Here's another way of looking at it: Suppose we subtract ourselves from existence to project back this lack into it and we realize that nothing really substantial happens. Life goes on much as before, just without us in it. It's basically the same movie without the demand for any sequel. So, here, by fully assuming the gap between ourselves and nothing we get a new nothing, but rather than an empty one, a live one at the core of our being that threatens to consume it because its very emptiness consists in the potentialities unfulfilled that form the true substance of the lack behind the lack projected. That is, our authentic grounding is grounding in the searing emptiness of a substance that should have been. Hence, the almost necessary giddiness in approaching the question.

Do you think that after producing his evolutionary account of the origin of species, Darwin persisted in perceiving animals in his daily surroundings as having arose out of independently founded lineages? — Joshs

I think he continued to feed his dog Pedigree Chum.

I mean, this is on my profile as a favourite quote:

"Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what's the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say?"

Cioran

Need I say more? Who is the Nietzschean here? Who is pirouetting and who is stamping around in clogs? Who is the fresh daisy and who, the rotten egg?

Burn your friggin' idols.

Thus Spake Badenusthra

What's interesting is trying to imagine ourselves out of existence or from the perspective of our non-existence when the concept of our existence is inevitably enfolded in our subjectivity and all that comes from that. We imagine ourselves out of existence and then project that lack into our actual existence to come up with an alternative reality that would fulfill the requirements of that lack.

In a way, we're adding something rather than taking something away---perhaps a narrative that is essentially personal, the closer we come to which, the further we must withdraw. I think un's answer hints at the impossibility of unironically or unselfconsciously disembedding our essential embeddedness and viewing it from a distance, of breaking orbit to authentically ground ourselves in a "realistic" answer that somehow does justice to who we really think we are. This is partly trivially because, by definition, it requires a distance from ourselves to take a perspective, but also because that minimal distance is like a tense spring which if compressed too much is somehow threatening.

But, yes, I think this is a different threat than being caught in a narcissistic mirror where one hysterically disavows through external projection the impossibility of completeness, and more like knowing all too well one must remain incomplete and that one's self-perspective necessarily contains a kind of self-shielding from completeness that maintains the integrity of self.

Nietzsche could write about fishing and make it interesting.

My view is that the way to deal with people like Kirk is to engage them reasonably. Try to figure out what they are actually angry about etc. I had a Russian student once who hated gays virulently. Puzzled by this, I asked him what he would do if his own son turned out to be gay. His first answer was "kill him". He later rowed back on that a bit, but to call him anti-gay was, let's say, an understatement. Still, he was generally speaking a nice guy and because I knew him and liked him before he revealed himself to be a homophobe, I didn't stop liking him and trying to convince him he was misguided. I met him two years after that incident when I no longer taught him and he had dropped the homophobia. Don't know why. But whatever happened, it was better than someone shooting him in the head.

At the same time, let's not downplay the fact that homophobic, racist etc propaganda, by people who are actually listened to (unlike my student) has real world consequences for those who are the victims of it. Anti-gay rhetoric in Uganda led eventually to a law that punishes homosexuality by life imprisonment and, in some cases, death. So, this is not a hypothetical. We don't have to condone essentially self-defeating acts of violence to realize that hateful rhetoric is dangerous and, over time, can instigate political changes that threaten lives.

Yes, Nietzsche was a philosopher and I am a great admirer of his writings, which have influenced me greatly and contributed no doubt to my own cleverness, wisdom, and inscrutability. If you follow my drift...

Let's give it a try then...

The for-itself is that which makes of itself what it is through its actions----what it is is not pre-given, what is pre-given is only that it exists, i.e. that it is is pre-given, not what it is. The in-itself is something that just is. What it is is pre-given.

That it is: Existence
What it is: Essence

What did he say about black people or "predominately black neighborhoods?" Again, I never heard of the guy until just yesterday, so. Just curious as to what information or knowledge you have that makes that analogy valid in your mind. — Outlander

His Wiki page contains some of the racist, anti-semitic, and Islamaphobic statements he's made. Of course, he was (apparently) a more vocal, rather than a more extreme, version of a significant minority of Americans and his killing will likely radicalise these people further.

i mean surely you can see Nietzsche's own ressentiment searing off the pages of Ecce Homo when he talks about Germans...

Nietzsche was a literary artist whose personal interactions were no more remarkable than other literary artists of his day. His special value lay in his ability to create. He was only an immoralist in terms of a kind of fantastical advocacy he left almost entirely on the page.

I'm a moral nihilist. — frank

Wasn't expecting that...

Anyway, having researched Charlie Kirk, it appears many of his views (anti-semitic statements, racism, homophobia etc) are not all that far off from the bigotry level of early era Nazi party rabble rousers. Regardless, I don't condone the assassination.

I guess you're a deontologist on this, which is fair enough. And I don't even know if I can agree with myself on the topic, so I'm not in the strongest position to argue.

The killing of a human being is a tragedy... but the killing of him as a representation of his political views and hateful viewpoints, is another form of act and another form of context that has philosophical and historical proportions worth discussing. — Christoffer

That's more or less my point. Where do we get consistency?

So how do we deal with the world we find ourselves in, imperfect and callous as it is? — Moliere

By finding an apparently impossible consistency across contexts.

I also think that this forum is exactly the place to discuss something like this, because here we discuss the philosophical ramifications of what is going on in the world... rather than what the rest of the internet is doing at the moment surrounding this event. And because of this, I think that a truly civil discussion like this is extremely important to have surrounding something like an assassination of a public figure of this importance to the current political climate. — Christoffer

Fair point. And I did get involved, so, performatively, I agree.

Another context we ought to problematize is context itself. Folks are very often going to react immediately based on political corner, no? When I first heard about Charlie Kirk, my immediate reaction was cold indifference, partly based of my limited knowledge that he was on the far right. But put me in a different context, e.g. in front of his family and, not being made of stone, I would have a very different attitude. Then, on here, I can take a purely intellectual stance. Same with Gaza, many on the right especially, dismiss, by default, the suffering there, but transport them next to a pile of rubble with Palestinian children suffocating beneath it, and it would most likely be a very different story. Contexts drive us and mislead us about the issues and about ourselves (to an extent deciding for us what is "obvious").

The assassination of political figures becomes retroactively justified and therefore simply justified depending on how history works out. The assassination of a Nazi functionary in 1934 by a Jewish sniper would likely have almost universally been condemned at the time. Now, I, and I suspect most of us, would consider the assassin a hero. This is just to say that what is obvious without problematizing a context or considering a possible future trajectory is not so obvious when you do so. I take @Moliere to be coming from that angle. The fact that this is about a real person who has really just been killed is unfortunate because it becomes understandably almost impossible to divorce oneself from the immediate tragedy of those who cared for that person. Maybe it's just all in bad taste to talk about it now. But I don't think @Moliere's thought process is completely wrong.

(Last point: I'm not trying to provoke anyone here or disrespect Charlie Kirk's family etc. Charlie Kirk is more or less just a name to me. I'm trying to find a route to something rather coldly philosophical.)

Also, I've looked through the thread I haven't found much in the way of ethical arguments one way or the other. The fact that it was a murder is irrelevant in the wider scope of things. E.g. for a Jewish person (or anyone) to have murdered Nazis in 1930s Germany would have been perfectly justified given the context. As I said before, I don't know Charlie Kirk enough to have any strong opinion of him, but I think part of @Moliere's point is to problematize the context and that's not in itself illegitimate, particularly given so much unjustifiable killing is legalized (e.g. the Gaza sniper example Moliere gave earlier).

EDIT: I am not saying America is Nazi Germany etc etc, only that it being a murder is not the end of the argument but the beginning.

But now we live in a time when we're actively supplying weapons to Israel who is committing a genocide.

Yet the media harps on about the shame of what was a talking head and memorializing it. — Moliere

Yes. I don't know much about Kirk, but many unambiguously good people get killed around the world daily, particularly children, sometimes with the complicity of our government's, and the media often expects us not only to not feel bad about that but to support it. One can be against political assassinations while still bemoaning the fact that our media environment is composed merely of propaganda, any relationship of which to morality is purely incidental.

