Draw, Run, Write.: Approximating Intelligence: How To Believe Anything You Want

I'm agnostic as to whether James Lindsay's work at new discourses is a practical necessity. That's the premise of this post, but it wouldn't tell you much.

In the Simpson's episode "Lady Bouvier's Lover" Marge's mother is faced with a choice between marrying Mr. Burns or Abe Simpson. To which she rejects both suitors. And what I would state at the outset, is that if political camps are suitors, I reject both, and I think people forget that this is an option.

The line I actually draw, is between poles of 'beliefs create reality' and 'reality constrains beliefs'.

And the central question I'm posing here, is IS it necessary to dig into Hegel > Marx > Lennon > Marcuse > Freire / Derrida > Foucault > Butler > Hooks > Crenshaw etc.

I say no.

But Can't I Already Believe What I Want?

Yes. Smart arse.

You can believe the universe is a chicken salad sandwich. This works fine for unfalsifiable beliefs. We can believe whatever we want where there are no stakes to settle.

I'm referring to a case like...

I'm taller than you.

It's generally good to be tall. Women who like men, generally like taller men. Tall men have better odds of becoming a CEO and better odds of becoming NBA players. There might be elevated risk of cardiac arrest in later life, and taller women can find themselves with fewer dating options etc.

But generally, better to be tall. And I'm taller than you. I believe that. But you pull out a ruler, or a tape measure, or a marker or something and say 'let's settle this'.

Now if I believe what I want, rather than what our senses tell us, I'm going to look delusional.

That's why there's a technique for how to believe anything you want.

How To Believe Whatever You Want

SHUZAN held up his staff and waved it before his monks.
"If you call this a staff," he said, "you deny its eternal life.
If you do not call this a staff, you deny its present fact. Tell
me just what do you propose to call it?" ~ sourced here.

Similar to my last post in this series 'Conversation Starters' the technique differs only slightly. Rather than simply disregarding a generally accepted fact, asserting a false premise, in order to proceed with a conversation. The technique is a simple matter of disregarding the concept of knowledge itself. It's super tedious.

René Magritte – The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe), 1929, photo: CC BY-NC 2.0 by Thomas Hawk

Basically you just create a gap, about an inch wide and then you cram a mile of spurious bullshit through it. What is that gap though? The gap is between language, and what language describes.

So we take Magritte's "The treachery of images" as an example. It's a painting of a pipe, with the caption 'this is not a pipe' which it isn't, it's a painting of a pipe. You can't pick it up, pack it with tobacco, light it and smoke it. Woah woaaaah woahhhhhhhh!

But as per the Zen Koan that opened this section, sweeping aside the esoteric language, you could do the same thing with a real 'pipe' because 'pipe' is "just" a word. What we mean when we say pipe, is wooden thing with a bowl and hole through it through which we smoke tobacco. And then WOAH WOAH WOAH you can do that with every word in my description of what a pipe is - 'bowl' is just a word we mean 'curved cavity in a substance that can hold other substances' and by 'tobacco' we mean 'green plant thing what has nicotine in it.'

And like 'woah' nothing really is what we say it is... therefore, women on average are as tall as men on average.

That's basically how to believe anything you want to believe. You dismiss the notion of a reality that constrains beliefs, by tediously using some variation of 'what is reality? It's *just* a word.' Shutting out the person responding to (what you meant as a rhetorical question) with: 'Reality is that which persists in the absence of belief.' ...Or you know, maybe you engage with pseudo-profundity by just asking:

'But what is "persist"?'

Open your palms and say 'who's to say anything is anything at all...'
Then conclude 'therefore, [whatever you want.]'

That's it. Pretty much every time. This did not take me hours to illustrate, and furthermore, I don't think it necessitates a review of the literature, even if I drew on Zen philosophy and Surrealist paintings as examples. That's more to demonstrate that noticing a map and the ground are not the exact same thing is a common, pseudo profound intuition.

It may seem like you have a point, if you are working with a category that has fuzzy edges, like Wittgenstein's definition of a "game" but not so much when my old lady asks me if I want anything from the store and I ask for a "snickers".

I have not, set her an impossible task. In fact it is quite predictable that she will bring me the exact thing I asked for. A mother fucking snickers.

It's the same if I ask her to buy a non-mass produced good like 'chicken'. Even in an alternative language that calls it 'pollo'.

