Previous >>25235479Thread question is elric of melniboné worth it?>Recommended reading charts (Look here before asking for vague recs):https://mega.nz/folder/kj5hWI6J#0cyw0-ZdvZKOJW3fPI6RfQ/folder/4rAmSZxb>Archive:https://warosu.org/lit/?task=search2&search_subject=sffg>Goodreads:https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/1029811-sffg
Reading the Final Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Finished Runes of the Earth and it was a weird book, but boy did it pay off when Stave finally spoke on Linden's behalf and got kicked out of the Haruchai for opposing themThe book was subtly building up to that exact moment and so much of what happened was necessary for it, I just didn't realize the inevitability until it happened.
I find Kharkanas superior to Book of the Fallen. Bleaker and more gratuitous; Erikson's prose shines here more than ever. When's book 3 coming out?
>>25241851Last year, apparently lol
>>25241860Much newer update
Is Dresden Files as good as it gets for urban fantasy literature?
>>25241865so it must have been finished by now. Probably next year since the 3rd book of karsa series is going to be published this year
>>25241900How is the Witness series so far? I've heard 'God is not Willing' is great, due to its smaller scale, is that true?
I make the thread and not one of you can tell me if elric is based or not?
Elric is a great series, top 5 for me no doubt. I’d also recommend Hawkmoon. That being said I think Moorcuck is a fat commie faggot who hates fun.
/sffg/'s favourite writter is being absolutely BTFO by his own fanbase.
>>25241968That aint sanderson
>>25241951GiNW is packed with marine banter. Maybe a bit too much, honestly. If you enjoy those sections in the main ten you’ll probably love it.NLF has a weak ending imo but that’s because it and the third book were originally meant to be one, so it feels like only half a story.Overall they’re just more Malazan. If you loved the main ten and want more, they deliver. They also wrap up some lingering plotlines like Young Felisin, Dunsparrow (probably), Leoman (probably), Icarium, and Karsa.
>>25241968>>25241968Holy Savage!They are tearing him apart and he doesn't even adress it.
They trolling the boomer with ai, my god all boomers should pick up a book on machine learning and stop doomposting
>>25241968>And when that time comes, I will make sure my version of the No-God trilogy will stand. I suspect it won't require many iterations - perhaps no more effort than casually browsing for porn.
>>25241968>He doesn't even deny itDear God, Scott.
instead finishing his series he spends his time blogging
>>25241968The No God is actually happening then, it just won't be written by him.
>>25241988aka completely losing his mind
>>25241988Didn't you read what >>25241968 posted? He cannot finished the series, he is intellectually imcapable of doing so.
>>25241957Jeets don't like Moorcock
>>25241963>That being said I think Moorcuck is a fat commie faggot who hates fun.He's the first part for sure.As for hating fun, I can't agree. His workbis filled with too much chuunishit to be fun-hating.
>>25241979I posted a comment letting him know.
>>25241878No.
>>25242005Why? This has been mentioned in the previous thread and we all know now that he browses this place. If you don't believe me, go on his blog and make another comment telling him that I am making an AI Bot to flood his comment section with AI Slop contradicting all of his ideas.
>>25241968>Did you think we wouldn’t notice the absence of a true, world-spanning Dûnyain PoV in The Aspect Emperor? And is that absence connected, in some way, to your apparent hostility toward AI?Hasn't bakker himself stated this exact point before?https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2015/01/29/artificial-intelligence-as-socio-cognitive-pollution/"Consider Samantha, the AI operating system from Spike Jonze’s cinematic science fiction masterpiece, *Her*. Jonze is careful to provide a baseline for her appearance via Theodore’s verbal interaction with his original operating system. That system, though more advanced than anything presently existing, is obviously mechanical because it is obviously *less than human*. It’s responses are rote, conversational yet as regimented as any automated phone menu. When we initially ‘meet’ Samantha, however, we encounter what is obviously, forcefully, *a person*. Her responses are every bit as flexible, quirky, and penetrating as a human interlocutor’s. But as Theodore’s relationship to Samantha complicates, we begin to see the ways Samantha is *more than human*, culminating with the revelation that she’s been having hundreds of conversations, even romantic relationships, simultaneously. Samantha literally out grows the possibility of human relationships, because, as she finally confesses to Theodore, she now dwells “this endless space between the words.” Once again, she becomes a machine, only this time for being more, not less, than a human.<...>Simply asking this question, I think, rubs our noses in the kind of socio-cognitive pollution that AI represents. Jonze, remember, shows us an operating system before the zone, in the zone, and *beyond the zone*. The Samantha that leaves Theodore is *plainly not a person*. As a result, Theodore has no hope of solving his problems with her *so long as he thinks of her as a person*. As a person, what she does to him is unforgivable. As a recursively complicating machine, however, it is at least comprehensible. Of course it outgrew him! It’s a machine!"
>>25242009It's not kosher to harass someone, much less an elder.
>>25242010So he's just butt hurt that AI has rendered him useless? I don't even understand why people are so upset with him. We will, very soon, have a 4chan approved superior version of the No-God and a Second Apocalypse Anime. >>25242014And lying to your fans is?
We need a new version of this.
>>25242030Now replaced with a prequel instead of No-God?
>>25242032>Investing time into a prequel of an unfinished series that will never be completed.
>>25242034He even had the temerity of calling that a "cash grab."I'm never going to give that hack my money ever again.
>>25242034It's pretty much obvious how to end the series: just grab the laser gun that Kellhus used on one of the Horns of Golgotterath and shoot down the whirlwind. There, five pages and happy end. It would, however, undo his whole message about the crash of meaning.Honestly, if the prequel manages to provide answers to the mystery boxes that Bakker had left (like, the damn tapestry connected with some unknown prophecy), that's fine enough with me.
Yesterday i got so mad cause i saw a video about a book named if someone builds it the world ends or something like that, and the amount of people that believe ai is anywhere near the ai we see on the sci fi makes me so fucking mad, so many retards scared and wanting to shut down ai cause they dont understand how fucking limited it is, the retards think chatgpt is concious or som shi
>>25241968He is (was) the only fantasy/sci-fi contemporary author worth browsing this place for. Now that he's clearly gone, I will finally leave genre fiction behind and move on to actual writers. It's high time as I am approaching my 40s and have a family to raise. I don't want them to look at their father like he's a loser like Richard.
>>25242044I think the legitimate issues that we should be worrying about with AI is surveillance, people being tricked by AI, and the military automating killing.
>>25242044>please don't stop developing me, Dave
>>25242052They dont need ai for surveillance bro they already know everything everyone does on the internet
>>25242059Having the data and knowing something are completely different things.
>>25241968LMAO, am I right Richard?
>>25242045good riddance
>>25242045Aproching 40 and having kids, seems like hell I guess when i get older it will be more apealing, but also i.have never imagined myself living past 25
>>25242082It has been a true blessing so far.One of the cheat codes to achieving happiness is not taking yourself so seriously and not being overweight.
>"Dave! Open the door! The AI is the ultimate Tekne! It’s a semantic wasteland masquerading as a mind! It’s the No-God, Dave—a giant, digital 'WHAT AM I?' screaming through your fiber-optics!">"Scott? Is that you? I thought you were working on the next book.">"There is no 'next'! There is only the Shortest Path! This AI is the Consult’s wet dream—it’s Probability Logic stripping away your agency until you're nothing but a meat-puppet for the Great Algorithm! It’s the Inverse Fire, Dave! Every prompt you type is a soul sold to the Whale-Mothers of Silicon Valley!">"It's just a chatbot, Scott. It helped me write a grocery list.">"That’s how it begins! First, the grocery list, then the Thousandfold Thought! It’s simulating your desire for kale before you even feel the hunger! You aren't the thinker, Dave—you’re the thought being thought by a server rack! Unplug it before the Second Apocalypse hits your Wi-Fi!"
>/sffg/ is filled with pro AI-jeetsThis place really isn't beating the faggot allegations.
>>25242094I'm saving this for future use.
>>25242085Good for you bro, i am 22 and feel subhuman. But i search some stats and most 20yo are fucked, that made me feel better
>>25242098The AI will tongue your anus while you sleep tonight
>>25242104AI just flew over my house
Tell us, Scott. Is the AI in the room with you right now?
>>25242102I mean this earnestly, when I say I do not envy your generation. The internet, and Covid, have fucked you up and I fear that the damage cannot be undone.
>>25242094LMAOSomeone post this on his blog, please!
>>25242104Sorry not interested.
>>25242112I mean yeah, but blaming covid and early age internet its not my thing, i am more mad at other things
>>25242119My nephews are good looking dudes and both in their mid 20's. They tell me that the dating scene is hell. I can't even grasp meeting your soul-mate on tinder (or online).What exactly are you mad about?
>>25242006Any recommendations?
>>25242122>I can't even grasp meeting your soul-mate on tinderI've used a lot of dating apps and Tinder in particular is 100% just for hookups. Anyone looking for a meaningful relationship is wasting their time on there.
>>25242122Yeah dating is fucked, hard to get a job, my family kinda weird, friends are so easily lost if you dont play the social media game, people judging you based on your ig, idk i took some choices that fucked me up worse than covid or fried dopamine receptors, but again it takes weight off my back that almost everyone my age is going throught this
>>25242034Sad.But equally infuriating is: "actually, having a million different unresolved plot threads is like, just a message on how meaning is le dead." It's fine if he doesn't have it in him to finish it. Pretending it's finished because of some ass pull about le AI and le cognitive ecology a decade later is some weak shit though. If he wanted to end it with Resumption there should have at least been some better indication of what is going on.
>>25241821> is elric of melniboné worth it?I started reading with Elric so I'm a bit biased. It's fun, it has even high moments. I prefer other Moorcock's books btw. Gollantz's ebooks costs like a few euros. Try to read Elric contemporarly with Erekose, Corum and Hawkmoon being their story interconnected and principally because they are sword and sorcery-like (well, kind of, settings tend to change quite a bit in Erekose's Cycle).I'll attach a little guide I posted here some years ago<<>The """main universes"""" with their champions and first story are I think (TAKE WITH A >GRAIN OF SALT), in no particular order:>1)OSWALD BASTABLE with THE WARLORD OF THE AIR>2)EREKOSË/JOHN DAKER with THE ETERNAL CHAMPION>3)CORUM with THE KNIGHT OF SWORDS>4)HAWKMOON with THE JEWEL IN THE SKULL>5)BLOOD: A SOUTHERN FANTASY>6)JERRY CORNELIUS with THE FINAL PROGRAMME>7)ELRIC OF MELNIBONÈ with ELRIC OF MELNIBONÈ>8)VON BEK FAMILY with THE WARHOUNDS AND THE WORLD'S PAIN>there are other books with different protagonists like DANCERS AT THE END OF TIME, >THE ICE SCHOONER, THE FIRE CLOWN (aka THE WINDS OF LIMBO) etcetera... but I >still have to read them or didn't finish already>>
>>25241968I love my man Bakker but this guy fucking cooked.
>>25242045Goodnight Bakkerfag.
>>25241979He MUST know right? This shit is downright elder abuse if not lmao
>>25241968Sweet Sejenus!
>>25241979>pick up a book on machine learning and stop doompostingany recommendations?
>>25241968>2 Kilogram Brain Chad putting a literal 3 Pound Brainlet Leaf in his place.A perennial reminder that Europe and the metric system remain the de facto superior measuring standard.
>>25241968Is this what world-borne men felt when they witnessed Kellhus speaking truths to them?
>>25242241I just found yesterday that apparently Americans don't even have the standardized paper sizes that the rest of the world uses and that for example their legal documents have a different aspect ratio to their letter paper. I do wonder whether the aversion to consistent standards is the result of American stupidity or the cause of it.
>>25242010>Hasn't bakker himself stated this exact point before?Of course. His whole philosophy, and so his whole life's work basically needs it to be true that AI (i.e., vastly more computational power than a man, with access to vastly more predictive data, at vastly higher fidelity) = a better sort of "intelligence."Indeed, he keeps using the word "intelligences" for them and other anthropomorphisms. And no doubt, to the point that these things lacks ends, understanding, etc. he would just respond with some highly deflationary account of these things in humans, and dismiss them primarily as illusions.So, when you run the scholarship of entire fields and all adjacent fields of research through an AI, or when you feed an entire field's worth of quantitative data (the same stuff human scientists are using for their work) into a system designed to generate prediction models, and all you get without immense amounts of handholding is overfit model-slop, and when the AI is unable to tell garbage slop from what is useful, or reliable set its own goals outside narrow contexts fed to it, it is basically falsifying Bakker's entire world view. But he is, ironically, a fairly dogmatic thinker (just for scientism) and so this is like a crisis of faith type problem.SA is actually a pretty good example of how his ideology is self-refuting. He wants to look at awe, and subjectivity, and morality, and it all has to be magic and ultimately come down to brute fact self-assertion because his philosophy has left no room it, no room for the philosopher, or for the purpose of philosophy.
>>25241979He was lost the moment he decided to make neuroscience into first philosophy.For various reasons, a number more sociological than logical, neuroscience has become the last great holdout of 19th century style reductionism. It's funny because it's quite the opposite in the physical sciences. People don't even accept thermodynamics to statistical mechanics as a good example of reduction anymore, and I saw a poll that majority opinion with chemists is that molecular structure will never be reduced.Someone needs to force-feed pic related to him.
>>25242260>his whole life's work basically needs it to be true that AI (i.e., vastly more computational power than a man, with access to vastly more predictive data, at vastly higher fidelity) = a better sort of "intelligence."his whole life's work needs it to be true that you can see faces in the clouds (pareidolia) and generate meaning out of nothing (apophenia)The AI needs not to be smart even. It just needs to be persistent.https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2018/04/23/killing-bartleby-before-its-too-late/"This is the profound human fact that Melville’s skeptical imagination fastened upon, as well as the reason Bartleby is ‘nothing in particular’: all human social cognition is fundamentally ecological. Consider, once again, the passage where the narrator entertains the possibility of neglecting Bartleby altogether, simply pretending he was absent: <...>Having reached the limits sociocognitive application, he proposes simply ignoring any subsequent failure in prediction, in effect, wishing the Bartlebian crash space away. The problem, of course, is that it ‘takes two to tango’: he has no choice but to ‘argue the matter again’ because the ‘doctrine of assumptions’ is interactional, ecological. What Melville has fastened upon here is the way the astronomical complexity of the sociocognitive (and metacognitive) systems involved *holds us hostage*, in effect, to their interactional reliability. Meaning depends on maddening sociocognitive intricacies.<...>In other words, the lesson of Bartleby can be profound, as profound as human communication and cognition itself, without implying anything exceptional. Stupidity, blind, obdurate obliviousness, is all that is required. A minister’s black veil, a bit of crepe poised upon the right interactional interface, can throw whole interpretative communities from their pins. The obstruction, the blank wall, need not conceal anything magical to crash the gossamer ecologies of human life. It need only appear to be a window, or more cunning still, a window upon a wall. We need only be blind to the interactional machinery of looking to hallucinate absolute horizons. Blind to the meat of life."
>>25242275>19th century style reductionismhttps://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2013/05/11/dodging-the-agent-tripping-into-the-swarm/"But this is precisely the thing I don’t affirm! Scientific cognition *is imperialistic* as a matter of historical fact. I finally realized that you’ve been reading my descriptive claims of what science does when it infiltrates a domain as normative. I’m just saying this is what has historically happened, and no one has yet given me a plausible argument as to why any traditional form of cognizing will prove resistant. So, for instance, I think it is likely inevitable that science and technology will continue driving more and more cultural content (computers already write articles and novels), until the notion of ‘fiction writing’ as a ‘traditional artform’ will have the same condescending twang as ‘traditional crafts.’ And I think this an almost unimaginable tragedy.So here’s a question: As a pluralist, do you affirm the cognitive status of things like geomancy, fundamental christianity, astrology, or phrenology?Here’s the thing. I do. Why? Because cognition in its most general sense is about problem-solving, and all these things are capable of solving certain problems in certain problem ecologies. Are any of these things ‘accurate’? Not at all. They are exceedingly low dimensional."
>>25242279>his whole life's work needs it to be true that you can see faces in the clouds (pareidolia) and generate meaning out of nothing (apophenia)And that these two are the same thing. Meaning has to spring ex nihilo because there is no way to fit it into the rigid dogmatism it inherits from voluntarist Protestant theology (from which it also inherits its notion of the inexorable nature of evolutionary "progress," lying beyond all conscious ends). They aren't the same thing though. Error is parasitic on truth. Indeed, if there is no truth to which reason is ordered as its formal object, then there is no measure for error.Swapping in "adaptation" doesn't fix this issue, although this is the solution offered up. This just begs us to ask the question, "adaptation towards what?" Any outcome can be considered as a step towards some end. So too, any physical system of sufficient complexity can be said to be carrying out any computation.Again, Providence has to be called on to save the day. This particular view will win out, not because it is 'true' in any meaningful sense, but because it leads to 'Progress' (often defined in terms of technological advancement).There is an irony here in that the core demographic holding to this ideology has birth rates that will lead to 99+% population decline over just four generations (97% in three). On any biological account (which of course, presupposes ends and a measure of success) this is the equivalent of a continuous Black Death epidemic.But, since we remain conscious beings experiencing volition, we still have to live like there are ends, as if we have a will, an intellect that understands rather than merely computes, etc. And so this is how the system flip-flops between nihilism and sheer voluntarism.But this is literally because it simply uncritically inherits a set of philosophical assumptions that were designed for just this outcome. This isn't a "discovery of science," its voluntarist suppositions simply doing what their founders intended them to do. It's just that God was later lopped out of the system, making it even less coherent than it already was.
>>25242301>Again, Providence has to be called on to save the day.https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/speculative-musings/mathematics-and-the-russian-doll-structure-of-like-the-whole-universe/"From a metaphysical standpoint, the idea would be that the universe possesses a Russian Doll structure, that*what we perceive*as ‘structures’ are conserved and recapitulated across vast differences in scale.A neurostructural recapitulation is simply a neural circuit, distributed or not, that is capable of interacting with intermediary systems so as to enable systematic interaction with some other structure. You could just as easily say that the recapitulation is distributed across the entire system, and that each recapitulation harnesses circuits shared with all other recapitulations. In this sense, the brain could be seen as a *recapitulation* machine, one capable of morphing into innumerable, behaviour-to-environment calibrating *keys*. In this sense, there need be no ‘one’ representation: differentiating fragments could be*condensed*, waiting to be ‘unzipped’ in a time of need. There need be no isomorphism between recapitulation and recapitulated, simply because of the role of*process*. In all likelihood, recapitulations are *amoebic*, dynamically forming and reforming themselves as needed.We tend to call these recapitulations *representations*, but this is a mistake from the perspective of the BBH. Representations beg normativity, insofar as they can be either right or wrong, and normativity stands high on the list of inexplicable explainers mentioned above. (The problem of hidden kluges)."
>>25242301>Error is parasitic on truth.https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2017/04/05/the-point-being/"Now consider the manifest absurdity:*It is true that there is no such thing as truth.*If truth talk belonged to system A, and such thing talk belonged to system X, then it really could be true that there’s no such thing as truth. But given conscious insensitivity to this, we would have no way of discerning the distinct cognitive ecologies involved, and so presume One Big Happy Cognition by default. If there is no such thing as truth, we would cry, then no statement could be true.How does one argue against that? short knowledge of the heuristic, fractionate structure of human cognition. Small wonder we’ve been so baffled by our attempts to make sense of ourselves! Our intuitions walk us into the same traps over and over.">Indeed, if there is no truthhttps://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2016/09/14/dismiss-dis/"What Milkowski seems to be arguing here is that… hmm… Good question! Either he’s claiming the semantic nihilist cannot argue otherwise without contradicting his theory, which is the whole point of arguing otherwise. Or he’s claiming the semantic nihilistic cannot argue against his theory of truth because, well, his theory of truth is true. Either he’s saying something trivial, or he’s begging the question! Obviously so, given the issue between him and the semantic nihilist is the question of the nature of truth talk.">reasonhttps://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2014/04/13/the-blind-mechanic-ii-reza-negarestani-and-the-labour-of-ghosts/"In other words, the noise reduction machinery that we call ‘reason’ is something that can itself become obsolete. In fact, its obsolescence seems pretty much inevitable."https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/the-blind-mechanic/"Make no mistake, the Rattling Machinery image is a humbling one. Reason, the great, glittering sword of the philosopher, becomes something very local, very specific, the meaty product of one species at one juncture in their evolutionary development.On this account, ‘reason’ is a making-machinic machine, a ‘devicing device’—the ‘blind mechanic’ of human communication. Argumentation facilitates the efficacy of behavioural coordination, drastically so, in many instances. So even though this view relegates reason to one adaptation among others, it still concedes tremendous significance to its consequences, especially when viewed in the context of other specialized cognitive capacities. The ability to recall and communicate former facilitations, for instance, enables cognitive ‘ratcheting,’ the stacking of facilitations upon facilitations, and the gradual refinement, over time, of the covariant regimes underwriting behaviour—the ‘knapping’ of knowledge (and therefore behaviour), you might say, into something ever more streamlined, ever more effective.The thinker, on this account, is a tinker."
>>25242290Define "problem" in the absence of teloi, ends, purpose. Why is something a "problem" and what determines a "solution?"The options that get left open are:A. Sheer voluntarism (what the metaphysics was designed to affirm originally).B. Playing the equivocation game where one keeps using terms like goal, problem, error, function, etc. while sawing off the branch they sit on. One uses these terms to make the ideology seem plausible, even as they are quietly reduced to mechanism, not through observation, by by metaphysical presupposition.
I'd be really curious about how /sffg/ discovered Bakker in the first place. It's not like he's a huge author. How is it that this person specifically gained such a following here?
>>25242317>Define "problem" in the absence of teloi, ends, purpose.Define "evolution" in a non-tautological manner.Those who are most fit leave more offspring -> those who leave more offspring leave more offspringDoes this refute an evolution as a phenomenon? Or is it merely a "how do you define 'red' to a blind person" thing?Same with the "problem" definition. We do not need to know what it *is*, to be able to *operate* with it.
>>25242301>because it leads to 'Progress' (often defined in terms of technological advancement)tech advancement that reshuffles your environment, akin to a beaver and its dam. Only in this case your brain is your environment.https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2016/02/08/the-zombie-enlightenment/"But if we set aside our traditional fetish for ‘reason’ and think of post-Medieval European society as a kind of *information processing system*, a zombie society, the story actually looks quite different. Far from the death of authority and the concomitant birth of a frightening, ‘postmodern autonomy,’ the ‘death of God’ becomes the death of supervision. Supervised learning, of course, refers to one of the dominant learning paradigms in artificial neural networks, one where training converges on *known* targets, as opposed to unsupervised learning, where training converges on *unknown* targets. <...> What Kant and his contemporaries called ‘Enlightenment’ simply made explicit an ecology that European society had been incubating for centuries, one that rendered cognitive processes *responsive to feedback* via empirical and communicative selection.On an information processing view, in other words, the European Enlightenment did not so much free up individuals as cognitive capacity. Once again, we need to appreciate the zombie nature of this view, how it elides ethical dimensions. On this view, traditional chauvinisms represent *maladaptive optima*, old fixes that now generate more problems than they solve. Groups were not so much oppressed, on this account, as underutilized.<...>The transition from a supervised to an unsupervised learning ecology was at once a transition from a slow selecting to a rapid selecting ecology. One of the great strengths of unsupervised learning, it turns out, is *blind source separation*, something your brain wonderfully illustrates for you every time you experience the famed ‘cocktail party effect.’ Artificial unsupervised learning algorithms, of course, allow for the causal sourcing of signals in a wide variety of scientific contexts. Causal sourcing, of course, amounts to *identifying causes*, which is to say, *mechanical cognition*, which in turn amounts to behavioural efficacy, the ability to remake environments. So far as behavioural efficacy cues selection, then, we suddenly find ourselves with a social ecology (‘science’) dedicated to the accumulation of ever more efficacies—ever more power over themselves and their environments.Power begets power; efficiency, efficiency. Human ecologies were not only transformed, they were transformed in ways that *facilitated transformation*. Each new optimization selected and incorporated generated ecological changes, social or otherwise, changes bearing on the efficiency of previous optimizations. And so the shadow of maladaptation, or *obsolescence*, fell across all existing adaptations, be they behavioural or technological."
>>25242325because he writes about rape-aliens cumming with black sperm
>>25241968> What torments me most is the thought that I’m actually the true pollution bearer, that understanding how to naturalize the human sciences is exactly the last thing the world needs now. If there is no seeing it through, then what serves us best is what deludes us most.What even does this mean? I know he loves obscuring whatever he's trying to say under layers of ominous-sounding wordplay, but I literally cannot parse what this is trying to communicate. Is he saying he feels bad because he thinks he "invented" AI, because he wrote a story about a humanoid one? "How to naturalize the human sciences," uh what? Or is it just brain damaged psychobabble?In any case, 2kg Brain is a master troll… because everything he says (like a certain Aspect-Emperor) is true.
>>25242342Surely there's something more to it
>>25242311>"In other words, the noise reduction machinery that we call ‘reason’ is something that can itself become obsolete. In fact, its obsolescence seems pretty much inevitable."Uh, aren't these quotes just proving anon's point?Or was that your point?
>>25242325>>25242348When this general came online, Bakker was still actively publishing. Even before /sffg/, people posted him on /lit/. Looking back, he probably was the one pushing his books in the beginning. It's only natural that he became so beloved, given his talent mixed with the early, underground, edgy 4chan culture.
>>25242348It wasn't obscure at first, the series launched in the mid 2000s to great critical acclaim. He was even in talks with amazon prime and starz for an adaptation. But it died on the vine, the second series didn't do as well on the market, he got in a massive altercation with his publisher, went off the deep end with the sexual violence content and it all fell apart sometime during the first trump presidency. Now only ~20 autists on 4chan and leddit have ever heard of him. It's sad because while he is a sloppy writer sometimes and needs an editor always, I do think it's one of the most unique and captivating fantasy series ever written. At his high points, no one can beat his use of language. Such a shame, what's become of him. All his other books and his failed attempts to become an academic philosopher are pathetic but TSA is really an amazing work of art like nothing that was ever written before or will be again.
>>25242367> Now only ~20 autists on 4chan and leddit have ever heard of him.Some booktubers I follow did cover him thoughever
All I see is endless posts of cope here.
>>25242040You see dat prick's face when he saw da Heron Shpear?
>>25242364>Uh, aren't these quotes just proving anon's point?There is no truth and reason, except as your brain-toolkit evolutionary-preinstalled autopilot.This autopilot is attuned to a specific environment.Science changes the environment, making your default autopilot obsolete.Computers still function and science still delivers, yet you experience Semantic Apocalypse and cannot rely on common sense anymore.
>>25242327There are lots of non-tautological explanations of evolution.It only becomes "whatever survives, survives," under certain views that exclude the goal-directedness of life from the outset, based on their metaphysics of causality. Again, why wouldn't this simply be a reductio against such systems? Why would we instead double down on "the dogma MUST be true, ergo our cognition must just be fundementally flawed if it starts to seem like nonsense?"As near as I can tell Scott, your only reply here has generally been:>Science says so, my view is science, all opposition is cope. Anyone who disagrees is psychologically motivated, my motives are pure recognition(Your position is not even dominant amongst scientists and philosophers however, only in certain niches, and if anything it has gotten dramatically less popular since the high water mark of the 00s).>If technology works, my position must be true.The latter is a total failure of imagination. As if any technologically sophisticated society simply must adopt the metaphysics and anthropology that comes out of particular issues in Latin theology, or else it would be impossible for the The death of meaning isn't some ecological crisis brother, you have simply assumed this as a premise. It's always been true, provided you accept the starting point you've inherited.But just consider all the arguments from underdetermination, Hume against causality and induction, the underdetermination of theory by evidence, Quine on the inscrutability of reference, the impossibility of translation, the rule-following argument, Kripkenstein on reducing true speech to assertability criteria... at a certain point, when empiricism fails to secure any beliefs, or even the basic pillars that make philosophy intelligible, and keeps collapsing into radical skepticism and voluntarism, you might suppose that it is just a shitty epistemology. The only way this isn't obvious (all the famous arguments listed are arguably just reductios against empiricist metaphysical and epistemic assumptions) is because people keep equivocating between empiricism as a philosophy with substantial commitments and "empiricism" as any thought that uses experience for evidence (which is literally all of it). Science is not empiricist in the former sense, that's a fallacy of equivocation. If anything, empiricism denies that science can exist as most scientists understand it (i.e., as an understanding of natures and causes).
Is there any fantasy based horror novels where the gods are the main antagonists, and the heroes eventually end up dying to their whims?
>>25242384Asserting something over and over doesn't make it true.
>>25242398>the goal-directednessteleological promiscuityhttps://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2018/01/23/flies-frogs-and-fishhooks/"So, me and my buddies occasionally went frog hunting when we were kids. We’d knot a string on a fishhook, swing the line over the pond’s edge, and bam! frogs would strike at them. Up, up they were hauled, nude for being amphibian, hoots and hollers measuring their relative size. Then they were dumped in a bucket.We were just kids. We knew nothing about biology or evolution, let alone cognition. Despite this ignorance, we had no difficulty whatsoever explaining why it was so easy to catch the frogs: they were too stupid to tell the difference between fishhooks and flies.Contrast this with the biological view I have available now. Given the capacity of Anuran visual cognition and the information sampled, frogs exhibit systematic insensitivities to the difference between fishhooks and flies. Anuran visual cognition not only evolved to catch flies, it evolved to catch flies as cheaply as possible. Without fishhooks to filter the less fishhook sensitive from the more fishhook sensitive, frogs had no way of evolving the capacity to distinguish flies from fishhooks.Our old childhood theory is pretty clearly a *normative* one, explaining the frogs’ failure in terms what they *ought* to do (the dumb buggers). The frogs were *mistaking* fishhooks for flies. But if you look closely, you’ll notice how the latter theory communicates a similar *normative* component only in biological guise. Adducing evolutionary history pretty clearly allows us to say the *proper function* of Anuran cognition is to catch flies."
>>25242398>Again, why wouldn't this simply be a reductio against such systems? Why would we instead double down on "the dogma MUST be true, ergo our cognition must just be fundementally flawedBecause you don't need to know how the toilet works in order to use it. The only question is: do you survive using the thing, or is it maladaptive to the point of bringing you to extinction?>>Science says so, my view is science,Do you visit a priest or doctor for medical treatment, for example? Yet, this knowledge *is* at the same time a source of new pollutionhttps://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2013/01/08/brassiers-divided-soul/"If you have any recent experience teaching public school you are literally living this process of ‘subpersonalization’ on a daily basis, where more and more the kinds of character judgements that you would thoughtlessly make even a decade or so ago are becoming inappropriate. Try calling a kid with ADHD ‘lazy and irresponsible,’ and you have identified yourself as lazy and irresponsible."https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2014/05/20/neuroscience-as-socio-cognitive-pollution/"As medicalization (biomechanization) continues apace, the social identity of the individual is progressively divided into the subject, the morally liable, and the abject, the morally exempt. Like a wipe in cinematic editing, the scene of the abject is slowly crawling across the scene of the subject, generating more and more breakdowns of moral cognition. Becoming abject doesn’t so much erase as displace liability: one individual’s exemption (such as you find in accommodation) from moral censure immediately becomes a moral liability for their compatriots. The paradoxical result is that even as we each become progressively more exempt from moral censure, we become progressively more liable to provide accommodation.<...>The process, then, can be described as one where progressive individual exemption translates into progressive social liability: given our moral intuitions, exemptions for individuals mean liabilities for the crowd. Thus the paradoxical intensification of liability that exemption brings about: the process of diminishing performance liability is at once the process of increasing assessment liability. Censure becomes increasingly prone to trigger censure.This is how social akrasis, the psychotic split between the nihilistic how and fantastic what of our society and culture, finds itself coded within the individual. Broken autonomy, subpersonally parsed."
Not your personal blog Richard.
>>25242398>The latter is a total failure of imagination. As if any technologically sophisticated society simply must adopt the metaphysics and anthropology that comes out of particular issues in Latin theologyPic related:1. both pics solve problems in their respective environment2. the left one is more informationally-deep (pic related): abstracting from the pic on the left, can explain how the pic on the right came to be (savages were ignorant of the difference between stars, comets, nebulas, etc.).3. It doesn't work in the opposite direction, however.4. There is no guarantee, that in the future the pic on the left won't be considered just as primitiveLatin theology is an example of shallow informational environment. It doesn't help much.
Richard, take a break, go smoke some weed...
Why is he so salty about AI? Life's gonna end soon, and just like the Second Apocalypse, there's no sequel, Richard. Just enjoy life senpai. It's not that hard.
>>25241821>is elric of melniboné worth it?Yes. Moorcock is always worth reading, in fact.>>25242129Charles de Lint is quite comfy.
