Ludwig Thinks Too Much

Wittgenstein's Ladder

2007-11-13T00:41:39Z

So, I was thinking about this, because I know it's entirely a coincidence that Wittgenstein's great metaphor for language about language is a ladder and the fact that this enterprise is called Silverladder (synchronicity?) but here's this, from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:

6.53

The right method of philosophy would be this: To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—but it would be the only strictly correct method.

6.54

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

Let's spend a minute unpacking this. Essentially, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein is talking about what can and cannot be discussed sensibly with language. (Please check out the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for more about this topic, if you like.) Because propositions of logic are senseless (e.g., they do not represent actual things in the world) philosophy is itself senseless. It is an activity, not a doctrine. And, the Tractatus itself is to be used as a ladder to climb up onto, survey the lay of the land, and then discarded upon the realization that it is senseless.

How is this like Silverladder? How might this be like Silverladder? Tune in next time for another exciting installment of pseudo-philosophy.

Incompleteness and Chaos

2007-10-19T05:54:22Z

I was just thinking, as I am apt to do, about Godel's incompleteness theorem and what it implies about chaos in the universe. The incompleteness theorem proves that any logical system of rules that is coherent cannot be complete. I don't really know exactly how this works, because I'm not that good at logic and philosophy of math, but the point is, the proof does work. There are some true things out there that do not contradict the rules of the systems they're in that nevertheless can't be proven by them. Troubling by itself.

Anyway, some big brains like Stephen Hawking have pointed out the incompleteness theorem implies there can never be a complete scientific picture of the universe. There are just some true things out there that do not contradict the rules of physics that nevertheless can't be proven by the laws of physics. Creepy.

This means that everything follows the rules, so to speak, but there are some things that can't be explained by the rules. I feel like this is a doorway into what I was asking the Two of Spades about that she didn't seem like she wanted to give me an answer about.

At the end of the day I believe that nothing that we actually perceive is random, it's the laws that underlie the things we perceive that are random. And even that is not so random. If you do a little reading up on the density of the universe, you'll find that cosmologists are being led down the path toward thinking that our universe has "the right" density. By some fluke, we are just dense enough to keep expanding just out to infinity. If we were more dense, we would have probably already experienced a big crunch - the universe collapsing in on itself back into a singularity - or a heat death - the universe expanding so far that everything is so far apart everything reaches absolute zero. This, I think, is the only real random accident in the universe. Physicists are beginning to learn, moreover, that the characteristics of our universe are fundamentally linked to the density it had at the very beginning. (Of course we're still stuck with speaking in terms of time and causal relationships and I don't know how to fix that.)

But, then again, any mathematical or scientific system is incomplete. There is some stuff we simply cannot explain, and we might be confusing some of that with stuff we haven't explained yet, but will. Nevertheless, the incompleteness theorem has not been disproven yet.

P.S., as an aside, you need to believe in causation in order to believe in chaos theory, I think. And I don't believe in causation. Though the idea that the universe is an orderly place is hard to explain by chance. Do you see my problem? It's been frustrating me for well over three years now, and something tells me that when I'm 75, smoke a pipe and dress in tweed it will still frustrate me.

Everything is Scheduled

2007-10-18T01:39:56Z

Let me tell you a little something about synchronicity, people.

I went home to my mom's house and on the bedstand in my room was a heretofore undiscovered copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass.

The Neurophysiology of Ecstasy

2007-10-17T21:26:05Z

I have studied this phenomenon for some time, and having it brought up again by a friend caused me to think about it further: the same neurological processes occur in instances of religious ecstasy, strong aesthetic experiences, psychedelic drug experiences, and severe trauma. Why have I been thinking about this? Well, first, the emergence of the Two of Spades (who I previously thought to be Art, in the A.L.I.C.E. theory), and the role of our own minds in the perception of the external world. What do our mental states and preconceptions do to add to such experiences? And moreover, what about the apparent causal web that we are building here?

