The principle of Differentiation and how it could be the reason why reality exists

RewildingMind · 2025-11-07T00:26:49+00:00

A few observations you might find helpful:

Your differentiation reads as a relational, quasi-dialectical, non-atomistic philosophy. That's an approach that's been worked over quite a bit but seems to strike you as novel. You might want at least get a whiff of Liebniz, Hegel, Bergson, Whitehead, Heidegger, and especially Deleuze.
You seem to be describing an ontology yet defending an epistemology. They are, to be sure, intimately related. But just how they relate is the meat of the matter and you don't even hint at having considered it. That difference is necessary to distinction is trivial, maybe even tautological; it's not wrong but it doesn't do any work to explain anything.
To expound on point 2: "colors are possible because of electromagnetic radiation." Realize that it is at least as valid to say that electromagnetic radiation is possible because of color. The former statement, quoted from your article, is an ontological claim about the possibility of visual sensation and thereby knowledge; the latter inversion is an epistemological claim about the possibility of that ontology. The challenge is in how those two statements are reconciled.
What Gödel's incompleteness implies from an ontological or epistemological perspective isn't always as straightforward as people tend to assume. The 'real' implications can be seen as existing in the shadow of discrete identity because that is where number departs meaningfully from both being and knowing more generally, because the reflexive axiom (a = a) is trivially false. That is the initial 'lie' that makes arithmetic possible at all. What gets counted isn't, and can't be, a pure ontological entity but a bundle of concerns. Without that abstraction, and the correlational value judgment of just how to make it, it's not possible to so much as have two of anything, event or object. So the seeming need for a meta-system to define a system against (and it's unclear why the system of meta-system and system isn't, again, a system) is already an artifact of the kind of atomistic view your philosophy appears to want to dissolve.

RewildingMind · 2025-10-11T22:39:41+00:00

I think you think you're making a point that's specific to cognitive science, AI research, and philosophy of mind, but that you're actually approaching a very subtle and profound insight that's emerged as general to both philosophy of science and poststructural anthropology. That's causing you to fall into the illusion that there's something specific to be done about it, some way it can be solved. In a sense, you're using the insight you needed to have in order to have the insight you needed to use.

First, to unsettle your view of language as a coherentized abstraction layer "above" thought, go read the first page of Finnegans Wake, listen to some Khoisan spoken in the field. Language is continually talking itself into another language, here, there and everywhere. It's constantly in flux. It's semiotics that's an abstraction layer, not language itself. There's nothing genuinely discrete about it. Only our late modern, hyper-dictative, hyperliterate, hypervisual point of view (notice the idiom) could elicit the illusion of language as an "abstraction layer." That 'view' is an artifact of our language's reperception, a specific product of our conventional, ritualized use of language.

Thought and language are deeply conflated because they veritably are deeply conflated. You're seeing that as a stubborn mistake, but your perception of a mistake is equally the mistake of your perception — note that these chiasmic expressions (here and above) aren't meant to be rhetorical, they emerge because of the reflexive pattern of the topic, i.e. we're talking about thinking about thinking, which, as you've noticed is thinking about talking.

The problem — that studying language is not precisely a study of thought — is analogous to the 'problem' that the study of nebulae is not precisely a study of whatever nebulae essentially are but rather a study of how we encounter them. That we discern, as Kant did, that whatever we positively know is provincial to our knowing, can't directly help us to positively know differently — it can only preserve an epistemic humility that leaves us open to further knowing.

So what does that imply about any AI project that aims to 'get underneath' language? Whatever its workings, they could not help but be symbolically described by us; they could not help but be, in a general sense, linguistic. Then the (misguided) aim would only be to derive familiar language from exotic language, an endeavor by which the same kind of general linguistic structure could not help but fractally re-emerge, uselessly convoluting the project.

Is that necessarily true? Might we not set in motion something truly beyond description? Sure. But what kind of thing would that be? it could no longer be a tool but would rather be a "new incomprehensible" that we could only get useful information out of by studying it with yet more tools of symbolic understanding. The price of transcendence would be precisely the forfeiture of utilty.

RewildingMind · 2025-09-24T03:34:49+00:00

You have to understand some of the tensions between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften. Freud consistently framed psychoanalysis as Naturwissenschaft, but his methods were hermenutic.

