meika loofs samorzewski

Recently I made some notes about stupidity, suspension of disbelief, and recent story-telling. They came up because this week I read Glenorchy Boy by John Dale. This is set centred on the northern suburbs of Hobart, Tasmania, of a lad coming into the grey zones of responsibility, relationships and restrictions. Mistakes are made, here and there, and avoided. Sort of.

Some while ago I read the phrase “art is his religion”. Where I saw this I have no idea. I do remember that in was in a context in which everyone was expected to know this. When I saw it I re-parsed it from my [selfing the world :: worlding the self] Janus dance, as “worlding is his worlding” and…

I’ve been following, very loosely, other people’s readings of Henri-Louis Bergson for sometime, as I have other writer’s works, but he has been a slow burn. Once so popular, now remembered by items found like second-hand curios. Many of us linger like that, but he was really really well-known. So reading Emily Herring’s Herald of a Restless World: How Henri…

In 2011 an exhibition called Awfully wonderful, science fiction in contemporary art took place in Sydney. In the library I work in a colleague asked me about the following paragraph from the exhibition's book: Lizzie Muller. “Speculative Objects and the Total Perspective Vortex.” Awfully Wonderful : Science Fiction in Contemporary Art, Performance Space, 2011. From a copy in the Phrontisterion. What…

When I was about twenty-two years old, and freshly sprung from a teenaged grove of science fiction by way of Hofstadter ‘s Godel Escher Bach, and 80s post-Punk anarchism, and chaos and complexity theory had yet to make its mark… —I would say I was an “asystems anarchist”. Or, what we need is ‘asystem”. So now at 60 I will…

Having ① a clannish [herb] (Polish coat of arms) on which a red field grounds a golden snake in the form of an analemma, and ② played a team sport which required players (against our desires) to be numbered on their jersey, which in our team’s case were also red, and so I chose ∞, it is with great interest that i…

Mathematicianss are shamans, like poets they don't know it. To frame this conundrum of metaphor versus identity I will first look ‘mapping’ as used in mathematics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomorphism (off you go, transport yourself to us all). It would appear that mathematicians use the analogy of ‘mapping’ with some Greek-originating words like isomorphic, or morely nounly, isomorphism to label the process while often retaining ‘mapping’ for…

Jaar : a pidgin-midwifery conlang 1.4, July 2026 by meika loofs samorzewskiversion 1.4, 2026-07-25 transferred from original html v1.3 2020-10-16. So first published on a wordpress site at: formeika. [1]. See also meika.loofs-samorzewski.com, whyweshould (self-hosted) and substack.com to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life [2] Jaar is a meta-conlang, a constructed language ennabler for speakers with 'no' common language to help create a working pidgin…

The world is a blur at best. Bad worlding can root itself in definitions, using them like hammers for everything in sight. Possibly because of kosmophasia. Good intentions can go either way, badly as often as best. Bad intentions are the same effort without— that within— with no one — worldless. They will destroy the world in order to save…

I'll be attending to how I read a post, any post, how my Divergent self works as a reading brain (as opposed to the Diachronic/Episodic selves on offer below in Bry Willis' post). It is an extended comment, but in from is just a series of episodic notes that follow the sections from:- Willis, Bry. “The Administrative Soul.” Substack newsletter.

Gerald J. Beyer. “Solidarity by Grace, Nature or Both? The Possibility of Human Solidarity in the Light of Evolutionary Biology and Catholic Moral Theology.” The Heythrop Journal 54.5 (2013): via academia Web Accessed 26 June 2026. [https://doi.org/10.1111/heyj.12030] I am fairly harsh on Catholicism, that variation of Christianity with its origins as a rogue version of an imperial cult gone into universal…

In the beginning was the tool, and the tool was the world. The world was with us and we were the world. Seeing the world was a tool, we said to each other, “Aren’t we clever?” and immediately forgot what we were doing. In case we got in trouble. Some say, to their credit, they remember themselves, but then, immediately…

Haworth, Alan. “Genes and Citizens: Can Moral Philosophy Learn From Evolutionary Biology?” Res Publica (2001): via academia.edu. Web. 10 Sept. 2024. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1011924516656 ABSTRACT: The claim that moral philosophers have something to learn from recent neo-Darwinian theory cannot be sustained -at least, not in the case of the three theses characteristic of the latter on which I concentrate. The first thesis,…

Stewart-Williams, Steve. “Evolution and Morality.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780080970868810569?via%3Dihub [via Web] [entry in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (2nd ed.). (2015) ISBN 9780080970875 : Web. ] 2015 was about the year I starting writing down notes about stuff with various thoughts and feelings, about a subject which I would later realise was boxed-in as ‘moral philosophy’. It took ages to realise…

The world goes on without each of us, beyond us. Below, the each of us can forget it all for a while, or reject it all for even longer, before it returns us all to ourselves, coming to us unbidden, with a wave. The world cannot go on at all, without us all attending to it, even as the each…

I have a certain care or consideration for believers. This may not be apparent from reading my less than supportive posts on the imperial cult that is Christianity, and especially the rogue imperial sub-cult that is Catholicism, statist moves which give us the definition of religion and its over-application to practices which might best be regarded as ‘worlding’ rather than…

Via medicalxpress.com when scrolling on my phone, “Baylor College of Medicine researchers have found that the human brain is capable of sophisticated language processing while in an unconscious state from general anesthesia.” So I’ve become aware of the following article in Nature “Plasticity and Language in the Anaesthetized Human Hippocampus.” I took a few things away from this quick scroll,…

There is a type of selfing the world which worlds the self in terms of an identity. It is generally unwise, while it may have prosocial outcomes, these do not generally provide not long-term strategies. One can identify with someone when they tell a story, and one says in recognition “That’s me in the mirror!” It is still a mirror,…

Josh Zlatus reveals he has an “abiding passion” that let’s him begin on interest and activities like psychotherapy or literature, and then diving deeply and lengthily, but works them out like miner, and so finds them a little wanting. Only to go on. So it goes. I call that abode the world, and the passion is the life. We world…

There are many middle worlds in the realm of literature and mythology, and indeed in the dominion of empires and realms with which these originary places are orbitally locked. Zhongguo/Middle kingdom, Mesopotamia, meditullium, Madhyadesha, Midgard, Middle earth. There are so many they have no middle ground, but constitute all mythology between the earth and the heavens, somehow... Quite often they…

Thus in these brief weeks Dorothea’s joyous grateful expectation was unbroken, and however her lover might occasionally be conscious of flatness, he could never refer it to any slackening of her affectionate interest. The season was mild enough to encourage the project of extending the wedding journey as far as Rome, and Mr. Casaubon was anxious for this because he…

Korsgaard, Christine M. 2010. Reflections on the evolution of morality. Amherst Lecture in Philosophy. The Department of Philosophy at Amherst College. Published Version & Permanent link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:5141952 ABSTRACT: In recent years a number of biologists, anthropologists, and animal scientists have tried to explain the biological evolution of morality, and claim to have found the rudiments of morality in the altruistic…

This one has a lot of set-up and a tiny speck of a glint towards the end. So I made a reframing comment supporting the comment quoting Steve Stewart-Williams (& Frans de Waal in 2002) that psychology has a lot to learn from animals, or studies of them. All that percolates through my head for a few days… —as I…

John McCrone’s 1991 The Ape That Spoke is a book which holds up fairly closely to my own attitudes. I wish I had read it at the time, 35 years ago. Of course many info-nuggets require updating, for example, all the contexts developed from ancient DNA work on the Homo genus, and the bones of likely Homo species of island…

One thing to remember about the word idiot is that it does not, in that ancient Greek context refer to the intelligence or capabilities in political efforts of an individual, merely their private status, their personal efforts, perhaps compared to those who hold, or are qualified to hold, public office and so engage in public life. Back in ancient days…

Celia Deane–Drummond. “Evolutionary perspectives on inter-morality and inter-species relationships interrogated in the light of the rise and fall of homo sapiens sapiens.” Journal of Moral Theology 3.2 (2014): 72–94. web. We launch into a discussion of “speciesism” as a protection of being special which studies of evolution undermine (if not eugenically located I guess), at least with reference to the…

no enough words means we will always have too many Now…then— “to self the world” and “to world the self” are not the same, not the same as in an identical tautology, nor a tautological identity. They are not a reversible reaction, even if they recursively feed themselves with outcomes. Their trajectories are bothered confoundedly, but in that they differ…

Haeckel, Ernst. The Riddle of the Universe. London: Watts & Co., 1900. Translated from the original 1899 German, Die Welträthsel, by Joseph McCabe. With glossary. I heard Ernst Haeckel invented the word ecology (among many biological terms). I’ve never checked that out, but remember this for later. He was a promoter of Darwinism in Germany but many in anglophone may…

I’ve said that values are an effort, which if recognised are raised as virtues — it is important to realise that many efforts are not perceived, not even taken for granted, and even if perceived, may not be seen as an effort, where efforts are not (allowed to be) recognised (among us). As we self the world among others doing…

Recently I subscribed to Structure of Desire after reading The Body Keeps the Fascism: on Jung, White Innocence, and the War for the Unconscious. I enjoyed it even where I disagreed. On subscribing one usually gets a welcome email. It is an email subscription after all. It was a very good email. I’ll have to go and look at mine…

Displaced belief (exemplum) : “Do you believe in god?” “No, but I go to church to keep the children happy.” I think Slavoj Žižek describes it correctly, but is wrong about the dates. Displaced belief is the basic compromise of 'modernity' which goes back into the late paleolithic. Well before Žižek’s example of Luther, well before Bruno Snell’s Discovery of the Greek…

My main concern is not that a structure* is judged to be good/bad/X, or is good/bad/X because it is a structure, but that certain agents live and move through the world to suit themselves without negotiating their way, thus producing structures that suit the common moves narcissists make, even performing or doing 'structures' that can be in a confounded conflict…

The last book report on was some analytical philosophy, the book A Moral Theory of Liveliness: A Secular Interpretation of African Life Force by Kirk Lougheed. So time to try to read some more continental philosophy, what better than Slavoj Zižek and his 2022 work on our topsy-turvy world Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed. This one I found in…

Input In recent years I have acknowledged my discomfort attending performances is mostly due to my inability to be at all comfortable in an audience. I am audience-phobic. It would be much easier to be on the stage. Note this is not a preference to be on stage, I have little desire to be on stage. Or perform for others. I would…

pre-put Back in September (2025) I read the following piece on the new work in philosophy channel. "A Moral Theory of Liveliness: A Secular Interpretation of African Life Force" by Kirk Lougheed. Fellow in Clinical, Organizational, and Research Ethics at the Center for Clinical Ethics which is housed at Unity Health Toronto, Academic Fellow in the the Department of Family…

When we see the day in our world and the world in our day, we have no need to should. One might say we should… —should, but this is too much. Chill. Relax. Smile. In giving this moment to the day we are open to the world. The biggest part of the world is the day. ① the day in…

Put up Today is a quick take or a reaction piece, a bit like I do at evolution~morality pieces papers. I am going to look at some dogmatic selfing. It follows from seeing an unknown term 'Argumentative ethics' I saw in someone’s comment someplace as an aside to something completely unconnected, what is this 'Argumentative ethics' I thought? Perhaps this…

There is a constant effort between all efforts, to call it war is to miss the point. War is a failure of effort, when our efforts forget themselves in the name of loyalty or some other type of dogma. To engage in a culture war is the laziest effort, a value of no value. All values are an effort, it…

