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Offlinemorrowasted
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post old meth-induced documents you wrote that you never finished
    #20567646 - 09/14/14 06:23 PM (9 years, 5 months ago)

i know i cant be the only one who used to get all amped up and start a ridiculous, directionless project and never finish it, only to start a different one the next time

Quote:

It seems to me that there are a number of different possible responses to this question. I will dress one of those responses, as well as further responses to it. I have labelled it Position #1 so that if other positions are presented, they can be easily referenced.

Position #1

1. P1|Truth is a property of true statements.
2. P2|True statements cannot be prior to language.
3. ∴Truth cannot be prior to language.

P1 carries the weight of the argument, since P2 appears to be an analytic truth similar to the assertion "Squares have four sides." P1 appears to be derived from a further assumption- that truth is only a property of true statements. If we adopt the formal of a statement that is used in modern formal logic for the purposes of this paper, then it does follow from truth only being a property of true statements that truth is a property of true statements.

This argument appears to imply that a thought/belief which is not in the form of a statement cannot be true. If we define a thought/belief as a systematic synthesis of sensory perception, spatiotemporal distinction, and correlation which are sequentially related to one another in that order but simultaneously functioning as a cybernetic system, however, the consideration that a thought/belief can be true when it is not in the form of a statement becomes less seemingly unreasonable. Assuming this definition, a thought/belief may be composed such that it corresponds to true properties about what is being perceived and their spatiotemporal distribution. It seems very likely that correlative thought/beliefs that are not in the form of a statement can be false, but it does not follow from that assumption that they can't be true. 

My dog knows when I am about to take her for a walk. I'm not sure what all of the correlations are which were involved in her ability to anticipate a walk, but I can think of some likely candidates. I usually put on a sweater I never otherwise wear and a different pair of shoes when I'm taking her for a walk. If she has a thought/belief given the definition provided earlier (which obviously cannot be in the form of a statement, since dogs don't have language), and it accurately corresponds to the circumstantial composition of whatever is providing the sensory input (it's common to use the word "reality" these days, but I don't like that term), then it doesn't seem unreasonable to say that the thought/belief was true. It was synthesized by whatever process is responsible for generating thought/beliefs in sequential order, as previously stated.

The first stage of this synthesis is perception, in which sensory input is perceived. The second stage analyzes this sensory perception and generates from it an isomorphic distribution of spatiotemporal distinctions (implying that the spatiotemporal distinctions exist independently of thought/beliefs in a specific configuration). This isomorphic distribution can be thought of in terms of human attempts at generating isomorphisms, which involve using a code, like spoken language, written representations of spoken languages, and even art, which appears to be trying to generate an isomorphism that captures information about the perception that is not necessarily limited by sensory input. This kind of perception is commonly called an emotion. The medium of this code remains unclear, because is almost certainly unlike the mediums we are accustomed to using when generating attempted isomorphisms, but that does not imply that there is no medium. The medium of a thought/belief is equally unclear, but perhaps that is because the idea of a medium is a metaphyiscal hypothesis whose semantic content is determined by the interaction between a thought/belief and the correlations derived from the spatiotemporal information it has encoded. The final stage in the synthesis of a thought/belief is the correlative or associative process, which limits the composition of the thought/belief to the patterns deciphered therein (which could be thought of as what is called focus).

Do you think that truth can exist independently of language? Or is it merely a property of true statements, and thus limited to contexts involving statements?

Can we simply discard the concept of truth altogether in favor of a different way of isomorphic generation? How would the world be different if statements of the form, "X is true" were incoherent? There is a psuedoscientific practice called Neuro-Linguistic Programming that involves drawing conclusions from Chomsky's analysis of transformational grammar and applying it to a kind of cognitive-behavioral therapy which appears to assume that the form of a thought/belief which is in the form of a statement induces positive restructuring of neural networks.

The practice is psuedoscientific because the models it generates are explanatory at best but never predictive. A predictive model allows for the possibility of necessitating the antecedent of a conditional. It is pseudoscientific rather than unscientific because it appears to employ formally-defined terminologies in a manner that is analytically inconsistent (the other alternative being that Chemists, for example, are more analytically inconsistent with their profession's own neologisms. For me, the fact that neurolinguistic programming fails to be predictive is not a reason to ignore it; after all, economics is not predictive in the sense just described, but it is nevertheless useful to be familiar with the discussion about.

For the sake of discussion let us adopt the theoretical framework outlined in the response to the original argument, which understands language as an attempt to create an isomorphism, and understands a predictive model as one that allows for the possibility of necessitating a conditional's antecedent. The attempted isomorphism can be said to have a potency proportionate to its potential to necessitate any conditional in which the antecedent is a specific coupling of a set of memories which are prioritized in terms of the predictive/explanatory success of their correlative component with a specific set of perceptual input, and the consequent is a coupling of a different set of correlative data with a set of perceptual input (which is not necessarily different). One model which attempts to formalize a predictive theoretical construct concerned with understanding the nature of the interaction responsible for determining the potency of a given isomorphism to is NLP.

I believe it is possible to understand the potential of NLP without adhering to formal, practice-specific terminologies. Many of the terminologies will be my own as I have defined them throughout this discussion, and the analytic inconsistencies that fall out of using them in semantico-syntactic configuration which ignores their formally-defined semantic delimiters will be ignored by considering the definitions I have provided for them to be a set of premises in a possible world where the analytic statements that entail contradictions are considered to be false.

