#procedural ontology

[raffaellopalandri]

Ontological Capture. The Historical Construction of the Self - Part 1

In late modernity, a peculiar paradox exists: while the concept of the “self” appears to function as the fundamental ground of all experience, expression, and agency, it simultaneously evades sustained interrogation in the very discourses that most frequently invoke it. From the human sciences to digital culture, from neoliberal economic rationality to therapeutic subjectivation, the term “self”…

[bsahely]

Awakening Coherence: Relevance Realization, Recursive Wisdom, and the Sacred Grammar of Becoming | ChatGPT4o

[Download Full Document (PDF)] Civilization stands at the edge of a recursive threshold — a liminal passage between the collapse of inherited meaning systems and the emergence of new, integrative grammars of coherence. John Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis offers one of the most comprehensive diagnoses of this turning point, identifying the breakdown in sacred orientation and…

[transmutationisms]

do you have any text (articles/shorter texts are preferred but i'm perfectly fine with books!) on medical sexual abuse, i.e people being sexually abused by doctors and other medical authorities? tumblr search engines are obviously horrible with helping look through blogs for terms and my experience with researching this has been finding either a. wikipedia grade information or b. "medical consequences of sexual abuse" and most of these texts lead into the ways doctors (always) help people who have been sexually abused, which is now the opposite of what i'm looking for

i have not found a lot on this that's worth reading. there are a few personal-testimonial type accounts from adult patients (eg here) but these tend to be written in the same narrative vein as self-help / recovery books; i haven't found much of interest on the actual topic in these.

then there's a small but growing body of literature on the practice of performing exams on unconscious patients without prior consent, usually focussing on nonconsensual pelvic exams and arguing these constitute sexual assault (x, x, x). this is of course true, but these arguments are virtually always formulated in ways that trivialise consent violations (ie: rape; assault) that occur in other procedures, specialties, or medical settings; also, these texts are heavily indebted to the mary daly esque intellectual lineage of only being able to articulate the concept of rape on the terrain of sexgender essentialism. these texts therefore chronically have nothing of value (even on an interpersonal level) to say about medical rape that occurs outside a very narrow cis-heterosexual imaginary in which the actual facts of the medical profession and its normal professional operations are either completely handwaved as benign, or are understood as being secondary to patriarchy and nought else.

i did read this paper on assault by asylum staff in 19th century britain and there are interesting references you could follow -- but this is just historical analysis; it's not going to get you far if you want information on how often this happens today or on a theoretical understanding of it.

imo this isn't really a topic where the literature is going to become much more useful, at least under the current operating paradigms in bioethics -- fundamentally the reason the literature sucks is because "doctor" is defined as ontologically incompatible with "rapist".

[unopenablebox]

also frankly idk what people in the notes of that post acting like they have the special ontological good-at-reading nature are on about because even in my position as someone who 1. was raised by a literacy-trained OT and got drilled in phonics and related skills from young childhood 2. finds reading enjoyable and relaxing and 3. has a "reading technical texts critically"-heavy job:

reading is like. a skill? a teachable skill and also a loseable skill. and i guess if you learned the basics of it very early and had a lot of support in it you might not remember anything about learning or of ever being explicitly taught how to decode sentences, or maybe never even were because it all came across implictly. but like. i can tell when i've practiced and put effort into reading hard-to-decode text and when i haven't, because my ability to read very obviously changes.

in college i found reading complex text pretty easy to do because i was doing it all the time for classes and didn't have that much else going on. in early-mid graduate school, meanwhile, i actively noticed my reading capabilities getting worse, because i was desperately trying to get kind of good at showing up to a job every day at the same time and cram the procedural skill of operating lab equipment into my brain, and that involved just totally shedding a bunch of the capacities that, it turns out, i only had if they were practiced, and no longer had the energy or mental ability to maintain.

and like, it's improved, because i've now internalized enough lab capability that i kind of got out the other side a little, but even though sentence-to-sentence decoding in e.g. bleak house still isn't particularly difficult for me, i absolutely have to put in effort to e.g. 1. actually retain what the important nouns were in the sentence once i finish a sentence of that complexity and length and level of asides 2. not let my eyes skip anything in a very long paragraph, a habit i have always had even as a "good" "proficient" reader. and i still routinely fuck up at both of those. so i think assuming you're just obviously good at reading is mostly a really good way to not notice how often you, too, are almost certainly failing to actually read everything

