That’s a thought! It’s not too much different from thinking of death as plummeting through an eternal void of nothing, except at least there is a destination. In a weird way I kind of like it.
And what’s more, if he actually had amassed a billion’s worth in fortunes at the end, he would not pass it to any children or relatives, or use it as social or political legacy, but he would burn it by paying for his own futile send off.
That’s really funny.
Did you know if he believed in any from of afterlife?
The scientific cointinuum had to change philosophy, i do not see any conflict here between science and philosophy, nor the notion that philosophy has become the handmaiden of science. Sure, science has changed the rudder by which we navigate, and god himself has appearently, so far has gone along with this. Now it is in man’s hands, wither he wants to go with this, toard happines and enlightenment, or, the opposite. Philosophy was science, once, and it still is in the social sphere, where critics allege, that it’s a weak point, wherea societal issues can not use science in it’s broades applications. They are wrong, because philosophy can not disengage , nor can science from philosophy of which, once it was indiscernible. This is only an illusion, such as Adam biting into gthe apple, as if he really knew the difference between eternal salvation and the pleasure of the retrogade origin. He did not realize his difference, (from animals) but noe he is starting to, and his realization will take him to his true identity. He has no ambition, except to be grue to the goal set for him in the reason for his exisgtence. And what is that? To overcome his morphic doubt, and to be able to reflect his sense of the aesthetic perfection, which will forever be sustained, in the moment of his highest pleasure, which contains his will.(to power)
TV has not even been invented yet. Saying we have television and production of real or valuable content is like saying Edison invented cold fusion.
I would try to gravitate toward the leading edge of development in this sense, the sense of the future, and say fuck it to every “pragmatic concern” or moralism steeped in any modern rationale, philosophical or otherwise.
The future world of TV, real content, real value, will bend to your will alone. But first we must learn to be gardeners and farmers, we must see the harvest in the tiny seed we are momentarily content to set in excrement-laced dirt.
I seriously think you are going to contribute to a revolution in TV and film content and production. I have no doubt, I feel the tectonics of the future reverberating at my feet right now just seeing it. Just think about it, this has never happened before; think about VO, all that has been accomplished, laid down, laid bare and lays there waiting to be impregnated; you, and film. Holy shit, man. I mean fuck but this is really it.
Yes. Absolutely.
Well said, and now, perhaps we couldn’t say so 3 years ago, but now we really know what the enemy is. And it trembles in terror at our coming.
I agree with this. I don’t think that science has come into conflict with philosophy, I think that science has come into conflict with life— not necessarily all life, there is much that is served by science. But the life that is conflicted by science will do all it can to oppose it, that is the way of life. Philosophy is the handmaiden of life, so it becomes convenient to put it in those terms (science over philosophy), even if not quite accurate. In reality there is a hidden agenda in putting the issue in those terms.
I’m not quite sure what you mean here by the goal being to overcome morphic doubt, for that reason I hesitant to make a response. But at the risk of being on the wrong path, I might say that doubt isn’t necessarily a bad thing or something to be overcome completely. It is in uncertainty that possibility is opened up— when everything is familiar and laid out before you there is only one (rational) path to follow, and we would follow it mechanically and lose what makes us dynamic as living organisms.
This is the reason I see a conflict between science and life. I don’t think it is all life. It is possible that some might overcome that and their possibility would be in the realm of what idealism and creativity priorly never could be, and the old “human” way of life in doubt, uncertainty and mystery of the universe will seem primitive. Such has happened before in lesser degrees (“civilization” vs “savage”…)
Out of curiosity, do you think, for example, Michaelangelo was more in touch with the highest power than, say, Heironymus Bosch?
Science merely verifies the possibility that a particular philosophy MIGHT be right. It’s primary function is to prove that a hypothesis could not be right through demonstration of observable contradiction in proposal. It cannot verify truth. It can only verify falsity.
I agree with you. I am not sure if you were responding to me, but in a post above I did say there is truth in science. I do think though that through scientific experimentation and other methods knowledge does get discovered that has concrete effects (like creating new technology), and that was in particular what I was referring to when I said there was truth, true or concrete effects, and in the context I was reffering (science vs. religion) the concrete effects are what have allure because they provide immanent pleasure or other desired goods.
