1:10 - You can gauge the intrinsic value from the instrumental value by the cost/benefit outcome and your expectations. Truth refers to a perspective that has proven to be successful, in relation to the expected/projected outcomes. Juxtaposing the theory, the expected, with the pragmatic, the outcome, on a cost/benefit evaluation, determines how close your instrumental application came to the intrinsic. But this is overcharging, so the same application at a different time/space will result in slightly different consequences. It is the wise man, the philosopher, who seeks truths that are more reliable, and for longer periods of time, and in broader spaces of space - where space = possibility, and time is the movement through and of possibility (change). Not all truths are equal - indeed. In all natural selection, where cost/benefit is not intervened upon, weeds out bad judgments - the degree to which a judgment was wrong, or bad, in relation to the expected/projected, exposes the degree to which cost exceeds benefit. Of course, due to the random (chaos) factor no judgment can ever be absolutely correct, so the we are always dealing with degrees of accuracy.
3:30 - The reason why it is easier to know what is wrong, than what is right, is because wrong covers what is left after right claims a portion of time/space. It is harder to miss the entire target, than it is to hit the bulls-eye. Because we are dealing with probability, and not absolutes, the odds of us not being probably correct, are greater than the odds of us being correct. This is where the evolution of intelligence comes in handy. Intelligence = *knowledge/experience, *imagination, *processing speed, memory, awareness of subtle patterns within the patterns - or within order, courage, and control. Intelligence = *knowledge/experience, *imagination, *processing speed, memory, awareness of subtle patterns within the patterns – or within order, *courage, and *control. *Intelligence holds experience/knowledge in lucid, conscious memory, and combines it with stored genetic memory (DNA), experiences; *projecting beyond the immediate time/space to gain the advantage of foresight, by appreciating past (nature = sum of all nurturing), or second-hand experiences/knowledge, and projecting into the future unknown accurately, minus any corruptible emotions, egoism etc.; *speed of processing sense data and integrating them alongside learned/experienced data, to construct mental models (abstractions); *ability to hold in consciousness data, abstractions so as to juxtapose them with the current, or to integrate them into the aforementioned mental models; *sensual acuity, picking up minute, subtle patterns that evade the awareness of lesser minds, producing a more refined mental model; *bravery to accept what the world is telling you, through its interactivity, producing patterns – the constitution to bear it; *self-control, containing this data, not letting it overwhelm you, or destroy you -dominating what the world is revealing to you.
4:40 - I am with Peterson on this. A truth cannot only be theoretical, ti must be applicable, pragmatic, proven by trial and error, otherwise it is romantic, ideological, that may fail when applied. All dogmas have claimed such truths, and when theory was applied in the real world all but a few survived unscathed, forced to change, or to contradict their own ideal principles i.e Christianity. A theory can be self-consistent, when ti has started from a detached from reality premise. Anyone can manufacture a perfect theory, when he disregards natural order and you fabricate your own. Truth, or theory, or opinion, or subjectivity, only has relevance in relation to an application of its theories, measured, juxtaposed, against the objective, the goal, the ideal. This is why value and value judgments are always about the conscious juxtaposition of A with B, and there is no intrinsic value or truth.
5:10 - morality is, as I've said before, related to a behavior, common to social organisms where cooperation and cohabitation is a matter of life and death. It is a behavior that promotes and maintains harmonious participation. There is no universal morality, or objective morality, because the universe is not conscious, only life forms are, and only for social lifeforms, or those that practice heterosexual reproduction, and need another of their kind to be successful, can be said to have a behavior we call moral. Ethics is the codification of this (inter)activity, this behavior determining relationships. The Abrahamic concepts of good/evil are meaningless outside these relationships, and in relationships, which eventually include an ideal. In human morality an individual is held accountable in relation to a shared idea(l). This can be meme specific, but all memes have a common ground, because memes come from genes, and not the other way around. A shared evolutionary past establishes the grounding for a shared morality. Where evolution divergence, as in the case of races, or species, we have a divergence in morality, equal to the degree of divergence, measured in time, but only in traumatic environmental effect. For example long periods of genetic isolation may result in a smaller divergence than a shorter time period but with more severe environmental pressures. Here I am moving away from Peterson's Abrahamic influences and siding more with Harrison.
8:00 - Moral truths are truths in the sense that they've worked in the past. Within a social context, where behavior matters, they hold true. But they are not universal, or intrinsic truths, because they cannot be used to apply to lifeless energy/matter and how these patterns relate, or (inter)act. The danger of anthropomorphizing is great at this point, because attraction/repulsion is how we, humans, understand how patterns relate as harmony/disharmony, and life does evolve from these basic interactions, but the element of memory is missing. Reputation follows the individuals life, particularly within a small groups. It dilutes within larger, heterogeneous systems, and this is why they dissolve in degeneracy, that begins to threaten the cohesion of the whole. Conscientiousness, to hold yourself accountable to the ideal, without having another do it for you, is also due to memory. But it does not in life-less patterns and non-pattered energies. they interact the same, with every encounter, or modified slightly in power, after each encounter...and its is the beginning of what we call memory. The difference is where the division between life-less congruities and/or unities of energy/matter and unities that are conscious is found here, in memory (DNA, Consciousness, encoding experience/knowledge that affects every subsequent encounter). Life-less matter/energy has no such memory. It just (inter)acts as it always has. Whether it gains or loses from the encounter does not alter its behaviour, but modifies its effect.
8:30 - Facts are about how phenomena relate. Truths are about a perspective on how phenomena relate, trying to assess what this relationship means. in other words, how the relationship of fact, relates to all other phenomena, past, present, and future. We can speak of facts, and accentuate our certainty by calling them absolute, but we cannot speak of absolute truths, without claiming to be outside space/time with a universal perspective where the wholeness of the universe is taken as a given. But language is an art, and it can be used metaphorically, allegorically, emotionally, without wanting to be precise or to retain integrity. Words have been abused for so long that many have lost all meaning. They've been detached from reality, from an external reference point, for so long, that this liberty of application, with minimal costs, has become addictive. No accountability = infancy - retardation man-child, moron = degeneration to prepubescence.
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Satyr Daemon
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Monism comes easy to the human mind, because the brain evolved on a very simple principle based on cellular systolic/diastolic rhythms. It necessarily reduces the multiplicity and fluidity of existence into an abstraction, a One, and then, later, posits its negation, as part of the diastolic phase of cellular metabolism, as the Nil.
Even when it attempts to conceptualize existence, it does so by imploding it into a One, a universe, implying something beyond it, which would be non-existence, the negation of universe. This is the foundation of Binary Logic, expressed by the mathematical representations 1/0, and developing into a world view based on dualities. There is, in fact, no oneness, no whole, literally understood, because no evidence of it exists. Oneness is a theory, a idea/ideal, an ideology a noetic construct. In math the absence of one, in reality, is expressed by fractions, shifting the decimal point. In linguistics it is expressed by verbs, as there is no static thing, only a name given to processes imploded into an abstraction with a ambiguous beginning and end.
All there is, is multiplicity, movement, process - interactivity - Flux. Many delusions have been built on monism, even while rejecting the idea. The idea of a panpsychism, of universal consciousness, is one that alludes to monism - living and non-living, consciousness and unconsciousness imploded into a singularity, a tautology, a oneness. Underlying the nihilistic ideology of oneness is the perception of sameness. Because we recognize what is most intimate to us, we assume that all is like us, going so far as to disregard or minimize the relevance of difference, divergence. Sameness relies on perspective - the perception of similarity from a distance, because the closer we observe the more the same becomes different. Here same is another way of implying oneness, whole. Not even an individual organism is the same with itself, in any given time/space. it is process, constantly altering because it is interacting and with every interaction a slight change occurs. What binds the organism as a concept is memory.
Sameness is a measure of degree of difference, just as strength is a measure of a degree of weakness, and order is a measure of a degree of chaos. Since all is tending towards absolute chaos, order is never absolute, it is always order-ing, manifesting as higher or lower order, just as strength is a deteriorating in time, due to temporal attrition, so it is not omnipotence, it is a degree of weakness. This is what makes strength and order so valuable, so precious - so revolutionary. It's not those who idealize chaos that are radicals, it is those who idealize order - they are the progressives, not the liberals who want to abandon self to chaos and the natural attrition towards fragmentation, change.
