Are You Guys Laughing Yet?

[0=2]

No?

"The search for meaning is an illusion of logic and a requirement of the middleclass for predictable breeding space." Christopher S. Hyatt

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnvM_YAwX4I

http://www.hermetic.com/bey/taz1.html#labelChaosSection

http://www.sacred-texts.com/bos/bos099.htm


That's because you're part of the joke.

(Watchmen's pretty good.)

[blp]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnvM_YAwX4I

But... why is this OK and not one of the western philosophers from the tradition you revile in toto, but who's basically saying the same thing? Got to say, I prefer the philosophy you're out to rubbish; at least it doesn't come with a load of tacky 3D graphics and cheap library electronic music designed to build excitement. Better written too.

[Lust Hogg]

But why bother devoting time to reading and understanding something in its entirety when you can get a condensed, scaled down version which elucidates some truth in ten minutes. 0=2 you are a real product of the modern age. Like i said at some other junction, Assert some contention which is focused enough that it can be adequately defended or adequately refuted. You seem to be intentionally and skillfully ambiguous. I still do not no whats so funny.

[blp]

But why bother devoting time to reading and understanding something in its entirety when you can get a condensed, scaled down version which elucidates some truth in ten minutes.

Yeah, but it's worse than that. I don't think the video I watched even knew which bits of western philosophy it was repeating.

[billyjack]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnvM_YAwX4I

i watched the second video of this as well. its conclusion was basically that there is a creator and we're designed by em. the logical hopscotch that was used to get to this conclusion was presented so matter of factly that I puked a little in my mouth

i was trying to find some info just now on bishop berkeley and his idealism. didnt someone refute him?

[blp]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnvM_YAwX4I

i watched the second video of this as well. it conclusion was basically that there is a creator and we're designed by em. the logical hopscotch that was used to get to this conclusion was presented so matter of factly that I puked a little in my mouth

i was trying to find some info just now on bishop berkeley and his idealism. didnt someone refute him?

*laughing* I watched it too. The thing of it is, even with the added ninth grade science lecture on the workings of the brain, the reasoning is just useless. Even the brain, when you take it out of the skull, is just another object seen in the brain, so it must not be the brain that's actually doing the seeing? Oy. It's not like when you take that seeing brain out of the skull the same consciousness continues seeing.

At least Berkeley is, as I said, a good writer. He's also rather more difficult to refute.

Kant early on in The Critique of Pure Reason, writes:

...if we ascribe objective reality to these forms of representation [space and time], it becomes impossible to avoid changing everything into mere appearance. For if we regard space and time as properties, which must be found in objects as things in themselves, as sine quibus non of the possibility of their existence, and reflect on the absurdities in which we then find ourselves involved, inasmuch as we are compelled to admit the existence of two infinite things, which are nevertheless not substances, nor anything really inhering in substances, nay, to admit that they are the necessary conditions of the existence of all things, and moreover, that they must continue to exist, although all existing things were annihilated - we cannot blame the good Berkeley for degrading bodies to mere illusory appearances.

Not sure, but I imagine Hume, as skeptical empiricist, would have opposed Berkeley too.

[0=2]

So friends, lets have a little discussion on... Ontological Anarchism.

The base goes something like this..

The world is art. Simple. A collection of images personas and aesthetics working on a plane permitted and allowed a "material" feel. Allow me to explain.

Every moment you expeience is a combination of a past-present pull created by a continuum you logically conducted of your thoughts to make sense of why you are thinking said thoughts. You live from yesterday to tomorrow with little time inbetween. The lines of this continuum construct the massive dull points that exist on a day to day basis. There are long periods of stagnation followed by brief periods of... periodical illumination. These points, these "high" points are the dots, the "low" points the lines.

