Chaos Magic
Quoting The central defining tenet of chaos magic is arguably the idea that belief is a tool for achieving effects.
Is the final goal of science effectiveness? (Control means controlling effects?)
Is not the objective test of good decisions their long term effect?
On the other hand, what if Truth for Truth's sake, has the best effect?
Most tragedies come from:
1. People justifying the means by the ends.
2. People acting without due consideration of the consequences.
Wisdom should necessarily involve being mindful of both the means and the ends.
As an attempt at reconciliation:
(Approximate) accuracy is necessary for effectiveness.
Effectiveness is a means of judging (approximate) accuracy.
What do you think?
-Is effectiveness a good measurement of truth?
-Is truth for truth's sake the best goal, or should the goal be to have an effective life philosophy?
-Is there necessarily a tension between the two?
Motto:
Strve for Truth while being mindful of the effects of your beliefs.
Thanks. Excuse me if my thoughts got a bit jumbled near the end.
7th principle of Huna:Effectiveness is the measure of truth.
[quote="Pragmatism"]An approach that assesses the truth of meaning of theories or beliefs in terms of the success of their practical application.
uca.edu:Most scientists, but not all, are interested in three goals: understanding, prediction, and control.
Is the final goal of science effectiveness? (Control means controlling effects?)
Wisdom defined by Cambridge Dictionary:the ability to use your knowledge and experience to make good decisions and judgments
Is not the objective test of good decisions their long term effect?
On the other hand, what if Truth for Truth's sake, has the best effect?
Most tragedies come from:
1. People justifying the means by the ends.
2. People acting without due consideration of the consequences.
Wisdom should necessarily involve being mindful of both the means and the ends.
As an attempt at reconciliation:
(Approximate) accuracy is necessary for effectiveness.
Effectiveness is a means of judging (approximate) accuracy.
What do you think?
-Is effectiveness a good measurement of truth?
-Is truth for truth's sake the best goal, or should the goal be to have an effective life philosophy?
-Is there necessarily a tension between the two?
Motto:
Strve for Truth while being mindful of the effects of your beliefs.
Thanks. Excuse me if my thoughts got a bit jumbled near the end.
Comments (54)
The trick, as used by many writers on philosophy, including sometimes the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, is to start by arranging a set of appropriate terminology in some random order and then grammatically connecting them.
The cut-up technique is an important part off Chaos Magic, where a written text is cut up and rearranged, often at random, to create a new text.
For example, taking from the SEP article on Belief the following appropriate words: symbol - hot water - mind - particular fact - entities - representationalism - mass of water - memory - accessed- proposition.
We can then put them in one random order and then grammatically connect them to give:
Take the symbol of hot water as part of a belief in the mind, where hot water is taken as a particular fact in the world. Such facts lead to a novel entity in the mind, specifically an important feature of representationism. It follows that the representation of a mass of water as hot, as one says, hot water, is something stored in the memory and accessed when required in the form of a proposition.
Or we can put them in a different random order and then grammatically connect them to give:
Beliefs are part of propositions about entities that exist in an observed world, such as the object mass of water which is accessed by the mind from observation as having the form of hot water. Such objects become a symbol in the mind, things that have been been observed in the world, and retrieved as a memory when required, being brought back to light as a particular fact, in other words, as a form of representationalism
IE, as long as the terminology is appropriate, it is often the role of the reader to make sense of the article rather than the role of the writer.
Thanks I'm not sure where to go from there.
Good post. I saw "chaos magic" and was prepared for baloney, but you've laid out an interesting issue, one I've thought about a lot.
Quoting HarryHarry
I had never come across Hawaiian philosophy. I wish you would give us a bit more background. It might even be a good thread by itself.
Quoting HarryHarry
Quoting HarryHarry
Quoting HarryHarry
I sometimes call myself a pragmatist. One of the things I mean by that is that the ultimate goal of thought is to determine what we should do next. If that's what's important, then truth is only a tool, not a goal in itself. It's secondary and too tight a focus on it is misleading. So, no, effectiveness is not a measure of truth. I guess you could say truth is a measure of effectiveness.
And no, I don't think truth for truth sake is all that important. I would say that knowledge for knowledge sake is. I think curiosity drives us to know the world in ways we can't know now will be useful in the future. So the final goal of science is not truth, it is knowledge, understanding. The most earth-shattering knowledge seems to come from sources that didn't seem all that useful in the beginning.