Monism has some curious effects. It implodes existence into a universe, and then reduces all differences to sameness - so consciousness is now everywhere, just as love is deserved by all. It devalues the traits that distinguish and makes them universal.
Christianity devalues love, by naming its monist Deity 'Love' and then declares it as being everywhere, in everything, deserved by all who open themselves to it etc. Panpsychics devalue consciousness, by projecting ti everywhere, within all processes, so that it is not a distinguishing characteristic of life, rising in hierarchy to superior and inferior consciousness, but it is everywhere, in everything. Not rare at all. Not distinctive at all. They imply that their own consciousness is but a part of a one consciousness. Their only claim to fame is that they are aware of this, or have access to the universal mind. It's Abrahamism using different metaphors.
This same ideology is expressed as a metaphysical certainty that all is ordered. That even what is chaotic is really hiding a secret order, a conspicuous connection to the oneness of absolute order. Chaos is defines as complexity, so that randomness can be prevented from contradicting the ideology of a perfect whole.
When man conceptualizes universe, or more appropriately named by the Greeks kosmos, what does he do, exactly, when he has no awareness of a whole, a one, or of everything in it? What he does, in his mind, is project his own consciousness, using imagination, "outside" space/time", into the non-existent, the nil, in other words, and then perceives the totality of processes as a huge, ambiguously held together, whole, a oneness - he, in fact, implodes it into an abstraction and makes the sum of all phenomena, into a noetic fabrication. But, there is no "outside" space/time, all there is are interactions, that deny the possibility of an immutable, eternal, perfect, complete, complete, whole, indivisible, one. even the processes we call phenomena, are in constant flux, and the laws man perceives that govern these interactions, patterns within patterns, are also changing. This is why consciousness is not static either - it is a continuously updating, verifying process.
Because conceptualizing fluidity, the interactive, without succumbing to the temptation of surrendering to your own representation is difficult, very few have managed to accomplish it. Very few can, or have the courage and the artistic talent to extricate themselves from the representation, or to use the representation to imply what can never be perfectly represented. Heraclitus did it by using a metaphor: fire. With it, flux, interactivity, regional energy fluctuations was displayed by suing the process of combustion. life is a part of the fire, a flame, a spark, becoming aware of its combustion - life as combustion - overflowing energy, or pathos as it has also been called. The pathos of suffering this combustion, and learning to enjoy and appreciate it. Fire is not aware it is fire...nor are all sparks conscious of what they are. Fire is a process of temperature interactivity, minus a combustion substance. It is only fire, caused/created by nothing, burning nothing but itself...slowly expanding and cooling down. What would life be in this metaphor? A cooling down of a region, within the fire....yes, ordering is contrary to combustion....unless it becomes an overman and realizes that combustion is what it is, and without it it is nil. A nihilist wants to cool it all down, or burn it all down, depending if he is a positive or a pure nihilist. What is a pagan? One who appreciates his own combustion, does not resent it, but also tries to control it, and cool it down to a degree, without extinguishing it. See there's a fine ascetic line there differentiating a nihilist, an Abrahamic from a Pagan. This is why I've said Nihilism is seductive, and there's a little Jew in all of us. Balance....Hellenic asceticism. It begins by reconnecting mind to world, or noumenon to phenomenon, the idea(l) to the real. With this first, necessary step, in an Age where words are used to discontent from reality, rather than to engage it, or connect to it, and with sheltering being present to prevent the weakling, the coward, from surrendering to fantasy, this first step is the hardest. Without it we can all construct cool, frozen, realities in our minds, and live in them as kings in our own private universe, hoping the fire will not burn it to the ground.
Those who cannot settle their minds in there, perceived fire as a whole, a one, from the cool distance of an "outside", and just as they can perceive something else burning from there, they continue to think of cosmos as a oneness, or they literally understand the metaphor as the universe being fire. theoretically projecting yourself into the fire, without feeling the ecstasy of being burned, the need/suffering, is a detachment only those who have projected themselves into an "outside" can enjoy....but not for long. Sheltering is not forever, and not perfect, either.
Philosophy is not for everyone.
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Satyr Daemon
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Consciousness emerges within existence, it does not precede or emerge alongside it. it is a product of (inter)activity, which is what existence is = dynamic. What exist is dynamic, it (inter)acts. Patterned and non-patterned Energies (inter)act = Flux.
Consciousness awakens to world. It is an awakening to what already exists, beginning a lifelong relationship of subjective consciousness and objective world. Minds are "trapped" in their perspective, seeking liberation outward.
The phenomenon, that which is (inter)active is apparent to the subjective emerging, awakening conscious mind. The phenomenon is interpreted by the subjective mind, and is indifferent to its interpretation, if it is also unconscious. Only a conscious mind, an organism, life, can care, has care, experiences existence as need/suffering. Noumenon relates to phenomenon via the senses which use a medium, mitigating (inter)activity, or direct (inter)action, translating this (inter)action into a form it has evolved to use - method. It translates it into a form existing as part of its unity - what is known. This translation is not automatically precise, accurate. The mind must motivate the body to apply its interpretation of the phenomenon in engaging it, (inter)acting with it. The consequences, the costs/benefits, the good/bad outcome of this (inter)action is in relation to the mind's expectations, usually having to do with its own esoteric, organic, needs, or in higher minds in relation to an exoteric projected ideal.
Judgment is the word we use to describe the conscious mind's evaluation of the phenomenon, in relation to esoteric needs/desires and exoteric idea(l)s concepts, standards. The consequences expose the subjective mind's quality of judgment - its intelligence, its awareness.
Philosophy is the discipline of evaluating, speculating, assessing, phenomena and how they relate to each other, in relation to esoteric needs and/or exoteric ideals, objectives. If it remains theoretical, abstract, noetic, it can never prove its judgments, nor have the disproved. It seduces with untested promise. They remain theoretical noetic constructs that cannot be applied or have never been applied or have been, as in the case of Abrahamism and Marxism, and have consistently failed, by producing more costs than the promised, expected benefits. Applied nihilism from Abraham spiritual nihilism, to its alter secularized variants - Marxism, Humanism, Transhumanism - make excuses, or blame others for its continuous, predictable failures - its naivete and obtuseness.
Language (symbols/words, semiotics) is how the noumenon relates and then engages the phenomenon. Mistaking symbols, language, including mathematics, for the phenomenon itself, is the first level of delusion - degeneracy...and may be willful, intentional, or due to a genetic limit, an inferiority. Using language to project an alternative world, is also a method of degeneracy, seeking escapes in semiotics, covering of facts, a release and relief from an indifferent world. Societies often create a memetic protective shield (code cocoon), permitting the continuing immersion in a manmade reality, by reducing the costs and accentuating, inflating, the benefits - artificiality. This increases the emergence of unfit mutations, dis-ease, just as when man protects domesticated species from natural culling, increases desired or undesired genetic mutations, dis-eases, which man then manipulates and/or exploits to his benefit.
The absence of absolutes means that the subjective, conscious mind must continuously validate its own abstractions, and/or adjust them, adapt them to fluctuating rearrangements. Finding patterns within patterns, or within order(ing) helps man deal with flux, by becoming aware of longer lasting patterns, that hold true for longer periods of time. Man calls these natural laws, or mathematical logic when the pattern deals with the validation of semiology once something ti taken as self-evident...in the case of math the concept of 'one' or 'whole'. This self-consistency is what is called mathematical logic, which can then be used to predict, to be applied externally, upon dynamic phenomena. In this case the symbols refer to external processes, and represent flux by infinite division, and/or infinite multiplication - divisibility, the absence of an a-tom, being a paradox language produces when and if it is taken literally and not as what it is, metaphorically, representationally, artistically.
All language, including math, is an art form, that can be more or less realistic, more or less precise....and can be sued to re-translate an abstraction into a form that can be projected outward, can be externalized and shared.
Mind interprets phenomena, converting them to neural pulses, then to abstractions, sensations, emotions, and then it may evolve the ability to translate them into a form it can then externalize - geometry, mathematics, words, symbols. Technologies are this externalization of man's understanding of himself and his own processes. They are the esoteric externalized. This is limited by man;s understanding, and of man's knowledge, awareness of himself and of the world he must sample to convert the internal into an external form, suing some other material. The medium of air/light is replaced by a medium of metal, stone, plastic etc.
