Meet Stan in the flesh

What is to be the topic of the roundtable?

  • Transcending desire

  • Digital utopia / Dematerialization

  • Cocktails / Craft beer

  • The thermodynamic real

  • Gravity's Rainbow (I will read passages aloud)


Results are only viewable after voting.

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Now, let me leave evolution for a moment to consider what is the unit of mind. Let us go back to the map and the territory and ask: "What is it in the territory that gets onto the map?" We know the territory does not get onto the map. That is the central point about which we here are all agreed. Now, if the territory were uniform, nothing would get onto the map except its boundaries, which are the points at which it ceases to be uniform against some large matrix. What gets onto the map, in fact, is difference, be it a difference in altitude, a difference in vegetation, a difference in population structure, difference in surface, or whatever. Differences are the things that get onto a map.

Almost Deluzean, like he's describing a body without organs.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
this is a meaningless sentence. total gibberish bollocks.
I wonder if society's increased diversity in what is believed to be true, what is taken as reality, can be understood as an advantage over a society with a more uniform apprehension of reality.
 
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sus

Well-known member
I wonder of the informational heterogeneity of today's media landscape could be understood as evolutionarily optimal from a systems perspective.
I think it's pretty damn short of optimal tbh—is there really that much diversity of worldview?—but trending the right direction. Probably the Internet is improving things, from what was more a 2x2 (cultural vs countercultural, conservative vs progressive). We're still mostly in that 2x2 but things are fragmenting. More worlds. We always want more worlds. More experiments. States the laboratory of democracy. Try it locally, scale up.
 

sus

Well-known member
"Are societies with perspectival diversity more fit than those that aren't? In other words, is there an evolutionary biology argument in support of the social justice movement?"
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Thats been my reasoning behind supporting demographic diversity in decision-making bodies, aside from any arguments of compassion.
 

sus

Well-known member
Thats been my reasoning behind supporting demographic diversity in decision-making bodies, aside from any arguments of compassion.
The problem IMO is merely the impoverishment of the axes by which diversity is defined. Intersectionality, despite its claims to coverage, is still so limited in the factors it considers legitimate. Very little emerging consciousness re: subcultural worlds.

Class is mostly paid lip service to, and entire swathes of working class worldview is treated as untouchable. Actual ideological diversity/dissent within the many sacred subjects of progressivism is basically impossible within respectable society & institutional life (journalism, academic work, literary culture). On the right, someone like Houellebecq is about as shocking as it gets, and there's only a few trads allowed in polite liberal company (Ross Douthat?). On the left, even as a certain degree of radicalism is more tolerated or respectable, it's a narrow sets of schticks—anti-family, anti-heterosexuality, anti-man.

It's as if the caricature about reaction (that it only defines itself in opposition) is true of far-field ideology on all sides of the political spectrum. They're always defining themselves against.
 

luka

Well-known member
this is what everyone keeps explaining to Stan but he is in retreat from reality. the world gets ever more homogenised and he insists its getting more diverse.
 

sus

Well-known member
That isn't to say "ditch the diversity initiatives" it's just to say "let's enrich the way we think of diversity."
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
The problem IMO is merely the impoverishment of the axes by which diversity is defined. Intersectionality, despite its claims to coverage, is still so limited in the factors it considers legitimate. Very little emerging consciousness re: subcultural worlds.

Class is mostly paid lip service to, and entire swathes of working class worldview is treated as untouchable. Actual ideological diversity/dissent within the many sacred subjects of progressivism is basically impossible within respectable society & institutional life (journalism, academic work, literary culture). On the right, someone like Houellebecq is about as shocking as it gets, and there's only a few trads allowed in polite liberal company (Ross Douthat?). On the left, even as a certain degree of radicalism is more tolerated or respectable, it's a narrow sets of schticks—anti-family, anti-heterosexuality, anti-man.

It's as if the caricature about reaction (that it only defines itself in opposition) is true of far-field ideology on all sides of the political spectrum. They're always defining themselves against.
Yeah I think most of the diversity preached by the left is phenotypic, and may or may not serve as a useful proxy for more substantive perspectival differences. Like someone having a different skin color will certainly have a different perspective, but that difference would seem minimal if both parties in the comparison enjoyed the same degree of wealth growing up in the same culture, etc.
 
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Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
e.g. watching some/all of the same shows, listening to some/all of the same music, speaking the same language.
 
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Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Yeah, especially because increased diversity would seem to entail increased rates of integration, mutual transformation.
 
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