And You Shall Be in the Blog

In which I begin to show a politically pragmatic streak.

2006-11-08T11:35:00.001-08:00

First post in a very, very long while. There are a number of reasons for this. I've been finding other distractions to occupy myself with-- chief among them, playing lots of guitar, and writing a novel (although I'm not doing so well with the latter pursuit-- about 3-4,000 words off pace to get it finished in time). But I've been so swept up with jubiliation since the returns of last night's election that I decided I just had to break out the blog again. So here goes.

So, I've been having a funny and unexpected thought recently, in light of the Democrat's unexpected success, or at least competitiveness, in heretofore solidly republican areas. Jon Tester's success in Montana (it looks, as of this moment, as if he is going to win) is probably the best example, but there are many others. These democrats have the peculiar and perhaps untoward feature of being conservative on social issues. Bob Casey, who beat Rick Santorum, is Catholic, and pro-life. The aforementioned Tester, if I understand correctly, is 'pro-gun' -- that is, against gun-control. Various commentators will no doubt spin these successses as examples of Democrats winning elections by running as Republicans, since the candidates mentioned are conservative on social issues. Of course this meme is shot to utter hell by the fact that most of the candidates conservative on social issues were rampantly liberal on economic ones. And I say that's enough to make them perfectly good Democrats.

Stances on gun-control and abortion have been benchmark issues for a good long while for determining whether someone agreed more with democrats or with republicans. And this worked extraordinarily well for the Republican party, because of the wedge issue effect. Whereas Democrats have had, I believe, little intent of pursuing any serious agenda on abortion (save keeping it legal), and no intent of passing any legislation with real effect on reasonable gun ownership (AK-47's, I suspect, make poor hunting instruments, after all), the Republicans have succeeded in using these issues to drive a wedge between the Democrats and much of the electorate. As a result, the electorate has quite often endorsed Republicans, in spite of the fact that said Republicans in no way have the economic interests of the majority of the electorate at heart. I think this is a pretty common way of seeing things, and I share it.

Now, prior to the Bush years I think I would have thought that it mattered much that Democrats maintain their stances on abortion and gun control. After all, stances on these issues were what part of what made Democrats Democrats, rather than Republicans. So giving them up would have seemed tantamount to giving up being genuinely progressive at all. The Bush years, however, have changed all of that for me. And I believe the switch is a pragmatic one. It surely would be ideal if we could maintain a uniform pro-choice, pro-gun control stance. But those stances have really alienated us to a large portion of the electorate for too long, and, in a sense I will address momentarily, they don't actually matter all that much. So, why not open up the party to pro-gun, "pro-life" Democrats and do our darnedest to drop the issue on those topics at the national level?

Consider abortion. Suppose there is no huge difference between a democrat and a republican in a given reace on the issue of abortion. Obviously, the issue loses its political potency. Lets suppose that the democrat, seeming more economically appealing to much of the electorate, gets elected, and let's further suppose that that democrat is pro-life. Fast forward to that democrat's term in office. Given that the issue of abortion is, de facto, no longer a politically divisive issue-- at least as far as the local choice is concerned-- do you think that the democrat will actively pursue new legislation on the matter while in office? I strongly doubt it. I guess I can be called a pronounced cynic about the abortion debate, in that I believe the "debate" is a non-starter qua politics. There is utterly no point for the government to legislate about a matter on which there is no real popular mandate. And people are, I believe, in general quite divided about abortion. So if abortion is no longer a wedge to divide the parties, I suspect it will disappear from the political landscape all together. Of course that only happens if Democrats "drop the subject" of abortion en masse-- by declaring an open invite to 'pro-life' Dems. I still, of course, think that the pro-life stance is wrong, but I remain convinced that if it no longer serves its wedge function, nobody will try to do anything about it, politicians will eventually quit using it to incite their bases, and in general it will cease to matter. As a consequence, democrats will go back to winning races that they should win-- because they are better qualified to represent the interests of the electorate.

Of course, disarming the abortion issue in politics would do nothing to settle the moral question of abortion, which would remain thorny and potentially divisive. But, taken off the political menu, it would no longer poison the electorate against otherwise superior leaders.

Likewise for gun control. The issue of gun control plays a ridiculous role in elections-- as democrats who, at their most aggressive, would simply prefer that functional howitzers remain off of the public market, get painted as people who will deprive people of their firearms all together. Now, I happen to believe this country would be better if we could dramatically decrease the role that guns play in our society, but I also recognize, at this point, that people get fantastically uppity and irrational when it comes to their guns, and if that means dropping the subject at the national level, so be it. As far as I know, very few democrats have ever promoted gun control legislation that would do anything more than slightly inconvenience responsible gun ownership. Yet time and again we get painted as enemies of responsible gun ownership. And that is absurd. So why not quit claiming to be the party of gun control, embrace those pro-gun proto-Democrats, and win elections that we should win-- because we better represent the people and govern more judiciously?

Dropping the subject at the national level would surely make progress on gun control a longer haul, but it would not halt it all together. There would still be ample room to make progress at the local and state levels, where effective communication may be easier, given the smaller scope of things. And this would also allow areas that are a bit touchier on the subject of gun control (possibly because gun control is less relevant, say, in hunting-happy rural areas) to opt out if they so chose. And oh good lord I sound like a Tory.

But what I mean to be is a pragmatist. The number one thing the Bush years have taught me is that life is miserable when you lose elections. So the first thing we need to do is stop losing elections-- and in some parts of the country, that means compromising on issues we northeasterners or left-coasters or whatever thought should be winners for us, but which weren't, and aren't. In most cases, it means endorsing our social libertarian wing whole-hog-- disarming the wedge issues when we need to and where we can-- and winning on superior governing ideology and competence. We got lots of help this time from the Republicans shooting themselves in the foot-- but the fact that we made even some of the reddest districts competitive, and that we fielded as many competitors as we did, I think speaks to the wisdom of this strategy.

The strategy is of course a close relative of Howard Dean's 50-State project, which is ultimately going to be a real no-brainer for the Democrats going forward. If we want to beat the Republicans on a regular basis, we can't keep conceding whole swaths of the country to them. We have to compete in every district, as much as we can, ever election year. But the hand-maiden of this strategy is that the Democrats should become a Big Tent party, embracing the social libertarians and even the odd social conservative. Because the last 6 years or so have, I think, vindicated our economic values, but they have also suggested quite strongly that Republicans-- or at least, Bush-style Republicans-- are utterly incompetent when it comes to governing, and moreover, that they are more than willing to take potshots at our cherished social institutions (public education, social security, medicare, etc.) as long as they're in office. Indeed, their ideology often compels them toward such actions. The democrats, by contrast, believe in strengthening these public institutions-- and that is what makes them the sane choice for America.

Philosophical Pet Peeve: The reification of experiences.

2006-10-16T06:30:00.000-07:00

Well, I need to write something for this blog before it starts to run the very real risk of grinding to a halt in the face of my fairly substantial workload. I've been meaning to write a couple of things, but laziness and business have conspired to prevent me from getting to it and posting something. Maybe I'll get to those things eventually, but the likelihood seems pretty slim.

So, in the meantime, I thought I'd rant semi-coherently a bit about a common philosophical maneuver that, it seems, carves up the philosophical world pretty neatly. I have in mind the "reification of experiences," by which I mean the move to treat 'experiences' as a kind of thing-like entity endowed with certain properties, and which stand in some privileged position with respect to our state of knowledge (typically, our experiences are what inform us of the state of things in the world and in our heads, and only they can do that). Now obviously there is a philosophically innocent way of talking about experiences. If what you understand by 'experience' is just the event of our coming into cognitive contact with some part of the world, that strikes me as perfectly defensible. On the other hand, philosopher's often talk about experiences as if they can be separated, or separately interrogated, from those things which the experiences are meant to be experiences of. This I find objectioanble. Hence, a rant:

This move, the shift into talking about experiences as separable from the objects of experience, typically happens very fast, and even unnoticeably. And its chief upshot is that we wind up talking about experiences as things which have properties all their own (again, quite independent of worldly things). Two examples come to mind from my very recent reading. The first example comes from a paper by David Chalmers, "Consciousness and its Place in Nature" that I was starting to read, until I got to the following excerpt, whereupon my brain fell out (slight exaggeration):

... A mental state is conscious when there is something it is like to be in that state. Conscious states include states of perceptual experience, bodily sensation, mental imagery, emotional experience, occurrent thought, and more. There is something it is like to see vivid green, to feel a sharp pain, to visualize the Eiffel tower, to feel a deep regret, and to think that one is late. Each of these states has a phenomenal character, with phenomenal properties (or qualia) characterizing what it is like to be in the state. (Chalmers 2002, 248)

Again, I insist that part of this is all right. There is indeed 'something it is like' to feel a pain, visualize the Eiffel tower, and so on-- and I will even follow Chalmers on the less obvious cases: there is indeed 'something it is like' to feel a regret or think that one is late, if one does so consciously. And we're even all right if we talk about these various states as having 'phenomenal character,' if what this means is that, in each case, things appear to us in a certain way by figuring in our idiosyncratic conscious experience of the world. It's the next step that bothers me: not only can we talk about the phenomenal character of these various mental states but, according to Chalmers, we can also meaningfully talk about the properties of these states qua first-person experiences. And thus the term 'qualia' is introduced into the philosophical discourse.

Let me first come back to the phrase "There is something it is like to be in mental state x." It strikes me that the word 'something' in this context is quite dangerous, if what I'm worried about is the treating of experiences as separately intelligible property-bearing entities. I take the significance of the "There is something..." to be roughly that, we can imagine having a pain, or recall visualizing the Eiffel Tower, or recall a time that we thought we were late, and so on-- we have some access to our past experience [innocent usage] that allows us, within certain limits, to simulate for ourselves the contact we had with things at past times. But as indicated by the way I phrase that, I think that when we perform this simulation, what we're recalling are our acts of accessing features of the world (in the broadest possible sense of the term)-- the pain, the image of the Eiffel tower, our being-late at time t, etc. I suppose some may bristle at the suggestion that things like pain and mental imagery are features of the world, but I don't find this the least bit problematic. I suspect we already possess enough knowledge to be able to determine from the total neural/neurochemical state of a person whether she is in pain (in principle if not in practical actuality) from the third person. I see no prima facie reason why gross facts about mental imagery would prove similarly recalcitrant to third person investigation, as long as we're maintaining some kind of significant realization of the mental by the physical.

There are two components to my suggestion for how to understand the genuine 'what it is like' associated with the mental states listed. First, there is the feature of the world, which, I take it, is the locus of all of the qualities we want to attribute to the 'experience.' Second, there is the act of accessing that feature. When we remember 'what it was like' to take our first bite of an apple, we remember the features of the apple by way of remembering the act that brought us into contact with those features. I suppose one might respond, "Sure, but when we remember the features of the apple, we're not just remembering any features-- we're remembering the experiential features of the apple, such as its taste, its texture, and so on. And surely those experiential features of the apple are distinct from its physical features (in the way that a specification of the microstructure of the apple would fail to capture the way the apple feels to you-- its 'subjective texture'). Voila: qualia!" But here (as in many other places) I'm a faithful student of Dennett and P.M. Churchland -- the 'experiential' features just are the physical features. That we have idiosyncratic faculties for accessing those features that register them in certain ways (textures and tastes) is no reason to expand the number of properties we attribute to the object, much less to expand our ontology to encompass new entities (experiences) to bear those properties. There are no such properties. Just features of the world.

[I should note, in passing, that Chalmers, in a footnote, tries to hedge the claim that the phenomenal properties in question must be properties of mental states-- he suggests in a footnote that they could be properties of individual people, characterizing what it is like to be them at a certain time. I don't think this helps at all, principly because I don't think one can get at the kinds of things Chalmers wants to talk about by adverting to the "what its like" of individual people at given times, firstly because I think this just underdetermines the subject matter. There is, of course, quite a lot one can say about what it is like to be, e.g., me right now-- only some of which will pertain to my mental states. Of course, we can somewhat arbitrarily narrow the field of play and say that we only want to talk about the properties of people that pertain to their conscious mental states, but I would resolutely maintain that these properties are, properly speaking, just dyadic predicates relating perceivers to objects (e.g. P(x,y) = x is perceiving y) or [more likely] triadic predicates relating perceivers to certain properties of objects (i.e. P(x,y,z) = x is perceiving the property y of object z), assuming that the relevant time is specified antecedently. The properties characteristic of 'what it's like' talk are, to my mind, always relational--because they are ways of specifying the act of coming into cognitive contact with an object. If I'm meant to revise this picture to include a set of simple (read: unanalyzable) monadic predicates true of perceivers at a given time, it's totally unclear to me why I should capitulate. So I won't!]

There's nothing new in the above, of course. But I want to place emphasis on the Wittgensteinian reading of the move to introduce qualia. I think we get tricked by the surface grammar of the claim "There is something it is like to taste an apple" into thinking that in fact there is something, by which I mean an entity, which we (to some necessarily limited extent) can describe as bearing certain properties (qualia) separate from the properties of the object experienced. And it's important to note that with this subtle slide, and the introduction of phenomenal properties, comes the whole "hard problem" of consciousness. Once you introduce conscious experiences as the locus of these funny phenomenal properties, you've got to explain how those properties got there-- and you deprive yourself of the obvious resource for doing so (viz. the objects plus our sensorium).

As I said, there is no shortage of qualia skeptics in the philosophical world. But qualia aren't the only byproducts of talking about experiences as separately intelligible entities. Doing so also gives rise to some, I think quite horribly misleading, talk about experiences as representational. Now I get to complain about John McDowell. Goody!

