[Xmca-l] Re: Political constructions of self vs politicalconstructions of identity

Tue Aug 2 11:31:21 PDT 2016

Thank What, Henry?
mike

To repeat the question from Valery via Bauman:

can the human mind master what the human mind has made?

mike

On Tue, Aug 2, 2016 at 11:23 AM, HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com> wrote:

> Thank god!
>
> > On Aug 2, 2016, at 12:20 PM, David H Kirshner <dkirsh@lsu.edu> wrote:
> >
> > Of course, Henry.
> > When uncivil fundamentalist beliefs are embraced by the hierarchy of a
> centralized religion the results are horrific.
> > These are the hard lessons that led in most Western traditions to the
> separation of church and state.
> > David
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:
> xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of HENRY SHONERD
> > Sent: Tuesday, August 02, 2016 1:12 PM
> > To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> > Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Political constructions of self vs
> politicalconstructions of identity
> >
> > David,
> > Good points. At the same time, take the Protestant Reformation and the
> push back from the Catholic church that resulted in slaughter all over
> Europe. Maybe the rule still holds that religious differences have been
> harder on apostates than on non-believers. Sort of. I am now thinking of
> what has happened to indigenous people (non-believers) all over the world
> when colonization hit. Devastating. Hmmm… Henry
> >
> >
> >> On Aug 2, 2016, at 11:53 AM, David H Kirshner <dkirsh@lsu.edu> wrote:
> >>
> >> Henry,
> >>
> >> There certainly are commonalities among all fundamentalist religious
> belief systems that make adherents potentially dangerous to civil society.
> But religions differ in how they distribute religious authority, and this
> factor can affect how widespread uncivil action is likely to become.
> >>
> >> In the case of Catholicism, authority is rigorously organized in a
> hierarchy under a single leader, the pope. Thus independent interpretation
> of fundamentalist belief is quite tightly constrained, and Catholic
> terrorism is a rare phenomenon.
> >>
> >> Protestantism is more decentralized, with religious authority vested in
> independent denominations. In some cases, these denominations can be quite
> small, and this has produced some cult worship that has resulted in murder
> and suicide. But the vast majority of adherents are organized into large
> denominations in which fundamentalist interpretations are modulated by
> concerns of fitting into a broader civil society.
> >>
> >> Islam is highly decentralized. Anyone who is sufficiently schooled in
> religious texts can proclaim himself an imam and establish a following.
> What is more, religious convention holds that all imams have true
> knowledge. Thus differences in interpretation from one imam to another are
> considered part of an ineffable variety of a common truth. Thus the
> religion has almost no internal mechanisms for control of fundamentalist
> interpretation. When President Obama calls upon Muslims to take more
> responsibility for uncivil interpretations of their religion, this turns
> out to be very difficult to accomplish given the way authority is
> distributed.
> >>
> >> David
> >>
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu
> >> [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of HENRY SHONERD
> >> Sent: Tuesday, August 02, 2016 11:31 AM
> >> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> >> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Political constructions of self vs
> >> politicalconstructions of identity
> >>
> >> Gente,
> >> Please forgive my beating a dead horse, but for me it isn’t dead yet:
> >>
> >> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/01/opinion/how-religion-can-lead-to-vio
> >> lence.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&modu
> >> le=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav
> >> =opinion-c-col-right-region
> >> <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/01/opinion/how-religion-can-lead-to-vi
> >> olence.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&mod
> >> ule=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.na
> >> v=opinion-c-col-right-region>
> >>
> >> Particularly interesting to me is the quote from President Obama at the
> end of the linked article: “Some currents of Islam have not gone through a
> reformation that would help people adapt their religious doctrines to
> modernity.”
> >>
> >> It seems to me that the Trump band wagon is populated by Christians
> with the same problem. (This of course, isn’t original. Duh! Obama got
> dinged for his “guns and Bibles” comment, which to me is saying much the
> same thing.) So-called Christians, in the same way as so-called Muslims,
> kill in the name of a revealed truth, mostly other Muslims. When analyzed,
> I wonder if most mass shootings in this country are basically an attack on
> modernity, motivated by essentialist notions of selfhood and political
> constructions of reality. So that radical Islamic terrrorism exists in the
> same way as radical Christian terrorism. What is ALWAYS true, it seems, is
> that such terrorism is harder on apostates than non-believers. Even some
> defenders of Buddh-ism have killed in the name of the Buddha, hence radical
> Buddhist terrorism?
> >>
> >> What I have gotten most from this subject line is how projects can go
> with the flow of modernity and yet touch the philosophical bases of ethics,
> aesthetics, epistemology and ontogeny. As always I go back to creative
> collaboration. Thank you, Vera.
> >>
> >> Henry
