That's me napping, after a crazy two weeks. Holly snuck in and took the pictures. I'm plotting my vengeance as we speak. I think I'll sneak into her room and take pictures of her as she's doing her daily naked dance. They will be posted.

Two papers due in one week is not funny. Especially when one of them is on Descartes the assclown, who, despite being rather intelligent, decides to spread his writings on the intellect and the will among various letters in addition to the Meditations, resulting in me having to look them up for the paper. Jerk. But in my paper, I got to prove that Joe (a random person Pereboom talks about) doesn't exist. Fun-ness.

Also, we had a crazy party on Friday, aptly named the Philhouse Soiree. (Phil-house, philosophy house, because it's us three philosophy grad students living together...get it?) We had about 40 people show up, lots of booze for those who drink, lots of gamecube for those who don't. The fencers also showed up, and I discovered (to my delight) that Steve was just like me, with respect to being awesome at fighting games and sucking at everything else. And he plays Soulcalibur. Whee.

Oh, and these two russian girls (maybe three) were definitely hitting on Brian and I. They kept trying to get Brian and I to make out, the whole time they were at the party. Oh yeah, they wanted us bad.

I've also been reading too many comics instead of writing my papers. It's Terences fault, for introducing me to Dee Cee Plus Plus. Oh, and Terence, you should check out Annihilation. The artwork is pretty, and if you're into ridiculously superpowered beings duking it out, this is awesome. Some of the most powerful beings in the universe get together to stop Annihilus.

Another good one is the MarvelX series - EarthX, UniverseX, and ParadiseX. It's an insane epic, where Reed Richards accidently awakens the cosmic seed in everyone, so everyone has powers, and the world is changing massively. It's deeper than alot of the other stuff, just because it's longer and has time to develop, I guess.

In other news, we've had a spate of very successful culinary adventures recently. I made an awesome beef stew, Holly did some tasty tasty grilled ham and cheese on rye with potato soup, Brian made chilli with Killian's Red, it was all good. I'm gonna have to break out the basil soon before it stops being 'fresh basil' and starts being 'gross black goo.'


And with that, I'm back to working on my paper. Just so yall have a sense of what it is I do, here's an excerpt - delightful, ain't it?


Consider the two billiard balls A and B we were discussing earlier. A hits B, and B rolls away. There is a microphysical causal explanation for this, which tracks the token microphysical causal powers L₁ through L_x possessed by the microphysical bits[1] A₁ through A_n. According to Pereboom, there is a token higher-level causal power H, such that H is constituted wholly by L₁ through L_x, but it not identical to them. H, in this example, might be the power to cause B to move at velocity v.. H, obviously, cannot be attached to any particular one of the microphysical bits A₁ through A_n, since one of these atomic bits, by itself, has the power to cause B to move at velocity v. In addition, since the object-causal-power relation cannot hold many-one, H cannot be attached to multiple members of the set A₁ through A_n. H, however, cannot float free. There must then be an entity to which this higher-level causal power attaches. The natural choice would be A: it is the ball A that possesses the causal power H, to cause ball B to move at velocity v.

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[1] “Bits” is, of course, not a scientific term. I use it here to distance myself from theory-loaded words like atoms or strings or quarks. I use it to mean something like the ‘atoms’ of Democritus rather than the atoms of modern science, by which I mean simple parts that remain at the highest level of decomposition of physical objects. My argument is not committed to the existence of simples, however, and if modern science were to discover that there were no simples, my argument could nevertheless stand with minimal modification.