I think the most you can hope for is a model of rationality and irrationality that can model mysticists or religious people as well as rationalists. I don't think you can expect everyone to grok that model. That model may not be expressible in a mysticist's model of reality.

Agree. The Pirahã could not use my model because abstract concepts are banned in their culture. I read from New Scientist that white man tried to teach them numbers so that they wouldn't be cheated in trade so much, but upon getting some insight of what a number is, they refused to think that way. The analytic Metaphysics of Quality (my theory) would say that the Pirahã do not use transcendental language. They somehow know what it is and avoid it despite not having a name for it in their language. That language has only a few words.

The point is not to have everyone to grok at this model, but to use this model to explain reality. The differences between the concepts of "abstract" and "concrete" have been difficult to sort out by philosophers, but in this case the Pirahã behavior seems to be adequately explicable by using the concepts of "natural quality" and "transcendental quality" in the analytic Metaphysics of Quality.

Irrationality is just less instrumentally rational - less likely to win. You seem to have split rational and irrational into two categories, and I think this is just a methodological mistake. To understand and compare the two, you need to put both on the same scale, and then show how they have different measures on that scale.

Do you mean by "irrationality" something like a biased way of thinking whose existence can be objectively determined? I don't mean that by irrationality. I mean things whose existence has no rational justification, such as stream of consciousness. Things like dreams. If you are in a dream, and open your (working) wrist watch, and find out it contains coins instead of clockwork, and behave as if that were normal, there is no rational justification for you doing so - at least none that you know of while seeing the dream.

Also, now that I look at more of your responses, it seems that you have your own highly developed theory, with your own highly developed language, and you're speaking that language to us. We don't speak your language. If you're going to try to talk to people in a new language, you need to start simple, like "this is a ball", so that we have some meaningful context from which to understand "I hit the ball."

You're perfectly right. I'd like to go for the dialogue option, but obviously, if it's too exhausting for you because my point of view is too remote, nobody will participate. That's all I'm offering right now, though - dialogue. Maybe something else later, maybe not. I've had some fun already despite losing a lot of "karma".

The problem with simple examples is that, for example, I'd have to start a discussion on what is "useful". It seems to me the question is almost the same as "What is Quality?" The Metaphysics of Quality insists that Quality is undefinable. Although I've noticed some on LW have liked Pirsig's book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it seems this would already cause a debate in its own right. I'd prefer not to get stuck on that debate and risk missing the chance of saying what I actually wanted to say.

If that discussion, however, is necessary, then I'd like to point out irrational behavior, that is, a somewhat uncritical habit of doing the first thing that pops into my mind, has been very useful for me. It has improved my efficiency in doing things I could rationally justify despite not actually performing the justification except rarely. If I am behaving that way - without keeping any justifications in my mind - I would say I am operating in the subjective or mystical continuum. When I do produce the justification, I do it in the objective or normative continuum by having either one of those emerge from the earlier subjective or mystical continuum via strong emergence. But I am not being rational before I have done this in spite of ending up with results that later appear rationally good.

EDIT: Moved this post here upon finding out that I can reply to this comment. This 10 minute lag is pretty inconvenient.

If neither side accepts the other side's language as meaningful, why do you believe they would accept the new language?

Somehow related: http://xkcd.com/927/

That's a very good point. Gonna give you +1 on that. The language, or type system, I am offering has the merit of no such type system being devised before. I stick to this unless proven wrong.

Academic philosophy has it's good sides. "Vagrant predicates" by Rescher are an impressive and pretty recent invention. I also like confirmation holism. But as far as I know, nobody has tried to do an ontology with the following features:

• Is analytically defined
• Explains both strong and weak emergence
• Precision of conceptual differentiation can be expanded arbitrarily (in this case by splitting continua into a greater amount of levels)
• Includes its own incompleteness as a non-well-formed set (Dynamic Quality)
• Uses an assumption of symmetry to figure out the contents and structure of irrational ontological categories which are inherently unable to account for their structure, with no apparent problems

Once you grasp the scope of this theory I don't think you'll find a simpler theory to include all that meaningfully - but please do tell me if you do. I still think my theory is relatively simple when compared to quantum mechanics, except that it has a broad scope.

In any case, the point is that on a closer look it appears that my theory has no viable competition, hence, it is the first standard and not the 15th. No other ontology attempts to cover this broad a scope into a formal model.

My work is a type theory for AI for conceptualizing the input it receives via its artificial senses. If it weren't, I would have never come here.

The conceptualization faculty is accompanied with a formula for making moral evaluations, which is the basis of advanced decision making. Whatever the AI can conceptualize, it can also project as a vector on a Cartesian plane. The direction and magnitude of that vector are the data used in this decision making.

