Edwin Hutchins once said: "We are all cognitive bricoleurs–opportunistic assemblers of functional systems composed of internal and external structures".

I think this taxonomy neatly addresses this issue, that is, the issue of the divide between the internal and the external by cleverly merging the extended mind hypothesis(See Chalmers and Clark) with the Peircian triadic model to create a synergistic relationship between the inside and the outside(representational and the ecological vehicles that facilitate cognition). Thus helping us reframe the notion of external as 'internal-izable'.

And for what it matters, this not only enables us to see the external as part of a continuum, it also provides us a way to jump between the discrete and the continuous based on the nature of the problem. Something that can help us move away from this external-as-a-punctuated-space-that-is-separate-from-the-internal model and allow us to switch between the external and the internal—technique and the technology—in a more seamless manner.

Notes

1. Although not directly related, but there are already several interesting efforts in the direction of unification in the form of category theoretic approaches(For eg. See [[Diagrammatic reasoning about conscious experience by Signorelli, Wang, and Coecke::https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.16061]]).

Reference

1. [[A Taxonomy of Cognitive Artifacts: Function, Information, and Categories::https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236946280]]

If you’ve ever implemented a compiler for a high level language, you’d recognize this as the register allocation phase. This is to say that, by marking certain variables as "unspillable," we prioritize their importance and ensure that they are always kept in the register. And although there are many ways to do this, the most common way, however, is to use graph coloring, where colors can mean registers or stack locations. My hypothesis is that this concept can also be applied to our own cognition and learning, by creating a knowledge graph of the concepts related to a topic and using graph coloring to keep track of which concepts we already understand and which we still need to work on – A graph of known and unknown concepts related to a problem, and making sure that the confusing parts that are crucial to understanding the problem are never spilled over to the stack, in other words, never left to be buffered(dealt with later).

Note that I am not saying you should completely get rid of confusions and uncertainties at all costs, for they are an inevitable part of the problem solving process. Some reveal themselves earlier, while some later in the process. I am saying you should not surrender to the uncertainties and the confusions. These nodes, I believe, when colored have the capacity to facilitate a smooth transition from known unknown to known known (Caveat: This cannot be and should not be applied to unknown unknowns. It can be very dangerous when applied to unknown unknowns as connections in such a graph can lead to unintentional acceptance/rationalization of buffering).

Additionally, I also have a feeling that this has something to with the idea of excluded middles, it's just that I am not sure how exactly. But I think the greediness of the coloring algorithm has something to do with it. Will update this post if I find anything.

In mathematics, objects are exhaustively defined by their place in the system. For instance, structuralism holds that the number 1 is exhaustively defined by being the successor of 0 in the structure of the theory of natural numbers. Consequently, structuralism also maintains that objects do not have any intrinsic properties but are defined by relation to other objects within the system. If we agree to this, then it should follow from this that the quest for structuralism is first a quest for information.

For eg. In the case of Freg-ian 'Julius Caesar', the question is not whether the Frege-ian 'Julius Caesar' can ever be seen as a number, but what information would it provide. From a structuralist standpoint, it should be fairly straightforward to construct a system where 'Julius Caesar' represents the number seventeen and the system should work just fine.

Here is another example where 'information' dominates the narrative when it comes to structuralism:

Note that not one of these elements can individually give us all the information. It is as if each element is chosen to play a part in this triadic relationship and only after the relationship is realised can one gather any information at all.

Notes

1. Structuralism, in its strictest form, encourages fungibility. Not ideal when you think in terms of computation and causation.

References

1. Joel David Hamkins. (2021). Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics
2. Greimann, D. (2003). What is Frege's Julius Caesar Problem? Dialectica, 57(3), 261-278. Retrieved July 12, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/42971497

Note that each brain has a different degree of opacity at any given level. This denotes the impact of a given brain(thought) on the final state we perceive(or the final brain that has this thought). This process of arriving at a final brain(final thought) is what we call 'merging. Though these branching and merging processes can extend for an arbitrarily long time but is only the merged state that we have access to. (Similar to the measurement problem in QM?)

