Talk:Transcendent values

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Craig Calcaterra (talk) 04:26, 27 March 2023 (CDT)

This is a placeholder for a page which discusses the general importance of transcendent values in any DAO, in the abstract sense. Need a discussion of the game theory that leads to the Transcendental Values Thesis. Some discussion of universal values (Good; True; Beautiful? getting more tenuous... Love? so many types... that's why they're transcendent), what they might be, why we've never seen anything that the globe has reached a consensus on... .
I haven't written up the more abstract principles for DGF, yet. Craig Calcaterra (talk) 09:26, 26 February 2023 (CST)

The Transcendental Value Thesis

The idea generated by the intuition gained from the Folk Theories of game theory is that, when you are playing a slightly complicated repeated game, like Prisoner’s dilemma, then there is no static set of rules that you can formalize that can guarantee players will be forced to follow that will ensure everyone gets a fair reward. No matter the strategy, there is another, likely more complicated strategy that a player can discover which will profit them at the expense of the group. More simply, you can always find a way to trick the other players while following the letter of the law.

Part of the content of this thesis is that a player can invent a new strategy that is outside the behavior prescribed by the rules. For instance, in prisoner’s dilemma with Lord Versus Peasants, if the Lord invents the idea of signaling, then the Lord can use that power to force the others to accept a lesser reward, because the Lord can threaten a grim trigger strategy if the others don't comply. …

• • Need 3-5 more examples of transcending the formal rules…

Thesis is the right word for this, instead of Theory or Conjecture, because the idea is a player would transcend the rules of the game and invent a new strategy that doesn’t violate the formally prescribed set of rules, but does invent a new way of interacting with the others.

The punchline is that you need transcendent unifying values to guarantee stability and fairness. You can’t rely on the letter of the law to keep your system running smoothly. "Transcendental" means beyond any formal description. Craig Calcaterra (talk) 21:52, 6 April 2023 (CDT)

Engineering in the Realm of Good and Evil

Most contemporary scientists reflexively reject any effort to scientifically analyze morality. This is natural, because making any judgment about such a complex subject requires many large leaps of logic. The scientific analysis of sociology is far from solid, much less the science of human behavior, much less the science of metaphysics and religion. Any description of a complex physical phenomenon that you can formally put to words, or in your scientific matrix, is a simplification of the reality. The map is not the territory. When you simplify a description of such complex phenomena as social meaning or personal experience, the description is certain to be imperfect. In fact whatever description you dare to announce is certain to have an aspect of the truth, but the negation of your description will also have valid interpretations.

Symmetrically, spiritually minded people reflexively reject any scientific approach to morality. Any logically rigorous framework for describing, analyzing, and drawing scientific meaning out of the human religious experience is necessarily reductive. Science’s approach is necessarily reductive and its analytical approach drives its attention naturally down toward the materialistically mundane. While a spiritual experience is necessarily holistic and transcendent. Synthesis is the process of uniting/linking/religare/ligamenting distinct simpler subjects into a common higher subject. Synthesis simplifies things, but makes them deeper, and higher. Analysis complicates things, but makes them shallower, and lower. In religion, meaning comes from above. In science meaning comes from below. In religion we seek the highest order, yearning to discern the pattern of God’s creation. In science we study the constitutive elements at the lowest relevant level, and we use our minds to invent patterns to explain them.

Scientific analysis requires reductive definitions of intellectual building blocks in a mundane area, such as quarks (physics) or molecules (chemistry) or living cells (biology) or consumers’ demands (micro-economics) or personal histories (psychology), or societies’ histories (history), or galaxy superclusters (cosmology). Then we make hypotheses with our definitions, which are speculative pronouncements of basic meaning.

A hypothesis is a proposition built from our definitions. A proposition is a logical statement with a verifiable true or false claim. A hypothesis is a more complicated claim about reality than the definitions. Hypotheses are how science builds up meaning. Then we endlessly test such hypotheses, and even the definitions, by observing the behavior of our building blocks. We iteratively refine and improve the definitions, while collecting more complicated hypotheses and recording the evidence for their validity, true or false. Since the definitions are always potentially in flux, the collection of hypotheses that forms a science is always provisional. Further, the verifiability of the hypotheses is subject to human observational error, so again, every hypothesis is always provisional. Every definition and every hypothesis always has a theoretical probability attached to its validity. However, when the enterprise of building and testing a particular science becomes stable, i.e., when some collection of definitions and hypotheses is not being regularly disproven for a long period of time, science changes the name of the hypotheses to theories, or better, laws.

