My Too (Many) Cents

 I read a blog post recently which tried to lay out principles for group rationality.  I wanted to see how they could come about emergent as a set of interactions between healthily developed egos.  To debate, you need to have high self esteem; The idea is to get others to believe in what you want. The ideal platonic essence of a debate is to  My break with platonism - deleuze talks about breaking against it in the sense of focusing on a essential perfection in things beyond the form that is revealed to us. My enjoyment of my music or my movement of my body is in the sense the atium shadow (from Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series) of the platonic essence of perfection I have already cognized.  This is the 'natural intelligence' Krishnamurti talks about. I realised that there's no objective grounding for a concept of "self esteem", because it is never about focusing and doting on yourself. It is about nurturing it in so far as it can become something you let go...

 Now that I have given this process a name, of exploring thoughts along fault lines, there is an anxiety for it to become a repetitive procedure instead of an active involvement. So too is always a fear with any discipline I practice; Whenever I get mechanically trapped in some processes, I plateau and stagnate. It is only in exploring further and deeper that my brain can develop along an entirely new axis.  I have been having fun in imagining life as a series of games. The idea of a game is that its consequences don't matter outside its realm of influence. Yet at the same time they should feel real enough that they are motivating incentives to someone inside the game itself.  A game is structured by a set of rules. It is these rules that define what is the objective of the game. To win a game we must perceive a subtler, deeper aspect of the truth and express it through our bodies and minds than the opponent. The opponent then isn't so much an enemy as he is a medium for ...

This is an expopsition of an internal dialogue (again following a feldenkrais approach, exploring around in the realm of thought that is comfortable to me and trying to expand further.) Axiom: You should be dedicated to perfection or truth in whatever activity you pursue.  Justification: If this were not true, why are you doing anything in the first place. Life is meaningless and you can probably just kill yourself and nothing would change.  It's not like anything is going to change either way. Is there intrinsic moral worth to pursuing perfection in each action? No, even that is not true. If you think there is a moral worth assigned to this action then you are getting the pleasure of slave morality. Of imposing on others what you cannot live by yourself. It is not "good" to pursue perfection, a creative and subtle path through life. It is simply the only effective path. That is a stronger claim than what I believe to be true. There is some degree of tolerance, an epsilon...

 people are not who they seem.  in fact people are not people at all.  People are kernels of light. Of reason that guides how they move through life.  And that is not a romanticized or mystical notion.  How one breathes, How they orient their body. The sound each syllable makes. The silence in between. The space they take up. The relaxation of their muscles - of their face and their body.  Everything flows from the kernel of their truth. Human beings are sculptors and sculpted. Agents roaming the world with Kernel access to edit our own source code. Again, not in a romanticized self-improvement kind of way. But literally; To expose ourselves to our fears, anxieties and structure experience around us in a way that we can overcome them.  We are molten lava in the process of solidifying itself. Molten truth ossifying into the subject.  The clothes we choose to wear. How they rub against our skin. The way we touch each other, from a handshake to sex. ...

 A sperm and an egg fused to create a spark of truth.  A mother labored for 9 months to birth pure potentiality. Glimmer in its eyes, Looking towards the skies. Hope, curiosity, and wonder colored its imagination. So free were its sights, set on an ideal far beyond. Plastic idols, Plastic ideals violently violated the space for serendipity. Where it earlier saw a vigorous interplay of forces, now arose the plethora of forms. Ambition, Talent, Acheivement. The need to have been somebody.  To a being born of thunder, such an insult could never stand.  But as a king loses his regality in having lived with beggars long enough, so too did the being finally surrender.  Without love and truth we crumble and wither away.  Being deprived of his lifeblood, the baker begged for little crumbs.  And then bigger crumbs.  Looking down the well of his discontentment, he saw darkness deeper and deeper.  Blood curdling screams, grotesque scratching.  Bloo...

