Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

Some people think one thing and then later think another? They learn from experience, including the experience of unexpected feelings? Couldn't be me, assholes.

If they never come to regard themselves with the same contempt that I'm currently using, then that means that my current contempt has lost its prospective mooring and can only be explained with reference to my current affect or my past experiences. And that would imply that I'm a person who gets changed and altered by my experiences! I do not want this! I want to be a person whose judgments are inviolable and outside of history. Satisfied security in my judgment is important for my self-concept!

Years from now, the people supporting [trend] will recognize that their language is [derogatory term] and they will regard themselves with specifically the same contemptuous feelings that I currently hold for them.

It is important for my sense of shrewd detachment that I believe all of this.

Other reasons not to let fly:
- I am still embarrassed about one dumb way that I reacted to his shitty behavior and that could be used to hurt me even now
- I am big mad and it's still a good general rule not to act on anger
- it's a small world and he has had 10+ years to build up goodwill among the people at his level
- his wife is even worse than he is, so any lesson I manage to import on him will ultimately fail to find long-term uptake

For years I have nursed a hatred of a former who traumatized me, and soon I will be in a position secure enough to freely say some really wrathful things to or about him.
I'm struggling to think of reasons why I shouldn't. I honestly haven't moved on and I can't really see that it's likely that I will.
My main hesitation is that I don't want to hear his response. I know that makes me a bad person but it's the truth.

Gauss was an OG schizo poster

The only way to fail the VK test is to be driven to anxious upset by it.
The only way to pass the VK test is to disengage from it, affectively.

My fan theory about the Voight-Kampf test is that it is a deliberate placebo of Kafkaesque tediosity.
Functional humans have an affective adaptation to absurd bureaucracy, namely dorsal vagal dis-engagement.
But something like a machine -- especially a machine that fears its own unconcealment -- is constantly making predictions about the next steps. It fears the efficacy of the VK test, but it has no way to estimate its own achievement relative to absurd questioning. This anxiety is its tell.

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.