why not?
-Imp
We philosophize out of proportion to its value because of our inability to suffer the existence of ourselves, and through self knowledge, experience the truths behind philosophy.
Dunamis, you philosophize for the same reason dogs lick themselves. Because it feels good. The rest is commentary. Openings and closings will be exponentially more difficult after the singularity. A Dunamis neuron was incorporated in a logo I created for DARPA in 2007. An inside joke with myself at the time, which backfired like a shotgun blast.
G-man,
“Dunamis, you philosophize for the same reason dogs lick themselves. Because it feels good. The rest is commentary.”
“The rest” is the part you don’t get. I am the White Shark you orgasm from that you imagine you have escaped after eating a meal. If fact though, your shark cage of tin-irony will not hold you against those jaws as it collapses pitifully around you. There is nothing that “feels good” about why I philosophize. It is sheer and implacable instinct put in the service of things you can’t understand ever since you gave up music.
Dunamis
Philosophy is the art of thinking for the sake of thinking.
You really think it’s tin-irony? Tin? I admit it’s not titanium irony, but can’t I get at least aluminum, copper, zinc, stainless steel…anything but tin? I think the problem started when YOU gave up music. Your cross-rhythms were reshaping modern dance. One joke about your manboobs and you vanished from the scene, only to turn up later on ILP. I think it’s time we made amends.
G.
I think the problem started when YOU gave up music.
My philosophy is but a shadow of the music I have not given up but of which I do not speak, but which you can hardly glimpse. That you confuse the iceberg tips with icecubes, is only a consequence of your tin-eyes rusting in your seawater soul. When you learn the difference between jerking off and fucking, give a signal to the world - perhaps three sentences in a row that retain coherence, or something other than really, really dumbed down Nietzsche -, and then restore the faith you once had in yourself…perhaps.
Dunamis
I sense anger.
I have long sensed you were brilliant, but I’m surprised and saddened to discover that you feel the same way about yourself. Iceberg, indeed. (Actually that’s not true. I’m really just trying to see more sides of your Spockian personality so I’m trying to rattle you cause I dig you.)
Trying to solve problems of philosophy have come in the form of poems about how we ought to think and talk so as to avoid those problems. I take myself out of the constructive criticism and stick to pure satire. I’m trying to show by example how hopeless traditional problems are – how they are based on a terminology which is designed expressly for the purpose of making a solution, how the questions which generate the traditional problems cannot be posed except in this terminology, how pathetic it is to think that the old gaps will be closed by constructing new gimmicks. This is the mindset I had when I changed my name from Dunamis to Gamer in 2006 and joined ILP to fuck with the red shift. I’m amused by the way philosophical problems come and go or morph into bugbears as the result of new assumptions and vocabularies. It’s fun to watch the sparks but I have better things to do than participate. Been there.
Gamer,
If you’re begging to be ignored, just leave my name out of posts when you are waxing impotent on the general state of philosophy. I take it when you repeatedly and vaguely reference me, you are asking for a little attention.
Dunamis
I’m asking for a LOT of attention, silly. It’s hard to leave you out of posts. Take for instance the time you proved eloquently that Scigov’s frequentist approach to probability was in fact a form of a Bayesianism, which resulted in saving the lives (and more importantly the dignity) of 26 quantum computers named Lucy.
I think Hermes’ point MUST include you. You are the perfect example of how shitting ourselves has taken on pesky new forms. Don’t misunderstand. I love philosophy and Socratic thinking. Ideas like yours are ahead of our time but they won’t be for long, and they will help make better robots. Now please finish your lasagna and go to bed.
The point isn’t to solve problems. Its to create better ones. The tension within a representational frame is not its flaw, but its procreative power. In language, metaphors are the hinge upon which real force turns, and it is language which helms the boat, like it or not. Philosophy is the application of the full force of the metaphor within the constraints of formulize discourse. It is the turning of the world, literally.
Dunamis
You say the turning of the world. I say the turning of the word. We’ll have to discuss this later…whether they’re in fact the same thing…literally. Literally. Interesting word choice. You have your work cut out for you.
G-man,
“You say the turning of the world. I say the turning of the word.”
They are the same thing. A word is the technology of the soul. It is by the word that the soul makes the world, and by the word that the world makes the soul.
Dunamis
Dunamis, you sure about that? It could be argued that the greatest observable advances in our evolution take place in our instruments, not our languages. A primitve language can be as elaborate as English, for example, and still the people themselves live in mud-huts.
I agree that language records and conveys information, but without a major change in industry and/or technology, no new terms are incorporated into the language. The important mover of the species and its evolution is the materialistic control of an environment. This, before all else, determines progress and growth. What languages are invented and assigned to concepts and ideas is contingent upon the rate of instrumental and economic expansion.
Consider this. Any political state can organize itself around rhetorical truisms while enforcing and controlling through propaganda. So imagine a ‘society’ with a set of mores and customs, arranged by the conventions of the politcal state. What we would call ‘morale’ would be the general complacency of each individual; a progressive state is one where all individuals feel content. The primary medium for this would be language, the widespread establishment of mores, customs, and conventions.
