7 Comments
User's avatar
Rob (c137)'s avatar

A lot of Robert Anton Wilson in Prometheus Rising explains this aimless yet complicated fake philosophy that took over the label.

What if the problem is how we perceive language...

"I believe humanity's foray into fiction began with the breakdown of the bicameral mind, and the insertion of meaningless symbols in between the subject and the seer. In short, back when people used pictographic alphabets, we were limited to discussing things we could actually see in the real world. The invention of phonemic alphabets like this one, which are comprised not of representative pictures but of meaningless letters, provides the opportunity to invent an endless stream of non-sense, the greatest of these being spelled with just a single capital letter."

Alphabet vs the goddess lecture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QQuD62RxrU

Expand full comment
laughlyn (johan eddebo)'s avatar

Thanks a lot, I had barely ever heard of him. There is a really good point in how language relates to the breakdown of our relation to creation and the cosmos (fundamental alienation), and one that's probably implicit already in the narratives of Genesis.

Don't think we ought to throw out the baby with the bathwater though - I think there's alienation inherent in the way we use language, just like the more radical anarcho-primitivists argue, but as you say, it's rather how we have come to perceive, shape and "do" language.

Expand full comment
Justarandomjohn's avatar

Wow!! Had to read it a couple of times and kind of/sort of get it. It reminded me of a story of invention (discovery?) of the number zero in Indian mythology. Apparently the original idea of ‘shunya’ was pursuit of that which is not countable, or an expression that is not in the realm of numbers, perhaps a void (Divine?). A symbol of the absence of materiality....

Expand full comment
wafflecannon's avatar

Ok, this is extremely interesting. And I'm having trouble understanding it so I need to ask. When you write:

So either the dog-truth is absolutely true (i.e. it’s absolutely true that you actually imagined it), or the sequestration of it is absolutely true (it’s absolutely true that the dog-truth does not hold in any general sense).

.. Are you saying that the act of denying the dog-truth as an absolute truth in itself validates the dog-truth, because if it was nothing; there would be nothing to deny?

Expand full comment
laughlyn (johan eddebo)'s avatar

But I like your statement as well, i.e. "if it was nothing; there would be nothing to deny".

This is another way, and rather more direct way, to support realism.

The very reference inherent in the denial does, as you say, validate that which it targets: the act of denial presupposes SOMETHING, it doesn't matter how you categorize it metaphysically, even if X is rejected an illusory experience or a reverie, it's at least that, and can be discussed and referenced as such - and is therefore real in some sense.

Expand full comment
laughlyn (johan eddebo)'s avatar

Sort of. The categorical affirmation of relativism is in itself necessarily an appeal to absolute truth.

This article says it much better:

https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-absolute-truth-about-relativism.html

Expand full comment