massrock

Well-known member
The word "reductive" gets thrown around a lot on here, and I don't think many of you have a clue how to use it in any meaningfully precise way.
Basic definition of "reductive" = "of or relating to reduction" or "reducing or tending to reduce."

That's quite straightforward and I should think most people (here) know what it means and how to use it.

Insisting on reading only a particular specialised sense of the word ("usual" to the world view of the cultural environment you inhabit) does illustrate an aspect of that point though.
 

massrock

Well-known member
But then, by that definition of the term "reduction" or "reductive", everything is a reduction. Eating a sandwich is a reduction, because you could possibly eat cereal or have a banana. Or walking three steps to the left instead of to the right is a reductive move because it's a decisive action that reduces the set of all possibilities and inputs at a given point in time.
A sandwich is an object, or an event, not a way of understanding or experiencing the world. Why are you comparing world views to sandwiches? By "possibilities" I don't mean choices of action.
This is what I mean by meaningful precision. Chemistry uses precision and accuracy standards mathematically, and these work very well to ensure that data doesn't get messy, that important information isn't lost in the shuffle, and that results across experiments are standardized. When you use a term in such a broad way that it could apply to almost any action, almost any person, place, or thing in the world, it ceases to be precise and loses meaning in the process.
If it's about ways of understanding or experiencing, it does apply to pretty much every person, place or thing.

But go ahead, why don't you lecture on the "meaningfully precise" use of every "term". Where does it stop? This is written language (it's you know, "fluid"), not something as formally defined as chemistry workings.
Well, ok. But compared to...? I don't see why you'd want to use the word "reducing" here, unless you're measuring cognition against a God standard of omniscience or something.
What's there is filtered, reduced. So, compared to what is. Compared to what others perceive, what is noticed, what is deemed noteworthy, how that might be interpreted, what might be believed about that, etc. Some of which is determined by "world view", cultural orientation.
Aldous Huxley said:
To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born — the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
As for "last time"...those "papers" were ONE paper you downloaded from the internet by Jared Diamond, and then iirc a couple of mp3s of him speaking.

There was nothing in any of them about lost spiritual utopias, either. Only about the relative levels of economic and social stratification pre- and post-agrarianism.

there was an important lecture by another anthropologist which you fail to acknowledge, which i am almost certain to this day you have not reviewed.

apologize to everyone else for going over well covered territory, but this silly person apparently has major blocks in her mind, caused by rigid adherence to a particular world view, which makes it near impossible for her to rationally consider scientific evidence on subjects which anthropologists world wide agree unanimously -- groups of band level societies, which are numerous, such as the Dobe Ju/'hoansi:

• gather 70 percent of their food (roots, nuts, fruits, etc.)
• no hierarchy and no authority, only "temporary leaders"
• no private property
• work 20 hour weeks with only division of labour being between sexes
• does not distinquish between work and play
• zero starvation: 100% of population fed compared to 30% starving in the "civilized" world
• superb health (relative to ours)
and no worries, i have not done much research recently, but will for sure be back with more.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Lanugo was confused about subjunctive because the rules for subjunctive are very different and more rigid in German.

That's ok though Germans get frustrated with English speakers all the time because our language is too creative with grammar.

A sandwich is an object, or an event, not a way of understanding or experiencing the world. Why are you comparing world views to sandwiches? By "possibilities" I don't mean choices of action.

If it's about ways of understanding or experiencing, it does apply to pretty much every person, place or thing.

But go ahead, why don't you lecture on the "meaningfully precise" use of every "term". Where does it stop? This is written language (it's you know, "fluid"), not something as formally defined as chemistry workings.

What's there is filtered, reduced. So, compared to what is. Compared to what others perceive, what is noticed, what is deemed noteworthy, how that might be interpreted, what might be believed about that, etc. Some of which is determined by "world view", cultural orientation.

I'm not trying to lecture. I understand where you're coming from. I realize that a lot of really intelligent people like Huxley agreed with you. I'm just making the case that it's better to recognize a full spectrum of "reductive" practices, beliefs, etc. Instead of just considering anything that isn't wild speculation equally "reductive."

The reason I went to the more specialized use was because we were talking about scientific worldviews. So that use seems to apply better than a common use definition.
 

version

Well-known member
Really been feeling this one lately, goes hand in hand with 'the new transparency'.

It's something that comes up in Pynchon all the time,

" . . . folks in the 18th century believed that once upon a time all kinds of things had been possible which were no longer so. Giants, dragons, spells. The laws of nature had not been so strictly formulated back then. What had once been true working magic had, by the Age of Reason, degenerated into mere machinery…. [The persistence of these beliefs showed] a profound unwillingness to give up elements of faith, however "irrational," to an emerging technopolitical order that might or might not know what it was doing."

Difficult one though as it's beneficial to uncover some mysteries, e.g. the workings of the human body in pursuit of healthcare.

An instance where it's a bit more open and shut, imo, is the relentless drive to categorise and explain things online, stuff like boiling people down to an "aesthetic" and YouTube vids telling you what a given film "means". There isn't really any positive to that, imo. Just useless "content" that sucks the life out of things.

Some of the new mysteries being created are pretty dull too. I dunno how Bitcoin works and there's nothing about it that really sparks the imagination enough for me to seriously consider it.
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
I remember Norm Macdonald (of all people,) known avid reader of Russian lit, saying in an interview one time that his main takeaway from these great novels was, that at the end of it all, faith is the only thing that'll save you.

Don't think he meant it has to mean religion.
 

version

Well-known member
Ballard manages to marry the imagination with the impulse to dissect, conjuring fantastical images rendered in the language of a surgeon.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
you should try and get off the internet for a period versh. it can leave this drab overlay on your imagination of the world. every nook and corner mapped out, accounted for, assimilated into the whole.

especially twitter with its tendency to assign position and value to everything. reject its system! fight off the tentacles of doom
 

Leo

Well-known member
you should try and get off the internet for a period versh. it can leave this drab overlay on your imagination of the world. every nook and corner mapped out, accounted for, assimilated into the whole.

especially twitter with its tendency to assign position and value to everything. reject its system! fight off the tentacles of doom

100%
 

vimothy

yurp
standard for weird twitter, that's not the interesting bit
 

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