[Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 129... MODERATION NOTE

[Pedro C. Marijuán]

Dear All,

The information everyone receives when inscribing in the list contains 
three posting rules.

"The FIRST RULE: Maintaining the academic & scholarly code of conduct; 
messages not abiding by it should be ignored."

And that's the case of the message below. Some of the comments are 
typical style of social networks, and not of this list.
So, please, ignore it.

--Pedro


El 31/01/2026 a las 0:17, Paul Suni escribió:
> Dear Katherine, Pedro, Laszlo, Francesco and FIS,
>
> AI has challenged humanity to grow up and evolve spiritually. Did any 
> of us get that memo? How about waking up, folks?  In my view, the 
> vector approach to art is regressive in light of AI, but as it may 
> bring technical people into artistic discourse, it has value. As an 
> expression of anti-westernism and obvious careerism I loathe Laszlo’s 
> work, as I imagine that Hannah Arendt might have done too, and no 
> doubt Ayn Rand would have done - unless they would have regarded it as 
> Wolfgang Pauli might have done  - as  “ not even wrong.”
>
> I find it vacuous, contrived and subversive, but it has a wonderful 
> list of references by familiar Western thinkers, which shows that 
> Laszlo has good scientific taste. Nevertheless, playing with vectors 
> is always fun. AI is made up of vectors and nothing but vectors - 
> trillions of them. I can see how academics without a mathematical 
> background might be excted. Someone should send Laszlo’s paper to the 
> French Revolutionary Communist, Alan Badiou. He gets a lot of social 
> credits among his French collectivist comrades by noodling on 
> elementary math, in vacuous ways.
>
> Thank you Kate for refreshing my memory about Hannah Arendt and Ayn 
> Rand - two intellectual giants whom I love a lot. They thought 
> radically for themselves and let their inner light shine on the world. 
> They were 100% about authentic wellbeing, in my view. Also, it is 
> worth mentioning that they expressed themselves throroughly in a 
> gender climate that oppressed women. Now, that the gender tables have 
> been entirely turned thanks to Feminism, and my race and gender are on 
> the shit list of the Global University, I admire them even more. I am 
> certain that Arendt and Rand would not admire Feminism in its 
> contemporary, Bolshevik form.
>
> Francesco, I am delighted that you remind me of my capacity for 
> religious ecstacy. When I disconnect from FIS - my last attempt at 
> social intellectual engagement, then I imagine that I will return to a 
> more blissful plane. To me, the social domain represents the domain of 
> evil. What Hannah Arendt called the “ Banality of Evil” is too 
> palpable in my mode of social cognition here and everywhere.
>
> Pedro, I don’t think that a proper vectorial correlate between art and 
> the interior can be found. Actually, I think that art and AI share the 
> basic information theoretic mechanisms. Perhaps I’ll elaborate some 
> day. The trick is to find in generative AI what represents the 
> interior and what represents the exterior, and how the dynamic betwen 
> them unfolds in AI. That is, in my view, the trick. to making progress 
> concerning the problem you posed. However at the moment, I cannot 
> bring myslef to continue participating in this question, because my 
> revulsion of Laszlo’s work is so profound that it makes me feel ill, 
> physically.
>
> Cheers,
> Paul
>
>
>
>
>
>> On Jan 29, 2026, at 8:40 AM, Katherine Peil <ktpeil at outlook.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Paul, et al,
>> Your points are well taken and echo the lovely Hannah Arendt, with a 
>> touch of Ayn Rand as well.
>> And you have put your thumb on the deeper meaning and function of the 
>> painful category of emotional experience - the*True South*of 
>> *“**self-preservation”*. Basic feelings of fear, disgust, sadness and 
>> anger - and their fight and flight responses - are our 
>> hardwired safeguard against social manipulation and domination of the 
>> individual within any collective. These “violations” are simply our 
>> social hacking of the reward~punishment aspect of Pavlovian learning, 
>> and applying thirdparty control through social bribes and threats. 
>> This has been one of humanities greatest failures in not 
>> understanding the “self-regulatory” nature of emotional signals, as 
>> well as how biology defines “self-identity”.
>> Indeed, the deep, abstract, structure of identity is*both*an 
>> autonomous whole (an embodied individual navigating in its local 
>> environment), and a*part*of a greater collective whole - all the way 
>> down to the electron in an atom (if not entangled “particles” in the 
>> quantum domain). For example, the "external” valence 
>> electronsfunction as the connective bonding within an atom as a 
>> whole, while the behavior of electrons within “inside” shells, are 
>> parts of that greater whole. So the electron - a fundamental particle 
>> - is Both a part and a Whole.
>> This same Part~Whole identity structure is mediated all the way up 
>> the evolutionary ladder, evidenced in the self/not-self identity 
>> distinctions in cellulardifferentiation, genetic, epigenetic and 
>> immune regulation. (If the individual loses sight of its collective 
>> identity, forexample, cancer results.)
>>
>> Fast-forward to human psychiatry and the role of emotion in 
>> mediating “identity”, Daniel Seigel offers the term “MWE” to capture 
>> this dual identity structure.  (Martin Buber addressed this as I and 
>> THOU.) It is the task of every sentient individual to mediate 
>> an*optimal balance*between both autonomous and collective aspects of 
>> identity, andsubordinate one over the other is a mistake. (The East 
>> tends to subordinate autonomy while West subordinates collectivity, 
>> as do the extreme Right and Left of US politics.)
>>
>> But as Francesco,Pedro - and all the major religious traditions - 
>> suggest, our*True North*toward cultivating the*complex positive 
>> emotional*experiences (*“LOVE”*as God,  compassion, 
>> gratitude, forgiveness, humility, etc….the divine Fruits of Spirit), 
>> speak to our innate desire for relational bonds in ever-larger 
