Orthodoxy- is one o the point society meets facts - a point where interpretation floats over an assemblage of one of truth or repeatable facts, and defines their relation. the fact that there are always many point between two truths is the suppressed or mitigated by a collective belief. There might be other ways to do this to think this but - WE agree (at least at the moment) on this one - on this fact. as such as way to at once allow one path one loop between points, and as a way of incarnating the effect of mass thought, the orthodoxy is rather wonderful. Belief is stated, seen, known to be social and indeed dependent on facts and argument. Belief becomes conitigent as paradigms set its parameters.
Fine - that is the aim of academa, where the very adherence to an orthodoxy creates also the possibility for doubt - and the orthodoxy made to hung on fact and truth.
But of course there is nothing absolute here. There is no real reason why the social element the BEEIF element of he orthodoxy cannot actually trimuph here. Then the very provision nature of facts known and paths taken become a source of angst. Certain truths must be known and taught so that we have a nation at all - be they in maths or history. Nationhood demands that its orthodoxy is real and vital - or a certain religion feels so much stronger if it can proclaim itself to the the one true faith.
The trouble of course that the interpretation of the facts and he community rise and fall together. They are bound together by the orthodoxy their binding create. If belief is strong so is the community, but if the belief falters, the truth' evaporates and for the majority of folk is barely even the memory of what was, while here and there there remain a smattering of one true believers.
Or again place an orthodoxy in a world where other voices also are, then doubt naturally into a belief which feels itself to be so oppressed, and craves acts of matryrdom to prove to itself its own truth. For one martry, one live given in the name of a path thought the facts, is the equivalent of a throng of living believers- as the ac of sacrifice and the thought of the mind dying, is enough to conjure hearts a trust in the facts - as if a ghost counted more than the living: Because the ghosts of memory exist in both me and you, in both facts, and interpretation. because that is matrydom in all forms is transfiguration in some squalid little way - for there is nothing too here - here the effect of sadness, the power of blood and the pull of hope of the mind.
Orthodoxy is therefore a good servant of a fact based truth, and fair if severe, master, but a lousy colleague.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Meaning as Natural
It is of course on of the deep bas lines for colloquial meaning.If it is natural -then its meaning is found - for the beast within needs no second take, no other explaination: It Is natural and that is done. Nature comes the base line of what is simply, like death their. hat cannot be negociated or thought any more. It is one of the things of life. something of our bodies that we cannot do anything about at all, so we had better get used to.
Find the bedrock in nature and all other arguments look contrived and vapid. Society bows before its inner nature - and Mankind looks to it for explaination of what he is. That is as mankind carries into the understanding of his own nature the perceptions of material process, and methods that typify reality. nothing wrong with that on a scientific level of course - this is the very stuff of proper science. the problems comes rather when any too simple series of assumptions are made about the heinously complex process that intermesh biology, personality,personal history and society together, such that we start to look for simple rules and leave it at that. The trouble of course here being that there is fro the side of society enormous pressure for such simple rules to exist.
A pressure that is both positive and negative; we want thing to applaud but also to ban. We want our science to produce neat little ethical dilemmas to think about and create new laws for. we do not want a mess where we stop being certain w here we begin and the world ends, and we really do not want the impossible ethical issues that arise when that mess itself is then taken up and becomes a feature for society.
We want science then to augment our lives, and start to resent and worry when it actually challenges them, and forces us to think afresh. And here a further complexity sinks in. according to the rules of the game, nature ought to prove the bedrock for us- that is what we want to find, the moment We are conjured from mere meat. Except of course as often as not science finds no such point. There are no simple beginnings like that, and few simple endings. We are a process that gradually emerge from Genes and Gristle, and populate in the names of society, being a single brain(if double hemisphere) and a personal history, a piece of matter. there is nothing simple in the process. there is nothing simple then for biology to find. Or will open wonderful doors in all likelihood and yet doors that lead to complexity undreamt of and realties that are profoundly odd and uncomfortable.
Nature stats offering something nice and simple- the simple super structure of meaning, and then explodes into the utter complexity of our being, a complexity which seems so much more difficult and problematic when written in biology rathe rhan society and so ineffiable, and 'natural'. Indeed they make the entire picture all the more complex. for the biolgical rules of cause and effect - that is the idea that drugs might effect what had only been emotions or experience before seep into the picture and make everything seem differently possible we might heal ourselves in the chemical or the emotive way- and given alchol and adrelain does it really matter? Possibly.
At which point nature slips it meaning, ti frees itself from bilgy as such, and become the cod biology of nature itself in its entirety. a nature free from having to find biological causes for, one that can be appealed to by our romantic souls. A nature free then from messy reality, and available for us to project whatever hopes and desires we want to upon and through. Nature then as antedote to the very society that created it and our idea of it, and other than the science it surely draws upon. A whology not of the body, but the mind and its feelings for the world, attribute to an infinite system (or something other).
Nature becomes then the double secrete- that in our bodies engraved which once found is ineffiable - or that engraved in the infinite face of the universe that is ever changing ever the same. Both realities reflect the 'real world' of our minds as it looks for allies for itself in other places, reasons for its assumptinos in the beyond - and so form bedrock or point we turn our spade in thinking.
