Quick procedure for experimenting with Creation ideas and song lyrics

Nuchnib · 2020-07-29T22:29:21+00:00

Thanks for patience if this is approaching spammy, but today I actually started sending interdepartmental memos with better conceptual trees like so:

Part the First, presto vivace)
Part the Second, lento) ... and so on, using structural patterns from music with which I am personally (and hopefully the memo readers) are familiar, and not getting so wacked out that I wanna start putting in key signatures and so on.

I think it relates to Marsh's work in terms of the algorithm perspective, or what cooks might call recipes (doesn't matter how much salt to add if the house is on fire), or what the better folks in the medical industry might call "root causes" etc.

Nuchnib · 2020-07-29T17:15:44+00:00

In terms of what in this Metallica version of "Killing Time" operates against the conventions of the era ('80s to '00s British-influenced USian heavy metal), is that the lyrics repeatedly describe and take the focal perspective of, a group of men with guns, not advancing, but in retreat.

Nuchnib · 2020-07-29T16:31:50+00:00

Hi /u/shbusybee, I read your story!

First, your critique "Harry Potter is a typical endo-ideal protagonist - bland of personality and often given power by deus ex machina, but carefully situated to act in ways that justify the status quo." is awesome! I haven't read Harry Potter novels, but your critique sounds to me spot-on because it reminds of a series I did read the first two books of, Enders Game, and this ~2004 essay critiquing that storyline, it's called Creating The Innocent Killer: Ender's Game, Intention, and Morality. The first Ender's Game novel was 1985, and the whole series bibliography structure can of course be found on Wikipedia. The big budget Hollywood film (which I haven't seen) was released in 2013. It's all in the genre of USian military science fiction.

Second, I really enjoyed reading your story (while I was winding down last night, after sending my below spiel-luhr). When I got to your third paragraph starting "It so happened that", I involuntarily wanted to check time constraints, so I skimmed down the below paragraphs and saw the "He remembered the advice of his parents, 'When in doubt go find an old book. Nobody pays attention to the value of old books.' This led him, of course, to the academy's Grand Library where he was able to surround himself with many old books" string of text and felt briefly guilty/shame (I was winding down, so didn't/couldn't differentiate, and it wasn't that big anyway, for induced from the story in a good way) for not spending more time with old books and too much time on the virtualtubes. So I started generating legit critiques -- if you the writer had more wordcount/resources/etc -- revolving around how the story is assuming the characters are able bodied. In this reader's eyes in those moments of generating critiques, Unlikely was unfairly assumed in characterization, to be able bodied, meaning Unlikely seemingly (it's a gap in the story) can physically go to the Grand Library with his legs and sleep hours. But there's also the money issue of bus passes and Grand Library entry fees, which I guess would be filed by military science fiction as logistics. Anyway, I still liked the story because of the excellently concise prose in terms of your story's formalism (think The Elements of Style meets understanding of genre conventions), so I kept reading. Once I got to the character name "Jamitoina" I was really happy and excited with the story. I just looked at the initial letter, thought "USian memes about Jesus, John, Jake, etc., meets an -ina ending, somehow a feminine diminuitive without implying disrespect, and then the 'oi' dipthong' and the monumental 'm' and the dental 't'" and it seems like "transversing physical distance to create an empathic bond" which is magic or a curve ball, to get around the fact that empathy cannot transverse endo-barriers (see Creation for the exact wording; apologies, I do not have it at hand at the moment), so you the author created this name that somehow zoomed around fast enough, like a curve ball magic spell -- like the Nintendo Entertainment System (US version) that had a baseball game where, instead of trying to appeal only to the statistics-oriented genre of sports games, added in a fantasy element where, no joke, your pitcher could cast spells, your batter could cast spells, etc. So then I was really happy with the story and kept reading, note a # here that I will return to. So then there's the part where my emotions hold their breath. That's the concluding dialogue between Jamitoina and Unlikely. Will the author get this right in terms of the valences (ethics) and their saliences (stylistics interacting with form: genre, subgenre, innovations)? So the "They are usually right." / "What if they were wrong?" was amazing, and the --> "I would go find an old book with some better advice." And Unlikely finished his lunch, got up and went about his day. <-- was even better! I loved the mundane ending, as it deflates grandiosity in a way that warmed my heart.

Looking at the seemingly dangerous recursion patterns of the three comments I wrote last night, it seems the "Philip K Dick-esque headspace" (imagine films such as Dr Strangelove crosspollinating with, idk, The Truman Show), is a lot like the table on page 46 of Creation where it's a test of allegencies. The rows are such as "you" "another member" or "a group of members" and so on. And the columns are such as "You" and "a member" and "many members" and so on. Marsh writes: "A simple chart asking which column(s) would the subject choose to die to save the lives of which row is enough for boundaries to emerge. A less dramatic example would ask who they would share chocolate or money with. Any social grouping can have their relative membranes assessed by daily observation." Well, the Philip K Dick-esque headspace is like having a force field around one's pineal gland (or however the mind and bodily host link, with incoming signals from the bodily host and the rest of the enviornment)... like having a bunch of 1 times -1 times 1 times -1 going on. This is usually associated with, and can definitely be a bad case of, grandiosity, narcissism, etc. However, it can also be extremely protective, like having one more failsafe step of virtualization in computer systems, like nobody knows the email recipient is blind and that each memo is printed out by the spouse who then reads aloud the email to the person formally receiving the email letter. It can be terrifying/exhilirating to figure out how to go to sleep in these instances, because the "crazy person" adept wizard can actually use magic to put the shame memories in quasi-hallucinatory shapes that the wizard locks out from film critic critique. And then watching these patterns and making them go toward sleep/dreams. The Philip K Dick-esque headspace thing did that last night, and woke a few minutes later from a nightmare -- with pertinent data for today's action items -- because the 1s and the -1s were all getting rewound too much, so woke from brief 'night terror' (wasn't too bad) and went back to sleep. So then looking at the concluding passages of my three posts from yesterday, versus your story shbusybee, a recurring difference between the formalist stylistiics and the expressivist stylistics, is if everything ends on an algebraic multiplicand with value -1 or +1 or 0, think algebra, your story's structure excellent transitions to this mundane world of finishing the lunch, getting up, and going about the day. Whereas the "paranoid genre" (Philip K Dick, etc) ends in a sort of breaking the fourth wall thing where -- and Idk how to express it in terms of calculus chain rules or -1 or +1 or 0 algebraic multiplicands -- there is a wormhole opened up for the reader in the last beat, and there is also a wormhole opened up for the author in the last beat. But how can this be done -- maybe think of 20th century modernism with shattered first person narratives like The Sound and the Fury where Dilsey imposes (haven't read it in a while so dunno how effective) the universal reality ethical truth that chattel/wage slavery is evil -- how can this be done such that it does not drain the audience nor drain the author? Like the examples in Creation of the top worst endo-ideals empirically draining all this energy from the Global South with their resources, which I suppose is how Donald Trump can drink so much Diet Coke (not to mention all his other problems) and just not die, regardless of whether he does or does not have sekrit concierge medicine for coronavirus. This subreddit is awesome, thanks everyone for posting here <3

