More Blogs Elsewhere

I am experimenting with different blogging sites. This one (http://nonismo.wordpress.com/) has a more pleasant interface. Of course I am grateful to Blogger for giving me this space. I am leaning toward wordpress because of their text editor. I also feel a little iffy about these ads I introduced into this blogger blog as an experiment. Lord knows I 'm not being read enough to make anything from these ads. And yet I don't want to shut them down. I get interesting things in the mail thereby (but not money --blah!)

secretion

being and/or thingness. discuss.

abstraction. what is abstraction? what are concepts?

concepts are concepts. they are their own form of being. all intelligible being is conceptual being.

but intelligible being is so mixed w/ sensual and emotion being that we do not see the difference. we experience a fusion. only dialectic can reveal this dual-nature of human experience.

the subject-object divide is a practical but illusory dichotomy. but so is the illusion-reality dichotomy. dialectic is a snake that swallows its own tail. still, a worthwhile residue remains.

wisdom is there. wisdom is findable. knock and it shall be answered. mysticism isn't necessary. the betrayal of reason isn't necessary.

1. most don't think w/ any intensity.
2. those who do must.
3. they must as the painter must paint.
4. concept is an art form.
5. clarity is one goal.
6. significance is another.
7. generality is another.
8. what is the conceptual skeleton of human reality/experience?
9. thats the task.
10. thats the sculpture.
11. thought as sculpture.
12. number is rarefied word.
13. mathematics is a game w/. indeterminate being.
14. the sacred heart of jesus is a profound symbol.
15. we are dealing with the heart and not the brain.
16. the brain creates the symbol of the heart.
17. all symbolism implies the brain.
18. the "brain" is just a biological symbol for Concept.
19. conceptualism is NOT idealism.
20. concept is the intelligible structure of monism.
21. concepts exist systematically, as part of ONE system.
22. we experience as embodied whats a unified system of intelligibility.
23. the real is rational. the intelligible real is rational.
24. the non-conceptual is tied up w/ the conceptual. we feel and then we name and describe these feelings with abstractions.
25. abstractions are universals.
26. concept is prior to time.
27. concept is prior to every THING.
28. thingness is conceptual.
29. thingness is unification.
30. unity is utterly prior to human thought.
31. human thought is unification.
32. humanity is an abstraction/concept.
33. thought is an abstraction/concept.
34. concept is an abstraction/concept.
35. what most folks think about least, perhaps, is thinking itself.
36. therefore our confusion.
37. we don't step back far enough.
38. know yourself. philosophy as self-consciousness.
39. wisdom is a matter of self-consciousness.
40. nomen est numen. naming is knowing. rumplestilskin.
41. i can type all i want. only a few will understand me. only those who care about clarity of thought.
42. some are sensitive to spatial form (sculpture and painting).
43. some are sensitive to sonic form. (music).
44. others are sensitive to conceptual form. (philosophy)
45. narrative is a mix of all of these.
46. in music, the theme is a character.
47. movies give us sound/image/concept simultaneously. the holy trinity.
48. the philosopher clarifies/improves the intelligible structure of human experience.
49. profound philosophy, the best kind, intersects with religion and art.
50. it is the task of philosophy to describe the task of philosophy.
51. philosophy is the root conceptual science. the buck stops here.
52. philosophy must explain the relationship of religion, art, and philosophy.
53. philosophy is the science of science.
54. the word science could and should mean more than it does generally.
55. we have a narrow view of reality.
56. our view of reality is our reality.
57. without leaving our chair, we can change our reality by THINKING.
58. the subject-object dichotomy obscures this.
59. reality/experience is naked. if we are blind to it, it's because we are addicted to vanities, confusions.
60. these confusions simultaneously flatter and limit us.
61. we can't see too far beyond money and sensual pleasure.
62. we dance sentimentally around a golden calf.
63. ok, so i exaggerate. especially in the case of the quality live-wires in my life.
64. but generally, no one sees reality as a miracle.
65. we are blind enough to be bored. and we are blind enough to not see this boredom as blindness.
66. feeding, breeding, and spending. that's America. most of America.
67. As to using our bodies or minds -- we leave that to Mr. Walton & sons.

religion

Some philosophy I personally couldn't call religion, and some religion is little or nothing like philosophy.

At the moment, though, I consider my current philosophy as something that simultaneously fulfills a religious purpose.

For others like me who can't abide the notion of the supernatural (and are even skeptical perhaps as to what "natural" is really supposed to mean) my perspective may be of value.

I don't a person has to betray "reason" in the least to have that joy that religion promises.

Blake stressed that men don't get into heaven by curbing their passions but rather by organizing their minds. (Blake was a profound philosopher, but are his annotations even noticed? Does our modern allergy to our Christian heritage make us blind to some of our great writers?)

Blake is something like Nietzsche, except that Blake was wiser and brighter. He reacted against the same godlessness. But instead of forbidding pity, he warned of the dangers of self-righteousness. He saw that much that went by the name of religion was nothing but this self-righteousness. He saw that passion was the foundation of joy, and also that the weak in courage are the strong in cunning.

Now Blake saw men as mental travelers who passed thru states. So to be weak in courage is a state that humans get stuck in. Courage for what? Courage to love, to risk the wound of love --that which the crucifixion symbolizes.

We dodge this love with all the cleverness that humans are capable of. We invent secret handshakes, build our exclusive buildings, be they skyscrapers or cathedrals. We learn to use a complicated and intimidating jargon to convince ourselves that we are somehow wise even as we are unsatisfied, anxious, angry.
Well, the world abounds in scapegoats. Indeed, there is much to accuse. The atheist has a good case against the religious hypocrite. The communist and the capitalist are both right on certain issues. The conspiracy theorist has his secret group behind the scenes. The less materialistic intellectual can blame a more-materialistic less-intellectual majority for letting society rot. But all of us are tangled in the goods and money. Drug money. Bomb money. High interest money. The food at the grocery store...

Ineffable

I suggest that thought is composed of universals which are simultaneously unities. Proper nouns are an exception. But these are still unities, if not universals.

If we zoom out and try to unify all the universals of thought, in other words consider all unities as a unity, we run into certain complications. If this attempt to include all experience is an object of thought, we can quickly ask who is thinking about this master-unity. Soon we have to consider this master-unity as its own audience, which pushes us back toward dualism. And yet this unity is by definition the concept of all concepts. So we are forced to think of it as dynamic. The concepts are all connected. A system of differences. Organized like a network. Within this system are concepts of the world, the body, and the concept of this system itself. The master-concept is a snake with its tail in its mouth. A self-eating self-shitting system of concepts which is in direct contact (?) with the ineffable. The ineffable is sensation (inner and outer), and emotion. This is stuff that painters and musicians work with. Or chefs and perfumers. And the sense of touch is not to be despised. The system of concepts includes the universals that allow us to name objects, have long distance conversations on a forum.
These thoughts are discrete. Singular nouns that we can iterate for plurality. But we seem to think in ones. And yet physics suggests that molecules are just about everywhere on earth. Scientific reality is continuous. And I think that sensation is largely continuous, while admitting that the visual field is automatically broken up into pieces.
The ineffable seems continuous. Language, including all of our philosophy and religion, seems discrete. Our abstractions are small in the face of life. And yet I can't offer a large abstraction to prove this. It's a value judgment or something. I experience a feeling that all my art and philosophy is dwarfed by the ineffable human experience, which largely eludes our discourse.

Words

1. We can all find something different in the TLP.
2. After all, it's style is mysterious, really.
3. It seems to negate itself, while yet claiming to have solved the more pressing problems of philosophy.
4. I'm not going to play the professional here.
5. A person must simply read it.
6. My comments are just an informal perspective.
7. I feel that it tells us that whatever we know, it doesn't really explain anything.
8. Our language is a system of relationships. But within what that cannot itself be said, do these relationships exist?
9. My informal interpretation of "the real is rational" is directly connected to the "limits of my language are the limits of my world."
10. What this is all about, in my opinion, is that it's trying to make us aware of certain dualities that we take for granted.
11. We say we are talking about the world, but our words refer to other words. And this "world" is a word.
12. We talk about the transcendence of thought, but this transcendence is itself a thought.
13. We talk about the world beyond our human minds, but this talk is within our human mind.
14. But what or where is this human mind we talk of?
15. We draw the line between the world and the mind with language.
16. But we can always talk and think in a different way.
17. For practical reasons, we think of the self as if contained in a body.
18. And yet our experience of life is the experience not only of our bodies, but of a world.
19. And within this world we experience other human beings who also use our language.
20. And this language allows us to be in one another's head, even if imperfectly.
21. Because the law protects our bodies and our property, we tend to think of the self as body and property. This is much easier as far as the paperwork goes.
22. We think of the world as it was before we were born. But we can only think this way after we are born.
23. We think of the world as it will be when we are dead, but we can only think this way when we are not yet dead.
24. Any version of God that fits snugly within our language is just not big enough.
25. We make and break words all the time.
26. None of our sentences are essential.
27. None of our distinctions are logically necessary.

Raw Feels

Ok, we philosopher want something to chew on, right? So what is this "qualia" stuff? Is there a better word?

We know already, right? That pain is a private experience, except as we translate it into words, grimaces, wails, expenditures, dances.

And the love poems capture love? Or do they remind us? Inspire a vivid memory? Or a vivid fantasy?

"Why does he care?"

Because we are all already there. It's a low cost entertainment, to simply pay close attention to the sensual we are immersed in, but often neglect to notice.

Because science can offer us all sorts of technology, which is great, when we aren't destroying ourselves with it. But neither science nor theology nor abstract thought of any kind can replace sensation/emotion or even say much about it. It just is.

"I am what I am." A good line. But it doesn't apply to you-know-who unless we are to understand you-know-who to be this irreducible reality we are immersed in. And even if we were to view things this way, that would still be just an abstraction, and not touch emotion/sensation as experienced.

Obviously, technology seeks to increase our pleasure. Even if only by making us feel safer by increasing the threat to our enemies. Our conscious motives seem to trace back to emotion. We have words for these emotions which of course are not these emotions themselves. Or I personally can't see how they are the same thing.

"The real is rational" says Hegel. Well, the intelligible real is lingual. I will grant him, and others, that. But there is something we cannot directly communicate which is with us all the time, admitting that we can concentrate on our abstractions until the sense-emotion element is in the background of "consciousness."

By the way, what the hell is "consciousness"?

It's my feeling/thought that some of the most obvious aspects of our "existence" remain not only unexplained but unexplainable. Yes, I know that f = ma and e =mc^2 and various other equations and that there's this nifty little organ called the brain. But I also know that I experience all of these abstractions as merely one "layer" of my existence, and I suspect it's the same for all.

