I hear you man. Again, I am familiar with Zizek and Deleuze, and I follow what you're saying. But all those thoughts swarming around a central goal feel to me like expressions of the thing they're describing. They will keep swarming around, tentatively descend, and then rise to swarm around again.

What I most like about Lacan is that he is only interested in people who are interested in their condition. Like it was something that paying attention to could change.
Otherwise, why bother? — Valentinus

True, but any therapist worth their salt is going to be interested in helping their patient to pay attention to their condition. I think the particular aspect of Lacan that makes him appealing to people into philosophy (like us) is his interest in people who are interested in paying attention to their condition as a way of moving toward intellectually modelling it (what number is saying when he talks about moving to 'the analyst's discourse'.) The end result of Lacanian therapy seems to be very close to 'knowing Lacanian psychoanalysis' (of course you have to keep going to the seminars to download the most recent OS update) And this is interesting, granted, but I don't think it's necessarily therapeutically helpful - at best relating your experience to a model is an auxillary step that helps you avoid psychological traps, at worst its entrenching a particularly recalcitrant defense mechanism (namely, intellectualization.)

I very much agree that paying attention is the crux, but there are different ways of paying attention.

Zizek is right about the link between fascinating objet a and the void. The addictive meta-fascination, going back to the same self-experiencing again, and again, and again indicates the hyper-accelerating motion around the void. But what is this void? It is a mode of death; it is an experience of death or absolute loneliness. Likely, since one cannot find ways out, and since one’s social self-affirmation could fail, one’s self starts to vibrate at the same location forcefully. It could be possible to find here the Lacanian split and doubling of ego, expressed by an intensive inner monologue between the interiorized Other and the imaginary self
of the mirror stage or a similar structure ( Althusser’s interpellation). One becomes governed by some model of death or fear of death. So, it could be about fear and the actualization of the transcendent subjectivation scheme. — Number2018

My feeling is that, of the two things you mention, this 'void' is closer to absolute loneliness than death. But I think, at its essence, its an instinctive fear of re-encountering forgotten emotions and memories which are very painful (or a means of delaying encounter with 'pending' emotions built up from things you've lived without fully digesting) . The results of my own self-experimentation lead me to think that the idea of a 'void' is a sort of veil over very complex, differentiated fullnesses. Many of those are complex, differentiated fullnesses of (quite serious) pain. But there are also little pockets of something you might call happiness, or peace, within that pain, and you have to withstand the pain to expand those pockets. Which is often too much, and can lead you to retreat to the same hyper-accelerating around the void stuff. But as it goes on, and you realize you have the capacity to endure the pain (plus the faith that enduring it is meaningfully leading somewhere), it gets a little easer, and you begin to slip up less.

I will try to explain myself. Of course, I like this kind of philosophical stuff. Yet, there are a few more things. Pleasure, all types of enjoyment and self-enjoyment are everywhere. People aspire to achieve happiness through the possession of material goods and ordinary self-affirmation. Many of them experience joy, maybe at least for some while. Unfortunately, for some reason, I am different. Therefore, I try to apply my reading to reconstruct various behavioral models connected to desire theories and then experiment with my situation. For me, there are two significant philosophies of desire: Lacanian and Deleuzian. My self-observation and experience incline me towards Lacan's model. Yet, it does not give any way out since it prioritizes an ultimate traumatic character of desire. Differently, Deleuze asserts the existence of lines of flight towards the unknown and creative connections with the forces from outside. Honestly, sometimes I doubt that either Deleuze or Lacan and Zizek are still relevant to explain what is going on right now. As you said:" There's no need for us, in 2020, to approach these matters as though we're living in Paris between 1940-1980." 'The matters' are dizzily super-fascinating! — Number2018

I sympathize with that. My base-state since ~13 years old has been anhedonia, punctuated by periods of emotional volatility. For me, also, that was the primary draw to Zizek and Deleuze (plus the romance and challenge of reading them.) I mean, I'm glad I'm read them, I think, or at least I wouldn't change anything if I had to go back and do that period of my life again.

But, in my case, the zizekian/lacanian focus on the tragic aspect of desire justified a kind of defeatism (there's nothing more than to accept the bleakness) while the Deleuzian stuff justified the emotional volatility (wild lines of flight, rhizomatic growth, mad-becomings, etc). And interwoven through all of it was some felt urgency, like, for some reason, I had to understand these guys, or be left out in some sort of metaphysical cold. Now, I'm thinking differently, and I guess part of any change is a period where you hit back at the last stage, and this thread is the tail-end of that transition period. It feels more and more like a fading turbulent relationship.

Aye I get that. I was driving at the same thing you've been talking about with my question. Removing the aspects of the theory which look like they should be taken literally makes it just "one interpretive device among others", rather than a structure you'll be compelled to believe by its power to facilitate description of stuff that happens.

Gesturing towards "a decent analogy is how ideological production produces subjectivities", kinda names the space the phenomenon occurs in, but doesn't pin down an account. And if you want an account that's tied to an event, hollowing out the literal aspects of the theory won't do - at one point you care that it's really happening, at one point it's devolved to a metaphor that plays a role in describing an interpretive device. — fdrake

Yeah, & I feel like a sufficient account is something as simple as: sometimes people get hurt so bad that its too painful to focus on how hurt they are, and they have to focus on something outside themselves. This has happened throughout all of history, big time. This also happens in capitalism, for many reasons, just as it happened for many reasons throughout the rest of history. People selling things make use of whatever helps them sell things, so they make use of this too.

The mistake, to my mind, is focusing on that (not-focusing-on being very different from ignoring) There is a way in which focusing on it becomes itself a way of doing: 'someone hurt, focusing on something else' and so just perpetuates the whole thing.

On the contrary, Zizek deals with ‘capitalism’. He utilizes formidable Lacanian, Marxist, and Hegelian theoretical recourses: “this is how the capitalist discourse functions: a subject enthralled by the superego call to excessive enjoyment, and in search of a Master-Signifier that would constrain his/her enjoyment, provide a proper measure of it, prevent its explosion into a deadly excess (of a drug addict, chain-smoker, alcoholic, and other -holics or addicts)… in order to enact the shift from capitalist to analyst’s discourse, one has merely to break the spell of objet a, to recognize beneath the fascinating agalma, the Grail of desire, the void that it covers.” It is Zizek’s project: to move from ‘capitalistic discourse,’ where we unconsciously follow pre-given and pre-programmed affective patterns, to the analyst’s discourse of critical analyses. — Number2018

Oh, I should probably clarify- I've read a good deal of Zizek & Deleuze over the past decade. I was really into both of them, and into trying to synthesize them. So I totally get what you're talking about, and I'm aware that this is how he thinks about things.

