Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q54,96

Main entry

1. Q54,96/Q54,96

   The Divine Truth: Arceus and Our Sins Against It

   / "Divine Truth" / 🪙 (pronounced nickel) -> first of all, this is a wonderful video. it's coded here as an Item to showcase that it had real effort and thought put into it. there's nothing I would change about the video. that said? wow. it shows everything "wrong" with Pokémon, or more specifically wrong with the world where people would make it. it is such a good piece of research into things I didn't know needed researching but after seeing it certainly knew then.
2. Q54,96/Q54,96 So... Was Team Plasma Actually Right? / "Team Plasma" / 🪙 (pronounced nickel) -> this channel really puts out a lot of "bangers"... if what you want is videos accidentally unpacking the entire worldview of Pokémon. or unpacking it just a little bit intentionally.

Motifs ("Team Plasma")

618. Pokémon is about ethics / Pokémon is a series about ethics -> arguably true. whether I like it or not, that's probably an intentional theme in the text.
618. Pokémon is about ethics / ethics in Pokémon (motif)
619. evil beings only using other living things for their own gain (counter-claim) / ... that you treat the humanity in your own person and in that of others (including their consent) as an end before a means ... (categorical imperative, Immanuel Kant) / (9k) -> in the manga, Cobalion was upset about the lack or presence of this. to be fair though it is the Pokémon of justice, so that vaguely is its "job".
618. N is an anarchist (Pokémon) / N Harmonia is a charcoal anarchist (tribal anarchisms; MX (pronounced meta-Marxism) onto Fy (pronounced fiction)) / N is a strawberry anarchist (Fisherism) / (9k) -> this is a more complicated claim than it sounds. the claim is that because N talks about Pokémon being raised in society as something that programs them to think and want certain things rather than what they "really" want, he is saying that society is unnatural while Free Will can only exist uncorrupted outside society. unpacking how that relates to anarchism takes longer, but there are various ways to argue that depending on what anarchism you're aiming at.

Motifs ("Divine Truth")

5493. Q5493/Q54,93 To be good is to live in harmony with metaphysics -> explanation of Arceus and the creator Pokémon pantheon and how they function as moral devices for arbitrating karma in Pokémon narratives. [1]
5494. Q5494/Q54,94 People attack metaphysics because they don't see each other as equals / The opposite of controlling metaphysics is being equals -> this bothers the hell out of me because it's outright used to argue against Communism in naïve terms of "utopia" and "forcing equality", yet in explaining why Existentialism will create a moral world people will say the word "equal" about ten times. the hell is up with that equivocation of the word equal?? it's like there is a secret definition of how being equals actually means existing in total mutual exclusion but doing it really really nicely and politely. it's like the definition of being equal was made up by Artisan types and Careerists who believe the way not to be dominated is to break everything apart to exist in individualized mutual exclusion. [2]
5495. Q5495/Q54,95 To seek greater life is to take life -> I've seen variations of this statement like four different places and hated it each time. Journey to the West / Dragon Ball, FNaF, Fullmetal Alchemist, Pokémon. I found it the least objectionable in an analysis of the metaphysical logic of Pokémon, where because it begins from such a mundane setting and can claim to be about chunk competition it at least felt logical [3]
5501. Q5501/Q55,01 Arceism (motif) -> the motif — or definition of a hypothetical anarchism — where anarchism is portrayed as any arbitrary assortment of individuals in the world spontaneously coming together into "a community" strictly independent of the existence of all governments and nation-states and the simple act of making everyone part of the same countable culture shortly solving everyone's problems potentially including xenophobia, racism, and poverty.
618. Arceism can be expressed materially as a stationary combination of heterogeneous elements -> seems true, but only in a very wonky way where Arceism is defined by believing the elements are stationary when they're not.

