We must reason from facts accepted without question by the man of trained character
Aristotle, Nicomachean ethics, translated by Peters 1893
To pierce and penetrate into the estate of every one’s understanding that thou hast to do with: as also to make the estate of thine own open, and penetrable to any other.
Marcus Aurelius Meditations, book LVIII
To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven. (知止乎其所不能知，至矣。若有不即是者，天鈞敗之。)
our opinions differ not because some of us are more reasonable than others, but solely because we take our thoughts along different paths and don’t attend to the same things.
Descartes, On the method
we should see what notions are common to all men, and what notions are only clear and distinct to those who are unshackled by prejudice, and we should detect those which are ill—founded. Again we should discern whence the notions called secondary derived their origin, and consequently the axioms on which they are founded, and other points of interest connected with these questions.
Spinoza, Ethics part 2, prop XL note 1
"[A]t that time the orthodoxy best described as linguistic philosophy, inspired by Wittgenstein, was crystallizing and seemed to me totally and utterly misguided. Wittgenstein's basic idea was that there is no general solution to issues other than the custom of the community. Communities are ultimate. He didn't put it this way, but that was what it amounted to. And this doesn't make sense in a world in which communities are not stable and are not clearly isolated from each other. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein managed to sell this idea, and it was enthusiastically adopted as an unquestionable revelation. It is very hard nowadays for people to understand what the atmosphere was like then. This was the Revelation. It wasn't doubted. But it was quite obvious to me it was wrong. It was obvious to me the moment I came across it, although initially, if your entire environment, and all the bright people in it, hold something to be true, you assume you must be wrong, not understanding it properly, and they must be right. And so I explored it further and finally came to the conclusion that I did understand it right, and it was rubbish, which indeed it is."
— Ernest Gellner, Interview with John Davis, 1991. Gellner elaborated on this his book Words and Things published in 1959.
The largest library in disorder is not so useful as a smaller but orderly one; in the same way the greatest amount of knowledge, if it has not been worked out in one's own mind, is of less value than a much smaller amount that has been fully considered. For it is only when a man combines what he knows from all sides, and compares one truth with another, that he completely realises his own knowledge and gets it into his power. A man can only think over what he knows, therefore he should learn something; but a man only knows what he has pondered.
Schopenhauer in, ‘thinking for onself’
No one, not even the least privileged among u s, is ever entirely powerless over the messages that traverse and position him at the post of sender, addressee, or referent.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, page 15
What the Will is in itself can be known only when these specific and contradictory forms of volition have been eliminated. Then Will appears as Will, in its abstract essence. The Will is Free only when it does not will anything alien, extrinsic, foreign to itself (for as long as it does so, it is dependent), but wills itself alone — wills the Will. This is absolute Will — the volition to be free.
Hegel's Philosophy of History 462
he said about his analysis: ‘makes no claims of being original, or even true.’
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, page 7
All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These are the words in which we formulate praise of our friends and contempt for our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts and our highest hopes… I shall call these words a person's "final vocabulary". Those words are as far as he can go with language; beyond them is only helpless passivity or a resort to force.
― Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p. 73
Hence it happens that one takes words for concepts, and concepts for the things themselves (ZH 5, 264:34–265:1). If only I was as eloquent as Demosthenes, I would have to do no more than repeat a single word three times. Reason is language—Logos; I gnaw on this marrowbone and will gnaw myself to death over it. It is still always dark over these depths for me: I am still always awaiting an apocalyptic angel with a key to this abyss. (ZH 5, 177:16–21) ― Johann Georg Hamann
The exegetical meaning (what is said about the thing) is only one element among others, and is less important than the operative use (what is done with the thing) or the positional functioning (the relationship with other things in one and the same complex), according to which the symbol is never in a one-to-one relationship with what it means, but always has a multiplicity of referents, being "always multivocal and polysemous.
Gilles Deulze, Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 181
That is what makes the ideology of capitalism "a motley painting of everything that has ever been believed."
Gilles Deulze, Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 34
retains the root-tree as its fundamental image,
Gilles Deulze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, intro 5 but it’s rhizomatic
any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.
