simpolism

The following is a brief summary of Breuer's discussion of "Intracerebral Tonic Excitation", from the second section of Freud and Breuer's "Studies on Hysteria" (1895). PDF of Breuer's original text. Breuer starts by contrasting the “two extreme conditions of the central nervous system: a clear waking state and dreamless sleep.” He asks, what is “the essential difference between the two conditions?” He notes that, when fully awake, “every act of will initiates the corresponding movement; sense...

Written in dialogue with Suspended Reason's posts: “ACiM is a Natural Extension of Cybernetic Theory”, “Consensual and Non-Consensual Manipulation”, “All Communication is Behavioral Manipulation”, and “All Communication is Manipulation”.See also, my earlier post “Is Communication 'Manipulation'?”, which takes a synthetic rather than analytic approach to its argument.A.“All Communication is Manipulation” (ACiM) is a tool for explanation. Its intent as an idea is to answer questions of the form “w...

I. My friend Suspended Reason recently wrote a post where he put forward the claim that "[all] communication is manipulation". The claim was not well-received. Readers disagreed. The formulation doesn't sit well with me either, but in a vague way. "I'm not manipulating others with my communication, and others aren't manipulating me" feels like a firm belief of mine. Without trying to discern the truth or falsity of the claim that "communication is manipulation," what I want to figure out is "w...

Question: What are the main differences between Aquarius and Pisces? The distinction I would draw between Aquarius and Pisces is that Aquarius is the large group (the nation, society, etc), while Pisces is the totality. The result is that Aquarius functions on the level of signifiers, ideology, etc (Saturnian in its reliance on form and structure, airy in its intellectuality, fixed in its presupposition and maintenance of that which exists), while Pisces transcends this and reaches for a leve...

For most people (elite and popular) the choice is not one between disenchantment and enchantment, science and religion, or myth and mythless rationality, but rather between different competing enchanted life worlds — even if people do not always recognize them as such. "Why Do We Think We Are Disenchanted?", Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm Over the past few years, or perhaps the last few centuries, a discourse has emerged regarding "enchantment", or more specifically "disenchantment", centering a...

The following was written in response to a comment on Reddit: A lot of Freud's ideas turned out to not be empirically validated. So we should ignore them. [??] To understand what's going on here, we need to think a little more about knowledge, with an understanding that the goal of Science is to produce knowledge. Contemporary Institutional Science, especially within academia, privileges the detached observer, in the sense that the method is only seen as valid if we follow the model of "arb...

Read in Žižek voice: I want to dedicate a little comment on an image I was emailed by my colleague. The image contains a little sad man talking to a turtle, very absurd combination. The sad man asks "why can I not find a girlfriend?". The turtle, wise of course, replies "all you need to do is, B. E. yourself". The sad man asks, as you might expect, "what do B and E mean?" to which the turtle replies "B stands for B. E. and E. stands for entirely, so the expression expands to "be entirely entir...

A friend writes: Do you have any theory as to why I am so prone to self-punishment? Like the other day I accidentally slept later than I wanted to and I beat myself up and had zero sympathy for myself. I am emotionally punitive with myself with lots of rules about when work will happen and how it will happen. The following was my reply: I can't tell you exactly what's happening in your case but I can give you a few ideas or tools that will help you figure it out on your own. The key idea: ...

In this excerpt from a longer conversation, I attempt to address the usefulness of the idea of astrological causality, whether it somehow negates the "magic" of the technique. I also address notions of cyclical history such as Turchin and Strauss and Howe, and the use of intuition in understanding history. My interlocutor writes "It should be clear to most by now that history isn't objective and is as much a construct of convenience and justification as one's personal narrative can be, though t...

The intent of this document is to answer common questions I get about how I conceive of astrology and why I think it's cool and useful. Basic Concepts Astrology is a description language for agentic systems, a vocabulary of symbols which describe features and a grammar for relating them. Astrology is a divination framework, for producing meaningfully patterned data from a random seed. As with all types of entropy generation, this is where astrology draws from physics, specifically astronomy. ...

Presented below is the text which coined the term "autism". Transcribed from E. Bleuler, Dementia Praecox, pp. 63-68, for source see this twitter post. The Compound Functions The complex functions which result from the coordinated operations of the functions previously discussed, such as attention, intelligence, will, and action, are, of course, disturbed to the extent that the elementary (simple) functions on which they depend are altered. Only association and affectivity have to be conside...

I had a conversation with a friend earlier regarding the distinction between "can't" and "won't". It seems straightforward at first, something taught as a joke in grade school: "can I go to the bathroom?" "yes, you can, but may you? No." But this example doesn't explain much; the smug teacher asserts their authority over the student, but what is the difference here, really? The student isn't permitted to go to the bathroom, under threat of [...], which may well be practically expressed as a "can...

The gaze is the medium of desire. Do not mistake the gaze for the look, one can gaze without eyes. More and more this is how we gaze and experience the gaze of others, as we remain locked in our rooms, afraid of the miasmas which inhabit the body of the other. They have no eyes, yet I must be seen. The gaze happens here too: flowing into the spaces between words, embedded in certain gestures of the other, certain clicks, certain words, figures emerging, the gestalt of fragments of acts, yet mor...

