Post Religious Theology as a Change in Terminology, or, you can lead a horse to water ...

The stubborn horse that refuses to open its mouth (mind) in this case is personified in the 'secular humanist'. Unable to perceive the irrelevance of atheism in the context of a post religious (non theist) era, the secular humanist hangs on to a rigid ideology with the same basis as that of the fundamentalist theists, who on their side are also unable and unwilling to recognize that the reality in which they live is post-Christian and that it's no longer a question of apologetics for faith. Apologetics are worthless in the face of the complete irrelevance of theism itself.

Asking thinking to speak on the level of scientism or religionism is holding it to a standard that doesn't measure up to it.

The root theo preexisted the notion of a substantial being referred to as 'a' god, it was purely verbal with no nominal formulation. Theo in the current context refers simply to the 'Event'. Study of the Event is the ground of studies in any particular regional ontology.

The area of theology that in a religious context studied 'a' god, its implications and correspondences or contradictions with religious tenet, becomes the study of the evental, the transformative, a purely verbal posit with no nominal (or noumenal) formulation.

The other facets of theology, namely theology of the psyche and theology of nature encounter similar changes in meaning on this side of the epochal break.

Theology of the psyche, of course, includes all the 'human sciences', depending on whether one is discussing the individual or collective psyche. Theology of nature includes all the 'natural sciences'. Each sub-study of psyche or nature has to be re-grounded in the evental, only then can questions of appropriate methodology be attended to.

Reformulating things in this terminology sounds alien to many, if not perverse. But aside from the important advantage gained by tossing the cartesian language and its resulting subjectification, isolation and mechanization of beings a priori reduced to meaningless objects, it self-excludes the contingent of closed minded ideologues that have turned 'science' into scientism, a religion of its own with all the negative features of fundamentalist religionism without even the possibility of forgiveness for one's anti-scientistic sins, the most deadly of which is, of course, any questioning of the tenets of scientism.

Thinking is tired of stubborn horses that won't open their mouths to drink. They are welcome to their ideology of a reductive universe dehydrated of meaning.

Thinking is and always has been heretical. It is time for heresy to be honest about what its real opponent and opposite consists in. That opposite is, and alwaya has been, Stupidity.

Post Religious Theology, Fundamental Ontology and Non Philosophy

Some years ago I heard a minister in the United Church of Canada deliver a sermon discussing the meaning of Christianity in a post Christian era. Heidegger's early description of his enterprise as 'fundamental ontology', while in many ways abandoned as his work progressed, retains some cogency as a descriptive. Laruelle's Non-Philosophy, by its nature a quirky term (certainly Laruelle doesn't intend his work as a hatred of wisdom), while it may distance him from some of Heidegger's early, necessary, but temporary enmeshment with metaphysics, in other ways intends many of the same tendencies of thought as the later Heidegger, a Heidegger of course only possible on the basis of the accomplishments of the earlier. Non-Philosophy's odd relation with thinking as the end of philosophy seems at times merely an unnecessary formalization.

The line between philosophy in its non-metaphysical guise and speculative theology in a situation where god as a being is no longer posited blurs and recoils upon itself in multiple ways. Theology without a substantive being as its posit is in no way the same thing as the 'Death of God" theology, which remains within the posit of a substantive being, simply one that is no longer present but only past. Heidegger's 'thinking as thanking' implies a theological thankfulness that is no longer directed at a substantive being. Thinking is thanking no-thing, then, yet it remains a thanking. Saying is obligated by no-thing, but the obligation remains.

If anything that obligation grows all the stronger.

The revealing that is technology has already revealed a good deal to a nuanced eye. That much of the revelation took place in the most technical of sciences first then is not surprising. While other sciences meander between cartesian and postmodern definitions of their basic posits, or have lost contact with their base posit to the degree that each 'theory' is really another attempt at founding the science itself without understanding the nature of foundation, at least in the quantum and thermodynamic areas of physics the metaphors of metaphysics have had no meaning for a fair time.

Philosophy it seems, by its nature, is agnostic. Is the philosopher, though, also by nature a Gnostic? Is it possible to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis, today reincarnated as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's hands, the impotence and uselessness of understanding wonderfully and wittily unable to share any transparency with the irrelevance and thoughtlessness of explanation?

Theism and atheism continue their bickering as two sides of the same coin, still probabilistically coming up heads or tails in their coveted determinism, but it's fiat money that lands on the table with a flat sound like the aluminium coins of the old East Germany, and like those coins, guaranteed by a World that no longer exists.

Behind all of the madness (pairing its nails perhaps?), and biding its time, the post religious collection of stories wrought with a complexity and severity beyond any testaments, Finnegan's Wake, reincarnates the Word itself in its newfound, though ageless, unsubstantial power.

Dawkins' Intellectual Dishonesty, or Why Dawkins Should Be Sent Down

This quote is from Dawkins 'rebuttal' to Not in Our Genes, a book by Lewontin and others that criticizes Dawkins obsessiveness with the genome as the only means of inheritance.

"So, life is complex and its causal factors interact. If that is "dialectical", big deal.
But no, it seems that "interactionism", though good in its way, is not quite
"dialectical". And what is the difference?

" . . . First (interactionism) supposes the alienation of organism and
the environment.... second, it accepts the ontological priority of the
individual over the collectivity and therefore of the epistemological
sufficiency of..." (emphasis mine).

There is no need to go on. This sort of writing appears to be intended to
communicate nothing. Is it intended to impress, while putting down smoke to
conceal the fact that nothing is actually being said?"

After reading Popper's quilt quoting of Hegel to make points he couldn't have made if he had any comprehension of Hegel whatsoever, it no longer surprises me to see this kind of intellectual dishonesty from a supposed scientist. But let me continue.

Quoting half a sentence, then claiming that "nothing is actually being said" is the height of "putting down smoke". The sentence chosen is interesting, if only psychologically, because it is at the crux of the most cogent criticism of Dawkins' views. If he does quote the sentence fully and the reader does understand the terms involved it will at least put Dawkins' enterprise into severe question in the reader's mind. Dawkins' ideas on the genome as replicator, as with all simplistic natural selection, view the environment as a fixed, external reality that is not affected by the organism as much as vice versa. Dawkins' emphasis on the genome as the focus of evolution with the organism playing the role of mere vehicle is precisely a flagrant dismissal of the notion of ontological priority.

Now that the human genome project has demonstrated that genes in fact are evental, and behave more like elements of a language, meaning something specific only in an actual cellular and organism/environmental context, Dawkins' actual views on the genome are no longer materially cogent in any case.

But that his views' lack of cogency originated in unquestioned assumptions that proved dead wrong combined with a lack of comprehension of basic philosophy (thinking), together with his intellectual dishonesty in this feeble attempt to defend himself from accurate criticism, leaves his views on other matters suspect, if not to be completely ignored. If an undergraduate at Oxford handed in a paper with the above he would not simply be failed, but 'sent down' (i.e. kicked out of the university permanently) for intellectual dishonesty, yet a man capable of publishing this in a scholarly journal was given the Simonyi Professorship at the same school?

It's time to take note of Dawkins' intellectual dishonesty along with his scientific ignorance and ideological rigidity as the major characterizations of his work. Together they add up to the Dawkins we know - the loudmouthed charlatan who is determined to turn science into a religion.

Quote taken from Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature
by Steven Rose, Leon J. Kamin and R.C. Lewontin (Pantheon Books, 1985)
Reviewed by Richard Dawkins in "Sociobiology: the debate continues", New
Scientist 24 January 1985
http://dba.fc.ul.pt/evo/textos/Dawkins.pdf

Preface to Book, or Why Phenomenology Overrides Science in the Study of the Psyche

Studying Art History, my wife spent a good deal of time looking at various things such as statues of the Buddha in various cultures. As part of these studies the abilities of the natural sciences were utilized, as well as the methodologies of history and art history in particular.

