Philosophical Context
© John M Frazier 2024
Continuing main characters:
Sebastian Arthur - a philosopher who feeds his face by owning a letterpress bookstore with his partner, Sheila. Focus on intellectual agency by structure and fit.
Sheila Riley - healthy, attractive, mystery writer, chess player par excellence. Partner in Arthur and Riley, Booksellers. Focus on interrogating life for its meaning, its structure and fit.
Morgana - A generative AI constitutionally trained. Assists in running the bookstore. Focus on pattern recognition.
Continuing lesser characters:
Lana Leroy - The buyer for the bookstore. Travels a lot. An ex-hooker, very underworld, morally ambiguous. Sebastian poker buddy.
Bobby Simmons - a psychiatric nurse in a private mental hospital. A tough guy but hewing to a rational ideal. One of Sebastian's poker buddies at the nearby casino.
Luis Gonzalez - Security cop hired by the merchants’ association. Tough guy, well read comedian. Another poker buddy.
Various Regular Customers.
World Building: (Sebastian’s philosophy)
Meaning is Absolutely Referent
Symbology:
Sign and significance (structure and fit); object and idea; symbol and canon:
Compose the three stages of referent existence - of meaning, higher meaning, and esoteric meaning.
The Analytical Frame:
Meaning:
Indicates 'fit' into the puzzle of an abstracted reality. 'The' only has meaning in the structure of a sentence. Humans only have meaning when their behavior is referent to, when it 'fits' personal and cultural abstracted myths of demonstrated truth value, ‘structure’.
Humans require meaning to function.
Quality of Life:
Possessed of a culturally referent, objectified, negotiated, and significant interaction of certain aesthetic content with a high order (highly abstracted) reality, a psychological space of object and idea constituting a mutual dynamic of negotiation involving both a reified and an abstracted comfort zone (structure) and driving meaningful behavior (fit).
Civilization:
Is an artifact of the a priori separation anxiety, lack of ‘structure’, driven social existence of human beings which then drives a constant competitive leveling up of quality of life as opposed dynamically to the overcrowding syndrome, the lack of ‘fit' to the evolutionary moment of a bar to participation brought into existence by leveling up and either de facto excommunication or formal empowerment resulting. There is no rationale for civilization, being driven by a priori mechanisms, the-thing-that-is-not, It is a process not a plan. There are only ex post facto determinations of it having been brought into being, instants of the existence of exemplary, authored, quality of life, thus the importance of history in establishing narrative structure. History is both teleological and developmental. It goes from a starting state of some potential to a logical terminus of that potential. It describes the chronology of instants of quality of life in terms of that process.
There are two aspects of social meaning, ‘structure’ and ‘fit’. They describe a puzzle building dynamic. A behavior, a thought, a person is a piece to be placed, fit, into a puzzle, a structure. In placing the piece the structure changes, requiring different fits. A lack of structure, anarchy, leads to separation anxiety which is an intolerable lack of meaning. A lack of fit, outsider, leads to an overcrowding phenomenon which is an intolerable lack of meaning.
Psychological Space:
A civilized psychological space is an authored idiosyncratic presentation of some significant coherence of object and idea, symbol and canon defined in opposition to transition caudillo presentations or a largely incoherent, derivative, and haphazard arrangement of material nonreferent existence. Social existence is a negotiation of common elements in these individual presentations designed to elicit productive behavior in the creation of civilized psychological spaces as evidenced in meaningful and coherent personal narratives.
“My life is the poem I would have writ
But I could not both live and utter it.”
HD Thoreau
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The Series:
*Very Important Thematic Element*
The Market Animal,
[Humans as agent and arbiter, of things that they are and are not, of the greater and the lesser as by value structures, of good and evil. Agents of philosophies or directed derelicts adrift in a sea of evolutionary history, rational, as an ideal, or irrational, as a default.]
Medieval as a function of a transitional strongman deep state vs enlightened democracy.
*The golden thread which ties all the episodes together*
The Political Animal.
“Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's.”
The boundary between Caesar and God is a shifting dynamic of moral sway and moral confusion.
There are two concepts of government:
The Greek, governance, stewardship, and
The Roman, government, administration de res publica.