A tweet appears on your timeline. A friend. The glyphs spell out "tfw no gf." You feel a twinge of sympathy, press "Like", and resume scrolling. You're in bed. As you wait for sleep, a feeling emerges. Your thoughts tumble and swirl. A sensation of want emerges, echoing, repeating in your mind. You realize, you are having tfw no gf. Despite the suffering, you realize something. This is an opportunity, to know that feel when no gf. But you need to gather some info. Ask some questions. What do ...

"Nobody owes you, or me, or anyone, anything" is a stance I hear from friends sometimes. It makes sense in the context of a perpetual imposition of others' desire on one's life, to think "I don't owe them anything [e.g. when someone talks to me in public in an unwanted way]", but what happens when this becomes universalized into a life philosophy, into an ethics? Is this tenable? The straightforward step in asking this question is to consider it in terms of the categorical imperative: what woul...

A: So you finished watching Evangelion, yes? I: Yes, I finished watching the entire TV series earlier this evening. A: Ah, so we don't need to worry about revealing any spoilers, then. What did you think? I: Honestly, I felt dissatisfied. Almost cheated. I feel like the show gave many hints to plot elements which were never resolved. A lot was never explained. A: Oh? Like what? I: Well, for example, the role of SEELE in the plot was never explained. What did they want, or why did they want ...

I. Imagine you are tasked on a journey across the waters, for which you must build a boat. You are faced then with the decision: which sort of boat shall I build? Innumerable concerns appear before you: what designs should I trust, and how will I get my hands on them? How much will it cost, and how much effort will it take to construct? What length of journey might any particular vessel accomplish: do I need to cruise across a lake, or traverse a vast ocean? And what capacities does any particu...

Inferiority is (a) a belief, about (b) a property of my self that (c) is relative to other people, and (d) found wanting or lacking in comparison. (a): Belief implies the level of knowledge. Inferiority is something you know to be true. But just because it's knowledge doesn't mean it's conscious. You may disavow that knowledge and say "I am not inferior... [but still, I believe I am]". As with any belief, the trick isn't to "replace" it with a new belief, but to undermine its grounding, to unse...

How would I describe the experience of MDMA? First, my shoulders relax. Then, I feel a shift in my social perception, others no longer "worry" me in quite the same way. I feel as if I could say whatever I wanted to anyone, and their response wouldn't bother me at all. I find it easy to fall deeply into conversations with others, maintaining direct eye contact and enjoying the interaction, without worrying about any sort of rejection. If they do start to shy away, I could shrug and move on, no ha...

The central causal argument of Cultural of Narcissism: lack of felt historical continuity leads to an abandonment of pro-social endeavors, leading to a "turning inward" toward the self, aka narcissism. This is not necessarily wrong, but vague. What caused the lack of felt historical continuity? Why didn't something else replace it, and instead we ended up with "narcissism"? How can we treat "society" as a totality in this sense without missing a lot? Using Lyotard's frame: we can think of "soc...

Original PDF (for those interested) "One Page" Outline Freud's goal: to tentatively define some basic scientific concepts within the field of psychology. What is an instinct (Trieb)? An instinct is a stimulus applied to the mind, that originates from within the organism itself. The stimulus is called a "need" and getting rid of it is "satisfaction". Has a pressure or force, an aim, an object, and an underlying source. We assume that the goal of the organism is to remove the pressure impose...

In this essay, I will discuss knowledge. We tend to speak of knowledge as a "body" that exists somewhere in the ether, but for the purposes of this essay, I'd like to restrict the subject of that knowledge to a single individual, who acts as the "knower"1. Knowledge is a broader topic than simple true or false statements, it "includes notions of 'know-how,' 'knowing how to live,' 'how to listen'"2. I intend to focus on symbolic knowledge, that we can create and access consciously through languag...

Thanks to @4Q248 for proof-reading this post and providing clarifying suggestions. Lacan gives a formulation, "the unconscious structured like a language" (Seminar XX, p. 21), which has always felt mysterious to me. Known as the foundational text of "structuralism", Saussure's "Course on General Linguistics" has helped clarify this formulation by providing Lacan's working definition of a language. Before I approach Saussure's definition, I want to set the boundaries of this post. I'm intereste...

(Excerpted from a longer journal entry written on an overnight flight from NYC to Dusseldorf, August 15, 2019. No significant edits from original entry. Footnotes added later, to contextualize references.) +2:22 Ate a sandwich and some peanut M&Ms, but I had to pay for them. Apparently in-flight meals are a luxury now. I was thinking about meaning issues, lack of ability to start or feel motivated. In college I felt a state of certainty, total unambiguity, that allowed me to single-mindedly...

As pointed out by preeminent Neoreactionary pastor "Zero HP Lovecraft", 2019 is the year of the paypig. And yet, many still cannot fathom the nature of this position. They read, and wonder: what must be going on in the mind of the paypig, to subject themselves to such a thing? To understand this, I turn to Lacan's insights into the phenomenology of the pervert. Briefly, from nosubject, the Lacan wiki: The pervert assumes the position of the object-instrument of the "will-to-enjoy" (volonté-d...