A law and a principle in the Science of Needs

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The Voice of Time
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A law and a principle in the Science of Needs

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A couple of powerful ideas came down upon me this morning, and I immediately wrote them down to the following, a law and a principle, adding to my science of needs framework of understanding:
The Law of Reduced Domain: in order to guarantee something, you must loose something else.
This is not a belief, but a principle of physics. If you have an environment under control, it is guaranteed. But in order to extend your range of guarantees, you'll have to interact with an uncontrolled environment, meaning you'll have to expose yourself to risk, loosing security.
Luck is therefore the only mechanism by which an individual can attain an increased domain, no human action (no action of free will) can extend the quantity of guarantees in their life.
and
The Luck Production Principle: if there is some security value that nature grants you in excess, sacrificing some of the excess is a trivial loss. This excess can be used to expand a domain of guarantees.
and this was followed by another idea that touches on a related subject:
The value of an action is calculated as the quantity of reinforcing security the action performs, times the factor (a ratio) produced by this division:

(quantity of uncertain elements to be exposed to)/(degree of least guaranteed element under threat)
Please tell me what you think and what's your reaction.
Scott Mayers
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Re: A law and a principle in the Science of Needs

Post by Scott Mayers »

I looked at these (and from the last addition on the "Information" thread for you last proposed principle). I haven't yet internally grasped what you mean until you can give an example of each. I study a lot of logic and upon initial reading have to keep going back, take a big break to ponder things I don't yet internalize of the author, and then try to create my own examples until I can make them make sense from their perspective.

But it would really help if you'd give those examples first to help. Can you take one at a time beginning with the first, your thinking, and your motive for thinking (while motive isn't necessary to an argument, it can aid in relating what leads you into that process.)

Thanks,

Scott.
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Re: A law and a principle in the Science of Needs

Post by Scott Mayers »

The Voice of Time wrote:A couple of powerful ideas came down upon me this morning, and I immediately wrote them down to the following, a law and a principle, adding to my science of needs framework of understanding:
The Law of Reduced Domain: in order to guarantee something, you must loose something else.
This is not a belief, but a principle of physics. If you have an environment under control, it is guaranteed. But in order to extend your range of guarantees, you'll have to interact with an uncontrolled environment, meaning you'll have to expose yourself to risk, loosing security.
Luck is therefore the only mechanism by which an individual can attain an increased domain, no human action (no action of free will) can extend the quantity of guarantees in their life.
Beginning here, prior to you responding, I wonder initially how you define "need" and how you might define "want" in context to usual philosophy in this area?

Initial response to your "law of Reduced Domain", I'm thinking you may be thinking Stoically here? At least, with regards the label of this, it seems like you are possibly thinking that in order to be relatively satisfied in one's conditions, you could reduce what inputs (members of your Domain) such that it limits what you could or would expect. As to this, though not certain yet how you relate it to 'guarantees', I agree this CAN be true but only if such a domain has either not been 'teased' from one's environment OR if you've actually had a literal taste of something 'accidental' from your environment to which you found interesting enough to include in your future 'domain' to seek for.

If one's environment lacks X, while such a lack can be real and 'necessary' in some way, the lack of knowing it even exists would make you interpret whatever you feel presently for its lacking is considered 'normal' to you. Only until you experience X and learn it enhances your life or, alternatively, decreases any pre-existing condition, you cannot determine it as necessary.

For example, those preferring prohibition do so on the thinking that if one rids the environment of either the supposed X that provides the acquired 'need' OR denying one from experiencing X through fear of penalty or threat of harm, such acts as limiting the domain of others so that they won't know what X is to be missing it. The problem here is that as long as the environment still has X OR for those who exist who have experienced it and now desire X, prohibiting it penalizes those already experienced of X even where unavailable and unless X is able to be absolutely removed from existence, its likelihood of others to try still exist. The trouble occurs when the prohibition also makes one curious to its supposed demand.

Take smoking, for example. A never smoker, in error 'thinks' the act is realistically 'unnecessary' and 'undesirable' with usual naivete. They may demonstrate they logically understand addiction and credit their own Stoic insistence not to try the supposed 'evil' X, but they nevertheless still ACT as though anyone still has the means to alter anything based solely on some 'logic' of willpower (or assumed lack of it in others).

But your actual description doesn't fit with this label. You appear to be saying that for anything you receive requires an equal and opposite loss in the same value as what you take in. This is Newton's third law being used a little awkwardly. If you relate this to the above, then your reducing of the domain is only about claiming that if you accept what you have to begin with, you cannot expect to get anything more. This is NOT what occurs in living things due specifically to the unpredictable reality of our external nature.

