Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Vimana]

There is a logic to your language (or an illogic), and that has nothing to do with what's in your head or in mine. It has nothing to do with individual psychology. Language can be read and interpreted scientifically, materially - this is what you don't seem to grasp. Language is not just reflection of interior experience. It operates objectively, socially, it has its own gravity. This is the effect of what happens when you engage in discourse. I don't care about what's in your head. You keep turning things around by saying "Might as well say..."; but you don't seem to grasp the fact that it doesn't matter.

Your intentions, your purposes, your personal beliefs, they have no purchase here.



That last sentence is hilarious.

I'm not sure if your ideas are "beyond language," or if you just can't write.

Logic is used in reference to the data at hand. Your logical deductions do not necessarily (and I flat-out say DON'T) lead you to what I'm attempting to convey because you don't seem to have experienced how much words are given meaning rather than giving meaning (which they do secondarily). How else was language created? It's not like it just came out of the air and some early hominids heard it, automatically got meaning from it, then continued using it.

Language is given gravity by the minds that create it and use it. I'm not arguing that that's not observable, since I'm speaking to you. I was arguing that reality makes sense without language, which you don't seem to grasp. Language does not contain meaning on its own. Or else you would know what derinsula (a word I made up) means without me having to tell you.

Language's effects in discourse depend on both parties involved primarily, since the words are just sounds (or in this case, arrangements of pixels) without minds that have the right set of memories to interpret them. You can get two people that don't speak Chinese and get them to speak Chinese to each other, but it won't mean shit. Why? Their minds did not develop a meaningful framework to interpret Chinese words.

If you do one tab of acid, your argument will come crashing down (for you. It's already apparent to me). But like I read before, you seem to have a set of assumptions about what it does and what it's like without actually doing it. I may as well say (gotta love this phrase. Well, I do, so you do as well since it carries its own gravity) caviar tastes like chocolate, which it may, but it has to touch my tongue to be verified or I'm just making shit up and pretending it's true.

This argument is separate from the one about nirvana.

Anyways, glad I could make you laugh.

I experience a fully-coherent, wordless reality all the time. Based on my interpretations of your arguments, you don't seem to think this is possible.

Maybe if you tried going an entire day, or maybe even an hour without a single thought or concept and let your body and senses do their thing, you'd see what destination (that isn't an idea, but all around us no matter what we think or don't think) I'm talking about. This argument for nirvana, base of consciousness, etc. isn't for an idea, it's ideas to lead to an idealess perception of reality.

 

[Einherjar86]

Logic is used in reference to the data at hand. Your logical deductions do not necessarily (and I flat-out say DON'T) lead you to what I'm attempting to convey because you don't seem to have experienced how much words are given meaning rather than giving meaning (which they do secondarily). How else was language created? It's not like it just came out of the air and some early hominids heard it, automatically got meaning from it, then continued using it.

Language is given gravity by the minds that create it and use it.

Language isn't created. That prescribes too much intention to the speakers.

Language, like any other evolutionary development, is accidental. It is not created by anyone. Language becomes. You wouldn't say that human beings created the opposable thumb.

You seem to believe that understanding and knowledge preceded language in order for it to come about. This is entirely incorrect, and is disputed by most scholars of linguistics and philosophers of language. Language is concomitant with knowledge, concomitant with understanding, with awareness. There is no purer form of knowing that precedes it.

 

[Vimana]

That is your view, and I laugh at it in between many moments where I make sense of things just fine without words. Words are hella useful and I think they're amazing, but words are symbols for meaning, and anyone who's meditated enough or done a psychedelic knows meaningful cognition happens with or without words.

For example, I don't need words to taste the omelette I'm eating or to remember its taste.

I highly doubt you don't enjoy fucking your wife until you say in your head, "I enjoy fucking my wife."

 

[Einherjar86]

That is your view, and I laugh at it in between many moments where I make sense of things just fine without words.

I laugh at your views! Ha ha! Ha ha! Oh my...

Well, both of your examples are sense perceptions: tasting, fucking, physical stimulation. This just proves how little you pay attention, since I already spoke of sensory perceptions in a previous post. And I never denied that you could have them without language. Otherwise how would nonlinguistic beings ever be compelled to eat, or reproduce?

This doesn't reach the level of knowing or awareness, however. I need language in order to know that I enjoy fucking my wife, and this is something I can think about even when I'm not doing it (and I do, quite often).