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>> On Aug 2, 2016, at 12:20 AM, Rein Raud <rein.raud@tlu.ee> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Correction to the last paragraph: "The philosophically more
> >>> thoroughly digested definition would state that nothing we can point
> >>> to is in exactly the same state at any two moments.” Best, RR
> >>>
> >>>> On 02 Aug 2016, at 06:52, Rein Raud <rein.raud@tlu.ee> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> Chris - spot on. Remember where this thread started: both essential
> unity and essential categoriality are infringements on the ity of the
> individual, who cannot be wholly identified with either. But either is a
> perspective from which candidates can make their calculations seem less
> complicated. I’d say we need not address the ity’s of the candidates rather
> than how their politics are likely to affect our our own.
> >>>>
> >>>> Annalisa - replace “stable” and “stationary” in my posts with the
> bulkier “what doesn’t change” and I’ll still sign them. So you are defining
> “change” as opposed to stability. Morevoer, most of what you describe as
> fundamental only exists in the human mind. Western languages indeed are
> conducive to an understanding of the world you have described, but it is
> not the only possible one. You say “things exist before they are named” and
> "we can remove all things in [space and time], and existence remains”. So
> existence is also a thing? Western languages consider sentences as “the
> rose is red” and “the sky is blue” to be equivalent, but if you look a
> little more closely, “rose” and “sky” are ontologically quite different.
> There is no such thing as the sky. And existence is more like the sky than
> the rose. Just like the referents of negative sentences, it is something
> produced by the mind. “There are no rusty nails in this soup” may be true,
> but if it is, then only in our reflection, because there is no thing there
> (“absence-of-rusty-nails”) that is described by this observation. So we
> meaningfully say “Uncle Harry exists” to point out the difference of said
> uncle with Santa Claus, who doesn’t. (Or doesn’t he? A matter of how we
> define existence. For example, if we grant existence to immaterial entities
> that can be the causes of real processes, and a child does her homework
> diligently because of Santa Claus, while otherwise she wouldn’t, then it
> would be legitiamate to say that Santa Claus exists.) In this particular
> sense, the word “existence” performs the work of a double negative: “it is
> not the case that uncle Harry is nothing but a construction of our mind”.
> >>>>
> >>>> Saying that constituents exist before their combination, therefore
> the combination exists before it actually comes into being is not very
> productive. There are multitudes of ways how to combine the currently
> avaialble physical objects and only a minuscule part of these will actually
> be realized. This is what is called “Occam’s razor” according to William
> Occam (14th century): we should not posit existences that are not logically
> necessary.
> >>>>
> >>>> Impermanence can be defined at least on two levels: the popular one
> (call it “impermanence light”) insists that nothing is forever, everything
> changes, everything that exists turns into something else. The
> philosophically more thoroughly digested definition would state that
> anything we can point to is in exactly the same state at any two moments.
> That is, even the briefest duration separates two exhaustive sets of
> qualities that characterize this thing. As no qualities are essential by
> themselves, and no differences in degree are essential by themselves, any
> thing is not self-identical at two given moments.
> >>>>
> >>>> With best wishes,
> >>>>
> >>>> Rein
> >>>>
> >>>>> On 01 Aug 2016, at 22:10, Christopher Schuck <
> schuckthemonkey@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> All these explanations are very helpful - thank you. So then when
> >>>>> Rein writes, "some calculations are less complicated," is this not
> >>>>> speaking to the specifically epistemological priority of our
> >>>>> efforts to pin down the candidates' essences? On what basis do we
> >>>>> decide what is less complicated in a good way (that allows us to
> >>>>> evaluate the candidates in tune with how they are as people and
> >>>>> future
> >>>>> presidents) as opposed to a bad way (being so uncomplicated that
> >>>>> you end up missing the truth entirely and/or being manipulated),
> >>>>> and what are the implications of appealing to either Trump-ity or
> >>>>> Trump-ness, respectively? I am trying to parse out the "cash value"
> >>>>> of understanding these candidates in terms of their -ity's rather
> than their -ness's.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Sorry if some of this may be redundant.    Chris
> >>>>>
> >>>>> On Monday, August 1, 2016, Rein Raud <rein.raud@tlu.ee> wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>>> Annalisa, I’m afraid we stray too far from the original topic of
> >>>>>> this thread if we get much deeper into ontology, and I would end
> >>>>>> up copy-pasting a lot from a book I am currently writing. Briefly,
> >>>>>> I don’t think we can define “change” as opposed to “stability” at
> >>>>>> all, and I’d suggest we speak about impermanence instead. You are
> >>>>>> quite correct saying that “change” can only be detected and
> >>>>>> described in regard of something else. The point is, this
> >>>>>> something else is itself always undergoing some other kind of
> >>>>>> change from a third point of view, and so on. The stationary point
> >>>>>> is quite arbitrary. Most people currently believe that the Earth
> >>>>>> is rotating around the Sun. However, the Sun is not stationary,
