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

African Americans and Vegans

New interesting facts:

1. Black Americans are called African Americans, Black Canadians are called Black Canadians.

2. There was a temporary vegan collective in Iran, one of the few vegan groups in history which did not suffer from B12 deficiency.  The speculation is that there was a lot of animal feces everywhere which contaminated their food, and that they grew some veggies out of human feces, and ate the roots, which had trace B12 content.  This has inspired me to make the following graph:

Notice how a severe b12 deficiency hits when you first turn vegan, but if you continue to love animals to the point that you bask in their shit you actually escape the trend.  With enough Love anything is truly possible.

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

Camus: The Absurd Life: Three Examples

Just a meditation via various wikipedia pages related to Camus and Absurdism that I really enjoy:

 In absurdist philosophy, the Absurd arises out of the fundamental disharmony between the individual's search for meaning and the meaninglessness of the universe. As beings looking for meaning in a meaningless world, humans have three ways of resolving the dilemma.

One of the ways is:
Acceptance of the Absurd: a solution in which one accepts the Absurd and continues to live in spite of it. Camus endorsed this solution, believing that by accepting the Absurd, one can achieve absolute freedom, and that by recognizing no religious or other moral constraints and by revolting against the Absurd while simultaneously accepting it as unstoppable, one could possibly be content from the personal meaning constructed in the process.

How should the absurd man live? Clearly, no ethical rules apply, as they are all based on higher powers or on justification. "Integrity has no need of rules." 'Everything is permitted' "is not an outburst of relief or of joy, but rather a bitter acknowledgment of a fact."Camus then goes on to present examples of the absurd life.

He begins with Don Juan, the serial seducer who lives the passionate life to the fullest. "There is no noble love but that which recognizes itself to be both short-lived and exceptional."

The next example is the actor, who depicts ephemeral lives for ephemeral fame. "He demonstrates to what degree appearing creates being." "In those three hours he travels the whole course of the dead-end path that the man in the audience takes a lifetime to cover."

Camus' third example of the absurd man is the conqueror, the warrior who forgoes all promises of eternity to affect and engage fully in human history. He chooses action over contemplation, aware of the fact that nothing can last and no victory is final.

conversations

when sum1 makes a judgment, i always have the CHOICE to see the truth in what they say or find fault with it. it's not an honest clash of our 'intrinsic beliefs,' it's not a verification of his truth or denial of his falsehood, it's just a choice that I make at that moment. always.

it's different/difficult to think this way, I believe many of us are entrenched in the idea that we have clearheaded, explicit stances (think politics etc) and when someone makes a judgment they are either saying something true or false and we will bring that to light with our reaction/response. but it's not like that. it's always just a choice that you make. a 'yes' or a 'no' almost at your whim, depending on what path you feel like going down at that moment. every. single. time.

so i think a fun exercise to do given this inherent illusion we have in discourse is the following: try to catch yourself. whenever you are about to disagree with what someone says (maybe out of habit of hearing this kind of thing or otherwise), immediately stop and say "yeah," and find SOME inkling of truth in their judgment to bring to light. or on the other side, when you are about to agree with someone because this string of words is one that you have subscribed to (or for whatever other reason), just stop and find something wrong, something to pick at, something to argue against in what was said. you'll find that you can make this swap almost every time (and eventually, with ease), and may be awakened to the malleability of dialectic. agreement is susceptible to whim. choice is beneath reason. it's actually a very grounded, practical way to make that classic 19th century realization that there is no truth.

void 2012.

A very cheeky symbiosis.

(2:35:30 PM) matteoplix: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship
(2:35:31 PM) matteoplix: BOOM
(2:44:34 PM) bboyamir: SICK
(2:45:22 PM) matteoplix: i went in one
(2:45:24 PM) matteoplix: soooo cool
(2:45:30 PM) bboyamir: OH really!
(2:45:38 PM) bboyamir: in mexico?
(2:45:39 PM) matteoplix: yup in new mexico
(2:45:41 PM) bboyamir: new
(2:45:45 PM) bboyamir: damn thats tight
(2:45:50 PM) matteoplix: was sick nasty
(2:45:58 PM) matteoplix: it was so cool inside despite the temperatures
(2:46:01 PM) matteoplix: no ac
(2:46:42 PM) bboyamir: see like
(2:46:45 PM) bboyamir: technology and nuclear energy
(2:46:49 PM) bboyamir: thats us DOMINATING nature
(2:46:55 PM) bboyamir: but these earthships
(2:47:00 PM) bboyamir: thats us like smirking at nature
(2:47:05 PM) bboyamir: and i kind of like that attitude more
(2:47:09 PM) matteoplix: yeah
(2:47:09 PM) bboyamir: windmills too
(2:47:12 PM) matteoplix: like hey , i see u
(2:47:15 PM) matteoplix: nature
(2:47:22 PM) matteoplix: very cheeky symbiosis
(2:47:25 PM) bboyamir: hahahah
(2:47:34 PM) matteoplix: thats the way it needs to be
(2:47:39 PM) matteoplix: no more raping

What should be our approach to renewable technology? Shall we only focus on the utilitarian end goal, the destination, securing pure energy in the most efficient manner possible, or is the method, the journey, the approach, equally important? Is the world our gas station or our friend?

