Response

>I fail to grasp your idea of “a system”, and there also seems to be some logical inconsistency in your discussion on premises and conclusions.

Now, this system is a very abstract concept rooted in pragmatism. Pragmatism regarding the abstract concept of pragmatism. Not pragmatism in the vein of utilitarianism or something like that. Utilitarianism is kinda tainted at its foundation on icky physical stuff and not really as spongy and malleable as pragmatism.

Another long-winding preface, while I was writing a different piece after I wrote this, I ran into Hume. I suddenly started writing about cause and effect and after a while I bothered to google Hume and my arguments were in the same vein as his (more or less). So I might have some Hume thrown in here but it’s of actually little relevance to Hume himself; rather it’s an allusion to the idea that he brought about (which, his idea as a constant, we should expect to run into again independent of him). And while, we’re at it, in general my philosophy is heavily influenced by Kant and Hegel. At its core, this philosophy has self-reference as the conclusion of a system (namely the person currently referencing themselves when they read “me”). So this will also be peppered with self-reference.

>You state that in order for us to arrive at a conclusion, we need premises. Further, you point out that a conclusion might be hidden within the premise itself. This however, does not imply that a premise is hidden within a conclusion, as multiple premises might produce the same conclusion. This points to the two being fundamentally different, which you later on deny (you write that they’re fundamentally the same). We can derive a conclusion from a set of premises through the laws of logic, but can we deduce the same set of premises from the conclusion alone?

It begs the question to assume the conclusion doesn’t have within it the premises used to get to the conclusion.

If someone goes to the hospital because they were hit by a car, “going to the hospital” has as its premise “getting hit by a car.” That’s one system. As soon as you hypothesize about going to the hospital to visit a sick loved one, we reach the same conclusion with different premises but also the system that produced the outcome changed. Instead of using the system “being injured” to go to the hospital, the person used the “having sympathy” system. Again, a very abstract concept of pragmatism.

3+1=4

Four has in it three and one. Four also has within it two two’s. But the only way we can triangulate the premise from the conclusion or vice versa is through understanding the system it went through. This might be the craziest part of my philosophy but it points towards triangulation. To find anything you need to be able have firsthand impression of it AND be able to triangulate it somehow. You can have one or the other (firsthand impression or an idea) but either case results in nonsense since firsthand impression without context is meaningless and a triangulation with unknowns only leads to further unknowns. So if you define yourself as good, you need a “you” (a bit problematic to define, but pragmatically we having a functioning “you” defined) and a definition of good (with the conclusion being “you are good”) and you need a system to connect it. So if you act in a good manner (the system that connects the two), then we can say you are a good you.

This is the dualism of Descartes: You are whatever you think you are (I think therefore I am; the impression that you being aware of yourself is the only impression that’s not a lie) but the only way for you to know that is to triangulate yourself with yourself. You need to go through a system of existence to reach the conclusion. Existence precedes essence.

Another example of this principle is Aristotle’s ethics. You’re always in the middle between two extremes. You never reach either extreme; you’re just a dot plotted in this graph and without the graph, you’re just a dot floating in space. Your ethical goal being to use reason to place yourself in a position that is virtues within the two extremes.

This is what I was working on but since it seems relevant (it’s not complete):

**BEGIN**

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How did we get to the conclusion that we’re a strange loop? By taking certain premises into consideration that led to the conclusion that we’re a strange loop.

These premises are in themselves loops.

When you reach a conclusion, you don’t draw a line from point *a* to point *b*.

Rather, when you reach a conclusion, you reach a kind of tautology. You create a system that connects *a* and *b*

Not only do the premises *a* correspond to the conclusion *b*; the conclusion *b* corresponds to the premises *a*. Proving a relationship is not proving a causal relationship; rather proving a relationship is creating an ideological atom that is self-contained within a further system that produced it.

The premise and conclusion is connected by whatever system you wish to use to connect them.

The ingredients for apple pie and an apple pie are connected by the baking process. There’s no disconnect between their relationships.

The relationship of the apple pie ingredients and apple pie is this kind of tautology. Every time you put the ingredients for apple pie through the “baking system”, you’ll always get apple pie. The only thing that separates the ingredients of apple pie and the apple pie is the system by which one becomes the other.

