])R@G()N wrote:I was familliar with the quote you posted, and that quote was all I attempted to draw parralels with.
Not to nitpick, but you wrote in response to my discussion of Lenji:
Again I have not read buddism, but this seems to run along the same lines as some personal views I have.
Given that I'd discussed Buddhist tradition
and quoted Lenji, I'm still not sure-- are you saying that you were drawing parallels with the Lenji quotation? You quoted my elaboration of Lenji's quotation, and not the quotation itself.
everyones point of view is enterly personal, to read another persons writing is not to udnerstand what they wrote, everything you read is interpertied by you and your preconceptions, as Ayimaki said 'understanding is a copncept purely based on wishfull thinking'.
Hmmm...
I am sure there are bhuddists who talk together, and feel they have the same views, who have no idea how different their conception of the world is from one another and therefor how different their interpritation of what they think they agree on is
Hmmm... So you're saying we can't really understand other people, but you're sure that people who seem to agree actually have different interpretations. How, I ask, could you claim that's anything more than a personal interpretation?
Let's compare this position with something else you wrote:
I stuided philosophy at college, and i found there were a group of people who were good at philosophy in my classes. Amoung these a very small number understood the text and how it related to life.
Hmmm... How can you say that a small number of people understood the texts if you also say that to read another person's writing is not to understand what the person wrote? And can you say, with any kind of consistency and any degree of certainty, that you weren't interpreting that small number of people and their understanding of the texts through your own preconceptions?
Most [students] however had no deepper udnerstanding of philosopghy at all. they were very good at it, and they knew a lot of different philosophies, and they could quote them, and then quote other sources that talked about them, and so forth. But they understood philosophy in the way a mathmatician understands mathmatical laws and formulas. they could quote philosophies and to some extent inter relate them using highly sophisticated philosophical terminology. but they couldnt see what the people were really saying outside of the exact phrasing that they read. they couldnt see when 2 philosophies were saying exactly the same thing just using a totally different view point.
How can you prove that two philosophies with different viewpoints mean exactly the same thing if "everything you read is interpreted by you and your preconceptions"? After all, that would simply be
your interpretation, and as such, it would say little about the philosophies-- since they can't be understood. Ditto the students-- how can you prove that they thought about the philosophers they were reading in the way you're describing, that this isn't simply your interpretation of the students' thinking?
Even teachers, who had masters degrees in philosophy seemed unable to relate what they knew in any way to themselves, reality or to other philosophical ideas that wernt written in exactly the same terminology.
Is this a statement of fact, or, according to your own line of reasoning about conversations and written texts and understanding people and things, an interpretation?
To think in terms of 'understanding' something other than yourself, to me, is like attributing hurt to the toy, its a delusion based on a delusion.
While I believe that "perfect" and "complete" understanding might well be impossible, I also believe that something like decent communication occurs when one party uses language clearly and/or to the best of one's ability and the other party follows the speaker or writer's words. Let's assume that the first party wants to be understood (wants the listener or reader to "get the point") and isn't deliberately being ambiguous. If the listener or reader finds certain statements unclear or contradictory and if he or she has the opportunity to ask the speaker or writer for clarification or for supporting evidence, the listener or reader should do so.
Call me utopian about that sort of thing. But if it's all interpretation, you have no voice, my friend. Not really. You're simply a text-generating machine who can never hope to be understood, even approximately. And it doesn't get more lit-crit and art scene and postmodern hipsterish than that.
And I don't think that's what you mean, or what you
want to mean. Or is that just my interpretation of your words?
I think you'd have to define or describe "understanding" for me to agree with you. And I don't think that acknowledgment of a person or thing or respect for it always has to do with "complete" and "total" understanding, which seems to be what you're hinting at.
there was a time when I would have loved to read some buddist stuff. However i do not read philosophy for the sake of it anymore...i dont enjoy reading to much into philosophies I cant question and recieve an answer too.
If you can never understand written or spoken things, why would you even want to question the philosopher or proponent of the philosophy, as the person's answers would be as unknowable or incapable of being understood as the original text, and the answers wouldn't explain or elaborate upon the thing you were asking about (which, in turn, can't be understood)? Come to think of it, why attempt communication or interpretation at all? And why bothering reading, listening to, or talking with anyone, unless it's for your own amusement?
I suspect that such attempts at amusement would get boring after a while...
