I'm not totally clear at what I'm getting at. A lot of things keep rolling together in my head, on threads with @unenlightened & @fdrake and my own reading.

I def think free will is part of it. I have this feeling that free will, at least at first, doesn't involve making a choice, but rather refusing to identify as the chooser. There are those famous studies where we appear to make a choice before becoming consciously aware of it. Free will, at this stage, would involve putting the brakes on our automatic choosing.

Maybe similar to how the goal of meditation isn't to produce deeper, mystical thoughts, but rather to note how the thoughts we've grown accustomed to see as 'ours' - thought by us, the subject - are more like a chaotic, phantasmagoric landscape that unfolds by itself. But still, with a strange order. To me, my thoughts seem cyclical on a broad scale, chaotic (or over-simple and calm) moment to moment

And how the same thing is true of our actions. They're not directed by a 'free' 'subject' but are a chaos of subselves acting impulsively.

So the initial free act would be not to stop acting (as the meditator does not try to stop thinking) but to observe how one acts, without feeling identified with it. (Husserl is saying somethig similar when he connects freedom and the ability to perform the 'epoche')

This is not an amoral fatalism because the purpose is to observe what change is possible despite ourselves. And then to nudge ourselves in the right direction when some event happens that provides an opportunity to disrupt our cycles. I think those events are similar to what you describe as those crossroads with massive ramifications. But to make an actual choice you have to be equal to the event, if that makes sense.

Those are my thoughts recently anyway.

Yeah it's hard to untangle cause and effect and I'm not keen on the easy boomer analyses either. I think the phone is a handy expression of something (where it is a both a symptom of that something, and a partial cause, or at least feeds back into it, helping sustain it)

The we and us break down makes sense.

amen

I guess the question is whether AI control outstrips the energy it requires to sustain that control. I don't think so. Of course I don't know. But I think any AI worth its salt would recognize this problem and mercilessly cut out impediments to its self-sustaining. If we go way out, an AI probably wouldn't be ethically above killing off enough people to direct energy its way. I mean, the energy is there. Capitalism ruthlessly protects itself. This village gets fucked, because we need a dam, so be it. An AI would do the same, but moreso.

Very much in agreement about the role of shame and basically your entire analysis of how that plays out.

Bo Burnham, of all people, made a good point (somewhere) about how, in converting all aspects of life into different apps you see on the same phone, flipping from one app to another as we like - we've created this flattening effect where everything is seen as part of the same basic thing, on the same level.

So social life, entertainment, politics, news, religion are all experienced in the same way. I think that contributes to the bizarre situation you describe where we respond to the amazon burning the same way we would respond to a member of our social circle being revealed as an abuser the same way we respond to a celebrity doing something scandalous.

Three thoughts on that :
1. totally debilitating and neutering politically. Like you said, the people in power just don't give a shit, they're playing a different game.
2. The irony and destruction and ( a certain kind of) joy that the alt-right exhibits is exactly right in one way. Its culture-jamming not unlike some of the Culp stuff (havent read through the article yet tho i should admit). The problem is the wrong people - or people infected by the wrong values - are the ones who are currently making the most use of it (tho Chapo etc. exist) which makes you wonder if the problem is
3. The Vampire's Castle. As in when you say 'we' and 'us' who is that? I feel like it has to be the group of people who feels this internet shaming thing in their bones and its really hard to know how representative that culture is of the nation as a whole. Whoever they/we are, its a group that believes in the power of shame, and, at a certain point, all that matters is that the shame hits its target, so we lob a desultory shame-rock at those outside our reach, and laser-shame those who are enough like us to feel the effects.


As to the convergence/interregnum man I'm not sure. I wouldn't describe your approach as cynical, because theory etiquette says there's no fullness, there's no it-ness, everything is in-between, forever. Or, if you like, it's cynical when facing the outside, believing when facing the in-group. It may be the case we're sleepwalking, or Zizek's cartoon character who hasn't looked down, but even if there's a hypnagogic delay between trauma and recognition, still 'bang, crash' at some point (Hegel)

(I'd say, cynically, that Gramsci was in jail a long time, which probably felt like an intterregnum, and the celebration of deferral by sequestered thinkers seems a lot like the way someone spirited away from the trenches would think about confrontation with reality - it never really happens, in fact can never happen (melancholy, safe) tho there are traces of *something*that remain with us, a haunting mystery.

I gotta get some of these links to show you what I mean. It's already happening.

