Two types of thought

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A useful model is the goal

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My hope is to eventually create a Useful model to describe the way we think. I plan to go through the different aspects that could be involved in this model incrementally over time, and eventually describe a structure for thought that may provide useful in day-to-day life.

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The two types

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I believe all thought falls into the following two types:

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  1. Concept-space: Our mental model that contains everything we think about. This would fall under the traditional idea of A priori thought. These are the mental frameworks we use to communicate with ourselves and others.
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  1. Map and Territory: The Map is how we understand the world to be. The Territory is the reality of the world. This would be considered A posteriori thought. This is where ideas like Bayesian updating will be useful.
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Feel free to follow the links to my scratch notes on what these ideas are, but I will come back to them in the future with (hopefully) more clarity.

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It is interesting that these two ideas fall into the duality of A priori and A posteriori thought. It isn’t a duality I assumed to exist when I started exploring structures of thought. But it makes sense that a first pass attempt at a model for thought would involve this age-old duality.

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I will continue to use the terms Concept-space and Map vs Territory rather than the more traditional philosophical terms to allow for expansion from those more commonly discussed concepts.

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Before diving into these ideas more, it will also be useful to describe belief, thought, knowledge, and truth, among others.

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Context

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This is a discussion of what I call Applied Epistemology (a term I’ve adopted from Holden Karnofsky).

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A lot of my thoughts on this topic are taken from Eliezer Yudkowsky’s writings. I’ve added my own thoughts and am trying to shape the ideas in a way that makes them easier to wrap my head around, but I would not claim much originality here.

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I also have done some but not enough research on different philosophical works on epistemology. That will be part of the ongoing exploration here. Still, while further research goes on, I think it’s useful to provide a current state of my thoughts on epistemology, and how we can apply it in our lives.

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I will be gradually be posting more updates on this model.

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This also seems to integrate with the Two types of disagreement.

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