Als ik constateer dat ik, eigenlijk nog wezenlijk niks heb bereikt in mijn leven, wat is het dan dat ik wil bereiken?

Ik ben vergeten dat ik een droom moet hebben, iets om te bereiken en om naar toe te leven. Zoals Nikki me had geleerd, dat iedereen een droom nodig heeft.

Ja, ik zit in een quarterlife crisis. De betekenis van het leven ontgaat me, ik weet niet wat ik wil, en de dingen die ik kan lijken zinloos, of anders onvoldoenend. Ik ben verdwaald en zoekende.

We moeten van "laat ze niet lopen" naar "overtuig ze niet te lopen". In het eerste heerst een mentaliteit dat (de groep mensen achter) pegida ansich illegitiem is, en niet begrepen kan of hoeft te worden; en is daarmee vooral symptoom van het verwarde linkse argument. Het realistisch/pragmatisch argument dat hun acties normalisatie zouden tegengaan (waaraan een berekenend sociaal en mensbeeld ten grondslag ligt),

Mijn les is om, zoals men een fysieke plek voor zichzelf kan veroveren, af te pakken van anderen en de wereld om er vervolgens geheel zelf het zeggenschap over te hebben, wat inherent natuurlijk een kwade actie is, zo ook een dogmatische plek voor mezelf te veroveren.

Hoe verdrietig of belemmerend dan ook, in zekere zin is de zelfwaardigheid van een levend ding (hierna: de spreker) niet genoeg, op een aantal manieren, om iets te bewerkstelligen; daarvoor is geslaagde communicatie nodig.

1. Omdat anders kwade machtsstructuren ontstaan, los van én jegens de spreker, op het fundament van onbegrip over de opinies/volities van deze spreker. Zie daar bv het menselijk kwaad dat onderling verricht is ten opzichte van de onbegrepen bedoelingen van god, danwel de natuur. Of het menselijk kwaad jegens god (natuur), of andere, menselijke, doch onwelcommunicerende prekers (het kind, de minderheidsgroep, de autist).

Het is de crisis van het levende ding, dat het (men) zijn stem moet kunnen vinden en verheffen, wil het (men) gehoord worden.

In dit opzicht is bv logisch empiricisme onze beste poging tot begrip van een spreker; doch, de spreker die we het makkelijkst kunnen begrijpen is de spreker die rationeel en consequent handelt: de natuur.

My natural inclination is (or at least was) to disregard talk of ethics as roundabout ways of talking about other things. Today I was listening with Julia to a podcast about the philosophy of lying, whilst painting her hair, and (a) recovered one of these typical reductions ('truth' not being a moral value but a sociolinguistic mechanism, and hence lying not as a moral code so much as a protocol), as well as (b) came to think of the notion of lying as a very interesting key connection between the immanence / initiality of politics in reality, and the discourse of propositional truth.

I have been very prone to reduce (and think this reduction is a natural, widespread, modern, scientific one) ethics to the propositional realm. However, such a reduction, in our conception of man as an organism, creature, and mankind as a species, in the world, causes values to be reduced to the propellent / inherent structures in this technical conception of life; i.e. reduces degree of morality / truth / beauty to stability, force, procreation, boundaries, etc. of what is life.

And this is exactly my disconcertion of late, with the reliance upon the notion of 'natural' as a guide, whereas we should surely be wanting to divide this 'naturality' up somewhere.

An example. An interesting video I just watched1, a TED video in which a father, man of science, speaks of his gay child, and of the science indicating that homosexuality is an intended natural diversity effect etc -- does exactly this: argue for ethical values / an ethical stance in terms of found propositional truth.

Or: postmodern focus upon notions of natural geographic growth. Etc.

I find herein the key dilemma which we, as a society, are facing. It is that we are answering (Yalom's interpretation of?) Nietzsche's dilemma of finding meaning in an inherently meaningless world with (also possibly very much Nietzsche's opinion) our, indeed quite self-reflectively found and definitely not ill-suited, 'life'-ness (with 'life' interpreted in this technical sense).

However, hereby we are:

1. tying ourselves to a radically unchangeable and only self-interested mechanism (i.e. like Habermas' purposive-functional systems, but then with my flavor of 'natural realism'), and thereby relinquishing autonomy in a very real sense (which is the contrary to, but simulteneously true, with the fact that mastery of nature is of course the becoming autonomous in the first place as well), and hence indeed not even being faithful to Nietzsche's aim of being 'value-creating' creatures, for we are relinquishing these abilities to nature;
2. abandoning any 'just' ethics that one would currently adhere to, as far as I know it. The immutable and equal dignity of each human being, etc.

Hence we have here our paradox. We know of no other substitute for meaning, than our propellant natural (and technically/propositionally understood) force/desire of life. However, we cannot let it be the substitute, for it would have us relinquish our desire to be autonomous, value-creating beings.

