so this is the problem. astrology etc, do have a real inquiry, AND they could even speaknof indebtedness to tradition in a good way. (path dependancy is real, and how we think of ppl probably effects ppl. all good). but this is the fruit thst the husk is hiding.
same with kabbalah and psychoanalysis. they have real starting points. if you don't expose them, you can't make real progress. you can't see if it's all a ruse.
and wrt math, I think its OK for someone to claim "this next step takes a long time to understand." but that's not OK when there are no steps, just a kafkaesque labyrinth.
surely you've seen fraudulent kabbalist teach. is this not what gives them false power? would they not be confused if asked to start from the beginning?
Idk, frauds have even bigger problems... I mean people use this against them, but I think the problem of frauds is more built in to the concept of building systems than implied by your solutions. Because either you refuse to create a language so can only point at the reality, but then make little progress. Or you do and then this immediately can be taken over by frauds - because now you don't *need* the reality for the words. So maybe math has some checks against this problem in a way, like if you go to far away from reality it won't compute anymore, but there isn't a promise every form of wisdom will have this kind of check.
I actually think obscurantism etc was supposed to be a check for this - you can't even use the words if not initiated into the reality - but then this itself opens up possibility for even more obvious fraud ..
I don't know to what extent it is true that things like psychoanalysis become untethered from the reality. It's hard to distinguish things like it from math.
The seeming "drift" can be explained differently. It might be the case that the psychoanalytic community has reached so deep into the aspect of reality they are discussing that they find it more useful to begin from already established language than from the base observations.
questions of "how we would know" must be separated from questions of "is it true/possible". God didn't promise us everything will be knowable from the outside. when we subjugate the "is it true" to the "how would we know"(from the outside) we often lost out on aspects of reality.
"blind trust" isn't the same thing as "entering a discourse"
every discourse reveals a certain aspect, but also conceals, the outside likes to notice what it conceals but it seems valuable to think what it reveals and what we would not know without it. sometimes the advanced revelations are available only within that discourse for the same reason the discourse is revelatory to begin with.
i think also in practice, most such discourses are starting from like level 17, but the practitioners have some idea - sometimes vaguely- of how it is interpretating reality, and in a sense "it works" for them in that it does "grab" the reality in the way or aspect they care about, even if there are few who know how to bridge from level 0 to there.
so in other words the question "how do we know" does become the question "how do i get from here into there, as you have framed it. but i think most advanced discourses don't have a good way to do this, and i don't think its just because they become self-referential, i think its mostly a hard problem of pedagogy.
so my archetype case (as you can guess, perhaps) is kabbalah, which seems to avoid entering from the beginning. same with modern psychoanalysis imo. but math has a pedagogy that says "start here, do this, and you will be able to understand these squiggles".
The insulated discourses don't have a good path. it's typical to start in the middle, and any attempt to try to start from the beginning is denied.
"so what's the problem tzimtzum is trying to solve, and how do we know it's a real problem and tzimtz solves it?" and the like.
I'm not sure I'm clear. but I'm trying to say that the pedagogy is hard bc ppl are scared and they are protecting prestige more than anything else.
right and i think these accusations (either that disciplines are lazy and circular or that they're just about prestige etc) while of course point at something real, are themselves a flattening of the really hard problem and we do ourselves a disservice by reducing it to that. like even math doesn't do a very very great job at teaching and it has the benefit of being the most axiomatized science. (which again, we cannot equate with also being the most revelatory one).
the problem being: how do i teach the aspect of reality which is revealed by like level 25, when starting from 0 would probably take you a lifetime to get to 2 or 3. but the answers from 17 to 18 are kinda really important for life.
"Did they enter the discourse seeking a solution to a problem or confusion? Or did they enter the discourse due to social pull?"