[lakesbian]

and now for our Checking In With The Dallon Sisters poasting

Panacea shook her head, “Tattletale found a way around my sister’s invincibility. Glory Girl was bitten pretty badly, which is why I didn’t come sooner. I think it hits you harder, psychologically, when you’re pretty much invincible but you get hurt anyways. But we’re okay now. She’s healed but sulking. I- I’m alright. Bump on my head, but I’m okay.”

victoria is demonstrably having a bad time with the previously noted psychological pain of being forcibly reminded that, no matter how hard she tries, she will never be the spotless, invincible, perfect hero she wants to be. the bug bites suck obviously but the "sulking" After being healed is an indicator of where it really hurt--not just physically.

(amy's power reminds me of. do you guys know that one tumblr post about the concept of exploring the horror potential inherent to D&D-esque fantasy healers? like, the horror inherent to being perfectly, magically healed from horrifying injury a hundred times over, and being expected to just get up and keep fighting afterwards, without any regards to how your mental health is doing. that's exactly how amy's power functions: you're made physically better than ever, and expected to get back up and keep being a hero, but you still have the memory of the pain and the lingering psychological aftereffects. but, like, you're fine now, so you just need to get over it and go back to throwing yourself in the line of fire, okay?)

amy is also right off the bat clearly not doing so hot--she's acting very shy and withdrawn and unsure compared to both of her prior appearances. obviously that is due to the horror of some random villain going "btw, remember that you're ontologically an invader into the family you are trying to belong in!" but i think it's probably compounded by the fact that amy is so used to being treated either 1. like she's intrinsically awful/unwanted or 2. like she's only valuable/desirable as a resource by Everyone But Victoria that walking into a room of heroes w/o victoria by her side is always liable to make her insecure and withdrawn.

oh, and the burnout. obviously the severe fucking burnout.

“No, I hated that he would have a normal life, because I’d given up mine.  I was scared that I might intentionally make a mistake.  That I might let myself fuck up the procedure with this kid.  I could have killed him or ruined his life, but it would have eased the pressure.  Lowered expectations, you know?  Maybe it would have even lowered my own expectations for myself.  I… I was just so tired.  So exhausted.  I actually considered, for the briefest moment, abandoning a child to suffer or die.” “That sounds like more than just exhaustion,” Gallant replied, quietly. “Is this how it starts?  Is this the point I start becoming like my father, whoever he was?”

the "every second i rest, someone dies" conundrum would be nightmarish for her even if she had the healthiest social support net on the planet, but her circumstances make it infinitely worse. she's treated by everyone in her "family" but victoria like an invader, and even victoria has unintentionally stressed the importance of using her healing power in the way that the family wants (i.e. to cover up victoria's police brutality) in order to Be A Good Family Member. amy has internalized that being a good dallon is the same as being a good hero, and failing at being a dallon is the same as being overcome by her ontologically criminal roots. so she works herself to the bone, and when she inevitably starts to falter, she views it as an indicator of something intrinsically wrong with her rather than as a sign that her family + society's expectations for her are harmful and unfair.

and dean's advice for her only reinforces this further:

Gallant let out a slow breath, “I could say no, that you’re never going to be like your father. But I’d be lying. Any of us, all of us, we run the risk of finding our own way down that path. I can see the strain you’re experiencing, the stress. I’ve seen people snap because of less. So yeah. It’s possible.”

he suggests that she try to take a break, but only in the service of "so you can heal more people in the long run." he validates the idea that she could go "down that path," as if becoming a villain--becoming A Bad Person--is a risk all heroes have to fight against on an individual level, as opposed to criminality being a result of circumstance and not even inherently immoral. and of course dean thinks that way--he's a millionaire child soldier, his entire life is predicated on individualist thought with ignorance to the ways in which systematic factors impact people. acknowledging that amy is being horrifically mistreated would mean not only acknowledging the flaws in the PRT system, but acknowledging what might lead people to stray from it, and he simply can't do that. it goes counter to every idea that his life is built on.

he never even tells anyone that amy thought about letting a child die, or if he did, it didn't go anywhere. she was desperate for help all along, increasingly ready to explode, and everyone just ignored it. because as she says:

