Thoughts on Truth - Philosophy

"It's possible for an author to hold right views, and yet to be unable to express them in a polished style. But to commit one's reflections to writing without being able to arrange or express them clearly or attract the reader by some sort of charm, indicates a man who makes an unpardonable misuse of leisure and his pen." - Cicero, Tusculan Disputations I. III. 6

The following pages are an unpardonable misuse of my leisure and keyboard.

So, let us begin...

Welcome to Nowhere

Population: 1

I am Nobody.

My Purpose: to find truth

My Intended Audience: just little ol’ me

My Method: a conceptual gymnastics routine I call “my rationality”

My Language: mentalese

My Method of Inscription for Recording the Processes of “Rationality” That Were Expressed in Mentalese: a playful but convoluted mess somewhat resembling English, lacking all beauty and style, with the occasional illustration

My Norms for Investigation that I aspire to: good faith, honesty, free speech, critical thinking, giving credit to those from whom I arrived at an idea, and the principle of charity with others, finding steel men when I am able (perhaps sacrificing a historical truth for potential insights into Truth).

These pages are an attempt to record my thoughts on the particular subject of Truth. They do not purport to be anything more than a description of my thoughts. I do not pretend to have found the answers to other people's questions, I have only found some answers to some of my own. I do not have any need to push the medicinal herbs growing here, which work for my particular constitution, on anyone else, especially when my medicine might be unsound to their mental composition, perhaps requiring a completely different tonic.

I arrive at conclusions with humility, and I recognize these conclusions are merely the product of my limited understanding. One should not expect to find things well written, organized effectively, or to find any content that is clear, intelligent, valuable, or profound. They are merely a description of my thoughts for myself and nothing more.

I'm attempting to record my thoughts using written language. I believe this is problematic, especially for me.

To begin with, there are my own personal shortcomings. There is a severe deficiency in my ability to articulate my thoughts. My writing and speaking are intense sources of frustration for me. Expressing my thoughts is like digging for treasure in the dunes of a desert. I search for an idea and once I have grasped it, I step back to visually describe what I have discovered for record, and the sand I have been digging in slides down and recovers what I had just uncovered.

In addition, I know that my writing is bad; I do not believe I have any literary talent. I want to put ideas in succinct, clear propositions, but this is simply beyond my ability. Also, there is too much complex material for me to simplify in communication, and each step in my thought is a microcosm in itself and I could expound and clarify them for one hundred billion aeons. I have trouble finding the proper balance between fully developing each and every logical step and expounding on the details of my thought to the point of prolixity and tedium, or, on the other extreme, writing easily digestible, pithy steps with little clarification. In general, I tend toward an amalgam of the worst parts of both, using volumes to gesture in a vague direction toward the tacit logical connections that I have made.

Furthermore, I have no conscious sense of style. In this whole expositional affair of mine: my irresistible infatuation with loose, slipshod phrasing of propositions; my casual and promiscuous using of the wrong words, just throwing them out in my writing as if they meant nothing; my estrangement from grammar - these aren't true to my intended meaning. When readers see the impression that the writing leaves behind they get the wrong idea. in these cases i have burned down the capitol.

If the aforementioned is not offense enough, the presented writing is a patchwork of notes and failed past expositions, a Frankenstein's monster of fitful parts, so there are additional problems of fluidity and consistency of development.

Oh, yeah, and also I'm just stupid.

I also think there are also limitations of inter-subjective language itself. I think that the language I must use confines the thought that is trying to be expressed. That is not to say that my thought is bound by the limits of language, it most certainly is not, but rather that when I engage in the use of language it is a particular endeavor which narrows my focus and guides my thought along the paths established in language's mechanistic inner workings. I think that our use of language sets the parameters for our interchange of ideas. It establishes the gales, currents, and tides our ships must use to reach harbor for our trade and exchange. Language makes the roads on which we must carry our wares to market, wearing grooves in the ground that force our wheels to run within them. There are original thoughts, and also frequently used ones with minute differences, that have no accepted corresponding words in language to express them, and context does not often make this clear, so one must borrow words that are in use, but these already have common uses that don't match the writer's meaning. There are many shades of blue, but most of the time one can pragmatically get by with just the use of the one word "blue". Here, the precise hue of blue is not an issue, but I argue that my views, which you might eschew, could soon confuse and lose you as I do use a slew of nuanced, well-thought through unique senses of words, en lieu of coining too many new ones (e.g. "value", "proof", and "true, to name a few).