Good post.
Quoting RussellA
:up: Damn. You just summed up [s]modern[/s] philosophy pretty darn well!
The human mind is so hyper-ready and prepared to find meaning in any way possible, that it will find one in the most obtuse and obscure sources. It will anchor in prior knowledge (pace Vygotsky) and use schema to fit into their own umwelt framework.
Oh, yes, and welcome to the forum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huna_(New_Age)#:~:text=King%20wrote%20that%20the%20seven,is%20the%20moment%20of%20power.
Have y'all been living under a stone not to have noticed the unreasonable effectiveness of bullshit?
Whatever your thoughts on Huna, @HarryHarry's post was substantive.
I just gave you the background you asked for.
Muhalo.
Quoting T Clark
Muhalo, you too, for as they say, you never step into the same river twice.
Maybe that can be an 8th principle of the tuna.
What channel is that on?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Quoting schopenhauer1
As T said:
Quoting T Clark
Truthsocial.com
Totally agree.
The Wikipedia article on Chaos Magic writes that our perception of the world is conditioned by our prior beliefs, and our perception of the world can be changed by changing those prior beliefs. An idea that relates back to Kant.
Chaos magic teaches that the essence of magic is that perceptions are conditioned by beliefs, and that the world as we perceive it can be changed by deliberately changing those beliefs.
The Wikipedia article also writes that William S Burroughs, who practised chaos magic, found importance in the cut-up technique as having a magical function, in not only politics but also science. The concept of the cut-up was developed by the Dadaists in the 1920's
Burroughs who practised chaos magic, and was inducted into the Illuminates of Thanateros in the early 1990s was adamant that the technique had a magical function, stating "the cut ups are not for artistic purposes". Burroughs used his cut-ups for "political warfare, scientific research, personal therapy, magical divination, and conjuration" the essential idea being that the cut-ups allowed the user to "break down the barriers that surround consciousness".
One example of the cut-up technique may be found in poetic philosophical writings, including sometimes the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where it is often the role of the reader to make sense of the article rather than the role of the writer.
Another example may be found in mainstream media, for example a BBC article on Trump. From observations about facts in the world, the following words may be used as a foundation for one's beliefs: supporters - Trump - America - great - threat - democracy - forces dominated - driven - intimidated - mob - stormed - patriots - insurrectionists.
We can then grammatically connect them to give:
Supporters of Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" agenda are a threat to democracy. "Maga forces are determined to take this country backwards." "But there's no question, that the Republican party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the Maga Republicans, and that is a threat to this country." Trump supporters thought of the mob who stormed the US Capitol last year as patriots rather than insurrectionists.
Or we can put them in a different random order and then grammatically connect them to give:
Patriots must now stand together against the threat posed by those mysterious figures who wish to destroy and must not be driven into despair or intimidated into silence. We applaud the great supporters of America who stand against the insurrections hiding in our midst, and like the mob who stormed the Bastille in 1789, seen as a symbol of the abuse of power, Trump has marshalled the forces for democracy in a world dominated by forces subverting the will of the people.
It may be seen that two people observing the same facts in the world may come to two completely different coherent understandings. The fact that an understanding of the world based on the same facts is coherent is no guarantee that the understanding is either true or correct.
The cut-up technique of chaos magic gives insight into art, politics and science.
That may be seen certainly. However, though 'I am sane and you are mad' may be rearranged to 'I am mad and you are sane', these are arrangements of words, not facts. From the fact that one can arrange words as one likes one cannot correctly deduce that one can rearrange thereby the facts. That is a bullshit that one can use to manipulate the gullible. Like this:
Quoting HarryHarry
A fine principle that equates truth and falsehood - 'because you're worth (jack sh)it'.
We see a large disorganised group of people, which are facts in the world.
One person may connect the fact disorganised with the fact group of people and say "I see a mob", and another person may connect the fact disorganised with the fact group of people and say "I see a crowd".
Within language, facts in the world may be combined to give grammatically correct propositions, yet the fact that a proposition is grammatically correct does not guarantee its truth.
I find that an odd way of talking, to be honest. 'Within language' one can say anything. but i would not say that there are any facts 'within language', because I tend to think of facts as being out in the world at large. Within language there are true statements of fact, and false statements of purported fact.
Are we saying the same thing?