Subjective themes

5497. Q5497/Q54,97 Alchemy failed because it is an offense to metaphysics / Alchemy failed to become a science because it is an offense to the metaphysical order -> an unexpected but sadly logical interpretation of Fullmetal Alchemist, if you've already heard of the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition [4]
5498. Q5498/Q54,98 Science without metaphysics is a tool of domination / Scientifically analyzing The Subject is an offense to metaphysics / Studying identity is an offense to metaphysics / Scientifically studying culture is an offense to metaphysics / Too much science is an offense to metaphysics -> the sci-fi corollary that seems to apply itself to gender, historical materialism, and misplaced research & development efforts such as "AI". in simple forms, it is asserted that science "without a reason" is morally wrong as the natural order can trivially be expressed in terms of "exceed" and "too much". in more elaborate forms, it is implied that trying to understand how identity, individuals, or culture function and develop must be forbidden. to try to understand the development of countries is to crush the living, breathing nationality and squash or gut under the scary boot of Bolshevism some of the living processes that constitute individuals interacting to produce what is truly Russian or truly Chinese, or truly German. to try to understand the sources of gender and what develops to produce gender is to crush the inherent ability of the transgender individual or "the transgender community" to thrash about, to out-produce, to weave itself into the Filamentocracy, and compel respect. this is why I don't like this axiom. a loud shouting of movements without a science of movements is basically reducing people down to literally out-living others and whoever is powerful enough to stay alive in a cruel world getting to stay around to supposedly tell everyone else how to be nice and good when none of that actually determined who lived and died.
5495. Q5495/Q54,95 To seek greater life is to take life -> (the following motif relates to this one)
5479. Q5479/Q54,79 Philosophers' stones empower global empire / If philosophers' stones existed in the 1500s, they would be used in service of global empire -> probably true, honestly. but you know what? anarchists have absolutely taken the wrong lessons from this concept about what the opposite of it is. what seems like half of all anarchisms boil down to the weird idea of existing and surviving being inherently greedy and specifically seeking to remove the ability to live and exist as much as possible without entirely extinguishing it. and the problem with that is it creates totally powerless civilizations that get crushed and precisely hand control of the earth to fascism and pronounce it canonically correct. after which the surviving fascisms will be as greedy and wasteful as they want to.
      that was a very Deng-Xiaoping thing to say. I don't care.
5499. Q5499/Q54,99 Discoveries come from violating metaphysics -> the 'pataphysics axiom that I like so much better than the way Pokémon appears to see things

Four elements

5474. Q5474/Q54,74 the four elements lived in harmony / The four elements lived in harmony until the fire nation attacked -> Avatar: The Last Airbender, Adventure Time, Pokémon, Wings of Fire
5475. Q5475/Q54,75 The four elements were never in harmony -> one of those lines from 4.3 that I really liked but didn't think was profound, until. until I realized that fantasy stories almost always use elements to argue this really medieval way of thinking that empire can be stopped with metaphysics, and kingdoms will never conquer each other if they just try really hard to Exist In Moderation. that is not a thing. the opposite of it is not a thing either. it's one of those stupid instances of making up a slider and trying to find the made-up middle.

Real-world Arceism

5501. Q5501/Q55,01

      Arceism

      (motif) -> there's a bit more to this than I thought there was. there are several patterns which are identifiable as Arceism.
      

      1) "garden of Eden" pattern: if you connect everything into Community, there will instantly be no violence because every form of life on earth just inherently wants to go together and get along from various animal species to the totality of all human beings
      1A) the assertion that things in nature are somehow aware of whole ecosystems and "decide" on some non-conscious level to practice anarchemistry and fall back to a "moderate" level of existing and not destroy other parts of the ecosystem - seems doubtful the moment you see an invasive species that simply proliferates everywhere and eats up everything
      1B) usually not intended literally, the fictional motif of non-human animals realizing that predation is Evil and becoming vegetarians or insect-eaters; usually used to present abstract lessons about humans
      2) unregulated system regulates itself by mutually-assured destruction / resets: in Pokémon, you see this with Kyogre and Groudon trying to rule the earth. if either of them wins, in concept you'd expect that they also take themselves out somehow, and Rayquaza showing up to stop them just shortcuts what is overall the same process. in Liberal-republicanism, you see this general idea about three or four different places.

