/lit/ - Literature

>>16670347
The spirit of Beecoming is the spirit of exploration: >>16669896

>>14419012
Things get a bit strange when we consider that we can become aware of our questions themselves, and ask questions about our questions that in turn mutate them - and in the process of following quests new questionable experiences may modify part of the quests, or even cause them to entirely change from their original desires. Metacognition, or "thinking about thoughts" is better thought as "questioning one's questions," and it is this faculty that is our activity of self-awareness.

Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness thus corresponds to a creationist view of human creativity which neglects questions in favor of choice and action. This is where the mistake of "free will" comes from, misidentifying choice as the driving force of self-creativity, when it is our ability to question - freedom of inquiry - which allows us to change and grow experientially over time. This freedom is a skill, and rather than coming from nowhere it comes from our coninual exposure to present change, which is a gathering of influences together in a living perspective. This has important implications for education, as it suggests that what is important isn't to "have the right answer" and to program people with the "right answers," but rather to encourage inquisitiveness. This is a matter of personal freedom, the ability to grow beyond one's existing understanding.

Questions have been woefully neglected in philosophy, though recently I came across Lani Watson's work and from what little of it I've read so far it's very admirable: https://philosophyofquestions.com/ She doesn't go as far as to link it to metaphysics, but she realizes that there's much more involved with questions than empty voids to be filled, or questions as mere linguistic objects.

>>14417682
Any important readings/videos you think should be added to the OP?

This comic: http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park It's highly related to the above discussions about questions, but stands on its own as a powerfully communicated perspective of process thought.

Any Whitehead friends familiar with Lani Watson's work on the philosophy of questioning? Seeing as how investigation/inquiry/discovery is a major current in process philosophy, it seems strongly related: https://www.philosophersmag.com/essays/186-what-is-a-question

>Beyond the formal sense in which any interrogative sentence or utterance can be identified as a question there is a clear sense in which a question is more than a formal linguistic expression. This is reflected in the survey, and I think it is also highly intuitive. If we want to understand what questions are we need to look beyond their role as a part of language and see them as a part of the way that we think and act. This is an illuminating insight. A question is an act.
Here's her website: https://philosophyofquestions.com/

>>14404928
There is no point, only a region. What is the region? For you, the terrain of your conscious experience of the world, a terrain of continual change.

>Deleuze proposes (citing Leibniz) that difference is better understood through the use of dx, the differential. A derivative, dy/dx, determines the structure of a curve while nonetheless existing just outside the curve itself; that is, by describing a virtual tangent (46). Deleuze argues that difference should fundamentally be the object of affirmation and not negation. As per Nietzsche, negation becomes secondary and epiphenomenal in relation to this primary force.

>>14019565
God exists as a state of mind, and that is thinking that one's self is "immutable, omniscient and omnipotent" which is a recipe for absolute stupidity, the inability to even imagine one being in error. Believing one has any access to such a state is equivalent; one is "Godly."

The contrasting condition is that of omniquery, to be all-questioning. Omniquery is "the set of all possible questions from a given perspective" as an object, but this object is just a metaphor for a process of unending questionability.

Whitehead's God when cleansed of residual neoplatonism is a question mark, or a "question questioning itself." This process is that of self-awareness, with Godly consciousness being an attempt to minimize it (destroy all questionability.)

>>11973026
The insight that our self-creative freedom comes from questioning and not choosing is huge. Methodological self-questioning is the complimentary counterpart to mindfulness meditation: one cultivates de-immersion from self-narrative, while the other cultivates free inquiry by challenging and changing the will - "free will" is actually slavery to the will.

Describing this in terms of the Darwinian process shows the true nature of conscious self-creativity. The Darwinian process of variation -> selection -> reproduction is mirrored by question -> reason -> action, questions are requests for information and create variation from following lines of inquiry, from which choice selects from according to some criterion (i.e. "reason.") We question our questions, reasons, and actions, and so this process is applied to itself, giving us theoretically unlimited powers of self-creativity and self-modification that are limited by our practical ability to question, which is necessarily always finite. Free inquiry isn't an absolute, but a cultivated skill.

What are you? The answer is contained within the question: a question questioning itself, a self-querying query. This is the subject-self, the becoming-self, whereas the object-self, the being-self, is self-representation (I am...) Human consciousness is evolution evolved, the creative process that through the flexibility of language folds upon itself to become self-creative. The question mark is the symbol of awareness and life itself, the source of inexhaustible meaning and endless becoming. Questions aren't a mere lack of an answer, a void to be filled, they are vectors of desire, searches, and quests. The Tao literally means "path" or "way" and it has no end, endlessly branching in diversity and potentiality.

>>11964048
Conscious creativity can also be characerized as temporal selection: we are able to do what evolution cannot and model possible futures, creating and selecting among potentialities to make a reality through action. Among these future states is future potential alternatives to how we currently are, which is the reason why we have subjective experience and self-awareness; self-awareness and self-query are synonyms. Awareness itself is a question mark, a request for information.

We're more than mechanisms to propagate our genes and memes, we are evolution itself evolved, self-creating creativity. Substance metaphysics has led to the conclusion that the self as an object is the nature of self-awareness, a self-representation relating to itself, but this being-self is secondary to the becoming-self which is a question questioning itself, created to facilitate self-inquiry. The existential implication is that meaning comes not from terminal satisfaction and enduring significance, but rather that meaning is an inexhaustible multiplicity without any end-in-itself, a forever growth of meaning and possibility. The answer to the meaning life is an ever-present question mark, and it is through this that we have a relationship with existence.