Justification is part of the way humans cooperate and compete, it seems to me. — plaque flag

Yep. Wrangham gives the detailed anthropological evidence.

It is a challenging thesis. To self domesticate – become essentially peaceful and cooperative – we had to kill off the violent males until our primate reactive violence was tuned down to a minimum. We had to weed the Neanderthal alphas out of the gene pool.

That left violence to become proactive – collectively planned – rather than individually reactive and emotional. We could kill others for good social reasons.

The process was a feedback loop once language showed up to allow public rationalisation or justification.

A group's code of conduct could be normed at the level of an intergenerational cultural understanding – a body of customary practice that could undergo Darwinian fine-tuning. That code in turn allowed justified homicide when one dude in a small band of 20 or 30 hunter-gatherers made too much of a regular arse of himself.

The wiseguy would be dared to climb the high tree to get the honey. And after he had laid his weapons down and shinned up the trunk, his mates would gather up his defences and sit about waiting for him to decide to come back down and face his fate.

Shaman rituals through nights in the long house would allow the deed to be debated and coalesce as the agreed right thing. Justification would hang in the air until it developed the weight of inevitability.

Often the entropic loop was closed by eating the victim. Killing off trouble-makers both reinforced the social norms essential to a social level of organismic existence and recycled precious fat and protein within the body of this society.

Call it autophagy – the new fad goal of the biohacker/longevity crowd. :smile:

Perhaps you are misunderstanding me. My point was that such a separation was impossible or confused. The truth is the whole. — plaque flag

But the wholeness requires the separation so as to have something to unify. And the separation in turn needs a vagueness which grounds its coming into being as being the being that is beyond being itself.

So wholeness – in the systems sense – is irreducibly triadic. All three levels are "the one".

You sound like you want to make the separation secondary to the unity. Which would be the brand of Hegelianism that Fichte popularised. Hegel was striving to do what Peirce actually did. Show how unity is irreducibly triadic.

Unity itself has to develop into concrete being by a process of logical becoming.

Is that metaphysical image actually the complex heart of a self-organizing, self-articulating reality ? — plaque flag

Metaphysics grounds the science. It establishes the causal logic that gets stuck into our mathematical theories. And from the maths, we can generate the measureable predictions which inductively justify our logical deductions.

This is another crucial feature of Peircean pragamatics/semiotics. It describes both epistemology and ontology in the one causal metaphysics. The way we humans model the world – using a rigourous and objectifying method – is also the causal logic of how that world itself works. It is how the Cosmos developed into being.

That is why both cosmology and neurology have converged on the science of dissipative structure as their fundamental level of description. The Bayesian brain and the holographic universe.

You give too much credence to this romantic notion of the romantic reaction to the industrial revolution. It was there in Ecclesiastes and Gilgamesh. — schopenhauer1

Argument by non sequitur.

I am explaining the current conditions. There is no justification... — schopenhauer1

Assertion rather than argument. "Move to dismiss, m'lud."

No other animal has that degree of abstraction, deliberation, and thus self-awareness. — schopenhauer1

No other animal has the entropic drive of half a billion years of dense hydrocarbons flowing through their veins. They are all pallid creatures living off whatever the sunshine brings today, not exploding with the pressure of unimaginable surging energy - all that fossil fuel that just desparately demands to be burned.

You think "self-awareness" is any more than pissing into the tornado here? I live among humans. I'm well aware of just how little will they can actually summon to counteract the constraints imposed by their environments.

The asymmetry or injustice or radical break certainly exists. But – as is always the case – it is entropic.

The human journey is about bumbling into whatever is the next entropic bonanza that makes itself available to our evolving intelligence.

Argument by non sequitur. — apokrisis

I think it is definitely sequitur.

Assertion rather than argument. "Move to dismiss, m'lud." — apokrisis

Correcting wrong characterization from your non sequitur.

More coming hold on..

The asymmetry or injustice or radical break certainly exists. But – as is always the case – it is entropic.

The human journey is about bumbling into whatever is the next entropic bonanza that makes itself available to our evolving intelligence. — apokrisis

I am explaining what it's like to be the creature that can do things it doesn't want to and can do things existentially driven (suicide). Even other apes, and complex mammals and birds don't have that kind of self-awareness.

Perhaps some bonanza will be there. I don't doubt it. I am just saying what it is to be this embodied break (asymmetry if you want) from the rest of nature.

