The article only mentioned the flow state insofar as it relates to freedom and identity

The article was talking about there being separate flow states, one for art and one for academia, that's what I was talking about

The person talked about how they grew up learning about nonduality in India…they said it’s called Advaita and that it underlies Hinduism and Buddhism

As far as I understand, yes

🤣🤣🤣yes everything is fused

Bergmann’s theory would suggest that you enter the flow state while playing pen and paper RPGs because you’re identified with the activity; you therefore act freely while doing it. On the other hand, nonduality says that the flow state is our natural state and we can get to the point of acting freely in everything we do if we move beyond the realm of identification and dissociation, let’s say.

I’m surprised his work on abstracting above all theories of freedom isn’t more spoken about

What was the original comment?

What exactly did you read?

I think they mean asexual reproduction. For the hypothetical to make sense, the person you responded to is trying to imagine an utterly alien observer whose judgement of human sexuality would not be influenced by their own alien sexual biology.

Isn’t this same as what Jiddu Krishnamurthy have been saying his entire life?

I mean this is all true, but changes nothing about the fact of an independent reality. We can lie to ourselves, we can play word games, communicate however we want to. We aren't creating anything other than a new story by doing so, and certainly nothing on par with what is true about reality outside of our minds.

Ahah, so this is where the Fusion from Yu-Gi-Oh come from.

Why should one care about living and finding meaning in life if the desire for meaning and essentially all human behavior arises out of logical necessity in evolution?

We aren't just observing reality we are also interacting with it. The concepts we use to describe the world influence the way we interact with it.

The tools we build, the stories we tell, the institutions we create and the relationships we form are all influenced by our understanding of the world.

Thereby when describing the world we are also creating it. Not from nothing but in an ever evolving loop.

This interconnection between reality, our understanding of it and the way we shape it is deeply historically ingrained.

As long as there is a human history it was there and further than that is just not something Butler cares about.

An old friend from Santa Cruz. Good to see Frithjof getting attention. He was a genuinely good person.

I don’t think it’s fair to equate the broad spectrum of modern religious practice and beliefs about divinity with millennium old beliefs about the Roman pantheon. It’s a little ahistorical to apply the writing of Marcus Aurelius to modern belief systems.

“They knew they couldn’t control the gods” is fundamental to many modern religions, especially non-fundamentalists, which make up the bulk of religious adherents AFAIK.

>The argument about biological sex is that it's a social classification (a group of scientists deciding on a definition is social classification), but that doesn't mean there's no reality behind it.

If they're not trying to deny the reality behind it why dismiss it as A social classification that can be replaced with a different social classification? Especially when they go on to dismiss everything that an underlying reality to that classification would lead to ? The entire point of science is to get your description of reality so close that there's functionally no difference. We don't have a description of a theoretical model of the solar system we have a description of where the planets are.

Biology is not perfectly predictive for every individual and hasn't tried to since at least Darwin. It would be far easier to push for the idea that there are individual exceptions to the trends where we can clearly see the exception than to deny the trend which is even more obvious. Boy and girl are imperfectly descriptive of an existing underlying reality, they do not create a platonic reality separate from this one.

The social justice oddity is when presented with a true thing followed by a BS argument that leads to a bad thing it to try some way of arguing the true thing is false rather than attacking the BS argument.

Boys like football. Girls don't. Jane is a girl. Therefore she shouldn't be playing football.

Why not just argue hey, fallacy of composition. A trend isn't deterministic for every individual, Jane's different than the other girls ... and would probably be the first one to tell you that.

When social justice circles try to argue things they can see are clearly false (boys are girls aren't born different, its all in how you raise them) it makes it MUCH harder to argue cases where they have a point.

I’m interested in phenomena surrounding ways we can make false assumptions of the information that we take in. This information could be visual, auditory words, or text.

Off the top of my head examples of where false assumptions could be are in person to person communication, or in marketing where the science is savvy enough that a type of misdirection could be intentional. Or in movies, when the direction is intentionally vague and you have to put pieces together later on. Or in movies again, when you simply don’t catch everything, but the theme allows you to follow and still be thrilled or inspired, while all along believing that you understood everything. Even if upon further review most of what you thought your witnessed was false.

I think on a popular culture level a lot of this falls in to being an active listener. And while trying to be an active listener, being able to reserve judgement, catalogue, or reserving space for further questioning.

I’m just constantly amazed at the various forms of communication. And how communicating information can be both simple and highly complex, and often very flawed.

Point me to some reads or subreddits, please?

The root of stoicism was the understanding that the only thing one can control is themselves and their own reactions to the outside world. They knew they couldn't control the gods. So, rather than pray to Zeus for bravery or Hera for wisdom, they worked to foster bravery and wisdom within themselves. You can take their ideas and express them in prayer, but if you say that prayer is equivalent to that idea you're just wrong. The prayer adds supplication and dependence upon the divine that stoics rejected.

This was a great read. The part about flow state was interesting. One of my hobbies is telling stories for pen and paper RPGs, it's an activity where I can enter flow state and it requires both creativity in order to make up a story as I go, and also more analytical thought so that I can present players with a balanced challenge with respect to rules that are math-heavy

>(the major feminist criticism of her work comes from how to deal with trans people, as her model kinda ignores them)

I just want to add a small detail to this: Butler has been explicit about their approach here. The point of the theory of performativity was to show how the (let's say) standard model of sex/gender classification fails to take into account the various other possibilities that are possible (i.e., trans identities).

That’s fine, page length doesn’t matter to me as long as the book assumes I don’t know much.

Well, I say "habit," but I'm speaking more in terms of individual experience. What I'm getting at is that it seems to me that Butler places more of an emphasis on environment than biology. I mean, that whole binary deconstructs when you really look at it, anyway, but I still think it's fair to say that the latter changes more slowly; my analogy has always been water dripping on a rock, where water stands in for environment and the rock for biology.

Anyway, trans people is a good point of contention for what I'm talking about: can her theory account for why trans people don't feel "right" in the role they've been conditioned into? To the extent that some find it impossible to adequately live up to that role and are Queered into the discourse? If not... I mean, I think that throws a huge wrench into the idea that that which feels "natural" is that which has been socially conditioned.

The article really doesn't put a good segue on this point so I can see why it seems jumbled. I'll give a shot at an explanation that will hopefully be a little clearer and more accurate

Butler approaches this problem of grievable life on the basis of performativity, not gender, but the approach has to do with their claim about how gender is maintained and produced as a system of classification of identities. Through a structure of repetitive acts that are socially established from many directions, some people are not really acknowledged as fully people, or as having the full value of humanity that allows their loss to be grievable. So the theory of performativity applies equally to how we view people as people (with all the ethical and axiological connotations this concept holds), and not just as man, woman, etc.