On the Sinking House and Numbers.

Every number is assigned arbitrarily to an item. Given enough freedom, losing count is inevitable, because there are literally infinite numerical quantities that can be assigned to a given object. For this reason, the Sinking House haunts this phenomenological inquiry, in order to prevent the mind from falling into the Problematic whilst it is captivated by the mystery of the Transcendant Function.

Dm.A.A.

Response to a feminist argument.

Well we’ve all been disrespected at one time or another, so I think that my two cents could at least count for something. I had a friend who was suicidal and got cat calls all the time, and of course it’s sad (to say the least) to hear about, but I’m not going to let it affect how I treat people because that would be neither ethical or logical. It’s like when people posted videos for crush fetishists on MySpace and the “norm” was to describe all the terrible things one would want done to the culprit, even though to preach such kind of violence as a punishment was in fact a hypocritical power attitude. And one of my friends wouldn’t talk to me for a few days because I was “defending” the woman in the video and preaching peace.

Different people respond differently to different behavior, and not all social deviance is poorly received. Some people even prefer to be treated with social deviance, such as in the case of a fellow I knew who was a social deviant as well and preferred to be filmed without being asked first. People are not crazy or “bad”. One just has to get to understand them.

I certainly never understood the whole “picking up girls” thing but I’ve heard about both sides of the perspective, and all though I found it silly myself I would not feel entitled to pass judgement upon the souls of the people involved so much as the actions. There have even been books written on pick-up artistry, one of whom I encountered in the home of a married couple whom I respect, and the argument in favour of this deviant behavior is that a minority of women will be receptive to it. But that minority is its self therefore a kind of social deviance and it would be bullying to say that such a woman is a whore or something.

I am sorry about your feelings and all I can suggest is that you do what you can to deal with it. That’s not a put-down; “dealing with” things by my definition is one of the most noble enterprises in life and can be done in a number of ways. I wouldn’t be presumptuous but I all ways tend to suspect that all though every individual goes through radically unique experiences they are all so more or less universal. As Watts said: “What you do and what happens to you are the same,” and all though this sounds like victim-blaming in a sociological context, speaking in the context that it was used in it means that rather than feeling disempowered or offended people should try to see the matter with as much objectivity as humanly possible. The shame of having wronged someone is arguably worse than the pain of being humiliated, and a basic trust in people will tell you that no one can escape his or her own conscience. That’s me preaching Buddhism, et cetera, but hopefully it creates a clearer context for what I said. Just don’t think I have not thought about this and how it affects people, both men and women, and the culture that it creates, in both its raw form and the reactionary movement that emerged out of it. Notice that I never once said that feminism was bad, but I wouldn’t embrace any ideology as universally good because that is fanaticism by definition, and it is contrary to intellectualism and freedom. That kind of thinking leads to fascism and suffering for all, and I think a more enlightened society would tend not to create so much division betwixt people. Frankly moralizing does that too, so I’m sorry for having done so in my self-defense.

Respectfully,

Dmitry.

My Qualms with the Politically Correct Movement.

My Qualms with the Politically Correct Movement.

 

I usually do not venture into politics, preferring to focus on philosophy, dream interpretation, mysticism, mythology, and, of late, science. As usual, though, I affirm the fringe, so here are my views.

1.       Socio-economic Disparity.

The argument is age-old. Are people victims or are they responsible?

It’s quite clear that there have been statistical studies showing that white people (like myself) tend to excel economically moreso than other groups.

Wait a moment. I just said white people like myself. There is a fallacy therein. But I will address that later.

 

Unless I am mistaken, and correct me if I am wrong, the nation was established essentially by fairly well-off people who moved to the America under the auspices of religious persecution – NOT so much hope of economic gain. These people would, in the words of George Carlin, “happen to be white.”

 

A good deal of the racial minority population would go on to move here, but under entirely different auspices.

That the majority tends to be the most successful by the standards of the culture comes as no surprise. This is a general rule in societies. This is all so why fringe beliefs are often marginalized or fit into existing stringent categories by members of any largely organized movement. But I digress.

African Americans came as slaves and struggled economically for a considerable time because of lingering racism and the strangeness with which people who were not African American met their liberation, to speak nothing of political motives. Many other minorities came from impoverished countries. They formed small communities that we have come to call ghettos.

 

If one is born into wealth, if one is educated in how to appear classy, and if one adopts the value systems of the dominator culture, it comes as no surprise that one succeeds. One would think that, over time, however, our great nation’s free enterprise system would be able to more or less equalize success amongst all racial groups, regardless even of cultural differences, leaving things like inter-racial marriage to even out the kinks.