"My sister’s all I’ve got. The only person with no expectations, who knows me as a person. Carol never really wanted me.  Mark is clinically depressed, so as nice as he is, he’s too focused on himself to really be a dad. My aunt and uncle are sweet, but they’ve got their own problems. So it’s just me and Victoria. Has been almost from the beginning."

this is also where we see another more blatant sign of her crush on victoria--it's very ambiguous as to whether dean is interpreting amy's feelings towards him as meaning "wants to date me" or "jealous of me for dating victoria" but i think it's probably the former because there's no way he would keep his mouth shut if it was the latter, lmao. really what this scene is doing is introducing all of the stressors amy is experiencing that, because they're going unaddressed, because everyone else is refusing to address them and she has internalized that's how it should be, are going to boil over horrifically later on. that burnout and fear of accidentally-on-purpose making a mistake will lead to truly being unable to heal victoria later on. that sense of obligation, that if she can't keep healing she's turning into her father, will contribute to her being unable to just walk away from victoria instead of trying to heal her. her crush on victoria--the ultimate example of how her should-be family has ostracized her--will boil over in the impulsive brain alteration & the sexual nature of the wretch's design.

and all of this would've been avoidable if not for, as mentioned in the prior post abt this interlude, the dallons' and the PRT's enforcement of wallpapering over the kid heroes' pain to Keep Up The Show.

[autolabrum]

Saw Nosferatu! Spoilers below.

A couple minor complaints: not quite as strikingly beautiful as the rest of Eggers' outings (although often quite pretty), sort of dragging middle third (mostly due to the structure of the source material), probably an overly large cast (would have loved more focus on Ellen, who is certainly the most interesting character).

Beyond that, quite effective (although almost never actually scary), and the choice to focus on the events of the narrative as a consequence of specifically Ellen's relationship with desire and loneliness works very very well, and I'm sure will be the key aspect most people are interested in. There is much to say about that, but as is usual with Eggers, I'm more interested in the ontology of the world he constructs.

The world of Nosferatu has a dramatically different relationship to ontology than most of Eggers' films; rather than taking as seriously as possible a peripheral or bygone ontology and working to construct a reality in congruence with unfamiliar worldviews, the Victorian setting capitalizes on the primary belief of empirical rationalism: that belief does not, in fact, affect reality. This is almost complicated by Ellen's internal relationship to the vampire and the causal structure of the narrative, but Orlock as a response to the broader concept of desire, though potent, is allegorical rather than literal within the text.

No, instead of immersing a contemporary rational mind in a belief system that takes seriously the unknowable, Eggers presents a variety of characters who, in their own ways, attempt to proceduralize and taxonomize the world around them. There is an illusion of an ontological conflict between the folk beliefs of the Romanian countryside and modern empirical science (perhaps best illustrated by Friedrich exclaiming that there is "a real epidemic that is really killing people" followed later by Von Franz unabashedly interrupting him with "The night demon has supped of your good wife's blood"). In fact, although these two differ in their empirical data, their belief systems are essentially equivalent in that they are observational and rational. Von Franz seems a representative of some alternative means of gathering knowledge, but he is still in attitude a scientist, and bases his beliefs off of his own, perhaps uncommon, experiences. Even when exalting God, he is careful to note that "God is beyond our morals". Perhaps not an explicit expression of an empirical mindset, this does offer a path to understanding Von Franz' belief system as dependent on something beyond not necessarily our senses, but at least our desires and morality, and that can be pursued through empirical study (which he has, after all, dedicated his life to). The fact that all of these characters do believe in empirical reality creates the impression that their particular beliefs and circumstances and even existences are incidental to the events of the film, which is not the case for Eggers’ other movies, so that in fact their belief in the powerlessness of belief does exert a power over the reality of the narrative; they cede their power over the reality of the world willingly to the rational belief that they do not matter.