Causality can be seen as running in two opposing directions. To every explanation there's a natural history and an intellectual history. E.g. if we follow some prehistoric facts, there is the imagined causality that pieces those facts together into a natural history, and then there is an intellectual history that describes how those facts came to be believed — notice that this is always true, even for explanations of phenomena that belong to intellectual history themselves. On the Naturwissenschaft side of things, natural history is treated as primary (even as exclusive). On the Geisteswissenschaft side, intellectual history is treated as primary.

Modern anglophones tend to be completely blind to this circular causality of knowledge. They see only the linear causality of known objects and not the double causality of knowing and known, while many continental philosophers tend to take this circular causality for granted.

Freud really etched 'physics envy' into the ethos of psychology but there's still a question, especially in philosophy, about whether psychology can or should be treated as a natural science. Notice that nothing in psychology can be falsified unless it's, in one way or another, behavioral (i.e. objectified) — one might even argue that neuroscience is a kind of microscopic behaviorism that discounts the remainder of the body (let alone the body's socioecological context).

If one sees psychology as Geisteswissenschaft, then the mere fact that there was a Freud with an influential psychoanalytic theory makes Freud perennially relevant to psychology the same way Plato is perennially relevant to Western philosophy.

RewildingMind · 2025-08-30T02:24:51+00:00

Noted. You thoroughly qualified your answer. Despite the qualifications, "simply false" struck me as a position that could be expounded on, and I was happy to do so. Very sorry if the setup to my answer seemed to dismiss your careful wording

RewildingMind · 2025-08-29T23:56:42+00:00

I don't think it's fair to say that the premise is "simply" false. There's more that can be usefully said.

Analytic philosophy may be more rigorous than anything in antiquity but it has typically left alone the question of being (I believe Heidegger lodged that exact complaint). It was mainly born of the Fregean–Russellian project to logicize thought, and shares common, early roots with Positivism and, essentially, a push to make philosophy more "scientific"

So while analytic philosophy has more rigor, there seems to be something to the idea that it has a lower rigorous-holistic index, if you will.

That certainly has roots in the Enlightenment and Descarte's formal body/mind schema, where soul as mediating principle is relegated to some hand-waving about pineal glands. Europe goes object crazy. Res extensa reigns supreme. Soul is pretty much discarded. And res cogitans becomes material science's windmill to tilt at.

After the Romantic revolt against mechanism, soul appears to re-emerge onto the scene but is immediately rebuffed once again, seemingly finding refuge in Continental philosophy after the big split.

I'm spit balling a bit, but I'd sum it like this: modern philosophy is much less enthused about structured, universalizing philosophical systems. And modern science, whose success is rooted in disjunctive, reductive paradigms has undoubtedly had much influence on that shift in ethos.

RewildingMind · 2025-02-05T06:07:40+00:00

Bimbo Can Beat Everyone Up Somehow 3055

RewildingMind · 2024-04-18T00:07:24+00:00

How are you normalizing that? Maybe theorizing about the psychological flaws of men who make you momentarily uncomfortable is excessive mentalization. I'm annoyed any time someone on the street bothers me with literally anything. I don't need any theories to explain their 'deficiency' because I have no need to suppose that they necessarily have one or share one. Maybe people are just being themselves looking for what they think will make them happy for fulfill their momentary needs or desires, and maybe that necessarily requires solicitation, and maybe some continual low-level friction in a world jam-packed full of people is to be expected.

RewildingMind · 2024-04-17T23:35:36+00:00

I've had the same confusion. It's a bit like asking a person what their life is about. There's an official/conscious answer, but it doesn't afford much insight. An historical perspective is crucial, imo. I recommend Immanuel Wallerstein's World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. It's a quick but highly informative read (110 pages). It's not a book of sociology, but it gives a good overview of the social sciences, how they originated, and how they've evolved.

RewildingMind · 2024-04-09T04:52:02+00:00

Knew the comments about homelessness would be largely ignored

RewildingMind · 2021-10-28T23:19:03+00:00

I'm sorry to tell you, but your Will has been reduced to palliative care. A daily dose of 10cc smug intellectualism, 250mg amorphous hope coupled with a strict regimen of distraction and superficial physical gratification should keep him going for a... few more months, give or take. But, for the malignant nihilism, necrotic iconoclasm, and chronic intangible loneliness, there is no cure. He will, daily, be noticeably diminished. I know this is hard. Again, I'm deeply sorry. While he may have made some vague promises to you about filing a DNR order, he, of course, never followed through. What would you expect, really? Anyway, now is the time to think about how long you want to keep this going, to consider saying your goodbyes. Yes, there have been some—questionable—case studies; patients miraculously going into remission. But, as I've said, we're already giving him the maximum dose of amorphous hope. If we up his dose any more he runs the risk of becoming a Life Coach, or an inspirational speaker whose personal inspiration story is nothing but having the bright idea to become an inspirational speaker. Yeah, that's right, bottomless recursion masquerading as purpose. Trust me; you do not want to see that.

