2003-01-10 15:01 (UTC)
My interest in metaphor is usually directed towards pining for some
kind of combinatorial calculus of thought more-or-less along the lines
Freud located in the "dream work" and then the unconscious more
generally (is it only me that reads Freud for the
mechanisms not the metapsychology? It's a different and much
more interesting kettle of cigars if you do) but that's probably
because I have this chronic case of
mathesis universalis resulting from a misspent youth. (Don't
worry, it isn't very contagious.)
If anything, then, I'm relieved to find this abridged version of
George Lakoff's
The Metaphors We Live By, which makes it abundantly clear
that he's doing something completely different - he's doing
well-established - institutionalised, even - systems of metaphors as a
kind of ideological infrastructure OF THOUGHT ITSELF.
Sorry, got a bit carried away, there. It's all good stuff, though.
[via the marvellous Mimi
Smartypants;
Permalink]
[Permalink]
2003-01-10 14:54
While the Big Book Freeze is hardening again and no purchases will be made
before I've eaten up all my Merleau-Ponty, yum yum,
Erik Stattin has correctly
diagnosed
my current fenomenologi-l�sfas, and
seeks to tempt me back into the unrighteous ways of
varufetischism by linking to the recently-published
Fenomenologin och filosofins kris - two translated lumps of Husserl
(1911 and 1935) stuck tastefully together for the benefit of newcomers.
(He also gives a link to the '35 piece
in English, but where's the fun in that? If God had meant us to
do philosophy in English then how do you explain A J "Freddy" Ayer?)
I shall, however, transcend this dichotomy of book freeze and
varufetischism - merely a stage in the historical unfolding of
the dialectic of wood-pulp accumulation, which is, as we have
established, at the heart of all human behaviour - by formulating a
synthesis in terms of the entirely noble impulse to overcome Swedish
bookshops' petty, nationalist refusal to sell abroad. (See my
Cahiers In�dits, vol. XXVII, for the full, inspiring details of
this argument.)
[Permalink]
2003-01-10 09:34 (UTC)
If ett �ga (pl. �gon) means "an eye" and
glas means "glass" (not to be confused with glass, which
means "ice-cream") what about glas�gon? Yup; "spectacles".
And this pointless
froth story (in collaboration with Swedish Elle) covers this years
range of hip frames; taking the name of prinsessa Madeleine in what
looks suspiciously like vain. But why not; I've run out of sensible
things to say for the week, too.
Oh, and if you're wondering, a glass eye is ett �ga av glas.
It came up in Harry Potter II, you see.
[Permalink]
2003-01-09 14:27 (UTC)
Gonna denounce you, baby,
like you've never been denounced before!
Gonna purge you, baby,
gonna make your thinking pure!
[Disco Denunciation, Ursula and the Show Trials]
Do you need a selection of vintage Soviet insults? Probably not,
but if you
do...
Now also in glorious historic and cultural PRC flavour!
[Permalink]
2003-01-09 11:48
Not well at all. It's just that m'colleagues are going off to yet
another conference (I'm not, thankfully) and it is the season of
panicking and I wouldn't want to leave them in the lurch, even if I'm
only being kept upright by Lemsip and a lack of sudden movements. In
my universe, if you can get out of bed at all then it isn't flu, so
this is just a bad cold.
I'm not going to make it to svenska i kv�ll, though. (I'll phone in
both our excuses, Fiona.)
Meanwhile, via Bluejoh, here's an abridged
online
version of Jakobson's Lectures on Sound and Meaning. In
fact the Marxists.org site has a whole
bunch of stuff. They claim to have permission from copyright
holders - c'mon, you'd have checked too, admit it - but they also
claim that
under US law "All works published before October 27, 1923 are public
domain." Hmmm.
They have (very limited) a Swedish section,
though, so I love them anyway.
Filosoferna har bara tolkat v�rlden p� olika
s�tt, men det g�ller att f�r�ndra den.
Which of course always makes my think of the Vilhelm Bragg song
(actually the Kristen McColl version):
Jag vill inte f�r�ndrar v�rlden,
Jag s�ker ingen nya Sverige,
Jag s�ker bara en andra tjej
(or is that en tjej till? English doesn't make such a
distinction...)
Although what I rilly, rilly, rilly want is another yummy mug
of Lemsip.
[Permalink]
2003-01-08 14:42 (UTC+1)
Yay! When England's sn�kaos rates a
mention in Aftonbladet then that's really something!
Fastfrusna v�xlar och ett omfattande signalfel stoppade i flera timmar
alla t�g till och fr�n Paddington- stationen i London.