For more see: Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology"

Here is a supplement:

When Heidegger investigates 'the question concerning technology' he is interested in the essence of modern technology, not just any technology; for it is modern technology that poses the problem. Heidegger presents as an example of traditional technology peasant farming. The relationship of the peasants to the land is one of respect: they tend the land, are stewards of the land, cultivating it, synchronized with its patterns, to let the crop develop out of it. Modern technology, however, exploits the land as pure resource, trying to gain the 'maximum yield at minimal expense'. Modern technology challenges the land, or whatever it happens to be exploiting, to yield more. Objects are thus revealed as pure resource. Objects are exploited for all the energy or use they can yield and are left to stand there until they are to be challenged for more use again. For instance, the dam on the Rhine reveals the Rhine as merely a resource for hydroelectric power. Even viewing the Rhine for its beauty has been made into a tourist industry, again exploiting the Rhine as a resource for tourist gratification and photos.

the digital medium, the next facebook, broomsticks, neo-heidegger

Alright first,

The Digital Medium

• Three Principles

pretty cool blog, but more cool is its 'three principles'

http://inventingthemedium.wordpress.com/three-principles/

Inventing the Medium is based on three foundational principles:

All things made with electronic bits and computer code belong to a single new medium, the digital medium, with its own unique affordances.

Designing any single artifact within this new medium is part of the broader collective effort of making meaning through the invention and refinement of digital media conventions.

When we expand the meaning-making conventions that make up human culture, we expand our ability to understand the world and to connect with one another.

• The Next Facebook/Google+

Given this digital medium, we can ask two questions

(1) what makes an internet medium popular?

(2) what makes an internet medium cool?

Clearly facebook encapsulates the answer to 1). But we can note some severe shortcomings to facebook, and why it's not 2) yet:

exhibit a) the social graph

"The funny thing is, no one's really hiding the secret of how to make awesome online communities. Give people something cool to do and a way to talk to each other, moderate a little bit, and your job is done. Games like Eve Online or WoW have developed entire economies on top of what's basically a message board. MetaFilter, Reddit, LiveJournal and SA all started with a couple of buttons and a textfield and have produced some fascinating subcultures. And maybe the purest (!) example is 4chan, a Lord of the Flies community that invents all the stuff you end up sharing elsewhere: image macros, copypasta, rage comics, the lolrus. The data model for 4chan is three fields long - image, timestamp, text.

Now tell me one bit of original culture that's ever come out of Facebook.

Right now the social networking sites occupy a similar position to CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL in the mid 90's. At that time each company was trying to figure out how to become a mass-market gateway to the Internet. Looking back now, their early attempts look ridiculous and doomed to failure, for we have seen the Web, and we have tasted of the blogroll and the lolcat and found that they were good.

But at the time no one knew what it would feel like to have a big global network. We were all waiting for the Information Superhighway to arrive in our TV set, and meanwhile these big sites were trying to design an online experience from the ground up. Thank God we left ourselves the freedom to blunder into the series of fortuitous decisions that gave us the Web.

My hope is that whatever replaces Facebook and Google+ will look equally inevitable, and that our kids will think we were complete rubes for ever having thrown a sheep or clicked a +1 button. It's just a matter of waiting things out, and leaving ourselves enough freedom to find some interesting, organic, and human ways to bring our social lives online."

exhibit b) m00t on facebook and identity constraint

http://mashable.com/2011/10/18/chris-poole-4chan-web-2/?utm_campaign=Feed:%20Mashable%20(Mashable)&utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedburner&WT.mc_id=obinsite00000

google+ came out and it was basically the same as facebook in terms of identity and most of us were unimpressed. that's why everyone's still waiting. the new facebook will have to change not just the way we share content (re: google+'s circles), but "who we share it as."

• Future of Interactive Design

In addition to the new popular digital medium, what does the future of the electronic medium--those devices that access the digital medium--have in store for us?

http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/

It better NOT be the ipad.