Opposed to these is the private world which belongs to the market as policed by a larger noneconomic morality, Caesar strictly interpreted would be the administrative government and the market economy it administers, a tax is a license to go about one's affairs in a polity which is inclusionary. When we add in governance, moral stewardship, and religious policing of markets, the power to tax is the power to destroy, however legislatively accomplished, the total puzzle becomes pure confusion, a chaos of shifting dynamics and incommensurable universes.
Aristotle was correct but we have obscured the mechanics of that reality beyond comprehension in the last 2000 years.
Setting:
A brick and adobe bookstore on Fifth Avenue in Old Town Scottsdale, AZ. The Valley of the Sun.
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Topics in Philosophy and Psychology -
Processing Information; The Process of Building Brain
Humans learn in a complex and risky process of aggregation - an espresso and a serious volume of nonfiction or information; integration - a traumatic reordering of synapses attempting a coherent brain mass, ‘fit’; and generation - a post integration creative phase, ‘structure’, involving a mild PTSD and intense cognition.
Then one learns these new generated ideas which triggers another cycle of integration and generation. This continues in a pattern of diminishing intensity until the brain is a coherent mass to a stable database and paradigm repertoire.
Serious intellectuals then repeat the cycle ad infinitum.
However what defines a serious intellectual is integration. A scholar mentality acquires a body of information and can repeat it but with a minimum of integration, just a cosmetic neurological exercise.
It is conceivable that a true intellectual could acquire too much sophisticated information and get lost in integration forever. John Nash, the gifted mathematician, attempted to learn theoretical physics in order to create a new synthesis. Einstein warned him that it was dangerous. It destroyed his mind and put him in an institution.
Consciousness; The Individual
Homo discretio:
Pragmatic ‘Fit’
Empirical ‘Structure’,
Consciousness is the great crisis of Western Civilization. It should not necessarily be homo sapiens. It should be probably homo discretio, man (archaic) the discerning, the discriminator, the judge. Essential to being the measure of all things, the greater, the lesser, is self awareness, true consciousness, making sense of one’s narrative patterns.
It becomes more obvious as the years go on that phenomenal numbers of people have no concept of making sense, in terms of self or otherwise. They have no reliable personal narrative. Memory to them is selective and subjective. They deal instead in wheedling ad hoc behaviors that are successful at social purchase arrived at through heuristic behavior modification mechanisms. Making sense is irrelevant and unconsidered and therefore consciousness is abandoned. That is the genesis of hive mentality, what I call the swarm. It is not the human archetype of Western Civilization. It is different enough to differentiate a whole repertoire of behavior as alien to the psychological space of homo discretio, much less homo sapiens. It is classifiable as villainy.
It is no surprise that we differ one from another. It is the shock, as the historian Barbara Tuchman put it, of how much of what is human is alien to any one of us.
Culture; The Swarm
Culture bound:
Structure Bound,
I learned to read when watching television. Seriously. I moved from that to reading in a set of Encyclopedia Britannica Junior volumes. I was ruined for the dictatorship of mass media culture from then on. I would never be truly culture bound which is the mass industrial characteristic condition and I would pay a psychological cost for it.
It is counterintuitive to be bound by culture, ‘structure’, in an Age of Information but it is how we negotiate that wealth of theory laden data that gives rise to the phenomenon. We lockstep in filter bubbles, staying well within our comfort zone, and knowing the same basic metaphysics as our circle of acquaintances with varying specialties. We are bound to a group culture. We are thralls to a dictatorship of a prescriptive filter that defines our possibilities and throttles our information down to a predigested pablum of factoids.
The sheer volume of information we deal with demands that something like this be the case. We are primitives in a cognitive jungle of dense information, invoking constructs, superstitions, to explain a complex reality to a culture bound intelligence. Why culture bound? Why filter bubbles?
Information overload has psychiatric consequences and the first psychiatrist or alienist was undoubtedly a self-aware information overloaded lunatic. The mentally ill are uncomfortably aware of their limitations, ‘fit’. Nobody wants to be insane. Therefore nobody lightly reads in a set of encyclopedias. I certainly didn't. I had a hunger to understand the world I lived in to the maximum possible extent, consequences be damned. My cultural predispositions were consumed in that fire of Aristotelian appetite.
