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OOO

Started by CBXTN, August 08, 2016, 04:43:49 AM

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CBXTN


Q. G. Pennyworth

I don't know enough to have a well considered opinion about this, but it looks good on the surface. Is "There Is A Moon" in the same general vein, or am I getting the whole thing wrong.

CBXTN

I found this online as a good stepping stone:

QuoteOntology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology ("OOO" for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, DVD players, cotton, bonobos, sandstone, and Harry Potter, for example. In particular, OOO rejects the claims that human experience rests at the center of philosophy, and that things can be understood by how they appear to us. In place of science alone, OOO uses speculation to characterize how objects exist and interact.

I think the point is that humans prescribe values, narratives/histories, and uses to objects. But how is the nature of objects if it were to step outside human value systems? How do these objects relate to each other with all things being equal? (Of course we can never step outside our nervous system, so all of this would be speculative debate).     

The Good Reverend Roger

This is philosophy, right?
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

CBXTN

#4
yeah, this is a newer branch of philosophy. I'm not terribly familiar with it, but I'd like to learn more and it seems fairly Erisian, since it places all things on equal footing. There is no object that is more valuable than any other object. It posits that humans are objects too, just like windows, dolls, space dust, sound, dogs, fire, and barstools. 

It is a realist philosophy - it assumes that this reality we inhabit is concrete and acts in certain laws; i.e. you throw a barstool at me, and it does hurt. 

But if all of humanity went extinct, what would happen to the barstool? Would it still remain a "barstool" after humanity? OOO says it's only a barstool in relationship to us, but outside of ourselves what is it? What exactly is the barstool made of? We can say it is an assemblage of dead pine tree cells, but what are those pine tree cells made? Is the gunk underneath the barstool also part of the barstool? Could an object be more than what it is made of? What is the barstool's relationship to other non-human objects?

These are just a few questions~ many more further down the rabbit hole I suppose


rong

seems like schrodinger (or his cat) might have something to say about it
"a real smart feller, he felt smart"

Q. G. Pennyworth

Quote from: rong on August 08, 2016, 10:18:55 AM
seems like schrodinger (or his cat) might have something to say about it

Remember that Schrodinger put forth the cat analogy as a way of pointing out that quantum theory was garbage because a cat that's both alive and dead is insane what is wrong with you people.

CBXTN

I don't think it's as insane or mysterious as anything "quanta".

It's merely posing the question "What is X?" and asking that we refrain from applying a hierarchy of human values.


Q. G. Pennyworth

There was some subjectivist stuff posted a while back which generated this rant:

http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=37764.0

Am I right in thinking this is a similar thing, or is OOO navel gazing in a completely different and equally obnoxious way?


The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: CBXTN on August 08, 2016, 06:24:25 AM
yeah, this is a newer branch of philosophy. I'm not terribly familiar with it, but I'd like to learn more and it seems fairly Erisian, since it places all things on equal footing. There is no object that is more valuable than any other object. It posits that humans are objects too, just like windows, dolls, space dust, sound, dogs, fire, and barstools. 


Yeah, that's called speculative reality.  I already have the news to tell me I dont' exist as a person.

This is exactly the sort of navel-gazing that makes everyone laugh at philosophers.
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

CBXTN

Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on August 08, 2016, 04:01:04 PM
Quote from: CBXTN on August 08, 2016, 06:24:25 AM
yeah, this is a newer branch of philosophy. I'm not terribly familiar with it, but I'd like to learn more and it seems fairly Erisian, since it places all things on equal footing. There is no object that is more valuable than any other object. It posits that humans are objects too, just like windows, dolls, space dust, sound, dogs, fire, and barstools. 


Yeah, that's called speculative reality.  I already have the news to tell me I dont' exist as a person.

This is exactly the sort of navel-gazing that makes everyone laugh at philosophers.

I don't think it is one of those anti-realist philosophies that state "we don't exist as a person", or "the universe only exists in the mind".
_
Rather, it's a type of thinking which says you are a person who exists - your body exists, your mind exists, the computer in front of you exists, the barstool exists, etc. But your personhood is no more important than any other object in a universe of objects. I suppose we could assume we are more important than other objects; we could apply our own set of values to objects, decree some events as right and others as bad (a mega-huge comet hitting the earth is usually assumed to be bad). But if we did that, it wouldn't be Object-Oriented thinking - it would be human oriented thinking.

And so, OOO is a type of lens to explore how things operate, setting aside human-oriented ontology as much as possible.

OOO is also very malleable, as long as it always posits all things as equal.

CBXTN

To begin a more concrete subject for debate;

Last night I was reading how someone was describing environments and ecologies as objects; "Global warming is an example of what Timothy Morton calls "hyperobjects"—entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. "

Here's outline for what constitutes a "hyperobject":

They are "nonlocal": they do not manifest at a specific time and place but rather are stretched out in such a way as to challenge the idea that a thing must occupy a specific place and time.

Hyperobjects have a time-scale so different from current human ones that they force us to drop the idea of time as a neutral container.

Hyperobjects are unavailable to direct human perception. Computational prosthetics are required even to think them (mapping global warming requires huge amounts of computing speed, for instance).

Hyperobjects exist "interobjectively," which is to say that they consist, of, yet are not reducible to, interactions between a large number of entities.



Essentially; Instead of inhabiting a world, we find ourselves on the insides of a number of hyperobjects.


**

It makes me curious how this type of viewpoint would challenge our anthropocentric view of the world that has dominated the West since at least the Greeks. The "Privileged Transcendental Sphere" of philosophy doesn't protect us from Ultra-violet rays or rising sea levels. The physical world is a vast system of objects operating beyond common human perception, but we humans are always trying to inject our own values into it; Ultimately, things like "Environmentalism" isn't any more natural than "Industrialism" - they are both objects working within a complex system beyond human control. I'm skeptical of Big Data and the Silicon Valley apostles who preach about the saving powers of Information.

Instead, I think such a viewpoint encourages us to be more humble about our places in this existence and among each other, to be more understanding of things we disagree with, and to restore a sense of awe about the world. Ultimately we have very little control in the grand schema of hyperobjects.


CBXTN

Quote from: Q. G. Pennyworth on August 08, 2016, 11:34:30 AM
There was some subjectivist stuff posted a while back which generated this rant:

http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=37764.0

Am I right in thinking this is a similar thing, or is OOO navel gazing in a completely different and equally obnoxious way?

yes, there is a moon, and it exists :P

OOO isn't any of that privileged transcendental "navel gazing", as you all call it hahah

The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: CBXTN on August 08, 2016, 06:56:54 PM
But your personhood is no more important than any other object in a universe of objects.

That's what I said.  It is the idea that we are basically a smear of infection on a rock orbiting a sun, and that's the only part that matters about us.

It is not a philosophy that improves anything at all.  It is nihilism in a funny dress.  It appeals to people who are afraid of being alive.
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Q. G. Pennyworth

It seems to me that using "object" to describe things that are not objects is less of a philosophy and more of a crime against language.