Pseudo-Intellectual collection of things that all fit together hopefully
1. my friend and I were walking and came up with a video game idea: On one level its a macro-game like Sim City but the focus is on individuals. There are thousands of individuals. They all have a measure of good/evil or happy/sad or creative/destructive. You can monitor this from above. But the other part of the game is first person, like in folk tales when a disguised monarch goes out at night to meets his subjects and so you encounter these people and there's dialogue trees. You can't change their outlook in one fell swoop but can slightly nudge them in either direction.
2. I only know pop science so this is that. Electrons, so I'm told, exist in some kind of weird probability space. They don't exist anywhere but are smeared proabilistically with some places more likely, others less, and are effectively nowhere til [something] collapses them. I know no science but if an electron collapses in an improbable place does that radically alter what's probable after?
3. A cycle that repeats itself in endlessly, only occasionally a slight disruption changes the cycle minimally. This changes the cycle slightly but more importanly changes what future disruptions the cycle is open to.
4. a vessel made using a potter's wheel.
5. A crouched animal in the bushes observing a repetitive movement of prey. Patient, quiet, and immediately attuned to an eventual, inevitable discrepancy, which it moves toward.
6. A pagan society observes astronomical cycles. Realizes there's moments when, due to some cosmic confluence, a certain light will shine here, on this day, rarely, as though there is a transmission from one cosmic level to another.
7. A musical ensemble playing the same standards, and someone plays one note wrong, and everyone else instinctively works it in. and the song is different now and here is jazz.
8. Oysters, irritation, pearls.
9. [political example]
2. I only know pop science so this is that. Electrons, so I'm told, exist in some kind of weird probability space. They don't exist anywhere but are smeared proabilistically with some places more likely, others less, and are effectively nowhere til [something] collapses them. I know no science but if an electron collapses in an improbable place does that radically alter what's probable after?
3. A cycle that repeats itself in endlessly, only occasionally a slight disruption changes the cycle minimally. This changes the cycle slightly but more importanly changes what future disruptions the cycle is open to.
4. a vessel made using a potter's wheel.
5. A crouched animal in the bushes observing a repetitive movement of prey. Patient, quiet, and immediately attuned to an eventual, inevitable discrepancy, which it moves toward.
6. A pagan society observes astronomical cycles. Realizes there's moments when, due to some cosmic confluence, a certain light will shine here, on this day, rarely, as though there is a transmission from one cosmic level to another.
7. A musical ensemble playing the same standards, and someone plays one note wrong, and everyone else instinctively works it in. and the song is different now and here is jazz.
8. Oysters, irritation, pearls.
9. [political example]
Comments (77)
What comes to mind:
All our choices between alternatives we sense, regardless of how trivial, are us standing at crossroads. The path we choose obliterates the path(s) we thereby choose against. Each choice leads to its own domino effect of future choices where we will stand at crossroads not yet materialized. But not all of our crossroads are of the same magnitude. The larger the importance of the crossroad, the greater the change in the course of our future lives—and of everything which we affect.
IMO echoing your own examples, this being a kind of chaos theory, replete with the butterfly effect, that is applied to a compatibilist reality.
Ignorant view of jazz.
Better view: cooperative improvisation.
Pearl necklace!
I think, ultimately, it's our language and attitude that fail us because deep down we know our knowledge and understanding is not absolute.
As to jazz, I would say that, we had not realised how tenacious a musical pattern could be, such that, certain dynamic irregularities would still not collapse it. But then I suppose the intent was always to enhance the music positively. Jazz is amaze-balls! :wink: :cool:
Well, you know a little science, as do I. Together we can be dangerous, or at least ridiculous. Now @StreetlightX, you stay out of this. It is my understanding (hush now Streetlight!!!) that some people think that the same processes that may make an electron suddenly appear in "empty" space may be the same processes that lead to the creation of the universe.
Quoting csalisbury
@S, irritation, insults.
In case there is any doubt, these are intended as serious contributions. Very stream of consciousness based on impressions from your list.
Actually, the last line started out as my attempt to find a common theme in your list. Then it struck me it might fit in as an entry. I don't really think "entropy" belongs. I just wanted to make myself look smart. You should put "entropy" somewhere in every post that involves science.
By way of history - After signing the CRA in 1964, Lyndon Johnson said "We have just lost the South for a generation." Boy, was he wrong.
I thought you were maybe proposing a new name for this message board.
