Message from @Garbage

Discord ID: 598520705788936193


2019-07-10 14:04:43 UTC  

So there is no one-to-one correspondence between genes and thoughts.

2019-07-10 14:04:58 UTC  

In other words, no combinations of genes can be said to cause a certain thought.

2019-07-10 14:05:38 UTC  

This is an entirely different kind of thing. It exists, but it is not a thing which can be understood using biological models.

2019-07-10 14:06:29 UTC  

It's like 'aggression'. You can model something like it using biology, but only a set kind of 'aggression'. One can be 'cruel to be kind' or even 'kind to be cruel', for example.

2019-07-10 14:07:04 UTC  

Such an emotion or way of thinking cannot be wholly fitted into a biological model because it's too vague and too flexible.

2019-07-10 14:07:55 UTC  

You might be able to model brute-force 'aggression', yes, but what about the purposes of this aggression, the uses of such aggression and so on?

2019-07-10 14:08:20 UTC  

What if the most aggressive thing to do is to *not* be 'aggressive' in the usual ways?

2019-07-10 14:09:51 UTC  

Concepts by themselves run away and explode into many things. We must consciously understand what they were like at different times, either in our thoughts, or in terms of concrete history, or both of these.

2019-07-10 14:10:50 UTC  

We can then split these concepts up and differentiate between them. That old 'aggression' is not the same as the new 'aggression', for example.

2019-07-10 14:12:01 UTC  

We already have concepts to describe these kinds of aggression, from passive-aggression to pacifism - but if we didn't have those, we would have no way of appreciating differences between the stages of things which change over time.

2019-07-10 14:12:49 UTC  

So we need to split these ideas open. It's like splitting 'fundamental' particles in a sense.

2019-07-10 14:13:40 UTC  

This is why I brought up the liar paradox.

2019-07-10 14:13:43 UTC  

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/360983468286410764/598517211807744000/unknown.png

2019-07-10 14:14:40 UTC  

The sentence 'this sentence is not true' contradicts itself and turns into something meaningless but only if we try to understand it as an unchanging thing.

2019-07-10 14:15:40 UTC  

**It is only absurd for those who have not yet grasped that the meaning of the sentence changes over time with each passing thought. When we look at how it contradicts itself, we find *two valid states* which, for a given moment, it can conform to: being true and being false.**

2019-07-10 14:18:05 UTC  

And there is also movement between being true and being false that we see in this picture.

2019-07-10 14:19:08 UTC  

This is closely linked to Hegel's dialectic: contradictory things are not just absurdities within a given system of thought, but they are things which necessitate a conscious division of the states between which they move - which implies that a new system of thought must be developed, often using pieces of the previous one.

2019-07-10 14:22:33 UTC  

**When applied to ourselves as people in general, it means that we cannot say that we are fundamentally determined by something which we can't ever be conscious of, because in our thoughts we can not only confront absurdities and meaningless things - dragging meaningful things out of them - but also, given the explosive paradox that I mentioned earlier, there's no way that we are static entities in any sense.**

2019-07-10 14:25:22 UTC  

***We cannot say that we are forever and causally determined by something that's outside of our sphere of reason and meaning - Marx's World of Man, Lacan's Symbolic Order - because then we can no longer say that we're casually determined by it since even if we came to know what truly determined us, we would already have understood it and we'd be beyond it control because we cannot fully understand ourselves at the present moment. __It becomes something which we just cannot control at that present moment.__***

2019-07-10 14:26:24 UTC  

So there is no responsibility upon anything else to do something about it or not. It is solely down to us.

2019-07-10 14:27:36 UTC  

It means that 'biology' is not an ultimate excuse to hide behind, since the only thing that stops us from modifying this is our present incompetence at changing it.

2019-07-10 14:28:28 UTC  

We do not have to have these bodies. Our subjectivities accelerate far beyond this, and they at least mostly can be preserved even if our biology is changed.

