41 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2023
    1. In the West we talk about how matter—body and brain—might be the necessary conditions for the emergence of the mind. That is the scientists’ assumption. However, there is another hypothesis, which is that consciousness itself is the basic stuff of the universe and that we are the emanation of that consciousness as opposed to the origin or the evolutionary source of it. Of course, to accept that we would have to give up the idea that everything is based on some material property
      • for: materialism Vs panpsychism

      • comment

        • Husserl's phenomenology, especially his views on epoche in his later years lean more towards panpsychism although they are different in a nuanced way.
        • there is direct, pure biological phenomenological experience ,- Epoche may give us a taste of it, interment meditation may go further and the deepest meditation of decades of intense practice may re-immerse us in it.
        • Feral children who grow into feral adults, an extremely rare occurrence, may have an immersive experience of it
        • social conditioning of language bind meaning tightly to our construction and experience of objects in our sensory field
        • it is extremely difficult to disentangle our conditioned meaning with prelinguistic phenomenological experience of reality
        • spiritual awakening or enlightenment would appear to show that it is possible
        • When we attach such strong meaning to ideas, such as to scientific ideas, "material* objects, in spite of their attached, implicit symbolic complexity, appear to have a natural, autonomous and obvious existence.
        • in this way, our conscious constructs become solidified and mistaken for concrete, autonomously existent objects. Consciousness then comes to mistaken variants of consciousness itself with autonomously existent objects
    1. In the remainder of this paper, I will focus on the first move, by describing and comparing four different ways of looking at the world: two versions of materialism and two versions of phenomenology. It is my hope that these world views may serve to set a stage for further discussion between Husserlian philosophers and interested scientists.
      • for: worldviews - materialist and phenomenological

      • paraphrase

      • categories: scientific worldviews
        • materialism
          • elegant
            • a form of materialism that classifies the universe according to different levels, each with new properties that give rise to the emergence of specific and unique behaviors that the level below does not have.
          • radical
            • this is the current worldview of science that explains everything from the existing physical theories such as the standard model of the weak, strong and electromagnetic forces. The radical materialist does not take the idea of emergence seriously.
        • phenomenological
          • elegant
            • The annotator is not clear about what this category is.
          • radical
            • the radical phenomenologist does sees the hard problem of consciousness as insoluble by its very design, consciousness cannot emerge from behavior of atoms, molecules or quanta. Correlation is not causation.
            • like the radical materialist who threw away the ether, he radical phenomenologist does not seek to ground consciousness in anything at all.
  2. Sep 2023
    1. He concealed the origin of this knowledge 00:23:38 by trying to show how you can derive the life of the nowhere out of the nowhere's intellectual byproduct.
      • for: quote, quote - Michel Bilbot, quote - circularity of materialism, scientific materialism - circularity

      • quote

        • He (Galileo) concealed the origin of this knowledge by trying to show how you can derive the life of the nowhere out of the nowhere's intellectual byproduct.
      • author: Michel Bilbot

      • comment

        • This is a very pith observation. It illustrates the circularity inherent in panpsychic scientific theory.
        • In a sense, we are putting the cart before the horse by using theory, which is the nowhere's intellectual byproduct, to derive the life of the nowhere.
    1. the conjunction of those two claims the properties exist even when they're not perceived even when they're not measured and they have influences that propagate no faster 00:06:57 than the speed of light that's local realism and local realism is false
      • for: objectivism, materialism, question, question - materialism, question - objectivism, if a tree falls in the forest
      • question
        • How would Donald respond to the question:
          • If a tree falls in the forest, does anyone hear?
          • Does he hold the same view as modern consensus of quantum physics?
    1. you accidentally presumed reality is not made of information but is instead made of some substance that behaves like information and can be describable by 01:25:58 information you philosophically decided that matter energy space or time are distinctly not information because you accepted the deduction that we're unlikely to be in the one material or 01:26:12 real reality that runs the simulation so you defaulted to a materialism philosophy without even thinking about it
      • comment
      • good observation, that's why I have always felt strange about the simulation hypothesis. If it's a simulation, it automatically assumes, there is something which is real and not a simulation.

        • See Donald Hoffman's Information theory and contention that we live in a simulation. Does it also come with the same implicit materialist assumption?
        • The nagging thing about the simulation theories is it is also a narrative that posits an unknowable reality beyond which we can never access - a rendition of the narrative that we only ever have access to the shadows in Plato's cave.
      • reference

    1. Winnicott’s psychological paradox of subject and object becomes a philosophical paradox of idealism and materialism
      • for: non-duality, non-dual, paradox, quote, quote - non-duality, quote - James Barnes, quote - paradox
      • quote: James Barge
        • Winnicott’s psychological paradox of subject and object becomes a philosophical paradox of idealism and materialism
  3. Jul 2023
    1. Has anybody or could anybody ever have   the experience of consciousness emerging?
      • question
      • has ANYONE ever experienced consciousness emerging from matter?

