Zompist Bboard Again

Theory of the Object by Thomas Nail, a Neo-Epicurean materialist theory of objecthood. I'm seeing an attempt to analyze the scientific method in terms of: sample, extraction, measurement, variability, apparatus, etc. It's still very much philosophy though. Thomas Nail is a Marxist in case that matters either way.

Marxist poetry: https://www.youtube.com/live/5SX9GeZTQpg

Andrew Kliman: https://files.libcom.org/files/Kliman_R ... apital.pdf

(Although I think Marxist thinkers have valuable ideas, I have to say my interactions with ideologically committed Marxists have been almost entirely negative.)

Systems metaphysics: https://youtu.be/Ex43Hh18JhQ

Discourses of the Elders (Aztec)
Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light (art)

A while back in the comments for a clip from Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, someone described it as their favorite Star Trek movie, and my interest was piqued. Eventually I decided to start reading the books it was based on, I'm on the 9th one now. I'm not really much of a fiction reader so that second one was pretty brutal, but it's important for the rest of the series so I pushed through.

I also worked through Beekes' Comparative Indo-European Linguistics last year. I'm not sure how much of it stuck lol but it was pretty interesting stuff

The Outward Path by Sebastian Purcell argues that the Aztec ethos was similar to some strands of Confucian thinking, namely the ones that promote social harmony against the claims of individuals. The author also supports this approach. Personally, I think such a society is conservative and repressive.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sat Apr 04, 2026 12:45 am The Outward Path by Sebastian Purcell argues that the Aztec ethos was similar to some strands of Confucian thinking, namely the ones that promote social harmony against the claims of individuals. The author also supports this approach. Personally, I think such a society is conservative and repressive.

Dunno about how accurate the author's claims are, but I agree with your take on his preferences.

Raphael wrote: ↑Sat Apr 04, 2026 1:32 am

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sat Apr 04, 2026 12:45 am The Outward Path by Sebastian Purcell argues that the Aztec ethos was similar to some strands of Confucian thinking, namely the ones that promote social harmony against the claims of individuals. The author also supports this approach. Personally, I think such a society is conservative and repressive.

Dunno about how accurate the author's claims are, but I agree with your take on his preferences.

The author is an academic philosopher and translator of original Nahuatl texts. The Discourses of the Elders was translated by him. IIRC he's of Nahua descent himself.

He refers to all the scholarship on the subject, but admits he has his own interpretation on some issues. He says that's to be expected given the incipient nature of the scholarship and the fragmentary evidence.

According to his interpretation, the Aztec ethos seeks to build a "rooted life", like a tree that gets its roots into solid ground and stays there. This is interpreted as situating yourself with reference to the social fabric and putting the interests of the group first in many ways. IIRC this is contrasted to living like the hare and the deer or something.

I don't entirely disagree with this argument in the abstract form. It doesn't follow that "many ways" implies a thick interpretation like social harmony without more detailed followups.

I'm only 10% into the book so far, so I don't know what these followups are going to be, if anything. Based on bits and pieces I picked up, one argument will probably be something like: The world is a chaotic place. Helping others is the only way to gain respect. This will pay dividends when you need help yourself. Another possible argument: The world is a tragic place. Individuals die. The community lives on.

Again, I agree with these arguments in the abstract. It doesn't follow just from these that social harmony is the highest good.

The author says you think you want to be happy, but you'll find out you don't really once you think things through. You want to take certain actions regardless of the consequences. It was weird that an academic philosopher like him would associate seeking happiness with "Western" ethics. This part of the argument strongly reminded me of Kant, possibly the most recent figure whom all the biggest names contemporary ethics refer to.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sat Apr 04, 2026 2:09 am
According to his interpretation, the Aztec ethos seeks to build a "rooted life", like a tree that gets its roots into solid ground and stays there.

Yuck. Sounds way too much like Blood and Soil to me. Then again, way too many people on the Left these days seem to be way too willing to accept Blood-and-Soil-type thinking when it's about cultural groups they like. IMO, that shows how deeply ingrained many right-wing ways of thinking are in the human psyche, if even so many people who are very decidedly left-wing still fall into such ways of thinking so easily.

I don't think you have to reject individualism to reject the current messed-up self-parodying capitalist way of running the world. You just have to seriously think through what impact that way really has on the prospects for the individual happiness, and even de facto levels of individual freedom, of most people.

"Happiness" - ok, whether anyone can ever be "truly" happy is a very deep philosophical question which I don't feel the slightest bit qualified to answer. But I think things should be organized in such a way that the average person can at least expect to be reasonably contented for much of their lives, in between the unavoidable tragedies and setbacks and disappointments.