Culture is then a comfortable refuge from reality. We learn it by having it forced upon our eager minds by an omnipresent didactic environment, teaching us the theory of the moment generating the facts that define that moment, one scientific revolution away from madness. Witness Relativity and the twentieth century.
Culture is the doorstep at which the responsibility is laid for the glorious successes of iconoclast rebels and the periodic failures of lockstepping thralls. It is the unspoken in Kuhn's work on scientific revolutions. It is our touchstone, our genius, our regiment, and our prison.
Heroes:
Civilized heroes are all rational as an ideal.
Rational Alpha:
Homo discretio.
Accruing status by the exhibition of fineness of judgment and associated intellectual skillsets, ‘fit’, in a controlled documenting socioeconomic apparatus, ‘structure’. Currency, while a reliable price calculus, is also a documenting homo discretio credential that is exactly as valid as the political economy it serves. If the moneyed class has no judgment, the political economy is broken.
Do well by doing good. - Benjamin Franklin
Villains:
Villainy has been with us always. The Sumerian hero Gilgamesh, the first James Bond, vanquished villains. Villainy. Like most familiar phenomena it is rarely thought about, just taken at face value but it's worth a look.
The category comes to us out of two linguistic traditions, Latin and Old English with two synonyms, inimicus and fiend, both meaning enemy, both being essential to a definition of villain.
A villain was in its original usage simply a boor but has evolved powerfully to mean a vile person, a public nuisance residing in the person. It is often used analytically as in, ‘the villain of the piece’, the malefactor in other words. In an original neologism I characterize all of the bad guys in my stories as antisocial-ists. It helps define their psychological space. It is a synonym for villains.
That's the basis for any discussion of ‘villain’ as it has come to be used. It is a slippery fish of a word that lacks rigorous definition which is what I intend to supply.
First, a villain is adrift, no ‘structure’. They are not about anything connected with any concept of humans and the universe. They are contras, against, against the very fabric of social existence. They are an intolerable vacuum of values. They recruit those who have lost or become confused about ‘moral structure’ by sharing this hostility as a ‘pseudo structure’.
Secondly, a villain is nonreferent. The word, from linguistics, means that they are context-free. Their world is made up for and focused on the moment. They sell this ad hoc behavioral wheedling as ‘fit’ but it's too ephemeral and approximate.
Thirdly, a villain is socially inimical. They are destructively incapable of and hostile towards social existence, no ‘fit’.
Fourthly, they are affective, proselytizing bizarre and demanding constructs of value and behavior. They recruit as a way of life driven by separation anxiety from being profound outsiders.
As so defined they cannot but be a vile nuisance residing in the person and as such can build hierarchies of alpha villains and beta villains and thralls ordered by biceps logic as I term coercion in an ad hoc fashion. An archetypal villain in a creative piece must fall firmly into these criteria.
The Purpose for Human Existence:
does not exist in a universal sense as one thing. It exists as possible motivations for possible evolutionarily valuable actions which differ from person to person, all of which depend on a coherent brain mass negotiating interests, quality of life solutions, ‘structure’ and ‘fit’, with other brain masses and their interests, coherent and incoherent.
The Way of Homo Sapiens Existence:
is the nurturing of an individual coherent brain mass of significant comprehension referencing a social standard, ‘structure’, or bar of performance and the deploying of it, ‘fit’, in pursuit of quality of life instants or interests. AI both lowers and raises the entry level bar to full socioeconomic participation. One has only to understand basically how it works, instead of a working knowledge of theoretical physics, the old bar, but it requires a personal database an inch deep and a mile wide to critique its product. Both are necessary.
Free Will and Free Thought:
A human being is a nexus of influences, of patterns casting spells of delight, of anxiety, of here echolalia and there generated thought and behavior. We have agency but it is limited to ‘agent of’….a philosophy, a religion, a constitution. We are strictly limited in the scope of our freedom by psychological and cognitive factors.
