a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Max Tegmark

I think that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways.[/b]

And that explains what exactly?

There’s no better guarantee of failure than convincing yourself that success is impossible, and therefore never even trying.

Unless of course it really is impossible.

So I feel that the experimental verdict is in: the world is weird, and we just have to learn to live with it.

That or check out.

…economics was largely a form of intellectual prostitution where you got rewarded for saying what the powers that be wanted to hear.

It still is.

I feel that my main responsibility as a teacher isn’t to convey facts, but to rekindle that lost enthusiasm for asking questions.

Good luck with that. At least around here.

What is real? Is there more to reality than meets the eye? Yes! was Plato’s answer over two millennia ago. In his famous cave analogy, he likened us to people who’d lived their entire lives shackled in a cave, facing a blank wall, watching the shadows cast by things passing behind them, and eventually coming to mistakenly believe that these shadows were the full reality. Plato argued that what we humans call our everyday reality is similarly just a limited and distorted representation of the true reality, and that we must free ourselves from our mental shackles to begin comprehending it.

I completely agree. Though for very, very different reasons.

[b]so sad today

you’ve mistaken my low self-esteem for kindness[/b]

That’ll happen sure.

nothing good happens out of bed

You know, if you can get out of it.

people want you to be okay so you will shut the fuck up

Not that everyone actually will of course.

don’t worry, things may feel hopeless now but they’ll get better soon and then be hopeless again

It’s genetic after all.

people are like “your depression isn’t your fault” and i’m like “no shit”

I wish I could say that.

high on existential dread

You know, philosophically.

regret or it didn’t happen

Though especially if it did.

[b]Lee Smolin

The whole history of the world is then nothing but the story of huge numbers of these processes, whose relationships are continually evolving. We cannot understand the world we see around us as something static. We must see it as something created, , and under continual recreation, by an enormous number of processes acting together. The world we see around us is the collective result of all those processes. I hope this doesn’t seem too mystical. If I have written this book well then, by the end of it, you may see that the analogy between the history of the universe and the flow of information in a computer is the most rational, scientific analogy I could make. What is mystical is the picture of the world as existing in an eternal three-dimensional space, extending in all directions as far as the mind can imagine. The idea of space going on and on for ever has nothing to do with what we see. When we look out, we are looking back in time through the history of the universe, and after not too long we come to the big bang. Before that there may be nothing to see- or, at the very least, if there is something it will most likely look nothing like a world suspended in a static three-dimensional space. When we imagine we are seeing into an infinite three-dimensional space, we are falling for a fallacy in which we substitute what we actually see for an intellectual construct. This is not only a mystical vision, it is wrong.[/b]

Come on, even if you do understand and agree with all this, there’s still no getting around those “unknown unknowns”.

Of course, there really is no chicken and egg problem; certainly there were eggs long before there were chickens.

Next up: The tree falling in the forest.

The key question for a quantum theory of gravity is then the following: Can we extend to quantum theory the principle that space has no fixed geometry? That is, can we make quantum theory background-independent, at least with regard to the geometry of space?

[i]This has now been narrowed down to three answers:

1] yes
2] no
3] maybe[/i]

Many of the important principles in twentieth century physics are expressed as limitations on what we can know. Einstein’s principle of relativity (which was an extension of a principle of Galileo’s) says that we cannot do any experiment that would distinguish being at rest from moving at a constant velocity. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle tells us that we cannot know both the position and momentum of a particle to arbitrary accuracy. This new limitation tells us there is an absolute bound to the information available to us about what is contained on the other side of a horizon. It is known as Bekenstein’s bound, as it was discussed in papers Jacob Bekenstein wrote in the 1970s shortly after he discovered the entropy of black holes.

And that’s before we get to conflicting value judgments.

Some of its proponents like to say that string theory is a piece of twenty-first-century mathematics that has, by our good fortune, fallen into our hands in the twentieth century.

On the other hand, what will they be saying about it in the twenty-second century?

There is no meaning to space that is independent of the relationships among real things of the world. Space is nothing apart from the things that exist. If we take out all the words we are not left with an empty sentence, we are left with nothing.

Let’s imagine Don Trump’s reaction to this in defending The Wall.

[b]Neil Gaiman

I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.[/b]

Here’s another rendition: youtu.be/_V8jbA1x-Cs

I’m the idiot box. I’m the TV. I’m the all-seeing eye and the world of the cathode ray. I’m the boob tube. I’m the little shrine the family gathers to adore.
You’re the television? Or someone in the television?
The TV’s the altar. I’m what people are sacrificing to.
What do they sacrifice? asked Shadow.
Their time, mostly, said Lucy. Sometimes each other. She raised two fingers, blew imaginary gunsmoke from the tips. Then she winked, a big old I Love Lucy wink.
You’re a God? said Shadow.
Lucy smirked, and took a ladylike puff of her cigarette. You could say that, she said.

