Introduction Over the past week or so, I’ve been turning over the relationships between a set of common, historically-recurring concepts dear to our collective hearts. This is an attempt to systematize some of these ideas, which are not entirely our own but recurrent from the time of the ancients, and connect them in a common mode of understanding.
It's interesting to think of the realm of ideas as a seperate plane which intersects our physical one in each of our minds. The space that contains all ideas is likely infinite, as is the number of possible ideas, but there are only so many thinkers in the universe to contain them. In this way conscious beings are a choke point through which ideas must flow in order to be realized in the material world or transmitted to someone else. As an engineer I spend lots of time talking with clients who have become possessed by an idea, and who cannot implement it themselves, and thus turn to transmission in order to see it realized.
Well done! I have been exploring similar ideas very seriously in the past couple of months and then you popped up with this amazing elucidation. Synchronicity? Mb not. Thank you!
I don't know if this fits with your claim, but I've been thinking lately about how wide I can expand my understanding of the spirits that inhabit the world.
Kicked off by someone's assertion that a dead loved one's spirit will always be with those they've left behind. What is their spirit, exactly? The ideas, sentiments, beliefs, values, which they held and animated, maybe. That spirit lives on in the people they influenced.
It isn't just people who have spirits. There are spirits of the times and spirits of the ages, too. I realised those aren't metaphorical either. There really are distinct sets of values and ideas that animate particular times and places.
None of this is metaphorical talk. But maybe it is grounding the language of the spiritual in the everyday world. I don't think it's profane to do so unless you've accidentally idolized Descartes.
Sep 28, 2022·edited Sep 28, 2022Liked by eigenrobot
"You" already have been metaphorically devoured by demons. Use some basic evolutionary intuition, humans have used language for many thousands of years
The idea of Map/mapper/territory seems similar to Jung's concept of the pyche and unconscious. the unconscious is the world beyond the self which has not been observed, but can observed by the psyche, where the psyche is both the observer and the internal substance that what is observed (what was unconscious) is transcribed into.
I love it -- hopeful and inspiring (in the direct sense, that you've inspired me to write something) -- and here's to this just being the tip of the iceberg.
Beautiful to see your thinking here. My only rebuttal would be about Plato. I think Plato has been largely misinterpreted and can also be seen in a kind of Buddhist sense where we live in Maya, and don't see things for what they are, free from judgement.
Also judgement, opinion, or "setting up what you like against what you dislike", to quote a Zen text, is the primary mode of action for ideas in the physical world, I believe.
Fascinating, very enjoyable. Sir, I urge you to invest a couple hours in the thoughts of Iain McGilchrist, sorta on point, for a “primacy of consciousness” argument. Among other things, he’s fond of bon mots like this from Bohr: “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.”
I am going to read this again more carefully, as needs be with any of your writings. I will tll you that I stepped back from the world a bit to examine how my intellectual life had become shut off from spiritual existence. I am trying to allow both to become far more present in my thinking and am all the better for that. Where will that lead? The fascinating thing right now is that I have no idea. That seems to be a good thing so I am going with it. :-)
Really enjoyed this and look forward to more. Also, this seems to be a deeply Augustianian epistemological framework. Augustine describes the trinity as he that loves (father), he who is loved (son), and the love (spirit). This mutual indwelling-ness seems to map well to territory, mapper, map.
As I said on Twitter, great post! Here are some additional thoughts:
I think emergent materialism suffers from the same flaw as reductive materialism when it comes to explaining how value enters into the world. Atomic particles and forces are amoral. The macroscopic world, on the other hand, is full of things that matter, things that it seems right to care about (e.g. life, loved ones, ideas, etc.). So the challenge is to figure out how you get from amoral particles to a moral world. I don't think the "emergent" perspective can help here... "value emerges from non-value" is a bit too hand-wavy for my taste.
I think you actually run up against the problem in your essay when you say:
> That is, mental constructs are part of the same world as a rock, but possess some interesting features that rocks don’t have, and may be regarded separately for some purposes.
What does "interesting" mean here? I think we can all agree that it's evil to destroy a mind and neutral to smash a rock... does the moral difference between the two really come down to how interesting they are? And what does "interest" actually signify? Is it just a word spoken by a rock-brain, or does it mean something more?
When I was younger, I had the intuition that there was something special about life, about the mind, but I had no way to justify this ontologically, so I pointed to "emergence" and told myself "it's complicated". Emergence has that magical vibe but it's not literally magic, you know? It was a way for me to have my cake and eat it too, to tell myself "minds are just atoms but in a really cool way." Eventually I realized that "being cool" was not a sufficient ground for the value and meaningfulness of human life.
Now I just shrug and tell myself that none of this shit makes any sense.
I think this lines up to some extent with some of my ideas around holographic actors. Consciousness, in my view, is something certain kinds of matter *does* - it is 'emergent behaviour' but follows the same laws. Ideas, therefore, are configurations of matter transmitted between brains and other suitable media. It is therefore foolish to dismiss ideas as 'real' any more than you would dismiss other configurations of matter acting upon the world.
