Book of Gnon: Against Scepticism
vitalist epistemology and the neuroticism of high modernity
You are a witness to the birth of a theory of knowledge, that is, an epistemology.
A vitalist one at that.
You'll see it expanded in the later posts, but the core is here. It's ambitious and far-reaching. If you like it, you should like the whole philosophical project of Epistemic Haystack too.
This idea birth is a result of a germination stage following the lockdown times where different concepts had an orgy in the head of yours truly.
The Dramatis Personae are Eliezer Yudkowsky, W.V.O Quine and Agrippa the Skeptic, with some surprise guests too.... Chances are you heard about at least one of them.
If not, you've been gatekept from this blog post. Go read a book.
I think they are special, each in his own right
It's a trio that has never been discussed jointly.
In this piece you'll see their theories of knowledge
discussed, partially rejected and selectively amalgamated into a new theory of knowledge
As you might guess, author knowing about Eliezer Yudkowsky but approaching him critically, makes him a terminally online postrationalist.
Let's do some more gatekeeping. Say friend, and enter.
What is the universal interface? What does TPOT mean?
What does plane pepperoni represent?
If these questions are unfamiliar to you, touch keyboard and come back later.
The story goes like this - I examine the harshest of skepticisms, then the simple theory of truth Eliezer Yudkovwsky made. Next I point out two problems with it, provide solutions to them and then summarize the resulting theory of knowledge.
There is a specific opportunity this will exploit.
There are unfilled niches in the ecology of online epistemologies.
This text has a broader philosophical purpose, but a very specific short term goal is to provide an explicit coordination point for some online tribes.
Online niches are mostly about politics and then, the mapping from politics to epistemology is weak.
The benefit of this state of affairs to this text is that people from multiple political angles could consider those ideas.
What should be the starting point then? Should I amalgamate all the possible readership niches and address all in a balanced way? Certainly not. You will see me talk about what I know - I exist in the context of everything in which I am and what came before me.
I haven't fallen off a coconut tree.
Should I endevaour to make this understandable to just about anyone?
Thorugh inference distance it's hard to know the everyman concept of knoweldge?
It's like the concept of average citizen, who then has a non-integer number of children.
Tradition disclaimer
I guess some societies do not have the same Westernized concepts that we use. Some tribes quantify how did you learn about a thing. This can be a spectrum: I saw it, it was told me by someone who saw it vs the elders relate a tale about it from the old days.
On the other end, the Occidental conception is bathed in the culturally variant concepts of objectivity.
The French postmodernists indicated this clearly and were correct on this one.
It is in the context of that tradition that this inquiry is made.
And the founder of modern Western philosophy is none other than the Frenchman Descartes.
Descartes in his famous 'Meditations" had the 'rejecting everything' moment. He outlined all the things he couldn't trust. Then he extrapolated it into the matrix-demon experiment. From there asssuming nothing was true he wanted grounds for any knowledge. That was his cogito ergo sum. Later he says that he has a concept of God which is infinite, but he himself does not feel infinite. That is two simple observations, the contentious bit is later. He as a finite being cannot think of an infinite on him own THEREFORE God must be real and outside him.
Therefore the concept of God is external and God-given.
Since in that concept God is good, then He wouldn't let a conscious being be subject to such maltreatment from a demon.
With that he abandoned the spirit of absolute scepticism.
Can we trust him really on having made this process in the best way possible?
The best steelman for the absolute scepticism may only come from an individual throughly commited to the bit.
I present Agrippa the Sceptic.
the hardest objection - Agrippa
This is not your average r/atheism variety sceptic. This is hardcore.
