Redoing the Analytic of Concepts

(Published Aug. 29, 2022 by Mariven)

Introduction to an Introduction

Motivation

• !parastart Conceptive: If phenomena which !c{concepts are concepts of }{or, phenomena which are given to us through concepts} may be called conceptual, then phenomena which are of concepts I call conceptive. In other words, what is conceptual refers to with the structure within and of concepts, whereas what is conceptive deals with the structure external to and among concepts.
  • My idea of evolution is conceptual, like ideas in general; the evolution of this very idea is conceptive.
  • The content of a cognition is conceptual; the processes that allow me to connect it to other cognitions are conceptive.
  • The sense-data brought up by a concept, which is used to derive connections and classifications from it, is conceptual; the means by which connections and classifications are derived from this sense-data is conceptive.
  !paraend
• !parastart Analytics: If the concrete dissection of this or that particular thing insofar as it is a certain kind of thing may be called analysis—and this is in line with the usual sense of the word—then the abstract dissection of a certain kind of thing insofar as it admits some things as possible instantiations, or more generally of the necessary possibilities of kinds of things, I call analytics. In other words, if analysis uses abstract knowledge to turn concrete observation into concrete knowledge, analytics uses the manner in which concrete observation becomes concrete knowledge to develop abstract knowledge.
  • To study an object that happens to instantiate the kind $\text{Car}$ by studying the way in which it is a car—its make, model, condition, etc.—is to provide an analysis of that object from the kind. To study the same object by seeing what its being a car suggests about what cars are like is an to provide an analytic of the kind from the object. Of course, we don't have to analyze a car as a car, but as any kind of object that it is, by one's own lights, admissible as. If we treat a car as an instantiation of the kind $\text{Machine}$, we'll analyze the machinations that make it do what it does And there are many ways to do this, depending on the way in which we take it to be a machine. Most obvious is to take its function as moving under its own power, but we could also treat it as an electrical machine that powers a radio, or an air conditioning machine that runs on gasoline. Any analysis depends on an object, the kind of thing we take the object to be, and the way in which we take it to be that kind of object, though this third argument is usually implicit in the second (as with the 'obvious' mechanical function of a car)..
  • A profile of a given program according to the general properties of programs (e.g. its time and space complexity) might be called its analysis; an exegesis of what the nature of programs must necessarily be such that a given program could even be a given program is called its analytic. This obviously lends itself to a circular process of symbiotic evolution - intension contextualizes extension constrains intension - and this evolution over time is perhaps the most important fact about any such exegesis.
  • Mathematical work is a great example of something that proceeds in both directions at once. If you have a topological space that you need to figure something out about, you want to provide an analysis of it as a topological space: is it a direct product or coproduct or quotient, or is there some pattern to the continuous mappings it admits or to the structure of its open sets? Whereas if you feel like there's something interesting about it you can't yet write down in a formula (or even in words, sometimes), you can instead ask what other spaces share this something, and what it might say about some way that topological spaces in general can sometimes be—you can perform an analytic of abstract topological spaces.
  In other words, if we have a typed object $x:\text{T}$ The notation $x:\text{T}$ means that $x$ is an object and $\text{T}$ is a type we're considering it as belonging to. For instance, $8: {\mathbb N}$, "$ababa$"$: \text{String}$, and $\text{me}: \text{Mammal}$ are all valid typings. The third argument mentioned above—the way in which $x$ is considered to have type $\text{T}$, is obscured by the colon in this notation, but it's just as important to keep track of. Any specific $x$ and $T$ can only ever be concepts for you, and the connection between them, even if you say it exists a priori or in itself, certainly isn't present a priori as an object of cognition—it's a connection you have to somehow make in order to recognize $x$ as having type $\text{T}$., analysis is using $\text{T}$ to understand $x$, whereas analytics is using $x$ to understand $\text{T}$. !paraend
• !parastart[important] Hence, *conceptive analytics* is the study of conceptual activity in general via the examination of things in their nature for us as concepts—as instantiations of methods of conceptualization, as exhibiting kinds of interactions with other concepts according to patterns attributed to one's abstract faculty of conceptualization, and so on.
  !tab While the faculty of understanding is not synonymous with the faculty of conception, this is perhaps the only productive method of trying to understand the understanding from the 'inside' that neither forgets nor gets lost in its own subjectivity. Of course, I intend to provide not just a definition but an account of conceptive analytics; it differentiates itself from other ways of understanding 'understanding' on the basis of its self-bootstrapping—good understandings of the understanding will often be good for understanding the understanding, so the method quickly recycles results into tools—and its subversion of generality, in which it emphasizes the particular in any given understander while simultaneously building a general form of particularity in a manner akin to the movement from the set-theoretic study of spaces (through their sets of points) to their topological study (through their forms of local connectivity). !paraend

Structure

• Such inner existence is sometimes called "subjective", but that's a dangerous word. The division here is a relatively clear one at first: emotions, thoughts, perceptions, intuitions, concepts, and so on seem to all be inside me, not outside (even insofar as they are stimulated by or represent outside things); it is the sensorimotor complex that lies at the boundary We'll have occasion to critique this division - for instance, if I take this keyboard I'm typing on to be "inside of me" as a perception which is merely represented as being "outside of me" as a supposedly real thing - what do I make of a headache? The pain is being represented as "inside", but is this inside not more like the outside represented in the keyboard (by virtue of their being in the same constructed space, my perceived world) than the inside thought in the experience of the pain of the headache? Whether we agree or disagree, even more troubling questions ensue, threatening to destabilize the "relatively clear" inside-outside divide - but we have to first pin down the concepts we actually have and confront the necessity of having to work with them; this is one point where the circularity of analytics provides our only actual hope of progressing. .
• In this division are the questions: What are concepts, to us? How does language become a meaningful something in our minds as we read it? How does this semantic flow recur upon itself so as to yield and moderate the process of verbally thinking or writing? This phenomenological study is the point at which cognitive analytics most closely approaches both science and mysticism; from the former we learn of the particularity of one's own phenomenology and the difficulty of generalization, and from the latter we learn of tools powerful enough to study the only mind one is on the inside of.