I was into pomo back in the day, though Zizek would disagree with such a label. The fact that he labels himself a Lacanian, makes it difficult to not attribute to him a kind of postmodern philosophical orientation, not to mention his discussions of Deleuze, Foucault and occasionally Derrida.

I saw too many of his lectures, documentaries and read his big book Less Than Nothing. His thought is difficult to summarize and his categorization of ontology/epistemology as the symbolic, the imaginary and the real, is arbitrary to me.

But, concerning the OP, I believe he has mentioned that he thinks that consciousness arose to detect when something goes wrong.

He gives interesting, if somewhat exotic examples of paradoxical situations, but his scholarship is quite bad and his obsession with Hegel makes him like counterintuitive thought way too often in a manner that, if taken too far, might be distorting to rational thinking.

He is best taken as a person who occasionally says something useful, but I wouldn't look for a systematic philosophy in his thinking, despite his many attempts to lay it out.

Perhaps his best stuff are his documentaries, they are fun, especially his Perverts Guide films. All to be taken with grains of salt.

It does represent an exile from Eden of sorts. A break. — schopenhauer1

:up:

Eden and that break were created at the same time.

It is a challenging thesis. To self domesticate – become essentially peaceful and cooperative – we had to kill off the violent males until our primate reactive violence was tuned down to a minimum. We had to weed the Neanderthal alphas out of the gene pool. — apokrisis

Intense, but it makes sense. Organized crime is / becomes law.

Shaman rituals through nights in the long house would allow the deed to be debated and coalesce as the agreed right thing. Justification would hang in the air until it developed the weight of inevitability. — apokrisis

The thickening of justification, yes.

You sound like you want to make the separation secondary to the unity. Which would be the brand of Hegelianism that Fichte popularised. Hegel was striving to do what Peirce actually did. Show how unity is irreducibly triadic. — apokrisis

Yes, I think I was pointing at a primordial unity. But yes Hegel talks of a round trip, also interpreting the Christian Trinity in a new way (I don't remember the details.)

The way we humans model the world – using a rigourous and objectifying method – is also the causal logic of how that world itself works. It is how the Cosmos developed into being. — apokrisis

If memory serves, you lean toward indirect realism. Is that correct ? Are you offering a model or a map that is not the territory itself ? Some understandings of Hegel identity map and territory.

Eden and that break were created at the same time. — plaque flag

Eden = no self-awareness. No ability to be uber-deliberative and to thus be existential. There was a time when there was no break.

Eden = no self-awareness. No ability to be uber-deliberative and to thus be existential. There was a time when there was no break. — schopenhauer1

Sure, but they couldn't enjoy it. Youth is wasted on the young.

Even other apes, and complex mammals and birds don't have that kind of self-awareness. — schopenhauer1

Or more critically, the social context which could even give such ingrained negativity any kind of accepted cultural interpretation.

There is no "you" having these thoughts without the romantic response to be the "unrequested self behind the forced social mask" that has a social history going all the way back to Ecclesiastes and Gilgamesh, as you so triumphantly proclaim.

But let's not derail another thread with your persistent Pessimism. That wasn't the subject here.

There is no "you" having these thoughts without the romantic response to be the "unrequested self behind the forced social mask" that has a social history going all the way back to Ecclesiastes and Gilgamesh, as you so triumphantly proclaim.

But let's not derail another thread with your persistent Pessimism. That wasn't the subject here. — apokrisis

Zizek might not agree. Anyways, pessimism goes part and parcel with being human. while our cultural and social environment may shape the way we understand and express our self-awareness, it doesn't necessarily negate the fact that self-awareness is an innate aspect of human consciousness.

Caveman and hunter-gatherers have access to doing things they would not want to do and suicide. But even if that were not true, the fact that we are a species with this capacity (exaptation though it might be), is still the case, however it formed. You can't banish self-awareness because you thus said "No this wasn't how it started!". Doesn't work like that.

Sure, but they couldn't enjoy it. Youth is wasted on the young. — plaque flag

That is how they enjoy(ed) it. The enjoyment is not knowing. The Tao and Nirvana and Flow state we are always seeking. Broken tool man.

If memory serves, you lean toward indirect realism. Is that correct ? — plaque flag

Correct enough. I'm a pragmatist if I have to wave any flag.

Are you offering a model or a map that is not the territory itself ? — plaque flag

As I stressed earlier, the modelling relation says the map is a model of a territory with us in it. So it is a selfish view. An Umwelt as von Uexküll put it. Thus it ain't actually a map of a territory in the usual lumpen realist sense.