I def think free will is part of it. I have this feeling that free will, at least at first, doesn't involve making a choice, but rather refusing to identify as the chooser. There are those famous studies where we appear to make a choice before becoming consciously aware of it. Free will, at this stage, would involve putting the brakes on our automatic choosing.
Maybe similar to how the goal of meditation isn't to produce deeper, mystical thoughts, but rather to note how the thoughts we've grown accustomed to see as 'ours' - thought by us, the subject - are more like a chaotic, phantasmagoric landscape that unfolds by itself. But still, with a strange order. To me, my thoughts seem cyclical on a broad scale, chaotic (or over-simple and calm) moment to moment
And how the same thing is true of our actions. They're not directed by a 'free' 'subject' but are a chaos of subselves acting impulsively.
So the initial free act would be not to stop acting (as the meditator does not try to stop thinking) but to observe how one acts, without feeling identified with it. (Husserl is saying somethig similar when he connects freedom and the ability to perform the 'epoche')
This is not an amoral fatalism because the purpose is to observe what change is possible despite ourselves. And then to nudge ourselves in the right direction when some event happens that provides an opportunity to disrupt our cycles. I think those events are similar to what you describe as those crossroads with massive ramifications. But to make an actual choice you have to be equal to the event, if that makes sense.
Those are my thoughts recently anyway.
Totally ignorant, for sure. I do agree that jazz is cooperative improvisation. My thing was a tongue-in-cheek theory of the origin of jazz, along the lines of the Lucretian swerve @StreetlightX brought up. In the beginning all standards were played perfectly in the void until one fateful moment one swerving musician fucked up. And instead of him, embarassed, correcting himself, the other musicians said 'yes and' and a beautiful tradition of cooperative improvisation was born.
I'm listening to the audiobook of Sapiens and it's funny he just mentioned the conquering of Australia by prehistoric sapiens as a momentous event that changed the course of human development (the first time we ascended to the top of the food chain) Though he also described the cultivation of pumpkins, obliquely, as equally momentous (one agricultural revolution, independent of others, involved pumpkins.)
On an even more crackpot, mystic note, Gurdjieff's law of seven purports to show how a kink is built into any straight line and deviation is inevitable - the twist is , in deviating, we think we're following the same line - new things always emerge under the banner of something old.
Yes, definitely. But not only. I've been trying to wrap my mind around Rovelli (halfway through The Order of Time) and the idea that even though time is one thread of the physical everything, still the physical everything can change. And how to understand that in my scientifically illiterate mind without introducing a illegitimate higher-order timeline in which the everything is embedded. So its not the swerve as big bang, I'm trying to think, but as an inherent part of it, thats constantly in play. Thats why the 'potters wheel.' In this self-contained space which is quasi-timeless, something shapes itself and emerges. Only the potter has to be part of the wheel now too.
This is all slightly manic, of course, and not rigorously thought out by any stretch, but for the moment I'm just letting it play out. I'll show my gnostic cards, a little, and say Zizek's (recycling of the) idea that christ truly forgets he's god on the cross deeply intrigues me. How does the everything modify itself if it can't be modified from without? It contracts time. ('contract' with all the zizekian-schellingian resonance.)
(fave example of yours btw is german mittens. Read any thinkpiece in a reputable newsorgan about the current state of whatever and its almost always a clunky collage of old concepts, meant for another era, awkwardly trying to express something currently inexpressible. And all with the stolid know-how of those who have so symbiotically made a career with those concepts, that the very idea of new concepts is unthinkable. Like a european anthropologist translatig another culture into the actual truth, not realizing their objects of study are consciously feeding them bad info because its funny. I'll edit in a link to one good example once I find it again.)
If so, I'm inclined to agree. only my gut tells me its even weirder than we think. Maybe at the limit, though, the weird and the familiar converge.
Whatever gets you thru the night.
Tononi's hyper-scientific explanation of consciousness is here discussed by the hyper-rational BBC in terms that recapitulate in effect the wackiest outreaches of Jungian theory, the collective unconscious.
And in terms of politics, Jung's theory was intended to address such political phenomena as the sudden slide into fascism of Germany which many are finding echoes of in current affairs.
As if what fits together is not so much the things themselves as stereoscopic conflicted way one is obliged to look at them.
I used to be fascinated by astrological symbolism. Scorpio is a symbol of a hidden destroyer like a little boy squirming on a pew in a church. No one realizes that he's going to grow up to become a powerful religious reformer.
Yes. I don't believe in randomness or the supernatural or miraculous because I believe everything is within the purview of nature. The weird stuff is just stuff we're unfamiliar with.
