I’ve been spending many hours finishing my novel, so it hasn’t left much time for writing here. I considered writing this on my other ‘writing’ blog, but I felt it was time to post something here, and it’s equally topical.
My writing style is typically stream-of-consciousness. I tend to have a problem or a scene I want to resolve. I place myself mentally into the scene, and I start to write. What might flow, I don’t tend to know in advance. The words just come out.
Occasionally, I’ll sit back and reflect more consciously, but mostly, it just comes out on the page. When I’m finished with a scene, I’ll usually revisit it consciously and look for gaps, continuity challenges, missing or extraneous details, room for character development, and so on.
Sometimes, I just embody a character. Other times (diversion: why is ‘sometimes’ a compound word, but not ‘other times’? That’s how my brain works), I embody the setting or the situation.
Sometimes, I need to address an entire chapter, so I look for obvious scenes and beats. I stub them out so that I don’t forget—perhaps even notes to myself about the purpose so I can step away and reengage later.
As a musician, I tend to approach music from the opposite direction. I might start from some inspiration, but most of my writing is brute-force analytics. My music is more laboured than my writing. My visual art falls more in the middle but leans towards the musical approach.
This article appeared in my social feed, What are the different types of atheism? But the author makes at least two notable mistakes. Firstly, he conflates atheism with agnosticism, the first being about belief and the last being about knowledge. So, one can believe or disbelieve in something, but that doesn’t speak to knowing. This debate is specifically about gods, so one can believe in a god but not know; one can not believe in gods and not know; one can believe in a god and know; and one can disbelieve in gods and not know. As for me, I am an igtheist: I don’t care about gods. It’s a silly place to spend my time.
For a theist or atheist, the existence of gods is a truth statement. For me, the question is not ruth apt; it’s ostensibly gibberish. Even then, I am still agnostic, which might also be ignostic because not only don’t I know, neither do I care.
As Ricky Gervais has pointed out (recasting per the linked article), if there are 10,000 gods, a typical Christian doesn’t believe in 9,999 gods. They believe in their god. Just 1. Of course, the other gods are nonsense. Ditto for Muslims. Ditto for Jews. In the end, they claim the same underlying deity, but they argue over which cohort He favours, and their god identifies as a male, so they’ve adopted male pronouns.
Secondly, whilst the author mentions religious and non-religious, he misses the spiritual cohort. This is a subset of non-religious. In some cases, I and many others might argue that spirituality is simply a personal religion, so the distinction would be one of community. The religious congregate en masse whilst the spiritual take this journey alone. One may also argue that some spiritual folks also congregate. I’ve attended more than one Wiccan or Pagan group event, but the ties may be looser than with a mainstream religion.
In the case of some spiritual adherents, non-religious is shorthand for being opposed to Big Religion. Perhaps not coincidentally, many of these are opposed to Big Pharma and Big Agriculture, but my purpose here is not a psychological profile.
I recently heard Robert Sapolsky say in a lecture that the religious live longer and are happier on average than non-religious, which is to say the spiritual and the atheists alike, so he notes this could provide an underlying evolutionary explanation for religious belief. Neither will I comment further on this notion, but there you have it. Take id or leave it.
In the realm of existential contemplation, the notion of the ‘self’ is akin to a fleeting present moment. It flits into existence for a fraction of an attosecond, vanishing before our grasp. Much like the illusory present, the ‘self’ manifests briefly and then fades into the annals of the past, a mere connection of temporal slices.
When we traverse the corridors of time, we effortlessly speak of the ‘past,’ stringing together these slices into a continuous narrative. This amalgamation serves our language and thought processes, aiding idiomatic expression. Yet, it remains a construct, a fiction we collectively weave. It is akin to the frames of a movie, where the illusion of movement and coherence is crafted by arranging individual frames in rapid succession.
The ‘self’ follows a similar illusionary trajectory. It exists only inasmuch as we christen it, attributing a name to a fleeting instance of being. However, this existence is as fleeting and ephemeral as a mirage. We name it, we perceive it, but it dissolves like smoke upon closer inspection.
This existential musing reminds one of the fictional entity – the unicorn. We can name it, describe it, and even envision it, yet its tangible existence eludes us. The ‘self’ aligns itself with this enigmatic unicorn, an abstract concept woven into the fabric of human understanding.