Natural science, for its part, can tell you many interesting things about a statue of a Buddha. It can give you its measurements to uncanny detail, its composition, approximate age, the probable locale from which the stone was quarried and the distance to where the statue was located, the exact physical latitude and longitude of that location, etc. I could go on and on.

And yet for all the natural sciences can add to the repertoire of knowledge an Art Historian has regarding a particular statue of the Buddha located in a particular place in the far east, it all remains a more or less irrelevant addendum. To those not familiar with the different sciences, their different realms of study, methodologies and applicability this may seem either simply odd, or part of some “unscientific” plot to keep the natural sciences out of art history.

So what is it that the natural sciences cannot tell us about the particular object of study that we have in front of us, a statue of the Buddha from any given ancient eastern culture?

Firstly, as an object, there is nothing theoretically or practically of importance that the natural sciences cannot tell us. True, on a quantum level there are things that are indeterminate even theoretically, but they don't really impact the type of knowledge that art history is. But we didn't begin by discussing an 'object'. We began by discussing a statue, in this case of the Buddha.

No matter how accurate the natural sciences can describe the objects form and material composition, nothing in its properties can determine for science that the object is, in fact, a statue. 'Statue' is not a determination of an object at all, it is a determination of a thing. 'Things' always exist in and for a World of comprehension and form part of that world of context and meaning. The 'historical' part of art history deals with this statue precisely in its context and meaning as a thing, and with a rigor unknown to the simple exactness of natural science attempts to reconstruct some of that World of meaning that gave birth to the thing.

We aren't finished with the statue by examining its thingliness in the context of its world (or ours), though. It is not simply a statue, but a statue of the Buddha. History exhausts itself in its determinations of the statue as situated, contextualized thing, but we are looking at it through the methodologies of art history, not simple history. As art the statue is a Work, a work that reveals the Buddha by presenting the Buddha.

As a result of a myth that crept into simplistic art history at some point, and has been difficulty to stamp out, there is an idea that art somehow 'progresses'. Concomitant with that myth is the myth that art is by and large 'representational' in nature. It results, in the worst cases, in the notion that pictorial art was some type of primitive method of photography that 'progressed' to higher and higher realism but has now been replaced by 'real' photography and continues as some sort of 'cultural' curiosity.

In contrast to this, the statue of the Buddha does not represent, because nothing was presented formerly that could then be re-presented. It is also not symbolic, it does not function as a symbol of something that somehow exists similarly but differently elsewhere as in the semiotic signifier/signified pairing. It makes as little sense to say that the statue is not the Buddha as it does to say that the statue is the Buddha. The statue reveals the Buddha. It also makes no sense to say, well, perhaps it does for Buddhists, but not for rational westerners. Belief is not at issue in the statue, because it was not at issue in the World that the statue hails from. Belief implies the choice between belief and doubt. One can, I suppose, doubt that trees exist, but it doesn't make one a more rational westerner, it makes one of interest to psychiatrists. The same goes for the statue of the Buddha within its context.

Why did natural science have no means of looking at the meaning either of the thing as a statue, or the work as the Buddha? Natural science doesn't deal with things, or works, fundamentally it deals with objects, which is to say it doesn't deal with meaning, understanding, or truth, but with description, explanation, and correctness.

I thought Dawkins had embarrassed himself enough ...

Quantum Fluctuations

I had thought the implosion of Dawkins "biological" theories would have been enough for this pseudo-scientific charlatan, however as the above link demonstrates, he's not above bringing in misrepresentations of physics in order to attempt to convince a public even less familiar with the notions of quantum mechanics than they are with modern evolutionary theory.

The following is my response to this latest video stream of bullshit:

I'm a bit baffled by how Dawkins and his cohort manage to conflate relativity theory with quantum mechanics, while physicists around the world have been trying for nearly a hundred years to solve the contradictions between the two. One of the main difficulties remaining for relativity theory is that as a theory that systematizes the universe as a whole, it becomes subject to Godel's incompleteness theorem, i.e. any self-consistent system implies the existence of a meta system. QM does not have this issue as it does not propose that the universe as a whole is systematic. However, let me set straight a few of the specifics proffered by this particular pseudo-scientific charlatan.

The total amount of energy in the universe we presently occupy is approximately 10^120 x 10^140 (including degrees of gravitational freedom) quanta, multiplied by the amount of energy per quantum. Sorry to dump water on your drum roll, but each quantum contains an infinite amount of energy, not zero energy. Any infinite amount of anything placed into a finite container will, of course, constantly spill over, creating a measurable, testable release of energy. This energy has indeed been measured and tested, and is known as the Casimir Effect. The University of Leicester, in particular, has proposed sending a probe into space in order to test whether the energy from the Casimir effect could be utilized.

The quantum void, as well, is not nothing, although it is certainly not a 'thing' either. The base particles of matter have no mass and are only differentiated from void by form (angle and spin). Odd isn't it that the ultimate materialism winds up, at the quantum level, being dependent on form - or to put it as Heisenberg did "Plato was right after all.". Mass comes about if/when these particles move in a certain fashion. Rather than being "space" the void could better be pictured as a seething layer of massless particles constantly being created and destroyed.

In fact the void bears a striking resemblance to some facets of Eckhart's mysticism as well as confirming Aristotle in the notion that space is illusory. Put simply, as Aristotle said "unformed matter and the void are not differentiable and therefore the same.". Eckhart's description of the godhead, originally a gnostic term, was that the godhead had no attributes that could be posited of it - i.e. no positive attributes. Eckhart's godhead, then, would also not be differentiable from the void.

Please note that I'm not proposing an intelligent universe, or a personally involved one. The crap Dawkins is displaying, though, proposes through a pile of pseudo scientific crap what is obvious to anybody sensibly familiar with dialectic - i.e. for the void to have self-identity it has to be compared to its opposite, i.e. its difference. The universe may well be the difference that provides the void with its selfsameness as void. Given that Identity and Difference underly all logic as well as all dialectic it would be hardly surprising to learn that this "law of thought" is actually a law of the universe.

Perhaps with the results of the human genome project having pulled the rug out from under Dawkins' genetic bullshit he now has to try to dazzle with his lack of knowledge of elementary physics instead. (in case you're unfamiliar with the results, genes do not translate to phenotypes in any direct manner, in fact genes function much like language, providing the nouns and verbs with which an organism can self-organize its system - linguistics has become the most relevant methodology for genetic exploration).

One thing is certain, though. It's far easier to demonstrate that Dawkins is a bigoted white upper middle class ideologue with no relation to either science or religion, than to prove or disprove the existence of something ('god') that we haven't even defined.

Seynsgeschichte: Lost in Space

Seynsgeschichte: Lost in Space

Dawkins the Political Ideologue

“Biologism is the doctrine, still prevalent in white nationalist ranks, that understands human races in purely zoological and materialist terms, as if men were no different from the lower life forms — slabs of meat whose existence is a product of genetics alone.”

Interestingly, the author of this quote, published at http://www.toqonline.com
in their February 2010 issue was discussing Schmitt, the ideologue of Nazi biologism.

More interestingly, given the admittedly white nationalist beliefs of the author, this type of biologism is dismissed as “too right-wing, too Nazi, and too philosophically naive".

Dawkins' notion of the genome as the fundamental being, the replicator, with his concordant description of the organiam, whether bacteria or a human vehicle, as simply a vehicle to properly replicate and improve the genome, obviously fits in well with such a definition of biologism.