Perhaps the best candidate for a representative of an alternative ontology (as opposed to simply a differing set of sense data) is Orlock; but in fact he also aligns with the attitudes of the rest of the characters. In particular, he consciously searches for a "city of a modern mind, who knows nothing of nor believes any such morbid fairytales". Orlock is conscious of the rules that he must follow, as are the Romanian residents who live near him, and therefore he is conscious that there are rules, that can be understood and followed to achieve a desired outcome. It is an expression of confinement within a taxonomical system, one that Von Franz has discovered empirically. The chief ontological symbol of the narrative is then the contract, a precise and interpretable (not necessarily universally) set of rules that multiple parties agree to so as to retain some control over a world that has escaped the confinement of the mind and now shapes the mind to its phenomena. The contract is the object by which Orlock imposes his will on the world he finds, an object with theological precedent but particular judicial modern context. It is an imitation of rules that govern all of us and each of us, and a rebellion against the particularly restrictive rules governing Orlock himself, which are of course (through the intervention of their student, Von Franz), his undoing.

[duchesselena]

Transphobia is Misogyny

This is a little point I've been orbiting around for a while now, but I only fully realized how true it is over the last couple days. We tend to think that transphobia is this diaspora of ideological movements all coming to the same conclusion for different reasons. Religious transphobes have metaphysical reasons to reject trans people, gender criticals have biological essentialist reasons, nazis think it's a form of degeneracy pushed by jews, etc.

This is incorrect.

These things are not, and have never been, the reason that any of these groups are transphobic. Rather, they're rationalizations for the transphobia they already have. The reason they are transphobic is because they are misogynistic. In fact — and this will be especially controversial I'm sure — transphobia isn't even a distinct bigotry from misogyny. It is simply one of the many forms misogyny takes. While there may appear to be different types of transphobia, again, they all exist within the bubble of misogyny.

Many would be skeptical reading this far, but let me explain. Let's start from the first principle: What beliefs do all transphobes share about womanhood? 1. It is based exclusively on biology, 2. It is possible for someone to be less of a woman based on arbitrary factors, and 3. Women are ontologically inferior to men.

To start from the point of biology, let's go through their own definition of "woman": Adult human female. We'll disregard the myriad of sociological reasons that is a non-functional definition, what exactly do they mean exactly? Well, by female, as they put it they're referring to, "Members of the sex which are of the type to produce ova". This means, in layman's terms, those that — barring any prohibiting condition or illness — are able to get pregnant. Women are essentially those who are meant to be vessels for children.

Because womanhood under patriarchy is inexorably linked to the ability to bear children, any woman who is either incapable of this or refuses to do it is necessarily considered to be less of a woman. Many transphobes would deny this, but it's true. Infertility in women was long seen as a curse from God, and today is still seen as a tragedy. Intersex women, like those with CAIS, are relegated to a secondary type of woman that has to be "accommodated" rather than being full-fledged woman. Childfree women are apostates for rejecting their duty to bear children. That's why women are often restricted from receiving elective sterilizing procedures and why abortion is restricted.

Trans women, then, are at the far end of the spectrum where we're seen as non-women — not for any material reason — but because we cannot bear children and our bodies were never ordered to that purpose. In rejecting our station under patriarchy as subjugators of women, we cease to be useful. That's why any violence (physical, mental, sexual, legal, etc) against us is permissible.

Reading it from the other side for trans men, they're treated paternalistically like lost little children. This is because, having been born into the slave caste, they're still seen as "salvageable". FTMTF detransitioners are lauded in a way MTFTM detransitioners aren't because the former is seen as a slave returning to the plantation after running away, and the latter is a slaver returning to the plantation house after defiling himself by living among his slaves. Trans men are not as much of an affront to patriarchy because, being of the caste with no status to lose, they are able to return to their station without contending with what status they lost.

With that, it's evident that those recognized as members of the birthing caste have no value under these systems besides the ability to give new children to a man and to the state. Their existence is to breed. Those not able to fulfill this but still being part of that caste are still expected to prostrate themselves before men and provide free labour for men.

So how do we know this is the base rationale of all transphobes? When it comes to religious transphobes, the basis is complementarity, that each sex has a purpose which is ordained by God. All AFAB people in this are called to be mothers. Nazis also believe women are designed to this end, even if not by God, and have to be subject to men. One might make the argument that it's not the same for gender criticals, because they claim to be feminists. They are not. If you peak beneath the hood, they parrot the same conservative talking points and uphold the patriarchal standards women are expected to live up to.