      • comment

        • what Spira is getting at is that there is a fundamental category confusion
          • deep down, matter is an abstract concept
          • matter is NOT a phenomenological experience
          • from this perspective, a phenomena cannot emerge from a concept
          • in fact a concept ALWAYS emerges from consciousness, not the other way around
          • the claim that consciousness emerges from brains is a fundamental category error that makes an impossible claim
            • that phenomena emerges from a concept
  4. bafybeihzua2lldmlutkxlie7jfppxheow6my62x2qmywif2wukoswo5hqi.ipfs.w3s.link bafybeihzua2lldmlutkxlie7jfppxheow6my62x2qmywif2wukoswo5hqi.ipfs.w3s.link
      • Title
        • Three levels of the symbolosphere
      • Authors
        • Mark Burgin and John H. Schumann
      • Abstract

        • This paper attempts to understand the coexistence of the
          • material and
          • non-material
        • aspects of our lives.
        • By synthesizing ideas about
          • structures,
          • physical entities,
          • mental phenomena, and
          • symbolic relations,
        • we argue that
          • the nonmaterial can emerge from the material, and
          • then the nonmaterial may mediate the production of material entities.
        • Finally, this cycle is applied to notions of creativity and invention.
      • Comment

        • the authors are situated in materialism that explains non-materialism as an epi-phenomena
  5. May 2023
    1. the Prison Notebooks, contain Gramsci's tracing of Italian history and nationalism, as well as some ideas in Marxist theory, critical theory and educational theory associated with his name, such as: Cultural hegemony as a means of maintaining and legitimising the capitalist state The need for popular workers' education to encourage development of intellectuals from the working-class An analysis of the modern capitalist state that distinguishes between political society, which dominates directly and coercively, and civil society, where leadership is constituted through consent Absolute historicism A critique of economic determinism that opposes fatalistic interpretations of Marxism A critique of philosophical materialism
  6. Apr 2023
    1. The issue at play in the AI question, or the question of tempering our growth in general, isn’t just that our technology is built without higher values that can mitigate its excesses. It’s that culturally we lack a story as to why values even matter to begin with. It’s futile to appeal to ethics in this context, because the ethics aren’t embedded at a deep enough level to counter powerful incentive structures. They aren’t worth dying for, because the system doesn’t value them, it only values quantity.

      Key observation - Quantity is all modernity values - Quality is thrown out the window - Later, the author connects - quantity to the Cartesian world view, - that seeks to measure everything - and quality to the Idealist worldview - that elevates consciousness over physicalism and materialism - (Destructive) growth - is an outcome of the cartesian worldview

  7. Mar 2023
      • Title: Buddhism and Money: The Repression of Emptiness Today
      • Author: David Loy

      David Loy explains how - the denial of ego-self, also known as anatma - becomes the root of a persistent sense of lack - as self-consciousness continues to try to ground itself, reify itself and make itself real - while all the meanwhile it is a compelling mental construction

      A good paper on the role (non-rational) relational ritual can play to help us out of the current polycrisis is given here: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbrill.com%2Fview%2Fjournals%2Fwo%2F25%2F2%2Farticle-p113_1.xml%3Flanguage%3Den&group=world