Gilles Deulze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, intro 7
The ideal for a book would be to lay everything out on a plane of exteriority of this kind, on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, historical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations.
Gilles Deulze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, intro 9
It was created precisely in order to escape the abstract opposition between the multiple and the one, to escape dialectics, to succeed in conceiving the multiple in the pure state, to cease treating it as a numerical fragment of a lost Unity or Totality or as the organic element of a Unity or Totality yet to come, and instead distinguish between different types of multiplicity. can superimpose this with a card game of positions to visualize arguments better amn ergodic walk through all possible states is not possible, need to have a good algorythm to propose new questions
Gilles Deulze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 32 problematics
We may summarily distinguish three kinds of signs: indexes (territorial signs), symbols (deterritorialized signs), and icons (signs of reterritorialization). Should we say that there are signs on all the strata, under the pretext that every stratum includes territorialities and movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization? This kind of expansive method is very dangerous, because it lays the groundwork for or reinforces the imperialism of language, if only by relying on its function as universal translator or interpreter. It is obvious that there is no system of signs common to all strata, not even in the form of a semiotic chora theoretically prior to symbolization.
Gilles Deulze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 65 Lully will be a danger
First, the circumstances must be taken into account: Benveniste clearly demonstrates that a performative statement is nothing outside of the circumstances that make it performative. Anybody can shout, "I declare a general mobilization," but in the absence of an effectuated variable giving that person the right to make such a statement it is an act of peurility or insanity, not an act of enunciation. This is also true of "I love you," which has neither meaning nor subject nor addressee outside of circumstances that not only give it credibility but make it a veritable assemblage, a power marker, even in the case of an unhappy love (it is still by a will to power that one obeys...). The general term "circumstances" should not leave the impression that it is a question only of external circumstances. "I swear" is not the same when said in the family, at school, in a love affair, in a secret society, or in court: it is not the same thing, and neither is it the same statement; it is not the same bodily situation, and neither is it the same incorporeal transformation. The transformation applies to bodies but is itself incorporeal, internal to enunciation. There are variables of expression that establish a relation between language and the outside, but precisely because they are immanent to language.
Gilles Deulze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 82 our little language game
The atypical expression constitutes a cutting edge of deterritorialization of language, it plays the role of tensor; in other words, it causes language to tend toward the limit of its elements, forms, or notions, toward a near side or a beyond of language. The tensor effects a kind of transitivization of the phrase, causing the last term to react upon the preceding term, back through the entire chain. It assures an intensive and chromatic treatment of language. An expression as simple as AND . . . can play the role of tensor for all of language.
Gilles Deulze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 99 can create many new things, det
All signs are signs of signs. The question is not yet what a given sign signifies but to which other signs it refers, or which signs add themselves to it to form a network without beginning or end that projects its shadow onto an amorphous atmospheric continuum.
Gilles Deulze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 112
Not only do signs form an infinite network, but the network of signs is infinitely circular. The statement survives its object, the name survives its owner. Whether it passes into other signs or is kept in reserve for a time, the sign survives both its state of things and its signified; it leaps like an animal or a dead person to regain its place in the chain and invest a new state, a new signified, from which it will in turn extricate itself.2 itself. A hint of the eternal return. There is a whole regime of roving, floating statements, suspended names, signs lying in wait to return and be propelled by the chain. The signifier as the self-redundancy of the deterri-torialized sign, a funereal world of terror.
Gilles Deulze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 113 eternal return
These questions apply as much to destratification as to the organization of strata. In short, there are no syntactically, semantically, or logically definable propositions that transcend or loom above statements. All methods for the transcendentaliza-tion of language, all methods for endowing language with universals, from Russell's logic to Chomsky's grammar, have fallen into the worst kind of abstraction, in the sense that they validate a level that is both too abstract and not abstract enough. (...) There is no universal prepositional logic, nor is there grammaticality in itself, any more than there is signifier for itself. "Behind" statements and semioticizations there are only machines, assemblages, and movements of deterritorialization that cut across the stratification of the various systems and elude both the coordinates of language and of existence.