Anyway, I am saying, against the op and the 7th principle of Huna, "Effectiveness is the measure of truth." that it might sometimes be effective to lie. And indeed if it was never effective to lie, there would be a lot less lying than there is. The fact that what is claimed to be the 7th principle of Huna is itself a made up principle completely denied by the locals to be any tradition of theirs, makes it an excellent example of effective falsehood.
But not very effective, if one thinks things through.
There may well be, but does anyone agree what they are.
It also depends whether one is using the Correspondence, Semantic, Deflationary, Coherence or Pragmatic Theory of Truth.
I don't see it that way. I think it just means that truth is a secondary principle. Truth is a servant of utility. Truth, or falsity, must be useful to be meaningful. Who cares if the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain unless they are a Spanish farmer, a climate scientist, or a linguist in Edwardian England.
Bullshit on, dude. See what you want to see, no worries.
Quoting RussellA
Any two, possibly, but truth is not democratic either. Things do not become more true the more people agree. Something can be true though no one knows it. I defend the meaning of the word against the destruction of its meaning with some vigor, because if the truth becomes a matter of choice, or convenience, then language itself loses its value, and we become as dumb beasts, because meaning depends on truth. Unless we can trust in the truth of language, we must dismiss its meaning entirely. Chaos will reign, but no one will listen to its proclamations.
So this is akin to post-modernism's notion of "all is text". What is the grand narrative? The other tendency is some sort of unitary philosophy or grand narrative for which everything can fit into. Fukuyama, Hegel, Marx, embody this in philosophy of history. Evolutionary psychology might embody this in a sort of scientism. And on and on.
The counter to this is simply "laws of the universe". There are universal constants. Technology processes information. Energy is being transformed into other forms of energy. This is something that you can refute in words, but not in experience.
Graceless.
The trouble is this:
Quoting Wiki
Wiki says now we know "the true number", simple as that. But of course that's not exactly true, because there are variations in the number, types, and arrangement of chromosomes listed on that very page. More importantly, for more than 30 years every biologist and every doctor believed it was a fact that humans have 48 chromosomes. Of course, we now believe they were all wrong, but it ought to give one pause.
None of this is a question of choice or convenience. This chaos magic business would be a non-starter even if beliefs created reality as imagined, because you can't choose your beliefs. Painter didn't choose his incorrect belief and Tjio didn't choose his improvement on Painter; he certainly didn't prefer 46 to 48 because it had the virtue of being true, as if he had some other way of determining that besides looking through a microscope. He looked and found 46. Others looked and also found 46 and said he was right.
If there's virtue here, it's not in eschewing choice or convenience, but in (a) looking and (b) holding your beliefs as open to revision. That's what pragmatism was aiming at, even if the talk of utility obscures that now and then.
:up: In a nutshell.
That's the direction many think Society is heading towards at the moment.
As the Wikipedia article on Criticism of postmodernism writes:
Postmodernism has received significant criticism for its lack of stable definition and meaning.
Yes. As the Wikipedia article on Postmodernism writes:
Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism toward the "grand narratives" of modernism; rejection of epistemic certainty or the stability of meaning; and sensitivity to the role of ideology in maintaining political power. Claims to objectivity are dismissed as naïve realism, with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization.
I'm not sure why you are telling me this. Certainly it is a problem that we get things wrong and believe things to be true that are not true. But it is not a problem for the meaning of 'true'. Something was thought to be true and turned out later not to be true. I think we need to keep stable and agree about what 'true' means and that it means the same when everyone thought wrongly then, as it means now that we have corrected ourselves. and if it turns out next week that there are another 17 chromosomes that have been hidden all this time because they are extra small or transparent or something, then we will revise again what we know. And at no time has what is true changed, but only what we believe to be true. Although it could also happen that the number of chromosomes might change.
By all means let us be open to revision and reversal of what we believe according to what we later learn to be true, but not according to what we later find to be convenient - that is the path to 'very stable genius' and never being wrong, conveniently.
Theophilus Thistle, the successful thistle sifter,
In sifting a sieve full of unsifted thistles,
Thrust three thousand thistles through the thick of his thumb.
If Theophilus Thistle, the successful thistle sifter,
Can thrust three thousand thistles through the thick of his thumb,
See thou, in sifting a sieve full of unsifted thistles,
Thrust not three thousand thistles through the thick of thy thumb.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Tell me now Srap Tasmaner,
If Theophilus Thistle, the unsuccessful thistle sifter,
in sifting a sieve full of unsifted thistles,
Thrust not three thousand thistles through the thick of his thumb.