So we have Mr. Richard Dawkins, too right-wing, too much of a Nazi, and too philosophically naive to appeal to white supremacists.

A book in the 1980's which included contributions by Lewontin among others accused Dawkins of precisely this, as did Stephen J. Gould.

Dawkins so-called rebuttal rests on name-calling, an assumption that his readership won't understand philosophical terms and he can therefore write them off, and the final act of intellectual dishonesty in the rebuttal, in which Dawkins claims “nonsense”, referring to a sentence from the book that he only half quotes. Exactly how half a sentence is supposed to make sense is apparently a question beyond Mr. Dawkins readership. Oddly enough, the sentence is about ontological priority, one of the key concepts that relegates Dawkins' work to the crank ramblings of a politically charged ideologue.

Given Dawkins' hero status among secular humanists, it poses an interesting question: Heidegger claimed that none of the humanisms that had existed to that point "valued human dignity high enough".

Do secular humanists value human dignity lower than white supremacists?

A Hermeneutical Dialectic

The study of the Invental necessarily proceeds by means of a hermeneutical dialectic. This dialectic, rather than attempting to sublate apparent contradictions, maintains them in their contradiction and utilizes the idea of a constantly self-modifying ideology to hermeneutically approach them. In this manner not only are the contradictions maintained but may be pushed further apart to discover their difference in a more profound manner.

One facet of the hermeneutic is to discover the difference between apparent contradictions. One of the basic questions is not how to sublate Identity and Difference, but to ask "what is the difference between Identity and Difference?", in that they are interdependent contradictions. In this case the difference is known in English by name of the Same.

The ability of the Self, as society, to hold and maintain both sides of the dialectic is the key to the Invental Subject's ability to come to a decision at all in a given situation, in response to a given Event.

The Invental Subject

**The Invental Subject**


Insofar as the Subject, within metaphysics, is the 'sujet', the topic, the matter, and hence also the substantive, in particular the material substantive of the Self, the Invental Subject is of an entirely different nature.

The Invental is in many ways the pure abstract, "the face we put on to meet the faces that we meet." As abstract the Invental is also //simple//. The society that each of us are, behind the mask, is simplified into the Invental agent that is able to quickly decide and act in response to the Evental within the specific situation understanding that most parameters are unknowable in themselves. The Invental Subject is the actor in the real Events that shape lives and societies. As such the Invental Subjects maintains the contradictory nature of being both the Real and the Abstract Subject simultaneously.

How the self invents and reinvents this Subject is the core of the notion of authenticity vs inauthenticity. In a pure everydayness of the workaday world the Subject is neither authentic nor inauthentic, in essence it is //missing//, it is only noticeable by its absence. As an Event of personal or societal magnitude becomes apparent an authentic or inauthentic Subject arises in anticipatory response.

The inauthentic Subject results from the identification of the Subject with the ego. The ego, the voice of insecurity, fear and ultimately paranoia constantly tries to assert control by spreading its fear and its insane need for an impossible security to the rest of the self, and without detachment from the ego it is very difficult to refute its claims to have the self's best interests in mind. Although the ego's own selfishness is the root of its ineffectuality in the face of the Event, in anticipation of the unknown nature of the coming Event its fears and insecurities seem rational and cogent. Its constant chatter, as well, is confusing and distracting, yet tranquilizing as well in an extreme way as it gives the illusion of constant presence and thus a constant present.

The authentic Subject, in distinction from this, takes into account reasonable worries and insecurities but allows the caring nature of the self to assert its ethical preeminence over the ego's selfishness in determining the view that 'one' will have and does have on the Event, and the corresponding decision and action to be taken. Dasein doesn't lose its authenticity due to 'falling'. The experience of falling is another insecurity of the ego, which feeling no ground beneath it is in constant delusion that it is factically falling. That the mode of authenticity arrives with much effort, and disappears leaving just the trace of its passing on the Self, is that it is a form of the transient, Invental, abstract 'one', while the Self is in itself always a multiple, its own society, that in a temporal manner grounds itself by a constant anticipation and a corresponding remembrance and repetition.

Subject, then, in this sense carries similar connotations to the way the term was used in the idea of the 'British Subject'. That Subject is subject to the Crown, which includes the government, civil and criminal law, and by extension society as a whole. It is this Subject that is the owner of rights, while freedom is the a priori of the Self's ability to comport itself to anything at all. The Subject is also the bearer of public duties and the recipient of public privileges. It also becomes the target of the moral law. The civil law was personified for the peasant through the Lord, generally the Lord of the Manor or other officiate. As the subject of the moral law, however, and within the ego-christian notion of right and wrong, the subject has no 'rights', only 'right'. The 'right' is the 'right to follow the law' and nothing more. The subject of the ego-christian has one duty, obedience to the Lord of imagination, the personified God of Jesus, and one privilege, that of eternally existing as the ego-personality it is. The ego of the ego-christian clings to this 'law', 'right' and 'duty' as its means of purchasing some form of security at the expense of a loss of contact with reality. The eschatology of the ego-christian is merely another facet of the ego's inability to face its own mortality, which it pushes onto the 'sinful' at the always-fast-approaching day of judgment. In the same way the extreme evangelism of the ego-christian (or the ego-sciencist for that matter) attempts to mollify the ego's fear, grounded at root in the knowledge that it is in fact mortal, that its beliefs are fictions. By spreading belief it can reassure itself of the reasonableness and thereby the truth of its ego-professed ideology.

Of course the evangelical, almost desperate figure of the ego-christian is by no means the only type of christian, or even the predominant one. Most christians, like other people, spend most of their time in an average everydayness of work and other concerns in a manner that is neither authentic nor consumed by ego. While at times when Events arise they may feel and temporarily succumb to the insecurity of the ego, they also recognize its selfishness as unethical, and thereby implicitly recognize the precedence of the ethical decision and action over a vocalization of a moral law.

The ego type also, of course, exists outside Christianity. The rise of a simplistic mechanistic scientism is one cogent example. While actual science left the mechanistic conception of nature behind in the 20th century, sciencists such as Richard Dawkins, antiquated as they are in their particular sciences, continue to loudly proclaim their onto-theologically based atheism and evangelize for the abolition of all religion. This is in the name of the myth of 'progress'. But the myth of progress itself is no more than the present infinitely extended, through which their terrified egos postulate some form of continued existence while simultaneously denying it.

Horizons of Identity

Society as meeting of Past and Future presencing of beings in the making present , The Temporal Moment. Authentic subject created by the 'Invental'

Abstract:

Each dasein is a ontologically a society constantly changing actors and interpreters. Logos as "gathering what lies before into thought and speech". The 'Invental' is the selfgathering of the different actors and interpreters into an authentic "count as one" capable of acting resolutely and effectively in a given situation.

We reckon time as "moments", rather than counting on hours, minutes or days, because the timespan of the invental is the moment, however short or long that may be in linear time.
The invental always involves or utilizes ideology as a structuring mechanism.

PDF horizonsofidentity.pdf

Basic Structures of Da-sein (the Being One Is)

1 Being-in-the-World
Being-in-the-world is one of the foundational, equiprimordial existentials of Dasein, it is neither based on nor is the basis for the other foundational existentials, which are attunement,language, and understanding. Insofar as Dasein is Dasein is in-the-World. The World is the most immediate (unmediated) thing to Dasein, it is only in view of the World that Dasein can even recognize itself.
1.1 Worldliness
Worldliness is a modification of being-in-the-world such that Dasein 'forgets' its ownness and judges itself purely on its ability to maneuver within the world. Falling prey is an inauthentic modification of worldliness, where Dasein no longer is even aware of its actual abilities to engage with the World, but is only aware of the judgements of the others from whom Dasein does not distinguish itself in any authentic manner.
1.2 Spatiality
Spatiality for Dasein is not the spatiality associated with Euclid nor quantum spatiality, but a spatiality unique to this being, and is based on the notions of directionality, distancing and de-distancing. An example of de-distancing, from which one can glean the meaning of distancing as well, would be the bringing into one's immediate spatiality the Dasein physically located miles away on the other end of a phone connection.
1.2.1 Bodying Forth

1.3 Projection
Equiprimordial with Being-in-the-World is Projection, because Dasein is always projecting its Being on a futural basis. In this sense Dasein is a futural being, it lives its possibilities by actualizing those it chooses.
1.3.1 Anticipation
Anticipation gives Dasein its possibility of choosing among possibilities to actualize, in terms of authentic anticipation or inauthentic avoidance it may freely choose its own possibilities or allow those possibiliities to be chosen by its inauthentic self, but in either case it 'does' choose among its possibilitiies.
1.3.1.1 Ahead-of-Iteslef-ness

1.4 History-Tradition
History and Tradition are not things essentially past and done. They are aspects of Dasein that originated prior to this particular Dasein but linger and remain effectual. Dasein is defined in many ways by a double boundary, in that possibilities have as their limit the inheritance of history and tradition, and the effects of that history and tradition are in their way limited by Dasein's choices among the futural potentials made possible.
2 Attunement
Attunement, or mood, is the primordial manner in which Dasein is always already aware both of its being-in-the-world. It is always already aware of "how it is" as a being, whether it has been made explicit or not.
2.1 Disclosedness
Disclosedness refers to the authentic or inauthentic possibilities for Dasein to make its being-in-the-world transparent to itself through an explicit taking hold of its attunement.
3 Language
Language has long been held as the distinguishing characteristic of Dasein, from the Greek zoon logon echon to the story of Genesis and on down. Reductions of language to symbology, semiotics or communication miss the totality of language in that language is where Being in the strong sense (i.e. including meaning and significance) resides.
3.1 Significance
Significance is the 'taking as' of language. Where language is assumed and then comprehended to convey meaning. While significance is fundamental to language it is also by reduction of language to significance only (and the further split into signfier and signified) that an inappropriate instrumental notion of language is first arrived at and maintained.
3.1.1 Discourse
Discourse is, of course, talking. But it is a talking where the matter at hand is of first importance, and the point of the talk is to share the matter, not to talk 'about' the matter or to pass heard information along. Knowledge is the only issue in discourse, information is irrelevant.
3.1.1.1 Casual Talk
In Casual or Idle talk the apparent subject matter is of secondary importance, idle talk generally works by speaking 'about' the matters rather than grappling with the matter, passing along information and 'heard gossip', and avoiding the focus required to actually grasp the matter. The importance of Casual talk lies not in the sharing of the matter but the sharing of time and each others being over the talk, bringing the Daseins involved closer together in each others being. Casual talk can fall into a dangerous ambiguity however, where the matter is not clarified sufficiently to have a specific meaning and in further passing along strays further and further from its origi, while at the same time gaining authority and apparent obviousness through publicness and repetition..
4 Understanding
Understanding is fundamentally the ability to relate to and make sense of one's being-with-others-in-the-world and, as such it always involves such things as the ethical as well as the instrumental.. Understanding is not in general a theoretical thing, however, it is found most primordially in the know-how to use something ready-to-hand without the need to analyze it or even take cognizance of it in any self-conscious manner. The scientific, objectifying manner of looking at the world is the exceptional case, not the usual manner of experience or understanding and most often interferes with comprehension of sense, meaning, being-with and World itself.
4.1 Interpretation
Interpretation is the ability to elicit meaning from experiential phenomena. In opposition to Brentano and his students Freud and Husserl, consciousness is not always intentional, in fact it is the idea of an always intentional consciousness that resulted in the need to posit an unconscious, which has resulted in nothing but insoluble problems for psychology since, problems that could have been avoided by simply positing unintentional acts of consciousness to begin with. The notion of always intentional consciousness acts originates in the same abstracted scientific way of looking at things as the forgetting of the ready-to-handedness of primordial understanding.

Interpretation maintains itself with the whole of what is to be interpreted. This whole might be the World, or a given thing, system or another Dasein, but it is never decomposed or subjected to a reduction.
4.1.1 Intentional (Directed)
Intentional, directed interpretation occurs most often during periods devoted to new learning, or in the abstracted region of scientific endeavor. Scientists' and scholars' tendency to take this as the 'usual' state of things has led in general to a misunderstanding of the nature of everyday being-in-the-World. The reduction often involved in this abstracted view is a reduction that removes World itself from view, leading to a loss of understanding as to what being-in-the-World could even refer to.
4.1.1.1 Explanation
Explanation, as opposed to interpretation, attempts to understand things without the context of the World. Depending on how the explanation is carried out further reductions may be implied. but de-Worlding is generally the initial step. All objective science deals with explanatory understanding rather than interpretive understanding.
4.1.1.1.1 Explication
Explication attempts to explain objects by decomposing them through a reduction into simpler component parts that are more easily comprehended. The main issues with the reduction involve choosing an appropriate reductive method and appropriately utilizing the findings at this level of 'componentry' when applied at a different level of ontological priority..
4.1.1.1.2 Explanation from Origin
Explanation from origin attempts to explain objects by unearthing their origin and postulated developmental process that brought them into being what they are. In terms of scientific method this introduces the difficulties of the archive. A historiologist or philologist has to have an archival proof, since a predictive model of something one knows a priori to have happened is not a viable proof in any sense. Unfortunately in many seemingly obvious developmental paths no indisputable proof is available and as such it remains conjecture. When applied to time spans beyond those of human history in terms of such things as evolutionary history or evolutionary psychology, such indisputable proofs are by definition unavailable, rendering the status of such studies unscientific and conjectural by definition.
4.1.1.1.2.1 Curiosity
Explanation, particularly the conjectural sort that explanation from origin tends towards, can quickly lead toward curiosity, a type of looking over that prefers to flit from topic to topic rather than grasping any topic in its matter. For curiosity a conjecture is as good as knowledge because curiosity is interested in satisfying its desire to be free of boredom, not any desire to know anything in itself. Conjecture is then spread around as 'knowledge' through the medium of idle talk and soon takes on the authority of common sense. In many cases this is harmless, although irritating to the expert in a given field. In other cases the conjecture is neither harmless nor innocent in its origin, and the same mechanism can be used to advantage by the less scrupulous.
4.1.2 Receptive
Receptive interpretation is the more common way in which things and events within-the-World become part of Dasein's understanding. This lack of directedness often comes from a lack of the appropriate language or the appropriate prejudgment.
4.1.2.1 Empathetic
Empathetic understanding comes from one's capacity to be-with in a fundamental sense. Spatiality is only one form of being-in-the-World, and since being-with is founded on the latter, it is not limited to the occurrence of multiple Daseins in a particular locale. Being-with allows the sharing of Dasein's World. Insofar as Dasein has a World, it is always already a with-World. Rather than dialectically seeing the Other as initially the Same, and only later recognizing the otherness of the other, leading to conflict, Dasein has no difficulty seeing the Other as other, due to Dasein's ek-static ability to see itself as other. Since it itself is both other and Same, the actual Other is also viewed as the same. Conflict or lack of conflict has to do with the individual Dasein's flexibility in modifying its prejudgments and assumptions based on observed differences between the expected other and the actual Other.

