''We live in a world in which no one knows the law.''
Ohad Asor, Sept 11, 2016
Chapter Two
I continue herewith with sharing my contemporary state-of-grok [1] of the up to now four [2] scriptures of the aka newtau [3]. Sorry for the delay, but it comes mostly from the efforts to contain the outburst of words, catalyzed by the very exegetic process of such a rich content, into a reader-friendly shorter form.
The subject of vivisection textographically identifies as the first three paragraphs of ''Tau and the Crisis of Truth'', Ohad Asor, Sep 11, 2016 [4].
The four core themes extracted are ennumerated bellow, with as modest as not to sidetrack the thought and to not spoil the original message, streak of comments of mine.:
I. LAW
As I guy who's immersed in Law for more than quarter of century [5] I can swear with both hands on my heart in the notion of unknowability of Law.
Since my youth years in the law school [6] I was asking myself how it is possible at all to have 'rule of law' [7] in case any legal system ever known required humans to operate !?
It seemed that the only requisite or categorcal difference between mere arbitrary 'rule of man' [8] and the 'rule of law' was that in some isolated cases some ruling men happened to be internally programmed by their morals [9] to produce 'rule of law' appearance effects by 'rule of man' means.
Otherwise 'rule of law' done via 'rule of man' poses extremely serious threats of law to be used by some to exploit and harm others.
In that line of thoughts my conclusion was that the Law is ... yet to come.
What we know as Law is not good networking protocol software of mankind as such, but rather we see comparatively rare examples of individually well programmed ... lawyers.
On the wings of a technological breakthrough, just like: flying came with the invention of airplanes and moonwalk needed the advent of rocketry, or to remember without to stay alive - the writing. The Law is an old dream. If we judge by the depth of the abyss of floklore - one of the humanity's most ancient dreams, indeed. Needless to repeat myself that this was what sucked me into Tau as relentlessly as a black hole spagetification [10] :)
The referred by Ohad frustration by Law of the great Franz Kafka [11] expressed in his book The Trial [12] becomes very understandable for Kafka's epoch lacking the comforting hope in a technology which we already have - the computers - and the overall progress in the field of logic, mathematics, engineering ... forming a self-reinforcing loop centered around this sci-tech of artificial cognition.
Similarly to the nuclear fusion, which is always few decades away, but the Fusion gap closes noticeably nowadays [13], we are standing on the cliff of a Legal gap.
The mankind's heavy involvement in cognition technologies, especially in the last several decades, outlined multiple promising directions of further development, which seem to bring us closer to abilities to compensate the fundamental deficiencies of Law and in fact to finally bring it into existence.
It took entire Ohad Asor, however, to identify the major reasons why the Law is bottlenecked out of our reach yet, and to propose viable means to bridge us through that Legal gap... The other side is already in sight.
II. WORDS
It is in the first place the language to blame !
The human natural language [14]. Our most important atribute as species. The mankind maker. The glue of society. It just emerged, it hasn't been created. It has rather ... patterns, vaguely conventional, than intentionally coined set of solid rules. There ain't firm rules to change its rules, either ... The natural human language is mostly wilderness of untamed pristine naked nature, dotted here and there with very expensive and hard to install and maintain ''arteftacts'' [15]. Leave it alone out of the coercion of state mass media, mass education and national language institutes and it falls back into host of unintelligible dialects. Even when aided by the mnemonic amplifier which we call writing.
Ambiguity is characteristic of the natural language, a feature in poetry and politics, but a deadly bug in logic and law.
We'll put aside for now the postulate of impossibility of a single universal language to revisit it later when its exegetic turn comes. In another chapter onto another scripture. Likewise, not in this chapter we'll cover the neurological human bottlenecks which are targetted to be overcome by Tau. Lets observe the sequence of author's thoughts and to not fast forward.
Instead of that I'll dare to share with you my own hypothesis about why the natural human languages are so. (I'm smiling while I type this, cause I can visualize Ohad's reaction upon reading such frivolous lay narrative. I hope he being too busy will actually not to.) To say that the human languages are just too complex does not bring us any nearer to decent explanation. Many logic based languages are more than a match of the natural human ones in terms of expressiveness and complexity. It shouldn't be that reason.
