10.10.2022
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Newsletter. Last week’s Newsletter can be found below, as well as some of the things I’ve been reading lately:
Quick Notes on Idealism, Post-postmodernism, and Oscillation
If I were to attempt to condense the current sociocultural/political, economic, and scientific “vibe shift,” I would reduce it to a return to Idealism. Now the reason I state this is multifactor. Starting with the 2016 presidential elections, a clear and concrete polarization manifested and solidified itself. This Polarization had been slowly coalescing in the background over the years, passing from democratic to republican administrations since at least the early 90s.
Several events caught my attention this past week, including the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics on Quantum Information Theory, Kanye West’s interview with Tucker Carlson, and Rapper Mos Def wearing this garment with the picture of 19th-century German Idealist Philosopher G.W.F Hegel.
Now I’m not one to put emphasis on synchronicities, but I think the examples mentioned help point to a general trend which I characterize as a return to Idealism. I can’t point to with accuracy when this shift last occurred but It’s easy to point out that in our contemporary landscape the popular outlook is that of a scular physicalist world view. One in which the material conditions effect the socio-cultural landscape and one in which there is a physical material substrate which is presupposed in our colloquial metaphysics. This is primarily due to the physicalism I invoked, which is in alignment with our most popular scientific models. Now there are those who would bracket that idea and state that the models are substrate “agnostic”, or that they are purposefully structured as to avoid direct interaction with metaphysical questions altogether. I won’t challenge this at this time for I lack the space to do so in this newsletter but I wouldn’t be writing this if there wasn’t a semblance of a departure from physicalism into idealism.
In terms of culture, we’ve seen that a neosincerity has been dominating zoomer culture including but not limited to big heavyweights, (Kanye West, Nathan Fielder etc.) as well as small niche online circles (Milady, Kant Bot, Alt-Right) all of these have moved on to a post-ironic, neosincere framework, one that goes beyond just Post-Modern critique and cynicism. Neosincerity to one degree or another is a colloquial Idealism, not one that presupposes a particular Metaphysics but one that emphasizes the affect of ideations on their own. Even if one where to rely on a materialist framework, a concrete idea (still referring to a material “object”) would itself via network effects be able to shape and mold the landscape it inhabits.
There is an oscillation, a constant vibeshift a kin to Hegels Dialectic. One in which we affirm the post-modern skeptical attitude towards meta narratives but also, one in which one can still naively affirm these overarching organizational systems, a pragmatic but non-reducible affirmation on the ground of affectivity; a revival of Romanticism.
The Nobel Peace Prize points to a radical shift in terms of what is in store for consciousness. Theories of consciousness like integrated information theory and epistemic frameworks like Informaiton Reductionism can become rigorously vindicated once again with the validation of this breakthrough in Quantum Information Theory. I won’t pretend to be an expert in this field, but in the case in which to one level or another the state of an electrons spin is fundamentally determined in the moment of observation, of measurement speaks to a fundamental component of reality, if not consciousness then definitely the limitation of Information, the boundary for our epistemic resources. If information theory and thus by extension integrated information theory (which is currently one of the leading emerging theories of consciousness) turns out to be the most parsimonious with our scientific and mathematical and psychological models, then it is warranted that we are seeing a radical shift back to idealism.
We are witnessing a radical vindication for non materialist metaphysics and ultimately its exiting on all fronts of inquiry.
~Links~
“The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.”
― Simone Weil
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-C.N.