Time Heals All Wounds.. And Then Kills the Patient

Seitan Tempts Not

Pat Gunn — 2010-08-18T19:23:17Z

It was mentioned that my last post may have not been super clear - perhaps few of my posts actually are clear. So, I will go into a bit of depth on it, both as a (public) exercise for me and as a potential source of clarity for others. I have no idea how interesting this will be.

Title - "Sate a Narky, You Topiary" is a play on words on Nozick's 「Anarchy, State, and Utopia」, suggesting that trees might tame the narcotics officers of the mind (those who belong in strong authorism - that meaning is strictly constructed by the author of a story, piece of art, etc). Trees in this case represent nature and invoke observation of it.
First paragraph is fairly light - the idea that many of us have parts of us that step back from what we're doing and observe for a bit. In computer science, "watchdog" devices did this in hardware to determine software lockups - they would automatically reboot the system if they were not notified not to on a regular basis. My feeling of absurdity was in unlikely combinations of social positional markers - idea that not a lot of techies listen to Alan Jackson, and idea that not a lot of either are interested in books on feminism or socialism. Implication: there are other unlikely combinations of interests and markers in my life I could probably list if I thought about it, and idea that maybe people are always this complex - people in stories are artificially flat. I consider whether stories are more interesting when the characters are flattened further, left as-is, or made as complex as real people.
Second paragraph - I draw on the idea that people don't actually live in the same world of facts - that they need to construct simplifying stories through which they understand their lives in order to give themselves a sense of significance. These simplifying stories give them "totems" of people around them, simplified to fit their roles in their stories. I speculate that demonisation is a particular form of this simplification, and one of the difficult things about telling people not to demonise is that demonisation is a direct part of the mechanism by which we understand ourselves. In real life, we direct our gaze at things that support our narratives, in order to protect them, and as each of us is mostly the sole author of our life-narrative (and these things are usually not discussed), it's sustainable to have these life stories being quite distinct. In other types of media (books, tv), we still can attempt to insert our own meaning into these stories, but because they're usually shared, we take on ourselves a cognitive burden when doing so - we must learn not to speak of our branched version of shared versions lest we create confusion, unless the work itself suggests interpretation (e.g. the last scenes of Brazil, or more controversially Hedwig or Lain). We may also have inhibitions about injecting meaning into shared stories - notions of propriety, ownership, or just a general unwillingness to put forth the efforts (hence the title reference).
Second paragraph, part 2 - notion of the gaze in film or book as the ability of those authors to direct our attention and experiences as *they* choose rather than creating an immersive, choice-driven environment. Idea that reality TV might be lessened by this a bit as there is less direction (and occasional blogs or other supplementary media that step outside the TV format - some other shows do this too). Even if reality TV is more suited to a less directed gaze, the user only gains a few degrees of freedom over traditional books or TV - it's mediated by the author (still being a story) rather than relatively freely explored by the reader. I claim that reality tv is usually rubbish, but it has some popularity that I speculate is tied to people's desire for TV characters that are more real than the relatively flat characters actually present in other forms of media, and that having complex characters and a relatively unplanned story is largely synonymous (not mentioned: a number of webcomics appear to be written this way - instead of planning story arcs, the author makes the characters and imagines how they actually would interact).
Third paragraphlet - I wonder whether all the stories we receive from TV and books and the like much shape the narratives we build for our own lives. This is a more direct reference (perhaps criticism) to Joseph Campbell's idea of the Myth; I wonder if the idea of universal narratives actually makes sense or not.
Fourth paragraph - "gospel of complexity" - I've often remarked that complexity is the most important idea I like to impress upon people - that we oversimplify by instinct, and that appreciation of nuance (one of my favourite words) is necessary to understand the world. We oversimplify the world (ideas like "muslims are evil"), we oversimplify each other, we think there's a unified "them" working together to face an "us". The basic idea is that we close our mind on situations before actual facts get a chance to help build our frameworks of thought, leaving us with impoverished frameworks that can't explain reality and leave us blind.
Fourth paragraph continued - I speculate that this "gospel of complexity" is a source of alienation - the idea of enhanced self-awareness inherent in really embracing complexity (needed to fight the instincts we're fighting) might raise interaction that's normally performed on instinct - people choosing friends based on some metric of how their life-narratives invisibly align (simple example - two people who consider themselves heroes may mutually consider each other a sidekick, and this may work provided it never comes up) while people who take this mechanism and think about it too much might break that mechanism. Likewise, if one comes to become an advocate for complexity, it may limit one's ability to enjoy films, books, and stories that are too shallow, like a plant that has decided to grow deep roots may no longer be transplantable into some places.
Fifth Paragraph - I reference my extension of Freud's theory in 「Civilization and its Discontents」, where I hold that the repressions and sacrifices needed for civilisation differ depending on the forms of government and society, and apply it, suggesting that repressing our tendency towards simple and emotionally satisfying judgements that lack complexity may be a great enabler of societal progress. I wonder if it's a safe thing to repress this though, as it's so tied to personal meaning in life (and presumably happiness). I suggest that instead of entirely supressing it, we might try a doublethink style solution, where we don't discard the idea of viewing the world through a (distorting) narrative; instead we keep that narrative but try to simultaneously keep a part of ourselves outside that narrative that could directly alter it as needed or pull us entirely outside of it into full self-awareness as a temporary measure when it's entirely inadequate. (e.g. when one is in a courtroom, one generally would be wise to put aside one's normal notions of pride and ego and submit to the court - saying "you can't interrupt me" to a judge or lawyer in the court just won't do, even if in one's main context of life it might work).
Sixth Paragraph - I remark that it's odd that we may need delusions (in particular, the distorting individual narratives of life we need to feel important and situated) in order to stay sane, and suggest that a metaphor for it might be how when humans travel into space, they have to bring a bit of earth's environment with them (air with the correct pressure, radiation controls, etc). Somehow the real world is like an outer space for our emotional life.

