News:

I WILL KILL A MOTHERFUCKER.

Main Menu
Menu

Show posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

Show posts Menu

Topics - Daruko

#1
Bring and Brag / Illuminated Orchid
July 29, 2008, 08:15:42 PM
I move expeditiously forward,
belligerent toward sustained contention.
Self-sustained predisposition;
a quandary perhaps.

Shall I question retrogression?
No time for that! 
The Beast cometh.

This is it. 
My blood coagulates.
Olfactory emotions react
to the putrid smell of regret.

Must I must? 
Struggle or capitulate?
Abscond!  Absquatulate!

Ah! Sweet wisteria.
A confidant emerges.
As I sway, I spot the fray;
The Beast eyes me ostensibly.

I must not relent,
but then...
Swift descent.
Disquieting pleasure.

A skid, a slump,
and the final bump,
Respiration ceases.
But what is this?
A sweet aroma?
A magnificent orchestration of the senses.
The orchid glimmers.
#3
And I insist that if you read it you not know who it is first.

"We all place ourselves at various levels, and we are constantly falling from these heights. It is the falls we are ashamed of. Self-esteem is the cause of our shame, of our fall. It is this self-esteem that must be understood, and not the fall. If there is no pedestal on which you have put yourself, how can there be any fall? Why have you put yourself on a pedestal called self-esteem, human dignity, the ideal, and so on?

If you can understand this, then there will be no shame of the past; it will have completely gone. You will be what you are without the pedestal. If the pedestal is not there, the height that makes you look down or look up, then you are what you have always avoided. It is this avoidance of what is, of what you are, that brings about confusion and antagonism, shame and resentment. You do not have to tell me or another what you are, but be aware of what you are, whatever it is, pleasant or unpleasant: live with it without justifying or resisting it. Live with it without naming it; for the very term is a condemnation or an identification. Live with it without fear, for fear prevents communion, and without communion you cannot live with it. To be in communion is to love. Without love, you cannot wipe out the past; with love, there is no past. "

There's a good huxley quote i gotta find that lines up with this thought rather nicely i think.
#4
Or Kill Me / Time Travel Ramblings
May 27, 2008, 06:22:07 PM
I posted this originally in the wrong context, and so this is a repost.

The subject matter is just basically my irritation with the so-called grandfather "paradox" and the overwhelmingly abundant crappy interpretations of how time travel would work. 

time does not flow in a linear fashion... so the grandfather paradox and the "where are the travelers from the future if it can be done?" dilemna don't really apply.   This has been illustrated not only in physical models of time, but I think there are a lot of ways it can be illustrated on more philosophical terms.  There are probably tons of zen koans about time which illustrate the illusory nature of "common sense causality".

Time does not flow, or that is to say, it SEEMS to flow, but operates much differently than it appears on the surface.  There is no moving line forward that becomes a different series of events, causing the universe to implode or something, because you moved through space-time and made alterations.   Because THIS time, right now, while you're making the alterations... that moment is it's own special case.  It is now.  Nature need not make excuses for our tendency to confuse what is now with what is "to be" or "has been".  "To be" and "has been" misrepresent time, except when not taken literally and used only out of convenience.  If I go "back" in time to 10 years ago, and meet myself, I see no reason for any paradoxes, and I certainly wouldn't expect (like these stupid time-loop synchronistic movie interpretations) to suddenly REMEMBER meeting myself 10 years ago.  10 years "ago" is really 10 years "over there", from a physics standpoint.  Another coordinate, if you will.  Once it is now, it is neither here nor there, no matter what other space-time memory slices you're associating it with.  If you are here, now, it doesn't matter whether it's 1950 or 1970 or 2070.  If you kill yourself in 1980 and then jump back to present day, would you really expect to find that you ceased to exist?   