The actual decision making algorithm may begin by making random decisions and filtering good decisions from bad with the mathematical model I developed. Based on this filtering, the AI would begin to develop a self-modifying heuristic algorithm for making good decisions and, in general, for behaving in a good manner. What the AI would perceive as good behavior would of course, to some extent, depend of the environment in which the AI is placed.

If you had an AI making random actions and changing it's behavior according to heuristic rules, it could learn things in a similar way as a baby learns things. If you're not interested of that, I don't know what you're interested of.

I didn't come here to talk about some philosophy. I know you're not interested of that. I've done the math, but not the algorithm, because I'm not much of a coder. If you don't want to code a program that implements my mathematical model, that's no reason to give me -54 karma.

That's a good result. However, the necessity of innate biases undermines the notion of rationality, unless we have a system for differentiating the rational cognitive faculty from the innately biased cognitive faculty. I am proposing that this differentiation faculty be rational, hence "Metarationality".

In the Cartesian coordinate system I devised object-level entities are projected as vectors. Vectors with a positive Y coordinate are rational. The only defined operation so far is addition: vectors can be added to each other. In this metasystem we are able to combine object-level entities (events, objects, "things") by adding them to each other as vectors. This system can be used to examine individual object-level entities within the context other entities create by virtue of their existence. Because the coordinate system assigns a moral value to each entity it can express, it can be used for decision making. Obviously, it values morally good decisions over morally bad ones.

Every entity in my system is an ordered pair of the form . Here x and y are propositional variables whose truth values can be -1 (false) or 1 (true). x denotes whether the entity is tangible and y whether it is placed within a rational epistemology. p is the entity. &p is the conceptual part of the entity (a philosopher would call that an "intension"). *p is the sensory part of the entity, ie. what sensory input is considered to be the referent of the entity's conceptual part. A philosopher would call *p an extension. a, b and c are numerical values, which denote the value of the entity itself, of its intension, and of its extension, respectively.

The right side of the following formula (right to the equivalence operator) tells how b and c are used to calculate a. The left side of the formula tells how any entity is converted to vector a. The vector conversion allows both innate cognitive bias and object-level rationality to influence decision making within the same metasystem.

If someone says that it's just a hypothesis this model works, I agree! But I'm eager to test it. However, this would require some teamwork.

That quotation looked crazy to me too. But maybe it's a way of saying "experience is analog, symbols are discrete". Tuukka's system looks like a case study in how a handful of potentially valid insights can be buried under a structure made of wordplay (multiple uses of "irrational"); networks of concepts in which formal structures are artificially repeated but the actual relations between concepts are fatally vague (his big flowchart); and a severe misuse of mathematical objects and propositions in an attempt to be rigorous.

When an ordinary crackpot does something like this, they've sealed themselves into an earnest personal theory of everything, and the only way out would be for someone smarter to come along, decode their work, and patiently isolate and explain all the methodological fallacies, something which never happens. Occasionally you get someone who constructs their system in the awareness that it's a product of their own mind and not just an objective depiction of the facts as they were found - someone who knowingly creates a crackpot synthesis out of choice, rather than just being driven to do so by unexamined compulsions. That's less pitiful, but it's still annoying. I'm not sure where Tuukka lies on this spectrum.

ETA In retrospect I regret the somewhat abusive character of this description. But I believe the bitter fact to be that Tuukka needs help in precisely the sense that I said will never happen. Even though he talks about all sorts of very interesting topics, what he says about them is mostly idiosyncratic interlocking nonsense. The aspiration to discover and convey truth, in a hostile and uncomprehending environment, has produced, as if by perverse chemical reaction, a set of exterior traits which serve to repel precisely the people he wants to attract. Having written his sequel to Pirsig he now needs to outgrow that act as soon as possible, and acquire some genuine expertise in an intersubjectively recognized domain, so that he has people to talk with and not just talk at.

Do you mean the sequence "Map and Territory"? I don't find it to include a comprehensive and well-defined taxonomy of ways of being rational and irrational. I was investigating whether I should present a certain theory here. Does this -4 mean you don't want it?

Insofar as LW is interested of irrationality, it seems interested of some kind of pseudo-irrationality: reasoning mistakes whose existence is affirmed by resorting to rational argumentation. I call that pseudo-irrationality, because its existence is affirmed rationally instead of irrationally.

I am talking about the kind of irrationality whose existence can be observed, but cannot be argued for, because it is obvious. Examples of such forms of irrationality include synchronicities. An example of a synchronicity would be you talking about a bee, and a bee appearing in the room. There is no rational reason (ostensibly) why these two events would happen simultaneously, and it could rightly be deemed a coincidence. But how does it exist as a coincidence? If we notice it, it exists as something we pay attention to, but is there any way we could be more specific about this?

If we could categorize such irrationally existing things comprehensively, we would have a clearer grasp on what is the rationality that we are advocating. We would know what that rationality is not.