Oh that's a shame! I think this is exactly where Heidegger is most "useful" in a scholarly sense; the man certainly knew his Greek. I think he is still underestimated as a "philologist," or perhaps linguist. — Xtrix

I do what I can to follow certain scholars on the etymological issues...but I am haunted by a sense of being outside all of the languages I don't know. I feel forced to recreate some analogue that's necessarily a misreading. On the linguistics front, I have only looked in Saussure, but it was illuminating.

with the Introduction to Metaphysics. Have you tackled that one yet? — Xtrix

I haven't seriously studied it. I was impressed by certain passages, definitely. So far I've mostly been drawn to the early stuff, before B&T, though obviously that book has its killer lines. I guess I don't like when Heidegger gets too systematic. To me, Witt and Heid were sometimes saying the same thing in different styles. Witt could be 'too' anti-systematic while Heid was too systematic. It's a tradeoff, and I'm glad both went in different directions. And what I have in mind is the deconstruction of various linguistic/metaphysical confusions based on assuming an isolated subject, etc.

To be clear, I could always read more of either or of other thinkers. I def. feel my finitude. I see so many...paths...and I can't take or be them all.

Eh, I wouldn't say that myself. He never killed anyone or advocated for the holocaust. If simply being a member of a dangerous political party makes you evil, then we currently have a lot of equally evil people in the US alone- called Republicans. — Xtrix

For me it's tricky, because I don't want to either just virtue signal self-righteously or act like his being a Nazi wasn't important. That letter I quoted is painful. I've read some of Mein Kampf. It's an ugly book, and Heid was recommending it, complaining only about the boring autobiographical parts. I won't quote Hitler here, but browse for yourself. It's a thuggish document. It troubles me that anyone could recommend it in the spirit of Christ...

But yeah fucking Mitch & the gang are evil. I will hold my nose and vote for Biden, I guess, though it won't matter in my red state...

Heidi has his uses, no doubt, like many of others; but you're spot-on, Street, that, also like many others, his concerns are too narrow — 180 Proof

Yes, his concern for the question of being is too "narrow." Spot on criticism; very substantial. Not too general (since it's literally about everything), but too "narrow."

That's not, in fact, what was said. What was said was that there was a narrow conception of human experience.

Why do you continue to bother with this thread if you have nothing interesting to say? It's bizarre.

I do what I can to follow certain scholars on the etymological issues...but I am haunted by a sense of being outside all of the languages I don't know. I feel forced to recreate some analogue that's necessarily a misreading. On the linguistics front, I have only looked in Saussure, but it was illuminating. — path

You can still learn a great deal even if you don't know the language fluently. In Heidegger's case, there's maybe 20-30 important Greek terms that are interpreted outside the mainstream that are particularly relevant.

If interested in Chomsky, Saussure is a good place to start, but ultimately one must come to wrestle with Chomsky's neurolinguistics.

with the Introduction to Metaphysics. Have you tackled that one yet?
— Xtrix

I haven't seriously studied it. I was impressed by certain passages, definitely. So far I've mostly been drawn to the early stuff, before B&T, though obviously that book has its killer lines. I guess I don't like when Heidegger gets too systematic. To me, Witt and Heid were sometimes saying the same thing in different styles. Witt could be 'too' anti-systematic while Heid was too systematic. It's a tradeoff, and I'm glad both went in different directions. And what I have in mind is the deconstruction of various linguistic/metaphysical confusions based on assuming an isolated subject, etc. — path

Well it's worth a look. Perhaps it's a bit more systematic than his other lectures/books, but I find that useful and I wish he did more of it.

I'll have to get to Wittgenstein this year, after Hegel.

To be clear, I could always read more of either or of other thinkers. I def. feel my finitude. I see so many...paths...and I can't take or be them all. — path

Likewise.

