Denmark Vesey: Damn. I Am More Impressed With This Cat, Than I Am With Myself. CNu Continues To Elevate The Discourse

Friday, September 21, 2007

Damn. I Am More Impressed With This Cat, Than I Am With Myself. CNu Continues To Elevate The Discourse

Michael Fisher said...

What COLOR does Mr. Jekyll classify himself as? And Mr. Hyde?
cnulan said... Michael, in your haste to apply the MF-WSD reductio ad absurdam, you forgot to consider or answer the very simple question I posed upthread; who exactly teaches spiders to spin webs, bees to construct hives, and beavers to build damns? If you have no idea, then simply say so. In so doing, you will have answered the shot-calling question for human beings, as well. at least so far as you know....,

15 comments:

Anonymous said...: that's good isht.; Sep 21, 2007, 11:24:00 AM
Denmark Vesey said...: The boy aint bullshittin', is he Jasai?; Sep 21, 2007, 11:33:00 AM
Anonymous said...: man!

Just read the most amazing quote:

‘If they can get you to ask the wrong questions, then they don’t have to worry about the answers.”

Thomas Pynchon, “Gravity’s Rainbow”; Sep 21, 2007, 11:36:00 AM
Anonymous said...: If no one can understand, are you really saying anything?

(and I have no qualms sayin I dont know what in the world CNulan is talking about since I'm smart as hell)

But hey, I guess I cant know everything.; Sep 21, 2007, 12:21:00 PM
Denmark Vesey said...: Robyn,

You are not supposed to know. You are supposed to understand.

Knowledge is overrated.

Understanding is more of a growth than a "figuring out". You smart, so give it a minute to take root, grow, blossom and bear fruit.; Sep 21, 2007, 12:34:00 PM
Anonymous said...: "You are not supposed to know. You are supposed to understand.

Knowledge is overrated."
-DV

I am fannin' myself and screamin' Amen!

If I ain't learned nothin' in this life, I understand this!

That was enlightened brotha DV. Gotdamn enlightened!; Sep 21, 2007, 12:41:00 PM
Anonymous said...: I also don't quite understand what Cnulan is saying..... "who teaches spiders to spin webs, bees to construct hives and beavers to build dams" Is it not programmed into their DNA? at least that's what I've always thought.
Who calls the shots for what ?? I'm lost!; Sep 21, 2007, 3:45:00 PM
J.C. said...: No Accra, I think it is the other guy that is lost.
He is a word smith.
He is going to wow you with bullshit.
Sociologists do that.; Sep 21, 2007, 5:14:00 PM
Michael Fisher said...: Craig.

This is what you're saying: People don't have free will.

Prove it.; Sep 22, 2007, 1:40:00 AM
cnulan said...: Michael,

You haven't answered a single question put to you, yet now you want to philosophize, eh?

I haven't asked you to believe anything that you can't verify for yourself. That said, I'll make a few more observations for you to consider philosophically.

The being of two people can differ from one another more than the being of a rock and of an animal. This is exactly what people do not understand. And they do not understand that knowledge depends on being. Not only do they not understand this latter but they definitely don't want to understand it.

Especially in Western culture it is believed that a man may possess great knowledge, for example be a competent scientist, make discoveries, advance science, and have the being of a petty, egoistic, caviling, mean, envious, vain, naïve, and absent-minded man. Will is a question of being, not knowledge.

The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness. And ‘consciousness’ cannot evolve unconsciously. The evolution of man is the evolution of his will, and ‘will’ cannot evolve involuntarily. The evolution of man is the evolution of his power of doing, and ‘doing’ cannot be the result of things which ‘happen.’

You want to talk about free will as if it was an ordinary, everyday, and run of the mill thing. That's simply absurd. It's the functional equivalent of stating that people are basically honest when in fact we all know that lying is a routine baseline for social existence.

Free will is a sign of a being of a very high order of existence as compared with the being of an ordinary man. Only one who is in possession of such a being can do. All others are merely automata, put into action by external forces like machines or clockwork toys, acting as much and as long as the wound-up spring within them acts, and not capable of adding anything to its force.

That's what I think about "free will".

For the past couple days here, however, the concept of free will hasn't really entered the discussion at all. Instead, the subject DV introduced, and on which I further expounded was the subject of addictions. In the course of this exposition, I proposed something novel and specific about the purpose of Christic teaching and praxis. As for the addictions hypothesis, I provided several instances of peer reviewed research supportive of the same.