You may have noticed that I never say either thought or belief, but always both. This is because I wish to avoid the frustrating logical pitfalls that result from considering a belief to be a thought which necessarily has some additional property that is captured by the word belief but not by the word thought. The components of belief/thought which consists of a statement as either "I believe X" OR "X" , according to the theoretical framework I am presenting, remain consistent despite the disparity between the perceptual input they appear to necessitate when reconstructed by the spatio-temporal component of thought/belief synthesis.

To understand my approach at reinterpreting the conclusions of NLP, it may be helpful for me to say what I mean when I refer to NLP. NLP herein refers the practice interested in catalyzing behavior change by implementation of psychologically-oriented conclusions drawn out of transformational grammar theory. Perhaps the simplest way of capturing the essence of NLP is to say that NLPs believe in a feedback loop between the syntatic configuration of a statement and its potential to elicit a behavior as well as its potential to predictively necessitate  material reconfigurations which reinforce the desired behavior. The necessary relevance of material reconfigurations to NLP seems to be inspired by the modern remnant of Cartesian mind/body dualism, alongside the unprecedented explanatory and predictive power of behavioral models which assume that macroscopic behaviors are determined by and thus ontologically posterior to neural networks whose medium is brain tissue, a position which I will say is assumed in most if not all neuroscientific theoretical frameworks. While the explanatory and predictive potency of the conclusions generated by research and formal analysis in cognitive neuroscience certainly appears to be superior to its predecessors, it nevertheless fails to achieve levels that even approach those achieved in, for example, Chemistry. A significant portion of the evidence supporting the neuro-paradigmatic perspective involves measuring correlations between an alteration in a specific aspect of brain activity and the behavioral consequent that seems to necessarily result. The causal relationship between them is presupposed and then experimental conclusions are formulate in such a way that they necessarily reinforce it by virtue of their reliance upon a formalized causal metaphysics in which so-called materials are ontologically prior to thought/belief configurations.

I propose that NLP's attempt to incorporate neural models of cognition into their practice is counter-productive to its intended purpose, which is to catalyze cognitive and/or behavioral change. In order to begin, let us assume that the thought/belief model is an accurate model of the interaction between perceptual input and cognitive output in order to determine its explanatory potential. This model appears to distinguish between processes, their medium of in which they occur, and the information that is being processed. As has already been stated, the medium appears to be the least formalized conceptual component of the thought/belief model. In order to reconcile the model, I will offer a formal interpretation of the word medium.

We will consider the medium to be set of all possible isomorphisms. We have previously said that according to the thought/belief model, the correlative process deciphers the patterns codified by the spatiotemporal-distributive process. Given the definition of medium just provided, the need to analogize by alluding to the manner in which humans attempt to generate isomorphisms, that is, using a code in conjunction with a medium, becomes unnecessary. If the medium of the process is the set of all possible isomorphisms, then what a given spatiotemporal distribution of perceptual input actually amounts to is merely the selection of a particular set of subsets. The election of a set of subsets that corresponds to what is known as relation-preservation is a function of the interaction between the spatiotemporal-distributive process and the correlative process, while the election of a set of subsets that corresponds to what is known as operation-preservation corresponds to the process that receives perceptual input. The metaset that results from a conjunction of the elected sets amounts to its referential identity.

In order to be consistent, is necessary to divorce oneself from the notion that something distinct from the set of all possible isomorphisms is responsible for the processing a selection of subsets. Instead, every instance of a selection of subsets should be understood as resulting from a cybernetic generative system. The system generates new members to the set of all possible isomorphisms. An increase in the size of the set of all possible isomorphisms amounts to a increase in the complexity of the correlative process. Complexity, on this account, can thus be understood as an indicator of the size of the set of isomorphisms.

If we are to accept that the medium of the processes described by the belief/thought model is isomorphism, what are we to make of so-called physical experiences? The term physical experience can be interpreted in a lot of ways, but on this model, a physical experience is best understood as being the process itself which receives perceptual input. The use of the word process here is merely a convenient abstraction that allows me to refer to any or all of them without having to make reference to it/them by its specific function on the model. Another way to understand how the model subsumes the metaphysical idea of physical things is simply to say that physical things belong to a group of subsets of perceptual input which is derived from a set of all possible isomorphisms that is smaller than the set of all possible isomorphisms generating experience at the moment of receiving input. This means that the configuration of so-called physical things is determined by the collection of ontologically prior set selections. The newest introduction to the set of all possible isomorphisms would thus never be described as a physical thing, since by the time it has manifested itself in such a way that our perceptual input incorporates it, the size of the set has increased.

I will attempt to draw informal conclusions out the analysis just presented. Quantum mechanics is the study of so-called physical things in terms of quanta, and its experiments seem to indicate that the smallest physical units have properties that are completely counter-intuitive to the commonplace conception of physical things.  For example, a location of a particle is said to be describable in terms of a Gaussian curve. The particle is literally understood to be existing in an infinitely expanding set of possible locations, and it is only possible to say that a particle has a traditional kind of location in spacetime at the moment it is "observed". What does this observation amount to? If it is the case that my thought/beliefs are generated by my brain, and it is also the case that my brain is composed of the same particles it is experiencing, whence comes observation? Are we to believe that particles observe one another?

In a sense, perhaps. If we assume the thought/belief model, the set of all possible isomorphisms observes itself by engaging in a systematic feedback loop characterized by the process I have outlined. Perceptual input, then, on this model merely amounts to the intersection between sets of isomorphisms that are recruited by the spatiotemporal process.

