Comrades, this is a bit off topic, but I'm having a literal Nietzschan existential breakdown and the beginning of the process of transvaluation right now and I'm scared as fuck.
On the other hand, it's provided me with invaluable insight into the nature of communist development, and has helped me link Hegel, Marx, Bertrand Russel, Nietzsche, Gödel, and Buddhism into a much more unified conceptual system, so that's nice, I guess.
There is no reason to be upset.
I know. It's just that I had the epiphany that I'm in no control of where my mind is going at this point and I'm not going to be able to stop. I have no idea where this is going to end up and it feels like the floor fell out from under me last night.
Whats going on?
Go with the fucking flow, let nature take its course, etc. Say fuck it to all. You're already on the right path.
So a couple months ago I was reading things about Hegel's philosophy discussing how you consider a concept in its entirety and you start to really grasp how different concepts inside that first concept are incompatible with one another.
You have two ideas that are true on their own, and false when considered by the other. The incompatibility begs change, and drives a concept to create some "new" concept that goes beyond the incompatibilities to make something that has less paradoxes in it. The dialectical drive.
And in that thinking through Hegel I just straight up had a vague, generalized epiphany that was like an entirely new instinct kicking in, and I just suddenly understood the draw of asceticism and Buddhism. Now, I've been talking to someone else who's already been interested in buddhism and is apparently undergoing a similar process about a lot of things, discussing things like the nature of suffering with him. We talked about how suffering implies the attempts to avoid suffering, but avoiding suffering doesn't get rid of the idea of suffering, it's part of suffering, and both agreed that in order to stop the suffering, you have to accept the suffering, and in so doing, come to acceptance in the same way that you come to acceptance over grief from a loss. You still have lost someone close to you, but you lose the attachment as part of coming to acceptance over their loss.
And we discussed that this is just sort of like the idea of having a mathematical axiom that creates a paradox. You resolve the paradox by changing the axiom, and once you do that, you set things "right. You don't know if your new concept is going to have new paradoxes in it, but you've resolved the old ones. We also came to a generalized idea that it is almost certain that many sufferings of the world are, really, just the axioms of our lives creating paradox. A simultaneous epidemic of obesity…right next to mass starvation. Homeless dying in the cold next to an empty building heating lifeless commodities. The tension is resolvable, and the things producing them are simply paradoxical axioms of how we run our society. The paradox doesn't ask to be resolved, it's just there, and we just…naturally want to resolve the axiom. It's the same for Hegel as it was for Marx as it was for Russel and Godel showed that we can't ever know if there won't be new paradoxes, but we can find them. Axiomatic math, axiomatic world, the only suffering is from paradox.
I also discussed how, a few days ago, I had a brief waver in my concept of reality. Nothing really changed, but for a few moments I was just compelled to look all around my work, and saw as everything just felt different. Like the boxes and pallets and floor and walls were still there, they just felt like they might not be my idea of boxes and pallets and floor and walls anymore. I could still see them, but not so much think them. They wouldn't "be boxes". they would just be, an incomprehensible is-ness. We also discussed the paradoxes developing from the concept of "self", whether we exist over time, or whether we only "exist" for a brief instant. Difficult to even really get a handle, but we agreed that the concept of self does start creating some paradox, so it'll be left behind too, eventually, as a new axiom of the mind takes place.
Now, earlier this week I strained my wrist. Nothing bad, but a mild annoyance, and I decided to focus on that at work yesterday, as a form of meditation, while discussing what causes suffering with my friend. Last night, I had another epiphany and this one was terrifying. It was the realization that I was in no control over the literal revolution that was brewing in my mind, that my sense of self was going to be overthrown just as surely as the bourgeoisie.
The axioms of our minds stay there until they're just overthrown by the new ones suddenly and violently implanting themselves in revolt. Epiphany. I actually felt like having the mental machinery in my head just snapped and suddenly gears fell into different places and turned differently. And I was in actual mortal fear. As my friend put it, I stared into the abyss, and the abyss stared back.
And at the same time, my wrist felt different. The pain of moving my hand around was gone. I could feel the muscles straining, feel them tell me that yes, they're still damaged…the way a machine is damaged. There was no physical pain. It wasn't "hurting". It was just making the neutral, unconcerned report that there was injury there being aggravated by movement. Bit into my finger just to make sure I hadn't fucking lost it and I could feel that pain normally, even as I kept moving my hand to feel my wrist. Got the vaguest pain from moving it really far and straining those muscles in particular.
I'm feeling normal again but I'm shaken by it, I know it's going to happen again at some point and I don't know when, and I really don't know if I'm just going to lose my entire mental structure of the world and be lost in the void, unable to make sense of the world. Trying to not-try to just accept the whole thing but this is difficult especially as I know I'm not the kind of person that allows thoughts like this to go untouched.
