The unknown is scary, possibly the scariest thing, so skeletons calm the poor prey animal so it doesn't constantly freak out at every twig breakage (out on the savannah). — frank

ha, :up:

Yeah, I think you're right that there has to be a 'skeleton' - and definitely agree that that's what conspiracy theories are; its probably no accident that people are most apt to get into conspiracy theories when there's an absence - or breakdown- of their unifying frame (like, in some ways Plato's theory of forms is a 'conspiracy theory' taking root in the vacuum left by Socrates' aporetic whirlpool.)

I guess my beef is something like: I think evolutionary theory is better approached as a bone (a good sturdy one, to be sure, maybe the femur) but is too often used as the entire skeleton.

But actually, I don't think that is what non-violent communication is about. It's not a theory that only special non-violent people can understand, it's something grumpy, traumatised, people can learn to do sometimes, something your everyday relationship counsellor might try and do with their clients, or peace brokers could model and teach in their negotiations, or my wife and I might use to defuse our conflicts. It's a very humdrum revolution for part-time peacemakers, not enlightenment for the unenlightened.. — unenlightened

Well shoot, I can't argue with that
----
(no hidden meaning here, I just straightforwardly get what you're saying and it makes sense.)

I like this advice. I can be grumpy sometimes and it is my least useful and most unattractive attribute. — Tom Storm

Same here. I'm trying to find a way to productively channel that grumpy energy. In the meantime, I've found that self-criticizing myself for being grumpy - as you describe, and which is what I usually do too - creates a bad feedback loop that gets me more grumpy. (it's what you see in kids too: if a kid is grumpy and parents make a thing of it, it perpetuates itself.) When I'm able to allow myself to just be grumpy, and unattractive and unuseful, it plays itself out much quicker. The cliche of relating to yourself the way you relate to friends seems true too - when a friend's grumpy, you just give them some space until it dissipates, and don't usually judge it too harshly.

Since you are generalising the personal here, — unenlightened

Right, this is the dialectical maneuver in a nutshell. So, to take that tactics lens: You're I know-you-are-ing the but-what-am-I. If we both nakedly did the dialectical maneuvers to one another it would be two mirrors facing one another and it would reflect infinitely out a glitchy emptiness. The dialectic is an engine that needs fuel, and another dialectic can't fuel it.

I think we both, in different ways, stumbled, at some point upon the insight - oh! you can 'zoom-out' a level and take others statements about stuff as the content for a 'higher-level' (zoomed-out) discussion.

I think we also both, in different ways, stumbled upon people who we ingenuously believed were pointing a way out of it.

And I think we both, in different ways, believe that pointing - the pointing of those we admired - to be genuinely pointing to something real. But while we soak up their vibes, and points, we nevertheless remain gummily-stuck to the security of the dialectically-able anchor point.

And - this is my main feeling - I think this is all wrapped up somehow in good/bad stuff. It's bad to post to look clever - but we both do it. At the same time - to get more personal - we both post stuff, occasionally, that attempts to create and sustain a shared-vibe. As when you post a youtube video with a song - trying to get closer to a shared feeling. I admire that because the end-point, telos, whatever, is to feel some shared attunement with others - a shared attunement where the person saying 'shared attunement' is missing the point. But what happens invariably is something disrupts that.

Gary Snyder - american poet if you don't know him, but i bet you do - once said that most western buddhism is crypto-protestantism. I thInk I agree. There is something in [all the pysch-systems guys i mentioned ] that is clinically, x-raying sin.* Hypocrisy. The pharisees say this, but they're really aiming to satisfy base urges through the veneer of spirituality. The real spirituality is: x. Not like those other threads.

I've been reading a lot about Shamanism and Taoism. There is transcendence but there's also a lot of pretty 'vulgar' everything. What comes out in a shamanic ritual? every emotion - a shaman (and the community watching) feel joy, anger, revulsion, happiness, sadness - it builds on itself - it builds and builds. Catharsis means getting all the emotions unstuck to fling them up. One of the worst feelings is being sick and wanting to puke but you can't. You're sick in every part of your body, you are sickness. And then the feeling after puking is great.

