Science Literature + Funding Pressure Encourages Divergence

We ask: why is the literature on charge-transfer (CT) mechanisms in organic systems such a shitshow? There are so many different terms for different types of potential mechanisms: tunneling, hopping, but then also superexchange, and resonant tunneling, and multi-step tunneling, coherent hopping, electron delocalization etc etc. Are there likely this many different mechanisms governing the charge transport in organic systems? The answer is definitely not, and a lot of these actually pick out the same fundamental mechanism but just use different terminology because their results were a little different when they ran the experiment.

You have many different groups under pressure from funding sources to publish. This puts a time crunch on things, and you should just get your results out one way or another.

But, you don't want to step on the toes of another published person in the field who might review your manuscript, so you use different terminology. you avoid really pitting your results against their framework, and just use different words, and that wont offend them.

As a result, there isn't a collective effort by the community to converge on a single unified explanation, but rather the opposite force to avoid each other as much as possible to just publish without problems. 

So the answer is: the social organization between researchers, journals, and funding sources.

Short term solution: write a review that goes over all the terms for different CT mechanisms, and what different major groups mean by them. And then you can distinguish (for example) superexchange vs superexchange', where the latter is how the XXX group uses the term which is completely different than the traditional technical meaning.

Long term solution: Rearrange the social dynamic of this deadly triangle. How would you do it?

The Earth's Will to Reproduce

Just quick dump of a thought here, but hopefully will have time to expand.

Q: If the earth is an organism, why hasn't it reproduced?

A: The earth first needs to reproduce by sending its seeds out into space to colonize it. This likely forms the basis of the human fascination with space, remarkable ability of humans to build tech to go into space and explore and proliferate, etc. We are the earth's seeds, and our desires, goals, fascinations, etc all proceed from the earth's will to reproduce.

Camus Absurdism vs Marx Leftism

Encountered the following challenge on an Absurdist forum:

do you not think reveling in absurdity and meaningless is a luxury you can afford if you dont have debt and work and struggle to get by every day?
if i stopped giving a fuck, which i wish i could do, i'd lose everything materialistic and financial. id be kicked out of my course.
"Schopenhauer was laughed at for praising suicide at a laden table [but he was technically right]"
He was maybe right but he still could afford the luxury of that being one of the only proper worries.
i cant imagine myself exactly being relaxed and happy and accepting about being homeless or out in the cold and the rain.

TLDR: If you can't avoid work/money/housing related anxiety, it's very difficult to be content in the absurdity and meaninglessness of it all, even if you're aware of it.

or maybe i'm just an idiot

Twofold Response:

1. This rings similar to the concept of a rollercoaster effect, where lower income brackets are statistically less likely to commit suicide because they are working toward something and have a direction of progress. Once you "make it to the top" and see that you have no more fulfillment than you did when you were climbing, you become depressed and have no where to go but the "steep drop" into oblivion.

Absurdism (I think) is supposed to help you see this steep drop before you begin climbing, so that you don't waste time "climbing the ladder of success" with expectations of fulfillment, only to confirm the meaninglessness that you knew was there all along.

2. Another point is that the concept of "not giving a fuck" in absurdism doesn't translate to "not caring about physical sustenance." It's more like "acknowledging that you are forced to care about physical sustenance as an animal organism even though you know it's all futile as a human being. And rather than ending it all, you decide to accept this and fall prey to your physiological needs because you don't give a fuck."

Donnie Darko: Holiness through Fatalism in a Post-Religious Era

Summary: I think one of the lesser-discussed messages behind Donnie Darko is: We can replace God with a romantic notion of universal fatalism.
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"Donnie wakes up in his bed laughing after dreaming some of the events within the TU. He then goes back to sleep seemingly content with life now. The experience has seemingly brought him closer to God and he is no longer afraid to die. The jet engine Donnie sent through the time portal now falls into his bedroom killing him."

Easily the best movie of all time.