 There are unfathomably deep truths scattered across our collective psyche.  It is these truths that nourish our existence. The signal that breaks through the noise of unconsciousness and suffering.  The brain needs an objective function, so as to not always be struggling. These truths are the objective functions that we converge to. Even if you say there is no objective driving you, that is itself an objective function.  The first truth is that life really is meaningless. Just a play of material reality. Or perhaps units of consciousness.  Each truth has a domain of applicability, used outside which it becomes untrue. Searching for truths creates one's journey.  This whole exposition is an attempt to discover even deeper truths.  It is possible to go infinitely deep into anything, to be one with the flow of the universe. When you are that master, then it doesn't matter what you do, you create art.  The hero's journey mirrors our evolution. We sta...

A new season of your life requires new axioms, new beliefs and new perspectives. Axiom: In any discipline, truth is the only effective thing. Define the truth as the shortest path to the desired action, making the axiom tautological.  This shortest path is not necessarily in the space of time or effort. The time or labour it takes for a truth to become imbibed is a projection of that shortest path along some lower space. The truth can be intuited through reason. By reason the essence of knowledge is referred to; the pure sharp faculty of the mind. Reason can only grasp for truths that are already in one’s field of awareness. Once a truth is in one’s awareness, there is no choice but to excercise our reason and grasp for it. Its shape only becomes clarified in the labour of its coming into being. Human beings are creative by nature. All our modalities of existence in their most exalted forms are creative endeavours. Creativity is subtelty; understanding and expressing difference. Un...

Why disturb serene stillness? It is to only to attain clarity about what the stillness already conceals We do not reside in true stillness.  There is turbulence and flow all over its surface.  In composing all those flows towards a single direction.  In watching the whole process of their movement.  They extinguish, and we are once again left in stillness.  The inner having expressed itself as the outer.  what does it mean to see? To really see without hesitation, without flinching.  Every wrinkle, every crevice and every surface of another's skin.  To use your eyes as a mechanism to be put in touch with the real.  do we know how to see? What does it mean to hear? Listening to every word uttered from the other's mouth? Or rather watching every single movement of thought, every flex of the muscles on their face and every dilation of their eye. Letting each note ripple onto the silence of your mind. Until you are one with the very flow of thoug...

 The mind loves to escape.  At the base level we are escaping the fact that our ego is limited.  Life is about creating our own games and playing them perfectly to conquer our mind.  To create a game, one needs to establish a goal, a desire that deeply burns within him.  If this desire is not genuine, there is no start to this game.  There is no hero's journey without the establishment of a villain.  In reaching for a goal we get buffeted.  Romanticizing that situation, pitying it, resenting others these are all the common responses to this.  We are fundamentally lonely, playing a single player game.  Excellence in any pursuit is really conquering the mind.  If one does not move to change a situation it is because he does not feel threatened enough by it.  Comfort breeds complacency.  The only thing I am concerned with is human perfection.  Even then I do not care about others, in so far as we do not help each other....

 RL Agents - there are only goals. Goals in life are frames. Linguistically and through the whole mechanistic process we have a way of setting up our life to change what goals we are maximizing for.  Or rather even if we don't, we still have the understanding of how we are to deal with life - Victor Frankl -> Even if they take everything from you, you can still find meaning in how you deal with the situations that come up in life. I propose that that is the only way in which we can find meaning - A slave's freedom.  The only way to have integrity in the process of your thought, to not be a second hand human being is to be integrated. Self education is a step towards it. Saucha of thought is also to check what you allow yourself to be conditioned by.  The truth might break me. I've been mercilessly conditioned in every way that even when sparks of truth like this arise they can't last long. I feel tired already. There's infinite distraction, an incentive to open n...

The truth is not a bludgeon. It is easy for a truth to be conveyed in language for the form of language is too gross an instrument to convey the subtleties in truth.  Once conveyed, we have access to those mental markers. Yet, if it is something that you are not yet ready to live by, or doesn't correspond to your lived experience then it creates debt.  In the same way as having conversations about concepts that you assume to be true without examining for yourself creates epistemic debt, having principles or prescriptions for life given to you by others creates existential debt. I suppose that is karma in some senses. I have often used these deeper truths as bludgeons. They are guiding lights for sure, for example the metaphysical understanding of the Upanishads however, if one's body-mind apparatus is simply not ready to live by the truths it sees, these truths can break them.  It is no different from an addiction, an obsession. The life of a human can be seen in some way...