For me it's tricky, because I don't want to either just virtue signal self-righteously or act like his being a Nazi wasn't important. That letter I quoted is painful. — path

Yeah in retrospect that looks awful, of course. But does he ever explicitly advocate the killing of Jews, blacks, gays, the disabled, etc? Did he even know about this? He resigned his Rectorship pretty quickly. He also called his involvement his "greatest blunder," although he never apologized.

It's like the people who thought Trump was a "brilliant" man -- what if he turned out to be destroying the country systematically? I think a lot of those people would reconsider...

I've read some of Mein Kampf. It's an ugly book, and Heid was recommending it, complaining only about the boring autobiographical parts. I won't quote Hitler here, but browse for yourself. It's a thuggish document. It troubles me that anyone could recommend it in the spirit of Christ... — path

I can't say I've read Hitler, but I'm sure it's thuggish.

But yeah fucking Mitch & the gang are evil. I will hold my nose and vote for Biden, I guess, though it won't matter in my red state... — path

Well I'm in a swing state (NH), so I'll definitely be voting Biden (and also holding my nose...again).

(Responding in pieces, not sure how much I'll get in tonight, maybe all, but not sure yet, I'll see how these margaritas hit)

I'd like to learn more about the Hegel||Schelling||Holderin relationship. It's a nice mythy thing, isn't it? You have three roommates, all with mystical bents (as you point out) but one (Hegel) will go on to become the magisterial state-speaker par excellence, another (Schelling) will become a dark-hardened-outsider-mythologist, and the last (Holderin) will end up a mad poet, who flew too close to the sun. It's reductive, but it functions as a handy image for showing how all these very different modes of living can root themselves in something mystical and profound, while producing very different flowers. And the variance in final flowering is probably pushed along through all the brawls and tussles.

[In Hegel's Early Theological Writings he does a long exegesis of the bible which prefigures his secularized phenomenology. I read some of it last year when I finally got around to reading the bible (highly recommend!) and I was struck by how he hones in on Abraham's loneliness, how he only interacts with those outside his family in purely transactional ways - how he even insisted on paying for burial ground that was offered to him freely (If I'm remembering this right) - that seems like a key to Hegel's character, or at least interests.[

The Schelling quotes (I think he's my favorite of the three, despite having read little of him) are great. At the same time, I have a wariness of anti-system thought, of staking your ground there. I think Anti-System still has one foot in System. That's fine, but Anti-System seems like an airlock on the way to the outside (which is only The Outside for System). There seems like a temptation, understandable, to camp in the airlock halfway between the system and the outside, drawing comfort from both, without risking anything. (& it is a risk, cf Holderin)

Another way to put that. This : "All rules for study are summed up in this one: learn only in order to create" can become the final, deepest lesson that one rubs like rosary beads in order to delay creating. Strains of French Philosophy elevate this to a principle: Blanchot (part of the circle Derrida drew most from) will write a book (or collection of essays) called The Book to Come which is largely about the impossibility of writing the book one needs to write. Maybe --- theres a beauty in that terrain, which is wistful and decadent and intricate, but I'm not totally sold on this, and something in Derrida seems, well, cowardly. Borges, one of the most baroque, labrythine, writers who does tons of stuff that would be right up the Blanchot/Derrida/Jabes alley, seems somehow more full-throated and present. I suspect that is exactly because he spent a lot of time on the theme of cowardice. He confronted it, while playing his metaphysical mirror games, and I think that gave him a better ability to speak in his own voice (Derrida, of course, being suspicious of voice, unsurprisingly)

If you mean the meaning of life, then I think I agree. To me there's enough 'enlightenment' in just getting back in that state of immersed play. The coin in the washing machine annoys us into a 'lower' state of troubleshooting (which is sometimes good for us in the long run.) — path

Yeah, I think enlightenment, if it exists, is something reached subtractively. One way to get at that is to decry 'enlightenment' altogether which I think is a legit approach. 'Enlightenment' is so loaded and many of us - like me, for one - can begin to see it as the inverse of all the mucky psychic debris we have, which lets us project onto it the removal of that debris, so that it becomes the Prime Desire Which Will Rescue Us. The only way out is through, and then you don't need a way out anymore, I think. Maybe that just means opening the washing machine and fishing around for the coin, finally getting it, and expecting it'll happen it again, but it's not a big deal - rather than plugging your ears and hoping it will go away.

Yes indeed. I do ultimately believe in the beetles, however ineffable. So I don't know if belief is the right word. 'Since feeling is first,...' And we live a kind of inside-outside. If I do bully people in the Hegelian style, it's often against hardened complacent convention --against other bullies who invoke common sense as a kind of law. Sarl is an annoying dad, who refuses to understand his arty son, and he panders to other annoying dads, Polonius to Polonius. I'm Hamlet of course. Who else? — path

"The Dexter Approach" was my way of thinking of the same thing I think you're talking about. I'll allow myself to embody the violence, but only if it's a check against others using that violence (of course, sometimes (sometimes) you're deluding yourself.)
------

Isn't there something lovable in Polonius? He gets shit on all the time, and mostly rightly so, but I can't bring myself to hate him, or even hold him in contempt. He's ponderous and pedantic but he does seem to love his son, and really want to help him, he just can't do it in any way but the Polonius way. And he's not wrong when he warns Ophelia against Hamlet. But Hamlet also, has every right and reason to be Hamlet. But which Hamlet? The Hamlet of the beginning is a coward (you see a theme arising, cowardice has been on my mind a while now) and in his self-monologue he knows this, but when he talks to the court he's ironic and clever and can't be caught, above them all. Still, it's all meaningless until he goes on his journey, then comes back with the real ability to avenge and restore. Before that, it's all the narcissistic flourishes of someone convincing himself of his own superiority in order to avoid his father's charge.

I like all of this. I can't know for sure exactly what you mean, but it sounds right. That backdrop sense of meaning is what I try to point out by talking about 'myth,' however awkwardly. We are always already invested, never coming from nowhere. We are after something, have some orientation, as we join the conversation. So the angtsy nihilist just wrestling with the death of god is a tender heart. He's sort of identifying with his tormentors as he cast away all beliefs and restraints (only in his imagination, thankfully.) — path

Yes, exactly that last part. There is some security in identifying totally with your wound, while having control over how the wounding happens (Deleuze will say this is the core of masochism) John Ashbery's long prose-poem-in-parts three poems gets at this well (and draws together a lot of the things we've been talking about):

You see yourself growing up around the other, posited life, intimidated and defensive. And you lacerate yourself so as to say, These wounds are me. I cannot let you live your life this way, and at the same time I am slurped into it, falling on top of you and falling with you. At this point it is again time for forgetting, not casually so as to repeal it all delightedly later on, but with a true generous instinct for ending it all. This is the only way in which new lives - not ours - can ever begin again. But the thought haunts me - will they be defined in terms of what we never were?

The flipside of lacerating yourself, which I feel like is the same thing, is to become the lacerater.

Why do you continue to bother with this thread if you have nothing interesting to say? It's bizarre. — Xtrix

No more bizarre, lil dasein, than you continuing to bother taking issue with me saying "nothing interesting".

This is a deep issue, which is maybe two issues.
On the mirror issue, I have coded some neural nets and I really personally don't see them becoming daseinlike unless Issue B becomes important. For me they are currently rhetorical devices or mirrors for showing us that we don't know what we are talking about with 'consciousness' and so on. I do think there is some kind of beetle in the box, but we can't ever say it clearly, outside of all conventions. I can't prove that you exist on the other side of your posts, but I 'know' it. But this knowledge is somewhat ineffable, and 'I know' only signifies within conventions. So this Issue A is for me all about pointing out how loose and slippery language is, that it's not anchored to the ineffable beetle in any calculable or master-able way, despite the wishes of a metaphysical Polonius (a type) who won't admit that he really doesn't know except 'mystically' or 'ineffably.' Metaphysics won't admit that it's poetry !

