<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><title></title><style type="text/css">p.MsoNormal,p.MsoNoSpacing{margin:0}</style></head><body><div style="font-family:Arial;">I find the "Laws of Karma" illuminating for any discussion of telicity, especially the 'free will' aspect brought up by glen.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">The Vedic-Buddhist notion of karma begins with the notion of pan consciousness, everything down to the subatomic particles (or strings) has some degree of consciousness and from this the ability to "choose" among behaviors. Choose the wrong behavior, for the wrong reasons and you accrue karma. (There is not such thing as good karma, no erasing accumulations from 'bad' actions by engaging in 'good' actions.)<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">However, the the possible choices are severely restricted if you are a quark and the 'bad' choices are but barely possible.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">When the accumulation of bits of consciousness plus the increasing organization of those bits is such that you have a conscious human being the <b><i>apparent</i></b> choices are greater.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">However, any particular choice is dependent upon previous choices—all the way back to when you were a mere amino acid. While the range of choice, the exercise of free will, appears to be large, the odds of you making a 'bad' choice are almost as improbable as would be the case if you were still a rock. [I am forgetting the name, but there is a modern philosopher who makes much this same argument against free will.]<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">In fact the only "choice" you have is to act with "non-attachment." A very difficult concept to convey, but for now just think of actions that are not motivated by a desire for gain; or by things like lust, greed, anger; or by the notion that "your choice makes a difference as to outcome."<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">An enlightened individual acts with 'perfect knowledge' (essentially an awareness of all those pesky antecedent acts) and takes the 'correct' (the act with a probability approaching certainty) action. With non-attachment, hence no karma.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">That is why the enlightened sage, when asked what it was like live as an enlightened being, replied, "When I am thirsty i drink, hungry I eat, and sleepy I sleep."<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">Everything done by anything is 'telic' in glen's sense. Karma accruing actions are telic in Nick's sense.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">davew<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">On Mon, Aug 12, 2024, at 1:21 PM, glen wrote:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> Nick and I had a lengthy argument about the ambiguity in telicity. He <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> sticking to his conception that telicity is indicated by objectives, <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> purpose, desire, etc. Me sticking to my conception that telicity is <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> (merely) anything posed in consideration of a final state.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> Whether the conversation's about Ukraine as a conflux of monists <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> cleansing the land of pluralists or, as Eric emphasizes, providing <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> narrative scaffolding (like a state with which one might identify), the <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> gist is the same: What is the *scope* of the causal agents? And is <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> there a heterarchy of causal scopes? Or are there primary (then <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> secondary, tertiary, ...) scopes?<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> Such arguments must (yes, must) End up in arguments about free will, <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> determinism, and the ontological status of stochasticity, as long as <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> there's no shared value system amongst the discussants that includes a <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> metaphysical commitment to (or against) the primacy of randomness. A <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> clever method for denying randomness without sacrificing the <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> distinction between the two conceptions of telicity is to commit to <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> Lewisian possible worlds (or the weaker concept of parallel universes). <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> But in all cases ruled by humility and agnosticism, pluralism is the <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> winner; and any type of monism is the loser.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> Either telicity can be disambiguated by allowing for false objectives <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> (those aspired to but not obtained, via ignorance, limited <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> understanding) *or* by allowing for a manipulable/controllable universe <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> (via limited power).<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> And because this post is already too long, I'll tell a story. At <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> Friday's Salon, a fellow anarcho-syndicalist argued that holding shares <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> via a market in a publicly traded company is strongly analogous to <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> betting on the final state of a roulette wheel. I tried, and failed, to <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> point out that the market is co-constructed by not only the players of <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> the game, but the co-evolving environment in which the game is played. <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> So it's nothing like a roulette wheel, at all, which is painstakingly <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> engineered to be "fair", with minimal friction mechanisms and whatnot. <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> But his (meta)narrative was way too strong. He's infected by the lefty <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> rhetoric that the stock market is Just a rent-seeking form of gambling <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> and the dividends come purely from the exploitation of the wage slaves. <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> I even brought up recent news of shareholder rebellions (Tesla, Exxon, <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> ...) as evidence that publicly traded companies may be "better" than <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> privately held companies. In the end, it made me more skeptical of his <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> commitment to syndicalism. >8^D<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> On 8/10/24 21:36, Santafe wrote:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> Quick comment from me, not to the direct point in this post, which I like too, but on something about Snyder which I learned (just off-hand) from a colleague within the past 2 weeks.