last updated 2025-04-13
My process of thinking is complicated. People sometimes call me analytical and I used to associate with that, but that now seems like a corporate buzzword that appears on every CV. I used to call myself a semantic debater because I question the meaning of words during philosophical debates, but philosophy is already inherently the analysis of labelled concepts so that description is meaningless. I called myself a deconstructionist once, but someone responded that I’m not a Derridaean and in any case I don’t want to identify with the butt of xkcd 451.
I was about to use ‘reduction’, but a quick search reveals reductionism is an extant and confusing philosophical approach, so I can’t use that term. I’m tempted to use ‘striptease’, but that’s unprofessional and somewhat inaccurate to what I’m trying to describe. Perhaps ‘dethreading’, but that seems complicated and probably means something in computer science. ‘Simplification’ feels a little misleading and implies over-simplification without context. I’m using ‘disentanglement’ in the meantime because there’s no Wikipedia page for it.
I tend to see objects as irreducibly complex amalgamations of infinite (and infinitely nested) concepts interacting with each other in uncountable continuous ways. In other words, I see ontology as some sort of mathematically indescribable hyper-dimensionally metaphysical scribble. (^^,) The joys of philosophy! As I’ve said many times before, I despise literature analysis because something can be interpreted to mean anything with enough mental gymnastics.
So when I process something, I’m sort of disentangling it, pulling out the base element (for my purposes) and watching whether the rest collapses. I’m not untangling it because that implies a decrease in messiness; I’m simply pulling out bones from slow-cooked hyper-dimensional pork ribs, simplifying a mess of knots into different sections (relative to my goal) without attempting to untangle it per se.
I understand and remember things through a logical process of disentanglement to ensure that I cover all bases and don’t leave any pork uneaten, which is why I despise and have never understood the allure of mnemonics. Take, for example, the common MRS GREN acronym for biological functions (movement, respiration, sensitivity, growth, reproduction, excretion, and nutrition). It’s very unintuitive: not only does it require one to memorise rather than learn, it presents biology in a very narrow view. Excretion and nutrition are both part of metabolism, while microbes don’t necessarily respire or grow in the way we usually understand those concepts. Furthermore, it stifles one’s creativity, stopping us from imagining fictional beings that die so quickly they do not need to excrete, derive energy directly from electromagnetic or radioactive sources, live in homogeneous environments where sensitivity and movement are unnecessary, or have a different non-oxygen method of “respiration” (e.g., osmosis).
One could argue that it provides a useful yardstick where we can consciously reject each aspect, but my point still stands that the yardstick is arbitrary and unintuitive if it makes us second-guess its definitions. Although the definition of life is complicated, I can disentangle the sentiment of MRS GREN and other definitions into the following categories:
I’m not a biologist so this definition is probably mistaken, but I find that much more intuitive than memorising MRS GREN. Instead of reducing, deconstructing, or untangling it, we can intentionally separate it into specific parts to make the fundamentals easier to understand and build on.
We can repeat the process of disentanglement until I reach one of the fundamental philosophical problems, at which point I defer to philosophers from the past few thousand years and any reader can see the subject is complicated. I name them thus:
I disagree with the tenet of reductionism that things are no more than the sum of their parts, because problems often have implicit problems that are only clarified with context. For example, the trolley problem is flawed because it assumes that we have complete knowledge and responsibility. Why should we make a decision when we aren’t a trained employee? How do we know that pulling the lever won’t just cause the train to derail, killing everyone? Isn’t it easier to explain inaction to a court? Doesn’t the professional responsibility lie with the train engineer for designing brakes that could fail and not have any backup systems? More generally, it’s very difficult to define morality considering there are many technicalities, edge cases, and implicit assumptions.
Disentanglement, for me, is simply a way for me to quantify those specifics to make sure my understanding is comprehensive, extendable, and based on solid ground.
Nowadays, I tend to open my essays by saying that something is complicated, then end them by linking to one of the fundamental philosophical problems and signing off with QED. I sometimes also add an additional line countering or mocking my writing, in part because I hesitate to say anything is incontrovertibly the truth. The questions of whether disentanglement is logical, an accurate and precise method for existence, a clear communication of my identity and desires, or a moral treatment of the reader reflect, of course, those fundamental four problems. QED.
Then again, Ryozen’s Law—autologically named after one of my characters—says that any interesting idea has already been done, so I expect there’s already a name for it or that this is how most people think. But eh, it’s nice to put things down in writing.