You create who you are from the dots you assemble in an order that makes sense to who you are becoming and how you conceive your "future". This is why emotion on a subject, on a moment, may switch, become null, or extinguished, or even amplified by time. The ethos you currently work with is, hour by hour, different from the ethos you previously worked with. This mechanism, this reading of the past, acts as a type of mental corruption, a subjective swing that turns these experiences into fuel for the moment... or the future.

Thus you project these past feelings of regret, love, what have you into the future. Thus continuum is made and projected. Your view on your future and past? Random, and created within the continuum. You viewed independant variables as a continuum, and because lines must end, you naturally assume an end goal.

Your dreams. It is important to note, however, that living for the future will ALWAYS stave off that future.

So these dots work as the form in your otherwise formless life, though they are simply the characteristics, the beast that really powers the machine are the "low" points inbetween these "defining" moments. Now it would be important to note at this time that all of these points are formed directly out of contrast. The human brain, being what some would assume as "analyctical" has a tendency to define self by other, and the world in correlation with this.

You yourself are a product of random variables and depending on how those variables are ordered in your mental continuum that makes you "you", "your"(I use quotes here because to say you possess this often gives a feel of control, which you do not have) general view on the world, including laws it ought to live by, or results it ought to create, or things you ought to achieve, are entirely random bias. No right, no wrong.

You define the characteristics that pigment others by your specific situation in the larger situation, simply a bigger equation of random variables. This further fuels your continuum by allowing any singular event to be perceived as an action WITHIN not of time, and allows various thoughts and ideologies to be more "right", or rather prevalent, to your life. This creates a dynamic that allows for every piece of "new" information presented to an individual to have a recorded response, a knee jerk reaction formed off of implications of that ideas place in the noosphere, and ones own place. This is why you are not me, and why you do not endorse my ideas. And likewise from me.

So this here? IT'S BEEN PREWRITTEN. None of this needs to happen, none of this has spectrum outside what we give it, and NONE of it is new. At all.

Things you take as fact are recordings of synchronicity that have worked IN THEIR FIELD to your perception throughout most of your life. When these things "fail" people start going through dogma withdrawal, their currnet form of belief no longer supports them and their happiness. You like happiness, correct? No, not the second by second timely release that comes from the boy girl antics we were all made to repeat, but those true moments of cosmic brilliance.

None of you own your own thought, it was all presented on loan by culture, and culture is a product of a similar equation itself. The microcosm acts as the macrocosm.

Solipsism 101, eh?

No, you have control. The moment can be turned with little training into a "Temporary Autonomous Zone" that allows for one to fully experience the aesthetic dynamic of that moment as the infinite personal creation it is. Dullness needs NOT happen. But as long as you have no control over your perception, this will continue. This and suffering.

Understanding ones symbolic basis, the core symbols that drive one to protect ego, perpetuate ego, and conduct ego, along with it's continuum, allow for a possible change in this. This is called Symbolic Architectualism. The ability to create ones own dogma. You have a series of blocks preventing you from "achieving" the things you would otherwise do. You see laws as solid, nations as Gods, lovers only in relation to a jealous ecstatic twist. Happy? Fulfilled?

The issue is with a strict moral code is that, naturally, considering the sheer mass of variables active in day to day life, it allows for moral lapses into sadness depression... and many other types of typified stagnation, most of which we now just accept as life. True happiness is attained by an adaptive and flexible moral code that allows any information ot permeate it without destroying it, or causing it any unease.

How on earth do you do this? Well... start by understanding that you are NEVER right, and ALWAYS only one of many aesthetic characters in a forever twining netowrk of interlapping symbolism. Allow this to be as is and understand the

JOKE!

Through understanding and constructing dogma you allow yourself hte flexibility to destroy what you consciously created, and the ability to laugh free, with love and hate and all that passion you normally deny yourself, at the all that consumes you and your place within it.

We usually do not like letting go, because it means a lack of control, and whether or not it is realized control is the center and basis of your ego.

Of your reason for responding to this thread.

