Modus Ponens? Or Modus Tollens?

2008-10-29T09:14:00.002+08:00

Things that have been happening:
Computer asploded
Got a new computer
New computer asploded
Got a new, new computer
Writing an essay for Supervillains and Philosophy (look for it at a bookstore near you, soon!)
Heavily in debt, gonna sell my body for money
Watching Heroes
Playing Changeling
Played Spore
Played a French prostitute
Made fig bruschetta for mock-Iron Chef
Got my driver's license

Things I've been thinking about:
Whether Magneto is blameworthy
Where baby ants go to school (Brian's a jerk)
What the project of metaethics is
The realization relation
Why poop is brown
Whether putting on weight will keep me warm

Things that are yet to pass:
Dragon-slaying
Halloween party
End-of-semester paper-writing-frenzy

2007-07-16T22:32:00.000+08:00

I just realized how much I miss Jake and Extinctor.

People who've been leaving messages on my chatboard, I apologize for the delay in replies. I'll call, I promise, if I have your number.

I'm too brain-asleep right now to write anything halfway meaningful, but not brain-asleep enough to go ahead and write something anyway. So, I'll leave you with the following. Trite as it might be, however much teenagers with pretensions to literacy point to it as their favorite poem, I like it. So bugger off.

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did.

Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone’s any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hoe and then)they
said their nevers and they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt for forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain

- e e cummings

2007-07-09T20:10:00.000+08:00

So it's huge. Really huge. Monstrous. Possessing Gigantor-like proportions.

That's what she said.

Also, Logicmills. Oh. Em. Gee. It's expanded like some sort of ...expanding thing. A duck. It's expanded like a duck.

In other news, Singapore is awesome.

So I've been reading Crime and Punishment, probably in some subconscious attempt at a buffer for when I have to write my paper on continental philosophy. I can see why Ted loves it so much, but I find myself oddly unsympathetic to the plight of the protagonist (if he's even such). The struggles he faces, the torment and the guilt and the bewilderment - it's hard to determine if it's right and good to feel such things.

Should a good person ever feel regret, or guilt, or mental anguish? The Nietzschean ubermensch probably never does. The Randian Roark probably doesn't either. The Catholic saint probably lives an entire life characterized by alot of it. A Buddha transcends it. It's probably not even relevant to a Utilitarian or a Deontologist. What about Aristotle's virtuous man?

I suppose the issue is mired (or quagmired, as it were) in so many other thorny problems that it is hard to get a hard clean look at just what is involved. The large part of this mire seems to me to lie in just how to fit a picture of what is good into an imperfect world, or an imperfect life. It's easy enough to see that a perfectly virtuous man (assuming the relevant moral agent is a space-time worm rather than a slice or point) would never feel regret, because he would do nothing that would be the target of regret. But, what if he does? If you commit an evil act, what happens? Does regret mitigate the evil, or should you let it go, casting it aside as something no longer having power over your character? Or is a virtuous life no longer possible once an act of evil has been performed?

I should go read more. Raskolnikov is fascinating, even if he is alien.

2007-06-29T13:21:00.000+08:00

If rising from electronic-death was a strange kind of time-travelling particle, then call me MISTER TACHYON.

Logicmills has been kind enough to fly me back to Singapore, ostensibly to teach and write stuff for them, but really, I know it's because they love me and can't bear to be without me. So, I'll be back in Singapore from about the 6th of July to the 20th of August. Do send me an email if you think you're somebody I like, because I lost your number with my cellphone, and I would want to hang out with you. If you're weird-looking, lack cellular cohesion, or are a member of an pan-dimensional alien race out to eat my brains, don't call. I'll ...eh, call you.

Also, several things rock. R. Scott Bakker. Dungeon Siege 2. Star Trek: Voyager. Mister Wolinsky. Extinctor. Logicmills. Checkers. Kitties. Organs. And of course, Monique.

2006-11-05T05:46:00.000+08:00

You know it's a good day when you get to start a blog-post with pictures of kittens and a very surprised Brian.

So, we got kittens. They were 18 weeks old, and are now about..20 weeks old, and overwhelmingly cute. They were all freaked out by us when we first got them, but now, they are both affection-whores. They do the little cute-meowing thing when they want to be petted, then they rub at your hand with their heads or noses and make pitiful little sounds, like you're a terrible person if you don't pet them right there or then.

Oh, and they have the best names ever. To understand the significance of the names, it is necessary to first understand several things. Firstly, all three of us who live in the house (not including the kitties) are philosophers. Secondly, there is this odd little thing in philosophy where we like to talk in abstractions rather than concretes. So, for instance, let's say I need to use an example to prove a point. Say, I'm talking about ethics, and whether it is right for some guy to torture another guy. Instead of giving them names like any normal person would, we philosophers tend to assign them numbers with subscripts. The example might go something like this: P1 (where 1 is a subscript) kidnaps P2 at time t1. P1 then proceeds to torture p2 at t2 until tn. At tn+1, p2 escapes. And so on.

So, our kittens are named C1 and C2. C for cat. It's pronounced Cee-Sub-One and Cee-Sub-Two. Or One-y (or Juani) and Twooey for short. Yes, we are awesome.

Aside from the kittens, we've had a huge party for Halloween slash Holly's birthday. Everyone dressed up, and it was pretty damn cool. I had a last minute costume thing, but I thought I made a very credible Jedi Knight. The advantage of being a Jedi is also that you can ask the girls all night if they want to touch your lightsabre. Uh..yes.

The cops showed up to our party because he recieved a call about a noise violation, but he was a really cool cop, which is a change from the usual donut-eating monkeys they put in uniform. But we figured that any party at which a cop shows up is one hella a party. There's another Halloween party thing with the fencers tonight. By all accounts, it's been insane every year, so it should be good.

I have also recently acquired Marvel Ultimate Alliance for the PC, which is consuming my life. Terence, if you're reading this, it's like Legends, but with more people and more awesomeness. I was saving the Asgardian Gods in Act 3, who knows what's happening in Act 5, the final act. I've been happily running around with my team of superheroes: Mister Fantastic is my main guy (and I want to have his babies), I have the Black Panther, the Torch, and either Invisible Woman or Iceman in the last slot. Doctor Strange gets called in for magic duty sometimes too.

Neverwinter Nights 2 is apparently also out, and that's something I'm gonna get too. Really soon. The first one was extremely entertaining, and there is the additional bonus of getting to tool around with such hippies as Lin and Alex and Rob. Who knows what I'll be in this one. Lin has stolen my shadow-type person, and Alex has stolen my cleric-type person. Grr.

The adrenaline of starting school again is also starting to wear down. Writing papers aren't as intensely fun as they were when the semester started. I'm still enjoying myself though, but my neurons are burning out. I need a break. The winter break should be really good - lots of time for NWN2, the Nintendo Wii, Marvel Ultimate Alliance, learning German, teaching Holly Chinese, reading up on quantum mechanics, meeting up with Jo and Charisia and their folks, getting fat from too much sitting around... It's gonna be good.

2006-10-17T00:12:00.000+08:00

We had a philosophy department picnic on Saturday, at Lake Wahburg, which is this pretty little place owned by the University. We kayaked a little, but failed to see any alligators. We also consumed much of Ludwig's world-famous marinated flank steak, really good guacamole, hummus, brownies, Holly's famous chocolate-chip pumpkin muffins.. it was a good day.

Except that we really wanted to swim (uh.. jump off the dock), but there were little cones around saying No Swimming, apparently because no lifeguard was around. So we walk up to the boathouse to ask about a lifeguard, and we were told that "there was something in the water."

Seriously, how scary is that? The entire lake was closed because there was "something in the water." Like... a giant gator? With chainsaw attachments and homicidal instincts? Lasers, even? Or maybe just skin-dissolving parasites. In the end, we didn't get to swim. Boo.

I did get a good conversation in with Carlos and his very pretty wife Maria though. They're both law people, and Maria is working on her dissertation in Spanish, and we got to talking about what justice is, and what the responsibility of the state and the judicial system is. It ended up being the two Columbians and Moti versus me. They were the hardcore socialists, and I was libertarian through and through.

But they did bring up many good points, put more clearly than I have ever heard it put, and argued more convincingly than I have ever encountered. Very roughly, their position was that the purpose of the government and justice system is to distribute resources evenly - what is called distributive justice. So, if you earn alot of money, the state can (and should) take some of that money and use it to help the poor, the hungry, the unfortunate. My position was that the government and justice system should be about protecting property - what I earn is mine, and the government should help ensure no one, not even itself, can take it away from me without my consent. It might be really nice for me to help the less fortunate, but it cannot be the case that the state can compel me to do so against my will. The right kind of justice, on my view, is corrective and protective, not distributive.

A simple thought experiment might serve to draw out intuitions on this issue. Say, you have someone born to a rich family, who then, through inheritance, becomes obscenely rich. On the other hand, you have someone born to a poor family, who is finding it really hard to scratch out even a meagre existence. The socialists would say that the state is justified in taking money from one to give to the other. I say it is never justified - legalized looting is still looting. I will not pay higher taxes just so you can get healthcare you couldn't afford otherwise, so you can have more children, so you can have subsidized housing. If you haven't earned it, these are things you don't deserve, and it cannot be morally right to give someone something he does not deserve, just like it cannot be morally right to withhold from someone something he does deserve.

