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But since I'm not an accepted member of that tribe (alas, being cuntless), I can only observe their artistic expression from afar. I couldn't actually interact with those gentle souls because I'd be likely be struck by the grenades their military wing would toss at me. — Hanover

I am under the impression that the modern cunt doesn't need to have a cunt, so perhaps you can still be a cunt in the future cunt.

@Hanover - I think this is a radical feminism you can get behind.

we are the modern cunt
positive anti reason
unbounded unleashed unforgiving
we see art with our cunt we make art with our cunt
we believe in jouissance madness holiness and poetry
we are the virus of the new world disorder
rupturing the symbolic from within
saboteurs of big daddy mainframe
the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix
VNS MATRIX
terminators of the moral code
mercenaries of slime
go down on the altar of abjection
probing the visceral temple we speak in tongues
infiltrating disrupting disseminating
corrupting the discourse
we are the future cunt — VNS, A Cyberfeminist Manifesto For The 21st Century

If anyone is out there who has same taste with me i will be glad to know :) — Burcu

I've seen Intermezzo recommended in three separate places I frequent now, I should really get to it.

Well, I never read something like this. I think the way he approaches solitude is unique and original. — javi2541997

Maybe in print. This was what turned me off the book though. He wrote in a narrative voice like every Norwegian man with social difficulties I'd met. This perpetual fleeing from the prickliness of the world into an unfulfilled solitude that he convinces himself he's fine with.

Something I'll remember from it though is that his schooling in the 1950s was similar to mine in the 1990s, and it's still quite similar to kids now in 2020s I think. 70 years, slow progress on not emotionally devastating people from birth.

Academic background, I presume. :cool: — Outlander

In a former life. I work with young kids that need additional support.

He has an occupational advantage from what I've gathered. :eyes: — Outlander

What advantage is this? :eyes:

That's a lot to chew on, thank you.

Aye. Which the OP implicitly stipulates as irrelevant (in its case).

At the very least I would say that is impermissible on account of societal example and norms, but I'm not looking to have that conversation. It would at least require a more nuanced thread. — Leontiskos

That's what I said, yes. — Vera Mont

"Legal != immoral != socially acceptable" looks like a whole other thread.

Okay yes. And why does that make incest impermissible when there's no chance of procreation? Say with our 60 year old sterile separated at birth story?

Why dont you build a giant paddock, and collect all the furniture of the universe inside of it. Then you can determine degrees of reality among the objects — Joshs

They were all real!

I'm afraid I don't understand. Are you saying eugenics is never immoral?

So are: Is it immoral? and Should it be illegal? — Vera Mont

Think those are separate too. There are plenty of moral things which are illegal (responsible consumption of harmless drugs), and plenty of legal things which are immoral (taking advantage of someone's kindness).

I would apply the principle that it is never immoral to abstain from copulation in view of the extreme hardship that would result on the part of the person conceived. Rare diseases and the deformities that can result from incest certainly fall under this umbrella. — Leontiskos

"Never being immoral" isn't the same thing as "being required not to". It's never immoral to eat ice cream, but you are not required not to. Separate ideas.

Would you go further to say that people who would have rare diseases and deformities are committing a moral evil if they have kids?

You can thank my students.

The prohibition on incest is a form of eugenics. — Leontiskos

Alright, which forms are eugenics are good and which are bad?

It's willful engagement in behavior that is likely to produce an unsafe condition of elevated likelihood for birth defects. — Outlander

You have to be really careful using principles like that, because as written they provide support for eugenics. IE, people who have heritable conditions having a child together is just definitionally "wilful engagement in behaviour that is likely to produce an unsafe condition of elevated likelihood for birth defects". If having a child is wrong on that basis, you've got a conclusive argument for people with genetic diseases having kids committing an evil act. Moreover, your reason doesn't touch people shagging who're both sterilised.

The irritating thing with taboo subjects like this is articulating why they're wrong without modus tollens impacting all of your other moral principles. As @Hyper noted, this is just lazy reasoning and dogpiling.

↪Leontiskos. What a strawman. Bearing any children would be better than bearing no children, or would you be in support of eugenics for the disabled? — Hyper

A better reason for claiming that incest should not be considered as permissible is that the conditions for consent to it don't make that much sense, the hypothetical scenario in the OP is not representative of the scenarios where incest occurs. It's a bit like saying that murder is permissible since there are conditions in which killing is permissible.

If hypothetically you had two sterile 60 year olds who were separated at birth, fell in love, married and shagged...what's wrong there? But simultaneously that's not what people are imagining when talking about incest.