One morning Shuzan asked his apprentice 'have you seen my staff?' and the apprentice said 'I have no idea what you're talking about.'

Which is to say, to believe anything you want, all you have to do, is ignore the entirety, and success with which language is conventionally useful. Ie. at describing things.

It Begins and Ends With Zeno

You are sitting in a room, or somewhere outdoors. At some point, you will leave the area you are in. But to do so, you will have to first travel halfway right?

Surely you agree. And agreeing to that, you must agree that before you reach the halfway point to leaving, you'll have to reach the halfway point to the halfway point. Agreed?

And to get to that halfway point, between you and halfway, you'll have to pass halfway to that point. In turn half way to that. And half again, and again, and again, and again and again. Halfway to halfway to halfway to halfway to halfway...

An infinite number of subdivisions.

That in my own words, is Zeno's paradox of motion. All of them. Whether it's Achilles and a tortoise, or an arrow in flight.

Zeno is wrong. We could look east of ancient Greece to ancient India, somewhere between the 6th-2nd century BCE, where Kanada (Atom Eater) reasoned his way to the indivisible, the atom, such that any amount of space is not infinitely divisible, or halvable, but is finite such that we pass atom 2 on the way to atom 3 and that is all there is to it.

But much closer, allegedly/apocraphylly, to Zeno was Diogenes, who rebutted the argument simply by getting up and walking away.

Now let's turn Zeno on his side. Now he is standing atop a light-house having drunken an amphora of wine. Tipsy he slips and falls from the top of the lighthouse. To hit the ground he would first have to fall halfway, and before he can fall halfway...[three hours later] and halfway to that point. So Zeno and anybody else is fine. It is but a mere illusion that all objects accelerate towards earth at 9.8m/s^2 reaching terminal velocity when drag = acceleration.

"And Yet It Moves"

Now we go from 5th century Greece BCE, to 16.5th century Italy CE, (Except we can't because first we'd have to get to the 2nd century CE and before that...[several years later] midday, and to get to midday we first have to get to 9am...) Where Galileo Galilei mutters under his breath

'And yet it moves'

after being forced to apologize for claiming the Earth isn't the stationary centre point around which the heavens revolve.

Some kind of trial had thoroughly proved, that the Earth does not revolve around the Sun using the very sound epistemology of consulting scripture.

Alas, when I said it begins and ends with Zeno, I was being hyperbolic. But it should for you. Diogenes rebuttal is rock solid. Zeno actually points the way though to 'how to believe anything' and it is, far from actually being interesting, the incredibly boring appeal to insisting language is, what reality was made of.

That language doesn't predominantly attempt to describe reality, but predominantly defines reality. It is somehow all the shit we talk about chickens, that render chickens unable to fly.

Giving the Devil His Due

The Church or whoever was giving Galileo a hard time just for speaking his truth, (incidently, the truth) provides an example of how the powerful can construct reality in the short term.

Imagine a man old enough to be your father, but sexy enough to be your daddy... I'm detracting from the point I'm trying to make. Imagine you have a father or grandfather or brother or beloved male teacher or whatever, pick a guy you feel quite comfortable about. Then imagine that you discover he is guilty of 10 counts of homicide against women a-la-Dennis "BTK" Rader.

A man that had a wife and 2 children and was a leader of his church.

Dennis the family man was a reality running from 1971-2004 or 5. Then the 'super' reality of BTK imposed itself on that constructed reality.

I pull out this case, because it's a kind of collapsing of two alternate realities that I imagine was super visceral for BTK's wife and kids. For his community and so forth.

It represents the kind of short-run concession I can make to the otherwise thoroughly unexciting notion of power-knowledge, grand-metanarratives and social constructivism.

Rader had the power to make himself known for some three decades (74~04) but he used that power to create a "reality" in which BTK did "not exist". The police didn't know who to arrest nor how to protect potential victims from him.

Bodies turned up, as though nobody had killed them at all. Dennis Rader created a reality in which BTK did not exist.

This isn't to say that 'anything is possible.' There's no cosmic power being exerted here. All of society around Dennis Rader had to operate on a map that simply didn't match the ground.

The bible and other scripture are other such maps, that taken seriously, alter reality. We have to deal with people that variously believe the Israelites migrated from Egypt across the bottom of the sea. That the male common ancestor of all humanity and the common female ancestor of all humanity lived in the same place and at the same time, that there was a global flood and that a global flood is even possible and on and on with claims that are demonstrably false, ahistorical but... did have predictive power.