Saying that this sort of thing's what humans do doesn't really explain
why we don't just wise up and acknowledge the futility of our own nature and efforts-- and according to that description, things seem pretty futile-- and give up the ghost.
For a moment, let's forget that I've actually followed your argument well enough to ask these sorts of questions, which in itself raises further questions about communication and about what you mean when you say that people don't really "understand" written or spoken words. (You can claim that I don't understand you and that no one really understands a written or spoken statement, but you'll have to explain how it was possible for some students to understand the texts in your university courses, while others lacked "deeper understanding" of the texts.) You're still left with the matter of
why we try to understand things. The answer-- or the mystery- is not simply a matter of human hardwiring or vanity, I think. That sort of circular reasoning strikes me as a cop-out. "We do it, we exist this way, because we have to... It's just the way we are." There's actually a pretty nasty and often messy alternative, but most of us don't take it.
And I have to ask... okay, so you don't read philosophy "for itself" anymore. What does academia have to do with reading philosophy?
I tend to read philosophical and religious/theological texts because a.) I'm interested in other cultures and ideas, b.) I find it fascinating to see the relationship between knowledge, interpretation, and practice at work, c.) I find people interesting, and philosophers and authors of religious texts are people, and d.) a lot of the concerns found in the texts touch upon some pretty basic fears, concerns, and questions.
you seem to miss my point totally, and i can't help but feel Kims to a certain level too. I am not talking about conciousness, and comparing states of conciousness.
By "miss your point," I suppose you mean that I didn't understand you? Or am I misinterpreting your interpretation of my words, which you interpret as misinterpreting your earlier posts?
])R@G()N wrote:everyones point of view is enterly personal, to read another persons writing is not to udnerstand what they wrote, everything you read is interpertied by you and your preconceptions, as Ayimaki said 'understanding is a copncept purely based on wishfull thinking'.
If an understanding of someone's writings is impossible, you shouldn't
expect me to see your point.
I think I
saw your point, but as I said earlier, clarifications to general statements make all the difference. And given that Kim was talking about modes of consciousness and that his points were very much centered around a discussion of such modes, I fail to see how I'm missing Kim's line of reasoning. Gods, dolls, and animals have different modes of consciousness, and these modes of consciousness are similar in that they lack the specific sort of self-consciousness common to humans and thereby differ from the consciousness-mode of humans, according to Kim.
And, as I've suggested, Haraway's conversation with Togusa is, in part, about differentiation between modes of consciousness in relation to morality, identity, and free will...
Your statements were a little broader than the above, though. So I was hoping you'd qualify, quantify, clarify.
I am talking about feelings of eing out of place and being in you place things that have a conciousness have. It is these feelings within that is the point, not a scientific study of different forms of conciousness to be cataloged like a formula.
How someone or something feels-- and I don't mean just the feelings themselves, but the
ways in which feelings are possible--
would be contingent upon the
mode or
type of consciousness, correct? Hence the film raising the issue of certain things potentially having a mode of consciousness-- and a ghost-- but no voice, and the dialogue and plot play such a possibility against Kim's "dolls are perfect because they lack consciousness of any kind" argument.
something of infinate conciousness has an inner harmony of purpous and understanding, something of zero conciousness has no ability to even consider, hence has no inner confliction because it has no inner to conflict.
I think I've mentioned in several posts that the relationship between infinite/perfect and zero/nonexistent consciousness is dialectal, that the terms are at times virtually indistinguishable from each other in much Eastern thought, and that Kim is playing with the concepts.
We might want to consider the way Kim quotes one of Confucius's teachings-- "Without knowing life, how can we know death?"-- and compare the original context with the way in which Kim uses the phrase. In context, the original comment has to do with ethical value and knowing one's duties to the living; Kim uses it to suggest, along with Confucius, that most humans don't understand life-- but Kim isn't implying anything about duty or morality. He's deliberately and ironically altering the phrase's meaning:
Chi Lu asked about serving the spirits of the dead. The Master said,
"While you are not able to serve men, how can you serve their
spirits?" Chi Lu added, "I venture to ask about death?" He was
answered, "While you do not know life, how can you know about death?"
A lot of Kim's argument mocks the very notion of moral value.