But I'm saying: why worry about any of this if it doesn't bring you joy? I've found that, for me, reading Zizek (and many other writers of theory) only led to meta-fascination: fascination with becoming-fascinated. This functions just like any other fascination, but there's a subtle trick to it where, since it makes fascination thematic, it seems to be 'outside' of it, giving you some critical purchase. I think this is pure sleight-of-hand (though I don't think its usually intentionally a sleight of hand, on the authors' part.) People seem to get addicted to the 'discourse', reading about the same cluster of ideas from different angles, never actually changing anything, but going back to the bookshelf again and again and again.

No, for me, it is not about the enjoyment — Number2018

What is it about?

between being a birthling & dropping in down into 'a transcendent Lacan', might there be a 'growth regulator' to steer one along & out of dreaded dysfunctionalities? I'm just asking. abe — abe

I think so, if I follow you. What do you have in mind by 'growth regulator'?

'The infant has a relationship with its mom. It's a complicated relationship - there's intimate touch, exchange of fluids, face-to-face communication, talking. There are intense feelings: love, hate, joy, fear. The baby knows in many many ways who mom is. There are two people in a very particular kind of relationship.'

— csalisbury

So far, primarily, you are right. But when you write:

'The introduction of 'you' as the kid learns language is another element added to the mix. It's another element in a constantly evolving thing.'
— csalisbury

a Lacanian would completely disagree. For Lacan, when the kid enters into the symbolic world,
there is an ultimate and traumatic transformation of a whole system of her relationship with herself and her immediate environment. The transcendent Lacanian scheme manages and directs what

'It can use its understanding of 'you', 'me' and 'I', as it grows, to participate in the world in new ways.'
— csalisbury — Number2018

Oh, I know that Lacan would disagree with what I'm saying & I'm saying further that I think he's just empirically wrong, at least when his model is applied universally. I think that what he's actually describing is something I characterized above, to Street, as 'the structure of fascination.' I don't claim that such a structure (a psychological lobster trap, so to speak) doesn't exist; I myself spent a lot of time there, and occasionally fall back into it. But I also don't think that we can chalk it up to 'capitalism' (Lacan's is one iteration of an ancient structure that far-antedates the late 2nd millennium....you can already find it in the Nag Hammadi) and I think that time spent trying to create a new model to supplant it would be better spent on other things. Certainly most developmental psychologists today aren't operating either within - or in opposition to - Lacan. There's no need for us, in 2020, to approach these matters as though we're living in Paris between 1940-1980.

There is a sort of retro-twilight beauty to gardening old parisian post-structural fads, in the same way a good historical novelist might play with old intellectual tropes (say, Pynchon's Mason & Dixon) but there's no need, at all, to stay here. If you find joy in it, then it is worthwhile; if not, there is no necessity to remain.

If we need to challenge the self-sufficiency and truth of Lacanianism, we should seek models that allow one to understand oneself in a broader social context. I am not sure that Sloterdjic’s critic of the mirror stage (according to your quote)
is sufficient enough. Deleuze and Guattari offer up a set of concept-tools for undoing certain habitual ways of being in the world, and constructing our lives, producing our own subjectivity. They aim to dismantle and then reconstruct Lacanian models of production of subjectivity as well as the most prosaic modes of our life. Their paradigmatic example is the bouncing balls from Kafka’s ‘Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor’. The proposed model lays the ground for the apprehension of the constitutive subjective split of the mirror stage and the case of ‘Blomfield’. — Number2018

Deleuze & Guattari have all sorts of useful stuff, much of which I love, but they also have a self-consciously radical tone, which, as in a manifesto, loves to play 'this is absolutely bad, this is absolutely good' games... & this is perfectly calibrated, whether intentionally or not, to tap into the psyches of people very hungry for maps of good vs. bad ways of thinking/being/living. The upshot of that is, partially, absurd stuff like Chomsky's linguistics being assimilated gloopily to other idee fixes of the authors, so that his technical analysis is read as an emanation of whatever malignant metaphysical power also emanates the centralized french state. But it comes out in all sorts of ways. Just as Deleuze read old thinkers against themselves, it may be helpful to read deleuze against deleuze, especially when he's paired with guattari.

All the militant stuff is unneccessary, and if being militant is necessary in your life, or community, then seeking necessity in philosophers is almost certainly a way of delaying confrontation with that real necessity.

I think the self is an organizing idea. It's an aspect of rationality which can emerge really early for some people and late for others. I think the distinction between "me" and "not-me" goes hand in hand with other distinctions like between real and not-real. It's long been accompanied by the idea of a double image where one side of the self is critical or narcissistic about the other side. But that's just the seed of the distinction.

It gets fleshed out more fully by all the little signals we emit and receive about who we are in the community, and then who the community is, which is usually about morality, either heroic or downtrodden. — frank

Even before the birth of the rational-self, everyone has an instinctive sense of how their presence changes the vibe of a room, or an intuitive understanding of who (which friends and family), when you move toward them with this or that feeling, will result in a change of emotional landscape. Like, if you think back to being a kid around your parents, around your grandparents, on the playground etc. You're *modulating* yourself, first and foremost, in order to try to find a kind of emotional harmony. There's still a self here, and its pre-rational, at least in some sense.

This is along the lines of the exchange of little signals you're talking about. I want to say that theyre felt almost musically at first, as modulations in the environment. Only later do you sort of sit back and make a risk-aware portfolio, always diversifying, taking into account what actions, on average, elicit what responses.

The rational 'self' seems like a little icefloe floating on top of the earlier stuff. Its sort of a risk-management thing. I think of the self as a universal, default self-presentation. Even then, its always contextual: we show different aspects in different situations (we diversify, we hedge.) But so much of what we're building on, at this level, is blackbox for rational self-understanding. The self has at least one foot in something that precedes x/not-x.

