| Doomflu? |
[18 Jun 2009|03:45pm] |
Turns out the doomflu I referenced in my last post as "debilitating" might've been the dread swine flu, seeing as though it is making the rounds through Montreal currently.
Of course I have no evidence for this whatsoever, but goddamn was it ever a nasty cold, so I choose to believe it. Now I want a t-shirt saying I survived the great pandemic of 2009. Ah, here's one.
swinefluswinefluswinefluuuuuu.
also iran!iran!iran! and other topical topics, insert interesting thought-provoking discussion here.
But I have other work to do, so I'll go procrastinate on that, not this.
iopha
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| Is this too long? Needs there be an Lj-Cut? |
[16 Jun 2009|12:55pm] |
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Was out of London for two weeks; back now. I think for the first time since I moved there I had a few pangs of something vaguely akin to being homesick for it. I always feel better when I get to re-charge in my own space, sure, but my stuff can be anywhere: this was me missing London a little bit. Just a little, mind you, and it was quite different from missing Montreal. Montreal homesickness is sharp with the hunger pangs of unfulfilled potential, the kind that only come with a certain intimacy you get with a city. All the things you still want to do and make and shout and kiss. London calls differently, with the actual, not the what-if: what I miss is our little house on the bad side of town, the one with the distressed, unkempt backyard we are laboriously remaking in our own image (i.e. unkempt and overgrown), the city's haphazardly beautiful bicycle paths, the steelwork'd cobweb of closeness we brazenly work and spin anew in nights and days, the University's hold over my intellectual affairs, a kind of polite submission of the Will; all these very real things that I am doing. I know it's changing me, or maybe it's age, or it's both and sundry other things besides, because the part of me driven by could is being partially annexed by is—or more precisely some third Hegelian synthesis of the two, transcending the dynamic, etc-whatever-etc, I dunno. Things are changed in ways I can't quite articulate yet; part of it is not wanting to talk about it in the old style, anyway. But that's neither here nor there. I went to Ottawa for the Canadian Philosophical Association's 2009 Congress in late May, where I gave a talk entitled “Wittgenstein, Constructive Mathematics and his Return to Philosophy.” The CPA is a good opportunity for grad students to get some conference experience and pad their C.V.s some; I drove down with another student from the department who was giving a talk. My own went well; the assigned commentator was sympathetic and constructive, and I jotted down a number of things to work on, for a re-write that hopefully could turn into a proper publication (I also got an email offering to publish a paper I presented in Ohio, but the journal isn’t very well-known, so I am hesitating). Stayed at friends' while in Ottawa; good to see them. Moved on, post-CPA, to Montreal, which was unfortunately marred by illness and bad weather. I spent about 5 days of my second week there in a flu-caused daze, caught when a cold rainstorm washed over Ford and I on the way to a United Steelworkers show. As a result I was not at my best and could not make the most of my time. Despite this debilitating impediment, there were several fun things made of win and space-cupcakes: the aforementioned Steelworkers, the Zoobizarre retro goth night—oh, to hear the Chameleons and Virgin Prunes in a packed, smelly club!--then TV on the Radio, absolutely wonderful, and the Dirty Projectors (whose album Bitte Orca is quite enjoyable although I preferred some of their live arrangements), tiny open mics on the plateau, good steak and missing spiders, bad movies and foul-mouthed video games, hackey sack games on the waterfront, botanical weddings and late night pitchers of beer: so no, it wasn't fail, but certainly I could've done without the doomflu, kthxbye. It certainly cramped Li and I's musical style. Back in London now and I have a ton of fucking work to do. On my immediate radar is yet another re-write of the proto-Prospectus, then a re-write of the Wittgenstein paper, studying for my area competency exam, and preparing a paper to submit for this fall's x-phi conference in Buffalo. That ought to keep me occupied until the Fall semester, when I will finally get a classroom to call my own: no more TA assignments, I’m teaching formal logic this fall. I’m in charge of everything: textbook selection, course syllabus, grading criteria. Really excited. So instead of plunging into it, when I got back to London Saiche and I borrowed a friend’s car and drove north to Bruce Peninsula National Park. I figured after being gone for two weeks it’d be nice to do something, just the two of us. We went rock climbing on the escarpment, explored caves, saw snakes and fish and birds and flowers (but no bears). It was nice. I’ll post pictures soon. Now I’m sitting at my desk at home. Band practice this afternoon. Should go make lunch. I can hear her singing downstairs and it’s a beautiful day outside. So there.
