Western Ontology and Lossy Compression

Existence

 Existence and non-existence. What "exists" and what doesn't? Western Ontology wants to bifurcate, but that isn't the only way to manage this information. It becomes possible to talk about different types of non-existence. For example, a number doesn't "exist" in the same way that two pineapples do, but it does exist. So it becomes necessary to draw a distinction between the way that a pineapple exists, and the way that we count pineapples. It later becomes possible to imagine something impossible like infinity pineapples. Infinity pineapples does not exist in the same way that two pineapples do. Two pineapples are within the realm of possibility while infinity pineapples wouldn't leave room for anyone else unless they were inside an even bigger infinity (which is possible).

We will be arguing that Western ontology wants to say everything either exists or it does not and this is a blunter tool producing less useful results than an approach that didn't.

Metaphysics

Western metaphysics is concerned with ontology which is the study of what is. Its impulse is to take the myriad things in the first order of material existence and then map them back to second-order existence things like numbers.

Can you do this? The answer is yes. But there is one rule. The number of objects on the first-order side must be identical to the number of objects on the second-order side (see Quine). Elsewise, you end up with information loss.

Information loss is not intrinsically "bad". It just needs to be kept in mind. 

So, let's say I write a book using every word in the dictionary at least once. Is this book "the same as" the dictionary? No. The book is out of order and does not contain the information we need. When we map, we need to map everything identically, and that includes the structure and the sequence. We have lost considerable information when we wrote our book. We added information as well.

Metaphysics in the Western tradition wants to be able to map the material back onto the "numeric" or "symbolic". Ultimately, this is the foundation of metaphor, language, religion, ritual, meaning, and everything. It becomes dysfunctional, however, when we forget that the two sides need to be even. 

I think Quine's work produces the best scholarship on the matter from an analytic perspective. Following closely with Quine would likely produce better results than I can produce. 

Categories and Sets

A category or set exists in the second-order. However, it is drawn off a first-order observation. For example, if I see a furry animal wagging its tail, I'd readily associate that with the category of "dog". Does "dog" exist as a stable non-dividable concept? Well, there was a time when dogs did not exist. Now they do. There will be a time when dogs do not exist. Perhaps the dog evolves stronger hind legs, and learns to walk upright and we can pay our furry friends to do our taxes.

The dog is not stable. The category is an effort to "freeze" the dog and it's useful for certain goals. The effort, however, is to encapsulate. 

Compression

We call "lossy compression" lossy because you lose information. In other words, what specifically I am discussing as a misguided effort of Western ontology is useful for making certain types of files smaller. Imagine a picture that is 400x400 of your face. I can compress the image by stripping 0s at the end of numbers (lossless compression) or I can fudge the information making it blurrier. The overall quality of the picture may not be severely reduced, but there is information loss. Why? Because you have mapped N elements to fewer than N elements.

When we discuss something in categorical terms, we do something similar. The category, as a second-order "thing" is "less real" than a material object (a first-order thing). It tells you less. One can imagine an image becoming blurrier and blurrier as information is mapped to fewer second-order symbols. (In this case, second-order merely means derived from. In terms of symbolic logic, second-order means symbolic, first-order means material, and everything else is unreal for now). 

In order to work successfully with a category, one must consider that it is a second-order thing, that there will be information loss, potentially information superimposed, and finally, could be indicative of cultural bias.

Where to go from here?

• Category charging - The cultural impulse to emotionally charge a category (good/evil). Also, the impulse to condition taboos or reinforce by category. When we discuss people in terms of categories, this can be used as a weapon.
• Category discrimination - Is Derridean asymmetry contributing to the manufacture of bias?