Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Einherjar86]

True, and mathematics is often touted as the "language of the natural world," etc. that whole tired rant. What mathematics forgets is that objects don't quantify themselves; while mathematics corresponds to an exterior reality, it doesn't find itself there. Mathematics is the human institution of the quantification of reality. It's no coincidence that mathematics likely arose in order to quantify time and objects, coinciding with the beginnings of economic interaction.

Animals don't count or quantify, at least not with numerical symbolism. Animals appropriate the amount required for their survival. Lions don't think: "I'm going to go kill four and three-quarters antelopes; four for the adults, three-quarters for the youngsters." They simply kill what they can, and eat. Mathematics, as a system, corresponds to the external world, but it doesn't reside in it.

 

[Einherjar86]

And this is why I'll never take Freud off my list of people who contributed intellectually to Western thought.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/30/hero-john-gray-sigmund-freud

Above all, Freud never ceased challenging human illusions. He wanted his work to be accepted, but was not surprised when it was not. Whereas other heroes may imagine they can liberate humankind, Freud neither needed nor offered consolation. That may be why I find him such an inspiring, life-affirming figure.

 

[Dak]

You can be completely deranged and "challenge" people all day long. Freud's answer to everything was basically "the sex makes you do it", and not just sex but latent incestual sexual desires. This, I expect, falls more under "seeing things as you are" as opposed to seeing them as they are.

 

[Einherjar86]

Freud probably wouldn't disagree. It doesn't matter whether he projects it or not; all that matters is whether his patient responds. Psychoanalysis only manifests through the function of language.

The toughest thing for people to wrap their brains around is that it doesn't really matter whether or not a boy ever thought of his mother in a sexual sense. All that matters is that the possibility is there, in language itself. The viable alternative theory that I know would be Deleuze's Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. There is certainly something "phallocentric" in Freud's thought; but again, I don't really think he would object to that. He occupies the unique position of being the analyst, the "one presumed to know"; but he is yet a subject among subjects, and he's well aware of that.

 

[Dak]

Unfortunately, even if he were aware of that, so many of his acolytes (a dwindling number amongst psychologists to be sure) do not see things in that way.

I would imagine it is quite common for young children to "crush" on adult authority figures in their lives. Often this has much more to do with desires of security vs sex (especially depending on the age, sex may not even be something the child is aware of).

 

[Einherjar86]

True, and mathematics is often touted as the "language of the natural world," etc. that whole tired rant. What mathematics forgets is that objects don't quantify themselves; while mathematics corresponds to an exterior reality, it doesn't find itself there. Mathematics is the human institution of the quantification of reality. It's no coincidence that mathematics likely arose in order to quantify time and objects, coinciding with the beginnings of economic interaction.

Animals don't count or quantify, at least not with numerical symbolism. Animals appropriate the amount required for their survival. Lions don't think: "I'm going to go kill four and three-quarters antelopes; four for the adults, three-quarters for the youngsters." They simply kill what they can, and eat. Mathematics, as a system, corresponds to the external world, but it doesn't reside in it.

Just for the record, this is what I'm talking about:

Classical physics has a substructure, and we don't get that at all. We've got the math that drags us kicking and screaming towards conclusions that are absolutely bat-shit insane; we've done the experiments; we have based massive technologies on quantum physics - nothing from GPS to laser beams would work if we had it wrong - and yet nobody knows what it actually means. Either nothing exists until something observes it, or billions of universes are boiling into existence from nothing every nanosecond; either nothing was real or everything is; effect can proceed cause, objects can be in many different places at the same time, Schrodinger's cat is both alive and dead at the same time. This is not a theory, this is not a model; this is basically just a bunch of correlations. They are mathematically described, they are painstakingly derived, but they are a black box for all of that. We know the equations work because every time you feed in 'A' you get 'B' and 'C' out the other end; but we have no idea why.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fID-y1qdPTM (around the 18-minute mark, or so)

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

Dialetheism.http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dialetheism/

Um, anyone understand this shit? Contradictions CAN'T be true! They just can't!

 

[Einherjar86]

Well, if you get hired as a professor at Stanford you can propose any fucking thing you want as a topic of study and people will fawn over it. Not that this topic isn't worth studying; I happen to love paradoxes, but less on the semantic side of things and more on the mathematical. That article seems to focus on the semantic.