So you wish to limit your definition of a system to an organism then? — apokrisis

Just a quick point for now. Definitely not (at least not literally). This is part of Luhmann's project, actually---to extend Maturana's concepts from biology to e.g. society (and also to find a mathematical basis for systems using Spencer-Brown's work). As for the connections to biosemiotics, I'm very interested in that, but my knowledge of biosemiotics is undeveloped. I'll try to come back to your post later anyhow.

And of course this is the thing about systems in interaction with their environments: they attempt to achieve predictability (and thus a kind of rigidity) not just by refusing to see what doesn't fit (as the counterculture would have it) but by making their environment more predictable, by eliminating what doesn't fit. Adaptation is required for the system to persist, but it can adapt itself to its environment or its environment to itself. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, and your examples were very interesting in that respect. A system must be less complex than its environment and it reduces complexity through a kind of code that "sees" only certain things in that environment. That becomes its reality. This is why I was saying earlier that systems establish different versions of reality. They observe and are perturbed by their environment but interpret it only according to a particular internal code that identifies them as a particular type of system. They create differences that determine their reality, and thus enable a form of "meaning" or "cognition" in a broad sense. That is, they are operationally closed (operate only according to their own internal rules or code), but they are cognitively open in that they are affected by their environment and interact with it. I'm not sure I would call this a "rigidity" but perhaps a structural limitation. But paradoxically, it is the reduction of complexity that allows systems to complexify (and adapt), and in fact reach higher orders of self-referential complexity (self-managing of complexity). The more efficiently they simplify, the more efficiently they can complexify in a sense.

(No meaningful difference can arise until all those differences arise coherently. A pure environment contains nothing to establish difference. Difference requires a coherent system that is different from its environment (A) and that is different within itself (C) for the differences described in (B) to manifest.)

Less than Nothing: Zizek

The sample is 300 pages long. 'Nuff said.

Here's my version as simple as I can make it. Do with it what you will.

A system can be seen as a "coherency of differences" as follows.

Difference A: Fundamentally, a system must establish a difference between itself and its environment.
Difference B: A system must "observe" / react to differences in that which is different to itself, i. e. its environment.
Difference C: A system must operate on the basis of internal differences. A pure homogeneity excludes operationality.

A, B, C, type differences must cohere in a system for a system to be identified singly as a system.

Therefore, a system can be seen as a coherency of differences.

My Masters thesis was on organisations making decisions despite their being undecidable. But only the good undecidable decisions are wise... — Banno

Ah nice, I hadn't considered that angle. :cool:

I don't think systems <=> coherencies is any definition. — Pieter R van Wyk

I didn't say they just were that. I said this:

Systems are coherencies of (self-recreating, in the case of autopoietic systems) differences between themselves and an environment — Baden

And I also clarified what I meant.

You asked a question. I answered with a definition and a detailed follow-up. I also gave you the theoretical context (Luhmann). You had everything you needed to make some sense of it.

If you don't want to get your brain out of first gear, don't ask in the first place.

[In general, if posters want non-academic, dumbed-down answers to their questions, why not just ask AI, why ask on a philosophy forum?]

I don't blame Mikie for his reaction (he didn't ask the question...). I'm reading a compilation of lectures by Luhmann at the moment, so these ideas are on my mind.

My understanding is that Luhmann worked on social systems, thus not a general systems theory — Pieter R van Wyk

He built from the mathematical work of Spencer Brown and the biological work of Humberto Maturana a kind of general system's theory that could be applied to society, but can also be applied to e.g. consciousness and other (autopoietic) systems.

But, yes, others may be more on point re what you're specifically looking for.

Just to add to that: We can only establish a difference by being some form of coherence that is different from the difference. Coherency in this observationally displaced sense is self-reflexive and is inhered in systems that self establish themselves as distinct from an environment. This (self-reflexive) coherency is more than a difference that makes a difference (it's not just information), it's a difference that grounds the possibility of difference from its perspective, allowing for information There's a kind of semantic bootstrapping here. Significance arising from an originary signification---this vs that, which is grounded in something that is not this or that but that can establish the distinction, i.e. a coherence. Without a corresponding coherence (observer/observation) there is naught. All this is to say there's a sense of "coherence" that inheres self-reflexivity that a difference like the difference between a rock and a tree does not in itself establish, i.e. a coherence that implicates a system as observer.

