adjacency - between - Ernest Becker - book - The Birth and Death of Meaning - Eastern meditation to interrogate sense of self - adjacency statement - Becker writes and speculates about the anthropology and cultural history of the origin of the self construct - It is a fascinating question to compare Becker's ideas with Eastern ideas of dissolving the constructed psychological self

for - Richard Slaughter - transformation cycle - definition - transformation cycle - social norms - construction and deconstruction - social construction

definition - transformation cycleL - The transformation cycle shows how the social constructions that come to be seen as real - eventually lose their viability over time, - with new - social constructions and - meaning frameworks -emerging. - This process can be described in three steps: - 1. Analysis of the breakdown of inherited meanings. - 2. Reconceptualisation via new myths, paradigms, images etc. - 3. Negotiation and selective legitimation of new - meanings, - images, - behaviours etc.

• for: bio-buddhism, buddhism - AI, care as the driver of intelligence, Michael Levin, Thomas Doctor, Olaf Witkowski, Elizaveta Solomonova, Bill Duane, care drive, care light cone, multiscale competency architecture of life, nonduality, no-self, self - illusion, self - constructed, self - deconstruction, Bodhisattva vow
• title: Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence
• author: Michael Levin, Thomas Doctor, Olaf Witkowski, Elizaveta Solomonova, Bill Duane, AI - ethics
• date: May 16, 2022

• source: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/24/5/710/htm

• summary

  • a trans-disciplinary attempt to develop a framework to deal with a diversity of emerging non-traditional intelligence from new bio-engineered species to AI based on the Buddhist conception of care and compassion for the other.
  • very thought-provoking and some of the explanations and comparisons to evolution actually help to cast a new light on old Buddhist ideas.
  • this is a trans-disciplinary paper synthesizing Buddhist concepts with evolutionary biology

• for: deconstructing self, self - deconstruction, object agent action triplet, deconstructing cognition
• comment
  • this is a necessary outcome of the self-reflective nature of human cognition.
  • English, and many other languages bake the (object, agent, action) triplet into its very structure, making it problematic to use language in the same way after the foundations of cognition have been so deconstructed.
  • Even though strictly speaking the self can be better interpreted as a psycho-social construct and an epiphenomena, it is still very compelling and practical in day-to-day living, including the use of languages which structurally embed the (object, agent, action) triplet.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1570057592595963904.html

Sönke Ahrens used Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's description of experimental work as a form of material deconstruction as a framework for looking at Niklas Luhmann.

Or maybe rather, engineering and the sciences, have, to a greater degree, been very differently shaped due to their different connections to commercial forces.

Critical theory invites us to step away from an idea of there being some kind of realm of pure, valid thinking/knowledge that might be corrupted/shaped by either academic structures (as Morningstar finds in critical theory), or commerce (as Morningstar finds in engineering and science), or connections to reality and instead explore how any human practice is connected to, shaped by and shaping of all those things and more.

Morningstar is on to something here in explaining critical theory's faults as the result of some structural, social/culture forces, but ends up misrecognizing his own insight for something that derives from intrinsic qualities of critical theory itself rather than how it participates in specific historical periods.

Morningstar steps away from his clever ridicule to finally reveal what he found valuable in his exploration of critical theory.

Surprised to see Baudrillard categorized as harder? more opaque? more sophisticated? than Derrida... Someone who had read both might switch the order...

I can't find it right now, but recently came across an example of how a different field, perhaps closer to Morningstar's, has experienced a kind of "drift", wherein a sizable portion of artificial intelligence research was characterized as being of low quality and published only due to a small "in group" colluding.

One of the things critical theory does is try to understand how culture works beyond this or that individual human interaction with say, one specific text. Part of this line of thinking is that culture (a critical theorist might say "discourse") has its own patterns, histories, structures, effects, etc. This might be why Morningstar finds the idea that a text could "deconstruct itself" fantastical.

Again Morningstar shows a lack of recognition that academia (most especially in the USA) operates in a marketplace, even though he describes some of its market characteristics elsewhere.

So for example, if a computer program had one primary database and one replica of the primary database that copied the primary database nightly, a computer scientist wouldn't recognize that setup as a hierarchy with two elements?

Does Morningstar think that math too suffers from the same issues he finds in critical theory, or just Godel's incompleteness theorem (I'm assuming that's what Morningstar is alluding to)? Explore a deep discussion about whether Godel's incompleteness theorem is a cheap trick.

Or is questioning labels and categories a quite legitimate move given that one of the primary focuses of critical theory is to look at how labels and catetgories shape understanding?

