Yeah.
Um, no was an outstandingly stupid thing to say.
It is also why a field so ridiculously rich as evolution has been reduced to Darwin.
What a fucking shame.
We may also take another message from that incredibly stupid thing to say and its even worse justification:
True intellectual discourse is reserved for the inside of university classrooms. Fuck all you rednecks, I just come here to… What, I don’t know. To… to… I can’t even tell.
What the fuck is it you do come here to do, Tabulas?
no dude the problem is that none of this stuff changes the already established parameters of classical natural selection, so it adds nothing new to the theory. what was it i read in one of parodites posts. fuck i can’t even remember now. somewhere he drew a distinction between ‘chance’ and ‘law’. this is a false dichotomy that springs forth a kind of mystification of the theory of natural selection. there is no ‘chance’ in a mutation, because the physical and chemical laws that determine them are not acausal. ‘chance’ is an observational concept that only means ‘we didn’t see that coming and/or could not predict it’. but there is nothing ‘random’ in nature because nature is an ordered and deterministic system of events. it couldn’t be otherwise, because then you’d have two or more fundamental substances or sets of laws interacting causally, which is nutts.
"no dude the problem is that none of this stuff changes the already established parameters of classical natural selection, "
Did you even read the thing?
Make a fool of myself entertainingly usually. Sometimes fight monsters.And to use some of those big words I know but rarely get to use. All important stuff.
What is it Pedro, that strikes you as ridiculously rich in evolution…? It’s not magic, though it saves us from magical critters like god. What’s so wrong with Darwin, he did a good job considering what he had to work with at the time, he was also brave. Evolutionary theory is worth someone running a little defence, worth someone coming along and saying ‘hang on, are you sure about that’ and ‘erm, no’ sometimes. Otherwise it’s all master races and memes and general mayhem.
I’m sensing some animosity lol. Like the op author I’ve learned more outside the classroom than in it. Any intellectual discourse was usually conducted down the pub.
But if you want to do science, you should go to university. It’s not insane. Say I woke up today and decided to become a performance artist welder, or a, I dunno, street entertainer chainsaw ice-sculptor. I go out, buy my acetylene torch, a bunch of explosive gases and/or my chainsaw/giant iceblock, and go out among the public.
Roll up kids, watch me work. That’s okay, come closer. Ahm uh pro-fessh-un-al.
A little schooling isn’t a bad thing. Saves your eyebrows and little Johnnie’s arms sometimes.
And yeah, fuck those rednecks.
‘what was it i read in one of parodites posts. fuck i can’t even remember now. somewhere he drew a distinction between ‘chance’ and ‘law’. this is a false dichotomy that springs forth a kind of mystification of the theory of natural selection. there is no ‘chance’ in a mutation’
Yeah. That’s why I put the word chance in quotation marks in the post to which you refer, after saying the term stochastic processes. (Processes like cosmic rays splitting DNA chains, or radiation in general, simply the imperfection of genetic inscription and that introduced in higher forms of life through sexual reproduction, or retroviruses and the influence of mutagenic pathogens, etc.) There’s no true chance in anything; chance is a vestigial relic of human language, originating from before either Newton or quantum theory.
“have avoided given its eurocentric mythologizing of history. but now you must understand where i’m coming from when i say this. the fact that the greeks produced probably the greatest proportion of metaphysical nonsense in the shortest amount of time …”
Oooh, eurocentricism. Anyways, it may be difficult for me to understand where you’re coming from when you are incapable of articulating for us where you are coming from. (First of all my use of the word Nomos had nothing to do with Greek metaphysics, it was an ironic reprisal of an outdated variant of evolutionary theory called nomogenetics, which was perfectly apropos to the tangent that developed in this thread on Darwinism: you are two seconds away from a google search that would have told you this.) If you haven’t truly and wholeheartedly studied the Greeks, to whose “metaphysical nonsense” we owe the current Democratic Republic and related political theory on whose account we are permitted to speak without worry of being burned at the state, then you really don’t have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to critiquing them. Both moral courage and intellectual honor demand the suspension of bias, and that we study those we disagree with, even viscerally, with as much enthusiasm as we study those whose views we endorse. No. It demands that we study them with even more enthusiasm. This too, is Greek sentiment: for it belongs to sophos, (yes, another 3spooky5me Grecianism) this enthusiasm, and not to any one particular way of thinking or to any one idea- but to thinking and ideation themselves: that is why I spent a great deal of time studying Marx’s Kapital, Feuerbach, and all the related materials as well as secondary literature- for it very much fails to align with any of the goals or foundations of my own projects. In fact, I’d happily venture the thesis that I can appraise the worth of a soul based solely on its instinct for revulsion and avoidance; for to avoid is contrary to the nature of the soul itself, which seeks expansion, growth, and contact in all cases- contact with those forces inimical to it and to that expansion, foremost. This imagery of expansion and the inherence of sophos at every stage of the soul’s movement toward it, recalls of course the beautiful metaphor of that hermetic mystic, Böhme, who tells us that the garden of the soul bears a solitary tree, that of Wisdom, for which,- though its branches spread apart to touch each of the presiding elements, yielding in their turn the falling leaves signifying mankind his endless generations and the fruit which is his Intelligence, or its roots descend beneath the earth toward the fire-seed of Nature while its stalk expands heavenward toward the stars,- bears that sap which it carries in each of these separate parts, by which it is nurtured, and which is rained down equally by God unto all.
Plus, all you’ve said just goes to prove my meme in the original post, the idea of which is “mapping” the sphere of the ineffable: the idea that a person who subscribes to any one entry on one side of the divide, is statistically more likely to subscribe to other entries from that side, as opposed to the other, even though there are no lateral connections (hence the function of a map, which explores, not logical connections, but spatial ones) between entries within each side. Hence your standard Darwinist view is accompanied by an interest in logical positivism, which you mention in your post as having studied at the expense of metaphysics, even though there is no direct connection between Darwinism and positivism.
Tab, back to the Zapf. thing. Of course, I am deliberately strawman-ing him, since he didn’t say we over-evolved intelligence (the nominal general-purpose faculty that is responsible for all the evolutionary boons I enumerated, and might continue enumerating ad infinitum) but that we over evolved- consciousness; awareness, self-hood, agency and introspection. Theoretically, it would be possible to have the same intelligence without this level of abstracting introspection, without this much consciousness of ourselves. Theoretically: it would be possible to have this same intelligence without any awareness of ourselves at all- according to Sam Harris. That is the basis of his fear of AI, since if we brought into existence just such a super intelligence that lacked any internal reality or experience, this would essentially destroy the basis of his ethics, which is the pursuit of deeper and more potent forms of consciousness, of ‘happiness.’ The reason I sort of set up a straw-man is that I do not believe the two faculties are actually separable, intelligence and consciousness, for reasons I will go into, if I so choose, in another thread devoted to it.
Consciousness. Always makes my brain hurt.
From what I remember it isn’t a discrete thing so much as a gestalt formed from many in-brain systems. Our sense of agency deriving from the necessary, but equally possibly illusionary, “I” required by our constant internal commentary on what is happening at any given moment. The brain seems to locate this ‘I’ at the locus of the senses and use it to separate actions of self vs. other. The overlap between these systems is usually invisible, and so impossible for the brain to dwell upon, maintaining the sense of wholeness, instead of parts.
The function, or at least use, of this faculty seems to be mainly to provide a simulation space for novel behavioural responses to the external enviroment. Endless ‘if-then’ loops. These if-then loops propagate until some kind of resonant threshold is surpassed with the ‘older’ emotional brain, which finally drives a physical expression of the initially simulated act - the simulation finally mapped onto the corresponding real brainmaps of the muscles etc. in a sequence to produce the action. These maps are what cause the ‘ghosts’ of lost limbs experienced by amputees. A secondary function, which is the one that seems to break in schitzophrenia, is to determine for the brain which of these simulations is the actual current reality our bodies occupy (because everything we percieve is really a simulation anyway brain-wise). The zero-simulation. I’ve forgotten what the brain’s proposed final judge of reality was, but I think it was granularity of qualia.
Cognitive dissonance, and self-reflection, seems to occur when our actions in the enviroment, slip out of sync with our own internal model of self - which our conscious uses when making predictive simulations of possible behavioural gambits - as the brain’s systems attempt to remodel.
We think everything has to be incorporated into one space to generate an intelligence, but with a good connection speed, there’s no reason a distributed intelligence couldn’t work.
Eusocialities - ant colonies - are a good example of a distributed intelligence, unaware of itself but giving an overall impression of agency, without morality or ethics.
"Make a fool of myself entertainingly usually. Sometimes fight monsters.And to use some of those big words I know but rarely get to use. All important stuff.
What is it Pedro, that strikes you as ridiculously rich in evolution…? "
Nothing, I can’t fucking be bothered. You embarrass me.
“And yeah, fuck those rednecks.”