The reason we have a conscious is to seek the environment BECAUSE it is unpredictable. When we receive all we want (including needs), our consciousness lacks a "need" to be....that is, we 'sleep', become 'numb' to our environment, 'die', or seek a higher high to maintain consciousness or stay alive (consciously). It is actually as much a 'fault' because we presume our consciousness IS our life and purpose when it is only a conduit device for the sake of our cells [the selfish gene/meme concept of Dawkins].

I'll stay at this for now and see what you have to say, if you haven't already responded.
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Re: A law and a principle in the Science of Needs

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I'm glad you take interest, it's unfortunate that I never seem to have enough time to explain everything, and I usually just end up having to write down stuff which others are unable to understand. My desperation to share my thoughts with others, though, compelles me to reach out even if I'm not always understood.

Let me start answering you:
Beginning here, prior to you responding, I wonder initially how you define "need" and how you might define "want" in context to usual philosophy in this area?
My Science of Needs, and Philosophy of Needs, collectively just called Opusology (from latin for "need"), treats "need" as something quite different than the way languages treat it. Because languages are often used just to affect people, to make them be or do stuff, studying "need" is quite pointless in language. In language need just becomes a mess of a concept.

In Opusology, instead, "need" is an object intended to be perpetuated. To be perpetuated, it has "subneeds", needs of needs, which I just call the conditions, the conditions for perpetuation. The way that the Law of Reduced Domain works in here, is to set the stage for that any infinitely long network of needs of needs, will create an evolutionary chain of possible actions that require someone to constantly adapt towards fixed points in an imaginary space of possibilites. The movement towards these points mean that those points are the only points at which you are completely and fully guaranteed. However, in order to reach those points, you'd have to also expand, not just adapt, because by necessity of how guarantees work (that they mean someone serving your interest is in control).

The implications for this is massive, both on the scale of fundamental truths about reality, as well as the very notion of truths. For instance, this understanding also predicts that destructive ways can never occur except as a passing phenomena, because any reasonable person would have to adapt in ways that eventually required the removal of the destructive ways. To exemplify it: evolution does not like pessimists.

It also predicts, though not as clearly, that only cooperation is the way forward, and that merging, instead of consuming, is the way by which opusologically aware beings will be forced to act, because consuming involves destroying what you take, and destroying implies destructive ways. Those who are not opusologically aware become instead various shades of a mixture between nature and opusology, between chaos and order (to put it poetically).
Initial response to your "law of Reduced Domain", I'm thinking you may be thinking Stoically here? At least, with regards the label of this, it seems like you are possibly thinking that in order to be relatively satisfied in one's conditions, you could reduce what inputs (members of your Domain) such that it limits what you could or would expect.
Yes! But there's just one thing you miss here, and that is that any such movement, to be a proper reduction, needs to be a delivered change, meaning that the change is seamless, prepared for to the full extent, you don't experience the actual change as a "loss". Any other type of action would be a trade-off, which is a different phenomena.
As to this, though not certain yet how you relate it to 'guarantees', I agree this CAN be true but only if such a domain has either not been 'teased' from one's environment OR if you've actually had a literal taste of something 'accidental' from your environment to which you found interesting enough to include in your future 'domain' to seek for.
I'm not sure what you mean either, but it sounds like you kinda got my idea, so it sounds like I kinda agree with you xD I think you mean that: if effort was required, it'd be a trade-off, at least that's what I'd say (a trade-off implies there are parts of an action that costs more security than is gained). I meant pure luck (of course, finding luck, like a natural resource, does make you have to adapt towards it to cultivate it, but this adaptation is not a trade-off in itself, whereas "making" the natural resource, like building an artifical lake and fill it with fish, is a trade-off. Nature didn't give you that lake).
If one's environment lacks X, while such a lack can be real and 'necessary' in some way, the lack of knowing it even exists would make you interpret whatever you feel presently for its lacking is considered 'normal' to you. Only until you experience X and learn it enhances your life or, alternatively, decreases any pre-existing condition, you cannot determine it as necessary.
This is where our thoughts become a bit divided, because here normal is given authority over needs, despite normal being a product of imagination, whereas nature runs its own course with or without or concept of normal.
For example, those preferring prohibition do so on the thinking that if one rids the environment of either the supposed X that provides the acquired 'need' OR denying one from experiencing X through fear of penalty or threat of harm, such acts as limiting the domain of others so that they won't know what X is to be missing it. The problem here is that as long as the environment still has X OR for those who exist who have experienced it and now desire X, prohibiting it penalizes those already experienced of X even where unavailable and unless X is able to be absolutely removed from existence, its likelihood of others to try still exist. The trouble occurs when the prohibition also makes one curious to its supposed demand.
This way of thinking is inconsistent with opusology, since opusology treat everything local and individual, and with an infinitely incrementing precision, meaning that because a need is to be perpetuated, there will always be a greater list you can make of how things should best be for it to be perpetuated. You will find errors you correct, and clarifications you can make, and there's always going to be more you can make.

