I SUBJECTIVE/INTERNAL

SELF AND CERTAINTY
I begin with DOUBT. There are three types of doubt: EVIDENTIAL (I don't have all of the evidence), EPISTEMOLOGICAL (my method of reasoning may be faulty), and CALCULATIONAL (I may have made an error in my reasoning). Certainty is simply the flip side of doubt - the more certain I am of a proposition, the less doubt I have about it. Evidential doubt plays an important role in Grist, where it is presented as ORGERON'S AXE: "For any proposition, if I can imagine evidence which would contradict it, then the proposition is not certain."

Applying the three types of doubt, I, like Descartes, finds myself doubting almost everything. Even of myself, I can doubt my perceptions (demonstrated to be inconsistent at times), my memories (may have been falsified and planted), my identity (am I just a mind, or even less, a fragment of a larger mind?). And yet, I cannot doubt the existence of my own KERNEL SELF, i.e. my bare consciousness, my seat of awareness. The existence of my kernel self is SELF-EVIDENT - i.e. literally evident to my self. (Note that I do not present the existence of my self as a logical deduction, i.e. not as "cogito ergo sum". My existence is simply directly evident to me.)

Only that which is self-evident, i.e. directly experienced is certain. So, what, aside from the kernel self, is directly experienced? Sensation, memory, perception, will, emotion, mood, all of these, as mental phenomena, are directly experienced. I.e., if I see a patch of red before me, the mental experience is self-evident, but the existence of a patch of red out there in the world is not self-evident. Similarly, my memory of a discussion yesterday is self-evident, but it is not self-evident that I am remembering the argument correctly, that the discussion occurred yesterday, or even that there is such a thing as "yesterday". Only mental phenomena are self-evident.

The kernel self and mental phenomena, while certain, are also a closed system - they do not provide a basis on which any additional certainties, or even probabilities may be based. Therefore, beginning in the next section, all statements are based on introspective observation of my own mind. The ideas presented are theories, and as such, they are subject to doubt.

SELF AND THOUGHT
I now summarize my theory of what knowledge is, how it is held and how I generate and validate it...

KNOWLEDGE is MODELLING. Entities, groups of entities, characteristics, events, types of events and laws are all represented by mental objects. Our model is true when it corresponds to what it represents. An imagined object EXISTS, i.e. is REAL, if it is an accurate model of what it pretends to represent.

The THINKING SELF incorporates and uses as tools many of the mental phenomena witnessed by the kernel self (e.g. sensation, memory, percepts, concepts, imagination, will). The thinking self is the self that I am most familiar with, the one that I use. It is the mind.

The thinking self is essentially TEMPORAL. It assumes the existence of time, and it assumes that memories represent past experiences and past ideas. In fact, the thinking self is a more process than object.

Unlike the passively experiencing kernel self, the thinking self is essentially ACTIVE and WILLFUL. At the simplest level, I turn my attention. At the intermediate level I touch, turn and play with the materials and entities of the world. At the highest level, I undertake planned, complex investigations. Imagination, which is as much a part of theorizing as it is of art, is a crucial, active process of the thinking self.

WILL is a self-evident process of the self - i.e. I direct my own mind, and I directly perceive my own will as I direct my mind (e.g. when I choose what to think about). In perceiving my will, I also perceive CAUSALITY. Thus, it is not that I passively and indirectly observe causality in the world, but rather that I directly see causality within my own mind, and then theorize that it also exists in the external world.

While the human mind is distinguished by its ability to think conceptually, the basis for all human thought, the ground floor of human cognition is actually PERCEPTUAL THOUGHT (i.e. non-verbal thought).

The primary source of input for the mind is SENSATION, which I theorize to be caused by and to somehow represent an external world. PERCEPTION is mixed with sensation, but is more subtle and quantized (i.e. sense data gives me smoothly blended patches of color and ranges of sound, perception give me object in motion and speech coming from a particular location). I theorize that perception arises from the processing of data by unconscious portions of my mind. (Note that the distinction between sensation and perception suggests an objective view of the world. I could theorize a subjective world, in which case the distinction between sensation and perception might disappear.)

The basic abilities to IDENTIFY entities, to recognize and differentiate groups of entities by noting SIMILARITIES and CONTRASTS, and to form understandings of patterns of action and relation between entities and groups of entities are originally and primarily perceptual (i.e. non-verbal). The objects that these abilities produce are PERCEPTS, which are essentially concepts without the symbolic (usually verbal) tag. (It's probably more accurate to say that concepts are named percepts.)

My COMMON SENSE knowledge is mostly perceptual, representing a vast store of patterns that I have (largely subconsciously) abstracted from my experience. When evaluating statements and theories, I generally first test the statements against my common sense knowledge.

CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT is usually tied quite closely to perceptual thought. Concepts formalize and standardize percepts. They provide handles for percepts, and thus allow me to invoke the percept even when the sensory trigger for the percept is absent. The strength of concepts is that they are more readily grasped, connected and manipulated than percepts. However, conceptual statements are not fully understood until interpreted in a way that invokes a perceptual picture.