The unitary nature of the set of all possible isomorphisms seems deterministically impossible since perceptual input, spatiotemporal distribution, and correlation appear to be restricted to and distributed unevenly across the so-called minds of so-called individuals. The model necessitates the collapse of the distinction between thoughts and thinkers. Thinkers are thoughts. The unitary aspect of the set of all possible isomorphisms implies that there is only one thinker, and it is the set of all possible isomorphisms, and there is only one thought: 1, 2, 3... The isomorphism is necessarily information-preserving (hence its name) since each transformation involves a set in which every ontologically prior set is belongs to one its subsets; namely, the one which has just ceased to be the set of all possible isomorphisms. What we call thoughts, then, actually amount to the correlative process's attempt isolate the pattern in the conjunction between every set of spatiotemporal distributions which corresponds to present sequential state of the set of all possible isomorphisms. That a thought seems to occur to you but not to me merely reflects the correlative parsing of spatiotemporal distributions. An informal thought can be said to occur to "you" when the correlative process is making use of the spatiotemporal distribution that was generated from the perceptual input which corresponds to a particular subset of the set of all possible isomorphisms. You, then, is a word best interpreted as meaning simply a subset of the metaset.

If we accept the thought belief model, you are a subset of information-preserving transformations. Your so-called body is perceptual construct that both resulted from and results in the increasing complexity of the set of all possible worlds. Its function is to generate said complexity. Remember that we are interpreting complexity as the size of the metaset, so as a descriptor complexity designates a measurement like density; in other words, to describe a particular subset as being relatively complex amounts to saying that it contains a unusually large set of possible isomorphisms relative to the metaset.

Neural tissue appears to be the most complex configuration of so-called materials, where the complexity of neural tissue belonging to so-called humans appears to be greater than that of any other communicable system. It is important to note that the body and, more specifically the brain, are not merely "places where complexity happens to be". The word place is a symbol that allows for the generation of isomorphisms that preserve the collective spatiotemporal information resulting from every perceptual input. Complexity is quite simply the position of a subset relative to the size and position of the metaset. The set of all possible isomorphisms is thus the most complex object, and is necessarily more complex than can be captured by any of its subsets.

Basically, the metaphysics I am describing says that each introduction of a subset necessitates a single perceptual input process. The perceptual input process has a correlative potential that corresponds to the complexity of the subset that necessitated it. This means that the metaset must constantly be modifying all spatiotemporal distributions, which necessarily follow at a 1:1 ratio from perceptual inputs, in order  that they do not form contradictions.

This model offers an explanation for the nature of evolution, or change over time, whose recently discovered exponential quality does not appear to be explicable in terms of the theory of natural selection and the gene theory. If the set of all possible subsets- which must by necessity have a perceptual input (a lot of people refer to the conjunction between this subset and the perceptual input it necessitated as "God")- necessarily gets larger in sequence, there must be a corresponding increase in the complexity of the isomorphism that preserves spatio-temporal distributive information.

I have previously suggested the possibility that the neural networks of human brains appear to be the perceptual manifestations of the most complex subsets (and presumably some or all "human" perceptual inputs could have been necessitated by the metaset), but there is another possibility. If the spatiotemporal distribution corresponding to some sets is defined according to 5 or more dimensions, then we who are limited by a spatiotemporal distributive process defined by 4 dimensions are surely not so close to the metaset as we previously might have believed. I don't want to get too carried away with this point, but perhaps apparently supernatural phenomena are merely 5 dimensional glimpses of 5+ dimensional subsets. There could be (necessarily) unimaginably complex subsets whose spatiotemporal distribution values coincide with yours along the first four dimensions but (necessarily) not the rest.

Let us finally return to the consideration of NLP. On the model I have just described, the functional aspect of NLP is lies in its practical application of an analytic truth of our model, that the level of complexity of subset has is defined by its size. Transformational grammar says that information can be reconfigured without losing any of it, so long as there is a corresponding syntactic distinction. NLP assumes that cognition is limited to thoughts that are in the form of statements. While this is probably not the case, it does appear that as soon as a thought can take the form of a statement, it does, and so for someone who is very familiar with language, it is now easy and productive to do.





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Offlinemorrowasted
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Re: post old meth-induced documents you wrote that you never finished [Re: morrowasted]
    #20567671 - 09/14/14 06:28 PM (9 years, 5 months ago)

Quote:

heh, well, I'm not going to lie, I don't know how I feel about astrology anymore. I'm about to make a really long reply, but I earnestly hope you will take the time to read through it. Not all at once. Take your time. It's a lot, and I go off into more-than-likely self-absorbed tangents that would get lost on just about anyone but me, but I hope that at the very least you will find it flippantly amusing if disagreeable, or, perhaps you will not find it so disagreeable. I'm not trying to convince you of anything either way, I'm just going to ramble some of my thoughts; in the end I think you will find that the position I take on the issue if someone forces me to take one is fairly simple yet relatively uncommon. The main argumentative point can be summed up as this:

    Sign-based interpretation of metaphysical relations such as but not limited to compatibility which is derived from astrological paradigms that were established at some point in the relatively distal past is irredeemably error-prone due to multiple procedural problems that arise during the semantic decoding process:
  • Of primary importance, the inaccessibility of the definitions, or any sort of functional equivalent, of pragmatic variables that applied to semantic decoding during sign-based phenomena interpretation at the time of a given astrological system's introduction to the human community, without which present-day procedural application of sign-interpretation cannot truthfully be said to accurately make use of the system in question.
  • Of secondary importance, the non-existence in the time at which any given distally introduced systems was introduced into the human community of intentional intra-linguistic semantic web, such as a modern Dictionary, which would at least allow for a better understanding of the modal relationality between the symbols, as apprehended by the minds of those responsible for introducing and originally popularizing a given distally established historical astrological system, without which the accuracy any instance of any sign-based interpretative conclusion such as, for example, but not limited to, compatibility, is obscured to point of non-computability.
  • Non-computability essentially means that a computer program could not take input data about your sign, birth location and time, etc., and give you output that is consistent enough to be worthy of attention. Essentially, if the level of semantic obscurity raised to a high enough level, the computer will begin to feed you the same output no matter what input you feed into it. You may be able to design a computer program that works based on an internally-consistent set of semantics of your own device, and that program would function. Such programs probably exist, and the language in them, I am guessing, probably tends to give messages that discuss the the actions of the reader, perhaps sprinkled with slightly-but-not-too-mystical-sounding-allusions-to-things-like-Light-and-Energy, that dazzle the reader with apparent insight about his or her personality and circumstances, but in reality are semantically and syntactically hard-wired to be as universally applicable as possible.
  • Despite my serious doubts concerning present-day practical uses for astrological systems which were introduced during portions of the past that are now so distant that we have lost all feasible means of acquiring the variable definitions necessary to execute the proper pragmatic procedures for accurate semantic decoding, I nevertheless maintain that it is possible- in fact, I cannot see how it would NOT be possible- that so-called macrocosmic and microcosmic phenomena could be correlated according to mathematical models. In fact, Richard Tarnas claims to have done precisely that in his book, Cosmos and Psyche. I find his schematic of archetypes to be dubious however, mostly because every time a historical event that is offered up as an example of the conformity between his mathematical models and his classificatory scheme of archetypes, the reader is either forced to accept his decision to classify the given event as such, or else start keeping a list of instances where Tarnas' theory failed to work inside of his own example simply because you fail to agree that one event belongs to a particular category rather than another. His methodology is unquestionably questionable, but if one wishes to question his methodology, one is forced to ask how, other than via the correlation of historical events such a task could be accomplished?
  • What I'm left with is a lot of doubts and very little to go on, yet my hope, joy, and contentment grow with each passing day. The idea that keeps invading my thoughts- almost always uninvited; nevertheless exuberantly self-principled and apparently designed (designed?) for action and nothing but action- has to do incorporating the concept of free will into any functional model of my own device that involves human input/output interaction. The faster I run from free will, the more potent its force becomes within me, and changes every preconceived notion I ever held near and dear, and every long-held position that ever gave me comfort, and tears up the pages of my mind more than psychedelics ever did, and hands them back to me in the shape of a single word: "Responsibility". I am no longer a victim of cosmological forces; I am no longer a victim of my genetic predispositions; I am no longer a victim of other peoples' behavior; I am no longer a victim of the apparently negative institutions that I used to feel surrounded by. I am a victim of my own actions. I experience the consequences of my actions. When I live this way, my thoughts become divine. I cannot explain it. I dare not try to any more; every time I have in the past, I've paid for it. I find now that even in the presence or lack thereof of divine answers within any given set of data, interpreted according to some system-astrological, hell, as Einstein occasionally voiced, maybe the divine can be found in the astronomical- I have quite suddenly lost the need to look outside of myself for divine answers.





And believe me, this is just a small portion of what I have to say about this topic. And I can talk about a lot of different topics (not bragging, I just don't get many opportunities and take as many as I can get, so let me know what else you like).

The first problem I run into with it is that almost every person I meet who buys into astrology seems to be using a slightly different system. I am going to focus on the idea of the original Zodiac system, as it existed when it came to be used by humans in what is now called the Far East (whether or not it was created); an idea whose precise form, I hope to demonstrate, has become inaccessible due the simple elements of time and change (progress?).



It seems to me that the main problem with drawing conclusions from Astrological data has to do with the archetypes or "signs". Where did the signs come from? Who decides what their characteristics are? If we assume that the characteristics of a particular sign were defined in a particular language (say, written ancient Chinese) using certain words, and that those words were maintained throughout generations as the components of the sign in question, then our understanding of that sign is sensitive to the way that we translate the Chinese words.

In written Chinese, the meaning of a symbol or symbol-set depends upon its specific shape/form. Shapes/forms are combined in Chinese to create new meanings; for example, to create the written idea of refrigerator the custom has been to combine the symbols for ice and box in serial order the way that we combine letters in English to create words. Thus 冰 (ice) and 箱 (box) become icebox when conjoined, and in the modern age the icebox is the fridge. The determination of sign compatibility according to the Chinese Zodiac originally depended upon this method of symbol conjunction, although lord knows how many different methods are currently being used to supposedly determine the compatibility relation.