Only living conscious minds can achieve this, if and when they develop self-consciousness.
The vast expanses of existence (space/time) simply (inter)act as patterned and non-patterned Energies, which can be perceived and interpreted by a conscious mind as matter/energy, or as void, darkness.
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Satyr Daemon
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In nature, before human systems evolved, there was no debate over subjective/objective and no claim that all was subjective, so all was equally valid.
There was a simple trial & error mechanism,. built upon an off/on neurological, binary dualistic switch.
Life evolved by applying subjectivity, in real time, in relation to an indifferent objective world. The participants were not expected to acknowledge, understand, or even perceive what was going on. No concessions, or agreements or justifications mattered.
A mind perceived, in accordance with its perspective, built on its particular inherited traits, methods etc. It then applied its subjective interpretation of objective reality, and faced the consequences as cost/benefit, where no external mitigating force intruded, intervened, to adjust the costs and the benefits. This is called natural selection. It evolved higher consciousness, intelligence, on the simple mechanism of applied subjective judgment.
No upbringing, all is a social construct, no excuses, no moral pleas, no God. Degrees of success and failure...over time...stored as memory.
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Satyr Daemon
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Mind - meme, idea(l), noumenon - Subjective Body - gene, physical, phenomenon physical - Objective
What we call 'subjective' refers to the living mind - consciousness. The skin/skull is the porous ambiguous boundary separating the subjective from the objective - mind from body, the ideal from the real, the noumenon from the phenomenon. Nervous system is the connecting nexus - where the phenomenon is converted, interpreted into the noumenon. What we call 'objective' is that which is beyond the mind, or beyond its capacity to perceive, and/or control. Subjective = Interpretations. Objective = Interactions.
Mind has a language, as does the body. Mind = symbols/words Body = gestures, reactions, sensations, movement, scents, feelings...
Feelings, and then emotions, are the rudimentary forms of a mind's ability to construct abstractions. Emotions, more sophisticated forms of sensations, are automatic reactions to particular stimulation. This automation is what the mind wants to control and direct so as to increase synergy and focus its aggregate energies.
Mind can control its modes of expression, safety tucked within the skull - exoskeleton. Its only avenue outward is via the nervous system. Body is exposed - esoskeleton. Its only avenue outward and inward is via the nervous system.
Clothing mitigates to cover the body so as to permit civilization, based on lies, or hyperbole, pretenses. The physical is transported via the mind - it becomes metaphor, mythologized, idealized. Mind transfers body into idea, using symbols - semiotics.
In human species the female's menstrual cycles are already inconspicuous, allowing the female to use her sexuality as a social tool. Covering the body makes its honesty inconspicuous. Shame is the product. Honesty, the body's realism, contradicting the mind's idealism, its pretenses, its secrets and lies, is a source of embarrassment.
Body can't 'fake it', cannot lie, because it is connected to brain, via the nervous system, circumventing the frontal cortex. Body's cells are like a plant's, reactive to stimuli. Localized stimulation cascading across the body. The brain experiences it as if it were an alien other - it has no choice. It experiences it after-the-fact. Inebriation and cultivating self-control are ways to preempt these automatic reactions. Training repeats a desired reactions to specific stimuli until they become 'second nature' - minimal mental interventions required to circumvent evolved reactions.
Genes (memories), are partially usurped by memes (experiences).
The process may result in neurosis - stress of control fatiguing the mind and fragmenting when it becomes convinced that its act is its true identity. In extreme cases or prolonged stress may fragment the psyche. The more contrary to the body's natural reactions the mind's desired reactions are, the more stress it puts on the mind. As with exercise, continuous training makes the mind fit - able to do the same work, of self-control, with minimal effort. As with exercise a lapse in this continuous training will gradually atrophy the mind's ability.
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Satyr Daemon
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When a choice, based on subjective evaluations of circumstances - interpretation, translation of presence as appearance and how these inter-relate (meaning) - is protected from the costs, and form the negative, to its welfare, consequences, then it begins to believe that all subjective judgements are equally valid, and all choices are determined by an external, all-encompassing Will, sheltering all within its benevolent, perfect, premises. Those who have experienced the severity of their erroneous judgement calls, want to be included in the all-inclusive uniformity, so as to escape the consequences.
Even sheltering systems cannot completely protect the individual from his own stupidity. Each sheltering event only increases a future error in judgement, because no corrective measures are ever enforced or imposed upon the individual. The fact that small mistakes have insignificant negative consequences makes a future mistake inevitable. The process snowballs, until the consequences reach a level that cannot be absorbed, harmlessly, by a community within which an individual is sheltered.
In natural environment, the organism is forced to adjust its judgements and its behaviour, after each mistake - or it perishes.
Choice is the application of judgement. If a judgement never produces an action then it remains theoretical - idealistic, noetic. Action is the manifestation of a choice, based no a judgement, based on the organism's evaluation, appreciation, of circumstances: environment - localized world - matrices of inter-relations, i.e., meaning.
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The demoralized, like Pavlov's dogs, encounter the uncertainty of their own naturally based creativity and recoil. It burns their bones, threatens their lives, the enormity of possibility and the noble task of countenancing it. They, like their eyes, artificially impose shapes on the world; boxes and compartments. Anything that destroys the expectation of the compartment, is resented and attacked. And, those stereotypes have some truth, as do the shapes of the world - but so does the quality of subjectivity have in itself a pattern - a truth - that is less consistent and less universal than most perceived (in both senses of accusation and acquisition).
Satyr Daemon
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We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world – its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.
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Among romantic idealists a realist appears overly pessimistic and dark; among cynics a realist appears overly optimistic. The objective world is always negative towards subjective needs and desires, so the first is almost always the case.
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Doubting or finding flaws in another's perspective does not constitute a challenge. An absent absolute more than ensures that no theory will ever be "perfect," "complete," and "whole". What best challenges a theory is a superior one.
I can doubt the Theory of Relativity and find flaws in it....but so what? Can I offer an alternative that better incorporates the perceived and that can be tested and sued to make predictions? Reality is my only true challenger. Convincing mankind has never been my method of evaluating "truth". We have to look back at the absurdities the majority believed in every age, including our own, to lose confidence in popular convictions.
The majority of laymen and mediocre minds have always followed what worked, not what was, necessarily, true; they always used each other as their standard of validation.
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How can you even begin to reason with a mind that denies an external standard - an objective standard? It's implied in his "subjectivity" obsession. Code for "This is what I need to cope, and I need not justify it, other than to say that I need it" - hedonism, slave morality, herd psychology. All words, representing mental abstractions, are declared independent from all external references and standards.
Subjectivity is code for "I say so", or "i prefer to believe so". Anything that contradicts this is considered a threat - fascism, bullying, coercion....some other "saying so" They can only bring it "down to earth" by reducing it to an emotional dilemma, a moral question. Remaining entirely subjective. They consider it a 'debate" to compare emotional reactions and coming to a emotional, mutually satisfying, compromise.
Thy are trapped in their private psychosis. Desperate for help, and unable to accept any that does not sooth and please them. There's no possibility for any rational discussion that does not involve some form of emotional appeal; some compensating offering. All that does not fall into their self-serving delusion is considered a wilful coercive threat. All has to become a personal matter; a private standard, so as to reach some agreement. as if reality gives a shit, through some other conscious entity. Universal morality is implied in their very demand....though it is never clearly stated, not personally admitted. In their mind, a world with no god, must be replaced by another universal morality. Something rational, and able to yield to pity, and pleading and prayer.
Most of these degenerate emasculated freaks have no clue. Their self-deception are denied. They are so immersed in their won lies that the very idea of a objective truth is anathema. They imagine it, to belittle it, as some form of a divine, absolute state of being; a complete wilful conscious whole.
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To understand the modern psychosis you must decipher its lingo.
The nihilist's desire to remain within the "subjective" is an appeal to remain within the emotional, the personal, where reason takes a back-seat to sympathy/antipathy. They have no rational arguments and no empirical evidence to support their delusions, so they must change the criteria for evaluating most probable from least probable. Their learned strategies are distinctly feminine. No cold reasoning, but emotional appeals, emotional triggering, emoting on every level. Only within these context do they have a chance to convince others of delusions they cannot support in any other way.