So maybe that clears things up? I admit it may have been hard to draw all the meaning out of that post (or really, many of my posts), particularly without having read my posts for quite some time and/or having had extensive philosophical conversations with me - I've received little feedback on my posts (e.g. "I don't understand what you're saying in this part"), maybe either because the topics are uninteresting to most people, or because the normal reaction to reading dense prose is to just stop reading. Maybe both.

I suppose dense poetry would not necessarily be better than dense prose. It might be more entertaining though? People use blogs as social media in such different ways...

Blind Arrow

Pat Gunn — 2010-08-23T03:50:02Z

State of head: recently altered, as if I were restored from a "last known good backup" and reintegrated. Complex, but good. Hoping things stay like this. Also hoping I can pull the bits of my life that I've terribly neglected back into working order. I think I can manage that, at least some of it.

Concern: Port Authority's planned bus service cuts come January are very very nasty. For example, the 61A is planned to be cut entirely, the 64 and 75 won't run on Sundays, and many other routes are cut, reduced, or limited. I will likely (hopefully?) be out of here by the time the cuts happen, but the extent of the cuts make me feel that the county is effectively giving up on public transit. It doesn't make sense to do this as a response to economic hardship - this will hurt businesses, it will hurt people, there are other things one can skimp on or reform but not this. A local paper explained that the cause of this is not actually due to reduced state funding (same as it's been for awhile), it's due to ballooning healthcare costs and the old budget expecting a toll highway to be tolled more (which I think failed). I'd love to see the bus system funded through property taxes or some other means - this reliance on fares and state/federal funds is ridiculous. I suspect if I were to stay here, I would have to buy personal transportation to still have a reasonable standard of living (maybe a motor scooter like someone I know, maybe something more robust which I could use for long-distance travel, or maybe I'd just sign up for Zipcar if the math worked out right).

The Jayme Stone/Mansa Sissoko 「From Africa to Appalachia」 CD is worth checking out - it feels like appalachian, gaelic, and traditional african music got caught in a blender.

I made my way past the theory part of 「The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure」 - the chief problem around which it's arranged is whether the Marxian analysis of class antagonisms is correct. Under Marxian thought, the classes remain antagonistic, with clear social and identity distinctions. As continued development has blurred these distinctions and changed labour relations, we ask whether the Marxian analysis is outdated - the authors of the book do studies to try to understand various aspects of selected members of the working class, trying to understand "embougeoismnent" - the pressing of bourgeois values and identity onto the working class in a way that alienates them from from the class struggle. As the background notes, orthodox marxists tend to dismiss the idea of this as being a blip or illusion, while a number of other marxists, socialists, and capitalists (believers in, in this sense) accept that marxian theory is outdated, based on assumptions about the way the state acts, about the cause of capitalist crisis, his notions about the sociology of classes (and perhaps the number of and distinctions between them) and the extent to which state and corporate actors would intentionally and successfully manipulate class identity to limit revolutionary potential (and perhaps need in the marxian sense). In particular, improved technologies and shifting social relations create a new kind of class that's neither traditionally bourgeois nor working class - that of the knowledge worker (described in its infancy in the book, but now quote common - every programmer is a knowledge worker, as are most engineers. The book doesn't adequately discuss the trend of globalisation and its effects on the growth towards knowledge workers (maybe outside of its scope), but the traditional antagonism between bourgeois and working classes is not replicated between those classes as strongly, and the alienation of labour is less pronounced.