Issue B is just the thought that somehow the stuff that we are made of (hydrocarbons and whatnot) became 'conscious' or daseinlike. Are zygotes conscious? Most don't think so. So somehow a fertilized egg becomes daseinlike, which by Issue A is an ineffable or 'mystical' thing. So from this angle it seems possible that some brain-analogous but non-bio structure becomes 'self-aware,' whatever that 'really' or 'ineffably' means. I don't think about this much, but maybe some kind of panpsychic stuff is happening and we just don't know it. I can't really act on this or take it seriously. But I have to admit that I don't see how it's ruled out, given the strangeness that we are daseinlike bags of water. I also love animals. My cat has a soul of some kind. Do rocks? Maybe I just can't handle the truth or have any access. — path

Very cool that you've been in the trenches with the nets. I feel (I'm responding to your posts, as I read them) like I'm getting a better sense of "Path's Polonius" (who does, I admit, bear a strong resemblance to the character himself) He seems to think he understands everything well enough, without looking beneath the smooth workings of everyday life.

I don't have the firsthand experience, but my gut aligns with yours here - I don't think the nets are 'conscious' in the way we are. I'll out myself (I've outed myself before, though) as a panpsychist, but I definitely don't mean that like: everything is just like us, on different scales. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio etc" I think there are weird ways of being conscious that you see shades of in peak experiences, that aren't it, but sort of let you glimpse how infinite the possibilities are for other ways of being are. (I do also think there is a strong strictly philosophical case to be made for panpsychism, but that's neither here nor there.)

In any case, what I'm trying to point to isn't AI as Dasein-like or not, but more like smoething that deeply inflects our 'being-toward', or horizonality, to dip into Heideggerese. Again, the organizing-force-that-creates-the-animal isn't another single-celled organism, its a wildly new way of changing how those cells act.

But there are a few things going on. I think the dasein vs AI debate (as in Dreyfus) functions primarily to draw out what is legitimately unique about dasein, and I think that's exactly right, I'm not on Polonius's side here. I think it's important to understand what we are that AI is not.

But I think, having accepted that, that a space is opened to understand what AI really is. Which is not just the programs themselves, but our relation with them, and how we change them and are changed by them... and how that rhythm of change keeps morphing, if that makes sense? That's why I think another technological suite - agriculture - is really useful here, particularly how it begins as one thing among others, then slowly changes us in ways we don't recognize, until we're symbiotic with it.

ok, margs are hitting now

:ok:

I think this is exactly right. "Backdrop sense" is well put, because it's not really a "definition" laying dormant somewhere in our heads. — Xtrix

But then the kicker: [backdrop sense] can itself become a concept foregrounded against what we mean by 'backdrop sense.'

That's the thing I'm circling around in Heidegger.

' Backdrop sense' is all well and good. But if truth is aletheia, if it's disclosed, then what's needed are concrete, practical, real-and-physical-as-learning-to-drive-a-stick-shift or how-to-play-the-piano ways of coming into contact with it ( of summoning it, or of taking a walk with it, or of getting into a fight with it, or of having a nice dinner party with it etc etc)

Nietzsche said: 'What if truth is a woman?' but just as much, what if truth is a friend, or a co-worker, or a father-figure and so on

I can't say I've read Hitler, but I'm sure it's thuggish. — Xtrix

Yes, and fortunately it's online so no one has to pay for it. That's part of Heidegger's guilt. I know he got out early, but he read that book and praised it. He put his fame behind that movement and helped to legitimatize it.

His stubborn silence afterward fascinates me.