Morningstar's big takeaway.

Morningstar frames his inquiry as a crime investigation.

hmmm...this needs to be unpacked...I might start by suggesting that critical theory does indeed often explore how judgements of quality and truth are shaped by politics, power, desire, knowledge, etc, but that's not a point against such work, but rather a recognition of part of its main practice.

Cleverness is another matter...there's quite a bit of cleverness here in Morningstar's post, so should we judge it less worthy?

I would suggest a different understanding: Much of what's happened in critical theory (especially the parts more visible to "outsiders") is deeply embedded in "mainland" contexts, including, most importantly for critical theory, being embedded in the expansion of higher education in the USA after the GI Bill and the long tradition of "pragmatic" thinking in mainstream US thought that may find its roots in Protestantism and flower in the mythic "American" "everyman".

Morningstar misses here how he goes on to describe exactly how academia acts as a marketplace and how academics do get paid by convincing somebody else that "what [they] are doing is worth" payment. The idea that academia is not participating in market-based dynamics seems like just the old "ivory tower" myth.

hmmm...so projects that participate in the marketplace are inherently...what? this needs to be thought through...see below where Morningstar returns to this point and suggests the answer is something like "more tied to reality".

This is a key point: Complex, unobvious topics can not always be talked about in simple, plain language anyone can understand. There are texts that needlessly obfuscate and maybe something easier to understand can be said about almost anything by way of an introduction or at least to explain "why it matters", but critical theory at its core is pretty deep work, resting on a lot of other material (eg, philosophy), and exploring areas that a lot of folks aren't deeply acquainted with. The fact that much critical theory is not easy of a newcomer to understand is not proof that it is bogus.

I wouldn't recommend Culler's worthy book as a primer — it's more like an advanced read. One might actually do far better just reading wikipedia entries on a few critical theorists and theories, or maybe a book like Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory, which I might not agree with in places but can be an approachable starting place for someone new to critical theory.

These seem like the three most common uninformed opinions about critical theory, with maybe the middle being most commonly held, though perhaps in close competition with the third, but with most adherents unwilling to undertake Morningstar's due diligence and so just jump directly to writing it all off as the bogus work of clowns.

theme for deconstruction sheet - sinead's class on active listening

De mon point de vue et gardant à l'esprit notre but d'analyser si le web favorise ou non le discours d'autorité, il est essentiel de porter l'attention sur deux caractéristiques de la communication dans le web: la grande diversification des sources d'information et le changement d'attitude des individu vis à vis de ces sources. Bien évidemment, l'enseignement en ligne est de plus en plus répandu (c.f. article précédent), mais ainsi le sont les plateformes qui donnent accès et qui permettent de partager toute sorte d'information, quiconque en soit l'auteur. L'article ci-présenté analyse les nouvelles pratiques de légitimation de l'information médicale dans les forums de discussion. L'article illustre clairement un phénomène apparu avec la diffusion et la démocratisation de l'accès au web: les participants assument une posture active dans le processus de production et de légitimation de l'information. Avant la diffusion du web, la production et la transmission de l'information étaient l'apanage presque exclusif de l'autorité médicale institutionnellement reconnue. Aujourd'hui, selon les auteurs, "nous assistons à une déconstruction" de l'autorité": la multiplication des sources d'information ainsi que le changement d'attitude entrepris par le participants aux forums, démontrent une tendance à vouloir (et pouvoir) complémenter et parfois contredire les experts institutionnellement reconnus et "voix" du discours d'autorité. Nous pouvons alors affirmer que les nouvelles formes de diffusion de l'information émergées dans le web ne favorisent pas et, au contraire, fragilisent le discours d'autorité.

Thinking of identity as contextual, interpretive, work-in-process, instead of as a static output, seems really positive and potentially integrative.

Alright, so a rejection of a nihilistic rejection of meaning, but at the same time, I'm not sure I'm so following his point on how to achieve that.

My guess: like with the signature example, just because we don't have a master-reference doesn't mean we can't make pragmatic associations, but it does mean we can't assume there exists a master-reference, and any system that assumes it (e.g. Sheridan's "correct" enunciations, Blair's belief in naturally-inclined taste) is inherently leading to failure. Deconstruction breaks down those structures... but I'm still lost as to what comes next. Bail me out, here.

All this talk of grounding is going to be really important when we get to Derrida and deconstruction. Burke seems to believe in the grounding, the scene, but it's often mutable, unstable, and ambiguous. Derrida's just gonna drop the bottom out and see how it falls.