Great feedback, thanks. I fixed the title issue. I had been leaving it hidden as it had been appearing in a poor position. But I’ve able to fix the positioning now. The constellar nodes area does need development. They are based on a “primary” constellation, not the one you entered through. Solving this to improve how the EKM works is going to be a bit more involved.
Edit: Suppose each node had within it a list of constellations it was related to and the related nodes for an identified primary constellation? That would go some way towards solving that issue, right?
I don’t think a primary constellation is necessary; if it’s desired that’s different, but it wouldn’t be required to solve the problem I identified.
I think what I wanted was to see which constellation I had come in from, in which case, a standard breadcrumb trail might help, on top of showing all constellations the node is related to/belongs to.
Styling should be fairly consistent too as of past few minutes. See anything else, please let me know. (E.g. The associated constellations are always a work in progress. Suggestions for better groups of associations for each node are welcome.)
Yes, the way I see this is the contemporary processing of ontological freedom into nominal freedoms.
Agreed, quality of being (which is to be healthy in the most holistic sense) has become largely culturally illegible. We see quality as something to be consumed - to have, rather than something to manifest - to be.
I suppose because quality has been exteriorised as an analgesic (defined negatively as the absence of pain rather than a positive state in itself), the inner call to quality - the discomfort at being functionalized into chasing analgesics also becomes the enemy. And this dynamic feeds itself until and unless a dramatic enough break occurs that initiates self-understanding.
I think, again, because it has been made culturally illegible. We’ve lost the "scent of time’’ as Han might put it, and, therefore, time is just another commodity to be used up. Rather than inhabit time, we’re trained to escape it.
I think the root cause is something deeper than liberalism. It seems to stem from the fact that as a species we’ve found ways to proliferate and connect (through technological advance) that require concomitant advances in efficiency that naturally homogenise, placate, and control us. Liberalism tends to go along with this and neoliberalism makes it global, but it’s not as if ostensibly illiberal regimes like China don’t manage perfectly well, perhaps even better in this zero-level ideology of consumption.
I needed to look him up, but yes, there’s something in that. It reminds me of Franco Berardi’s call for “poiesis and rhythm” as a means to escape the semiosphere, a call to slow down and refuse its constant demands on our attention. (Only with more hard physical labor in Hahn’s case).
Agreed.
Kind of. I think it’s also the fact that when you have exteriorized your identity as a commodity, you can easily have beliefs without identifying with them. What matters more is that you have the ‘right’ beliefs rather than any line from belief to praxis. Something like: I’ve done the believing bit, now it’s time to move on and satisfy the usual desires. And as long as the social field facilitates this, it will continue.
I think maybe the complication here is that we want it both ways: we want to be able to say we believe just as long as nothing changes. And I think this is a deeper bind and goes back both to your point about why contemporary ideology so easily consumes alternative discourse as well as to our lack of a notion of health (or as I’ve put it, the contemporary illegibility of quality of being). That is, we do genuinely want to believe something, but we don’t want the risk of being held to our belief. We want belief without true identity because, again, we are trained to see ourselves as outside ourselves, as a commodity - something we can functionalize and consume. The idea of actually stepping into ourselves without the cushion of that perspective (a perspective that parasitises that which we would step into) has again largely been made socially illegible. There seems nothing to step into. Everything is outside us to be grasped at.
Absolutely. And that’s a very apt metaphor for the difference (as I would put it) between nominal and ontological freedom. We can be nominally free and do nothing but constantly arrange our lives into different heaps because we never slow down enough to realize we are still just a heap. Or we can develop enough (painful) self-awareness to realize we need to build our castles even if there’s no one there to see them.
Really great points. I try to respond to the rest later.
I guess I should clarify that re “liberalism” I really mean more of the broader post-Enlightenment liberal ethos, which tends to think of values in general as too speculative to be given a role in policy, education, etc. (except via procedural or functionalist work arounds; and yet obviously it must assume values, since no state or culture can be truly valueless). Obviously, the core assumptions of naturalism and empiricism dominate here too. However, I identify liberalism, as a culture, as the primary target because lots of people are not empiricists or naturalists, and yet they act like they are because cultural and institutional norms tend to privatize any violation of those epistemic and metaphysical assumptions (essentially, a shadow epistemology and metaphysics is assumed in the realm of policy and education, more by default than positive affirmation).