Find the bedrock in nature and all other arguments look contrived and vapid. Society bows before its inner nature - and Mankind looks to it for explaination of what he is. That is as mankind carries into the understanding of his own nature the perceptions of material process, and methods that typify reality. nothing wrong with that on a scientific level of course - this is the very stuff of proper science. the problems comes rather when any too simple series of assumptions are made about the heinously complex process that intermesh biology, personality,personal history and society together, such that we start to look for simple rules and leave it at that. The trouble of course here being that there is fro the side of society enormous pressure for such simple rules to exist.
A pressure that is both positive and negative; we want thing to applaud but also to ban. We want our science to produce neat little ethical dilemmas to think about and create new laws for. we do not want a mess where we stop being certain w here we begin and the world ends, and we really do not want the impossible ethical issues that arise when that mess itself is then taken up and becomes a feature for society.
We want science then to augment our lives, and start to resent and worry when it actually challenges them, and forces us to think afresh. And here a further complexity sinks in. according to the rules of the game, nature ought to prove the bedrock for us- that is what we want to find, the moment We are conjured from mere meat. Except of course as often as not science finds no such point. There are no simple beginnings like that, and few simple endings. We are a process that gradually emerge from Genes and Gristle, and populate in the names of society, being a single brain(if double hemisphere) and a personal history, a piece of matter. there is nothing simple in the process. there is nothing simple then for biology to find. Or will open wonderful doors in all likelihood and yet doors that lead to complexity undreamt of and realties that are profoundly odd and uncomfortable.
Nature stats offering something nice and simple- the simple super structure of meaning, and then explodes into the utter complexity of our being, a complexity which seems so much more difficult and problematic when written in biology rathe rhan society and so ineffiable, and 'natural'. Indeed they make the entire picture all the more complex. for the biolgical rules of cause and effect - that is the idea that drugs might effect what had only been emotions or experience before seep into the picture and make everything seem differently possible we might heal ourselves in the chemical or the emotive way- and given alchol and adrelain does it really matter? Possibly.
At which point nature slips it meaning, ti frees itself from bilgy as such, and become the cod biology of nature itself in its entirety. a nature free from having to find biological causes for, one that can be appealed to by our romantic souls. A nature free then from messy reality, and available for us to project whatever hopes and desires we want to upon and through. Nature then as antedote to the very society that created it and our idea of it, and other than the science it surely draws upon. A whology not of the body, but the mind and its feelings for the world, attribute to an infinite system (or something other).
Nature becomes then the double secrete- that in our bodies engraved which once found is ineffiable - or that engraved in the infinite face of the universe that is ever changing ever the same. Both realities reflect the 'real world' of our minds as it looks for allies for itself in other places, reasons for its assumptinos in the beyond - and so form bedrock or point we turn our spade in thinking.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Meaning as partial knowledge
Wa would meaning if we actually knew it all?
The point about meaning is in a sense hat we imply or read it into the world. It is the point that we want more of the world than we can know. Finding meaning in the world and belief (of very differing sorts) run together. Meaning happens we then we start to tell the tell - and yet do so always with our eye on something or some one else. The question then is merely how we understand the role of this partial knowledge within the tapestry we create. In best philosophical traditions one might say their are two engines of meaning at this point- - an immanent and a transcendental one.
The immanent methodology assumes that every partial truth represent a point or part of an underlying picture,mundane or divine- a picture they then seek to use reason or experiment or learning or faith to explore this underlying substance through the partial knowledge they have and that they hope to have. This then opens up an articulation between the two. So that the overarching theorem should explain partial knowings to come, and when it is the partial knowledge that in its partiallity hints both at the underlying structure, but also to the fault lines in that structure- the points it might be wrong from, or at least point one does not know. The very partiallity of the knowledge is then a part in the picture - it poses the problems in the first place, but is also very capable of breaking free from boundaries imposed upon it- and forcing the substance that would appear to explain it to say other things. Substance might then explain, with its world, and so concot a fabric for the partial things- but the partial bits, actually evalue and judge that judgment- making it appear good or bad or demanding further clarification. That is in the end in the immanent model it is the very partial nature of the partial objects, the hint to being a part of, that actually is the creative engine for meaning- it is what makes sure we are always in the middle of any and every story, and that real endings are seldom simple or absolute, even when (or particuliar when) the facts themselves are true.
The transcendental methodology uses a rather different approach, is taken for what it is in itself. A truth real or lusty, meaning or levelly. This approach is then inhabitied, the feelings explored, the the different worlds it opens on viewed- it is then this world, this other place built from hollowing out a single partial fact,into a world, that is then justified and explained or perhaps merely assumed. Single line truths will then war into the world, as the world is change to suite or guide them. A single partial fact is then in a sense partial because the world has not yet been found that is big enough for it, and it is the task of thought or feeling to provide that world. single feelings or events or occasions becomes then the gate into other worlds, world we need to then justify or explain. Minds become the the story houses for of the shelf explaination - that is standard truths that can be used, well known facts that inhabit the many worlds the event-as-gateway partial objects would open out upon. These off the shelf truths becoming the the great refrains of the mind (and ultimately representing an FACT, or long running partial truth or set of truths of their own). the entire picture has then a very complex symmetry, where one event hollows out a world using other partial objects and well known truth - or other events to do so, including ones self interest and self importance. These others might well be gates to their own worlds, and use this using to illustrate that. the entire picture then being held together by passions, and the power of the individual events to crate a resonance in the mind- and to demand a world.
