So Many Stupid Boring Ideas!

It's as if people were deliberately educated en masse to fail to be able to grasp the most basic premiss of actual human knowledge, which is how is it that we can ever actually know anything as individuals. As we learn to speak and understand each other, something each of does from a very young age, we solve this problem instinctively, but by the time we reach the level of post-graduate studies we seem to have been convinced otherwise.

I have a great example of a post-doctorate researcher in "quantum foundations" and "quantum information processing" whose response to the idea that actual human knowledge is the invariant content of the different statements we can translate from one language to another (see Popper's 1978 Tanner lecture Three Worlds) was "but where is it?" What is it that he wanted to know the location of? The actual human knowledge, of course! Why would one expect knowledge to have a physical location? Is this some demand that physical notions of realism impose upon us? Quite possibly, but if so then physical notions of realism are wrong. And that is I think one of the problems: in order to understand what actual human knowledge is one would have to abandon a large part of what people think of as actual human knowledge, including most of modern physics since some point before Newton. "But of course that's absurd and shows that what you call actual human knowledge is complete nonsense!" No, it just means there are a lot of assholes talking crap and not just on the Internet but at Cambridge, Oxford and The Perimeter Institute too!

It is not just in physics that this imbecilic attitude to knowledge persists but in mathematics and logic too.  Formal logic is the invariant content of the translations we can make between all the different formal proofs we can construct in particular symbolic representations, but in the "solution" to the "crisis on foundations" of the late 19th Century formal logic was replaced by symbolic logic which took the formal proofs to be some particular string in some particular symbolic representation which became referred to as "realization" and then the idea that the actual human knowledge was merely represented by that string of symbols was forgotten. See What is Formal Logic? and John Searle - Syntax is Observer-Relative.

The consequences of this kind of thinking are disastrous. They are that people think they can lie just by "controlling the narrative," because after all, that is all that physicists needed to do, so why can't the US State Department do the same? So the whole public sphere dissolved into a slurry of absolute fucking nonsense peddled by idiots.

See Mikhail Gromov on Mathematical Description of Biological Structures. Why did nobody ever tell me about these lectures? Because they were buried in a slurry of nonsense peddled by assholes.

See from 59:44 in the first lecture.