The goal of the DGF project is to find the right algorithmic rules for governing an open, globe-spanning economic organization. This ambition falls right on the territorial fight between religion and science. The Folk Theories of Game Theory demonstrate the need for transcendent values in guiding such organizations. The failure of sociology and psychology to achieve some stable body of conclusions about the human experience as a group or individually makes science reflexively suspicious of any attempt to logically and rigorously apprehend such complex issues as defining good behavior.

Further, the historical failures of every single religious and secular organization that humans have ever participated in, makes scientists reflexively suspicious of any attempt to define good or evil. For instance Christians claim to follow the example of a God who came to earth in human form to show people how to live, by allowing Himself to be tortured to death, to give his enemies eternal life. Yet people who profess to follow His example have murdered millions in His name.

The very attempt to objectively analyze morality or ethics is denigrated. We assume anyone who does make the attempt is very likely a charlatan who uses pseudo-scientific engineering buzzwords to manipulate the network. This is a natural assumption, because that would certainly be easier than actually solving this insolvable problem.

Nevertheless, here we are. We need to find perfectly rigorous rules, rules that are so formally explicit that they are expressible in machine code, which promote transcendent unifying values for organizing people across cultures in their competitive pursuit of profit. We need to do this in a system which has no leader. We need to maintain the decentralized structure and empower as many people as possible. We need to promote creativity and freedom for its participants. To attract the maximum number of people, and to preserve these members’ freedom and personal rights in this open-source system, we need to strive to protect our members’ anonymity. This leaves the system open to attacks from anyone on the planet who wish to exploit the system or destroy it.

So we also need to build a system which promotes communal harmony (which is inverse to protecting individual rights and freedoms). We need to build a functional democracy for governing more people in more aspects of their lives (while inversely empowering them and promoting their autonomy) in the decentralized network. As we watch our democracies and social institutions crumble, this is a hard sell. People are losing faith in democracy, in media, in academia.

Throughout history, the most successful groups, the most stable groups that last the longest, are groups with the best values. The values that best help a group survive are transcendent values, ones that cannot be formalized. This is because formalized values are more limited. Since they can be specified rigorously, they become something that can be competed for, which undermines group cohesion. Values that transcend the current historical human desires are superior. Values that are beyond mere natural needs and desires and impulses have the possibility of better keeping groups coherent and powerful for longer.

It turns out that the deepest insight about building decentralized networks is that the network’s values are the key to keeping any group together. Experience with the Folk Theories of game theory illustrate that those values can’t be formally written down or else adversaries will take advantage of them. So the decentralized network needs to have vague values. Values everyone recognizes and don’t argue about, semantically. Groups that have lasted the longest have been devoted to spirit of the law values instead of letter of the law rules. Transcendental values. Craig Calcaterra (talk) 16:43, 3 June 2023 (CDT)

Transcendent vs. transcendental

I changed the terminology from transcendental to transcendent out of respect for Kant's terminology. Craig Calcaterra (talk) 19:43, 3 July 2023 (CDT)

Vs. Wittgenstein's rule-following paradox

The Transcendent Values Thesis can be compared with Wittgenstein's rule-following paradox given in Philosophical Investigations §201a: "This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because any course of action can be made out to accord with the rule". The basic idea is that in the process of defining any rule there are necessarily some ultimately undefined primitive notions (see #page footnote) that leave room for interpretation, allowing one to follow the rules in multiple ways. In fact Wittgenstein assertion is maximal: this looseness in interpreting the primitive notions allows room to follow the rules in any possible way.

This rule-following paradox is not subsidiary to the Transcendent Values Thesis, nor does it imply the Thesis. Nevertheless they augment each other.

The Transcendent Values Thesis assumes an environment where there is a universally accepted interpretation of rules, yet we still claim the intent of the game designer cannot be completely encapsulated by any choice of rules. Thus the claim of the thesis is twofold: 1. human desire and intent is more complicated than any formal language is capable of containing, 2. there are sufficient available strategies to subvert the intent of the designer.

The first claim means that human desire transcends formal description.

Kripke's skeptical solution to the rule-following paradox is that there are social expectations that determine what following a rule means. In this sense, Wittgenstein is wrong to claim "any course of action can be made out to accord with the rule". This is also motivation for DGF's approach to creating the Web3 enviroment: we wish to provide the tools which will enable humanity to build communities where Web3 transactions can flourish in accord with their values. Craig Calcaterra (talk) 13:48, 12 July 2023 (CDT)