I held the book in my hand and thought, merely looking at the title— … it won’t know worlding, i guesses, it will moralise… but anyway: If all all values are an effort or an inclination towards such labours, a price is a meeting of the efforts, a market is a type of worlding. The market, like morality, is a subset of worlding,…

This was written in March 2023 (substack.com) and relates to whatever chatGPT 4 was around at the time. Even then I just felt they mapped the record of our social learning rather than instantiated any form (artificial) intelligence. Large language models (LLMs) don’t know anything we don’t all know mathemangled together. Specifics can be hard, whether stylistically or in factoidiness, but general…

Intakes I have been offering a intentional mindfilling of the blur as a means to clarify categories that have become too hardened, too defined or over-determined, and so unconsciously dogmatic. Or worse. Not in relation to truthfulness or logical or tech-tree-like procedural syllogisms, but in relation to the potholes such processes can get stuck in, i.e. suboptimal solutions. They work,…

too much effort went into this substack.com comment for a separate post today Crossposted from substack.com as a post. “The blessed unity, Being, in the unique sense of the word, has been lost for us, and it was necessary that we should lose it for us to be able to aspire and to conquer it by main force. We detach…

a list of aporia I generalise into the… —gap This is in prep for an index of gap-fillers. [See Posts on the… —gap.] So, “the… —gap” is a term that refers to not knowing, but still wanting to do something because something should be done! This is an urge we have, to find shelter and food and ways to negotiate…

Bias is a part of being alive. Where one is blinded by the golden age of pure but lost absolutes, bias can be seen as an imperfection of that ideal form, of the true reality, or real truth, which is something more than just good enough, which our sad lives are but a degraded iteration. Bias is a mark on…

There is a legalistically narcissistic subculture in which the verb to innerstand is currently gaining currency. I do not think they invented it (I’ll leave that deep dive into innerstand's prior art to another day). The usage betrays the general self-focus, or self-absorption, some subcultures and/or pervertagencies are prone to. It’s all very doctrinally based, i.e. rashly born in dogma grabbing. Thus…

the comfort zones of doctrine and dogma, traps for the unworldly To world is to live where it is practical to agree on what should be done. To world-build is to should a feeling nothing else that nothing but shoulding is to be should, so it should (not always good). Within that complexity bullies take agreeableness for weakness, they have…

lip-service is the purer behaviour The Evolution of Culture: An Interdisciplinary View. Edinburgh University Press, 1999 / edited by Robin Dunbar, Chris Knight, and Camilla Power. 9780748610754 It’s a quarter of a century since this book of interdisciplinary conversation came out. And I am only reading The Evolution of Culture: An Interdisciplinary View now. This book explores the ways in which contemporary evolutionary thinking might inform…

Part 1 tilting In the Assistens Kirkegård, a cemetery in Copenhagen, a monument to the Russian writer has been raised (Dostojevskij Monument Unveiled in Copenhagen) and they have a facebook page. Hence the repost by an FB friend of something who shared their post from a year ago, in which Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky describes a quote from Don Quixote, itself a metafictonal work,…

List of post that cover in some way more social things, i.e. sociology, anthropology, economics, in contrast to the world. Response to reading Joseph Henrich: See also Reading Mary Douglas linkpost

how it is that empires mean we cannot have good things Christoph Antweiler, Our Common Denominator: Human Universal Revisited. New York: Berghahn, 2016. ISBN 9781785330933 After the introduction to this interdisciplinary work on human universal, Christoph Antweiler looks at the ins and outs of universal human rights. In reading this I’ve realised… —or noted two things to work on. Rights are a type of…

There has been a call for greater clarity or precision in writing. At least that is what I am taking away, at first, from what they have written: Notice: it is actually hard to ever make use of anyone else’s thinking on anything. As a professor I can tell you that the most painful part of my job is reading…

There are a couple of papers described as debunking man the hunter: Ocobock, Cara, and Lacy, Sarah. 2023. “Woman the hunter: The physiological evidence.” American Anthropologist 00: 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13915 Lacy, Sarah, and Ocobock, Cara. 2023. “Woman the hunter: The archaeological evidence.” American Anthropologist 00: 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13914 Both via https://www.sciencealert.com/one-of-the-biggest-hunter-gatherers-myths-is-finally-getting-debunked The debunking is not silly, but it is possibly a little bit of pot calling kettle black type…

Bergson, Deleuze et al Others

3 minutes of quotes that try to reframe our animal assumptions Henri Bergson was wrong because despite his insight into our animal assumptions, Bergson thought these animalities were the hard stuff of the world, when they are just contingencies of survival. He went doctrinal on life, and made his worldbuilding some type of reality, and thus was lead to feel…

conspiracies of emotional laziness in feeling empowerless The thing about words like ideology or even narrative now, is the sense that some forces control us through them. For some among us, when a light goes off in someone’s head, when a truth/story is revealed/explained, they reject the world. But still they seek to world this feeling. So they find companions who enjoy meeting and…

rituals and worlding: religion = doctrinal world-building The small point The small point i need to make, prefacing this rewheeling invention post, is that the dichotomy describing a division of life into/between profane and sacred is not required. And that, because it is not necessary it is not then, most likely, even useful, at least in a positive way. This does not…

Many values are unnamed emotions, they are very moving… we shake it up— A bubble in the wind… alive, let’s name me —animal. Emotions shout out until we call them virtues or discontents that should into duties that suit us up into uniforms re-doubled into identities, and again yet again, outcomes become causes to blame ourselves a credit to our…

lecture notes on gradients of thick description and thin control I do not write because I know but because I do not even… Writing out in order to think, publishing (blogging) in order to make progress by logging errors, with a timestamp. To thin the thick, to thick the thin. A self-similar process given/taken as progress. Two-steps to step once…

time enough Going to have a break from alignment this week. Most of my writing time currently is taken up with editing older posts from the first year of this new attempt at blogging. I have about 15 posts to go at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski. I do not trust platforms, anyone might buy them. Other people put them out on many multiple…

'Worlding' as a verb is not very popular. It is, however, increasingly used in recent decades. I must research how others are using it in detail another time. I use worlding as a very broad word, and distinguish it from “world-building” which is a more doctrinal, or self-conscious, or doubled-down, version of worlding. Or, at least, I do now, since I…

This is following up from world/empire/civilisation which was a comparison of those very nebulous things. Each nebulous in their own way, such that they do not overlap very well into a cute Venn diagram. For example Empire is nebulous in extent rather than concept. Empires are narcissistically certain they are the one. Nothing nebulous about that, but because of that, any…

I do not have enough German to read Heidegger. This is a blessing, as one should read these peeps in the original… I’ll cheat and use secondary literature. Heidegger is an unashamed ontologist, delving into the minutia of the verb “to be” as he maps his life into philosophy, like one of those mechanical inventions artists use to scale, while claiming to…

on how we see, and from where You spin me right round internal monologues & one's mind's eye.

A Friday night in October 2023, we had some friends and colleagues over for dinner, ages ranging from 20s to 50s. The subject of internal monologues came up, after the then recent spread of people acknowledging that they had no internal voice. I mention another colleague who had no internal voice at all, to the extent they had always thought the…

Panarchy & me [version substack] A panarchy of relativism [version substack] Freedom to/from liberty… —lack thereof [version substack] Agency [version substack] Stability: order versus the hierarchy[version substack] Agency and mores [version substack] I grok you innerstanding geddit? [version substack] Bias & Duḥkha Agency versus structure [version substack] Reading Joseph Henrich TWO : Social institution of the individual [version substack] Clans…

If agency is more than (freedom to/from) what are its mores? Mores (/ˈmɔːreɪz/, sometimes /ˈmɔːriːz/;[1] from Latin mōrēs [ˈmoːreːs], plural form of singular mōs, meaning "manner, custom, usage, or habit") are social norms that are widely observed within a particular society or culture.[2] Mores determine what is considered morally acceptable or unacceptable within any given culture. A folkway is what is created through interaction and that process is what organizes interactions…

Binding William Hazlitt’s 'An Essay on the Principles of Human Action…' extra tempus, ex tempore ex libris books I buy Bookending worlds - Solzhenitsyn

In late 2023 I made a 2up imposition and it printed out, a PDF I found on the internet archive of William Hazlitt’s An Essay on the Principles of Human Action: Being an Argument in Favour Of The Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind, to Which Are Added, Some Remarks on the Systems of Hartley And Helvetius. It’s from a bad scan…

There are gaps. Of knowledge. Of systemic completeness. And. These days I feel that this is where we are dancing, either the gap itself, or at least dancing all-about the gap/s, pivoting around and roundabout… —from the logical hindsight of yesterday into a hangover of that logic/determinism/detmination with whatever it is we dance/live/thunk/feel/intend into the morning. That threshold between our…

intakes https://hyperallergic.com/865677/californias-iconic-salvation-mountain-designated-a-historic-site/ There is a term for people who make ‘art’ regardless/despite/because of what is going on in their lives and which labels them outsiders or naive. They may have an agenda, they may be mad, but the frame for calling them names is based on the art market terminology that real artists work in or aspire to be involved in.

same same but different Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash Breathe. In the context of poetry as a making, which is grounded in the figuring out of living a worlding a self… among others —arises way back where LIFE as we know it composes itself in response to a flow, or gradient, of protons in water. At times capturing but flow rupturing the…

The term ideology was boosted by Marxists to indicate that part of the superstructure that was all in our heads. In particular it came to refer to false consciousness. False, that is, in comparison to how the world really operated, and as if ideology could only ever be ideologically incorrect. I.E a culture might have some code of honour for a martial responsibility that the…

I write about the blur as a state of mind, or perhaps it is better to say, a state of attention. Or intention : In philosophy, intentionality is the power of minds and mental states to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs. To say of an individual’s mental states that they have…

Originally posted on substack.com in February 2024. It is perhaps a caricature of analytic philosophy that an analytic philosopher takes it for granted that beliefs are merely propositions that are held to be true. They use belief as a type of shortcut or shorthand for a whole world of formally logicked pain. It is the analytic philosopher’s job to nut out that solution space.