Imo, The greatest trick the ego ever pulled is to focus our attention on 'spiritual' emotions while foreclosing others. The more you foreclose them, the stronger they bubble up underneath, the more you have to resist them, the more appealing the idea of self who has the right emotions and approaches.

So: you never get to puke. You feel sick and, feeling sick, need a release. (this is why I brought up J Krishnamurti earlier. I imagine you know of his experience with 'the process' - but I found that, when I googled it, it takes some digging to get to it. If you don't know, 'the process' was a thing Krishnamurti experienced as a kind of agonizing nonsensical writhing of the body and emotions that would sometimes last for hours or more. He would undergo it constantly, before appearing on state, stiff and wooden, to talk spiritually of spiritual things.)

Needs and tactics: The thing with needs is they aren't just in 'the self' and then projected onto others through tactics. Back to Gary Snyder & cryptoprotestantism - & the language of the biblical prophets who are constantly saying that the people of israel have fallen into using tactics to manipulate God, and he won't have it any more (e.g. 'the smoke of your altars is irritating gods nostrils!' etc)

Babies needs are always other-directed, from the beginning. Needs are always personalized So are ours. We need to live and puke our emotions, personally, in order to live and enjoy them at others. Otherwise we'll oscillate between idealizing non-emotion and puking in the wrong spot - then, guilty, go back to idealizing the right emotions and so forth. This is why Alan watts is such a good example: dialectically right-on-the-money, getting onto the stage and saying it all, then leaving the stage, and his family, to drink.

-----
*'sin' in the original sense - a state of being that is off the path. Using tactics because separated from needs.

I'd add "and those who can do neither, post." I think I'm deeply flawed, hopefully not dangerous, but certainly confused and frustrated & deeply mistrustful of everyone (myself included)

Isn't there something violent in this whole schema of needs and tactics, and the rest? Who talks about people in terms of needs and tactics, like this? The R D Laing of Knots, the Eric Berne of Games People Play, the Gregory Bateson of Many Books, the Alan Watts of Many Lectures.

We know of all these people that they were difficult in their own lives - their own relationships fell ever apart - but razor-sharp and charming while appraising the situations of others. Why is that?

I read a blogpost by an anonymous psychiatrist to the effect of: there are a disproportionate number of psychiatrists' children hospitalized with personality disorders. Why is that?

That's personalised so as to become a tactic, not just a need. — unenlightened

Underlines mine.

[Believing that tactics means personalized, and personalizing means tactics]
^
|
V
[going up a level to impersonally map the tactics of others]

Cause & Effect isn't clear (hence the weird format) but the two seem deeply related.

(I'm guilty here too, but do you see what I mean?)

I don't think I'm quite following which part you've disagreed with. — Marty

Most of it. In my experience people are basically always motivated by emotion. They can act for good reasons, in a space of reasons - but that's only if that space already aligns with their emotions. I think people - like me, often, for example- tend to 'zoom in' into the space of reasons, and pretend it's sufficient in-and-of-itself, when they're trying to disavow their emotions. Especially if they're unpleasant emotions which don't sync up with one's idea of oneself.

I think we think probably differently about ethics. I think its more about tuning in to subtler emotional frequencies rather than climbing out of affects into reason. But I'd rather leave that as a difference between us than debate it.

Anyway, @StreetlightX if you do ever, one day, feel a moment of happiness, I hope you can enjoy it and not reflexively search for the right citations to contextualize and justify it. Joy -outside, communal - awaits all those who will partake of it. happiness may be solitary & bourgeois, but academic scruples are even more so. You don't need dead europeans to underwrite a day off.


Just live your life man!

Long time, Marty

So, to answer your OP, I think it's the good part of 'good reason' that is the sticky point. I know you know your german idealists, and your Nietzsche, so I'll quickly play the card I think apt here: there is no 'good reason' without some form of valuation, and valuation is inseparable from living and from desire.

Now if you're acting in some space where everyone is in agreement about the relevant values, then, yes, for all intents and purposes, you can parse whats happening with a 'good-reason' lens, no remainder. The desire is already 'priced-in' so to speak, and needn't be laboriously pointed-to every step of the way.

In any circumscribed domain, you can use a model, and describe how agents act accordingly. Nothing wrong with that, I think. But it's a carved out space.

