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matabele comments on Rationality Quotes July 2012 - Less Wrong
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Another Goethe quote, whilst on that tack; seems appropriate for disciples of GS.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There's one (okay, more like 1.6) major problem with that quote, everything else being otherwise good:
The implicitly absolute categorization of "love" as "ideal", and the likewise-implicit (sneaky?) connotation that love is not as real as it is ideal or marriage as ideal as it is real.
Love is a very real thing. There are very real, natural, empirically-observable and testable things happening for whatever someone identifies as "love". However, further discussion is problematic, as "love" has become such a wide-reaching symbol that it becomes almost essential to specify just what interpretation, definition or sub-element of "love" we're talking about in most contexts if ambiguity is to be avoided.
Goethe is writing in a time influenced by German Romanticism (for which he was partly guilty); it would not be amiss if one were to capitalize love there as 'Love' - an abstraction, not some empirical neural correlates.
I'm not quite sure what this abstraction would even correspond to. In fact, when I ask myself what abstract meaning 'Love' could possibly have, I find myself confused. It seems there might be some 'Love' somewhere that feels like it is the ideal, abstract 'Love', but no matter where I search I cannot find it on my map.
I'd like it if you could help me map this "abstract ideal" in my conceptspace map, if that's possible.
When mapping labels (symbols) to their underlying concepts, look for the distinction, not the concept. Distinctions divide a particular perspective of the map; each side of the distinction being marked with a label. In early Greek philosophy the opposites were: love and strife (see empedocles.)
(An abstraction corresponds to a class of distinctions, where each particular distinction of the class, corresponds to another abstraction.)
Oh! That makes a lot more sense. It doesn't seem like the most reliable technique, but this particular term is now a lot clearer. Thanks!
Of course, this seems to me like 'Love' is then merely a general "Interface Method", to be implemented depending on the Class in whatever manner, in context, will go against strife and/or promote well-being of cared-for others.
Which is indeed not something real, but a simple part of a larger utility function, in a sense.
A good resource on distinctions (if you are not yet aware of it), is George Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form. These ideas are being further explored (Bricken, Awbrey), and various resources on boundary logic and differential logic, are now available on the web.
I'm not really sure Laws of Form is a good resource, and I'm not sure it's good at all. A crazy philosophy acquaintance of mine recommended it, so I read it, and couldn't make very much of it (although I was disturbed that the author apparently thought he had proved the four-color theorem?). Searching, I got the impression that one could say of the book 'what was good in it was not original, and what was original was not good'; later I came across a post by a Haskeller/mathematician I respect implementing it in Haskell which concluded much the same thing:
It's not worth trying to understand beyond Goethe having fun at some idealists' expense. I took a course on Romanticism, and came out with little better understanding than you have now.