“We cannot factor experience into a conceptual part and a raw experiential part in such a way as to allow us to make sense of the intactness of that experiential part in the absence of its conceptual framing. Capacities for experience and thought go hand in hand and are in a sense one. Creatures acquire capacities for experience as they actively explore and begin to think about the world.” — Alva Noë

Apocalypticism is tightly correlated with nihilism, I think. The end becomes your only sense of purpose, even if it’s an end you fear and don’t want. The question isn’t so much how would you live your life knowing the world is coming to end. The harder question is how should you live it knowing that it won’t.

Human memory is less about storage and more about formation.

Intelligence is a kind of choice, directed at a valued end.

Intelligence and attention are deeply entangled activities, to the extent that I think they can only be analytically but not concretely separated. Attention guides intelligence; intelligence structures attention. 🤝

Writing on my way out the door, but Levin's paper has me thinking about how his ideas can connect with a view of philosophy rooted in an askēsis of perception: Two orienting quotes from Levin: 1. "Bodies (whether living, engineered, or hybrid) are interfaces for a massive, multi-scale hierarchy of patterns to ingress into the physical world." 2. "Is there a 'force', beyond the 'if you build it, they will come' model of physical objects, pulling patterns from the space? Or are the contents of the Platonic space under 'positive pressure', somehow encouraging their appearance in the world as intrusive thoughts, archetypes, works of art?" Now add to (1) and (2) the way human minds scaffold and transform their own perception through practices of formation (meditation, contemplation, prayer etc.), carefully architected affordance spaces (cathedrals, libraries, monasteries), and certain kinds of techniques and technologies (e.g., reading and writing) and a really interesting picture emerges of how ingression doesn't just occur but can be transformed through certain kinds of activities done in the right kind of places. This picture suggests that the kind of "ingression" we have available to us in perception is downstream in part of our shaping practices. My work in a nutshell, in Levin's terms.

practice 🤝 memory

Ascetic formation is an inherently temporal activity; its temporal structure is what lets the same practice, engaged in correctly and over time, change the abilities and disposition of the practitioner. Memory, in this context, is the means by which the repetition becomes cumulative and transformative. Memory can thus be read to imply a future-oriented formation that goes beyond past-oriented storage retrieval in an unchanging subject. There’s a Ravaisson-Bergson thread worth pulling on here somewhere.

I’m still working on the longer piece—likely now more suitable for an academic publisher—but below you’ll find a summary of how I’m thinking about ideas of intelligence as read through Ivan Illich and Hugh of St. Victor. I’m working with a constellation of five key ideas: - Legere: Reading and gathering - Relegere: Reading and gathering again - Neglegere: Not reading or gathering - Intellegere: What to read and gather - Diligere: What is worth reading and gathering There is of course also reference to practice, memory, attention, and orientation, as is my habit. Link below.

"The cultural technique of deep attention emerged precisely out of ritual and religious practices. It is no accident that 'religion' is derived from relegere: to take note. Every religious practice is an exercise in attention. A temple is a place of the highest degree of attention. According to Malebranche, attention is the natural prayer of the soul. Today, the soul does not pray. It is permanently producing itself." — Byung-Chul Han

“Intelligence” in its most basic definition isn’t specifically about logic or processing speed or pattern recognition—though these factors are of course involved—it is rather more about choice and aim: Knowing the right choice to make, the right aim to pursue. How do you know what is the right choice to make or the right aim to pursue? That is the measure of intelligence, strictly speaking.

Walking notes.