Does an 'expression of joy' lead to (or come from) emancipatory / transgressive conduct or servile / debased conduct? Is it used for medicine or to poison? Maybe something along those lines ... — 180 Proof

:up:


I'm pretty sure I feel you here.

I may be be wrong ,but it feels like the subtext of what you're talking about is, at root, the joy of being part of a real-life community sharing in something outside of yourself, sharing it with others. But then, as soon as that wouldn't-it-be-nice begins to come in, the spectre of 'but isn't that also how fascism works?' pops up. Not just fascism but any happy group thats happy through communally purging some scapegoat. If that's right, it's also a pattern of thought that I'm afflicted by.

I'm reading Walt Whitman's Song of Myself*, for the first time, and it's mostly pure ecstatic (with all the vibey and etymological resonances of that word), which is how, by osmosis, we all think about Whitman. But - & I didn't expect this - at one point, late in the poem ( & it's a very long poem) he begins to slip into darker territory; at first in his same joyous register, but slowly tending more and more morose and then:

Enough! Enough! Enough!
Some how I have been stunn'd. Stand back!
Give me a little time beyond my cuff'd head, slumbers, dreams
gaping,
I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.

That I could forget the mockers and insults!
That I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of the
bludgeons and hammers!
That i could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and
bloody crowing!

I remember now — Whitman

A lot follows, and it would be ridiculous to reduce it to any one thing, but a large part of what he does after that [event/trauma/breach] is to imaginatively work through a process of healing, defending, consoling and so forth - and it's all worked out, as is his fashion, in very concrete scenes of such processes taking place (enter the academic register: In this poem he always expresses an emotion or idea by providing a series of tableaux that exemplify it; so, here, he presents a succession of tableaux exemplifying the idea of the active protection and aiding of a convalescent)

Maybe there's something to that - being attuned enough to the joyous whole to share in it, but aware enough to say 'enough!' when it spills over into something sinister. He literally puts the poem on pause to help all the sufferers, before he will resume the joy

(even the antinatalists!


"Down-hearted doubters dull and excluded,
Frivolous, sullen, moping, angry, affected, dishearten'd, atheistical,
I know every one of you, I know the sea of torment, doubt despair
and unbelief.

[...]
Be at peace bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mopers,
I take my place among you as much as among
any,
The past is the push of you, me, all, precisely the same,
And what is yet untried and afterward is for you, me, all precisely
the same.

I do not know what is untried and afterward,
But I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail.)


I do think that there is a point here where thought really can't have any purchase. There can't be any cognitive guarantee that a given, shared, joy is of the type that can be apodictically condoned - there has to be some intuition or art in figuring out if it's one or the other.

& I do also think happiness and tranquility have their place. There is an element to the encounter-with-the-outside in certain deleuzian strands that reminds me of doing the oregon trail at strenuous-pace-no-rations - a saint might handle it ( or not handle it, and die beautifullly worn-out) but there's something to be said for rejuvenation (to take another video game metaphor - if the world of capitalism is resident evil, you have to avail yourself of the soft music of the safe room, from time to time.)


----

*Song of hisself, yes, but he's clear he means (and the poem bears it out) that his 'self' is the shared experience of a collective

It's interesting to compare deGrasse Tyson to Penrose. deGrasse Tyson, of course, inherited Comos. Penrose does interviews but he's sort of withdrawn, gesturing as best he can at something untranslatable. You can see deGrasse Tyson at a beer hall, on trivia night. Penrose is sort of library-at-the-end-the-night-with-brandy.

I think there might be a hard limit. I am only slowly accepting I won't understand our age's cosmology and physics. I wonder if part of the problem is that, with religion, it was always clear what register a mass, or a elusinian mystery, was supposed to be in - its not clear what register science is supposed to be in. And part of that is the priests an mystery-guardians were directly tapped in, in a directly transmissible way - now there's always an inherent difference - they know the science, you don't, and its not a matter of consecration, or induction. They're just the people with the brains and focus, who learned it. What to make of it? We have to cobble it together from their various presentations, in totally different registers.

For example, the Carl Sagan Cosmos used the imagery of a spaceship cruising. And then, imagine a planetarium at 12. A feynman lecture. a look at the equations in a book one time. Brian Greene, softly guiding you. Carlo Rovelli trying to make it weird and electric but intuitive. All these very distinct vibes on the same subject, but you can only know the subject through years of study.

