User:RD/9k/secular animism (Q618)

Main entry

618. 618

     secular animism

Animism and supply chains

618. Globalization destroys consequentialist ethics [1] -> only an anarchist could believe this. to any Communist it makes deontological ethics impossible and consequentialist ethics critical to understand and apply.
618. Animism can be used to understand supply chains; this is to imply that animism can be secular as opposed to being religion [2] -> I am fascinated by this. I don't like the concept. I kind of hate it. but I really want to know what on earth it could possibly mean. because from the explanation of the premise given in the video that introduced it, I have absolutely no idea how you conceptualize animism without religion.

Miscellaneous

618. Tribal populations lived less exploitative and more sustainable lives because of animism / Animism originated in tribal populations, and tribal populations lived less exploitative and more sustainable lives, therefore they lived this way because of animism, and industrial societies stopped living this way because colonialism maliciously destroyed animism [3]
618. Scientific rationalism is insufficient for creating purpose and meaning; it is unclear what purpose or meaning implies in this context [4] -> so. maybe this is a stupid question. why do we need to create purpose and meaning in the first place? why is it necessary to have a framework for that and immediately assume it applies to everything? how can we know that any given framework for "creating purpose and meaning" will not run into nasty issues of plurality where it will inherently begin enforcing itself onto other people who don't want to use it while they would rather enforce a different framework?
     think about this. Trotskyism claims to be able to unite everyone of all industrial societies around the world. but it inevitably runs into conflicts with Third World Marxisms that don't want Trotskyism essentially invading their country from the outside and conquering their population — which it inevitably does because it doesn't like the idea of non-Trotskyisms joining the Fourth International on their own terms, starting 'from within their own framework of meaning'. how do you know this problem couldn't happen with basically all philosophies ever including secular animism? I am convinced at this point that all philosophies that don't acknowledge the concept of meta-philosophy and analyzing themselves as mere objects rather than Subjects are basically garbage. people say that "scientific rationalism" centers humans. but I don't think that's the problem. I think the real problem is that it centers The Subject, and can't conceptualize a universe that is made of inanimate objects instead of Subjects. and, sure, it'd be ridiculous to create an ethics centered around inanimate objects. but if you aren't thinking in terms of ethics, and are thinking in terms of descriptively modeling the universe to get the best consequences, I think a model centered on inanimate objects is the way to go. every time you center The Subject you will always give Subjects the power to conquer the rest of the universe, because that's what individual Subjects do: they eat, occupy space, fight, and reproduce. so I think you honestly get a way more ethical philosophy if you practice "inanimism" rather than animism. because only a philosophy that includes the whole universe including inanimate objects truly lacks the ability to exclude any group of people.
618. re-enchanting the world [5] -> what has always confused me is, what actually is this, and why is it necessary?
618. When Westerners appropriate animism for themselves and see it specifically through Western eyes, discussions about animism are not insulting tribal populations any more [6] -> this feels.... ironic, like a bit of a disaster waiting to happen.
618. Animism is concerned with learning how to be a good person in respectful relationships with other living beings [7]
618. Ecosystems are biosemiotic processes in which living organisms create meaning as they interact; it is still unclear what "biosemiotic" or "meaning" means in this context (Eduardo Kohn) [8]
618. Biological evolution is the invention of a self / Biological evolution of particular species or individual traits is in fact the invention of a self and an act of meaning-making (Eduardo Kohn) [9] / Be yourself because everyone else is already taken (interpreted rather literally; generic) -> okay now this is one of those claims that's uniquely Existentialist. I swear only existentialism could think of this. that the survival of particular species in a given form is somehow an act of Free Will and a choice, and ecological specialization is an inherently good thing because it enables species to Not Violate Arceism and not step over each other. this strikes me as an inherently capitalist philosophy. it's very ironic that the article characterizes old outdated pictures of ecosystems as 'modeled on capitalism' and then fails to see how its newer 'more accurate versions' are in fact also modeled on capitalism but way more insidiously. the new "agenda" being presented here is that as a particular unique special living self you don't deserve to have a particular self if somebody else can have that specific self better; that if somebody else has a specific self and you try to have it too then you have no respect for others and are inherently Freedom-hating and colonial if you don't change yourself to be a different self than the self you wanted to be; that your most authentic inner self is inherently restricted by social class and fine-grained social standing and being superior or inferior at things, and deserving or undeserving of particular actions and forms of expression is a natural part of having a self; that what is essentially a spatial hierarchy where everyone horizontally oppresses each other and tells everyone who they can and cannot be is in fact a form of respect and Community that is especially organic and natural and whole.
618. Commons are realms of life defined by organic wholeness and relationality, as opposed to division and alienation; it is unclear what "organic" or "relationality" implies in this context [10]
618. All life is semiotic and all semiosis is alive (Eduardo Kohn) [11] -> I think you need to break this claim into two parts, because I think the first part is wrong and the second part is right.
618. All life is semiotic (Eduardo Kohn) -> why. why is there any need to connect biological life to language or signifiers?? I mean, obviously humans speak languages and they're alive. but I don't think the connection goes the other way from life directly to language. I think the concept here is similar to the concept of "functional purpose". but it really baffles me that that is being put in terms of language like language is the only thing that can contain ontological structures or define things. this is the kind of thinking that got humanity to inventing large language models, out of the belief that only intuitive acquisition of language could possibly express models of the world. and now people are just going to language models and interacting with them like humans, because surprise, language has always been a tool for physical beings that primarily exist as material objects to interact with each other, not a way of understanding the world or understanding "meaning" as it already exists in the universe.
     this is so frustrating, because it's like the relationship between Marx and Hegel. Hegel went around saying that the universe was made of Ideas and then Marx had to explain that it was made of physical objects that resolve all made-up hypotheses about them through physically interacting and exchanging their contained physics. and it feels like the language people are doing the same thing with language, "semiotics", and "meaning". they are convinced that the universe and nature evolve through language and arbitrary linguistic assignments of things to other things. when that just isn't how it works, things have physical structure that is contained in them as unique separable identifiable countable objects or repetitions of the same identifiable countable object, and the contents of that repeated pattern evolve through the interaction of two or more repeated patterns to produce one or two further repeated patterns. naïve dialectical materialism; one-step dialectical materialism; wave-machine logic.
     this process supposedly 'made of language' is, ironically enough, really hard to describe in language, but it's terribly intuitive once you have ever played with two twenty-sided dice and hurled them into each other. the position of each die and the side it's currently on changes in response to the current position, velocity, and rotation of the other die about to hit it. for any given state vector of each die "x" and "y", f(x,y) = z. that's it. two objects, the dice or state vectors, are separate, and then you put them together, and you calculate what happens. the concept of "meaning", as in we label the dice x or y or we group the numbers about them into a specific mathematical object, is superfluous to what the actual objects do, but it allows us to simplify the situation down to the parts that matter and use those to calculate the resulting observations that matter. it's really all about the objects being countably separate. it's all about countably separate objects being able to interact because they are separate. you don't even really have to make reference to the content of the objects. it's there, it interacts by default, but sometimes it doesn't produce anything interesting. gosh it's like, Existentialists fundamentally don't understand the concept of things interacting instead of the universe being static. they'll claim that if you don't believe in secular animism you can't explain consciousness. but if you don't believe in apple plus apple dualism then it would be literally impossible for anyone to ever think a thought, so isn't interaction vastly more important than providing an apparent explanation of consciousness?
     the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition. where causation is described by structuralist linguistics, a.k.a. the existence of two opposed words that "mean" different evolving things, and causality inside causation is described by existentialism.
2970. 2970All semiosis is alive (Eduardo Kohn) -> this one would just be the same as Q29,70 "A Subject is a living organism that eats and occupies space". so, it's true. all "semiosis" sure does contain material objects that resolve the immaterial, and some of them sure are alive.

Life or consciousness as hallway

618. hotel hallway of minds / David Rain doorways (philosophy) / psychological hotel hallway (psychoanalytic; critical-theoretic; Freud, Jung; Habermas) / communicative reason (Habermas; generic) -> this is the gateway, pun somewhat intended, between Jungian psychoanalysis and anarchism. this silly hall of mind doorways. one door leads to traditional animism, one door leads to psychoanalysis and the "collective unconscious", and one door leads to modern anarchisms including the "Arceism" motif in Pokémon. oh yeah and one door leads back to early-existentialism and Henri Bergson.
     why do human beings keep coming up with this. I mean, I know the reasons behind the secular-animism and animism-revival side of things, but how do people keep getting here in such different ways?? Jung got his hallway out of shared themes in dreams coming from similar human minds. Last Dragon Chronicles and Pokémon got it from old religions (Shintō and Inuit animism respectively). anarchists seem to get it from weird psychological trips about ecology that genuinely don't make any sense. I'm going to ignore the fact that sometimes they copy it from tribal populations because they almost always have independent lines of reasoning to get there that are supposed to lead there anyway. so.... what's the commonality? I don't really understand why these all lead to the same place.
618. Reality is a commons; this is to imply that all conscious beings are united by consciousness rather than divided by it (Andreas Weber) [12] -> ah. they're using "commoning" to smuggle in Henri Bergson.
618. Anarchism is not an economic system of structures and items but a living system of social relationships where relationality is a core reality [13]

