Possibilities are individuated in talk of possible worlds. — MindForged

To come back to this: they really aren't. There's no actual individuation that goes on at all: the whole idea is that possible worlds are a given set out of which the actual world is simply one; as you said, "the actual world is part of the set of possible worlds". But one is hard pressed to come up with a more stupid account of individuation: "well it is possible because it is possible that it is possible (and we've invented some rules regarding this!)". One wants to say to the whole enterprise of modal semantics: fuck off.

But in all seriousness, in the background here is Bergson's critique of possibility: for Bergson, the very idea that there are individual possible entities (whether 'worlds' or events or whathaveyou) is something of a mere grammar mistake. It used to be that to say that something was possible was just to say that it was not impossible. "We can do the thing" (given the current conditions). But then some idiots decided that it'd be a good idea to reify individual possibilities as quasi-substantial entities in-themselves. So where possibility once designated a mere truism ("it is not impossible"), it began to taken on a positive sense which Bergson refers to as "pre-existence under the form of the idea". But for Bergson, this approach to possibility is thoroughly parasitic or derivative of actual things. As he says, there is in fact 'more' in the idea of the possible than there is in the idea of the actual:

"But there is especially the idea that the possible is less than the real, and that, for that reason, the possibility of things precedes their existence. They would thus be representable in advance; they could be thought before being realized. But it is the inverse that is the truth... For the possible is nothing else than the real with, in addition, an act of the mind which casts the image of it back into the past once it comes forth... Just to the extent that reality creates itself, unforeseeable and new, its image reflects itself behind itself into the indefinite past; thus it finds itself to have been possible at all times, and that is why I said that its possibility, which does not precede its reality, will have preceded it once the reality appears. The possible is thus the mirage of the present in the past." (Bergson, Creative Evolution).

So the positive sense of possibilities pre-existing the real is basically a retroactive illusion based on nothing more than a mistake of grammar. The entirety of PWS is bad grammar, and everyone who works on it should go back to elementary school and learn some proper english before engaging in metaphysics. So while it's always 'possible' (not-impossible!) to ratiocinate and say things like "So a rock having the potential energy to fall can be said to be possible within that world itself", the whole recasting of potentiality into possible worlds and accessibility relations is entirely parasitic act that takes for granted the very thing it attempts to account for. (Hence fdrake: "The possible worlds of various counterfactual states of the falling rock are generated by how it could fall').

I propose a name for that realm outside the circle of possibility - 'the circle of the fantastic'. — unenlightened

I prefer the more mundane 'impossible'. It interests me too because in political theory there is an approach to understanding proper political action as that which aims to bring about the impossible: that is, to change the very distribution of the possible such that what was once deemed impossible is rendered otherwise through acts of political courage. To demand the impossible: the basic definition of a politics worthy of the name. So another advantage of thinking about the adjacent possible as a ever-moving horizon of possibility.

. The lesson I took is that reductionism is a one-way trip. We can explain higher levels based on lower ones, but we can't predict higher levels based on lower ones. Doesn't that take the wind out of the adjacent possible's sails? — T Clark

Au contrarie, the idea is that the adjacent possible takes the wind out of reductionist sails. The Kauffman paper I linked to is not for nothing titled "Beyond Reductionism Twice".

Well I guess I just don't see the upshot of that position. Possibilities are individuated in talk of possible worlds. It's just that some possibilities are only accessible given some other possibilities being the case (e.g. the Bruce Wayne being a redhead example I gave). — MindForged

A brief response to this as I'm about to hit the sack: part of what I want to do is suck the explanatory air put of possibility-talk altogether; possibility is what must be accounted for, and is not what ought to do the accounting. @Fdrake is on the money here:

the potential-sense of possibility for rock falling is logically prior to the possible-world sense of possibility for rock falling, the latter would be said on the basis of the former. Adjacent possibility (potential being constrained by the actual) being the condition for the possibility (lulz) of substantive possibility (contingent truth or falsehood turning on holding in a possible world). — fdrake

Possible-worlds talk is always ex post facto, what Bergson called the retrograde movement of the true.