Keats said "oh for a life of sensations rather than thoughts." I always thought that was strange. I feel I am closer to understanding him. Not that I don't love thought, but perhaps he was more tuned in to his sensations and emotions than most.

Perhaps I think that many of us, and certainly myself at times, are richer than we realize. I am suggesting that advertisement (to mention just one factor) has us generally coveting abstractions, the mere symbols of status, at the expense of noticing the sensual wealth we are immersed in, especially if we are lucky enough to live in relative safety and comfort.

We crowd our museums with aesthetic treasures. These treasures are transported in armored cars. I love art, but I also see the danger in this kind of structure. Before long, we have an implication that beauty is one more commodity. One must at least travel to some secure building to gaze on official beauty. Because the commercials and the museums assure us that beauty is never free.

Religions tell us that the good consists in certain beliefs, duties, and abstinences. Science has little or nothing to say about beauty, so far as I can tell. The artist sends a mixed message. Because s/he produces and sells objects of beauty. Other artists might be interpreted as trying to "open our eyes" to the beauty all around us. I don't know if this is the intention of the color-field painters, but this is one possible message to take away from them.

Redness is. Warmth is. A smile is. Harmony is. Does Heidegger have anything to say about this?

To talk about "raw feels" is already to move away from them. "They" are what "they" are.

AIT

There is a proto-logic, an ur-logic.

Notation is contingent.

We can symbolize numbers, for instance, both with different glyphs and/or in different bases. (And also different phonemes, of course). Still, we have same integers, all with a distance of unity between them. (A non tempered number system would be almost useless for ordinary purposes, and extremely counter intuitional.)

To consider whether a statement is true or false, we must consider it as a unity.

Indeed, thought in general is the unification of lesser unities. With math and formal logic, we see thought at its most discrete.
With a book like Finnegans Wake, we see thought/language at its least discrete. Which is presumably the point ("the abnihilisation of the etym.")

The word "transcendental" is self-canceling when followed to its logical conclusion. If experience is structured, then concepts like "unstructured experience" are one more example of structured experience.

Kronecker is a fascinating character. It's too hard to find information on the man. "God created the integers. The rest is the work of man." He was a proponent of finitism. He was quite the student of philosophy, and not just a math man. He was suspicious of the work of Cantor. He teased the man who proved pi transcendental by calling his proof elegant but also a waste of time. As pi did not exist.

Last night an amusing parallel occurred to me. As we calculate the digits of a transcendental number, each calculated digit gives us information that is one tenth as significant as the digit before. The closer we get to the limit, the slower we are moving toward it. This reminds me of acceleration towards the speed of light. As an object accelerates toward C, it gains mass, and this means an infinite amount of energy would be required to accelerate the speed of light. In the same way, an infinite number of calculations would be required to exactly calculate the digits of pi or e.

Pi does not exist, then. Only approximations of pi exists. Of course the Greek letter exists, and "pi" exists as a useful symbol, but this symbol points toward an impossibility. We cannot know a transcendental number in its fullness, no matter what integer base we use. If we calculate a trillion digits, we should think of these same trillion digits in relation to infinity, which would make them equivalent to zero digits. Any finite number divided by infinity is zero.

If I approve of finitism, then why do I speak of infinity? Infinity is an algorithm! And so is pi, and e. The notion of the infinite is where math touches Zeno and philosophy. Mathematics is a perfect zone for the examination of the so-called transcendental.

I have argued, never denying my many influences, that beings are unities. This is why math is philosophical. The notion of unity, of the One is crucial, in my opinion. We experience the world as a collection of objects. And this collection is itself an object. And by object I mean unity.

We can consider the bicycle as a unity, or zoom in and consider the chain on this bicycle as a unity. We can look at an individual animal or zoom out and consider the species. I have heard the word holon used for this Russian doll concept.

We can look at molecules, or zoom in and look at atoms. And we can zoom in even further and look at subatomic particles.

If mathematics is the grammar of nature, and mathematics is essentially discrete (despite the brilliant attempts of calculus to overcome this), we see that nature must, for human beings, be discrete, at least insofar as it is an object of thought.
This is obvious even in the fact that we unify nature with the name/concept "Nature."

Thinking is always this way.

"Science is what we can teach a computer to do." Donald Knuth.

Questions of ethics are obviously important to human life, and indeed they are associated with the philosophical tradition.

Still, I can't help feeling that ethics are philosophically off-center. Does it really require a philosopher to "do" ethics, if ethics are central to all social life? There's something questionable here. I'm suspicious of a science of ethics. Can philosophy, on the subject of ethics, transcend opinion?

Of course one can call all philosophy a matter of opinion. And philosophy is much like literature. This hasn't kept me from moving away from the obviously literary toward philosophy that addresses the "structure of structure" or, in other words, the shape of thought. (Science of science is another excellent description for the same thing.)

Mathematics has gripped me precisely because it is universal, and does transcend opinion, or at least it transcends opinion as much as this transcendence is possible. This is not to deny that their are debates in mathematics, but the core is largely not debated. The integers are there, no matter what base or glyphs or phonemes one prefers. And the primes are there. Number theory is fascinating because this is math that feeds not on nature but on itself. To use calculus to study the distribution of primes, rather than the instantaneously acceleration of rockets, is fascinating.

Mathematics is also the collision of the perfectly finite with the perfectly infinite --admitting that this "infinite" is a somewhat paradoxical concept.

Set theory is math that concentrates on unification pure and simple. The grouping of groups. Badiou fascinates me, but I have not bought his book. There are too many good books out there. This is why libraries are such a great idea. Rather than each of us buying 100 of the same books, 100 of us can each buy 1 percent of a hundred different books. But the library in my city is lazy about buying recent philosophy books. How it annoys me that so few read philosophy! That so few care! I do feel a certain rage at the general thoughtlessness ....

Wittgenstein was right to focus where he focused. It doesn't matter whether one agrees with each of his statements. He saw that philosophy can easily be absorbed in a bad way by psychology. Philosophy in the ideal sense is more central than a "science" like psychology. If philosophy is the science of science, it must keep to the center. Empirical specialists have different concerns the philosopher. The politician is applied ethics, for instance. The physicists aren't looking to Aristotle. But the philosopher does still have a use for Aristotle. The accident and essence distinction is the presentation of a "law" of thought. We do think in terms of accident and essence. And this is a contingent revelation of the proto-logic. Accident is simply that which is not part of the abstract unity of an abstract class. Accident and essence have everything to do with set theory.

I blog for the few who might be interested in this aspect of philosophy. I would be happy to discuss these ideas with those who have a real interest and not just an aggressive vanity. I don't mind sincere disagreement. I simply despise a trait that I myself have been a carrier of, which is a tendency to contradict from a motive of vanity. Vanity and envy are always with us. Except when the beauty of the universal makes us utterly forget them.













Infinity is a direction. Positive infinity is a direction down the number line, which has a potential infinity.



If we consider a word like "if," we see we are dealing with a word that is not so easy to define.

Does this not also apply to a word like "not"?

And the question mark: does not this too say something strange?

This leaves us with "and" and "or" which are used in everyday speech in several ways. But of course they do also have a strict logical use which identical to one, in each case, of their everyday uses.

All is this is well known to a student of logic. We also could mention words like "some, " "all," or "none."

Words like this have a meaning entirely different from the meaning of a word like "dog" or "run."

We can use these words to get a peek at the proto-logic.

But remember, it is the opinion of this guy that notation is contingent. And phonemes too are contingent. Or in other words accidental. The word "if" has an essence that has nothing to do with the roman letters that represent it or the way these letters are pronounced in English. I feel that it's safe to assume that any human language must have a word that functions like "if" does in English.

If we examine computer programming language, we see a few basic necessary concepts, and if is one of these, and perhaps, w/ "goto" (the basic ingredient of loops), the most crucial programming concept. I suppose variables are also a contender for this spot. With variables and "goto" statements alone we can create significant and productive loops. This I admit. But without "if" statements, a program has ZERO flexibility. With "if" statements, one program can do anything than programs in general are capable of.

Structured program makes "goto" statements taboo not because they are unnecessary but only because these same structured programming languages provide one with more sophisticated looping structures. The do-while structure is a loop with taste, a loop with restraint. The goto statement is the all purpose tool of the anarchist. The goto statement is the teenage boy of looping structures, and in more complicated programs is often the cause of spaghetti algorithms.

Algorithms are a crucial modern concept, as the modern world is currently guided by algorithms. But not one in ten humans are clear as to the nature of algorithms. What are they? Systems of precise instructions, that include the manipulation of variables within conditional loops. Of course we cannot exclude the input and output procedures that make them useful in the first place.

A number like e can only be approximated. This same number e is also known as the exponential function. It's amusing that the approximation of the such of number is achieved, digit by digit, with an exponentially decreasing amount of precision. In base-10, the 5th digit is only a tenth as precise or significant as the 4th.

We use base ten. Can we imagine base infinity? We would need an infinite number of glyphs. And this would require an infinite memory. So base infinity is a thought experiment. Base 1000 is certainly possible, if absurd.

The advantage of smaller bases is that they provide for the possibility of algorithms. When we multiply large numbers, for instance, we use an algorithm. We break multiplication down to small multiplications, to the kind we memorize in grade school. 7 times 9, and so on. We then "carry," move the decimal point, etc.
To double any binary number requires only the addition of a zero. This is similar to taking any number in base-10 times ten.


AIG, or algorithmic information theory, is something special. I read Chaitin's Meta-math again and was more impressed this time than last, as I was more prepared.

Comprehension is compression. A natural "law" is useful to the degree that it compresses information. We need only look at computers to see this idea in its full potency. The compression of picture and music files is only possible because of repetitions within the constituent bits of these files. A program that calculated the digits of pi could be infinitely shorter than an "algorithm" that presented omega.

Stuffing

I share these ideas with whoever can use them. These are debris from my "spiritual" journey. For the most part, they are stolen, borrowed, assimilated, cherished, passed along....

First, the self-fetish. It's all about me. My greatness. My superiority. Your failure is my success! We impose self-flattering distinctions between the self and the other. But!

To go right after the ego and make the ego a "sin" is too often one more version of the self-fetish. I'm more ego-less than thou. There are so many convoluted ways to play this game. I've probably tried them all. (I'm more self-depreciating than thou!)