As for meaning and purpose through community life - ironically, that is something that underscores the importance of individual choice. There are definitely people who are best suited to a life focused on a solid community, and will be constantly frustrated without that. There are other people who will be deeply unhappy if that kind of life is forced on them, and would be better off being more on their own. And there are probably people for whom it's different at different points in their lives. It's one of the many ways in which the world don't move to the beat of just one drum, and what might be right for you may not be right for some. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

So, if it was up to me, a life with that much focus on community would be an option for everyone and an obligation for no one. Way too much damage is done by people arguing that the way of living one's life that works for them clearly has to work best for everyone, or at least for everyone who belongs to their gender, and should therefore be forced on everyone.

While the Aztecs were a military empire in constant war like the Nazis, the Discourses of the Elders, which this book is based on, aren't about that. It tells boys to provide for their wives, girls to take care of the kids and stuff like that. Pretty much what Marxism would lead you to expect from a society at that level of development. What's different is the cultural coloring. "Quetzal plume" is used as an endearment. Men are told they have to make a living because they are hunters by nature, with the nature of eagles and coyotes or something. It's unfair to rely on the one with the skirt and the blouse to provide for the household.

I think accepting any of this at face value is to be, let's say, blind to historical materialism. I don't accept idpol, let alone Aztec idpol. In Mesoamerica, they were known for having an international merchant class that spied for the empire! This kind of cultural idpol is promoted by the middle class and rich people indulging their nostalgia. I'm just evaluating the arguments on their own merits. My own proposal puts individuals front and center.

The valuable part of The Outward Path, in my opinion, is that it places subjectivity in subordination to external reality. This sounds promising for materialist philosophers. Arguments drawn from here could bolster your own philosophy.

I also read a wide variety of thinkers for the anthropological value. I am reading The Philosophy of Redemption, a book I'm not sure it's safe to discuss in public.

Maybe a vague discussion wouldn't be problematic: In the beginning was God, a being of absolute perfection. God knew that non-being is superior to being. Therefore, he willingly decomposed into diversity. That diversity is the world we live in.

This was written by a philosopher of absolute pessimism. He was a social democrat who believed everyone should be given the education they need to reach perfect understanding like God once had. It's the hardship of everyday existence that makes being seem precious.

I've heard people saying this guy was a good person with a tender soul that's rare among philosophers. I don't know. His nationalism seemed obnoxious to me. Non-being is superior to being, but give your life for the state! He also refused to condemn historical stages like the caste system and the racism underpinning it. But this guy has no problem making value judgements about plenty of other things. The whole system is a metaphysics grounded in the value of being.

What the book is good for is following the pessimistic train of thought through to the logical conclusion. Like Hegel said, the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. Seeing something as a completed whole helps in considering alternatives: No matter how bad life seems, your pain is not metaphysical. Particular problems have particular solutions.

Unrelated: I'm currently reading The Idiot Brain by Dean Burnett, which is, to avoid misunderstandings, not about the brains of idiots, but about the idiocy in all our brains. Apparently a neuroscientific look at the ways in which our brains get things wrong. Since that's a topic I've thought about a lot, and read about a bit, I suspect that it will often tell me things I already know. But it still sounds interesting.

Great early quote: "The brain apparently thinks logic is a precious resource to be used only sparingly."

Raphael wrote: ↑Sat Apr 04, 2026 4:12 am Great early quote: "The brain apparently thinks logic is a precious resource to be used only sparingly."

Yes, using executive function lowers your executive function temporarily. Even restraining yourself from doing anything measurably lowers your IQ for a while.

On the other hand, using logic regularly increases my capacity to be logical in the long term. It's like physical exercise.

BTW, these have been tropes among online rationalists for years, popularized by Yudkowsky. The Sequences have free summaries of a wide range of cognitive limitations.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sat Apr 04, 2026 6:20 am
BTW, these have been tropes among online rationalists for years, popularized by Yudkowsky. The Sequences have free summaries of a wide range of cognitive limitations.

Hm, judging from what I've heard about that crowd, they might have trouble applying what they know in that regard to their own thought processes, though.

Raphael wrote: ↑Sat Apr 04, 2026 4:12 am Unrelated: I'm currently reading The Idiot Brain by Dean Burnett, which is, to avoid misunderstandings, not about the brains of idiots, but about the idiocy in all our brains. Apparently a neuroscientific look at the ways in which our brains get things wrong. Since that's a topic I've thought about a lot, and read about a bit, I suspect that it will often tell me things I already know. But it still sounds interesting.

