The Information of Meaning

Ichthus77 · February 13, 2022, 5:37am

Why do you hate cigars so much?

Meno2 · February 13, 2022, 6:13am

That’s surprising.

Ichthus77 · February 13, 2022, 6:36am

Answer every question w/o me asking it.

Meno2 · February 13, 2022, 2:48pm

Why if you alreadynknow the question that is known as the answer to another question that is not contrary but fallacious to a non related answered question earlier with no possible solution?

Give it up as I have not and never will abandon the answer.

If curious, then try to pretend to know, me no. I never ever and never been dislodged for apparent wrong doing not committed and while avoiding slips of profane tongue as the gates of he’ll may not ever may or have opened it’s fiery entrails to consume

So rest assured my name as is implied by it’s signature.

Ichthus77 · February 13, 2022, 3:33pm

Why did you sign Anubis?

Ichthus77 · February 13, 2022, 3:42pm

“I think we must fully face the fact that when Christianity does not make a man v. much better, it makes him v. much worse. It is, paradoxically, dangerous to draw nearer to God. Doesn’t one find in one’s own experience that every advance (if one ever has advances) in the spiritual life opens to one the possibility of blacker sins as well as brighter virtues? Conversion may make of one who was, if no better, no worse than an animal, something like a devil. Satan was an angel.”

– W. Lewis, ed., Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966), p. 301

Meno2 · February 13, 2022, 4:25pm

It’s a long story, one that has many implications. The simplest one is the best a here, and it has to do with my upcoming dental surgery, at USC school of dentistry.
And it goes like this:

He is 22 finished BS and is already in his final year in residency , talker, Egyptian and already taking of getting the other degree in dental surgery. Then, talking with You, about God and it’s phonetic inversion, found out about Egyptian magic and the ancient worship of dogs.

That’s a prelude to follow up on some thoughts he has on Egypt ology, and how when very little me no bereft of parents a big sheepdog komondor guarded lovingly over me.

This is the obvious. The less obvious is detailed and much more involved maybe time allowing will enable to figure those out, more in line with ILP objectives.

Ichthus77 · February 13, 2022, 4:58pm

Now you’re speaking my language. Vaguely.

Part of me wants to say there is dust in ash.

The other part of me feels like you just spun me around again and wants to call you a jackass.

Meno2 · February 13, 2022, 4:58pm

Forget that part.

Ichthus77 · February 13, 2022, 5:01pm

They worshiped cats. You’re always spying aren’t you? That’s creepy. Unless you’re a sheep dog. In which case I don’t really care. Actually, I really don’t care either way. I feel sorry for you, actually.

Actually.

Don’t you have anything better to do with your life? lol Seriously.

Ichthus77 · February 13, 2022, 5:04pm

Terrible. Good terrible?? Fear & trembling terrible?

Way to write it in crayon.

Ichthus77 · February 13, 2022, 6:57pm

coincidence?
fb.watch/b93msFQfd4/

Meno2 · February 13, 2022, 7:30pm

I can only allude momentarily to a previous allusion
That don’t look to go too close to God for the other(s) may get hurt.

That is in and out of the electromagnetic irony of how it works.

That is a core argument where getting too close changes apparently the negativity of the core if opposites attract .

It creates a dynamic effect; turning it like the wheel to regulate the appropriate distance to the coure.

Alternative relatively the core does not revolve but the others going around it do, as did ancient Ptolemy.

With sincere effort Prometheus need not have burnt up, but the fatality was fore seen and the invention premature.

Since it had to be in an effort to enlighten the surrounding darkness, that message from a willingly sacrificial lamb , reassured the being of the cosmic reappearance

Meno2 · February 13, 2022, 7:33pm

Simulation > coincidence < fear & trembling

Dealing with the coincidentally relevant after the fact.

Ichthus77 · February 13, 2022, 7:39pm

Meno2 · February 13, 2022, 8:30pm

Kukur tihar worshipped dog of nepal

77, hate to seek imprimatur at this point but shall print a menu of bow wow of litany regarding man’'s best friend:

“According to some old beliefs, black dogs are also said to be the reincarnation of the fearsome god, Bhairava. … This dog was Yama who took this form to test the truthfulness of the eldest Pandava, Yudhistir. Yama, the Hindu god of death has four dogs with four eyes guarding his abode.”

"Saint Guinefort was a 13th-century French dog that received local veneration as a folk saint after miracles were reported at his grave. "

And manthy too numerous to mention.

Ichthus77 · February 13, 2022, 8:37pm

ok

Dan1 · February 14, 2022, 5:50am

Ichthus77:

Fall 2021 Summary
It was a wild semester in Dr. Carter’s Information of Meaning course. I hope it is not my last course with the youngest grey haired man I ever met. I loved getting to know him by way of his many stories, jokes, classroom routines, and emails probably more than I loved the subject matter, which is saying a lot. I’m not one to cry in public, but almost want to, thinking about this semester coming to an end. The intention here is not to blub, but to review some of what stands out from the reading assignments this semester, and perhaps tie some of it together. Had I known then what I know now, I would have been recording every song and story Dr. Carter told from the beginning of the semester, and interweaving it into this review. I suspect it would turn into a novel or more to really do the whole thing justice. We have been enriched! His life really should be a movie. Something along the lines of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets Forrest Gump. I can neither confirm nor deny this semester was like the first time you (ahem never) drop acid. Absolutely no one could have prepared me for what was coming. Even if it wasn’t the first time. Mind definitely blown.

Charlie Gere’s Digital Culture covered the history of technology up to 2008. The thing that stands out most to me is that this sort of “rationalization” or “signification” (digitization of information into discrete elements) toward efficiency in communication and storage is not new - although advancing exponentially to a point it will outgrow us if we’re not careful - but is something the human has done since we made our first conscious choice. It is that sort of human culture that produced the digital age, rather than vice versa, and it is the sort of human culture we shape and that can continue to shape our technology.

It’s almost like we were patterned to be this way. As we read in Richard Powers’ The Gold Bug Variations (TGBV), digitization is in our very genes - the ones and zeroes of our discrete alphabet-like elements, the base pairs encoded in our DNA transcribed into RNA, revealing the codons of our unzipped amino acids read like words by ribosomes translating them into our proteins, “and on and on” as Dr. Carter would say.

“The God of the scientists, one is tempted to suggest, created man in his own image and put him into the world with only one commandment: Now try to figure out by yourself how all this was done and how it works,” (23, Hannah Arendt, as quoted in TGBV). Arendt’s thought affirms one of my favorite quotes from Galileo about not feeling obliged to forego the use of reason, senses, and the intellect with which God has endowed us.
“And as seekers, we may well discover from science many interesting answers to the question, ‘How does life work?’ What we cannot discover, through science alone, are the answers to the questions ‘Why is there life anyway?’ and ‘Why am I here?’ … In my view, DNA sequence alone, even if accompanied by a vast trove of data on biological function, will never explain certain special human attributes, such as the knowledge of the Moral Law and the universal search for God,” (88, 140, Dr. Francis Collins, head of The Human Genome Project, writing in The Language of God - unassigned). Dr. Collins believes in an evolutionary process that does not exclude the possibility of God’s intimate involvement at every step of the way (205).
In my view, after learning spring semester how cognitive scientists distinguish between human and animal language, it is like God wrote his programmed language in us and for us the way someone engraves a tiny riddle into a diamond that only a jeweler’s magnifying glass can help you read–but as yet we have no interpreter, no rosetta stone that tells us what it all means. We have only our bodies running a program we didn’t design, like we’re AI. The programmed language in our bodies even corrects for errors in the signal. Who designs a program only our bodies can decode? It has to be someone with a jovial sense of humor who understands the way nerd engineers tick and wanted to give them something fun (but of weighty importance) to figure out, like the riddle at the beginning of The Gold Bug Variations (I assume).

We are wise to heed Dr. Collins’ warning against leaving ethical decisions solely in the hands of scientists. A discussion of social construction/evolution of science and the ethico-political implications is also covered in Pandora’s Hope by Bruno Latour. Perhaps we are wise to prepare for…

…a scenario similar to the one we read about in Earth Abides by George R. Stewart, where much of the world dies from a probably engineered virus, or the scenarios labeled “never” or “unacceptable” in Dr. Collins’ book, including “designer babies with precisely predictable outcomes” (269). Yes, the times they are a-changing, aren’t they? But we’re still dignified individuals who can shape the sort of human culture who can swim against the digital tide, right? Earth Abides was actually the second book we read this semester. The digital age hit the reset button back to the Pleistocene, basically. We had to rethink everything about what organizes our cultural fabric, rip out the seams, and start over. COVID-19 restrictions have forced many of us to reevaluate our values and what we’ll accept as a new normal, and we don’t seem to be learning good lessons. Our liberties are worse for the wear, worse than after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, and science is worse for the wear, especially when it comes to losing public trust. We used to think science was just silly when it couldn’t decide if something was healthy or not - now we think it’s political propaganda and eugenics. It’s as if we stand on a precipice of becoming tools, or becoming aware we’ve been tools for a very long time and will potentially never be pretend-treated like persons again. Digital Culture traced some of the history leading up to this, ironically kicked in to high gear by folks who used to be free-loving hippies. Makes no sense. The worst tyrants have the best intentions. Or some b.s. Oh well.

The two most influential books for me this semester, though, were Pandora’s Hope (Latour), and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Persig. Together with Kant, Hegel, Levinas, etc. they helped me fill out the Venn Diagram thingy I birthed in various courses after a very, very long and complicated pregnancy stretching back to 2007 and even earlier. It synthesizes all my splintered, scattered, disorganized thinking into a tidy, neat, intelligible whole. It digitizes it, if you will. Some say that takes the soul out of everything, but that makes about as much sense as saying sheet music begets silence (save that one soundless song Dr. Carter played at the beginning of the semester, paired with abstract art that was all white, LOL!!!). Nah. Sheet music helps you play… and if there are others around, it helps you all get on the same sheet of music, unless you prefer cacophony. First the sheet music (or at least the order it represents - we can always improvise)… then the actual playing of music… then the dancing. If we choose. And of course it will always be a work in progress. It was sort of designed that way.

A Word on References

I loathe doing references. I would accept demerits in order to avoid doing references. If I ever get as far as an actual thesis, I will probably be paying someone to do my references. Say no to references. Please don’t flunk me for plagiarism. If somebody wants to know the publisher and year, that’s why God made Google.

Ask me for my updated Venn DIagram thingy if you’re curious. I’m actually going to start working on it as soon as I submit this. It’s the one I submitted for the midterm. It is mostly still the same, just needs some tweaking. Maybe I’ll share it without invitation when I’m done, depending on how fast I finish. Thank you for teaching me this semester. Live forever.

I read your whole OP.
Good philosophers tend to feel refreshing and clear.

Ichthus77 · February 14, 2022, 6:21am

During that semester I was mixing science and philosophy in some of my written stuff. I was starting to think that was weird about myself until I found some old papers on similar topics, and I was doing the same stuff back then. It hit me …dude, I’ve been weird for a really long time. I’m really glad he helped me find that part of myself again. Weird is good.

Ichthus77 · August 4, 2022, 3:21pm

stuff