There really is no deciding between the world being one or being many, and some of this overlaps that. I think. — Srap Tasmaner

The oneness of the many is the manyness of the one, or something like that.

If your intent is to make shit up, it's an excellent scale, imposing minimal constraint on your creativity. "Like our Heavenly Father, Everest is great ..." — Srap Tasmaner

I do really like the idea of trying to come up with a continuous graduation reality concept, which isn't an accuracy of a representation, or a way of counting things that already apply, or a way of saying how individuated an entity is. But I don't think it's possible, honestly.

I think the latter idea, parametrising individuation, is about as close as you get. But you still need a background of individuating processes for it. The origin point is an analytical posit rather than an ontological ground.

One predicate to rule them all, one scale with which to measure being — Srap Tasmaner

It isn't a very good scale. It jettisons the distinctions between all properties. It's exactly the same scale which would let you answer "What's a bloody mary made of?" with "7" and be totally accurate.

I think, in discussing why we say mortality is a property of Socrates rather than saying Socrates is an exemplar of Mortality.) — Srap Tasmaner

Exemplification's got the same kind of weirdness with existential import as the application of predicate to subject does, right? Socrates is mortal either takes a already individuated object with the name "Socrates" and predicates "is mortal" of it. Or alternatively you take the property "Mortality" as primary and somehow zip up a chunk of it into Socrates. Though such a property also does not admit of degree, surely, as beings are either mortal or they are not.

Spinoza in Ethics has a claim that the more real an entity is, the more attributes it partakes in. Which are like essential parameters of all that is.

The more reality or being a thing has, the greater the number of its attributes (Def. iv.). — Spinoza, Ethics Book 1,Prop IX

: for nothing in nature is more clear than that each and every entity must be conceived under some attribute, and that its reality or being is in proportion to the number of its attributes expressing necessity or eternity and infinity — Spinoza, Ethics Book 1, Prop X, note

The degree of reality there seems to be a bit like a volume switch between 0 and infinity, where 0 is those entities which partake in no attributes, and infinity is substance, God or nature. We're stuck on 2, thought and extension, rocks are at 1, just extension.

Another being-ish degree concept I'm familiar with is from Manuel De Landa, he conceives of individuation in a parametrised way. How diffuse or crisp are the borders between entities, how distributed is it in space or over a concept? Like a nation state with an open border vs a patrolled one, or who is granted a what type of keycard to buildings in a industrial estate respectively. Though an entity with little to no internal boundaries would still exist, like the components of a single element gas. (eg here for DeLanda using the concept).

The degree of reality concept thus seems to require a measure, an origin point, from which discrepancies are marked, and special graduations on that scale. For Spinoza this seems to be nature or God as the most real, at infinity, and entities are more real if they partake in more of God's attributes. 0 attributes being the origin point, and attribute participation counting being the measure.

The subject/predicate way of construing it doesn't seem to require a privilege regime of properties, like attributes, nor does it have an origin point by which all entities have their predications' realities measured.

To contrast the two, DeLanda's approach has degree properties that express the configuration of a given being, as does the subject-predicate approach. Whereas the Spinoza one has degree properties that just count how many attributes an entity partakes in.

Yes, I'm talking about Forms. Why not say Mortality is manifested in, among others, this little temporal object called "Socrates", but Mortality is itself more enduring, more perfect, more real than such objects? — Srap Tasmaner

I think what Srap's done as quoted is blend those two ideas together, in which a Greater Exemplification of a single Property (which properties?) makes The Exemplar more real. Spinoza had a good answer for which properties (predicates) make an entity more real, when you can say they partake in more attributes. So if X participates in attribute X1 and X2, but Y only participates in attribute Y1, Y is less real than X since it's only got one attribute. What's the answer when you've got one property and you're measuring how well something exemplifies it? How do you relate different strengths of exemplification of different properties? Is Everest more real than a dust mote on the count of Everest's largeness and mass?

Another, tangential thought about exemplification, is that if X is a maximal exemplar of P, then it will be minimal exemplar of P's antonym Q. Eg, the dust mote might be "maximally real" for smallness, and Everest might be "maximally real" for largeness, but that gives us no means to distinguish degrees of realty between entities measured on the same axis, without another theory that links properties together and tells you how their combination induces the degree of reality of the entity they apply to.


.

