deCypher said:

andrewss said:

Icelander said:

Does anyone know what happened to daytripper23?

I got tired of his wordy obtuse posts.

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He posts mostly posts some good shit, actually

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He seems pretty intelligent but I usually have no idea what he's trying to say. 

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Lakefingers said:

Check out that Manuel de Landa book (A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History) I recommended in the Kant thread. I was thinking mostly of you when I said others might like it, I think it's right up your alley if with the interest in indentity and flow.

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Lakefingers said:

Yes, but I don't think animals make concepts, or grasp things. From what
I've read and observed in animals is that they can't make sets of sets like we can.
The don't name to the extent we can, so their conceptualization is very
primitive. To put it poetically, without languages and humanoid hands, they cannot
grasp the world.

/me takes a sip of fresh, hot coffee.

What happens for us is that we can have an object, a grasp of something, conceptualize,
then we can turn around, or take a further step back and conceptualize that as well. We
can conceptualize to the point that what we conceptualize is not logically or actually possible.

Where does this come from? - Language, and the related structures in our nervous
system, I think. Language is interesting because it has organs in each, normally
developed individual human that can reproduce it, yet it cannot be developed on
its own. For instance, children left in the wild and brought back after a certain age
will never learn to speak properly. There's a cut off age, and before that, language
doesn't arise in one brain, but is stimulated by a collective language, a
relationship to the other brains... hence all the internet and Borg comparisons...
There is something to Platonism... It's very exciting with the extent of human
intersubjectivity... What is part of one, and the capabilities of one's individual
organs must be created, activated and developed with other individuals to reach
the current, full conceptual capabilities.

We catalog, analyze, (not just "civilized people", even hunter-gatherers
have etymological, botanical, geological systems with which they catalog things and
species) as a result or necessity of our language, the hypothesis goes. My question
is whether this is a result or a necessity--is it that we need to analyze,
organize, create things that seem permanent, or is it that that's one of the peculiar
byproducts of our capabilities, with which we've gone wild. Related questions: have we
evolved or devolved? Are we a finished species or a dysfunctional transition?
Can the conceptual scheme of evolution or
our concept of species manage an adequate answer to this?

We can easily get caught in a loop where we take these practical concepts of permanence
in things, adding a layer of symbolic entanglement above the primitive layers of
reification, as found in a dog. Dogs seem to expect and rely on their environment
remaining intuitively the same (as in the case of the ship or house above, we know
when it's the same and can deal with it then. BTW, I think this demonstrates that
cognition is to a large extent non- or aconceptual). Humans do this, but they have
concepts as well, which give us designation
by which we can describe and attempt to
test our sense of essence. So if you look at
things, cause and effect, etc, there is a
multilayered illusion of them being stable
at this very moment, but the flux is either
too gradual for us to notice, or it can even been too rapid and destroys our concepts.
When do we ever actually see change, movement, or cause and effect itself? We
measure fragments of them due to our senses (eyes/brains only take in a certain amount
of images per minute) and draw intuitively
plausible conclusions based on observation of real things filtered through our very
messy conceptualization structures.

And interestingly, our concepts are not limited only for what they can be applied to
as permanence, but we have concepts for impermanence, and things that are clearly in
change and seem to have no other essence than change, such as impermanence itself, energy field, or river
(a river is water flowing in a certain place, but the waters moving, not the same; water in its turn
is moving particles; the beach or banks are being eroded, etc, etc)
whereas concepts also apply to brick, which can be moved around to many different
places, but will, without extraordinary conditions, remain "the same" if it sits on
your shelf for sixty years. There are many different flows and speeds of impermanence,
kind of like clouds moving along and sometimes we see shapes in them and
sometimes they rain. Guess what, my coffee's become cold.

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This post started making me think about how smeared perception (all of it really) becomes whilst tripping.  

As far as other animals goes, it is funny how bodily form and mechanics are perhaps more developed in them. The human is primarily preserved in nature due to its powers of conceptualization and thus science, our apparatus of affect is the delicate hand and the sensitive eye, if I could be so quick and crude in a summation... But this to me seems like "just another mode of nature" granted, apparently it is the most powerful as far as species domination goes on earth - at least that is collectively. Though obviously without our communion and without our science many many animals have the advantage on us in raw power. We are the being who embodied the cunning of mentality; getting off on our brain being fed copious amounts of blood and energy rather than our muscles. Funny what resulted. Thus entails "hyper consciousness" ??

Also our cunning was a forward looking thing too, vicarious projections / role plays had to in my mind played in integral part in our successes as a hunter species early on. Though I dunno, but would we say while some other animals have perfected their hunts we are ones that didnt specialize too much specifically but rather developed by happen stance a most versatile approach to sustaining ourselves? Damn conjecture!