Moving from perception to force to explanation with Hegel

"A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon". This wise statement from Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, an ancient Buddhist text, points out that language is not a substitute for direct experience (stated in language, ironically enough). We can refer to the truth of reality all we want, but ultimately it is right there in front of us, waiting to be experienced. This is an appealing metaphysics, as it grounds reality and our knowledge of it down here in the immediacy around me, not getting lost up there in abstractions. However, it is still natural to wonder:  Is there something beyond what I directly sense, a mind-independent reality? Or is this all in my head? If it's all in my head, what is my head in? This candle, with its whiteness, softness and many other features, are those all just my representations of it, or is that what the candle really looks like? Why is science so successful? Is it because reality is composed of atoms and void, or are those just ideas by scientists that might be totally wrong? Those who wonder things like this may benefit from Hegel's dialectic on perception. 

Below, we will walk through Hegel's dialectic, moving from the position of sense-certainty--truth is given in experience--to a position closer to what we would call critical rationalism or explanatory realism: truth is something we grow toward over time as we try to explain our world to ourselves. To do this, we will reconstruct Hegel's dialectic in the context of the modern philosophy of science.

Background

Around Hegel's time, there were a few dominant views with respect to truth and perception in Western thought: 

1) Empiricism (Hume), which argued that what is true is what we directly sense from the world, all universal/formal concepts are derivative and after the fact. Similar to how pointing at the moon is not the moon. 

2) Transcendental Idealism (Kant), which sort of culminated (and defeated) empiricism by arguing that our direct experience is already full of universal concepts (like space and time) that aren't explicitly in the sense data. Our brains must therefore condition data from incoming senses with these universals before they are even experienced. So we don't directly experience the world as it is. Rather, there is the world in-itself, free of our experience of it, and this passes through the senses and the brain, where we condition it with universals like space, time, and causation, leading to the appearances in our experience. If this is true, it would mean we can't possibly understand the world in-itself: metaphysics is impossible. In science, we use space, time, and causation to understand the world. But if the categories of space, time, causation, etc only apply to experience, then we cannot use them to understand what is beyond the experiences--which may not be spatial, temporal, or even causal. In this sense, even physics, which yields real knowledge, is not unveiling the world in-itself, it is rather finding the causal regularities and structures in experience (which, importantly, still counts as real knowledge that allows us to make valid predictions). This is known as the veil of Kant--we are trapped in the world of appearances, forever cut off from the world in-itself. 

3) Correspondence theory, roughly employed by most views on truth up to this point, which is that truth involves confirming that a theory or statement directly corresponds to reality. In fact, Hume attempts to break the rational foundation of scientific truth by showing that it violates correspondence. Using his stance of empirical sense-certainty, he argues that both causation and induction are not logically necessary. Therefore, we have no logical certainty that the predictions of science "correspond" to reality prior to those events occurring. This is why Kant after him is trying to find a stronger foundation to stand on to save scientific knowledge (he ultimately succeeds--by showing that space, time, causation, etc. are already baked into our "direct sensation of the world", we can say with certainty that the structures we find do correspond to fundamental structures composing that experienced world). 

Impressively, Hegel shows that all three of these views fail, and one can show this with a single framework, which will also offer a way out. Part of his motivation here involves revising the grounds of western epistemology to account for the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematical physics," which was starting to become clear around this time.  In this light, Hume's skeptical empiricism will fail because science posits all kinds of invisible things beyond sensory perception in order to explain the world. He questions whether Kant's move of the "inaccessible in-itself vs appearance," while certainly grounding scientific knowledge more fundamentally, was correct in veiling the in-itself from human understanding.  

