Thought on Brexit and Van Eyck

Perhaps we could democratise not the jobs of authority (let them be done by competent people), but the selection of the sacred texts and objects.  I want to vote for the the Ghent Altar.  Media and screens as channels of engagement with the objects of veneration could become the sacred objects.  People might develop variants of potter’s nod, which would look remarkably like the bobbing found in prayer.  Let everyone’s world be real, might be our slogan.

On the outer panels of the altar, there are four figures in one row: the flanks are the patrons, all fleshy, very very real and present.  The middle two are saints and they are paintings of statues.  Representations of representations.  Because they are above mere humans in the neo-Platonic hierarchy, you cannot see them, which would be to be in their presence.  You must content yourself thus with a representation.

 

Why bother?

P-worlds neither exist nor don’t exist.  Why bother articulating this point of view?  It is not because it might be more right than some other; it is that it might be useful.  It might be a god way to think about difficult issues.

 

Free will

You’re free to enjoy yourself. right now.  Probably best to lose the self.

 

Infection

Which body is sick in infection? Somatic illness has a collective side.  Mental illness has a somatic side.  Nothing new here, folks.  Move along now.

 

Music is what it is to shout

Music is collective. The body collective.

 

Science and consciousness

As long as science treats consciousness as something that exists in the world, along with ducks, thunderstorms and gamma rays, it will find out nothing. Consciousness is not something to be found in the world, it is what gives us the world in the first place. Bah.

 

The Aesthetics of Thought

It is increasingly apparent to me that we need to develop an aesthetics of thought.  Once we rid ourselves of the illusion that we are “doing” our thoughts, rather than simply having them, we will recognize that some thoughts are inherently more beautiful than others.  What separates a beautiful thought from an ugly one is not a matter of content in any simple sense.  And we will learn to coordinate our lives such that the beautiful thoughts have a greater likelihood of occurrence than the ugly ones.  Perhaps they will be mathematical in nature.  I don’t know.  I would like to devote my life to the proposition that we can and will develop an aesthetics of thought.

 

How is knowledge acquired?

You ask “How do people acquire knowledge?”.  Ask rather “How does knowledge acquire people?”.

 

Merging people…..

I found the following po-faced discussion on a Wikipedia community page: 

 rather than proposing that Notability (people), (pornographic actors) and (academics) be merged into Notability, it is proposed that (pornographic actors) and (academics) are merged into (people). The reasoning being that porn actors and academics are people, so one tidy set of guidelines can be drawn up to accommodate them. 

 

It’s true, it’s horribly true….

This is what my brain looks like: I have a rich and deep interpretation of this picture, but I’ll keep it to myself.