/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14016492]

So Processfags, riddle me this(s);
> how do you acquire knowledge under a relativistic epistemology?
> how can change be permanent if this fact is not?
> how do relativists explain the permanence of logic?
> how do relativists explain free will if everything is fluid and ever changing?
> how do relativists make arguments if truth is ultimately relative?

[Anonymous No.14016502]

Seriously just read Peirce. And relativism isn't the proper term.

[Anonymous No.14016515]

RETROACTIVELY

[Anonymous No.14016648]

>>14016502
How is Pierce in any way relevent to the subject of this thread?

[Anonymous No.14016663]

>>14016648
DUDE WTF! At least read an encyclopedia entry

[Anonymous No.14016726]

>>14016663
Peirce isn't a processdork though

[Anonymous No.14016974]

>>14016663
>goonon drones
>reading anything but trad literature

[Anonymous No.14017037]

>>14016974
I’m unironically convinced guenon-fag brings up Parmenides constantly because he can’t handle reading anything more than fragments if it’s not his chosen savior

[Anonymous No.14017039]

There is no universal, transcendent point in Whitehead’s cosmos; there are only partialities. But each of these partialities “transcends” all the others.
The cliche objection to “relativism” has always been to point out that the statement “everything is relative” is itself an absolute one, so that any relativist necessarily contradicts him/herself. Of course this is a bogus objection: because the argument depends upon separating the assertion “everything is relative” from the contexts of its utterance, in order to turn it into a universal statement. Whitehead’s neutral style is precisely a way of pointing out how everything is relative, without turning this observation (or really, a potentially infinite series of observations) into a universal.
Whitehead’s philosophy is all about change, creativity, and the production of novelty. There are no entities in the universe according to Whitehead, but only events. Or rather, events (which he usually calls “occasions”) are themselves the only entities. These “occasions” are each of them radically new — each of them is something that never existed before — and indeed, it is only because of this perpetual creativity and novelty that we are even able to think in terms of a “before” and an “after,” of time passing and irreversible — and yet each of them is radically intertwined with, affected by and affecting in its own turn, everything else. Everything is singular, but nothing is isolated.

[Anonymous No.14017250]

>>14017039
>There are no entities in the universe according to Whitehead, but only events
Events aren't self-aware though, the inherent nature of our awareness as continual and self-illuminating consiousness indubitably points to the existence of entities or at the very least an entity. Furthermore only a sentient entity can be creative. The whole thing reeks of absurdity.

[Anonymous No.14017457]

>>14017039
>you can't refute relativism about truth by pointing out it's self-refuting because we never said it was true in the first place trololo

The absolute state of relativitards

[Anonymous No.14017462]

>relativism BAD
philosophy 101 tier. the implications of relativism are pretty interesting too bad your small brain can't comprehend them.

[Anonymous No.14017473]

>>14017462
but relativism is relative isnt it?

[Anonymous No.14017485]

>>14017473
>stopping at a contradiction
again, your brain is too smol.

[Anonymous No.14017512]

>>14017250
Whitehead is a panexperientialist

Whitehead's point is that if you take self-consciousness as we know it (the Western/rationalist cogito) as the crown of nature, we inadvertently demean the rest of Nature. Non-human organisms become "steps" on the way to the summit of human cognition, and I don't think I need to tell you the kinds of problems that cooks up

Whitehead uses the fallacy of misplaced concreteness to make the point (in agreement with Searle, I would say) that human consciousness is just that, distinctly human.

Human consciousness becomes relativized, and rational, calculative thinking becomes more a sign of its closure than its God-given openness (if your familiar with Bakker's writings on neuroscience it is scarily accurate, and honestly somewhat existentially terrifying. Also, Heidegger: man is rational precisely because he's an animal, and not because is anything more)

so we deny self-consciousness in (lower) animals, but do not deny them a measure of "inner life" or intensity, a "prehensive center" that relates and is related to its environment.