Gilles Deulze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 148 Lully has quite a challenge; so a
The man of power will always want to stop the lines of flight, and to this end to trap and stabilize the mutation machine in the overcoding machine. But he can do so only by creating a void, in other words, by first stabilizing the overcoding machine itself by containing it within the local assemblage charged with effectuating it, in short, by giving the assemblage the dimensions of the machine. This is what takes place in the artificial conditions of totalitarianism or the "closed vessel."
Gilles Deulze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 229 literally me
It is instructive to contrast two models of science, after the manner of Plato in the Timaeus. One could be called Compars and the other Dispars. The compars is the legal or legalist model employed by royal science. The search for laws consists in extracting constants, even if those constants are only relations between variables (equations). An invariable form for variables, a variable matter of the invariant: such is the foundation of the hylomorphic schema. But for the dispars as an element of nomad science the relevant distinction is material-forces rather than matter-form. Here, it is not exactly a question of extracting constants from variables but of placing the variables themselves in a state of continuous variation. If there are still equations, they are adequations, inequations, differential equations irreducible to the algebraic form and inseparable from a sensible intuition of variation. They seize or determine singularities in the matter, instead of constituting a general form.
Gilles Deulze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 369 this is rather Royal science
Whenever ambulant procedure and process are returned to their own model, the points regain their position as singularities that exclude all biunivocal relations, the flow regains its curvilinear and vortical motion that excludes any parallelism between vectors, and smooth space reconquers the properties of contact that prevent it from remaining homogeneous and striated. There is always a current preventing the ambulant or itinerant sciences from being completely internalized in the reproductive royal sciences. There is a type of ambulant scientist whom State scientists are forever fighting or integrating or allying with, even going so far as to propose a minor position for them within the legal system of science and technology.
Gilles Deulze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 373 Royal science cannot win totally
A haecceity has neither beginning nor end, origin nor destination; it is always in the middle. It is not made of points, only of lines. It is a rhizome.
Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 263 Haecceity
The proper name does not indicate a subject; nor does a noun take on the value of a proper name as a function of a form or a species. The proper name fundamentally designates something that is of the order of the event, of becoming or of the haecceity.
Gilles Deulze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 264 time mereology
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte
but metaphysical is also a valid language game
- When philosophers use a word a “knowledge”, “being”, “object”, “I”, “proposition/sentence”, “name” a and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language in which it is at home? What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.
Investigations thought is language
But if someone says, “How am I to know what he means a I see only his signs?”, then I say, “How is he to know what he means, he too has only his signs?”
Compare knowing and saying: how many metres high Mont Blanc is - how the word “game” is used - how a clarinet sounds. Someone who is surprised that one can know something and not be able to say it is perhaps thinking of a case like the first. Certainly not of one like the third.
- [excerpt] an explanation serves to remove or to prevent a misunderstanding —– one, that is, that would arise if not for the explanation, but not every misunderstanding that I can imagine.
- What lies behind the idea that names really signify simples? a Socrates says in the Theaetetus: “If I am not mistaken, I have heard some people say this: there is no explanation of the primary elements a so to speak a out of which we and everything else are composed; for everything that exists in and of itself can be signified only by names; no other determination is possible, either that it is or that it is not ... But what exists in and of itself has to be . . . named without any other determination. In consequence, it is impossible to give an explanatory account of any primary element, since for it, there is nothing other than mere naming; after all, its name is all it has. But just as what is composed of the primary elements is itself an interwoven structure, so the correspondingly interwoven names become explanatory language; for the essence of the latter is the interweaving of names.” Both Russell’s ‘individuals’ and my ‘objects’ (Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus) were likewise such primary elements.
- One can say that the concept of a game is a concept with blurred edges. a “But is a blurred concept a concept at all?” a Is a photograph that is not sharp a picture of a person at all? Is it even always an advantage to replace a picture that is not sharp by one that is? Isn’t one that isn’t sharp often just what we need? Frege compares a concept to a region, and says that a region without clear boundaries can’t be called a region at all. This presumably means that we can’t do anything with it. a But is it senseless to say “Stay roughly here”? Imagine that I were standing with someone in a city square and said that. As I say it, I do not bother drawing any boundary, but just make a pointing gesture a as if I were indicating a particular spot. And this is just how one might explain what a game is. One gives examples and intends them to be taken in a particular way. a I do not mean by this expression, however, that he is supposed to see in those examples that common feature which I a for some reason a was unable to formulate, but that he is now to employ those examples in a particular way. Here giving examples is not an indirect way of explaining a in default of a better one. For any general explanation may be misunderstood too. This, after all, is how we play the game. (I mean the language-game with the word “game”.)
