Thread for mundane ironists

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282

Science

“We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.” Douglas Adams

Hear! Hear!

“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.” Daniel Kahneman

And now we know.

“Student: Dr. Einstein, Aren’t these the same questions as last year’s [physics] final exam?
Dr. Einstein: Yes; But this year the answers are different.” Albert Einstein

Uh, if you get his drift?

“You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.” Philip K. Dick

Everywhere? Does that include here?

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.” Lawrence M. Krauss

Do they know that?

“Whether or not you believe in God, you must believe this: when we as a species abandon our trust in a power greater than us, we abandon our sense of accountability. Faiths… all faiths… are admonitions that there is something we cannot understand, something to which we are accountable. With faith we are accountable to each other, to ourselves, and to a higher truth. Religion is flawed, but only because man is flawed. The church consists of a brotherhood of imperfect, simple souls wanting only to be a voice of compassion in a world spinning out of control.” Dan Brown

Unless, of course, he’s wrong.

283

Roberto Bolaño

There’s a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. As far as I was concerned, this was the latter.

Next up: the virtual fists here.

Reading is more important than writing.

Unless, of course, you actually can write.

Only poetry isn’t shit.

Let’s define shit…philosophically.

History, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.

Let’s define whore…philosophically.

We play at believing ourselves immortal. We delude oursleves in the appraisal of our own works and in our perpetual misappraisal of the works of others. See you at the Nobel, writers say, as one might say: see you in Hell.” Roberto Bolaño

Let’s appraise this.

The diseased, anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man’s sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air. Then, too, then, too, then, too.

How about we pin down the diseased minds here. Or is mine the only one?

284

What is the definition of health by which to compare a diagnosis? Pretty sure no mind here is healthy, except the one subsuming here. Group spirit noogies.

285

God

“It’s tragic that extremists co-opt the notion of God, and that hipsters and artists reject spirituality out of hand. I don’t have a fixed idea of God. But I feel that it’s us - the messed-up, the half-crazy, the burning, the questing - that need God, a lot more than the goody-two-shoes do.” Mike Doughty

See how it works? Or do you need it explained to you?

“I know there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him and I have touched him. I know the devil exists and therefore I know there is a God.” Roméo Dallaire

See how it works? Or do you need it explained to you?

“God seemed to have become a brand, a packaging, and people purchase this trusted brand with such faith and devotion that they no longer care who the vendor is.” Justin Villanueva

If they’re not the vendors themselves.

“There’s a lot of pride involved in my refusal to believe in God.” Orhan Pamuk

Me? No way. I want to believe again.

“You push the TRUTH off a cliff, but it will always fly. You can submerge the TRUTH under water, but it will not drown. You can place the TRUTH in the fire, but it will survive. You can bury the TRUTH beneath the ground, but it will arise. TRUTH always prevails!” Amaka Imani Nkosazana

Well, of course.

“I believe in God the way I believe in quarks. People whose business it is to know about quantum physics or religion tell me they have good reason to believe that quarks and God exist. And they tell me that if I wanted to devote my life to learning what they’ve learned, I’d find quarks and God just like they did.” Mary Doria Russell

Any of those people here?

286

Death

“I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three… nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn’t see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.” Sylvia Plath

Next up: your bell jar. Unless, perhaps, you’d like to know more about mine?

“There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.” Jean Rhys

Next up: There are always two lives…

“Yer a good lad, Atticus, mowin’ me lawn and killin’ what Brits come around.” Kevin Hearne

Any Brits coming around here? Welcome!

“Tell me what it is like to die," I answered.
He dismounted from his horse, looking at me strangely the whole while. “You experience something similar every day,” he said softly. “It is as familiar to you as bread and butter.”
“Yes,” I said. “It is like every night when I fall asleep.”
"No. It is like every morning when you wake up.” Martine Leavitt

Only, chances are, you never, ever wake up.

I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory.” Lin-Manuel Miranda

That can’t be good, right?

“The only sin is the sin of being born.” Samuel Beckett

True enough. But…does anyone here know why?

