Current Epistemic Status
What Even is this Page
My brain can be decently approximated as idea soup. Various half-formed ideas float around, synthesizing with each other to add nodes to thoughtspace (I haven't written that essay yet, hopefully I will at some point), stimulated by life and/or discussion. But the collection of ideas in the back of my mind at any given time tends to orient itself around certain topics. When these are well formed enough, or I feel a particular need, I write essays. But this is high friction, and by the end, often the idea is somewhat solidified. My hope in creating this page is that I can entice people to debate with me as the ideas are forming, rather than solely afterwards. So check back every once in a while and see if your interest is piqued!
The Center of Mass of my Soup
Right now I'm thinking about language. It's known that, generally speaking, language acts as a framework, a lens into life. And, like anything of the sort, it thus limits what one can percieve. Or, put simply, given the world is in some sense more internal than external, the process of framing perceptions into language imposes the cultural beliefs that birthed said language into your reality. It sort of acts as a base set of axioms. This is pretty commonly accepted, and is probably for the most part true. But it's more supplementary context than the main point of what I'm about to say.
Self perception and the past are often fundamentally incongruent. That is, the traits I believe myself to possess are often not seen in my actions historically.1 As we move through life, we are often faced with choices which bring the past and the perceived into conflict. In these moments, we often act as we believe we would in an external sense, and in doing so, become the person we think we are.2 This is called growth. I haven't said anything monumental here — this is kind of just a generalization of "fake it until you make it." You become who you think you are. This births some interesting notions. This is the idea underlying affirmations, first of all. To be honest, I don't really believe in them, but the concept is very real — saying things shapes who we think we are. Not simple things (which is why I don't buy into affirmations). But for complex ideas, especially ones that are weakly held, trivial things like giving a simple explanation to avoid a much longer, much more nuanced one, can act as epistemic poison. I lie a lot. Not to be harmful, but because I get asked a lot of questions with very complicated answers, and the people asking aren't looking for the nuance, so what I tell them isn't quite true. But in simplifying, we replace ideas with false substitutes in our RAM. We make bad pointers. And often it's even worse — when fleshing out an explanation of an idea previously only thought of broadly, skipping precision for simplicity runs the risk of building false connections — of creating faulty nodes — in thoughtspace (again, essay coming soon). This sounds like a minor issue, but for someone like me doing nonstandard things, I often answer people asking various "why"s about my life choices. These small lies build up, and before I know it, I find myself off course — the philosophical justifications for my actions are muddied, and as a result, the person I think I am changes. Who I become thus changes, and all of a sudden it's very easy to find oneself lost, void of truth or purpose.
Supplementing this, of course, is the restriction of language. Not only do the beliefs embedded in language influence what John Doe thinks, thus orienting him towards the epistemic bedrock of his society by default, they also act as a normalizing force — those with nonstandard views have a constant force exerted on them towards normalcy by the terms through which they must express themselves, and the simplifications they find themselves linguistically dragged into.
Did I just say "when embedded in a culture, the culture embeds itself in you?" Yeah, basically. The concept itself isn't super fancy. But I'd say my point is a bit more general, by nature of the fact that the conclusion is mostly a facet of reality, whereas what I set out to do here is establish a map. Also note that the conclusion isn't super important. There are really three different ideas at play here — linguistic worldviews, the nature of growth, and epistemic poison — all of which are related to language. It's less that these ideas synthesize in a way that matters, and more that I've been seeing language in life recently, and these are the core ideas that seem to come up over and over again, each time in synthesis with some new smaller facet of reality. So think about the ideas, not the conclusions. And if any of them interest you, or bring to mind some alternative perspective of yours, reach out — these ideas are new to me, highly malleable, and as of yet deeply incomplete. I'd love for them to be challenged!