Simplicity rules in nature. Going slowly for a gazelle is deadly for the gazelle, running fast the gazelle gets to run another day. Simple, but it works. It’s putting all the simple steps that promotes understanding.
Darwin for example observed the simple mechanism in the evolution of species.. His description of his observations were also simple..
No expertise needed.. simple can be understood, for the most parts anyway…
You remind me of a moment between my Headmistress and I when I was only 12 years old. I struggled alarmingly with maths, chemistry, physics but excelled in languages, sports and domestic sciences. We were beginning to study trigonometry and I put up my hand. Our teacher was the most intimidating creature that ever walked within a school for girls. She wore a flowing black cape, hefty leather shoes and a tightly wound grey speckled bun at the nape of her neck.
"Can you give me an example of how I might use trigonometry in real life?" I asked boldly and the Headmistress froze. So did the whole room. It was one of those moments that you just know is going to stay with you forever.
Eventually, the Headmistress put down her chalk and board rubber, dusted off her hands, slid her tiny framed glasses back up her nose and told me to pack up my things. She escorted me rapidly to her office. After a brief conversation it was decided that I should spend all maths lessons training in the swimming pool or using the sewing room.
I think that wonderful woman would have totally approved your thesis.
I had a somewhat similar experience in highschool.
I publicly asked my physics teacher if the homework/classwork was needed if i can just pass the tests, and she looked amused and surprised and said no. So she gave me the tests upfront, and if i passed them i could sleep. So she ended up moving me to the desk beside her so i could sleep without being harassed.
Oddly to my knowledge no one else even attempted this. We could have all maybe tested out and used the period for study/rest/catch up/chillaxins.
Remarkable woman, real integrity. I'm sure they'd fire her 1000 times over these days. Real JT Gatto vibes.
It would be nice if I could feel like anyone understood what i'm doing here. Thank you so much for the reading and the comment.
It's seriously mistaken that Pyrrhonism "leads to the cessation of inquiry." The ancient Pyrrhonists' own term for themselves means "inquier"! Some of our most important surviving ancient literature is from Sextus Empiricus enquiring into contested issues of his era.
Ok? Kinda beside the point though? You're right that the Pyrrhonists called themselves skeptikoi (inquirers) and that Sextus engaged extensively with arguments of his time. I should have been more precise.
What I meant is that Pyrrhonian suspension doesn't generate positive systematic inquiry into what's actually true. It investigates claims to achieve equipollence and suspend judgment, which leads to ataraxia. The inquiry serves the therapeutic goal of tranquility through suspension.
Sextus examines arguments, but the point is always to balance them into suspension, not to determine which is correct or to build knowledge from what survives scrutiny. That's what I mean by cessation: not that Pyrrhonists stop thinking, but that they abandon the project of constructing positive epistemic foundations.
My approach uses similar suspension moves but for opposite purposes: to enforce burden of proof so I can identify what's actually foundational (experience, logic, valence) and then build systematic knowledge from there. The Pyrrhonist suspends to escape. I subtract to reconstruct.
Pyrrhonist inquiry does generate positive, systematic inquiry into what's actually true. What it finds is that very little can be found to be true. Suspension of judgment is used to evade dogmatism. Equipollence is used to generate suspension.
Sextus does not always balance arguments into suspension. A tiny few he accepts (e.g., relativity). Some he outright rejects (e.g., astrology).
What the Pyrrhonists do is to enforce a burden of proof. What they find is very little meets the standard.
I see. What would they say about EE you think? Quick summary:
TLDR: Experience is reality; its structure is logic; its quality is morality. Science, philosophy, and morality share a single substrate: the nature and structure of experience itself. I call inquiry pertaining to this substrate Sourcery.
Five facts are true right now, as you experience these words:
**1. Experiences exist.**
*Qualia.* The feeling of existing right now. The thinking. The awareness of these words. These are happening. You cannot doubt them without using them to doubt.
**2. All experience has feeling.**
*Valence.* Every experience has a qualitative character: how it feels to undergo it. This feeling defines what the experience is.
**3. Experience has limits.**
*Logic.* You cannot, through effort of will, experience "2+2=5" as correct, or push your hand through a solid wall, or unthink what you know. Reality is the shape of these limits. Experience has structure.
**4. Experience is the only possible source of information and meaning.**
*Meaning.* Everything you know about physics, mathematics, other minds, even logic itself, came through experience. No other channel is possible even conceptually. Without experiential impact, something is undetectable even in principle. Experience is the necessary foundation for anything to 'be' in any coherent sense.
