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.

how to learn a new language

For you to learn a new language you could first memorize a lot of words, then force yourself to use some abstract meaningless grammar rules, then fix the crooked pronunciation this whole thing is bound to distil in you. There are many many schools that follow this (let’s say) strange procedure.

There is a short-cut. The basic mechanism of our use of language is something i will (imprecisely) call “frames of mind”. And the trick is to assume the frame-of-mind of the new language before you understand it.

Hesiod’s theology

Contemporary belief in science and reason (which should supposedly be deflationary ways of thinking, more common sense, less arcane) fails to tell us why shouldn’t barbarians be more scientific, since they didn’t have a big corpus of literature to make exegesis on. Of course, this blindness is a willing blindness, since part of the myth-of-science is this mockery that it is no myth at all.

One of the inventors of this silliness was Hesiod.