Shocolate and Chit

Shocolate and Chit: what is the difference? Does it matter?

One way to phrase the goal of what Jan Cox called "This Kind of Stuff" is to tell the difference between what is actual, and what is otherwise.

First you have to appreciate there is a problem. In ordinary terms, perhaps the value of a dish depends on your being able to tell the difference with your fingertips between a painted design on a plate, and one that is a decal pasted on. A mere example this, to point to things far more valuable, and even more fragile.

Is that a saxophone or a clarinet you hear?  Investigating the physical itself, is a step onward, and critical to any more ethereal weight-bearing matters. The phantasmal of any kind, just dilutes one's effort.

To know what is going on, that is ever the goal.

What is bravery

How brave those little mammals, like meerkats, and chipmunks, that signal the presence of predators, to warn their kin. They are telling the hunters where they themselves are. Chipmunks of course may be underground, but not always,-- I saw one doing the gong alarm they can do, from under a vehicle.

Celebrating Cerebration

This is a real headline:

"John Brockman's Book on Thinking Machines: What Should We Keep From Artificial Intelligence?"

I have no doubt the author did not intend this to be funny. The threat from AI has been raised by leading intellectuals.

THERE IS NO SUCH THREAT.  You can only program words. And that is not the whole game.

To really understand thinking, you must grasp what is a non-verbal distance from cerebration.

So kick back jack. put your boots on the table and open a beer. Not to relieve the scary thought of a robot takeover. But to try and forget the tension a 'real attention' requires to sustain the gap we mentioned, the distance between words and a something adjacent. The gap which can nurture if sustained. And if not sustained, is still responsible for all the literary masterpieces, and scientific advances on the planet.

The gaps in maps

Notice any example of cartography. There is an outline of land, and of sea. Perhaps we see first the shapes of land, but the shapes of the seas are just as enthralling.  Maps are a product of man's imagination. The usefulness of maps points to the utility of imagination. Imagination got us to the moon, and is the source of most of our bourgeois splendor. It is marvelous indeed to inhabit such a world.

Mapmaking is a nice hobby. For some few though, they recognise the rivet holes of binary thought in the spectral pursuits. Thank goodness someone is pursuing them. That is the way it is meant to be.

And for some few, their interest is in that which is not cartographable. I mean, marshes.

Oblivious to the obvious

When people think something is obvious, this assertion, this confidence, shows in their words regarding the something obvious.

My description applies regardless of the topic of the words exuding assurance.

Where this gets sticky is if the import is concerning matters of the invisible. In this instance the sauce of confidence and knowingness poured over some verbal construction, actually impedes communication.

We are for the sake of expediency assuming there is a class of things which are obvious and worth discussing. In fact, Jan Cox pointed this out: when you think you've "got it", you have not.  

One reason Jan's phrase deserves to be recalled is the importance of the invisible and the difficulty of communicating about, around, these topics regarding man's potential.

When the speaker assumes his topic is "obvious," then the listener may himself may treat it as obvious. That way, hope of communicating that something is, lost. What the listener is learning is not something that may expand, facilitate, his own internal reaching for transcendence. What a listener
learns from one who speaks superficially, is to himself, imitate, a smart-ass.

Freedumb

Freedom to do what?

Freedom is perhaps the word of the 20th century, so you might think this topic had been sorted out.

What we see however is the quite vacuous idea there are restraints on you becoming "your self." One is not suggesting the restraints are imaginary, but rather the end point is worth examining. An example is Tim Burton's movie about Alice in her usual milieu. Our herowhine finds finally she can make decisions for herself. Decisions to do, decision to accomplish, WHAT.  But the story NEVER gets that far.  The waltdizzy fictionalizing of --really everything -- winds up with characters who can now be captains of their own barks. But where will these watercraft sail TO?

For some the interest is in the inability to even see the question.

Philip K. Darn

A plot from a Philip K Dick story is outlined at this link.  "Expendable" resolves a war between bugs and humanity by having a spider (aligned on the side  of the the humans) share that the spiders will be able to "save you." It turns out the spider meant save humanity, not save that man personally.

An individual is both one and many. To a bible humping kid from Alabama, that realization once was shocking. What is the function of words after all.  They cannot be disconnected from the physical world. A distinction must be made between binary thought (critical to man's conquest of the external world) and that thought which appreciates and discovers, glances towards, the barely sayable.

But thought is not disconnected from the physical world. The connection is simply not what most suppose: the relation is not one of cause and effect.  After all, there is no separate realm between the mental and physical. There is just--- the material world. That reality though, that there is no separate spiritual realm, no superiority of the mental functions, is not a deflating recognition.

In fact, that the material contains all trialities, merely makes the wonderment more astonishing and provocative.