Will he ever come back?
It's the best and most prosaic fantasy since Tolkien and far more intricate and philosophical.
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 It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
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R. Scott Bakker
Will he ever come back?
It's the best and most prosaic fantasy since Tolkien and far more intricate and philosophical.
|
It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
|
what does 'prosaic' mean here?
It means that his grasp of the English lexicon and its inherent artistic fluidity is in vast excess of the slop we are seeing across all writing today.
Prosaic does not normally mean that in English. We say “poetic” to mean that. “Prosaic” comes from Latin for nothing too fancy, originally the opposite of poetic. While prose can be kino the term “prosaic” means mediocre, pedestrian. It doesn’t refer to prosody
Well, it is my mistake, I mean to say that his prose is very apt and he espouses high quality rhetoric through dialogue in a way that I cannot think of any other author doing through a fantasy medium.
Is this bait or are you just an ESL?
Worse he's a midwit who thinks he's intelligent because he read a wikipedia article about Friedrich Nietzsche.
Yes, I am here, and working on something new and exciting! It's taken me a while but I hope it'll all be worth it, guys!
Thank you for the kind words, anon, although is correct about your use of the word "prosaic", sadly. It's an easy mistake to make!
Assuming this isn’t a LARP, what are your biggest literary inspirations that you believe to have the greatest influence on your writing style?
OP here, I have lurked Three Pound Brain, The Three Seas and The Second Apocalypse forums enough to know that Mr. Bakker is very much the irritable sort and he was clearly quite depressed about his lack of income from writing, I would assume since he is a peer to George R. R. Martin who has found success despite being a much poorer author and worldbuilder.
I don't believe this is him, though he is definitely on the 'cool' countercultural side and his being here would not surprise me at all.
Black person, bakker doesn't give a shit about money, he got defeated for a wide variety of reasons but the main one is that he always styled himself as a philosopher first and foremost (the most reddit kind at that) and then got blown the frick out when his idol pretty much laughed at him
as far as his fantasy books go, he's been for a long time that people don't like the direction they took after the original trilogy, and i think he might be getting old enough to realize how cringe some of the shit he wrote down was and how it's going to ensure he'll never get anywhere in life as a serious person (which he most certainly is not)
dude thought he was a rockstar, but he was always a cringy redditor
>he is a peer to George R. R. Martin
they're not peers at all, a single book from asoiaf (even the dogshit ones) probably sold more than all of second apocalypse combined
>despite being a much poorer author
he's not lmao
>and worldbuilder
george is an infinitely better worldbuilder than bakker, i don't even think you know what that tearm means, but protip, using weird names doesn't make you a good worldbuilder and that isn't the standard by which we judge good worldbuilding
>inb4 accusations of being grrm superfan
i'm not, quite the contrary, i used to be really into bakker as a teen which is why i'm extremely familiar with all the books, all the blogposts, all the podcasts appearances and interviews, the whole shebang
But you clearly aren't familiar at all, or else you would know it was primarily monetary issues and ebook piracy that pushed him out of writing, as the record clesrly shows.
>protip, using weird names doesn't make you a good worldbuilder
But creating entirely new ethnolinguistic cultures with a believable ethnogenesis and thousands of years of worldbuilding does, and Bakker is the best to do that since Tolkien, while Martin was consistently awful and unbelievably simplistic.
Basically you're a moron, and you clearly like slop because you continued liking GRRM into adulthood while being filtered by Bakker, who basically connected the streams of1920s pulp fantasy and Tolkienesque sagas with a heavy dose of effective existential philosophical dialogues, honing fantasy into a more modern, enjoyable genre without simplifying it for the masses.