Questions about the actual state of things are fascinating, and while it's practical to assume that one thing cannot simultaneously be its own opposite, I don't have the authority to say so definitively. Perhaps things can occupy multiple spaces at once; I don't know. Or, perhaps, things are continually changing in states so quickly that we simply can't observe it. After all, as the speaker I posted mentions, we all have a blind spot in our vision that our brains simply trick us into thinking isn't there.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

Yes this is definitely the semantic side, and it's damn confusing. What's blowing my mind is that I can't just add new possibilities and get out of the paradox. No matter how many levels up you try to go, something is going to find a way to stick you with a sentence that is both true and not true.

Now you could try to just keep saying, "Oh, well, if we go one level up in language we see that that sentence doesn't make sense!" But really, you're building these inconsistent sorta meta-languages that do nothing except get you out of this one problem, and you can never build enough. By the end my brain just says - will you just let it be true and false asshole!

 

[Dak]

I haven't looked deeply into contradictions, but I have heard that Eastern thought treated them differently to some degree, where both A and B could be true even if they appeared to contradict. Something which was supposed to explain (for example) how we could theoretically have free will AND a deity could know everything that would happen in advance without actually infringing on the free will.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

I'm talking more about the amusing little trick of language.

"This sentence is false."

What do you do with something like that? Is it false? well then it's true, so fuck. Maybe instead you want to say it's true? Well if it's true, then it's false, so also fuck.

 

[Einherjar86]

EDIT: @Dak

I will always vividly recall an example that Cyth gave a long time ago:

He said that an omniscient deity doesn't necessarily preclude the possibility of free will. The deity might know, without any doubt, that an individual will act a certain way. Now, as Cyth claimed, if the individual is considering acting differently, the deity will insert some mechanism that will cause them to act "accordingly" (for lack of a better word). However, the person might still choose to act in that manner without any supernatural intervention. Thus, free will can still exist despite the presence of an omniscient/omnipotent deity.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

But isn't the persons existence supernatural in the first place? So it's entire life is one big intervention?

There is also the problem of evil, but I guess that's more of a why than a what.

 

[Dak]

I'm talking more about the amusing little trick of language.

"This sentence is false."

What do you do with something like that? Is it false? well then it's true, so fuck. Maybe instead you want to say it's true? Well if it's true, then it's false, so also fuck.

The sentence states it is false. Then it cannot be true. For even if it is true that it is false, it is still false. For it is false.

EDIT: @Dak

I will always vividly recall an example that Cyth gave a long time ago:

He said that an omniscient deity doesn't necessarily preclude the possibility of free will. The deity might know, without any doubt, that an individual will act a certain way. Now, as Cyth claimed, if the individual is considering acting differently, the deity will insert some mechanism that will cause them to act "accordingly" (for lack of a better word). However, the person might still choose to act in that manner without any supernatural intervention. Thus, free will can still exist despite the presence of an omniscient/omnipotent deity.

I think that it can, but that would generally be considered a contradiction.

 

[Einherjar86]

The sentence states it is false. Then it cannot be true. For even if it is true that it is false, it is still false. For it is false.

You actually illuminate something important here: "even if it is true that it is false, it is still false." That, of course, would be true. However, the problem is, as you also said, the sentence states that it is false. That's where the paradox lies.

Thinking of this in semantic self-referential terms can't get us anywhere; Dak opens a new interpretive category by suggesting a kind of "meta"-realm of meaning that transcends the sentence's material meaning.

This, however, gets us into problems of mathematics, and we can't cross over without making some arbitrary and speculative conjecture. For instance, presuming that the statement is actually false means that it subsists within a larger set of constituted meaning: i.e. "statements that are false." If that is the case, then the statement claiming its falsity means that it is justifiably contained within the larger set of false statements. However, simply taking the sentence at face value doesn't allow us to make that leap.

 

[Dak]

Yeeee-aahh. Opening up new realms.

Math is not my strength. I do much better with semantics.

 

[Einherjar86]

Facebook is being flooded with people either calling for stricter gun laws, or for arming our teachers.

I don't believe in banning all guns, but neither do I believe in increasing the amount of guns in circulation. If we're talking in a purely statistical sense, increasing the amount of guns among the population will only increase the number of gun-related incidents, even if those incidents are accidental.

 

[Dak]

Yeah, this happens every single time there's a mass shooting (nearly always at a school...hrrm.....maybe we shouldn't have schools?).

A sick society creates sick people, or maybe it's the other way around. Either way, we have a sick population both mentally and physically, and everyone is trying to blame the clip and cup sizes.

 

[Dak]

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

"Let's take away their guns with our guns!"