2019-07-10 14:29:21 UTC  

To say that we are essentially biological as subjects is not just to misrecognise ourselves, but to *insist* on a certain kind of misrecognition.

2019-07-10 14:30:32 UTC  

It is to ignore what we actually are as subjects: voids, *creative nothings* (to use Stirner's term), processes set in an ever-more diverse kind of motion.

2019-07-10 14:33:00 UTC  

This insisted misrecognition always leads to some kind of exclusionary politics - if people are fundamentally constituted by a combination of roles, for example, then *of course* it follows that to not follow that combination of roles would be to destroy people.

2019-07-10 14:34:11 UTC  

To uphold the existence of anyone who, by those standards, does not fulfil their personhood (i.e. how well they suit any of the roles in existence), would be to pour poison into the ocean of society according to such politics.

2019-07-10 14:36:38 UTC  

These standards built upon such insisted misrecognition are consciously conceived of by people in their thoughts and discourse to some degree or another. This is why there is a need to speak about 'liberty', 'purity' and all that shit in the first place and argue about it to convince people to do it on an intellectual, theoretical level.

2019-07-10 14:38:14 UTC  

It's never simply because of things like 'oh, they killed my brother' - it's about what that means and how people use such events to convince each other of the success of pursuing some political programme. This is not something which can be wholly understood using sociobiology, which at most can only target ranges of specific cases which are then generalised in theoretical models.

2019-07-10 14:41:41 UTC  

People fuck shit up not because it relates to something which forever floats out of their control, *but because of something which they cannot currently control at the most granular present moment*.

2019-07-10 14:43:07 UTC  

**Hence the insistence on not controlling that for the sake of something which they imagine to be beyond them is a sign of DEFEATISM.**

2019-07-10 14:43:51 UTC  

In light of the death of determinism. saying 'a few people control the masses' ignores the things that 'the masses/people' do to each other and themselves.

2019-07-10 14:48:02 UTC  

We keep fucking ourselves up by subscribing to unchallenged defeatisms regarding the failures of ourselves - the irony is that we are not defeatist about such defeatisms. We still want to cling onto this, because the trauma of overcoming that is something which we assure ourselves is best to avoid. *We still have confidence in something, but it is something which, as an exclusive aim, will always eventually betray us as a political programme.*

2019-07-10 14:49:08 UTC  

Questions like 'who is 'worthy' enough? Why should there not be a more extreme restriction on who gets to feed?' explode out of such politics.

2019-07-10 14:50:56 UTC  

This is why the politics of exclusive interests (people acting *as* classes, sexes, races and so on) is really a submission to ghosts of our making, but not ghosts which we want to control.

2019-07-10 14:54:43 UTC  

Furthermore, because we relate to each other indirectly with such politics - as commodity sellers, people who like the Olympics and so on, rather than as people who only do things in a certain way *at the present moment* and have at least *some* control over themselves hence some responsibility - we honour things which we unconsciously subscribe and submit to in our practice. At the very least, we act as if we're not conscious of it.

2019-07-10 14:55:40 UTC  

For example, *capital* as a process.

2019-07-10 14:56:28 UTC  

A tumour, a runaway thing which dictates the successes and failures of what we do. It is the big Other of capitalism - the thing which sets the stage of our politics.

2019-07-10 14:57:19 UTC  

"This is an entirely different kind of thing. It exists, but it is not a thing which can be understood using biological models." It can and it has, here is one example

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/360983468286410764/598528182815293441/MAOA_repeat.png

2019-07-10 14:57:52 UTC  

But what is the dimension of the meaning of shooting and stabbing?

2019-07-10 14:58:27 UTC  

I could pull an infinity of studies which claim that some genes lead to certain behaviours which manifest themselves in certain ways in our society.

2019-07-10 14:59:45 UTC  

No alleles casually determine us as subjects. This does nothing to deal with the paradox that I brought up earlier.