The greatest thing about Donnie Darko is that it uses fatalism to add a holiness to existence in a post religious society. And it does this in so many ways, through the directing, and a masterfully crafted plot that exists on many layers, somehow still haunting the user with this holiness on each one. It evokes one with the eerie but infinite astonishment about the world that Heidegger characterizes as fundamental to Dasein. Like a fascination with your very existence in the world, as a self at this time and place for no apparent reason. In this case it is evoked by playing with the meaning of your story in the universe through manipulations with time and choice that can imbue a weird sense of destiny on everyday living. One must ask: why does Donnie die laughing?

the story exists on two levels

1.

i think from just watching it, without seeing the director's cut or anything, you see a guy who falls into a horrible series of events

and is questioning death and being alone, and having issues with that

and goes through a series of events and seems to understand something, or realize something

especially after the series of events is so pointedly terrible (like the universe is sending him a message), and occurring in this dreamlike sequence

and when he wakes up, back at the beginning of it all

he sacrifices himself so all those bad things dont happen to everyone

and he goes happily, feeling that there is some greater sort of timeline, a holier connection with the universe and his story as he had hoped for. the universe "spoke," so to speak.

and that evokes this notion that he is "closer to god so more okay with dying," which is something that every human ultimately wants. It's harder and more evasive to get in a post-religious era, and that's why Donnie Darko is mysterious and evasive itself at times. But it allows for that possibility using the story of your life in the place of the story of humanity, no greater deity needed...after all, he could have dreamt the whole thing. But it's this notion of fatalism that, through backward time travel from the end of your life, breaths meaning onto your present.

2.

the second layer is when u actually learn the philosophy of time book that this is based off of, and realize theres a structure and ruleset to everything thats happening

at the start they break into a tangent universe, and the universe is doomed

donnie is the chosen one, and his goal is to return the extra engine that dropped on top of his house

and everyone in that tangent universe is subconsciously guiding him to send that extra engine out of the universe so it can collapse safely, without forming a black hole. It's incredible how every single interaction in that movie is meant to lead Donnie to his destiny, it gives a powerful sense of purpose to every human interaction he has, one that the viewer feels even if he doesn't know about this deeper layer to the plot, probably from the incredible visual directing and acting.

 And it is from this beautiful perspective we can derive a sort of fatalistic maxim to live one's life in a post moral and religious society: we dont need god: just treat everyone in a way that they are subconsciously guiding you toward a fate to save the universe. This notion of a "meant timeline," and of a mysterious force leading the humans you interact with to guide you to your Great Task, ultimately death--but one in which you are happy to go, is a beautiful way to look at your life, and it's why Donnie laughs in his last moments--one must imagine Sisyphus happy. While it literally happens to Donnie, I really think this is just a metaphor for life--a tangent universe that you explore until you happily accept your fate. Follow the queues of your fellow humans--all interactions holy.

And as a follow-up, you could even interpret this without the force! The laugh works on so many levels, and even the most bare (which may make it the most powerful, existentially), where he basically realizes his fate as the Living Receiver and is brought into a feeling of holy communion with the universe (think Stranger from Camus), and even though he doesn't need to die--since the airplane wing has already been returned the primary universe is now restored and he can choose whether to go or not--he is okay with dying, because his role as the living receiver is even greater in death, and he sort of realizes that its all about choosing your story, and punctuating your fate on The Timeline, and laughs in those last moments.

