I really enjoyed their interview.

For myself I know that I like Type O for the many reasons people like bands -- found them in my teens and they spoke to me -- but I'm glad to see others getting a kick out of them.

Thinking of them as Toxic Chads vs. Tool as Toxic Virgins gives me a good feel for the Chad-Virgin spectrum.

They're both definitely toxic, at least :D -- part of their attraction is that they express toxic beliefs.

What I like about Type O Negative in particular is that they like double meanings, like Tool, but most of the time they're just making puns as a way of expressing self-denigration -- a lot of the times the puns are offensive and clever, much like "Cast that spell on me -- boo-bitch craft"

The interview captured a lot of what I like about Type O musically, tho. Peter Steele did legit sound and look like a sexy depressed vampire :D

@unenlightened Has long been an excellent interlocutor for myself, for instance.

I'd say we're friends in the normal sense, and phriends in the philosophy sense.

:D

It fits tho right? I like the idea of phriends, at least in philosophy -- peeps you like to hear from even though you know there's something different in your respective beliefs.

I quite like Sartre, but the suggestion that he might be aligned with Krishnamurti seems almost ludicrous. Sartre's still playing goodies and baddies, even if he asserts that he is making it up like everyone else. — unenlightened

Thank you for saying so.

Sartre is definitely playing goodies and baddies. At least I'd say he's playing it like the other existentialists who have notions of authentic/inauthentic.

I'm coming back around to Sartre in so many ways that I thought would not be the case.

I'm probably confusing things with respect to Krishnamurti, too.

I'll attempt to give some details on his phil-o-consciousness after i re-read the section on temporality. today I'm just goofing off with the philosophy phriends ;) :)

I feel flattered. :)

I've been wondering if I'm a skeptic of some kind or other, but I don't want skepticism to be first philosophy -- and because of my love of Levinas I'm not attacking the idea of a first philosophy.

But I tend to think that philosophy can start anywhere, and that starting point heavily determines where you end up.

EDIT: I think what this leads me to is an acceptance of multiplicity in philosophy -- I realize that some beliefs are attractive because of my personal history, and that does not thereby make them true.

In a way my acceptance of first philosophy is a rejection of totality, at least as I read Levinas -- we all start somewhere, and we need to accept that difference if we're ever able to talk to others at all. If I know everything about the world there's no need to talk to anyone unless they "need to be taught", or whatever. That's exactly what's wrong in thinking.

I think (awareness is always aware of being aware).

I have basically stolen the notion from J. Krishnamurti, that thought is nothing much to do with awareness. If awareness is considered as 'presence' to the world, it surely becomes clear that thought is secondary, subsequent, and thus always operating on the past as memory. The awareness that can be put into thought and thought about is not awareness but thought.

I want to, or you want me to, talk about life— but talk is dead; thought is mechanical. And this is the hardest lesson for western philosophy and western culture by which I mean to include both Christianity and science (the twins). The heart of things cannot be touched by thought, cannot be understood by thought, and all that AI does is to expose how dead and mechanical we have become, that we mistake our lives for that endless talk that clouds it. — unenlightened

Yes!

or yes?
or yes.

I think I agree, though now I'm wondering if there's a difference between "I think I agree" and "I think (I agree)", but simultaneously seeing that as the wrong way to go about.

I'm going to jump to Sartre because thems the words I'm familiar with at the moment:

But it does sound a lot like Krishnamurti might agree with Sartre on consciousness: Sartre's unique contribution to the philosophy of consciousness is that it is always what it is not. Intentionality means that consciousness is never the thing it's directed to, but rather an awareness of the thing while not being the thing.

I would love to talk about life, but I've come to like talking about puzzles related to that love.

Did you listen to this one? — Arcane Sandwich

Amazing. I didn't, but now have.

It's awful. Corny Country, Cringe Country. — Arcane Sandwich

Certainly!

I like it for whatever reason... I think it speaks a fantasy that never was



I enjoyed the song. I enjoy them creating this idea of pirate music that's metal :D

***

I relate TOOL to jazz a lot because the band mimics a lot of what jazz has already done with respect to rhythm -- they change rhythms throughout as jazz does as a way of making the music and expressing it.

I think I just like any music which plays with rhythm. (I started your video but they were talking about a lot more than Toxic-Healthy / Virgin-Chad chart. -- on its face I could see TOOL as Toxic Virgin, but I don't know why that's bad.)

Yeah well, there's something I gotta tell you about metal... (and about punk rock, and about rock and roll in general). EDIT: You know what? I'll just let Key & Peele tell you something about that: — Arcane Sandwich

:rofl: Yeahhh.....

There's very few bands that can do both. — Arcane Sandwich

Which ones, in the metal genre, do you think succeed at both?

TOOL comes to mind, but also it could be a cheap trick because they never explain themselves really -- it's all esoterica that alludes to psychedelic experience and trauma

EDIT: Also, I've never heard that Afroman cover and love it.

I listen to trash, like Hank Williams Jr., but the racism of some country stars has always bothered me -- Hank, Hank Jr, David Allen Coe -- because I like the songs, but hear the lyrics.