Take the Eternal Recurrence pill user
Your life will never end, rather, whenever you die, you'll come back to the beginning and experience the wonder of life once again, without any knowledge of it occurring. This is not your first time here and it won't be the last.
Seriously, accepting eternalism forever liberated me from the fears of death and obliteration, and I urge you all to craft an eternal heaven for yourself and everyone around you, so that it wouldn't be an eternal hell.
Epiphany of the mind, revolution of the body. All of it is the drive to create world without paradox, because paradoxes literally hurt.
But these aren't really paradoxical. Unlike with a paradox, we can look at this and point out the exact reasons why it is the case. A paradox is something that can not be, but still is, while these societal examples have very clear causes, all stemming from capitalism pretty much, so it would actually be a paradox for them to not exist in the current world.
Remember how it is for a dialectical development. Both things are true following their own logic as a development from a certain axiom. Capitalism's axioms imply both overconsumption and want at the same time. It's a paradox in the sense that it is two competing branches of logic that defy one another's existence but both remain true so long as the axiom generating them as true still holds. You can point out why paradoxes happen in math. You can point out why they happen in society too, for the same reason
Or, here, let's take another one. The arguments on minimum wage raises as good for the economy are true, and so are the arguments that they are bad for the economy. They cannot simultaneously be true, but both are logical developments from the axioms of liberal capitalism, and so long as we retain those axioms, both are true and when put into practice we truly do see unpredictable, contradictory results.
I really like your posts, but these are the same thing.
The food directed towards the obesity epidemic is directed away from starving people towards the more profitable market, where it can stay and be speculated on rather than distributed fairly and maintain a larger profit than the high risk low reward third world, and the people are homeless because investors are worth more than housing people. Their furniture is heated purely because it's a way to extract more rent.
Yes i know. They're just instances of a contradiction. Russell's Paradox isn't ``the'' contradiction in naive set theory, it's an instance off it
I had similar episode which developed into localized Schizophrenia while studying foundation of mathematics long time ago.
Unfortunately I was still lolbert ancap back then so my visions were more 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸LAND🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸ian solutions.
What I wanted to add is that, dialectic process is not closed form of calculation that allows you to refer unique omega from alpha. Two mutually exclusive "Axioms" can be proposed to resolve undecidable proposition maybe you are confounding undecidability and paradox… will try to come up with better examples and you can have two distinct, compact systems of logic from that point onward.
What will prevent jaded youth to uncritically support fascist movement "that just werks" without strong class consciousness and leftist theory?
Alright well this is starting to make me nervous, the psychotic nature of recursion that is dripping from AnComs posts resonates with me and I've worried about schizophrenia before. Is localised schizophrenia dangerous?
unlike computers that can run out of memory to allocate for stack, human mind tends to react in very erratic way when dealing with recursion and I am not memeing when I say studying formal logic to some degree is psychological hazard.
Stay away from the internet as often as possible, try to talk to real people, do manual labour that exhaust you so your mind does not descend too deep
I work at a factory doing manual labor aassembling plastic parts. I have nothing to me but my own thoughts for hours at a time.
Two mutually exclusive "Axioms" can be proposed to resolve undecidable proposition maybe you are confounding undecidability and paradox… will try to come up with better examples
I get it, yeah.
That's what I think a lot of communists and especially Marxists miss.
We do not know what is going to happen after revolt because it is a total unmaking of the rules of the world. We might still land in a different realm that is incomprehensible to us just buy being a new world with new rules, or worse, we might just fall into the Abyss.
eh, at least confine yourself to well defined realm of mathematics while you are wage slaving then. I am most intellectually productive during those time of the day too as my mind is willing to do literally anything else.
I had to leave work halfway through. I can't stand there thinking like that for another four hours or I was going to break down screaming.
Read Spinoza already jesus christ how do you want to even begin to understand hegel if you have no clue about spinoza
hey user, had something similar happen to me but it involved reading Gödel Escher Bach, by Douglas Hofsdtater and some lsd.
In my trip, I kind of saw and understood the fractal nature of the universe and existence. The "learning" stayed with me for a week, but eventually faded. Meanwhile, I kept calm and appreciative of being able to experience such a weird thing as my life (not that it's special, I just don't live in misery or war). The world of ideas is extremely huge, and there's patterns we can study, such as psychology, math, biology, etc. It dawned on me later that I was applying my newfound model to everything, including life itself, and through it, missing the forest for the trees. There's so much I don't understand, but when I "saw" the mathematical nature of reality, I felt I knew all I needed to know. I realize your experience is different, just wanted you to know.
basically, it'll fade, don't be scared. better yet if you avoid reading about it and reinforcing it.