The Correlation Between Philosophy and Politics

Part 1
One of Heideggers ideas is this idea of the Gay man. Where like the truly free man has recognized his condition and that he will never be fulfilled in this higher sense, and this gives him a radical freedom and unshakeable joy
Now, what the gay man does need not change, but it’s how he does it
He no longer expects a permanent fulfillment from his projects, he just does them for the sake of doing them
Now, it’s important to note here that the gay man does not drop his projects, because if he did it would be like admitting that he expected meaning out of them and got disappointed
He simply “sticks to things without getting stuck to them”
So I was thinking about how heidegger uses the specific term “projects” here
Camus has an almost identical formulation
Where he’s like should I kill myself or drink a cup of coffee
Aka once you confront the absurd, the futility of the world doesn’t actually direct you to kill yourself, it’s just one option among many
And in fact using that as an excuse to kill yourself would NOT indicate a confrontation w the absurd, since it implies that you were “disappointed” by the futility and therefore assign value to it
It’s the same point, but much more coldly and rawly stated, and he doesn’t use the term “projects”
It’s almost like Heideggers is more obviously a state brainwashing tactic
Where the goal is to convince disillusioned youths to not drop their projects but still gave value to their depression
But still give*
And you can make an argument that Sartre and Camus were doing this for the left, and H was doing it for the right
And on top of that, Sartre and Camus had complementary shortcomings
Camus was a poet of life who wished he had more pull w the academic community
Sartre had the whole community at his feet but always lamented not being able to use words with the right type of sincerity and passion (poetry)
Heidegger had both in one package, an analytically sound but still poetic-passionate view of man
I wonder if you can correlate this philosophical victory to the rise of the fascist right at that time...
Both of them were using existentialism to appeal to depressed youth, just for different sides.

I wonder if this is happening now with the victory of Sloterdijk…
That’s the first major point.


Part 2
The second part of this meditation: its interesting when you connect this to our other discussions on sort of, the role of certain philosophical concepts and propagation of them in grooming fascist tendencies to take over.
Wherein, we frame it as, certain types of thought, having to do with void, failure of liberalism, return to the tribe/myth, secrets of the unconscious, self-reliance, etc tend to fuel of rise of fascism in the country they are propagated
But in the existentialism case, the same concepts were being used to fuel both sides of the political spectrum!
So maybe this DOES imply a non-correlation between Phil concepts and their political consequences
It’s just how they’re marketed and who they’re marketed to that makes the difference

Part 3
Now, on first glance, you might think that this sort of allows us to hate on Heidegger for being a Nazi without burying his ideas; he just marketed great ideas for a bad cause (let's say intentionally or unintentionally for now, thats a different discussion). 

BUT, then you can argue "okay, doesn't that imply that heidegger's ideas, in his formulation, are still marketed towards bad things, and therefore his writings, as written, are bad?"
Which leads to the question: How do we distinguish his concepts from his framing of them?
Ironic, because this struggle between the framing of beings and the Being of them is an issue he really worked through.

It also leads to the question "can one just preach philosophy in a vacuum?"
is it always inherently directed at a political audience, with its own ideology, even if the author doesn't intend it?
Is philosophy a scalar or a vector?

If this leads you to think "well, the author has his intentions, but after he writes it, the book becomes its own new thing since hermeneutics and transcendent idealism etc etc." then I challenge you yet another time: this would imply that camus or sartres formulation of existentialism, having similar concepts to Being and Time but marketed to the more inclusive Left, is the "good" version of the text. But then, why is Being and Time the preferred version that's still used as the canon, by a mile? Clearly its content goes above and beyond its marketed political effect... and a second challenge on that, wouldn't this be like saying that the Bible was a better version of reality than Epicurious' much more accurate account of reality at the time, because the Bible placated the masses and led to less violence, aka had better political consequences?

Cultural Critique of "Dissect" Music Podcast

Here is Dissect's mission statement:

https://dissectpodcast.com/about/

In a world creating and accessing more content than ever before, we’ve quickly become a scrolling culture, hurriedly swiping through this infinite swath of content that seems to replenish without end.
Dissect was created to counter this cultural shift.
Dissect picks one album per season and analyzes one song per episode measure by measure, word by word.