Now, if you determine the quality of that society by its linguistic conventions you are relying on a contingency. In other words, the extent of that societies ‘progress’ was based on its material circumstances, its industry, and not its political, language-based conventions. Any convention would have worked, or produced the same results. Language is invented around our physical complexes.
It isn’t what people are ‘saying’ that is creating the world, that’s an epiphenomenon at best. It is our use of the instrumental complexes and the language used to identify those materials that’s makes progress. Action first, then identification by the word. We acted long before we ever talked, and what language did evolve was fairly simple until agriculture was invented. From there, industry and language.
This was just for arguments sake, dude. I don’t believe any of it. I think we were genetically engineered by aliens and planted here on Earth to raise a slave population for later harvesting.
Talk about agriculture. Jesus, what if we’re being grown like crops?
detrop,
It could be argued that the greatest observable advances in our evolution take place in our instruments, not our languages.
Language is our primary instrument, and we its.
I agree that language records and conveys information
It formulates information, connecting it in texture to our bodies, in rhythm, pace and concept. Primarily, language is a body, our body.
Now, if you determine the quality of that society by its linguistic conventions you are relying on a contingency.
Most certainly, that is why society is an immanent expression, a historically contingent unfolding of events, of which language plays the connective part.
Language is invented around our physical complexes.
Most certainly. Language is a body.
It isn’t what people are ‘saying’ that is creating the world, that’s an epiphenomenon at best.
I never said it was “what†they are saying that is important. It is “how†they are saying/making that is important. Metaphor actualizes material connections through the body to other bodies.
Action first, then identification by the word.
Action occurs on the word-made-world. Then the word comes after, for the second time.
We acted long before we ever talked, and what language did evolve was fairly simple until agriculture was invented.
A word is an action.
Dunamis
Dunamis:
Really its just another form of information, no different than a physical body. How you determine what is ‘primary’ in a set of rules for the exchange of information on a bodily level is the weight of the effects, the mass and the density. There are informational languages that far exceed the boundaries of what we call ‘verbal expression’ and they organize substance and create extensions. First it is the body, then it is the thought conveying the word meaning. Primarily what is most important is the infinite organizations of effects that produce the corporeal body in space.
To put it metaphorically, the information required in the effort to extend a set of vocal-chords in space is much more than the effort needed to generate a mental concept of the word.
I agree with most of what you’ve said.
I dunno about that, though. I maintain a distinction between an act and a meaning. The former has a greater effect and requires more effort. The latter is a lesser amplitude of expression.
detrop,
“Really its just another form of information, no different than a physical body.”
It is our metaphysical body. It is the means by which we assemble ourselves together, the manner in which our individual bodies form larger wholes, move into and out of assemblages. By facilitating bodies, it creates bodies of higher, more complex orders. Cells language other cells, we language each other. Language is modulation.
Dunamis
As usual you guys are a pleasure to read. 
Cheers,
James
I do not have an opinion on the meaninglessness or otherwise of philosophy; Gamer does. The prominence of this philosophical conviction about philosophical conviction is indicative of more than the so-called ‘truth’ of what is asserted; an argument is an event and as such has no absolute boundary (or therefore seperability) from the context in which it is invoked.
Henceforth the rhetorical force of an argument, it’s ‘position’ (the place and time of its invoking) - is itself another argument, or aspect therein, which serves to position a participant in a discourse.
Now one thing I have been struggling to articulate to myself recently is the superb inadequacy of this characterisation;
I believe that Gamer is perhaps the most capable (practicing) rhetor on this forum, and probably by some margin (whether he ‘wields’ or ‘intuits’ this ability is not particularly relevant). Yet the reflexive consequences of his insight (i.e. the conclusions he draws about himself) are not necessarily validated on this account. (Which, in part, is just another way of saying that I do not feel any urgent compulsion to resolve my differences with him at this time.)
The problem with reading a text - (…to shift to another level of analysis) - is that the notion of intent bends and warps the perception of meaning which jumps up off of the page and into the halls of your thought. Yet the shadow, or shall I say the ‘spectre’, of ‘mis-reading’ (which includes both ‘over-reading’ and ‘under-reading’, it should be remembered) follows the reader incessantly; especially at a place like this, where we must attempt to re-construct the author from ostensive utterings, intensional and non-intensional subtext, and a whole horde of other chimeras. Which are all, it must be kept in mind, also simultaneously responsible for the authoring of ever new chapters in our own, ‘personal’ narratives.
Having said this then, perhaps partially as a disclaimer, I will say that I believe Dunamis has missed an important aspect of Gamer’s putative personage, and that he is therefore not adequately in tune with the rhythm of his thought. Which is why I called the above quote from him ‘inadequate’. Yet why did I call it ‘superb’, you might ask? This is simply another superlative in my rubric for characterising pre-emptively what I cannot say explicitly. It is not simply a matter of one arguer being as a mouse in the maze of the other; as argument is collaborative, and identity splayed and multifarious.
It is with caution then that I show the following…;
…in order to point out the two distinct portions of text here, and how each orients towards Dunamis in a different way.
Regards,
James
p.s.
As for Heidegger’s characterisation, concordant (you ought to post more often, btw), I was reminded by this quoted passage of another that Polemarchus had cited some time back on another thread, which itself may be pertinent to this discussion.
Check it out if you are interested. 
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=138303
Regards,
James