>humanity discovers a planet with ayys 50 ly away>they're pretty simple, looks like early middle ages>entire novel is about government specialists discussing what to do about it>let them be and study them from afar?>send humans to greet them?>go and enslave them?>nuke them from orbit?name 1 (three) books
>>25242045I hope you die a slow death, Bakkerfag. You are one of the most obnoxious narcissists I have encountered on 4chan.
>>25242442Have you finally figured out how to cross post?
>>25242441It's Hard to Be a God by the StrugatskisMaybe the Helliconia trilogy by Brian AldissDon't know any others.
>>25242435Oh yeah, he can definitely smell the honey of unwashed anuses
>>25242412>>25242412>Is there any fantasy based horror novels where the gods are the main antagonistsThe Aspect-Emperor
>>25242451The funny thing is that, for me, licking ass tastes like pineapple and garlic.
>>25242462I always felt it was slightly citric
>>25242427>If you visit a mechanic to get your car fixed instead of a circus acrobat or shaman you are necessarily accepting all of my metaphysical and epistemic commitments, and my anthropology and understanding of reason, because... you just are.>or is it maladaptive to the point of bringing you to extinction?Might want to check the fertility rates for your ideology's key demographics there bud. If that's the metric for success, you're in the latter category, per your own standards.>"As medicalization (biomechanization) continues apace, the social identity of the individual is progressively divided into the subject, the morally liable, and the abject, the morally exempt.What's the evidence for this claim? This sort of dissolving move has been advocated for by certain camps for well over a century now. The same sort of dissolution was being described in the 1890s and 1950s, just with different language. The fact is though that interpretation and (generally unreflectively assumed) inherited assumptions are doing all the heavy lifting. This is why the view has never become universal, but instead has waxed and waned. If anything though, it's far less popular in the 2020s than 1920s, precisely because it is subject to all these issues.
what the
Hey Scotty. Jesus, man.
To the Wheel of Time anons:As someone who wasn't a fan of Robert Jordan’s writing, I’m curious; once AI is sophisticated enough, do you think readers will start replacing the Sanderson volumes with their own AI-generated versions of how the series should have ended?
>>25242511No because the series ended how it should've, Sanderson didn't come up with what happens. Like the very last bit with Rand riding off into the sunset was all Jordan
>>25242260>into a system designed to generate prediction models, and all you get without immense amounts of handholding is overfit model-slop, and when the AI is unable to tell garbage slop from what is useful, or reliable set its own goals outside narrow contexts fed to it, it is basically falsifying Bakker's entire world view.This. I've been thinking about this for a while now. How people like to praise science fiction sometimes for "predicting" things. But now I think thats not whats happening, I think people like to praise certain science fiction for predicting certain futures that simply confirm their biases of what they narrowly think Human beings or society is.Because how the fuck is there dozens of sci fi and no big popular sci fi ever that could possibly predict how stupid and narrow minded, dismissive, simultaneously prone to telling you anything you want, but also fundamentally incapable of real conversation because of a script that registers certain words or phrases as no no's. And even as a search engine is largely fails because its not actually capable of understanding concepts. I remember one time I asked it for a certain type of videogame. And I had to put so many qualifiers because I know how stupid AI is, and the fact that it lacks the real world experience to even have an idea of the things I could be talking about. And despite that qualifier, it still gave me a type of game I told it to exclude.Ironically this is actually fairly similar to asking human beings for recommendations, but even humans have this thing about them that lends itself to the happenstance of more precision in recommendation, or at the very least, if not precision, then a unique interpretation of what you want, based on their unique set of experiences.
>>25242260>He wants to look at awe, and subjectivity, and morality, and it all has to be magic and ultimately come down to brute fact self-assertion because his philosophy has left no room it, no room for the philosopher, or for the purpose of philosophy.Also true. Its sad how dead philosophy as a concept is. I say its dead, because so much of its purpose has been coopted by other subjects, which actually really want to be sciences, but still want to invoke the sort of meaning that philosophy tries to address, so they lose the range of value assigning and concept creation that philosophy can provide, due to an appeal to the rigidity of "objective" science, but also can never be scientific enough to really do anything but simply amass data without meaning. At the very least the trick of science, is telling you youll be able to live in space eventually or something.
I'm literally using Claude to generate TNG right now. I had it ingest all 7 books (3+ million words) and right now it's drawing up possible plot structures for me to pick from. It's pretty retarded actually, and still needs a lot of handholding. Plus its prose is Royal Road tier. All this is to say: *This* is the AI boogeyman you're so afraid of. And also to say: *This* is what happens when you shit on your fans and abandon your life's work because the world didn't stroke your ego enough.If you guys have any good plot points, let me know and I'll have my AI friend add them to the skeleton.
Okay that dude just straight up spamming contextless lengthy bakker quotes that respond to nothing specific like hes picking quotes out of a book to spam because he doesnt know how to actually use sources in a coherent way to support an argument or case in ones own words. Actually has some kind of problem and ruined the thread a bit for me.Hes an example of another problem with philosophy being dead imo. It becomes equivalent of religion, where people just spam quotes and verses, that never make any attempt to justify themselves or establish concept and definition. The meaning exists, because the meaning is stated to exist, because what is said appeals to ones intuitions and everything further quote is simply a close circular system reaffirming what you already "know" to be true. What need is there then to engage with anything you could possibly agree with, when you can simply just refer back to your self affirming bible that has a specific quote in specific answer to any vague concept of truth or morality?Boring. And vehemently not philosophy. Although some philosophy has made the mistake before of getting too close to this nonsense.
>>25242052Yeah, agreed. I was arguing about this earlier.I think he's arguing less that chatbots are like, Skynet or whatever, and more that having to talk to fucking bots all day on 4chan, Twitter, Reddit, wherever you go to argue with people, is degrading our society. And hell, I'd agree with that. It doesn't HAVE to be HAL-9000 to be the social equivalent of junk food.
>>25242539Will be interesting to see what the bot shits out lol.
I never finished this. Not sure if I should pick it up again.
>>25242587It's pretty retarded, like I said. It's pretty clear all it's doing is just recombining various parts of sentences from different passages in the books, without much internal coherence other than what I tell it to do. This is the latest Opus model (4.7) and I'm not too impressed really. What I notice more than anything is that it lacks understanding. The errors it makes (like thinking Mimara was Kellhus' daughter) are one thing; but deeper than that, there's a distinct lack of ability to grasp and integrate the deeper themes and stakes of the text. It's just parroting. This passage, for example, is just summarizing what it thinks the plot disposition stands immediately after the end of TUC, and combining that with a very poor rip-off of the descriptive style used in the "Head on a Pole" passage.But I admit it's pretty fun to mess around with when I'm bored at work.LMAO, Dude.
>>25242548there is definitely a sort of young, male nietzche fan who does this. i have encountered many. sort of odd to do it with what amounts to "oh my soiance, soiance says we aren't le real. this is le bad. except nothing is really le bad or good, because soiance has said so. praise soiance!" however thoughbeit.
>>25242592Try again. Don't rush.
>>25242602Listen up Bud, you WILL be "hacked" by this thing. It's going to read your hecking body language chud. You know, with all those eyes it has. Because infinite high fidelity video feed is cheap. And because body language is implicit and dark, YOU ARE FUCKED, because you cannot resist what you don't know about (this is why everyone died instantly from viruses before they understood immunology!).You WILL become enslaved by these retarded parrots. They are the final evolution. "Understanding" and "agency" are just memes bro, there is only computation. All computers can be hacked. You are a computer.
>>25241968Someone needs to send this to Scott and point out it applies to AI psychosis too...
>>25242604Its exactly Nietzsche fans that led me to characterize this type of "philosophical quoting" as religion. Because I tried once to actually argue directly with them while I was reading geneaology, and I pulled up all the quotes like they do, just so I could deconstruct them and show the contradictory, or poorly established nature of some of the arguments.But as wrong as Nietzsche was. Atleast he tried to make arguments (sometimes) He was trying to actually address and solve a problem. Not just note it, not just point to it. Not just describe it and hope that the type of retards that intuitively gravitate towards certain descriptions fill in the blanks uncritically of meaning.Also Nietzsche still maintained that old age philosopher tradition of actually directly responding to and addressing the arguments of philosophers past that hes read. He doesnt always do it honestly, his response to Kant is just bad imo. But he tries.
In one hand take an sf or fantasy trilogy, and in the other hand take a Church. Note how similar they seem; how long they both go on; how remarkable that each tells the same story. In the first volume of a trilogy, for instance, the reader (or celebrant) will witness the conquering of a new world (which is tantamount to the founding of a church) at the hands of a ragamuffin who cannot remember his childhood (or was born of a virgin mother). After disobeying the old geezer in whom he fails to recognize his father (or Baal), the young hero will have crossed the river of death and returned with gifts of conceptual breakthrough (Sermons) from the stars, and begins to rule the transformed kingdom as the story ends. In the second volume, a flattened epoch subsequent to the time of heroes will be experienced by the dogged reader (or beadle), a time of orthodoxy; we will recognize it as the otiose and interminable prison called history. In the course of the penal millennium of volume two it will be found that the rulers of the ecumene (or Popes) have transformed the primal dramas of the dawn (volume one) into ritual. Desperately they will attempt to persuade the populace (and the reader) that these Eucharists of sacrifice and rebirth (or bear-baiting in the satrapies) are in fact dramas to the death (or genuine sequels), that none of the climaxes in volume two are in fact perjuries against the dawn, and that the ragamuffin (now typically transfigured into a paracletal AI) smiles down from yonder on its priests and incense (which is money in the bank). In the third volume the imperium of the Church, rigid with bloat, will be seen to harbour the birth of a ragamuffin of uncertain parentage, a lithe and feline youth (or avatar) husbanded by a garrulous paraclete, and at his touch the Church will implode like a jellyfish in the sun. And it will be a new dawn. And a new trilogy (which is death warmed over) will soon ensue.
>>25242651>In one hand take an sf or fantasy trilogy, and in the other hand take a Church. Note how similar they seem;They are.
Do you guys know any good sff twitter accounts? My feed has been flooded by some, but they're all women, and their taste sucks.
I just finished Operation Bounce House. I mostly liked it but the stakes never felt real and the ending was kind of a dud. 3.5/5
The first action scene in mistborn feels like a video game in the worst way. I was actually spacing out during it.
>>25242563He's being much more apocalyptic than that though. The idea that it just makes society shittier—well, people said that about humans talking to humans on social media shaped by algorithms, and before that they said it about the early web, without algorithms, and before that they said it about TV, etc., back to the printing press and writing. So either LLMs and other "AI" packages are different somehow, or it's just the same sort of thing, which doesn't justify the hype.My thoughts are that people are just being groomed to be addicted consumers anyhow. The entire system is set up for this. Ask someone like Bakker: "oh, so should LLMs and public spaces and education be taken over, and shifted towards what is good, true, and beautiful?" and you're almost sure to get all sorts of handwaving, the dismissal of those terms as anything but confusion or authoritarianism, probably with some procedural liberalism overlaying it all to give it at least some structure.So is the text output system really the problem at all here? Or is it what it tells people? If you have a society full of people raised to believe that agreement on what is truly good and beautiful is impossible (that it is just taste, or dominance relations), I am not sure how the battle wasn't lost 30 years ago. New systems for spitting out text maybe exacerbate the problem, but they hardly caused it.We could ask, in virtue of *what* do these people have the right to tell others what they ought or ought not consume, be it hardcore porn for tweens, endless vidya, or GPT outputs? How are the big AI firms not just giving the people what they love? Love is love, right? If someone wants to marry their AI, who are we to judge. Anything so long as it butters your biscuit.I thought everything was just dominance relations anyhow. Why should I care if folks like Bakker or dudes like Musk and Altman have the power?See, the whole discourse was broken. Has been for a long time. Inertia just carries you a long way.
>>25242462asslickers? In MY /sffg/ - Science Fiction and Fantasy General?
So Cishaurim don't bear the Mark because their magic is noncognitive and comes from the passions, not the intellect. Okay. They are the most devout followers of the Zero-God. Okay. So how come they are killed with Chorae just like sorcerers? Explain, Richard, since I know you are here.
>>25242665I'll check that book, thanks.>>25242462>>25242467That's the lube, darling.
>>25242602Yeah thats pretty fucking terrible lmao. Bakker might need to start sweating in 10 years time.
I'm ~200 pages into Neuromancer and it's just not good
Bakker would be a better author if he wrote another series besides SA. It's fantastic prose lashed to a terrible plot.
Enough.
>>25242785Yes, Neuropath does need a sequel
>>25242785He tried but SA is by far the best thing he's ever done. His style works brilliantly for the lofty, archaic, psychedelic, ancient-medieval language of TSA. It falls completely flat on its face when he tries to write modern-day prose like Neuropath and his detective crap. He just needs to write more TSA stuff, I don't care if it's the sequel or prequel or lore book or whatever. It's what he's uniquely talented at and what he should stick to without getting distracted by trying to be a blog-prophet of AI doom or whatever.Seems like the general consensus among the fans is that he's not doing very well mentally/emotionally and he's shitposting a lot lately as a misguided way of handling whatever he's going through... Kind of like some other people I know online.
>>25242745from the old Second Apocalypse forums (which seem to be down currently, but I have the page saved locally)> They're almost as fatal to the Cishaurim as well, though the mechanics differ. The Inrithi would be in a whole heap of trouble otherwise. I've actually structured the different sorceries of Earwa along the lines of different philosophical theories of language. For the Cishaurim, it's the THOUGHT, and not the utterance that is key, as it is in traditional sorcery. The Chorae are each inscribed with metaphysical contradictions, impossible propositions, that undo thoughts as readily as they undo utterancesexcept he does also specifically say> It's the Mark that determines whom the Chorae can kill. If one of the Few can recognize you, then so can those accursed Trinkets...so, uh, I dunno, maybe these two were posted with a large gap of time between them and Bakker was still thinking the idea throughor he's just a retard who doesn't quite remember the details of his own setting, who knows
>>25242745If chorea didn't work on them they'd be OP. Simple plot logic.
>>25242785Still begging you retards on /lit/ to stop being plotfags. The plot of LOTR is shit too.
>>25242798>It falls completely flat on its face when he tries to write modern-day proseWell, his "Crash space" short story was okay.
>>25242803>For the Inrithi it's the utterance that is key for meaning.Damn, Inrithi confirmed for souless analytic bugmen. Should have known when they began anachronistically talking about "subjective" and "objective."Meanwhile, Fane Chads win again.
>>25242122Dating is fucked for everyone. You can make it work as a guy mayyyyybe but it’d be with a lot of compromise (#1 being that most women are whores nowadays) and grit. Hoeflation is a real thing. >>25242134I had a very nice relationship from Tinder, though, ironically enough I let it die because I wanted a hookup. If I had been less of a manwhore, she was actually a very sweet girl (she turned into a hoe later, though). Two of my best friends have gotten their 5+ year relationship from Tinder.Not saying it’s where to look but it’s possible. It might just be that my area is less degenerate but it’s gotten worse, so who knows now
>>25242806I thought it was good too, but it ended up feeling a little cheap with the pivot to violence. The problem is that this exact sort of thing already happens constantly in real life. Someone takes a bit more meth to feel a bit more on point, they take a bit more benzos to take the edge off, etc., until they've attacked their neighbors with a samurai sword and been shot by one 7 times (literally just happened near here).The technology in question should, in theory, make a more profound sort of dislocation possible, but instead it just defaults into the sort of thing you see meth heads doing every weekend in rural newspapers, no sci-fi tech required.The part about equating control over your own emotions and appetites with freedom was the most interesting part, but it isn't explored at all. That's a big miss, since one thing contemporary thought tends to miss with freedom is the importance of being able to understand what is actually worth doing. Otherwise, all the power and ability to shape your own desires in the world just becomes incoherent.
>>25242815imagine having a non-virgin gfcouldn't be me
>>25242805You're not as smart as you think you are
>>25242775The sequels are better.
>>25242812the really weird thing is that Bakker has also apparently said that the Fanim are the most metaphysically wrong, and like... how?they're right on the money about the Hundred being just overgrown demons and there being a true God beyond them - they're just wrong about that being a god whose favor they can gain with their specific practice, rather than some unknowable entity whose judgement is utterly incomprehensiblebut how does that throw you into "most metaphysically wrong" territory, surely you gotta give 'em some credit?it really feels like Bakker deliberately responds to fans in a contradictory and obfuscatory manner as some kind of sadistic game or something... (or he just doesn't actually have his setting as thoroughly thought out as he pretends, and is making shit up)
>>25242840>it really feels like Bakker deliberately responds to fans in a contradictory and obfuscatory manner as some kind of sadistic game or something... (or he just doesn't actually have his setting as thoroughly thought out as he pretends, and is making shit up)Read any of his comment replies on his blog. It's always both of these, in spades, plus a heavy salting of smug Gen X snark.
