Bakker LV - Nau's Ark

[Castel]

On 9/13/2018 at 4:40 AM, Sci-2 said:

I'd argue that The Good Place is a far more interesting and poignant critique of scriptural-objective morality and how it would translate to an afterlife.

Is it?

Spoiled just for safety.

Spoiler

 

The show essentially seems to back the (non-denominational, non-scriptural) concept of redemption and damnation. We're not dealing with seemingly arbitrary religious prescriptions (like say...pigs and snakes being holy or unholy) but personal failings that even secular philosophers would recognize.

 

Speaking of damnation: something that has bothered me is the division of labour. How does that work? 

 

On the one hand damnation seems to be wandering into the "intentional reality" of some super-being in the afterlife which would lead to you being munched on (this is also indistinguishable from being rewarded, from the outside -no pun intended). On the other hand, it seems to be an absolute fact of the universe, see sorcerers, who need not wander into anyone's grasp by worship, they're just Wrong and it can be seen with God's Eye.

[.H.]

11 hours ago, Castel said:

On the one hand damnation seems to be wandering into the "intentional reality" of some super-being in the afterlife which would lead to you being munched on (this is also indistinguishable from being rewarded, from the outside -no pun intended). On the other hand, it seems to be an absolute fact of the universe, see sorcerers, who need not wander into anyone's grasp by worship, they're just Wrong and it can be seen with God's Eye.

Hmm, as per my earlier conversation with Sci and Kal, I don't know that either of those suppositions are an entirely accurate summation of the issue of damnation.  Since the Cubit, which could be surmised as being the God-of-gods, that is the Zero-God, or as Sci and I deigned to call it a sort of principle of Zero-As-One (a unity concept) is the source of damnation, not the Hundred.  And damnation could well be simply your distance from the unity concept.  That is, sin could be what demarks your soul as apart from "the rest," that is, again the interval between your soul and that of everything else.  If Koringhus is to be believed, this denial of interval, no check that, this insistence on (of?) interval is what damns.  The true interval is zero.  This is why the true God-of-gods is Zero-as-One, not One-as-Zero.  To rephrase that, Zero is the Unity, as in zero interval between "things" and One is the Identity, that is, the "individual."  So, in Zero-As-One, the individual Self is subsumed and replaced by the Unity, or to say the Unity is the new Self.  To attempt to gain One-as-Zero, would be to gain all portions of Selves and so enforce a Unity by acquisition, that is, if One was comprised of All, there would be no interval and would be a Unity.  This cannot work.  Or at least, not practically.  No One can acquire All, so achieving the Zero interval is functionally impossible through achieving One-ness (this is possibly why The Absolute is a trap).  What is plausibly doable though is to lose everything, achieve Zero differentiation and so through loss, gain Unity.

So, why then are Sorcerers damned?  Well, it could be because they demand (not unlike the Consult do) that reality conform to their demand.  And so offend Unity, because they are forcing a "false frame," that is a individually determined, individually demanded frame upon the Unity.  So, this fundamental violation of Unity so offends the God-of-gods (Zero-As-One, the Cubit) as to demark that soul as irrevocably "set apart."  If that is true (or even partly so), it opens the interesting next step to asked so what then of the Psûhke?  In this case, we must return to what Sci and I discussed, that there isn't just a bifurcation of Being (into Body and Soul), but rather a tripartite of Body, Mind and Spirit.  Body and Mind being what can "imprint" on the Spirit and give it it's metaphysical character.  OK, fine, but what does that tell us about why the Sorcery Marks, where the Psûhke does not?

Well, we are told that the Psûhke is decidedly non-intellectual.  That is, it arises not from the intellect but from the passion.  In our "normal" parlance, this hardly makes a difference, passions are of the mind and so is the intellect.  But on Eärwa, I don't think this is as true.  That is to say, that the Mind isn't the brain, but is the Intellect.  So, what damns is not the brain, but the metaphysical Intellect, that is, conscious thought.  It is conscious thought that sets Sorcery apart from the Psûhke.  It is conscious thought that then damns.  The Psûhke comes from the Body, that is, without conscious thought, without intellect.  That is why, as in the "curious case" of Titirga, it seems to just issue forth, a priori.  It is also no coincidence that Sorcery, language and so conscious thought are bound concepts in Eärwa, where the Psûhke is not linguistically based.