The anxiety of influence. The desire to make one's name. But what is one's name? The beauty of some of this math made me forget I ever fancied myself a writer. When I did write, it was joy exhaust. I just wanted to share the ideas out of some simple love for them. I felt no lust to play the math whiz, as the mountains of math seemed topless. It was sculpture made of pure form, absolute form. It's harder than stone. Perfectly beautiful. And you can carry it in your head...

I'm no angel. Who isn't proud at times of the road they've traveled, of the books they not only read but more importantly digested, truly assimilated. Granted. But it's not always a parade. Because we are taught an idolatry of famous thinkers and of the famous in general, the reference to one of these names is experienced by some as a sort of incantation --which is sometimes threatening. They perceive that a distinction is possibly being drawn between them and the other who is drawing it. The ins and the outs. The oldest game in town.

But to deny that it takes some time is also not feasible. We are dependent on books in many ways. I vote that we praise the book as great and love the man as the vessel through which these ideas flowed and gracefully expressed.

1. I'm thinking of trying to move toward private messaging as far as this forum goes.
2. I expect there is less posturing involved as the privacy ups the seriousness of the words exchanged.
3. Maybe we are less tempted to role play for the public at large.
4. I start some thread about the fundamentals of mathematics --a Kantian sort of thing --and some little turd can't shut up about his homework.
5. That little turd is me in another life. That's what makes it worse.
6. I praise someone's intelligence and someone uninvolved, presumably envious of such praise, interrupts to attack self-education. Claiming a great education himself.
7. It was wasted on him, or...
8. He's yet another insane person on planet Earth, who believes his lies.

7. I know this is wrong. It's my "official" position that we are all connected to one another's vices and virtues. In theory, I believe in forgiveness.
8. But this person reminds me of what Jung would call the devouring mother...which symbolizes everything earthbound, reductive, cramped. I hate humidity and I hate


1. Once again I'm going to try to forget the haters, including myself.
2. It's about the ideas!
3. Don't hate on my numbers.
4. Unity is only trivial if you are counting with rather than thinking about numbers.
5. We use our hands everyday without appreciating their beauty.
6. It's the same with unity, with "not, if, and, or," etc.
7. How sharp is the point at the top of a cone, an imagined cone? Is it infinitely sharp?
8. George Cantor's work is GREAT ART made of pure thought. And, sure, a few sweet glyphs.
9. I'm done with starting threads for now. I'm going to blog about whatever lifts me out the hatred and misery too common on planet Earth.
10. If anyone is amused by or attracted to any of these ideas, they can private message me for a conversation on any particular point.
11. I don't claim them. They claim me.
12. The good stuff cannot be claimed or caged. It belongs to no one and everyone.
13. It's tempting to try to cage up "god" or "wisdom" or "truth" and to put a crown on one's head.
14. Screw that.
15. And screw the lack of enthusiasm/joy that pretends to wisdom.
16. Just to make this clear, it's not my intention to pose as some math whiz, or to mystify with the few poetic equations I have learned.
17. In fact, it's just the opposite. I hate that math is seen as sterile, dry, difficult, hard work.
18. Some math is indeed hard work. Some of it is dreary.
19. I'll leave the drudgery to computers, or to those who just like it.
20. I want the lovely essence of it. I want the depth of it.
21. The essence of calculus is simple and ridiculously poetic.
22. In 8th grade we learned about the infinite series in Zeno's paradox. I loved it then. I love it now.
23. I think that most 13 year olds with a passion for it could learn the basics of calculus without much trouble.
24. Passion is what drives comprehension. We think on what delights us. We follow our bliss.
25. Granted, some skills must be learned by rote, fun or not. Like the multiplication table.
26. But even this is fascinating if one feels the beauty of simple numbers.
27. G. H. Hardy tempted me toward a Platonic view on numbers, as they call it. But it didn't stick.
28. And yet there is something strange here.
29. The primes get quite a bit of attention. And it's not just their use in codes.
30. G H Hardy used a particular prime number, 317, as an argument that numbers are Out There.
29. We iterate unity and get strange properties from some of the bundles we create.
31. And yet they all divide by one.
30. If an integer didn't divide by one, that would be strange.
32. But isn't this unthinkable?
33. Is my interest in the intuition of unity really so absurd?
34. I remember how struck I was when it occurred to me that beings are always singular.
35. And we only deal with pluralities as sets, also singular.
36. If this only applied to number, it would not be as interesting.
37. But it also applies to words.
38. We put spaces between our words and our words are circles drawn around patches or bits of our experience.
39. "Dog" is a way to see all the properties of a dog as related, integrated.
40. Our more common words are infinite sums.
41. Can anyone offer an exhaustive description of justice? of love? of meaning?
42. Any description of reality that pretends to completeness must also incorporate this very description.
43. This is where natural science fails the standards of serious philosophy.
44. It represents patterns in experience without representing the pattern of these same representations.
45. Philosophy is the science of science.
46. F = ma. This is brilliant. But where is the formula that explains the existence of formulas?
47. I use the word "explain" generously.
48. Science doesn't ultimately explain anything.
49. It just integrates experience in an imagined causal web mathematically.
50. Do we really think the word "gravity" is an explanation?
51. Of course not. Newton's formula is golden. But it's not an explanation.
52. It's an abstracted form, useless without the intuition of unity.
53. Useless also without the nonmathematical conceptual understanding that allows us to see how it can be applied.
54. What is this "Force"?
55. Oh, well that mass times acceleration.
56. What is this "mass"? What is this "acceleration"?
57. I'm not denying that we do make sense of these terms. I'm just pointing out how abstract they are.
58. Physics time is a brilliant invention.
59. But it disturbs me to see this invention taken as "real" time.
60. Where is change in the absence of memory?
61. Where is the man who doesn't live largely in the future?
62. Where does this future live?
63. It's the same with the past.
64. Are meaningful human relationships made possible by physics time?
65. Or is it by memory?
66. Natural science has generally imagined the world as if the observer didn't matter.
67. I realize this has changed significantly.
68. But an obsolete view of science still has taking impossible abstractions for ideal truth.
69. What man have we known of who existed apart from other humans? Who did not think and speak in an inherited language? Who did not live among the creations of other humans?
70. What man have we known that wasn't exchanging air, water, food, etc. on a regular basis with his environment?
72. In a physical, emotional, and intellectual way man is immersed in his environment. To consider him apart from this environment that sustains him is an abstraction.
73. Abstractions aren't bad. But sometimes they become obsolete.
74. What world exist for man that does not include him? Only the abstraction he has dreamed up.
75. The mind-matter distinction is useful but in some ways absurd.
76. William James saw this. Hegel saw this. And long before either others saw this.
77. Kant was on the edge of this. Berkeley was on to it in some way it seems, but clung to he idealist terminology, it seems.
78. I speak of "concepts" which sound biased toward idealism, but this is what I am forced to work with in our dualism heavy language.
79. There was a reason that Hegel came after Kant.
80. I feel that the idealist emphasis is a necessary step toward the non-dual or absolute position.
81. I don't think we can live there. We are going to fall back on our useful dualisms.
82. And yet the non-dual view is a logical presentation of something metaphorically equivalent to this: we live in God and God lives in us.
83. In my opinion, most religion tends to cage God, and present God as some sort of cookie one gets for obedience.
84. Even worse is the misunderstanding of symbolic narratives like walking on water as the literal claim of such.
85. If we teach humans that God exist in miracles, we are obscuring that all life is a miracle, even if its sometimes a terrible miracle.
86. All the predictive formulas in the world still don't tell us WHY.
87. Mental models of electromagnetic radiation (an impressive abstraction, admittedly) can't obscure that the "subjective" experience of a roses redness is what it is. Just like you know who.
88. Electromagnetic radiation is just as "subjective" in its own way as redness. This "radiation" is made of concept. This "redness" is made of [insert synonym for "qualia" here).
89. That's the beauty of Wittgenstein's best line. They smack us awake to our self-satisfied complacency.
90. Why didn't we notice before that prediction is not explanation? That prediction in mathematical terms and a minimum body of supporting hyper-abstractions was hardly an exhaustive revelation of being, to say the least.
91. How is it that we forget how much of our living human experience is made of language?
92. Why is it so shocking to be reminded that the intelligible structure of the world intimately involves us? (is us?)
93. Science is not our enemy here. Our intellectual complacency is our enemy here.
94. We thought that science could just go ahead and take care of philosophy for us at the same time.
95. Until the "explained" world becomes a bore.
96. Is metaphysics the bad guy? Is religion from top to bottom the bad guy?
97. Or is bad metaphysics the bad guy? Is inferior religion the bad guy?
98. In the broad sense of the term, man has always been and will always be religious, a creature insisting on purpose.
99. We can rename it to avoid unpleasant associations, but it's same anew.
100. Societies exist around common values.

Obscurity

The practical can obscure the logical, the truly philosophical.
For instance, the concept of self is so apparently necessary in everyday life, that many can see no reason to investigate this concept. And most would not even agree that the self was a concept.

Quantity is everywhere in human thinking. The most common quantity is one. A investigation of our grammar reveals the singularity and plurality are constant concerns within our language use. Mathematics is only a specialized investigation of quantity. Quantity is fundamental to ALL disciplines, from natural science to religious traditions.

We speak of objectivity and truth, but perhaps we don't closely enough examine the connection of truth and emotion. To suggest that proof is successful or strong persuasion seems quite reasonable to me, but this suggestion meets with resistance.

I suspect that we desire some truth beyond opinion, and that therefore we are uncomfortable looking at the possibility that proof is founded


Quantity is always with us. All concepts are singular or plural. All human thinking is at least indirectly concerned with quantity, and the foundation of quantity is unity, oneness, coherence.

Our visual field is automatically broken into pieces, into objects. So even here, we find quantity, and this visual quantification meshes quite automatically with our conceptual quantification. Quantity is so much with us that we miss how fundamental it is to our experience.

Do we think that nature itself is broken into objects? If the physicists agree to such a thing, they are talking about particles far too small to be seen by the naked eye. At the human scale and in the human environment, physics suggests an unbroken continuity. Or doesn't it?

Why do we accept a statement as true? Does this statement agree with the rest of the statements we accept as true? Does this statement agree with our interpreted sensations?
Does this statement make us feel good?

How important is emotion in what we take for true? Is there an element of emotion in any consideration of truth?

I propose that we are so in love with our abstractions that we easily ignore what they are founded on. What are they founded on?

Damn, i'm Good

So, yeah, I know I'm not a scholar type...nor have claimed to be. I mention this for anyone who projects such a claim on my

Because I regard both religion and science so highly, I stress that for me religion is metaphorical or symbolic, and yet deeply profound, more profound, never

In my opinion, to scrap the supernatural increases the profundity of religion traditions. To understand God and Eternity as cartoons is an inferior way to use these concepts. This is just one man's opinion, of course.