But Marxism has inherited much of this, and China has generally suppressed its indigenous philosophical tradition quite a bit, and has attempted to institute similar values (albeit in their own way).
In this context, I don’t think it’s surprising that the Islamic world has been most resistant to this culture. Islam began dealing with voluntarism, fideism, and nominalism even before the Latin West, and so they had their own solutions worked out and didn’t import Western ones the way much of the world did (to the same degree anyhow).
Yeah, and I guess this goes to Han’s point in Agony about the need for genuine receptivity. I found someone else using the Lego analogy in a text on Neo-Confucian hylomorphism, and a point there, that comes through clearer in Chinese thought, is that the Legos simply cannot fit together without the voids that make up their center. They need the receptivity of the Other to fit together at all. This is certainly in Latin, Byzantine, and Islamic thought, but it tends to get washed out by the focus on actuality.
Whereas, if the Legos somehow merged when fit together (the assimilation of the Other to the Self) they lose the freedom to rearrange themselves and change their form, because now they are just one solid block. Every additional block must now be assimilated to the existing block (the Self).
That makes sense. Post-enlightenment thought wants to find its footing in a universalism that is inherently ungrounded, and that’s not limited to “liberals” but is generally ingrained in contemporary social structures.
On your further thoughts re the lego analogy, do you have any recommended sources on that?
In Jung’s chapter “The Modern Spiritual Problem” he describes modern psychological inquiry into the psyche and unconscious as reactive to moderization and loss of spirituality, particularly influenced by the destructive power of technology from the first world war. He had, of course, yet to see what was to come.
The point being, he argues, that part of our general advancement includes both technological advancement into the material world and advancement into our inner psychic selves. That is to say, your demand of creating protective mechanisms for the psyche to combat technological takeover can be seen as part of human advancement as well. It’s not a counterforce to technology, but part of the greater picture of human advancement.
Our foray into human psychology and its unconscious drivers is, just like our foray into technology. It’s all new inquiry.
As in, we’re that incredible of a species, not only constituted for causing great external change, but also so constituted that we self preserve our inner states.
You touch a subject I personnaly been studying for years. I think a profound psychologically sane re-organization of society on many levels is necessary (this include the technological level obviously) - espescially in the western world. The idea of enlightening people’s habilities to think, make connections and more, capitalizing on the present technological situation, is a noble endeavour.
It is interesting to me to use Sillicon Valley-inspired algorithmic persuasion techniques to better serve people - and attempts have been done in the past. The guru of technological persuasion of the early years of Big Tech, BJ Fogg, have created a website back in the day - The behavior wizard - to help change behaviors and habits. While it is said to have been tested by his lab to be efficient, its popularity right now is close to none (as un-updated website’s design clrearly suggests and also no one ever heard of it, did you?). I know other people are trying to find different ways to capitalize on big tech algorithms for greater good. Patreon’s CEO’s I’m Building an Algorithm That Doesn’t Rot Your Brain - New York Times - Opinions for exemple. There is of course the technological ethicists that push for such endeavours. There might be more people trying out there for sure.
I wonder however where are the psychological triggers of your UX in the EKM? Which metrics do you take into consideration for the fulfillment of the objectives of this “soul machine”? And also what is your target audience? Do you have plans for eventually adverstising/communicating your creation and broadening your audience? Because I see the texts and presentations in the terminal are niche and difficult to approach subjects for the common population (if not even some of us here), and as of right now it seems to me that it is a plateform to write essays with some (targeting?) algorithms (which is cool in its own respect, I mean I’m on a philosophy forum for a reason). The advantage of Big Tech companies is that they have simple and relatively low amounts of metrics to boost. Which metrics do you rely on to improve both the machine and fulfill your objectives (aka create that symbiosis)? I might not fully understand your objectives, can you enlighten me?
