When you settle for less than you deserve, you end up with even less than what you settled for.
Don’t you dare settle.
Author: William
Pensive Persuasion
By the time you realize you care, it’s too late. She’s moved on. She’s waited long enough.
He plays the game. Every move is coolly calculated, symmetrical with her every move. Nothing escapes. No feeling is beyond him. He is boldly aware. But before he knows it, it’s over.
Somewhere along the way he decided that he won, that his efforts sufficiently spun the wheels of affection so that they continue spinning freely. How wrong he is. Every time too.
“It is not a game.”
“Oh?” says I “Than why do you play by the rules?”
“What rules?”
His response is as dead as it is rhetorical. I reply, “The cat and mouse, the hesitations, the calculated caroms, the mysterious reticence, the pervasive premeditation moderating every move? Why don’t you shed and share all, unmask your motives, lay down your cards?”
“Ha! I can’t do that!”
“Oh?”
“Well, I suppose you could, but where’s the fun in that? There’s no excitement. The glories of love need to be delayed!”
Usually he waits with reserve. His only recompense is the razbliuto left by fond memories of feral fantasies.
Writer
I bought several books on writing.
“Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases”, by Greenville Kleiser. I will master.
Literary and rhetorical devices. I will master.
Story development: character, plot, climax, conclusion. I will master.
How will I master? With discipline, focus, firm resolve and dedication.
Teacher
The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.”
—William Arthur Ward
Keep this in mind when you communicate: you cannot escape the reward of your action. Consider that each time you communicate with someone you are revealing something about who you are and what you know.
“Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn of him.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
We learn from every man, and every man learns from us. In this way we are teachers. Instruct the prying eyes with inspiration. Let it seep from your intention and into your action. Do not waste time living mechanically or methodically. These are the grossest representations of transcendent man. Instead, become imbued with exuberant ecstasy, let your revelatory enthusiasms erupt with escalatory elation! Be a great teacher. Inspire with greatness.
Life: Feeling and Thinking
Since when did you hear a man say “I think alive!” Never! No one thinks themselves to be alive. Life is left for feeling! “I feel alive!” says the man. There is nothing rational about life!
I like to entertain that, whereas the happy man feels, the sad man thinks. On a whole it seems that there are much less rational optimists than there are rational skeptics. More often than not, it seems, the happy are the irrational. The sad men are the skeptical, the realistic, the rational evaluators.
However, no one thinks himself into a fulfilling life overflowing with goodness. This is left for feeling. Rich, ripe feeling.
You cannot rationalize feeling. You can only move yourself into feeling. We are moved by our senses, by the sensuous stimuli composing experience. Life is meant for feeling. After all, we do not think senses cognitively; we feel senses intuitively. Likewise it is that we feel alive.
“I think myself to be happy” one might say. This would suggest that there are reasons for feeling. Does one need a reason to be happy? And what if there are no reasons? Is that good reason to feel any differently? Certainly not! We may give ourselves reasons to be sad, but we certainly don’t need these anymore than we need reason to be happy!
Let feelings stand alone, justified singly by the resolute rapture of existence!
Rando
I resent anything that chooses me. Anything that forces to identify with me, that I do not freely or willfully accept as a true reflection of my intention or choice, is like a disease and is resented like a disease, with disdain and contempt.
Let me exercise freedom with choice, with conscious choice. People who make choices for me are like a cancer and I strive to cut them out of life as quickly as possible. Let me choose my habits, my thoughts, my desires, my relationships.
Students are rewarded for their method, not the ideas. Ideas should be valued above method. You are graded if you follow the rules. How drab. How limiting. How boring.
School teaches us that you will succeed if you follow the rules, if you meet expectations, if you show me how to reproduce. The ideas themselves, if there are any left, are pushed aside as if they are an inferior priority. Since when did it become advantageous to encourage the ability to take apart and unpack, rather than put together and create?
Soft Summer Songs
There is nothing so satisfying as an opulent ocean of redolent rays gleaming across the sublime summer sky.
Relationships: these interesting symbiotic syntheses of feelings and minds and circumstance. Two people, pulled by fate, like magnetic force, yield their defenses long enough for a daring gesture of interest to find its way into their intimate chambers, where their egos reside with the risible recantations of a wry world.
Two men exchange their thoughts, like young twins speaking their own tongue, referencing their experiences, in blissful agreement: “Yes, yes” and “yea”, “but of course” and “oh right!” These affirmations of love, spoken in frank response.
Write with freedom, with unrequited passion; the world will never return the favor with the same fervor. Never mind it. You are a model, a leader. As a writer, your words do more than etch new thoughts and moods among men. They reverberate through time. Their roots wrap and coil around future gardens of growth.
I need to journal more. What do I mean by journal? I mean, feel more deliberately. Writers experience life twice. Why would I want to deprive myself the experience of living life with any less feeling the second time? Full and fabulous.
I want to be a writer. I want to capture the human condition, to communicate existence with humanity, as a comfort, a beacon, that life is not a lone journey, but a universal struggle. The journeys are all different, but the struggle is all the same. The phenomenon of each journey may be irreconcilable with another’s, but the limitations are universal, uniform, consistent.
Writers are sensitive, acutely aware of details, of the incantations strewn by the senses throughout the consciousness.
When I write, I feel. I never write without feeling. The best thing one could do for oneself is be transparent with their thoughts and feelings. Thoughts should reflect feelings, so that when you feel intensely, thoughts follow with equal force and vigor.
When I write, I write through my states, through the moods moderating my memories and mind. Like a performer, my heart commands and my fingers obey, with precise form and clarity of expression. There is nothing wanting. The audience is a lone traveler, hungry and thirsty, searching for anything to quench their parched and pallid imagination. The routine of this journey weighs, and each step adds another circular chain to their load. Starving eyes, so eager to capture the faculties of imagination so they might dispel their locking illusions. They long to shed the weight. The writer offers this salvation.
