More than a century after Saussure, civilized consciousness is bored stiff with semiotics. It is not interested in being reminded that the symbols, rituals and rites of current reality is utter crap. It just wants to make merry with its incoherent, man-in-the-mirror junkie bullshit.
The investigation is aiming to drive into Baudrillard, and the crash will be violent.
“Boys are stupid…throw rocks at them!”
And judged by the number of ‘likes’ at the quote, apparently a universal sentiment.
As a very rough initial primer. Baudrillard laments the dehumanization of society, and the terrible delusions, lies and condoned violence involved. Unfortunately Baudrillard’s criticism is itself crippled by the common denial that individual identity is sickeningly incoherent in the first place. So the battle hinged in the volitional self deepens with wave upon wave of social mirror-mentality in-fighting, as the evidence mounts against it, threatening to expose it as absolute nonsense.
Taking the quote as example, and risking the reflux that it is only a joke. Males and females tend to need each other ever less, in other words, there is ever greater gender dichotomy (except in mirthful, common ritual). But this is far from just a gender issue. It concerns all the twisted attributes of willful identity. Consciousness is on the brink of by far the most complete reconstruction since the rise of language.
The volitional self will dissolve. It will be the first healing of a massive mental disease that has been growing for a hundred thousand years.
Comments 3
It doesn’t seem likely that people are willing to give up on it anytime soon. I wonder how they could.
I met a guy who confided in me that he had had a schizophrenic breakdown. His family were extremely religious and believed in miracles and that their young son was healed by prayer. This guy
But what struck me was when he explained the experience that led him to his nervous breakdown. He started talking about the wheels of a car. His point which I can’t remember very clearly was something like that there are a greater amount of revolutions on the exterior or interior of the wheel. He said he was unable to stop thinking about this and blamed it as the source of his breakdown.
It reminded me of your investigation which posits that there is a fractal infinity accessible to consciousness at all times. It was almost like this guy became aware of something similar and was terrified of what he saw. Maybe he broke free of his addiction to self and was punished for it by his society.
I came to the same realization as you about the invalidity of the notion of self and the sickness of civilization a few years ago. However I was terrified at my inability to express this and tried to become ‘normally insane’. I had troubles similar to the guy in the example I just gave. I think this is why he was able to confide in me. It seems that I was only able to intensify my addiction to the self when I tried to work around it.
I am confused about the dissolution of the self – because you also posit a deterministic universe. So then wouldn’t the addiction be mechanical?
Let’s say that it does dissolve. This will still leave us in a position where we need to gather food to avoid starvation. Will there not be conflicts over resources? Unless productive capacity was increased/augmented to meet everyones needs (and this will surely soon be possible with new bio technologies and fusion power) there will still be conflict. Is it perhaps this conflict that is the source of the problem of the self? Since we use identities to demarcate territory and attack others.
I have some ideas about the symbolic nature of consciousness and the mechanism of the addiction.
Perhaps the problem is that the addiction allows us a false perspective. A perspective that seems to be OF the self from outside the self. As if looking on our own living corpse.
People just want to forget they are dying and make peace with their death. And if they can bring it closer with fatalistic practices then they will do so because they enjoy the thrill of delusional control.
So at all moments there is infinite fractality. However by misusing symbolic consciousness we can imagine images of ourselves from a perspective outside our bodies/selves. We think we are looking back in time at ourselves. We imagine looking at ourselves from the outside. Language animates this process. When people refer to us like this, we become susceptible to suggestions about our self and what it could be and do. We fill the fractality with idolatrous self images. We then attribute selves and volition to these symbolic hallucinations.
Is this something like the addiction you are describing?
It’s like walking around imagining you are watching a film of yourself. When you refer to your self through language you detach from it. You gain a perspective that does not exist.
According to your investigation this perspective is false and addictive. The solution is the eventual dissolution of the self that you posit – can you explain how the coherent consciousness that replaces it will function?
Language will no longer refer to selves. Yet language emanates from individual actors. These actors will speak without referring to themselves? What will they talk about? However I understand that perhaps it is not possible to know this yet.
Posted 26 Jan 2013 at 02:48 ¶Yes, the description of the addiction is pretty close to the investigation’s finding.
It has to be all-inclusive thought experimentation, without knowing exactly where to start. Therefore, it is not possible to know exactly how the new consciousness will function, yet. The trick when for instance starting to hear voices or feeling disembodied because of this experimentation, or other phenomena not approved by emotionally seated upbringing is not to even start thinking about it being crazy—or it will become runaway. Think of whatever unusual hallucination forming as just another element of consciousness, only not sanctioned by the reigning psychosis, thus as a friendly strain of consciousness—then it will remain very limited and quite comfortable. Chronic fear is by definition utterly incoherent or full-blown instability. Normalized thought is the psychosis and it maintains dynamic equilibrium like any addiction, but as addiction, it also inexorably points to total collapse.
Posted 28 Jan 2013 at 11:57 ¶The determinism is indefinable (perhaps it is infinitely resolved, as pointed to by the infinite resolution of potentical consciousness). All observable mechanics is narrative.
The addiction is narrative. Everything conscious is narrative, including the protrusions into the unconscious as imaginings of metaphorical reference, like Jung’s collective unconscious and Timothy D. Wilson’s adaptive unconscious.
Posted 28 Jan 2013 at 12:22 ¶Post a Comment