McDowell, I think, motivates his Mind and World project [btw, M&W is all I will talk about vis-a-vis McDowell's writing, since its all that I've studied] with the innocent thought that states of affairs in the world are capable of rationally influencing our thinking. If our thoughts weren't capable of being rationally integrated with the facts-- if the facts gave our thoughts no support-- we would be hard pressed to make sense of the notion that our thoughts were really about the world. We all want to make sense of intentionality, and that seems to mean we have to make sense of states of affairs as coming to bear on our thoughts as reasons (and like). This is all well and good so far--as is the thought McDowell wants to find room for, that our experience is best characterized as an 'openness' to the facts. Absolutely. I'm on board.

I think, however, the way McDowell characterizes experience otherwise stands in some considerable tension to the notion of experience as an openness to facts. I have in mind McDowell's characterization of experiences as representing the world to us as being a certain way. For my part I do not understand why McDowell intoduces a representational account of perception, other than to account for the possibility of non-veridical, 'misleading' experiences, which, I suppose, McDowell wants to characterize as representing the world as being a certain way when, in fact, it is not that way.

If I'm right, then the motivation for speaking of experiences as representing the world in a certain way is perfectly understandable. That is, we want to account for how we can come to have false beliefs about the world. It seems natural, in view of certain visual illusions, to suppose that one way in which we can come to have false beliefs about the world is by being misled by our experience. Thus, in the hackneyed Muller-Lyer illusion, we are 'misled by our experience' into thinking that one line is longer than the other, because our experience represents the one line as longer. Presumably, this representational content is a function of the way the Muller-Lyer illusion looks.

But, with thanks to Charles Travis, we can find another way to make sense of this case, and other similar cases of perceptual error. I think the most direct way to put the point is to bypass a lot of Travis' argument (which comes in his paper, "The Silence of the Senses," Mind 113:449, ppg. 57-94), and just say this: if you really want perception to amount to an "openness to facts," what sense does it make to suppose that the 'openness' is in fact restricted to a particular set of contents for any given perception. Whether we have 'openness' in any case of perception becomes a matter of deciding whether the propositional contents of the perception correspond to the facts or not-- the question of whether we have 'openness' in a given instance is really open and up for grabs. But we can avoid this, and really embrace 'openness to facts' if we deny that perceptions are 'representational.' Rather, we insist that perceptions are presentational-- and specifically, they present us with the world of objects, neutrally, so that we are then able to attend to, make out, and describe whatever facts we should find in the occurrent environment.

Where, in this alternative picture (very brusquely and inadequately sketched), does misleading come into play? Well, certain facts that we observe by way of perception may appear to be indications of further facts: the steam rising from my tea, for example, is an indication that the tea is hot, and that it probably has recently been poured. The first indication is fairly reliable, I suppose, but the second might not be: it could be that the tea was poured hours ago, but has just been reheated in the microwave. Phenomena like this could hardly be more familiar to us, I suspect. We take features of the observable environment to be evidence for further conclusions, and we are often wrong. Our 'experiences,' then, don't do the misleading-- rather, the facts do.

But what of perceptual illusions? An illusion like the Muller-Lyer, in Travis' way of thinking, has a certain look. That it has this look is an objective property of the figure on the page. We ordinarily take things that have similar looks to be indicative of, among other things, a disparities in length. In this case, the look is misleading, because the two lines of the Muller-Lyer illusion are not actually disparate in length. If this makes sense to speak in this way, then there is a way of understanding perceptual illusion that does not obligate us to talk about perceptions as bearing contents intelligible separate from the states of affairs they are meant to be perceptions of, and the notion of 'openness to facts' is legitimately won.

Quite a lot more could be said in reference to McDowell, I think-- especially in teasing out where the invocation of a representational theory of perception ultimately leads him. I think that all I shall claim for the time being is that endorsing such a representational view precludes McDowell from being able to wholeheartedly embrace the leading thought that in perception we are 'open' to features of the world. The notion of 'openness' strikes me as quite discordant with McDowell's contention that in experience we find ourselves 'saddled with content'-- to the extent that we are open, content is made available to us. The features of the world are all there for us to inspect and make out. Perception doesn't hedge things by determining (before active thinking is in the picture) what facts we should take up from a given environment. It simply lays the world at our feet so that we can go about the business of figuring out what's what.

To bring about some kind of conclusion to the rant, I suppose I should say that I don't think there is anything necessarily fraudulent about talking about and describing our mode of access to the world. We can certainly describe salient facts about our sensory and perceptual capacities. But we shouldn't think that those capacities give rise to something-- experiences-- which are intelligible independent of the relevant features of the world or perceivers, and which have their own properties or character quite independent of what they are experiences of. Or at least, I see no reason to do so, and besides which, doing so seems to lead to more complications than it solves. Perhaps I could be convinced to expand my ontology to include 'experiences,' but I will have to be convinced. Hence the peeve: the phenomenal or representational character of experiences is so often passed off as something obvious, but to my mind it is rather so far from obvious that there are even such things as 'experiences' to be meaningfully spoken of in these philosophically significant ways. Hence these philosophical contexts seem ripe for the roughly Wittgensteinian retort that the most suspect philosophical move is often the first one. I'm convinced that is the case here.

References:
Chalmers, David. "Consciousness and its Place in Nature." Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings. Ed. by Chalmers. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002.

McDowell, John. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Travis, Charles. "The Silence of the Senses." Mind v. 113, no. 449, ppg. 57-94. 2004.

Late Night at AYSBITB, 10-12-06

2006-10-12T22:52:00.000-07:00

OK, so it's really the 13th at this point. So what.

"Your Kisses are Wasted on Me" by the Pipettes.

I'm trying to figure out if I only like this video (and song) because the furthest singer to the right reminds me very distinctly of Naomi Watts' character in Mulholland Drive. The whole retro-50's shtick doesn't hurt that association, either.

I have not forgotten you, blog! But my mind is on Other Things.

2006-10-11T10:14:00.000-07:00

Still neglecting the blog, largely on account of work. I have way too many reading projects ongoing at the moment.

This is largely due to the fact that I've got coursework to worry about, and there is quite a lot of reading to be done in conjunction with that. I feel as though I ought to prepare quite a lot for each class session, which, in many cases, means re-reading things several times over, or reading them very slowly, while taking copious notes. So far, I haven't found that this has enabled me to be any more productive a participant in conversation, and I wonder how much I should really invest in, e.g., Plato's Republic, when, although I think the course is enjoyable and stimulating, I have no long term goal of becoming a Greek philosophy scholar. And indeed, I continue to find Greek philosophy somewhat less than totally compelling. It's interesting enough as it goes, but it doesn't get me up in the morning (Thank Goodness, then, that the Plato class meets in the afternoon!)

So I've been working on the project of remedying deficiencies in my knowledge base. There is an enormity of things that I Should Have Read but Haven't-- even-- nay, especially-- in my professed areas of interest. For all of my professed interest in philosophy of mind, for example, it often seems that I've barely read a lick of it. That's less true now than it was a year ago, certainly, but for as animated as I feel about the problems, I continually find myself blissfully unaware of contemporary attempts to address them. So I've begun devising curricula for myself-- primarily by consulting the relevant Stanford Encyclopedia Entries and checking the bibliographies, attempting to determine where the most important articles have been anthologized, and what book-length works need to inform my amazon.com wishlist. Then I've begun organizing the findings within four content areas.

(1) Intentionality
(2) Foundations of Cognitive Science
(3) Scientific Explanation
(4) Phenomenology

Most of my attention has been directed at area (1). Area (2), I expect, will wind up containing considerable crossover with area (1), and I feel that I've made considerable progress in improving my general knowledge of area (2), even though I'm still far short of genuine familiarity. Area (3) might be better entitled "Scientificity and Explanatory Character" since what I'm really interested in is a taxonomy of types of explanation (and, correspondingly, in the distinction between description and explanation, if it exists) coupled with some improved understanding of the features of certain explanations that mark them out as admissible in scientific discourse. If all goes well, area (3) will interface very well with area (2), and by extension area (1). A possible link among the first three areas is the realism/anti-realism debate. I'm attracted to certain forms of anti-realism and anti-positivist realism (e.g. Dupre's "promiscuous realism") concerning science and scientific explanation, and, if committed to those positions, it seems to me that questions about our approach to the explanation of cognition and behavior might take on a new tenor/look different/become more-or-less interesting/etc.... or something grand like that. Probably not a very original research project, but I think of it more as a way into the disciplines of philosophy of mind and philosophy of cog sci. If I actually stumble upon an interesting new insight or question or way to think about the problems, that will constitute the research project. Until then, like I say, these curricula only (hypothetically) supply my path into the broader field.

It ought to be said that as of last year I was really interested in non-computational accounts of spatio-temporal awareness; that is, accounts that make sense of spatio-temporal consciousness without reducing spatial awareness (for example) to the successive manipulation of internal computational/representational states. I'm not sure that the preceding sentence, or the associated research project, actually makes sense, and accordingly it's on hold until I get a better grip on the terrain. I may still be interested in the prospects of various ways of accounting for specifically spatial and temporal cognition, but I don't feel inclined to pursue that course explicitly until I know quite a bit more about the general lay of the land.

Finally, area (4) probably needs little explanation, and, to be sure, it remains relatively low on the list of priorities. I already know quite a bit about phenomenology, although far less than I'd like to (to be sure), so it takes a back seat to the other areas of the discipline I know little about but care much for.

One upshot of all of this is that I seriously have my work cut out for me. The prospects of my being able to make nay progress on these projects while completing my remaining coursework seems extraordinarily doubtful. But I'm going to endeavor all the same. And as a consolation, every little bit I can read will undoubtedly help to fill the gaps in my understanding. Given my present state of knowledge, it wouldn't take much to constitute a dramatic increase in my familiarity with the issues.

Late Night at AYSBitB, 10-06-06

2006-10-06T21:37:00.000-07:00

Best. Music. Video. Ever.

Yo La Tengo, "Sugarcube"
I'm not a huge YLT fan, but this is genius.

Friday Random 10

2006-10-06T10:34:00.000-07:00

Another Friday, another go around the Friday 10.

1. Sonic Youth, "Hits of Sunshine (for Allen Ginsberg)"
2. Andrew Bird, "Opposite Day"
3. Bloc Party, "Positive Tension"
4. Claude Debussy, Piano Trio in G Major, III. Andante
5. The Fall, "Vixen"
6. Sleater-Kinney, "Things You Say"
7. Erik Satie, Nocturne No. 6, Avant Dernieres Pensees
8. Castanets, "First Light's Freeze"
9. The Fire Show, "1986' 6" "
10. Dirty Three, "Distant Shore"

Memories of Pre-Calculus

2006-10-06T10:05:00.000-07:00

This post brings back fond memories of high school math class, only the students whose work is displayed there show a bit more creativity than I ever did.

Hat Tip: Pharyngula.

Late Night at AYSBitB

2006-10-05T21:55:00.000-07:00

I had to troll the internet for this one. Didn't come from YouTube or Google. I'm a bit skeptical, but we'll see if it works anyhow.

Helium, "Superball"
For such a silly song it's a bit of a straightforward video. But oh well, it's got Mary Timony in it, so I'm happy.

Classical Music Corner

2006-10-04T22:30:00.000-07:00

As I'm writing, YouTube is down for maintenance, so even if I were blogging the kind of music that tends to come with visuals attached, I'd be hard-pressed to produce the vids. Fortunate, then, that I thought I'd sing the praises of a couple of classical pieces I've become obsessed with lately. Do yourself a favor and track these down, pronto!

First, there's Mozart's Great Mass in C-minor, K. 427, which I first heard, in excerpt, in the movie The Triplets of Belleville. That was a bit of an odd film-- far more to my liking than Sherry's (she found it a bit disturbing somehow)-- but there is one absolutely gorgeous scene in it where the protagonists are paddling a little dinghy across the Atlantic ocean (IIRC) to the Kyrie of this mass. It's a great sequence on film, thanks in large part to the fact that the opening section of this piece just takes your breath away. I guess I often find that while its hard to go wrong with Mozart, Wolfie doesn't usually get me worked up the way later music can, but this piece is pretty awesome. Granted, of course, that it isn't the Coronation mass or the Requiem mass-- both of which I sang during my college choir days and remain partial to-- but it still manages to be quite stunning. After the opening section, I think my favorite bit is the duet of the Domine Deus, in the Gloria. My best reference for all things classical, the All Music Guide describes that movement as Handelesque. My ear isn't quite so refined, but that does sound about right to me.

My second new obsession isn't exactly a piece but a series of them: I finally got hooked on Bartok's six string quartets. I've had a two-disc set of all six quartets sitting on my iPod for probably over a year now, but given the sheer amount of unfamilliar classical music I loaded on to my iPod at that time (I raided my dad's collection), and given the fact that I'm usually of a mind to listen to popular music over classical, it's taken a while to get these pieces into the rotation. But I've just discovered how cool they are. I think the first few times I listened to them-- and remember that my first listens are almost always with the pieces in the background, with me reading or writing away-- I imagined I just assumed they were atonal, with lots of really interesting interplay among the various parts, but without much harmonic drive. I think the discovery that's really woken me up to these pieces is just that they're not atonal at all. Dissonant as you'd expect, yes, but not atonal. What's more, at least in my favorite of the six quartets so far (the second one), Bartok pulls one of my favorite tricks-- namely, in the first movement, he sticks a gorgeous folk tune in the middle of his extended, adventurous harmonic forays. The AMG, again hip with the comparison, calls the moment "Ravelian," which is apt. In much the way I feel with other music that aspires to the same effect (Benjamin Britten is really my favorite example of this)-- throwing in the moments of gorgeousness both accentuates the dissonance of the other sections and also makes it seem more significant or meaningul somehow qua dissonance. As should be obvious, I am not a musicologist-- and my musical knowledge and vocabulary is really limited. Its hard for me, to a large extent, to put words to what I'm hearing. But suffice it to say, amidst all of the interesting dissonance, there are some fantastically beautiful bits, and I love music that plays up the dissonance/consonance contrast in this way-- in effect, giving your ears a stretch before the massage. I didn't mention it above, but the amount of rhythmic variation in the quartets is also really exciting.
Glad I finally got around to giving those the fair shake.
(Oh, and lest I forget the best bit, Bartok was a Unitarian! Woo-hoo!)