I have vacillated between using words like "truth", "reality", "rationality", "knowledge", "evidence", "proof", etc., and coining my own words to use for my meaning. I believe these words also already carry with them a value recognized by our culture and so their use, sometimes intentionally used by other writers for manipulation of the reader's understanding, but usually unconsciously and unintentionally, often bias and influence the understanding of both the writer and the listener. Once such words are used and grammatical structures employed, the writer might forget the original meaning of his thoughts and unexpectedly begin to understand his own meaning in terms of the common use of the words, a type of red herring. And the reader might understand the words according to their common use instead of the way the writer is intending to use them. Through the use of particular words, the reader can assume more or less emphasis or intended value of a claim unintended by the writer. And, of course, each reader brings his or her own personality, understanding, culture, and background experiences to interpret the language differently. And as this map is made for myself, and I see myself as a constantly morphing being, I believe this varied interpretation happens to me as well with my own writing. I have decided to use these standard words anyway and to hope that the words don't hijack my future self's understanding of what the me now is trying to record for the me later.

These problems with language are exacerbated when the content covered is of such a nature as to largely lie outside of what has been conversed on before. The foundation of my system is entirely subjective and begins at the most basic level of my experience and thought. I think there is a fundamental limit to definition and description that one cannot transcend without merely using synonyms and circular definitions, but rather one must let experience itself be the final definition. For example, I take a simple word like "blue" and I find myself unable to provide a sufficient definition for it. How could I define or describe it that would give a person who has never had sight an impression of blue before his mind's eye?

This difficulty of communicating the content will be all the more common in my writing because, as I mentioned before, my exposition begins at the most basic level of my subjective experience. Furthermore, my thoughts exist as an inter-connected system in my mind, and it is only to communicate them to others that they are chopped and stuffed into the pre-established forms of language and grammar. This requires it to be reconstituted in a structure foreign to itself, and in the writing itself it requires a linear form of development to represent a multi-dimensional original, which might give the reader an impression of its lacking certain relations and support, but which I believe the system, as a whole, does offer. This also causes a problem of where to begin my account. The ethereal thoughts I wish to capture exist for me as a convoluted interconnected structure, but I am forced to begin my exposition at a particular starting point, perhaps giving it an appearance of rootlessness. I must admit that this has been a constant source of frustration and the reason for an untold number of revisions, enough to turn the Euphrates black if one were to throw my computer into it.

This contorting of meaning's original form in thought into the alien form of language doesn't merely result in misunderstanding. There are instances when I must write something to attempt to transmit an idea, but it shouldn't be taken as part of my system of thoughts, but rather as a gesturing to something close to it, and there will be instances when the meaning suggested by my written language will contradict itself. This is a problem with my written language but not with the system of thoughts I'm intending to convey. If one can look beyond the problems of cohesion in the written text but use it as a clue to discover the system of thoughts I am intending to communicate, then all such problems should disappear, or so it appears to me. There are a number of Buddhist rafts and Wittgensteinian ladders being utilized and discarded.

My limitations of expression, the limitation of communication itself, and the difficulties of the subject matter all provide enormous obstacles to the accurate communication of my thoughts. However, I don’t think that the preservation of my thoughts is necessarily hopeless. I believe that through the chance that I have the same fundamental phenomena and experiences, that my definitions, contextual structures, and through reflective, logical analysis on the part of my future self, what I write still has a chance of being understood the way I am now intending it to be, and this is my aim. And perhaps reading these records might be the precipitating factor that incites someone else to make their own insights.

