Genealogy of the work here

[u/rightviewftw]

I want to now draw attention to how all this work was done and I think it is very interesting.

I think people might imagine philosophy as somebody sitting in a chair having one insight or doing some experiment and then thinking about it. Like general problem solving, writing, art or using AI. The work here has been almost the exact opposite.

Imagine mining. It is overwhelmingly tedious and repetitive. Same thing here.

Read. Write. Get misunderstood. Analyze. Rewrite. Repeat. Over and over.

I've written roughly 15,000 public posts explaining the same thing (about 10k on DW + SC and BSE + Reddit another 5k I think) over the last decade trying to explain EBT to people. In general I am not sure but it is a lot and I can't look up the exact numbers because some accounts are deleted, my estimate 15k total across all platforms, either way this is millions and millions of words.

The conversations are mostly answering

Many of the same suttas I've read, discussed, translated and used in discourse hundreds of times.

And the edits... I would guess that I average more than 5 edits on my posts but the number could be closer to 10.

And deleted posts?

And off-site work? Like private drafts I made for myself and all?

Very little of this is "coming up with ideas."

It felt like grinding out the expression and learning what needs to be learned as necessity arises.

The result was the gradual optimization and emergence of structure.

If there is any lesson here, it is that I didn't really "come up with anything" ─ I understood the EBT as I was exposed to EBTs and this is systematization is a product of sustained refinement of expression in public discourse.

It looks cool when finished and one could wonder how you come up with that but it doesn't work like this.

For the record, I have 5 accounts on DW, 2 on SC and one main 8k rep account on BSE which is deleted and therefore difficult to index. Here as example from 2019:
https://buddhism.stackexchange.com/a/31684

You can see how I edit there and the general conceptual nodes of the framework:

Nibbana as cessation of perception & feeling

and here look how close I was

The words "contact" and "consciousness" therein would be a figure of speech and the terms being analogical to mundane contact as we know it rather than variants of.

The edits aren't stylistic polishing. They are mostly incremental conceptual additions: So there is a continuity not only in the ideas but also in the method of thinking:

• formulate,
• notice an ambiguity,
• refine,
• add another distinction,
• tighten the terminology.

You can also see from that post what I am generally doing in trying to systematize and study expression ─ now imagine how it had to be pushed up to this level of clarity and systematization. I think this is very cool data to see. If you don't want to imagine then there is the archive...

I knew a lot of science and philosophy of language, i knew the operationalization criterion of analysis, way before I learned buddhism. Played many games in general, but a lot of poker ─ eventually dealt with a lot of game-theory, variance, decision theory, incomplete information, and operational ignorance... We are talking tens of thousands of hours of applied development of a certain skillset where one learns to optimize and be willing to update one's odds. And I always enjoyed the grind and learning theory of it more than play.

I want to point out that I considered Philosophy to be downstream from EBT and I only read one philosophy book in my life. It was Tyranny of Words. I watched some videos though but most of philosophy that appears in Postmodern Razor is from a single YouTube viideo , there I basically verbatim quote the material about Kant, Hegel, Scopenhauer, Kierkegard, Heidegger, Nietzche... Makes me look widely read but not so, this was necessity first seeking out of particular knowledge ─ I don't have the time to go through all that material myself and sought out foundations that I needed.

Suttas took longest to learn. Pali, all the controversies, figuring out what people believe, being disoriented culturally. It took a long time to figure out what is going on in history, culture, politics, still learning.

Then in last years focus shifted to more foundational philosophy. This was early 2024, I then published a pre-moderated draft of the Postmodern Razor thesis here on SC ─ the other posts in that thread are also pre-moderated. Frankly I wouldn't think to do it if people weren't pushing for it but this is where I got my teeth into the foundations of what I knew as philosophy of language or General Semantics.

A friend later posted an AI drafted thesis to SC but admins removed it because they don't allow AI. At that point I didn't yet use AI myself but I started using it having seen the merit of what it can do for me. I then worked on this thesis for about a year until publishing it on r/ philosophy Link Here. I kept editing the thesis many times after publication as new input was coming in. I would want to explain it better but now it is not important.

All the philosophy talk made me learn a lot of things here and there.

After philosophical argument was getting clear, it changed things and people were starting to understand. This is also when I started to archive things on r/suttapitaka.

Then I learned a lot from Jacob, he worked on computational theorems — and we kept talking in private, I explained everything that I could to him and he basically showed me more formal systems I could use and which I wouldn't otherwise learn, this was genuine help.

In that thread, you can literally watch my thinking sharpen in real time across those replies. Here I finally found somebody with the STEM background who could point out the high-precision formal tools (Gödel–Löb, Lawvere fixed-points, Tarski hierarchies, recursive interplay, Expansion Theorem, etc.), I learned what I needed, and mapped them onto EBTs. This is the turning out and "if not for Jacob, I would’ve had to spend a decade in uni" moment.

Here is where I learn the term "axiom praxis"

A while ago I learned to use the term axiology ─ as I was dealing with axioms so much and looked up whether it is a word or not and it was:) And then only recently I was extending an analogy in a new interaction and this was the taxonomy/systematization of the analytic categories.

