the destruction of genius and rehabilitation to sensibility

Alfred MacDonald1h 50min

Speaker 1

00:00

This is probably the most abstract, lecture slash transcript recording that I've made. And so if you lose interest, I don't blame you. But this is going to get fairly high level in terms of conceptual analysis. So if that's not your thing, feel free to click away. But the main project I'm doing here in this transcript is defending language as a aspect of analysis and also as a mode of thought, that is perceived to be hierarchically lower than other modes of thought. And there is this sense that the, in, for example, the rationalist fear or in the tech world, or whatever that intelligence is related to consciousness is related to intellectual prowess is related to quantitative prowess and so on. And even though no one explicitly says that being good at for example, manipulating quantities makes you more conscious and therefore smarter, and therefore smarter than a world changing brighter or whatever. That is, nonetheless, the implication if you follow the breadcrumbs, lots of people have implied connected beliefs that they are not aware of, because they have not bothered to know that their beliefs imply other beliefs. And so they're not aware that they have contradictions and one of the major contradictions of people who believe in a sort of hierarchical system of thought were the quantitative is placed about the horrible those people are generally not aware that they have these sorts of entailing beliefs as it were. So, one of the key premises for the belief that stem some kind of knowledge is superior to language as a mode of knowing is the idea that science measures what is real what is out there. So you know, the all of the knowledge that I can represent by language is inferior to the real things that it represents. So like if I know the word chair that's inferior to the fact that there is actually a chair in front of me is one of the examples given by Saul Kripke. However, it is equally the case that matter mathematics is linguistic, and that it also concerns itself with language in the same way and also logic. In fact, logic is even less logic is more valued in this hierarchy than the superficial humanities stork person, yet, logic is even more abstract and even more disconnected from the physical world than than languages. So it actually doesn't make sense for the language to be devalued in this way. For literature to be deemed a humanity. These are things based on the premise that it's not sufficiently analytical or whatever, because not only does mathematics reducing language in the first place, because every mathematical arrangement can be stated in purely verbal terms and non symbolically, or rather,

Unknown Speaker

04:14

without mathematical notation, I should say. Not only is that true, there's it is also true that

Speaker 1

04:24

that both represent a kind of modeled analysis. And a, it's, it's a frequent refrain of rational is to say that the maps not the territory, yet. The idea that math is that different than language is the idea that we are using fundamentally different maps and I think that this is a first of all overstatement also, kind of missing the point. If a if a person has has a very high reaction time. This is very clearly a strong score on a intellectual metric. Yet, this is not something that is regarded as valuable or profound per se, by the sort of people who assess what they believe to be genius in these in this like stem, adjacent area of the world. And also another hypocrisy is that, if they were to value the realness of things, they would value the biological sciences more, they would value. Physical engineering more, they would, they would very much be invested in the progress of medicine, yet. Rational is tend to and also stem. Fans, stem Lord people, stem STEM stands problem STEM stands for probably the most accurate here. STEM stands tend to not be as interested in medicine or biology, they tend to be more interested in math, physics, engineering and computer science, computer science especially. Which is interesting because computer science overlaps a lot with philosophy in the sense that both are essentially just abstractions. And they both have co listed logic courses. I'm being a bit facile here. There's there are larger differences. I mean, there's the there's the electrical engineering part of computer science. However, when I refer to computer science here, I'm referring to it by its essential element, not its accidental element. In other words, what makes computer science computer science is the analytical aspect. And if you were making purely computer hardware, independent of the analytical aspect, it would be electrical engineering. So the X factor that makes up your sense of your science is the analytical aspect of it. And what makes it bigger science different philosophy in that way, is primarily that you are allowed to tell a machine what to do. And with philosophy, you can't tell other people what to do. But I really want to stress that the hierarchies ation of language and quantization and so forth in this intellectual hierarchy makes no sense. Because if you language is radically important for the demonstration of anything, I mean, you could argue that like say memory or memory or reaction time is important that the level of individual performance but when integrated into scientific paper is reaction time and memory don't really matter a whole lot. And I mean, maybe Okay, fine. But if we're dealing with the, purely the demonstrations that occur in a paper or whatever, language is obviously the most important by far. And the abstract concepts that language represent are also the most important because they are essential to getting things right. So much of the time, if you were to call a mean, like just at the very basic level of objects, if you were to call a chair, a spaceship that is implying erratically for things, so you have to get linkage, right? First of all, if you when you use a concept like and this is a bit speculative on my part, but I'm okay with that being that if you use a concept like entropy, or delta or whatever, saying that there's like information and entropy or that there's more delta and whatever, or that there's no alpha left and whatever, you're using a quantitative concept, kind of, but the there's been like a kind of quantitative

