There were issues with this book, but I appreciate how the Critical Theory aspects of it serve as a sort of "red pill" to break us out of our complacent acceptance of the world--specifically in video games. Many reviews complain about the erudite verbiage, but all Critical Theory makes use of newly-invented words in order to circumvent our preconceptions about the social constructs that rule our lives. I appreciated the concept of the "allegorithm" of how the programming of games is used to define a world, the questioning of "play" in games when really many games are actually work, criticizing the concept of "flow" and calling it "non-contemplation," and the idea that the best gamers are merely the ones who most internalize the algorithms. This book is not for everyone. It is dense and obtuse, but also highly effective and will be very enjoyable for the right readers.
06 JUL 2024 by ideonexus
Allegorithm is About the Relation of Sign to Number
Allegory is about the relation of sign to sign; allegorithm is about the relation of sign to number. Signs don’t open to reveal chains of other signs, pointing in all directions. Or rather, it is no longer of any importance what signs reveal. They billow and float, pool and gather, arbitrary and useless. There is no way to redeem them. But signs now point to something else. They point to number. And number in turn points to the algorithm, which transforms one number into another. Out of the...Folksonomies: gamespace
Folksonomies: gamespace
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notes22 OCT 2023 by ideonexus
How Realities are Created
It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question “What is reality?â€, to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally sa...Folksonomies: reality
Folksonomies: reality
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notes23 SEP 2023 by ideonexus
I and Thou Thinking
In his 1923 book I and Thou, the philosopher Martin Buber draws a distinction between what he calls I-It and I-Thou ways of seeing. In I-It, the other (a thing or a person) is an “it†that exists only as an instrument or means to an end, something to be appropriated by the “I.†A person who only knows I-It will never encounter anything outside himself because he does not truly “encounter.†Buber writes that such a person “only knows the feverish world...Folksonomies: mindfulness
Folksonomies: mindfulness
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notes23 SEP 2023 by ideonexus
School of Epicurus
In fact, fourth-century Greece passed much the same judgment on the school of Epicurus, whose students avoided public service and chose to live in obscurity. One of the school’s harshest critics was Epictetus. Like other Stoics, he prized civic duty, and he thought the Epicureans needed to get real: “In the name of Zeus, I ask you, can you imagine an Epicurean state?…The doctrines are bad, subversive of the State, destructive to the family…Drop these doctrines, man. Y...Folksonomies: philosophy civilization
Folksonomies: philosophy civilization
1 notes
notes23 SEP 2023 by ideonexus
This is Real
This is real. Your eyes reading this text, your hands, your breath, the time of day, the place where you are reading this—these things are real. I’m real too. I am not an avatar, a set of preferences, or some smooth cognitive force; I’m lumpy and porous, I’m an animal, I hurt sometimes, and I’m different one day to the next. I hear, see, and smell things in a world where others also hear, see, and smell me. And it takes a break to remember that: a break to d...Folksonomies: attention mindfulness
Folksonomies: attention mindfulness
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notes23 SEP 2023 by ideonexus
Nothing is Harder to do Than Nothing
Nothing is harder to do than nothing. In a world where our value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured, optimized, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily. We submit our free time to numerical evaluation, interact with algorithmic versions of each other, and build and maintain personal brands. For some, there may be a kind of engineer’s satisfaction in the streamlining and networking of our entire lived experi...Folksonomies: cyberpunk attention economy
Folksonomies: cyberpunk attention economy
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notes14 OCT 2021 by ideonexus
Philosophy Does Not Inflame Passion as Religion Does
Besides, we must not be apprehensive that any philosophical opinion will ever harm the religion of a country. Though our demonstrations clash directly with our mysteries, that is nothing to the purpose, for the latter are not less revered upon that account by our Christian philosophers, who know very well that the objects of reason and those of faith are of a very different nature. Philosophers will never form a religious sect, the reason of which is, their writings are not calculated for the...Folksonomies: enlightenment religion
Folksonomies: enlightenment religion
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notes14 OCT 2021 by ideonexus
I Think, Therefore I Am
I had long before remarked that, in relation to practice, it is sometimes necessary to adopt, as if above doubt, opinions which we discern to be highly uncertain, as has been already said; but as I then desired to give my attention solely to the search after truth, I thought that a procedure exactly the opposite was called for, and that I ought to reject as absolutely false all opinions in regard to which I could suppose the least ground for doubt, in order to ascertain whether after that the...Folksonomies: philosophy metaphysics
Folksonomies: philosophy metaphysics
1 notes
notesThe first paragraph is sound, but then the conclusions drawn in the second are not.
02 MAR 2019 by ideonexus
Logic as Magical Thinking
These battles over definition are not taking place in the same universe as the one in which men throw around these terms online. But for the Logic Guys, the purpose of using these words — the sacred, magic words like “logic,” “objectivity,” “reason,” “rationality,” “fact” — is not to invoke the actual concepts themselves. It’s more a kind of incantation, whereby declaring your argument the single “logical” and “rational” one magically makes it so — and by e... 1 notes
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