Language

[Aegean]

Creating a self-consistent alternate reality is as difficult as the quality of mind you wish to attract - seduce.
See Lord of the Rings, compared to Star Wars.
Philosophy is not immune.
It fabricates word-based alternate realities it then claims to be more ‘real’ that the experienced.

Selling the product is the easy part, because there are always ready and willing feeble minds desperate for anything other than the real world. It doesn’t take much to convince a dullard or a man-child that what it sees is illusory, or superficial, hiding something more profound, and conveniently more pleasant.
Occultism suffices to quiet any rational scepticism. It alludes to what it can never show, or prove, ro justify. but it doesn’t matter if the target audience is desperate and needy enough.
All it wants is something plausible, and not insulting.
Something self-flattering, self-aggrandizing and yet still not obviously bullocks. Something the individual can justify to itself, while at the same time escaping itself.

[Aegean]

Those who live in the either/or subjective confinement of their own simplistic mind, will use the usual “evidence” of absolutes:
Bachelors are either married or I are not married.
Trump is either President or he is not.
I have money in my pocket or I have none.
There’s an elephant in the room, or there is not.
Without getting into it, the confusion is produced by a cause that described by Jaynes in his book Bicameral Mind, and it is similarly rooted in the emergence of self-awareness, and the language used to express it.
For primitive minds self-consciousness - or their internal dialogue - was mistaken for external spirits and gods speaking to them, guiding them, admonishing them, speaking to them inside their own mind. Their own conscience was mistaken for divine disapproval of their actions and choices, as though there were another mind involved.
Similar to how life is in a state of antagonism with existence, so too mind is in a state of antagonism with the body it emerges from.
I will not explain the reasons here.
This either/or confusion is embraced by a simple mind seeking for simple but final solutions to its existential dilemmas.
If applied religiously it produces paradoxes, which are then used as evidence for the occult, justifying the mind’s desire for relief via mystification.
[see Zeno’s paradoxes]
If we understand what language is - and why mathematics is also a form of language that can produce numerical values superior to the existence it purports to be representing - then we will also comprehend why mind is being worshipped as the one-god, creator of all and independent from it; mind exceeding reality, and pre-existing existence.
It’s all about language - i.e., semiotics - and how and why it emerges; and what methods it employs to interpret the world it gradually awakens into.

Language is an art-form - including mathematics. This is why mathematicians often describe their algorithms and mathematical formulas using aesthetic terms like ‘graceful’ and ‘beautiful’, or ‘harmonious’ and ‘eloquent’.
To understand language we must understand art, and why it can represent what exceeds the existent, and can synthesize contradictions, concealing them in its semiotics.

There was a vid posted by an ILP member on the paradoxes of mathematical infinities, which accentuated the ability of the mind to abstractly - theoretically - exceeds and usurp reality, by confusing its own interrelations and representations for reality itself.
That the mind can manufacture infinite infinities exposes the relationship between noumena and phenomena - and abstractions of a fluid world, for the real world that is not entirely ordered but includes energies that are chaotic, ro random in their interactivities, and so are counter-intuitive and incomprehensible by an organism that depends on order.

[Aegean]

@McGilchrist

Things change according to the stance we adopt towards them, the type of attention we pay to them, the disposition we hold in relation to them. This is important because the most fundamental difference between the hemispheres lies in the type of attention they give to the world. But it’s also important because of the widespread assumption in some quarters that there are two alternatives: either things exist ‘out there’ and are unaltered by the machinery we use to dig them up, or to tear them apart (naïve realism, scientific materialism); or they are subjective phenomena which we create out of our own minds, and therefore we are free to treat them in any way we wish, since they are after all, our own creations (naïve idealism, post-modernism). These positions are not by any means as far apart as they look, and a certain lack of respect is evident in both. In fact I believe there is something that exists apart from ourselves, but that we play a vital part in bringing it into being. A central theme of this book is the importance of our disposition towards the world and one another, as being fundamental in grounding what it is that we come to have a relationship with, rather than the other way round. The kind of attention we pay actually alters the world: we are, literally, partners in creation. This means we have a grave responsibility, a word that captures the reciprocal nature of the dialogue we have with whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves. I will look at what philosophy in our time has had to say about these issues. Ultimately I believe that many of the disputes about the nature of the human world can be illuminated by an understanding that there are two fundamentally different ‘versions’ delivered to us by the two hemispheres, both of which can have a ring of authenticity about them, and both of which are hugely valuable; but that they stand in opposition to one another, and need to be kept apart from one another – hence the bihemispheric structure of the brain.[The Master and His Emisary]

