Curious for your take on the premise that ontologies always have tacit telos.
Some ontologies seem to have more of a telos ‘baked in’—e.g., Christianity might be a good example—whereas other ontologies have zero explicit telos—e.g., pure mathematics.
But I think you’re right that there’s always a tacit telos, perhaps based on elegance. When I argue that “consciousness is a physics problem”, I’m arguing that it inherits physics’ tacit telos, which seems to be elegance-as-operationalized-by-symmetry.
I wonder if “elegance” always captures telos? This would indicate a certain theory-of-effective-social/personal-change...
Also, we desire to expand the domains of our perception with scientific instrumentation and abstractions. This expansion always generates some mapping (ontology) from the new data to our existing sensory modalities.
Yeah, it doesn’t seem technology can ever truly be “teleologically neutral”.
Elegance is probably worth exploring in the same way that moral descriptivism as a field turned up some interesting things. My naive take is something like ‘efficient compression of signaling future abundance.’
Another frame for the problem: what is mathematical and scientific taste and how does it work?
Also, more efficient objection to religion: ‘your compression scheme is lossy bro.’ :D
Some ontologies seem to have more of a telos ‘baked in’—e.g., Christianity might be a good example—whereas other ontologies have zero explicit telos—e.g., pure mathematics.
But I think you’re right that there’s always a tacit telos, perhaps based on elegance. When I argue that “consciousness is a physics problem”, I’m arguing that it inherits physics’ tacit telos, which seems to be elegance-as-operationalized-by-symmetry.
I wonder if “elegance” always captures telos? This would indicate a certain theory-of-effective-social/personal-change...
Yeah, it doesn’t seem technology can ever truly be “teleologically neutral”.
Elegance is probably worth exploring in the same way that moral descriptivism as a field turned up some interesting things. My naive take is something like ‘efficient compression of signaling future abundance.’
Another frame for the problem: what is mathematical and scientific taste and how does it work?
Also, more efficient objection to religion: ‘your compression scheme is lossy bro.’ :D