Opusology on a societal level is an enormous task of calculation that involves pulling multiple needs together towards a fixed point for them all (a person, though not strictly speaking a person so don't think of the definition of a person, can be treated as a need-object. Opusology has a definition of people as well, to convert them into need-objects, but that's another story).
Take smoking, for example. A never smoker, in error 'thinks' the act is realistically 'unnecessary' and 'undesirable' with usual naivete. They may demonstrate they logically understand addiction and credit their own Stoic insistence not to try the supposed 'evil' X, but they nevertheless still ACT as though anyone still has the means to alter anything based solely on some 'logic' of willpower (or assumed lack of it in others).
Opusology does allow for a problem to exist, it does not shy away from facts. But opusology, with its evolutionary perspective, considers such a thing as smoking to be something that must be combated with science. Science, if it doesn't have the answer now, it eventually solves the problem by finding solutions to "deliver" smokers out of smoking. Of course, not just science does this task, but all of societies disciplines must unite together to bring together a pool of resources that gives the knowledge and the force to make the deliverance: changing them to non-smokers, without a loss. So not winning instantly isn't a problem. Also, this touches on another principle of opusology, which is that the opusological world and the non-opusological world cannot directly mix, because that's like order and chaos. Once you introduce one to the other, sure you can have shades, but those shades are really just localized consentrations that are spread out enough for it to look like a shade across. This also means that opusological people cannot meaningfully mix with other people without treating them as "lesser people", this is an unfortunate but necessary feature of opusology, because opusology itself is to vulnerable to be a hybrid way of thinking, you can't think opusologically with only half your brain, or half your people. Then it simply isn't opusological. It also implies that opusological people would look upon other people as objects for cultivation. They become a long waiting list of normal people to be converted into opusological people to allow for opusological thinking at ever higher organizational levels.
But your actual description doesn't fit with this label. You appear to be saying that for anything you receive requires an equal and opposite loss in the same value as what you take in. This is Newton's third law being used a little awkwardly. If you relate this to the above, then your reducing of the domain is only about claiming that if you accept what you have to begin with, you cannot expect to get anything more.
This isn't an accurate way of thinking about it, but nice observation though.

The action you perform is an investment in guarantees. The return value is what is uncertain. You can end up incurring unforeseeable damages to the things that guarantee your well-being, so as long as you puruse the uncertain action, unforeseeable things might occur. However, when you no longer perform that action, new guarantees might have accumulated. Think of it like eating: going on a hunt will cost you a lot of calories, but you might find food also. When you first have the food, the food can be called guaranteed although a lot of things might go wrong with it of course, but let's stick to positive presumptions in order to keep it simple. Because hunting is not necessary every day, and because you have a high chance of finding food, you have a lot of time to just enjoy yourself. That tapping into the uncertainty though, is not good, therefore an opusological way of thinking is to try and strive for a large surplus of food, and multiple food sources, such that you can have many bad hunts in row, without it being bad for you. Having family members could also guarantee your life if you become sick, and multiple people storing surpluses leads to an even greater surplus that allows for any one individual to have even more bad hunts before it can become a problem.

It can also be used for balance. You are always as weak as your weakest point, and opusology uses this principle to attain guarantees at your weak points, at the cost of your strong points.
This is NOT what occurs in living things due specifically to the unpredictable reality of our external nature.
The unpredictable part is what I refer to as "luck". Bad luck is not a concept of itself but it falls under "loss due to incomplete knowledge", which says that things will sometimes prove themselves to be insecured because there's something you don't know about and haven't had the opportunity to find out about.
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Re: A law and a principle in the Science of Needs

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Wow, just wow... sooo much text xD this is why I sometimes say "that's another story", because the explanations are so long and never-ending! xD
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Re: A law and a principle in the Science of Needs

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I've asked you before VoT but can you give a concrete example of your Opusology in action, as I really have no idea what it is nor what is scientific about it?
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Re: A law and a principle in the Science of Needs

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Arising_uk wrote:I've asked you before VoT but can you give a concrete example of your Opusology in action
It's a work in progress, so I may change my phrasing and wording as I discover deeper and deeper truths about needs. To be sure, I'm not the same person as two years ago.