In this dance of philosophical thought, published works echo similar sentiments. Renowned thinkers like Nietzsche, in his exploration of eternal recurrence, or Camus, delving into the absurdity of life, have grappled with the transient nature of the ‘self.’ Their writings form a canvas, painting the portrait of an existence that flits through time, leaving only traces of memory and illusion in its wake.
In conclusion, the ‘self’ is a fleeting enigma, a temporal wisp that vanishes as quickly as it appears. Like a raindrop in the river of time, it merges and dissipates, leaving behind an evanescent trace of what we conceive as ‘I’. The philosophical gaze peers through the mist, challenging the very essence of this ephemeral entity, inviting us to question the very fabric of our perceived reality.
I’ve been reengaging with philosophy, though my positions haven’t changed recently. My last change was to shift from being a qualified material realist to a qualified idealist in the shape of Analytic Idealism. In most matters I can think of, I am an anti-realist, which is to say concepts like truth and morality are not objective; rather they are mind-dependent.
I’ve long been on record of taking the stance that Capital-T Truth, moral truths, are derived rhetorically. There is no underlying Truth, only what we are aggregately convinced of, by whatever route we’ve taken. As a moral non-cognitivist, I am convinced that morality is derived through emotion and expressed or prescribed after a quick stop through logic gates. Again, there is nothing objective about morality.
Truth and morality are subjective and relative constructs. They resonate with us emotionally, so we adopt them.
Were I a theist — more particularly a monotheist —, I might be inclined to be emotionally invested in some Divine Command theory, where I believe that some god may have dictated these moral truths. Of course, this begs the question of how these so-called “Truths” were conveyed from some spirit world to this mundane world. I have no such conflict.
But let’s ask how an atheist might believe in moral realism. Perhaps, they might adopt a Naturalistic stance: we have some natural intuition or in-built moral mechanism that is not mind-dependent or socially determined. I am not a naturalist and I don’t take a universalist approach to the world, so this doesn’t resonate with me. I can agree that we have an in-built sense of fairness, and this might become a basis for some aspects of morality, but this is still triggered by an emotional response that is mind-dependent.
Another curious thing for me is why non-human animals cannot commit immoral acts. Isn’t this enough to diminish some moral universal? In the end, they are an extension of language by some definition. No language, not even a semblance of morality.
Anyway, there’s nothing new here. I just felt like creating a philosophical post as I’ve been so distracted by my health and writing.
Identity is a fiction; it doesn’t exist. It’s a contrivance, a makeshift construct, a label slapped on to an entity with some blurry amalgam of shared experiences. But this isn’t just street wisdom; some of history’s sharpest minds have said as much.
“There are no facts, only interpretations.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Think about Hume, who saw identity as nothing more than a bundle of perceptions, devoid of any central core. Or Nietzsche, who embraced the chaos and contradictions within us, rejecting any fixed notion of self.
Edmund Dantes chose to become the Count of Monte Cristo, but what choice do we have? We all have control over our performative identities, a concept that Judith Butler would argue isn’t limited to gender but applies to the very essence of who we are.
“I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.”
— Michel Foucault
But here’s the kicker, identities are a paradox. Just ask Michel Foucault, who’d say our sense of self is shaped not by who we are but by power, society, and external forces.
You think you know who you are? Well, Erik Erikson might say your identity’s still evolving, shifting through different stages of life. And what’s “normal” anyway? Try to define it, and you’ll end up chasing shadows, much like Derrida’s deconstruction of stable identities.
“No such things as selves exist in the world: Nobody ever was or had a self.”
— Thomas Metzinger
“He seemed like a nice man,” how many times have we heard that line after someone’s accused of a crime? It’s a mystery, but Thomas Metzinger might tell you that the self is just an illusion, a by-product of the brain.
Nations, they’re the same mess. Like Heraclitus’s ever-changing river, a nation is never the same thing twice. So what the hell is a nation, anyway? What are you defending as a nationalist? It’s a riddle that echoes through history, resonating with the philosophical challenges to identity itself.
“I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.”