AI would have bulit into it a thing about allocating labor to sustain itself. Money is already a technology for distributing labor. Drop the ontological value stuff about money and its just how to distribute labor. Flawed, bc the rich get richer, but still.But - look at me- I *did* anticipate that and the answer is humans doing AI training tasks (already, in real life, a thing people do with refugees).

Given the reality of resource depletion, ever more rapidly increasing debt and systemically entrenched human behavior, I don't see development of AI or space exploration, not to mention electric vehicles and large scale development of "renewable" to be realistic options. — Janus

You've clustered those last four together as a set of [means of 'salvation' or 'rescue'] and I'd agree that none of them will, really, save us. I don't see the AI thing as a salvific force. In my doomsday scenario, I see it more like when a third world country fails and needs the IMF to bail them out, and forever after they're part of the system.

AI is progressing rapidly and its scary. I agree with you on everything but AI's capacity to get real good.

It's interesting that in that data-as-oil-almost article, right and left coincide. It's clearly written from a left-standpoint (a smart left standpoint, the tango with Hayek is good) but the means of overriding the Hayekian dependency on price is explicitly described as being acheived through a flood of data we'd need to be mostly ignorant of. This seems like invisible hand meets central planning and the handwaving about details, while legit, is also a clue that this is a fantasy of relinquishing control that satisfies both the right rejection of being held responsible for others and the leftist need for a caring, nourishing bosom.

Yeah, I feel you.


I've also felt more and more lately a vague sense that everything is converging on something, and that any attempt to influence what happens will be somehow anticipated by that process, and will simply accelerate the convergence, whatever that means. It feels kind of like a phase change has already been triggered, and the macro-whatever of everything will override what any small collection of molecules can do. My paranoid doomsday self is focused on the convergence of AI (especially as a means of efficient allocation) --- global warming events ---- refugee influxes. A world-historical crisis with no forthcoming human solution coincides with a extreme sophistication of AI, and the overwhelming exigency forces us to remove the ethical brakes, and cede control. I can imagine AIs resettling refugees in camps, AI-training as the new means of wage labor (both of these are already happening embryonically btw) , cultivation of echo-chambers and reality-bubbles as enforced fragmentation. It's out there, but if we can't handle another recession, or if there's a camel-straw ecological crisis, it really doesn't seem too farfetched.

Concepts are residents of the realm of reflection and analysis. Retrojecting them into unified experience is a natural thing to do, but it produces philosophical problems when we notice a priori features of concepts.

In spite of that, we do retroject, and in the process we construct an analyzed world.

It's a matter of confusing the dismantled cuckoo clock for the unified one. We do this reflexively and then laud that it "works" and therefore must yield a solid foundation for a kind of realism.

Agree?
5d — frank

Hey sorry, I'd missed your response here. I think I agree mostly tho I still have some additional thoughts that muddle it up a little ( & big caveat: I'm mostly thinking out loud on this thread and I don't have much canonical philosophy to back any of this up. (I guess this all vaguely Deleuzian, but with none of the rigor. )

I think that there are degrees to which a concept is clear and distinct, that they're on a continuum on this regard, and that most concepts are halfsubmerged in a preconceptual muck that secretly sustains them and gives them sense. They emerge as cognitive solutions to transconceptual problems, and thinkers are, at best, half-medium, half constructor. (That's why thinking seems to follow grooves, to be guided by existing landscapes of thought, and why sui generis creation of a concept is all but impossible.)

Another way to say this that i think they grow organically, like everything else, and the activity if reflection simply sharpens them, like cutting a diamond.

To recreate reality from dismantled pieces is, yeah, definitely a temptation and a confusion, since concepts are one part of reality itself. Though their 'working' (as opposed to simply being internally consistent) is still a sign of some kind of realism, because it means they're linked up to something beyond thought.

Does that make any sense? I don't know how well I expressed that.

I don't want to derail too much into the hedi/nazi thing, but yeah that is what I was thinking of. I like Heidegger a lot (a lot!) and I'm not one of those whos keen to throw the baby out with the bathwater -- but I think his engagement with politics is bathwater, so, when talking about politicsI think we should look to other thinkers.That's all.

if ethics has gone to shit, shift the focus to communal world building, to reengineering the conditions under which we could again relate to one another outside juridical categories, whether in a renewed ethical mode, or simply otherwise. These paths don't exhaust the range of responses, but indicate, if I'm not insane, some possible — StreetlightX

That's an interesting and dizzying thought. reengineering conditions - when the current condition is the breakdown of those bedrock-seeming values that one would usually reach for to orient any sort of engineering project - sounds like something that could spiral down a recursive Nietzschean hole, the transvaluation (of transvalution (of ..))