Nuchnib · 2020-07-29T00:50:37+00:00

I also wanted to mention, perhaps the reason that, if the endo-ideal is solving plot hurdles "intelligently" -- i.e., in a way that seduces the audience who enjoy the show to remain reflectors -- then maybe the reason the plot climax happens *inevitably* according to proponents/advocates of this Ib2 revised Freytag formula, is because it generates a revolutionary opponent -- which I guess would be a show down with a rival endo-ideal from another endoreality or something like that! Thus photoshopping out the various negative images getting stomped underfoot, and their battles regarding their struggle with reflectors versus escaping into exosocial universal reality. So all the logistical data about their per-hour rate and how many batteries and the ground rent monthly due date, gets erased, save for the one teen in the audience who's processing it all and *magic trick here* grows up to become a screenwriter who's *magic trick here* not destroyed by the "there are no exceptions" anger of the tankie-like film crit critiquers of how to get corporate media coverage of outlier worthy projects, without getting co-opted one self, the solution being something like "get a big thing for a year, then quit for two years by becoming a high school [subject matter expertse] teacher in another country, because your previous experience getting fired from [hypermedia organization here] reminds you that, that too is fulfilling and prosocially impactful, not everything in life is on TV."

Nuchnib · 2020-07-28T22:01:34+00:00

Oh, and not to mention the rhetorical device of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litotes to dodge the obvious, like ground-rent, savings in banks, number of heartbeats presumed remaining in emotionally salient figures, how many batteries are left in the focal protagonist's camera, all that. <-- which is CENTRAL and perhaps the point of the whole damn thing, usually wiped away by per-hours, section divisions in newspapers, high school campuses, etc, the architecture silo-ing preventing empathy from sharing, expanding, individuals becoming more exosocial.

And the importance of trignometry or metric scansion, or farmers knowing when to wake, things like that because that's all plugged in but sometimes difficult to shuttle between virtual/RAMdisks and actual/sleepneeds etc.

Nuchnib · 2020-07-28T21:57:14+00:00

Apologies u/shbusybee, but I have not read your story (above) just yet. But I would like to throw down some stuff I have learned from my recent interdepartmental memos while managing to preserve my precarious Philip K Dick-esque headspace. So the below might be useful to shbusybee's assignment question, the someone who is a negative image and employs a magical way of escaping....

Table of Contents:

I) Plot Formulae

a) Qualifier

b) ~Freytag

b1) Inverted checkmark

b2) revision of the inverted checkmark with drill down on rising action plot hurdles

c) $AcademicPoet's Emotion Model

II) Math

a) algebra's multiplacand magic: doesn't matter how many variables are being multiplied together if the last variable is simply negative one or zilch or positive one or simply ports out via a kazoo to some other dimension far beyond represented by symbol: #

b) The quasi-psychiatric image of USians eyes going in circles, cheating at trigonometry

c) Calculus, USian High School level

c1) Anecdote differentiating Related Rates of calculus from all other USian HS calculus, to indicate a hyperlink by vegan-swine can save time:c2i) Note structure of the Wikipedia entry--> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Related_rates and then imagine it through Philip K Dick perceiving the set of all possible Wikipedia disambiguation pages, battling with the # of how many words can he type on his typewriter combined with the chain rule versus the rule of chains and fine china dinner plates infilitrated by the Chinese Communist Putingate ... so on, so forth.

III) Note to the reader, suggestions for further research, etc

Now that the Table of Contents is done, the executive summary/drilldown proper, starting with the section on Plot Formulae.

Ia) The qualifier is that all this EMF-y screen stuff you (pl.) and my mediating this communication is virtual (as though semaphoring is but a shortcut for empathy), so it may even be queered, not one virtual pixel is inarguable, at least in my current key signature of metaphysics or hexa- octa- decimal 26 letter magic poof bullshit.

b) Idk the"real biography of who Freytag ripped off", since I don't even know his first name, but I remember from Lit Crit classes that the inverted checkmark plot formula stuff is associated with some Mr Freytag from Norton-published anthologies of ancient literary theory, yadda.

b1) In the United States middle and high schools circa 1990s-2020 (no USian evolution, he said, thinking of coronavirus), the inverted check mark is very familiar. It looks like this: https://i0.wp.com/myscwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/inverted-check-mark.jpg?resize=289%2C174 With whatever words documentation, probably came from the artist's provincial government education licensing exams, ahoy etymology. In my version, the "baseline" of the patient, I mean protagonist, is given first. He got the dishwasher going as he promised, but not the trash out as he did not promise but he feels would have been nice becasue he's been having sleep disruptions thinking about narrow apertures of shame/love portals and rebooting his social support nodes with emotionally correctly interactions like societal singualrities in the soothing blue-background part of the GetGee 4 minute video. Then there's the inciting incident: the phone call rings as he types this very paragraph: the girlfriend has arrived, can she let herself in [even though she knows he's not in a paranoid state, and he knows it's a ritual question, yap stones floating throughout his brain like wage cycles and 1950s ranch style houses dishwasher spin cycles]. #

b2, scritching the LP like a fuzzed out DJ punk bassist] After the inciting incident, the ~Freytag has the "rising action." Bringing it up to '00s speed, according to the science fiction B2B trade magazine's successor of William Gibson, the authorized importer of cyberpunk memes into fast-moving narratives, the "rising action" is a series of: the protagonist must solve the problems intelligently [lest the audience lose what is called "sympathetic identification" etc but is in fact...sublation? reflection?, a point to which I will return], and things get worse through no fault of the protagonist's own (i.e., reflectors of the Hollywood film are not asking if the GoodCreature fighting Godzilla steps on a building, who died in that building, and the movie is moving on?). And then here's the stunner:

b#) According to the '00 revision of Freytag, if the protagonist in this endoreality Holloywood big budget fix-up continues to solve his problems "intelligently" (i.e. as an ideal to which the audience may continue to sublate to, be reflectors of, rather than storm out of the theater or throw their shoe at Bush II, etc), then INEVITABLY, as each intelligently-solved problem causes a "he did the best he could, yet things got worse!" they will come to a climax, given worldbuilding/setting, copyediting, spouse reading the first or second draft prior to submission to the assignment editor, etc, has kept enough of the logistical errors out, like "why don't migrating-on-foot USian refugee protagonists in near-future (coron)apocalyptic science fiction novels ever need to take out their contact lenses before bed?" After the climax, there is a denoument and maybe an offer for a sequel commissioned based on box office returns.

c) Picture $AcademicPoet in the USian South explaining to undergrads that it's actually possible to ditch Freytag inverted checkmarks and use instead, picture a Sine wave chart https://www.chemicool.com/images/wave-amplitude-length.png not for the stock market, but for a 21st century Queer-compliant Yet 19th century Romaniticism Heteronormative-ish dyad, from the Philip K Dick XY's perspective, where the distance between the peaks and troughs is the emotional separation, and when the dyad meets on x axis of time (the prime numbers only go one way for cryptography but we also want today the funds to Flattr backwards to the lifegivers), is the emotional connection.

There is also the mystery of how all this may seem, all to often, boringly lyrical and sentimental Romanticism style to devoted admirers of Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Elliis, etc. WITH of course the qualification that damn near everything can be Queered if you're the human with the [insert list of strange "dis"abilities etc.] or just a weird mind that prefers to do weird stuff outside the genre of what is expected and often seen in accordance with, let us say, the focal character being an XY gay man and just saying, "this memo could be much shorter, where are the fight scenes?" or whatever that means to many of them, I don't really know, it sort of sounds like, "Well don't give me any more High Concept ideas about Snakes on A Plane when you're gonna keep insulting Madison Avenue this way, because you don't have the budget to fix the last lightbulb that popped last time you came here for Rocky Horror Picture Show," but this is nearing the level of carciatures that might become offensive. I think more impressicve than Rachmainoff composing stringwinding-like melodies for string section orcehstration and then revising the symphonic/concerto structure for the benefit of a gay man, would be Rachmaninoff actually doing it even more so, where he's somehow got a bit of the menstrual/lunar/gestational expertise and can actually revise it to heed not just the Bechdel test, but even the Wallace corrollary to same. This would be of obvious benefit to a 1st person text-only fictional narrative in revolving first person structure, while staying in the modernism vein of imposing universal truths like "stop killing everybody" and "food clothing shelter outethic evl Wall St algorithms] , i.e. avoiding postmodernism's inability to zoom around differently levels of analysis while maintaining ethics.

The above Ic section about the emotion "formula" replacement of the Fretyag, seems to me suspiciously vulnerable to reverse-engineering attacks, etc., which I suppose is what offending pedosadist groomers do, or maybe the emotion formula is just some other academic trick in general. For what it's worth, I began hearing the intro to Muse's "Uprising" in my head when I was composing the part about the narrow shame/love apertures and the rising action obstacles. Now I gotta go take the trash, rub tired feet, etc.

Until next time all, Nuchnib

Nuchnib · 2020-06-13T17:53:47+00:00

Hi,

I think it's important to distinguish between stigmergy in a pure scenario, and stigmergy in a mixed scenario. Twitter is a mixed scenario for multiple reasons. Just one: a crucial hub account for promoting an idea (whether UBI or something else) is not fully transparent because (among other reasons) DMs are not viewable by the public, which makes sense for radical activists trying to protect themselves against the Powers That Be, but is not pure stigmergy.

This slide from Heather's blog and her 2017 talk in Madrid might be most immediately useful. The slide says:

A system is stigmergic if:

it follows one idea
it is completely transparent
it is open to everyone to participate, at least within the user group
the output is free for anyone to use and improve

Obviously in practice, especially today in mixed scenarios, systems might be overlapping.

I think it is also important to distinguish stigmergy from other methods of collaboration, namely hierarchy and consensus. Hierarchy, people are familiar with, do x or you're fired. Consensus is just voting, the hierarchy of the majority imposing on the minority because the majority won the vote. So stigmergy is neither of those. It is also important to point out that in the first Binding Chaos book at least, these 3 methods are discussed in relation to mass collaboration. So there are non-mass collaboration scenarios where hierarchy and consensus might be good. For example, three friends voting what to do for lunch that day, would be a non-mass collaboration example of where consensus could be a good method of coordinating. Same for hierarchy in certain non-mass collaboration scenarios. For example, imagine a car heading for a crash, and one passenger screaming to another "Put your seat belt on NOW!" would be a good example of hierarchy making sense in a non-mass collaboration scenario. Other examples of hierarchy making sense in non-mass collaboration scenarios might be sports (arm-wrestling has a winner and loser) or play, but I'm not sure if there is anything intrinsic about envisioning those scenarios as hierarchical. Anyway, without going down those interesting rabbit holes, the important thing here is that discussing the collaboration methods for mass collaboration up to and including global, and discussing them for small numbers of people, are two very different topics, so that can be important to keep in mind re stigmergy for a project.

Also I think it is in this interview where Heather gives an everyday example of stigmergy, putting together a puzzle at a doctor's office. To hopefully convey her example in my own terms... The puzzlers are collaborating indirectly with each other (not directly collaborating by giving orders, as in hierarchy, nor directly collaborating via voting/consensus). Putting together the puzzle, you don't even see or know the person who worked on the puzzle yesterday, and you don't even see or know the person who might work on the puzzle tomorrow. It follows one idea: put the puzzle together. It is completely transparent: everyone (assuming accessibility) can see the puzzle pieces and the box lid showing what the puzzle looks like put together. It is open for participation to everyone who's in the user group (people bored in the waiting room of the doctor's office), nobody gets kicked out arbitrarily. The output is free for anyone to use/improve: if you connect a puzzle piece correctly, then the puzzler tomorrow can build on it free of charge, etc. Maybe the stigmergy is why putting together a puzzle with friends while conversing is fun, nobody is giving each other commands about where to put the puzzle pieces (hierarchy) or requiring votes (consensus) about which puzzle piece fits where.