• One subdivision closer in spirit to A takes the mind itself to be an external object which is only presented to itself mediately via awareness (of what is necessarily within the mind already), the interpretation of which presentation is merely (the study of) phenomenology, and thereby formally dissects and bounds the illuminating power of phenomenology.
• Another subdivision closer in spirit to C attempts to find general forms of conceptuality, thereby discovering "arch-metaphors of cognition", highly productive yet formal schemata underlying the faculty of reason itself, the catalogue of which may be not only dissected but intentionally added to, thereby giving us the ability to comprehend those processes which at first seem alien. (This is one of the greatest practical achievements of conceptive analytics - a system for the concrete, topical upgrading of the faculty of thought in general).
• For the most part, though, it asks questions like "what can we learn about the mind's relation to the world from the history of scientific development? ... from the history of my own scientific (mis)understandings?"

• On one hand, this consists in examining those patterns in human cognition by means of which it may "hook on" to the objective even as it is entirely subjective. On the other, it consists in attempting to examine the extent of the "transcendental legibility of the world", a task which proceeds largely through examination of the arch-metaphors of cognition.
• Around a year ago in the essay The Ideatic Realm, I gave the name ideatics to the study of the metaphorical world of abstract forms that seemed to appear in the shadows of mathematical and physical patterns; while my idea of it has evolved significantly in the intervening time, the phenomena discussed therein are still pretty good examples of this supposed "transcendental legibility" of the worldDespite my use of the t-word, I don't mean that the universe is structured as Kant thought it was, with the mind imposing a priori law onto its experience of a reality unknowable in itself, but that there seems to be a kind of thoroughgoing organization of abstract phenomena - and therefore concrete phenomena which directly implement them - which lines up with our conceptive form such that we can at least partially understand these abstractions in themselves. This is largely something that one will have seen after doing enough mathematics or programming or just sufficiently abstract thinking; I'm simply pointing to it and asking "what's that?"..

Another way of motivating this method of division is as follows:

Analytics

By analytic of concepts I do not mean the analysis of concepts, i.e., the usual procedure in philosophical inquiries of dissecting already available concepts in terms of their content and bringing them to distinctness; rather, I mean the hitherto rarely attempted dissection of the power of understanding itself.
From Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, B90, tr. Pluhar.

The Idea of an Analytic

Some Useful Words

• !parastart Something is material insofar as it is (whether actually or hypothetically, whether physically or ideally) cognized as a substance-bearing, singular object; contrasting this, something is formal if it is merely cognized as a template or pattern which material objects may be manifestations or instances of - i.e., if it is a general form of some possible kinds of things. !paraend
• !pstart My body exists physically and materially, in that I cognize it as a singular thing whose substance is matter located right here in space, whereas "the human body", which abstracts away the who possessing the body, exists only formally. If I asked you to show me "the human body", you could show me a manifestation of the human body such as !c{a human body}{oh god, where did you get that}, or you could show me a representation of the general form - whence the name 'formal' - of the human body such as an anatomical sketch, but neither of these are the formal human body, being manifestations of it Which you are presumably showing me in order to "point" to the abstract form. So it is with the Buddha's (supposedly) saying "I am a finger pointing to the moon. Don't look at me, look at the moon". . My human body is a material object, the human body is a formal object. !pnext The dichotomy applies to properties as well: my human body is !c{physical}{to be clear: made out of matter in spacetime} in a material sense, in that I cognize its singular and actual existence, whereas the human body is physical in a formal sense, in that while it itself - as something cognized - is not existentially compatible with physicality, its instances are nevertheless physical. Thus, to "speak of something formally" is to speak of it insofar as it is a particular kind of thing, without reference to its material existence: we might say that this particular seesaw is, formally speaking, a simple machine that redirects and translates forces, while, materially speaking, it is this one arrangement of a red plank of wood on top of a rock. !pend
• !pstart However, the seesaw may just as well be, materially speaking, the particular mental construct I form while working on a physics problem, which problem specifies this seesaw as having a length of $3\pi$ meters and so on, as materiality is distinct from physical existence. Both a hypothetical kid and that kid's imaginary friend are material, but not physically existent (the imaginary friend isn't even hypothetically physically existent, even though the kid is). Materiality is a property of what is cognized, just as formality is - whence the "cognized as" above - and thus it ought not to hinge on something which the mind may very well be mistaken about, such as the physical reality of any given thing When people "do metaphysics", for instance by asking about the extent to which abstract objects exist, they're primarily just moving around mindstuff and pretending it corresponds to what is outside their minds; because minds are different in their stuff on every level, they disagree, and because they don't think they're moving around mere mindstuff, they can't resolve these disagreements.
  !tab This does not thereby delegitimize metaphysics: it is precisely when it is explicitly taken as the moving around of mindstuff that metaphysics is extremely useful and rewarding, for this gives it a raison d'etre according to which it can be performed, applied, and judged: the illumination of the architecture of mental content. Furthermore, there absolutely are metaphysics-like questions concerning that which lies outside the mind - which I generally bundle under the term "second metaphysics" in the 'advancing' sense of the second level or stage rather than the 'shadowing' sense of a second harmonic or second sight - it is a vision of what metaphysics could look like - asks questions regarding the parsimony of physical law or the nature of the "fractal universals" produced by evolutionary processes, both insofar as they exist via our cognizing them (c.f. Kant's locating physical law in the mind) and as they exist otherwise - but the mathematical and scientific background required to approach such a thing has only been developed in the past century or so, and seems to have gone relatively unnoticed by philosophers. This is largely because we cannot approach such questions without an analytic in hand, attempts invariably leading to the proliferation of woo A preliminary description might be this: thoughts tend to get tangled in massive concepts - the conceptive equivalents of mycorrhizal networks, really - which are too vague to be controllable, too large to be visible, and too subconsciously anchored to have any force of discursive reason behind them. A forest of thoughts growing up together in such a milieu will have been warped in its own peculiar, pre-logical way by this environment. This always happens, here too, but when it gets particularly blatant, we call it woo. . (Also, how many people with the mathematical aptitude for such things go into philosophy?) !tab Anyway, when I say that the vocabulary I've provided here shouldn't be taken as actual definitions, but as guides, I just mean to share a set of tools that I find useful for moving around mindstuff. . !pnext In fact, the aforementioned "the" human body was only formal because I cognized it as such; if I want to put on my Platonist hat and cognize it as a singular Form which really exists in some sense, it is then material. What is formal may be made material through this sort of reification. Conversely, what is material may be made formal through !c{modalization}{as in modality}: when I consider all the possible variations of this essay I could've written, I turn this material essay into a formal "this essay" which other cognitive objects, representing the other possible forms this essay might have had, are material instances of. (Actually, such modal forms blend materiality and formality, but I won't discuss that here). !pend