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> These ideas about the language of inevitability as one of the devices of tyrants was, I think, argued in much the same terms by Hannah Arendt, and Snyder continues in that framework, continuing to test and develop it.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> What I learned is that he expanded another of her ideas in a place she didn’t get to.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> This question of whether ethno-states are the only long-term attractor forms for states is being tested again in this era, to a degree it never really was before. Somewhat in the early 20th century, but the notion that rights-based states would fill the world was still nascent then.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> Arendt argues that the “universal rights of man” were articulated at a time when the number and sizes of groups of stateless people was on the rise. But at the end of the various competitions, this notion of “man” was diaphanous enough that these supposed “rights” didn’t actually protect anybody who wasn’t already being protected by a state under its charter. The waves of the stateless was both a human calamity in its own terms, but also a source of stress that the totalitarians were able to use to activate the masses into motion in “the movements” as she calls them. She even called the Israel-Palestine disaster exactly, right away at the beginning of its formation. Saying that, because Europe had never properly corrected its problem of generating stateless people, it then exported that problem to the middle east by constructing a new class of stateless people, now the Palestinian Arabs. Much else, of course, has always been ongoing in the region, with its local <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> interests and competitions, of course, so one doesn’t want to seek one-factor analyses. But this one factor, for the part it plays, seems exactly rightly articulated by her, to me.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> What the colleague told me is that Snyder wanted to check whether this was a good argument, and followed it up by a comparison of the situation of Romanian Jews, who were given statehood, to the many others who were not, through the era of the two world wars. He concludes that Arendt’s analysis is a good one, though there were other stresses in Romania at the time that make deconvolving the various threads of causation something one has to put in work to do.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> I like these kinds of work put in by historians, when they are done really well.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> Eric<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>>> On Aug 11, 2024, at 5:46, Jon Zingale <<a href="mailto:jonzingale@gmail.com">jonzingale@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>>> I appreciate Timothy's warning for why historians should be sensitive to the use of telic political exposition. That is, he shows why defining telos in terms of finality or pre-determination is both useful and important. In the lecture, Timothy describes a well-known tyrant's *love letter* to a nation, which I find strangely reminiscent of Frank Booth's threat to Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet. The telos expressed is one of inevitability. Timothy warns:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>>> "When a tyrant makes an argument for how history *has to be*, then some of the forces that are actually resonant in history get classified as being ahistorical or nonhistorical or exotic or alien."<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>>> He then elaborates on how this Tyrant's premise and derived predicates lead to a logic of ethnic cleansing, a foundation or a rationale for war. I have just started the lecture series. I hope it remains this rich. For those interested, the lecture is queued to where this post is intended to be a reference.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>>> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJczLlwp-d8&list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz_1Mx1MaO6sw_&index=1&t=720s">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJczLlwp-d8&list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz_1Mx1MaO6sw_&index=1&t=720s</a> <<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJczLlwp-d8&list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz_1Mx1MaO6sw_&index=1&t=720s">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJczLlwp-d8&list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz_1Mx1MaO6sw_&index=1&t=720s</a>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">>>> While I am personally appalled at what is happening in Ukraine, I am not intending to post here on politics. I am interested in Timothy's modelling of the argument, how important it is to his argument that one does not erase human agency when describing human history. His perspective reminds me of why it is important to know *for what use* a person fixes the meaning of a word like telos.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> -- <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> <a href="https://bit.ly/virtualfriam">https://bit.ly/virtualfriam</a><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> to (un)subscribe <a href="http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com">http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com</a><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> FRIAM-COMIC <a href="http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/">http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/</a><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> archives: 5/2017 thru present <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> <a href="https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/">https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/</a><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> 1/2003 thru 6/2021 <a href="http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/">http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/</a><br></div></body></html>