Relationships. These are a peculiar breed of experiences. The man longs to be free, the woman longs to be secure. Each seek to liberate or enslave the other. In this way each relationship seems over before it has even begun. But this is precisely the bond that brings them together.
Everything persists by demand, and it is through this demand we experience a command, a resounding order abounding from the passions. To disobey is mutiny: a self sabotage.
There cannot be freedom without activity. To utilize humanity one must act. But activity must be chosen every moment. Routines develop into chains as circular habituations take hold of choice. We must attend our freedom like a fire, gently stoking its embers and fueling its flame. The inattentive watchman risks losing the fire, the light of his soul; or it bellows beyond control, consuming everything until there is nothing left to ravage. Either way the man is lost: losing his way or losing his life.
Passivity is slavery. Unreflective choice is slavery. Impulsive choice is slavery. Any thought or action that is not chosen via volition is inauthentic. Passivity encrusts the consciousness, it clouds and clutters and confuses. There is no I without action, no subjective perspective without freedom and action.
TV, advertisements, anything generated from a capitalist society that engenders humanity as a static condition of a whole, is an assault on freedom, on authentic living. Man cannot manifest his freedom by doing nothing. He cannot create ethics or values or tastes or preferences that reflect an original genesis of choice unless he acts through himself, for himself, as himself. Men should not be whipped with their past. Advertisements: propaganda that illuminates man as a predictable creature, as a rational creation, with no faculty of imagination, objectifies man and indoctrinates him with alien laws and limitations.
Dialectical Thinking
We are never presented with fixed options. This kind of thinking always leads to more of the same. So long as we are free agents with an imagination and desires, we can coin any option we want. And what if the option doesn’t fit with the system? What if the option, the aim and goal and desire, isn’t compatible with the existing framework, the current context? Change the system. If we don’t it will continue perpetuating more of the same, the same options, the same outcomes, the same predictable behaviors. The illusion that people unknowingly carry on is that one can escape the system by working it harder, by being the best. This is a lie because when one buys into a system, one buys into the rules, the conventions, the practices that characterize the system. Working harder, or achieving within the system, will only bring about more of the same. More input equals more output, not different output. Hard work will produce quantitative differences, not qualitative differences. That is, it produces changes in the amount of values, rather than changes in the values themselves.
So if a system isn’t producing, consider discarding it. Ask yourself if the system was established with your best ends and aims in mind, if it complements your natural inclinations or strengths. If it doesn’t, if it isn’t conducive, create a new system. That’s right: create. Synthesize patterns and behaviors that work for you into something wholly novel and practical according to your pursuits.
Diary of Sapien
Dearest Sapien,
Why am I so god damn sensitive? I am so sensitive, that I hide my vulnerability. I master a callous veneer that deflects most, if not all, attention thrown my way. My heart aches with every stupid dig. It doesn’t matter who it comes from. It doesn’t matter if I think it’s true, if they think it’s true. Being sensitive means it hurts. And I hate it. It means you react before the insult even lands.
You are acutely aware— the bumbling bee, the radiant rose, the felicitous smile, the downcast eyes: nothing escapes your attention. Intonation resounds like thunder, the slightest misinflection cracks at the window of your awareness. Sensitivity causes a convulsion, an empathetic rescue to remedy the reaction.
I just close my eyes and imagine the various pins and needles penetrating my affections.
A rioting panic wells up in my eyes.
As quickly as the wind changes its course, my mood, my self esteem, just about every confident conviction I hold so close, turns against me. My mind turns inward on itself and begins to ravage all the inadequencies lurking in safe shadows. It seeks them out, festering and plucking and picking at old wounds, and hurls fresh insults. I have to convince myself that I am above it. That the rapacious pillaging of self loathing doesn’t weaken me. It requires work and energy. Far too often I think about killing myself. There. I said it. When times get tough, and my self esteem plummets towards dark depths, my escape is fantasy. But not just any fantasy. Fantasies of death. Death and nothingness. Neutrality. These types of thoughts are typically associated with the psychotic. With the mentally unwell. I have to agree most of the time. But I seem to think it’s perfectly normal to want to kill yourself. You will die anyway. But my death, by any unnatural way (whatever that means), will be presented as an attack on those closest to me, and I resent that. What that means is that I should take time to disengage before I kill myself so that no one will hurt as bad. The abrupt is too cold, too merciless.
I exist in various states.
If you go on living, chances are you won’t be remembered. The tragic is remembered. The world loves to wallow in bliss or tragedy, not in the purgatory in between. That god awful gray area where the mediocre reside. Who could live in such a place? Most people. But they don’t want to know about it. There is nothing there they want to be reminded of.
So they obsess over the other corners of experience. Tradgedy or bliss. My role is to fulfill the tragedy that is their lives. I will kill myself, one day, as an act of definance, of absolute revolt. The idea is more appealing than the actual process, but I assure you, there is a methodology to my madness, to the sick recompense I seek to serve my fellow man. Your aberrations have turned to adulations, and I want to defecate on all the bad deemed good. On lifeless lives.
Yours Truly,
Sapien
Thoughts on Evolutionary Economics: Organic Models of Economic Growth
‘Progress’ or ‘evolution,’ industrial and social, is not mere increase and decrease. It is organic growth, chastened and confined and occasionally reversed by decay of innumerable factors, each of which influences and is influenced by those around it; and every such mutual influence varies with the stages which the respective factors have already reached in their growth. In this vital respect all sciences of life are akin to one another, and are unlike physical sciences. And therefore in the later stages of economics, when we are approaching nearly to the conditions of life, biological analogies are to be preferred to mechanical, other things being equal. (Alfred Marshall 1898: 42-3)
Examine the Thesis: Economic models must not be closed. Rational models are not reflective of nature as a function of change and therefore time. The creative and adaptive enterprises of men cause rational economic models to become outdated in the long run. Rational economic models are suitable for short run analysis but can not make accurate long run predictions.