287

Free Will

“Harris expects us to dismiss free will as an illusion, whilst he fails to comprehend that he has generated a much greater mystery, namely, if matter can’t be free, how on earth can it suffer from delusions and illusions that it is free? Why are illusions of free will more scientifically plausible than free will? Where’s the scientific theory for this? There simply isn’t one. Harris has proposed that the “rational” alternative to free will is collections of atoms subject to mental illness.” Mike Hockney

Yeah, what about that?

“The very fact that we believe ourselves free, means, by the strict application of Occam’s Razor, that we are free. To argue otherwise is to make the insane claim that the real world, for no conceivable reason or purpose, invents illusions. If that were true, we could never know anything at all because absolutely everything could be an illusion.” Mike Hockney

Yeah, what about that?

"We would be living in the fantasy world created by Descartes’ malevolent demon. In rather similar terms, fundamentalist materialists propose that a more rational alternative to the concept of “God”, which they say explains nothing, is scientific randomness. However, randomness also explains nothing since it operates via miracles happening for no reason, and is even more of a mystery than God!” Mike Hockney

Yeah, what about that?

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was not convincing the world that he didn’t exist; the greatest trick he ever pulled was making us believe we have free will.” Abhaidev

Or that he had it?

“True freedom is solipsism. True freedom is believing that the world will cease to exist the moment you die. True freedom is realizing that only you have free will, while the others are mere puppets, hive minds. True freedom is, therefore, nothing less than insanity.” Abhaidev

True freedom it is then.

“As an act recedes into the past and becomes imbedded in the network of one’s individuality it seems more and more a product of fate – inevitable. However, an act in the immediate present seems to be more a product of free will.” Sylvia Plath

Then right up until she sticks her head into the oven.

288

Stanisław Lem from Solaris

We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them.

Or, perhaps, all we could, in fact, ever have done is to detest them?

Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox…

Next up: eternal recurrence.

Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him.

The fools!

Put simply, unlike terrestrial organisms it did not adapt to its surroundings over the course of hundreds of millions of years, so as only then to produce a rational species, but it had gained control over its environment from the start.

Next up [of course]: actual contexts on Solaris.

I’ve no intention of trying to dissuade you. I’ll only say one thing: in an inhuman situation you’re trying to behave like a human being. That may be admirable, but it’s also futile. Though in fact I’m not even sure it’s admirable—I’m not sure something foolish can also be admired.

Not much that isn’t applicable to.

The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox…

Well, this explains very little, almost nothing, right?

289

Logic

“How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.” Isaac Asimov.

Nothing about what we do here, alas.

‘It seemed to me,’ said Wonko the Sane, ‘that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.’ Douglas Adams

Of course: smart toothpicks!

“We seem to inhabit a universe made up of a small number of elements-particles-bits that swirl in chaotic clouds, occasionally clustering together in geometrically logical temporary configurations.” Timothy Leary

That and dasein, of course.

"There can never be surprises in logic.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Does that surprise you?

“When I say “The good man gave his good dog a good meal,” I use “good” analogically, for there is at the same time a similarity and a difference between a good man, a good dog, and a good meal. All three are desirable, but a good man is wise and moral, a good dog is tame and affectionate, and a good meal is tasty and nourishing. But a good man is not tasty and nourishing, except to a cannibal; a good dog is not wise and moral, except in cartoons, and a good meal is not tame and affectionate, unless it’s alive as you eat it.” Peter Kreeft

Socratic Logic let’s call it.

“In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind.” Edgar Allan Poe

On the other hand, for some of us, anomalies are par for the course.

290

Milan Kundera from Immortality

“To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn’t know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn’t even know how to be dead.” Milan Kundera

Bummer?

Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.” Milan Kundera

Let’s hope that never happens here.

I think, therefore I am’ is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.

He means herniated discs of course.

The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen.

No, really, where exactly is this “I” we keep referring back to?

Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.

My guess: woman too.

She blushed. It is a beautiful thing when a woman blushes; at that instant her body no longer belongs to her; she doesn’t control it; she is at its mercy; oh, can there be anything more beautiful than the sight of a woman violated by her own body!

No, really, can there be?

