#frrrst

„Ich und Uwe“ • (256 Seiten, 12x18 cm, offene Fadenheftung, 25€)

Uwe Arnold (67) und Fabian Steidl (29) lernen sich zu Beginn der 10er Jahre in der Online-Community eines toten Printmagazins kennen. Aus der gemeinsamen Faszination für Sonderbares entsteht ein reger, langjähriger Austausch zwischen dem Gymnasiallehrer im Ruhestand und dem Designstudenten.

„ich und uwe“ ist die Dokumentation dieser unwahrscheinlichen Verbindung. In vier Kapiteln und vier Interviews beleuchtet das Buch Fragen des (alltäglichen) Daseins sowie der unterschiedlichen Welten der beiden Autoren. In kurzen Texten, Fotos und Zeichnungen reflektieren sie kongenial die eigentümliche Absurdität der Existenz und der menschlichen Natur mit skurrilem, teilweise schwarzem Humor, aber auch sarkastischen Tönen. Dieses Buch wird ergänzt durch Video- und Audiobeiträge auf der Website fu.frrrst.com .

Beste Grüße fu

Interesting question. I would argue that, to some extent, truth is a basic concept. That is, it cannot be analysed in terms of other concepts. Luckily, I would also argue that every person is acquainted with the basic concept of truth. We utilise it all the time, when making judgements, reasoning, doing mathematics or logic, talking in a trivial or serious manner, doing science, walking around avoiding things and in pretty much every aspect of our life. Although it cannot be analysed in terms of other concepts, I think we can discover some properties of truth. Indeed, there has been a lot of work in philosophy trying to systematise and clarify what is true about truth; see this page by the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy on the topic.

"Who’s truth is it?" I’m not sure what to make of that part of your question. Perhaps you have presumed truth is relative to individuals. This is indeed an interesting proposed property of truth, which has a long tradition in both western and eastern philosophy. The idea might stem from the observation that a question like "what’s your favourite colour?" will have different correct answers for different people. However, I think when we use the word "truth", part of its meaning (and its separation from a correct answer to an individual-relative question) is that truth is objective and real. It isn’t relative to an individual. I’m not going to try and get any deeper into the issue of truth realism versus truth anti-realism right now.

Great theory. Would this mean that the methods of our internal discourse are based on the techniques we learned in real conversations?

Yes!  There's a philosophical point here too (I think).  According to this theory, the concept of the thinking self arises only from a conversation with two or more sides!  The singular from the multiple.  It's just that we learn to provide both sides of the conversation (between different parts of the brain?)

In the episode (which I forgot to link in, it's here), they went on to speculate on how various schitzophrenias, or feelings of being compelled or tormented by voices, etc, could be simple problems of failing to recognize your own "voice" inside your head, perhaps identifying with only part of the brain and not all.

"...language also seems to me to serve as a method of communication between different systems within a single mind."

s33 reblogged this from you and added:

I think this is another clue as to the nature of personal consciousness as a multiplication of sub-personal experiences...

frrrst:

Interesting! I think there is also a difference in what language you use. I noticed that i speak english (my foreign language) to communicate different things to myself or on different occasions.

If you combine these two insights, you may get two (or more) "persons" inhabiting the same body/brain, each defined by the linguistic connections it has among it's own parts.

The pop-experimental stuff I'm reading these days really does seem to point towards something like "sub-persons" of an individual that can differ from each other in what they know or don't know.  Like...

Parts of my brain to do with vision and foot control are conscious of my driving, but a more speculative part of my brain is not.

Some muscle-memory related system is aware of adjusting my clothing, or the finger movements as I type, but not the part that's composing the sentence.

For me it’s a version of 4: The basic form of consciousness is the interaction between two elements. With combination of these you create higher forms of consciousness. Humans f.e. are just an agglomeration of many tiny conscious events.

In reference to this post, in which "4" is the suggestion that all of the material world be considered a pool of possibly-conscious things.

Your version has a consistency and simplicity I like.  So are my... uh... sub-agglomerations simultaneously conscious?  (like subsystems of my brain)  Or super-agglomerations, like "humanity" or "the biosphere"?  Is there some sort of way that unity is defined, or it is all simultaneously conscious?

I'd probably bet on "simultaneously conscious", which is kind of why I said "anything with a boundary" in the original post.

Of course this is nothing new. Customers who bought this idea also bought:

Functionalism, Materialism, Physicalism, Epiphenomenalism, Panpsychism

Intriguing?  Yes, it is!  Check out the post his came from, which is about "...the tiny but fundamental question of how everything works."

I guess it should be no surprise that such a sensitive topic can generate so much response... and Haidt is so much in the margins between camps, it's hard to know how to respond to some of his thoughts.  Some followers did have reactions, and I thought I'd share some.  Here's the original quote again:

"Societies that forgo the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few)." - Jonathan Haidt

And here are some responses:

libre-sollus:

Atheism is a non-thing to be honest. Everyone believes in something, whether it be the Abrahamic god, the Hindu cosmology, a shamanistic/animalistic/pantheist view or just “the universe”, which is basically the same thing. Atheism is destined to die.

Maybe this is right - that it's wrong to classify ourselves as non-religious... maybe our sense of sacredness has just been transferred to something else.  Science, or "the universe" for example.  Still, the lack of ritual or mass group activities in the current science/materialist zeitgeist might be a real difference, and a relevant one in the context of this quote.

dialectic:

I think the lack of recognition of so-called “atheistic” communities is an unrelated qualifier that doesn’t really put us on a platform of truth. Atheists have always been here. They were there the first moment someone said “I believe in God"

So maybe Atheism isn't just on or off, but can be present to some continuous degree in any given community.  Maybe.  Still, I think I could say of my own society that atheism seems waaay more prevalent than in any historical time and place I can think of offhand.  If you're claiming that atheism just doesn't correlate with group cohesion, well then I'll have to put my faith (pardon the pun) in Haidt here.  He's a psychologist, who backs up everything he says with data and studies.  The point about religion and group cooperation is one of the main points of his book, so he explains and sources it thouroughly.

frrrst:

That seems like a bold statement. I cannot recall any european society that could be described as atheistic. Also i strongly disagree with the view that the quality of a society should be measured by its efficiency.

You've got me there - I'm not sure which European society Haidt was talking about!  As for measuring the quality by the efficiency, that's an interesting point.  From a long, evolutionary perspective, efficiency (turning resources into babies) is really the only measure to use.  Whichever qualities a society has, it will inevitably surrender to one that out-breeds it.

However, I think there is room for argument.  In a world where we are coming closer to the boundary of our natural resources, birth rate might cease to be the only measure of long-term survival.  If one defined quality to include maintenance of renewable resources, then this might have real survival value.  A high birth-rate could actually be detrimental to this kind of quality!

And of course in the short term, there are so many things about a culture that seem more like appropriate measures of quality.  Music and art.  Food.  Scientific insight.  Kindness.  In the scale of a single life, these are so much more important.