Regarding the mirror stage - what about people who're born blind, though? If seeing your own reflection is a necessary event in the formation of a distinction between self and world/other etc. — fdrake

It's a knock-down argument if Lacan is taken literally, but

(And I have to be honest and say I don't know him inside and out, only mostly through Zizek, though I do own a few Lacan books I've read a couple parts of)

but I I feel like the rebuttal is that Lacan didn't mean literally a mirror* (and, if he did mean it literally, it can be recuperated & he knew all along & either recuperated it himself or waited for commentators to recuperate it) but what he meant was some unified 'thing' that the inchoate infant projects wholeness onto and says 'this is me.' As Number2018 was saying, this could be a 'me' or a 'you' or an 'i' -- all the stuff we can associate with what Althusser calls 'interpellation.'

My feeling is that what's being talked about in 'the mirror stage' or 'interpellation' is really close to what James C Scott in Seeing Like a State calls 'legibility,' i.e. the clearing away of noise to get at a nice, digitally pristine, identity. But there's something wrong about bringing that level into early development. It brings it too deep.

I want to say it confuses 'initiation in the tribe' with 'having a sense of who you are' which occurs much earlier. And a proper 'initiation into the tribe' weds 'a sense of who you are' to 'symbolic participant in the community.'

If you read between the lines, theres an aporia here. Or something. But It's not just capitalism. Huh. That's what I got for now.

-----
* all of what follows is tongue-in-cheek, in some ways, iimo Lacan was a malignant narcisssist, who instinctively made use of the infinite potential for reinterpretation

Hey I'm not gonna push. If you feel that was a satisfying answer, fair enough. I've registered my response to it.

Necessary because the fortunes of our concepts are derivitave of the fortunes of the world at large, and without tracking the latter you can't track the purchase that concepts have on it. Concepts like the imaginary and the symbolic and so on have their own degree of consistency and autonomy from the real, and the way in which they track the world can't be taken for granted. The historicization and 'anthropologization' of concepts - especially 'developmental' ones - is necessary make them more than speculative thought experiments or just-so stories. — StreetlightX

Eh, can you spell it out for me though? This feels very just-so. Like what's a good example? I think an example would really help here.

I see what you're saying, but what do these theoretical models and terms add here. How does it enrich?

The infant has a relationship with its mom. It's a complicated relationship - there's intimate touch, exchange of fluids, face-to-face communication, talking. There are intense feelings: love, hate, joy, fear. The baby knows in many many ways who mom is. There are two people in a very particular kind of relationship. The introduction of 'you' as the kid learns language is another element added to the mix. It's another element in a constantly evolving thing. It can use its understanding of 'you', 'me' and 'I', as it grows, to participate in the world in new ways. As with anything. But the 'you' was already prepared in an exchange of attention. Just a mom and a kid paying attention to one another in a particular way.

Isn't this enough? What do we gain in understanding by adding the rest?

A simple, but useful metaphor. If you don't toss your ring in Mount Doom (If you can't bring yourself to offer a meaningful sacrifice) then as the years and decades move on, you slowly become gollumized.

Of course tossing the ring, means you can no longer become invisible to the things chasing you, you have to confront them.

Hey, cool, glad you found & liked it. It does work as a quick, stand-alone little piece.

Really nice. What I would go on to further emphasize though, is the necessity of appending to all this a 'materialist' analysis of all this: i.e. the 'primacy' of the one or the other (imaginary or symbolic) should be thought not just in ideal, stadial-teleological terms, but also with respect to the conditions which 'bring out', as it were, the one of the other in a sociological setting. To use a too-obvious example, 'identity politics' is precisely what happens when imaginary identification becomes the primary mode of political practice, say. Wilden also has some incredible stuff on how money functions in the imaginary mode:

"The special characteristic of commodities, however, is that one particular commodity of the original circulation of use value (in which objects are simply different from each other) is thrown out of the system to become the Marxian "general equivalent of exchange": this is gold or silver or shells, or some such similar commodity. There is no such general equivalent in Symbolic exchange, although there is exchange value. The general equivalent is characteristic only of Imaginary exchange. The general characteristic of exchange value is that it is the SIGN OF A RELATION (as in language). But in imaginary exchange, the general equivalent turns all exchange value into the SIGN OF A THING ... In our culture, money does not represent a relation between people as does the 'symbolic object'. As the valorization of an ENTITY, money under capitalism represents Imaginary relations between things, and the 'things' it represents are the 'clear and distinct' people who are exchanged - as alienated objects - in the system".

This is the kind of stuff I love. — StreetlightX

Right, this is the thing.

For me, the temperature changes notably when 'the necessity of appending to all this' & 'should be thought' and similar ways of speaking enter in.]Necessary why? Should be thought, according to whom and for what reason?

What's being got at in that Wilden quote is something I'd describe as 'the structure of fascination.' Fascination is a gravitational force : it pulls you toward one thing at the expense of all other things. Fascination is also an enervating force. It saps your capacity for action in order to sustain itself as fascination.Something seems charged with a mysterious power. It seems important to keep your attention focused on it, to trace its contours, to hum it like a kind of refrain. It's something you always feel like you almost get, but are possibly in danger of losing so you keep returning back to it. You have to trace its outlines again and again to remind yourself of what it is. It's definitely what's important and it's always tip of your tongue. Sometimes you get it for a second, but then it slips away. You know for sure you had it, and you still feel like you almost have it, so you return to it again, wherever you see its form crop up, to retrace it.

I think the most subtle form that fascination can take is fascination with the story of becoming-fascinated.

If you draw your attention away for a second then a kind of thought pops up: 'remember it's important and necessary to pay attention to the story of how one become fascinated'.

I think another key indicator that a particular thing is happening here are weird inversions, where there is a tendency to say the opposite of what you're doing. How is the necessity packaging itself? As the avoidance of teleological and 'stadial' ways of thinking. But, having got its foot in the door (via the identity politics reference) what happens next? A teleological and stadial account that moves toward 'our culture', where 'our culture' = a ripened form of fascination.

It feels like the anthropological marxist stuff is here a backdrop for a staging of the 'story of fascination' (can also be staged in a Lacanian psychoanalytic setting, in a linguistic setting, in a systems setting etc) but its always the same story: fascination exerting fascination by describing a movement toward becoming-fascinated. It's rather ingenious, there's a kind of devious cleverness to it.

