Pike's ghost

James Wynn · 30 Nov 2011, 22:47 · from 2011-November.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:47:17 -0600
Subject: (urth) Pike's ghost
In-Reply-To: <4ED6A315.5070602 at gmail.com>
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>>> Ant?nio Marques wrote:
>>> If you think the archives are full of theories challenged because
>>> they have simpler alternatives, I think perhaps you might reread
>>> them.
>>
>> James Wynn wrote:
>> That is in no way how I have described the challenges.
>
> Antonio wrote
> No? You couched it in rather judgemental terms.

I'm not sure how that would matter in regards to whether or not I said 
that theories are challenged because there are simpler alternatives. The 
point is, I didn't say it.
But, people who cannot disabuse themselves of the idea that their own 
interpretations are *objectively* the most reasonable, simpler, and 
obvious, and are therefore the DEFAULT theory...these people make that 
claim all the time.

>> However, you have _perfectly_ described the way that an
>> unenlightened** challenger (such as I have been describing) sees his
>> own challenges. HIS alternative is "simpler". Of one's own
>> alternatives are /always/ simpler: Either it does not require a
>> recognition of irony in the text or it does not leave problematic
>> questions hanging or something else.
>
> If it does not require a recognition of irony in the text or it does not
> leave problematic questions hanging or something else, then it's simpler
> because it does not require a recognition of irony in the text or it
> does not leave problematic questions hanging or something else, not
> because it's one's own.

????? <eyes squinting, head tilted with a look of befuddlement>
And a Rube Goldberg contraption is simpler because it only consists of 
unmachined parts. (coo-coo)
My actual POINT was that when an alternative is your own, the remaining 
complexities are insignificant to you, the simplifications a a great 
major improvement.
It is your child. The defects have charm.
Your point is what? Just to have the last word?

>> It is the failure to understand that marks one's approached as
>> unenlightened.
>
> Failure to understand what? (Please don't answer 'Precisely.'.)

It is the failure to understand /that one's own alternatives always 
appear simpler/ that marks one's approached as
unenlightened...that is, lacking in awareness of his own nonobjectivity.

>> **"Unenlightened" is a term you, Antonio, originally coined. I'm
>> merely adopting it so we can use the same terms.
>
> Coined it I may have, but I can't find the reference and I would like 
> to in order to understand what made it so memorable. Can you provide 
> it? (If not actually, from memory?)

I _believe_ it developed at earliest with a statement from you along the 
lines of  "what makes you so much more enlightened?"
Your point at the time seemed to be that describing the terms "arrogant" 
and "smug" is in and of itself arrogant and smug. Which I then explained 
was an absurd presumption. So, "unenlightened" seems to have developed 
as a less "judgmental" term for arrogant/smug. I'm not crazy about it, 
because without history, it looks like we're saying there is a certain 
universally /enlightened/ approach rather than an approaches that are 
individually bad. I considered using another term but then thought we 
might get sidetracked into a discussion of defining terms...which we 
seemed have done anyway.

You have convinced me, Antonio, I shall go back to using term "smug".

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