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Self
A macro-fact: a wholly intensional artifact of macroinformation. (See my Macroinformation blog, and curse the fed for censoring my Macroinformation.org along with all of my other domains.)
The self is informational, mental: a mental construct. But so are any of our abstractions, no matter how manifestly material they seem to be: star, moon, state, church ... God.
We have no contact with "reality"; only symbols, and symbols of symbols.
"Some Kind Of ..."
I first noticed this phrase as invidiously iterative in crumby science fiction movies: They have some king of ray gun ... It was some kind of robot ... some kind of cyborg ...
Now I notice it everywhere: I think he must be some kind of radical ... some kind of Communist ...
In many of its manifestations it's a code phrase. It means that the subject is not one of us.
It means that the weapon wielded by the alien is not recognizable to reasonable men. Therefore, it's not fair, it's black-magical: it's cheating. Therefore, the Nigger, Jew, Communist, Terrorist ... is not subject to the Bill of Rights, to due process, to the presumption of innocence, not deserving of fair play ... We don't have to honor any treaties with him, not even remember Rules of Engagement and so forth.
Alas, the code phrase doesn't appear merely in B s-f flicks: you'll hear it (if you're listening) occasionally from academics, from lawyers, from bureaucrats ...
It's a labeling. It's a subtractive label. It labels the other as OTHER.
I write something, I mount it: reading it later I find errors, overstatements, typos, infelicities ... This time, bkMarcus came back at me with a flaw before I'd even had a chance to find it myself. Good: I wish I was always caught before I notice my own guilt for myself. This way it can get fixed pronto.
I've already added the necessary qualifying word or two above, and now add a bkMarcus counterweight:
Some kind of wonderful ...
Though I had not meant my statements "absolutely" I had made them (too) absolutely. Point remains: beware the potential pejorative emotional content of the phrase.
Actually, a better point will emerge once I make time to rewrite the whole thing: the phrase does consistently invoke a sense of alien: too often "the alien" is meant by xenophobic mouths to fall on xenophobic ears.
Spectra
Many things that we think of as x-things (extensional things: see Glossary / "thing" below) are not only
i-things (intensional things, see "thing" below), they are spectra as well. Just as north is a direction, not a place, the political left and right are neither places nor things; they are directions along a far from two-dimensional spectrum.
I'll shortly develop a module in which I'll argue that the same applies to many of our paired words: good & bad; good & evil; light & dark ... I'll also shortly argue that however much Homo sapiens's development of natural language explains what anthropologists term "The Great Leap Forward," [see Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee]. I say that continued failure to generalize appreciation of the advantages of artificial languages will shortly precipitate A Great Downfall. I'll develop that point as a part of Macroinformation (with Macroinformation.org censored, see blog of that name).
Actually, I now have jotted modules on spectra:
And see Mi's many Spectra modules (not all of them yet recreated at the blog).
Superstition / Religion
Religion: Your own superstitions
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