Using context-awareness to learn better: Embodied cognition

[Carl-Richard]

I have a thing for playing fast on guitar. I also like to spend most of my time improvising, often while playing as fast as I can. I very rarely spend time learning songs or things that others have made. But when I do, I find myself using the "start slow and increase speed slowly" approach. But again, because I improvise a lot, I rarely do this, so I just spend a lot of my time playing fast.

Interestingly, this is the advice from probably the fastest guitar player to have ever lived (Shawn Lane) about learning to play fast on guitar: "Rather than going from one mental process of playing slow and getting gradually faster, you approach it from the way of playing it fast and sloppy and gradually learn to clean it up":

3:00 - 3:19

 

Similarly, Yngwie Malmsteen, also known for playing fast, has said "I never practiced, I never practiced once in my life. Ever since I was 8 years old in my bedroom, I was playing like I was performing. I was expecting to be blown away by what I was doing, I was expecting to impress myself":

0:05 - 0:27

So both players seem to have gotten to their level by mainly jumping right into the real thing and trying to take it from there. No "slow and controlled" approach, just going straight for the real deal.

This interestingly connects to a principle for learning for school exams which says "practice the way you're going to be tested". For example, if you're going to write an essay for your exam, practice by writing essays. This is in line with a more modern and context-aware understanding of cognitive science, "embodied cognition". It says everything in the situation matters; the context, the energy, the way your fingers move; be it typing on a computer or playing notes on the guitar. It is relevant to the situation you're aiming for and how memories are encoded and how you build up the requisite skills. It's contrasted with the more traditional "symbol processing" perspective of cognitive science, which treats cognition as something that is mostly going on inside your head.

The symbol processing perspective would favor techniques like flashcards, thought maps, rote revising and rehearsal. It doesn't treat context as very important. But it is. That's why "practice the way you're going to be tested" is so effective for test performance. That's why Shawn Lane and Yngwie Malmsteen are known for their speed.

Specifically for guitar, when you practice by playing slow, you might be using certain techniques that don't translate well to the end product you're aiming for. So you might end up either taking forever to get there, or you'll just never get there, or you'll get a partial version, or an inefficient version. For learning for the exam, you just might not be using the same cognitive faculties that you will be during the exam (e.g. typing on the computer, putting your thoughts into words, answering a question, answering the right kind of question), which does have something to say for the end product.

So if you want to get to a certain speed of playing guitar, or you want to learn for an exam, and probably many other things, practice the way you're going to be tested.

Edited May 29 by Carl-Richard

[Nilsi]

That’s a sharp framework for exposing the fraudulence of what passes for “education” in modern institutions.

It’s absurd that you can take a philosophy of science or methodology class without ever having heard of Hegel - when the entire structure of modern education still operates under the specter of his dialectic. His ghost haunts the machinery, even when his name has been scrubbed from the syllabus. The system still believes in progress through abstraction, contradiction, sublation - except now it’s dressed up as “learning outcomes” and “research clusters.”

But this isn’t just some unfortunate legacy. The system’s very drive - in the Freudian sense - is to perpetuate itself. Like Freud said: a drive doesn’t want to reach a goal; it wants to keep going. Its symptom is itself. And the education system’s symptom is this: perpetual deferral of the Real. One more module, one more credential, one more method section. Experience is replaced by commentary. Learning becomes a sanctioned descent into a bottomless dialectical pit - where nothing happens but everything is “critically engaged.”

That’s why Schopenhauer hated Hegel so much. He saw it early. “If I were to write a satire on professors of philosophy, Hegel would be the main character.” Because Hegel wasn’t just wrong - he was useful to the state. He gave dialectical cover to the bureaucratization of thought. And that’s still the function of most “critical theory” today: self-replicating jargon that insulates institutions from actual rupture.

Which is exactly why Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer as Educator should be mandatory in any philosophy of science class. Because unlike most “methodology,” it isn’t about how to produce knowledge - it’s about what kind of person can bear truth in the first place. And the answer isn’t someone who follows protocol. It’s someone who jumps - into intensity, into contradiction, into the Real.