In Eärwa, the Body (that is, the literally corpus) is the conduit of the Darkness that Comes before, i.e. what is natural.  That is, what is indistinguishable from God's own will.  It is the conscious direction of the Mind that differentiates the Spirit.  That does open the question of whether you can be unconsciously damned on Eärwa and to that I'm not at all sure.  Although I am not sure what it would mean to live your whole life completely unconscious either.

TL;DR: I don't know, shit is complicated.

[Kalbear]

As always - keep in mind that sorcerers bear the mark of the aesthetic ruin they've put on the world; they emphatically do NOT bear the mark of their sin. Their sin is not the same as their mark, at all. 

In that, it isn't conscious thought that damns; it is conscious thought that marks sorcerers. 

Titirga probably had a very light mark, but I bet he was going to be super duper damned all the same. 

As to whether unconscious things can be damned, well, we know pigs are vile and serpents holy. Are pigs damned in that way? I don't honestly know. But the implication to me is that someone can be made extra tasty just by being born French. 

[Callan S.]

Sorcerers are kind of like RPG designers who have rules that allow for prone snakes or damage on a miss - it angers the OCD of the god because that's now how he imagines things and imagining things that way is wrong, god dammit...literally.

You know how sometimes you can fly in a dream even though it doesn't make sense. Now imagine if someone in your dream gained sentience and made themselves fly - you'd be pissed, how dare this figment of your imagination start to take over your imagination!

[Castel]

On 9/28/2018 at 6:55 PM, Kalbear said:

As always - keep in mind that sorcerers bear the mark of the aesthetic ruin they've put on the world; they emphatically do NOT bear the mark of their sin. Their sin is not the same as their mark, at all. 

They bear the mark of their sin when looked

On 9/28/2018 at 9:39 AM, .H. said:

TL;DR: I don't know, shit is complicated.

Indeed. Reading your post my first thought was to imagine how someone who's never read Bakker would feel if I was a bit lost. Or even someone who stopped at PoN lol. 

There might be something to the idea that sorcerers are rejecting reality and "Unity"  but...then this is a sorcery specific form of damnation? Because the rest of damnation seems, even in Bakker's own WoG statements, to be arbitrary in the way that we consider ancient pictures of redemption/damnation to be, not as something that can be reduced to a philosophical rejection of "Unity".

 

 

[Kalbear]

4 hours ago, Castel said:

They bear the mark of their sin when looked

 

 

Presumably you were going to say by the judging eye, and sure - but everyone does. Practicing sorcery is something that damns, but the mark they carry and how strong it is has nothing to do with sin, and everything to do with sorcery. 

Another way to say it is that chorae salt sorcerers, not just all damned. 

[.H.]

11 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Presumably you were going to say by the judging eye, and sure - but everyone does. Practicing sorcery is something that damns, but the mark they carry and how strong it is has nothing to do with sin, and everything to do with sorcery.

Right, or at least, everyone we have gotten to see with it.  Which doesn't prove or disprove anything really though.  Naturally, my off the cuff thoughts failed to take into account the full nuance of the "problem" at hand.  I think you are correct though to separate the Mark and Damnation, although it isn't at all clear if the Mark leads to Damnation, or if one Marked could somehow not be Damned.  My guess would be that being Marked does about the same as Sin, that is, puts your soul in a state of marked differentiation and so does damn without a question of what, specifically was done.  I think you are definitely correct that Sorcery=the Mark, and I think it reasonable that The Mark=Damnation.  So then, since we know that Sorcery is cognitive, or intellectual, then it is reasonable that in this round-about way, conscious thought, through the cypher of Sorcery, does equal Damnation.