In perceiving brains(and thoughts) like this, there's an important observation we are able to make. We don't have to, or more appropriately we cannot contemplate the 'aboutness' or the 'meta' because 'meta' is a consequence of branching i.e., it's a part of the superposition that is intractable. This is to say that when you interface with things like anxiety or depression by way of analyzing your thoughts, you never really are accessing the 'aboutness' of it. The aboutness always gets destroyed once the thoughts/states/brains are merged to provide you with the perceivable state/thought/brain.

This is to say that our attempts at tracking what could have caused a certain thought are motivated by our belief in our ability to reverse engineer the possible trajectories from the perceived predecessor and our confidence in our knowledge of who we are. But it is very counterproductive, because all thoughts/states/brains that are trajectorial i.e., that lie between the perceived predecessor and successor are inaccessible to us, partly because they are part of the superposition which is intractable in a sense, and once the merging happens these thoughts become totally inaccessible owing to the destruction of all the states.

A better way to interface with your thoughts(or things like anxiety and depression), particularly the 'aboutness' or the 'meta' would be to conjecture teleologically not etiologically i.e., keep the plausible causative elements in mind, but don't use them as primary navigation tools. Use your current perceived/merged state as a navigation tool via error correction. If your conjecture leads you to feel better, then that is what the solution, at least tentatively, should be. If the conjecture leads you to not feeling any better or feeling worse off, error correct. And conjecture again.

To put it succinctly, teleological conjecturing with built-in error correction is the way to handle 'aboutness' or the 'meta'.

Notes

1. It was not intentional to connect thinking-as-a-process to machine learning or quantum mechanics or the everettian interpretation here. All similarities you see in terms of multiple brains(or multiple thought-states) are either a coincidence or merely an unintentional byproduct of having been exposed to some of the aforementioned concepts from before.
2. The difference in etiological and teleological thinking can be understood better from [[Adlerian Teleological Thinking and A Simplified Life]].
3. The notion of conjecture and criticism can be better understood from the 'Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach' by Karl Popper.

References

1. Stephen Wolfram. (2020). [[Exploring Rulial Space: The Case of Turing Machines::https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/06/exploring-rulial-space-the-case-of-turing-machines/]]
2. Lulie Tannett. (2021). [[Internal Meta Discussion 🌀 How I got out of my head::https://youtu.be/F8kW9gBM9Qw]]
3. Bertrand Russell. (1912). [[The problems of philosophy::https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5827/5827-h/5827-h.htm]]

The basic idea here is to see each correspondence(C_i_j) between the abstraction(A_i) and the reality(R_j) as remappable with a fungibilty quotient(fq). The fungibility quotient(fq) can be then used to determine the degree of cognitive tangibility, whereas the remappabilty can be used to enforce the popperian/darwinian notion of variation and selection(a.k.a conjecture and criticism) to enable error-correction.

References

1. Tarski, A. (1944). The Semantic Conception of Truth: And the Foundations of Semantics. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 4(3), 341-376. doi:10.2307/2102968
2. David, D. (2021). In conversation with David Deutsch: musing about statements, propositions, and truth
3. Kolenda, K. (1979). Truth and Fallibilism. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 15(3), 251-258. Retrieved May 8, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40319611
4. Massimo Dell'Utri. (2005). Truth and fallibilism: a dubious combination in Robert Nozick's philosophy
5. Massimo Dell'Utri. (2014). New Frontiers in Truth
6. Bertrand Russell. (1912). Problems of Philosophy

The child is already good at scientific deductions in it knows what to infer from its experience but the man seems incapable, what does it say about the man? Is he less educated or is the child more intelligent?

Obviously, this is not a fair comparison you say, and I agree. You can’t compare a reflexive response like reacting to fire with the highly complicated dynamics of life you say, and I agree with that too. But by the same logic, isn't it also wrong to subject all men to the same standard and call it education? And then expect all of them to succeed in it by putting them through a punitive system that either sucks the soul out of these men or conditions them into operating within the scope of this system.

I mean how did this happen? How did we come to reducing something like education to the systematic process of incentivizing people into downloading the technical know-how onto their brains? How did we trick them into never realizing that in the name of education they were being filtered and not fostered? And most importantly, how did we convince them into believing that education despite its vagueness was a matter of convergence and not creativity? How?

