#thomas moynihan

[maxksx]

[proustiansleep]

The fact that all representation requires mediation (that there is nothing simply ‘given’, either in conceptual graspings or in neural activations) means that the more complex our world-model becomes, the more we must fold into our own systems. Yet for the living, each gyre of life’s egress into its own parameter space is experienced as a painful departure from immersion. Chronognostic range and nociceptive capacity are positively correlated. So that while, from the finalistic perspective of propagative function, such complexification spells unparalleled adaptive potentiation, from the embedded perspective of the actually-existing organism, it implies a cursed inheritance, the legacy of an increasing nociceptive, and eventually dysphoric, burden. The more conversant you are with time—that is to say, the more time inhabits you—the more painful life is going to be. We chordates are immanence’s self-lacerating attempt to escape itself;

Thomas Moynihan, Spinal Catastrophism

[ahumourlessworld]

“In 1876, the year prior to Kapp’s disquisition upon Organprojektion, Engels had declared that the primal adoption of ‘more erect posture’ was ‘the decisive step in the transition from ape to man’ because it freed up the hands for labour; and labour, in turn, promoted conditions that would promote further spinal erection. In this conception, labour and spinal erection cause each other: mutually bootstrapping, symbiotically and serially dragging one another into existence, to gradually converge on Homo economicus. From one perspective, uprightness first enables labour to invade reality; from another, labour value quite literally drags the ape upright, invading is with lowering time preference, riddling us with futurity. A symbiogenesis of sufficiencies.”

[noumenalroom-deactivated20221021]

Thomas Moynihan, “Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History”, 2019

Spinal Catastrophism - Urbanomic

Drawing on cryptic intimations in the work of J.G. Ballard, Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, André Leroi-Gourhan, Elaine Morgan, and Fri

https://www.urbanomic.com/book/spinal-catastrophism/

[sodomyaspraxis]

“Like Blumenberg, Bataille relates uprightness to the origins of mythology, and, like Freud and Ferenczi, he formats the ‘progressive election [from] quadruped to Homo erectus’ as a deviation from coprophiliac anality. Bataille fixates upon half-upright monkeys, who, he delectates, expose their ‘anal projections’ like ‘excremental skulls’. Inasmuch as their knuckle-dragging existence is some kind of ugly ‘halfway house’ between horizontal and vertical modes of carriage, primates are cast as some kind of partway antithesis on the stepwise ascent to mankind’s upright ‘nobility’: a dialectical step between horizontal and vertical, the monkey is awkwardly diagonal. (Primate posture thus inhabits a kind of uncanny valley—from which Bataille derives much titillation.) Nonetheless, by way of necrotizing the Renaissance cliché of orthograde ‘dignity’, Bataille locates in man’s spinal realignment merely a more refined lasciviousness—a more violent voluptuousness. To wit, he pinpoints ‘Two Terrestrial Axes’: the ‘vertical’, which ‘prolongs the radius of the terrestrial sphere’ as axis of libertine escape, lorded by ocean tides and plants (which ‘flee’ the earth to sacrifice themselves ‘endlessly’ to the Sun’s downward onslaught); and the ‘horizontal’, domicile to beasts and ‘analogous to the turning of the earth’. ‘Only human beings’, Bataille notes, ‘tearing themselves away from peaceful animal horizontality’, have ‘succeeded in appropriating the vegetal erection’, surrendering themselves to exquisite upwards collapse towards outer space’s solar enormities and fluxions.”

Thomas Moynihan, Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History (2019)

[sodomyaspraxis]

“Coitus and sleep—both relieving the discontinuity of spinal-priapic erection through collapse into horizontal submersion—represent attempts at ‘archaic’ regressions. During both, ‘the whole body assumes [a] spheroid shape’, recapitulating not just conditions in utero, but the morphologies of our pre-bilateral ancestors, the marine radiate. Ferenczi states, moreover, that the sleeper’s executive center, their ‘soul’, sinks back through nervous laminae, routing down from hibernating and deactivated encephalon into the proprioceptive spinal column. A katabasis of the CNS, sleeping is thus temporary decapitation: the somnolent ‘has only a “spinal soul”’, Ferenczi exclaims; evidence, then, of the sleeper’s ‘phylogenetic regression’ through neuronic layers. The ‘soul’ descends spinally from brain to thorax; a genuine recapitulation of precephalic existences. Dreams are spinal emissions. Sleep is time travel.”

Thomas Moynihan, Spinal Catasrophism: A Secret History (2019)

[humanforaminute]

The story [...] goes something like this. Just as it was once assumed that we live in a maximally populous universe, it was once thought that we live on a perfectly designed planet, created not only to be most beautiful but also to be permanently habitable. As such, it was presumed that it was indeed the best of all possible worlds, fine-tuned for life, in particular human life. The nascent geosciences detonated this illusion, by discovering that it had not always been habitable, and had not always been inhabited by humankind.      But it was upon shedding this illusion, understanding that our conditions of existence are contingent, and realizing our birthplace could itself kill us, that humans first began to imagine that they could give the planet a better design, so that we might not be so certainly extinguished from it. The invention of geoscience went hand-in-hand with the invention of geoengineering, because understanding our planet could kill us inspired us to change it so that it might not.

Thomas Moynihan, X-Risk

[humanforaminute]

“ [T]he crucial question here is not how many intelligent life forms there may actually, factually, turn out to be (or whether Earth somehow is the only planet upon which rational animals have evolved). The point is rather that the Enlightenment's disenchantment of nature obliges us to proceed with the utmost caution: we cannot just assume that values-mongering intelligence is a given or guaranteed galactic fixture simply because we happen to find the idea admirable or agreeable. Once philosophers like Kant had demonstrated that it is mere bias to assume ahead of any investigation that the cosmos at large aligns with our values, it began to make sense to seriously study the contingent preconditions requires in order to create and evolve oases of value-thus paving the way for the emergence of the filed of astrobiology.

     Another less of Kant’s is that we must be cautious in the main of existential issues; we cannot be nonchalant with our status as self-conscious beings. Even a low probability of cosmic loneliness does not warrant nonchalance, given the severity of the consequences if we are wrong. Until we find evidence otherwise, we must act as if we are the only intelligent species in existence. Meaning that we ought to as act as if all the duties that might arise from such a position fall exclusively upon ourselves.

[...]

     With existential threats already piling up on the road ahead, we humans cannot rest upon our Copernican laurels and assume that, should we fail, Earth will once again blossom into a Planet of the Apes. And this means that the eerie silence of the sidereal skies should not be encountered as paralyzing horror but as rallying summons. Again, Kant was sensitive to this. In the closing sections of his masterwork on morality, he reaches a rapturous climax:

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. [...] The first view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature, which after it has been for a short time provided with vital force [must] given back to the planet (a mere speck in the universe) the matter from which it came. The second, on the contrary, infinitely raises my worth as an intelligence in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of the animal and even of the whole sensible world, at least so far as this may be inferred from the purposive vocation that determines my existence because of this law. 

Light years away from the interminably populated galaxies of his early work the cosmos of the mature Kant is now acknowledged to be a cold and annihilating material immensity, unresponsive to the ‘moral law within’. And yet this is but another trial in the path to maturity. For, encapsulated perfectly here, we see that it was the gradual discovery of the silence of outer space that alerted us to the precariousness of our project down here on Earth, and thus summoned us to the modernity-defining projects of fortifying and asserting reason’s dominion within a universe revealed to be utterly unresponsive to reason. ”

— Thomas Moynihan, X-Risk