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 (nobody)...and 70 guests Last 5 registered Oplandisks nothingstar N_loop yipe foxtrotromeo Browse members... |
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hmmm lot to chew over here. We could really get into the weeds. I'm going to think about it and sleep on it. Really appreciate the thoughtful response, welt! |
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An infamous criminal once remarked to the court "I wish you all had one neck and my hands were on it." That's how I feel about these kinds of discussions - there's a single neck in there somewhere and I like to wait until I can be sure I can get my hands on it. ;) The neck is, what would the world be like without minds. Would there be a world? Would there be objects? Would they relate to one another the way they do in phenomenal consciousness? In other words, is there a noumenal world and can we say anything about it. So, do we carve reality at the joints? Would the joints still "be there" without us? I think we can agree that the uncarved reality would be there without us, but the distinctions we make between cats and dogs and trees and moons and galaxies and grains of sand would not. The way we divide things up is pragmatic. Our carving is instrumental. We have something to gain in controlling some small parts of the world by dividing up the ocean into waves, so to speak. But, this doesn't mean there's no ocean. I think Laozi addressed this as tersely and poetically as it is ever likely to be expressed. To reiterate: The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things. Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations. These two spring from the same source but differ in name; This appears as darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gate to all mystery. |
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I hate when an article copies a piece of the text in the article and makes it bold and larger font somewhere else. I already read that you red and yellow striped clown assholes! This is the type of thing their bean counting tests have determined are most profitable, this tricks more people to buy the magazine or whatever as determined by experimental testing. People are this dumb. They like iphones and they like re-reading text they already read, it has more symmetry and repetition in their simple minds this way since they can barely communicate in language anyway. Their primary readers are mostly illiterate! |
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Heh. I've been reading that one verse for decades and every time I do I get more out of it. Looking back I don't think I understood it at all the first few dozen times I read it. |
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I already read that you red and yellow striped clown assholes! I hate when an article copies a piece of the text in the article and makes it bold and larger font somewhere else. I already read that you red and yellow striped clown assholes! They like iphones and they like re-reading text they already read, it has more symmetry and repetition in their simple minds this way since they can barely communicate in language anyway. This is the type of thing their bean counting tests have determined are most profitable, this tricks more people to buy the magazine or whatever as determined by experimental testing. People are this dumb. They like iphones and they like re-reading text they already read, it has more symmetry and repetition in their simple minds this way since they can barely communicate in language anyway. Their primary readers are mostly illiterate! |
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There is an instinct for rank which, more than anything else, is a sign of a high rank; there is a delight in the nuances of reverence that allows us to infer noble origin and habits. The refinement, graciousness, and height of a soul is tested dangerously when something of the first rank passes by without being as yet protected by the shudders of authority against obtrusive efforts and ineptitudes—something that goes its way unmarked, undiscovered, tempting, perhaps capriciously concealed and disguised, like a living touchstone. Anyone to whose task and practice it belongs to search out souls will employ this very art in many forms in order to determine the ultimate value of a soul and the unalterable, innate order of rank to which it belongs: he will test it for its instinct of reverence. Différence engendre haine: the baseness of some people suddenly spurts up like dirty water when some holy vessel, some precious thing from a locked shrine, some book with the marks of a great destiny, is carried past; and on the other hand there is a reflex of silence, a hesitation of the eye, a cessation of all gestures that express how a soul feels the proximity of the most venerable. The way in which reverence for the Bible has on the whole been maintained so far in Europe is perhaps the best bit of discipline and refinement of manners that Europe owes to Christianity: such books of profundity and ultimate significance require some external tyranny of authority for their protection in order to gain those millennia of persistence which are necessary to exhaust them and figure them out. |
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(cont.) Much is gained once the feeling has finally been cultivated in the masses (among the shallow and in the high-speed intestines of every kind) that they are not to touch everything; that there are holy experiences before which they have to take off their shoes and keep away their unclean hands—this is almost their greatest advance toward humanity. Conversely, perhaps there is nothing about so-called educated people and believers in “modern ideas” that is as nauseous as their lack of modesty and the comfortable insolence of their eyes and hands with which they touch, lick, and finger everything; and it is possible that even among the common people, among the less educated, especially among peasants, one finds today more relative nobility of taste and tactful reverence than among the newspaper-reading demi-monde of the spirit, the educated. - Nietzsche, BGE |
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I guess the universe is some particular manifestation... though it might be so complex that nothing that exists can understand it all? Maybe the programmer if there is a programmer (that's one example actually... there either is a programmer or there isn't. There either is a teapot orbitting around the moon at a specific location or there isn't. The only fogginess is a mind with its limited information and computational power trying to figure it out). If there is a programmer, the programmer might not fully understand it even. A human programmer divides a program in to smaller modules like functions to comprehend a small piece at a time. Steven Wolfram's description of the universe as akin to a cellular automata program produces the least cognitive dissonance in my neural paths currently, with the insight that a simple program can produce complex output. The "programmer" if there is one might be so otherworldly that it defies our concept of a being in a body, like maybe time itself is the programmer and the most "superior" "being" in the universe. |