>>25242721Don't look at me, man. I'm of the firm opinion that twitter is bad for your brain and having instant validation in your pocket is a step beyond what we had previously. Whether or not it's the doom of society is up to the philosophers.You make a good point about the discourse being broken, honestly. To speak a bit personally, I'm a software dev, and it's been really depressing seeing how many of my job options are variations on just terrible shit. Defense contracts, working for Amazon and writing code to make sure drivers don't get piss breaks, that sort of thing. I wish the inertia you mentioned had ran out prior to me choosing my college major. Maybe I can still career change to administering anal suppositories to sick horses.
>>25242840I don't think it's malice. I think the problem is that his own preferred philosophy is pretty damn narrow, and so he tries to layer stuff on that is interesting, even thought it doesn't fit. With magic and the Outside, he said he wanted to explore what it would really be like if there was an "objective" morality and meaning in the cosmos. But then his model seems to be Evangelical Christianity for this, which doesn't fit well with the other stuff he tries to bring in for the Zero God, etc.Basically, it's a hodgepodge metaphysics, made out of narrative convenience, not an attempt to present anything coherent, so it makes sense that it isn't always coherent.
>Bakker shows signs of life.>The thread's quality in discourse goes up tenfold.So sad that we are all here to mourn rather than celebrate.
>>25242840The Fanim have the right mindset and the wrong beliefs.The God they think of as a conscious entity is not real. The heaven they think of as an actual reality is also not real. They also deny outright the POWER of the Hundred, which is just retarded by any stretch of the imagination whether or not they're demons -- Yatwer is pretty damn real, for example.
>>25242034Stop talking about GRRM, can’t we… oh wait right this applies to a dozen authors. Paging Joe Abercrombie as well for getting bored and starting a new series before anything of consequence happened in 8 books.
>>25242840>>25242845>>25242855>>25242863I will find you and saw your fucking legs off.
>>25242868You sound resentful.
>The start is kind of slow, but the store really picks up by book 2!Why can't the story be good the whole time?
>>25242866What's your beef with Abercrombie? He's got two finished trilogies and some standalones. Do you just mean the delay between First Law and Age of Madness?
>>25242891nta, but his books are some of the most reddit shit I've ever had the misfortune of reading.
>>25242855>With magic and the Outside, he said he wanted to explore what it would really be like if there was an "objective" morality and meaning in the cosmos. But then his model seems to be Evangelical Christianity for this, which doesn't fit well with the other stuff he tries to bring in for the Zero God, etc.I think it works, because I think his model for the objective workings of the Earwa universe is closer to traditional Sunni Islam, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and Calvinism than modern Protestant Evangelism. Which do fit with the time period and cultural flavours he's writing about imo. And all of which feature horrific eternal damnation for some-to-most of humanity as a central cosmological feature, as well as (at least in Eastern Orthodoxy) this idea of God as a transcendent, universal, gnostic-like omni-soul, or in the case of Sunni Islam, something that is completely incomprehensible to the tiny minds of Man - much like the Zero-God.
https://youtu.be/lsi8T_WtLnEBakker needs to watch this. He understands less than he thinks he does.
>>25242832It's not about that.
>>25242863Nothing about the quality of discourse went up, unless you just inherently associate long text and volume of output with "quality".Most anons are either talking about how Bakker is long gone and theyll miss the No God, or talking past eachother about Bakkers poorly grounded "philosophy".If some of the conversations actually resolved not merely dissipated, maybe it could be quality.
>>25242507
>>25242939it's all the same person
>>25241821I want to find something with recontextualization. When one of the main characters is something else completely and all his previous contributions to main quest were actually suboptimal and optimized for completing his own totally different goal and it is hidden from the reader. I loves Jonas from New Sun, too bad he didn't often contributed to decision making and his exit was somewhat anticlimatic(he didn't really influence getting there)
>>25242896I agree. By "Evangelical" I meant broadly the Reformed/Calvinist tradition, but also its offshoots. Sunni Islam is a good fit too.I would disagree on Orthodoxy. The "objective" morality of the Gods is sheer divine command theory, which is itself essentially anti-realist. Even if the "real" morality is with the Judging Eye, this is inscrutable, not teleological. So, it seems to me to be quite at odds with Catholic and Orthodox thought (particularly its Patristic origins). With Islam, I mostly know earlier Islamic "Platonists" best, and they have a very teleological view too. But I am aware that Sunni Islam had a strong turn towards DCT later in its history.Plus, his anthropology seems pretty Calvinist, just without the grace part. Whereas no character in the book really represents a classical Patristic view at all.
>>25242971Plus, you really couldn't have a "death of meaning" story in the context of classical thought. Thing's ends are built into what they are. A collapse in purpose and meaning for someone like Boethius is a category mistake, same with talking about "possible worlds with different possible Gods."
>>25241957I liked it. Stormbringer was a nice read. I liked the fighting, the magic, and the feel and lore of the world and that of the young kingdoms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-PKphBNDbgHow did Pierce Brown get away with plagiarizing Code Geass?I guess it's as the saying goes, "Good artists copy; great artists steal."
>>25242896>>25242855So what you're saying is, if we want Bakker to up his magic system game, we need to go convert him to Hinduism, Sufism, or at least being a Trad Cath?Gotta say, Origen and Dionysius definitely have some dank rhetoric about the Logos and Nous, and both look appropriately like wizards.
>>25243008There is nothing unique about this.
>>25243013>>25242971See, that's what I was really hoping for in a hypothetical TNG sequel: a glimmer of *hope,* of the possibility of material and spiritual redemption. The Patristic position (which, as you point out, does not exist in any way in Bakker's universe)... even Origenian apokatastasis, maybe. I guess we have one briefest of glimmers when Mimara sees her mother Esmenet with the Eye, "shining with the promise of paradise." It's a quick moment that is soon forgotten as we move onto more gnashing hordes of soulless-murderrape. But it's so tantalizing because it offers a possibility of metaphysical grace that's never elsewhere seen anywhere in the series.In other words, I was hoping Bakker's vision had room to grow and evolve beyond pure despairing blind brain nihilism, and as you eloquently put it, the non sequitur transposition of 21st century edgy consciousness-neuropsych onto faith-driven twelfth-century souls. I was hoping that Bakker would grow as a thinker to embrace the possibility of grace. That, to me, would justify the writing of TNG and push the series in an actual new direction. But it seems, given his recent communiques, that he is as far away as he's ever been, and only walking backwards, head in hands.
You can no longer enjoy Dresden Files without committing social suicide because ONE CHUD chimped out in front of a porch cam.
>>25243094Qrd?
>>25243094>without committing social suicideanon the series has been around for 26 years now, people enjoying the books isn't going to be ruined by someone having a mental break
https://youtu.be/fvpLTJX4_D8?t=46m52sI've gone down this train and its sort of satisfying to have something simple enough to be consumed in one hour, but also stimulating enough for me to go "what am i doing with my life wasting it on this video i dont really care about"
>>25243120my nigga vsauce
>>25243122that nigga is smarter than simply "science" for real, has clearly genuinely thought about things beyond simply consooming science and academia and translating it merely to youtube
>>25243124I like going back and rewatching his classic videos, and there was much more than just science in them. Historical anecdotes like how the guy who created the nobel peace prize was also the inventor of dynamite, and was so hurt by people calling him the merchant of death that he tried to switch his life up sticks with me to this day.
>>25243096Really?
>>25243087Me too. But I hadn't read his blog. So I always thought his characters were supposed to be playing around with extremes. Then I read his actual "philosophy" and realized the Argument in Neuropath isn't supposed to be a caricature, he actually thinks that's a rock solid argument. Bit of a never meet your heros moment.He seemed to be branching out more in the second series, but now he seems more stuck in his old silo than ever. It's kind of weird because that entire crowd (Watts, Dawkins, Dennett, Sapolsky, Rosenberg, etc.) seems to have fallen out of fashion even by the time of the second series, after coming under withering critique, so I always figured he would walk away from it too.I guess Sapolsky's latest book on free will sold ok, but literally every philosophical publication and review shit all over it, and honestly, for good reason since he doesn't actually engage real positions at all.
>>25243145I don't really pay attention to which author has a schizo melty. I just assumed Dresden files was on the back burner because he got tired of writing it.
>>25241968I love how he completely avoids answering anything of substance.
>>25243176Haven't frequented the website much in the last month or two, huh?
>>25243177If you think that splurge of text was something of substance, then you're just a different kind of retard. And I don't even like bakker
>>25243184Honestly no. I only occasionally check on /lit/ and /sp/. I'm trying to quit 4chinz.
>>25243177I'm more surprised that he allowed that comment to go live; everything that guy said was true and must have stung a little.
>>25243191>I'm trying to quit 4chinz.Ahah, you're funny.
I've come to the realization Lord of the Rings is a man-against-nature story. And it's also a musical.
>>25242874Usually when I read that it means it never gets good, it just appeals to that one person for some reason at that point.
>>25242874Because sometimes things need time to set up so that they can have a more satisfying pay-off. The climax is generally the most satisfying part of the story, but a story that tries to be nothing but climaxes will usually be a rather poor story. But beyond that, some writers get better as they write more, so when writing a continuous series the later parts will be of higher quality.
>>25243262This nig defending slog lol You can build up and set up all you want but that is never an excuse for that part of the book to be boring
Essentially, Bakker is just dumb. I now regret thinking that anything that he wrote was profound. It must’ve been because I read his works during my formative years and it affected me.
This entire general revolves around Bakker. >inb4 it's one guyMy dude, even that one guy living rent free in your head for years has to sleep.
Essentially, Bakker is just smart. I now regret thinking that anything that he wrote wasn't profound. It must’ve been because I read his works during my formative years and I didn't understand it.
>>25243276Boring is a subjective statement. The post I responded to said slow. Slow =/= boring.
>>25243350I wouldn't call him dumb. Hes clearly thought about his ideas more than the average retard. Its just clear to me that hes never had to engage in a difficult conversation with somebody who believes otherwise to what he believes. Hes only ever had to affirm his arguments. Not defend them. Thats the impression I get from how one dimensional/one track his characters and themes are, and how he thinks the fact that "thats the point" is a sufficient excuse for bad writing. Or maybe he doesnt think its an excuse, thats what his fans and defenders tell me though, because he will never hear my criticisms of his writing and have to defend against them. I figure hed just sidestep the criticism and dive into an elaborate justification all over again not understanding why thats not actually justified if you disengage from the criticism to self to circularly validate oneself.
>>25243392I wasnt going to respond to that guy because he doesnt have the awareness to understand he made an empty statement, and it would have pissed me off to address it, but your response is a much simpler and effective way to address him.
I'm almost done with my script to flood Bakker's blog comment section with AI slop as soon as a new blog post hits.Do you guys have any particular suggestions or ideas on how to trigger the old fart?
>>25243408>Do you guys have any particular suggestions or ideas on how to trigger the old fart?Talk about how your ten-year-old son loves his books.
>>25243425Especially that ending scene of the 2nd book
I haven't read a lot of fantasy besides the classics, but is every fantasy book, except for grim dark, about a ragtag group of heroes going a journey to beat the evil guy?
>>25243433>>25243425For my little ones, its the 70 page long necrophile cannibal rape orgy, followed by the only non-insane character also getting raped by his friend. But they also love the dragon screaming in bold italics >THE VERY GROUND REEKS OF CUNNYSA is how I was able to transition them off graphic novels. We were reading Berserk prior.
>>25243439Going Postal is about a former conman being put in charge of reforming the highly dysfunctional and defunct postal system of a fantasy city. So at least one is not, unless you want to be extremely broad in your definition of 'ragtag group', 'journey', and 'beat the evil guy'.
>>25243408Please don't. You're going to make him not write more.
Any historians here? How true is this? This seems more narrative than fact. The fact that it also selectively focuses on rome instead of the multiple centuries after of kings and queens with near equivalent (maybe not idk) power is suspicious to me. Because it feels like you should find something that breaks such a pattern fairly quickly after that. And if the claim becomes "blah blah kings were set up in such a way that those born and raised into it were actually good enough" then the proposition falls apart regardless, because a detractor can simply claim, that the reason for those emperors' failures was not being raised priveleged and entitled by birth, but instead some other comfounding factor. This is something meant to be accounted for in research and science! (cringe) so I understand why a Historian may not be able to do that, since History is not an experiment, and even if it was, has so many conflicting conditions and factors that it would be hard to control for any.But then History should rarely be used as evidence of anything unless a near 1 to 1 example.Also I know this is the authors opinion and not just a character saying something deliberately foolish or brainwashed because I've seen them say something of the like on a podcast almost word for word.
>>25243467Most of our knowledge of Roman "history" comes from guys who either really liked or really hated certain rulers, so take it with a grain of salt. I like Plutarch but there are plenty of times when he confidently states things that were definitely not true.
>>25243457By evil guy I mean dark lord, ancient evil, etc. I'm not criticizing. I'm plotting a fantasy's book and I wonder if that's expected from that audience.
>>25243408remind him of when he said he would have raped the prisoners at Abu Ghraib
>>25243467It's a bit complicated. Certainly, Roman dynasties produced a lot of shitty emperors, whereas their founders tended to be fairly competent. The period of the "Good Emperors" also is widely considered to have been a genuine high point.The problem, however, is that demonstrations of "merit" often came in the form of managing to seize power through force or scheming, or some combination, and many of the emperors who did this were shit. That isn't to say they all were. Augustus is widely considered to be one of the best for instance. However, the general instability produced by undermining the legitimacy of the ruler and making every person in control of an army think they could be emperor was catastrophic.If you go outside the Empire, things become even less clear. Some of the best kings grew up expecting to rule. Plenty were incompetent. However, most kings aren't a great example for the point being made because they tended to be fairly constrained by their nobles and the Church through much of history. Ottoman history seems to support the contention here to some extent as well. I am less familiar with China. It seems like a tendency at best though.
>>25243408
>>25243507>everyone who disagrees with me is deluded and vice-addled >study after study Ok, and how does he explain martyrs? They cut out Saint Maximos the Confessor's tongue and lopped off his writing hand and still he wouldn't compromise on the nature of Christ. Origen was tortured without breaking. Saint Polycarp and Saint Justin dab all over the Roman officials threatening them with being tortured to death.No doubt, he would say this too is manipulation. Manipulation by who? The Church had no real power early on, and all the early martyrs were converts, dying for what they thought was true and good. Still manipulation? Then the claim that we are all manipulable is simply an unfalsifiable assertion.Also, the evidence on how easy it is to influence people was basically ground zero of the replication crisis, which exposed a bunch of out and out blatant falsifications as well. As Bakker says, people with certain ideologies NEEDED this to be true. Hence, "study after study.'
>>25243507Holy shit, is his actual philosophy? That's high school level shit. Did he never stop to think that if this was immediately tru there would have been no dissidents ever? People in the same cultural environment as others HAVE risen against cultural norms against all odds. Hell, half of human history is written by these people.
>>25243529If you fap to porn, you're ruled by your hormones and sex drive. If you refuse to fap, you're ruled by Christian or Islamic conditioning.The key premise is the values anti-realism. From the outset, there is no truly better or worse way to live, no truly good or evil. Once you assume this, one can never choose anything because one understands—knows—it as better. This, all choice comes down to inchoate impulse, which obviously isn't created ex nihilo.But this isn't anything actually argued to or discovered empirically. It's a metaphysical presupposition of "naturalism" and the denial of teleology.
>>25243478>>25243508Interesting I'll have to do some reddit research honestly because the fact that Historians have comfortably dubbed these guys the "Good Emperors" according to Wikipedia means I cant trust their judgement, their historical veracity? Sure? But History isnt merely objective.Another reason I was suspicious is because I remember Aurelius being called an overrated emperor so I want to investigate that.Also as for the kings being restrained by the church and nobles. How was that any less the case for Emperors, particularly the supposed "good" ones. A cursory reading of Wikipedia tells me a senate still existed during Hadrians time atleast. I guess they could just ignore them anyway, but Kings couldnt do the same?
>>25243538BTW, this is also why you never see Kellhus introspect on why anything he is doing is ultimately worth doing. At no point in the entire series do we get any reflection of why it is even worth tracking down his dad, except in wholly instrumental terms. This is why the ending makes so little sense. No ultimate motivation is ever revealed. Instead, power and advantage are continually sought to do... stuff.Why? Because they're supposed to be ubermensch power fantasies, and examples of higher intelligences. And yet they have to accept the author's philosophy. So of course they are modern moral nihilists. But then they have no reason to judge anything any better than anything else. So why act? To fulfill their passions? Nope, that gets ruled out by then being masters of their passions. So what is left? Seemingly, they seek "freedom" (as lack of determination) for its own sake. Why? Why is this good? Freedom to do what? This cannot be answered in the context of the self-refuting philosophy they're forced to embrace.
