What Jan Cox might have pointed out about a new movie, had he been still alive

Just saw an interview with James Cameron, whose new movie, Avatar, looks to be a hit. Not going to see it, don't need to. The director's movie Titanic, tells me all I need to know.  We still though can glean some interesting points. Apparently a lot of trouble went into conceiving  thousands of new plant species, a new language, for these inhabitants of another planet.  All this novelty is spent on --- a boy meets girl plot.  Couple of things-- for someone with a certain aim, all fiction becomes inane, it is recycled fumes for one trying to breath at a new altitude (altitude measured in millimeters of course)l.

Also---we can ask, what underlies this reliance on a threadbare plot.  When I spoke of trying to get a breath of air from a higher zone, I was pointing to the possibilities for an individual.  This focus on coupling is magnetic perhaps because it points to the dreams of the mass of humanity. For the species to endure, we must procreate.  These biological necessities point to the fact of immortality---or should I say, the possibility of immortality--at the level of a species. This game is worthy of the attention of fictioneers, regardless of the silliness of their plots. In this particular movie too, we get to see what is a growing trend, I think, and that is the mechanical dreams of some scientifically based individual immortality, on the part of those who think they have given up the illusions of mechanical religion. (In the movie a crippled person is put in a new body.) This whole impetus behind research into and stories about  robotic intelligence, brain dumping, cryogenics, are driven by children who cannot accept the fact that immortality, is, so far as anyone can tell, not an option for the individual. 

At least with mechanical religion the plot lines were a little more interesting than boy meets girl.  That thought could be a last salute to mechanical religion.

The Climate Inside, (as Caro once said)

Another report on declining Siberian tiger populations. These
reporters are part of the problem, though symptomatic is a fairer
label. What these wild animals need is lots of free space,
untrammeled by people, and what you have are researchers setting up
camps and making trails through hitherto isolated wilds. The
researchers and scientists are part of the problem.And THEY will say,
without our reporting the world will not rally to save the tigers.
And they are right. This is the mechanical mind, only notice----you
cannot hold both yes and no together. The ordinary mind, that machine
that is responsible for the progress of millenia, that binary
computer, will say, well, which is it? And that is the ordinary
mental apparatus of man. Being able to see with the stereoscopic
vision of one who grasps that yes and no can both be valid, and merely
present, together, a fairer picture, is a step on the way to....

Odd Odds

"Homeless Brothers set to inherit billions:" that's the headline for a
recent news story. My story is about -- odds. Lottery winners get
written up, and people find this encouraging, he won, why not me. What
no one thinks, unless they have listened to or read Jan Cox,
philosopher of a radical empiricism, is that, the event being in the
news, its newsworthiness, is why it will NOT happen to you. The
opposite, to speak loosely, (since another thing Jan spoke of, in his
attempt to point people's heads in a certain direction, is that "the
opposite is never true." This quote points to the nature of binary
thought though.) --- so speaking loosely, --- people find their doom
encouraging because they have no idea what is going on.

Similarly people take a so-called mystical experience, as an
authentication of whatever they believed before, rather than
conceiving the possibility that this event is a common experience,
rather like getting splashed by a car driving by you in the rain.
Except the forces involved are not glimpsed, much less understood. And
the possibility such is just pointing in a direction, rather than any
arrival, is not even in the universe of everyday assumptions. Jan's
picture of the nature of these common, wonderful, and transitory
'mystical' events, was they were like signs for Istanbul in a Parisian
train station.

What if, the odds of a sustained awakening, to speak loosely (I should
invent my own linguistic codes, tsl) are actually smaller than those
of finding one has inherited a fortune...?

Disignorance

Wow is this a great holiday or what. Here is another story that speaks for itself. This link,
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/carroll09/carroll09_index.html
is to the comments of a theoretical physicist Sean Carroll and the cool thing is, here is a scientist, not a science popularizer, so, after you read his assessment of what modern physics is lacking, notice---the number of times he says we don't know the answer to that and, his solution "think harder." This is a real scientist here talking, and there are some comments to be made on this category of person.
1. Real scientists have fun. That is why they are not more interested in the work of Jan Cox. (Of course now that Jan is dead, it is a question a living teacher, which I am not about to get into here.). Real scientists already DO a low grade version of "real work," and it is ------- fun beyond words.
2. But as I hinted, these fun having scientists are not driven by the psychological discrepancies which motivate many to search for some version of Real Work. So they miss the push to go forward and miss, well, everything. That's okay. We recognise our brothers even if they fail to get the family connection. Of course most who seek to solve a certain disignorance, never find the real work either. And at least the scientists are having real fun. Their yellow circuits are flashing on newness, they are living on an edge.

