User talk:Soapiopath

What's this?
This user was created solely to draft User_talk:Soapiopath/CSR, so you probably want to click through to that. However, before you do click through, if you're interested in my rationale for working on this project, scroll down a bit..

Right here is probably also the best place for:

Terminology

 * So-called 'metaphysics' is jointly the two branches of philosophy dealing with being (=ontology) and knowledge (=epistemology).
 * The unfortunate word 'intentionality' has very little to do with willful intention, ie trying. It means something like 'aboutness', i.e. the (perhaps) mysterious feature of mental 'things' that they're often 'about' physical things (like my belief that Paris is in France). Beliefs are mental, but beliefs about Paris and France intend the real Paris and the real France to be meant by the belief, even when the belief is wrong.

-Soap 89.240.143.34 (talk) 07:56, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

Links
http://bit.ly/1yYUhbz links here. 86.151.100.237 (talk) 12:40, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

Remind me to move Dan K's mp3 to somewhere more sensible, btw. I want to keep it 'cause I'm backing him (on bass). -Soapiopath (talk) 22:52, 18 July 2015 (UTC)

Welcome!
Hello, Soapiopath, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful: Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or and a volunteer will visit you here shortly. Again, welcome! Luxure (talk) 11:14, 28 September 2014 (UTC)
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Article rationale: Social Reality and Digital Signatures
See User_talk:Soapiopath/CSR. Last year I began drafting this Wikipedia article about John R Searle's 1995 book The Construction Of Social Reality. I haven't really got very far with it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Soapiopath/CSR), but that's not for lack of interest in the problem of explaining how it can be an objective fact that the Clintons (say) are married and that the piece of 'paper' (really cloth) in my wallet is legal tender, despite that these facts are nonphysical: perhaps there is an entry in some marriage register evidencing the Clinton's wedlock, but if that were to be destroyed in a fire tomorrow, Bill and Hillary would still be man-and-wife, no? And if I could reproduce a banknote down to the last molecule it would not be legally money, but counterfeit.

To Searle, every social or institutional fact is grounded purely in consensual belief: change the beliefs and you change the facts. Searle's best example of this incredible mutability is the collapse of communism in 1989, which I mention in a side note among several important quotations from CSR at the end of the draft article. -Soapiopath (talk) 23:04, 18 July 2015 (UTC)

Better still, on page 119 of CSR Searle makes a practical point that I have found deeply thought-provoking in the context of information technology. He says, "The most common device for status-indication is the written signature." What he means is that the usual 'proof' of validity of an official document is its being signed by a person empowered to create social or institutional facts of the type corresponding to its 'template', ie the invalid, unfilled-out generic version of the document. By filling out the document and signing it (or, in other cases, ink-stamping it), an appropriate person creates or modifies a social or institutional fact: for example, a travel visa creates the fact that some person may legally enter a territory.

Modern cryptography has devised an altogether new kind of signature: so-called digital signatures. Signatures of this kind are checked every time you point your browser to an address beginning 'https' rather than 'http', as in the web address I gave above. Correct browsers will warn you if the site you are about to visit is counterfeit. All things being equal, you get an epistemic benefit from this, because you *know* you are visiting the site you were expecting. Therefore you can enter your username and password with confidence, say. To be sure of my ground, in 2014 I waded through the mathematics of a basic digital signature scheme.

To illustrate the significance of this, consider a problem I solved last winter: a gym has a treatment room for physiotherapy, osteopathy, reiki, massage, and the like. Clients might undress for a treatment, so privacy is important. Placing a 'room occupied' sign on the outside of the door was not working because as often as not the sign wasn't removed afterwards, so seeing the sign didn't provide knowledge about the room's occupancy after all.

I replaced the sign with a red light akin to the 'don't enter' light used in recording/broadcasting studios. The light is outside, but the only ON-button is inside the room. A microswitch in the architrave detects when the door is closed. The ON-button only works when the door is closed, and when the door is opened the light automatically goes out. So, it is not possible to switch the outside light on without entering the room and closing the door from the inside before pressing the button. And the only ways of leaving the room without turning the light off are previously to have sabotaged the microswitch or to abseil out of the window. Leaving these possibilities aside, the light provides *knowledge* that the sign did not: if the light is on, all things being equal, someone is inside. So technology gives rise to epistemology. Equivalently, the epistemology emerges, with caveats, from the technology. Hence human beings can engineer (suitably qualified) knowledge.

At this point my wider argument depends on Searle's. Searle claims that all of social and institutional reality consists of iterated structures reducible to what he calls 'status-functions'. Searle Status Functions are predicates of the form "X counts as Y in context C". Logically, the idea is that given C, X is sufficient for Y. His stock example is that dollar bills count as money in the United States of America. Another example is that a registrar saying "I pronounce you man and wife" counts as creating a marriage in the context of the appropriate ceremony (as opposed to the very different context of a stage-revival of Pride and Prejudice, say).

Searle argues convincingly for the non-physicality of socio-institutional facts by drawing attention to the extraordinary, hardly noticed change in the ontology of money wrought by electronic computation: in the field of banking, ink marks in ledgers have been almost entirely replaced by magnetically charged or optically polarized micro-particles in hard drives and similar digital media. Other social facts seem to have no ontology outside human minds: in general, nothing about the arrangement of pieces on a chessboard tells you whose turn it is to move, for example.

Every usable multi-player online game uses cryptography to generate a consensual virtual reality, but the best example of a crypto-epistemology in the real world is probably Bitcoin. Such epistemologies are possible because, if Searle Status Functions can be imposed on arbitrary objects, it's not much of a leap to impose them on points on the number line or in a finite field. Unlike sets of objects, number points form a natural, incremental sequence. Therefore they can be inter-referenced by the phenomenon of coding (due to Kurt Godel) by yet more collective intentionality. Specifically, some number can represent a claim of truth and some other number can represent a proof of that truth. If the claim is of authorship, the authorship is provable (with caveats) by mathematical analysis of the proof-number. Digital signatures generally amount to authorship proofs because is it not computationally feasible to calculate proof-numbers without possessing some crucial piece of 'inside information' known only to the author (typically a password, which might be guessed of course).

Surely, if it exists at all, collective intentionality can be applied to the public-key infrastructures that make digital signing possible. Indeed, it's hard to see how such infrastructures could get off the ground without a collective belief that some X's public key is agreed to be U. Granting all this, digital signatures can be construed as Searle Status Functions. Some document D signed by S "counts as" a valid D in the context that S is empowered to issue D's. Iterating, P signing their permission for S to issue D's counts as empowering S to issue D's in the context that P is empowered to authorize people to issue D's.

So it would seem that a collective intentional attitude taken towards a sufficiently large mathematical number-space would ground a social reality of arbitrary complexity, and that modern information technology is increasingly enabling this kind of societal engineering. Although most current examples are of deliberately independent 'virtual' realities (typically very limited in scope, though easily ample for quite complex multi-player games), no clear feature of our existing collective intentionality seems likely to prevent the reach of cryptographic epistemology into the 'real' world. Hence, Searle's p119 claim that the most common device for status indication is the *written* signature seems unlikely to remain true for much longer than an early-20th century accountant's claim that the most common device for recording money transfers is a written double-entry in some ledger.