For example, if your sign is 羊 (Goat) and the longitude of the Sun is 344 degrees during the Spring, you are presumably interacting with an environment in which the fixed element 木 (wood) is predominant. If you meet someone whose sign is 蛇 (snake), the ancient Chinese attitude involved something like literally taking a brush out and painting 羊地木蛇火 (Goat-Earth-Wood-Snake-Fire) to just "see what it looked like", because in doing so the compatibilities/incompatibilities- the deeper meaning- would sort of just "jump out at you". This attitude is probably related to a learned notion that the symbols were created in such a way that they necessarily posses a "divine" or at very least non-arbitrary connection between the appearance of their precise written form (think about how precise the differentiating parts of the characters are [supposed to be]) and the meaning they produced in one's mind upon observation and reflection. In other words, the ancient Chinese individuals intimately familiar with their written language didn't need someone else to tell them what sign was incompatible with what sign, instead they simply interpreted what was, to them, a "common sense" understanding of the meaning of the symbols, by observing the symbols and the form created out of their conjunction and interspatial-relations. In an attempt to draw a more clear picture of the interpretive process I have been attempting to describe, I now note that it seems to me to be most nearly analogous to the process by which people today are individually able to by virtue of what has come, for better-or-for-worse-but-nothing-if-not-curiously to be referred to with simultaneous connotations of nostalgia and embitterment as - yep - "common sense" arrive at strikingly similar interpretations of metaphorical poetry:

Quote:
Quote:


Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference






What is the author talking about, in this poem? Most readers get the impression that the poem is a metaphor about the consequences of choosing to live a relatively unusual type of life. The poem, however, never mentions life. It is about a couple of slightly different roads in a wood, and the fact that the author makes a choice to walk one of them. Without the last line, the general reader will not typically get the impression that the author is talking about life; at best it would seem like a weak metaphor for making atypical decisions, but more likely it would seem like two affirmative statements of fact containing some perhaps poetically-(mal?)inspired grammatical anomalies, but no metaphors. There appears to be some-THING (I rarely use that word, because to me it's like a philosophical mind trap that was literally invented by ancient philosophers for the purpose of making reference to the stuff that you experience with your perceptual faculties and manipulate with your- free will(?)- without talking about certain kinds of stuff. My contention is that they weren't immediately forthright; nobody bothered to say, "by the way, since nobody ever experiences or manipulates stuff that isn't of a specific kind, the stuff we're talking about doesn't exist in real life and was actually just one part of the Sophist tactic of creating generalizations out of specific instances in order to derive propositional contradictions for the sake of winning arguments and gaining prestige and political reputability in the minds of the less-thoughtful [or simply less frightened and selfish?] majority [which unfortunately included those who ruled Greece during the rise of Sophistry] but the truth is, I'm talking about someTHING that I need to refer to, and I don't know what it is because my experiences of it are most  like what philosophers call "mental states", and in English we only have specific words for a few mental states that are very non-specific relative to what I am talking about, and mostly affective, like 'happiness', 'anger', 'jealousy', and 'inspiration') residing in the (specifically modern English speaking) cultural-collective- deductive/ inductive/Heuristic/Analogously-Interpretive/Divinely-Inspired(?)/(???)- semantic and pragmatic decoding of this poem, the result of which is the weird-if-you-really-linger-on-it-long-enough,-I-promise reality that most adult English-speaking humans read the poem, and then some message resembling, "This author chose to live an unusual life and seems to be saying that he would've regretted choosing to not do so. " just kind of emerges in their minds.

I think the ancient (and perhaps in many instances also modern, but with different pragmatic assessment results) Chinese interpretation of their Zodiac symbols is like that. It seems that with so few words, each word was probably embedded with a significant amount of semantic content. Here I am going to digress into a bit of sticky linguistic theory, but I will do my best to explain it in words that are easy to understand. Each word being "embedded with a significant amount of semantic content" means that the word has a large variety of possible correct meanings, and that the specific  meaning or set of meanings was intentionally determined when it was written, when necessary, by two things. The first and most important is syntactic variability; in other words, the placement of the word in the sentence relative to other words eliminates a range of possible meanings, thus narrowing the possibilities. For example, the word "Bat!" at the beginning of a sentence can only be the verb meaning to hit with a bat, since English requires sentences to contain the elements Subject-Verb-Object, in that order, except in the imperative, or command, form ("Bat!" is a command).

Furthermore, it cannot be the subject or any type of object- which eliminates the possibility of interpreting the word "bat" according to any of its noun-related meanings- because it lacks the necessary indefinite article "a" (which would make it the second word anyway), in addition to the fact that it would lack a verb if it were allowed to be a subject despite lacking the indefinite article, which would result in a sentence fragment. "Bats", on the other hand, could be the first word of a sentence, and, since English does not allow subject elimination in third-person conjugation of the simple present tense (or any tense other than the imperative/command), the word's initial position in the sentence rules out any meanings related to an action, the meaning would have to be one of the nouns. In a textually isolated sentence like, for example, "Bats are cool.", however, we still do not have enough information from the position of the words (the "syntax of the sentence") alone to figure out whether the writer is talking about the little creatures that sort of resemble rats but have scary wings and live in caves, or the huge, sturdy wooden sticks used to hit balls during baseball games. In order to figure out which meaning the writer intended, our only hope is to make a pragmatic assessment of the situation. In this case the best we can do is to say that in our current cultural context, it seems more unlikely that someone would comment on the "coolness" of something as common and simple as a baseball bat and that the writer was thus likely talking about the animals. Based on the fact that flying bats are epically accurate users of echolocation, and that they sleep upside down, and that they inspired Batman to be who he would be if he weren't a fictional character, and that they occasionally turn into vampires, and those guys in baseball are hitting a ball with a big stick and running around in circles, we can definitely conclude that the speaker is a massively disappointing moron who not unlikely "swings from both sides of the plate" (which is yet another expression that I bet anyone on the Shroomery can decode with a simple pragmatic variability assessment, in most cases as a variant of the expression "to swing both ways", the meaning of which is almost universally understood among modern English speaker), if he is in fact he is attempting to express a metaphysical relation between the object, "big sticks used to smack balls as hard as possible" and the non-intrinsic "coolness" property.