CONCEPTS are dual natured, being both a set of REFERRENTS, and the set of DEFINITIONS that describe the similarities that bind the referents into a group. Most concepts are "fuzzy", meaning that they have multiple, overlapping definitions. If I were to draw a Ven diagram of the referents of a concept, I would (usually) draw multiple, slightly off-center circles. Each circle represents a single definition. While most referents are included by all definitions, some referents (called borderline elements) are included by some definitions, but rejected by other definitions. (Hence I can say of Hamlet's Yorick that he is both a man and not man, since a corpse of a man is a man in some senses, but not in others.) The determination of whether a borderline element is or is not a referent of a concept in particular statement depends upon the context of the statement.

Like percepts, CONCEPTS are formed through observation of similarity and contrast. The process of formation may wholly conceptual, or may consist of a formalization of a percept. Concepts are HIERARCHICAL in their level of ABSTRACTION - more abstract concepts cannot be derived directly from sensation, but rather only from experience with other concepts. Concepts can also be formed by division, i.e. by taking an abstract concept and extracting more concrete concepts from it. Here again, the new concept is formed by similarity and contrast - i.e. I note that within the abstract concept, referents fall into two or more distinct classes, with the division being determined by a contrast. Concept formation is not a passive process but is rather a willful, often pragmatic process - i.e. I generally form concepts depending on what is useful to me. (E.g. people living in cold, snowy climates often have multiple concepts of snow, while those living in moderate climates generally have only one.)

STATEMENTS combine concepts to express knowledge. Inductive and deductive logic are concerned with generating and validating new statements.

DEDUCTIVE LOGIC is simply NON-CONTRADICTION. The need for non-contradiction reflects the fact that my mind is unable to make SENSE of contradictory statements - i.e. it is unable to translate them to perceptual form.

Deductive logic is used to determine if a set of statements can be INTEGRATED, i.e. to determine if a contradiction arises from the combination of statements. Deductive logic is also used to produce new statements that are implicit (but perhaps not obviously so) in a set of statements. Statements arrived at by logical deduction enjoy LOGICAL CERTAINTY - i.e. they are immune to evidential doubt (though they are still subject to epistemological doubt and calculational doubt).

INDUCTION is the generation and validation of new non-deductive knowledge. Induction does not follow the deductive model of propositional statements leading with certainty to conclusions - rather, induction is partially a perceptual process, and largely a heuristical process.

New ideas can be generated in a variety of ways. The innate abilities of my perceptual/conceptual mind to note the identity of objects, and to note similarities and contrasts between different objects is one method. Another method is GENERALIZATION of observed patterns ("true so far, therefore always true"). IMAGINATION, i.e. the non-rational creative recombination of existing ideas provides another path. Of course, COMMUNICATION of ideas from other people, is the most common method by which I acquire new ideas.

The ultimate standard for validation of an idea is it's CORRESPONDENCE with what it models. Correspondence can be determined for ideas of some self-evident mental experiences (e.g. "This is a memory."), but not for all ideas of mental experiences, nor for any ideas of an external world.

COHERENCE (i.e. logical consistency) with other ideas is used in validating ideas, but finding an inconsistency may actually indicate a problem with my other ideas, rather than with the one under test.

CONSISTENCY with observation is the primary means of judging truth of theories. Because virtually every observation involves auxiliary hypotheses, ideas generally may not be proved nor disproved by any single observation. Nor may they ever be completely proved by observation, since the possibility of obtaining other, contradictory observations remains (evidential doubt).

In determining whether a given observation is evidence for a theory, I must determine if the theory makes predictions about that observation. I.e. if the fact had been different, would it have counted as evidence against the theory (or at least not for the theory). If the observation cannot take at least a neutral position in regards to the theory, then the observation cannot provide evidence for a theory. (In other words, consistency can only be determined for theories that are FALSIFIABLE.)

Because of the general impossibility of proving or disproving a statement from a single observation, I use several pragmatic rules when evaluating theories. These PRAGMATIC HEURISTICS include: 1) continue to support the current theory until the evidence for an alternative theory becomes substantially greater, and 2) when faced with two theories that are equally supported, choose the simpler one (Occam's Razor). These heuristics are not measures of accuracy, but rather are methods that have been demonstrated to cause me to reach accurate theories more rapidly.

Inductive evaluation yields FUZZY PROBABILITIES. The evaluation is probable because induction can never entirely prove a statement to be true or false, and it is fuzzy because there is no clear way to calculate precise numbers for the probability.

II Objective/External
Up to this point, I have primarily been concerned with how I know, and that has been an internal and subjective exercise. I now turn to my theory of an external, objective world. The previous section dealt primarily with epistemology, but also dealt with the metaphysics of my self and my mind. This section deals primarily with the metaphysics of the external world, but also deals with the epistemological implications of the presence of other thinking beings in the world.