The last one is just to prove that I'm a big softie. It's Brahms' first piano trio in B-major, Op. 8. Obviously, it's a very early work in the Brahms oeuvre and not, I think, an especially famous one. Still- like a lot of Brahms, it's feel-good heartwarming stuff-- or so it strikes me. I'm quite partial to the final movement, which in many ways seems the most interesting to me-- but the part that really gets to me in this piece comes midway through the second movement, when the relatively thorny scherzo is suddenly interrupted by a gorgeous piano theme that, to my ear, recalls the opening of the first movement. The melody, which is fairly simple and sweet as melodies go, rotates through various permutations and voicings, building to a brilliant forte pass before resolving back into the scherzo. Again, the contrast between the scherzo sections and the interlude is really what holds the movement together for me-- and the fact that the melody that occupies the chewy center of the second movement is just, well, earcandy.
I think I find a lot of Brahms to just be eminently listenable and non-demanding in that way-- perhaps the early stuff especially, but, I feel like quite a lot of what I've heard just sounds warm and inviting. And generally when it's not warm and inviting, it's just jaw-droppingly beautiful, as in the amazing soprano solo from the German Requiem, "Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit," which just kills me every time I hear it. I'm not currently obssessed with that piece, mostly because I've listened to it so much that I've totally worn out the mp3's (har har har). Nevertheless, it remains one of my all-time faves.

So, there you have it, all you cultural neophytes! Go grab your headphones and learn yourselves some old stuffy music!

Unless I forget, more danceable numbers will return tomorrow, with the customary accompanying videos.

Ho hum.

2006-10-04T00:16:00.000-07:00

Second week of courses. Lots of reading to do. Not much time for blogging.

Besides which, found myself in a pretty awful funk today, after I said a series of absolutely useless, totally philosophically uninteresting things in a session of Plato. Still waiting for when I will finally have something philosophically meaningful to say. Have been waiting a long time. Dogged by fears of incompetence and terminally limited philosophical potential. Again.

Feeling considerably annoyed at the unreasonable size of a chunk of Kant reading for a class tomorrow [besides which, dead sick of Kant], and the fact that Heidegger's methodological writings (to be read for Thursday) are, suprise surprise, almost totally impenetrable. Think I have some guess as to what "formal indication" is supposed to be, but its pretty vague. Get the fore-structure pretty well (IIRC-- leaning on my sophomore year understanding of it, here), but not exactly sure how it informs the method (again, some clue, but no clear & distinct ideas as yet).

Hence, radio silence.

Late Night (Early Morning?) at AYSBitB: Two-fer Make-up Edition

2006-10-01T01:51:00.000-07:00

So, I realized just now that by failing to post on either Thursday or Friday, I missed the weekly "Late Night" entries. So this week is a two-fer, featuring highlights from the other Late Night. See David Letterman get his ass kicked--twice! The second feature--which might be the cooler one--is after the flip.

Sleater Kinney, performing "Jumpers," from their album The Woods.
They will be greatly missed.

TV on the Radio performing "Wolf Like Me" from Return to Cookie Mountain.
Seriously, Paul Schaeffer doesn't know what hit him.

Fear and Fascination

2006-09-30T13:36:00.000-07:00

There is a famous story from my childhood that happens to relate one of my earliest memories. I was probably about 3 years old, give or take a couple of months, and we were out visiting my great grandparents in California. While out there, we decided to make a jaunt over to SeaWorld. One of the main fixtures at SeaWorld at the time was a huge shark tank that housed hammerheads and reef sharks and others. We were making the rounds through the exhibits and got around to that one. Looking into the tank, though, and seeing the sharks: I was absolutely terrified. I freaked out. I couldn't look at it at all. I think my folks tried to console me, but I imagine I was pretty inconsolable. We left the exhibit, but in that moment something triggered in me, and my erstwhile budding fascination with dinosaurs was flat-out eliminated-- for the next 3-5 years of my life (I'm fuzzy on the actual duration of this phase), I was flat-out obsessed with sharks.

In some ways, this is an unremarkable phenomenon-- i.e. being a kid obsessed with sharks. Some kids go for sharks rather than dinosaurs, and I'm sure there are other variations as well. Of course, kids express these fascinations in different ways-- for my part, when I was six years old, I had accumulated a surprising amount of shark-related knowledge. My parents got a pretty big kick out of taking me to the aquarium, to the shark exhibits, where--no longer afraid, having realized a thick wall of glass separated me from them-- I would proceed to identify each species of shark in the tank at sight, without consulting the displays. Another famous incident from this period came during a family trip to the North Carolina beach. I got a bit worried on this particular occasion when my mom announced her intention to go wading and swimming in the ocean. I'm not sure why this particular occasion warranted my concern-- my mom had done this many times before without my being alerted. In any case, for whatever reason, I found the occasion to warn mom that most shark attacks occur in 3 feet of water (so I had read). My mom reassured me that she would be O.K., and in fact she was. But not a week later at the same beach, after we had left, a woman was attacked and maimed by a bull shark (IIRC)-- while wading in about 3 feet of water. Just one of life's strange synchronicities,though, since, while sharks attack most often in shallow water, they do so only very rarely. But it's an interesting anecdote nonetheless. Certainly gave my mother a moment's pause.

Eventually my shark obsession died down-- probably because I learned enough that the shark's mystique dampened, and besides which, I got past that phase of dinosaur/shark-childhood fixation, and entered the next part of the developmental progression. But I've long been fascinated for a long time with how this obsession of mine was spurred on by an episode of terror. I think superficially one might think that the impulse to learn about something that provokes fear is just a way of mitigating that fear. Certainly the episode of warning mom at the beach shows, however, that I still had anxieties about sharks even after I'd heard many, many times that your chances of being attacked by a shark while swimming are far less than your chances of being struck by lightning. Sharks still scared me a bit even after I learned enough about them to realize they weren't terribly interested in eating people, and even after I came to appreciate their beauty. I think the explanation for the pattern in response rather ought to invoke an internal relation between fear and fascination. I didn't become fascinated in sharks to conquer my initial fear of them; rather my fascination was a matter of my being transfixed at the terrifying power of the natural world.

I would like to say more by way of giving an analytic of this link between fascination and fear, but I think the result would be, again, rather under-read. I'd like to, at a minimum, read a bit further into the literature on dread (anxiety) as it shows up in Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and others. Then I could probably say something intelligent and educated about what the sort of internal relation I'm hypothesizing might come to. For the moment I'm going to stick with merely advancing the hypothesis that fear and fascination are internally related, in the sense of being, as it were, two sides of the same coin or perhaps two different modes of expressing a more fundamental mode of comportment toward the world, rather than being externally related, which would amount to calling my shark-fascination (and other fascination's like it) a response to fear, as in a coping mechanism or something of the like.

I'm moved to think about these themes again as I've been exploring a bit more of a new fascination with tornadic weather. I had a mildly close call with a tornadic storm when I was in my early teens, when a tornado passed through southwestern Durham county where I lived. Since then I've gotten curious about this sliver of meteorology, and perhaps a bit more lately now that I live in the midwest (although, not a particularly tornado-prone area of the midwest). Mostly I find video footage of tornadoes absolutely riveting to watch, and I periodically trowl YouTube for especially awe-provoking clips. This one fits the bill:

It's a recording made by a security camera outside Caruthersville High School in Caruthersville, MO, as a tornado strikes. Pay particular attention to the moment when the face of the house across the street gets completely removed, and the trees behind it are wrested right from their roots. Someone commenting on Youtube suggests that you can see the actual funnel come around the corner of the building, but I'm not so sure-- mostly because I can't tell a darned thing about what's happening after about 40 seconds or so into the clip, and the Caruthersville tornado can be seen here. Kinda large to be visible (as a whole) inside the frame of the surveillance camera. I rather think its worse than that-- that the camera shows what its looks like inside the funnel, as the tornado comes right over top of the school building.

In a word, Yikes.

A bit of a blogging hiatus of late

2006-09-30T13:32:00.000-07:00

So the better part of the past week has confirmed a suspicion of mine-- that when courses started, it would be very difficult to maintain the blog, or at least the same pace-of-blogging. I think that coupled to a large degree with it being something of a slow week for my sliver of the blogosphere in general: not much going on that I felt responding to at any of my blogging hot spots. Hence the radio silence since Wednesday. And now, today, when I have some (nominal) free-time to spare, I have to attend to some of the housework that Sherry and I put off through the very busy week. So, blogging is pretty low on the list of priorities at the moment. Still, I will try to make an effort as the weeks progress to keep this thing going. Anyone who happens to surf here should, however, take note of the fact that my blogging is quite likely to be a highly erratic activity.

What's wrong with Texas?

2006-09-27T00:16:00.000-07:00

So many things. But among them, this. Apparently a teacher at a school in Frisco, Texas was put on probation after she took her students on a fieldtrip to an art museum where her students saw--gasp!-- nude sculpture. Why, that's positively pornographic! Who ever heard of art depicting the human form?! Clothesless!

Not only that, but after they'd already put her on probation, they decided to fire her. I understand that school administrators have to be responsive to the concerns of parents-- even including those of crazy, overprotective parents-- but being responsive does not mean firing someone should they happen to accidentally introduce their charges to a representation of human anatomy.

I think it also seems quite clear how uncultured (some of) the inhabitants of Frisco, Texas must be to think the teacher's conduct warranted anything: I mean, surely the parents signed a permission slip allowing their child to attend the field trip? They knew it was an art gallery. Did they not know that art galleries sometimes contain, y'know, art? C'mon, even some of the most paradigmatic examples of artwork involve nudity. Michelangelo's David or the Sistine chapel ceiling, anyone? Plenty of nakedness going on there-- and aren't those things the sorts of things that spring to mind immediately when people think of art? Isn't it the parent's fault that they didn't know enough to realize there was some threat of exposed plaster private parts? And that's to stop short of asking why the hell would anyone ever conceive to find such things objectionable?

But lest we dismiss this story as another oddity from the bizarro alternate universe of middle America, we should heed the common wisdom of the press and remember that these ignorant puritans exemplify what American values are all about. Truly they are the heart and soul of America. Or something.

Early Miscues

2006-09-26T14:35:00.000-07:00

Today started off all wrong. Technically, it started with me lollygagging around, refusing to finish my McDowell paper in spite of the fact that the paper is a throwaway for a pass/fail course that did not merit more than 2 hours of focused attention in toto. I think I ended up giving it about 5 times that amount, with at least 3 hours devoted from about 1:30 AM early this morning to 4:30 AM, by which time I had still not finished. I had told Sherry to wake me up so that I could course shop this morning. I had originally intended to shop a course on 19th Century Philosophy of Religion, which, if nothing else, would give me a chance to do more idle thinking about religious ways of understanding the world (which have been on my mind of late), and finally read some Kierkegaard. Most importantly, it would fulfill an area 1 requirement, which is code for "value theory & aesthetics" -- not my main area of interest, to be sure. On the original plan, I would proceed from the philosophy of religion class to another shoppable area 1 course, "Spiritual Exercises and Moral Perfectionism" at 10:30, which would, all things being equal, be my first choice for going about fulfilling that requisite coursework.

But I went to bed at 4:30 AM. So things didn't happen that way. After Sherry made her usual Herculean effort to rouse me from my comatose state at around 8 AM, I fell asleep again, not to be roused until 11:15-- too late to do any course shopping whatsoever. In theory, I could still squeeze into philosophy of religions (missing one class is not such a big deal), but the spiritual exercises class seems like a wash: waaay too many students have tried to sign up, and I think by failing to attend the first class I gave up any claim of trying to insert myself into the proceedings. This likely means that I will wind up taking a class being taught on resemblance and family resemblance, which, I suppose, counts as area 1 because it involves issues that fall under the broad heading of aesthetics, even though they're really issues with import for the question of the nature and possibility of general representations-- in art, but also in language and thought. So it feels like a cheaty sort of way of fufilling that distribution requirement, but it means I'm taking a course that will present material with implications that matter to me. I feel pretty stupid for missing the first day of a couple of classes I might have prefered to be involved in, but I suppose, given the relevance of the course I will wind up taking to issues that I care about, this is not a circumstance about which I should complain.

Mmm, Righteous Anger!

2006-09-26T00:33:00.000-07:00

Olbermann defends Clinton, achieves eloquence. via Crooks & Liars.

He's getting good at this.

Cultural polarization sucks (duh).

2006-09-24T13:30:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking lately about how my point of view is, to a large extent, shaped by sociological factors, and in particular, by the allegiances I claim to certain ideological factions. Probably the most potent example of this is how I think I've tended to become a more rampant atheist (and indeed, a quasi- or proto-naturalist of some kind) as I've become a more avid reader of atheist/science blogs. Certainly, a large part of my attraction to a blog like Pharyngula is the harsh, no-nonsense stance it takes against the more irrational, extreme strains of Christianity present in our culture. I think I've become less tolerant of theistic positions than I once was, and in some measure that's a good thing-- quite a lot of theism winds up depending on some absolutely deplorable metaphysical assumptions, quite a number of which prove to be incoherent on further inspection. Of course, I tend to forget that these atheistic or naturalistic rebuttals really fail to speak to conceptions of God that aren't predicated on believing that God is a real object of some kind (either "in" the natural world in some weird, idiosyncratic sense, or outside of it, which would totally beggar belief). I'm also quick to forget that before my recent, more virulently skeptical turn, I seriously considered adopting a deflationary view of God (i.e. one that identifies God with nature; not something "over and above" nature, just nature, considered as a whole), and while I think there are reasons for wondering what deflationery God's really add to the picture, I don't think the deflationery view of God is out-and-out crazy. Unmotivated, maybe, but not crazy.