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| mmm-hmm |
[22 May 2009|04:18pm] |
It's not that I'm not posting; it's more like an experiment in applied elision.
Sometimes I read the old posts and I think, "Who is that guy leaving the house without wearing pants... again." And I've yet to find a new voice that isn't inspired by a desire to reveal things (or: dissimulate other things by revealing these).
Isn't that why the internet and Facebook and blogs are so succesful? Unlike other media, the audience is kept rapt because the content is about one's own life and relations: as Thomas de Zengotita put it in a recent essay, "...as the real world lost its moorings, the virtual world found its mission. It keeps your attention by paying attention to you."
But holy shit, I'm not that interesting; what I do might be, one day. However: My attention kept virtual prevents concrete activities from reifying forth (as Athena from the forehead of Zeus) out of my hollow musings.
So I flounder about some, trying not to struggle free of an ensnaring net but to climb up and over its strands. Of course Athena did not appreciate Arachne's hubris; perhaps that is not the best model to take up. And the trickster spirit of Anansi, too, has already found its anonymous place on the web. What's an aging boy to do? Take up a sword named Kumokirimaru?
Or quit looking at wikipedia to sound smart and come up with something new for once?
Ha!
Meanwhile, I find this little piece of software pretty cool. I have to reboot and get into BIOS to check my system temperature. This was the only free program I found that worked well: gives me chassis, CPU and HDD temperatures, fan speeds and warns me when I start overheating.
Ain't nothing to do with nothing. Also, the new Manson album is crap. Cue-in the surprise of the null set.
iopha
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| Methodological Contrast: Political Science |
[16 May 2009|06:12pm] |
My politics are generally informed by the desire to live in a 'good' society. I'm pretty casual about what 'good' means, precisely: some kind of pluralist satisficing compromise borne of reflective equilibrium. Most of us want a society that is free, genuinely meritocratic, absent egregious social strife and inequality, with just laws and a representative government and opportunities to develop one's talents and interests without too much interference. I've discussed elsewhere arguments for wealth redistribution in a 'good' society that illustrate well the kind of reasoning I consider well-formed and persuasive.
[Ed.'s Note: Please see this interesting article on the correlation between income inequality and standard of living.]
I like to make arguments based on comparative case studies, analysis of available data, incorporation of sundry pragmatic and practical considerations, various heuristic devices (that are admittedly fallible but reliable), with an eye both the desirability outcomes and the caveat that ends don't always justify means. It's not particularly elegant, but it's reasonable and it works.
Now contrast this with an axiomatic, a priori approach: where one begins with self-evident truths (or 'first principles') and then derives conclusions based on conceptual analysis of these. We might take private property as a fundamental concept and conclude that we have no responsibilities to the poor. In this we proceed as Hobbes did in Leviathan, Spinoza in the Ethics, or as Rand did with her "three axioms." From the assertion of indubitable truths ("existence exists") we conclude, at the end of a long derivation, that the sole purpose of government is civil defense. Mmm-hmm.
What I never really figured out is why on earth I should believe that reasoning from so-called first principles can tell us anything at all about how to build and maintain something as complex and messy as a human society.
I understand axiomatics in set theory, formal logic and mathematics. But it's incredibly messy even there. For instance: do we accept the axiom of choice? We don't have to! There are dozens of variations on the formal set-theoretic axioms: mathematicians often use the ZFC axioms, but many don't.
For the better part of 2,000 years rejection of the Euclidean Parallel Postulate was seen as self-contradictory, but geometry gets along fine without it, thank you. So things are certainly more subtle than 17th-century Rationalists would have us believe--but at least they have the excuse that the idea was novel and untried at the time.