What's the song? a quick glance at the clock tells me too late to buy a beer, but i got some weed and tobacco.

I found him fascinating once but was eventually put off by certain contradictions. That's how complicated this game can get. There's always a cave or a bottle or a matrix. We can't escape this structure completely without inhabiting it naively, so we seek and half-find a reasonable version of it.

(?) — j0e

Yeah, i don't know, I'm in the same boat. I've really wanted a guru at parts in my life, and have alwaysfound something to distrust in everyone. I like the forum split in some ways. argue stuff on here, live a normal and unphilosophically related life irl. I don't have a mentor but i'd like to think if I found one I wouldn't hold him to a nirvana thing - I'd just try to figure out how he managed not to go berserk by 60, and try to learn from that? I assume anyone I trust will eventually do something I find abhorrent. I do things I find abhorrent. So what I'm hoping is I can find peace of mind to be like, ok yeah, you've lived this life too [x], how'd you make it work?

Right! the impulse is good. And, to be fair to science, you can do the same thing to the arts. It's fun to mess around with paint, it's enthralling to have a vision of something pretty, and painstakingly paint it - maybe even a painting of a black widow laying eggs. But then you get to school and it's like - you want to paint a black widow laying eggs? At that point, you, the undergrad painter, have to suss out what's happening and learn what's accepted. If you have the skill to do so and go through the gauntlet ( if you have: pure talent, political knowhow, emotional sympathy, intellectual knowledge of the state of affairs) you can pull a Georgia O Keefe and paint black widows laying eggs. but only after squeezing through it. And I guess I don't think that's entirely wrong - the vision has to be tempered by the times, and its ability to ascend beyond the times is only legitimate if its been tested by them.

But that's it - there's something similar about reposting a 'fuckyeahscience' facebook post and a 'fuckyeahart' van gogh - that is just pure signaling, in the same way.

All that rigamarole and whatever it is - i guess its like 'first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then then there is' - but it's like a push to get back to the simple thing

Yeah, that's it exactly.

I think I relate & agree here. I tend to blend the prestige issue with the demarcation issue. I think ordinary people care about science because of its power. We can lump prediction and control into coping if we want, or tools that work with or without their users' faith in them (where Buddhism or Satanism or Hegelianism may or may not work.) — j0e

Right - science yields antibiotics (to take the low-hanging, cliche defense of science), but that doesn't get at the everyday way many people relate to Science, capital S. I know some people who delight in digging up evidence as to why Jesus wasn't a real figure, while idealizing science. That thing is pure ideology (I think they'd probably be the same people who, if they lived at the time of Hezekiah, would have paid lipservice to his rediscovery of Deuteronomy while bashing the other beliefs of the time. i.e. 'the rubes in the rural areas still pray to Ishtar while those in the know, know that the power-center is pure Mosaic. If you're not a redneck, it's clear. Everyone I know at the temple agrees, and we have a good laugh at their expense, drinking wine at home.)

But, still, science has antibiotics and a million other things, in a way Hezekiah doesn't. Certainly. I think I want to say that the impulse behind the scientific method is the same impulse we have when we are skeptical of its claim to truth. And that, I think, is good. The same monks who thought hierarchy was bunk, and wanted to experiment, came up with ways to experiment. We can come up with ways to value what they did, and also see how it's limiting in some ways.

In this thread, as opposed to that thread — unenlightened

why not get angry and violent in a space where its ok to do so?

There's a violence and anger in any moral dialectic, no matter how far you zoom out. They're bad because they think they're good (and i'm good because I know I"m bad), fed through the dialectic machine, can spiral out into infinity (I'm a severely wounded veteran of that spiral.)

I feel you, strongly, but what if you just are mean somewhere with an equal who equally wants to be mean?

(i know this sounds dumb, but I can cite my sources to make it intellectually plausible. I don't say this as someone with an attraction to life-as-violence; I say it as someone with an abusive relationship with an internal moral-voice, which can dialectically unravel any attempt at being good I can muster. I agree that nonviolent conversation is the way to go; I also think that we can't will ourselves into it. Personal landing-point, as of now: accept original sin, hope for grace. But meanwhile, do meditation, help friends and family when they need, cook good meals, so forth. And maybe sometimes be the grumpy person when doing it?)

