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Tuesday, January 23, 2024

Categories, Errors, Spectra, Spaces

 Let us apply the Laws of Form to the notion of categories. Before any distinction is made, there are not categories. Is this what is reflected in spiritual, psychedelic, and other experiences where one has the sense of no boundaries and being part of one "consciousness"? We create categories with some value / intent. In particular, our psycho-biology uses distinctions / categories to create the "other".  The other can he revered (perhaps as authority) or hated. These variations determine our behavior towards the "other". 

Another way to think about this is that we are all somewhere on a spectrum of whatever attribute we are using to create categories. Categories imply a qualitative difference. However, on most attributes what we have are really quantitative differences.

We can further generalize this notion to think of a multi-dimensional space of attributes in which we all exist. In this case again we are quantitatively different from each other rather than qualitatively as implied by categorizations. These categorizations can be positive (saint vs sinners, boss vs worker, ..) or negative (good ethnic group vs vermin, chosen group vs damned, ...).

These ideas can be applied to the notion of category error / mistake. We put things, beings, etc, in different categories with some intent. Would it be more accurate to think of them as being in a different part of ontological attribute space? One of the possible benefits of that may be that affect circuits may not be inadvertently activated with their resulting behaviors and responses to the delineated category?

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