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Messages - sciborg2

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16
...and yet ->

Mike mentioned this on TPB as the 'question of questions,' but I'm sure this in the books somewhere. Wracu find them painful, for reasons that are hotly contested. One interpretation involves the fact that it's not just places where atrocity wears thin the fabric of the onta. As Wutteat shows, it's beings as well. Wracu, some argue, are demonic in some respect.

Another interpretation turns on the way morality is intrinsic to the ontology of the World. If you look at Chorae as 'logic bombs' designed to obliterate violations of code, then you can chart antipathies to Chorae according to different kinds of violations. Thus the difference between Schoolmen and Cishaurim. Wracu are not simply Inchoroi abominations, they are Inchoroi abominations possessing souls. Like the Cishaurim, they do not so much violate the 'letter' as the 'spirit' of natural law. Chorae are 'ontological stressors' in the latter instance. 

I actually, at times, have wondered if they somehow went and "mixed" actual Inchoroi genomes and whatever genome Wutteät is/was in an attempt to manufacture Wracu.  Which might explain why they all are somewhat different than each other, each was some new experiment on how to combine Inchoroi DNA with Wutteät DNA and graft that onto cybernetic parts.  In other words, it was a makeshift process, using what tech they still had available, not wholesale "new" creations (which likely could not be souled because they lacked the understanding of how to imbue that "part").

Not that we could prove any of that one way or the other.

Might be why they were so obsessed with "cunny" as well....

17
Also, isn't it weird that despite the Dunyain reflecting a proper proportion of the God they are spiritually weak?

I don't follow what "proportion of the God" is really supposed to mean.  I just read that as a soul being the "portion" of the God that is tied to a given individual.  Dunyain don't lack souls, they lack the manner of Spirit (read: Geist, as Mind) that reflects into itself in a manner we could notionally call "spirituality."

Their "religion" is rather the Logos, which chains them to a differential conception of self-consciousness and so a different sort of expression of mind (and the role it should play).  One that leaves them far "superior" in conscious ability but weaker to the unconscious forces that are still at play.  They are still fully "souled," still self-conscious, still portions of the God, where Tekne creations are not at all.  Dunyain are fully continuous/contiguous with "natural" reality, where Tekne things are not.

Do you agree with Madness that perhaps Big Moe just let Kellhus yammer on about discrepancies in voices while in truth the Cish easily rooted out the skin-spies?

I think in line with what you are saying here is that what the Cish see has, to them, always correlated with souls. They perhaps see souls as entities with passions, intellect, etc. And before they never had reason to doubt this correlation.

Perhaps it's also the case that because they felt they could still see "souls" in the skin-spies they insisted that these were not biological machinery but magical artifacts made by the Scarlet Spires?

18
General Earwa / Re: (Spoilers All) (Srancpost) The Solitary God
« on: May 12, 2021, 06:16:47 am »
"Function" is definitely the tricky word here, as otherwise it could be a Classical Theism God who is apart from creation but also creation's concurrent cause.

Maybe the Divine Function is meant to be a matter of what outputs are produced by what inputs, sort of like a Relation that precedes Relata?

Is that sort of like a Platonic form of Relation?

Yeah, that was what I was going for - like God has already thought Cause/Effect relations out and while He mentally sustains these relations He is not immanent in the world.


19
Ah, and here's that quote I forgot about!

yeah same heh....makes me wonder to what degree are we Nonmen wandering in forgetfulness...

20
...by the absence of souls in their meat?

Basing this on a Bakker quote ->

Quote
Regarding the Third Sight (which refers to the way Cishaurim see without seeing), the idea is that Psukari can actually see souls - those things invisible to the naked eye. Souls 'shine' to the degree they reflect the 'proportion of the God.' So the implication is that the Dunyain somehow reflect the proper proportion..

Also, isn't it weird that despite the Dunyain reflecting a proper proportion of the God they are spiritually weak?

21
They are just another weapon. We know the Inchoroi can't make souls on purpose, so I think its safe to assume that the Wracu do not have souls.

...and yet ->

Mike mentioned this on TPB as the 'question of questions,' but I'm sure this in the books somewhere. Wracu find them painful, for reasons that are hotly contested. One interpretation involves the fact that it's not just places where atrocity wears thin the fabric of the onta. As Wutteat shows, it's beings as well. Wracu, some argue, are demonic in some respect.

Another interpretation turns on the way morality is intrinsic to the ontology of the World. If you look at Chorae as 'logic bombs' designed to obliterate violations of code, then you can chart antipathies to Chorae according to different kinds of violations. Thus the difference between Schoolmen and Cishaurim. Wracu are not simply Inchoroi abominations, they are Inchoroi abominations possessing souls. Like the Cishaurim, they do not so much violate the 'letter' as the 'spirit' of natural law. Chorae are 'ontological stressors' in the latter instance. 