Think of J Krisnamurti and the process. There's always a shadow-undergoing underlying the goodness, right? If we can't process like jk, maybe we have to find a release for our anger elsewhere, until we're graced with freedom from it?

Sure. Of course there are those 'sages' who carefully orchestrate for others to testify on their behalf. Perhaps the origins of marketing.

The figure who I would choose as a kind of archetype of the Sage is Socrates. — Tom Storm

Yeah, that's a good point. That was always my criticism of U.G. Krishnamurti, back when I used to talk to people who talked about U.G. Krishnamurti. His thing was that he didn't care at all about guruhood, that people came to him and he didn't even want it. Still, on his deathbed he dictated a guru-y swan-song. He knew what he was doing the whole time. So it goes.

My feeling is that Socrates was self-consciously an anti-sage. I think he was a charismatic, genuine, figure who delighted in good-naturedly poking at the weakpoints of other would-be-sages (but was he only that? it's not clear from Plato what exactly Socrates' relation was to the idea of forms.... he might not have been solely someone who only knew that he knew nothing. He might have had an idea, and carefully popped all the other balloons until there was space for his own thing. It's hard to say, only having Plato's Soctrates. The Parmenides is a weird text in this respect.)

I can make sense of this as 'pure' science only predicting and not intervening. I like the distinction, but I think pure science would be trapped at a certain level without the invention of various scientific instruments which would contaminate that purity. Consider the telescope that controls light and allows for new observations and new predictions. — j0e

Good point - a scientific experiment, I suppose (I'm not well read on this, admittedly), requires setting up an environment that controls for variables (by artificially removing them?) Yeah, on reflection, I think you're right here.

Part of my knee-jerk reaction against the relationship between science & control is that sometimes people make too much hay out of the relation of power to knowledge in science and then draw over-reaching conclusions. Now, I don't think that's what you were doing here, but I think I've built up a reflex to signs of that and reflexively responded along those lines.

I think there's a naturalized esotericism that's defensible (like an inner circle that gets some metaphor as a metaphor, or an inner circle that gets be bop.) But this stuff is all around us. So I think the issue is the intersection of esotericism and science, where esoteric statements try to rival science, where creation myths are taken as something like (quasi-)scientific hypotheses. As far as science goes, I pretty much boil it down to prediction and control. These are things that even non-experts can judge. No grand metaphysics need be attached as far as I can see. The epistemology might be stone - aged simple. Do the tools work for everyone, whether one expects them to or not? — j0e

Yeah, when I think of naturalized esotericism, I tend to think of artistic movements. That sort of thing feels inevitable, and natural to me. Of course there will be the temptation for those, in a circle, to use their privileged space in the circle for esteem, sex etc - but, that's part of it, it's hard to find fault there.

(in some cases, it's less clear - a moralist's approach on inner circles, well thought-out: https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/)

I think science is inherently predictive (repeatability being such a key part of the scientific method) but accidentally in service of control. 'Contingent' might be better than 'accidental.' But in any case, I think it's true science has tended to be in service of control. My personal feeling is that science is a sub-activity within the field-of-various-activities that is life, and any claims within that field are fine - anything that goes beyond that is also fine, but has extended beyond science, and is open to debate.

Coming in too late to read all the way through, but based on first-page: 'you shall know them by their fruits', a frame 180 referenced, is a good one. If there's such a thing as a 'true' sage, I imagine he'd show, not say (to tie it back to W) Last thing he'd be concerned with is establishing that there are true sages, and that he is one, or has studied under one.

Of course, it's just a human fact that we desire recognition. You can't fault someone for desiring that, in moderation. But the thing of wanting to be recognized for recognizing the overcoming-of-recognition - that's a swampy space to be in. If, on the other hand, its possible to get outside that, you wouldn't, having gotten-out, need to be recognized for it. So either way, whether the esoteric is real or not, someone who seems to be asking to be recognized for being in alliance with the esoteric is probably not worth listening to, at least not on the subject of the esoteric (they might, if a lawyer, still have sound legal advice) (Even if esoteric knowledge is real, and they've tasted it, they're standing in their own way. I think the gospels are really good on this pragmatic issue.)

