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.

making Relativism palatable to Realists

Trapped by their fears, Realists retreat screaming whenever faced with a Relativist idea. Simply can’t swallow it. And they retreat into exactly the same lack of intellectual discipline they accuse litcrit of. Conditioned by our cruel education system, that treats children as cattle, they refrain from any philosophy not geared towards providing “correct answers to the test”. To win the argument, then, you should proceed not with sound argumentation — that would only lead them into rationalization — but instead with masking relativism’s sour taste of personal responsibility.

to comprehend as measurable familiarity

The understanding of human beings is vastly taken to be powerful, a source of power, the thing that makes us as a species “Kings over the Earth”. We are not kings. And to understand does not mean you can do anything. It just means that, if you could, you would be more likely to know you could.

Understanding is just a kind of familiarity. It just means you are used to something. You’ve done it times enough that you can reasonably expect to be able to cope with most of the outcomes.

There are some times, though, where different people, with different life histories, can compare their familiarity in matters where their experiences had little in common to one another. How exactly does this work?

to live on your shoes

What kaos-people mockingly refer to as “consensual reality” will sometimes be taken up by realists as a misguided attempt at showing that cognitive dissonance is an exception rather than the norm, that their inability disprove the relativity of knowledge does not make knowledge relative.

Worse still, they will sometimes frame the whole point as “OK, maybe I do not know what reality is, but that does not matter, it is not important, what is important is the reality that everyone agrees on”. Can you spot the malice there? The pretence of humility stands here as proof that their position is the only one that is valid.