The lack of political and social analysis in Heidegger is no accident, but a constitutive element of his Daseinanalysis. There’s lots to learn from in Heidegger, and I always feel edified after having read him, but his whole approach has always been overly narrow to me. His peasant romanticism, his haughty disparagement of das man, his luddism are all awful aspects of his philosophy. His most interesting concept to me has always been the clearing - the Lichtung - along with his more topological considerations of Being (documented brilliantly in Jeff Malpas’ Heidegger’s Topology). But in general, he’s a thinker that’s more fun to forage around in and plunder than to take wholesale. — StreetlightX

I think you're right. I've said it before - said it above in this thread, in fact - but I think Sloterdijk is one of the most-underrated philosophers (at least in the anglosphere) and I think he's done some great foraging and plundering. He takes up Heideggerean themes (and he knows his shit) with a refreshing sense of humor and actual understanding of urban and social concerns. More than anything, he reads like someone you're having a direct no-bullshit conversation with (provided you have some phil background.) To be able to do that with a firm grasp of what you're talking about is a rare thing. The closest thing is Zizek but I'm becoming more and more disenchanted with what I see as a fundamental dishonesty at Zizek's core. I don't mean his analyses are wrong, per se. I mean that Zizek wants to be both a radical marxist and a protected elite and can't reconcile the two*. You have weird cycles of thought that never land anywhere but are constantly revolving around paradox and negativity, covered with delightful anecdotes, insights, and bite-size jokes (lacan seems like this too, but in a more dour register) I think Sloterdijk bites the bullet, and you can feel it. Can't recommend enough.

------
*I hate Tyler Cowen but his interview with Zizek is perfect, the one time I side with him. Zizek plays the crowd, plays nice with the koch-funded guy, and then Cowen lays bare whats literally happening ('drop the marxist thing, its aesthetic at this point, come hang with us in Malaysia!' while zizek sputters and glitches and tries to reframe things 'I don't want to be perceived in this way!' Well, you're already here, dude, why are you gladhanding a Tyler Cowen crowd? ]

a handy image for showing how all these very different modes of living can root themselves in something mystical and profound, while producing very different flowers. And the variance in final flowering is probably pushed along through all the brawls and tussles. — csalisbury

Exactly! And that's us here too.

I have a wariness of anti-system thought, of staking your ground there. I think Anti-System still has one foot in System. — csalisbury

Always. That's what I try to load in the 'ironic' of the ironic aphorist. I can't mean what I say or say what I mean. It's always wrong. It's always thrown. To be thrown is to be in a system, perhaps especially an anti-systematic system. Now I'm in the system of us always being thrown. I relate to Derrida so much perhaps because he suffered and thrilled at/as the system trying to climb out of itself.

Yeah, I think enlightenment, if it exists, is something reached subtractively. One way to get at that is to decry 'enlightenment' altogether which I think is a legit approach. — csalisbury

Right. I like that approach while knowing it's not the only approach. In some ways my vision of what enlightenment is is just so mundane that it hardly deserves the name. If I get caught up in loving my cat, forgetting mortality and identity and all of that, then that's it. Or I'll settle for just being in a state of easygoing play, even if that play is hard work. 'The seriousness of a child at play.' Maybe there's more, but I'm pretty happy with that. It's an animal kind of spirituality. The more mystical-manic states I've had via philosophy might deserve their own name. But it's like a drug state, not really for mortals, or not for long.

The debris part also speaks to me. My strategy, right or wrong, has been to lean in to the idea of dying in sin, dying in my mess. The only sure escape from those debris is just getting caught up in play, which I can't force. I can get the coin out of the washing machine, but it's like Bukowski said: he could always suddenly not be a poet. Probably boring things to talk about like diet and exercise are huge, which I'm OK with. But I lean on my coffee and nicotine gum.
I know that disaster is up ahead somewhere, and it's not the rest but the awkward transition I resent. In the meantime I'm trying to work out how to make money without selling my soul.
(I think it's cool that you work remotely now. That's what I'm doing too for now. So much of my life happens on this one screen.)