Procedurally, on pf, I think they're allowed.
But also: the world insults us, continually.
Is that insult legitimate?
Maybe a thread on legitimacy would best-focus the anti-natalist question. Not joking.
Is it legitimate that I live to suffer, that others cause others to suffer? etc.
Book of Job?

All a little digressive- but at the same time - skill, childhood, mastery - it all ties back into the 'I' and "we" from the beginning. (I add, because i can feel myself tending gravitationally, narrowing to a point, even though I'm talking about levitational things on my way to that gravitational narrowing) Up! The world we of skill we grow into and live within is always floating over some deep well/chasm you can't learn better by falling in.

This anti-theoretical and anti-philosophical notion of skill...I think Heidegger can be read as 'dasein is (primarily)skill.' Nice that we have a monosyllabic English word. Better than know-how in that words and deeds live together, no exact boundary between them. — j0e

Yes! And the thing of skill or art or mastery is its not reducible - you know it when you see it, and if you loose all the accumulated scales-over-the-eyes of growing up, you can look back at childhood, go over memories, and see clearly (when you were a kid, witnessing grown-ups) who had it -for this, or for that - and who didn't. I think that test (if a child witnessed me doing this, or that now, what would they think?) is a primary one. Of course it's not all that - a kid might be impressed, even though you fuck up the pottery. But it's a good mental-jiggle to slot out of the fake stuff, and recalibrate with the real. Recognition among craftsmen is as important, but also if there's nothing in your life you can do that you can't explain and show to a child , delighting them- you're probably on the wrong path.

@j0e beautiful bouquet of passages. I really like the archipelago-vibe - a series of loosely connected passages - loose enough (like the resemblance between games) to allow fortuitous connections, but tight enough to have a discernible throughline.

I'm going to come in a little heavy-handed, and focus on one theme - hopefully I can add to that whole, while not unduly gravitizing one part.

Picking out one flower:

[T]he idea that the most basic linguistic know–how is not mastery of proprieties of use that can be expressed once and for all in a fixed set of rules, but the capacity to stay afloat and find and make one’s way on the surface of the raging white–water river of discursive communal practice that we always find ourselves having been thrown into (Wittgensteinian Geworfenheit) is itself a pragmatist insight. It is one that Dewey endorses and applauds. And it is a pragmatist thought that owes more to Hegel than it does to Kant. . — Brandom

(i)Brandom's 'raging white-water river' image is fantastic, and honestly (having read only a little of him) a nice surprise. He has felt dry to me in the past - this is a living, breathing, apt, image.

(ii) While I was reading the earlier posts, pre-Brandom - the posts with Wittgenstein talking about generality and the indigestive hunger for explanation, I kept thinking 'Hegel, this is Hegel.'

At first blush, tha's counter-intuitive because Hegel, in our collective imagination, is the arch-everything-has-its-specific-place guy - but if you read his Phenomenology, there is a long, insightful discussion of the connection between reason & explanation.

There is also an early discussion of 'mystery traditions' that leads him to the nothingness at the heart of revelation.If he means literally the mystery traditions, this is reductive and missing-the-point, but I don't think that's what he's about. I think he's foreshadowing something that comes into play more explicitly a bit later on. What do we get we get to the explanatory center?

Explanation is a human activity. It takes one level, x, the explanandum - and links it to another level, y, the explanans. in context, in the proper language games, this is a super useful tool! Science makes use of it all the time, and we have rockets and penicillin and VR etc. But when it's taken out of those contexts - when the indigestive hunger is looking to be satisfied - then (here's where Hegel really breaks it down) what is explanation? Metaphysically it can't satisfy. It can only link descriptions between different levels. Maybe you say x is the expression of y. Or maybe you say y causes x. But the indigestive, metaphysical, hunger expects]explanation to supply - offer the substantial heft - of the final satisfying thing - when all it can do - all its constructed to do - is establish linkages between levels.Wittgenstein breaks his spade to show the bedrock, and Hegel posits a 'inverted world' to show there's only so far you can go.

Just a digression from the main course of the posts, hopefully legible.

This seems to assume that people constantly contrast their experiences with death on offer to give them stakes and texture, and that seems very wrong.