I think we might be close to the same page. I added a bunch of edits above just as you were posting. Sloterdijk is interesting in this way: he doesn't seem to ground his positive approach by reaching toward unity in the full oceanic sense. It's differentiation all the way down for him. Or more accurately: metamorphoses in spatial (and also acoustic!) webs of relations. He traces psychological development as a cascade of differentiation founded on attachment theory (or: 'intimacy') throughout Bubbles (with a lot of tongue-in-cheek-but-simultaneously-reverent riffs on Heideggerean being-in stuff)

The idea is something like this: It's only from a paranoid ego's perspective that everything of itself outside its imaginary identification is just undifferentiated chaos. The paranoid ego that thinks like this is a particularly embattled psyche. (The chapters leading up to this are a very persuasive (imo) model of a 'subject's' genesis. The guiding light is attachment theory. ) If you spend time with kids from infancy to birth (oldest brother of five, here!), it's clear and simple that there is a continuity and growth that builds on itself all the way up through and that you don't need a dialectics of failure to ensure integration in an intersubjective order. However it's also the case that disrupted continuity and growth (disrupted attachment, at essence) will lead to over-reliance on the type of rigid psychological developments Wilder is talking about.)

This is cool but I wonder how much of this is beating on an open door. The mirror stage, qua stage, is for Lacan marked by failure from the beginning - the integration never truly happens, which is why the subject is then further propelled, as it were, into the symbolic, where there is some measure of compensation for the failure of identification at the level of the imaginary. The conditional that Sloterdijk lays out - "If it were genuinely the case that one could always find a self-blinding imaginary element of this type at the bottom of a self, it would at least explain why the subject in a Lacanian universe only finds wellbeing, or at least order, in the symbolic" - is, as far as I can tell, granted by Lacan. — StreetlightX

Oh yeah, I agree that Lacan would allow it. & Sloterdijk would agree. It makes sense Lacan would grant that; the quote wouldn't make sense if you supposed he wouldn't. Sloterdijk is talking about what Lacan offers of his own volition, what he thinks is the case.

The conditional that you quote is operating like this: If you accept Lacan's premises, his conclusions follow. The throughline here is Sloterdijk suggesting that Lacan's premises are an illegitimate universalization by a hurt person of his particular hurt. The key to understanding that 'if' is the sentence before it: 'For every ego formation that took place in this way via a flight to the visual illusion of intactness, one could indeed predict that paranoid instability that Lacan, based on his self-analysis, sought to present as a general characteristic of the psyche in the cultures of all periods."

Okay. But I'm not locking anyone out or fortifying against new, anticipated, arguments for the proposition. I'm just calling it out as an incoherent concept fallaciously arrived at. Like saying 'the atoms of strawberries taste like strawberries'. :nerd: Feel free is dispel the analogy and correct my criticisms. My "fortress", csal, is the wide open wild spaces of where sound inferences roam free ... like apex predators. :smirk: — 180 Proof

Okay. But I'm not locking anyone out or fortifying against new, anticipated, arguments for the proposition. I'm just calling it out as an incoherent concept fallaciously arrived at. — 180 Proof

Yeah, I get the apex predator thing. Maybe a better analogy would be a fortress + good logistics + divine armor + divine weapons. The Iliad complex: a righteous cause, tight tactics, traceable lineage of armory, gods on your side.

Meriones gave Odysseus bow, quiver and sword and over his head he set a helmet made of leather. Inside it was crisscrossed taut with many thongs, outside the gleaming teeth of a white-tusked boar ran round and round in rows stitched neat and tight - a master craftsman's work, the cap in its center padded soft with felt. The Wolf Himself Autolycus lifted that splendid headgear out of Eleon once, he stole it from Ormenus' son Amyntor years ago, breaching his sturdy palace walls one night, then passed it on to Amphidamas, Cythera-born, Scandia-bound. Amphidamas gave it to Molus, a guest-gift once that Molus gave Meriones his son to wear in battle. And now it encased Odysseus' head, snug around his brows"

There's a whole machinery that lets the heroes get real nasty - something subtends their courage, if you like. Homer loves lion and sheep metaphors, but the heroes that those lion-metaphors apply to only get to the lion-point after all the 'secretly aided by gods" stuff. Maybe the difference between us and, say, Dimoedes is that Diomedes would never brag about his confrontation with the void, because everyone would laugh him out of the room. You only boast about confronting the void, if youve lost some confrontation. The loss irks you and then you make your experience of being-knocked-down a victory. I mean this is zero-level compensation. Sometimes I think you let your Brassier drown out your Nietzsche.

At some level, 'apex predator' on a forum is just a metamorphosis (metastasis?) of choosing badass anime fighters for one's avatar. Boys in a Sandbox, right? Here is my homebase: this action figure is here and says this, and this action figure is here and says that, and etc etc. The 'Apex Predator' thing is always based in the fortress, eventually.

Ok.

I don't want to get into the weeds here. You can parse that as fear of being shown wrong, if you like. I've stopped wanting to think things through by defending against people who think of themselves as apex predators, against kids who have the best action figures. The problem with the strawberry thing you bring up is that of course the taste of strawberries is emergent. But I think it less useful to argue for panpsychism by explaining why that is the case than to ask why you think the atoms-like-strawberries is a good 'in', a knock-down reductio (it's patently not) rather than a move by a self-styled apex predator characterizing a panpsychist sheep's thought (strawberries, curious, why that particular thing?)

My response isn't ""about building fortresses", just laying my cards on the table so we can dispense with bluffs and bluster and call everyone else's hand. It's facile, at best (like angelology), thus panpsychism's "popularity". So smoke 'em if you get 'em, peeps. — 180 Proof

I disagree with you - it is building fortresses; if we're talking cards: I call your bluff.

That said, I have no interest in tangling with you outside that. If the bluff works hereafter, I won't be tapping the bluffed on the shoulder to say 'consider this.'

Is it a generational thing? Not to get too psychological, but when people insist on being strong, there could be some underlying fear.

The SEP says the peak of materialism was in the 1970s. Hmm. — frank

I'm not sure. I think there's a thing of panpsychism=new age = intellecutaly-limp. There has to be a distance from the hippies, for sure.

As I post, I see that @180 Proof has stepped in with Bolds and references to Spinoza & references to his own posts & named fallacies. I think that illustrates better what I'm talking about that anything I could say would. That's about building fortresses.

