dagblog - Comments for "On Knowing and Not Knowing"

Seems our evolution is

PeraclesPlease — Mon, 09 Jan 2017 09:31:00 +0000

In reply to On Knowing and Not Knowing

Seems our evolution is focused on getting taller and taller basketball players (or in the US' case, body mass - bigger and more like a couch potato or football offensive lineman) rather than say mental / psychic expansion.

Or maybe no one's measured it? How big's your aura compared to great-grandma?

PP... I as you...

oldenGoldenDecoy — Mon, 09 Jan 2017 08:07:41 +0000

In reply to I remember an ashram in rural

PP... I as you...

Many many scattered pieces...

Throughout the Universe.

~OGD~

I remember an ashram in rural

PeraclesPlease — Mon, 09 Jan 2017 06:31:00 +0000

In reply to Peracles... nice... very very

I remember some ceremony in an ashram in rural India, stepping outside the chaotic din of conch shells and gongs into the quiet night with the amazing swaths of gleaming stars above, my head exploding - alone but not alone. No one drew from my epiphany, no references on episodes of Mad Men, but still remember. SE Asia can do funny things to one's mind. I remember drinking gin in Cambodia, the geckos pasted on the sliding glass door, peering, wanting to get in. We are the geckos - tiny lizard brains, just need a drink, something on TV, be where the action is...

Were you that sobbing solitary soldier pretending to be a golden Buddha, maybe being Buddha? How much of your soul is still in that rice field? I've got mine scattered all over the world.

Spent a lot of time on

PeraclesPlease — Mon, 09 Jan 2017 06:24:20 +0000

In reply to The freedom or servitude

Spent a lot of time on Bateson at one point. The story of the trainer trying to teach the dolphin to do *new* tricks, metalearning, the dolphin's frustration with do-reward-do-no reward. I want that breakthrough moment where all of a sudden the dolphin gets it, *new tricks*, and in a flash does 5 new tricks. I want this for humanity, all people, a step up.

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart
until, in our own despair, against our will,
comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

But why is wisdom painful, and in drops rather than rivulets or buckets? Who are these Gods dispensing grace as if it were gold or crack cocaine or food rations to the starving? Are they real? Do they still hold sway over our destiny, keeping us in preschool until we're ready to progress to the mental major leaguea?

One reason (not the only) we

PeraclesPlease — Mon, 09 Jan 2017 06:11:24 +0000

In reply to Love this, dude.

One reason (not the only) we have to control so much is we know so little and learn so slow. We've had what, 3000 years since the Greeks and our evolutionary breakthrough is being able to tap on glass instead of stone?

We've settled for parlor tricks, not knowledge, the Walmart bargain bin version of the mind.

Peracles... nice... very very

oldenGoldenDecoy — Mon, 09 Jan 2017 02:12:34 +0000

In reply to On Knowing and Not Knowing

Peracles... nice... very very nice...

How do we know we know? And what to know? And when?

Here's something of mine from 1966 while I was in the Navy in Memphis.

The "crystal turns to clay" ???

See: BBC 2016 - The idea that life began as clay crystals is 50 years old

See: "...how the end is wept In a South Asian night"

The "frog choir" ??? Note: Long before Harry Potter.

The "Golden Decoy" ???

~OGD~

The freedom or servitude

moat — Sun, 08 Jan 2017 23:25:59 +0000

In reply to On Knowing and Not Knowing

The freedom or servitude thing has been going on for some time now. I am not sure that there has been much progress since Spinoza pointed out that people get trapped in self defeating ideas about the "will" and hope for things that will only be crushed by the unfolding of the world.

Bateson was also a thinker who tried to separate the process that leads to different kinds of life coming into being from presuming to explain everything that happens.

Maybe Ivan Illich is a good person to listen to in regards to what "understanding" should mean:

Efforts to find a new balance in the global milieu depend on the deinstitutionalization of values.

The suspicion that something is structurally wrong with the vision of homo faber is common to a growing minority in capitalist, Communist, and "underdeveloped" countries alike. This suspicion is the shared characteristic of a new elite. To it belong people of all classes, incomes, faiths, and civilizations. They have 'become wary of the myths of the majority: of scientific utopias, of ideological diabolism, and of the expectation of the distribution of goods and services with some degree of equality. They share with the majority the sense of being trapped. They share with the majority the awareness that most new policies adopted by broad consensus consistently lead to results which are glaringly opposed to their stated aims. Yet whereas the Promethean majority of would-be spacemen still evades the structural issue, the emergent minority is critical of the scientific deus ex machina, the ideological panacea, and the hunt for devils and witches. This minority begins to formulate its suspicion that our constant deceptions tie us to contemporary institutions as the chains bound Prometheus to his rock. Hopeful trust and classical irony (eironeia) must conspire to expose the Promethean fallacy.

From Deschooling Society

In other words, who "understands" things for themselves? The vision of the homo faber serves individuals and corporations alike. Illich is saying that something else is needed. It won't simply be given to us.

Love this, dude.

Obey — Sun, 08 Jan 2017 23:20:27 +0000

In reply to On Knowing and Not Knowing

Love this, dude.

Much to think about, but my first reaction is a gut feeling. One that your conclusion feels dark and not empowering despite the superpower talk - being a combination of Thor and Ironman should sound appealing. We were aiming too low with those jetpacks we put on the wishlist way back eh.

So I kinda sorta want to pick at your conclusion: "See, the slip up in the garden wasn't about do vs control - it was about knowing."

It was about knowing ourselves, which turned out to be somewhat embarrassing, because we had parts we weren't in control of - bits that got excited all by themselves, and bits whose effect on others some of us couldn't quite control (boobies, mostly, as far as my sunday school memory serves). These were just the most salient examples of the general idea of what was gained at the price of paradise lost - self knowledge and self-control which brought also knowledge of the limits of our control over ourselves and others. Sure we're animals, and our animal nature is to some extent outside of our control, and there is nothing we can do to fully excise it - like a problematic prostate, excising too much leads to ... dysfunction of a different sort. Equally, faster, deeper knowledge of the wider world won't get us what is important, it gives power but not controlled use of it. Ferchrissakes, every damn superhero film is waving this well-worn moral in our faces.

I don't think the solution to anything is a turbo charged knowledge machine. Control. It's still about control. Self-control. Which is knowledge of a sort - knowledge of what is in our power, the acceptance of the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can... etc.

Just a first shot at what you bring to mind. Grinding once again at my neural grooves.

Not a political discussion.

PeraclesPlease — Sun, 08 Jan 2017 23:05:50 +0000

In reply to Okay, I would definitely like

Not a political discussion. Evil just ignorance? Hardly. But presumably we're talking about uberwisdom, and the conditions that invite buying into a higher order. Sure, some will be greedy, no idea what that means in practice since this is such an absurdly conjectural diary anyway. Buy them pizza till they go away?

Anyway, instead of autotrepanation, I've decided mental mutation is more my speed. Let the rest eat cake if need be, though happy to share.

Okay, I would definitely like

Peter Schwartz — Sun, 08 Jan 2017 22:40:41 +0000

In reply to Less distorted perception;

Okay, I would definitely like all that, but doesn't its value depend on whether one uses all these abilities for good or ill? Or do you believe that evil is just ignorance? IOW, could someone have all that and still think Trump was the better candidate? Just asking; obviously, I don't know.