And I would want add, redundantly and just for emphasis, that we must not answer this dilemma with a 'oneness with nature or environment' kind of argument; for it would be exactly that automatic alternative which abandoning any 'just' ethics as we now conceive of it.

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1. Homosexuality: It's about survival - not sex, James O'Keefe, TEDxTallaght

Ever since the Greeks discovered syllogisms, Western culture has prided itself with the finding of rationality. In fact, rationality has become the mold of society and individual, and hence can almost not be distinguished from truth and meaning. However, we're now learning the glaringly obvious fact that, at one and the same time, (a) that rationality is a much a social construct as all others, and (b) that rationality is not something inherent to ourselves (other than our having evolutionally acquired it, that is to say), but to the universal notion of computation.

(a)
This is what it means for Western society to have rationalized. It is the fact that our particular quality judgement, something inherent to any society, is based on one's ability to think, but maybe more importantly, behave, rationally. It is what Weber refers to when he speaks of the import of Protestant work-ethic.

(b)
From developments in logic and type theory, we know that our mathematical notion of rationality is just an approximation of computation. Rationality is the stratification, the making accessible, making understandable, of pure computation.

Assuming / considering:

• (The features of) language form a great deal of thought, or at least conscious thought, and hence drive the conscious intellectual process; and furthermore is thus inherently conputational is nature. (Not that all thought is computational of course, the human mind is way too complex to reduce it that way in any meaningful sense, but there is strong evidence that all conscious applications of thought, though maybe not directed by computation, are indeed instances of computation.)
• There are a few good mathematical characterizations of what computation is, e.g. Turing machines. Of these, the lambda calculus is perhaps the most elegant, 'stripped down', version, aligning neatly in a structural sense with our computational understanding of language.
• Lambda calculus comes in two major flavors: (1) untyped lambda calculus, (2) typed lambda calculus.
• The 'typedness' of lambda terms ensures their termination, and is also our best approximation of their 'logical/rational' nature, in the sense that a linguistic statement is rational exactly when it can be typed / assigned an understood (and true) logical form.
• However, our understanding of these logical forms (a) is unsatisfactorily demarcated (in the strict sense that we have collected a small 'zoo' of trusted/recognized logical forms, but we don't understand why exactly this zoo, these logical forms, and no others); (b) suffers from logical paradox (in the sense that we have Gödel's incompleteness and related paradoxes; noteworthy is that by introducing typedness, we isolate these paradoxed in the newly constructed meta-realm, as opposed to the now 'typed' object-realm). Hence, we can see that 'recognized logical form calculus' is almost inherently always but an approximation of what can be called rationality.
• Thus, to understand 'full' rationality, one must keep looking at untyped lambda calculus.
• The untyped lambda calculus has the remarkable feature that the employed 'reduction strategy' determines whether a term computes to its normal (final) form (if it has one), or may possibly get stuck along the way: if the term has a normal form, then the 'outermost' reduction strategy gets it there, whereas other strategies may get stuck. If one understands a term 'having a normal form' as the term's 'rationality in some sense', then apparently the employed reduction strategy has a certain rational purport.
• The ground for possible analogies is rich: computing to normal form as 'reaching conclusion', or possibly 'withstanding further ..dilemma..'; direction of conscious thought as 'choosing a reduction strategy' (either allowing one to get stuck, or reach conclusion).
• It's even very obvious: if infinite computation amounts to Falsity and hence anything, then, whenever one is faced with a dilemma of reduction strategy, either allowing one to infinitely compute or reach a normal form, one is indeed faced with the 'simultaneous' reality of some conclusion A, and Falsity (i.e. not A), and hence, a paradox. In other words: paradoxed are caused by a dilemma of reduction strategy.
• [I wonder whether Descartes' argument can be seen to encompass a certain form that either allows or disallows such strategy dilemma's..]

To live in a world of limited human resources, is to live in a world of singular things, and unbridgable distances between them. Singular human beings and distances between them. Singular concepts the relations between which are intractably understandable. Singular conceptions, which we cannot interrelate, understand, even relate.

• Even though the grounds are so fertile, and the photos of the photo albums so incredibly beautiful, the people so bizarrely unique and the situations so incredibly beautiful. Even though the world seems to burst with possibility, color and vibrance, and all the people have been put in place so determinedly. Even though all this is the case, the possibilities do not materialize, the people do not connect, the full life is not lived, and nothing grand is built for sheer lack of the possibility for such a thing. Humans are simply too complicated, unable to emancipate themselves, express themselves, communicate with themselves and others, and lack the emotional and organizational resources to enrichen themselves and their communities satisfactorily. In short, humankind has a case of misanthropy and limited abilities.