Primaprimaprima
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User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
I read GEB in high school and it was one of the first books that turned me onto philosophy. It's not "deep", but as a popularization it does its job well.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
They're pretty well aware of how insane their claims are. But, philosophers justify insane claims for a living.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
The easiest way to get away from pseudobabble is to state a testable hypothesis.
Well, no, not really.
We can give multiple examples of statements that are clearly meaningful and aren't "pseudobabble", but which admit of no possibility of empirical verification or falsification, even in principle.
We can start by asking what happens when you turn your statement on itself: does "the easiest way to get away from pseudobabble is to state a testable hypothesis", make a testable hypothesis? It of course depends on exactly what you're trying to say here, and what you mean by "pseudobabble". If your statement was only intended to express something purely subjective, something like "I have no interest in statements that don't make testable hypotheses", or "I have no use for statements that don't make testable hypotheses", then it perhaps could be defensible (although even then there are significant difficulties). But if your statement was intended to express something objective -- that is, you were offering an objective criteria for distinguishing "pseudobabble" from non-"pseudobabble" -- then we run into some real problems. What is the empirical test for empirically verifying the statement "statements that don't make testable empirical predictions are 'pseudobabble'"? You could point to past successful empirical predictions made using claims that make empirical predictions, and the lack of successful empirical predictions made by claims that don't make empirical predictions. But this would just be circular. If someone hasn't already accepted the assumption that empirical verifiability is a guide to meaningfulness, they're going to be unimpressed by a track record of past successful empirical predictions.
Let's consider examples of inaccessible past information. There is a fact of the matter regarding what color shirt you wore on March 1st, 2009. There are probably no reliable records of what color shirt you wore that day, nor does anyone alive have a reliable memory of what shirt you wore that day; if there are reliable records of that day, just pick a different day for which there are no reliable records. This is not a "pseudobabble" question to ask. But there is (plausibly) no way of empirically verifying what color shirt you actually wore that day, even in principle. So, here we have another counterexample.
I am aware that the idea of fully simulating the past, starting from the universe's initial conditions, is a hot topic of discussion in AI spheres. It seems at least possible to me that due to a combination of time/energy constraints, inability to know the initial conditions with enough precision, and possible indeterminacy, there may be no way of actually fully simulating all past events with perfect accuracy. If you agree that this is a conceivable possibility, that's all that's needed for the counterexample to work. We may or may not be able to know what color shirt you wore on March 1st 2009, but it seems that even if we can't, that doesn't thereby make it a "pseudobabble" question. So the meaningfulness of the claim is not dependent on its empirical verifiability.
For a more grandiose example: there may be regions of the multiverse that are causally isolated from our own such that we can never empirically verify their existence, or empirically verify certain concrete facts about those regions, even in principle (could be a parallel universe, could be regions of our own universe that are beyond the limits of the observable universe, take your pick on whichever strikes you as the most physically plausible). But the question of the existence of these regions is not "pseudobabble". They could simply... exist. And there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with that. Your inability to verify the existence of these regions has no bearing on the meaningfulness of the claim that they do exist. (You could imagine, for example, a sentient inhabitant of one of these regions claiming that talk of anything beyond his own region of spacetime is "pseudobabble". Well, you know that your own existence is not "pseudobabble"!)
For an even more grandiose example: you have no way of empirically verifying that you are not the only consciousness in existence. It's possible that you're the only conscious being who actually exists, and the rest of the universe is just your hallucination. But the existence of other consciousnesses is not "pseudobabble". When you see someone who is not you prick their finger and experience pain, there is simply a fact of the matter as to whether or not there is a conscious experience of pain happening for some consciousness at that time. You have no way of empirically verifying it, but it's still not a meaningless question.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
Qualia, Consciousness
Actually not vague terms at all!
If you've ever pricked your finger and felt pain, that's a qualia.
If you've ever felt a sensation of hot or cold, that's a qualia.