The book goes on to some studies in the town of Luton (worth noting this was published in 1969 and performed in the 60s) - not as interesting as the theory, but still good stuff.

Questions:

Is Marxian theory adequate given class changes? Was it ever adequate on this account? Is long-term forecasting of the future always a fool's task given changing circumstances?
Must class conflict lead to cultural divides?
Is freedom from alienation of labour possible? Would workers collective ownership of the means of production actually lessen or eliminate that alienation? If this freedom impossible, are there still benefits to struggle aiming to lessen or eliminate it?
Is showing the possibility of embourgeoisment (or its presence in some degree when one goes looking for it) necessarily a problem for Marxian thought, or would one need to show that it's widespread?

Still chewing on these..

Chthonic Grassburn

Pat Gunn — 2010-08-25T20:47:15Z

Swung by the old workplace to talk about backups and data store management - need to hang onto huge datasets from past experiments creates interesting challenges, particularly as these sets keep growing. We recently filled another 6 terabytes of RAID storage.. oy. Cognitive burden of "are we ready to archive this experimental data yet?" is housekeeping that's hard to do in a group that doesn't have a fulltime sysadmin.

On the way out, I chatted with a researcher on the state of psychology - apparently my research interests are not necessarily that far off from being approachable but they are likely to be very difficult to make concrete enough to do interesting research. It's an interesting enough problem that the field will have to do it at some point, as it's tied to the heart of neuroplausible hard AI (as well as understanding human learning). The challenge is how to turn it into simple tractable problems that don't amount to studies of separate problem domains - if I really want to understand inter-domain reasoning and domain construction, I'd need to be thinking about the kind of experiments that could regularise domain mastery among participants and measure how they bring these things to the table in new domain - either relying on concurrent verbal protocols or cognitive models with very good imaging evidence would be appropriate, and each would have challenges (I'm extending this a bit beyond my conversation with him).

Before I left, I was reminded that he's from Belgium, and we talked a bit about the future of Belgium (for those of you who don't follow world politics, look into this - it's interesting stuff) - I never thought of the status of Brussels as being what keeps that country together (my formal reading on the topic suggested it would just become a third region), but it makes sense. It was also good to get the perspective of someone who has on-the-ground knowledge - as I've often stated, it's hard to get the breadth of perspective from even the best sampling from current events journals. We also talked a bit about the future of the United States, shaky foundations of our economy and issues with our educational and political systems.

PRIVATE PART

I have a letter to finish writing. The feel of pen on paper is nice.

Open Letter to Hysterical Sharia Conspiracy Theorists

Pat Gunn — 2010-08-25T21:17:58Z

Is this thing on? *tap* *tap*

An open letter to Hysterical Sharia Conspiracy Theorists (not that many of them are likely to read my blog):

Hello,

This letter is for you if you believe that Sharia is an imminent threat to western civilisation, written by me, part of the American Left. In particular, I am one of the rare actual socialists in the United States, but one also inspired by and operating in many of the same Enlightenment traditions under which the United States was founded. My opinions on some topics are in the minority among the American Left (you have often confused non-lassiez-faire capitalism with socialism - as a socialist I can tell you that you're very wrong), and on others are likely more majorty. On many topics, I expect substantial numbers of conservatives would agree with me as well.

On the topic of Sharia, your claims are based on the ideas that:

Barack Obama is a Muslim
Liberal judges are likely to introduce Sharia to the United States in some form
Muslims in general wish to introduce Sharia law as the law of the land in the United States
Muslims are responsible for 9/11
The presence of a Mosque is a step towards Sharia

All of these ideas are significantly wrong.

