Verily, and so much for all that.

[kiya]

I just posted to the SDMB something that concluded:

I tend to think that the overarching purpose of people really does come down to constructing meaning from things -- people make patterns, and respond to them. I don't have any opinion on whether some god put that there, whether evolution put that there, or whether it's a happenstance; it's just something I've observed about people. I tend to think that some of the patterns people come up with are neat, and some of them are beautiful, and some of them are horrible, and some of them are bugfuck nuts; I select the patterns I prefer on the basis of aesthetic and utility to me, and while I'm willing to be convinced about other criteria for selecting patterns, the fact that other people think that my tastes and purposes are quaint, silly, or asinine has not yet done so.

I showed the post to oneironaut before I posted it and got a few comments, and then, because we'd been discussing Discordianism lately, dug up the piece of the Principia that I had essentially rephrased at the end of the post.

I find myself remembering the moment senior year of high school, May, with everyone out doing some exam or other that I wasn't taking. (May have been French.) I'm sitting in English class shuffling a new tarot deck because we were all just killing time, and the girl next to me (Anita, for those of you who're familiar with RM's IB class of '95 ;) ) asks me what the cards are. I told her; she said, "You don't . . . believe in that stuff, do you? I mean, you're Science Girl." I said, "I believe in what works."

Which didn't really answer the question, but I don't think the question has a useful answer.

There are a huge number of systems of approach for looking at the world, for filing data into piles, for sorting out what's dismissable and what's meaningful. Millions, thousands, hundreds may even be involved. A number of them are systems I use.

I don't know whether or not it's appropriate to say that I believe in any of those systems, anyway. They're the filters through which I use the world, through which certain things appear ordered and certain things appear disordered. If I want a certain set of things ordered I use a filter that orders them; if I don't, I go at it differently.

Some problems can be solved much more easily if one draws the axes at a different angle. It's like that. Trying to insist that the axes always have to align in a certain direction is just going to make life more difficult for all involved. So I don't get paradigmatic limitation, going at the world in only one way; the monoculture just hits all my 'inefficient' buttons.

Do I believe in my filters, the patterns, the systems? Mu.

I wrote something about the inefficiency of monocultural paradigm in that post, and oneironaut told me I'm such a plural. Which is . . . an interesting thought. Because as far as I can tell, my personal system divides on the basis of specialisation to particular modes of thought; my fluidity is because the dynamic of what modes of thought are most useful at a particular moment is a matter of constant change. (I have no idea what the common systems of division into selves look like; I've seen a lot of age-band divisions and trauma-divisions, so my presumption is that's what's 'normal', but normal is such a squidgy concept.)

One of the things that leaves me very comfortable with Kemeticism is the nature of the identity of the divine -- as discrete and recognisable entities that blend together in various combinations and are at the same time a whole. And I think I'm comfortable with that because it feels very familiar to me; that's how I feel I am. We are. Whichever. Which leaves me wondering whether singlets find it confusing; I know some people have a hard time with the syncretism thing.

But going into the One and the Many again, and the concept of multiple filters and the Original Rohrshach. And one of my favorite lines, 'before there were two things'. Reality is duality, at a minimum; duality is proliferation, because creation is the dynamic between difference and the way it expands outwards. One thing on its own, without alternative, without contrast, isn't meaningfully different from nothing, because there isn't anything else. One paradigm, one worldview -- there isn't any way to develop really new thought there, because there isn't anything else. The axioms define what is ordered and what is disordered, and it doesn't all fit, but there's no way of disordering the order or ordering the disorder and seeing what the new patterns look like.

And so then there are multiple grids, and the interleavings between them making new patterns. And you get syncretism, and somehow I think this fits into here, this riddle-of-the-me, and I need to stop typing and go find my Hornung.

Is the purpose of these combinations a clever priestly "equalisation" of conflicting religious claims, as Bonnet, like his predecessors, assumed? Must gods be "equated" with one another until one finishes with a vague, solar-tinged pantheism? Such an interchange of attributes, which leads towards uniformity, is un-Egyptian; if anything it is Hellenistic. The Egyptians place the tensions and contradictions in the world beside one another and live with them. Amon-Re is not the synthesis of Amun and Re but a new form that exists along with the two older gods. In this case one could, if necessary, provide arguments for an "equalisation" required by religious politics--however questionable such a method may be--but what could be the purpose of "equalising" Horus and Sothis or Harmachis, Khepry, Re, and Atum?

...

It is evidently unnatural for Egyptian gods to be strictly defined. Their being remains a fluid state to which we are not accustomed; it escapes every dogmatic, final definition and can always be extended and further differentiated.

(Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many, by Erik Hornung, trans. Baines, pp. 97-99.)

I don't give up old filters; I collect them. Sometimes they're still useful. And over time I tend to syncretise them, develop new filters from the combinations of the old grids. I'm looking forward to studying Feri and seeing what new grids I develop from that and whether they syncretise into a default; it's pretty clear that the Kemeticism and the Discordianism mesh rather nicely for me already.

Making new patterns. The old patterns still exist -- I mean, I could do Kemeticism straight or Discordianism straight, if I wanted, and other people still are -- but I've made something new out of them. In some ways, it's something I can have a better relationship with; in other ways, I can subordinate either component to the other; on the gripping hand, the things still are separate influences.

(And we come around to that old favorite Sri Syadasti here.)

Reality is what's out there. But people make their own truths. Some of the grids thus created will be of wide utility; some will be narrow. I don't know what will happen in N years when I've gone through all the religious study I want and come up with some vast syncretism of a very specific filter that works really well for me; it may be that it only works for me. (It may also be that it's some great breakthrough that will be a revelation to a number of people. Life's funny that way.)

The context of the original post was something about intelligence and belief. With a bunch of folks arguing that scientific knowledge renders religious grids obsolete. And I don't get it. Science is a really good grid for aligning certain things into an orderly system. It doesn't align some of the other bits of reality into a system at all. Different religions have different grids. Different social groups have different grids too. Collect all 14,792, y'know?

Some people don't have a particular need for organising the stuff that's organised well with religious grids. Good on them. But that doesn't mean that there aren't reasons to want to order that stuff and get it lined up in a satisfying way; it just means that not everyone has those reasons.

I find myself deeply baffled by the need some people have to have their grid defined as The Grid. Doesn't matter to me whether it's fundie-Christian-proselytiser or white-lighter or atheistic-science or buy-Pepsi or whatever; I don't understand the value of paring things down to one grid. That set of tools may be useful to some things -- it may even be the best set of tools for 'em -- but that doesn't mean that those are the only things I want to work with. It doesn't make my life any simpler or more comprehensible; I still have bits that go off the edges of what the grid makes it possible to work with, and I can't turn my brain off and say 'That's not a part of the system'.

And I wonder if it's related to the common notion that You Can Only Have One Religion, generalised. You Can Only Have One Sorting Grid. I wonder if somewhere in among all the sorting grids I've got I have an Only One, and if that's why I wind up having those rupture moments sometimes, people trying to argue some sort of different Only One. I don't know how to tell.

Some days I feel like a chaote. Some days I don't. (Almond Joy's got nuts. Mounds don't.) When I don't, it's because . . . it's all real. I'm not putting it on, it's all there, it's a living system, I'm all within it. I'm not in a system of systemlessness; I'm in a complicated interleaving of glowing system, and I wish I could show it to you, because in my head it's this network of gold and blue and green glowing lines pulsing away into the dark and over the invisible, delineated horizon.


That was long. I don't know how much sense it makes outside my head.

Comments

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

It makes a certain amount of sense in my head. I think my take on religion may be evolving into something similar, a highly idiosyncratic blend of Christianity, Heathenry and Pratchett-style witchcraft. "I believe in what works" is a good motto, I think.

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

It makes enough sense that I'd like to add this post to my Memories section, so I can re-read it on occasion.

[linenoise.livejournal.com]

Makes a lot of sense in my head. Especially the bit about the Tarot cards. Because I've basically had that exact same conversation snippet at least once. I don't "believe" in the Tarot. I use it. Because it works.

The more I think about it, the more I really want to write my graduate thesis on the idea that The Map Is Not The Territory. (Eventually, anyways. It's years away yet.) And so I shall add your post to my memories, because it contains useful thoughts on the matter.

[ian-gunn.livejournal.com]

I think it was a coherent and interesting post. The grid analogy for a worldview/decision set works for me. I tend to think that most people have multiple grids of varying sorts but, tend to only have one grid for each "area" of there life, religion, work, politics etc... I think it is rare to hold more then one grid that covers the same area of life. Of course, that is a sign of intelligence right?

The whole concept also brings to mind Godels Incompleteness Theorem (http://www.miskatonic.org/godel.html). It seems to me that, similarly, no single grid could cover all possible aspects of life, but I could be stretching the the analogy here.

On the other hand the whole grid analogy makes me want to try to find the matrix transform formulas for the different grids and map them out and code it up in MatLab. Transform any decision point from one world view to another with the click of a button! Hummm, could be a project here, collect and characterize all the grids and their prevalence in society. Make predictive models up on how society will develop based on the intersections of all of the grids. Oh, wait, I think Asimov already did this :p