Alfred Marshall and the Growth of Wealth: A Short Microeconomic Analysis of Wealth Accumulation
Alfred Marshall was a pioneer in economics, even by today’s standards. In 1890 he published Principles of Economics which, compiled from years of study and contemplation, proved to be his magnum opus on economic thought. The work was so fastidiously compiled that it served as a standard in which all economic thought over the next century would respectfully consider. This essay will delve into the concept and history of the growth in wealth. A brief outline of Marshall’s descriptive analysis of wealth accumulation will provide a basic framework that can be used for comparing Marshall’s thoughts to that of other economists.
Zeit
How you spend your time defines who you are.
Who are you?
When I want to judge someone’s character, I don’t let appearances do the work. Experience renders character. Where do they garner their experience? Examine how they spend their time. A man is what he thinks about all day long. Whatever task is at hand will dominate your thoughts. Your mind manifests its intention through action, through activity. Do you sit for hours online and mull about the mindless material circulating ad infinitum on the web? Do you seek out the novel? Do you spend time with quality people? Do you read quality books? Or read at all for that matter?
Many people like to think they are someone. Everyone likes to think they’ve achieved a degree of individuality. I will tell you: how you spend your time defines who you are. Ask yourself if your routine is any different from the millions of other rats trapped in this menacing maze. The habituations trap the mind into apathetic unoriginality.
I suffer these delusions. I ask myself how I individuate my experience from all other experience. If I watch all the same shit, if I desire and strive and celebrate all the typical glories that hail from mainstream adulation, I am a copy. I am a duplicate. My experience may as well be the same. How you spend your time defines who you are.
Experience renders the material of thought. It provides sense datum which feeds the flickering flame of the soul. Like the flick of a match we were born into this world and throughout our lives we burn. The brighter we burn is dependent on the kindling and fodder fed by way of experience. Experience is the filament of human existence. It allows us to burn brightly. The more original experience, the more brilliant our flame, our life, will shine.
Individuate yourself. Individuate your experience. Do we realize how asinine and inimical it is to scour the ranks of top sellers and most popular lists? Why do we fawn more of the same?
There must be something to wanting a shared experience. “Happiness is only real when it’s shared.” Perhaps that’s why people rush to accumulate all the same experiences as everyone else. While there’s nothing original in going to all the same amusement parks, in reading all the NYT best sellers, in watching all the hit reality TV shows, in buying all the latest gadgets and gigs, I see the utility in it. Yes, the utility is glaring. It creates a unity of experience. Some experience so we can feel apart of this greater whole, this greater truth. Or it fills some hole, some void thrust upon us when we were bestowed with the burden of freedom. Perhaps they are one in the same. The responsibility of freedom- those god awful chains of choice- weigh equally on every man. I understand the exhaustion. I understand the willingness to shed a link or two and indulge in ‘truth’, or popular convention.
I seem to be stuck with these bitter sentiments. What did routine do to me? Ah. I remember: lull me into lecherous lethargy.
I want to get positive. Live life with enthusiasm and passion and excitement and energy. I say that most of my time I exert the full force of my being to the moment. I long to shine through. Sometimes I question. These questions rear their head like a hydra and I find myself lost in a continual battle . Pollyanna, or skepticism. Such is life.
Pragmatic Science Studies: Thoughts
All things are subject to interpretation; whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Examine the thesis: Science serves as a social utility that facilitates the economic and political power over a community.
Elucidate the utility of science from an individual and national level. Show how science and economy are reflexively compatible and serve as complimentary forms of power.
What are the pros of accepting science as truth? What are the cons? Can one accept external truths and retain freedom? Internal?
Singularity: Information Expediting Evolution
(From: http://www.socialnomics.net)
The first thing that came to mind as I watched this video was Kurzweil’s concept of ‘singularity’. If we consider the past decade alone it’s simply astonishing to think about the enormous proliferation of information and technology. My first thought was whether we are progressing beyond our means to adapt. The news is filled with queries regarding multitasking and information overload. But then it occurred to me: knowledge and information is expediting our evolution. No longer must we wait for nature to facilitate our evolution; knowledge is allowing us to manipulate nature so that it adapts to us. Evolution is taking place right before our eyes at exponential rates like never before in history.
Protagoras was ahead of his time when he said “Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not”
Burn
Never again will I subject myself to eighteen credit hours, fifteen hours of work a week, and actively participate as an executive officer of a large organization. These activities alone are frustrating enough and near impossible to juggle. Never mind maintaining a social life, close relationships, and free time to think.
My current schedule could be taken as belonging to a sadist. My daily routine consists of waking at 7:30am, gathering my books and school supplies together, and heading to class by 9:00am. Monday through Friday I have class from roughly 9:30am to 2:30pm. Daily I work till six in the evening. By this time hunger has taken hold and I make plans for dinner. When fraternity meetings are not on the agenda, I can expect to begin studying around 7:30pm. This is approximately the first time during any given weekday where I can begin to reflect on my life, or my homework and studies. So, yea. Sleep deprivation has ensued. This week is no fun.
Insanity
What is insanity? The most familiar definition that comes to mind is from Einstein who said, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” It is peculiar to think of insanity this way, particularly because it flies in the face of normalcy. Many believe that the socially responsible and acceptable thing to do is to adhere to certain norms and customs and traditions, and that these will allow you to adequately function in society. What normalcy doesn’t guarantee, however, is individuality, or originality. To be an individual, one must do things differently and expect different results. But what of a society that values doing things differently only to achieve the same results, such as participating in all the counter-cultural rituals to gain acceptance as an ‘individual’ ? Can it be said that such a person has achieved individuality?
”Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” -F.Nietzsche
Insanity. What I find insane is society. Civilization. Tradition. Custom. Ritual. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the utility of consistency. I understand the pragmatic element of predictability, from a linguistic standpoint as well as a logical and epistemological standpoint. After all, learning curves are greatly reduced by assimilating the knowledge past down by forbearer, no? And we can’t very well go about creating our own neologistic language and expect to be effective interpersonally, now can we? But where do we draw the line between maintaining and gaining? Passing on and passing over? Subsisting and thriving? Progress requires change. Change requires adaptation. If we sell out to maintain the status quo, if we fail to commit to the efflorescent incarnations of possibility in favor of the denouement of equilibrium, we must embrace our death; for we have already died.
Society is insane. Look at the way they scuttle around in the rat race, trying to secure these temporal provisions; see how they frantically instill meaning and comfort into fabricated facticities. Observe the perduring populous that embodies repetition; always allied to the alacritous attachment of doing the same thing, over and over again, and always expecting different results. If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting. In the end everyone’s demise is the same. Society is a self-fulfilling prophecy; a reflexive perpetuation proselytizing more of the same. The social consciousness does not readily expand but rather, it promptly strengthens itself onto itself.
So what is insanity? A break from conventional norms, I suppose. So sanity, once again, is doing the same thing over and over again. The endorsement of cultural customs, e.g. materialism, hedonism, consumerism, aceticism, celebrityism, sciencism, etc. I suppose the great majority of people think they aren’t insane because they don’t expect different results. Predictability is offered as a sycophant of security.
That is the real tragedy. When people not only do the same thing over and over again, but they do not expect different results. They have been sedated or conditioned or desensitized to rudimentary routines and rituals. 9 to 5. Primary, secondary, tertiary schooling, followed by a stint of rebellious youth, cue the career, make room for marriage, corral some kids, restfully retire, and then comes the inevitable surprise of death.
Sanity: “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the same results.” This rationalist program will inevitably suffer the same stifling fate as freedom. Time waits for no man. If you are not progressing, you are regressing. Life is meant to flourish. Growth and evolution should be the cynosure of contemplation, the mark of progress. But not by any quantitative measure imposed by external authority. It should be an inward journey. Growth is not static.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.” -R.W. Emerson
Insanity is characterized by senseless or abnormal behavior by societal standards. But how amazing it is to look at societal standards! Especially through the perspective lens of time! How standards change!
So the question of insanity remains. Are you insane for following your desires? Even if your desires lead to your demise? Even if they cast you into chains? Even if they toss you into pain and hardship? Would you be willing to escape sanity and embrace the lucres of authentic freedom? At what price?
Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.
-A. Camus
Be Interested.
The uninteresting are uninterested.
The interesting people of the world are those who are most interested. They are constantly accreting new knowledge about themselves and the world. They continue to dig about for new wonders to incite the passions and move the imagination. They forge new experience through people, books, travels, or creative expression. These are the interesting people. By most standards they may be mad or crazy, eccentric or foreign, but they are overtly original and authentic, blithely bold and daring.
Do you want to be interesting? Be interested. Be curious.
How does one become interested? Ask questions. “Why questions?” you may ask.
Question (n.) c.1300, from Anglo-Fr. questiun, O.Fr. question “legal inquest,” from L. quæstionem (nom. quæstio) “a seeking, inquiry,” from root of quaerere (pp. quæsitus) “ask, seek” (see query). The verb is first recorded late 15c., from O.Fr. questionner (13c.). Question mark is from 1849, sometimes also question stop (1862); figurative use is from 1869.
Query 1530s, quaere, from L. quaere “ask,” imperative of quaerere “to seek, gain, ask,” probably ultimately from PIE *kwo-, base forming the stem of relative and interrogative pronouns. Spelling altered c.1600 by influence of inquiry. The noun in the sense of “a question” is attested from 1630s.
Questions are reserved for the seekers; for the creative minds who wish to explore the depths of experience and find the outer reaches of their world. But man cannot see what he does not know. Let us work on increasing our knowledge, on cleansing the lens of perception, so that we may have clear eyes with which to seek.
Those who ask questions are the adventurers of the world. They are not afraid of the unknown. On the contrary, they slaver at the sight of uncertainty.
Thoughts on Science: Realism and Anti-realism
There is a debate between realism and anti-realism. I believe the arguments brought against the other lack a certain scope regarding the enormous claims made about science. The realist philosophers in our readings represent realism with general coherent agreement. The anti-realists, on the other hand, represent a wide variety of views regarding anti-realism. The philosophers in both camps do a poor job accounting for, what seem to me, vital aspects of scientific enterprise.
When one talks of truth, or a true reality, one is not merely critiquing the sociological or psychological influences of those conducting the experiments, nor are they simply making claims about whether causation and inference are adequate tools for explaining phenomena or whether they can produce true and reliable ontological claims. It is much more than splitting hairs over observables and non-observables, true and falsity. While these are important, one needs to begin with examining the context in which this debate resides. That is, one needs to look at the embedded assumptions within the language of philosophy of science, as well as the sciences in which they refer. In addition, one needs to examine the various components that comprise the discourse: logic, context, and the principles of epistemological analysis of scientific knowledge.
A great deal of clarity could be gained if the debate focused on the aforementioned aspects. A starting point is differentiating between true relational knowledge claims and true substantive knowledge claims. This debate focuses a great deal on the nature of predicate logic and truth and falsity. But what is meant by truth? Regarding relational knowledge, truth is a result of the true conditions of predicate logic. The statement “If you are an unmarried male, then you are a bachelor” is a true statement, where M(x)->B(x). They are true because of their form and their form depends on certain immutable laws of thought.
On the other hand, substantive knowledge claims deal with the ontology of entities within the world. These are true based on experiential knowledge on the entity through acquaintance, be it through direct or indirect reference.
