Show newer

In ancient cultures, the one scribal class that would set the conditions under which men could be allowed to do harm to men were priests.
In classical-medieval cultures, the scribal classes included priests, counsellors, and doctors.
In modern cultures, the scribal classes have added psychologists.

I think that the key to this might be to recognize that YOUR MAGNUM OPUS ALREADY EXISTS, word-for-word, but it's buried very obscurely inside the Library of Babel and/or down a very distant path through lexical vector-space.

Maybe people need to realize that if they produce a bunch of halfass notes, it can AT LEAST be used to burrow through the LLM to a point where the machine can be used to create non-trivial extensions of the human output.

Show thread

There's something to be done with Romantic irony & fragmentary philosophy VS the tendency of many people to have an unwritten magnum opus in their imaginations.

Like... NaNoWriMo is some overachiever shit. I want to see a 12 hour period where people just drink a whole pot of coffee and write their halfass version of "Speculative notes toward X." The world would be much richer for it.

Look, I get it: you're edgy.

What is the practical upshot of saying all this edgy shit?

It seems like there's an under-exploited attractor in polemic-space that's in favor of 100% human-permeable borders but which also punishes capital flight with righteous fury. Basically adopt "move to where the jobs are" as a policy goal.

You assume I am a decent person but I wrongthink all the time just for the speculative activity.

εὐρύς = the broadness (planet Earth)
εὐρ - ώπη = the broad-eyed (cow)

I achieved Socratic flight today while denouncing Apollo as a rapist. Christianity achievement unlocked.

I'm gonna hypostatisize a major moral imperative into trivial lip-service, then browbeat anyone else who doesn't let me rewrite our mutual commitments on the basis of my lip service.

I'M SORRY, I GUESS I'M THE ONLY ONE HERE WHO'S ACTING MOOOORALLY.

With all due apologies, I find it very improbable that "Cat's in the Cradle" breaks through anyone's shell. People who have raised little kids up to be grown adults will either already know at some level that they've been shitheels or they never will.

It's a solid song, though, and I think it's been a useful work of art for expressing and facilitating conversations by kids about parenting.

Gotta learn more about Herder and Schiller's views of eros. How is eros incorporated into self-definition? or play-drive?

It's hard to explain what I think is so magical about this chain of transmission.

You start off with the dog-torturing asshole Descartes giving us some real drunk dad philosophy about how you can't trust anything. You start in this really grim position of this corpse-universe of efficient action grinding away empty matter on empty matter.

But by the end of this chain of critique, you actually come all the way around to this fascinating view of reality as intrinsically meaningful.

Show thread

Part 4. Peirce says "no," these things attributed to the mind are all fake, the mind is fake, most of the phenomenal ooze is fake, EXCEPT there are a handful of transcendental bits that are actually totally real and necessary for signs to work. And signs working is the base reality now.

(Wait a minute, you may say: If the mind is fake then what is receiving all the signs? Of course the answer is that semiosis interprets itself, you silly goose. Semiosis is the atomic form of phenomenal ooze.)

Show thread
Show older
Mastodon

a Schelling point for those who seek one