Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

dimwit: You're fired. Collect your things and go.
midwit: "The tides do not only pull the ocean to the shore, but also pull it away. I believe that we are shaped by those tides of both connection and emancipation. And therefore it is with great personal conscientiousness that I have drafted this message to inform you of a great tidal shift within our bond as a working unit. In the words of my personal icon, Martin Luther King Jr..."
topwit: You're fired. Collect your things and go.

I feel that it's weird that my life has mostly been defined by Type 3, a little by Type 2, and I've barely had much of Type 1 at all.

I think this is mostly due to my authoritarian upbringing. I tend not to doubt the teachers and I am very very slow to develop a spiteful relationship to them.

Type 3. The Phantom Tollbooth. This is a lot like the guru of nothingness, but you are denied access to the secret from the outset. Someone informs you that you are not worthy of hearing the secret, & only after you're done the road of trials and the impossible feats of strength -- only then do they inform you that the secret teaching teaches that what you've already done was impossible.

There are at least 3 types of adversarial teachers:
Type 1. The anti-role model. You encounter some asshole who is assholish in specific ways that you choose to precisely reverse.
Type 2. The guru of nothingness. You trek into the wilderness, complete a road of trials, climb the holy mountain, meditate for 5 years at the guru's feet in anticipation of the secret teaching, only to be informed at the end that the guru's secret teaching is that the guru has no teaching whatsoever.
...

You know what the word "assume" means? "ass-ume"? It meaens that I am filled with ασώματα -- a sense of the incorporeality of objects, as in ancient philosophy.

I just stumbled on the grimmest reddit user profile: it's a working mom raising young kids, with a spouse who suffered a major brain injury that has robbed him of most executive function, and this mom is hanging out on subreddits for things like tCDS, nootropics, and lots of similar treatment-hacking. Now the husband is using the tCDS and I have this Beckett-like image in my mind of a family where the traumatized parents are electrifying each other's brains out of desperation. Just truly grim.

We need something like "hillbilly globalism," based around the poor-ass folks from all the mountain hollers playing their old fiddle music, eating low-nutrition high-calorie food, and telling crass jokes.

Chinese classical string ensembles sounds just like bluegrass bands, and I'm amazed that people don't talk about this more. It's such an obvious area of cultural fusion.

Sorry about the delay in the Peirce thread.

I have to be a human sometimes

If you didn't like that, here's the man himself:

>The First is that whose being is simply in itself, not referring to anything nor lying behind anything. The Second is that which is *what* it is by force of something to which it is second. The Third is that which is what it is owing to things between which it mediates and which it brings into relation to each other.

For Peirce, this third thing, the response, is where learning happens. If the response does not return the living thing to some state of non-responsiveness, or if the stimulus remains stridently distinctive, then the living thing will probably keep trying responses to the stimulus.

The third part, the response, is informed by the ground but the ground isn't sufficient to produce the response. And the response is also informed by the stimulus but it isn't reducible to the stimulus. The response is premised on the dyadic nature of the ground and the stimulus, but can't be reduced to that.

The response reflects some kind of association that the living thing bears. The association is something that has been imprinted, such as by genetics or by grooming, onto the living thing

You have some default condition of some living thing. It's just vibing.

Then sometimes you have some kind of stimulus introduced to the living thing.

Then sometimes you have some kind of response by the living thing to the stimulus.

Got it?

The first part is the basic ground or reference. It is the fundamental situation of vibe-ish-ness from which everything else draws its distinctiveness.

The second part is meaningful as it presents a dyad that's apart from, but refers to, the 1st part.

OK OK so what does this have to do with consciousness and hypermedia? Before I get onto that, I think I need to make a stop and address the stuff that Peirce is actually known for.

You may have had a college class that referenced Peirce or semiotics. Semiotics are Peirce's theory of signs. And strangely enough, it works according to the three phases that I described above.

So let me first explain sign-process as it would appear in a natural organism's behavior.

But I should also make very very clear that Peirce also believes in evolution etc. He isn't ignorant of all of the divergent qualities of reality. But he thinks that the divergent base of reality is going to become more and more determined with the advance of time.

That is, in the long run, Peirce imagines that reality is going to become asymptotically convergent towards these finious things.

To make a strained metaphor, you can think of the force of necessity kind of like some infinite flypaper that turns into a black hole. At first the infinite flypaper just catches flies, and you can say, "Oh there were 3 flies in here. I didn't know how many, but now I do because they are now Actual." But eventually, the infinite flypaper catches your whole world.

This has a ratchet effect. More and more things randomly trip into causal interaction with finious reality, and these encounters have this ratchet-like effect that create more and more Actual entities, they create history, and so on. And furthermore, more Actual entities can be made out of existing Actual entities, and so on.

In the absolute fullness of time, Peirce imagines that these interactions with finious things are going to continue to happen, and so over time reality is get determined.

Then, from time to time, one swirling whirlwind of indeterminacy meets another and -- POP! -- something capital-a Actual comes out of it. It has a determinate character. It is something that was made out of the shifting mass below, but this Actual thing has outlines and characteristics and stuff. Now how did that happen?

For Peirce, what has happened is that the first stuff was determined in some way by something finious. At some point, something engaged with a logical consequence.

This gets kind of trippy and I don't want to be even more confusing than I already am.

My understanding of Peirce is that he thinks that some things, "finious" causes (similar to final causes but not quite) have a kind of ratcheting effect on reality that brings the total cosmos closer and closer into convergence.

At the beginning of Peirce's worldview, at the base level, he thinks that the ground of being is indeterminate, an etic chaos of every sense, every force, etc.