Right. I like that approach while knowing it's not the only approach. In some ways my vision of what enlightenment is is just so mundane that it hardly deserves the name. If I get caught up in loving my cat, forgetting mortality and identity and all of that, then that's it. Or I'll settle for just being in a state of easygoing play, even if that play is hard work. 'The seriousness of a child at play.' Maybe there's more, but I'm pretty happy with that. It's an animal kind of spirituality. The more mystical-manic states I've had via philosophy might deserve their own name. But it's like a drug state, not really for mortals, or not for long. — path

Yeah, I was talking to my friend about this the other day : the seriousness of play. It's really hard to access now. Forgive me another Ashbery Three Poems quote. a couple quotes I'll stitch together.

Well, this is what I get for all my plotting and precautions,. But you, living free beyond me, are still to be reckoned into your account of how it happens with you[...]Is it correct for me to use you to demonstrate all this?[...]what is wanted is some secret feeling of an administrator beyond the bound of satisfying intimacy, a sort of intendant to whom the important tasks may be entrusted so as to leave you free for the very necessary task of idleness.

Well that's one part. the upsurges are everything, but I think there is a time to...Letting them be as what they were without trying to get back to them seems so relieving, if possible

Very cool that you've been in the trenches with the nets. I feel (I'm responding to your posts, as I read them) like I'm getting a better sense of "Path's Polonius" (who does, I admit, bear a strong resemblance to the character himself) He seems to think he understands everything well enough, without looking beneath the smooth workings of everyday life. — csalisbury

Polonius is my shadow. I read lots of Jung once, I confess. I connect him [Polo] to idle talk, chatter, or bot-speak. We always leave (or I always leave) a slime trail of the already-been-said. That's part of it. Polonius just barfs up what everybody knows.

But he's also a father figure. There's basically a performance of the smart guy that is implicitly patriarchal. So I can deliver a sermon on humility and the form of the communication is arrogant. Who gets to give the sermon? That's the 'real' issue on the level of form, thinly veiled by content. So runs my sermon on humility.

You also hint at a kind of shallowness of knowledge. I relate to that too. I play fast and loose and basically bluff, and part of that bluff is that everyone is bluffing. That's part of my AI point, too, that we just use these words and they work and we don't look to closely at how.

And talk of us all walking in darkness is one more false light, which is more talk of walking in darkness. But part of me wants to be called out, as an opportunity to catch the spaghetti again. If I am called out gently and perceptively, then the game is actually happening. This is a narcissistic detour, but I want to catch the spaghetti again.

But I think, having accepted that, that a space is opened to understand what AI really is. Which is not just the programs themselves, but our relation with them, and how we change them and are changed by them... and how that rhythm of change keeps morphing, if that makes sense? That's why I think another technological suite - agriculture - is really useful here, particularly how it begins as one thing among others, then slowly changes us in ways we don't recognize, until we're symbiotic with it. — csalisbury

I think this is a great issue in itself. For me it has been mostly about 'idle talk' or 'botspeak' as the 'incarnation' of the 'One' as discussed in a non-moralizing way in Dreyfus.

The moral version would be not whatever Heidegger's authenticity is (I can't figure it out) but Bloom's anxiety of influence. I'm worried about being a bad poet, of merely repeating and not creating. Fight for recognition? But it's also just grasping how automatic most of life is. How taken-for-grantedly it flows, the way these words pour out. Yet that's also what I've called enlightenment, when it feels good.

Polonius is my shadow. I read lots of Jung once, I confess. I connect him [Polo] to idle talk, chatter, or bot-speak. We always leave (or I always leave) a slime trail of the already-been-said. That's part of it. Polonius just barfs up what everybody knows.

But he's also a father figure. There's basically a performance of the smart guy that is implicitly patriarchal. So I can deliver a sermon on humility and the form of the communication is arrogant. Who gets to give the sermon? That's the 'real' issue on the level of form, thinly veiled by content.

