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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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The Soul of the Marionette

17 Jun 2024 - 28 Jun 2025
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    • book by John Gray, subtitled "A short inquiry into human freedom". I read this while trying to rescue myself from the tedious free will debate (see Choose your own review ) – this one was about 1000x more sophisticated.
    • Starts off riffing on Kleist's "The Puppet Theater" (which oddly hasn't appeared on WS, it sounds exactly like their sort of thing). On the Marionette Theatre by Heinrich von Kleist
      • My reply was that, no matter how cleverly he might present his paradoxes, he would never make me believe a mechanical puppet can be more graceful than a living human body. He countered this by saying that, where grace is concerned, it is impossible for man to come anywhere near a puppet. Only a god can equal inanimate matter in this respect. This is the point where the two ends of the circular world meet.
      • It seemed, he said, as he took a pinch of snuff, that I hadn't read the third chapter of the book of Genesis with sufficient attention. If a man wasn't familiar with that initial period of all human development, it would be difficult to have a fruitful discussion with him about later developments and even more difficult to talk about the ultimate situation....I told him I was well aware how consciousness can disturb natural grace."
    • For Kleist...freedom is not simply a relationship between huamn beings: it is, above all, a state of the soul in which conflict has been left behind. -p6 emph added
    • ... those who seek inner freedom do not care what kind of governmetn they live under as long as it does not prevent them from turning within themselves. This may seem a selfish attitude; but it makes sense in a time of endemic instability, when political systems cannot be expected to last. – p7
      • OK this is a major theme, he is semi-regretfully advocating this turn inward, and is sceptical of the kind of grand humanism or efforts to reform the world. Kind of reactionary? Well, no, he is not anti-modernism, he just expects it to collapse. Can't say I disagree....
    • gnosticism the end of the Kleist fable holds out the possibility of eating again from the tree of knowledge, assuming infinite knowledge and giving up this botched partial human existence.
    • the ancient Gnostics viewed the experience of choosing as confirming that huma beingas are radically flawed. Real freedom would be a condition in which they would no longer labour under then burden of choice....many people today hold to a Gnostic view of things without realizing the fact. Believing that human beings can be fully understood in the terms of scientific nmaterialism, they reject any idea of free will. But they cannot give up hope of being masters of their destiny. So they have come to believe htat sicence will somehow enable the human mind to escape the limitations that shape its natural condition...At present Gnosticism is the faith of people who believe themselves to be machines.
      • Something weird about Robert Sapolsky and maybe this is it. I personally do believe we are machines, more or less – does that make me a gnostic? Hm, maybe, especially since I also believe machines can be modified and improved.

    • Bruno Schulz on Tailor's Dummies

    • The narrators father is a "metaphysical conjurer" who holds that everyting liverd was the work of a demiurge, which is matter itself.
    • The idea that consciousness is a mystery is a prejudice inherited from monotheism. -p 151
    • what seems to be singularly human is not consciousness or free will but inner conflict...no other animal seeks the satisfaction of its desires and at the same time curses them as evil. - p153
    • There's a lot on gnosticism and a section on PKD ()