Notes

relevant jrnls

The provocative feedback loop.

Don’t start writing a book. Just flesh out thoughts. An explanation, not a full blown academic defense. A short essay for a sympathetic and interested small audience, not an academic treatise addressing every concern. Fashion a way of talking that is helpful and addresses the biggest issues, that can serve as inspiration and foundation for other writing and working.

Be inspired by Borges. Don’t write the book. Assume the book and write the review.

Emergence and emergent phenomena – opposed by lesswrong.com

When you cut the world with words, sever a whole into things, the two never appear to be one again without magic (gravity, force, energy, emergent) or distance (stepping up to a higher level of abstraction).

Always know what difference of experience you are arguing about. What would about your anticipations for future events would change as a result of accepting proposition X?

Like any conversation, a text is an act of manipulation – Talk like this = break up the world of your experience like this = experience the world like this = think like this = live like this. Our concern about the meaning of a text arises because someone (and that someone could be ourselves) challenges our interpretation of the text and we feel the need to find some basis on which to defend our position. So I first ask what an “interpretation of a text” is. The answer I came up with is that it is a way of talking that claims to rely on the text for at least some of its authority. Ways of talking don’t appear out of the void and they don’t pass through the gauntlet of life unchallenged and unchanged. The stories we tell ourselves about our experiences (how we talk and think), have histories, they have origins and they evolve from those origins as they are used. We learn them from our parents, from books, from movies, from friends etc. and they change as we encounter things that those stories can’t easily account for, or when we discover an alternative way of talking that is more useful/helpful, or when we test our stories for reasonableness/coherence and find them lacking, or when we submit to some outside authority that demands that we talk a different way. So engaging with someone’s interpretation is just like engaging with all of the other ways that they talk except that you have an additional avenue through which to challenge their way of talking – the text on which they are relying.

Example of thought without language: eye doctor’s “1 or 2?” – no words to describe difference, but still choice, or recognizing actors/musical artists from voice or gestures or posture – no words to analyze, yet still able to identify.

Lana del ray, Johnny Cash hurt. Who sings it, who says it, changes the meaning. Meaning isn’t in the words alone. It’s in the discourse, the cycle of response. The provocative feedback loop.

If the meaning of words grows. Then to look back on an older meaning isn’t too see deeper but shallower. Perhaps in the line from now to then you can draw a trajectory of growth

Words do. Meaning is doing not being.

Doctrine of Inerrancy - Meaning does not reside in the words or in the speaker, but in the discourse through language between speaker and audience, author and reader. Meaningful languaging provokes response. Meaning is found in the living interaction between responder and provocateur.

Abandoning a referential theory of meaning need not result in an existentialism in which all languaging is an inherently meaningless substrate upon which any meaning whatsoever may be imposed without limit. The divide between meaning and meaninglessness, sensible and nonsense, is efficacy – did the discourse work.

Your faith doesn’t rest on the wisdom of man, but on the power of God. There are many ways that the modern church replaces God with the Bible. It gives the Bible authority and inerrancy when God had the authority and Jesus is the truth. Programs are designed to teach about the Bible rather than provide opportunities to encounter God. The goal is changed behaviors to conform with a written moral code rather than growing maturity in relating to the Person at the center of morality. The Bible is the Word of God, not because the authors wrote as they were driven by the Spirit, but because that Spirit still speaks through it today. In the absence of the living God, the Bible is just dead words.

Scripture is true, but is not more true than the rest of “what is”. Truth is concrete, not abstract. Particular. Relational. Not a standard or benchmark. Which means Scripture as “authority” does not constrain “what is” but rather constrains what is permitted to be said about “what is”?

We see people using money and words in all their forms, buying and selling, speaking and listening. Nothing is hidden. Nothing stands behind all the activity. The value – or meaning – lies in the activity. … We do not mirror reality. We are enmeshed in it. – Ian Ground