This "adjacent possibility" idea is basically already part of modern discussions of modality. — MindForged

Well, to put my cards on the table early, I think the whole attempt to cash out possibility in terms of possible worlds is a giant mistake, and that any analytic metaphysics that takes that route is basically a new scholasticism not deserving of being taken seriously. That said - what I find attractive about the notion of the adjacent possible is that it attempts to take seriously the need to account for the individuation of possibility. It does not take the possible as a 'given', simply waiting in the wings to be actualised, even if as a second-order 'non-live' possibility. In the scientific context in which the concept was elaborated, the adjacent possible is created or brought into being where it simply did not 'exist' before hand even qua possible; In Kauffman's own words:

"The ever changing actual “context” of the biosphere constitutes “enabling constraints” that as enabling constraints “create” the Adjacent space of possibilities into which evolution can become. Then that becoming creates a new specific evolutionary situation or context of actual adaptations that again act as enabling constraints creating ever new, typically unprestatable Adjacent Possible directions for evolution." (source [PDF] ).By contrast, possible world semantics is what I see as 'dogmatic' in the properly pejorative, Kantian sense of the term, insofar as it desperately needs something like a Critique of Pure Possibility. Or to put it otherwise, what I like about the adjacent possible is that it provides what I think is another, far superior, scientifically grounded way of thinking about possibility than the idealist logical toys of modern day analytic metaphysicians.

Can you explain further? I have no difficulty in demarcating experiments from non-experiments. — Mariner

Nah, not demarcating experiments from non-experiments: I meant that experiments are themselves an exploration of 'demarcations', or limits that are not laid down in advance. To experiment is to (attempt to) stumble upon the new, to create by means of an undertaking that does not rely on demarcations laid out before the undertaking of said experiments. And here it's particularly clear that to affirm exprimentation doesn't require one to affirm 'non-experimentation': to say this is to confuse the concept of experimentation for the practice of it. The same can and should be said for the the affirmation of immanence, which again, needs no reference to the transcendent.

Again, I was responding to this line of inquiry: "How can Nietzsche (or anyone) demarcate "the immanent" without a clear acknowledgment of the transcendent?"; The issue is that the very question of demarcation misunderstands what is at stake in affirming immanence. To affirm is not to demarcate.

Other than this, I'm afirad I don't really recognize your redescription of what I said in terms of 'mythos and logos' - words I did not use. And finally, it's not just a question of valorizing action over discourse, but of the kind of thing action is compared to the kind of thing discourse is. If a difference in kind between the two is not recognized, then the point is unfortunately missed.

This kind of reproach to Nietzsche is a common and consequential one - one finds it in Arendt and Heidegger, to name two figures off the top of my head - but I think it's ultimately misguided. As I understand it, the 'trick' is in recognizing that immanence and transcendence are not simply two poles on an equal plane along which one can be orientated. They differ in kind. The difference is that the affirmation of immanence is not the affirmation of something given, a concept, idea, or set of values; instead, I understand the affirmation of immanence to boil down to the imperative of creation: the much vaunted 'creation of (new) values'.

This phrase, found everywhere in Nietzsche, is often (mis)read as though what Nietzsche simply called for were alternative values, values other than the currently(?) existing ones - as though, once found, we could rest on those new, appropriately forged laurels. But the accent instead needs to be placed on the act of creation itself, the perpetual engagement and renewal of value-creation as an art unto itself. Eternal return. This is where the difference-in-kind between transcendence and immanence lies: immanence is not an affirmation of an alternative set of 'worldly' values, as though one could pick and choose between two gift-boxes in the shop: the affirmation of immanence means the affirmation of action, of doing, of acting in the world without an external standard which would 'judge' it from without or in advance.

Understood in this way, immanence needs no reference to the 'transcendent' which would 'demarcate it', because action and creation are never 'demarcated' by anything otherworldly. Creation is not the kind of thing that can be 'demarcated', which amounts to a category error, or a grammatical mistake. Immanence is not a 'concept' in the way transcendence is, although it bestows a name onto a certain way of approaching the world. One so named, there is indeed the danger of reifying immanence into kind of principle unto-itself - a new religion - but this is just the danger of names or all philosophy in general (one doesn't ask: how can you affirm your Streetlightness when you need non-Streetlighness to demarcate your Streetlightness? But I don't act or write by reference to my 'non-personality'. The very idea is a post-facto fabrication).