I saw a chained bonsai someplace online, I did not really notice it. The miniature tree itself was not chained, it was growing as usual on a rock on a platter, but the platter a floating world was attached to the top of a welded chain. The type of apprentice workshop conceit I remember from my childhood neighbourhoods, where they…

It’s easy to fall into old routines, into the safety of slogans, that rend the air with curt dialects. Slanging matches that echo their way into lazy dialectics, an oppositional magic, as if there could never be anything more than that two-step stags-in-must. Everyone can count to two, they say, me and you, but there is already more here among…

This follows on from Me third go at a zero shot, by analogy metaphor carried me here and Analogy shots. Analogy and metaphor are the same thing, but are not the same object. Like. Metaphors are about immanence and emergence; compositions, if not fractal conspiracies of figure/ground. The thing. Analogies are about the ratios of distinction; differences meted out in…

First posted on substack.com in March 2024. This is a follow up to Me third go at a zero shot, by analogy metaphor carried me here. I have always had a preference for the metaphor over simile (analogy) as a figure of speech and thus how we think about thinking. I like to think metaphors are originary to thought. It’s…

Originally posted on substack.com in March 2024. When a “trained model”, i.e. an AI model which has ‘learned’ to classify some lumps in our world, is then asked to classify new sets with lumps of our reality that it has not been trained on directly, but has been exposed to indirectly in another algorithmed dataset (i.e. it can recognized traffic…

The slaver’s cave is a hole in our bite (imagine invaginating a gastrulation) that bodies a passage, a passing through (confound logic a composition) all that abject shit, running on sand and stone, (reject the best ideas left unsaid rightly) saying whereof we cannot speak with our tut-tutting teeth )mumble swallow cough(. The rock of the cave wall, remember, is…

Silvertown, Jonathan. Selfish Genes to Social Beings: A Cooperative History of Life. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2024. [https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198876397.001.0001] Good introductory text by Jonathan Silvertown to the science and history dealing with the idea of co-operation in our biological lives. Give it to your friends who need a break from Dostoevsky or Nietzsche. We have the usual suspects: Part 1: Kropotkin,…

A major thread running through The Ideological Brain, by Leor Zmigrod, a detail of Charles Darwin’s intellectual biography. His marriage to Emma provided Charles with a distinct contrast to his scientific work, and that emotional commitment provided much of the delay in the ideas of natural selection and its implications being published. For Charles had made an agnostic commitment to Emma not…

Woolcock, Peter G. “The Case against Evolutionary Ethics Today.” Chap 11 in Biology and the Foundation of Ethics, 276–306. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press, 1999. https://www.academia.edu/35875522/The_Case_against_Evolutionary_Ethics_Today Usually when I react to papers I like to remain behind my veil of ignorance (at all levels), partly because it is lazy, but also strangely in counter to that laziness, because I learn more,…

Bejarano, Teresa. “The Most Demanding Moral Capacity: Could Evolution Provide Any Base?” Isidorianum 31, no. 2 (November 24, 2022): 91–126. https://doi.org/10.46543/ISID.2231.1056. Abstract: The attempts to make moral and evolution compatible have assimilated moral capacity either with complex self-control in favour of one’s own goals or with spontaneous altruism. Those attempts face an easy problem, since those two senses of moral…

Cronk, Lee. “Evolutionary Theories of Morality and the Manipulative Use of Signals.” Zygon 29, no. 1 (1994): 81.https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1467-9744.1994.TB00651.X [also via academia.edu] So. 1994. This might be my oldest paper on this topic of evolution~morality. And thus the cranky PDF is hard to copy from. Abstract: Several attempts have recently been made to explain moral systems and moral sentiments in light…

Timothy Dean ——— “Evolution and Moral Diversity.” The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication. Vol. 7: Morality and the cognitive sciences (2012): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.4148/BIYCLC.V7I0.1775 [and via academia.edu] ———. Evolution and Moral Ecology. Doctor of Philosophy, UNSW, 2014. [via academia.edu] First I’ll have a quick look at the doctorate’s table of contents. Looks like the paper might be the…

Our words are both the sediment and the bones. Reading “Morality and empathy vs empathy and morality : A quest for the source of goodness in phylogenetic and ontogenetic contexts.” Chapter 4, by Augusta Gaspar, in Sara Graça da Silva, ed. Morality and Emotion: (Un)Conscious Journey into Being. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. [https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315651040-10][Chapter also available at academia.edu]…

So I am reading an editorial to a special issue of Jus Cogens, for a symposium debating Allen Buchanan's Our Moral Fate. Evolution and the Escape from Tribalism. Corradetti, Claudio. “What Makes Us Human? Evolution, Intentionality and Moral Progress.” Jus Cogens Vol. 3, no. 1 (April 1, 2021): 1–10. Very enjoyable reprise, seeing terms like “niche construction” again and not…

Evolution frees us from evolution. Ben Serber’s paper An Evolutionary Vindication of Moral Facts via academia.org [PDF] is basically a reaction to the book by Richard Joyce The Evolution of Morality (2006), with a nod or two and then a but. And then some musing about agnosticism. Looking at my linkpost page of reactions to evolution~morality articles (substack version) I can confirm I…

from internet archive The world is not only hard to define, the world is hard to quantify. While the hardness itself is not of any practical measure, but of difficulty. A difficulty of perception, entwined as it is with appearances. So the world appears to us often more like the sky than the earth, a ground more like the moon than…

Stability is not what your prefer it to be. In Agency (2023 substack.com version) I argued that freedom from/to is a dud concept. Medieval and bleh. Ever since stratified societies invented the city, or state, order is a by-word for peace, where everything and everyone is in their good place, such that Order has become a synonym with Stability. In many civilisations…

Agency recognises the world we live in, not the one we fight over. All animals who are more equal than others, force King John into signing the magna carta © 2023 meika loofs samorzewski In A panarchy of relativism: and the meta of me and you (substack.com 2023) which follows on Panarchy and me from (substack.com 20230) I left room…

policing the psychopaths without putting foxes in charge of the hen house Liberty is a problematic term because it presumes it lack. This is true of each term in the pair often contrasted in discussing freedom… —(free-from/free-to). Many discussions in liberalism/libertarian/anarchism spin in their orbits as they circle this bleak sun of lack. By doing so, and by glorifying the…

This is the second part. First part is Panarchy & me (substack.com 2023). There is a method of comparison, a non-destructive method of ‘analysis’, where one compares a variety of examples in which some logical process is forestall by the framework one is in, such that deduction, some invert induction, is not available. One looks at what is left and…

Wherein I mention things that turn out to be examples foreshadowing themselves, but badly timed, of what is said later. Yes, I guess I always write like that. While across the Tasman sea for two weeks and somewhat out of contact, I read two pieces dealing with a similar issue. One on moral relativism, one on applied philosophy. The issue…

It is likely that the worlding we do as religion or even philosophy, as drama or even industry, is a pre-existing condition. As such we tend to notice its success and take credit for them, even if they are natural to us, and blame them others over there… for their failures in the light of our own luck/efforts. Part of…

ZHERO Personal growth for the sovereign citizen © 2023 meika loofs samorzewski Prep In the Janus Ratio (substack) I begin to re-frame [how we intuitively, traditionally place or regard a point-of-view] not as a noun but now→as a verb→ to(self/world). to(self/world) is a verbing of two nouns into a complex gerund which blurs distinctions we live with, in order to…

So I return decades later to the same room. Epidemics, heretical conflicts, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into banditry, have decimated the population. I believe I have mentioned suicides, more and more frequent with the years. Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species -- the unique species -- is about to be extinguished,…

I use umwelten as a background assumption. I use it roughly and mess up the distinctions between who does what to whom (paraphrasing wikipedia) : • from the German Umwelt meaning "environment" or "surroundings • The term is usually translated as "self-centered world" • Uexküll theorised that organisms can have different umwelten, even though they share the same environment, and…

[notes on boundaries] I've been writing boundaries for various ontologies… Looking at this sentence makes it seem very abstract. If I add that this writing was stuff for work, one may begin to think it is more jargon of a trade than dilettante scholarship, or perhaps, a sign of revolutionary fervour. As trade jargon, one may think it has something to…

So I write about worlds, worlding, worldmaking, worldbuilding, the world, a world. How do other people use the word? Ulay is a hard put upon performance artist with a career, or should I say, now, platform, no one is going anywheres these days, which is based in shadowing a successful New York eurotrash dominatrix from the Balkans. Ulay ist sein…

Originally posted on substack.com 2023-09-30. Socius based studies go off the rails when they forget they were given the go ahead by their betters, or, by peeps deciding to better their betters. I’ll use socius to abstract away from the form/usage "society", as such it refers to methods where ‘structures’ are used to explain or change the world (control it perhaps),…

In the mid-1980s, on a windy slope with a view, overlooking the shallow waters flowing in the Murrumbidgee of the Monaro, in southern New South Wales, a clean-cut hippy drummed deep into the weed-invested night. Hippies had peaked in influence over a decade before, but those who had recapitulated the back-to-the-landers of the post-war period had their hills and valleys…

When I learned about joint attention I had my mind blown a little. It’s a term from psychology and studies of the acquisition of language, but the general idea goes back to the Greeks and their ideas on learning language. Basically a parent looks or points at something and the child notices, because they notice everything their parent does, and…

I was watching the youtube channel Religion for Breakfast on more recent scholarship on what the eucharist was, or represented, when remembering the last supper. The TL;DR or didn't-watch for this is that shared meals were a very common activity, which in the Greco-Roman world might be called a deipnon in the Hellenised eastern Mediterranean (at about 24 minutes in the…

Attic red-figured Pinax. Diameter: 19.5 cm Height: 1.9 cm. Attributed to Epiktetos by signature. Made in Athens about 520-510 BC; from Vulci, Etruria. Currently, London, The British Museum via https://www.flickr.com/photos/69716881@N02/7691738970/in/photostream/ Christopher I. Beckwith, The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022, ISBN 9780691240534) In large measure the book is composed…

I have just been reminded that Sargon was the first known ruler of the known world. This happened before empires were a thing. It was at a time when kingdoms were not yet available to be captured and incorporated. Imperialists had to make do with cities. This was in a post about Sargon's daughter Enheduanna by Historical Snapshots. Enheduanna being…

"Is there, in fact, such a thing as the specialization of the generalist?" Bill Ward asks this question after describing their own reading style and their attitudes towards those who read in a generalist manner and those who read with a special focus. Go read it, SPECIALIST AND GENERALIST READERS. It’s from 2009, it deals with the question from the…

This blog started out as a multi-voice poem nine years ago one easter. Well, laying it out by hand with coloured pencil in a highlight-coding for each 'voice'. The nine year old FB post said I am a year in at this stage. Before that is was just a ‘unsplit’ univocal poem. Or notes. I have lots of notes. The…

Below is a reworking of a comment at J. N. Nielsen’s Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon on the post ‘A Thought Experiment in the Aggregation of Civilizations’. This post is also the third on Reading Joseph Henrich see ONE and TWO. As such my comment used the terminology found in that post and my own favoured herbs and spices…

Preamble In ONE I discussed some of my reading of Joseph Henrich’s books, and this morning I am riffing within the same books on the idea of the individual as a social institution. Or at least the interplay between the acknowledgment and the possibility of the individual as social institution. This is some more exploratory & metaphoric work on the implication…

This avenue of reading began like my discovery of the creator or promoter of the umbrella term ‘Man the hunter’ in two ways. It was a family hand-me down book and it was the writer’s second book. See Robert Ardrey's The Territorial Imperative (substack.com). In Joseph Henrich’s case the second book has made a bigger splash than the first, and…

"Machine learning maps social learning not individual intelligence" may appear as not saying very much, especially if social learning is unknown or just hard to notice because it is like water to fish, essential but taken for granted. Social learning is a grab-all term for deliberate, emergent & surprising processes, intentional or unintended, that arise as humans organize their lives…

Recently I’ve been dipping more widely into general anthropology discourses, and learning how much there is to cover. A recent quick take on a paper meant looking harder at prosociality, and here I’ll be looking at another term I have not spend time to do a proper background check on. This may develop into an ongoing series, and will be…

Neil Levy "The Prospects for Evolutionary Ethics Today" Euramerica 40, no. 3 (September 2010): 529-71. Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica http://euramerica.org [via academia.edu] Crossposted at substack.com So, an Australlian? Neuroscientist? via Oxford? Abstract: One reason for the widespread resistance to evolutionary accounts of the origins of humanity is the fear that they undermine morality: if morality is…

A list of reactions to other evolution~morality papers and chapters and textual matter can be found at Reactions to papers on evolution~morality. This post is crossposted on substack. Bertini, Daniele. 2020. ‘Introduction The Evolutionary Approach to Ethics: From Animal Prosociality to Human Morality’, European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 12(3). DOI:10.24204/EJPR.V12I3.3411 [via academia.edu or philarchive.org] This paper was chosen next…