I am little surprised that so far no one has suggested another approach ― maybe again because it tends to be treated as a binary. That would be claims that there is a hidden reality, a deeper reality than the one we know. I suppose people don't usually say that makes this one less real, but simply illusion. Always the binary. But if there's a reality behind or beyond this one, couldn't there be another behind that? Why assume there are exactly two, rather than admit that if there's more than one, there may be any number? In which case, it seems to me more natural to assume such realities are on a spectrum. (Even scientists sometimes seem to talk this way, if not in terms of reality then in terms of "what's going on": it seems to us one thing, but it's really something else; and behind that there's something even stranger; and we don't know what's behind that, but maybe the universe is a simulation, or a calculation, or something else quite different from what we expected a hundred years ago.) — Srap Tasmaner

Doesn't that construe degrees of reality like degrees of accuracy of its representation? The scientists aren't going to think that tables are less real than the compounds that make them up. Whenever people with science backgrounds say stuff like "People can't really touch each other because our atoms can't be in the same place" they're just zooted.

But as noted at the outset, one of the characteristics of modern culture is the 'flattening' of ontology. — Wayfarer

I think you can have hierarchical organisation of predicates without being committed to reality degrees. Like everything which is red is coloured - the former is on a "lower rung", or "higher rung" on a ladder of predicates, than the latter. Much like plant is on a lower or higher rung than the mineral. Why equate the concepts?

That's certainly a perspective.

"wall" = w
"beige wall" = wall + beige

Walls have a higher degree of reality when painted beige? I suppose that just means some properties are privileged, because no one wants to believe that.

I don't understand why anyone would want to say "higher degree of reality" when they mean "has more characteristic predicates applying to it", could you spell that out for me? What makes a predicate make something it applies to more real?

Say as a crude example, that a delusional subject has an inadequate grip on reality. There are of course degrees, ranging from severe mental illness through to narcissistic personality disorder, for instance. I think in classical philosophy, there is at an least implicit principle that the philosopher is less subject to delusion than the untrained mind - the hoi polloi, if you like. They are more highly realised, they have a superior grip on reality. — Wayfarer

A deluded person's grip on reality is a property of them, not of the delusions. It would be the delusions that would need to admit of degrees of reality, rather than the degree of delusion of the subject. Paradigmatically though, delusions are that which are not real and we staunchly believe despite evidence.

IE that's an example of a predicate with an intensity parameter - a person's degree of grip on reality. And it's also not a degree of reality of what that person grasps.

It's very difficult for me to imagine what it might mean to have a degree of reality, in contrast to an existent which has a property of a given intensity. Like a remarkably red apple makes red "exist more" because its red is remarkable. But that's about the redness, not about the apple.

Degrees also seem like a quantitative concept - as if one thing can exist more than another, or exist harder in a given way. As opposed to a qualitative one - like an idea might exist in a different sense to a cup. The former corresponds to changes in degree of reality within a type, the latter corresponds to differences type. Compare heights and masses, two different quantitative axes, differences of degree. Ideality and materiality, two different seemingly binary properties, differences in kind.

What can you accomplish with different degrees of reality that you can't accomplish with a predicate with an intensity eg "Sally is 1m tall", or alternatively a standard predicate label, say "Sally is tall"? Open question.

If so then it seems the skeptic must at least admit of knowledge of time. — Moliere

We don't see the skeptic Sartre is responding to in the OP. I find it difficult to tell exactly what radical doubt he's responding to.

This is almost a troll reading, but I want to give it anyway - no further resources are needed to talk about the validity of "I think, therefore I am" than seeing if, in the circumstance of the utterance, predicating an entity entails it exists. In normal circumstances it does. Therefore the argument ought to be understood as valid by competent speakers of English.

What isn't a troll reading about it - Sartre's commentary is transcendental, a reading of the necessary preconditions of Descartes' ability to argue, judge, doubt ensuring the truth of the claim it seeks to demonstrate. That the doubter exists. The above account involves only norms of language, and specifically talks about predicability rather than any phenomenological, a-priori or transcendental structure.

If an account of the argument can be given without use of the specific transcendental concepts Sartre is using, how can we say his analysis of necessary preconditions follows? Since the argument can be conceived otherwise.

I mostly just wanted to throw this in the thread to see what happens.

but more because I wanted to see what a mild-mannered statistician saw in such a goofy unusual subject. — T Clark

Projects like that give you entire other ways of imagining everything. There isn't too much evidence for how we see the world at a base level, so it's nice to be able to view it from a remarkably alien perspective.

But at some point works like that became closer to how I see the world, in terms of worldview and metaphysics, than the everyday pretheoretical intuitions I live in. If whenever I open my mouth fairytales fall out, I may as well learn as many as possible.