And honestly, I’m not surprised that a metal guitarist intuitively grasps this, while so-called “philosophers” and “educators” with fancy degrees and research credentials couldn’t spell it out if their lives depended on it.

The great contemporary reader of Nietzsche, Peter Sloterdijk, puts it best: “To philosophize is to exercise. To think is to train in the intensities of reality.”

[Nilsi]

Also, isn’t it funny that this exact principle shows up in weightlifting? The real gains don’t come from “slow and controlled” isolation movements, but from something more intense, more instinctual - where the whole system is under pressure, not just the „muscle.“

It’s like that John Carpenter movie They Live, where putting on the glasses reveals the ideology behind the image. And honestly, if I put those glasses on in the gym - behind all the cliché posters of bodybuilders and motivational quotes - I’m pretty sure I’d see a portrait of Hegel and quotations from the „Logic of Science.“

Edited May 29 by Nilsi

[Nilsi]

There’s a brilliant conversation between Slavoj Žižek and Peter Sloterdijk that, whether they intended it or not, perfectly stages the eternal conflict at the heart of subjectivity and education.

Žižek, ever the dialectician, embodies the carrot-on-a-string logic of Hegelian deferral: just one more book, one more analysis, one more ironic aside, and we’ll arrive. His method feeds the fantasy that the Real can be grasped through accumulation - that if we sublate enough contradictions, the truth will eventually emerge, retroactively justified by the system that produced it.

Sloterdijk, on the other hand, represents something else entirely: the embodied, ritualistic stance that says the Real is here, now, always too much - and always slipping just beyond our grip. But instead of chasing it, we train for it. Not to master it, but to expose ourselves to it again and again through deliberate intensification of life.

Edited May 29 by Nilsi

[Schizophonia]

@Nilsi I just put my face in pp and will ask Leo to change my username into my first name because i had a kind of illumination that having an abstract avatar and username tacitly hidden the will to hide myself in a reduced imaginary order.

Presenting myself in this new way bring me closer to symbolic order and indirectly real.

Like the masculin/affirmative energy which is correlated with the supremacy of the symbolic order allows a further step into real, because of the diminition of libidinal investissment into a heavy imaginary order i talked about before.

If you see what i mean.

[Carl-Richard]

4 hours ago, Nilsi said:

And honestly, I’m not surprised that a metal guitarist intuitively grasps this, while so-called “philosophers” and “educators” with fancy degrees and research credentials couldn’t spell it out if their lives depended on it.

😂 I wish I had read these philosophers so I knew exactly what you're pointing at. It does seem like it could make sense, I'm just unfamiliar with the concepts.

 

3 hours ago, Nilsi said:

Also, isn’t it funny that this exact principle shows up in weightlifting? The real gains don’t come from “slow and controlled” isolation movements, but from something more intense, more instinctual - where the whole system is under pressure, not just the „muscle.“

I thought about including this but I would've been to long, and I wasn't sure how to formulate it. But that seems to make sense.

[Nilsi]

3 hours ago, Schizophonia said:

@Nilsi I just put my face in pp and will ask Leo to change my username into my first name because i had a kind of illumination that having an abstract avatar and username tacitly hidden the will to hide myself in a reduced imaginary order.

Presenting myself in this new way bring me closer to symbolic order and indirectly real.

Like the masculin/affirmative energy which is correlated with the supremacy of the symbolic order allows a further step into real, because of the diminition of libidinal investissment into a heavy imaginary order i talked about before.

If you see what i mean.

I see what you mean.

If you want to “traverse the fantasy” for some existential sobriety - castration, really - be my guest. (Though let’s be honest: changing your avatar and username on an internet forum is hardly a cut in the flesh.)

Personally, I find that posture dull.

There’s a darker lineage - de Sade, Nietzsche, Bataille, Klossowski, Artaud, Deleuze, Land - that doesn’t aim to dissolve fantasy, but to saturate it. A lineage that doesn’t seek some higher clarity, but a descent - into mask, ritual, theater, erotic force. A masquerade, not to conceal identity, but to undo it. Not to symbolize, but to dissolve in intensity.