Well, fuck you too sir. Sincerity is at least something we can work with, something we respect. Maybe we can start there.
I’m sorry Dad.
[here I said something nasty about rednecks and their cousins - was going to edit it out, but the damn rednecks got here too quick. Surprising given their usual weight and athletic ability.]
" From what I remember it isn’t a discrete thing so much as a gestalt formed from many in-brain systems."
Indeed, the interaction of various subsystems is important, though there is a different perspective on the “I”, as opposed to it being illusory, which is pretty common these days. I mean, the I as a ‘strange loop’ a la. Hofstadter.
" A strange loop is a cyclic structure that goes through several levels in a hierarchical system. It arises when, by moving only upwards or downwards through the system, one finds oneself back where one started."
“A tangled hierarchy is a hierarchical consciousness system in which a strange loop appears.” - Just a basic wiki definition to start.
Schelling’s transcendental idealism and notion of the tautegory led me to vastly re-conceiving all of this; the I, not as an illusion, but as something more akin to the transcendental object of an infinitely recursive series, as in PI: an in-existent datum upon which an existence depends.
What I like about these exchanges is that it makes extremely clear to anyone watching that all this rhetoric about “equality” and “governing for everybody” and “thinking of the poor” and, most laughably, “unifying,” is an absolute lie. Were you fucking leftists to gain power, you would mercilessly govern against us.
This is war. To lose is to be destroyed. And I thank you all every day for insisting on making that so perfectly clear.
That’s what held us silly hicks back for so long. We actually were baited every time you pretended to reach across. Not anymore, our great President has, with you like he did with Iran, forced the enemy to reveal just who exactly and what exactly we are dealing with. We cannot compromise anymore, because compromise is not even close to the minds of those who would not blush or blink at calling another a stupid cousin fucker.
This is war. That is clear now. So thank you.
Oh noes, the rednecks are coming. Hide the candelabras.
Was never very sure about H.'s strangeloops ideas, I think critiques at the time said his wife had recently died and he was trying somehow to preserve his memories of her as something more, so I never bothered to read that book.
I’m quite ok with being an illusionary placemarker. Not like me believing myself to be such will change anything. 
me and you is in for a rough ride there, parodysseus, because i can’t get down like that anymore. i’m tellin you i caint do it. not because i don’t wanna, but because i caint. my brain don’t work like that anymore. i underwent a complete intellectual metamorphosis (omg that’s a greek word i think) after studying analytical philosophy and i haven’t paid no mind to greek, german or french metaphysics since. continental philosophy is now, to me, nothing more than a long drawn out comic book series of fantastic nonsense. you want me to tell you what happened? fine. i found ludwig vitkenshtein, that’s what happened. and you know how in the anticlimactic scenes in the old cartoons when the horn goes ‘wah wah wahhhh’? well that’s what i heard, man, and i’ve never been the same since.
and then, just when i thought my discovery that philosophy was just a load of useless gibberish violating just about every rule of grammar conceivable, i found her (a fifth degree blackbelt in philosophy and logic), came under her tutelage, and soon learned that not only is this garbage incomprehensible gobbledygook, but also that it originated from the nefarious intentions of lazy fat bastards who didn’t wanna work. no, it wasn’t just that these greek idiots were completely lost. these sonsabitches were doing this shit on purpose. and here we are thousands of years later at a philosophy forum babbling the same mindless crap.
so imma show you, man. imma show you what i saw on that fateful night, a night that would change me forever. but you have to make a decision, bro. you have to be willing… nay, prepared, to step outside yourself for a moment and get a good look at what you’ve been doing for fifteen years while locked in your bedroom.
who you are about to meet is the philosophical equivalent of a master jedi. if this chick was an x-man, she’d be jean grey and then some. if philosophy were galactus, she’d be the silver surfer. if philosophy were raucous foul-mouthed 80s stand up comedians, she’d be eddie murphy. and if philosophy were actors inappropriately placed into action hero roles they are not properly disposed to play, she’d be keanu reeves.
today just might be the most important day of your life, son. a destiny that has been following you for thirty years. but we won’t know for sure until we see what you say next. it could very well be that you hath not ears for this. we shall soon see.
brace yourself, son. for you are now entering the kill-zone…
Help !!! I clicked on the link and now there’s rednecks at the door…!
#rednecks
#fearformychickens
I liked that bit from the second link though. You see examples of that allllll the time here.
M1 - Consciousness is a bridge between simulation and reality.
M2 - Rednecks own copies of guns and ammo.
M3 - Qualia are related to unicorns.