What they don't tell you is that trains out of Paddington are
disrupted if a sparrow farts in Wiltshire - half (literally) the
trains to Bristol were cancelled last Friday, long before the sn� got
serious.
But Moscowgrad has registered -37; beat that, mewling Scandiwegian lapdogs of Capitalist Imperialism! I'm assuming that does
count as serious - I'll pass on data on just how cold that is when
Beeg Sees regains enough circulation to email a first-hand account.
[Permalink]
2003-01-08 09:34 (UTC)
Vickan has been
seeing her boyfriend. I think I missed the bit that explained why
this was news - it's not a new boyfriend, or anything.
I saw an hour-long documentary about the Swedish royals on cable TV in
Estonia (I skipped the one specifically about the king because I don't
care very much specifically about the king). It was dead weird
watching them move and hearing them talk and stuff (Shame on that
Merkin accent, Vickan! And those Britney-esque facial tics have got
to go Madde - ask yourself, "Is it Regal?" No, it isn't.)
It was almost as if they were actual people. A
shock to the system, certainly, but in no wise an excuse to for any
crazy republican talk. And as for a whole
Republikanska F�reningen,
well, I scarcely know what to say! How could you?
This had better just be some sort of pointless and irrelevant egalitarian
navel-gazing with no popular support whatsoever, that's all I can say.
(What's that? It is? Phew!)
[Permalink]
2003-01-07 13:14 (UTC)
With Leuschke having ridden
off into the sunset, the looseness of the ends at which [grammar] I am
in the habit of finding myself has rather increased.
So, in the spirit of making my own entertainment, and because I have a
really owie throat (how did people find out how to
spell orthographic conventions for [la-di-dah] words like "owie"
before Google?) and my head is sore befuzzled, here is some riffage to
riff us through the day.
Imagine what 1000 judiciously-placed clones (of the same clonee) could
do for the nature vs. nurture debate. C'mon, guys, let's settle this
once and for all!
Can I have a business-model patent on cloning dead (at first)
film-stars, please? You can license it for the very moderate fee of
just one (1) Audrey Hepburn. My people stand ready...
Finally, the Folklore Fairy (patron pixie of the saucily unsourceable)
reminds me that I may have read or heard somewhere that imagining
sequences of muscle movement (such as in playing an instrument)
without actually performing them can actually improve
performance. Presumably, then, there is some neural correlate for
purely imagined muscle movement. It's not a big leap from that to
suppose that your interior monologue brings with it a neural trace of
lip and tongue movements. Now suppose that MRI (or some other
brain-scanning tool) gets sophisticated enough to observe such neural
traces in enough detail to allow reconstruction of the unspoken words. Now imagine the minions of John Ashcroft IV, third (cloned)
Hereditary Ayatollah of the Glorious Bush Dynasty, are using this to
read people's thoughts. Bummer, huh?
I am torn between the hope that this will never happen and the hope that
I live to see the day when scottmcneally.com broadcasts 24/7 streaming
audio of the soundtrack in the head of the man who brought us the
slogan, "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." Tell you what,
Forces Of Evil, you can have the technology as long as:
- McNeally's first.
- You promise only to use your powers for good. Promise!
They all said I was crazy, but I'll show them...
[Exit, muttering and gesticulating wildly.]
[Permalink]
2003-01-07 10:02 (UTC)
all over Europe.
Even Denmark
has got in on the act.
(Snekaos? These Danes are crazy!)
Having long mistaken their temperate country for a frozen northern
wasteland, though, they
more than
adequately prepared for such contingencies. (Barking, I tell you.
Completely hatstand. But in a good way: when it gets cold in Britain
people die.)
My sister told me that the hot (hah!) topic among newbie Muscovites
was whether -30 would feel all that much colder than -25. (The
consensus was that it would.)
[Danish links from Birgitte, tack.]
[Permalink]
2003-01-07 8:57 (UTC)
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he
sat hacking at the PDP-6.
"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe"
Sussman replied.
"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play",
Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
[AI Koan,
Jargon File]
Back when I was doing my master's degree in Maths, the University's
philosophy department took to advertising some of its seminars in our
department. I didn't go to the one on Aristotlean set theory
(somebody did, and was as about as impressed as you would expect) but
then they had one on AI in actual robots, which no self-respecting
geek could afford to pass up (although, come to think of it, I think I
was the only outsider who showed up).
It turned out that the chap in question (from Sussex University) was
the philosopher on a team of roboticists, and he was going to be
talking a great deal about Heidegger's conception of the hermeneutic
circle, and very little (at least explicitly, so far as I could tell)
about robots.
I think this was the first time I had ever heard of either Heidegger
or hermeneutics, and I didn't understand very much of the talk.