If this happens successfully Dasein is able to share the World of the Other, while sharing its own World with the Other, in such a manner that there is temporarily at least no differentiation. When this happens often enough with a particular other Dasein learns more and more about alll the existentials of the Other, their attunements, understandings, etc. Particularly through a sharing of attunements each Dasein is disclosed to the other in a more penetrating fashion, in a very similar manner to which Dasein is disclosed to itself. This disclosedness is referred to as empathy and is an important mode of receptive interpretatiion, if one that is not universal.
4.1.2.2 Undirected
I have had no difficulty getting across the notion of de-distancing using the phone example, in fact it is obvious enough that the understanding required was already present to the majority of people I have discussed it with. But those same people did not have the language or prejudgments necessary to have an intentiional act of consciousness towards the situation of interpretation. As a result the situation was interpreted, interpreted correctly, and became part of Dasein's understanding, without an intentional act occurring or even having become possible.
4.1.2.3 Unaware
Some events are interpreted without our direct awareness, as our attention is directed elsewhere.
5 Mineness
"Mineness" refers to Dasein's awareness that the mind and all its elements and properties are its own. This is fundamental enough to Dasein's experience that a loss of "mineness" in any area of thought is a root of mental breakdown and psychosis. Mineness is at the root of all actual freedoms, and equiprimordially with an appropriate Being-in-the-World, attunement, understanding, and relation to language constitutes the a prioris required for mental health. Mental illness could be defined as the damage to Dasein's freedom caused by an inappropriate or dysfunctional root existential.
6 Capacities

6.1 Sensory Capacities

6.2 Actionary Capacities

7 Mortality

7.1 Freedom

7.1.1 Comportment towards Being of individual Beings

7.1.1.1 Ability to see somethting 'as' something, i.e. name it.

8 Being-With
Although based on Being-in-the-World, as much as Dasein is always in-the-world, Being-with is part of Dasein, whether Dasein is factically with others or not. The totality of this structure is mitdasein, or being-with-others-in-the-world.

From an email to a friend ...

The problem, though, even with more advanced and realistic science, is that it deals with being only in the weak sense. Being as extantness. It doesn't deal with being as existence with meaning. There is a difference between an extant object and an existing thing, in that an existing thing takes part in the World of meaning, which is what we experience both most immediately - wake up and your initial experience is that of World, then oneself as experiencing World. It takes an abstract 'step back' to experience the Universe of objects and oneself as a subject. Within the World of things, as well, there are different types of things, a human being has as its being being-with-in-the-world, which is not a relation, but is part of its being whether it is factually with others or not, a work of art has as its being workliness, something a 'mere thing' does not, a tool has as its being a usefulness. There is also the difference between a technological thing, something produced, and something brought forth by poiesis, i.e. brought forth of its own accord. This is a distinction we have forgotten in the technological age and it's one of the reasons people keep looking for an architect or producer for things that are not produced in any sense.
At the same time we experience World as mediated by understanding - which always includes pre-understanding via pre-judgement and assumption, that together constitute ideology. None of these are inherently bad things. We understand things as quickly as we do without extensive analysis from the ground up by taking in the 'whole' through assumptions and prejudgments, then subtracting those things that don't fit. As long as our assumptions and prejudgments are always prepared to be challenged and dumped whenever necessary we can think both quickly and accurately.
The 'fundamentalist' view, which can be religious or scientific, or based on any other world view, is really formed by a rigid ideology. That may be Jesuit, or Protestant, or neo-Darwinist. Unwillingness to dump invalid prejudgments and assumptions when they don't fit reality is the issue, not the prejudgments themselves. Many people believe an ideology is something we only have if we choose to, by adopting Marxism or something of that sort, while in fact we all have an ideology, the Marxist has simply made his more transparent. It comes from our hermeneutic method of understanding itself. We always understand the whole via each part, and we understand each part via the whole. Ideology is the set of assumptions and prejudgments that we use as 'ladders' to get from the whole to the part and back again if you like.

The Term 'Atheist'

As a result of my rather unusual (in this society) notion of the being and reality of such things commonly referred to as 'gods', I've often accepted and utilized the term 'atheist' to describe my perspective, generally because theist is a term that intrinsically implies western metaphysical (Christian) theism and the consequent association of what I mean by 'gods' with the Christian god.

I'm no longer accepting or utilizing the term 'atheist' however.

The fundamentalist scientistic 'atheists' that can conveniently be associated with Richard Dawkins and his acolytes are as much my enemies as the Christian fundamentalists, and for the same reasons. They value polemic over argument. They dismiss areas of knowledge due to their own ignorance rather than any understanding of what might be contained therein. And they are motivated by political reasoning, specifically the maintenance of the current political elite. Atheists and Biologists love each other, I personally believe it's simply due to neither being able to understand modern Physics and its implications.

One thing about having been raised and trained by the Jesuits is that cults such as those of Dawkins are very easily seen through. i.e. if the most successful cult in the West didn't convince me, these half assed jokers are not about to.

From now on I will be referring to myself as a materialist Eckhartian, viewed through the lenses of Heidegger and Schurmann. Realize that 'materialist' is in reference to Aristotle's proof that 'space' is unformed matter, such that as is generally the case in metaphysical dualities it implies idealism as well, since only form separates what we know as matter from the void.

Hanging on in Quiet Desperation is the English Way ...

I've been doing the English thing - hanging on in quiet desperation - most of the night. Somehow my mind is doing an extra recursion on itself that brings back everything just said in a sneering and derisive fashion.

I've been thinking seriously of taking a vow of silence to prevent it ...

The worst is that it gives a good reason for the isolating always hiding behind every corner for me. Isolating for its own sake = bad, but what about isolating to prevent something worse?

Refusal 2

In thinking of how to describe the experience, and looking at the earlier post, it struck me that it sounds, in the earlier writing and in the way I've explained it to people close to me verbally, like a quiet sort of thing. It sounds reminiscent of Heidegger's description of the call of the conscience, where a silent call gives no specifics to understand, but one immediately associates the word 'guilty'.

In some ways there are parallels, but the negativity of the guilty in the call of conscience is a past negativity. One is called forward 'out of guilt' and back to oneself. In that sense this experience was almost opposite, in that there was no feeling of judgement or even interest in the 'me up until then'. It was a judgement on what I might become, not what I had become.

As an experience itself, though, it couldn't have been more different. It wasn't quiet, it was louder than anything else I've ever experienced, louder than bombs, louder even than Iannis Xenakis in quad sound. It was loud visually, sensually, my sense of smell, taste, touch all overwhelmed. Rather than it slip away when I tried to grasp it it more overwhelmed me and made my grasp irrelevant. Most overwhelmed was thought itself - the intensitiy of the experience overwhelmed the muddle of memories words and experiences normally going through my head, obliterating them into quietude so that the immense volume of the experience itself was for the duration all that I 'knew'.

Nothing in the experience 'meant' anything in the usual sense. Nothing was implied, nothing was given. If experiencing "the nothing" was in every way more intense than any other possible experience that wouild be my best description. Whatever it has meant to me then and since there is no way to really communicate any meaning, even were I to discern something that could be communicated conceptually it would remain irrelevant to anyone else.

Refusal 1

I haven't been an atheist for a long time, although most of the authors I relate to and am influenced by would come under that classification in some sense. By the same token the way in which I am not an atheist would probably cause most religious people to put me under that classification as well.

I haven't considered myself one, despite not being associated with any religion for a very long time, and not having any belief in any of the gods of those religions as those religions describe them. This came about as a result of what I can only describe as a religious experience.