If you're envisioning something different that a restoration (brave new world thing) then this would have be the creation of something new. I know this is nitpicky (and I'm not sure you used the word literally) but wouldn't it have to be less a matter of 'engineering' and more a matter of *cultivating* present (pregnant) conditions for (the realization of) new conditions?

If so, what would that kind of politics consist of?

My first thought was something that I realized, reflecting, was very gelassenheit-y, and that's no good because we know how well that worked out.

My next thought is just trying to participate in the political field, not to some determinate end, but to struggle to push the tension of the political field in the right direction, and sustain oneself in doing this, in order that when some event precipitates those new conditions, they will be more likely to be good ones.

What were you thinking of in terms of politics? something similar or no?

I'm gonna let myself float out a little here, but in the way (Arendt's) labor is the ebb and flow of biological life in relation to the earth, this new labor would be something like a way of modulating and regulating emotions in order to forestall the trauma of realizing that we're increasingly ceding control to impersonal systems ( the market, the AI-ing of everything) so no one is in control. It would be the labor of sustaining a sort of emotional 'greenhouse' (Sloterdijk) where we act out the simulation of concerted teamwork, hierarchy etc in order to satisfy basic emotional needs related to community, authority, united efforts toward some goal.

It wouldn't be able to last forever though, because after a while we'd use up the nutrients, and it would be impossible not to recognize that the bits of the old world we've been using to sustain our belief that that world persists would seem more and more mysterious/arbitrary and referentless (like old virtues to the thinkers in the age of the enlightenment, say)

maybe some future Alasdair Macintyre would try to piece it all back together, years later, and for people who seem,algorithmically, likely to be interested, the AI could automatically relocate them into communes where they could try to live as the responsibilists of yore once did.

I read a little bit of Virno in school. Mostly faded now, but I think that makes sense, dfw was definitely a 'virtuoso.'

So using Arendts terms again here:

If the workis now usually a performance, and if that performance is increasingly a performance of action, which means there's not really action, or responsibility, just in the way you say....at a certain point doesn't this endless cycle of work-as-performance-of-action cross over and just become a new layer of labor, tilling a weird soil which is enriched by the breakdown of work and action?

I'd love to meet Willow, but I don't feel like I ever have. I've met ideas about Spinoza. I've met patterns of thought. That all tend to general concepts about what exceeds the general.

You do truly know me, but you're unwilling to accept that you do, for it is not enough. Willow vanishes because you need me to be more than just Willow to qualify for existence. To just know my difference, is not enough for you. You want me to be funny. Or smart. Or insightful. Or something. For me to just be is not enough for you. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Well, I don't know you in real life. I know you online, on philosophy sites, where you talk about certain things. You could just be, and not talk about philosophy, but I mean, that's not what you're doing here, on philosophy forums, talking about specific conceptual areas.

I would agree that I don't see you, but how would I?

Well I know you, so I'm asking it of someone who meticulously opposes the singular to the universal. And really I truly don't know you because you've brilliantly posted up on the paradox itself. but the cost of that is I might as well be talking to the paradox. Everythig eternally orbits around that. Its the safest space around. Willow vanishes in the concept.

We're always floating in the aether.

Whether we manage to find ourselves there or not, each of us is one floating around others. Identity is always singular and never constrained. The contradiction is to think the accidental was ever given by a property. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Focusing in on one part - what does it mean to say 'accidental given by a property'? That makes me think something like this: 'A property is still too general; what's accidental, is singularly accidental.' Sure, but ---

There comes a moment where someone asks 'who are you?' and you say ' nothing you could ever recognize' and to that I agree! but thats what floats out endlessly. What makes a life is the clash of that singularity against the recognizable, right?

You can drop it all, but at the cost of floating beyond anyone's grasp, ever - safe, but alone. Self-realized, with no actual realization.

I don't mean that here. Cloud of unknowing (I've read it, though don't claim to truly understand it) I see as a very precise text for the practicing mystic, mostly about prayer, silence, loneliness, moods --- the affective states for the day-to-day mystic, and how to make sense of them.