Barack Obama is not a muslim. He does not wear his faith on his sleeve, but he is a Christian - the church he is known for attending, Trunity United Church of Christ, is not a Mosque, and while the pastor of that church was had some unorthodox views on race and politics, but these views are neither uncommon nor are they limited to the left. There are many christians in America who consider religion not to be a matter to be involved in every part of their life, out of sensitivity to those around them who don't share their opinions.
Liberal judges, like all judges, have extensive legal experience and understanding how our legal system works, the principles on which it rests as well as those of its actual functions. As scholars, there is little reason they would seek to replace our well-honed legal system with an alien system, particularly one that has had great difficulties in adapting to modernity. As liberals, there is little reason they would accept, let alone promote Sharia law given how in most senses it would restrict traditions precious to us, built by women's liberation, the labour movement, free-speech advocates struggling against cultural conservatives, and many other such struggles dating back to our common legal heritage with England.
American Muslims no doubt vary in their beliefs - there may be some who desire their particular faith to dominate the land, but the vast majority of Muslims in the United States are not radicalised. Likewise, there are Christians, followers of judaism, and those of other faiths who would attempt to create religious rule over the US and replace our traditions, but they are slim in number. The strength of liberal traditions and high living standards is that they generally moderate people, pulling them into our broader culture and building enough ties across communities that provided communities are well-treated, the potential for radicalism is minimised. You have nothing more to fear from the average American mulsim than you do from the average American Christian - their traditions differ from yours, but yours never have been the only traditions in our nation. The founding fathers had considerable disagreements on that front, from the aggressive atheism of Thomas Paine or the thoughtful deism of Franklin to the traditionalists like Patrick Henry.
Muslims as a whole are not responsible for 9/11. Those who were responsible were or are Muslim, but they are in a minority sect, relying on hosting of a nation that was considered a rogue dangerous to its neighbours (Iran, for example, frequently suffers attacks from international islamist movements operating from Afghanistan) and acting in the company of other militant groups that have long posed threats to Muslim-majority nations. Not all of these movements are the same and some have fought each other with as much violence as they've used against Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Lebanon, and other countries. The fact that they claim to be representing the true face of Islam is a claim you should take as seriously as you might claims by the fringe christian groups who likewise kill to be the true face of Christianity. Islamists don't represent most Muslims in the west, and 9/11 was condemned by many Muslim-majority nations. 9/11 was also not a simple event, and constant US meddling in the affairs of other countries has created resentment, making it hard for people to consider the United States to be working for anything but its self-interest - we have overthrown democracies, supported regressive regimes out of interest in profit, and otherwise not acted on the high ideals we espouse. We are not unique in this, but we are powerful - many admire the ideals that we (and the rest of the rest) hold even as they are bothered by how frequently we violate these ideals and act without tolerance, without concern for anyone but ourselves, and without concerns for human dignity. Being humans, this is something we are guilty of as a species, and we have not escaped these tendencies in the west.

As liberals, you can expect that we will not support sharia as the law of the land of the United States. It doesn't align with western society nor the enlightenment foundations we've been working on. Those of us who are atheist will never accept religious rule, and we distrust those who call for a Christian government as much as those who call for an Islamic one. A christian government was not intended by the founders of this nation, and in this case we concur with their reasoning - by maintaining a secular government that is very reluctant to even dip its toe in religious water, we keep cultural struggles over values much safer for everyone involved. You may believe in some specific laws inspired by your religion or philosophy, but unless you can justify it in secular terms, the rest of society should be very suspicious of it. For those few of us who are socialist, we will not accept Sharia as the law of the land because we see socialism as the future culmination of enlightenment and liberal thought, not a regression towards religious rule. While there have occasionally been attempts to blend Islam and Socialism, they have been very rare, and the political movements in Arab nations that have been socialist have as a rule struggled against those advocating a stronger Islamic basis in society.