If you know what the color blue looks like, and how it looks different from the color red, that's a qualia.
It's just conscious experience. That's it. It's that thing you have when you're alive and experiencing things, and that you lack when you're dead. Its nature might be mysterious, but the concept itself is about as straightforward as you can get.
I think what's happening is that people correctly notice that the people who like to use the word "qualia" also like to use other strange terms like "property dualism" or "epiphenomenalism" or "p-zombies" that seem to refer to very strange ideas. So they get nervous and they assume that any talk of consciousness in general must be BS. Independent of your evaluation of the philosophical literature on consciousness, it would simply be a mistake to write off the idea completely. That would be like saying that because people have come up with crank theories of physics before, physical reality itself must be a "vague" or "nonsensical" idea.
to forever escape any demands for rigor or practical application
The rigor is that you know what pain is, that's the rigor.
As for "practical application", that seems like a category error. It's not clear how you can derive from first principles, starting with our current best theories of fundamental physics, that anyone is conscious at all. And yet we know they are. Surely you can appreciate that it's intrinsically interesting to try and figure out why that's the case?
"It's whatever the fuck you want it to be"
But it's not. See above.
But man does it look like so much pseudobabble from here.
If you have specific examples in mind, or want to talk about specific terms or ideas, I'd be happy to try to explain them.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
That the "0th Dimension (The Nothing) Emerges/Balance All Infinite Possibility Across The Conceivable & The Inconceivable Reality"
I mean probably not.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
(Just as a quick note for anyone reading this: my views on sexuality will be inevitably misunderstood at first glance, although if prompted to clarify these misunderstandings, I could perhaps only speak in metaphorical language. It's easier to clarify what I don't believe in. I don't advocate for Bataille's permanent revolution, I don't advocate for the ecstasy of transgression-as-such, etc.)
you'll see there's a reason "free love" isn't the rallying cry it once was.
I am cautious regarding this concept.
One of the themes I keep coming back to in my participation here is the crucial importance of cultural memory.
Something that, due to my own dimwittedness, I didn't appreciate until recently, is the difference between concrete rootedness as such on the one hand, and rootedness-to-come on the other.
I yearn for rootedness. There's nothing I want more. But it's a rootedness-to-come. It's an abstract rootedness that can only be intimated at with whispers and signs. It's a familiar image, but it's been passed through a filter that makes it look like a dream. Perhaps it will forever be on the horizon.
It's easy for me to forget sometimes that there are people who live in reality, and not in dreams. Rootedness for them is already here; it's inconceivable for things to be otherwise. Rootedness for them is Aunt Sally and Uncle Joe, it's the corner convenience store that's been in the family going five generations back, it's the guys down at the Elks Lodge or the local church, it's all the family gatherings at Thanksgiving and Christmas and in general it's all these things that define the coordinates of their world. These are their "roots", this is their "memory".
Given the vast differences in constitution and temperament you find among different individuals, it's unsurprising that we develop different conceptions of "memory".
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
Level 1 MBTI is horoscopes for Korean people.
Level 10 MBTI is like... imagine you're standing on the sidewalk on a busy street, dazed and with a vacant look in your eyes as you stare off into the distance, while throngs of people pass you by. You've been deprived of any stable reference point for unifying the sensory manifold before you into a single coherent "experience". You (half consciously) perceive other people, but you have no way of knowing if any of them are even sharing the same reality as each other, or if the fundamental constituents of their phenomenological experiences are at all commensurable. We may indeed be condemned to a fate of Leibnizian monadism. What was fantastical has become mundane, what was trustworthy has become suspicious.
A passerby notices you in your silent reverie, and asks if you're ok. You're vaguely aware that they uttered a sentence, and that that sentence was composed of words. But what even is a "word", and what even is a "sentence"? The raw sensory impressions have already denatured themselves into their basic indissoluble components. The world has been deworlded, to use Heideggerian terminology. You're still not sure if the scene unfolding before you is a memory or a dream, or some as yet unnamed phenomenon that is more properly to be located in the crevices between them.