Peirce chose to call it objective idealism. But that confuses folk too.

Again think of the pilot who sees the world as the still centre of a rapid flow. The centre is parsed as the self and its target. The flow is parsed as reality whizzing by until the feeling of wheels kissing a runway.

The map contains two fictions – the "self" and the "world". As Kant says, we are stuck in the phenomenal and cannot truly represent the thing in itself.

But on the other hand, this semiotic relation is what works for life and mind as encoding structure that can surf the world's entropic gradients with practiced habit.

Epistemology is mad if it thinks there is something to "fix" here – all those tired old AP moans about theories of truth and Goedelian incompleteness.

Zizek might not agree. — schopenhauer1

Post your support for your assertion. Do the work.

As I stressed earlier, the modelling relation says the map is a model of a territory with us in it. So it is a selfish view. An Umwelt as von Uexküll put it. Thus it ain't actually a map of a territory in the usual lumpen realist sense. — apokrisis

Thanks ! I hope I'm starting to understand your view.

So is it a map constructed by networked human brains which includes avatars of those brains ? And is your metaphysics necessarily deeply human in that sense ? Is there something like a reality-in-itself as territory ? Or is this 'territory' something like the map's boundary ?

The map contains two fictions – the "self" and the "world". As Kant says, we are stuck in the phenomenal and cannot truly represent the thing in itself. — apokrisis

What you count our manifest image (Sellars) or umvelt as part of this ? Is the land of marriages and contracts within this larger fiction ? Then physics and metaphysics are specialized focuses on deep structure ?

Schopenhauer is the philosopher of the Real, of the traumatic kernel that resists symbolization, of the traumatic encounter with the Thing that cannot be represented" — The Sublime Object of Ideology

But in general, his philosophy acknowledges the play between authenticity and power structures that help us internalize habits of thought.. Things that I was emphasizing earlier about us being an animal that has habits but can also break free of those habits.. A being with the self-awareness understanding bad faith....

That is how they enjoy(ed) it. The enjoyment is not knowing. The Tao and Nirvana and Flow state we are always seeking. Broken tool man. — schopenhauer1

:up:

We get flow states too, sometimes! Our sense of exile from the garden comes and goes. Sometimes we spread our singed wings and laugh. Horror and glory, sorrow and ecstasy. Lows and highs. I just can't pretend that life is never a positive good. I don't deny hellfire either. I just try to dodge it.

So how are…

[quote"]the traumatic kernel that resists symbolization, of the traumatic encounter with the Thing that cannot be represented"[/quote]

and …

[quote"]…us being an animal that has habits but can also break free of those habits.. A being with the self-awareness understanding bad faith....[/quote]

… the same concern?

But on the other hand, this semiotic relation is what works for life and mind as encoding structure that can surf the world's entropic gradients with practiced habit. — apokrisis

:up:

As Nietzsche put, life is exploitation. It is this surfing. The model making mind is an army of mapping metaphors.

Zizek is a continental guy. Schopenhauer, Hegel, Marx, Lacan, Kierkegaard, are all on his radar. It's the well he draws from.

There's a strong tradition of pessimistic thought there. Critiquing the power structure regarding things out of our power to control. The Real is what is out of our power, eludes symbolic interpretations and answers.

The Real is what is out of our power, eludes symbolic interpretations and answers. — schopenhauer1

I think it's cool. It's paradoxical Romantic metaphysical psychoanalytic poetry.

I think it's cool. It's paradoxical Romantic metaphysical psychoanalytic poetry. — plaque flag

I think Guy Debord is similar there with his idea of The Spectacle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle

As it says here:

Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation: "All that once was directly lived has become mere representation."[2] Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing."[3] This condition, according to Debord, is the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life."[4] — Wiki

Actually I'm already a reader of Zizek and Debord. I wish I kept my copy of The Sublime Object... I did keep my Debord. Also read Debord's weird autobio, cool stuff.

Actually I'm already a reader of Zizek and Debord. I wish I kept my copy of The Sublime Object... I did keep my Debord. Also read his weird autobio, cool stuff. — plaque flag

Sorry to go over well-trodden ground. Just keeping up with the thread.. Although I guess it's not really Zizek's "consciousness" theory as much as his epistemology of politics.

There's a strong tradition of pessimistic thought there. — schopenhauer1

But your quote spoke of an epistemic trauma and your own complaint is of an ontological trauma.

Shome category error shurely?