>> collectives. They are about our "self-developmental" and collective, 
>> cooperative, and co-creative capacities.
>>
>> This misunderstanding of the dual nature of identity, together with 
>> the equally biophysically false dichotomies of Good and Evil, and Us 
>> versus Them; are a major culturally constructed source of our most 
>> self-destructive behavior as a species. (Recall “The Fall” in 
>> Genesis, was about eating the fruit from the forbidden Tree 
>> of/Knowledge of Good and Evil,/which I interpret biophsyically as our 
>> own creation of our own misguided value system - separating us from 
>> those of our innate emotional sentience.)
>>
>> Thank you all for thinking about emotion, and I encourage you to 
>> likewise think about identity as “form”, and your personal 
>> experiences of navigating the ‘in-formative” relational boundary 
>> between self and other, how both emotional resonance and dissonance 
>> play out in attaining optimal balance.
>> With all best wishes for optimal health and authentic happiness,
>> Kate Kauffman
>>
>> PSKrassimir, I took your on-line test - very cool!  I got a low score 
>> of 2/8. Did I blow it? Or is this a measure of how language devoid of 
>> semantic emotional tone fails?
>>
>>
>> On 1/28/26, 12:48 PM, "Fis" <fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es> wrote: 
>> Katherine Peil Kauffman
>>
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>> Today's Topics:
>>
>>    1. Re: Fwd: What is Art? The Missing Link (Paul Suni)
>>
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Message: 1
>> Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2026 11:47:12 -0800
>> From: Paul Suni <paul.p.suni at gmail.com>
>> To: Pedro C. Mariju?n <pedroc.marijuan at gmail.com>
>> Cc:fis at listas.unizar.es
>> Subject: Re: [Fis] Fwd: What is Art? The Missing Link
>> Message-ID:
>>         
>> <CAKTT-2ibZhX0gyzjxAw+FWwTjQELfc2zHBmmFMHMWY4PuJ=ksA at mail.gmail.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>>
>> Dear Pedro,
>>
>> You bring up crucially important points about art as embodying shared
>> aesthetic forms (Clynes); art as nourishment (extra-trophic), and the
>> taking in and metabolization of aesthetic nutrients as a matter of
>> biological capability - not all aesthetic nutrients can be absorbed 
>> by all
>> organisms. Among humans there is selectivity based on capability and 
>> taste
>> (or the lack of taste), which occurs on a spectrum from high art (extreme
>> art) to unexceptional mass productions of demi/pseudo art. You end your
>> commentary appropriately noting that such nourishment may be 
>> essential for
>> social wellbeing. I agree that wellbeing, art and love belong intimately
>> together, as you emphasize. I think what you are trying to say is
>> provocative and very valuable, but let me nitpick on that a bit, if I 
>> may.
>>
>> As a student of wellbeing, I hold it as self-evident that the 
>> individual is
>> the primal unit of wellbeing, and I have yet to make the cognitive leap
>> from individual wellbeing to social wellbeing, but I imagine that your
>> reference to social wellbeing is actually to the social context within
>> which individual wellbeing is potentially realized, rather than the
>> experience of wellbeing itself. That would keep us on the same page. You
>> see, my prejudiced view of *social* wellbeing is that it is a particular
>> kind of discourse, a technology of persuasion and oftentimes a coercive
>> language game, whose primary function in groups is putting people in 
>> their
>> place and teaching them lessons - socialization, in other words: For
>> example, " if Paul does not agree with this academic committee's 
>> notion of
>> wellbeing, Paul should not be regarded as one of us. Paul must 
>> produce and
>> accept the kinds of aesthetic nutrients that this committee approves. We
>> are one."
>>
>> Above all, the collective cannot experience any particular aesthetic form
>> on an individual's behalf. Socialization makes collectives happy, by 
>> fiat.
>> You see, there is that which the self-identified communist New York Mayor
>> Zohran Mamdani calls, " The warmth of collectivism." That warmth is
>> probably an expansive, love-like feeling inside Mamdani, which may be
>> catalyzed by visions of happy masses singing the praises of the 
>> collective,
>> where everyone is of academically endorsed race, gender and moral
>> sentiments.
>>
>> Love ostensibly begins in neoteny, and expands into the social domain,
>> where it can be harnessed as a persuasive technology for political,
>> religious or simply sadistic purposes. Mamdani's idea of the warmth of
>> collectivism brings to my mind Hitler's ovens at Auschwitz and the hell
>> that Mao's cultural revolution put Chinese intellectuals through. I 
>> am also
>> reminded of the unspeakable plight of artists and composers in the Soviet
>> Union, not to speak of the countless exploitative love cults throughout
>> history.
>>
>> Nevertheless, love is the perfect correlate of art, in a fundamental 
>> sense.
>> Although art does occur in contractive and hateful contexts such as the
>> exuberant manufacture of brutal postmodern ugliness in universities, I
>> choose to regard that kind of academically inspired art as 
>> inauthentic - as
>> art in name only. There is no wellbeing in it. The most productive
>> conversations about art that I can imagine involve the notion of art as
>> expanding individual potentials and accumulating surpluses of rich and
>> fulfilling personal experiences - spiritual wealth.
>>
>> Having said that, we must ask what is human potential and what makes an
>> experience rich and fulfilling? I have much to say about that, but I've
>> said enough. Science might quickly retort, as a reflex, that what 
>> makes an
>> experience rich and fulfilling is natural selection. Academic 
>> literature is
>> replete with rather infantile mannerisms on how to deflect the 
>> conversation
>> from the personal interior to impersonal explanations. It is the
>> quintessential mark of academia to silence and cancel interiors -
>> especially  of " the right people."
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Paul
>>
>>
>>
>>
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