Is Discorianism an ideology?

[LMNO]

Naw, the barstool is a too-easy convenience.



In fact, over-use of the barstool can blind a person to the Weird Shit that can't be placed in the Pragmatist's box.

[Thurnez Isa]

by that defination what distinquishes a religion from an ideology?

[LHX]

Naw, the barstool is a too-easy convenience.



In fact, over-use of the barstool can blind a person to the Weird Shit that can't be placed in the Pragmatist's box.

aha

interesting

if the barstool is a challenge to the abtract-alites


what is the subsequent challenge to the pragmatists?

[LMNO]

O:M


Actually, I'm not sure.

As we can easily demonstarte with Doc Howl and TGRR, it seems pretty difficult to convince a pragmatist that the abstract can be useful.

[LHX]

O:M vs Barstool

Bruce Lee vs Mike Tyson

[Jasper]

More like Hulk Hogan vs Termnator, a decade from now when Hogan can't control when he pees and wears flannel.

Edit: Oh right, my point.

O:M is about as relevant to the machine as MW is to actual spirituality. 

Personally my "Perscription" would be to *fix* the machine like so many fixed posts on these forums.  I have no objections to a machine.tm that worked toward something we can get behind.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Yeah, that's why I threw in the E-Prime codewords.

Otherwise it looks like:

D: The world as people see it.
P: The world as people should see it.
S: Our Way or we drag you down the highway, motherfucker.

HIMEOBSed

D, P and S: HIMEOBS way

HIMEOBS does not recognise the word 'or' in this context, so neither do you!

[Triple Zero]

what is the subsequent challenge to the pragmatists?

O:M

Actually, I'm not sure.

As we can easily demonstarte with Doc Howl and TGRR, it seems pretty difficult to convince a pragmatist that the abstract can be useful.

this is an interesting point.

i would guess it's almost impossible to demonstrate the usefulness of the abstract, without join/playing the game of the pragmatist, and thereby validating their viewpoint.

well, this is in fact not really true. mistakes were made, arguments got convoluted, shit happened.

the problem is when you start confusing the abstract (symbols etc) with the intangible and the airheads.

i always compare it to higher mathematics: i can prove that two plus three equals five. for this i need symbols.
it starts with defining what a number is (a bunch of rewrite rules).
then we define the plus operator (another bunch of rewrite rules).
then we write down the symbols <two> <plus> <three>
then we apply the rewrite rules (and in this simple example there's only one way to apply them) until we see the symbol <five>
and then we write QED

(i can write down the exact proof if anyone's interested, but i'll skip it for now)

now there are some observations to be made for this:
- we made a few assumptions, that we haven't proven. for example we didn't define what equals means. this is in fact a fairly difficult philosophical bootstrapping problem, because you can't really "define" anything, without having a notion of "equality", but the important point here is, that we can gloss over this assumption and still be left with a thorough explanation of why two plus three equals five, (with the implicit sidenote "according to a certain notion of equality).

- this is a fucking simple example. everybody knows that 2+3=5 right? so what's the use of writing all this down? the answer is of course, that with these basics you are making a solid theoretical foundation to really pull apart the weird quirks that is Number Theory. and more profound proofs like "there is no highest prime number" or "this statement is unprovable" (that's Goedel), are only a few steps away.

- the fact that there are a lot of people out there (ab)using numbers to "separate people from their money" (think about lottery, loans, banking, statistics, round-off errors, and much more), or people that say the most wrong things about numbers and actually believe in it (again think statistics), does not say anything about the usefulness of Number Theory!!

can you see where i'm going with this?

to me, most of the occult systems are big complicated collections of "common sense through the ages", things that people think goes without saying. things like "before there was something, there was nothing", "before there was form, there was force", "most things have more than one side", "there are things a human cannot perceive" etc etc, REALLY simple dumb things, just like 2, 3, + and 5.

but there's a whole load of these common sense things, and when you make symbols for these bits of common sense, you can put them together in big new ways, make symbols for that, and continue in this way, which is for me, close enough to a Scientific method as would fit the purpose. the purpose being "figuring stuff out, about how things work".

now, something like "before there was something, there was nothing" is of course an assumption. we don't know if it's the case (though the static-universe model of cosmology is getting out of fashion in Science). but by just keeping in mind that we have made assumptions, we can reason further and can come to interesting conclusions (again with the implicit sidenote of having made these assumptions)

okay and this is what i find as my personal use, and interest, for studying a few occult systems. they teach me a ruleset, from which i can use symbols to reason with "common sense".
now the rulesets aren't nearly as strict, rigid and thorough as current day mathematics. but i don't think this is because it's a "fuzzy" or "fluffy" area of research, just that the theories are quite old and dusty, and are in dire need of some good updating (which i may do some day, or maybe not), in any way, quite comparable to the state mathematics was in several hundreds of years ago.

as i said, this, and nothing more or less is what i find useful about studying occult systems. i admit, at first, before i knew much about it, i was under the impression that there was supposed to be something "magickqal" to it, but once you learn more about it, you see it's all really down-to-earth, common sense, no magiqal hosrie stuff.
i compare it to learning about Artifical Intelligence and Neural Networks, at first i thought it was magical, creating a "soul" in a computer .. but not really, it's just lines of computer code, numbers and statistics.
same with hacking, at first it seems like Neo and Trinity using their mind and willpower to bend the machines rules .. but not really, it's just taking advantage of errors in computer code, and having a thorough idea of how things work.

ok i know i shoulda wrote this last week or so when all the discussion about it was going on, but some personal things got in the way, so there was no time.

i hope it made sense
i hope i don't open a new can of worms
i hope it doesn't make me look stupid either

[LMNO]

Hey, thanks for this.