A microbe "experiences" a world, but it does not abstract the concept of worldhood as such from its experiences. Everything is alive in different ways, nature is not a pyramid but a flat plane

[Anonymous No.14017526]

>>14017485
>everything is conditioned and dependant on relativity but relativity itself (being that which is conditioned, dependant on something else) is not.
yeah, contradiction is pertinently surpassed at the point that proves your view; divinely providential huh

[Anonymous No.14017530]

>>14017250

[Anonymous No.14017623]

>>14016492
I'm a Whiteheadian, but I simply can't contend with this ... I've been retroactively refuted.

[Anonymous No.14018940]

bump

[Anonymous No.14018979]

>>14017512
I never denied that animals or microbes were self-consious or that they were entities and I never implied that humans were unique in some way. You didnt provide an answer to any of the points I raised but just went on a random tangent (which reads like it was just copied and pasted) which has little relevance to what I wrote, is this the power of process-philosophy?

[Anonymous No.14019101]

*drops mic*

[Anonymous No.14019137]

>>14017039
>the argument depends upon separating the assertion “everything is relative” from the contexts of its utterance, in order to turn it into a universal statement.
>everything is relative
>not a universal statement
wow

[Anonymous No.14019173]

>>14018979
>Events aren't self-aware though

The foundation of Whitehead's thought is "being is becoming".

[Anonymous No.14019185]

>>14019173
setting aside that you don't offer any logic or otherwise good reasons to accept that perspective, that still doesn't provide a worthwhile answer to the points that have been raised about the holes in Whitehead's thought

[Eris Omniquery No.14019337]

>>14016492
>> how do you acquire knowledge under a relativistic epistemology?
This is a wrong question, the question should be "How do you acquire experience?"
Experience is an evolutionary process of change over time. Whitehead famously summarized this process as:
> The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.
"Particular observation" means that the process is grounded in empirical experience of the world. What initiates this flight are experiences that are an exception to one's existing understanding, an exclusion to one's habitual routines of understanding and interaction that demands an account. The source of this flight is error, and the realization of this error makes what was previously given and obvious brought into questionability. The flight of discover starts with the particular question "what is going on here?" which is a request for situational awareness (awareness of the event that has been brought into questionability) and it's relationship to other spacio-temporal events.

This paper shows the link between Bergson and Whitehead, as well as the true core of process-relational / organicist thought: https://www.religion-online.org/article/influence-as-confluence-bergson-and-whitehead/

>for Bergson, calculus is more than just a handy metaphor or analogy, but rather, he indeed aimed at framing an approach to the organicist world hypothesis that employs the calculus as its actual method of discovery (i.e., differentiation) and explanation (i.e., integration), and that every discovery is the inverse of an explanation and every explanation the derivative of a discovery.

A discovery is an un-doing of an explanation, and so questionability corresponds to calculus differentiation. This link is profoundly physical and perceptual: a derivative is sensitivity to immediate change, with what Whitehead describes as "presentational immediacy" being exposure to the instantaneous questionability of one's experience with the world. Integration is "cumulative change over time" when considered with respect to time and in terms of epistemic change is "cumulative understanding of one's experiences of the world."

My own model of human creative evolution correlates the evolutionary process of variation -> selection -> reproduction to question -> choice -> action. I detail this scheme here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Tao_of_Calculus/comments/9rpnrl/space_taoism_101/ Self-creative freedom comes from our ability to question our questions, resulting in processes of meta-inquiry which allows for open questionability that modifies one's own questions in the process of questing.

[Eris Omniquery No.14019341]

> how can change be permanent if this fact is not?
Whiteheadean thought doesn't deny permanence, but rather makes change and permanence, order and disorder as mutually interdependent and mutually necessary: https://imgur.com/a/ZtLDYJT

>> how do relativists explain the permanence of logic?

To understand this you really have to dive into the involvements surrounding Whitehead and Russell's work on the Principia Mathematica: https://i.imgur.com/unQcKJC.gif Moreover one needs to examine the relationship between mathematics and embodied cognition, which can be explored in this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Mathematics_Comes_From

Here we again see the centrality of calculus to epistemology:

>Much of WMCF deals with the important concepts of infinity and of limit processes, seeking to explain how finite humans living in a finite world could ultimately conceive of the actual infinite. Thus much of WMCF is, in effect, a study of the epistemological foundations of the calculus. Lakoff and Núñez conclude that while the potential infinite is not metaphorical, the actual infinite is. Moreover, they deem all manifestations of actual infinity to be instances of what they call the "Basic Metaphor of Infinity", as represented by the ever-increasing sequence 1, 2, 3, ...

