Same old same old

In trying to explain narcissistic selection as something related to but distinct from natural selection, I've been developing (what I see as) a fundamental premise of philosophy, more primitive than logic can support. According to most people with opinions on the matter, there can be nothing more primitive than logic, but I think of this as an example of precisely the problem (with logic) that I'm trying to deal with. Mathematics is ultimately primitive, but when you use words and things instead of symbols and numbers and call it "logic", I don't think it remains so fundamental.

The central premise of my 'religion' has always been the realization, which I first glimpsed back in the 1990s, of what I now refer to as the 'bootstrap problem'. It occurred to me that what had formerly been considered the most basic of philosophical ideas, long adopted by IPTM, were actually quite advanced, or simply shoddy philosophy, requiring assumptions that were considered necessary only because they were declared unavoidable. In truth, these are the underpinnings which allow philosophies such as Buddhism to seem both very simple and very complicated at the same time. Buddhism (at least some kinds), for instance, simplifies philosophy (and commits a peculiar inversion of Socates' Error that ends up being just as erroneous) to the point that consciousness itself is not something generated in our brains, but is instead inherent in the fabric of existence.

But it is my conviction that there is a great deal of things, call them philosophy, religion, or science, that separates the process of cogitation that we experience as thought and the physical mechanics of the universe. Without a human (or other linguistically sentient) perspective on matter and time, the un-ended cascade of physical interactions between particles which is the cosmos does not resolve itself, as we often suppose, into objects and occurrences, the emergent properties of being which we call stars and planets and rocks and (non-linguistically sentient) creatures, are not apparent, are not important; they are chaotic and transient results of the unended cascade of particle interactions, real but not manifest. Time itself cannot truly be said to exist as we think of it until a sentience is capable of thinking of it in that way. This is the natural logical state of the universe.

Into this existing but unknown universe, reason is born. It makes sense that so many people insist there must be a God to create and even guide it, since the simplest reasoning makes it obvious that time has been passing for longer than we have been here to observe it, that although we essentially create the universe we see in our minds through our perceptions, there must surely be a universe, uncreated by our perception but instead by the unended cascade of physical interactions of energy and matter within unperceived (but now manifest) time. This, I believe, is because science does not merely lack an explanation for the separation of our thoughts from the universe in which they occur, but insists that there is no such gulf. IPTM is not only the idea that our brains are similar to computers, but that computers are similar to our brains. Thought is merely the mathematics of neural networks, and the emergent property we call mind is just as automatic and fundamental a process as electrons or gravity, according to IPTM. Any properly programmed computer will (miraculously?) bootstrap itself to consciousness, is the assumption.

Anyway, I'm trying to work out (in my own perdicious way) the nature of the bootstrap process, in the mechanism of reasoning but also in the mechanism of evolution. My hypothesis is that the fundamental premises of identity, similarity, and affinity explain something (or perhaps everything) about how it occurs. Some way of defining a thing (a particular form of molecule which represents biological information which we call a "gene", for instance) both in its own and in relation to any other (similarity and affinity) is required.

It all still needs to be sorted out, and I haven't done that yet. I'm still a little unsure whether any of it could ever make sense to others. But I am pretty sure there is something important in there, something which will help me, in turn, explain the gap of boostrapping that seems so problematic to me and so invisible, so non-existent, to everyone else. I put a page on the wiki to give me a workspace to try to develop the idea by trying to explain it. Eventually I imagined I would link it in to the NS page, but I haven't even finished the first draft, having barely begun to describe what 'identity' is to begin with. Overall, the idea is that our common assumption that a molecule "does" things, that even a single celled organism presents or possesses some kind of volition, that creatures are capable of purposefully maintaining their own integrity, is not logically valid, that the validity is assumed for convenience' sake. Scientific logic assumes the same premise, but under the influence of Socrates' Error, proceeds to ignore it. My belief is that this relates to both the process of reasoning and the process of biological evolution itself. But I've hardly gotten started with any of it.

So why is it that 13 people have already found and seen (if not read) the 'ISA' (identity, similarity, affinity) page? I know I sound like a stuck record, at least half the updates on this blog have been nothing but the same thing over and over, marveling as if in my own narcissistic glory that there has been anyone at all reading any of this. But that's just the phase I'm in; until the presentation at the UU next month, I've got nothing to go on with my "new religion to save the world" than these hit counts, simultaneously pathetically small and unbelievably huge. So I hope I can be forgiven for being a bit obsessed with them, and the fact that they haven't slowed down in the last few weeks as my posting and updates have decreased. And for anyone trying to make sense of the ISA page, I wanted to let you know that I'm still struggling with it, but I don't expect to have anything more written any time soon.