• I say that some mental phenomenon is generalizable, or generic, to the extent it holds in almost all people Unless otherwise specified, I use “person”, “mind”, and so on to refer particularly to humans, the terrestrial primates, rather than to any possible sentient being or mode of intelligence. , its non-existence in a small class of people being admissible but conceived of as an anomaly, or extenuating circumstance, with some outstanding explanation. ("General" is very similar in its colloquial usage, but the use of the word generic both sidesteps the problematic existence of the totally opposed mathematical sense of the word "general" and allows me to manipulate concepts more clearly for both your sake and mine). Thus is idiosyncrasy is a generic feature of reason: except for maybe infant twins, every person has their very own architecture of reasoning, this uniqueness coming from the haphazard construction of the edifice in response to a complex interaction between pre-existing neural potentials-for-development and environmental spontaneities. Thus, I won't be using "general" in the mathematical sense, where it means "in all cases"; in such cases, it's clearer to simply say "in all cases" (unless one is actually doing mathematics). Ironically, though, this use of "generic" is more or less the mathematical sense of the word, with the caveat that we cannot formalize it (there's no measure space structure on the finite set of all people which wouldn't either degenerate, break symmetry, or render "measure zero set" as "literally nobody" - see proof Proof
  Denoting by $P$ the set of all people (if intermediate evolutionary forms concern you, pick an arbitrary cutoff point, it hardly matters), suppose we had a $\sigma$-algebra ${\cal A} \subseteq {\cal P}(P)$ and measure $\mu: {\cal A} \to [0, \infty)$ rendering the set of all people into a measure space. Symmetry means that in any measurable set $X$ we can swap out any person for any other person to get a set $X'$ which is both measurable and has the same measure, $\mu(X) = \mu(X')$. Since all measurable sets are finite, we can get from $X$ to any set of the same cardinality by a finite series of person swaps, each of which preserves measure, implying that $\cal A$ has every set of the same cardinality as any set in $\cal A$, and furthermore that the measure of a set depends only on its cardinality.
  If any set of cardinality $n < |P|$ is measurable, all sets of cardinality $n+1$ are measurable, as any such set $S$ is the union of any given cardinality-$n$ subset $S'\subset S$ along with a cardinality-$n$ subset swapping out someone in the first subset for the one person in $S'-S$; by finite repetition, all sets of cardinality $n+2, \ldots, |P|$ are measurable as well. If $n>1$, then every set $S$ of cardinality $n-1$ is measurable as well -- add two different people to $S$ to get cardinality-$n$ sets $S'$ and $S''$ such that $S' \cap S'' = S$. Thus by finite repetition is every set of cardinality under $n$ measurable. So every finite measurable space displaying our symmetry property is either indiscrete, ${\cal A} = \{P, \emptyset\}$, or discrete, ${\cal A} = {\cal P}(P)$. In the former case, the measure is specified by its value on $\emptyset$ - necessarily zero - and on $P$ - which is arbitrary and doesn't mean anything since the case is degenerate.
  In the latter case, where every set is measurable, the additivity of measures and finiteness of $P$ implies that the measure of any set $S$ is the sum of the measures of the singletons corresponding to each of its elements - each of these having the same measure by symmetry (clearest in this case: no person has a greater representativity regarding "almost all" than any other person), call it $c$, $S$ is simply $c|S|$. Thus, so long as $\mu(P)$ isn't zero (which would render the space degenerate, all sets having zero measure), the measure of any set $S$ is simply $\frac{\mu(P)}{|P|}|S|$, which is zero if and only if $S$ is zero.
  Hence, either the only measure zero subset of the set of all people is the empty set, the measure is degenerate, or symmetry has been broken - and it is therefore useless to formalize "almost all people" as meaning "everywhere except on a measure zero subset people", i.e. the proper mathematical sense.).
• Of course, this isn't rigorous; I haven't eliminated ambiguity from my use of this word, I've merely provided some shape to the ambiguity.

