proximoception (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
proximoception) wrote2012-03-26 12:58 am
proximoception) wrote2012-03-26 12:58 am
(no subject)
Gonna bite my tongue and stay clear of Crowley's Krauss grousing. This side the great watershed our differences make little difference. And a lot of that little comes down to a sort of allegiance to the terminology you're accustomed to.
The person you might be can't speak to you, but you're ready to hear the unspoken words. In what isn't words you hear them, including what within words isn't word. In your own, too: the best thought is active sonar.
I'm liking all this novel-reading. Certain great stylists talk to your life less stupidly than you do. You hear your life talk back, are amazed that it can, then that you can understand it, then that life's been speaking to you. You start to say something back.
The air is dense with what we might fill it with. Not the surface of the air but the middle. That great weight in the middle of emptiness. All on us. Too much. That much on you you run crabwise seeking an end to the burden, hoping the pressure will fall on the place you just were.
The air united us just as much cold. But the warm air we're happy to share. Cold breaths are cones to outer space, seem like just you and all nothing. In the warm you're in something smaller and greater, where you don't know where it starts, what else it might encompass, where it's taking us.
Past a point you age more than a day per day, more than that each tomorrow. Life's a leap where you find you were only a handful of sand right as you start to come down, getting a faceful of you in the face. You know that you're you now - now it's you you leap from.
I've never told women to smile but the smiles of some are all of my memories. I hang from them, fall from their absence. Maybe I want them rare because I need them real. This is the value of blushing, how it's earnest as agony. A blushing woman's smile comes always just in time.
Sleep melts the world but the world's already melted - it's us that recongeal it on our waking way. Sleep knows better, so any sleep that makes it into waking instructs us effortlessly. The melt isn't pell-mell, but currents. Long, tangled weeds that share a tending.
I never know whether to knock barriers of sympathy down, what they might be holding up, out or in. I know I was once unaware how many are there. I don't think they're any weaker now I've mapped so many. They're just as electric to contact. But now, even joined up, they seem shorter. Perhaps it's me, that I've drifted above and a bit to the side.
What unifies us is weak, they say, what drives us apart violent, decisive. And they're right, they're always right. But who can remember decisions, and who stays with violence when something else offers. The weak thing pulls on, rain or shine. And what if instead we said gentle?
The person you might be can't speak to you, but you're ready to hear the unspoken words. In what isn't words you hear them, including what within words isn't word. In your own, too: the best thought is active sonar.
I'm liking all this novel-reading. Certain great stylists talk to your life less stupidly than you do. You hear your life talk back, are amazed that it can, then that you can understand it, then that life's been speaking to you. You start to say something back.
The air is dense with what we might fill it with. Not the surface of the air but the middle. That great weight in the middle of emptiness. All on us. Too much. That much on you you run crabwise seeking an end to the burden, hoping the pressure will fall on the place you just were.
The air united us just as much cold. But the warm air we're happy to share. Cold breaths are cones to outer space, seem like just you and all nothing. In the warm you're in something smaller and greater, where you don't know where it starts, what else it might encompass, where it's taking us.
Past a point you age more than a day per day, more than that each tomorrow. Life's a leap where you find you were only a handful of sand right as you start to come down, getting a faceful of you in the face. You know that you're you now - now it's you you leap from.
I've never told women to smile but the smiles of some are all of my memories. I hang from them, fall from their absence. Maybe I want them rare because I need them real. This is the value of blushing, how it's earnest as agony. A blushing woman's smile comes always just in time.
Sleep melts the world but the world's already melted - it's us that recongeal it on our waking way. Sleep knows better, so any sleep that makes it into waking instructs us effortlessly. The melt isn't pell-mell, but currents. Long, tangled weeds that share a tending.
I never know whether to knock barriers of sympathy down, what they might be holding up, out or in. I know I was once unaware how many are there. I don't think they're any weaker now I've mapped so many. They're just as electric to contact. But now, even joined up, they seem shorter. Perhaps it's me, that I've drifted above and a bit to the side.
What unifies us is weak, they say, what drives us apart violent, decisive. And they're right, they're always right. But who can remember decisions, and who stays with violence when something else offers. The weak thing pulls on, rain or shine. And what if instead we said gentle?
no subject
(And also I think this means, this sense of the interactions of potentials to interact, that you disagree with Krauss, and agree with Albert instead. Or maybe, what is the same thing, agree with Krauss and disagree with Albert. And maybe the fact that they're the same thing means that Krauss is right. Or that Albert is.)
no subject
Well, string theory always sounded to me like an avalanche caused by a rounding error but once straightened out it seems likely enough that materiality's relationship to immateriality will reduce to random emergence and/or predictable transitions. Questions like what is the reason for the world or from where does the world come beg things like 1. causal chains implicating the containing world on the model of relationships among its contents, 2. the world's having resulted from a decision, hence decider, and/or 3. that there is another place from which places emerge.
3. may have some intuitive truth to it. The Krauss moment, when it comes if it hasn't yet, will just explain what about stuff is continuous with unstuff - not Godstuff, not anystuff, just unstuff. That intuitition can't claim it hasn't been addressed anymore, at that point. That's all that will happen then, but it's a lot, so if Krauss is overclaiming then shame on him. Didn't see any of his own words damning him in the article, though.
1 and 2 may be somehow intuitive also (not to me or the billions of non or pretheological humans, though) but make no claims resolvable from observations made within stuff. No headway can ever be made against them, just like no headway can ever be made against the proposition that your hairs are the droppings of an interdimensional bird who has bent time and space and existence as we know it as a hygienic receptacle. Not mine though - mine are where the happy thoughts of puppies settle after particularly frolicsome picnics. Positing a second variety of nonstuff as somehow constitutive of the stuff-nonstuff observed reality gets you straight into anystuff, where anything goes hence all thingness does.
The Nagel/Alberts point is that we can't disprove the second nonstuff: meta-nonstuff, nonstuff with potential content, darkness that's not just lights-off but brooding. We totally can't, it's true, but this totally doesn't matter in the religion v. irreligion debate. Kill off observable nonstuff and you'll never catch God in the act unless the act changes, at which point...the act changes. Observe that and you'll have reason to believe in it, assuming reason will still exist. Philosophy likes to put science in its place, and that's fine, but it should be a bit clearer about the vacuity of all the other places. When Nagel doesn't make clear everything his argument entails, he isn't making it. This is pretty much the problem with the term agnostic - even in philosophy departments it's too often used to trojan-horse in other stuff to be thrown around safely.
As for the part where Alberts goes ad hominem on a strawman of Krauss going ad hominem: wow that's weird. Coddling the majority viewpoint is nothing new in print media, but verges on bullying here, guven his choice of terms.