Ecosystems as single populations

618. Ecosystems are single populations / Particular local ecosystems are singular populations, not a separable plurality of populations [14] / Biome are not singular (counter-claim) -> I do not think this is true. how is it physically possible for invasive species to exist, or for human civilization to exist, if ecosystems are naturally connected into one population and that process is an inseparable part of them? how was it physically possible for humanity to separate from that at all??
618. Lake Erie is a living entity because it is full of living organisms [15] -> on one hand, this is technically true. like, if it contains many individual living organisms, Lake Erie is conceptually a population, and populations are ecological entities. I can't even really say that laws protecting the lake or protecting animal populations are necessarily bad.
     on the other hand, I think the best response to this claim is to pull out scenes from old mildly-racist cartoons. notably that scene in Kimba the White Lion where an African tribe in a scarcely developed area was illegally hunting animals and somebody from a city just flat out started ordering the tribal people around and telling them the city had the rights to those animals, not the tribal people, so the tribal people have to move to the city and participate in capitalism at its lowest rungs. and Kimba the white lion just stood there smiling at it the whole time. this is what happens when humans think that any group of humans can actually speak for inanimate objects or nonhuman animals as if they were people — the objects turn into allies of that specific group of people against other groups of people, which can be used to oppress other groups of people in a Filament effect.

Arguments against

618. inanimism -> the motif of seeing the universe as based on inanimate objects. [16] this term is rare, but already occasionally in use.
618. Every known sociophilosophy (political faction or ideologically-charged theory of society) requires separation between individuals in order to create a "commons" or "community" -> I really cannot think of one that doesn't. not after that statement on a David Graeber review that said that bush people have a core concept of 'personal autonomy of the other'. well, White people have been either explaining that or twisting that to always mean a strict separation between people where people are specialized and do and own specific things. unless this is just a gross appropriation of animism by Eduardo Kohn — which I'd totally entertain, because all of this has sounded pretty bullshit (pronounced [BS]) to me — I genuinely don't think there is any meaningful distinction between secular animism and "Enlightenment rationalism" in that they both seem to promote this very Artisanal view of the individual where freedom and respect are strictly achieved through autonomy, social standing, and property.
618. If all humans are inherently connected, why do tribes have separate languages? -> it seems like a non-sequitur at first but you have to really think about it. I am vaguely aware of at least 5-10 different languages in North America. I've been told the world has thousands and thousands of local languages. put aside English, French, and Spanish, and there's like, Inuit languages, at least one language in Alaska (multiple?), the Cherokee language, the Lakota Sioux had a language, the Wendat people had a dialect or a language that I don't know much about, within Mexico there was Nahuatl, I'd guess there have to be multiple languages in the Mexico region, multiply the number of languages I can think of off the top of my head by at least ten. the Iroquois people existed and they have some language or dialect. Why are there so many languages if different tribes of people did not come to be in separation from each other without any consideration for being able to understand each other?
     it's common to talk of people not knowing about particular cultures as an intentionally fabricated thing and bigotry being "socially constructed" in some deliberate way, but if you get outside the scope of racism, there are any number of ways that groups of people are separated totally unintentionally, and plural languages are one of those. if animism is true then like, why weren't all tribes of people somehow created with the same language? why is it that people have to deliberately learn languages to understand each other's communication or culture and yet everyone gets ignorance for free?
     now, there are a few caveats here like, "untranslatable words or phrases". I'm not sure those actually exist. I feel like if you can explain something in one language within about a page of a paperback book in another language or the amount of speaking time it takes to read one then the concept exists in both languages. so for languages to be inherently different you have to point to things like grammar, not purely the existence of different words. but either way, different groups of people separately develop different definitions of each word or concept without thinking about what that means for other groups of people who speak other languages who would want to define all those concepts another way. how does that support everyone being part of one thing instead of multiple things?
618. Rights are inappropriate for a river because they're too easy to overturn [17] -> oof. it's a little darkly funny when not even Liberal-republicans believe in human rights.

Related

618. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Kohn 2013) [18]
618. The creation of nation-states destroys deontological ethics

Ideology codes

• A / anarchism