Kim states that dolls, gods, and animals are similar in that they lack the self-consciousness inherent to the human mode of consciousness, but he's pretty careful to point out the differences between all of these modes. And there's a reason that he notes the differences between dolls, gods, and animals in passing. For someone like Kim, they have to be described
as different modes of consciousness in order to discuss the similarities and differences. He ironizes, much of the time-- and
his notion of harmony is mathematical and scientific.
Kim's entire discourse describes modes of consciousness, knowledge, and mastery, and it embraces a scientific and materialist worldview. Kim categorizes, classifies, and discusses relational and functional value. As he says, "the desire to transcend the quest for perfection"-- the desire to move beyond admiring gods and creating dolls and envying a kind of "pure joy" in animal consciousness, the desire to pass beyond the quest for something like the three modes he's described-- led to the development of certain technologies which, in turn, resulted in the resurrection of the man-as-machine idea. Kim implies that someone who follows this line of reasoning runs the risk of discovering that humans can't become something like gods, but can become something like a mere machine, something like Kim's
idea of dolls-- as dolls are "nothing but human," and as "[t]he notion that nature is calculable inevitably leads to the conclusion that humans, too, are [like dolls] reducible to mechanical parts." "The definition of a truly beautiful doll is a living, breathing body devoid of a soul..." If humans are reducible to parts in the same way that dolls are, if dolls are "nothing
but human," and if dolls don't have souls, Kim's argument implies that humans themselves don't have souls.
According to Kim (speaking through a hallucinated version of Batou), the universe itself is revealed as "God's everlasting geometry"-- an ironic reference to Johannes Kepler's open letter to Galileo, to the foundation of modern cosmology and, by extension, to the idea of man as machine and the universe as clockwork.
For Kim, all these things suggest-- and perhaps prove-- that we're in fact nothing but machines making other machines. Kim hints that we're flawed
as machines, because we're
self-conscious,
self-aware-- but our "humanity"-- the flaw itself, that which makes us different
from machines-- is beginning to disappear. "[S]cience, seeking to unlock the secret of life, brought about this terror." "The mirage of life equipped with perfect hardware engendered this nightmare."
If this sounds like a mockery of Eastern philosophy and religion, of the idea that the soul can achieve Oneness with things, of the value of ethical action, it is. For Kim, we're nothing but machines-- machines flawed in such a way that we don't recognize our mechanical nature.
Our mode of consciousness is an anomaly, a malfunction-- a misunderstanding. And Kim's saying that we're understanding that, and in doing so, learning that we are without souls.
As I've stated elsewhere on the forum, Kim is echoing Edison from
L'Eve Future, the novel quoted at the beginning of
Innocence.
Kim isn't at all adverse to the 18th Century notion of man as machine, and he seems to enjoy provoking terror and uncertainity in his visitors, while other viewpoint(s) within the film-- the implied religious or metaphysical views-- contrast with Kim's views.
As I've said, we should take Kim's words seriously, but with caution...
A thing of finite conciousness can have an inner harmony 'akin' to that of the infinate and zero, or it can have a conflicting sense of purpose and understanding which causes it mental pain.
I thought you said you weren't talking about consciousness or different modes of consciousness, but here we find
two of Kim's three modes of non-human consciousness being mentioned...
I didn't think your earlier posts were clear on
how the Major's mode of consciousness was akin to the modes of gods and dolls. If wanting clarification is a sin, I'm numbered among the damned.
Kim suggests that humans differ from animals in that animals don't have self-consciousness; the only thing his argument implies is that infinite consciousness, zero consciousness, and the consciousness(es) of animals are commensurate (related) to each other in that they lack
self-consciousness. Why does Kim describe perfection as being possible only for those with infinite consciousness or with no consciousness or with something like the consciousness of animals? Because those modes imply a lack of
self-consciousness. A god (as Kim describes lowercase-g gods) has no reason to think of things the way humans do, a doll is without consciousness and can't think of things that way, and animals are incapable of doing so because their brains work differently.
Note that to arrive at this point in our discussion, we
did have to talk about modes of consciousness...
It's important to remember that Kim's reading of the consciousness of dolls is probably incorrect-- the gynoids and androids that have attempted suicide seem to have something like consciousness, and probably a "ghost" as well. (These two terms-- consciousness and ghost-- aren't necessarily synonymous in the
GitS franchise, although they're certainly related to each other.)
According to Kim, dolls have zero consciousness. But Haraway mentions gynoids (other than the Hadaly-models) and androids attempting suicide; this is at odds with Kim's statement, as is the Major's comment that the dolls would most likely not want to be human.
