The Hierarchy of Perspectives:

Keats argued that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of emotions. He was basically pointing to the fact that you cannot engage in the act of writing a poem (that is if you want to be effective at it) in the same way you might making a table. You can’t just do like you would a table, and just start making one and hope that inspiration finds you. The only activity you can engage in as concerns poetry is keep coming up with lines until something clicks together. It has also been said about poetry that the main goal is to accumulate enough experience to achieve revelation, and that poetry is a kind of concentrated experience that accelerates the process that eventually leads to revelation –or a spontaneous overflow.

Now the reason I bring this up is that I think it connects to what we’re doing in that our primary goal, as the creatively and intellectually curious, is revelation: a spontaneous overflow of the experiences (or activities) that we tend to engage in. And these experiences, as far as I can tell, tend to accumulate through 3 primary types of perspectives: the personal/anecdotal, the social, and the academic (or what I like to call the god’s eye view).

The personal/anecdotal, as would seem obvious, consists of our everyday experience. I mean we all have day to day experiences that we have to interpret and form ideas about. There’s not much more to explain about this domain.

The social, on the other hand, gets a little more complex in that it is based on information we get from others. This, of course, would be the domain of what we get from our friends and acquaintances. But it’s more than that. It would be the information we get from journalists and artists. Now we could say that these are from the academic. And that would be true to some extent (as I’ll cover later). But the main role of this type, this domain, is the relating of the basic human experiences of others to others.

Academic (or god’s eye view) is, of course, the domain of the scientist or philosopher that seeks to offer a perspective that is somehow above the common. They seek to give us information that is not so mired in common human imperatives and agendas.

Now it is important to remember that this is a spectrum in which each discipline is confined to their particular domain. As I pointed out earlier, the journalist and the artist can be said to straddle all three in that they are reporting the personal/anecdotal while also trying to do it in a very academic way. Still, I would argue that they inhabit the social domain. Plus that, while the academic would seem to be the dialectical opposite of the personal, it still has a vital connection to it in that anything it might produce is useless, unless it has something to do with the personal lives of most people. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Now the catch for which I drug you this far for, a question:

Do you think the relationship between the 3 is primarily vertical (or hierarchal) or horizontal?

Now I know there will be those who will argue that it is primarily vertical, that you start with the personal/anecdotal and work your way up through the social to the academic/god’s eye view.

But I would argue that it is primarily horizontal in that all it is, to me, is a shift in perspective. First of all, the 3 perspectives seem interdependent to me. As I pointed out earlier, the journalist and artist seem to straddle all 3. And even the academic requires that it somehow apply to basic human experience in order to be of any good. Secondly, it seems to me there is a kind relativity when it comes to knowledge in that the criteria of being knowledgeable or “smart” is always relative to what is most in demand in a given situation. As smart as we may be, try seeming to be smart around common people around someone who, say, renovates old cars. And how smart would we seem as compared to some alpha male that knew how to survive in some kind of post apocalyptic world? And like I like to joke: I could be a quantum physicist and still look like an idiot to a small town mechanic.

But lastly, to make an argument that might seem my weakest because it exposes an agenda, I just think it would be to resign ourselves to the vertical/hierarchal model in that it would make us subjects of an “expert culture” that was owned by those who had the money. It would pose the knowledge of those who had the money to attain it against the knowledge of those who had to experience the consequences of it. It would reduce us to system where those who had the means could tell everyone else what their reality was.

Anyway:

For me there are only 2 categories as you, in a rare moment of lucidity, present them:

1- Experience - first-hand information

2- Knowledge - second-hand information

The hierarchy is as presented.
Jugging the validity of the information is a matter of personal diligence, motive, and courage.

In the #1 I testing must precede any confidence.
The more testing, real time, over a longer period of time will increase the probability of the experience's usefulness and the conclusions, one draws from it, validity.
Always skepticism is included.

In the #2 the same applies only here to avoid wasting one's time the source's validity must be judged beforehand, as well.
One considers the source's previous successes and failures, its previous positions and how they panned out before one offers his mind to its possibiltiy.

How does one test?

There are two ways.

The first is the most reliable, efficient and effective: pragmatism.
One constructs a course of action, one makes a prediction, using the information gathered and after repetitive attempts and ensuing tweaks one judges the validity of the starting propositions.

The second is more abstract, as some ideas cannot be tested in this way.
In this case one creates models using the knowledge, experiences, and then one assesses how many connective points the model has to the ongoing reality.
The least reference points to reality it has the less probable it should be considered.

Wow! Now this is the discourse I was hoping for. Unfortunately, you caught me at the end of my run (in other words, I'm drunk) and I feel inadequate to respond to this in the way it warrants. But I will get back to it.

But this is good. Not to be sarcastic, not to be condenscending, but this is good.

Right off the bat: I do like your initial distinction between knowledge and experience.

You're gonna hate this, satyr, but as I look at it more, I get the feeling we both think more alike than either one of us would like to admit. I just hope I don't get as cantankerous as you.