How many thistles has Theophilus Thistle the unsuccessful thistle sifter,
while sifting unsifted thistles through the thick of his thumb,
thrust through the thick of his thumb?
But you haven't just grammatically connected them after mixing them up, you've kept the semantic meaning roughly the same, or in your later example, flipped the tone. An actually random process wouldn't keep the semantic content largely unchanged, because there are far more ways to throw those words into grammatically correct gibberish than to keep largely the same semantic meanings in tact within them.
I'm not sure if this is magic so much as the trivial fact that words have meanings but that that sentences also carry emergent forms of meaning, and that, by mixing up your words you can write different sentences.
This isn't 'people operating with a different set of facts and constructing their own meanings from them.' That is a phenomena that does exist, but this is more just an example of how language works, a good analogy maybe.
Only to some degree. I can believe magic will let me drive my car through a wall, but when I try it, I presume my perceptions will not match up to my past belief.
Maybe we are thinking of a different "chaos magic?" Chaos Magic in Liber Null and Psychonaut and other sources I am familiar with I found to be essentially just grifter nonsense. Not that I found it to be all that different from Crowley and Evola in some respects, but then again, I also think those guys were mostly grifters.
The entire modern business enterprise of "magic," seems to rest on a bait and switch between the idea of magic as in "you can control the weather, shoot fire balls, brew love potions, summon demons," and "here is this really obscurantist philosophy. If you are a 'patrician of the soul,' you will find it to be incredibly deep and this proves you are exceptional. If you find it dumb it simply proves you do not understand it and are a plebian of the soul."
I find esoterica to be very fascinating, but boy does it also bring in a lot of predatory folks and obscurantism.
I also might be biased because my limited experience with "esoteric societies," convinced me that their main magical abilities are the transmutation of US dollars into drugs, and drugs into nothing. Which is fine, just not very impressive. I had friends who mastered that from middle school on, but hours of smoking pot and entering "trances," only seemed to give them magical skills vis-á-vis Street Fighter, Mario Kart, and Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey, along with an encyclopedic gnosis of horror movies and Dragon Ball Z episodes. Then again, in retrospect, that their girlfriends stuck around for all that... maybe they did have magic they weren't telling me about lol.
Sure, but in my experience of Chaos Magic and modern magic more generally, this insight is stretched into farcical territory, where writing down and meditating on sigals can help you with any goal, or you can imbue your sigals with personality until they become daemons, etc.
Hugh Urban has described chaos magic as a union of traditional occult techniques and applied postmodernism.
As a believer in neither the occult nor postmodernism, chaos magic does not appeal, although I find its cut-up technique interesting.
That being said, as one reads that 99% of Morocco are Muslim, 68% of Norway is Christian, 94% of Thailand are Buddhists, 74% of Israel are Jewish and 79% of India are Hindu, this suggests that one's perception of the world can be changed by changing the beliefs of one's geographic location.
I don't know about "magic", but I can see "chaos" in your post! :smile:
Scattered ideas here and there, with no purpose seen in the horizon ...
Sorry about this, but this is what one can see from where I'm standing.
Maybe if you could tidy it up a little ...
Just not clear to me what the word "true" is doing in this story.
If a belief is true, there can be no evidence that it's false, so you'll never need to revise your belief. If such evidence does turn up, in addition to revising your belief, you also remove the "true" sticker from it. So what? What was the sticker doing anyway?
Now when we accuse someone of holding a belief because it's convenient for them, I think often we're talking about something they're not aware they're doing. What we perceive is that holding such a belief serves some need of theirs, again probably something they're not aware of.
And basically that's true for all of us, so far as I can tell.
"Just not clear to me what the word "true" is doing in this story. "
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
The sticker was misapplied, so it is removed. what would you rather say?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Indeed. anything one thinks is true ,one is reluctant to change ones' mind about; because it is inconvenient to change one's mind and change one's habits and rethink everything. One needs to think one believes things that are true most of the time, or thought itself would be useless. Fortunately, up to now the world has proved fairly stable; the key I put in my pocket remains there until I take it out to open my front door which it still unlocks and which is also just where I left it. Losing or finding a few chromosomes for 30 years is far less important. But if one comes home one day, and the house has vanished and there is just a pile of bricks, it is traumatic and one's whole life is changed.