I certainly don't completely understand time, but it's weird to me that people get so hung up on the grandfather paradox, that they use it as justification for imposing new restraints on the physically possible.  I blame it on this:

Quote from:  WIKIPEDIAStephen Hawking once suggested that the absence of tourists from the future constitutes an argument against the existence of time travel—a variant of the Fermi paradox. Of course this would not prove that time travel is physically impossible, since it might be that time travel is physically possible but that it is never in fact developed (or was cautiously never used); and even if it is developed, Hawking notes elsewhere that time travel might only be possible in a region of spacetime that is warped in the right way, and that if we cannot create such a region until the future, then time travelers would not be able to travel back before that date, so "This picture would explain why we haven't been over run by tourists from the future."[10] Carl Sagan also once suggested the possibility that time travelers could be here, but are disguising their existence or are not recognized as time travelers.[11]

Talk about whacked out theories?  It's not that I subscribe to one opposing viewpoint.  I'm certainly not with the Presentists or the Eternalists (although I do agree the universe is "happening").  But why do we constantly suppose that nature can't possibly contradict our maps, when we already know goddamn well the maps are off.  We know enough about time travel to screw with our own notions of causality, and break and bend the rules the same way we have done with lightspeed impedence.  But it's as if we are following a map in the woods, and suddenly come upon a lake that isn't marked on the map.  We know damn well that lakes exist, but there's no explanation for how THIS lake is right HERE in THIS forest.  It's not on the map, so you know what?  It's not there.  I didn't see a lake, did you?  Mere hallucination if you did, because it's not on the map.  Besides, how many times have I walked through this same forest.  If there were lakes not on the map, then why am I not bumping into them all the time?    Why just THIS lake, in THIS forest?   My point is, until the limits have been clearly defined (and they never will be), why make skeptical conclusions FIRST?  If the contradiction on the map needs worked out, then why still assume that the implications of the contradiction can be explained by the map?

Theoretically time travel is possible.  We haven't seen any time travelers (that we recognized anyway), and we don't know what would happen for an observer to "alter" perceived causal trajectories and then return to his original location in space-time.  I'm gonna take a stab in the dark and give my best guess.  I'd say that if he returns to his original location in space-time, he's not going to notice a thing.  It will appear as if he made no alterations.  I'd guess that if his time machine has a better map than we do now, it will know how to follow that new causal trajectory and return him to a DIFFERENT and causally-associated space-time which appears very (maybe) similar to his original starting point (before any of this time-traveling nonsense).  This would be the world in which he had never been born, say, due to the alteration he made in a causally connected time slice (killed his grandfather).    He may very well find his laboratory is now a gas station.

I don't know, and this is a very MWI sort of guess, but it makes much more sense to me then to suppose that 1)time travel isn't possible despite it's theoretical possibility, BECAUSE we haven't seen people "from the future" and 2)if i went back in time and killed my grandfather, i would go poof!  OR the universe would go poof!  and then based on that 2nd absurd notion: 3)I can't go back and kill my grandfather after all.  The universe isn't "large" enough for processes that appear contradictory?

Well, anyway... We'll see if anyone is in the mood for this nonsense.
#5
The culmination of years of work by researchers at Microsoft sets a new standard in the 3-dimensional representation of vast amounts of data taken from telescopes, AND its free.   

http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/    :fnord:
#6
Or Kill Me / Liber AAA Excerpt
April 09, 2008, 03:17:57 PM
This is an excerpt from Liber AAA The Art of Anarchic Artha (A look through the void via Alan Watts) written by the OOO
and you may find it here in full: http://www.uncarved.org/OOO/watts.html

There is one notable Western philosopher, however, who seems to be aiming at something similar. Watts viewed the writings of Wittgenstein as a form of jnana-yoga, intellectual bending and stretching which makes the mind supple and ready to realise profoundly its identity with It. As he was led to point out, many of the questions that seem so deeply meaningful, such as "Why are we here?" and "What is Existence?" are strictly speaking meaningless; somehow we get ourselves tied in mental knots whereby this isn't understood or felt at all. (6)