**5. Valence grounds morality.**
*Ethics.* Because experiences have feeling, and feeling defines what they are, some experiences should never have been possible. That they exist cannot be justified by any ensuing good. Some things can never be worth the price and unequivocally should never have been.
I am having difficulty connecting this with anything in my life. I have a few questions, if you are willing to indulge my curiosity.
1: Am I correct in thinking that this philosophy rejects the notion that there is any objective reality?
2: Does the fact that a person is comforted by a particular belief validate that belief as being true?
3: As an example, you say 'Medicine: Stops being about “objectively measurable outcomes” and centers on “how much suffering are we actually eliminating.” The patient’s lived experience becomes ground truth, not the lab values.'
This raises two practical questions:
3a: How would a doctor measure how much suffering is being eliminated?
3b: When a patient consults a doctor, how would they determine the path of less suffering for that particular patient?
If I have a disease that will most likely end in death but is not causing discomfort then a doctor would be superfluous.. tests and operations are all a suffering of an intense kind ( in my opinion). Better to deal with one's imminent death which is learning to not suffer the fear of death. The opinion of the doctor is not required. A painful disease would be a balancing act for sure.....mitigating suffering.
Yea, and not treating death as a controllable option is one of the gravest mistakes of western philosophy. And it's not like we're unaware of the mechanics. It's a cliche in medical professional circles that the family pet in some cases gets better care than grandma. Basically western civ is only good at one thing, stacking technology. Which is imo our only realistic hope now.
Always! Thank you for taking the time to consider read and ask! Happy to help :) 1. Short answer yes, but not like that might imply. Firstly, it doesn't change anything about day to day experience or what we've learned from thinking in a materialist/externalist way. There may be an outside, but my point is that for rigorous applications and purposes it needs to be ignored because it's forever cut off, and including it anyway via assumption creates many many problems. My most recent paper is about how catastrophic the error is: https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTEC
2. "True" is a loaded word. Experiences as they are are unchanged by this framework. This won't manifest a dragon in your backyard say. It just reframe how we understand what happens to us and how we parse and predict those events. All the "science" is left unharmed, (indeed it is upgraded though parsimony and enhanced rigor) so "reality" becomes a set of stable reliable patterns of experience, as opposed to a story about atoms and externalities.
3. A. Suffering reports and all the other metrics we've found that connect to suffering reports (only we treated those reports as secondary instead of primary data.)
3. B. The same way as always, tests, discussion, examination, etc etc. Basically EE/RRT just makes them take their oath more seriously, don't cause suffering spikes, and realize that your entire job is first and foremost reduction of suffering and constraint.
Bonus: To answer questions like that, it's helpful to imagine the behavior of a robot following my alignment protocol. Because it's basically the same as exploring what ee/rrt says is best to do in a given situation: https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTHC
Ask anything else you like, I'm happy to talk about this all day. Eager to in fact.
Descartes uses subtraction as a temporary method to clear the ground, then rebuilds the very metaphysical structure he initially doubted. His doubt is strategic rather than principled, a means to an end rather than a permanent epistemic stance. But thank you, I'll add him to my genealogy paper. https://philpapers.org/rec/SEREEA-2
It's a profound shame no one ever just stuck with it like i did for a minute and thought about what it meant for the subject object divide and inquiry generally. We might have spared ourselves unit 731 and mengele. Truly, discarding the core of meaning ("Subjectivity") from "hard" "real" science likely honestly was the single most catastrophic mistake in history. We wrapped the whole of our social destiny around a massive and totally unwarranted justification for psychopathy.
Keep your eye on Michael Levin’s work over the next 18 months. If anyone has (which I suspect he does) or will have the empirical evidence in this space, it’s his lab at Tuft’s. He’s doing the experiments and it’s paradigm shifting work.
Interesting esssay, and while let's be real: asking for proofs in philosophy is already a losing game, I am of the school of philosophy that says we cannot get away from metaphysics, and only redescribe and reinterpret it. Hume's distinction had already fallen on hard times since philosophers started believing that the world is not prepackaged into facts and values; those are distinctions we make.
Exactly. That's the only route for information to reach us. Literally everything else apart from logic applied to same, is unprovable assumption. When you get some time i'd love it if you'd more fully skim what I've done here. https://innomen.substack.com/p/the-most-important-video-of-all-time
Simplicity rules in nature. Going slowly for a gazelle is deadly for the gazelle, running fast the gazelle gets to run another day. Simple, but it works. It’s putting all the simple steps that promotes understanding.
Darwin for example observed the simple mechanism in the evolution of species.. His description of his observations were also simple..