A vital distinction between these two types of knowledge is their relationship with context. Relational knowledge claims are contextually independent in that whatever the context, they will be true. As a result, relational knowledge is contextually indeterminate. It doesn’t matter what context a relational knowledge claim is made, the veracity does not change. Substantive knowledge, however, depends on a context for validity. The statement “Water is cold” depends on a context with determinate parameters for a truth value. In short, relational knowledge uses logical deduction to arrive at exact truth, whereas substantive knowledge uses logical induction to arrive at approximate truth.
To continue building towards clarification, we need to examine the role of language. Due to the discursive nature of philosophy, the debate within the philosophy of science seems to revolve around language, but its implications are much more than language. Language cannot be transcended. Mathematics and logic can be said to be the purest language as descriptions of truth, but these are semantically independent. That is, despite given predicates and primitive parameters, the semantic predication cannot be determined by the inference system itself. Once these have been semantically defined, the truth value can be inferred.
Regarding knowledge, language serves two primary functions of establishing knowledge, that of indexing proper names, and that of referring to descriptions. Drawing from Russell’s theory of language, there are two basic kinds of knowledge acquisition, namely acquaintance and description. Knowledge by acquaintance includes logically proper names which are referential of indexical demonstratives. Knowledge by description includes attributes that make description claims of thing in the world that can be true or false, but are not referential. That is, they are merely conceptual constructions. Within these descriptions reside indefinite descriptions, which make existence claims using indefinite articles (“A man drinking a martini…), and definite descriptions (“The man drinking the martini…), which make existence and uniqueness claims using definite articles.
What about non-existence objects? These are merely descriptions with no acquaintance. They may lead one to denote a particular in the world, but they do not ensure it. Descriptions without acquaintance may offer a adequate roadmap to their truth.
Strawson would say that referring is not asserting, but rather mentioning, something quite different from identifying. In addition, Donnellan divides definite descriptions into the referential and the attributive. Attributive descriptions denote all important, essential information about whoever or whatever. Referential descriptions contain information that is accidental and not important, but rather is instrumental in accurately picking out particulars through idexical or deictic use.
Names of objects and facts can have meaning, but only insofar as they have a context of propositions that are held together by a proper logical form. You may ask: why is this important? The answer is that logic is used to make inferences about the properties of postulated entities. Suppose we have the statement F(m, n) which stands for “m applies force to n”. In this way F is a property between m and n such that F is “applies force to”, and m and n are primitive names for Mike and Nail. So that, Mike applies force to Nail. The semantics of these variables are contextually determined and dependently attributed. They are given as substantive knowledge claims regarding the properties.
Context is necessary to define any set of data. Finding an ultimate truth is akin to finding an ultimate context. Within any given context there are phenomena that can be said to be real and true, but extrapolating beyond that context can be a fatal move for a theory.
Inward explanation
I don’t care what you claim to know. It is still you that is knowing it. Let us explore the you before going any further.
Thus we have my fascination with the self.
jeJune
I hate the feeling of not really living. You know the feeling. It happens when you begin reflecting on your life, your existence. You ask yourself those questions that only you can answer. What am I doing with my life? Am I happy? Why am I here? Where am I going? Am I alright with that? Why am I not doing more? Being more?
On one hand I find myself thinking how terrible it is that I have these thoughts. On the other, how wonderful. I and I alone can answer these questions. No one else. They don’t need to float along indeterminately. I can solidify them into whatever I see fit.
You wanna know what pisses me off? That I don’t write more. Not just write, but that I don’t share more. I have so many thoughts I need to get out at any given moment. Thoughts on the uniformity of experience. The quaint nature of maturing. What it’s like to watch people make mistakes, and let them make mistakes, knowing that’s the only way they’ll learn. And figuring out ways to not resent them for it. I wanted to write about the fact that everyone thinks they’re thinking is the most exact, their conclusions generally the most sound, like they are some how blessed with insight and knowledge and reasoning that allows them to transcend conclusions attributed to the ‘petty’ masses (I sure hope I don’t do this. Hm. Who am I kidding. I’m all too human.).
I wanted to write about the fact that there are always ‘others’, but that these are people too. Now, what the hell do I mean by ‘others’? They are the people you can’t or don’t identify with. They are the object to your subject; disconnected from the humanity you possess. They are revered or resented. They are the end and butt of all your jokes, criticisms, affections, reverence, etc. The ‘others’ are the awkward or mean or defiant or kind or caring people in the world that are somehow more or less intelligent, or something ‘other’ than you. Somehow on a level that is distinctly different from yours. I’m not sure I fully articulated what I mean. No matter. The point is is that this conception is really just bullshit. There is no ‘other’.
I was observing a family visiting the university today. I did a quick assessment from observations and began thinking of a possible scenario. Never mind if it’s true. It could be true.
Suppose: Some parents were crude, uneducated, poor, uncultured, unfashionable and the like. They had a son who was extremely bright and intelligent. This family had a respect for one another. Their conversations and points were genuine and always considered and heeded. Their son soon enrolls as a student and becomes enculterated with the university life and begins to adopt some customs and conventions that allow him to socially function. One day you sit next to him in class. When he talks you have a deep respect for him. He is articulate and smart and seems to be put together. You revere him in a certain regard. Say you walk on the street and you see a family. The same crude family. You make hasty judgments about them: who they are, what they know, their capacities and capabilities. They are the “others”.
What I find amazing is that the son and parents can function with such respect for each other, and that that respect is not there when we pass superficial judgments on people we have trouble identifying with. We have no problem passing respect to the son, but we’d never infer that he was cast from the same mold as the crude, uneducated family.
Does this make sense?
