Difficult to evaluate, with potential yellow flags.
Read full explanation
Thought Lookup, for thought there can be no fixed initial truth gating paths of no traversal. This is not to say there's no object truth, there for sure is, but, there being one does not mean Humans are entitled to ever finding it, or, knowing it.
Contending directly with 'truth' before contending with 'thought'. Truth is objective insofar it doesn't relate to personal opinion, insofar that opinion is truly personal, not received unquestioned. What this informs is: There's no such thing as "my personal truth", there are opinions (then they're the product of actively thinking) and truth, and the two can, and often, do conflict.
That leaves the explaining of Truth under this article as something clear to explain, harder to accept:
Truth is the Human attempt to reach infinity through linear counting, and the limit between the count and it is thought, how close one comes to an unreachable target.
To facilitate further expansion I'll tag the upper bound of 'Truth' to 1.0, and, a human contending with a novel subject, one he hasn't previously actively thought about, starts at 0.0. The act of the human thinking about the subject moves his 'Baseline' closer to 1, and, will never reach 1.
How would this counting work exactly? The proposal for this thought experiment carries 2 axis, where the first is the Decade and the second is the Sign, taken as one they become a 'Value'. This leaves the growing of the value assigned to the subject inside a log scale, and from not knowing to actively advancing the field itself you accumulate depth, not only magnitudes. The usage of signed values ( + and - ) also does something interesting, it allows multiplication of pair negative values to add to the positive plane.
First page, produced while watching a Cambridge debate, not thinking about the debate itself, but, what the debate could produce.
From this I start my reasoning towards the eventual conclusion from an initial axiom set:
Truth = 1, Thought = 'multiply' or 'add' using values = 'ideas' that numerically become= [+,-]idea < 1, and R(n) > Log(10)n. Where for any finite lived Human 1 is impossible to reach, therefore increasing 'n' approximates the field and the human to 1, without ever touching 1.
From the axiom as the initial position for thought evaluating why 'Priors' work backwards from true thinking becomes the initial necessity:
A prior is a (pre)computed value, masquerading itself (or not) as a full 1, it isn't, by necessity it can only be a piece of 1, therefore it has an R(n) and is signed. A prior can't be checked from within itself, it requires a second value and a non 1 normalized scale.
Using priors will always accelerate counting towards the full, unreachable, 1. Most priors have been thought to a positively signed value. The main issue is, while importing a prior to your own baseline thought, it can act against the overall value you already hold on the subject at hand. The following example shows this phenomena:
and Therefore additive route becomes impossible And multiplicative is possible
or keep
The new baseline value is lower than the old value, it's also valid, without checking simply adopting the new prior as completely valid destroys the original higher value.
The thought experiment largely explains how thought, being de prioritized over tabling (which will be expanded on later), makes the understanding of complex subjects actively lower, not higher. When one doesn't actively think before importing a prior, they'll devalue both their original baseline and the prior being imported. The main culprit here isn't the prior, it has been correctly constructed, according to a methodology, and is internally coherent, the problem is the delivery that considers no baseline on the receiver position.
Considering the receiver as devoid of baseline values has been status quo inside education for over 120 years now, treating every mind as initially empty, and simply adding values to it, some of these being considered as 1 (the Prior itself doesn't consider itself anything, it is a value, the proponent of it many times masquerades the partial value as a full 1). This method fails because no human entering formal education starts at 0, every human has prior accumulated values, and the addition of a new prior on top of something that's already computed can't be done before the mind normalizes one scale against another.
No prior is Truly '1'
For a prior to be transferable in any meaningful way it must have a standard path of being computed. This is what makes it teachable, the sequence of operations have been methodically decomposed and anyone can sequence them so another human learns the thinking process of that prior.
Whenever someone tries to say their prior is the full 1 of the subject, what they're saying is, to them and that to them is the whole subject. For teaching, as a structured process, this can be terribly useful, it allows anyone to expand a subject programmatically and methodically, not importing priors that currently sit above the student's baseline understanding of the subject. But, this optic only holds when: the full chain from 0 to whatever value the subject as a whole currently holds inside the collective understanding of humans > 1. Then this step process needs to be correctly scaled and normalized, it's methodological approach exposed, and the value be composable and (de)composable.
