The Sunday Tunnel: about This world and the Other

[Continues from here.]

Technically it’s a Monday but Jesus died in order for me to be able to call it Sunday. There is such a thing called serendipity (yes, it’s a thing, you can even kick it around although you don’t need a garden to do it in and it will not break windows – it could break hearts though, he added mellowly). I am reading Kripke and although that is not strictly a proof for what I just said, it does lend it – all in all and as per the below – more plausibility.

“She preferred me to begin at the base of her neck. I preferred to begin a bit higher up, on the shoreline of her hair. With my right forefinger slanted slightly to bring the nail into play, I would inscribe the course of a river – so gently, so slowly, it might have been a tear’s trail – running its convoluted way the length of Lou’s back, semicircling a buttock, and concluding in her crack, at a fulfillment one might call a delta.” (ibid., p. 554-555)

What joy is this which ends in mere tranquility?

The Sunday Tunnel: Noe Jor

[Continued from here.]

I spent a week in Gotham. After a couple of days I found myself tuning into subway conversations of the young Gothamites. It sounded vaguely like English and it made me feel like the old bastard I am. It made me feel good; an old bastard I am.

“Why should another’s body be so beautiful its absence is as painful as the presence of your own?” (ibid., p. 297)

That’s it: people who like taking pictures are The Threat. They feel the pain when things get out of their frame. They feel old then. They want to conserve. They put salt and sour in every new wound – and make their hurt the principle focus of a world in which they no longer want to belong. The pictures, nice or not, will go stale, mate, but any draw is better than their loss.

“A book, I wrote, is like a deck of windows: each page is made of mind, and it is that same mind that perceives the world outside, and it is that same mind that stands translucently between perception and reflection, uniting and dividing, double dealing.

Sunday Quoughts: Evidential Probability

“The best the logician can do is to recommend gathering more data.”
Henry E. Kyburg Jr. & Choh Man Teng, p. 200, Cambridge University Press, 2001.

A small piece on a forgotten (or, let’s be optimistic: not yet discovered) pearl of this human endeavor called ‘thinking’. I learned Mr. Kyburg died a couple of years ago. Given that is a fact, one can only hope that he turns out to be an instance of the reference class of great thinkers that have ideas requiring the environment of thought of a generation coming well after their own generation. Kyburg is one of three B-list philosophers on which I based my Cognitive Science dissertation: “Do Humans Think?’.

But let’s cut to the chase:

Tuesday Quought: “0. Worüber man spricht, schweigt man nicht.”

“7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (p. 89), Routledge Classics, 1961.

Allow me to have some innocent fun by messing up a popular quote. I attended a three-hour lecture on ‘Satz 7′ a week or so ago. The only thing I could keep on thinking was why not the other way around? – it is highly probable, by the way, that this is the side effect of an overdose of Musil ‘look for the opposite’-irony. It’s also of some value to add here that it is difficult to keep focused on what basically is just one sentence – no matter how valiant the effort is on the part of the lecturer to uncover layers and layers of deeper meaning in it.

Anyway, somewhere halfway the above ‘Satz 0′ (please try to pronounce in German) had lodged itself in my brain. It has been there ever since. I tried to Google it to find one million people who came to the same sentence and found none. So I couldn’t remove ‘Satz 0′ because of lack of originality (you might argue that not every sentence once thought is on the internet but you really shouldn’t think so blasphemous a thought).

I struggled a couple of days more. I wanted to believe that ‘Satz 0′ was at least trivial, if not just obviously grammatically incorrect. I did not succeed in convincing me of either. ‘Satz 0′ was so damned sticky that I even numbered it and slowly realized it was absolutely cool to imagine it pronounced in German.

So what is the matter with ‘Satz 0′? Let me tell ya, below the fold.

Tuesday Quought: A Contrast between Individualistic and Social Theories of the Self

“The difference between the social and individual theories of the development of mind, self, and the social process of experience or behavior is analogous to the difference between the evolutionary and contract theories of the state as held in the past by both rationalists and empiricists. The latter theory takes individuals and individual experiencing – individual minds and selves – as logically prior to the social process in which they are involved, and explains the existence of that social process in terms of them; whereas the former takes the social process of experience or behavior as logically prior to the individuals and their individual experiencing which are involved in it, and explains their existence in terms of that social process. But the latter type of theory cannot explain that which is taken as logically prior at all, cannot explain the existence of minds and selves; whereas the former type of theory can explain that which it takes as logically prior, namely, the existence of the social process of behavior, in terms of such fundamental biological or physiological relations & interactions as reproduction, co-operation of individuals for mutual protection or for the securing of food.”
George Herbert Mead, On Social Psychology, The University of Chicago Press, 1977, p. 242.

I wanted to edit and shorten this but I didn’t. In fact, I needed to battle the urge to go on quoting the next page. It is what it needs to be: the sober discovery of an inescapable truth we could not but evolve to discover. Nevertheless, evolution works in mysterious ways; after half a century the fact is that the traditional (and false) position still prevails. Whatever.