Wikipedia says the following:
According to Victor Brochard "the five tropes can be regarded as the most radical and most precise formulation of philosophical skepticism that has ever been given. In a sense, they are still irresistible today."4(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippa_the_Skeptic#cite_note-4)
So if we're picking a fight with skepticism, this is a good place to start. That's the steelman we're up against:
According to the mode deriving from dispute, we find that undecidable dissension about the matter proposed has come about both in ordinary life and among philosophers. Because of this we are not able to choose or to rule out anything, and we end up with suspension of judgement. In the mode deriving from infinite regress, we say that what is brought forward as a source of conviction for the matter proposed itself needs another such source, which itself needs another, and so ad infinitum, so that we have no point from which to begin to establish anything, and suspension of judgement follows. In the mode deriving from relativity, as we said above, the existing object appears to be such-and-such relative to the subject judging and to the things observed together with it, but we suspend judgement on what it is like in its nature. We have the mode from hypothesis when the Dogmatists, being thrown back ad infinitum, begin from something which they do not establish but claim to assume simply and without proof in virtue of a concession. The reciprocal mode occurs when what ought to be confirmatory of the object under investigation needs to be made convincing by the object under investigation; then, being unable to take either in order to establish the other, we suspend judgement about both.
I forgot to mention that we don't have Agrippa's writings directly with us.
The above is an extract from:
Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrhōneioi hypotypōseis i., from Annas, J., Outlines of Scepticism Cambridge University Press. (2000).
The five arguments can be listed as
discord
infinite regress
relativism
unfounded assumption
circular argument
Those five arguments want to exhaustively cover possible sources of knowledge in order to be a foundation to scepticism. We can use this fact and it will suffice for us to only disprove one of them. Nevertheless there is something against each of those five arguments, covering some cool stuff along the way:
Solving 1
If human dissent is a sufficient reason for skepticism, showing human agreement crosses it out.
Any human common agreed beliefs though can be important candidates for number 4 - foundational belief. That argument is as strong as the idea of beliefs being in disagreement being a pro-scepticism argument.
Let us not look for what is absolute, but what is human universal; better - civilization universal. Let us us this as another way of overcoming the challenge of relativism? Living in society, people talk about their beliefs. There are completely non-contentious beliefs. We're not talking about the extreme philosophical doubt. Non-contentious, as in someone vehemently denying them should get checked into a psych ward. Even if being under informed about them is seen as bizarre. Then let's apply the 5 modes to the social disagreements
If we only manage to find 1 thing people would agree on, then 1 stops being a global reason to skepticism, merely local.
Choice of the group tangent
We can restrict the group of people that need to agree on something to some group that isn't inclusive. Pyrrhus thought dissent among the people he knew of was enough of an argument, he didn't ask all foreigners he met. Also his split of the argument that
both in ordinary life and among philosophers
hints at a 2x2 diagram, where there would be a square
agreement among philosophers, dissent in ordinary life
which is undoubtedly second-best situation from the 4 quadrants. It's the one the Perennialist phiosophers went with.
The first-best (both agree) is too unimgainable, quite a utopian situation.
Solving 2
Infinite regress isn't possible. Material reasons are one thing, but utterable explanations for each following event, or belief, are finite. Quine spoke about this question of relative sizes of linguistic utterances:
In the essence of modes 4 and 5 there is a notion of sentences in an argument. Therefore we can use this concept, and say that each node is a sentence. We are dealing with a sea of nodes that can be connected directionally showing support of one node to another.
nodes picture
Note that if we restrict character limit to a book length, K is the Borgesian Library of Babel. And I'd say that all metanarrative contenders should be able to condense their arguments into 410 pages.
Trivially, our chosen Knowledge Set (KS) is always some subset of K (even if null), some 410 book that is out there.
Now we can solve mode 2.
Babel Library Theorem
Insofar as the infinite regress argument posits existence of non-terminating read sequence of a directed graph of sentence - nodes, with the set K being finite such non-termination is reducible to mode 5 - circular argument.
In split sentences this is:
facts can be represented as nodes and their argument-relation as a directed relation, creating a graph
infinite regress argument assumes a non-terminating read traversal of a directed graph of nodes.
the set of possible facts is finite, (even if phrased in various ways)
from 3+2 the traversal must be circular with enough time to deliberate
from 5 - the infinite regress is reducible to circular argument.
Solving 5
Now we can see numbers 4 and 5 as parallel to each other. Number 4 is the mere existence of a choice of beliefs from K. Number 5 is about their internal configuration, but it also implies 4. It is therefore a more specific statement.
Pyrrho focuses against circularity, and definitely on low depth search of beliefs, such as in Socratic dialogues it is a valid heuristics to avoid circular arguments. In other words, for most arguments the answers are tree-like directed graphs and cyclicalities become relevant in a minority of arguments.
Yet on the ultimate level, dealing with K set, it is clear that the choice described in 4 is actually STRONGER when accompanied by mode 5.
"Circularity" just means self-grounding, or -- dynamically -- self-propelling. A circular "argument" is stronger (i.e. more independent) than a non-circular one. If you don't have a circle, you have arbitrary axioms. @Outsideness
This excellent tweet is from none other than His Coldness.
Solving 3
Mode 3 is about differences between observers and also fundamentally the noumenon beyond Maya.
It's the uncertainity - is our H wrong relative to J. Trivially by saying more things, we generate new H members. Speaking precisely this is about is a move-and-copy operation of some from J (trivially) and K.
Description of the world beyond Maya figures in K, as long as it is describable. If it is ineffable to human beings by our nature - like not having the senses for it. Yet information is compressible.
Any reason for us not to get a transmission from the right world'
Now we have a question. Is Pyrrho's rejection of any beliefs here absolute or relative to the unvierse he finds himself in?
If it is absolute, he sees a 'true belief' analytically wrong, as 'married bachelor', belonging in Meinong's jungle.
But that is not what his arguments are about. In what world would his arguments not fall true.
Human agreement is necessarily local.
Any agent agreement is necessarily local, subject to principles of game theory.
What would be the most true argument then? We can take notes from Steve Jobs:
the best way to predict the future is to invent it
This is what CCRU called 'hyperstition'
True knowledge game - local knowledge
Any sane human will agree to this
claims:
you can make a game that will give you full knowledge - for instance instructions: moving a stone from one hand to another, and so forth, and so forth.
Any utterances of the form ' in this game...'. will happen is an exhaustive definition.
The same would happen for a simple Wang B-machine for a self-referential tape endlessly shifting [0,1] into [1,0].
Your knowledge is true in these instances, if knowledge and truth are to mean anything.
We'll make use of this later.
Solving 4
In discussion of mode 2 we transformed the problem into choice / search between different subsets of K. From Gödel we know that for every node system KS, it can be derived from a number of axioms picked from set KSK (KS-kernel). Those in KSK are all acting together and the choice which are fundamental and which are derived is arbitrary.
Of course the same property is equivalent to the circular support mentioned in point 3.
Too much rigour relative to what works
The equations of the Standard Model combined with General Relativity are fairly well predicting reality in a given context.
We see them break only at the scale of galaxies and galactic superclusters and Big Bang.
natural necessity argument
By nature we see that we're bound to have KS expressive enough to differentiate between good and bad. This argument rests of a wholly different field from philosophy, so taps into our (mine and yours, reader) common set of beliefs. No 80iq trailer park drug addict is reading this.
Differentiation between what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ requires discrimination. This is a capability no younger than life itself, which it serves as an indispensable function. As soon as there is behavior, there is discrimination between alternatives. One way leads to survival, the other way leads to death. There is nourishment, or not, reproduction, or not, safety or predatory menace. Good and bad, or the discrimination between them (which is the same thing), are etched primordially into any world that life inhabits. Discrimination is needed to survive.
---from XS, discrimination
See also E. Fromm on optimal truth, and Bret Weinstein’s metaphorical truth.
Summary of the answer to skepticism
We know that we are bound to have some set of beliefs, best if circular, at the core of our big set of beliefs.
That is merely positing some states of KS as acceptable. Achieving some KS is a different question, that we'll respond soon.
You might have noticed how Quine and Nick Land, already have been smuggled into the arguments against Agrippa. There is a nascent epistemology here.
You will see it develop in the next section, as we refine Yudkowsky's simple theory of truth.
The best case - Yud
You might not be familar with this text. I was FRENZIED when I first read it late in the night of 2017.
To read and ingest the text would take you about an hour, but note that it's well written. It is not a required reading though, as you'll see the ten key extracts soon.
They are intersparsed with my paragraphs and some EY - adjacent pieces of work, most often from LW.
It is a diaglogue between a shepherd and some guy called Mark, some others join from time to time.
The story goes like this - the shepherd counts sheep with stone pebbles and we see him exaplain his method to the passers by.