True. Materialism is the easier thing to play with and decide to believe because there are “concrete” results. The lure is that people are so very tempted into believing that their theory was right merely because the result comes out as they predicted. That is actually false reasoning, but very common and exercised greatly in Science, especially in Quantum Physics and Relativity.
Yep, and the big boys like playing with easy odds, which is what makes the issue of science different from the past “quarrel” between philosophy and religion a la Bacon and Descartes.
I just had deja vu about both this discussion and the other one with Artimas occurring at once, strange. Did this happen before?
Excellent post AP. You raise all the issues that are related to the lethargy I have encountered.
Absolutely. And here, James will agree. The will to improve oneself, to become more self-harmonious, is the self-harmony. This is reflected in the will to power.
But my issue has been epistemological: what is power, what is harmony, in terms of the human being? “Domination” and “reservation” have go a long way to sketch the generalities, but neither reflects directly on the psyche. My choice of the word valuing is a remedy to that. It has proven to be, and I am as far from disillusionment as I cold possibly be; in fact my ambition has not waned but has been accompanied by a certain fear; the power of the concept is, now that am somewhat changed, separate of the psychological plasma that produced it, a force that operates on its own accord, and no longer needs me as an engine and thus no longer gives me the fire of that engine. At least this was the case until some days ago. I seem to have reclaimed my fire.
The answer is a matter of approach, that is all. I was never under the impression that there is an answer to the chicken and egg question. It is an incentive to ask a different question; the only sensible questions are questions that have answers. Questions must appeal to knowledge.
It is clear that the chicken and the egg evolved as one principle. It is clear that conditions and the things that make us call other things ‘their conditions’ are inextricable. I find that Heidegger was the first to approach causality with this in mind; emerging, disclosing is his answer. Not of things but of relations. The relations acquire sediment which become ‘things’ - processes so constant that we van attribute nouns to them and relate them to one another as constants.
The thing in itself is thereby fully negated, but the question is: should this purist epistemology impact the ways of defining objects? What would be the merit?
Your answer is correct: “environmentalism”. The ‘ism’ of ‘Dasein’, which is the human being as ‘emergence’, to hold a Heideggerian mirror to ‘affectance’.
Surely what emerges emegres out of affectance, but affectance emerges out of emergence equally.
But using the concept value, it is possible to bypass tsuch terms and arrive at an acutely real definition of any situation. That, I think, is what scientific approach to ontology must accomplish.
I clearly spoke of the clerical “belief in base derivations”, not of clerical “findings”. That would be a contradiction, clergy interprets the truth and waters it down for the profane, it never finds anything, it would not dare even to look. It knows its power emanates only from the ‘gods’ - the theoretical scientists, the men who disclose synthetic a priori conditions, who shape the human species by adding significant powers of grasping. Such scientific thinkers are most rare and most precious.
Science has not taken over the role of religion, but of God - by the institution of scientific clergy.
What is this means is that the great concepts that science has produced in the first half of the last century, have now been claimed by a body of men that has no idea how to work these concept in any sensible direction. This is the sorry state of scientific progress - there has been no progress - there have been no scientists. Well, few of them and only humble ones, humbled by the fact that they have no answer for the fundamental problem now to be addressed, but build on different, older layers of physics; most of it captured under the term chemistry, if we take that term broadly. Theoretical physics had not advanced. Neither string theory or the Higgs hypothesis are no advances; they are both veiled confessions of a lack of power to actually control by science; they are introductions of a speculative approach to science. In this, the clergy is most happy. They are like the eunuchs in a late Roman court, more than like maggots; they excel at form, ritual, protocol. To what end? To insulate the ruler from criticism, but most of all, may the ruler inadvertently fall, to keep their jobs, to make their jobs necessary. The apparatus has become more necessary than the truth; science has become bureaucratic.
All that has been developed is a system of implementation of the powers that science has made available. To this end science has come to a virtually full stop; Technology and the pleasures it allowed for has for a century distracted man from the fact that science itself has not progressed beyond Heisenberg, Bohr, Einstein, Lorenz.
the reason for this is probably that the reality encountered commands a different epistemology. This has always been the purpose of my own work.
