what’s ‘good’

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It promises a better way, relative to other options. It’s an appellant metonym for the way to go.

Historically, the term tropes a concept of appropriateness: fitting, uniting—or fit uniting, fitting unitedness?—cohering?

Its vast range of meaning (52 sub-definitions)—its aura-tic nebulosity
(so dependent on context of use)—is basically and merely twofold:

1: attributive value: favoring, fitting, appealing; being sufficient, valid, or satisfactory

2: exemplary value: being admirable, respectable, or capable.

The better way orients (like a pole star) events of appropriation.

My several discussions of this (typically here—but also prospected in earlier years more casually) haven’t mentioned that interesting etymological and lexical character of ‘good’. So, here you have it,
brief and non-tedious.

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ensouled worldliness of a singularity

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This is part 14 of “soul of Self interest”

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High flourishing prospects the scalarity of engaged aspiration, beyond an appeal of exemplary humanity, beyond passed heuristics of some wholly flourishing interplay with pretentions of constellating proteany. Radiant gravity of futural Appeal is the point.

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next—> “divining stars”

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being “conventional”

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This is part 1 of “being an American (with conceptual issues)”

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I guess that one’s first take on the meaning of ‘conventional’ is like “being conformative” or customary—and passive irt a convention.
(My use of ‘irt’= “in relating to” has become so customary for me in writing that I no longer define ‘irt’; I just use it.)

But the first meaning of ‘convention’ stood for something active: “1 : a: an agreement between persons or parties” (M-W. Unabridged). Being conventional, beginning for English in the 15thC, was something “1 : a: based on, settled by, or formed by agreement or compact.”

The agreement can be with/to oneself: resolved, self-realization, appreciating who “I” am, truly, to-and-for myself.

A convention is an action-orienting value that makes one’s action worthwhile.

vistas of blobs: gathering satisfaction in a hunt

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To call motion a hunt implies intent in the motion. The moving thing hunts because eventually a capture is seen, after which the moving settles, evidently satisfied. That which moves captures and settles, showing intent.

But there can’t be intent without intelligence. So, the moving capture that settles itself is intelligent.

Formation of clouds in a humid sky gravitates toward concentration of moisture into precipitous portent. The air shapes itself as if drawn to concentrate moisture—as if centripetality of temperature differences in barametric pressure prefers entropic condensation—because entropy prevails “above” all.

Time lapse video of cloud formation over a plain looks like an awesome formation by intent. Analytically, there is physical “prevailing” with results being centripetally drawn into self-precipitating vortexes.

historical “psyche”

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‘Psychal’ and ‘psychalness’ also allows more-direct association with its classical Greek root, psyche, which is revealing of the Self/self Difference.

The combining form ‘psych-‘ originally meant “life, spirit, soul, self” (M-W Unabridged). All of that! life itself? life as “spirit”? essentially spirit, but life apart?

Greek psyche is “akin” to Greek psychein: to breathe, blow. I blow, but do I breathe?: Forgetting that I breathe, by attending to anything in my day, “I” continues to breathe, as if there is another I within me: spirit, like the wind of Nature breathing.

recalling intra-psychal differences

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1 | When a child personifies a toy, their enjoyment of actual interpersonal relations is mapped into relating to the toy (creating a “real” relation-
ship). Multiple toys, multiple personified relations; but the child has a dim conception of being one self having multiple personified relations.

2 | Likewise in actual interpersonal relations. Being personal is relative to relations with actual others; and multiple relationships are multiple interpersonal relations that don’t clearly cohere. To be “personal” is ordinarily to be [inter]personal variably.

psychalness again

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I posted over a year ago that “I began using ‘psychal’ in mid-March, 2011, because I wanted a correlate of my term ‘mindality’,” which is “associable with phenomenological interest.” [“psychalness,” Jan. 2019]. “…Psychal interest in mind or psyche is experiential (or phenomenological). Psychological interest in mind is methodic, structural, or conceptual...” (sweet transgression, Mar. 2011).

The middle ’o’ of ‘psychological’ is merely a conventional connector between the root ‘psyche-’ and ‘-logical’. I substitute ‘a’ for inquirial (inquiry-al) interest in psychalness: psychalogical interest.

I mentioned in November, 2011 that “...my preference for ‘psychalogical’ over ‘psychological’…is analogous to a difference between [interest in] phenomenal experience and systematically-interpreted experience” (“...developmental interest”). But that is better represented as two kinds of inquirial interest: phenomenological and empirical.

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foresting life

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This is a letter emailed to the author of a NY Review of Books review of three books about Charles Darwin. I’m musing across a scale of interest from cellularity to facing the black cosmos.

A couple of “[…]” points in the letter refer to irrelevant chat-level content. [Bracketed text is slight amplification or explanatory indications of content that a reader might not be familiar with.]

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praise for gifted longevity

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Freeman Dyson died this week, age 96.

I commented at the NYTimes obituary.

I’m noting that here because I’ll soon prospect at length about giftedness as model for understanding the nature of intelligence, which is to be employed for a realistic idealism about human potential, which will serve prospecting notions of highly flourishing life.

There’s a typo in my NYT comment I can’t correct there: We “mis-imagined that heaven as someplace else.” I meant: We mis-imagined that heaven is someplace else. We mis-imagined heaven as someplace else. We’re the diasporic (diaspora-ic) species, hungry for greener pastures.

Dyson’s last article for the NY Review of Books notes that, in the beginning. “the universe was divided into earth and sky, the earth made of perishable stuff in constant turmoil, the sky made of immortal stuff, serene and ageless” (January 2020).

Yet, alas: We’re all children of the pale blue dot.

Freeman Dyson exemplified the leading edge of Our evolving. | March 19: And more today from Edge.org.

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