[mos6507]

Not splashing in the grease yourself...

I want to complement you on your post.

However, I'd like to make an observation, and it's not the first time I've done this, about analogies.

The one theme that is blaringly obvious in the doomer/environmental phenomenon is the degree to which we lean on analogies, and we don't even really think about why it is that we do this.

My feeling is that we are really not that smart, not that good at seeing the complexity of reality directly. We have to resort to framing big concepts in a way that is accessible to us. So we reach for "frog in the pot", "Shock to trance", "Chicken little", "Boy who cried wolf", "blind men and the elephant", ''Ant and the grasshopper", "Mad Max , "Soylent Green", "Darmok at Tanagra" (Well, maybe not that one, isn't that an allegory?). It's also why we seek to simply things through religion and dualist narratives of heroes and villans.



I catch myself doing this all the time. While I'm trying to explain things to my sister or talk "doom" shop with other doomers, I start circling around the issue and rattle off analogy after analogy, film reference after film reference. It's like I have such doubts that anybody can just understand the concepts at face value that I have to knee-jerk transpose them in one easier to digest analogy after another, bludgeoning people over the head with them.

I'm also reminded of Carl Sagan's Cosmos when he tries to explain how the universe is like a balloon that is expanding. So much of our image of the world can only be imagined through some symbol or analogy because our senses, our frame of reference, is really incapable of grasping it. We are hardwired to eat, drink, screw, and shit and anything beyond that is kind of underevolved, IMHO.

That's what I think underlines a key failing of us as a species, a lack of the ability to hold the big picture in our conscious without compressing it down into some childish analogy.

[vision-master]

I'm also reminded of Carl Sagan's Cosmos when he tries to explain how the universe is like a balloon that is expanding.

Who's blowing up the ballon?


The big bang is nothing more than myth.

[mos6507]

"The big bang is nothing more than myth."

Do you ever come down on the side of reason? Your posts are so predictable I could write them myself. The earth is flat. Nibiru is on the way, drugs open the doors of perception, yada yada. Claim whatever you want but you're dreaming if you think you're winning any converts.

[Ludi]

This seems relevant :

More Gaming Can Save the World! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE1DuBes ... mbedded#at

[SeaGypsy]

I think this sums up the core quandary of your creative mission.
It appears you have given all this a lot of thought. I think it's one of those human paradoxes.
Art is both informative and entertaining if it's successfull.
The ability to convey tragedy in a way which brings the audience to tears of joy, blended with agony, the holy grail of artistic endeavour.

[Pops]

I'm guessing because we don't have an starkly real example of a global civilization running out of a limiting factor.

All the Easter Islands, Roman Empires and Texas oilfields don't fit because everyone went somewhere else and this time we got nowhere to go.

[vision-master]

"The big bang is nothing more than myth."

Do you ever come down on the side of reason? Your posts are so predictable I could write them myself. The earth is flat. Nibiru is on the way, drugs open the doors of perception, yada yada. Claim whatever you want but you're dreaming if you think you're winning any converts.

So,,,,,,, who's blowing up the ballon?

[Outcast_Searcher]

My feeling is that we are really not that smart, not that good at seeing the complexity of reality directly. We have to resort to framing big concepts in a way that is accessible to us. So we reach for. . .

That's what I think underlines a key failing of us as a species, a lack of the ability to hold the big picture in our conscious without compressing it down into some childish analogy.

Clearly as a species we're idiots, or our world wouldn't be in a constant turmoil with clear signs lately of sharp (self-inflicted) deterioration.

I think one reason we rely on analogy, metaphor, etc. though is to explain things to folks who are not as familiar with a given topic as we may be.

This is NOT a slight on someone's individual intelligence or priorities, but an acknowledgement of part of the human condition. We only have so much time, energy, etc. to devote to things. We ALL tend to be highly specialized in a given field or skill in order to compete. (When I was a teenager my dad quoted the idea that specialists are people who know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing. I thought this was brilliant, but I still see no way to fix it due to societal/economic pressures).

I also think it's unreasonable to ASSUME that using an analogy means the person doing it is "dumb". Someone who clearly has mastery of a concept SHOULD be able to explain its ESSENCE in simple terms, IMO. (Simple language, simple image, simple story, etc) Watching CSPAN, where most high level managers, congressfolk, senators, and our orator in chief blather on in specious generalities because of a seeming inability to articulate MEANINGFUL specific concepts -- is an excellent illustration of this, IMO. (They ARE good though at the nearly universal line, "It's not my fault!)

So I applaud you for the thought, and bringing it up. Such philosophy is important. I just happen to think your assumption isn't correct in some (and perhaps many) cases.

Cheers.