Speaker 1

09:14

it's almost like there's been a kind of quantitative stage design, and then the person is just using the concept independent of its quantitative origin. So you can actually infer based on usage and then also use the concept of entropy and delta, without even knowing the way to quantitatively get to either of those things. So it it's clear that language is just as fundamental as the quantitative and it's not clear per se, why quantities would be a more intellectually prioritizing data language because also, quantities are strictly dealing with cannibals. Whereas language describes Everything, like it's a superset of all non visual concepts. So, it can describe things like quantity, but also quality. And the Well, that was glib, okay? There is a difference between describing the essence of something and the properties it contains or the or the or the operations of a concept or the boundaries of the concept or something to the effect, there's there are so many ways in which you can use this conceptual machinery via analog and by explicit description to describe more or less all the conceptual legwork that you could do. So, it's odd that language is viewed as a subordinate to the quantitative here and this way, there's also this idea that the there's also this idea that language is subordinate to the visual, which is a better argument than that it's subordinated to the quantitative because at the very least, that kind of is consistent with the very physical physical as argument that what is important is what physically exists. So it makes absolutely no sense to subordinate language to the quantitative but it makes some sense. On an intuitive level, it is born into the visual because the visual is a representation of what we see, therefore, we can touch and so it stands to reason that by being visually representative, we are manipulating the physicalities of what we can engage with. However, it's clear from even a introductory understanding of neuroscience that what we what we engage with visually is just a representation, and that our visual logic can have lots of errors. Anyone who's done the numerous visual illusions can attest to this, that our eyes are quite inferior at judging what is actually there, and we need tools to navigate this. So, we do have a visual logic, however, that visual visual logic has its limitations. And I think the way in which we have a visual logic is actually subordinate to language in terms of the conceptual broadness and applicability. So, what I mean by that is that if you try to represent the concept of property or quality or a category boundary with visuals, it is very hard. I I think that for the sake of argument, you could try to have the most abstract game of Pictionary ever, and then try to represent many of the more foundational things like categories, objects, properties and so forth using visual symbolic representation, it is quite difficult. You can do it, but you have to use very specialized representations that will after a certain point approximate language and that actually gets me to my other point, which is that symbolically after enough symbolic abstraction, visual logic becomes language anyway. So when people talk about visual logic, they really mean a couple of things, they are referring to either the