Chomsky says that to be truly educated is to be able to realize that the real value of education lies not in obeyance but in autonomy. But it appears to me that by removing the personal component from education—i.e., the the sense of self-awareness—we have successfully created a culture that values consensus over cogitation, concordance over contemplation, and convergence over creativity: Basically, a world where fungibility is the only criteria, so that they can replace you with someone who is just as "educated" as you.

Note that I am making many assumptions here, starting from the fact that biographies will be different owing to the differences in the creative aspect influenced by perspective, experience, sense-data, encodings(genetic or otherwise), etc, to the fact that being a sub-entity(or a part of a whole) bestows upon you the same level of authority as the whole itself.

This question is of interest to me because an answer to that would (at least partially) answer one of the most important questions that I have been thinking about, which is "Is knowledge creation, first and foremost, an activity of selecting between representations or reconciling different representations?.

Let me explain. Knowledge creation, in general, is perceived as an abstraction-sensitive activity, that is, only entities at a particular level of emergence(creative beings) can create knowledge. But I want to understand what disambiguates the (qualitative) value of this knowledge when there are multiple representations, which I feel is often the case. Take, for example, the idea of knowledge creation as an act of selection or syncretization. It would mean that we as creative beings only have the ability to select among different representations or reconcile different representations, which is to say that our cognition is incapable of 'touching' the world so to speak, all we have access to cognitively is (abstract?)representations. I realize that I am making assumptions regarding interactions here, but it seems to me that theorizing is a game that can only be played cognitively and only on the realm of (abstract?) representations; to say that these representations are not being plucked out of the tree of abstractions, but are being created in a literal sense does not make sense to me. And if we give a nod to this, we will also have to accept that in a certain sense there is a fungibility quotient that is attached to these representations.

With 100% replaceability, everything would be everything in disguise. But the interesting aspect is at different levels of emergence, there seems to be different amount of fungibleness between representations. For eg. If we considered us trying to reason about life, the universe, and everything as universe trying to write its autobiography, would the presence of an advanced alien civilization somewhere far away in some distant galaxy trying to demystify the universe using the (abstract?) representations that they were able to discover change the dynamics of the situation?

Now take it to the next level, if we were to never meet this civilization then would the idea of humans(i.e., sub-entities) writing the autobiography of the universe be justified? Maybe not:

1.The Selection Problem: Are there two autobiographies?

2.The Syncretization Problem: Should these attempts be considered as just biographies that need to be fused together to form a comprehensive autobiography?

Note that I am just conjecturing here, for I am not really sure if there are other ways of "creating" knowledge apart from what I like to call "cognitive correspondences". If I am wrong and if it is true that we can indeed create knowledge in a literal sense, no problemo. But if there is even a tiniest sliver of possibility that I am right about creation being a matter of selection/syncretization, is it justified that we go so far with (w)holism at the expense of the level of emergence at which the representation is to be evaluated?

Related: [[Is the whole really an eternally elusive state?]], [[Correspondence theory of truth and Fallibilism]]

Although the main idea behind (w)holism is to prefer whole over parts in systems(a.k.a emergent systems) where the value of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, the modern-day (w)holists("anti-parochialists"?) instead twist it and take the route of promulgating (w)holism as the panacea for all philosophical ills. The real trick of theirs lies in their use of structure mapping in tactically discrediting the value of parochialism. In fact, you won't even notice that their analogies or metaphors are incorrectly aligned until you engage with them and realize that they keep using the same metaphors and analogies to move the goalpost by attributing flaws in your arguments, against (w)holism as a cure-all, to the self-referential nature of wholeness.

I mean take the example of "Elephant and the Blind Men". This is a metaphor that is generally used against fields like medical science, where the developments are targeted at a specific component. Cardiologists study the heart, neuroscientists the brain, hepatologists the liver, etc. Now if you take the metaphor at its face-value, it is not very difficult to see that studying just the heart doesn't address the issue of causation(note that I am not talking about causality) when looking at diseases like a heart attack. And the same goes for the brain, in that, you can't really say why we chose to think and act the way we do by merely studying the functional and structural aspects of the brain. But the problem with this is that even if you concede that their objections are right and that we must climb a level up to get a much better perspective, they will try to trap you by restating the degree of wholeness as part of a larger whole. See the problem? This is exactly what I am trying to understand here: Is it really an eternally elusive state as they make it out to be? Or is it just the verb-centric/process-centric nature of self-referentiality that makes it look like one?