He has an empty bucket and when the sheep leave the enclosure through a gate in the morning he stands by the gate and drops one pebble for each one passing.
Then in the evening, when the sheep come back, he extracts one stone for each of the incoming sheep. After all sheep have passed the remaining number of stones magically corresponds to the number of sheep lost in the pasture. Best if zero.
First snippet
“Mark, I don’t think you understand the art of bucketcraft,” I say. “It’s not about using pebbles to control sheep. It’s about making sheep control pebbles. In this art, it is not necessary to begin by believing the art will work. Rather, first the art works, then one comes to believe that it works.”
What jumps at us is the word control. In 1950s it was the starting point to the science of kybernetics.
This is a keyword to the whole of this interpretation of the text
Second snippet
So I need different names for the thingies that determine my predictions and the thingy that determines my experimental results. I call the former thingies ‘belief’, and the latter thingy ‘reality’.”
That is clearly wrong, as the thingy that determines my experimental results is not reality in its fullness. It's the proximate reality that lets me see itself.
This frame hinges on the correspondence theory of truth not the coherence one.
Therefore, we can use some Indian words and concepts.
Maya is a Hindu term used to term this illusory reality, and the beliefs that are locally true even if wrong in the larger sense, are called Upaya(guides) - a Buddhist term.
Keep this in mind, we'll need this later.
Third snippet
This is a great summary of the Bayesian approach to knowledge
Above all, don’t ask what to believe—ask what to anticipate. Every question of belief should flow from a question of anticipation, and that question of anticipation should be the center of the inquiry. Every guess of belief should begin by flowing to a specific guess of anticipation, and should continue to pay rent in future anticipations. If a belief turns deadbeat, evict it.
[making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences] (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences)
It's very high modern, even early Wittgensteinian, and similar to Popperian approach to science.
Of course there are multiple beliefs for which you cannot directly anticipate experiences. Those are but a hidden node in a tangled networked of nested Bayesian distributions.
A Bayesian reasoning agent is just entangled locally but might never come to question those deeper assumptions, which are further removed from experience.
To do this you'd need to track at least a pair of hypotheses for those bigger assumptions and for each a set of statements close to experience.
A lot of effort.
There are different beliefs give you different prediction sets over facets of your life.
One belief might make you go into physics, another one into electronics, the third one into dentistry.
And there is no formal criterion to distinguish between them, apart from the Will, the motivation.
And later on , which are you have path-dependent subsequent beliefs.
Bayesianism is not powerful enough - it grants you certainity of the local algorithms but it quickly rises in complexity under a broader view.
Fourth snippet
Lesswrong post on strategic reliabilism has those an interesting fragment:
If SAE works from a descriptive core, how are normative consequences extracted? The authors do not contend this is impossible for theories of SAE, but the prospects aren’t good. Many criticisms of naturalism by SAE proponents apply to their own theories. In the end, everyone has to bridge the is-ought gap. Philosophers are essentially experts in their own opinions, while Ameliorative Psychologists have documented success at helping people and institutions reason better. By the Aristotelian Principle, this success is what gives Strategic Reliabilism a chance at normativity.
and then we see another one:
What is evidence? It is an event entangled, by links of cause and effect, with whatever you want to know about. If the target of your inquiry is your shoelaces, for example, then the light entering your pupils is evidence entangled with your shoelaces. This should not be confused with the technical sense of “entanglement” used in physics—here I’m just talking about “entanglement” in the sense of two things that end up in correlated states because of the links of cause and effect between them.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6s3xABaXKPdFwA3FS/what-is-evidence
From this snippet we can extract the key phrase - using the 'cybernetic' keyword extracted earlier - Yudkowsky's theory of truth hinges on cybernetic engtanglement.
This entanglement is something material, cause and effect.
What matters here is that the loop your beliefs have with reality is equivalent to the control loop of a fridge, or any of many control circuits. Examples include industrial robot arm, an alligator temperature regulating, or a negative feedback loop in a climate model or climate reality.