I'm done here. You're inconsistent and you provoke more confusion than anything else. Feel free to substantiate your claims or dispute what I just said; you may do so with the luxury of knowing that I won't respond to you.

 

[Vimana]

This doesn't reach the level of knowing or awareness, however. I need language in order to know that I enjoy fucking my wife, and this is something I can think about even when I'm not doing it (and I do, quite often).

It does reach the level of knowing. Happens to me all the time. Maybe you think you need language to know you enjoy fucking your wife, but that can change.

I'm done here. You're inconsistent and you provoke more confusion than anything else. Feel free to substantiate your claims or dispute what I just said; you may do so with the luxury of knowing that I won't respond to you.

That is how you perceive it from this view that knowing cannot happen without words. Try to meditate sometime, dude. Unless you're so turned off by it from associating it with the frustration of this debate (which I infer from what I can interpret as snippets of condescension). Regardless, I have plenty of awareness without words and no amount of your words or thoughts will change it. Hell, no amount of my words or thoughts can change it.

And it's a shame you won't respond. This has been a lot of fun for me.

Edit: If I needed words to be aware of what I'm aware of, my head would explode. "I'm breathing. My backpack's on my back. I'm standing. My feet are in shoes. I am walking. I am typing. I am holding a phone I am using the internet. I am acknowledging that I am aware and know these things are happening without using a single word." Jesus.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

As an audience member and fan of this thread I think you should go back to the 'altered states of consciousness' thread

BOOOOOO!BOO! BOOOOOO!

 

[Vimana]

Okay, dude.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

Hey man you can be the Deepak Chopra of this thread if you want. It's just going to get silly.

 

[Vimana]

That was awesome. You got a laugh out of me. I don't know shit about that guy except for the homeopathy stuff which I know nothing about except that it's like using water to try to cure disease and people have died while doing "treatments."

I wasn't communicating anything mystic. Far from it. I was trying to point towards the axis of one's own consciousness that is constant through their entire lives. It was merely interpreted as mystic.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

I wasn't communicating anything mystic. Far from it. I was trying to point towards the axis of one's own consciousness that is constant through their entire lives. It was merely interpreted as mystic.

In my best Deniro voice from Goodfellas "lil bit, lil bit"

Consciousness itself is pretty mystic.

and just for fun ... this is how I imagine Ein reading your posts

 

[Vimana]

You can call it that. To me, it's the most ordinary thing since it's present through all experience.

This was me the whole debate:

 

[Einherjar86]

In more productive news: I stumbled across an interesting text in the library yesterday, called The Accursed Share, by Georges Bataille.

It was originally published in 1967 and is subtitled "An Essay on General Economy." The volume is titled "Consumption."

In the book's preface, Bataille writes that he is not considering the facts "the way qualified economists do," but that he has "a point of view from which a human sacrifice, the construction of a church or the gift of a jewel [is] no less interesting than the sale of wheat." He goes on to say that his essay addresses "a problem that still has not been framed as it should be, one that may hold the key to all the problems posed by every discipline concerned with the movement of energy on earth - from geophysics to political economy, by way of sociology, history, and biology."

The final paragraph goes as follows:

I will simply state, without waiting further, that the extension of economic growth itself requires the overturning of economic principles - the overturning of the ethics that grounds them. Changing from the perspectives of restrictive economy to those of general economy actually accomplishes a Copernican transformation: a reversal of thinking - and of ethics. If a part of wealth (subject to a rough estimate) is doomed to destruction or at least to unproductive use without any possible profit, it is logical, even inescapable, to surrender commodities without return. Henceforth, leaving aside pure and simple dissipation, analogous to the construction of the Pyramids, the possibility of pursuing growth is itself subordinated to giving: The industrial development of the entire world demands of Americans that they lucidly grasp the necessity, for an economy such as theirs, of having a margin of profitless operations. An immense industrial network cannot be managed in the same way that one changes a tire... It expresses a circuit of cosmic energy on which it depends, which it cannot limit, and whose laws it cannot ignore without consequences. Woe to those who, to the very end, insist on regulating the movement that exceeds them with the narrow mind of the mechanic who changes a tire.

While I have no complete sense of Bataille's philosophy, I do have knowledge of disparate components (such as his "base materialism," which I find fascinating) and I find myself attracted by an approach that aims to theorize some anomalous aspect of any market system: namely, expenditures that do not yield any material return. Bataille concerns himself with human sacrifice in Aztec culture, the potlatch tradition in Native American cultures, some aspects of Eastern and Middle-Eastern religion, and Western political economy.

