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Ok, so i watched this video, with the quote
"dirt is all around us, everything is shit. we apply meaning, value, and worth to the shit surrounding us. we live by this meaning, and by our words, we live by worth and apply value - but everything is shit."
and this rant below just came out of me. It's not about reacting to that piece in particular, but in reacting to our culture that allows an applause for that kind of thing in general. We'd want to compartmentalize this issue to departments of art and aesthetics, but some of these only offer us the most pure expression of something quite pervasive. My rant is less an opposition as hint of the possibilities now facing us. I didn't want to clutter this wonderful thread, so I post it here instead. I'd want to do an essay about this sometime, but I have no time atm. I put the tl;dr version first:
GOSPEL OF 2012:
The truth of objectivity is again becoming fashionable,
and this time, we are no longer concerned
with saving the ineffable. Thus, we include
art, religion, consciousness, and whatever else
in our scope, and can with scientific certainty say
"FUCK YOU" to people like the one in the video.
...
I love how people were so concerned about saving value, but how was that even possible without saving some kind of objectivity first? When you see people like that, you even suspect that they did not even want to save value; they just want to debase themselves, like the guy in the tub of shit [in that thread] here.
And then the snappy minimalist objectivist people of this time, who think that current science is sufficient with its pragmatic and utilitarian focus. and yet by reducing objective things like subjective experience, to things we have currently understood, they leave this giant room for all kinds of nonsense to creep in.
(they forget that wittgensteins dictum "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" was motivated both by the arrogance to think that the problems he could not solve, could not be solved, and in addition a desire to save his spiritual christian side from analytic analysis in the way kirkegaard did. thus, even in this material-positivistic heart, before his talk of linguistic relativism, where notions of language-games figured, he was already concerned with saving the ineffable.)
SO I SAY, FUCK THAT. we can do better than this crude reductionism, and for those who can see the signs, we are currently doing just that! the pockets of awesomeness do exist. :D
...
Has anyone seen the new theories of whole brain theory? The theories of consciousness? The speculative materialists? The books on presenting visual complexity? The info-theoretical versions of evolution? The new theory of causality? The theory of intelligence and optimal AI? The theories of beauty? The optimism of the new composers? Even to the point of reappropriating religious imagery? Theories of what religion is, at heart?
And these are ALL non-reductive theories. They focus on emergent phenomena. Whole brain theory focus on "Free Energy," theory of consciousness on "Integrated Information," info-theoretical versions of evolution define creativity mathematically, theory of causality is not reduced to correlation, theories of intelligence uses "hierarchy of sequences of sequences," (or in the case of AIXI...) theories of beauty use "compression to minimum description length" (or in the case of ramachandran...) list goes on and on..
It is not about whether these particular theories are correct or not. The point is that we are realizing that non-reductive explanatory formal theories of general things that were previously considered subjective, ineffable, impossible to analyze etc. are now becoming a real possibility.
The great thing is, when you take all of these possibilities combined, the room for the spooky ineffable, elusive "x" of love, religion, consciousness, creativity in evolution, art, disappears. Explaining it is gradually seen to be just another (hard) problem.
You want to be proud of your lack of religion? Don't be skeptical. Don't be oppositional. Figure out more stuff. Understand new things. Move the fuck forward. Everything is becoming possible now. Become like gods. Explain everything. Shy from nothing.
"dirt is all around us, everything is shit. we apply meaning, value, and worth to the shit surrounding us. we live by this meaning, and by our words, we live by worth and apply value - but everything is shit."
and this rant below just came out of me. It's not about reacting to that piece in particular, but in reacting to our culture that allows an applause for that kind of thing in general. We'd want to compartmentalize this issue to departments of art and aesthetics, but some of these only offer us the most pure expression of something quite pervasive. My rant is less an opposition as hint of the possibilities now facing us. I didn't want to clutter this wonderful thread, so I post it here instead. I'd want to do an essay about this sometime, but I have no time atm. I put the tl;dr version first:
GOSPEL OF 2012:
The truth of objectivity is again becoming fashionable,
and this time, we are no longer concerned
with saving the ineffable. Thus, we include
art, religion, consciousness, and whatever else
in our scope, and can with scientific certainty say
"FUCK YOU" to people like the one in the video.
...
I love how people were so concerned about saving value, but how was that even possible without saving some kind of objectivity first? When you see people like that, you even suspect that they did not even want to save value; they just want to debase themselves, like the guy in the tub of shit [in that thread] here.
And then the snappy minimalist objectivist people of this time, who think that current science is sufficient with its pragmatic and utilitarian focus. and yet by reducing objective things like subjective experience, to things we have currently understood, they leave this giant room for all kinds of nonsense to creep in.
(they forget that wittgensteins dictum "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" was motivated both by the arrogance to think that the problems he could not solve, could not be solved, and in addition a desire to save his spiritual christian side from analytic analysis in the way kirkegaard did. thus, even in this material-positivistic heart, before his talk of linguistic relativism, where notions of language-games figured, he was already concerned with saving the ineffable.)
SO I SAY, FUCK THAT. we can do better than this crude reductionism, and for those who can see the signs, we are currently doing just that! the pockets of awesomeness do exist. :D
...
Has anyone seen the new theories of whole brain theory? The theories of consciousness? The speculative materialists? The books on presenting visual complexity? The info-theoretical versions of evolution? The new theory of causality? The theory of intelligence and optimal AI? The theories of beauty? The optimism of the new composers? Even to the point of reappropriating religious imagery? Theories of what religion is, at heart?
And these are ALL non-reductive theories. They focus on emergent phenomena. Whole brain theory focus on "Free Energy," theory of consciousness on "Integrated Information," info-theoretical versions of evolution define creativity mathematically, theory of causality is not reduced to correlation, theories of intelligence uses "hierarchy of sequences of sequences," (or in the case of AIXI...) theories of beauty use "compression to minimum description length" (or in the case of ramachandran...) list goes on and on..
It is not about whether these particular theories are correct or not. The point is that we are realizing that non-reductive explanatory formal theories of general things that were previously considered subjective, ineffable, impossible to analyze etc. are now becoming a real possibility.
The great thing is, when you take all of these possibilities combined, the room for the spooky ineffable, elusive "x" of love, religion, consciousness, creativity in evolution, art, disappears. Explaining it is gradually seen to be just another (hard) problem.
You want to be proud of your lack of religion? Don't be skeptical. Don't be oppositional. Figure out more stuff. Understand new things. Move the fuck forward. Everything is becoming possible now. Become like gods. Explain everything. Shy from nothing.
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Edited by CLains at 01:05 CST, 17 January 2012 - 20148 Hits
CLains