>know it was primarily monetary issues and ebook piracy that pushed him out of writing, as the record clesrly shows
???
yes because it's clearly impossible to write if you don't make millions doing it, every author out there is a BILLIONAIRE, especially fantasy ones
>But creating entirely new ethnolinguistic cultures with a believable ethnogenesis and thousands of years of worldbuilding doe
not really, a literal AI can do that now, it's complicated and lengthy but ultimately pretty mundane and doesn't require much creativity
> while Martin was consistently awful and unbelievably simplistic.
damn it's almost like filling up your book with names that nobody can remember and pronounce is not a good thing that's going to sell your novel, imagine that
>Basically you're a moron
you're the one who thinks putting non-english names on something makes it good worldbuilding lol
>you continued liking GRRM into adulthood while being filtered by Bakker
i don't particularly like either, but yes, grrm is objectively a much better author and that's indisputable to anyone who is over the age of 16 (at least mentally)
>who basically connected the streams of1920s pulp fantasy and Tolkienesque sagas with a heavy dose of effective existential philosophical dialogues
basedyyyyyyyy, dude, it's fantasy, nobody cares about what some brainlet who couldn't even get his phd and got laughed at the one time he attempted to write anything connected to actual neuroscience and philosophy, there's nothing deep or meaningful to consider about second apocalypse
>honing fantasy into a more modern, enjoyable genre
>without simplifying it for the masses
no he's just a pretty shitty prose writer, it's not very deep or anything
this isn't fricking finnegans wake, Black person, people aren't dropping the book because it's just too confusing and hard to read, they're dropping it because it's full of monster rape and other cringe shit that belongs in an edgy manga for teenagers
maybe once you grow up and read more than one author you'll realize bakker pretty much just lifted all his worthwhile ideas from sci-fi writers
Another tilted author coping hard over being mediocre, or someone who simply doesn’t really get it. (You)
sad
you write like a fricking AI. I dont believe you're human
I would rather write like an AI than like a petty aggressive egoist seeking to transfer his self hatred onto anonymous IQfy tulpas
He doesn't. I bet you get duped by actual bot posts too.
>when his idol pretty much laughed at him
Who are we talking about here? Not familiar with this stuff.
Martin is not a good world builder.
He has a GOOD METHOD for world building that you homosexuals didn't figure out.
It came from his year playing dungeons and dragons and consuming shit tons of settings.
Those settings, campaign and modules, most content from the forgotten realms, just get rehashed over and over again with names swapped until it sounds good and is original enough to avoid getting copy-right-fricked in the ass.
He literally plays with your need to know more in the same way a good DM puts a fancy name in a map to let your imagination run wild.
Like a stage magician you got bamboozled.
At least Bakker approach is a subversion of the history of religion in our world, which it makes it a lot more original than the war of the roses with a lot of content stolen from the forgotten realms with the names changed.
What is conjuring an immersive world in prose but a kind of stage magic?
what does 'excess' mean here?
It means what it means, that his ability to write in English exceeds the average published modern author by a wide margin.
First off, turn down your words! If I heard that in real life, I would break my dick!
Sadly, I am really not sure. He sort of went dark.
His brother wrote this 2 years ago https://www.newsload.ca/post/insights-on-the-second-apocalypse-book-series
sounds like vax injury to me no offense
I think it must be hard having such a dour and misanthropic view of life. Bakker is a talented individual and obviously fairly smart. It seems a shame to me that he fell into eliminitivism and other garbage ideas in philosophy.
His writing seems to indicate some familiarity with ancient and medieval thought but nothing suggests he's really gone deep and internalized any of it. Unfortunately, a lot of atheists are allergic to anything that mentions God and write it off. So he has this very cool idea of magical systems grounded in metaphysics, but it gets presented in a fairly shallow way, and I take it that this is because he is not super familiar with the sorts of systems that would underlie things like alchemy, the Gnostic ogdoad, etc.
And yet his dismal view of fallen humanity, ruled over by desire, instinct, circumstances, and passion cries out for something like the Platonic ascent, Boethius' medication and consolation, or St. Aquinas' recognition, with Aristotle in Book X of the ethics, that man's telos lies in rationality, yes, but not the dry eliminitivist rationality of the Dunyain, but in contemplation.