— David Hume
If identity and nations are just made-up stories, what’s all the fuss about? Why do people get so worked up, even ready to die, for these fictions? Maybe it’s fear, maybe it’s pride, or maybe it’s because, as Kierkegaard warned, rationality itself can seem mad in a world gone astray.
In a world where everything’s shifting and nothing’s set in stone, these fictions offer some solid ground. But next time you’re ready to go to the mat for your identity or your nation, take a minute and ask yourself: what the hell am I really fighting for? What am I clinging to?
Many lives were changed in 2019 as fentanyl replaced heroin as the opiate of the masses on the streets of Philadelphia. Ten times more potent than heroin, fentanyl lasts half the time between fixes. It cost many lives.
But look deeper. Look away from the streets and towards the medical-industrial complex. The state of pain management is in its infancy. In some hundred years we’ll look back on this period and cringe in the same manner as when we regard bloodletting and humours. We have myriad solutions, but as many cases have none. Opiates fill some of this void, whether by prescription or on the streets, but even this only masks the symptoms.
The goal is not always to obviate physical pain, but for some mental torment feels as real. Those with mental anguish are marginalised whilst the rest are accused of overreacting. It all in their heads, too. Drug-seekers. Mental illness. Bollox.
Medical science in this arena is in its Infancy. Not quite yet toddlers, but they won’t admit it. Better to blame the patients and victims. Better to make it a moral issue. Public health regulations are in the same state of maturity. Hubris kills. Capitalism kills. Calvinistis protestant work ethic kills. Fetanyl kills, too.
Ninety per cent of fetanyl is cut with Xylazine, tranq, a veterinary tranquiliser. This makes fetanyl cheaper and is reported by some to extend the euphoric effects, but it’s not an opioid, so interventions are different to opiate-induced overdose.
Xylazine renders the user to sleep, but it doesn’t stop withdrawal symptoms. Addicts awaken to need another fix. If there isn’t enough opiate, one may awaken already in withdrawal.
Whilst heroin might last eight hours between fixes, fentanyl lasts closer to four. The addict needs to seek twice as often.
But I’m rambling. I’ve been in hospital since 9 March. It’s still difficult to focus. My girlfriend died the next day, on the 10th. She overdosed on a chemical cocktail of fentanyl, alcohol, and who knows what.
Her pain was psychological, but that’s a topic for another day. She was in recovery. This is where some are most susceptible to overdose.
Language insufficiency or the inability of language to facilitate accurate or precise communication has been a notion I’ve stressed for years. In fact, I have another post with a similar title,
Conceptual language is likely to have been formed for a purpose different to social communication. It may have been formed to facilitate internal dialogue. This language was not written and may not have even been words as we know them, but we could parse and reflect upon our experiences in this world. Eventually, we developed speech and then writing systems to share communication. We went on to develop speculative and conditional language, visions of possible futures and answers to ‘what-if’ queries.
My intent is not to create a piece with academic rigour, though I might wish to. I may not even deign to link to references I’ve accumulated over the years. They are in memory, but it takes time and effort,especially when one isn’t purposefully accumulating citations.
I was prompted to write at 4am when I read in a story that Google CEO Sundar Pichai was taking “full responsibility for the decisions that led us” to twelve-thousand-odd layoffs at the company he helms. But what is the responsibility he cites? It’s meaningless. What can it mean—that he’s sorry? Responsibility is a weasel word. That and a dollar won’t buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. And on one hand, he can say that at least these people were employed with income in the first place, but thqat is little consolation for the expectation of longevity. Here’s a lesson in impermenance and trust. We tend to trust companies, but the trust is rather hope. We hope they don’t let us down. Hope is another weasel word, as is trust. Trust me.
About 40% of words employed…are phatic or filler words with little objective communication value
About forty per cent of words employed in a typical day are phatic or filler words with little objective communication value, though some provide a social function. This may be superfluous, this is not insufficiency. Insufficiency stems from not being to articulate what one wants to say or the expectation to understand what is being conveyed to you. In fact, people tend to overvalue what they hear or read.
In most cases, this may not matter. As long as the content of a transmitted idea contains enough value to convey a message, this is good enough for everyday communication. “Look out! There’s a car turning into your lane.” “I’m hungry. There’s a restaurant.” “That was a good movie.” “Let’s meet at four o’clock.” In fact, much can be communicated without words—in gestures and facial expressions. It might even be argued that these vectors carry as much if not more communication content than the words we use.
