Monkeys

Sep. 17th, 2005 11:11 am
andrewducker: (Juggling)
[personal profile] andrewducker
Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart have suggested that rather than being called Homo Sapiens (wise man) we should instead be called "Pan narrans" - the storytelling chimpanzee. Recent genetic results would tend to also place us extremely closely (within 1%) with Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus, the two other strains of Chimpanzee currently in existence.

In many ways the name Pan narrans clearly highlights a problem I see on a frequent basis. On the one hand we are animals, creatures evolved to fit a series of niches over millions of years, with brains and bodies tuned for various strategies that worked well enough for our ancestors to propagate. On the other hand we tell amazing stories to help the world make sense to us - spinning everything from simple dramas about not trusting Uncle Bob with the whisky bottle since the incident last Christmas to hugely complex mathematical epics concerning the origins and fate of the universe.

There are certain kinds of stories that particularly appeal to us - ones with a clear Right and Wrong, ones where the hero (or heroine) succeeds against tremendous odds (whether success be in vanquishing an enemy, getting the perfect job or finding their One True Love), ones where everything goes wrong - but only so the hero can learn from the experience and come out of it a better person.

There are, of course, other stories - ones where everyone dies, ones where nobody learns anything, ones which deliberately play against type, or where the point is that there is no point (see Andy Warhol's films for one example of this last type). These, however, tend to be less popular - they don't comfort people, and their appeal tends to be towards those people who are either interested on a meta level (i.e. with the fact that the stories themselves are being played with) or who find it impossible to suspend their belief enough to enjoy stories which tell them that everything is going to be alright.

Sometimes we tell stories so simple, reassuring and hard to disprove that they become insanely widespread - helped by the fact that people will try very hard to believe something if it means they can stop thinking about something discomforting. Religion, for instance, deals fantastically well with the worries of meaning and death - meaning is gained from God's will, and by following God's will we will all be rewarded after death.

The problem being that in our modern secular world, people still feel this instinctual need to make their life into stories, and we've done a pretty good job of weakening (and in some case removing) several of the threads that were most commonly used to construct those stories. This problem isn't helped by the fact that we are surrounded by more stories than ever before - TV, books, comics, movies, theatre, radio - all pumping out vast numbers of stories, the vast majority of which reinforce the feeling that things will turn out ok, that life has meaning, that the world has patterns we fit into, that there is something more.

All of this leads us to feel that our lives are lacking something because they aren't leading anywhere, that there is some grand design, if only we could see it (and the corrollary - that there are people out there controlling this grand design and excluding us from it), that some day we will understand and find something meaningful that will suddenly let us know exactly what we need to do to be happy.

It took me a few years to realise that my search wasn't going to turn anything up, because there was no intrinsic meaning or grand design. Reading between the lines of Dave Sim's insanity, it seems that he too was looking for meaning, but when he realised that the direction he was heading in wasn't heading for a pinnacle of epiphany but rather for the blank freedom of nihilism he ran screaming to unquestioning belief. Some people find meaning in helping others, in children, in achievement or in the search itself. Others do without meaning, either finding other ways to keep themselves happy, or anaeshetise themselves against the lack they feel.

The problem comes when people want something more - and don't realise that this something more is going to have to come from within. We define our own meaning - we write our own stories - we find our own path. Living for someone else's meaning is going to bring you as much happiness as attempting to enforce your meaning on others will bring to them.

Stories can help you deal with life, but they aren't real. We're not the centre of the universe, the centre of the only story, headed for revelations and a nice conclusion that wraps things up. We're monkeys, surviving any way we can, mucking about in the middle of a chaotic planet in the middle of nowhere. We're not special, and expecting the universe to treat us as so is just going to lead to disappointment and a constant sense that things aren't going the wya they're 'supposed to'.

"Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why." - Kurt Vonnegut

Date: 2005-09-17 10:14 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] octopoid-horror.livejournal.com
We're monkeys, surviving any way we can, mucking about in the middle of a chaotic planet in the middle of nowhere

I'm fairly certain that I said this to you in around 1998/1999 and you disagreed, probably due to whatever Big Theory Pop Science book/article you were reading ;-)

You saw the thing on Hannah's livejournal about monkeys and economics, I presume. It was about monkeys, money and Adam Smith. Not that one, the other one. The one who isn't renowned for liking monkeys.

Date: 2005-09-17 11:36 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] octopoid-horror.livejournal.com
She's on your friends list. Andabusers.

I am surprised the monkey thing didn't turn up quoted on your lj. It's the kind of thing you quote.