And so it comes to seem as if my transition from more or less apathetic agnosticism to more committed atheism comes by way of a desire to be identified with the faction that most radically opposes Christian fundamentalism. To be a committed, dogmatic atheist is the most forceful way of exhibiting the belief that fundamentalist Christianity is a fundamentally wrong world view. Of course it seems quite problematic-- and not quite rational-- to determine one's world view in order to be the negation of some other world view one does not like. At worst, if one's dislike of the opposing world view is motivated by a visceral dislike of the persons who espouse that view, then one's personal committments are likely to be just irrational. At best, the committment betrays a lack of confidence in any positive conception about how things really are, or might plausibly be, such that the risk is something like falling into atheism by default.

But I think there is a problem beyond the considerations against defining oneself in opposition to something, and that is brought to my attention by Toby's recent post on Sam Harris, who, besides being an atheist, is indeed an eliminativist with respect to religion. He (apparently) thinks religious belief is one and all irrational superstition and that our toleration of such belief should come to an end as soon as possible. The problem, which is neatly exposed to view by the review of Harris' book that Toby cites, is that Harris essentially shares the fundamentalist's religious world-view-- except, of course, that he rejects it. By that I mean that fundamentalism is the only kind of religious belief that Harris can understand, and what's more he thinks that the institution of Christianity (and Christian faith, accompanying) must be taken whole, or not at all-- as if the label "Christianity" denotes a basic set of beliefs that can reasonably be expected to be held by all Christians.

Here's the thing. I think fundamentalist Christianity, to say nothing of quite a lot of the history of Christian theology (which all Christians must take or leave as a package), is not even a particularly good species of Christianity.* So if I reject that fundamentalism supplies the most exemplary way of being Christian, so too should I reject Sam Harris' eliminativism (at least as so-argued), and I should also question my sympathy with his disfavor toward Christianity as a whole. Hence, in general, I worry that my move toward atheism away from contented agnosticism is motivated by an an implicit identification of fundamentalism-- or, heck, metaphysical realism-- as the proper way to be Christian, which-- forget the qualifications of this claim-- I don't even believe is true!

It's also interesting that Pharynguloids (by which I mean, the commenters at Pharyngula) frequently ridicule attempts at Christian apologetics that attempt to distinguish between better and worse versions of Christian belief. The claim that certain episodes of poor Christian conduct (motivated by Christian doctrine) can be dismissed because the perpetrators in question are not "good/real Christians" is, I think, subject to the criticism that the distinction between good/bad Christians is arbitrary, and can be moved around at will to insulate Christianity from any accusation of bankruptcy. Hence the distinction between "good" and "bad" Christians or forms of Christianity is shown to be specious. I think this argument against the apologists is poorly conceived. For one thing, drawing a distinction between 'good' and 'bad' Christians arbitrarily is no real complaint if you allow that value judgments about belief systems will tend by nature to be arbitrary-- in the least because, I take it, there is no agreed-upon answer to the question of how to be Christian, and denying that it is up to the individual Christian to work that out for himself just begs the question in favor of literalist/institutionalist theology. Denying that there is a problem with the arbitrariness of the judgment, I think, likewise should press the question against the skeptic about whether or not the distinction is really being marhsalled willy-nilly: it could instead be the case that different individuals are simply deploying slightly different standards, or the same individuals are reinterpreting and readjusting their conceptions of "good" Christianity as they go. Finally, there seems to me to be no problem insulating Christianity from at least some strains of criticism if Christianity is understood as an ideal species of world view (something to be strived after) rather than as a worldly institution. As I indicate below in the footnote, the only criticism that would really stick on Christianity understood in the former sense would be one that attacked the form of life that such an ideal strain of Christianity would promote. If that form of life was not worth living, then no form of Christianity would be worthy of pursuit. But nobody has shown that yet.

Revoking a certain level of antagonism toward Christianity still doesn't incline me particularly towards pursuing a Christian way of life or adopting a Christian perspective (whatever that would mean). I think that comes to this: I don't feel compelled to attempt to make sense of my existence (past, present, future) in terms of the possible existence of God and/or of my relationship with it, whatever that might be. I don't answer in the affirmative or the negative; the question for me is simply dormant. This is arbitrary, but a fact, nonetheless.

(of course, it should be noted that my use of "form of life" bears only accidental relation to Wittgenstein's. I offer this disclaimer because I still don't know what a Wittgensteinian "form of life" is supposed to be)

* How, by the way, do I judge species of Christianity? By the degree to which they genuinely attempt to encourage believers to approximate the example of Jesus Christ. I think I can reasonably maintain that fundamentalist Christianity is flawed by this score even independently of any prior conception of just what sort of example Jesus Christ is meant to be, since it seems quite evident that for a lot of Christian fundamentalism, Jesus' conduct is not even especially important. But why choose this criterion-- encouraging followers to emulate Jesus' benevolence-- as the criterion for judging strains of Christianity? Because, in my view, the ultimate aribiter of any belief system is whether it promotes a form of life that is worth living. So there is an ineliminable valuational component to my reasoning here, in that I take it that a life of Christ-like benevolence would be worth living, whereas a life organized around, e.g. prosperity theology or exclusivism, would not be. I can't do much to justify that intuition, especially since I've hardly done a whiff of value theory in my life.

The joys of Hyde Park living

2006-09-23T23:19:00.000-07:00

So, my poor blog was left neglected for a full twenty-four hours. The full story behind this recent lapse of blogging activity is really not worth telling (quite a lot of it can be chalked up to my lethargy, coupled with my desire to enjoy my last weekend of freedom by doing absolutely nothing whatever), but a good part of that story would involve my describing a 4 hour trek up to the north side of Chicago for groceries. There aren't really any reasonable grocery stores in Hyde Park: after suffering it for the first few months of our life here, Sherry and I determined that that Hyde Park Co-op was to be avoided at all costs: completely unreliable stocking, utterly irrational pricing structure, and just recently, no computers at the check-out line. So we make a trek up to the Lincoln Park area, where we do our groceries in two phases: first, a stop at Dominick's for the essentials, and then a subsequent trip to Trader Joe's to buy as much as we can. Trader Joe's is, as is well known, cheap and reasonable, but they don't stock everything-- so a second store is necessary to fill in the gaps. Usually, the whole business takes us about 2-3 hours. Today it took four: traffic was pretty awful, and Dominick's was strangely lacking in all sorts of things we needed (which we nevertheless scoured the store for), so: 4 hours. Hence, my afternoon was pretty shot. Couple that with a pretty late wake-up and the usual Saturday night activities (dinner & movie[s]), and that was my day. No time for blog. Maybe tomorrow.

Late Night at AYSBitB: Albums gone by edition

2006-09-22T23:49:00.000-07:00

So, the Hold Steady have a new album coming out in about a week or so. I've gotten to listen to it ahead of time, and I'm kinda thinking disappointment. A bit too polished, and lyrically just not as grabbing as its predecessor, the ecstatically excellent Separation Sunday. Listening to that record is like hearing one long, extremely salacious, bar-room rant, but with a much better plot. And sometimes I quite like it for albums to have a plot. It's a rare thing. Unless I missed it on first listen, the new record doesn't have a plot (or much of one, anyway). Such a shame.

Anyway, I may live to retract my first impression of the new record (overly high expectations & all that), but in the meantime I've found a golden oldie from the Hold Steady's first record. I was going to post the lead single off of Separation, which actually has two videos, but after watching both of them, I decided that they both sucked. Hard. So, we're going with "The Swish" instead. A classic.

"The Swish" by The Hold Steady.

Friday Random 10

2006-09-22T14:17:00.000-07:00

Alas, this will be only a two-blog-meme Friday.

1. Libby Kirkpatrick, "Jupiter"
2. Nina Nastasia, "On Teasing"
3. The Replacements, "Sixteen Blue"
4. Aki Tsuyuko, "Flutter"
5. John Vanderslice, "Time Travel is Lonely"
6. Vashti Bunyan, "Here Before"
7. Antonin Dvorak, "Hear, oh hear my prayer, Lord"
8. The Wrens, "The House that Guilt Built"
9. Dirty Three, "Stellar"
10. Stereolab, "Iron Man"

Mmm, my iPod... bastion of obscurity!

Obligatory Friday Catblogging

2006-09-22T14:13:00.000-07:00

Looking a little sultry today. Not sure what that's about.

Clinton a better president than Bush even when not president.

2006-09-22T13:49:00.000-07:00

Another quickie.

This article does a nice job of making the case that Bill Clinton, through his Clinton Global Initiative, has more or less single-handedly managed to keep the notion of America as a wellspring of entrepreneurial, idealistic, creative energy alive, if only on life support, through the recent dark ages of the Bush administration. The article also puts a more sympathetic spin on Clinton's recent outreach to the progressive blogosphere that seems genuinely consistent with his actions elsewhere.

Like a lot of left-leaners, I thought Clinton's centrism left a lot to be desired. Yet I'm sympathetic with Clinton for his having to slog through the Newt Gingrich years, and indeed unlike a lot of leftists, I'm more inclined to cite the (failed) '94 conservative revolution in congress, rather than Clinton's triangulation, as the source of most of our problems today [note: 'failed' since, in the ensuing years, the beneficiaries of that revolution have not pursued the measured conservatism of the '94 wave; instead, they've gone off the deep end, and it seems likely, barring the timely and expected Democratic campaign collapse, that they will pay for it in November]. His politics aren't my favorite, but I still like the guy. And, sure, if it were possible for him to run again and he did, I'd vote for him in a heartbeat.

[The inevitable response from the right:] A-ha! But you forget! ... That man once got a blow job!

October Surprise?

2006-09-22T13:42:00.000-07:00

Not too worry. Seems the more philosophically renowned conspiracy theorists are also on the case.

In other news, I think I've crested the hill of my paper on McDowell. About 2 1/2 pages left to write. But I take these things very slooooowly.

Late Night at AYSBitB: Modestly Creepy Edition

2006-09-21T20:58:00.000-07:00

Fellow Norwegians (except, these are full-bloods) Serena Maneesh:

The song is "Drain Cosmetics."

They were ostensibly going for "stylish/creepy." I think they succeeded in reaching "modest camp." I do like how the pianist becomes animated. The creepiest thing in the video is probably the lead singer's 'stache, or the fact that he can sing that whole song without moving his lips even once. Weird, that: just weird.

Connecting some dots.

2006-09-21T11:03:00.000-07:00

So, on Rawstory today, they have a story on how Karl Rove has promised the GOP faithful an "October Surprise."

Meanwhile, on Salon, there is a story recapping the highlights of Frank Rich's new book. It's best feature is, apparently, Rich's advancement of the notion that we invaded Iraq to shore up the narrative of GW Bush as a "war president"-- and of course, the source of that narrative is none other than Karl Rove.

Now that Iraq has been shown to be a complete failure, and even Afghanistan is looking less like a sure victory every day, and Republicans are faring dismally in the polls, what on Earth is Rove going to do? Back to rawstory we go, where we learn that contingency planning for a strike on Iran has proceeded to a second stage.

Geez, I never would've guessed.

I guess this really comes to quite a bit of rumormongering and hearsay, but, if the "October Surprise" proved to be a preemptive nuclear strike on Iran, would any of us honestly be surprised?

(Working in Progess)

2006-09-20T16:37:00.000-07:00

Another light blogging day, as I actually got down to writing the first half of my paper on McDowell. And then, after that, I actually (started) cleaning my study, which has been a federal disaster area for months now. If I get around to posting again today, don't take it as an optimistic sign of things to come: tomorrow should be worse. Yet you can still look forward to this week's entries to "Late Night at AYSBitB" tomorrow and Friday night.

Andrew Newberg on Mind, Brain, and God

2006-09-19T19:59:00.000-07:00

Wouldn't ya know it, the moment I say I'm having trouble finding things to blog about, I surf on over to Salon.com and found a good one: this interview with neuroscientist Andrew Newberg discusses recent findings in the science of spirituality. Newberg (among other neuroscientists in the field) has been running brain-imaging studies of experienced Franciscan nuns, Tibetan Monks, and Pentecostals (well, Pentecostals who speak in tongues, anyway) engaged in intensive religious practices (i.e. prayer, meditation, Pentecostal tongue-speaking). The results are interesting.

Probably the most interesting finding reported in the interview is that both Buddhist monks and Franciscan nuns show similar patterns of brain activity while engaged in prayer and meditation, respectively. Both show lots of activity in the frontal lobe indicating intense concentration, and a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which Newberg describes as the area that "uses our sensory information to create a sense of our self and relates that self spatially to the rest of the world." Pretty interesting stuff. And certainly worthy of note that the Franciscan experience is comparable to the meditative experience, with the difference being perfectly expected: the Franciscans were engaging in prayer, so the parts of their brain responsible for language processing were more active than the Tibetan monks.

Interesting as it is, certain features of the article seem to me worthy of complaint. The first is this frightening phenomenon that it reports:

Some [neuroscientists researching spirituality] even question the materialist paradigm of science -- the idea that the only reality worth studying is what can be tested, quantified and reproduced.

Yikes. I don't know who those people are, but they don't sound like scientists. I don't know if this is a prima facie reason why we should teach philosophy of science more widely or what. Perhaps if we did, I'm thinking, people might be more likely to realize that the "materialist paradigm of science" is not a function of what scientists have traditionally considered interesting or worth studying, but rather a function of what we can reasonably hope to gain knowledge of. We use the scientific method because individual testimony is eminently fallible, human observers make mistakes even (especially?) reporting their own experiences, and often draw the wrong conclusions even when their observations are successful (e.g. if they fail to record the data effectively). The scientific method, with its emphasis on experimental testing, reproducible results, and explicit data (not necessarily quantitative, of course), aims to minimize our observational fallibility. And it does so in a way that no other paradigm we have can match. Because of that, science has a claim to authority over other forms of inquiry. Remove those canonical features of scientific investigation, and just about anything goes. Truly: were we to remove the standards of experimental verification, methodological transparency, and data collection from the mix in order to create a 'science of subjective experience,' quite frankly, we would have my word against yours. And if you think we can come to some kind of agreement as to our common mental contents, wait until I put my eliminative materialist hat on. Then we'll really have problems.

