When one is troubled by directionality, perhaps the clues are not found post-facto but are already present a priori. In other words, one may need to find or become conscious of them within the history of the self.
This intuition stems from the observation that even in many scientific discoveries and engineering inventions, historical precedents serve as crucial references.
Scientific and engineering discoveries are products of collective intelligence. There appears to be a distinction between this and the act of tracing one’s own history to discover one’s personal directionality. However, unless collective intelligence can be linked to one’s own history and experience, the application of knowledge remains impossible.
The reality may be that resources exist nowhere but within one’s own history. Therefore, even if the foundation of this personal theory is sought in the philosophy of science or hermeneutics, the problem of “accessing” resources for judgment and the question of whether those resources “exist” are not separate issues, though they may seem so.
My concern lies in how to extract those resources from the accumulation of the past. While the access problem can be partially resolved by tracing records and memories, the real challenge arises afterward. It is less a problem of access and more a problem of the subsequent “selection and shaping.”
In the selection and shaping of resources for judgment, a benchmark is required. But from where is this benchmark derived? Even if we trace our own history, how do we handle the selection and shaping of the resources used to determine that benchmark? This leads to an infinite regress.
Here, I bring in the “chicken and egg” debate. A chicken is intuitively recognized as a chicken even without conscious awareness of its formal definition. For a “chicken’s egg” to be established, the chicken must take precedence.
An individual manifested as a chicken must exist before the extraction of “chicken genes” is possible. When those genes are contained within an egg, it is recognized as a chicken’s egg. However, the egg’s inclusion of genes is not synonymous with the manifestation of the chicken.
In the context of judgment and benchmarks, the manifested individual (the chicken) corresponds to the “judgment,” while the benchmark is the “gene” (or the egg containing it). The infinite regress is a cognitive problem surrounding judgment and its benchmarks.
The infinite regress in selection and shaping means that when one seeks the benchmark for selecting and shaping a judgment in the past, a further benchmark is needed for the selection and shaping of that benchmark. This requirement continues indefinitely.
Both this infinite regress and the chicken-and-egg problem share the same structure as cognitive issues. Just as the chicken must precede the egg, in the realm of judgment and benchmarks, the judgment must precede the benchmark.
Only when a judgment takes precedence does a benchmark emerge. Regarding corrigibility, a judgment cannot be corrected unless there is an existing judgment to serve as the object of correction. Furthermore, to perform a correction self-consciously, one must be conscious of the judgment itself.