This isn’t about gendered energies - masculine, feminine, whatever. It’s erotic, yes. But not in a Hallmark or Tantric sense. It’s visceral, filthy, electric. It’s base, in Bataille’s sense - a materialism of excretion, meat, pus, and sex, of sacred obscenity. No idealism, no vitalism. Just matter - convulsing, shimmering, decaying, birthing masks.

That’s what interests me: the Imaginary not as misrecognition, but as a surface of metamorphosis. A decadent theater where the flesh wears infinite veils. This is the dream of Deleuze and Guattari - to tear the body from the Symbolic and set it loose on the plane of consistency. Desire here doesn’t orbit lack. It builds. It pulses. It spills.

And Nick Land takes this into a blackened futurity. With hyperstition, masks no longer belong to subjects - they belong to time itself. The masquerade becomes a self-writing mythos, seeding real effects. The Imaginary becomes flesh-code. A simulation so intense it eats through the Real and shits out prophecy.

This for me is a radically immanent and ecstatic metaphysics.

[Nilsi]

9 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

I see what you mean.

If you want to “traverse the fantasy” for some existential sobriety - castration, really - be my guest. (Though let’s be honest: changing your avatar and username on an internet forum is hardly a cut in the flesh.)

Personally, I find that posture dull.

There’s a darker lineage - de Sade, Nietzsche, Bataille, Klossowski, Artaud, Deleuze, Land - that doesn’t aim to dissolve fantasy, but to saturate it. A lineage that doesn’t seek some higher clarity, but a descent - into mask, ritual, theater, erotic force. A masquerade, not to conceal identity, but to undo it. Not to symbolize, but to dissolve in intensity.

This isn’t about gendered energies - masculine, feminine, whatever. It’s erotic, yes. But not in a Hallmark or Tantric sense. It’s visceral, filthy, electric. It’s base, in Bataille’s sense - a materialism of excretion, meat, pus, and sex, of sacred obscenity. No idealism, no vitalism. Just matter - convulsing, shimmering, decaying, birthing masks.

That’s what interests me: the Imaginary not as misrecognition, but as a surface of metamorphosis. A decadent theater where the flesh wears infinite veils. This is the dream of Deleuze and Guattari - to tear the body from the Symbolic and set it loose on the plane of consistency. Desire here doesn’t orbit lack. It builds. It pulses. It spills.

And Nick Land takes this into a blackened futurity. With hyperstition, masks no longer belong to subjects - they belong to time itself. The masquerade becomes a self-writing mythos, seeding real effects. The Imaginary becomes flesh-code. A simulation so intense it eats through the Real and shits out prophecy.

This for me is a radically immanent and ecstatic metaphysics.

Let me be very clear about this. This is not some personal invention. It’s not a historical curiosity. It’s not a clever pastime or a niche aesthetic I’m trying to sell. It’s not just something that sounds cool. What I’m trying to describe - what I keep circling around - is something real, and old, and deeply serious.

It is older than civilization. It is older than language. It is, in the deepest sense, sacred.

It begins - if anything begins - with God dreaming. Dreaming not the world, but His own mask. Dreaming forms, colors, voices. Dreaming roles, costumes, veils. And in that act of creation, forgetting Himself. Forgetting that He was ever something other than the performance. The dream becomes flesh, becomes theater, becomes multiplicity. God enters the mask and becomes the character. And He never fully returns.

This is not metaphor. It is myth at its most literal. The divine is not hidden behind appearances - it is shattered into them.

The Greeks knew this. The Dionysian rites did not offer transcendence. They offered rupture. Ecstasy. Dismemberment. A tearing of the god into fragments - body broken into image, into voice, into sacred frenzy. The mask was not used to hide the truth. The mask was the truth.

And no one understood this better, no one enacted this more completely, than Nietzsche.

Nietzsche did not write from a position of stability. He wrote from within the storm. He did not interpret Dionysus - he became Dionysus. Read him through Klossowski and you see it: the eternal return is not a metaphysical thesis, but a vicious circle of appearances. A recursive theater. A sacred spiral in which the subject dissolves. Nietzsche is not a philosopher. He is a ritual performer possessed by his own thought.