And now, for something a little lighter - PHILHOUSE, in green!

2006-10-04T00:44:00.000+08:00

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.

[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.

2006-09-18T00:21:00.000+08:00

So, I was traumatized yesterday.

We were playing pool (badly, in my case) at some bar that was supposed to represent the seedy underbelly (or C.D Underbelly, ala drunk Moti) of Gainesville, and I was informed (not for the first time), that I was 'prettier' than Miss Holly Stillman.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm a good looking guy (really, that's so true it's almost analytic). But 'pretty' is just a shot of lethal, lethal estrogen into my system. And while I know I'm cleaner (obviously) than this particular dirty burpin', fartin' hippie girl, that really isn't saying much.

I hereby submit, for your judgement, dear Reader, the following:

Holly versus Jared. Who's prettier? Let the crowd decide.

n.b. This is not a battle of awesomeness. If it was that, Wolv.. uh.. I, would win, hands down.

p.s. Random Brian quote: Cameron Diaz is the only reason why I'm not gay.

2006-09-05T00:51:00.000+08:00

Dum dee dum.

So it's Labor Day over here, which means I get to skip Logic and Neuroscience. And here I am blogging instead of writing my paper.

So apparently my roommates hate me. I know this because, several times, they tell me, "Jared, we hate you." I know it sounds paranoid, but I really think it's true. The primary reason is because I have been starting on papers way before they're due, whereas my hippie roommates are starting pretty much the day before they're due. So I'm usually done with the paper before they start. And then I gloat and I taunt them by doing my Taunting Dance in front of them. After they recover from their throes of laughter, that's when they tell me they hate me.

In other news, I'm just discovered that I have royal blood. I am Prince Jared of Dalaam, an Heir to the throne, a man of Mu, a warrior, a lover, a poet, a monk and a hot piece of ass.

I've been watching way too much MTV recently. My hippie roommates are both obsessed with MTV. Their slack-jawed adulation of the Channel of Satan has, however, a strange pull, and I find myself drawn into the whirlpool, much as a young boy may be drawn into the strange pull of a strange man offering strange candy. Then, much like the young boy, I find myself with a very sore ass afterwards. Luckily, also like that young boy, I have repressed all such memory. La la la. Yes, the Gators won against Southern Mississipi. GO GATORS!

So, several things you must know about the Gators:

1) They were the origin of Gatorade. That's right, that drink you know and love (in most unusual ways, I must say) started right here at the University of Florida, home of the Gators.

2) They have this really cool hat on sale at the bookstore. It's a green thing, with jaws that protrude from your face, to look like a gator. It's awesome, and I want one.

3) The official hand gesture for cheering on a Gator team involves extending your arms, one near the top of your face, the other at your jaw, and then opening and closing them, to look like the jaws of an alligator. Imagine a stadium of 30,000 people all doing that. Makes my happiness glands tingle just thinking about it.

4) Gators eat babies. I eat babies. I heart Gators.

Oh, back to talking about MTV. So, I've been watching Flavor Flave, and Next. In case you, dear Reader, are not conversant with MTV, prepare for your education.

Flavor Flave involves something like 20 mostly ugly women, trying to win the favor of a really ugly man., namely, Flavor Flave. They're bitchy, and mean, and fat, and it's hilarious.

Next involves moderately hot people, sometimes. So, you have 4 girls, and 1 guy (or the other way round). One at a time, the girls approach the guy and try to get him to like them. At any point, he can send them away by yelling "Next!" at which point the next of the 4 girls show up. My roommate and I have agreed that the funniest people are gay people, and black people. Or gay black people.

In keeping with the somewhat random nature of this entry, I will end off with a verse from the Ali G show:

Throw the Jew down the well,
So my country can be free!
You must grab him by the horns,
Then we'll have a big party.

2006-08-28T11:17:00.000+08:00

So, I've been writing my first paper of my graduate school career. It's a paper for a free will seminar, and here it is below. Feel free to read and critique this first draft, I'll probably be working on it over the next few days, and any comments, even if you read only a paragraph or two, is welcome.

On Ayer's Conception of Freedom and Constraint

I. Introduction

In this paper, I will very briefly lay out Ayer’s compatibilist position[1]. I will then proceed to examine Ayer’s characterization of constraint, and work a little to make the concept coherent and useful.

II. Ayer on the Difficulties of Free Will

The core of the position Ayer argues for is that freedom is to be contrasted not with causality, but with constraint. Towards this end, he begins by setting forth the apparent conflict between free will and determinism, and attacks some of the ways other philosophers[2] have attempted to defend the freedom of the will. Ayer’s version of one of the arguments against free will is as follows:

1) If human actions were entirely subject to natural laws, then we could not have done other than what we in fact do, and thus are not free.

2) Human actions are entirely subject to natural laws.

3) Therefore, we could not have done other than what we in fact do, and thus are not free.

Ayer does not explicitly argue for premise 1. He states it as an accepted truth, in fact as the very first line in his paper:

When I am said to have done something of my own free will it is implied that I could have acted otherwise; and it is only when it is believed that I could have acted otherwise that I am held to be morally responsible for what I have done.

There is a rich literature with regards to this, which has come to be known as the Principle of Alternate Possibilities, and the constraints of this paper does not allow me to do justice to it, just as the constraints of Ayer’s paper did not allow him the luxury of further analysis in this direction. In part III of this paper, I will argue that Ayer’s compatibilism comes from him implicitly denying premise 1.

In defense of premise 2, Ayer points out that the search for explanations in both the external, physical world and human behavior has made significant progress, and there has been success in coming up with laws that predict both physical events and human actions. It seems like we have some reason to think that human actions will eventually be revealed to be explainable in the same mechanistic way that the external universe is explainable.

If this argument is successful, then we are not free moral agents, and therefore not morally responsible for our behavior. Free will collapses.

III. Ayer’s Compatibilism

Ayer accepts the truth of determinism, understanding determinism to mean that every event, even human actions, has a cause. If freedom requires that human actions be uncaused, somehow free from the chains of causality, then the existence of free will must be incompatible with the truth of determinism. As Ayer argues:

Now we began with the assumption that freedom, in this sense, is contrasted with causality: so that a man cannot be said to be acting freely if his action is causally determined. But this assumption has led us into difficulties and I now wish to suggest that it is mistaken. For it is not, I think, causality that freedom is to be contrasted with, but constraint.

If Ayer is right and freedom requires not the absence of causation but rather, the absence of constraint, then we can be free even in a deterministic universe. Our actions can be unconstrained even if they are part of an unalterable chain of causal events, and thus free despite determinism. Ayer is denying premise 1 of the argument against free will, rejecting the idea that being subject to natural law denies us our freedom.

It seems to me that Ayer’s entire argument turns on the axle of a coherent characterization of ‘constraint,’ and this is what I will examine next.

IV. On Constraint

For the idea of constraint to work in Ayer’s argument, it has to fulfill several criteria. It has to be shown that constraint is contrasted to freedom, that constraint has causal powers, and that it is a proper subset of cause.

IV.1 Constraint Contrasted to Freedom

Ayer’s argument would fall apart if there was no sense in which freedom could be understood as the absence of constraint. For the argument to work, there must be some way in which constraint could be opposed to freedom.

Ayer argues that there are at least two kinds of constraint that would be relevant here. If there was a constraint that deprived one of the ability to deliberate, then we do not count the agent as acting freely. For instance, a kleptomaniac is not a free agent with respect to his stealing. His kleptomania acts as a constraint upon his actions, and it is precisely because he is thus constrained that we do not consider him free. In this case, constraint counts against freedom in the exact way that suggests they are diametrically opposed.

Constraint, however, does not have to deprive one of choice. If I was forced at gunpoint to perform some act, then it is true that I was constrained, even though I could have chosen to disobey the gunman. In this situation, Ayer argues, I cannot be held morally responsible for my actions.

It seems to me that there is a problem here. It is not at all clear that this case (of choice at gunpoint) involves a lack of freedom. In fact, Ayer dances around talking about freedom at all. He sets out the situation thus:

…if the man points a pistol at my head I may still choose to disobey him: but this does not prevent its being true that if I do fall in with his wishes he can legitimately be said to have compelled me. And if the circumstances are such that no reasonable person would be expected to choose the other alternative, then the action that I am made to do is not one for which I am held to be morally responsible.

At best, all Ayer has shown here, I believe, is that this type of constraint absolves one of moral responsibility. He has not shown that I am not free. After all, it is clearly true that I retain fully the power to choose (to obey the gunman, or to disobey), and it would be a mistake to think that I somehow lack free will.[3] If we think of the will as a rational appetite, as such notaries as Aquinas and Ockham did, then the will’s choosing the better over the worse is its nature, and not a constraint upon it.