No expertise needed.. simple can be understood, for the most parts anyway…
You remind me of a moment between my Headmistress and I when I was only 12 years old. I struggled alarmingly with maths, chemistry, physics but excelled in languages, sports and domestic sciences. We were beginning to study trigonometry and I put up my hand. Our teacher was the most intimidating creature that ever walked within a school for girls. She wore a flowing black cape, hefty leather shoes and a tightly wound grey speckled bun at the nape of her neck.
"Can you give me an example of how I might use trigonometry in real life?" I asked boldly and the Headmistress froze. So did the whole room. It was one of those moments that you just know is going to stay with you forever.
Eventually, the Headmistress put down her chalk and board rubber, dusted off her hands, slid her tiny framed glasses back up her nose and told me to pack up my things. She escorted me rapidly to her office. After a brief conversation it was decided that I should spend all maths lessons training in the swimming pool or using the sewing room.
I think that wonderful woman would have totally approved your thesis.
I certainly do.
I had a somewhat similar experience in highschool.
I publicly asked my physics teacher if the homework/classwork was needed if i can just pass the tests, and she looked amused and surprised and said no. So she gave me the tests upfront, and if i passed them i could sleep. So she ended up moving me to the desk beside her so i could sleep without being harassed.
Oddly to my knowledge no one else even attempted this. We could have all maybe tested out and used the period for study/rest/catch up/chillaxins.
Remarkable woman, real integrity. I'm sure they'd fire her 1000 times over these days. Real JT Gatto vibes.
It would be nice if I could feel like anyone understood what i'm doing here. Thank you so much for the reading and the comment.
Could i trouble you for a move i'm making summary in your own words? https://innomen.substack.com/p/philosopher-zero
It's seriously mistaken that Pyrrhonism "leads to the cessation of inquiry." The ancient Pyrrhonists' own term for themselves means "inquier"! Some of our most important surviving ancient literature is from Sextus Empiricus enquiring into contested issues of his era.
Ok? Kinda beside the point though? You're right that the Pyrrhonists called themselves skeptikoi (inquirers) and that Sextus engaged extensively with arguments of his time. I should have been more precise.
What I meant is that Pyrrhonian suspension doesn't generate positive systematic inquiry into what's actually true. It investigates claims to achieve equipollence and suspend judgment, which leads to ataraxia. The inquiry serves the therapeutic goal of tranquility through suspension.
Sextus examines arguments, but the point is always to balance them into suspension, not to determine which is correct or to build knowledge from what survives scrutiny. That's what I mean by cessation: not that Pyrrhonists stop thinking, but that they abandon the project of constructing positive epistemic foundations.
My approach uses similar suspension moves but for opposite purposes: to enforce burden of proof so I can identify what's actually foundational (experience, logic, valence) and then build systematic knowledge from there. The Pyrrhonist suspends to escape. I subtract to reconstruct.
Does that clarify the distinction I'm drawing?
Pyrrhonist inquiry does generate positive, systematic inquiry into what's actually true. What it finds is that very little can be found to be true. Suspension of judgment is used to evade dogmatism. Equipollence is used to generate suspension.
Sextus does not always balance arguments into suspension. A tiny few he accepts (e.g., relativity). Some he outright rejects (e.g., astrology).
What the Pyrrhonists do is to enforce a burden of proof. What they find is very little meets the standard.
I see. What would they say about EE you think? Quick summary:
TLDR: Experience is reality; its structure is logic; its quality is morality. Science, philosophy, and morality share a single substrate: the nature and structure of experience itself. I call inquiry pertaining to this substrate Sourcery.
Five facts are true right now, as you experience these words:
**1. Experiences exist.**
*Qualia.* The feeling of existing right now. The thinking. The awareness of these words. These are happening. You cannot doubt them without using them to doubt.
**2. All experience has feeling.**
*Valence.* Every experience has a qualitative character: how it feels to undergo it. This feeling defines what the experience is.
**3. Experience has limits.**
*Logic.* You cannot, through effort of will, experience "2+2=5" as correct, or push your hand through a solid wall, or unthink what you know. Reality is the shape of these limits. Experience has structure.
**4. Experience is the only possible source of information and meaning.**
*Meaning.* Everything you know about physics, mathematics, other minds, even logic itself, came through experience. No other channel is possible even conceptually. Without experiential impact, something is undetectable even in principle. Experience is the necessary foundation for anything to 'be' in any coherent sense.
