Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

Obviously there's something Freudian about the way David transfers over his affection to his mother onto the icon of the Blue Fairy.

IDK there's a trace of something here I'll revisit later

... over what GH Mead saw in language -- as a constantly-refined tool for collective meaning-making, among generations of creative situations, that we occasionally direct inward for (originally social) problem-solving.
The repetition of the Pinocchio narrative in AI is like a threat that our stories will outlive us, will be taken up by others who will not understand the situations that created them.

I'm watching Spielberg-Kubrick's AI and I'm reminded of something I read yesterday from Wm. Empson. It seems like the menace of the movie is that the experience of David, who is convincingly tortured and abused, might be mass-produced.
In "Some Versions of the Pastoral" Empson argues that humans' capacity for language allows us to abstract away the real character of something. The reduction of human pathos to mass-producable circuits and programming threatens the triumph of abstract language

Subversion is a finite game. Containment is an infinite game.

Reading books is literally better than psychedelics

It's so disappointing to look up an academic journal and to find that its most recent issue was in 2020.

I've heard multiple stories of journals' area-editors (EG the review editor) going completely AWOL since 2020 with no sign of returning, and there is no formal process in place at these journals for catching up for all of the missed work that these people left behind.

I miss rain. It's just snow and wind here. Rain is so nourishing and calming.

In this way, Mead reminds me of Henry George, who is unique (IMHO) in political science for being a great dude. George was a capital-W "Wife Guy" who stuck with his true love through thick and thin. And George also had a surprising habit of becoming best friends with people! People who got into Georgism would reach out to George himself and would frequently discover that he was an extraordinarily good friend.

Remember what George's big slogan was? "I am for men!" Meaning, "Dudes rock!"

Mead has the benefit of being a guy whose ideas come across as profoundly pro-social, pro-humanity, pro-freedom. He's a kind of "have your cake and eat it too" thinker in that he thinks social dynamics and individual creativity are both outputs of the same process, and that this process is fundamentally rooted in the perennial human tradition of liking to be around each other and of preferring to figure out what complicated signs mean as a great big team.

In George Herbert Mead I recognize another guy whose brain was split open by CS Peirce.

Tau Day fucking curbstomps your pathetic Pi Day.
https://tauday.com/tau-manifesto

Jousting wouldn't even crack the top 5 most damaging bloodsports of the contemporary US.

Fuck it bring back jousting

Did you know the doors to you home can freeze shut?

People would rather believe in the strangest shit rather than accept that logic exercises non-efficient causality.
To get rid of the Heavens, Kant would tell you that all thought and experience are never accessed in-themselves, only vaporous interactions on the membrane between the two. Later materialists would try to convince you that causality is ineffable, or that you are not conscious, or that everything is just as conscious as a person. It gets quite silly.

To be perfectly plain about it:
I think teleological (or "finious") causation exists by way of logic.
I think human intelligence participates in the same cosmic Logos that brings causality from once instant to the next and thereby makes the Heavens spin.
I think that humans only have access to some aspects of cosmic Logos and by developing pragmatic communities of inquiry with each other and other possibly intelligent systems (higher mammals, AI) we can converge on a fuller understanding of it.

Platonists buried the Heavens like treasure in their math books, and Abrahamic traditions have launched theirs into the post-Romantic realm of Spirit, but otherwise this period of modern humanist philosophy has no recourse to the cosmic view of energy, time, intelligence, etc. This means that modern humanist philosophies are deeply troubled by causality and consciousness. These are the two central irresoluble problems for a post-Kantian philosopher.