Dissensus Dilettante Society

Much of the autodidactic approach I'm taking consists of osmosis. Continual exposure to educational material that is beyond ones grasp. That, paired witht he kind of willful libidinization I've been talking about, seems to work well as a self-guided approach.

One of the major hangups now, in terms of prototyping this praxis for other humans, is the disproportionate amount of free time I have. Much of that is clearly predicated on socio-economic privilege, but much of it goes beyond that and into the territory of, say, sacrificing social life to further the project, incurring manageable frugalities to incrrementally offset the financial demands of your lifestyle (and thus the time you need to spend earning money), etc.

Again, still very early in this, but there is still potential. If this is a project that will prove exclusive to some bourgeois stratum of society, then I'm inclined to embrace and further elaborate the prospects of a cognitariat vanguard, assuming it can endure sufficient auditing. If, on the other hand, this project can be programmatized into a less time-consuming commitment, then perhaps it can enjoy less exclusive class parameters.

One of the major things going for it is that it is conducive to the will to power, while not coming at the expense of an egalitarian sensibility. This can perhaps be used to siphon certain alt-right intensities, harnessing some portion of that mass libidinal phenomenon and channeling it, perhaps, toward the far-left. This particular effort would need to be transparent though, as far as I can tell.

The alt-left would need to market itself as an alternative to the established left. That said, the alt-left wouldn't be completely phobic to this or that neoliberal/liberal establishment - in fact it could even be in an intimate rapport with it.

Not sure if this would be the MO of the alt-left, or if the alt-left would play a supporting role to this larger movement, but the point of such a "larger movement" would be to converge communist interests with capitalist interests, in a manner that would make accelerationism seem a bit daft in hindsight.

Such a convergence may necessitate a deeply heterogeneous ideological composition. That is, an alt-left would need to be engineered to withstand the combustive potential of vast ideological difference, and to harness this combustion dialectically. I think we are already moving toward this with strains of the left today such as heterodox/dirtbag/etc, namely in that these figures exhibit a wider tolerance of differing voices in the conversation - which isn't to say they agree. In fact, its impressive precisely because they don't agree.

To be clear, I don't think the likes of Justin Murphy or Red Scare are doing what I;m talking about, just that they are individual exhbitions of a larger trajectory that may enter the territory of what I'm talking about. If this trajectory can be steered, than it must be.

luka said:

I don't think learning is useful. I don't think information is useful. I don't think reading is good for anyone. Just try to have a laugh.

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One axiom of this project is that an individuals outlook shouldn't be confined to the circumstances of the individual, and that what works on the individial level (first order) may not only not work as well on the collective level (the second order), but may even be detrimental. Just yesterday I thought of this in terms of cars and traffic: what suffices perfectly well from the perspective of the individual car is actually quite detrimental from the higher order perspective. The same, in some terms, can be said about this or that individual's belief system. How can the first order be reconciled with the second order, pragmatically?

The hubristic nature of all this consists in a rising against the sheer complexity of our world. Lest some among us argue that I argue for submission to complexity. I do, but not without resistance.

edit: infinite complexity, that is. Hence the hubris.

@luka that said, if I'm unable to have a laugh, then I've lost.

edit: in a particular and egoistic way, but seemingly also in a universal sense. The trick would be to harness these energies without granting them complete and compulsive control.

Summary of certain facets of the whole thing:

-There is a need to elaborate a new learning regiment, an autodidactic program, which is better suited to the informational complexity of our world.

-There is a need to establish territories for vulnerable conversations between conflicting belief systems, as well as a framework for such differences to harmonize.

-There is a need to realize the situation of the human psyche, in terms of physical complexity, within the universe.

-There is perhaps a need to elaborate a new religion that proves conducive to both the libidinal, spiritual, and perhaps even abstract capitalist energies of the everyperson - one that is coordinated with, but not confined to, science. (by "abstract capitalist energies" I mean the drive to progress in some capacity, including but not limited to material wealth.)

-Material, social, and political constraints inhibit the psyche's maximal potential, and need to be reckoned with accordingly.

What are the thoughts on Wikipedia?

For a while now I've been exposed to the not entirely unfounded skepticism of Wikipedia as a libertine and unchecked source.

Does anyone here have any experience in adding to Wikipedia? Any processes involved that prevent any addition from remaining on the page?

What prompted this? I was reading a wikipedia page, and noticed how, after reading a quote ascribed to the figure whom the page was about - I felt a sense of acceptance of this information merely by virtue of seeing the citation superscript next to the quote. Granted, it would only take a matter of seconds to gauge the authenticity of this citation, but seeing the citation was enough to quell my scruples.

And I would venture that, for others, the citation itself may not even be necessary to satisfy scruples.

I am a wikipedia apologist, rather passionate in my own way. Using Brave browser, getting BAT tokens for viewing adds, I send what few dollars that earns toward wikipedia, because it has been instrumental in my self-guided efforts of education. In a way, Wikipedia has been my real campus.

Anyway, my enduring argument is that Wikipedia is useful in its extensive capacity much more than its intensive capacity. That is, it lends itself much more to navigating across topics than it does to diving into topics. Anyone else have any feelings about Wikipedia?

