Then, all-of-a-sudden, their eyes roll back and they speak in the classic deep, inhuman voice of prophecy. It's something about how some horrible event shall betide thee; maybe "thou shalt killeth thine heir" or something similarly cliché. Let's just go with that as an example.

Generally, prophecies are infallible, and this one is no different. Thus, you know with certainty that the aforementioned tragedy shalt come to pass. Maybe thou'll accidentally your child in a sparring match, when you're just simply trying to show them the ropes. Perhaps thine child will commit some unforgivable crime, and you must sentence them to death. Or you just lose your temper with them at the wrong time.

They will die by your hand, is what I'm saying.

However, you're also well-read enough to know how these patterns typically resolve. Subverting a prophecy never works. If you forego the sparring match, your child will die unprepared in battle. If you exonerate them of their crime, ve'll recidivate. Or you just won't be there to save them while avoiding them.

You'd be hoist by your own petard, is what I'm saying.

Thou canst not flee either. Mayhaps if thou runeth to the hills, your child attempts a desperate search, and by a thoroughly bizarre sequence of coincidences you mistake them for a bandit, and realize only when it's too late.

Even if you attempt suicide, your child, unable to live with the grief, will do likewise.

The game was rigged. Fate was the original master of the Xantos gambit.[1]

[1] Warning: TVtropes

Translating Alien Languages

Epistemic Status: Likely

Related: Three Worlds Collide

I'm learning Lojban sorta off and on, mostly off, and yesterday I was idly pondering whether the meanings of words in Lojban would be biased the words used in their English descriptions (I'm not considering this seriously, sense I doubt someone would make a conlang without knowing a few languages). It eventually lead to me thinking about languages in general, and how dictionaries create endless circularity of meaning.