[Puchica]

my concern regarding the Big Bang discussion is that both sides seem to be arguing from the wrong frame of reference. I recall before the 1968 discovery of the photon evidence that confirmed the validity of the big bang theory that the Steady State universe model was preferred by Fred Hoyle and other physicists. Certainly my father preferred it because he thought the Big Bang was just religion dressed up in phony science. (a beginning implies a Beginner) He used to predict that the Steady State would eventually be proven, would have to be proven, else, they'd just have to hand it over to the religionists and shut up. Recall, too, that the very name 'Big Bang' was a derisive term scientists tagged the theory with, to show how it smacked of creationism. My dear dad died just months before the Big Bang was proven; it would have killed him. He was militantly pro Hoyle and anti religion. I'm just revisiting science history here to show you young folks that it seems the religious folks attacking the Big Bang and the anti creation folks defending it seem to be arguing the wrong side of the coin. If not, how odd how things change with time and interpretation.

[mos6507]

The reason the big bang topic drift is annoying is because V-M is not here to remind us that scientific theories are sometimes refined or replaced with others. He's here to tell us that there is some mystical explanation for everything instead. That's not moving forward. That's regressing to infantilism.

The closer we come to explaining everything, the more human need we have for mystery and the supernatural, else the world appears too mundane and predictable. I think that's what drove Carl Sagan to write the Demon Haunted World (a book I admit I haven't read, but I get the gist of).

The more secular we become, the more the drive we have to cling to something, anything, that is beyond the normal routine, which of course, extends to stuff like "Building 7", if you catch my drift.

Life in the cubicle is just too boring. We're all dreamers descended from cave painters.



The trick is to be able to dream without actually believing your dreams are real.

[Ludi]

The trick is to be able to dream without actually believing your dreams are real.

Worth quoting.

[Arthur75]

Mos, there is a text from Mallarmé (one of my prefered writer but almost untranslatable) called "the devil of analogie" (le démon de l'analogie), clear that the dictionnary and the flat line is the only thing in the end, fueling anything though.

LE DÉMON DE L'ANALOGIE
Des paroles inconnues chantèrent-elles sur vos lèvres, lambeaux maudits d'une phrase absurde ?

Je sortis de mon appartement avec la sensation propre d'une aile glissant sur les cordes d'un instrument, traînante et légère, que remplaça une voix prononçant les mots sur un ton descendant: « La Pénultième est morte », de façon que

La Pénultième
finit le vers et
Est morte
se détacha de la suspension fatidique plus inutilement en le vide de signification. Je fis des pas dans la rue et reconnus en le son nul la corde tendue de l'instrument de musique, qui était oublié et que le glorieux Souvenir certainement venait de visiter de son aile ou d'une palme et, le doigt sur l'artifice du mystère, je souris et implorai de vœux intellectuels une spéculation différente. La phrase revint, virtuelle, dégagée d'une chute antérieure de plume ou de rameau, dorénavant à travers la voix entendue, jusqu'à ce qu'enfin elle s'articula seule, vivant de sa personnalité. J'allais (ne me contentant plus d'une perception) la lisant en fin de vers, et, une fois, comme un essai, l'adaptant à mon parler; bientôt la prononçant avec un silence après « Pénultième » dans lequel le trouvais une pénible jouissance : « La Pénultième » puis la corde de l'instrument, si tendue en l'oubli sur le son nul, cassait sans doute et j'ajoutais en manière d'oraison : « Est morte. » Je ne discontinuai pas de tenter un retour à des pensées de prédilection, alléguant, pour me calmer, que, certes, pénultième est le terme du lexique qui signifie l'avant-dernière syllabe des vocables, et son apparition, le reste mal abjuré d'un labeur de linguistique par lequel quotidiennement sanglote de s'interrompre ma noble faculté poétique la sonorité même et l'air de mensonge assumé par la hâte de la facile affirmation étaient une cause de tourment. Harcelé, je résolus de laisser les mots de triste nature errer eux-mêmes sur ma bouche, et j'allai murmurant avec l'intonation susceptible de condoléance : « La Pénultième est morte, elle est morte, bien morte, la désespérée Pénultième » , croyant par là satisfaire l'inquiétude, et non sans le secret espoir de l'ensevelir en l'amplification de la psalmodie quand, effroi! - d'une magie aisément déductible et nerveuse - je sentis que j'avais, ma main réfléchie par un vitrage de boutique y faisant le geste d'une caresse qui descend sur quelque chose, la voix même (la première, qui indubitablement avait été l'unique).

Mais où s'installe l'irrécusable intervention du surnaturel, et le commencement de l'angoisse sous laquelle agonise mon esprit naguère seigneur c'est quand je vis, levant les yeux, dans la rue des antiquaires instinctivement suivie, que j'étais devant la boutique d'un luthier vendeur de vieux instruments pendus au mur, et, à terre, des palmes jaunes et les ailes enfouies en l'ombre, d'oiseaux anciens. Je m'enfuis, bizarre, personne condamnée à porter probablement le deuil de l'inexplicable Pénultième.