This is how one can understand Nietzsche's affirmation of life as a work of art or, elsewhere, as a work of experimentation: it's in the 'doing' that one finds joy, and not the 'talking' (especially about 'Gods in the proper way'; note that experiments, in their nature, are not the kind of thing that can be 'demarcated'). Hence also Nietzsche's revulsion at dialectics: "With dialectics, the rabble rises to the top" (Twilight of Idols). Anyway, long story short is that the kind of critique you make only works if immanence is modelled on the form of transcendence: but this is exactly what is meant to be undone. The very talk of 'demarcation' itself treats immanence as something it is meant to contest.

If you have institutional access, see if you can find Jeffrey Bell's essay "Philosophizing the Double-Bind" where he shows that despite the surface similarities of Plato and Nietzsche across a whole range of points - and there are many - their respective commitments to Being and Becoming make them irreconcilable at the very level of form, and not merely 'content'.

Yes. Just as the engineer is 'in the end' still a bricoleur, so adaptation is, if we remove all traces of teleology, always exaptation - a novel use for the chemistry of carbon. — unenlightened

Yeah. One of the interesting things about history of the idea of exaptation is that it found a home in the study of technology (exapted to the study of technology?), even as its use in biology has declined: the fact that inventions are built off the back of other inventions is something that is far easier to discern in the development of technology than it is biology sometimes. Pascal Chabot gives the example of the locomotive, which was the result of the coming together of the steam-engine and the wagon, which in turn brought about new problems to be addressed, which needed new innovations in turn:

"Eventually, the idea arose to combine these elements. The steamengine was mounted on a wagon. A crankshaft transmission system converted the alternation of the engine’s pistons into a continuous turning of the wagon’s wheels. Primitive locomotives combined different existing technologies, but this combination was as yet ‘intellectual’, closer to the freedom of theory than to material practicalities. None of the components were originally conceived to function together. The structure of each element betrays its original intended purpose. The steam-engine adapted to power the wagon was originally designed to be fixed in place. In this position, its weight was unimportant. ... However, for the construction of the locomotive, the problem of weight and size had to be addressed: it was impossible to build a retaining wall on a wagon.

[To address this,] Marc Seguin invented the fire-tube boiler. Submerged in this boiler’s water tank were tubes which collected the hot gas released from the fire-box. By placing the heat source inside the boiler, Seguin reversed the older design, increasing the surface area for heat transfer while reducing the amount of water required to generate steam. A fire-brick frame was no longer needed to prevent heat loss. The weight of the engine was reduced. But Seguin’s invention had additional benefits. The tubular boiler also allowed for a reduction in the size of the fire-box, since the heat it produced was conserved inside the tubes. ... This type of boiler would be used in the first series of locomotives constructed by George and Robert Stephenson, beginning in 1823." (Chabot, The Philosophy of Simondon)

This is exaptation in action (Chabot, following the philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon, calls it 'concretization').

How can one "affirm the joyful immanence of this world" without acknowledging the transcendent? — Mariner

Nietzsche's problem was that the appeal to the transcendent - at least in its classical guise (e.g. Plato and Institutional Christianity) - always came at the price of the denigration of the worldly. Thus for Plato, the body is figured as a 'prison of the soul' (and Nietzsche in turn calls out 'the despisers of the body') , or, you get this lovely tidbit form James 4:4 : "Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God." (compare Nietzsche: "Remain true to the earth, my brethren ... Let it [your love and knowledge] not fly away from the earthly and beat against eternal walls with its wings!").

