Love Is The Ultimate Meaning

It is in the nature of love and care that responsivity - and responsibility - to the stimulations of the world around us leads to some sort of degree of connection. This means, in effect, that loves binds, or synchronizes, the system-which-loves with the object-that-is-loved.

Yes, yes, "you" hate that. The "you" here, indeed, is a nice little fiction "you" tell "yourself" as a way to help "yourself". This is a prickly paradox of a situation. Semiotically - or in terms of "meanings", everyone is attached to something. If it's Buddhism, you're attached. If you're a believer in Gnosticism, those ideas "you" recruit are there to help "you". Ideas are not just semantic devices but also ontological devices that are there to regulate the physiological flow of your bodies dynamics. The idea would stand there at the top of the precipice of your being, serving "you" in helping your regulate your affect state, while at the same time "you" serve it: you're dependent on its particular semiotic configuration with respect to the meaning and significance of life: for instance, if you believe in Gnosticism, your belief automatically attaches negative significance to the physical world i.e. your body. This belief dissipates energy - in terms of your particular semiotic history - "coherently". This belief has worked to help you: it both affords you a good sense of self, but more than anything else: it binds you to others - both real and imaginal - with whom you are affectively in "need" of.



Whenever I post the above, or share the above figure with others, I can often tell whether or not the person "gets it" - inasmuch as understanding something like this entails a certain degree of self-awareness i.e. the capacity to observes and recognize the semiotic differences of the forms of experience we have.

We "have" identities, and we "have" a body. When the correct identification arises within the flow of my feeling in response to a particular context, this is just the brain "shaping the flow" so that meaning/attunement/synchrony/coherence can be attained. Thus, every state the brain assumes is a canalized response that has the neurological/physiological quality of being a "path of least resistance" with regard to the reduction of entropy.

You Don't Choose Your Beliefs

You didn't choose your parents, and you didn't choose the traumatizing or enlivening experiences which shaped your brain-development. The fact is: we are simply afforded directions by our environments, so that the world shapes us one way or another, with every thought-content being "transversally" related to the bodies/events/cues around us. The topological perspective, developed by Felix Guattari in philosophy, Kurt Lewin in psychology, and Rene Thom in the study of biological organisms, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Human minds function precisely with respect to the activating influences around them - and of course, by the force of memory and the somewhat stochastic meanderings that the mind can take within itself.

Just Thermodynamics?

Dorion Sagan, the son of Carl Sagan, is a well-known and respected scientist who studies complex systems in terms of their semiosis. However, like other 'materialists', Sagan is unable to afford any meaning to the activities of the minds of organisms besides noting that these activities are really thermodynamic in nature. Sagan is pulling a Darwin: in not understanding the nature of his own human semiosis, he moves proudly and arrogantly in saying that life really has no meaning: this is just what the dumb human thinks.

There is a tinge of misanthropism in views like Sagan, even if he and I would agree on most things, I still find myself wondering: why is he so averse to considering the deeper meaning of the world around him? Answer: Please see chart above.

The environment is not just full of others - but of evaluating others. Do not think you're brain isn't keeping intimate track of the values of the other's it lives with, as the identity states (read: value system) we assume, if not compatible with the identity states of others, will lead to repeating experiences of "not being recognized", which hurts, is disenlivening, and from the perspective of the amygdala, a thread to be avoided.

So your brain learns, just as Sagan would say. It learns to 'dissipate energy' in a way and manner that will make interactions with others in our environments coherent and synchronous - even if the objective truth quality of the interaction is tarnished by a fearfulness that can't see too much meaning in the world, lest the mind be overwhelmed...

Why Do we Think/Feel This Way?

Since feeling is itself a cognitive - knowing - process, in that it tells us something about what we feel about something else (even if we can't immediately discern the cause of a feeling, a simple reflection on what the body-mind needs will bring you to the right answer i.e. not eating, sleeping, etc?) our feelings contain knowledge - and not just any knowledge. It contains the meanings of our ancestors: how they knew the world.

Indeed, our present day stories are permeated with the stories of the people of the past. The "ancestors" we so care about, however, were damaged. The stories they told, last-ditch efforts at "holding at bay" the flood-waters of the unconscious. For humans over the last 8 or 9 millennia, viewpoints like "Gnosticism" have been "attractors" in the way and manner energy is processed within the minds of a societies elite. The more imperialistic - the more aggressive - the more antinomian, antagonistic towards truth, and convinced, that they and theirs is "right", even though there are such obvious conflicts of interest I.e. obvious motives, for why this belief system exists in the first place.

The answer, of course, is trauma. Take the Jews in Egypt and the phenomenon of Judaism. Trauma - or being a slave of another - forces reason into awareness. Thus, Jews aren't some "special" chosen people, and so its belief system not some special "truth". God, as understood by the Jews, was a necessary force to help them get away from what the Egyptian elite had subjected them to. But was it real i.e. was it really the case, that the Jewish God was THE God?