Sharia is a manufactured fear, like immigration reform. There may be some level of underlying issue that should be addressed, but it is neither an imminent threat nor have there been remarkable causes to worry about it so suddenly - there have been conservative presidents before and there no doubt will be conservative presidents again. I hold that you are manufacturing issues because you have not had enough to actually complain about with regards to a surprisingly centrist, technocratic president. This is understandable - for many of you, dealing with the presidency of GW Bush has been embarassing, and some political figures have rubbed your nose in it sharply enough that your pride was injured. I believe if you look at the facts of these issues carefully, you will find that you are in hysteria over relatively small issues, and like confusing those few of us who are socialists with the Democrats, you have allowed your emotions to cloud your reasoning, and you may be driven into this partly by malfunctioning news media that cross lines that traditionally have not been crossed. You can do better - conservativism has always been a large tendency in politics, and there are ways to be conservative without becoming divorced from facts. This threatens us too - as fellow americans and part of western civilisation and civilisation in general, there are challenges that cannot be aptly met without a firm reliance on the facts and efforts to keep dialogue careful and respectful. We will fail every challenge we face as a society if we are not intelligent about how we manage them. One of the weaknesses of a democratic republic like ours is if enough of the people pull enough against the fabric of society - at best we would have gridlock at every level, at worst our government would disintegrate entirely. We have a responsibility to better ourselves, and bettering society depends on efforts on part of individuals to conquer inappropriate passions, develop compassion for each other, and work from the facts. The specifics of this are things on which we may disagree, but Christians, Muslims, Jews, Seculars, and many others are part of our society and many others. Don't mistake the healthy struggles in a democracy and public discussion with the kind of struggles the US faces with Islamist militants.

Para metric society

Pat Gunn — 2010-08-26T14:41:43Z

In jogging/running, I go barefoot and apart from some very light clothing am carrying nothing but my NexusOne (still don't consider it exactly a phone, but I digress). I've been experimenting with different parameters of how I hold my body when doing so - seems to be difficult to figure out what settings are best.

Parameters:

Leaning forward versus back
How high up the feet come off the ground
How much knee bendage
How high up my heel should be (ranges from "it taps the ground once per step" to "it never touches")
How much spring should go in my feet
Vvarious hand position things

Most of these have a tiredness cost, and I can easily feel that. I'm not sure what their other costs and benefits are though, and it's not so easy to notice when I'm actually moving - I think the differences are probably small per pace and they just add up. I'm sure runners who go to a sports doctor/trainer have really good advice on form - I've seen videos of people critiquing slowed-down runners (on TV, years ago). Curious: what's the best way for someone looking to parameterise their form appropriately if they're not looking to spend a lot of money? Hire a trainer for a session? Are there books? I'm probably never going to be a super serious runner, but it's something I've done at some rate for my whole life (used to do races in high school), and I might get serious enough to occasionally do shortish races for fun (serious for fun!). I'm feeling more encouraged than usual on this because two nights ago I had a nice 40 minute jog involving hills, I wasn't feeling crazy tired when I finished, and I haven't felt sore or tired from that in the days after.

Musical Training Wheels

Pat Gunn — 2010-08-30T04:50:23Z

There are times when I hear a cover of a song and it helps me understand the original song. Not so odd. What is odd is when I don't like the original until I have the time to get the interpretation through the cover. Odd when a cover is training wheels for the actual song.

Example: I have a fondness for Jeff Buckley's version of 「Hallelujah」, and only after listening enough to it did I really begin to appreciate the Leonard Cohen (original) version.

Shape of the Eyes

Pat Gunn — 2010-08-31T20:09:21Z

This is qualified as a dissenting thought.

When may a search for wisdom (philosophy) become a search for knowledge (science)?
When we define and decide on on a notion of what knowledge is and how it is to be sought.
Can one find knowledge without looking for it?
One may find things that may become knowledge with reevaluation rather than search, but until we have that framework knowledge is not definitionally meaningful.
Is reintegration of past events as valuable in science as prediction of future ones? Are we not better off not seeking material that may be reevaluated into science?
Depends on the notion of science we make for a field. Each field differs a bit

Dissenting because in my main framework, I do not make this exact distinction between knowledge and wisdom, plus I consider philosophy to be a superfield that contains science.

BigThink's Dangerous Ideas of 2010

Pat Gunn — 2010-09-01T16:14:18Z

BigThink has put forth ten interesting "dangerous ideas" for discussion. Some thoughts:

Drug our drinking water with a low dose of lithium in the hopes of lifting moods and lowering suicide rates.

I am deeply disturbed by this idea. Right now, we live in a society with a number of difficulties, and we don't spend enough time thinking about happiness. We are too complicit in the narrative of material production and labour and not enough with community and solidarity. Mood-affecting drugs for everyone are not the answer - at least now if people use such things, they know they're doing it, which might act as a reminder that better lives are possible. With this, we would be medicating our problems away rather than suffering them (as we do now) or solving them (which some of us do and more of us should). A society that would drug its people this way is one that's on the wrong side of livability.