Cantankerous is how I keep retards away...it is how I seclude myself so as to invite only those I appreciate closer.
I's how i weed out the chaff from the grain.

“The hierarchy is as presented.
Jugging the validity of the information is a matter of personal diligence, motive, and courage. “

Now this could be said to be prescription rather than description. For instance, by what standard could judging be matter of diligence, motive, or courage? Of course, you did add the qualifier “personal”. So I think this is a matter of elaborating and articulating.

That said, I think you will appreciate the fact that I posted this on ILP and no one touched it. This, I think, is due to a kind of postmodern ADD. It was just too long for the average attention span.

The point is: you did take the time. And that says something for you.

But before this gets too sentimental and to keep order in the universe, and before our civility leads to things like plagues, floods, earthquakes, or the moon turning blood red then disappearing forever:

Go fuck yourself bitch.

Satyr wrote:

Cantankerous is how I keep retards away...it is how I seclude myself so as to invite only those I appreciate closer.
I's how i weed out the chaff from the grain.

I think that's a technique we all have to use from time to time -of course, some of us more than others.

Does it keep the bums from hitting you up for money as well? If it does, hopefully some of it will rub off on me.

Looking at your points again, I'm a little surprised at how close you are to the pragmatism of Rorty.

Once again, despite the differences in our conclusions, our methods and underlying assumptions are strangely similar. I would also add that the methods you describe and kind of things they are effective at dealing with are what distinguish philosophy from science. This has often led to a kind inferiority complex on the part of philosophy that has often compelled it to become more like science such as in the case of analytic and experimental philosophy. And while these responses may have value, I think this complex on the part of philosophy a little misguided. So I must say, I respect your shamelessness in embracing this method. I think I would far rather deal with a cantankerous continental than a harping analytic who, thinking them self ordained by the "scientific method", points at everything I say and nags "yeah, but can you demonstrate it?"

An idea should be able to stand on its own.
Attaching the value of the idea to the perceived value of the herald is pragmatic, but leads to error.

Yes, Phon. Your view is pretty much supported by many of the informal fallacies -primarily the ad hominum ones.

This becomes especially apparent when you look at the Tou Quoqay fallacy which basically means "be consistent with yourself" -that is if you didn't know already. If we were arguing about abortion and I took a pro-life position, then during the debate it was revealed that I took my daughter to terminate a pregnancy, it would do you no good to point to this because my failure to live up to my argument would have nothing to do with the argument itself. You would have committed a fallacy. This is because my argument could just as easily be made by someone who was consistent. This is why, for instance, while so many christian fundalmentalist evangelists have been busted in scandals, christian fundalmentalism remains alive and well.

Well, that and the fact that christian fundamentalist generally don't embrace critical thinking in the first place.

Long live the ad hom. Behind every perspective must be a thinker, and this perspective owes itself as much to the thinker as it does to its internal validity. Fuck the tou quoqay fallacy.

d63tark wrote:

Looking at your points again, I'm a little surprised at how close you are to the pragmatism of Rorty.

Once again, despite the differences in our conclusions, our methods and underlying assumptions are strangely similar. I would also add that the methods you describe and kind of things they are effective at dealing with are what distinguish philosophy from science. This has often led to a kind inferiority complex on the part of philosophy that has often compelled it to become more like science such as in the case of analytic and experimental philosophy. And while these responses may have value, I think this complex on the part of philosophy a little misguided. So I must say, I respect your shamelessness in embracing this method. I think I would far rather deal with a cantankerous continental than a harping analytic who, thinking them self ordained by the "scientific method", points at everything I say and nags "yeah, but can you demonstrate it?"

The scientific method is full of presumptions which must resort to philosophy to be justified.

I've mentioned some before, and Pinker shows how the humanities are now taken over by liberal agendas with social motives, but, in short, the most glaring starting proposition in science, and in the mathematics which is the holy scripture, is the notion of a #1.
The idea is a secular and very abstracted version of God.
A singularity with no reference to anything in experience.

Of course in philosophy the ideas that support it and the ones that depend on it, like Buddhism, Monism in general, Parmeneidis and his disciples, resort to a convenient twist:
The world,a s we perceive it is an illusion.
With that they sweep away this noumenon with no conneciton to the phenomenon.

The rest follows on the subsequent logic, as math's logic, for example, must remain true to its own premises, once the starting proposition has been accepted as self-evident.
The method is comfortable because it is founded no the evolved method of binary logic, creating the dualism around which all human ideas revolve.
Language, at this point must be taken literally, and not as artistic expression, symbolizing what is experienced.

So, 1+1=2 is logical once the #1 is passed over as a necessary generalizations, all others being over-generalizations, of course.
Take the unity of the human race...a generalization exceeding even the prohibited noes of race and sex, yet it is accepted without question.

But I digress.
Once the mental construct of a #1 is taken as a necessary starting proposition then all follows...the negation of it, the miden, the nil, the {0} is the next step.
A useful tool, no doubt, but still a mental construct.

