It is impossible to picture the firmness
Of relationships then. The slack
Was by definition taken up, and so
Everything was useful. People died
Delighted with the long wait,
Exhaled brief words into the afternoon, the hills:
Then sweetness was knocked down for the last time.

Cares or uses the little station any more.
They are too young to remember
How it was when the late trains came in.
Violet sky grazing the gray hill-crests.
What laziness of appetite
Kept the buzzards circling, and when the dawn came
Up it did so on four wheels, without excuses or fuss.

But what I mean is there's no excuse
For always deducing the general from particulars,
Like spots on that sun. How many
Helpless wails have slid out orchestras
Across skittery dance floors until even
The dancers were there, waltzing lamely at first
But now static and buzzing like plaid? No one

"Climate" isn't a sign, but it could be
A by-product, an anonymous blue-collar suburb
In the great mildness that has taken over the air
With snapping cogs, deft reversals.
The blinded sun's got to answer for this
But meanwhile the housing's been built
And actually moved into, some of it.

I wrote a poem-ish thing today & I figured this thread is as good a place as any to share it:

It doesn't have a title but I guess I'll call it:

Springtime in Sim City (& Environs)

A cry went out in last year’s canyon. A howl of wisdom and regret. Above, the seven birds of prey wheeled languid double helices. The carts in cities trundled forth, their bright wares spilling. All manner of passerby took heed, absolved themselves of accumulated restraint. A whistle blew, then two, and fresh from heaven wan sunlight spread. A sleeping sow awoke to the din of the general rut. You, Michael, wore the suit I always knew you could. As dashing a man has never lived. Your kids in peaking pride cast wide smiles. The confectioner took double orders, and stacked his pastries high. The wind of change blew soft and swift through every housewife. In sum the world, in self-esteem, shook firmly its own hand.

As news unfurled in rhythmic blast, I sorted files in my office, amazed at it all. My very graphs seemed tinged with bluer blues, and redder reds. The thing the gypsy said came true. My suitcase glimmered. A thing like this, a world anew. I counted each and every paperclip. The bounty of a harvest horn. And did she know, or is she still? But who in truth could not be reached? My skin like milk absorbed the glow. I never knew just how she lived.

And farmers lost in last years flood came sodden back to family fields. With pearls in pockets, seaweed beards, they filed into hay-filled barns. A dance the town had never known broke fiercely out and swept the whole into its sway. All cherry-pie, Miss Lucy laughed, and curved her dress into the fold.

In foreign fields, new tracks were laid. A sigil carved by railroad men. the smoke of trains across the land cast signals into silent space, a message sent across the void to reach the hum of alien lands. At polished altars priestly men inhaled an incense new as rain. The funny pages teemed with jokes, and beetle bailey quit the force.

the course of rivers reaffirmed
the census sent to rabbis wives
the x-ray made of angels bones
the passport stamped with cold finesse
the orange market swept and cleaned
the former mayor tressed and curled
the riddle solved with patient care
the doe a deer a female deer
the ray a drop of golden sun

all these and more with fluid grace flowed swift as swallows toward the well.

in troubled times in years to come
when wracked with anger, hate or fear
an anchorite with bend of head
stoops crookedly down winding halls
where masonry gives way to rock
as city wails fade slowly out
the water cold and full and sharp
will reinscribe upon the soul
the signs of things as once they were
the silence of old ciphered joys
lost memories become new seed
to reawait the vital rain.

Thus all good intentions remain puny
Consigned as they are to the cold dews
And nagging climates of a life's blood.
Does grave dawn drape in a pattern of convolvulus
The next noon alters, dim or baldly untragic
Until the pattern comes to seem no more than footsteps,
Dry and gay, doting on the old-fashioned, the mensual.

And for those who understand:
We shifted the day, until there was no more
Coming out of the situation we had so imitated.
And now we had talked of it
Not as a human being, deeply polite and intelligent
Coming forward to speak things of dark concern
But as a merely interesting description of itself.

New Poem : All and Some

1. If the prospect of alien contact is especially relieving, then:
2. Imagine a world where aliens never come
3. If (2) is painful, consider why it's painful.
4. (3) has told you what, in your life, you can no longer abide. What is impossible to live with
5. Determine what steps you can take to combat what is impossible to live with
6. Witness the tiny empowerment you feel taking a few steps. Snowball that into the next steps. So forth.
7. So forth and so forth
8. The aliens finally arrive, only you no longer need them
9. & That was the condition of their arrival all along. Interstellar barbecues ensue.

