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

[glen]

Your interleaving broke me. I can't tell if you have a coherent thing to say or if you're merely reacting shallowly to the things I've said. Maybe it's because I'm still sick from my last COVID infection and just can't think straight. But I can't coerce your interleaved responses into a coherent whole. Sorry.

But I can respond to the primary point I think I was making, which is that the disambiguation of the 2 conceptions of telicity (1 - agential aspiration vs. 2 - calculation where a final state is an input) relies on asking questions like "How personal is the calculation?" Is it merely about you, the agent? Or is it about something larger, like the system in which you (the agent) operate? If it's the latter, then telicity leans more my way (type 2). If it's the former, then it leans Nick's way (type 1).

The dissolution of self (however it's brought on - hallucinogens, ecstasy, beauty, etc) is one way to ensure we talk about type 2 telicity, rather than type 1. Individualism ("efficient markets", BDI agents, etc.) restricts telicity to type 1, whereas socialism (networks, fabrics, fields vs particles, etc) allows both, conflates the two.

Those of us who are tricked by profundity seem to feel an urgency for self-dissolution. My guess is that's because they don't have a way to induce ecstasy in themselves, at will. Whether you develop a regimen of judicious drug use or can simply dive in and back out of deep bullshit like String Theory doesn't matter that much. All you need is some/any method by which to induce ecstasy in yourself. And if you have such a method, you won't be *desperate* for it. And if you're not thirsty in that way, you won't fall for profundity against your will.

On 8/13/24 15:42, steve smith wrote:
> 
> 
>> Dude. OK. The Angels becoming Demons isn't a duality, at least in my intent raising it, here.
> 
> Not clear which of the myriad usages of /dual/ you are saying it is not. But I will try to defer to your declaration that such doesn't map onto your intentions in invoking them.   Most oft/recently here  I think "duality" gets invoked in the sense of mind-body and that definitely doesn't map.   It is precisely a /dual/ in the metaphysical sense?  My intention however, was a little more structural, vaguely Cat Theoretic (any attempt on my part to explicate that probably would be significantly bullshit)...  The tangent I was on had to do with the interplay between good intentions and bad and the transition between them, how one can maybe drive the other and vice-versa?  Symbiotic Mutualism?
> 
>> Our want to, desire for, *fascination* is both good and bad and good and bad aren't duals.
> complements then, perhaps?
> 
>> 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. 
> Thus my reference to annealing schedules?   Is this not how CAS and life in general and human innovation itself explores the possibility/probability space?  It drives us beyond  a "reasonable" excursion from the existing problem/solution regime we are "naturally" in?
>> Only those of us hopped up on mediTation or drugs that blunt emotions exhibit a reduced desire for things like profundity, awe, ecstasy, etc.
> I'm feeling this in the inverse of what I experience?  Maybe my experience with such things is enhanced sensitization rather than suppressed.
>> 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.
> yes and amen...
>>
>> 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.
> I think it reflects the tension between individuation and synthesis that comes with (not sure of a better word) levels of organization/aggregation?    Atoms/molecules on the edge between individuation and collection are where chemistry happens?   Teens preparing to leave home into the "big world", same/same?   I think it transcends multiple "levels" of organization (being a good true-to-self ego/id human vs a good spouse/partner/parent vs a good neighbor/employee/citizen vs a good participant in an ecosystem/biosphere) and this is where the "roil" happens, a dynamic rather than a static balance?
> 
>> 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 like this concise/specific definition, it rings True for the most part.  My own experience of (others') bullshit is that it is ambiguous to me as to the full spectrum of intention.  Sometimes it is exquisitely the case that the BS is pure gaslighting, defined not only to be not-true but to avoid True.  Other times it seems to be sheer laziness, a total disregard for truthiness which is maybe the BS you are referring to?  Or maybe you are invoking the sort of deliberate injection of noise that sort of prevents coherent truthiness?
>> 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. 
> Not much at all yet too much somehow.
>> But, for me, the enthusiasm and ecstasy they exuded was infectious.
> I know the feeling of acute jealousy of their ability to give over so thoroughly.   I get that among fundamentalist Xtians and Newagers (rhymes with sewa..) as well.   I get that here when the (other) technophiles get really high on their own supply of some tech-thingy... (we all know who we are?).
>> 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. 
> I grant everyone their own morbid fascinations, mine are legion.
>> It's a miracle of happenstance (or genetics?) I was never engulfed by it.
> I like the idea that "our allergies are also our addictions", I've known people who really thrive on dancing the edges of dysfunction and that it is easier/safer for them to do so by proxy.   I have my own element of that, but I respect/acknowledge those yet more drawn to 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.
> I like this stylization/ideation/characterization of "deep bullshit", like the kind you can only find when you switch your vision from raw to telescope to Hubble to Webb.
> 
> While I am fascinated by GPTs bullshit generation (maybe where this discussion started?) but very disappointed by it's "dynamic range"...  I hit it first with DALL-E's image generation where it's "hallucinatory" visual imagery offered up in response to a BS session I'd had with GPT.  Pretty quickly it "blew my mind" with some imagery but then I found that if i settled in and tried to fully inhabit/absorb/commune-with the imagery it got old and rite really quickly... Perhaps that is the Achille's heel of these transformers is that they manage to settle in on something which has the statistical profile of profundity without actually being profound?   The more "interesting" superficially the text or image generated, the more "hollow" it is?   A good load of properly "deep bullshit" is not hollow?
> 
> Did I just talk myself around to the point you have been making all along?
> 


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