Once it is made all multiplicity must be explained away or resolved under a uniformity, a singularity.
Difference is the illusion, and sameness is a matter of fact.

From this starting "point" all other follow: here, now, self, God, particle, absolute zero, alpha and omega, the particle, substance, whole, unity, ONE.

We first dismiss our senses as inconsequential or irreverent or prone to illusion, and then [rojec trh mental construct we NEED, as the final destination which we then strive to find.
See here we are looking for the elusive "god-particle" or the Big Bang starting point, or the absolute zero, rejecting anything that hints at differentiation and its absence...like human nature, the past, history, the world, experience, reality.

This is the difference between Top>Down versus Bottom>Up thinking.
The first starts with a projected idea, ideal, and works backwards trying to prove its reality.
The second starts from nothing, and builds up its information, projecting it forth...taking the given and extrapolating the probabilities of the yet to be known or the unknown.

Satyr wrote:

So, 1+1=2 is logical once the #1 is passed over as a necessary generalizations, all others being over-generalizations, of course.
Take the unity of the human race...a generalization exceeding even the prohibited noes of race and sex, yet it is accepted without question.

But I digress.

History doesn't seem to prove you right on this point, as during the period when science and mathematics were considered infallible and Newtonian mechanics as representative of some kind of absolute truth about how the universe works there was also an unquestioning acceptance of phenomena such as race, class and gender, with little or no critical analysis to the contrary.

Logically speaking, given your argument, shouldn't the reverse have been true?

How is it also true that in the century when we have witnessed the collapse of established scientific facts about the world we have also seen the dissolution of boundaries that formerly separated populations based upon class, race, gender, etc... etc...?

d63tark wrote:

Keats argued that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of emotions. He was basically pointing to the fact that you cannot engage in the act of writing a poem (that is if you want to be effective at it) in the same way you might making a table. You can’t just do like you would a table, and just start making one and hope that inspiration finds you. The only activity you can engage in as concerns poetry is keep coming up with lines until something clicks together. It has also been said about poetry that the main goal is to accumulate enough experience to achieve revelation, and that poetry is a kind of concentrated experience that accelerates the process that eventually leads to revelation –or a spontaneous overflow.

I agree that sitting down to write a poem or make any other creative something needs something more than what it takes to begin making a table - though tables usually have some external push (read:inspiration) - we need somewhere to eat breakfast, put our tools, whatever.
However, I can't see poetry being only the spontaneous overflow of emotion, or it would simply be emotion. And reading a poem would be like eavesdropping on a primal therapy session. You end here by saying that it is a kind of concentrated experience. Poetry is generally ambiguous or has multiple layers, so a number of experiences can be had reading a poem.

Quote :

Now the reason I bring this up is that I think it connects to what we’re doing in that our primary goal, as the creatively and intellectually curious, is revelation: a spontaneous overflow of the experiences (or activities) that we tend to engage in. And these experiences, as far as I can tell, tend to accumulate through 3 primary types of perspectives: the personal/anecdotal, the social, and the academic (or what I like to call the god’s eye view).

Quote :

The personal/anecdotal, as would seem obvious, consists of our everyday experience. I mean we all have day to day experiences that we have to interpret and form ideas about. There’s not much more to explain about this domain.

The social, on the other hand, gets a little more complex in that it is based on information we get from others. This, of course, would be the domain of what we get from our friends and acquaintances. But it’s more than that. It would be the information we get from journalists and artists. Now we could say that these are from the academic. And that would be true to some extent (as I’ll cover later). But the main role of this type, this domain, is the relating of the basic human experiences of others to others.

Academic (or god’s eye view) is, of course, the domain of the scientist or philosopher that seeks to offer a perspective that is somehow above the common. They seek to give us information that is not so mired in common human imperatives and agendas.

This last sounds like 'experts', or at least people declaring themselves to be that.

Quote :

Now it is important to remember that this is a spectrum in which each discipline is confined to their particular domain. As I pointed out earlier, the journalist and the artist can be said to straddle all three in that they are reporting the personal/anecdotal while also trying to do it in a very academic way.

I can see where the journalist generally is claiming to do all three, but the artist? How are all poets, for example, claiming to have the God's eye view? Aren't many of them using complicated images and language in a sense phenomenologically: when you hear these words and see these images you will understand my experience. I don't think all poets, let alone all artists, are claiming to explain Experience or any other objective truths. Visual artists often just make what they think is beautiful.

Quote :

Still, I would argue that they inhabit the social domain. Plus that, while the academic would seem to be the dialectical opposite of the personal, it still has a vital connection to it in that anything it might produce is useless, unless it has something to do with the personal lives of most people. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Now the catch for which I drug you this far for, a question:

Do you think the relationship between the 3 is primarily vertical (or hierarchal) or horizontal?

Now I know there will be those who will argue that it is primarily vertical, that you start with the personal/anecdotal and work your way up through the social to the academic/god’s eye view.