(Without consciousness, gynoids and androids wouldn't have the potential to object to their obsolescence, they wouldn't have the potential to object to their mode of consciousness being changed, and they couldn't possibly want to commit suicide-- unless you can show me that things without consciousness are capable or potentially capable of objecting to things, desiring their own demise, and/or committing suicide.)
Also, to come back to my original (and oft-repeated) point: The Major doesn't fit Kim's definition of a god, insofar as she doesn't have-- nor does she claim to have-- infinite consciousness. And to be completely honest with you, I believe that Kim is discussing gods
as an idea, as a thought experiment or concept, not as something existing in reality.
A toy (the toy soldier for example) can't be hurt...my point of the toy soldier was and is a look at how we cant see outside of our understandings of the world, the idea of attributing things that we feel like hurt to an inanimate object shows how, as the major put it, 'what we see now is like a dim reflection in a mirror', when u look at the mirror, you neither see the mirror for what it is in itself, nor do you see yourself for what you really are. When u mentally attribute to a toy feelings of its hurt etc you are not truely seeing the peice of plastic for what it is, nor are u seeing a being that is capebale of feeling hurt. the mirror within it only clouds the true vision of either. To see face to face is to see the toy as a lump of inanimate atoms free of any artificail concepts like 'this is a toy' 'this is a soldier' 'hurt' 'want' etc.
I think this simply repeats your former argument, without addressing the issues I raised. You seem to be saying that even acknowledging the essences of non-human-- even non-animal-- things implies that those things "feel" pain, love, etc. in the same or similar way to humans.
In the first film, the Major quotes from 1 Corinthians. In the King James Version, Verses 10-12 read:
But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
In the original context, the passage is part of a discourse on the importance of charity. All other things-- speaking in tongues, the gift of prophesy, knowledge of the world-- are compared to childish things, while experiencing divine truth is compared to "becoming a man" (or adult).
In the context of the movie, the quotation foreshadows Motoko's fusion with the Puppetmaster, and equates it with divine experience, with seeing God face-to-face.
We were talking about gynoids and androids, I think. A different matter altogether, as Batou is uninterested in fusion. (EDIT: ])R@G()N, I'm trying to bring us back to topic, to a specific examination of quotations or even metaphors in the second film. A minor digression or even a regression to an earlier discussion on the thread is fine by me, but I'll politely suggest-- again-- that some of your posts might be more appropriate to the sort of discussions found in the forum's Philosophy section, or that you might want to quote specifically and more often from
Innocence when framing your comments in
this thread. That said--)
I stated earlier:
Also, the toy soldier-- like the gynoid, although I don't want to stretch the analogy beyond this point-- doesn't have a "voice", i.e. it can't say one way or another what it wants. Unlike the toy soldiers, gynoids and androids can demonstrate their displeasure in physical ways...Oshii includes the religious custom of burning inanimate objects in the film because it implies respect for those objects...[W]hy should the person's discomfort matter to me at all? What prevents me from hurting a person (or an animal)? What makes that different in kind from hurting a toy? After all, there's surely some difference between your brain and my brain (in terms of processing, experience, what provides pleasure/pain), and there're certainly differences between our brains and those of dogs... and if I assume that I'm superior to you, or if we decide that humans are superior to dogs...
If one doesn't adjust the position to account for this line of thinking, one might come to the conclusion that because understanding is impossible, nothing really matters.
And I wonder if you think one can or might hypothetically recognize a thing for what it is, if understanding is impossible... or how one can even speak of seeing things for what they are, as such a statement would imply things such as truth or validity, and recognition of such a thing would seem contingent upon some
sort of understanding of reality.
But you've suggested that the concepts employed would merely be articulations of an interpretation of what we
perceive to be discrete objects or phenomena, and the articulations would be interpreted but not understood by the reader or listener...
In short, I'm wondering what the purpose of this discussion is. If you believe what you're saying, what you're writing can't be understood by readers, and what I'm writing can't be understood by readers, and both our views are just interpretation, anyway.
So we're back to the points I was raising earlier in this post.
Let's put this to one side and proceed.
Regarding the second film, I wrote:
Oshii's points seem to be: What happens when our "toys" become aware? Should we treat them as toys? And if our bodies are viewed as or literally become machines, what does that say about our essences? Are we even sufficiently aware of our essences to recognize or acknowledge the essences of non-human entities, or do we take too much for granted?