I suppose if we want to create a science that makes no claim to deriving conclusions of the least certainty, then we can create a science of subjective experience sure enough. I'm just not sure what we would hope to gain from it, other than a catalog of the vast variety of creative ways that people describe their experience. That doesn't strike me as anything that would be of much interest to a scientist. An anthropologist, maybe.

This response by Newberg also caught my eye:

But the problem with the term "hard-wired" is that it implies that someone or something did the hard-wiring. And I'm not sure that I can say that.

Sure you can. You've heard of natural selection right? That's a "thing" (in a suitably broad rendering of that noun), and it hard-wired us if anything did. There, that was easy!

Finally, the interviewer also says one oddly misleading thing:

Clearly one thing you've done is to show there's nothing delusional about spiritual or religious experience. This is a normal thing happening in the brain.

The problem with this is that nobody-- not even a thoroughly Godless humanist U.U. like myself--would deny that people who claim to have religious experiences are, y'know, having experiences. It's not as if people who are skeptical of prayer retort to the Christian, "Nah, you weren't really concentrating deeply there or processing language at all: you were just moving your mouth and your vocal cords in discernibly patterned ways!" (assume the Christian was praying out loud in this case). What we Godless heathens think Christians are delusional about is the notion that they have any, e.g., veridical experience of God's presence, and ostensibly this research doesn't say word one about that. In fact, if that "experience of God's presence" is really just the sense of oneness-with-things, then this research potentially shows the way to a naturalistic understanding of that phenomenon, having to do with the way parietal lobe activity modulates during prayer.

In any case, kudos enough to Salon for interesting reading, but I'm left feeling that like a lot of the discourse that goes on in the chasm between science and faith, even-handedness prevailed over honest realism. The latter view point would recognize that this research offers little comfort to those hoping to make faith at home in the world.*

* Of course this is distinct from making a home for faith in the world, which in my roughly existentialist way of looking at things is still definitely up for grabs. And anyway it's not meant to be controversial to say that faith is not at home in the world since, in some sense, neither is mankind. Hence: horror films & humility.

The one week anniversary of AYSBITB

2006-09-19T19:31:00.000-07:00

I haven't had much to post about today; I've been wrapping up a bunch of projects. I finally finished reading Andy Clark's Associative Engines, which was very interesting-- although I worry that, given the book was published ~15 years ago or so (I forget which year), its scientific picture might be more than a little dated. But its hard to find resources (in book form) that are scientifically up-to-date, philosophically interesting, and useful for the novice "cognitive philosopher."

I did want to point out that today is the one-week anniversary of And You Shall Be in the Blog. Ahh, it seems like almost yesterday that I started posting (and it very nearly was), and here we are: a full 37 posts in the span of a week. Not a bad start! In a week's time, I think I've reached the halfway point in attempting to eclipse the posting-output of my previous blog, which languished for a year with little activity.

But, that said, it now becomes much more difficult, as I have to balance blogging against the demands of my graduate labors. I'm still in the coursework phase of my program, and that means I'll have a full slate of papers due in a short while. Being on the quarter system doesn't help the workload, either. But I will try to find time, and hopefully, I'll manage to blog some of the work I'm doing. We'll have to see how things go. I have definitely embraced the "quickie" post, however, which should allow me to squeeze in some new content-- most of it probably culled from various other points of interest on the information super highway-- most days.

Speaking of blogging work, I hope to get around to writing up the next bit of my project to blog a reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's The Structure of Behavior soon. That business is probably useless to the general reader and even to philosophers, but its enormously helpful to me, because it forces me to read slooowly. And that's something I ought to quite a bit more of.

Ooh, comics!

2006-09-19T12:20:00.000-07:00

For those of you who (like me) enjoy maximum plot conveyed through minimal text, you can now enjoy the What's Liberal about the Liberal Arts? graphic novel.

Only don't let it discourage you from buying the book.

via (where else?) Pharyngula.

Putting women in their place... with science!

2006-09-18T15:35:00.000-07:00

This book sounds awful. I won't say much about it, particularly as all I know about it is gleaned from second-hand reports, but it is worrying that the author of the book seems to want to draw fairly bold conclusions from what-- according to the Language Log-- amounts to pretty modest science. I'd also be pretty worried about the level of generality of the explanations that the author, Luann Brizendine, gives: obviously, the right evolutionary story can underwrite a difference in the statistical distribution of traits within a population or sub-population relative to another sub-population or a larger set. But the book is pitched as if the story has implications for our understanding of individual female behaviors/behavioral patterns-- and that would make for pretty crummy science.

I am also a bit concerned about the tenor of the post on Feministing, though, where the poster there seems to suggest that it's un-feminist to claim that sex differences are hard-wired. If it is, then it seems to me quite plausible that a major tenet of feminism is just false. It might in fact be the case that sex differences are hard-wired, and, if so, then either saying such must be compatible with being feminist, or feminism is incompatible with telling the truth. And the latter would be a big problem for feminism. But I might be misreading the poster at Feministing.

Of course there is a legitimate claim to be made by feminists about the prescriptive content of The Female Brain, quite independent of its descriptive accuracy. According to this article, Brizendine describes the following set of cases of attitude changes in post-menopausal women (making the argument that post-menopausal women ought to undergo hormone-replacement therapy):

Brizendine doesn’t seem happy to treat menopausal women with HRT for purely physical symptoms. She finds it fascinating that women over 50 are more likely to initiate divorce than a man.

She writes about Sylvia, a “patient”, who found she was no longer interested in making her husband’s dinners, picking up his socks or solving her children’s problems. When the husband objected, she decided she needed a divorce. Brizendine reckoned she needed HRT.

Sylvia’s problem, she diagnosed, was that without oxytocin and oestrogen in her brain to make her a caring mother and wife, she had to take these hormones artificially. Sylvia said no and went for the divorce, but Marcia, another patient, said yes and soon felt like her old self again, “much to her husband’s relief”. He’d been wondering why he’d had to fix his own dinner.

This may not be a fair retelling of the story, but regardless-- it's one thing to argue that certain patterns of behavior more common in one sex or another are the result of gross physiological/hormonal differences between the sexes. It's quite another thing to say that the resulting patterns of behavior are 'normal' and that deviations from them should warrant therapy. In this case, it certainly sounds like the problem Brizendine found with Sylvia and Marcia is that they failed to continue fulfilling their, as it were, 'normal functional roles' in their marriages. Their prescribed treatment suggests that Sylvia and Marcia were somehow defective without the hormonal replacement therapy. And that is something I can imagine a feminist--rightly--reacting to.

Pitchfork Review of BPB, "The Letting Go"

2006-09-18T10:42:00.000-07:00

The Pitchfork review of Bonnie "Prince" Billy's latest album, "The Letting Go," is here. It was good enough to be recommended but not good enough for their 'Best New Music' category, which seems fair. I think the review is basically accurate.

[side note: obviously, I've had a chance to listen to the album before its actual release; my means of doing such a thing are not exactly esoteric, but rest assured, having gotten an advance peak, I do intend to buy the album once its available in stores]

I think the album more or less lives and dies by how you think Dawn McCarthy, Oldham's pick of collaborator this time around, fits as a back-up vocalist. She's prominent enough-- much more than on Master and Everyone-- that if you really don't like her voice, you might have a hard time with the album. But if you don't mind her voice (and if you're listening to Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, you're probably not a snob about your vocalists, although W.O. has measurably improved over the years), you're likely to like it, as some interesting harmonies emerge from the vocal interplay. McCarthy's lines seem almost amorphous with respect to Oldham's sometimes, and that works surprisingly well, and makes the album feel more musically exploratory.

I think the Pitchfork review is also correct that the album doesn't wind up being engrossing, even though it is a compelling listen. I think it avoids seeming immersive because the range of songs is so wide: you have the cinematic sweep of the single "Cursed Sleep," the string quartet-laden soft opener "Love Comes to Me," the noisy, chaotic "Seedling", etc. In a way, no two songs really sound that much alike, and although they all more or less sound like examples of the indie folk/folk-rock genre, they feel like they're all peeling off in very different directions within that broad categorization.

In some ways, the same is true of other albums that Oldham has done-- his classic I See a Darkness in some sense seemed all over the map as well; on the other hand, all of the songs on that album seemed to share in the same gloomy twilight sort of feel, which gave the album a feeling of cohesiveness. At the opposite extreme, Master and Everyone (which I liked a great deal better than the Pitchfork folks did), was pretty much all soft acoustic numbers, but relentlessly tuneful stuff. That album was a model of consistency (perhaps too much consistency); this one strikes me as a bit erratic (pace Pitchfork). All of this leaves me feeling that The Letting Go is probably Oldham's weirdest record since his Palace days. I might liken it to a more polished, "clean" Viva Last Blues, in that it seems to share in that album's shambolic folk attitude far more than anything Oldham has done recently. The All Music Guide, I just noticed, has called this record the best of Oldham's career. I think that's a fair stretch, because I don't think the writing quite reaches the sustained quality of Viva or Darkness. There are, to be sure, moments of extreme brilliance (especially "Strange Form of Life" and "Cold & Wet"), but they seem to be sandwiched between songs that are merely good. But I'm very pleased with what Will has done this go around.

I hope that he'll tour to promote the album a bit and come through Chicago. I saw him in London, and he gave a great performance--a surprisingly engaging stage presence for one man with guitar. It's quite cool to hear him almost completely reinvent the melodies to everything he plays. It keeps things interesting.

Even if he doesn't run...

2006-09-17T23:52:00.000-07:00

I will still love Al Gore. Quoth the article:

With no fanfare, [Gore] signed a few weeks ago with Penguin Press to write "The Assault on Reason."

As described by editor Scott Moyers, the book is a meditation on how "the public arena has grown more hostile to reason," and how solving problems such as global warming is impeded by a political culture with a pervasive "unwillingness to let facts drive decisions."

Sounds fantastical.

Re: the possible implications for a Gore re-run in '08, I kinda thought he was a terrible candidate last time around: just did very little to inspire any enthusiasm in me. More recently, he's seemed a much more impassioned presence all around, but campaigning for president seems to bring out the absolute worst in everyone, so, I remain not totally convinced that he wouldn't go all wooden again when the national spotlight was on. If there wasn't that nasty election thing in the way, though I'd be all for him. He really seems like the leader we need at this point. Although I would honestly forgive him if he didn't want to be saddled with 8 years worth of worthless governance to undo. Even as presidents go, he'd have to be a busy man.

John Oliver on our National Safety

2006-09-17T22:31:00.000-07:00

Here is the Daily Show vid with John Oliver doing the schtick I mentioned last night, replete with grammatical joke:

Oliver's bit doesn't begin until about three and a half minutes in, but the rest is worth watching as well.

Critterblogging: Do Not Taunt the Fuzzy

2006-09-17T21:25:00.000-07:00

Talked to my rents this afternoon. Apparently, yesterday, while gardening, my mom had a nasty run-in with one of these:

(Your cue to run like hell)
Seriously, it's faster than it looks.

I'm told it's a saddleback catterpillar. Apparently it packs a rather nasty punch. Seems ripe for a creature-feature, don't you think?

The Downside to Institutional Transparency

2006-09-17T19:40:00.000-07:00

If I'm correct in reading the inclination at large in our society, people who preside over institutions of the public interest strongly favor transparency in their dealings. To put things another way, institutions that provide services to the public (i.e. universities, political parties, etc.) have tended of late to make their internal dealings public. In a large majority of cases, I think this general trend is a good thing: by showing the internal workings of these public (or semi-public) institutions, it becomes possible for members of the public to scrutinize and voice an informed opinion about how things might be better run. But transparency comes at an obvious cost: if the institution in question is undergoing a significant amount of turmoil, airing (what comes to be) the dirty laundry can cause the public to lose faith in that institution all together. Lacking public support, then, the institution may begin to crumble, and then too much transparency proves undermining.

I think an excellent case can be made that the latter problem is one that confronts the Democratic Party quite often these days (here is the example that prompted this thought, although there have been countless others). Many Democratic leaders have posed points that seem almost certainly to be directed at other Democratic leaders -- or in this case, a group of activists-- that seem like internal directives, except that they are voiced in public. Is the value of transparency behind this? Maybe. The alternative-- settling party strategy issues behind closed doors-- certainly seems exclusionary. And yet the effect of someone like Obama coming out and saying what Democrats need to do to win the election is, I think, merely that the public is made more aware of how difficult a time Democrats have had winning elections, and how flustered they are that they can't seem to get it right. Hence, when the dems need to look like a well-oiled political machine, they come out looking like a bunch of divided, incompetent losers.

My suggestion, then, would be that if any democrat wants to question or discuss party strategy, she should send an internal memo. In secret code, preferably. If she wants to enact party strategy, she should get behind a microphone. Otherwise, quite frankly, you're telling the American people more than they want or need to hear, and you're disrupting the sensitive political brand-marketing that needs to happen.

The last six years have rendered me exceptionally tolerant of teleological-suspensions-of-the-ethical in politics. I don't care if the democrats are secretive and opaque in their strategizing. I don't really care how the grassroots-higherup interactions play out. Heck, I don't even care if they employ some dirty tricks or thuggish tactics (you can't make an omelette...). The only thing I care about is that they win, and then govern intelligently. If they aren't the paragon of a democratic institution or an exemplary fair player during the election cycle, I'll happily turn a blind eye as long as they get into office and do the right thing once they get there.

And that sentiment is why I'm expertly qualified to vote in the state of Illinois.

Going (moderately) Pseudonymous

2006-09-17T15:56:00.000-07:00

I made some changes to the blog to conceal my identity some. It felt strange doing this, but after a bit of thought-- and recalling the lessons of a previous debacle with another blog-- I realized that I'm going to be posting controversial opinions and quite a fair bit of snarkery. In other words, I will be engaging in some activities on this blog that are perhaps not befitting the responsibilities of a philosophy graduate student, and which would not reflect kindly on the department with which I am affiliated, were someone to take genuine offense (nb: I am most especially likely to call other academics nasty names when I sense that their behavior merits it-- cf. my recent heckling of Ann Althouse). I originally simply posted on a disclaimer signalling that the views and attitudes here are mine and are not intended to reflect the views and attitudes of my professional affiliation. But I'm quite sure that I could still get myself and my department in trouble if someone failed to take that disclaimer seriously, or if they perceived my behavior as simply unbecoming for a prospective member of the academic profession. So I erased the link to the department and the other mention of it on the sidebar. Furthermore, since I doubt that there are many people with my name who are philosophy PhD students, I configured the blog to sign my posts with a pseudonym, noema, which I've used in other online contexts, and which just happens to be a bit of jargon that issues from Husserl's particular approach to the problem of intentionality.

Obviously, I don't mind most people knowing who I am, and some of the links to this site are already provided with my name attached. That's just fine, people can link to me by name all they want. My name, I'm pretty sure, also appears in some posts here, along with details about where I live, who my advisor is, etc. But truly, I'm not that worried. Given the gestures I've made, someone would have to stoop pretty low to think that I was blogging as a graduate student. And that's the point: I just don't want to give people the impression that this is a professional blog, especially since I will occasionally be blogging on matters that do relate to my professional life (principally, my research). However, as I say, some of the activities I'll be engaged in on this blog (massive snarkery) really belong among my personal, non-professional dealings, and I want to make sure they are treated as such.

I still feel very weird about going pseudonymous-- especially since almost no-one reads this blog and it's quite likely that few people ever will-- but blogging can be a risk for people who are involved in the academic professions (particularly in non-tenured capacities), and I believe it is appropriate to try to manage that risk a bit, while still enjoying the expressive capacities that the internets have laid open to us.

Ann Althouse's Amazingly Deficient Ironic Sensibility

2006-09-17T14:20:00.000-07:00

I've been debating whether it was worth posting anything about this, an amazing flare-up of blogospheric passions over this scandalous photo-op. In case you missed it, Ann Althouse took exception to the way the photo was posed (noting that the young feminist blogger Jessica Valenti was placed immediately in front of Bill Clinton), and her commenters proceeded to compare Jessica to a certain infamous intern. Jessica took exception, and Ann Althouse responded by encouraging her commenters' petty snipings over Jessica's appearance (and producing some of her own, most notably insinuating that Jessica was striking a deliberate pose to accentuate her chest) and posting this, in which she claims that Feministing is obviously "one of those blogs that [is] all about using breasts for extra attention." Everyone should have a look at the Feministing site and take special care to note the "mud flap girls" featured in the blog's header (I think I'd have to say, on reflection, that they are most definitely mud flap women in this case), which Althouse found so objectionable. It seems, by Althouse's understanding, that these icons of female-objectification are present in the Feministing header because of their comely appearance. Of course, Althouse seems to have failed to note that the icons in question are posed giving the general audience the finger. I think this can be considered an instance of irony: the familiar female figures are present, but their pose has been modified to subvert our expectations. We're used to them sitting passively, perhaps just happy to be soaking up the attention; but here, we find them in a slightly more defiant role, kindly asking if we would please fuck off. If I'm not mistaken, their presence on Feministing is as such signaled as ironic. But Althouse manifestly does not get it.

As an aside, Althouse seems to insinuate that, by prominently displaying breast-bearing humanoids in its banner and in various other parts of the site (on the side adverts, displaying a shirt in one of the posts), Feministing has failed to accurately represent feminist values, by participating in the objectification of women. I read things the opposite way: it seems that Althouse has betrayed a general suspicion to the effect that, if its breasts are detectable, its something to-be-objectified. That strikes me as hardly an appropriate sentiment for a feminist to hold. Althouse seems to think the most desirable thing for a feminist to do, qua feminist, is to cover over her femininity. Not a very appealing approach to things, to my mind, but of course I'm neither a woman nor a (specifically professed) feminist. So what do I know?

In any case, the failure to appreciate the intended meaning of the mud flap woman image on Feministing is not the only instance I've seen of Althouse's deficient ironic sensibility. Althouse also famously took Atrios to task for failing to subdue commenters on Eschaton she perceived to be sincerely making sexist (and racist) jokes. If Althouse were correct that the comments she read were intended as straightforward sexist/racist humor, then indeed the commenters on Eschaton would be several degrees worse than the vilest of pigs at Little Green Footballs. The difference of course is that the commenters at Eschaton lay their irony on pretty thick. Read the comments on any significant number of posts and you'll find that a preferred sport of the commenters there is to adopt the poses of various right-wing factions in order to poke fun at them. For those who get it, it works quite well: I find the comments at Eschaton to be one of the better features of that site. But Althouse manifestly does not get it.

What is even more telling is the fact that Althouse attacked Atrios for failing to subdue his commenters, while in this instance, Althouse was more than happy to encourage her own commenters to snipe at Valenti in the crassest, most objectifying ways. It seems that even though she cannot recognize irony when it's smothered on her face, she's still quite capable of perpetrating it, if perhaps only unknowingly. And that reminds us of the one redeeming feature of Althouse's presence in the blogosphere (and in this 'debate' in particular): she may be a humorless nitwit, but at least she's still good for a laugh.

A little Sunday Nature-Worship

2006-09-17T12:41:00.000-07:00

For those of us interested in worshipping at the altar of nature, there's a fantastic series of posts up at The Dharma Bums called "Good Planets are Hard to Find." They've solicited photographs of natural environs near and far so that even those of us who are currently city-bound can gawk at the splendor of our natural landscape.

The hat tip of course comes from Pharyngula.

File under "pointless" but-

2006-09-17T02:13:00.000-07:00

I've just spent a bit watching recent Daily Show clips, atoning for my lack of cable TV reception. I've decided I'm pleased with the current line-up of correspondents. Rob Cordry has recently departed (for a network TV sitcom I was told...?), and I'm actually kind of happy about that. Don't get me wrong, he could be funny at times, but I usually found him more crass and obnoxious than actually clever or uproarious. I guess the official replacement (Rob Riggle) hasn't made his first appearance, but in the meantime they've actually hired a british guy (double plus good!) by the name of John Oliver, who, on one of his first segments, actually delivered a rather elaborate grammar joke. It didn't actually go over too well with the audience (I'm not sure they followed; come to think of it, I'm not sure I did either), but it seemed pitched at the right tenor anyway. And the rest of his bit was pretty good, too. I'm hopeful.
But alas, whatever Mr. Ludwig W. might have said to the contrary, the joke above did not even seem "deep."

For all you scallywags

2006-09-16T20:33:00.000-07:00

All those in the Chi-town area tomorrow should stop by the Renegade Craft Fair in Wicker Park tomorrow. Lots of funky stuff that merits the attention of upper midwesterners (as well as the rest of us).

Late Night at AYSBITB: Silencio!

2006-09-15T21:40:00.000-07:00

No hay venda!

There is no band!

Il n'est pas de orquestra!

This is all...

A tape-recording.

Talk Talk "performing" "I Believe in You" on Dutch TV.

Hollis & co. had gotten sick of the recording/touring industry by this point. For some reason they agreed to go on to Dutch T.V. to perform this song, but they didn't want to bother trying to recreate the sound of the recorded song in concert, so they just lip-synced it. In spite of that, the performance is still pretty damn effective... largely 'cuz the song is so beautiful.

Friday Poem (The Blog Meme Tri-Fecta!)

2006-09-15T13:50:00.000-07:00

I found this over at The Unquiet Grave:

I SWALLOWED A MOUSE

The mouse was fit to be swallowed.
The other man looked at the ear in my hand.
I heard a buzz. It didn’t mean a thing.
The rain hesitated a moment
and it was nice to get out of the rain.
The other man swallowed the label of his coat.
He was dead. He stood there
without saying anything. He finally
got around to looking at me,
lifting a match to his lips. His voice
was somewhere else. We each swallowed
one of his eyes, then we stood in the dark
looking for his voice. There was an ear in my hand.
The other man struck the match on his shoe
and swallowed it. He turned into
a slightly better lit other man.
I wanted it to rain, waited ten minutes,
then the other man swallowed the dark
and everything in it. We stood around
until morning, then I swallowed the rain.
It was like drinking water.

Tony Tost wrote it (and posted it). I didn't ask permission or nothin'. But I was nice enough to link.

Friday Random 10

2006-09-15T13:43:00.000-07:00

It's genre-rific!

1. Miles Davis, "Solea"
2. Arve Henriksen, "Blue Silk"
3. Yo La Tengo, "Everyday"
4. The Beatles, "Cry Baby Cry"
5. John Fahey, "Bean Vines Blues #2"
6. Philip Glass, "Dance 2"
7. Pixies, "Monkey Gone to Heaven"
8. Skip James, "Cherry Ball Blues"
9. Charalambides, "Here not here"
10. Bonnie "Prince" Billy, "Raining in Darling"

(jazz? weirder jazz? rock? folk? blues? noise? minimalism? we have everything)

The blogger hangover.

2006-09-15T11:47:00.000-07:00

So, I managed a full seven posts yesterday. And if I keep this rate up (I won't), I will eclipse the total number of posts on my old blog within a couple of weeks! Whew!

Anyway, I can't be quite as frenzied a blogger today because I have to hunker down and write a quick expository essay on chapter two of McDowell's Mind and World. If anyone stops by who speaks McDowellish, be sure to give a holler.

Friday Cat Blogging

2006-09-15T11:43:00.000-07:00

Every cat owner has this shot:

... but not every cat owner turns on the faucet.

It's Ok, we didn't!

How I broke my B4B addiction.

2006-09-15T00:24:00.000-07:00

I used to be in the regular habit of lurking / very occasionally trolling on a site called Blogs for Bush.

But why? How could such an innocuously titled blog inspire the regular practice of foamy-mouthed perusal?

The short answer is: I sometimes exhibit a pathological enjoyment of things that make me mad. Also, it is (1) somewhat fascinating to see how the other side thinks, and (2) rather reassuring to be regularly reminded that you think better than they do.* I found that B4B also provided a unique window into the bizarre, xenophobic, ultra-religious perspective of the average Bush voter (a.k.a. the "average American"), from whence I could regularly extract confirmation of the hypothesis that conservatives generally don't like brown people (of any shade you like -- commenters were pretty much uniform in exhibiting this attitude, actually). It was further fascinating to see them regularly betray a strange and misguided distrust of the modern university. Compelling stuff for morbid sensibilities like mine.

But then something happened that took all of the fun out of my BlogsforBush trolling. That something was...
THE DEATH OF SCIENCE!!!
Read at your own risk, if you haven't been subjected to it already. [it is about a month old now]

* With due regard to Arthur Ward, I should recall the learned wisdom that winning an argument with an idiot does not make you right. A timeless kernel in the information age, that is.

Late Night at AYSBITB: Hey, Remember the 90's? Edition

2006-09-14T23:02:00.000-07:00

So, way back in the day, before the advent of war and blogs and gelatin and all that, Chan Marshall was cute. The evidence:

"Cross Bones Style" by Cat Power, from Moon Pix

... now she's got the Nico-esque art-diva thing going on, and I'm just not sure about it.

For the Irony Department

2006-09-14T21:41:00.000-07:00

Anyone else find it ironic that Blogger's spellcheck function doesn't recognize the word "blogger"?

New blog, old functionality

2006-09-14T20:23:00.000-07:00

I managed to import my favorite functionality of my old blog-- the ability to create expandable post summaries. Now, if you see "continue reading [post title]" that means there's more content off of the main page. Click through! Click through!

And, might I add, that my way of allowing these is actually far preferable to the stock blogger solution, which puts the "read more" link on every post, regardless of whether there is more content to be viewed or not. My way of doing it, however, isn't really mine: it's all thanks to the brilliance of Brown Bread Ice Cream! Kudos for helping again.

Two more people I should read?

2006-09-14T16:46:00.000-07:00

O.K., so, as per last post, I'm going to be reading Jonathan Lear on Freud at some point, so that will be one name to mark off of my "Should've Read but Haven't Yet" list. Now I've thought of another two writers I need to read, concurrent with my interest in phenomenology.

One is William James. I don't actually know why I'm supposed to read William James, since I don't actually know anything about him. At all. But I'm aware that people who are interested in phenomenology tend to also read William James. Probably this has to do with James' influence on Husserl. And that whole being the founder of modern psychology bit, too; I bet that contributes some It seems like the book I ought to start with is The Principles of Psychology. Amazon reports that volume one of the book is 690-some odd pages. Yeesh. On the other hand, they sell it for less than $15. On to the wishlist it goes.

Another is Emmanuel Levinas. Sure, this kind of pushes me into the branch of continental philosophy I tend to think of as largely obscurantist, but I was reading the Stanford Encyclopedia article on Levinas today and it actually sounded kinda cogent and interesting. It turns out that Arnold Davidson is teaching a class on Totality and Infinity in the winter, but alas, it requires reading knowledge of French, which I ain't got. Since that magnum opus is meant to be super-dense (and I won't be reading it in class), I was thinking maybe I would start with earlier writings, when Levinas was pretty much just writing about Husserl and Heidegger. Levinas is, prima facie, an interesting dude insofar as he is attempting to inscribe ethics (or, probably, meta-ethics) within the phenomenological project, and generally trying to make sense of intersubjectivity, which had (to my understanding) pretty much eluded Husserl's comprehension, try as he might to capture it. Anyway, I'm kind of interested in the ways the phenomenological project got taken up by thinkers beyond "The Big Three," and I still retain bizarre biases against Gadamer and Sartre, so, Levinas it is.

