Weird Studies/SSOTBME

03 Mar 2023 - 17 Jun 2023
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    • I actually have read SSOTBME on their earlier recommendation.
    • Let's see if I can give the general take: the author (Ramsey Dukes aka Lionel Snell) has a theory that divides human culture into four quadrants: Art, Science, Religion, Magic. Of roughly equal stature and importance. There's various dimensions these can be related to, like thought vs feeling. Magic is the interesting one of course, the others we kind of know how they work (although there is quite a lot of talk about the purpose of art and the nature of science on this show). Magic is hard to define, it resists the grasp of rational thought (aka science). It can involve a degree of animism, of assigning personality and agency to various natural objects, by a sort of as-if process. This is a holistic mode of cognition in contrast to the normie mechanical, reductionist one.
    • It touched on AI, and it occurred to me that their take is the opposite of Chapman's – they are celebrating the sketchy, semi-real agency of these artificial constructs, Chapman is alarmed by them.