there  could  be  snakes  in  here

A toy model of aesthetics with just two binary variables, 'classiness' and 'busyness'*: Minimalism : Simple Classy Baroque : Busy Classy Brutalism : Simple Vulgar Rococo : Busy Vulgar Are these descriptions true ? Well, they are incomplete, and are not definitions (i.e. one-to-one mappings ), but yes. Are they helpful? As a start, absolutely. Now, the labels on the left are vague and intuitive family resemblances ; it is a fool's game to imagine they could ever be nailed down as monothetic definitions (the philosopher's ideal of neat, necessary and sufficient sets of attributes). We can still model usefully and harmlessly, even if the models can never be complete.** But the critics and art academics I know spend far more time muddying the water: deconstructing our use of the problematic term "classy"; and who gets to say what 'simplicity' is anyway? They don't seem to want to explain things, even fuzzily .*** Or, maybe the...

God chose to empty himself of language and become a life. But along comes Christianity and turns it back into words, trillions of them, poured out incessantly in pulpit, book and on the airwaves, reducing the mystery of what is beyond all utterance to chatter. I told them I had come to mind religious overconfi­dence more than I minded its atheistic opposite, because atheists did not claim to put ultimate reality into words. agnosticism should not be described as a hypothesis, because it is not positing an answer to the question so much as learning to live without one ...there is no doubt that Anglo-Catholicism, as it evolved, became attractive to gay men, though the reasons for this are probably more theo­logically rooted than is commonly understood. The high camp aesthetic of the more florid wings of the movement was clearly attractive to a certain kind of gay sensibility, as anyone who has had to negotiate a high mass in one of the more fashionable outposts of Anglo-Cathol...

From 2008: the first original philosophical argument I remember making: Searle: "all purely syntactic systems lack subjective experiences." Searle: "I have subjective experiences." So Searle: "I am not a purely syntactic system." (modus tollens, 1&2) The only system that Searle has knowledge about the subjective experiences of is himself. So if Searle is not a purely syntactic system, he has no knowledge of what it is like to be a purely syntactic system, He cannot therefore cannot assert premise 1. (5 & the knowledge account of assertion ). If Searle is a purely syntactic system, (1) is false. (by 2) Therefore premise (1) is either unwarranted or false. (by 6&7) (These days I wouldn't use infallibilist knowledge as the baseball bat I did; I'd go at him with probabilism instead. And I'd do something against Searle's odd dichotomy between representational machines who are 'pure' syntax vs those wh...

(c) DCLCQ (2014) I made a Markov chain of my social media data recently. Here are my cherry-picks (out of perhaps 300 seeds): What an option for underhand comments made as just data. I'm being a first-world problem? I think the inevitable is still on loan from the History Department. will smash them. ran out of your 'reality' bullshit. We're the lowest of others; we continue in our children, and in Libya. scratching a certain region of spacetime. gee thanks bud. Ah, my cruelty. I am currently reading Robbie Williams' thought-provoking autobiography... metaphysics really want us to perve. A city full of men die like dogs, for telling your name, sacred music in the matter. I think, too account for the softer tribes living in the missing beats. I'm moving closer to you, but it never fully comprehend woman's concrete situation. my epaulettes, ripped off While desire focuses on the line of flame that characterizes the universe in terms of b...

(c) Occupy the Amendment (2014), Jeff Hemsley The reason to use quantitative methods wherever possible* is not that numbers are generally better representations — they're not, for psychological or social or art phenomena — but because of what they do to your method: first, they minimise the space that our raging biases get to act in; and, more, because they force the enquirer to think clearly about the Thing. (" What about this Thing can be counted ?" implies the prior questions "What are the distinct features of the Thing?" and "From which of its features arise which features?") * And they are possibly always possible . **************************************************************************************** The quantitative omits most of the lived world; the qualitative includes all of its bullshit. (The former is leashed to one rich dimension, numbers; the latter is leashed to an insensitive kludge , human perception and languag...

Stable breeder in Conway's Game of Life. Original author one ' Hyperdeath ' One of my computer science lecturers does philosophy in passing while discussing superficially unphilosophical things like Harvard vs Princeton and the gubbins of molecular computing. (Molecular as in Hofstadter's comment: "Looking at a program written in machine language is vaguely comparable to looking at a DNA molecule atom by atom.") It is gigantic stuff: "People always define computers as 'data-processing machines' - which they are not and cannot be, because data are mental events. Machines process representations - and all this is is us using the physical world to help us with the mental world we have such limited range within (usually to help us with the physical world we have such limited control over). (This is also why the infinite cannot be properly represented, because there is nothing usably physical for the purpose.) (In the reified field that g...

(c) Alberto Magnelli (c. 1909) For the first time in a year I really want home internet access. I want an m4a convertor, and a script that downloads TVTropes and the Stanford Encyclopaedia*, and to know the Gaelic for Gordon. Also I want the history and present disposition of the Argentine punk band Boom Boom Kid, and to hear my DJ mate’s new playlist, and to prove to my flatmate that Pluto has not been reinstated as a planet by an appropriate authority , nor do Chinese people customarily use newspaper for condoms. Why go without? After all, there’s no strong argument against it: the ‘information overload’ hypothesis is really not well-founded, the educational potential of the net is, at last, better than most IRL schools’ [citation impossible], and one can avoid almost all of the unbelievably horrible things on it almost all of the time. I go without because four hours a week at the library is enough and because, these dry days, I actually read instead. (There's also...