Unfortunately, this is the most naive and idealized view of the American economic system that I can think of.

 

I have noticed a tendency for people who are very passionate but all so very biased to commit the fallacy of the excluded middle. This means: “If you do not believe in a systematic oppression as the cause for these statistics, then you MUST believe that people who are white and male just HAPPEN to be better, more skilled, or harder workers.”

Woah, there.

 

First of all: There is no direct correlation between one’s work ethic and skills and one’s economic success in our capitalist society. Education does not bring us up to think critically but to parrot information without questioning its meaning. Teachers, under protection of their rights, may feel no obligation to explain a difficult concept to a student outside of class hours. Within class hours, they may silence a student for interrupting the class with “time-wasting” questions. Few teachers I have known do more than anticipate that the student essentially learn how to parrot an ambiguous text in a text-book without paying heed to what it means. Tests are so formatted as to draw upon this reserve knowledge, and students may feel at liberty to forget what they had learned and any intellectual cognitive dissonance that might result once they had gotten the grade.

If I work as a cashier for eight months, essentially as a nameless middle-man between a group of consumers and a corporation whose chief product is valued for its uselessness (luxuries), I make more money than a struggling free-lance writer trying to publish a novel. This I can say from experience.

 

To exclude the middle is to forget that there are HISTORICAL reasons for socio-economic disparity. The perpetuators of this disparity in the present are the media and the political movements. Capitalism depends upon the creation of illusory class division which in turn becomes actual class division. Yet even this is in fact a naive oversimplification, because in the grand scheme of things there are only two classes: The American class and the Wealthy elite.

 

The media is saturated with racial stereotypes, romanticized depictions of ghettos, et cetera because it can market its products by appealing to a certain group. Group identification is all ways arbitrary. As the philosopher Jacques Derrida pointed out, there is no definite black person or definite white person. If anything, everyone is a part of the same spectrum, with no dividing lines in nature between one race and another. And his argument seems even more convincing when one meets the offspring of inter-racial couples. This is not a joke; it is actually the single most convincing argument I have heard against racism, because all though any one can makes a pathos appeal against the evils of racism, Derrida’s argument actually uses logos to explain the absurdity of NOT being racially colour-blind.

Martin Buber, the Jewish theologian, said that you can treat people as either belonging to the I-It category or the I-Thou category. True racial color blindness is not color blindness at all but rather a focus of attention on something that is not an arbitrary imposition of characteristics upon the object of one’s consciousness. This is absolutely nothing short of the basic decency with which one ought to treat not only all other people but the natural world as such. One can reduce the problem of racism to this: One reduces the other to an abstraction, a member of an arbitrary group. TO pay no attention to another’s It characteristics in this way, to regard the Other as a Thou, is, according to Buber, to see the face of God (in the words of Hugo).

 

2.       All of this would be very well if the Politically Correct movement KNEW what to do about it. But instead they perpetuate the problem. More than once I have noticed that society is a projection of the individual. No two people inhabit the same society, because everyone is in contact with different people. Jung, Sartre, Krishnamurti, and a number of other thinkers have pointed out this fact: You are society. Yet society is all so an illusory abstraction, and you are much more than that.

What the “guilty liberal” does is that he or she creates a kind of separation between the “problems of society” and his or her own involvement in it. This is the mentality: There IS racism in society, I am not responsible for it, but I must take action against it.

The pathos seems moving. In fact, it is self-defeating.

Anyone can speak of “oppression” as a vague political term, like “Terrorism”. Yet this is Orwellian language. The word “oppression” is meaningless outside of a context, and that context is all ways provided by the individual. The reason that there is so much anxiety and depression amongst members of a youth culture is this problem of communication and miscommunication, because they are unified in belief in an idea but fundamentally separated in its context.

Remarkably, the dominator culture that they rebel against suffers the same ill.

 

If society is a projection of one’s self, then any actual oppression that one can be aware of is either oppression that one is perceived to be a victim of or oppression that one oneself does to other people. Given this, if no oppression seems to exist in society, this indicates that the individual is probably in a state of relative harmony with others. It would suggest that one’s relationships are genuine, non-discriminating, and in the Thou mode as much as possible (though obviously, as Buber pointed out, one cannot be in that mode all the time. We oscillate between modes, but one all so participates through one’s decisions in the up-swings.).

 

Yet this is not what the Politically Correct movement wants you to think. Instead, they assert that, if you are a part of a privileged group, then you should note that “racial colour blindness” is simply a form of naive projection upon people who are in much worse conditions than one’s self of one’s own conditions. Meanwhile, if one is part of an “oppressed group” and one does not become “aware [of the ‘Truth’]” that one is being oppressed, then one is not only doing a disservice to one’s self but to all others in one’s group, even if one had not hitherto identified with the group as strongly as with members outside of it.