Take the recent Jack Straw example of Asian men. Grooming white girls. Absolutely emotive (and pure partial fantasy - this act of grooming under age sex is a horrific but absolutely standard bit of modernity). Jack minds jumped form one salacious and disturbing story across the range of the problem of ethic assimulation (which we knows clearly parts from government statistic, and part from constituency stories) added a bit of 'every young man is the same', mumbo jumbo, and bobs your uncle got the the of story the media loves to discuss (and to prove - albeit in an utterly unscientific manner. The problem of course in that the reporting of the story makes itself a story of its own- we are all invited to entire Jacks world, and many will, and he world changed.
Partial objects then really matter- for meaning is impossible without them. the problem is always merely what follows from that mattering? Is it enough that their is the problem i the object.a problem beyond simple solution? r must one somehow got to the bottom of the object itself, and run with it (and not merely its problematic status)? That is do the worlds of meaning these open out to exist through the fact that these objects are not confined to this world alone (and so demand any other nature to comprehend them)? Or must that very partiallity be occluded with hollowing out the 'object'- the event itself to the full, and not merely left as a creative problem, and the worlds they might enter in so sampled ?
The point about meaning is in a sense hat we imply or read it into the world. It is the point that we want more of the world than we can know. Finding meaning in the world and belief (of very differing sorts) run together. Meaning happens we then we start to tell the tell - and yet do so always with our eye on something or some one else. The question then is merely how we understand the role of this partial knowledge within the tapestry we create. In best philosophical traditions one might say their are two engines of meaning at this point- - an immanent and a transcendental one.
The immanent methodology assumes that every partial truth represent a point or part of an underlying picture,mundane or divine- a picture they then seek to use reason or experiment or learning or faith to explore this underlying substance through the partial knowledge they have and that they hope to have. This then opens up an articulation between the two. So that the overarching theorem should explain partial knowings to come, and when it is the partial knowledge that in its partiallity hints both at the underlying structure, but also to the fault lines in that structure- the points it might be wrong from, or at least point one does not know. The very partiallity of the knowledge is then a part in the picture - it poses the problems in the first place, but is also very capable of breaking free from boundaries imposed upon it- and forcing the substance that would appear to explain it to say other things. Substance might then explain, with its world, and so concot a fabric for the partial things- but the partial bits, actually evalue and judge that judgment- making it appear good or bad or demanding further clarification. That is in the end in the immanent model it is the very partial nature of the partial objects, the hint to being a part of, that actually is the creative engine for meaning- it is what makes sure we are always in the middle of any and every story, and that real endings are seldom simple or absolute, even when (or particuliar when) the facts themselves are true.
The transcendental methodology uses a rather different approach, is taken for what it is in itself. A truth real or lusty, meaning or levelly. This approach is then inhabitied, the feelings explored, the the different worlds it opens on viewed- it is then this world, this other place built from hollowing out a single partial fact,into a world, that is then justified and explained or perhaps merely assumed. Single line truths will then war into the world, as the world is change to suite or guide them. A single partial fact is then in a sense partial because the world has not yet been found that is big enough for it, and it is the task of thought or feeling to provide that world. single feelings or events or occasions becomes then the gate into other worlds, world we need to then justify or explain. Minds become the the story houses for of the shelf explaination - that is standard truths that can be used, well known facts that inhabit the many worlds the event-as-gateway partial objects would open out upon. These off the shelf truths becoming the the great refrains of the mind (and ultimately representing an FACT, or long running partial truth or set of truths of their own). the entire picture has then a very complex symmetry, where one event hollows out a world using other partial objects and well known truth - or other events to do so, including ones self interest and self importance. These others might well be gates to their own worlds, and use this using to illustrate that. the entire picture then being held together by passions, and the power of the individual events to crate a resonance in the mind- and to demand a world.
Take the recent Jack Straw example of Asian men. Grooming white girls. Absolutely emotive (and pure partial fantasy - this act of grooming under age sex is a horrific but absolutely standard bit of modernity). Jack minds jumped form one salacious and disturbing story across the range of the problem of ethic assimulation (which we knows clearly parts from government statistic, and part from constituency stories) added a bit of 'every young man is the same', mumbo jumbo, and bobs your uncle got the the of story the media loves to discuss (and to prove - albeit in an utterly unscientific manner. The problem of course in that the reporting of the story makes itself a story of its own- we are all invited to entire Jacks world, and many will, and he world changed.