Bad with albums -- but this is another heavy metal song I love:

Not album, but I love this metal cover. Also @unenlightened -- maybe a blasphemy, but hopefully not.

Yep. I think this the least problematic way to understand possible worlds. — Banno

That's how it clicked for me -- stipulation is what makes the rigid designator true, and while maybe it could work in general i tended to think that the stipulation was always about a particular individual we've already referred to.

I'd like to join in the mutual appreciations; I've got a deal of reading up to do, and things to think about, and thanks for that. I would have been a bit more forthcoming maybe, but I had a seizure on Boxing day and have been in hospital for tests and scans and then on anti fitting drugs and painkillers for a severe backache.
So I can say from immediate experience that I am not my brain, because my brain is going its own way and doing stuff that I definitely do not approve of, and my body likewise — unenlightened

No worries, and I hope you get to feeling better soon.

Also, silver lining, your example provides a good basis to think on the topic ;)

"I assure you I am neither my brain nor my body" makes a good deal of sense to me.

Would you say that human awareness is a thing-in-itself?

And my answer is an emphatic 'yes'. It is the thing in itself; the noumenon into which all phenomena fall. Awareness is like the black hole at the centre of the galaxy, it is the unexperienced source and destination of all experience. Thought cannot touch it, cannot grasp it cannot know it. The confusion of the mechanical process of thought with the silence that is aware of thought and everything else, Is I suspect, the heart of most philosophical difficulties. — unenlightened

So we cannot be aware of awareness.... at least insofar that awareness is thought?

Is there a non-thought awareness of awareness?

I'm thinking that if we answer "yes" to there being a non-thought awareness then that makes some sense of how we can say awareness is a thing-in-itself.

So personal identity, then, is the confabulation thought creates in the attempt to stabilise itself as the narrative thread on which identity is built. In the superficial physical world, there are the facts of name, age, medical history, posting history, etc, etc, that is substantially true of a physical body and brain, but that is all merely phenomenal; of the thing in itself, of that which I am and you are, nothing whatsoever can be said. — unenlightened

By golly I think we're beginning to converge. I found myself nodding along here.

Though the zen stuff is always outside of my comprehension -- I'm told that's the point, but that makes me even more confused. :D

No, I would not. I would say that it is indeed in-itself, but it is not a thing, it is not a res. Awareness is a process, just like any other mental process. It is noumenical (a process-in-itself), without being a noumenon (a thing-in-itself).

Does that make sense? — Arcane Sandwich

I'm tempted to go into the thinghood of the thing. oof. :D

Definitionally at least I think it's not the "thing" that the thing-in-itself emphasizes -- it's the outside-of-cognition that it emphasizes.

But the self is inside of cognition, and so can be considered a "thing" in the super-general sense Kant is getting at -- which is basically anything that can be named.

He bases his logic around the copula such that "X is Y" is the form of an assertion, and every assertion can be appended with an "I think X is Y", and the X is the name and the Y is a category.

EDIT: Moliere this might interest you, given our most recent philosophical conversation elsewhere on this Forum. — Arcane Sandwich

I've noticed on this forum if you edit in an "@' that it will not snag the person whose been '@"-ed -- just an fyi.

But I've been reading along (and obviously re-reading along) because I find the topic interesting -- only silent because I don't have anything to say.

It's at that border where sometimes something pops to mind and sometimes I just appreciate that others are talking about it.

I have referred to your post. It's a function of the forum.

To be clear I mean

If I were to say something after you might be able to guess what I'm referring to. But there'd be no fact of the matter with respect to the reference -- your words will not change because I'm referring to them, and we can only decide which bits, or if all bits all the bits, not by referring to what is referred to but by talking.

Also, should say, it's been a blast going back and forth. I find it hard to articulate my own positions a lot of the time and you helped me define some things I think about.

Like Bruno Latour, for example. — Arcane Sandwich

Hrrrmm! Carlos Astrada and Bruno Latour -- I've heard the latter but never read.

But that adds two names that I ought investigate to help me articulate myself better. I'm not sure that I'm a relationist, but if that's the category that comes to mind through the conversation I ought investigate it

EDIT: My "core beliefs", if that's what they're called, are the following five:

1) Realism
2) Materialism
3) Atheism
4) Scientism
5) Literalism

I'm not so sure about the last one, though. It's the newest addition to my system. I might have to modify it a bit, in some ways. — Arcane Sandwich

Cool.

I don't know 5, but it seems we do have some pretty significant differences with respect to 4, even without my knowing exactly the meaning -- just basing that on our conversation here.

2 I'm somewhat ambivalent on -- it's what I think, but it's not really important to me as a truth.

3 I'm solid on in terms of some gods, and fine with modifying it with respect to more metaphorical gods or things like epicurean gods or deist gods. While I'm an atheist I'm increasingly ambivalent towards gods that don't interact with the world.

You can do what I do: just accept substances. It's like, you're not going to turn into a fascist just because you have a concept of substance in your personal philosophy. — Arcane Sandwich

I just don't think it makes sense, truly. So I want to drop it for that reason.