If you mean concerning promoting broader use, then I am not sure how to overcome the Adorno via @Jamal paradox, or the AVJP as I now call it, that pursues me like my own legs do when I run. That is, the mechanism for spreading good ideas is also a mechanism for capturing them in bad ones. The problem isn’t quite the ideas themselves but the mode of our relationship to them as defined by our mode of relationship to ourselves. You can take a person out of commodities but you can’t so easily take self-commodification out of a person.
Yes but that is like stating that you want to use modern techniques without using them. It is rather the outcomes that you despise or rather should despise, not the techniques in their essence. We can derive variable forms from the essence of these techniques and steer them, transform them to change our relationship with ideas. That means not to toss the effective techniques away (because they are definitely the most influential techniques out there), but to change the direction in which our psychology and behaviors are being engineered, inspire yourself from them in a way that is actually providng measurable results in allegedly more healthy grounds. The transition needs to be more smooth than disconnected/violent with the present systems and customs if it is to be succesful. A compromise between what we think is optimal and the current situation. I humbly think you can aim to make such improvement to your EKM.
Maybe, and believe me I appreciate the support. I tend to think that we can’t pre-posit events of fundamental social change, that they can only retroactively posit us as part of their causal mechanisms. So, here ‘trying’ in a misaligned context may only make things worse by putting us out of tune with the transformed context we wish to be a part of. It may be better to remain misaligned with the present in order to be in tune with a possible future even at the cost of appearing not to actively work towards it (because such work is, as mentioned, dependent on and captured by just the context we wish to subvert or overcome).
(Edit: To bring this down to earth, it’s not far off Bukowski’s “Don’t try” btw).
I understand, but to succesfully make such a change with an efficiency that surpasses the current ways of doing, it would need the arrival of a nearly miraculous knowledge we don’t yet have. We can rather inspire ourselves both from the existent techniques and from something outside of the habitual context and culture in which they are used. The problem Big Tech has is that they have very narrow visions due to the culture and the persistent pressure coming from their business models. As a consequence they are often really short-term sighted and alienate themselves from the interests of the public, so that the business and the relationship with investors thrive (if you ever been personnaly in the tech start-up world, you can also testify of this beyond what is said in books). Psychological engineering of the future would need to have more of a broad vision (taking inspiration from multiple sources, not just the mainstream tech world), be long term sighted, and foresee the subtle but nonetheless existing global advantages in taking care of people’s interests at large.
The answer is almost readable from the paragraph you quoted. The slightly longer version is that capitalism is the most sustainably efficient ideological technique for processing the following conversion: the organic / sensuous >> abstract / formal >> social / institutional. That is, for turning people into ideology. Therefore it is the “best” ideology; therefore it wins.
The root of this though, in my view, is not capitalism itself but technique (as the abstract force that concretely realizes itself in technology). Technique becomes more and more important as human groups grow in size (which they can only do by developing farming and building techniques, for example). It becomes more important because the variables needed to control larger groups quickly multiply as interpersonal connections, in accordance with network effects, grow.
This, of course, is self-reinforcing; technique breeds the need for more technique, and so groups become bigger and bigger; we get cities and civilisations, then a “global village” and technique becomes ever more refined, through more sophisticated technology, at creating citizens that have internalized the behaviour necessarty to further its proliferation.
Capitalism is just the version of technique that has won out at political organisation and control. It has been selected and there is nothing in current circumstances to suggest a viable alternative. There would have to be some unforseen and probably unforseeable ‘Event’ to make one possible.
Mark Fisher’s “Capitalist Realism”; Jacques Ellul’s “The Technological Society”; and Zizek’s analyses of capitalism across multiple books are good reference points if you’re interested in this.
Also well I think I wasn’t clear enough (cause I was implying something way too subtle without making any explicit trace), but actually I was thinking that you could make a machine that “lures” people into thinking deeper and deeper and make connections. Like a hierarchical targeting where it begins with something close to reel-ish philosophy if you allow me the expression and then attract the person into more and more complex/rich knowledge and thinking, using the modified techniques vampirized from AKMs.
Kind of a rough draft I wrote quickly but you get the idea (I guess?).