Not a batsignal, but an appreciative nod.
The article makes sense to me. The summary sounds like german idealism + neurocomputation. Instead of a worldspirit, theres a world-computer. I'd only object to the (implicit) claims to newness, as you did. There's additional experimental verification, of course, but there's the itchy feeling theyre verifying things in a certain self-confirming way. Like what's being chosen to be measured somehow, through that choosing, is already smuggling in the conclusions it advocates. do you get that vibe too?
As to to stereoscopy, what if its stereoscopic all the way down?
Fair, but what is 'nature'?
Put me in place of the earthquake and it turns out I have supernatural powers. I can cause humans to come into existence.
That's one way to see why Schopenhauer said there is only one Will. We analyze events and whatever we identify as causal (usually the subject of an action sentence) is in possession of will. The object of action does not have will until it becomes the subject in its own sentence.
Subject and object are two sides of one concept. They imply one another and only have significance relative to one another. Some take that as a sign that this a pattern that is an aspect of mind (is projected by mind?)
Schopenhauer theorized that the human body is a representation of the one Will.
Ramble ramble.
Since time is an aspect of movement, it's an aspect of what Schopenhauer meant by Will. If we say there is only one time, or one entropy, it's like that.
Although now that I'm saying this, maybe I should go reread and see if I understood what he meant (vs. what I wanted him to be saying).
Yet I won't find that from any physics book. Why would you give old Schopenhauer more credence than modern physics?
Not the description. It wouldn't attribute that to "Will", surely?
A force, like gravity. What I'm questioning is why anyone would give Schopenhauer with his Will or Newton with his God the time of day, instead of going by what the physics books say.
Mediums of knowledge. And nothing in particular, just the general basics of physics, which I studied at G.C.S.E. level in secondary school, which I own a few books on, and which can be read about through various sources online
What? The cause of what? What are you referring to with "their"?
The force would be the cause. Physics explains that.
Schopenhauer wasn't saying that there's a special thing called Will that makes things move. He was analyzing the way we think.
When we think of volition we might think of the world as having dual causes of locomotion: natural causes and the special purposeful causation attributed to animals.
Schopenhauer, being a determinist, believed that there is really only one cause of motion. I don't recall what he thought that is, but he had a scientific outlook.
What's cool about Schopenhauer is that he didn't just stop thinking and say that freedom of the will is an illusion. He went on to place our perception of freedom in a fairly startling picture of the universe. Definitely food for thought.
I own two books by Carlo Rovelli. In one them he praises Democritus and the atomists, whilst criticising Plato. Yes, I would shut down much of Augustine and Heidegger, but maybe there are some saving graces of which I'm not aware.
You're suggesting that I'm "fetishising" science, just because I'm questioning why you'd turn to Schopenhauer over matters which seem to pertain to physics? Clearly I value philosophy, too, but not to an unreasonable extent. I don't fetishise philosophy.
Good. Don't fetishize anything. Rovelli didn't and that's why, if he were a poster, and other posters were discussing, say, the Mahabharata, he wouldn't jump into say -- 'yet I won't find that in any physics book.' Instead he integrated it wonderfully.
Go on then, what's the Mahabharata supposed to be? The capacity for doing work, which exists in potential, kinetic, thermal, electrical, chemical, nuclear, or other various forms?
And the Ding an sich, let me guess. That's how fast an object is moving, a vector quantity that indicates distance per time and direction?
Dasein? Well that's obviously the mass per unit volume of any material substance.
In Schopenhauer?
But for good reason, given that "will" is taken to be something quite different these days. It doesn't generally have the meaning that Schopenhauer attributed to it, or the meaning that Schopenhauer attributed to it according to Frank, anyway.
I don't know, I guess you'd have to ask the guy who cites it. I couldn't say if he's knowledgable enough to list all those types of work, that's pretty hard-sci and anyone would struggle, but maybe he gets close.
It just sounds a tad revisionist to me. Anyway, so Schopenhauer's great contribution was to take the findings of Newtonian physics, and give it a different name, "Will"? Is that about right?
There's a guy in a small town and he's hemmed in by this and that. Regulations, mores, all of that stuff. People are asking him to adhere to bullshit things for no reason.He's sick of it, and isn't going to put up with it anymore.
Now, how is the guy going to do this? One option is full-throated rebellion, fuck you, I'm doing my own thing. The other is to seek the protection of a third party. This will allow him to rebel, but with someone he can call upon. 'Fuck your god! ...Science, are you there?'