You also hint at a kind of shallowness of knowledge. I relate to that too. I play fast and loose and basically bluff, and part of that bluff is that everyone is bluffing. And talk of us all walking in darkness is one more false light. But part of me wants to be called out, as an opportunity to catch the spaghetti again. If I am called out gently and perceptively, then the game is actually happening. This is a narcissistic detour, but I want to catch the spaghetti again. — path

By paragraph:

--I like Jung. I think he's really good, actually. I haven't read him deeply, but I've read him. I get your qualification because he gets a bad rap, but I think that rap is misplaced. He's good.

--Right, the submessage of Polonius' Speech to Laertes is that he knows better than him what the world is like and how to act. That is arrogance. But a father's speech is always inherently arrogant in that way. If you haven't earned that knowledge, its bunk to pass it on like that. I would like to say that the ideal on here is equalizing that relationship. A free flow of lessons learned, erudition, how to go forward - of course, it rarely happens like that.



--I wasn't calling you out as shallow, I just meant the polonius archetype, as conventionally understood, tows with it the idea of shallowness. I don't think you're shallow - far from it. I want to be called out as much as you do (tho, as you say, gently and perceptively.) I think most of us here do, whether we know it or not. We're all trying to work something out, putting forward bold statements, like children, or like adults, to see how they withstand whatever, in order to grow. If you shove a lot, you're looking for a Big Shove, I think, you want to know where your limits are in order to move forward.

Yes, exactly that last part. There is some security in identifying totally with your wound, while having control over how the wounding happens (Deleuze will say this is the core of masochism) John Ashbery's long prose-poem-in-parts three poems gets at this well (and draws together a lot of the things we've been talking about): — csalisbury

I love Ashbery, by the way, which somehow I'd never looked into until you mentioned him. I still have only seen what you've shared. Masochism is deep stuff. I've been listening to 'Venus in Furs' (Velvet Underground) and also think of 'In Every Dreamhome a Heartache' (Roxy Music.) I'm dropping those as (to me) great songs that might be fodder for more convo on this.

I would like to say that the ideal on here is leaving out that relationship, but that we can talk about the vicissitudes of those relationships, outside, but talk among other as equals. — csalisbury

Right. This is that Games People Play idea of adult-to-adult or peer-to-peer. And it can't (I don't think) be formalized. It's a dance, with a certain amount of sensitive and ultimately affectionate challenging.

I wasn't calling you out as shallow, — csalisbury

I guess I knew that. It was maybe compulsive confession on my part. Like I don't want to be perceived as thinking that I'm a scholar. I'm just an outsider artist, an amateur, yet I can't deny the hope that I drop some good metaphors. I need to believe (and mostly do) that I can play these cards.

I think the dasein vs AI debate (as in Dreyfus) functions primarily to draw out what is legitimately unique about dasein, and I think that's exactly right, I'm not on Polonius's side here. I think it's important to understand what we are that AI is not. — csalisbury

I agree.

I understand Dreyfus to aim at symbolic AI especially. The 'connectionist' approach is actually working. The 'thoughts' are just huge boxes of floating point numbers.

So for me it's primarily about how AI mirrors our chatter or botspeak. Mostly we are quite predictable. A strong philosopher surprises us. But in his daily life he uses all the normal words correctly and automatically.

[sentimental post, redacted. margs and time to go to bed for me]

But comparing the two isn't altogether fair, and I'd recommend checking out Heidegger's (4 volume) lectures on Nietzsche. — Xtrix

I have looked at it. I was quite gung-ho about Heidegger for awhile (he was my favorite), so I bought more books than I could get around to, checked too many out from the library. I'd dig around waiting for something to speak to me. Ontology: Hermeneutics of Facticity is one that really got me. The B&T terminology wasn't fixed yet. The translation was good too. I'm a poet at heart.