The character Jesus utters some of the most profound statements I know of. William Blake is an excellent interpreter of this character and his sayings.

Christ represents an Ideal that no man lives up to, just as infinity represents something that finite number can match.

I associate Rocknroll w/ Christ, and the Devil too, while we are at it. They are all just symbols for me, symbols of transformation.

When playing rocknroll (a term I remain fond of and have extended FAR beyond the 50s stuff), a person sometimes attains a state of ecstasy. And that's the point. For me, that has always been the point. To cross over from contentment to bliss. "Break on through," even if excellent song has made this a bit cliche.

Captain Beefheart. Do you know him? Well, the song Moonlight On Vermont contains the lines, sung passionately, "Give me that old time religion..


rocknroll is jesus is nirvana is the devil blah blah. i'm talking about emotional states. and those are just words of course...words for a feeling....a grand feeling, a feeling as good as biblical knowledge. check the etymology of "knowledge."

the elephant in the room is passion, emotion, bliss. the donkey or ass in the room is intuition. both are taboo w/ certain folks as both indeed are dangerous at times. oh yes. i don't deny it. Hitler didn't lack passion or intuition, for instance.

i was an ambitious little shit. i think it kicked in full strength when teenaged jesus jerk (yours truly) started reading that Norton Anthology in hikes cool (Billy Madison reference) & thought he was hot shit. meanwhile the other kids got laid, or at least were conspicuously matched. why do i reveal this? it's been a technique of mine for long time. you want to be trusted? then trust. confess your sins & ecstasies and others will, if ready, confess theirs. that's an old scoop. & its an inverse hypodermic periscope. you want knowledge aka soul-fuck? give and you shall receive.

life is short. when god died, it was no stretch that i would have to die do. "out of the blue and into the black, and once youre gone, you can't ever come back" but the song continues: "hey hey my my rocknroll can never die"

voices come and ago. the song remains the same.

rocknroll or jesus or the dick of god. the one, the primary, the etc. the what-you-will. names are not of the essence. oh its a beautiful truth.

last night there was mist on the moon. it reminded me of emanation, in the Blakean sense. the moon is always only seen thru the mist. only the mind/intellect can know the moon sans mist. and this is of course metaphorical.

formal logic is mist. our numerals are mist. i make this claim. i see the moon thru this mist. but i hope i get diarrhea before i'm cruel to other humans because of this claim. so fucking what if i see the moon behind the mist? ok, its a pretty moon. and yes it enriches my life. but most live and die w/o giving a shit for the moon sans mist. and they are not wrong.

because concept is beautiful, yes. but so is sensation. and more important than either concept or sensation is love. sweet sweet love. does anyone have the balls to celebrate love these days? or it more manly to talk of cunt, slit, gash?

you know who's a mother fucking genius? Walt motherfucking Whitman is a genius. (why all this profanity? oh it's playful, and let me pose a bit as the non-academic intuitive little shit I am, who only lives thinks & reads and never took grades seriously.....but did get those straight As once, as a senior, just to prove he could findlly)

profanity is not of the essence. but seriously..does anyone else notice what profanity and obscenity are made of? you guessed it. sex and religion. the unspeakables are sex and religion. and i understand why. so my profanity is methodical in this case.

sex and religion, religion and sex....you either know (fuck) or you don't. and i'm not claiming to know all i can., oh no. i don't want the game to be over. i want ascension. without contraries is no progression. the end of history concept is sexy. "absolute knowledge" aka "absolute fuck" "i am the truth. " says Plato Christ Satan & Nietzsche and who else? probably quite a few. probably Stalin. probably those sweet saints the prayed with animals. the question remains..who is this "I"? and what is "truth"?

"i've gotta use words when i talk to you" --a great t.s. eliot line from a fragment of a drama. "a nice little white little missionary stew" is another gem from this fragment. sweeny is involved. "and somebody's got to pay the rent."

do writers love words? i think they do. but also there is a contempt for words. and it has its advantages. yes, mother, a word is not what it refers to. but a word does not refer to sense experience either but rather to an organization of sense experience, a concept.

what is a concept? well, plato already tackled this. i'm no plato scholar, but i did learn to read once. we can't talk without concepts. i don't mean words. i mean concepts. i can't prove this anymore than i can prove 1 + 1 = 2. you either know or you cannot. some things are so obvious that no one notices them. and i have a contempt as well (and an affection) for the word "concept" (I gotta use words when I talk to you....and somebody's got to pay the rent.)

certain styles of philosophy strike me as islands of denial. they don't want the profound. they don't want the eros. they just want righteousness, an orthodoxy, a definite hierarchy. they don't need me and i don't need them. still, they are a part of me, my shadow, and i am theirs.

no disrespect to the formalist i have been chatting with but i experience mathematics like a diamond bullet through the front lobe. to call it mystical is to misunderstand me. the beauty of mathematics is its ideal clarity. the real world doesn't offer us this. yes, we interpret the real world thru mathematical forms, but the forms in themselves, or at least abstracted as far as possible, are more beautiful than in their diluted state. hence the word absolute.

i was at this party once and a weird guy who was a stranger quite obviously to drinking and women was going on about the truth of mathematics. i wasn't bitten by the bug yet & was still in my metaphor phase. well, i would tell him now that sure, math is true, perfectly true...but it's not the truth about nature. or not the perfect truth about nature. it's a language based on perfect identity on one hand and continuous relationships on the other. to oversimplify. f = ma is continuous, not discrete. but 345646.23423 is perfectly absolutely discrete. does anyone see this? y =2x has how many solutions? we represent these solution pairs as a straight line on the sex-why plane, and there are an infinite number of them.

do i have a math degree? hell no! no sir, not at all. no degrees. i'm just a thinker, just an asshole who thinks that reading and more importantly thought can do the job. what a fool, right? doesn't this jackoff know that one needs teachers? i was one of those kids who thought he was smarter than his teachers. was i? well, i wasn't as smart as i thought i was.
am i now? you be the judge. --as if you had a choice....

the eyes are the windows to the soul. another golden line from you know who. my big brother jesus sliced. or kriced. or what you will, because he's just a symbol. he's a chatterbox like hamlet. and hamlet was shakespeare's son. do you know the story? shakespeare's real son hamnet died at 11. shakespeare played the ghost himself in hamlet. and hamlet had an authorial consciousness, the widest consciousness in western lit, if you ask harold bloom. hamlet and christ, two of our best instructional puppets.

satan was the big brother o jesus, if you ask milton. or close enough. and he sure didn't like baby bro getting so much attention. so he raised his hand against omnipotence.

so do we all. we judge the world as ugly, faulty, corrupt. and its our own accusation that makes it so. "cast out opinion. thou art saved" did marcus aurelius read the tao? sure, i'll talk some politics with ya. and rail against the folly o the world. but there is another more important perspective, which is this: get the dirt out of your eyes and the world is infinite and holy....this is blake, job, christ, tao, plato, blah blah blah. all these great names are toys. all these great names are mist blanketing the moon.

in my early twenties i knew for sure that i would never be just a fan, just a zero behind a one. no sir. it was greatness or bust, and the devil take the hindmost. i now agree w/ blake: "if a fool persists in his folly, he will become wise." and this is also hegel and nietzsche that error evolves into truth. the higher evolves from the lower. and it never happens, never, w/o desire, eros, giving a shit. energy is eternal delight, except when it's confused and self-torturing. i know all about that. to feel this itch, this intuition of perfect beauty, and see everywhere only compromise and misery...and worse yet, to see this in the mirror. to fail one's ideals. now that's agony. "thank you lord that i am not one of the dirty little nobody's like so and so over there" oh the pharisaical folly of us all! this fool persisted in his folly, saluted not satan, which would have been a missed understanding, but himself, his reflection. "i am the captain of my soul" this, my friends, is real satanism, and not that kiddy stuff for sell at the mall. you will kill others or yourself as deemed necessary. & you take your pleasure as you like it. do what thou wilt shall be the hole in the law.

but who is this "you" and what does he "wilt"? if the self were indeed an island, then satanism would be true philosophy. mind you, my friends, that "satan" is just a symbol. anything more is a lesser idolatry. the self-idol is king of all flea-bitten idolatrous pseudo-kings. the self as truth is high tech compared to the rest. you already have exempted yourself from keeping up with the jones's & you are intellectually at least beyond all human authority. so satanism, or my version of it which is of course the ideal version, is not unlike stoicism and skepticism. it's a hybrid, even, but heavy on the transformational symbol, and light on the stoical ethics..

what is this transformation symbol crap? well, its ye old numen. its the ideal, and the ideal is always already erotic. what is spiritual eros? you either know or you cannot.; but i suspect we all know. i assume its universal. its beatrice. its the Good. its the eternal feminine maybe that draws us on. something o that, she said.

as my oft quoted hegel says, history is driven by the desire for recognition. and philosophy is driven by the desire of self-recognition, and is therefore a dialectical progress toward complete self-consciousness, or complete enough. philosophy doesnt really aspire to all the details of the natural world, does it? i think not. complete self-conscious should be understood generally. plato was quite the hegelian, it seems, and yes thats a joke. but plato put dialectic on top. i just read that an hour ago. whether we deny it or not, dialectic is obviously all reason is. and an internal debate is dialectic enough. i should no.

i'm not trying to show contempt w/ my tone here. let's call it stylistic pluralism, or saturday night w/ strong coffee & nicotine gum. god bless us all. its surely long been obvious to the regulars here that you dear friend reconsmucto is occasionally manic or ...excessive self-assured. i blame it on this coffee cup that my old man used to drink from. it said "damn, i'm good!"

Elite Minorities/Unity

You read these words and you are probably conscious of the "meaning" of them and not the shapes of the letters. If you decide to study the letters, you probably see just that: letters. You see all the lines that make up each individual letter as a unity. You also know that the dot above the "i" is part of the "i."

In the same way, when we walk down the street, we see the meanings in our visual field, and neglect the raw visual data. Now this "raw visual data" is itself an abstraction. It is difficult if not impossible to see without recognizing objects. Still, we sometimes will pause to study the shape and/or color of an object. Sometimes, this object is a group of clouds. Or perhaps an ad at the bus stop.

I think it would be silly of me to condemn in any way our capacity to see the meaning rather than the "raw visual data." We evolved this ability because it helps us survive. It's essential also for social reasons. A wedding ring means something. The look on a stranger's face means something. But it also just is.