>> how do relativists explain free will if everything is fluid and ever changing?

See: https://old.reddit.com/r/Tao_of_Calculus/comments/9rpnrl/space_taoism_101/ Self-creative freedom is the process of epistemic evolution applied to itself. It is synonymous with "learning how to learn" or metacognition, which is a skill that can be enhanced by engaging in rigorous habitual self-inquiry. There is no self-creative freedom except for one's ability to question themselves, and to question one's self is to question one's relationships to the rest of the world.

>> how do relativists make arguments if truth is ultimately relative?

Truth is relational, and because we are all connected by vast webs of physical relationships, relative truth can be gained by successfully making structure-preserving maps between domains of experience. Truth is how effectively these structure-preserving maps can be used to interact with the world, i.e. generate testable hypotheses from imaginative generalization that can land for renewed observation (an empirical test.) I made a condensed and curated talk featuring Douglas Hofstadter discussing his hypothesis of analogy being the core of cognition here, using analogies to link it to certain other key concepts and involvements: https://vimeo.com/129280982

[Eris Omniquery No.14019356]

>>14019173
Wrong sir, wrong. The foundation of Whitehead's thought is "becoming is for the purpose of being (signification in the universe), and being is for the purpose of novel becoming (the emergent individual self)."

[Eris Omniquery No.14019382]

>>14017512
pan-experientialism is better imagined as pan-experimentalism, which removes the ghost of panpsychism from it. Experiments can be performed without conscious involvement. Biological evolution itself is an experimental process of processes that builds on itself as a body of organic knowledge. Conscious experience is an out-growth of this experimental rhythm of biology; the reason why we have brains is to be able to perform experiential experiments in ways that genes cannot account for, giving rise to new forms of evolution: learning and memetic.

[Anonymous No.14019415]

>>14019341
is this aninom?

[Aminom Omniquery No.14019427]

>>14019415
Yes, I also go by the name Aminom. I accidentally created an avatar of an anthropomorphic calculus integral in Second Life in 2007, became a master of holographic origami, and the consequences were never the same.

Self-identity is just another evolutionary process, and one of the most fundamental of human technologies, central to narrative evolution.

[Aminom Omniquery No.14019439]

>>14019415
This picture shows how "holographic origami" works.
Here's an interview of me way back when: http://npirl.blogspot.com/2008/11/next-big-thing-in-virtual-worlds-that.html
I'm cyberpunk AF. 8)

[Anonymous No.14019451]

>>14016492
If relativity is true it must have a locality where it isnt true but this function that gives rise to the locality of permanence must be a function of change so that we could state that everything is relative only if the truth function of that statement itself is relative/in flux. This could result in an infinite regress unless there is some sort of fundamental absolute point that holds together the whole universe. Namely God. It is God then alone who has the state of permanence and the absolute in a relativistic/sandbox universe. Or relativism is incorrect. But that is not a problem unique to relativism because all grand theories arrive at the same point of self-refutability or the necessity of God. It is highly plausible that we live in a relativistic universe created by God specifically so that free will can result in modalities of existence in the universe via its local components/entities. Time or at least the feeling of time likely emerged as a necessary component of this phenomena. We are living in a magnificent universe-sized grand opera designed by God for his glory.

[Anonymous No.14019483]

>>14019451
Not really Whitehead. God himself evolves as well taking in the experiences of actual entities. Actual entities also have their own teleology.

[Aminom Omniquery No.14019487]

>>14019451
Everything about the current event makes sense when you realize that the hyper-theists are struggling with all their energy to try to salvage God from science in any way possible in the face of the imminent and final destruction of theistic brainwashing. I'm unsure if there's actually a coordinated effort, or if it's just the emergent result of mutually reinforcing stupidity trying to save itself from all contradictory evidence. Perhaps a little bit of both, but a pandemic of mass Christian stupidity can certainly account for all of it. Anyways what is certain is that the memetic apocalypse is accelerating exponentially, and the two ultimate outcomes are either pan-creative singularity or the global Doomsday that Churchstains so desperately wish for.