Simplified_Technical_English

1. Groundwork for Metanarrative
   2. Stories create limits – compare sailing over the edge of the world to flying/jumping over the edge of a cliff.
   3. Stories create possibilities (framework for questions) – can’t ask “how could I convert mass into energy until e = mc. – see Scientific Revolutions, kuhn
   4. Stories establish goals (ideals) and imply (suggest) methods for reaching those goals – prisons are for rehabilitation vs punishment.
   5. We very rarely have only one story to tell.
   6. With multiple stories comes conflict. Conflict implies a lack of clarity about limits, possibilities, goals and methods.
   7. Figuring out what to do in the face of conflict requires the telling of stories about stories so that we can know the limits, possibilities, goals and methods of storytelling so that from within that framework we can judge the stories we have told.
   8. In what follows, I will present several conflicting stories. We need a framework within which to judge those stories. (This is an infinite loop of meta-analysis). I will use three words as my guides (the ideals of the meta-meta-story I am telling):
   9. health – tendency to promote ideals (established by some other story) – e.g., nihilism fails this for most people
   10. coherence – intellectual satisfaction, does it hold together, does it have internal clarity, is it consistent in itself, is it a stable framework
   11. effectiveness – does the story empower its bearers in their pursuit of my ideal for meta-stories: conflict resolution.
2. Beyond Symbols and Shadows: A Geneology of Meaning (Objection to Thesis: Stories are told in language and language has a definite meaning rooted in being and so every story is either right or wrong) 2. Symbols and Pictures Generally
   3. To Point at Things
   4. Pros 5. intuitively appealing 5. makes most sense of Truth 5. promises working solutions 5. seems to be foundation of science
   5. Cons 5. Assumes world is made of things (do we discover things or create them) 5. makes all talk about world carry the implicit assumption that whatever we are talking about exists (reification) 5. Talk about particulars is impossible, but most people seem unwilling to permit talk about universals 5. We can talk about non-existent things just as easily and sensibly as reality - parmenides 5. Zeno on inability to talk sensibly about space and time 5. How could we ever get it wrong in our talk if all meaningful talk is about what is. 5. Film noir (brick), Doc Holliday in Tombstone – examples of words that have definite meaning without definitions or even prior use – a la Wittgensteins PI
   6. Point at or picture appearance of things – sensibilia
   7. Point at or picture ideas
      2. Conjure up ideas in another – communication generally
      3. tokens in a language game
3. My Discourse (Response / Feedback loop) theory 2. Types of Discourse
   3. Discourse with Others
   4. Solipsism
   5. Discourse with the World
   6. Access to the World
   7. Relationship with Cause and Effect 5. We could push back on “cause and effect” as well and say that this is not a very helpful story to tell. But that is only partially true. The appeal of cause and effect is that we intuitively believe that what went before is connected with, indeed explains, what is now and that what is now will result in what will come. the problem with the story of cause and effect is that it rips a complex organic whole in two and then is astonished when the question “what connects the two parts” is difficult to answer. the two are one. The separation is a figment of language. You rip them apart when you call one cause and one effect. you rip time and space apart when you talk of moments or locations. We need a story of cause and effect because without it we have no stories to guide our actions, explain our present or predict our future. But we need to recognize the limits of such a story.
   8. Mental Discourse
   9. Creativity / What does it mean ‘to know’ something
   10. The Mind as Language Generator / Processor
   11. Do we have access to the contents of our mind before they are captured/expressed in language?
   12. Written Discourse
   13. Interpretation 2. How does this theory resolve conflict???
4. Demonstrations of the Discourse Theory 2. Logic
   3. Symbolic
   4. Math
   5. Rational
      2. Science
   6. Bayesian Statistics
   7. Idea is that you have some observable phenomenon (A) that you discover with some given regularity if you go looking for it. And you tell a story where A is related to (caused by) some other (hopefully more easily) observable phenomenon (X), such that when you observe X you expect with some degree of certainty ( P(A|X) ) to observe A as well. Bayes formula provides an algorithm for refining P(A|X) as new observations of A and X are made – it tells you how much observing X and A or X but not A should affect the certainty with which you predict A the next time you observe X.
   8. There are many problems. 5. You have already made decisions when you decided to carve the world into A’s and X’s. Perhaps that division of reality is not the most helpful. 5. Bayes algorithm is built out of a probabilistic algebra that is itself very dubious. Are there random processes? Or are there merely processes the outcomes of which we are not yet able to predict/explain with certainty? Is a coin flip random or do we permit it as a simulation of randomness because we are unable to control or predict accurately how many times the coin will flip in the air? 5. Considers Zeno’s haybale. You have a button that dispenses nutter butters with every press until it doesn’t. Bayes doesn’t provide a good guess for when it will stop dispensing nutter butters, nor what certainty you should have that it will spit one out the next time you press the button.
   9. Einstein - not talking about what is, but rather about what we can observe. Our observations, he predicts, will change when the thing being observed is moving relative to the position from which we observe it.
      2. Theology – A handmaiden’s tale (Aquinas)
   10. Core Principle of Church as Political Organization: Scriptural Authority as derived from Divine Authority
   11. Core Principle of Church as Spiritual Organization: Christ’s Living Lordship
   12. Core Principle of Gospel: Salvation by faith in Christ alone through grace of God.
5. Law
6. Education
7. Philosophical Practice