But I would argue that it is primarily horizontal in that all it is, to me, is a shift in perspective. First of all, the 3 perspectives seem interdependent to me. As I pointed out earlier, the journalist and artist seem to straddle all 3. And even the academic requires that it somehow apply to basic human experience in order to be of any good. Secondly, it seems to me there is a kind relativity when it comes to knowledge in that the criteria of being knowledgeable or “smart” is always relative to what is most in demand in a given situation. As smart as we may be, try seeming to be smart around common people around someone who, say, renovates old cars. And how smart would we seem as compared to some alpha male that knew how to survive in some kind of post apocalyptic world? And like I like to joke: I could be a quantum physicist and still look like an idiot to a small town mechanic.

But lastly, to make an argument that might seem my weakest because it exposes an agenda, I just think it would be to resign ourselves to the vertical/hierarchal model in that it would make us subjects of an “expert culture” that was owned by those who had the money. It would pose the knowledge of those who had the money to attain it against the knowledge of those who had to experience the consequences of it. It would reduce us to system where those who had the means could tell everyone else what their reality was.

It sounds like you are heading towards a description of different kinds of intelligence, each suited to certain contexts. Which I agree with. But you are also talking about three kinds of experiencing - supposedly - personal, social and this third one which includes both philosophers and scientists. I think this third category is confused. A lot of philosophers are rationalists - I mean this in the philosophical sense of believing in innate knowledge - whereas scientists are empiricists and therefore utterly dependent on the first category, formally that is. There is a kind of hierarchy - if you do not have the first category, you cannot have the other two. Everyone is dependent on experience. Scientists of course work via peer review and use/build on the work of others so even in their strictest region they are 'social'. It is built in to their methodology. IOW I think your category 3 is about what is being claimed - objectivity - not the kinds of experiences that lead to the claims, which for scientists are just one way of organizing 1 and 2 and saying this is the way to knowledge and all other organizations of 1 and 2 do not necessarily lead to knowledge.

Philosophy has nothing so rigorous as a consensus methodology, certainly not if we look at the 'great philosophers'. They arrive at conclusions through all sorts of different ways of organizing 1 and 2.

Feyardabend argues in Against Method that scientists are not nearly as strict as they claim and I agree, but nevertheless, compared to philosophers, they are really quite anal around methodology. Which is neither good nor bad per se, though when they generalize about knowledge they tend to be philosophically weak, and deeply lacking in breadth in experience. You could almost say they take pride in this lack which is their rigor.

without-music wrote:

Long live the ad hom. Behind every perspective must be a thinker, and this perspective owes itself as much to the thinker as it does to its internal validity. Fuck the tou quoqay fallacy.

Tou quoque [i]is[/] ad hom.

without-music wrote:

Long live the ad hom. Behind every perspective must be a thinker, and this perspective owes itself as much to the thinker as it does to its internal validity. Fuck the tou quoqay fallacy.

So if someone says X is true or good, but they act like this is not the case, X is not true or good?

Kovacs wrote:

without-music wrote:

Long live the ad hom. Behind every perspective must be a thinker, and this perspective owes itself as much to the thinker as it does to its internal validity. Fuck the tou quoqay fallacy.

So if someone says X is true or good, but they act like this is not the case, X is not true or good?

That's just the point, WM, someone saying X is true and someone acting like X is not true are 2 different issues. This is because one could just as easily come up against someone who claims X is true and acts like X is true. The act of someone claiming X is true and not acting like it is is merely a contingency.

That said, thanks for giving me a way of slim-lining my point, Music.

I'm sorry Kovacs, it was you I was responding to. And it wasn't Without Music that made the other point, it was Joker being true his anarchist sensibility. I still have to figure out how Without MUsic got caught up in this.

That said, you seem to be grasping my initial point. And at a better time, I hope to benifit by responding to your responses. I look forward to it.

Lilith wrote:

Satyr wrote:

So, 1+1=2 is logical once the #1 is passed over as a necessary generalizations, all others being over-generalizations, of course.
Take the unity of the human race...a generalization exceeding even the prohibited noes of race and sex, yet it is accepted without question.

But I digress.

History doesn't seem to prove you right on this point, as during the period when science and mathematics were considered infallible and Newtonian mechanics as representative of some kind of absolute truth about how the universe works there was also an unquestioning acceptance of phenomena such as race, class and gender, with little or no critical analysis to the contrary.

Logically speaking, given your argument, shouldn't the reverse have been true?

The confrontation of genes by memes is at play.
since memes are extensions of genes, they try to usurp them but fail, as the past might be denied, as the liberals and communists do, but it cannot be overcome or dealt with in this way.
We see this contradiction in such areas as gender and sex.
Women are convinced that they are like men, or that we are all the same, yet they cannot help but behave and think as women, contradicting the ideal with the real.

So, men might pay lip-service to the social ideal, might even be totally convinced by it, but they act in ways that contradict it.
Human artifices do not affect reality, unless they are useful because they reflect reality better than other artifices...and then only temporarily.