Like I've said many times before. World is converted to Humanity. God as world creator is replaced by man as world-creator....meaning human subjectivity usurps, theoretically, objective reality. A political endeavour, based on morality ploys expressed linguistically. Hedonism, how an idea makes the majority feel, is the new standard for validity. Moralizing also reduces the discussion to a social, group dynamic. How many can be integrated; how many benefit, from a "truth"? How is the majority affected? No reasoning necessary. Only altruistic projections of self into other - sympathy overwhelming reason with its appeal to private interests, to personal secret fears and anxieties. A feminine mind-game of emotional manipulation, using words. All must become subjective, meaning all must be reduced to the personal, the self-interest of each, to emotions and pleasures.
World is Humanity; in lieu of a one-god, a one Humanity. All is conscious, meaning all is vulnerable to pain/pleasure triggering; all can bend to pleading and flattery, or to threats; all can be tricked using word-games; reality can be reshaped by altering word sequences and definitions.
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Man studies man, i.e., makes him the subject of his objective study, by eliminating his own participation in the studied group. We call such sciences psychology. Like evolutionary psychology explains why man, and all organic life, develops particular patterns of interactivity we call behaviours.
Here is why I consider Nietzsche a psychologists first and foremost.
His "metaphysics" was but an extrapolation from his psychological insights, commenting no existence through the agency of man.
Man studies world through effects, or affects upon him. he deduces causes, after-the-fact of an experienced effect. Some go over-board, overwhelmed by anxiety, and make absolutist claims about causality needing an all-encompassing one, primary cause. This is aided by the organic mind's mechanisms which must reduce multiple stimulations to singular sensation, and then abstractions.
Even in psychology multiplicity is present. The singular drive is nowhere to be found. Sometimes one passion dominates, and then another. During one period in the organism's life, one drive dominates, and then, at a later date, another takes over the dominant controlling position.
I've called this compartmentalization, a Trojan Horse, where a single mind can sometimes evoke rational arguments and then, at different times evoke delusional, superstitions - fleeing to the former when the latter is offended or threatened. Orwell called the institutionalization of schizophrenia newspeak - using words to contradict the real, by redefining them, corrupting their meaning and making the new definition common, or by eliminating them, erasing the concept from minds.
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The theory of probability is the only mathematical tool available to help map the unknown and the uncontrollable. It is fortunate that this tool, while tricky, is extraordinarily powerful and convenient.
Probability is another name for order. Probability in the field of expanding possibilities, inserts order within a fluctuating topographical map including chaos, i.e., randomness.
Subjective/Objective concepts should be arranged accordingly, introducing the existence of awareness into the mapping, as a prerequisite for it to become probable. Therefore, the subjective refers to the concious interpreter of the predominately unconscious interpreted, establishing a relationship of power, i.e., the former subordinating to the latter, as a matter of survival - its care. A tenuous relationship that always distresses the one that cares, and not that which does not, because it cannot. Objectivity is clarified as the subjective imitation of the object of care, which remains indifferent.
An approach that can only be cultivated ascetically - gradually becoming tolerant of longer and stronger degrees of tension, i.e. stress, connecting the process with psychology.
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Satyr Daemon
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The subjective is an interpretation of the objectively real - an approximation. The noumenon is an abstraction - mental model - of the phenomenon. Appearance is a translation of the present into a form that can be used - processed. The degree of the subjective accuracy determines the probability of success if applied effectively. Like the degree of a map's accuracy, in relation to the geography it represents - interprets in a code - determines the degree of success in its see to navigate the real world geography. Anything exceeding the organism's need, in utility, is unnecessary for its survival. It will ignore it. The organism only needs to perceive enough to increases its reproductive and survival probability. "If you see the truth, you go extinct" this phrase says it all. To see more than what is required will make your performance less effective/efficient.
In sex, for example, hyperbole and hypocrisy, is the rule, not the exception. Much of what we take for granted about love, lust, copulation, is based on a lie. A necessary lie. I've made some attempts to clarify the lies in concepts such as "love/lust", or why females find rape to be so traumatic, or what respect is etc. But, for most, this is a detrimental insight because it will affect performance. In fact, I would say, that in regards to sex inebriation is almost a prerequisite for the efficiency of the performance to reach its climax - pun intended. Romantic idealism is a necessary component...just as religion is necessary for the average mind to cope with reality. Many species go into a seasonal rut, which is like going momentarily insane....for the reproductive cycle to be completed the mind has to be placed in a state of paroxysm.
"Fitness pay-offs" is what others call "affects or effects"...choosing to focus on the "effect" rather than the cause, because to be aware of the cause may inhibit the attainment of the effect. So, most organisms simply want to copulate, or eat, so as to gratify a need/desire, and need not know why they feel this need/desire. If "fitness pay-offs" are somewhat guaranteed, as many are in modern systems, then this further diminishes the necessity for knowing the truth, leading to increasing levels of detachment from the objectively real world. Because now the quality of the subjective interpretation of the objective world, is reduced in significance - in severity. Being unfit, or inheriting a low quality mind, has less severity when success is modified by an external factor, such as modern institutions. We might say that humans are inclined to focus on the effect/affect, and not so much the cause, just as many focus on pleasure, and not what need/suffering - necessitating a relief called pleasure - truly is.
The confusion is produced between a literal understanding versus a figurative understanding of the noumenon, as it related to phenomena.
The "I" is also what is experienced, as a negation of other-than-I. "I am that which I am not" - a negation of other. Experience, the subjective, goes through "I". Discrimination is an essential aspect of identity - so Know Thyself is a urging which entails a lifetime of discriminating negation of otherness. I gradual sharpen my sense of self, but never complete it. There are no absolutes, outside minds - represented by words, referring to relationships we hold to be of high probability. "Truth" is what we call the sum total of these relationships of high probability.
"Fitness=pay-offs" refers to needs/desires and their potential gratification. I've given my vies on the difference between 'need' - based no organic lack - and 'desire' a by-product of need - based on excess that has to be expunged. The relationship between "fitness pay-offs" and "the structure of the world" tending toward 0, is akin to Baudrillard's "simulations and simulacrum" - the real being gradually replaced by the surreal, the hyper-real. As space/time expands - multiplying possibilities, tending towards chaos = absolute randomness is no probability - the mind focuses on increasingly a smaller percentile of reality - i.e., probability, order - and the organism begins to lose contact with reality. An organism with a finer niche survival strategy will not have to understand anything beyond this focused niche - that propagates because it is approximately effective. As long as it remains successful, within that niche, it will not have to know anything more - fine- tuning its approximation within that small field - specialization. Consider the demands upon the mind of such scientific fields, like medicine. They are so complex, requiring constant upgrading, that the mind will be unable to squander any amount of mental energy towards other intellectual pursuits - it may seek relief in physical pursuits. Some fields are so demanding that the individual can spare no time or energy for any other interest. I've called this "institutionalized autism". It's the nerd effect - a brilliant command of one discipline, necessitating total ineptness in everything else, including social interaction.
The organic focus on the "pay-off" is equivalent to the mind's focus on the effect, and not so much on the causality - there things become too complicated or un-knowable, and beyond a certain level they may even make the pay-off less likely. There is such a thing as being "too aware" - i.e., hyper-sensitive....as in hyper-aware. Too much data does decrease performance effectiveness because it affects performance efficiency. It's been called "in the zone", this focus on the task, the goal, at the expense of all other perceptions.
Reality is antagonistic to the continuance of life - ergo life must struggle - fight - to survive, and to overcome reality - replicate so as to overcome mortality. Heraclitus called this a "war" - agon. World is both what makes life possible and what makes death probable. This is the resentment Nietzsche spoke of - the true essence of the ubermench - an organism - not human - which has overcome its resentment for the very state that makes it possible.