Contemporary physical scientists certainly don't rely solely on axiomatics. Sure, some theoretical physicists proceed at an extreme level of mathematical abstraction; a certain measure of empirical input is nonetheless required (various constants, for example). From chemistry on up it's perfectly obvious that axiomatics simply don't work. And we know this for a fact: while quantum mechanics in principle allows us to calculate the properties of chemical systems without having to perform any lab experiments (via the Schrödinger equation) in practice the calculations are far too complex to solve except for the very simplest systems.
This is chemistry! A hard science! And then what? Upwards, to biology? Then psychology? Then sociology and political science?
And I'm supposed to believe that the axiomatic method can tell me anything about the incredibly more complicated, higher-order, non-linear complex systems involved in running a fucking planet? That sober reflection on lofty self-evident principles will ineluctably lead us to good societies? It's sheer nonsense and absolutely flabbergasting to me that anyone should think this.
Note that the plausibility of any putative axioms has nothing to do with my criticism, which is that the deductive mode of reasoning is completely inapplicable to the topics considered.
In the case of the Randian "axioms," most are fairly reasonable platitudes charitably considered in and of themselves; but as has been pointed out, almost immediately crude errors arise in the "deduction" process, such as a failure to properly distinguish between sense and reference--a distinction made before Rand was even born. It is this lack of thorough engagement with the serious philosophy of her day that makes Rand an entirely ignored figure in the modern academy and not any ideologically-driven conspiracy.
iopha
[Brought to you by my utter bewilderment at the continued appeal of Ayn Rand, recently voted "person who has brought the most disrepute to discipline by being associated with it" by philosophers, in a landslide.]
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| get out of my soul |
[12 May 2009|08:07pm] |
“On his 70th birthday,” Vaillant said, “when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, ‘Would you write a letter of appreciation?’ And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters—often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.” Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. “George, I don’t know what you’re going to make of this,” the man said, as he began to cry, “but I’ve never read it.” “It’s very hard,” Vaillant said, “for most of us to tolerate being loved.”
[...]
What Makes Us Happy?, The Atlantic
( Another quote, under the cut )
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| Star Trek |
[09 May 2009|12:55am] |
Saw it earlier tonight. Must say: I was entertained. But it's not Trek, and J.J. Abrams is on the record as saying that the film is not meant for the hardcore fans.
And I'm okay with that, too; if this is what it takes to get an ailing franchise rolling again, so be it. Let it be noted my inner Trekkie nerd was aghast at a few things.
( Let me count the ways...[SPOILERS!] )
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| On Rancourt's "The State of Academic Freedom" |
[07 May 2009|01:44pm] |
i. I MELTED DOWN THIS GILDED CAGE
“Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”
-William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, (‘Proverbs of Hell’).
Blake’s underworld in the poem is quite unlike Dante’s all-too-literal Inferno: Hell is not a place of torment or punishment, but rather an extended metaphor for a frothing proto-Id, the locus of Dionysian, active energies, contrasted to a passive super-Ego of a Heaven “that obeys reason.”
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is very much a product of the late 18th century, a time of radical politics and re-evaluation of values; of a nascent Luciferian principle that upsets orders and beckons to action—any action. There are enough Nietzschean and Freudian themes present for a dissertation or two. In fact, I’m sure they’ve been written. But that’s not the point here.
I saw Denis Rancourt speak at Western on Monday and I thought to myself at one point: “Goodness, here’s a man who has taken Blake’s proverbs of Hell to heart.” He represses no urges, but rather boldly acts in accordance to his re-evaluation of values.
( Read more... )
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| on a bicycle |
[31 Mar 2009|03:38pm] |
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If you're lucky, the morning is cool and still and the pavement rushes by underneath and breathing murmurs fire to the lungs. Sometimes a bird feigns to alight but flies for a moment with you instead. So you match speeds with a quiet grin and watch the wings beat, watch the drop and lift of its movement, carved seamlessly from the air like the sculpt of her flank. And you may think to yourself, "why sadness? why yearning? why anxiety?" and you may think to yourself, "this is enough, this air on my face," because for a lost moment you understand there will never come a time without entropies.
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| Montréal pour mon 30e anniversaire |
[30 Mar 2009|12:45pm] |
| [ |
music |
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tricky: dear god |
] |
I've already made the perfunctory Logan's Run reference elsewhere about this--and frankly it's not that big a deal. Doesn't feel particularly mythic or important, though I suspect that the salient difference isn't that one is older, but is treated as if older.
(A wit once said: people don't get older, their hangovers just get worse).
In any event, old age has bequeathed me with some small measure of disposable, discretionary income and I choose to spend it thus:
- (2) tickets for Tricky at the Mod Club in Toronto for this Thursday.
- (1) car rental from Discount for Thursday, April 2nd through Tuesday, April 7th.*
The plan is as follows: drive to Toronto, enjoy supper and a concert; then get caffeinated as all fuck and drive to Montreal overnight to crash attend a certain Friday-night theme party and generally bum about Montréal with Saiche 'til monday.
So: If you have an o'erweening desire for shenanigans, you could do worse than get in touch, moppets & droogs.
iopha
*It should be noted that this is epic win, because Discount is giving me a free three-day rental on the basis of a customer loyalty program, and that the previous rentals, being for academic-related travel, will be partially reimbursed by the department here. So really I'm paying for two days of a five-day rental and someone else is picking up the tab for the previous rentals that enabled this. Ha!
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| Gear weakness |
[19 Mar 2009|02:21pm] |
I'm currently sorely tempted to buy a Korg KP3 from Craigslist, though of course I'm well aware that simply acquiring more stuff won't suddenly make me a better musician, or improve my home recording abilities.
Besides, I really should get a decent microphone first.
Blah!
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| The Crisis, one year on |
[18 Mar 2009|02:59pm] |
Beyond all the prattle about big and small government, this is the mega-irony of the Republican Party: that of all people conservatives ought to have been the first to grasp the dangers of unregulated markets. If big government is susceptible to the abuses of sinful human beings, how much more susceptible is a corporate system that is bigger than any government?
The right wing of the party ought to have seen this better than the center, and the religious right ought to have seen it best of all. That they failed to see it bespeaks a spiritual bankruptcy beside which the financial plight of an auto industry is as a gnat unto a camel. -Garret Keizer: "Shine, Perishing Republicans."
Ten years ago I was at a student forum held by the Fraser Institute, a corporate-funded free-market marketing agency masquerading as an independent think tank. I was there to argue, because their foolishness was apparent even then.
I told a bright-eyed besuited man there that I was, at heart, a libertarian: "Then you should be sympathetic to what we're trying to accomplish." But no, I replied: there's an insidious tyranny latent in so-called 'unregulated' capitalism.
Had I been more eloquent, I could've explained that the absence of rules, laws, conventions, practices, regulations, enforcement, ideals, ethics is not freedom but its very antithesis. This should be obvious: freedom is a space to be carved out from the deep constraints that inhere everywhere. The antagonist of choice is scarcity; and we've fought long and hard to reduce this scarcity, which requires organization, rules, regulations, laws. These laws do not constrain: they carve out a space for freedom to dwell.
To make liberty possible at all we must organize ourselves in useful, realistic, ethical ways. The consequences of removing organizational principles from the economic world will be disastrous. And indeed: scarcity has increased for many; choice lessened; freedom trampled. As if the ability to trade in exotic derivatives or send money to tax havens had anything to do with human freedom. But they couldn't see that. The Republicans, pessimistic about the abuses possible in government, gave capital free reign.
See where it has left us, you sophists, you fools, you whores. See where it has left us.
iopha
Caveat: One year ago, when this mess started, I predicted that the Fed would print enough money to stave off the crisis indefinitely. Turns out I had gravely underestimated just how rotten the whole structure was. So: I was wrong. Take that into account.
I still think we'll make it out okay. Hurt, but okay. The question is: will we ever learn our goddamn lesson?
