Democrats and Aristocrats Quantify Differently

Democrats and Aristocrats Quantify Differently

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The metametaphysical sets called romantic clusters facilitate a rationally justified hypothesis about blocks.

There are four clusters per ontology.

*** Feeling a sudden "You won't understand this -- how much am I required to explain in order to make you understand this -- I have no way to figure that out because the best of you never tell me when they lose track... but maybe I wouldn't want to know." ***

There are two ontologies. One of them includes Sensing and Feeling, the other includes Thinking and Intuition.

There are four clusters per ontology. These clusters divide the Information Elements into four "slices". The purpose of slicing the IEs is to facilitate quantification of moral value.

Slicing the IEs facilitates quantification of moral value because it is a way to standardise subsets of the Information Elements according to shared properties.

The price of slicing the Information Elements is that the shared properties are metametaphysical, which means it's difficult to explain what they mean.

The shared metametaphysical properties are called romantic clusters and they include concepts pertaining to awareness, free will, harmony and such concepts that, on one hand, are considered appallingly vague, but on the other hand, are considered nevertheless important, convincing or at least rhetorically valuable. In fact, there have even been attempts to use these concepts for declaring human rights or other such man-made conventions. The excessive confidence that permeats these attempts is similar to that part of Hilbert's program in which they tried to axiomatise physics.

Note that, even though people concluded that axiomatising physics is impossible, I wouldn't be so sure of that. It surely is impossible if the axioms pertain only to physical objects, but if the axioms were to pertain also to the conduct of physicists I see no particular difficulty in axiomatising physics and predict that the axiomatisation will eventually succeed. Even though said axiomatisation attempt is currently regarded as a both failed and terminated process.

In a similar vein, Gödel's incompleteness theorems do not prove arithmetic in general to be "incomplete" in any sense of "incompleteness" that anyone except a logician or a mathematician would understand. They merely prove that arithmetic in general includes useless objects. These objects haven't even been found but they're known to be numbers. But if they're numbers, they can't really be known to be useless.

If they're numbers, they're objects instead of relations. Objects in general are known to be useful. If Gödel has proved that there are useless objects in some forms of arithmetic, it's still possible to devise several different forms of arithmetic in an attempt to find different useless objects in each. Comparative analysis of these objects could yield useful results even though the objects themselves are useless within their own theory.

Furthermore, even though we now know there are useless objects, what about relations? Are there useless relations in arithmetic?

Apparently, most relations of arithmetical objects are useless. The only useful relations are those that mathematicians and logicians bother to write down. But nobody thinks mathematics in general is useless because some relations between arithmetical objects are useless. Furthermore, any relation can be interpreted as a variable and vice-versa in meta-analysis.

It makes absolutely no sense to regard Gödel's incompleteness proofs "devastating" unless you can't play ball with him.

Now that this issue is out of the way, what about romantic clusters?

Just play ball. Don't play grenade and don't play cluster bomb. Thx.

I'm not really telling you anything, just bragging about what I don't need to do.

But I need to look at this: https://i.imgur.com/K8hSx2L.png

The romantic clusters of the "abstract sphere", which includes Intuition and Thinking, are labeled:

Unity
Awareness
Significance
Harmony

The clusters of the "tangible sphere" are labeled:

Deliberation
Higher needs
Lower needs
Sense-data

Recent developments in interpreting Pirsig's LILA serve as a reason to revise the names of the tangible clusters. The recent development that causes this need is that of declaring both of the bottom objective levels to be biological in the sense Pirsig would've meant. The inorganic level is, in fact, a part of the intellectual level. This should be obvious because atoms and molecules cannot be seen or touched. If they have anything to do with the tangbile world then that must be something utilitarian.

Nobody would need to think about atoms or molecules unless they had the deliberate intention of accomplishing something by this activity. Of course it's also possible to make poems about atoms but in this case the actual properties of atoms are usually secondary whereas the essential meaning is, from the viewpoint of the scientist, metaphorical. This metaphorical reality may of course be the poet's preferred reality. In optimal circumstances, both realities appear real, but for the scientist the metaphorical reality is of instrumental value in the result of his inquiry whereas rational reality is of intrinsic value in the result.