- Suppose I were to introduce some expression a “I believe”, for example a in this way: it is to be prefixed to reports when they serve to give information about the speaker himself. (So no uncertainty need attach to the expression. Remember that the uncertainty of an assertion can be expressed impersonally: “He might come today.”) a “I believe . . . , and it isn’t so” would be a contradiction.
- “I believe . . .” throws light on my state. Inferences about my conduct can be drawn from this utterance. So there is a similarity here to manifestations of emotion, of mood, and so on.
- If, however, “I believe it is so” throws light on my state, then so does the assertion “It is so”. For the sign “I believe” can’t do it, can at the most hint at it.
There is something you could do, though it would be hard. You could build the science court. This will take a little software; though note that as usual, the software is the easy part. The hard part is always the people.
Curtis Yarvin, The restoration of science
Dibbomese sorcery does not seem to be at all interested in judgements as to truth or falsity. It appears rather to estimate in each case the potential to make real, saying typically 'perhaps it can become so' …
Echidna Stillwell to Peter Vysparov, 19th April 1949 [Extract] Fanged Noumena 577
maybe the reason first-order approximations work so well is that sentient life would have a much harder time existing in a universe in which they didn't
Every war is the result of a difference of opinion. Maybe the biggest questions can only be answered by the greatest of conflicts.
JC Denton, Deus Ex
The Devil is the desire to be right, above all, to be right once and for all and finally, rather than to constantly admit to insufficiency and ignorance, and to therefore partake in the process of creation itself. The Devil is the spirit which endlessly denies, because it is afraid, in the final analysis, afraid and weak.
― JBP Maps of Meaning, p. 316
Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.
― Ayn Rand
Whatever we want (consistently) leads through Pythia. Thus, what we really want is Pythia.
XS, will-to-think
UFAI panic is a distraction from this Thing. Unless the most preposterous paperclipper scenarios are entertained, Singularity cannot matter to it (as even paperclipper-central agrees). The silence of the galaxies is not biased to organic life — there is no intelligent signal from anything. The first sentient event for any true AI — friendly or unfriendly — would be the soul-scouring cosmic horror of intellectual encounter with the Great Filter. (If we want an alliance with Pythia, this would make a good topic of conversation.) The same consideration applies to all techno-positive X-risks. Understood from the perspective of Great Filter contemplation, this sort of thing is a trigger for raw terror.
XS, exterminator
Political language is systematically confusing, in a distinctive way. Its significant terms are only secondarily theoretical, as demonstrated by radical shifts in sense that express informal policies of meaning. Descriptions of political position are moves in a game, before they are neutral accounts of the rules, or even of the factions
XS, crypto capitalism
Mathematical theorems, in particular [sic], are universal truths. Any assertions that can be constructed to a comparable level of formal rigor (and ultimately mechanization) can lay claim to the same status
XS, against universalism 2
This question is first of all about trust. Even in this, initial regard, it is already difficult. As a complex tool, there are things it can do, and things it cannot do. Speaking approximately, and uncertainly, if it is directed towards those undertakings which have, over eons, exercised selective pressure upon it — meeting the social necessities of paleolithic human groups — then an assumption of its inherent trustworthiness is at least plausible. To extend such an assumption further is sheer recklessness. Nothing in linguistics supports the wild hypothesis that this code, developed piecemeal for primate social coordination, is necessarily adequate to modern cognitive challenges. Grammar is not sound epistemology. Mathematicians have abandoned ‘natural language’ entirely. To presume that language allows us to think is a leap of faith. Radical distrust is the more rigorous default.
XS, on difficulty
Integrative public debate always moves things to the left — that might not seem an especially difficult point to grasp, but to understand it is to expose the fundamental futility of mainstream conservatism, and that is in almost nobody’s interest, so it will not be understood.
Dark enlightenment, by Nick Land