Basically, Bakker would be happier if he went to a Catholic philosophy program. Who knows, maybe he can still tap into that stream and lead his atheist audience out of darkness, up out of the cave. The world can seem ugly, but the virtues are rungs on a ladder up. As St. Bonaventure says, the world is a ladder handed down by grace. Self-determination, freedom, which he is so obsessed with and pessimistic about, requires knowing what is truly good and doing what is truly good. It is in reaching out for truth and in love that one transcends current desire and belief, becoming more than what one is, no longer an effect of what one is not. The final state is St. Bernard's last state of love, when we love all creatures on account of God, with God's own love.
I feel like he's like 75% of the way there, but hung up on stumbling blocks that lead to this very dark view of life that seems toxic over time.
>catholicism
bakker's thirst for transcendence makes him a gnostic in my book.
Gnosticism is part of orthodox Christianity. Pagels argued that John is a gnostic gospel for example. The entire idea of illumination and contemplation is about gnosis, about having an infused noetic grasp of the divine nature (which includes all natures in the Logos).
Aristotle and Aquinas locate this as man's highest aim and true happiness.
Gnosticism was sublated by orthodoxy. E.g., Origen grew up in an Alexandria where Platonist Judaism and Christianity was booming alongside Gnosticism. Plotinus is a younger contemporary of Origen and Clement in the same environment, and it's not hard to see how his hypostases could be drawn from Gnostic cosmology.
What was excised from gnosticism was the hatred of the body and the material world, which flows from a deep misunderstanding of Plato. Plato's whole point is that the intellect needs to unify the person, not divorce them from their being. The rational part of the soul, the charioteer in the Phaedrus, tames the appetitive and spirited parts of the soul (the horses in the Phaedrus) and in so doing makes the ascent. Gnosticism was suppressed in that it was founded on error and in that it made up all sorts of extra canonical texts to support this era.
But much of it was simply sublated into the main stream, and the ideas that were good show up in the Cappadocians, St. Maximus, etc. and help inform later developments in Eriugena and Eckhart.
Transcendence lies at the very heart of orthodoxy, the drive for divine union, theosis and diefication.
It wasn't a misinterpretation of Plato, it was a deliberate inversion of his basic premises.
there's no reconciling the need for transcendence with an omnipotent God. All Christian theodicies are schizophrenic by design
>Bakker would be happier if he went to a Catholic philosophy program.
https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2013/01/23/zizek-hollywood-and-the-disenchantment-of-continental-philosophy/
"My own position might be summarized as a kind of ‘Good-Luck-Chuck’ argument. Either you posit an occult brand of reality special to you and go join the Christians in their churches, or you own up to the inevitable. *The fate of the transcendental lies in empirical hands now*. There is no way, short of begging the question against science, of securing the transcendental against the empirical. Imagine you come up with, say, Argument A, which concludes on non-empirical Ground X that intentionality cannot be a ‘cognitive illusion.’ The problem, obviously, is that Argument A can only *take it on faith* that no future neuroscience will revise or eliminate its interpretation of Ground X. And that faith, like most faith, only comes easy in the absence of alternatives–of imagination.
The notion of using transcendental speculation to foreclose on possible empirical findings is hopeless. Speculation is too unreliable and nature is too fraught with surprises. One of the things that makes the Blind Brain Theory so important, I think, is the way its mere existence reveals this new thetic landscape. By deriving the signature characteristics of the first-personal out of the mechanical, it provides a kind of ‘proof of concept,’ a demonstration that post-intentional theory is not only possible, but potentially powerful. As a viable alternative to intentional thought (of which transcendental philosophy is a subset), it has the effect of dispelling the ‘only game in town illusion,’ the sense of necessity that accompanies every failure of philosophical imagination. It forces ‘has to be’ down to the level of ‘might be’…
You could say the *mere possibility* that the Blind Brain Theory might be empirically verified drags the *whole of Continental philosophy into the purview of science*. The *most* the Continental philosopher can do is match their intentional hopes against my mechanistic fears. Put simply, the grand old *philosophical* question of what we are no longer belongs to them: It has fallen to science."