Life has stakes because of the different paths it can take, not because it has an end. — Echarmion

I think that's fair. Upon reflection, death, per se, isn't what gives my life flavor either ( full disclosure: I'm a staunch believer in reincarnation, but even if I wasn't...)

Let me put it another way. The reason why [acting in one way further unfurls one path, while foreclosing another] gives meaning and texture is that there is the possibility of some paths leading to very frightful things. For those that believe in a single life, one of those frightful things - often ( but not always) the most frightful thing - is death.

But, agreeing with your point, It could also be other things: having a child who rejects you, terminal-alcoholism, inflicting irreversible pain on someone you love. Some alternative paths, even for a one-lifer, are worth than death.

On the other hand, maybe a road not taken could have offered: reconciliation with an estranged child; recovery; integration into a loving community. Again, whether you believe in multiple lives or not, these things are meaningful, and the possibility of those possibilities not being actualized produces very high stakes.

I think 'death' is often used as shorthand for 'worst possible outcome' and I was posting in that key, but I agree that it's not the only, or even most-moving key.

At the same time, I think there is something to the fact that death imposes an inexorable time-limit on righting wrongs. If we had available infinite time, we could have infinite stabs on making things right. We didn't go down this path, went down the other. 'Well, given infinite time, we'll go down the other next time.' So even in those non-death scenarios, where other things have the more profound impact, death still plays a strong secondary role - as a countdown clock.

Congrats on the computer!

I'm still bullish on pets.com . It's a long game. On the dark web, we holders of the pets.com/bitcoin/sega/crystal pepsi ETF have invented marvelous new financial instruments that work even for non-existent assets. It's very heidegerrean - we play cards while the nothing noths, and always-already profit.

No worries! just wanted to make sure. (plus, I think, having seen 'pace' in both forums & formal texts, that it can be legitimately used in both ways - which is a big oversight, imo, on the part of whichever providential agency is tasked with overseeing semantic evolution) But the upshot is - we do agree for sure.

But (pace csalisbury), there's this tendency for everyone to sometimes engage in philosophical reflection. — fdrake

I actually think we agree here (though I'm still shaky on the meaning/usage of 'pace.' I'd long taken it to mean 'contra, with respect' but have since seen it used in different ways elsewhere, so I may misunderstand you.)

From a recent conversation with Snakes

hey joe.

I don't know that I folllow you, (beyond , I think? an ironic undermining of philosophy, which there with you) but I will say I actually like Jordan Peterson, for the most part (IM me for details/apologia) Don't like Eric (IM me anyway, always love to talk)

When this thread goes out of fashion again for a year ...or even six months, that's when bitcoin is very interesting. At least it has dealt obstacles, that is for sure. But have we yet seen any collapse in crypto or something marketed as crypto?

Somehow I don't buy the "hyperinflation immediately" -idea, so I guess that we will have again a similar roller coaster ride in the financial markets as we had in last year. — ssu

This thread's activity probably isn't a good index for tracking bitcoin's value. The thread was last active, save a handful of posts, around 6 months ago before it went up all that much. It was silent during most of the steepest rises.

Yeah he has some prime position for something to do with Thiel & finance. I don't begrudge him that. I'm just trying to say that that fact makes him outside of a public or perish dynamic.

Well, the simple fact is that sectors that aren't there to make money are then judged somehow by some metrics in order to be proclaimed to be efficient and worth wile the investment: how many students graduate, how many doctors are made, how many patents they get or how many academic articles are published and what is their impact factor. — ssu

Oh yeah, I believe in (the reality of whats designated by the term) 'public or perish', don't get me wrong. As with your other account, I think its an apt general account that doesn't apply in this case. Weinstein is (1) not part of the academy and has a net worth of ~10mil & (2) has a theory he treats as valuable and complete - so 'public or perish' - a real and pernicious thing - doesn't apply to him (in fact he's almost the opposite of the type of person it would apply to.)