I think we all know what true and false mean, as applied to statements or extended to friends. A false friend is one who pretends to have your interests at heart, in pursuit of his own interests - a deceiver.
I think when you say, "Just not clear to me what the word "true" is doing in this story. ", you are deceiving yourself, and saying something that is not true. I believe it is true that my key will open the front door, and if it should turn out not to be true because the lock is broken, or my wife has changed the lock or someone has blown the bloody door off, or the god of locks is angry with me, then I will have to admit I was wrong.
Which is different, how, to "I believe that my key will open the front door"?
What's '... it is true that... ' doing in that sentence? The sentence seems to have an identical meaning without it.
I'm curious then how you square that with...
Quoting unenlightened
...?
That's one hell of an impassioned plea for the sanctity of a term which can, it turns out, be completely dropped from the sorts of sentences it's used in without the slightest impact.
I don't see how. If I say something to you like "the pub is at the end of the road", you'll be able to do anything with that exactly and only to the extent that you trust me. It seems trust, not truth here is doing the work. You're not expecting me to be 100% right, you're expecting that I'm not deliberately trying to get you to the end of the road for nefarious purposes. It my intentions that matter, not my unfailing accuracy.
When politicians lie, it's usually not a clash of beliefs, it's a clash of intention. They don't even believe what they're saying. Their intention is to sound electable. You (presumably disliking their policies) don't want that.
If a politician genuinely believed what they say, then what possible grounds could you have for anger? Must everyone only speak when guaranteed to pass all accuracy tests in perpetuity?
1. People who say things they do not believe for nefarious purposes.
Fair to be angry at these people. Their purposes are nefarious after all. But it's nothing to do with truth. It's to do with intent to harm.
2. People who say things they believe to be true but later turn out to fail accuracy tests.
What grounds do we have to be angry at these people. Surely we can't be expected to only say that which is infallible.
3. People who say things they believe to be true but @unenlightened believes they didn't ought to believe.
Here I think is where we actually get to the crux of the matter. People arriving at beliefs by methods we don't agree with, usually by trusting authorities we think they didn't ought to trust, or not trusting authorities we think they ought.
Hence back to where we started on truth several weeks ago. It's political. It's about gaining (or losing) a cudgel. We say 'truth' is a beacon of sanctity, we raise it above petty disputes, but all we're really talking about is which institutions we trust, which methods we approve of.
Who said anything about unfailing accuracy, not I? I trust the stranger I ask directions of because I trust that most people most of the time are honestly helpful. Just as i trust that most sign posts have not got twisted around. I trust you will say "I don't know" if you don't know where the pub is. I trust that you intend to tell the truth as you know it. If half the people on the street have nefarious purposes, I will not be asking anyone anything.
Quoting Isaac
No. Why would you imagine my thinking that? I trust your directions to be true, and my trust is based on my experience that people usually tell the truth about such matters. I wouldn't ask Boris Johnson because his words mean nothing to me, based on my experience that he does not try to tell the truth.
But Now i see that you are making up what I say and are not honestly engaging, so I will stop responding. Our conversation has no meaning.
Fucksake, not this shite again. Must every challenge be 'dishonest' these days, every disagreement 'disinformation', every ideological difference 'bigotry'....
When did we forget how to disagree?
If you haven't the stomach for engaging with those who see things differently to you (yes, including the meaning of what you write which, it may surprise you to hear, is not as transparent as you might like to think), then I can't think what you even post here for. Were you expecting a coterie?
No, not every challenge, it's entirely personal: your engagement with me. you see you make a big thing about my admitted anger, but here is yours for all to see. I quite like some of your posts directed at others, and am tempted to engage with them, but i mainly do not, for just the reason that you play this silly game of universalising the opposition in an attempt to humiliate and silence. Thus: If I say your challenge is dishonest I "must" mean that every challenge is dishonest.
Uh huh...
Quoting unenlightened
I suppose that quip was meant to hearten and encourage further discussion of T Clark's considered position?
Sure, go for it. I'm angry at the world's decent into tribalistic lunacy where the value of a person's contribution to discussion is based, not on their expertise or their intellect, but on whether they hold a handful of key opinions which act as stigmata for the sanctified.