This is bad. Because all that it does is perpetuate the sense of division in the system created by monetary-ism.

 

What to do.

 

The economic system is collapsing, and with it will go many of our problems. We are on the verge of some transformation that will be truly extraordinary. I do not promise that it will be entirely “positive” by any existing definition. Yet I have faith in that Humanity will make the transition to a Resource-based Economy and use its scientific knowledge, technological skill, creative brilliance (in all disciplines, save for the most banal) and existing abundance to create a radically new human community. Most of the perceived “racial and gender oppression” in the United States comes to us in the form of economic statistics. I have met people who refuse to seek courses of action because of the “statistical odds against their success”. Yet this is madness. You are not a number. You are a person, and if you hate he statistics then don’t listen to them, for defining yourself as a member of a group according to an abstract number will in turn perpetuate the problem you perceive by worsening morale.

 

We cannot control individual choice when people are in any sort of bureaucratic power. But a resource-based economy, as distinct from a Capitalistic, Marxist, or any other hitherto seen society, would rid us of bureaucracies and power structures in general.

 

In the mean time, it is important to note the difference between abstraction and reality. The word “oppression” only has meaning in an individual case history. Yet no one can pass judgment upon your ethical behavior other than yourself, at least according to De Beavoir’s Ethic of Ambiguity. This is because any outsider could easily judge you to be unethical according to his or her own agenda. This in turn is a form of oppression. Ad hominem attacks upon individuals who are “privileged” won’t help. Rugged individualism never helps. We must get out of the habit of seeing ourselves and others as objects and respect the power of human subjectivity. Fanaticism will only create Fascism.

 

3.       I do not identify myself as white. When I came to the United States, I had only lived in apartments. The first time my family lived in a house was when I was in the fifth grade.

Personally, it was totally overrated. I liked to keep the company of my fellow young people. We would play games in the winding snake-like labyrinths of the apartment complex. We would not notice each other’s differences, and the words of adults meant little to us. That was until for about the fifth year in a row we had had to learn about the history of American slavery.

 

When I was in Elementary school, a girl asked me what my religion was. I asked what religion was. Someone else asked if I celebrated Christmas or Channukah. I said Christmas. In truth, my family had traditionally celebrated the New Year in place of Christmas. But since my parents did not want to explain to me what the word “Christmas” meant and why people would put circular, doughnut-shaped bushes on their doors six days prior to the New Year, we adopted the American capitalist habit.

 

For a short while, I thought I was Christian, because that was what I was told. I all so was told that I was white. Had I not been born in the European part of Russia, maybe I would have insisted that I was Asian America. But my parents had more of a say in this matter than I did, and a child does not see fit to complain except in personal emergencies. So I went through middle school as a “want-to-be Asian” because of my attraction to Asian women in my honors classes.

 

It took me a long time to identify myself as Russian. That was because the system of political correctness in the Educational system and Mass Media on television nearly squashed the Russian pride out of me. Yet that was with my consent. It was very well, though. I kept a diverse group of friends. It was not until I saw how much my ethnic background affected my views, customs, and even speech that I embraced it again. Yet I have met a young man of Mayan descent who did not want to talk about it, a young man who was Native American but only mentioned it in his poetry, and even one of my best friends from high school, living in San Francisco, who got upset when I pointed out that I thought that she had a markedly Confucianist influence in her approach to things. Mind you: She actively practiced traditional Asian medicine, and I had been around her parents.

 

The PoC kids would say that it serves me right. But the matter is not one of individual guilt. I recall acting as a judge at a Speech and Debate tournament and listening to a moving speech made by a young Asian girl who talked about how Americanisation tempted her to forget her culture and to stop using her home language. She pointed out with the breath-stopping brilliance that I have come to expect of everyone but can really only find in Speech and Debate that the death of a language is the death of a culture.

 

And yet, all though I understand that it’s your individual choice whether or not to identify with your heritage, I am vilified for raising questions about people’s cultural back-grounds. And this is said with good intentions!

 

When I visited China Town in San Francisco years ago, simply being in the presence of a Chinese restaurant entirely transformed my thinking and brought me closer to my core. This “core” is not a Taoist or Buddhist idea; it is universal. Yet the latent Fascism of political correctness would efface this core by claiming equality. Yet this is NOT the equality of the I-Thou relationship.

 

I still visit China Town, I have just realized, in my dreams time and time again.

 

Dm.A.A.