And in the end, the performance consumed him. The letters he wrote - one signed as Nietzsche, the next as Jesus, the next as Dionysus, the next as Richard Wagner - are not the signs of confusion. They are the signs of divine recursion. He was no longer the author. He was the play. The roles had taken over. He was being dismembered, scattered, like Dionysus. The rite was complete.

And when I talk about this performance - this ritual, this sacred madness - I don’t mean illusion. I mean God entering simulation, God losing track of the script. This is not aesthetic play. It is liturgical derangement. It is psychedelic theology. It is DMT before DMT. The Imaginary is not false. The Imaginary is the zone through which the Real becomes possible.

And you can even hear it, impossibly, in a pop album. I Love Jennifer B. by Jockstrap.

I know how that sounds. But listen. This album is not just eclectic. It is possessed. It is a shifting vortex of masks, sounds, identities, performed with such precision and commitment that it becomes - against all odds - a ritual.

It is composed like a hallucination in formalwear. One moment you are inside a crystalline rhythm - synths sequenced like diamonds. The next, a string section, European, decadent, baroque. Then her voice - suddenly girlish, or angelic, or mechanical, or obscene - sings of Champagne, Italy, sex, violence, childhood, theater. She is a stripper. She is a diva. She is a girl. She is a monster. She is no one. And every version of her is sincere.

The entire album is a masquerade ball performed in a burning temple. Every song opens a new mask. But the masks are not worn - they are lived. The music doesn’t move through genres. It convulses through identities. From art school elegance to trashy club beat to something like a séance. You don’t follow it. You get lost in it. You forget yourself in it.

It is grotesque, refined, camp, sacred. It is sacred because it does not mock. It is sacred because it burns. You hear lace, latex, mascara, blood, perfume, rot, prayer. It is beautiful. It is stupid. It is divine. It is exactly what it is.

This is not ironic. This is not experimental. This is a liturgy of the Imaginary.

Because the Real does not lie behind the mask. The Real erupts through it.

This is not metaphor. This is how God lives - dreaming, forgetting, performing.

[Schizophonia]

@Nilsi You spread a lot 😅

 

I'm not against libido, i just dont want lose it in a mediocre fantasy as you call it.

When you dis invest yourself from a fantasy, it doesn't supress libido it just redirects it towards more obvious, tangible things.

Actually, where I think I might agree with Deleuze is that it feels like a pure increase in vitality, regardless of how it is spent.

It's as if I'm basically a potentially infinite source of energy, and identifying with meaningless fantasies makes me weaker and stupider, "at the height of the baseness of my fantasy", while identifying with more tangible, holistic phenomena actually makes me more powerful, beautiful, smart, and happy.

And a more holistic a fantasy is, the less it looks like fantasy...

Edited May 29 by Schizophonia

[Nilsi]

 

17 minutes ago, Schizophonia said:

@Nilsi You spread a lot 😅

 

I'm not against libido, i just dont want lose it in a mediocre fantasy as you call it.

When you dis invest yourself from a fantasy, it doesn't supress libido it just redirects it towards more obvious, tangible things.

Actually, where I think I might agree with Deleuze is that it feels like a pure increase in vitality, regardless of how it is spent.

It's as if I'm basically a potentially infinite source of energy, and identifying with meaningless fantasies makes me weaker and stupider, "at the height of the baseness of my fantasy", while identifying with more tangible, holistic phenomena actually makes me more powerful, beautiful, smart, and happy.

And a more holistic a fantasy is, the less it looks like fantasy...

To disinvest from fantasy in the name of something more “tangible” or “holistic” - let’s be honest - that’s castration. Not in the moral sense, but in the very structural sense Lacan meant. You are cutting off the current. You are taming the very force that made you feel vital in the first place.

You say identifying with fantasy makes you stupid and weak. I say you’re not going deep enough into the fantasy. You’re still clinging to coherence, to mastery, to the fantasy of not having a fantasy. You’re domesticating the libido to make it productive, recognizable, grounded - and in doing so, you’re neutering the very beast that gives rise to beauty, power, madness, and transformation.