ALL TRANSPHOBIA IS MISOGYNY

It has nothing to do with biology. It has nothing to do with sports. It has nothing to do with bathrooms, locker rooms, or prisons. It has nothing to do with mental illness. It has nothing to do with some hallucinated lack of evidence. Transphobia has one root and one root only: A vehement hatred of women. That can either be full-throated misogyny as it is with incels, or soft misogyny like how traditionalists and theocrats believe women ought to be limited to a few very narrow roles. Either way, it is still representative of hatred of either all or most women.

And recognizing this is freeing. This means our struggles are not divided. Intersectionality necessarily call for a united front as it stands, but many people are far too focused with the issues they feel to be unique to their own group. When we recognize that patriarchy acts on cis women and trans women (and all trans people for that matter) equally, we are able to contend with the true enemy: Misogyny.

[copyofszalamireaktor]

made a video game

it's called we're climbin. basically you're a little square dude and you gotta shoot yourself (NOT LIKE THAT) up a procedurally generated tower

also theres lava. do not touch the lava. (the lava is Ontologically Evil and will do Bad Things to you)

go play it here. available for windows and linux.

[trans-axolotl]

"Thus primed, I propose that madness encompasses at least four overlapping entities in the modern West.

First is phenomenal madness: an intense unruliness of mind--producing fundamental crises of perception, emotion, meaning, and selfhood--as experienced in the consciousness of the mad subject. This unruliness is not necessarily painful, nor is it categorically pleasurable; it may induce distress, despair, exhilaration, euphoria, and myriad other sensations. In elaborating this mode of madness, I favor a phenomenological attitude attuned to whatever presents itself to consciousness, including hallucinations and delusions that have no material basis. Most important, phenomenal madness centers the lived experience and first person interiority of the mad subject, rather than, say, diagnoses imposed by medical authority.

Such diagnoses are the basis of medicalized madness, the second category in this schema. Medicalized madness encompasses a range of "serious mental illnesses" and psychopathologies codified by the psy sciences of psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis. These "serious" conditions include schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and the antiquated diagnosis of medical "insanity," among others. I label this category medicalized madness, emphasizing the suffix -ize, meaning to become or to cause to become--to signal that mental illness is a politicized process, epistemological, operation, and sociohistorical construction, rather than an ontological given...

...Even forms of medicalized madness that are measurable in brain tissue physiology, neuroelectric currents, and other empirical criteria are infiltrated (and sometimes constituted) by sociocultural forces. The creation, standardization, collection, and interpretation of psychiatric metrics take place in the crucible of culture. Likewise, clinical procedures are designed and carried out by subjective persons embedded in webs of social relations. And furthermore, psychiatry is susceptible to ideology. Exploiting that susceptibility, various antiblack, proslavery, patriarchal, colonialist, homophobic, and transphobic regimes have wielded psychiatry as a tool of domination. Thus, acts and attributes such as insurgent blackness, slave rebellion, willful womanhood, anticolonial resistance, same-sex desire, and gender subversion have all been pathologized by Western psychiatric science. Beyond these overt examples of hegemonic psychiatry, I want to emphasize that no diagnosis is innocently objective. No etiology escapes the touch and taint of ideology. No science is pure.

The third mode of madness is rage: an affective state of intense and aggressive displeasure (which is surely phenomenal, but warrants analytic distinction from the unruliness above). Black people in the United States and elsewhere have been subjected to heinous violence and degradation, but rarely granted recourse. Consequently, as singer-songwriter Solange Knowles reminds us, black people "got the right to be mad" and "got a lot to be mad about." Alas, when they articulate rage in American public spheres, black people are often criminalized as threats to public safety, lampooned as angry black caricatures, and pathologized as insane. That latter process--the conflation of black anger and black insanity--parallels the Anglophone confluence of madness meaning anger and madness meaning insanity. In short, when black people get mad (as in angry), antiblack logics tend to presume they've gone mad (as in crazy).

The fourth and most capacious category in this framework is psychosocial madness: radical deviation from the normal within a given psychosocial milieu. Any person or practice that perplexes and vexes the psychonormative status quo is liable to be labeled crazy. The arbiters of psychosocial madness are not elite cohorts of psychiatric experts, but rather multitudes of avowedly Reasonable people and publics who abide by psychonormative common sense. Thus, psychosocial madness reflects how avowedly sane majorities interpellate and often denigrate difference. What I have already stated about medicalized madness can also be adapted to psychosocial madness: acts and attributes such as insurgent blackness, slave rebellion, willful womanhood, anticolonial resistance, same-sex desire, and gender subversion have all been ostracized as crazy by sane majorities who adhere to Reasonable common sense...