I expect to get around to reading those two circa 2030. I'll let you know.

Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior: Introduction

2006-09-14T16:45:00.000-07:00

One of my projects late in the summer has been to have a go at reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty's The Structure of Behavior. I was attracted to reading this book both out of a general interest in phenomenology, and by the fact that it has become a touchstone for a certain strain of critique of orthodox views in the philosophy of cognitive science. Hence the book is actually a happy point of intersection for my two main projects at the moment.

In any case, I read about 100 pages in before I realized that I'd lost the thread. M-P is not an easy author to read, and this book especially strikes me as difficult because of its protracted engagement with then-contemporary psychology, which, in this case, means classical behaviorism. Now, I understand a little bit about classical behaviorism, but I felt, on first reading, that quite a bit of the discussion was going above my head, whether because of M-P's writing style or because I'm not as conversant as I might be in that style of psychology. I've therefore decided to make my reading project also a blogging project. This is rather ambitious of me, and I suspect rather firmly that, given the scope of the project and the limits on my time, I won't follow through with it. But I will give it a shot: that is, try to produce a slow reading of the text via blog. No-one should expect profundity or even comprehension out of this: as I said, I think Merleau-Ponty is a difficult read and, besides which, I'm not very bright. Still, as I say, it's worth a post-graduate try.

I'm going to start, rather appropriately, at the beginning, with Merleau-Ponty's introduction to the work.
----
Merleau-Ponty begins the work by announcing his intention "to understand the relations of consciousness and nature: organic, psychological or even social," where by 'nature' he means "a multiplicity of events external to each other and bound together by relations of causality" (3). Appropriately enough, M-P avoids giving a similar clarification of the term "consciousness"-- appropriate because what consciousness or the mental actually is seems to be part of what is at issue. All the same, we can recognize a historical tendency to find the relationships between the mental and the physical terribly problematic. As such, we do not need to have settled on an definition of mentality to see that there is work to be done here. But what work? The work of clarifying the organic, psychological, and social relations between consciousness and the world. I have to admit that I'm not sure exactly what those categories of relation amount to. Hopefully this will become clearer later on.

M-P goes on to survey the way "critical thought" has generally treated the relation between consciousness and nature. I would imagine that "critical thought" is something of a reference to the Kantian and post-Kantian traditions, or at least this is suggested by the solution that "critical thought" offers up: that "the world is an ensemble of objective relations borne by consciousness," which sounds roughly idealist or Kantian idealist to my ear. M-P suggests that the critical tradition can quite happily accommodate the historical development of physics, insofar as physics shows itself to be "liberated from ontological pretensions" and as such, happily "indifferent to the classical antimonies of mechanism and dynamism which imply a nature in itself" (3). I'm not quite sure how to gloss this phrasing, but it seems the point is that the Kantian approach to mind-world relations (where the mind, as it were, contributes structure to things-in-themselves, and as such establishes the very possibility of natural phenomena) works just fine as long as one's attention is focused solely on the territory of the physical sciences (primarily, physics). This solution works because it dismisses the conception of nature that was in some sense hostile to mind (the "multiplicity of events external to each other and bound together by relations of causality") as an illusion.

But M-P goes on to suggest that we're not in such a privileged position when it comes to the life sciences or psychology. In the former case, the limits of our current understanding (or then-current understanding- remembering this book was written more than 60 years ago!) ensure that "our picture of the organism is still... that of a material mass partes extra partes." Thus, according to M-P, we still see the biological order as something quite separate from our minds, purged of the ideality we can impart to the exact sciences. The result is the realism articulated in the conception of nature noted above: where causes are understood as real features of an extramental reality that link otherwise atomistic events.

The fate of psychology according to critical thought, meanwhile is to be split in two: into analytical psychology on the one hand, and the study of bodily behavior on the other. According to M-P, however, psychology has, like biology, attempted to embrace realism by interpreting mentality, again, according to the rubric of nature: as a domain of distinct, but causally related events. Especially noteworthy for Merleau-Ponty are the various attempts to understand the mental as a kind of causal force in the world, or at least akin to one. He surveys a number of different ways in which the mental has been understood as a causally unified whole.

The tension weren't meant to discover in this state of affairs is evident from the opening of the ensuing paragraph: on the one hand, transcendental philosophy treats nature as "an objective unity constituted vis-a-vis consciousness," while science maintains a realistic attitude, treating the organism and consciousness as engaged in reciprocal transactions of cause and effect. Clearly we could reconcile the position of science with that of (critical) philosophy by letting philosophy loose on psychological science. I suppose we would then see the cause and effect relations that exist between the mind and the organism as a reflection of our own subjectivity- but Merleau-Ponty sounds skeptical that this would be satisfying (and I'm inclined to agree with him). Surely there is more to mind-body interactions than that.

So what does M-P propose to do? He suggests that if we turn our attention to the study of behavior (which, he notes approvingly, "is neutral with respect to the classical distinction between the 'mental' and the 'physiological'" (4), we may be able to give a clearer delineation of the relevant psychological categories, and better understand their relations. He proposes to specifically examine the theory of the reflex in the context of behavioristic psychology, since, in that tradition, the reflex receives an atomistic interpretation consistent with the realistic position defined above. Yet the atomistic treatment fails to be cogent, at every level of analysis. M-P concludes the introduction by suggesting that we can follow the path through behaviorism-- depriving it of its atomistic assumptions about the nature of behavior-- and arrive at a novel conception of consciousness as a "structure" rather than as a causal force or immanent reality. Of course, we have to wait until further chapters to understand what this suggestion really means.

That's the blow by blow of the introduction. I think the most difficult aspect of the chapter is seeing reconciling the two stated intentions, that is, the intention announced at the beginning of the chapter, to investigate the organic, psychological, and social relations between consciousness and nature, and the intention that emerges towards the end of the chapter, which is specifically trained on reconceiving the relation between mind and body. The second intention seems narrower than the first, but it's not clear that Merleau-Ponty intends it so. I still remain unclear about what the categories of relation named in the opening sentence are meant to suggest, and it looks as though, if these are going to be clearly spelled out, it won't be until the final chapter. The material towards the end of the introduction, however, gives a good indication of where Merleau-Ponty is heading next. And what I'll hopefully be blogging about in the near future, as well.

All references refer to:
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Structure of Behavior. Trans. by Alden L. Fisher. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2002.

Today's haul

2006-09-14T13:27:00.000-07:00

So, today I went to meet with my advisor, John Haugeland, to discuss my curriculum for this year. It, in the end, was a largely unproductive meeting, insofar as we determined that there are a number of paths I could take to fulfilling my distribution requirements (and taking the classes I want to), and the possibilities just proved to be too numerous for us to sort out in the context of a short meeting. So I have some assigned homework-- I'm to create a series of 2x3 matrices that chart all of the minimally plausible combinations of courses that appeal to me this year, and then choose the two or three combinations that I like best, and choose from among those. I would not be beset with this dilemma if John would assent to my taking more than 2 courses per term, but he is, in fact, a stickler about that general guideline. And he's probably right to be. I've been an auditor for a third course just about every quarter I've been at the U of C, and in each case, I've felt a little overwhelmed by the fifth or sixth week. I can't imagine feeling at all obliged to actually write for three of them. So I'll probably just end up doing the two-and-audit thing. But I do want to maximize the amount of writing I do for courses I actually care about (as opposed to mere distribution requirements). In any case, there are somewhat difficult choices to be made. And I haven't made them yet. So we're meeting again next week.

After our impasse at the meeting, I felt the urge to shop. So I went to the seminary co-op and picked out three reasonably priced selections:

Microcognition by Andy Clark.

The Nature of Selection: Evolutionary Theory in Philosophical Focus by Elliott Sober.

& finally,

Open Minded by Jonathan Lear.

The only one of those that really makes sense for my stated interests these days is Andy Clark. And Andy Clark seems to be virtually the only person I read on the topics that interest me. I guess that makes me a Clark devotee. In truth, I find Clark's work to be a pretty quick read, and reasonably informative. Not enough to make me an expert, but enough to give me a foothold for further explorations. Seems like a worthy investment of effort at this point.

I bought Sober's book because I'd like to know a bit more about philosophy of biology. In part, this is out of concern for the potential power of evolutionary accounts of mental capacities (and wanting to be aware of the philosophical issues that may be associated), but mostly it's just idle curiosity. I've also read some Sober and thought it was pretty thoughtful stuff. Time to read some more now.

Finally, I bought Lear's book on Toby's suggestion. Toby didn't actually suggest which Lear book to buy. But Toby wanted me to learn more about Freud, or anyway read Lear on Freud, and Open Minded, at least superficially, seems to be a book by Lear about Freud. And it was less than $20.

I almost bought a book that would have been genuinely helpful to me, Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science, edited by Robert Stainton (useful esp. because it's actually contemporary: published this year!). But it costs $34.95. C'mon, I don't have that kind of money to throw around on my future livelihood! Geeez.

When I actually get around to reading any of the above is anybody's guess, of course.

In case you missed it, Michael Wynne is batshit insane

2006-09-14T00:22:00.000-07:00

I'm actually two days late on blogging this news (the story will probably be removed from CNN's site before anyone reads this), but I did think I ought to say something about this. Michael Wynne, secretary of the Air Force of the United States of America, has explicitly proposed testing non-lethal weapons on protesters in America before deploying said weapons in wartime situations. The reasoning just beggars belief.

"If we're not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation," said Wynne. "(Because) if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press."

Several thoughts spring to mind. #1: Since when is the United States government concerned about the propriety of using non-lethal weapons in a wartime situation? Last I checked, the Bushies seemed pretty nonchalant about their employment of the lethal kind. So why suddenly get uppity when the weapon in question poses little threat of killing anyone? (to say nothing of, y'know, burning the skin right off of their bodies...)
#2: Wynne is worried that if we used these weapons overseas and they caused some unintended injury, that we would be "villified in the world press" ... You mean like the U.S. government wouldn't be villified by the press, domestic and international, for attacking its own citizens with untested weapons? Say what?!

Is it just me? Does anyone else get the feeling from that quotation that this guy is a fucking nutcase?

'Cause we don't have enough of those around, that's for damn sure.

Bonnie Prince Billy, "Cursed Sleep"

2006-09-13T22:26:00.000-07:00

The "Cursed Sleep" video from the upcoming album, The Letting Go:

I dig the song a lot but the video don't make no sense. It does have falconry in it, and that's cool.

This blog is a morbid blog.

2006-09-13T16:29:00.000-07:00

1/3 of the posts on this blog concern zombies, horrror, and/or death.

Not to mention my macabre blogger template.

(muahahahahaha.)

Dennett on Death and the Self

2006-09-13T13:40:00.000-07:00

Update. Early morning, September 15: I modified this post to make it less crappy.

A couple of days ago, I watched an interview on meaningoflife.tv where Robert Wright interviewed Daniel Dennett on a number of topics-- largely, the subject matters of Dennett's sundry publications (on free will, on consciousness, on evolution, &c.). The interview concludes, interestingly, with a brief discussion of death. The conversation is interesting, because the pair discuss the prospects for immortality. Dennett, as you might imagine, is skeptical of an afterlife, but endorses the use of afterlife-fictions to comfort grieving children (my mind is not made up on this, but I won't get into it now). Then Wright mentions a quote from Dennett's book, Consciousness Explained, which runs as follows,

If what you are is that organization of information that has structured your body's control system (or, to put it in its more usual provocative form, if what you are is the program that runs on your brain's computer), then you could in principle survive the death of your body as intact as a program can survive the death of the computer on which it was created and first run. (pg. 430)

This is an interesting shift of metaphor for Dennett in the chapter. Earlier he compares a self with the center of gravity of a physical body. The force of the comparison is that the 'center of narrative gravity' -- the self -- like the center of gravity in physical bodies, is a theorist's fiction. There aren't really any separable centers of gravity out there, but we can talk about a center of gravity a useful abstraction in order to describe interactions in mechanics. Likewise, according to Dennett, there is no separate self distinct from the body: the 'I' is just a useful, fictional abstraction that allows us to tell stories about our behavior that we would otherwise find to be enormously cumbersome, or even impossible, to tell.

Or anyway, his view is something like that. There are further and details-- for example, Dennett is quite happy to accommodate cases in which there might be "more than one self to a customer," and the like.

It's interesting, though, that there is a huge tension between the two metaphors for talking about the self-- as center of gravity and as software. Centers of gravity cannot be transferred from body to body. You can certainly alter the center of gravity of a body, but you cannot duplicate it in another body. The center of gravity is inextricably and conceptually tied to the body that bears it. It just doesn't make any sense to talk about transferring centers of gravity from one body to another.

Software, manifestly, can be moved around at will. It doesn't much matter to the identity of a piece of software what machine it's running on, or even what kind of machine it's running on. The same piece of software can, of course, be copied on to multiple machines as well-- but each of the copies isn't the original, unique Microsoft Word; rather, it's a copy of the program. I guess, then, that I'm inclined to think, in the first place, that software programs are more like types than individuals. Selves, on the other hand, are individuals par excellence. Quite obviously, there may be manifold ways in which we can map the software/hardware distinction on to our cognitive appratus, but I'm just not convinced that our apparent selfhood is such an well-behaved aspect.

To get back to the first point about software (its indifference to its vehicle), I wonder: does it matter a whit to selfhood how it is embodied? I'm inclined to think, emphatically, that it does matter, and that Dennett's shift in metaphor is an unfortunate swing toward a Cartesian viewpoint-- something his book is more or less devoted to dismantling.

