About

Orthogonal: adj. intersecting at right angles

Orthogonality is the killer app of consciousnes. It goes by many names (third way, reframing, neither/nor, etc.). It is the identificaton of new degrees of freedom, new dimensions along which your mind can travel, and in this way extricate itself from the knots we tie ourselves in.

Orthogonal thinking is not compromise; it is not settling for a lesser evil between two unsatisfactory poles. It is stepping back to recognize that the choice itself is false: that you are not constrained to the dimensions you assumed you were, if only you can become aware of this fact. We are free in proportion to the dimensionality of our conceptual reconstruction of the world. And this is why philosophy is so powerful1: It is centrally concerned with enriching our coneptual vocabulary, resulting in a deeper, more granular command of the world and our room to move within it.2

All this is to say: my goal here is to raise more questions than answers. Questions that force divergent thinking, that drive a wedge into my (and hopefully your) conceptual scheme, and then lever it apart to let new ideas rush in. Taking a philosophical crowbar, as it were, to a rigid mind.

Topics

  • Philosophy, Science, Mental Health and “Right Living”
    • Epistemology
    • Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Mind
    • Psychology (Social, Cognitive, Evolutionary)
    • Morality
    • Evolution & Individuality
  • Physical Health
    • Anatomy & Physiology
    • Metabolism & Bioenergetics
    • Physical Fitness & Performance (esp. GST)
    • Nutrition
    • Longevity

Stipulations

There are a few things I will take for granted along the way:

  • Ceteris is never paribus. I believe that cognitive representation and the meaning of the symbols we use to communiate is fundamentally context-dependent (and conversely: context-independent meaning is artificial). This means that inducing general rules about human behavior from specific individuals is fraught with error, and in a fundamental way inevitably leads to misrepresentation.3 In cognitive psychology, this point is captured in the principle that human behavior is the product of multiple influences with no single factor ever being a sufficient cause. There are no main effects.

  • Any individual’s conceptual scheme is empirically underdetermined – as Quine said, there is “empirical slack” in one’s web of beliefs, which allows for variation in the theories individuals can posit to explain the same sense data. We may disagree on hypotheses where such slack exists, but disagreeing about the data is a non-starter (unless, of course, the methodology used to generate them is the point of discussion).

  • Nothing is sacred. All beliefs exist on a continuum of credibility, and it is the job of science to calibrate our confidence in any posited belief. Those beliefs more central to our conceptual schemes are harder to revise, and have more serious ramifications, but they are nevertheless just as malleable as peripheral beliefs upon which little depends.

  • At the end of the day, we are all just mammals wearing clothes. That which we do not know dwarfs that which we do.

  1. It is specifically analytic philosophy (Wittgenstein, Quine, Frege) that is concerned with language and precision of meaning. Continental philosophy (Hegel, Freud, and so on) is a different animal and not one that will receive any love here. ↩︎

  2. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is probably the most famous expression of this principle, known as linguistic determinism, which holds that our ability to conceive of and reason about the world is determined and constrained by our language – that is, by the dimensional vocabulary we have available to describe it. Although I readily grant that we can make use of knowledge without being aware of said knowledge, to the extent cognitively conceiving of an idea and reasoning about the world are conscious, language-bound activities, I find the principle of linguistic determinism compelling, at least enough to explore it as a default hypothesis. ↩︎

  3. See Simpson’s paradox for a famous example of this error. The ecological fallacy represents a related error. ↩︎

2020-09-22