You should see feedback loops everywhere. Draw out the control loop of cold blooded alligator. It sits in the sun to externally warm up. It knows it needs to do this. It hot-blooded animals you have a higher base metabolic rate. The goal is the same - temperature homestatis, but what for the alligator is done at macro level through sun exposure is done on cellular level by greater mitochondrial work and heart rate. You can rearrange the circuit under many invariants (ceteris paribus) if you swap out the other components in a smart way. The evolutionary search space is equivalent to this swapping of blocks inside negative feedback loops.
Our methods of belief conceptualization and recording are the same thus as a squirrel's qualia of remembering where the nuts are. Yet the level of abstraction and problem domains are different.
The mistake the logical AI ('old school AI') made was to assume this abstraction layer is fit for the real world. ML algorithms - much more fuzzy - capture the patterns of the world much better.
The key to this is intent, or prediction and effort, and the subsequent backtracking over beliefs depending on the success.
Through this, we can see this cybernetic control as the world fulfilling itself.
The belief is not some gnostic separate layer from the physical world, it is a necessary part of it.
What follows from this is that true are things that are executed by the World machine.
if we become part of the world machine, we can enjoice in that entanglement.
Of course the machine has dusty cogs that don't move anymore - the rubbish bin of history.
Fifth snippet
To say it abstractly: For an event to be evidence about a target of inquiry, it has to happen differently in a way that’s entangled with the different possible states of the target. (To say it technically: There has to be Shannon mutual information between the evidential event and the target of inquiry, relative to your current state of uncertainty about both of them.)
That a succint and formal description getting at the core of the issue.
Sixth snippet
Some belief systems, in a rather obvious trick to reinforce themselves, say that certain beliefs are only really worthwhile if you believe them unconditionally—no matter what you see, no matter what you think.
Now this is a fascinating edge case. If he refers to Christianity that is quite false - the soteriological conclusion is said to appear clearly to the naked eye - the problem is time. It's said to arrive 'at the end of the world'.
This statement is not absolute and needs to be quantified.
The sheperd's cybernetic loop closes when the sheep go back - the periodicity of just one day. That's a simple one. Some experiments last minutes.
The longest running human experiment in the scientiifc sense - since 1927 pitch drop experiment.
Has enough time passed since French revolution to tell was it good or not?
It's all about the relative time lengths for the cybernetic entanglement to occur.
And why would we be so lucky so that all useful beliefs be entanglable but ourselves as individual observers in the brief periods of our livetimes.
There is even a statement for a belief that's not justified in the great sense - a blik. It is fitting to apply to this to beliefs with a long feedback loop, some would call them Dao, or Tradition.
There are entire schools of thought devoted to the idea that some loops are closed to us now. A big examples are the Mulism conception of Mohammed as the 'Seal of the Prophets', and the school of Traditionalism.
Seventh snippet
Entanglement can be transmitted through chains of cause and effect—and if you speak, and another hears, that too is cause and effect.
That tracks what we've already discussed, spelling it out nicely with a slightly different wording.
Eigth snippet
Indeed, if you feel, on a gut level, what this all means, you will automatically stop believing. Because “my belief is not entangled with reality” means “my belief is not accurate.” As soon as you stop believing “ ‘snow is white’ is true,” you should (automatically!) stop believing “snow is white,” or something is very wrong.
That is just a deflationary theory of truth. Here he tries very hard to not admit metaphorical truth and relies on a very literal understanding of statements. Is also assuming that it's about atomic change in beliefs, one by one.
This atomic focus on particular statements is really rare and limited in real life.
whodunnit mysteries are an example of this, where the detective considers different suspects and hypotheses.
They all propagate forward (predict) empirical bits (evidence) but are also backpropagated into motive.
Another instance is science. Scientific theories are often tested by a long chain of secondary assumptions.
Let's say you want to test a new theory of gravity to explain the spinning radial velocity of galaxies. You need to apply the model to the data on galaxies, use a telescope to see some nighy sky lights, reconstruct the lights into data and into the galaxy-models and finally estimate their mass distribution based on the lights.
The inference chain is very long and science is often stuck.
Ninth snippet - summary
“When a sheep passes, you toss in a pebble?” Mark says. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“It’s an interaction between the sheep and the pebbles,” I reply.
“No, it’s an interaction between the pebbles and you ,” Mark says. “The magic doesn’t come from the sheep, it comes from you . Mere sheep are obviously nonmagical. The magic has to come from somewhere , on the way to the bucket.”
