I like Grand Theft auto too, but I mean: are you really going to sit there and rag on a group of people (that you didn’t even know existed until today) who are really into a game because it offers incredible depth and possibility of emergent game-play, insinuating they’re only into it to… what, make themselves feel smart, and it must be an inferior game because Grand Theft Auto sold more? Really? (And the game is the same game as when it was first released, it just gets new features once a year or so. GTA are completely different games each release, GTA is a franchise.) They’re into the game because of the depth of possibilities it offers. Did you not read the post? You can build a fully programmable and working analogue DWARFPUTER out of logic circuits made by exploiting the physics engine, using lava flows as “wires” and such. (If you’ve read up on some decent amount of computer science or at least studied some designs for 8 bit computers, which are easily acquired.) That is why they play it: because it’s fucking awesome. It is like the control on a plane versus that of a car. If you want greater control, the control will require greater complexity: more “buttons”. Besides, your “argument” wouldn’t even work- because as I pointed out to you, while Dwarf Fortress may be absurdly dense for most to get into- it invented many design and gameplay elements that trickled down into a product you might have heard of- “Minecraft”, you know, one of the best selling games of all time, as per your standards of what artistic merit is. This isn’t you’re right, I’m right: this is, I’m right. Also, there would be many “dwarf fortresses of philosopohy”, if you were to go with that comparison. You see the first Latin inscription, in my signature? It is John Dee, from the frontispiece to his Heiroglyphic Monad, an exceedingly difficult text. In English it means: If you do not understand, then either shut the fuck up or learn it until you do understand.
Indeed, as to the other point, about my not being concerned with the physical world. I couldn’t have said it better myself. Think of it like, red blood cells. Red blood cells, skin cells: intestines, shit, etc. Most people only exist to circulate energy so that the organs- no, not even the organs- but so the brain can live. The brain is all that matters. Everything else is just a battery. It is the same with all systems, from a solar system to the human race. Most are just, blood cells. They exist to keep the economy moving. They exist to feed and sustain- me. The world won’t end because I argue with red blood cells about it: red blood cells want to survive as much as I do. They don’t keep going for the sake of the brain, they keep going for their own sake, they don’t even know what a brain is. And as to trickling down: yeah, there is no practical way to force ideas into political action directly, even if I- as a noble philosopher, were to condescend to act upon the world-stage. Every single attempt that has been made to do that ended in millions of deaths: every single one. And while I do not care much for this world, I don’t hate it either, or wish harm to it.
Besides, it still misses the point. It is thought itself: gnosis. That is the goal of my thought: thought. There is nothing outside of it. There’s not a utopia. There is no political goal at all. The goal of philosophy is philosophy: the end of thought is thought. This is called the samadhi of inner-enjoyment, or gnosis from the Western perspective. The mind reflected upon itself, infinitely, recursively- forever; carving with the lightning finger tip the mutant sigil AGLAIA upon the surface of its own waters, a sea lost in itself, which is the sign of mastery, of the Immortal and Enlightened Self: for it is not only the goal of the human race to produce the enlightened-consciousness-- it is the goal of this universe, of all universes, to produce that Being.
Everyone feels like they understand it all, sometimes. But I’m pretty sure I’d pass the test.
Parenthetically, I forgot to note one more thing when I said this:[size=50] Beyond being understood or not-understood: my ultimate goal is to pursue untested and novel domains and lines of thought; to ‘break the symmetry’ over which the fate of System can be determined, and to achieve this by exploring the ambient signal and cross-current of disparate frequencies, blending concepts from one domain with those of an unrelated one, etc. (hence I did not mean to imply I am, economically, a Marxist, despite using a concept of his: I prefer to insert myself within the logic of a foreign body as a kind of retrovirus in order to steal a concept from one place and use it somewhere else in a way it was not intended for, often against its own creator) and through a multitude of various techniques like this, or the zairja or the cartography of the ineffable I did another thread on, to force Thought to reconnect with its pre-Symbolic real, that is,- the phantom residuum or stochastic memory of its (g)/host. (ghost, host)[/size]
Of course you’ve got the Lacanian stuff, the Schelling stuff, etc. but also, another interesting connection to this idea of re-connecting thought with its “stochastic residuum” or chance-memory is to be found in Borge’s Argumentum Ornithologicum: “I close my eyes and see a flock of birds. The vision lasts a second, or perhaps less; I am not sure how many birds I saw. Was the number of birds definite or indefinite? The problem involves the existence of God. If God exists, the number is definite, because God knows how many birds I saw. If God does not exist, the number is indefinite, because no one can have counted. In this case I saw fewer than ten birds (let us say) and more than one, but did not see nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, or two birds. I saw a number between ten and one, which was not nine, eight, seven, six, five, etc. That integer—not-nine, not-eight, not-seven, not-six, not-five, etc.—is inconceivable. Ergo, God exists.”