I think we're moving away from needing to stay in fortresses, for whatever reason.

I'm a panpsychist because I think it's the most economical solution to a lot of thorny problems. But presumably I'm also in some ways a 'case' illustrating a general trend. I think there has been an implicit nebula of attitudes around the question, where being a panpsychist means you're 'soft' or not ' brave enough to accept the meaninglessness/contingency of consciousness' etc & that's a bummer. I think that nebula is fading, concomitant with shifts in cultural attitudes surrounding what a Serious Person believes, and that may account for some of it. Of course, the waning of a [Serious Person] wall around a possible solution doesn't recommend that solution, in-itself, only makes it less knee-jerk rejectable. You still have to articulate what you're trying to articulate. But I think the barriers are coming down.

Hey, congrats on your gains. Sentiment has been very bullish lately, so hopefully you got in at a good time. Personally, I've been "in" since late 2016 and I can assure you that the volatility can be absolutely face-ripping. In March we saw roughly a 50% drop in a day. If you hold onto your investment for over a year there's tax advantages to that, i.e. you'll get to keep more of your profit.

I actually didn't buy my first bitcoin with the intention of holding onto it or treating it as an investment. Bitcoin was simply the best way to move money around the poker sites given all the onerous bank restrictions on sending money to them. It's definitely the favored currency on those sites as well now: Censorship-resistant, decentralized, borderless. When you hold your own bitcoin in your own wallet that bitcoin is truly yours - it's not being held onto by a bank or a company that gives you an IOU. It's yours and no one else can access it, not even governments. What else falls into that category? You can send it anywhere you want at any time you want and no one can censor or reverse it. It's truly unique. — BitconnectCarlos

Thanks! I'm excited for the gains but trying my best not to too closely follow the change in valuation (reasoning that if I get too excited about the rise, I'll get too worried about the drop, trying to keep even keel.). I really like your story because you don't hear enough from those who adopted bitcoin because it's useful - because it works.

OK,

This thread is back! Again people who basically are into Philosophy have become interested in talking about Bitcoin/Cryptocurrencies. Last discussions were 2-3 years ago. Interesting actually, that this is the only investment that has been talked about here.

This thread is the perfect "canary in the coal mine" indicator: Just look at when people have written on this thread and what where the bitcoin price has been then.

(bit old graph, now I guess over 17 000 USD so back again where it was years ago..when this thread was active) — ssu

I suppose there's two ways to look at that graph. One is a (fair) assessment ala: 'here we go again.' The other is that if you were a long term holder pre 2017 and held on, then the brutal crash following the bubble, in the long run, didn't sink your investment. You seem likely to end up ahead despite the 2018 (and covid-2020) crash.

I agree entirely that the best time to invest in bitcoin is when it isn't being talked about. I didn't invest anticipating a bull run like this, and its a happy accident my investment coincided with this sort of rapid appreciation. I wish I had come to the decision to invest earlier on, because my rationale didn't involve thinking it would spike again like this. I anticipate this to go up up up, generate interest (media coverage etc), attract a lot of FOMO investors looking to get-rich-quick, and then crash again - BUT peak at a higher point, then crash to a level higher than what it leveled out at last time.

The only good rationale for investing in bitcoin is learning and appreciating the value of the technology - trying to buy on the dips and sell on the peaks to get-rich-overnight might work occasionally, but is more likely to fuck you up.

In in July, good lord. A hearty -and envy-tinged - congratulations.

Agree very much with all of what you've said (& am going to take you up on that PM offer shortly, I need some help with wallets)

I do think this is one of the rare cases where philosophy dovetails quite nicely with worldly concerns & wanted to put out there some of the things I've been scribbling on notepads during my downtime. I think you're wise not to spiel, but I can't help myself:

Alongside the technical bitcoin stuff, I want to understand what money is and why it has value. I feel like the core thing is:

I Money has value because people will accept it as payment
&
II People will accept it as payment, because they know other people will accept it as payment in turn.

Which leads to: why would people think other people would accept it?

I feel like the answer to that is

I It's scarce
&
II (building of off I) it's hard to simulate (fake)

So: metal is a prime early candidate. It's rare. It's near-impossible to fake. & those conditions hold wherever you go. (Plus, to dust off the musty marxist terminology, rare metals had little use-value compared to other bearers of value) Of course, if you go ahead and colonize argentina & pump metal into the market, that can throw a wrench in things.

The obvious problem is how cumbersome it is. Plus, how easily you can be dispossesed if you're tromping around a world as violent as the metal-currency world was.

Enter Banknotes, redeemable for a certain portion of gold (from what I understand they used to be redeemable only if you were the original depositor, only later became redeemable to whoever holds the notes). The circulation of gold ('s value), without actually circulating gold, allows for dramatic changes in how credit works & we're off to the races.

With the introduction of redeemable notes, you're also introducing trust in institutions. Accepting a banknote means you have faith that there is a stable institution that you can go to that will give you gold for your paper.. You're implicitly showing faith that there are certain institutions that will remain stable within the flux of history.

Trust in institutional stability gets its foot-in-the-door there. As it establishes itself, it becomes central in the shift to fiat. The value of fiat currency is entirely tied to faith in the state & because of that is totally linked to how that state fares on the world-stage. Which is ok early on in the life-cycle of a reserve currency; less palatable when interest rates drop to zero and there is no way to pump up the economy besides redistribution (which won't happen without bloodshed) or mass-printing of paper money. In the broad scope of things, holding fiat feels kind of like betting on a state-combatant in a historical struggle. That's fine when your lifespan is snuggly nestled in an era where your chosen combatant is at his prime; less so when he's wheezing and rambling about the good old days and trying to sell you DVDs of his best fights.

Ok, that's my scribbles for 'Context for Bitcoin's Significance'. To anyone who's read this far: thank you & I'm sorry.

I'm in, money wise, and almost an ideological convert, I think.