With permission, I'm yoinking this.

[Triple Zero]

what, you read all of that in under three minutes?

edit: anyway of course i grant you permission to yoink

[LMNO]

I process symbols quickly.


heh.

[LHX]

maybe its not our place to convince anybody of anything


the alternative, of course, is to assemble a barrage of material

eventually somebody will wonder how it gets done and what kind of people are behind it all
and they wonder why they cant do it themselves

[P3nT4gR4m]

maybe its not our place to convince anybody of anything


the alternative, of course, is to assemble a barrage of material

eventually somebody will wonder how it gets done and what kind of people are behind it all
and they wonder why they cant do it themselves

... and then we offer to sell them it if they build us a nice big comfy temple.

[P3nT4gR4m]

(i can write down the exact proof if anyone's interested, but i'll skip it for now)

fraid I'm gonna have to ask you to do just that. Long story short - I got in an argument at work today and stand to lose £10 if two plus three doesn't equal 4.

[was nevar that good at sums]

[Triple Zero]

ok ok

* part the first: numbers

we define a symbol and we call it zero: 0
the symbol zero doesn't do anything, it's just a symbol.

we define a function and we call it the successor function: S

this function also doesn't do anything, it's just that you can apply
it to one symbol, and since we only got one symbol yet, it looks like this:
S(0)
now this is of course also a symbol, so we can apply the function again
and we get this:
S(S(0))
we can also do it three times:
S(S(S(0)))
and four times, and five times, and so on.

now, we're gonna make things a bit more easy on ourselves, and introduce a few notational conveniences, doesn't change the meaning or working, just another we to write it down:

- we can leave out the parentheses, so we get 0, S0, SS0, SSS0, etc. we only leave out the parentheses if it causes no ambiguities.

- since we know the same languages, we can also call these new symbols by the number of S-s that appear before the 0: zero, one two three, 0, 1, 2, 3, een twee drie, ein zwei drei, etc etc. the definition of language i will leave to the linguists. also for the rest of the proofs we'll be using the above notation for clarity.

* part the second: the + operator

we define an operator and we call it "plus": +

this operator also doesn't do anything yet, but it kinda works like the function, except you can apply it to two symbols, and you put the operator in the middle.

(sidenote: we call this infix notation, which happens to be the natural way we use most of our operators, it also happens to be one of the more inconvenient notations, as you need parentheses and orders of precedence to solve ambiguities. most computers use prefix notation internally, which does not have these ambiguities, so this example would look like + 2 3 = 5. there is also postfix notation which is just as useful as prefix, except that hardly anybody uses it)

now we can make a whole new set of symbols, things that look like this:
S0 + SSSSSS0
SSS0 + SS0
..and so on

now, in order to have the plus operator actually do something, we're gonna introduce a few very simple rules. these are simple rewrite rules, they are very exact, you are allowed no liberties with these. think of them as being only able to use the search/replace function in your text-editor to make these formulas. it's the exactness of this that makes certain you won't make any accidental mistakes, because we're merely working with symbols, so you cannot apply any knowledge you happen to have about these symbols, only just the rewrite rules. (the other rules we have had so far are called production rules, btw, cause they only show how to produce certain symbols, where the rewrite rules show how to transform symbols into others, *ahem* just like alchemy *cough*)
the rules are:

(a) - X + 0 = X
(b) - X + SY = S(X + Y)

very simple rules. these are the two basic properties that completely define the plus operator. we need to create these rules, to define the operator, if we would have picked different ones, we might have ended up with a differnent operator (like minus, or multiplication).
first one says X plus zero equals X, we can agree with that right?
second one says X plus the successor of Y equals the successor of X plus Y. maybe a bit harder to wrap your head around it, but it's in fact so obvious, you might miss it. it says that 3 + 1+5 = 1+(3 + 5). got that?

then we can move on

* part the third: the proof

what needs to be proven: 2 + 3 equals 5

we will start by writing down 2 + 3 in the successor notation:
SS0 + SSS0
this is a valid sentence ( = sequence of symbols), according to the production rules of the symbol zero, the successor function and the plus operator.

now we can notice that this sentence fits the general shape of rewrite rule (b), so let's apply it:
SS0 + SSS0 = S(SS0 + SS0)
you may notice that the bit inside the parentheses in the right hand part of the above, again fits the mold of rewrite rule (b), so let's apply it:
S(SS0 + SS0) = S(S(SS0 + S0))
again the bit inside the inner parentheses fits rewrite rule (b), so once more:
S(S(SS0 + S0)) = S(S(S(SS0 + 0)))
now we have a slightly different situation, the innermost parentheses bit fits rule (a), which we apply:
S(S(S(SS0 + 0))) = S(S(S(SS0)))
what we have now on the right hand side is perhaps already clear to some, but for completeness sake we can remove the parentheses and end up with:
SSSSS0, or more popularly known as five

QED

sorry Silly...