**5. Valence grounds morality.**
*Ethics.* Because experiences have feeling, and feeling defines what they are, some experiences should never have been possible. That they exist cannot be justified by any ensuing good. Some things can never be worth the price and unequivocally should never have been.
I am having difficulty connecting this with anything in my life. I have a few questions, if you are willing to indulge my curiosity.
1: Am I correct in thinking that this philosophy rejects the notion that there is any objective reality?
2: Does the fact that a person is comforted by a particular belief validate that belief as being true?
3: As an example, you say 'Medicine: Stops being about “objectively measurable outcomes” and centers on “how much suffering are we actually eliminating.” The patient’s lived experience becomes ground truth, not the lab values.'
This raises two practical questions:
3a: How would a doctor measure how much suffering is being eliminated?
3b: When a patient consults a doctor, how would they determine the path of less suffering for that particular patient?
If I have a disease that will most likely end in death but is not causing discomfort then a doctor would be superfluous.. tests and operations are all a suffering of an intense kind ( in my opinion). Better to deal with one's imminent death which is learning to not suffer the fear of death. The opinion of the doctor is not required. A painful disease would be a balancing act for sure.....mitigating suffering.
Yea, and not treating death as a controllable option is one of the gravest mistakes of western philosophy. And it's not like we're unaware of the mechanics. It's a cliche in medical professional circles that the family pet in some cases gets better care than grandma. Basically western civ is only good at one thing, stacking technology. Which is imo our only realistic hope now.
Always! Thank you for taking the time to consider read and ask! Happy to help :) 1. Short answer yes, but not like that might imply. Firstly, it doesn't change anything about day to day experience or what we've learned from thinking in a materialist/externalist way. There may be an outside, but my point is that for rigorous applications and purposes it needs to be ignored because it's forever cut off, and including it anyway via assumption creates many many problems. My most recent paper is about how catastrophic the error is: https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTEC
2. "True" is a loaded word. Experiences as they are are unchanged by this framework. This won't manifest a dragon in your backyard say. It just reframe how we understand what happens to us and how we parse and predict those events. All the "science" is left unharmed, (indeed it is upgraded though parsimony and enhanced rigor) so "reality" becomes a set of stable reliable patterns of experience, as opposed to a story about atoms and externalities.
3. A. Suffering reports and all the other metrics we've found that connect to suffering reports (only we treated those reports as secondary instead of primary data.)
3. B. The same way as always, tests, discussion, examination, etc etc. Basically EE/RRT just makes them take their oath more seriously, don't cause suffering spikes, and realize that your entire job is first and foremost reduction of suffering and constraint.
Bonus: To answer questions like that, it's helpful to imagine the behavior of a robot following my alignment protocol. Because it's basically the same as exploring what ee/rrt says is best to do in a given situation: https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTHC
Ask anything else you like, I'm happy to talk about this all day. Eager to in fact.
Descartes was a few hundred years ahead of you in asking this question.
Descartes uses subtraction as a temporary method to clear the ground, then rebuilds the very metaphysical structure he initially doubted. His doubt is strategic rather than principled, a means to an end rather than a permanent epistemic stance. But thank you, I'll add him to my genealogy paper. https://philpapers.org/rec/SEREEA-2
I agree that his answer to the question is unsatisfactory, to the point of being an evasion.
It's a profound shame no one ever just stuck with it like i did for a minute and thought about what it meant for the subject object divide and inquiry generally. We might have spared ourselves unit 731 and mengele. Truly, discarding the core of meaning ("Subjectivity") from "hard" "real" science likely honestly was the single most catastrophic mistake in history. We wrapped the whole of our social destiny around a massive and totally unwarranted justification for psychopathy.
Keep your eye on Michael Levin’s work over the next 18 months. If anyone has (which I suspect he does) or will have the empirical evidence in this space, it’s his lab at Tuft’s. He’s doing the experiments and it’s paradigm shifting work.
WTF? Blah blah blah
Interesting esssay, and while let's be real: asking for proofs in philosophy is already a losing game, I am of the school of philosophy that says we cannot get away from metaphysics, and only redescribe and reinterpret it. Hume's distinction had already fallen on hard times since philosophers started believing that the world is not prepackaged into facts and values; those are distinctions we make.
Also, this reminds me of Rousseau saying that it didn't matter if our feelings were true or false because we felt them regardless.
Exactly. That's the only route for information to reach us. Literally everything else apart from logic applied to same, is unprovable assumption. When you get some time i'd love it if you'd more fully skim what I've done here. https://innomen.substack.com/p/the-most-important-video-of-all-time
Sure, no problem Innomen.
Thank you :) I look forward to your assessment :)