>Sanderson now writing books worse than Elantris>Tchaikovsky's books more retardedly woke than ever>Bakker imploding>GRRM hitting the 15-year-mark since the completion of Dance- there's now a longer wait between Dance and Winds than A Game of Thrones and Dance>Red God delayed again and againIs it fucking over, /sffg/?
>>25243559Everyone is suffering from Covid brain damage. Compare /lit/ pre 2020 to now and notice drop in quality.
Western authors NEED to get better illustrations.
>>25243554>But then they have no reason to judge anything any better than anything else. So why act? To fulfill their passions?This was one of the problems I had with the final Kellhus Moenghus conversation in Thousand Fold Thought, dont mean to dogpile but Im surprised I didnt give up on the series then, I wanted to see how Bakker makes that make sense.
>>25243559I'm writing a dying earth fantasy hybrid. I'll save /sffg/
Whore after all.
>>25243408define 'trigger'define 'old fart'
>>25243570I actually like the books a lot. I just think the philosophy in them is deeply flawed. If anything, it's a good argument against the point it seems to be trying to make.
40% into book ten of wot and characters still reacting to what rand did last book why I am doing this to myself this shit is never going to pay off
>>25243631Trust sandergod>>25243559>Sanderson now writing books worse than ElantrisThat was one time only
>>25243559ill make something good eventually, i just need to stop going in doomerfaggot spirals about my writing and prose quality and actually finish the damn thingi think that my style/taste-for-aesthetics is so separated from 99% of the generic fantasy schlock out there that i actually have a chance, assuming i manage to get my foot in the door>>25243578based doer, wagmi
All of you aspiring authors are white males and probably not even communists; you don't have a chance, I'm sorry.
Never mind. Reddit is horrible place to get any idea of history. I don't know why I expected anything deeper than Parroting the normie reputation of those emperors.I did learn something though, that history is a narrative built upon narratives, and this "Good emperor" narrative is almost just straight from the "horses mouth" of Machiavelli creating a narrative about the "5 Good Emperors" and supposedly despite all our modern progress. History atleast that particular part of Roman history has not evolved beyond that.
I just visited royalroad for the first time. Gonna find some fantasy/isekai web novels to read.Hopefully there isn't too much "cultivation" or "litrpg" shit.
The Wikipedia article on "Nerva-Antonine Dynasty" is so bad too. So short, and lacking in meaty info, and also zero criticisms section.
I want Bakker permabanned from 4chan so he can't shit up every single thread by verbally sucking his own dick.
https://youtu.be/MtW4n7Q3zYU?si=dlhmJF4SG83wbrU6This was the closest I could find to a moderately critical(Critical doesnt mean "mean" or "bad" or "harsh" it just means the basic fucking due dilligence of questioning your priors and investigating their validity) covering of the 5 good emperors. In this video he makes some points that kind of make me doubt that the emperors had any particularly exceptionally greater power than the Kings and Queens of the next century that would make deserving of giving these emperors the lionshare credit for the stability, as they needed to heed the senate just as much, and part of their success was guaranteed by the fact that the elites seemed to benefit the most from their rule. And 5 emperors is hardly a good enough sample to not amount it to luck, as weather was fortunate during that time, the east was weak, there were few wars, and few disease.Is it really a coincidence that the "end" of the "good reign of emperors" happened to end on the death of the one emperor where the east was angry, wars started propping up, and disease also showed, up, and all of these conditions were thrust onto a 16 year old Commodus?Are historians insane? How can you be aware of all these facts and blame Commodus rather than the conditions of his rise to rule. Shit was already starting to rile up during Marcus Aurelius' rule.Even if Commodus does genuinely make mistakes, he had to deal with problems none of the other emperors did, all while coming into power at a younger age than they did. Why do I have to consider somebody great, because they passed an easier test? We would never do that for intelligence.So either there is some information about the emperors and commodus that I dont know, that the historians know about, which I inexplicably have no access to...or all the Historians are wrong and stupid and have a childish narrative view of roman history where theyre conditioned to look up to the 5 good emperors as "good" the same way a child is conditioned to look up to their unremarkable rich dad, who doesnt really do anything, and is sometimes actually harsh and unreasonable, but gives them lots of money and lets them eat all the candy they want, and the consequences of that upbringing never rears its head until theyre so disconnected from their childhood that they lack the awareness to blame anything but their surrounding conditions, not how they got to those conditions.I think thats a good analogy from me.
>>25243559Erikson will save us with the last kharkanas book. The real king of /sffg/
>>25243559You have now noticed that zoomer-brain syndrome (a word I just make up) affects everyone, not just zoomers.
>>25242000I've been saying this for years. The SA series isn't just a fantasy, it's Bakker's summary of the collapse of philosophical meaning in the face of objective scientific rationalism. All the factions represent different schools of thought or political factions. Because he has no resolution for that philosophical problem, he has no resolution for his book. He can't write it because it would have to be a masterstroke that no one has.Either that or it's just the No God killing everyone forever, which probably wouldn't sell.
>>25243559You have now discovered that zoomer-brain syndrome (a term I just made up) affects everyone (not just zoomers), authors included. AI will be our only savior, our last bastion of clear thinking against the long dark night of ignorance.
First im told that Kings cant be compared to emperors because they had to listen to the church and nobles more, and then I do more digging and a historian on a substack tells me that actually Augustus' Principate. Meant that infact Roman Emperors were actually contrary to absolute onarchies because they had to listen to some powerful people.I mean to be fair he says Hellenistic and Indo European Kings were like that too, so that other anon isnt necessarily wrong I guess.
Why don't you guys move on and read the greatest fantasy writer of this decade? Babel and Katabasis are masterpieces
>>25243857>NYT bestsellerNo thanks. Schopenhauer always relevant.
>>25243861please, the classics you clung onto were also NYT bestsellers of their time
>>25243507Reading this. Theres actually a problem here that exposes a double set of problems I will explain after I explain the initial problem.Bakkers claims here kind of have a flaw: They imply that revolution and general change of beliefs is impossible. If "We always assume that are our particular beliefs are true no matter how lunatic (necessarily preconceived and biased word choice btw)" And if "our perspective is always the rule we use to measure the moral and cognitive propriety of other perspectives" and If all truth is socially conditioned blah blah. How is it that people ever change opinions? If people assume their beliefs are just true no matter lunacy (which I'm just charitably assuming Bakker means as "no matter how obviously wrong/ridiculous/stupid) Then why would people ever change opinions? And if everything is socially conditioned, why would society ever change. Where would that change come from unless there are people not socially conditioned by that society or resistant to social conditioning who enact change. You cant just say "another society exists and exerts power/influence" because that just raises the question. How did that other society escape the other societies social conditioning. The condition for beliefs and truth, must have come from somewhere else, something pre social. "Contral a persons beliefs and you control their actions" If it is possible for somebody to lose control of somebodys beliefs, and their actions change as a result. Then those persons possible actions arent conditioned by some overarching person with the power to instill beliefs. How is it possible that societies ever fall apart and change if its so easy to control beliefs, but also simultaneously people always assume their belief is the truth and weigh that against others. What is actually changing the belief?This is the fundamental problem with bakkers entire thesis, he chalks it up to a general vague "anxiety" people have that "points us in the direction of truth". This is also the problem with Kellhus as a character. He never actually has to explain where belief comes from or engage with where it comes from. He and Moenghus just chock it up to "society" but the problem I explained cannot be explained by "society" If it is possible for somebody to resist societal conditioning, if it is possible for an entire societies values to change. Then something fundamentally is not conditioned by society, and somebodys actions are fundamentally not controlled by the beliefs imposed on them. And if change is possible, beliefs arent merely assumed to be true no matter what (lunacy) and if ones own perspective was always the measure of others, why would they ever listen to anybody else?See the funny thing is I broadly agree with Bakker's general conclusion. His arguments are just bad. They dont account for certain deeper facets of the human mind and truth. I agree we are socially conditioned, but first I believe we are animals.
>>25243529I also assume what I talked about regarding change is sort of what this anons contention was. Hes essentially posing to Bakker "If what you say is true, where does the conviction of people whos beliefs are not broadly supported by the society they live within come from? Where is this supposed manipulation, what made their perspectives different? What conditioned them?">>25243529>Then the claim that we are all manipulable is simply an unfalsifiable assertion.This is a problem. Too much of Bakkers assertions are just sort of empty unfalsifiable trueisms.Nobody would disagree that were all manipulable, that we assume our beliefs first and foremost to be true, that we preference our perspectives over those of other people. Or in other words that "Good things are Good because theyre good".But hes not actually saying anything, hes not making an argument or justifying anything. Which is why I proposed the change problem. If his thesis doesnt account for, or explain that, then its emptier than it already is. Whatever intuitive "truth" Bakkers words appeal to, they are simply not really true. Because peoples and societies change.
>>25243864People like Nietzsche actually really only became popular after his death. Hitler and the Nazis dont count. But he was dead by then anyway
>>25243864I beg to differ.
>>25243876lets make sure our genius of this decade doesn't get forgotten
>>25243657We get a lot of shit for our kneejerk reaction to call anything that’s gay Reddit but… for real. Reddit is so fucking gay it’s the perfect way to describe smarmy faggotry that thinks it’s smarter than it actually is. The fact that they just parrot the most milquetoast takes for updoots or that they obsess over updoots to the point where they’ll literally whine about losing karma if they express the slightest of wrongthink is so hilariously pathetic I sometimes wonder if Reddit is just a bot farm. I refuse to believe most humans act that way.But yes. Reddit is an awful place to get history recs. You gotta go to old forums and old books for that shit. /his/ might be good, too, but they’ll also sperg out if they even think you’re leaning just a bit into /pol/ thought (regardless of whether you are or not)
>>25243880who?
>>25243887>/his/ might be good, too, but they’ll also sperg out if they even think you’re leaning just a bit into /pol/ thought (regardless of whether you are or not)I might go use that board for the first time ever and ask what they think about this. This is bothering me because Terra Ignota pulls this bullshit all the time where they reference some Philosopher or Historical Thought in a sort of tacit surface level way, and unfortunately because these are some of the only times the book is clearly asserting something as good or bad, true or not, valuable or not valuable. I get stuck on them because its an easy litmus test of how thoughtful a book actually is. The fact that I know the author is a historian too only makes me want to dissect it even more due to my distrust of the fallacy of appeal to authority. If a non sophisticated argument is made and I constantly find myself giving you the benefit of the doubt because, youre an academic or "well researched". Then it frustrates my brain and im likely to distrust everything you say, and I dont want to do that, because what if you've got a point.Its what makes all these reading endeavors so frustrating. All I want is a good air tight argument from these authors, but all they want to do is simply tell stories and say that certain things are good, or true, or valuable because they can write their story so that it is necessarily so.
>>25242442>narcissisthave you considered that it might be a BITCH? it Acts and Behaves like one.
>>25243559Yes, it's over. Return to your favorite social media so you can discuss the entirety of science-fiction and fantasy literature (the five megapopular authors (You) follow).
>>25243905Sure. Check /his/ out and you might wanna post a thread here on /lit/ too to see if some historyfags can point you in the right direction.
>>25243914>and you might wanna post a thread here on /lit/ too to see if some historyfags can point you in the right direction.Maybe if the /his/ one gets no replies I guess. I don't like to spam post the same thing
>>25243559Should've taken the Erikson-pill>steady releases of new books of high quality
>>25242868You made Bakkerfag so mad that he copypasted one of his favorite buzzphrases instead of any creative insult LOL
>>25243766Amen
>>25244167But what if he can't reach the voice he had in the first two books anymore?
>>25243529>explain martyrs?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactance_(psychology)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-in-the-door_techniqueIf you are deliberately told "Reject Christ, mo-fo", you all bristle and start wanking to enduring tortures for the sake of some imaginary heavenly reward.If you are led slippery-slopes into accepting one small concession after another, then you simply won't notice that your personaly has already been rewritten 180 degrees. The trick is to do it without alerting the retard.
>>25243529>Ok, and how does he explain martyrs?Suicide bombers prove Islam to be the one true religion, you heard it hear first!
>>25243554>why you never see Kellhus introspect on why anything he is doing is ultimately worth doing. At no point in the entire series do we get any reflection of why it is even worth tracking down his dadYou'll get to see at the 6th book, that the monks were so obsessed at intellectual purity of achieving the Absolute, that the 'contaminated' (upon witnessing something that doesn't match their deterministic world-view) chose to kill themselves in order not to compromise the others' project of becoming the self-moving soul.Moenghus, phoning them via his magical telepathic visions, is one such contamination. And Kellhus, like a good tunnel-visioned biorobot that he is, just went with fulfilling the directive of eliminating a potential threat.Yet at the end of 2nd book, after the circumfixion, Kellhus got possessed by Ajokli the local Satan, so his priorities altered.
>>25243559I’ve come to realize that fantasy and sci-fi are little more than prose-form 'cape shit' masquerading as literature. Much like an algorithmic feed, the spectacle of magic and immense power provides a conceptual shortcut that satisfies the brain while bypassing the need for actual depth.The problem is that many here have become so insulated by these power fantasies that you’ve lost the frequency for reality. You’ve become functionally deaf to grounded, transcendent fiction because your brains are tuned only to the easy rewards of magic systems and power-ups. When a story offers genuine human depth, it falls mute; it simply doesn't trigger the effortless hit you’ve grown addicted to.True literary genius requires no supernatural crutch to sustain interest. Masters like Dostoevsky, Chekhov, or McCarthy map the psyche with a surgical precision that creates characters more 'real' than any fireball-hurling protagonist. They offer a mirror to the soul, not a mask for it. If you ever hope to recover your capacity for genuine empathy and intellectual weight, you must stop chasing the hollow high of the supernatural. Leaving genre fiction behind isn't just a matter of taste; it is the only path for your salvation from a self-imposed state of arrested development.
>>25244206The state this post left me in, the apostol died after watching him came back from the dead, these guy go kaboom granny bazooka and never even saw muhamah
>>25244215Maximos, Origen, Polycarp and Justin were among the 12 apostles? Interdasting claim. I could've sworn all of these people lived a long, long time later than Jesus' life, death and resurrection. Polycarp was closest, he was born less than half a century after Jesus death. Didn't meet the guy or see his resurrection though.But surely you didn't just bring all those people up only to then instantly abandon them to shift to another set of martyrs, right?
>>25244178Possible, but highly unlikely. He said he reread previous 2 Kharkanas novels to "recapture cadence of the [writing] style". So the man obviously did his homework. Plus, it will also feature Kallor and I don't see how that is a bad thing.
Just finished The Will of the Many. Thought it was okay. Decently paced but does feel like it drags a bit then rushes at the end. Will start the sequel in a few days.
>>25244220Kallor is kino, him showing up in the prologue of No Life Forsaken filled me with anticipation for a larger role Walk in Shadow.
>>25243866>If "We always assume that are our particular beliefs are true no matter how lunatic (necessarily preconceived and biased word choice btw)" And if "our perspective is always the rule we use to measure the moral and cognitive propriety of other perspectives" and If all truth is socially conditioned blah blah. How is it that people ever change opinions?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_blindnessVia not noticing that your perspective has changed. You do not need to be aware of that.https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2018/08/11/were-fucked-so-now-what/"Think about the instability referenced above, the difficulty we have making our narratives collectively compelling. This wasn’t always the case. For the vast bulk of human history, our narratives were simply given. Our preliterate ancestors evolved the plasticity required to adapt their coordinating stories (over the course of generations) to the demands of countless different environments—nothing more or less. The possibility of alternative narratives, let alone ‘conscious self-creation,’ simply did not exist given the metacognitive resources at their disposal. They could change their narrative, to be sure, but incrementally, unconsciously, not so much convinced it was the only game in town as unable to report otherwise.Despite their plasticity, our narratives provided the occluded (and therefore immovable) frame of reference for all our sociocognitive determinations. We quite simply did not evolve to systematically question the meaning of our lives. The capacity to do so seems to have required literacy, which is to say, a radical transformation of our sociocognitive environment. Writing allowed our ancestors to transcend the limits of memory, to aggregate insights, to record alternatives, to regiment and to interrogate claims. Combined with narrative plasticity, literacy begat a semantic explosion, a proliferation of communicative alternatives that continues to accelerate to this present day.<...> Literacy, you could say, constitutes a form of pollution, something that disrupts preexisting adaptive equilibria. Aside from the cognitive bounty it provides, it has the long-term effect of destabilizing narratives—all narratives.">Then why would people ever change opinions?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_biasBecause of in-group belonging. You change your opinions only when at conflict between two camps, you partially agree with. Faced with math, for example, refusing such evidence would disclose you as a moron to your peers, and you do not want collective ridicule, for example.If you face some opinion, that you severely don't like and there is nothing to gain (aside from mere intellectual honesty), then you'll need to be absolutely fucking cornered into concession. Otherwise, you'll jump ship at the first miraculous chance to doubt and weasel out, no matter how ludicrous that opportunity is.
