Fwd: Re: The nature of Discussion Fora

David R. Thompson [hidden email] · Fri, 05 Apr 2013 11:56:16 -0700

Steve,

Thank you for forwarding this twitching message. I realize that this 
thread is probably long past its prime, though I wanted to mention my 
appreciation. The term "twitching" bugged me at first, and this was a 
good thing. My pejorative interpretation poked at me, probably because 
its connotation rings with some important truth for me.

My interest in our storied lives is parallel with my interest in the 
Buddhist notion of our "conditioned" lives, our lives wherein we break 
the world world down into - this vs. that -, and see our arbitrary 
ontologies as real, and see the entities in our arbitrary ontologies as 
containing their own (self generated) essence. Though the entities of 
our conditioned views are powerfully useful fictions of individuality, 
when mistaken as "real" they (and we) become unwitting actors in 
unquestionable stories (people, trees, cars, chairs ...).

Put another way, if I connect this with my understanding of the radical 
and 2500 year old Buddhist view, the twitching (and the ensuing dukkha 
driving the twitching) arise from seeing our useful fictions, our 
conditioned worlds and the stories we weave about them, as hard reality. 
When our stories are hard reality, rather than a way of attempting to 
negotiate our infinite ignorance in the world, we act from them as the 
"subject" of our doing. When lost in stories as the subject from which 
we act, we cannot see or question them, their relative nature is 
unthinkable, so we twitch and dance to our stories.

My understanding is that, when we wake up to see the practicality of our 
stories and ontologies, that they are useful fictions and partial 
understandings, and that essence is only in the dance of the broader 
interaction, we can make our "subject" views and stories into "objects". 
We can act directly on our operational stories and become authors. And, 
as evinced by the discipline required to retain authorship ("the path"), 
it is hard to be in authorship in a world where so many forces tell us 
that we must act in someone elses' stories to be safe. Creating and 
maintaining these roles and perceptions of ourselves is the core of the 
pain pointed to in anatta (not self, or no self).

Thank you for the insightful "twitching" term Glen! It has stuck in my 
mind for a couple of weeks.
David
______________________________________________________
David R. Thompson -- Problem Resolution Advocate
Blog : http://storyresolution.org/
Email: [hidden email]
home : 509.624.1018
cell : 509.263.0792

Clumsy is the dance of one brain clapping
______________________________________________________
On 3/19/2013 3:08 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
> Glen -
>
> This is twitchin awesome!  But for some unexplained reason, I feel 
> pithed about it. (lame puns intended, punning being one of *my* 
> twitches).
>
> I'm still enjoying my illusion of free-will and get a little skitchy 
> around overstated pre-determination (or a fully mechanistic model of 
> the universe?).  This is probably just a twitch itself?
>
> I do think that a great deal of what we (think we) do consciously is 
> some level of "twitch" as you call it.  Coupled dynamical systems, all 
> of us in one great grand ensemble of twitching frog-legs all wired 
> together...  or in Stephenson's Diamond Age like the "Drummers" (sorry 
> Carl).   I also accept the idea that *much* of what we think we 
> understand or control is just a post-hoc rationalization of what 
> happened  without even our involvement much less understanding.
>
> You have referred to yourself in the past as a "simulant" which I took 
> to mean that you are a professional creator of "simulations" 
> (simulation scientist?) despite the fact that it was too close to 
> "Replicant" from Blade Runner and sounded more like you were claiming 
> that "you" were just a somewhat modularized region in a giant simulation.
>
> This of course wanders me into Fredkin/Wolfram/Chaitin land where 
> their digitally updated version of Leibnitz' Monist Metaphysics is 
> expressed variously as Digital Philosophy or Digital Physics.
>
> In some circles it is a truism the "we are what we eat"... which 
> suggests that someone who "eats simulations" for a living is likely to 
> "become a simulation" at least in their own mind.  Or perhaps it is 
> your twitch that you *are* a simulation scientist *because* you see 
> the world as one grande simulation and the ones you create and execute 
> are just modularized simulations within the simulation?
>
> In my offline conversations with Rich Murray, it is becoming apparent 
> that we (he and I) share the feeling that by giving over to 
> "consciousness" being *at best* the unique ability to observe (but 
> maybe not to effect) the unfolding universe.   It is why I am 
> entertained by such as Bohm's Rheomode and of course Digital 
> Physics/Philosophy... the possibility that even if "I" am mostly an 
> illusion, "I" am also not completely an illusion.
>
> Oh Ego, twitch on you surly beast!
> - Steve
>
>> Steve Smith wrote at 03/19/2013 01:20 PM:
>>> I am glad that you *also* appreciate the list's freewheeling style and
>>> seek more engagement in a broader sense (if I read you correctly).
>>> Maybe this discussion will help encourage a broadening in the
>>> participation...
>> I don't think of it so much as freewheeling.  I think of it more as a
>> compulsion.  Owen's persistent attempts to find a homunculus inside
>> Google is a better example than brain farts for a better definition of
>> time.  And it goes back to what I was trying to say in the last e-mail.
>>
>> We (humans, actors, initiators of causal chains of events) have only a
>> SINGLE effector available to us: twitch.  We spastically twitch about
>> because that's the only thing we can do.
>>
>> The resulting patterns are NOT caused by any intelligence, plan, goal,
>> objective, belief, intention, etc. within the actor.  The resulting
>> patterns are an artifact of the collection of actors twitching about in
>> the open universe surrounding us.
>>
>> It's only in hindsight ... or with an epiphenomenal or finitely limited
>> attention span that we "recognize" patterns and, post-hoc, impute
>> intelligence, plans, objectives, etc. onto some arbitrarily sliced out
>> kernel of the pattern.
>>
>> ----
>> Given that, I explain running forward with our own reality-disconnected
>> systems of assumptions as life's imperative: we twitch and we just keep
>> twitching.  We just wiggle and squirm about in our own juices until some
>> other wiggling squirming process changes the juices in some happenstance
>> way.
>>
>> So, when you're quaffing pints with that guy who just won't shut up
>> about, say, football, then you can see him for what he is: a twitch with
>> few degrees of freedom.  He must twitch and football is all he has to
>> twitch about!
>>
>
>
>