This is from an old bunch of notes from two years ago, born digital. If they were handwritten I’d remember better where I was going with the ideas in the notes. I'd even remember whether it was windy that day or not. But now I have trouble telling apart my views from the quotes. Is it a quote, did I…

Examples of where we throw stuff into the gap. Including where people have noticed we have done so and wondered about it, or criticise it. The… —gap is a term that refers to not knowing. I use it as a notice where peeps recognise a failing or gap in knowledge, or systems remaining incomplete despite attempts at coherency or intervention,…

An essay from about 2000 about learning how to get unlost. Backgrounding for an uncoming piece on fusion by terror. Recently I got lost. This is unusual because I never get lost. Ever. Anywhere. Not that I have felt completely immune to getting lost. The feelings I had while stopping by the side of the Sturt Highway were as aware…

Dear Galatea, while science has taken up the error rate of our worlding as a virtue, that the noise is the signal, the information is an emotion, in a practice of charms, the categorical error of our making all thought an ontology gives us a method showing less favour on the missteps and trials of life long learning. The boxed-in mistake is…

I have been reading the substack Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon since late 2024. It’s J.N. Nielsen’s more recently used platform as his work is available on tumblr and there is a newsletter or two. I have been educated by all this and is my go to read on substack. Especially for the generalist reader (as opposed the general…

I have been reading the substack Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon since late 2024. It’s J.N. Nielsen’s more recently platform as his work is available on tumblr and there is a newsletter or two. I have been educated by all this and is my go to read on substack. Especially for the generalist reader (as opposed the general reader)…

In my view, religion is a technology of government. My view? Within the framework of the worlding urge, that much of our institutions are things we have met with and made, are the outcomes of that which moves us to should among and on others. It is why we should, the basic assumption of this blog. I say that with…

The topics of the mind’s eye and the inner voice, and how they are born across the human population have been on my mind because I wonder how that affects something as nebulous as the world. If worlding is what we do when we express our urge to should on others as ourselves, do we lack an organ to sense…

We read. Douglas, Mary, and Steven Ney. 1998. Missing Persons: A Critique of the Social Sciences, The Aaron Wildavsky Forum for Public Policy. Berkeley : New York: University of California Press ; Russell Sage Foundation. ISBN 978-0-520-20752-3 Douglas, Mary. 1996. Thought Styles: Critical Essays on Good Taste. London: SAGE publications. This deals with the changes in the ritualistic use of conspiracy theories…

Mary Douglas & Steven Ney. 1998. Missing Persons: A Critique of the Social Sciences, The Aaron Wildavsky Forum for Public Policy. Berkeley : New York: University of California Press ; Russell Sage Foundation. ISBN 9780520207523 A copy of Missing Persons arrived in excellent condition, while heading towards 30 years old. Bought in my reading to catch-up with the work of anthropologist by…

‘I feel like a man from another era’: Neanderthal hunter Ludovic Slimak This is the author in their natural habitat, but curiously unmuddied or dusted, from the inside of the dustjacket of the book The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature. The title riffing on Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape (tell me, if you’re under 40 would…

This post follows on from The blur is not just a contradiction (Simone Weil). The notes for these were written at the same time as preparation for the post The need for worlds: Simone Weil and The Need for Roots. In The blur is not just a contradiction, the blur is discussed as an intentional way of thinking, with regard…

This floated past me on social media in November 2023. The opposite meanings these verbs define are/is united in the movement that gives the difference birth. I am fascinated by them as they can thus uncover the tension between ….movement — that we animals assume, as we step out of the flow into our bodies, embodied or worlded,… and —…

With my development of the blur as an intentional way of thinking, with regard to categories or routines of thought and language, I have discovered prior art which is either allied or bears striking similarities. Striking in the sense that they show a similar stance or attitude to: paradox, mystery, holism, emergence with any way of knowing (meaning broadly, holding…

This post discusses the idea or mental stance, not a “belief state”, of the blur. It is a key aspect of my thinking, or at least, a key meditation or practice. I came to it in parallel to my related work on the… —gap, with which the blur is part of that Janus Dance. As such it is a conscious…

Babich, Babette. 2012. ‘ “What Makes Human Beings Into Moral Beings?” The Significance of Ethics in the Process of Evolution’, Revista Voluntas: Estudos Sobre Schopenhauer 2(2): 03–30. [via academia.edu] [It is a quite long and rambling reaction] This came my way and I was pleased. I have read, decades ago, Babich’s 1994 Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the…

No order at all, not even chaos. Not even wrong. Crossposted from substack.com, September 2023. Some re-phrasing. Roger Scruton’s The Face of God: The Gifford Lectures 2010. (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2014, ISBN 9781472912732). Picked this up when I was writing the other Roger Scruton posts listed below, but only began reading it a couple of days ago after I mined Super…

Hillar, Marian. “Morality Is a Principle of Nature Discovered by Philosophy and Evolutionary Sciences.” English version via academia.edu of the chapter ‘Koncepcja naturalnego prawa moralnego w świetle historycznego rozwoju filozofii etyki i jego interpretacja w świetle nowoczesnych nauk ewolucyjnych’ [pp. 137 – 159.] From: Szymczyk, Paulina, and Ewelina Chodźko (eds). Dialog Filozoficzny o Człowieku. Wydawnictwo Tygiel, Lublin, 2021. [book pdf:…

Example of blur - 'de-range' I was reading Maximilian Werner’s essay Countee Cullen's Lyric Ghosts about Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen (1903 – 1946) and his use of Keats, when I came across some joyous prior art, a good example of the blur. The deranging work here of the poets, their making, unclasses the prepositions of language based on the…

Because of post mentioning Object Orientated Programming (software programming that focused on creating classes of objects and manipulating them) I’ve been asked to look at Logical Framework Approach. It is “so ubiquitous in the world of development NGOs. I am very sceptical of it and would love to deconstruct it thoroughly”. I’ve never heard of it, not moving in those…

“How can we exist in the world without representing it?” page 165 of Peter Conrad’s 1988 Down Home: Revisiting Tasmania. [London: Chatto & Windus]. Example of the usage of the word world. Crossposted.

For my worlding urge arguments about why we should… the curator presenter actually says its the most important thing one can say… “to make things function as they should”. Glossing this as a statement of power misses why statements of power would talk like this. “Make America Great Again” or “Drain the swamp” or "Eat the Rich" are equivalent statements…

In Rob Kurzban’s recent How the Psychologist Got Confused Explanation is a word, but a word is not an explanation —we get an excellent diagram, a four pointer. Pointer as in to point, as in the arrow of whatever puny vector space our minds can handle at anyone time. Like most blog pieces that are engaging, like many one can learn…

Kockelman, Paul. 2024. ‘Ontologies and Worlds: The Price of Being Free’, Current Anthropology 65(5): 922–7. via journals.uchicago.edu Kockelman introduces his article as follows: Here is a link for the wikipedia entry on ‘ontological turn’. This is a play on the ‘linguistic turn’ describing philosophical fashions beginning a century ago. It passed me by. I basically cannot stand ontological approaches so…

I picked up Super Cooperators: Altruism, Evolution and Mathematics (or, Why We Need Each Other to Succeed) by Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield sometime in 2020… —three years on my to-read shelf. Even at a decade old, it is an excellent introduction or refresher on game theory and evolution, amidst some even more excellent stories about people around Martin Nowak’s mathematical life.

Originally posted in September 2023 on substack.com. Most notes and quotes from or for Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992. ISBN 9780701139988 (No idea what that book is look at this Review article by Gillian Dooley). In mathematics classes they often want you to show your working. I once did a exam as part of…

No/true! — it's not nothing all the way down either. (I started my reading journey with From selfing in worlding to sovereignty. This is my finished up reader’s report.) reading plato in a martian chasm Iris Murdoch was a British novelist and philosopher who read Plato with a post-Wittgenstein lens, holding a distrust of recent (post-)structuralist temple-smashing efforts. Though this…

Using use bing chat LLM circa 2023-08-29. Reposted from Substack.com Iris Murdoch and Ursula le Guin having breakfast while sitting under the net where the word for world is forest © 2023 meika loofs samorzewski Searching for: Ursula le Guin birth and death dates Searching for: Ursula le Guin birth and death dates Searching for: Iris Murdoch birth and death dates Searching for: Iris Murdoch…

Skin in the game & Agent Nassim Nicholas Taleb's journey in the new world [Originally posted at Substack.com in March 2024] Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life mentions that in ‘teh’ west we have trained ourselves to contrast the individual and the collective, so much so, we miss out noticing the grey tiers in…

I’ve been reading someone else’s copy of Iris Murdochs’ Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992. ISBN 9780701139988 (article) over the last few weeks. By “someone else’s copy” I mean it has pencilled marginalia like Astute Observation and as I have met the previous owner, these words read themselves aloud in his voice. It’s been slow going, not…

Wikipedia says The Shepherd of Hermas, or the Good Shepherd, 3rd century, Catacombs of Rome. But the devotee bringing a lamb to sacrifice is common across many local “pagan” practices in the Mediterranean. A couple of posts ago (Inappropriation) I introduced the work that led to an awkward conversation. This post is just to add that I’ve finished Jörg Rüpke’s On Roman Religion: Lived Religion…

Originally posted on substack.com in August 2023. Evidence for global cultural diffusion post at Vectors of Mind spurs the raising of the question in the comments by Little Kenny, “[…] I am trying to imagine what might have been some of the more fundamental worldview changes and social practices triggered by recursion. Maybe they're now so embedded into our behavioral norms and unrecognized priors that we…

Narcissism is regarded as a personality disorder, but what if we regard it as a worlding disorder, an inability to world, or world-build among others doing the same. or some time in Hobart, Tasmania, a small Buddhist group has been given the benefit of the doubt. This last week some survivor stories are making their appearance in news reports— Devotees…

I've been cataloguing many many sex education works, from the explicitly clinical to the psychologically instructive, and beyond into messed-up socio-econo-polio-anthro-opinio… —culture wars are not new. The period ranges from the 1920s and earlier, but peak in the 1970s, with titles like Naked Yoga, with not a yoga mat in sight, mind you. The horror. One of so many books…

A reaction to: John Collier and Michael Stingl. “Evolutionary Moral Realism.” Biological Theory (Forthcoming 2013). Accessed September 3, 2024. [via academia.edu] I’ve already looked at a more recent paper by these authors (so this will be a bit cursory. I’ll ignore the LLMs this time): REACTION Collier, John and Stingl, Michael. “Evolutionary Naturalism and the Objectivity of Morality.” Biology and…

I often use the term ‘to police’ in regard to our responsibilities in negotiating narcissists in our midst. So here I will attempt to define ‘to police’ in that context. For the longest time policing has been seen as a force, much like the sovereign’s military forces, but directed along interior lines that stratify or grid us, rather than the…

A list of reactions to other evolution~morality papers and chapters and stuff can be found at the linkpost Reactions to papers on evolution~morality. Today we have: Berkman, John R. “The Evolution of Moral Wisdom: What Some Ethicists Might Learn from Some Evolutionary Anthropologists.” from Evolution of Wisdom: Major and Minor Keys. Notre Dame, Indiana: Center for Theology, Science, and Human…