That is indeed a curious bit of interpretation. The magic - the entanglement comes from a non-random indidivdal action. It is an action, and a meatbag one at that, 'fleshie', or 'elan vitale'.
The belief does not come out as a gnostic or Cartesian Dualist abstract logical truth. It is a result of a material exchange, cause and effect.
Tenth snippet - conclusion
I shrug. “I ordered it online from a company called Natural Selections. The fabric is called Sensory Modality.” I pause, seeing the incredulous expressions of Mark and Autrey. “I admit the names are a bit New Agey. The point is that a passing sheep triggers a chain of cause and effect that ends with a pebble in the bucket. Afterward you can compare the bucket to other buckets, and so on.”
A neural activation pattern in your visual cortex can interact with your beliefs about your shoelaces, since beliefs about shoelaces also exist in neural substrate. If you can understand that, you should be able to see how a passing sheep causes a pebble to enter the bucket.”
“You have to bind the bucket to the pastures, and the pebbles to the sheep, using a magical ritual – pardon me, an emergent process with special causal powers – that my master discovered,” Autrey explains.
that’s quite true indeed
how to make an even better case?
Let's see all those snippets summed up:
words: 'control', 'cybernetic'
Upaya and Maya
focus on predictions which are limited though
cause and effect = cybernetic entanglement
formalization with Shannon mutual information
quantification of the time frames of entanglement
confirmation of cause an efect in human communication
deflationary theory of truth and a long inference chain
meatbag beliefs
Another summary of the pebbles
If we summarize that in turn we get:
A = 1 + 4 = cybernetic entanglement as the atomic unit of belief-related action
B = 2 + 3 + 6 + 8 = context specificity and information-limitations of the model
C = 5 + 10 = summaries
D = 7 + 9 = material nature of the interaction.
Now to connect A, B and D, we get: material interactions create cybernetic entanglements which are locally true but exist in the context they were made and are overfitting into that context.
material interactions create cybernetic entanglements which are locally true but exist in the context they were made and are overfitting into that context.
We can wish Yudkowsky delved a bit more into this problem space. But now there is a space for a blog like this, which is also good.
Let's say you want to switch to use this theory daily. What immediately jumps at you are the aspects that aren't contained in the statement:
how to transition and how to treat the knowledge you've gained so far. Do other people know nothing unless they use this pebble-based system?
how to conceptually and practically deal with the problem of overfitting to your circumstance?
Once those two questions are addressed, we can conclude our proceedings - formulating this epistemological theory. At least for the purposes of this post, each of those questions touches a deep topic on which this blog will have more explorations, now in drafts.
problem 1 - ordinary knowledge
The first problem - how to treat the ordinary knowledge?
Would Elizer like you to feel that you've become a pebble-entangling gigachad while the unlearned virgins are helpless in their illusions of knowledge?
I'll leave this one for you to answer.
"Yes" would be the reply true for many esoteric theorists. Whether you join a cult which says true knowledge comes from mystical frenzy, psychedelics, True Book, Logical Positivism or any other method - the exclusion of ordinary knowledge ensues.
You get an exclusive membership, and with time you stop passing the ideological Turing test to understand the normies.
That's what all those systems suffer from - they want you to use their terms and they lose the ability to model what came before.
My aunt Velma knows she did her laundry and will need to buy lemons to make lemonade for when her nephew comes visit at the weekend.
She didn't come to arrive at this conclusion through a conscious pebble-study.
BUT OF COURSE she must have done an equivalent!
The Bayesian model in this sense is not a NEW TOOL. it's a new lens to see the ordinary.
Eliezer did an analytical piece of philosophy here, not a normative one.
I applaud him for it.
Ok, that is not entirely true, he makes normative statements there about some cases. But it is worth noting that the bulk of his argument is descriptive.
Of course this resembles the Hero's Journey where the hero returns to the village having defeated the dragon and now looking with new eyes.
This is very interesting. Eliezer answers both prongs of the problem of criterion by the end of his argument. (See appendix B). Let's trace his steps.