Even the church? But indeed, the message is not itself the means to bring it across. The “eunuchs” I speak of were the first to capitalize on this.
Suppressing is not going to work and it is certainly not desirable; Rather, the advance of science is required to deal with the wasteful industries we are presently unleashing.
Again, in full agreement here. Here I found the necessity and possibility for an ontology based on the reality of encountering than on the reality of the processed encounter. Hence, the concept of self-valuing; to an extent the truths needs to be obscured to a being for it to be able to be; a being requires certain conditions and the absence of others - and all truths are conditions. This is an unconditional truth, a permanent condition. This realization brings about a voice that speaks a new truth: tread lightly. This is not a fact, but an esthetics; here we arrive at truth in a higher order, the order where pure mathematics has its place, among much other human excellence.
We must include the mysterious, the unnamed, the unnamable, the ‘spirit’, the inscrutable identity of experience in our definitions. Wherever we seek to eliminate them, we are eliminating ourselves.
Newton did not dream of claiming the mystery resolved;much less did Einstein. Their words are not ambiguous in this respect. Their main drive was an immense awe, the sense of wonder that defines every scientist, and to which the cleric is perfectly alien. Only one without wonder can invent something like the church. On the other hand, only someone with a great sense of wonder can design a cathedral. My point Technology can rise to great heights even in a scientific backland, for the simple reason that science, once produced, is applicable by anyone, anywhere if there is enough power involved.
Indeed.
We preserve our life for something, i.e. for pleasure, if we can truly stretch that term to mean happiness.
If life becomes too displeasurable, a creature will seek to end it.
In this sense Epicurus remains the quintessential philosopher.
Yes- the antithesis of philosophical comprehension; the mark of a scientific paradigm ruled by technicians.
The clergy do not direct the way power is wielded; they only profit from its conquest, confuse its limits and decorate its authority, so as for its rule to be extended in the name of what they decorate, and which becomes a phenomenon distinctly different from the penetrating insight and the following bold hypotheses of the scientist. So science is valued in terms of two of its uses; technological power and religious status. To what extent the clergy and the technicians cooperate I can’t say and have no interested in; all I am interested in is a scientific progress, a breakthrough, a thinking that rather than shirking back from it, accepts and makes use of the findings of, from a perspective demanding immediate satisfaction of full explication, irreconcilable certainties at the extremities of quantifiable observation. This use is primarily an opportunity to reform ‘truth-tables’ - perhaps it is calculus itself that needs to be refined, or put to greater use, be integrated in a more substantial pattern-mapping logos.
Are you familiar with Max Weber’s hypothesis of the iron cage, if so what do you think of it?
Don’t you think that the progress of science in any direction will continue to increase technological power? There will always by those seeking unlimited power and if they allocate funds to their particular projects of interest, and the development of the means of control will increase. I might be mistaken on this, but didn’t Einstein’s work play some role in the creation of the atom bomb?
It seems you are closer to Obe in the esteem you hold for science, and I won’t press my opinion too forcefully because I am certainly in the minority and I do see concrete benefits of science, I am just unsure if the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
What do you see to be the goal or purpose of science?
What kind of breakthrough do you imagine? What purpose would such a breakthrough hold?
Have you heard of the concept of the singularity? What is your feeling about it?
You seem the have skimmed over good parts of my post, so I’ll keep it short and simple. I do tend to write densely, late at night.
I do not believe in singularity, I think the concept is nonsensical sci-fi, based entirely on a ridiculous prediction that science advances ‘of itself’ as a predictable curve of ‘homogenous progress’. It literally has nothing to do with what science is, only what the clergy thinks it is.
I think I have made it quite clear that I have immense respect for science, more than I can see anyone showing in these modern days. But if you do not understand what I mean by the difference between clergy and scientist, and between scientist and technician, then I can see how you have missed this point.
The iron cage is a poetic name for ‘society’ and ‘economy’. As more people gather and technological power increases, people are squeezed like fruit for ‘functionality’. Yes, obviously this is real.