618. anarchemistry

     ("chemistry" in reference to objects interacting to produce historical events, but also just a tiny bit in reference to the idea relationships have chemistry and you can relate the idea of chemistry to pairings or reproduction) / anarchunking / anariteration / anargrowth / anarreproduction / overpopulation (overshoot; individualist anarchism) / abstract concept of hoarding the ability to produce people and historical events when everbody "Should" have an equal amount of historical event production, and thus should smash all ability of other groups to produce people or historical events which is over that quantity -> the motif of anarchists turning the normal reproductive process of populations into a conspiracy theory and determining that everyone could have prevented war and empire and "colonialism" (cue five different definitions where four are Idealist) by deliberately controlling reproduction and business activity and moving-out-to-new-towns (see: frontier fights, gentrification, "job opportunities", fleeing from Tories to Europe) and all activity that produces any more actions or history or society, specifically as individuals who can control all that as individuals and specifically not as a society. a core value of the "Arceist" category of anarchisms.
     

     this is one of those "up-there" concepts where even if it's total nonsense you wonder if people believing it does any real-world harm. the answer is... it's complicated. it takes rather specific situations before it becomes a real issue and there come to be right or wrong positions on it. like, you take a situation where Cuba is trying to build something for its people either to enjoy or to pay people a living wage but it would use oil and so the United States is like, you can't use oil, the world has a finite supply of oil as I actually believe underneath all the lobbyists so I need it all for myself so the world can stay on oil but only I can use it and grow, you damn Cubans, you better just stop being born and be happy with how many people you have because if you have any more people I'll fight a war for oil again and face no consequences for how many people my country is producing. in a situation like that anarchemistry can actually become harmful because it oppresses Cuba or oppresses Black people purely by starting at the idea that biological life naturally Uses Resources Politely and Doesn't Take Them From Others and these values come from nature, while when that is applied to the real world the people who are in dominating groups will get to ignore the rule while enforcing it onto every group who is on the bottom, accusing them all of wasting oxygen. how about the concept of "greedy Palestinians who don't know when to stop wanting existence and thus stealing from Israel"? have you ever heard that one come up?
     it is trivially easy to make a moral rule which sounds harmless in the abstract but in real-world conditions with historical contingencies ends up horrifically racist.

618. anarchemistry -> this concept can truly be either blue or charcoal.
     you see it used in charcoal anarchisms and anticommunist postcolonial theories in the context of arguing that tribal societies or peasant societies were "better" than industrial societies because they somehow knew their anarchemistry and knew exactly how to use individual choices and actions to stop before they'd taken enough to cause war or ecological catastrophe despite people in ancient times not having any idea what the rest of the world outside their village is doing and not really practically being able to predict that.
     but you also see it in blue anarchisms with the dangerously false assertion that chunk competition inherently regulates itself and inherently punishes or humbles everyone who tries to compete for too long. the problem is that as more generations are born and the population grows, "too long" will get shorter and shorter and shorter until you're being cosmically punished for your overwhelming greed and avarice at about 20 years old before your first job
     so anarchemistry is either blue or charcoal but I think Arceism is almost uniquely blue because that unspoken "resets" part where Kyogre or Groudon obliterates the environment to devastate the other one without anybody winning is always hidden in there
618. anarchemistry -> "to devastate" — it's sure a lot easier to see why villains would spontaneously show up and think they have to be there picking fights with someone to "protect the world from devastation" now isn't it
     gosh this is my new conspiracy theory about Pokémon. Arceus ordained all the evil teams to exist to make people feel pain so they would be good
618. Arceist reset -> the motif of a process of many things competing radially leading to an incident of violence or devastation that knocks everyone down and supposedly punishes all the free-floating individuals for their "greed". seems to exist in both models of capitalism and models of global geopolitics