It's funny how we grow so dumb in so many words, and even when the tongues are severed we seek redemption in the ego, obelisks of continuum and ordered thought.

Allow this to cease and you will be free of worry.

Allow it to continue and... deal with it. No doubt it matters not.

But this? This right here? This is a joke, and you are all part of it(with your ideas and children and books and political motives), like it or not.

http://www.dorkclub.com/watchmen_comedian.jpg

[Quark]

start by understanding that you are NEVER right, and ALWAYS only one of many aesthetic characters

You may have just made yourself the butt of your own joke.

[blp]

'Never right'. I can go for that, though. It's practically the first time I've been able to breathe reading one of your posts, 0=2. The Hakim Bey stuff's sort of fun too, though, at its worst, never mind the ego, some of his stuff and everything in your posts up to now has sounded like what Slavoj Zizek calls 'the obscene dominant superego injunction', which he adds is always 'to enjoy'. Its textbook: ribaldly abusive, always obscene, relentlessly vicious and insulting, always with the same bullying, ironically enjoyment destroying content: you're not having enough fun. In the post-sixties, anarcho version of this, which Bey exemplifies and Deleuze and Guattari, in an only slightly different way represent too, it becomes, specifically: you're not free enough, not sufficiently open to flows and intensities, too neurotic, Cartesianly rational, insufficiently schizophrenic, even, at times, too unwilling to commit crime and try out transgressive sexual practices. All of which is easy enough to say - over and over again, ultimately quite boringly, with various dubious justificatory parallels in things like quantum physics - but, sorry, refresh my memory, exactly how many times have you guys been to jail for your acts of poetic terrorism? Oh right. Yeah, though so. None. Know what I mean? And the reason they can't even begin to follow the implications of their own writing is, precisely, that the superego's injunction is impossible to follow; that's how it's able to perpetuate the abuse.

'Never right' though. Honestly, that works for me. And I take your point about the ego shenanigans that go on in a place like this, but, really, I didn't write any of the above to be right, just to frankly lay out some of the problems I've always had with this kind of stuff.

[billyjack]

*laughing* I watched it too. The thing of it is, even with the added ninth grade science lecture on the workings of the brain, the reasoning is just useless. Even the brain, when you take it out of the skull, is just another object seen in the brain, so it must not be the brain that's actually doing the seeing? Oy. It's not like when you take that seeing brain out of the skull the same consciousness continues seeing.
.

oy is right. seems like this line of thought is in the same realm as the old, "if a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound" question

thanks for the kant quote. just what i was looking for--old boy does write in riddles though, gotta say he's tough to digest.

[blp]

oy is right. seems like this line of thought is in the same realm as the old, "if a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound" question

Yeah. Even worse though - the logic here just doesn't even work. At least the tree falls thing makes sense on its own limited terms.

thanks for the kant quote. just what i was looking for--old boy does write in riddles though, gotta say he's tough to digest.

Very. And it's difficult to really deal with that quote without having read what leads up to it, which is at least as dense. I'm pretty sure there's another quote of his where he says very clearly that one shouldn't mistake his Transcendental Aesthetic for Berkeley's assertion that everything is an illusion, and explains why, but it wasn't where I expected to find it in the critique. Might be in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Other than that, might be worth checking out Hume's Dialogues on Natural Religion, which I've yet to read, but which is probably rather easier than Kant. Hume kept it from publication until after his death because he knew its atheism would be unpalatable to his contemporaries.

[0=2]

So if you examine it, the all, from this vantage point, from zeroless center, the nothing that is the all... the point of highst possibility...

philosophy is no closer to "truth" to "essence" than football for Smirnoff. It simply isn't an objective creation, and the process under which you "examine" the qualities you suppose the universe has is itself a product of those qualities... which are not only subjective abstracts but hardly universal in and of themselves.

And whether or not one commits a "crime" matters NOT. These are social orders. Should drugs be illegalized? Are they any different than most food? What defines one chemical from another?