It's a noble endeavor, and Pimp a Butterfly is an excellent album to start with! But in a general sense, here is my critique:

It's funny how connoisseur culture favors this kind of stuff. i might be critical here: their message is to reverse the scroll-through culture that our hyperconsumerism has led to, but their remedy (feeding you the exhaustive list of facts about the song in order to truly capture it) suffers from an arguably similar cultural sickness. In the end we don't put on the headphones and close our eyes through an album anymore, we either scroll through feeds or reductively dissect the facts about a song in order to conquer it (see: success of rapgenius). Let's be cautious in how we frame our solution.

That being said, I'm definitely going to play the shit out of this because I'm a complete product of connoisseur culture. 

The Reversed Role of Modern Working Art: Pulling Us Out of the Void

pre WW2, the goal of working art was to unconceal the earth from underneath us, and present it as such

for example painting obscene pictures of naked old people, because no one likes thinking about that, its hidden from our daily life, we push it away

its a concealed earth that we walk on and are oblivious too and rely on its concealment in order to maintain comfort

and this is heideggers definition of working art, and it makes sense

and i think in his era, the important thing to do (a la deconstruction) was pull people out of the romantic and into the void that they were repressing

romantic/classical, depending on whether you were religious or technical etc

but in any case the "earth" in this case was the uncomfortable void that everyone was ignoring

and people more or less do the same thing today, but what if its the opposite?

we've confronted the absurd formally ever since camus/sartre, and have been DEFAULT in the void

so working art is now about pulling us out of the absurd and back into the romantic

reminding us that feelings are still real, and things DO matter, even though we dont want to admit it

this meditation was inspired by this track:

https://open.spotify.com/track/0Eqm7hD828cATBLUx2fJox?si=fbFjH0ggQ-mm0tgPyaRKew

Great Nihilist Responses to the Question of Suicide

The question is "Why should I remain alive?"


Great Nihilist Responses (from Camus meme stash):

• Because your death is meaningless too. Might as well drink a cup of coffee.

• "Man is mortal. That may be; but let us die resisting; and if our lot is complete annihilation, let us not behave in such a way that it seems justice!"

• "What's your hurry?"

• There’s no reason to remain alive. But there’s also no reason not to. It makes literally zero difference. Life is futile, but deciding to end your life because of its futility assumes there is some kind of value (although negative value) attached to that futility.

• Intuitively you should kill yourself. And that’s why you shouldn’t. Because it’s absurd not to!

• And finally my (lamer) response:

life's meaning comes IN the rebellion against suicide in the face of futility and meaninglessness. its almost more meaningful that way, if you think about it. choosing to rebel against suicide in the face of transcendent meaning is almost boring. our story is the cool one.

Opioid Epidemic Cultural Breakdown

i just read such a beautiful interview on NPR about opioids

the guy FUCKING laid it out

in an era where machines are threatening the dignity of the "working man"

he loses an aspect of meaning, but also religion is gone now too, so he can't fill the void with that either

oxycontin actually serves as an instant replacement for oxytocin, which is the neurotrans. released when you get social acknowledgement like sex, being rewarded for work, or partaking in communal spirituality

furthermore, technological age of screens encourages us to get "lost in our own worlds" at the screen rather than going out and interacting

so staying home in ur own world using oxycontin is a natural consequence of undignified labor + expired religions + screens

a couple of other things, 1. you can trace this correlation starting from the AIDS movement where patient autonomy was encouraged, aka fight for your treatment as a patient regardless of what doctor says, to now. This patient autonomy is part of why patients are so adamantly demanding these drugs.

2. this is hitting men much harder than women. part of this is because men have been traditionally getting their prestige and meaning from manual work, which is now gone, and also that being a man is sort of irrelevant in this social progressive period where the woman is being redefined in a fruitful way.

so all of this together just leads to people demanding drugs to ease pain, but then sinking into this world of meaninglessness and loneliness that can only be nurtured by oxycontin.

tldr: opoid epidemic is less of a physical/economic issue and much more of a spiritual, psychological, and existential issue.