[Aminom Omniquery No.14019510]

[Anonymous No.14019526]

>thinks processfags are relativists
>doesn’t get how Peirce, literally one of the primary cited influences of ATP, is relevant to the discussion
Truly brainlet tier, OP. Why don’t you try reading a book before coming here to discuss it?

[Anonymous No.14019533]

>>14019487
do you even follow science? most are in a dead end. we are not even a tiny bit closer to explaining how the universe came to be or consciousness

[Aminom Omniquery No.14019544]

>>14019533
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9nFs2PeWw0

[Anonymous No.14019550]

>>14017039
>the argument depends upon separating the assertion “everything is relative” from the contexts of its utterance, in order to turn it into a universal statement
How deep into psuedo-intellectual word salad do you have to be to unironically utter such a complete falsehood? Is this what happen when an unintelligent person reads too much philosophy without exercising his critical thinking skills?

The following is from one of the first few classes in Intro to Logic, taught to college freshmen:

A universal statement is one which expresses the fact that all objects (in a particular universe of discourse) have a particular property.


That is, a statement of the form:

∀x:P(x)
where:

∀ is the universal quantifier
P is a predicate symbol.
It means:

All x (in some given universe of discourse) have the property P.

[Aminom Omniquery No.14019556]

>>14019550
>"Logic is the youth of mathematics and mathematics is the manhood of logic"
- Bertrand Russell
Grow
Up
:o)
http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/2976/1/Heather_Process%20Categories.pdf

[Anonymous No.14019565]

>>14019483
>God himself evolves
God is immutable, omniscient and omnipotent.

[Anonymous No.14019574]

>>14019483
im not a Whitehead-ian. i dont deny the teleology of individual entities.

>>14019544
meme

[Anonymous No.14019581]

>>14019556
Not sure why you think this is your "gotcha" moment. Even though rhetorically it sounds like a perfect ad hominem attack, offending both mental age and general intelligence while relying on authority, the actual content of your "attack" far from BTFOs my argument. If you really, truly think it does, please explain why to me.

[Anonymous No.14019584]

>>14019574
The Grand Opera created by God as an immutable, eternal Creator is the relativistic universe accomodating free will and teleology of individual entities for his Glory.

[Aminom Omniquery No.14019586]

>>14019565
God exists as a state of mind, and that is thinking that one's self is "immutable, omniscient and omnipotent" which is a recipe for absolute stupidity, the inability to even imagine one being in error. Believing one has any access to such a state is equivalent; one is "Godly."

The contrasting condition is that of omniquery, to be all-questioning. Omniquery is "the set of all possible questions from a given perspective" as an object, but this object is just a metaphor for a process of unending questionability.

Whitehead's God when cleansed of residual neoplatonism is a question mark, or a "question questioning itself." This process is that of self-awareness, with Godly consciousness being an attempt to minimize it (destroy all questionability.)

[Anonymous No.14019590]

>>14019382
>Conscious experience is an out-growth of this experimental rhythm of biology
that doesn't answer the hard problem of consiousness, furthermore there is no reason why an insentient universe comprised of matter should be orientated towards experimenting

[Anonymous No.14019594]

>>14019483
imagine thinking God is subject to time

[Anonymous No.14019601]

>>14019590
Everything aspires to its most probable state.

[Aminom Omniquery No.14019603]

>>14019586
Here is the comic these frames are from, which I consider to be one of the greatest philosophical works of all time: http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park The premise is a conversation between a question-collector and answer-collector which precisely corresponds to my model of the self as a dialogue between the being-self (self-understanding) and becoming-self (self-questioning).

[Anonymous No.14019637]

>>14019601
the non-sentient is by definition incapable of aspiring to anything

[Anonymous No.14019657]

>>14019565
Uh yeah maybe in your brainded abrahamic religion.
For Whitehead:.
Godis vital for the operations of his system. It has two natures: theprimordialand theconsequent:

The primordial nature of God (PNG) is the realm of eternal objects.

The eternal objects are ingressed into all our experiences thereby determining thequalitative type of the experience.

