Fundamental Precepts

Where do you come up with this crap?

    As I write about UP, I become aware of these founding ideas that inspired UP into existence. They come from a lifetime of reading and going to school, and I often forget which idea is which. They float around in my head, often just barely within the periphory of consciousness; vying for recognition. Here is my working list of precepts.*

Central UL/UP ideas

• Fractal knowledge; human knowledge and calculation can elegantly be described using a recursive set of fixed terms which scale in complexity as new ideas are formed from the previous-level's primitives.
• That human knowledge can be thought of as one (poorly organized) database. As such, coherency must constantly be maintained in order to make primitive intellectual concepts available for practical use to people at all levels of human society. Terminology must continuably be consolidated in order to prevent academic obfuscation. Academics are merely stewards, like overpaid System Administrators.
• Academic obfuscation is usually motivated by professional ambition and NOT by the dictates of sound information theory. 
• The conflict of capital motives with didactic prinicpal has created our current dysfunctional education system.
• Incorporation of Vigotsky's Scaffolding Technique into all areas of education, no matter how abstruse.
• Incoherence within the human knowledge database is introduced by successively compounded compromises (created out of need at the time of innovation), but which are no longer necessary and actually impede human progress by generating confusion and codifying negligent 'best practices'.
• Progress in human knowledge follows a roughly darwinian model. Only very recently has cultural evolution been recognized as a legitimate phenomena. As such, the current status of the human knowledge database is still (haphazardly) dominated by entropy.
• Darwinian modes of evolution are both efficient and effective but create completely incoherent databases -- ask any Biologist.
• After every major evolution in human thinking, the academic's job is to filter through the results and construct a coherent system of cause and effect based around universal terminology which logically flows from previously established primitive principles -- a la Scaffolding. Then, find the most logically consistent and intuitive way to teach the masses about the newly discovered principles.
• Symbolic Abstraction is to be minimized in places where tangible real-world analogues exist. How hard is Hyperbolic Space to understand; until you look at one of your grandma's coffee-table doyleys?
• Complex mathematical functions should primarily be represented in graphical form; not unlike those used in intuitive Home-Recording Suites like Ableton Live. Wolfram Mathematica is a good example of this and many other UL/UP principles.
• Mathematical functions and principles should be presented initially by stressing their output patterns first and focusing on the symbolic rigor last.
• Freedom of ideas. It is impossible to own an idea. There are no creators of new ideas, only discoverers of clever combinations of old ones. Ideas are created simultaneously by multiple parties across the globe. As such, ideas should not be patented nor should previous patents be treated as anything other than legal devices to enable corporate monopoly. Futhermore, we adherents must strive to eliminate patent law in order to ensure the maximum rate of human progress, and ultimately, survival.

*I claim no propriety over the principle of Universal Primitivism. Many greater writers than I have achieved immortality by popularizing the same or related ideas; Chomsky, Plato, etc. Still, I must speak in the first person of my own discovery in order to expose my inherent observer bias to the reader. Objectivity and originality are impossible goals for any writer to achieve.