Next up,

Broomsticks revealed

Just that way of framing the practice: rather than aesthetics, they focused on potent plants that had powers, functional plants, plants that cast spells. that's such a cool way of viewing it. just a different mindset back then. i'm not even going to say the difference back then was a lack of knowledge. just a different mindset.

Neo-Heidegger focused on space

"The book ends, symmetrically, with a meditation on Mary's giving birth to Christ, as an image of the mother-child dyad that brings the reader up to the edge of the Renaissance, when the major spheric disintegration took place once Copernicus et. al. started to question the notion of being encased inside whirling cosmic macrospheres. When those spheres were shattered, all hell, did indeed, break loose, and humanity was set on the path toward Nietzsche's annunciation of the death of God as a disguised cry that the human being now, for the first time ever, faced a gigantic cosmos alone and unprotected by any metaphysical immune system. Hence, the anxieties of the 20th century, its chaos of wars and its profusion of sages, each of whom desperately attempts to offer a pharmaceutical balm to soothe the anxiety of being-in-the-world, as Heidegger put it.

Sloterdijk, indeed, picks up from where Heidegger left off, for it was Heidegger's primary task to situate the lonely philosophical Ego into a specific and very concrete world, where he is always already engaged in doing something, thus putting an end to the subject-object dichotomy that had haunted philosophy since Descartes. Sloterdijk picks up the tradition of embedding the individual in a context by saying that not only is the human already in the world doing something, but he is specifically inside a container of some sort that functions as an extension of the mother womb. He or she is always involved with someone -- even when no one appears to be present -- inside an invisible environment of one ontological sort or another. Ontology, then, is applied immunology."

http://www.amazon.com/Bubbles-Spheres-Microspherology-Semiotext-Foreign/dp/1584351047/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320753177&sr=8-1

"Don't speak," God

Earlier today I caught myself humming some melody that I was really emotionally jiving with, and for some reason the first thing I thought was "please be that No Doubt song that I was thinking about earlier."

I wanted it to be the No Doubt song because I was talking about how awesome it (and the rest of 90s pop) was earlier with a friend, and if I was humming something that emotionally caught me now, it would be awesome if it were the same meaningful song I was talking about earlier, rather than some random Other melody that just entered my head. Because then it becomes more than just a fleeting song. It becomes recurring, unified, more meaningful, almost meant to happen.

I identified this yearning as completely synonymous with a religious one. The religious quest to unify all events, no matter how disconnected they may seem, into a single justified recurrence--God or something--stems from the same impulse. I don't even think science is that different, showing that all distinct events and phenomena are a collection of atoms subject to the same scientific procedures and measurements. Perhaps the human yearning for meaning causes us to unify all of the wonderfully disconnected events in our world into a simple recurring framework so that things can, as with the No Doubt song that popped into my head a second time, seem 'meant to be' in some sense.

The desire for unified meaning leads to fundamentalism.

Maybe we should just leave things in their separate spheres of being. I kinda feel like that's what space is for? Like space allows us to separate things from each other, because they're in different regions of space. So does time. But then we try to override it all with some framework ultimately generated by language. But this ironically only further distances us from the world that we are indistinguishable from, because it gives us shelter in abstraction.

Internet progress

moot on preserving the freedom in individual identity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=e3Zs74IH0mc

also, an awesome letter written in 1992 about the onset of the 'cyberpunk'

http://cyber.eserver.org/cyberpnk.txt

Brief Conversation with David Foster Wallace

Or rather, with my interpretation of one of his quotes:

re: Sklaroff wall post

good job, but there's still something troubling about it

like, why does one throw one's entire self

rather than like, most of it

it's a suicide of a different type in that sense

if you give all of yourself to something

there's nothing left

hella selfless, I suppose

me

yeah

Zak

perhaps virtuous

in that sense

me

i mean i'm willing to go far as to say the self isn't really anything but a conglomeration of ones interactions with society or w/e

all existence is external

looking into the self one will not find much

that's why people get much happier helping other people (peace corps or w.e) than by helping themselves

....

______________

but ye in response to your response to my sklar comment

i guess what i mean is

there is no throwing 'most of ones self' into something

as long as you are not committing suicide

you are throwing your whole self into all of existence

whether thats just religion or like 5 things

doesn't change that fact

existence is all one anyways

human categories distinguish it

but once you say 'yes' to this moment,

you are saying yes to all of existence

does that make sense?

3:09 PM

Zak

i think i follow but maybe not that last "saying yes to the moment = yes to existence" bit

me

its the same thing as saying as long as you are not committing suicide
you are throwing your whole self into all of existence

Zak

and i kind of agree with the

you are what you do

you are what other people experience

me

and "existence is all one anyways"

there is only one binary

truth and nihilism

nihilism is a saying 'no' to the moment