Education doesn't do this, therefore I'll contend with any position that tries to argue that this does happen only if it shows:
Full scale at R(n) > 0
What are the connecting points that compose the higher decades into full R(1) values.
And for any given subject, what should be taught at what stage, and how to check for the advancement to the next.
For any counter that holds more than this axiom, where full truth = 1 and we're incapable of ever reaching it, I require you to, without importing axioms without explaining them, decompose how any such system gets to a 1 under my axiom.
How thoughts Alter Values
No human is ever at 0, therefor the additive pipeline described cannot normalize anywhere closest possible to 1, it'll allows, by simple addition, have the possibility of going over 1, which is not a possible number inside the axiom. Therefore multiplication becomes the norm for the operation that imports priors to the baseline value held by the human. And, in using multiplication, the only way to grow your baseline is to invert the sign on the imported prior, invariant of whom or what tells it to you.
A second thought experiment illustrates the sign inversion, showing how thinking becomes the very act of inverting the sign of the prior:
and
first step is to treat the prior to be added as completely incompatible and different from your prior.Where your prior (A) is + and the incoming one is -.
and since we remain with A. and again we remain with A. and , possibl
The normalization of what B contained equal to A, and the addition of the novel parts, once normalized, produced advancement of a high baseline value. While trying to add them without normalizing will always yield in lowering the baseline value.
This operation is only possible to those who can understand that their understanding of any given subject will always be and can invert the sign of an incoming prior, treating it as something incompatible at first glance, without adding it fully, or exchanging one baseline for another baseline.
The ability to, whilst holding your internal position as not the full extent of 'Truth', understand that another position isn't incompatible with your position simply for the face value, that any position requires steps to import onto your baseline value, is what I argue 'Thought' is.
Costs Analyzed in two signs (- and +)
Society Favors + and Shuns -
My main argument is that the cost of abandoning thought in favor of lookup attitude is greater than the cost it proposes to save. But cost as a word is doing double duty here, and I must separate the two facets properly.
No operation is devoid of cost, most can immediately understand this, some cannot, for those who cannot explanation is simpler than it might otherwise seem: Any operation cost agnostic (where the cost doesn't change the initial set) is inflationary beyond entropy, and, nothing can beat entropy at infinite time. Every operation must carry their cost structure in one form or another. And there's only one or (an)other...
They're energy or time, mostly they're interchangeable, and everything costs one, the other, or a mixture (most commonly) or both at varying degrees. Energy cost, for the sake of the argument, is taking a positional change at the cost of potential energy, aiming for a positional advantage. Time cost is the accumulation of potential energy, without positional change, lowering work for some set cycles. So cost can be additive of position, or, subtractive of efficiency for more potential position.
In editing I chose to move the subsection to be alongside the header, the argument requires the full initial exposition to land
Time, as understood in modernity, is an unknown as to amount limited resource, and, for humans (up to what we've discovered so far) finite. Viewed through this lens it would "feel bad" to accept time cost, it's inefficient compared to energy cost, for energy cost doesn't lower work through cycles, potential energy accumulates at the gives efficiency you have, and you spend it for positional advantage.
But I propose that thought (which is the mode requiring more time than energy of the two) is the less costly option, and therefore must ask myself: Is thought less efficient? or, have I been given a false binary? In answering if time truly is finite as modernity puts it, and also, if it's a truly limited resource:
Human timeline, from the human's perspective, time is finite.
Human-to-human transferring of time is possible. Proof is, overall, society advances.
The time cost paid by one human can be transferred at a lower time cost to others.
These three points, taken as a whole, and which require no outside proof other than already contained inside point '2', it can be said that time cost, or rather, 'Time' is an infinite resource, regenerative and compounding. Now, before stating the obvious, I'll analyze energy cost.
Energy cost is measured against infinite resources, for the argument of this text they can be seen as: Money, Human Capital, Compute Cycles, Artifacts and Information... The are the outcome of time being used not as a cost, but as the producer of resources themselves, and the less you defocus from the production, the more perfectly time becomes these infinite resources. Once you acquire these types of resources you can trade them for positional advantages. And for this second experiment I'll use the "Homo Economicus" thinking to maximize efficiency, knowing this thinking pattern IS impossible, and no agent can ever truly reproduce it.