Reminds me of what I've been thinking about lately - Kant's claim that there are ways of thinking that are free or unfree - eg thinking influenced by social pulls is unfree, but thought driven purely by a need to understand might be autonomous.
so this is the problem. astrology etc, do have a real inquiry, AND they could even speaknof indebtedness to tradition in a good way. (path dependancy is real, and how we think of ppl probably effects ppl. all good). but this is the fruit thst the husk is hiding.
same with kabbalah and psychoanalysis. they have real starting points. if you don't expose them, you can't make real progress. you can't see if it's all a ruse.
and wrt math, I think its OK for someone to claim "this next step takes a long time to understand." but that's not OK when there are no steps, just a kafkaesque labyrinth.
surely you've seen fraudulent kabbalist teach. is this not what gives them false power? would they not be confused if asked to start from the beginning?
Idk, frauds have even bigger problems... I mean people use this against them, but I think the problem of frauds is more built in to the concept of building systems than implied by your solutions. Because either you refuse to create a language so can only point at the reality, but then make little progress. Or you do and then this immediately can be taken over by frauds - because now you don't *need* the reality for the words. So maybe math has some checks against this problem in a way, like if you go to far away from reality it won't compute anymore, but there isn't a promise every form of wisdom will have this kind of check.
I actually think obscurantism etc was supposed to be a check for this - you can't even use the words if not initiated into the reality - but then this itself opens up possibility for even more obvious fraud ..
Really important concepts for those seeking self knowledge. Particularly those of us who have developed fluency in multiple modes of discourse
I don't know to what extent it is true that things like psychoanalysis become untethered from the reality. It's hard to distinguish things like it from math.
The seeming "drift" can be explained differently. It might be the case that the psychoanalytic community has reached so deep into the aspect of reality they are discussing that they find it more useful to begin from already established language than from the base observations.
I think that's possible. how would we know what the case is? or must we trust blindly?
questions of "how we would know" must be separated from questions of "is it true/possible". God didn't promise us everything will be knowable from the outside. when we subjugate the "is it true" to the "how would we know"(from the outside) we often lost out on aspects of reality.
"blind trust" isn't the same thing as "entering a discourse"
every discourse reveals a certain aspect, but also conceals, the outside likes to notice what it conceals but it seems valuable to think what it reveals and what we would not know without it. sometimes the advanced revelations are available only within that discourse for the same reason the discourse is revelatory to begin with.
i think also in practice, most such discourses are starting from like level 17, but the practitioners have some idea - sometimes vaguely- of how it is interpretating reality, and in a sense "it works" for them in that it does "grab" the reality in the way or aspect they care about, even if there are few who know how to bridge from level 0 to there.
so in other words the question "how do we know" does become the question "how do i get from here into there, as you have framed it. but i think most advanced discourses don't have a good way to do this, and i don't think its just because they become self-referential, i think its mostly a hard problem of pedagogy.
so my archetype case (as you can guess, perhaps) is kabbalah, which seems to avoid entering from the beginning. same with modern psychoanalysis imo. but math has a pedagogy that says "start here, do this, and you will be able to understand these squiggles".
The insulated discourses don't have a good path. it's typical to start in the middle, and any attempt to try to start from the beginning is denied.
"so what's the problem tzimtzum is trying to solve, and how do we know it's a real problem and tzimtz solves it?" and the like.
I'm not sure I'm clear. but I'm trying to say that the pedagogy is hard bc ppl are scared and they are protecting prestige more than anything else.
right and i think these accusations (either that disciplines are lazy and circular or that they're just about prestige etc) while of course point at something real, are themselves a flattening of the really hard problem and we do ourselves a disservice by reducing it to that. like even math doesn't do a very very great job at teaching and it has the benefit of being the most axiomatized science. (which again, we cannot equate with also being the most revelatory one).
the problem being: how do i teach the aspect of reality which is revealed by like level 25, when starting from 0 would probably take you a lifetime to get to 2 or 3. but the answers from 17 to 18 are kinda really important for life.
"Did they enter the discourse seeking a solution to a problem or confusion? Or did they enter the discourse due to social pull?"
Reminds me of what I've been thinking about lately - Kant's claim that there are ways of thinking that are free or unfree - eg thinking influenced by social pulls is unfree, but thought driven purely by a need to understand might be autonomous.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-reason/#MaxiReas