22
General Misc. / Re: What are you watching?
« on: May 06, 2021, 04:08:47 pm »
Starz are mother-fuckers, I tell ya. First they cancel Boss ( incomplete ) and then Counterpart ( quazi complete, but had more gas in the story to tell ) and now American Gods ( serious cliffhanger ). Really? I'm guessing because it wasn't watched by enough people, but plenty of people waited for the entire thing to be released to binge watch it, like myself. Anyways, I loved the show, some killer gay/trans sex going on near the end of season 3 ( an extraordinary scene, amazing render of unrepressed human love ).

I guess I'll have to finish the book to learn the end ( found the book boring - but I guess I suffer a lack of imagination given how beautiful the show is ). Still worth watching even though the story "ends" on a cliffhanger.

Gaiman's book, while the inspiration, does feel less exciting than the show...but then I read the book years ago. I do recall enjoying it, so it's probably worth a library rental at the least?

Yeah, it's a weakness of mine, I get lost with too much description in books. I make the mistake thinking I have to visualize it accurately in order to understand it. I think I would've understood the TSA books better if I didn't let myself get bogged down in the environment details. I think that's why I gave up on American Gods, I didn't appreciate the scenery of it enough. Watching the tv show was a trip as I'm recollecting the parts of the book and I'm like, I no way visualized it that cool.

I do think the show took things to another level, just as Rats of Nimh the movie exceeds its bookish origins. :-)

Rewatching The Wire...it's actually better than I remember....

23
This sounded a lot like Brownian motion.  I looked it up; I guess pedetic is the word kids are using for it these days.  :)

He uses Brownian synonymously but I think he does need a new word since most people assume Brownian motion is inherently random and he wants to make a distinction between randomness and indeterminate-but-relational.

From an interview ->

Time Will Tell: An Interview with Thomas Nail

Quote
So, you don’t interpret the swerve in Lucretius as a random motion? No chance?

I am open to hearing evidence for an outside to the universe, but I have no idea what that would even look like. In part, because the universe is not a whole but an expanding and open process—just as Lucretius described in De Rerum Natura. I believe there is genuine novelty in the universe but we do not need to posit randomness to get that novelty. Lucretius says that matter is always in the habit [solerent] of swerving. There are at least two typical ideas of randomness neither of which Lucretius’ view could support. The first one is a radical randomness, or what Quentin Meillassoux calls “hyperchaos,” which is complete ex nihilo creation from nothing. Lucreitus is explicit that “nil posse creari de nihilo” [nothing can be created from nothing]. The second kind of randomness is the constrained definition randomness where there is a closed domain of objects and matter moves randomly within that. Again, Lucretius is explicit that nature is not a finite closed system—and so there cannot be randomness in this sense either. Something always comes from something relationally but creatively and non-deterministically.

24
Just posting some stuff on Pedesis, the idea that matter can/does move in ways that are neither deterministic nor random.

The very idea of a purely random motion presupposes that it was not affected by or related to anything else previously, which presupposes that it was the first thing and before it was nothing, which is a version of the internally contradictory hypothesis of ex nihilo creation: something from nothing. The ontology of random motion claims that from pure disorder of discrete nonrelational particles comes high-level composite order. Given the high level of order and complexity in our present age, randomness is demonstrably not the case.

Pedetic motion, on the other hand, is not random at all, but instead emerges from and is influenced by other motions, just not in a completely determined way. Unlike randomness, pedetic motion is not unpredictable because it is not influenced by any other motions; rather, motion is pedetic precisely because it occurs in relation to other motions. It is the interrelation and mutual influence of matter with itself that gives it its unpredictable character. Over a long period of time, the pedetic motion of matter combines and stabilizes into certain patterns, synchronies, and relations, giving the appearance of stability and solidity, only to become turbulent again and enter into new conjoined relations.

Nail, Thomas. Being and Motion (pp. 73-74). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

=-=-=

Heisenberg thus showed that even at the quantum level, matter in motion is both relational and uncertain, or pedetic. Pedesis may be irregular and unpredictable, but it is not random. What is interesting about movement is not simply that it is pedetic, but that it is through pedesis and turbulence that metastable formations and emergent orders are possible. By contrast, the ontology of randomness is quite bleak. In a purely random ontology, all of matter would be moving randomly, and thus nonrelationally, at all times.


-Nail, Thomas. Being and Motion (p. 73). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

=-=-=


25
The Unholy Consult / Re: What's up with the "Second" Inverse Fire
« on: May 05, 2021, 03:58:21 pm »
Yeah it all gets wonky once you have a world like Earwa - itself in the Bakkerverse - where stuff like breeding and evolution work similarly but not exactly like they do here, and where a Post-Singularity Civilization can scientifically prove its own damnation.