You don’t transcend fantasy by purifying it. You transcend it by pushing it to the point where it melts into performance, into flesh, into God. The Dionysian is not a retreat from reality. It’s reality at its most raw, most performed, most sacred. If your fantasy is weakening you, you haven’t gone far enough. You need to let it break you open. You need to bleed myth.

[Schizophonia]

5 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

 

To disinvest from fantasy in the name of something more “tangible” or “holistic” - let’s be honest - that’s castration.

I see it like that:

1)Energy, vitality come from movement, libidinal investment, openness to language...

2)In case of immobilization there is a stagnation of vital energy.

3)Recovering energy by libidinally disinvesting oneself from a more reduced fantasy to something more holistic, by "getting some perspective," is a masculinizing process.

4)Recovering energy through "inflation," by sinking again and again into a fantasy, is feminizing or even "psychoanalyzing"

If you are around women, men full of e2 for whatever reason (clomid, steroids...) or people who are a bit psychotic, you will find this inflationary logic in them, they have a lot of energy indeed but it's always the same thing.

5 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

Not in the moral sense, but in the very structural sense Lacan meant. You are cutting off the current. You are taming the very force that made you feel vital in the first place.

No I just open other sources instead of pumping one more.

The less i have ego, the better i feel and the stronger/more masculine (more assertive, enterprising, even sexually dominant lol as i described somewhere here) o feel.

5 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

You say identifying with fantasy makes you stupid and weak. I say you’re not going deep enough into the fantasy. You’re still clinging to coherence, to mastery, to the fantasy of not having a fantasy. You’re domesticating the libido to make it productive, recognizable, grounded - and in doing so, you’re neutering the very beast that gives rise to beauty, power, madness, and transformation.

You can gain energy by investing in a place over and over again, as I mentioned above, but it's feminizing/hysterical.
It's also stressful/exhausting.

5 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

You don’t transcend fantasy by purifying it. You transcend it by pushing it to the point where it melts into performance, into flesh, into God. The Dionysian is not a retreat from reality. It’s reality at its most raw, most performed, most sacred. If your fantasy is weakening you, you haven’t gone far enough. You need to let it break you open. You need to bleed myth.

Well, go get sodomized in a cocaine orgy in blood if that makes you happy.

I'd be the kind/stoic basketball player who likes to wander in nature, see lots of people, tinker, etc. 

 

There is still a possibility i just didn't understand you lol.

[zurew]

21 hours ago, Nilsi said:

Because unlike most “methodology,” it isn’t about how to produce knowledge - it’s about what kind of person can bear truth in the first place. And the answer isn’t someone who follows protocol. It’s someone who jumps - into intensity, into contradiction, into the Real.

Bruce Lee came to my mind once I read what you wrote there.

Quote

Running water never goes stale so you just have to keep on flowing.

 

Edited May 30 by zurew

[Nilsi]

1 hour ago, zurew said:

Bruce Lee came to my mind once I read what you wrote there.

 

I have deep appreciation for Bruce Lee, and likewise for Peter Ralston. In many ways, they represent the ideal that @Schizophonia seems to be aiming for - the figure of the analyst in the Lacanian sense, someone who has traversed the fantasy, confronted the Real, and can sustain a relationship to it without falling back into illusion. That’s a powerful stance - one of clarity, groundedness, and effectiveness. From an instrumental standpoint, it’s extremely compelling: a method oriented toward mastery through self-honesty, direct perception, and a sort of existential sobriety.

But that’s not ultimately where my desire is aimed. My concern lies elsewhere.

As Ralston himself notes, mastery only develops in relation - it’s only through contact with resistance, otherness, and feedback that depth becomes possible. There’s no mastery in isolation. Yet this necessity of relationship also reveals a limit. Because the moment mastery presupposes a relational field, it risks becoming subtly tethered to the gaze of the Other - to a form of becoming that is still structured by what can be seen, mirrored, validated, or resisted. Even in the most refined, non-attached, “Real-facing” form, it still moves within a relational logic.