Using the initial baseline values of High School level education (the "standard" worldly minimum) from day 1, post graduation, agent runs every cycle optimally.
From available (non-deeply researched) jobs choose the one that pays most per time unit, meaning, most per cycle.
Cycle it, and whenever the opportunity arises to accept a better paying position because of accumulated experience, take it.
Invest the resources earned in raising positional advantage, insofar none are educationally gated (no time resource allowed). Middlemen are always kept, because the investment to remove them isn't a cycle at maximal efficiency.
What the test shows, quite reasonably, is that the median modern thinking is, without any agent being the "Homo Economicus", very close to this optimization function, and consumed by the fastest positional advantage seeking behavior decision making process. Except, knowing no one can be guaranteed the optimal decision, while actively not allowing one self to think through the consequences of choosing wrong playing this scenario.
Further, society frames positional advantage time costs as the natural time cost sink, basically extracting time for a position gated, not by genuine understanding of any one subject, but the credentials that investing time gives you, or, the agent entering and leaving the time cost the same, nothing having changed, and yet, for paying the time the positional advantage magically is allowed, like it wasn't an artificial gate to begin with.
These are the main reasons as to why the framing of efficiency and not thinking, or it's inverse, never committing fully because there's always a better position to be achieved closer than the time of commitment, frame these as binaries, when in fact they're the function a thinking agent runs on default: "How much certainty do I need before choosing any of the available options, of which there are more than 2, in front of me? and how much time do I allow myself to reach that certainty?". The time invested into thinking this through is, by the nature of thinking, one not invested into thinking about the next short you'll watch, or what label person A uses, versus what label is the "correct" label.
Now and Then, the cost for the Agent
The making of agent choosing the time cost, instead of the immediate energy cost, is made evermore impopular, leading to the lower amount of people who take their time to produce such an artifact.
The real reason to add the pictures of the handwritten notebook, it's production is time cost, not something that is meant for publication, something meant for the thought itself.
It requires time.
It can't be written for an outside task.
The only winner is, possibly, future me, and nothing structurally guarantees any advantage.
While keeping these 3 points at the forefront of any cost analysis, very few can trade their finite time for the uncertain of an artifact. The exchange rate is whatever hourly rate against whatever the future holds. Hourly wins, for most of the agents. The lack of immediate gain is what makes time cost lose out, there's no reason to do it, after all there's nothing guaranteed.
An agent who can't ignore their current selves cannot easily invest time in producing something that has no apparent reason to exist. But, these artifact are what's required for sustained societal advancement, after all in producing something that outlasts themselves they have made time less costly for a future agent... Or is this also not a false binary statement?
The time invested in producing the handwritten artifact, in long form, affects no one other than myself at production time, that's true, but, once produced it exists as itself, beyond what's connected to me. The handwritten example of this article exists as a condensed form of a snapshot of my thinking, and that snapshot captures a thought I must not re develop every time I want it expanded again. By thinking through how the argument of: Truth as unreachable, thought as the action that bring any agent closer to truth, I made my thinking organized in such a way that it chains from Point A to Point B, and this also organizes it for myself.
Of I were to think that any time invested this way had no intrinsic value, and it really doesn't, it's potential future discussion would have value, not the original artifact, then I wouldn't have invested the time to organize my thoughts, and wouldn't have come away with a more organized for of thinking through why people debate the way they debate, where their truths confront another person's truths and one must be valid, while the other can't be. And, as a teacher, I've accidentally made my cycling more efficient, this thinking has made it easier to understand what it is happens inside the framing my students adopt, and how to better organize their way of showing their baseline, listening to another prior, decomposing it and accepting that which adds while not using that which subtracts.
The true cost
The true cost of exchanging what has always been a thinking process (what I think and what you think, although different, can coexist) to a lookup table of valid positions isn't paid fully at the agent level, the agent is ever optimizing their actions according to whatever function they're following, they feel as though they have no time wasted, and every second is min-maxed against inefficient extraction of positional advantage.
The issue is, when one cannot organize their thoughts, or pay more than 6 seconds of attention, they cannot ever reach the point where, by thinking and laying out their thoughts long form, they self defeat twice.
human-to-human transference of knowledge stops becoming time cost paid in the past, it becomes time cost paid at each cycle.
the agent loses their self-actualization potential, and this is the more nefarious one.
