[FRIAM] quotes and questions

[glen]

I've always wondered why we obsessively dichotomize. I've tried to express my confusion in the context of the law of noncontradiction and excluded middle since my 1st (authentic) analysis course in college. I'd caught a whiff of intuitionism by that time and asked my prof about it. He wisely feigned ignorance and suggested I do my homework.

When Dave asks a question like "What is the negation of evolution?", it absolutely *begs* us to avoid negation  ... this silly impulse to think in dichotomies. Negation is a stupid concept, perhaps the most Evil human invention ... maybe 2nd only to religion. And juxtaposed with evolution, which relies heavily on high-dimensional contexts, makes it crystal clear how stupid a concept negation actually is.

Now, "opposition" carries much more ambiguity. One could think of it (and "reaction") in something like Newton's 3rd law. But the ambiguity also allows us to think in terms of a bushy opposition or "response", rather than negation or reaction. So kudos to the quotees who used the more ambiguous term, helping us think a little more broadly. And woe to those who read the ambiguous term and preemptively register it as the miniscule-minded concept of negation.

That bushy opposition flows nicely into Dave's invocation of "stress". In the past, I've expressed affinity with the (ole timey) Cynics who flout contemporary norms and attempt for Flow. But if I'm honest, I'm actually anti-Flow ... or maybe it's a kind of processor-sliced-multi-Flow. The only time I feel authentic is when I'm surfing a stressful context ... like some adrenaline junky hopping from one brief high to another. Comfort, Groove, Flow, Eudaimonia, are most accurately mapped to something like laminar death. Turbulence is the new groovy. Flow is for squares, man.

On 5/10/22 21:06, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Wokeness or antifa are two reactions to bad faith.  At some point communication is no longer occurring and it is delusional to expect a civil dialog.   When that happens it is just a matter of whether to keep taking a beating in the name of a principle that the other party does not care about (who IS the audience for this demonstration of futility?) or to use other means that they cannot ignore.
> 
> Another way to deal with Trump-like people on social media would be to scale the the fact checking with the lying, so that liars have an unblockable paragraph of injected correction surrounding each false claim.   Unfortunately then the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and that the narcissist gets the attention they seek.  In that sense cancellation is better.
> 
>> On May 10, 2022, at 7:42 PM, Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm> wrote:
>>
>> 
>> Quotes:
>>
>> /"A thing without oppositions ipso facto does not exist ... existence lies in opposition."/ C.S. Peirce.
>>
>> /"It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth." /Neils Bohr.
>>
>> Questions:
>> What is the negation of evolution? Natural Selection? Survival of the 'Fittest'?
>>
>> What is the negation of 'bleeding heart liberalism'? Of Trumpism? Of "wokeness?"
>>
>> Quote:
>>
>> /"Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourselves whether a tree which is supposed to grow to a proud height could do so without bad weather and storms; /*[1]* /whether misfortune and external resistance, whether any kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, greed, and violence to not belong to the *_favorable_* conditions without which any great grown even of virtue is scarecely possible." F. Nietzsche (emphasis his)/
>>
>> *[1] *The Biosphere 2 project encountered a problem with trees falling over far before they reached their maturity. It was from lack of wind. Wind and mechanical stress was required to grow the hard tissues that allowed the tree to stand.
>>
>> Questions:
>>
>> To what extent do we (denizens of FRIAM and their local cultures) require the kinds of stress being encountered in the world?
>>
>> I suspect that there needs to be a balance between realizable civilization and stresses, but how is that balance defoined and, more importantly, found and maintained?
>>
>> Concrete example of last question: Will the Twitterites end up being a better or worse 'culture' post-Musk?
>>
>> davew


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