Date: 2005-09-18 05:38 pm (UTC)

Date: 2005-09-17 11:36 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] octopoid-horror.livejournal.com
I don't believe in an ordered universe, scientific laws, cause and effect.. that sort of thing. You did. It was when we were still playing Mage.

Date: 2005-09-17 10:15 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] lilitufire.livejournal.com
Interesting post. I agree with a lot of this, I think.

Date: 2005-09-17 10:35 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] laserboy.livejournal.com
Yes. I'm sure we've talked about this many times over the years.

We should not change "Homo Sapien". It's largely accepted than humans are little more than special apes, mostly because religious loons had until recently backed off, so it seems pointless.

Date: 2005-09-17 10:38 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] thishardenedarm.livejournal.com
so how much do you believe THIS story, rate it from 0 to 100%, where 0 would be not at all, this tale of meaning as a little light in the endless void has quite a poignant pull so more than that i guess, where 100% is completly believe, but this is a story about stories, an arabian nights for the soul, so you can't completely believe a story about how all stories are just stories, so it can't be quiet 100%, so how much are you believing your story, now, right now, in the amber of the moment (fade out on Julian Cope singing, "until you realise, its just a story, until you realise, it's just a stor...")

Date: 2005-09-17 11:04 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] thishardenedarm.livejournal.com
wow, really? 100%? Good story. but where meaning is inescapable, where even the barest observations are always already, a priori, tied up with narrative, no way not to, no way out, isn't it best to exercise what Keats called Negative Capability: "the ability to remain in doubt, mystery and uncertainity without any irritable reaching after fact and reason", particularly with regard to ones own meta-narratives? And i like that use of irritable. (fade out on David Bowie singing, "dont believe in yourself, dont decieve with belief...")

Date: 2005-09-17 01:08 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] thishardenedarm.livejournal.com
“What man knows is a world permeated by his knowledge, and causality and the necessary laws of science are built into the framework of his cognition. Observations alone do not give man certain laws; rather those laws reflect the laws of man’s mental organisation. In the act of human cognition, the mind does not conform to things; rather, things conform to the mind.”

richard tarnas's rather neat summary of Kant. the mind can no more stop meaning imposing than lungs can stop processing oxygen, take your pick but: Hume, Kant, RAW, Crowley, Dan Dennett's version of memes (one of the few coherent ones), Lacan, Wittgenstien, all the same basic presupposition, that we are born into a world of meaning that is essentially transpersonal... the ones like RAW and Crowley who want to do more than just describe this process have made the interesting observation that when you start using a particular memeplex, the universe will start using it right back at you.

it reminds me of the bit at the end of ghostbusters, where they have to "choose the form" and Gozo the Destructor ends up as the stay-puff marsh mallow man,its what Lacan calls a forced choice, you can't chose for Gozo to have NO form, you will always impose something, otherwise, well, there wouldn't be anything at all...

Date: 2005-09-17 09:49 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] thishardenedarm.livejournal.com
no no none of us have an original thought in our heads, or like wittgenstein put it, there is no such thing as a private language, or like Lacan put it, individuality is precisely what needs to be sacrificied to enter the symbolic order and get a mediated version of yourself back, or Hegel called it the Cunning of Reason (personally i think its the Cunting of Reason), and Lacan again calls it the realm of the dead, but there is nothing personal in the realm of meaning, nothing at all...

and since there is no outside of our meaning, no access to the ding an sich, all bets on what might be absolute or what the object might be like if we weren't there are strictly off, we can never peek behind the phenomenal curtain (fade out on Laurie Anderson: "And they were all free and they were all asking themselves the same question: What is behind the curtain?"...)

Date: 2005-09-18 09:30 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] thishardenedarm.livejournal.com
its the personal thing we're stuck on here, meaning is like a city we all inhabit, a place we are thrown into at birth, i like the german word geworfenheit "throwness" to desribe our existential state, we are like the stone after it has beeen chucked, we all wake up already thrown, in media res, in the midst of a world of meaning we had nothing to do with shaping

so meaning is impersonal, as for meanings, plural, its like the distinction between the ontic and the ontological, between beings and Being, sure we all have our own room in the city of meaning, so at that level its at least idiosyncratic, but no-one lives outside it.

the absolute, the ding an sich, like i said bets are off, it's strictly inaccesssible, but personal has nothing to do with it, we all stand in the same relationship to the whatever is behind the curtain, wondering. i think thats where stories come in. but even here the structuralists will tell you how similiar the stories are, the screenwriters how there are only 12, the Jungians how limited and repetitive the archetypes are, and Wittgenstein will point out the family resemblances between them.

the take i'm trying to develop on this one, because its seems hey, why not, is to go all ludic with it, RAW and Crowley seemed to have the most fun with the symbolic order, decided to play with the treasure house of images rather than just inherit it or object to it or say none of it is real.

