Monday, 17 October 2022

All Things Are Relative & SRH Statements

Bit of history, my first maxim.

Derived from understanding a line of physics "there is no nail we can hammer into the space-time to give us an absolute reference point for velocity" All velocity is relative to something else (a frame of reference. However the speed of light is constant to all frames of reference). But understanding the relative nature of speed gave the analogy to see all things as relative.

When we take any measurement it is with reference to a "yard stick." The issue then was whether deciding what something was required a yard stick.

Original investigation was colours as these are the most apparent qualia. Usually we think the colour of something is absolute.


That is green and if we pick a bit of it the "greenness" we think is "just there" and is "green in itself." 


There we go a patch of green cut from the above picture. In there are "pixels" that are green in themselves. However we have placed it on a white background in order to see it. Suppose we cut a bit of white from a picture:




There we go a bit of "whiteness" we think is "just there" and is "white in itself."

Now actually what is uncovered here is different from what I investigated as a child. The presence/absence of white above is down to "context" and is Quine's use/mention distinction. The page is white, the gap above has an ambiguity because I am referring to s specific patch of white in the same way as the green above, and yet because it is white on a white background we're unsure which is the patch being mentioned. While the contextual white of the page is being used.

A a child I was investigating the actual qualia. A much deeper problem than just a meaning problem. Does the "whiteness" or "greenness" have a quality that is "in itself."

So the question to resolve is whether the green in a red context is different from the green in a yellow context. To his credit and I mentioned this before in the blog a friend when asked this question decide that at the boundary between red/green and yellow/green the green was different.

As a way in to this suppose the whole world was green. If all we ever knew was green then we would never have a word for green. Why would we say something was "green" since everything was green. It would be meaningless. I think I first met that idea in The Machine Stops. When Kuno gets outside the machine he notices a quietness and realises for the first time that the machine makes a continual sound that no one notices because it is constant.

Our experience is indeed relative. We are like dinosaurs and reptiles that we can only detect change. In fact difference is the basis of our perception. Things need to change or be different for us to be able to apply meaning to them. This was the great realisation embedded in that maxim. Which itself came from a jhana. In jhana it seems "the machine stops" and you see the fundamental noise of experience.

So back to the colours it is never-the-less very difficult to rethink the qualia of colour as a relative experience. Its easier to see the meaning of the words of colour as use/mention and depending on the contextual than to relativise the actual experience itself. Green does seem very absolute when we see are actually seeing it.

This goes back to a conundrum I was taught. While the words are the same, how can we tell whether the actual experience we have is the same as someone else. Perhaps someone else sees what you would call red when they look at the green box above, and vice versa. How would you know?

Now this conundrum enters a very shady world because it separates our experience absolutely. It is what Dennett calls the "Cartesian Theatre." Somehow what happens in my experience is completely divorced from yours. And I mean completely. But we agree that the words are the same. So that means that the words have no connection with the experience either. Even the mighty Wittgenstein in his later writing "On Certainty" puzzles over the mystery of how the colour red related to the word. Looking at a red thing and thinking the word "Red" there seems to be no connection. Now we can see here that there is the use and mention distinction. Normally we say "pass me the red box" and the red is in use and we don't think about it. In Wittgenstein's musing on the word "Red" he is actually mentioning it. So there is this added use/mention problem to that thought. And perhaps Wittgenstein got here himself and I forget, because this type of Language Game thinking is all his. When you puzzle over how the word Red gets applied to a red thing you are using "Red" in a different way, you are mentioning it, rather than using it as you normally would. That puzzle may stem entirely from language. We simply don't normally puzzle over the connection between words and what they refer to when we normally think and speak. I mean if we stopped to look at how the words of this sentence actually worked the sentence would break down and be of no "use."

So this is very Ryle in fact. Can we attribute the mystery of the link between "qualia" and their "words" to a change in the way we think and use words during such thoughts. To separate qualia and words we actually reuse the word as a mention and then no wonder we find qualia and words no longer belong together.

But this is perhaps not all of it. Aren't we left with the nagging feeling that qualia somehow exist separate from the words.

Well to cut this short there are several reasons why this all dries up. Firstly if you cannot tell then there is nothing to find out. What is the name of the oldest unicorn in existence? Unicorns don't exist so we have no difficulty in ignoring this question. What is the name of the oldest person in nearest parallel universe that we can never have contact with? Well its the same answer, we can just ignore it. Is the sensation I see when I see green the same as yours? Well we can never know so we just ignore it.

And that is interesting isn't it. There is something wrong with a question that has written into it a clause that says it can never be answered. "My Experience" appears to suggest that it is not yours and you can never know. Well in a weird way if you can never know then how can I know? This is again Wittgenstein and his argument against a Private Language.

It appears when we start telling people things that only apply to us we are entering into a contradiction. "But I am seeing Green but its not something you can see, only I can see it. You might be seeing Red" kind of statements are a bit weird. We can never know the answer cos the statement entails the impossibility of you seeing what I see.