There are two ways I think we can go here. We could discard the example of the gunman and restrict the range of situations to those that deprive the agent of choice (or where the agent’s choice does not play any role in his actions), but I suspect that solution owes its attraction to a philosopher’s desire for cleanliness. The alternative is to reformulate Ayer’s concept of freedom as specific to the moral arena. That is, we are interested in freedom only where it is relevant to moral responsibility. Insofar as Ayer has shown that a certain form of constraint exonerates one of moral responsibility, that form of constraint denies freedom in the relevant sense.

IV. 2 Constraint has Causal Powers

For Ayer, constraints are a kind of cause. A causal relationship seems to be the only kind powerful enough to determine the freedom of an action, as Ayer argues constraints as capable of doing. As he puts it:

For it is not when my action has any cause at all, but only when it has a special sort of cause, that it is reckoned not to be free.

Take for instance the case of a kleptomaniac. He feels the compulsion to steal, and he will steal, regardless of his deliberations on that matter. It is because his kleptomania is a constraint upon his decisions and actions that his moral blameworthiness is lessened – in some sense, he is not a free agent. If his kleptomania was not at all causally connected with his actions, then it is hard to see why it would figure into his moral responsibility, as it does.

IV. 3 Constraint as a Proper Subset of Cause

If all causes were constraints, Ayer’s attempt to reconcile freedom and determinism would fail. Recall that Ayer’s argument was based on freedom being understood as being unconstrained rather than uncaused. If all causes were constraints, then the truth of determinism would mean that everything is constrained, which once again denies human freedom.

Showing that there are causes that are not constraints is not a difficult task. Consider ‘choosing to do a happy dance.’ In most circumstances, barring mad scientists and evil aliens, ‘choosing to do a happy dance’ would be the cause of me doing a happy dance. It would be absurd to say that my dancing was not free, because it was caused (by my decision to do so). Clearly, here, we have an instance of a cause that is not a constraint upon my freedom.

Of course, there are causes that are constraints. If my doing a happy dance was the result of hypnosis, then I am not freely dancing, and not morally responsible for any consequences of my happy dance. The cause, in this case hypnosis, is a constraint.

One further consideration stems from our understanding of virtues or vices. We want to think of virtues, such as a habit of generosity, or vices, such as greed, as being at least partial causes in our actions. If, as causes, they were also constraints, then any action taken as a result of a virtue or vice becomes, by definitely, amoral. Praise or blame would suddenly become inappropriate for the habitually virtuous or vicious. The counterintuitive nature of this conclusion should provide good evidence for there being causes that are not constraints.

V. Conclusion

The picture we end up with is something like this: determinism means that all actions and choices are caused, by the motion of molecules and bio-chemicals or our genes or our characters. This is irrelevant to the kind of free will we are interested in, which is intimately connected with moral responsibility. What is relevant is only the small class of causes that count as constraints, which as partial causes of our actions at times deprive us of our freedom.

[1] At least as laid out in Ayer, “Freedom and Necessity.” The position here might not be Ayer’s full, mature position as revealed in the entirety of his works, but it is rich enough to be philosophically interesting and worth analyzing.

[2] He never explicitly names any of these other philosophers (aside from Dr. Johnson), but he probably had in mind such luminaries as Hume and Hobbes.

[3] This is further sharpened if we consider not ‘free will,’ but ‘free choice.’ It is a contradiction to say that I can choose to obey or disobey, and yet not have the power of ‘free choice.’ It might be interesting to note the terminological shift from liberum arbitrium to libertas voluntatis in the thirteenth century.

2006-08-23T00:33:00.000+08:00

So, it's been awhile.

I've spent the last two weeks moving in, getting furniture, doing paperwork, bonding with my housemates, and sitting on my ass. School starts tomorrow, and I'm really, really excited about it. Classes I'm taking this semester: Modern Philosophy (Descartes, Leibnitz, Hobbes), Graduate Logic, and a seminar on Free Will. I'm also teaching assistant for an Intro to Logic class. The free will seminar is gonna rock. I'm planning to blow everyone away with my incredible intellect and my watertight theories... eventually.

My room, and the house, is all starting to come together. I have my bed laying close to the ground in one corner, my very full bookshelf on the opposite wall, my extremely comfortable recliner in the middle of the room. The best part is my computer, which is on a stool/table about 2 feet off the ground. I even got an awesome rolly chair with no legs, so I'm pretty much on the floor. It's weird, and I love it. Now I just need a nice fluffy rug, two flat boxes for my winter clothes, and I'm all set.

The house, and my housemates, are working out nicely too. We got a very nice sofa and loveseat for the living room, enclosing a little nook with the TV and gamecube and nintendo and stuff. Best part of the room, though, are these two pimp chairs we bought. They're like thrones, with high backs, deep polished wooden frames, little wings extending from the back, upholstered in deep blue velvet and backed with red embroidered satin. They're great.

Housemates are funny people. They're not quite the unattractive trolls I envisioned most graduate students to be, though they ARE really dirty. Dirty, like hippies. And God, I hate hippies. It only took us like two days before we were making jokes about my asianness and Holly's german naziness and Brian's incompetence. Even though they're white, and by definition not awesome like ninjas, I just think this might work out.

So, today, I'm gonna go get myself a bike, for travelling to and from class. And also books, because those are tasty with ketchup, much like small children. So, for now, toodles.

2006-08-11T05:15:00.000+08:00

So I'm all set up here in Gainesville, Florida. Got my room, my computer with the brand new 17" LCD monitor, my wireless internet.

Instead of intellectual fodder, I will provide you with amusing tidbits.

1) The lady next to me on the train from Richmond to NC kept reaching under her shirt and rubbing herself. I was very close to asking her what the hell she was doing, but I wondered: Do I say "Why are you touching your boob?" Is "boob" acceptable? Or do I have to say "breast"?

2) The lady who helped me get my social security card today was moderately hot. And I'm glad to say I made her day a little bit better.

3) I managed to forget to write a return address on 4 big boxes of books I mailed, and also miswrote the address as "11th Street" instead of "11th Avenue". According to the mail people, that means I'm screwed like a choir boy.

4) Lammy's dad gets less scary and more cool the more time I spend with him, and the more Lammy isn't around. I think there's an Inverse universal Law to be had somewhere here.

5) My new roommate Brain (NARF!) is way cooler than I thought. And apparently he's not a control freak. Now we just have to wait and see if our last roommate will be hot, or not.

6) Do woodchucks even chuck wood? Or is it just a name? Like goldfish? Or Frank?

7) Girls wear either jeans or very short shorts here in Florida. On a completely unrelated note, demin is so last season.

More later. For now, ....other things.

2006-08-07T08:34:00.000+08:00

Tomorrow, I leave for Gainesville, Florida. It'll be a long train ride. It'll be at least a couple of days before I get my computer set up and the internet thing going, so I'll be offline for a short while.

Now, the rest of this post is gonna be self-indulgent. A little like masturbation. Except in public.

So today I got to talk to a few friends. Some old friends from back in JC, some from college, some fencing people, some kids (my little friends!). This intersected with something I've been mulling over, something Lammy said. I had commented that I had started mumbling in the last few days, and that it was his influence. He remarked, "I didn't think I could influence you."

That set me to wondering if that's the sort of person I appear to be. I tend to be aloof, yes, distant sometimes, mostly not exactly Mister Sympathetic. Sometimes I lose touch, sometimes I'm disinterested, sometimes I'm passionate and excited, sometimes I'm uncontactable. What is the nature of the friendships I form?

(I am perfectly aware that some of my readers here are people I consider friends. So, this is in some part an attempt to vindicate...something. I'm not sure what.)

I think the best kind of friends are the kind that do not need one another. Friendship should not be a giving of alms, or a charitable act of pity. It shouldn't be based on mutual guilt, or common viciousness. It shouldn't involve sacrifice, or compromise, or duty.

Friendships should be based on a kind of exaltation, where there is something so good in the other person that you want to be near it, in the same way one seeks out clear light and clean air. There should be some sort of goodness in the other person, perhaps an integrity of moral character, perhaps a refusal to bend under pressure. Perhaps there are seeds of greatness awaiting, and you receive pleasure from contemplating it. Perhaps you desire to mold the other person in some way, and be molded in return, just as the sculptor's hand is shaped by the clay.

Good friends are the kind of people you hold to the highest standards. There are people who say that best friends are those people you can say anything to, where you don't have to watch what you say. I think that's bullshit. It is strangers I don't care about, and I have little reason to watch what I say to them. Friends, on the other hand, must be worthy of my respect, and you would not speak loosely to one your respected.

Friends are also the people you should be harshest with. The character and growth of strangers is none of your concern, and so, civility is most appropriate there. It is only with friends that one should be angry, or frustrated. It is only with friends that one should care enough about to argue, or fight, or try to convince to change. It is precisely because you care about them that you must hold them to the highest standards. To ignore faults 'because he is a friend' is a horror and an outrage.

Now I'm just blabbering. The bottom line is this:

My friends are the kind of people I would want to face the end of the world with, come fire, come dragons. Not for comfort, but for companionship, for fellowship. Because they are the people who can fight the Apocalypse and win.

So, if you're someone I know and reading this, you know what I expect of you. Better get cracking.