Wittgenstein started out using the linguistic logic first developed by Frege and Russell, but in trying to explore the construction of language, ended up transcending philosophy itself in the process. His jnana-yoga starts with using Russellian analysis to show how grammatical form can conceal the logical form of a sentence. This analysis acts extremely corrosively to get rid of self-contradiction and hidden assumptions by applying self-evident rules of logic to analyse grammatical constructions and break them into their most basic component parts. Complex sentences very often feature a grammatical "clouding over" of logic as they compress assumptions into too little a space ("Try me for size, babe" would be a good example of a very complex construction hiding out in a simple sentence-what could it exactly mean?). This is where metaphysical problems tend to creep into arguments-they refer to things that don't exist, but we become grammatically deluded by the seemingly convincing layout of language that the questions raised actually mean something in the first place. And as language gains its meaning socially, we can already see a similarity (concerning ego) with eastern philosophies. Wittgenstein was originally involved with logical 'atomism', which states that complex sentences are derived by linkages of 'atomic sentences'. These are in turn built out of atomic facts, which are the basic, 'given' units of language that cannot be analysed further (e.g. saying 'apple' to refer to, well, an apple). This already brings to mind a link with zen-style mysticism via Korzybski, who liked to point out that the experience of 'water' is not a word-you can't drink the word 'water'.

The jnana-yoga reaches another level when we start to work out how atomic facts are linked with atomic sentences in order to be logically linked together into complex sentences. In order to make a proposition that links an atomic fact with an atomic sentence, you already have to think of an atomic sentence that goeswith it. This is because they're atomic, not complex facts. (All we can do here is recommend that the reader checks out some Wittgenstein, sorry). Any attempt to describe the linkage will be itself a logical, and therefore complex, statement, capable of being analysed back to its atomic components. Wittgenstein used peculiarly suggestive language to suggest how the linkage is actually made-he called it 'showing'. An ironic slant on the old Chinese saying "a showing is worth a thousand words"! We're also reminded of zen's insistence on 'direct showing' of reality. We 'picture' (not mentally, but logically) due to the activity linking the atomic fact with its sentence, . . . but . . . something's gone wrong here . . . what about the theory of talking about all this in the first place? It's not logical, it's not atomic, it's not even tautological. It must therefore be meaningless, complete nonsense. The whole of Wittgenstein's philosophy is a giant koan used to tease the mind out of linear, logical thinking, and "that whereof one cannot speak one must consign to silence." The parallel with mysticism is obvious.

There are also implications for the place of mystical writing in the overall scheme of things. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logicophilosophicus (which ends with That Sentence About Silence) states that the limits of thought are the limits of what can be said. Again, another feel of what "stopping thought" could imply. Philosophies can only analyse the use of grammar, grammar being how language use derives its sense and nonsense. This means that Wittgenstein required that philosophers stop lapsing into language use connected with non-philosophical thought. When analysed using Russellian logic, many apparently philosophical writings turn out to have chunks of language use that are instead connected with language "games" such as condemnation, commendation, and so on. This led Wittgenstein to state that his aim was to bring language back to its "everyday use", i.e. its proper home. Language can only truly be analysed as it is actually used. The use of course depends on the world view of the user, which is a given, non-analysable set of assumptions that are left after the analysis has reached the atomic level. A world view is the "logical space" inhabited by language, and is a framework of true/false constructive activity. It can only be 'pictured' through the use of language. World view cannot be viewed in a broader concept, as that broader concept would itself form a world view. In other words, to assume there is an essence of language is meaningless and pointless. The same words can be used in entirely different languages. This is perhaps what gives rise to that feeling that some people who are appearing to talk sense are talking drivel, and vice versa. This is very important when trying to deal with eastern philosophies, as people can become easy prey to the next passing guru who will sell another version of institutionality with nice eastern trappings. As Wittgenstein said, "DON'T LOOK FOR THE MEANING, LOOK FOR THE USE".

To press the point one more time, let us look at music again. Although all Western music uses a 12 tone scale, nobody (from the West) would ever dream of confusing Schoenberg with Wagner. The very essence of what their music is about, what it stands for, is utterly different. It is exactly this way with words. Words are empty (as John Cage enjoyed over the course of several records and a book).

==========

Don't actually have ANY time to comment right now, but thought this was relevant towards several recent conversations I've had on here, and very interesting.  I'll add my own thoughts on the content later.