you can also see this in the surge in weed and meditation in culture

people are desperately trying to fill this void

you can't just view humans as economic agents, they will lose meaning and destroy themselves

you need a system which views them as complex, psychological, emotional etc beings

we need a new religion etc

it was such a good interview, best one ive heard in a while, here is the original article:

https://medium.com/new-york-magazine/the-poison-we-pick-261d062e6938

7 mins

Sartrean Solution to Consumerism: Consume Nothingness

General Summary: We can’t help but have an impulse to consume in our modern society, so the solution is not to avoid consuming, but to consume nothingness (i.e. your relaxing breath). this parallels sartre who sort of said, we can’t help but asking “what is consciousness” in our ego-based society, so the solution is not to avoid talking about it, but to just call it “a pool of nothingness in the brain” that sucks everything in.
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We are trapped in layers of consumerism. In one sense, we can resist temptations--eating, smoking, masturbation, etc to rebel against consumerism. But we still lose here, as the entire Western society we are situated in is framed in terms of consumerism, so you will constantly find yourself in jail. Every directive and norm is telling you to consume, and you have to pass constantly. This is not solving the problem, but rather imprisoning yourself to it.

Sartre found himself in the same situation in the 20th century--we were still trapped in Descarte's formulation of the cogito--unable to formulate our relationship to the world without conceiving of our "selves," our discrete "consciousness," which necessarily separates us from the world. Even if you say things like "my consciousness is connected deeply with the world" or "we are all one!" you still lose in the same way as consumerism above, because the cogito, whether formulated as "consciousness," heideggarian dasein, kantian transcendental subject, etc, is still the individualist separatist framework within which you are operating.

So Sartre devised an ingenious solution--let us not rebel against the framework we irresistably operate in, but rather invert it with nothingess. He defined consciousness as "a pool of nothingness in the brain," a sort of vacuum that is always sucking in everything. In this formulation, you submit to the cogito, but also transcend it, as now consciousness is always OF something, and if it is not filling itself with SOMETHING in the world, then it is--literally--nothing.

I stumbled upon a solution to consumerism that I found strikingly similar to this. If I meditate immediately for 10 minutes upon waking up in the morning, focusing on my breath and watching the dreams go around in my surface-dreaming mind, without falling asleep, my breath becomes an exceptionally calming force throughout the rest of the day, almost like a drug. It is as if doing breathing exercises in the morning while my brain is still on drugs forges a connection between breathing and hallucinating that MILDLY maintains itself throughout the rest of the day. Here, any time I felt a consumptive impulse, I would simply breath, and it would have this neurally calming effect, similar to that of a drug. And in this case, I could consume, consume, consume all I wanted, eating nothingness all day, but oddly escaping the paradigm of consumerism from within it.

Do not rebel against your framework--invert it with nothingness.

"Man would rather consume nothingness than not consume at all"

Analysis of Scorsese Movie Silence

Silence is a powerful 2017 film by Martin Scorcese, that pierces deeply into some interesting theological questions. Below is a discussion analyzing some of these points, between a friend and me.




Friend:

Finished it


Wow


Me:

He kept the cross.



Friend:
Yeah


Did his wife.slide it into his hand?


It was such a good movie


Its like Padres came to Japan to "save" the Japanese but the only way to save them was to give up their ego, which is the route to Buddhist salvation


And all the inherent conceptual conflicts between Christianity and Buddhism


Damn



Me:
Yes, but also more importantly than their ego, their spirit, their entire world view


It’s asking much more than taking your life, in a sense



Friend:

Yeah


True




Me:
Because they wanted to die for their beliefs, they did NOT want to live to see their beliefs die




Friend:
Such a beautiful film


Wow


Well put




Me:
But you realize at the end that he did the ultimate sacrifice


He gave up all external signs of his belief, stepped on jesus, to forever go down in history as a heretic. But he kept the cross. He kept his belief in the end


He was the first Protestant, in a sense




Friend:
Ah that's a good point




Me:
External rituals are irrelevant, as long as you stay true to your personal relationship with god


That’s why he heard jesus’ voice at that crucial moment, saying step on me, it’s okay