Certain thinkers have written/spoken of being a sort of indifferent mirror to reality. Perhaps the idea is that fear, envy, hatred, lust, etc., distort our perception of the sensual richness at all times available to a healthy human being. And then we have the emotional richness available to those not harried and tormented by abstractions. Hegel associated time with concept. Well, desire and fear are emotions in relation to an imagined/conceived future. And this future is conceived in the terms of the past. Our passed experience teaches us what to expect from our current experience, and also what to look for in it, how to shape it.

"La la la live for today" is not my message here. To make time and the concept taboo is absurd, in my view. All I'm trying to do is put some weight on the other side of the scale.

My wife hates math, and doesn't like the more abstract aspects of philosophy. I used to sometimes be frustrated by this. I would even nag her to read certain books. I now can kick myself, because it's more than a little possible that she was moving through her life with a richer sense of the sensual and emotional. Who was I to impose my favored abstractions on another being? Sensual and emotional richness is not easily spoken or written of. I suspect that many great souls are overlooked because they have chosen to live more in this realm, and not in the abstract realm.

I see girls on the street with brand name t-shirts like "be be" for instance. This amuses me. The store offers you a lower price product that at least features the name of the store, even if this name is imprinted on a shape as basic as a t-shirt. The store is offering its customers pure symbol. The buyer summons the "magic" of that stores advertisement by simply wearing the name. And it is often just a name, no picture.

This is why I think the focus on hypocritical religion is too narrow. We are idolatrous in many many ways, not just in the matter of religion. We don't just drive a car, but also a brand. Our hair is not just a shape, but also an association with celebrities and stereotypes with the same hair. We are hyper-symbolic these days. Everything is hyper-text. Yes, that's an exaggeration.

So we have our favored abstractions, and our favored brands. From there we can pretend that other human beings live in an inferior way. This is especially easy when we see the obese, the addicted, the dirty, the homeless, etc. There is of course some truth that we make our fates. But who is this "we"? Did we create our own characters? And if it's true that we did, did we create the "we" that created our character?

How often do we turn what should be gratitude into an excuse for contempt? And pretty soon, the world is a mess because they won't live like we do. If only the world were like you and me, we might say to a friend. We could all be happy. You and I wouldn't start wars. You and I wouldn't steal. And perhaps that's true.

The problem with this, in my opinion, is that everything is connected to everything. The good food and education you may have received was quite possibility paid for by a rough life somewhere else. Is there money anywhere that doesn't have blood on it? Is there land that hasn't been fought for? And what about all the generations before us, the source of our genetic code? What violence, theft, and exploitation were committed to ensure the survival of these genes in us?

The point isn't guilt. Screw guilt. The point is awareness of connectedness. I am aiming my rhetorical cannons at the island myth. Our bodies replace their cells constantly. An interruption of the exchange of water or air is quickly lethal. Food and excretion are also necessary constants. So the body exists only as part of a system that includes food, water, air. And this body only comes from other human bodies. We think by means a learned language. We are deeply immersed in the world. It's only the well-fed low-manual labor lifestyle that can allow much forgetfulness of this. And yet modern man is fortunate (?) enough to often indulge this island fantasy.

The stoic and the skeptic use abstractions to forget or ameliorate their slavery. The crude theist invents a master above his earthly master. This is in Hegel, by the way. Abstractions and spirituality go way back.

Perhaps the most common modern religion is the self-fetish. We build a system of concepts that shares our name, and slave away for the greater glory of this name. We live our lives from the outside. We peep in, trying to see our glorious personality as we hope others will see it. This is a harsh exaggeration, of course. But are we not taught to seek this career, buy this product, visit this museum, give to that charity, largely for the glory of the persona rather than for genuine pleasure?

How many humans have worked night and day, away from wife and children, to buy status symbols they have no time to enjoy? And what kind of enjoyment do we get from status symbols? Obviously, some kind. I associate status symbols with religion. I think that brand names like Nike and Calvin Klein and Coke, etc., etc., have all wised up to what a brand name is. It's a fetish.

I think what's bad about all fetishes, be they philosophical, scientific, theological, brand-name based, the cult of celebrity based....is that they reduce the wonder in everyday life. We box up the Good into something small, something expensive, something one works for, something one can hold over the head of another human being. We have a strong tendency to form elite minorities. If I were to simply curse elite minorities, I would be creating a new one. It's all of piece, in my book. The world must at least on an ideal level be accepted as a piece. On a practical level, we will of course work to improve our lives. We must pass laws against murder, etc. But perhaps there is a part of "emotional hygiene" that sometimes involves accepting the world as a whole, "as is," including the cancer that kills children, the starvation, the vanity and contempt man has, etc. etc. To see it all as one and accept it as a package deal. To exclude, in these ideal moments, no one from our sympathy. To "forgive" even Hitler, or a raging homeless man, or an abuser of children, or the executives whose money promotes war, etc. etc. To see all humans as one human in 6 billion different flavors, manifestations. We can imagine the human as a particle that manifests different properties according to its relationship to other particles. If we are "happy and wise" at moments, this is a gift, even if it also cost us hard work.

There was/is a lot of wisdom in the saying of grace before meals. I mostly experienced this on TV, and not in "real life" (as if TV weren't quite visceral really.) One thing that most of us are probably "guilty" of all too often is ingratitude. I sound like an old man, right? If I blog this, it's to share a reminder for myself with others. I have often resented certain chances that were not presented to me, that were indeed presented to others. It takes only a little reflection for me to remember the not insignificant fact that I have been a healthy little bastard for 33 years. What greater wealth is there than health? You can say "food" but that is part of health. A starving man is not a healthy man. A healthy person, if unhappy, is "wasting" their health. And I have wasted many years, especially in those difficult 20s. I suppose our angst is unavoidable. But what if much of our angst is an unnecessary self-obsession? I find that my "greatest" thoughts are hundreds if not thousands of years old. And these are the best I can offer. What has this "self" to add, really? I've added the most to this world by interacting with other humans. Of course this interaction has been enriched by my thinking and studying. And I have often played the role of the likable nerd. The point is that my personal relationships are where I have really made a difference on the Earth. No doubt, a lonely genius will now and then give humanity something beautiful or useful. I'm not trying to condemn or attack anything. That's an essential point. I guess I'm really trying to praise a measured humility and awareness of the richness of something as easy and obvious as the color, sound, texture, scent, and taste or everything around us. And more important than these, the experience of love. Don't expect me to stop reading books. There is love in concepts too. Math is beautiful. Or some of it is. But I hope to love math-haters as much as I love my fellow math-lovers, as long as they are kind. I think it's fair to love the kind more than the unkind. And I am not, make no mistake, presenting love or anything else as a duty. I think the presentation of duty is a killer of the spirit. Prohibitions are confusing. It's better to praise what these prohibitions implicitly praise. The "sin" of adultery is the implicit praise of sexuality associated with love and commitment. The "sin" of jealousy is just implicit praise of a life free of that nasty creature. The mortal sins are generally just inferior modes of being. Perhaps when dealing with children, the simple prohibition is all they can understand. But I don't like spiritual traditions for adults to dwell on duties or prohibitions. I would like them to point the essence, to the positive that is waiting.

Plato's Good

Plato's Form of the Good is a little vague it seems. If anyone has insight on this, I would love to hear it. The Good seems to unify the other forms, and to be a part of them. Well, I can only interpret another man by my own personal experience of course.

At the moment Love seems like the Form of the Good. Or Beauty. But Love and Beauty are almost inseparable. What we love is beautiful and what we find beautiful we love.

Love transcends or is simply other than any of the concepts it lights up. We experience a fusion of emotion and concept, but this emotion must be conceptualized for us to speak/write of it. In face-to-face discourse we experience one another as fusions of emotion and concept. But the book can't give us this. No book can give us this. We can read about all the Forms, even the Form of the Good, but the Form of the Good, if indeed it is Love/Beauty is not and cannot be contained by concept alone. The letter kills. The spirit gives life.

It seemed real hip once to play the pragmatist and the relativist. And indeed, sophistry is ...well, sophisticated. Or it is in contrast to the unconsidered opinions of the non-philosopher, by which I mean those who aren't even interested in truths that are not practical. I currently propose that sophistry isn't so impressive after all when considered next to the strong points of a philosopher like Plato.

I did everything backwards, and maybe this was good. I was immersed in the acid of Nietzsche and the rest, all that cash-value pragmatism...This is great. It allows one to look a Plato with suspicion. His theory of Forms isn't perfect. He offers strange views (to me) on the afterlife, etc. Are there forms of mud and hair? Sure they're are! Of course. Or I couldn't have asked that question. Forms are just concepts. Yes, they are beautiful but this is only because of Love or the Form of the Good.

Concept is already the Form of Forms. If we really think what "concept" means, we have something great here. In my opinion, we just take it all for granted. We can't find our glasses anywhere precisely because we are wearing them. If we look at words like concept, abstraction, essence, it's all right there. But are we interested in this? It's not necessary really, but there is an eros toward clarity. The TLP is a manifestation of this. I always loved Witt for his austerity. I understood it. The minimal, the essence, the pure which is also the absolute. Of course! What else? The intellect desires the absolute, the eternal, the root, the equation (unchanging) that describes all flux. This is why calculus is heartbreakingly beautiful in essence. And not in its hyper-complex applications. It's the essence god damn it! And this is why the foundations of arithmetic and logic are so important for philosophy. Anyone can learn a few little symbols, but these symbols are arbitrary. Just as our digits are arbitrary. It's what's behind them that matters. I sincerely feel that we get caught up in complexities, because we like to impress ourselves and others, and neglect to examine what if anything we are standing on.

I go on and on about certain ideas and probably seem silly to many, and yet I see the beauty, simplicity, and obviousness of these ideas. I ask questions with utter sincerity, and perhaps I am misunderstood as playing some sort of game. What is concept? What is number? What are the fundamental building blocks of human thought? Or is there just ONE block. Is there just ONE cornerstone? And have the builders rejected it? Was it so simple that a child could do it? A purloined letter?