Sounds like a smart thing to say. I'm not sure that I agree with it, but OK. — Arcane Sandwich

It's where my mind has been drifting in reading Sartre... slow going as always.

It's a transcendental argument so we can be suspicious about it immediately :D -- but I suspect Descartes' is too, in some fashion.

But the point of Moore's argument is that he has two hands. Solipsism says that there is only one thing. If that's the case, then Moore would have to have just one hand. But he has two instead. So, it follows from this that solipsism is false. It's a rather simple case to make, but most people resist it for some unknown reason. — Arcane Sandwich

I didn't until I read On Certainty.

I'm a materialist as well. Through and through. — Arcane Sandwich

Probably not through-and-through on my end, only it's what appears true to me.

But articulating it, and trying to do so without a notion of substance -- well, that's what I think about at night to go to sleep ;)

I'm a realist in metaphysics, and I'm a realist in epistemology. — Arcane Sandwich

I'm a realist of some kind or other, though I have no clear idea of what that entails.

I'm certainly also a skeptic of some kind or other, even if merely by disposition alone.

Could you briefly make a case for that, so that I can "picture" it? — Arcane Sandwich

When I think about the various examples of extreme neglect of children and the effects that has on them it's apparent to me that we at least need others in order to get to a place where we can confidently say I have a sense of self.

The fish experiences the world, but does not experience itself experiencing the world like a self does (which, really, seems to me a third step removed -- there's the experience of the body knowing the body and the world and there's the synthesis which somehow allows us to meaningfully and truthfully say "I am")

The cogito is so significant not because it's point-like, but explosive: Once we have a sense of self there's so much already in play that solipsism is a clear impossibility.

Who cares? You can differentiate them in reality, when you're awake. Everyone can do that. — Arcane Sandwich

Right. It just takes more than me waving my hand in the air. Once I'm speaking to everyone in an audience there's no need for proof, and saying "here is a hand" proves nothing.

Yes, for that, and for other things as well. But here's the thing: is a person literally a thing, as in, a res? Descartes said "yes", we are thinking things (res cogitans) — Arcane Sandwich

I don't believe so, no. But I'm a materialist at the same time.

Hence the conundrum.

Why? I'm curious to know your thoughts. — Arcane Sandwich

Well, there's two thoughts I have on Kant. One, I think he has a deep insight in his philosophy which is that the rational mind is more limited than what it might desire to know -- there are some things which are beyond us.

But there's a lot that comes along with his project that I reject like transcendental idealism, even of the one-world variety, mainly because I don't think the world makes as much sense as Kant seemed to believe. One Big Mind would make sense of a nature which is rationally ordered, but I don't see rational order in nature or the signs of some kind of purposive mind (to be fair Kant predates the wide acceptance of Darwinian biology which can explain some of this stuff).

What I like to keep about the thing-in-itself is that it's a purely negative concept which indicates some beyond that we must assume in order to make sense of the world but which will forever be outside of our mind's grasp -- almost by definition, meaning if terra-incognita somehow became cognizable due to brain-implants or whatever then this new part of the mind previously unexperienced would no longer be a thing-in-itself.

By definition it's unknowable, and the funny part that's hard to accept is that because causation is part of the categories it cannot be the case that the thing-in-itself is the cause of our representations. So it really just floats outside of all thought to take the place of things like the philosophical Ideas or God and the Soul and the Good.

It's an incredibly beautiful philosophy that I just can't bring myself to really believe in. The world appears much more jagged, and even if it were constructed it appears to move much more than Kant's epistemology seems to indicate -- there's not some eternal structure behind it all that provides a mental foundation to explain our rational abilities, but a loose web of guesses which hold together many of our bleiefsbeliefs meaningfully, but changes with time.

No, I would not. It's in-itself, sure, but it's not a thing in the technical sense. Human experience is not a res. Human experience is more like cogitans in that sense. I would say: there is a human (a res) that has human experiences (cogitans). In other words, we shouldn't think that the cogitans is purely "mental" or "rational", since it is also empirical — Arcane Sandwich

Cool.

I'm not sure I'd put human experience as an in-itself at all -- I'm not sure we really are our brains, or that there is something so solid about identity that we can treat it like an in-itself.

It's right around there that it becomes wildly interesting but speculative at the same time.

I'm not sure there even is a cogitans -- the brain-body bundle doesn't think much without having grown up in a supportive environment.

I really think of "mental" and "rational" as socially performed and taught rather than bound up in the structures of our brains.

Yes it does. It proves that solipsism is false, as Moore argued: — Arcane Sandwich

He argued it, but does he know that "here is one hand"?

What if he were dreaming? Would there be a hand there?

But there'd be no way to differentiate between the dream-hand or real-hand in dream-land. So we must conclude that Moore does not know, in the apodeictic sense of proof, that "here is a hand"; we must grant that he is able to refer to the hand in the first place by interpreting him and responding in kind. Without that collective enacting of language in the first place the hand couldn't be referred to -- he's assuming a great deal in thinking that referencing his hand is what proves solipsism to be false.