I don't think its personal, but i do think the structure of the noumenal is formally undecidable, so you might as well go for colour.

Date: 2005-09-18 11:03 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] thishardenedarm.livejournal.com
ok we need to define the level of our discussion. at the ontic level, at the level of individual differences, of tastes and preferences, meaningS are personal, idiosyncratic

but ontologically, at the heart of our subjectivity, is someting fundamentally impersonal. Kant argued, and the cognitive scientists would agree, that reality is posited, achieves its phenomenal coherence through the world-building activity of the observational machinery. However - “it is not possible to pass directly from the purely “animal soul” immersed in its natural life-world to “normal subjectivity” dwelling in its symbolic universe – the vanishing mediator between the two is the “mad” gesture of radical withdrawal from reality that opens up the space for its symbolic (re)constitution.” (Zizek)

This “mad gesture” appears in numerous guises in the history of ideas, the Hegelian Night of the World, Schelling’s Night of the Self, the Abyss of Freedom, even Freud’s Death Drive. What all these homonyms attest to is a fundamental negativity, a moment between the noumenal and the phenomenal where the former must be utterly destroyed to be reformed as the latter. This moment can never appear in the phenomenal. We never see it, because it is the means by which we see. As Kant noted “the thing which thinks…is known only through its predicates”. Indeed it is absolutely essential that the means of production of meaning remain, in Zizek’s terms, foreclosed for reality to have its coherence. It is only when it begins to “peep through”, in moments of madness, that we even notice it at work at all.

So at the heart of subjectivity, for meaning to be there at all, is a completely impersonal and universal process which has absolutely nothing to do with you. Meanings may be personal. Meaning isn't.

Date: 2005-09-18 07:15 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] thishardenedarm.livejournal.com
coming Real Soon Now...

it's here, we can already point to the neurological correlates of consciousness, even the neurochemical correlates, but to move from correlation to explanation is a leap that even the most sanguine of the consciousness theorists have to admit that we don't even know how to begin to make - how does what happens at the biological level explain the phenomenon of subjectivity? the more pessimistic theorists reckon we don't even know how to frame the question let alone begin to answer it.

as for being esoteric well, yeah. the phenomenal/noumenal distinction is one of those tools for thought that prosthetically enhances our ability to think about the interaction between reality, representation and consciousness; like any other specialised language - like you have with computers - you can't really get to grips with the basics if you don't know the lingo.

i think meaning is basic. I think that we can no more mean differently from our neighbours than we can breathe differently, or our kidneys can process fluid differently, or our muscles can exert effort differently. Thats the level at which i mean that meaning is basic, universal, impersonal and not subject to individual variation. There are pathologies of it, for sure, like with kidneys, lungs and muscles, and the pathologies of meaning, like schizophrenia, probably do tell us something about meaning making in general, but no-one, other than Lacan, as far as i know, have tackled it at that level.

I'm sure we've lost our audience by now. But for me, the only kids on the block, as far as even approaching a version of how matter has produced mind, are the more esoteric philosphers and thinkers. And behind most of them, behind Hegel, Kant, Derrida, even behind string theory, you can detect the influence of jewish mysticsm, of the kabbalah. Its a reach, I know, but if i want to get a glipmse of the miracle that is matter that has evolved to the point where it knows itself, conscious dust, (and thats just so damn odd) then i turn to the poets and philosphers and mystics. science, and i consider myself fundamentally a scientist, has not even begun to go there yet, doesn't know how. except with embarrsaments like Roger Penrose and "quantuum consciousness", which just go to show how far we are from anything like understanding the basic facts of our being.

(spot the difference :>)

Date: 2005-09-18 09:04 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] thishardenedarm.livejournal.com
yeah and real world robotics too, and embodied cognition... Andy Clarke, who just moved to edinburgh uni, is one of my favourite scientists working in this field (his book Being There rocks) but read him, its all heidegger and hegel behind the science, and quite explicitly so, and considering meaning at the level of ontology rather than ontically is no lingusitic trick, its the only way forward. A.I. has been programming disembodied boxes with ontic tastes and algorithms for years and got precisely nowhere until it decided that being-in-the-world was definitive of intelligent behaviour. So, over to Heidegger. These guys know their philosophy too.

My use of meaning hasn't changed since this discussion began (and by the way your first description of meaning - "the meanings" - is a plural noun, not an adjective). i've always been trying to take it back to the process of meaning making (the ontological level, the impersonal) not whatever particular meaning that process might produce (the ontic, the personal). Science and theory can only progress by considering meaning at the former level.