You have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.
(Speaking of Heidegger, Michael Pierce and Renaud Contini had a fascinating exchange regarding the typological implications of Being and Time in the comments section of Heidegger's PDB page.)
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
Well that’s the Hegelian dialectic of freedom innit?
“I think everyone should be free to do whatever they want.”
“Ok then I’m free to make you my slave.”
“Wait that’s not what I meant.”
Of course recourse to a “nonaggression principle” already admits that 1) there are certain other “natural” principles that must be allowed to impinge on the purity of absolute freedom, which leaves open the possibility that there are further “natural” principles that remain undiscovered, and 2) we are in want of a definition of “aggression”, which of course immediately drags us into hopeless complications and confusions.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
Fetishes are spiritual (shoutouts to Skimmerlit, he's a real one):
Fetishes are like your own spirit schemas. Your own spirit schemas. It's a tool and a religion. This is the method by which you'll do your most important analysis of the world. This is the religion you belong to. Frankly, this is probably the way you'll interact most or best with your deity. Do not mistake fetishes for simple perversions.
Those who already perceive the resonance of duty within themselves, those who already walk a "path" -- be they adherents of traditional religious tendencies, or woke activists, or TRP/manosphere/MGTOW types, or even certain garden variety authoritarians -- correctly identify pornography as a portent of an alternative spirituality, an intrusive force from "somewhere else" that encroaches on their market share and threatens to de-sediment what they have worked so hard to bring together under a certain conceptual regime.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
How I wish I were a man! I'd be smart and active and heroic and achieve things in the world!
Haha, yeah exactly haha…
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
The other side scares us. Our own side doesn't.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
I wonder what answer would run the highest probability of ick-induction in a manic pixie programming girl. Excel? SAS? SQL? An actual but boomer-coded programming language like COBOL?
What would be the likely reaction to Common Lisp?
(It has to be CL, none of that Scheme or Clojure shit.)
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
It's especially useful when you're writing reusable framework code, e.g. your UI library will probably have something like register_callback(Function f, Widget w) so you can perform action f whenever button w is clicked. But if you're just writing "app" code as opposed to "framework" code it may not come up as often.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
It blew my mind when I first learned about it too!
In some sense this is the same sort of mental gestalt shift that is at the basis of all scientific thought, and is therefore a useful experience for everyone to undergo.
What if a function were an object just like any other, and therefore subject to all the same sorts of operations, you can pass it around, access its properties, etc.
What if the human mind/body were an object just like any other, and therefore subject to all the same sorts of physical laws, etc.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
It's interesting to ask why it should be bothersome when you feel that someone is "monopolizing" the site with posts you don't like. It certainly is bothersome, I won't deny that. But it's not clear why it should be. The site has an in principle unlimited amount of server space. It's not a zero sum game. One person posting a thread you don't like doesn't prevent you or other people from posting threads that are more to your liking.
There are certain popular genres of threads here that bore me to tears (mainly the policy wonk posts, and the posts that get into obsessive minutiae regarding current events). But I know that by the same token, there are people who hate the types of posts that I like to produce and read as well (borderline schizophrenic free associative rants about philosophy and psychology). If I start harping on people for writing posts I don't like, then I know that they can just turn that around and say "well we don't like what you're trying to turn themotte into either". So I generally just try to keep my mouth shut when there's a post I don't like and I just ignore it or collapse the thread.
I suppose that although the site in principal has space for an unlimited number of threads, it only really has space for one dominant culture, and in this sense it is more zero sum. The fear could be that threads you don't like will attract the types of posters that you don't like, which will over time shift the culture in a direction that makes the site less valuable to you.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
Trying to tackle Of Grammatology for like... the 4th time in my life? Maybe this time I'll actually finish it. Gonna try to just plow through even if I feel like I don't have all the "prerequisites".