Let's say we find this Form of Forms. Does this threaten our beloved concepts? The word "concept" sounds a little cheap perhaps. Maybe we don't want our highest ideas put under the Concept of Concept. But this is to miss the beauty of pure concept. To gaze at pure concept is to gaze at utter perfect simplicity. The ultimate sculpture which is absolutely portable. You can call it Nothingness or Being. But the Form of Forms, pure concept, cannot be named. It can only be inferred. All of its names are temporal. The Form itself is eternal. But wait a minute! Eternal is a just a concept, just a form. So even Eternal is not the perfect word. There can be no perfect final word. The Form of Forms is what all Forms/Concepts have in Common. Their irreducible Core. I am capitalizing because it feels right. This is some beautiful heavy shit in my opinion. Concept, which is only an imperfect name/pointer, exists in its own "realm" (only a metaphor, and metaphors are concepts). Concept just is. And it just is in a way different than the way sensation just is. Sensation and Concept are unified in the mind by Concept but in Life by Love/Beauty/the Non-Form of the Good. Or the Trans-Form of the Good.

The Form of the Good must also be Formless. It unites the discrete and the continuous. Concept and Sensation. And the Trans-Form of the Good is the Living Loving Unity of All. The philosopher knows that all concepts are contingent expressions of the Form of Forms. She or He intuits Pure Form behind all Forms. He or She sees that Form Just Is.

What Hegel added to Plato was this. He saw that Forms were created and destroyed. Not all concepts are eternal. In fact, most of them aren't. Let's go farther. Only the Form of Forms is "Eternal" -- but "Eternal" cannot be the final word. There is no final word. Still, Eternal is pretty damn close. Man is Logos Incarnate. Logos is a system of concepts/Forms. Our speech is the play of Forms. We yakk only in terms of unversals,, essences. A quick check of this confirms it.

But we don't see that our everyday reality is a collision of concept and sensation. We don't see that the objects in our world are only objects because of Form of Concept that Unifies them. Because it happens automatically as far as vision goes and we learn to talk as children. For practical purposes, we know more than enough. We just don't examine it. That's my proposition. A chair is a chair not because the Form of chairness is eternal, but because forms are created and destroyed in the context of sensation and emotion. We can make forms like Chair and Love and Hate in the context of experience. ,The only Form that isn't created or destroyable is the Form of Forms. And words like Being / Essence/ Concept ? Unity are about as close as we can get to this in language. We must intuit behind these words and see that Form Just Is.

I realize this is bold post. I certainly don't want to offend. I see something beautiful here. If I turn out to be crazy..at least I meant well. I don't believe in Wisdom that isn't Joyful. These ideas fill me with love, a sense of beauty. A few months ago I was struck by these ideas in a less polished form, and it lit my life up. Since then I have tried to integrate and refine them. In my opinion, none of these ideas are mine at all. They are thousands of years old. All of them. So it's not about ego. It's about something clicking for me. And maybe it will click for you. I did drop out of negative third grade, of course. & I have only read 2 pages of half a book. Hoping that someone benefits from my Blather, I bid ye farewell......

Form of Forms

I have this theory, and it feels right. Of all things it concerns the Form of Forms. Now I'm not even sure which philosopher is famous for speaking of this, if any. I picked up the phrase somewhere and ran with it. Perhaps I am offering a creative misreading. Who can say? We cannot see above our own minds. That makes perfect sense to me. My sense of confidence when it comes to understanding a philosopher is based on the beauty and power I get from the thought.

Absolute Idealism is also Absolute Realism, as I have mentioned in other blogs. Some might interpret it differently. In my view, the whole advantage of Absolute Ism (how's that?) is that it escapes what now seems to me like the utterly needless confusion of the mind/matter game. Both mind and matter are abstractions, forms, essences, and they are not, in my opinion, eternal forms.

Kant screwed us all up with his things-in-themselves. Oh I see the practical value in things-in-themselves. But they are philosophically disastrous. They do not hold water. And things-for-us is also useless or redundant, and still suggests duality.

We have to back up, I think, and get phenomenological. Ah, but phenomenon still hints at noumenon. Oh well. I believe phenomena derives from "shining." If we look at our lived personal experience, what do we find? How do we experience life? Well, we see hear taste touch smell, etc. And simulatanouesly we think and feel. So life is obviously the unity of conception, sensation, and emotion. However there is no reason this could not be described with other basic terms. Those are the best I can come up with just now.

We experience a structured reality. Our reality is formed. If we look/think at this form carefully, I think we experience too kinds of form. Spatial form or visual form is continuous. Obviously we as humans sometimes break up this continuity as much as possible, but our sense of space is continuous. We don't see holes in space. And more important we have geometric intuitions of continuity, and also of paradoxes like points without extension. How thin is a Euclidean line? How sharp is the point of a Euclidean cone? How perfectly can we imagine a circle, a square, a triangle or a straight line?

Here's the tricky part. How many points can we fit on any line? And I am talking Euclidean points without extension. As many as we want? Can we build anything as straight as we can imagine perfect straightness? And I don't just mean beyond visual recognition. I am asking the reader to think whether humans can organize physical matter into an ideally perfectly straight line.


If the mind is just a concept, and concept is just a concept, then what can we mean really by "mind" and "concept"? Oh we can use them practically. But what about logically? What about dialectical coherence? Form is a better word, perhaps, because it doesn't lean toward the subject or the object, both of which are abstractions, concepts, forms.

As I argued in another blog, I think we should distinguish between Form and sensation, even though
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our sensations are automatically interpreted as Forms, essences. I think Form is laid against sensation like a measure. Form helps us cut the visual field into meaningful objects. I argue that objects are nothing but Forms combined with sensation. And that therefore abstract objects or just remembered everyday objects are no less real in a logical sense, even if from a practical point of view it makes all the difference in the world.

I think there is a place for philosophy that ignores or resists the practical. The practical man is happy with sophistry. And he will call this sophistry truth. Because logical coherence is not his goal.

This idea of mine is quite radically philosophically and perhaps insignificant as far as practical application goes. I think Wittgenstein was saying as much or almost as much in the TLP. All our essences are accidental. The only essential essence is empty essence. Essence is unification. The number 0 is close but no cigar. It is still determinate. What I am pointing at is the utterly indeterminate Form. And this would be an abstraction from all Forms, in order to synthesize what they all have in common. Well, they are. They exist. Existence isn't a property they say. Because it's always there. Because Form and Thought are the same thing. To think about nothing is to think about a Form that is. Thus the notorious "presence of an absence." Being is. Nonbeing is not.

Why are all of our essences but one accidental? Because they are created and destroyed in relation to experience, and this experience is not only Formal or conceptual but also sensual and emotional. A concept like the self is invented. It's quite useful, quite justified practically. But close investigation shows its imperfection. Wittgenstein did this is the TLP. Absolute Solipsism is the same as Absolute Realism. The self only exists in relation to a non-self. The non-self is justified practically but not philosophically. Why? Because there is no way to draw an honest line logically between one aspect of our experience and another. The so called self is made of sensation, emotion, and associated concepts. This is completely similar to all other accidental concepts. The self is a popular notion because of human society and the pressure put on us to be responsible. The pronoun "I" reinforces this questionable concept constantly. I feel this is where Kant went wrong. He was too practical perhaps to go all the way. What is this transcendental apperception of unity? Does it unite all experience? But it itself is a concept. Is it a set that includes itself? Or do we learn this sort of concept from experience. I argue that this sort of concept, and the unity of the "I" in general, is learned, not given. Yes, we live in different bodies, but even this is the imposition of Form. And all forms are accidental, except the Form of Forms, or Absolute Form, which is empty unnamable Form. It must be inferred. Any name is already too determinate.

If all Forms but one are temporary, created and destroyed, then there can be no perfect science or philosophy. There can be no God knowable conceptually to man. God is a concept. And this concept is related to other concepts, sensations, and emotions. But science too is vulnerable. Causality is also just a concept, an extremely useful and popular concept, but one that is accidental in my opinion. I think causality is learned. Abstraction is unification.

The form of forms is a finite empty unity. Nonempty forms are still finite unities. And to say unity is really the same as to say finite. Is this why time is experienced as a sequence? Because we can't hold more than one unity in our mind at once? But if we say events are simultaneous, is this not a unity?

Pure negation cannot be conceived of. The Form negation is an abstraction of what all negations have in common, which is that they negate something. We can infer t

Form 2

Absolute concept is like a diamond bullet to the skull. Perhaps it's what Hegel meant by "pure negativity," but 'negativity" is such a misleading word here. Concept is an other to sensation-emotion. If sensation and emotion are being, sometimes called "spatial being," then concept is a sort of nonbeing.

If we look to the difference between analog and digital information, we see that digital information in non-spatial. The spatial aspect of the digital is husk, not kernel. Digital is made of perfectly precise chunks, bites, or bits of information. Digital doesn't have to be binary. But it often is. And binary is the minimum digital form.

We go to a party and hope some pretty girl is there (unless we are married of course). If she is not there, we feel this, because we can see her in our head. She is present as an absence. She is present as a memory which is also a fantasy.

Indeed, strong arguments have been made that time is nothing but this nonbeing, this concept. Some say that time is change, but fail to consider what makes the perception of change possible. I suggest that without memory, we cannot experience change. If we lived entirely in the present, and I mean entirely...we would not see movement. Indeed, there would be no "we" for our consciousness would be nothing but that which we perceived. The "we" / "I" is invented by mirrors and concepts. And most of our concepts come from others. They talk to us as if we can hear them, and we return the favor. Sometimes.

So concept is a non-spatial kind of being, sometimes called nonbeing or negativity. Why would someone use the word "negativity"? I think I know. Perhaps I'm wrong. Let's play.

What is abstraction? Let's use Fluffy the cat. First of all, we are already seeing one cat, and not a bunch of cat parts. If we see cat parts, they are parts because we already conceive of them as a unity. Another thing we take for granted is that we aren't looking at the same cat from moment to moment. It eats and sh*ts. Old cells die. New cells are born. It moves. It behaves in different ways. It was born once. It will die. And yet all of this we refer to with one word.

What do we ignore in order to fit all this experience-of-catness into one concept? What do we negate in order to synthesize this concept? And why is Fluffy a cat, and not just Fluffy?
Our entire reality is organized by sets or groups that all upon close examination reduce to sensation and emotion. Our conceptualization is so automatic that we hardly notice it. After all, our survival depends on it. And survival is a practical matter, usually, and not a philosophical matter.

Form

Opinions on Form, or its digital conceptual aspect. Spatial Form is something else, and shall not be addressed.


Form is prior to considerations of mind, matter, self, world, right, wrong, etc. Form is not sensation, although sensation is interpreted via forms.
By "form" I mean something like concept, but concept misdirects us toward idealism.

This is why I couldn't figure out if numbers existed within Nature.

I knew we thought in terms of quantity. So I thought we projected quantity on nature.

But then it clicked for me that quantity is prior to all other thoughts. By quantity I mean unity. Plurality is just sub-unities gathered into a greater unity.