As to the breakthrough, it has already happened. So far no easy to read papers on it exist. Talk is probably the medium where it’s made most accessible. I’m discussing it or some of its aspects and applications here.
I did read your entire comment, I just did not feel up to making a comment about for example:
because I didn’t feel I had anything worthwhile to add that you would not have thought was obvious.
It is similar with the discussion about “the chicken and the egg”. I try not to comment when I don’t have anything fruitful to add.
Since I don’t personally know about the science behind the singularity, I can’t argue with you, but mainly I was looking for your opinion on it in any case. I have seen videos about brain implants allowing individuals to manipulate robotic arms, and videos displaying the work of Jose Delgado which seem pretty unbelievable and I believe was accomplished back during the 60s, but perhaps the science behind the singularity is vastly different.
I am sure I don’t understand what you mean by the difference between scientific clergy and scientists. Would you like to explain it?
On another connected note, don’t you think that advancements in science could be picked up and used to further the goals of technicians?
Does value ontology protect against coercive practices of technicians? Whose values? I am not familiar with value ontology.
I did explain it at some length but perhaps not explicitly enough.
In terms of the hardest sciences: there have been no real scientists since the first half of the past century. Theoretical physics has not advanced since then.
All of what came after has been clergy and technicians.
Scientists find.
Technicians are the ones who apply, where it can be made useful, what has been found.
Clergy are the ones who teach (portions of) what has been found.
I also covered this. Yes, this is not only possible but ubiquitous and virtually synonymous with progress these days. It’s all technicians do, and it’s most of what’s happening now under the name of science.
It’ll take some time to get familiar. It’s not an easy concept, obviously; it models cognition.
it does not prescribe anyones values. But yes, it offers and commands a completely different approach to technology.
Have you read any Poincarre? That would be a good intro to VO.
Then I must apologise for my lapse in mental acuity. Thank you for taking the time to reclarify.
If you have already gone over this as well then I will really look like a dummy, but I suppose this issue of the technicians inevitably following along with the scientists (as well as the clergy, so to speak) is what causes me to have an issue with science on the social level and cause me to wish to seek a remedy, regardless of any potential I might have to see it through.
I suppose I will have to gain a deeper grasp of the subject before I can comment substantially, as this is my first time hearing mention of value ontology.
Science is simply one kind of understanding produced by the application of a certain kind of method. Fear of science’s power is justified but does not justify abandoning the scientific quest- either we rise to the new world of possibilities and powers that science unlocks or we are destroyed by that world. There is no “let’s just return to a time before all this problematic science”, unless you want to do that for your own life which of course is not impossible. But society as a whole could never do that.
As humans make themselves more and more observant and demanding of reality’s secrets reality discloses more of these secrets to us. Humanity is an active process of violent and controlled encounter with reality seeking to tear into that reality and re-work it in humanity’s own image; that is what all life is and does. A belief that this is wrong, or unjustified, or too dangerous, is a belief that serves a regulatory function in the individual psyche, much like how religious ideas serve a regulatory function: these beliefs, despite the fact they possess very little or no actual appeal to reality or the way things actually work and can progress, give the person a way to better relate to the great behemoth of truth. It slows our approach so we can control our engagements and our own progress a bit better.
So eventually, after we have grown enough in terms of our strength to sustain and to create ideas, these regulatory beliefs must be abandoned, which means they must be understood their actual nature and folded back within our mental system. One side-effect of doing this is that we learn finally our values which had caused those specific beliefs, whatever particular forms and contents they had expressed as. Our own deeper self-value is revealed when we shed these limits; but at first those limits are quite necessary, they are like training wheels for thinking.
People who tend to lack this “conservative” instinct to self-preservation to slow down the incoming truth-relations only have their self disorganized much more rapidly and find it impossible to cohere out of their experiences a lasting sense of purpose, identity, strength or idea. They are basically trauma victims to even the smallest swath of reality exposure because their hearts never learned how to self-value in the face of the other- thus they never had the possibility to even develop much of a mind at all.
We call these people “moderns” or “progressives” or maybe “socialists”. In whatever form they blindly defend any status quo and worship the empty idea of “progress itself”. When these sort of brain-damaged people enter scientific fields we get what Jakob is calling “technicians”.