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
Call me crazy, but I'm starting to see recurring themes in the cases you choose to present.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
I'm curious how you'd distinguish this from desire-to-be-masculine.
I'm just going off of my general impressions from hearing FTMs talk over the years. There seems to be a much bigger focus on escaping the responsibilities and restrictions of femininity, and the actual positive desire for masculinity is secondary (but it certainly still does exist in at least some individuals, as your examples show).
It's noticeably different with MTFs because there's such an obvious strong fetishistic sexual component. Of course there's a confounding factor here that explains why we might not see that as much with FTMs, because women have fewer paraphilias overall than men, and the paraphilias they do have aren't felt as intensely. But FTMs could still desire masculine traits in a non-fetishistic way. My impression is that that part of it just isn't quite as important for them on average, but I freely admit I could be wrong on that point.
Of course, if it were the case that FTMs simply straightforwardly desired to be masculine in the way that MTFs desire to be feminine, then that would be fine, because it would still support my original claim that there's a symmetry between MTFism and FTMism. But enough people have pointed out that FTMism seems different on the surface that there should be some sort of explanation for this apparent difference.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
Black Americans have been here for hundreds of years, I suppose we can throw out the term “black” too and just talk about the American race from now on?
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
it seems pretty obvious that a lot of FtM types in particular are far less interested in becoming men than they are afraid of becoming women
Huh...
This makes me think that FtM transsexuality and MtF transsexuality are actually a lot more symmetrical than I previously realized.
Someone here once mentioned that FtM transsexuality was driven by an urge to "self annihilation", which I thought was great and accurate. Although it did make FtMism out to be a rather different phenomenon than MtFism, since MtFism is pretty clearly driven by positive desire.
But if we instead think that the key issue underlying all forms of transsexuality is the individual's relation to femininity. FtMism = rejection of and flight from femininity, MtFism = attraction to and desire to possess femininity. Then we can start to conceive of the two forms as being separate manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon.
I happen to agree with the radfems who claim that men are the "default" gender and women are a deviation from the default. Although I might disagree with them over the specifics. Rather than conceiving of femininity as a "lack" of masculinity, it's relatively clear to me that femininity is something that one possesses in addition to the "default" human state. And this is exactly what we see expressed in the two distinct forms of transsexuality.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
If the term "white" is too contentious, we can start saying "ethnic Europeans" instead. That would probably be for the best. It's less ambiguous. (Romani are a mixture of European and non-European ancestry.)
Frequently when people try to frame Romani or MENA rapists as "white", the political angle is that they want to deprive European peoples of the language for distinguishing between themselves and ethnic outsiders (even though wokes have no trouble distinguishing between white and non-white people in contexts where it's more beneficial for them to do so). But these are attacks being perpetrated against Europeans by ethnic outsiders, and Europeans have a right, arguably a duty, to frame their self-understanding in this fashion.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
What else is there to even say at this point?
Looks like the shooter went out of his way to piss off as many people as possible and make it hard to pin down his political orientation. Non-negligible chance of a psyop.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
That moment of dawning realization when you understand that your enemies are humans just like you, and you're a human just like them.
Not to pick on you specifically of course. It's a difficult truth to realize, and it's an easy truth to forget. We all need constant reminders.
My only nitpick would be that I don't see it as a "vulnerability". I just see it as a constitutive part of being human.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
The distinction starts to get blurry very quickly.
We can reasonably assume that there is a fact of the matter regarding which HBD claims are true. But the reason people take such strong stances on HBD, even in the face of inconclusive or insufficient empirical evidence, is because of their values. It’s hard to cleanly separate questions of value and questions of fact because our values influence what we think about the facts.
The community overall is majority women. But the people doing hour long deep dives on Marx’s or Nietzsche’s type and how their cognitive function stack influenced their work, are all men. So in that sense it has a more masculine bent than astrology does.
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