Without presuming to give my thoughts too much importance or influence over the minds of others, just to obviate a possible disasterous outcome, I feel I must forewarn the other possible reader who isn't me (poor souls suffering from some sort of masochistic tendency) about the potential dangers of the content on this site. If you are another sad, lonely lost soul that might find comfort in learning of the loneliness and bewilderment of someone else, maybe my map (site) might mitigate at minimum a modicum of melancholy from your mind. If you are fearful of a pernicious doubt, these thoughts could foment more doubt. But if that isn't you, and you are confident in yourself and your views, well then, I can only imagine that when reading these pages you will have wasted precious life and be upset with having paid any attention to my prattle. However, some benefit might still be salvaged, if there is one thing my whole life has proven me to excel at, above all others, it is to be the perfect model of what not to do. Just think of me as the stern showing the shoal, as in that insightful "Mistakes" Demotivators' calendar month.

My conclusions undermined of all of my beliefs, hopes, feelings of security, and my most cherished beliefs. The purpose of my inquiry was to discover Truth, whatever it would turn out to be, without letting my own desires and prejudices obscure or color my sight of it. On the whole, this system of thoughts is strongly skeptical and agnostic, undermining rational support for practically all beliefs, and almost entirely negative and destructive, as much as I would have liked the conclusions to have been positive and creative, but this is the system that my inquiry into Truth has lead me to.

My interest is in Truth, I am not interested in rhetorical competition or in gratifying my ego. My thoughts on this site do not seek to persuade the reader. My thoughts do not seek practical value. They do not promote an agenda. They are not an attempt at self-validation, intellectual competition, or pedantry. They do not seek explanation or certainty. My conclusions do not pretend to be profound, authoritative, without precedent, or to correctly make sense of the objections or positions of others. I do not presume to have answered the questions of others, only to have answered some questions for myself. I only claim that these conclusions were arrived at in good faith and sincerity, and as far as I'm consciously aware, were arrived at independently. So the reader should not interpret my language to be self-important, absolute, or authoritarian.

To save time for those readers who are curious but who do not wish to spend the time required to peruse these pages, so that they can pass on to more personally satisfying and worthwhile pursuits, the conclusions on this site are skeptical and agnostic on almost all subjects. They find complexity, spectrum, subtle hues, and blended regions more profitable than stark contrasts of dichotomies. An active, constantly evolving, individualistic, perspectival, subjective self-supporting earth is what is found to root conclusions, as opposed to an external support of infinite tortoises. Water is a favorite metaphor, and a tentative, "We'll see" way that cannot be expressed in words is often one of the prefered approaches.

The content of this website is an attempt at a systematic exposition of my thoughts on Truth, nothing more. As such, it presupposes the legitimacy of a language of mentalese. Phenomena, thoughts, concepts, and experiences are its indivisible elemental building blocks, from which I construct my worldview. The guiding intention behind all of these thoughts was a search for Truth. All the content on this site has been framed, directed, and limited by this intention. My search for true beliefs is the foundational starting point. It is conducted through a self-critical rationalistic approach, so even the current views of science will be looked at through a rationalistic lense, which I believe is the proper logical order, a most unpopular view.

I have more influences than I could ever recount, and though I pay all of them homage, I will give special credit to these main philosophical influences: the Socractic Method, which taught me to go meta and keep going meta with questions. I am certainly not the first to use systematic doubt, DesCartes came before this horse's ass, and I was influenced by him. From his dream and demon arguments I took away the concept of indeterminacy. In using rationality to critically analyze rationality itself, I had to exHume a dead philosophy from the 18th century. His refutation of the argument from design, and his arguments in his Enquiry, which called my attention to the limits of rationality. Chuang Tzu's butterfly passage was the immediate contextual inspiration for the lastest of my major revolutions in my thought processes, leading to my current view about Truth, as I use the term, as being essentially a subjective value and concept. These thinkers awoke me from my dogmatic slumber, so that my thoughts are based on an epistemology which is the outcome of the logical forms of those influences generalized.