How much does my embodiment matter to my being 'me'? It seems to me that a lot of ways one might think are effective to ask this question turn out to be spurious. For example, if we ask, if my body were other than what it is, would I still be me? the obvious answer is, yes of course I would-- the answer is presupposed by the question. The right scenario is closer to what Dennett is supposing: suppose we had the technology so that a computer or neural network could perfectly emulate my cognitive processes. Suppose we built it while I was still alive: would there now be two copies of me, two Tucker's? No: we wouldn't even have that if selves were software. Instead, we'd have Tucker and a perfect replica of Tucker's brain, or two tokens of the Tucker-type.

I think, more tellingly, the perfect working replica would probably only be Tucker-like for a very short period of time. Unlike Microsoft Word being adapted to run on a different sort of machine, I suspect if copied into a new vehicle the second Tucker would be Tuckerlike for only a very short period of time, perhaps not at all. If the new Tucker weren't saddled with mundane traits like being a relatively short guy (and therefore a hopeless basketball player), a periodic sufferer of kidney stones, and a frequent insomniac, would it still be me? I'm inclined to think not. Nor would it likely be recognized as the author of this blog or a welcomed guest at the McKinney household at Thanksgiving. That is to say-- replicating the workings of my brain would hardly replicate the extrinsic factors, both physiological and social, that contribute to my identity. Obviously, some of these obstacles might be mitigated if we altered a human brain, in another human organism of more or less my size, shape, etc., to be a perfect replica of mine. Again, posed with the question, would there now be two Tucker's? I'm inclined to think that the answer is pretty apparently 'no,' although this sort of clone might succeed in being me-like more generally for a little bit longer, but not much. I think all of this suggests that the idea that our selves are just pieces of software is at least highly counterintuitive, but I also think that it might motivate a stronger conclusion that I'm not sure I know how to argue-- namely that selves just ain't in the head.

I think one way to draw out the meaning of that phrase in this context is to consider the analogy between selves and centers of gravity. If I'm right, selves are like centers of gravity in more than one way: in addition to being theorist's fictions, they are inextricably, conceptually tied to the bodies that bear them. Being me isn't just about having the thoughts that I have: it also encompasses my bodily being, and my social engagement. Where a body goes, so goes its center of gravity. Where a human organism goes, so goes its self.

I think that if we imagine the cases of Tucker-duplication from above, but suppose that my body (and with it the original brain) ceased functioning just as the duplication completed. If I'm right in my hunch that my identity and survival as a self depends on my identity and survival as an organism, I've not really achieved immortality. With the death of the original body would come the death of the original me: that is to say, the one and only. Even if, in some sense, the Tucker-type survived in a new embodiment, that, again, would seem to be survival of the type, where what we care about vis-a-vis hankerings after immortality, is the survival of the individual (fictional though it may be!).

The sudden appearance of the dualism of software and organism in that chapter of Consciousness Explained marks, I think, a modest retreat into Cartesian thought for Dennett. I think, in the context of the book, that he has simply gone too far in appeasing the Cartesian reader who wants to be thoroughly vindicated for thinking that some dualism exists between the subject and its physical housing. As Dennett pretty much emphasizes throughout the book up until that chapter-- no such dualism exists. No way, no how can your "self" survive the death of your body, because the two are one and the same.

In the interview Dennett says some somewhat more sensible things-- i.e., that we die because our parts break, and as such, if there was a way to keep our biological organism functioning indefinitely (by replacing parts as they broke, or something of that sort), so we could prolong our lives indefinitely. But, of course, indefinite extension of life is not immortality, for the obvious reason that there are still plenty of things out there that can kill you by rending your body beyond recognition, in such a way that it really could not be reconstituted. Drive your car often enough and eventually one will happen to you. Indefinite life is just passing on the buck a little while longer. Sooner or later, we all will die.

Sounds awful depressing doesn't it? It's strange that it does - death happens to absolutely everyone; along with birth, its one of the most common things in life. So why get depressed over it? Hell, why even resist it? Of course, wanting to live longer is a perfectly sane, humane attitude (I hope so, since I happen to adopt it). On the other hand, wanting not to die (full stop)-- i.e. hankering after immortality, seems to me to be a perfectly delusional orientation. To believe that we could ever achieve immortality is to believe we're something other than the common, fragile, temporally finite biological machines that we are (or to be irresolute in believing that we are such, which is how Dennett seems to me on this score), and that's just a fantasy. Coming to terms with mortality is difficult, but, I think, in the long run more rewarding than deluding oneself about one's nature.

Dennett, Daniel. Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown and Company: New York, NY. 1991.

Looks like the pope could stand to watch a horror flick or two

2006-09-13T12:37:00.000-07:00

From Pharyngula (who in turn got it from parts elsewhere), apparently the pope said this about the implications of a naturalistic, evolutionary theory of the origin of man:

Man, "would then be nothing more than a chance result of evolution and thus, in the end, equally meaningless," said the Pope.

Let me say, pace PZ Myers, that if your ability to make sense of your existence depends on adherence to a set of bizarre dogmas that turn out to be false, then yeah, I guess your life is pretty meaningless.

Tough cookies, those.

Attention Chicago Public Works Dept.

2006-09-12T16:38:00.001-07:00

(I'm not sure there is such a thing)

The drainage on my street is so bad that the road is nearly submerged after only a modest rainfall.*

* At least, it seemed like only a modest rainfall. In any case, 54th Pl is often a hot spot for mosquito breeding, less so for cars. Could mean rust is a big problem, no?

In praise of (some) horror

2006-09-12T13:54:00.000-07:00

I figured since I posted the video of Night of the Living Dead that I would offer some passing, off-the-cuff, pseudophilosophical, nearly vapid thoughts on the merits of horror as a form of artistic realism.

Quite obviously, horror films and literature are rarely realistic at the surface level. Corpses do not, as a rule, become animate no matter how much radiation you subject them to, as they do in Night of the Living Dead. And the horror films and literature which are superficially realistic (e.g. slasher movies, teen horror) do not actually possess the sort of realistic outlook I admire in the more far-fetched examples of the genre.

I find that realistic outlook on the world common to many horror films to be exemplified in the thought that, the world was not built for us to live in (and, for matter of that, the world for which we are adapted might be other than the one in which we dwell). Thus, to my eye, horror films come as an antidote to a certain form of anthropocentrism, which I believe to be not only common to our outlook but perhaps even intrinsic to it. That form of anthropocentrism takes for granted that our way of living is well suited to the world and will continue to be so. Horror films like Night of the Living Dead deprive us of this assumption, insofar as we find, quite suddenly, that our world is not what it used to be, or what we thought it was. In the process of showing the attempt to adapt to the new situation, the flaws in our current ways of living come to light.

It is interesting that disaster films invariably fail to pose this sort of existential challenge. But that is because typically the disaster becomes simply another practical obstacle to circumvent in one's daily dealings, or at best poses a temporary disruption. In Night, and probably even more so in its follow-ups, there is a palpable sense that the new event is not merely a practical challenge or temporary hassle, but a thorough inversion of the natural order. It's also significant that, in the disaster movie, the disaster in question is almost always well-understood: very often, the disruption either was or could have been expected. But in the horror film-- at least in the sort of film that exemplifies the traits I am ennumerating-- nature proves to be beyond the reach of our understanding, sometimes even essentially so.

At any rate, the point would be that this feature of some paragon films of the horror genre to my mind reflects something quite likely to be true (or rather truistic) of the world. Since I understand the natural world as devoid of high-level teleological purposes (i.e. higher than our own), it follows that the world might genuinely turn out to be hostile to human inhabitance or comprehension, even suddenly so. I believe it is worth being reminded of this precariousness every now and then. Watching horror films thus becomes an instrument for the cultivation of humility.

The horror film, for the features I cite above, also seem like a good candidate for the phenomenologists' favorite genre. In a very loose sense, I think, (some) horror films involve a "detaching" of the world or the natural attitude, insofar as they depict horrific events not only disrupting our everyday activities, but depriving us of our familiar attitudes toward the natural and human worlds we inhabit. And this affords a unique opportunity for social criticism and existential insight that I must say is too rarely taken up by filmmakers. George Romero is an exception, and I suspect Cronenberg is as well, although I confess I've yet to watch any films by the latter director.*

I saw an interview with Geore Romero once where he mentioned that one of his principle complaints about the horror genre was that so frequently in horror films, a condition of normalcy is restored in the end. I have to admit I find Night's ending a bit ambiguous on this score [warning, spoilers coming]. On the one hand, the zombie-hunting posse, at least to all appearances, seems quite successful in eliminating at least the threat to the rural Pennsylvania community in which the film is set-- but on the other hand, we are given to understand that the zombie attacks have been spread at least throughout the Eastern half of the United States. Hence it is unclear, at the end of Night whether we ought to understand the zombies as merely a passing phenomenon, a difficulty which can be overcome. Of course it is clear that the condition of normalcy that would be re-established if the threat was eliminated would not constitute a happy ending either, at least if the Harry Cooper's of the film are an index to normalcy. And maybe that would be sufficient for Romero: namely that we've dealt with the zombie threat, but the reality we're restoring has been shown, through the process, to be a cold comfort at best.

Oh well, food for the budding film theorists in the (non-existent) readership.

* My fiancee is, as it happens, not a fan of the horror genre, and so convincing her to sit through a Cronenberg flick, or finding the opportunity to view one on my own, is seldom easy.

And while we're at it, this blog needs some color!

2006-09-12T11:00:00.000-07:00

Things are getting a little drab around here, what with the grayscale background and then the black and white movie to view, so I decided, since I'm embedding videos today, that I should add a splash of color. This is a film shot by a friend and former teacher Chris Vitiello. Mmm... texture...

How to Spend the Time Very Late at Night

2006-09-12T10:51:00.000-07:00

By watching Night of the Living Dead on the internets, of course:

For the record, apparently this fell out of copyright a while ago. Hurray for the public domain!
And kudos to Romero for a good picture. If you'd rather view it on a larger scale, you can go to google video and search for it there. Still not fullscreen, but with the quality of the digital video, that's actually a good thing.

Context Fixation

2006-09-12T01:51:00.000-07:00

I am a second year PhD student in philosophy at the University of Chicago. I'm interested in classical phenomenology, philosophy of mind (including cognitive science), and philosophy of science. Those are interests; I don't have a well-defined specialization yet, and frankly I can't see one developing at any point in the near future. This is a cause of some concern.

Over the past year or so, my focus has swung fairly dramatically from the history of philosophy to contemporary debates. I think for most graduate students this would seem an odd shift, but the plain fact of my undergraduate education in philosophy is that I read only as far as roughly 1970. My reading basically concluded with Naming and Necessity. I think in retrospect my sense of contemporary debates in philosophy was really radically impoverished, and continues to be so relative to my progress. The explanation is fairly simple-- history was a primary focus of the philosophy curriculum at Bates College, where I went for undergrad, and is an even greater focus here at the University of Chicago.

Unfortunately I seem to be getting rather tired of history. The classical phenomenologists (by which I mean at least Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty) remain a fascination for me, however, as I see their work continuing to be relevant to contemporary debates in philosophy of mind and the foundations of cognitive science. But I know only a hair about issues falling under those broad headings (although I'm making every effort to learn more), so it may yet turn out that the phenomenologists also prove to be relatively unimportant to my trajectory, and if so I imagine I would lose all historical bent whatsoever.

I think, however, that at some level I owe my shift in attitude toward the history of the discipline to a deepening appreciation of the phenomenologists' motto ('zu den Sachen selbst!')-- to the things themselves. As I understand it-- and I must confess that for all my professed interest in the phenomenologists, I'm hardly an expert on their work-- the imperative adopted by the phenomenologists demands that they spurn much of the academic back-and-forth of philosophy in favor of a renewed attention to phenomena, where the attention is not simply idly directing one's mind toward one thing or another, but genuinely attempting to bring matters into relief so that the phenomenonon in question shows itself for what it is. Unlike Husserl, however, I have my doubts that the phenomenological method can serve as a font of genuine knowledge. Hence the turning to phenomena is, for me, cast as a turning toward the instrument and output of science. And then my interest, when it is not devoted to the question of how the instrument of a particular scientific research program (e.g. cognitive science) could be refined, is usually fixed on determining just what the phenomena in question are.

Of course, that makes me sound like I'm an proto-eliminativist, i.e. it makes me sound as though I think science is the ultimate ontological measure and thus the final judge of whether there are really such things as beliefs, desires, and so forth (assuming these have no place in the relevant scientific theory). But I'm not actually an eliminativist (or even a proto- one)-- I think folk psychology is just fine and dandy within its proper scope. More broadly I think ontological- and even some explanatory- claims can be bought more cheaply than by scientific endorsement. Nevertheless, I think that respectable attempts to answer philosophical questions about the mind ought to be rooted in a relatively robust understanding of how the mind actually works. As such, I'm finding myself compelled to quite a bit more interdisciplinary reading than I could have dreamed of in my younger days as a budding Kant scholar.

And that, in fact, roughly sums up where I'm at: experiencing a dramatic shift of focus away from my historical roots, and reeling from the new, terrifying burden of facts. I may grow to miss the days when I couldn't be troubled with such things...

Re-commence blog.

2006-09-12T01:01:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, I had a blog.

But that was before it got eaten.

I've decided to resurrect it (with a new name) to serve as a placeholder in time. The reason comes to this: I dislike boredom, and lately boredom has been a pretty constant presence. Quite often when I am bored, I have thoughts. Usually, I do not write them down (I am lazy). But writing thoughts down seems an excellent way to pass the time. We shall see if I actually employ this blog for such a purpose, or whether, like the last blog, it is left untended and withers away, until a passing whim wanders by and devours it. Only time will tell.