The problem with philosophy, as I see it, is as follows: Looking at philosophy to see how the world works is like trying to do geology with nothing but maps. The reality of the thing is not to be found in its representation.
Philosophy is ultimately and finally derivative. It will not and can not be more then the description of other things, even itself. All of philosophy reduces, from a god's perspective, to physics, just like everything else.
Philosophy is not the tool to make pronouncements with. No matter how good your map is, it is still not the earth and water it represents. Someone will always be able to find something that your map doesn't successfully describe, and why that missing element is important.
Human knowledge does not happen with just words, it happens with neurons, and neurotransmitters, and blood chemistry and a million other things. Liver disease can cause insanity, so can social isolation, so can emotional trauma, and the exact same events aren't always traumatic to all people. What counts as knowledge is the functioning of brains, and any description of knowledge that does not reference the behavior of the knower is a failed project.
Foundational epistemology¹ is one of the most hopeless projects I have ever had to give a damn about. Using intelligence, keen observation, and clarity of thought to try and prove what knowledge is, without reference to the biological reality of thought, is one of the stupidest things I've ever seen done by my intellectual betters.
¹What I mean here is the project to provide an unassailable grounding of justified true belief. Or even any attempt to completely describe knowledge.
Monday, November 22, 2010
Saturday, November 20, 2010
An alternative to shopping for the holidays
This is not an anti-consumer thing. This is not a pro-environment thing. This is a pro-sincerity thing. I have always felt that gift giving on birthdays and Christmas were dangerously close to being disingenuous. "I love you so much that I bought you this obligatorily piece of manufactured pre-garbage from the mall" has never really struck me as something that we should, as a nation, do to each other.
But the problem is that no one person can opt out of gift giving. With everyone giving gifts, any one person opting out just looks like a jerk. Believe me, I know. But what to do in place of the obligatory mall gift?
Here is my solution: do things for people. Spending your time, and using your (abilities/talents/pickup truck) to help them out. If you have a friend who hates doing windows? Wash his windows for Christmas. If you are big and strong, you could offer to help someone rearrange their living room. If you are the only person in your circle of friends with a car, offer to take someone shopping on some really bad weather days.
Take what you can do, and what your loved ones need, and give them something unique and important: your time. I'm asking people to join me giving sincere gifts that people really want, that will bring us closer together. If I'm on your gift list for the holidays, send me a note with a coupon for a favor and we can help each other out.
But the problem is that no one person can opt out of gift giving. With everyone giving gifts, any one person opting out just looks like a jerk. Believe me, I know. But what to do in place of the obligatory mall gift?
Here is my solution: do things for people. Spending your time, and using your (abilities/talents/pickup truck) to help them out. If you have a friend who hates doing windows? Wash his windows for Christmas. If you are big and strong, you could offer to help someone rearrange their living room. If you are the only person in your circle of friends with a car, offer to take someone shopping on some really bad weather days.
Take what you can do, and what your loved ones need, and give them something unique and important: your time. I'm asking people to join me giving sincere gifts that people really want, that will bring us closer together. If I'm on your gift list for the holidays, send me a note with a coupon for a favor and we can help each other out.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Three Rules
Are you crazy? Are you really upset about life? Would you like to survive this phase of your life and still have the chance to be a person again in the future? You know, when and if you ever care about being a person?
Well if you fit this description then I have three simple rules that can keep you alive that you can remember at almost every level of intoxication.
1. Don't do drugs you can't quit.
2. No felony convictions.*
3. No STD's that can't be cured.
3b. Children count as an STD.
Following these simple rules leaves your future self the full range of options that your current self is too upset to take advantage of, without sweating the small stuff.
Plus everyday you go to bed counts as a success, as long as you don't 1) do heroin 2) leave evidence and 3) don't contract hepatitis. And if you need these rules, having a unmitigated success is a nice thing.
*Felonies are fine, its the conviction that has permanent consequences.
Well if you fit this description then I have three simple rules that can keep you alive that you can remember at almost every level of intoxication.
1. Don't do drugs you can't quit.
2. No felony convictions.*
3. No STD's that can't be cured.
3b. Children count as an STD.
Following these simple rules leaves your future self the full range of options that your current self is too upset to take advantage of, without sweating the small stuff.