EDIT: I've included the full article I quote from under the cut.
( Read more... )
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| Why fighting the good fight is worthwhile |
[09 Mar 2009|11:35am] |
From the Washington Post:
-- A wide-ranging study on American religious life found that the Roman Catholic population has been shifting out o of the Northeast to the Southwest, the percentage of Christians in the nation has declined and more people say they have no religion at all.
Fifteen percent of respondents said they had no religion, an increase from 14.2 percent in 2001 and 8.2 percent in 1990, according to the American Religious Identification Survey.
Northern New England surpassed the Pacific Northwest as the least religious region, with Vermont reporting the highest share of those claiming no religion, at 34 percent. Still, the study found that the numbers of Americans with no religion rose in every state.
"No other religious bloc has kept such a pace in every state," the study's authors said.
So there you go. Despite quite legitimate criticisms of the New Atheism, clearly we're having an impact.
Also rather interesting is that denominational identification amongst Christians has decreased substantially in favour of more fluid self-identifications such as "born-again" or "evangelical," a development likely due to the rise of non-traditional "mega-churches" that are not 'generationally' linked to their attendance. This is good news, too, for it portends a fragmentation of Christianity that could serve to weaken its political force--which, honestly, is my only real problem with it. Religion is an obstacle to coherent public policy, and social changes that push towards secularism in governance is a good thing for everyone, not just the non-religious. So here's to optimism.
In other news: I'm going to Kent State to present a paper on Merleau-Ponty this weekend, that's exciting; I've moved out from Concord rd., and that's kinda scary but good; I've set up a little study to work in, and my recording instincts are pushing me towards heavier material. We'll see where that goes.
Also, Left4Dead is still a wonderful timesink.
iopha
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| Plantinga vs. Dennet |
[03 Mar 2009|01:04pm] |
Note: An online petition has been circulating within the professional philosophical community concerning the restrictions certain private Christian universities place on the hiring of gay and lesbian philosophers—namely, that such philosophers may identify as gay or lesbian but cannot have sexual partners if they wish to work at these institutions. Whether such private universities should be allowed to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation (personally, I don’t think they should) is not what’s at issue here.
Rather, the issue is that the American Philosophical Association (APA) publishes a list of “Jobs for Philosophers,” which is how the overwhelming majority of North American philosophers find work. These Christian colleges and universities advertise alongside their secular counterparts. Now the APA endorses an explicit anti-discrimination policy which states that:The American Philosophical Association rejects as unethical all forms of discrimination based on race, color, religion, political convictions, national origin, sex, disability, sexual orientation, gender identification or age, whether in graduate admissions, appointments, retention, promotion and tenure, manuscript evaluation, salary determination, or other professional activities in which APA members characteristically participate. It certainly seems that the hiring practices of Christian colleges and universities conflicts directly with the APA’s anti-discrimination policies, and the petition asks to either stop listing their job offers or at the very least marking the job postings as coming from institutions that violate the APA’s anti-discrimination statement. If the APA fails to do so, it should remove the language in its anti-discrimination policy statement that ostensibly claims to “reject as unethical” discrimination based on sexual orientation.
A counter-petition has sprung up, asking the APA to keep things as they are; one signatory comments that those asking the APA to enforce its own anti-discrimination policy are “filled with the very same kinds of hatred and bigotry they claim to oppose,” a ludicrous and idiotic argument which is, for reasons unfathomable to me, apparently repeated even by professional thinkers—which perhaps raises questions about the quality of education at Christian colleges.
It was with regret that, amongst the signatories of this counter-petition, I saw Alvin Plantinga (or someone claiming to be him), of which more currently.
( Read more... )
P.S. Please don't sign the petition unless you are a member of the APA.
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| Plantinga-Dennet |
[25 Feb 2009|10:57pm] |
For those of you curious about the Plantinga-Dennet 'debate' I referenced in my last post, there's a summary here with discussion.
The author is far more sympathetic to Plantinga. Sometimes I agree with him, particularly in his assessment of Dennet's glib shallowness and derisive tone; more troubling is his easy division of the audience into "Christians" and "naturalists" who do no more than act as cheerleaders for their respective camps.
