Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Derrida for True Democracy

Among the cultural delusions embedded in modern western thought is that there is some "Order to the Universe" that human beings can potentially discover and "know." A sociocultural-anthropological perspective makes it obvious that the idea of order that modern western humans seek in the universe is fundamentally a modern western human kind of order. There's no reason to assume our concept of order has anything at all to do with the the Universe or Being as a whole. Put another way, there's no reason to believe the universe is ordered or structured in a way that would necessarily fit the modern western human conception of order. Any link between a human idea of order on the one hand, and the nature of Being as a whole on the other, is necessarily a matter of faith, not reason. By proceeding based on that faith, rather than remaining agnostic, we proceed down a particular path, and many many other paths are rendered invisible, beyond the pale of modern western experience.

One cannot prove (using reason) that human knowledge, as powerful as it can be, is capable of discovering or understanding the nature of the universe outside of human experience. The reasonable agnostic position is: there may or may not be something like "order" to Being – we can't tell from here. But even if such order does exist, there is reason to believe humans couldn't access it anyway because we would necessarily have to access it through language, and the idea that such language could objectively represent some Order (that would necessarily encompass human being and language) is necessarily a matter of faith, not reason. Given the inability of discovering order through reason (as opposed to faith), those who believe in true democracy should consider letting go of the question altogether and proceeding agnostically; this new way of thinking will open up new frontiers of being for social reality construction, frontiers of utopian democracy that are not visible from within the order-deluded, modern western human world-view.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Usage of light is the frontier for the construction of true democracy utopias

- the limit evinced in quantum mechanics
- the limit evinced in Godel's theorem
- the limit manifesting as the speed of light
are not limits on human beings;
they are limits of one particular way of being human -- through the western/modern mode of thinking, with its particular mode of coming to and interpreting light -- its particular way of casting a world with language and practices.

If you look at reality THAT WAY, you come upon THOSE LIMITS !
(now it seems obvious, doesn't it?)

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Quantum experimental observation tells us that when we look at something we 'pin down' one possible result out of a 'probabilistic' spread of possibilities. The reality we see, the one we pin down, depends on our looking at it.

One way to interpret that: the probabilistic spread is Being -- the pinning down of one possibility out of the realm of Being is a particular usage of light, a particular being in spacetime.

The sense of probability evoked in quantum mechanics is an expression of the fact that we construct our worlds, and the consequent crucial fact that we could do it differently. The realm of other ways we could be constructing our worlds is the realm quantum physicists identify as a sort of smear of probability. But that smear is better understood as a field of possibility, a field that contains the resources for radical reconstructions of self, society, and reality. The unattended-to wave that makes up Being is the universal frontier of reality construction... In order to open up new parts of this frontier, and see and experience new, different aspects of Being, we need to develop a new 'usage of light,' a new language/practice of light.