So if you posit a difference, you must posit a system that establishes difference through a coherency. But a rock cannot itself establish difference in relation to itself. From that point of view, it's not a coherency. The coherency can only reside in that case in the observer who states that the rock is a coherency. Short version, if coherency is understood self reflexively as semantically grounding then the definition above suffices. Coherency inheres the idea of a process of observation. If it's understood just as coherency as difference (something that can coherently be distinguished from something else), it doesn't.

We say someone is intelligent when they demonstrate analytic capacity but wise when they show good judgement. — Banno

:up: Intelligence decides among decidables, only wisdom among undecidables.

This is why I argue against education for technology. I think the world you want requires a liberal education. I have been alone with this argument for many years. I could die in peace if I were not the only one fighting for liberal education. — Athena

We are mostly singing from the same hymn sheet then. But I think it's OK to educate kids in how to use technology if they understand its situatedness with regard to subjectivity. And that can start simply by telling them: This stuff is not just something you use, but that if you use it, will use you. Here's how...

I think that's right in the sense that a fish doesn't actively experience water. It's too fundamental. On the other hand, water is an essential part of its lived experience, and if you take it out of the water, it definitely knows the difference.

Ha, let me clarify by commenting that woke is the anti-Coke. Uncle Sam drinks Coke and sprinkles golden urine on his flock. Satan drinks woke and pisses hellfire on his army of demons who terrorize colleges across the land. The final war as prophesied between the golden sheep and the woke demons, the fight between Coke and hellfire is ending now in the defeat of woke. Glory be to Coke…

[Taken verbatim from the real life sermon of our preacher hero, at the gates of Berkeley San Fran, wearing a sign “The Last Bastion of Satan”]

But, less facetiously, on one end of the spectrum, woke collapses into vain resistance (in the form of naive anger), and, on the other, it's just critical theory or something with fairly obvious value. And for anti-woke: on one side of the spectrum, it's non-resistance, naive passivity, wrapped up in indignance, and on the other, it's a justified critique of the excesses of woke as naive anger.

The media-fuelled woke/anti-woke war is a kind of a cartoonish oversimplification.

A rock is coherent and there is a difference between a rock and a hard place. — Banno

Yes, but I am not that difference unless I am the system. The system itself is the observer here.

The definition needs fleshing out for sure. There are also the ideas of open/closed, boundary and complexity. In one sense, a system represents a different category of reality from its environment.

Woke just is Satan. Satan stepped into the soul of the oppressed and told them to open their eyes, and they did so not to God but to Beelzebub. They became full of hell-fire and spat it on God-fearing folks who had no idea they were oppressing anyone. After all, they paid their taxes. And so the woke demons ran rampant for a while and spread their vile ideology. On they ran through university eggheads who bitten by these woke bugs became rotten stinky eggs farting woke gas all over their students. And the stupid young people who did not know God made a deity of the Dark Prince. Eventually the God-fearing folks got wise to this evil and learned how to defeat woke. But, irony of ironies, it was too late, for woke had defeated itself by making of the universities lakes of hellfire in which the stinky eggheads and their rotten students melted and disintegrated. And now that woke has been ended, let us all join hands and open our eyes to the Lord. Glory be...

[Paraphrased from an actual real life sermon by a cool holy man of the deep south who, though he had been sniffing coke that day, abstains on the Sabbath]

Donna Haraway --- A Cyborg Manifesto

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cyborg_Manifesto

(RIpping read.)

Yes, see Nikhlas Luhmann.

Systems are coherencies of (self-recreating in the case of autopoietic systems) differences between themselves and an environment. (I can't remember what Luhmann's formulation is, but that springs to mind).

Luhmann draws heavily on Humberto Maturana and George Spencer-Brown.

