/lit/ - Literature

ok so i have calmed down after my meltdown yesterday (or the day before?) here i will lay out my issue with the entire project of material composition:

as far as i understand it, the goal of ontology, as quine puts it, is to select a category of primitives which may through their combination (though not composition) permit explanation for everything in our domain of discourse. this approach is, naturally, doomed. previously, i mentioned the halting problem and effective information theory as immediate demonstrations of the issue, but as i was having an autism fit, failed to spell out the root problem at hand. this entire project, of picking what to quantify and treat as basic, is not only flawed due to explanatory insufficiency (as is suggested by stratification in effective information), but as a related corollary, an endeavour that is rigid to a fault. the latter is not only demonstrated by the halting problem, but also in the very ostensible problem of vagueness.

the key word is ostensible. for there is no vagueness when you actually understand what you are doing. in quantifying over chair, we are constructing an invariant in cognition. i believe penrose demonstrates this phenomena in his various proofs which he uses as examples that differentiate computation and thought. an object's composition and form may change, but what persists is the invariant we hold of it in our mind. this is why talk of so-called vagueness is infuriating, as it conflates different levels of discourse without any attention to what one is even trying to achieve. let us consider even particles, in which they could be instead interpreted as excitations of a field. where exactly the particle is is vague from such a stand point. that this doesn't seem the case on the level of particles is a byproduct of your quantification. if the problem is concerned instead with how some information system should come to categorize an object in the world, this is also an issue that is simply idiotic to try and treat as a formal issue in the first place. this time the boundaries being crossed are disciplinary ones and not just categorical. what here we are concerned with is the basis of perception, and schema construction. these are better dealt with in artificial intelligence and observer mechanics

this rigidity is also contrary to what goes on in natural science and mathematics. especially in the latter, new mathematical objects thus conceptualizations are posited in order to better understand the problem. keeping a rigid ontology is contrary to the unconstrained play of ideas in the sciences. i ask again, where should this actually be used? upon meditation, i have come to the conclusion that it is best used for simulation and automated proof assistants. it isn't pointless, but there just aren't any arguments to be had when you understand what is going on