Mar 25, 2023 · writings • free

Why "Philosophy" is Invalid

And what is wrong with people who call themselves "philosophers?"

But the people who are “in the know” know that results and the inadequacies of words are why “philosophy” is bunk. It is pretty easy to see why. Precise measurement is what enables precise prediction. Mathematics is how precise measurement is translated into precise prediction. Any verbal deviation from these decreases the precision of prediction.

Say you want to predict when a ball dropped off of a 50 meter roof will hit the ground. How long will it take? What about when the roof is 100 meters? The answer is that it will take the square root of the height of the roof divided by 4.9 seconds to reach the ground.

Even this sentence is vague. Did I just write

t = \sqrt{ \frac{d}{4.9} }

or did I write

t = \frac{\sqrt{d}}{4.9}

and where do the seconds go? On the bottom?

And I was speaking in a way essentially translatable into algebraic notation. What if I just abandoned quantity, as English allows? I could say that it stands to reason, that, given the tendency of Things Which Are (they have Being) to fall, it is the Nature of Objects to drop; therefore, the ball will drop when let off a roof.

That reads like philosophy! In fact, Aristotle attempted verbal physics and ended up with this:

What if I abandoned thinking predictively? “The essence of the ball is one of ballness. The Being of the ball is as-Object, hence the identity of the ball is preserved no matter its context. It follows that the ball cannot really change, for such would be a contradiction of identity.”

Mathematical communication forces the relating of quantities. If you are describing the world with math, you are measuring it and relating those metrics to other metrics. You are observing things very closely by breaking them down into measurements and you are predicting things by relating those measurements in a way that works. You are really, truly, going beyond the common sense of verbiage.

From this, I think you can begin to see a key heuristic I want to make philosophers get: if I open up a book and it’s all words and no attempt at studying the natural world, it is a waste of time unless it was probably written by or inspired by God or is studying a text that is probably written by or inspired by God.

So I open Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. It’s math. Little to no observation. But what it tells me is that if I have a relation fitting some starting assumptions, there is a bunch of logic I can do to study the relation. For example, if I have two measurements from 300 people, I can do a bunch of math and find something called a correlation coefficient that tells me how much those two measurements are linearly related, because those measurements are like two random variables. So abstract math is good. Another example is topology, which is useful in relating the quantities concerned in language processing AI. Now say I open Political Parties by Robert Michels. No quantity, but at least it’s observation. The value is probably limited but I might generate some hypotheses from the vague observations. Then say I open a physics textbook. Excellent, it’s filled with positive mathematics.

Now say I open Deleuze.

We can follow the becoming of these doubles in mixed semiotics, which are interminglings as well as degradations. On the one hand, the passional love double, the couple in love-passion, falls into a conjugal relation or even a "domestic squabble" situation: Which is the subject of enunciation? Which is the subject of the statement? The battle of the sexes: You 're stealing my thoughts. The domestic squabble has always been a cogito for two, a war cogito. Strindberg took this fall of love-passion into despotic conjugality and hysterico-paranoid squabbling to its extreme ("she" says she found it all by herself when in fact she owes it all to me, echo, thought theft, O Strindberg!). On the other hand, the consciousness-related double of pure thought, the couple of the legislating subject, falls into a bureaucratic relation and a new form of persecution in which one double takes over the role of subject of enunciation while the other is reduced to a subject of the statement; the cogito itself becomes an "office squabble," a bureaucratic love delusion. A new form of bureaucracy replaces or conjugates with the old imperial bureaucracy, the bureaucrat says / think (Kafka goes the furthest in this direction, as in the example of Sortini and Sordini in The Castle, or the many subjectifications of Klamm). Conjugality is the development of the couple, and bureaucracy the development of the cogito. But one is contained in the other: amorous bureaucracy, bureaucratic couple. Too much has been written on the double, haphazardly, metaphysically, finding it everywhere, in any old mirror, without noticing the specific regime it possesses both in a mixed semiotic where it introduces new phases, and in the pure semiotic of subjectification where it inscribes itself on a line of flight and introduces very particular figures. Once again: the two figures of thought-consciousness and love-passion in the postsignifying regime; the two moments of bureaucratic consciousness and conjugal relation in the mixed fall or combination. But even in a mixed state, the original line is easily discovered by semiotic analysis.

Actual word soup with no attempt at observing, much less measuring, and predicting phenomena. Basically no attempt at finding truth. Maybe Deleuze was just a retard. Try based Heidegger, who had something to say about physics. He thought he knew something about Being and Time:

When, for instance, a fruit is unripe, it "goes towards" its ripeness. In this process of ripening, that which the fruit is not yet, is by no means pieced on as something not yet present-at-hand. The fruit brings itself to ripeness, and such a bringing of itself is a characteristic of its Being as a fruit. Nothing imaginable which one might contribute to it, would eliminate the unripeness of the fruit, if this entity did not come to ripeness of its own accord. [btw, if you spray fruit with ethene, it will ripen!]

Okay, is this worth reading, or should I pay attention to the adults in the room who actually study fruits and know ethene causes ripening, can be measured, and from that the time to ripening can be predicted?

An actual study of the origins of fruit ripening and the process through time should have a chart like the one shown above. It should have measurements that support this chart. Maybe some equations for the curves on the chart. I flip through Being and Time and see a lot of words and nothing approaching measurement or mathematics. I throw away Being and Time and go study relativity and quantum mechanics, with the intellectual big boys. This is because verbal language is low resolution and built on common sense, and knowledge is about going beyond those things.

What is wrong with philosophers?

But what if I were stupid and couldn’t comprehend relativity and quantum mechanics? Say I’m very curious about the fundamental essence of reality, society, but can only physically produce low quality verbal screed?

What if I have the mathematical capacities of the average Biology or Political Science grad student, but I’m a lot more curious and want to chart new courses into the study of the mind, the study of social power, the study of being itself, the study of time, etc. But I have the mind of a botanist or a pseudo-scientist. How are they doing again?

Fawcett and Higginson (1) have shown that citation rates of biology papers with equations in the main text are lower than those of papers without equations. They claim that this implies “heavy use of equations impedes communication among biologists” and recommend that equations be moved to appendixes to improve citation rates. We suggest that a better interpretation of their results would be “mathematical illiteracy impedes progress in biology.”

Oh, you know, just trying to cut equations out of their field because they’re too confusing and the democratic consensus (citations) of biologists soy-sneer at them.

Meanwhile, studying the mind looks like this:

Studying social power looks like this:

Studying being and time looks like this:

Uh, ouch. But I’m a philosophy brain, so I don’t really understand any of this. I’m like a man with 20/100 vision who can’t quite see things far away. So I tell myself that everyone has 20/100 vision, everyone sees in 240p. And the public, well, they’re blind, so they don’t know the difference well enough to defund the Heideggers and the literary theorists and so on. So I become a literary theorist of physics and call it philosophy. And that is why Lacan and Saussure are taken seriously in film criticism departments but not in quantitative psychology and articificial intelligence groups — these things are on two different levels. Philosophy is in the intellectual WNBA. People become philosophers when they want to do intellectual work but can’t cut it in the big leagues. They supply the lower physics, psychology, sociology, all free from numbers. They produce nothing. Their work is like a WNBA game. This is why they are so resentful and emotional when you tell them that they’re doing it wrong — you’re Michael Jordan telling someone who is 5’5” he’s not dunking correctly. He can’t.