I'm wondering if there has been a "karmic" analysis of assembly theory
(or vice-versa)?
On 8/15/24 7:10 PM, Prof David West wrote:
I find the "Laws of Karma" illuminating for any discussion of
telicity, especially the 'free will' aspect brought up by glen.
The Vedic-Buddhist notion of karma begins with the notion of pan
consciousness, everything down to the subatomic particles (or
strings) has some degree of consciousness and from this the ability to
"choose" among behaviors. Choose the wrong behavior, for the wrong
reasons and you accrue karma. (There is not such thing as good karma,
no erasing accumulations from 'bad' actions by engaging in 'good'
actions.)
However, the the possible choices are severely restricted if you are a
quark and the 'bad' choices are but barely possible.
When the accumulation of bits of consciousness plus the increasing
organization of those bits is such that you have a conscious human
being the */apparent/* choices are greater.
However, any particular choice is dependent upon previous choices—all
the way back to when you were a mere amino acid. While the range of
choice, the exercise of free will, appears to be large, the odds of
you making a 'bad' choice are almost as improbable as would be the
case if you were still a rock. [I am forgetting the name, but there is
a modern philosopher who makes much this same argument against free will.]
In fact the only "choice" you have is to act with "non-attachment." A
very difficult concept to convey, but for now just think of actions
that are not motivated by a desire for gain; or by things like lust,
greed, anger; or by the notion that "your choice makes a difference as
to outcome."
An enlightened individual acts with 'perfect knowledge' (essentially
an awareness of all those pesky antecedent acts) and takes the
'correct' (the act with a probability approaching certainty) action.
With non-attachment, hence no karma.
That is why the enlightened sage, when asked what it was like live as
an enlightened being, replied, "When I am thirsty i drink, hungry I
eat, and sleepy I sleep."
Everything done by anything is 'telic' in glen's sense. Karma accruing
actions are telic in Nick's sense.
davew
On Mon, Aug 12, 2024, at 1:21 PM, glen wrote:
> Nick and I had a lengthy argument about the ambiguity in telicity. He
> sticking to his conception that telicity is indicated by objectives,
> purpose, desire, etc. Me sticking to my conception that telicity is
> (merely) anything posed in consideration of a final state.
>
> Whether the conversation's about Ukraine as a conflux of monists
> cleansing the land of pluralists or, as Eric emphasizes, providing
> narrative scaffolding (like a state with which one might identify), the
> gist is the same: What is the *scope* of the causal agents? And is
> there a heterarchy of causal scopes? Or are there primary (then
> secondary, tertiary, ...) scopes?
>
> Such arguments must (yes, must) End up in arguments about free will,
> determinism, and the ontological status of stochasticity, as long as
> there's no shared value system amongst the discussants that includes a
> metaphysical commitment to (or against) the primacy of randomness. A
> clever method for denying randomness without sacrificing the
> distinction between the two conceptions of telicity is to commit to
> Lewisian possible worlds (or the weaker concept of parallel universes).
> But in all cases ruled by humility and agnosticism, pluralism is the
> winner; and any type of monism is the loser.
>
> Either telicity can be disambiguated by allowing for false objectives
> (those aspired to but not obtained, via ignorance, limited
> understanding) *or* by allowing for a manipulable/controllable universe
> (via limited power).
>
> And because this post is already too long, I'll tell a story. At
> Friday's Salon, a fellow anarcho-syndicalist argued that holding shares
> via a market in a publicly traded company is strongly analogous to
> betting on the final state of a roulette wheel. I tried, and failed, to
> point out that the market is co-constructed by not only the players of
> the game, but the co-evolving environment in which the game is played.
> So it's nothing like a roulette wheel, at all, which is painstakingly
> engineered to be "fair", with minimal friction mechanisms and whatnot.
> But his (meta)narrative was way too strong. He's infected by the lefty
> rhetoric that the stock market is Just a rent-seeking form of gambling
> and the dividends come purely from the exploitation of the wage slaves.
> I even brought up recent news of shareholder rebellions (Tesla, Exxon,
> ...) as evidence that publicly traded companies may be "better" than
> privately held companies. In the end, it made me more skeptical of his
> commitment to syndicalism. >8^D
>
>
> On 8/10/24 21:36, Santafe wrote:
>> Quick comment from me, not to the direct point in this post, which
I like too, but on something about Snyder which I learned (just
off-hand) from a colleague within the past 2 weeks.
>>
>> These ideas about the language of inevitability as one of the
devices of tyrants was, I think, argued in much the same terms by
Hannah Arendt, and Snyder continues in that framework, continuing to
test and develop it.
>>
>> What I learned is that he expanded another of her ideas in a place
she didn’t get to.
>>
>> This question of whether ethno-states are the only long-term
attractor forms for states is being tested again in this era, to a
degree it never really was before. Somewhat in the early 20th
century, but the notion that rights-based states would fill the world
was still nascent then.
>>
>> Arendt argues that the “universal rights of man” were articulated
at a time when the number and sizes of groups of stateless people was
on the rise. But at the end of the various competitions, this notion
of “man” was diaphanous enough that these supposed “rights” didn’t
actually protect anybody who wasn’t already being protected by a state
under its charter. The waves of the stateless was both a human
calamity in its own terms, but also a source of stress that the
totalitarians were able to use to activate the masses into motion in
“the movements” as she calls them. She even called the
Israel-Palestine disaster exactly, right away at the beginning of its
formation. Saying that, because Europe had never properly corrected
its problem of generating stateless people, it then exported that
problem to the middle east by constructing a new class of stateless
people, now the Palestinian Arabs. Much else, of course, has always
been ongoing in the region, with its local
>> interests and competitions, of course, so one doesn’t want to seek
one-factor analyses. But this one factor, for the part it plays,
seems exactly rightly articulated by her, to me.
>>
>> What the colleague told me is that Snyder wanted to check whether
this was a good argument, and followed it up by a comparison of the
situation of Romanian Jews, who were given statehood, to the many
others who were not, through the era of the two world wars. He
concludes that Arendt’s analysis is a good one, though there were
other stresses in Romania at the time that make deconvolving the
various threads of causation something one has to put in work to do.
>>
>> I like these kinds of work put in by historians, when they are done
really well.
>>
>> Eric
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Aug 11, 2024, at 5:46, Jon Zingale <jonzing...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I appreciate Timothy's warning for why historians should be
sensitive to the use of telic political exposition. That is, he shows
why defining telos in terms of finality or pre-determination is both
useful and important. In the lecture, Timothy describes a well-known
tyrant's *love letter* to a nation, which I find strangely reminiscent
of Frank Booth's threat to Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet. The telos
expressed is one of inevitability. Timothy warns:
>>>
>>> "When a tyrant makes an argument for how history *has to be*, then
some of the forces that are actually resonant in history get
classified as being ahistorical or nonhistorical or exotic or alien."
>>>
>>> He then elaborates on how this Tyrant's premise and derived
predicates lead to a logic of ethnic cleansing, a foundation or a
rationale for war. I have just started the lecture series. I hope it
remains this rich. For those interested, the lecture is queued to
where this post is intended to be a reference.
>>>
>>>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJczLlwp-d8&list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz_1Mx1MaO6sw_&index=1&t=720s
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJczLlwp-d8&list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz_1Mx1MaO6sw_&index=1&t=720s>
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJczLlwp-d8&list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz_1Mx1MaO6sw_&index=1&t=720s
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJczLlwp-d8&list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz_1Mx1MaO6sw_&index=1&t=720s>>
>>>
>>> While I am personally appalled at what is happening in Ukraine, I
am not intending to post here on politics. I am interested in
Timothy's modelling of the argument, how important it is to his
argument that one does not erase human agency when describing human
history. His perspective reminds me of why it is important to know
*for what use* a person fixes the meaning of a word like telos.
>
> --
> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
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