Friend:
Yeah! And in the end, when Jesus said I was suffering beside you in the silence




Me:
Ugh yes, fuckkkkk


In a sense he did the hardest thing


He could have disbanded his beliefs like Ferreira, or died for his beliefs


But he decided to externally disband them while internally holding on


The ultimate enslavement 2017


I’ll have to hand 2017 over to him tbh


He won that shit




Friend:
Yeah seriously

And yeah I’m assuming he had his wife give it to him

How was that movie not way more popular



Me:
Probably too deep for most


Same with birdman




Friend:
Oh hold up


What if he didn't




Me:
They both had that layered quality, like 6 different layers


Of meaning




Friend:
What if she just gave that to him


Which maybe makes it more beautiful


Like he would never jeopardize her in any way


And he never outwardly showed his faith


But she saw it in him still



Me:

Yeah, good point. They leave it up to the viewer, to add more layers of meaning


Same with birdman. Remember the ending?


There were like 4 ways you could interpret it, and each made it a completely different movie




Friend:
Yeah!!!




Me:
I was always curious whether he kept “silently” blessing kijichiros confessions, even after


Cuz they showed one instance of him doing it silently




Friend:
I think he did




Me:
But at the same time they said the one emperor dude was watching him super closely to the end of his life and saw now Christianity


No*


And he kind of used Japan’s metaphysics against them, the same way they did against him


They were so preoccupied with external signs, so he gave that to him


But he still kind of won, while letting hem win too




Friend:
Yeah!!! You're right!!




Me:
Cuz all they wanted was to write down in history that he showed no external signs and therefore was not Christian


But he totally challenged that


Ahhhhh so many layers!!!




Friend:
Yeah!!!




Me:
The brilliance was, when I first saw it I was like man they broke him, Japanese ego death wins,


But when they show the cross at the very end


It just totally fucks WVERYTHING up


And starts adding all the layers




Friend:
Yeah and I think he thought he wasn't a Christian anymore too



Me:
Still maintaining the top layer, but adding so many more



Friend:
Bc he denounced




Me:
Also cool symbolism: if you watch closely, kijihiro and the other Japanese Christians only partially step on jesus’ face toward the end


Because they are still preoccupied with the externality




Friend:
But him dying with the cross hidden in his hand really showed that he still was, even if he didn't think he was bc of how he externally lived




Me:
But our boy puts his WHOLE foot on there, he don’t give a shit!!!




Friend:
True!




Me:
And that line at the end too: he failed in the eyes of god, or I guess, that’s between him and god.....


Then it shows the cross


AHHHHHHHH. The best.





Friend:
it's such the best one




Me:
Silence moonlight and birdman


Top 3 easily




Friend:
Yeah!


Without a doubt


Man


That was such a powerful movie


Even how is was shot


Most of the movie is silence or the sounds of nature


But when it's not silent, you almost don't want it to be


Bc the dialogue uncovers or fortells pain


And if it's not dialogue, the silence is broken by suffering


The pit or the cross on the shoreline are the worst ways to die I think


Japanese are fucked up




Me:
Yes!


The surface layer is that the Christians are doing it for their glory, the price is the suffering of others


Which is true


But a lot of the other layers Kind of subvert the Japanese

funny story idea: death

Amir Mazaheripour:

u know what would be a nice read

a guy is about to die

and he’s terrified, because he doesn’t want to vanish into nothingness, it all starts dawning on him towards the end

that everything he ever knew, loved, hoped, is all just about to be…stopped

forever

then he dies, all scared

and he BECOMES the one “mind at large”

there is only one

then he starts laughing and goes “oH YEAH, HAHAHAHA. holy shit, i forgot i was this, and i was just doing an experiment with locality”

“okay, let me dive back in, and this time, NOT get freaked out about death”

but the same thing keeps happening

he keeps diving into local neural systems

and then getting really freaked out about nothingness

and then dying and remembering that this was all an experiment, and laughing