After reading about reserve currency cycles (& with corresponding concern about the sheer amount of US currency being printed since 2008, but especially in the past year) converted a sizable percentage of my modest savings to bitcoin at the end of last month. Crypto's notoriously volatile and I know not to make too much of a sharp valuation-shift in a short time-window but the rapid appreciation of the investment was still dizzying enough for someone who has never made money on anything to lead me, effervescent, to try to talk some old friends into getting some. Basically I just wanted to share the excitement. One friend I talked to said he was interested, but had never heard it explained in a way that he was satisfied he understood it enough to invest it in. And I realized I couldn't explain it well enough, because I don't understand it well enough either. I've spent the past couple weeks trying to learn about it and make sense of (1) its structure and, just as importantly, (2) why that structure is meaningful. I logged on tonight hoping there would be a thread open to talk about this stuff.

Here's a challenge: if you had a 15 minute pitch to explain what bitcoin is and why that makes it valuable, what would you say? (If pressed, I will give my scribbly sketch first, but I am curious to hear someone else's take and build off of - & with - it)

[end of poem, book, thread]

A breeze like the turning of a page
Brings back your face: the moment
Takes such a big bite out of the haze
Of pleasant intuition it comes after.
The locking into place is "death itself,"
As Berg said of a phrase in Mahler's Ninth;
Or, to quote Imogen in Cymbeline, "There cannot
Be a pinch in death more sharp than this," for,
Though only an exercise or tactic, it carries
The momentum of a conviction that had been building.
Mere forgetfulness cannot remove it
Nor wishing bring it back, as long as it remains
The white precipitate of its dream
In the climate of sighs flung across our world,
A cloth over a birdcage. But it is certain that
What is beautiful seems so only in relation to a specific
Life, experienced or not, channeled into some form
Steeped in the nostalgia of a collective past.
The light sinks today with an enthusiasm
I have known elsewhere, and known why
It seemed meaningful, that others felt this way
Years ago. I go on consulting
This mirror that is no longer mine
For as much vacancy as is to be
My portion this time. And the vase is always full
Because there is only just so much room
And it accommodates everything. The sample
One sees is not to be taken as
---
Merely that, but as everything as it
May be imagined outside time - not as a gesture
But as all, in the refined assimilable state.
But what is this universe the porch of
As it veers in and out, back and forth,
Refusing to surround us and still the only
Thing we can see? Love once
Tipped the scales but now is shadowed, invisible,
Though mysteriously present, around somewhere.
But we know it cannot be sandwiched
Between two adjacent moments, that its windings
Lead nowhere except to further tributaries
And that these empty themselves in a vague
Sense of something that can never be known
Even though it seems likely that each of us
Knows what it is and is capable of
Communicating it two the other. But the look
Some wear as a sign makes one want to
Push forward ignoring the apparent
Naïveté of the attempt, not caring
That no one is listening, since the light
Has been lit once and for all in their eyes
And is present, unimpaired, a permanent anomaly,
Awake and silent. On the surface of it
There seems no special reason why that light
Should be focused by love, or why
The city falling with its beautiful suburbs
Into space always less clear, less defined,
Should read as the support of its progress,
The easel upon which the drama unfolded
To its own satisfaction and to the end
Of our dreaming, as we had never imagined
It would end, in worn daylight with the painted
Promise showing through as a gage, a bond.
This nondescript, never-to-be defined daytime is
---
The secret of where it takes place
And we can no longer return to the various
Conflicting statements gathered, lapses of memory
Of the principal witnesses. All we know
Is that we are a little early, that
Today has that special, lapidary
Todayness that the sunlight reproduces
Faithfully in casting twig-shadows on blithe
Sidewalks. No previous day would have been like this.
I used to think they were all alike,
That the present always looked the same to everybody
But this confusing drains away as one
Is always cresting into one's present.
Yet the "poetic," straw-colored space
Of the long corridor that leads back to the painting,
Its darkening opposite - is this
Some figment of "art," not to be imagined
As real, let alone special? Hasn't it too its lair
In the present we are always escaping from
And falling back into, as the waterwheel of days
Pursues its uneventful, even serene course?
I think it is trying to say it is today
And we must get out of it even as the public
Is pushing through to to the museum now so as to
Be out by closing time. You can't live there.
The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how:
Secrets of wash and finish that took a lifetime
To learn and are reduced to the status of
Black-and-white illustrations in a book where colorplates
Are rare. That is, all time
Reduces to no special time. No one
Alludes to the change; to do so might
Involve calling attention to oneself
Which would augment the dread of not getting out
---
Before having seen the whole collection
(Except for the sculptures in the basement:
They are where they belong).
Our time gets to be veiled, compromised
By the portrait's will to endure. It hints at
Our own, which we were hoping to keep hidden.
We don't need paintings or
Doggerel written by mature poets when
The explosion is so precise, so fine.
Is there any point even in acknowledging
The existence of all that? Does it
Exist? Certain the leisure to
Indulge stately pastimes doesn't,
Any more. Today has no margins, the event arrives
Flush with its edges, is of the same substance,
Indistinguishable. "Play" is something else;
It exists, in a society specifically
Organized as a demonstration of itself.
There is no other way, and those assholes
Who would confuse everything with their mirror games
Which seem to multiply stakes and possibilities, or
At least confuse issues by means of an investing
Aura that would corrode the architecture
Of the whole in a haze of suppressed mockery,
Are beside the point. They are out of the game,
Which doesn't exist until they are out of it.
It seems like a very hostile universe
But as the principle of each individual thing is
Hostile to, exists at the expense of all the others
As philosophers have often pointed out, at least
This thing, the mute, undivided present,
Has the justification of logic, which
In this instance isn't a bad thing
Or wouldn't be, if the way of telling
---
Didn't somehow intrude, twisting the end result
Into a caricature of itself. This always
Happens, as in the game where
A whispered phrase passed around the room
Ends up as something completely different.
It is the principle that makes works of art so unlike
What the artist intended. Often he finds
He has omitted the thing he started out to say
In the first place. Seduced by flowers,
Explicit pleasures, he blames himself (though
Secretly satisfied with the result), imagining
He had a say in the matter and exercised
An option of which he was hardly conscious,
Unaware that necessity circumvents such resolutions
So as to create something new
For itself, that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being. Parmigianino
Must have realized this as he worked at his
Life-obstructing task. One is forced to read
The perfectly plausible accomplishment of a purpose
Into the smooth, perhaps even bland (but so
Enigmatic) finish. Is there anything
To be serious about beyond this otherness
That gets included in the most ordinary
Forms of daily activity, changing everything
Slightly and profoundly, and tearing the matter
Of creation, any creation, not just artistic creation
Out of our hands, to install it on some monstrous, near
Peak, too close to ignore, too far
For one to intervene? This otherness, this
"Not-being-us" is all there is to look at
---
In the mirror, though no one can say
How it came to be this way. A ship
Flying unknown colors has entered the harbor.
You are allowing extraneous matters
To break up your day, cloud the focus
Of the crystal ball. Its scene drifts away
Like vapor scattered on the wind. The fertile
Thought-associations that until now came
So easily, appear no more, or rarely. Their
Colorings are less intense, washed out
By autumn rains and winds, spoiled, muddied,
Given back to you because they are worthless.
Yet we are such creatures of habit that their
Implications are still around en permanence, confusing
Issues. To be serious about sex
Is perhaps one way, but the sands are hissing
As they approach the beginning of the big slide
Into what happened. This past
Is now here: the painter's
Reflected face, in which we linger, receiving
Dreams and inspirations on an unassigned
Frequency, but the hues have turned metallic,
The curves and edges are not so rich. Each person
Has one big theory to explain the universe
But it doesn't tell the whole story
And in the end it is what is outside him
That matters, to him and especially to us
Who have been given no help whatever
In decoding our own man-size quotient and must rely
On second-hand knowledge. Yet I Know
That no one else's taste is going to be
Any help, and might well as well be ignored.
Once it seemed so perfect - gloss on the fine
Freckled skin, lips moistened as though about to part
Releasing speech, and the familiar look
---
Of clothes and furniture that one forgets.
This could have been our paradise: exotic
Refuge within an exhausted world, but that wasn't
In the cards, because it couldn't have been
The point. Aping naturalness may be the first step
Toward achieving an inner calm
But it is the first step only, and often
Remains a frozen gesture of welcome etched
On the air materializing behind it,
A convention. And we have really
No time for these, except to use them
For kindling. The sooner they are burnt up
The better for the roles we have to play.
Therefore I beseech you, withdraw that hand,
Offer it no longer as shield or greeting,
The shield of a greeting, Francesco:
There is room for one bullet in the chamber:
Our looking through the wrong end
Of the telescope as you fall back at a speed
Faster than that of light to flatten ultimately
Among the features of the room, an invitation
Never mailed, the "it was all a dream"
Syndrome, though the "all" tells tersely
Enough how it wasn't. Its existence
Was real, though troubled, and the ache
Of this waking dream can never drown out
The diagram still sketched on the wind,
Chosen, meant for me and materialized
In the disguising radiance of my room.
We have seen the city; it is the gibbous
Mirrored eye of an insect. All things happen
On its balcony and are resumed within
But the action is the cold, syrupy flow
Of a pageant. One feels too confined,
Sifting the April sunlight for clues,
In the mere stillness of the ease of its
Parameter. The hand holds no chalk
And each part of the whole falls off
And cannot know it knew, except
Here and there, in cold pockets
Of remembrance, whispers out of time.

No, You’re a shit stain! This forum is falling apart.

The shadow of the city injects its own
Urgency: Rome where Francesco
Was at work during the Sack: his inventions
Amazed the soldiers who burst in on him;
They decided to spare his life, but he left soon after;
Vienna where the painting is today, where
I saw it with Pierre in the summer of 1959; New York
Where I am now, which is a logarithm
Of other cities. Our landscape
Is alive with filiations, shuttlings;
Business is carried on by look, gesture,
Hearsay. It is another life to the city,
The backing of the looking glass of the
Unidentified but precisely sketched studio. It wants
To siphon off the life of the studio, deflate
Its mapped space to enactments, island it.
That operation has been temporarily stalled
But something new is on the way, a new preciosity
In the wind. Can you stand it,
Francesco? Are you strong enough for it?
---
This wind brings what it knows not, is
Self-propelled, blind, has no notion
Of itself. It is inertia that once
Acknowledged saps all activity, secret or public:
Whispers of the words that can't be understood
But can be felt, a chill, a blight
Moving outward along the capes and peninsulas
Of your nervures and so to the archipelagoes
And to the bathed, aired secrecy of the open sea.
This is its negative side. Its positive side is
Making you notice life and the stresses
That only seemed to go away, but now,
As this new mode questions, are seen to be
Hastening out of style. If they are to become classics
They must decide which side they are on.
Their reticence has undermined
The urban scenery, made its ambiguities
Look willful and tired, the games of an old man.
What we need now is this unlikely
Challenger pounding on the gates of an amazed
Castle. Your argument, Francesco,
Had begun to grow stale as no answer
Or answers were forthcoming. If it dissolves now
Into dust, that only means its time had come
Some time ago, but look now, and listen:
It may be that another life is stocked there
In recesses no one knew of; that it,
Not we, are the change; that we are in fact it
If we could get back to it, relive some of the way
It looked, tour our faces to the globe as it sets
And still be coming out all right:
Nerves normal, breath normal. Since it is a metaphor
Made to include us, we are a part of it and
Can live in it as in fact we have done,
---
Only leaving our minds bare for questioning
We now see will not take place at random
But in an orderly way that means to menace
Nobody --The normal way things are done,
Like the concentric growing up of days
Around a life: Correctly, if you think about it.

As I start to forget it
It presents its stereotype again
But it is an unfamiliar stereotype, the face
Riding at anchor, issued from hazards, soon
To accost others, "rather angel than man" (Vasari).
Perhaps an angel looks like everything
We have forgotten, I mean forgotten
Things that don't seem familiar when
We meet them again, lost beyond telling,
Which were ours once. This would be the point
Of invading the privacy of this man who
"Dabbled in alchemy, but whose wish
Here was not to examine the subtleties of art
In a detatched, scientific spirit: he wished through them
To impart the sense of novelty and amazement to the spectator"
(Freedberg). Later portraits such as the Uffizi
"Gentlemen," the Borghese "Young Prelate" and
The Naples "Antea" issue from Mannerist
Tensions, but here, as Freedberg points out,
The surprise, the tension are in the concept
Rather than its realization.
The consonance of the High Renaissance
Is present, though distorted by the mirror.
What is novel is the extreme care in rendering
The velleities of the rounded reflecting surface
(It is the first mirror portrait),
So that you could be fooled for a moment
Before you realize the reflection
Isn't yours. You feel then like one of those
Hoffman characters who have been deprived
Of a reflection, except that the whole of me
---
Is seen to be supplanted by the strict
Otherness of the painter in his
Other room. We have surprised him
At work, but no, he has surprised us
As he works. The picture is almost finished,
The surprise almost over, as when one looks out,
Startled by a snowfall which even now is
Ending in specks and sparkles of snow.
It happened when you were inside, asleep,
And there is no reason why you should have
Been awake for it, except that the day
Is ending and it will be hard for you
To get to sleep tonight, at least until late.