Here is Bunge's take on that, and I happen to agree with him on this specific point: a brain transplant, by definition, is impossible. You can have someone else's kidney transplanted into your body. You cannot have someone's brain transplanted into your own body, even if the technology to do such a thing were to exist. Why not? Because if you receive someone else's brain, what has happened is that the other person's brain has received a body. You, on the other hand, exist wherever your brain exists. So, if you receive a brain transplant, what happens to you is that you have become disembodied. Someone else has occupied your body. You now only exist as a disembodied brain. If they put you into someone else's body, then you have received a new body. A brain transplant, therefore, is impossible by definition, even if the technology for it were to exist. — Arcane Sandwich

So close and so far at the same time! :D

I tend to think that we are more than our brains -- we are our bodies, what we own, our relationships, commitments, legal rights all barely bundled together in a collective fiction we call "the self", which I think forms a dyad with the Other. In our original innocence the world is a playground which we can do with as we please, but the adult is the one who sees there's more to the world than the self and the world, and that the self requires others to exist at all (consider what happens to prisoners in solitary confinement, and feral children)

Brains seem an important part for human beings to be able to do all the things we tend to think of as a self or a mind -- but all unto themselves they're just a pile of dead cells. We can put them into computer chips to treat them like physical neural nets and train them, but for all that I don't think that the chips with neurons are a self at all.

Hmmm... I don't agree with this. We have a ton of things. We have science (episteme), we have opinion (doxa), we have reason (ratio), we have deductive reasoning, we have inductive reasoning, we have "abductive reasoning", as Peirce called it (it's really just inference-to-best-explanation), etc. We have a ton of things, in addition to language, charity, and the semi-mystical experiences of being-with-others. — Arcane Sandwich

For understanding the experience of others'?

Some funky thoughts on the exteriority of the Other:

Suppose we had this plug in our necks we could slot something into which would cause our total experience to become like the record rather than being directed towards the world around us. And let's suppose we have some recording device where I can record a day in the life of me and put it into the machine for others to play back.

More or less treating the brain like a VCR-Recorder, or perhaps it could be streamed across UV rays to various brain-transponders which generate experience, somehow.

The ineluctability of the Self before the Other would remain because it would still only be myself experiencing these things. They may have originated from some kind of wild science fiction machine, but even as I change identities I'd remain in my ipseity, the cogito.

The exterior isn't experienced, but lies outside the self. Since there is no gap between world and self the difference cannot be accounted for by our world -- it comes from the impossibility of ever being the Other.

But what we can do is imagine and encounter -- the encounter is beyond proof, like having hands doesn't prove anything. I think of the face-to-face relation as more an encounter than a strict logical relationship -- it's a phenomenon when one is made certain of the existence of the Other and the impossibility of knowing them the way you know your own ipseity and world.

All we have is language and charity, and the semi-mystical experience of being-with-others.

I think that some knowledge arises out of the facts. — Arcane Sandwich

I'd say that insofar that it does the fact has to count as significant in the first place. When we falsify something, for instance, we have an idea what the measurement will entail one way or the other -- so there is a fact to the matter which decides a belief, but the facts had to already be important to us: there had to have been some guiding passion that brought the seeker or producer of knowledge to consider these facts.

It's because reality is abundant that I'm thinking our values is what aids us in picking out facts -- they can be epistemic values, such as honesty or integrity or consistency. Or even a thirst for truth itself.

I think that things-in-themselves exist, and they can be thought about (as Kant argues), and they can also be known (as Bunge argues). — Arcane Sandwich

Bold! :D

I obviously disagree there.

Would you say that human experience is a thing-in-itself?

Neat!

I never expected Bose-Einstein condensates to be useful.

Can it? — Arcane Sandwich

Sure!

Derrida, Sartre, and Levinas aren't fascists but Derrida, in particular, credits Heidegger for his philosophy.

And thus far what I'm liking more about Sartre is it fits in with my materialist prejudices than Husserl did. He still uses Heidegger, but he also does his own thing.

It's in this sense that I mean we can interpret it differently -- it's not necessary to attend to Heidegger's intent or belief in making use of his philosophy (though I think it's worthy to note his fascism in approaching the philosophy as a contextualized historical product which Heidegger is offering to us to think through)

But almost any philosophy can be modified by disagreeing with one inference or adding an auxiliary hypothesis or entirely cutting out whole sections of thought and decontextualizing the concepts within to try them in new ways.

Carlos Astrada. — Arcane Sandwich

Cool. I'll keep him in mind as someone to investigate.

That doesn't mean that the knowledge that gets produced is somehow 100% relative to those social norms. — Arcane Sandwich

I agree. Similarly to Kant's notion "But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience." -- though all our knowledge is directed at facts by no means follows that knowledge arises out of the facts.

But then I also want to avoid things like things-in-themselves while preserving some of the insights which put a limit on metaphysics.

Same here. — Arcane Sandwich

Sweeeet

It's "Nazism for Philosophers", at the end of the day. — Arcane Sandwich

But it can be interpreted elsewise, yes?

Because Levinas is a Husserlian before being a Heideggerian. And Heidegger himself is, at the end of the day, just one among many of Husserl's students. The most famous one, sure, not necessarily the best one. — Arcane Sandwich

Which is the best, in your estimation?

Either way the reason I brought up Heidegger is his notion of disclosure, but with a twist that with a disclosure there is something passed over -- but by reworking what we think as possible a new disclosure appears, and passes over what we were thinking on before.

It's an ontological description of the epistemology of history that I've been arguing for.

But if you mean metaphysics in the Bungean sense, as general science, then I would say no: just as there is one biology, one chemistry, and one physics, there is also one metaphysics. — Arcane Sandwich

Oh here I disagree entirely. I see science as much more fractured than this.

But here I'm still ignorant with respect to Bunge, so all I can say is I see more than one of each of these -- even in physics we have classical and quantum mechanics. Even if at some point later we find some way to reconcile these it will still have been the case that there was a period of time when there were 2 physics, and I see no reason to disparage that -- they both work in their respective contexts.

Good for them. Doesn't mean that one has to do the same thing. — Arcane Sandwich

Well, you can attempt to do something else. And I think most people believe that metaphysics is prior to ethics -- but I can give an argument as to why I think it's the other way about.

If, in describing the world, we were purely descriptive then we'd never finish enumerating all the features of the world. However, we do finish, so there must be something which is not purely descriptive that we're doing.

In building knowledge we're eliminating irrelevant facts in favor of relevant facts that link up -- we make wild guesses and insecure inferences in peicing together the relevant facts. What guides this is what we want out of the science -- some people want a puzzle, some people want a medicine, some people want the truth (and they have some pre-theoretical notion of what "the truth" consists in). This "wanting" is all that ethics consists in; it's the guide which helps us navigate, and it's even pre-figured in our modes of knowledge-production. We are thrown into the norms which predate our existence, and it's only by following these social norms that knowledge gets produced at all.



Ahhh, the cogito rears its head once again!

All I can say there is what the cogito is in various capacities has been a recent uncertainty of mine. I see the cogito becoming relevant again and again even as philosophers attempt to overcome it.

This is part of why the phenomenological-existential tradition is interesting -- the outcomes may be weird, but I genuinely believe they've managed to at least advance the cogito philosophically: the cogito is composed of, part of, directed towards the world so there is no gap between self and world in the first place there.

I think therefore I am whatever I think. I am the thought of myself. I am the result of the distinction I make between myself and the world. But this is obviously wrong. I am, therefore, whatever I mistake myself for. — unenlightened

That gets along with what I'm thinking... there's certainly the sense of self that is continual from day to day, and yet...

We talk about them as objects for convenience, but we do not draw the boundaries or wonder where they go when they dissipate. The problem with formal logic is that it cannot deal with time. — unenlightened

The self does seem to be a fuzzy bundle that even changes what is part of the bundle as time goes on...

Cool. Glad that I understood you. "The dao that can be said is not the eternal dao" definitely popped to mind in asking my question.

Seems to me then you'd come out as a firm "no" on the OP's question?

We can't record it really, and the defense of poetics falls to the same narcissism as the defense of science.

Yeah? Or naw?

EDIT: So I guess my point is, I don't agree with Heidegger in characterizing One as "impersonal exsistence" as opposed to "authentic existence". If anything, I'd say it's the other way around: One is better characterized as "authentic existence", while Dasein is just "impersonal existence". I'll say it even more recklessly: To be One is to be a stone, to be a Dasein is to be a Nazi. I'd rather be a stone, thank you very much. — Arcane Sandwich

My biggest doubt with respect to the existentialists is the emphasis on authenticity, and with respect to Heidegger especially, his use of "authentic" with respect to a metaphysical existence.

I definitely see the fascism in Heidegger -- it's really only because of Levinas that I take him seriously. I've said it before on this forum but I consider Levinas to be like the baptizer of Heidegger.

The entire point of metaphysics is that one emerges in a way that is not reducible to the upper layers of Reality itself, precisely because one emerges as a physical object in Reality itself before emerging as a social subject in Reality itself. — Arcane Sandwich

Would you accept that this is the entire point of a metaphysics?

I see metaphysics as subordinate to ethics; one chooses a metaphysic that fits with an ethical stance, at least historically speaking. i.e. Plato wrote a metaphysics that got along with his philosophy, as did Aristotle and Epicurus etc.

Hmm. "Philosopher" is an identity that identifies itself as central. But then that goes for any old narcissist too. But that's ok with me, because I am happy to say that I am the real Donald Trump, or a 17thC French playwright, or a harvest mouse. I am any centre anywhere. — unenlightened

What would a non-narcissistic philosophy look like, in your opinion?

I am all of that, — Arcane Sandwich

What's your feeling on Heidegger? The notion of Dasein seems to fit here as a place for thinking about this.

@unenlightened -- looks like we've come to a similar path you've described: that identity serves as a kind of "center" for philosophy at large.

I can give an answer, though my position necessarily requires me to say that in other circumstances I might change the answer due to the circumstances.

What am I?
What is one?

I am a person. One is a person.

Why am I this, and not that?

No reason. We come from nothing and here we are -- there is no why.

Why am I one, and not many?

Because we like to think of ourselves as unitary.

Can one be many?
Can many be one?

Yes, to both.

How do you know, what one is?

I don't know what I am, at bottom. I have so many certainties, but these aren't necessarily knowledge-based certainties.

What are you, and what am I? Why am I not you? Why are you not me?
Why are we not them? Why are they not us?

What are they? What are we? What is one as many? What is many as one?
— Arcane Sandwich

I think these questions are asking after the difference between self and other -- and that's the sort of thing I often think about. What I don't think is that there's some criteria for the seperation -- there's a "why", but not a list of reasons.

Though with each question we could articulate more about this relationship my thought is that I still think about this relationship a lot. Almost like I like Levinas ;).

My best guess is it captures questioning -- it's a much more literal poem than people usually mean by "poem", but all the same. I feel confusion throughout because the questions are about big concepts and seem almost nonsensical without something more to interpret, but also this is a common experience in thinking through philosophy so it's not exactly like the poem needs more.

Poems, and art generally, are created between a creator and an audience -- it requires an expression and an interpretation.

Though I ought note that just because a poem is the best way (EDIT: at present) to record human experience that does not then mean that all poems record human experience -- some are structured for different purposes, or on strictly formal phonetic and syntactical terms.

Will you accept this as an example of a poem, yes, no, or sort of? — Arcane Sandwich

As long as its intended as such, sure. But sometimes poem-looking writing can be intended otherwise, and vice-versa -- the proem.

That is, there's not a textual criteria for counting as a poem that I can think of that's universal universal.

In this response I'm going to try and loop back to the OP -- not that the conversation isn't interesting, only that I feel we're beginning to lose the OP.

With respect to scientism, though, I want to be clear: I have no problem with scientists trying it all over again. It's only that it's failed before and I don't have high hopes for a real unifying theory of science. Furthermore, I tend to think we don't even need one -- there's too much out there to want to investigate to build some kind of theory of making theories. Just make shit up and see what works; it is no grander than that.

So, what other questions might you have about these topics? — Arcane Sandwich

Do any of these record human experience?

That was my initial reason for using poetry as a record -- because we have nothing better than poetry to capture human experience. Novels, poems, bank-statements, government records, attendance sheets, newspaper articles, reports, letters, oral interview are the records of human experience, and this is what history deals in.

It's because history is perspectival that there isn't one way to tell it. You only get the full sense of history by hearing all the sides, some of which contradict.

Human experience is contradictory.

You think you're doing storytelling, but you don't realize that the very attempt to optimize your storytelling indicates that what you are doing has something in common with science, for the sciences also seek to optimize — Arcane Sandwich

Like numeration, optimization is not a criteria for the sciences -- actors optimize their acting to fit a scene, and aren't doing science for all that.

However, here you go astray when you compare physics or history to shopkeeping, just because all of them use math. Yes, they all do, but to do science is to do basic and applied research. The shopkeeper is just running a business. And science is not a business. — Arcane Sandwich

The point of the shopkeeper example was to demonstrate that your criteria of numeration could not differentiate science from not-science. Similarly so with the above on optimization. I don't think that shopkeeping is either science or history -- but numeration is used by all three and so this can't be a criterion which differentiates science from not-science.

Controversial statement at the end, I know. I kinda have that style. I think it suits me. What do you think? — Arcane Sandwich

I love it! :D

Gives me something to think on and through.

I notice that you give quite a lot of importance to events. Why? — Arcane Sandwich

No reason that I can think of.

When you say...

Historical phenomena that occur more slowly, which have a longue durée, are far more "structural" than mere, ephemeral events. — Arcane Sandwich

I don't know how I'd differentiate between the two. Similarly so with the histories you list -- I've read none of them, but on their face I don't see why I'd prefer the history of the mediterranean over the microhistories -- arguably the microhistories are more accurate than the grand narratives. But, really, I think they complement one another. (similar move to what I've been saying with respect to science and history -- there isn't a better or worse, they're just different)

We're not in the 20th century anymore, are we? A lot has happened ever since Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, and the like. The refreshing originality of such approaches to philosophy of science and history of science has worn off by now, and their epistemological relativism has, pun intended, gotten really old by the epistemic (and even political) standards of 2025. — Arcane Sandwich

We're not, but I haven't seen an adequate response to Feyerabend as much as a shrug.

People don't like the conclusions so they go on to try something new. All well and good.

But it's not their freshness or originality which draws me to their philosophies. Rather, I just read them and they appeal to me and my experience of science; they have good lessons for reflecting on the beast science, and really I think their relativisms are overhyped.

Feyerabend and Kuhn, in particular, are often overhyped as some kind of arche-relativists, but if you just take them at their word they are nothing of the sort.

They poke holes in some pet theories of science, but that's more the philosophy of science than the science itself.

And of course we've absorbed some of those lessons over the course of time. But Feyerabend still strikes me as particularly relevant since people will reject Popper, but then still try to define science by its methods -- that is, find a different criterion or structural description of science that Feyerabend isn't addressing, but totally missing the point that a whole cadre of philosophers and scientists have already tried to build a science of science and failed at it.

For me to take the idea seriously I'd have to know what it is about this science of science that is superior to Popper's theory, which is pretty well articulated.

Of course. I've debated this topic before, though not with you : ) — Arcane Sandwich

Cool. Insofar that you have some intuitive sense of what I'm on about that's enough for me.

Sure. But there are other theories of writing history. How are we to settle which one is preferable? I don't think that's a purely political matter. It's a scientific matter as well. There is such a thing (I believe) as writing history in a more scientific way. — Arcane Sandwich

This might be the in-a-nutshell version of our differences as I see it, at least: Not only are there other theories of writing history, it is not the historians job to settle which theory of writing history is preferable. The best the historian can do is choose a consistent perspective and tell a history, and it's the multiplicity of historical theories that gives a more well-rounded character to an event, whereas a scientist would prefer a singular theory which gives an account of many of the same kinds of events.

Usually the reason a historian chooses a perspective to write from is because it resonates with the way they see history, but not always -- one can purposefully use the concepts of another theory to write a history. What moores this storytelling is that it must be based upon evidence.


...


Actually, this is a better example for the difference between history and science, using the Big Bang.

In science the big bang happened billions of years ago

In history the big bang happened in the 20'th century -- there are no documents to reference in writing a history of the time before human beings. If one's ontology were defined by this historical reality, rather than by science, then we'd say that right now it appears that the Big Bang happened billions of years ago, but by the documentation it didn't exist until much more recently.

I don't think that history is like shop keeping. It's more like physics. The difference between a shop keeper and a physicist (and by extension, a historian) is that the former is running a business while the later is doing basic and applied research. Historians are scientists because they do research, like the physicist does, not because he is running a business, like the shopkeeper is. — Arcane Sandwich

I agree these are closer -- shopkeeper example is meant to point out that numeration is common to many human endeavors, even outside of the academy, and so can't serve as a basis for separating out what makes science, science.

(Also, for what it's worth, I don't think there is a solution to the problem of the criterion)

Can the historian quote Jorge Luis Borges in the same sense that he can quote Emily Dickinson? If so, then he has something in common with the physicists. — Arcane Sandwich

Not something relevant, though. The relevant difference is that for the historian the poem can reasonably be considered evidence in some circumstances, whereas with the physicist it can't: there is no circumstance in which a poem will count as evidence for a scientific belief.

How do you know it's not the other way around? Maybe physics is more permissive than history. That's another way to look at it. — Arcane Sandwich

Study. ;)

Also, "more permissive" can be challenged -- ultimately they're just different, and those differences are what account for why we can have a history of science and not a science of history rather than some sort of fight for the top or a superior discipline with respect to reality.

I take 20th century philosophy of science has having demonstrated the failure of a science of science: without an answer to the problem of the criterion there can be no way to ascertain if what we're talking about is scientific proper, and thereby we can never classify a knowledge which is the knowledge of knowledge: science is more a thematic unity than a methodological unity which leads one closer to truth.

It forces agreement, but it smothers out difference in the process -- and this is a good thing for what it's doing.

History allows more differences than science to count as significant in the construction of a history.

The Marxist would be leaving out a lot of important sociological variables in that case, and the progressive historian would be arriving at a somewhat simplistic conclusion when he tries to formulate "the moral of the story". — Arcane Sandwich

Exactly! And yet, in order to bring any sort of coherence to an odd collection of records, one must have some idea of the structure of history before writing a particular monograph.

So the historiographical move is to allow this multiplicity since to rely upon only one would necessarily ignore very important things.

Do I need to just say my slogan in here as well? : ) — Arcane Sandwich

Yes lol.

If it's not story-telling, then what is it? What else is research than the telling of stories?

Seems to me that they're just different forms of literature that go towards different purposes. I know history isn't story-telling in the sense that Tolkien is a storyteller, and I know that the storytelling parameters of history are different from the storytelling parameters of science, but even in science, when you communicate your findings, the important part -- and the part that often gets fought over -- is how the story gets told.

So even this storytelling isn't what excludes science from history. I think it's really just that they aren't doing the same thing.

Why not? There's a lot of quantitative content in history, already. We have numbers for the centuries, for the years, even days and the minutes and seconds of each day. Not that you'll take all of those into account when you write or read about, I don't know, the French Revolution, but it's like, there are some numbers here already, about a ton of stuff. What was the price of bread in the months leading up to the French Revolution? How many people lived in France at that time? How many in Paris, specifically? How many guards were at the Bastille? Etc. And then you can study larger phenomena, like, the first World War. How many countries were involved in that conflict? When did it start? When did it end? How many combatants, on each side? What was the death toll? Etc. All of this is quantifiable. Why wouldn't you then look for statistics, trends, correlations, etc.? — Arcane Sandwich

"Shouldn't" because the phenomena isn't a scientific one, but historical. So while we can draw up statistics and trends and correlations this won't be what decides how a history is told, or at least we'll be missing out on a huge part of the history of all we do is look at measurables and ignore stories.

There's even a whole theory of writing history dedicated to exactly that -- it's the multiplicity of stories and causes and perspectives on an event which fills out an understanding of the event, rather than a unifying theory or the necessity for agreement or universality, though. I think both disciplines look at time and causation in different ways such that you can do a history of science or a science of history, but when you try to do a science of history you don't really get any unifying theory whereas if you do a history of science you get a multi-faceted narrative that doesn't give you a Method or Theory of Science, but gives you some ideas about how to go about doing science some of the time.

Quantitation is acceptable, of course. Numbers of people, hectares of agriculture, year Franz Ferdinand is shot are part of history.

But that doesn't make it a science. (Shop keeping requires mathematics, but running a shop is not doing science)

Probably both. Why not? It's "a human thing" that has numbers, isn't it? — Arcane Sandwich

Because it's a political entity and so all statements about it will themselves be political statements rather than statements of fact that can be assessed from some intersubjective objectivity.

Unlike biology economics will have a class-character.

So do some physicists, when they quote Borges in one of their papers, for example. — Arcane Sandwich

That's different, though -- the physicist can't quote Emily Dickenson as a record of physics, whereas the historian can.

That's because they're doing different things entirely. I think of them as orthogonal to one another, and it's only because history is more permissive -- rather than superior to science -- that there can be a history of science but no science of history.

They have different goals in mind, though, so this isn't a problem.

It is, but historians aren't doing poetry when they're working, just as mathematicians are not playing chess when they're working. — Arcane Sandwich

Well, they aren't doing poetry as the poets do poetry, though in the sense of the difference I'd keep between science and history -- they are in a sense doing two different kinds of poetry with different rules and thereby different outcomes. The poetry is more rigid than what we usually associate with "poetry", but the narrative character of both history and science is what I mean by the "poetics".

Consider the difference between the Big Bang and World War 1, to use your example. (other historical sciences, like geology and biology etc. will likewise count here as a point of comparison):

And it's not reproducible. — Arcane Sandwich

What's reproducible with the Big Bang are the results of the experiments which the scientists generated using such-and-such methods, rather than the Big Bang itself. Likewise I don't need to witness the entire evolution from RNA to homo sapiens re-occur to still have reproducible results.

However, such reproducibility is not the point of delving into the causes of World War 1. Everyone will acknowledge that there are many causes, and there will often be a handful of causes that all historians agree upon. What will differ is which causes get more emphasis and "what it all means" -- the marxist historian will emphasize material conditions and internal conflicts, the progressive historian will situate world war 1 as a terrible lesson we can grow from, etc.

And even within a particular theory individual historians will disagree on the exact narrative.

Do yo usee the difference?

Is there a particularly important reason why non-Orthodox Marxism can't support scientism? — Arcane Sandwich

Can't? No. But this is the very point that I begin to question Marx on -- whether history even can be treated scientifically, or more to the point, whether it should be done.

In some cases, sure -- I see a lot of advantage to being able to predict the flows of the economy, for instance, but I wonder if the economy is more a historical rather than a scientific entity. In which case the notion of models and empirical evidence and all that kind of goes out the window -- it's too close to home for us to make predictions about because we care too much about it. As soon as we have a model which works people will adapt to that model and the model will have to change in order to be true.

Whereas science emphasizes reproducibility and explanatory power history emphasizes the moment and the narrative.

Sure. But you wouldn't approach the invention of the cannon or World War 1 as academic topics just from the point of view of poetry. That history isn't physics doesn't necessarily entail that it's non-scientific tout court. — Arcane Sandwich

I think that treating history like science is overly broad on the part of science.

And also, historians do reference poems and novels from time periods they're interested in. This is because they are historical records unto themselves if they were produced at that time and capture something of the era.

With respect to human experience I think poetry is an important record.

Well, in my honest opinion, this is because the social sciences in general are not as scientific as the natural sciences, at least not currently. If we wanna bring up the social sciences so that they are on a par with the natural sciences, then we kinda need to place our bets on scientism, right? Anti-scientism won't get that particular job done. See where I'm commin' from, partner? — Arcane Sandwich

As always it depends upon how we understand the terms in the first place.

To my understanding I don't think we need to place bets either way. If neither literature nor social science nor physical science are in some sense superior to each other then there's no need to argue which one is going to win. We can engage in each at our whim.

Well, then, what you're alluding to right there is the following question: "Is historiography a social science?" "Is it a science to begin with, or is it one of the "Humanities" or "Humanistic studies"? And I just don't think that it's a productive discussion at the end of the day, even though people love to discuss it. Like, let's just all come out of the scientism closet: we all believe in scientism at the end of the day, let's not fool ourselves about that. Right? Or do you disagree? — Arcane Sandwich

I certainly don't believe in scientism -- I don't see science as superior to other forms of knowledge. I see it as one of the ways we can go about our world. And sometimes it's a foolish way to go about our world.

With respect to history in particular I think this is true. This would be where I begin to part ways with Orthodox Marxism.

Generally speaking I don't think all phenomena fit the same methodological bill -- and which is better at a time has much to do with what we're talking about in the first place. I wouldn't want the historical record of a particular cannon ball in figuring out where it will land when given such and such an amount of energy. I also would not break out thermodynamical models to explain the causes of World War 1.

These are just different ways of knowing.

Oh, also, I tried to track down access to the particular paper you linked and failed. I found some papers by Bunge, but not that.