I agree with this. I am not really so foolish as to think scientific progress could be stopped. I think the conversation with me and Jakob petered out quickly because while we might see eye to eye on a lot of the fundamental issues, we are coming at it from completely different directions. In particular my concerns are with the social sciences, but technology does play a role and theory from the physical and formal sciences influence the former and the way the former influences society impacts the latter.
I wouldn’t particularly consider myself conservative. I’ve even been (incorrectly, I believe) accused on this forum of being a communist. At the end of my first previous comment in this thread I alluded to the importance of pleasure and brought up applied behavior analysis, pleasure being part of applied behavior analysis under the “reward” component. This is really what I have the biggest issue with in terms the sciences, because the findings are used in conjunction with social psychology, environmental psychology, organizational psychology, social system theory (particularly social rule system theory), and economics (particularly behavioral economics) to construct an increasingly “rational” society.
The rationalization of society contributes to creation and classification of ever more mental illnesses, because efficiencies of behaviour have been set. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to look at socalled “irrational” behaviours any other way. The typical physical environment, particularly in cities, is almost (or completely) filled with designated space and rules.
Since I am not familiar with value ontology, I cannot really comment on it, but the society we are brought up in shapes our beliefs and expectations about the world, this has always been so, so even our values which are relational to the environment we find ourselves in and the conditions it sets for action.
There is currently an effort to privatize all land and even water. The issue isn’t really at the bottom of it science in the sense of what physics is able to uncover, but ultimately it will play a role either directly or indirectly — if not by creating a physically coercive measure then by aiding the spread of ideology.
I don’t really think my suggestion, the unleashing of pleasure from monopolization, is the most ‘noble’ solution, but as I said, due to science’s master of physical phenomenon (through technology) it seems that material means will need to be employed and not merely ideological ones.
What about the social sciences in those specific fields most concerns you? I am interested to explore these in greater depth.
I definitely agree about rational society. Have you read Marcuse’s book One Dimensional Man? Another thinker you might look into is Wim Rietdijk.
By conservative I just mean a person relatively closed off to the modernist insanities and pathologies. Granted that closure-defense often takes a form of ignorance such as naive religion or zealous political persuasion, but it need not do that. Likewise a “liberal” (these terms are really saturated with nonsensical and foul-smelling substances these days, but it still seems a bit useful to use them) is a basic psycho-epistemological structure but that structure can happen to express with varying degrees of ignorance or pathology.
You are right about pleasure. Modern thinking has defined all pain/discomfort as bad necessarily, as morally evil. If you deliberately allow someone to feel even a little pain you are liable for charges of abuse or assault. It hasn’t really fleshed out much yet but all parenting, education, work and intimate relationships are already technically illegal, assuming anything based in reality about those activities. Only empty shadows and non-reality performances remain officially sanctioned.
Mental illness is a particularly striking example of this terrible insanity of weakness having gained the upper “democratic” hand among intellectual society. The DSM is probably among the most deplorable books to be published in the last century.
I am not sure exactly what you mean here, if you mean in reference to particular theories or what about the social sciences in general.
I am glad you phrased the question as directed at me in particular, because as I see it my concerns are connected to my own history and desires.
I see the focuses of the social sciences I named above as offshoots of preexisting methods in forming society, so most of the findings are not new in the way a steam engine would have been new the first time it appeared, or what might perhaps arise from studies in neuroscience. But in this way the application of the social sciences in society are much more subtle.
My concern with something that on the surface seems quite ordinary, environmental psychology, for example, is that by studying the impact of various environmental factors, shapes, line distribution, presence or abscence of structures (say a desk, or a chair) can be understood to elicit responses from people. An example, are the parks in your area mostly open to the streets without sheltered areas? If where you live is more modern it’s likely that they are. The reason is that behaviour within the parks is meant to be observable. The original rational was that crime festers in unobservable areas closed off from the streets.
I do think the social sciences can have positive applications, but generally the incentive is to use them for purposes like profitability and social control.