Through the terminological fog I vaguely glimpsed the outline of the
Heideggerist critique of symbolic AI as neglecting the (allegedly
necessary) already-in-the-world-ness of an intelligence - which was of
course why they insisted on having actual physical robots - but I was
profoundly unimpressed by their use of small neural networks,
configured by genetic algorithms from a randomly-seeded population.
(Although I wasn't then familiar with the above koan.)
The robotics, at least, smelt like grant-application buzzwordology -
neural nets and genetic algorithms were both considered very groovy in
those days. (Personally I didn't like connectionist AI then, and
I don't like it any better now - it's like glueing feathers to a box
and hoping it will fly - and genetic algorithms, although not
completely stupid, were massively oversold at the time.)
And then he put up a Rothko picture on the overhead projector for no
obvious reason, and it was time for the Earnest Young Man Who Asks Too
Many Questions At Philosophy Seminars (I assume there is
always one?) to do the thing that he does so definitively well.
Since a cursory search of the library quickly established Heidegger as
someone I wanted nothing to do with at the time, it's a bit surprising
how much of this I remember. (I have also an eidetic haze of roomness,
which my prose skills are unequal to conveying.)
I didn't say it was going to be a good story, did I?
[Permalink]
2003-01-06 14:04 (UTC)
Reading Phen.Perc. (as we call it chez Bladet) has
made "Oh, really? That's one of my favourite passages in the
unpublished sixth volume of Cartesian Mediations, too!" something of a
catchphrase.
And
this
is now Very Funny Indeed:
By referring to destitutive analysis, we must not be understood as
intending (in the sense of radical
directedness-to-a-preliminary-perceived objectivity) to imply that,
speaking -- as always -- strictly within the finite-infinite limits of
transcendental apodicticity, the object 'part-whole synthesis' is even
partially reducible to the noematic correlate of affective suspension
(in the sense of ideally intended noesis subsumed and founded by the
epoche).
Splork! (Tomorrow, if you're good, I'll tell you a story instead.)
[Permalink]
2003-01-06 09:43 (UTC)
First, a web
preprint on a thaw in relations between cognitive "scientists" and
phenomenologists.
Marbach agrees with Dennett that within phenomenology there is a
problem with respect to word meaning. In scientific contexts such
problems are addressed through the use of formalized language systems
such as one finds in mathematics. Marbach thus attempts to develop a
formalized language, a phenomenological notation, to express
phenomenological findings.
Not to say such things! Zombie Ricoeur get angry! Zombie Ricoeur
come hermeneuticize your ass but good!
Meanwhile, a follow-up quote from yesterday.
The power of music, narrative and drama is one of the greatest
practical and theoretical importance. One may see this even in the
case of idiots, with IQs below 20 and the extremest motor incompetence
and bewilderment. Their uncouth movements may disappear in a moment
with music and dancing - suddenly, with music, they know how to move.
[...] And in drama there is still more - there is the power of
r�le to give organisation, to confer, while it lasts, an
entire personality.
[Sacks, TMWMHWfaH, pp.176-7]
So then, religious ritual, which often combines music, narrative and
r�le (and if "celebrant" isn't a r�le, I'm not theatre critic for the
Episcopal Herald) could be described either as:
- responding to the needs of the deepest levels of the human spirit; or
- optimized for the profoundly brain-damaged.
Choose now, and choose wisely, Varied Reader - Zombie Ricoeur is still
hungry. (You'll get my answer when there's sn�kaos i
helvete, and not before.)
[Permalink]
2003-01-05 12:58 (UTC)
This book had something of a vogue when it came out as a freak-show of
neurological dysfunction, but that's the least of what's going on here
- it's really an enquiry into the nature of what it is to be human.
From the author's preface:
The patient's essential being is very relevant in the higher reaches
of neurology; for here the patient's personhood is essentially
involved, and the study of disease and identity cannot be disjoined.
Such disorders, and their depiction and study, indeed entail a new
discipline which we may call the "neurology of identity", for it deals
with the neural foundations of the self, the age-old problems of mind
and brain.
"Self", here carries most of the weight of "soul", and Sacks doesn't
duck any of the implications of this. (The French word "esprit" seems
to do the same job without begging quite such explicitly theological
questions.) Ten years ago, as a stroppy young materialist git,
ever-alert to even unintended slights to the possibility of AI, much
of this "soul" malarkey got on my nerves, even as I found the book
fascinating for what it revealed about the brain.
Reading it today, as an stroppy middle-aged git with phenomenological
inclinations, it's a very different book; still a rich source of
material, but for a quite different project. Three distinct patient's with
Korsakov's syndrome (which causes loss of short and medium-term
memory) are encountered, in three distinct phases of the disease.