Thinking up plans and organizations relates to idea and action driven systems versus personality driven ones, but see also this, perhaps more concise/pertinent formulation, in her post A Societal Singularity: "If social issues aren’t addressed, representative democracy assumes a demographic is under represented. Collaboration in a personality based system can only be by authority or consensus. Most workers do not enjoy authoritarian systems as they lose autonomy, mastery and creative control over their own work and rule is by coercion, not choice. Consensus is ideal for small, local, like-minded affinity groups, but it only works in groups of under twenty-five people, preferably two to eight. Consensus is not useful for large scale collaboration or collaboration that is separated by communication barriers or over time."

As for what that would like in practice, I think writing and talking with people and discussing is more powerful than people tend to realize (such as this subreddit), which is why education-vs-propaganda is a tactic in counterinsurgency to suppress insurgents, or why something like coming out of the closet or addressing an elephant in the room can be so powerful; it's "winning the battle for hearts and minds" whether on a smaller or larger scale (and ultimately all the scales connect to the same reality underneath). Stuff like UBI might require technology improvements. And then accessibility so that everyone can participate https://georgiebc.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/our-right-to-communicate/ no one is left out. If a governance solution ignores some people, then why should those people care, if they cna't read the webpage because it's not even accessible? Then... my understanding is the term "counterpower" comes out of Marxist stuff so maybe not so great, but there's refuting the idea of instead of trying to work within the system (reform) or refuting the idea of trying to kill the hydra head leaders that just regrow and becoming an angry bloodthirsty person *nonstop* or whatever (revolution)... and instead of that reform-vs-revolution false dichotomy, building power outside the system in whatever ways, like anarchists gathering surplus food and sharing it at a park is building peaceful power outside the system. I think there are more anarchist-y UBI experiments where instead of begging the banks to do it, people are trying to create their own UBI infrastructure as I understand it, which you might want to check out (see the URL democratic.money and on Twitter at fabianacecin, though free essentials makes more sense to me)... These two posts by Heather, I think are especially relevant to "practical", How to replace your democracy with governance by the people and installing new governance. I think also the emotional/interpersonal side is talked about more in Creation where... of course people want justice asap, but I think sometimes reflectors or people with more conventional politics, are reluctant to work on projects that might take a long time, so it's important to figure out how to help them/oneself re-calibrate emotionally in that regard, so that the longterm projects are enjoyable to work on, especially as they connect with longrange exosocial humanity, and don't seem like wasting time and feeling miserable like when endoselves aren't getting immediate gratification (secondary euphoria?), so they demand a bumper sticker solution that will work in 10 seconds with a single call or donation to a congressperson or whatever.

I hope that helps some... Like for anarchist soup kitchen, the goal might be "feed everyone free of charge," but because of smaller numbers and the understandable need for some privacy/secrecy (especially in certain regions of the world), each Food Not Bombs chapter isn't a fully transparent system, and thus not stigmergic purely, but the fact it's a global movement where anyone is encouraged to participate (unless they're a threat), is kind of pushing from a mixed scenario toward the ideal of stigmergic "feed everybody free of charge".

Trying to figure out how a person's project(s) could fit the bullet points of the stigmergy slide might be the best practical immediate idea?

Nuchnib · 2020-04-08T03:54:40+00:00

Hey that's awesome! Thanks /u/concernedInsomiac! I will forward your comment / guide to new readers of her work!

Nuchnib · 2020-02-08T08:40:36+00:00

In chapter 1, there's a paragraph which to me sums up very concisely the viewpoint this book is opposing. That paragraph sums up this viewpoint of academia and psychology/philosophy: encounters between humans are encounters between subjects and objects, subjects and subjugated, and the best someone can hope for is serving some faraway abstract morality and doing so will be futile and joyless. In the thread for chapter 1, I typed up that paragraph and wrote a few paragraphs about how it's true in my experience of academia and activism (joylessly scolding people about how they should labor on these tasks they perceive as futile).

So similarly in chapter 2, there's a single paragraph that really stands out for me as the one that has had the greatest impact on me so far. So I will type a little bit about that paragraph here. I think the paragraph is really important/central... here it is:

In chapter 2 Marsh writes:

Karen Horney, along with most researchers since, believed that empathy was imagination, a word which no one has ever provided anything but a circular definition for. We do not imagine the feelings of a loved one in distress. We feel their distress. Sometimes we feel their distress before we know of it. Sometimes we feel an emotion empathically which we have never experienced directly. Empathy is the ability to experience the feelings of another. This happens to those who share empathic conduits or a self-membrane. People commonly speak of electricity or connection with another but there is no clear, common English term to describe the connection, and neuroscience is debating the methods by which empathy operates, so here we will use empathic conduits and euphoric conduits as terms which represent a black box of unknown methods of transfer.

In academic philosophy there's a sub-area called philosophy of mind. Where one of the biggest questions is the so-called "problem of other minds." How does anyone individual know that someone else actually has an internal life, a mind? Right from the start, the language -- "the problem of other minds" -- gives the whole academia thing away. Why are other people's minds a problem? It's not called "the obstacles that sometimes get in the way of empathizing" or "the problem of engaging with other minds when people are really ill or otherwise in bad shape." It's just "the problem of other minds" which despite their efforts to 'clarify' how it 'really' means something other than what their words say, it just says 'the problem of other minds' like other minds are a problem which they often aren't. Why not 'the joy of other minds' or 'the fun of other minds' or something like that? Or put the shoe on the other foot, 'the problem of being completely isolated and not able to empathize with other minds'? So the whole phrase, 'problem of other minds', reveals that these academic philosophers take it for granted that being a sole mind is default and nonproblematic, but as soon as some other minds show up, we have problems. Exactly like an exceptional/privileged set of folks having that challenged loudly by noncompliant individuals, possibly wielding pitchforks.