What's the psychology of this? well, you idealize the third party. It's less about what they are, then the capacity they have to intervene on your behalf.
What gives them that power? Well. It works. You can see the results. The same way a feudal lord is visibly powerful based on his estate. You can call on him, when need be. But unless you get close to the source of that power, and understand it, its just vassalage.
And its clear when an invocation of a lord is just that. It's derived power. Which is a trope in movies. I offer no fealty to Rovelli, though I like reading him. But when you meet someone claiming power from science in this way, you gotta say, ok, you're invoking something - but do you even know what you're invoking? What is going on here? Stand on your own. You claim the name of your lord, though your lord seems not to really be down with what you're doing. So what can you say without giving the answer to implicit high school physics questions?
Why would you listen to Schopenhauer when Physics knows already.
I don't even like Schopenhauer mostly, but this kind of appeal is lame. It's cheerleading essentially.
You could have just said so, and in less words.
Here's some few comments I've made about what I think nature is:
Quoting BrianW
Quoting BrianW
Quoting BrianW
The next step would be to acknowledge that there's a reason for that, which would be that it's either redundant, or that it lacks the required support that the high standards of science expect.
You obviously have some gripe with the fact that much of philosophy is outdated and no longer seen as credible, and with the fact that I jumped in to point that out. That's too bad.
You're leading the witness, but - from within, obviously.
Quoting csalisbury
Yes. The one thing science cannot at all deal with is freedom. It just comes out as random in every theory.
Two flat pictures that contradict at the margins. And the third, non-picture, that is the integration of information, that 'looks like' a 3d scene... We contradict each other at the margins while agreeing almost everywhere, and see our relationship as we see the world, and perhaps it is the relationship that has the better view.
The domination of a creature's forward directed stereoscopic vision, necessitates its seeing everything in terms of seeing, if you see what I mean (no freedom there). So science takes the transcendent view and can change nothing; it takes the scientist to even construct an experiment. Like Jesus. Every good scientist comes to that moment when he has to infect himself with the disease he thinks he might be able to cure. Take up your cross and follow me...
I think if we could follow it 'all the way down' there would be a limitless limit like the dateless gate, where the integration is complete and the conversation falls into silence...
Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we...
As I understand it, yes. Once a measurement has collapsed the wave-function, it is exceedingly probable that it will be observed there again.
It seems that the percieved weirdness of QM now is due to a lack of understanding of what the equations actually mean, and that some kind of paradigm shift is needed to truely understand it... a bit like how curved space-time solved the mystery of gravity being instantanious action at a distance in classical newtonian physics.
More soberly, this time: I think the question is misplaced. So, for example, Newton thought that absolute space was God's 'sensorium' but the weirdness of this doesn't mean we now discount Newton. In fact, he's taught to this day. We see his understanding as partial, and we can even see why he thought it was God's sensorium, and how this wasn't simply an error, but a precise conceptual knot which would be disentangled by later physicists. I don't agree with Schopenhauer but my disagreement isn't based on the fact that some of his terms seem spooky. If you see him from 'within' the immanent logic of his thought, you can understand why 'will' is still a valuable way of thinking about things, in the same way if you understand Newton from 'within' you can understand 'God's Sensorium' in a fruitful way.
Two paradigms
(1) paths of thought traversing the same terrain in different ways, with various missteps on the onehand and helpful trailblazing on the other
(2) Foolishness (worshipping spooky idols) and clearheadedness (seeing things as they are)
I think (2) is likely to become the thing it worries about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conatus
Quoting csalisbury
Nice analysis!
Have you read Schopenhauer?
Do you remember what he said about subject and object? That would clarify.
Listen, it's like we read two different Schopenhauers. This probably isn't the place to determine who went wrong and why.
I also of course agree that the way we experience the world "shows up in how we speak about the world"; how could it be otherwise? I know that Wittgenstein was influenced by Schopenhauer, so perhaps he carried out the analysis from the linguistic angle that Schopenhauer didn't?
Although, of course Wittgenstein would not reify the will as Schopenhauer does. Could this mean the former may be considered to be more of an idealist than the latter?
Silence appeals to me, maybe just because I can't stop talking, but if we use stereoscopic in the way you mean, then 'all the way down' could also mean conversation and relation all the way down.
There is no incompatibility; in the relation that is a conversation, there is on both sides, or as many sides as there are, both talking and the silence of listening.
I ought to say something profound here about John Cage 4'33
ha! thats it in a nutshell.