She’s right though, most books on consciousness are a massive pile of words, resting on yet more. What empirical evidence does exist usually stems from some poor bastard getting a pool-cue shoved through their frontal lobes.
Guns and ammo rednecks do have.
Anyway, thank you.
It is notable that, before Russia, there is one other defeat in Napoleon’s record. It is possible that it was a different nation than Russia that drove Napoleon into Russia with enough hastiness to replace his usual perfection with near perfection.
yeah so the big mistake of the ‘philosophy of mind’ is that it abuses empirical reductionalism in such a way that gives rise to false conceptual problems surrounding the nature of ‘mind’. you start seeing the typical cartesian shit that characterizes philosophical talk about ‘consciousness’. guys like chalmers take advantage of this confusion, and the confusion lies in talking about mind and consciousness as if it is a property, as if it is something we ‘have’, something complex systems ‘have’ after they emerge out of and from that complexity. ryle thoroughly addressed this mess and wittgenstein put the nail in the coffin. to talk meaningfully about ‘consciousness’ we use language representational of behavior, not about some ‘entity’ that’s ‘in there’ points to head
the whole frickin edifice of the western philosophy of mind starting with plato has been an exercise in this very nonsense.
as peter hacker once said something along the lines of ‘the horsepower produces the movement of the car, yes, but the car is more than its horsepower’. to talk about the car in a dualistic sense such that it can be broken into parts - here the horsepower and there the car - is to confuse the identity of the car in meaningful talk about what it is and does.
evidence of joe’s ‘consciousness’ is not in describing some isolated feature of his being, but in observing behaviors which we describe as ‘being-conscious’.
these goddamn philosophers get this platonic/cartesian baloney into their heads (maybe a pun there?) and start talking senselessly about ontological essences of human identity.
But this is not only important because of the naked enmity that it shows.
It is important because it tells also what we are fighting FOR. As long as these are in charge, nothing interesting can be said, nothing true can be furthered, nothing promising can be explored. Thousands of years of painstaking perilous and careful build-up of thought, of exploration, of determining, of finding, of conquering and advancing, of allowance of beauty and of things deeper than joy. Instincts harvested carefully over hundreds of thousands years, yet an unimaginable fast-forward in terms of the usual rate of change of determination of evolution, to be simply ascribed to cousin fucking chicken whatever. This is not new, the commies in Venezuela (the intellectuals, the self-haters, not the honest to God citizens that fell in love with Chavez) often refer to me as the product of generations of inbreeding. I was an inbred redneck before I even heard the word redneck! This is the commie MO. Life is bleak, boring, and uninteresting. You dare to question that? It is because we didn’t work hard enough at eugenics. This doesn’t matter.
What matters is that there is such a thing as economy. Much as we marvel at the beauty of these creatures like we marvel at the beauty of any creature, they are taking up the resources, the space. We cannot allow them not only to continue their on-going campaign of physical and spiritual genocide across our beautiful planet, our beautiful brotherhood of Man, our sacred battlegrounds, our holy spaceships. Also simply because, wisdom is too cool. We really do need to get them off the stool so we can look further into some stuff. Really, enough, we want to find out more about evolution. Just the thought produces drool. And about so much more. We need to get rich, too. Look at what these fucks do with all that money. They might as well wipe their asses with it! Such contempt.
There is so much to know, to find. We haven’t even passed the surface. All the might and power of the Greeks was just to get us UP TO the surface, to show it. What glorious bastards were they.
I suppose they were also inbred bastards or something, yadda yadda, I suppose the US is worse in its bomb strikes than people who actively (yes, literally, not as part of some retarded dialectic) enslave people and subject them to the most unimaginable indignities, I suppose the liberation of all European slaves really shows Europe’s retardedness next to that whole other rest of the planet which mind this never crossed.
Evolution… Goddamn, we need to know more.
The latest book I read was Thomas Metzinger’s Being No one.
Note the bold - he seems to worry about the same things you do.
It’s an insanely difficult read, the first couple of chapters do very little but introduce you to the ‘conceptual toolkit’ he uses later to talk about his ideas, and unless you have those down pat before you proceed… well, lotta page flipping goes down. Overall though, it struck me as being as deeply rooted in current neuroscience as one of these books can be.
My belief in it’s veracity however may be simply a psychological bias brought on by the expense involved in buying the damn thing, and the fact it made me feel stupid, both which would have primed me to buy into its premises. Enforced sacrifice and a feeling of helplessness are real headfucks, as every good cult leader knows.