The imperialist experience is not unique to the Jews, of course. African Americans have become a sort of "chosen people" within the confines of the trauma of being enslaved, sold, carted over the Atlantic, dehumanized as property, and subject to all sorts of other horrors, generation after generation, so that the DNA of every slave became more and more about protecting the self from threat - from fear, from doing what the master doesn't want you to do. You become what the Other wants you to be. Agency - or the feeling of being for oneself - is not allowed to exist in any real way in a mind that grows around such horrible conditions.

To sum up this post: it is probably the case that Human beings are much a part of something ontologically larger as the cells which make up my body create "me". I am above the cells that are me, yet the cells, of course, are important and necessary in themselves. I wouldn't want any part of my body "fighting" with another part, and I'm pretty sure other wouldn't want that either.

a reply to: Astrocyte

You didn't choose your parents, and you didn't choose the traumatizing or enlivening experiences which shaped your brain-development.

But you can choose to be consciously aware of it and make a concerted effort to correct what you may believe to be wrong?

Love is the law, after all. Love, under will.

Feelings are semiotic processes. When we are afraid, it is a function of a relational process. This conflicts with that. This is what you experience as "your" feelings. The fact that one semiosis - or meaning structure - is interacting with a present one, isn't even known, acknowledged or apparent to most people. Feelings are reified and imagined to be expressions of something that is "genetically essential' to me.

This monstrous fiction, fueled by Richard Dawkins in particular, is leading to an even more monstrous attitude towards our minds plasticity: homosexuality, transgenderism, and all sorts of other unnatural dynamics are being treated as "equal to" the natural, symmetrical and complementary norm invented by nature, and relating to these norms as if their vile and vicious fictions.

The circle of stupidity works like this: with a false assumption about reality, and then the semiotic "meaningfulness" of feeling and being in such a way that the world is experienced as just-as-one-thinks-it-should-be-known. The stupidity is simply the false knowledge. The proposition that symmetry/complementarity doesn't matter for how well a society/relationship/mind functions, is nonsense, as again and again human societies discover and establish such norms as a function of the chaos that results from living as if things weren't fundamentally meaningful.

The tragedy of denying relationality its ontological primacy is best seen when we consider what happens AFTER someone has gone through something horribly traumatic. If such a person is to survive - and outgrow their nihilism - they have to commit to change. If their fantasy about reality ultimately proves too powerful, suicide is taken as "preferable" to living, but they will probably be treated to a state that is "complementary" to the world they lived.

If love ends up being the cardinal point which the living processes moves towards - in bringing about Humans - then that means human awareness always has love as its originating reference point, no matter how deformed the cognition/affective body, love is still there anchoring the "other side" that is dissociated and treated and imagined as unreal. If fear is where life begins in its evolving, love is where it ends. As difficult and sickening as that idea can be (and I feel it too, which is why I note it), the truth, very few of us are psychologically able to metabolize the meaning-significiance of the reality we live through and within - and hence, the fictions, the cynicism, the unstated, but implicit agreement of, "lets take it slow". This is the essence of progressivism. Progressivism opens the way, yet science, and science alone, can reveal the truth.

a reply to: ColdWisdom

Will under Love. The will is dependent on the conditions which underlie its emergence in the first place.

a reply to: Astrocyte

This monstrous fiction, fueled by Richard Dawkins in particular, is leading to an even more monstrous attitude towards our minds plasticity: homosexuality, transgenderism, and all sorts of other unnatural dynamics are being treated as "equal to" the natural, symmetrical and complementary norm invented by nature, and relating to these norms as if their vile and vicious fictions.

I'm gay. Didn't choose to be. Don't know if it happened at birth or if it was a combination of environment + epigenetics.

Also, homosexuality occurs in the animal kingdom.

a reply to: ColdWisdom

No one chooses the feelings they feel: they are functions of what was once felt/known.

And since feelings "spread out" through unconscious associations, an event can become what the philosopher Claude Romano calls the "evential", or how the event has become modified and reorganized in a different semiotic form.

Schizophrenia is basically this: a runaway semiotic system, and hence, the further from coherence a meaning moves, the less likely it will be for the person to regain their sanity.

Of course, meds are able to "dull" certain embodied meaning-states, and so, temporally remove the forces/forms that intrude from the past into present consciousness.

Also: morally speaking, there is a world of difference between mistreating someone and having sex with a man. While I consider the latter action, with respect to the humans semiotic prowess, to be incoherent, I do not and would not advocate any sort of legal regulation of what people do with regards to sex.

This libertarian idea, to me, is necessary when the actions in question are "only" of metaphysical significance vis-à-vis the evidence from the sciences; yes, animals in nature can sometimes be gay, yet there is always, just as in humans, contextual reasons for that behavior. Sometimes theres no female partners and yet still the biological drive to mate. Hence, even a male will do (particularly with sheep).