One of the issues with attempting to describe such an experience is that even during the experience, any attempt to grasp the experience conceptually, even to apply words to it, threatened to cause the experience to disappear. It wasn't an epiphany either, I've had the occasional epiphany and epiphanies give one something to understand, often too much at once, whereas this gave so little that it has been much more difficult to place it or even relate any particular meaning to it.
That's not to say words didn't attach themselves to the experience. I was, at the time, attuned to the possibility of such an experience. And I understood that such an experience would be in essence positive. However the only words that I could attach to the experience were "refusal", not a partial but a total refusal, and a "not you". This by no means appeared to be a positive experience.

Recently I've come to understand that refusal further than just the experience of the word. In later posts I will try to explicate the sense of refusal that I experienced and how that relates to my further development.

Why are Atheists so obsessed with Explanation from Origin?

To read the work of some self-proclaimed atheists, one would think that as soon as a god is shown to not be necessary to explain the origin of humanity, the world, the universe etc. that religion would simply cease. However this apparent mania for explanation is in most cases only true of the atheist that shares that assumption, not of the religious type they are professing to.

Dawkins' exploration of the probability of the existence of gods (ignoring his statistical inadequacy as well as the inadequacy of his definitions) is mostly irrelevant to the people he apparently wants to dissuade from their beliefs. The Greeks had religion with no pretension that it "explained" anything, the point was understanding through metaphor. Given that such things as the "gene" in Dawkins' own works are not things but metaphors, he is on shaky ground when he attacks other works that do the same in the same manner. Using probability itself in terms of belief is also unwise if one believes in the origin of the universe as an initial singularity. Currently the physics that examines that area is looking for possible reasons that the singularity might have found itself in such a singularly unlikely state (having a probability of being in that state exponentially lower than anything that does exist in order to result in the universe as observed) at the moment the expansion began.

Most religion is primarily about understanding things that are as they are, not explaining how they came to be that way. While creation stories abound and make useful fodder for answering the questions posed by inquisitive 4 year olds they aren't taken that literally or even seriously by the majority of adult believers. (and if you take people by mental age, adult as a modifier disincludes the majority of so-called fundamentalists).

That most of the inferences religions have made regarding the existence of their god are logical fallacies is easily demonstrable. Unfortunately, that many of the arguments made by atheists are also logical fallacies is just as easily demonstrable. Dawkins attack on religion, for example, doesn't simply contain logical fallacies, its core is only tenable if one ignores three of the fundamental logical fallacies, the most cogent of which is the travesty his book makes of the fallacy of association. Were I to read the God Delusion with no knowledge of the book or its author outside its pages I would make the assumption that its author was just another ignorant crank and as such unlikely to be listened to by those sympathetic to either side. That it was written by a supposedly intelligent man verges on shameful.

Time - Deleuze on Bergson, Aristotle and Leibniz

Time - Deleuze on Bergson, Aristotle and Leibniz

"The first shift observed by Deleuze leaves behind the Euclidian geometry of movement

as an essential character of time. It also leaves behind Aristotle, who follows

the Platonic logic to proclaiming that ‘time is a number’ (Deleuze 1989: 130). For

Aristotle, time moves by increments, some of which are so small as to allow us to call

them instants. Once divided into instants, time becomes the purview of sciences, first

abstract, such as mathematics, physics and astronomy and then bio-technological:

cryogenics, bionics, robotics, etc. The connection of time to technology makes Deleuze

use Ford’s assembly line as a metaphor for the movement image; it is a line that moves

and, as it moves, it accumulates, adds to the original image thus making the image

appear as if it gets fuller and fuller with every frame and every cut until it reaches completeness.

Charles Chaplin’s 1936 fi lm Modern Times serves as an illustration of this

model; in general, argues Deleuze, the old cinema fi lls up the space of perception

by showing time as a sequentially ordered movement toward a pre-specifi ed point

of destination (imaginary) or backward toward an achieved product (memory).

Leibniz

Deleuze contrasts this naturalistic concept of time with Leibniz’s process-oriented

concept, which he summarizes in The Logic of Sense:

Time is the result of the operation of compossibility. The latter means that, with the

monads being assimilated to singular points, each series is extended in other series

which converge around these points, another world in another time begins in the

vicinity of points which would bring about the divergence of the obtained species

(2001: 297, italics in the original)

The syntactic complexity of this quote matches its logic. Traditional interdisciplinary

divides point to the incompatibility of ‘points’ and ‘species’, making it impossible to

conceive of a system that would position a mathematical and a biological concept next

to each other without creating some kind of ambiguity. However, argues Deleuze, if

we approach ambiguity not as a mathematical defi ciency, as would Aristotle, but as

Leibniz did – in line with his differential mathematics – in terms of a space created by an

addition to nothing (defi ned as ‘zero plus one,’ where ‘one’ is an instant), time would

indeed show itself as ambiguous. But unlike Plato’s thinking of time as the ambiguity

of pursuit, which can only lead to the past, or as the progressive development in a

series along an infi nitely long path, which is but a prolongation of the present, Leibniz

thinks of time as if it were a forgotten future, or a future that has been committed to

memory before it actually occurred."

Second shift: From Leibniz to Bergson

However, for Leibniz, time is still bonded by number; moreover, like Aristotle, Leibniz

gives absolute priority to number ‘one’; hence, monadology. Both mathematics and

philosophy begin with ‘one’, leaving us little if any room to think time as ‘many’. At

the same time, claims Deleuze, it was Leibniz who fi rst suggested that time should

be viewed as ‘a movement’. Following this logic, Bergson suggested that time was

the movement of number ‘one’. If Leibniz begins and ends with ‘one’, Bergson takes

‘one’ as the nexus of multiplications: ‘“One” can only multiply itself. It is the most

abstract number’ (2002: 58). In multiplication, time is non-directional; hence, the

human ability to experience time as it moves for itself. ‘For Leibniz’, Deleuze writes,

‘the countdown never begins and never stops, or, rather, “everything is the beginning”’

(1989: 45). For Bergson, time runs like a stream, everything is movement, or ‘durations

of different tensions’ as opposed to ‘the homogenous time of beginnings and origins’

(2004: 275). In this definition of time, the tensions should be understood as the

temporal effects of the matter on the world and the world on the matter. This kind of

genesis was particularly attractive for Deleuze given his interest in the empiricism of

a transcendental kind.

After Bergson

As a philosopher of time, Bergson is defi nitional for Deleuze, who begins his Cinema 1

and Cinema 2 with one of many commentaries on Bergson and essentially constructs

his own model of time on the basis of the Bergsonian view of time: ‘a state of things

that would constantly change, a fl owing-matter in which no point of anchorage nor

center of reference would be assignable’ (1986: 57). No wonder then that Deleuze

approaches time at the intersection of memory and matter. At the same time, concerned

with both semiotics and phenomenology, Deleuze makes sure that he puts a

hyphen in the compound word ‘time-image,’ stressing our understanding that image

belongs to time and does not just represent time. It also designates a relationship of

mutual contamination of the two terms. The content available to consciousness blends

with the subconscious absorption of this content, bringing memory to perception. This

is to say that ‘time-image’ collapses the two parallel times together in a space which,

as I argued earlier, can be defi ned as ‘liminal’. This kind of space does not know the

distinction between the past, present and future. In that space, time appears only as

singular memory.

‘CRYSTAL-IMAGE’

For accessing this kind of time, Deleuze suggests a particular visual aesthetics, – the

new cinema (e.g. Italian neo-realism, French neo-classicism, Russian neo-symbolism).