Two small examples, but representative of how the transcendent in Nietzsche's understanding is always pitched against the worldly, and ladens the world with what he variously calls guilt, gravity, and sadness (with Nietzsche in turn affirming the value of innocence, lightness, and joy). Unsurprisingly then, the appeal to the tranacendent is always coupled with a nostalgic, guilt-inducing story of a 'fallen humanity' in need of some eschatological, redemptive moment - one that just so happens to mire all of humanity in sin. But of course this story is nothing but a self-poisoning chalice: the introduction of the transcendent induces the very toxic effects it pretends to aim to cure. See also: Nietzsche's The History of an Error.

Related, for sure, but I there's a deeper semantic inflection here regarding the interplay between environment and 'thing' (a deeper focus on relations), as well a emphasis on 'nature' that is missing in the more 'culturally' inflected 'bricolage'. Nature's bricolage, if you will - although taken to it's limit, the idea of exaptation probably also helps to break down the artificial barrier between nature and culture.

Same page. And as you say, there is no other appendix. Exaptation, then, not being about the appendix that is, is not about the appendix that is. Rather it is about something that is not an appendix - the history of their evolution or something like. This is the only distinction I'm making, and nothing Kantian or philosophical to it. — tim wood

Hmm, okay, but I think I'd still put it differently. I'd say exaptation speaks to modality of the relations that compose the appendix - or anything else, for that matter. This is what I focused on in the OP: exaptation highlights the contingency of function of traits, with these contingencies of relation - evolutionary and historical - necessarily making of the appendix 'what it is'.

So I disagree that it is 'about something that is not an appendix': it most definitely is. The mistake seems to be in trying to separate the historical evolution of the appendix from the 'appendix itself' or some such: but an appendix is historical and evolutionary through and through and it is a mistake to try and isolate some 'appendix-substance' apart from that evolutionary history (the 'substance-accident' distinction being one of the greatest mistakes ever made in Western philosophy).

Cool resource. 'Serendipity' rings a bit too whimsical for my tastes - I would like to affirm the necessity of contingency as much as the contingency of necessity - but the focus on novelty, creativity and chance seems right up my alley. Might write up a thread on the 'adjacent possible' next, actually.

Eh, I kinda understand what you're driving at but I think the attempt to draw a distinction between 'concepts' and 'things themselves' within language is a doomed endeavour that can lead nowhere. But that is not a discussion that is very relavent here.

For instance, I don't think the distinction you're drawing between what you call 'criteria for description' and 'what a thing is' is well-founded. Part of what the concept of exaptation is meant to show is that a developmental environment - the environment in which any one trait undergoes evolution - determines, at the very level of 'the thing itself', what that thing is. There is no 'appendix-in-itself' apart from it's existence right now as a structure that helps regulate the gut biome: that is what the appendix is. But this 'is' is a 'provisional is', one subject to change and further evolution according to different possible evolutionary pathways. And of course one of the lessons of evolution is that all 'is' are 'provisional is'.

The so-called 'actual appendix' you're looking for - as if an 'actual appendix' existed apart from it's being in the here and now in a human species - is a just a figment of your imagination, or rather and more generously, an expectation derived from an outdated metaphysics that looks at actual appendixes and their functions and incredulously asks: 'yes but where is the real appendix?'. Or, to put it otherwise: the world itself functions as a 'meta-level' which conditions the object(-level) 'itself'. Language is not at all special in this regard, it just functions as another 'meta' framing device, one among myriad of them that already exist in the absence of any language whatsoever. What you call 'description' needs to be transposed right into the 'world' itself: the world functions as its own context, shaping the very being of the traits subject to evolution.

What you're looking for doesn't exist. Or rather, it's staring at you in the face, only to have you ask where in the world it could possibly be. Platonic illusion.

L'etat cest Trump?

This seems to approach an argument that says that what a thing is (if you even grant the possibility of there being a thing) is simply its description. — tim wood

But this is just what I've denied. At no point in the OP did I invoke a distinction between 'descriptions' and 'the thing itself'. This kind of Kantian approach is just what I would like to totally escape from. That something is an exaptation belongs to 'the thing itself', and not merely our 'descriptions' of it. I would in fact drop the vocabulary of 'descriptions' entirely, which I think is here misleading and unnecessary.

There is nothing that is not stupid about the Cartesian outlook.