So number doesn't exist in the mind or in the nature but in both and in all of our concepts.
Conception is digital.
But digital conception is related to sensation and emotion, which are continuous.
This is why language is so slippery. This is why we need a Wittgenstein to steer us away from certain confusions.

Formal logic and mathematics stay as far away as possible from the complexity of language. This explains their beauty. They are made as digital as possible, so that their inferences are more persuasive.

But dialectic is required to explain the source of formal logic and mathematics. We must wrestle with the concept of concept, and the form of form.

To see that Form (concept) is prior to all particular forms or concepts is a potent liberation but also a destruction.

There can be no final truth. The final truth is empty. In my opinion, this is some of what the TLP is trying to tell us.

The only necessity is logical necessity, and this is because form is prior to forms. Causality is just a particular form. This is why causality is only justified psychologically.

For practical purposes this causality is fine. But in my mind, philosophy is not just practical. It seeks Truth, not just profit or pleasure.

Or better yet it seeks its profit and pleasure in Truth.

But this search for Truth leads to the discovery of the impossibility of Truth, except for the One Truth, which is utterly empty.

As mystical as this may sound, I believe it is logical.

It should be remembered that in my view all forms/concepts are temporary. No metaphysics is final. And my own "metaphysics" is self-dissolving. All I can do is point to certain inferences, intuitions.

I am continually surprised that the deeper issues in the TLP are simply ignored. He shows that causality and the self are not logically justified. No comment from those who love Wittgenstein the breaker of metaphysics. Wittgenstein does not just break metaphysics. He breaks also the pretensions of science. Not its usefulness or beauty, but only its over-extensions. Only its implicit metaphysics.

Absolute concept is inferred from seriously thinking about the problem of Form (concept). But we are so attached to our Concept Castles, we might not want to hear it. They are made of sand. Wittgenstein is the tide.

Not that he was the first. Not at all. But he is perhaps the most Western of destroyers/openers. All composite things decay. Our conceptions are composite. They evolve in a sensual, emotional, and social context. The evolve within and from flux.

The only timeless form is the form of form itself. Or the mind's tendency to extract/abstraction unities from experience. We gather an infinite continuum of emotion and sensation under the term "love." We gather an infinite or near infinite series of correlations under the word "cause." We do the same with God, time, self, world, nature, etc. We are only bewitched if it hurts, if it fails us, if our current conceptions reduce us.

Well, the philosopher is an itch. And if we burrow into the ground of Truth, we will find it. And it's isn't much. In fact, to even say "nothing" is already saying too much. The truth is so empty it cannot be told, but only pointed at. And yet the truth has hidden in plain sight.

Number Beauty

0 (zero) is an enclosure of empty space. I'm talking about the glyph, the symbol, and not just the number (the un-number?)

If there is a proto-number, zero is about as close an any official number gets to it. We have here pure unification, and the presence of an absence.

Perhaps we should think of this glyph, this "0," not in terms of the encircling line, but only in terms of the space inside this encircling line. The line is just a way to point at the space. The emptiness is the thing, the (no-)thing.

The simple beauty of it, of man's favorite shapes. He rolls down the street all the time. He lives in terms of cycles. He symbolizes eternity with this circle. He races his fastest cars in circles. He lives on a globe.

The circle is also an opening, a feminine symbol. Whereas the 1 is obviously a male symbol, among many other things. Perhaps the 0 is a womb, the void from which all other numbers are born. For all numbers are unities. Only 0 is empty, neither negative nor positive. And 0 is the fulcrum of the number line, smack in the middle of positive and negative infinity. 0 can symbolize the proto-being from which all other abstract beings derive.

1 is the perfect primary being. 1 stands in the void heroic. A thin man. A phallus. A line. How little we notice it, but 0 gives us the curve and only the curve while 1 gives us the line. Perhaps 0 is ideally drawn as a perfect circle, and 1 as a line without serif. These are geometrical absolutes. The 0 is pure continuity. The 1 is digital. Although the straight line is spatial and not truly digital, still the straight line is as close as the spatial can get to the digital. I don't think we can count that paradoxical point-without-extension, no matter how fascinating this (non-)point is.

The glyphs for 1 and 0 are too perfect to be an utter accident. I think they caught on for a reason, even if this reason was subconscious. Those who have studied a little math know that only 2 digits are necessary. Of course it's arguable that only 1 is necessary, but this is utterly impractical. Because we need 2 and only 2 digits for positional notation, which is immensely superior to the unary system.

Binary or base-2 is beautiful like sculpture is beautiful. Symbolic Logic, that beloved pet of philosophers, is nothing but a breed of base-2 math. Well, that's one way to describe it. The bit is fundamental to human thought. And 2 or duality is part of this, and obviously fundamental to human thought.
Between 0, 1, and 2, we have the most important numbers to human beings. Binary uses only the 0 and 1, but implies the 2 by using 2 digits. The 2 is the hidden structure of these 0s and 1s.

Right/wrong. Self/world. Mind/matter. Self/other. Theism/Atheism. Up/Down. Left/Right. Male/Female. Good/Evil. Love/Hate. Negative/Positive. True/False.
Wisdom/Foolishness. Etc. Etc. Etc.

We think largely in binary. And I am anything but the first to notice or mention this.

2 is the possibility of movement, of time. Of course one doesn't need the digit 2, as positional notation in base-2 allows one to imply the 2. And every other number as well.

And the operators in Logic allows one to connect 2 or more bits into a composite bit.

Generally, I think the mind unifies. But most unities are acheived at the cost of negation. Good is a negation of Evil, and the reverse. Mind is a negation of Mind-independent, and so on.

Fortunately, at the greatest levels of abstraction, we can enjoy a sense of existence as something unified. We have the monism of Parmenides, Hegel, and many others. We have concepts like Being, the All, the One. All of this is beautiful. If we are 0's, we are in love with 1, or Unity.

I think the Christ myth involves unity. And I think other spiritual heroes symbolize unity. Jung talked of the Circle and Square of playing this role for the psyche.

Nicholas of Cusa used a proto-calculus to represent knowledge of God. Man is a polygon that increases its number of sides. But true knowledge of God is a polygon with an infinite number of sides, or a Circle.

That's the ticket right there --the Circle is the limit approached by a polygon with more and more sides. Add as many sides as you like. You won't have a circle exactly, but you are moving always (and forever) in that direction.

Why is the number e so beautiful? How sad it is that so few know of it! We all know pi. And pi is an eternal sort of number. We can see or almost see pi in any circle. One might argue that any circle outside the mind is an imperfect circle. But that aside, pi can exist all at once, spatially, implied by the form, real or imagined, of a circle.

e can do this do, yes, but e is more often associated with process, with change, with time. e is the constant associated w/ perfectly continuous self-proportionate growth, just as pi is the constant associated with the perfect curve, that maintains its constant curvature exactly.

Now e is used to generate the equiangular or logarithmic spiral. Strange enough, the circle is also an equiangular spiral, but with a zero growth rate.
So e and pi are strangely related in the curves that are generated from them. But this is not all.

e to the power of imaginary pi is or equals negative one. pi is imaginary because another strange number is involved. the number is i, or the imaginary unit. This unity is neither negative nor positive but lateral. It's between negative and positive, and yet a unity, a digital exact number, whereas pi and e and never fully revealed nor can be.

If you know a little math, this is shocking, for pi and e are transcendental numbers quite primary to mathematics.. If 0 and 1 are the most important "usual" numbers, then pi and e are the most important unusual numbers. Just as 0 and 1 have a poetic relationship, so do pi and e.

Pi is a good symbol for eternity. And e is a good symbol for time. Then we have i which is quite important in its own way. It's rational like 0 and 1, but unlike 0 and 1 which are real, i is imaginary. So we have 0 and 1 which are the most basic of basic numbers, and pi and e which are the most exciting perhaps of high-tech numbers, and then i which is really quite simple to use but different from the rest in that it is imaginary. i is the square root of negative one, which did not exist until someone created this strange beast the imaginary unit. It should be noted that there is -i as well as i. And the imaginary number line runs perpendicular to the usual number line. And this forms a cross. 0 is at the absolute center of this cross that stretches to infinity (and beyond) in 4 different directions. Must we deal with 4? Not really. We just have 2 to the power of 2 here. We have 2 number lines that meet at 0, each of which moves in a negative and positive direction away from 0. 0 is the origin.

Here's the finale. e ^(i*pi) + 1 = 0. These five crucial numbers fit together somehow into one beautiful identity. And this is an eternal relationship. e and pi are discovered not invented. 0 and 1 are the ultimate reduction possible of numbers in the traditional sense. i is invented. But once invented it was a key that unlocked the relationship between these other four, and itself of course. i, the imaginary number, was a tool that revealed a deep structure in our fundamental and most exciting numbers. This is a sculpture of perfect beauty, that no one can claim, that is easily carried around in one's head.

question 43a

In many math problems, one's solution can be checked. It's something like cracking a safe. If the safe opens, you did it right.

When it comes to music, things are more complicated. Bad music is popular, and bad musicians are rich.

But so are good musicians.

Also painting. Is Jackson Pollock a fraud? Are monochromes a joke? I personally like monochromes more. But some like Pollock.

On the other hand, is accurate drawing valuable in this age of the camera?

What makes a musician, a painter, a novelist important?

Why should we care?

Of course we do care. As life is enriched by music, paintings, novels.

As soon as one decides to embrace the artistic role for one's self, such questions become more serious.

What does it take to be worth remembering? Or to be worth noticing while one is still alive?

Of course there is no simple answer. This is the realm of taste.

And yet certain names are famous, and others unknown. Certain paintings sell, are talked about. Certain bands draw millions as they tour the world. Certain albums are valuable technology for throwing the perfect party.



The shock-game is old now. It's over. It can only be pushed further in ways that are simply ugly. Or shall we pretend that crime scene pictures are great art? Shall we pretend that suicide is performance art?

Sure, suicide can be performance art, but is it GOOD art?

We do still want our "art" to be good.

Noise is beautiful. Some noise. So I'm not coming from Nashville, here. I'm looking at intention more than style.

Is pleasure the goal? Or are we talking about bluff, role-play?

Now bluff and role-play CAN and DO give pleasure. But I suspect it's only the silly little boys and girls that are dazzled by the merely shocking.

I've played that card. I'm almost ashamed to have bothered. But that's how we learn. And it was and is valuable to a certain stage of growth. We have to win our mental freedom. Perhaps getting naked in public is a way to do this.

But the question remains: what do we USE this "freedom" for? Now that we ARE free, what's the NEW goal?