The process I have just described of inducing (which means gathering and including as much relevant data as possible to look for patterns) and deducing (which means eliminating as much irrelevant data from the induced set of data as possible, given the circumstantial variables that would induce elimination such as morphosyntactic data and semantic inconsistency) what I will respectfully designate the "most useful" or, as those displaying symptoms of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, the so-called 'victims' of which I shall proceed to mercilessly yet tactfully bamboozle following the next four oh-so-brief (okay, maybe not so brief) paragraphs (and yes that was my sad, desperate attempt to maintain your attention throughout their entirety, because, hey, uh, it's going to be funny-as-fuck to the extent where you actually might even giggle which is actually a big deal when you're sitting at a computer; just gonna throw out one possible pragmatic assessment of the meaning of "LOL" in 98% of contexts: "I am acknowledging that there  either A) was some intention on your part for what you just said to be received in a humorous way or B) was a mildly humorous element in what just occurred, but not enough for me to actually laugh, in which case, I would've said "hahaha". oh ya and also u mite lern sum kewl shit dat u can past in2 a paper 4 skewl hehe. not making fun of you btw) are not infrequently, yet oftentimes and quite impressively  managing, without even so much as flinching in reaction to the pain they are surely experiencing from that wholesome benevolent deity Autogenes, in whom I must believe at all costs, lest I impulsively create that divine force for which only he should be responsible; that is to say, the infliction of severe physical unto those intentionally inhuman individuals who insist on perpetually redisplaying the dysfunctional and uncooperative erection of their own image how the world ought to be in their mind (aka their egos), by allowing ridiculous things like, "the ONLY correct working hypotheses" to escape from the orifice on the lower front side of their face- from a given set of input data is often referred to as "common sense." (so yeah that sentence was stupidly long to the point of incomprehensibility unless you read it like ten times, and 98% of the reason it exists is for my own enjoyment, which turns out to be ironic should you manage to sort through it and figure out what the heck it was trying to say). cliffs: it's like there is this computer program in your brain, in which inductive and deductive inference rules work together in a feedback/feedforward loop, to sort through any given set of input data (that I can think of) and then generate the most relevant or useful output possible, depending on the type of input. If the program is trying to generate output in the form of the best meaningful interpretation of symbols you have just focused your attention on, that would be relevant output; whereas if the program is trying to generate output in the form of the most appropriate reaction to a given environmental stimulus, that would be an example of useful output.


The result of the fact that each traditional Chinese pictogram probably had a very large range of possible semantic outputs (the fact that there were so many ways of interpreting what the symbol meant), combined with the reality that ancient Chinese users of the Zodiac lacked the foresight to document these relations and the necessary pragmatic assessment variable definitions, unfortunately, is that we are left with very little guidance concerning the procedure for interpreting the relevant meanings of the symbol in different contexts. This is not at all surprising, since they were probably only minimally if at all aware of the procedure's discernible involvement in the activity of reading (for comprehension). Moreover, before we make the Chinese look like fools who forgot about the future, everyone apparently lacked the foresight to document these types of relations until the first instance of what we would call a genuine Dictionary, with words in a single language making reference to one another in order to create a semantic web of meaningful relationships between them, was published no sooner than 1604. There were bilingual dictionaries prior to this, of course, but the real problem with creating and distributing a modern type dictionary in ancient times was probably related to the reality that, since larger bodies of written material were considered to be intrinsically ephemeral due to the lack of durability of the mediums on which they appeared (which was generally flammable and biodegradable via air moisture), yet expensive at the same time, since each one demanded hand-copying via educated and thus relatively well-paid scribes; moreover, the books were far less practically useful at that time than bilingual dictionaries, which potentiated your ability to interact with foreign trade merchants at a more personable level. 

Unfortunately, "common sense" isn't actually universal. It's context-sensitive, in the case of the original Zodiac system it's sensitive to a particular culture at a particular point in its development. The point I'm getting to relates to the fact that in the modern age, it's common to find explanations of the Zodiac signs (often as if it has some sort of functional output, but that's another story...), that look like this (from wikipedia):
Quote:
Quote:


The relations between those elements are interpolation, interaction, over action, and counter-action, which are believed to be the common law of the motions and changes of the creatures in the universe





You'll note, however, that this particular section of the paper is not cited on wikipedia. That is because there is no ancient Chinese text which contains words like "interpolation". In ancient Ancient Chinese there was a unique pictogram for each idea that was to be represented, so they had to be conservative about the number of ideas they were going to represent (not the mention the fact that writing- especially in China- was still a relatively new, primitive, and rarely-utilized technology).