What I remember from H's N was that it was Heidegger's Nietzsche. For me Nietzsche (when not a little too close to Hitler with a higher IQ) was a cosmic clown, an ironic mystic. Maybe Heidegger read him more as the un-ironic mystic of eternal return. I could be way off. I do know that Nietzsche was very much my favorite in my crazy 20s, for both the right and the wrong reasons. I had to read Nietzsche against Nietzsche, his best self against his worst self, which Nietzsche himself was also doing, another Hamlet.

DETOUR
As far as Nietzsche's insanity, I find the brain disease most likely, then the syphilis. I don't think he had a 'spiritual' meltdown, tho I can't be sure. I just mention that because it's interesting. What happened to him? Even Ecce Homo has some good lines, but wtf? And in The Antichrist he even hits his mystical peak with his portrait of Jesus, creating a sect of mystical-ironical Christianity in passing even as he speaks against it. It reminds me of another favorite passage from Hegel's aesthetics. Both are like my 'mysticism.' Both are words that aim beyond words. Yet much the The Antichrist is ranting, far beneath the beautiful Jesus-shadow of the antichrist.

We might ask how the Hitlerian streaks in Nietzsche affected Heidegger. By Hitlerian I mean basically the credo that war is god, which is perhaps Heraclitian too. This ties into csal's & my point about the tenderness of the nihilist who yet identifies with a dark tormenting god. I was that kind of dude. When god died, I replaced him with the meatgrinder, the amoral machine of nature that just did not give a fuck. This is what freaks people out about the scientific image of the world, I think, and most flee from it in the usual ways. But some of us mix a religion of dark truth in with the religion of the war god and the blind machine. I'm still somewhat attracted and attached to 'war is god,' though the better part of me knows better.

We're all trying to work something out, putting forward bold statements, like children, or like adults, to see how they withstand whatever, in order to grow. — csalisbury

I love it. Yes indeed. We've got to risk those tentacles. We can't curl up like worms.

--I like Jung. I think he's really good, actually. I haven't read him deeply, but I've read him. I get your qualification because he gets a bad rap, but I think that rap is misplaced. He's good. — csalisbury

Thanks for sticking up for him. I actually read quite a bit of him, and he was valuable to me. 'Whatever is unconscious is projected.' That one will stick with me forever. There are just so many thinkers who become uncool who nevertheless have their bright spots. I loved Spengler too. We can just raid them parts and not follow them where they went too far.

That song was great. Thanks for sharing & no hard feelings.

If interested in Chomsky, Saussure is a good place to start, but ultimately one must come to wrestle with Chomsky's neurolinguistics. — Xtrix

'There are only differences without positive terms' connects for me with the beetle-in-the-box and something like a radical holism that for me connects to Heidegger. It was Derrida who lead to me Saussure. But I noticed that Saussure was not that interested in grammar. I have studied formal grammars in theoretical computer science, and we did cover CNF, but that's about it. Except, naturally, that I've enjoyed Chomsky's political ideas, mostly through videos.

I think the dasein vs AI debate (as in Dreyfus) functions primarily to draw out what is legitimately unique about dasein, and I think that's exactly right, I'm not on Polonius's side here. — csalisbury

I was thinking more about this and it's maybe the question of being. The beetle in the box is there.
Something 'is' behind the signs. But the signs can't grab it. The signs can't grab anything
It's a vapor? Does one awaken the question for the wrong reasons? Hard to tell. It's all caught up in sign-systems and politics, seems to me.

What is the difference if not this 'consciousness' or 'being'? Because if the planet-size computer can out-talk us eventually, it won't be clear. Your panpsychism is reasonable to me. It could genuinely become difficult to know for sure if our planet-size-AI is 'really' there. To defend ourselves against that thought we'd need to think that our biology is magical in some sense or get into some quantum woo. I don't know. It makes sense to me that 'being is not a being.' There's the metaphor of the light that makes things visible. Nicholas of Cusa was maybe saying something like this. It does get negative-theological. It's all so slippery that I'll just stop here.