The ultimate goal of any person has always been to reach a stable position, and once there, work towards the self actualization of what is functionally their personal goals. These personal goals were what one human left to others, beyond their working cycles, what has made the inter generational advancement more than simply looking up what the correct answer was for the given topic. Humans writing long form, their thinking, and leaving it for others to find and read, without necessarily needing the reward, simply because the process was theirs to make, and theirs to think through.
So, not only do we pay an agent cost, we pay a societal cost, and that secondary one cannot be measured from within your timeline, because you are optimally choosing, and your life has the greatest possible outcome. Given enough time of the same function running, we see the cracks beginning to form, and the eventual doom Sayers (of which there will always be enough) correctly predicting societal issues. This time their low value of priors isn't right on a random chance... society has multiplied against a prior value to such an extent, it might collectively reach the lower bounds where doom Sayers make their living.
Usage of the term: I do not use priors as the Bayesian priors. Prior will be used as an idea formulated before the human contends with the subject, or, formulated by another human where both haven't coordinated.
Thought
Contending directly with 'truth' before contending with 'thought'. Truth is objective insofar it doesn't relate to personal opinion, insofar that opinion is truly personal, not received unquestioned. What this informs is: There's no such thing as "my personal truth", there are opinions (then they're the product of actively thinking) and truth, and the two can, and often, do conflict.
That leaves the explaining of Truth under this article as something clear to explain, harder to accept:
To facilitate further expansion I'll tag the upper bound of 'Truth' to 1.0, and, a human contending with a novel subject, one he hasn't previously actively thought about, starts at 0.0. The act of the human thinking about the subject moves his 'Baseline' closer to 1, and, will never reach 1.
How would this counting work exactly? The proposal for this thought experiment carries 2 axis, where the first is the Decade and the second is the Sign, taken as one they become a 'Value'. This leaves the growing of the value assigned to the subject inside a log scale, and from not knowing to actively advancing the field itself you accumulate depth, not only magnitudes. The usage of signed values ( + and - ) also does something interesting, it allows multiplication of pair negative values to add to the positive plane.
First page, produced while watching a Cambridge debate, not thinking about the debate itself, but, what the debate could produce.
From this I start my reasoning towards the eventual conclusion from an initial axiom set:
Truth = 1, Thought = 'multiply' or 'add' using values = 'ideas' that numerically become= [+,-]idea < 1, and R(n) > Log(10)n. Where for any finite lived Human 1 is impossible to reach, therefore increasing 'n' approximates the field and the human to 1, without ever touching 1.
On Priors[1]
From the axiom as the initial position for thought evaluating why 'Priors' work backwards from true thinking becomes the initial necessity:
A prior is a (pre)computed value, masquerading itself (or not) as a full 1, it isn't, by necessity it can only be a piece of 1, therefore it has an R(n) and is signed. A prior can't be checked from within itself, it requires a second value and a non 1 normalized scale.
Using priors will always accelerate counting towards the full, unreachable, 1. Most priors have been thought to a positively signed value. The main issue is, while importing a prior to your own baseline thought, it can act against the overall value you already hold on the subject at hand. The following example shows this phenomena:
The new baseline value is lower than the old value, it's also valid, without checking simply adopting the new prior as completely valid destroys the original higher value.
The thought experiment largely explains how thought, being de prioritized over tabling (which will be expanded on later), makes the understanding of complex subjects actively lower, not higher. When one doesn't actively think before importing a prior, they'll devalue both their original baseline and the prior being imported. The main culprit here isn't the prior, it has been correctly constructed, according to a methodology, and is internally coherent, the problem is the delivery that considers no baseline on the receiver position.
Considering the receiver as devoid of baseline values has been status quo inside education for over 120 years now, treating every mind as initially empty, and simply adding values to it, some of these being considered as 1 (the Prior itself doesn't consider itself anything, it is a value, the proponent of it many times masquerades the partial value as a full 1). This method fails because no human entering formal education starts at 0, every human has prior accumulated values, and the addition of a new prior on top of something that's already computed can't be done before the mind normalizes one scale against another.
