• for: progress trap, unintended consequence, unintended consequence - digital technology, quote, quote - progress trap, quote - Doc Searls
• quote
  • What won’t change is people’s tendency toward gossip,
    • tribalism driven by gossip and the ability of anybody to inform anybody else about anything,
      • including wrongly.
  • The only places where news won’t skew fake will be localities in the natural world.
  • That’s where the digital and the physical connect best.
  • Also expect the internet to break into pieces, with
    • the U.S.,
    • Europe and
    • China
  • becoming increasingly isolated by different value systems and governance approaches toward
    • networks and
    • what runs on them.

http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/InterWiki

InterWiki is the idea of having one unified Wiki system distributed across many servers.

Hintergrundartikel zum möglicherweise bald beginnenden Tiefseebergbau, dessen ökologische Folgen enorm sein dürften und wissenschaftlich noch nicht eingeschätzt werden können. Zentrales internationales Konfliktthema ist die Rolle der internationalen Meeresbodenbehörde ISA: Die Metalle, die in der Tiefsee abgebaut werden können, sind vor allem für Erzeugung und Speicherung erneuerbarer Energien interessant.

https://monde-diplomatique.de/artikel/!5943456

Nordstream gas leak september 2022

No going back to oil and gas.

Exxon knew as early as 1981 of climate change, and since has been actively denying and distracting from the real issue - burning fossil fuels

Exxon knew from their climate scientists

Exxon must face trial for climate crimes, Exxon Knew

Lützerath Braunkohle nicht gebrauch für Energie Sicherheit in Deutschland

Equinor - August 2022

Justification of investment in terms of money, and alleged economic boost

Stop Cambo - September 2022

Sky news on Lützerath painting a strong picture

Windfall tax on energy firms and banks

A global program to regenerate soils, ecosystems, forests and revive life in the oceans can reverse a lot of the damage, fast. The biosphere can solve the climate crisis, if we give it a chance. #climatechange #slowwater #amazon #clouds #regeneration

Rob 6-pillar strategy

The case for healthy eco-systems is crucial

How plants cool the planet

https://www.studyebooks.com/2023/07/harvard-classics-pdf.html

Downloadable .zip from Archive.org with full collection.<br /> https://archive.org/compress/Harvard-Classics/formats=TEXT%20PDF&file=/Harvard-Classics.zip

• for: voting, power - money, money - voting, inequality, voting - money, equity, voting power - rich
• paraphrase
• question
  • if we think of money as a voting tool
    • why does a billionaire have a billion times more power to decide what society should be like than i do?

Cooling Climate Chaos III

Cooling Climate Chaos II

Cooling Climate Chaos I

Rob - 6 Pillar Strategy for regenerating ecosystems everywhere

hydrology and water cycles to cool the planet. resources.

• for: emissions reduction, bend the curve, TPF, W2W, emissions reduction - cultural sector, bend the curve - cultural sector, TPF - cultural sector, W2W - cultural sector, carbon emissions - cultural sector, carbon inequality

• comment

  • well written article on the carbon emissions challenges of the cultural sector
  • this is related to the carbon emissions of the luxury industry as well
• question
  • same question as asked about luxury, since there is overlap with culture industry and luxury
  • Given that the 1% have the same carbon emissions as the bottom half of humanity, does the sustainability impacts of the decarbonization efforts of the luxury aspects of the culture industry measure up to stay under earth system boundaries in time?
• reference
  • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=carbon+inequality

• for: the lack project, sense of lack, the reality project, sense of self, sense of self and lack, poverty mentality, sense of time, living in the future, living in the present, human DOing, human BEing
• key insight
  • we construct different types of experiences of time, depending on the degree of sense of lack we experience
  • it means the difference between
    • living in the present
    • living in the future
• paraphrase
  • it's the nature of lack projects insofar as we become preoccupied with them
  • that they tend to be future oriented naturally
  • I mean the whole idea of a lack project or a reality project is right here right now is not good enough
    • because I feel this sense of inadequacy this sense of lack
    • but in the future when I have what I think I need
      • when I'm rich enough or
      • when I'm famous enough or
      • my body is perfect enough or whatever
    • when I have all this then everything will be okay
    • and what of course that does is that future orientation traps Us in linear time in a way that tends to devalue the way we experience the world and ourselves in the world right here and now
    • it treats the now as a means to some better ends
    • Now isn't good enough
      • but when I have what I think I need everything is going to be just great
  • So many of the spiritual Traditions taught
  • especially the mystics and the Zen Masters
  • they end up talking about what is sometimes called
    • the Eternal now
    • or the Eternal present - a different way of experiencing the now
  • As long as the present is a means to some better end
    • this future when I'm gonna be okay
  • then the present is experienced as
    • a series of Nows that fall away
    • as we reach for that future
  • but if we're not actually needing to get somewhere that's better in the future
  • it's possible to experience the here and now
    • as lacking nothing and myself in the here and now
    • as lacking nothing
• it's possible to experience the present as something that doesn't arise and doesn't fall away