Lilith wrote:

How is it also true that in the century when we have witnessed the collapse of established scientific facts about the world we have also seen the dissolution of boundaries that formerly separated populations based upon class, race, gender, etc... etc...?

Did I not go over this in my essay The Feminization of Mankind?
The "dissolution" is not real, it is theoretical....it is artificial.

The meme has buried the gene, convinced the mind that the artifice is real....simulations, Baudrillard style.
We live in a cocooned environment made up of increasingly self-referential human artifices.

Satyr wrote:

I've mentioned some before, and Pinker shows how the humanities are now taken over by liberal agendas with social motives

Are you talking about The Blank Slate here? If you are, he does make some convincing indictments concerning the left that even had me reconsidering some of my previous mistakes. But, hell, who doesn’t make mistakes? But that last chapter on the arts calls, nay, asks for a good going over. At that point, he clearly steps out of his realm and exposes some major gaps in his reasoning. At that point, I think he got a little overconfident and reached too far and may have compromised the rest of his argument in the process. I just think he, based on his command of the scientific, over-reached the domain of the scientific.

But that said, Satyr, I give you a lot of shit. I, as you would probably put it, flatter myself with the illusion of actually standing up to you. But as little as you may care what I think, I am authentically interested in what you have to say here and will try to get to it tomorrow under better circumstances.

Satyr wrote:

I've mentioned some before, and Pinker shows how the humanities are now taken over by liberal agendas with social motives, but, in short, the most glaring starting proposition in science, and in the mathematics which is the holy scripture, is the notion of a #1.
The idea is a secular and very abstracted version of God.
A singularity with no reference to anything in experience.

No insult I’ve hurled at you could possibly sting like this one; but now it seems as if we were separated at birth. It seems as if what you are talking about here is the Grand Narrative, that which is embraced by the more powerful among us and calls upon the weaker to “make sacrifices for the common good.”

It’s like I like to say, it use to be:

Pray hard and follow these principles, and you too may enter the kingdom of heaven.

Now it’s:

Work hard and follow these principles, and you too may enter the kingdom of success.

It will be interesting to see how we manage to assert our different conclusions arrived at by a common continental method.

Especially, if I'm right about you on this, given our common embrace of the nihilistic perspective.

Satyr wrote:

since memes are extensions of genes, they try to usurp them but fail, as the past might be denied, as the liberals and communists do, but it cannot be overcome or dealt with in this way.

Problem here, dude. As pinker points out, being a liberal or communist may be genetic as well. So what will there be to be overcome? I think your wandering into a naturalistic fallacy here, that is even after engaging in the fallacy of trying to make being a liberal or communist seem unnatural -that is an extention of our natural genetic makeup. And at what point in this transformation does something go from being natural to being un-natural?

I'm sorry, bud, but the more I look at this, the less it works -in ways I have yet to comprehend.

d63tark wrote:

That's just the point, WM, someone saying X is true and someone acting like X is not true are 2 different issues. This is because one could just as easily come up against someone who claims X is true and acts like X is true. The act of someone claiming X is true and not acting like it is is merely a contingency.

Another way to put it is: deciding X is true because someone is hypocritical about X is like punching yourself in the face because someone else is an asshole. Unless you're lucky. And since there is someone being hypocritical, right now, for pretty much every idea, nothing is true. Ah, what a relief.

Satyr wrote:

So, men might pay lip-service to the social ideal, might even be totally convinced by it, but they act in ways that contradict it.
Human artifices do not affect reality, unless they are useful because they reflect reality better than other artifices...and then only temporarily.

Have to agree with you on this, Satyr. I was raised by my mom who taught me to be respectful of women. That didn’t work out so well. I mean you’re right, I want a slut, like any other man. But I have played the nice guy who is just there to help.

To reinforce your point even more:

Evolutionary psychology came up against the question of why it is that if women (referring to the myth of female misogamy) only preferred long term mating strategies, why is it that men who engage in short term mating strategies still happen? The idea was that they would have, through a genetic process, been filtered out. The solution they came up with was that women tend to engage in both long term and short term mating strategies.

The problem I have with this is it may not have been JUST a matter of genetic selection, but the possibility that any man is capable of relying on short term mating strategies. It may be, rather, a matter of what he thinks he can get away with.

Satyr wrote:

But I digress.
Once the mental construct of a #1 is taken as a necessary starting proposition then all follows...the negation of it, the miden, the nil, the {0} is the next step.
A useful tool, no doubt, but still a mental construct.

Once it is made all multiplicity must be explained away or resolved under a uniformity, a singularity.
Difference is the illusion, and sameness is a matter of fact.

From this starting "point" all other follow: here, now, self, God, particle, absolute zero, alpha and omega, the particle, substance, whole, unity, ONE.

We first dismiss our senses as inconsequential or irreverent or prone to illusion, and then [rojec trh mental construct we NEED, as the final destination which we then strive to find.
See here we are looking for the elusive "god-particle" or the Big Bang starting point, or the absolute zero, rejecting anything that hints at differentiation and its absence...like human nature, the past, history, the world, experience, reality.