Yes, nature lets this happen. But of course, not animals known what they are doing. Humans are able to understand the world, themselves, and so come to appreciate the sub-optimal nature of this.

That said, I would not, as said, ever condone/support mistreating homosexuals or transgender people. I consider love to be a higher principle than nitpicking at things like sex. However, I would appreciate greater scientific scrutiny at essentialist claims about things, so that people don't go so far off into left field claiming things that aren't real or true, such as "I am really a girl", when you are biologically a male.

If trauma - understood as a destabilization of affective systems - is understood as the cause of transgenderism (and as is typical, in the case of homosexuality, a negative/abusive relation to an early male figure) then people could be both a) more accepting of what they have gone through, and, in being recognized, be given an opportunity to process the traumatic meaning in a way that doesn't entail permanently modifying ones body. If a person still doesn't want to hear/listen to the truth, that is completely their choice as well. Negative information that is potentially constructive - such as being told you have cancer - is oftentimes ignored because the person would prefer not to be 'disturbed'. Yet - as in the case of a disease, there is never any societal confusion as to the irrationality of ignoring.

a reply to: Astrocyte

I have Synesthesia. Some people would consider that a detriment, like Schizophrenia.

Not me.

originally posted by: ColdWisdom
a reply to: Astrocyte

This monstrous fiction, fueled by Richard Dawkins in particular, is leading to an even more monstrous attitude towards our minds plasticity: homosexuality, transgenderism, and all sorts of other unnatural dynamics are being treated as "equal to" the natural, symmetrical and complementary norm invented by nature, and relating to these norms as if their vile and vicious fictions.

I'm gay. Didn't choose to be. Don't know if it happened at birth or if it was a combination of environment + epigenetics.

Also, homosexuality occurs in the animal kingdom.

So true. My dog tries to hump boy dogs. He is gay but I don't care.

a reply to: ColdWisdom

No, Synesthesia sounds interesting.

In any case, my thinking goes deep. I notice your willingness to interface with my thinking - and I find this interesting too.

I take myself - and I try to take myself - as truly as possible. I let the sciences speak their patterns to me, and so I collect the patterns, until my mind catches on important meanings.

If you understand your mind as involved in a thermodynamically driven process "loaded" in the affects we feel within us, you are on the right track.

If however, you mistake the feeling of goodness as unrelated to semiotic coherence in relation, you are going to be punished for that.

The problem that most philosophers/scientists don't recognize is love itself. Fear is the beginning of the semiotic process in organisms, which is why the early brain differentiated itself bilaterally so as to deal with 'environmental threat' on one side, and 'response to threat' on the other. The 'not-self' on the right, and the self on the left, held within one brain.

As the brain evolved further in reptiles, the amygdala formed and became a specialized center - literally a central hub between the front-back and top-down of brain functioning, signifying its structural centrality.

But love created humans. The whole notion of duality is introduced via the illusory dualism of semiotic existential knowing, in which the mind observes itself "knowing" something. What do you think this "observer" is, if not a function of a higher ontological correlate, the internal observer within us, who actually embodies, in its originality, the face-of-the-other? We use our social mind to observe ourselves, and hence, function as an advocate for the coherency requirements of your functioning.

Almost no one properly appreciates this very logical idea, even if it contradicts what you've been told or how you've come to believe, the idea of a "semiosphere" which anchors our capacity to think and cohere, against the primal drive of entropy-depletion, which underlies the need to survive and so, impresses upon us the feeling-attractor of fear. Fear-Love is the body-mind connection, said otherwise. The body's semiosis began in the state of fear; as mammals evolved, the centripetal dynamics which drew organisms into a semiotic "oneness" with one another, despite their physical individuality with their own perspective, the "flow" of energy was inward within (attraction) towards the other.

Further evolution in mammals leading to primates opens up to the semiosphere, which is basically to say, the internal logic of love. Organisms evolve and cohere, quite logically, as dissipative systems. Their behaviors imply all sorts of environmental truths. The emergence of human life would not be what it is if did not pass through the semiosis of earlier life, but it is, from my perspective, patently obvious that we are negatively alienated from the love - the feeling of meaning - that puts magic in the world, quite literally, simply as a function of our knowing.

I believe that correct understanding of the body-mind-environment relationship moves the very structure of our body into greater semiosis synchrony with our environments.

The world - and US inside of it -will then feel somewhat like a composer and the performers of nature.

I believe that humans can interact at a higher level than we currently exist from, but this higher level entails a far more complex semiotic relationship with reality than most of us exemplify. For the most part, most of us don't even realize how energetically depleted we are when were fighting/competing, rather than supporting/advocating, for one anothers beingness.

a reply to: Astrocyte

The very fact you begin and end in both matter and duration proves that you are not above the cells you are, but only believe you are by sleights of hand in language and imagination.

a reply to: Aphorism

That seems a bit vague. Care to expand?

a reply to: Astrocyte
Actually, playing a game is.
m.youtube.com...