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.
>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.
Yes very much! I love this framing.
One thing I haven't really gotten clarity on for my own purposes is the exact nature of the realm of ideas. I've been thinking about it as you write about it here, a vast space of arbitrary dimensionality. But, ok, most of that space will never even remotely occur to any person. And when someone "encounters" a new idea, are they--the age old question--creating the idea, or discovering it, or what? Are we explorers of the space of ideas or architects?
This is sort of a semantic issue as long as you treat the space of ideas as strictly divorced from the world of substance but maybe its implications are more . . . substantial in the framework where ideas loop back on the material world.
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!
These ideas have definitely been floating around, especially over the last . . . thirty years? Forty? But I want to connect them, ground them, make them more explicit and emphasize their connection to the material. It's well and good to discuss "memes" but my impression is that they're still viewed as purely spiritual without any material grounding, and so it's easy to talk about them abstractly without taking them seriously.
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.
Yes! I have had thoughts in parallel to--all of this actually!
It's hard to map this out because--well, I'm not exactly sure why. Partly it's because sensical or systematic observation of these things is difficult--it's hard to "measure" ideas directly, and so we end up either taking crude proxies, or relying on pre-scientific methods of understanding. These prescientific methods aren't bad exactly, they have their place; and I shit on science as much as anyone; but they do leave a lot to be desired in precision and generalizability.
I'm going to try to write about my thoughts, but I think it's going to turn out less like a systematic post and more like a DnD bestiary.
One can imagine various topic modelling analyses of social media or word frequency in books is the kind of proxy you might be thinking about. Even reading Google Zeitgeist for trends....is in the most literal sense of all, a measure of the spirit of the age (it's in the name, or it was; now renamed "Year in Search"). But you are right these are crude proxies. I think that's fine, and the proxies will likely get better and better (what happens if I train or fine-tune a language model on only texts generated in a particular era, then ask it to tell me what is important?).
The question is what the pre-scientific understanding and lexicon might add to our understanding over more modernist labels like "trends", "influences", and so on.
"You" already have been metaphorically devoured by demons. Use some basic evolutionary intuition, humans have used language for many thousands of years
Oh yes absolutely although i think it's not so dire as all that. I'm still trying to map this space out but my suspicion is that humans have some agency here!
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.
A lot of people are mentioning Jung and I'm a little bit wary about this because overall I have a deep distrust of post-folk psychology. On the other hand, I guess my exercise here is in a sense deeply psychological.
Eh, any exploration of the self and it's interactions with the world will bear *some* resemblance to a psychological theory, given the spread of psychological ideologies. The reason I like Jung's thought here is precisely because it includes the outside world as object, especially that which the self *doesn't* integrate, in it's formulation, making it more ontology than psychology in my mind. Granted I'm a psych major, so I'm certainly biased
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
>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.
Yes very much! I love this framing.
One thing I haven't really gotten clarity on for my own purposes is the exact nature of the realm of ideas. I've been thinking about it as you write about it here, a vast space of arbitrary dimensionality. But, ok, most of that space will never even remotely occur to any person. And when someone "encounters" a new idea, are they--the age old question--creating the idea, or discovering it, or what? Are we explorers of the space of ideas or architects?
This is sort of a semantic issue as long as you treat the space of ideas as strictly divorced from the world of substance but maybe its implications are more . . . substantial in the framework where ideas loop back on the material world.
Hmmm.
I lean towards a discovery framing, but maybe that's a bias inherited from mathematical theory.
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!
Thanks Caroline! (It's lovely to hear from you, by the way--I hope you're well.)
I am well! Taking a little break. be back soon. hugs to your girls!
I've come across a few people talking about concepts like this lately. Notably Handwaving Freakoutery here on Substack.
I hope the eregore eregore turns out to be freindly.
“People don’t have ideologies. Ideologies have people.” — Jordan Peterson
These ideas have definitely been floating around, especially over the last . . . thirty years? Forty? But I want to connect them, ground them, make them more explicit and emphasize their connection to the material. It's well and good to discuss "memes" but my impression is that they're still viewed as purely spiritual without any material grounding, and so it's easy to talk about them abstractly without taking them seriously.
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.
Yes! I have had thoughts in parallel to--all of this actually!
It's hard to map this out because--well, I'm not exactly sure why. Partly it's because sensical or systematic observation of these things is difficult--it's hard to "measure" ideas directly, and so we end up either taking crude proxies, or relying on pre-scientific methods of understanding. These prescientific methods aren't bad exactly, they have their place; and I shit on science as much as anyone; but they do leave a lot to be desired in precision and generalizability.
I'm going to try to write about my thoughts, but I think it's going to turn out less like a systematic post and more like a DnD bestiary.
One can imagine various topic modelling analyses of social media or word frequency in books is the kind of proxy you might be thinking about. Even reading Google Zeitgeist for trends....is in the most literal sense of all, a measure of the spirit of the age (it's in the name, or it was; now renamed "Year in Search"). But you are right these are crude proxies. I think that's fine, and the proxies will likely get better and better (what happens if I train or fine-tune a language model on only texts generated in a particular era, then ask it to tell me what is important?).
The question is what the pre-scientific understanding and lexicon might add to our understanding over more modernist labels like "trends", "influences", and so on.
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
Oh yes absolutely although i think it's not so dire as all that. I'm still trying to map this space out but my suspicion is that humans have some agency here!
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.
A lot of people are mentioning Jung and I'm a little bit wary about this because overall I have a deep distrust of post-folk psychology. On the other hand, I guess my exercise here is in a sense deeply psychological.
I'm not sure how I feel about this.
Eh, any exploration of the self and it's interactions with the world will bear *some* resemblance to a psychological theory, given the spread of psychological ideologies. The reason I like Jung's thought here is precisely because it includes the outside world as object, especially that which the self *doesn't* integrate, in it's formulation, making it more ontology than psychology in my mind. Granted I'm a psych major, so I'm certainly biased
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.
That's entirely fair. I will freely confess to using 'Plato' as a foil rather than trying to render a correct-in-some-sense depiction of him.
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.”
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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.