3. Real scientists do not have to face the primordial problem of how do you remember to (let's say, remember the work, it has different names.) All the natural scientist has to do is glance at the physical world surrounding him---that is where his intellect is focused, and the external world is where his achievement comes from. The natural scientist is using the mechanical mind for the job it is designed to do. Of course they are going to put words where words can't go. But you can't have everything. So the link I am giving is to an example of the most fun you can have with words on.

The link should be above, but here it is again:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/carroll09/carroll09_index.html

A holiday license

Quoting is something I do sparingly, even of Jan Cox, ---usually, but
I just got the following from a newsletter associated with
wordsmith.org. What grabbed my heart was the Indo European root of the
word 'science.' The info is in the derivation of a word, scienter:
Quote:
scienter
PRONUNCIATION:
(sy-EN-tuhr)
MEANING:
adverb: Deliberately; knowingly.
ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin scienter (knowingly), from scire (to know; to separate one
thing from another). Ultimately from the Indo-European root skei- (to
cut or split) that also gave us schism, ski, shin, science,
conscience, and nice.
End quote.

And this reminds me of one of the astounding things Jan Cox said: and
this is a close quote. He said, if you do not know the etymology of a
word, you cannot use it properly. His example was the 'word cakewalk.'

And quoting Jan, I found this recently, after some comments I made in
an attempt to convey something Jan helped me glimpse, about faith.
Here is a quote from a paper Jan wrote and numbered 6950.
"That which is real and practical requires no faith, but still- a man
must believe in the work or he wastes his time. If a man does not
believe in what he does, nothing will happen. If a man does not
believe in the ideas of the work, he can never think in a new way...No
man can be converted to this work."

end...quote....

The Burglar's Bugle

It is possible to grasp the dilemma that determinism presents to the
rational, verbalizing, mind of man. The self described mind of man as
elucidative, and illuminating, can only conceive its own destruction
or impotency at the picture that any knowing, any dialogue, inner or external, is
not affected by the exchange of ideas, but rather a flow of forces,
loosely described as genetic. The picture of the mind producing words
as a genetic bugle might put forth sound should not obscure that the
verbalizing mind plays a crucial role in the progress of humanity, as the
arranger and rearranger of the external world. a function Jan Cox outlined.
And perhaps that includes the imperialistic aspect of the verbalizing
function of the human mind, as part of the propulsion for this
progress.

It may be that the prospect that a few men, through out history, have
succeeded in leveraging this determinism to gain a foothold, a toe
hold, on a vista, from which everything, including determinism, may
(one surmises) appear,-- glorious--, if non transmittable via the ordinary intellect,
is equally scandalous, (as scandalous as the fact that determinism
points to the impotency of the rational mind) to the verbalizing
function of the human intellect.

Easy even to feel sorry a bit for the human mind, if it didn't so resemble
some gadget sold on late night television.

But of course the human intellect is
superb as evading basic, and really obvious, truths. The picture Jan
drew many years ago of the intellect is in this story---man is a
person in a house who thinks he hears a burglar, and the
burglar-----is in a position to say, here, let me help you --find this
intruder..

Human Soup for the Chicken Lover's Soul

The fact is most (I was going to say all, but how do I know) of us
take breaks. What supports you then, when you are not struggling, is
mechanical habit, and that suffices for, for most peoples whole lives.
The only safe place to retreat to, is the pararational alertness Jan
Cox describes. The ordinary definitions of faith have no place in a
real struggle, except you could call the humble awareness of your own
ignorance, and not panicking when you glimpse the enormity of your
ignorance, a kind of faith. But generally speaking, what the ordinary
call faith is for a few, a "kick this door in" scrawl that points the
way to, in addition to the constant need for pararational alertness, a
direction for (what Jan Cox calls) 'neuralizing,' which could be said
to be a whirling around of various possibilites in your head, not
landing on one explanation but trying to think of as many explanations
for the circumstance that called forth the label of 'faith.' A bunch
of explanations all together at the same time.
What you want is at least a soup of the unthought of before, mixed
with the undeniable, and tossed together with a sense that as
mysterious as the world is, you can make sense of it--not the whole
thing, but spoon full at at time, and the spoonful, is not at all the
whole soup, but is still always just a part, that spoonful of
understanding you taste. It all starts with a stone of novelty.
And throw in some commas.
And---what if, really, what if----your best ideas, your best intentions, your secret assumptions, were of the level of significance of----a chicken scratching in the grass....what if.....
this chicken is adorable but exists in a world of jaguars, among an infinitude of things, which the chicken cannot cannot know, regardless of the chance of encounters.