I think I have had all the experiences named above except severe trauma. When I was younger I was very very very religious, and I am sure that I have experienced religious ecstasy. It's why I wanted to be a priest when I was little. I have had strong aesthetic experiences of visual art as well as music - and I'm sure you have too. You know those chills you get when you listen to a beautiful work of music? That's actually this neurological process that lends itself to ecstatic experiences at work in a very mild way. And, I've done my fair share of psychedelic experimentation. I can fairly say, along with thousands of interviewees in various psychological studies (if you want some names, hit me up, I might have a few stray PDFs lying around), that these experiences were among the most formative for my identity and my sense of self. Sometimes it seems weird that we can boil our identities down to something so basic as a set of chemical processes, but there are the facts.

The fact of the matter is, it is impossible to have an ecstatic experience naturally (that is, unassisted by substances) without being prepared to enter into an ecstatic state. And I will say from experience that it's not safe to enter into an ecstatic state with the assistance of substances unless you are prepared to do so. Our brains add more to (and subtract more from) the sensory stimuli we receive from the external world than the sensory stimuli themselves. Seems a little crazy, but the classic thought experiment is to go out on the street thinking about a specific color. All of a sudden that color will start cropping up everywhere. It's not as though it wasn't there before, you just hadn't been noticing it. And perhaps this has something to do with synchronicity, too - once we are prepared to look for something, say 11:11 on a clock, we are going to see it more often. There's a survival aspect to this - once we have identified what things are good to eat or are threats to our existence, we will be more vigilant in finding them. We keep our families fed and our bodies intact.

But then you have this higher level of perception - these heightened states - that come along with sophisticated human society. In some weird warping of a survival feature gone bad, we can have these bizarre experiences of "the sublime." By some strange twist of fate, we can see things "as they really are." I'm not going to offer any judgments one way or another as to whether the things you see and experience in ecstatic states are "more real" than the things you see and experience in daily life, but I will say they are profoundly different, and in some ways it makes the world seem like a better place to think that they are the way things really are.

My point here is not a skeptical one: we can, and do, know things about the physiology of our minds, which in turn informs the way we look at the things we know about the world around us. With that in mind, I can see Silver Ladder as a deeply symbiotic relationship between the sensory stimulus (what goes on on the website, the (dis)information we get from various in-game sources) and the sensory organizers (us). It's like we're a big brain, organizing a vast quantity of information. And just as we have each picked certain things to focus on, so too has the big brain emphasized and excluded things. Just as I cannot even begin to guess what life would be like if I were to process all stimuli, I have no idea what this game would be like if we processed all stimuli.

The brain is a mysterious thing. I think that there is a certain amount of modeling that is going on here, intentional or otherwise, of human consciousness in general. I would like to think that it is intentional. What do you think?

Mind Hacks: Alice in Wonderland Neurological Disorders

2007-10-15T21:44:23Z

Just for fun -- although I haven't read it yet. Check this post at Mind Hacks...it links to a PDF of the article from a clinical neuroscience journal that was published a few years back. I don't have time to review the article right now, but I hopefully will get a chance to tomorrow. Cool!

(via Boing Boing)

A Question of Good and Evil

2007-10-15T21:07:49Z

I've been reading Philip's very thoughtful post on Jungian dualities in the characteristics of the Korporation and the deck. I have to say, his ideas were very thought-provoking and I do agree that there is a certain forcefulness toward dualism in the Korporation's rhetoric.

L.W.
Do you believe in sides?

Lillith

Of course I believe in sides. Why wouldn't I?

L.W.

That's quite a black-and-white, simplistic worldview you have there young lady.

Lillith

You all seem to hold quite the black and red simplistic world view.

L.W.

Touche. On the other hand, I wouldn't be so quick to clump us. I have a theory.

Lillith

And what is your theory? I understand if you would not like to tell an enemy, however. Do as you must.

L.W.

I have no enemies. One channel bleeds into another.