Now, let's return for a moment to Eastern thought.
I stated:
Humans, animals, and inanimate things have essences, but depending upon the school of Eastern thought, the essences are themselves different in kind, or are similar only insofar as they're bound or related to matter; the nature of the essences, or their particular mode, might be different manifestations of Oneness, or they might differ because of the nature of the thing.
(Emphasis added; there are many different accounts of the relationships between "soul" or essence and matter in Eastern thought, but few of them resemble or directly correspond with prevalent Western models, except where Eastern and Western models have fused.)
Taking a hint from some of the Eastern models I described, we might say that a plastic soldier's essence
qua plastic soldier is such that it has no consciousness, but that doesn't mean that the toy has no essence. (Again, this isn't my personal belief, but a position I'm offering as an alternative to yours.) When you say that the hypothetical owner of the toy soldier thinks of the toy as "hurting", it follows that the owner is confusing his or her sort of essence with that of the toy. Is that a mistake on the owner's part? Sure, and I stated as much when I said that essences would differ in kind. But you seem to be misinterpreting my comments about respect-- devotees of Eastern religions and philosophies can acknowledge and respect the essence of something inanimate without implying that the thing "feels" this or that emotion, and without claiming perfect knowledge or total understanding of the thing.
To put it bluntly, a "soul" or essence in certain Eastern traditions is pretty different from what most of us think of as a soul. I think I kept suggesting as much...
As I've said, I believe the ritual burning was meant to suggest a worldview that's better able to deal with the notion of our "toys" having an essence and developing consciousness, ghosts, souls, whatever. A contrast to, among other things, Kim's radical materialist philosophy, which denies the existence of a soul and argues against essence of any kind by suggesting that we in fact the sum of our parts.
Again, if somebody starts from a different set of presuppositions or definitions, the conclusions will be different. That doesn't mean the conclusions are necessarily and in all instances illogical. It just means the initial points in their line of thinking are different from yours, and that perhaps the
structure or
formal language of logic is different from yours.
Hence the value of looking at positions antithetical or removed from one's own position; one learns how others think about the same issues, and can see that there is more than one way to skin a cat-- or look at a toy.
And that was really my point about why you might want to look at other (i.e., non-Western) philosophical traditions before talking about what "we" do as a species.
I'll repeat something I stated earlier in this post: You'd have to define or describe "understanding" for me to agree with you. If you mean something like "perfect" understanding of a thing or person or "oneness" with the thing or person, sure. That probably
is impossible. But such a statement doesn't cover all
types or
styles of understanding, and it wouldn't include such things as provisional or operational knowledge-- and acknowledgment of ambiguity and paradox. And it wouldn't preclude the significance of
trying to understand, nor would it mean that the
attempt is meaningless or futile. And it doesn't seem to take into account that continuity, contiguity, experience, etc. provide
kinds of understanding and knowledge that are valid, meaningful, and useful, both to individuals and to communities.
hurt, pain, feelings of 'bad' in any shape of form are the result of you having a body and being capeable of thinking and effecting your surroundings coupled by need enforced on our minds by our physical bodies.
This still doesn't answer my questions about what
you mean by "brain" or "mind" and about the relationship between such a thing and the body. (I have my own thoughts on the subject, but I haven't discussed those thoughts, and I can't really elaborate upon comments I haven't made. But you've shared your own thoughts, so I might as well ask, so that I can try to...
understand you.
)
Your statements as written could be taken to
imply a mind-body dualism, and I don't think you meant to do that. "
You having a body" can be taken to mean that "you" "own" a body, and that 's something different from your existing
as a body, if we include the organic matter and neurochemical impulses/reactions that make consciousness possible as parts or properties of a living body; "need enforced on our minds by our physical bodies" isn't quite the same as describing a biological and neurochemical reaction to a given stimulus or to the absence of/need for something.
Again, is the mind something other than a neurochemical and biological thing, and if so, how does it exist, and if not, why make or suggest the distinction? Is there another option, and if so, what do you think it is?
These aren't abstract things. A person's honest and deeply-held beliefs about these matters-- conscious or not-- influence and inform his or her responses to issues including the environment, the "right to life"/pro-choice debate, the right to die and euthanasia debates, artificiality, etc. Some pretty basic moral issues.
And they're relevant to a discussion of the film...