@sufi has it come up in your internet activist efforts?

Meant to post this information in this thread, but here it is in that thread:

As per request:

Overall, I lacked the necessary familiarity with the source material, and wasn;t able to appreciate the exegesis.

It was certainly fascinating from a distant and abstract perspective, I just wasn;t able to keep the thread through the whole presentation.

Connections were drawn between certain significant cantos from Bhagavata Purana and modern astronomy, making an argument that such and such modern scientific discoveries were prognosed by such and such sacred text. Perhaps other puranas too. Not sure how these texts are organized.

I'm a bit eh on a religious apologetics situating itself against science. Reactive. Ought to be proactive. There ought to appear no disconnection between science and gnosis. The latter should not be catering to the former, nor vice versa. They should have each other's best interests in mind, no?

I can see where that can open up certain possibilities, certain emancipations, etc - but I'm inclined to keep working through science, if for no other than to systematically work out such alternatives.

Anyone have any opinions on Gresham College? Just stumbled across their youtube channel. Their Wiki says they don't enroll students and just offer all of their lectures for free, and have been uploading them since 2001. A nice trove of material on youtube.

I find this to be concise, from SciTechDaily, for anyone interested in quantum physics.

There does seem to be a recurring theme of arbitrarily named objects. Blue/Red/Green? Up/Down/Top/Bottom/Charm/Strange? I believe Feynman was outspokenly critical of the seemingly random and non-intuitive nomenclature here. Although one cool example, if I'm not mistaken, is "quark" itself, which I heard was taken from Finnegan's Wake.

And a helpful etymological point is that the suffix -on pretty much denotes an (in principle) indivisible particle or a base unit of something. "Proton" as positively charged particle, "neutron" as neutral, "electron" presumably named as the base particle of electricity, which might be corrected by "photon" as the base particle of light, the force carrier of light/electromagnetism. Etymology can really help cut through the jungle here.

Anyway heres the little article.

Science Made Simple: What Are Quarks and Gluons?​

"Quarks and gluons are the building blocks of protons and neutrons, which in turn are the building blocks of atomic nuclei. Scientists’ current understanding is that quarks and gluons are indivisible—they cannot be broken down into smaller components. They are the only fundamental particles to have something called color-charge.

In addition to having a positive or negative electric-charge (like protons and neutrons), quarks and gluons can have three additional states of charge: positive and negative redness, greenness, and blueness. These so-called color charges are just names—they are not related to actual colors.

The force that connects positive and negative color charges is called the strong nuclear force. This strong nuclear force is the most powerful force involved with holding matter together. It is much stronger than the three other fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak nuclear forces. Because the strong nuclear force is so powerful, it makes it extremely difficult to separate quarks and gluons. Because of this, quarks and gluons are bound inside composite particles. The only way to separate these particles is to create a state of matter known as quark-gluon plasma.


In this plasma, the density and temperature are so high that protons and neutrons melt. This soup of quarks and gluons permeated the entire universe until a few fractions of a second after the Big Bang, when the universe cooled enough that quarks and gluons froze into protons and neutrons.

Today, scientists study this quark-gluon plasma at special facilities such as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Quark and Gluon Facts​

• There are six different kinds of quarks with a wide range of masses. They are named up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom.
• Quarks are the only elementary particles to experience all the known forces of nature and to have a fractional electric charge.
• The interaction between quarks and gluons is responsible for almost all the perceived mass of protons and neutrons and is therefore where we get our mass.

DOE Office of Science: Contributions to Quarks and Gluons​

DOE supports research on the interaction of quarks and gluons, the ways they combine into composite particles called hadrons, and the way they behave at high temperature and density. Scientists study these topics at DOE accelerator facilities like RHIC and the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.

The theory that describes the strong nuclear force known as Quantum-Chromodynamics is notoriously difficult to solve. However, it can be simulated on supercomputers built and maintained at DOE facilities. DOE has been a leader in the study of quarks and gluons since the 1960s. The idea of quarks was proposed in 1964, and evidence of their existence was seen in experiments in 1968 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). The heaviest and last discovered quark was first observed at Fermilab in 1995."

Etymology has huge potential for demystifying these topics, like "quantum" for example, which is a perfect example of a mysterious word that instantly makes anything it describes seem complex. Not to say that isn't an accurate conclusion, but the word itself is semantically similar to "atom" and "-on" I believe.

"Quantum" is just a singular and irreducible base unit of something, plural being quanta. Think quantity, as opposed to quality.

A quantum of solace, for example, is an isolated unit of solace, wherein solace itself is a sort of body or field of these quanta.

You can use the word abstractly, as the Bond film does, exploiting the chic evocations.

So in this way, referring to quantum physics as "quantum" is similar to referring to atomic physics as "atomic", which etymologically means "indivisible", an example of our logos proving unable to endure our techne, no? Anyway, it assumes that "This is it, forget what I said last time, this is the bedrock."

But my point is that having this etymological and semantic toolbox makes learning much of this easier.

Really? All of em? Didn't know that.