Reddit reviews Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models Of The Fundamental Mechanisms Of Thought

Some great books go out of print for a while and you have to really hunt on the second hand book market for them. I had to do that for this book a few years ago, but it seems this is back in print and available from Amazon.

Here's an Amazon link.

I think the dog analogy isn't entirely accurate, but you make a good point. I've been skimming another book by hofstadter which seems to defend this argument (I have read very little). It looks like a good follow-up for GEB. Have you read it?

Reminds me a bit of the alphabets in Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies book.

Yeah I'm very into a lot of this stuff too. Your post inspired me to start writing down some thoughts on the connections between them and it got a little out of hand, but I'll post this little manic outburst anyway and maybe you (or others similarly interested in a lot of this stuff) will be able to relate at least some of this to your own reasons for being interested in all these thinkers.

Accelerationism is interesting because I've been into ideas about post-scarcity/fully automated luxury communism for a long time, although I don't agree with the Nick Land/right accelerationist perspective that capitalism is the only system that can push the technological advancement to the max, and I find that the left accelerationists often seem kind of vague about how a transition away from capitalism might actually work and what specific kinds of technologies would be involved (I have my own ideas).

The overlap of kind of "mystical" ideas (like Jung, occult stuff etc.) and sort of cybernetic/psychodynamic perspectives on the way the mind works, and the way self-organizing social dynamics work, is interesting to me too, I think a bunch of the people you mention touch on that, like a lot of Mark Fisher's more esoteric posts on "cold rationalism" on his old k-punk blog, like this one ("The great Cold Rationalist lesson is that everything in the so-called personal is in fact the product of impersonal processes of cause and effect which, in principle if not in fact, could be delineated very precisely. And this act of delineation, this stepping outside the character armour that we have confused with ourselves, is what freedom is.") I don't know if you ever read xenogothic, a former student of Mark Fisher who's really into the "patchwork" idea, but he has a good post here on Nietzsche's ideas about seeing the self in terms of a bunch of interacting "drives" (relating to modern ideas of neural darwinism or agent-based models of the mind, Douglas Hofstadter's models of competing mental 'pressures', and general ideas about the universality of bottom-up Darwinian dynamics in complex adaptive systems which Nick Land seems to have been inspired by) and something he wrote by the title "Self-mastery and moderation and their ultimate motive" which talks about achieving a kind of dynamic balance between different drives where none can overwhelm the others, something I also think sort of relates to Graeber's piece about the universality of "play" among animals here.

So there's maybe some kind of sense in a lot of these guys that there are "higher" state of consciousness or organization that manage to achieve a more complex dynamic balance and integration between a larger number of competing drives or pressures, which you could also maybe relate to Marx's ideas about how human flourishing is best served by "all-round activity" and "all-round development of individuals", and also to Hegelian ideas about stages of growth based on integrating ideas or desires that previously seemed contradictory. If you're into mystical/occult ideas I recommend that in addition to Jung you check out Ken Wilber, who's a bit of a New Agey crackpot at times but has some really interesting intuitions about a sort of evolutionary vision of spirituality that tries to integrate Hegel with psychological notions of stages of development and the idea of spirituality as pointing the way to more advanced/integrated stages, like those discussed in this slatestarcodex post...I talked here a little more about some of the stuff I find interesting in Wilber.

Also on the subject of more vs. less integrated and "holistic" forms of consciousness and possible relations to political differences, I really recommend The Master and His Emissary on the modes of the left vs. right brains, along with this thesis that discusses the possible connection of left and right politics to mental modes involving "strong categorization" or "weak categorization". They sort of come to opposite conclusions about whether the more holistic mode is oriented more with left or right politics, or more conservative or more modernizing religious and philosophical movements...I think the relation of these mental modes to political/philosophical/religious movements is more complicated than the binaries either one seems to set up. (For me a key is that people on the right tend to see creativity and psychological "flow" flourishing best within certain kinds of formal rules and boundaries that you just take for granted, like the verse structures in certain kinds of poetry like haikus--I remember Anna talked about this idea of creativity thriving on constraints at one point--whereas the leftists/modernists are more interested in going up to a meta-level and not taking traditional boundaries and rules for granted, trying to rethink them. There's also some stuff in The Master and His Emissary about how while a certain kind of verbal abstraction is mainly rooted in the left brain, ability to understand and be creative with other types of abstract domains like math and understanding of causality actually requires more integrated activity of both the left and the right brain.)

Of the people you mentioned, I think Moldbug is probably the least interesting to me--I can sort of see what others who don't share his right-wing views (Justin Murphy for example) might find inspiring when they read him, like "Cathedral" and ideas about "patchwork", but to me whatever's good in those ideas can be found in earlier leftist thinkers. The Cathedral is basically Gramsci's ideas about hegonomic ideas under liberal capitalism, with some additional ideas I think are basically wrong like the idea that these kinds of ideas wouldn't have developed if not for the legacy of puritanism/calvinism (I think if you had some sort of alternate history where some totally different culture developed capitalism, the scientific and industrial revolutions, and Enlightenment style questioning of tradition and desire to justify philosophical and moral ideas in rational terms, most of the broad ideas and politics Moldbug attributes to the 'Cathedral' would have developed in much the same way). And the idea of nation-states devolving into more local government bodies that experiment with many different laws and ways of living is something that can be found in Murray Bookchin's ideas about post-scarcity anarchism.