Tax fat people

It's ok to have societal mores that frown on being overweight. To directly tax it is not implementable, and those who are overweight (beyond a certain point, which I believe is the scope of the term here, we're not talking "over 50 percent weight") already will meet real consequences, from the daily-life to the health complications. I would rather just see a consistent message about weight combined with efforts to restructure American society and our food infrastructure to make a healthy life more possible. Going further would be a mess, and people would not accept it.

Legalise all drugs

Not ok with this either. The metric I'd use is: If it is possible for most people to use the drug responsibly in moderation without severely damaging their lives, then it should generally be legal. Realigning drug policy along that metric would feel sensible to me - going further would not.

Abandon Earth, as Stephen Hawking urges, or face extinction

In the long term, sure. We don't have the technology to do this yet, as far as I understand. Truly self-sustaining off-Terran colonies (whether in space or on another chunk of rock) would require us to be able to do serious manufacturing in space, to manage a small biosphere up there, to manage disasters in a less damaging way, etc. We can probably manage it in time, and we probably should.

End aid to Africa

The detailed explanation suggests massive corruption and problematic incentives created by aid. These are real concerns, but I don't think they're sufficient to cease aid. We might decide to focus our aid in ways that are less likely to end up in the hands of the corrupt (medicine, education, infrastructure), and we should tune our aid to local governance standards. There are times where we might intervene with particularly bad governments, although except in obvious cases like genocide (which unfortunately were often the end result of western colonial policies), there is considerable delicacy in such matters.

Erase traumatic memories

I don't know if I would have a legal ban on this, but I feel there should be a very strong societal taboo on these things - these memories we would erase are part of who we are as individuals. If we can't remember, we can't learn or grow, and the coherence of our shared history diminishes further.

Sell American citizenship - This might be pragmatic, with certain limits - American citizens are required to pay taxes on all their income, worldwide, and this might be a way to gain extra tax revenue. It does risk some dangerous entryism though - we're big enough to survive some of that, but ..
Introduce elephants and lions to the Great Plains

Similar to other ideas about reintroducing wildlife to nature. I like the idea if done well - we will have to make adjustments though if we move from the "dominate" to "coexist" model with nature.

Mandatory buble study

This might be interesting, if it were part of a larger curriculum of studying many religions and philosophies, and if it were done correctly. In the traditional idea of "bible study", I'm skeptical about this.

Allow infant euthanasia

I am very uncomfortable with this idea - I begin to assign moral significance when there is significant brain development, and slide that significance upwards as that development continues. At birth, there's no strict necessity for the mother to keep custody should she not want it or circumstances intervene, and I've used that as a signpost for near-full (and pragmatically treated as full) moral significance given no severe developmental disorders. There's no reason I *must* use that as a signpost, but it seems an appropriate point given that other custodial options open. I would not consider traditional societies that handled this differently to be necessarily abhorrent, but I don't want our handling of it changed.

Powdered Chalkboard

Pat Gunn — 2010-09-02T18:15:20Z

Social barriers, professionalism:

Notion of taking on a role (usually work, not always): association is no longer freely chosen, and we may deal with difficult people. Common response: we mechanise ourselves for that role while meeting it - relations from under that hat become formal, pleasantries shallow. Should we meet someone we normally see on the other side of the counter, we are left with a choice as to how congruent things are without it.

With time we may build something that we can feel is more genuine (?), perhaps hanging out elsewhere.

Is this the only arrangement possible? I prefer the hats people wear to not mask them so much, and even at the cost of exposing normal human relations that might be less than happy, I am happier with more realism in the relations. I wonder what the costs are, and how much of this comes from owners or managers thinking of employees as needing to be kept in line. I suspect that keeping in line is bad for people, diminishing us in ways we don't really understand (but I may be wrong on this, and there are circumstances where it is desirable).

Maybe I am overinspired by a general observation that the most pleasant (to me) teahouses are those where the owners/managers exert the least control over the employees and there is a lot of autonomy in how people act, dress, what music is played, and the like. This dynamic is different when the owner/manager is there most of the time; otherwise one ends up with the hellish elevator music (or christmas music playing from October until February) place with people wearing a uniform, smiling fake smiles, and a dull place without the personal touches that people would add. This holds in other types of business too. I hate that corporate, tidy, no-you-can't-change-it-it-has-an-official-look kind of place.