[Ludi]

clear that the dictionnary and the flat line is the only thing in the end, fueling anything though.

I'm not able to glean much meaning from that phrase, can you restate it? Thanks.

[Arthur75]

I'm not able to glean much meaning from that phrase, can you restate it? Thanks.

Something to do with the Virgin Maria or the Vierge Marie (la petite morte derrière les rosiers, Ophélie !), (or the obscure female in Lao tseu) but also with the need to consume symbols for the thing to get settled, there is a true need for identified sources of symbols these days, like a centralism from the bottom, or assumed true artic flowers (like in Barbare from Arthur Rimbaud), except that now they exist like for bar codes for instance, which doesn't mean that they still do not exist in the sense of Rimbaud (that is for the celestial Jerusalem or something)

[vision-master]

He was militantly pro Hoyle and anti religion. I'm just revisiting science history here to show you young folks that it seems the religious folks attacking the Big Bang and the anti creation folks defending it seem to be arguing the wrong side of the coin. If not, how odd how things change with time and interpretation.

The creation/ CHRISTIANS (linear time) folks are the ones that believe in the Big Bang.

Looks like GOD is the one blowing up the Ballon, eh.

The Big Bang is nothing more than a Big Bust!

What a bunch of sheeple.......

Popes have had considerably less to say recently on the subject of the origin of the universe than they have on the subject of human origins. In 1951, interestingly, Pius XII (who so grudgingly acknowledged the possibility of evolution) celebrated news from the world of science that the universe might have been created in a Big Bang. (The term, first employed by astronomer Fred Hoyle was meant to be derisive, but it stuck.) In a speech before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences he offered an enthusiastic endorsement of the theory: "…it would seem that present-day science, with one sweep back across the centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness to the august instant of the primordial Fiat Lux [Let there be Light], when along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation, and the elements split and churned and formed into millions of galaxies." (ME, 254-55)

But the Pope didn’t stop there. He went on to express the surprising conclusion that the Big Bang proved the existence of God:

Thus, with that concreteness which is characteristic of physical proofs, [science] has confirmed the contingency of the universe and also the well-founded deduction as to the epoch when the world came forth from the hands of the Creator. Hence, creation took place. We say: therefore, there is a Creator. Therefore, God exists!

The man who laid the groundwork for the Big Bang theory, astronomer Edwin Hubble, received a letter from a friend asking whether the Pope’s announcement might qualify him for “sainthood.” The friend enthused that until he read the statement in the morning’s paper, “I had not dreamed that the Pope would have to fall back on you for proof of the existence of God.” (ME, 255)

http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/project ... nview.html

[vision-master]

The reason the big bang topic drift is annoying is because V-M is not here to remind us that scientific theories are sometimes refined or replaced with others. He's here to tell us that there is some mystical explanation for everything instead. That's not moving forward. That's regressing to infantilism.

Tell ye I now of the mystery of cycles that move in movements that are strange to the finite, for infinite are they beyond knowledge of man. Know ye that there are nine of the cycles; aye, nine above and fourteen below, moving in harmony to the place of joining that shall exist in the future of time. Know ye that the Lords of the Cycles are units of consciousness sent from the others to unify This with the All. Highest are They of the consciousness of all the Cycles, working in harmony with the Law. Know They that in time all will be perfected, having none above and none below, but all One in a perfected Infinity, a harmony of all in the Oneness of All.


The Key to Above and Below

[Ludi]

Thanks, Arthur, it's still over my head.

I got completely caught up in symbols and symbolism at one point, where everything had to do with one particular obsession I was having at the time. Other people have this, or seem to, where everything is connected to everything else through symbols. An old poster here, Raphael, used to exhibit this a lot. It's a weird phenomenon, but I'm not convinced it's usually very helpful or useful in "real life" aka stark reality.

[vision-master]

Then why all the corporate logos?



Why the double X

[Arthur75]

Thanks, Arthur, it's still over my head.

I got completely caught up in symbols and symbolism at one point, where everything had to do with one particular obsession I was having at the time. Other people have this, or seem to, where everything is connected to everything else through symbols. An old poster here, Raphael, used to exhibit this a lot. It's a weird phenomenon, but I'm not convinced it's usually very helpful or useful in "real life" aka stark reality.

A fine line for sure (the wing of stupidity is never far), but clear that somehow we are also today sitting on a book, and that the health of this book also needs one or a few clear symbol sources to get going, (libraries without ISBNs simply wouldn't work these days, for instance).

[Ludi]

A fine line for sure (the wing of stupidity is never far)

It wasn't stupid, it just had nothing to do with reality.