It may extend the definition of economy, but Bataille acknowledges that and makes it clear that he believes economy can't be properly critiqued without taking these libidinal expenditures into account. He's particularly interested, of course, with their institution at a socio-cultural level, beyond mere jouissance at an individual level.

 

[Vimana]

I agree with what that dude says (or how I interpret it anyway). I think trying to put human affairs (like economics) within the confines of the ideas used to understand them can result in failing to even know what one is trying to accomplish because it eventually becomes a matter of this idea versus that idea, not the bare observable facts like people wanting food, entertainment, to create new technologies, explore new recreations, whatever. Economic systems can accomplish these tasks, but they also have their own problems. The problems mainly are in the fact that economic theories are descriptions of human activity which, though it has patterns, is immensely complex and ever-changing. Whenever I read any political or economic idea, I see how it works, but also how much more there is to human activity. I don't think the solution to society's problems is within any idea because ideas are only a piece of life. The solution is within the harmony of all human actions, which sounds vague as fuck, but only because it is something so immensely complex that actually describing it word-for-word would be like counting every molecule in a DNA strand one-by-one.

In more productive news

I'm counting this as a reply and this is how you meant it no matter what you think.

 

[Dak]

I don't see what is anomalous about expenditures that do not yield a material return, whether deferred or not at all. Maybe that's just because of Austrianism.

 

[Einherjar86]

I think Bataille is interested primarily in excess. So, beyond scarcity of something necessitating production, Bataille says that all production also entails a kind of remainder that cannot be reduced to the needs of the producer. This is the theoretical model, as I understand it, but I haven't gotten far enough to investigate the argument. I'm looking forward to the section on human sacrifice, as this is something I'm interested in, as far as cultural anthropology is concerned.

 

[Vimana]

This just made my day. Keep rolling, Spicoli.

Yeah, people getting along and loving one another is so stoopid. I must be rolling face to love the human race. Hate, murder, crime, and war are just facts of life we can do nothing about. Unconditional love is just a stupid, drug-induced hippie dream lolololol.

 

[Dak]

I'm not sure where you get the idea that what is being rebuffed is a desire for "peace, love, and understanding", or the value of meditation/mindfulness, etc. The problem is you are claiming to do something which all good arguments and science have so far shown to be impossible, and you are providing no argument or evidence to back up the interpretation of your experience(s) as escaping or experiencing consciousness itself in some objective form.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

V, ya have to consider that you just might be a romanticist with poor value judgement.

 

[Einherjar86]

I'm not sure where you get the idea that what is being rebuffed is a desire for "peace, love, and understanding", or the value of meditation/mindfulness, etc. The problem is you are claiming to do something which all good arguments and science have so far shown to be impossible, and you are providing no argument or evidence to back up the interpretation of your experience(s) as escaping or experiencing consciousness itself in some objective form.

And, on top of this, I just don't need mediation to prove that it is undesirable to do harm to others. This need not be an individual pursuit within the mind, it can be assessed and supported scientifically/theoretically.

 

[Vimana]

I'm not sure where you get the idea that what is being rebuffed is a desire for "peace, love, and understanding", or the value of meditation/mindfulness, etc. The problem is you are claiming to do something which all good arguments and science have so far shown to be impossible, and you are providing no argument or evidence to back up the interpretation of your experience(s) as escaping or experiencing consciousness itself in some objective form.

I got the idea from being called Spicoli. I inferred that perhaps ideas of peace and love were seen as childish, stupid, and related to drugs, kind of like my interpretation of Spicoli.

You can't escape consciousness because it's always there as you are. I was presenting ways to point to a wordless reality without concept and you guys have been trying to make inferences about it with words. Do you see the irony?

It's like being shown a food you've never tasted, and saying, "I've never tasted it, but it tastes like this or doesn't taste like that." It makes no sense. I'm talking about a way to a lack of concept. Conceptualizing it is false. No amount of reading anything I say will get to what I'm trying to point to. You are already there and just have to separate yourself from what is on top of it.

Edit: Here's a joke I made from this debate that I think Zen monks would find hilarious.

Person A: I experience a wordless knowledge of the reality I experience.
Person B: Really? What's it like?
Person A laughs.