It has predictive power insofar as people's behaviour is informed by their beliefs. Like if you believe that God chose your people from a bunch of spare people he also created for some reason, not to mention all the spare animals and creepy things that crawleth.

But a more grounded example might be somebody who acts on a belief that a financial security is safe. Because an institution rated it AAA, as safe as sovereign debt, even though that security is a 'collateralised debt obligation' or a bunch of 0.1% stakes in a bunch of garbage loans that were sold to you, in order to offload them from the lenders books who knew they were garbage.

A really common example of belief-creating-reality is all the people that secure loans and finance by convincing someone else that they are solvent, that they earn money, that they can someday pay it back with interest. It could be plain incompetent forecasting through to outright fraud.

The point is you can take reality - someone who is broke, operating a business that loses money, and slap a new "reality" over the top of it and change reality...

For a while.

To Know is To Predict

In order to ultimately believe anything, one inevitably needs to dedicate oneself to a concerted effort to not notice that the cosmos are dynamic rather than stationary, that we can indeed move around, regardless of whether we understand what this means and that people know what we mean by terms like snickers, chicken, fried chicken and what not.

Yes in some trivial sense, things are systemic, alas not arbitrary, and seldom malicious, more often self serving.

When push ultimately comes to shove, to know something is to be able to predict something. Whether that be in the past or future.

Take for example the question 'how much money do you have on you?' To know how much money you have is typically (and in cases of Visa paywave being available, historically,) a matter of predicting the face value of bank notes and coins on your person.

Accusations directed at me of bias, are true. I am bias, prejudiced, whatever, and it is towards the predictive power of knowledge. On that front, I can accept a concept like 'power-knowledge' whole heartedly. I just fail to care.

The first thing is that generally speaking, the epistemologies that historically have entrenched power, are widely available now - Empiricism (the scientific method), Rationalism (mathematics) and so forth are free to anyone with an uncensored internet connection. They are probably free to those with censored internet. Just not pictures of Xi as Winnie the Pooh or Putin in makeup.

Construction vs. Convention

It was Brown University Professor Glenn Lowry that pointed out to me that money is not a construction but a convention.

Money has a bunch of properties, necessary properties, in order to be used as money. Even though constructed. It has to be relatively scarce, generally acceptable, a unit of account, a store of wealth etc.

Remove any of those qualities, money doesn't work anymore. At least, not as money. You might notice that Cryptocurrencies have none of these qualities except, arguably being relatively scarce. And as at writing this might explain how bitcoin has lost half its value in the past year.

So people holding fiat currency worried that inflation has hit 6.1% p.a. it's a far worse story for people who bought crypto a year ago. But crypto isn't money. It's more like paintings, sports memorabilia etc. Crypto are most likely 'greater fool' investments. I.e. things that have no intrinsic value purchased by fools in the hopes that they can be sold to greater fools, fooling themselves.

Conservative comedian Matt Walsh released a documentary I haven't seen this year called 'What is a Woman?' where from what I can gather he gathered the very low fruit of watching theoreticians struggle to answer this question.

For the record, my intuitive response to 'what is a woman' would be 'a mature girl.' It's a common honorific bestowed upon females.

There are some people who want to introduce terms like 'birthing people' for a variety of reasons, none of which I'm interested into going into here. And this is where construction runs into convention.

To pick out just one application, and it really is a separate post, "woman" as gender role is treated as a social construction, and therefore subject to reconstruction, redefining. But it doesn't exist in a vacuum. There are other pieces of language like 'heterosexual' or 'lesbian' that had nested the social construction of "woman" within them. So redefining or reconstructing or deconstructing "woman" also redefines, reconstructs, deconstructs "heterosexual" and "lesbian".

But these were conventions. They had predictive powers. Before redefinitions such as 'trans women are women' If someone were to say they were heterosexual, we very definitely knew who they would not sleep with. They would not sleep with people who weren't women. After redefinition, we discover that heterosexual men and lesbians in many cases won't sleep with women.

I don't understand my own sexuality. If someone were to ask, I would say I am heterosexual. But if someone were to ask me if I would sleep with a trans woman, in principle, my honest answer would be 'not knowingly.' What's my justification? Nothing intelligible. Or rather, it need not be intelligible.