As a (critical?) rationalist myself, I carry the view that all problems are by nature parochial, which is to say that the solutions can be universal but even those are far and few between. So, how is it that we are playing this game of hide-and-seek? Are we talking past each other? Is there something that I am missing here? I don't know, but this is something I definitely want to resolve, if not to end the debate, but just to preserve my sanity.

Abstractions play a vital role in our lives. In fact, it has been central in bringing about the cognitive revolution that we know of today. Abstractions allow us to think beyond irreducible states, and it is abstractions that help us understand the validity of a concept with respect to the level (of emergence/abstraction) it is being used in. Although we have always had abstractions in nature, I am talking specifically about the abstraction in the human communication systems(languages, ideas, symbols, etc). I mean what is stopping us from referring to each other by our uniquely identifiable DNA sequence, or for the matter reducing the validity of humanness to its bare minimum i.e., atoms/sub-atomic particles. What is so special about you or me that we deserve a name? Why should I respect you, aren't you just a bunch of atoms in a particular configuration?

These are the classic examples of reductionism-based thinking. Also a cause for nihilism. But what most people fail to understand is that most concepts acquire any meaning only at a particular level of abstraction/emergence. Take, for example, the idea of causality. Reductionism would have you believe that the idea of causality is just hokum. People who espouse reductionism will reason all the way back to the big bang and pre-big-bang to prove the constructed nature of space-time. But at a particular level of emergence, causality does have predictive powers. For eg. If you have a light source at a particular height and distance from an object, you know it will cast a shadow of a certain length. You can find the length of the shadow using high-school trigonometry, but so can you find the height of the object using the length of the shadow. So does it mean that in the latter case, the shadow is causing the object to materialize?

This is to show that almost every concept that has any explanatory/predictive power must be evaluated in the right context instead of expecting it to be valid across all levels of abstractions at all times. And this is very essential to understanding the false-dichotomy that non-dualism invokes. That is, if the appeal to atoms and big-bang is downward reductionism, shouldn't appeal to an overarching unity or nothingness as the ultimate reality be considered a form of upward reductionism. In a non-dualistic ontology, there is never a differentiation. The truth is always "this" and nothing more. Note that I am not saying that this is wrong. I see the motivation here. "This is and this cannot be known" is a very powerful idea, but the problem here is there is no way to reconcile the real-world developments as we know and experience them with an all-encompassing and ever-present truth. The notion of an overarching unity reduces everything by terming them as contents of an all-encompassing space of awarness(a.k.a consciousness)[[Note: By awareness, we are not talking about your ability to be aware, but the notion of pan-awareness or consciousness::rsn]]. How is it any different from reducing everything to atoms or dragging things back to pre-big-bang times?

Another advantage to abstraction is the ability to embrace fallibilism. All knowledge is conjectural, so what is to say that one theory is correct and the other isn't. Deutsch explains this particularly well in his book The Beginning of Infinity through the idea of Hard to Vary explanations. Deutsch claims that all knowledge creation simply follows the process of conjecture and criticism. It is the error-correcting mechanism that makes an explanation a good explanation vs a not-so-good explanation. This is to say that something like the Darwinian idea of natural selection is just a better explanation compared to say Lamarckism, and it is perfectly possible that there might come a time in the future when we can explain evolution much better, but it must be understood that error correction has to be a fundamental moral obligation no matter the field of inquiry.

The beauty of this line of thinking is that it fits perfectly well with the idea of reconciling concepts with the level of emergence. Let's take again the example of Darwinian natural selection. If you think about it you could just explain(handwave?) away the entire process of evolution in terms of electrons and protons doing what they do. You could even attribute the cause to the complexity of interactions between these particles, but does it really explain anything though? It seems to me that for an explanation to be a good explanation, it should not just embrace fallibility and error correction, it should also pay attention to the level of abstraction in which it has any explanatory powers. And I think this is something both the downward reductionists and upward reductionists fail to incorporate in their philosophy.