Good. I like Sartre as an "in" to this approach to consciousness and I'm not particularly bothered by the critique in this context (also, my relative lack of knowledge of Husserl means I can't effectively argue the point anyway).

In a rough way, yes. I'm wanting the eating disorder example to be filled out in a general manner which might apply elsewhere -- but that means the idea is interesting. — Moliere

I'm trying to fill out above a context (more to come) that I'll try to loop back into a fuller application to body image disorders (including body dysmorphic disorder and eating disorders).

The ideas of Lacan as a later psychoanalytic development are also of significance. At this stage, I haven't managed to read his actual writing as I I found it rather heavy going. But I did read one book, 'Using Lacanian Clinical Technique_ An Introduction', by Philip F Hill.
He offers a couple of relevant quotes from Lacan:
'Man is captivated by the image of his own body.'
'The sexual relation implies capture by the other's image.'
Hill explains the role of images in particular as central to falling in love in general.

It would make sense to argue that it is differ fall in love if one is struggling with one's own self image and that is why issues, such as body dysmorphic disorder, have such an intrusive impact in life. — Jack Cummins

Those quotes are super interesting and I don't remember coming across them in my study of Lacan. I agree that it's not only difficult but probably impossible to maintain a romantic loving relationship when trapped in a body image disorder. The other becomes the impossible point of validation and love dissolves into fear.

(Addendum: Non-resistance, vain resistance, and productive resistance.

Non-resistance does not recognize the problem and embraces humiliation. This is a process of fading liveability and a disappearing call to self. The “trace” of original being becomes uttterly invisible. The non-resisters may be “comfortable” but deny to themselves “higher” potentialities. They are ultimately proletarianized and disindividuated.

Vain resistance recognizes the problem but self-destructively misinterprets it. It denies to itself its internal logic. Vain resisters (such as sufferers of body image disorders) see the possibility of higher potentialities, but in their hystericized desire for them, the seeking of an impossible direct route to them, they deny themselves all comfort for glimpses of a trace that they immediately smother through their overwhelming desire for it.

Productive resistance recognizes the problem’s inherent lack of an ultimate solution, and negotiates a liveable compromise that yet avoids passivity. Productive resisters accept and embrace discomfort as a necessary part of the irreversible contract of subjectivity and as a route to higher potentialities manifested in creative, and therefore individuating, action. That is, they understand both the rewards and limits of individuation, and that its pains and satisfactions cannot be disentwined. )

Adding to this (hopefully for clarity) and then I'll come back with some specifics relating to your comments:

In the mirror, we see the grammatized self, and of course it’s not perfect but we want a “perfect” fit and there is a block to that that prevents validation.

Validation is a key concept here. Integration with the socio-symbolic installs in us the desire for validation. That is that we should see in our actions a reflection of its demands.

We should note here that its fundamental demand is inherent. It inheres in the fact that our experience of the world is split. The leading edge of experience is immediately formatted in a way that negativises it. The world is no longer presented in its full positivity. The world in-itself is what it is, cannot be what it is not, and is therefore an absolute positivity, but the creation of a system of symbolic structure inserts gaps into it. A scaffold is not a block, a web is not a sheet. For there to be conceptual understanding, there must be the creation of such negativity, of nothingness, and from this, the subject- object distinction.

The object in this dynamic becomes more than what it is and also less. It is more than what it is in that it is not just its physical reality, it is now also its conceptual reality. And it is less than what it is because the imposition of the socio-symbolic on sensory data is always a kind of reductive formatting. We do not feel the object fully as a pure significance of sense, that purity of significance is sculpted conceptually, and, in the shaping, something is lost, just as in the sculpting of a block we lose some of its physical substance to create an abstract substance as represented by the sculpted form, we lose some of the sentient substance of the object through its sculpting by conceptualisation.

For a pre-linguistic child, the object is pure significance. It is unified with the movement of its inner desire such that that desire functions in a purely reactive way according to the possibilities of urge and restraint. The world demands from without and within simultaneously and the child is satisfied or denied in that pure relation. The mother’s breast is an inner potential, an unfolding promise of the self rather than what we understand as an object. It is a unified reservoir of being which the child shares as its own being.