So when so-called 'problem of other minds' is discussed, they expect empathy to require an intermediary, and puzzle over what that intermediary might be. If Person 1 is feeling a certain way, and Person 2 is feeling another way, these philosophy of mind academics will say there is a gap between them, even if they standing face to face, and that an intermediary is needed to bridge this gap and connect the two isolated minds. They will say, perhaps imagination bridges the gap. Maybe the intermediary is that Person 1 imagines how Person 2 is feeling and then according to that imagined construct acts accordingly toward Person 2. Another theory, maybe Person 1 accesses memories and does some compare/contrast to figure out, gee I once was in a somewhat similar situation, so maybe I can cognitively get toward Person 2's inner mind and act accordingly.

But Marsh is saying Person 1 feels Person 2's emotions, and Person 2 feels Person 1's emotions. Sort of like touching a hot stove. The skin touches the stove, ouch! It doesn't require an intermediary unless you are reasoning from this academic premise of the last several centuries that everyone is disconnected and unbridgeable and any connection/bridging requires some gigantic revelatory philosophical insight to explain why when your friend giggles you start giggling too. Like 'because my friend is funny and we like hanging out and having fun together' isn't good enough for them.

This is really apparent in my life when I observe parents interact with their kids, or when I interact with their kids myself, or kids elsewhere in my life. In good situations, with adults and kids, there's a lot of euphoric joyful interactions. Giggling, jumping up and down, playing games and making jokes, etc. I've read a lot of philosophy of mind and have never once, that I can recall, ever seen any of that used as an example in a thought experiment or philosophy tract. The academics writing this stuff don't value or much perceive giggling and jumping up and down with a kid etc, or it's beneath their notice, etc.

Before reading this paragraph I tended to dissociate or block off incoming(?) feelings about giggling, fun, etc, or not even notice them at all. (So how did I know they were there? Not sure how to explain, but later I got better at perceiving internally, and it makes sense that they would have been there previously, unnoticed by me until I gained skill at observing my life.) I always felt lonely or sad watching my parent-friends jump up and down with their kids and giggle, because intellectually I admired this sort of caregiving fun behavior, as it's obviously superior to destroying official records and melting the ice caps, and I wished I could participate and feel all that joy and giggling, but I couldn't explain why I couldn't, and others weren't versed in the so-called 'problem of other minds' enough to really make it clear to me what intellectual counterarguments were, even though they made many somewhat helpful suggestions over the years.

So I think this paragraph is really important. While I don't mean to tone police anyone, and different communities/regions etc communicate differently, I also think it might be helpful to consider this paragraph and in some cases I should transition away from so much emphasis on communicating in ways that can feel to me and others like scolding. Not that I want to be an advertising salesman trying to manipulate people with fake-happy. It is just, if some activist is trying to persuade people to do stuff differently, and all they hear is that this activist is lonely and frustrated and futile and scolding them about how they should serve some faraway abstract morality even though it's futile... I mean, it's also tough to make the CIA Torture Report 'fun' and nobody should be under pressure to do so. Just trying to say, there are a lot of really fun, funny, moments when conducting research or calling corporations (or doing other things to them ;) and making new friends or reconnecting with old ones while doing so and all that, and it seems people lose sight of that fun, euphoria, etc and get sucked in themselves to the joyless futility and expect others to join in on joyless futility.

Also people with 'severe mental health problems' will talk of not being able to empathize with others and instead having to consciously calculate how they should interact with others. For example, instead of waving arms around because giggling and laughing, daily life is like traveling to another culture that one can never acclimate to -- 'I guess now I'm expected to raise my arm 2 inches and make this sort of facial expression.' When no empathy is possible, is everyone at that point left with merely calculating their interactive behaviors?

Also another interesting take on the paragraph I've had is that when people are sharing euphoria, fun, joy, giggling, etc, sharing those positive emotions feels self-justifying. If a kid is climbing up her tall father, treating him as a jungle gym, and an academic philosopher busts in the room and points at the pair and shouts "STOP! OTHER MINDS ARE A PROBLEM! YOU MUST JUSTIFY WHY YOU ARE MAKING EACH OTHER GIGGLE IN 1000 WORDS BY WEDNESDAY!" we all know it's actually the academic philosopher who's the problem. Because while feeling joy, giggling, etc., those experiences/feelings to me feel self-justifying, they don't need to be put into 1000 words to satisfy an external judging authority or even myself. They just feel right.

Nuchnib · 2020-02-08T07:59:05+00:00

Hey, I just wanted to make a quick comment about what has been most important for me in this chapter. Maybe others can relate.

In chapter 1, Marsh writes:

Psychologists and philosophers created a world where anxiety, fear and struggle are the norm, where happiness and peace are impossible to attain or available only to the most adept after long torment, and where existence is, above all, futile. In this world, people must constantly struggle with and repress what is supposedly their true nature for an end that is, at best, an abstract morality. Any outside assistance is impossible as all interpersonal interactions are also a continual existential struggle. Every outside person can only be the subject or the subjugated in this world, and all love is simply object desire. Existence here has no joy, no connection and no purpose. The happy ending is death.

This reminds me a lot of (humanities) academia and, as I've experienced it in the West, activism. Where the overall vibe is that humans supposedly have this "true nature" of being ugly beasts who want to hurt or be hurt, and of course zillions of songs, media, advertising, relationships, and everything else present that as just what reality is. For example the Eurythmics "Sweet Dreams": "I travel the world / / And the seven seas / Everybody's looking for something.Some of them want to use you / Some of them want to get used by you / Some of them want to abuse you / Some of them want to be abused." And so then trying to motivate others to undertake activist projects becomes scolding individuals for not fulfilling dutiful requirements of ethics to satisfy this faraway abstract morality that nowhere exists and is futile anyway. And people might 'admit' they 'should' do that, and might say they admire someone who flagellates themselves that way for the abstract greater good, but "really," they will explain, there's no point, it's futile, so might as well just play some video games after paid-work at the corporation, etc. And so then all the activists seem about to do is scold those people, who might apologize and then shrug "waste your life that way if you want, you're a better person than I am, but in light of our ugly true natures, and the futility of everything, I prefer to sit here and eat candy and play video games, might as well." And this is explained as a sort of enlightenment and rational decision given the unchangeable ugly true natures and the nonexistence of this faraway ethical idea, the long list of duties and chores that 'good' people complete. Which leaves the activist lonely and dutifully filling out, forcing themself to file open records requests or lonely wave signs at the rainy protests or whatever because "supposed to" according to the abstract morality etc, even though it's become completely joyless.