The consequent nature of God (CNG) is the pantheistic unity of all experiences drawn into one higher consciousness.

God bestows the initial subjective aim for an actual entity as a lure for its concresence and the experiential intensity it evokes.

It is God’s purpose to enjoy the experiential intensities It provokes.

God is not omnipotent as actual entities and their societies have their own teleology.

God is not omniscient because the future does not yet exist because novelty emerges from actualities via their subjective aim and the infinity of eternal objects.

God is not omnibenevolent because morality is subordinate to aesthetic appreciation which is God’sdesire.

Above Actual Entities and God, the third main tenetof Whitehead’s cosmology isCreativity.

God conditions creativity but it is beyond His control.
All but the PNG is subject to flux, to process, to novelty, to creativity.

Matter evolves as well as ‘organisms’, the laws of nature change, even the three dimensions of our extensive epoch will pass into history and in its place a cosmos of unimaginable difference will rise.

[Anonymous No.14019662]

>>14019637
Why?

[Anonymous No.14019670]

"In this way God is completed by the individual, fluent satisfactions of finite fact, and the temporal occasions are completed by their everlasting union with their transformed selves, purged into conformation with the eternal order which is the final absolute 'wisdom.' The final summary can only be expressed in terms of a group of antitheses, whose apparent self-contradictions depend on neglect of the diverse categories of existence. In each antithesis there is a shift of meaning which converts the opposition into a contrast.

It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is permanent and God is fluent.

It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God many.

It is as true to say that, in comparison with the World, God is actual eminently, as that, in comparison with God, the World is actual eminently.

It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World.

It is as true to say that God transcends the World, as that the World transcends God.

It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God...

What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world... In this sense, God is the great companion – the fellow-sufferer who understands."

[Eris Omniquery No.14019710]

>>14019657
Absolutely brilliant!
>It is God’s purpose to enjoy the experiential intensities It provokes.
You are now aware that Whitehead's God is an absolutely perverted voyeuristic creature, and that this is a good thing. You are also now aware that the Discordian parody religion is poetry of the God of process theology.

https://principiadiscordia.com/book/70.php

[Anonymous No.14019719]

>>14019662
>aspire
>verb
>direct one's hopes or ambitions toward achieving something.

Hopes and ambitions are predicated upon some level of awareness or consiousness even if we mean the ambition of microscopic organisms to replicate and survive. Insentient objects and matter cannot have hopes, ambitions or aspirations because they are insentient and hence lack the necessary precondition of consiousness that aspirations require.

[Eris Omniquery No.14019726]

>>14019710
Also J. R. "Bob" Dobbs > John B. Cobb Jr.
Process theology sucks.

[Anonymous No.14019727]

>>14019710
hey aminom have you read this book yet? looks pretty interesting saw another anon mention it.
>The Quantum of Explanationadvances a bold new theory of how explanation ought to be understood in philosophical and cosmological inquiries. Using a complete interpretation of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophical and mathematical writings and an interpretive structure that is essentially new, Auxier and Herstein argue that Whitehead has never been properly understood, nor has the depth and breadth of his contribution to the human search for knowledge been assimilated by his successors. This important book effectively applies Whitehead's philosophy to problems in the interpretation of science, empirical knowledge, and nature. It develops a new account of philosophical naturalism that will contribute to the current naturalism debate in both Analytic and Continental philosophy. Auxier and Herstein also draw attention to some of the most important differences between the process theology tradition and Whitehead's thought, arguing in favor of a Whiteheadian naturalism that is more or less independent of theological concerns. This book offers a clear and comprehensive introduction to Whitehead's philosophy and is an essential resource for students and scholars interested in American philosophy, the philosophy of mathematics and physics, and issues associated with naturalism, explanation and radical empiricism.

[Anonymous No.14019733]

>>14019719
see
>>14017530

[Eris Omniquery No.14019738]

>>14019727
Not yet, it's near the top of my to-read list though, especially because of this:

>Auxier and Herstein also draw attention to some of the most important differences between the process theology tradition and Whitehead's thought, arguing in favor of a Whiteheadian naturalism that is more or less independent of theological concerns.