Pokémon and nature

618. Q618/Q618

     RPG monsters as ecological encounters

     / RPG monsters as ecological beings -> the best way to describe Pidgey, Caterpie, and the early routes of a Pokémon game. RPG monsters are not "enemies" that are out to get you, they are basically an annoying bug that got in your face and you had to wave away or a bird you were worried would get stuck under your car but that got out of the way exactly at the last minute. this is to say, they exist in conflict with humans and each other but only inasmuch as they are busily looking for the next scrap of food and not really paying attention to others that might walk across their path in the middle of things.
     

     this + Economies are ecosystems of humans = ???

618. Q618/Q618 Science must not be a holistic worldview containing complete large-scale models and is only allowed to exist as individual narrow propositions / 🪙 (pronounced nickel) -> I had to think about it a whole lot after listening to these videos over and over but I think I finally cracked the relationship between science and animism within Pokémon and across the Pokémon fandom.
     you look carefully at these videos and you chop them up into little slices and think about them. and here's what you see. the videos are actually made of tiny slices to begin with. the proposition that "Pokémon can be feral" is added to the story independently of all other propositions, as is "Pokémon can be predators or prey", "Legendary Pokémon personify natural disasters", and "Pokémon do not mind being in Poké Balls". it's all just kind of an arbitrary stew of miscellaneous chopped vegetables that looks a single color from a distance.
     from there we can see how science is actually used within Pokémon plots and lore. science is not actually used to make anything more coherent, because it isn't the underlying logic of how anything in the Pokémon world is put together. (which makes the presence of scientists in the Pokémon world a little baffling when you think about it.) Pokémon does not aim to be "plausible" or "realistic", and so does not make use of Materialism toward such an end. nonetheless, the series is actually quite preoccupied with appearing "natural" and "ecological", and superficially creating Pokémon designs to be absolutely, crushingly "realistic" only and solely in the sense of being ecological. in the Pokémon world the overall concepts of "physics", "nature", and "the material world" are fundamentally different from what those words mean in the real world. (which, if I can stop for another tangent, is actually one of the most cool and interesting things about Pokémon; having a series that wholly redefines what physics and material reality are from beginning to end at least feels like no small feat.) Pokémon is obsessed with "nature" and "ecology" enough that while there has to be a car Pokémon it can't be designed like a car is designed, and yet it constructs "nature" almost entirely out of Idealism and the careful Idealist placement of individual scientific propositions onto a pile rather than scientific propositions becoming part of the world emergently based on smaller-scale rules. some of this is by necessity: when individual Pokémon are separately designed as Gameboy sprites it's hard to think in detail about the complex relationships between biology, ecology, evolution, and the universe, so casually throwing in individual scientific propositions between the Pokémon after the fact is simply a more practical way to do things. but that isn't really the full story of why it's done that way. I think that even if the disconnected designs of individual Pokémon somehow weren't a factor and like, I don't know, the environments of Pokémon gen 3 or 4 had been carefully put together the way you'd put together the parts of a novel, this "casual proposition pile" approach is still the way it would be done and still exactly the way the final thing would look. I am still trying to figure out exactly what "nature" means to Pokémon and exactly why it is things are put together this way.

Pokémon and adventure narratives

618. Anarchists won't listen to any proposition which isn't phrased in terms of ethics / Anarchists won't listen to any proposition about reality which isn't phrased in terms of individual ethics / (9k)
3666. Q3666/Q36,66