I meant something simpler. The best thing I could think of is kids playing a game, like in a forest. The trees are there and part of it, but just part of it. In a weirder, mystic sense, we're all part of an ecosystem and are connected, sharing something, without feeling, at a given moment, how it relates together.

The moment where we identify a tree as a tree is already a kind of distance.

You can interact with something without knowing what it is. You have a vague sense of it, or sometimes not even that.

Maybe. I think you can interact with trees and triangles without concepts though. I don't agree with the object - perception - concept - mind model except as a subset of what we do.

At the limit isn't a singular identity almost contradictory? If I'm not constrained by any accidental properties, I float off into the aether.

My examples may have skewed too agenda heavy. I think the tree works too. The concept of tree has evolved a lot as we have. Triangle too. It doesn't mean we invented trees and triangles, tho, it means we developed ways to interact with and think about then.

I'd add that some of these examples I think are helpful conceptual solutions, others not so much.

It's like when we were talking about wolfpacks the other day. There were a couple open conceptual threads in the air, and you brought them together in the image of a wolfpack. It wasn't just a metaphor, but a way of thinking of hierarchy, authority, cohesion etc. together.

A marxist example, to try to tie conceptual solutions to nonconceptual problems, might see the idea of individual liberty + rights as a convenient way to explain how factory workers aren't being violated (they freely exchange their labor for wages, they aren't slaves.)

For the the left, the concept of the 'alt-right' packages up mentally a hyper-diverse set of people as a single bloc, while for the right 'Soros is a mastermind' packages up a different hyper-diverse set.

The theological concept of the trinity, which is chronically in interpretive revision, aims to solve the problem of what christ means/is.

'She has daddy issues' explains all sorts of things in one fell swoop.

(here, I was going to try to do this with something like Kant's noumenon but I don't have the focus right now)

@StreetlightXPassing thought. I don't know if you've read much David Foster Wallace. I was a devotee for while. He was obsessed with (I'd also say scared of) solipsism. He also had a style of writing that allowed for no ambiguity, that sought to anticipate in advance the readers' reactions, and to address those reactions, often within the same sentence. A lot of people - myself included - found that this gave him a a sense of trustworthiness - 'he respects my intelligence, he sees me as an equal.' But the effect is exactly to neutralize the kind of responsibility your talking about. In Arendt's terminology, he was creating works while refusing action. But in this very precise way, where the work simulated action. It's sad to look back and realize he was simply doing a hyper-sophisticated version of a simple sales technique ('This method changed my life, made me rich. But look, this isn't a 'get rich quick scheme'. It's not that easy. [I'm no huckster, listener, you who would recognize a huckster] Instead...')

In addition : There is a huge internet-age trend of doing action-y things, but only in ways where the outcome - the response - is guaranteed in advance. I mean making these performative gestures that would have been considered 'radical' 20-40 years ago but which are de rigeur now, while asking they be treated as radical.

It really does feel like the sphere of 'action' in Arendt's sense is lessening. [rib about groundbreaking theory and its academic recapture while still laying claim to 'radicality']

:cool:

Tangential to the central argument (which i haven't read all of, so I may be repeating) but if we think of concepts, like horseshoes, as a kind of solution to a problem, then we have the possibility of an evaluative context which (1)isn't correct or incorrect, and is also (2) outside the felicitous/infelicitous divide (which is about effective use of things already given)

You could look at concepts (and horseshoes) in terms of how effectively the resolve the issue. In solving one problem, they push out other possible solutions, which means they resolve tensions in one way while foreclosing the actualization of other potentials.

Terrapin for instance has, in the past, vocalized a problem he has that people seem frustrated by his way of holding a conversation in a way he personally finds baffling. and now he's put forth a family of concepts involving, among other things, the absence of responsibility for the effects of one's words, the total subjectivity of meaning, the ethical freedom to ignore catering to others and so on. It works in one way, but the path of theoretical commitments required to remain loyal to these concepts requires a lot of goofy kludges at the expense of more fruitful avenues of discussion.

My apologies if I misread you.

My advice in general (as someone eminently guilty) is try not to use erudition as shield and sword. Reread Being and Nothingness all day but there comes a moment when everything youve read droops down around you and youre still the same person. If you want an image of the philosopher who has it all under control, the first short of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs on netflix captures what happens well. Eventually youll be able to talk good forever but...

Philosophy (& psychoanalysis) should be supplement. Don't make too much of it.