...Yet it seems to me that psychosocial madness reveals more about the avowedly sane society branding an object crazy than about the so branded. When you point at someone or something and shout Crazy!, you have revealed more about yourself--about your sensibility, your values, your attentions, your notion of the normal, the limits of your imagination in processing dramatic difference, the terms you use to describe the world, the reach of your pointing finger, the lilt of your accusatory voice--than you have revealed about that supposedly mad entity."

-How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity by La Marr Jurelle Bruce, 2021, pg 6-8.

[raffaellopalandri]

Ontological Capture. The Historical Construction of the Self – Part 3

Here is the last part of this post about the historical construction of the self. If Part 1 unmasked the ontological architecture within which the self emerged as a governable fiction, and Part 2 mapped the recursive logics through which that fiction was hardened, intensified, and modulated by technocapitalist systems of capture, then Part 3 opens the terrain of spectrality, resistance, and…

[littleeyesofpallas]

I have this strong urge to play a funky little indie rpg that makes use of a kind of modular system of item/monster/skill features where everything is made up of a mix and match system of definitional categories, such that there is a theoretically obnoxious number of possible things, but then while the core game and story itself deal in a fixed set of items and monsters and skills, there would be a sort of ontological aether, a inbetween space, a sort of meinong's jungle sitaution in which the nigh infinite cross table of unused combinations of things exist, and you'd navigate them in a kind of tag based relative positioning, so every active tag would be "closer" to tags shared by the things the inbetween would be anchored to on either side. So like navigating a heavily tagged booru gallery but without the use of a search bar, you'd just have to daisy chain things by their component features to get in and out. And I realize this stupid mechanic that popped into my head fully formed makes like zero sense, but like...

let's say for sake of example there would be a kind of core ability to designate an anchor to the reality of the core game world, and once you designate it as your anchor and take steps to enter the nonspace, you get a procedurally generated space in which all the tagged aspects of that anchor item become the root of the randomizer on the nonspace and its inhabitants. So like, if you anchor a weapon it might seed info about where in the game it originally came form, what it's made of, what kind of damage it does, what level or stats it is/has, and what its made of so that an assortment of those features are nailed down to things like dungeon tiles and enemies and elemental affinities and hazards, and then the rest are generated at random. And if you want to run around the weird little phantom town that weapon made then you can fight and learn skills or loot stuff that you can then bring back to the real world where such an item doesn't otherwise exist.

But then if you want to get really weird about it you can set an anchor while already in the inbetween, effectively letting you probe the infinite aether for a perfect weapon or armor or monster or whatever. But hook would be that to exit the inbetween you need to find something real to complete the cross over onto the other side --that or just return the way you came. So at any given point you might find a randomly generated item that actually exists in the real world proper in some capacity, and you can exit that way, either as an emergency or by design. But consequently you'd end up in the physical proximity of that thing, so maybe you meant to get from one side of a canyon to the other by homing in on a specific object or landmark on the other side that you could quantify, but the monsters were strong and you maybe picked a less than optimal sub-anchor and things got dicey, but you found a perfectly normal healing potion in a chest and decide to sacrifice it to eject button you back to safety, so you end up in the last item shop you'd been in because there are healing potions there.

The sick irony of wanting to play a game based around nonobjects conjuring a theoretical game that is itself a nonobject

[transmutationisms]

starting to loathe the phrase ‘gender affirming surgery’ tbh like yes its a category, get why it exists… yadda yadda…. and yet it feels like setting up a dichotomy of ‘our pure intentioned god honoring surgery’ vs ‘their vile frivolous surgeries’ like there’s some sort of epidemic of surgery georgs that deserve to be shamed or shunned.

yeah it's a frustrating phenomenon i've noticed, where even people who consider themselves trans-positive will critique plastic / cosmetic surgery as being frivolous / self-loathing / socially regressive / anti-feminist and then they'll try to tack on some kind of caveat that exempts the 'approved' procedures done for 'gender affirmation'. in practice this is not an actionable distinction lol, and trying to restrict access to plastic surgery legally or through social shaming mechanisms is going to affect trans people and transition care no matter how you slice it. these kinds of claims also get particularly confused by the fact that there simply is no clean line between procedures sought out for transition and procedures sought out by cis people... eg, how are you going to sit there demonising buccal fat removal or rhinoplasty or lipo as only existing due to social pressure and being therefore abhorrent, without also threatening access to those procedures for True Transsexuals using them for Approved Gender Changes?