Books - I read a lot, and am sometimes bothered at how little I remember from great literature - great novels from Murakami, Rushdie, Kundera: there is a sense of great adventure when I pick up the book and the hours fly by, and I know that they give me a lot to think about for awhile, but I get the sense that most other people have more of the story stick with them than I do. It may be that on some level I hope to lose enough detail that I can read them again in a few months, but it makes it harder to talk about books than it should be. Maybe it's that I always have another few books on the queue and I don't take enough space between books to remember them solidly. I would love, for example, to think of 「The Satanic Verses」 (one of the first Rushdie books I've read) and recall more of it than a movie star falling out of a plane and then developing an unusual condition, angels, and "flashbacks" to the times of Mohammad. I have the products of analysis left too (what was the book about? what was the symbolism? what is the mood of the various timeframes the story explores?), but being able to trace over the story as if a finger were moving over braille would be more ideal. Maybe it would be absurd to expect that level of recall for everything I've read though. Maybe reading too much (for this purpose) causes the memories to compete with each other to the extent of making that impossible? Or maybe I just have lousy literary recall.

I especially dislike when I can't quite remember if I've read something or not.

I remain highly impressed at how quickly I can type with the NexusOne's onscreen keyboard, turned to the side.

Recently I dug the bike out of the basement and had it repaired. Discovered that the muscles I need to bike need a lot of work. Today I discovered that my messenger bag is good at staying out of the way and distributing weight evenly enough that I can in fact bike with it (with Laptop!). This means I won't need to wait for the bus so often, provided I can build the muscles I need for more efficient riding quickly enough. After I leave Pgh, chances are I'll be someplace flatter, and I'll probably switch to a road bike at that point.

It's obviously too late this year, but if I can get in good enough shape, I could imagine heading to ColumbusOH for TOSRV next year.

In most respects I have a lot of respect for Richard Dawkins, but in this debate, I have some friction of perspective - I don't like how quickly or strongly he marks questions as meaningless. The way I see things, while science is operating in the only sphere that merits capital-T truth, philosophy (and philosophical elements of religion) is what provides the meaning - I am comfortable considering philosophical questions to be scientifically meaningless but very bothered by unqualified use of the term meaningless. I agree with Richard that we may be able to trace our fingers along the brain as we do philosophy, and that we may understand that process entirely in theory someday, but I think it'd be a genetic fallacy to invalidate it by that perspective. To the extent that a philosophy/religion does not make truth claims (even truth claims outside the current or theoretical grasp of science, history, and some other disciplines (interesting question: what qualifies? I won't go into this here)), it does not conflict with science on a foundational level (even as it might discourage science, prevent/disrupt scientific institutional/personal development, or otherwise conflict with it on other levels). Science is not enough to live a fulfilling life - we have narratives, philosophies, and emotional responses to things that are connected to philosophy. There is no need to discard our questions or ideas of meaning when they can coexist neatly with empiricism, and I hold that we cannot actually do so. Even were we to have a complete understanding of human psychology standing on firm pillars of tested theory stretching down through cognitive neuropsychology, chemistry/information theory, and physics, until we invest our own values (even knowing that those values are similarly derived), we remain embedded in subjectivity (whether a delusion or not) that requires something more in order to act.

Recently been chewing on Wittgenstein's argument against private language - while I believe I agree with the premise, the argument seems fairly broken to me. Part of my discomfort is I think the terms relevant to the argument have been laid down in bad places and that on a more ideal fabric, the question would take a different shape or be impossible. That's not uncommon in philosophy though - one often has at least three possible responses to an idea - it is right, it is wrong, it is defined in terms that are either ill-formed or inappropriate. I may offer more concrete objections as I continue to chew on it - for starters, I believe the terms "language" and "understand" should be held differently (ideally in a way more messily-emergent-from-biology than formally-in-a-way-that-feels-like-they-were-plucked-from-Platonic-forms), and I object to his building off of falsifiability as foundation for meaning (structural/definitional statements have meaning too, even as a different one).

Oh Science, Fair!

Pat Gunn — 2010-09-02T20:05:09Z

One suggested activity for the sciency-minded among us: Every week for a month, find a new and interesting question to ask on 「Ask A Biologist」. Post your question and the response(s) to your blog and talk about them.

One of my favourite answers on that site was on a question (not asked my me), "Are viruses alive?" - the answer:

In summary, Jason's orginal question "Are viruses alive?" might be better expressed as "Is 'alive' defined in such a way as to include viruses?" Put that way, it's clear that the question is about definitions rather than facts.