2006-08-01T23:00:00.000+08:00

So Maryland was awesome. Hiking plus doggy plus kitty plus poker plus kebabs plus nintendo (mario? streetfighter!) plus soulcalibur plus family guy movie plus good company plus no capitalization at all in this sentence. Rob has a great family.

What's also awesome in the amount our game progressed in the car trip to Arlington and back to Richmond. We have decided that there would be a certain kind of character whose specialty was linking. Imagine for a moment that you are a Fireweaver, adept at shaping the flows of fire into ribbons and coils of flame. You're not so good at the actual summoning of the energies involved, perhaps, but that's usually okay, because the little you can summon you can twist into all sorts of patterns.

Now, consider another character. He's a kind of Seer, able to see the weaves of force that comprise the world. Most open to the elemental forces of fire, he has learnt to generate massive amounts of energy inside himself, calling forth auras of brilliant flame as defense against sword and arrow. More importantly, he can see the weaves of fire as other people are weaving them. That means, teamed up with the previous character, they would be a nigh unstoppable force. Second person calls up alot of fire energies and feeds it to the first person, who shapes it and releases it in the form of multiple lances of flame. The second person then feeds those weaves again, resulting in BURNINATION!

Now imagine 8 of this second kind of character teamed up. Those aura fires are gonna be insane.

/nerd off

Back to this thing people call "real life". Lammermyre is leaving for LA on August 4th, and I can't go down to Florida until August 7th or 8th, because 1) the house wouldn't really be available, and 2) the train tickets for any earlier are really expensive. So my options are:

a) Keep staying at his place with his dad till the 8th. Problem with that is, it's kinda weird, and his dad is scary. Ask Beth. And food might be an issue, since he's not within walking distance to ANY food.

b) Find someone else to stay with, maybe in Charlottesville. Problem there is that train service from Cville is much more expensive than from Richmond, for some obscure reason. However, I DO get to see old friends and such.

c) Join the Polish mafia. I hear they offer accomodations to Family.

Option C is looking more and more appealing.

2006-07-29T06:11:00.000+08:00

So this post is for Zach.

Here're pictures of the 'stuff'. The bodies have all been well wrapped up, so odor should be minimal.

On that note, I'm off to Maryland for the weekend, where the Robbiness resides.

2006-07-26T23:53:00.000+08:00

Escaping discorporation and flaming death, against all odds, I have arrived, despite the best attempts of sentinel fleets and Russian nuclear warheads and raving demons from Sheogh.

Thank you to Joel and Jem and Johnson and Junyuan and Colin and Hanwen(I just wanted to put the 'J's together) and family, for being at the airport. Thank you, Ernest. Thank you all, for your well-wishes, and your not-so-well wishes, and your downright-evil wishes.

On the other hand, it is good to be back here. Lammermyre (his name until I think of a better one) is trying to get me to play World of Warcraft. So I arrived late last night, and immediately had it forced upon me, like a big fat really ugly German with a small penis forces himself upon a little boy, crying alone in the dark alley. Poor little boy. All he wanted was some food for his family, and medicine for his sick sister.

So, anyway, I made myself a human Warlock named Malagir. Take note of the name: it took us something like a full hour of discussion to come up with it, after discarding such worthy candidates as IPwnz0rXj00 and Nefertitties. Apparently, Malagir was a angsty, emo kid, sensitive and quiet. All his life, his greatest regret was that his family was not all gruesomely murdered in some Scourge raid, and so he had to pretend to the tragic greatness he felt he deserved. Resenting his contented, happy family for their contentment, happiness and lack of general tragedy, he turned to the dark arts, figuring that that's what sensitive poet people do. Dying his hair black and taking the name Malagir (meaning Son of Sickness, in his own made up language loosely based upon a little bit of Elvish and some Gnome), he attached himself to Jethon the mage, and now seeks to die in some terrible accident.

I really don't hate angsty people. I just like making fun of them. And of people in general.

For now, however, like the little boy being raped by the Prussian, I am hungry and must go find food. Food of happiness and delight.

2006-07-24T17:54:00.000+08:00

Goodnight stars and goodnight moon,
I hope to see you very soon.

Farewell, and farewell, and fare you well.

2006-07-23T19:26:00.000+08:00

Ladies and gents, friends, mormons, countrymen, ninjas, beloved reindeer, members of the audience,

I will be leaving the sunny land of Singapura for the wild, untamed Americas on Tuesday, the 25th of July, Anno Domini 2006. The carriage of the skies will depart as the sun rises, at 720am, and will be known by the name United Airlines, and it will touch the groundat 847pm, at Castle Dulles.

What rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethelhem to be born?

2006-07-20T22:58:00.000+08:00

So this is what I saw today. In case you can't read it, it's cherry flavored cranberries. In case you actually wanted cherries anyway, but for some reason are eating cranberries.

In other news, I finally gathered the right conjunction of events such that I got my visa. I'm -finally- leaving for the Americas. Either Monday or Tuesday, the 24th or 25th, 720am, United Airlines. There will be so much debauchery and alcoholism and drugs that I'm not sure I will survive. But it'll be a good kind of dying.

2006-07-18T22:33:00.000+08:00

Gyges is a shepherd, a simple man who dreamt of sheep and little things. One day, there is a great storm, and a bolt of lightning strikes open a fissure upon the earth. When the storm has passed, Gyges wanders into the fissure, curious about its contents. Within, he finds the body of a giant, upon whose finger lies a golden ring. Gyges takes this ring and places it upon his finger, and soon discovers that it gives him the power of invisibility. He quickly arranges to have an audience with the king, whereupon he uses the power of the ring to kill the king and assume his throne. He marries the queen, and becomes the most powerful man in the kingdom.

This is the story from Plato's The Republic, and is supposed to constitute an argument for the superiority of injustice over justice. It is argued that we are just and good only because we cannot get away with being unjust and evil. If we could, we would.

Ask yourself this: Would you rather be a good man, and thought to be evil by all, or would you rather be evil, but thought to be good?

Put another way, if there were no rewards for goodness, but purely punishment, would you be good?

I want to say that the right thing would be to choose goodness, even if there were no rewards, this world or the next. However, I understand the position laid out in the story of the Ring of Gyges is a difficult one to refute. After all, what conceivable reason could we have for being good, if it only brought about disadvantage? I offer here a sketch of an answer, a version of Plato's response.

Plato (famously) said that No evil can come to good men. Taken in the modern context, this seems absurd. After all, we can just look around us and see good men getting cancer and going bankrupt and losing their jobs. We can see evil men with happy families and nice cars.

I think this involves a confusion about what goodness and evil is. A good man, in the full sense, is a man with a good life, not just a good character. The full flourishing human life is one that involves both the virtues of character as well as serendipity in the events of his life. The man who is good of character but hated by everyone, and thought to be evil, is not leading a blessed life. We aspire to be like him only in the sense that we want to develop character traits he has. We do not desire his life. His life is, in the full sense, not good, not blessed, not fully flourishing.

The choice then is clear. We want to be good. We want to lead good lives. Goodness cannot admit evil. It will not. We want a good life, which involves a multitude of things: developing courage and patience and honesty and temperance, having a good family, having loyal friends, sufficient funds, and so on. All these are things to be cultivated; to lose sight of this is the obsession with character traits is a sad, sad, mistake.

Consider, furthermore, that advantage and disadvantage seem to be the wrong kinds of considerations in discussions of virtue. Virtue is a good thing, in the same way happiness is a good thing: simply because it is. We don't want happiness for the sake of something else, happiness is good in itself. Similarly, we don't want virtue for the sake of something else, because virtue is a good in itself. In contrast, we have, for instance, taking medicine, which is something not good for itself, but because it brings about other good things.

So, dear reader, be good. Be courageous, and patient, and honest, and true. Be generous, love your family, have loyal friends. Be good, be good, and no evil can come upon you.

2006-07-17T01:14:00.000+08:00

In reverse chronology, because my trans-temporal galt-constant modulator is malfunctioning.

1) I got my ass whooped good by Ernest at Solitaire Showdown. Don't ask why we're playing. I suspect he's haXX0ring my computer. I don't know why I suck so bad at it.

2) Met Becks and watched a weird French film with Monica Bellucci. The above sentence is deliberately ambiguous. Now you'll never know whether I watched the movie accompanied by a famous Italian actress, or with the metrosexual (former) captain of the English team, or both. Much nudity was had, and we eventually wandered into HMV and got a copy of INVADER ZIM, season 2. Awesome. Gir must have tacos, or he'll explode!

3) Had a good steak dinner with the family. It's one of those weird coffee-shop things, but surprisingly good. It's not the regular Singapore "western food" fare. This is real good stuff. The chilli dog was massive, and the 300grams of rare ribeye was heavenly. Thank God for cows. And fire. Especially fire. Fire deserves to be in bold. For no real good reason.

4) Stayover at chez Link. The usual watching of random stuff, humping, made more amusing by our corkscrew ninja adventure, starring me, Captain Awesome, and Bugger. Our patience was tested as we waited for hours for the Guardian of the Kitchen to fall asleep. From shadow to shadow we then flitted, risking capture and torture for the sake of attaining the Holy Corkscrew. Grapey beverages were had, with me and Bugger sharing a full bottle of happiness. Kirby had a cup too, and Bugger ended up very, very hammered. His subsequent activities will be released in the sequel to the famous gay porn movie, Buggery: Catch your wave.

That's it for now, folks. Gotta go fix my modulator.

That's not a euphemism for what you're thinking. Get your mind out of the gutter. Perverts.

2006-07-13T22:48:00.000+08:00

So all the cool people in the world have been playing Heroes of Might and Magic V recently. Specifically, I have.

So, anyway, I was on the last mission for the good campaign, and I have these huge groups of Paladins and Priests and Archangels, which are the top tier units. To get a sense of how many I have, you can get a maximum of 2 archangels per 7 game turns, and that's after building the right buildings (in this case a cathedral) and having the amount of resources. So I had something like 50 archangels, and a hundred Priests and Paladins, and I was feeling cocky. (A little like when I made a certain bet with Johnson...)

I waltz up to the opponent's base, and charge in without bothering to scout it out, certain of victory.

And I see that the opponent has 400 Pit Lords, which are the evil equivalent of my Archangels. 400 to my 50. They have 3000 Hell Hounds. 3. Frickin. Thousand. Another 1000 imps, 800 or so Nightmares. It was a massacre.

Moral of the story: Sometimes, even being Awesome can't save you from stupidity.

2006-07-12T00:43:00.000+08:00

Strange things happen to me, and I am left to wonder if I am the only person who experiences these things. Every now and then, events in my life would cascade in a pattern, each piece randomly falling into place to form the suggestion of some larger picture. Being the kind of person I am, even such a shadow the possibility of something new to know is irresistable. At least until the next shiny thing comes along.

Recently, the issue seems to be Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. I'm seeing echoes of it everywhere, and the randommest (yay new word) conversations would suddenly involve it. So, in an effort at catharsis, I will blabber a little about it here.

Godel proves that any sufficiently rich system, if consistent, cannot be complete. I use 'consistent' and 'complete' here technically, to mean the following:

A system is consistent if there is no statement within that system that can be proven both true and false.
A system is complete if every statement within that system can be proven either true or false.

Godel's original formulation is as such:
To every ω-consistent recursive class κ of formulae there correspond recursive class signs r, such that neither v Gen r nor Neg(v Gen r) belongs to Flg(κ) (where v is the free variable of r).

Of course, this is incomprehensible gibberish. I am proud to say that there was a point in time when I understood the full proof, but ashamed to say that I can't even remember what Gen refers to.

A better formulation might be this:
Any consistent system (of at least a basic level of complexity) is incomplete.

This means that, for instance, elementary arithmetic is incomplete. There are statements within elementary arithmetic that cannot be proven either true or false, using the rules of elementary arithmetic itself. This applies for just about any system you can imagine. Consider the implications for our self-knowledge, or for AI. Even if we manage to straighten out all the kinks in the works and arrive at a clean, consistent system that represents our minds or an artificial mind, there would be propositions within the system that cannot be shown to be true or false within the system itself! So much for the dream of downloading our consciousnesses into a software replica, to live forever in a digital world. We cannot represent ourselves totally!

Consider the following example; It's a fair translation of Godel's proof into something normal people can understand. To be clear, Godel's proof is far, far, more rigorous, written as it is in first-order logic and mathematics. If you desire to find out more, let me know, I'll be happy to share.

Someone introduces Gödel to a UTM, a machine that is supposed to be a Universal Truth Machine, capable of correctly answering any question at all.
Gödel asks for the program and the circuit design of the UTM. The program may be complicated, but it can only be finitely long. Call the program P(UTM) for Program of the Universal Truth Machine.
Smiling a little, Gödel writes out the following sentence: "The machine constructed on the basis of the program P(UTM) will never say that this sentence is true." Call this sentence G for Gödel. Note that G is equivalent to: "UTM will never say G is true."
Now Gödel laughs his high laugh and asks UTM whether G is true or not.
If UTM says G is true, then "UTM will never say G is true" is false. If "UTM will never say G is true" is false, then G is false (since G = "UTM will never say G is true"). So if UTM says G is true, then G is in fact false, and UTM has made a false statement. So UTM will never say that G is true, since UTM makes only true statements.
We have established that UTM will never say G is true. So "UTM will never say G is true" is in fact a true statement. So G is true (since G = "UTM will never say G is true").
"I know a truth that UTM can never utter," Gödel says. "I know that G is true. UTM is not truly universal."

-Rucker, Infinity and the Mind

It's a little tough to wrap your mind completely around, but if you do, grasping it should feel a little in the nature of a revelation.

2006-07-11T00:38:00.000+08:00

Sunday evening was spent at Ben's place, watching the France-Italy finals. Seeing Zidane get sent off for head-butting was certainly entertaining, but more entertaining was having Zhirong try to describe what a female orgasm involved. More entertainment involving Zhirong involved commandeering his MSN account and professing his love to Charisia. Who promptly logged off in sheer terror, understandably.

Dinner with Zhiming, Andy, David and Junx, and spent most of the time discussing artificial intelligence and the ramifications, as well as the possibility of proof of its existence and nature. It was suggested that it is, in principle, impossible to prove that any AI is exactly like a human intelligence. (I don't know if I got the formulation right) It's clearly an extension of Godel's Incompleteness Proof, which I've mentioned in a previous entry. Using the system of human intelligence, can we ever show that X (where X is a system of AI) is a replica of a system of human intelligence? It seems like there is a proof that it cannot. The implications are mind-boggling.

I was thinking about writing a little about the Incompleteness Proof here, or about the Ring of Gyges, but the hour is late, and the witching hour grows nigh. Not that I have any idea what witches do with all that nigh, but I guess it's important. So, dear reader, I will sign off here with Yeat's The Second Coming, from which I draw the url of this very site. Pay especial (this should be a word) to the last two lines. Enjoy.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-W.B. Yeats

2006-07-09T01:50:00.000+08:00

Band concert was highly entertaining.

I'm friends with a pirate. 'Nuff said.

2006-07-07T16:00:00.000+08:00

Talking to Ilya Farber at Logicmills yesterday resurrected my frustration against reductionism. Here's my angry splashing of my thoughts out upon the electronic world, in the hope that some clearer echo might return.

The Problem
First off, I'm very much attracted to Trenton Merricks' argument for eliminativism. Consider a left glove and a right glove on a table. How many objects are there on that table? A proper answer, it seems, is two -- a left glove, and a right glove. One would be a strange answer -- a pair of gloves. Three would be just completely bizarre -- a left glove, a right glove, AND a pair of gloves. It seems that that bizarreness might spring from our intuitive understanding that 'a pair of gloves' does not exist in the same sense as the individual gloves do. The 'pair of gloves' is, in some sense, just in our heads.

Consider then a regular table, or chair. I point to it, and ask, how many objects are there? We know (I assume more people accept this) that the table is composed of many smaller particles, be they atoms or quarks or whatnot. Let say the table is composed of a zillion atoms. A proper answer might be: a zillion. The 'table' is just like the 'pair of gloves' -- both seem to only have existence in our minds, as a grouping of things. Surely, we cannot say that there are a zillion and one objects there: a zillion atoms, AND a table.

We note that this means everyday objects do not exist. If they have no causal power above and beyond their parts, existence becomes meaningless. Chairs don't exist, tables don't exist, that bus doesn't exist, that building doesn't exist. People, I'll put aside for now. Merricks wants to say that people have causal powers more than the sum of their parts, and therefore exist. I'm not sure where I stand on that though.

On the other hand, I am also very attracted to Aristotle's virtue ethics, which demand the existence of people. His function argument (and the modern version of it, Phillipa Foot's) further demands the existence of hammers and knives and animals. The idea is this: that ethics is about what it is to be a good man. A good hammer hammers well, because the function of hammers is to hammer. A good knife cuts well, because the function of a knife is to cut. The function of a man is to think, be rational, and therefore, a good man thinks well. There is no change in the meaning of 'good' as applied to 'a good oak tree' or 'a good person'.

Clearly, this argument cannot work if there are no such things as hammers or knives, or oak trees. If arete, or telos, can only be applied to people, then we need some other argument to arrive at what it is to be good.

A Sketch of a Solution
Tentatively, I will accept that most (maybe all) things are reducible, either to simple parts or reducible ad infinitum. After all, it seems pretty clear that the 'pair of gloves' really is just left glove plus right glove, and nothing else, just like the table is just Atom 1 + Atom 2 + Atom 3 ... + Atom Zillion, and nothing else. There is no extra weird entity of 'a pair' or 'a table' that pops into existence when you put those parts together.

At the same time, it is not meaningless to talk of tables, and pairs of gloves. After all, if we mean ANYTHING at all by 'exist', we mean that tables exist. We are interested, usually, in what the soccer ball did to that window, rather than the interaction of these zillion atoms on these other zillion atoms. When we seek explanations, we seek explanations about wholes, rather than parts. The whole must have some sort of existence.