I differentiated the lower biological level from the higher biological level by using an example of a crying baby and a mother who wakes up to soothe him. From the viewpoint of sense-data the mother's preferred option would be to put on ear plugs and keep sleeping, but of course she won't do this.

If her preference to care for the baby is explained in terms of atoms or molecules then it's impossible to use that explanation to relate information to someone who doesn't know science. But indigenous peoples hate the white man for being unable to relate information in a convenient manner that's easy to understand, and the white man even hates himself for this. A metaphysics that perpetuates this problem is therefore no grand answer.

The mother who wakes up in order to calm her baby down remains on the biological level. But this is still a higher biological level than the one in which she'd prefer to go back to sleep. However, all this includes no reason to change the names of the clusters.

The only reason to rename the clusters that I can think of is that these names are inconvenient in formal expression. I'd like to formalise these metametaphysical concepts by referring to them by their initial letter, but I can't do that because there are two instances of H and S. However, for some reason, I'd still like to refer to these concepts with one-letter codes. I think I feel this way because I perceive this namespace to be empty. Nobody except me has ever really been here, where I am now while writing this. Nothing has ever been found from this domain until now. So, if it's so hard to find anything from this domain, why wouldn't we at least refer to the findings in the most convenient possible way?

Naming these clusters, however, is tricky because there's no known way to order them. The reference to "higher needs" and "lower needs" in the tangible clusters is just a reference to Maslow's hierarchy of needs which happens to describe these metametaphysical concepts. But the fact that Maslow's hierarchy is ordered this way doesn't mean it couldn't as well be ordered the opposite way. So, as far as I can tell, these notions of "high" and "low" are relative to Maslow's theory, not absolute.

Even though I want to use one-letter codes I have a hard time coming up with anything that makes sense, so maybe I should just try something.

Unity 		 -> Monolithic
Awareness 	 -> Aware
Significance -> Symbolic
Harmony 	 -> Polylithic
Deliberation -> Deliberate
Higher needs -> Virtue
Lower needs  -> Compassion
Sense-data 	 -> Factual

Some people will have a problem with some of these names being adjectives and others being nouns. Knowing the basics of the grammar of written Chinese, I don't understand the cause of this problem. If you have a problem with this you can just study a little Chinese and the problem will go away.

I can make one-letter codes based on these initial letters. But maybe the definitions could be formalised in a way that explicates more information. In this case it could be better to use two-letter codes as long as these won't be confused with socionics Information Elements.

Furthermore, it would be a good result to express these metametaphysical concepts in terms of Information Elements if that's possible. People in general don't want even metaphysical concepts and have no idea what's the difference between a metaphysical and metametaphysical concept, so it's obviously a problem if they need to understand something like that. However, this is a complicated issue because some people really like talking about these concepts even though they haven't been defined. Further complications arise from the fact that these people actually want to talk about these concepts while refusing definitions for them or behaving as if these concepts are like fly traps and definitions are like flies. In this case they encourage multiple definitions while nevertheless discouraging quantification of their value. So they purposefully retain vague meanings, apparently until some practical application makes it ridiculous to cling to such vagueness, but they seem mysteriously sure about no such application ever coming their way. They can afford to do that as long as they're the only powerful people who can see that coming. In this case, even if they see it's coming they can cling to their current social standing until it has indeed come.

In order to ignore this weird behaviour I'll explicate romantic clusters as if they were derived from the Information Elements. They weren't but they could've been. The process is just a little more counter-intuitive for me if it goes that way. In any case, no metametaphysics is necessary for defining these concepts so that:

Mo := N-T+
Aw := n-t+
Sy := t-n+
Po := T-N+
De := F-S+
Vi := f-s+
Co := s-f+
Fa := S-F+

These names mean that, for example, Factual quality is "mild" in the context of Sensing but "intense" in the context of Feeling. We may explain this so that Sensing is isomorphic to the "I'm Not OK, You're OK" Life Position, so whatever is pointed out as a fact in the context of Sensing is, in effect, pointed out as a problem. In the context of Feeling, however, the most obvious facts that are relevant to point out pertain to feeling good about something. The default state of affairs is that people like to share good vibes.