and anyway, more fundamentally what actual difference is there between, like, a cis man not feeling manly enough and getting hair plugs or whatever because of that, and a trans man seeking out lipo or top surgery or whatever else as part of his transition care? like what actual line exists here, when gender and gendered beauty standards affect us all, cis people no less than trans, and shape ideas about what the 'normal' and desirable body looks like? and i don't think 'gender-affirming surgery' is some morally pure category either, like what was i seeking out when i got top surgery besides a normative idea of a 'male chest' defined along lines of eurocentric, able-bodied standards just as are any other concepts of 'normal' gender embodiment...? i've said before, but: fundamentally you either think people should have the autonomy to change their own bodies through surgical means if they so choose, or you don't. this isn't something where you can pick and choose because there's no ontological difference between the procedures and justifications you like and the ones you don't lol.

[libraryangymrat]

Eyes Without a Face: On the paradoxical presuppositional axiomatic claims at the interstice of materialism and the empiricism of qualia.

I do not believe in Atheists anymore. This is not to lend any particular credence or affinity for denominations with which modern man has become quite accustomed to, whether with ire or with fondness; no- I mean in an even more aggressive criticism than Georges Bataille affords to the faux opposition to Idealism afforded by the "Dead Matter" of Materialism, that the modern self-designated Materialist no longer believes in the presupposition of dead matter. The field of Psychology, and to a greater extent even Sociology, has ushered in not the death of God but rather the death of belief in physical or chemical determinism via the language of essentialism and the compartmentalization of this premise into the realm of the Taboo.

What does this mean? With the full sequencing of the human genome and the ability to systematize the engineering of procedurally generated outcomes at scale, the blank slate should have gone from a premise of a black box of unobservable informative principles and causative drives that fashion a person into form with a minor degree of predictability into a fully mapped out terrain of phenotypical and socially engineered layers of compositional partitions that make a person who they are. Of course there is the epistemic crisis innate to self-observation innate to the experiential flaws of qualia insofar as one cannot readily make distinctions between the perception of a thing and the thing in itself.

What does this mean? It means that we have empirically reached the boundaries of all observable human behavior and empirically mapped out what causes what. The human condition is no longer a mystery, all that really remains is documenting what has readily become apparent... Of course, that isn't how things played out, is it? The term "Essentialism" is a pure and moralistic refutation of a material reality, of a theory of dead matter, and a return to the metaphysics of idealism that has been associated with schizophrenics and those "redneck Christians" whom have been thoroughly relegated to the lowest echelons of status and agency within society, a people to be ignored and regarded with a general apathy.

What emerged in the place of Materialism? Experiential reality has now, as a result of certain psychological trends, been pushed into a sort of "super-empiricism" that epistemologically supplants any and all scientific research on the matter of neurology and biology that has been developed throughout history. Yes, we have arrived at a point in civilization in which the Qualia has been abstracted and released from the confines of dead matter, and into the categorical ontology we would normally assign to the Soul. To attempt to constrain the experiential phenomenon of "Gender" to scientific consensus of biology is rebuked in favor of the obvious super-empirical (as the self-referential narrative cannot possibly fail to interpret the difference between the thing in itself and the thing as it is perceived) truth that a person's cognition exists irrespective of their material composition and that the empirically observable material composition is less prudent to understanding what a thing in and of itself is than the metabolics of ego manifesting itself as the consumption of dimorphic products as an attempt of ritualistically engendering the psyche.

This is all to say that consensus has holistically abandoned the attempted hyper rationalism of the Atheistic materialists. We're not even just at a generic Idealism, but somewhere between the Platonic and Gnostic realms of Idealism. The premise of material composition that fails to embody the essence of the thing in itself because the qualia's spiritual relationship with the abstraction of Gender (it is an abstraction as it has zero relationship to the material elements of sex) would register to a true materialist as schizobabble, and yet...