Maybe the right way to think about this is that existence an incredibly rich concept, rather than the sad little thing some metaphysicians seem to want it to be. We use it loosely, but when the context changes, the meaning changes. When we say "Quarks exist", we use a different sense of 'exist' from when we say "Democracy exists". Perhaps, democracy can be reduced to the total sum of the concept of democracy held in the brains by all sentient beings, and then further reduced to brain states, and then further reduced to quarks. Perhaps.

But there is something wrong with this process! I still can't put my finger on what exactly it is. Which step fails? Argh.

But for now, tow huey calls. And one does not refuse the siren cry of tow huey.

2006-07-06T00:17:00.000+08:00

Cor meum conturbatum est in me
et formido mortis cecidit super me
Timor et tremor venit super me
et contexit me tenebrae
Et dixit: quis dabit mihi pinnas sicut columbae
et volabo, et requiescam.

My heart is sore pained within me
The fear of death falls upon me
Fear and trembling have seized me
And covered me in darkness
And I say: would that I could have the wings of a dove
That I could fly far, and be at rest.

It's just one of those days. Bad embassy experience in the morning, and NO VISA, followed by some amusing Logicmills stuff and work, and then a very good dinner with the fencing guys. There's something about old friends you haven't seen in a while. And by old I mean like Eunice.

In other news, I am now officially friends with a pirate. *cough* Xuyang *cough* Once Laura and Stephen do the thing they say they might do on their livejournal, then I'll be friends with 3 pirates! It'll be like the Triumvirate of Awesomeness of the High Seas.

Now where are my ninja and zombie and robot buddies? A superhero needs good friends of this sort.

(Ernest and Daniel, the Latin part might be of amusement to both of yall, for different reasons. Enjoy.)

2006-07-04T19:14:00.000+08:00

My flight has been postponed to Tuesday, the 11th of July. That gives me a little more breathing room, but not much. A quick update, more for my sake than for yours. Things left to do:

1) Get an I-20 from UFl. That involves me faxing a form over to them, then calling them and requesting they mail it to me by the fastest method available.

2) Get an exit permit from 6DA. I need to fax my UFl acceptance letter to them, and yell at them and get them to send me the permission slips as soon as possible. Keeping in mind that it is the frikkin Air Force.

3) Get a visa from the the American Embassy. Need to get the previous two items, filling in a bunch of forms and printing them out, and then going to the Embassy for an interview.

4) Sign over shares and power of attorney at Logicmills. This should be really quick.

5) Learning by heart the full lyrics of all Click Five songs. I wanna catch your wave.

2006-07-02T23:16:00.000+08:00

Welcome to another post full of randomly disconnected events, thoughts, ideas and wombats.

(Wombat is a great word. Just like titmouse.)

Major issue right now is this. I have bought my United Airlines plane ticket, to leave Singapore at 720am on Friday, the 7th of July. I have contacted my friends in the States, to pick me up at the airport at the appropriate time. I have figured out more or less how to transport stuff over.

And then, today, while talking to my aunt, I realize I had completely forgotten that I need a visa. A visa, that thing they give you so you can enter America as a student rather than a refugee or a Byzantine whore. As I understand it, post 9-11, the visa application takes over a week to process. A week I don't have. Crud. So, I figured I'll call the embassy tomorrow and see what help they can offer me. Gotta turn on all my charm and animal charisma, and maybe show some leg. Show some hairy, hairy leg.

On a brighter note, the weekend has been awesome. Ran around with Kirby, bought Southpark boxers, considered making dogtags, walked way too much between Bugis and Lavender because Kirby was stubborn, met Hanwen, watched C.R.A.Z.Y., a French movie about a father and his homosexual son. Christian, Raymond, Antoine, Zac et Yvan. C'est un film tres.. unexpected. Mais je l'a (verbe enjoyer). I lose my wallet, then find it, sans cash. As consolation, the lady manager of Orchard Cineleisure gives me a Superman Returns notebook and pen. Awesome. Customer service in Singapore keeps getting better and better.

Then, stayover at Jem's is awesome, as always. Watching the World Cup matches, humping, more watching, humping, sleeping, humping, surfing the net, humping, blog-surfing, humping, playing PS games, humping. I think I gave and received more humpage in 24 hours than I have in all my previous life. That's saying something.

Then, off to Hougang (sit, Colin, sit!) to my gramma's place, then off to seafoodiness. Seafoodiness was good. Very good.

In other news, I have been busy improving relationships between Frog and Flamingo, as well as tiao bo li jian between Cheem Flamingo and Smelly Flamingo. I also agreed to buy vodka for Ernest, He who Pees in Oceans. I have also converted to Mozilla Firefox. In addition, I have decided that my mutant power will be like Adam Warlock's: Being ridiculously... good at stuff. Like ninjas.

Until next time, folks. In the meanwhile,

wombat wombat wombat titmouse badger mushroom whee. rubber ducky you're the one.

2006-06-29T23:33:00.000+08:00

Several points of happiness in the past couple of days:

1) Got back in semi-contact with Zach and Rob and Stephen. Then AIM broke down and I need to redownload another version. Crud.
2) Met up with Shawn and Max, remembered the good ol' 3DA days. Spoke of Max's Yo and Boom Boom Room and Shawn's debut into Cleo's 50 Most Eligible Bachelors. His number is for sale, ladies. Contact me.
3) Finally met Jeremy from Logicmills, and he's actually pretty cool. He's a continental philosopher though, so we might have to laser him at some point.
4) Had a really good Logicmills session at St. Hilda's. There is no delight like shaping intelligent young minds into eventual psychopathic adults. In my own image. It's better than sex.
5) Received a Kirby limited edition Lego Tshirt. Seriously, how awesome is that. I've been lusting after that shirt.

Also, I watched Superman Returns with the aforementioned puffy pink ball of pokemonic phlesh. (I scare myself sometimes). Way too much popcorn was consumed, and my sperm count took a nose dive from the large Mountain Dew. But the movie was great. It has a rather different feel from the other superhero movies, if only in the lack of whininess. Lesser time bitching about how nobody understands me and my powers, I'm blind so I need a hot girlfriend, my parents got killed so now I must flip out and kill everyone leaves more time for heat-visioning random objects, lifting huger and huger things, and streaking around in the sky in red underpants.

I do need to streak around the sky in my underpants. It's liberating. I'll require digital editing though, for the same reasons as in the movie.

On a slightly more intellectual note, I've been re-reading Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. This book should be read by everyone for the same reason why everyone should read at least a little Nietzsche. Because they provide a counterpoint to the Judeo-Christian Puritanical ethics so many of us take for granted. One might not agree with Rand or Nietzsche, but at least one would have a better understanding of why.

The Fountainhead is a fictitious account of a great man. It follows the life of an architect, Howard Roark, as he courses unerringly through life. It is a book that flies in the face of what we are taught in moral education and by culture and parents and friends. Selfishness is a virtue, and selflessness the greatest crime. Man sees God not at his lowest, but at his highest. I'll rest here with two excerpts, both from the Introduction of the book. The first is a glimpse of what the central battle of the book is, and the second an observation that I share.

"...Man-worshippers, in my sense of the term, are those who see man's highest potential and strive to actualize it. The man-haters are those who regard man as a helpless, depraved, contemptible creature -- and struggle never to let him discover otherwise. It is important here to remember that the only direct, introspective knowledge of man anyone possesses is of himself.
More specifically, the essential division between these two camps is: those dedicated to the exaltation of man's self-esteem and the sacredness of his happiness on earth -- and those determined not to allow either to become possible."

"It is not in the nature of man -- nor of any living entity -- to start out by giving up, by spitting in one's own face and damning existence; that requires a process of corruption whose rapidity differs from man to man. Some give up at the first touch of pressure; some sell out; some run down by imperceptible degrees and lose their fire, never knowing when or how they lost it. Then all of these vanish in the vast swamp of their elders who tell them persistently that maturity consists of abandoning one's mind; security, of abandoning one's values; practicality, of losing self-esteem. Yet a few hold on and move on, knowing that that fire is not to be betrayed, learning how to give it shape, purpose and reality. But whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential."

Dear reader, don't lose the fire. Do not go gentle into that good night. Be true. Be true. Be true.

2006-06-26T19:47:00.000+08:00

I think the good life is personal, in the sense that it matters only to you that you lead it. At the same time, others matter, in the sense that one cannot lead a good life with enemies of good men. It might be more accurate, I think, to speak of the blessed life, the truly good life.

I cannot see how the good life necessarily requires the presence of others, however. An oak tree can be a good oak tree without there being any other oak tree in existence. A rock can be a good rock, a lion a good lion, without there being a single other of that thing in the universe. Surely, God can be a good God without other Gods in existence. God can be good even if there is nothing else in existence. Why then think that human beings are so ethically odd that we require others at all?

On another note, a conversation with Terence has got me thinking over the past few days. It's one of those questions that stay with you, that most intelligent beings have pondered at at least some points in their lives: If you were a mutant, what power would you have?

Terence called dibs on control over the elements. Fire, wind, water, earth, metal, (heart! Captain Planet!) and so forth would be his to command. Phoenix, we decided, would have some version of control over forces. Between the two of them, they have control over all the physical world. I called command over possibility, so I can play with things not as they are, but things as they could be.

