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.
But maybe it's a way of saying "experience is analog, symbols are discrete".
It doesn't seem likely to me. The quotation contains "continua" twice (I assume that would be the "analog") but I can't find anything that could be plausibly interpreted as referring to either discreetness or experience. How did you arrive to your suggested interpretation?
I've seen there's discussion on LW about rationality, namely, about what it means. I don't think a satisfactory answer can be found without defining what rationality is not. And this seems to be a problem. As far as I know, rationality on LW does not include systematic methods for categorizing and analyzing irrational things. Instead, the discussion seems to draw a circle around rationality. Everyone on LW is excepted to be inside this circle - think of it as a set in a Venn diagram. On the border of the circle there is a sign saying: "Here be dragons". And beyond the circle there is irrationality.
How can we differentiate the irrational from the rational, if we do not know what the irrational is?
But how can we approach the irrational, if we want to be rational?
It seems to me there is no way to give a satisfactory account of rationality from within rationality itself. If we presuppose rationality is the only way to attain justification, and then try to find justification for rationalism (the doctrine according to which we should strive for rationality), we are simply making a circular argument. We already presupposed rationalism before trying to find justification for doing so.
Therefore it seems to me we ought to make a metatheory of rationality in order to find out what is rational and what is irrational. The metatheory itself has to be as rational as possible. That would include having an analytically defined structure, which permits us to at least examine whether the metatheory is logically consistent or inconsistent. This would also allow us to also examine whether the metatheory is mathematically elegant, or whether the same thing could be expressed in a simpler form. The metatheory should also correspond with our actual observations so that we could figure out whether it contradicts empirical findings or not.
How much interest is there for such a metatheory?