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@danfaggella To the latch stuff — I think great philosophers tend to be cognitive entrepreneurs that pioneered a new mental motion. People read philosophers' great works to learn their signature mental moves, and this is often more personally valuable than the logical content of the works.

Physical inventions are easy to see & track; steam engines, color photography, combustion engines, etc. Mental inventions are more difficult to spot, but imo are just as real. Often we won't be able to trace back to "patient zero", the first person to do a specific thing with their mind, but sometimes we can.

Roughly, there are two classes of 'new mental motions':
(1) Stabilizing a new class of structure, i.e. creating a new lens for viewing the world. Example: Plato's forms, Darwin's natural selection, Spinoza's conatus;
(2) Exhibiting a new class of cognitive-emotional freedom. The Buddha is perhaps the archetypal example here; his mind was not free in a certain important way, then he figured out how to jailbreak it, then he taught this to others.

I view both of these through the lens of vasocomputation; (1) involves learning to flex our vascular 'hand of the mind' in a new way, and (2) involves releasing latched tension (opening & regaining natural dynamic range in a neural circuit that had its bloodflow pinched and dropped into 'safe mode' where it couldn't update).

I.e. imagine your nervous system split into ~100m tiny voxels; each voxel can be "latched" or "unlatched". "Latched" is my slang for: 'the vascular muscle in this voxel has engaged the latch-bridge mechanism of smooth muscle, and is basically stuck in a contracted state, and this is preventing nearby neurons from dynamically updating.' If we had a map of your latches, we'd have a *map of where your nervous system is not free*.
(This is a lossy description of vasocomputation; would rec my pinned thread. Latches can happen for many reasons but mostly they're artifacts of your body trying to keep you safe -- a chronic latch is evidence that at some point your body made a decision that access to the full dynamic range of this tiny neural circuit was dangerous or unproductive. So it pinched off that possibility, in a reversible but durable way.)

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There's a surface reading of Nick Land (and similar writers from Nietzsche onwards) where he just likes to trigger people. Maybe he does like to trigger people -- but I see a stronger intention to *free* people. Many things he says are really painful if you're hanging onto certain aspects of a normal worldview; they become less painful if you let certain expectations go. Land's refrain "the only way out is through" is essentially an invitation to let go of these requirements for 'how the world must be', which I expect to ground out in terms of opening specific latches.

Shock therapy to open latches is not for everyone. I'll just say I'm very interested in "whitepill versions" of Land's work -- we need philosophy that can stare into (& deeply engage with) the dynamics that Land points at and maintain confidence that The Good exists and we can get there from here.