 Fragrances often have tones. These are differentiated on the basis of how long they persist after the fragrance has been used.  People's personalities are like fragrances. We wear these different masks which are archetypes of behaviours. Like onions with infinite layers. Depending on the social group or the situation we are immersed in, our personality changes. Yet there is still a semblance of going towards the core.  As we become more sensitive to this process, we can see that at our core we are like children, bundles of joy. This plethora of masks is nothing but a collection of defense mechanisms to life's circumstances.  In essence, it is possible to game the system once one realises this; there are certain masks that society loves. I have been reading Feldenkrais recently, and in his language it is possible to put in the reps mechanically to develop a certain mask but those mechanical and fearful reps do not arise from a place of sensitivity and love.  Lan...

We humans love to suffer. From the day we're born, or rather from the day we pick up some linguistic fragments and start violently attaching meaning to this mess of qualia we call the world. Suffering is like a whirlpool in the realm of consciousness, constricting its free flow. We love our suffering, that is how we create novelty and complexity.  Actually. There's no me here. There is an I. All writing is written so that it may be read, and passed on to someone. It's a selfish endeavour, and has always been. We create the constrictions in this flow and then we create a whole drama around it. We love the sense of tragedy, of wonder, of playing around and frolicking observing and touching different parts of that drama. That is the only way we can have the spark in our eyes that little kids have, the sense of wonder only an innocent mind possesses. To get lost in maya, samsara, illusion. The christians romanticize it best perhaps, to have a love so great for the world, a whir...

In sanskrit grammar there are three types of implication ajahati Lakhsan (implication by exclusion)- original meaning of the world is totally substituted Jahati Lakshana (implication by non-exclusion)- original meaning of the world is not substituted, but a new connotation is attached to the  The third approach is called bhaga tyaga lakshana (literally 'abandoning parts') and it corresponds nicely to hegelian sublation.  There is a truth in the bare linguistic expression of the sentence, but it is unrefined. It is in the process of thinking through and interpreting it that the truth is refined and 'lifted' aufhebung to a higher unity. This is how the mahavakyas are to be interpreted in the upanishads.  Everything that is written, is written in the hope that someone else may read it, but writing words down necessary kills some part of the truth you know. 

 your life is a death sentence.  these beautiful buildings, with their clean marble floors. the board rooms, the suits, the team building meetings. It makes me puke, the putrid smell of inauthenticity.  Bitterness. As you go home, to your perfect bourgeosie lifestyle, a temple of plastic. Aesthetic tupperware as you cook the cuisine of some culture that got appropriated. As you taste the pasta to make sure it is 'al dente' and you pass a snide remark about your friends and gossip about the newest developments to your clique.  The beautiful kitchen counters, as everyone tries to keep up, the furniture you appreciate, the skincare routine that has been 'working wonders'. your skin looks so good lady! that doesn't change the fact that it will decay and go to death. Freckled, wrinkled, disgusting with warts and protrusions or perhaps just old and in a flash if you're lucky.  Into the ground, burnt to ashes, eaten by vultures depending on your culture.  Where ar...

 The eccentric artist is one of the most beautiful archetypes I have had the pleasure of observing in our collective psyche. He is a philanderer, making love to life so deeply, exploring each nuance of a crevice that is his art to the deepest depth possible yet having no commitments. If one must go deep or high, they cannot travel with a lot of weight.  He is a nomad, where each village he encounters is a temporary bastion. A place to sell his wares from the adventure he has been on. His travels are sacrifice in the purest biblical sense. he travels not only to sate his own curiosity. No. There is a deeper purpose, a dharma to his journey.  Each step of his life, each movement of his feet, each stoke of his brush, each key he presses on his keyboard. Each movement of little perfection is also a movement of truth, of sacredness. It is not mere curiosity that drives him, but the very flow of existence.  No less can he be forced to pursue excellence in his art than a wa...

