/lit/ - Literature

>>12007922
>>12007926
it's not a crazy question. McCarthy is a prose god and certainly some kind of philosophical genius. and i think the Judge and Chigurh line up well with the 'nemocentric superman,' at least:

>To know, to understand in the fullest sense, is to plunge into an enlightenment of inanity, a wintry landscape of memory whose substance is all shadows and a profound awareness of the infinite spaces surrounding us on all sides. Within this space we remain suspended only with the aid of strings that quiver with our hopes and our horrors, and which keep us dangling over the gray void. How is it that we can defend such puppetry, condemning any efforts to strip us of these strings? The reason, one must suppose, is that nothing is more enticing, nothing more vitally idiotic, than our desire to have a name – even if it is the name of a stupid little puppet – and to hold on to this name throughout the long ordeal of our lives, as if we could hold on to it forever. If only we could keep those precious strings from growing frayed and tangled, if only we could keep from falling into an empty sky, we might continue to pass ourselves off under our assumed names and perpetuate our puppet’s dance throughout all eternity.

>Interestingly, Metzinger uses the thought experiment of an ‘Introspective Superman’: a being with such computational speed/power that it has global access to its own cognitive processes (i.e. there is no ‘transcendental’ or ‘upstream’ that is unavailable to this particular mind)… He claims that it would have a ‘global, opaque state of consciousness that is like “lucid waking”‘. There would be naïve identification with either its models of the world or its models of the self. Thus it would have an unparalleled potential for self-engineering. Brassier and Metzinger note that the Introspective Superman would be ‘burdened with an additional computational load’, which it would ‘have to find some way of discharging without getting trapped into infinite loops of self-representation’ (because it would constantly be recursively representing itself as a representation). If it did mitigate this problem, however, it would ‘constitute a cognitive system operating with a non-phenomenologically centered model of reality’. It would be, as Metzinger calls it, nemocentric. (We ask, at this point, if we here have a blueprint for a nemocentric agent, what would the design plan for a nemocentric socius look like? A tantalizing brief, to say the least…)

source:
https://earth-wizard.livejournal.com/47133.html