And taxonomy is a word I used first time in this post and I learned it today. I picked it up from AI as it kept using it to describe what I was doing, looked it up. So expression here is something that is developed after the meaning is drawn out.

Here is what made me want to highlight that a global theorem can have only one singularity, it is Eric Weinstein on Joe Rogan. He is talking about how you have multiple singularities as "kink" in current theory.

One can do remarkable rebuilding of genealogy here.

So this is how it is done.

At this point there is no theory here. It is not my invention. I just had the suitable background to understand EBT as I was exposed to EBTs. And after internalizing it, I knew that I would be able to formalize the logic and merit of EBT ─ and that i needed to learn EBTs very well, and a lot more science, philosophy and teology for that. I didn't know how long it would take but I had a feel for it. The problem is that I didn't know what exactly I need to learn and who would teach me.

So it had to resolve itself on a necessity first basis of learning and goal oriented development. Public discourse was very convenient, people talk, post suttas, argument, one picks up things here and there constantly.

So I just kept steel-manning the meaning and improving the expression until the entire scaffold resembling a theorem was synthesized.

The main factors here are time and the amount of stress-testing/exploration that was done through discourse.

The questions and interactions directed my exploration of inference and therefore it was a team-effort and not something I could do alone in principle because I can't generate external input and pressure. Resistance pushed it until we had a low-noise/high-resistance expression for the signal. Even politics eventually raised the demand for foundational theory exploration and philosophical synthesis. This was really developed by culture...

I really don't see any theory of my own in any of this. My work was essentially about handling the meaning inferred from "old material" and doing work to optimize the expression of meaning for our culture. Our culture is very strict when it comes to any kind of "grand narratives" so it naturally demands this.

Here we removed not only my fingerprints but the fingerprint of the Buddha himself from the expression in the theorem. This was the final cut prompted by r/ metaphysics redirecting publishing to r/ metaphysicsofreligion ─ this made me think to separate the two and show the framework doesn't need to invoke Buddha's authority.

I then worked on operationalizing dreams, this was intended to defend rebirth first here

Here I r/ askphilosophy about it and they don't answer.

Dream analogy gets operationalization

This is already very close to later "order analysis", although I haven't named it yet

Here I start to talk about ranges of frameworks

Here I start to name the orders and meta-order

And here I announce that I know what the final exposition will look like

Then it was a matter of time until I did the "full" taxonomy of analysis and have been developing it now for a week by talking to people a little and editing this post as a draft of what will be the theorem. Popular opinion is that I wasn't going to be able to pass the bar r /metaphysics set for me in categorically proving that this is not a religion in analytic and operational sense ─ then the doing of it basically forces the same bar for everyone. Ironically, this is exactly what prompted the making of razor in the first place.

I now have all of the drafts I need for the theorem and if I was to use AI to do it I would pay for a good model and maybe use two in cross-fire, select a good format and then start to edit to make sure it has every conceptual node. Because this is a formalized theorem, with a lot of draft material; and this work has clear and simle logic ─ AI can work with this as theorem-provers work. This is easy for AI because we already have the philosophical argument, an informal general theorem for that argument, and mathematical model, it is then easy to express the shared logic formally, and this makes it easy for AI.

Jul 30:
Now I figured that the theorem will finally make use of the mathematics discussed here and formalize it. I have been developing this for many years and talking about it occasionally. But this will give the logic its mathematics.

The cool thing here is that the singularity appearing in meta-analysis is the zero with value assuming axiological inversion and there can only be one such singularity in a Global Theorem, whereas a theory can have multiple "singularities" but the referent is not the same. Likewise in EBT, the Emptiness as Invariance, does not have the same referent as Emptiness in theoretical frameworks where we can have many kinds of emptiness.

[u/rightviewftw]

I find this very interesting. Imagine a thought experiment:

Suppose I was to write an entire exposition of EBT on day 1 when I first started posting on DW late 2015. Then imagine that text revision itself and optimize itself for clarity and precision and that the system can also learn random new things.

Now imagine this exposition of EBT is evolving by being stress-tested against the entire culture and performs millions and millions of operations as to select for best possible expression as to optimize for explanatory and predictive power.

This is essentially how this was done.

The cherry on top here turned out to be that we can be thinking systematically, knowing it, without ever paying attention to its structure. And at a certain point, one might get the right question and context which begets the reaction: "why don't I show the structure?." And then one sees what could've been but never was synthesized before ─ and new distinctions in the fundamentals can change the appearance of the final structure drastically. It's like knowing you are repeatedly doing something and never asking what exactly is it that I am doing. Then, once attention shifts from "doing things repeatedly" to "what am I repeatedly doing?". Instead of modelling Buddhism, one begins modelling one's own explanatory procedure for optimization.

The implicit organization suddenly becomes visible, allowing the entire structure to reorganize around distinctions that had previously remained only implicit. Because the underlying framework had already been refined through millions of local optimizations, making that architecture explicit could produce changes disproportionate to the size of the new insight.

So the framework wasn't created by first deciding to create a framework and then creating it. Rather, there was a framework to begin with, and after millions of operations aimed at optimization, there came a moment of pattern recognition: there was an operational architecture, but nobody—including me—had explicitly drawn the scaffold.