Plus everyday you go to bed counts as a success, as long as you don't 1) do heroin 2) leave evidence and 3) don't contract hepatitis. And if you need these rules, having a unmitigated success is a nice thing.
*Felonies are fine, its the conviction that has permanent consequences.
A Request for Submissions.
There is a certain kind of problem that I love to figure out. When most people see some regularity out in the world that seems totally inexplicable, they leave it as inexplicable. I, however, worry over whatever it is until I have an explanation. I'll give you a quick example and then tell you why I'm doing this.
One of the first problems I tackled like this was how to understand generosity. I was in high school and someone did very nice for me, and it occurred to me that I had no good way to talk about selflessness. How can you say that someone wants to do something selfless? Isn't that a contradiction in terms? I spent what must have been at least weeks, if not months, with this problem in the back of my mind. Working on it during my shifts of dish washing, I came to the conclusion that anything that a person chose to do was definitionally selfish from their perspective. It was only when you looked at the effects of that action that you could talk about generosity.
I'm hoping to do a variation of an advice column: an explanation column. This is why I am asking people to submit questions or problems that are like this, that they think I can answer. Other examples could include, "Why is my line at the grocery store always the slowest?" or, "How come everyone either loves or hates that movie?" Feel free to submit something in the comments, either anonymously or with your name. I'm hoping this will be a fun post with everyone looking at the puzzles of day to day life and what kind of interesting BS I can generate to resolve the questions.
The first example of generosity was there to give you a feel for what I'm after. The example below is something I have already worked out that is more like what I hope to write in response to a question.
Dear Explainer Guy,
I frequently worry about leaving the coffee pot on when I leave the house. I get on the bus to go to work, and I look at my apartment and wonder, "Will my house burn down, killing all my pets, while I am away?" I can never remember if I shut things off and I almost never actually leave them on. What's a dude to do?
Thanks,
Potentially Inadvertent Pyro.
Dear PIP,
The problem that you have posed is that you needed to have done something in the past, you don't remember doing it, and now you need to know if it still needs to be done. Furthermore, the problem is that you can't, or can't easily afford to, get more evidence. We are looking for a solution using memory alone, but there doesn't seem to be any way to remember the action that matters because it is something you do all the time.
When someone tries to remember something like this, there seems to be three things that he or she is trying to remember:
1) the decision to turn it off.
2) having checked that it was off.
3) the action of shutting it off.
The first two are what I think most people are trying to do as their bus pulls away from the stop and they start to worry. The third, with a modification, is what I am going to recommend.
The real problem with this dynamic is that once you are habituated to using your heating element, you are habituated to shutting it off. You no longer decide to turn it off, you turn it off out of habit. Most of the time when using the iron, you turned it off out of habit, or you didn't turn it off at all. This is the trouble that I think most people have. They search in their memory for the act of deciding to turn off the thing, but no such decision was ever made.
Checking after the fact is a little different. When you check on the stove and see that it is already off, there isn't anything memorable about that. As you get ready to go out, you might check on the stove each and every time you are in the kitchen, but the only thing that would have been memorable would have been if you had left it on and had needed to shut it off. If everything is going normally, you simply have an idle curiosity, and you take a trivial action, looking at the stove, and confirm that it is off, so nothing interesting enough to form a memory happens.
Remembering the action of turning off the appliance is normally in the same category as remembering the decision. If you are habituated to turning off your electric tea kettle, then the action itself isn't really a dramatic struggle. Some very small part of yourself flicks a switch without you really ever thinking about it.* The part that people try and remember is something like the motor action of flicking the switch. Such a simple action, that is basically handled by muscle memory anyway, isn't interesting enough to really form a memory.
This is much like your pin number: sometimes the only part of you that remembers the numbers is your hand. There is no explicit memory of what the numbers are, but if you "get out of the way" and let your hand do the remembering, then you can successfully enter the correct number.
So what exactly am I recommending as a solution to the "Did-I-leave-my-heat-gun-on problem"? Two things: First, don't examine your memory for the things above. We know you can't remember them anyway, so searching for them doesn't tell you anything and just makes you nervous. Second, what I think one can remember is the sensation of the switch flipping. It's a different kind of memory, unlike the kinds above. What you do is imagine turning off the kiln and see if you have a recent sensory memory. The question I am suggesting that you pose to yourself is this: do I remember touching the off switch? In my experience this kind of sensory memory holds in a useful way that the other kinds of memory do not.