One may say that the apple pie ingredients are premises but that the conclusion is not necessarily apple pie; just that apple pie is possible from those premises. But the “baking system” makes the apple pie conclusion inevitable. Every time the ingredients go through the same system, the conclusion is already determined before it’s produced.

It’s not evident where the tautology is yet because it just seems straight-forward.

But it’s *oddly* too straight forward.

The reason you don’t see it as a tautology is because of the framework in which we get from point *a* to point *b* is based on abstract spatial and temporal impressions. You’re taking something happening in real life from various inputs (time, space, sight, smell, touch, etc) and creating a “unified sense” of everything.

But even this process of “creating” or “forging” your sense of reality by combining all the various sensations operates on the same basis of reality; they’re guided by the same system that guide the stars and the fish.

Throwing anything you want into the (abstract) system will bring back a reflection of both the premises that went into the system and what the system produced. “What the system produced” is not referring to the product itself but rather the process that led to the product. The abyss stares back, etc.

_____________________________

**END**

That’s what I was going to publish. Continuing in from there, the evidence points to something super duper exciting. We never start with premises. We always start with conclusions because the conclusions are tautologies. And the only way we find answers is by finding the premises through pragmatism.

This means that reading this, you know what this means to you. It would be absurd if you read this and didn’t know what it meant to you. But you can misread this if you read it and extract some concept of knowledge that’s not in the same vein as the meaning that I intended. If we start with similar premises we can still reach different conclusions. This can be either because we used different systems to process the premises or I expressed myself inaccurately or vague and thus we’re using different premises or a mixture of those two factors. But the conclusions are always predetermined by the premises and system. This is why philosophy is possible: we are conclusions without access to the premises or system (although science and math are good at deducing the universe’s functions, what they deduce is our abductions about the universe but they don’t reduce the abductions; abduction is our saving grace; the question is whether we can abduct God)

If we ourselves exist in a universe with certain premises and an objective mechanical system, then our conclusion with regard to those premises and system is already determined.

I had a bit back and forth with a user on a different sub and they brought chaos into the situation.

I was talking about the Premises going through the System to reach the Conclusion. They brought up Chaos affecting the conclusion. That would be dualistic.

There is nothing beyond the System between the premise and the conclusion. If Chaos is involved in the process then Chaos is part of the system.

If what I say follows, then I can use you reading this as an example. Since you’re a system reaching the meaning of this post (conclusion). So what’s the premise?

In order for you to reach whatever conclusion you reach you need to have some conclusions already established.

For you to process these words you need to already know what they mean and for you to understand this you need to be able to understand this (or at least you think you know what these words mean; I may be coincidentally in this very moment communicating with a Martian race and I can (with these very words) be telling them about how nice weather we’re having here).

The only way you as a system reach the conclusions you reach after reading this is because you already have some conclusions regarding these words. But not only that, you’re also functioning inside a logical system which supersedes the English system you’re using (since we can extract logic from English and can understand it independent of English). And we understand everything under this logical framework

But again, we find that logic is a conclusion in itself within a system. Insanity seems equally valid.

Taking all this into consideration, we can also say that it’s nonsense to take determinism into consideration because you cannot process it in any system. To say something is true and that something *needed* to be true are two different things. We can say that the consequences of an event were necessary for what happened next but we cannot say that the consequences determined the outcome. Because the consequences are the conclusion of an event but also the input for the next conclusion. The input needs to go through the system to be processed. But because the input, system and conclusion are independent from each other (they’re three distinct things), the consequences can serve as input to a system that reaches a conclusion that was not within the consequences themselves. That is, the consequences revealed certain conclusions but relative to the system. Thus determinism wasn’t evident. Because the system could have changed and thus the conclusion could have changed.

The input, system and output are independent but relative to one another. They details/variables can change but there’s a certain relationship they have (eg. the premise and system determine the conclusion but the premise does not determine the system).

Moving on, it’s convenient to share conclusions. The English language is a conclusion built on conclusions and with it we get to further conclusions. English itself is built on other conclusions. Some dependent on our conscious and others not (e.g., the human body comes before our conclusion; existence precedes essence).

We can translate conclusions from other language (e.g, Plato’s conclusions from Ancient Greek). We can translate conclusions from English to mathematical notations, etc.