291

William Golding from Lord of the Flies

The pile of guts was a black blob of flies that buzzed like a saw. After a while these flies found Simon. Gorged, they alighted by his runnels of sweat and drank. They tickled under his nostrils and played leapfrog on his thighs. They were black and iridescent green and without number; and in front of Simon, the Lord of the Flies hung on his stick and grinned. At last Simon gave up and looked back; saw the white teeth and dim eyes, the blood—and his gaze was held by that ancient, inescapable recognition.

We still recognize that of course. Though, by all means, some more than others.

Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!

Ah, the Beast inside each and every one of us.

The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable.

This, dasein and political economy.

Which is better – to be a pack of painted Indians like you are, or to be sensible like Ralph is?
Which is better – to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill?
Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?

Once and for all let’s settle this.

If only one had time to think!

How about we make time here?
Yes, yes, of course: theoretically.

Life’s scientific, but we don’t know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.

Though certainly more than all the others.

292

Meaning

“Not everything that can be counted counts.
Not everything that counts can be counted.” William Bruce Cameron

You first this time.

“Keep your mind open. The meaning of things lies in how people perceive them. The same thing could mean different meanings to the same people at different times.” Roy T. Bennett

On the other hand, what if that was really true?

“The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.” Rebecca Solnit

And not just astrologically. Though close to it?

“It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful.” Alan Cohen

Not to worry, you’ll find it someday.

“Words have weight.” Stephen King

True. But I’m packin’ anyway.

“Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.” Jean-Paul Sartre

Next up: inside the worm.

293

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through.
If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.
Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.

Now all that need be is it is actually true.

In art it is hard to say anything as good as saying nothing.

Link us to nothing your art has articulated.

The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.

Next up: how things ought to be instead?

So in the end, when one is doing philosophy, one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.

What’s yours?

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

Let’s run that by our own “my way or the highway” pinheads.

“The great delusion of modernity, is that the laws of nature explain the universe for us. The laws of nature describe the universe, they describe the regularities. But they explain nothing.

And not very well either.

294

Science

“We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.” Carl Sagan

See, I told you.

“Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.” Terry Pratchett

Uh, different definitions, perhaps?

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.” Charles Darwin

Pinheads let’s call them.

“Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?” Stephen Hawking

Anyone here actually know?

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” Nikola Tesla

Theoretically.

“I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.” Antonio Gramsci

You tell me.

295

Roberto Bolaño

Reality is an AIDS-riddled whore.

Steer clear?

For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths…

And, no, not just pornography.

Reading is never a waste of time.

Define “never”?

Ah, what a shame they don’t make Los Suicidas mezcal anymore, what a shame that time pases, don’t you think? what a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.

Who gets shamed for it though?

Even on the poorest streets people could be heard laughing. Some of these streets were completely dark, like black holes, and the laughter that came from who knows where was the only sign, the only beacon that kept residents and strangers from getting lost.

Same here? For example, when henry quirk posts? 8)

He was an atheist and it had been years since he read a book, despite the fact that he had amassed a more than decent library of works in his specialty, as well as volumes of philosophy and Mexican history and a novel or two. Sometimes he thought it was precisely because he was an atheist that he didn’t read anymore. Not reading, it might be said, was the highest expression of atheism or at least of atheism as he conceived of it. If you don’t believe in God, how do you believe in a fucking book? he asked himself.

Reading posts here is still okay though, right?

296

God

“If in my life I fail completely to heed others, solely out of a desire to be ‘devout’ and to perform my ‘religious duties’, then my relationship with God will also grow arid. It becomes merely ‘proper’, but loveless.” Pope Benedict XVI

Of course, now we all know that Catholics are not True Christians.

“God is dead and I am his replacement.” J.D. Robb

Her and God knows how many others.

“Sometimes doubting is not a lack of faith, but an expression of it. Sometimes to doubt is to merely insist that God be taken seriously not frivolously, to insist that our faith is placed in and upheld by something other than seeming conjuring tricks.” Mark Buchanan

That’s the loophole I’m counting on come Judgment Day.