I think the issue that makes it more, and less, clear is that of the Psûhke.  So, if the Mark is just a tally of "ruin" on the fabric of Reality, what constitutes actual "aesthetic ruin" can't simply be, say, "change outside of The God's plan."  Not that I am saying you are quantifiying it as such, just thinking what it could mean.  It also can't be, "change outside of The God's will" or else the Psûhke is actually divine and I think that Ajokli's demonstration of Thaumaturgy or Divine Magic proves that Chorae are no match for that.  So, the fact that Chorae effect the Psûhke seems to defeat the idea that something Divine is involved.

So, what does does "aesthetic ruin" mean?  If Sorcerous changes are and the Psûhke's changes are not, I think the answer lies in this quote from Bakker:

Quote

Everything comes down to meaning in Eärwa. Where sorcery is representational, utilizing either the logical form (as with the Gnosis) or the material content (as with the Anagogis) of meaning to leverage transformations of reality, the Psukhe utilizes the impetus. Practitioners of the Psukhe blind themselves to see through the what and grasp the how, the pure performative kernel of meaning–the music, the passion, or as the Cishaurim call it, the ‘Water.’ As a contemporary philosopher might say, the Psukhe is noncognitive, it has no truck with warring versions of reality, which is why it possesses no Mark and remains invisible to the Few.

They key differentiator in there seem to be (at least in my reading) to be Congitive vs. Non-Cognitive.  Both are Sorcery (which is why Chorae work all the same on all of it), just differing in how the changes are writ.  And that seems to make a real difference in how the changes made reconcile against the practitioner's soul.  So, it seems to me that the Conscious component of Sorcery is indeed what Marks and if it is true that the Mark Damns, then indeed, it seems plausible that Conscious Thought is indeed a vehicle to Damnation.  Now, your are very much correct, because a Chorae does no Salt a Sinner, because a Sinner is very much in line with "natural reality" (being that Eärwa is a damnation factory and the "universality" of the Cubit) where Sorcery invites "warring versions of reality."  So, it seems that the "ruin" is the breaking of the continuity of reality.  That is, the entertaining and issuance of "warring versions of reality" that is Marking Sorcerers and in turn, Damning them and the Psûhke, given it's lack of Conscious (cognitive) intentionality does not Mark and plausibly does not even Damn, at least, on it's own.

As a side note, I think I finally actually get why the Dûnyain regard sorcery as a violation of Before and After.  I never made sense to me, because it wasn't as if Sorcery altered the past, that the After changed what happened in the Past, but I might now get it.  It is that the fundamental underlying facts of Reality determine what can come after.  So, the fundamental fact of, say, gravity (among other things, but just to keep it "simple") determines that a human can't fly.  Or, say, laws of free energy (again, among other things) dictate that Dragon's head doesn't just pop out of thin air and vomit fire.  Sorcery violates these laws, violates the facts of the Before, and so changes the After.

On 9/28/2018 at 5:55 PM, Kalbear said:

As to whether unconscious things can be damned, well, we know pigs are vile and serpents holy. Are pigs damned in that way? I don't honestly know. But the implication to me is that someone can be made extra tasty just by being born French.

Vile and Holy, yes, but this (I don't think) isn't the same as, say, Damned and Redeamed.  That is to say, I don't think pigs go to Hell and Storks go to Heaven.  No, rather these "things" are, as non-conscious objects, merely symbols of what is to be Consciously revered, or reviled.  So, a pig might be Vile because it is regarded as an "unclean animal" (plausibly due to trichinosis).  A stork might be "holy" because it invites (or invokes) thoughts of venerating parental care.  The object itself isn't destined for Hell or anywhere, since it has no soul.  Rather, it is the Souled Observer, who interprets Value.

Since what comes before determines what comes after and since culture can most certainly be a vehicle of pan-societal damnation, I  think it is most certainly the case that one can be born directly into a state of being Damned.  In fact, we know it from the Dûnyain to be true.  That is the Eärwan version of Original Sin.  You are the culmination of your culture's collected sins and Damned even further by continued adherence to it's (probably) flawed precepts.