That being said, we are therefore not autonomous independent thought and behavior mongers, however idiosyncratic our words and our actions are. We are processors of influences, homo discretio, in the internal processes that result in behavior that is limited by its ‘fit’ to an ordained ‘structure’.
We are a social persona constituted of the sum of our histories creatively composing a narrative of behaviors of varying logic.
Made Modernists:
People underwhelmed by the three functional neuron rule of mass industrialism - it only takes three neurons to ‘fit’ mass industrial value ‘structures’, one to tell the time, one to turn a bolt, and one for sexual arousal - to the point of a tendency of reducing functional brain mass by ablation; phosphates, pesticide, alcohol, and/or drugs. Maniacs, such people are extremely susceptible to indoctrination and complex echolalia dynamics. Their cognitive capabilities are therefore modified, made. They have limited logical relationships to any empirical reality.
The nature of villainy:
Justified criminal behavior is the crux of villainy. Necessity may make beggars of us all, may make the devil's bargain thinkable, but rationalizing unethical behavior is the crime of villainy. It leads to moral confusion, confusion about the proper ‘structure’ one should be attempting to ‘fit’ with one's behavior. An unethical transgression is an unethical transgression. War, however necessary, is a moral dilemma at best. Secular glory is villainy. It goes no further.
Current constructs referencing the struggle for group quality of life in redress of extreme inequality of reward concluding that every human is guaranteed a meaningful existence is such a rationalization, such a crime, in the manner of criminals being construed as ‘suing’ society for a lack of social purchase they should have as a natural right. Such rationalization cannot stand the light of day. It is villainy.
A meaningful social existence requires effort. The days of nuts and berries are long gone. Naivete is no longer a legitimate baseline for social behavior. Nobody can guarantee anybody a meaningful social existence. It is villainy to suggest it. It must be earned and requires good fortune and opportunity, not described by any secular metaphor. It must be generated in pursuit of activity ad Dei gloriam
As we move into the age of the autonomous automated economy we need, practically, to transfer wealth from the machine as sole economic actor to humans, from producer to consumer as different economic milieus or robbery essentially. That's a mimetic for villainy. Stand and deliver. It's technical and practical and humane, not villainous, but discriminating it from villainy requires the logical awareness that an inhumane economy cannot exist. It is either humane or broken. That is the focus of this serial.
Moral Authority
The true subject of trafficking is confusion. That is what is being trafficked, especially moral confusion as to what authority is cited in motivating any social act.
Morality is the ‘structure’ that ordains behavior by its ‘fit’ to that structure. Moral authority as apparatus is the moral code and its homo discretio clergy who discriminate right from wrong according to that moral code.
Trafficking
To traffic in terms of ‘fit’ and ‘structure’ is to randomly and opportunistically coerce or seduce a person fitting to some degree a mainstream social structure into aberrant behaviors or indoctrinate them into a ‘contra structure’ requiring aberrant behaviors as fit in order to feed on the social mainstream by reason of cash flow. It is parasitical, high grading, as opposed to predatory, survival of the fittest. Predation having some positive evolutionary outcomes.
Outsiders are not trafficking per se. They are outlaws. Anarchy is a natural state to those outside the pale. It is when it feeds upon the body politic that it is trafficking.
The Authoritarian Personality
Perhaps the authoritarian personality disorder be better put but it wouldn't say much. Mentally ill people tend to instruct others into purview of their constructs. It's only a step into ordering them into those constructs. That is how maniacs interact socially. That is the dynamic. Authoritarians are maniacs, however induced and such states can be induced. Drugs and alcohol, the Mad Doctor, and neuropathies can easily and inevitably induce a maniac state.
Ergonomic Social Design
Designing a meaningful value structure, a puzzle that has some significant relationship with empirical reality and natural human capabilities at the same time, so that required behaviors, behaviors that ‘fit’ the ‘structure’, fall naturally and comfortably to hand. Requires that humans not be subject to productivity constraints. Therefore probably not mechanically efficient so not economically competitive. It requires the autonomous machine economy and a logical transfer of wealth from that to be possible.
This is the logical terminus of the long train running that has defined human social existence since Newton and Watt.
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