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<p>I'm wondering if there has been a "karmic" analysis of assembly
theory (or vice-versa)?<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 8/15/24 7:10 PM, Prof David West
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
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<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"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">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"
moz-do-not-send="true">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"
moz-do-not-send="true">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>
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