I sent Lillith a message about the Jungian duality and the fact that the deck's emphasis on love and understanding implies to me that they are trying to pull away from a dualistic view of the situation. Although they don't seem very fond of the Korporation (and who is ever very fond of assholes with simplistic worldviews?) they don't seem to spurn them per se. One of our newest team members got these Myspace messages from the Two of Hearts. Seriously, Jane, you are so post-modern. :}

So, in addition to post-modern ideas about time and causation, we seem to have a distinctively post-modern system of ethics developing here. (Or at least a distinctively post-modern system of good and evil - which is basically a lack of good and evil.)

Here is some synchronicity at work though: I just read a paper by A.J. Ayer for my philosophical ethics course addressing the topic of ethical relativism. His argument for ethical relativism - which is framed as a critique of ethics and theology - is remarkably convincing. It is an argument for an ethics that is based in a logical system.

Ayer argues that ethical statements such as "killing is wrong" cannot hold truth value in the same way commands like "do not kill" cannot hold truth value. You cannot challenge someone saying "do not kill" on the truth of his statement. So, in order to get to a theory of ethics which can be judged on a level of truth, we need to be able to translate our ethical statements into regular empirical statements. This is kind of hard - normative ethical statements don't appear to translate. Maybe this is something to think about going forward, in both life and in-game.

Die Zwei Von Spaten

2007-10-10T05:47:39Z

It is a pause;
some small recursion opening
future memory sealed softly
against prying eyes. Never
the thought occurred to me ---

What have we, at the end of the day,
but waiting for the next?

It is a pause;
some small waiting opening
future memory sealed softly
against prying minds. Always
the thought occurs to me ---

Why wait, when we can press,
forward,
into the lurid light of the unknown?

Crossposted from my poetry journal, styrofoam_jesus, for the Two of Spades.

Getting Antsy

2007-10-09T19:28:06Z

Okay, sorry I'm turning into loli_sl with my constant livejournal dumps, but I am also sitting in an hour and a half long lecture about knowledge and reality, and everything has to do with Silverladder. I just had to get this out here though.

I know that the rabbit hole is supposed to open on 11/11/07 at 11:11, but I'm starting to get antsy. We seem to be early adopters in this process, and clearly there is a goal to get more people on board before the rabbit hole opens. But I think I'm right in saying all this weird stuff has been happening amongst the crew that is indicative of our unease with the waiting process - the need for the weekend's hiatus, for example, or the forbidden contacting of Shane Watson's family, which apparently took place recently.

I myself am wondering a little why this had to happen so early -- we have about a month to go still, and I still feel like I'm stuck on my livejournal blogging about philosophical concepts that may or may not have any relevance to the game. Though I have gotten a note of encouragement from the Two of Clubs, I'm a little bit spooked. Like, my conversation with Lisa last night was fantastic, and it was really fun, and obviously that's part of the point, but afterwards I was unsettled as I drifted off to sleep, wondering whether this kind of thing is really headed anywhere at all.

I know I have espoused the theory that our theories drive what happens in-game, but still -- we haven't really started yet, as has been emphasized by the cards. And maybe that's it, we're driving the framing of the game...I don't know. Anybody else having these kinds of reservations? Again, maybe I think too much.

LOL.

2007-10-09T18:59:32Z

What Could Count as a Black Swan?

2007-10-09T15:49:17Z

Last night I had an IRC conversation with Lisa about my previous entry. We reached the additional conclusion that a surprising discovery of any kind about the external world - including one that contradicts previous beliefs about the external world - can count as a Black Swan event. Though it is not specifically outlined in the definition, the theory seems to entail that, say, discovering the Earth is actually round as opposed to flat is as unexpected and surprising as anything else random.

14th Century Europeans had no idea the Earth could be round at all - it would be quite preposterous to propose such a thing. Nothing in their knowledge set could have predicted the discovery that the Earth is round. It seems to us this is also a Black Swan event.

The Problem of Induction

2007-10-09T06:34:05Z

This was brought up in relation to the Black Swan theory earlier, and the Black Swan theory is something I can't get my mind off of. This evening the Two of Hearts noted to Lisa that "This whole thing didn't come together by accident," and of course it didn't. Not really. We just didn't expect it so much.