EXTERNAL WORLD
I theorize that there is an world beyond my thinking mind. I divide this world into my SUBCONCIOUS MIND and an EXTERNAL WORLD. I theorize that I occupy a physical body within this external world, and that this body provides input to mind in the form of my SENSES, while I am able to influence the world by engaging in ACTION, i.e. movement of my body (where "movement" includes speaking.) I theorize that my senses are actually filtered through and augmented by my subconscious, so that the sensations and perceptions that my mind receives are due in part to the workings of my subconscious mind.

I theorize that there are other entities, OTHER THINKING BEINGS encased in bodies much like mine, and interacting with the physical world in the same way that I do. I.e. I suppose that there are people in the world. I am able to communicate with these other beings through physical gestures, actions and language.

I theorize that the external world exists independently of my awareness, or of the awareness of any of these other entities. (Though certain facts about the world may be only true due to my physical interaction with the world.) In other words, I theorize that the external world is OBJECTIVE, not subjective.

GROUP EPISTEMOLOGY
I find it efficient to (under certain conditions) believe the statements of other people in this world - i.e. to TRUST their statements of experience and even their communicated theories as true. In some cases, I theorize that their AUTHORITY in some subjects to be superior to my own, and thus accept their theories in preference to my own theories.

The epistemology of trust and authority is centered around my self. In contrast, the SCIENTIFIC METHOD provides heuristics that enhance the production of true theories by a group of people. In part, the scientific method reflects the same epistemology of evidence and induction that I use on a personal level. However, the scientific method also incorporates pragmatic heuristics intended to deal with the testimony by people who may be lying or simply poor reasoners.

There is a tendency within science to only talk about what can be proved or tested. This is very sensible from the group epistemological standpoint, but it should not be interpreted to mean that truth is meaningless outside what can be proved or tested. There is reality, and there is our model of reality. The truth of our model depends only the correspondence between model and reality - not on our ability to demonstrate that correspondence.

PHYSICALISM
The natural sciences have succeeded astoundingly in describing and explaining the world. They have revealed a world that appears to be explainable entirely in mechanistic (i.e. immediate) causal terms. In fact, it appears that everything is ultimately explained by the laws of physics. (This view is called PHYSICALISM and REDUCTIONISM.)

Though I first and most intimately observed CAUSALITY in my own mind, physics indicates that causality is a fundamental aspect of nature.

ELUCIDATIONS
Despite Minkowski's famous quote, time is not a dimension just like space under SPECIAL RELATIVITY. For example, you cannot rotate objects into the time "dimension", though you can rotate objects within space dimensions. I.e. north is north, even if you're traveling at .9 c. Note that under special relativity, any event that may have a causal effect upon another event always occurs before that other event, no matter what reference frame the observer is in - i.e. relativity does not allow the temporal inversion of events in any significant way.

GENERAL RELATIVITY raises the possibility of curved space, possibly even curved into a closed surface. This is fine, but it does not deny the possibility of that this curved space lies within a larger, more highly dimensioned space. (Like the curved, two-dimensional surface of a balloon exists within our three dimensional space.) Relativists prefer to talk only about the geometry of the surface - that's fine, but it does not render the larger space impossible or meaningless.

QUANTUM MECHANICS is contrary to experience at the human scale and is described by math that is difficult to grasp. Also, at this stage, QM does not have (or generally is not taught with) a consistent, comprehensible conceptual picture. This lack of a conceptual theory is due to the complexity of QM and the misguided philosophical efforts of early QM theorists (Bohr, etc.). QM does not deny a model based, causal view of the universe. (Though it does seem to imply a limited fundamental randomness.)

COSMOLOGY theorizes that our universe began with the big bang. But it neither affirms nor denies that anything existed before the big bang (or that there was any time before the big bang). Since the big bang would obliterate any evidence of such an epoch, this becomes an era about which science cannot present any evidence, and hence science avoids it. Again, this lack of evidence should not be taken as a denial of possibility.

CRITICISMS
As the mechanistic view of the universe began to be realized, a vast difference between it and the mind appeared. This MIND/BODY DUALISM dominated philosophy for a long time, but continuing discoveries in the science of the brain have continued to provide evidence of the identity between the functioning of the brain and the processes of the mind. I theorize that the mind is wholly a function of the brain. I deny the existence of any sort of SPIRIT WORLD. (I.e. I deny the existence of heaven, hell, life after death, out of body experiences, telepathy, clairvoyance, etc..)

Physics indicates of a world dominated by immediate cause with no place for TELEOLOGICAL cause (though it may be useful to use such terminology in certain sciences to reflect the stability of certain patterns). Thus, neither FATE nor LUCK exist (in the sense of a force determining events rather than in the sense of pure coincidence).

Science sees no evidence for the existence of GOD, and given the explanations provided by biology, by evolution, by cosmology, there seems to be no need to invoke him to explain the universe. I do not accept the theory of (the existence of any) god.