slumberdisrupt

há 2 anosdiscuss

If there is such a thing as consciousness, no matter its variety (like how the viscosity of water varies on a "spectrum" without become its opposites ice or steam), there is by necessity such a thing as non-consciousness. That's just how concepts go.

slumberdisrupt

há 2 anosdiscuss

Actually, right, but it's not about the hobby of gaming in its ideal form (playing the game software). It really is about "scalping" (oof! so much for the entrepreneurial spirit and the sanctity of buying cheap and selling dear) and collecting or some other passionate hobby. What is this other passionate hobby? Emulation actually makes playing games so easy and accessible that the perverse nature of playing them "correctly" (with original hardware) is completely exposed. These perverted game hobbyists insist on the "correct" experience: I want to hold that dusty, magnificent copy of Pokemon Stadium 2 in mine own hands, to smell the corroding copper contacts on its PCB edge, to snap the power switch upwards, to see the dull red oval light up... but alas, I must emulate.

Really, every one of these occupations is gross. Even gaming "ideally" as the poor sap relegated to emulation does is a perversion. And let's not forget those digital collectors. Who reading this thread doesn't have an organized stash of ROM files on their external drive?

Back to the scalper: what actually separates him from the collector? That he fetishizes the money form over the commodity form? In objective terms, the money form really is the purer and cleaner one; it's the commodity form that is marred and gross. Although:

> Whenever there is a general and extensive disturbance of this mechanism, no matter what its cause, money becomes suddenly and immediately transformed, from its merely ideal shape of money of account, into hard cash. Profane commodities can no longer replace it. The use-value of commodities becomes valueless, and their value vanishes in the presence of its own independent form. On the eve of the crisis, the bourgeois, with the self-sufficiency that springs from intoxicating prosperity, declares money to be a vain imagination. Commodities alone are money. But now the cry is everywhere: money alone is a commodity! As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth.

But none of this matters if you want to stay constrained to some narrow set of nerdy interests. After all is said and done, don't let me "yuck your yum"! So yummy, that corroding PCB smell, those shallow vertical bevels in the gray plastic, that soft crackle of the compressed music of the Nintendo 64... who am I to take that from you? I am no "scalper"!

slumberdisrupt

há 2 anosdiscuss

Wow, gross people?! Is collecting that perverse of an activity? OK, yes it is, but so is playing video games in general and enjoying retro games "correctly" in particular. Emulation is a "blessing"! Weird and vaguely competitive.

slumberdisrupt

há 2 anosdiscuss

Yes, one and the same (he appears on the homepage you linked)

slumberdisrupt

há 2 anosdiscuss

I brought up Tyson because I watched a video recently where this guy argues that this whole perspective is an especially American phenomenon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD0S1rH8AiE

I'm sympathetic to this even if this lethargic attitude goes back to the religious period as you say. We can at least find the roots of it in the Enlightenment with Newton's "hypotheses non fingo".

slumberdisrupt

há 2 anosdiscuss

Where exactly do you suppose philosophy went wrong? In any case I've heard this assertion from Neil deGrasse Tyson for years; it's philistine. The phrasing of the assertion totally gives away its limits: what is the real world, and who else but a philosopher is equipped to even ask that question? Then the question then becomes its opposite: where have the natural scientists gone who are interested in the real world?

slumberdisrupt

há 3 anosdiscuss

This is a caricature of clinical psychoanalysis and is more applicable to other therapies. For example, the initial moments of CBT are "psychoeducation", where the therapist sketches out with magic markers a bunch of categories (feelings, thoughts, behaviors, emotions) and their subcategories, and the patient learns to see themselves in these ontological terms. Suggestibility is the cornerstone of these interventions.

Every psychoanalyst of course has their theoretical meta-psychology, but every clinical psychoanalyst knows that they must fight to abandon it at the door as they confront every analysand anew. Psychoanalysis is not a matter of instructing the patient of the death drive, of resistance, of the Oedipus complex, and so on. (Freud was wrong about why his intervention with Little Hans "succeeded".) Freud himself searched for something beyond hypnosis because the hypnotic technique required a susceptibility of the patient to suggestion, and furthermore required a constant relationship with the patient, otherwise the patient would invariably suffer a symptom relapse. Relate this to the dismal long-term rates of regression of CBT patients. (And this is the forbidden evidence of this "evidence based therapy".)

The analysand enters the analytical relationship supposing (as you have supposed) that the analyst knows something crucial that the analysand does not. So what happens as the analysand comes to realize that the analyst does not, in fact, possess this knowledge? The analyst indeed knows they don't know, but this is presumably nothing like what you assume the analyst supposes themselves to know.

The analyst is, in their role as an analyst (and not a therapist), merely the secretary of the analysand. They "take notes" on what the analyst says, in order to help show the analyst what they've said.

slumberdisrupt

há 3 anosdiscuss

I genuinely love your sentiment. We have way too much faux asceticism and way too little self-mockery in this godforsaken industry that pays us all way too much money. Programming is wizardry. But being a professional one (a software engineer) is a ridiculous occupation we're coerced into. We all know this, otherwise Silicon Valley wouldn't have been a universally cathartic show.

But GP is completely correct that all of the fun, magical projects in the OP article are antithetical to the profession.

slumberdisrupt

há 3 anosdiscuss

That's a fair point, but we should also note that the mighty thinker Aristotle speculated seminal theories of relativity, continental drift, and evolution. I mean Freud's discovery of the unconscious as OP presumably means the discoveries of Einstein, Wegener, and Darwin respectively. Freud's scientific conception of the unconscious was a breakthrough beyond his progenitors.

I'll only admit I've cheated a little: that Freud's contribution was a scientific one is not an assertion that is "generally regarded as correct." But Freud believed himself to be a scientist and frankly I agree. It's not like Einstein, Wegener, and Darwin are uncontested figures, but certainly Freud is much more so.

slumberdisrupt

há 3 anosdiscuss

The momentous and scandalous discovery of evolution can only be matched in the field of psychology by the discovery of the unconscious. All of the other responses here do not come close in importance to those massive upheavals you listed.

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