Part 1: The lawyer and the doctor When I was a younger adult I was very briefly on a team sports club committee. In a mixed gender competition of a sport with a low profile in Australia. The committee were all of a similar age and contained some early career tradcore professionals. Being mixed it was low contact gameplay. Officially…

In the negative gist I riffed on the context for page 212, of the 2017 biography of Mary Douglas, which lists the misunderstandings people have of her work. So here I will try to put down a positve version, if not a definition. It will be based on my reading of her work, which is by no means complete. When…

Part 1 is here. (Or substack) I decided to start here with saying what Mary Douglas’ framework is not, i.e. write a negative gist. There is a helpful page 212 which lists the misunderstandings in Perri 6 and Paul Richards’ 2017 intellectual biography Mary Douglas: Understanding Social Thought and Conflict. This is 4 pages from the end of the book,…

Writers on culture, society, and other outcomes of thw worlding urge

Mary Douglas – reading over three decades (substack) Mary Douglas: a negative gist (substack) Mary Douglas : a positive spin (substack) The lawyer and the doctor Risk, training, habit & inclination. Mary Douglas and narcissism. Not in that order. (substack) Douglas & Ney's 1998 'Missing Persons: A Critique of the Social Sciences' Part one — Missing institutions (substack) Part two…

In my late twenties my reading moved to include more non-fiction. By my forties there was very little fiction, even if this is still more than most people read… I read a lot. So before my third decade I would wander the State Library of Tasmania’s reference section and browse and sit and read. Soon I would be expecting babies…

confusing the forest for the trees, the word for the tree and the phrase for the forest © 2024 meika loofs samorzewski In a lump of the world we call taxonomy people are split into lumpers and splitters. A "lumper" is a person who assigns examples broadly, judging that differences are not as important as signature similarities. A "splitter" makes…

A list of reactions to other evolution~morality papers and chapters and stuff can be found at the linkpost Reactions to papers on evolution~morality. This reaction looks at the following piece: Cartwright, John. “Naturalising Ethics: The Implications of Darwinism for the Study of Moral Philosophy.” Science & Education Vol. 19 (2009): 407–443. via academia.edu [DOI 10.1007/s11191-009-9205-7] [https://www.academia.edu/94896217/Naturalising_Ethics_The_Implications_of_Darwinism_for_the_Study_of_Moral_Philosophy] From the abstract: Standard…

This post has mainly been “prompted” by becoming aware of some “prior art” by Arthur Boyd, though one of the main stories was inspired by a conversation with Julie Gough. Reposted from substack July 2023. Arthur Boyd’s Jinker on a Sandbank, Shoalhaven (1976) oil on canvas. In Cormac Orthography, more or less, I introduced my position on punctuation, and in…

This was first posted as part 1 & 2 on substack. Ronald Cicurel, and Miguel A. L. Nicolelis, The Relativistic Brain: How It Works and Why It Cannot by Simulated by a Turing Machine (Natal: Kios Press, 2015 ISBN 9781511617024) Hat tip. Martin Ciupa of mindmaze.com At the time of writing in July 2023, there were some Douglas R. Hofstadter…

A list of reactions to other evolution~morality papers and chapters and stuff can be found at Reactions to papers on evolution~morality. Arvan, Marcus. “Morality as an Evolutionary Exaptation.” 2021. via academia.edu. Web. This is a preprint of a chapter published in Johan De Smedt & Helen De Cruz & (eds.), Empirically Engaged Evolutionary Ethics, Springer – Synthese Library. The final…

Over a decade after it came out I finally have had a gander at Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind (2011). It’s a fine introduction. I tend to agree with what bits I read about empire. It tells a good story. What’s wrong with that…? Apparently all that co-operation we do, Harari says (from that wikipedia link) (and that…

Can you fix the world by typing better? The world is made in the same moment we are each born, and just as helpless. We are each already there, but not quite all there. This is part of the help and part of the helplessness. Baby and world are not the same thing, not even the same kind of thing,…

Pro tip: attack the psychopaths and their grandiose narcissism, and not the authoritarian outcomes of their injurious actions to our world. A recent article 4 reasons not teaching evolution in schools is immoral on the conversation gives these points as moral reasons: equality of opportunity, free inquiry, fairness and public reasoning, and intellectual honesty, within the context that authoritarian governments east and west are…

if we subsume meaning, morality, philosophy, culture, religion, art, polity into one category what would it be called? I keep dipping into Large Language models (LLMs) and being annoyed when not disappointed. Better than neural networks? Are data-painters better than balsa-wood ships in a bottle? LLMs just do not operate where I am operating. If I was schizoid I would…

This follows on from reaction 1 to Peter L. Berger : meaning is a lazy ritual. There's no introduction here and ends up way more anti-clerical than I had imagined. We start from about page 35 of: Cultural Analysis : the work of Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986) which…

Books I've ordered are arriving, and as is traditional, they arrive in order of least desperately wanted first. So, the first is a general introduction to four writers on culture, which came out when I was 21 years old. Back then I was reading Stirner and anarchist SF. Cultural Analysis : the work of Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel…

Once upon a time in the beginning was the word and everything was the text. A sublime mechanick whose logicks, predicated on magicks, preyed on our prayers. But… —if, as I have been saying, much of what we do and name, and seek cause for, are outcomes of an urge we do not name, but just live wordlessly, then when…

A list of reactions to other evolution~morality papers and chapters and stuff can be found at Reactions to papers on evolution~morality. Garvey, Brian. “The Evolution of Morality and Its Rollback.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40.2 (2018): via academia.edu. Web. 31 Aug. 2024. From the introduction: it is possible that humans do not possess as much internal machinery…

A list of reaction to other evolution~morality papers and chapters and stuff can be found at Reactions to papers on evolution~morality. Derya Sakin Hanoğlu The Ascent of Morality, from Non-Human to Human Animals: An Emotion-Based Account. Middle East Technical University, 2021. via academia.edu. Web. My reaction to her article “On the Evolutionary Origin of Morality”can be found here or on…

About twenty years ago Jamie Kirkpatrick wrote a book The ecologies of paradise: explaining the garden next door. (PDF) In the Australian blogosphere at the time (how to find those comments? on blogspot? (oh look searchblogspot.com but no) there was some dismissive commentary in regard to Jamie’s comments about 'leafy suburbs' (these being the posher suburbs in Australia), and specifically,…

My basic position which has arisen in these recent years of blogging If we can find a term or phrase that describes what we do without a focus on ‘its’ outcomes of : (religion/polity/art/morality-plex and its instantiations tribe/club/religion/) or even just practices (ritual/performance/sport/mindfulness) then we will be able to talk about 'it' sensibly and reasonably, or at least provide a pathway for us…

A list of reaction to other evolution~morality papers and chapters and stuff can be found at Reactions to papers on evolution~morality. Derya Sakin Hanoğlu. “On the Evolutionary Origin of Morality.” Beytülhikme An International Journal of Philosophy (2022): via academia.edu. Web. Abstract: In this study, I will approach morality from a naturalistic perspective and defend that morality is a product of…

I’ve been thinking more about Kurt Gödel and his incompleteness theorems, ① that attack on formalism with reference to his intuitive Platonism, and ② the observer around which many human efforts are now circling, or circulating. Recommended reading: Alexander T Englert. “Kurt Gödel, His Mother and the Argument for Life after Death.” Aeon. 2 January 2024. https://aeon.co/essays/kurt-godel-his-mother-and-the-argument-for-life-after-death If, as it…

Following a comment i made, that ‘meetings made us human’, in response to the following fable: I neologised this Greek monster: Κοσμοσωτηρία Transliterated this is kosmosōtēría which is ‘world-saving’. This is an attempt to meet the soteriological focus of the individual (with an eye on ataraxia) with saving the world, where ‘worlding’ is still a type of ‘selfing, and not…

Originally posted on substack in June 2023. one word prompt “Kludge” to nitro diffusion My use of “worldbuilding” is an attempt to language a notice that when/what various places and periods label: morality/spirit/culture/love/gods/Jesus/One/etc, or enlightenment (really) or whatever, is the unquestion of intention, regarding the question of intention or design and morality. ¿what is the ethical response to morality? I…

The first on a series of books I enjoyed reading long ago. A list of these will be found at Reading guilty pleasures. I read Elaine Morgan's 1972 Descent of Woman and then 1982 The Aquatic Ape in the mid to late 80s when “man the hunter’ was, well at least to me, moribund as an idea, and so that…

This page lists books that I have really enjoyed reading despite their contents being out of whack with the direction of consensus consideration. If not whacky. I’ve been meaning to do it for a while but discovering Robert Ardrey’s second science essay book The Territorial Impulse on my grandparents shelves reminded me that Elaine Morgan’s book The Aquatic Ape was…

In my opening of this series on reading Robert Ardrey's The Territorial Imperative I mention his use of Jean-Jacques Petter's term of noyau as a label for a society of inward antgonism (page 168). In the second post Figuring out the grounds beneath the world: noyau, lek and home I explore the noyau in relation to other similar notions in…

The “extended phenotype” is a phrase I collected on reading the book of the same name by Richard Dawkins. It's where that word 'meme' as ideas in the mind-brain as parasitic replicate was born. At the time in the early 90s I thought we could move onto talking about 'rede's and interpretive viewpoints about epigenetics but the cybertroll bros have…

In the review of Robert Ardrey's The Territorial Imperative I cover my discovery of his book on my shelves. Here I wish to explore the implications, by which I think I mean metaphysics, but in a good way, that is… —poetically, of Ardrey’s use of Petter’s term noyau. The discussion of noyau, or noyaux in the French plural, is a…

In reshelving books on their shelves recently, with the two bookshelves themselves only returned to their place in the living room after we replaced the flooring, my eye lingered on a book cover. I did not recognise it, but it was familiar in the way one's infancy can return feelings. The book is then both unknown and known at the…

① "not believing in X" is easily confused with ② “not believing” if you have no frame of practice in noticing 'world-building' is what you mean by meaning. We live in an age that follows the rise and fall of many empires. Empires are a collection of kingdoms and cities. Empires are a derivative of the practices of those states.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM--QQAKlfY Helen Pluckrose seems fine. This broad orgins podcast is a great way to start. Helen is [successfully] doing that which her targets have done first. Creating what I called in the 90s “a textmachine”, a discursive method and practice of which academia and scholarship are but a small part, with an authororial platform (I am jealous), (which nowadays we…

Reason ① versus Reason ② while currently reading Terry Eagleton's Culture and the Death of God Recently I’ve been circling like a vulture… I am a vulture… I am the… i am vulture thermalling above… — the gap. …looking for the signs of death below on the plains of rationality so I can feed my family in the nest, dear…

This first appeared on substack in June 2023. The etymology of the word thing is more interesting than one might think. Originally this usage meant "assembly", and this itself perhaps arose from a metonymic use when referring to the time appointed… —to decide or assemble. Later this happening then came to mean, again metonymically, a specific issue discussed at such…

D.M. Thomas’ Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in his Life. (1998, New York: St. Martin's Press.) When I was cataloguing this biography I was reminded of the copy of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago my mother had on the family bookcase at home. I eventually read it and went on to borrow from the state library in Launceston a hardcover of One Day in the Life…

“We are artifacts designed by natural selection,” Daniel Dennett wrote, to which Fodor said no. “Darwin’s idea is much deeper, much more beautiful, and appreciably scarier: We are artifacts designed by selection in exactly the sense in which the Rockies are artifacts designed by erosion; which is to say that we aren’t artifacts and nothing designed us. We are, and…

