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THE RAW DATA OF EXPERIENCE ONLY BECOME EXPERIENCE UPON BEING THOUGHT ABOUT.

"UNREMEMBERED MEMORY" IS AN OXYMORON.  It is difficult to grasp something that is not graspable by a human hand. Or by an “analog” of a human hand. (Pliers, description, picture, concept, theory, . . . ) And “grasp” does, doesn’t it, assume “analog of a human hand” in its initial conceptual formulation? And what else could we mean by “understand” except something like “grasp.” (This question has been essayed by numerous writers, perhaps illuminatingly, surely at least modestly edifyingly. At least some of them, at least for me.) Probe? Make graspable? Analyze? Taste? See? Feel? (Current Black idiom: feel me?)  Might “understand” mean something different for an octopus, a spider, an as yet unimagined space alien? Humans begin conscious life by making the first distinction. Given the way we think, this can lead us to ask “might some other physiologically constructed/evolved and environmentally embedded kind of living being begin conscious life otherwise?” Of course, all our att...
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How can an atheist be moral?

 posted originally on Apr 21, 2017, 2:27 PM       A student quotes his textbook: "morality is a bad fit within the contemporary atheistic world view because there is no good reason to think that creatures who evolved intelligence through purely naturalistic mechanisms would have evolved the ability to correctly discern the content of necessarily true, general moral principles" I replied: To the contrary, secular humanism, an atheist philosophy, is intensely moral. Its morality comes from two sources: 1) a rational argument that cooperation is not only more beneficial to individuals than conflict or competition, but also that it is structurally necessary in order that it be possible for individuals to live together; 2) a scientific understanding that the source of psychological individuality is group membership, interaction with family in infancy and early childhood and interaction with peers and other community members in later life.
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       For years, I have limited my considerations of Foucault to his archaeology, studying almost exclusively The Order of Things . I've mostly ignored his sociology, as iconized for me by his focus on apparatuses of social functioning (disposatifs). Beginning to read about this (in The Essential Foucault ) I find myself considering them (disposatifs) to be basic cross-institutional arrangements for providing the functionalities required/allowed by modern societies --as almost a taken for granted sociological common sense view of how things work in modern societies, rather than just as self-consciously intended and arranged sets of social arrangements and thought flow systems.     I understand (perhaps prematurely) that Foucault focussed on the  self-consciously intended and arranged aspects and cases of apparatuses. ... I have also begun to read in his lectures on The Hermeneutics of The Subject .
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Political Correctness

There's a history to this. I'll be brief.   The social constructionists in general, in particular one of the originators of this approach, the sociologist, Erving Goffman, have revealed clearly what everybody already knew anyway, but hadn't seen it systematically as a major aspect of the processes of social stratification and the enforcement of existing stratification regimes. What was pointed out is the fact that how you talk about someone, how you talk to them, is a major means of exerting social control over them. Particularly, to insult a person is to demean them, to tell them that they are "less than" and to interactionally maneuver them into the position of subordinate to you. Insult a man and he's either got to fight back or accept the insult, accept a position in the interaction of less respect and less power than you who insults him. This is not a matter of “feeling insulted,” but a matter of self-defense in something like micro-class warfare. (That’s...
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 My natural mode of thought tends to be exploratory, comparative, aggregative perhaps, syncretic. After a fashion (in a way) I naturally assume something like a unitary pool of base --or ground-- subject-matters in/for human thinking. So diversity of thoughts reveals, stems from, diversity of perspectives. Coordinating several such diverse phrasings of "the same" subject matter would thus provide a fuller, a more "true" representation of that subject-matter.
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21st Century Nihilism

      “Millions who should be ranged against the American oligarchy are distracted and divided – just as their leaders want.      The biggest beneficiaries of [the four years of] Trump’s charade are the party’s biggest patrons – the billionaire class, including the heads of the nation’s largest corporations and financial institutions, private-equity partnerships and hedge funds – whom a deeply divided nation serves by giving them unfettered access to the economy’s gains.      Their heist started four decades ago. According to a recent  Rand study , if America’s distribution of income had remained the same as it was in the three decades following the second world war, the bottom 90% would now be $47tn richer.      A low-income American earning $35,000 this year would be earning $61,000. A college-educated worker now earning $72,000 would be earning $120,000. Overall, the grotesque surge in inequality that began 40 years ago...
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Economic Epicycles (from 6/10) The shift from national industrial economies to a global financial economy signals a shift (or an order-of-magnitude increase) into a "Ptolomaic epicycles" model of large-scale economic activity. The free-market model of the economy has become, with the shift from local price discovery focused markets rooted in the dual economic functions of allocating production and distribution activities on the primary or sole basis of "real" population needs to international speculative profit-oriented markets which tend consciously to ignore those base functions of economies in favor of pure profit, an effectively "religious" or "free market faith-based" model. The excessive complication of "financial product" creation, such as swaps and other derivatives, greatly resembles the construction of Ptolomaic epicycles to adjust the coherence of increasing astronomical observations to fit the heliocentric model of the astro...
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