But a concrete example is anything really. Opusology studies relationships between things, and the things can be a car, a movie, a situation, as well as any abstract phenomona, or for instance a substance. It is "generic", as long as the thing in question can be reduced itself to natural sciences and the laws and rules there, it can be studied with opusological eyes.

I've mentioned concrete examples multiple times before, but unfortunately discussing them takes time. But take for instance a car, now all needs leads back to human beings, but since a person is a very complicated thing to talk about, we'll just assume that this person's life demands a car. This person will have to take actions that perpetuates this car, and for each such action, you gain, and may lose, some currency of security, which is the "conditions".

But those actions, while part of them is physical and mere "work", most of them is not about labour, but about finding out, getting the necessary knowledge, that this car requires to be guaranteed, and the size of this knowledge is infinite. Therefore, you take the time to study, and through study you get an ever increasing amount of information you can use to evaluate the security of this need-object which we call the car.

Through hypothesis you make presumptions about at what the car can handle and still be in the shape that you require it to be.

Through trying to break the hypothesis, you find out whether it's true, and by trying out many different hypothesis and expanding with an ever-increasing amount of hypothesis you can do the same for all the other aspects of the car. Eventually you create a system of understanding about how to perpetuate the car.

Now I used the simple example of a car to illustrate, purely. When this thing becomes really interesting, is when you start studying bigger things, abstract things... things that we care about, or should care about, and how this way of thinking empowers us to find solid truths that we can rely upon to make a solid, a -guaranteed -, personal life, as well as society.
Arising_uk wrote:, as I really have no idea what it is nor what is scientific about it?
It's scientific in that it studies the robustness of the security of a person's need-object, expanding outwards to a network of need-objects, and finding out what increases, as well as what decreases, this security. Meaning that a need-object is dervied from a person, and from them we get chains of other needs. These other needs, "subneeds", I call them conditions. Those conditions are what preserves the need-object (derived from the person).

The need-object derived from the person is a complicated manner to talk about, so it's hard to say what is being studied unless you abstract it to words like "need-object" and "condition", but consider it not as an identity, not as our biological functionality, or any other intuitive approach you might take yourself, but as being about what we recognize about ourselves as necessary to preserve, and this necessity that we recognize, it is derived from our reflexive, or to put it another way: physically reactionary, ways of behaving. If we are physically interacted with (like a sense: smell, sound, imagery), the interaction will produce a physical contact between the matter and our matter, causing physical forces to occur. These physical forces in turn force a response in some way: every action has a reaction. The reaction has two possible outcomes that we care about in opusology: for or against preservation. Now when these stuff touches our brains, we can either reognize or don't recognize this thing that we are, which always tries to preserve some things and not others. But the things that we do preserve, and we do recognize, they become part of an identity package about what constitues us, and from natural science we know what constitutes everything else, and opusology, especially what I wrote here in this thread, talks about that dynamic relationship, and what it means.

Sry, everybody wants the simple explanation, but this is immensely complicated stuff for me to explain and goes through so many levels that it's easy to lose orientation of where you are at sometimes.
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Re: A law and a principle in the Science of Needs

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I'm not making myself understood. Please can you give me a concrete example of where you have applied your opusology to a real world situation, preferably one where you had needs and you used your opusology to assess and achieve them.
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Re: A law and a principle in the Science of Needs

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VoT,

Sorry if I may be the one in error of interpreting, but I am having a hard time following with consistency. It could be my own fault here and I have certainly been misunderstood too. But the wording you use is partially rational and then thrown off by some word or words (often verbs) that make you come across as if you've had a stroke. [...something that perhaps I'm the one at fault for happening?]

I haven't yet read all of your first response to me and will still do so. Up front, however, you used the word, "Opusology" of which seems self-invented (not a problem for philosophy), yet is NOT what you assert true by anything I have been able to look up. "Opus" means some set of works by some composer that acts collectively as some whole, not "need"; "-ology" is an ending to specify the logic or study in mind related to that. So "Opusology", if it actually IS a word, suggests a study of works or collections of artists (usually musicians). How did you possibly get "need" from this?