Reposted from substack from May 2023. This world we live is a practice, where we make up things together in order to organize ourselves. All the world is a child at play. Evolution cares not at all, or at least, not at the moment at all, not yet, how:- rational, or, reasonable, or, crazy, or, fantastic, or, believable, or, even,…

Wherein I try to define my terms (see chatgpt etymology for this term/terminus/terminology plex using my own contexts and examples (of themselves). The major context assumes an animal life’s logic, point of view (POV) and scale. The essay is also about those as limits to the understanding we have as animals when we are looking out and about as prey or…

We often try to impose the world on reality. (this is most marked in case of narcissistic ‘sweorlds’) However this imposition is impossible because the world does not exist, and reality does not and can not care. Still, many of us try, which is the first mistake we make which allows us to learn about reality, but repeated the same…

Imaginary conversation with a dumbfounded respondent as I try to get what I mean by 'worlding' across as a framework fo the self/world ratio or Janus dance. Look, is romance a risk? (yes) and when you move to take that risk, i mean, have you always rejected that risk? (no) so, when you take the risk on in a romance,…

To be a moral person requires empathy. It does not require a morality. Narcissists use moral principles to game their local system all the time. Why does being moral not require morality? Becasue reality does not care about reality. It has no bones to pick. It does not care what we do with reality, or don’t. Caring about reality is…

Reality, evolution and the world Terminology without bounds thingology recapitulating phylogeny Reality and the world If the world is a thing we have made, then all things are in the world. we are human because we have meetings things are meetings not object reality is a late discovery Reasons to be real what the late discovery means Reason is of…

(Some pointers on a non-relativistic position on worlding) Worlding (to world with a self, to self with a world) describes what we do as we live among others. Worlding/selfing arose in evolution, in a reality before we got here. But evolution does not care about what we produce with the worlding urge, just as it does not care about our…

Reaction to a review by David Copp of: Frans De Waal: Primates and philosophers: how morality evolved, edited by Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016, 232pp. 9780691169163 I was excited to find this in my to-do reading list as I did not know that a 2016 revamped version of his 2003 Tanner Lectures on Human Values…

From the missoulacurrent.com by Laura Lundquist “This is such a special day, a day we envisioned many years ago. But it really wasn’t ready to happen until today,” Thompson said. “It happened because of hard work. Hours upon hours, days upon days, of trying to figure out not only how to do it, and where to do it and how…

Examples of people worlding in their words I’ll list under here examples of people drawing on the worlding urge more directly than usual. By more directly I mean that they are not using more derived frameworks to structure or form. They still use metaphor and simile, we are wordy worlders afterall, and it may be that they appear sacharin or…

A list of reactions to other evolution~morality papers and chapters and stuff can be found at Reactions to papers on evolution~morality. Joyce, Richard. “Evolution and Moral Naturalism.” The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism (Forthcoming). Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. via academia.edu. Web. ISBN9781118657607 [Chapter 26 pages 369-385] This reaction is really just riffing on ‘moral naturalism’ more than the positions described in Joyce’s chapter,…

Recently, I read a great run down on Nietzsche and the philology of his time informing his entire schtick. It came out on thw 19th September 2024. Alexander Prescott-Couch. “Nietzsche’s Ideas about Morality Were Shaped by Philology.” Aeon.co 19 September 2024. https://aeon.co/essays/nietzsches-ideas-about-morality-were-shaped-by-philology Yes go away and read that, and then come back here. It's so great, it's okay to forget…

Simone Weil and The Need for Roots as an example of the world-bulding urge, and its sub-urges to order order, when/as\how we should should Originally posted on substack in July 2023. There are many people whose names pass me by and for decades I nod and think, must read them one day. Recent chatbots have developed greater facility to 'read'…

This is a rebooted crosspost from substack written june 2023. See also: Worlding and the sentimental theory of value - part one and Etymology of Romance Terms Romance, romantic are words deriving from the ruination of the empire of the city of Rome. That is, after it empired or end-of-empired, and in those de-intensification of activity and power, its ruins forget their glorious…

A list of reactions to other evolution~morality papers and chapters and stuff can be found at Reactions to papers on evolution~morality. Beginning with the abstract's opening. My stepping through my first reading of the abstract might be all I do today. We propose an objective and justifiable ethics that is contingent on the truth of evolutionary theory. Wow. A strong…

I used chatGPT4 to generate a bit of a timeline of the history and development of the words, and they were much more homonymic than I remembered, i.e. I thought more of them shared a etymological source than they do. The words ideals, idyll, idle, and idol all have different origins and meanings, and their usages have evolved over time.

When we blame the system what are we are crediting what exactly? Something going according to plan? Something orchestrated to end up in someone's favour at our cost? A cost to us all? We gain a soul at the cost of the world? A lesson learned, put it down to experience? If something is systemic is it just cancerous? An…

I used chatGPT4 to generate a bit of a timeline of the history and development of the word Romance and Romantic, it was quite good, especially on the time-saving front. https://chatgpt.com/share/66ece23d-37fc-800d-84e4-d5b8de959225? This conversation may reflect the link creator’s personalized data, which isn’t shared and can meaningfully change how the model responds. meika said: Outline the usages of the words romantic…

Other parts listed at Worlding and the sentimental theory of value - header Supplement on romance & romantic etymology is available here. Generated by chatGPT4 after I wrote the words below. This relates to my notice that when we throw something into the… —gap, we often do so out of an impulse, to world or to self, regardless of the in/consistency or in/coherence…

I'll also list resources used or suplemented along the way here. See also Worlding the love: romance, romantic and roman and Look, is romance a risk?

In part 1 or ‘Do it for the house' I discussed a narcissist who did really well out of a working bee or two, which he advertised as “doing it for the house". This improved the property before he sold the house, on the back of unpaid labour, other peoples' tools and skills. He just happened to own it when…

Reflective Equilibrium and Conceptual Naturalness can be found on my favourite read on the substack platform by J. N. Nielsen, but this is the way I discovered him, he has other sites on other platforms from earlier times. wordpress, tumblr, etc Anyways, he has been educated me on various [philosophy|history/\history|philosophy]&time issues as I read his essays. As I read Reflective Equilibrium…

So I was flicking through number 134 of Texte zur Kunst, an issue devoted to sculpture, and started with the article by Simon Baier 'A carrier bag theory of sculpture.' I was in a library moments before a meeting, so did not think much about it as I read what little I read of the article, so this is not…

There are works of art in which the primary reaction, at least on my part, is goodness how much effort went into this? Where did they find the time? Who paid for all this? Why did they bother? This is in contrast to people who wonder, “Where do they get their ideas from?” While the artistry may or may not…

In a recent reaction, I glossed over an incomplete thought I had in reading a mention of the expanding circle. I just nodded it away, yeah, Singer. But then as often happens, I woke up thinking about it the next morning, drove to work thinking about it. It festers and expands in my notice. In itself, it is a good…

Caso, Juan Manuel Rodríguez, and Ricardo Noguera Solano. “Biological and Cultural Evolution of Morality: The Delusion of Progress.” Revista de Filosofía Fundamental (2022): via academia.edu Web. 21 Aug. 2024. A reaction below to a paper that came my way. I am working my way through a to-do list of them. That opening “Life evolves; it does not progress.” “To evolve”…

part one -- Do it for the house. part two -- get rid of the sweorlfds part three -- art part four -- paranoia and cult In part 1 or ‘Do it for the house' I discussed a narcissist who did really well out of a working bee or two, which he advertised as “doing it for the house". This…

In part one I described a sweorlfd or narcissist and his world-parasitising methods of extracting labour from his new-agey targets or marks, by saying to the fools, I mean volunteers, “Do it for the house.” I restrained myself from quoting directly from Marx or a Marxist canon or any Marxian contributions on the labour theory of value, wanting to example…

We'll take the owner of a new age business as our model. He ran a crystal, candle and incense shop for a decade, but had a hankering to run his own… —special personality cult. He tried grandstanding over a men's group for about the same time, but decided he needed more him than them. So, he sells the shop and…

A reaction to a paper that came my way. I am working my way through a to-do list of them. Well let’s start with those two first sentences… I know this is an abstract but… So, not sure if you can leap from co-ordination, nor even from unnegotiated co-operation, to “a moral structure inevitably develops.” Chicken/egg? I’ll keep reading with…

A reaction to a paper that came my way. I am working my way through a to-do list of them. So this is from 1993. I was in my late twenties. Never read any of this stuff back then. This is before primatologists and paleo-anthropologists came up with the idea of the Egalitarian Revolution of the Paleolithic among Homo species.

Michael Vlerick's “Better Than Our Nature? Evolution and Moral Realism, Justification and Progress.” in Ruse, Michael, and Robert J. Richards, eds. The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Ethics. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 9781107132955. Cambridge Handbooks in Philosophy. [via academia.edu] Puts forward an “innate ‘moral compass’ ” or “ ‘moral sense’ ”as a way to allow an evolutionist to…

This is an organiser or to-do linkpost page for reading and reacting to the following books, papers, and ideas regarded morality-in-broad-terms in relation to evolution. It's a gap I am trying to fill. As reactions I won't dig too scholarly into to the intertextual background, and just say where I differ and why. When I get bored or repetitive I…

I read Overcoming Bias by Robin Hanson quite often because of that word ‘bias’ in the title. I like to keep up-to-date like a potato. I find choices very interesting as a topic to discuss, because of bias, regardless of being overcome or indulged. Power corrupts by indulging our biases: 'use your anger Luke'. So overcoming in the title is…

The importance of an exhibition as a event is all very well, but as Gilbert & George are often want to say, it is the postcards or the posters or even the catalogue that people take back to their homes, they argued that these takeaways have an important democratic character. I would add because they go out into the world.

Original posted in May 2023 on substack.com. The Go-Between (1971 film) Lexigraphically, in traditional English habit, when one worries about the meaning of words one takes a descriptive rather than prescriptive attitude, that one ought not should words. Thus large and important English dictionaries hoard examples of the use of a word or term. It’s a point of pride for…

Platform Arts occupies an old re-purposed court house in Geelong|djilong kulcha precinct. Worlding exhibition in July 2024 curated by Amber Smith, occupied the main exhibition space downstairs, and upstairs mezzanine and theatrette. I am here because of the word 'worlding', a project of my own. Part 1 is here. You can enter by the cafe and go up either side…

Or “beliefs that proposition 'p' ” versus the world Over at new work in philosophy substack I get exposed to current work from academic philosophers as the blog is used to re-publish, and thus highlight on a different platform, articles from more scholarly journals. So recently I read Preston Werner’s (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), "Toward a Perceptual Solution to Epistemological Objections…

My use of worldbuilding draws directly on its use in fiction, both in doing it in my failed attempts at SF/F novel writing, and in genre and literary criticism’s listing of examples. I cover that as an introduction in Worldbuilding 101. This building of worlds has been greatly commercialised in all movie 'franchises' since the 1970s. More recently in computer…

There is a type of social scientism which is called technocracy (and not sciencarchy I’m afraid, which is an attempt at a neologism, but I did not get there first, see references). Technocracy has been overshadowed in recent decades by the term technocrat which is a type of bureaucrat who uses some sort of mathematical based science to determine processes…

The Origins of Virtue came out 25 years ago when I was 32, and I have a dim memory of it. Dim and thin, compared to a memorable reading I had of Matt Ridley's The Red Queen, which I borrowed from the State Library of Tasmania’s Hobart shelves. I can visualise where it was on the shelf, on a bay…