Ancient Greek subject-object metaphysics divides (life, the universe and) Everything into subject and object as its first cut (as Pirsig puts it). — Pattern-chaser

I'm almost entirely sure the subject-object distinction came about long, long after the ancient Greeks, and that the words - or their equivalents - didn't even exist in that time either. I'd be curious to be proven wrong, but as far as I know it's an entirely Latinate distinction (which, incidentally, used to mean the exact opposite of what the terms now mean). From Daston and Galison's Objectivity: "Its cognates in European languages derive from the Latin adverbial or adjectival form obiectivus/obiective, introduced by fourteenth-century scholastic philosophers such as Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. (The substantive form does not emerge until much later, around the turn of the nineteenth century.) From the very beginning, it was always paired with subiectivus/subiective, but the terms originally meant almost precisely the opposite of what they mean today".

Or, as Simon Critchley points out, to the degree that one can look to the Greek for its genesis, 'subject' in the Greek meant more or less what is referred to as 'object' today, and does not function as one-half of an idiotic dualism: "Subjectum translates the Greek hupokeimenon, ‘that which lies under’, ‘the substratum’; a term which refers in Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics to that of which all other entities are predicated but which is itself not predicated of anything else. In a classical context, then, the subject is the subject of predication; the hupokeimenon is that which persists through change, the substratum, and which has a function analogous to matter (hule) ... Indeed, one immediately here notes the oddity that the word subject can also designate an object. ... The modern philosophical use of the word subject as the conscious or thinking subject ... first appears in the English language as late as 1796." (Critchley, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity).

In any case, the Greeks, as far as I know, were neither stupid nor facile enough to employ the subject-object distinction in the manner in which it is generally used today.

Now, apparently, it helps regulate the environment of our intestines. But this in turn gives no clue as to how or why or what the appendix is doing in terms of itself. — tim wood

I guess one of the things I would like to put into question is the very idea that there is any sort of 'in terms of itself' that belongs to anything. If I were to formalize it, I'd want to say something like: everything belongs in the 'exaptive mode' from the very beginning. So one of the things I'd like to avoid is this distinction between 'mere description' and 'the things themselves': what I'm getting at is that the things themselves function differentially from the very beginning; the fact that the appendix had it's genesis in the digestive tract says nothing about 'the thing the appendix really is': the point is that there is no 'really is': the 'terms' of a thing are found in it's exaptive environment, from the very start.

Everything that is, is just a cog, ready for appropriation and co-option (ex-propriation?). I mean, one thing I didn't mention is that the idea of exaptation has somewhat fallen out of vogue in biological discourse itself, not because there's something 'wrong' with it per se, but because the lesson it was invented to impart has been so thoroughly absorbed that every adaptation is now seen as more or less a kind of exaptation to begin with: the distinction has fallen apart somewhat because it's now recognized that most, if not all evolutionary adaptations began - if you push far back enough - as structures that had either no use or different uses entirely. In a sense, the difference between exaption and adaptation is the kind of emphasis you want to place on whatever it is you're looking at.

There's a nice Quanta article that deals with some of the ambiguities of the term, ambiguities which for some discredit the term, but which for me enrich it: "The metabolism study suggests that a healthy portion of novel traits get their start as exaptations. In fact, the ratio skews heavily that way ... “If what we find holds in general, it will become very difficult to distinguish traits that are adaptations from the traits that are not adaptations,” Wagner said".

A default approach should be: anyone who invokes the subjective-objective distinction does not know what they are talking about, unless proven otherwise.

Its not a nihilist perspective. Nietzsche actively fought against nihilism all his life.

Not forgetting that krisis in Greek means 'judgement', or the moment of decision (in medicine: the moment where the patient hovers between life and death and a course of action must be decided upon), it's probably fair to say that Nietzsche did throw philosophy into crisis - a moment of decision: continue to wax nostalgic for some other-wordly paradise so as to better secure the triumph of nihilism, or affirm instead the joyful immanence of this world, freed from the stifling and deadening (non-)sensibilities of Platonism. A very welcome crisis.

Lol, that's super cute.