This is the difference between Top>Down versus Bottom>Up thinking.
The first starts with a projected idea, ideal, and works backwards trying to prove its reality.
The second starts from nothing, and builds up its information, projecting it forth...taking the given and extrapolating the probabilities of the yet to be known or the unknown.

Dude, I could not agree with you more on this. The problem is that we come, due our different dispositions, to different conclusions. And this compliments your more pessimistic take on things:

But how could we not come to war on this? We certainly can’t agree on the top. And the bottom/up only comes to different conclusions about the nature of reality since it always involves a multiplicity of experiences. I would further argue that the top/down argument is always a result of the bottom/up process.

And what you were describing at first is similar to Marcuse’s concept of operationalism: that which forces a criteria of a valid statement, then proceeds to hold all argument beholden to it thereby shaping the whole discourse to its favor.

You mention Pinker. And as brilliant as I think his books to be, I think he engaged in this very strategy in The Blank Slate when he stepped out of his domain in the last chapter. This was evident in the way he tried to apply his understanding of cognitive psychology to an assertion about what art should be. He starts the argument by pointing out that there generally tends to be, statistically, a general expression about what is beautiful: a certain kind of landscape that you tend to see on calendars. He then goes on to connect this with the structures described by cognitive psychology and evolutionary psychology.

Now at this point he has already committed the naturalistic fallacy he has pretty much denounced throughout the rest of book. Throughout it, he took great pains to point out that describing an aspect of human nature does not lead to some moral or value judgment either for the left or right. Yet he asserts here that the cognitive structures impose an aesthetic imperative. Furthermore, he goes on to point out a list that tells us the criteria by which art must work in order to be art. But he missed an essential one in failing to point out that art is part of a general discourse. Hence: his obvious repulsion to conceptual art and art that rejects Bourgeoisie values. He accuses it, based on the on the assertion of a couple of artists, of rejecting beauty altogether. Yet work by such artists as Duchamp have aesthetic value, that is since I can still see their influence in such things as the Nine Inch Nails video for Closer.

But what really pissed me off about it (and I’m almost certain you will disagree with me on this) is that he tried to pass my appreciation of modern and postmodern art as being the result of my being some kind of pawn for critics.

He then proceeded into an argument that was, ultimately, ridiculously self contradicting. In the process of his point about arts resistance to the beautiful, he pointed to Serrano’s Piss Christ and brought Mapplethorpe into it as well. Now first of all, Mapplethorpe does have an aesthetic if you look at other works than the ones that created the controversy. He actually creates photos of Lilies that were actually quite beautiful –even by old school standards. But Pinker’s failure to recognize the discourse role of art becomes even more ironic when you consider his point considering Serrano’s Piss Christ.

Now before I go on, I should point out that I have issues with it as well in that I think it was primarily presented for the shock value of it. I just think it was a little heavy handed. And the problem I see with shock value, which is without any aesthetic value, is that once the shock value has worn off, there is nothing left. Now the irony of it is that those of us who were a little less shocked by it and understood it as part of a discourse had dismissed it a long time ago. But it is those who tend to nag on it, such as Pinker, who keeps bringing it back into the discourse that they failed to recognize in the first place.

But his biggest offense, to me, was his inane attempt to make relativism the primary drive behind Orwell’s 1984. He points out a dialogue in which one of the leader’s points out that that what the main protagonist doesn’t know is that there are no absolute truths. In other words, Pinker is trying to ground police states in the fact that there is no foundation for anything we might think. And to that extent, he would be right. As I have pointed out, the sociopathic is little more than an exploitation of the intuitive sense that all our constructs ultimately have no solid foundation. What Pinker fails to see is that, regardless of the foundation, the actual police state finds its expression in absolute statements. Ultimately, it wasn’t the nihilistic foundation that led to the Orwellian police state; it was what the leaders did with it.

The point is that ultimately ideas do nothing, people do. And this is the aspect that folds back on the rest of Pinker’s thesis. He makes his point as if had we not embraced the blank slate, the noble savage, or the ghost in the machine, everything would have been much better. But can he really prove that by the very standards he utilizes throughout the whole book?

Anyway, if it’s anything to you, Satyr, you are the first one I’ve presented this to. It will be interesting to see what you have to say about it.

Sorry to draw you into such work. But you seem like one of the few committed enough to struggle your way through it.

In short...

d63tark wrote:

Dude, I could not agree with you more on this. The problem is that we come, due our different dispositions, to different conclusions. And this compliments your more pessimistic take on things:

But how could we not come to war on this? We certainly can’t agree on the top. And the bottom/up only comes to different conclusions about the nature of reality since it always involves a multiplicity of experiences. I would further argue that the top/down argument is always a result of the bottom/up process.

Yuor perspective is naive...and that's why you are a boy.