I've been on a Cybernetic Culture Research Institute kick the last few months. I read:

Nihil Unbound by Ray Brassier through fully for the first time.
I went back to his dissertation Alien Theory. I didn't finish it because it would require a lot of further study for me to understand. Though I was surprised by how Brassier writes in it! He's usually very sardonic, and when he attacks a position you feel as though that position has been put firmly in its place, in this one there's a sense of catharsis in his critique. The dissertation just bulges with utter frustration at the navel gazing hermeneutic meta-game of continental philosophy and social science at the time.

Currently going through - I stress going through, not reading - Nick Land's Thirst For Annihilation, it's quite a book. The prose has a prophetic and thoroughly debased quality to it, though its coke fuelled rambling is marked by great self awareness:

What I offer is a web of half-choked ravings that vaunts its incompetence, exploiting the meticulous conceptual fabrications of positive knowledge as a resource for delirium, appealing only to the indolent, the maladapted, and the psychologically diseased. I would like to think that if due to some collective spiritual seism the natural sciences were to become strictly unintelligible to us, and were read instead as a poetics of the sacred, the consequence would resonate with the text that follows. At least disorder grows. — Thirst for Annihilation

and often there are fecund critical insights:

Kant’s great discovery—but one that he never admitted to—was that apodictic reason is incompatible with knowledge. Such reason must be ‘transcendental’. This is a word that has been propagated with enthusiasm, but only because Kant simultaneously provided a method of misreading it. To be transcendental is to be ‘free’ of reality. This is surely the most elegant euphemism in the history of Western philosophy.

The critical philosophy exposes the ‘truths of reason’ as fictions, but cunning ones, for they can never be exposed. They are ‘big lies’ to the scale of infinity; stories about an irreal world beyond all possibility of sensation, one which is absolutely incapable of entering into material communication with the human nervous system, however indirectly, a separated realm, a divine kingdom. This is the ghost landscape of metaphysics, crowded with divinities, souls, agents, perdurant subjectivities, entities with a zero potentiality for triggering excitations, and then the whole gothic confessional of guilt, responsibility, moral judgement, punishments and rewards...the sprawling priestly apparatus of psychological manipulation and subterranean power. The only problem for the metaphysicians is that this web of gloomy fictions is unco-ordinated, and comes into conflict with itself. Once the fervent irrationalism of inquisition and the stake begins to crumble, and the dogmatic authority of the church weakens to the point that it can no longer wholly constrain philosophy within the mould of theology, violent disputes— antinomies—begin to flourish. Due to the ‘internecine strife of the metaphysicians’ polyglot forces begin to be sucked into conflict, at first mobilized against particular systems of reason, fighting under the banner of another. But eventually a more generalized antagonism begins to emerge, various elements begin to throw off the authority of metaphysics as such, scepticism spreads, and the nomads begin to drift back, with renewed élan. — Thirst for Annihilation

the style of argument in it isn't what you would expect though. There are no syllogisms. There are no premises. There are scarcely conclusions. Where there is is a sustained and thorough attempt to get you to imagine everything around you differently. The book operates at the level of ideology without being propaganda, a surgery upon worldviews. It wrestles with intuitions that would make anyone imagine the world and its history of ideas in any way at all. All in the style of a candyflipper asking you to hold his snuffbox before running at a wall.

It is true that Knausgård wants to get into the deepest point of sadness and loneliness, but it is something I am looking for right now — javi2541997

Lemme know what you think when you're done please!

Was that list from ChatGPT?

A Death in the Family. My Struggle 1. by Karl Ove Knausgård. — javi2541997

I could not get along with this one. Knausgård has the most Norwegian man's narrative voice imaginable. He represents the ancestral urge to escape loneliness by living in the family's country hut in complete isolation.

You need to write an OP. I'll close the thread.

When I try to explain to friends why I do phil. — J

Madness.

Thank you for your welcome!! — KantRemember

I too welcome you! Great posts.

I want to return to this loose end. Am I right that we can avoid the conclusion in (8) by denying (4), the symmetry of relevance? — J

I believe so yes. I enjoyed your counterexample. Removing symmetry stops you from setting up a partition of things into that which is relevant and that which is not relevant to philosophy, on the basis of the relation, but you still end up having the sense of connection between ideas. As in, if X is relevant to Y, and Y is relevant to Z, then X is still relevant to Z. It's just you can't go "backwards" now.

I quite like the idea of dropping symmetry, since moves in disciplines tend to be autonomous of philosophy, whereas moves in philosophy do not tend to be autonomous of other disciplines. So things are relevant to philosophy, but philosophy is not always relevant to things.

That's an imprecise way of putting it, since the relevance relation is on assertions, but I hope that abuse doesn't do anything to what I'm saying.