Basically, the problem of induction rests on the fact that we use inductive inferences to gain information about the world around us. An inductive inference is one where we make an indirect connection going from specific events to generalizations. The classic example is this:

S1: The sun has risen every morning in the past.
------
SC: The sun will rise tomorrow.

It is certainly an argument that is true, although how we reach the SC is definitely up for discussion. We have taken our experiences of the sun rising every morning and formed a belief about what the sun will do tomorrow. A number of philosophers of language have pointed out that we have no reasonable justification for believing SC given S1. There is no reason to believe a so-called Uniformity Principle of the universe. There is absolutely no reason to believe or disbelieve that the unobserved part of the universe (time and/or space) is at all consistent with the observed part.

So what are the implications of this? Well, first of all, science is fucked. All our scientific knowledge rests on inductive inferences. Second of all, we have no way of predicting future events. This is an interesting point, and it is what ties this all into the Black Swan theory.

The Black Swan theory kind of points to a flaw in induction, after all -- maybe something about it indicates that the universe isn't as uniform as we would like to believe in one way or another. Whichever way you want to paint that picture is up to you, but I am tempted to say that the most likely way in which the universe is not uniform is a function of time and causation.

As far as I can tell, both time and causation are ways the human mind have devised to organize the sensory inputs we receive, ergo, time as external reality isn't existent. That is, there is no time if there are no sentient beings to organize sensory input into chronological orders. Likewise, causation is dependent on the chronological ordering of events and the inference that one thing caused another. After David Hume, I think that all we really see is event A - let us say, me pushing loli_sl - and then event B - let us say, loli_sl on the floor. There is nothing that we actually see to imply that my pushing of loli_sl caused her to be on the floor. But that's what our brains think, because it makes more sense.

Just as the Black Swan theory points to a flaw in induction, so does it point to a flaw in time and causation, and I do not think that this is mere coincidence. Induction is dependent upon our place in space and time, and if that place in space and time is disrupted - or rather, if our perception of it is disrupted - we cannot make inductive inferences. Likewise, if our place in space and time is disrupted, then we cannot make causal inferences, and therefore cannot make predictions. This is some kind of time-causation-induction vicious circle that is kind of making my head throb. (Feel free to ask questions about this, as I am a little disjointed in my thinking about it.)

That concludes my philosophy lesson for the day.

Welcome Back

2007-10-08T06:25:50Z

It's been a nice hiatus. I have to say I didn't make as productive use of it as I would have liked. Instead of studying up and getting some homework done in advance I accidentally got really drunk Friday night. Whoops. I can't blame myself too much: I like to say that most members of our department would be mathematics majors if they weren't drunk all the time. I'm no exception to this. Takes my mind off of heavier things, and unfortunately sometimes it seems like the only thing I can use to take my mind off of heavier things.

I spent some time recalling Maurice Merleau-Ponty and my study of modern art history. Merleau-Ponty's main point is that perception is embodied. You cannot separate the aesthetic experience from physical being - your conscious mind, your perception, and your body are mutually intwined in the act of perceiving.

Oh hell, much too tired for this now. Need to get a good night's sleep because I haven't quite kicked my cold yet.

10/4/2007

2007-10-05T03:29:08Z

Everything is just as wrought with meaning as we make it.

Parallel Realities?

2007-10-05T01:35:57Z

Is 2C just talking about the inscrutability of reality, or is he implying - as I think he is - that there are parallel realities?

L.W.

I've been turning the black swan theory and the power of coincidence over and over in my mind lately. I'm beginning to build a theory that involves confirmation bias as the way that people influence things that go on - i.e., we have come to the realization that Loli's ALICE theory was something major that changed what was going on, so I am starting to think that maybe the way that causal relationships (if they even exist!!) are arranged is contrary to the way that we assume they are. I am becoming invested in randomness to the point that I am wondering if our last conversation was a series of random responses to my grabbing at straws to make sense of them. Is there any insight you can offer?