> >>>>>> but also in movement. We can imagine a hypothetical celestial body
> >>>>>> which moves around in space so that it is exactly at the same
> >>>>>> distance from the Earth at all times and does not move around its
> >>>>>> own axis so that the Earth is always also at the same angle seen
> >>>>>> from it. For someone on this celestial body, the Earth moves
> >>>>>> around its axis, but is otherwise stationary, while the Sun moves
> >>>>>> around it. It is just that certain calculations are less
> >>>>>> complicated when we assume the primacy of the Sun as the center of
> >>>>>> the solar system in this scheme. And that’s how we end up with
> >>>>>> notions such as change vs stability - some calculations are less
> >>>>>> complicated. With best wishes, Rein
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>> On 01 Aug 2016, at 20:11, Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu
> >>>>>> <javascript:;>> wrote:
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> Hello,
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> Larry, my questions are straightforward, as I stated them, but
> >>>>>>> I'll just
> >>>>>> reiterate that I was asking is what is Rein's definition of change?
> >>>>>> How is changed detected? And from who's point of view?
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> In the end, there must be something stationary in order to gauge
> change.
> >>>>>> Whether in time or in space. Otherwise no change can be detected.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> Now Chris brings up an interesting extra to this that there is
> >>>>>>> the
> >>>>>> reality "out there" changing, and then our perception of it (which
> >>>>>> can also change). But I think the definition still holds that even
> >>>>>> if the world is illusory, and our perception changes too, there
> >>>>>> are laws still in play, whether we understand those laws or not.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> For a law to adhere it must hold for all cases, or, in homage to
> >>>>>> Einstein, in those cases relative to it (which would be marked
> exceptions).
> >>>>>> I consider a law as a stationary point.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> It's not pure chaos out there. When I wake up I wake up in the
> >>>>>>> same
> >>>>>> body, even though there is a cellular distinction from my body of
> >>>>>> 7 years ago. I don't wake up as someone else or with an extra limb
> >>>>>> I didn't have yesterday. Now someone could ask, "Well how do you
> >>>>>> really know that?" And I would say, "Well, how can you ask the
> question?"
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> Something has to be stationary for change to happen. Even if
> >>>>>>> change
> >>>>>> happens faster or slower, the point I'm attempting to make is that
> >>>>>> there must be a stationary point regardless.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> Something must be (stationary), before it can change or before
> >>>>>>> change
> >>>>>> can be detected.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> I would say existence is the "center." I think Buddhists contest
> >>>>>>> that,
> >>>>>> which is fine. I know that that is how they see it, that nothing
> >>>>>> exists. As in no thing.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> And in some ways they are right if you are talking about the
> >>>>>>> apparent
> >>>>>> world and the thingness that makes a thing a thing. But everything
> >>>>>> that is here has is-ness, not thing-ness. Otherwise it is not.
> >>>>>> Which means the thing-ness that isn't thing-ness isn't present in
> >>>>>> time and space. It doesn't present itself, whatever it is.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> How does one detect change of something (anything) that is not in
> >>>>>>> time
> >>>>>> and space?
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> First, I'd say whatever this non-thing is, can't change, because
> >>>>>>> only
> >>>>>> things in time and in space change. On earth as we humans perceive
> >>>>>> it, change appears to be dependent upon time and space. But then
> >>>>>> thanks to Einstein, now we know that even time and space change.
> >>>>>> Which means that the change of time and space must be dependent
> >>>>>> upon some other stationary "point" as-if outside of time and space.
> >>>>>> I say as-if because we are dealing with a container metaphor, but
> >>>>>> this metaphor doesn't work when trying to conceive something
> >>>>>> outside of time and space. Be we can use it because we are human
> >>>>>> and this is how we reason about things, using time and space as
> reference points.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> Anyway, whatever that "point" is, it would have to be pretty
> >>>>>>> expansive
> >>>>>> and eternal in all directions, in all time. It would have to be
> >>>>>> big to cover all of space and time. But because it would be
> >>>>>> outside of space and time, it would also have to be formless and
> changeless.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> Take away form (space) and change (time) and all that is left is
> >>>>>> existence. Which is.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> Right here right now. :)
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> Kind regards,
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> Annalisa
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> P.S. I see that Rein post just now, so this is not in reply to
> >>>>>>> that post
> >>>>>> of his.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>

-- 

It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an object
that creates history. Ernst Boesch