Mr.�Thompson has a form in which he calls on
a veritable confabulatory genius - for such a patient must literally
make himself (and his world) up every moment. [...] It might be said
that each of us constructs, and lives, a "narrative", and that this
narrative is us, our identities.
Could be said? You know, I think it probably
has been. (Sacks cites Borges, Hume, Nietzsche,
Wittgenstein and Frege - on "feeling tone" in speech, yet - but goes
mysteriously quiet on the philosophical tradition after that, despite
dropping in words like "phenomenological" and "ontological". I have a
suspicion that much of this is a question of not frightening the
horses, though.)
This stuff (and there's a tremendous variety of clinical experiences here)
deserves top billing in any encounter between philosophy (at least
such philosophy as seeks to engage with "lived experience"
(v�cu), and frankly I'm too old to care about any other kind)
and the brain.
Watch out, Cognitive "Scientists" - Zombie Ricoeur is hungry, and he
can smell your spicy brains!
[Permalink]
2003-01-04 13:19 (UTC)
The day before I left for Florida there was actual snow in Bristol, and today, when I
left the house for the first time after coming back from Estonia, also
was there snow in Bristol. Isn't that just so cute? Of
course, both times it was the merest tantalising sprinkling-ette, but
it was sweet of it to make the effort.
Now, by popular request, some photos. The tower called Tall Hermann,
which is a tower on top of the hill, and thus of immense symbolic
importance.
Me contemplating the dreaded Singing Fields of Tallinn. It is said
that one third of the Estonian-speaking part of the population of
Estonia (which later declared itself to be the only part that counted)
turned out for a sing-song, whereupon the Soviet empire crumbled, as
well it might.
Me contemplating the elk of driedness. (It tastes as good as it
looks, too.)
A skyline from the hilltop, partially obscured by me.
(All photos copyright my mother, 2002/3. It's her (spare) hat, as well.)
[Permalink]
2003-01-03 15:38 (UTC)
Estonia has reinvented itself as Baltiwegian (which they spell
"Nordic"), and abolished its time in Imperial Baltislavia except for
the purpose of blaming the Soviets for everything, and in Tallinn at
least this seems to have worked. There certainly isn't a lot of
Cyrillic on display, and there's just the one (albeit big)
Onion-Orthodox Church on the hill. The old town is all very pretty
and medieval and stuff, and stone towers loom jovially down on the
part of the town which isn't built on the big hill.
But more to the point, the beer (Saku) is good and reasonably priced,
the food likewise in the pubs as well as restaurants. The service can
be fairly perfunctory, but it's never unfriendly (with the honourable
exception of the cloakroom trolls at the Peter the Great's old place
in Kadriorg) and pretty much everybody speaks English.
The old cellar pubs are just a big win all round, I think - England,
meanwhile, is replacing its city pubs with giant charmless pre-club
drinking sheds which turn into a hell of testosterone and aftershave
on weekends (and that's just the wimmins) and the country pubs, shorn
of a purpose by drink-driving laws, have reinvented themselves as
restaurants with variable success. Tallinn's cafes are less
convincing - they're obviously relatively new to latte-culture (says
the Englishman, ho ho) and they don't for the most part serve any food
other than cake, which I do not eat.
The main thing is that Tallinn is still negociable on foot or with
public transport (they have trams! I like trams!) and this does wonders
for the atmosphere of a city. Oh, and there was plenty of sn�, but
no obvious kaos to go with it if you don't count me falling over when
drunk (or not-so-drunk, for that matter).
Trains and tubes have given me, as is traditional, nothing but grief
on my return, and seeing as I can cope with 6 hours of daylight, sn� and -20
degree cold in short bursts (yes, I know, it's cumulative) I am
continuing to ponder some of your frozen northern wastelands as
domicilic possibilities.
[Permalink]
New Year's Eve, 2002 12:59
My sister has swiped Hobsbawm off of me
Oh well. Incidentally, if you order dried elk meat at the
Old Hansa restaurant in Tallinn, that's exactly what you get, bundled in a handkerchief tied up with string. Yum, yum. I did eat it all up, but you can forget the blood sausage for tonight - I have lost all faith that Estonian restauranteurs will protect me from my own stupidity.
And since this computer is ridiculously under-specced (it's already crashed once) and the Internet cafe yesterday frustrated my attempts to post anything at all yesterday, and I expect to be very drunk shortly and then very hungover tomorrow, I may well not post again from Estonia.
So I'll leave you with a phenomenological observation:
Have you ever taken a sip from a cup of tea only to discover that it was actually coffee? It tastes at least as strongly of surprise as of coffee - experience is always a collaboration between expectation and perception.
See you next year, Varied Reader, and not before.
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