It's interesting to think of the realm of ideas as a seperate plane which intersects our physical one in each of our minds. The space that contains all ideas is likely infinite, as is the number of possible ideas, but there are only so many thinkers in the universe to contain them. In this way conscious beings are a choke point through which ideas must flow in order to be realized in the material world or transmitted to someone else. As an engineer I spend lots of time talking with clients who have become possessed by an idea, and who cannot implement it themselves, and thus turn to transmission in order to see it realized.
-Connor, OfAllTrades
Well done! I have been exploring similar ideas very seriously in the past couple of months and then you popped up with this amazing elucidation. Synchronicity? Mb not. Thank you!
“People don’t have ideologies. Ideologies have people.” — Jordan Peterson
I don't know if this fits with your claim, but I've been thinking lately about how wide I can expand my understanding of the spirits that inhabit the world.
Kicked off by someone's assertion that a dead loved one's spirit will always be with those they've left behind. What is their spirit, exactly? The ideas, sentiments, beliefs, values, which they held and animated, maybe. That spirit lives on in the people they influenced.
It isn't just people who have spirits. There are spirits of the times and spirits of the ages, too. I realised those aren't metaphorical either. There really are distinct sets of values and ideas that animate particular times and places.
None of this is metaphorical talk. But maybe it is grounding the language of the spiritual in the everyday world. I don't think it's profane to do so unless you've accidentally idolized Descartes.
i was surprised about how much i agreed with this at the end. you would enjoy howard bloom
"You" already have been metaphorically devoured by demons. Use some basic evolutionary intuition, humans have used language for many thousands of years
The idea of Map/mapper/territory seems similar to Jung's concept of the pyche and unconscious. the unconscious is the world beyond the self which has not been observed, but can observed by the psyche, where the psyche is both the observer and the internal substance that what is observed (what was unconscious) is transcribed into.
I love it -- hopeful and inspiring (in the direct sense, that you've inspired me to write something) -- and here's to this just being the tip of the iceberg.
Beautiful to see your thinking here. My only rebuttal would be about Plato. I think Plato has been largely misinterpreted and can also be seen in a kind of Buddhist sense where we live in Maya, and don't see things for what they are, free from judgement.
Also judgement, opinion, or "setting up what you like against what you dislike", to quote a Zen text, is the primary mode of action for ideas in the physical world, I believe.
This seems rather sensible, not insane. The norm is insane.
Fascinating, very enjoyable. Sir, I urge you to invest a couple hours in the thoughts of Iain McGilchrist, sorta on point, for a “primacy of consciousness” argument. Among other things, he’s fond of bon mots like this from Bohr: “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.”
Comment was truncated, full comment here:
https://pastebin.com/raw/8DVs2WBq
I am going to read this again more carefully, as needs be with any of your writings. I will tll you that I stepped back from the world a bit to examine how my intellectual life had become shut off from spiritual existence. I am trying to allow both to become far more present in my thinking and am all the better for that. Where will that lead? The fascinating thing right now is that I have no idea. That seems to be a good thing so I am going with it. :-)
Really enjoyed this and look forward to more. Also, this seems to be a deeply Augustianian epistemological framework. Augustine describes the trinity as he that loves (father), he who is loved (son), and the love (spirit). This mutual indwelling-ness seems to map well to territory, mapper, map.
As I said on Twitter, great post! Here are some additional thoughts:
I think emergent materialism suffers from the same flaw as reductive materialism when it comes to explaining how value enters into the world. Atomic particles and forces are amoral. The macroscopic world, on the other hand, is full of things that matter, things that it seems right to care about (e.g. life, loved ones, ideas, etc.). So the challenge is to figure out how you get from amoral particles to a moral world. I don't think the "emergent" perspective can help here... "value emerges from non-value" is a bit too hand-wavy for my taste.
I think you actually run up against the problem in your essay when you say:
> That is, mental constructs are part of the same world as a rock, but possess some interesting features that rocks don’t have, and may be regarded separately for some purposes.
What does "interesting" mean here? I think we can all agree that it's evil to destroy a mind and neutral to smash a rock... does the moral difference between the two really come down to how interesting they are? And what does "interest" actually signify? Is it just a word spoken by a rock-brain, or does it mean something more?
When I was younger, I had the intuition that there was something special about life, about the mind, but I had no way to justify this ontologically, so I pointed to "emergence" and told myself "it's complicated". Emergence has that magical vibe but it's not literally magic, you know? It was a way for me to have my cake and eat it too, to tell myself "minds are just atoms but in a really cool way." Eventually I realized that "being cool" was not a sufficient ground for the value and meaningfulness of human life.
Now I just shrug and tell myself that none of this shit makes any sense.
I think this lines up to some extent with some of my ideas around holographic actors. Consciousness, in my view, is something certain kinds of matter *does* - it is 'emergent behaviour' but follows the same laws. Ideas, therefore, are configurations of matter transmitted between brains and other suitable media. It is therefore foolish to dismiss ideas as 'real' any more than you would dismiss other configurations of matter acting upon the world.