• Genericity is opposed to particularity: a mental phenomenon is particular to its bearer insofar as the bearer has it, and has it in a way dependent on some specific determination of theirs, for instance a specific architecture of reason according to which one's thoughts are essentially endowed with particular structures of internal and external relations not necessarily present in the thoughts of others.
  !tab That smells evoke place memories for me in a way that songs, textures, etc. don't is particular to me Since I'm curious about how other people experience this if they do, I'll describe how this goes down for me: as I'm walking somewhere, I pick up a new, faint scent, and am rapidly hit with a barrage of "phantoms", or sudden recollections of complex clusters of sense-experiences with a lot of vividness but little intensity. Let's call each such barrage, which may unfold over the course of anywhere from ten seconds to ten minutes, an episode - not to pathologize them, since they're not harmful in any way, but just to have a name for each quantum of this general phenomenon. Any one episode might include:
  • Almost always, vague images of a certain place I regularly inhabited or visited a long time - maybe a year, maybe a decade - ago, though it may take me a while to identify the place; if I don't, I'll just have a vague sense of the general period of my life it came from
  • One that occurred a few days ago had me recall the sixth and topmost floor of a parking garage at my undergrad university, which in my junior year I used almost daily.
  • In some cases, these images are coupled with senses of spatial orientation corresponding to the images, or a sense of a hazily outlined map detailing the locations of things relative to one another.
  • e.g., an instinctive sense that the library ought to be visible in that direction from the topmost level, that some particular obstacles or affordances are in some particular locations relative to the building, and so on.
  • In some cases, they're also coupled with sensory recollections of particular experiences which were mundane everyday things at the time but which no longer happen.
  • e.g., tastes of the various kinesthetic senses encountered while walking down a stairwell along with visualizations of the corresponding parts of the interior being walked down (it was also my habit to walk up and down the full span of the garage's stairwell rather than use the elevator, and it was therefore burned into my mindto demonstrate: each story has 25 steps, the first set of 13 being separated from the next and previous sets of 12 by flat sections that spiral counterclockwise as one goes up, clockwise going down.); but I hardly have occasion to traverse stairwells nowadays, and I don't have to drive in my current location.
  • In most cases, a complex emotive disposition forms, directed towards the combined content of the phantoms. This usually has positive valence overall; I suspect that's more due to a programmed response rather than the content itself, but in any case the disposition is thereby usually informed by the manner in which I draw happiness from the phantoms; so long as I keep aware of the scent, the phantoms exist, though since I generally encounter them while moving from place to place I don't spend time getting familiar with them.
  • e.g., my disposition towards the parking garage was one of contentment with open tranquility - the top level is open to the sky, and I would often arrive or leave at night when there was little activity and gaze at the cityscape or stars - and my disposition towards traversing its stairwell was one of comfort in a stable routine.
  • It's very rare that I can tell what the original scent is actually a scent of, why it's triggering these memories in particular, and I was unable to figure out either of these with respect to the parking garage memories.
  • The explanation for this is likely the boring obvious one, which has three movements:
  1. If some scent I smell a couple times is hard to compare to other scents or characterize in itself, and associates itself with nothing particularly memorable, it's reasonable to posit that I won't be able to recall the actual scent in consciousness, since I didn't hang it on to anything conceptual (e.g., "my coworker's tacky cologne", "result of that terrible egg experiment", "like a toothpaste cigarette"), and extremely qualitative senses such as scents can be tough to recognize without conceptualization.
  2. Olfactory bulb neurons don't need concepts to learn and recognize scents, though; it's plausible that my brain might learn to recognize the scent of heated foobar without my recognizing it consciously. If the scent is "subconsciously learned" in this way through a few repeated noticings of it (or, better yet, many exposures so small that none of them are consciously noticed) which all have some situation in common, for instance their being in the same place (where the source of the scent presumably was), my brain may understand the scent as essentially being an indicator of that situation.
  3. Thus, if I come across the scent again a while later, it might activate a neural indicator of my being in a situation I'm not in, which activation results in various parts of the brain trying to navigate me through that situation (as they navigate me through whatever situation I'm in) by priming me with the various concepts and memories which make up its understanding of the original situation; the connection of the scent to this priming may be clear, since consciously smelling the scent makes it even more immediately available to cognition than a concept of it, but the presence of the scent in the original situation may remain a mystery since it was subconsciously learned.
  
  Again, I claim nothing more than that this is how it is for me in particular -- while I suspect that roughly similar things happen to many humans, it's clear how easily I could be wrong (c.f. the hyperphantasia mentioned elsewhere having a potentially unique synergy) if I claimed that. Though, it seems that the general phenomenon whereby senses are linked to vivid memories is well-known enough to have a name - the Proust phenomenon, after a famous passage in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time in which the narrator details his experience of it (c.f. this. reading the passage, it seems that - while Proust was actually describing taste Which is fair enough, given how closely smell and taste are linked - though, while I have experienced episodes involving particular foods, these seem to emanate not from the taste itself but generally from the activation of some phantom form of the taste which is itself more closely linked with smell. It would never be tasting something which causes an episode for me. I imagine this is just another particularity. - he definitely has what presents itself to my mind as being the basic thing, even if many of the individual details vary. The weaving in of all the little details that concord perfectly with my own experience, such as the visceral struggle to raise the source memory from the abyss (and we both assume that it is already wholly determined as a single truth, merely to be lifted out into awareness, rather than determined only partially, requiring a final set of harmonizing confabulations to become a single unity), as well as the suddenness of its appearance when it does appear... it's like trying to remember a word or a name that's "on the tip of your tongue", but in an altogether different cluster of sensory domains.
  , though it may be to some extent generalizable (insofar as it's a generic human phenomenon). Patterns of experience start off to me as particular, and only upon review are taken by me as having some genericity. (This definition is a second sense of the word "particular", though it's not out of the range of ordinary usage of the word (e.g. "they have a very particular way of interpreting the Bible") - when I say "this particular experience", context determines whether I mean "this one experience" or "this experience unique to me").

• abstract and concrete, contrasting in regard to the extent of actual determinationIn its philosophical sense, the "determination" of some thing is the extent to which that thing is specified as having or not having particular properties. If I idly think "I need a computer" without really building on this thought, the object of my cognition won't be determined outside of its being a computer. If the next day I go on to plan out my !c{dream computer}{it's going to have this model of CPU,
  this RAM, this case, and so on}, I would be rapidly determining the object of my cognition, making it that much more concrete. of the thing. (Not just 'extent of determination', as I think hypothetically concrete objects to still be abstract; nonetheless, there is a useful distinction to be made between hypothetically concrete abstractions and abstractions that are not hypothetically concrete). An imaginary friend I provably had when I was five years old would be an actual ideal concrete object; I don't recall having such a friend, so the imaginary friend postulated at the beginning of this sentence is a hypothetical ideal abstract (but hypothetically concrete) object. Another example: suppose I wanted a sandwich. This sandwich is for you qua supposer a hypothetical physical abstract object, not even hypothetically concrete for you since you are in your supposition merely mentally roleplaying as though I wanted a sandwich -- this is what supposition is, and as a consequence things being supposed can exist in two ways depending on whether they are looked at inside or outside of the roleplay It's the same with fiction: Daniel Radcliffe is Harry Potter - among other things an orphan and a wizard - from within the roleplay the movies are built to facilitate, but is not Harry Potter when viewed from outside of the roleplay, being an ordinary human like the rest of us. . In your mental roleplay you would take the sandwich as being for me a hypothetical physical hypothetically-concrete object; and - even though I'd bet that most readers of this essay will upon being told to suppose something instinctively construct such a roleplay, as I do - for one who just reads "Suppose that..." and thinks "make me" while continuing to parse the rest of the sentence without such a roleplay, 'sandwich' refers to an actual ideal abstract.
• actual and hypothetical, contrasting with regard to the thing's existence in this particular reality;
• physical and ideal, contrasting with regard to the essential substrate of the thing's existence, regardless of whether this existence is actual (an existence in this particular reality) or hypothetical (not in it, but in another postulated reality).

Problem Demonstration

Like anyone over the age of, say, four, I have a highly developed, highly idiosyncraticAs in, unique to myself as an individual just like my handwriting or my genome - not shared by others except in miraculously rare coincidences of similarity (unlike particularities, which can be widely shared). toolkit of mental processes - of various key concepts, heuristics, and so on that I have internalized and to which I repeatedly return by force of habit if not necessity; I can't help but to analyze the world through this toolkit, the structure of which therefore determines the general forms through which I conceive of things by, among other things, determining how I'm inclined to ascribe formal descriptions to particular happenings and how I'm inclined to put events, objects, forms, and other mental content into relations. My mathematical training, for instance, has honed my ability to apply the concept of necessity to my various reasonings about things - I'll put more effort than most people into an attempt to outline which observed aspects of the thing seem to me to have necessarily caused other observable aspects of the thing, yet this is generally not done out of wise and intentional cognitions in that direction, but because my mind has been woven into such a pattern as to capture and dissect them in that manner, just as a spider web woven in a certain way can't help but to catch insects of a certain shape and size.

Yet I maintain that it can be done correctly. As for why we might want to do this -- there are many obvious reasons. To give my main one, though, I'll quote Feynman:

It has to do with curiosity. It has to do with people wondering what makes something do something. And then to discover, if you try to get answers, that they're related to each other – that the things that make the wind make the waves, that the motion of water is like the motion of air is like the motion of sand.
The fact that things have common features - it turns out more and more universal. What we are looking for is how everything works, and what makes everything work.
Richard Feynman (Source video)

Yet, of course, there are practical reasons - extremely important ones. All intellectual endeavors - at least, those that bother to be of any service to humanity - benefit from clarity, and therefore from that proper systematization of clarity that offers us general tools to understand what exactly we are talking about and what mental motions we are performing in our cognitions of things. there's a set of common issues with human understanding that the vast majority of confusion and catchable error seem to stem from We can picture the general distribution of error-causation among systemic issues with the understanding as being a Pareto distribution, with a vast majority of the caused errors stemming from a small minority of issues, so long as we don't mean this too literally. , and which cannot be solved without first understanding what's going on with understanding in general. Furthermore, understanding the understanding, when taken far enough, shows itself as allowing in a natural way the artificial reconstruction of the process of understanding, so as to implement it e.g. computationally in line with one's own thought patterns and values.

Concepts Are Semifictional

To take one of the understanding-issues way up along the (again, metaphorical) Pareto distribution, consider the following narrative, the fiction of the unified concept: when humans agree via language to let a word X hold some particular semantic significance Really, there's nothing to this clause besides the speaking of a common language: this agreement is implicit in speaking the language, and the semantic significance is to be found in the actuality of its use. , people will tend in any given use of the word X to immediately yet mistakenly take the concept that stimulates that particular use of X as being given in the word itself, as being the meaning of the word, and therefore as existing inside the minds of anyone else who uses it. Thus do we fictionally represent the word as referring in itself to a static concept, forgetting not only various other ways in which we may use it for entirely different arrangements of concepts Not in the easy homonymous sense, where the different employments may as well be different words, e.g. "I killed the fly"/"I wonder how airplanes fly", but in the harder sense where we have a whole continuous range of conceptual arrangements to which a common word is applied. For instance, as concerns the word "see", there's both an absolutely conceptual way to use it and an absolutely visual way to use it, but also a continuous interpolation between them which vibrates with various other connotations the word can take on. Look: "now I see what you mean by 'conceptual'", "now I see Picasso's painting style", "now I see how this stain could be tomato sauce", "now I see the tessellated pattern of the wallpaper", "now I see you pulling up so I'll hang up the phone", "now I see a bottle of shampoo on the counter", "now I see more clearly with these new glasses", "now I see nothing since I lost both my eyes". but the essential subjectivity we insert into whatever we read as a consequence of the variance in the conceptual aspect that is taken to correspond to any particular use of a word with respect to the taker. This particular kind of error will be discussed in much greater detail later, but since it's such low-hanging fruit, let's demonstrate the fictional conceptuality of the word 'reality' I'll take this to include other forms of the word insofar as they can be interchanged in any given sentence without the alteration of semantic or conceptual content in that sentence. (For instance, sentences containing "reality" can usually be rewritten to contain "real" instead without really changing them, but it's rarer that we can write "realistic" instead without really changing them - thus the former is one of the forms the fictionality of whose conceptuality is tied very closely with that of 'reality', the latter somewhat less so). Anyway, when I say that the word 'reality' is fictional in its conceptuality, I don't mean by that phrase that "reality is conceptual" or "reality is fictional" or "the conceptuality of reality [itself] is a fiction". (Note that neither do I reject any of these in saying that, nor do I accept them via this parenthetical; they're just not relevant). I am saying that there is no singular and universal conceptual form - no one "thing that is meant" by those who speak the word (yes, in plain English - we don't need to reference particular dialects). !tab Really, there isn't even really a patchwork of meanings, as the existence of such a patchwork would imply the existence of individual meanings, as though generated by some unifying, transcendental structure of conceptions from which the whole of the patchwork's operation, and in particular its generation of singular things called "meanings", could be deduced; but no such structure exists - it is an analytical problem to exposit the means of understanding the forms of such non-singular things (the hope lying in the very possibility of despair), the processs by which we think these strange illusory thoughts concerning "meaning", and those aspects of their nature through which meanings really are to some extent genuinely coherent and communicable. After all, if there were no such thing, it would be pointless to write this essay, as I couldn't expect anyone to get what I mean - not just because I'm a terrible writer, but because there wouldn't be any "what I mean" deducible from an essay in the first place. This theme repeats itself over and over throughout this essay - there is something real and true in the vague abstractions we employ, but we have to meet this truth on its own alien terms, as our attempts to build it artificially (see any book on linguistics, sociology, psychology, analytic philosophy, etc., etc.) are nothing more than ridiculous simulacra. as a means of demonstrating the utility of understanding the understanding.

Which of the nine pictures below depicts something real? For convenience, let's assume for now that there is a physical world that can by fiat be called real, and that it is more or less as the sciences describe it to be - thereby do we furnish ourselves not only with the various particles and forces discovered by physics, but also with the various manners through which neuropsychology (biology more generally) sees this real matter and energy as conditioning subjective forms of mind. Given this, which of these pictures may we take to be a depiction of something real?

Most people, I suspect, would answer that (ii), (iv), (v), and (vi) are real, maybe (iii) as well, while (i), (ix), and maybe (vii) are true rather than real. Ignoring "!h[no-bg]{ceci n'est pas une ___}{}"-type problems, it at least seems clear that (ii) canonically points out a certain clump of actual matter, namely the actual moonIt is because there is an unambiguously singular actual thing, and because I asked "which things depicted below are real" rather than "which things below are real", that we even have the capability here to ignore the treachery of images, identifying a picture of the moon as depicting that particular physical object that appears in the sky.. This much is certainly real, right? Well, "thing" may be debated - we might say that the identification of a single entity from all that matter is merely conceptual, does not actually mark out a feature of physical reality, and that when we say "the moon" we are employing a concept that is not real due to a sort of !c{artificiality defect}{I'm not actually going to use this terminology, don't worry} - but regardless of whether we accept this argument, the matter in which we see "the moon" is physically real and basically unchanging matter being more or less veridically perceived through the depiction. (Unless, of course, something has gone terribly wrong - perhaps the moon disappeared in 2018 and has since been replaced by a complex system of satellite mirrors and hypnotic effects - though while we can't rule this out, we have no reason to believe any such thing has happened. Please remain unsuspicious until a general advisory has been posted to the contrary).

!parastart One step down the ladder, (v) points out a thing that at some point physically existed - some actual bee which probably died a long time ago. Yet, on the supposition that the bee has died and decomposed, being transmuted into various bacteria and fungi, is the photo still a photo of something real? Is this different from the criterion on which the it is a real photo? If that bee is somehow still alive, then, given that it like most living organisms has likely shuffled through all of its component atoms, the photograph is not one of any existent arrangement of physically existing things, so - if we bite the artificiality bullet and claim that "the moon" is real, is "the bee" then real or not? We might call this a permanence defect. !pnext This doesn't seem to be that pressing of a concern - first because we think of a single reality subject to a flow of continuous change, rather than a continuous flow of single realities (notice how I referred to the same bee above), and second because we often think of a reality as including its past: most people will feel fine calling a photo of e.g. Thomas Edison a real depiction of a real person A painting of Edison and a painting of a photo of Edison might both be a "fake depiction of a real person", though the painting itself wouldn't be fake as an object, just as a depiction. . For those who do accept the reality of Edison, myself included, consider the following: if I take a lightbulb and blow it to bits with twenty megatons of TNT, can I then continue to say that the lightbulb is real? I want to deny this, but it's not immediately clear to me how I can both think to deny reality to the dynamite while at the same time bestowing it upon the lightbulb. After all, if they are "real", and reality means a single thing, they ought to be real in the same sense; but even though they've both gone through the same process of being created and destroyed, I feel like I should judge them differently.
!tab The problem exists between the intuitive judgements I make concerning the application of attribute ("reality") to two different objects ("Thomas Edison", "vaporized lightbulb") and the !h{dianoetic}{discursively reasoning, as opposed to intuiting} comparison of these two judgements - namely, it seems to me that the attribute named 'reality' should be applicable to a given object based on cognizable criteria concerning that object, but here are two different objects for which those criteria I'm conscious of existing in "reality" are the same and yet for which I have different judgements. !pnext The issue is that 'reality' does not actually name a singular attribute with such-and-such cognizable criteria; in fact, the existence of such criteria themselves is an illusion, as the mental processing that leads to such-and-such a judgement is represented neither fully nor faithfully by my consciousness of mental processing. Not that I can't expand my consciousness of what's going on through introspection - if I do so, I find that when I say "Thomas Edison is real" I'm activating a dichotomy in my mind between fictional and non-fictional people, whereas when I say "the lightbulb is no longer real", I'm activating a dichotomy in my mind between physically existent objects at a certain moment and physically non-existent objects at a certain moment. Congruently, my first interpretation of the sentence "Thomas Edison is no longer real" as meaning something like "he was real, but then he became fictional", which doesn't make sense to me; but if someone were to say this to me, I'd almost instantly cut this first interpretation loose to form one which matches with my account of the situation, "he was alive, but then he died", perhaps noting the strange use of the word 'real'. There is no singular concept that the word 'reality' evokes for me, as I'm using a slightly different concept in each judgement. (Alternatively, consider: the words 'fake', 'fictional', 'imaginary', and 'non-existent' might all be taken as antonyms to 'real', but do not all mean the same thing). !pnext If someone thinks "no, neither Thomas Edison nor the lightbulb are real, though they were real", this paradox doesn't exist for them. The intensity and precise form of the paradox will vary from person to person; certainly some people take reality generally to consist exactly in physical reality and to explicitly take as an argument a given moment, and this solves the paradox (save for the sub-problem of the reality of structured things accidentally included in it). Thus is there an essentially personal aspect: a correct answer to this paradox can only be a correct answer for a particular person. !paraend

Continuing with the picture: (iv) is not an actual photo of any actual protein, being computer-generated, so it really does fall prey to the Magritte attack - there is no physically existing thing that the photo depicts. Yet we may say that the photo represents, in a looser sense, every RNA polymerase II protein, and in this particular sense the picture is "of" a real thing, even if it does not depict a real thing. (In this sense, would a painting of the actual bee - posing on an actual couch, holding an actual pollinated flower in its mandibles - depict a real thing?). Call the failure of an image to be a "real image" of something (which is necessarily real, if it has a real image), as with the bee painting, a representational defect; call the failure of an image to be an image of a single real thing, as with the protein image, its multiplicity defect.

Concepts Are Misleading

Cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following after speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inwardly to illuminate your self.
!tab -Dōgen, Fukan Zazengi (Universal Recommendation for Zazen)

• What criteria specifically determine the level of reality of some phenomenon?
• Is reality necessarily opposed to abstraction?
• Is there really just a plain interval between the two, rather than some more complex geometry?
• Does level of abstraction not depend on the perceiver's individual cognitive frameworks?
• Or should levels of reality be taken as inherently perceiver-dependent rather than universal?

Concepts Are Everywhere

• Some time ago, I was watching a streamer who, some time after taking a bite of an apple, saw its flesh start to brown - upon asking why apples "do that", others watching the stream answered with "oxygen" This obviously isn't an actual answer, as nowhere in it is any sort of process by which it turns from white to brown; I may figure from that answer that apple flesh naturally undergoes some process in the presence of oxygen, and that the skin keeps oxygen out (or in general does something to keep the process from happening), but "oxygen" is not a sufficient explanation in itself. Yet it isn't exactly a so-called "dormitive principle", as would be presented had I asked "why does air turn apple flesh brown?" and received the answer "air has the general tendency to affect the interiors of fruits, and in apples this manifests in browning" (two for one special!) - it is in fact slightly better pragmatically Dormitive principles aren't entirely useless - the fact that it's possible to use them to wrongly attribute causality ("doorbells have an innate tendency to make people want to press them") tells us that they do communicate something about causality, namely some level of direct (meaning something like "black-boxable") order. , when we assume it to be uttered in the common knowledge that the air is permeated with oxygen, as given this answer I can think to prevent further browning by locking out oxygen, e.g. by sealing the apple. But here's a richer answer with more pragmatic implications: destroying the cells that make up apple flesh - as happens at the surface exposed by a bite or cut - exposes them to atmospheric oxygen, fueling hydroxylation by the polyphenol oxidase (PPO) enzyme family of various present phenols into 1,2-benzoquinone, which combines with amino acids to form various dihydroxyindoles; these then freely polymerize to form eumelanin, the same chemical responsible for brown hair, eyes, and skin in humans.
  !tab I say "richer" and not "actual" because, while this answer hints more explicitly at the causal processes (through verbs like "fuel", "combine", "polymerize", "appear"), it still ultimately just ascribes various outcomes to various things without explaining further: it doesn't explain how PPO enzymes react with oxygen and so on. It nevertheless tells me that I (or, well, someone better-equipped) may prevent the browning of apples by somehow preventing the action of PPO enzymes (e.g. by silencing their production at the genomic level, by inserting a gene which codes for the production of an inhibitor, etc.)., by somehow preventing the polymerization of dihydroxyindoles into eumelanin (e.g. by inducing the overexpression of a gene coding for a protein which turns them into something else, or one that targets dimers and trimers and cuts them up, or etc.), and so on. Thus, while it may be the case that there is no "actual" explanation besides reality itself, we may at least judge explanations in terms of the hypothetical affordances they allow us. .
  !tab Analytically, it may be asked: first, in what way was the browning of the apple represented in the streamer's mind so as to come out verbally as "do that", and how was the notion of browning successfully transmitted by - and presumably expected to be transmitted by - those words? What particular notion of "reason-why" is activated upon being stimulated to come up with an answer to this question? In what form is the knowledge that leads to the answer "oxygen" present, and how is this knowledge activated by cognition about the question? Why is it cognized as an answer to the question - what sort of mental structure do each of the asker and answerer build from this answer in order to consider it as an answer to the question? !subparaend

• A couple days ago, I had a package on my desk, and wanted to cut the wrapping tape in order to open it. My reaction was to look around my desk for various things that I could use to do this, rejecting a few things before coming across the plug of a phone charger sort of thing I had lying around (picture); upon perceiving Not "seeing" it per se, as I had to somehow be stimulated by its appearance into (some relatively explicit level of) consciousness of it, rather than merely seeing it and unconsciously passing over it - the same phenomenon that lets humans wonder where their phone or keys are when they're right there in their pocket or even hand. it, I rapidly picked it up and, setting one of the prongs at an angle against the taped median of the top of the box, used it to rip the (paper) tape open.
  !tab We ask: what led me to see that the charger could be used in this manner? What sort of awareness of the previous things - a pen and a bottle of hand sanitizer among them, both of which I could've used - led me to reject them, yet accept the charger? Just now, what led me to call it a "phone charger sort of thing"? Namely - what was the structure of my internal representation of it, and how did this interact with/get interpreted by my linguistic faculty so as to lead to that phrase?

• When considering a problem, one generally refers to different methods of phrasing/approaching/solving it as "perspectives", "angles", or "points of view", and often hears of "taking a different point of view", "looking at it from this angle", and so on - all seeming to analogize the problem with a physical object in space that we're physically looking at. And indeed - when I employ such turns of phrase myself, I'm sometimes aware of a vague perception deep in my consciousness like an imagined relocation around an object.
  !tab We ask: how do such analogies tend to affect the way we approach the analogized concepts? How do they arise from, and affect, the sensory faculties we employ in imagination when considering something? How are things in general cognized through sensory imagination?

• Misrememberings are often related in abstruse ways to their corresponding realities. Sometimes they'll be simple transpositions or substitutions, e.g. I might misremember the number 195032 as 190523. Sometimes they'll be stranger, as a few days ago when I named "David Cobain" after being prompted to think of a magician, later seeing that I had blended the names of David Copperfield and David Blaine (both actual magicians).
  !tab We ask: what do such misfirings of the faculty of memory reveal about the ways in which it generally stores, recalls, and employs information stored in our minds This, I think, is the only reasonable way to ask of the relation between the particular phenomenon and the general faculty: to ask not what our idea of the faculty of memory can do for it, but to ask what it qua phenomenon of the faculty can do for our idea of the faculty. This is what it means to treat it analytically, ? What general conceptual-sensory-linguistic rules govern the manners of transcribing information into whatever memories are made of, such that failures of these rules tend to manifest in the peculiar ways that they do? !subparaend

How?

Shape

Many minds will succeed very well in the exact and even in deep sciences more closely allied to intuition while they cannot succeed in investigations dealing exclusively with abstract concepts. In such cases men should apply their talents to other subjects.
Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Hackett ed. pg. 8

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