[FRIAM] quotes and questions

[Eric Charles]

[image: image.png]


<echarles at american.edu>


On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 11:55 AM glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>
> --
> Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙
>
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