An emotional stimulus resonant enough to change my position is also likely to be associated to that emotion thereafter. It's not a moral example, but I never particularly liked pigs. Then one night I had a very emotive dream about a pet pig. Now I love pigs! Point being, I never rationally concluded that pigs were great. I didn't "change my mind", except in a literal sense. I was conscious of all of the data, but reason didn't effect or affect the outcome. Most of my recent moral epiphanies seem very similar: a strong emotional reaction to some stimulus that similar stimuli resonate, with post hoc rationalisation. But yes sometimes you just gotta work it. — Kenosha Kid

Empirical moral datum (a ‘report’):

I've found that my moral epiphanies are both (1) very emotional (literally epiphanic, 'revealed)' and (2) usually precipitated out of saw-toothed reason-traps, slowly accreted over time. A pattern that seems to repeat: my present way of living and thinking about how I'm living (my intellectual and practical moral habitus) tends progressively toward some sort of insuperable, double-bind block. There's no way to progress. Lassitude, despair --- & then suddenly some sort of shift. I find that though this shift is often instantaneous and seemingly discontinuous, on reflection it seems like a leap out of an object level to a metalevel, where the object level had to run its course, wheeling itself into the paralyzing muck, in order to become receptive to the flash that (discontinuously establishing a greater continuity) connects it to a metalevel perspective (of course itself destined to become a future object-level double-bind)

The epiphany has to come as epiphany, but its sort of like a flash connecting two levels. It may be that at some absolute level the 'flash' exceeds any reason-sculpted context, but, as flash translates into new habitus, I find that I don't discard 'my dislike for pigs' in favor of 'a like for pigs' but rather incorporate each part. (Not quite true. In actuality, there's usually a foggy period in between, where I turn my arsenal of moral fury toward the last stage (often through projective online arguing.) This seems to have some purgative function. After that stage completes itself, the fog lifts, and I can see the continuity more clearly....and then feel morally bad about having turned that arsenal on my past self.)

Edit: the above is really just a gloss on what fdrake said about reason's 'restitching’

Edit2: I also find there’s another layer that is outside this cyclical progression which seems like a continuous, waxing understanding of the affective/cognitive states that correspond to each stage. Like: a better ability to catch the wind by putting up the right sails, or, on the other hand, recognizing when to batten the hatches and ride out a storm. It’s neither object nor meta level, I don’t really know how to characterize this layer.

[end of poem]

This would be the day: a few small drops of rain,
A dab of this, a touch of eau-de-cologne air
As long as it's suggestive. And it
Mounts, a serenade, to the surrounding
Love. You bad birds,
But God shall not punish you, you
Shall be with us in heaven, though less
Conscious of your happiness, perhaps, than we.
Hell is a not quite satisfactory heaven, probably,
But you are the fruit and jewels
Of my arrangements: O be with me!
Forget stand-offishness, exact
Bookkeeping of harsh terms! The banal
Sun is about to creep across heaven on its
Daily turn: don't let it find us arguing
Or worse, alone, each
Having turned his back to the other,
Alone in the wonderful solitude
Of the new day. To be there
Is not to know it, its outline
Creeps up on you, and then it has fallen over you
Like bedclothes of fog.
From some serene, high table
Set near the top of a flight of stairs
Come once and for all into our
Consideration though it be flat like lemonade.
The rest that is dreamed is as the husk
Of this feast on the damp ground.
As I was turning to say something to her she sped by me
Which meant all is over in a few years: twenty-six, twenty-seven,
Who were those people
Who came down to the boat and met us that time?
And your young years become a kind of clay
Out of which the older, more rounded and also brusquer
Retort is fashioned, the greeting
That takes you into night
Like a lantern up ahead:
The "Where were you"s; meanwhile
The dark is waiting like so many other things,
Dumbness and voluptuousness among them.
It is good to be part of it
In the dream that is the kernel
Deep in it, the unpretentious, unblushing,
But also the steep side stretching far away:
For this we pay, for this
Tonight and every night.
But for the time being we are free
And meanwhile the songs
Protect us, in a way, and the special climate.

New Poem : Robin Hood's Barn

[end of poem]

But commemorates
Because it does define, after all:
Gray garlands, that threesome
Waiting for the light to change,
Air lifting the hair of one
Upside down in the reflecting pool.

If one could seize America
Or at least a fine forgetfulness
That seeps into our outline
Defining our volumes with a stain
That is fleeting too

A veil of haze protects this
Long-ago afternoon forgotten by everybody
In this photograph, most of them now
Sucked screaming through old age and death.

new poem: City Afternoon

[end of poem]

With ourselves. They are empty as cupboards.
To spend whole days drenched in them, waiting for the next whisper,
For the word in the next room. This is how the princes must have behaved,
Lying down in the frugality of sleep.

Four quotes, with the fourth interrupting the third, resisting it. (Kierkegaard, Homer, Hesse, Ashbery, then Hesse again)

“I feel as a chessman must when the opponent says of it: that piece cannot be moved”

"Apollo took Aeneas out of the crowd and set him in sacred Pergamus, where his temple stood. There, within the mighty sanctuary, Latona and Diana healed him and made him glorious to behold, while Apollo of the silver bow fashioned a wraith in the likeness of Aeneas, and armed as he was.”

"Only slowly and gradually did I begin to suspect and then perceive what it was intended to represent. It represented a figure which was myself, and this likeness of myself was unpleasantly weak and half-real; it had blurred features, and in its whole expression there was something unstable, weak, dying or wishing to die..."

["These were meant to be read as any
Salutation before getting down to business,
But they stuck to their guns, and so much
Was their obstinaacy in keeping with the rest
(Like long flashes of white birds that refuse to die
When day does) that none knew the warp
Which presented this major movement as a firm
Digression, a plain that slowly becomes a mountain.

So each found himself caught in a net
As a fashion, and all efforts to wriggle free
Involved him further, inexorably, since all
Existed there to be told."]

"...I saw something moving, slowly, extremely slowly, in the same way that a snake moves which has fallen asleep. Something was taking place there, something like a very slow, smooth but continuous flowing or melting…I was overcome by an infinite weariness and desire to sleep, and I turned away to find a place where I could lie down and sleep.

One interesting thing about chess is that everything is structured around taking the king, but the king is never taken. The game ends, both players exit, when the taking of a king becomes inevitable. A kind of gentlemen's agreement: we both know it would have happened, but we agree that it will not.

A game of chess takes place by carving out a small frame and arranging a set of symbolic tokens. When the symbolic system freezes, as in checkmate, it's resolved by 'zooming out of the frame.' The freeze is re-inscribed in the broader world (" X beat Y at chess") The pieces (now physical objects, rather than symbolic game-tokens) are picked up, and put away.

What if you're in checkmate, but there is no way to move out a frame, and reinscribe the impasse as a resolved outcome on a new level? Thought, or at least a certain kind of thought, can always provide the necessary supplemental level. From there, it can work on itself endlessly But still: the board hasn't being picked up and put away, and, somewhere, far below, you're still in checkmate.

Meanwhile thought is going to work on itself. Awareness of the foundational-checkmate is being well-buffered; Not only can you not become aware of the original checkmate, but now you can't think anything that implies that checkmate. Then: anything that implies something that implies checkmate. (Ashbery: "Does the first nettle make any difference as what grows becomes a skit?)

Thought is forming itself like a pearl around an initial irritation. Or thought is like cocoon. Or it's stack of embedded chess games with itself, where the inevitable gentlemen's agreement keeps pushing things farther and farther from the source. The way of describing it is sometimes hopeful, sometimes sad & defeating.

I want to go back, out of the bad stories,
But there's always the possibility that the next one...
No, it's another almond tree, or a ring-swallowing frog
Yet they are beautiful as we people them

@apokrisis

First: welcome back.

Second:
edit: objection: badgering. Sustained, stricken from the record.

But all of this is too speculative and needs something much firmer to hang from. — Banno

To segue off of this into a maybe meta-forum line-of-thinking: what is the place for this kind of unqualified speculation?

On the one hand, it's foolhardy to build on these fragments to try to say something sweeping. Recently, I've taken up chess - terrible at it, very bad - and there's nothing for it but to keep playing games, paying attention, and reflect afterward with reference to the existing body of theory. Sometimes, I think I have a stroke of insight, but then I'm also well-sure I'm either the one millionth person to have this realization or I'm amateurishly mistaking a deep confusion with the experiential trappings of insight for actual understanding.

But I also keep finding myself at firepits where the conversation turns philosophical. I know myself well enough now to know I probably won't ever learn Shannon inside and out. I'm probably going to ever be an amateur -- and there's always going to be much smarter, and much more erudite people than me, suggesting totally incompossible ideas.

At that point, having give up the idea of being at professional-level - not necessarily due to inability , but with all the constraints that make it hard for layman to master a field’s ideas - I have to decide whether I have the right to play with the ideas (while reminding myself of my limitations, and that this is just conversation to work out my own thought), or remain totally silent.

There's a line of thought that total silence is the right action; but if you apply the same perspective that brings you there broadly, you have to be willing to go all the way: almost everything in life we have opinions or comments on we don't know the guts of. Apply this rule consistently and I believe there is nothing you can say about anything (minus what you know deeply) except that you don't know.

Knowing that the forums are just forums, I'm more than ok with amateurish conversations, which are just massaging out thought-knots. I think the problem is less with talking about what we aren't qualified to talk about - and more when we mistake forum-conversation for seismic hypotheses the professionals would do well to take swift notice of.

But also: I have to keep playing chess to learn even layman's chess. I can learn to make implicit to myself that any amateur chess game, any anything I've learned, is still at the foothills. And I know I'll never be Kasparov, but I still like playing.

t seem'd for a while back then that we were about to find out something really profound, to do with reflexive iterations, self-similarity, Chinese rooms and so on. Then Google Translate came along and beat all that over the head with blind, brute calculating power and statistical analysis, while neural networks seemed to lead in a different direction.

Bump. I'd like to see more thought on the eternal gold braid. — Banno

With the caveat again that most of the detail has faded for me, it feels to me like the causality is backward In Hofstadter. I’m far from familiar from last-gen AI debates, but the sense I got is that Hofstadter was trying to leverage paradoxes of reflexivity in formal symbolic systems In order to lay the theoretical groundwork for creating real AI - in other words, it seems like he thought that these paradoxes might be generative of human-like intelligence.

I think it may be more likely that a living animal who is inducted into symbolic thought* -and uses it while still existing as a living,time-bound being -requires that kind of reflexivity in order to bridge the gap between its flux-y existence and the stately, time-independent fixededness of symbolic systems. The “I” (along with its attendant paradoxes) is a useful symbolic fiction to facilitate this -but it’s a facilitator, not an origin. I guess you could also say this kind of thing might be necessary for human-like intelligence, but not sufficient.

Not my natural element so let me know if any of that makes sense.

(Incidentally, my long flirtation with continental (especially hegel-inspired thought) in my twenties stems largely from hearing echoes of what glimmered most to me in Hofstadter. I read him first, in high school, after hearing about him on a forum for fans of a webcomic.)

———
* in the way one is ‘inducted’ into a language, even if a chomskyan (sp?) capacity for learning language in general is hardwired

As long as the night allows" This was one of those night
rainbows
In negative color. As we advance, it retreats; we see
We are now far into a cave, must be. Yet there seems to be
Trees all around, and a wind lifts their leaves, slightly.

The trees weep drops
Into the water at night. Slowly couples gather.
She looks into his eyes. "It would not be good
To be left alone." He: I'll stay

Pomp of flowers, decorations
Junked next day. Now look out of the window.
The sky is clear and bland. The wrong kind of day
For business or games, or betting on a sure thing.

I’m glad it resonated so strongly! (I have read Steppenwolf but so long ago now it’s sadly faded.) I have a hunch a lot of people, especially here on a philosophy forum, feel ( or have felt) similarly.

However many voices there may be it all amounts to the same thing, which is that internalised conversation. Whether it’s true or not I don’t know, but evidence seems to suggest a high rate of suicide in poets. (What the rate is among builders, or plumbers I don’t know, so how can we be sure the poet figures are high?). My feeling is that poets spend too much time in that internalised space. Philosophers are the same. Mathematicians might be considered in that light but their language is maths.

My personal feelings are that action is the only thing to put the internal voices in place. Action is about moving forward, literally one step in front of the other. In the end you are removed from where you were. The voices never do that. To spend too much time in that conversation is profitless. Do they determine how one acts? very rarely in my opinion.

If the way one acts in a different way is action then it doesn’t change one’s internal monologue, it shuts it up long enough to put you in a different space ( then one may have a different conversation). In extreme active situations that monologue is completely shut down, it’s no longer relevant, it has no benefits. — Brett

I agree. The image I have is of trying to climb out of a swamp, all wrapped up in reeds that keep pulling you back into it. I especially like the idea of quieting voices long enough to be in a different space, where a different conversation can happen. That sounds just right to me.

