roachboy

dear knife missle:

you have a choice to make.
you could tank this thread in a useless quibble that appears to be with me (though it's hard to actually tell) or we could move on to other things.
your choice.
for what it's worth, i am not interested in what appears to be the buzz buzz buzz in the drum of your ear.
and if i am the cause of it, mea culpa.
ok?
but if you want to push it, if you feel this buzz buzz buzz is important enough to keep forcing it into the discussion, then go for it.
but i will stop being nice.


bises.

your pal roachboy


THE FOLLOWING MORNING, HE AWOKE AND SAID:

pigglet: the ain problem that atlan at least concentrates on with reference to questions of multiple scales of systems operating within the same(?) higher-order system is about the relations between or across scales. the argument is that the problem of integration is an effect of conceptualizing various scales/systems as discrete---so if integration comes down to a question of how a bounded system links to another at a higher level (scale wise), the problem can well be confused by thinking of these systems as discrete, or like the edges are geared and mesh somehow with other gears such that research is about stumbling across the patterns of teeth.

the reason this positing of discreteness happens is a function of the assumptions that go with nouns or naming. nouns describe forms you see.
rather, (here we are tipping into wittgenstein a bit) meanings are in relation to noun such that taken together they describe the characteristics of a Form (in the platonic sense): the refer to bounded entities in the world; complexity is a matter of multiple layers of discrete referrals.

for wittgenstein, meanings are forms and so are metphysical.
metaphysics is based on both a doctrine of form and on the assumption that the shifting world that we move through is shaped, is made meaningful, because it embodies a dimension of forms--so meanings are stable, more or less unchanging, and the world shifts (form/doxa).
from this viewpoint, when you use language you shift in and out of a metaphysically oriented reconfiguration of the world.
if, that is, you restrict how you understand the relation of language to the world to the representational function of language. which is one dimension of it, and is the dimension that (basically) we function within. so you cant really just say "representation is metaphysical is bad"--rather you have to think about (1) the notion that this dimension of language carves up the world in particlar ways and (2) this carving up of the world has effects so (3) an awareness of these effects can maybe be useful in trying to shift, say, be (back to atlan) research into how biological systems work and interact because (4) treating language as simply describing means that you are blind to the effects of description and so (5) a naive relation to language amounts to a way in which the logic of one system gets dragged into the logic of another around the position occupied by the observer.

you could apply the same kind of logic to the question of belief in a god.
god is a noun. it is a name. the word itself implies something, generates a signified, and with particular characteristics that you can isolate and think about if you are so inclined--folk invest in the signified as structured by the formal characteristics of a noun without realizing it, etc etc etc.

i need more coffee.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite