Psybertron Asks

I was posting a more prominent link to the TED talk by Sherwin Nuland (related to the ECT Meme thread) when I noticed this interesting piece from Jill Bolte Taylor. A brain scientist who got to study her own brain and glimpsed the euphoric mystical “now” … and like Sherwin saw this mystical revelation as part of their “resurrection” to life after near terminal experience.

Quite different, but highly connected – like our brain hemispheres ?

And in connection with the unity (some unifying metaphysics) behind physics in Nick Maxwell’s agenda … Murray Gell-Mann talking about elegance in truth and beauty behind physics. And even more connected with Nick’s agenda, Barry Schwarz on the loss of wisdom, and appeal to virtue. And so close to James Willis too … a sense in which it is obvious, and yet … literally “demoralising”. And even better “The Paradox of Choice” joining up a few dots around the official dogma of western economies … and clinical depression is the result. Finally for now … how osyter mushrooms will save the planet.

This is a (near) verbatim copy of a MOQ Discuss forum post of mine from a month or so ago.

I caused some offence last year when I dissed Zeitgeist (2007) without having seen this Zeitgeist Addendum (2008). I have since seen this version too. It is pretty comprehensive and on the money 😉 as you say.

I still have my usual “non-conspiracy / cock-up theory” take on this.

The facts are facts and they’re not new – as old as economic empire building itself – just that the world has shrunk to a village. When your (national) industries are backed by (national) governments, backed by clandestine organizations and military might (which otherwise have good “security” – static-latch – reasons to exist). ie this process is a natural outcome of two myths (memes, as I call them).

(1) the myth that progress depends on competition (only) – too simplistic a (Newtonian action / reaction) view of causation.
(2) the myth that the value of progress is measurable with numbers (like money) – too objective a view of value.

The conspiracy is in those myths, and in the ignorance of the fact that they are memes we take for granted. Two kinds of ignorance – one called skilled-incompetence in management, a kind of plausible-deniability, and another simply convenience of the individual, a pragmatism based on the wrong “calculations”. Most of us wage slaves do value the benefits too, and we have to rationalize – look-away from – the cognitive dissonance inherent in that.

Organizations of (mostly) moral men often make immoral decisions, because the decision-making process is immoral. Seeing the SOMist meme as the conspiracy is the key. The cock-up is that we really do know this and still allow it to dominate. The primary solutions for me are education towards this kind of individual enlightenment, and free, wise, open governance of all national and transnational institutions – which are after all generally comprised of such (moral) individuals.

What I distance myself from is the conspiracy theory agenda, when people point at long-standing cabals of evil people as the “cause” of the problem (reptiles in the boardroom, etc) – mercifully this film does not itself do that, but some of the hangers-on are that kind of whacko. We are all slaves to competition accounting – bigger numbers equals better – the tyranny of numbers – incentives we can count and compare quantitatively – we are slaves to SOMism. (Words like scam and fake don’t help matters for me, there are many levels of “illusion” in the reality we value.)

As the film says … the so-called human nature of competitive greed, is nothing more than a cultural meme driving behaviour – “received wisdom”, not real wisdom. The prevailing wisdom of economics is “autistic”, “neurotic” a “mental illness”. Also as the film says (as Pirsig said) – there is nothing evil about the applied science of technology, on the contrary its a tool we can use when we act on an understanding of “what is good”.

Probably the only contentious point for me is the idea of a class-less society – no elites of any kind. If we ever reach that vision as a static global state, then maybe. But, I can’t see how we can ever evolve to that state, without some conservative institutions and processes that defend and preserve real, enlightened, wisdom … otherwise the simplest memes simply continue to dominate … some “management” is necessary. Clearly we need checks and balances against institutions that exist on tradition alone – proper philosopher princes, not the Platonic kind – we must not be naive about what it will take.

But individual choices are easy to make if taken wisely, that’s the point. Like, it might not actually be wise if we all acted at once on all of the recommendations at the end … but the intent is in the right direction.

Thanks gav. I’m glad I watched that again.

Thanks to Sam for this link, interesting to see what a trillion dollars looks like. Big, but not that big, but then the paper denomination is large to start with, it’s only money.

Wonder what it loooks like on some internationally recognized unit of currency (rather than 100 dollar bills). The modern equivalent of Mars Bars … Big Macs I guess ?

Can’t see any acknowledgement of Dennett’s words in the title of this Andrew Marr piece. Looks promising though.

OK so the Swiss “ProtosCar Lampo” is currently only a concept car showing at Geneva, but it is built on the same Wilmington-built GM / Opel / Saturn  GT / Sky platform as my current car. Strangely my previous GM (Opel Sportster/ Vauxhall VX220) Lotus-built aluminium & fibre-glass model was the platform for an award-winning GM diesel powered sports model too.

Busy converting the US electrics of my Sky to European road standards of the Opel GT for use on Norwegian roads. Trickier than it looks.

OK, so enough Zizek for one day … clearly a student of Jacques Lacan is about as “foggy froggie” / PoMo as one can get, but cheeky with it. Hard work, but valuable on balance.

Picked-up the Peter Sloterdijk link in my earlier reference to Zizek. Found this review of his “Critique of Cynical Reason” by Stefan Lorenz Sorgner entitled “In Search of Lost Cheekiness“. A good read.

The Cynic / Kynic distinction is between the Cynic (in the modern sense) who lives with the hypocrisy of working a system in which they do not actually believe, rationalizing the irrational, whereas the Kynic in the Diogenes sense who actually makes a statement out of living outside the system in which they do not believe, refusing to engage in the flawed system of argument. The hypocritical style of cynicism as a “necessary” part of institutional life in both business and science is not new here – Maxwell’s scientific empiricism neurosis, Brunsson & Argyris organizational hypocrisy.

Sloterdijk is more an observer than a philosopher. Clearly the hypocritical cynic is effectively living with a mental illness for life whereas the Kynic is truer to themselves, cheeky with positive intent, but as he also observes there can never be a “majority” outside society’s norms, so long as society as a whole has any norms. The situation can only exist temporarily and/or locally, in carnivals, universities and bohemia. Depressingly the majority must live with rationalizing the irrational, and Sloterdijk offers no alternative formula. Globalization of institutions is itself the problem – the memes win.

Does anybody actually have anything new to say ?

Wikipedia page on Zizek.

For Lacan and Žižek, every word is a gravestone, marking the absence or corpse of the thing it represents and standing in for it. It is partly in the light of this that Lacan is able to refashion Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” as “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I think not”.

This was precisely the point that struck me on completing Thoreau’s Walden.

The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of their residual statement. Their truth is instantly translated; its literal monument alone remains.

Authentic Radical Fundamentalism that is ? Still not sure, but I got one thing right with Zizek

… taking things seriously and taking sides
are absolutely not the same …

In “The Empty Wheelbarrow” he says …

The ruling ideology appropriated the September 11 tragedy and used it to impose its basic message: it is time to stop playing around, you have to take sides – for or against. This, precisely, is the temptation to be resisted: in such moments of apparent clarity of choice, mystification is total. Today, more than ever, intellectuals need to step back. Are we aware that we are in the midst of a “soft revolution”, in the course of which the unwritten rules determining the most elementary international logic are changing ?

Two distinct points

(1) Step back from world-scale stark choices.
(2) In apparent clarity of choice, mystification is total.

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Post Note

Re-reading Zizek’s 2005 piece again in 2023 – he’s obviously a bit “Marmite” as a philosopher and commentator – Lacanian, provocative style as well as wearing his socialist heart on his sleeve, I’ve witnessed him in action a few times – but prescient here in pinpointing the poly-crises facing us.

Even just the paragraph starting “On September 11 2001, …”

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I’ve just thoroughly read and re-read a piece by Slavoj Zizek in The Cabinet entitled “From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism“. Zizek is on my “must read” list for various reasons, so this was a good start, and I quoted briefly from this particuar piece in responding to Chris Locke’s reference to it in his blog header. Not always clear when Chris is piling on the irony, and dare I say sarcasm, exactly how many levels of irony you are dealing with, but I read Chris as approving of the sentiments Zizek expresses here. If that is the case, then I’m agreeing with both.

Zizek is pointing out the falacy, the fetish, in one group holding a view of another somehow distinctly “other” remote, distant, lost in time in possessing some superior wisdom, resulting in a kind of jealousy, both a wish for it and a negative reaction against it. Both equally irrational – a fetish. Zizek is a man after my own heart in his liberal use of “scare quotes” – “rational” being one of the words frequently couched that way.

Zizek is referring to the “West vs East” fetish in particular, and uses Tibet / Lhasa as a specific object illustration of this fetishism. But he also reminds us that this is as old as the Greeks revering the Egyptians, the Romans the Greeks, the classicisits the Romans & Greeks, the Westerners the Eastern, and so on. “Twas ever thus” I must have said a million times, and it’s been said for over 4000 years itself. Zizek’s actual target is the debate bewteen moral majority fundamentalists and tolerant multicuturalists.  He has two main points.

One is that the fetish and its symptoms are so close as to be almost interchangable, yet secondly the whole of both is concerned principally with the focus on otherness. This paradox is real and worth serious consideration. A pox on both their houses he says …

The conclusion to be drawn from this is a simple and radical one: Moral Majority fundamentalists and tolerant multiculturalists are two sides of the same coin: they both share a fascination with the Other. In the Moral Majority, this fascination displays the envious hatred of the Other’s excessive jouissance, while the multiculturalist tolerance of the Other’s Otherness is also more twisted than it may appear�”it is sustained by a secret desire for the Other to remain “other,” not to become too much like us. In contrast to both these positions, the only truly tolerant attitude towards the Other is that of the authentic radical fundamentalist.

OK so again, the conclusion is that dichotomous choice is no choice, throwing out babies with the bathwater is an acknowledgement of the reality of babies. Rejecting eastern wisdom is an acknowledgement of the reality of eastern wisdom for example. Atheism is an acknowledgement of the reality of theism, Denial of global warming is an acknowledgement of global wearming as an issue, etc … pick your favourite world-scale (dichotomous) debate.

The fact that either side is making a living “marketing” its side of any such debate is a hypochrisy we all share so long as standing for something is seen as taking sides.

[Aside, interesting reading Gibbon, as I still am, is seeing that the persecution of Christians and their one supreme god was a primary motivator for their success.]

Question is what is “authentic radical fundamentalism” ?
(Sounds like neo-pragmatic / radical-empiricism maybe ?)
Need to read more Zizek. Marketing works 😉