How I use words - Reality, Truth, Explanation, Decisions, Power

• Reality

  • Reality exists. Reality is undivided and formless.
    • I am a neutral monist. That means at the bottom layer of reality, there is no distinction between physical and mental or the like.
    • I am also a pragmatist and I find the following distinctions to be useful.
  • At least some parts of reality are not influenced by consciousness alone. It takes action to interact with these parts. When I talk about these parts, I call them bottom-up reality. People use different words for this. See Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
  • We do not experience bottom-up reality directly. Instead, we experience a top-down constructed VR-model that is trained to keep us alive. I call our experience of this VR-model experienced reality.
  • Both bottom-up and top-down reality are real.

• Truth

  • Truthfulness is a property we ascribe to statements. I hold to a pragmatist definition of truth: True statements are those that are useful to believe. All models are wrong, some are useful.
  • We call a statement top-down true for a person if the person believes them to be true. This truth is always relative to a person. “Is it true for you?” is a sensible question to ask for these types of truths.
    • Top-down truths are political truths if people with power believe them. Force, deception, and persuasion are the three ways to wield power.
    • Wishful thinking is creating top-down truths. Whether this brings a person closer to their goal or not, relies on the interaction of top-down truths and behaviour guided by it and relevant bottom-up truths.
  • We call a statement bottom-up true if usefulness does not depend on whether people believe them.
  • Bottom up truths can be verified decentrally. Political truths are relative. They change with what people think is true. Both forms of truths are real in a sense of “this is how the world is right now”.
  • Every human can access truth. There is no authoritative source of truth

• Explanation

  • An explanation is a set of statements that lay out what to pay attention to for making predictions. Every Explanation is a set of decisions

• Decision making

  • Decisions are always made by individuals.
  • Perception and experience are not passive. We decide what to pay attention. Paying attention is bottom-up true. Struggling against paying attention is top-down true.
    • Science is about figuring out what to pay attention to
  • The question what to pay attention lies at the heart of finding better explanations. The decisions, the answers to this question is a creative process that lies at the heart of what it means to be human. It’s what makes us free.
    • Our relation to reality determines our degree of freedom

• Power

  • Power means an individual decision changes how others behave. Force, deception, and persuasion are the three ways to wield power.
  • The alternative to the profit motive, is bureaucratic rule.
  • God, State, and Network are mechanisms for restricting power.
  • Legitimacy is what makes concentration of power durable.