Recall our 'true knowledge game', where we construct a situation where our knowledge would be true. That is equivalent to starting with a 'how' prong, rather than 'what'. The sheep and pebbles have the same role, it is a controlled scenario where knowledge is gained as a property of the shepherd - pebbles - sheep system.
Once that is granted, we can very easily pattern match for moments in our own lives that are similar and then we get the answer to the question of 'what we know'.
Eliezer seems to be singling out some variants of religious belief as targets for his epistemology. Yet broadly I'd say that his system is indeed the bulk of everyday beliefs of the people.
He is rediscovering the wheel a bit there already is a term within philosophy that says: the ' general view that "ordinary language is correct"'.. Let's delve deeper into that.
ordinary language philosophy for assemblages
Stanislaw Lem in his Summa Technologica presents (p189) a quasi - late- Wittgensteinian understanding of language. There he conceptualizes a protocol of communication in not even a linguistic community, but rather for the whole material system.
translation mine
Sign assumes existence of information. It exists purely as part of its code. The information exists if and only if there is an entity it's addressed to. We know who is the addresse of Hamlet, just as well we know that a nebulae do not have any addresses. Still - who is the receiver of the genetic information inside chromosomes of a reptilian lizard egg? A mature organism? No - it's a certain later stage of the information processing. That organism in its turn does have an addrressee - where? On the Moon or the Sahara the lizards cannot live, only in a river with muddy banks. There the lizard can find food and mates. Therefore the addressee of the genetic information of the lizard is that very ecosystem, along with the whole local population of the species, as well as of other species, devouring him or being devoured. In other words the receiver of genetic information is the bio-geo-ceno-otic environment of an individual. In that environment he will sire other lizards and through thta the circulation of genetic information will be upheld, as a part of the evolutionary process. Analogously, the "environment" that makes Hamlet's continued existence possible is human brain.
I am not sure if he had read Wittgenstein, but for sure that is a more generic definition than just a 'language game' played by people.
It is something that has been vindicated, AI can create its own languages now.
What is importat is that the communication protocols - language games are nested in each other.
That will tie into our second point of dispute with Eliezer's theory.
If we go with Contextualized Ordinary Language philosophy) I'd argue that there is a zoom in - zoom out dynamics, like Arcimboldian paintings.). There should be a word for this, when a distinction is not an absolute, but depending on the scale, distance from the observer. In this case the dynamics is that the more highly defined context (such as BTC protocol), the semantics is fully clear. When the situation is narrow, each word is clearer, until appears fully semantic. That must have been a cause of many philosophical misunderstandings. The more you zoom out, the more dependent on the context is the word.
Of course, the details of the Standard Model are an instance of the ultimate zoomout, where nature itself bounds all the messages inside its physical context. We, aliens and rogue AIs could talk over radio waves, but the intelligiblity of the message relies on the context of both agents being in the same universe. These constraints aren't qualitatively different from any other context constraints - a final stop on the road, but built in the same way.
Now what constraints are you under?
problem 2 - topological instability
There is a nice physical-theoretical and information theory approach to this.
Let's recall the statement:
material interactions create cybernetic entanglements which are locally true but exist in the context they were made and are overfitting into that context.
Context overfitting. People who peak in high school overfit for high school and don't update that some things are not cool anymore.
There is more theory behind this actually in the realm of manifold learning.
less is more, coarse learning on low dimensional manifolds
Checkout this github repo for the details
There is a correspondence between that and our discourse on truth.
Learning always submits an assemblage of assumptions to a series of empirical tests. This is a feature of reality.
Suppose you have a Petri dish with bacteria and add some acid.
The bacteria learn to cope with the new chemical environment through cell level adaptation and also selection.
The whole of the assemblage is tested against the acid - this is the physical confirmation holism. But just one metric - resistance to acid is tested.
Here we arrive at confirmation holism.
Beliefs are a low dimensional spec of reality.
They are the low dimensional manifolds that are as coarse as your language.
That implies the effect of topological instability, which is the Maya we mentioned before
Beware the observed real sample - we do not observe the true platonic Forms! We cannot even conceptualize them.
The same coarseness relationship applies to the sentences we observe compared the possible ones - see Quine's sequences.
We can finally conclude now, that every aspect has been covered.