I'm kind of spiritual, yet atheist, and also a brainlet, so take this as you wish. Enlightenment is a state, it is not understanding. You don't need to understand anything in particular. As for suffering, physical pain is just one type of suffering. You're suffering now, but the extacy of epiphany numbed your physical pain.
The brain is like a forest. Paths have been traversed by throught all your life. At the moment you are thinking differently, but eventually, the paths you are doing now will merge with the paths you had before your epiphanies. A hegelian motion, if you will.
Thanks man. That helps.
Detachment is a difficult process. I'm not nearly as upset anymore and just doing some dumb video games and having a few drinks and sleep, and talking about the insane places the mind can go to helped.
I have no idea what the fuck youre talking about but i hope youre ok.
I'm feeling a lot better. I guess, looking back on it, I was attempting to totally detach myself from the world and emotionally mature totally, in the span of about a week.
I do have one criticism though, of what people say when they mean they're "materialists" now. Matter is fucking incomprehensibly divine in its existence. Matter has no meaning, it just IS. And I came to realize that living in a world without Meaning is a world where you can show me a cardboard box and ask me what it is, and I wouldn't even be able to say "I don't know" because those three words have meaning, and meaning is a thing that doesn't apply to matter.
Matter is truly a Divine thing, and I am happy to curl up in the world of ideas again.
hey user, I'm glad your doing better now. here's some of my opinions as food for thought.
we rely on mental models to understand reality.
materialism is deriving mental models from what we can observe, and not by how we feel or by pure reason alone. scientism is confusing the map for the territory. It's confusing our mental model of electrons as the real deal. It's confusing the noumena for the phenomena. Matter isn't divine, it just is. Using your example, a cardboard box is a concept, a model, that is useful for humans to communicate and describe an abstract object. But the matter itself exists as well and we can derive useful information about the matter by using abstractions, such as, "it's a sturdy cardboard box with a capacity of 50 liters". you can't escape abstractions, your brain is made to abstract. if you can distinguish objects (say a cup and a table) as visually detached, you have already failed.
Yes and no, both your claim and OP's claim are true, the way both you and OP describe matter make it sacred in the strict philosophical sense and if the sacred is not divine then what is?
One should recall here that the dalai lama is buddhist by duty, but quite literally marxist by confession
**He insists that concious only, which is to say, engaging
in interpretatio graeca, idealism in the abject hegelian sense is more useful but materia only is more true**
There are no paradoxes. If you have two mutually contradictory conclusions that are both simultaneously true, you fucked up somewhere in your thought process. You are seriously over complicating things, dude.
I'm just breaking down. my ability to care about anything is just fucking eating itself and I can feel it in my chest. It hurts. Im in tears for the second time in a few days.
I honestly think I'm going to end up as burnt as Nechayev at this point.
Take a very long moment to think about why they are called the "contradictions of capitalism".
stop reading philosophical and religious BS and just live
also detachment is about the worst possible thing you can do - it causes trauma
Detachment is part of being a revolutionary. This is part of me no matter what or I just drop out of politics entirely.
No, dude. There is no such think as a real life paradox. If people are starving when there is a surplus of food, that's not a paradox, that can easily be explained by using market theory. A paradox are like zen koans, "I just shaved, I have such a long beard".
I meant detachment in the buddhist sense - detachment from your bodily sensations to focus on ascension or whatever the fuck.
It's not detachment from your bodily sensations. It's detachment from things that arent you. There is no focus to it. It's just coming to terms with it and going through the process of acceptance. Much the same as the acceptance you get from going through a process of grieving over loss of a loved one, just in a much more general sense.
The paradox is that the market theory cannot resolve the surplus of food and people starving no matter how long it runs. The market both needs to satisfy needs and still have needs to be satisfied, even if it has to create them. It remains in constant inner turmoil until new processes are set in place to resolve them. It's exactly what we're doing.
I am legitimately a new person.
I do not have to try to control myself anymore. I just do. I don't have to worry about my emotions ruling me. If I want to change myself I just do.
This was the most painful singular experience of my life, but I am so much better for it I would not trade it for anything in the entire world.
I may or may not choose to stay a leftist. I certainly don't have the same attachment to reducing suffering in the world I once did, I may choose to make it a worthy goal for myself, but I'm not even going to just limit myself, yet.
I do want to thank you guys for all the help you've given me in reaching this. It's been a very important part of my life. I'll probably stay here a while but no promises, honestly.
If you were a leftist for such a retarded idealist reason you were never one of us to start with.