greek prejudice

A classic problem in Philosophy is the Body|Mind controversy. Is Mind just a consequence of matter? If so, why is it so difficult to reproduce? Why so devious to train? And also: Why so fond of fiction, of stuff that simply is not there?

Conversely, is the material world just a figment of our imaginations? Just some overblown fantasy from meagre stimuli not correlated to any external reality? Then why can’t we fictionalize just as we please? Interpretation seems capable of the most outrageous silliness, but shall every last thing come from interpretation? And if it does, is it all false?

Questions without answers if there ever were any. But i’ll try to show that the paradoxical nature of this questions stem from a very real practice, and that maybe we should offer ethical answers to epistemic problems.

3 worlds

In all dualities we want to go to one side (that is, MIND, and the release from inertia and the enhancement of freedom), but the means to do it always seem to lie exactly in the side that negates it (that is BODY, and the power of presence and of being concretely real). In the end, we want more MIND in order to get more BODY. But every time we go in this direction we get farther and farther from what we want, exactly as we are getting nearer.

In fact, we try to go to a third world, a third point beyond the dichotomy, and it becomes an impossible goal which we can’t stop following.

This third shade, this World-3, is not less direct than World-1, nor less real, it is just different. But contrary to World-1, you can never tackle it quantitatively. It is never possible to brute-force World-3, neither with muscle, nor money, nor spam. Thus, BODY-through-MIND is always difficult.

ode to the unknown dj

i just got there
and i couldn’t stop
my feet were bouncing
my hands were shaking
heartbeat over and over
there was no time
no time to breathe
no time to rest
no time to talk
no time to check the fscking lineup to find out your name
— i danced
still hoping to find you
at one of those festivals

competition and the lens-flare of vanities

Given that we believe in this myth of natural selection, that life-forms optimize on the long run through simple difference of reproductive success ratios, we must check what fitness means in “survival of the fittest”. As it turns out, the common sense is fairly mistaken about this issue, which becomes clear when we contemplate the word-tension «competition»: In the proverbial primal jungle, the monkey and the panther do not compete, in the sense of both vying for a bigger share of the same amount of reproductive success, instead each has an independent reproduction rate, determined by an staggeringly high number of factors — amongst which only one is the other’s reproductive success rate. Thus, it is better to say the panther competes with all the other panthers, the monkey with all other monkeys.

And that is why designers are such shallow, vain, pompous pricks! Because humans must compete with humans. More precisely, design work can only gain leverage when it is easy to subvert into human to human competition.

Almost the same intro could be used to say that «success» (i.e., for example, a bigger apartment) is only a means to get more sex (and through it reproductive success), but nevertheless it keeps us from cheat-flavoured complexity-collapsing strategies (as it, for example, constrains your daily experience to the same settings). That’s why it is impolite to ask a potential mate for his bank account…)

[from some very old notebook]