Great early quote: "The brain apparently thinks logic is a precious resource to be used only sparingly."

A longer great quote from a section on conspiracy theories:

I'm in league with ‘Big Pharma’ to suppress all natural remedies, alternative medicine and cancer cures for the sake of profit (nothing spells ‘big money’ like potential consumers constantly dying). I'm part of a plot to ensure that the public never realises that the moon landings were an elaborate sham. My day job in the field of mental healthcare and psychiatry is obviously a massive racket intended to crush free thinkers and to enforce conformity. I'm also part of the great conspiracy of global scientists to promote the myths of climate change, evolution, vaccination and a spherical earth. After all, there’s nobody on earth wealthier and more powerful than scientists, and they can’t risk losing this exalted position by people finding out how the world really works.

And a quote on the practical difficulties of researching the neuroscience of conspiracy theories:

Conspiracy theorists tend to be secretive, paranoid and distrustful of recognised authorities, so if a scientist were to say to one, ‘Would you like to come to our secure facility and let us experiment on you? It may involve being confined in a metal tube so we can scan your brain’, the answer is unlikely to be yes.

Postmodernism by Jameson, the book that originated all the tropes about humanities academia. It's the book about "Late Capitalism" that constructs an interpretation of Heideggerian phenomenology through a Marxist lens. Did I get all the keywords? I think it's pretty accessible, but then I'm irresistibly attracted to boring things. You might like it if you like art interpretation.

Raphael wrote: ↑Sat Apr 04, 2026 8:25 am Hm, judging from what I've heard about that crowd, they might have trouble applying what they know in that regard to their own thought processes, though.

Cults of all kinds pop up in California all the time. Yudkowsky has tried to shut down all the worst ones I know of like the left brain/right brain house boat for trans people.

As for whether Yudkowsky himself runs a cult, the root problem is that his Rationalists assume there is some material structure that allows you to magically find answers to questions.

Personally, I don't believe in the naive account of intelligence. Accurate answers are arrived at through correspondence with the facts. Within reality as I understand it, this means:

1. You have to conduct a search to discover facts.

2. You have to compress the facts you found into a smaller representation for storage. This sometimes has an accidental benefit of ditching needlessly complex theories (Occam's Razor). You also have to uncompress them to generate predictions.

3. You need physical energy to conduct searches, compress and uncompress the results. Energy is a scarce resource. If you don't have the resources to do all this, it's not possible for you to take over the world by being smart. (That's also a silly idea for other reasons like needing physical strength to put your plans into motion.)

4. Even after doing all that, the context in which a physical system operates remains underspecified in several ways:

a) The number of combinations possible in physical space are currently much larger than what our knowledge systems can predict. (This is an understatement.) It's always possible a competitor will construct a larger system.

b) At the limits of representation, it remains possible to construct contradictions through self-reference.

c) Ignoring self-reference, it's unclear whether a mathematical formalism exists that generalizes knowledge representation across all contexts. Neural networks use a piecewise linear representation. Other possibilities exist.

...

alice wrote: ↑Fri Mar 20, 2026 3:41 pm The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution – A Groundbreaking Narrative of Galileo, Newton, and the Birth of Modernity by by David Wootton. Dense, but interesting from a conworlding point of view.

That sounds interesting for science and for history.

A great book I am reading at the moment is Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman. Bregman encourages the reader to find effective ways to improve life for the many, an explains how citing examples of abolitionists, virologists and others.

MacAnDàil wrote: ↑Wed Apr 15, 2026 10:41 am A great book I am reading at the moment is Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman. Bregman encourages the reader to find effective ways to improve life for the many, an explains how citing examples of abolitionists, virologists and others.

Seconded! I have read that book, too - twice.

EDIT: malloc should really read it. It will help him understand that something can be done about the current crisis, instead of catastrophizing all the time.

How did I live my entire life until now without ever knowing that Josh Ritter exists?

So far, I've only heard Getting Ready to Get Down https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnQ89jZvZD0, but I'm curious about more of his stuff now.

Raphael wrote: ↑Fri Apr 17, 2026 6:01 pm How did I live my entire life until now without ever knowing that Josh Ritter exists?

So far, I've only heard Getting Ready to Get Down https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnQ89jZvZD0, but I'm curious about more of his stuff now.

Nice song, though IMHO nothing special, but I like the way he represents the lyrics in the video!