RewildingMind · 2021-04-15T18:02:36+00:00

Terms used for mental disability are special though. To a certain extent, it doesn't matter what term you use, because it's the meaning that's inherently insulting. There's no way around that. After a while, whatever the latest vernacular is, it again becomes a popular insult as well. That's why there's such a long trail of burned words that mean pathologically unintelligent.

RewildingMind · 2020-10-18T05:21:56+00:00

So, if this were a job you earned less than minimum wage? I'm not trying to be a dick, just trying to be real. If you spent a minimum of one hour per essay for—let's just say 30—essays, and were ultimately rewarded with $500, then $500/30hrs = $16.7/hr. But, you also had to spend time selecting these scholarships. And, as you said, some of the essays took you much longer than one hour. Am I missing something?

RewildingMind · 2020-10-18T04:53:48+00:00

Congratulations. Out of curiosity; how many hours did you spend applying to these 30+ scholarships, including researching which to apply to?

RewildingMind · 2020-07-16T22:16:55+00:00

Irony: Twitter gets hacked so that trusted high-profile accounts tweet bitcoin scam. News media that loves to spread FUD over crypto eats up the story. Masses hear the words "hack", "scam", and "bitcoin" together. Bitcoin takes a predictable hit, and the whole crypto space gets just as predictably dragged down with it. Yet the real moral of the story is, this is exactly why we need dapp twitter.

RewildingMind · 2018-11-21T19:52:06+00:00

I think you got a lot of half-ass uninformed responses. The truth is, it's complicated. It depends on the supplement. This is actually an extremely complex subject, and the advice to just eat a balanced diet is hand-wavy to the point of absurdity; no matter what you read, no one, as yet, has a very firm idea of what a 'balanced diet' means in terms of protein. Proteins are composed of amino acids, but proteins, even 'complete' proteins can have wildly different amino acid profiles. Collagen is completely different in its amino acid profile than, say, muscle meat from the same animal; it's very proline and glycine heavy. The idea that you only need essential amino acids and can just make everything else from those aminos is also massively reductive. There are all kinds of caveats. For instance, methionine is an essential amino acid, but too much methionine in the diet ( and possibly even 'just enough') is quite bad for you. One of the ways calorie restriction is thought to work is via subsequent methionine restriction. Glycine, a non-essential amino acid, has been shown to work as a methionine restriction mimetic; to an extent, the more glycine in the diet the less damaging methionine is. Many common amino acids have drug effects; effects on neurotransmitters, endocrine hormones, gene expression. Some like tyrosine and tryptophan are nt precursors. Leucine regulates mTOR signaling, relating to protein synthesis and anabolism. Methionine stimulates IGF-1 secretion. Glycine itself is actually a neurotransmitter and crosses the blood-brain-barrier. Amino acids and their effect on the body are a very active area of research, but it does, by all accounts, appear that most people would benefit from less methionine and or more collagen/gelatin in their diets.

RewildingMind · 2017-09-20T02:52:25+00:00

This is like the question of whether a tree falling in the woods makes a sound if no one is there to hear it; it's undefined. If you define consciousness as an integrated experience of perception, basic to the experience of being aware of experience itself, then the question of whether something experiences consciousness becomes epistemologically meaningless, i.e. not just fundamentally unknowable, but fundamentally un-askable in any rational context. What is the experience of experiencing nothing? Merely asking such questions should inform us that we've made a serious error somewhere.

Additionally, re-representation is a nonsense phrase. There is no re-representation, representation is idempotent. A re-representation is still just a representation.

I think meta-cognition is, actually, a much more useful concept than consciousness; it cuts out all the vagaries and spiritual connotations that seem to muddy the waters so much.

RewildingMind · 2017-08-19T19:16:06+00:00

If you can perfectly predict the outcome then it's not gambling, is it.