At the end of the day Michael, it's a working hypothesis. It's an hypothesis that provides a plausible explanatory basis for your WSD hypothesis. (or do you really want to bank on collective, conspiratorial, freely-willed evil?)

I believe that people by-and-large do behave mechanically. In their individual and group behavioural manifestations the mechanical nature of what we do can be clearly and comprehensively demonstrated.

If I were to task you with performing some routine function, and did an fMRI showing where in your brain the corresponding activity supportive of that task occurs, we would see that you performed the task mechanically and then a fraction of a second later, your speech center would activate indicative that you thought about it. (engaged in subvocalized speech after the fact)

That's how the human machine ordinarily works. Little-to-no free will involved.

Now, I also proposed that there are systems of human psychological development and cultures of competency whose purpose is to free people from our mechanical natures. That in fact, some folks have recognized for a very long time that something is very wrong with the picture and have devised methods and means to enable us to incrementally alter our ordinary waking state.

In addition, such people have developed alternative views or models of reality and have preserved these across centuries (millenia) for the edification of future rehabilitated dopamine addicts....,

Take it or leave it Mike, it's all there and available for your personal consideration and verification....,; Sep 22, 2007, 7:05:00 AM
J.C. said...: Pardon me but what you are saying is nothing new, and has been known from ancient times.
Science has proven it also.
Pavlov made it clear.
Gurdjieff wrote about it.
Why make it into a flowery exibition, and sound like you are saying any thing new here.
By stating your ideas and others ideas in a Neuro Linguistic Programming mode you destroy the interesting aspect of what you are trying to talk about.; Sep 22, 2007, 1:10:00 PM
cnulan said...: Michael,

Here's a recent talk on the subject of free will...., Blackmore is not one of my personal favorites, but she's competent, fair, and does a decent job for an academic...,; Sep 22, 2007, 1:48:00 PM
Michael Fisher said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; Sep 22, 2007, 2:27:00 PM
Michael Fisher said...: cnulan...

You have not proven that free will doesn't exist, you've stipulated that it does exist, though as a result of evolutionary mechanisms.

Besides that, your elucidations are tautological: "The evolution of man is the evolution of his will, and ‘will’ cannot evolve involuntarily."

If that ain't a tautological statement despite the quotation marks you put around the second "will", I don't know what is.

Given that free will exists, the question I have for your question...

"do you really want to bank on collective, conspiratorial, freely-willed evil?"

... is why not?

Cause at the end of the day, "evil" is relative. From the point of view of a chicken that is raised to be food for a human, the humans involved in the process are evil. No? From the point of view of the humans all that has to be done to escape the label evil is to abstract the chicken from it's existence as an individual.

Tyson Farms is most certainly a conspiracy of evil against chickens.

If you can do it with a chicken you can do it with a human. Abstract a human from the human's individuality in your own mind, and you can do all kinds of shit to him/her and the notion of evil doesn't even have to enter your mind.; Sep 22, 2007, 2:28:00 PM
J.C. said...: Ok, I repeat now to the both of you hopelessly enamored clods of abstract concepts, "Pardon me but what you are saying is nothing new, and has been known from ancient times.
Science has proven it also.
Pavlov made it clear.
Gurdjieff wrote about it.
Why make it into a flowery exibition, and sound like you are saying any thing new here, when you are not ?
By stating your ideas and others ideas in a Neuro Linguistic Programming mode you destroy the interesting aspect of what you are trying to talk about.; Sep 22, 2007, 10:44:00 PM

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"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

The founders of the American state understood that the proper functioning of a democracy required an educated electorate. It is this understanding that justifies a system of public education and that led slaveholders to resist the spread of literacy among their chattels. But the meaning of "educated" has changed beyond recognition in two hundred years. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer sufficient to decide on public policy. Now we need quantum mechanics and molecular biology. The knowledge required for political rationality, once available to the masses, is now in the possession of a specially educated elite, a situation that creates a series of tensions and contradictions in the operation of representative democracy.

Margaret Sanger. Woman, Morality, and Birth Control. New York: New York Publishing Company, 1922. P

Lord Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science On Society (Routledge Press: New York, 1951).

Lord Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science On Society (Routledge Press: New York, 1951).

"At present the population of the world is increasing at about 58,000 per diem. War, so far, has had no very great effect on this increase, which continued throughout each of the world wars.. War has hitherto been disappointing in this respect, but perhaps bacteriological war may prove effective. If a Black Death could spread throughout the world once in every generation, survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full. The state of affairs might be unpleasant, but what of it?"

*George Orwell (1903-1950) English novelist, critic