Why don't I want to put another man's penis in my mouth? Or less graphically, why am I reluctant to kiss another man on the lips? Why wouldn't I hold hands with another man as we walked down the street, or as we waited for our brunch to arrive?

There's no intelligible answer, but there was a conventional answer: 'I'm not gay.'

So redefining women isn't as simple as changing a social construction, because it also breaks conventions, that even with overlapping distribution (in this case, some number of heterosexual men and lesbians that would sleep with trans women) it's predictable that the pre-existing convention would either become a kind of 'black market' convention, ie. men call themselves heterosexual, women call themselves lesbian and officially would have sex with the new construction of "women" but in practice only have sex with the old convention of women.

Or you just get a linguistic arms race, where "straight" or "heterosexual" is ceded and men start identifying as "super-straight".

If you believe in nothing...

You'll believe anything. And now there's an intuitive method abounding that proves it true.

For me personally it is extreme-left-wing politics that annoys me most with the tedium of believing anything they want. But my tribe is really neither right nor left but the people willing to have arguments constrained by a tentative understanding of reality.

The outside tribe is that trying to bludgeon reality into non-existence. I'm not worried that they can ultimately invade and conquer. I'm worried about how much damage they will do until the truth will out.

Mostly, this stuff is a pain in the ass. Little more. Like insisting on photo id to vote. That's just a pain in the ass, given what is known about the incidence of actual voter fraud. Vaccine hesitancy is just a pain in the ass, given what is known about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Graysexual people, are just a pain in the ass, given the autonomy people still maintain regarding who they sleep with and date.

Some contrition would be nice, given the fullness of time.

What is proving true, even specifically by the example of 'super straight' is Timothy Snyder's prediction that without a public domain, there can be no resistance.

So does the Internet allow new things, or does the Internet create a channel for old things? I would say it's rather the latter. We know, because this is something that people have theorized about since the Enlightenment, that in order for there to be a democracy there has to be something between you and me and our fellow citizens, something between you and me and our leaders, which is: a factual world. We have to have this thing called the public sphere where you and I and our fellow citizens and our leaders agree that there are certain realities out there, and that from those realities we draw our own conclusions, our own evaluative conclusions about what would be better or worse, but we agree that the world is out there. And that it's important for you and I, as citizens, to formulate projects, but it's also important in moments of difficulty for you and I, as citizens, to resist our leaders. Because if we're going to resist our leaders we have to say, "On the basis of this set of facts, this is the state of affairs; it's intolerable; therefore we resist." If there are no facts we can't resist, it becomes impossible.

And this is the cautionary tale of believing whatever you want. It's self defeating.

I do not know the origins of 'trans women are women' for example, and it's ambiguous as to whether it is linguistically equivalent to 'apples are food' or 'apples are apples' probably worth a google, alas I found nothing. My guess is that it's intended to mean 'apples are apples' as in to collapse the distinction of 'cis' and 'trans' and is certainly not intended to mean 'oranges are apples'.

But we can see, there's no resistance to whatever unbearable oppression redefining women was supposed to make. As many discovered before the invention of 'super straight' was that it just doesn't work. Alas, heterosexual and lesbian never meant 'someone who sleeps with all and any women' The language never had the reality defining power to say 'you say you're attracted to women, I'm a woman therefore you are attracted to me.' And conversely for lesbians, the whole population of women however defined were never available to lesbians, not even a majority just the sum of lesbian and bisexual women.

How to Resist Any Belief

1. I feel like eating a KFC Tower Burger.

2. [Holds up what was conventionally known as a pinecone.] This is a KFC Tower Burger.

3. That's a pinecone.

4. Who's to say it's a pinecone and not a KFC Tower Burger?

5. [Throw's away pinecone.] Thanks.

6. I thought you said you wanted to eat it.

7a. I never said that.

8a. You just said it a second ago.

9a. I'm not who "I" said "I" was.

7b. Who's to say "throwing away" is not "eating" a KFC Tower Burger?

Yeah so just to hopefully illustrate the last point. If definitions, destinctions, facts don't exist, then they don't exist. Not simply when they suit someone to not exist.

All that is achieved by how to believe anything you want, is that someone has given up on the challenge of describing reality. Definitional offenses permit definitional retreats as beautifully illustrated by the 'trans women are women' > 'super straight' response.

Friday, September 30, 2022

Approximating Intelligence: How To Believe Anything You Want

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