[Wittrs] Re: Operation Duckrabbit (ongoing...)
- From: kirby urner <kirby.urner@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 18 May 2011 22:10:21 -0700
Kirby, commenting on his own writing:
>
> Yes, not trying to argue their contraries so much as show that "free will"
> does not hinge in any critical way on so many of these other positions.
> Wanna be a radical solipsist *with* free will? No without? Flip. Flip.
> What's the difference? And so on down the line.
>
... Now without? Flip. Flip.
An allusion to "gestalt flips" ala Necker Cube. Gotta have those,
lots of 'em, when doing Operation Duckrabbit.
If you could only flip the Tractatus with the PI within the *same
picture*... a kind of buried joke in these allusions.
> However, there's a *non-vacuous* notion of "free will" which has to
> do with imprisonment, and a spectrum of actions available to one,
> which justice philosophers such as Rawls spend a lot of time on.
>
This goes back to my earlier poster campaign, showing people
in various states of imprisonment. "Mental imprisonment" is
a reality too. There's that sense of being 'straitjacketed' (a word
used in 'Grunch of Giants', one of the American Transcendentalist
works I cite sometimes -- dedicated to M. Osoli, early editor
of 'Dial', a position later filled by one of the Seldes brothers.
> If I'm not "at liberty" to address the polity or "am constrained by
> the rules" from uttering some thoughts about some naked emperor,
> then we immediately gaining traction in some ethical ballpark, starting
> to build an ethical science, or science of ethics.
"...then we're immediately gaining traction in some ethical ballpark."
In other words, if we're talking about our rights and liberties,
and freedom of the will in that sense (Hawaiian independence
etc.), then we're doing some work. The "free will" of the
Anglophone philosophers, on the other hand, the nerdy
analytic ones, is a linguistic / mental illness we need to
push forward as something we're proud of in the philosophy
business. These are not the prime specimens.
Often you can accommodate a group's or individual's will,
where before there seemed no way forward, thanks to
gestalt flips sometimes. A way opens. A door you
hadn't seen, suddenly presents itself. No laws of physics
shattered. Psychology doesn't care (has no plans to
get in your way).
> "Constraining", in the sense of "making verboten", is something
> philosophers (the serious ones) want to talk about. Yes, that
> includes yakking about Gitmo, and the rights some give themselves
> to tromp around the world using flame throwers against medicinal
> native crops, ethnogens, tended by Amazonians and/or Afghanis
> and/or the people of Sonoma, for 10K years or who knows how
> long.
>
In the background I'm reading about the Santo Daime religion,
which has some roots in Swedenborgian philosophy, as
does New England transcendentalism (which became
global, spreading from Bear Island and thereabouts).
Two naturally occurring herbal ingredients provide the basis
for a ritual drink, not wine, but tea.
You'll get these puritanical tyrants in El Norte who think it's
OK to murder peasants, much easier than controlling their
own kids. Hence the schizophrenia that bedevils the world,
a Great Satan who is determined to both make these
controlled substances illegal *and* pay just about any
amount for them.
http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2011/05/hb2me.html
(alludes to the Hawaiian thing again)
> In other words, lets philosophize about the stuff anthropologists
> care about, and stop giving the limelight so exclusively to the
...such as attempts to militarize anthropology...
> childish among us who still suffer from linguistic problems long
> ago diagnosed (and for some, cured). Lets stop expecting
> other cultures to take our more nerdish brands so seriously,
> as if we were loyalist-apologist-shills for some Royal Crown of
> some description (sounds kinda stupid on the face of it, like
> some kind of cola drink).
>
An obvious allusion to the "cola wars", Royal Crown a more
obscure one.
Again, there's impatience with "language idling" in the
Wittgenstein camp. He was always running off to hospitals,
signing up to volunteer, complaining about the suffocating
atmosphere of one subculture's vexations and obsessions.
Philosophy has more to offer than those analytic dead ends.
Or don't call them "analytic" if you think Wittgenstein has
freed us from those dead albatross language games and
has rescued "analytic philosophy" for more serious business
(computer science anyone?).
Kirby
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