Rolling Philosophy

*world spins off axis*

i don't think that's an ish. pretty often i seem to experience the act of being sober and it's fairly demonstrably false

Sure, illusions can happen on occasion, but if free will is an illusion it's an extremely persistent one.

"so why did people think the sun moves round the earth?" etc

Sure, people have been wrong about lots of things, but to be wrong about such an intimate part of my own inner experience is a bit different. It's kind of like if I'm feeling angry and someone told me I wasn't really angry, would I credit it?

but your experience of feeling as if you have free will isn't in question

which is what i shd've said last night, duh. your sense of having free will is absolutely reconcilable with yr not actually having free will in the sense in which you feel like you do.

real problem: i'm using a dualist "you" in there aren't i? a you that has the experience and a sub-you that is emanating the will. lemme get back to that later.

your sense of having free will is absolutely reconcilable with yr not actually having free will in the sense in which you feel like you do

This is possible since I'm not sure I can precisely define what free will is. But I do think that it is a very real thing, though perhaps hard to define precisely.

Important philosophical question. http://www.newappsblog.com/2013/12/should-i-try-to-fly-just-on-the-off-chance-that-this-might-be-a-dreambody.html

Interesting to see how philosophers have been trying to reconcile determinism and free will since at least classical times. In those days it was framed more as free will vs. fate or divine foreknowledge, but the issues were quite similar. See e.g. St. Augustine's criticism of Cicero: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf102.iv.V.9.html

http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2014/01/my-faith-a-progress-report.html

This observation is childish, obvious, but no less true for that. It is important for me in particular to appreciate it, for over the past year one thing that has become clear to me is that both before and after my confession I was, and remain, an asshole. Many of the people who have encountered me, particularly those I do not know and with whom I have fleeting exchanges, would find it hilarious, absurd, and supremely hypocritical to learn that I have been carrying on in this space about my faith.

What do I mean by 'asshole'? I mean I am brutally unkind to people. I am capable of displaying a sort of indignation in my interactions with ticket agents, telemarketers, strangers, that must be simply terrifying to experience. I am haughty, condescending, stubborn, awful. I am lucky I have never been taken away in handcuffs from my many scenes of protest.

this dude can really bring it

don't know who that is, but my views have a lot in common with his (& ilx seems not a place to get into it)

haha ok no I do know who that is

that's good stuff.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/jamiebartlett/100012093/meet-the-dark-enlightenment-sophisticated-neo-fascism-thats-spreading-fast-on-the-net/

This may not be entirely accurate but the gist seems to be right, didn't realise that Nick Land had gone so outrageously off the deep (deep deeper) end.

I got momentarily interested when I read the bit about rejecting democracy, liberty, and equality bc I figured there'd be something clever located in it but it turns out to just be more racist conspiracy theorists who i guess only happen to be interested in philosophy? zizek could do a better job wrt provocative "neo-reactionary" fascism.

been reading old unread analytics

findings:

1. norman malcolm: tin-eared and tactless

2. moore: like if descartes was burning one 24-7

man. genuine contrition from b. l31ter. never would have expected that.

it's been a fucked up week

this is more of an economics thing i guess, but whatever: i think i'm gonna order that piketty book tonight

on a whim I got a new book called Derrida/Searle on my kindle. pretty good. nice refresher.

hadn't seen that before. did you ever end up continuing w/ yr laruelle reading?

no I had to put it down for some compulsory reading and then shiny new books caught my eye. I will pick it up again soon though.

still haven't touched him since 2011, really, but there's new stuff out there now and am thinking of getting the one that anthony paul smith translated iirc. philosophy and non-philosophy?

lol this isn't on 77 oops. hi anthony if you see this.

principles of non-philosophy is the name of the book according to amazon

that's the one I was reading. got about 1/3 of way through it.

ey markers that one's a co-translation you jerk.

you're right.

don't know who the other person is

i have a slight feeling you may though.

the dude (and in this case there is only one) who translated whichever book continuum (it was continuum back then) put out of laruelle's in 2011 works at a college not too far from my house

he and i should kick it sometime

there's just some tone that makes you sure way beforehand that you're going to be reading about speculative realism sooner or later in an essay

http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/ordinaryism-alternative-accelerationism-part-1-thanks-nothing

perhaps it's that combination of coining ever new silly slogans and neo-neo-romanticism.

are they the ones who coined 'accelerationism' or is that some outside thing?

god, speculative realists, bleh

I'd never heard of it before!

i hear it a lot but i thought it was connected to, like, the singularity, and who can be bothered to investigate such things

i have a slight feeling you may though.

― markers, Thursday, March 27, 2014 1:35 AM (2 days ago)

I know eeeeeverybody. Though yeah. But my more general thing here is attacking this common tendency (not at all to accuse you of anything here) of devaluing the female side of male-female duos in philosophy.

re accelerationism, it comes from the CCRU and Nick Land especially, associated with an odd right-Deleuzian vs left-Deleuzian thing that took place at late '90s Warwick - Land being in the right camp and pushing for a kind of hyper-capitalism that tears itself apart. Then Land lost his mind and is now a bizarre white supremacist. It's been picked up again recently by leftists like Srnicek and Williams but it is still I think deeply ~problematic~ and at times a bit scary sounding, despite the good intentions this time around. The volume that's on it that's going to be released on Urbanomic comes with a bottle of accelerationism hot sauce, which is a very good gimmick imo.

oh is land one of those uh i forget, goole is into them, dark conservatives or deep conservatives or whatever? i think there was a guardian article about them.

yeah that kind of thing. The story of the CCRU is interesting and they produced a lot of good work, though some of it seems almost comically dated now. ILX favourite Simon Reynolds put together a little account of them: http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/renegade-academia-cybernetic-culture.html

While there's a bit of neoliberal dodginess to some of their stuff I don't think Land getting to where he's gotten was a natural conclusion of their work, I believe at some point he had a very clear mental break at which point everybody decided to stop associating with him.

fwiw i've known who aps was for years now and don't know if i've ever heard of the other person. but i'm not in yr world. just an observer mostly although now a few of 'em are following me on twitter (not him tho)

very brief emails w/ a few phil blog ppl and i think i donated like $10 to help aps or someone go to a conference in like 2010

talked to rm @ urb4n0m1c abt their rss feed once too

as you can see, i am very important

I believe the term is "dark enlightenment" but I could be wrong.

http://media.vocativ.com/photos/2013/12/Dark-Enlightenment-041010102874.png

ya markers i understand and as i say i don't wish to question yr noble character, i just feel the personal need to see due credit given to women in philosophy.

it would be nice to laugh at the dark enlightenment ppl on account of them being ridiculous nerds but they're just too creepy for it to really work, it's hard to be amused by people suggesting that the way forward for humanity is "total NAM [non-Asian American] removal".

the actual "reasoning" behind most of it is pitifully facile but yeah, a virtual fascist is still a fascist

non-Asian Minority*, obvs.

Land's own recent writings try to maintain the screen of academic objectivity and thoughtfulness and for the most part seem discomfiting rather than outright outrageous, for judgement purposes it's convenient that his followers and associates are less careful in that way.

Wow that Reynolds article is quite a time capsule!

piketty book's mad discounted on amazon right now. like, 24. yikes. buying.

also he's coming to the harvard bookstore next month for the zero of you who will be in the area