Several thoughts spring unbidden from this:
1) Just how much control does control over elements and forces give you? Where is the mind, or the spirit, or large social movements? Would the mutant power to control, say, traffic conditions, be a subset of control over elements and forces, or something else altogether?
2) What is our obsession with control? I'm as guilty of it as anyone else, but it is a little odd that our first instinct is to pick powers of control. The mutant power of omniscience would be kinda fun, and very powerful. The mutant power of perfect health (ala Wolverine) would be useful too. How about immortality? Or Forge's power to create things?
3) Sentinels really do suck butt.

Back to the important question. What power would I have if I was a mutant, about to be enrolled in Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters?

Okay, dork alert here. Up ahead is some seriously dorky stuff, and somewhat philosophy dorky at that. If your dork tolerance level is low, please refrain from reading further, lest the Uberdork consume your soul.

Anyway, yes, possibility manipulation. Say, there is one actual world: this one. There are a multitude of possible worlds out there, each one slightly or bizarrely different from this one. If you say 'It is possible that Kennedy didn't get shot,' there is a possible world out there where Kennedy didn't. Usually, these possible worlds are real, in the sense that they aren't actually real. (Shut up, David Lewis! Get off my case!) To be able to locally and temporarily realize (ie make real) these possible worlds would be a highly entertaining mutant power to have.

Consider: Rogue Sentinels attacking civilians? No problem, this rock I'm throwing at them happens to be from possible world 633Beta, where granite has a density of a billion g/cm3, and is highly corrosive to metallic compounds. The other Sentinels shooting at you? No problem here, there are possible worlds where photons have as little effect on matter as neutrinos. Watch the laser beams pass through you and marvel. Marvel, indeed.

Of course, omnipotence is boring. One doesn't just start off knowing immediately which possible world to bring into reality. It takes lots of practice, danger room sessions, and getting yelled at by Wolverine for skipping classes. Mom, Dad, I'm going to Xavier's.

2006-06-21T16:27:00.000+08:00

Talking to Zim the other day reminded me of how messy ethics can be. This post will just be me rambling, putting down thoughts in the faint hope they'll fall into some discernable pattern. Read at your peril.

It is clearly morally wrong to push a stranger onto the path of an oncoming vehicle.
It is clearly not morally wrong to be shoved in such a way that you push a stranger onto the path of an oncoming vehicle.
It is a little less clear where the responsibility lies, for placing oneself in such a position that one could be used as an object to push someone in front of a car.
It is clearly morally wrong to kill someone while in a drugged stupor.
It is clearly not morally wrong to kill someone while in a drugged stupor, when the drugging was not voluntary.
It is a little less clear where responsibility lies, for taking drugs such that one eventually ends up killing someone involuntarily.
Are we responsible only for actions done in full consciousness?
Are we responsible for actions done involuntarily, under the compulsion of external forces?
Are we responsible for placing ourselves in such a position that we can fall under these compulsions?

These whittle away at the 'should implies could' principle of moral judgment. It might be the case that you should perform an act, even if you couldn't, given that you were the one responsible for not being able to perform the act in the first place. If you fail to save a drowning baby because you lost the use of your arms in a freak orgy-related incident, would you be responsible for that failure? Does responsibility carry across, from 'cause of cause' to the cause?

I suspect the answer is (annoyingly) 'sometimes.' There are cases, like the aforementioned one, where intuition pushes us in the direction that you are responsible for the results of your voluntary actions, even when those results might be involuntary and undesired. There are other cases where intuition pushes us the other way. Consider the person who tries to save a drowning baby and accidentally triggers a massive whirlpool that consumes a passing ship. He might be the cause of the multiple deaths on the ship, but surely he is not morally responsible.

The task then is to determine where the line is. When does responsibility carry across, and when does it not?

I think the right move is to discard all this as irrelevant, and return to an Aristotelian/Greek concept of goodness. Moral goodness shouldn't be somehow distinct from goodness in general. A good person, in the full sense, would not be shoved into someone, thus sending him to his untimely automobile death. A good person, in the full sense, would not be drugged by enemies such that he then goes on to commit murder. A good person, in the full sense, would not contract any limb-paralyzing disease from random orgies. A good life is the life free of evils such as these. While issues such as responsibility might be interesting to a lawyer (and involuntary acts to a bio-psychologist), they are ultimately irrelevant in the question of how to lead a good life. We need to live with wisdom, and courage, and the rest will follow.

2006-06-19T21:44:00.000+08:00

I got my first bra today! It's a sports bra, bright green, with a little padding. It's great.

I also have an awesome ninja action figure (not doll!), a flashing penis (uh..genetalia?) cellphone attachment thing, a black dog book (because, apparently, I'm a black dog), a box with a retarded bear, a Hammy hand puppet and plenty of cards. I think the bra might be a little too small though. I'm at least a B.

Carl's Junior, sitting around and deciding on a movie, pool, repairing my mom's MP3 player while listening to the kids play with the electronic keyboard, dinner at Joel's favorite place, Ben and Jerry's, and home. Thanks for a most entertaining day, guys. Between Meikeen trying hard to guess the identity of Kirby, Blackie giggling like a retard and banging tables, Andrew being mocked mercilessly for his love affair with Wisdom, Ernest trying ice-cream for the first time and LIKING IT, Abel being ticklish and writhing like a writhy thing whenever he's poked, it was a good day.

But now I'm tired, and I need my Middle Earth and Xmen fix. I have some thoughts from the conversation I had with Zim about stereotypes that I need to work out and put down into words. Damn feedback loops!

(oh, and Zim, it's Jennifer D'Cotta. It's in my journal.)

2006-06-18T16:30:00.000+08:00

My tagboard is full of freaks. Just thought I'd get that off my chest. Yall are very amusing though, so keep up the entertainment. Some responses:

Peixin: I do think acts can be objectively wrong. But as I argued in premise 1, I think an act cannot be objectively wrong unless the person involved can do otherwise. Perhaps you have a counter-example to offer?

Cherry: Don't sell yourself short. I've read your MI paper, remember?

Rayshio: I think we should not stereotype badly, but still would. I think we should keep stereotyping well. E.g, if you've encountered French people on 800 different occasions and they've all been axe murderers, I think you should prepare to run from the next one you see.

Kirby: Pika!

Keen: My implicit assumption was that if something is not wrong, then it is not the case that one should not do it. That is, ~~R(x) -->~~D(x). Where ~ is not, R is (right), X is the action under scrutiny, D is (one should do).

Sarah : is a pokemon. Sarahmon, I choose you! *throws pokeball on ground*

Terence: Iceman is awesome. Nightcrawler pwns. Cyclops' Leadership + Flawless Tactics make my happiness glands go whee.

blackie: What? Who said something?

Okay, now that aside, the past two days have been rather eventful. Lanning with the guys, which involved me rediscovering the awesome might of a shotgun in close quarters, was amusing, because it reminded me of the time I represented the state in CS tournaments, quite a while ago. After a brief stop at Cold Storage (CS too! w00t), we had dinner at Jem's, which involved vast amounts of pizza (Ernest: "I've never seen this much pizza in my life!"), noodles, wings and onion rings (Ernest again: "NooooOOOOooo!"). Then, some of the guys watched soccer, while the cool ones played mucho XMen, Marvel vs Streetfighter, some Mortal Kombat, and some Winning Eleven.

I kicked butt. Mucho butt was kicked, by me. Yes. Fatalities didn't work so well in MK4, and I learnt some new game, which is more or less than Archon Ultra. I loved it...speaking of which, I should go see if it's on some emulator.

Memorable moments of the rest of the stayover:
1) Playing a 9 point game with Ernest, who gives up after losing 4, then having Weiliang win 5 in a row. But I maintain it's only because I let him.
2) Jeremy going into fits from losing a match in Xmen. I was just about ready to perform a frontal lobotomy.
3) Colin walking around the house with "I heart Tira" drawn in marker on his forehead. The joys of writing on people's faces while they're asleep. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.
4) Ernest being thrown bodily in between Daniel and I, and then quickly being removed by Jeremy when his lack of personal hygiene was revealed.
5) Jiayi capturing pictures of Colin being jumped in bed and humped by Ernest and I.
6) Daniel and Jiayi and their 24-point card games. Squaring should be a legitimate operation.
7) Jeremy losing a bet and having to make out with Suzanne Tan. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.
8) Zhirong tonguing everyone.
9) Climbing the RJ gate, and walking around the place after an 8 year absence. Remembering the places where we used to do banners, have lunch, fence, wait for class. Nostalgia hits hard.
10) Talking to Jem's mom, watching her believe Ernest is a muslim-jew-african.
11) Giggling everytime I look at the lamp in Jem's living room, and am reminded of the worst mutant power ever.

And then, a long bus ride home, fortunately with good company. And then I get home to realize my computer has gone KAPUT. Apparently, that's the sound it made as it gasped its last. Yeah, I was surprised too. So, after realizing that the modem, the USB ports (all 6 of them) and the graphics card were all down, I got my friendly neighborhood computer repairman to get me a new graphics card and send it to my place. Now, the long road to recovering the rest of my computer continues. On the bright side, I have a new Geforce 6600GT. Wheeness.