There is much more to be concerned about in your language and my understanding here. For instance, I don't get why you would assert that words (language) is intended to "affect", dismissing my request for a definition here. I don't know if you are being serious, intending some other objective here, or are potentially having that stroke (or some other potential mental/brain problem...or just high on something?).

It WOULD help, if you can attempt to define "need" here to begin with. AND if possible, as Arising suggested too, to try to give a particular example that might help us internalize what you sincerely mean.

Thanks,

Scott.
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Re: A law and a principle in the Science of Needs

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Arising_uk wrote:I'm not making myself understood. Please can you give me a concrete example of where you have applied your opusology to a real world situation, preferably one where you had needs and you used your opusology to assess and achieve them.
I haven't done that, yet, because the examples of everyday life are to boring for it to be used on those, and all the interesting ways I could apply it would require a lot of labour, and I'm not at a stage where I'm willing to commit that labour. However, these ways of thinking I always carry with me, so I'm probably influenced by them but not in a manner that allows me to tell you exactly when and how. I study programming and I'm hoping to make a program which can simulate how this applies to large quantities of data, but I'm not at a stage where I can do that yet.

If you ask whether it's a living science, a science that is being applied and used, then no, it's not. Right now it's a Frankenstein-monster waiting to be electrocuted to life. I still hope you're willing to take an interest in it, though, because everyone has to start somewhere.
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Re: A law and a principle in the Science of Needs

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Scott Mayers wrote:So "Opusology", if it actually IS a word, suggests a study of works or collections of artists (usually musicians). How did you possibly get "need" from this?
I invented the word so that I have something to refer to.

Opus is latin and means "need" through the sentence "opus est" (it is needful, wanting; there is need of), check out latin dictionaries if you really care (I don't care, it's just a name). The opus you're talking about is a concept invented for historical reasons, and I really don't think that anybody who wants to know what opusology is, will really have a problem seperating the different uses of opus (if you take away the fact that I don't show up in google searches). The -ology ending is used to define a field, a discipline (bi-ology, ont-ology), a system of thought that can be taught and learned.

It is just a name. Arguments could be made for using other words, either from greek or latin, but I thought opus was the best word, because it's short and simple, like "biology".
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Re: A law and a principle in the Science of Needs

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The Voice of Time wrote:I haven't done that, yet, because the examples of everyday life are to boring for it to be used on those, ...
Not if you want it to be an 'ology' they're not.
... and all the interesting ways I could apply it would require a lot of labour, and I'm not at a stage where I'm willing to commit that labour. However, these ways of thinking I always carry with me, so I'm probably influenced by them but not in a manner that allows me to tell you exactly when and how. ...
Then you don't have an 'ology'.
I study programming and I'm hoping to make a program which can simulate how this applies to large quantities of data, but I'm not at a stage where I can do that yet. ...
Try starting by applying your idea to an example from everyday life as it may help clarify the algorithm to be used.
If you ask whether it's a living science, a science that is being applied and used, then no, it's not. Right now it's a Frankenstein-monster waiting to be electrocuted to life. I still hope you're willing to take an interest in it, though, because everyone has to start somewhere.
For sure and a good place to start is with simple examples.
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Re: A law and a principle in the Science of Needs

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Arising_uk wrote:
The Voice of Time wrote:I haven't done that, yet, because the examples of everyday life are to boring for it to be used on those, ...
Not if you want it to be an 'ology' they're not.
You do know that an "-ology" is just a word used to refer to a discipline that can be taught, right? I don't think you realize that there's no "bar" set on what can be called an "-ology" or not. Don't be mean to me just because I haven't gotten the momentum yet.
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Re: A law and a principle in the Science of Needs

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The Voice of Time wrote:You do know that an "-ology" is just a word used to refer to a discipline that can be taught, right? ...
Can you teach yours then?
I don't think you realize that there's no "bar" set on what can be called an "-ology" or not. ...
You just said it was a discipline that can be taught?
Don't be mean to me just because I haven't gotten the momentum yet.
I'm not and you've had a fair bit of momentum behind this idea upon this forum. All I'm asking is for an example of how to use your ideas concretely as this helps understanding and will help focus your thinking.
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Re: A law and a principle in the Science of Needs

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Arising_uk wrote:Can you teach yours then?
Of course I can.

Hey, I do appreciate you challenging me, but a sentence like that is just unreasonable. You are being very edge, it feels more and more personal instead of objective.
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