We can understand Hegel's move at the most general level by looking at his clever reformulation of truth. Truth is not simply evaluating whether a given statement "corresponds to" reality. It is not accessed by standing on skeptical foundations that will allow one to grasp it with certainty (Descartes). In fact, we should be skeptical of this type of skepticism. A true skeptic doesn't doubt everything they possibly can until they find the un-doubtable source of knowledge. A true skeptic accepts that there is no absolute foundation to knowledge. Rather, truth is evolved over time, starting with a goal and growing into its objective, like how an acorn grows into a tree.  It is not something you can apprehend directly through perception or reason, or any particular theory, but something you can see converge by watching the growth of theory over time. In this sense we don't say that earlier theories are wrong because they didn't "access the truth." This would be like saying the earlier stages of the acorn tree are wrong. Rather, we say that they are all necessary stepping stones that grow into each other, not forgotten but rather elaborated on, refined, getting less wrong with time, through a sort of trial and error. The same way Newtonian Mechanics is not wrong or forgotten, but absorbed/evolved/refined into relativity. This shift to a more "process philosophy" that studies movement and growth instead of static essences and direct correspondence is both intensely radical and consequential. Darwinian evolution is predicated on it--literally, animals are not static essences, they are a process over time. It is also the workhorse of Marx's dialectical materialism and the critique of capital. And so to with critical rationalism and Popperian epistemology--which claims that in science we do not access the truth with logical certainty in a given theory or experiment. Our theories are conjectures which can get falsified/refuted and error corrected, slowly growing over time to be less wrong. 

The Dialectic

One might ask: what does this look like in practice? What does it mean to examine the growth of theory over time instead of the validity of a given single theory? Hegel's dialectic, as hinted above, goes something like this: I have a default intuitive stance toward the truth. Then I find some kind of problem in that stance--an internal tension, an error, a contradiction--that forces me to subsume it into an evolved form which resolves the instability. As such, his dialectic on perception will attempt to show that the history of how we view perception--how we think about our experience in relation to reality--is not an accidental or contingent history, but rather a logically necessary path that consciousness must take on its journey toward the truth. This journey involves the transition from perception as the source of truth, to force as the hidden structure of reality. That transition is another massive critical strike in the history of human thinking. We've never been the same since. Below we will walk through the dialectic, first concisely and then in detail.

1. Sense certainty: Truth lies in the immediate particular. Concepts are inventions after the fact. 
• Issue: Concepts are already present in the immediate particular
2. Perception: Truth lies in the conditioned universal. My experience is conditioned with concepts, I experience particular objects with universal properties.
• Issue: I experience objects as a plurality of independent universals, yet I also know that they have particular, determinate identities that persist through time. How can the object be both one and many?
3. Force: Truth lies in the unconditioned universal. There is an "entity of interaction" beyond experience, not conditioned by us, that allows for determinate and distinct objects in my experience. This entity is formal and universal and thus can be conceptualized by the mind.
•  Issue: We cannot pin down what the force is, as it dances infinitely between latent and manifest, solicitor and solicited.
4. Law: Truth lies in the relational universal. We fix the dance of forces as an image that unites both latent and manifest on the same terms, as a relation. Appearances become an inference to the real, a window to the beyond. The distinction between appearances and mind-independent reality begins to dissolve. 
• Issue: Laws show the connection between conceptual hidden and appearances, but doesn't explain how this connection is possible, leaving them as a passive description. 
5. Explanation: Truth lies in the reflexive universal. With the dissolution of the distinction between the appearances and the beyond, we understand that truth discovery is an activity purely within consciousness. The idea of trying to "leap outside of the mind" to get at the truth is revealed to be an illusion. Our minds already grow out of the universe, using its own formal structure to understand it from the inside.   

1. Sense-certainty, default stance 

We start by assuming as little as possible. No conceptual constructs exist beyond our direct experience. We directly perceive the world as it is through our senses. The world is sense data. Universals like self, space, time, causation, scientific concepts, are all constructed by the mind after the fact. Truth, in this view, is accessed directly, as the immediate particular: this tree I see here right now, etc.

• Contradiction: when pointing out a particular moment or object in the world, we already employ universals. Even something as simple as pointing out a tree, involves "I, here, this, now" which are all universal indexical concepts. The attempt to ground knowledge in the immediate particular collapses into universality. 

2. Perception, synthesis

Universals are already baked into experience. We are no longer directly apprehending the world as sense data (immediate particular), but perceiving the world as particular objects with properties (conditioned universals). I have an object in front of me, a piece of chalk, and it appears as a bundle of universal properties including whiteness, hardness, cylindrical shape, etc.  In Kant's formulation (described in Background), he epitomizes this position, arguing that our mind (or brain) uses universals like space, time, and even causation, to structure raw sense input into coherent objects that we can understand. 

