#cartesian doubt

[dissidentlibrary]

I am not a wind

"I now admit nothing which is not necessarily true: I am therefore, precisely speaking, only a thing which thinks, that is to say, a mind, understanding, or reason, terms whose significance was hitherto unknown to me. I am, however, a real thing, and really existing; but what thing? [...] I will stir up my imagination in order to discover if I am not this assemblage of limbs called the human body; I am not a thin and penetrating air spread through all these members; I am not a wind, a breath of air, a vapour, or anything at all that I can invent or imagine, since I have supposed that all those things were nothing, and yet, without changing this supposition, I find I am nevertheless certain that I am something."

René Descartes, Second Meditation (trans. F.E. Sutcliffe)

[yoinksquid]

evolution: *gives us senses so we can see/hear/smell predators in the environment around us and not die*

humans: *invent philosophy* wHaT IF oUr SeNSeS ArE LYiNg tO uS AnD NoTHiNg iS ReAL 🤔🤔🤔

[dbcii]

Realistic vs. Romantic Literature - The Sunday Re-Blog

This post originally appeared on Comparative Geeks, as the end of a series of posts I had done and have shared over here as well. The post is long, so I will keep my intro short – but let me just say this, this is a post I am proud of!

Hello my readers, time again for me to touch on a series of posts I’ve written over the course of the blog so far. It all started out from a definition of science…

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[comparativegeeks]

Realistic vs. Romantic Literature

In the conclusion of one of my favorite series I've written on the blog, I examine Realistic vs. Romantic Literature

Hello my readers, time again for me to touch on a series of posts I’ve written over the course of the blog so far. It all started out from a definition of science fiction I read in a book, which led into a blog post exploring that. Then, for comparison, I explored a definition of fantasybased on a quote that’s floated around social media. So between the two, I had pitted Frank Herbert against…

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[s33]

(There Ain't No) TOE like a Primordial Identity Pansensitivity TOE

I think I see the confusion here. Remember that in comp, as in any TOE, we begin by hypothesising an ontological base for a universe (or multiverse) from which we will attempt to derive all-else-that-exists (heaven help us!).

That can help explain why it is hard for others to understand my approach. I begin from the reductio ad absurdum of Cartesian doubt. I make no hypothesis and then see what must be unavoidably conceived. Ironically, it is from early experiences with programming games that it was impressed on me that the sense of things cannot be taken for granted. If you want graphics to bounce off of each other when they are moving, you have to define that collision detection and the behavior that follows. The problem with comp is that is does not see that computation itself also runs on a lower level language which (and here is where I start my hypothesis) is neither an immutable given nor is it an accumulation of accidents, but is the fundamental capacity for presence, participation, and the aesthetic enrichment of that presence through participation. Computation is, at best, a thin silhouette of sense, which does not participate and has no presence, but rather is the shared abstractions drawn from the same. Computation does not enrich itself qualitatively, nor does it have any plausible motive to pursue or avoid aesthetic discernments.