FWIW, as someone who has practiced both Vipassana and Dzogchen for a long time, I think I have a pretty good understanding of the (subjective?) experiential aspects of the teaching. And yes, upon closer inspection the self or the center disappears in pretty much all the traditions I mentioned above, but whether you take a look at the pointing out instructions(a.k.a intellectual exercises) of Dzogchen or the grueling body scans of vipassana, you will notice that there is never a question of fallibilism. What is to say that this interpretation of your subjective awareness is the correct interpretation? What about the possibility of misinterpretations?

Another major issue is the emphasis on the persistence of these states without paying attention to the emergent aspects of life i.e., even if we conceded that there is no self as we experience prior to the realization of this all-encompassing awareness, what is to say that the constructed nature of self isn't of any value. Isn't it like causality all over again?

My updated view is that fallibilism has to be central to one's worldview, whether it is subjective or objective. And "self" upon a deeper examination seems to me like a good model that helps you navigate the "real world" as you experience it. To conflate the idea of self with centerlessness is to conflate two different levels of abstractions. Yes, there is a subjective sense of non-differentiation when you meditate deeply, but also understand that self isn't meant to explain that, just like causality isn't meant to explain why you can use shadow length to determine the height of the object but cannot say that the existence of shadow is what creates the object. Also, this doesn't really say anything about whether this centerless, undifferentiated, overarching unity is indeed all there is to it, meaning, if you really follow fallibilism there is no ultimate truth to be found. There are only error-corrected explanations!

"All life is problem solving" — Karl Popper

Although it is true that there is no good alternative to start with and you have to go with whatever you think you 'want'. The problem, however, arises when you keep going without stopping to reassess the validity of the 'want'.

Think about it, how do you know if it is a 'want', a 'want-to-want', or a 'have-to-want'. It is literally impossible to distinguish. And to add to the burn, most people try to use it as a leading indicator, only to be discouraged when it doesn't pan out the way they wished it would; while attributing the cause to elements like distractions, will-power dissolution, cognitive exhaustion, circumstantial(financial/emotional) distress, etc.

Although it is possible that these are the real causes, I also think there is more to it than meets the eye. For eg. Emotions, whether positive or negative, abstract away reasons. The belief that overwhelming desires should know no reasons—although true—might be playing some part here, possibly the part of creating a misconception that all overwhelming 'wants' are real 'wants' and one mustn't heed to reasons even if they arise. When in reality, you can only ensure the validity of most of your 'wants' post-hoc.

That said, I do think that there are variables that can be used to gauge the validity of the 'want'. To be precise, two variables: Constraints and Resilience. These variables can be used as leading indicators to predict if the 'want' has any possibility of yielding any result.

I won't go into the details here as I am still trying to understand it myself. But out of the two, I think resilience is far more difficult to model than constraints, for constraints no matter how weak can be managed by using a stronger enforcement protocol. In the case of resilience, there is a lot of investment that goes into it from developing it to managing the rapidity of recovery, to persisting the state post-recovery.

With constraints, the challenge is ensuring that you have a good enforcement protocol. Even a weak constraint can be adhered to if the enforcement is strong enough. Although there is a lot of things that can be done with the constraint design, it is the enforcement that usually makes or breaks the thing. Remember that I am not saying that constraints alone cannot predict the success rate, I am merely stating the importance of enforcement when using constraints as variables. FWIW, there are designs that allow constraints to operate independently of enforcement protocols, but they are far and few between. I like to call them 'autocatalytic constraints'. (What would be a good example here? Death? Computation? Consciousness?).

That said I think there is still a lot to understand here. I still do not understand how to create a strong enforcement protocol without relying on standard means or incorporating an external enforcing agent. I still do not understand how to design a good constraint that works without relying on explicit enforcement protocols. Or for that matter understand the dynamics of building and managing resilience. But I do feel that there is something here that is worth exploring. Your ability to recover will not be the same across domains, so that should tell you something about the possibility of reaching the finish line. Your inability to deviate owing to the constraints should tell you something about how far the constraints will be able to hold before you reach (or fail to reach) the finish line. It's just that I do not know at the moment how to make sense of it all without getting caught up in the never-ending drama of prescriptions vs vague generalizations.