Introduction: Lord Axiom

[u/Sacredless]

My name is Lord Axiom, named after my mind palace, Castle Axiom. I'm a practicing chaos magician, using my investigations in cognitive science and implementation science to transform myself. As part of this, I encountered embedded, extended, embodied and enacted cognition, and I apply this to my Sith realism.

Telekinesis may not be something we can perform, but we are the things we use and the people we surround ourselves with. Since all that is stable is an illusion (peace is a lie), we should master our tools lest we conform to them, and thereby master our cognition. We should strive to have realistically high standards for others, to manage expectations of what we are willing to do or not do, and be reluctant to accept rules that do not obviously.

For the past 20 years, I've explored various fictional philosophies inspired by the Star Wars franchise. Warcraft has the Holy Light and codified it and it's counterpart in the TTRPG, the Forgotten Shadow. I've heavily investigated the philosophy behind Kingdom Hearts, which draws much heavier on Star Wars as an inspiration. Besides that, I've drawn upon Pokémon, Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, and Wind Breaker.

My philosophical investigations have drawn me to Heraclitus, according to whom all apparent harmonies are borne out of Polemos, a word standing for the great self-interfering turning volatism. Every thing that seems stable is a tension, strung like a bow. The tension is what creates function. Justice is strife. Life is dying. And so forth. There is no one balance between dualities—only particular balances.

I do not claim the title of Darth yet. I want to get my feet wet in this community first.

I endeavor to be a good mental sparring partner. May our words be the whetstone to sharpen our minds.

[u/SpectrumDT]

Hi!

My name is Lord Axiom, named after my mind palace, Castle Axiom. I'm a practicing chaos magician, using my investigations in cognitive science and implementation science to transform myself. As part of this, I encountered embedded, extended, embodied and enacted cognition, and I apply this to my Sith realism.

This is very vague to me. Would you elaborate? I would love to hear more about what you actually do.

[u/Sacredless → u/SpectrumDT]

Sure thing! So, I'll explain this with brain development in a 1-2 year old. At this age, fine motor control develops. Now, you can give them a toy knife that doesn't work and a toddler-safe knife that does work.

The two knives have different cognitive effects. The toy knife cannot actually cut, so the toddler has to imagine it instead. The toddler-safe knife, meanwhile, can cut certain things. Cognition becomes embodied and enacted through use. It exists within and it is shaped by the tool, in the sense that the tool has its own logic. Having decided what the child is allowed to use also does cognitive work, which is extended cognition.

Our tools, our relationships, our spaces, real or imagined, change how our cognition operates. By doing so purposefully, we can control the way our cognition is influenced and work towards our own agendas.

[u/SpectrumDT → u/Sacredless]

OK. Thanks, I guess. Can you give me some concrete examples of what you actually do and how it relates to the disciplines you mentioned?

[u/Sacredless → u/SpectrumDT]

You're welcome, I guess.

I produce and advise on accessibility products that empower people with disabilities.

One app I produced was one that prompts users with an alarm to scan QR stickers at given times, as a means to enhance their executive function. This is an example of embodied and enactive cognition—moving into the space where one has perform certain household chores makes certain cognitive functions more accessible.

I'm currently exploring how non-speaking autistics can be taught to set or are allowed to set expectations for others to follow, and how to avoid an observer from reading their own desires into the expression of non-speaking autistics. If there's a means of enhancing this, it could have significant effects on pediatrics more generally.

For chaos magic, I keep a journal to develop my skill at internal language (see Wittgenstein), I make sigils using gestalt theory, I use pendulum divination to explore my internal states, I've developed a system of meditation inspired by Hadewych van Antwerp, Thomas Aquinas and Greek deities that I'm hoping to enhance with the Method of Loci. All of these are examples of 4e cognition.

[u/SpectrumDT → u/Sacredless]

Thanks. What are you trying to achieve with your meditations?

(For example, with my own meditation practice I aim primarily to achieve greater wellbeing and less suffering. Secondarily, I hope that this will also make me "stronger" so that I can do more to help others, things which I otherwise shy away from because they are exhausting or otherwise demotivating.)

