Why Conspiracy Theories?

[luka]

But isn't this kind of momentary primal being still riding the wake of previously established values?

I wouldn't say values no. I'm talking about self as a space in which certain things can happen, can be felt, can take place

 

[luka]

A kind of possibility space....the degree to which it can be altered changed, temporarily or permanently is subject to experiments.... how do the parameters change when I change my beliefs, or when I swallow this pill or....

 

[constant escape]

Well yeah I think you can be in a more immediate, non-ruminating state wherein values don't undergo that kind of formative/crystalizing process that is fueled by cognitive effort.

But I also tend to think that such a cognitive effort is the force that differentiates one psyche from another, in manners beyond mere physiological or chemical or otherwise genetic differences. So it would be something more like an undifferentiated id-like state of being.

The again, perhaps there could be a unvaluated "space" beyond values, rather than prior to them. This would describe certain enlightened states, states wherein no further action is required, or at least the compulsion to act is diminished.

 

[constant escape]

Maybe "values" could be thought of in terms of interpretative decisions, decisions where again are not necessarily made consciously.

Say your father tells you balloons are for birthdays, and you walk outside and see your first balloon. Is it a conscious decision to ascribe a birthday-relatedness to that balloon? I don't think so. That would be an example of a value spreading from one mind to another, in a more or less arbitrary way.

That balloon could've had any characteristic or quality ascribed to it, any value ascribed to it, but the one that was ascribed was predetermined, in a way.

 

[constant escape]

Maybe "meaning" is a more effective term than "value", seeing as "value" seems to describe a quantitative worthiness/preciousness, and not so much a qualitative character.

 

[constant escape]

So not what you choose to present but the bedrock of your being and what it is comprised of moment to moment. The grain of your experience.

Well I believe the bedrock of being is the bedrock of the cosmos, which I would be inclined to map out in physical terms.

 

[constant escape]

That is, we are abstractions projected by and suspended within natural machines of a far greater physical complexity than artificial machines.

 

[luka]

Yeah I think Freud talks about this in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that our sense organs only let in so much signal, so as to prevent an overload of our hardware. Thus the sensory layer/stratum that insulates the psyche is a sort of callous cortex that has certain receptors/inlets through which certain raw signals enter to be processed.

It's not just a question of quantity it's also the way these things land. Why the noise of the neighbour's can become intolerable. Why the sight of your own pulse in the wrist throbbing can become intolerable. Why the skin itself can become intolerable.

I put very very little weight on cognition. I think it's almost without any importance at all. I'm not even convinced thinking exists. That would be a major difference here.

 

[constant escape]

Well would you say that howness of how these things land is partially learned and partially inherited/genetic? And that there is a variety of hows from psyche to psyche?

 

[constant escape]

So perhaps ideology pertains more to the formalized/articulated valuations, more or less cognitively attained.

But what you're talking about still involves a physical system ascribing meaning to a signal, and the meaning that gets ascribed isn't necessarily the only meaning that could have been ascribed

edit: "ascribing meaning" in a way that isn't conscious, at least not in the way that we experience or characterize consciousness.

 

[luka]

Saying anything is part nurture part nature is usually a safe bet but what's interesting is how much this changes during the course of a life. How you can go through periods where the self you are occupying is radically different from the one you took for granted a year ago

 

[luka]

Again as I say I think that we can and do perform all types of experiments to change our internal conditions
Change diet, exercise, meditate, swallow all the drugs, breathing exercises, affirmations, fasts....

 

[constant escape]

So ideology would perhaps refer to the set/system of values that are formed posterior to this preconscious ascription of meaning to a signal. Conscious valuation is a sort of refinement/rumination/processing of these pre-conscious impressions.

 

[luka]

So ideology would perhaps refer to the set/system of values that are formed posterior to this preconscious ascription of meaning to a signal. Conscious valuation is a sort of refinement/rumination/processing of these pre-conscious impressions.

This is closer to what I would sign up for I think yes.

The difference between a state of anxiety and the state of calm is not ideological. These are the kinds of things which exist prior to any cognition and are in ,y view, more significant and influential

 

[luka]

That's where my attention is focussed anyway. At that moment to moment awareness of being and what is transpiring. That's what I write out of. Trying to notice what is happening as opposed to thinking.

 

[constant escape]

The mind works with what the gut already processes, perhaps? But even the gut can learn.

Yeah I think your point is critical, and that a more nuanced map of ideology needs to be worked out, bearing in mind how signals can be received and processed in pre-conscious and physiological ways, and that cognitive processing is a higher order interpretation of signal than the physiological interpretation of signal.

Interpretation in the sense that a physical system may respond to a signal in a variety of ways before acquiescing into a pattern based on which response yields the best result.

 

[constant escape]

Yeah I think your point is critical, and that a more nuanced map of ideology needs to be worked out, bearing in mind how signals can be received and processed in pre-conscious and physiological ways, and that cognitive processing is a higher order interpretation of signal than the physiological interpretation of signal.

"higher order" also meaning, necessarily, less direct.

 

[luka]

Yes I think so. I was talking about this in the aphantasia discussion on zoom the other day. How the initial information is pre-linguistic, pre-cognitive, pre-sound & vision, and get progressively unpacked and translated into those terms subsequently, and with an inevitable garbling in translation

 

[constant escape]

Yeah I think the garbling is an important thing to acknowledge. I would say near the same thing, but in terms of the signal being more differentiated, or perhaps abstracted. Abstracted in the interest of optimizing predictive ability, perhaps.

But yeah failing to acknowledge how those signals get transformed by cognition will only exacerbate the whole confusing-the-map-with-the-territory problem. The cognitive effort is a sort of mapping of the territory, a mapping that could have been done without cognition, but would have taken orders of magnitude longer.

 

[constant escape]

Self-assembling systems seem to assemble "towards" a hastening of their own assembly and evolution.