Bakker is infatuated with the incoherent positivist "view from nowhere." I think philosophers like Robert Sokolowski have done a pretty good job at revealing why this is a broken way of thinking of the world and ourselves (some continentals too).
It is in language and thought that the intelligibilities of things are made most present to us. The relationship between knower and none is not a sort of "less real," relation. It is the relationship in which things most are way they are (which roughly follows the intuitions of Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel).
All the properties of "things," are known and instantiated through interactions. But things only instantiate a few of their properties at any one time. Only in a knowing mind is all that a thing can be brought out and made present at once.
The positivist view has no way of overcoming the problem of the One and the Many. If you take the scientific view to it's logical conclusion, there are no such things as neurons or molecules to cause conciousness. Rather, information, causation , energy, and mass slip across the boundaries of all "discrete things," effortlessly. Rather than a universe of things, we have one global process. But this makes all statements of truth impossible, for if relations involving mind have a secondary ontological status, then the truth is that there is just frenetic change in universal quantum fields, just one thing, nature.
The only reason anyone embraced eliminitivism is because they are wedded to smallism and reductionism. But there is absolutely no prima facie reason for them to be true and there is very weak empirical evidence to support it. Bakker can see the splinter in another's eye but not the log in his, and so he moves to denying his own existence.
But science is ultimately a realization of human beings as agents of truth, of the intellect's desire to know truth, which always ascends and leads back to the First Cause.
Of course, Bakker seems most familiar with the straw man Christianity of the Evangelical to athirst pipeline, and here refers to athiestic continentals as the main rival to analytic eliminitivism.
It's a sad thing to see. In all there is a telos that cries out for transcendence. And not a transcendence that isolated, the neo-gnostic elitism, but one that is part of the global, mystical body of Christ, a single, holy, apostolic and catholic church. There, the entire liturgy moves the masses towards their goal, that of contemplation and theosis.
>Only in a knowing mind
anosognosia, agnosia, apophenia. Nuff said.
>no such things as neurons or molecules to cause conciousness.
just because your brain toolkit crashes, doesn't mean you can't get fricking extinct. Filtration by environment, capiche?
>Rather, information, causation , energy, and mass slip across the boundaries of all "discrete things," effortlessly.
https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/reactionary-atheism-hagglund-derrida-and-nooconservativism/
"Differentiations that exceed our brain’s capacity to sense/cognize *make no difference*. Or put differently, *information* (understood in the basic sense of systematic differences making systematic differences) that exceeds the information processing capacities of our sensory and cognitive systems simply does not exist for those systems–*not even as an absence*. It simply never occurs to people that their incandescent lights are in fact *discontinuous*. Thus the profundity of the Heraclitean maxim: not only does nature conceal itself behind the informatic blind of complexity, it conceals this concealment. This is what makes science such a hard-won cultural *achievement*, why it took humanity so long (almost preposterously so, given hindsight) to see that it saw so little. Lacking information pertaining to our lack of information, we assumed we possessed all the information required. We congenitally assumed, in other words, the *sufficiency* of what little information we had available."
>But this makes all statements of truth impossible
https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2017/04/05/the-point-being/
"Now consider the manifest absurdity:
*It is true that there is no such thing as truth.*
If *truth talk* belonged to system A, and *such thing talk* belonged to system X, then it really could be true that there’s no such thing as truth. But given conscious insensitivity to this, we would have no way of discerning the distinct cognitive ecologies involved, and so presume One Big Happy Cognition by default. If there is no such thing as truth, we would cry, then no statement could be true."
he will be back
much like kellhus, the series is dead but not done
quints
Reminds me of the silly argument that smallism and reductionism must be true in Neuropath because it is easy to understand.
Most of nature isn't easy to understand, e.g. relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. Indeed, following Donald Hoffman's arguments in The Case Against Reality we might well be suspicious of things that just seem to work nicely intuitively.
But reductionism isn't some new idea science just happened to bring us to. It's as old as philosophy. The idea that little bits of stuff must cause all things is one of the first solutions to the problem of the One and the Many. It's just a bad solution. And yet a guy who is all about cognitive biases seems to miss this and take the simplicity of smallism as evidence of its truth.
I will allow that Wittgenstein has a point that the symmetry, parsimony, and beauty of explanations can be a reason why we accept them, but there is a gaping hole in the middle of smallism. If fundemental particles aren't concious, how are we? Jaegwon Kim seems to have shut the door on strong emergence in substance metaphysics, and yet we seem to need it.
Eliminitivism can't answer this question. It's just a bait and switch. The question is "how does first person subjective experience emerge," and they answer with "well conciousness isn't as rich as you think it is." Ok, not an answer. Why do I feel something and rocks presumably don't?
But the flaw increasingly seems to be the foundation of substance metaphysics. Process metaphysics needs no strong emergence because "more is different."
But if we're in a world with something that does the job of strong emergence, then there is no reason to stick with the same old, arguably falsified idea of little balls of stuff forming all things.
>that smallism and reductionism must be true in Neuropath because it is easy to understand
Black person, you've just been quoted that there's a vast chunk of what you hadn't even began to understand. The one that you don't even know that you don't know.
>The idea that little bits of stuff must cause all things
Black person, you've just been quoted that it's precisely the ignorance that is important.
>If fundemental particles aren't concious, how are we?
you've just been quoted that you are not. *Ignorance* is important, do you even comprehend that?
>Most of nature isn't easy to understand, e.g. relativity, quantum mechanics, etc.
quantum mechanics is one of the most reliable things in the world, however.
intentionalism is anything but.
>The question is "how does first person subjective experience emerge," and they answer with
the standard eliminativist answer is to b***h-slap you with Reductio ad Absurdum and reply "Formulate your screeches better, moron"
>Three posts in resorts to repeating "I am right because of things all people must be ignorant of," over and over and hurling around racial slurs.
I will pray for you Anon, that you may come to see the light of reason. You might consider how one becomes self-governing enough to avoid such outbursts. It is through the human desire for what is truly good, not simply what others say is good or what appears to be good. But if this knowledge of the good can make us more fully real as ourselves, then it must be more real than material things, which are mere bundles of causes external to them.
I recommend pic related.
to repeating "I am right because of things all people must be ignorant of,"
Resorts to repeating about heuristics (aka suboptimal processes) and uncertainty to a 2-digit-iq animal, that keeps attacking a strawman, while screeching "little bits of stuff do not cause all things, reee!".
>the light of reason
https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2014/04/13/the-blind-mechanic-ii-reza-negarestani-and-the-labour-of-ghosts/
"In other words, the noise reduction machinery that we call ‘reason’ is something that can itself become obsolete. In fact, its obsolescence seems pretty much inevitable.
Why so? Because the communicative function of reason is to maximize efficacies, to reduce the slippages that hamper coordination—*to make mechanical*. The rattling machinery image conceives natural languages as continuous with communication more generally, as a signal system possessing finite networking capacities."
>It is through the human desire for what is truly good
https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2012/05/24/inchoroi-love-song/
"And the pharmakon is growing. Now, we are entering an era which will see HUMAN nature become thoroughly compliant to HUMAN desire, and so dwell in the shadow of yet another catastrophic consequence: the Semantic Apocalypse.
The *potential* problem with rendering HUMAN nature compliant to HUMAN desire is quite obvious: given that HUMAN desire is rooted in HUMAN nature, the power to transform HUMAN nature according to HUMAN desire becomes the power to transform *HUMAN desire* according to HUMAN desire. This is a cornerstone of what troubles so-called ‘bioconservatives’ like Francis Fukuyama, for instance: the possibility of ‘desire run amok’—or put differently, the breakdown of the consensual *values* required for liberal democratic society.
