I suppose one of the things I find more
frustrating about persistent intellectual posture is how easy it is
to ignore where and how it creates cramps. I can bend and balance
boxes of 2-liters for hours and inevitably will start to feel a
little knot form or a wave of pain. You sit down all day and need to
lift your arms above your head and roll your neck or swivel side to
side. An intellectual posture allows you to say the same thing over
and over again, and instead of setting off a warning sign that
there's a need to stretch or get a massage, the neural pathways
you've created to work yourself into that position get reinforced
each time you assert it or you hear that someone agrees with it.
As infinitely complex and confused perceptual beings, we're blind to the “true” nature of reality. I don't believe we will ever find the words, run the experiment, or dig up “42” in an act of cosmic comedic justice. This isn't what we want though. We want the explanatory power that infects and translates or gives us the groundwork from which to build. The more you understand about quantum systems, the cooler the devices you get to take pictures of your dick with. Find the evolutionary ingrained model for social being or mental pathologies, turn your abusive parents into categorically immature and unintelligent narcissists with oedipal complexes and mood disorders; the more adjectives, the easier to swallow and maybe cope with or develop a strategy for combating.
We want the story because whether we're particularly adept at articulating it or not, we want the story to mean something. We want it to reflect our values, what we've worked or sacrificed for, perhaps what many members of our tribe have died for. The problem being, there's no end to the amount of things any one person may find valuable or ways in which they'll choose to try and approach them. So you get extremely specific scientific disciplines arguing so minutely that maybe 3 or 4 people in the entire world even have a shot of knowing what the hell they're talking about, let alone be able to discern the truth of either one. The other side of the spectrum gets you an endless ethics debate regarding the relative imperative to behave in accordance with the tenants of the really peaceful religion.
As infinitely complex and confused perceptual beings, we're blind to the “true” nature of reality. I don't believe we will ever find the words, run the experiment, or dig up “42” in an act of cosmic comedic justice. This isn't what we want though. We want the explanatory power that infects and translates or gives us the groundwork from which to build. The more you understand about quantum systems, the cooler the devices you get to take pictures of your dick with. Find the evolutionary ingrained model for social being or mental pathologies, turn your abusive parents into categorically immature and unintelligent narcissists with oedipal complexes and mood disorders; the more adjectives, the easier to swallow and maybe cope with or develop a strategy for combating.
We want the story because whether we're particularly adept at articulating it or not, we want the story to mean something. We want it to reflect our values, what we've worked or sacrificed for, perhaps what many members of our tribe have died for. The problem being, there's no end to the amount of things any one person may find valuable or ways in which they'll choose to try and approach them. So you get extremely specific scientific disciplines arguing so minutely that maybe 3 or 4 people in the entire world even have a shot of knowing what the hell they're talking about, let alone be able to discern the truth of either one. The other side of the spectrum gets you an endless ethics debate regarding the relative imperative to behave in accordance with the tenants of the really peaceful religion.
Here
I'll note a reason I approach writing the way I do. There's a very
specific and infrequent utility I get from truly picking out the
individual lice of insight on the infected head of some topic I'm
exploring. 99 times out of 100, absolutely no one wants or cares to
read the book I read, or the Jacobin article giving you the ten page
history of why your modern union sucks ass, or the Guardians of the
Galaxy comics so you can appreciate how disappointing I felt the
first movie really was. They want an impression of my approach to
whatever it is that concerns them.
They either want someone to mirror and add, or swallow. 1 in 100 want
to genuinely talk or debate and perhaps learn something new. It is
true that I find details interesting and vitally important depending
on your task. Details aren't going to give you an impression of “me”
and my process, they're going to reduce me to a pedantic research
paper “wowing” you with my capacity for citations.
