Highlights
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2024-10-27 14:51 with a thinker like Nietzsche, that’s just not the case at the sentence level. And I don’t think there’s anyone that I know of who did that to a greater extent than he did
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2024-10-27 14:51 there’s other people who. Whose thought is of equivalent value. I’ve returned recently, and I’m going to do a course on to the work of this romanian historian of religions, Eliade, who’s not nearly as well known as he should be, and whose work, by the way, is a real antidote to the postmodern, nihilistic, marxist stream of literary interpretation that the universities as a whole have adopted.
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2024-10-27 14:51 And it’s a good way of thinking about it. It’s kind of interesting from the perspective of technical analysis of intelligence. There’s a good book called the user illusion, which is the best book on consciousness that I ever read. It explains the manner in which our communication is understandable in this manner. So imagine that when you communicate something, you’re trying to change the way that your target audience perceives and acts in the world
- Note:book-advice
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2024-10-27 14:52 change in perception, because change in perception, well, those are both relevant. And it’s an important thing to understand because the classic empiricists make the presumption, and it’s an erroneous presumption, that perception is a value free enterprise. And they assume that partly because they think of perception is something passive. You know, you just turn your head and you look at the world, and there it is. It’s like perception is not passive. There is no perception without action, ever. Ever. And that’s a weird thing to understand, because even when you’re looking at something, like your eyes are moving back and forth, if they ever stop moving for a 10th of a second, you stop being able to see. So your eyes are jiggling back and forth just to keep them active. And then there’s involuntary movements of your eyes, and then there’s voluntary movements of your eyes. Like what you’re doing with your eyes is very much like what a blind person would do if they were feeling out the contours of a object. You’re sampling, and you’re only sampling a small element of the space that’s in front of you
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2024-10-27 14:53 Nietzsche was very interested in that, and I don’t think he got that exactly right. But the postmodernists, for example, especially the ones, and this is most of them, with the neo marxist bent, their presumption is that the fundamental unifying idea is power. That everything’s about compulsion and force, essentially. And that that’s the only true unifying ethos of mankind, which is. I don’t know if there’s a worse idea than that. I mean, there are ideas that are potentially as dangerous. The nihilistic idea is pretty dangerous, although it’s more of a disintegrating notion than a unifying idea. The hedonistic idea that you live for pleasure, for example, that’s also very dangerous.