Borders don't exist. Every moment is a tangled sphere of synchronicity across which any point can be drawn and said to bear resemlbance to any other point. This is why this "argument" can be made, the argument itself is not "true", and I am hardly "right" for saying it, and your responses bear nothing but subjective premise on the overall "isness" of the statement.

You do because you do not know what else. This is of life, in life, and it. Live happy and adaptable. Fear of going insane? Does it sound "Skitzophrenic"? Does it matter? Absolute insanity can be one of the highest peaks of bliss from which man has ever fell, it could also be another pipedream, the fact that both are thought means both are relavent and true to interpretation.

This being said, if you follow the steps needed to create your own dogma, you will be clinically refered to as a psychopath.

[blp]

In other words, pace Hassan al Sabah, 'Nothing is true, everything is permitted'. It's either a paradox or it negates itself: if it's true, it's not true, if it's not true, then it's not true that everything is permitted. That's the problem with all this stuff in, ahem, a nutshell: ever proliferating volumes of appeal to the the truth of nothing being true.

I started looking through that Hume I linked to above. It's bloody good and incredibly relevant:

The vulgar, indeed, we may remark, who are unacquainted with science and profound enquiry, observing the endless disputes of the learned, have commonly a thorough contempt for philosophy; and rivet themselves the faster, by that means, in the great points of theology which have been taught them. Those who enter a little into study and enquiry, finding many appearances of evidence in doctrines the newest and most extraordinary, think nothing too difficult for human reason; and, presumptuously breaking through all fences, profane the inmost sanctuaries of the temple. But Cleanthes will, I hope, agree with me, that, after we have abandoned ignorance, the surest remedy, there is still one expedient left to prevent this profane liberty. Let Demea's principles be improved and cultivated: let us become thoroughly sensible of the weakness, blindness, and narrow limits of human reason: let us duly consider its uncertainty and endless contrarieties, even in subjects of common life and practice: let the errors and deceits of our very senses be set before us; the insuperable difficulties which attend first principles in all systems; the contradictions which adhere to the very ideas of matter, cause and effect, extension, space, time, motion; and in a word, quantity of all kinds, the object of the only science that can fairly pretend to any certainty or evidence. When these topics are displayed in their full light, as they are by some philosophers and almost all divines; who can retain such confidence in this frail faculty of reason as to pay any regard to its determinations in points so sublime, so abstruse, so remote from common life and experience? When the coherence of the parts of a stone, or even that composition of parts which renders it extended; when these familiar objects, I say, are so inexplicable, and contain circumstances so repugnant and contradictory; with what assurance can we decide concerning the origin of worlds, or trace their history from eternity to eternity?

What exactly was your problem with western philosophy again - that it's just a johnny-come-lately echo of eastern traditions, which you agree with, or that it's just a way for the mind to play tricks on itself, which you don't? You can't have it both ways. You can say you can have it both ways if you like, of course.

Western philosophy has indeed anticipated your various objections and dealt with them, if not conclusively, at least in terms that you'd have to do a bit of work to refute. But that's OK, because you've rejected its whole 'making sense of things' paradigm, neatly sweeping aside anything that might interfere with your bliss and serenity. Except you haven't. But that's OK too, because you have, justifying your continued mind****ing assaults on signification in the same statement-of-a-compromise terms as Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes: 'But I've gotta use words when I talk to you' - the always perfect get-out for the egotist who wants to talk alot, but never be pulled up short for not making sense, for actively contradicting himself or, in some cases, failing to respond to the people he's supposed to be conversing with or even show he's understood what they're saying: there's a reality beyond all this obfuscating chit-chat; you just gotta have eyes to see 'n', y'know, stop letting that Cartesian head of yours with its arguments that are a bit beyond me get in the way. In other words, a game, since you say you love games, but one where you just make up the rules as you go so you can tell yourself you're always winning. Solitaire, as I said before - to use the polite term.