Partial objects then really matter- for meaning is impossible without them. the problem is always merely what follows from that mattering? Is it enough that their is the problem i the object.a problem beyond simple solution? r must one somehow got to the bottom of the object itself, and run with it (and not merely its problematic status)? That is do the worlds of meaning these open out to exist through the fact that these objects are not confined to this world alone (and so demand any other nature to comprehend them)? Or must that very partiallity be occluded with hollowing out the 'object'- the event itself to the full, and not merely left as a creative problem, and the worlds they might enter in so sampled ?
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Meaning as order and symetry
It is one of those those trusim - minds love order - and from the depth of our grammary soul seek to impose it upon nature. Give us order, and we find truth. the world is then reduced to patterns, and structures formula and symtery predictions and anomalies.
Find a pattern and we think one has found the truth.
And yet there is of course pattering an patterning. Nothing is as simple as there being one pattern. On the contrary there are many different possible stratediges for our patterning.
firstly and most powerfully there are the patterns of diagrams. To pattern becomes then a matter of at once abstracting a sequence truth from rich world of possible patterns and then translating opposing or interlinked truths into a graphic net. The truth is out their to be mapped. A map or diagram once drawn then allows you to navigate where you are in the world. the map is then a place for prediction. Meaning exists then at an odd juncture point between the graphic mind, the analyytical and our desire to predict. So that our ability to locate ourselves in space and time becomes tranliterated into an ability to make some kind of predictions.
Alternatively meaning might well be translated into formula each with their own stripped down predictive power. meaning then is seen in the symetry but also the simplicity of such formula, and and their ease to be translated into the world. Classically then the complexity of the world is taken over and transformed into the symeteries of maths , and the orders it naturally imposes unto the world. So that is a sense the symmetry is imposed from a hidden higher symetery- the laws of maths. and yet the imposition is in a sense invisible and hand off. The point of a formula is that although it is part of another world, that of maths, it is also encapsulated in this single line- in the means to make prediction. the order then is not invisible and forced - so much as the ordering is invisible and the symmetry established in natural. So that the mathematical relation a good formula produces greats a symetry a proposition in the world. Too much of one thing leads to something else, to little elsewhere. Vibrant quantitative symetries emerge then into the world - laws of amount, and issues of consequence. The Future or what will happen is distilled into things that are already there. The symetry then not only links distinct elements (and creates open causal connections between them), but also allow one once again a sense where the future is back written into the present. What is here now leads to--- and what is here comes form--- time and hidden symetry link and create.
more than that the symetries of the formula are of course testable in this relationship. they have to cohere with prediction or else the entire formula founders. It works - is a formula then as it can predict.
Symetery greats meaning as first a special and then a general theory. Its given in the formula that clutches at a truth, and then the formulas are ordered into patterns, and explained from underlying geology or in a geography or through a patter. Formulas then open out into pictorial representations (as well as being at other times deduced from such image). The symetry defines the in a single axis not merely the future, but also the sense that we understand and share the understanding of that future. Meaning as symetery is necessarily social in the seeing. In addition a good symetry imposes not merely order, but simplifies that order as well. Symteries are fundamentally simple properties - and bring with then the assumption that the simpler they are the better. compress the complex shifting sands of reality into a single simple series of formulas and collect the formulas in a symetry- and we assume meaning is there.
But of course the mere act of telling a stories also creates its own symetries - in three fold structure: Once for meaning, once to loose the meaning in the joy of repeating, and then the third time for everyone to join in. Repeat three times and then the audience is already with you. The symetry of repeating or not quite repeating or repeating right. World of symeteries open out into worlds of repeating, where then mere act of double and then trebling creates not merely the ability to predict but also to share in that prediction. In repeating - that very act of repeating creates symetries, and with it a new way to share and locate oneself in a story.
Symemtires are then everywhere we want to both predict the future and use somethign here and now in that prediction business - but also demand that prediction is shared (and so has general meaning- and so has value- to in sharing reality of sorts always lurks). Symetry is therefore in a sense always rather dangerous for meaning. We look for order and once we have created it, we tend to want ti in there come what may- we leave it in, we assume it, and can share it. it will then immediately form its own world- it becomes its own truth in the sharing, and becomes hen very hard to gainsay or destroy, even if it openson a world of error
Find a pattern and we think one has found the truth.
And yet there is of course pattering an patterning. Nothing is as simple as there being one pattern. On the contrary there are many different possible stratediges for our patterning.
firstly and most powerfully there are the patterns of diagrams. To pattern becomes then a matter of at once abstracting a sequence truth from rich world of possible patterns and then translating opposing or interlinked truths into a graphic net. The truth is out their to be mapped. A map or diagram once drawn then allows you to navigate where you are in the world. the map is then a place for prediction. Meaning exists then at an odd juncture point between the graphic mind, the analyytical and our desire to predict. So that our ability to locate ourselves in space and time becomes tranliterated into an ability to make some kind of predictions.
