Note 126

Empirics: The (infinite?) process of refining educated guesses.

Personal Identity 1

The problem is that the form of correspondence of the correlation between the inside-out perspective of the “I” and the outside-in perspective of the “I” is arbitrary and pragmatic. They are not the same kind of object, and the connection cannot be derived from either perspective, but must be established by empirical experience. This makes it essentially unknowable.

The I is not fully identified with either, and both do not fully capture what I is as a set of phenomena.

The process of identifying the I as a set of phenomena and the I as attribution of self-same identity to that phenomena involves the integration of the phenomena to the contrasting frame through explanation.

For example, the I of the inside-out frame requires some way of differentiating internal from external phenomena, and the only way to do so is to establish that division via an externalist narrative of an object with special features in the world. Similarly, the I of the outside-in frame needs to establish the provenance of the material object via correlation of material observations with internal experiences. The combination of the two gives rise to the externalist narrative established via correlation of internal experience and the material world.

An object in two different frames of reference are thereby conflated with each other in a single language game of daily use.

Philosophical Investigations Note 4: Duck-Rabbit 1

Context is the set of associations which give rise to the content of identity conditions for phenomena. Identity conditions are not a function of the phenomena but of the language game. The phenomena is the cause/trigger of the language game. It causes it, and is the limiting condition. It plays the role of existence – the interface of meaning and non-meaning. (It identifies the language game from nothing).

(Heuristic)
Form of Life
↕
Identity
↕
Phenomena
↕
(Application)
Identity
↕
Associations
↕
Context
↕
Use

Note 125

Anything which is not found within is not truly yours. Identifying with external objects is a form of objectification, which is the start of misguided living.

Note 124

The problem is that there is never proof of a categorical distinction, only a manifestation of it through correlations. Therefore assertions cannot be proved or disproved by evidence. But that also means that nothing more can be said about them.

Inflation 1

There are 2 necessary conditions of inflation: excess credit and insufficient capacity. The former, combined with structural supply bottlenecks to increased investment (project obstacles, insufficient skills) in conditions of deficient aggregate demand, creates asset bubbles. The latter, which sees cyclical short-term bottlenecks to increased inventory production, combined with strong growth in aggregate demand, creates wage and goods price inflation. At root is lack of investment, and inflation is the early-stage recovery period of excess savings over investment, of which central bank policy is the price-taker.

Quote 18

"Looked at from the network point of view, survival depends on routings that provide better use of resources - for example, re-circulation of water and biocarbon in an ecosystem, or an improved multiplier effect for cash flow in an economy. Inside a network community, it is these routings that are favoured. As a consequence, the tags that determine these routings become persistent features of the community. Persistent tags, in turn, become building blocks for for further changes, and consequently, the source of new hierarchical organizations. In this process, the throughput from lower-level niches largely determines the nature of interactions between higher-level niches - persistent lower-level niches with higher throughput have more influence on the overall organization." - John Holland, Complexity

Note 123

It is a mistake to say that emergent phenomena derive from complex adaptive systems, like wetness from H2O molecules. Emergent phenomena come from the interaction between different systems, which creates new frames of reference - even if one system is causally antecedent to another.

Quote 17

Major insight from Dawkins: the noticing of structures is the fundamental nature of knowledge of the world.

“We humans, uniquely among animalkind, have the poet’s gift of metaphor: of noticing when things are like other things and using the relation as a fulcrum for our thoughts and feelings.” - Richard Dawkins