[0=2]

...Can't have it both ways?

All THIS is is the mind playing tricks on itself. Meditation still triggers a chemical response. Words always remain fruitless masturbation, in the end you can ONLY break even.

I've stated this, over and over, the fact you can write this, the fact you can give a plausible explanation on paper as to why nothing means anything... well it should be obvious... it doesn't matter. Is this disturbing you? Is the symbolic clash too much? You hold this premise, that Western philosophy has intrinsic value, as a protection mechanism to allow the illusion of control and predictability. Even if you do not assume that these philosophers are "correct" the mere fact you acknowledge them as the originators or providers of knowledge, and simultaneously disallow others, shows you have a preference...

And according to relativity any one preference can be just as easily traded for any other and still be just as close to the same center. Your providers... my providers...

I have also stated multiple times that I DO use western philosophy to my advantage, or rather have in certain situations for it's psychological insights... but I understand that in part the only reason it works me toward any goal is because it was written and these "principles" equally permit the behaviors they seek to encompass as the behaviors permit the label.

And, if we were to judge these two practices, Eastern mysticism and Western philosophy, by a historilatical merit it would appear the over whelming majority of Western philosophy is mere surface regurgitation of many older beliefs, not acknowledged for cultural reasons. In fact that greatest leaps in European philosophy have come from a influx of Middle Eastern and Far Eastern mysticism clashing with native esotericism normally conceived as "taboo" or "illegitimate" forms of understanding and appreciating your surroundings. The Renaissance... age of enlightenment... The Masonic revival, Ouspensky's later work, The Golden Dawn and new age hermetism it brought with it, the Beat movement, and this whole "New Age" and "chaos" phenomena are all products of Eastern and Shamanic beliefs being introduced to Western culture.

So it would appear, if we were to draw this into a linear timeframe, that Western philosophy and science is greatly in debt to the roots it ignores and the parents it scoffs at. It is possibly this disconnect with philosophies roots that allows our current philosophical echelon to remain stagnant in the face of change and numb in the face of "the known". The serpent eats its own tail

again and again and again...

If a philosophy is active and the user is happy, not a bored dogmatic member of the "intellectual elite" who allows for the boredom continual mental masturbation brings, than the practitioner need not fear a "conflicting knowledge" for it can bring nothing but joy and insight.

After all, there is only one movement the universe truly responds to, and that is sex. Matter and thought birthing situation, mind reading situations through matter, situation allows for mind to enter matter. If the mind is healthy, here meaning happy and open, nothing can threaten it, for it holds no attachments to be used as chains. It is free to adapt.

That being said, if you think I believe any of this crap, you're out of your mind.

[blp]

...Can't have it both ways?

All THIS is is the mind playing tricks on itself. Meditation still triggers a chemical response. Words always remain fruitless masturbation, in the end you can ONLY break even.

I've stated this, over and over, the fact you can write this, the fact you can give a plausible explanation on paper as to why nothing means anything... well it should be obvious... it doesn't matter.

Eh? It takes you three posts to even acknowledge I'm here and now I'm the one being taken to task for not paying attention? Madre. Laughing yet? If I wasn't before, I am now.

Seriously, how can you give me gyp for not understanding your point when most of your rhetorical effort has gone into trying to show that it's not possible to make a rational point? You're stuffed from the start if you want to prove that rationally and completely dreaming if you think you have. If you think the video you posted at the start of this thread makes that point, we can talk about that. I've already listed a number of objections to it.

Is this disturbing you? Is the symbolic clash too much? You hold this premise, that Western philosophy has intrinsic value, as a protection mechanism to allow the illusion of control and predictability. Even if you do not assume that these philosophers are "correct" the mere fact you acknowledge them as the originators or providers of knowledge, and simultaneously disallow others, shows you have a preference...

Disturbing me? Yeah, I'm all of a quiver. No, wait, that's still laughter.