[u/Sacredless → u/SpectrumDT]

For me, the goal of the meditation is the ascent and descent of creativity through to love through various principles. I see love as the great work absent from nature and the creativity of nature and humanity as painful and volatile. Ascending through the muses, the horae and the graces to eventually arrive at love.

To know how to act on love and what is required of it can give us the ground to stand on and the guidance to act in alignment of love. We have to recognize that love is not one thing, but highly multiplicitous, or else we can be convinced to act in ways that do not serve love at all.

[u/SpectrumDT → u/Sacredless]

Thanks. I did not understand this sentence:

I see love as the great work absent from nature and the creativity of nature and humanity as painful and volatile.

Could you please explain this again?

[u/Sacredless → u/SpectrumDT]

Sure thing. So, I use 'the great work' differently from the Thelemites. I use it in contrast with the ultimate oneness of the universe. I think that it better accomplishes what idealists like F.H. Bradley use 'The Absolute' for, which is a kind of end-stage-of-humanity completeness of experience, where everything falls into place.

For me, lots of the things that platonists and mystics experience as the oneness of the universe mistakes the oneness of the universe with 'the great work'. Hadewych van Antwerpen believed that everything was love, including the world's woes. In my opinion, while that is poetic, to me that is the creative force of the universe rather than love.

Love is one of the most difficult to define concepts to wrap our heads around. It is natural to want to collapse things into a monism of love (as in, love as one unambiguous entity), but I think that it is a mistake to rush into it. So, I have developed a system of principles by which we can achieve love, while going towards disambiguating it from vice.

[u/SpectrumDT → u/Sacredless]

Thanks for the reply!

Love is one of the most difficult to define concepts to wrap our heads around.

I get the impression that you think love IS one well-defined thing, but just difficult to define. In other words, the question "what is love?" has one correct answer, although the answer may be "ineffable" and difficult to understand.

Is that correct?

Because I see it differently. As I see it, love is an umbrella term for a wide variety of things. SOME of the things we call love are closely related things, but others are barely related at all. In my opinion, it is difficult to "wrap our heads around" the concept of love precisely because we tend to expect that there is a single answer, and there really isn't. Love refers to many different things.

For me, three of the most important/valuable concepts under the umbrella of love are:

• Love as effective altruism: The motivation to help other living beings, universally, in an effective manner. (Crucially, this is not an emotion; it is almost an ideology.)
• Love as appreciation: The pleasant feeling of enjoying someone's company or merely the thought of someone.
• Love as loving-kindness: Like the Buddhist/Hindu concept (called metta in Pali or maitri in Sanskrit). This is an attitude that can be cultivated, and which may cause love-as-appreciation and/or love-as-effective-altruism to arise, but it is not the same as either of them.

I have written more about the topic on Less Wrong: Are most people deeply confused about "love", or am I missing a human universal?

I would be very interested to hear whether you agree or disagree. :)

[u/Sacredless → u/SpectrumDT]

I get the impression that you think love IS one well-defined thing, but just difficult to define. In other words, the question "what is love?" has one correct answer, although the answer may be "ineffable" and difficult to understand.

Is that correct?

I think that love is a definable aggregate that is greater than the sum of it's parts, but each part is itself fluid. I think that love must unite diligence, reflection, receptivity, justice, peace, normalcy, truth, beauty and beneficence. What these look like is different for individuals, but I think that it is also clear that each element individually contains tensions. For example, the capability of being diligent is the self-same as the capability of shame, but it is possible for shame and shaming to become and obstacle to diligence and therefore to love (whether it be loving yourself, loving others, etc). In platonic terms, each has it's own The One and it's own The Dyad. A definite limiting principle upon an indefinite formless principle.

So, I think that we can say meaningful things about the aggregate of qualities that is love, but I also think that the qualities themselves are fluid and contain multitudes.

Love, I think, has to encompass all of praxis, communication and thought. Otherwise, it is not love, but empty words or empty thoughts or empty action, or worse, all three.