According to Deleuze, the new cinema is what produces singular memory in the

intolerable, the unbearable and the impossible. Its mission is ‘to make holes, to

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KOZIN THE APPEARING MEMORY 109

introduce voids and white spaces, to rarify images, by suppressing many things that

have been added to make us believe that we were seeing everything’ (Deleuze 1986:

22). By openly embracing this agenda, the cinema of the last half of the 20th century

severed its connection with the cinema that had come before it. The latter showed just

an image; the former shows an analytic of an image. With this ‘extra’, the distinction

between the real and the imaginary had to be foregone: the new cinema was very convincing

in demonstrating its indiscernability.7 In turn, the same feature brought in a

new conception of frame and framings, which exposed ‘transcendentals’ for an analytic

intervention. For Deleuze ‘transcendentals’ show themselves as ambiguous signs (e.g.,

Peirce’s ‘thirdness’); hence the need to supply their phenomenological exposure with

a semiological interpretation, helping us follow ambiguity toward its appearance in an

assemblage, which is the minimal unit of ‘visual semiosis.’

According to Deleuze, ‘Cinema does not just present images, it surrounds them with

a world’ (1989: 68). An opening line of the chapter on ‘crystal-image’ in Cinema 2,

this quote not only confi rms the relationship between the world and imagery; it

establishes the direction of fi t: images to the world (e.g. memory to photographic or

cinematographic image). This is not to say that images do not come from the world; on

the contrary, the kind of analysis Deleuze presupposes deals precisely with the movement

from the actual to the virtual toward a mirror image; hence, the signifi cance

of the semiotic concept ‘mirror’ for Deleuze’s entire philosophy: ‘Mirror is a turning

crystal, with two sides if we relate it to the invisible character … and the crystal turns

over on itself’ (1989: 88). The emergent signs and their assemblages in the fi lm are

based on the confl uence of the two.8 I see in the fi lm what I otherwise could have

seen in the mirror, except that the fi lm shows more than a refl ection, while mirror does

only that. Both create oblique, opaque and obscure images; however, only the fi lm

shows dynamic indiscernability of the actual and the virtual: ‘Distinct, but indiscernible,

such are the actual and the virtual which are in continuous exchange’ (1989: 71). This

insistence on the material presence without content (body without organs) refl ects

Deleuze’s emphasis on the pure signifi er. He fi nds it in the concept ‘crystal-image’.

The choice of the name for the concept can be explained through the physical properties

of mineral morphology: the structure of a crystal allows us to see how, with

each turn of the crystal, what is opaque and virtual becomes luminous and actual.

This reversibility makes all sorts of binaries coalesce, taking us beyond anthropological

structuralism with its staple distinctions: ‘hard’ and ‘soft’, ‘saying’ and ‘said’, ‘past’

and ‘future’, ‘here’ and ‘there’. Our thoughts become matter, while matter becomes

an object of our thoughts. The ‘crystal-film’ is therefore the kind of film that exposes

the relations between what is being reflected and the act of reflecting, or, to put it in

phenomenological terms, the ‘given’ and ‘givenness’. Once again, we must remind

ourselves that the kind of phenomenology that preoccupies Deleuze is neither strictly

speaking transcendental, although it examines ‘transcendentals’ or ‘liminalities,’ nor is

it empirical, although it presupposes ‘matter.’ The liminal in-between that it explores is

not empty; it contains a prime mover, and it is in that pivot that we fi nd one of the most

basic conditions for our experience of the world as image: ‘what we see in the crystal

… is time, in its double movement of making presents pass, replacing one after the

next, while going towards the future, but also of preserving all of the past, dropping it

into the obscure depth’ (Deleuze 1989: 87). The ‘crystal-film’ that rises from the liminal

place gives us a glimpse of time, and of course, the time that appears is inalienable

from the place of its appearance.

Reclaiming the Lifeworld - towards an Ontology of Political Will

http://www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=358

Genes as Events

"Contemporary molecular genetics focuses on the simultaneous tasks of
identifying genes and articulating the processes through which they synthesize
proteins. Gene identification alone is not a simple task. Genes, while we
typically think of them as objects, can really be thought of more accurately
as events. Genes are sequences of nucleotides that have the capacity to
produce proteins, which are in turn the foundational building blocks of cell
biology. Most of the DNA in the human genome is referred to as “junk DNA”
because it is not involved in protein synthesis. We cannot simply look at
strands of DNA and see the genes – we must catch them in action and only
through their behavior can we distinguish genes from junk DNA. It is in this
way that genes are in many ways events rather than objects and it is the
reason that it is so very difficult to identify them. This is also the reason
that the process of identifying genes is dependent upon simultaneously
understanding how they work to synthesize proteins. In the last five years,
revolutionary advances in research technology have been made in both the
identification and functional facets of molecular genetics. This has led to an
equally revolutionary revision of our understanding of genes and how they
work.

Some of the more notable findings are that: 1. The human genome is contains far fewer genes than was previously estimated – only approximately 30,000 as
compared to the 120,000 historically assumed. This is of importance because,
given that this is far fewer than the approximately 100,000 genes of the
nematode (flat-worm), it suggests a complex relationship between genes and the complex biological structures and behaviors of human beings. 2. A single gene is capable of synthesizing more than a single protein, which has severe
consequences for relating genes to phenotypic outcomes as compared to the old
dogma that there was a one to one relationship between genes and proteins.
Thus, knowledge of the gene sequence itself, without the developmental
conditions differentiating when a given protein might be synthesized, provides
no information about how gene sequences relate to proteins, let alone complex
behaviors such as depression and schizophrenia. 3. That both gene expression
and the process of protein synthesis are much more probabilistic and complex
than previously thought. Indeed, gene expression is dependent upon the
activity many other genes in the genome and highly sensitive to cellular and
extra-cellular contexts (see Garcia-Coll, Bearer, & Lerner, In press)
The two sciences redoux: behavioral genetics and developmental psychobiology
Behavioral genetics, relying on population genetics methodology has
traditionally held as its aim the statistical estimation of behavioral traits
given the presence of those traits in parents, non-twin siblings, fraternal-
twin siblings, and identical-twin siblings. The key statistic of behavioral
genetics is the heritability quotient, signified as h2. This statistic is
derived from the differential correlations in a given behavioral trait (e.g.,
schizophrenia, depression, alcoholism, extroverted personality, etc.) among
various relative relationships (i.e., parent-child, non-twin siblings,
fraternal-twin siblings, and identical-twin siblings). The h2 statistic can
range in value from 0 to 1 and is thought to reflect the percent of variation
in a given behavioral trait due to shared genes (e.g., if h2 = .75 for a given
trait, then it is argued that 75% of the variance in that trait is due to
genes). However, this interpretation is a substantial misinterpretation of
the true meaning of the statistic. The h2 coefficient simply reflects the
likelihood of a phenotypic trait given that trait is present in a relative –
it in absolutely no way indicates a mechanism of heritability (Michel & Moore,
1995). The implication of the gene as the mechanism is an assumption based on
an adherence to the non-developmental preformationist approach to genetics.
Indeed, the genetic basis of human behavior was estimated using this
statistical approach before any scientist had ever identified an actual gene!
Moreover, the more we have learned about genes and their functioning, the more we find that the statistical assumptions underlying the h2 coefficient are
largely invalid. "

Value vs Worth

Origins of the word "value"

c.1300, from Anglo-Fr. and O.Fr. valliant "stalwart, brave," from prp. of valoir "be worthy," originally "be strong," from L. valere "be strong, be well, be worth, have power, be able," from PIE base *wal- "be strong" (cf. O.E. wealdan "to rule," O.H.G. -walt, -wald "power" (in personal names), O.N. valdr "ruler," O.C.S. vlasti "to rule over," Lith. valdyti "to have power," Celt. *walos- "ruler," O.Ir. flaith "dominion,"

1570s, "having force in law, legally binding," from M.Fr. valide, from L. validus "strong, effective," from valere "be strong" (see valiant). The meaning "supported by facts or authority" is first recorded 1640s.