Another way to state the above paragraph is that there is no point to how I write but to try. It has set with me for a long time the psychopath (and I use that term technically) who attacked the very idea that I would even bother at all when so many better philosophers have said it before. It's like an archetypal ignorance. I couldn't possibly phrase intellectual and cultural suicide better. Every morality story you hear in church has been passed down from “already figured out” sentiments our ancestors learned from fighting the environment and each other. Every step forward, be it technologically or in terms of morality, builds on the breaking down and reiteration then reorientation of models and experiences that, say every 40 or so years, 1/3 of the population hasn't necessarily experienced. In 2 years, how many younger obliterated freshman during Little 5 are going to stop and remember to make a reference to 9/11?
It seems stories about tragedy, war, and mass death are turning into failures of retaining and translating the meat of why they happened meaningfully. 9/11 will get a commemorative stamp. Someone will put a statue up memorializing the Pulse nightclub victims, naively inspired by a little girl staring down a bull as a statement regarding intrinsic value or consequence. What to do with the details, when they matter so so much but are often so many and so complicated they get lost to the lazy symbolism or furiously debated into pieces so small you can't really pick them up anymore?
I think you have to learn how to orient yourself in relation to those details. You have to get a higher consciousness perhaps about the nature of what it means to hold something as a distinguishable entity. Say at the level of the neurochemistry of your brain, it can't differentiate between the positive rush from coffee verses cocaine verses the best sex of your life. But you're not just your brain, at least, you don't act like it, so you impose a value and relative utility in how you choose to get the channels flowing. You can look for the hidden orientations of your mind with digressions like these. You can surprise yourself by stumbling forward into manifest value.
It's something of a confusing and seemingly perfectly arbitrary process. Why write...just anything? Whether I want it to or not, my brain is working. It's taking my experiences and matching them against my expectations of the world and of myself. And it's doing it with more (possible) neural connections than there are atoms in the universe. That I could distill a single sentence is a miracle. That I might give you an impression or insight by peeking so far into my mind I'm actually in yours is an act of God.
And you don't like that. Not one bit. And you don't like that because to take on the burden of what it means to be God is infinitely taxing. It's an obliteration event. You can't be “you” if you're God, as it's understood in modern terms. What an act of ignorant pride! You don't know everything! You are not everywhere! You are not the underlying Truth of MY morality! So you learn pretty quickly how intellectually deficient an ideologue is as they summarily dismiss you and often condescend to pray.
The issue being, you are God too, incidentally, the angry destructive one that no one seems to understand but keep sacrificing for. Surely one needn't know everything to know a significant amount about that which they are and how it tends to behave. Not a single person on the road deemed it practical or necessary to drive on the wrong side and cause an accident today. In all of my Godly wisdom, without ever saying it out loud, I predicted as much and it came true! How does one know the future if not by divine right? As to the morality of not running your car into others deliberately, how'd you learn not to do that except by the normalizing factors of your culture? Of course I'm your truth, because you haven't killed me off despite the murderous intent I can see in your eyes. A murderous intent that happens everywhere and in everything where Gods like me attack lesser Gods like you in manners like this.
We don't say our goals out loud, so we're constantly disagreeing about, literally, “nothing.” The goal of a “productive” conversation is to get the point of what the person is telling you and see if it has anything to do with how to better orient yourself later. When you get into an argument, and you assume it's about “winning,” it seems more a misfiring of your threat systems. Your goal isn't to escalate until you get a divorce or kill the other person to defend your opinion. Your goal is to be understood or achieve some form of reciprocity, when all you've done is offered a baseless proposition floating in the might-as-well-be-empty head-space of your mind.
This comes out with the phrasing of things like, “I was only trying to help!” Help what? Help who? Help how? You have a very vague feeling and notion of what constitutes “help,” and by not parsing it out, you're throwing yourself in to drown along with the person you think is trapped under water.
So you can think about this when people, in my view, very ignorantly attack the idea that science can't speak to human values. They point to the tenuous assumptions in science that the observable universe is fundamentally capable of being understood to the point of absurdity. It doesn't matter if we get to “42,” it matters that it's irrelevant your opinion of clitoral castration, for example, it's an unnecessary harm inflicted on vulnerable women where it should be obvious there's a meaningful reason to eradicate the process objectively. Science, the study and approaching-more-accurate accounting of the material world in which we operate, can help dispel the empty-headed idea that vilified genitalia. (Empty insofar as to what we understand today as it is reasonable to conclude much of our ingrained attitudes and relationships are influenced by the complicated dangers regarding sex as we progressed.)