2C

There's truth in everything. There's nonsense in everything. You can see the Mona Lisa in the static on a television screen if you look hard enough. Then again, if you just change the TV to a working channel, you'll actually see something that *is* there.

L.W.

You cards and your Mona Lisa. :)But what's on the TV might *not* really be there...it only appears to be.

2C

It may be another channel bleeding through. Or perhaps, several channels bleeding through.

Whenever I write about this sort of thing I always psych myself out that I am thinking about it too hard. You reach this point where you are so wrapped up in the mystery of consciousness - or something of that nature - where you start doubting everything you see and hear to the point where you are stymied. I am having that failure of faith at present.

But while we're here - the imagery of channels bleeding through evokes for me this mystery of consciousness that all men are islands, and there is no way I will fully know anyone else's reality. In that way, I do believe in a many-universes theory, although I do not think I have the authority to hold a position on external-world-type universes. Sometimes, when we have those precious connections with other consciousnesses (I think this is called human emotion, I'm not sure, and it can also be on an intellectual level) it sometimes feels like one consciousness - one channel - is bleeding into another.

The overlap of our specific universes is right here, on the internet. We're logging it and recording it for everyone to see. Isn't that something?

The Black Swan Theory

2007-10-04T15:49:16Z

This guy is pretty neat. Nassim Taleb is the guy who really articulated the Black Swan theory as we know it today. (Although the theory in its foetal form was the work of my man Karl Popper.) Basically he writes about how people tend to ignore unexpected, unexplained events because they can't make sense of them.

Taleb proposes three fallacies:

1. Narrative fallacy: creating a story post-hoc so that an event will seem to have a cause.
2. Ludic fallacy: believing that the structured randomness found in games resembles the unstructured randomness found in life. Taleb faults random walk models and other inspirations of modern probability theory for this inadequacy.
3. Statistical regress fallacy: believing that the probability of future events is predictable by examining occurrences of past events.

(1) and (2) seem to be the most relevant to us, and incidentally they deal with my theory that we are being presented with this...stuff...and then making sense of it post-hoc. What's different between our situation and the Narrative Fallacy is that the event no longer just seems to have a cause, but ends up with a cause that has some influence on the ensuing events. Similarly, the Ludic Fallacy may point out that we expect structured randomness in simulations but everything in the world is unstructured randomness. And when we make connections between these random events, we get a weird application of the Narrative Fallacy.

Enej posted a message on the unfiction bulletin board saying we should look into it. Here's a jumping-off point. What do you think of the theory, and my outgrowth of it?

Confirmation Bias and Synchronicity

2007-10-03T19:58:06Z

I have been thinking a great deal about the role of confirmation bias-type phenomena in my daily life. In brief, basically, the human brain sees what it wants to see, and as a tool for perception and organization, it really is sometimes in our best interest to see what we think we see. We also kind of can't help it, it's a sort of side-effect of organization (sort of like...time). On the other hand, it's a pain in the ass. It occurred to me, because I had been thinking about how my conversation with 2C had seemed very quick - like he had just fired off quick, random, cryptic-sounding responses - that maybe there was a bigger role of randomness here than we were all thinking of initially.

And here's my thought - 11:11 is a time/date associated with synchronicity, and synchronicity is the connection of seemingly random events that share a temporal characteristic. Instead of causally connecting them, something else does. Mainly I think synchronicity is, like time, a byproduct of our minds being categorization machines. You see, at most one quarter of perception is actually gathering sense data. The other three-quarters or more is processing it - categorizing it, making spatial sense of it, and making temporal sense of it.

So here's where our causal role comes in: there is no pattern to what's happening, really, except for some references to numerology and occult symbolism to get us started down the path. Rather, we create the meaning here - take the jumble of mystical, pop-cultural, and artistic references and process the shit out of them. What comes out the other end - like the ALICE theory - shakes up what's going down in the story, so that it starts to resemble, and indeed conform to, our various confirmation biases. And I think that's why they want more and more players - the more people we've got on this, the more weird and esoteric our confirmation-bias-directed references and understandings become. Quite frankly, that's just cool.

