PWIP 36

Epistemology

One may observe how anything that can possess an epistemology understands itself. We can’t hide from our own knowledge, only hope to forget it or bury it deep in our subconscious. Knowledge in the form of rules and patterns are easier to follow. Every things’ place possesses meaning. Existence itself appears to have an omnipotent spontaneity with every place being filled with (something, anything, everything(?)). Though having an epistemology that can replicate the ontology in its totality is impossible, the goal is still necessary to pursue.

We may discover the values in existence by separating ourselves from it. We see ourselves as no longer belonging to the world but to ourselves. The falsehood generates distinctions that further separate the epistemology from the ontology from the epistemology’s point of view, all remains one to the ontology. We can’t claim we are the Ontology, so it appears true that we are separate from it in some sense. Order manifests itself out of the relationships made in the separation of the ontology from a whole into parts. The ontology molds the epistemology, it is an epistemology, and it transcends epistemology.

The most basic form of information is motion. The falsehoods in motion relate to differences between the world as it is and the world as it is given or understood by the senses. Distance presents itself as a problem throughout epistemology. The distance between the mind and the world confuses what is in the world and what is in the mind. There’s temporal distance between observations and the explanations for them. Mental distance between concepts can make it difficult to make the connections needed for understanding to function.

Ethics Build

The aspects of a being that appears to give them ethical value are suffering and belonging. Suffering can be a negative state of being meant to promote survival in biological machines. Belonging refers to a relationship between the owner and owned. Animals have a sense of belonging to themselves that other beings (e.g. rocks) don’t appear to possess. Such may be a result of the DNA’s inclination towards survival, equilibrium, a particular pattern in the world, or something of the like. The individual extends their sense of the self by belonging to his/her self. An uninformed state of nature may find it difficult to identify objects of ethical value. Our problem isn’t an inability to identify belonging, but rather a lack of utilitarian math. Suffering is not mere pain, it appears to be the intent to harm for the sake of harm and destruction. In this light, there’s a distinction between unethical acts, actors, and environments. Each form of the unethical state is bad, only the actors can take blame for actions or environments.

The difference between Kantian Politics and Relativism Aesthetics is the difference between individualism and collectivism. This is the problem that presents itself in ethical dynamics. We must contend with the question of how much of ourselves are we willing to give to the group? And how much of the group belongs to an individual? Groups are similar in functionality to individuals but with more power. Groups with virtuous psychologies are more predictable because their rules for behavior use less probability. Groups can appear ethical because their numbers follow a strict program for action. Actions based on tastes can contradict ethical principles. Unethics spreads rapidly when Kantian Politics is based on a group’s taste, who themselves would say they belong to a particular individual. The tension between individualism and collectivism comes from the authority of belonging. An unethical kantian politics is unstable due to the malicious belligerence of vice. Wisdom being a virtue grants the virtue psychology the ability to communicate the reasons for his/her right to act. Those who actively pursue vice are typically easier to identify than those who fall into vice through neutrality.

Eclecticism Ethics

Kantian Politics

The aesthetics of the world allows for no strict duplicates. All beings appear to have their own experiences. Despite that, equality, fairness, symmetry are still ideals to look towards when stabilizing a system. Maths can make everything one. The representative of the group, the government, is judged on its math rather than its aesthetics. Do the leaders of the group provide for the group? If all members were of perfect virtue makeup, the group is stable regardless of conditions. Equals need no functional leaders.

Utilitarian Mathematics

The brain measures the value of beings. The mental weighing is scaled up in economic systems, but essentially one can make an ordering of preferences that can be transformed into arithmetic. Utilitarianism is concerned with a preference ordering that prefers the good. We see that math deals with many aesthetic conflicts. Agents can vote, compete, or gamble to settle disputes. Aesthetics is important because everything with function needs a form or appearance. Ethics may require justified ownership.

Ownership can’t merely be who found what first or keeping what one has always had. Utilitarianism plays a major role in belonging as ethics requires everything to be in service to the greater good. Capitalism attempts to mix kantian politics, relativism aesthetics, and math to create a system that doesn’t require virtue. Without virtue, all acts end in self-destruction.

Relativism Aesthetics

Ethics also desires freedom (in as far as it is obtainable in the ontology). There is a preference ordering for one’s own taste. Conflicts tend to erupt between one’s own taste and the good. No form is bad in of itself. It’s a form's relation to another agent that makes it so. Given what appears in reality, it is very difficult to operate without doing vice. This is because knowledge can be difficult to hide from. Once one is no longer innocent of the vice in one’s taste, one is aware of the bad one has done, is doing, and may do. Yet we all are artists. And to only be allowed to make copies of the world is an injustice.

Ethics seems to contain the mundane. We find it in many places of safety and protection. A type of nihilism seems to be contained in the mundane. Ethics becomes void when there are no negative states. One is thus able to pursue one’s taste uninhibited, which is not mundane. But one does this without risk, which is mundane. Such protection or lack of pain is a type of negated freedom, and positive nihilism. Pain seems to want to take meaning with it when it is removed.

Virtue Psychology

There is perhaps less of a need for virtuous agents to use science to discover which rational beings have ethical value from which don’t. A virtuous agent is passive and would only move to help another. The ultimate objective is to help whatever needs help. Individuals with the ability to communicate are quite easy to help. We must balance it with other systems. These other systems can be found in epistemology. The passivity, as opposed to neutrality, allows the virtue agent to avoid doing harm, rather than simply ignore it whenever it occurs. An active virtue agent may scour space for vice or harm. Though the ideal of the perfect virtue agent is impossible, the ideal of vice is self-destructive.

Ethics Dynamics

The outcomes of ethical dynamics are along a spectrum of peace, mercy, conflict, and suffering. The complexity of the system increases with the number of agents, who themselves vary the power of virtue and vice with their choices of either one. The simplest case of the system is peace, in which all agents choose virtue. The more difficult cases of the system involve mixed strategies, unequal power, and the outcomes of mercy or conflict. And, of course, when vice wholly overcomes virtue there is suffering.

A third individual in the equal power game can create an imbalance of power. In a three-person game where there is unequal power either two agents have more power than one or one agent has more power than two. The agents with the most power dictate the outcome of the game. The imbalance of power generates suffering or mercy. Though virtue agents want to make equals out of other agents, there are more opportunities for virtue to prevail when it has more power than vice.

Virtuous agents are trustworthy, and therefore deterministic. Malicious agents are probabilistic, as they can choose to add to the power of either agent. The case is complex, with allegiances to either type being unstable. Agents who play vice are more stochastic in their behavior since they need not obey ethical rules. They can use the tools of virtue as means to ends in vice. Intentions are bad when the goal is malicious. Some can have good intentions but bad knowledge or skill and thus windup with an action that is a vice. The distinction in the origin of vice may change the means but not the end of preventing or stopping suffering.