Long post short. Shall we just leave it for now as a bit weird to say things like this.

So what of these "private qualia" the actual stuff of experience. Are they atomic absolute or are they relative. They are certainly a bit weird, and talking about them is weird also.

Its interesting that in the years since those experiments as a kid a lot has happened in perception research. Take Purves and Lotto's now famous illusion. I've cut a piece of the blue tile and piece of the yellow tile and moved to the white background. 

They are the same colour grey! And yet the context actually changes the qualia so that the same grey looks blue in the left Rubix cube and yellow in the right Rubix cube. 

OMG there we go the qualia are not absolute they are indeed the result of processing and depend upon context. Now we might dismiss as an "illusion" with no universal value. Under normal circumstances we think when we are not being "tricked" colour works normally and we see what is there, and our absolute qualia. But the point is this shows that a "grey" qualia can be seen as blue or yellow depending upon the context.

In other words we don't see the qualia! We see what we think.

Don't we then need to invents Qualia2 which are the perceived qualia from the actual qualia. So while the actual pixels are grey and the qualia are Grey we perceive Blue or Yellow Qualia2.

Its starting to look weird. That is all I need for now.

The point of the blog was to investigate again my first maxim that "all things are relative" and this indeed turns out to be an interesting maxim as its hard to find anything absolute. Even the certainties of vision "seeing is believing" become less absolute on examination.

So are we floating in a bubble of relativity? In Buddhism the gods tremble when Buddha starts going here. It takes a long time to deal with "emptiness" or sunyata when we are used to grasping at the certainty of sense experience.

However finally the Platonic argument and I received this very quickly at school. I was evidently very lucky to have smart colleagues. Plato argues that if all things are relative then how can you have an absolute statement like that? He demolishes Heraclitus with this argument against flux and never looks back (I think to the detriment of the Western World which spun off into nonsense there after).

It seems at the time like a pointless argument. It doesn't capture the value of the idea of relativity and seems to just try and shut the door as if not wanting to look at what lies behind. I believe Nietzsche argues like this too. Who cares for contradictions, they should not stop us venturing forth.

But it remains a thorn in the side of emptiness and freedom. How can we have doctrines that teach of No-Absolute, and how can we have Rules to guarantee Freedom? This is the Truth but it seems the truth somehow breaks logic.

Well we can turn to Godel instantly and show that systems with self-reference are either incomplete are have contradiction so we shouldn't be too troubled by contradiction.

But it is never-the-less interesting to just sit with that contradiction "all things are relative" is not itself relative. And its a funny thing about Truth that it always turns against its own definition.

And we are now on to, what has become probably the core of this blog, SRH. To make a universal statement implies self reference: "All things." And when there is self-reference the SRH says "beware!" Whatever you are trying to say of "all things" implies you are trying to deny something else. And that means you are limiting the freedom of "all things" and that limitation becomes a limitation of the statement. The negative side of the statement becomes compounded and self-defeating as Koesler observes briefly in "Godel, Esher, Bach"

"All things are  relative" is the same as "No things are absolute" and it is this negative side which then damages the statement itself.

Statements like to start with complete freedom. When we first say something we don't like to start with conditions. But when there is self-reference the statement becomes its own condition.

"No things are absolute" given that no things are absolute. Is what the maxim actually becomes.

And so actually because of self-reference it is relative to itself!

So the Platonic critics are stumbling into contradiction themselves. They are using the relative nature of the statement to show that it contradicts.

The Platonic Criticism depends itself upon the relative nature of the maxim "all things are relative"!

So to find fault is actually to prove the maxim! How odd is that.

Its not that the maxim does not contradict, but to self-contradict it must be relative to itself which proves the maxim. To contradict we must adopt the maxim!

This is very "I am false" or more modern its analogous to the infinite loop and never halting algorithm that cannot find an exit point.

Its not wrong, and its not right, you just can't find an exit point.

What is the logic status of algorithms that do not halt like "I am false"? Not sure what the technical status is: I'm going to call them "SRH statements" on the broad (unproven) conjecture that all halting problems arrive from recursion, or in logic from the isomorphic self-reference which is the SRH.

Conjecture 1: recursion is iso-morphic with self-reference
Conjecture 2: Halting problems are isomorphic with SRH problems.

Conclusion: statements that are neither True nor False are SRH problems and halting problems.

so "All things are relative" is actually a very interesting maxim indeed and its taken me almost 40 years to get to this point (how embarrassing).

This is partly due to the poor state of modern western society. At school I had a bright and smart environment in which to think and that paid dividends. But in the modern Capitalist world there is nothing but dullness and ignorance. Capitalism really is the last hurrah of the human race and the final decent into the pit of planetary destruction and mental stagnation.

Is there a broad statement that can be made about the axioms of Capitalism and how it entails destruction of all things (hopefully then itself!) ?

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