So what gets your goat?
It's doing what the word "true" is actually useful for, which is allowing me to endorse by reference the account denoted by "that".
There's a very good reason "It's true that Billy ate all the cupcakes" is equivalent to "Billy ate all the cupcakes" and to "'Billy ate all the cupcakes' is true": it's because we want to be able to express agreement without repeating everything, so we have "That's true" (and "That's not true" and so on) as a construction where "that" refers to something someone has already said.
There are some complication but I think such a prosentential theory of truth is fundamentally on the right track.
Quoting unenlightened
There's the past tense again, just like with Painter and the chromosomes.
Let's go with that. The examples we come up with always have to do with someone turning out to have been wrong in the past. That suggests that there is an "accounting" use for words like "true" and "false" in judging past performance. If we want to make good predictions, we need some way of judging the past performance of an inference engine, so we regularly look back and tally up the successful and the unsuccessful predictions. We do the same thing at the macro scale when we have a new theory or forecasting model: we try retrodicting the events already in the books and see how well we do.
It would be nice if we really could "check" a previous prediction against "what actually happened", but I just don't see how we would do that. All we have is our current understanding based on the evidence we have, and we can say the prediction squares with the evidence or doesn't, but all of this is (a) a lot squishier than it sounds, because we mostly deal in probabilities and (b) all of the accounting we're talking about is handled by inferential mechanisms in our minds the workings of which we are not aware of and do not control. We're accustomed to giving reconstructions of the reasoning process we "must have gone through" to reach conclusions, but the truth (!) is that our beliefs arrive in our awareness as finished products. You don't consciously "work out" your beliefs as the rational consequences of your other beliefs much at all, if at all.
None of which is to say that some beliefs aren't more defensible than others, of course they are. I don't doubt that the very stable genius you mentioned has defective belief formation equipment, but the real problem is that his behavior is dishonest. We expect people to aim at saying things that square with the evidence and are defensible, but he aims at saying things that will materially benefit him. We don't have the option of only speaking the truth; if we had some way of just knowing how things really stand, it wouldn't take so much work to find out. But we do have the option of only saying what we do in fact believe, and what we believe aligns with the available evidence, and what we believe we can give good reasons for that others should find convincing.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes indeed, and I am not asking for more. But I do point out that that option that we do have, that you outline, is a moral imperative arising from the social nature of language, that it is shared. As we are seeing, a medium that is filled with too much dishonest communication, like the boy who cried wolf, ceases to communicate at all - and this has implications for freedom of speech - that the freedom to speak honestly the truth as best one can, should absolutely be defended, but the freedom to lie, deceive and mislead should be curtailed as strongly as possible while allowing for our fallibility and stupidity.
Of course I must remember that there are other things we do with language too - naming, constructing, playing, patterning, and so on where truth or honesty are not issues.
We're on the same page here. Humans have always lived in cooperative groups, and language is a cooperative enterprise in furtherance of other sorts of cooperation. Dishonesty violates the social contract, more or less -- except when being a little dishonest upholds it. Someone like Trump thumbs his nose at the idea he is under any sort of social obligation, and that extends to his use of language. But that potential is built in: one of the selling points of language is that utterance is, for the individual, inexpensive, but that also means that talk is cheap.
Upholding the cooperative use of language is upholding the cooperative basis for society per se. If you want to describe that as an obligation to mostly "tell the truth," I won't complain. The way we talk about truth serves our social needs, but I think it's a mistake to construct a theory out of that talk.
I'm not familiar with the principles of Huna, or with the notion of Chaos Magic. But, I long ago, realized that one feature common to all forms of magic --- Taro cards, divination, astrology, incantations, alchemy, sorcery, spirit mediation --- is dependence on confusing the rational mind with chaos, or misdirection, of some kind.
For example, those who read tea leaves or animal entrails are seeing random/chaotic patterns, which allow the imagination to create its own designs. The freedom from structure allows the mind to rearrange old beliefs to suit new or future situations. Magical interpretations are usually expressed in the vocabulary of commonly held beliefs/superstitions, such as ghosts & fates. :smile:
Chaos magic teaches that the essence of magic is that perceptions are conditioned by beliefs, and that the world as we perceive it can be changed by deliberately changing those beliefs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_magic
But none of this seems related to your signposts example. The utility of a signpost is not its honest intention to point you in the direction of it's named location, it's whether it actually does. A 'dishonest' sign post which just so happens to point the right way anyway (dishonest and stupid) is more useful than an honest one which points the wrong way out of error.