 Life for me has always been suffering interlaced with temporary moments of happiness. If I think back to all the mental states I know, much more of them have been spent in lack. In waiting. Waiting for life to happen to me. A nagging sensation that this is not what my life is supposed to be like. And that possibly, somewhere out there, there is a version of me who is living the best life I could be living. His life is not mine though, yet I constantly use him as an excuse, to devalue my own experience. My friendships are empty, my relationships are empty. Every thought is plagued by the promise of a 'what if(?)' or an 'if only' There have been certain moments that surpass the dissatisfaction inherent in every waking experience. I have felt in those moments that I am underneath the flow of life as it passes over me and refreshes me. I have experienced it in badminton; The absolute, unwavering concentration that carries within it the plethora of expressions and emotions ...

Preface 13.  (4/06/24) Old World - Substantial life - the forms of knowledge here don’t quite work fully yet they still have form and content. Nascent Sciences - seem esoteric and understandable by only few individuals sometimes because it takes away the determinacy the old world has. But this is important for the development. Real Science is OPEN - capable of being learned and apprehended by ALL - this is what science turns towards.  14. (4/6/24) Science as process - Knowledge that can account for itself (get over the epistemic circularity that is fundamental) - and for the historical process through which it emerged. Huge Undertaking. Nascent science  not complete in details (not enough data) = content not complete in articulation = form. real science should be able to articulate in satisfactory terms what its studying and itself as the method of study. i.e. become adequate to the things its studying. One = old world, old science -> intelligible, wealth of the mat...

 Sense Certainty 92.  (3/6/24)If we examine sense certainty and think of its essence then it’s not actually immediate, pure being. To think sense certainty, we must think an example of sense certainty and not its essence itself. And to refer to sense certainty we must implicitly split the experience into two ‘thises’. a ‘this’ which is the ‘I’ which experiences and a ‘this’ which is the object of experience. e.g someone describing an experienc of sense certainty may say it’s like “When you’re in the flow state”.  93. (3/6/24) This mediation described in the previous paragraph is not just a heuristic we need to use to refer to sense certainty, but rather embedded in its essence itself. There is an object which exists independent of our knowing of it and keeps producing sensory information. The relation between the ‘I’ and the object is knowing. This is contingent. It doesn’t NEED to happen. Progress: 16/808

Sense Certainty  90.  (2/6/24) In apprehending we must resist the urge to comprehend ‘what is’. apprehension = Aufassen. comprehension = begreifen. If we try to conceptually comprehend it, that cognition colours the mere sensate qualia. 91. (2/6/24) Sense certainty is an immediate experience of qualia. It seems spatiotemporally infinite due to the fractal nature of qualia. i.e. wherever we focus, it extends infinitely. It is being itself. Lots of religious and mystical metaphors are probably referring to and romanticizing this state. e.g. enlightenment. or the fall of eden. Hegel does not satisfactorily make the case that one cannot remain in sense certainty.  Why is a situation not posible where In a krishnamurtian sense if there is just an experience of the body or e.g. feldenkrais somatic experiencing, where the necessary mechanistic knowledge flows out at the level of determinate knowledge even though you are penetrated into sense certainty. Emotions are somatic quali...

 Preface (Continued) 10. Intuition places itself “above” determinate = extensional  = phenomenal = computationally reliable    knowledge. E.g. creative people saying they’re ‘not linear thinkers'', can’t think with their left brain etc but real creativity is only in determinate forms (content is consciousness). in such a situation spirit pours “forth as finite multiplicity without force”. intution without expression thinks it has acquired depth even though it hasn’t, it is just hazy - the power of spirit is only as great as its expression. Spirit has to take determinate forms otherwise dialectic stops and “hides the truth from itself” Introduction          73. Talks about cognition. Is cognition an instrument or a medium to know the absolute??                      Instrument -> Problems: Its possible that we can choose the wrong category of thought to examine the absolut...

