Two types of thought
My hope is to eventually create a useful model to describe the way we think. I plan to go through the different aspects that could be involved in this model incrementally over time, and eventually describe a structure for thought that may provide useful in day-to-day life.
- concept-space: Our mental model that contains everything we think about. This would fall under the traditional idea of a priori thought. These are the mental frameworks we use to communicate with ourselves and others.
- map and territory: The Map is how we understand the world to be. The Territory is the reality of the world. This would be considered a posteriori thought. This is where ideas like bayesian updating will be useful.
It is interesting that these two ideas fall into the duality of a priori and a posteriori thought. It isn’t a duality I assumed to exist when I started exploring structures of thought. But it makes sense that a first pass attempt at a model for thought would involve this age-old duality.
This is a discussion of what I call (applied) epistemology (a term I’ve adopted from holden karnofsky).
A lot of my thoughts on this topic are taken from eliezer yudkowsky’s writings. I’ve added my own thoughts and am trying to shape the ideas in a way that makes them easier to wrap my head around, but I would not claim much originality here.
I also have done some but not enough research on different philosophical works on epistemology. That will be part of the ongoing exploration here. Still, while further research goes on, I think it’s useful to provide a current state of my thoughts on epistemology, and how we can apply it in our lives.
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Following from two types of thought, it seems that all types of disagreement and argument fall into two types that correspond to the types of thought. I have yet to find a good example that breaks this schema, but would be eager to find one.