Alternatively meaning might well be translated into formula each with their own stripped down predictive power. meaning then is seen in the symetry but also the simplicity of such formula, and and their ease to be translated into the world. Classically then the complexity of the world is taken over and transformed into the symeteries of maths , and the orders it naturally imposes unto the world. So that is a sense the symmetry is imposed from a hidden higher symetery- the laws of maths. and yet the imposition is in a sense invisible and hand off. The point of a formula is that although it is part of another world, that of maths, it is also encapsulated in this single line- in the means to make prediction. the order then is not invisible and forced - so much as the ordering is invisible and the symmetry established in natural. So that the mathematical relation a good formula produces greats a symetry a proposition in the world. Too much of one thing leads to something else, to little elsewhere. Vibrant quantitative symetries emerge then into the world - laws of amount, and issues of consequence. The Future or what will happen is distilled into things that are already there. The symetry then not only links distinct elements (and creates open causal connections between them), but also allow one once again a sense where the future is back written into the present. What is here now leads to--- and what is here comes form--- time and hidden symetry link and create.
more than that the symetries of the formula are of course testable in this relationship. they have to cohere with prediction or else the entire formula founders. It works - is a formula then as it can predict.
Symetery greats meaning as first a special and then a general theory. Its given in the formula that clutches at a truth, and then the formulas are ordered into patterns, and explained from underlying geology or in a geography or through a patter. Formulas then open out into pictorial representations (as well as being at other times deduced from such image). The symetry defines the in a single axis not merely the future, but also the sense that we understand and share the understanding of that future. Meaning as symetery is necessarily social in the seeing. In addition a good symetry imposes not merely order, but simplifies that order as well. Symteries are fundamentally simple properties - and bring with then the assumption that the simpler they are the better. compress the complex shifting sands of reality into a single simple series of formulas and collect the formulas in a symetry- and we assume meaning is there.
But of course the mere act of telling a stories also creates its own symetries - in three fold structure: Once for meaning, once to loose the meaning in the joy of repeating, and then the third time for everyone to join in. Repeat three times and then the audience is already with you. The symetry of repeating or not quite repeating or repeating right. World of symeteries open out into worlds of repeating, where then mere act of double and then trebling creates not merely the ability to predict but also to share in that prediction. In repeating - that very act of repeating creates symetries, and with it a new way to share and locate oneself in a story.
Symemtires are then everywhere we want to both predict the future and use somethign here and now in that prediction business - but also demand that prediction is shared (and so has general meaning- and so has value- to in sharing reality of sorts always lurks). Symetry is therefore in a sense always rather dangerous for meaning. We look for order and once we have created it, we tend to want ti in there come what may- we leave it in, we assume it, and can share it. it will then immediately form its own world- it becomes its own truth in the sharing, and becomes hen very hard to gainsay or destroy, even if it openson a world of error
Saturday, January 8, 2011
meaning as that singularites thing
Meaning is of course always also about events - the great events of history from which lessons are to be learned or at least a world change. What is more more our brains appear very humble in front of such vents- humble and bowed - and with some reason. we know that such events serve as the chits on which our facts are communally re-thrown. That is the moments which run between all individuals, which we all agree that happened, and that changes stuff - as change we must all be part of. a change which differs and gathers power in history.
such changes are then bound to events whose power to matter is a product of their power to be unique, to resonate across many different individuals, and to be at odds this convention. Of these the last is the one that really matter most. we all know that events have a right we do not have- the right to change our assumption to corrode paradigm, to make us thinks afresh. in a world of boring facts be they economic or chemical realities, events are the moment freedom shines through- the moment that things are not what it seems, our ever modern transubstaniation. A transubstantial that has it power in not following the rules as such- that is in being unique in making us thinks afresh - and ponder otherwise. to be unique is then to defy reason and its laws, and to have already set of on this path to the singular- to that which is shared in memory and is imagination if not in fact.
The trouble of course then is that their is absolutely no imperative here and perhaps to ability for these events to be true. They do not work by the staid course of true or not- their power lesson us learning lessons that never need be simple or real. Events are then are at every point compound affairs. From which it follows that events are bound by rules of legend and not reality. They grow in power as their are told and as individuals half believe them or act as if they believe them, or let their faith change their nature - knowing it is never the simple or plain truth.
Well know stores and ancedotes seep across society: A move which is all very well (if often rather irritating and potentially tricky- all the stories about immigration are just that part fantasy). The trouble comes then when these legends are mistake for actuality. The monsters of tales and the singular events are then set up as the rival to science (in endless cod sciences) and becomes the only 'acceptable' politics of it day, In this move of course Newspapers - which by logic event in the vat of events (real an imagined) have a very great role. their commericial future is totally bound up in the creation an maintainence of certain types of events- events they propulgate and control. Events hat in event become TradeMarkeded - making sound commericial sense but no political sense- and yet which the logic of the trademarking (and its assertion of truth) demands ought to be TRUE - meaning that some kind of politics needs to develope around them.
The trouble then with the british media is not it arrant bias and political cynicism so much as trademarking and then marketing one particular kind of event at the expense of so many others - one that has no link to truth or to the world beyond the sales base of the media organization.
From which last fact one last point follows - events are (and perhaos always were as well) the great totem or badge of a people. That is nation communities, families are defined by their events, real or imagined. The events are what gives then their unity, that which makes and allows them to be different - and without such defining evens communities and orginization flounder and fail around; They need then to make sense of themselves. Events then matter they define societies both interally and externally. A communities which believes in this events and follows on is simply from another community with other events as its standard. Events then really matter a political and so nation futures are created and fated by them. It really matters then when those events slip into nonsense or the domain of this or that media organization.....
The singular is then resonant with world it gets caught up in, with the myriad different takes it creates across communities and through time - as it powers away to create ever new and developing meanings.
such changes are then bound to events whose power to matter is a product of their power to be unique, to resonate across many different individuals, and to be at odds this convention. Of these the last is the one that really matter most. we all know that events have a right we do not have- the right to change our assumption to corrode paradigm, to make us thinks afresh. in a world of boring facts be they economic or chemical realities, events are the moment freedom shines through- the moment that things are not what it seems, our ever modern transubstaniation. A transubstantial that has it power in not following the rules as such- that is in being unique in making us thinks afresh - and ponder otherwise. to be unique is then to defy reason and its laws, and to have already set of on this path to the singular- to that which is shared in memory and is imagination if not in fact.
The trouble of course then is that their is absolutely no imperative here and perhaps to ability for these events to be true. They do not work by the staid course of true or not- their power lesson us learning lessons that never need be simple or real. Events are then are at every point compound affairs. From which it follows that events are bound by rules of legend and not reality. They grow in power as their are told and as individuals half believe them or act as if they believe them, or let their faith change their nature - knowing it is never the simple or plain truth.
Well know stores and ancedotes seep across society: A move which is all very well (if often rather irritating and potentially tricky- all the stories about immigration are just that part fantasy). The trouble comes then when these legends are mistake for actuality. The monsters of tales and the singular events are then set up as the rival to science (in endless cod sciences) and becomes the only 'acceptable' politics of it day, In this move of course Newspapers - which by logic event in the vat of events (real an imagined) have a very great role. their commericial future is totally bound up in the creation an maintainence of certain types of events- events they propulgate and control. Events hat in event become TradeMarkeded - making sound commericial sense but no political sense- and yet which the logic of the trademarking (and its assertion of truth) demands ought to be TRUE - meaning that some kind of politics needs to develope around them.
The trouble then with the british media is not it arrant bias and political cynicism so much as trademarking and then marketing one particular kind of event at the expense of so many others - one that has no link to truth or to the world beyond the sales base of the media organization.
From which last fact one last point follows - events are (and perhaos always were as well) the great totem or badge of a people. That is nation communities, families are defined by their events, real or imagined. The events are what gives then their unity, that which makes and allows them to be different - and without such defining evens communities and orginization flounder and fail around; They need then to make sense of themselves. Events then matter they define societies both interally and externally. A communities which believes in this events and follows on is simply from another community with other events as its standard. Events then really matter a political and so nation futures are created and fated by them. It really matters then when those events slip into nonsense or the domain of this or that media organization.....
The singular is then resonant with world it gets caught up in, with the myriad different takes it creates across communities and through time - as it powers away to create ever new and developing meanings.
Friday, January 7, 2011
meaning as the truth that is out there
What is one counting?
Rules or exception? Ancedotes or statistics?
It is a real problem,.
The power of modern science was traditionally bound up with statistics- that is with treating numbers as an entity independent of facts, a distribution whose properties were well known, and that was therefore free to use to explore reality. One counted by stepping beyond actual reality, and into a theorectical world, working out what should be i this world, is all the assumptions of the real world were right, and then testing this against reality - and so judging its assumptions and hidden values.
A method that allows one to fix certainties as a probability, and so adjudicate.
The only trouble with the method is that like so much of statistics one has to go so far way from reality to produce the figures which matter. there is a lot of theory to be one, a lot of number crunching assumed (and performed). truth becomes bean counting, as is of course only as good as the beans counted.
the last fact then leads to have to divide the process into four parts,- one needs to work out first the bean to count - the theory to test, the assumptions to make, and state them: then devise the model to use; before finally collecting the data, and testing it against where the theory would have predicted. This process is necessary as it has at its heart the assumption that the theory is independnt of any one mind. one goes through this process therefore to distance the 'truth' one stands alone and independent from the flux of perception or the demands of feeling.: What is more there is tendency in statics to yearn for clean truths and not flaccid clumpy ones. I mean here the hypothesis that one demonstrates ought to be open and clear - a single theory is then tested hypothesis - and not merely a whole clump of different associated prejudices. The truth is then not about clumps of related ideas cobbled together with a name (which is the bedrock of most verbal meaning) - a world where it is never clear exact;y what one sis saying let alone proving. Statistics yearns to be exact (whether it gets there or no).
Meaning is therefore given the right to inhabit the hidden world of truth - the one where things actually lie - the tangible yet hidden reality of actual occasions. Numbers- understood as patterns as what one would predict before the test, becomes then the way to define what lies beyond us all - what we like to think of as facts . That is things we can do nothing about - truths that are just THERE.
A process that will of course creates this own world of facts, as the one that have a statistical presence are not at all the same ones that inhabit our world. other patterns other trends are seen there: For numbers are different they do things differently there. From which in turn we end up spinning out new actors new inhabitence for this world (Social facts, Genes-for this or that) - at which point the problems actually start - for this is the moment when the truths of statistics are assumed to be real things, real actors f differing sorts in the world. The real trouble of course is always at this point what kind of actors are they?
there are so many different possibilities for truth.
these range from the statistics indicating real actors somehow hidden whose agency is infered - virus are classic example here: the mass phenomena of coordinating symptoms allowed the inferal of an agency for those symptoms and the quest to find the agent: A quest repeated for DNA but also Dark matter, and dark energy- a quest then that is the stuff of Science adventures.
but there are other facts that is a sense are merely social - the product of myriad individuals reality one with the other - they have then n actually agency beyond mass participation. Facts that the come in two different forms - either certain long terms trends (such as the classic Durkheim study of suicide) or else mood things- unique constructions of crowds and mobs.
The truth then of the hidden agent or the crowd as anti-agent.
The problem then being that most complex biological and probably social construction are somewhere in between these two points. That is they have elements of agency in them (DNA, or social manipulation), and elements of mass phenomena (protein cascades, moods in a culture as well as social pressures, and realities) in them to - and it is never very simple to draw the line between the two. The problem being Even one can devise a genuine statistical test to tell these apart (that is test some hypothesis or other according to an established model), it still remains possible that the boundary is genuinely fluid betewen these two. The results then for this test here and now might not be universal - elsewhere ti is already different and that difference might well matter. There are more things hidden in our truths than our philosophies might simply allow (which does not mean of course that such testing is difficult or should be done, or never right or even not often right- it is merely that it is complicated, and one needs to not loose sight of that fact- )
What is more it is made all the more difficult because ones one does have an agency be it individual or crowd or trend in mind the rules of statistics come under strain. not because they go wrong - they do not, but rather because of that natural tendency of mind to inhabit the world it has assumed. That is we look for what we expect to find,and so up our chances of finding it (and finding it is places we might never have looked or expected, for one reason or another,- if we had not assumed that it was their). The mere act of assuming tends to change the world, if we let it - and certainly breaks with the statics that actually defined the world in the first place. again one needs care here this is not a council of disappear, so much as a problem. Ones tendencies of mind to assume truth and inhabit run against the actually practicalities of creating a truth independent from us - and we have to respect that fact: The truth might be out there but it has little to do with us and out assumptions or conspiracies- and that is the point of it.
Across this landscape an elusive figure holds its presence- a truth objective and beyond us- a truth we are grasping at, and questing towards, and yet one that cannot necessarily be simply assumed or accepted or can be only at the cast of shifting this nature: The truth that is out there is then like nothing we normally dream or or thinking it- a fact that makes it so powerful and yet hinders our ability to simply grasp or assert it at any and every turn.
Rules or exception? Ancedotes or statistics?
It is a real problem,.
The power of modern science was traditionally bound up with statistics- that is with treating numbers as an entity independent of facts, a distribution whose properties were well known, and that was therefore free to use to explore reality. One counted by stepping beyond actual reality, and into a theorectical world, working out what should be i this world, is all the assumptions of the real world were right, and then testing this against reality - and so judging its assumptions and hidden values.
A method that allows one to fix certainties as a probability, and so adjudicate.
The only trouble with the method is that like so much of statistics one has to go so far way from reality to produce the figures which matter. there is a lot of theory to be one, a lot of number crunching assumed (and performed). truth becomes bean counting, as is of course only as good as the beans counted.
the last fact then leads to have to divide the process into four parts,- one needs to work out first the bean to count - the theory to test, the assumptions to make, and state them: then devise the model to use; before finally collecting the data, and testing it against where the theory would have predicted. This process is necessary as it has at its heart the assumption that the theory is independnt of any one mind. one goes through this process therefore to distance the 'truth' one stands alone and independent from the flux of perception or the demands of feeling.: What is more there is tendency in statics to yearn for clean truths and not flaccid clumpy ones. I mean here the hypothesis that one demonstrates ought to be open and clear - a single theory is then tested hypothesis - and not merely a whole clump of different associated prejudices. The truth is then not about clumps of related ideas cobbled together with a name (which is the bedrock of most verbal meaning) - a world where it is never clear exact;y what one sis saying let alone proving. Statistics yearns to be exact (whether it gets there or no).
Meaning is therefore given the right to inhabit the hidden world of truth - the one where things actually lie - the tangible yet hidden reality of actual occasions. Numbers- understood as patterns as what one would predict before the test, becomes then the way to define what lies beyond us all - what we like to think of as facts . That is things we can do nothing about - truths that are just THERE.
A process that will of course creates this own world of facts, as the one that have a statistical presence are not at all the same ones that inhabit our world. other patterns other trends are seen there: For numbers are different they do things differently there. From which in turn we end up spinning out new actors new inhabitence for this world (Social facts, Genes-for this or that) - at which point the problems actually start - for this is the moment when the truths of statistics are assumed to be real things, real actors f differing sorts in the world. The real trouble of course is always at this point what kind of actors are they?
there are so many different possibilities for truth.
these range from the statistics indicating real actors somehow hidden whose agency is infered - virus are classic example here: the mass phenomena of coordinating symptoms allowed the inferal of an agency for those symptoms and the quest to find the agent: A quest repeated for DNA but also Dark matter, and dark energy- a quest then that is the stuff of Science adventures.
but there are other facts that is a sense are merely social - the product of myriad individuals reality one with the other - they have then n actually agency beyond mass participation. Facts that the come in two different forms - either certain long terms trends (such as the classic Durkheim study of suicide) or else mood things- unique constructions of crowds and mobs.
The truth then of the hidden agent or the crowd as anti-agent.
The problem then being that most complex biological and probably social construction are somewhere in between these two points. That is they have elements of agency in them (DNA, or social manipulation), and elements of mass phenomena (protein cascades, moods in a culture as well as social pressures, and realities) in them to - and it is never very simple to draw the line between the two. The problem being Even one can devise a genuine statistical test to tell these apart (that is test some hypothesis or other according to an established model), it still remains possible that the boundary is genuinely fluid betewen these two. The results then for this test here and now might not be universal - elsewhere ti is already different and that difference might well matter. There are more things hidden in our truths than our philosophies might simply allow (which does not mean of course that such testing is difficult or should be done, or never right or even not often right- it is merely that it is complicated, and one needs to not loose sight of that fact- )
What is more it is made all the more difficult because ones one does have an agency be it individual or crowd or trend in mind the rules of statistics come under strain. not because they go wrong - they do not, but rather because of that natural tendency of mind to inhabit the world it has assumed. That is we look for what we expect to find,and so up our chances of finding it (and finding it is places we might never have looked or expected, for one reason or another,- if we had not assumed that it was their). The mere act of assuming tends to change the world, if we let it - and certainly breaks with the statics that actually defined the world in the first place. again one needs care here this is not a council of disappear, so much as a problem. Ones tendencies of mind to assume truth and inhabit run against the actually practicalities of creating a truth independent from us - and we have to respect that fact: The truth might be out there but it has little to do with us and out assumptions or conspiracies- and that is the point of it.
Across this landscape an elusive figure holds its presence- a truth objective and beyond us- a truth we are grasping at, and questing towards, and yet one that cannot necessarily be simply assumed or accepted or can be only at the cast of shifting this nature: The truth that is out there is then like nothing we normally dream or or thinking it- a fact that makes it so powerful and yet hinders our ability to simply grasp or assert it at any and every turn.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Meaning as Water
There is a point in any discussion about meaning - a point where we and the world need to be of the same stuff for meaning to work. I mean for all the transcendental pretensions of meaning (real or imagined) in the end it works because we are of the world - we understand it and understand it in a way we share in some sense with it: we are a part of it- and live through it. The world and us are not then apart: We share in its energy flows or its water flows, we are part of its story. Our ability then to build for ourselves our own little world and the worlds meta power to disrupt all such worlds and to reform them otherwise, are caught together because at a base level we share some stuff some light some energy. We see a world, and it in that seeing is already sharing something with us and through us.
We matter, and so does the world: Meaning is the to be caught both in a single flow of something towards some other state: We are points ruption or eruption, or interruption or merely continuance on that flows- point to be comprehended by it:
And at the same time the flow is also elsewhere a part in a cycle or a series of cycles or systems that might well be orchestrating its movements and defining what it is.
What is more this cycle this flow might b caught up in greater flows or cycles and be so to continua.
To be a part f the world, to share in t, is to be caught in some sense in the arch-paradigms for time as flow and cycle. it is then in the flow and through the cycle we feel ourselves in the very act of perceiving to also we a part n nature: we see and the world is - and somehow we are already sharing what we are - and how we are.
The truth of being water is then surely this- that in our most intimate moment of being, the moment a perception tumbles into the conscious mind, we are already sharing what we are, already a part of some other movement, another story, one where our cycles and loops of mind is merely else where moment in a flow ; or alternative our flowing time is gathered in a great hoop of existing.
The be water is therefore to already be sharing hat you are in some sense even as you are it - and for that the be the very crux of meaning - for by what else do we mean in the word?
We matter, and so does the world: Meaning is the to be caught both in a single flow of something towards some other state: We are points ruption or eruption, or interruption or merely continuance on that flows- point to be comprehended by it:
And at the same time the flow is also elsewhere a part in a cycle or a series of cycles or systems that might well be orchestrating its movements and defining what it is.
What is more this cycle this flow might b caught up in greater flows or cycles and be so to continua.
To be a part f the world, to share in t, is to be caught in some sense in the arch-paradigms for time as flow and cycle. it is then in the flow and through the cycle we feel ourselves in the very act of perceiving to also we a part n nature: we see and the world is - and somehow we are already sharing what we are - and how we are.
The truth of being water is then surely this- that in our most intimate moment of being, the moment a perception tumbles into the conscious mind, we are already sharing what we are, already a part of some other movement, another story, one where our cycles and loops of mind is merely else where moment in a flow ; or alternative our flowing time is gathered in a great hoop of existing.
The be water is therefore to already be sharing hat you are in some sense even as you are it - and for that the be the very crux of meaning - for by what else do we mean in the word?
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