But this coincidence of a particular object, with a bundle of universal properties, runs me into a different issue. These “conditioned universals” do not simply appear on their own. They seem to coalesce into independent, particular, unified single objects, the identities of which are at the same time dissolved into a plurality of universal properties. Is the object one or many? How can unified identity through time be coincident with such a plurality of variable, independent properties? What is tying them together for each object? One might think there could be one property that "determines" the object, and all the other properties are secondary. But this doesn't work, because the properties present themselves as universal and independent...there is nothing about "whiteness" that uniquely determines chalk, for whiteness appears in all kinds of things. So then if all the properties are secondary, what determines the unique identity of the object?

• Contradiction:  The opposition here is that perception is now oscillating between the unity of the thing and the plurality of its properties without resolving how both can coexist. Perception has collapsed. How can this be resolved?

Here, Hegel has a hint from Spinoza: determinate negation. To be a unique, determinate perceptual object, you must be distinguishable from other objects. Something is what it is by not being something else. The chalk is white as opposed to brown, or green. If white were the only color that existed, it wouldn't be an identifying property of the chalk in the first place. The identifying properties are those that can be opposed to each other in reality. And thus a thing is only defined by its opposition to other things. The thing-in-itself becomes the thing-for-another. The essence of the thing is not substance, but negation, interaction, opposition. Something which allows objects to interact with each other, so that they can oppose and distinguish themselves from each other. If true, the contradiction between unity and multiplicity would dissolve, because the unitary essence of an object does not "inhere within the object," it is determined through its relations with opposing objects. We will call this interactive entity at the core of reality "force."

3. Force, synthesis 

Up until this stage, we have tried to avoid moving beyond experience. Our immediate particular collapsed and we moved to perception, or conditioned universals, in order to  recognize the primacy of universals, while still preserving truth as given in experience. But if the universal properties that are characteristic of an object are all independent of one another, and that's all we see in experience, we need some unifying principle that is not an appearance, that can bring unity into this apparent plurality. The understanding must now move beyond appearances to explain reality . Force is thus is an unconditioned universal, a mind independent entity which acts whether or not it is being perceived. And as mentioned before with determinate negation, this invisible unity must allow objects to interact with each other, to determine themselves as they appear to us, unifying their diversity of appearances. While the notion of force here is not uniquely tied to force in physics, physical force still represents a subset of what counts as Hegel's idea of force. With gravity for example, all the diverse appearances of objects falling and behaving a certain way on earth, are unified by this invisible, unified entity, which is fundamentally relational.

Force does not need to be conditioned by the mind like perception, but it is a universal in that it is ultimately a concept. The properties we sense are all secondary...after the fact. The perceptual given (whether immediate particular or conditioned universal) is no longer the source of knowledge and reality. Rather, the core of reality is now conceptual—the unconditioned universal. What we posited as fixed objects with properties in experience turns out to be a play of forces within a reality beyond our experience. To gain knowledge of reality we need to understand this play, and how it manifests into the appearances that we experience--determinate objects with properties, doing stuff. 

This is a huge move in multiple ways. We have moved from the core of reality being visible, to being invisible. From being a direct appearance, to being a concept beyond experience, accessible to thought through conceptual structure. If, with Kant's veil, we were stuck with the world of appearances we could know, and the unknowable world in-itself, we are now liberated by Force, which acts as a bridge between appearance and the in-itself. The inner structure of reality suddenly becomes conceptual and intelligible. And based on the successes of Newtonian physics by this point in explaining the structure of our appearances, we find that our conceptual apparatus may indeed be capable of coinciding with the inner workings of the world.  The veil, which was once opaque, is starting to look translucent... 

The understanding now looks back on its appearances, through the concept of force. It begins to wonder how this notion of force could structure its appearances...what form must force take if it is to give rise to the patterns in my experience? How is it embedded in objects, and transferred between them? Where does it live? How does it move between the invisible and the visible, the latent and the manifest? On the most basic assumption, we can suppose that force is the One invisible behind the plurality of our appearances, generating them. However, when examining our appearances to pin down this One, we soon run into something unstable:

When moving billiard ball A hits stationary billiard ball B, we assume there is an invisible force transferred from A to B. This is then manifested in appearance as the motion of B. So we have the latent (invisible) force, and the manifest, or kinetic appearance of the force. We want to say intuitively that A is the actor here, imparting the latent force into B, the acted upon, which then manifests it kinetically. However, we find (through Newton's third law) that A is also acted upon, and B is also an actor. For the latent force in A to have any effect on B, there must also be an equal and opposite latent force in B to resist the force of A, otherwise it could have no influence. So there is no clear actor and acted upon. No solicitor and solicited. Both objects seem to have latent and manifest force, both are solicitor and solicited. The force doesn't exist in one object and get transferred to the other. Rather it exists between the objects. Forces require each other to manifest in appearance, dissolving into each other and escaping our attempt to individuate them. Force is now caught in this oscillation between solicitor and solicited, between its true latent aspect beyond experience, and its expression in appearance...both sides referring to each other, caught in a constant loop. This is the play of forces, and it appears highly unstable...we cannot pin it down. Alarmingly: if the distinction between latent and manifest is destabilized, so is the distinction between form (substantial unity of an object, organizing principle) and content (appearances, generated properties that we experience), between reality in-itself and appearance. Kant is indeed under fire.  

It is worth noting another significant move here. In addition to finding that the core of reality is conceptual, we also find that it is not a static structure. This does away with the sort of substance ontology that we assumed back in the stages of perception, which was extremely dominant at the time and went back to Aristotle and even earlier. The view in which the world is constituted by individual, independent entities that persist through change and bear properties. Instead, this previously supposed core of reality merely becomes another appearance. And at the core, we now find a play. A flux, a process, an activity is what leads to the unified and determine objects in our perception. While this is only a stage in the unfolding of the understanding, it is also a significant turning point in history from substance to process ontology.

• Contradiction: In summary, force does not seem to belong to objects, but exists between them, caught in an endless dance between manifest and latent, kinetic and potential, active and passive, solicitor and solicited. And with this collapse we also lose the distinction between form and content core to substance philosophy. The world is no longer composed of stable substances which give rise to the properties we perceive. It is as if the ground beneath us has been lifted away.

How are we to resolve this instability at the core of reality? While force is always caught in this play between appearances and the hidden, it ultimately manifests itself in appearance as stable objects with properties that exhibit patterns over time. And, as shown before, it must be relational in nature. How can we stabilize relation as the core of existence? There must be a way to manifest relationality itself as a stable image of the play of forces, one that shows how they structure stable patterns when expressed in appearance. The understanding must move beyond the unconditioned universal to the next stage: the law.

4. Laws, synthesis

 If forces structure appearance, there must be consistent patterns in our experience that can be discovered as governing laws. Thus instead of chasing the hidden forces moving in and out of appearances, we can try to pin down the regular structure in the organized appearances that come out of this play, as universal formal relations. For example, in the case of the billiard balls imparting force on each other and manifesting those forces in appearance as movement, we can specify the laws governing those appearances as: 

1. Force = mass x acceleration, Newton's second law, which describes how the force on an object relates to its movement (acceleration) in appearance

2. F1=F2, Newton's third law, asserting that the force exerted by the moving ball on the stationary ball is equal and opposite to the force exerted on the moving ball by the stationary ball. 

All of a sudden, the unstable dance of forces between invisible and visible, between solicitor and solicited, gets stabilized as a set of fixed images expressing the equivalent two-way relation...by equations. The equation is our way to make a stable image out of flux. The understanding stabilizes the dance by finding stability within instability, by finding sameness in difference. It now expresses both the latent force and manifest behavior on the same terms. In this sense we don't consider reality as an unconditioned universal, solely hiding behind appearances. With law, we unite appearance and reality as a stable relation. We have now moved to the relational universal. Reality is revealed as formal structure.

With the movement toward law, the understanding sees how force has transformed perception. Perception is not merely passive appearance, it is an inference to the real, a window to the in-itself. And we have formally captured the collapse of the distinction between the in-itself and appearances by expressing them in the same conceptual framework, on the same terms. F=ma not only stabilizes the play of forces, it represents the dissolution of the Kantian distinction between appearances and the in-itself, as well as the substance ontology that preceded it. The in-itself is no longer a hidden entity behind appearances, it becomes a formal structure expressed in appearances themselves. The distinction between in-itself and appearances has collapsed; the law becomes the new stable structure of reality.

It's worth briefly noting the magnitude of this step as well. In force, when the distinction between active and passive failed, so did the distinction between form and content, driving the need for law. What we used to call the thing, is actually emergent from the play of forces, which we can understand with static, unitary, underlying principles called laws. This gives us a static, formal way to describe becoming itself. Plato never thought this could have been possible, that we could capture the fuzzy flux and becoming of appearance with static laws. This is why he believed math lived solely in the realm of the forms, he thought such clean formal relations could never possibly capture our messy, qualitative experience. 

Which leads us to our next question: why does F=ma work so unreasonably well? Why should the conceptual structure of laws coincide with the structure of appearances in the first place? We can, and should, discover the laws, but if we don't explain how our conceptual apparatus happens to perfectly coincide with the inner structure of reality, allowing us to predict our appearances, it becomes unclear whether we are really explaining reality or merely re-describing it. It seems as though the fate of consciousness is not merely to observe the laws passively through experience, that it may have a more active role in creating them. Perhaps the distinction between law and appearance is itself part of the issue.

• Contradiction: Laws passively describe relations between inner reality and appearances without explaining why they coincide. While laws stabilize the flux, we need to introduce flux into laws.

5. Explanations, synthesis

In order to resolve this tension between law and appearances, let's first look back at the movement from perception-->force-->law. The understanding doesn't assume realism as a given from the beginning, realism emerges from the attempt to grasp reality through sense certainty--consciousness must posit something beyond itself. And after doing so, it finds that this realist distinction itself--between appearances and reality in-itself--gets dissolved into a flux of forces, which gets stabilized by law. This points to two critical realizations:  1) Law reveals reality as formal structure. 2) Realism was never given or inevitable, it was itself produced by consciousness as an explanation for that stage of understanding, before being subsumed by the next. These distinctions and their resolutions all exist within consciousness, as part of the understanding's process of explaining reality to itself, of growing toward the truth. The theories we get, and the corresponding reality implied by them, are simply the best explanations up to that point. These realizations will together resolve the tension between law and appearance.

We can illustrate point 2) further by briefly stepping into the scientific process. This process involves taking our observations (appearances) and finding a way to model/explain them through our conceptual apparatus, updating our beliefs and reinventing the apparatus as necessary to match new observations. For example, moving from a Newtonian to a quantum conceptual framework to account for observations such as blackbody radiation. But our perceptual observations, and our conceptual apparatus--these are both completely within the activity of consciousness. There is no moment in which we step outside of the mind. We verify it from within, reflecting on our appearances, using our conceptual apparatus to discover the laws behind it, and improving our theory with time as we find problems, just as we have been throughout this very dialectic. 

With law, we see that reality is ultimately formal structure. Formal structure which governs the play of forces, which generate our experience. And crucially, formal structure which the mind grows out of. The mind's conceptual apparatus can understand the formal structure of reality in-itself because it grows out of that very structure. And it does not grasp the full formal structure directly as a given, but through a creation and discovery process. A dialectic where it tries to explain the world to itself, and update those explanations over time as it finds problems within them. In this sense even the laws themselves, which constitute the universe, are not fixed. They reflect a stage in the journey of the understanding. We do not simply discover laws in the world, or create them and impose them onto the world. We recognize them as the structure of reality, but through our conceptual activity over time, in our project to understand the world. Structure is recognized as produced by the understanding as it gets closer to the truth of reality. Thought and being are no longer separate. We are the structure of the universe, and as we look deeper into the world over time, we look deeper into ourselves. Knowledge is the activity of reality becoming intelligible to itself.

Discovery of the world is thus a process of self-discovery, a movement in which we update our beliefs over time, growing toward the truth. We now understand why F=ma works so unreasonably well.  The conceptual order of appearances is grasped through the same logical structure that constitutes reality in-itself. Thus reality moves from the relational universal to the reflexive universal. The positing of reality in-itself leads to a realization that the structure of this reality can be accessed by the concept. The structure of the world is the structure of the understanding. The lifting of Kant's veil is complete. 

Synergy with Critical Rationalism and Explanatory Realism

It is worth noting the synergy at this stage with explanatory realism and critical rationalism, the modern Popperian philosophy of science position alluded to above, currently held by lauded physicists and philosophers such as David Deutsch. It is no coincidence that this stage in the dialectic happens to use the same word as that movement. In explanatory realism, reality is composed of the objects in our best current explanations. Here, in step with Hegel, is a recognition of the mind's fallibility, and the impossibility of absolute foundations, moving instead toward a rational theory growth process over time to converge on the truth. They both accept that we initially seem "trapped in the subjective," but find later that we don't need to leap outside of the mind and "grasp" the external world absolutely. In fact, such a notion is almost non-sensical and is itself produced by the mind, dissolving away under further reflection. And what is left is a gradual, self-correcting process which evolves over time toward the truth, from within consciousness. In this process, we accept that the most real things are whatever our best explanations allow them to be, whatever we currently know to be real. Reality, with its truth and its formal relations, ultimately proceeds from our attempt to explain the world to ourselves. Both Hegel and explanatory realism collapse the distinction between epistemology and metaphysics in this way. 