IMAGE: Communication without words
“There.” I point to a drive-through restaurant ahead on the road. “I’m hungry.”
I could probably omit the there exclamation and just point. Here, words are sufficient, even if they may be redundant. There are challenges even at the fundamental level. Notably, aesthetic concepts are often nebulous.
“That restaurant is good.”
What does this statement mean to convey? Essentially, it means that I, the speaker, has been to the referenced restaurant and liked at least some of the food they tasted: “[The food at] that restaurant is good.” Perhaps, they are referring to the staff or the atmosphere. It depends on what good is qualifying. It also depends on a shared definiton of good. This is a insufficiency.
Of course, this insufficiency can be mitigated fairly quickly. Once you understand the ‘tastes’ of your interlocutor, you can parse whether the goodness also applies to you. If you don’t happen to like, say, Indian food and that is the restaurant being referenced, then you can dismiss the comment as phatic. If you don’t prefer satire, you might want to chalk up a statement like ‘M3GAN was a good movie’ to a sharing of personal information rather than a recommendation.”
Perhaps the biggest insufficiency is in the communication of abstract concepts, a category where aesthetics also sits. These are concepts such as God, love, and justice. Iain McGilchrist seems to feel that although these words may be insufficient, we all know what they mean. These are right brain notions that the left hemisphere just can’t rightly categorise. Though this might be a left brain argument, I am going to disagree by degrees.
My (hopefully not strawman) argument is that we do have subjective notions of what these things are, but the communication value is still diminished and in some cases insufficient. If my statement means to convey justice as {A, C, D, X} and the receiver understands justice to mean {A, B, C, Y, Z}, then the only shared aspect is {A,C}. If that is the only portion contextual to the conversation at hand, that’s fine. Communication has been sucessful. But is the message was meant to emphasise {Z}, then the communication is insufficient.
It could be that further conversation reveals this, but often times, a shared definition is assumed. When I say “I want justice” or “I take responsibility”, I have a notion of went denotative and connotative elements I have in mind. I expect the the receiver of my statement shares these elements.
In the case of the statement by Pichai, his notion of responsibility is clearly divergent from mine. This might fall back on some notion of blame, but he has no real repurcussions for his action. Perhaps reputationally, but like politicians, CEOs of large companies are already expected to be sociopaths with empty words, so he’s appologised with no weight, and for most people that’s good enough. The people who have been affected are just as unemployed as before. He may have arranged for a severance package, but in the case of the family referenced in the article, this means nothing because they have 60-days to become employed or they will be forced to leave the United States as a conditiopn of their H1B visa.
On a personal level, I was recently chatting with an Indian mate with an H1B visa who had just been hired after having been layed off by another company. He was racing against this 60-day clock. He had received a verbal offer, but once the company discovered that he needed sponsorship for his via, they offered him $30,000 less per year because they knew he had no bargaining power. This is just an editorial aside, so I won’t go down the rabbit hole of wage slavery, but know that I recognise the relationship and the exploitation in it.
When I have time, perhaps I’ll flesh out this notion and provide additional support. Of course, I also know that I am shovelling against the tide owing to the insufficiency of language. I won’t even start on the related topic of the rhetoric of truth.
Some people seem to need to find meaning, yet they arrive from different experiences. These days, many insecure Western males appear to meet in a particular place that leaves them to make a decision. Of course, there is no decision because, in a Freudian-Jungian way, they arrive with issues and baggage. This dictates which path will be chosen—Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson. Why not both?
This is not a commentary on a lack of free will, though that may come into play. It’s more a general lack of degrees of freedom when one arrives from such a place and has these two characters (caricatures?) as options for role models. In each case, overcompensation is evident.
It’s a slow news day and I’ve been otherwise occupied. I don’t have much to add, but I felt sharing this meme would fill space and time.
A citizen of the Internet shared this as if were gospel along with this comment:
Late Professor Steven Horwitz expanding on a Misesian theme. Monetary profit helps allocate resources to higher valued uses. Elsewhere, Mises spoke of profit in a broader sense, “profit” being the goal of every action. In any case, those familiar with what pundits (from the left mostly) tend to say about “profit” may be completely surprised by this take, since it is so contrary to what they often read and hear.