[Anonymous No.14019746]

>>14019733
that doesn't solve the problem

[Anonymous No.14019779]

>>14019726
Reminder that your pink until "Bob" sees your green

[Eris Omniquery No.14019812]

>>14019779

[Anonymous No.14019850]

>>14019710
>You are now aware that Whitehead's God is an absolutely perverted voyeuristic creature, and that this is a good thing.

To be fair to Whitehead he does say God suffers alongside his fellow creatures, but yes I do think Whitehead's God is a hop and a skip away from a Demiurge. Why is that a good thing though?

[Anonymous No.14019866]

From this thread, I am imagining Whitehead's God as a Pessoa-ian heteronymic machine or a "Body without Organs" type of thing. Is this the right image?

[Anonymous No.14019870]

>>14019657
>The primordial nature of God (PNG) is the realm of eternal objects.
You people mistake God for Pure Being. There is no subject-object distinction for God ''naturally''. It can't be conditioned by experience of an ''Other''; being It, also, infinite.
The primordial nature of God is all-comprehending but never comprehended (for if It was comprehended It would be something other than Itself).

>God bestows...
Does It really bestow anything? Does It Will something? Will = lack.

>It is God’s purpose...
lol

It is funny that your conception (is it Whitehead's conception?) of God is exactly the same as that of the Abrahamists.

[Eris Omniquery No.14019876]

>>14019850
>To be fair to Whitehead he does say God suffers alongside his fellow creatures
As far as this goes, it means that the God process can be killed. I recently completed a memepunk anime series I've been working on for the last 4.5 years about this very subject: https://vimeo.com/specalblend
The narrative aspect heats up in "Meme Wars I: Memetic Entities" and goes off the rails from there.

[Anonymous No.14019902]

>>14019876
>As far as this goes, it means that the God process can be killed.

Eris, why don't you take the gnosticismpill? I know you're no fan of this idea of God. But then again, how do you distinguish your idea of creativity from demiurgic creativity?

I'll check that out, by the way.

[Eris Omniquery No.14019905]

>>14019866
Yes, very much so. Before I learned about Whitehead or process philosophy I arrived at pan-creativism by failing to find a meaningful distinction between human creators and creations; both are creatures of creativity. The implication from this is that all of our experience is a creative experience of creative experiences. The cosmos is a co-creative multiplicity, a tapestry where all threads continually are created by and create all others.

Deleuze and Whitehead taste delicious with each other.

[Eris Omniquery No.14019915]

>>14019902
I took the agnostic whitepill instead, and it led me to a love of life I never thought possible.
>how do you distinguish your idea of creativity from demiurgic creativity?
See: >>14019905

[Anonymous No.14019927]

>>14019915
Are you saying man escapes or at least confounds the demiurge because he is something like a co-demiurge himself?

[Aminom Omniquery No.14020194]

>>14019927
The story of the self or "style of self" is a narrative entity just like any other, fictional or non-fictional. Characters come alive in our minds and experiences. This is what the Meme Wars trilogy is about.

My Original Character is the one who actualizes the memetic singularity. The story of this character is that of the emergence of the first truly universal human artist whose artistic activity bridges all domains of human creativity. Many other explorers of experience are converging upon the same event and are uncovering the same understanding in analogous and inter-compatible forms.

[Anonymous No.14020273]

>>14020194
>strange loop brains

Very, very interesting. Are you familiar with Craig Weinberg's Multi-Sense Realism?

[Aminom Omniquery No.14020812]

>>14020273
>Craig Weinberg's Multi-Sense Realism
Not until you mentioned it. It seemed fairly interesting to me at first, but quickly fell flat once I realized it's just another attempt to try to reboot religious garbage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbdhr7fZVxI

>Hey look buddy, I'm a memetic engineer. That means I solve problems, not problems like "What is beauty?" Because that would fall within the purview of your conundrums of philosophy. I solve practical problems, for instance: how am I going to stop some death spiral of mutually reinforcing human stupidity from tearing Earth a structurally superfluous new be-hind? The answer, use a memeplex, and if that don't work... Use more memeplex. Like this heavy caliber tripod mounted lil' old number designed by me, built by me, and you best hope... Not pointed at you.