Theses

Unsorted theses on various topics. Mostly undercooked.

Transcendent Imagination
The most important faculty of the modern person is her ability to conceptualise “something else”. All our notions of progress, morality, belief, even linear time itself, spring from our ability to conceptualise things not as they are but as they could be. The ought, rather than the is. To lose this faculty would be the most dangerous single event that could happen in our society's consciousness; the same animus which drove my ancestors to venture out into the unknown with but the sea-birds and stars to guide them, which led others of them to cast off the shackles of dogmatism and build machines and institutions which ushered in modernity, could slip away from us in only a few generations.

The destruction of a possible future comes from the destruction of historical and cultural memory. To remember nothing is to believe in nothing—and to believe nothing else is possible.

In Answer to a Friend's Question: Who has a Better Theory of Mind? Left or Right?
I'll attack this by looking at people's internal explanations for others who hold different beliefs, because I think considering someone's capacity to see the world differently when that view seriously differs from one's own is a good indicator of one's capacity to conceptualise the internal world of another person. In answering this I'm considering the most common denominators. For the left-learners, it's someone between a bachelor-holding Western social democrat versus an old union mum. For the right-leaners, I'm going for someone between a tradie and a small business owner. Note for this answer I'm excluding progressive liberals, which is big decision, but because I think their theory of mind is sort of a weird mirror image of the right-wingers.

I think at its most basic level, the way that both tendencies explain someone else's different thinking is by deficiency. For the left-leaner, deficiency in knowledge, for the right-leaners, deficiency in common sense. I think the moral judgement here is revealing; the left-leaner thinks that the tradie could gain correct beliefs with more education or life experience, whereas I'm not convinced the right-leaner allows so easily for improvement. Common sense is usually described as inherent, not learned, in contradistinction to 'book smarts'. You don't hear, for example, tradies saying "put the wokesters on the job site and they'll learn quickly", it's usually "put the wokesters on the job site and they'll be hopeless and suffer! haha".

There's a redemptive element to the left-leaner's belief, which is quite Marxist. Benjamin's big smackdown RKO 619 epic finisher to orthodox Marxism was identifying its cosmotechnical borrowing from redemptive Christian theology. Marxists inherently believe that the world can be redeemed in this life, by the destruction of inequality and the building of heaven on Earth. This redemptive kernel basically remains in all leftist thought, and even your garden-variety left-leaner will almost always believe that his ideological opponents can be reeducated and redeemed. At it's most extreme form, each of these ideologies builds camps; leftists build theirs for reeducation, right-wingers build theirs for extermination.

Conservative Christianity, by contrast, believes that humans are necessarily fallen and essentially tainted with original sin, and that redemption is only possible through Christ, at Judgement Day, after apocalypse. Note that "apocalypse" really has the sense of "revealing"; people essential character is revealed, and they are judged accordingly, either redeemed, sent to purgatory, or (maybe, possibly) damned. There is no way to redemption except through Christ. It's controversial to say, but basically everyone in the West who hasn't consciously questioned where his beliefs come from and isn't a leftist probably has this belief. Christianity is still the absolute ontological underpinning of Western political thought for normies, and the right-wing hesitance to embrace redemption in their ideological opponents is due to this.

Coming to the San Quentin example, right-leaners are much more likely to believe that these people are essentially and irredeemably uncalibrated, i.e stupid, ESPECIALLY because they're sinful (they must be, because they're in prison, right?). Left-leaners, as inheritors of Marxist thought, think that the state institutions of man are inherently evil, and thus have more mental scope to consider that these people have the potential to be elevated to goodness and intelligence with the right person-building and person-repairing.

Therefore, I think leftists are better equipped with the mental models to understand that someone can be 'fixed', or 'improved', and therefore a broader capacity to understand how someone may change their cognition and view of the world from a starting point other than the observer's. Note that this all rests on an improvement narrative; and presumes that someone is necessarily wrong (not woke enough) for not sharing a particularly point of view.

My final, still-undercooked thesis is that the people who are most equipped for external theory-of-mind recognition is, maybe, liberals. Real liberals believe that every man carries his God under his hat, and tend towards idealism more than the materialism of Marxists or the zeal of Christians. They're the inheritors of the sceptical, rationalist tradition, and a necessary part of that is the allowance for the diversity of a chaotic universe. They have a general resistenace to metanarrative, aside from 'liberty' generally increasing over time, but no special allegiance to a given motor or teleology of history. I think, at the moment, that this translates to allowing more readily for different points of view, and for a conception of evil that involves people being misguided, not necessarily sinful or anti-historical.

I think the next question is whether a 'better' theory of mind is one with a logical conclusion of treating every individual as a free agent, and that discounts collective, normative pressures which might be simply playing out on the terrain of his mind rather than representing actual cognition. The other problem with mentalism in general is that it's kind of unfalsifiable, and creates chicken-and-egg scenarios like "Why did he draw that picture in blue? Because he wanted it to look that way." The question is ever: "Why did he want it to look that way?" Despite all this, that Leone (1982) article I sent you the other day does have some cool mentalist ideas at scale, which reconciles some of the issues with traditional mentalism by considering group 'grammars' for individual action.

I think the ultimate, probably unachieveable, best theory of mind is one that excavates the normative forces acting on a person's cognition, as imprinted on their biological equipment and capacity for complex thought in a number of given realms, and (importantly) predicts how they will respond to given stimuli. I'm still not sure what tradition of thought gets closest to this; Father Brown from team Conservative had a good crack at it last night with his scathing critique of Buddhism, but I have read basically zero psychoanalytic literature past Freud (no Jung, no Lacan, no Zizek) so I don't actually think I know enough to answer the question satisfactorily; except that, as it was posed, I would say left-wing.