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Last edited by Satyr on Mon Sep 23, 2019 10:57 am; edited 1 time in total
Satyr Daemon
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Based on the above, we can say that the common use of the term "truth" is in reference to a "pay-off", and so "lie" is a term used to dismiss what the individual cannot find a "pay-off" or that which is detrimental to a "pay-off". In short, truth refers to the subjective and not to the objectively real, i.e., that which exists independently from all subjective interpretation and evaluations, therefore the "objective truth" may have no intrinsic value, because value implies a subjective judgement, or a measurement in relation to a subjective objective, and has no independent existence. Value, idea/ideal, truth, are subjective interactions, necessitating a concious mind that needs/desire - and so is prejudiced, by definition. Truth is always a reference to the subjective evaluation, and/or interaction. We can see how slight modification of defining the same word can lead away from clarity towards convoluted confusion - sometimes intentionally.
When used in the context of objectivity it refers to what exists independently from all subjective interpretations and judgements. If we factor in fluidity - i.e., flux - then the objectively real is itself lacking absoluteness, but is a movement/momentum, infinitely divisible when converted to a subjective contexts. When the fluctuating fluidity of existence is converted - interpreted - into noetic abstractions, i.e., absolutes, things, ideas/ideals, concepts, images, sounds, texture, smells, they can only represent fluidity as infinite divisibility - fragmentation, of the noetic, represented by semiotics = letters, numbers places in sequence - binary 1/0 and/or dualism on/off, good/bad, hot/cold, etc.
Returning language - semiotics - to their objective role as a representation of the connection of noumenon/abstraction with phenomenon/appearance is how language is brought "down to earth", from the noetic clouds of ideology. Worlds like "morality", "love/lust", "race", "sex/gender", "god"...etc., can be reconnected to physis - the experienced as representations of a fluctuating objectively real world - denying ourselves the easy pleasure of confusing the representational approximated truth, for the literally absolute 'truth'.
The pagan dodecatheon were representatives of order, fighting along side man, as leaders, against the forces of chaos, i.e., the Titans. They were not representation of absolute order, or omnipotent/omniscient being....but fellow warriors against the forces of chaos.
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Satyr Daemon
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The [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] vid, implies that too much truth is like too much water, or oxygen; it becomes toxic to the organism that also needs it to survive. Few can bear truth over a certain level, and so few can become philosophers. For the majority the term "truth" refers to the subjective, i.e., to that which promises pleasure and some form of hope, gratification....placation of 'need/suffering,' a way towards expunging excess energies, experienced as 'desire', i.e., 'fitness pay-offs".
But the cosmos is predominately negative towards such organic needs/desires, and nihilists call it so....because it denies them the ideas/ideals they so crave, and without which they cannot endure existence. This is called "pessimism", when in fact its the reaction to this understanding that is their pessimistic and/or optimistic. Prompting Spengler to say...
It's not the awareness that the cosmos is threatening towards life - i.e. a 'negative' environment - but the denial of this fact; just as it isn't cowardice to admit that fear is present, but it is the denial of fear's presence which exposes the true essence of cowardice.
We can now see that nihilism, as the denial - negation - of the real, seeks to increase the fitness of the one holding it as an idea/ideal. Lying to one's self, increases the probability of survival and reproduction, and yet it is a lie. Many philosophers never married not reproduced. Too much truth, i.e., too much exposure to what is negative to life.
Now we can comprehend why love/lust is a form of self-numbing (intoxication) - a self-induced madness. If animals were aware why they do what they do, every spring, then most would not. If a dancer knew the insinuations and symbolism of the dance, she would not dance....or not dance as carefree and carelessly......her grace would suffer from the intervention of self-consciousness; if females knew and understood the nature of penetration, many would not enjoy it....just as knowing how a movie is made diminishes its enjoyment, and the audience member's immersion in the fantasy plot....the lie.
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Satyr Daemon
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It would appear that when the absolute one-god was declared obsolete many minds that depended on Abrahamism, or any other version of the absolute were left without a coping mechanism. 'Truth,' like the 'one,' and the concept of an 'absolute' itself, substituted for what was ...lacking....missing....absent. If the truth were not absolutely complete, or not good, then it was denied existence....like the Christian god was both omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent. Existence becomes intolerable without this crutch. Truth, for many is "salvation" only they say "the truth shall set you free", or some nonsense like that. "Speak the truth", becomes a way of saying channel god, be god's loyal servant, say "yay to your submission to the absolutely one truth" or be pious, or do god's will. The 'presumption' is that reality is always good, or that it is at least a balance of good/bad....in relation to man's needs/desires. To approach the truth is akin to approaching the one-god.
All that is, is truth....like saying all is god; the truth is always good....never bad, or so the average hope, i.e. that this lie is true. Lies are the Devil's work, and yet without lies few would manage to make it through the day. Who can take the blazing glory of divine truth? One craves a bit of darkness....a shadow to hide within. In time lies become truths, and truths becomes a lies. One senses it... The "devil is in the details".
The abyss, you say? A man looks into the light, and the light burns his retina - it blinds. The light must be approached with respect....one never stares at the god of light - sun. One must always glance, from the corner of his eye, with caution. One sees in the light, not at it. Man's eyes were not meant for the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Most of the truth is lost in the extremes. The truth makes life possible, but the lie makes life tolerable.
"Knowledge is power"....and also a burden that breaks a man, if it is too great, or he too feeble to carry its mass. Man thought knowing & understanding would give him unimaginable power, discovering too late, that one must have a strong back, and a durable constitution, because power breaks the one who has it. Like any powerful weapon, a man must have the stamina and the muscle to yield it....otherwise it spells his own doom...otherwise it's as good as nothing.
The 'truth' they say...is what they want....but they do not really. They only want a plausible lie...something not obvious. Not even a small truth, like race and gender differences is a truth too potent for them to swallow - and if they cannot even endure that small truth, that obviously insignificant one, then how do they hope to endure what is even more devastating? In this age even those small, obvious, truths must be repeated...as Orwell said. Degeneracy always gives itself to lies....or to some other form of self-medication. With words, the light becomes darkness, and darkness is light; degenerates are swimming in progressive advancement towards the divine....they are bathed in "light", everything is improving, enlightening, and they feel the burning heat of truth as pathos.... when they keep their "eyes wide shut", and they are engulfed in darkness.
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Satyr Daemon
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Attitudes towards the subjective/objective, right/left, singularity/multiplicity, oneness/divergence....is all linked to masculine/feminine reproductive roles.
Feminization, and the emasculation of males, implies a growth of leftism, Marxism, Abrahamism, and belief in oneness, in an external absolute authority, Abrahamic morality, absolute determinism, etc.
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Satyr Daemon
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Experience is forever in motion, ramifying and unpredictable. In order for us to know anything at all, that thing must have enduring properties. If all things flow, and one can never step into the same river twice – Heraclitus's phrase is, I believe, a brilliant evocation of the core reality of the right hemisphere's world – one will always be taken unawares by experience, since nothing being ever repeated, nothing can ever be known. We have to find a way of fixing it as it flies, stepping back from the immediacy of experience, stepping outside the flow. Hence the brain has to attend to the world in two completely different ways, and in so doing to bring two different worlds into being. In the one, we experience – the live, complex, embodied, world of individual, always unique beings, forever in flux, a net of interdependencies, forming and reforming wholes, a world with which we are deeply connected. In the other we ‘experience’ our experience in a special way: a ‘re-presented’ version of it, containing now static, separable, bounded, but essentially fragmented entities, grouped into classes, on which predictions can be based. This kind of attention isolates, fixes and makes each thing explicit by bringing it under the spotlight of attention. In doing so it renders things inert, mechanical, lifeless. But it also enables us for the first time to know, and consequently to learn and to make things. This gives us power. These two aspects of the world are not symmetrically opposed. They are not equivalent, for example, to the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ points of view, concepts which are themselves a product of, and already reflect, one particular way of being in the world – which in fact, importantly, already reflect a ‘view’ of the world. The distinction I am trying to make is between, on the one hand, the way in which we experience the world pre-reflectively, before we have had a chance to ‘view’ it at all, or divide it up into bits – a world in which what later has come to be thought of as subjective and objective are held in a suspension which embraces each potential ‘pole’, and their togetherness, together; and, on the other hand, the world we are more used to thinking of, in which subjective and objective appear as separate poles. At its simplest, a world where there is ‘betweenness’, and one where there is not. These are not different ways of thinking about the world: they are different ways of being in the world. And their difference is not symmetrical, but fundamentally asymmetrical. [The Master and His Emissary - The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World]
Brain asymmetry is a forced compromise made to necessity - functionality, reflecting the absence of absolute order - in an existence characterized by the interplay of order & chaos.
What appeals to it, as higher potential, is not perfection - symmetry, but proportionality, indicating utility in responding to the unpredictable.
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Satyr Daemon
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Neuropsychology is inextricably bound up with philosophy. In recent years this has been increasingly recognised, more by philosophers than neuroscientists, with one or two important exceptions. Some of these developments are very much to be welcomed. However, all too often there is a potentially treacherous, because undetected, process at work. What science is actually doing when it delivers its revelations goes unexamined: the scientific process and the meaning of its findings is generally taken for granted. The model of the body, and therefore the brain, as a mechanism is exempted from the process of philosophical scepticism: what it tells us becomes the truth. And, since the brain is equated with the mind, the mind too becomes a mechanism. The philosophical world view is brought into line with that, and reveals – the truth of the mechanical model as applied to brain and mind. As a result, in a spectacular hijack, instead of a mutually shaping process, whereby philosophy interrogates science, and science informs philosophy, the naïve world view of science has tended by default to shape and direct what has been called ‘neurophilosophy’. If the world of the left hemisphere and the world of the right hemisphere are both present to the mind, and form coherent aspects of experience, should we expect to find the resultant incompatibilities reflected in the history of philosophy? The hemispheres have different answers to the fundamental question ‘what is knowledge?’, as discussed in the last chapter, and hence different ‘truths’ about the world. So on the face of it, yes. But the default approach of philosophy is that of the left hemisphere, since it is via denotative language and linear, sequential analysis that we pin things down and make them clear and precise, and pinning them down and making them clear and precise equates with seeing the truth, as far as the left hemisphere is concerned. And since the type of attention you bring to bear dictates the world you discover, and the tools you use determine what you find, it would not be surprising if the philosophical vision of reality reflected the tools it uses, those of the left hemisphere, and conceived the world along analytic, and purely rationalistic, lines. It would be unlikely for philosophy to be able to get beyond its own terms of reference and its own epistemology; and so the answer to the question whether the history of philosophy would reflect the incompatibilities of the hemispheres is – probably not. If there were, however, evidence that, despite this, philosophers had increasingly felt compelled to try to give an account of the right hemisphere's reality, rather than the left's, that would be of extraordinary importance. Admittedly, trying to achieve it at all using the conventional tools of philosophy would be a bit like trying to fly using a submarine, all the while making ingenious adaptations to the design to enable one to get a foot or two above the water. The odds against success would be huge, but the attempt alone would be indicative that there was something compelling beyond the normal terms of reference, that forced one to make the attempt. This would be far stronger evidence for the ultimate reality of the right hemisphere's world than any amount of philosophy that confirmed the left hemisphere's reality, which would be only to be expected. What I shall argue in this chapter is that precisely such a development has in fact occurred in philosophy, and that it has been evident in the work of the most influential philosophers of our age. Such a development seems to me as striking as the developments in mathematics and physics since the 1880s to which it is in some important respects a parallel. It's hardly surprising that scientific method for a long time led to a vision of the universe – the Newtonian universe – which reflected the principles of the scientific method. But when it began to compel conclusions incompatible with the model assumed by its method, a ‘paradoxical’ universe, that was a more revealing finding. In the late nineteenth-century Georg Cantor struggled with the idea that there was a necessary uncertainty and incompleteness to the realm of mathematics. Infinity was no longer tameable by turning it into an abstract concept, giving it a name, and then carrying on as though it were just another number. He came to the realisation that there is not just one ‘infinity’, but an infinity of infinities, beyond anything we can capture or re-present, something that was real, not just taking series ‘as far as they will go’, but beyond; something Other in nature than the series that tried to reach it, and that could in principle never be reached by any kind of known cognitive process. His contemporary Ludwig Boltzmann introduced time and probability into the timeless and certain realm of physics, showing that no system can be perfect; Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems proved that that would always inevitably be the case, that there will always be truths within any system that cannot be proved in terms of that system. Niels Bohr's ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ of quantum mechanics and Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle established a universe in which uncertainty is at the core, not just a product of human imperfection, to be remedied in time by advances in learning, but in the very nature of things. Though the insight or intuition that led them to these discoveries came, I suggest, from the right hemisphere, or from both hemispheres working together, in every case their conclusions followed clearly from lefthemisphere processes, the logic of sequential analysis. These transformative developments nonetheless validate the world as given by the right hemisphere, not the left. To return to philosophy and the brain, we should expect them to illuminate one another: philosophy should help us understand the nature of the brain, and the nature of the brain should help to illuminate philosophical problems. There are three questions in particular worth asking here. Has what we know about the hemispheres anything to offer in illuminating philosophical debate? Equally, does philosophy help make sense of the hemisphere differences we know exist? And what can the answers to both questions tell us about the nature of the brain? The first question takes us into deep water immediately. Philosophers themselves will be the best judges, and the issues are as extensive and complex as the mind itself. However, some possible areas for discussion naturally suggest themselves. In Western philosophy for much of the last two thousand years, the nature of reality has been treated in terms of dichotomies: real versus ideal, subject versus object. Over time the meanings of the terms, and sometimes the terms themselves, have changed, and the constant need to transcend such dichotomies has led to modifications and qualifications of the kind of realism or idealism, the type of objectivism or subjectivism, but the essential issue has remained: how are we to connect the world and our minds? Since our world is brought into being by two hemispheres which constitute reality in profoundly different ways, it might seem likely that some of these dichotomies could be illuminated by the differences between the worlds each of the cerebral hemispheres brings into being. It has nothing to do with the idea that, for example, one hemisphere might be subjective and the other objective. That's obviously untrue. Rather the point is that philosophy in the West is essentially a left-hemisphere process.2 It is verbal and analytic, requiring abstracted, decontextualised, disembodied thinking, dealing in categories, concerning itself with the nature of the general rather than the particular, and adopting a sequential, linear approach to truth, building the edifice of knowledge from the parts, brick by brick. While such a characterisation is not true of most pre-Socratic philosophers, particularly Heraclitus, it is at least true of the majority of philosophers since Plato in the West until the nineteenth century, when, for example, Schopenhauer, Hegel and Nietzsche began to question the basis on which philosophy made its advances. Philosophy is naturally given, therefore, to a left-hemisphere version of the world, in which such divides as that between the subject and the object seem especially problematic. But these dichotomies may depend on a certain, naturally dichotomising, ‘either/or’, view of the world, and may cease to be problematic in the world delivered by the right hemisphere, where what appears to the left hemisphere to be divided is unified, where concepts are not separate from experience, and where the grounding role of ‘betweenness’ in constituting reality is apparent. The key to such philosophical dichotomies lies not, then, I suggest, in the division between the hemispheres, but within the nature of the left hemisphere itself. If one had to characterise the left hemisphere by reference to one governing principle it would be that of division. Manipulation and use require clarity and fixity, and clarity and fixity require separation and division. What is moving and seamless, a process, becomes static and separate – things. It is the hemisphere of ‘either/or’: clarity yields sharp boundaries. And so it makes divisions that may not exist according to the right hemisphere. Just as an individual object is neither just a bundle of perceptual properties ‘in here’, nor just something underlying them ‘out there’, so the self is neither just a bundle of mental states or faculties, nor, on the other hand, something distinct underlying them. It is an aspect of experience that perhaps has no sharp edges. Heraclitus (like the Oriental philosophers who influenced Greek thought until Plato) was unperturbed by paradox, taking it as a sign that our ordinary ways of thinking are not adequate to the nature of reality. But around the same time that the Platonic mode of discourse, with its insistence on the Law of the Excluded Middle, came into play – as, in other words, thinking became philosophy in the accepted sense – paradox started to emerge as a focus of intellectual disquiet. Some of the most famous are: The sorites paradox (from Greek soros, a heap). Thought to have originated with Eubulides of Miletus (c. 350 BC). If one grain of sand is not a heap, and at no stage adding one more grain of sand is going to make the difference between not being a heap and being a heap, how can it ever be that (by, for example, the time 100,000 grains are reached) a heap has come into being? The Ship of Theseus paradox. Plutarch wrote in his life of