> I can try to elaborate on these if there's interest
As someone who asked "why?" all the time as a kid, I'd love to read your elaboration.
As someone who asked "why?" all the time as a kid, I'd love to read your elaboration.
This is where you need an organizing concept. I call this the whole. The whole is the topic plus the inverse of the topic. So if you're using the whole of all nations, you might say that the inverse of the United States is all the other countries of the world that aren't the US.
Next step is the reverse context. The United States is a country, so the reverse would be everything that is not a country. As you can imagine that's a very big space.
We now reach the converse. The converse is the part of the reverse that is the counterpart of the topic. To find the converse is the whole point of doing this kind of logic, and it requires some location.
The part of the reverse that isn't the converse is called the obverse. So to understand what the converse of the United States is, find the United States-shaped hole in the the rest of the universe that isn't the United States. A good approach is to take the inverse of the United States and use it to "cast a shadow" on the reverse. This highlights the converse.
Note that I used the word "universe" just now. It turns out that there's just no good word for the combination of the whole of a topic and it's reverse. Any word you use is going to constitute some kind of limitation on what it is. If you're spiritually-minded, though, it maps perfectly onto concepts like God, or the Source. In fact, I developed this whole scheme in order to better understand spiritual topics like what does it mean to be non-physical.
Locating a thing's converse isn't easy and it requires delving into a lot of things that might seemingly have no relation to the topic, but will if you keep applying context logic to them. I'm going to just jump through the intermediary contexts to arrive at what the converse of the United States is. Not that it wouldn't be interesting but it just takes a lot of work to articulate. I told you this was hard to write about.
In the beginning we assigned the inverse of the US to the other states of the nation, but that's not really the case. The real inverse is the people. The inverse of America is Americans. People have agency. Agency means you can change yourself to become something you're not. But you're not just changing randomly, you're directing it. The United States, being a collection of people, has agency of its own. Agency charts a path through the reverse, that path is the converse.
It all seems a bit boring, but this sort of analysis is extremely useful for making sense of spirituality. What does it mean for something to be real? What are verses of reality? I can sit here and tell you what it is, but it's better to do the analysis yourself and have insights yourself. It's essentially a way to explore the world of ideas in a rigorous fashion.
For example you use the U.S. and, sure, it can be useful to think of every country that isn't the U.S. So if someone says "C++" it can be useful to think of every computer language that isn't C++.
But the rest of your "-verses" didn't give me any reason to think of them in the future.
Can you give a few more real-world examples and the insight you gained? Why is this useful?
You can work out all manner of insights about a film this way. Works well with comic fandoms, legal concepts, anywhere where there's significant amounts of hidden context to uncover, you can use context logic to quickly sketch out an outline of how it all hangs together, and fit all the information you read into fleshing out that model.
I noticed the human mind doesn't tend to be able to work consciously with inverse / obverse. For example, humor tends to leave the scene when you start analyzing a joke. I call these "core" contexts. A lot of insights can be mined out of what you're not seeing. If the inverse is hard to find, maybe it's like that for a reason.
Look, as far as I can tell these terms are your own. If you could, would you please give more, illustrative, examples - I know it's hard to do. Like, with your film example.
I'm not looking for a list of domains like "comic fandoms, legal concepts, anywhere where there's significant amounts of hidden context to uncover". This is just a list of all sorts of things.
I would request for you to please walk through exact explicit examples of each of your "-verses". Make an example up and show me the insight. Be super explicit with a specific real example, if you can.
I am on board, due to the example you just gave with "reverse" and films -- meaning, "everything else the filmmaker could have put there." So I'm on board and you have my interest and attention.
Meticulously walk through the other "-verses", while staying with real, specific examples. Try to work hard to make a genuine example that grants insight. I'm sorry to make this request (I'm on board with everything you've written), but I find your abstract definitions too hard to follow. Instead of a single example (like the United States), if you would give specific examples that really give insight (as you did with film above) it would be helpful. Thank you.