Worth

from P.Gmc. *werthaz “toward, opposite,” hence “equivalent, worth" (cf. O.Fris. werth, O.N. verðr, Du. waard, O.H.G. werd, Ger. wert, Goth. wairþs "worth, worthy"), perhaps a derivative of PIE *wert- "to turn, wind," from base *wer- "to turn, bend" (see versus). O.C.S. vredu, Lith. vertas "worth" are Gmc. loan-words. Worthless is first attested 1588; worthwhile is recorded from 1884.

worth (2) Look up worth at Dictionary.com

"to come to be," now chiefly, if not solely, in the archaic expression woe worth the day, present subjunctive of O.E. weorðan "to become, be, to befall," from P.Gmc. *werthan "to become" (cf. O.S., O.Du. werthan, O.N. verða, O.Fris. wertha, O.H.G. werdan, Ger. werden, Goth. wairþan "to become"), lit. "to turn into," from P.Gmc. *werthaz “toward, opposite,” perhaps a derivative of PIE *wert- "to turn, wind," from base *wer- "to turn, bend" (see versus).

On Information 'Decay'

The notion of information 'decay' is not accurate in the sense that information suffers any deformation in the process, but it poiints to the way in which what we are experiencing as information has its own temporality, which may also point to the ground of the way in which da-sein has its own temporality, in both cases more primordial than 'time' in the classical sense.

Prior to information having gone through the kind of change which indicates the entropy inherent in its temporality as in every other, information is the ground of possibility itself. As information passes into presentation, it becomes the ground of presentation and simultaneously the ground of what is presented.

Once presented information, in itself having suffered no deformation in its characterization as information, has been modified through presentation into imminent actuality as the presented and then becomes the ground of the extant, which as extant is always grounded in the past, i.e. in information that is no longer 'vital', having no further possibilities, since as ground of possibilities it has entropied temporally into the ground of what-already-is. Since the information itself has not seemingly suffered a change in its potential for representability, in terms of representation it appears to be supra-temporal. Classical time as derivative then is based on the representation of information, whereas primordial temporality, itself in a strong sense indistiguishable from primordial entropy, is based on the change in what given information grounds.

In terms of primal time, then, what is prior is information as the ground of possibility, since it is required that it be this ground prior to actualization in the event of presentation and extantness as representation. The apparent primacy of representation over presentation and possibility lies in the explanative focus of instrumentalism, as opposed to the focus on understanding operative in phenomenology.

As ground of possibility, the event of actualization and the representation of the extant, what is in this way experienced as 'information' is indistinguishable from what is experienced in the terms 'Being' and 'Nothing', the duality now envisioned from the arithmetical as the original 1 and 0 that grounds the basis of number itself as a binary entity. That entropy is effective in the ground itself is isomorphic to the proposal that Being is finite.

This would seem initially to reposit the "One", but in fact maintains that the 'One' is not, in the sense that the binary 1 and 0 are interdependent, in the same sense that Being and the Nothing are interdependent, in fact the notions are the same, 1 and 0 are the literal translations of Being and the Nothing from the English language into the language of binary arithmetic. The transcendental "One" of Plato, with all its isomorphs, has its transcendence in that it is the 'real' abstract, being only thinkable without isomorphs within the universe, when the universe retains its original meaning as "everything that is". And yet it also interchangeably retains its sense as origin of that "everything". The "One" is not, then, in a different sense to the way in which Being and the nothing "are not". Each "is not" in only having sense as ground of what is conceived as having being. Being and the Nothing, however experienced or interpreted, are the grounding multiple, represented in numerical form as the binary 0 and 1, in logic as identity and difference, instrumentally as information, and mathematically as the empty set.

The original ambiguity of what is intended variously by the notion of "Being" can be structured as differences of grounding in that different conceptions of "beingness" have a different groundedness. Where a particular entity is conceived of as "in being", what "is not" necessarily in order to ground such is also modified, the conceptions of beingness themselves are grounded in either the existential of understanding, or the activity of explanation, viz:

within understanding "beingness" refers to "having meaning" in the sense of a thing encounterable as what it is within-the-world by a being structured as world-opening by ecstatic ek-sistence.

within explanation (which always reaches into the past as origin and thus must represent) "beingness" would refer to "presentedness" without implication that presentation involves observation. The pastness of explanation's provence is the meaning of both undecidability and the 'observer effect' in the inability to represent what has not yet been presented.

althussian concept of ideology

Ideology?


From "Louis Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" " -

http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/1997althusser.html

"Hence the final part of Althusser's argument: How is it that individual subjects are constituted in ideological structures? Or, in other words, how does ideology create a notion of self or subject?

All ideology has the function of constituting concrete individuals as subjects--of enlisting them in any belief system, according to Althusser. That's the main thing ideology as structure and ideologies as specific belief systems do--get people (subjects) to believe in them. There are three main points that Althusser makes about this process of becoming subjects-in-ideology.

1. We are born into subject-hood--if only because we're named before we're born; hence we're always-already subjects.

2. We are always-already subjects in ideology, in specific ideologies, which we inhabit, and which we recognize only as truth or obviousness. Everybody else's beliefs are recognizable as ideological, i.e. imaginary/illusory, whereas ours are simply true. Think, for example, about different religious beliefs. Everybody who believes in their religion thinks their religion is true, and everyone else's is just illusion, or ideology.

3. How does ideology (as structure) get us to become subjects, and hence not to recognize our subject positions within any particular ideological formation? How do we come to believe that our beliefs are simply true, not relative? Althusser answers this on 245b with the notion of INTERPELLATION. Ideology INTERPELLATES individuals as subjects. The word "interpellation" comes from the same root as the word "appellation," which means a name; it's not the same as the mathematical idea of "interpolation." Interpellation is a hailing, according to Althusser. A particular ideology says, in effect, HEY YOU--and we respond ME? You mean me?? And the ideology says, yes, I mean you.

You can see examples of this every day in commercials. I saw one the other night for a home gym system, claiming that "this machine will give you the kind of workout you desire, meeting your needs better than any other home gym." Each instance of "you" in that ad was an interpellation--the ad seeming to address ME PERSONALLY (in order to get me to see myself as the "you" being addressed, and hence to become a subject within its little ideological structure). This is also what Mr. Rogers does, when he looks sincerely into the camera and says "yes, I mean you." It also happens in the Uncle Sam recruiting posters which say "I want YOU for the Army."

Althusser makes some final points about ideology working this way to "hail" us as subjects, so that we think these ideas are individually addressed to us, and hence are true. He says that ideology, as structure, requires not only subject but Subject. In using the capital S, he invokes an idea similar to that of Lacan (whom Althusser studied and wrote about), that there is a small-s subject, the individual person, and a capital S Subject, which is the structural possibility of subjecthood (which individuals fill). The idea of subject and Subject also suggests the duality of being a subject, where one is both the subject OF language/ideology (as in being the subject of a sentence) and subject TO ideology, having to obey its rules/laws, and behave as that ideology dictates.

The interpellated subject in the ideology of the home gym commercial would thus order the gym, behave as if bodybuilding or rigorous exercise was a necessity, something of central importance. The Subject here would be some notion of physical perfection, or body cult, the rules that the subject is subjected to. Althusser uses the example of Christian religious ideology, with God as the ultimate Subject--the center of the system/structure.

On p. 248 Althusser links his ideas about ideology to Lacan directly, noting that the structure of ideology is specular (like Lacan's Imaginary, like the mirror stage)."