Comments by Neal Jansons

I think that whole mindset i learning their lesson right now. Watch them flail as their former winning strategies turn to nooses to hang themselves with

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Oh, and for the record: "Ishtar".

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NO! NO! It will be radical awesomeness! (clutches Serpentor figure saved from childhood and sings "Cobra-la-la-la-la" softly to himself)

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rofl

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I know, it's epic

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Like that old King Missile song: "If some of us were wind-up toys, we would have to learn how to wind each other up, we would have to learn to wind ourselves up."

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Well, however epic that sounds, it isn't possible. The best we can hope for, given what we now know about how little of our mind is actually available to introspection, is to become our own programmers and to have good dreams.

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Yes, that is essentially what I am saying. If we can be brainwashed or accidentally come to believe things that make our realities suck, we can also brainwash ourselves and arrange our experiences such that we come to believe things that make our realities rock. This is, essentially, what I believe the psychodramatic rituals of magick and religion are about: creating and reinforcing a particular reality-bubble to be inhabited by those who participate in the narrative.

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Thus I argue that, while it is true that ideologies have driven history, part of the reason they did so is because it was possible for it to be "true", thus worth fighting, killing, and dying for. If we abandon the notion that any abstract statement (barring formalized systems like logic which define truth-conditions; we already agreed we made up the rules there, and we already know they have problems, see Quine, Godel, et al) can have a truth-value and that they are like choosing chocolate over vanilla (a matter of taste and preference) and abandon the folk psychology that our stories in our heads correspond to the world and thus some one story must be "the case" in the same way there must be a truth-value to the classic "Schnei ist weiss" or "the cat is on the mat" examples. If we abandon the idea of an abstraction being "true" and merely address the issue of it being useful, much of the nastiness you describe becomes negated in principle. No one is going to kill over religions when a religion is chosen out of preference...

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I agree completely, though I cringe at extending our notion of concern to other species without them being able to self-report...the Problem of Incorrigibility and all that. My thought is that there are two distinct ontologically valid realms, but that the abstract is predicated on the concrete and dependent upon it (if not minds, universe; if not universe, not minds). The abstract realm is where magical (or magickal, if you catch the reference) thinking works, because belief to a large extent determines the facts. Since we know how to create and destroy many beliefs now, thanks to our narratives of neurology and psychology, I think we should use these technologies to change our beliefs to be such that we enjoy better narratives. We need an augmentative psychology.

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ROFL

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I am not disagreeing with that. However, the moment we try to make a narrative about what that impact is, or what it means, or how it relates to the rest of the universe around it, we end up biting our own tail. We are navel-gazing. Making up narratives to explain other narratives about other narratives. I am not, in any way, discounting or negative the real effects that happen to arise from these abstractions; I am arguing for a moderate form of pragmatism. To whatever degree our narratives do not rub up against reality, they are completely made up and simply a matter of choice, so we should choose those that best serve us. It is pragmatic to believe ideas rule history, I suppose, but the fact that all of these ideologies rise and fall due to that damnable, accidental drive of physical events (consider if Hitler had, as another historical accident, died of pneumonia in the trenches of WWI or gotten brain damage from lead poisoning in his youth) makes it very unlikely that ideologies drive things so much as our need to...

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Huh...That's weird. Is it a dependency issue? Haven't been very interested in Chrome so haven't looked at the code. Seems like it should be easy to fix.

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I agree with all of that. But because of the nature of your claim, that ideas rule history, we must examine whether ideas have ontological freight beyond our own psyches and conversation. My claim is that there is a qualitative difference between abstractions like ideas and the actual reality the ideas are about. I would also agree that some ideas being the most adopted make certain other narratives difficult or impossible to participate it. European jingoism (an abstraction) being adopted by a larger, more powerful majority who was better at dictating the discussion, made other narratives like, perhaps, an African golden age or Cherokee renaissance, difficult or impossible to engage in. However, the reason for this always comes down to things that are real, that bear ontological freight. Ideas didn't make that conquest happen...superior physical force did so. Ideas made that physical result possible, but only possible. Narratives give us a skeleton to hang our experiences on, but without the experiences, the really real...

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To make Firefox work at all, or just not be lame? Admittedly, Firefox with all my plugins is not stable.

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