As objects are conceptualised through grammatization, so is the child self-conceptualised as subject, as a separation from its environment and others that must now connect through the socio-symbolic mediator. The “Big Other” is the guardian both of the world and the self. It gives us the world and the self-in-the-world, but the debt we must pay is that what we get can never be the “pure” world as a unified self-world. Our life world is infused with the negativity of grammatization, of mediated functionalities, of a “right” way of seeing things such that the demand, the moral demand inheres at its most basic level in the object as such. That is, the lamp demands to be seen as a “lamp”. The table demands to be seen as a “table”. Our base level conceptually-bound reactivity is our first step into the moral world. Such are we taught how to acquiesce. Such are our sensory instincts domesticated. This is the primeval bow to the socio-symbolic, the initial humiliation and our initiation ritual into its sphere.

And so are built higher orders of acquiescence. We join concepts and speak the language of the socio-symbolic both to others and to ourselves. It becomes our subjective and objective world. And then we accept the particular situational interpretations of the sociosymbolic. We acquiesce there too. This is a lamp (the primeval bow), I speak of it as a lamp (linguistic acquiescence), and I treat it as others do (situational acquiescence). These orders of sentient castration are overwhelming. What we know as “freedom” is given to us too as a socio-symbolic “object”. We bow first to “freedom” by understanding the concept, and then by speaking of it, and then by treating it as others do. Freedom in this way becomes just another reactivity, even in immediate reflection.

But we must reflect on our reflections. I think of freedom this way and why? And why, further, do I think this way in general? And why, further, do I think at all?. Only reflections of reflections can take us back to our origins. Yet still the route must be mediated. There is no way to cancel the contract that was signed for us with the blood of our unified world-relation, our pure sentience, That blood is set and dried. We can only negotiate the terms.

Here we return to the pathologies of the mirror (body image disorders) and situate them in a refusal to negotiate, a false hope of cancelling the contract, of seeing reflected back at us a grammatized self that is somehow also whole and therefore unificatory, that cancels our responsibility for our own happiness (the negotiation), that resolves the unresolvable split. The logic of the misunderstanding is a flee from action, that is action as socially legible (or potentially legible) action, and as the only way to negotiate a presence of self and receive validation of self. It is a hystericized reaction to inevitable actual imperfections in one’s impressions of the bodily image as situated under the gaze of the “ideal” grammatized (socially legible) body such that onto such imperfections are projected the original loss of the unified self that in its ungrammatized state was not to itself an other, a body in the world, but a world in and of itself.

And so the imperfections in the mirror come to bear the weight of impossible return. And the more they do, the more hystericized the reaction, the more fear of the magnified imperfections, the more the sufferer is bound to deny them by looking in the mirror to not find them (the pathology subsisting in the illogic of devoting all one’s energies in a search to not find that can only end when it fails its goal).

We see here how any negotiation becomes impossible in the hystericized denial of such a negotiation’s necessity. Body image pathologies are a route that takes the sufferer further and further from responsibility as they seek an impossible effacement of an inevitable difference, That is, they ultimately seek (unknowingly) the effacement of subjectivity itself in a search for a pure subjectivity that exists only in a false reflection or memory, a trace that does not represent the experience but only a view of it from outside so to speak, and a view only possible from outside, from the already split subject—for the pure unity is not a subjectivity but sentience in-itself that does not know itself and cannot experience itself as another as the split subject can.

So, in relation to subjectivity, the sufferer “throws the baby out with the bathwater” in a refusal to acknowledge that its humiliation by the socio-symbolic is a part of its being and being able to be in the only way now possible, in being able to feel the trace of lost being, even transiently. And so it self-humiliates its own socio-symbolic subjectivity in a masochistic act of revenge that cannot end in anything but exhaustion, that is, the exhaustion of the will to be in the subject, which is the only position from which it can act to fulfill itself, and the productive redirection of which is its only hope of its salvation.

Maybe you two have special skills. — Banno

Yes, yes, we do... None of which are helpful or even relevant, sadly.