As a second synergy, the resolution that the stage of Explanation offers to the understanding is oddly resonant with David Deutsch's own explanation for the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematical physics. Deutsch essentially points out that the laws of physics are computable (formal, logical relations that can be computed, like F=ma above), and the matter in our universe happens to be structured in such a way that it can make universal computing machines (our brains). Therefore, we are able to simulate the laws of reality because our brains grow out of reality (which is governed by laws) into an ordered structure that allows them to think in formal, universal concepts, reflecting the laws back at the universe. Sound familiar? This is precisely the reflexive universal!

Both of these minds are pointing to the same thing: that the reason we can so effectively capture the fundamentals of the universe with our minds, is that our minds are not external to the universe to begin with. They grow out of the structure of the universe, which is logical and formal, and use that structure to examine it from the inside. If the universe is formally structured, and our minds are a piece of this universe trying to know itself, then it is not so surprising that our thought structures can map unreasonably well onto reality, and grasp it at the most universal level. In that sense--and again both Hegel and Deutsch agree here--we can say optimistically that as we move deeper into the understanding, into explanation, into self-consciousness, into our "pointing of the moon," we do not move further from Being, we get closer to it.

The mathematician plays a game in which he himself invents the rules while the physicist plays a game in which the rules are provided by nature, but as time goes on it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which nature has chosen.

--Paul Dirac

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?

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.

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.
--------------------------------------------------

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

Climate Change Skepticism as an Opportunity for Cultural Shift

had a meditation this morning

was thinking, climate change skepticism is actually a really good opportunity for science, and global culture at large, to make a marked distinction between the truth and technical-sounding jargon

right now they are viewed as one in the same by most laypeople

thats why an argument for global warming and an argument for why the earth is flat are equally compelling to laypeople

its just a bunch of exclusive technical jargon, and that is one of the issues in truth-revealing practices such as science...it is one of the most rigorous and reliable, yet also one of the most exclusive...accessibility was never a focus, and that's led to a national crisis

one solution is education, yeah

but i wonder if there is something else, where we can finally change the language to not be as exclusive and make truths more self-evident

perhaps blockchain?

Some Scattered Thoughts on Season 2 Episode 4 of Black Mirror

I would write this into a cohesive post but am in a bit of a crunch, so hopefully these can serve as helpful notes for someone who would like to write a thoughtpiece on this. Feel free to take, just happy to get these ideas out. I bolded the parts in particular that I thought could be nice aphorisms from the episode:



I saw ep 4 of black mirror, a truly beautiful revealing of the importance of death in the human story. with a presentist mode of existence, and the important characteristic ability that we have to "forget" (a la Nietzsche), would we really want to keep going, if we had the chance? easy to say yes now, hard to know what you'd say then.
this was the first good episode this season for me,
the importance of life's ephemeral glow.
her decision to stay with the girl into eternity was so much more heartbreaking than the option to die and preserve the meaning she lived
cheating death does not evade nothingness, if anything, it emphasizes it
sartre would have loved that episode
we live with this paradoxical yearning to both escape death and experience a type of meaning that transcends life. this episode sort of demonstrates that we can't have both, in a really beautiful way.
singularity is bullshit, technology can't "solve" existentialism.

Conversation with a friend:
i had to like, think for a while just to reconcile the emotional disturbance it left me with
thats a sign of a good ep

yeah
It's so creative, even as a premise, then to build that world, build the characters so that we care about them, and then introduce a conflict and meaningful resolution
All in 90 mins

Yes! How could they do so much in so little time!
High maintenance also is good at this in its own way
Like you know so much about everyone so quickly, from so little

Character driven plot development

But this black mirror had this kubrick-esque quality
Where even at the end, during the supposedly happy ending, you can't help but feel there is something deeply disturbing about all this when you're looking at those circulating lights at the very end
Similar type of discomfort u get during the outro to 2001 odyssey

Just like, not readily explainable, but you know there's something

This is what Heidegger called "working art"

Athletics vs Time-based video games, and Donald Hoffman Interface Theory of Perception

We ask:
What is the essential difference between playing a videogame and playing a sport?