Instead they had pictograms/symbols for things that were relevant parts of their experience; things they needed to make reference to; hence, wood, fire, snake, ox, goat, earth, etc. ('yin' and 'yang' are highly notable exceptions because of their highly abstract meaning, but in written Chinese they had very few contenders until they were joined by invading Messianic-era abstractions, including but not limited to the etymological relatives and descendants of 'Tao'). There was almost certainly no pictogram in ancient Chinese for the action we call "interpolation", since it is the kind of action that has only become commonplace (enough to elicit a neologism, or new word) in the context of very high rates of literacy, and more important high-level argumentation about knowledge and/or opinions gathered by interlocutors from a chosen item of text. What this means is that the writer of this document is making his own assessment of what was taking place when the ancient Chinese were engaged in thinking about the interaction between Zodiac signs, and asserting that the Chinese elemental system inherently implies 'interpolatory' action.

The truth, I believe, is that the kind of interaction that takes place between the elements, in the minds of the creators of the Zodiac system of signs, has to do with the combination of symbols and thus the morphology (transformation of pieces of word units to alter their meaning, ie hating v. hated, syntax (word order), semantics (meaning of the words given their relation to one another in the sentence), and most importantly the pragmatics (the meaning of words given their relation to the environmental context in which they are used) of traditional written Chinese itself. Pragmatic assessment of the written Chinese that existed when the Zodiac system came about is utterly inaccessible due, as we have previously stated, to time and change. Even if you ask a modern Chinese person, the pragmatic assessment you will receive is composed of the the meaning of the word within the context of modern written Chinese, even if it is traditional. A simple example of changing pragmatics is, excuse my language, the word nigger. It is no longer acceptable to write or say this word in almost any context except perhaps one such as this, but even 60 years ago it was perfectly acceptable in many parts of the USA to write this word in a paper and turn it in to your teacher for a grade.

You'll also find things surrounding astrology such as this (from wikipedia):
Quote:
Quote:


Ox - Narcissistic personality disorder, Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, Schizoid personality disorder






These personality disorders- the first two, anyway, which I will focus on- are almost certainly context-dependent. In a hunter-gatherer society, there is no time for narcissism or compulsive behavior that serves no useful purpose. Any individuals who may begin to exhibit such narcissistic or useless compulsive behaviors in such a society would be promptly made aware that continued instances of such behavior would result in decisively negative consequences, or  simply disposed of immediately. Narcissistic personalities exists in the present age- in perpetuity- in such large numbers that, when exhibited to a certain degree, it has been classified as a pathological disorder. Why is this the case? Because we have created and/or become inadvertently involved in a situation which demands that certain individuals maintain narcissistic attitudes as defense mechanisms. Many individuals feel lost in the shuffle.

In ancient China, a human was 1 in maybe 500,000,000, but a human didn't even think about numbers like that; he felt like 1 in 5,000 at most. Today, just the knowledge that a human is 1 in 7 billion is hard to fathom- but being in a big city makes the feeling of insignificance multiply, and the celebrity "circus maximus" (which is, ironically, composed of people who are selected and then groomed into a variety of personalities and appearances and roles, just right, by the truly significant people, who you never see and have probably never heard of- because they like it that way- to give the impression that you, too, no matter how insignificant, can one day rise above the masses and at least be on the other side of the screen) makes it exponentially worse because it quite often forces you to realize that not only are you so insignificant that when you die you'll be forgotten in two generations at most, but that there is this other group of people who seem to be really significant whose achievements will carry on post-mortem, sometimes for millenia- and you're not part of that group.

Narcissistic personality disorder is a reactive rejection of the feeling that one person is an insignificant thing in the grand scheme of things, a reaction that could only exist in the context of a huge community in which certain individuals have to capacity to broadcast whatever they wish on a massive scale with the (well-grounded) expectation of a massive, mixed, and usually non-determinate audience, while others can only broadcast most (but not all) of what they wish to relatively small, homogeneous, and often predetermined audiences. Similarly, the existence of obsessive-compulsive disorder is sensitive to the context in which its existence was postulated. It doesn't seem far-fetched to imagine that there have always been individuals who mentally obsess about the particularity of performing a certain sequence of actions, but until modern times, individuals who obsessed about particularity in such a way that their obsession interfered with the solidarity of group action would (in a more sympathetic tribe) simply be given an ultimatum that would immediately and (quite interestingly,) perpetually interrupt their obsession before it became a compulsive behavior, or be exiled (or worse). The mechanisms underlying obsessive-compulsive disorder are probably more complicated than those undergirding Narcissistic personality disorder, because of the relevant research on the environment/predisposition interaction involved in its initial development.

Needless to say, it isn't likely that individuals with the sign of Ox suffered from Narcissistic personality disorder in ancient China. This is something that modern Americans who are familiar with abnormal human psychology have superimposed on the interpretative schematic based on their understanding of the characteristics that are associated with each sign. So, whoever decided to write that Ox-signs are more likely to have NPD did all of the following:
  • Assumed prior to beginning that it's actually possible to fully understand and use the Zodiac system without using or even having any understanding of the language in which it came about.
  • Read and memorized modern and very arguably less-than-perfect English translations of traditional Chinese pictograms, whose precise connotative meaning is difficult to determine outside of the cultural and historical context in which the Zodiac system was devised (at that point in history dictionaries did not exist, so we cannot refer back to a dictionary which existed at that time in order to determine the then-most popularly accepted semantic content of a particular symbol).
  • Read one or more modern English guides concerning the practical application of Zodiac-based knowledge or understanding, derived from the use of various information input values arranged in accordance with the Zodiac system template. Assumed that these guides were not only in systematic agreement with one another but also that they had correctly re-instituted the precise practice/science/art of achieving knowledge/understanding via interpretation of data fed through the Zodiac system, or else only read one guide and assumed the same of it.
  • Intentionally categorized characteristics that are grouped within a particular sign on the basis of the diagnostic criteria that can be found among the most broadly-defined personality disorders in the Diagnostic and Stastistical Manual (like Narcissistic Personality Disorder. If you read the behavioral diagnosis criteria in the DSM, you will almost certainly say, "Hey, I do that sometimes, so does that mean I have the disorder?" The short answer is, only if you do it so much that you can't function in a cooperative manner).
  • Wrote something on the internet that has probably been read by at least a few thousand people that essentially means this is probably what was going through her head when she wrote it: "Well, the Chinese sign for Ox has more attributes that translate to words that are sort of synonymous with self-centered in English than most of the other signs, and people love to have catch-phrases that they can use as excuses for maladjusted behavior, so now not only can maladjusted narcissists blame their maladjusted behavior on a "Disorder" (it's been diagnosed!!), they can also point out that this was all predetermined by the fates, (nearly all oxes born between 11am and 3pm have personality disorders!!)



Now, if you're still reading, I earnestly commend and thank you, you've done more for me than most people on the planet can say they have done, and that's the true truth. Most people would've never started reading when they saw the size of the scrollbar, because they would rather watch something, because it's easier. But is it really a better use of your time? No further aimless apologetic digressions: I've kept you too long already.

You might be thinking, but what about Western astrology? The predominant set of modern "systems" that originally surfaced among so-called Western civilizations, all of which are essentially homologous, has its own set of historically different yet characteristically familiar problems, in light of those we have just discussed (at great length, for which I must apologize). If you are interested in understanding the specifics of those problems, I would be happy to detail them for you, but you were probably burned out on the specificity of my atypical word choice and absurdly excessive length of my sentences before finishing the second paragraph, as any reasonable person ought to be. I gave up on being reasonable. For better or for worse.



To know and to not do is to not not know.

I slept, and dreamt that life was joy. I woke, and found that life was duty. I acted, and behold: Duty was joy!


Gregory




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InvisibleSophistic Radiance
Free sVs!
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Registered: 07/11/06
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Loc: Center of the Universe
Re: post old meth-induced documents you wrote that you never finished [Re: morrowasted] * 1
    #20567677 - 09/14/14 06:30 PM (9 years, 5 months ago)

I wouldn't post what I wrote when I was on meth, it was so fucked up that it's beyond sharing. It's not even that long. It's just fucked up. By the way, when I did meth, I would do ALL of it RIGHT AWAY and then masturbate without pause until I physically collapse, so my writing was basically about how fucked up I felt


--------------------
Enlil said:
You really are the worst kind of person.


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Offlinemorrowasted
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Posts: 31,383
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Re: post old meth-induced documents you wrote that you never finished [Re: Sophistic Radiance]
    #20567707 - 09/14/14 06:37 PM (9 years, 5 months ago)

lol meth never made me horny

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InvisibleSham87
mashAllah
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Registered: 05/16/11
Posts: 9,819
Re: post old meth-induced documents you wrote that you never finished [Re: Sophistic Radiance]
    #20567740 - 09/14/14 06:42 PM (9 years, 5 months ago)

Quote:

BlindSophist said:
I wouldn't post what I wrote when I was on meth, it was so fucked up that it's beyond sharing. It's not even that long. It's just fucked up. By the way, when I did meth, I would do ALL of it RIGHT AWAY and then masturbate without pause until I physically collapse, so my writing was basically about how fucked up I felt



I know that feel...the collapsing part.


--------------------
:mushroom2::sun::crazy2::leaf:




...once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest places if you look at it right...



:feelsgoatman:

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Offlineeigengrau
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Re: post old meth-induced documents you wrote that you never finished [Re: Sophistic Radiance]
    #20568004 - 09/14/14 07:26 PM (9 years, 5 months ago)

Man, if I can dig them out and find a scanner, maybe. I always hand wrote my mental meth vomit.
It was all variations on the same though, seeing how long I could string out vapid prose before the reader/myself realized it was hollow.

Quote:

BlindSophist said:
...and then masturbate without pause until I physically collapse




...followed by oodles of that.


--------------------
"Now they were regaining consciousness - were being treated to a cruel and lovely illusion."  -  K.V.

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OfflineTheGreenArrow
Goodbye, Mr. Chops.
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Registered: 06/22/12
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Re: post old meth-induced documents you wrote that you never finished [Re: eigengrau]
    #20575792 - 09/16/14 03:31 PM (9 years, 5 months ago)

Quote:

eigengrau said:
Man, if I can dig them out and find a scanner, maybe. I always hand wrote my mental meth vomit.
It was all variations on the same though, seeing how long I could string out vapid prose before the reader/myself realized it was hollow.

Quote:

BlindSophist said:
...and then masturbate without pause until I physically collapse




...followed by oodles of that.


:randy2:


--------------------
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an
invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, conn a ship, write a
sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the
dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve an
equation, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a
computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects.- Robert A. Heinlein
Saint RedBow of the Shroomey Loomey-Patron Saint of Sandbaggin Sumbitchs

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Invisible1234go
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Registered: 07/08/09
Posts: 55,143
Re: post old meth-induced documents you wrote that you never finished [Re: TheGreenArrow]
    #20576061 - 09/16/14 04:51 PM (9 years, 5 months ago)

I was always too busy with my latest tweeker project to be writing anything down.

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