I suppose I find it interesting when people talk about others in higher or lower regards. They are people. Someones son, mom, bro, daughter, niece, employee, best friend, colleague, etc. “He’s a loser.” to one person is to someone else “He’s the smartest guy I know.” Or “She’s a bitch” is to someone else “She was my first friend.”
So…
I find people hilarious. Especially the naive. They teach me about myself better than anyone else. I watch their actions and could almost cast bets on the outcomes. They haven’t a clue. I could talk about what’s at hand, wave it in their face, and they wouldn’t have a clue to the mechanisms at work. They have their appealing myths, their comforting delusions. They would attribute it to their own ratiocinations, or other causes that could be explained with their endless reservoir of knowledge and experience. Psh.
Anyway. Bed.
Absurdity
Existence? There is no reason.
Absurdity: when the inference of reason reveals itself to be wholly dependent on cognitive activity alone, the sole work of consciousness. Inference ceases to follow from the nauseating compulsion of objective necessities and the world readjusts itself as a relative, subjective condition of man. Inference positions itself as alien to the world from which we attribute it. When we posit the question “why?”, we reveal the lack of inference and elucidate the feeble follow through of reason. We realize, through an awakening, that inference is a machination imparted to the mind, rather than a process inherent to the world. Justification is born out of intention, out of the desire, to survive or thrive.
Inferential causation. Rationality.
We cannot negate this absurdity with rationality and simultaneously escape it.
Consciousness undergoes an awakening under its own weariness. The question ‘why?’ invites a break with a life of routine habit, of poor reflection and inauthentic living.
Creativity and rationality are incommensurable. As is art and clarity. Either one accepts absurdity and the lack of genesis, or one willfully bears the ligatures linking man to unreflective leitmotivs.
Revolt with freedom and passion; embrace existence as protean possibility. The possible is the absurd.
Yellow Sunshine Pt.1
My vision: Pt.1
It really shakes you outta the stupor of life. Everything shows itself as absurd machinations of the mind, mental metaphors, crazy constructions. The contours of experience bleed and seep into a kaleidoscope of color. Everything shakes and shudders. It bubbles and boils over, spewing out of my mind, my mouth. My eyes consume the uncertainty that entertains the world.
10:30. Three hits. We talk about what’s to come. Drink water. The paper tabs begin to mush under our tongue. I roll the paper between my teeth. Music pulsates in the background. I switch tracks between eclectic electronica, to aural ambiance, to dithyrambic instrumentals, to melancholy melodies.
I play videos on my laptop. My friend watches from the bed. His face is serious, but inquisitive. There is something creeping behind his veiled expression. Something is beginning to swivel and unhinge. He hasn’t put his finger on it yet. My eyes catch his. A smile wraps around his face.
Hilarity begins to boil. My limbs feel weak. A faint vibration ripples around the periphery of my vision. It is almost out of sight, but it resonates with the growing uncertainty lurking at the edge of my thoughts. What’s to come? An impulse stands ready. It is barely noticeable, but it pervades my experience. Apprehension? No. Anxiety? Not quite. It is a steady waiting. For what? For nothing. For my senses to explode. For my experience to erupt with something. At this point I’m not quite sure what that something is. Meaning? Color? Laughter? Absurdity? Noise? Overwhelmed with possibility. Fragments of thought begin spinning off and collect other disassociations. They amass into knots. Clarity begins to merge with severe obfuscation. Inky residue clouds the genesis of my thoughts. Where do they come from?
We need to walk. We need to go somewhere. Something wants to crawl out of me. Creation. Explosion. I need stimulation. External stimulation. I need to make memories out of my mind.
I look at the glasses of water resting next to the computer monitor: short and fat, tall and skinny. His stubby glass of water seems icy and pure. I examine mine. Smudges seem to ossify into bedaubing patterns of residue. I pick up the glass. My eyes probe the contents. Light refracts into millions of splintering shades. The edges of each dividing shade is strewn with a spectrum of variegating color. Something is moving within the water’s current: particulates. A blue fuzz. My face contorts with a look of disgust. I glance at the other glass. It sits still with pure glistening coolness.
“My water is contaminated,” I declare to the room.
He shifts his attention to me. He’s been watching my inspections with perplexity.
“Your water is perfectly fine.”
“No. It’s not. It’s contaminated with debris. I cannot believe I’ve been drinking this water.”
My stomach tightens at the thought of microbial contents worming its way into my blood stream. I swallow the writhing reaction down and head to the kitchen. I pour soap all over the glass and furiously clean its walls. Repeatedly I hold it up to the light for inquest. “Not clean enough” I mutter, and continue cleaning. The bubbles on my hands seem to froth mystically into existence, like tiny worm holes spontaneously forming and combusting.
I return to my room with a clean glass of fresh water. I seat myself and inspect it one last time before sipping its contents and returning it beside the stubby glass. There is a pause. My world begins to shudder, my skin titillates, my eyes strain. Suddenly I get up.
“We need to do something.” I say this with conviction.
“I agree” my friend replies, “let’s go somewhere.”
A confusion has set in. Beginnings and endings seem elusive. Thoughts and goals, a peradventure. Is it cold? I go outside to audit the evening: Cold, really cold, with a mounting moisture. We bundle up in garments, grab apples and a bottle of water. The process seems difficult to organize. I cannot forget the necessities: but what are these necessary items? Wither are we going? and for how long? He goads that we are ready, that nothing has escaped our attention. I hesitantly subscribe.
We exit the comfy confines of my home and begin walking down the street.
“Traffic calming neighborhood” he says. “Reduce speed ahead”
The two of us are paused in the street examining the sign.
“What does this mean?” I say with my hands on my hips. I tilt my head thoughtfully. “Who is doing the calming?” I am bewildered. Who put this sign up? How long has this gone unnoticed? “Is the neighborhood calming? This doesn’t make sense. Who in this neighborhood is calming? The traffic? How does this work? What does it mean?” After a good deal of speculation and confusion we decide that the question is better left answering for another time.