“The choices we’re working with here are a block universe, where past, present and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted because we can’t know all the variables; and a Christian universe in which God made everything and it’s all here for a purpose but we have free will anyway.” Audrey Niffenegger

Pick three.

“And if there is no god? You act as if there is, and it’s the same thing.” Janet Fitch

Yep, thst’s all it takes, alright.

“In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the needless assumption altogether. This holds true for everything from Noah’s flood to the Holocaust.” Christopher Hitchens

He’s still dead…roasting in Hell…right, God?

297

Death

“When the time comes to die, make sure that all you have to do is die!” Jim Elliot

You tell me.

“No more let life divide what death can join together.” Percy Bysshe Shelley

You tell me.

“The flesh surrenders itself. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not…yet, I occurred.” Frank Herbert

Ah, a philosophical death.

“Death didn’t bother me much. Strong Christian and all that. Method of death did. Being eaten alive. One of my top three ways not to go out.” Laurell K. Hamilton

Start here:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_animals_to_human
On the other hand, how many of them were Christians?

“I’ll never speak to God again.” Sylvia Plath

How about now though?

“If you die in an elevator, be sure to push the up button.” Sam Levenson

Like that will fool God!

298

Philosophy

“…it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.” Ernest Hemingway

How’s that going for you? Here, I mean.

“Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, ‘atheism’ is a term that should not even exist. No one needs to identify himself as a ‘non-astrologer’ or a ‘non-alchemist.’ We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.” Sam Harris

Sounds a lot like a libertarian to me. :wink:

“The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it.” Frank Herbert

No, really, actually think about that this time.

“To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize.” Blaise Pascal

Define “really”?

“…as soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.” Slavoj Žižek

How’s that working out for you?

“Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables.” Thomas Aquinas

And Gods, of course.

299

Free Will

“Reason is but choosing.” John Milton

And what reason might that be?

“I believe that artificial intelligence is quite possible precisely because our human intelligence is artificial. What is natural is stupidity.” Alexander Dugin.

Click?

“Freedom means the possibility to choose from a set of unfree options.” Radoslav Rochallyi

Click?

“They’re trying to reduce us all to safe little reflex machines, extensions of their own will.” Cliff Jones Jr.

They’re convening in Milwaukee right now. Then later in Chicago.

“Eternity. It stretches above and blow, and to right and left of this little Earth of yours, and Earth is lost within it. Eternity is so vast that your little human mind cannot encompass its meaning. Yet it is in this little moment of time you call life that you must choose. And so I say, look how you choose, you choose for eternity.” Hilda Lewis

Uh, whatever that means? Though, sure, by all means, point taken.

“Those who whisper freedom to your ears are the greatest threats to your existence.” Eduvie Donald

In other words, you are free to be exactly as they are. Or else.

300

Stanisław Lem from Solaris

Apathy robbed me of the strength even to despise myself.

Though not to despise others, of course.

I was still a prisoner in my nightmares, and every morning the play began again.

Though it might close any day now.

I didn’t believe for a minute that this liquid colossus, which had brought about the death of hundreds of humans within itself, with which my entire race had for decades been trying in vain to establish at least a thread of communication—that this ocean, lifting me up unwittingly like a speck of dust, could be moved by the tragedy of two human beings.

Imagine our ocean acquiring its own specks of dust. And, no, not just in the Bermuda Triangle.

Put simply, unlike terrestrial organisms it did not adapt to its surroundings over the course of hundreds of millions of years, so as only then to produce a rational species, but it had gained control over its environment from the start.

God’s will?

Human beings set out to encounter other worlds, other civilizations, without having fully gotten to know their own hidden recesses, their blind alleys, well shafts, dark barricaded doors.

What do you think, some more than others?

We’re not searching for anything except people. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can’t accept it for what it is.

I’ll be your mirror if you’ll be mine.

301

Were you free to be exactly as you perceive them to be when you…perceived them so hard like that?

Just curious.

Freely curious.

For a purpose.

Cuz without (a) reason, you go the way the wind blows ya. But with (a) reason… you … do extreme sports & shit.

Well. I don’t. By design. Totally on purpose. As a rational person.