Fractured rambling

[kiya]

(First of all: ibnfirnas is required to go read this. And perhaps this as well, which I showed to roimata earlier. Addendum: Accomplished. But I leave the comment here anyway, for the benefit of others.)

Okay, that's the tangent. Now on to the fractured rambling.

A thread on makinglight got to talking about mostly otherkin but also multiples and some other things as well, and I'm gnawing on bits of things. And oddly enough there are bits of this that connect with the moral relativism / moral absolutism thread on the SDMB at the moment, and I'm poking at that too, a bit. Not sure how much sense this is going to be.


There's a category in my head that seems to be called something like "systematisation of experience", into which a lot of this stuff goes: otherkin, multiplicity, religion, and so on. I think this is one of the things people do, create systematic metaphors, codify them, proliferate them, congregate with people with similar systems, extrapolate from the systems, play with the systems, modify and improve the systems . . .

I said in the thread "I don't, as a general rule, think of any of the various metaphors people use to systematise their experiences are intrinsically sillier than others." They're all, looked at from the right angle, very silly indeed; a familiarity and affinity with absurdism is one of the ways I fake adaptability and cope with the world. At the same time, this means that silliness is not of itself a reason to dismiss a structure, because all structures partake of the wack.

I get the impression that a lot of people are blind to the fundamental wack. (A thread on the Thicket recently had one of the forum members venting about a religions class where someone was presenting Christianity as a superior religion to all others because it was the only one that was entirely logic-based. I'll just leave that thought uncommented on for people to chew on.) And then discussions get sidetracked into whose wacky funny ridiculous system is the best, most factual, most logical and reasonable and sensible way of interacting with the universe, as if there was a possible systematisation of reality and human perception that does not partake, in some way, of the completely ludicrous.

I get kinda cranky when people dismiss other folks' systematisations as unreasonable, irrational, contrafactual; none of these systems are fact-based in the first place, they're all structured on the complicated matrix of perception. Facts don't come in pure, they get shaped and twisted and have meanings assigned to them (because facts don't come with meanings; facts are just things that are, meanings are things people do to them). I get particularly cranky when my systematisations are dismissed as automatically counteradaptive or too silly to be worth considering. (Which was part of why I posted in the thread, as it happens, though I think I managed to moderate the cranky down to mild enough to go largely unnoticed.)

Part of my systematisation of self is as multiple; a case can also be made for being otherkin, if I wanted to go to the effort. If I didn't think that these were useful components to my systematisations, I wouldn't use them. The plurality provided me and several other people with a theory that covered a number of situations and paradoxes of myself simply and effectively; it removed epicycles from my cognition. My understanding of some folks' interactions with otherkin stuff is similar.

I think literalisation of these things is a means of missing their point; it doesn't matter whether the thirteen of me are distinct, separate entities or facets of self or delusions or something else altogether. The functionality of the representation is neither supported nor refuted by a set of facts; it's an image, a representation, a non-conveyable perception. It may be "true" (factual) or it may not be, but either way, it's what I'm using, because it works. As a tool, it does what I need it to do. (It's worth noting that I have no internal consensus on its literality; one of me firmly believes she doesn't exist, but allows that her posited existence is a reasonable metaphor for her function. Can't put it from her POV right now.) I don't need to be cured of the tool or turned into someone for whom the tool isn't useful; it's still a tool, like any other assignment of meaning to bits of reality. (This is, by the way, an argument I use frequently in theism/atheism arguments, when I'm dumb enough to get involved with them.) A tool isn't a pathology or a delusion; it's a tool. What one does with the tool may be pathological or delusional, or it may be, y'know, a course to a successful career writing fiction or a profound inspiration that brightens lives.

It's hard to see the wack in the tools in one's hands most of the time; they're too busy manifesting usefulness for the ways in which they manifest ridiculous to be clear. (Tools whose primary use is in manifesting wack are not immune to this; witness some of the common failure states of Discordianism, stand-up comedy, and politics. As pnh said in response to my comment: What it does mean is, as R. A. Lafferty put it: "The opposite of 'serious' isn't 'funny.' The opposite of both 'serious' and 'funny' is 'sordid.'") That doesn't mean that the wack doesn't exist; it just means that it's not being seen just now -- or not being seen by the person holding the tool.

Sometimes the wack gets in the way of using the tool -- I think a lot of converts had that problem with the religious practices they started with, and this gets worse when the tool wasn't for anything that they needed a tool for. Sometimes this can be fixed by recasting the way of looking at the concept; other times, one just plain needs a new metaphor, a new structure, a new concept, because this one is too wack to be useful.

(One of my tools is, obviously, "Does it work?" It breaks down in some amusing ways around the question of defining "work" and in situations where utility isn't terribly useful as a rubric. I tend to get into weird goings-around with people whose value of 'work' is closer to 'adherence to this system' than 'accomplishing the effect intended'; there's another profound source of wack for you.)

There is no tool so useful that someone cannot make of it utter wack; there is no tool so silly that someone cannot find use in it.

I was going somewhere with this, but I think I missed my exit.

Comments

[redbird]

You may have missed your exit, but you found some fine scenic overlooks, maybe a decent diner, and a roadside attraction or three. In particular, "There is no tool so useful that someone cannot make of it utter wack; there is no tool so silly that someone cannot find use in it."

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Yes -- I like that, very much.

[boojum.livejournal.com]

I rather liked it, especially the separation of "this is true" (whatever "true" may mean) and "this works". 16/64 and cancel the 6s.

Another factor is that some (many?) people have difficulty using pre-made tools. I do my best work when I'm trying to show that the problem was defined wrong or somebody else's solution doesn't stretch far enough, but I do my worst work when I have to follow someone else's system, even if what I'd've done when left to my own devices fit that system. It took me a while to realize that this was probably why *all* the tools I could find looked wrong or not far enough to me -- it wasn't that they were all broken and everyone else foolish. If premade-tool-aversion's at all common as a mind-setting, it can't be helping philosophical discourse.

[duathir.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this; it has helped considerably tonight.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

it was the only one that was entirely logic-based

You know, I think that might actually be a heresy. It's right there in St. Augustine of Hippo: Neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam. (It is not a matter of understanding in order to believe, but rather I believe in order to understand.)

[mahajarabali.livejournal.com]

Yay Byzantine History class! In other words, the basis to that believe occurs in Constantinople, somewhere around 450AD or so (I'm not sure about the year), in which a bunch of old men sat around using Greek philosophy and decided how the Christ-God matrix thing worked. They did this a few more times through the centuries... thereby using logic to make up new rules to explain what they obviously did not understand.

Yay Plato! >-

you kind of said this

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

I'm not entirely sure if I agree that a (specific kind of) tool is (inevitably) not a delusion or pathology in and of itself.

But it /is/ extremely necessary to be able to listen to what the hell the particular tool does and/or the purpose it serves for the person using it.

So, um, I think what I'm saying is, hey, food for thought!

[syndramise.livejournal.com]

Awesome essay, lilairen! I want to point lots of people to it... :)