We may simplify the previous notation so that:

Mo := NT
Aw := nt
Sy := tn
Po := TN
De := FS
Vi := fs
Co := sf
Fa := SF

Now the deprecated IE always precedes the preferred IE so that capital letters indicate the greater quantitative value difference as opposed to lower-case letters, which indicate a smaller value difference.

People already use shorthands like NT and SF to refer to groups of character types. The fact that these shorthands overlap with this notation doesn't seem to cause problems. Despite being meant for an entirely different purpose, the referents do not exactly contradict each other. So this notational ambiguity only obscures the context of inquiry but not the meaning. However, it has so far always been trivial to figure out the proper context anyway from other parts of the inquiry.

It's relevant to notice that the romantic clusters do not include clusters named ST, ts, NF or such, even though these shorthands could also be used to refer to some groups of character types. This difference is essential for understanding why it's a different goal to refer to charater types than to refer to romantic clusters. If we were to explain this difference in terms of character types we could say that some types are romantic. That is, in order to understand how the Egos of some types quantify moral value, it is relevant to understand that they are romantic types. The other option would be to be a classical type.

To use Model A terminology, personality types with "ST" or "NF" in their code are classical whereas types with "NT" or "SF" are romantic. These groups of types are already differentiated so that the former are called "aristocratic" whereas the latter are "democratic". This is a good convention but in order to understand Pirsig's metaphysics it could be more useful to call aristocratic types classical and democratic types romantic.

In 1974 Pirsig published a best-selling philosophical novel whose name is abbreviated ZAMM. He introduces the notions of "romantic" and "classical" in this work and clearly designates them as metametaphysical -- but without using the word "metametaphysical". This can be considered an attempt to formalise the difference between the reference and the referent, or the intension and the extension. Indeed the attempt is based on such a vague method that it can be considered successful within its own context. But for some this success is such a minor accomplishment that they don't consider it real. However, Pirsig's vague methodology doesn't facilitate a success any greater than that which he already attained.

Socionics provides reason to argue that the difference between an intension and an extension is a personal one. It depends of the sociotype of whoever tries to tell that difference.

People experience events as coincidences of two Information Elements. Some restrictions apply to which two Information Elements may coincide as an event. The elements must neighbour each other in the socionics 3-space. But in order to assemble the socionics 3-space in a way that facilitates this approach, the introversion and extroversion of Sensing and Intuition must be reversed from what they are in Model A.

Consequently, the negative Z axis of the 3-space includes the following elements:

[[Ni,Ti],
 [Fi,Si]]

Whereas the positive Z axis includes:

[[Ne,Te],
 [Fe,Se]]

These forms may be thought of as matrices. They're written to resemble JavaScript arrays. The introversion and extroversion of Sensing and Intuition has been flipped. I just got done explaining about this elsewhere so I don't want to dive into the same topic again, for now. Let's just take that for granted.

It's really nice they bothered to write that more research on the aristocratic and democratic types is needed[1] because this method facilitates that. The difference between them is that their preferred method of quantifying moral value is different. Aristocratic or classical types prefer classical quantification whereas democratic or romantic types prefer romantic quantification.

In classical quantification there's a one-to-one direct correspondence between the morality of the reference and the morality of the referent. That is to say, classically quantifying people feel like grand things should look great whereas unimportant things should look small.

There's that one book called "The Magic Christian" by Terry Southern. The story is basically about a millionaire misusing money in order to prove money isn't a reliable indicator of value. The acedote could be generalised to mean that capital in general isn't a reliable indicator of moral value.

Some guy actually told me moral value is subjective. He seemed kind of baffled about the idea that this isn't enough. Well, it sure isn't enough because if I did what I feel like, and if I could take lots of money from rich people without consequences, I would. And so would many others. People actually need to be prevented from doing that because people in general do not assume that someone must've deserved a lot of money simply because they happen to have a lot of money. Only aristocratic or classical types would make such an assumption by default, and that's because they quantify moral value in a straightforward manner.

In classical quantification the value of the reference is expected to correlate with the value of the referent. In romantic quantification an inverse correlation between the reference and the referent is expected. Extremes of romantic quantification appear when some single word or act or whatever, simply is taboo so that people can actually start beating someone up right on spot if that poor person break that taboo, even though he only has to do one small thing wrong in order to cause that. They will feel as entitled in delivering that punishment as the classical quantifiers feel entitled to retain capital simply because they've once acquired it.

In terms of socionics quadra, alphas are more likely not to even play the same game with betas, so they don't deliver punishments to them. They just make fun of them. But they do compete with deltas and vice versa. The lively ingeniousness of alphas is at odds with the dryness of the deltas.

In a similar vein, gammas do not compete with deltas because they have different goals. But they'd find rich betas not to be serious about using money wisely. And maybe alphas don't effect the decisions of the betas whereas the deltas and the betas don't even understand each other. So should someone make a beta change his mind, the first one to have nothing better to do than that would probably be gamma.

In "The Magic Christian" a billionaire plays tricks with money, such as by paying an officer a huge sum of money to make him eat a parking ticket he just issued.

It's pretty obvious that one can buy food with money. The value of survival isn't essentially just subjective. You'll never get anywhere telling people it doesn't matter whether they live or die, that's up to them to choose. Many people believe that but to preach that is another thing.

If that's what you preach, either you're going to have to die yourself pretty soon -- because who wouldn't use your teachings against you? -- or then you can't practice what you preach. The only way to get out of that situation is to adopt a non-binary Life Position in which one doesn't force people to make up their mind about him. This leaves him in a position in which his demands aren't taken seriously but he can remain less affected by all kinds of other power issues, too. Indeed he cannot demand anything because then people get to believe he doesn't need anything. But what if people like him for nothing else than that impression? Then he's got to have something else to offer, too. Something else than likability.

I don't think the Merry and Aristocratic disposition predisposes betas towards risking themselves for other people. The more likely outcome is that they go a bit over the top themselves. That's a possible bad outcome of quantifying straightforwardly enough to get there in the first place. But it's not an excuse to declare moral value subjective. It's okay if that's a far as you got, but if you end up defending yourself for not getting any further than that, you are, in effect, declaring your definition. Or then you arrived because you just wanted to be you. Everyone else didn't arrive because of that.

The problem with paying an officer to eat a parking ticket is that it's just a joke, and as a joke it gets old really quickly.

When a joke gets old it no longer has subjective value. But the objective value of the joke stays the same. It remains objectively true that if you're starving because you can't afford food, you need money regardless of whether it's a funny joke to eat a parking ticket.

But you could feel offended if you were required to pretend to be having fun while eating the parking ticket if you really need the money. Then the billionaire who's going to pay you would treat you condescendingly. Some people would rather starve than be treated condescendingly. But if someone knows he'd rather starve than lose his dignity what has he got to lose if he'd just get a chance to rob the billionaire? If he can't pity the billionaire after being the butt of such a prank?

This definition of romantic and classical isn't exactly compatible with what Pirsig wrote in ZAMM. In ZAMM romantic quality is that which is directly perceived whereas classical quality is found in some underlying meaning. In other words, when Pirsig writes in ZAMM statements of the form "X is/has romantic quality" he actually means the moral value of X is quantified classically. And when he writes "X is/has classical quality" he means X's morality to be quantified romantically.

I'm not sure what to do about this problem. It ensues from the fact that the metaphysical sets of subjective and objective quality are defined as the subsets of classical quality. Therefore, the only domain that's free for containing their intersection is that of romantic quality. But if we actually do that and place the definition in the only domain to which it clearly belongs, the result is a metaphysics of romantic quality. Full stop. There are several issues now.

In ZAMM Pirsig implicitly presumed or expected a metaphysics of romantic quality to be impossible. But if that would really be impossible then romantic quality couldn't be differentiated from the concept of Dynamic Quality Pirsig introduces in LILA.

In ZAMM Pirsig describes romantic quality as something like "the pre-intellectual cutting edge of experience". But if there's no theory about that edge than apparently that edge just hadn't cut deep enough. However, should it cut deep enough then it would no longer remain quite so pre-intellectual. In any case it can always be argued that Pirsig didn't present a theory of romantic quality simply because he couldn't come up with any. This pretty much ends the debate over that issue as far as I can tell.

So a metaphysics of romantic quality is possible although people need to be told that or else Pirsig will encourage them to believe it isn't. Furthermore, this metaphysics facilitates expression of a qualitative difference in how democratic and aristocratic types quantify moral value. Romantic types turn out to quantify classically in the sense that they need classes to explain how they quantify. But these classes are classes of romantic quality, and this makes it confusing, at least at face value, to state that romantic types quantify classically.

All classes are classical but classes of romantic quality are also romantic.

Classical types, on the other hand, quantify romantically in the sense that they're more likely to treat surface appeal as a reliable indicator of quality. But this quantification method is classical in the sense of associating quantities, which are classical, into surface appeal, which is romantic.

Hence, it's clearly possible to argue over this issue the either way. If an argument about this is started for its own sake I can't currently predict the result of the argument. I can't rule out the possibility that no actual result would be attained in such a debate and that the debate, instead, would merely keep changing state indefinitely until people get bored. I don't look forwards to that kind of debate.

The most obvious, or should I say least obscure, relevant thing to note now is that Pirsig has decently described romantic quality as surface appeal and classical quality as something that isn't obvious. There's no need to contradict his descriptions about this.

Furthermore, since Socionics offers the terms "aristocratic" and "democratic" which can be used instead of "romantic" and "classical", why wouldn't they be used here if the latter option causes ambiguity?

Well, statistics provides us an even simpler alternative. We may call "aristocratic" quantification simply "correlation" and "democratic" quantification "anticorrelation". The value quantification method of a block can be determined by checking whether the block is oriented horizontally or vertically in the Socionics 3-space. Horizontally aligned blocks quantify by anticorrelating and vertical blocks quantify by correlating.

All this facilitates an increase in the precision of Socionics that's so great currently existing descriptions don't even predict it. In order words, you don't know what you're looking for based on what you currently know. I need to give you a clue in order for you to know that.

Let us recap the romantic clusters.

NT: Monolithic
nt: Aware
tn: Symbolic
TN: Polylithic
FS: Deliberate
fs: Virtue
sf: Compassion
SF: Factual

We may generalise that each cluster refers to an anticorrelating value quantification pattern. All such patterns refer to a certain function being called with specific parametres. The clusters differ from each other in terms of which parametres they include. This gives us a reason to treat these forms as sets of parametres only. In this case we implicitly remember the members of each set to be references to a function but explicate only the references and not the function.

NT, TN, FS and SF are equal sets whose members are 1 and 4. The smaller number is associated to the preceding Information Element and the greater number to the succeeding Information Element. The members of the sets whose names are in lower-case letters are 2 and 3. These numbers are absolute values.

We may differentiate FS and SF from NT and TN by assigning negative numbers to the former and positive numbers to the latter. However, the benefit obtained this way isn't a practical one. It merely seems likely to facilitate another unspecific benefit that could be practical but isn't yet understood.

I've began counting from 1 instead of 0 because this quantification method is founded on a metaphysics of quanta. Or quantum metaphysics. Indeed it makes sense to call my work quantum metaphysics, but I don't know if that name's already taken. If it has, probably for a less worthy purpose. But I only mention that because I might need to. In any case the black dots in the Venn diagram[0] depict quanta. That is, the only name I could come up with that black dot is "quantum".

If I were to attempt to explain this in layman's terms I'd tell that in anticorrelative quantification a small impulse in the accepting function of a block matches a large impulse in the producing function of that block. In correlative quantification, on the other hand, appearances would be true: a small impulse in the accepting function matches a small impulse in the producing function whereas a large impulse would match a large impulse.

I guess the world looks like a simpler place for people who mostly quantify correlatively. There's nothing wrong about that but it's easier to explain a difference between these kind of people for those who quantify anticorrelatively. Funnily enough, it seems like this method could be used to argue that people, who quantify correlatively, owe something to people who quantify anticorrelatively, but in order to understand the nature of the debt correlatively quantifiying people should learn to quantify anticorrelatively. But they can do that by activating their Metatype. Instructions provided elsewhere. And they're currently outdated because the Information Elements have been recently renamed. That's not to spite you, it's just a friendly word of warning. Or should I say, mention of a caution.

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References:

[0] https://i.imgur.com/K8hSx2L.png
[1] http://www.sociotype.com/socionics/dichotomies/r2t3