On Sheldrake, Fluidity, and the future of Physics.

On Sheldrake, Fluidity, and the future of Physics.

 

The only evidence I have found for Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of a law-less Universe and the only evidence I could need or hope for is that it’s the only view of Physics that, once entertained, has improved my aim.

 

This is not ‘merely’ anecdotal. It is in fact the most immediate, reliable evidence a human being can hope for.

 

Traditional physics does not benefit Athletes or Artists; it only improves the performance of Mathematicians and Engineers.

 

The only reason to vilify the anecdotal is that my experience is not that of an engineer. Yet that is a terrible reduction.

 

Technology is a form of Power.

For its ends, we need a Physics (and therefore a discipline of Physics) that follows stringent Laws.

 

Yet the human individual is not a machine. That view originated in the nineteenth century with the intent of employing the human being as one.

 

We therefore need a view of Science which is not oppressive. Since any ‘Truth’ that is available to inter-subjectivity depends at least in part upon the capacity to represent the world in an image in a word or set of words that can indicate the world, all Truth reflects, inextricably (except where it is deeply individual, and therefore perhaps non-verbal) both the culture and the subjectivity of the speaker.

There is no ‘objective Science’ to take the throne of the usurped Power God of antiquity.

 

The Athlete responds to a changing environment without thinking to link one moment to another. But the stringent theorist hoards reality in abstractions that carry the illusory quality of constancy and obscure the fluidity of the world.

This needs to change. We must transcend and include.

 

Dm.A.A.

On Science.

On Science.

 

The Scientific Frame of Reference cannot provide an Ethic. Science can only provide Means and unresolved ‘Facts’. Even should we value a scientific theory as ‘fact’, an Is cannot create an Ought.

 

Dm.A.A.

 

For something to be ‘Scientific’, it must only sound Scientific.

 

Dm.A.A.

 

No degree of put-downs by members of the Scientific Community who gain publicity can change the standing fact that Science Cannot Provide a Truth. The Technological impulse predates Modern Science according to History. Had we a different frame of reference available to Consciousness by which to understand, explain, and justify the development of technology, would it work for us?

Arguably yes, because so ancient an impulse would probably be rooted in the Unconscious.

 

Dm.A.A.

 

I am interested in the truth, and these familiar plaints unsettle me deeply. Numbers and pictures all one will probably! not satisfy me.

 

Dm.A.

On Derrida.

On Derrida.

 

Derrida’s logocentrism has one central, de-bunking enemy: The ineffability of immediate experience.

Since very early childhood, I have struggled with not so much my most intimate experiences as my inability to describe them.

 

The very incompetence on my part in this respect evidences that these experiences could not have originated in language, because were they the products of language then I would have presumably found the words to describe them. There seems to have been in my life an inverse relationship betwixt the capacity to describe things and to experience them. This is the dichotomy of Directed Thought and Non-directed Thought. Our language is malleable; the Truth is not.

How had this escaped Ali? Well, as an extravert , he would naturally be driven more by the object of his consciousness than his own objectivity.

What motive could exist to recount one encounter to another person? The second person would simply become the next experience, submerging the former. The Judging Preferable would lead to such an over-valuation of this Conscious process that the vague corners of the psyche revealed from Unconsciousness by Intuition would be forgotten.

 

Dm.A.A.

 

Derrida’s view of Love, as expressed in the film Derrida (however tentatively), is that Love is most pure when it is directed towards another unconditionally and without justification. Such justification would come in the form of a description. Yet the function of Art is to express the inexpressible. So: An expression of Love in terms of characteristics would be the involving of Art in Love. Every Thou is bound to become an It, which again becomes a Thou.

 

Dm.A.A.

Revelatory Dream.

 

 

The dream must have involved an Under Ground rail-road that borrowed images from several games: Atlantis: The Lost Empire (The Fire Trial), Spyro the Dragon, Ripto’s Rage: The level I imagined in a dream to be Ripto’s level, Jak and Daxter III: The Catacombs, Harry Potter (Gringotts), and perhaps A Bug’s Life and/or Cliff Town in the original Spyro.

 

Yet it culminated in what seemed like a three-layer Cake the colour of this custard morning and treading the in-between betwixt Dream and Awakeness.

 

Prior to explaining these last three dreams, wherein I was part-asleep and part-INTP, I should mention that these things all so happened:

 

                Palomar College.

                The train station.

                Driving about some place like San Marcos by car. I must have been the passenger seat.

 

                Now: The layer-cake.

 

1.       Wandering about down Avenida Venusto, where I would usually go with Pumpkin and where I met Parham Gholami that first time that we walked, (just beyond the inter-section) I encountered some peculiar thing, I think in the crux of a tree, that served either to prove a desperate point I had or to spell some impending doom, if not both.

