Consensus is reached atop shared reality
Reality, like the city of Amber, casts shadows in all directions.
Conflict resolution
Consensus is formed on top of reality based on the fact that physical objects have positions.
Every (macroscopic) obect has a defined position. It cannot be at two places at the same time. Two massed objects cannot be at the same place at the same time. This is how information is stored.
Individuals may have different opinion on what they see. This is ok.
No matter how we think of what we see, what we see is shared. There is only one world.
Journalism
The consistency principle of mathematics cannot tell what information is real, only that: when two pieces of information conflict, at most one of them may be real.
If we want to know what is real and what is fictitious, we need good journalism, not just freedom of press. Opinion should not be mixed with fact. Most self-identified press today don’t pass this standard. Al Jazeera and AP News do.
We also need more people to choose to listen to good journalism instead of drinking directly from a firehose of a particular ideology. I feel absurd that I need to write about this, but present day events demand it.
All arguments build up from this common ground. Among the common subjects, only formal math can be detached from reality.
Personal observation forms the basis of reporting
I don’t like debates. Much of science today is finding patterns from observation. Greek-style debates are worse than pattern matching in figuring out what is real.
What you and I observe has the highest priority in a conflict. Observation … is the only way we are attached to this world. Without observation, no conclusion about this world can be reached. I don’t mean interpreting observation, only observation itself.
To deny personal experience is to deny reality. When I meet people denying personal experience of others, I don’t communicate with them, as they deny the common ground consensus is built on. It is possible to have different interpretation about the same observation, or different, unrelated observations. None of these differences need to be settled, by debate or otherwise.
Proper use of language
Language is formed to describe what people perceive. It is a reflection of reality.
In order to communicate without barrier, words need to have specific meanings. All parties involved need to use the same dictionary.
You might of heard of commercial solutions described to “maximize impact”, as if whatever described is a kinetic object seeking to damage the target. This type of linguistic pollution damages communication.
Political propaganda always use word combinations with meaning that contradicts with itself. If it doesn’t, it can hardly be called propaganda.
I really encourge the reader to not use words that has lost their meaning for this reason.
Historical account of fictitious reporting
Have you seen these animals?
Or these animals?
To the people at that time, they could all be real. After all, most readers of those works have never travelled there to see for themselves. Without photo cameras, they have no way of knowing if any of these are real or fictitious.
The incentive of lying
There are already too many cases of people telling lies for personal gain, at the cost of the receivers of such lies.
“Safe lead-added gasoline” is one example. With no evidence, the investor of Tetraethyllead (TEL) claimed the chemical to be safe. Even after they know the effect of lead on human intelligence, the company did not disclose the finding, nor did it stopped the sale of TEL.
We now know that no amount of lead intake is safe.
What incentive? Well…
- sell more product
- trick others to work for the perpetrator for free
- trick others to give money to the perpetrator
- trick others to use their future as collateral for the perpetrator’s action
I am not qualified to talk about how to stop people from lying.
Information systems (social media platforms) full of lies capture their users and replicate their lies outwards if unchallenged.
I have not tried communicating with those trapped users. When I do, this section will be updated.
Misinformation / mind control
“Spreading misinformation for political gain” is maybe a misnomer. There might be something to be gained from it, but from the definition of power, spreading misinformation is exerting power – it influences behavior of others. It is often hard to estimate how much power one has. Power only exists when exerted. In the cases of journalists and political dissidents being silenced. Who silenced them know very well the influence they have on others.
Projection happens due to the lack of imagination by the speaker.
Value is expressed only through actions
In the US, there are voters that claim to support affordable housing, when confronted with local zoning change that would allow more compact housing to be built nearby, acted to stop the change. By doing so, they have chosen their own… whatever, I don’t know what they think… over affordable housing.
From my observation of people and learning from history and journalistic reports, the only reliable measure of someone’s value is what they do. People with delusions often don’t know their own values.
“The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.” said John Dewey. If someone hold a notion in their mind but act against it, how do we call this inconsistency? This may happen to all ideas and ideologies that can possibly fit in the human mind.
Delusion and self
If we define delusion as “unwilling to change in light of conflicting evidence”, the people in the affordable housing example above should count as delusional if they still say that they support affordable housing after denying the construction of said affordable housing.
Can we tell apart being delusional from lying? If we can’t observe directly how someone feels and thinks, the appearance of the two are computationally equivalent – what they say is inconsistent with what they do. An awful property of delusion is, those with delusion often deny others of personal experience and individuality to support their own delusion.
Delusion, severe enough, may not be changed by feeding it information. If a prior is too certain, effective Bayesian learning can’t happen. Without external shock (not just exposure to new information), such belief system is incapable of change.
I do not ask the reader to forgo beliefs inconsistent with their actions. Such process can be painful. What I ask from the reader is to respect individuality of others.
If I were to be responsible, I can’t tell you what to believe in. This is because a belief system, formed naturally, should benefit the belief holder. Without knowing you well enough, I can’t possibly know what you should believe in.
“Benefit who” you may ask. Self is formed through repeated choice of action. Past action determines present self, and future action is supposed to benefit present self. This recursive nature of self determines by definiton that only you can possibly know what is good for yourself. Others who claim to care about your interest must act by guessing. If you try to explain yourself, the structure of your self is changed in the process. By this logic, you really don’t need to explain your actions, or to retain a copy of the decision making process (reasoning) in your mind. If you think of a reasoning for your past actions after you forgot about the original reasoning, it is called rationalizing. I avoid doing that as it makes no sense to me whatsoever.
The author of this article has faced too many stupid questions, asking it to explain its own actions, calling it immature when it refuse to explain. To be specific, this one is not a quantum computer where every step of computation is reversible. I still need to be observed, right? Those who kept asking it relentlessly are, in all cases, delusional. They also don’t understand personal boundary, or respect, or tolerance, nor liberty, which is about a half of the driving behind me writing this article.