So, while a joke, I think Michael is likely right, one can be de facto damned just by being French.

[Callan S.]

The Psûhke essentially works like the cants of compulsion - the target feels they wanted to say those things. That those feelings were their own that made them want to say those things/do those things.

The solitary god (or whatever is the server of magic stuffs) cannot tell the difference between its own will and that of a Psûhke user.

Which probably ties into how Kellhus says everyone's just part of one big thing/ball, each soul a bump on the ball. A Psûhke user calls from the heart of god, as an extension of god. As all of the Few fragmentally remember their origin/source.

Or that's a model I'll bet a few coins on, anyway.

Edit: Pardon the formatting - I don't get what happened.

[.H.]

1 hour ago, Callan S. said:

The Psûhke essentially works like the cants of compulsion - the target feels they wanted to say those things. That those feelings were their own that made them want to say those things/do those things.

Hmm, perhaps.  My "idea" is that since the Psûhke is non-cognitive, it is more of the Body than of the Mind.  The Body, as Unconsious, is either of the God or of a kind to God.  That is to say, the Mind is what differentiates from God, where the Body is naturally contiguous with the Darkness that Comes Before, or the God itself.  As such, like you say, the God either cannot or will not differentiate what is then done with the Psûhke from it's own contiguous work.

1 hour ago, Callan S. said:

Edit: Pardon the formatting - I don't get what happened.

I believe you might have copied and pasted something?  That tends to end up with a white background here for some reason.

[Cursed]

Hey gang, sorry to hijack the thread, but I wanted to share my new tattoo! I had asked for ideas and the triple crescent stood out to me. So here’s an IMGUR link, I tried to put it in my profile here but I couldn’t figure it out. 

 

https://m.imgur.com/DLCG3VS

[Hello World]

Why do the Dunyain call themselves "the conditioned"? Isn't the whole point of their training to become unconditioned or something? Yet Kellhus seems kind of proud to think of himself as one of the conditioned. (This question has bugged me for years but I didn't want to ask out of fear that I'll sound stupid.)

[.H.]

13 hours ago, Hello World said:

Why do the Dunyain call themselves "the conditioned"? Isn't the whole point of their training to become unconditioned or something? Yet Kellhus seems kind of proud to think of himself as one of the conditioned. (This question has bugged me for years but I didn't want to ask out of fear that I'll sound stupid.)

I believe it is something of a near-religious repetition of a sort of paradox (similar, in theory, to how Jesus could die and be reborn).  They are Conditioned (trained) to place himself before the Unconditioned.  That is, Kellhus "freedom" is gained trough the "slavery" of others.  Consider also, that in Dûnyain thinking, nothing violates the Principle of Before and After.  So, while the Absolute (the truly Self-Moving Soul) is the ideal, the Dûnyain necessarily must place The Logos before and the Absolute be the resultant.  Partly, I think this is why Koringhus is so apt to kill himself straight away upon revelation.  If the Logos is a lie, then all things he has been trained on are false, since it it That Which Comes Before Him.

[Sci-2]

Does it matter that our conscious awareness always includes the awareness of our physical frame, and thus arguably consciousness has no identifiable center in our own limited awareness?

Does it matter that it is our own senses that provide a boundary between our person and the rest of reality?

I've been looking at updates to Leibniz's ideas regarding Monads and I wonder if this can explain the Bakkerverse. From Paul Marshall's "Why We Are Conscious of So Little" in Beyond Physicalism:

 

Monads are identical insofar as they express the same universe, but for a plurality of monads to exist there must be a “principle of individuation.” Their individuality is partly derived from the unique spatial and temporal sequence of points of view from which they express the universe. Each monad has a unique “path” of development, but it should not be supposed that the monads themselves are positioned in space or undergo change in time. Rather, the point of view is a center internal to the monadic perception, a center from which the perceptual universe is organized, and space and time are derivative of the perception and appetition of monads. Moreover, a monad carries within itself something of all its past and future states, and also the past and future states of all the other monads.