No prior is Truly '1'
For a prior to be transferable in any meaningful way it must have a standard path of being computed. This is what makes it teachable, the sequence of operations have been methodically decomposed and anyone can sequence them so another human learns the thinking process of that prior.
Whenever someone tries to say their prior is the full 1 of the subject, what they're saying is, to them
Education doesn't do this, therefore I'll contend with any position that tries to argue that this does happen only if it shows:
For any counter that holds more than this axiom, where full truth = 1 and we're incapable of ever reaching it, I require you to, without importing axioms without explaining them, decompose how any such system gets to a 1 under my axiom.
How thoughts Alter Values
No human is ever at 0, therefor the additive pipeline described cannot normalize anywhere closest possible to 1, it'll allows, by simple addition, have the possibility of going over 1, which is not a possible number inside the axiom. Therefore multiplication becomes the norm for the operation that imports priors to the baseline value held by the human. And, in using multiplication, the only way to grow your baseline is to invert the sign on the imported prior, invariant of whom or what tells it to you.
A second thought experiment illustrates the sign inversion, showing how thinking becomes the very act of inverting the sign of the prior:
first step is to treat the prior to be added as completely incompatible and different from your prior. Where your prior (A) is + and the incoming one is -.
The normalization of what B contained equal to A, and the addition of the novel parts, once normalized, produced advancement of a high baseline value. While trying to add them without normalizing will always yield in lowering the baseline value.
This operation is only possible to those who can understand that their understanding of any given subject will always be
The ability to, whilst holding your internal position as not the full extent of 'Truth', understand that another position isn't incompatible with your position simply for the face value, that any position requires steps to import onto your baseline value, is what I argue 'Thought' is.
Costs Analyzed in two signs (- and +)
Society Favors + and Shuns -
My main argument is that the cost of abandoning thought in favor of lookup attitude is greater than the cost it proposes to save. But cost as a word is doing double duty here, and I must separate the two facets properly.
No operation is devoid of cost, most can immediately understand this, some cannot, for those who cannot explanation is simpler than it might otherwise seem: Any operation cost agnostic (where the cost doesn't change the initial set) is inflationary beyond entropy, and, nothing can beat entropy at infinite time. Every operation must carry their cost structure in one form or another. And there's only one or (an)other...
They're energy or time, mostly they're interchangeable, and everything costs one, the other, or a mixture (most commonly) or both at varying degrees. Energy cost, for the sake of the argument, is taking a positional change at the cost of potential energy, aiming for a positional advantage. Time cost is the accumulation of potential energy, without positional change, lowering work for some set cycles. So cost can be additive of position, or, subtractive of efficiency for more potential position.
In editing I chose to move the subsection to be alongside the header, the argument requires the full initial exposition to land
Time, as understood in modernity, is an unknown as to amount limited resource, and, for humans (up to what we've discovered so far) finite. Viewed through this lens it would "feel bad" to accept time cost, it's inefficient compared to energy cost, for energy cost doesn't lower work through cycles, potential energy accumulates at the gives efficiency you have, and you spend it for positional advantage.
But I propose that thought (which is the mode requiring more time than energy of the two) is the less costly option, and therefore must ask myself: Is thought less efficient? or, have I been given a false binary? In answering if time truly is finite as modernity puts it, and also, if it's a truly limited resource:
These three points, taken as a whole, and which require no outside proof other than already contained inside point '2', it can be said that time cost, or rather, 'Time' is an infinite resource, regenerative and compounding. Now, before stating the obvious, I'll analyze energy cost.
Energy cost is measured against infinite resources, for the argument of this text they can be seen as: Money, Human Capital, Compute Cycles, Artifacts and Information... The are the outcome of time being used not as a cost, but as the producer of resources themselves, and the less you defocus from the production, the more perfectly time becomes these infinite resources. Once you acquire these types of resources you can trade them for positional advantages. And for this second experiment I'll use the "Homo Economicus" thinking to maximize efficiency, knowing this thinking pattern IS impossible, and no agent can ever truly reproduce it.
What the test shows, quite reasonably, is that the median modern thinking is, without any agent being the "Homo Economicus", very close to this optimization function, and consumed by the fastest positional advantage seeking behavior decision making process. Except, knowing no one can be guaranteed the optimal decision, while actively not allowing one self to think through the consequences of choosing wrong playing this scenario.
