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Posts (text-only) from March 1, 2024 – July 2, 2009.
Dates are imperfect and missing some years.
“Everything has a telephone number, and each one is unique even though there is a word for this number which is not precisely a number in the classical sense, and yet can be ‘figured’ as such. The number is love. But as I said, it is always unique; even for any given addressee. Is love then novelty? No, not merely.”
— an anonymous informant
“Every time I see him move one of his hands I secretly hope it will leap down his own throat, rip out his esophagus, and shake it at the audience while he expires from his own organs realizing that they’re ashamed to be associated with hubristic stupidity of a stature far too monumental to articulate with mere words.”
— Bobby Yingo at the Red Room
“Every morning a birthday; every nightfall a funeral.”
— infraheard
“Every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.”
― Alfred North Whitehead
“And this is fundamentally unavailable to intellect alone…”
— Me
∞ It is misting this morning. It looks a little like snow. I have only very rarely seen snow in my lifetime. The air is filled with tiny motes of moisture. I place my hand into the stream, and it feels like tiny tingles, little explosions, ‘pops’ where the droplets land on the skin of the back of my hand. I realize that there is always moisture in the atmosphere. But I do not feel it upon my skin in this way. Ordinarily, it seems dry or normal, moist or damp. Now, however, it is different.
There are all these sensory sparks going off, like tiny, randomized cascades of… sensory music. This is an example of the collapse of wave to point, across the boundary of sensing. Ordinarily, we ‘sense’ the ‘wave’ … that is, the general, ambient state of the atmosphere. The ‘potential’ that is ‘present as atmospheric moisture’. Of course, this sense does not disappear entirely during mist, rain or snow… but in these situations, the waveform of moisture in and as atmosphere … has ‘collapsed’ (condensed) into ‘droplets’ or ‘points’. And this becomes our point of focus.
In this situation, the entire sensory field shifts. It is still aware of the wave nature of atmospheric moisture, but now, the point nature becomes compelling, obvious, and, sensorially primary.
This is an interesting analogy of the activity of the mind. We do not ‘collapse’ possibility into reality. Rather, we, in an ‘extra’ universe of thinking, reorganize and collapse ‘possible qualities and relationships’ into those we think about. Wave becomes point. See my point?
Language is, in fact, an example of the cognitive aspect of this phenomenon. These examples exist in a ‘second universe’ of consciousness and thinking, which, while a part of the ordinary universe… is, primarily, an array of methods for abstracting it into representations and frameworks.
Unlike the atmosphere, which is guided by variables in the environment, what happens within our minds and societies is guided by ideas. Frameworks and concepts ‘compete’ in human minds and cultures, for dominance, reproductive assets, and resources to convert into power and developmental momentum. Most of what happens is that fictions consume living beings, places, and whole epochs of existence on Earth.
The reason is simple: when representations overwhelm relation and ecology, reality and biology… crisis and disaster must follow in every case. Our species then ‘rains horror’ upon ourselves, the living history of our world, life on Earth, intelligence… and, most cruelly, we »set this up as a series of futures we cannot ‘turn back’ or undo. We »alter the basis of the relational and developmental ladders of biology and humanity… forever. We trade these for lethal fictions we must then ‘celebrate’ and live out the repercussions of. This is catastrophe, made pure.
Apparently, we discovered this ‘strange inner wave place’ and the capacity for collapsing it into tokens… long before we had any idea how lethal, blinding, self-aggrandizing, and dangerous this activity was.
So we never learned to properly collapse the wave of cognition toward insight or intelligence. Indeed, we have learned nearly every other thing, instead. What we derived, valued, worshiped and enacted… were AND REMAIN the primary opposites of our humanity, relational necessity, ecologies and … intelligence.
Bluntly: there it is absolutely impossible to ‘solve ANY problem… »unless we address this FIRST. Seriously. NO problem will EVER be solved unless we, as persons and peoples… »start precisely here.
Knowing this is thus the crucial ‘first step’ to resolving it. This awareness is the necessary precursor to any attempt to solve any problem whatsoever, but, especially, those problems based in the vastly self-magnifying hubris and blindness of our so-called cultures, which are little but swarming nests of tyrannically predatory ‘artifact’ factories. Physical, relational, emotional, cognitive… and ecological.