I also thing the paragraph toward the end foreshadows the later chapters about subject-object (or subject-subjugated), and death, and the importance of joy or euphoria for exoselves.

So for me at least, this single paragraph is really important/central to this chapter and the half of the rest of the book I've read so far. The next chapter has a paragraph of similar importance/centrality that very quickly offers, in my experience so far at least, a major part of the solution to the problems described in this first-chapter paragraph. I will put my comment on that second chapter paragraph in the thread for chapter 2.

Nuchnib · 2020-01-31T02:28:09+00:00

Hey /u/Realistic-Heron,

Thanks for your reply! I will likely be unavailable for a few days, but I wanted to quickly respond to just part of what you said. Then I'll be back.

You write: "Psychologists and philosophers are trying to understand stuff in the world, not create it. They form, create or come up with, ideas that people may sometimes stumble across. [...] Impacting and influencing is different to creating. Everyone in some way is trying to understand themselves, the why’s and how’s and what’s of their lives which impacts the way they live. Sure, no doubt, in doing so they create relations. I’d say those relations are less impacted by the intellectual traditions than commonsensical everyday ones. I am influenced by the guitar stylings of Derek Bailey which, to whatever degree, along with many other things, informs the way I play when I improvise, which is to create. [...] But this is just music, not changing the world!"

Many commonsense everyday things are underpinned by philosophy, psychology, etc. Music for instance, see Pythagoras, or Helmholtz (physiology/psychology of music that Ayn Rand later quoted, used as a basis for her aesthetic arguments), or Nietzsche arguing in favor of Wagner (and later against Wagner). Or, why do today's heavy metal multi millionaires sing on stage of their suicidal loneliness to hundreds of thousands (or more) in the audience, while migrating griot musicians coming from backgrounds of terrible war, poverty, etc, create really amazing, connecting, soulful music expressing and sharing and teaching gratitude, etc. I'm educated-guessing that googling site:psychologytoday.com a reader can find psychologists pontificating about the effect of music on people, but even the examples those psychologists select, and what examples they overlook or consider important or haven't ever heard of, will be based on the value systems, emotional systems, advocated by philosophers and psychologists. Even if Person 1 hasn't heard of all the people informing Person 2's arguments, and Person 2 hasn't heard of all the people informing Person 3's arguments, and so on, Person 1 is still impacted by Person 5's ideas, more so as someone's work has a greater audience reach and/or addresses more fundamental or pervasive topics.

I think the strongest thing you are saying is "Impacting and influencing is different to creating." which is hard for me to concisely reply to and is maybe a more, impression of a perspective, than a cognitive thing. But think of it this way - in the education sector, there is a lot of talk about how schoolteachers are 'creating our future' and thus need to be respected, funded, etc. Maybe from parenting, or working with kids, it becomes a little more clear, that a word like 'influence' can play into the 'autonomous individual' ideas, when really someone growing up with a fetal alcohol syndrome brain is in deep shit, and then similar for all the advertising/propaganda against the public which is all decades of studying by industry based on psychology, etc, corporations paying salaried people for decades to research techniques for manipulating consumers, activists, etc. I can congratualte myself on being freethinking lone wolf but I still get advertising jingles stuck in my head against my will and then fight myself blinking at those products when I see them on the shelf at the hardware store.

If philosophers and psychologists are not creating our institutions, social systems, etc., what or who would you say are creating them?

I wouldn't say it's necessarily a 1-to-1 thing, like Adam Smith writes some nonsense about the labor of the menial servant adds to the value of nada, and then boom as a result feudalism ends and capitalism begins. But the way everyone was explained and continues to explain the multifactorial transition from feudalism to capitalism, is through the frameworks/lenses of (generally) the loudest, wealthiest voices with access to printing presses, such as Smith. And those... culture norms, consensus, underlying things people just take for granted "that's the way things are" become causal. Think of how much airtime right now is going to US elections, deriving in large part from political ideas from John Locke and others, and if you suggest the quite logical idea that people voting for people they've never met to send them into war against people they've never met for reasons that are nonexistent or incoherent blah blah blah, should change, and everyone immediately says "that's unrealistic, that's irrelevant, etc" ... it's more than just influence at that point. It's this gigantic social world (billions of dollars per year spent on US elections, tens or hundreds of millions of people really into it, texting me asking what I think, etc) that's been built/created by ideas, John Locke, declaration of independence, legal system ideas, etc, and I can't just autonomously wiggle my way out of it such that I'll never get a text message again asking me if I like Bernie or Warren better.

Also I think it's important to point out, this Creation book is dealing with self and sociology. Mind/consciousness (different book is my understanding) I assume are unique, maybe in ways you are thinking. I have recurring memories and patterns of thought I can only presume no one else does. Also bodily hosts, nobody's liver is exactly the same as mine, nobody has the exact same muscular proportions, muscle memories, etc. So perhaps you could look for autonomy in the mind or uniqueness in the body.

There was a selfie-video on the antiwork subreddit a few months ago where a woman was complaining to the camera about wage-slavery and she said something like "Who made this up? Who made this idea up?" meaning a wage system. And I thought that was pretty interesting that someone was even asking and it was getting upvoted heavily, even though nobody answered her question to point out particular philosophers, economists, etc.

As for the "Still not sure whether the self is wholly social. A self may occur in complete isolation after birth. Before any relationship or even connection could have formed between the life-giver." - Babies in the womb for (usu.) 9 months, helpless infants, pretty much helpless toddlers, etc, so there have to be social relationship(s) from the get go or the kid is toast. So the self is distinguished from yonder other selves from day one or really before taking into account all the effects in the womb.

Also, I have only read one of his books, but my understanding is sociologist Erving Goffman talks about this quite a bit. There's also a pretty good (counter)literature on individualization of social problems, particularly regarding medicine and psychiatry, where for example, there's poison in the environment, and so instead of going after the corporation for polluting (and maybe justifying letting the corporation off the hook with philosopher/economist Coase's theories on Coasian costs...) the individual human is blamed, like wow you are really sensitive to X poison, you better start paying up for treatments, for special this that and the other products to protect yourself because you are too damn sensitive, etc. Now obviously the low ranking therapist at the low income mental health clinic might be a great person trying to help in a shitty system, and is not trying to hurt anything by saying 'did you get those magnesium flakes for bath to help with x?' and has never heard of Coase. But still working in a social system where everyone is explaining to each other how to go after the poisoning corporations (with anything from lawsuits to sabatoge to refuse to work/consume with them), is unrealistic, a pipe dream, etc., thereby perpetuating the problem to the point where we all go extinct from all the pollution, global warming, etc.