Example: Smash Melee vs Fencing

Both require real-time split second reaction, in combination with predicting an opponent's response to specific provocations.

The essential difference, is that in this videogame, the physics world occupying your mind is virtual, while the space that you will the decision in is physical (entering the various inputs on the controller). These two unfoldings are synchronized in time so this divorce goes un-noticed, humming softly underneath the veil of immediate focused consciousness.

In fencing, the physics world occupying your mind and the space that you will the decision in are one and the same. But, perhaps more obviously, this fact also goes un-noticed.

So phenomenologically, there is no difference, but in the Hoffman construction of conscious agential experience, specific variables must be different (specifically A, and kind of G maybe):

Source:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqDP34a-epI @ 16 minutes.

Drugs and the Meaning of Life

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/drugs-and-the-meaning-of-life/

Extremely moving and persuasive passage on drugs and the way they should be treated in modern culture.

Synchronicity

Some wiki excerpts on this beautiful concept.  Following the excerpts, I will use this post as a place to collect all examples of synchronicity that happen to me:

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, yet are experienced as occurring together in a meaningfulmanner. 

The concept does not question, or compete with, the notion of causality. Instead, it maintains that just as events may be grouped by cause, they may also be grouped by meaning. A grouping of events by meaning need not have an explanation in terms of cause and effect.

The idea of synchronicity is that the conceptual relationship of minds, defined as the relationship between ideas, is intricately structured in its own logical way and gives rise to relationships that are not causal in nature. These relationships can manifest themselves as simultaneous occurrences that are meaningfully related.

Jung believed that many experiences that are coincidences due to chance in terms of causality suggested the manifestation of parallel events or circumstances in terms of meaning, reflecting this governing dynamic.^[8]

 Following discussions with both Albert Einstein and Wolfgang Pauli, Jung believed that there were parallels between synchronicity and aspects of relativity theory and quantum mechanics.^[9] Jung was transfixed by the idea that life was not a series of random events but rather an expression of a deeper order, which he and Pauli referred to as Unus mundus. This deeper order led to the insights that a person was both embedded in an orderly framework and was the focus of that orderly framework and that the realisation of this was more than just an intellectual exercise, but also having elements of a spiritual awakening. From the religious perspective, synchronicity shares similar characteristics of an "intervention of grace". Jung also believed that in a person's life, synchronicity served a role similar to that of dreams, with the purpose of shifting a person's egocentric conscious thinking to greater wholeness.

Example:

A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since.^[15]

(9:16:16 PM) Amro Maz: this one time

(9:16:19 PM) Amro Maz: i was at the airport

(9:16:23 PM) Amro Maz: and my mom was late to pick me up

(9:16:36 PM) matteoplix: uh oh

(9:16:38 PM) Amro Maz: so when i arrived, i went and hid behind a column

(9:16:40 PM) matteoplix: amir is FLIPPING OUT

(9:16:54 PM) Amro Maz: and every like 5 minutes i peeped out

(9:17:05 PM) Amro Maz: this one time, after one of the peeps

(9:17:12 PM) Amro Maz: RIGHT when i saw the back of her head

(9:17:20 PM) Amro Maz: she SUDDENLY turned around and looked directly at me

(9:17:37 PM) Amro Maz: later when i discussed this with her she said she "felt" me staring at her

(9:17:49 PM) Amro Maz: this i believe was an example of synchronicity
-------------------------------------

[crumpets]:

(kedzie05) man

(kedzie05) holy shit

(kedzie05) that must have been hard to watch

Amir:

what

[crumpets]:

(kedzie05) my descent into madness

(matteoplix) wtf

(matteoplix) dude fucking stop

(matteoplix) with the sn=yncrhon

(matteoplix) holy FUCK

Amir:

me?  i never noticed such a thing

[crumpets]:

(matteoplix) ok guys get this

Amir:

sep

[crumpets]:

(matteoplix) im re listening to the fly lo

(matteoplix) and as kofi typed

(matteoplix) descent into madness

(kedzie05) holy shit

(kedzie05) hahahaha

(matteoplix) i heard “descent into madness”

Amir:

NO