In other words: living beings, places and minds, destroyed into objects, tokens, arguments… and ‘profits’.
Graveyards. Museums. Literature. Film. Images. Language.
MACHINES.
“Equality’ is a psycho-social ideal that Nature has nearly zero in common with. All creatures are born unique. There is no way to ensure equality of opportunity in circumstances whose structure is fundamentally diverse. On one side of this ideal, we have the opportunity to work to ensure equality of opportunity for all people and groups, if, as a group or people or nation we prioritize this. But there’s another course open to us, which is to recognize the power that actual diversity represents… this is the power that nature capitalizes upon in every creature and ecology, in every place and time.
While I personally believe that the establishment of a ‘fair’ society is a worthy pursuit, my intuition is on the side of ‘integrative diversity’, which has the power to grant individuals and groups advantages that ‘equality’ could never approach.
“Indeed, the irony is that to the degree we are successful in making family income and home environment less important in determining economic outcomes, the effect is to make more important those genetically inherited skills and traits that no amount of social engineering can alter. A meritocratic society that reduces the role of “nurture” only winds up increasing the role of “nature”, reducing one form of injustice only to increase another.
The implications of these insights for economic justice are profound. If genuine equality of opportunity is neither possible nor even desirable, then we must acknowledge that luck must always play a significant role in who achieves economic success. No matter how hard we might try to make it otherwise, there is a fundamental and irreducible level of unfairness to market competition, one that undermines the moral legitimacy of market outcomes and provides a justification for taking reasonable steps to make them more equal.”
This article makes some interesting and useful points in this direction, but I think that rather than a meritocratic aristocracy, we live in an aristocratic pseudo-meritocracy.
“Equality is an ideal. It’s not and cannot be a fact. What we mean by equality in socio-political contexts is idealistic, yet, I think, noble in essence. But in fact, no two people are equal. We are each unique, so our power lies in the unifications of diversity (literally non-equality) that produce apparently miraculous results. Sometimes these results can be malignant, however, as well as beautiful.
Much of our society is founded upon the recognition of inequality that results in hierarchies. We might notice that, as an example, a football team has different roles. These are combined into a powerful unity that pursues a purpose which is invented. A strange fiction, from some perspectives.
What would it mean to be equal? It could not mean to be an animal or a human, since each person, plant and insect is born and develops uniquely… which specific strengths, opportunities and challenges that face no other of its species.
Try to imagine combat between two equal fighters of either gender. Equality would mean … that the conflict would fail to resolve. Forever. It would serve us to realize that the equality we speak of isn’t physical, emotional, or based on qualities at all. It’s an ideal that we speak of in contexts that are socio-political, philosphical or economic. This is its actual scope, because, well, in nature, nothing is equal. Ever. It’s impossible.
Einstein proved that the actually simultaneous experience by two observers… cannot happen. Ever. Because no two beings can occupy the same world-line without being the same person. And each perceiver is ‘equal’ »only in the sense of their inclusion in a category, which, while reasonable for some forms of analysis, is an entirely conceptual status conferred upon them by someone with the purposes, perspectives and intentions that incline them to do so.”
— an anonymous informant
“Either your muse is with(in) you, or your relationship with your muse is missing, damaged or occluded… or your human lover is your muse… or being with them interferes with it.
And yet this relationship need not be singular or entirely specific… for some, their muse may be the spirit of humanity… for others, the spirit of origin… or a living place or being… or all these things. Yet all of this is merely language, and the truth lies within the relationship… explanations will never encompass it.”
— infraheard
“Either we advance together, with and for each other, or we fall apart. Now.”
— infraheard
“Dreaming is a clue about the nature of its apparent opposite, waking; for the waking mind is like the walking-stick of the dreaming mind — which it only needs to navigate in verbal-conceptual domains (i.e: culture). But a walking-stick is not a mind! And yet, the waking mind continuously pretends — and argues — otherwise.”
— an intelligence agent
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