Oh, and I stumbled upon an old journal of mine, from back in ACPS Primary 6, when I was in love with my English teacher. I was such a dork back then, it's hilarious. Who am I kidding, I still am. Sigh.

Tonight, I'm gonna cook a whole kilogram of beeftail I got the other day, as a sort of Father's Day thing, for my dad. I'm excited, and looking forward to it.

Yargh. I woke up this morning needing to move around and do stuff, but I know the pool, the gym, the track will all be crowded on a Sunday. I really need to fence again.

2006-06-15T23:16:00.000+08:00

There'll be two parts to this post, a brief account of today's events, and a response.

Part I:

Today started off with the need to write. I awoke from a dream of words, which needed to be set down before they faded, as dreams do. Alas, even as speedy as I was, much of it had faded ere I set finger to keyboard, but the tattered remnants, you see in the previous post. I know once again the frustration of Coleridge.

If I could revive within me, that symphony and song
To such deep delight twould win me, that with music loud and long
I would build those domes in air, those fiery domes, those caves of ice!
That all would heard should see them there
And all would cry, Beware! Beware!

After that, it was lunch and off to Gnome-Rayshio's. Flaminjo and I decided to be adventurous and attempt a shortcut to Gnome's place, walking along canals on paths no mortal men hath tread in centuries. Fortunately, we met two seers, wise in the arts of navigation, who guided us unerringly to our destiny.

Much entertainment was had messaging Gnome's friends (who after what we did, might not be friends any longer). There was also a great improvement in his relationship with several young girls. Some listening to random podcast stuff and amusing soundclips, watching Date Movie and Gandalf clutching his wizardly nuts, a very good dinner, watching Paris and Nicole harass firemen, whacking Flaminjo on the head with pillows, stealing Battle of Middle Earth II.

I think Flaminjo smells of dumb, and I think Gnome has boobies.

Part II:

Stereotyping.

Originally meaning the metal plate used to print with, the word now has very negative connotations, of racial violence, of denial of opportunities, of oppression. At its core, I guess to stereotype is to cast further images from a basic mold. One sees a person of a certain race perform an act of theft, for instance, and concludes that all persons of that race are thieves. The question is, is it wrong to stereotype? Let me offer an argument for stereotyping, then refute some of the points in Rayshio's post (http://unwritten-love.blogspot.com/).

Argument: Should implies could
1) It is wrong to do X only if it is possible to not do X.
2) It is not possible (for us as human beings) to not perform acts of stereotyping.
3) Therefore, it is not wrong (for us as human beings) to perform acts of stereotyping.

The validity of the argument should be clear. I'll argue for premise 1 and 2.

In support of premise 1: It is wrong to do X only if it is possible to not do X.
This is the classical 'should implies could' idea. I'm not familiar with much of the territory, but strong support from this should come from intuition. An act cannot be morally wrong unless the agent could have done otherwise. It makes little sense to blame a person for stealing, if he had a psychological defect that compelled him, despite his strongest desires, to take things that did not belong to him. We could blame him for not seeking help, or allowing himself to be in the position where his defect would result in theft, but we cannot blame him for the act of thieving, since he couldn't have done otherwise.

For clarity, another way of putting the proposition is this:
If it is impossible to refrain from doing X, then it cannot be wrong to do X.

Thus, involuntary motions are never blameworthy. If some crazed alien implants a device in your left arm that fires a deadly laser beam whenever you hiccup, you cannot be held resposible for the destruction caused by the weapon, since hiccups are not under your control. It is impossible to refrain from hiccuping (and thus causing death), and therefore, it cannot be morally wrong (blameworthy) for you to hiccup.

That's a really cool weapon, on further thought. I want one. Make that ....two.

In support of premise II: It is not possible (for us as human beings) to not perform acts of stereotyping.
Put another way, it is necessary, as part of our humanness, that we stereotype. We cannot help but stereotype. Consider the following:

You are hungry. You look across this flat wooden thing near you and see a container of soft white grains. What do you do?

I'm tempted to say the above scenario isn't even possible. Once you know what rice is, you can no longer look upon something like that and not categorize it as rice. In either case, to believe that that substance would nourish you and assuage the hunger is to stereotype. It is to say, such stuff has been nourishing in the past, it will be nourishing in this new instance as well. Induction, right here.

Stereotyping, as such, is just induction. And it should be pretty clear it is not possible to not perform induction. To be a human person is to have a mind, and a human mind cannot exist without an inductive inferential structure (or so I declare, because every human mind I've seen has had one. Shut up.) So, to be human is to stereotype. It is necessary for survival, and growth, and flourishing.

Conclusion: It cannot be wrong for us to stereotype. It is unavoidable, and thus cannot be morally blame-worthy.

Refutations:
As I understand it, a large part (the last two paragraphs) of Rayshio's argument is directed at the possibility of making a mistake in stereotyping. That is, that bowl of rice you thought was nourishing (because you stereotyped it) might turn out to be toxic. In that sense, you were incorrect in stereotyping.

I think this is founded on an ambiguity in the application of 'correctness'. Consider the following (slightly more realistic) scenario.

You meet several people from India, and they turn out to be, say, conniving. You lose a bunch of money. From these instances, you conclude that most people from India are conniving. You then meet a person from India, who in fact turns out to be the most honest person this side of the world.

You would be 'incorrect' to have drawn the conclusion that he is conniving, in the sense that the content of your judgment does not correspond to the way reality is. On the other hand, you could be 'correct', in the sense that the previous encounters might be sufficient for a justified judgment. Specifically, a judgment can be justified without being true.

Stereotyping can be justified, even if there are instances where it turns out to produce false conclusions.

Two conclusions come from this:
1) It is false that we should not stereotype, or place people in categories.
2) Stereotyping is justifiable, just like other forms of inferential rule. There are times when it is justified, and times when it is not. It can be done well, or badly.

2006-06-15T12:14:00.000+08:00

Sometimes we wake, words fresh upon our lips and singing like lightning in our minds. Sometimes we are touched with fire.

They say that we begin in darkness
and end in glory but we
lose the way sometimes and we bend
like sunlight does, to the tides.

And yet despite
the newness and the nearness
we (not knowing better)
we fight and we fall and hope is only hope for
what

must lie behind
those hidden paths in bisected air,
slashed pale as fracture,
but such secrets, such secrets there

are given to us without words, perhaps
so we can hear, so we can hear the breakers.

I hear breakers and there is no peace,
there is no peace,
there is no peace, only stillness.

That was carthartic.

2006-06-15T00:34:00.000+08:00

Since this is intended in part as an electronic chronicle of the happenings in my life, here is today, forged into words through the brute power of mind and hand, eye and sinew.

Started off the day playing Minesweeper with Kirby and Rambutanwei, and it was amusing. By amusing, of course, I actually mean the opposite of amusing. See, there were stakes involved. I won myself a movie ticket, so that's good, but I also managed to commit to certain acts that might be construed as, well, homosexual in nature. *sigh* Lesson of the day: Save the cockiness for when you actually have Saint Patrick on your side. Lama Sabathani!

Much stuff was also read today, chiefly Chalmers' Mind, Machines and Mathematics. http://consc.net/papers/penrose.html I might comment on it a little in future posts, after I've had a little time to digest it. Which is just another way of saying that I've completely forgotten Godel's Incompleteness Thing. Sorry Professor Cargile.

Then inspiration struck me, and this blog was born. But of course, you already knew that, in a Bloggo Ergo Sum kind of way. Except, not at all.

2006-06-14T23:16:00.000+08:00

There is something exhibitionistic about this. And then again, I've always been the person who enjoys running around nekkid in the great outdoors.

That said, it is an odd thing, privacy of thought. The content of thought, surely, is private. The content of cognitive processes, and more so perceptual processes, cannot be open to anyone but the corresponding thinker or perceiver. It is not in our power to make the content public. It is more than opening up your room to guests, and merrily inviting them in. It is not enough that one reveals the content to others. The fall from privacy seems to require that these others know that nothing is hidden. Privacy seems to remain even if these others know all there is to know, as long as they do not know they know it all. And this is not possible except to those telepaths among us.

On a side note, Jean Grey is hot, when she's not starting blankly into space and drooling.
Or maybe she's especially hot then.

You're sick, all of you.

The form of thought, however, is observable (The solipsists are crying, but no one else exists anyway). Be it by the Bene Gesserit detection of dilated irises and raised eyebrow, or the Matrix analysis of electrodes-in-brain, thinking is an act. Acts are, by their nature, events. We need not know the nature of these events (and I can hear the dualists rejoice even here, separately from their bodies which are also performing rejoicing motions), but merely their existence. One cannot keep the existence of thought private.

It seems then that my exhibitionistic streak is not to be appeased. I cannot make public anything that was private. All I can do is reveal a little of the workings of the Great Machinery, and perhaps bring light to the cogs and gears and oscillators that function within.

And wow. I need practice writing. It's been too long.