If a "free" person makes art for other "free" persons, a focus on freedom does not seem necessary. It's as if stage one spiritual progress is a destructive phase that clears all the bullshit away. Shock-rock and Nietzsche, etc., is a bulldozer, a sacrifice.

When the ground is clear, one can BUILD. Philosophy may indeed begin with skepticism. But should it end with skepticism? Did we ask questions as a sort of show? Or did we really want answers?

I can't help but question those who make a God of the question mark.

Babble

New roads. That's my theme. Always the new road.

I played the rocknroll game. Two aspects. One is intensity. The other is pleasure.

Intensity is a macho sort of contest. The violation of taboo. Both the good and bad side of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche pretty much bragged about being man enough to see the Truth....and this "truth" was that there was no truth. But that's both paradoxical and oversimplified.

Nietzsche is riddled with absurdity, contradictions. Which is a virtue as much as a fault. N is a spiderweb. You've got to think yourself out of him. Beyond him. And he himself played this same game. I still think he's a great man. A bit of a maniac.

1. I don't believe that humans are selfish at the core.
2. Not in the usual hyper-cynical way.
3. I believe that cynical selfishness is a defense mechanism, a pose.
4. This pose is justified by the hypocrisy that inspires it.
5. Cynicism is a machete. Chop it all down. Start from scratch.
6. A boy feels lied to. The pain inspires him to assume that it's ALL lies.
7. The boy is right, too. In many ways.
8. The rich en masse if not in particular are happy to see him die on a foreign field to protect their markets.
9. The rich man needs a hand in his factory. The rich man needs a clerk.
10. But the poor man is not exactly an angel.
11. What socialism sentimentally denies is that some humans are BETTER than others.
12. Yes, environment is a HUGE part of this.
13. We LEARN our habits.
14. Education ISN'T FREE.
15. Parents are the primary examples. And then we have schools, public schools.
16. Not everyone WANTS to learn what must be learned to make oneself MENTALLY valuable to other humans.
17. In the in, it's much more difficult to be a doctor than a stockboy.
18. If we had free education for all, and I mean free medical school, free law school, THEN we would have less illusion on the matter.
19. Only a small percentage of the poor would use such an opportunity.
20. Why?
21. We are indeed status seeking beings, but there are many ways to claim status.
22. It's easier to adopt some myth.
23. This is the allure of rocknroll.
24. This is the allure of religion.
25. This is the allure of magic.
26. All of these things are based on faith.
27. One proves nothing except to one's self.
28. This is also called faith.
29. All of us live by faith. But some moreso than others.
30. The Rocknroll man can accuse the Medschool student of lacking faith.
31. And to some degree he's right.
32. But the med student can accuse the Rocknroll man of Bullshit, Vanity, Bluff.
33. And the med student is right.
34. Most of Rocknroll is a bluff.
35. But the Rolling Stones are richer than any doctor.
36. If one can SELL one's rocknroll, one is playing a different game.
37. But most people can't.
38. Most of rocknroll is a bluff....and it functions just like a religion.
39. The rock-boy is a legend in his own mind.
40. This is a beautiful bluff.
41. And what we believe IS our reality, as long as we truly believe it.
42. But rocknroll doesn't age well.
43. This is where the overdose comes in.
44. This is where the 20 gauge shotgun comes in.
45. And all this talk of rocknroll can also be applied to the writer boy, the writer who makes no money for his writing, who perhaps does not even TRY to sell his writing.
46. I'm not denying that artistic genius is often beyond such salesmenship.
47. I'm not pissing on that.
48. I am speaking from a place between the two worlds.
49. I know the Rock Bluff intimately. It's still a part of me.
50. But at 33, I see the need for new roads.
51. I have always felt the need for new roads.
52. Keep learning. Keep growing. Keep being born. Keep refashioning that persona.
53. But it was never work. It was high holy pleasure for me to LEARN.
54. The 1 and the 0. The 1 is self-esteem, confidence, what one IS.
55. The 0 is what one is BECOMING. The 0 is a mouth that devours influence.
56. The 0 is the orifice.
57. The exaggerated macho pose is the pose of being all 1 and no 0.
58. "Look at me, Mom. I am nothing but a giant DICK." I am perfect and eternal, just as I am.
59. But this is always bullshit, even if it's a good feeling.
60. Only fools waste their time being impressed by such a shallow act.
61. All real society and all real friendship is based on Openness, curiosity, the feminine element.
62. A man craves the Universal. So does the woman. But I will speak from the viewpoint I know best.
63. A man wants PERSONAL greatness and achievement, yes. He wants to be Number Fucking One.
64. But he wants to be RECOGNIZED as such.
65. He wants to be declared the winner of a fair fight.
66. This requires a field of competition where the rules have been agreed on.
67. Something like Rocknroll is complicated in this respect.
68. Shitty bands becomes rich and famous.
69. So money is not proof in the realm of art.
70. Art history (music, painting, etc.) is FULL of stories of neglected genius.
71. But "genius" is still just a matter of taste, of consensus.
72. Still, here is my personal opinion...
73. If no one but your friends/bandmates/girlfriend embraces your music, it's probably faulty in some way.
74. We live in a world of commercials that sell us a cheap version of individualism. Consumer choice is their bluff.
75. They sell us flattery.
76. Unfortunately it works. On many.
77. We can "go our own way" all we like.
78. But what we like is being liked.
79. Take away the potential audience and only the true composers are left.
80. The real artist LOVES FORM.
81. I suspect that all humans are a mix of this "real artist" and the usual vanity.
82. But I think the "real artist" creates the form not for applause but because he/she wants this form to exist.
83. And of course there is a simple pleasure in playing with form.
84. I realized long ago that I wasn't really a composer.
85. My natural form was THOUGHT. Music was something to think about.
86. Music is a collision of mathematical form and sensual form. This makes it especially fascinating.
87. I still consider myself to have a good ear and a decent voice, but this doesn't make me a composer.
88. A rocknroll band can be great without a real composer in its ranks.
89. Because rocknroll is absurdly and beautifully simple.
90. If you want to see how simple algebra really is, study calculus.
91. If you want to see how simple rocknroll really is, study classical music.
92. But SIMPLE WORKS.
93. Party music is rightfully simple.
94. Give them ALWAYS a BEAT.
95. Dress up this beat in one of the classic harmonic progressions.
96. Add some tasteful lead.
97. It seems to me that rocknroll is more about taste than anything else.
98. A certain amount of technique and grace is necessary for greatness, of course, but the essence is just a feel for it.
99. To know it when one hears it.
100. To not waste time playing shit.
101. To think of the band as a unit, a balanced organism.

102. I got tired of the theatrics. The same small field of battle.
103. Who was I trying to convince?
104. I had already convinced myself.
105. I already had a good woman, good friends.
106. At some point, it's almost embarrassing. To be another seeker after attention, applause.
107. And yet this is a natural.
108. So it's a matter of sublimation.
109. We don't want just anyone's applause.
110. Another problem: the market is flooded.
111. This applies to writing books, too.
112. We are drowning in theatrics of our fellow humans.
113. Look anywhere. A show awaits you.
114. Compulsive showmen. That's us.
115. I studied philosophy. Good stuff.
116. I wanted something beyond the usual chatter, the usual gossip.
117. I am not above the usual chatter and gossip. Part of me is exactly on that level.
118. But indeed, another part of me is elsewhere.
119. I assume this is true for everyone.
120. Even writing this paper...I could have done this yesterday, or last year.
121. Why bother?
122. I've got my entertainments. They have theirs.
123. But perhaps I think the books that I read are better than the books that others read?
124. And perhaps they feel the same.
125. So we look around for cultural friendships, for shared experience.
126. It's one of my long-term mild frustrations that I don't bump into anyone that has dove in to the same general pond.
127. But such is life. And mine is good.
128. I look around these days, reading about all the crazy mathematics, all the programming languages, all the etc.,
129. Where should I fit in? The burden of choice.
130. I want to contribute. I am a mortal man.
131. I can't take EVERY road.
132. I wish I COULD. I despise my own limitations. I despise my mortality.
133. Yes, I want to know everything.
134. I want to be as much of a God as a human can manage.
135. And we can't get far.
136. And it's a bit absurd, these high hopes.
137. I hate buying shit, because I usually regret it.
138. Money is time. To spend money is often to throw away time.
139. Let's not talk about you. And let's not talk about me.
140. Let's talk about what is above and around the both of us.
141. But this is what you and I are made of. To talk about it is to talk about us.
142. The danger lies in dwelling on the small self. The face, the mask, the lie.
143. And many a man has told the truth in order to practice deception.
144. What is "truth"?
145. There are facts: I saw Jane at the store this morning.
146. There are myths. "I'm the son of God."
147. Here's a classic myth: "I am the Truth."
148. Jesus said that.
149. Was this the truth? Is it true he was the Truth?
150. There's a German quote that goes something like this:
151. When I here the word culture, I load my rifle.
152. Well, when I hear the word Freedom, I look around for cages.
153. And when I hear the word "truth" I become twice as skeptical.
154. And when they tell me they aren't a bum, I'm pretty sure they are.
155. What we say is a naked confession of that which we think needs to be said.
156. All of us are more naked than we would like to be...
157. Except we sometimes exhibitionists.
158. A Frenchman once said that we can more eagerly forgive those who fail to entertain us than those whom we fail to entertain.
159. Now that is a brutal line.
160. Here's another gem:
161. "He who despises himself still respects himself as one who despises...."
162. Does it matter who said that? Does it add authority to the line?
163. One of my favorite writers opened a book with that sort of attitude.
164. He thought the thoughts could speak for themselves. Enough with all this academic idolatry.
165. I have quoted in many cases to honor my influences. But perhaps I was also borrowing the glamour of their names.
166. What is glamour?
167. "The happiness of being envied."
168. Envy me. Admire me. Desire me.
169. A man once said that humans are above the animals because we desire to be desired. We desire not simply food, but recognition.
170. A cynic might say this is just a spin on chimpanzee social structure.
171. That cynic might be right.
172. But the chimps aren't as good at bluffing.
173. A human can be poor, old, unliked, and consider himself a god.
174. I prefer the proud to the self-pitying.
175. But who asked me?
176. The young proud man is an expert at self-pity.
177. A cynic might say that human excellence means nothing.
178. That all of us die, and all of us are forgotten.
179. I suppose the cynic is right.
180. I can't logically justify the pursuit of "greatness."
181. I can't justify "deep thinking."
182. What makes any kind of thinking "deep"?
183. And yet we know it when we experience it.
184. We value it. We just do.
185. Some more than others.