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The universe has got to be beyond turing complete, whatever that means. Therefore the universe must be capable of running the universe inside of it (probably at a slower speed since microsoft minesweeper is turing complete but is probably really inefficient). But the inhabitants inside an emulation inside an emulation inside an emulation probably wouldn't know it was running slow because their minds only get updated on the next tick along with everything else in that emulation. Is it harder to imagine the universe, or to imagine nothing? What is nothing, maybe nothing is not capable of "being" therefore there is something. |
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Another thought A: being a person conceiving of an utterly impersonal world should be considered in possible world terms, where possible worlds are conceptually inter-accessible. You don't have to be in world X to conceive of it. Another thought B: there are some interesting parallels between Taoism and Hayek's neoliberalism. Hayek conceived of markets as information processors and the optimum outcome was arrived at by non-interference. Taoism conceives of the universe this way: let things run their course. Another thought C: welt, have you read Byung-Chul Han? Just started reading Psycho-Politics and it's blowing me away. |
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thread reminds me of this |
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Love Syd. My shit's all destabilized now, maybe Taoism is bad, maybe Heidegger's analogous holistic counter-enlightenment ideas swept away confidence in reason and paved the way for Hayek's antirational sense of truth as whatever the market process vomits up. Fuckity wow. |
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it's like a coin fell downstairs and hit some metal pipe. tao te chinnnnng! |
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oh hey I just found out about object oriented ontology |
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Oh I get it now, the Laozi perspective is actually correlationist, and so is Heidegger in his anthropocentrism I'm only now understanding the implications of Meillassoux and that bunch, I picked up Tim Morton's book Humankind, it's full of delicious bread crumbs tao te chingggggggggg |
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Yep, we can agree that uncarved reality would exist without us unless we use the term 'us' in a very non-standard way. I’m not sure, thought, if ‚usefulness‘ is an adequate concept to make sense of the fundamental conceptual divisions we make naturally. We inhabit a world in which the distinction between food and non-food is natural. It’s useful to observe it ifyou want to keep on living within that world. —Usefulness presupposes an aim/goal/telos.— However. 1) The baby who makes the distinction between breast and non-breast is - by making that distinction - not yet really acting in a goal-directed manner. The baby is not making the distinction in order to gain something out if it. The distinction is, as it were, already made for it (by its natural instincts). The distinction is instinctive and the baby just goes with its instincts. .. So we enter the world and follow certain patters of behavior not because we find them useful but we just act how we naturally act. …. Now once you mature and masters concepts such as ‚use‘, ‚instrument‘, ‚function‘, ‚telos‘ you can go back and analyze the instinctive distinctions and it becomes very evident that have a use insofar as they are vital for survival. Thus you can break down the pattern of behavior in a an goal/aim ‚survival‘ and an instrument ‚making the distinction between breast and non-breast‘. |
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However, here point 2) applies. If something is useful because it aids one’s life, then what is the status of one’s life? Is life useful? Life seems to be that which bestows usefulness on instruments. It doesn’t seem to be useful itself in a comparable way. But then life - as the bestower of usefulness - is more fundamental than use. But then you can’t explain the structure of our lives (= the structure that is given by the conceptual distinctions we make) by the usefulness of our concepts because the usefulness of our concepts derive from the fact that they’re aiding our lives.. But we can’t even understand what a human/subjective life would be without conceptual distinctions. So we’re going in circles and the explanatory value is dubious. An alternative candidate to use would be play. In contrast to ‚usefulness‘, which seems to require a clearly defined goal, play doesn’t need one. So it might be a better candidate for making sense of our ‚fundamental‘ relationship to ‚uncarved reality‘. |
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"hello ma'am, i'm just here to distinguish between breast and non-breast, would you kindly flop em out" |
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ok I'm not especially attached to usefulness and play is fine, in fact with its multiple shades of meaning it might be better, the play and interplay and so on. The point being that in this carved / uncarved scenario, distinctions are created by our modes of accessing the world, whether instinctive or reasoned or however motivated. But this is just nitpicking the details of correlationism, rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking metaphysical titanic and I'm in craaazy flux exploring speculative realism and associated ideas, lol Might post a big chunk of Timothy Morton later. also, tity is good |
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I haven't read Byung-Chul Han, by the way. If I remember correctly I was on the very edge of picking up one of his books and then I read an interview in which he described Glenn Gould's interpretation of Bach's Goldberg Variations as his favorite, and then - because I don't like Gould's Goldberg - I wrote him off as a philosopher. I'm aware, though, that this is a very bad reason and I'm drawn to read his book about Zen ...I'll probably get it for 4,80 euros next time I pass the bookstore |
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