I've been wary of 'the true self' for some time, maybe it is just a genX eyeroll at the boomers of my youth trying to 'find themselves' while also claiming to invent everything they had not learned about yet. But then they were the most modern generation, i.e. living as part of the biggest or widest demographic exploration of modernity…

First posted on substack 25 March 2023. As a librarian it is part of my calling to bring attention to readers books that they may not be aware of, but would be of interest or use to the reader. This is mostly done through the use of professional empathy, and especially allow books to find audiences who may not at…

First posted on substack in May 2023. I was ruminating about writing a post on throwing belief/s into the… —gap, and while readingWhy We Believe by Agustín Fuentes… —on the facebook group Pyrrhonism, a post came up on the book In Praise of Doubt by Peter Berger and Anton C. Zijderveld. For a moment I confused it with a title…

Unable to make the opening night of the exhibition at Platform Arts of Worlding in Gelong|djilong I delayed the trip to the mainland into the penultimate week of the show (ending 19 July 2024). This did give me time to print and bind a doctoral thesis, which Dr Amber Smith kindly emailed to me. Along with the information that Amber…

I'm comparing two frames ① the world or worlding and ② suffering in relation to artificial intelligence. I should note that I suspect that general intelligence does not exist in humans, so creating an artificial version of this would mean creating it for the first time. Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized Digital suffering: why it's a problem…

I read a physical copy of Realist magic : objects, ontology, causality by Timothy Morton and enjoyed reading it, both the writing and the physicality of it in my hands. Its text block is now grubby. But, within the discourse it is a part of, the technical use of ontology and thus object really annoyed me. Not as much as…

Things that annnoy (deprecate 'objects')

Last week in Atlas of non-landscape artists I said that a book had been purchased and subsequently delivered, after I had watched Sam Harris Still Hasn’t “Solved” Morality w/ ‪@lanceindependent in which the book had been mentioned by Lance, with particular reference to Stephen Stich and Edouard Machery. I still haven’t found time to watch the entire stream, but have…

The following paper finds a gap in the ‘science’, then has some handy theology (another outcome and its derivatives of the worlding urge) to throw in the gap science has discovered. Seemingly unaware of the whole god of the gaps. From the abstract at philpapers.org: Well to be fair, not a deus ex machina, not quite a god's messenger a'leaping…

I'll take moral realism to describe all those positions which developed, whether in Christian, Islamic, Confucian or even Buddhist worldings, which feel the world would fall apart if people were not moral, that morality is somehow bound up in the substance of the world, and that one has direct access to this realm as a human (other animals not so…

Gapping OSB (or Plywood) sheathing by DavidPoz “Allowing the gap” is a building tip, and describes a practice that avoids an arrangement of elements that are too tight. By butting each end up tight against the next, in hopes of achieving some minimalist perfect surface that hides its parts and bits and bones under an ideal finish…. —but which does…

vowels space, flocks of birds, mapping plans, composing ourselves intently We see our bones as our both innermost and outlasting remains, rarely do we think of them as the fossils of our movements, except when they ache. We can feel our bones structure us like a building’s walls, but outside of that intent, we quake in life regardless. The difference…

Upon my algorithm a video from DigitalGnosis appeared streamingly with the title Sam Harris Still Hasn’t “Solved” Morality w/ ‪@lanceindependent‬, 2024. It’s a critique video reacting the one by Sam Harris (i.e. streaming in realtime while listening to it) . The pair is quite well-prepared so it is not a “I’m amazed” reaction video. This is the first I’ve seen…

When I was learning how to pour molten bronze into lost-wax hollows burnt out from slapped-over investments of plaster, in order to create Consorts to the Mountain Goddess, my teacher in metal Matt Carney would say to me, looking at… my dad-bods My dad-bod figures of Gog & Magog (from a series of Deloraine Adonides never poured) “Why don’t you…

the first gap is the future, it's child's play Mapping the gap, gaping at the void with/in-out — mapping the gap is not really about mapping the gap in itself, as there is nothing there. So then…. gaping at the void with/in-out… —or, at, not even nothing… at Nothing is the first thing we put into the gap, for it…

This is a rebooted version of all-logic-is-a-prior on substack.com. There is an interesting discussion involving game theory and learning models at Updatelessness doesn't solve most problems (in the unavoidable context of AI training). It’s written for the lay person. But it contains a lot of jargon, so it’s really for the lay person who knows what game theory is. The…

A year or so ago I started capturing thoughts on the… —gap (see link for list of those thoughts, and a sort of list, a list of sorts for the beginning of a taxonomy of gaps). At that time I was mostly intrigued by what people throw into the gap, and generally I focussed on those intuitions (including intuition itself)…

the gap-hunter must known the country,the gatherer of gaps knits them into the world This is the beginnings of a taxonomy of various gaps in knowing. At this stage an taphonomy of gaps is not expected, but it is possible that a phylogeny will arise out of it, an dit may reflect an epistemology, rather than an ontology, one way…

St Ciarán's Church overlooking the harbour Image: Colin Park via CC BY-SA 2.0 via eoceanic.com In Divining the…—gap I mentioned St Ciarán and the ruins of a stone church, making special with the dead, because sacrifice, amid the holy graves and their lovely bones. And in this sacred loss, a ruined wall with the gaps of a wooden structure in…

In Can we define the… —gap? I’ve begun my exploration of this near constant feature of our lives. There is, in philosophical border disputes between theology and science, a term created by theologians protecting the honour of their mono-god, and it is critical of other believers who use science up until some point where they cannot explain something, and who…

Incompleteness, lack, aporia, unknown unknowns and how we carry on regardless A concrete play by 愚木混株 cdd20 on Unsplash There are so many gaps one might ask, "is there only one gap?" One might then answer that the answer lies in the gap, perhaps, so there be no way to know. We urge ourselves on to know. On. You know…

Christopher Brennan calls the gaping issue an ‘annoying wobble between’. I like that, it is less pompous than my Janus dancing the two-faced ratios. My wife Mona went to ante-natal exercises called Pregnastics here in Hobart, and her classmate, an old friend, Anitra, said that it was ‘really just a wobble and a chat’. Our to-be-born child is now 21…

This starts with reading J. N. Nielsen's various posts on various platforms. I've been reading them mostly via substack. The readings have been leaking through and require acknowlegement. This particular post is in regard to the word world and it relation to time as mentioned in J. N. Nielsen's Al-Ghazali’s Spiritual Crisis (Philosophical Side Quests: Philosophers of the Islamic Golden…

These Worlds of Worlds posts wander through some uses of the word world. Each use can be a world of its own. But just as the world is home for all our homes, it is also the home for all worlds, even if these worlds-of-their-own, these ‘epistemic enclaves’ as J.N. Nielsen calls them, can see and or seek no others…

Less obtuse uses of marks and cuts: The mark as a symbol beyond judgement that creates it: I mean what have the symbols ever done for us?

These thoughts follow from reading Caleb Everett’s 2017 book Numbers and the making of us : counting and the course of human cultures. It argues our ability to use numbers, however useful, is a happenstance affair. A use that composes our body’s limbs & digits with some need in environments varied and varying. Counting does not depend on any innate…

In 2023, the novelist Cormac McCarthy died. His first published work came out the year I was born. He wrote what I would call mainstream westerns & apocalypses. I’ve only read The Road. At the time there were some interviews with him re-floated, in which his low use of punctuation is given some air time, and how he got there.

This is part two, so if you are beginning… —maybe start over at Slash-and-blur worldculture part 1 which introduces the slash, the blur and the contronym as the main tools in a good worlding culture. The slash lists things into a chunk, and in chunking, it blurs… —while our attention finds another focus: a distraction, an urgency, a pot on the…

A method to use or explore an intentional suspension of judgement or separating out. While this term of the blur was developed before my readings on neo-Pyrrhonism, it has parallels with Pyrrhonist suspension of judgment I hope to draw on. I do not see ataraxia as the only endpoint/utility/framework of this suspension of judgment, I see more potential for it…

The simplest things have the most names The simplest things have the most names, as they can arise in more frameworks and their jargons. The named names then develop their own worlds of influence. The strike or score, a slash or scratch is, almost, the simplest mark. A dot or spot or peck is simpler, but less clearly an intentional…

Art is a recent version of worlding. Why I no longer arts artifacts into artefactual fits and starts : religion/art/ritual/drama/routine Mary Beth Willard’s 'Why It’s Ok to Enjoy the Work of Immoral Artists' arting is a subsets of worlding Ulay versus the bones of Descartes worlding exhibition in geelong|djilong worlding in Geelong July 2024 – very excited — part 1…

First written in March 2023 at substack. For discussions on my use of the slash "/" see Posts on punctuation and the mark. Aaron Wright’s ‘Why I No Longer Call It “Art” ’ (Archaeology Southwest, 2023-03-09) makes me leap over the planned but not yet written No. 1 post on the… —gap (& world & should) and jump into a…

I put Saturday morning aside to write on the world and moral philosophy from a framework based in evolution’s minimum viable product. It means most of the time I am pointing out that things are outcomes and not causes, or, worse, causal explanations of many things are not necessary for them to be done in the first place. Examples of…

In the self-help article How ‘Should’ Makes Us Stupid — And How to Get Smart Again by Jane Elliott (warning medium.com member only access, but you might get a freebie or two), we get a number of usages on how bad “should” is. This rap sheet lists the misdemeanours that we, as in you, you shouldy miscreant, commit when using…

In At home in the world I put down how I got to by thinking about ‘home’ and the relationship to/with 'world'. And in writing that decided to separate out the thoughts about home/world and it relationship, in my head at least, with country and country/city, and empire. I cover part of that at Worldbuilding 101. But here are the…

The other day — in a library — I briefly looked at a book. And thought, ‘another one I’ll not have time to read.’ But I gave it a quick peruse. John S. Allen’s Home: How Habitat Made Us Human is a science essay book which goes over common ground to reframe some assumptions or two that we have in…

A large part of my response to the question ¿what is the ethical response to morality? is that we have an moral urge, if not an instinct, to world-build, which in English we can also phrase as as why we should. The details do not matter so much, until we go off worldbuilding ourselves, as much as that we actually should should about something,…

In February 2024 in Writing good out of me worlds better than the old fool's selfie I left off with an enigmatic: And Julia Kristeva’s Lacanist worlding? I may leave that for another day with the cheap remark that it is not engrams all the way down. No, they lie only between the fool and the world. So finally I…

writing and reading densities, the proverb, the pun, the multitool and worlding a life This post is: While in the space of making a ‘three-parter’ on the…—gap, my daughter has mentioned that she has read a few posts (in 2023) on the substack version of why we should, if only because I mentioned her in one post, and she said,…

Like the post Sister Wendy on love as an obedient art, this is mostly about the preface. Purity and Danger was originally published in 1966, a year after I was born. In Categories versus practices: moral leadership & teenagers running amok I briefly rail against the methodology of using categories as resolution for a 'digital scanner' of social realities (in…

An interesting example of throwing one's favourite thing into the…—gap, in this case panpsychism, while offering it up, in the same action, as a moderating mediation. If not meliorating the pox in both their houses. On page 128 of Philip Goff's 2023 book Why? The Purpose of the Universe. I have to admit that I do not think of materialism that…

"Literature" more generally The fable that is modern literature Anthony Burgess, fabulous writing and narcissism. Follow from Parables of Submission, Fables of Truth-Based Creativity Taphonomy examples: Denis de Rougemont’s Passion and Society Marginal note to Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (late example of de Rougemont's argument) Stupidity, Dostoyevksy & Glenorchy Boy and 'suspension of disblief' The sky pool The quote on…

Julia Kristeva, Robert Graves and a cameo by Fyodor Dostoevsky In this post I’ll try to connect two writers on the subject of the alphabet. The key theme is how alphabets by their very mnenomic natures double-down in various lifelines, or directions, one of which is writing and so… —being a writer. Writing both allows communication and better ways to…

Steve Stewart-Williams, a reading of his The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve. (Cambridge University Press, 2018. #ISBN9781108425049 ) I pick this up because it covers some big history, from which general assumptions in my approach to morality and worldbuilding arise. It’s an academic book, as opposed to scholarly. It’s got a great innovation in…

Willard, Mary Beth. Why It’s Ok to Enjoy the Work of Immoral Artists. New York, NY: Routledge, 2021. ISBN 978-0-367-89864-9 I was hoping this book would easily generate a discussion piece for me, but no. The author has a blog aestheticsforbirds.com besides the day job as an academic, though I guess we could say teacher in Utah to make it…

In product development, defining or outlining a “Minimum viable product” (MVP) is a key part of the process used to develop a going concern in business. It's a tactic of specialisation, and is kin to core business as a strategy. Today I am using it as a type of Anthropic principle, where when we ask, say, “why is the sky…

I'll group that type of worlding which is more doctrinal or dogmatic, or focuses on bad outcomes of worlding under the term worldbuilding. I.E. it is a more intentional worlding, which is conscious of its ability to construct the world we live in, but does not see that urge to world, as anything other than something that must be controlled.