Preface continued  31/05/2024 8. Modernity has a romanticized conception of the mystics and occult of medieval times e.g. Augustine. They talk of the saints and gnostics of previous times as having some otherworldly knowledge, having to be turned to the practical and empirical from their gaze set on heaven. After Kant’s project, a divide has been created between that which is empirical, and knowable in everyday life( from phenomena) as opposed to the noumenal. Because of this, the secularized, modernized spirit is so thirsty for any sense of “spirituality” that it will take without critically grasping anything that reveals itself as spiritual knowledge. 9. Edification can be thought of as ‘upbuilding’. If philosophizing more does not create a system that accounts for more generality, there is no cognitive discomfort or effort extended there y our thought isn’t a creative activity in a Deleuzian sense . People who are okay with mere edification want beliefs to be intentionally a bit...

  30/5/24 6. Hegel is criticizing philosophers like Spinoza and Schlegal here who think that Intuition - direct, unmediated experience is central to experiencing god and truth.Hegel on the other hand thinks that the german word Begriff = Grasping translated as ‘The Notion’ or ‘The Concept’ is the essential nature of the truth. The other philosophers are in some sense afraid of the labour of the whole emergence of truth and pessimistic about Humans’ capability to get there which is why they place direct unmediated experience at a higher level than discursive knowledge. This is a problem because with unmediated knowledge you cannot know whether it is a hallucination e.g 7. Continuing the criticism, Hegel mentions a movement of thought where not only has spirit been displaced from substantial life = NPC lifestyle unaware of finitude, but it has also become aware of its finitude, abusing itself for living in this wickidness. (Kinda like this family guy clip ). Instead of going through ...

 Hello everyone. I've always been meaning to read Hegel and have read a decent bit about him and also read through some of his work randomly from the middle. However, given the density of writing, all these unsystematic readings do not do his work justice and I haven't been able to grasp enough of his work to integrate it into my thinking as I was able to do with Nietzsche.  Since this is something I really want to do, because I think he has some interesting things to say and an interesting way to think, I am starting this new series. The aim is to read and comprehend atleast 1 passage of the phenomenology everyday until I finish the book. at worst this may take me around 800 days, which is around 2 years of my life spending ~15 minutes a day.  The resources I'll be using are as follows: A.V. Miller's Translation of the Phenomenology J.N. Findlay's commentary on the text The Half Hour Hegel Lecture series by Gregory B Sadler The Internet and My own intution wherever...

 This post is about frames.   A frame is a self-consistent representation that accounts for all the observations you have made about life.  We love frames because it allows us to coherently ground our action in the world. We expend a lot of cognitive (in lack of a better word "vital") energy in trying to create and update our frames in a bayesian-like process of updation. We want frames at all levels. You want a frame for your own actions, a story. You want a frame for your relationships, a dynamic. You want a frame for your company, a vision. You want a frame for the world, a utopia.  When we don't have frames, we don't have meaning. We end up confronting life in all its absurdity and unexplainability.  A plausible definition of creativity is an extension of the current frame to account for such observations; it is at the edge of chaos and logos that it plays.  All frames are at their base delusions. The map is not the reality. The more closely you ob...

 I have a newslettter here.  These are a few posts that I wrote for the newsletter but eventually I realised that they didn't fit with the theme of what I want to do with my newsletter. At the same time, they fit in perfectly with the theme of my blog (unrefined creativity that might end up being ranty sometimes). So here I present to you the posts from my newsletter. being human. To the depth allowed by my current perspectives, there are three classes of problems we are confronted with as humans. The problem of livelihood The problem of relationship The problem of health If you may examine your own experience, you see that the things you struggle with, may be approximately categorized as problems relating to health, money or relationships. It is a disservice to the depth of these problems to categorize and express them as easily as I did. A detailed exposition is in order. The problem of livelihood is the problem of a craft. Your craft works on you more than you do on it. It ...