Theseus: The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same. The reference to Demetrius Phalereus dates this from about 300 BC. The ‘logical question of things that grow’ alluded to, known usually as the ‘Growing Argument’, is the basis of numerous paradoxes, such as Chrysippus' paradox, the point being that, as things grow, at least one particle is added to them or lost by them, and so, according to one interpretation, they cease to be the same entity. In effect all living things present this problem, that of a thing that flows, since they are always in a state of change and self-repair. (As the German philosopher Novalis was to put it 2,000 years later: ‘There is no doubt that our body is a moulded river.’) Zeno's paradoxes. Originating with Zeno of Elea (c. 450 BC): Achilles and the tortoise. In a race in which Achilles gives the tortoise a head start, Achilles can never overtake the tortoise, because first he has to reach the point where the tortoise began, then the point the tortoise reached while Achilles reached the tortoise's starting point, and so ad infinitum. The dichotomy. We can never move at all, because first we have to get halfway to where we are going, but before that, a quarter of the way, and before that an eighth, and so ad infinitum. The arrow. An arrow fired at a target cannot move, because, at any one moment, the arrow either is where it is, or it is where it is not. If it remains where it is, then it must be standing still, but if it moves where it is not, it can't be there. So it cannot move at all. The Epimenides paradox. Named after Epimenides of Knossos (c. 600 BC), a possibly mythological Cretan seer, who wrote in a light-hearted poem or song that ‘Cretans are always liars’ – false if true, true if false. It seems that this only started to look like a real problem when examined retrospectively by later Greek writers. Looked at with an understanding of the different worlds disclosed by the two hemispheres, the development of paradox starts to make sense. There is a sudden obtrusion of the left hemisphere's take on reality, which then conflicts with the right hemisphere's. Take the sorites paradox. This results from believing that the whole is the sum of the parts, and can be reached by a sequential process of incrementation. It tries to relate two things: a grain of sand and a heap, as though their relationship was transparent. It also presupposes that there must either be a heap or not be a heap at any one time: ‘either/or’ are your only alternatives. That is the lefthemisphere view, and sure enough it leads to paradox. According to the right-hemisphere view, it is a matter of a shift in context, and the coming into being of a Gestalt, an entity which has imprecisely defined bounds, and is recognised whole: the heap comes into being gradually, and is a process, an evolving, changing ‘thing’ (this problem is related to the Growing Argument). Failure to take into account context, inability to understand Gestalt forms, an inappropriate demand for precision where none can be found, an ignorance of process, which becomes a never-ending series of static moments: these are signs of left-hemisphere predominance. Or the Ship of Theseus. Here again the problem is caused by a belief that the whole is the sum of the parts, and disappears as the parts are changed. There is also a belief that there must necessarily come a ‘point’ in a process where identity changes. The fact that this type of paradox was known as the Growing Argument (auxanomenos logos) demonstrates that there is a difficulty here in dealing with all living, changing forms. All, once more, points to a dominance of the left-hemisphere view over that of the right. Zeno's paradoxes similarly rest on the adoption of the left hemisphere's view that every flowing motion in space or time can be resolved into a series of static moments or points that can then be summed to give back the living whole. The ‘seamless’ fluidity of motion in space or time is ‘reduced’ to a series, akin to the series of still frames in a ciné film. This is what happens to subjects who suffer right-hemisphere damage, and develop palinopsia (see p. 76 above). This fragmentation of experience is also what underlies delusional misidentification, another right-hemisphere-deficit syndrome, where the seamlessness, the individual quiddity, of a living being, is broken down into a series of manifestations, taking us back to the Growing Argument: my wife one day is not the same person as my wife the next. The Cretan liar paradox is a little different, but here, too, the problem is caused by relying on the left hemisphere only to construct the world. It does so by rules, and with precision. Meanwhile, the right hemisphere, like Achilles in real life, overtakes the left-hemisphere tortoise in one effortless stride: right-hemisphere pragmatics mean that we know precisely what Epimenides is getting at. We don't have to get hung up on the rules. In the real world nothing is absolute, and with a lack of pedantry appropriate to the fact that his remark actually comes from a poem, and is probably humorous in intent, since he is well aware that he is a Cretan, we understand that Epimenides has stepped outside the frame for a moment, to take a look at the people he belongs to. In real life one has come across people who take humorous remarks literally, or who laboriously attempt to replace understanding by the application of absolute rules and come up with a paradox, and they are usually somewhere along the Asperger spectrum. It looks like right-hemisphere failure again: misunderstanding of context, lack of humour, lack of flexibility, insistence on the certainty obtained by rules. What this paradox also illuminates is that any enclosed, self-referring system the left hemisphere comes up with, if taken strictly on its own terms, self-explodes: there is a member of the system that cannot be accommodated by the system.7 There is always an escape route from the hall of mirrors, if one looks hard enough. Paradox means, literally, a finding that is contrary to received opinion or expectation. That immediately alerts us, since the purveyor of received opinion and expectation is the left hemisphere. I called it a sign that our ordinary ways of thinking, those of the left hemisphere, are not adequate to the nature of reality. But – wait! Here it seems that the left hemisphere, with its reliance on the application of logic, is stating the opposite: that it is reality that is inadequate to our ordinary ways of thinking. Contrary to received opinion, it asserts, arrows do not move, Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise, there can never be a heap of sand, Theseus' ship is not really his ship after all, Epimenides was inevitably talking nonsense. In other words its understanding of paradox is – not that there must be problems in applying this kind of logic to the real world – but that the real world isn't the way we think it is because logic says so. This looks like an interesting usurpation, a swapping of roles, with the new dispensation redefining who is Master, and who emissary. Problems arising from whether we see the world as a process, always in flux, or as a series of static, finished, entities, have inevitably persisted in philosophy. In the Middle Ages it was acknowledged in the distinction between the world seen as natura naturans, nature ‘naturing’, doing what nature does, a process ever evolving, and to that degree unknowable, and natura naturata, nature ‘natured’, a something completed, perfect (which always implies past tense, an arrest of the flow of time), static, knowable. Spinoza was one of the few philosophers, apart from Pascal, between Plato and Hegel to have a strong sense of the right-hemisphere world.9 For him this distinction, understandably, had a particular importance; he also pre-eminently understood the way in which the universal is attained to only via the particular; ‘the more we understand individual things, the more we understand God’. But the area in which the hemispheres and philosophy can be mutually illuminating that is of chief interest in this book is that of the relationship of the mind to the world. Just because of the immensity of that topic, I want to limit it by moving on to look at things from the other end of the process, and attempt my second question, what philosophy can tell us that will help us understand the hemisphere differences. Let's return to the main point of hemisphere difference, division versus cohesion. Since the notorious Cartesian subject–object divide, philosophy has grappled with the spectre of solipsism. To know something is to encounter something other, and know it as separate from ourselves. If all I am certain of is my own existence (cogito ergo sum), how does one ever cross the gap? For the solipsist, there is nothing to encounter, since all we know stems from our own mind alone: according to Wittgenstein, the solipsist is like someone who tries to make the car go faster by pushing against the dashboard from inside. There is a paradox here, too: the position is self undermining, in that it nonetheless demands another mind, another consciousness that can constitute the solipsist (as Hegel's master needs the slave in order to be a master): to use the term ‘I’ requires the possibility of there being something which is ‘not-I’ – otherwise, in place of ‘all that is, is mine’, we just get the vacuous ‘all that is mine, is mine’. As Louis Sass has demonstrated in relation to the world of the schizophrenic, solipsistic subjectivity on the one hand (with its fantasy of omnipotence) and alienated objectivity on the other (with its related fantasy of impotence) tend to collapse into one another, and are merely facets of the same phenomenon: both imply isolation rather than connection. The attempt to adopt a God's eye view, or ‘view from nowhere’ in Thomas Nagel's famous phrase, the position pretended by objectivism, is as empty as solipsism, and is ultimately indistinguishable from it in its consequences: the ‘view from nowhere’ pretends to equate to a ‘view from everywhere’. What is different is the ‘view from somewhere’. Everything that we know can be known only from an individual point of view, or under one or another aspect of its existence, never in totality or perfection. Equally what we come to know consists not of things, but of relationships, each apparently separate entity qualifying the others to which it is related. But this does not entail that there can be no reliably constituted shared world of experience. Because we do not experience precisely the same world does not mean that we are condemned not to meet in a world at all. We cannot take refuge in fantasies of either omnipotence or impotence. The difficult truth is less grand: that there is a something apart from ourselves, which we can influence to some degree. And the evidence is that how we do so matters.