I later found a drum-stick with something at its end that was bent like the head of a crochet-pin. It resembled a beak, as in a parrot.

 

2.       I was arguing with K. He was in my house, in the kitchen, I think. He and I were disputing the ‘facts’ that an M.R.I. can trace any kind of brain activity you could think of.

I must have abstained from using the argument I had used in Waking Life:

That simply because one can monitor the activity that does not mean that the origin of water, even though one could monitor in much the same way the heat of the faucet, which will depend upon the heat of the water but not necessarily be the cause for the water’s heat).

 

A heated argument broke out. I denied out-rightly the empirical evidence of the M.R.I. I said that the sense organs lie. I might even have said as early as this: The brain could be conical for all we know and we wouldn’t know. It is not divided into ‘parts’ by nature; we simply lend it those distinctions. The mind imposes its categories upon reality and simulates it.

No one observer is unprejudiced.

We can observe activity in the brain, but the distinction of which ‘region’ of the brain it occurs in is thus arbitrary. I was shouting Now. We buy into a shared delusion and hallucination because to have a contradictory hallucination would deem us Crazy. The mind filters these alternate worlds out and leaves them unconscious.

Kresten’s demeanour was infuriatingly calm and self-assured. Then, like a decisive slap in the face, he said:

‘Well, guess what? The doctor is going to take care of me.’*

And that was the end of conversation and Episode.

3.       The third part took place in a space akin to Christopher’s blank wind-space from third grade. The only distinguishing characteristic was the intrusive morning light that I usually welcome and that Kresten so dreads.

The presence of a Thinker was Dubious.

But there were Thoughts.

Conclusions:

                The brain is in fact a cone.

                Our sensory data would evidence this, could it reach the Mind.

The Mind and the Senses are out of accord. A bureaucracy exists between them that is marked by mis-communication.

The mind only pays attention to the Encultured View. The Senses try to communicate the Conical nature of the brain to the mind, but they lack the words to do so.

Words belong to Culture.

All experience is intellectually intersubjective takes place in the Mind.

It is hard to say whether this was all a part of the Dream or simply my thoughts upon waking. Is there even a difference? Where does the Ocean end and the wet-sand begin?

                Dm.A.A.

*Paraphrased.²

 

If this were true, it would invalidate all arguments against it. One could freely posit ‘different parts of the mind’ without fear of legitimate reproof from neuro-science, for it would evidence if not the fallacy of neuro-science then its fallibility. The inquiry would be culturally relative. If adopting an old mythological way of viewing the Mind, Body, and Soul – such as the Hindu or Native American way – has merit even in opposition to Scientific ideology, (based in Cartesianism) then so does this.

One can speak freely of ‘parts of the mind’ in an attempts to understand one’s self without appealing to the shelter of an Outside Opinion. The truly poetic is so vague that science does not even offer answers to the most ambiguous and deep appetites of the Soul, preferring to discuss the vague as delusional. This I have seen in the attitudes of researchers. If a shared hallucination such as the Sighting of the Virgin Mary could be dismissed as the superstitious projections upon random phenomena by the members of a culture with a binding religious world-view, and if this kind of thing is barely different from the phenomenon of shared dreaming, then not only does the attempts to clear away the Mystery create more questions (by affirming Shared Dreams), but all so the same could be said of all Scientific research and peer review.

If the answers provided by the Unconscious and interpreted by Consciousness awake that child-like spirit of wondrous Doubt, then not only can they be said from a pragmatic angle to ‘work’ but they surpass those models created arbitrarily by Consciousness alone.

And the Unconscious cannot be denied in its power, not only because of things like Shared Dreams, Premonitions, and Hallucinations, but all so because the very aim of Science must be the unveiling of That Which is Unknown: The Unconscious.

 

                                                                                                Dm.A.A.

 

². ‘Seeing a doctor’ could mean two things:

1. On the surface, it lends Science an authority by the presence of Doctors.

Doctors are owed to the study of Medicine. Thus pragmatism lends Science value.

2. It lends Doctors an authority by the presence of Science.

                ‘Woah.

                For a moment there

                I might have started thinking

                for myself.

 

                I would see a doctor.’

               

Dm.A.A.

 

Kresten’s fears of going Crazy are assuaged by yet manifested in his Faith in Science. I saw however a maddening fervor for Science in his eyes last night that actually made Me worried for my Sanity and his.

 

Could Science be the Traitor?

 

For K., it very well might be. But I should not rush to judge. It’s his call.

Dm.A.A.