Date: 2005-09-22 05:17 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] thishardenedarm.livejournal.com
"meaning is a quality of the relationship between an observer and an observed. The meaning of X to me is A,B,C and D, the meaning of X to you is B,D,G and H." (your arguments for the meaning of X being an adjective)

but ALL consciousness is a "relationship between an observer and an observed" or, as the philosphers put it in their little churches, all consciousness is intentional, all consciousness is consciousness of something. thats not an argument for meaning in your sense being an adjective, neither is its subjectivity, its BDGHness, not no way, not no how, (but see my comments on grammar in post below, which i should have stuck to, but i couldn't let it lie...boys will be boys)

Date: 2005-09-22 04:39 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] thishardenedarm.livejournal.com
wow this could run and run - does it continue getting more indented? in the end we'll be like one of edwin morgan concrete poems

anything that can be said can be said clearly, said wittgenstein, and i agree. All im talking here is stuff like the phenomenal/noumenal distinction; the ontic/ontological distinction, in the paragraph that you said you didnt get, those are the main notions at work and particularly the relationship between the phenomenal and the noumenal, which is, for me, the basic thing our discussion is about. I was presumptious enough to assume you were ok with that stuff. I dont know what there you consider inner church/esoteric but i'll happily explain whatever was unclear.

As for my use of meaning, i think i've been trying to be clear, at least since i introduced the ontic/ontological thing into our little textual dance, indeed since i introduced Kant (and i'm sure he came on in the first act) at what level i think meaning is worth discussing with regard to theory or research or, well, life. At what level its a profoundly odd thing that we all do, a human universal. Maybe i've just been reading a particular kind of writer for too long. Thats why i wanted to stop reading/writing Theory and start reading about and writing screenplays - having done so, ironically, the totemic text of the latter discipline is a book called Story, about how the latter (despite all surface appearance of uniqueness and individual variation) is an inescapable universal, a fact of life...

at the ontic level, about our stories rather than our story making, i dont think they are arbitrary there either, maybe thats the level we should shift this too? or maybe its just me that needs to shift. enough with the ontology.

(and i still reckon if someone was asked to parse the sentence "what was the meaning of that truck running over your grandmother" they'd have meaning as an abstract noun, but lets not do grammar, im sure no-ones reading this as it is, any survivors the audience will shoot themselves if we start doing grammar)

Date: 2005-09-17 10:54 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dalglir.livejournal.com
Not so sure about the monkey stuff. I'll need to read more around that but it seems agreeable. Generally agree with the life/meaning stuff though.

I do, however, err towards a slight belief in fate/luck. This is irrational as far as I can tell. Luck doesn't exist in a metaphysically quantifiable way - its just probabilities - luck isn't something you can have more or less of but I wise man once told me that 'you make your own luck' or rather 'its up to the individual to put themselves in front of and take positive opportunities. It is in this sense that I believe in luck. As for fate: well, its a bit more complicated. I had, while at university, what my christian friends call a 'religious experience'. Lets call it a supernatural experience - its something that a large chunk of the populace can expect to have in one way or another before they die and which cannot immediately be explained away by science. Who knows? Maybe I just had a brain fizz. Maybe the circumstances were just right for my mind's psychological and my brain's chemical states to produce what I experienced all by itself. It was not an epiphany that drastically changed my worldview but rather, it simply saved me from the overwhelming circumstances I was in. Regarding fate, I still, frequently, keep running into situations that I've dreamed about in detail previously. Recently, they centre around weird banal telephone conversations at work where the setting and subject are exactly the same but that I've dreamed as part of a larger dream months before. It triggers a terrible, sinking sense of deja vu. There are also instances in my life where the arrangement of people and events just seem too 'lucky' to have been a simple 'being in the right place at the right time'. Maybe I was just making my own luck.

Who knows? Its stuff like this that religious bodies thrive on. The last outposts of Things That Science Can't Explain Yet.

Date: 2005-09-19 04:56 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] channelpenguin.livejournal.com
I believe in both brain farts and luck! They are both what you make of them :-) It's absolutely fascinating just how weird things can get with fuck-ups in perception/memory - well enough to explain anything 'mystical' that I ever heard of...

Date: 2005-09-17 11:08 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] in-thy-bounty.livejournal.com
I found this very interesting. I've often struggled with the correlation of books, films and music with my own life with the end result that I often find it very difficult to be happy unless things are grandly exaggerated in a suitable manner.

p.s. - I hear that Andy Warhol did a film involving lesbian vampire sisters. How can that be considered pointless? HOW? HOW?!?!?!?!?!?!