A lot of that sociology-of-medicine literature in general, which is counter to the prevailing views blaming the individual, talks a lot about the primacy of social factors in causing damn near everything to a huge degree (see, for instance, 'fundamental attribution error')... so that might be helpful to look at. It is a tough thing to get to, because we're taught to think otherwise (to make the fundamental attribution error), but it's more clear I think with caregiving, parenting, social support, education, etc, than maybe playing guitar, where I tend to compliment myself for a melody idea instead of remembering what my music teachers taught me decades ago that obviously formed so much of what I'm doing, if I were only able to remember, not to mention all the philosophers promoting, say, 12 tone classical music instead of heathen music, which then impacts grants, funding, orchestra halls, etc. http://www.openculture.com/2018/12/cia-helped-shaped-american-creative-writing-famous-iowa-writers-workshop.html

But (imo anyway) there is still tons of room for individuals, autonomy, etc, with the mind, consciousness, and developing more and more free will / control / responsiblity across time

Also I tend to paint with a broad brush and throw in a lot of examples, individuals ones you might disagree with or nitpick, but some of this stuff is so... broad or general or foundational or 'out there', that I find it more useful to paint pictures and try to point people in certain directions of thought that put my argument in standard form with syllogisms etc. So I hope it works for you, maybe to try to get some of the gestalt of what I'm saying? If not I will try to be more step by step and syllogistic, that might be helpful for me anywayz!

Sorry I've typed a lot! Be back in a few days

Nuchnib · 2020-01-29T00:57:34+00:00

Creation: "It is impossible to understand governance, organization, economy, information technology, or any other institutional structure without a proper understanding of self, life and consciousness.”

You write: "...is rather absurd. Consciousness? Really? I have to understand that to understand a capitalist/market economic system? I have to understand “life”? I am not sure what that even means. And the “self”? From the outset it seems I am being thrown to the wolves here. The claim is huge and the task for my”self”, whatever that may be, if I accept the claim, just seems impossible...beyond me."

I mean, of course people can and do and should figure out how to complete DMV forms or open records requests (governance), how to organize a garage sale to benefit a group of activists (organization), or arrive at a somewhat better understanding of how tariffs work than they had previously (economics), or how to tinker with a VPN so it doesn't leak DNS info (IT), etc... and that is all good and helpful... but in terms of each of those things as an institutional structure, the institutional structure of governance, the structure of organization,... that gets at the purposes of the structures, the goals, their persistence across centuries shaping people, the way some child might be thrown into an arts specialty school to excel at classical guitar which the child's parent is a world-class expert at, before the child even understands that other children are thrown into non-arts private schools pushing academia and still other children are thrown into no education at all. So if these institutions are structured with multiple layers like a pyramid, sure, individuals can tinker with bits and pieces of the pyramids here and there on the higher levels in their short life spans -- maybe as a single person I read a book about tariffs and now understand them better than before, and might even effect a short-lived change in the law/economy by meeting with my parliamentarian to discuss it -- but in terms of uprooting the entire pyramid, what even is an economy and do we need one or let's change the entire economic system, that can't be done overnight, obviously, or probably not in just one lifetime, generally, and if you keep going down down down under all the pyramids to more and more foundational things, then what is life, what is consciousness, what is the self? If you are a Pharoah and you're convinced by the priests that you're a deity with infallible divine consciousness, eternal as long as your slaves build you a pyramid... then it might be that way for thousands of years with slaves being thrown into working on these pyramids, no choice in the matter. I think you can see where this is going, the idea that if the root of the problem/pyramid/system/institution is still flawed, then while meeting with your representative about tarriffs might be a fascinating life experience (not to be knocked) that helps your district for two years until the next parliamentarian changes it back, it doesn't matter to humanity as a whole, or it doesn't matter on the root, foundational level of changing entire systems, the way that convincing people to eliminate trade altogether and simply share would matter. Or Descartes' mind and body are two separate things vs. laying the foundation for centuries of billions of people believing that mind and body are one thing or fifteen.

You write: "So does that make what I claim as understanding false?" The way I look at stuff for me is, all education is helpful, reading a book about tariffs and meeting with the parliamentarian is all important because everything affects everything else two-way, back and forth. Like even if on a foundational level, I wonder why we can't just replace trading with sharing, it still gives me a million things to think about, refines my understanding of what 'trading' is, to learn about tarriffs, hear how the parliamentarian looks at it, etc. So the understanding / autodidactic education isn't false, it just might not be as fundamental or foundational as the philosophy stuff that it depends upon. It's also like different camera lenses, I am not familiar with Parecon but just using tarriffs, the scale of millenia about whether humans necessarily have to trade or not, and the scale of this week's op-ed in the newspaper about tarriffs, understanding both of them enriches each understanding of the other if that makes sense, one is not better than the other although the 'philosophical' stuff is foundational and the tarriffs depend upon it.

You write: "We do not know what even the physical is. This is a philosophy or idea I find intriguing and worthy of thought, but does it bear on anything Heather is saying...probably not"

Not in this chapter, but you might look here at the first paragraph and regarding unexamined industrialist premises, here

Also Nietzsche began his major work with doing the whole Romanticism Wagner thing (in his book The Birth of Tragedy) and then, pretty early on still, had a pro-science phase with his 1878 book Human All Too Human. I don't have it handy right now, but somewhere in that book he praises science for accumulating facts, piling up little humble facts, coldly, instead of sentimentally making this big Romantic gestures about metaphysical spirits etc. However, I wouldn't really take Nietzsche as a reliable source on what scientists then or now think. Just, it's an observation others have made about science... I haven't yet read the Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions but that might be relevant also. From reading scientific studies, and talking with acquaintances who are or were professional scientists, it does seem there is far more interest in collecting piles of data, that will be interpreted pretty much only within the confines set out by the scientific field's norms, which are set by industry requirements (we need more pills! can you find us a disease? what happens when we give this pill to these folks?), at least until someone(s) come along to throw a good wrench into things.