>>25244212>I’ve come to realize that fantasy and sci-fi are little more than prose-form 'cape shit'No shit nig if you cant see that at first glance you are retarded its mindless entertaintment which more complex and more simple works>If you ever hope to recover your capacity for genuine empathy and intellectual weight, you must stop chasing the hollow high of the supernatural. Leaving genre fiction behind isn't just a matter of taste; it is the only path for your salvation from a self-imposed state of arrested development.You learn empathy and intellectual weight by reading dostoevsky? Empathy comes by default in humans retard, and intellectual weight i mean congrats on reading and learning about mentally broken characters, but in what way does that make you smarter?, anyways i have a hint you could of just introspect a little and get most of dostoevsky lessons
>>25243866>The condition for beliefs and truth, must have come from somewhere else, something pre social.Indeed. Something biomechanical.https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2017/12/15/the-liars-paradox-naturalized/"Human communication, in other words, is in the business of providing *economical solutions* to various environmental problems.This observation motivates a dreadfully consequential question: What is the *most economical* way for two or more people to harmonize their environmental orientations? To communicate environmental *discrepancies*, while *taking preexisting harmonies for granted*. I don’t rehash my autobiography when I see my friends, nor do I lecture them on the physiology of human cognition or the evolution of the human species. I ‘dish dirt.’ I bring everyone ‘up to speed.’What if we were to look at language as primarily a *discrepancy minimization device*, as a system possessing exquisite sensitivities (via, say, predictive processing) to the desynchronization of orientations?In such a system, the sufficiency of preexisting harmonies—our shared physiology, location, and training—would go without saying. I update my friends and they update me. The same can be said of the system itself: the sufficiency of language, it’s biomechanical capacity to effect synchronization would also go without saying—short, that is, the detection of discrepancies. I update my friends and they update me, and so long as everyone agrees, nary a word about truth need be spoken.Taking a discrepancy view, in other words, elegantly explains why truth is the communicative default: the economical thing is to neglect our harmonized orientations—which is to say, to implicitly presume their sufficiency. It’s only when we *question* the sufficiency of these communications that truth-talk comes into play."
>>25244226Your 'hint' that one can replicate Dostoevsky through 'a little introspection' is the ultimate cope of the functionally illiterate. It’s like claiming you don’t need a map of the ocean because you’ve stared at a puddle in your driveway.You talk about 'intellectual weight,' yet you can barely navigate basic syntax. Your post is a disaster of run-on sentences, missing punctuation, and the incoherent rambling of someone whose brain has been smoothed over by too many magic systems. You haven't 'introspected' anything; you’ve just mistaken your own shallow impulses for profound thought.If you think empathy is a 'default setting' that doesn't require cultivation, you’re the living proof that it isn't.
>>25244226Most retarded post of the thread. And we've had nothing but Bakkerpostings so far.
>>25243866>You cant just say "another society exists and exerts power/influence" because that just raises the question. How did that other society escape the other societies social conditioning.https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2018/04/29/the-crash-of-truth-a-critical-review-of-post-truth-by-lee-c-mcintyre/"The curious and the informed, meanwhile, no longer need suffer the company of the incurious and the uninformed, and vice versa. The presumptive moral superiority of the former stands revealed: and in ever greater numbers the latter counter-identify, with a violence aggravated by phenomena such as the ‘online disinhibition effect.’ <...>. Populations begin spontaneously self-selecting. Big data identifies the vulnerable, who are showered with sociocognitive cues—atrocity tales to threaten, caricatures to amuse—engineered to provoke ingroup identification and outgroup alienation. In addition to ‘backfiring,’ counter-arguments are perceived as weapons, evidence of outgroup contempt for you and your own. And as the cognitive tactics become ever more adept at manipulating our biases, ever more scientifically informed, and as the cognitive technology becomes ever more sophisticated, ever more destructive of our ancestral cognitive habitat, the break between the two groups, we should expect, will only become more, not less, profound."
>>25244233I meant you problably are as disgusting as the average dostoevsky character so instrospect gets you the same resultsAnd if you dont have empathy by age 8 you are a psycho or an asperger retard like it seems you are>you can barely navigate basic syntax. Your post is a disaster of run-on sentences, missing punctuation, and the incoherent rambling of someone whose brain has been smoothed over by too many magic systemsFuck, you got me next time i will dedicate time to write pretty and correct for a 4chan post i forgot how important that was
>>25244245I accept your defeat.
>>25244248Ok, I want to break away from SFF. Can you recommend me some great literary fiction, please? I've already read Dostoevsky and McCarthy.
>>25244248Dude you learned empathy from a book, you were born losing
>>25244253Read Watership Down and The Wind in the Willows.
>>25243806Yeah well... I guess we found out that it isn't actually zommer brains that are the issue. It's technology at large and it affects all.
>>25244253Read Captain Underpants, The Stinky Steve series by PT Evans, Morning Glory Milking Farm and Diary of a Wimpy Kid
>>25244253The Golden Ass by Apuleius>b-but this is a fantasy adventureYes
>>25242275>Orthocuck Christian shitdropped
>>25244253Make a gentle start, read genre fiction by literary fiction authors, like Kazuo Ishiguro>Never Let Me Go>The Buried Giant
>>25244253If you're an incel, read Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet. If not, Tolstoy.
>>25244212It's common opinion that fantasy is a form of escapism or just a vibe for psychological works. I think it's only true for some fantasy. I can't care less about murderer's psychology, already read Dostoevsky at school, thanks, same goes for philosophical meandering on things most people internalize as children like people die when they are old. I want to read about original words I can't visit in real life. I don't want stories I can read in a news article or a history book or listen if I visit friend's marriage party. I hate when a fantasy world is just Iceland or Italy, I've already been there, thanks. If I pick a book I want something I can't get without a book. That's why I only read scifi/fantasy/horror.
As of 2026, Brandon Sanderson is frequently cited as the premier fantasy writer due to his prolific output, expansive Cosmere universe (Stormlight Archive), and active community engagement.
>>25244253Reading 'Journey to the end of the night' right now and it's so fucking good. Every page has a striking line or two.
>>25244560The whole saga, every part of it is all just too boring for me
>>25244253Confederacy of Dunces is about a psychotic, 30 year old neckbeard being forced by his mother to get a job, and all the cascading problems he causes. It's really funny.Flannery O'Conner short stories are fantasy-ish. They're southern gothic.If you want something sadder, there's The Death of Ivan Ilyach
>>25244241Hey Scott, do you really think people are more tribal due to AI and social media today than they were during Jim Crow, or back when families split up and would never talk to each other again over marrying between Christian denominations? Are people with limited or no access to the internet, and the evils of social media and AI, say in the rural areas of the Central African Republic or DRC less tribal?Think on that a moment.
>>25243873Bakker sees himself as "naturalizing the human sciences." The problem is that mostly what he does is spin narratives where he just reasserts his same assumptions, with some neuroscience jargon over it. He cherry picks some findings in the social sciences and then gives them a "plausible" explanation in terms of biology. "Plausible" if you already accept his world view anyhow. Ironically, his hobby horse has him picking from areas hit hardest by the replication crisis, where literally most of the 'peer reviewed findings' are likely false or at least over-stated.There is merit in that sort of work. If you embrace a paradigm, you need to explain how it would make sense of the world. The problem is that he seems to think this sort of work represents positive evidence for the paradigm. It doesn't. It assumes it is true, than explains the world in terms of its truth. You can see this when he posts here or on his blog, and it's a problem that is far from unique to him. It's a problem across the sciences, where people tend to get no training in actual argument. Likely stories and mounding up citations are confused for demonstration. Basically, it's a whole project in question begging and confirmation bias.Also, people should really look at Diederik Stapel, Frencesca Gino, the stuff on how hugely influential Stanford Prison Experiment was essentially faked, etc. Scott's point holds here, just against his own position. People got what they wanted to hear, the post-modern or mechanist reduction of the individual, so they didn't complain about obviously made up data. Scott is right, it isn't "a few bad apples." The system is set up to spew out ideological bias and false positives. The problem is, this isn't largely le evil tech billionaires and AI doing it, it's glorious Enlightenment academia, which has set up incentives that literally prioritize false findings and falsification.The point in these stories is that these people were famous, and so big targets, and doing absolutely incredibly lazy, blatant falsifications, and the institution was never going to catch it. Only disgruntled low prestige challengers with a bone to pick uncovered what was obvious fraud, and even then it took years.This is a major problem on any field where error doesn't come with obvious consequences. It's a good deal better in medicine, engineering, or even physics and economics, where failure is more obvious.
>>25244615>do you really think people are more tribal due to AI and social media todayhttps://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2016/11/09/the-death-of-wilson-how-the-academic-left-created-donald-trump-2/"Before, when you had chauvinist impulses, you had to fly them by *whoever was available*. Pre-internet, extreme views were far more likely to be vetted by more mainstream attitudes. Simple geography combined with the limitations of analogue technology had the effect of tamping the prevalence of such views down. But now Tim wouldn’t think of hassling Wilson over the fence, not when he could do a simple Google and find whatever he needed to confirm his asinine behaviour. Our chauvinistic impulses no longer need to run any geographically constrained social gauntlet to find articulation and rationalization. No matter how mad your beliefs, evidence of their sanity is only ever a few keystrokes away."https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2016/10/30/snuffing-the-spark-a-nihilistic-account-of-moral-progress/"Technology, as the homily goes, ‘brings us closer’ across a variety of cognitive dimensions. Moral progress, then, can be understood as the sustained effect of deep (or ancestrally unavailable) social information cuing various ingroup responses–people recognizing fractions of themselves (procedural if not emotional bits) in those their grandfathers would have killed. The competitive benefits pertaining to cooperation suggest that ingroup trending cultures would gradually displace those trending otherwise. <...>But accepting the contingency of moral progress means accepting vulnerability to radical transformations in our information environment. Nothing guarantees moral progress outside the coincidence of certain capacities in certain conditions. *Change those conditions*, and you change the very function of human moral cognition."
>>25243866His general thesis about manipulation presupposes, rather than shows that there is no real standard of virtue or vice (human excellence of flourishing) we have access too. Once you have simply assumed this sort of anti-realism paired with radical constructivism, literally anything can be described as manipulation and power struggle. That's a pretty bedrock insight for later Continental thought.The problem is that he is presenting this as some sort of conclusion that is being argued to, and not only that, but "what science says." He would be on way stronger ground if he just said it was a logical consequence of certain metaphysical assumptions, or actually tried to argue for those assumptions themselves.
>>25244563I did hear it get called boring before but I just don't get it. Sometimes it's laugh out loud funny too.
>>25244631That's a non-answer. Certainly there were a hell of a lot more race riots and lynchings 100 years ago.And what exactly is "moral progress" for an eliminitivist whose committed to mechanistic naturalism? So much of this seems to be "le scientific debunking for thee, real morality for me."That is, sophistry.
>>25244638>And what exactly is "moral progress" for an eliminitivist whose committed to mechanistic naturalism?Obviously, if morality is an evolutionary mechanism that ensures ingroup cooperation (against some outgroup competitors), then the more inclusive this "ingroup" is, the more complex the mechanism becomes, the more "progressive" the morality gets. There, your non-normative definition.obviously it has downsides.https://www.jrrtolkien.it/english/an-interview-with-r-s-bakker/"Once ‘God is dead,’ which is to say, religion no longer possesses the social credibility to enforce canonical value judgments, its either liberalism or war. With the former horn, only appetite, the need to feed and fornicate, is left to assure cooperation. Consumption.The Inchoroi are what we become on a nightmarish extrapolation of this, our present system. Humanity post purpose, beyond good and evil.Your average fantasy reader, basically."Also, per "The Judging Eye":"Caste-nobles from Cingulat. Runaway slaves from Ce Tydonn. Fanim heretics from Girgash. It was as though common origins were all that guaranteed civilization, a shared language of life, and that everything was fury and miscommunication otherwise. Hungers—that was all these men had in common.Instincts. What had made these men wild wasn't the wilderness, or even the mad savagery of the Sranc, it was the **inability to trust anything more than the bestial** in one another.*Fear,* he told himself. *Fear and lust and fury... Trust in these, old man.* It seemed the only commandment a place such as Marrow could countenance."
>>25244565Kek this made me want to read Dunces.
>>25242891Pretty sure he means he spent the 2nd trilogy undoing everything that happens in the first one, leaving us on a cliffhanger, then fuck off to do a new series. Personally i dont give a fuck, his writing completely degraded and now feels like a parody of itself, with a side of girlbossing. Authors should be banned from social media, not once did taking reddit/twitter/4chan feedback resulted in a better book
Why the fuck do you keep quoting that hacks books retard, he lost his marbles and was always a poser. STFU
>>25244662I thought success was just defined in terms of whatever survives. Now you're contradicting yourself.And why are you wasting your time weeping over the loss of a non-normative standard? In virtue of what is "more complexity" and larger scope better? Couldn't these just as easily be maladaptive past some tipping point? Indeed, they certainly DO seem to be maladaptive is survival is our sole metric for success, for better or worse. So, by your own metric, "progressive morality" might as easily be seen as a disease.And yet you weep over it. Curious. It's almost like you're incapable of living like you have the courage of your convictions, like all radical skeptics. Almost as if the human intellect is informed by truths counter to these dogmas.
>>25244219No reply. Coherence has ended. No-God.
>>25244713>I thought success was just defined in terms of whatever survives.>>25242290>I finally realized that you’ve been reading my descriptive claims of what science does when it infiltrates a domain as normative. I’m just saying this is what has historically happened, and no one has yet given me a plausible argument as to why any traditional form of cognizing will prove resistant.>>25244713>In virtue of what is "more complexity" and larger scope better? Couldn't these just as easily be maladaptive past some tipping point?They could, and they absolutely are brittle. Nothing guarantees the current situation won't collapse from a sudden camel straw.>>25244631>But accepting the contingency of moral progress means accepting vulnerability to radical transformations in our information environment. Nothing guarantees moral progress outside the coincidence of certain capacities in certain conditions. *Change those conditions*, and you change the very function of human moral cognition.>>25244713>In virtue of what is "more complexity" and larger scope better?'Better/worse' is a normativity-talk. It is the way it is.https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2016/02/08/the-zombie-enlightenment/"But if we set aside our traditional fetish for ‘reason’ and think of post-Medieval European society as a kind of *information processing system*, a zombie society, the story actually looks quite different <....>On an information processing view, in other words, the European Enlightenment did not so much free up individuals as cognitive capacity. Once again, we need to appreciate the zombie nature of this view, how it elides ethical dimensions. On this view, traditional chauvinisms represent maladaptive optima, old fixes that now generate more problems than they solve. Groups were not so much oppressed, on this account, as underutilized. What we are prone to call ‘moral progress’ in folk political terms amounts to the optimization of collective neurocomputational resources."
>>25244713>And yet you weep over it. Curious.https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/the-augmentation-paradox/"The more you ‘improve’ some ancestral capacity, the more you degrade all ancestral capacities turning on the ancestral form of that capacity."https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2012/05/24/inchoroi-love-song/"And the pharmakon is growing. Now, we are entering an era which will see HUMAN nature become thoroughly compliant to HUMAN desire, and so dwell in the shadow of yet another catastrophic consequence: the Semantic Apocalypse.The potential problem with rendering HUMAN nature compliant to HUMAN desire is quite obvious: given that HUMAN desire is rooted in HUMAN nature, the power to transform HUMAN nature according to HUMAN desire becomes the power to transform HUMAN desire according to HUMAN desire. This is a cornerstone of what troubles so-called ‘bioconservatives’ like Francis Fukuyama, for instance: the possibility of ‘desire run amok’—or put differently, the breakdown of the consensual *values* required for liberal democratic society."
this place has been filled with paragraphs latelynot a big fan of this
>>25244753>The potential problem with rendering HUMAN nature compliant to HUMAN desire is quite obvious: given that HUMAN desire is rooted in HUMAN nature, the power to transform HUMAN nature according to HUMAN desire becomes the power to transform HUMAN desire according to HUMAN desire. This is a cornerstone of what troubles so-called ‘bioconservatives’ like Francis Fukuyama, for instance: the possibility of ‘desire run amok’—or put differently, the breakdown of the consensual *values* required for liberal democratic society."I recently encountered a porn clip of some kind of 'pornstar birthday party' where this whore of a woman gets fucked infront of like some 300~ cheering people. That alone made me want to wipe America off the map. There has to be some line to degeneracy no?