Kierkegaard back in his day spoke of a feverish desire to go beyond, at any cost, beyond whatever there was out there. He counselled beginning at the beginning.

But hey if you want to just go for pure new - OOO seems to fit the vibe

I am not sure what you're trying to say. I am not trying to criticize morality. I am simply saying that:

1) saying that one ought to do something or that things ought to be in some way is not necessarily a sign of resentment

2) morality is not a delusion

That's it. — Magnus Anderson

So in the case of the powerful man killing the person who might expose him, my gut reaction is 'no he really shouldn't kill them.' What is that should? It's there. It's different than the other shoulds and oughts you mentioned (which are 'hypothetical', in Kantian terms.) It's not that he shouldn't kill them because [x].It's just like, man, he shouldn't kill them (categorical, in Kantian terms.) Two things : You ought not do that because... And : you shouldn't do that, period. They both exist, and if you follow any hypothetical ought (you ought to do this because...) for enough steps, it will always bottom out in a categorical one.

So I was saying salving hunger is one type of ought, decrying injustice another.

If you can get away with it -- yes — Magnus Anderson

Ok, but if you actually feel that way, and aren't simply making the right moves in order to preserve an argument, then you're missing the moral sense which you need to criticize morality. You can't criticize music as just modulations of tone if you can't hear what others do.

I think that does serve a purpose, but is ultimately its harmful for both parties in the long run. Or like it's a stage? I've been thinking a lot about the thread with Un a few weeks back, about AA and cycles. I feel like we all cycle through subpersonalities which leaves us at any moment blind to some things and more perceptive about other things. Maybe the idea of fellowship is that you all collectively balance one another out building toward something. Authority is good if its earned, but then its also like a thing that can harden whatever subpersonality currently has the microphone. Maybe authority is less something one person has, and more like, using the idea of play, deferring to one kid when he seems to have a cool game or idea or knows this neighborhood youre biking through, or how to deal with mike's dad etc. I think clinging to permanent authority is usually a sign of fear that if you yield to another person, youll be exposed, and hurt.

But, say, I'm a powerful person and I did something bad to someone who is going to reveal something horrible about me which will prevent anyone from cooperating me. I have the means of killing this person and being free of anyone finding out what I did. If it's all about survival, I suppose I ought to kill that person.

The difference between hunger and, say, injustice, in my mind, is that the latter is subject to a moral judgement. A moral judgment is once for all - this kind of thing ought never happen. That doesn't apply to hunger (unless you're a full-throated pessimist casting a moral judgment on the world, on the idea that a thing hunger could even exist.) You don't condemn hunger, but you condemn the unjust.

In Kantian terms, a separation of hypothetical and categorical imperatives.

This has been occupying me a lot lately. I fall prey to moralizing constantly. And it usually has a (self) righteous anger associated with it. True kindness does give of itself, just as you say.

I agree that that kind of moralizing comes from resentment. If true kindness gives of itself maybe the only worthwhile moralizing is a practical one, delicately removing the impediments that have blocked off access to that source? (One impediment would be righteous moralizing.)

But that process is tricky because its hard to know yourself and to know what adjustments will have what ramifications. Also, building a little hamfistedly off of fdrake's discussion of the seed, its not only internal impediments to remove, but also seeing how you choose (or are drawn to) certain external circumstances which ensure dormancy. Being a person is sometimes as though a seed had another seed around it which not only reacted to certain parameters, but tried to ensure the parameters remained the same (perceptual control theory comes to mind.)

There's a room where I'm playing chess with my brother and we're listening to Led Zeppelin. I go there sometimes. — frank

I envy that. I wish there was a little more room for other people in my image. I always got nervous if my brother tried to draw close. I still do.

There *should* be and my whole idea is pretty solipsistic. Yes, definitely, to answer your question, only I don't know how to fit it in to my man alone with his life scheme

I think you can do philosophy in a way which inspires transformation of whatever domain you're dealing with; I think another way of doing it is more exegetical and rooted in wonder, travelling along some domain and chronicling what's there. The two aren't mutually exclusive of course, but I think they can be. — fdrake

Boringly, I agree again. I think you can enrich your tradition from within. There's a part of me that's very sad I'm cut off from that. Sentimentally, I like the idea of a Rabbi being not only like 'you get it [conceptually] but 'you're a good kid' or something similar. but what are you gonna do. At this point, I wouldn't believe him if he said it.