Well I Saw her Face

HIS face, actually, was in a chip, 

unmistakeably

Jacques Derrida, in a dorito chip

and he was reading.

Now I'm a  Believer.

Humid Hume

Quoting a lead into an article recently published:

If moral responsibility and the social institutions that enforce it depend on belief in our own agency, what happens when we lose faith in free will?

I haven't read the article, that is not the point in today's post.

I say that because --- the support for good behavior is not the most dangerous loss when people glimpse their own helplessness. The aspect of the debate on free will which is so scary philosophers and natural scientists won't even talk about it, is

that rational discourse depends on faith -- faith that man is a rational animal and capable of surveying the evidence and coming to conclusions, and then defending them.

To suggest that man has no free will is to glimpse that  his words and sentences might be determined by non-rational factors, his mega and micro biomes, or something equally appalling to the presumptions of cognitive flag-wavers.

Even David Hume,who tossed out the validity of causation, rather fliply, did not tear up his own books. As radical as Hume's conclusions about causation might appear, he could not glimpse that everything people said might just be foam bubbles, erratic juxtapositions, like vomit, because the words are not based on a sober analysis of facts, as they are claimed to be.  Rather even within a sentence words are concatenations based on non-rational, unglimpsed, forces.  The illusion of cogency then may just be a reflection of man's assumptions about his own agency.

One picture Jan Cox drew, from science fiction tropes, is of the modern intellect is that of a brain in a laboratory vat, thinking away in a bubbly medium.

Jan's is an apt picture, not because of what it says about the possibility of human rationality, but for the accuracy of the picture of the typical mechanical mind.

An Avian Trope

Why would a hawk
undertake to educate sparrows....

Dr. Lamarck I Presume

Notice also that nobody is even using the word Lamarckism, though that is precisely the term for instances where environmental changes get translated into heritable characteristics. The standard example is the long neck of the giraffe, gained over generations of stretching to reach high leaves. I think now of studies suggesting  trauma affects the genes of offspring, among other headlines. For most of the last century Larmarckism has been an example of out-moded thought. It had to be--- since ordinary thought is binary. This means Darwinism is defined by what it is not--- and it is not Lamarckism. This was the natural conclusion with the explanatory success of Darwin's idea. But step back--- why couldn't both explanations be correct. Why can't evolution have two methods of advance. What a good question.

The fleas of DNA

In rare instances, DNA is known to have jumped from one species to another.

This is the first line of an article, from phys.org which shows the limitations of modern thought. "In rare instances" is a lovely phrase. Because you could not evaluate the relative rarity of something without a firm knowledge of the whole, and that is an unlikely  perspective. Unlikely not because of positivistic assumptions, but because of the nature of binary thought. Which must divide to succeed. External progress depends on man's ability to rearrange his environment, and this rearrangement assumes that things can be broken into pieces prior to the rearrangement. This is something Jan Cox pointed out decades ago. The special success of this rearrangement is so great that modern scientists never question (nowadays) the utility of binary thought to handle all cognitive tasks. And yet, we have here, with DNA hopping around, evidence that man is not separate from all of life. Every breath depends on the reality that we are part of a larger whole. But partialness is exactly what ordinary thinking cannot grasp. Or remember. 

Funny thing

You can't use the word "nonduality" without betraying an assumption that there ARE opposites. NOT  DUAL assumes two possibilities. Now it may well be that there is duality and nonduality and something else. At a minimum you could make this case. All this complexity and glory is lost, however, when you pick ONE dilemma of the horns, ONE cheek on which to sit.  

Jan just said, we call it the  W.O.R.K: the way of real knowledge, "because that's what it is -- work." 

In the Wild

Many of us have held out some food to a stray dog. The picture of a beast grabbing the food and running away is not unfamiliar to animal lovers. Let's reverse this picture for now. What if the alert person, while he or she is "remembering the Work" resembles not the generous human. What if the best of our self resembles the stray dog. What if words have some content, some reference,  which can be comprehended without letting the mechanical necessity of words, that unstoppable locomotive, pull one along. A way to use words, without letting the larger mechanical structure hypnotize one--- utterly. This may require the cunning and alertness of a wild animal.

To succeed may mean studying also stray gods.