Ronald Bogue - Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts
Wilfrid Sellars - Science, Perception, and Reality (replacement copy for the last one I lost in the middle of reading!)

One can only imagine telling someone who hates racists - because he or she has had to put up with racial vilification all their life - that their hate is 'just as ugly' as that of the racist themselves. The only possible rational response to this kind of liberal kum-ba-yah bullshit is: go fuck yourself you ivory tower con-artist.

Good.

One of the most important reasons for seeing this is that counter intolerance is just as ugly as the primary type. — frank

Utter and total horseshit.

It's philosophy if it makes some argument about 'the way things are' that cannot be checked against objective empirical sense data (or whatever definition you prefer). It's a useful one if the person holding it finds it satisfying. — Pseudonym

"It's philosophy if I'm philosophically incompetent".

"What can a machine do? (Not this or that machine, by the way, but machines in the abstract) Tell me! Oh you can't tell me what a machine can do? Well, obviously machines cannot be evaluated as to their usefulness because you can't answer my question!".

Language on holiday. Exemplary of the kind of pseudo-question that philosophy rightly rejects.

@fdrake @Srap Tasmaner:

My favourite example from the OP's paper was actually its discussion of infinity, which I didn't bring up for the sake of space - but since we're in the thick of it: it makes a comparison between the Cantorian notion of infinity - which is more or less accepted as standard today - and another, 'forgotten' attempt to think about infinity, drawn by John Wallis (the guy who 'invented' the number line and the infinity symbol, ∞). Wallis' argument was basically that infinity must be less than any negative number (contrapositively: all negative numbers are larger than infinity!), because:

1. As 1/x approaches 0, x = ∞
2. As 1/-x approaches 0, x also = ∞
3. But 1/-x > 1/0
4. So ∞ < -x (infinity is smaller than any negative number!); Which yields a new number line:

0 << 1 << 2 << 3 << ... << -3 << -2 << -1.

(See the paper for a more detailed, less condensed account). As B&C point out, this is mostly seen as a bizarre result and is mostly ignored today. But, as they note, we tend to have a very selective view of what is and is not 'bizarre': it's well known that Cantor's infinity gives rise to weird results too, in the form of 'Hilbert's Hotel' paradoxes, where, if we 'use' Cantorian infinity, we can show that there are as many perfect squares (X^2) as there are natural numbers (they can be put into a one-to-one correspondence), despite the fact that this too is incredibly counter-intuitive (the set of perfect squares 'ought' to be a subset of the the natural numbers).

So why do we accept one counter-intuitive result and not the other? Is there any intra-mathematical reason? But of course not. As Clark puts it in his solo book, "Which contradiction we allow to stand, it seems, determines which particular brand of infinite number we are inclined to buy". So what I wanna say is that this all plays into this idea that it's not the 'proofs' themselves which are decisive, but what it is that the proofs allow us to do; we accept and/or reject results not just on the basis of their intra-systemic consistency, but also on the basis of their fecundity, their fruitfulness for ... whatever it is we want to do (there's a mathematical empiricism here, that isn't at the same time a realism!).

Which brings us back to Witty...: "The mathematical proposition says: The road goes there. Why we should build a certain road isn't because the mathematics says that the road goes there - because the road isn't built until mathematics says it goes there. What determines it is partly practical considerations and partly analogies in the present system of mathematics."; (This also kind helped me think though some of the Zeno stuff that's been around the forum recently: all the questions re: calculus and the continuous and the discontinuous - the Zeno paradoxes probably arise from applying a certain concept to a phenomenon not suited for it).

I'm not sure one can reason with it so much as attempt to show that another logic is possible - beginning, perhaps, by trying to show that sexuality is situated beyond a economic circuit of mere supply and demand; people are not 'goods': they have autonomy which must be engaged with and appealed to - even at - especially at - the risk of rejection. 'Goods' don't reject you, for a start.

