Ditching Dualism #6: Maybe Monism?
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.resilience.org/stories/2025-12-31/ditching-dualism-6-maybe-monism/
#Monism
The Architecture of Resistance
The seventeenth-century Hague, the mid-twentieth-century Levant, and the digital terraforming of 2025 have a shared preoccupation with the “Average.” Whether it is the theologian’s way or predictive stats, control begins by smoothing out the landscape. The project of power is a project of cartography and illumination—an attempt to banish the dark corners where the unmapped might grow. Thus, the history of resistance, of being “against the world”, is less a history of rebellion than a history of seeking cover.
The Large Piece of Turf, 1503 Albrecht DürerIn Spinoza’a world, legibility was the cosmos in an ordered hierarchy. Meaning descended from an external judge and was mirrored by the terrestrial proxy of the King and more often the priest. Behavior was aligned to the “Scriptural Average.” A pre-written behavioral code that transformed the conatus—that primal drive to persist and expand—into the passive states of hope and fear. By removing the external judge, Spinoza suggested that freedom is found in the intellectual mastery of the causes that move us. A pushback against the “average pious subject,” asserting that every individual is a necessary, logical expression of an infinite substance. There is no error in the world, only the lack of a thick enough understanding to perceive the necessity of one’s own outlier status.
With this position, and self assurance, Spinoza became illegible to his friends, his doting teacher, and his community. He was cast out, but his thoughts are the seeds of today’s world.
In the Beirut and Damascus of the mid-twentieth century, the imposition of legibility took the form of the “Citizen-as-Monument.” It was a world of endings, where identity was a frozen artifact of nationalist scripts and religious orthodoxies. The poet Adonis, through Mihyar, pushes against this world not by asserting a new identity, but through a “movement of erasure.” If a stable interior is to form, it is to be quickly discarded. A stable interior is merely another coordinate, a dependable predictor, for the state to map. Mihyar becomes a “knight of strange words,” defined by the iltifat—the sudden turn away. By peeling back the layers of the social mask and embracing a radical anonymity, he counters the stagnant city. He exists as a hot wind, something that is felt through its movement and friction, yet remains entirely unsearchable by the collective grammar.
We have entered a third world, a digital landscape that functions as a terraformed plain. It is, in a sense, a Spinozan monism—all data is one substance—but it is a substance managed by a Leibnizian bureaucracy of optimization. The mechanism of control is no longer the scripture or the state monument, but the “Mechanical Harmony” of the statistical mean. A decade ago this was social media shaping votes. Today’s AI tools, perhaps inadvertently and perhaps not, impose an “averageness” on thought itself, by providing the next likely response and hiding the outlier. This is a form of disindividuation disguised as efficiency, a smoothing of the world’s texture until it becomes a frictionless surface for the sake of searchability.
What emerges as a necessary response is the logic of the thicket. If the terraformed plain is the habitat of the tourist—where everything is predicted, optimized, and known—the thicket is the habitat of the explorer. It is a deliberate architecture of complexity, an insistence on terroir and the messy, non-replicable context of the local. To build a thicket is to re-introduce friction into a world too smooth. We are apes inhabiting the long tail. Like Spinoza, our conatus withers under the umbrella the statistical mean. If every response is predicted, the individual ceases to be a cause and becomes merely a consequence of the architecture.
To emerge, life itself needed discontinuities. The thicket provides the opacity necessary for the transforming process of the self to occur. It honors the uneven distribution of the world, providing a high-density environment of unique, complex encounters impossible in a flat plain. In this 2025 context, to be “against the world” is perhaps better understood as being a cultivator of these unsearchable spaces. The Dark Forest of the internet has created literal operating systems, habitats for our interconnected selves. Away from the violent imposition of the center, things can still happen by surprise. We seek cover in the thicket as a primal way of being where the emergent world remains deep enough to inhabit.
#Adonis #AI #AlgorithmicFlattening #AliAhmadSaidEsber #ArchitectureOfResistance #artificialIntelligence #Conatus #CulturalCritique #DigitalTerraforming #history #Iltifat #IntellectualHistory #LLMs #LogicOfTheThicket #MechanicalHarmony #MihyarTheDamascene #Monism #Noodiversity #OntologicalResistance #philosophy #philosophyOfTechnology #RadicalImmanence #Spinoza #StatisticalAverage #TheThicket #writing
On #ThisDayInHistory in 1632, #Dutch and #Jewish philosopher #BaruchSpinoza was born. His geometric writing style and complex argumentation disguised some huge intuitive leaps and assumptions, but #Spinoza's #monism helped make #Enlightenment rationalism and #deism possible.
#agriculture #animism #apocrypha #astrology #bible #collectivism #civilization #christianity #culture #cosmology #cosmos #earthmother #esotericism #individualism #judaism #knowledge #materialism #monism #monotheism #motherearth #mothergoddess #nephilim #neuroscience #neuropsychology #pantheism #philosophy #poetry #polytheism #psychology #religion #secretsociety #spiritualism #spirituality #symbolism #theism #theology #society
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#astronomy #biology #consciousness #cosmology #cosmos #evolution #information #materialism #metaphysics #monism #neuropsychology #neuroscience #perception #philosophy #physicalism #physics #physiology #politics #psychology #quantum #reality #religion #secretsociety #science #society #socialsciences #spiritualism #technology #transhumanism #theism #theology #universe
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Det stod "fjärrstyrda", men jag ändrade till "hjärnstyrda".
Undrar vad Mats, filosofen på Konsthallstorget tycker om det.
#filosofi #monism
Mats, konsthallsfilosofen, fortsätter träget sitt värv med att upplysa allmänheten med hjälp av sina handmålade skyltar på Konsthallstorget i Malmö.
