#i have entered a phase in the cycle known as Dark Sam in which all the friends who might ask me to meet up for brunch while they’re in town

[samwisefamgee]

sure, being the biggest idiot Alive has some drawbacks but it also causes me problems

[welcometomy20s]

March 17th, 2020

Living In A Ungrounded Reality (and other musings)

‘I’m a lesbian!’

(Well, I’m probably heterosexual/gynosexual but that’s for a different time)

There is a board in a communal working space that defines LGBTQ+ terms and I never truly like the board, but I couldn’t articulate why until now.

It’s just that the board is full of secondary definitions, definitions in which the words require a definition themselves. It’s a signpost pointing to a signpost. And while in technical terms, that is fine, in part of the language so close to emotions, it’s a really bad way to define things.

To explain secondary and primary definitions, I need to harken back to Derrida and the post-modernists. To them, the idea of language as fundamental feels useless because there is no end to the referents. One word is defined by a set of words, which in turns are defined by a set of terms, and so and so forth. We are trapped in an endless cycle of abstractions.

They are true, but first they have to be false. This falsehood was first demonstrated by Descartes, in his cogito argument. Most people remember ‘I think, therefore I am’, but it should be more close to ‘I doubt, therefore I am’. The ego exists in opposition to something else, and that is sensation, because sensation is unexpected. It is not obviously logical.

This reaction, or doubt, to our sense is the primary ingredient in our description of the world. Cognitive scientists call this ‘qualia’. While we think about direct qualias, like the sensation of ‘red’, there are also relative qualias, like the concept of ‘big’ and ‘three’. When qualia are defined, they are usually defined by their properties, what do we sense.

(In fact all the relative qualias in mathematics can be defined by one relative qualia, either concretely, by using groupings of qualias, which is confusingly known as ‘set theory’ or fluidly using the active nature of processes, which is more confusingly known as ‘category theory’. There are other ones too, but those are the two most popular and accessible ones.)

This has been grounding for so-called classical science that began around the time of Descartes. But by the early 20th century, further observations have realized something more sinister lying beneath. Turns out there are things that cannot be explained in qualias alone. To ascertain our qualias, we must create a world beyond our qualias, a kind of supernatural is necessary in order to explain the natural. This reverberates throughout philosophy, like the Kirkegaard’s Leap of Faith or Hume’s thinking of Is-Ought Gap.

Therefore the ground that we have found in qualia becomes unmoored with the levels of abstractions we have to introduce underneath in order to completely explain our qualias.

It is that ungrounded reality that post-modernist are reacting to. And it is what we should also react to as well, but we don’t have to be so drastic as in the case of the postmodernist. Preceding and following pieces, mostly political in nature, is my way of coming to the terms of the ungrounded reality and perhaps embracing it in order to further our understanding.

I think this is a good enough exploration for today.

P.S - Talking about qualia eventually leads me to thinking about Pleasantville, which I proposed as the better explanation of the thinking behind Mary, the Color Scientist. I said the reaction of the changing colors represented a new kind of understanding that is not academic. It is curious how that changing color occurs, because mostly it comes in the exploration of a new regime of sensation, rather it be passionate love or an irrational duty to order. The movie presents the colored and the monochrome as a race allegory, with some ham-fisted set pieces. But I like the idea here, that the ‘colored’ are the ones who have witnessed a new regime of experience, although not of positive ones as in the movie but one of exploitation and humiliation, and the monochrome are who have been protected against that.

The last decade has been sometimes characterized by what some call ‘The Great Awokening’. This is a reference to the Great Awakenings that constituted the growth in American Christianity. I think that this idea of being awake or just ‘woke’ is a fascinating one, because it implicitly tells us that the act is an realization of a new sensory regime. It is an epistemological revolution.

One of the most curious things I like about Gone Home was Sam’s reaction to coming out to her parents. She was surprised that they were not upset that Sam liked girls, but rather confused. What she thought would be a moral barrier, was instead an epistemological barrier. Olly Thorn talk about this in terms of Trans Rights, as opposed to Gay Rights, but I think this distinction merely comes from the time they existed in. The 1990's was a more objective time, people can agree on the facts, but they disagreed on the merits, but in the 2010’s, we don’t agree on the facts because some people are ‘woke’ and other people choose not to be.

Question changed in the wake of 9/11 and the Great Recession from ‘what path should we take’ to ‘what is out there’, a more fundamental and unsettling question. Yesterday, I watched through hours of unfiction explanations and one of the videos talked about the history of unfiction, and it’s curious that it happened at the turn of the millenium. Y2K was starting to be a thing, and soon we would have a contentious election and a terrorist attack and a financial crash. The things that we thought were solid were no longer solid. The chaos and the reawakening followed, in some sense we’re still in the middle of reawakening, entering a new phase where we have to fight the unbelievers, those who try to destroy knowledge. How long and how bloody it would get is unknown for now. But we should get ready.

P.P.S. I didn’t know how dark the P.S. would get. I’m sorry about that. Also, my fictional series used Great Awakenings as a plot point, at first I just did it because it was cool, but I like the rise of magic coinciding with the expanse of the collective epistemological regime.