      Individual choices mold society

      / Individual choices immediately shape the health of society
618. Q618/Q618

     Individual actions are society

     / The choices of individuals are the only way to shape society (Existentialism, Lacanianism) -> stronger version of Q36,66 which doesn't have a number assigned yet.
619. ... that you treat the humanity in your own person and in that of others (including their consent) as an end before a means ... (categorical imperative, Immanuel Kant) / (9k)
618. Q618/Q618 golden rule / Treat others as yourself / Do unto others as you would have them do unto you / (9k/...) / (Q50,98)
618. Q618/Q618 silver rule (golden inverse) / Do not do unto others as they should not do unto you (golden inverse) / (9k/...) / (Q50,98)
618. Q618/Q618 bronze rule (golden converse) / Others' actions for yourself / Treat yourself as you would treat others / (9k/...) / (Q50,98)
618. Q618/Q618 platinum rule / Treat others as they would like to be treated / (9k/...) / (Q50,98)
1142. Q1142/Q11,42

      ethics adventure

      / (9k) -> I think this type of literature was once very popular in the field of religious narratives that were a bit too enthusiastic about religion; The Pilgrim's Progress might be considered an ethics adventure specifically if you're a Christian reader or reviewer. likewise, Journey to the West could be conceptualized as an ethics adventure ... Dragon Ball ... Undertale and Steven Universe can be seen as stories that are intended to have the shape of an ethics adventure narrative ...
      

      ethics adventures baffle me. they definitely "feel" good, but so many people seem positively convinced that they are actually some kind of accurate representational model of change or restoration in the real world that is mandatory to believe and prohibited to not believe, and that's the part that has me deeply confused because ... I still do not understand what is being faithfully represented in the art. ...

618. Q618/Q618

     Pokémon trailblaze toward ethics

     / Pokémon journey toward ethics / Pokémon is a journey to ethics / Pokémon is an ethics adventure / Pokémon seeks to sketch out an adventure narrative ("hero's journey") in which the major achievement of the "adventurer" is an individual successfully taking actions that are considered to be ethical despite being limited to the control of one person or more accurately 1-7 individuals; the end goal of the adventure is precisely the production of an ethical individual which does not harm other individuals or surrounding nature — despite the inherent contradiction that when telling this narrative through the medium of a kaiju story, all the tools available to the "adventurer" such as kaiju, battle techniques, levelling and evolutions, and the ability to use basic kaiju to acquire powerful local-gods are all essentially destructive instruments and none of them are inherently helpful or constructive ->
     

     out of all the concepts humans have invented this is one of the most annoying concepts I've ever seen. (annoying is a really good word for it too, it's not precisely pernicious, insidious, or toxic in particular as much as it is just utterly annoying.) but that's why I have to unpack it as much as possible down to the tiniest detail. because it cannot be defeated unless I truly and fully understand it.

Related

618. Q618/Q618

     secular animism

     / (9k) -> so, I may have misrepresented this a bit because I genuinely had no idea it existed or what it was. (and no way of discovering that either until I stumbled onto the specific linguistic dictionary word "animism" being used in a secular context; I cannot express how frustrating it is to find that concepts are locked behind arbitrary words and arbitrary culturally-fabricated word definitions and are not comprehensible without those specific words even as those words are often not even the same sequences of words between different authors. I just want the concepts, dammit (pronounced censored). and I just want them to actually be coherent in and of themselves rather than being explained with more totally arbitrary definitions according to some particular individual's individual preferences. I realize the vague opportunity for hypocrisy here when I'm always making up words, but to my credit, I am trying very hard to ultimately make all my findings on meta-Marxism a series of interconnected "numbers" independent of words and language however slowly that's going.)
     

     I plan to re-evaluate and expand this page as I learn more about this bizarre new philosophy.

Ideology codes

• Fy / fantasy genre
• A / anarculture
• MX / relativistic determinism
• MX / existential materialism

1. Z–86 (pronounced 86. (Z))⧼hue-philosophy-/en⧽ (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/en⧽) (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/en⧽)  / MX (pronounced exmat) / existential materialism (Q86/TT)1:-1:-1

Subpages or related scraps

Nickels

• 🪙 Q54,96/nickel
• 🪙 YT/WasTeamPlasmaRight3-8