Tomorrow is easy, but today is uncharted,
Desolate, reluctant as any landscape
To yield what are laws of perspective
After all only to the painter's deep
Mistrust, a weak instrument though
Necessary. Of course some things
Are possible, it knows, but it doesn't know
Which ones. Some day we will try
To do as many things as our possible
And perhaps we shall succeed at a handful
Of them, but this will not have anything
To do with what is promised today, our
Landscape sweeping out from us to disappear
On the horizon. Today enough of a cover burnishes
To keep the supposition of promises together
In one piece of surface, letting one ramble
Back home from them so that these
Even stronger possibilities can remain
---
Whole without being tested. Actually
The skin of the bubble-chamber's as tough as
Reptile eggs; everything gets "programmed" there
In due course: more keeps getting included
Without adding to the sum, and just as one
Gets accustomed to a noise that
Kept one awake but no longer does,
So the room contains this flow like an hourglass
Without varying in climate or quality
(Except perhaps to brighten bleakly and almost
Invisibly, in a focus sharpening toward death -more
Of this later.) What should be the vacuum of a dream
Becomes continually replete as the source of dreams
Is being tapped so that this one dream
May wax, flourish like a cabbage rose,
Defying sumptuary law, leaving us
To awake and try to begin living in what
Has now become a slum. Sydney Freedberg in his
Parmigianino says of it: "Realism in this portrait
No longer produces an objective truth, but a bizarria....
However its distortion does not create
A feeling of disharmony....The forms retain
A strong measure of ideal beauty," because
Fed by our dreams, so inconsequential until one day
We notice the hole they left. Now their importance
If not their meaning is plain. They were to nourish
A dream which includes them all, as they are
Finally reversed in the accumulating mirror.
They seemed strange because we couldn't actually see them.
And we realize this only at a point where they lapse
Like a wave breaking on a rock, giving up
Its shape in a gesture which expresses that shape.
The forms retain a strong measure of ideal beauty
As they forage in secret on our idea of distortion.
Why be unhappy with this arrangement, since
---
Dreams prolong us as they are absorbed?
Something like living occurs, a movement
Out of the dream into its codification.

The balloon pops, the attention
Turns dully away. Clouds
In the puddle stir up into sawtoothed fragments.
I think of the friends
Who came to see me, of what yesterday
Was like. A peculiar slant
Of memory that intrudes on the dreaming model
In the silence of the studio as he considers
Lifting the pencil to the self-portrait.
How many people came and stayed a certain time,
Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you
Like light behind windblown fog and sand,
filtered and influenced by it, until no part
Remains that is surely you. Those voices in the dusk
Have told you all and still the tale goes on
In the form of memories deposited in irregular
Clumps of crystals. Whose curved hand controls,
Francesco, the turning seasons and the thoughts
That peel off and fly away at breathless speeds
Like the last stubborn leaves ripped
From wet branches? I see in this only the chaos
Of your round mirror which organizes everything
Around the polestar of your eyes which are empty,
Know nothing, dream but reveal nothing.
I feel the carousel starting slowly
And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,
Photographs of friends, the windows and the trees
Merging in one neutral band that surrounds
Me on all sides, everywhere I look.
And I cannot explain the action of leveling,
Why it should all boil down to one
Uniform substance, a magma of interiors.
My guide in these matters is your self,
Firm, oblique, accepting everything with the same
Wraith of a smile, and as time speeds up so that it is soon
---
Much later, I can know only the straight way out,
The distance between us. Long ago
The strewn evidence meant something,
The small accidents and pleasures
Of the day as it moved gracelessly on,
A housewife doing chores. Impossible now
To restore those properties in the silver blur that is
The record of what you accomplished by sitting down
"With great art to copy all that you saw in the glass"
So as to perfect and rule out the extraneous
Forever. In the circle of your intentions certain spars
Remain that perpetuate the enchantment of self with self:
Eyebeams, muslin, coral. It doesn't matter
Because these are things as they are today
Before one's shadow ever grew
Out of the field into thoughts of tomorrow.

Alright, done.

The problem with utopia, Fukuyma says, (jk, there's no way to actually know what fukuyama said) is that those with the right model of the world have to explain it. And they have to explain it to those who don't get it. Without the gap between those who have the right view and those who don't, those who do have the right view can't get the kick of explaining, scolding and berating those who don't. If they don't get to explain, scold and berate, what do they do with their understanding?

In a sec, I have to google the relevant parts.

Oh I see. I didn’t think much of his first book and so I should have read his latest? — apokrisis

Wait, what? If you've read The End of History, you'd know instantly I was talking about a key part of that book. Did you just google "fukuyama+thymos" and see Identity pop up? (of course that came up first and almost exclusively...think of how many online pieces were written in reaction to that book!) Which book did you read, Apo? It would have been a better look if you hadn't doubled down on having read it, and just come out with it.

How is it the bone in the throat? Do you mean that if everyone self-actualises as the highest personal good, then no one is left to give them respect. Everyone is Superman, no one the crowd? — apokrisis

You've tossed around Fukuyama recently - have you actually read his book? I've long had a general suspicion about some of your references...

If you haven't, I'm happy to recapitulate what he said, just let me know.

@apokrisis Let’s get into some of the thornier stuff. What do you think of Fukuyama’s treatment of ‘thymos’ as the inevitable bone in the throat of a utopian Maslow-satisfying society?

Yes, I know that’s what you’ve been saying! I have a good sense of your view, and, having a good sense of it in all its dimensions, it does not surprise me that you see me as blinking, waking up to it. I think you’ve misunderstood how much we agree on, which has led to previous confusions about the points we disagree on. Anyway, my butting-in was simply to try to point out that Banno’s responses aren’t nonsense and to tease out the space where one can make a reasonable response. I also agree with a dissolution of the is/ought along similar lines, but it takes some explanation, rather than indignation.