Conclusion
The attack on skepticism here is merely to create a minimal working argument - possibility (even necessity!) of some true knowledge in local conditions.
It does not mean that full knowledge can be reached for any given context. Neither it means that there exists a tractable algorithm to reach it until the final context of Nature.
Is scientific method the passcard? We could imagine a world where mysticism clearly is, giving better predictive power on higher context occurences.
Imagine a saint predicting a day of rain coming in a draught in a bronze age society through a divine revelation ( a simple simulation scenario would suffice).
But as we see in Appendix A, scientific method applies only to a narrow subset of knowledge. We cannot make an experiment of a billion years of Solar System evolution... at least yet.
But as we've seen above, our knowledge is part of the universe and its process of self-exploration, not outside of it. The universe is not a dark and inhostpiable place...
vitalist epistemology
your priors are Universe predicting itself
Knowledge is in the feedback loops and any explicit beliefs are a cache of those past runs or feelings based extrapolation of those.
There is a material base to beliefs - the purely cybernetically entangled processes, entangling your mind with the developing, unrolling the Universe.
Our knowledge of the world is part of it, it's not beyond it.
It's a radically pagan statement, stating that the knowledge is present in animals, objects, rituals.
This is very animist, with agency all the way down.
The cybernetic embedding is all that an assemblage (life form, or a company, or a molecule) does with the environment given excess energy. (yeah I know this is very e/acc and Jeremy England coded).
Still we need to remember the key hindrance, Maya (aka topological instability).
You haven't fallen off the perfect vantage point tree. you exist in the context of what you live in and what came before you.
to paraphrase US VP Kamala Harris
This context is treacherous, it's a weak form of the Cartesian demon.
It manipulates the inputs to our system, the data that we have. Then we produce the outputs.
If those outputs are checked only locally, it's the same demon again. The outputs need to stretch the limits to tear down just a bit of the veil Maya.
By Anonymous - Camille Flammarion, L'Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire (Paris, 1888), pp. 163., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=318054
If you stretch the limits enough to tear a whole in the veil, the Outside creeps in. The real(er) space checks your work and finally you see a glimmer of something real.
Conversely, if outputs aren’t checked by the Outside (subjected to the Will of God), then the assemblage doesn’t have the right feedback - cannot back-propagate the changes.
checking your outputs against reality lets you test your actions, your body and your assumptions
It is the highest of modernisms to try to encapsulate all processes hitherto external to us, inside of a fixed, intellectual System. Early 1900s abound in examples: bringing understanding to the unconscious, democracy instead of revolution / elite rotation, party politics instead of literal backstabbing.
But as Godel and the postmodernists after him said, that is folly, or at least incomplete.
This is a neurotic approach, and not a brave one.
High modernism tries to understand what it sees more than it tries to predict what it does not see.
Prediction is the best way to learn, but can't predict everything, there's a cost and benefit.
You might need to sacrifice a lot for an unknown goal of learning something. Startups are hyperstitions and VC are chaos magic wizards. And selective teachers to the founders.
Founders are the non-neurotic ones, choosing the brave path.
To be the brave one is to face the unknown at the boundary of a system, risking losing everything. Or at least a lot.
That is Deleuzian line of flight from a known plateau into deterritorialization.
It means to love risk and gamble with death - while owning it - 'me ne frego'.
The act of sacrifice is intimitely tied with the act of acquiring knowledge.
It's all a Bataillean ritual of sacrifice of the excess in exploration and production for its own sake?
This vitalist lived epistemology is by nature problematic to many, as it extols superiority of dynamic Life over stasis and the process over the concept.
Further posts
We can discuss the embeddedness of knowledge, but our communicable knowledge is whatever we say or can formulate. It's a set of statements.
We also have latent knowledge - aristotelian phronesis, which is key for in person skill acquisition and application but as we network online it's of less interest.
What can be shared in the blog and its comment section can be only doxa or episteme.
Let's operate inside those limits, exploiting them to the fullest.
The next in the plans is first covering the structure of knowledge as a web of nodes, followed by an examination of the strongest sources of Maya - ideologies and personal circumstances. Then the knowledge part will be finished and the following posts will be on ontology.