We walk down the street.
We look into the windows of passing houses. A gaggle of children sit round their instruments and play harmoniously with mechanical precision. The parents recline in the adjacent room. Each wears a pacified expression; or is it sedated?
The trees force an atramentous outline into the caliginous sky. From giant branches sprout thousands of nascent limbs, covering the tree like coarse cilia. The thick branches look hacked and mutilated. Only in the winter can you see the atrocities these trees bear. They bear their scars proudly and persist the fight upwards. Missing limbs, brutal reminders of mans molestation.
We continue walking along the sidewalk. Street lamps illuminate the misty air. It glows like a neon lamp, smooth and ambient.
Vegetation seems to glisten with oscillating shades of purple, orange, pink, green, red and yellow. We continue thinking about the plants. I begin a diatribe.
“Plants are raped. Flowers are abducted. They are thrown into these whore houses we call gardens and flowerbeds, unnaturally solicited for our aesthetic indulgences. Our eyes molest their natural colors. They try their best to impress us in this new and foreign land. Rows of plants, plucked from their homelands, their natural environments, are forced into crowded corridors and tight boxes. All for human indulgence…” I mutter inaudibly, lost in thought, and continue “for the gratification of manipulation. We manipulate nature, whore her out, rape and molest her natural beauty, exploit her fertile flowers. This grass is not at home. These trees? Stolen away in a violent struggle. Their offspring, the tiny seedlings huddling to her ovaries, clutch for dear life. They are stripped and implanted into a city, cast into pots, verges, medians and swales.”
An elementary school passes beside us. Four giant columns support the architrave holding the massive pediment bearing its name.
“Let’s vandalize it.” I say enthusiastically.
“No way. That’s a horrible idea.”
“No, not like, vandalize it. I mean, lets try toppling these columns.”
“Like Samson?”
“Exactly like Samson. I mean, he did it. I feel like if we can topple these columns, we deserve to vandalize it.”
We laugh and position ourselves between the columns and give a few exasperating heaves and hoes. Nothing. We abandon the pursuit and sling insults at Samson.
“What a woman. I mean really, who gets stronger the longer their hair is? Isn’t long hair emasculating? I think they had it all wrong. He should be ultra strong the shorter his hair is. Psh.”
We continue walking along, admiring the various colors bleeding from the leaves. The twigs tremble in the breeze. Green buds hang from their tips and weigh on the weak winter branches. The trees seem alive. They probe the air like colorful coral creations, like the fingers of sea anemones.
Random Thoughts on Science
Random Thoughts on Science
Worldly Pleasure
An excerpt from Pascal’s Pensees:
666. Fascination. Somnum suum. Figura hujus mundi.
The Eucharist. Comedes panem tuum. Panem nostrum.
Inimici Dei terram lingent.122 Sinners lick the dust, that is to say, love earthly pleasures.
The Old Testament contains the types of future joy, and the New contains the means of arriving at it. The types were of joy; the means of penitence; and nevertheless the Paschal Lamb was eaten with bitter herbs, cum amaritudinibus.
Singularis sum ego donec transeam. Jesus Christ before His death was almost the only martyr.
Blaise Pascal was a philosopher who contributed to a variety of academic disciplines. I find that his fragmented writings in Pensees are the most fascinating artifact left of the man. It was compiled from a handful of notes and letters and scraps. It offers a glimpse into the innerworkings of a great man, a man of prodigious contribution and genius.
The passage in bold resonates with me. It describes those who, swept up in a world of self-indulgence, go about “licking the earth”. While I’m no religious advocate, I believe there is a lot of truth in the bible and other religious texts. I think that sometimes secular and biblical minds get caught up in the differences they share rather than their similarities. They often talk past each other when talking about the same thing.
Whether you’re a Christian or secularist doesn’t detract from the fact that preserving the self is important. Ravaging it with temporal self indulgences, material luxury, and cheap thrills won’t leave you any more of a person. While the Christian equates this life to that of a sinner, a secularist would just look at this man and think how empty his inner life must be if he feels the need to continually fill it with such vapid pursuits and possessions.
Remake the World
“You must write every single day of your life… You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads… may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.” -Ray Bradbury
This quote inspires the hell outta me. Remake the world. Fashion it according to the inner. What is the inner? Is it lust worthy? Is it wonderfully made? What does that inner life look like? How does one accumulate enough of these miniature worlds to reconstruct a wholly new reality?
Is it mood that determines the direction? Passions? Motivations? What is it in someone, in myself, that fuels the furious fire inside? Where is that spark?
What must I do? Huddle in libraries? Nestle in books? Must I write? Endlessly? Ceaselessly without tire? How to fashion the imagination? The infinite?
The more defiant and questionable and adventurous you are, the larger your world. The gaping green grass spans as far as the eye can see.
Question everything but the wild. Never tame yourself.
Remake the world.
Imagination. What a wonderful concept. What is imagination? The faculty that imagines. That creates something from nothing. That extends beyond the reach of time and necessity and constraints of realism. It falls endlessly forward and backward. Forms and substance, concepts and ideas, personalities and character, comedy and tragedy.
Is it sad that I cannot paint a story of imagination? I need to water this latent faculty, this dormant world. It exists wholly independent, barely existing at all. Where is this place where monsters smile? Before I wake each day, I want to write down ten impossible ideas. I want to force the option and make them exist in the imaginary.