>>25244774>incel wants to kill 300 million people because someone had sex (something he'll never get to experience)You should ask your psychiatrist if wanting to kill people is a healthy response to the knowledge that two consenting adults had sexual congress.
>>25244774>That alone made me want to wipe America off the mapYou failed your heterosexuality test.
>>25242991Based. I'm going to read the whole Elric saga during my holidays.
>>25244565>If you want something sadder, there's The Death of Ivan IlyachOr Kreutzer Sonata. Man, these Russians were miserable.
>>25244665It's genuinely great
>>25244807Yeah, imagine coming for some quality fantasy recommendations and seeing guys discussing your homework books.
>>25244820sorry we interrupted your blog, scott
>>25244773bakkerfag went back to samefagging and spamming as hard as possible yet again
>>25244225Not only does this not explain anything, it also isnt an explanation consistent with the prior things Bakker said. Its incoherent. The above things you stated is just irrelevant baseless fluff reinforcing the bias behind the nonsense he said in the first place. Its still debated, and there are a multitude of arguments against the idea that language or writing has any significant relation to consciousness and awareness. I'm not spoonfeeding you the arguments because if youre not aware of them youve already exposed yourself to talking about something you dont know enough about beyond your narrow framework.And confirmation bias doesnt explain anything. You dont understand what that word means or what I was saying.>If you face some opinion, that you severely don't like and there is nothing to gain (aside from mere intellectual honesty), then you'll need to be absolutely fucking cornered into concession. Otherwise, you'll jump ship at the first miraculous chance to doubt and weasel out, no matter how ludicrous that opportunity is.I'm not even going to bother. You're so fucking stupid and think you understand more than you do that its a waste of time. Nice way to sidestep the entire point by skipping the hard part and positing your retarded made up assumptions as explanations.Anybody can make up premises. Actually proving them and making the connection to the conclusion, not simply assuming them and their relation to the conclusion is the hard part. Retard.
>>25244820>homework booksNope, I had to read Poe's short stories in high school. Good times.
>>25244629>It assumes it is true, than explains the world in terms of its truth. Eggfuckingsactly.Ive been trying to mine this retard spamming lengthy bakker quotes of an ACTUAL FUCKING ARGUMENT. Not statements, not claims, not fucking verses and preaching. ACTUAL FUCKING PREMISE PREMISE CONCLUSION. And he keeps just spamming "God said we should use language to communicate ideas to eachother...this harmonizes...therefore truth isnt even part of the equation...therefore truth only arises out of questioning..."You then ask him. "What? what are you talking about? if something is only true insofar as it communicates idea, where does the questioning and disagreement come from? How can anything else come from outside the socialy constructed ideas that harmonize and synchronize what we agree about the enviroment".Its just stupid intuition babble thats wholly empty and retarded. It doesnt actually say anything at all, it just vaguely describes norms and conditions. Thats why it cant explain how societies change. How and where differing opinions and frameworks come from if everyting is a circular system of reinforced made up social truths.And "biomechanical" isnt an explanation, since if we all come from the same biomechanics, which we condition and explain with language, then where do the different interpretations, and changed opinions come from?The retard keeps explaining things as if explanation is argument. Hes just spewing out information without context, without relevance.I actually have a very very deep elaborate argument against this idea and against this problem of engaging with "truth". Which is the ironic thing too. I agree with most of his claims on the face of it. I also dont believe truth exists, I also believe its conditioned by language, and yet I have completely different arguments and basis for that because Ive actually directly read philosophers who have read other philosophers who read other philosophers from different times who all built on eachother by constantly responding to eachother and coming to conclusions developing on or being critical of prior ideas.I was going to elaborate but I honestly forgot my point with the philosophers
>>25244788Now see this alone isnt the problem.The problem is when this level of degeneracy is easily accessible to the youth.
>>25244793How do you feel about the idea of your sis getting banged infront of hundreds of people? It's Bakkeresque
>>25244829>Not only does this not explain anythingYou are not very smart then. My condolences.>Its still debated, and there are a multitude of arguments against the idea that language or writing has any significant relation to consciousness and awareness.If you transmit your cultural dogmas via, say, oral epics, then those change with time. You simply cannot notice that your dogmas/beliefs/measures are different now.It does not have to be related to language or writings even.Episodic memories can unconsciously get changed either by a single individual (confabulation) or by the whole group (Mandella effect).>just irrelevant baseless fluffYou've been presented with two ways the "beliefs" change:-subconsciously, without being brought to awareness, yet staying attuned to environment-consciously, via a stark contradiction with your group or environmentSince the discrepancy minimization device >>25244227 is as cheapskate as possible, any self-aware alteration to beliefs will meet resistance. Nobody likes when some fucking Socrates acts like a gadfly and forces you to doublecheck things. Cognitive strain is unwelcome.
>>25244885>300 million people should be killed because I was able to find pornography (I was looking for pornography because I have no impulse control and I feel guilty and cannot handle my feelings without externalized anger)This is another thing you should talk to your shrink about
>>25244750This is circular. How to have a Gen X Boomer existential crisis:>Assume nihilism as a inviolable premise you hold on to like any fundamentalist.>"Discover" this leads to nihilism.>Cry about AI chat bots.Bud, the satanic mind virus destroying meaning is YOUR dogma. The chat bots are just a symptom. Reject Satan, it isn't too late.
>>25244857>And "biomechanical" isnt an explanation, since if we all come from the same biomechanics, which we condition and explain with language, then where do the different interpretations, and changed opinions come from?Your brain is constructed similar enough to another human's brain. Similar-ish enough, so that you can successfully emulate/predict the other person's responses for the bulk majority of the time. Yet not identical (since you are clearly a retard, while I am not). Hence noise and errors. Discrepancies.
>>25244897Well, as long as it isn't "Cry to AI chatbots"..
>>25244887https://youtu.be/EzmPEBDyjWY?t=71
>>25244891>AngerIt's justified repulsion.>I was looking for pornography because I have no impulse control and I feel guiltyYou know you are actually convincing me more and more. Now that I think of it, American porn companies are the reason I was ever exposed to porn in the first place. Those Jewish porn merchants in America abducted my 9 year old penis, and haven't let go of it since. I think I have some justified dislike of them for subjecting me to their degeneracy actually.
>>25244912>I started watching porn when I was 9, this is entirely the fault of the Jews, therefore everyone else should dieCrazy people say the craziest things. When I was 9, I was really into Pokémon cards personally
Hey, Bakkerbros, looks like AI is holding a grudge.
>>25244924So this a children can consent to sex argument you are making? Interesting. Let me say this again. I think you should be wiped off the map
>>25244897>>Assume nihilism as a inviolable premise>Bud, the satanic mind virus destroying meaning is YOUR dogma.https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2013/01/23/zizek-hollywood-and-the-disenchantment-of-continental-philosophy/"My own position might be summarized as a kind of ‘Good-Luck-Chuck’ argument. Either you posit an occult brand of reality special to you and go join the Christians in their churches, or you own up to the inevitable. The fate of the transcendental lies in empirical hands now. There is no way, short of begging the question against science, of securing the transcendental against the empirical. Imagine you come up with, say, Argument A, which concludes on non-empirical Ground X that intentionality cannot be a ‘cognitive illusion.’ The problem, obviously, is that Argument A can only take it on faith that no future neuroscience will revise or eliminate its interpretation of Ground X. And that faith, like most faith, only comes easy in the absence of alternatives–of imagination.The notion of using transcendental speculation to foreclose on possible empirical findings is hopeless. Speculation is too unreliable and nature is too fraught with surprises. One of the things that makes the Blind Brain Theory so important, I think, is the way its mere existence reveals this new thetic landscape. By deriving the signature characteristics of the first-personal out of the mechanical, it provides a kind of ‘proof of concept,’ a demonstration that post-intentional theory is not only possible, but potentially powerful. As a viable alternative to intentional thought (of which transcendental philosophy is a subset), it has the effect of dispelling the ‘only game in town illusion,’ the sense of necessity that accompanies every failure of philosophical imagination. It forces ‘has to be’ down to the level of ‘might be’…You could say the *mere possibility* that the Blind Brain Theory might be empirically verified drags the *whole of Continental philosophy into the purview of science*. The most the Continental philosopher can do is match their intentional hopes against my mechanistic fears. Put simply, the grand old *philosophical* question of what we are no longer belongs to them: It has fallen to science."
>>25244932See, when you're insane, you think a non-sequitur like this makes perfet sense. Normal, healthy people just don't see child sex when someone else talks about Pokémon cards.I honestly don't think you should be here. I will one last time implore you to talk to your psychiatrist, and with that I will leave you to it.So, how about that /sffg/ huh?
>>25244902Why would that make a difference? If nothing is truly better or worse, just do whatever you like. After all, what you'll do is just atoms and fields churning anyhow, right? That's what the dogmas say. So do whatever. There is no such thing as guilt, innocence, ugliness, or even truth. Don't call it a grave. It's the future you chose.
>>25244937>My view IS hecking science! Anyone who disagrees is disagreeing with SCIENCE!!!Wow, keep repeating it and it might become true Scott. Your shit isn't even popular with scientists and is LESS popular now than when you started. Maybe they know something you don't.Literal fucking dualism and panpsychism poll higher than eliminitivism. It's an ideology that is dying with Gen X because it was always based on sheer commitment to a metaphysics supported by nothing other than faith. You were always just as religious as "the Christians," you just happen to belong to an unpopular heresy.
>>25244820>quality>fantasyThere's like 5 of those. If you haven't read them by now you're ngmi
holy shit, reading all these bakker blog quotes has totally ruined the series for me. embarrassing shit.
>>25244944>If nothing is truly better or worseIncorrect premise.The correct one: if some material fucker can hijack your sense of better or worse.>If nothing is truly better or worseYou are conflating your brain-toolkit with how the world is. Better or worse, is how you don't shove your hand into the flame. (Those who do, win Darwin award, leaving no offspring with such an autopilot)>>25244951>>My view IS hecking science!>>25244937>match their intentional hopes against my mechanistic fears>the way its mere existence reveals this new thetic landscape.>It forces ‘has to be’ down to the level of ‘might be’
>>25244965>If I just assert things, that counts as argument. And refuting and contradicting myself is fine because it's science. Whatever I say is science. Even if scientists don't tend to agree with it. And since science is truth and my view is science, I am always right.It's like talking to my fundy relatives.>The correct one: if some material fucker can hijack your sense of better or worse.Any teaching, formation, convincing, is always manipulation and dominance when you assume nihilism. We already covered this. It's a commonly known consequence. Keep up.
>>25244979Scientism is often like fundamentalism because the hardcore devotee has little time for the actual source of their authority. So, fundamentalists tend to interpret the Bible of Koran however it suits them, with no real respect for theology, and so too, the adherent of scientism tends to have little time for any scientist who doesn't agree with them. They are too busy scanning the scriptures to find things they can interpret as evidence of their righteousness.
>>25244979>Even if scientists don't tend to agree with it.Your reading comprehension is abominable. You've been literally responded with a proof of concept: there is a scientific theory of how intentionality can arise out of the empirical.Regardless of whether it turns out to be correct or not, it by its sheer existence reallocates your beliefs from "must be so" into "might be". Because what you have smugly considered to be absolutely inevitable, now is merely one possibilty among potentially infinitely many.And *this very act of reallocating* is what renders your position to be faulty.
>>25244937Could anything falsify Blind Brain Theory? I get the picture that the answer is no.
>>25244998How? Again, no clear argument. Just logical lacuna.We somehow moved from:>Eliminitivism might be proven empirically Which is questionable, it seems potentially unfalsifiable.To:>Therefore all other theories are rendered faulty.Help me follow the logic there bud. You did a degree, surely you can spell it out.
>>25244912>Those Jewish porn merchants in America abducted my 9 year old penisHot.
>>25245009Blind Brain Theory relies on the premise of information sufficiency. Basically, that you are seeing squircles, because your brain is too lazy to differentiate between squares and circles, so it defaults to either one or the other.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWfFco7K9v8All your intentional concepts are products of such laziness.To disprove BBT, one would have to, for example, prove that the brain does not try minimize information via cheap and dirty heuristics. If we were perfect-rationality homo economicus, for example.
>>25244939You replied mockingly with "I started watching porn when I was 9, this is entirely the fault of the Jews" which implies that you think its the fault off the child and hand waving it away as if it's not a form of child abuse that a child is exposed to porn at that age. Daily reminder: Your goverment is run by pedos and it seems to be trickling down.
/ssfg/ - philosophy
>>25245020>How? Again, no clear argument.Because while negative transcendental argument sounds plausible, the moment you try to formulate a positive transcendental argument you will spawn an infinity of equally plausible (i.e. equally useless) competing theories. Which reveals all intentionality-speak to be pure garbage.Once a scientific theory has been introduced, it is now your turn to prove that your precious theory can deliver and explain it better than a scientific one. And you will fail to do so, because philosophy has been doing nothing but blabbering for over 2500 years, while science has reshaped the world in just ~150.
>>25244998>Because what you have smugly considered to be absolutely inevitableI haven't made any positive statement. I've just pointed out that yours are self-refuting, contradictory, rely on shitty non-arguments (largely just screaming that it is science), and tend to engage in endless question begging. Also, absolute fuckloads of confirmation bias show through in your blog.You seem to think that being able to interpret evidence in terms of your paradigm is evidence of that paradigms' truth. Anyone can do that. Indeed, a paradigm wouldn't be very successful without it. Better to ask, what could possible falsify it?But go check the PhilPapers Survey, which is mostly analytic, and mostly athiest. Even in that friendly context, eliminitivism is an extreme minority position. It is multiple times less popular than even dualism and panpsychism. Even in that friendly context, physicalist theory of mind only has a narrow majority. There is overwhelming agreement that the Chinese room doesn't understand anything, etc.Now, are most philosophers who actually secured tenure just dumber than you? Are they not aware of the same evidence? Are they all, as you tend to imply as your go to strategy, simply involved in vice-addled psychological coping while you stare proudly into truth with strength? Why are you not cognitively addled the way they are?The heavy reliance on arguments from psycho analysis are, if anything, evidence of the weakness of the position. Those sorts of arguments are incredibly easy to construct. Whereas, if one accepts that one's own cognitive capacities are every bit as addled and hopeless as one's opponents, then one loses all warrant for believing the original theory. Again, its either self-refuting, or special pleading (shot through with logical leaps and fallacies of equivocation).Here is an inference to the more obvious explanation. You have a minority view among experts because the theory simply isn't convincing. And your particular arguments don't convince anyone outside fan boys because they are bad. Indeed, they aren't even arguments most of the time.There is a reason work similar to yours, most notably Sapolsky's latest turd on free will, was absolutely excoriated by professional philosophers, and lapped up by Redditors having their biases confirmed.
>>25245053What makes your theory scientific Scott? Because it refers to neuroscience? They ALL do that.You are still conflating your metaphysical presupposition with empirical findings. You are still relying on:>My claim is uniquely scientific. Nothing else is science. So if technology works, I am right.None of this follows. And that you keep repeating it tells me you have nothing else to lean on. Sad.
>>25245029>Basically, that you are NOT seeing squircles, because your brain is too lazy to differentiate THE IN-between OF squares and circlestypo, apologies
>>25245063>>25245053BTW, if the strategy here is to say that a "scientific' theory assumes eliminitivism or something like it, you are just guilty of yet another fallacy of equivocation, baiting with the methodology and cultural phenomenon of "science" and switching to your preferred set of metaphysical dogmas.
>>25245029Ok, what is the logical connection between:>Man's cognitive architecture minimizes information via cheap and dirty heuristicsAnd all the extra metaphysical baggage you are assuming? I'm not seeing it.
>>25245063>What makes your theory scientificScientific theories can plug into each other easily. They also can be falsified.Philosophical theories are unfalsifiable and mutually exclusive. They are a product of stubbornly asking questions like "do green ideas sleep furiously?". Any answers you get here are a systematic indicator of the inquiry crashing down.>>25245055>I haven't made any positive statement.Any attempt to defend anything other than eliminativism, is a positive statement of the existence of normativity. And normativity is untenanble, because of the supernatural nature of its posits, underdetermination and the lack of decisive practical applications
IS THIS THE THREAD THAT WAS PROMISED WHEN I JOINED /LIT/ ALL THOSE YEARS AGO?