Good luck, and if it doesn't work, or if anyone has recomendations, let me know.
One of the first problems I tackled like this was how to understand generosity. I was in high school and someone did very nice for me, and it occurred to me that I had no good way to talk about selflessness. How can you say that someone wants to do something selfless? Isn't that a contradiction in terms? I spent what must have been at least weeks, if not months, with this problem in the back of my mind. Working on it during my shifts of dish washing, I came to the conclusion that anything that a person chose to do was definitionally selfish from their perspective. It was only when you looked at the effects of that action that you could talk about generosity.
I'm hoping to do a variation of an advice column: an explanation column. This is why I am asking people to submit questions or problems that are like this, that they think I can answer. Other examples could include, "Why is my line at the grocery store always the slowest?" or, "How come everyone either loves or hates that movie?" Feel free to submit something in the comments, either anonymously or with your name. I'm hoping this will be a fun post with everyone looking at the puzzles of day to day life and what kind of interesting BS I can generate to resolve the questions.
The first example of generosity was there to give you a feel for what I'm after. The example below is something I have already worked out that is more like what I hope to write in response to a question.
Dear Explainer Guy,
I frequently worry about leaving the coffee pot on when I leave the house. I get on the bus to go to work, and I look at my apartment and wonder, "Will my house burn down, killing all my pets, while I am away?" I can never remember if I shut things off and I almost never actually leave them on. What's a dude to do?
Thanks,
Potentially Inadvertent Pyro.
Dear PIP,
The problem that you have posed is that you needed to have done something in the past, you don't remember doing it, and now you need to know if it still needs to be done. Furthermore, the problem is that you can't, or can't easily afford to, get more evidence. We are looking for a solution using memory alone, but there doesn't seem to be any way to remember the action that matters because it is something you do all the time.
When someone tries to remember something like this, there seems to be three things that he or she is trying to remember:
1) the decision to turn it off.
2) having checked that it was off.
3) the action of shutting it off.
The first two are what I think most people are trying to do as their bus pulls away from the stop and they start to worry. The third, with a modification, is what I am going to recommend.
The real problem with this dynamic is that once you are habituated to using your heating element, you are habituated to shutting it off. You no longer decide to turn it off, you turn it off out of habit. Most of the time when using the iron, you turned it off out of habit, or you didn't turn it off at all. This is the trouble that I think most people have. They search in their memory for the act of deciding to turn off the thing, but no such decision was ever made.
Checking after the fact is a little different. When you check on the stove and see that it is already off, there isn't anything memorable about that. As you get ready to go out, you might check on the stove each and every time you are in the kitchen, but the only thing that would have been memorable would have been if you had left it on and had needed to shut it off. If everything is going normally, you simply have an idle curiosity, and you take a trivial action, looking at the stove, and confirm that it is off, so nothing interesting enough to form a memory happens.
Remembering the action of turning off the appliance is normally in the same category as remembering the decision. If you are habituated to turning off your electric tea kettle, then the action itself isn't really a dramatic struggle. Some very small part of yourself flicks a switch without you really ever thinking about it.* The part that people try and remember is something like the motor action of flicking the switch. Such a simple action, that is basically handled by muscle memory anyway, isn't interesting enough to really form a memory.
This is much like your pin number: sometimes the only part of you that remembers the numbers is your hand. There is no explicit memory of what the numbers are, but if you "get out of the way" and let your hand do the remembering, then you can successfully enter the correct number.
So what exactly am I recommending as a solution to the "Did-I-leave-my-heat-gun-on problem"? Two things: First, don't examine your memory for the things above. We know you can't remember them anyway, so searching for them doesn't tell you anything and just makes you nervous. Second, what I think one can remember is the sensation of the switch flipping. It's a different kind of memory, unlike the kinds above. What you do is imagine turning off the kiln and see if you have a recent sensory memory. The question I am suggesting that you pose to yourself is this: do I remember touching the off switch? In my experience this kind of sensory memory holds in a useful way that the other kinds of memory do not.
Good luck, and if it doesn't work, or if anyone has recomendations, let me know.
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