OK BOOK
Etymology is fun. Words are fascinating:
Schumpeter and Creative Destruction: The Process of Market Innovation in Capitalist Societies
Schumpeter and Creative Destruction:
The Process of Market Innovation in Capitalist Societies
Joseph Schumpeter was a 20th century Austrian economist who taught at Harvard for several years upon coming to the US. While much of his work was overshadowed by his contemporary Keynes, he made important contributions to macroeconomic theory by developing dynamic models of market change. His work described the nature of market innovation within capitalist societies and emphasized the role of less quantitative measures such as sociology as a major factor for economic development. Much of his inspiration was drawn from the economists Marx and Weber who favored dynamic sociological backgrounds, as well as Walrus from whom he borrowed the concept of the entrepreneur. Despite his emphasis on social factors, however, Schumpeter was one of the leading econometric economists of his day.
In 1942 Schumpeter published Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. In this work lies the theory of creative destruction, one of his most notable contributions. Originally a term coined by Marx, Schumpeter employed the “creative destruction” to mean the “process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one”. He wrote that the concerns of capitalism were less about how existing structures were administered and maintained and more about how these structures are destroyed and created. Entrepreneurs, he says, are the sole facilitators of innovation and invention that bring about these structural and market changes in economic systems.
Schumpeter placed much focus on equilibrium and the role of entrepreneurs to facilitate change within an economy. According to Schumpeter, an economy in equilibrium produces products for future consumers who are consuming their present products, and consumers consume products of past producers in a circular flow based on past experience. The expectations and cycles are essentially contained with no new production functions allowing for changes. The entrepreneur operates outside the system and introduces changes to the production function that allow for the creation of new wealth and destruction of the old- hence the term, creative destruction.
In Schumpeter’s analysis, entrepreneurs are the sole agents of change and responsible for the destruction and construction of new markets and wealth within a society. It is the sheer acts of will and leadership, rather than intellect, which characterize the entrepreneur and secure economic progress through successful innovation.
According to Schumpeter, capitalist societies did not operate in a the static circular flow, or equilibrium, proposed by Weber where the production function is invariant and preexisting factors of production are combined according to the technology at hand mechanically. Market activity is much more dynamic and changing. It is the Entrepreneurs who operate as a nonentity outside of this equilibrium and force new combinations of factors that disturb the circular flow as a means of innovative development. Rather than changing the quantity of factors to change the quantity of products produced, this disturbance creates market disequilibrium as their innovative contributions change the form of the production function. This change in production function form introduces new and higher quality commodities which destroys old wealth and creates new wealth.
Reliablilism
Reliabilism is a form of epistemic externalism that generally states that a belief is justified when it results from a reliable belief forming process that is either doxastically dependent or doxastically independent. That is, S knows that p iff p is true, SBp is true, and S has a reliable process for arriving at p. In this way, SJp (att) iff (1) it is not in other epistemic evaluative terms, (2) explains how SJp is justified is a function of SBp’s genesis. This principle emphasizes the virtue of the belief forming mechanism and the veridical historicity of the belief over the truth value in order to account for the possibility of a false belief.
Suppose that I claim knowledge of my age, 24. I believe that my age of 24 is true. The process I possess to justify my age is to check my birth certificate. As a notarized document of the government, I believe the process of checking my birth date to its data yields reliable knowledge. I justify this belief forming process from the fact that everyone verifies their age in this way and it is most accurate and consistent. Additionally, I believe the government would not falsify this data as a notarized document. This is an exemplary example of reliabilism because my knowledge is based on the virtue of the belief forming process, naming checking the birth certificate, that is historically reliable and still allows for the possibility of falsity if say, my birth certificate was lost, or doctored, and I forgot my real birth date.
ne te quaesiveris extra
My most recent tattoo:
I drew inspiration from Emerson’s opening line in his essay Self-Reliance. It literally translates: No you seek yourself outside. More poetically: ‘Do not seek yourself outside yourself’ or, ‘seek yourself within’.
Quaesīverīs is the second-person singular perfect active subjunctive of quaerō. Or quaesīveris, which is the second-person singular future perfect active indicative of quaerō. Quaerō means: I seek, look for; I ask, question, inquire; I strive for; endeavor; seek to obtain; I miss, lack; I desire, require.
Some interpretations: ‘Stretch your arm no farther than your sleeve will reach’, or ‘Cut your Coat according to your Cloth’
Many think it was a misquote from the Satires of A. Persius Flaccus, who lived in the first century AD: “… nec te quaesiveris extra” which means: “Nor look for yourself (what you can find only in yourself) outside yourself.” “Be your own norm.” Others arrange it: “ne quaesiveris extra te,” or “nor ask any opinion but your own.” Pretor translated “nec te quaesiveris extra” from “do not try to correct the tongue of your delicate balance by applying it to a pair of ordinary scales.” That is, do not seek out the opinion of another beside yourself.
Essentially the message is, you find yourself by looking inwards, not by turning to the pedagogy and opinions of teachers and preachers and judgments of others.”
Update
I haven’t updated in quite some time. I need to journal more. Every once and awhile I find it necessary to take a break from writing and thinking and let my mind just absorb things and act. Too much reflection paralyzes me.
So mid-terms week was grueling. Glad that is over and done with. I went to Mardi Gras from Sat to Wed. It was crazy as usual. Not as crazy as last year, but crazy nonetheless. We had eight people per room. For many this was their first time in New Orleans. There was an incredible amount of drinking. About 18 hours a day. I wish I could say this is a moderate estimation, but it’s not at all. I don’t think I regained a sense of sobriety at one point for the first 72 hours I was there. I had to pretty much quit on the last day. My body, my bowels, my stomach, my head, all throbbed and pulsated in response to the lacerating libations. I also spent several weeks worth of pay. Not so cool.
When I returned to Nashville I pretty much found myself in a coma. I slept for three days straight. I went out once on Friday with Conrad to a tattoo parlor. He made an appt and told me to make one as well. Initially we agreed to get one together, but I was balking so he took the initiative and stuck it to me. In the end I made an appt for Sunday March 13.
I got the words “ne te quaesiveris extra” tattooed on the underside of my right arm. My inner bicep.
William Dare 
