AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
** Listening to WS episode on Spinoza that I have downloaded for some reason (and ran through a speech program)?(looks like July 18 I was futzing with this)
PF likes Mythbusters but does not like the default naturalism
JFM: Spinoza Ethics as mindblowing (I did listen to this before I think). He coes off as fanatic rationalist but in 5th book goes off on new plane.
Marshall Sahlins, last book, The Enchanted something or other. Sounds very WS. "St Augistine was actually an animist".
PF: the modern as a meditation (?)
> You know, it's the nature of the modern, it seems to me, is removing the stops to that process of collective meditation. And so the nature of modernism actually is to go there. And what you see in the history of the modern is a series of stops that are being imposed to prevent us from getting to the place that modern thought wants to go, where it must naturally go.
metapersons (not quite human, eg the dead)
> Suppose all the, quote, magical things that make our current lives, all the appurtenances,
meaningful and technical, whose substance and forces we did not make ourselves. I'm assuming he's
talking about things like, you know, your phone or whatever. Imagine that such things were
recognized by and as their humanized effects. Suppose they were proper subjects with real agency.
JFM goes on to make the usual mistake, that agency and naturalism are opposed. I'm tired of that.
YEah I don't disagree with any of this I just find it a bit tedious, I've already figured this shit out.
> Charles Taylor calls the subtraction
hypothesis, which he finds Right. Highly unconvincing. The idea that the universe is exactly as
naturalists understand it, and that all we needed to do was subtract the enchantments of religion,
the the false consciousness of religion, in order to see the universe as it truly is, from which
point of view this the mental style of scientific modernity isn't a style at all, but simply, what
we see when we finally, you know, clean the window
Also conflating consciousness and agency.
Churchlands get mentioned. Sigh.
Spinoza: one substance, constitutes both matter and god, manifests as both thought and extension
(this just seems like common sense to me)
WOnder if AI people (MInsky esp) talk Spinoza at all
Mythbusters as dwarves (fabricatorrs)
cool they appreciate it, it means I might be able to explain Minsky to them (sort of)