But the premises remain the same regardless. It’s what keeps the translations connected. You don’t translate a conclusion. You translate a premise that leads to the conclusion once the person processes the premises so that the person processing (the system) the translations reaches the product (conclusion). Although every time you read a philosopher, you’ve read them wrong, etc.

You and a lion live in the same time and place but experience radically different emotions and states of mind because of the depth of references but most of those references are not present. Most of those references are memories which are conclusion of processes; and those memories are put through algorithms that end up at a conclusion but you’re already at the conclusion before those memories are processed. For example, for you to understand these words you have to know what they mean but they mean what they mean. That refers to two different system of retrieval; once you’ve accepted something, the conclusion is already present.

Ultimately, all conclusions are only conclusions insofar as they’re premises. And all premises already have the conclusion inside of them because all the system does is extract it from within (a bit of Hegelian trickery). Because to say that the the system took anything other than the premise would be dualism because what else is there? And the reason I say abstract from within it is because the world we live in is abducted. Repeating what I said before, deduction doesn’t actually reduce anything. Whenever you deduce something, you don’t up with less of anything. You end up with an equal amount of abduction. I’m thinking here of the neo-platonic One. The metaphysical concept that represent ultimate reality.

Now if we go back to the conclusion that we are a conclusion and that we don’t have access to our premises or the system we’re in, then the One can very well be a fundamental premise of who we are and what we come from. It would be what metaphysically connects us all. Since we’re all similar conclusions; and the universe looks repetitive because everything comes from the same origins and guided by the same universal laws.

As far as art is concerned, the difference between symbols like the ones you’re reading right now and the symbols an artist might create is that the artist creates a raw conclusion that can only be used as a raw premise for your own interpretation through whatever system you wish to process it by. Even if you know the background and context in which the artist was working, you have to put a certain amount of yourself in the art to reach the conclusion because the premises from the art and the system used by the artist to produced it are hidden. It’s a bit akin to use reflecting on the universe. We cannot reflect on the universe without seeing ourselves in it. It’s a self-reference.

If a squirrel finds a tree feature beneficial and spread its nuts more, which in turn functions as a premise for the estblishment of a new species of trees, can we say that the squirrel found the the feature useful before it existed? No, that’s absurd. So it’s a circle: the feature popped up and the squirrel found it useful. That’s a tautology.

What has happened was possible because, if it wasn’t possible, it wouldn’t have happened. What has happened was necessary for this moment to be possible because this very conclusion we’ve reached was only possible because of what was happened. But those are two separate observations.

The second observation (what has happened was necessary for this moment to be possible) is the result of us being in an objective universe that exists independent of us. Existentially, our roles as inputs, systems and conclusions are part of a larger system (the universe) and so it would be contradictory to say that we’re not the conclusion of everything that was happened until now. And now. And now. Etc. But just because what happened was necessary for now to be possible, it doesn’t follow that what’s possible now is necessary for what happens next. It only follows that what’s possible now is possible for what happens next. Possible meaning that there are options for either processing the necessary inputs in different possible systems or using different possible inputs in necessary systems

The interesting thing is that we have no evidence to conclude that conclusions exist outside of awareness

The problem with other minds is that we don’t know what kind of conclusion they are or what kind of conclusion they carry. Deceit, love, sincerity, mocking, etc.

But we can somehow believe or have faith in other minds. And when a tree reacts to its environment, we may say that the tree concluded that it was time to hibernate or whatever. But we can’t say that the universe concluded the result of everything. We don’t even know if the tree reacted to its environment and reached a conclusion. We can only process those through our own conclusions which are conclusions that rests on systems of logic, existential context, and other details that determine how we interpret who we are.

The system of logic we depend on varies depending on our education, IQ, upbringing, psychological health, etc. And all those are conclusions within our own understanding, but again we can’t say the universe concluded that.

As far as deduction is concerned, deduction is limited that it can only talk about conclusions. Never premises or systems. And the conclusions are always have within them the premises and system that produced it.

The paradox then is that each conclusion is always implying unknowns that must exist for the conclusion to be true. And the unknowns united is what would the neo-platonic the One because within it also contains all the knowns. Not sure if this touches on *a priori* problems.