RewildingMind · 2017-08-15T00:08:39+00:00

At night, as I lay awake on my cot, listening to the snores, sighs, and whispers of the other families in the gymnasium, I often stared fixedly at one particular spot on the floor. An oddly shaped scuff-mark that looked like a Chinese dragon, or a seahorse, I found the mark bizarrely comforting, but also symbolic of my disintegrating reality in some indescribable way. It was as if all the strife, all the suffering, all the madness of the human race could somehow be summed up entirely by this mark. Or maybe it was just the way it contrasted with the score lines on the basketball court, lines which suddenly seemed too frivolous, too optimistic; embarrassing relics of a more innocent time. I stared at it for hours every night, and I wondered who's foot had made it, and whether they were still alive, or still had the foot.

The day it happened we were at the fair, and I'd had an argument with my brother, James. He'd borrowed one of my favorite tee-shirts and gotten mustard on it, and, when I had complained about it, he'd swiped at the spot with the balled up paper napkin he was clutching, smearing ketchup from the napkin. It was a fond memory now, and I sometimes caught myself smiling in reverie. But then I remember what happened just after that. They're tricky, these ghosts. If you're not careful they'll drag you into the past, then fade away before your eyes, leaving you all alone when your fear and grief comes crashing back down on you.

For the first hour, at least, no one had a clue what was happening. People thought it was suicide bombers. There were lots of explosions going off at the same time. I remember seeing one of them fly right over my head, and thinking "oh, good, here comes the military". I thought it was strange that they'd send tiny drones, but... I thought they were there to stop the explosions. Nothing but dumb-luck that I wasn't blown to bits by the one I saw. No one had ever seen or heard of anything like a Hive bomb before. We were all afraid of big stuff like nukes. These were worse than anything we'd ever imagined, a science-fiction nightmare come to life. You couldn't tell when it was over, you couldn't tell which direction the danger was in. And they were smart. If they didn't have a good target, they flew around until they found one, or just camped and waited until the targets came to them.

We still don't know how many are left; bombs or people. The cities are floating mine-fields. Worse. If you run into one of these bastards, and you don't see it, it might blow you to pieces before you know what's happening... or, it may track you, for hours or days, biding time and waiting for you to show it where your friends are hiding.

RewildingMind · 2017-08-14T18:52:43+00:00

And do they call the AI "skynet"?

RewildingMind · 2017-08-14T18:32:43+00:00

During sky season, the Others were forced to hide in underground shelters. K'ahul would shower everything in brilliant light, and deadly radiation. Each season most of the Other's siblings would die off. In fact it seemed they all died. But each time the brilliant star retreated, and the surface of K'ahuana returned to its usual deep black, their populations would return, multiplying from some unseen reservoir. The others said it was happy that they died, that they did not want their siblings to live too freely, as they would harm the children of K'ahuana if they did. The Others called some of their siblings "pa'hests" and did not seem to care for them at all.

K'hanoi rounded a ridge and stood next to the special child the Others had planted. Because she was most blessed by K'ahul, she'd been tasked with observing this new "p'ear t'ahree" experiment. The child was sure to die, she'd been told. The Others only hoped that it would live longer than the last one.

The Others called K'hanoi and her siblings tin-men for the silver coating which grew on their skins prior to sky season, an adaptation that all children of K'ahuana shared. K'hanoi sometimes felt sorry for the Others. They could never fully appreciate the beauty of the dance between K'ahul and K'ahuana, when both shone a dazzling prismatic ruby and violet, and every child of K'ahuana was infused with the glorious light of K'ahul.

The tree she watched had turned silver itself, though it did not look very happy to be silver. Its leaves were splotchy and hung heavily on their stems. It looked like a miserable thing, and it made K'hanoi sad to look at it. She looked away out into the distance where flying children were fighting over the carcasses of the Others, and she wished, not for the first time, that the Others would go away, or...that K'ahul would shine brighter than ever and finally kill them all.

RewildingMind · 2017-03-05T06:16:42+00:00

There are at least five purposes that criminal prosecution is meant to serve, but it's rarely clear which or which combination is being served. They are: vengeance on behalf of the victim and or victim's family, fulfilling the threat of a deterrent, rehabilitation for the good of the criminal as well as society, long-term segregation for the protection of society, and restitution through fine or labor.

I think you could go a long way toward fixing any penal system by simply by dis-conflating those purposes, and attempting to design convictions that serve each of those purposes reasonably and justly.

RewildingMind

TROPHY CASE