You can’t get more ecumenical than this.

Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.

So, anyone here ever done that?

What we read as adults should be read, I think, with no warnings or alerts beyond, perhaps: enter at your own risk.

Or bring your own.

The end of the story of Batman is he’s dead. Because, in the end, the Batman dies. What else am I going to do? Retire and play golf? It doesn’t work that way. It can’t. I fight until I drop. And one day, I will drop.

Tell that to Hollywood.

That is the eternal folly of man. To be chasing after the sweet flesh, without realizing that it is simply a pretty cover for the bones.

Who thinks that then?

[b]Edgar Allan Poe

We gave the Future to the winds, and slumbered tranquilly in the Present, weaving the dull world around us into dreams.[/b]

Now that’s great writing.

…that fitful strain of melancholy which will ever be found inseperable from the perfection of the beautiful.

Could anyone doubt it?

There is an eloquence in true enthusiasm.

Until you get to the other side of the coin.

When a madman appears thoroughly sane, indeed, it is high time to put him in a straight jacket.

You know, if you can tell the difference.

Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day; or the agonies which are have their origins in ecstasies which might have been.

In other words, coming or going it’s brutal.

It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation…busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe.

Let’s pin down how ordinary.

[b]Jeff VanderMeer

So long as you don’t tell people you don’t know something, they’ll probably think you know it.[/b]

Just not around here.

At the time, I was seeking oblivion, and I sought in those blank, anonymous faces, even the most painfully familiar, a kind of benign escape. A death that would not mean being dead.

A sinking down into the masses as it were.

If you don’t know your passion, it confuses your mind, not your heart.

Either that or the other way around.

Like most men, Wick could not help terror about one thing erupting as anger about something else.

And then either having the balls or not having the balls to do something about it.

The Thing about people who wanted to show you things was that sometimes their interest in granting you knowledge was laced with a little voyeuristic sadism. They were waiting for the Look or the Reaction, and they didn’t care what it was so long as it inflicted some kind of discomfort.

Like they’ll ever admit it.

We were always finding each other and losing each other and finding each other again, and that was just the way of us.

Not to worry: perfectly normal.

Has anyone not done those things ever? I suppose some people might never trust their dreams, if we are talking about REM sleep, and even perhaps dreams as in what you really want. But I can’t imagine someone who does not trust their heart ever or their story.

[b]John Dewey

The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs. [/b]

Fuck it then, he thought.

The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to be important.

If [nowadays] only for fifteen minutes.

There is no such thing as educational value in the abstract. The notion that some subjects and methods and that acquaintance with certain facts and truths possess educational value in and of themselves is the reason why traditional education reduced the material of education so largely to a diet of predigested materials.

On the other hand, if you can read and write and do a little arithmetic, you can still be a wage slave.

Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving…conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity.

Next up: how [in conflict] the end justifies the means.

We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future.

You know, for better or for worse.

The only freedom that is of enduring importance is the freedom of intelligence, that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment, exercised in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worth while. The commonest mistake made about freedom is, I think, to identify it with freedom of movement, or, with the external or physical side of activity.

Intrinsically worthwhile purposes? Ours you knucklehead!

Someone please explain to him the part about mundane irony.

He is, after all, a serious philosopher. :wink:

But there is no irony in the way you cling to your story, that was the irony I was pointing out.
Your lack of irony. Anyone was you in my post.

Clearly this needs to be taken up on a new thread.

My suggestion: the philosophy forum.

You start it, okay? :banana-linedance:

[size=50][no seriously][/size]

[b]C.G. Jung

How difficult it is to reach anything approaching a moderate and relatively calm point of view in the midst of one’s emotions.[/b]

I doubt anyone even tries anymore.

We are the great danger. Psyche is the great danger. How important it is to know something about it, but we know nothing about it.

Or, worse, think we know everything.

I could not say I believe. I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God.

Well, before you die is the time to believe it.

Synchronicity is the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer.

Synchronicity or bullshit.

In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately springs as a gigantic summation from these hidden source in individuals.

I challenge someone to tell me what that means. For all practical purposes in other words.

Is it worth the lion’s while to terrify the mouse?

Let alone the other way around.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour.” William Blake[/b]

Admittedly, I’ve never tried this myself.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” William Blake

Let’s file this one [obviously] under, “If…”

“Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.” David Hume

On the other hand, even I’m willing to concede there is something to Satyr’s frame of mind here.

“Men follow their sentiments and their self-interest, but it pleases them to imagine that they follow reason.” Vilfredo Pareto

Sometimes objectively, sometimes close enough.

“All the money in the world is spent on feeling good.” Ry Cooder

Either that or not feeling as bad.

“He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.” Michel de Montaigne

Let’s run this by, among others, Don Trump.

