As recently as last night I was tweeting on social responsibility in the context of public education, and you must must have planted subtle seeds with me: I cited Spock’s “the good of the many” .. powerful words.

You mentioned religious and political activism which is indeed strong, but don’t forget the power of our consumer culture, and the weight that it bears on divisive, judgmental materialism. Our Western consumer culture has created proliferation of choice on a ridiculous scale. I did a double take in the grocery store the other day. It’s almost insane what we have created. Is there a path out of this?

I look forward to exploring these ideas with you and others. I’ll be watching for seeds of conversation on values. Much important ground to cover. Thanks as always for your investment of insight and time.

Chris

Personally, I think that Star Trek is a great source of inspiration for thinking about values, as most of the species (at least the major ones) seem to instantiate a kind of thought experiment about what a society would look like if it were guided primarily by certain values. The human society is clearly guided by the notion of self actualization, or a eudaimonisitic individualism as I like to call it, that we should aspire for. Everything about their philosophy and social organization supports the individual in living a satisfying life, however they might image that. This contrasts with the kind of materialistic, borderline sociopathic individualism of the Ferengi. I feel like these two forms of individualism do battle in us Americans today.

There are some interesting papers written by Mark Bickhard, John Christopher, and Robert Campbell you might be interested in, as they (especially the latter two, apropos of moral development) have spent much time writing about values. I’ll just link you to their pages:

http://www.montana.edu/hhd/facultyandstaff/jchristopher.htm

http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/vita.html

Kant’s not here to explain himself, but given his framework of categories that intends to describe any aspect of knowledge, I believe he’d want us to apply it in ways that made practical sense. I used my verbs as an example in the post, then later, on G+ (linked above) introduced a cinematography metaphor. I’ve been mulling some examples from mathematics too.

The verbs helped me translate Kant into the modern vernacular, as I worked to distill insights from the rows (3) and columns (4). If a convergent epistemology linking science, philosophy and complexity holds up, I’ll be thrilled. I see echoes of Bacon/Newton as well as Descartes. In a sense, my verbs were declaring my semantic interpretation of his 12 categories, for discussion. By collaborating, we might improve on them; for now, they represent 12 stakes in the ground.

So far, no one has thrown me under the epistemology bus :)

I think the word ‘absolute’ is always dangerous, and I hope I didn’t misspeak there; certainly not my intention.

Finally, yes, personal belief is safer, more down to earth, and more easily ascribed to the individual believer. But there’s much to be said for personal knowledge too, supporting customized, localized interpretations of what we come to know. But I need to brush up on my Polanyi before I dig myself any deeper!

Appreciate the thoughts. Looking forward to more.

The verbs in the framework are only as reliable as the person performing those functions. Thus the framework is only useful as far as the one using it is correct – not only in the facts he already knows, but in the rational process of thought that leads him to further conclusions.

If we frame this set of ideas in the context of belief rather than knowledge, the whole thing works better. Belief requires much less rigor to acquire than knowledge, and it can be changed when new information is available. Absolute knowledge cannot be changed or undone, because true knowledge must be based on absolute truth.

That work lies ahead, but, perhaps, we will start to address it in the near term. Enjoyed connecting again.

Let’s change some paradigms!

I remember the day I saw it, and what a rush it was to see it in the WSJ, because I was already studying the topic. It made it seem like it was finally ‘mainstream’ to me. And here we are over a decade later…