I actually also think Twilight and The Antichrist are among the best of Nietzsche's works. They're just the right mix of sharpness, cruelty and insight that really make them wonderful reads. I remember reading somewhere that they were Kauffman's recommended places to start with Nietzsche as well, though I can't for the life of me remember where.

the article cited in the OP is pretty good on this:

"Once Rodger’s friends or the girls at school see him with his new thing, he thinks, he will finally have access to the prize he seeks. The more expensive, exclusive, or exotic the object, the greater its sexual exchange value. This logic extends to the literal acquisition of people ... Sex is money. Acquiring coolness and sexiness is just a matter of buying things. Desire is produced in the form of commodities. But the more items Rodger acquires, the more frustrated he becomes by their failure to give him what he really wants. Nothing stays true to its promise. At every turn, he is betrayed. But instead of questioning the logic in the first place, the logic equating the accumulation of luxury goods with sexual fulfillment, the logic of desire as a lack of something, he concludes that his problem is simply that he doesn’t have enough money. Only with a virtually infinite amount of money, he thinks, will he be finally irresistible to women.

...How different is the logic of capital and sexual accumulation Elliot Rodger articulates from the proper values of our society? What makes it pathetic when Rodger wears Gucci sunglasses to get laid and perfectly normal when his father, or Harvey Weinstein, or Donald Trump do so? Why do we, ostensibly well-adjusted bourgeoisie, think it is so absurd that Rodger expects that these commodities entitle him to sex and affection when we exhibit and encourage the same behavior ourselves?".

It makes debate about power rather than ideas and truth — bert1

Who said it's about debate to begin with? Debate has never been situated on the side of truth: the very etymology of de-bate stems from contest and agonism - in other words, power: (dis-battuere 'reversal+fight/beat/batter'). No debate-team ever consoled themselves after losing that they were 'right'. Debate is alien to truth and always has been. The whole point is that one explores ideas and only ideas: that one is not shackled to - a losing game. That's intellectual debilitation through and through.

I think one of the best things one learns while doing philosophy is exactly how to identify ‘losing games’, and with it, how to remove oneself from them. It’s not even entirely unfair to say that the ability to evaluate the game itself - it is worth playing? Are these moves - the available ones - the ones we want to make? - is the sine qua non of philosophical aptitude. The game as a whole and not the moves within it. It’s often too easy to get caught up in the trap of ‘but do you agree or not? It is right or wrong?’, and not attend to whether or not the very terms of the argument, the very way in which an argument is formulated, is itself felicitous.

I think nine times of out ten, sides of a debate are not ‘wrong’; it’s much worse: they are ‘not even wrong’; the game itself is broken from the very beginning: the set of possible moves needs to itself be rejigged. Worthiness, not error; value, not fault: that's the criteria of games.

No. Fuck no one. — Noble Dust

Well yes, that seems to be the issue.

'Incels' are scum and deserved to be treated as such. We're not just talking about 'lonely men', we're talking about lonely, resentful men who, idealising mass-murderers like Eliot Rodger - or "Supreme Gentlemen" Eliot Rodger, as he is known in those circles - believe that all those on the outside of that subculture are deserving of literal death. Fuck all of them.

None of which is say, by the way, that this absolves society from taking a good, long, hard look at itself and the way in which it narrativizes sex and sexuality. Incels are as much symptom as they are gangrenous disease, which is main point that the article in the OP rightly presses upon. But yeah, no sympathy for those shitcunts.

Alsooo, there seem to be some here who think that the kind of 'math problem' I'm comparing philosophy to is some stupid banality like "2+2=?". But this is not a genuine problem of or for math ('of' understood in the subjective genitive case), there is no concept to be determined here. "4" clearly 'falls out' of it, and the only 'problem' is how to go through the motions of calculation. The kind of math problem I'm referring to is of the kind detailed in the OP: What to do with the irrational? Or: What to do with the infinite? Or: What to do with the imaginaries? Not some trivial kindergarten crap where you simply map domain to codomain.

