[FRIAM] On telos- was: When are telic attributions appropriate in physical descriptions?

Fri Aug 16 10:34:53 EDT 2024

I'm wondering if there has been a "karmic" analysis of assembly theory 
(or vice-versa)?

On 8/15/24 7:10 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> I find the "Laws of Karma" illuminating for any discussion of 
> telicity, especially the 'free will' aspect brought up by glen.
>
> 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.)
>
> However, the the possible choices are severely restricted if you are a 
> quark and the 'bad' choices are but barely possible.
>
> When the accumulation of bits of consciousness plus the increasing 
> organization of those bits is such that you have a conscious human 
> being the */apparent/* choices are greater.
>
> 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.]
>
> 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."
>
> 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.
>
> 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."
>
> Everything done by anything is 'telic' in glen's sense. Karma accruing 
> actions are telic in Nick's sense.
>
> davew
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 12, 2024, at 1:21 PM, glen wrote:
> > Nick and I had a lengthy argument about the ambiguity in telicity. He
> > sticking to his conception that telicity is indicated by objectives,
> > purpose, desire, etc. Me sticking to my conception that telicity is
> > (merely) anything posed in consideration of a final state.
> >
> > Whether the conversation's about Ukraine as a conflux of monists
> > cleansing the land of pluralists or, as Eric emphasizes, providing
> > narrative scaffolding (like a state with which one might identify), the
> > gist is the same: What is the *scope* of the causal agents? And is
> > there a heterarchy of causal scopes? Or are there primary (then
> > secondary, tertiary, ...) scopes?
> >
> > Such arguments must (yes, must) End up in arguments about free will,
> > determinism, and the ontological status of stochasticity, as long as
> > there's no shared value system amongst the discussants that includes a
> > metaphysical commitment to (or against) the primacy of randomness. A
> > clever method for denying randomness without sacrificing the
> > distinction between the two conceptions of telicity is to commit to
> > Lewisian possible worlds (or the weaker concept of parallel universes).
> > But in all cases ruled by humility and agnosticism, pluralism is the
> > winner; and any type of monism is the loser.
> >
> > Either telicity can be disambiguated by allowing for false objectives
> > (those aspired to but not obtained, via ignorance, limited
> > understanding) *or* by allowing for a manipulable/controllable universe
> > (via limited power).
> >
> > And because this post is already too long, I'll tell a story. At
> > Friday's Salon, a fellow anarcho-syndicalist argued that holding shares
> > via a market in a publicly traded company is strongly analogous to
> > betting on the final state of a roulette wheel. I tried, and failed, to
> > point out that the market is co-constructed by not only the players of
> > the game, but the co-evolving environment in which the game is played.
> > So it's nothing like a roulette wheel, at all, which is painstakingly
> > engineered to be "fair", with minimal friction mechanisms and whatnot.
> > But his (meta)narrative was way too strong. He's infected by the lefty
> > rhetoric that the stock market is Just a rent-seeking form of gambling
> > and the dividends come purely from the exploitation of the wage slaves.
> > I even brought up recent news of shareholder rebellions (Tesla, Exxon,
> > ...) as evidence that publicly traded companies may be "better" than
> > privately held companies. In the end, it made me more skeptical of his
> > commitment to syndicalism. >8^D
> >
> >
> > On 8/10/24 21:36, Santafe wrote:
> >> 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.
> >>
> >> 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.
> >>
> >> What I learned is that he expanded another of her ideas in a place 
> she didn’t get to.
> >>
> >> 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.
> >>
> >> 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
> >> 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.
> >>
> >> 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.
> >>
> >> I like these kinds of work put in by historians, when they are done 
> really well.
> >>
> >> Eric
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>> On Aug 11, 2024, at 5:46, Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> 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:
> >>>
> >>> "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."
> >>>
> >>> 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.
> >>>
> >>> 
> 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> 
> <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>>
> >>>
> >>> 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.
> >
> > --
> > ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
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