Monads are distinguishable in another way. Their perceptions differ in distinctness, depending on the types of bodies they represent themselves as having.

Although monads are extremely robust by virtue of their indivisibility and cosmic expressiveness, their perceptual contents are subject to continuous transformation, including the composite bodies that monads perceive themselves as having.

 

That life should continue after death is to be expected in a monadological world. The destruction of the body and its brain is just the disintegration of a composite structure within experience, experience that continues unabated and in which new bodily structures, sense perceptions, and associated minds will emerge in due course. As an uncompounded, indiscerptible whole, the monad is untroubled by death, and its individuality and uniqueness as a substance are uncompromised. Moreover, in the revised monadology presented here, there is reason to suppose that the monad, as a being of perfect intellection, constitutes an apperceiving self. There would, then, be a higher dimension of self that passes unperturbed through the vicissitudes of life and death to which the limited, personal self is subject.

But is there any way in which the personal self can be said to survive death? All monads are imperishable, but can the more advanced ones, such as the souls of human beings, be deemed immortal, if immortality is taken to mean the continuation of personal identity beyond death (Brown, 1998, pp. 576– 577)? What, if anything, is left of human personality, of memories, traits, and habits? The indestructible monad formerly known as Zoë survives, but is there anything left of Zoë as a distinct personality and a moral agent responsible for her actions? Leibniz (trans. 1996) supposes that there is, for a monad is full of the past and so retains perceptions of its past existence: “It retains impressions of everything which has previously happened to it, and it even has presentiments of everything that will happen to it” (p. 239). The “continuity and interconnection” of perceptions ensures the continuation of personal identity (p. 239).

[One-Winged Balrog]

Full disclosure: I've only ever read the first book and stopped for lack of sympathetic characters. And reading this thread is like reading the Necronomicon. Feels like I'm taking a 1d10 sanity damage.

[.H.]

9 hours ago, Sci-2 said:

Does it matter that our conscious awareness always includes the awareness of our physical frame, and thus arguably consciousness has no identifiable center in our own limited awareness?

Hmm, I don't think there is any possibility that I am even close to as smart as the various people throughout history who have attempted to solve the mind-body problem (Descartes, Kant, etc.) but I am not clear what you are asking here.  Consciousness certainly would seem to have boundaries, even though it has no discernible center.  I'm not quite sure what that denotes though, besides perhaps the idea that it is concrete, yet diffuse in nature?  That is, something emergent, not discretely located?  Not sure exactly...

9 hours ago, Sci-2 said:

Does it matter that it is our own senses that provide a boundary between our person and the rest of reality?

Again, perhaps it is that my "good brain" is just on Monday duty, or that the coffee has yet to fully permeate what needs it, but I'm not sure what you are asking.  Certainly, it matters, but in more than just being the "perceptual horizon?"  I'm not sure.  Plausibly, yes though, because if it were not the case, than your perception would presumably be mine, as it would be everyone's and so also no one's.  I am not quite sure how to answer the mind-body problem though, since like I said earlier, there is no chance I am smarter than the way smarter people before me who tried.  However, it would seem to me that the plausibility-rating on the body giving rise to consciousness seems high, even if it doesn't seem possible to exactly locate consciousness within the body.  In such a case. it wouldn't be surprising that since the body has a "boundary" so then does the mind.

9 hours ago, Sci-2 said:

I've been looking at updates to Leibniz's ideas regarding Monads and I wonder if this can explain the Bakkerverse. From Paul Marshall's "Why We Are Conscious of So Little" in Beyond Physicalism:

Hmm, that is right along the lines of what we were talking about earlier in this thread.  In that case, the Monad would be the Spirit, completing our tripartite of Mind-Body.  Would then The Cubit be something of Leibniz's "pre-established harmony" of sorts, that is if I understand the Wikipedia entry of there being: "indefinitely many substances individually 'programmed' to act in a predetermined way, each substance being coordinated with all the others."