[b]T.S. Eliot

Only by acceptance of the past, can you alter it.[/b]

So, sure, go ahead, pick any one particular version.

Someone said, ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.

It does get tricky.

He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience.

In the waste land as it were.

If time and space, as sages say,
Are things which cannot be,
The sun which does not feel decay
No greater is than we.
So why, Love, should we ever pray
To live a century?
The butterfly that lives a day
Has lived eternity.

Few things get more relative than time.

We ask only to be reassured
About the noises in the cellar
And the window that should not have been open

The answers being more or less the same.
Well, some of them.

Where is the Life we lost in living?

And now is certainly a good time to figure it out.

[b]Judith Butler

We must be undone in order to do ourselves: we must be part of a larger social fabric of existence in order to create who we are.[/b]

Good luck with that, he thought.

Learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an inculcation into normalized language, where the price of not conforming is the loss of intelligibility itself.

Let’s translate this into English.

Precariousness and precarity are intersecting concepts. Lives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteed.

Amen?

There is no reason to assume that gender also ought to remain as two. The presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it.

Of course there may well be no reason not to.

In other words, they appeal to the state for protection, but the state is precisely that from which they require protection. To be protected from violence by the nation-state is to be exposed to the violence wielded by the nation-state, so to rely on the nation-state for protection from violence is precisely to exchange one potential violence for another. There may, indeed, be few other choices.

First of course we have to pin down precisely what the state is.

We do things with language, produce effects with language, and we do things to language, but language is also the thing that we do. Language is a name for our doing: both “what” we do (the name for the action that we characteristically perform) and that which we effect, the act and its consequences.

First of course we have to pin down precisely what language is.

[b]Kurt Cobain

I would like to get rid of the homophobes, sexists, and racists in our audience. I know they’re out there and it really bothers me.[/b]

Of course, he’s gone now and they’re not.

Rather be dead than cool.

Or [like me] somewhere in the vicinity.

If you ever need anything please don’t hesitate to ask someone else first.

For example, Courtney.

We’re so trendy we can’t even escape ourselves.

In other words, there’s only one way out.

I use bits and pieces of others personalities to form my own.

Anyone here want to borrow bits and pieces of mine?

…dreaming of the person you want to be is wasting the person you already are.

I’ll take that chance, he thought.

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

Words can hurt. But the true serial killers are the ones that you keep to yourself.[/b]

Want to hear mine?

[b]There are two types of people:

  1. Always lonely, never alone.
  2. Always lonely, always alone.[/b]

Or three if you count me.

The American dream. Now brought to you by Russian reality.

Cue the “pee tape”.

Get a room already, time and space.

And fuck like bunnies.

‘Go to hell!’ seems such a pleonastic utterance these days given that we’re already there.

This: “the use of more words than are necessary to convey meaning”
So, she’s right.

A Short Introduction to Surrealism: Ceci n’est pas une ceci n’est pas.

It’s Greek to me.

[b]Tom Stoppard

Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.[/b]

Doesn’t surprise me.

Give us this day our daily mask.

Remember when it was only one?

For all the compasses in the world, there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure.

Actually, it is twice as mysterious as it sounds.

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one’s memory. And yet, I can’t remember it.

On the other hand, I am inundated with such moments now.

We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.

Glum enough for you?

Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn’t death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees but it doesn’t bring death home to anyone- -it doesn’t catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says, ‘One day you are going to die.’

Gee, you think so?

[b]D.H. Lawrence

Religion was fading into the background. He had shovelled away all the beliefs that would hamper him, had cleared the ground, and come more or less to the bedrock of belief that one should feel inside oneself for right or wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one’s God. Now life interested him more.[/b]

As you might imagine, that doesn’t work for me.

He felt the devil twisting his tail, and pretended it was the angels smiling on him.

As you might imagine, that doesn’t work for me.

But you don’t fuck me cold-heartedly, she protested.
I don’t want to fuck you at all.

Let’s weep for their future.

You know, he said, with an effort, if one person loves, the other does.
I hope so, because if it were not, love might be a very terrible thing, she said.
Yes, but it is — at least with most people, he answered.

Let’s just say it’s not the least most perceptive observation.

And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.

Unlike, for example, philosophy.

Their words were only accidents in the mutual silence.

More in the way of grunts and sighs.

[b]God

Retweet this and you can kill a guy.[/b]

Just kidding probably.

Mark Zuckerberg is one of the last people you should trust, and I mean that both literally and alphabetically.

God being clever.

Reality was a bad idea.

Not unlike, for example, religion.

Sometimes in life all you need is fifty million dollars.

Sure, I’ll settle for that. Even a little less.

Do unto others as others would do unto you if they weren’t so fucking mean and stupid.

An update was long overdue.

Donald Trump is an asshole’s asshole. He’s the kind of asshole other assholes look at and say, ‘Now there’s an asshole’.

Okay, let’s impeach him for that.