Copyright © ‘Reality’ Doug 2013
To Philosopher to King by ‘Reality’ Doug is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Life must take a specific course. The carpet must be cut. Choices fall by the wayside. There can only be one path taken. Life is an essay, a plot on the move. Which choice? What choice? What consequences? Click.
Interpretation of life requires invariants. Why? Because life itself requires invariants; otherwise, the plot would stall. Facing the risk of false gods is central to being a man. The stakes are high, everything possibly available. The builders of civilization ought to rule it. Let PQ be Philosophy Quotient. In terms of sophistication: EQ < IQ < PQ.
Mathematics is the universal (design) language, the mechanics of causality: 1+1=2, 3*4=3+3+3+3, force=mass*acceleration. Physicists postulate the existence of a universal equation. There can and must be only one master causality.
The existence of the individual is cut from the cloth of the universe. Individual free will must have one master causality, able to change, self-realized or not. Individual responsibility must have choice. The nature of human free will is a mystery solved only by crude, emotive certainty. I suppose mortal free will to be deterministically nonexistent from the supernatural perspective but real from the natural perspective. Our minds have survival and achievement value so we ought to use them. Interestingly, randomness in our physical world has not been proven. The inherent uncertainty of phenomena observation at the microscopic level does not prove randomness. True randomness (not pseudo-randomness) would indicate a lack of determinism. The philosophical question is: to what degree are we merely automatons? A hammer must hammer because it is fit to do little else.
Some human automatons are more suited to free citizenship than others. It comes down to the invariants of individual behavior, whether hardwired or learned. In the fields of philosophy and science, a law is a statement of principle or a principle supposed to have authority. The working assumptions (frame) make all the difference. The progress of science demonstrates that refinement of invariants and interpretive convergence are mutually required conditions of advancing understanding.
Game is life as we have it. What follows, to properly define Game, are the prerequisite invariants I recognize as life and Game imperatives:
Axiom of Credo – I believe not we believe. The psychological self is a singleton directly connected only to a shared physical universe through stimulus of unshared organic inputs and outputs.
Axiom of Identity – Observation of fact is possible and useful. Evidence is discernible. The only other means of supposition is faith, which is baseless and inferior to evidence-based reasoning through sincere inquiry.
Axiom of Causality – Thing are and happen for a reason. Change is limited to directional pathways.
Axiom of Conservation – Resources of the shared physical universe are limited by quantity and state.
Context, being half the truth metaphorically speaking, is critical to interpretation. The axiom of credo supposes individuality: I think; therefore, I am (philosophy). My needs are not your needs (freedom, politics, religion). My success is not your success (specialization). The axiom of identity leads to cardinality (mathematics), attraction and repulsion (sexuality, chemistry, magnetism), inequality (meteorology, ecology, sociology), harmony (music, engineering, philosophy). The axiom of causality favors methodology (science, engineering, habit) and discrimination (sexuality, culture, rationalism). The axiom of conservation leads to inertia (physics), no free lunch (economics), time and resource management (business), criminalization of theft (law), sin of theft (divine law, religion), antipathy of theft (morality, culture), and the adage an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure (philosophy).
Context is critical to the application of principles. ‘Turning the other cheek’ and ‘an eye for an eye’ are two mutually exclusive responses to an injury or slight. The need to identify invariants and apply principles wisely is what makes philosophy practical and increasingly critical for the advancement of social sophistication. Any real life situation is a harmony of aspects. There are no existential inconsistencies, only inadequate assessments of reality. Click.
‘Reality’ Doug 