And that’s precisely what I want to cut across.

My interest is in what Deleuze and Guattari, following Artaud, call the Body without Organs - not a body emptied of structure, but a body that no longer organizes itself according to external scripts, fixed functions, or recognizability. It’s a liberation of desire from organization, from hierarchy, from the grid of the Other’s gaze. I’m not looking to master a relation to the Real as such, but to dismantle the relational machinery that gives the Real its form in the first place. Not to reflect the Real back with fidelity, but to intensify its unlivable zones - to become a site where something unnamable insists without seeking resolution.

So while I admire the clarity and coherence of that Ralston-Lee vector - and recognize its immense power - my trajectory moves toward deformation, excess, and desire without telos. A becoming that doesn’t want to master the world or even oneself, but to open up zones where mastery no longer applies - only force, intensity, and the strange joy of disarticulation.

[zurew]

@Nilsi So if I tracked you correctly - you take even  mastery to be a constraint on self expression and self becoming. You would consider that an unnecessary  limiting structure.

Edited May 30 by zurew

[Nilsi]

4 minutes ago, zurew said:

@Nilsi So if I tracked you correctly - you take even  mastery to be a constraint to self expression and self becoming.

 Of course.

[zurew]

53 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

Of course.

This was one of your main point that you expressed to Leo, right?

Basically - "Start living in an unbounded way and stop narrowing your whole life down to being focused on, constrained by the chasing of truth"

Edited May 30 by zurew

[Nilsi]

1 hour ago, zurew said:

This was one of your main point that you expressed to Leo, right?

Basically - "Start living motherfucker, stop being focused on, constrained by the chasing of truth"

I’m not exactly sure what conversation you’re referring to, but the point still holds. Life shouldn’t have to justify itself to ideals it didn’t invent. That’s really what I’m getting at: how concepts like truth or mastery - things that seem noble or liberating - end up shaping and constraining the very life they claim to elevate.

With Plato, the shape becomes clear. Truth is not something that arises from life, but something life is meant to reflect. An ideal form - stable, eternal, untouched - set above the mess of existence. You don’t discover truth by living; you measure your life against it. That act of comparison is already a kind of submission. It disciplines. It tells you what counts, what doesn’t, and silently insists that your experience isn’t enough on its own.

Nietzsche pushes against this from the start. In On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (actually a great entry point - short, sharp, and readable), he shows how concepts like history or truth become toxic when they’re no longer grounded in lived force. When they stand apart, they dominate. They freeze life instead of supporting it. The question, for Nietzsche, isn’t “is it true?” but “does it emerge from life, or is life bending itself to it?”

Foucault radicalizes this. He shows that truth isn’t neutral, and it’s never outside of power. Truth is a discursive regime - it defines what’s thinkable, who can speak, how knowledge is produced. But what’s most important is that the discipline doesn’t come from outside. We participate in it. We internalize the norms. We adjust ourselves to fit. We become legible. Truth, like mastery, isn’t just a goal. It’s a system of self-domestication.

And mastery works along the same logic. It promises autonomy. But the promise already implies a shape: a model of what it means to have mastered something. You have to become recognizable, to perform a certain kind of coherence. Even when mastery appears improvisational - take Bruce Lee, for example - it’s still caught in a structure. Still framed by visibility, recognition, performance. Still shaped by the gaze of the Other.

This is the loop I’m trying to describe: every ideal that claims to free you already carries the seed of its own imprisonment. You define the ideal, and the moment you do, you start becoming the one who reaches it. The form is set. Desire attaches to it. And in doing so, you begin to mold yourself around it. You don’t just chase something - you reshape yourself for it.

That’s where Deleuze breaks with the whole structure. He doesn’t start from lack, or from the need to model anything. He doesn’t try to flip Plato upside down or salvage the structure. He exits it. Thought, for Deleuze, is not reflective - it’s productive. It doesn’t describe or discipline - it acts. It cuts, it flows, it experiments. And the body, too, isn’t something to control or train. It’s a site of intensity, where desire is already happening. A terrain of immanence, not a project to fulfill.

