To summarize the practical aspect of Panidealism (rather than the theoretical duality):
“You don’t know everything; stop acting like you do.”
That’s it – it simply states that we will never have the complete set of knowledge required to judge the ultimate consequences of ideas, and we should stop limiting ideas on such judgments in our ignorance.
Perhaps I’m putting a bit of my own spin on it as well:
“The thinker creates. The parasite destroys.”
It’s the fundamental question of any utilitarian philosophy: by existing, do you add anything? Or do you take away? Is the world better or worse for your influence on it? True, destruction makes way for new creation, but it’s foolish to praise the effects of a fire or earthquake because they enable people to build more houses, for example – better to credit the builders for the very human feat of creating in spite of the destructive forces that oppose them.
Thus it is desirable to destroy only as much as is required to replace with a better creation. Anything further is gratuitous, unnecessary, …even evil.
And thus the principle of additivity finds its application and its grounding in utilitarian philosophy (perhaps with some Objectivism thrown in, though Rand’s aim was to create a philosophy for living according to one’s own principles within society, while my aim is to create a philosophy for the act of creation itself).
Rand defines the worth of society as the amount of freedom it affords its citizens. It’s a good definition, but I’d also factor in the amount of unnecessary destruction it requires for creation (or even just life in general) – destruction of the environment, destruction of people’s fortunes, destruction of people’s ideas, etc. Anything that doesn’t need to be cleared for creation shouldn’t be.
Slowly, the concept of Panidealism is being fleshed out (through the usual method of subconsciously generating unrelated ideas and tying them together in surprising ways, or “painting a house with a paintball gun”). It’s going to be quite a philosophy when I’m finally ready to write it up. Unfortunately, I don’t think it will happen before I graduate.
(Update: Why do I always add an “e” to the end of his name? Subconsciously, “Roark” just lacks a sort of linguistic “balance”).
Here’s another one that I think is good advice for scientists:
“Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.”
–Albert Einstein
The idea is one I’ve long held, though it flies in the face of conventional ideas: reading is useful to learn only what other people have thought. After a while, however, you need to move on to creating your own thoughts, using other people’s thoughts only as stepping stones – if at all. There’s no novelty to be found in the thoughts of others – they’re better at thinking in their own ways than you are.
Concentrating too much on the past will only prevent you from expending the effort in more useful ways.
I’ve held these beliefs for a while, but kept them fairly private. Since a major theme of mine during the last year and a half has been the necessity of an appropriate educational system for nurturing great thinkers, I think I’ll state them in the open:
We really must, as a society, move beyond the “no child left behind” mentality. We cannot afford to slow classes down more and more in order to cater to the slowest learners. It does a great disservice to the normal children and a far greater one to accelerated learners. The manifestations of this are pretty plain: boredom, lack of focus on work (but not a general lack of focus), preference for self-devised side projects, frustration, detachment, etc. If these abound in a classroom, chances are the work is too slow.
The worst culprit, however, is not No Child Left Behind. It’s the concept of a grade. Even at young ages, mental ability is not uniform. It is absolutely unfair to group all children of a certain age into a single grade, learning all the same materials, and then to keep them there for a fixed amount of time. Sorry, but if a student learns multiplication halfway through 1st grade, for instance, he really should not need to keep learning it for the rest of the academic year – move the work up to something more appropriate for the student’s background.
The rest of this will concern math, because it’s the area I’ve tutored most extensively. However, it can be applied to any field in a similar manner, taking appropriate safety precautions in fields such as chemistry, of course. (“You know how to use a bunsen burner, now let’s work with some HCl!” is probably not a good idea).
From my own experience as a student and a tutor, I bet we’ll see students learning algebra in 3rd or 4th grade in such a system. I started learning it at 8, but I had no help in the matter (as usual; I’ve always had to do everything on my own), so I bet we could teach it even earlier, at least to the mathematically gifted. Taught properly, rules from arithmetic supply the intuition – things like multiplication and division being inverse operations, associativity, and even binomial multiplication (FOIL) on simple things that the student can verify conventionally, including showing how it emerges from the distributive property, such as (5 + 1) * (4 + 3) = 5(4 + 3) + 1(4 + 3) = 5*4 + 5*3 + 1*4 + 1*3 = 42. Anyone who knows simple addition and multiplication can of course verify this simple example by adding 5 and 1, 4 and 3, and then multiplying the resulting 6 and 7, which allows the student to verify for himself that the identity does indeed work on this example. After this is done, generalize by moving onto variables.
Once basic algebra is mastered (and it doesn’t need to take years), introduce the basics of calculus. If you’re feeling really adventurous, it’s probably an ideal time to introduce some abstract algebra as well – right after a student finishes generalizing numbers to variables, they’ll be in the right mindset to generalize variables to teach them to generalize algebra itself – to get rid of the whole “number” thing and just talk about systems.
Logarithms and things are all special cases in calculus and can be safely ignored until the students learn about them (their “special” properties really arise from the definition of the operators anyway). Limits are easy to teach – use a number line and terminology like “gets closer and closer”. And DO NOT tell me you can’t teach someone d/dx(x^n) = n x^(n-1) as soon as they know algebra, because I won’t buy it. If they can learn the quadratic formula, they can certainly learn how to differentiate a polynomial.
Integrals are taught pretty well as-is (Riemann sums and the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus give good intuitive foundations for the concept), but again, far too late. It should be 7th / 8th grade sort of stuff at the latest.
The idea is to teach students enough that they can learn the rest, then move on and let them learn the rest (with help, if necessary). Exactly how much is “enough to learn the rest” varies from student to student and must be recognized on an individual basis.
Forcing homework upon them isn’t going to help them learn the rest, either. They should be encouraged, but not coerced. Students start out wanting to learn – in my own experience, the younger my proteges, the more enthusiastic they were about learning science, engineering, and/or math. Associating boring and repetitive work with such subjects for years eventually turns most people off to it (or worse, makes them think they can’t do it when they really can). The high school and college students tended to be the least enthusiastic, because they had the choice of (a) rote study or (b) an active social life. Assignments force them to the choice while providing very little benefit. Einstein states that “it is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education”, but, scientist that he was, he hasn’t seen the casualties.
Ultimately, it is society that suffers.
Yes, I’m aware that Montessori came up with a similar idea, but I’ll stop saying it when I see people acting on it. It doesn’t matter whether the idea already exists if people don’t do anything with it. Further derivation just serves to underscore the need for an implementation.
While looking up information on the aforementioned Wizard’s Rules to see whether my guess of “Confessor”‘s theme was accurate, I stumbled upon an interesting explanation of the First Rule that was apparently given in the book:
“People are stupid, they will believe anything, either because they want it to be true or because they are afraid it is.”
Wizard’s First Rule: Chapter 36, Page #397, US Hard Cover (revealed by Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander).
* Explanation by Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander: “People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it’s true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People’s heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool.”
(Wikipedia)
It is clear from the explanation that I owe somewhat of an intellectual debt here. The rule itself doesn’t even need explicit mention (we’re all stupid, and all genius is but a lesser form of stupidity), but the explanation is helpful. One of the foundational principles of my “panidealist” philosophy is the inability to fully estimate the objective range of applications of an idea. This is a particular flavor of the last sentence in the explanation (although I strengthen “rarely” to “never”). Although that principle was largely observed from experience (it was practically shoved down my throat whenever I attempted to explain my research on the divisor function and I would have thought of it, Wizard’s Rule or not, because it was simply made so clear to me again and again), this doubtless counts as an additional influence on that aspect of my philosophy. Credit where it’s due; I’ll cite Goodkind in my Treatise 🙂
I began thinking about the selective nature of certain communities in terms of my “panidealist” philosophy this morning, only to come to a shocking conclusion:
Any community that enforces a single set of common beliefs through selection or coercion reduces itself to the strength of a single free-thinking individual.
Recall that my philosophy states that reality is itself an expression of various combinations of ideas. Mathematically, it is the image of a basis of ideas represented as a matrix. I’ve been told that this aspect of my philosophy is also the philosophical view of Bertrand Russel (though I’ve never read his philosophy and don’t really read philosophy in general, preferring to keep my own worldview untainted by the philosophies of others). However, what I am about to propose extends beyond his philosophy.
We can define the rank of a matrix as the number of linearly independent columns. Because the ideas underlying reality form a basis, they are, by definition, full rank. Their expression is the image of this basis, thus it is not full-rank. In other words, redundant ideas are expressed in various facets of reality (which is fine; the idea of sentience is not independent from the idea of humanity, for example).
Now let us take a community that selects for a shared set of ideas. Such selections include “fit”, personality, interests, etc.
Because all members of this community share these ideas in common, the size (and thus rank) of the basis is reduced. The more ideas are shared, the more the community’s basis approaches the size of a single individual.
Now it gets interesting: what if we define intelligence, or “cognitive power” (to differentiate it from the psychometric concept of intelligence), as the number of ideas one is simultaneously capable of expressing or creating?
We discover that an community consisting entirely of shared values is as intelligent as a single person. A community with completely independent ideas or values (deliberately selecting for people who do not match the existing basis would be the only way I can see of approaching one; actually attaining this is impossible) is full rank, and operates optimally save for the fact that any individual idea may not have enough momentum within the community to become fully expressed (a major problem). As this community introduces more redundancy, the size of the basis does not scale with the number of members, and the rank of the community remains the same despite an increasing size. Thus the average cognitive power of the community drops despite increasing membership. Negative returns.
This results in the satisfying conclusion (if the premises are correct, which is a philosophical matter) that any society that continuously expands its membership while selecting for particular ideas will ultimately run itself into the ground, possibly to be overcome by the thought of a single individual.
As Ayn Rand puts it at the end of Anthem, “For they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers. I have my mind.”
Because of my unique “panidealist” philosophy, I am perhaps the worst person to ask to review papers. If we cannot assess the full impact of an idea (an axiom in the philosophy), something would have to be horribly wrong for me to reject a paper because doing so may very well impose my ignorance upon others.
I hate the way the scientific establishment works. No small group of people should act as gatekeepers. Just let the ideas go before the community as a whole and let them choose which to work with. If you are too worried about massive amounts of quackery, let them “digg” or “bury” papers and sort by number of “diggs” / citations. It will work.
The strong anthropic principle states that any viable universe must have the capacity for observation; that is, life must evolve in it. If the multi-worlds interpretation is correct, however, we may not all necessarily be in the same universe (if “quantum immortality” is correct, it gets even weirder: people might be in the same universe at one moment in time and may forever diverge at a future branching point as their own survival takes them along different paths).
I wonder whether we can propose a “strongest anthropic principle” of some sort that roughly states that the particular universe each person (or lifeform in general) inhabits evolved specifically for that person/organism rather than for the general existence of life as a whole. The existence of multiple universes would permit it.
We could even take it further, actually, and permit free will under the assumption of determinism (disclaimer: I am not a determinist), though this treads dangerous philosophical and theological ground because it would essentially argue that we are God: if the initial state of the universe is organized for a specific organism, it may be organized for the organism’s free will, or even by the organism’s free will.
Not that I believe this, but the ideas are intriguing. It’s the ultimate philosophy of egocentrism 🙂
I was reading the first page of Hofstadter’s new book, “I am a Strange Loop”, and, as usual, Hofstadter got me thinking. He begins by attempting to draw a dividing line between what has a soul and what does not, using an analogy to what animals may be ethically killed for food to demonstrate the inconsistencies and paradoxes that result when attempting to define that boundary. His own solution is essentially a compromise – he will eat certain animals, but abstain from eating others. His reasoning for choosing certain animals is not precisely made clear.
Well, I tend to view eating as an expression of a natural order, so I don’t feel precisely the same qualms he does about it, but regarding the intrinsic “presence” of a soul, I believe that the dividing line is determined by the soul’s capacity for compassion – that is, to ensure a positive outcome for all, not just itself. In essence, then, the “magnitude” of a particular organism’s soul becomes a function of its behavior rather than an intrinsic property. We can then discard the word “soul” altogether and speak from strictly utilitarian terms:
In an everyone-for-themselves world, the law is kill or be killed. No one will shed any tears for any loss of life, because everyone is only looking out for his own well being. This represents the absolutely degenerate case.
In an entirely compassionate and altruistic world, everyone looks out for everyone else. Presumably, no one starves because everyone gathers food for the good of the community (of course, how this is done without killing is a major missing detail, but an irrelevant one). This is what communism in its purest form promised, but it is of course absolutely unattainable, as the entire world has witnessed over the past century.
So let’s set these situations at opposites and speak about the area in the middle. Specifically, we’re interested in the reciprocity of the situations.
The less compassion one shows, the more likely one is to harm others to benefit himself. However, this creates a scenario (prisoner’s dilemma where the prisoner is guaranteed to proclaim you guilty) in which the only good response is opposition (i.e. you proclaim him guilty as well so you don’t get locked up). The exigencies of the situation then demand a particular type of response, and, because it’s a simple requirement, the moral opposition to this should dwindle.
Therefore, I can set my own dividing line based on the compassion of the creature.
The only remaining question now is that if I eat animals, am I demonstrating the same sort of reprehensible behavior that I spoke of before? That’s a tricky question which many people are going to answer differently, but ultimately, I believe that the amount of good one’s continued existence can engender is a counterbalance against the amount of life one is responsible for taking in the name of sustenance.
I’ve come up with many philosophical ideas that I’ve later discovered to be unoriginal, but I don’t really read much philosophical literature. What, then, is the message? Is it that my thoughts would be original if I had been born a century earlier? Or does the legacy of past philosophers suffuse society to such an extent that the ideas are easily rediscovered, even by one who has never gone out of the way to study them?
Why must novelty be so hard? Must I study previous works every time I discover an idea to ensure that the idea was not written down? I couldn’t; I have far too many ideas and it would take far too long. Neither can I simply throw ideas away, as one particular lesson that I’ve learned from the scientific community is that people simply cannot estimate the potential value of any idea. Paradoxically, an exhaustive study of the field would additionally seem pointless if I am capable of synthesizing others’ philosophies intellectually; the only distinction lies in knowing that an idea is unoriginal. I’m not sure there’s a particularly good answer, except perhaps to ignore it, write as if all of my ideas are original (thanks Descartes), and let society sift through them later if it chooses (and if it doesn’t, there’s no point in writing them down in the first place because they’ll simply be ignored).