Of course we're all flailing about in the infinite waters of confusion and entropy. But more of course our very capacity for, not just perception, but motivated and reproducible perception means we need to adopt a mode of starting from a shared place and stating a goal AFTER we've done the work like this to bounce around the universe of our own mind to figure out just what it is we're even bothering to talk about, worry about, or set out to fix or achieve. There's a very large list as to why that doesn't happen, presumably the confusion or frustration you might feel trying to follow a blog like this and immediately concluding, indeed mylinating, the “no point” circuitry top amongst it.
I get very dismayed when I hear spot-on heavily tested and investigated stories for either my own behavior or something I've noticed in my family. If I were to try and “bring this home” as it were, without hesitation you can rob yourself of your identity, and therefore responsibility, by couching your understanding too convincingly in any paradigm that relies on your capacity to make an ill-informed “truth” claim. It doesn't matter the doting mother scared of being alone provokes her only son to overcompensate, and indeed run far away, in EXACTLY the manner as has happened between my second cousin and aunt. My degrees of openness and conscientious thoroughly predicted I'd be writing this thought digression after 17 hours of practically nonstop work. But that doesn't remove my responsibility for what it says or choice to write it. It's one blog, one piece, of all that is me, I have been, or am trying to be. Like every detail, it informs, but it's only the Truth to the degree in which you want to deify me, which you don't want to do. But how many other ideas from other deities are you doing that with right now? How many variations of other people's hells are you roasting in? And can you articulate why you chose them, if you chose them, and if there's a way out? That's the kind of story that's meaningful to me.
Another way to state the above paragraph is that there is no point to how I write but to try. It has set with me for a long time the psychopath (and I use that term technically) who attacked the very idea that I would even bother at all when so many better philosophers have said it before. It's like an archetypal ignorance. I couldn't possibly phrase intellectual and cultural suicide better. Every morality story you hear in church has been passed down from “already figured out” sentiments our ancestors learned from fighting the environment and each other. Every step forward, be it technologically or in terms of morality, builds on the breaking down and reiteration then reorientation of models and experiences that, say every 40 or so years, 1/3 of the population hasn't necessarily experienced. In 2 years, how many younger obliterated freshman during Little 5 are going to stop and remember to make a reference to 9/11?
It seems stories about tragedy, war, and mass death are turning into failures of retaining and translating the meat of why they happened meaningfully. 9/11 will get a commemorative stamp. Someone will put a statue up memorializing the Pulse nightclub victims, naively inspired by a little girl staring down a bull as a statement regarding intrinsic value or consequence. What to do with the details, when they matter so so much but are often so many and so complicated they get lost to the lazy symbolism or furiously debated into pieces so small you can't really pick them up anymore?
I think you have to learn how to orient yourself in relation to those details. You have to get a higher consciousness perhaps about the nature of what it means to hold something as a distinguishable entity. Say at the level of the neurochemistry of your brain, it can't differentiate between the positive rush from coffee verses cocaine verses the best sex of your life. But you're not just your brain, at least, you don't act like it, so you impose a value and relative utility in how you choose to get the channels flowing. You can look for the hidden orientations of your mind with digressions like these. You can surprise yourself by stumbling forward into manifest value.
It's something of a confusing and seemingly perfectly arbitrary process. Why write...just anything? Whether I want it to or not, my brain is working. It's taking my experiences and matching them against my expectations of the world and of myself. And it's doing it with more (possible) neural connections than there are atoms in the universe. That I could distill a single sentence is a miracle. That I might give you an impression or insight by peeking so far into my mind I'm actually in yours is an act of God.