So I'm not seeing how honesty is serving the purpose you've assigned it (making communication functional). If I ask you where the train station is, I'm far less interested in your honesty than I am in where the actual train station actually is. I want you to be right, not honest.
Or, to put it in the terms you and @Srap Tasmaner were discussing, in what way would an honest (but massively deluded) Trump be better than a dishonest one? If Trump incited Jan 6 because he was insane enough to actually believe there was a conspiracy against him, would the end result have been different to the world where he knows there isn't, but lied about it?
It seems either way there's an insurrection and a group of people who now have less faith in the democratic system.
Would dishonesty over delusion have made a difference?
(Btw, there's a game-theory based argument for truthfulness and trust in David Lewis's Convention, the details of which are not leaping to mind.)
It's an interesting question. Obviously in the short term sense, misinformation and disinformation will have the same effect, and the cause of the inaccuracy is irrelevant, assuming you rely on the 'information' to the same extent.
Over the longer term, you're of course also assessing the quality and reliability of the source. I think we do distinguish between sources that are untrustworthy because they're regularly mistaken and sources that are regularly deceitful. The question would be, how do we that and why is it worth the trouble?
One thing that comes to mind is that you get very different results for predicting the source's behavior: mistaken guy can be expected to act on his mistaken belief, but deceitful guy we would expect to act on his genuine belief. Hence "actions speak louder than words" is the corrective heuristic for "talk is cheap."
Is that the conformity to regularity stuff? If so, it's crossed my path on social conformity issues - I'd like to claim this as proof that psychologists do listen to philosophers sometimes, but that would require that I clearly recall any of it... yet I don't.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I think that's good. I was also reminded of what you said over in the Ukraine thread about agency. The deceitful person is taking agency away from us by attempting to supplant our intention to get to the train station with his intention to send us awry. The mistaken person has no affect on our agency, only our ability (in that we now lack the data we need). As such we don't quite mind the mistake so much since they're not now appearing as risk to the otherwise carefully crafted plot to our story.
I wondered how we would be able to talk about the 'behavior' of things like signposts, and I'm sure we could come up with something, but it could also be that we inevitably face problems with artifacts like this.
I'm reminded of a very clever check fraud scheme I heard about once. Guy had gotten hold of the magnetic ink that's used to print routing and account numbers on checks so they can be read by a machine. He made some fake checks that had one bank's routing number encoded but another bank's name actually printed in English on the checks. When these checks went to the merchant's bank, they would sort them first through the machine and the ones that kicked out would then be sorted by the bank they went to. Then a loop would start, where one bank's machine would reject an account number and it would land on the trouble desk, someone would glance at the bank name on the check and say, oh that's not us, then send it to the other bank, whose machine would say, wrong bank, and then it would go right back. These checks would loop back and forth for months until some human finally noticed.
Perhaps one of the problems with the analogy, yes. Humans are, of course, not mere repositories of information which we pass on either faithfully or not, and so unlike the signpost, we're more interested in the other person's intent than we are in the data they have.
And this is the problem with this whole 'truth' nonsense. It's already subsumed into the social interaction it is trying to take the 'God's eye view' of. Those advocating it already have a view of, not only what the truth is in certain key matters, but, more importantly, how is is arrived at and tested. So advocacy for 'truthfulness' is not philosophical advocacy for a modus of discourse, it's political advocacy for a method, and more insidiously, a set of authorised institutions.
Talk of 'mis/dis-information' invariably has nothing to do with post hoc checks (the only way to assess the truthiness of a claim, but rather are just political claims about which institutions ought have authority over what.
Not that I'm in disagreement with all such claims, I just dislike the dishonesty in pretending they're something they're not.
The signpost is better treated as the source than the messenger here. A demand for 'truthsaying' disguises itself as talk about the utility of signposts, but is in reality always talk about the authority of that exact signpost to back claims about the location of the village in question.
Signposts are just like forum posts except their author is not pseudonamed. We don't need to talk about the behaviour of forum posts or sign posts, just the intentions of posters. There is an unconfirmed by me story, that during WW2, when invasion of the UK was expected, sign posts were turned around to 'confuse the enemy'. Checks can be fraudulent and so can sign posts.