A bottom/up process reveals a world where suffering cannot be avoided or escaped or dismissed, but dealt with, coped with, tolerated.
If entropy is increasing this means that no matter how much ordering is occurring, how much good, how much positivity,there is, the so called negative, the dirodering is always more.

d63tark wrote:

And what you were describing at first is similar to Marcuse’s concept of operationalism: that which forces a criteria of a valid statement, then proceeds to hold all argument beholden to it thereby shaping the whole discourse to its favor.

Perhaps we can go with less rationalism and more emotionalism.
I tend to favor mature and masculine attitudes.
A rational argument is one which is constructed within a harmonious model. One which encompasses the physical and the metaphysical in its deliberations and that does not conveniently use one method here and another there, or one standard in on context and then a contradictory one in another.

d63tark wrote:

You mention Pinker. And as brilliant as I think his books to be, I think he engaged in this very strategy in The Blank Slate when he stepped out of his domain in the last chapter. This was evident in the way he tried to apply his understanding of cognitive psychology to an assertion about what art should be. He starts the argument by pointing out that there generally tends to be, statistically, a general expression about what is beautiful: a certain kind of landscape that you tend to see on calendars. He then goes on to connect this with the structures described by cognitive psychology and evolutionary psychology.

He follows through with his own reasoning. this is called integrity. Whether he does so succesfully or not is another matter.

If you prefer the douche-bags who fear to follow their own "logic", as Heisman courageously did, because they are too stupid or their "logic" is adopted and so they have no clue how to follow it, or are cowards who wish to selectively apply their "reasoning", then there are plenty of forums out there for you....in fact the real world is full of retards like that.

d63tark wrote:

Now at this point he has already committed the naturalistic fallacy he has pretty much denounced throughout the rest of book. Throughout it, he took great pains to point out that describing an aspect of human nature does not lead to some moral or value judgment either for the left or right.

Because despite his intelligence he cannot overcome his own cultural and social triannig, and he tries to remain politically-correct; he tries to remain loyal to the social milieu so as to not face the consequences and gain in sales and attentiveness.
In the end he backs off going all the way with his reasoning...still he faces the assaults of Gould, the retard liberal nitwit.

Yet he asserts here that the cognitive structures impose an aesthetic imperative. Furthermore, he goes on to point out a list that tells us the criteria by which art must work in order to be art. But he missed an essential one in failing to point out that art is part of a general discourse. Hence: his obvious repulsion to conceptual art and art that rejects Bourgeoisie values. He accuses it, based on the on the assertion of a couple of artists, of rejecting beauty altogether. Yet work by such artists as Duchamp have aesthetic value, that is since I can still see their influence in such things as the Nine Inch Nails video for Closer.

d63tark wrote:

But what really pissed me off about it (and I’m almost certain you will disagree with me on this) is that he tried to pass my appreciation of modern and postmodern art as being the result of my being some kind of pawn for critics.

I shall refrain from comemnting on art, as the topic is too large to get into here.
I will comment on it in my essay...but in short your admiration for Jazz is indicative of the state of the human mind in modern sheltered environments.

Mencken, H.L. wrote:

-As a result of this preference of Southern
gentry for mulatto mistresses there was created a series of mixed strains
containing the best white blood of the South, and perhaps of the whole country.
As another result the poor whites went unfertilized from above, and so missed
the improvement that so constantly shows itself in the peasant stocks of other
countries. It is a commonplace that nearly all Negroes who rise above the
general are of mixed blood, usually with white predominating. The mulatto girls
of the early days despised the poor whites as creatures distinctly inferior to
Negroes, and it was thus almost unheard of for such a girl to enter into
relations with a man of that submerged class. The aversion was based upon sound
instinct. The Southern mulatto of today is a proof of it. Like all other
half-breeds he is an unhappy man, with disquieting tendencies towards
anti-social habits of thought, but he is intrinsically a better animal than the
pure-blooded descendent of the old poor whites, and he not infrequently
demonstrates it. It is not by accident that the Negroes of the South are making
faster progress, culturally, than the masses of the whites. It is not by
accident that the only visible aesthetic activity in the South in in their
hands. No Southern composer has ever written music so good as that of half a
dozen white-black composers who might be named.

-In the United States the number of genuine
music-lovers is probably very low. There are whole States, e.g., Alabama,
Arkansas and Idaho, in which it would be difficult to muster a hundred. In New
York, I venture, not more than one person in every thousand of the population
deserves to be counted. The rest are, to all intents and purposes, tone deaf.
They can not only sit through the infernal din made by current jazz-bands; but
they actually like it.

-The jazz-band fetches only vulgarians, barbarians, idiots, pigs.

-All the progress that has been made in the art
during the past fifty or sixty years has been based upon quiet filches from the
camera, just as all the progress that has been made in panting has been based
upon filches from the spectroscope. When one finds a painter who professes to
disdain these scientific aids, one always beholds a painter who is actually
unable to draw or paint, and who seeks to conceal his incompetence by clothing
it in hocus-pocus. This is the origin of the Modern Art that regales us with
legs eight feet long, complexions of olive green, and human heads related to
the soap-box rather than the edam cheese. This is the origin of all the gabble
one hears in ratty and unhealthy studios about cubism, vortism, futurism and
other such childish follies.