    1. Buddhism and Money: The Repression of Emptiness Today
      • Title: Buddhism and Money: The Repression of Emptiness Today
      • Author: David Loy
  8. Jul 2022
    1. let me comment on your quantum physics i have only one objection please i think it's uh uh it's 01:01:21 what you said about the two uh sort of prototypical uh quantum puzzles which is schrodinger the double slit experiment uh it's uh it's perfect um my only objection is that in my book 01:01:34 i described of course i had a chapter about schrodinger cat but i don't use a situation in which the cat is dead or alive 01:01:46 i prefer a situation in which the cat is asleep or awake just because i don't like killing cats even in in in in mental experiments so after that 01:01:58 uh uh replacing a sleep cut with a dead cat i think uh i i i i completely agree and let me come to the the serious part of the answer um 01:02:10 what you mentioned as the passage from uh the third and the fourth um between among the the sort of the versions of 01:02:25 wooden philosophy it's it's exactly what i what i think is relevant for quantum mechanics for this for the following reason we read in quantum mechanics books 01:02:37 that um we should not think about the mechanical description of reality but the description reality with respect to the observer and there is always this notion in in books that there's observer or there are 01:02:50 paratus that measure so it's a uh but i am a scientist which view the world from the perspective of 01:03:02 modern science where one way of viewing the world is that uh there are uh you know uh billions and billions of galaxies each one with billions and billions of 01:03:14 of of of stars probably with planets all around and uh um from that perspective the observer in any quantum mechanical experiment is just one piece in the big story 01:03:28 so i have found the uh berkeley subjective idealism um uh profoundly unconvincing from the point 01:03:39 of view of a scientist uh because it there is an aspect of naturalism which uh it's a in which i i i grew up as a scientist 01:03:52 which refuses to say that to understand quantum mechanics we have to bring in our mind quantum mechanics is not something that has directly to do with our mind has not 01:04:05 something directly to do about any observer any apparatus because we use quantum mechanics for describing uh what happened inside the sun the the the reaction the nuclear reaction there or 01:04:18 galaxy formations so i think quantum mechanics in a way i think quantum mechanics is experiments about not about psychology not about our mind not about consciousness not 01:04:32 about anything like that it has to do about the world my question what we mean by real world that's fine because science repeatedly was forced to change its own ideas about the 01:04:46 real world so if uh if to make sense of quantum mechanics i have to think that the cat is awake or asleep only when a conscious observer our mind 01:05:00 interacts with this uh i say no that's not there are interpretations of quantum mechanics that go in that direction they require either am i correct to say the copenhagen 01:05:14 school does copenhagen school uh talk about the observer without saying who is what is observed but the compelling school which is the way most 01:05:27 textbooks are written uh describe any quantum mechanical situation in terms okay there is an observer making a measurement and we're talking about the outcome of the measurements 01:05:39 so yes it's uh it assumes an observer but it's very vague about what what an observer is some more sharp interpretation like cubism uh take this notion observer to be real 01:05:54 fundamental it's an agent somebody who makes who thinks about and can compute the future so it's a it's a that's that's a starting point for for doing uh for doing the rest i was 01:06:07 i've always been unhappy with that because things happen on the sun when there is nobody that is an observer in anything and i want to think to have a way of thinking in the world that things happen there 01:06:20 independently of me so to say is they might depend on one another but why should they depend on me and who am i or you know what observers should be a you know a white western scientist with 01:06:32 a phd i mean should we include women should we include people without phd should we include cats is the cat an observer should we fly i mean it's just not something i understand

      Carlo goes on to address the fundamental question which lay at the intersection of quantum mechanics and Buddhist philosophy: If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear? Carlo rejects Berkeley's idealism and states that even quantum mechanical laws are about the behavior of a system, independent of whether an observer is present. He begins to invoke his version of the Schrödinger cat paraodox to explain.

    2. i just wanted to interject that uh could i come at this point carlo i would like to insist a bit on this because i'm i'm not quite clear 01:07:22 on whether you are agreeing or not on the question of the mind um thank you this is also i wanted to ask him the same question mario uh so by just raise the question 01:07:40 specifically all right so let me okay since we're talking about nagarjuna now i would also like to uh read some simple verses that he has and get from both from barry and you what do you 01:07:53 think so this is from chapter three examination of the sentences seeing hearing smelling tasting touching and mind are the six sense faculties their 01:08:04 spheres are the visible objects etc like the scene the herd the smell that tasted and the touched the hair sound etc and consciousness should be understood so actually i'm confused from both of 01:08:18 you first of all barry is the mind anything special in buddhist philosophy or is it just like seeing and hearing and carlo are you saying there is anything 01:08:31 special about them right

      Mario interjects in the conversation to clarify Barry's question to Carlo, which is concerning the subjective aspect of experience and how it fits into science as the observer. It comes down the the question of existence of reality and the obrserver's role in that, epitomized in the question: If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear?

    1. McLuhan wendet also den Formcha-rakter des Mediums ins Materiale

      Erinnert mich direkt an Latour und andere New-Materialism Ansätze vllt auch interessant für das Emergenz Phänomen, von dem Jörg Noller wiederholt spricht- http://felix.openflows.com/html/mcluhan_latour.html

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  9. Mar 2022
    1. LeCain (2015) - Against the Anthropocene. A Neo-Materialist Perspective - https://is.gd/pUqNmj - urn:x-pdf:ba8ad0181bbfae49b319f835281d61f7

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  10. Aug 2021
    1. “For a while he trampled with impunity on laws human anddivine but, as he was obsessed with the delusion that two andtwo makes five, he fell, at last a victim to the relentless rulesof humble Arithmetic.“Remember, O stranger, Arithmetic is the first of thesciences and the mother of safety.”BRANDEIS

      Interestingly enough this sentiment is more commonly expressed through Kipling in late modernity. At the time this book was written Kipling would have been still alive, but so was Louis Brandeis. Korzybski in any case has the sense of necessity at the heart of a strong modern materialism.