Speaker 1

14:12

visual manipulation, which is on the Ravens Progressive Matrices, style questions, or they are referring to spatial rotation. Spatial rotation is very clearly defined. So I'm not going to go into that much but visual, the visual logic is a bit more complex. And what it what it is composed of is a series of operations where a shape can change its pattern, its texture, its color, its frequency, its direction, and other things. And it's depending on the variety of visual logic tests, these operations will be frequent in number. And in some, some more than others basically. So in the Ravens Progressive Matrices on the infamous IQ test DK. It is common for test takers to infer a kind of movement along the answer choices. I've noticed this because I've looked at the responses that people give. And so there are people who start off with the premise that the test is going to feature more like spatial transformation across the answer choices. And then there are people who believe that the test is going to offer more spatial repetition or, or pattern manipulation. Sorry about pattern manipulation, I mean, pattern alteration, actually. And if you want another abstract challenge, try to represent the difference between manipulation and alteration using purely visual logic, it is difficult. So the difference between pattern manipulation and alteration I'm sorry, the presence of pattern alteration on the Ravens Progressive Matrices test occurs where they will, for example, include a square in the first and second column, and like not in the third one, or whatever. And then by like by frequency of the second column, and third column, you will deduce like way or the square should have been paternalistically. And that's debts accounting exercise, because you're counting the number of squares. In other kinds of tests like this, you are supposed to infer the way in which the, the way in which the item has been transformed, so like from item one to two, the square might be morphed a little bit. In, there's the texture station, so not in one, arm two, it might be filled in a little bit, and so forth. So a lot of the Ravens use more paternalistic, and for instance, rather than the transformative inferences, and so depending on a person's assumptions, walking into the sub test, that will determine how they perform on it, because of what kind of inferences they're looking for. And also what kind of verses they're aware that the test could determine are correct. But what I want to stress here is that the test that all of these things are actually sub components of other cognitive skills. So in one sense, there's a visual pattern recognition. And another there's, well, actually, there's visual pattern recognition by frequency, and there's visual pattern recognition, recognition by quality, those different things for one, but then there's the rotational ability also. And then there's counting ability, these things are very separate. And they can these things can also relate to scanning ability. So there is a large difference between rather their most people can read about as well as they can listen. But there are certain people who can listen better than could read and there's certain people who can read by they can listen. And people who can listen better think and read I'm one of those people have difficulty scanning text with high accuracy. And because the, your eyes just don't follow the text as well as you'd like. And this is not merely an issue of reading, like long textbooks. Actually, this occurs to me even at like grocery stores, I have a problem. Switching from item to item, and my eyes just like don't visually work as fast as I would like them to. With language, there's going to be things like analytical reasoning,

Speaker 1

19:12

obviously, vocabulary recognition, there's going to be things like structural recognition. The manipulation of rhyming patterns, is also a thing I think that relates with language, but it doesn't really factor into IQ test much I don't know why. And also, the ability to just like come up with different words come up with many different like categories of concept. And there's also the audibility of like anagram ability, like how you can rearrange the ordering of letters to form a word, although I think that's more symbolic, or I think that's actually symbolic exercise and that it gets sort of miscategorized as language simply because it involves words, but that actually is a bit complex. Point, which is that given enough symbols, they become language. I mean, this is obvious to anybody who's looked at the history of any pictorial language, but the but any, the alpha any alphabet originally developed from a much more elaborate system of pictorial representations. So eventually, the only difference between a purely symbolic representation of something such as, say, like a, the no symbol, you know, like a circle with a diagonal through it, the only thing separating that from the word no is the sound associated with it that we then recognize as a word. Otherwise, there's no symbolic difference between the symbol No, and then the inscription of an O that represents No, they are identical in terms of their symbolic capacity. The word no has additional information and that we have a sound associated with it. So, I mean, depending on your dialect, we know are like no, but like it's gonna still like have a sound. But the visual just has a visual, but they both have a visual, but one has sound, too. So, you actually could argue and I think you could argue well that the linguistic aspect is more informationally rich than the symbolic aspect in that way. Of course, there's a limit to how, because we chunk language according to these orthographic representations, the phonological aspect dominates, and therefore, we don't have a we don't have a symbolic analysis going on when we are looking at language. Because we've replaced it with the phonological aspect. So the phonological aspects aside, a lot of people will look to symbolic representations of information as a indicator of the epistemic priority of that information. And the it would not be analogous. Rather, it would not be appropriate to say that the performance aspect of the symbolic activities are what dictate the importance to this kind of STEM, Stan demographic a person, so we're sort of distracted by an IRL event. And I lost the last like, minute or so my verbage was actually pretty imprecise. So I apologize for that. But the It's very odd. So if symbolic manipulation were the or rather, if spatial manipulation were the supreme aspect of what people consider genius and brilliance and so forth in this sort of STEM Stan sphere of thought, or as is commonly thought, then there would be a hall, a pantheon reserved for people who win Rubik's Cube competitions, or, if not Rubik's, because I've heard that you can use memory tricks to eventually make the Rubik's cube of physical activity given a certain

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