@McGilchrist

The particular relevance to us at this point in history is this. Both hemispheres clearly play crucial roles in the experience of each human individual, and I believe both have contributed importantly to our culture. Each needs the other. Nonetheless the relationship between the hemispheres does not appear to be symmetrical, in that the left hemisphere is ultimately dependent on, one might almost say parasitic on, the right, though it seems to have no awareness of this fact. Indeed it is filled with an alarming self-confidence. The ensuing struggle is as uneven as the asymmetrical brain from which it takes its origin. My hope is that awareness of the situation may enable us to change course before it is too late.
The Conclusion, therefore, is devoted to the world we now inhabit. Here I suggest that it is as if the left hemisphere, which creates a sort of self-reflexive virtual world, has blocked off the available exits, the ways out of the hall of mirrors, into a reality which the right hemisphere could enable us to understand. In the past, this tendency was counterbalanced by forces from outside the enclosed system of the self-conscious mind; apart from the history incarnated in our culture, and the natural world itself, from both of which we are increasingly alienated, these were principally the embodied nature of our existence, the arts and religion. In our time each of these has been subverted and the routes of escape from the virtual world have been closed off. An increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualised world, marked by unwarranted optimism mixed with paranoia and a feeling of emptiness, has come about, reflecting, I believe, the unopposed action of a dysfunctional left hemisphere. I will have some concluding thoughts about what, if anything, we can do – or need not to do – about it.
Because I am involved in redressing a balance, I may at times seem to be sceptical of the tools of analytical discourse. I hope, however, it will be obvious from what I say that I hold absolutely no brief for those who wish to abandon reason or traduce language. The exact opposite is the case. Both are seriously under threat in our age, though I believe from diametrically opposed factions. The attempt by some post-modern theoreticians to annex the careful anti-Cartesian scepticism of
Heidegger to an anarchic disregard for language and meaning is an inversion of everything that he held important. To say that language holds truth concealed is not to say that language simply serves to conceal truth (though it certainly can do), or, much worse, that there is no such thing as truth (though it may be far from simple). But equally we should not be blind to the fact that language is also traduced and disregarded by many of those who never question language at all, and truth too easily claimed by those who see the subject as unproblematic. It behoves us to be sceptical. [The Master and His Emissary]

[Aegean]

The use of philosophy to circumvent reality is a common practice among the feeble-minded and the psychologically retarded.
A continuous reference to references to more references, about the world, which loses itself in referencing.
Words referring to more words, referring to text, that quote script, that allude to another’s book, and on and on.
Within this mess the mind escapes into itself.
It seeks refuge in ideology, founded on ideas, grounded on more theories…
A pseudo-intellectual cacophony of insatiable name-dropping, and quotations, losing its way, intentionally, in ideology.

Nihilism finds its perfect environment here.
It’s goa is to selectively sample from experienced reality and to dismiss all the rest, so as to escape in theory - validated by occultism and superstitions, that feed into this psychosis.
This is not philosophy. This is a self-help dogma, exploiting naivete and need/desire.
Power built on the powerless.

Over time, the mid is incapable of tolerating the world, as it is, preferring its theories and abstractions.
This is how humanity becomes ‘world’, or how world is theoretically converted to ‘humanity’ - because the extent of nihilism’s influence is the human mind, and those who share a common language - remaining impotent outside these perimeters.

[Aegean]

It’s easy to manipulate ‘meaning’ when it is entirely based on semiotics and has no grounding in objective reality.
Texts can be redefined and appropriated, selectively and conveniently, in support of any ideology.
Like I said, elsewhere, the difficult part is selling this crap to morons - and there are plenty of them in this world.
Like a fisherman chooses the hook and bait, the charlatan chooses his words, and their insinuations, carefully, creating a plausible, alternate reality, to the one many wish to escape.
depending no what kind of feeble mind he wants to seduce and exploit, he constructs a language-based, self-consistent, mental-model, which need not be relevant to anything experienced, because the goal is to escape not to engage.

Ideas like ‘love’, ‘justice’, ‘equality’, ‘freedom’ can be employed, depending on the type of psychology one wishes to attract and to manipulate.
Words that can be defined out of existence, as an alternate existence; hidden and offering a secret advantage to the desperate.
Need/Desire will overcome scepticism; if the bait is large enough the fish’s natural paranoia will yield.
It’s how superstitions have remained effective over the centuries.