The whole exchange was bad. Not bad only because Dennet rather unfairly mocked just as much, if not more, than he argued; but also because Plantinga's own arguments, while seriously presented with conviction and sincerity, themselves were uniformly awful.
My assessment here is echoed by Brian Leiter, from whom I stole the first link above. He writes that I did stay for about 20-25 minutes of Plantinga's presentation, but it was sufficiently bad (in part because repetitive of arguments previously, and rather decisively, criticized), that I left and so did not see Dennett's reply. I'm trying to restrict my own account to five pages, and it should be up tomorrow.
Until then, play safe.
iopha
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| Chicago! |
[25 Feb 2009|01:04pm] |
Spent a few days visiting Riin in Chicago. It's a very nice, clean city with broad sidewalks, arresting architecture, cheap, plentiful taxicabs, good restaurants, wonderful public parks--of the American cities I've visited, I'd say it is one of my favorites so far.
Not that I will ever be so lucky to find a teaching job there.
On Thursday Riin and I went to the local goth club, Neo; it was New Wave night. I drank Delirium Tremens on tap and danced to Depeche Mode and Tones on Tail and it was good times.
Friday we explored the city with Peep and went to the Presidential Address of the American Philosophical Association's annual Central Division meeting, coincidentally in Chicago that week; Peter van Inwagen criticized the recent anti-metaphysical writings of Bas van Fraasen and Hilary Putnam. I sharply disagreed with some points, but I won't go over the details here.
Later Friday evening, after the talk, we caught a comedy show ('Scumbag Millionaires') at Chicago's famous Second City theater, where John Belushi, Bill Murray and Mike Myers have all performed; then walked down the street to a local pub and drank 5$ pints of Guinness. Also good times!
Saturday, after breakfast, we headed back to the APA to hear Alvin Plantinga, possibly the most famous protestant Christian philosopher alive, present a paper entitled "Science and Religion: Where the Conflict Really Lies," but the real draw was who the APA chose to comment: none other than Dan Dennet, noted philosopher of mind and public atheist. I'll be posting a more detailed discussion of the exchange between the two shortly.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) imlac showed up at the talk, and before he headed out of town we ducked into the Field Museum (the one from Ferris Bueler's Day Off!); then Riin and I made our way to the Sears Tower to take in the view.
Sunday I drove back, taking Riin with me back to London. Naturally, a blustering snow storm awaited us in Ontario. But it was a good trip. And I'd love to go back!
iopha
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| Hex: [(2 * A) + 5] Things you Don’t Need to Know About ‘Me’ |
[14 Feb 2009|02:45pm] |
1.
I’m not sure I believe there is a ‘me’. Sure, there’s a persistent carbon based phenotype of homo sapiens vintage that has answered to my name for score and a half years now. But, as J.B.S. Haldane once wrote, “I have come to the conclusion that my subjective account of my motivation is largely mythical on almost all occasions. I don't know why I do things.”
(Although myself, I’ve become very good at inventing plausible stories. )
While motivation is indubitably a tricky, opaque thing, Haldane might’ve also suspected that there is no fundamental, singular “I” to which motives can be neatly ascribed in any event. “I” might just refer to some lashed aggregate, some compound plurality held together by the whims of flesh and the stone-firm sternness of the present.
( Read more... )
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| Anyone? |
[11 Feb 2009|04:48pm] |
Wondering if there are any volunteers willing to help me out with some code. I know exactly what I want, but the implementation is beyond my meager technical skills. It shouldn't be too complicated.
Ideally, it should run within the NetLogo modeling environment, which is Java-based, but has its own (very easy!) internal scripting language.
Golly would be an acceptable alternative, since both Perl and Python scripts are supported within it.
The basic idea is a non-traditional vamp on Game of Life / Cellular Automata rules and shouldn't take very long to code up. I can't promise any financial compensation, but should any publications or conference presentations result from the work, credit will be given where it is due.
Comment for details. Thanks!
iopha
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