Date: 2005-09-17 11:30 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dalglir.livejournal.com
"p.s. - I hear that Andy Warhol did a film involving lesbian vampire sisters. How can that be considered pointless? HOW? HOW?!?!?!?!?!?!"

ROTFL!

Agreed.

:-D

Date: 2005-09-17 11:11 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] diotina.livejournal.com
This ability of human beings to tell bloody good stories touched a chord in me recently while watching Samurai Jack (the episode with the multicultural mythology) - when I realised, that for the longest time, all I had wished for was for mythology to be true. Obviously, as a rational adult, I realise that these are only narratives to help us construct and understand the world, but with that also comes the realisation that many don't. Which, in its way, astounds me...because even though meaning might be 100% subjective, truth isn't.

Date: 2005-09-17 12:33 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] communicator.livejournal.com
instinctual need to make their life into stories,

I think another probem with making lives into stories is that common reaction to other people's misfortune: 'you must have done something wrong', as if bad results are a reflection of moral badness, like they are in stories. As Oscar Wilde says 'The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily - that's what fiction means'. Unfortunately, a lot of people think the world itself works like that. You can see it in the reaction to Katrina 'Those dumb people were asking for it', 'They chose to be poor', 'This is god's judgement' and so on. A comforting lie.

Religion and oversimplification

Date: 2005-09-17 06:10 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] seebs.livejournal.com
What's interesting here is that your description of religion actually fits perfectly with the thing that makes bad religion so effective; the desire to trivialize people with whom one disagrees.

The fact is that, for nearly all of us, there exists someone smarter and better educated than us who disagrees with us about religion, and for good reasons we have not adequately considered.

I am glad that you have found a view of life that allows you to interact with it; however, your smug dismissal of alternatives doesn't strike me as improving matters much.

Re: Religion and oversimplification

Date: 2005-09-17 11:02 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] seebs.livejournal.com
"It took me a few years to realise that my search wasn't going to turn anything up, because there was no intrinsic meaning or grand design."

There's a couple of comments like this; dismissing the possibility that there's anything to it. If there is no "grand design", then many religions are necessarily false. It seems a little early to conclude that you have seen all the grand design there is to see. :)

Anyway, if you wanna see some competent religious thinkers, there's some of 'em out there. I have seen some folks at Cross+Flame (http://crossandflame.com/) who are plenty clever. If you want to see how stupid and bigoted religious people and atheists can be, try Internet Infidels (http://www.iidb.org/), but be ready to be disapointed in humanity. This is not to say the forum's useless. Freethought Forum (http://www.freethought-forum.com/) has a few fairly bright religious folks, and some fairly bright non-religious folks, mostly able to get along and talk about the grand meanings they're all looking for. And yaoi, and writing contests...

I've met plenty of people out there who disagree with me for good reasons.

Re: Religion and oversimplification

Date: 2005-09-18 11:28 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] thishardenedarm.livejournal.com
oh and if you want intelligent spirituality, its got to be the Jews everytime, good place to start is either/always Gershom Scholem or Triad: the physicists, the analysts, the kabbalists by Tom Keve, which is about the mutual influence of these three disciplines at the turn of the last century, but if you want really top notch thinking that will lever you out of the ontic into the ontological its got to be Zizek's Tarrying with the Negative, and hes a great writer who also knows his film, opens with a real good use of Blade Runner...

Re: Religion and oversimplification

Date: 2005-09-19 03:36 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] seebs.livejournal.com
That's the thing. There are people much smarter than either of us who have subjected the concept to rigorous analysis and found that it stood up just fine.

It's not that I necessarily object to you dismissing alternative views; just so you realize that your dismissal of alternative views is indeed absolutely equivalent to everyone else's. You are stating your current beliefs just as baldly, which makes it look silly if you dis them for stating their beliefs just as baldly.

Date: 2005-09-19 04:53 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] channelpenguin.livejournal.com
You wanna watch that heavy thinking or you'll end up a crazy as me :-)

Funny, I was thinking to day that people hand over the job of god/equivalent to something/someone else because it's such a tough bloody job being actually in charge of your existence (and knowing it).

As I have said to you before, the universe is arranging itself for my convenience so presumably, yours is for yours. Whether you are aware of it or not.

And I don't want anything more than what is - not that I can think of, anyway.

But we all (me included) get a bit too caught up in the story sometimes, I think....

Date: 2006-01-31 12:21 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] lord-caramac.livejournal.com
I think what the world needs is more sex. People who are underfucked tend to think too much of the wrong kind of thoughts.

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