In today’s psyche.co essay, Adolescence is a ‘use it or lose it’ time for moral development I’ve learned about moral foundations theory, and as I read it, I felt like pointing out, or shouting, that using the word categories, for practices, might help with tick-a-box data collection, but can lead to boxed-in thinking. As a failed poet I always grumpily fume against the…

Reading Gilles Deleuze’s Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. Zone Books. Cambridge, Mass: MIT. 2005. ISBN9781890951252 I’ve begun a project in which I tackle writing that I find difficult to read. This in order to write in a more understandable way. That is, to see if helps put me in their shoes. I found this book by Deleuze on a dear friend’s…

wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotropism Monotropism is a person's tendency to focus their attention on a small number of interests at any time, tending to miss things outside of this attention tunnel. This cognitive strategy has been posited as the central underlying feature of autism. The theory of monotropism was developed by Dinah Murray, Wenn Lawson and Mike Lesser starting in the 1990s, and first published in 2005.[1] Lawson's further work on the theory…

(midjourney 2023: failed on Greek red-black vase style, failed on pear tree, failed on duck-rabbit on mushroom) prompt /imagine Ludwig Wittgenstein reading St Augustine of Hippo under a pear tree, greek red-black vase style, a rabbit-duck watches Ludwig from a low mushroom (stolen wrist-pears are not coloured?) Miles is well aware of the… —gap. I am reading his newly [re]-formed…

down to the sky, up to the pool… —and Colin Wilson I was cataloguing Colin Wilson’s memoir The Angry Years, and I thought, who is he again? Colin Wilson is one of those boomer generational figures who have had little impact on my on cohort of genXers. His books would have passed my gaze in second hand book shops, in…

Mapping Christian byways of worldbuilding by way of a flowchart. an aside The usage of terms like “worldbuilding” here is the reason this writing has been written, i.e. I hope I can more fully explore and explain what wworlding is, as a substitute for a lot of 'things' that are outcomes of the moral/worlding urge, but we treat as causal,…

The re-post below this introduction, was originally posted as The fable that is modern literature in 2021. It describes an experience from a decade before at Parables of Submission, Fables of Truth-Based Creativity. Reposted here because it relates to literature and thus to world-building, and thus worlding and morality more generally. Basically literature is always fantasy where it prefers non-flat…

There is this wonderful book written by Lorraine Daston called Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (The Lawrence Stone Lectures. Princeton ; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022 ISBN 9780691156989). I say wonderful because it is one of those histories which illuminates by way of the taphonomy of etymology, of usage in their historical contexts, rather than, say, a list…

This last week I woke up at about 4am and actually got up out of bed, to write in my notebook, some questions that follow from Newtonian space-time metaphors. I mention this getting up to write down, because it was quite complex sleep thinking, and usually when I think at 4am I tend to remain asleep. My waking hours when…

Today I am having: Roger Scruton: The Philosopher on Dover Beach. Continuum, 2009 by Mark Dooley. 978-1-84706-013-6 In a first reading this book, it occurred to me, I might be becoming a gap-hunter, or, better, as in more accurate, I might become a hunter of what people throw in the gap. There is always a gap, so why hunt that?…

To world is a verb. I found this out writing why we should. Morality/religion/art all those things that should be blurred back together are outcomes of the urge to world, just as we compose our bodies from the sustenance of the terrain, in a landscape of care. These posts focus on more postive aspects. The more negative or doctrinal or…

A table of concerns, if not a table of contents. Most of the following links connect to linkpost pages trying to organize the concerns. Much of what is below will be used or at least influence the writing the book project. The substack version whyweshould.substack.com/ has been migrated here under the 'structure' being developed above, and where it will be continually…

Over the last week I have been reading Jörg Rüpke’s On Roman Religion: Lived Religion and the Individual in Ancient Rome. books.google.com/ngrams/ It’s a whole world of pain. For more discussion on Appropriation (art) and Reappropriation see Mary Beth Willard’s 'Why It’s Ok to Enjoy the Work of Immoral Artists' So, at dinner the other night I was at the second stage of…

metaphor analogies you by way of the world like the way coins are words You might argue that ‘the cell as a factory’ is only a metaphor. You could say that scientific metaphors should be judged based on how useful they are, and no metaphor is perfect. The ‘cell as a factory’ metaphor has undoubtedly been useful in guiding the trajectory of…

Krebs cycle is another pivot, or hinge, the threshold where Janus dances, the gate is a dance surfing a flow of protons. Consciousness re-iterates this in/by/through/up/out/ involutions, some meta, some complexified, some hindsighted into logic, like the way a bear eats berries to pile on fat for winter. There is a routine there that rites iterate, same same but different, hymns to…

Or, not what I had planned, which involved a matrix of ratios on self/world:reality This is a planned post on proportions of the Janus ratio. But not the planned post. Planning got me nowhere. I ended up somewhere else, but at least I am not lost. ‘Planned’ means that I had an idea, and began mulling it over, thinking about…

In a few comments elsewhere I have started using the term Janus ratio, to describe our threshold of attention, the gate on which it pivots is the urge to live. I’ll try to make sense of it, by some attempts at definition of this neologism, below. Janus ratio of self and world © 2023 meika loofs samorzewski The Janus ratio describes the proportions…

I've used the term the "Janus ratio" to indicate our relations to the… —gap. There are many gaps. One gap is our view in-out. In self, out there world. Here the Janus ratio indicates where our attention allocates it self in world. The point is unobtainable, thus the dancing, and hand waving. The ritual and the dead certainty. The hope…

Julian B. Barbour The Janus Point: A New Theory of Time. First edition. New York: Basic Books, 2020. ISBN 9780465095469 Given my interest in Janus the two faced god of the threshold and gates, and my use of it in a metaphor to describe our gap dancing abilities (and difficulties), I bought Julian Barbour’s book on physics, and, well, cosmology,…

Sister Wendy was a Carmelite nun who gained famed as an interpreter of art, especially on free-to-air television in the 1990s, and whose passion for this vocation was irrepressible. All images of text and quotes are grabs from Sister Wendy Beckett's The Mystery of Love: Saints in Art through the Centuries (London: HarperCollins, 1996) #ISBN0551030121 The Carmelites are a Catholic…

This post follows on from discovering that belief in belief, or believing in believing, or having faith in faith— is a heresy in the biggest Christian Churches, because obedience. I covered this in : I was at work when first writing those posts, and while cataloguing books into a library system I discovered the following from Arnold Lunn’s The Revolt…

Post that mention narcissism Casewell’s Jaspers, but meika’s Deleuzian Bergsonism. asystems anarchism: a youthful play re-worked Posts that are about narcissists Series of posts on Worlding and the labour theory of value (but really about narcissists and our need to police them). to police to care On the appearance of a living buddha in Hobart, Tasmania Worlds of difference: Esther…

About the gap in more consideration or detail Can we define the… —gap? Mapping the gap: The night sky is full of constellations rickrolling unicorns for fun and profit. Why don’t you use more definition? Mapping the gap… —within Listing the gap: examples of where we throw stuff into the gap. Including where people have noticed we have done so…

To build a better world, we should destroy the Catholic Church Fideism & Obedience : the extra bit about St Augustine of Hippo Sister Wendy on love as an obedient art The Catholic Church is a technocracy a bit contra: Reading Beyer: Solidarity by Grace, Nature or Both? Fideism, reason and… —the gap that is always there Inappropriation (Jörg Rüpke’s On Roman…

Belief in belief is regarded as a heresy called Fideism by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian Churches. To me this appears… —odd. Why would a church or religion not belief in belief, not have faith in faith? Surely this is prior to belief in somepiece of dogma. But for most established Christianities, not only is it unrequired, it is…

To face tomorrow is to world today, expecting… a child hopefully fears its innocence and naives a plan and so mishaps the world, any… —all, does not exist. But is where we are headed, never to arrive we adult into our worsts, see, and the world lies before us in a moment of care that says fare well. The World—“Pam-A”…

MEIKA LOOFS SAMORZEWSKI MARCH 2024 one might argue, you might cook, we might eat, we might talk metaphor analogies you by way of the world like the way coins are words metaphor me a ratio just like you a halting problem I've been thinking about for three decades Analogy shots general intelligence and the inner stochastic parrot Me third go…

Early in 2023 a Cardinal of the Catholic Church was buried in Sydney, Australia, amid tearful protest and weepy hagiography. I leave the description of George Pell’s life to others. The key I wish to turn here is the context for the choices that determines conscience: George Pell flew higher than any Australian priest, but he chose career over the safety of children…

Why we should discusses what is broadly called moral philosophy. It does so on the assumption that evolution is key. The first essay which sets this out is (from 2019): Why we should : an introduction by memoir into the implications of the Egalitarian Revolution of the Paleolithic, or, Anyone for cake? RSS feeds feed.xml or feed.json If you wish…

Self-care as salvation-- all authenticity but no responsibility Deborah Casewell in her aeon.co essay raises some notice on Karl Jaspers’ existentialist angst-mongering, how it has been mis-categorized (by Sartre) such that Jaspers as an inventor of the word existentialism he gave it away after losing control of the branding in the marketplace of ideas, but, Casewell reminds us, the “focus on the individual, the importance…

(not mentioning Paul Blooms' against empathy today) I am refering to a recent article by Lucinda Holdforth “The Problem with Authenticity (and Other 21st Century Virtues).” (The Guardian, August 2, 2023, sec. Books. ) It’s an edited extract from 21st Century Virtues: How They Are Failing Our Democracy , published 1 August as part of Monash University Publishing’s In the National Interest…

History-telling is the ability not to recall what somewhat said, though story-telling is important, but the ability to read the traces in their contexts, and the recursivity of this process amidst those contexts of telling that layer us between the lines of our lifes as we track to and fro. If interupted. Or even if interrupted by extinction and steel.