Thinking about this more... Systematization is like The Game. The Game is unwinnable and only has one rule: don't think about the Game. You lose when you think about The Game. You've just lost by reading this (traditionally, you get a 30 minute 'cool-off' period before you can lose again). System is the same. And Derrida's whole shtick about undecidables is basically this: the undeciable means you can always be inscribed in a system if you look for it (read: 'decide to be so inscribed'). It's the fridge light of philosophy: if you look for it, it will be there. It's empty, brutal tautology. So you don't look for it. You let thought be forced by the pressure of the encounter-motive (becoming-ecological, becoming-math) and you just create. But as soon as you separate that creation from 'what it can do' - its pragmatics - and think about it in terms of system, you lose the Game, even if just to argue that it is not a System.

So at least one lesson of Derrida is: keep moving. Don't let yourself get pinned down. And with Deleuze there's no imperative to movement - he kinda just... does it. There's no concern for the spectre of Hegel, no real engagement - other than bald-faced denunciation; he speaks of his 'innocence' and 'naivety': what Nietzsche tried - and ultimately failed - to do. Having said all this, I've got 30 minutes before I become undecidable again.

Anyway. Literally shower thoughts.

I think (and maybe this is laruellian?) that there’s no formalist (and philosophy is alway formal) way past the a venir. Once you’re there, then you just have to enter into it, which, to me, means bringing philosophy into uneasy commerce with something else — csalisbury

Yeah, look, I agree with this in its entirety (it's Deleuzian becoming! Becoming-friend; Becoming-'The-something-else'...), but fuck, man, it's not easy to do. But - to pick up some recent themes - this 'hardness' isn't just a psychological quirk ("we're not built for it" or whatever), but an issue endemic to reason as such (transcendental illusion, etc). I mean - reason generalizes, that's just what it does (the machinery of token and type, etc). And argument and discussion presupposes this machinery as a matter of course ('justify your position'; 'defend it against it's negative'; 'how does it deal with this case?'), so it's incredibly easy to get caught in it (and if one doesn't 'get it' the previous sentence sounds like madness).

So you literally have to reason-against-reason or employ a kind of trans-reason that works diagonally across the tiered distribution of token-type stratification that comes so naturally to us (this is why Deleuze was so against the negative, and always said that philosophers 'run away from discussions': it takes away from the positivity of concept-creation that responds to the encounter, the becoming-X that is it's result). So I'm not saying this (just) to excuse it but I definitely get caught up in the game of 'giving and asking for reasons' and all the attendant reflexive loops which lead one higher and higher up the reason-ladder until you reach the level of formal purity which yeah, I often circle around. Nothing particularly wrong with this.

So the best way to disable the TOE is simply to... ignore it. Or at the very least you point out why it's nothing but a self-sustaining circle, and leave it to its own devices. You create instead. It's true I guess that there's no real way to say 'you are wrong because...', and create off the back of that, because it immediately commits you - structurally, as it were - to being gobbled up by the Absolute Cricle of Circles (idealism of 'belly turned mind'), but goddammit you can't just not do it either, at times, as much as it's nice to be above the fray. Getting messy is fun. But yes, yes, more becoming-other (too philosophical?), I get it.

There's little of substance to discuss here I'm afraid; a game of bad faith and ignorance - the one generating the other by turns - that I'm uninterested in playing.

The point being is that we can connect various patterns that we observe in reality into some coherent whole in a wide variety of ways. I think that philosophy is exploration into giving facts possible meaning. — Devolved

I think this is close, but runs the risk of confusing philosophy for ordinary 'sense-making' which we do everyday; the 'mere' act of perception, for instance, is an effort of sense-making, of relating the world around us to possible actions upon them, etc. I see philosophy more as a kind of 'second-order sense making': a practice of 'making-explicit', where we make sense of... how we make sense of things. An effort of re/framing frames, as it were.

I mean, one of the lessons of phenomenology is that all our basic actions in the world, from perception to movement, understanding and communication, all take place against a background of significance and meaning which we are bound up in ('being-in-the-world', etc). But I don't think this means that we are 'doing philosophy' by virtue of, well, existing. I think you need to add an element of reflexivity to this definition, where philosophy 'brings out' and attempts to realign - according to various imperatives - how we make sense of the world 'naturally'.

(There's a little bit more to it than this, I should add, but I'll leave this refinement here and see what comes of it for now).