how to avoid schizophrenia, or how realism and relativism stem from the same concerns, or why i cannot accept that we all believe the same things with different names

It’s become a kind of an habit with me to bash Realists. The problem is: i do agree with them in a lot of things. That led Gorm to declare that we both believe the same things, and that my insistence that “THERE IS NO TRUTH” was a mere confusion in terms.

Take for example Levi Bryant from Larval Subjects: he quotes all the guys i’m reading and liking, he’s got terribly cool post titles (that make his blog much harder to “Mark all as read” than it really is). He proposes the Flat Ontology, which i discussed in there is only circumstance. He’s got this Principle of Translation thing (“There is no transportation without translation”), which is great, indeed, and which i had tangentially touched when treating the Fundamental Problem of Communication. Me loves such ideas, but i believe they are actually proofs of my point of view, so: what gives?

We do not believe the same things with different names, but indeed we are trying to deal with the same issues. At that specific point, in our intellectual histories, we are trying to avoid schizophrenia.

opacity of mind evidence

If you need further evidence that the mind does not know the mind, consider the following. Sometimes i wanna fart, sometimes i wanna shit, and i almost always know which is which. But if i pay attention, the sensation is exactly the same. There’s nothing different about the two stimuli, but even then i still know the difference. My mind is not transparent to myself.

the thinking machine

The (misguided) comparisons between brain and computer usually begin by stating that the brain is massively parallel, working into multiple threads of thought at the same time.

But it just isn’t.

The brain is not a massively parallel processor. It does not process more than one symbol-chain at the same time. The brain deals with only one thing at a time, and it can’t even vary this one thing: the brain is always dealing with the person’s immediate circumstance.

the world out there

Those people that insist (despite all evidence to the contrary) that there is truth argue that the world out there is truth. They say something like “something is true if it really is in the world out there”. So they take the world and put it in the centre of knowledge. But this is a concrete mistake, in the sense of being in discordance with the concrete. The world is out there. Therefore, it is out. It can’t be at the centre. In the concrete sense, it can’t be.