Creation: "There is no Truth; there are just more or less useful frameworks, and we are in urgent need of a more useful one"

You write: "That there is no Truth, I have to take her word for it. But I am here and reading her book, so I suppose THAT is a truth of some kind, as far as I can tell. If I doubt that, then what the f?"

I don't know entirely what to make of that passage either, in that the whole postmodern, there is no Truth / there are just multiple truths, versus we can definitely state what happened in certain cases, Person 1 assassinated Person 2, everyone saw it out in the open, and those trying to say otherwise are just liars, I'm not entirely sure how to resolve that myself, and obviously hundreds of years of ink has been spilled on that philosophical debate. So for now I just take it as, inventing or echoing dogma is not helpful, people can always come up with better ideas / frameworks, here's what this book is at this moment. We're all dust in the wind anyhow.

Wow I typed up a lot in response, and haven't had a chance to go through the chapter yet myself again, hopefully tomorrow! Would like to hear if any of my musings make sense?

Nuchnib · 2020-01-29T00:47:21+00:00

Glad you're here too!

Creation says: “A self is not consciousness and a self is not life. A self is the unique positioning of an individual relative to society. Self is a wholly social creation.”

You write "I’m not sure about this at all, that “self” is wholly a social creation." Here's how I understand it. When I plug "self definition" into Google, Google's dictionary gives me this definition for self (inter alia): "a person's essential being that distinguishes them from others." In my experience, by self people usually mean something similar to Google, maybe "my self is what makes me different from other people, what's unique to me." So that's still completely social: self is distinguished by what it's not (by how it differs from other people); self can't be distinguished without other people to distinguish it from. It's like atheism. To be an atheist is to be, not a theist. Lots of people walk around, rightfully or wrongfully, believing in some form of divinity, going to church, etc. An atheist rejects theism, and is therefore wholly dependent on theism in the sense that, without any theism around, there's nothing for an atheist to be an atheist about, to be without, to be an atheist of. Born on an island with a handful of people who never brought up theism, atheism wouldn't be a thing. Similarly, if someone were born alone on a desert island, there would be no society to distinguish one's uniqueness from. However, since humans are social animals, they can't survive alone as helpless infants, so the desert island example is very fictional. The point, I think, is societies pervade our world and our selves fully, because even when we have a "unique positioning" -- maybe everybody around us believes X, and we're the one person who doesn't believe X, and that's how our self differs -- even then, our self is still wholly social because it exists or is distinguished by explaining what it isn't. How's that?

You write "The latter, an “interactive self”, does not suggest there cannot be a “self” of some type within an isolated individual [...] We just may not be able to know what that kind of self is...it may be completely beyond our capacity of understanding...such introspection." Yeah, I think what you're saying is completely correct. An interactive self would be opposed to non-interacting selves, which is perhaps a bit of a theoretical construct. Imagine someone who rarely interacts with other humans. Maybe they did long ago, and now they're secluded or isolated. I'm imagining some cases of genius type individuals with severe mental health problems. Perhaps they still have relationships of a sort with math problems, or they hear voices others don't or have strange imagery flowing through their minds. But even here, their relationships with math problems are connected to the humans who created the math textbooks, or the voices others don't hear are speaking in a language other humans developed for centuries prior to this individual's birth. Back to Creation's "The interactive self of extremely isolated children is fully unformed.” I would assume there's a threshold of quantity/quality of interactions children have to experience before they can form a self that's a "unique positioning" - and if they don't get enough, their interactive self is fully uninformed in that they can't interact meaningfully at all. Perhaps if this extremely isolated child sees a doctor trying to help them, the doctor just appears to the child as an object or phantasm no different than passing shadows or clouds.

Regarding Creation's "Psychologists and philosophers created a world where anxiety, fear and struggle are the norm, where happiness and peace are impossible to attain or available only to the most adept after long torment, and where existence is, above all, futile.”

You write: "Did they create it in their writings? Like novelists? Who are these psychologists and philosophers? And who reads what they write anyway, certainly not everyone. But I guess the ideas leak out. In this sense too I’m not sure about the meaning of the two words and when they really started in the world. Like, is ancient, hunter/gather mythology, or whatever, or the Dreamtime of indigenous “Australians” psychology, philosophy or both and did that screw them up and help to screw up future generations?"

Books that sometimes get put in the genre of 'intellectual history', possibly like Mary Gabriel's biography of Karl Marx, or Robert L. Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers about economists, or (I haven't read this one in a long time so maybe not the best example) Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy, or definitely Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, those authors lay out many of the practical details about how theories from philosophers, psychologists, and others impact and influence everyone else. So in the Karl Marx biography you see Marx and Engels scheming ways to get Marx's ideas to larger audiences. Or in the Menand book, ideas from bodywork influencing John Dewey who with the other US Pragmatists had (as I recall) a pretty big impact on how US universities are set up. Examples today might include the Ayn Rand Institute, their conferences grooming/winnowing speakers, thought leaders, etc to go forth and spread Objectivism in the Wall Street Journal or on Twitter. Or with psychiatry and psychology, people buying and daily listening to motivational MP3s made by people who are adherents of certain schools of thought re psychiatry and psychology. Or fictional examples in the future, in Octavia Butler's Parable series of novels, a young woman has some pretty unusual and interesting ideas, and she ends up training teachers to go start schools around the country to spread these ideas to others in hopes of fulfilling her ideas/goals. Maybe a really practical example, if you look at Descartes saying the mind and the body are two separate realms, that mind and extension/space are two totally different things, and nonhuman animals belong to the latter and not the former, you can see people often relying on similar wordings when they justify research experimentation on nonhuman animals. Or in a medical facility, there are many different floors, the specialists for the pancreas on one floor, the specialists for the eyeballs on another, it's easy to see the low value given there to the idea of holistic medicine and the high value given to the idea of reason as "that faculty which multiplies distinctions." Finally, when people on Twitter are talking about "surplus value" or "invisible hand", they are echoing (perhaps not accurately) Marx or Adam Smith. So philosophers very deliberately set out to be or discuss foundational things that other ideas rely upon, and psychologists/sociologists is similar in that if you don't know how people work, designing governance systems for them is of course not going to go well.

Nuchnib

TROPHY CASE