    2. It is useless to argue if electricity be“natural”or“supernatu-ral,”of“material”or of“spiritual”origin. As a matter of fact wedo not ask these questions in studying electricity; we endeavorto find out the natural laws governing it and in handling livewires we do not argue or speculate about them—we use rubber[xi]gloves, etc. It will be the same with Man and the great affairs ofMan—we have, first of all, to know what Man is.

      This basically materialist approach, believing that Man has a specific nature which can be described and planned around accords with the zeitgeist of the 1920's, and it's of course correct. Its declining popularity in the ensuing decades points more to a declining society than to any essential incorrectness.

  11. Mar 2021
    1. As the Philosopher relates (Metaph. xii), some ancient philosophers, namely, the Pythagoreans and Leucippus, did not predicate "best" and "most perfect" of the first principle. The reason was that the ancient philosophers considered only a material principle; and a material principle is most imperfect. For since matter as such is merely potential, the first material principle must be simply potential, and thus most imperfect. Now God is the first principle, not material, but in the order of efficient cause, which must be most perfect. For just as matter, as such, is merely potential, an agent, as such, is in the state of actuality. Hence, the first active principle must needs be most actual, and therefore most perfect; for a thing is perfect in proportion to its state of actuality, because we call that perfect which lacks nothing of the mode of its perfection.

      Passivity of matter

    1. Those who are in the flesh can't please God. [9] But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if it is so that the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if any man doesn't have the Spirit of Christ, he is not his. [10] If Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is alive because of righteousness.

      Opposition of flesh and soul and ideology of immateriality

    1. their notion being that the soul is buried in the present life; and again, because by its means the soul gives any signs which it gives, it is for this reason also properly called “sign” (σῆμα). But I think it most likely that the Orphic poets gave this name, with the idea that the soul is undergoing punishment for something; they think it has the body as an enclosure to keep it safe, like a prison, and this is, as the name itself denotes, the safe (σῶμα) for the soul, until the penalty is paid, and not even a letter needs to be changed.

      Why this reference to "letters" (gramma)? Obviously the letter game (soma sema) but also the reference to signs and inscriptions.

  12. Feb 2021
  13. Jan 2021
    1. His opinions are these. The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist. The worlds are unlimited; they come into being and perish. Nothing can come into being from that which is not nor pass away into that which is not. Further, the atoms are unlimited in size and number, and they are borne along in the whole universe in a vortex, and therby generate all composite things – fire, water, air, earth; for even these are conglomerations of given atoms

      Democritus atomism cited by Diogenes

  14. Sep 2020
  15. May 2020
    1. What is missing here is any serious consideration of the idea that the kind of processes Weber (1992 [1930]) attributed to modern Calvinist theology and practice – much less any kind of intentional social engagement (see Miller & Yamamori 2007) – might be evident in late‐modern Pentecostalism.

      This is a criticism of the materialism present in "occult economies" approaches to third-world Pentecostalism that uses Weber's classical work an argument for the efficacy and power of religion.

    2. Central to this interpretation has been Comaroff and Comaroff's work on ‘occult economies’ (Comaroff & Comaroff 1999; 2000), which situates the prosperity gospel alongside witchcraft accusations, rumours of zombies, and lurid tales of Faustian pacts with the Devil.

      Very similar folk tales are shared informally in Brazilian prosperity gospel churches of pacts with the Devil and witchcraft explaining mysterious economic events. Comaroff's mechanism of market fetishization is a very materialist and economicist explanation to prosperity gospel according to the article's author.

  16. Apr 2019
    1. You seem well pleased to be handling the money, Peter

      What does this exchange of money suggest about Yeats and Gregory's conception of Irish national culture?

  17. Jul 2017
    1. erm Marx refers to all the practical know-how, theoretical knowledge and other socialresources available to any particular historical society or group within

      Marx refers to all Historical Materialism as ways of producing and reproducing the means of human existence. Marx puts value to this theoretical knowledge, according to him this knowledge is passed on from generation to generation, society to society therefore it has great historical value.