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Last edited by Satyr on Tue Feb 04, 2020 2:43 pm; edited 2 times in total
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37106 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
MacGilchrist identifies as the source of paradoxes as well as Aspergers Syndrome, as a Right-Hemisphere deficiency brought about organically or do to environmental forces, a such as the current system's association of identity with the left-hemisphere - ascribing to it a superiority.
We see here my own diagnosis of nihilism as a linguistic dis-ease - imbalance.
He also mentions the either/or world-view which I've also identified as Nihilism.
Omnipotence or Impotence - the bipolar psychosis of Positive & Pure Nihilism.
The in-between is where we can orient the 'real world' - not quire a product of the mind nor entirely not dependent on it.
Positive Nihilist gravitating towards the left-hemisphere's certainty and linguistics, to believe it is the creator of reality; the Pure Nihilist gravitating towards the left-hemisphere's ability to believe in a reality as entirely out of its control.
Bi-polar psychosis - either one, if realized, would essentially nullify experienced existence.
In-Between is physis - physical tangible reality - in-between the metaphysical and the idealistic. Neither absolutely one not absolutely nil.
Looked at with an understanding of the different worlds disclosed by the two hemispheres, the development of paradox starts to make sense. There is a sudden obtrusion of the left hemisphere's take on reality, which then conflicts with the right hemisphere's. Take the sorites paradox. This results from believing that the whole is the sum of the parts, and can be reached by a sequential process of incrementation. It tries to relate two things: a grain of sand and a heap, as though their relationship was transparent. It also presupposes that there must either be a heap or not be a heap at any one time: ‘either/or’ are your only alternatives. That is the lefthemisphere view, and sure enough it leads to paradox. According to the right-hemisphere view, it is a matter of a shift in context, and the coming into being of a Gestalt, an entity which has imprecisely defined bounds, and is recognised whole: the heap comes into being gradually, and is a process, an evolving, changing ‘thing’ (this problem is related to the Growing Argument). Failure to take into account context, inability to understand Gestalt forms, an inappropriate demand for precision where none can be found, an ignorance of process, which becomes a never-ending series of static moments: these are signs of left-hemisphere predominance.
I'm officially turned onto this thinker. I gotta get a hold of his work.
The Paradox, is the capturing of perceptual flux. It contradicts the whole because it represents the 'conflict' of its parts, in separation, and i am beginning to understand how he relates this to the left and right brain hemispheres, it's rather brilliant. Motion, movement, is conflict, collision of separate bodies or particles. To unify them is to see them as opposite first, then combine them into the whole; as a way to view the anatomy of an idea, by its object in space, in nature. One must dissect it, then reattach it. Fluidity of thought is the flux of nature.
Minds with the ability to freeze nature into a conceptual representation, are the ones who see the pattern of it, as it moves in nature. The ones who attribute constraints to this pattern based on learned rules, are the stunted minds, the mediocre, the dull. This is why a sense of imagination, empowers the mind's ability to reach further into perception. Like an overflow of water from the brim of a container. The water will travel, covering more area; reaching more space. Dauntless, unbridled, unhindered.
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37106 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
The more I read him the more I find an uncanny agreement with everything I have been saying for years.
I first got a hint of it in a vid of a discussion with Peterson where he is asked by Peterson a question - can't remember the exact wording - and he replies 'all is pattern". Using even my own words.
Now, in this book, the more I read the more he is repeating my positions, from the perspective of right/left hemispheres - what I've named the mind/body dichotomy.
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Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37106 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
He even claims that philosophy is left-hemisphere dominated - where language is also dominant - and left-hemisphere is also certain and absolute and confident, dealing with complete abstractions and particulars, whereas the right-hemisphere is open and deals with ambiguity and uncertainty.
That's why I placed 'free-will' in the right-hemisphere, where novelty is dealt with. These divisions are not absolute...and he even mentions how there is no absolute. It's amazing....word for word.
Now I must read everything he's ever written.
The right/Left hemisphere seem to correspond to body/mind - merging asymmetrical.
Because the right-hemisphere has no ability to express itself, it borrows the left-hemisphere's language - this is where confusion begins.
Right-Hemisphere deficiency is what produces autism, and it is presently favoured.
Nihilism is the left-hemisphere's use of language to protect itself from the right-hemisphere's conception of self, as it relates to other. The right identifies with the body - and is dismissed as primitive by the average Modern, using rationalism and language to apply their positive/pure nihilistic defensiveness against their own physicality. It follows that such a schisms would then produce an obsession with materialism and hedonism.
Neuroscience is, indeed, the philosophical acumen from the perspective of brain/mind, whereas philosophy as t is practised approaches it from mind/brain, or mind/body.
This is the inversion of nihilism I spoke of.
the impotence/omniscience dichotomy is also a word for word repetition of my own positions. It's clearer in the concept of free-will and how the pure nihilist deals with is, in relation to the positive nihilist - both part of the same binary paradigm. If not absolute free-will, then absolutely no free-will. Either will is an absolute outside man or inside man.
The real is, always, in-between.
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Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37106 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
To see the organism in nature, the nervous system in the organism, the brain in the nervous system, the cortex in the brain is the answer to the problems which haunt philosophy. And when thus seen they will be seen to be in, not as marbles are in a box but as events are in history, in a moving, growing, never finished process.
Dewey wrote:
The much lauded objective evidence is never triumphantly there; it is a mere aspiration or Grenzbegriff [limit or ideal notion] marking the infinitely remote ideal of our thinking life … [But] when as empiricists we give up the doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest or hope of truth itself. We still pin our faith on its existence, and still believe that we gain an ever better position towards it by systematically continuing to roll up experiences and think. Our great difference from the scholastic lies in the way we face. The strength of his system lies in the principles, the origin, the terminus a quo of his thought; for us the strength is in the outcome, the upshot, the terminus ad quem. Not where it comes from but what it leads to is to decide.
The fact that humans can speak is dependent on the evolution, not just of the brain, but of the articulating apparatus – the larynx, the tongue and so on – and of respiratory control. That is why birds can imitate human speech, whereas apes, our nearest relatives, cannot: birds have the necessary equipment, in order to be able to sing. Through some fascinating detective work we can tell from looking at human skeletons when it was that the necessary developments in control of the tongue and larynx, and of the muscles of respiration, developed. That turns out to be from a time long before – from other evidence – we believe we developed language. So what were these developments for?
The answer, according to many anthropologists, appears to have been: in order to sing. That might sound odd, because we are used to thinking of music as a bit peripheral. But in fact the “music” of speech – in the sense of the intonation and all that is not “just” the content, coupled with other forms of non-verbal communication – constitutes the majority of what it is we communicate, when we do. Denotative language is not necessary for I–thou communication. Music is largely right-hemisphere-dependent, and the aspects of speech that enable us truly to understand the meaning of an utterance at a higher level – including intonation, irony, metaphor, and the meaning of an utterance in context – are still served by the right hemisphere. Denotative language becomes necessary when we have projects: when we need to communicate about a third party, or about things that are not present at the time. It expands immeasurably our capacity for manipulation – what one might call “I–it” communication. It is therefore, necessary, not for communication in itself, but for a certain kind of communication. Equally, there is a mass of evidence that we do not need language to think, even to conceptualise. One rather wonderful example is that,believe it or not, pigeons can distinguish between a Picasso and a Monet, without having any language in which to do it (Cerella, 1980; Matsukawa, Inoue, & Jitsumori, 2004; Watanabe, Sakamoto, & Wakita, 1995). But we also know that tribes that do not have numbers above “three” can calculate perfectly well to much larger numbers and have a grasp of concepts they cannot put into words. Language is not necessary for thinking, just for certain kinds of thinking.
Approaching a subject, it is always wise to immediately step back away from it as one would do approaching a cliff. That way we gather our bearings, calm ourselves, and survey the chasm of the object in front of us. 'Caution in observation' is a temperament of perceiving, and a method of knowing.
