"... not a Chain of single Links... a great disorderly Tangle of Lines... "

version

Well-known member
It's strange being able to read incredibly detailed histories of the period you're living through too. You could easily spend a lifetime just reading things about and from, say, 2014.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
It's strange being able to read incredibly detailed histories of the period you're living through too. You could easily spend a lifetime just reading things about and from, say, 2014.
This gets at a recent way I started thinking about modern and postmodern culture. Its like more and more of human conscious experience is shifting away from raw, direct reality, and into our own collective depiction of reality. I'm sure Baudrillard has elaborated on this greatly.

But its like our sense of reality is more and more comprised of our own depiction of reality, our own ideas, and less of direct sensory experience that isn't mediated by ideas. And I suppose the critical mass of this trend is what Baudrillard calls hyperreality, and arguably this as a status quo is what defines postmodernity.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
And there does seem to be a competitive advantage that comes with an ability to abstract information about the world and employ this information in the form of concepts and models, and this advantage has been manifest perhaps in the form of business administration.
 

version

Well-known member
This gets at a recent way I started thinking about modern and postmodern culture. Its like more and more of human conscious experience is shifting away from raw, direct reality, and into our own collective depiction of reality. I'm sure Baudrillard has elaborated on this greatly.

But its like our sense of reality is more and more comprised of our own depiction of reality, our own ideas, and less of direct sensory experience that isn't mediated by ideas. And I suppose the critical mass of this trend is what Baudrillard calls hyperreality, and arguably this as a status quo is what defines postmodernity.
Screenshot-from-2021-10-15-20-04-43.png
 

version

Well-known member
This gets at a recent way I started thinking about modern and postmodern culture. Its like more and more of human conscious experience is shifting away from raw, direct reality, and into our own collective depiction of reality. I'm sure Baudrillard has elaborated on this greatly.

But its like our sense of reality is more and more comprised of our own depiction of reality, our own ideas, and less of direct sensory experience that isn't mediated by ideas. And I suppose the critical mass of this trend is what Baudrillard calls hyperreality, and arguably this as a status quo is what defines postmodernity.
I imagine that's always been the case, but nowadays we have more tools at our disposal and a lot more material to work with.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I imagine that's always been the case, but nowadays we have more tools at our disposal and a lot more material to work with.
More tools and better tools yes, but we also spend a third of our lives looking at screens, effectively living online, which is new.
 

version

Well-known member
It feels like direct experience and anecdotal evidence are more or less totally devalued at this point, mind you.

If you've actually experienced whatever you're discussing then that apparently isn't as convincing or reliable as being able to produce a random paper the person you're arguing with probably won't even read anyway.

Both having their weaknesses, surely you want to use them in tandem?
 
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Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
It feels like direct experience and anecdotal evidence are more or less totally devalued at this point, mind you. Any assertion is expected to be backed up with stats and figures as though they aren't also flawed.
Yeah in order for our IT society to process events, they need to be quantified and expressed in certain ways, otherwise its just a group of people with singular apprehensions of event, the communication of which involving more friction and distortion than that of bits.

But yeah it seems like we are practically destined to keep conflating the map with the territory. As Vim and others have pointed out, the economic models and theories hardly do justice to the complexity of human society. There's also that aphorism attributed to George Box: “All models are wrong, but some are useful."

Like I think understanding economic growth in terms of technological development is a relatively useful lens through which to understand society, but it seems like we'll always craft a more useful lens, and none of them will comprehensively explain the complexity of the universe. But then here we have that narrative of perennial progress, which I subscribe to in self-awareness.
 
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