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This website is investigative. Its organization is not only unpolished, it is deliberately wild. Please do quote me but note that all findings are preliminary Run by: |
Ideas /
Today's IdeasWednesday September 08, 2010, chronological.
The correspondence between words and objects is a secondary relationship, subordinate to a web of associative relationships of a quite different sort, which even allows us reference to impossible things. - p.70 The Symbolic Species - Terrence Deacon. Or words do not even need referents, except associations between words. This is machine mind bootstrapping itself. Babies learn a word as an icon (the sound of a word becomes familiar by repitition), then index reference is established to an object or already known words, and only then the word can be used symbolically. Words as symbols become object, breeding ground, landscape, self-referentially iconic, fantasy. Call it the panglossia of the machine, or the breeding machine. It is as fatal to human life as nature - unless we can define the dangers and stay out of it. The world of language reality is as fatal to human life as wild jungle. It is not a stage and we players. That we humans are in denial of our profound mental addiction is why we keep on stumbling around in over our heads, utterly delusional. And why by evening we sit around in panglossian reverie, mutually humming over our delusions. Shaman machine is a mental parasite in the civilized human animal. As in the natural evolution of the human animal, ontogeny recapitulated phylogeny, in the parasitized human animal, individual development recapitulates cultural development. This is the evolution of the machine. My finger-symbol is about this pathological, self-destructing Shamanism, this addictive institution of blind paradigm. Language itself is not the culprit. The culprit is the Shaman-delusional way our ancestors have fallen into using language from the very beginning. Language as we now use it is a human-existential atrocity. I am so close to proposing the first viable fundamental rearrangement of language ever, I can smell it. I see a world of pre-language ancestors pushing ever harder to verbalize increasingly complex indexed and symbolic conceptual networks of environment. With language fluency it was like a violent release of pressure into the atrocity of shaman opportunism. My origins theory comes from the conviction that humans are mindlessly self-destructing because of literally believing in imaginary nonsense. "Society" is a misnomer (it is not "social," but is machine). Human agency is not intelligent but methodical. Human consciousness is virtually non-existent. Story-telling to the contrary is chronic Shaman mendacity to keep humanity mentally addicted. Self-help literature, religious, spiritual or just plain secular-cognitive, is there to make us believe that self-development is human self-improvement. But it is no such thing It is the self-organizing machine driving the evolution of machine mind like a parasite in human brains. Humanity is not the disease. The civilized machine mind parasite in humanity is the disease. I am a nondescript universal point eating machine like a dark hole. At the moment there is sadly nothing to prevent us from pervasively moving into virtual abstract environment and destroying ourselves. In fact, we don't even know we are doing it. We think we are dealing with "reality." Symbolic language is by definition relationships between symbols in subordination of indexical reference to the world. The symbolic role of words is mystical or Shaman. Symbols are intrinsically mystical. Symbolic words in syntax are primarily acontextual and NOT representative of the world. Symbolic syntax is only proximately contextual, and as such lends itself perfectly to Shaman ambition. "On subjectivist theories of the good,what makes it true that something is good is that it is desired, or liked, or in some way is the object of one's pro-attitudes, or would be the object of one's pro-attitudes in some suitable conditions. One might think that to affirm a subjectivist theory of the good is to reject natural law theory, given the immense variation in human desire. But this is not so. For one might hold that human beings’common nature, their similarity in physiological constitution, makes them such as to have some desires in common, and these desires may be so central to human aims and purposes that we can build important and correct precepts of rationality around them." http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-law-ethics/ The problem defining Natural Law is that our perception of Nature is mystical-symbolic. It is not human-existential. It is generalized and not particular. Timeless and not timely. And abstract and not concrete. My search is for Shaman or the way we use language which prohibits any possibility of discovering human-existential ethics. Until we change the way we speak and think, we cannot think clearly. ...we know we cannot define our needs when we see that panglossian symbolic syntax has constructed such mountains of wants in their place. Then we can only realize that our desires have become dismally fantastic. Pierre Rousseau must very clearly define an epistemological principle by which a particular, timely and concrete Human existence will annihilate the general, timeless, and abstract Shamanism of symbolic language. In arguing for my hypothesis of adaptability being the foundation for language: Feral children adapt to act like the animals that have adopted them, and after the Critical Learning Period of young childhood, cannot adapt to culture at all.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child Human adaptation for adaptability makes symbolic language possible - up until language fluency our ancestors had adapted for adaptability through stimulus generalization and transfer of learning sets. These are not symbolic association, but advanced index reference. It took place across environmental stimuli, iconic art, and coarse verbalization. |