He’s not proposing a new truth. He’s not offering a new model of mastery. He’s offering a different movement. One that doesn’t subordinate life to anything outside itself. One where becoming is enough.

So no, truth and mastery aren’t the same thing. But they share a structure. They both place life in relation to an image. And it’s that image that disciplines. That asks us to shape ourselves in its form. That says: become this.

And yeah, maybe this all sounds a bit heavy. But really, this is just me purging my system. A kind of neurotic tic. I run through all these concepts, these thinkers, like I have to burn through them just to clear my head - just so I can get on with life again. Don’t take the form too seriously.

What I’m really trying to say is simple: that we should become - freely, without constraint, without guilt, without pre-approved images of what life should look like. No ideals to answer to, no script to follow. Just life unfolding on its own terms.

[zurew]

4 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

I’m not exactly sure what conversation you’re referring to, but the point still holds.

This one:

Quote

17 hours ago, Nilsi said:

Think of it this way: you have all of eternity to contemplate the truth - to dwell in the stillness of the Platonic One, in the cool serenity of the eternal. But life? Life is utterly singular. Every instant is unrepeatable. Every moment vanishes as it arrives. If you blink, you miss it.

This is less a critique of you than of Plato - though I’m not sure how aligned you are with him. Plato saw the world of the senses, the particular, the fleeting, as a distortion - a shadow of the true, the good, and the beautiful, which dwell beyond time in the realm of unchanging forms. The task of philosophy, for him, was to renounce the sensory, the contingent, the perishable - and ascend.

But I say: yes, this world may be imperfect. It may be broken, mad, chaotic, base. And yet it is singular. Non-fungible. Charged with strangeness and beauty precisely because it does not last. My ethics begins there - not in renunciation, but in reverence for the ephemeral. In honoring the fact that I, too, have been and will be here for all of eternity, but only ever like this, right now, once.

So what’s the big deal with getting a little lost in the play? With letting the dream move through you? This world isn’t a prison - it’s a masquerade. And knowing that, I choose to dance.

 

[zurew]

13 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

And yeah, maybe this all sounds a bit heavy. But really, this is just me purging my system. A kind of neurotic tic. I run through all these concepts, these thinkers, like I have to burn through them just to clear my head - just so I can get on with life again. Don’t take the form too seriously.

I know you probably dont like it as a metric (just from the fact that its narrow), but have you ever done an official IQ test?

I would be curious how much you would score on it. Your ability to reference and to express thoughts in a relevant way is crazy.

 

Btw , I take you to be what Jordan Peterson would like to be - referencing and integrating thinkers in a relevant way and then expressing their thoughts in your own way (without trying to grandstand with your verbal IQ and obfuscate the fuck out of everything).

[Nilsi]

9 minutes ago, zurew said:

I know you probably dont like it as a metric (just from the fact that its narrow), but have you ever done an official IQ test?

I would be curious how much you would score on it. Your ability to reference and to express thoughts in a relevant way is crazy.

 

Btw , I take you to be what Jordan Peterson would like to be - referencing and integrating thinkers in a relevant way and then expressing their thoughts in your own way (without trying to grandstand with your verbal IQ and obfuscate the fuck out of everything).

 I’m flattered. But yeah - aside from having serious doubts about IQ as a meaningful measure of intelligence, I find it kind of obscene to rank people in such a narrow way.

For me, this isn’t about being “smart” in any stable sense. It’s more like a kind of OCD, or a daemon that possesses me from time to time and makes me manically read, think, and write at this abstract level. I used to believe it would lead somewhere - like becoming a public intellectual or something. But these days, it feels more like how I imagine women relate to having their period: it just happens, you work around it, and ultimately you just want to get through it and move on with your life.

That’s probably why I’m perfectly content writing in the obscurity of this forum rather than chasing recognition or visibility.

So yeah, I really do appreciate the kind words - but it’s not something I value about myself the way you might think. If someone tells me I’m funny, or kind, or protective - or notices some small, human thing - that means a lot more to me.