And you don't like that. Not one bit. And you don't like that because to take on the burden of what it means to be God is infinitely taxing. It's an obliteration event. You can't be “you” if you're God, as it's understood in modern terms. What an act of ignorant pride! You don't know everything! You are not everywhere! You are not the underlying Truth of MY morality! So you learn pretty quickly how intellectually deficient an ideologue is as they summarily dismiss you and often condescend to pray.
The issue being, you are God too, incidentally, the angry destructive one that no one seems to understand but keep sacrificing for. Surely one needn't know everything to know a significant amount about that which they are and how it tends to behave. Not a single person on the road deemed it practical or necessary to drive on the wrong side and cause an accident today. In all of my Godly wisdom, without ever saying it out loud, I predicted as much and it came true! How does one know the future if not by divine right? As to the morality of not running your car into others deliberately, how'd you learn not to do that except by the normalizing factors of your culture? Of course I'm your truth, because you haven't killed me off despite the murderous intent I can see in your eyes. A murderous intent that happens everywhere and in everything where Gods like me attack lesser Gods like you in manners like this.
We don't say our goals out loud, so we're constantly disagreeing about, literally, “nothing.” The goal of a “productive” conversation is to get the point of what the person is telling you and see if it has anything to do with how to better orient yourself later. When you get into an argument, and you assume it's about “winning,” it seems more a misfiring of your threat systems. Your goal isn't to escalate until you get a divorce or kill the other person to defend your opinion. Your goal is to be understood or achieve some form of reciprocity, when all you've done is offered a baseless proposition floating in the might-as-well-be-empty head-space of your mind.
This comes out with the phrasing of things like, “I was only trying to help!” Help what? Help who? Help how? You have a very vague feeling and notion of what constitutes “help,” and by not parsing it out, you're throwing yourself in to drown along with the person you think is trapped under water.
So you can think about this when people, in my view, very ignorantly attack the idea that science can't speak to human values. They point to the tenuous assumptions in science that the observable universe is fundamentally capable of being understood to the point of absurdity. It doesn't matter if we get to “42,” it matters that it's irrelevant your opinion of clitoral castration, for example, it's an unnecessary harm inflicted on vulnerable women where it should be obvious there's a meaningful reason to eradicate the process objectively. Science, the study and approaching-more-accurate accounting of the material world in which we operate, can help dispel the empty-headed idea that vilified genitalia. (Empty insofar as to what we understand today as it is reasonable to conclude much of our ingrained attitudes and relationships are influenced by the complicated dangers regarding sex as we progressed.)
Of course we're all flailing about in the infinite waters of confusion and entropy. But more of course our very capacity for, not just perception, but motivated and reproducible perception means we need to adopt a mode of starting from a shared place and stating a goal AFTER we've done the work like this to bounce around the universe of our own mind to figure out just what it is we're even bothering to talk about, worry about, or set out to fix or achieve. There's a very large list as to why that doesn't happen, presumably the confusion or frustration you might feel trying to follow a blog like this and immediately concluding, indeed mylinating, the “no point” circuitry top amongst it.
I get very dismayed when I hear spot-on heavily tested and investigated stories for either my own behavior or something I've noticed in my family. If I were to try and “bring this home” as it were, without hesitation you can rob yourself of your identity, and therefore responsibility, by couching your understanding too convincingly in any paradigm that relies on your capacity to make an ill-informed “truth” claim. It doesn't matter the doting mother scared of being alone provokes her only son to overcompensate, and indeed run far away, in EXACTLY the manner as has happened between my second cousin and aunt. My degrees of openness and conscientious thoroughly predicted I'd be writing this thought digression after 17 hours of practically nonstop work. But that doesn't remove my responsibility for what it says or choice to write it. It's one blog, one piece, of all that is me, I have been, or am trying to be. Like every detail, it informs, but it's only the Truth to the degree in which you want to deify me, which you don't want to do. But how many other ideas from other deities are you doing that with right now? How many variations of other people's hells are you roasting in? And can you articulate why you chose them, if you chose them, and if there's a way out? That's the kind of story that's meaningful to me.