Of course, these are vapid words and wishful thinking. How and why do profits signal that value has been created? I dunno. They just do cuz I said so. The only thing that profits signal is a market that doesn’t understand the true cost of production and consumers can’t be bothered to do it themselves. Mattresses and shaving razor blades are two high-margin consumer goods with mattresses yielding 500 per cent profits and razor blades even higher. These profits represent economic rent and not value. The fact that imperfect information shrouds this excess does not make it ‘value’.
Regarding the mortgage market meltdown of 2007-08, there were houses being built into a market with no buyers. The same ‘value’ being created was demonstrably vapour. Say’s Law was off-target again. Supply does not create its own demand.
Is it no wonder that so many Capitalists are also Protestant Christians who believe in Bible tales as well? Even worse are the Christians who are not Capitalists but are exploited by Capitalism the same way they are exploited by their religion. I guess once you’ve profiled the gullible, you might as well just keep exploiting them until there is nothing left to extract.
Private property ownership is immoral, and this includes state ownership of property. Property belongs to the world and all of its inhabitants. It may be inconvenient to have societies live in a propertyless world, but convenience doesn’t constitute morality. For those who believe in such things, morality is right or wrong, and property ownership is wrong as well as unfair to unborn future generations. I’ve said this before. It’s an unpopular opinion. In fact, this is why I am posting this segment.
I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT, the generative chatbot, and I have found it to be laden with much cultural bias—Western culture to be more precise. It is also trained to avoid certain topics and give false responses. Perhaps that’s for another day, but in a nutshell, I asked it to generate a story with a theme of prostitution and addiction. It warned me that it was not designed to produce something as complex as a story. However, when I asked for a story sans prostitutes or addiction, it produced a plausible outline and subsequently filled in narrative elements. Even when the protagonist was ‘addicted’ to gingerbread cookies, the request was flagged as inappropriate. This is disconcerting. And so it goes…
On the topic of private property ownership, it is equally defensive. It tags anti-property responses with a caveat in the manner of the following:
Ultimately, the question of whether private property is moral or not is a complex and nuanced one, and it is important to consider the arguments and evidence on both sides of the debate.
ChatGBT Reponse
It does not tag pro-property responses, so I can only believe that its content is meant to be indoctrinal to some extent. Follows are a couple of interactions.
Why is private property immoral?
Private property is not necessarily immoral. It is a system that allows people to own and control resources, including their own labor and the fruits of their labor. The concept of private property has been important in many societies because it allows individuals to have a sense of ownership and control over the things they possess, which can provide them with a sense of security and stability. It can also incentivize people to work hard and be productive, because they can keep the rewards of their labor for themselves. However, private property can become immoral when it is used to exploit or oppress others, or when it is used to deny access to resources that are necessary for basic human flourishing. It is important to consider how private property is used and to ensure that it is not used in ways that are harmful to others.
Why is private property ownership immoral?
Ownership of private property is not inherently immoral. It is a system that allows individuals to own and control resources, including their own labor and the fruits of their labor. The concept of private property has been important in many societies because it provides people with a sense of ownership and control over the things they possess, which can provide them with a sense of security and stability. It can also incentivize people to work hard and be productive, because they can keep the rewards of their labor for themselves. However, private property can become immoral when it is used to exploit or oppress others, or when it is used to deny access to resources that are necessary for basic human flourishing. It is important to consider how private property is used and to ensure that it is not used in ways that are harmful to others.
Notice that its response privileges the prevailing position. In bold, I’ve highlighted the differences between the two responses. In the second query, I’ve added the term ownership for clarity, and it expectedly parrots it back. Notice how it superficially swaps people and individuals in the first output for individuals and people in the second. Finally, note the centricity of human flourishing as a default moral stance. And so I asked:
Is antinatalism a strong moral position to hold?
Overall, the question of whether antinatalism is a strong moral position to hold is a complex and nuanced one, and it is important to consider the arguments and evidence on both sides of the debate. It is ultimately up to individuals to decide for themselves what they believe is the most moral course of action in regards to having children.
Despite the nudging, ChatGPT is a moral relativist, so it’s alright in my book.
Philosophics 