See, it's really not going to be possible to communicate at all if you keep responding to positions you just imagine I hold rather than the ones I actually express. You know absolutely nothing about my reasons for reading philosophy, nor which philosophers I think are the originators, whether I consider any of them to be providers of knowledge and which ones I disallow. You couldn't know that because I don't even know these things myself. I'm still getting to grips with it and expect to be for a long time to come.

I have also stated multiple times that I DO use western philosophy to my advantage, or rather have in certain situations for it's psychological insights...

Not here you haven't. All you've said, once, in the 'trouble reading philosophy' thread is something to the effect that you can see the point of reading western philosophy for aesthetic purposes. Something like that. The rest of the time you've been caustically scathing about reading it at all, mainly because you seem to imagine that anyone who does believes all of it, internal contradictions and all, and privileges it above all other thought - something not one person who's responded to you has actually said.

And, if we were to judge these two practices, Eastern mysticism and Western philosophy, by a historilatical merit it would appear the over whelming majority of Western philosophy is mere surface regurgitation of many older beliefs, not acknowledged for cultural reasons. In fact that greatest leaps in European philosophy have come from a influx of Middle Eastern and Far Eastern mysticism clashing with native esotericism normally conceived as "taboo" or "illegitimate" forms of understanding and appreciating your surroundings. The Renaissance... age of enlightenment... The Masonic revival, Ouspensky's later work, The Golden Dawn and new age hermetism it brought with it, the Beat movement, and this whole "New Age" and "chaos" phenomena are all products of Eastern and Shamanic beliefs being introduced to Western culture.

So it would appear, if we were to draw this into a linear timeframe, that Western philosophy and science is greatly in debt to the roots it ignores and the parents it scoffs at.

This is a potentially interesting area of inquiry, but the way you're laying it out has near fatal problems. No one denies the links between eastern mysticism and most of the things you list: The Masonic revival, Ouspensky's later work, The Golden Dawn and new age hermetism, the Beat movement, "New Age" philosophy, so they are simply useless to you as evidence of some kind of suppressed irrational eastern other within a dominant master narrative of western rationalism. You might have a stronger case with the renaissance. I don't really know and I'd be interested to find out, but until you provide some actual evidence, I'm in the dark.

It is possibly this disconnect with philosophies roots that allows our current philosophical echelon to remain stagnant in the face of change and numb in the face of "the known".

If that's what it is. You could just as equally argue that, rather than being disavowed or suppressed, the mystical roots of philosophy were simply discarded as it became clearer and clearer that they weren't philsophically tenable. Actually, I find that easier to believe, given that Christianity itself is a form of mysticism and the overwhelming cultural pressure throughout most of the history of western philosophy has been to accept this creed. Philosophers began to give it up, rather surreptitiously, as it turned to dust in their hands. Don't you think, at this point, if some other form of mysticism had made more sense to them, they'd have picked it up?

No, you don't because you think western philosophy is just a monolithic, elite gentleman's club, strictly governed by arbitrary codes:

If a philosophy is active and the user is happy, not a bored dogmatic member of the "intellectual elite" who allows for the boredom continual mental masturbation brings, than the practitioner need not fear a "conflicting knowledge" for it can bring nothing but joy and insight.

This openness to 'conflicting knowledge' could actually be a description of a kind of Hegelian dialectical development of philosophical thought. Honestly, it does become harder and harder to believe you really know anything at all about the tradition you're so furious at. Western philosophers are not all the same. They're constantly repudiating each other.

After all, there is only one movement the universe truly responds to, and that is sex. Matter and thought birthing situation, mind reading situations through matter, situation allows for mind to enter matter. If the mind is healthy, here meaning happy and open, nothing can threaten it, for it holds no attachments to be used as chains. It is free to adapt.

That being said, if you think I believe any of this crap, you're out of your mind.

Oh well that's OK then. [more laughter]