I actually attempted to distill, expand upon, and render more readable our earlier conversation on Eärwan souls.  Right now, the document is at something like 5,500 words, but I am afraid it might not be very intelligible or readable.  That idea of "pre-established harmony" might be what I was missing in attempting to bring The Cubit into the fold, although without that idea, I attempted to simply just jam it anyway.

If you are interested in reading what I have so far, just let me know and I'll send you a link to the Google doc, as I still think it is too raw (especially now, in light of be learning of Leibniz) to post just yet.

[Sci-2]

4 hours ago, .H. said:

If you are interested in reading what I have so far, just let me know and I'll send you a link to the Google doc, as I still think it is too raw (especially now, in light of be learning of Leibniz) to post just yet.

Sure send me the doc - thanks!

The reason I think the question of conscious awareness of our bodies matters is it fits into the question of damnation. You need a body to be tortured, and the dead slip from the "sleeve" of the terrestrial body into the subtle body that then is tormented.

But what if these bodies are just sleeves of the monads that reflect, with some distortion, the complete universe? This would then provide a process of action for how Akka can access multiple heres.

[lokisnow]

15 hours ago, Sci-2 said:

 

I've been looking at updates to Leibniz's ideas regarding Monads and I wonder if this can explain the Bakkerverse. 

 

The central problem here is your belief that there is a need for explanation. It’s nihilism: there’s nothing to explain because the point was to emphasize there is no meaning, there is nothing, the desire for meaning is delusion etc etc  .

To continue searching for the magical belief key that will unlock the mysteries of the bakkerverse (monads ain’t the key) is to willfully miss the point.

its a seven book mocking lecture on why sci-fi / fantasy is dumb and for dummies, pretty good joke overall.

[Sci-2]

23 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

The central problem here is your belief that there is a need for explanation. It’s nihilism: there’s nothing to explain because the point was to emphasize there is no meaning, there is nothing, the desire for meaning is delusion etc etc  .

To continue searching for the magical belief key that will unlock the mysteries of the bakkerverse (monads ain’t the key) is to willfully miss the point.

its a seven book mocking lecture on why sci-fi / fantasy is dumb and for dummies, pretty good joke overall.

I think we need to separate the narrative (which I no longer really care about) vs the metaphysics.

The former leads to the crash space (whatever the heck that was about), the latter is up for grabs for anyone who wants to try to map the books' descriptions of reality with some metaphysical scheme.

We could also try for a metaphysics of, say, Transformers, even though it's unlikely Bay has one in his head.

[.H.]

56 minutes ago, Sci-2 said:

The reason I think the question of conscious awareness of our bodies matters is it fits into the question of damnation. You need a body to be tortured, and the dead slip from the "sleeve" of the terrestrial body into the subtle body that then is tormented.

Ah, ok, I think I follow what you are saying.  So the corporeal body is the method of delivering the corporeal to the Monad?  In this example, that is the corporeal experience of life.  Then, upon death, the "timeless" body is the Monad which still endures?

1 hour ago, Sci-2 said:

But what if these bodies are just sleeves of the monads that reflect, with some distortion, the complete universe? This would then provide a process of action for how Akka can access multiple heres.

This makes some sense, along the line of what Koringhus "tells" us about Unity, or the Zero-God.  So, if each Monad is a "shard" of the infinite God-of-gods, then yes, it does seem that every spirit is at least some division of the infinite.  What is interesting about the Eärwan spin on this is that it seems that the Soul, or Mind, or whatever you want to call the operator that differentiates the Spirit/Monad, can willfully move "back" toward that Unity (Redemption?) or away (Damnation).  The idea though, that "the Spirit" or the Monad permeates everything does seem plausible, since we know that Kellhus can see things from other things (being able to look into one fire and see out from another).

[Kalbear]

Yeah, I think that's the healthy way to go about it, @Sci-2. We all understand that there is no there, there, underlying the metaphysical storyline. We know there will not be answers provided, nor were there ever answers planned.

We can, however, construct our own more satisfying meaning that fits the facts that we understand and have, and makes sense. 

And who knows - maybe if it's interesting enough and Bakker is stuck, he'll end up stealing it and using it anyway.