With something like behavioural economics, the focus is on how people act irrationally within an economic system — this doesn’t mean that society will thus be formed irrationally, it just means that at the bottom of our reason is irrational desires and instincts and so by appealing to our baser instincts rational decisions are bypassed.
The problem with my suggestion about ridding the monopolization of pleasure is that generally as a society we limit the pleasure of people in order to keep each other from committing acts which throw society into chaos, so actually what I am suggesting is potentially extremely dangerous… it’s the opposite of what Freud and the psychoanalysts advocated… As it is, access to pleasure is being used, but it is used deliberately… we have values of which pleasures are okay and which are not okay, and then there is the economic and price system… even normative codes work in this way… by creating a fashion trend for example which has a high economic cost wherein those who don’t conform to the fashion are ostracized, it ensures that individuals will continue to act within the societal framework even for something which might be otherwise free, like “friendship” (and here I am using the term friendship very lightly, in the sense of the modern facebook era friend category).
Of course propaganda relies heavily on the social sciences, Edward Bernays used Freud in its pioneering era…
Here is a book for example that translates social theory including feminist theory and post-colonial theory, even Weber and Foucault into techniques useful for public relations:
I’ve kind of dragged on here. The reason I mentioned that it’s of particular concern to me because of my history and desires is because I am a creative person, I wanted to work in the arts before I was interested in philosophy, and many times creative impulses do not translate into rational behaviour… so basically I find society very limiting.
I do think that would have always been a problem, as I mentioned, these aren’t new things. What is new is the increasing perfection of the technique.
I have probably rambled on too long and I didn’t address a lot of your comment, perhaps I will return to it, but I will say a couple more words.
I have not read Marcuse, but I have looked into that book a lot, and I have had an interest in the Frankfurt school. Due to an unfortunate insanity I have like 100 books sitting on my shelf unread so I probably won’t be able to obtain a copy any time soon. I got into this mostly through my own experiences, and reading the social sciences, with lots of literature and philosophy thrown in there.
I wouldn’t even consider pain as opposite to pleasure, some people can feel pain at pleasure, even most people, for example a rough massage of a sore muscle… uncomfortable would be harder to justify in that way because discomfort is often used synonimously with unpleasant, but something like fear and anxiety if generally considered uncomfortable but can be a cause of pleasure, in the case of horror movies or paintings, also adrenaline is converted in the body into dopamine, which is one of the happiness chemicals, which is probably where there are adrenaline junkies…
I would be interested in you elaborating a little on this if you’re up for it:
Okay yes, these are two rather distinct issues, the social and the natural sciences. Still they both are treated by value ontology. The central issue is the question of self-determination - to what extent peoples are ‘allowed’ to shape their own lives. In modern society, much has been accomplished in terms of getting people to comply with standards that do not emerge from their nature, that, when they are complied with, alter the subjects nature. In the past, people were just told ‘comply or die’, now people are trained, bred, indoctrinated, programmed into submission using all sorts of technologies, and when they still do not comply then some force may be used. But as always happens, as soon as there is a critical mass of complying people, this mass will coerce the rest of the people to comply as well. On the whole there is no greater compelling force than the acceptance of or (threat of) expulsion by the community.
But there is so much wrong with social sciences and their implementation that it was necessary for me to approach the subject on a strictly logical, philosophical way; the whole fundamental notion of what a human is, as it is used in todays sciences, social and natural, is deeply false - at least its results are a type of human that I can not relate to. I find most modern humans absolutely unbearable in weakness and feebleness of spirit, the lethargy and servileness of their minds. It is common for humans to think of culture and civilization as constant progress, but if we compare todays intellectuals to those of a century ago, it is clear that our time has little to boast.
If that’s at all interesting to you, I recommend browsing around a bit here, or probe links I gave before. It’s not so much an isolated theory as it is a logic that commands (or rather, allows for) a new way of thinking about the individual and his relation to the world, and in a larger or more impersonal way it presents cosmic laws as derivatives of deeper, more acute logical necessities; namely, the nature of entity. Rather than studying the balance and harmony of big systems of which entities (atoms or humans, or anything in between) are part and studying those entities as parts, I opted for studying the principle of entity, and deriving from this some knowledge about possible wholes in which they might partake.