• for: the lack project, the reality project, sense of lack, sense of self, poverty mentality, polylcrisis, polycrisis - root
• paraphrase
  • the irony is that
    • if this desire
    • if this craving for money
    • if this lack project and
    • we could also call it reality project
      • because another way to talk about all this is to say that we don't feel real enough and we're looking for that which somehow will make us feel more real more complete more whole
  • because whatever the lack project may be it is looking for out something outside
    • that's going to secure this sense of self-inside
  • the tragedy of the whole process is that it doesn't matter how much money you earn
    • it's never going to be enough
    • because what we're dealing with is just a symptom and not the core problem
• key insight
  • the lack project is at the root of our polycrisis

• for: progress trap, sense of lack, the lack project, collective lack project, individual lack project
• key insight
  • progress, and the shadow side, the progress trap
  • is the collective lack project, that corresponds to the individual's lack project

highlights the dire financial circumstances of the poorest individuals, who resort to high-interest loans as a survival strategy. This phenomenon reflects the interplay between human decision-making and development policy. The decision to take such loans, driven by immediate needs, illustrates how cognitive biases and limited options impact choices. From a policy perspective, addressing this issue requires understanding these behavioral nuances and crafting interventions that provide sustainable alternatives, fostering financial inclusion and breaking the cycle of high-interest debt.

• for: gene culture coevolution, carrying capacity, unsustainability, overshoot, cultural evolution, progress trap

• Title: The genetic and cultural evolution of unsustainability

• Author: Brian F. Snyder

• Abstract

• Summary
• Paraphrase
  • Anthropogenic changes are accelerating and threaten the future of life on earth.
  • While the proximate mechanisms of these anthropogenic changes are well studied
    • climate change,
    • biodiversity loss,
    • population growth
  • the evolutionary causality of these anthropogenic changes have been largely ignored.
  • Anthroecological theory (AET) proposes that the ultimate cause of anthropogenic environmental change is
    • multi-level selection for niche construction and ecosystem engineering.
  • Here, we integrate this theory with
    • Lotka’s Maximum Power Principle
  • and propose a model linking
    • energy extraction from the environment with
    • genetic, technological and cultural evolution
  • to increase human ecosystem carrying capacity.
  • Carrying capacity is partially determined by energetic factors such as
    • the net energy a population can acquire from its environment and
    • the efficiency of conversion from energy input to offspring output.
  • These factors are under Darwinian genetic selection
  • in all species,
  • but in humans, they are also determined by
    • technology and
    • culture.
  • If there is genetic or non-genetic heritable variation in
    • the ability of an individual or social group
  • to increase its carrying capacity,
  • then we hypothesize that - selection or cultural evolution will act - to increase carrying capacity.
  • Furthermore, if this evolution of carrying capacity occurs - faster than the biotic components of the ecological system can respond via their own evolution,
    • then we hypothesize that unsustainable ecological changes will result.

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Barzun, Jacques. “The Great Books.” The Atlantic, December 1952. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1952/12/the-great-books/642341/.

Barzun heaps praise on Great Books of the Western World with some criticism of what it is also missing. He finds more than a few superlative words for the majesty of the Syntopicon.

According to Jacques Barzun (and possibly written in the volumes itself), while the Syntopicon has 102 ideas, there are "some three thousand subheadings."

the five-foot shelf reference is to the Harvard Classics competitor

• for: downscaled planetary boundaries, bend the curve, allocate responsibilities, fair share, science-based targets
• key insight
  • downscaling to city scale and to business actdors
  • based on Science based targets

I like their simplicity and cloth texture, but family members seem to think that my 1952 set of The Great Books of the Western World are a bit on the "dreary looking side" compared with the more colorful books in our home library. (It says something that the 12 year old thinks my yellow Springer graduate math texts are more inviting...) Has anyone else had this problem and solved it with custom printed dust jackets?

• Has anyone seen them for sale?
• Made their own?
• Interested in commissioning some as a bigger group?
• Used a third-party company to design and print something?

In doing something like this for fun, I might hope that the younger kids in the house might show more interest in some more lively/colorful custom covers.

I'm partially tempted to use a classical painting as a display across the spines (a la Juniper Books collections) perhaps using:

• The School of Athens by Raphael
• The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David

Other thoughts? suggestions?

Syndication link: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassicalEducation/comments/15gv2cz/custom_dust_jackets_for_the_great_books_of_the/

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https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Go_links

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/opinion/jack-smith-trump-indictment.html

https://twitter.com/TheGreenLineTO

Local storytelling creating identity.

Suggested by Aram Zucker-Scharff

https://forum.eastgate.com/t/tinderbox-meetup-video-saturday-june-10-2023-a-discussion-with-jerry-michalski-on-the-brain-and-tinderbox/6720

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reply to u/TheVoroscope at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/va2s09/comment/jtwqhd7/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

u/TheVoroscope, the only things I've seen on it are the original and what you've written. I suspect anything current will be quite niche and would require searching in the areas of academic journal articles or at the level of graduate studies within the library sciences where you might find something. Simon Winchester had a section on the rise and downfall of the Encyclopedia Britannica in his most recent book Knowing What We Know (2023) which has a brief mention of the Propædia, but it was broadly described as a $32 million dollar bomb that ended the Encyclopedia. I would suspect that the last printings in 2010 and 2012 were probably the last more as a result of the rise of internet usage than they were the form and function of the Propædia itself though.

• for: net zero, kick the can down the road, green growth, degrowth, NET, negative emissions technology

• for: inequality, 1%, elites, carbon inequality, leverage point, leverage point - climate change, oxfam
• quote
  • Richest 1% Took 2/3rds of Global Wealth Since 2020
  • Richest 1% increased wealth in 2020 and 2021 twice as much as 99% of Population Earned

• for: William Blake, poem, evolution, beauty, climate communication, motivation
  • William Blake Poem
    • The Divine Image
      • To Mercy, pity, peace and love all pray in their distress and in these virtues of delight return their thankfulness
      • when push comes to shove as they say in English
      • when you're up against the wall when you're in an extreme situation
        • someone's going to hit you and what do you do? Mercy Mercy you just say it or
        • you see someone else, they're about to hit someone and you say for pity's sake don't do that or
        • you find somebody very, very attractive and you feel this love right?
      • that's why he says
        • love the human form Divine
        • mercy has a human heart
        • pity a human face
        • love the human form Divine
      • these things are actually almost spontaneous intuitive things that happen and what does it mean?
        • they come from the biosphere
        • they come from your body
        • they come from evolution
      • it's very, very clear for example that art and language ritual comes from at least as far back as primates

• for: inner/outer transformation, transformation, rapid whole system change,
• Title
  • The Human Form Divine
• Speaker
  • Timothy Morton

• for: ecological civilization, degrowth, futures, deep ecology, emptiness, polycrisis, human exceptionalism, planned descent
• source
  • The Great Simplifcation
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE39xfNRRyw

• Description

  • Nate hosts this discussion on what constitutes an ecological civilization with guests
    • William Rees
    • Rex Weyler
    • Nora Bateson

• Reflections Overall,

  • an insightful discussion on the polycrisis and
  • reflections on what is in store for civilization.
• There is consensus that
  • what we are experiencing has been decades in the making and
  • the solutions-oriented approach to solving problems has only treated the symptoms and indeed has made things worse.
• There is a strong undercurrent of the emptiness in nature

• Rex

  • emphasized the folly of human exceptionalism that has been socially normalized and which
  • continues to create the major separation that fuels the polycrisis.
  • Not recognizing that we are nature, not recognizing our animal nature
  • we look upon nature with an attitude of controlling nature, rather than flowing with her.
  • advocated Taoism as a more consistent way to frame nature rather than the reductionist, control methodology that separates us from nature.

• Nora's perspective is the folly of abstraction that generates fixed preconceptions of aspects of nature that we then reify.

  • The fixed preconceptions are solidified but they are an oversimplified version of reality,
  • and that oversimplification leads to actualizing the cliche"a little knowledge is dangerous" into civilization
  • in other words, the continuous manufacture of progress traps.

• William sees our impending crash as not only inevitable, but natural.

  • In this, he concurs with Rex's perspective.
  • Human beings are simply another species and like them,
    • we are susceptible to population explosions when negative feedbacks are removed,
    • which can lead to nature self-correcting with mass dieoff when resources are overconsumed.

• for: anthropomorphism, apex species
• quote
  • it does not make sense for one species to command most of the energy flow through the ecosystems which it is part of. That's a very destabilizing situation and the wise species would do everything possible to reestablish some kind of balanced energy material throughput.

• for: downscaled planetary boundaries, earth system boundaries, bend the curve

• for: bend the curve, climate clock

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• for: progress trap
• definition
• quote
  • progress trap
    • A progress trap is the condition in which we find ourselves when science, technology and industry create more problems than they can solve. Often inadvertently.
• author
  • Dan O'Leary
• source
  • https://www.progresstrap.org/2010/02/12/the-progress-trap/

• for: progress trap, abstraction
  • comment
    • we do not recognize the power of abstraction
    • through it, we begin to construct Indra's Net of Jewels, one jewel (idea) at a time
    • but each jewel (idea) that we construct is just a little knowledge, and as Dan observes, a little knowledge, compared to the endless knowledge reflected in any jewel is dangerous.
    • this then, is our dangerous predicament - we base technology on incomplete jewels of Indra's net
    • as we know from mathematics, when the finite meets the infinite, it can never win

• for: progress trap
• quote
  • Since humanity is a small product of nature, he can by definition not control nature. To believe that he can is a delusion.
• Author
  • Dan O'Leary

• for: progress trap, progress traps

• Tttle

  • Escaping The Progress Trap
• Author
  • Gordon Kubanek
• Source
  • Canadian Association for the Club of Rome
  • https://canadiancor.com/escaping-the-progress-trap/
• Description
  • Gordon Kubanek shares his review of Dan O'Leary's book, "Escaping the Progress Trap"

Quote from Evelyn Waugh's satire Scoop from section on Wenlock Jakes "creating" a revolution.

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• we look at a bad person
• try to get rid of him/her
• when we do, then another bad person ends up in the role
• this is because we are treating the symptom, not the root cause

• comment
  • interesting analysis that it is the system that promotes the wrong type of people to positions of leadership.

The work of Musashi, Dokkodo, is the Japanese for "The way of walking alone", which I like most as a translation.

Tiefseebergbau ist noch nicht rentabel, und es ist unklar, ob und wann er rentabel werden wird. Interview mit Matthias Haeckel zur Erforschung der biologischen Folgewirkungen, zur internationalen Regelung des Zugangs und zu den möglichen Profiteuren. https://taz.de/Umweltfolgenforscher-ueber-Tiefseebergbau/!5929507/

• Oxfam inequality report
• Report name
  • Survival of the Richest
• Date
  • Jan 2023
• Key findings
  • the richest 1% earned nearly 2/3 of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020
  • the remaining 99% earned the remaining 1/3

• Title
  • The Planet's Scarcest Resource is Time
• Source
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXVgTD2F6ZQ
• Description
  • Interview with Lester Brown

• Title
  • The landscape of biomedical research
• Authors
  • Rita González-Márquez,
  • Luca Schmidt,
  • Benjamin M. Schmidt,
  • Philipp Berens
  • Dmitry Kobak
• Date
  • April 11, 2023
• Source
  • https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.10.536208v1.full
• Abstract
  • The number of publications in biomedicine and life sciences
  • has rapidly grown over the last decades,
  • with over 1.5 million papers now published every year.
  • This makes it difficult to
    • keep track of new scientific works and
    • to have an overview of the evolution of the field as a whole.
  • Here we
    • present a 2D atlas of the entire corpus of biomedical literature, and
    • argue that it provides
      • a unique and
      • useful overview
    • of the life sciences research.
  • We base our atlas on the abstract texts of
  • 21 million English articles from the PubMed database.
  • To embed the abstracts into 2D, we use
    • a large language model PubMedBERT, combined with
    • t-SNE tailored to handle samples of our size.
  • We use our atlas to study
    • the emergence of the Covid-19 literature,
    • the evolution of the neuroscience discipline,
    • the uptake of machine learning, and
    • the distribution of gender imbalance in academic authorship.
  • Furthermore, we present an interactive web version of our atlas that
    • allows easy exploration and
    • will enable further insights and facilitate future research.

• quote
  • "Policymakers need to win public support for energy demand reduction mechanisms. -The reality is decarbonisation on the supply side, where energy is generated and distributed, will not be enough to deliver the emission reductions that are needed. -So, energy demand will have to be reduced. That is the inescapable reality."
• Author
  • Milena Buchs
• Experts on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimate that
  • reducing energy demand could produce between 40% and 70% of the emissions reductions that need to be found by 2050.

"Our research is indicating that public support for energy demand reduction is possible if the public see the schemes as being fair and deliver climate justice."

• comment
  • aligned with Kevin Anderson's findings from 2013 that
    • it takes decades to build out supply-side infrastructure that can replace fossil fuel systems
    • therefore, significant demand side reductions are necessary to delivery the reductions in carbon emissions needed now
    • https://hyp.is/lOljjiV1Ee65J2N_QMPZhw/kevinanderson.info/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Edinburgh-presentation-Oct-2013.pdf

• Title
  • Big Oil v the World Series 1 03 Delay
• Author
  • BBC

• Title
  • Big Oil v the World Series 1 02 Doubt
• Author BBC

• Title
  • Big Oil v the World Series 1 01 Denial
• Author BBC

• title
  • The Great Turning
• Author
  • David Korten
• Description
  • David Korten describes "the great unraveling" as a multi-dimensional ecological, social and economic crisis

• Second great separation
  • Industrial Revolution
    • The early enclosure movement during the 1600s
      • separated people into farmers and non-farmers
      • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.parliament.uk%2Fabout%2Fliving-heritage%2Ftransformingsociety%2Ftowncountry%2Flandscape%2Foverview%2Fenclosingland%2F&group=vnpq69nW
    • Prior to the enclosures, land was held in common for public use, not owned by individuals.
    • The rise of capitalism also occurred during this time.
      • Adam Smith wrote his landmark book, The Wealth of Nations, in 1776.
      • Land was privatized so the most efficient use of land could be determined
        • by market competition rather than
        • community consensus.
      • Labor then also had to be ​“commodified,” or bought and sold,
        • so non-farmers could work for wages and buy food and the other necessities of life they had been getting from the land.
      • With reliance on working for wages, buying, and selling
        • the necessity for personal relationships were diminished.
      • With the diminished necessity for personal relationships,
        • the social cohesion within families, communities and society began to diminish as well.
    • The persistence of chronic poverty and malnutrition, even during times of tremendous economic growth and individual wealth, are direct consequences of a growing sense of disconnectedness from each other that was nourished by the industrial era of economic development.

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Does it really?!? When the conversation omits so many perspectives and points of view for lack of diversity, it's also going to be missing quite a lot that one may not anticipate either. It's also likely to go down some blind alleys that may not be as beneficial too.

There are 443 works by 74 authors in the Great Books of the Western World. All of them are printed in their entirety except for Aquinas, Kepler and Fourier.

One of the primary goals of The Great Books, was to make some of the (especially ancient writers) more accessible to modern audiences with respect to ready availability of their works which were otherwise much more expensive.

This certainly says something about both publishing and reading practices of the early 20th century.

The idea of the Lindy effect is subtly hiding here. Presumably it also existed before.

It's often seen in how historians can or can't easily evaluate the impact of recent historical figures without the appropriate amount of additional evaluation with respect to passing time.

Broadly the entirety of the documented existence of mankind...

Robert Hutchins takes sole responsibility for the final decision on the selection for the books which appear in The Great Books of the Western World series.

One wonders what sort of advice he may have sought out or received with respect to a much broader diversity of topics and writers with respect to his own time. I reminded a bit of the article The 102 Great Ideas (Life, 1948) which highlights a more progressive stance with respect to women and feminism in the examples used.

See: LIFE. “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog.” January 26, 1948. Https://books.google.com/books?id=p0gEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA92&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false. Google Books.

amplifying, modifying, contradicting...

what other means of argumentation/conversation could one enumerate here with respect to a greater conversation?

How specifically does the author define "The Great Conversation"?

Note that it is consistently capitalized throughout the book to give it greater importance.

It feels odd that people wouldn't understand their own traditions, but it obviously happens. Information overload can obviously heavily afflict societies toward forgetting their traditions and the formation of new traditions, particularly in non-oral traditions which focus more on written texts which can more easily be ignored (not read) and then later replaced with seemingly newer traditions.

Take for example the resurgence of note taking ideas circa 2014-2020 which completely disregarded the prior histories, particularly in lieu of new technologies for doing them.

As a means of focusing on Western Culture, the editors here have highlighted some of the most important thoughts for encapsulating and influencing their current and future cultures.

How do oral traditions embrace the idea of the "Great Conversation"?

Two of the driving reasons behind the Great Books project were improvement of both education and democracy.

The democracy portion was likely prompted by the second Red Scare from ~1947-1957 which had profound effects on America. Published in 1952, this series would have considered it closely and it's interesting they included Marx in the thinkers at the end of the series.

A great admission to make upfront in such a massive endeavor which one hopes to shape the future.

What does this mean for ars excerpendi writ large? Particularly when it may apply to hundreds of thousands?

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• 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

• 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

• insight

• there is a transcendental need for reason as the vehicle of itself undermining

  • the only way to understand that
    • reason isn't self-justifying
    • there is knowledge that transcends reason
  • is to use reason to reach a stage where you think reason might need to be abandoned,
    • reason becomes most necessary
  • Understanding the limits of reason requires reason
    • that is the essence of Madhyamaka

• comment

  • when reason is turned upon itself, when consciousness studies itself, that is where paradoxes emerge - at the limits of thought and the limits of conceptualization

• Answer

  • No.
  • we end up with a non conceptual insight that:
    • we can then communicate
    • that we can discuss
    • that we can articulate
    • that requires that reason be present at:
      • the beginning like the seed
      • in the middle when we're performing the analysis
      • like the rain that nourishes the crops and
      • in the end in the harvest
    • because non conceptuality is really easy to achieve all you need is a very large rock,
      • just bang right on your head and non conceptuality is there
    • but that's a mute inert non-conceptual
    • Non-conceptuality needs to be enriched by the conceptual insight that allows you to actually make something of it

• The Middle Way

  • using the conceptual to reach a deeper appreciation of the state of non-conceptuality,
  • in other words, using dualistic thought and language to reach insights about the nondual

• western analog to Nagarjuna's use of reason to undermine itself
• references
  • https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sextus-empiricus/#YesSceHasBel
  • https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/sextus-empiricus-against-the-logicians/

• Title
  • Madhyamaka: Jay Garfield
• Description
  • Jay Garfield talks about why Nagarjuna's technique employts reason to undermine itself to achieve peace in a nonconceptual state.
    • He humorously points out how its easy to achieve nonconceptual states in many ways, such as a large rock to the head, but that kind of nonconceptual state is not really insightful for penetrating the deep philosophical questions we all have.
    • He clarifies why Nagarjuna's process is called the Middle Way,
      • it employs (conceptual) analysis to achieve wisdom of the nondual (nonconceptual) state

• comment
  • the study could not find any detectable EEG signal in the deceased monks practicing Thukdam
  • Philosopher Evan Thompson commented that this does not disprove the existence of consciousness in the Thukdam state, merely that the instruments used may not have been where the critical signals reside

• Title
  • The Thukdam Project Inside the first-ever scientific study of post-mortem meditation
• Author
  • Daniel Burke
• Publication
  • Tricycle
  • https://tricycle.org/article/thukdam-project/

Part of literature is the Great Conversation, which often turns on the ability for writers to be understood and appreciated, often in translation. Gary Saul Morson takes P&V to task for their Russian translations which often focus on the incredibly specific nuances of direct translation, but which simultaneously lose the beauty and sense of literature. He says, "[...] readers typically turn to translations not to hear about culinary ephemera but to read literature."

https://welovetranslations.com/2022/01/10/whats-the-best-translation-of-the-brothers-karamazov/

• in other words
  • we are writing for the reader
  • we need to know what is salient in the reader's world and synchronize to that

https://www.coursehero.com/lit/The-Brothers-Karamazov/context/