-Art and Nature: The doctrine that art is an imitation of
nature is full of folly. Nine-tenths of all the art that one encounters in this
world is actually an imitation of other art. Fully a half of it is an imitation
twice, thrice or ten times removed. The true artist, in fact, is seldom an
accurate observer of nature; he leaves that gross and often revolting
exploration to geologists, engineers and anatomists. The last thing he wants to
see is a beautiful woman in the bright, pitiless sunlight.

Art always reflects the overall qualities of the people.

d63tark wrote:

But his biggest offense, to me, was his inane attempt to make relativism the primary drive behind Orwell’s 1984. He points out a dialogue in which one of the leader’s points out that that what the main protagonist doesn’t know is that there are no absolute truths. In other words, Pinker is trying to ground police states in the fact that there is no foundation for anything we might think. And to that extent, he would be right. As I have pointed out, the sociopathic is little more than an exploitation of the intuitive sense that all our constructs ultimately have no solid foundation. What Pinker fails to see is that, regardless of the foundation, the actual police state finds its expression in absolute statements. Ultimately, it wasn’t the nihilistic foundation that led to the Orwellian police state; it was what the leaders did with it.

Authoritarian systems are the ultimate expression of masculine desire for order...a counter nihilistic stance if not taken to the extreme.

d63tark wrote:

The point is that ultimately ideas do nothing, people do. And this is the aspect that folds back on the rest of Pinker’s thesis. He makes his point as if had we not embraced the blank slate, the noble savage, or the ghost in the machine, everything would have been much better. But can he really prove that by the very standards he utilizes throughout the whole book?

Like I said, Pinker exposes the liberal bias in the sciences having to do with human beings but he cowers away from going all the way with it...so instead he offers a half-assed critique which is profound because it is rare in this day and age.

Satyr wrote:

A bottom/up process reveals a world where suffering cannot be avoided or escaped or dismissed, but dealt with, coped with, tolerated.
If entropy is increasing this means that no matter how much ordering is occurring, how much good, how much positivity,there is, the so called negative, the dirodering is always more.

In fact I would suggest that as disorder increases this difference between ordering and disordering is increasing.This means that entropy is increasing as the effects of fragmentation accumulate.
This too is part of my model.

As the absolute is approached, this time towards a Big Crunch, the almost singularity approached from a different vantage point, entropy will increase until it approaches a near absolute state.

Do you mean Big Crunch, as in the cosmological theory disproved by observation of the positive acceleration rate of the universe?
It's also misleading to use entropy in the context of this conversation. A maximum state of entropy implies nothing more than a state of equilibrium, in which no energy transfer takes place.

d63tark wrote:

You mention Pinker. And as brilliant as I think his books to be, I think he engaged in this very strategy in The Blank Slate when he stepped out of his domain in the last chapter. This was evident in the way he tried to apply his understanding of cognitive psychology to an assertion about what art should be. He starts the argument by pointing out that there generally tends to be, statistically, a general expression about what is beautiful: a certain kind of landscape that you tend to see on calendars. He then goes on to connect this with the structures described by cognitive psychology and evolutionary psychology.

Now at this point he has already committed the naturalistic fallacy he has pretty much denounced throughout the rest of book. Throughout it, he took great pains to point out that describing an aspect of human nature does not lead to some moral or value judgment either for the left or right.

I can understand this. It is natural to consider that human beings apply a human bias toward judging whether something is beautiful or not. For some reason, most of us tend to think that a rose is more beautiful than a steaming turd. That bias is acceptable, though, because considering how things may be perceived by non humans is completely irrelevant to the study of human values.

Art must not be limited to beauty, though. I don't think Duchamp or the Nine Inch Nails had the pretense to create beautiful art.

In addition, statistical considerations aside, judgement of beauty is ultimately irrational. One can be indoctrinated into a mechanic response when it comes to judgement of values, but the legitimate judgement can only come from the gut.

phoneutria wrote:

Do you mean Big Crunch, as in the cosmological theory disproved by observation of the positive acceleration rate of the universe?

Yes, I mean the Big Crunch, at the opposite side of the same coin on the other side of which the Big Bang rests, as being part of the current scientific model, expressed as metaphor.

Within my model it is the near absolute point, which is never finalized.
An ongoing process, rather than a singular event, approached from different vantage points.

phoneutria wrote:

It's also misleading to use entropy in the context of this conversation. A maximum state of entropy implies nothing more than a state of equilibrium, in which no energy transfer takes place.

And as such I consider it a mental model...a human construct, a linguistic and artistic metaphor.

On a microcosmic level I see imbalance, conflict, change, everywhere. I can't imagine a universe that contradicts its parts, unless I imagine myself outside of it, observing it as a God, from some "outside" position, calling it One.
In this case I know I am merely imagining things.