Sometimes a musical phrase would perfectly sum up
The mood of a moment. One of those lovelorn sonatas
For wind instruments was riding past on a solemn white horse.
Everybody wondered who the new arrival was.

The steadfast tin soldier gazed beyond the drops
Remembering the hat-shaped paper boat, that soon..."
That's not it either.
Think about the long summer evenings of the past, the queen anne's lace.

Es war einmal...No, it's too heavy
To be said. Besides, you aren't paying attention any more.
How shall I put it?
"The rain thundered on the uneven red flagstones.

New Poem: Märchenbilder

[end of poem]

Snow was the last thing he'd expected.
Sun, and the kiss of far, unfamiliar lands,
Harsh accents though strangely kind
And now from the unbuttoned corner moving out,
Coming out, the postponed play of the day.
Astonishing. It really tells you about yourself,
The day made whole, the eye and the report together, silent.

@Judaka & @Brett - thank you for the thoughtful responses. Just realized the time and have to go to sleep before responding, but I will tomorrow.

So, building on that, the part of the essay that most jumped out at me was this:

There is something to observe here, that lies under our noses. It is little attended to, and yet still so obvious as to seem trite. It is this: causality consists in the derivativeness of an effect from its causes. This is the core, the common feature, of causality in its various kinds. Effects derive from, arise out of, come of, their causes. For example, everyone will grant that physical parenthood is a causal relation. Here the derivation is material, by fission. Now analysis in terms of necessity or universality does not tell us of this derivedness of the effect; rather it forgets about that. For the necessity will be that of laws of nature; through it we shall be able to derive knowledge of the effect from knowledge of the cause, or vice versa, but that does not show us the cause as source of the effect. Causation, then, is not to be identified with necessitation. — Anscombe

I like this. I think it directs us back to how we first think of causes: something happens and we know it happened due to this other thing. It doesn't mean forensically establishing a necessary frame-by-frame progression, but simply recognizing that the presence of this led to that. That's it. How the one lead to the other depends on the case. Whether the one had to lead to the other also depends on the case.

I think learning to be attentive to how we actually encounter causality, leads to an epistemic humility that counteracts a prideful awareness of an epistemic ideal, never actually attainable. (The 'pride' is in offloading precision to a dream of total comprehension (absolute accounting) that you are at least aware of, while others operate blindly, not even aware of the dream) Like most things born out of pride, the awareness of an ideal lets us undercut others, while simultaneously undercutting ourselves (we are aware there is a 'deterministic order' and can rest on the laurels of having apprehended that). And I think that that kind of epistemic humility (there is no way to shatter the universe into a series of precise distributions of matter along a time axis) ultimately lets us track causes in a more effective way: If you drop the idea of a demon who could do it at a subatomic level, you have to simply look at how you see causes being responsible for certain effects. There is an art (and pragmatism) of understanding causality and there is no metaphysical reason to see that as mere 'folk' understanding of causation.

(Now obviously this can cut both ways (one can 'see' false causation, and that has historically happened a lot, and caused horrible things) so a methodology and an ethics of how ones casts causal relationships is still necessary, but dropping the metaphysical pretense at least clears the ground for going to work on that.)

Have you looked at I am a strange loop? It's dreadful, but also excellent. Your constructs within constructs... strange loops indeed. There might be some similarity between what you describe and Hoftader's thesis. I found it helpful in similar circumstances, especially in identifying the more persistent strange loops so that they can be explicitly dealt with. — Banno

I haven't, but I did read Godel, Escher, Bach back in the day (before I was ready for it, tbh). It really impacted me, despite not grokking everything going on. The basic thing I took away was an attentiveness to the process by which meta-level framings become objects themselves (and how the paradoxes of a system representing itself as an element within itself are strangely productive). There's a Swiss Animator, Georges Schwizgebel who, If I'm not misreading him, gets at the same idea in another medium.

I'm beginning to think this is less about consciousness tout court, as Hofstadter seems to think, and more about how a certain kind of thinking works (sort of like when Kant talks about illusions inevitably generated by reason when it tries to apply the form of 'understanding' beyond its native province.) I don't think the labyrinth is constitutive of consciousness, I mean, but is one tangle consciousness can get into, when one part of it begins to think it's all of it.