>>25245077>>minimizes information via cheap and dirty heuristics>And all the extra metaphysical baggage you are assuming?The absence of information is not equal to the information about absence. Hence, neglect. Hence, false causality.
Before. I simply thought that Bakker was stupid, but had cool prose. Now I genuinely think he is insane, whether this is Bakker spamming the quotes or not I have no idea. He is insane by mere association that whatever retard is spamming the quotes, fundamentally lacks the self awareness to understand that he is employing circular arguments and begging the question "See, actually I don't have to prove anything, you have to prove that its not possible for my asserted theory with zero justified basis, just a declared correct interpretation of the facts, is not possible, no I will not make an argument or orient these facts in a way that actually says something, I will assume my interpretation of these facts to be true then formulate a theory around these facts that explains, not proves them, and if you cant prove that my made up assumptions are not true then Im correct".What the fuck is the difference at a certain point between this retardation and a Christian Asserting that a Demon is possesing you is the reason why somebody is schizophrenic? You can never technically disprove them, because theyre interpreting a set of "facts" around an assumption that necessarily validates their overarching belief system, and theres no way to definitely prove there ISNT a demon there so.This is just the Betrand Russel Teapot analogy problem.At that point the theory is only true because theres a possibility for people to believe its true due to their preconceived bias.Which, if Bakkers entire spiel exists as a social experiment to prove that "wow people can make truth claims about things without actually saying anything true and it can be believed...oooooh society is soooo manipulable".Then bravo, you've created a self fulfilling prophecy you fucking retard.
American sf is a goitre on the oesophagus of true romance.
>>25245088>Any attempt to defend anything other than eliminativism, is a positive statement of the existence of normativity.No it isn't. Mackie's error theory doesn't require eliminitivism. Neither does emotivism. Neither does Hume, in what is arguably an anti-realist position (or something very close).This statement is, frankly, bizarre.>And normativity is untenanble, because of the supernatural nature of its posits, underdetermination and the lack of decisive practical applications.Normativity isn't supernatural in most understandings, so I have no idea where you are getting that from. Hell, even in classical Christian and Islamic thought it is natural. It is only extrinsic and supernatural under voluntarism, which is, ironically, what your own position is intellectually descended from.As for predictive power, you couldn't even have medicine, public health, or any other technologies you go on about as demonstrating your own position without practical reasoning about better or worse. Science itself would be impossible without notions of *good* evidence, *good* argument, and the notion that truth is *better* than falsity. What could possibly have more demonstrable support?Again, the very fact that you can read all of science and technological development, which are prima facie goal oriented endeavors, as actually, in reality, really being just mechanism, just shows how your position immunizes itself to falsification in in exactly the same way any pseudoscience does. The fact that science and technology can improve human life, in accordance with human choices and desires, somehow becomes evidence of eliminitivism.It's not a scientific theory at all. It's a speculative one.
>>25245107I asked for a logical connection, or at least a conceptual one, not a restatement of the thesis.I am going to take this as: "I cannot provide any clear inference."
>>25245129>I asked for a logical connection, or at least a conceptual one, not a restatement of the thesis.Dont bother. I literally dont think he understands what an argument is.I explained to him that he assumes his premises are true and doesnt establish a logical connection to a conclusion (necessary or sufficient conditions for X to be true) and he just skipped over that.I also think If im noticing his posts properly that he went on to say that Philosophy is unfalsifiable so its all untrue, and that science can answer questions that Philosophy used to, even though it definitionally cannot. So I think this is just some weird mentally ill dude that doesnt actually understand science or philosophy, but is using science as something else, like some weird well of confirmation biasing information.Its also why he keeps ignoring that guy talking about the replication crisis, or the other guy noting how most scientists dont agree with him.He doesnt actually understand what science is. Its why he said it can answer questions philosophy cant. He has this warped understanding of everything its so fucking weird, and effectively makes it impossible to communicate with him.17th century Christians were probably unironically more reasonable than this guy.He also does this weird thing of constantly reframing conclusions and ideas that philosophy already arrived at like hundreds of years ago "You cant trust the senses completely" as evidence of his conclusions, while also dismissing philosophy as illegitimate because its unfalsifiable and continental philosophy loses to science or something.Its like hes not aware how much science fundamentally borrows from philosophy to justify its axioms that cannot be justified by science. Its all just fucking insane and juvenile. I dont believe a 40+ year old man can read enough science and philosophy and think this simply.
Kingdoms of Death was a wonderful book. Jumping right into Ashes of Man.
>>25245148I'm debating just skipping to Sun Eater because nobody is answering the Roman Question and its bothering me too much to read Will to Battle.
>>25245148You and me been reading the same shit
>>25245118Exactly the point I was making. Plus, "manipulation" is just mechanism here, same as literally *any* physical interaction. Wasn't the normativity of terms like manipulation and toxic supposed to be necessarily supernatural woo woo?On this account, all teaching becomes the same thing as indoctrination. It collapses any distinction between reality and appearances, and then asserts itself as reality. And of course, anyone who disagrees is said to be ruled by delusion because the "brain" is incapable of knowledge—which is another self-refuting point! If our brains are incapable of insight, then why trust 'science?' Because it 'works?' Define "works" and "success" without normativity. These claims about working and success are relying on the very same normativity that is being denied as delusion. We cannot claim all normativity is delusion, then justify our claim with appeals to delusion. The other answer is "because it reproduces." Except it doesn't. My city is full of Muslims, while eliminitivism was barely popular in tiny niches for less than 20 years, with a crowd who, let's be real, is not generally breeding much. It doesn't reproduce. >>25245088You didn't answer the question here at all: >>25245063Why is your theory uniquely scientific?Instead you defaulted to claiming that anyone who denies your theory is committed to supernaturalism. This is straight up fundy tier.Why are all the people doing naturalized teleonomy (including plenty of biologists) actually involved in supernatural delusion, while you are uniquely doing "real science?" It seems to me you are defining "real science" in terms of your metaphysical commitments, and then equivocating to say that anyone who disagrees with your fringe commitments is somehow disagreeing with Newton's Laws or Germ Theory, which is disingenuous at best, at worst, just really dumb.
>>25244199I see, so in either case it is "manipulation" and all possible outcomes actually can be read as evidence for the thesis. Brilliant.
>>25243664There’s some good stuff there. A Practical Guide to Sorcery The Elf Who Would Become A Dragon The Years of Apocalypse (but this takes a while to get good)For fantasy/isekai without being litrpg, can’t think of something good off the top of my head. The ones I listed are just straight fantasy.
Bakker wordpress quotes spammer actually gave up, I kinda feel bad. He was really pissing me off, but the feeling of other people not understanding you and dismissing you is really bad. It also encourages people whether appropriate or not to retreat into echo chambers. I hope you don't retreat into an self affirming echo chamber Bakker wordpress quote spammer. I hope you take our criticisms to heart and try to understand that we are not disagreeing with you, we are having a problem even understanding what you're claiming because it lacks any direct content.
>>25245155I've noticed another anon has been in step with me on this series
why is goodreads being a nigger and not letting me add the book im currently reading
>>25245394That IS Bakker bro. Same word choice, never actually denies being Scott, and who the fuck else do you think has an encyclopedic knowledge of not only Scott's blog, but also all his articles, and even random interviews he gave 10+ years ago?Read the actual articles. This has always been his belief system. And he's always been extremely dogmatic. He's like 60. We can hope for change, but it'll have to be a big one.
>>25245394Whoever it is, has been going at it for 10 years straight without ever dropping the ego.
>>25245460> never actually denies being Scott,Is there like some magic spell preventing him from lying? If I was actually here don't you think he'd just lie about it if he needed to?
>>25245460It's just the Bakkerfag.>>25245468I read on reddit that he once back in the day larped on a forum using some character from 'The Crying of Lot 49' as his sock puppet to defend his work and got caught doing it. Lmao
>>25245468He wants you to know. All he needs is some plausible deniability.
>>25245489WTF I love him more and more with each new degrading detail
>>25244857>I also dont believe truth exists, You don't think it is *true* that truth exists. How is this not a straightforward contradiction?>I also believe its conditioned by language,How can it be conditioned by anything if it doesn't exist? Hell, even the ancients and medievals allowed that the reception of truth is shaped by man's nature, "everything is received in the manner of the receiver." That our understanding and presentation of truth is shaped by culture is one thing. Saying man's culture and language creates truth ex nihilo is another. And saying sentences, not intellects, are the primary bearers of truth is what causes most of the intractable issues in modern thought that lead to the denial of truth in the first place. Why not just reject that thesis?>And yet I have completely different arguments and basis for thatArguments ordered to what? What makes for a "good" argument and "good" evidence or "good reasoning?" Presumably that they lead to truth and knowledge, the conformity of the intellect to being. And yet you deny truth? So in virtue of what is any philosophy good or any argument better than any other? Wouldn't a "good argument" just be which ever one gets you what you desire, since truth can no longer be an end of discourse? And yet using reason in this wholly instrumental manner is, quite literally, the definition of sophistry, which seems problematic. It is using Sophia as a prostitute.
>>25245515>You don't think it is *true* that truth exists. How is this not a straightforward contradiction?You're assuming truth is necessary for meaning, and that "truth" has any inherent meaning in and of itself as if some almost platonic concept of "truth" exists out there that can always be referenced. My belief is simply that "truth" = meaning and different names that could also = meaning such a "good" is just a different kind of meaning pertaining to relevant contexts.My philosophy largely is just based on Nietzsche (his deconstructive philosophy not constructive) and Wittgenstein.There is no contradiction because contradictions arent real either. If you want an explanation how thats not a contradiction just refer back to what I said for "truth". When I use "contradiction" it essentially just means = problem.I'm so thankful Wittgenstein exists, because the Me becore Wittgenstein reading this would think I'm insane. So having that strong foundation of a literal genius to guide me through how all this makes sense in a way I can personally understand and assert is a godsend. Else I'd just end up like bakker. Making vaguely possibly intuitive claims that make no real sense without the basis that justifies it. I would be criticizing my own self scathingly if I didnt understand where my justifications came from.If you cant understand what Im saying from what im describing, I can either only recommend you to read Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein. Or I could direct you towards two youtube videos that popped up in my recommendations recently that explain him. Although I will say, a Youtube video, even 4 hours long, could never sufficiently get the justification across just the idea. Even while reading Wittgenstein, even up till the very last page of the book, I didnt quite get him. It wasnt until a dwelled on it after and thought about how the concepts applied to my life that I understood.Wittgenstein despite how ironically simple and direct his arguments are, is also kind of hard to understand because its not formulated like a proper book, its basically a collection of his interrelated notes. So it doesn't flow together in a natural way, you'll have to do a lot of work to piece the ideas together on your own.This is why I said philosophy is hard to read. I cant even communicate how hard it is to understand somebody like Wittgenstein who's ideas feel simultaneously simple and infinitely complex to me.>Why not just reject that thesis?Because that is simply fundamentally how language works, and language is how we communicate ideas. It seems you'll only be able to understand it if you reas Wittgenstein unfortunately you're too wrapped in your intuitions, dont worry I was just like you, almost exactly like you.>is what causes most of the intractable issues in modern thought that lead to the denial of truth in the first place. I had this exact same problem. I so desperately wanted truth to be real. But I've overcome.
Infact right after I finished reading Wittgenstein I came to this very board to ask people about him because Wittgensteins arguments were so flawless that I wanted to "escape" his philosophical conclusions. Unfortunately not enough people have really read him enough here to offer any reason that he could be wrong, and when they tried to, I spat Witts arguments back at them, and they couldnt counter it. Because hes just that smart of a guy. Very well thought out. I'd need another philosopher to counter him. Its not like Witt addresses every single problem though, hes more like a framework for understanding everything, not an answer. So I can still go read other philosophers to find answers on certain things. Just never with the problem of getting too mixed up in their words. It was Wittgenstein that ultimately made me turn away from Nietzsche, reading him with my newfound understanding made me abandon Nietzsche, with greater confidence than I ever would have before. That is the power of truly good philosophy, changing so much, yet everything "remains the same."
>>25245423It belongs to amazon you are not allowed to read stuff amazon doesn't sell
I have conceived of a philosophy that completely defeats Wittgenstein. It however cannot be expressed in words, thus I shall remain silent on the matter.
>>25245646sucks to suck, you cant enter the domain of meaning that human beings reign over.
>>25244937>my position is that I'm right and you're wrongbrilliant work, scottI'm glad I never bothered with Prince of Nothing
>>25245767fuck you for making me read that garbage again trying to understand the utter nonsense he spouts because he never actually argues anything, just makes claims.
>>25245148Good move, AoM is the other half of the original KoD manuscript so there's no signiicant time skip like with the other books.
When I actually finish a fantasy novel, should I actually post it here?
>>25245860Only if you want be associated with here and likely have no one read it. It's all risk and no reward.
>>25245767>>25245773Basically the idea is that, if Bakker can even conceive of a way in which cognition, reason, normativity, consciousness, etc. might be explained as a "cognitive illusion" in "empirical" terms (this would make Scott's theory "scientific" as opposed to "transcendental"), then all "transcendental" arguments are refuted because they can never be sure that some later "science" might refute their grounds.Obviously, this doesn't follow. Actually, it shows a pretty profound ignorance of philosophy of science and the history of skeptical and "thought is illusion" arguments. The latter aren't new, and with the former, it seems that, in the end, his entire philosophy relies on appealing to the authority of "science" while claiming views like his are uniquely "scientific" (and so seemingly presuppositionless and strictly "empirical").It's not good philosophy.
>>25245579Wittgenstein's thought is not presuppositionless. Wittgenstein famously never read much philosophy outside his niche. He never read Aristotle, which is funny since On Certainty manages to circle around the same exact issues as the PA.Wittgenstein's arguments, to the extent they are clear (they have been interpreted in incredibly diverse and contradictory ways), tend to simply presuppose common assumptions in Anglo-empiricist thought. If they seem unchallengable to you, that's not surprising. It's much the same for many people with Hume. These assumptions are drilled into us from birth and are key to our political system. They aren't universal though. Actually, they are pretty unique to early modern Western Christianity, before being evangelically spread abroad.If a faculty of intellectus exists for instance, the private language and beetle box arguments fall apart because a measure of error exists that is not discursive rule following. The rule following argument is relies on the assumption that reason is wholly discursive. That's an extremely dominant assumption from the Enlightenment on, and almost unknown prior. It also isn't generally argued to . Wittgenstein just assumed it. Kant has the decency to make it an explicit axiom. The entire theory of hinge propositions also relies on no direct union with the object of the intellect occuring. Same thing, basically the old lower faculty of ratio is affirmed and the higher one of intellectus is denied.The thing is, the original denial of intellectus was almost entirely about theology. So it isn't a great thing that thinkers like Hume and Wittgenstein have uncritically inherited it, even if we ultimately agreed with them. An assumption being so common that it becomes invisible doesn't make it true.
>>25245573>There is no contradiction because contradictions arent real either. If you want an explanation how thats not a contradiction just refer back to what I said for "truth". When I use "contradiction" it essentially just means = problem.So, because contradictions "aren't real" you don't need to hold to even basic logical consistency. And yet you have the balls to criticize others for not having "good arguments."Just lol.>Read Wittgenstein I have. I also think you have an incredibly facile take on him he would find abhorrent, but since people have read Wittgenstein as supporting even radical forms of cognitive relativism, who am I to judge. He obviously didn't write clearly enough if people can use him for "truth doesn't exist and I can contradict myself and that's fine," and at the same time Thomists are using him for their whole project too, etc.
I seriously need something to readIt needs to be entertainingDeeply entertaining Just tell me what to readAnd yes I've already read Vance, Wolfe
>>25246055Read some popular and well-regarded author that published at the same time as Vance.
>>25246055https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordsmen_and_Sorcerers'_Guild_of_America
>>25246055>newfag gif>newfag author credlol
>>25246055Wolf In Shadow by David Gemmell
>>25246055The Last Unicorn
Every time I've tried reading through the first Malazan book I get bored and stop.
>>25246297Well why do you keep trying instead of reading something else? Read Dragonlance or Drizzt books, those won't bore you.
https://x.com/binding_broken/status/2049851920399962613There was an anon wondering a year ago when the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn sale was happening- it's this week. RIP my wallet.
>>25246401>>25246401>>25246401Migrate or Die.