The only way I see that we can get "relevance" to be symmetric here is to define it as such, so it means something like "possibility of making eventual connections." But that seems much too broad, and misses the interesting questions about why we care about relevance in the first place.

The possibility of making eventual connections seems to be the sense of relevance that iteratively asking a question as previously spelled out has, however. Which is to say, asking a series of relevant questions to a statement which must terminate somehow in philosophy would need a more precise demarcation of relevance to - and perhaps relevance of - philosophy to a claim or discipline of study. Otherwise I believe we're left the silly one I wrote down. At least, with reflexivity and transitivity intact.

First, just some housekeeping: We considered whether "Why?" was the actual recursive question, and raised some problems about that. But the way you've formulated it here is better, and still allows a robust sense of relevance, unlike the "What would Kant have thought of that?" example. So let's say that Q( X ) asks, "What is your justification for X?" — J

:up:

You point out the danger that we've done some definitional fast-footwork here. Philosophy (or the context Phil) is being construed as "the demarcation between a fixed set of Q and other sets." Does this mean that the fixed set of Q is only unique in this way? "Why does asking [the Q question] eventually lead to philosophy?" you want to know, and the suspicion is that is does so because we have defined it thus; there is no other reason. — J

Yes. It is quite probable that you end up setting up a question which forces you to terminate in philosophy. But with perhaps no good reason to assume that philosophy has this unique termination property. Like @Srap Tasmaner's psychoanalyst example shows. There needs to be something about the sequence of questions that renders each of them somehow relevant to what they're asked, and the answer to be informative to what it's asked of. That is, the question has to be a "good" question in a nebulous sense and the answer has to be a "good" answer in a nebulous sense.

Repeatedly asking "What is your justification for X?" might be seen as relevant to any claim, as the reasons motivating a claim are ideally articulable by someone who knows them - not that they always, or often, are known or said. The question would need a guarantee that one would always end up in philosophy when asking it.

One way of fleshing that out would mean at some point questions about justification always become philosophical. About the meaning of justification. Here is @Srap Tasmaner again with "I speak English", which you'd also need to parry - why isn't it a good answer? Why isn't it a relevant answer?

If you asked "What is your justification for "I speak English?"?, one could very well answer "I speak English" as a demonstration. But that's not a philosophical remark, it's a statement of fact about the person.

There's another thing to be mindful of when making the question related to justification - if we already come in with pretheoretical intuitions that justification is philosophical in nature and that philosophy concerns itself largely with justification, our pretheoretical intuitions will just make us note a few things. Firstly, we might reject off hand that the chain could terminate with something that looks like a bad justification, like repeating yourself might be - that's a no go, bad justification. Secondly that good justifications resemble explanations of logical principles. And in that case of course you're going to end up with a termination in philosophy, since you've pruned any answers that don't terminate in philosophical justification chit chat away.

Perhaps there are other terminations. If an experiment demonstrated a theory conclusively, you might end up saying "The experiment demonstrated the theory" - which may be the final relevant word on the matter of justifying the claim if "The experiment demonstrated the theory" is justified by the standards of the discipline. In that case asking "What is your justification for (The experiment demonstrated the theory)?" and expecting something on the nature of justification as the only type of relevant answer will just pop you out of the discipline's context and perhaps no longer be a good question.

Thus there seem to be profound and shitty terminations. Profound terminations say something about the relationship of philosophy to other disciplines and vice versa, and perhaps even about the nature of ideas themselves. Shitty terminations will occur when we've set it up the termination in philosophy through unarticulated, or trite, presuppositions regarding what counts as a good answer and what counts as a good question.

But we can perhaps toss away the "good question" thing for now, and grant that "What is your justification for X?" will always be "good" in the appropriate nebulous sense. To gesture in the direction of that nebulous sense, I'll say that a question is good when it reveals something about how what it is asked of is known or supplementary information about what it is asked of. And perhaps we should assume that the answerer plays nicely and just answers truthfully, directly and sincerely every time. No frame shifting on their part.

This thread appeared once before and immediately disappeared. I wonder why. — Vera Mont

It was deleted because.

I can't make sense of what is being asked. — Vera Mont

It's very dense word salad.

@EdwardC - please put more detail into your points and questions. I'm going to close the thread. You can remake something on the topic but please try to make it readable.

unless fdrake or his evil twin were to come along and claim that this is the only way of understanding the issue I raised in the OP. — J

The only way of understanding anything is to assign symbols to bits of it. Paying no attention to the silent process of individuation which allows the symbol to refer to a target. It worries me, but I think I'm joking.