Trying to Solve for X when you don’t know Why

Everybody got the same chance to take it, chasin’ one color

• Lloyd Banks

Get rich and charge it all to a bitch, that’s how this shit ‘posed to go

• Freddie Gibbs

Para los gustos, colores

• Saying

I’m not sure where I first read about “local epistemology” but it can be used to group all of our knowledge while not directly challenging other epistemologies.

Local epistemology is first something that cannot be denied. It’s not about being right or wrong. It’s about an objective relationship between the knowledge of a person and their environment.

Epistemology in this case is performative in the same sense that it is relative. That is, to do knowledge is to contribute to the locality in which the epistemology lives. Thus to do knowledge is to change and construe knowledge because of the feedback loop in which knowledge changes the environment.

This point is very subtle. It’s like a Chinese finger trap. Whatever movement you do contributes to the circumstances you find yourself. Like when psychologists say that smiling tricks your brain into being in a happier mood. Thinking puts you in an existential situation that contributes to the beginning or the foundation of your actions. Your actions, as soon as they’re acted, are feeding back into your thinking.

We find some calmness so even though all that stuff is happening at all times, we can ignore it straight on and just let it be in the background as we act. If someone was looking at us, they would be able to calculate our moves based on the patterns left behind.

The question of predictability leads to the question of free will: Can someone predict another person’s behavior if they know everything about the other person’s mental conditioning?

We could reasonably say that, while each moment could possibly have an infinite number of outcomes, the act of thinking is radical enough that our prediction of another person will always lack the act of thinking. One cannot predict how another person will think. It’s paradoxical. You think they think what they think because you think what you think. Thinking thinking doesn’t objectify thinking just relativizes it.