[FRIAM] When are telic attributions appropriate in physical descriptions?

Tue Aug 13 15:41:34 EDT 2024

When said with the right inflections it sounds like someone laughing.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Tue, Aug 13, 2024, 11:53 AM Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Years ago, a teacher offered me the following universal adage.
>
> He who, he who,
> He who, he who.
>
> I have never been the same since.
>
> It's nothing if not asinine.
>
> N
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 13, 2024 at 1:21 PM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
> wrote:
>
>> There's a large dog park where I walk my dog most every day.   One of the
>> minor downsides of this park is that there are these geezers there that sit
>> on the park benches and rant about various things.   Their dogs are puzzled
>> because all the other dogs get walks, but they are expected to sit there
>> with their diminished owners.   One of them is a RFKjr advocate.  Another
>> is a Trump guy.   I try as I hard as I can to avoid talking to them, but
>> others get drawn in.  It's occurred to me that it wouldn't take much for a
>> guy like that to take a tumble into the water, especially if it were dark
>> on a Friday evening.    That would really improve my walk with Abby.
>>  Luckily, she's deaf and doesn't have to hear it.
>>
>> No, I don't get it.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
>> Sent: Tuesday, August 13, 2024 10:07 AM
>> To: friam at redfish.com
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] When are telic attributions appropriate in physical
>> descriptions?
>>
>> Dude. OK. The Angels becoming Demons isn't a duality, at least in my
>> intent raising it, here. Our want to, desire for, *fascination* is both
>> good and bad and good and bad aren't duals. Regarless, even if you want
>> them to be duals, that's fine. The point I'm making is that this trait of
>> ours, the desire to be fascinated/ecstatic is hallmark/canonical. Only
>> those of us hopped up on mediTation or drugs that blunt emotions exhibit a
>> reduced desire for things like profundity, awe, ecstasy, etc. It reminds me
>> of the book "To Engineer is Human" ... but I'd generalize and say that it's
>> fundamental to biology for organisms to seek ecstatic states ... the
>> oneness of the universe, the dissolution of the self, etc.
>>
>> But this desire for beauty, to escape our selves, IS the problem as much
>> as it is the solution. That's what I mean by Angels and Demons. Also
>> "bullshit" is fairly well defined. It's an artificial/false construct
>> constructed without regard to the Truth (where "Truth" might mean any
>> number of shared values, accuracy, usefulness, etc.). This means that
>> bullshit can accidentally be true, but never True.
>>
>> I don't know how much time y'all spend talking to, say, QAnon believers
>> ... or back in the day those who yapped about Bilderberg, the Illuminati,
>> speaking in tongues, or whatever. But, for me, the enthusiasm and ecstasy
>> they exuded was infectious. Even as several of my homunculi knew it was
>> bullshit-begetting, it was downright fun; not so harmless as the mob
>> behavior of a rave, but still fun. I sought (still do to some extent) it
>> relentlessly. It's a miracle of happenstance (or genetics?) I was never
>> engulfed by it. I still do, at least when it's not merely lazy. In order
>> for me to feel it, there has to be some *deep* bullshit ... you have to be
>> able to get lost in the bullshit. If you hit clay or sand in the first hour
>> or so, then it's just not that beautiful ... It has to be like String
>> Theory deep. Now that's far out, man.
>>
>>
>> On 8/13/24 09:19, steve smith wrote:
>> > Ideaphoria as part of an annealing schedule perhaps?
>> >
>> >
>> > A possibly self-referential example of what we are speaking of follows,
>> as triggered by the topic and substance itself:
>> >
>> > On he angel-demon duality...
>> >
>> > Escher's famous hyperbolic tesselation on the same subject reminds me a
>> bit of rayleigh-bernard convection cells?  I haven't seen (but may have
>> imagined?) the kind of convection/involution patterns we see in the classic
>> demonstrations in the context of the churn of good vs evil, and the the
>> foreground/background exchange?
>> >
>> > As Dennis Miller used to smirk at the beginning of his "don't let me
>> get off on a rant here"...
>> >
>> > I'm honestly trying to explore this "riff" as an example of what I
>> think you are speaking of?   We were talking about the generality of
>> "profundity as a breeding ground/enabler/masker" for "bullshit" (not
>> precisely defined, but we probably all share an intuition of the 'know it
>> when i see it' style?).
>> >
>> > Your mentioning of the Angel-Demon duality triggered in my (too near
>> the edge of chaos?) fecund (fertile/feral?) mind and Escher's image
>> overlayed with R-B convection cells roiling (my first experience was in
>> metallic model airplane paints when disturbed and left open to evaporate?
>> would roil until the metal particles settled to the bottom?).   Without
>> trying (but perhaps being compelled by an inner nature or drive, possibly
>> what you refer to as the "orgasmic feeling" of "paradox or sophism") I
>> found myself tangenting (as explored above) on the Angel-Demon implications
>> of good/evil and the way one might be the fuel for the other and vice-versa.
>> >
>> > Having veered from the original question of Telic and perhaps
>> Teleonomic (applied recursively to the RB-convection phenomenon) I would
>> sit and stare (inadvertantly huffing the volatiles?) at the roiling cells
>> in the model-airplane paint with a fascination as to whether there was
>> intention or goal or purpose in that activity? I did not know much of any
>> of the technical details of these things and while I had been instructed by
>> elders in no uncertain terms not to impute either perpetual motion nor
>> animism into such things,  it was hard not to be deeply fascinated by said
>> roiling.   I don't know that I as the R-B cells in Escher's image the first
>> time I saw it, but probably not long afterwards.
>> >
>> > This is the type of tangent I often delete, understanding it might well
>> be taken to be deliberate bullshit generation (disguised as profundity)?
>>  My threshold for <delete before sending> varies.   I haven't been on any
>> pain meds beyond acetominophen since my (first) hip replacement a week ago,
>> but the strange euphoria residue from the dissociative sedative (ketamine?)
>> used during the extremely precise/surgical yet nevertheless invasive
>> surgery, and the whole new suite of pains emanating from the hips and the
>> introspective consequences are quite mind-bending.  As we know, I don't
>> need this kind of (mild?) altered state to wax "profound", but it does
>> change it qualitatively (from the inside)  a bit...
>> >
>> > On 8/13/24 9:05 AM, glen wrote:
>> >> It's reasonable to ask what proportion of profundity is a cover for
>> something versus a marker for something. I still tend to give people the
>> benefit of the doubt. So when I see either something that seems profound
>> (to me) or others saying or acting as if something's profound, it's a
>> marker for my or their confusion, respectively. While it may be true that
>> there are grifters out there who sow profundity, purposefully, in order to
>> mask their rational plans, that sounds conspiritorial to me. A good edge
>> case might be Elizabeth Holmes. To what extent did she know her claims were
>> bullshit? Or to what extent did she convince herself that her bullshit was
>> true/useful?
>> >>
>> >> Regardless of the proportions, the grifters don't breed bullshit so
>> much. They prop it up artificially. Bullshit begetting more bullshit (i.e.
>> breeding) has another home. I grant that it may not be profundity,
>> directly. Maybe it's the confusion underlying the profundity. But the
>> reason I think it's more the profundity is because the people I see who are
>> most guilty of it are attracted by the "awe" or the "beauty" of some thing.
>> They *want* to get stoned on some aesthetic, whatever it is ... carried
>> away, ecstatic, blissful, etc. Like a paradox or sophism, there's a kind of
>> orgasmic feeling to profound things ... "like. whoa, man."
>> >>
>> >> And *that's* the breeding ground, where Angels become Demons.
>> >>
>> >> On 8/8/24 11:03, steve smith wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>>> Maybe. I'm not convinced. Profundity is THE breeding ground for
>> bullshit.
>> >>> I'm more inclined (in the context of my own profundity or perhaps
>> more aptly prolificness or prolixity) to suggest that it is more of a mask
>> (and therefore enabler?) of bullshit than a breeding ground. Could be a
>> fine hair I suppose.
>> >>
>>
>>
>> --
>> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
>>
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>
>
> --
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
> Clark University
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