My suspicion is rather that the natural human languages pose such a Moravec hardness [16] for being not exactly languages. Languages are conveyors of meaning. Human languages convey not meaning, but indexes or addresses or tags of mind states. The meaning is the mind state. Understanding between humans is function of not only shared learnt syntaxi, but also of shared lives. Of aggregation of similar mind states which to be referred by matching word keys.
If this is true it is another angle for grokking the solution of human users leaning towards the machine by use of human intelligible Machinish, instead of Tau waiting the language barrier to be broken and machines to start speaking and listening Humanish.
In a nutshell we yet wait the Law to come cuz Law is not doable in Humanish. Bad software. And the other side of the no-law coin is that the humans are no cognitive ASICs [17]. We do congnition only meanwhile and in-order-to do what other animals do - to survive. Bad hardware.
In order law to become law it must become handsfree [18].
Not humans to read laws, but laws to read laws.
The technology to enable that looks on an arm's length.
III. TRUTH
Ok, so far we butchered the law and the language. What's left?
The nature and essence of human language brought one of the most harmful and devastating notions ever. Literally, a thought of mass destruction.
The ''crisis of truth''. The wasteland left by the toxic idea spilover of ''there is no one truth'' or even ''there ain't truth'' at all. This is not only abstract, philosophical problem. Billions of people actually got killed for somebody else's truth.
Not occasionally the philosophers who immersed themselves into this pool are nicknamed 'Deconstructivist' [19]. Following back their epistemic genealogy, we see btw, that they are rooted rather in faith than in reasoning, but this is another story.
The general problem of truth, of which the problem of law is just a private case, opens up two important aspects:
Number one, is that all knowledge is conjectural to truth and that, truth is an asymptotic boundary - forever to close on but never to reach. Like speed of light or absolute zero. Number two, is that human languages make pretty lousy vehicles to chase the truth with.
If really words are just to match people's thoughts together, then there are thoughts without words and words without thoughts. Words mismatch thoughts, so how to expect they to bridge thoughts to things? Entire worlds on nonsensical wording emerge, dangerously disturbing the seamless unity of things and thoughts. Truth displaced.
''But can we at least have some island of truth in which social contracts can be useful and make sense?''[4]
This island of shared truth is made of consensus [20] bedrock and synchronization [21] landmass.
Thuth and Law self-enforced. From within instead of by violence from without. And in self-referenial non-regressive way.
IV. NOMIC
''We therefore remain without any logical basis for the process of rulemaking, not only the crisis of deciding what is legal and what is illegal." [4]
Peter Suber with his ''The Paradox of Self-Amendment: A Study of Law, Logic, Omnipotence, and Change'' [22] proposed a rulemaking solution which he called Nomic [23].
''Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move.'' [22]
The merit of Nomic is that it really eliminates the illths of the infinite regress [24] of laws-of-changing-the-laws-of-changing-the-laws, ad infinitum, by use of transmutable self-referrenial rules. But Nomic suffers from number of issues - the first one, in the spotlight of that chapter, being the fact that we still remain with the “crisis of truth” in which there is no one truth, and the other ones - like sclability of sequencing and voting - we'll revisit in their order of appearance in the discussed texts.
The aka 'newtau' [3] went past the inherent limitations of the Nomic system and resolves the 'crisis of truth' problem.
The next few chapters will dive into Decidability and how it applies to provide solution to the problems described above.
Resources.:
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok
[2] - https://steemit.com/tauchain/@karov/tauchain-exegesis-intro
[3] - https://steemit.com/tauchain/@karov/tauchain-exegesis-the-two-towers
[4] - http://www.idni.org/blog/tau-and-the-crisis-of-truth.html
[5] - http://www.behest.io/
[6] - https://steemit.com/blockchain/@karov/behest-for-tauchain
[7] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law
[8] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrant
[9] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality
[10] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification
[11] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka
[12] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial
[14] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language
[15] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_language
[16] - https://steemit.com/blockchain/@karov/tau-through-the-moravec-prism
[17] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrated_circuit
[18] - https://www.etymonline.com/word/manipulation
[19] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction
[20] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making
[21] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronization
[22] - http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/psa/index.htm
[23] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic
[24] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_regress
[0] - the illustration is a painting courtecy of the author Georgi Andonov https://www.facebook.com/georgi.andonov.9674?tn-str=*F
18qSKUUTAGw1uL53simrSiZ6pJpfxKACvj for research support. Thanks.
Copyright © 2018 Georgi Karov. All rights reserved.