I didn't say geometric unity is bunk, just that I couldn't find any actual exposition of the theory, and evidently neither can anyone else. It's all a bit mysterious. — fishfry

Yes, that's fair, that is how I was thinking of it, but too cavalierly used the first word that came to mind. I should've said 'quite skeptical, given lack of available info'

Publish or perish. — ssu

"publish or perish," as I understand it, is usually used to denigrate an, uh, Embedded Growth Obligation (EGO). It basically means that you have to sacrifice careful, long-term, work on something for the sake of periodically publishing new results. This doesn't apply to someone who claims to have a robust new theory, and is more than happy to lean into 'podcast or perish'. I.e. 'publish or perish' is about pressuring people that don't have an important new idea to publish stuff, as though important, when its really just about career-security. It's the opposite of the situation Weinstein's in.

Fair enough. Fishfry seems to think its bunk. So I'm in the same spot.

I'm not sure which of the two brothers caught fame first, but at least Bret Weinstein was dragged unwittingly into the public eye with the incredible events in an unknown university, who otherwise would have stayed as an total unknown.

I think the main reason is that the American public debate is and has been void of "common sense" academicians who once pushed into the media limelight appear different from the usual bunch, the celebrities, movies stars or politicians. Somewhere the intellect from your Hollywood-actors has to show and now with Youtube and other podcasts there can be these "long form" chats and there is an audience for them. — ssu

Again, I don't necessarily disagree with your general analysis. In fact, I mostly agree with it. I just don't think it applies to this particular case. I want to separate these two things. I agree with what you're saying, in general, (and it may apply to Eric's brother, who isn't Eric) but I don't think it applies here.

Regarding the second part - as I've said from the get-go, I freely admit that I - like everyone on this forum - is not qualified to judge Weinstein's work. I may very well be wrong. But, especially given the red flags I see, I'm more inclined to believe the physics mainstream, and dismiss Weinstein, for what the dismissal of a layman is worth, until something, beyond Eric's self-recommendation, recommends otherwise.

@frank

That fits nicely with Harvey's analysis, as I remember it (been a while, & I think I only read the first 3/5 or so) Ideological 'neoliberals' want to reduce the role of the state, officially, but their ideology includes an explicit awareness that the state will have to continue to serve some minimal, order-sustaining role. But when theory becomes reality, the ideologically purity of the economic-eye-from-nowhere theorist is lost - Once the state gives a businessman some special dispensation, that businessman has every incentive to milk that dispensation - and so you have a weird chimera that's part- 'pure'-neoliberal, part-patchwork-of-state-cronies. (I it can also go the other way, the state calling upon its cronies - I vaguely remember something about thatcher and the Falklands War in Harvey's book?)What we call 'neoliberalism' is that chimera - which, as you guys are saying, involves two semi-autonomous, but deeply linked...entities? (hard to find the right word here...it's not 'entities')

The toll-booth stories are a great example.

But rather than get mad, maybe it's better to suss out what the current incentive structure is - how it leads, of its own autonomous logic to monstrosities - and then figure out how to break out of it. Not that anger's bad. But there are different types of anger, or, if you like, modes of using anger.

It's like Marx's contradictions - we have a moral desire to condemn and locate evil in the heart of the evildoer, but we also have a (marx-derived) understanding that we're dealing primarily with systemic issues, extra-personal structures that are like geology meets sociology (Levi-Strauss). This contradiction is as potent as that between use and exchange values. We want to be the prophet righteously denouncing, while at the same time we want to be someone who understands that it's the system that's broken - and a system's insentient, our righteous denunciations can't even fall on deaf ears - there's no ears at all. Which is more effective - the denunciating prophet, or the patient, focused steward of systemic evolution in time? Maybe the steward needs the passion, and the prophet needs the project. Surely the resolution is meaningful action.

A good historical analysis would resist the urge to denounce, and channel the anger into understanding (1) the conditions of the incentive structure that led to that toll-booth shit & (2) understanding the present, through the past, find a plausible model for how to get out of it then finally (3) act upon that. That's about as marxist as you can get.

(@StreetlightX if this is clogging up the 'currently reading' i wouldn't be offended at it being split off into a new thread.)

Yet I think the chip shortage is more because of the pandemic problems on our wonderful globalized supply system than the "everything bubble". — ssu

Oh there is a thing where bitcoin 'miners' are buying up video cards, I heard a piece on bloomberg or the economist or one of those. As crazy as it sounds, he's right - bitcoin is at least partially responsible for him not being able to play cyberpunk.