I'll tell you what. I've been thinking of doing a context-logic wiki, but just haven't found the right time to get started on it. I think a good entry point would be an email thread. Why don't you shoot me an email and I'll try to give you what you want. You can find my email in my profile.
That goes for anyone else following that wants more of this.
This might be of interest: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/concepts.html
identification taxonomy discovery location cultivation collection curation meditation organization workflow analytics design management systems mapping maintenance encapsulation problem-solving incident-clearing derisking
These are all approaches for working with discrete ideas. The thing about context logic is that it's exceedingly and annoyingly heavy. Once you get the hang of it the mind naturally just wants to push the logic to the periphery and go back to doing things the way it used to. If I'm looking to work with an idea, I might look at that list of verbs and ask myself, "what does this idea need?"
There's a converse here of concepts:
philosophy research intelligence marketing sales diplomacy finance development engineering operations health service legal political public-relations celebrity monetary economics business branding creative
At first I was just writing these concepts down, collecting, then suddenly I realized I needed cultivation. So I started just moving them around. Eventually I realized that the former were individual approaches for dealing with ideas and context, while the latter were collective approaches.
Couldn't it just as well be fluffy cats, Saharan sand or an Aztec deity?
In fact I came to the realization last night after I worked on that comment, that searching for a thing's converse only really makes sense when the thing has some form of agency. You could perhaps consider the inverse to be "ideas" as America is an idea. You might consider all the different ideas that constitute America, such as individual freedom, meritocracy over hierarchy.
Where you get when you go down this road enough times with enough topics, as I did, is that the alternative considerations all belong in the topic's inverse. You get a deep sense for the dividing lines between contexts. Contextual spaces are vast. Perhaps you can find some old apocrypha tying America to an Aztec deity, say Jefferson wrote a reference to one in some legal opinion or whatnot.
That would be enough to put Aztec deities into America's inverse. But it wouldn't be very relevant. As I kept working with this, I realized that you need a sense of importance. You're driving towards an insight, and every insight is additive. What you're looking for is classes of things. The history of America, the culture of America, everything you can think about that America is, goes in the inverse.
All that combined make up the whole.
let the topic = x
let the whole (the organising concept) = T
x is related to T thus, x:T, : changes depending on the organising relation
inverse topic is T-x
so T = x + T-x is what you have stated.
George Boole, Lincoln, 1847, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, being an Essay towards a Calculus of Deductive Reasoning http://www.gutenberg.org/files/36884/36884-pdf.pdf See the Table on page 25
the reverse appears to me to be T′, as you say, that's a very big space
it's unclear to me what you intend by the converse. you say that it is located within T′, let's call it x′ (pronounced x prime).
following on from that the obverse appears to be T′-x′.
the whole of the topic (T) and its reverse (T′) could be 1 using this notation, and this notation is fairly standard.
Boole called the conceptual space we're trying to pin down the “domain of discourse”, this is fairly standard terminology.
> Note that I used the word "universe" just now. It turns out that there's just no good word for the combination of the whole of a topic and it's reverse.
In that case I don't think you should use the word universe for that designation. Maybe just use domain of discourse? However, be aware that there is a precedent for the use of the word universe: https://ncatlab.org/homotopytypetheory/show/universe
> kind of logic
To my mind what you are doing is not logic per se but analysis. Specifically a narrow kind of conceptual analysis https://philpapers.org/browse/conceptual-analysis Though if pressed I would not quibble with you calling what you are doing a kind of logic. Again, there is a precedent for this.
I'm kind of intrigued as to what you're getting with the notion of a converse. Maybe give a concrete example? From there it should be obvious what is meant by the obverse.
Previous times I've tried to articulate these concepts to an audience I've gotten no bites. What I'd really like one day is to sit down with someone who does work in theoretical philosophy and articulate my views over the course of a few weeks / months. I see that as about as likely as Donald Trump actually being a good president.
In the meantime I satisfy myself with iterating and refining my beliefs by myself.
So "spoon's" converse are forks, knives, maybe chopsticks, etc.