Någon annan har med krita ställt en fråga som lyder:
"Borde den här skylten få finnas?"
#Zoomposium with Professor Dr. #Daniel #Dennett: “A #naturalistic #view on #consciousness”
The #philosophical #concept of supposed #naturalistic #monism is currently the basis of most approaches to elucidating the phenomenon of #consciousness in the research field of #cognitive #neuroscience, which attempt to #reduce #mental states to #physical #states.
More at: https://philosophies.de/index.php/2023/12/25/naturalistic-view/
Today I rode my Honda Super Blackbird CBR1100XX to have a chat with my pal Mats, the philosopher of the square of Malmö art gallery.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DE-Il1aIEOr/?igsh=emM3OHk0NzR5d3Fu What if death is not the end? For Spinoza’s #monism, the universe is one infinite, eternal substance, and we are its temporary modes—fleeting waves in an #ocean of being. Our minds and bodies will dissolve, but the substance endures, transforming. From the perspective of #eternity, distinctions like self and other, life and death, are illusions.We are moments of the infinite, inseparable from the whole, destined to return to it. #philosophy #psychology #science #nature
A look through the #materialistic #monism glasses
Anyone who always sees things through their own glasses (doesn't even have to be “pink”) will at some point lose sight of the big picture with all its facets. Or to put it in a more modern culturally technical way: Anyone who is always sitting in their #filter #bubble or #echo #chamber need not be surprised
A new paint job for the #science building ?
More at: https://philosophies.de/index.php/2021/07/31/ein-blick-durch-die-materialistische-monismus-brille/
#Zoomposium with Professor Dr. #Daniel #Dennett: "A #naturalistic view on #consciousness"
This philosophical concept of supposed naturalistic #monism is currently the basis of most approaches to elucidating the phenomenon of "consciousness" in the research field of cognitive neuroscience, which attempt to reduce mental states to physical states.
More at: https://philosophies.de/index.php/2023/12/25/naturalistic-view/
#Zoomposium with Professor Dr. #Daniel #Dennett: "A #naturalistic view on #consciousness"
This philosophical concept of supposed naturalistic #monism is currently the basis of most approaches to elucidating the phenomenon of "consciousness" in the research field of cognitive neuroscience, which attempt to reduce mental states to physical states.
More at: https://philosophies.de/index.php/2023/12/25/naturalistic-view/
#Zoomposium with Professor Dr. #Daniel #Dennett: "A #naturalistic view on #consciousness"
This philosophical concept of supposed naturalistic #monism is currently the basis of most approaches to elucidating the phenomenon of "consciousness" in the research field of cognitive neuroscience, which attempt to reduce mental states to physical states. In the field of philosophy of mind, this concept has rather led to an eliminative #materialism, which assumes that only a "#heterophenomeology" would be possible, in which the "first-person perspective of consciousness" would not exist at all. The "ego/self" is only a "constructivist self-model" (Metzinger) of the brain as a "mental multimedia show" (Damasio) or "Cartesian theater" (Dennett).
More at: https://philosophies.de/index.php/2023/12/25/naturalistic-view/
#MichaelRuse - #Philosophy of #Reductionism & #Emergence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S39nn-lKAtw
#PhilosophyOfScience #Science #Hierarchy #Hierarchies #Physics #Biology #WeakEmergence #StrongEmergence #MindBodyProblem #PhilosophyOfBiology #PhilosophyOfConsciousness #Consciousness #Panpsychism #Monism #Dualism #PhilosophyOfMind #Mind #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
#SwamiMedhananda - #Metaphysics: #Essence and #Existence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YQ3h9zU-pI
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfConsciousness #Consciousness #PhilosophyOfMind #Mind #Religion #God #Life #Meaning #Soul #Spirit #Dualism #Monism #NonDualism #Causality #Buddhism #Hinduism #Space #Time #Vedanta #ClosertoTruth #RobertKuhn
Matts then continues with a quote from Dov Baer:
If the material world were constantly attached to the Creator without any forgetting, the creatures' existence would be nullified, [since] they would be attached to the root, to ayin. Thus they would do nothing, considering themselves to be ayin. So there had to be a breaking [of the vessels], which brought about forgetting the root. Everyone could then lift his hand and act. Afterwards, through Torah and prayer, they attach themselves to the root, to ayin... and thereby raise the sparks of the material world,... bringing pleasure to God.
Especially this last quote addresses two major issues that both sound like the same question, "why are we here?"
'Why are we here?' as in, if God is One, how can "we" perceive ourselves as separate. and
'Why are we here?' as in why would the infinite manifest itself in a physical world, why even do a creation?
#jewish #monism #pantheism #panentheism
#mazeldon #kabbalah #philosohy
Occasionally I'll mention jewish monism, pantheism, or panentheism... and reading Essential Papers on Kabbalah with my rabbi has thoroughly confirmed that all my reads on this are pretty on target.
there's a ton of examples, but one that rung clear for me was in this chapter on Ayin/Nothingness by Daniel C. Matts:
Underneath it all, God is the only "thing", the only existent. "Apart from Him, all are considered nothing and chaos." The world, though, is allowed to enjoy the illusion of separate existence, so that it not lie utterly passive in the pool of ayin.
#jewish #monism #pantheism #panentheism
#mazeldon #kabbalah #philosohy
#EricSchwitzgebel - What is the #MindBodyProblem?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UanDuyeatE0
#Philosophy #PhilosophOfMind #Mind #PhilosophyOfConsciousness #Consciousness #PhilosophyOfScience #Science #Brain #Body #Dualism #Monism #Belief #Intentionality #Experience #Awareness #Qualia #Idealism #Materialism #Physicalism #CommonSense #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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