"did you ask them what they believe? did they tell you? i think that they didn't say a thing. or else you misinterpreted. it's not the kind of answer that you can write on a piece of paper or a million pieces of paper or countably infinite pieces of paper. i quite expect you were out of your league. oh, don't get huffy with me. i keep telling you that you need to go there, or here, or elsewhence and pour tea down your kettle. no, it's not something you can buy in the store or demonstrate via religious faith, science, or epistemology, nor is it something that is a thing in the abstract or the concrete, nor is it nothing or nothingness. you keep complaining (quite loudly in fact) that all these cultural wars are nonproductive, and then you gingerly plunge into the fray loudly and drunkenly claiming your own epistemological ascendancy. see, i'm moving. at least, i'm staying still. i won't be here tomorrow. and neither will you, but i won't be elsewhere, and mayhaps you won't. no, it isn't magic, why would you think it was that? oh, argument from mystery! still harking back to logic as your own fundamental system of abstraction. you know i get more mileage out of arguing with objectivists! ok, ok, point taken, but it's not as if all of my marbles have crawled on the floor: there's a sequence of that's downright impossible: exclamations of incomprehensibility and multiply enfolded awareness, folded back onto itself, a transcendental blue purple vapor plume interpenetrating itself. dear gouraud shading no i'm not hawking this. you couldn't make a war from this stuff if you tried (at least not directly, and that's a separate question).
see, i can give you flotsam and jetsam, but it comes from and is gone to thusness: little farandolae, terraced chance-shelves, chromic engines, jumping color jacks, braided attention swirls, transelliptic orreries, and you'd be like "is that IT? is that the ULTIMATE THING?", and you wouldn't make the leap to jumping on the reference jungle and just losing yourself in the network, and that's precisely what you need to do: that's the essence of direct mystical experience, you stop trying to hold on, and just for once the boundaries between you and the universe, specifically, your ego and the universe evaporate. it's this chaotic froth weaving in and out all the time and you're just so immensely close, but everyone keeps saying that again and again: world doomsayers usually predict that tomorrow the world will end, and yes, tomorrow, the world does end. the world never ended, the world always ended, but that isn't the nub of the question, or the thing to hang your worries on.
if i were to use a change of contexts operation, you'd see that your opinions are meaningful: there are reasons that you hold them, either because they are authentic imagings of the world around you, or because in them you hold your stresses in order to survive -- even if they aren't authentic imagings of the world. but just staying in that mud puddle of yours is not productive. there's a, oh dear where do i start?
it's like this. you're a little civilization humming along, maybe you spend the first several thousand years acting and living like primates, and forming your own opinions of yourself as the highest form of life (as if!), and producing systems of self-appraisal which are hideously prescriptive and moreover aren't exhaustive catalogues of the type and kind of your creature that could exist because you spend so much time trying to bend the types of people you think there are to the types that you have imagined should be, and otherwise blasting the hell out of each other, and then finally, and invisibly, the world changes. this isn't the type of transformation that you can walk out in the street and see, or read about on the newspaper or the global information processing network, or even be aware of for a while until and only until it kind of gels that it has happened, and is happening, and will continue to happen. this is not a mystical or quasireligious or scientific or experiential transformation thus history will have a hard time coping with it. but more to the point once it has happened it takes much much deeper perspective to determine that it happened.
let's examine the impulse to find extraterrestrial life: why does this happen? because everything under the sun is dull, more to the point, people don't take the effort to avoid alienating other people, then fetishize the alien because it is the proverbial other. here 'extraterrestrial life' means 'sentient life'. but the whole (physical) space exploration program has a massive social cost, and it will mean bringing the problems of human beings to more places. your science fiction stories reflect this. the apposition of the desire of the different against the dull doldrums of the same when splayed against the primate territorial acquisition, defense, and resource control methodologies leaves a sorry taste in one's mouth. waxing poetic: you are part of larger structures. astronomers are the galaxy's way of understanding it's large term structure. it would be a sorry state of affairs if it were so easy for young species to continue their idiocies on grander and larger scales. what is farther away is so much more imminently close in the mind than it is in physical space. the anthroposopher Straywasp Gwongrive hypothesized that one reason for the general relativistic properties of space was to act as an in built speed limit of the territorial activities of primitive species. and make an anthropic argument you don't: you already know exactly what happens in universes where the speed of light is easy to cheat, just look at your science fiction. with great capacity, comes great responsibility, some philosopher said. the scope of your species' capacity to deal with energy corresponds to your species' capacity to deal with itself, and correspondingly to the length and reach of each member. there are shortcuts, but these do not involve phallic objects launched at ridiculous speeds to other worlds for the purposes of colonization. " -- Zanhai Arripongelet of the Codewarper Valve of the Fifth Thylakoid of the Greater Migrating Shenzoro Clade of Aunhex in the Yolk of Diparwanzion.
see, i can give you flotsam and jetsam, but it comes from and is gone to thusness: little farandolae, terraced chance-shelves, chromic engines, jumping color jacks, braided attention swirls, transelliptic orreries, and you'd be like "is that IT? is that the ULTIMATE THING?", and you wouldn't make the leap to jumping on the reference jungle and just losing yourself in the network, and that's precisely what you need to do: that's the essence of direct mystical experience, you stop trying to hold on, and just for once the boundaries between you and the universe, specifically, your ego and the universe evaporate. it's this chaotic froth weaving in and out all the time and you're just so immensely close, but everyone keeps saying that again and again: world doomsayers usually predict that tomorrow the world will end, and yes, tomorrow, the world does end. the world never ended, the world always ended, but that isn't the nub of the question, or the thing to hang your worries on.
if i were to use a change of contexts operation, you'd see that your opinions are meaningful: there are reasons that you hold them, either because they are authentic imagings of the world around you, or because in them you hold your stresses in order to survive -- even if they aren't authentic imagings of the world. but just staying in that mud puddle of yours is not productive. there's a, oh dear where do i start?
it's like this. you're a little civilization humming along, maybe you spend the first several thousand years acting and living like primates, and forming your own opinions of yourself as the highest form of life (as if!), and producing systems of self-appraisal which are hideously prescriptive and moreover aren't exhaustive catalogues of the type and kind of your creature that could exist because you spend so much time trying to bend the types of people you think there are to the types that you have imagined should be, and otherwise blasting the hell out of each other, and then finally, and invisibly, the world changes. this isn't the type of transformation that you can walk out in the street and see, or read about on the newspaper or the global information processing network, or even be aware of for a while until and only until it kind of gels that it has happened, and is happening, and will continue to happen. this is not a mystical or quasireligious or scientific or experiential transformation thus history will have a hard time coping with it. but more to the point once it has happened it takes much much deeper perspective to determine that it happened.
let's examine the impulse to find extraterrestrial life: why does this happen? because everything under the sun is dull, more to the point, people don't take the effort to avoid alienating other people, then fetishize the alien because it is the proverbial other. here 'extraterrestrial life' means 'sentient life'. but the whole (physical) space exploration program has a massive social cost, and it will mean bringing the problems of human beings to more places. your science fiction stories reflect this. the apposition of the desire of the different against the dull doldrums of the same when splayed against the primate territorial acquisition, defense, and resource control methodologies leaves a sorry taste in one's mouth. waxing poetic: you are part of larger structures. astronomers are the galaxy's way of understanding it's large term structure. it would be a sorry state of affairs if it were so easy for young species to continue their idiocies on grander and larger scales. what is farther away is so much more imminently close in the mind than it is in physical space. the anthroposopher Straywasp Gwongrive hypothesized that one reason for the general relativistic properties of space was to act as an in built speed limit of the territorial activities of primitive species. and make an anthropic argument you don't: you already know exactly what happens in universes where the speed of light is easy to cheat, just look at your science fiction. with great capacity, comes great responsibility, some philosopher said. the scope of your species' capacity to deal with energy corresponds to your species' capacity to deal with itself, and correspondingly to the length and reach of each member. there are shortcuts, but these do not involve phallic objects launched at ridiculous speeds to other worlds for the purposes of colonization. " -- Zanhai Arripongelet of the Codewarper Valve of the Fifth Thylakoid of the Greater Migrating Shenzoro Clade of Aunhex in the Yolk of Diparwanzion.
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