TOTAL CREATIVE FREEDOM
mapping the physical world onto a controllable recombinant abstract process space

OR

CHAOTIC RUNAWAY HUBRIS
destabilizing the homeostasis that intertwines physical and abstract process

?????????????????????

I too side with Emerson. Yet mindfulness requires continual, well, mindfulness.
And Dan, I’m happy to have my thinly-veiled value judgments busted.

It’s very interesting to think of what Sartre might have meant by that statement though. The origins of jazz are not entirely clear, but from what I understand the leading theory is that it began in New Orleans when French-speaking blacks, many of them trained as musicians in the western style, lost the social status they enjoyed over the former slaves. The latter group already had a music tradition carried on through work songs which ultimately became blues. The two groups supposedly started playing music together after the difference in social status disappeared (during Jim Crow) and jazz was supposedly the fusion of the earthy, spontaneous blues of the former slaves and the technically precise marching and popular music of the French-speaking blacks.

So even the beginning of jazz, or at least the myth of it, is dualistic. I can’t help but wonder whether Sartre realized this in writing that line.

Christina

Was more formulaic in the 30′s. Improvisation was a part of it, but it wasn’t really until the 50′s that free jazz and really open improvisation typified the genre. The genre would have had very different associations for Sartre writing in the 30′s than it does for us now.

My take on all this is almost entirely opposite to Sartre’s. The idea that Descartes was right and I might just be a brain in a vat is what makes me sick and dizzy; the idea that there’s a physical world providing the foundation for our perceptions is immensely comforting to me in contrast.

Emphasis on things the people of that future (preferably people who lived in the 20th century as well!) take for granted things that we here in 2012 would find near magical. The tedium of consumer level nanoreplicators and crowded slummed space colonies and the banality of omnipresent AI, and the sheer superficiality of perfect virtual or immortality/body reconstruction driven orgies.

But without the usual tawdry cyberpunk cliche’s. The future not as a urban sprawl covering had a continent, or as a with hipsters carrying shoulderslung 4.7mm caseless flechette coilgun pulse rifles – no, not much violence at all.

The term I believe is Wei-wu-wei?

http://io9.com/5905257/10-untranslatable-words-and-when-youll-want-to-use-them

Too bad we can’t believe that individual free choices are at least halfway toward robust moral action.

It’s just too easy to deconstruct free choices and reduce them to their subconscious and ideological underground and how they are turned into commodities and simulations.

A genuine philosophical response lies in dispensing the whole free will / free choice idea or defer it and openly admit the desire of wanting to be forced by the truth. It is the “Socratic ideal” once again. Of course one doesn’t know the truth and one doesn’t even know how it is shaped. If we end up seeing double, get ambiguities, unknown unknowns and hydra which eats them for lunch, paradoxes, trade offs, data clouds, knotted problems and multiple perspectives, then that’s it.

Those gruesome results are still accessible through a thought process in the medium of language which goes step-by-step and it works better when all the effects of environmental and random causes which make up my personal dispositions, such as heritage, socialization, education, religion, cultural prejudices, neurotic traits etc. are damped; otherwise we deal with case studies and symptoms. Reducing authors to their causes is a polemic strategy which attempts to make them irrelevant. Just tell your students that they shouldn’t apply it to themselves. Others will do it to them once their own thoughts are relevant for some people – something which might never happen! There is no need to be in hurry.

A final remark. There is nothing bad about ones identity being “socially constructed” when a conscious construction leads to the same result. When Sartre returned to the colors of the tricolore this also reflected his ambient culture but couldn’t he bother less about it?

When I am in a public space dominated by mass culture and its native inhabitants, such as a mall, I feel like I am surrounded by philosophical zombies. Yes, they talk and listen, but it is not clear to me that what they are using is language.”

Yes…yes…sort of.

I understand and sympathize and disapprove, but I don’t think this is new. I think it’s always been the case.

Years ago I came across a startling quote by Chomsky, something like: “The primary function of language is not communication.” At first I was puzzled, but now I think I understand what he means, and it’s exactly what Venkat is talking about. Most of what passes between us when talk to each other is not information, it’s something else, something social. Like a very sophisticated system of grunts. It only seems odd to those of us who need something different in our interactions.

1. Can you provide any reference for your interpretation of Indian combinatorial recitation practices? A “null hypothesis” would be that such elaborate practices were simply an aberration serving no useful purpose that was developed once and then persisted solely by conservatism of tradition.

2. “Sites like tvtropes.org are sustaining basic literacy skills.”

This sentence reveals imprecision of your concept of “literacy”. TvTropes is all about *semantic* literacy, that is, being able to recognize cultural contexts and references. As such, it has no inherently “linguistic” component – one can be well-versed in modern memes and popular cultures in exactly the same way that ancient tribesmen could be well-versed in their own local culture, poems, oral tradition etc. If this is what you mean by “literacy”, it’s completely unoriginal (and schoolteachers have been ranting about this kind of “illiteracy” since the beginning of time), but as I understand, your concept of “literacy” is closer to syntactic or low-level aspects of language, somehow more related to the structure of language, not the outside reality that language refers to (in this respect, I see no particular structural difference between quoting Shakespeare quoting Bible and quoting “Casablanca” or Tarantino’s movies). Or am I missing something?

3. “Mathematics and programming, two specialized derivatives of language that I consider part of high culture, retained the characteristics of oral cultures of old, with an emphasis on recombinant manipulation, terseness, generality and portability.”

Can you elucidate that? It seems a rather far-fetched claim.

In fact the concept of “manufactured normalcy” is tautologous by Sartrean standards. We manufacture the “normalcy” of whatever—March madness, online shopping, dating etiquette—in order to prevent random meaninglessness from seeping through.

But who is “we”? In the gap between the manufactured normalcy field we are living in and pioneers, adventurers, research scientists and madmen with a vision at the outposts, we find early adopters, innovators and entrepreneurs who attempt to pull novelty into the normalcy field out of idealism, prestige, cash or all of it. The normalcy field can be perceived from two angles, that of the Eloi and that of the Morlock. It is not important to be either an Eloi or a Morlock but being able to see double.

So, in the end, the rush of Nausea actually propelled Sartre’s writings. It propelled his quest to seek, or at least create, some meaning for human existence—and as a passionate modernist, he would hand each individual the powerful gift of radical freedom to create the meaning of our own lives.

So he returned to liberté, egalité and fraternité and thus rounded the life of a French intellectual post 1789. The folk hero gives the people what they already have, but he gives it differently and this makes him an innovator of the moral and ideological normalcy field which needs occasional actualizations through “consciousness”. The worry point today seems to be that we don’t believe anymore that this is enough or that it could even work for us.