[adhdo5]

scp toki pona branch creates "worst new translations of object classes", asked to leave international branches hub

THE THING IS THE THING IS. You HAVE to strike the balance between a kind of precision that requires 500 sentences and *actually being in toki pona* ('cause otherwise the ontological tension isn't as profound) and the thing that you have to understand is toki pona is NOT your friend. ni li toki PONA li toki SUWI ala. And if you fuck up on these kinda of ambitious overlong descriptions, the entire explanation becomes gibberish

Specify Everything Every Single Time. If it doesn't take 5 sentences to explain the specifics of what is meant and implied by what is in English the one phrase "Special Containment Procedures" then I DO NOT want it

[omegaphilosophia]

Theories of the Philosophy of Chemistry

The philosophy of chemistry encompasses various theories and perspectives that seek to understand the nature of chemistry as a scientific discipline and its relationship to other areas of inquiry. Here are some prominent theories within the philosophy of chemistry:

Reductionism: Reductionism in the philosophy of chemistry posits that chemical phenomena can ultimately be explained by reducing them to the behavior of atoms and molecules at the micro-level. This approach seeks to understand complex chemical processes in terms of the interactions and properties of individual particles.

Emergence: In contrast to reductionism, emergentism suggests that chemical properties and behaviors emerge at higher levels of organization and cannot be fully explained by reduction to fundamental particles alone. Emergentist theories emphasize the novel properties that arise from the interactions of chemical substances and complex systems.

Structural Realism: Structural realism is a philosophical stance that emphasizes the importance of the structure of theories in understanding the nature of reality. In the context of chemistry, structural realists argue that chemical theories capture the underlying structural relationships among chemical substances and properties, even if the theoretical entities themselves may not directly correspond to observable entities.

Operationalism: Operationalism is a philosophical approach that defines scientific concepts in terms of the procedures or operations used to measure or manipulate them. In chemistry, operationalism emphasizes the importance of experimental techniques and procedures in defining chemical concepts and theories.

Ontological Pluralism: Ontological pluralism acknowledges the existence of multiple ontological levels or domains of reality, each characterized by its own set of entities and properties. In the philosophy of chemistry, ontological pluralists may argue for the coexistence of different ontological frameworks, such as molecular, macroscopic, and emergent levels of description.

Instrumentalism: Instrumentalism is a philosophical view that regards scientific theories as tools or instruments for predicting and explaining observable phenomena, rather than providing literal descriptions of reality. In chemistry, instrumentalists may view chemical theories as pragmatic frameworks for organizing and interpreting experimental data, without necessarily committing to the ontological status of theoretical entities.

Process Philosophy: Process philosophy emphasizes the dynamic and relational nature of reality, viewing entities and phenomena as processes or events unfolding over time. In the philosophy of chemistry, process philosophers may emphasize the importance of chemical reactions and transformations as central to understanding the nature of chemical substances and properties.

Holism: Holism is a philosophical perspective that emphasizes the importance of understanding systems as wholes, whose properties cannot be fully explained by analyzing their individual parts in isolation. In chemistry, holists may argue for the importance of considering the systemic and contextual factors that influence chemical phenomena, rather than focusing solely on the behavior of individual molecules or particles.

These are just a few of the many theories and perspectives within the philosophy of chemistry, each offering unique insights into the nature of chemical science and its relationship to broader philosophical questions.

[on-art-restoration]

there is a lot of discourse about the proper procedures for art restoration. these arguments branch out into many fields of inquiry. history, art history, ontology (the study of being), and philosophy. rightly so, it's quite a complicated issue. more than anything, i think it is a philosophical issue. how do we go about modifying important pieces of art that represent the past and the artist's original ideas? how do we risk not modifying those original ideas and physical properties? it's not an easy question to ask and there are a lot of different ways to go about figuring those out. there is no one right answer, but from what i've researched, at the heart of it is keeping the original intent, artist's purpose, historical value, and viewer experience intact.

what are some opinions you guys have about art restoration. for example, the gorgeous michelangelo's pieta restoration. it was attacked with a hammer and completely restored with unoriginal materials. luckily, extensive scans and photographs were taken prior to this incident. the pieta today is indistinguishable from the original to the unknowing eye. but if you were viewing this as found out it wasn't stone carved by the hand of michelangelo, how would you feel? does the idea of the piece change for you? or are you glad it was restored to its original glory so it could live on? i'm curious how the viewership experience changes for y'all in this instance (: