/lit/ - Literature

>>18549642
I thought this was a bionicle for a second and I was interested, then I clicked on the picture and saw it was not. did not read your op btw because of that, hope you feel bad.

>>18549659
Holy fucking based. OP BTFO.

>>18549659
Truly blessed post.

>>18549642
The Dunyain are barely human. What I'm wondering is what role is his grandson gonna have

>>18550468
His kids are basically just very very smart humans, later generations would be even more diluted.

>>18550590
his kids from the worldborn woman are smart humans, we do not know about the ones of duniyaborn. The survivor was extremely competent to survive and kill for 12 years in the maze with the kid. The interesting thing about clawyboy is that he has no training, either philosophical (the reason for the duniya's existence), physical or metaphysical, he has no directive for existing at the moment.

>>18550590
I'm talking about his full-Dunyain grandson, with the crab hand

>>18550746
I think claw kid has the most character potential in The No-God, if it ever comes out. I was sad to see his dad yeet himself. His character as a concept was pretty epic, but my expectations for him got killed because he couldn't handle a little noncoke

He should have done more with the Dunyain.

There are only so many pages or Acha walking and being miserable or random people being sadistic that can be interesting. Acha just fucking walks for 4 books.

>>18551054
Yeah I love the series, but too much of the story, especially in The Aspect Emperor series, is people traveling. Any time Dunyain conversed with each other though was absolute kino

>>18549659
holy kek me too

Where's the bionicle
I was promised bionicle by the Thumbnail

>>18551476
Fuck off, we're talking about the Raping That Comes Before.

>bionicle

>>18551411
It's a problem with Bakker's philosophy. He wrote Neuropath out of Blind Brain Theory and then tried to keep the same set of ideas going for seven books and it got a bit tired. He has to make damnation actual, physical in his universe to fit the edgey determinism.

There are plenty of intellectually interesting, if maybe hard to write directions he could have taken the search for the Absolute, into an explanation of Hegel's semiotics of negation and coherence epistemology, but instead he hits the reader over the head with Blind Brain Theory determinism and man as a violent ape over and over.

>>18551797
I think it is partly to do with the fact that he conceived the series as a teenager, and fleshed it out conceptually during his college years, when he was well within the continental tradition of philosophy, but by the time he actually got down to writing the first book in his 30s he had made the switch to the whole eliminative scientific un-philosophy thing.

The Dunyain, and Khellus in particular, are clearly, to a certain extent, a young man's nerdy power fantasy but written with a retrospective awareness of this fact. So their handling ends up being a mix of disdain and a endearment toward their folly, which I think frustrates some readers that just want to see them vindicated and triumphant.

I’ve thought this was a Hindu mythology thread judging by the first few posts.

>>18551969
That makes sense now.

His magic system has the veneer of philosophy, Greek terms and all, but it all reduces down to some abstraction about "bending reality." Seems more like he came up with the magic plot first, and then tried to dress it up after.

A fantasy setting with philosophers as magicians has a lot of options, but that whole avenue kind of gets ignored.

I don't even mind the novels coming down to "just" epic fantasy. Acha and Cleric fighting the dragon or the non-man city are cool. The philosophical conceit just wore thin. Maybe because elimitavism itself is retarded. The Dunyain, for all their thinking, never seem to have reached a Kantian turn, to see that their facilities help construct reality. Nor did they ever seem to grapple with idealism and the role of semiotics or and observer in physics.

I think Bakker needs to realize that his BBT doesn't really explain nearly as much as he thinks it does. Just because the amount of information reaching self-conscious awareness is quite low, doesn't mean that everything in the background is running at an animal, reptilian level. Einstein figured out special relativity while watching painters on a scaffold. Every indication is that complex thought keeps running in the background when attention, the "recursive system" isn't holding it in self reflected focus. People don't necessarily degenerate into apes when their recursive system breaks down, experiences like Victor Frankel's in Auschwitz demonstrate this.

>>18552116
Or maybe it just offends me that super humans would be nuckle dragging materialists.

Clearly the ascended should recognize the absolute truth of German Idealism. The Inchori don't exist outside fate, nonesense. Everything that exists is the Absolute coming to know itself through Itself through sublation.

I can only posit that Hegel was a more powerful sorcerer than Khellus and that Khellus would an hero like the Survivor if he had to stare into his eyes.

>>18551572
What is this from?

>>18552116
>Einstein figured out special relativity while watching painters on a scaffold.
https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2018/02/25/no-results-found-for-scandal-of-self-knowledge/

"Henri Poincaré describes how the relation between Fuchsian functions and non-Euclidean geometries occurred to him only after fleeing to the seaside, disgusted with his lack of progress. As with prior insights, the answer came to him while focusing on something entirely different—in this case, strolling along the bluffs near Caen.“Most striking at first is this appearance of sudden illumination, a manifest sign of long, unconscious prior work,” he explains. “The rôle of this unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to me incontestable, and traces of it would be found in other cases where it is less evident.” The descriptive model he ventures–a prescient forerunner of contemporary dual-cognition theories–characterizes conscious mathematical problem-solving as inseminating a ‘subliminal automatism’ which subsequently delivers the kernel of conscious solution. Mathematical consciousness feeds problems into some kind of nonconscious manifold which subsequently feeds possibilities of solution back to mathematical consciousness.

As far as the experience of mathematical problem-solving is concerned, even the most brilliant mathematician of his age finds himself stranded at the limits of discrimination, glimpsing flickers in his periphery, merely.
For Tegmark, of course, it matters not at all whether mathematical structures are discovered consciously or nonconsciously—only that they are discovered, as opposed to invented. But Poincaré isn’t simply describing the phenomenology of mathematics, he’s also describing the superficiality of our cognitive ecology when it comes to questions of mathematical experience and ability. He’s not so much contradicting Tegmark’s claims as explaining why they can do little more than add to the sum of disputation: mathematics is, experientially speaking, a black-box. What Poincaré’s story shows is that Tegmark is advancing a claim regarding the deepest environment—the fundamental nature of the universe—via resources belonging to an appallingly shallow cognitive ecology."

>>18552151
Well, again, I think a lot of this comes down to him creating continental props, and then using an scientific/materialist script for his drama.
It creates a certain tension in his works that is likely never to be resolved and likely explains the shifting of focus away from philosophy toward epic fantasy, as you say.

This is what makes me curious about seeing the series finished more than anything else, to see which tendency will win out.

>>18552212
The Darkness That Comes Before, quite good fantasy series. Really my favorite in the genre, rising above genre fiction at its best.

Really, the whole "genre fiction," thing is kind of blurry anyhow. Isn't all Borges actually fantasy?

The main theme is how people's actions and experiences are dictated by what comes before. Also a lot on ain and damnation. Kind of reminds me or Borges' Library of Babel, where monks search endless walls of incoherent text forming every combination of letters possible, looking for the one book that tells their life story and redeems them.

>>18551797
>>18551969
>>18552116
lol as someone who has read the series but knows nothing about philosophy, I'm now realizing that there's probably a lot that went over my head in regards to that field

>>18552371
Ah, thanks. Sounds interesting. Like it when there is a somber theme and atmosphere in these things.

>>18549642
Truth shines…

>>18553710
>Truth shines
Wrong. Your prophet is a deranged abomination. All believers must be purged, the Hundred demand it. The Dread Mother will feast upon his bones.

>>18554249
You don't like Zaudunyani? Is there something wrong with guys just being dudes?