What is artistic creativity in such an Idealist-we-are-all-One world? What are myths in a world where gods are not just real but seemingly suffused into creation in some sort of elemental way?

When an artist is inspired, does something Divine move through them? Something clairvoyant?

26
There are some rumors circulating that imply dragons are perhaps living Ciphrang or moving topoi, although for the life of me I cannot find any quotes confirming it.

Bakker did say something about how the Chorae pain dragons because they are distortions of living beings...have to find the quote because it didn't make sense to me how dragons were significantly different from Sranc in that regard...

27
The Unholy Consult / Re: What's up with the "Second" Inverse Fire
« on: May 05, 2021, 03:17:42 pm »
This seems to be about things different - and perhaps more - than simply Hell.

Definitely - I don't the latter work has any hints of being an accurate picture of Hell, rather it has something to do with the true nature of God perhaps...maybe the artwork reflects what Mimara sees through the Chorae?

28
The Unholy Consult / Re: What's up with the "Second" Inverse Fire
« on: May 05, 2021, 12:20:17 am »
Do you remember where the passage about this was where it is stated the Inverse Fire shows different scenes of suffering each time you look?

Quote
“After a time,” he said vacantly, “the sheer profundity of it, the monstrous scale of the anguish ... it becomes soothing ... sublime ...”

The sluicing of firelight across white skin.

“And never ... never repeating, always different ... like some kind of broken arithmetic ...”

TUC, Chapter 17.

Nice, thanks!

Interesting to compare this to the other detailed depiction of Hell mentioned in the Glossary ->

Quote
Pa’bikru—“Warring Glimpse” (Invitic). Known as “Cage-carvings” in the Eastern Three Seas, Pa’bikru are the product of the peculiar spiritual sensibilities of Nilnamesh. In the twilight preceding the ruin of the Ceneian Empire, a nameless monk translated Memgowa’s Celestial Aphorisms into the Invitic dialect of Sheyic, thus inspiring the famed “screen sculpture” of Nilnamesh.

The techniques evolved wildly over the centuries, but the premise was always the same: the sculptor would carve miniature scenes, many of them drawn from the Tusk that they then placed in a so-called “peering box” or behind some other obstruction. The original idea was to recreate Memgowa’s conception of the “Blind Beggar Soul.” Like Ajencis, the famed Zeumi sage was forever arguing the folly of Men, but unlike the famed Kyranean philosopher, he argued that it was the inability of the soul to know itself, and not the inability of intellect to grasp the World, that was the origin of the problem. In Celestial Aphorisms, the Sage continually returned to the Rebuke of Angeshraël in The Chronicle of the Tusk, the famed story where War, dread Gilgaöl, upbraids the Prophet for “peering through cracks and describing skies.” He also uses the legend of Ilbaru, a Zeumi folk tale about a man who spies his wife through a cracked shutter, and confusing her attempt to save his wounded brother for an act of passion, murders her, and then must watch his brother die. His argument, refracted through the smoked glass of his aphoristic style, is that the soul is that which sees, and therefore can scarcely be seen. Thus the aesthetic of screen sculpture: the creation of scenes that utterly contradicted the way they appeared when seen through some fixed aperture.

Historically, the most famous of these was Modhoraparta’s “Dance of the Demons,” where the face of the God of Gods viewed through the aperture became a group of demonic monstrosities viewed from all other angles. The rumour of the work so incensed Shriah Ekyannus IX that in 3682 he outlawed all art works that “blaspheme the Simple, the Pure, and the True with foul Complication.” At his trial in Invishi, Modhoraparta claimed that he wanted to show the how the myriad evils suffered by Men find themselves redeemed in the God of Gods. Indeed, all the sculptor’s acts, let alone his work and his claims, argued that he was as devout as any who would presume to judge him. He would be burned for impiety nonetheless: reason counts for naught in matters of outrage—truth even less so. In those days, the Thousand Temples was always eager to display its authority in Nilnamesh, where the scalding sun and indolent air seemed to engender heresy as regularly as harvests.

29
Wutteat, AFACITell, has a soul and this is what sustains his undeath.

But the other dragons, from what I understand, are soul-less beings and this is why they can be controlled by the No-God.

Yet the way they speak in the series, they seem more like full entities when compared to the Sranc and the Skin-Spies.

So...does this mean they have souls? That they are soul-less but have a link to the Outside in order to breathe fire?

30
The Unholy Consult / Re: What's up with the "Second" Inverse Fire
« on: May 04, 2021, 08:03:57 pm »
and there was some mention in the one of the books or Tales that the Inverse Fire never shows the same scene of torment twice...
More specifically, the Inverse Fire is projecting atemporal onto temporal, which isn't going to be in any way straightforward, or even complete, to perceive.

Do you remember where the passage about this was where it is stated the Inverse Fire shows different scenes of suffering each time you look?

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