The Fluidity of Reality

2007-10-02T06:05:22Z

Just before the Two of Clubs was silenced, I had the following brief MySpace conversation with him.

L.W.
Evenin' 2C.

As a relative newcomer, I have a lot of learning to do, but I have discovered the learning curve here is more about volume than content. Something that has been nagging me is about causation, though -- I seem to be detecting suggestions of an enormous web of causal chains, and I find it intriguing. Coupled with some early communications' emphasis on synchronicity, though, I am unclear as to how deep I should invest into such a causal map...

I also wonder if I read too much into things. It is the philosopher of language in me.

Cheers
L.W.

2C
It will have more to do with content than volume soon enough. It will be content in volume.

One domino does most definitely fall into the other, but sometimes one of them goes sideways, and a new reality is created. There is a path set, but those on it have already changed directions several times.

There is concrete, but you can shape it before it dries.

L.W.
You're saying that events are both random and causally linked? Events are causally linked, predetermined, and up for manipulation?

It makes sense. It is an infinite game, yes? One in which the object of the game is to manipulate the rules and continue playing. But the original rules themselves are a bit of a mystery still, and I guess that's the way it is generally speaking.

Nevertheless concrete is still concrete and will never be...say...wool...the rabbit hole will open, for example?

2C
The rabbit hole is concrete. There are some certainties in life. There are some absolute truths. There is a beginning an an end. Everything in between is wide open.

L.W.
What I'm feeling is that the concreteness of everything is becoming less and less apparent. Even a beginning and an end, more and more, seem arbitrary.

2C
"I can't see the car!"

Oh, but what a ride it will be.

Sometimes I wonder if 2C was actually telling me something, or spitting off random responses and hoping I'd get something out of it. (This is actually something I worry about now and then with mostly everything and everybody, and I guess this is because I have a great deal of skepticism about causation. More later.) The malleability of reality, of course, is something that so many people have thought so very much about in the past.

This is also kind of a tie-in to the comments the Two of Hearts made about art tonight: I wanted to bring up the fact that perception is, at most, about a quarter actually receiving stimuli to the sense organs and, at least, three quarters processing it. It was brought up on the IRC channel that the subjectivity of art might have something to do with the "what if the green I'm seeing is different from the green you're seeing?" problem. Processing is mainly a verbal exercise: putting things into categories is the way in which we are able to identify things. Take a shoe for example - you see a shoe sitting on your bedroom floor, and you know it is a shoe because you have prior experience of shoes. If you did not, who knows what you would think? Perhaps you'd have prior experience with their color - say, black. Or with their material - say, leather. But you would not have an experience of shoes.

And maybe that is the trick here - we are getting all these cryptic messages and applying our various filters to them, and each getting something wildly different. It's been discussed that there are no hard-and-fast rules or meanings here. Maybe this is the point of origin for the "point."

Synchronicity and Causation

2007-10-01T17:39:32Z

There is a great deal of emphasis on causal relationships that I have noticed so far. And there is a very nuanced inconsistency going on here. At the same time, I've been quoted saying "coincidence is all we have." One of the first communications from Two of Clubs was this:

synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally unrelated. In order to be Synchronous, the events must be related to one another conceptually, and the chance that they would occur together by random chance must be very small.

Which is interesting, considering other people are talking about how we players influence things. Is there such a thing as synchronicity - especially in this environment, where there appear to be both internal and external influences. I was discussing with loli_sl last night on the IRC channel her theory that Neurocam might have something to do with what's going on here. Are there external forces in this game? And if so, maybe there is less coincidence than we might be seeing at face-value. If not, I'm clearly overthinking this whole thing.

Yet the time travel aspect does bother me - time travel presents a number of problems of causation, especially with people from the "present" accessing "future memory." I think that if time travel is possible, then it is so that all moments exist simultaneously, in which case there is no such thing as causal relationships. Maybe I am overthinking this...