Further, society frames positional advantage time costs as the natural time cost sink, basically extracting time for a position gated, not by genuine understanding of any one subject, but the credentials that investing time gives you, or, the agent entering and leaving the time cost the same, nothing having changed, and yet, for paying the time the positional advantage magically is allowed, like it wasn't an artificial gate to begin with.
These are the main reasons as to why the framing of efficiency and not thinking, or it's inverse, never committing fully because there's always a better position to be achieved closer than the time of commitment, frame these as binaries, when in fact they're the function a thinking agent runs on default: "How much certainty do I need before choosing any of the available options, of which there are more than 2, in front of me? and how much time do I allow myself to reach that certainty?". The time invested into thinking this through is, by the nature of thinking, one not invested into thinking about the next short you'll watch, or what label person A uses, versus what label is the "correct" label.
Now and Then, the cost for the Agent
The making of agent choosing the time cost, instead of the immediate energy cost, is made evermore
impopular, leading to the lower amount of people who take their time to produce such an artifact.The real reason to add the pictures of the handwritten notebook, it's production is time cost, not something that is meant for publication, something meant for the thought itself.
While keeping these 3 points at the forefront of any cost analysis, very few can trade their finite time for the uncertain of an artifact. The exchange rate is whatever hourly rate against whatever the future holds. Hourly wins, for most of the agents. The lack of immediate gain is what makes time cost lose out, there's no reason to do it, after all there's nothing guaranteed.
An agent who can't ignore their current selves cannot easily invest time in producing something that has no apparent reason to exist. But, these artifact are what's required for sustained societal advancement, after all in producing something that outlasts themselves they have made time less costly for a future agent... Or is this also not a false binary statement?
The time invested in producing the handwritten artifact, in long form, affects no one other than myself at production time, that's true, but, once produced it exists as itself, beyond what's connected to me. The handwritten example of this article exists as a condensed form of a snapshot of my thinking, and that snapshot captures a thought I must not re develop every time I want it expanded again. By thinking through how the argument of: Truth as unreachable, thought as the action that bring any agent closer to truth, I made my thinking organized in such a way that it chains from Point A to Point B, and this also organizes it for myself.
Of I were to think that any time invested this way had no intrinsic value, and it really doesn't, it's potential future discussion would have value, not the original artifact, then I wouldn't have invested the time to organize my thoughts, and wouldn't have come away with a more organized for of thinking through why people debate the way they debate, where their truths confront another person's truths and one must be valid, while the other can't be. And, as a teacher, I've accidentally made my cycling more efficient, this thinking has made it easier to understand what it is happens inside the framing my students adopt, and how to better organize their way of showing their baseline, listening to another prior, decomposing it and accepting that which adds while not using that which subtracts.
The true cost
The true cost of exchanging what has always been a thinking process (what I think and what you think, although different, can coexist) to a lookup table of valid positions isn't paid fully at the agent level, the agent is ever optimizing their actions according to whatever function they're following, they feel as though they have no time wasted, and every second is min-maxed against inefficient extraction of positional advantage.
The issue is, when one cannot organize their thoughts, or pay more than 6 seconds of attention, they cannot ever reach the point where, by thinking and laying out their thoughts long form, they self defeat twice.
The ultimate goal of any person has always been to reach a stable position, and once there, work towards the self actualization of what is functionally their personal goals. These personal goals were what one human left to others, beyond their working cycles, what has made the inter generational advancement more than simply looking up what the correct answer was for the given topic. Humans writing long form, their thinking, and leaving it for others to find and read, without necessarily needing the reward, simply because the process was theirs to make, and theirs to think through.
So, not only do we pay an agent cost, we pay a societal cost, and that secondary one cannot be measured from within your timeline, because you are optimally choosing, and your life has the greatest possible outcome. Given enough time of the same function running, we see the cracks beginning to form, and the eventual doom Sayers (of which there will always be
enough) correctly predicting societal issues. This time their low value of priors isn't right on a random chance... society has multiplied against a prior value to such an extent, it might collectively reach the lower bounds where doom Sayers make their living.Usage of the term: I do not use priors as the Bayesian priors. Prior will be used as an idea formulated before the human contends with the subject, or, formulated by another human where both haven't coordinated.