For the first time in HUMAN history, in other words, the *biological* basis of HUMAN desire will be put into play. Given that this is historically unprecedented, and given the degree to which social cohesion depends upon overlapping networks of consistent—or at the very least, compatible—desires, the threat seems quite clear. ‘Designer desires’ should have the same sinister ring as ‘neurocosmetic surgery.’ Imagine waking up and deciding what to wear as well as *what to feel* for the day."
>But if this knowledge of the good
>Speculation is too unreliable and nature is too fraught with surprises.
>Imagine waking up and deciding what to wear as well as *what to feel* for the day."
That sounds fricking awesome.
It's sounds like it would be an absolute disaster. He's right about that one. Crashspace was a nice take on this.
Unfortunately, while I like the guys stories, a lot of his other philosophy is not good. It has this very annoying abstruse continental writing style, while at the same time positions like Dennett's represent the worst sort of post-WWII philosophy.
Basically, any problem that is difficult is taken to be a pseudo problem. This was Wittgenstein's big thing, "I'll just get around hard problems by declaring them not problems."
Well, we already have seen morality, value, beauty, and truth "eliminated." Why not eliminate our own consciousness next? What you're left with is a philosophy the explains nothing of the human experience, isn't edifying in any way, and is essentially pointless. And it's not even based on particularly sound facts. There is a lot of "science says it is this way," despite a total lack of scientific consensus on conciousness or the fundemental nature of physical reality.
>Well, we already have seen morality, value, beauty, and truth "eliminated." Why not eliminate our own consciousness next?
It's not a question of "Why not", it's a question of "What you gonna do if/when?". And your answer is "Nothing of help."
Muh xperience...
>And it's not even based on particularly sound facts.
You've been demonstrated on the example with "truth"
Because you were NOT even considering that your brain is modular (and insensitive to perceiving this), you've been conflating 2 different things under ONE term.
*It is true, that there is no such thing as truth.*
*Operation successful, object X not found.*
>Why not eliminate our own consciousness next?
>And it's not even based on particularly sound facts. There is a lot of "science says it is this way,"
>it has the effect of dispelling the ‘only game in town illusion,’ the sense of necessity that accompanies every failure of philosophical imagination. It forces ‘has to be’ down to the level of ‘might be’…
>You could say the *mere possibility* that the Blind Brain Theory might be empirically verified drags the *whole of Continental philosophy into the purview of science*.
Anything "could" be right. That doesn't really say much.
>Anything "could" be right. That doesn't really say much.
Anything "could". Not "has to".
It says the very same thing that the Greeks been saying ever since Sextus Empiricus: dogmas are shit.
>Dogmas are bullshit
>Quotes Bakker the way scholastics quote St. Augustine, as a voice of authority.
>But if we're in a world with something that does the job of strong emergence
Consciousness is when you begin to ask questions like "Who lives in those houses? Should we improve their living conditions?"
>Rather than a universe of things, we have one global process. But this makes all statements of truth impossible, for if relations involving mind have a secondary ontological status, then the truth is that there is just frenetic change in universal quantum fields, just one thing, nature.
Could you explain this?
It's the age old problem of the One and the Many, which is still with us.
Basically, physics shows us a world where you just seem to have a few entities, fundemental fields. In QFT, particles are not fundemental, they are abstractions based on measurements of field behavior, but the part(icle) can only be defined in terms of the whole (field) rather than the field being just the sum of the particles that lie in it. Virtual particles and condensates are interesting here in that they spring from the field, not from "fundemental particles."
We now think/in some cases observe that "fundemental particles," have a begining in end.
The goal of grand unification is to boil everything down to one field.
But then you just have one thing, and processes in it giving rise to all of nature.
Now a lot of people will say that something's "appearing blue," or "tasting bitter" is a sort of "less real," property because it is "constructed by the mind." The problem here is that, from the stand point of physics, there are no discrete things, it seems all objects might well be said to be mental constructs. This wasn't a problem when particles were thought to be the ontological basement. Information is sometimes proposed as more basic than even fields but information is essentially relational and processual so it doesn't do the job that particles did in being "real things," that exist outside the unity of being.
The Problem of the Many comes up here as well. This is the problem that discrete entities are hard to define. E.g., for a cloud, you can draw a line around set of water droplets and say "here is the cloud." But dilneating the boundary is always somewhat arbitrary. There will be bits of water vapor on the fringes? Are they part of the cloud? It seems we could draw many different boundaries using the same cloud, different ensembles, and say we have myriad different clouds.
This is true for cats too. Is the cat on the mat still a cat plus or minus a loose hair, or some stray atoms? And borders are even harder to delicate over time. A person exchanged 98% of the atoms in their body over 18 months, and we are constantly shedding energy and matter across any boundary that might outline our body.
So, if you take phenomenal relations to be somehow less real, somehow too arbitrary, the it seems like you can't say anything about anything. We're back at Parmenides.
But Hegel and others have a good response to this. It seems ridiculous to call relations between people and the objects they perceived somehow "less real." They seem plenty real. A full accounting of being needs to involve an absolute category that wraps around the subject and objective, rather than reducing one to the other. But reductionism tends to rule this out. If we are just atoms, and atoms lack mind, then mind must be acausal and somehow illusory (causal closure).
The positivist perspective where "objectivity approaches truth at the limit," ends in a bad place.
>Now a lot of people will say that something's "appearing blue," or "tasting bitter" is a sort of "less real," property because it is "constructed by the mind."
Functionally dependent on your brain. Just like films are your INability to perceive frame slide-show. Exaptation of malfunction. An error. Crash-space.
>The problem here is that, from the stand point of physics, there are no discrete things
Meanwhile, gravitation is not dependent on your neurodivergence. Trying to frick with gravitation will unambiguously get you killed, regardless of your screeches about discrete/continuous things.
>it seems all objects might well be said to be mental constructs.
They are. However, just because you are blind and tap your way, doesn't mean there ain't a fricking Cthulhu skulking around.
>So, if you take phenomenal relations to be somehow less real, somehow too arbitrary, the it seems like you can't say anything about anything.
What morons like you are not getting, is that morons like you keep conflating the signal encodings of their own toolkit with the environment itself.
Your signals can malfunct.
Your signals can malfunct in a useful, cheap and dirty manner. Heuristics.
>you can't say anything about anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsupervised_learning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectionism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm
Which is why morons like you should get educated, instead of reading Hegel.
>But Hegel and others have a good response to this. It seems ridiculous to call relations between people and the objects they perceived somehow "less real." They seem plenty real.
incompatible with survival, though. Attunement and exaptation of malfuctions via brutal culling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_syndrome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatoparaphrenia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_transfer_illusion#Rubber_hand_illusion
>But reductionism tends to rule this out. If we are just atoms, and atoms lack mind, then
then mind is like films. An exaptation of Type I False Positive Error. Why we aren't seeing fricking PowerPoint slide-show instead of movies?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold
>I think it must be hard having such a dour and misanthropic view of life.
It is, and that's why so many have to cope using the nuance of religion as an existential crutch. For those of us who don't, dread is often omnipresent, but the truth must flourish at any cost.
If you check putbthe Secind Apocalypse forum he was clearly malding over money and lack of financial success, and I would bet that his malaise is largely due to Game of Thrones. But as we all know quality and ingenue are not metrics of financial success in literature.
>passion cries out for something like the Platonic ascent
It's been a little while since I last reread Bakker but iirc he had a grand Platonic legendary philosopher, Ajencis, and used his works as a mouthpiece for some intriguing humanist philosophy.
Ingenue doesn't mean what you think it means, friend.
Truth is the fruit of the Logos. One cannot deny the Divine Word, the Son, and attain to truth.
To believe in the Divine Word and the Son is to deny the truth; to hide from it. Neither fables stand up to logic, reason, or even self coherency when taken in as a whole.
Sell your apologist poison somewhere else
>It's the best and most prosaic fantasy
Lol
Just don't have him write any more male characters sucking dick, please.
Bakker is awesome. I hope he comes back. It seems like there is still a decent sized fan base. I'm sure he doesn't make a ton of money off these but I'd hope it's at least a decent income for him.
If the Nonmen suffer all the time why don't they just kill themselves?
they fogor
F Scott NotBakker
I think there's a self-consciousness to him he couldn't expunge even in his own writing and the frustration carried over into interactions with his critics. very common among hyper literate types who have to be a little perverse for their job description. nothing is as compelling as his world and its metaphysics and especially the problem of damnation, the epistemological treatise on belief can miss me, the inchoroi are just ascended normies anyway. In my head canon the progenitors were the rulers of the Scorn world, they ascended to their golden penis-ships from their cities in the sky and one fell on Earwa. Imagine an entire civilization that knows for a fact there is nothing waiting on the other side except an eternal terror dimension. You bet they'd be hyper, mega, giga, supra coomers
On a complete tangent from the general discussion of Bakker’s philosophy in his novels and otherwise, do you guys believe that a good fantasy/science fiction novel needs to be as dense and well-read as Bakker in order to be considered worthwhile for literary discussion? Or is “simple” artistic and stylistic merit sufficient to be considered “good”? Can a layman produce work on par with the Second Apocalypse? Is such work possibly better or lacking in some ways because if it?
>Can a layman produce work on par with the Second Apocalypse?
>Is such work possibly better or lacking in some ways because if it?
If you want to go full materialistic and leave things like "soul" and "art" aside.
The reality is that...
If you want to avoid the pitfall of worldbuilding and what people call "boilerplate" and tell a fantasy story in a minimalistic way you can fall in two big groups
a) "Common ground fantasy" which is your generic fantasy that does not deviate too much from the norm. A dragon is a dragon and a castle is a castle. The nort have ice and people that talk with funny accents, etc. The way you avoid reinventing the story telling wheel is having everybody sharing a common ground with your story.
b) Gonzo type fantasy were weird shit just happen and people will accept it because this is that type of story, sort of like Alice in the wonderlands.
Of course you have the pros and cons.
a) Is too generic and the market is too inundated with it to the point that is not only hard to be original but is even hard to avoid copyright.
White wizards, red wizards, black sorcerors, brotherhoods of steel and swords and whatever. Even something as "names" sometimes fall prey to some brand copyright just because the brand became popular.
b) This is simply hard to pull off. And is even hard to objective between "you are a genius" and "this is the product of a moronic drug addict".
Anything more complex than a) and b) will need you to have some sort of expertise, creativity or to create a complex enough world to peak the interest of the readers.
It would be too ambitious to think that you (or me or anybody) would be able to reinvent soem strong "literary-brand" like Conan or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.
Even if you are able to write a better Conan, people will still prefer to read a classic over a nameless author.
Sometimes being first is a quality in itself. If you can't be first you need to be better. If you can't be better you need to be more original. If you can't you need to at least apparent. This is where all the smoke and mirrors and the worldbuilding with 101 hidden easter eggs mysteries appear.
On a different lane you have people like Bakker that use their fiction to play with their autistic ideas.
I have my own autistic ideas, mind you, that I would love to play with writing fiction.
On the other hand you have people like the author of "Codex Alera", Jim Butcher author of the Dresde Files.
He wanted to prove that storytelling was more important than world building and was dared to write a story that combined "the lost roman 9th legion" and "pokemon".
He ended up writting a fantasy story about how the roman legion end up in a fantasy world were they can consort and tame elemental spirits called furies.
He wrote six fricking books so I'm assuming it was somehow succesfull.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Butcher#Codex_Alera_series
Of course is implicit that his knowledge of roman society is somehow tight...
It will be hard to write a story in "fantasy greece" if you know shit about the greeks.
He's done, but not dead.
Move on, there's better fantasy literature.
Bakker please spoil the No God for us if you can't find a publisher.