    2. Whereas animals can survive by consuming what they need, humans need to make everything they need -from clothing to shelter to food -out of materials from their natural environment. Without burrows, lacking fur or claws, in this vulnerable state humans need to work together to survive, hence they need to develop social relationship

      I find this comment very important an appealing to internalize. perhaps why humans have been "successful' as a species is that we have to make everything we need, but perhaps we have gotten too successful. As we become more inventive, we continue to develop tools that help us become more independent more easily, and often these tools hinder our ability to develop social relationships which then creates a discord between the ideal and true self leading to greater amounts of negative affects.

    3. 'historical materialism

      Marx recognizes that the specific knowledge and tools shared in a community during a particular historical moment plays a role in those peoples' productive capabilities. This conception recognizes the productive qualities of the natural world and the social processes that occur to complete the conversion of natural resources into use-able goods

    1. Modes of Production

      Socities developmental stages that are successive: Primitive Communism, Slave Society (ancient), Feudalism, Capitalism, Communism

      this a type of economic system, that is about all the different ways humans produce the means of survival (the needs) and enhance socialness. history is then characterized by predominant methods production. there then will be succesive socities in evolving patterns formed

    2. Historical Materialism

      Marx is looking at how that society is organized to satisfy material needs, and whenthese are altered from natural resources, it then changes across time what we will need to acquire. This can also give rises to different classes of power based on material.

  18. Apr 2017
    1. A , word is an event, a happening, not a thing, as letters make it appear to he

      Ong's using "thing" in the sense of a material object, but it'd be worth looking at this line in the context of "thing" and "ding"

    1. But that does not make it any less persuasive-if anything, it makes it more persuasive.

      If you go to a parking garage and look at spaces that are adjacent to the concrete pillars, you'll see that most drivers give way more berth to the pillars than the car parked next to them. This, logically, makes no sense--if I scratch the pillar, I'll ding my car's paint job, but it I scratch the neighboring car, I'll not only ding my car, but I might be on the hook for damage to my neighbor's. And when it's a beat-up Taurus with rust holes, there's no logical sense for why I'm more cautious to the pillar. But under Latour's model, the pillar, with it's solid, imposing concrete, makes the better argument to be careful, even "making the weaker case the stronger" as rhetoric has been accused of earlier in this class.

  19. Mar 2017
    1. we're always making a fiction/history that always has to be re-mad

      Nice, this takes me back to Rickert's theory of rhetoric that takes on a kind of historical materialism

    1. the payment that he re-ceives from the community or from individuals;

      This is only one of many factors, but the materiality is--I think--crucial, and recalls Woolf's five hundred pounds a year.

  20. Feb 2017
  21. Dec 2016
    1. the materiality of our (textual) scholarship and its material modes of production, is and should not in any way be separate from a discussion on the content of our work.

      If performative publications are the material expressions or incarnations of specific research projects and processes, entangled with them are various other agencies of production and constraint (i.e. technological, authorial, cultural and discursive agencies, to name just a few). What I want to argue is that performative publications as a specific subset of publications actively interrogate how to align more closely the material form of a publication with its content (in other words, where all publications are performative—i.e. they are knowledge shaping, active agents involved in knowledge production—not all publications are 'performative publications', in the sense that they actively interrogate or experiment with this relation between content and materiality —similar to artist books). Yet in addition to this there is also an openness towards the ongoing interaction between materiality and content which includes entanglements with other agencies, and material forms of constraint and possibility.

      This concern for the materiality and form of our publications (and directly related to that the material production and political economy that surrounds a publication) is not a response to what elsewhere as part of a critique of certain tendencies within the field of new materialism is seen as a reaction to ‘the linguistic turn’ (Bruining 2013). On the contrary, I see this as a more direct reaction against perspectives on the digital which perceive digital text as disembodied and as a freeing of data from its material constraints as part of a conversion to a digital environment. However, content cannot be separated that easily from its material manifestations, as many theorist within the digital humanities have already argued (i.e. Hayles, Drucker). Alan Liu classifies this 'database' rhetoric of dematerialization as a religion that is characterised by 'an ideology of strict division between content and presentation' where content is separated from material instantiation or formal presentation as part of an aesthetics of network production and consumption (Liu 2004, 62).

  22. Nov 2015
    1. The lack of gratitude is contagious, and is passed from one generation to the next. Conversely, the act of gratitude is also viral and has been found to greatly and positively influence not just relationships but one’s own emotional status.
    2. Tom Gilovich, a professor of psychology at Cornell University, known for his finding that spending money on experiences brings more happiness than spending money on material things, also studies gratitude. In his gratitude research, Gilovich looked at whether people feel more grateful for purchased experiences than purchased things (spoiler alert: yes).