The Common Dead-end at the End of Aesthetics, Philosophy, Family Fights, Lovers’ Quarrels
That sinking feeling when you can’t come up with an example to back up your abstract claim.
Pensées
A clever person I know thinks that art just triggers or fails to trigger a generic “I like this art” experience in you, and as your taste supposedly evolves you merely need more complicated stimuli to trigger that exact same old “I like this art” experience. I don’t think that this view is very probable at all*, except I know that I would kill myself if I thought this is probable, so I can’t really trust myself on this one can I?
*Espresso doesn’t turn into hot-chocolate when you start to like espresso. Basically I think he’s failing to the distinguish between the interoceptive and perceptual part of aesthetic pleasure. (Like the intuitive distinction between the orgasm-related part of sexual fun and the this-person’s-body’s-tactilely-amazing part of sexual fun.)
My Version of Believing in Objective Value
I believe in implicitly defined criteria, because, you know, all definition is implicit definition. And I believe that at various times in the day you actively care about whether the world meets a particular implicit criterion, or about how to make your life meet a particular implicit criterion. So, like, there are value-facts but only in the sense that when we have an implicit criterion in mind and we ask ourself whether something embodies it and care about the answer, which we do a lot, we ask a perfectly good question.
Critiques Pure and Vulgar
We don’t really reject artworks — we reject a mindset implied by enjoying an artwork. It’s not like “this answer is wrong,” but like “the question for which this work is the answer sucks.”
The Black Bug Room
When I first saw this page a bell knelled in my head and I insisted/knew the Black Bug Room’s a thing that means something to me — means something serious to me — but I had no good take on what. It’s not the first supernatural metaphor for “that dark place in your mind” that I’ve seen, but it’s the only one to ever resonate with me at all. I’ve started using ‘Black Bug Room’ colloquially, albeit mostly when I’m having conversations with myself, to mean “that dark place in your mind,” and wrote off as unanswerable the question of why this rendition made this type of metaphor I never cared for so profound for me.
A day ago I saw my copy of New X-Men #116 at my friend’s house - I lent it to him but he didn’t read it yet - and started trying to tell him all about the Black Bug Room and how I just can’t tell what makes this scene so special. But instead I found myself explaining, with ease and without any prior reflection, exactly what makes it so special: The Black Bug Room’s specifically that place you go when smack dab in the middle of an action or a life you phase out for a second and recall an ancient worry or resentment you could never solve but mostly learned how to let go of, and in this second everything else in your life seems like it is a ploy distracting you from properly attending to that ancient worry or resentment so you tune your life out, and a voice inside your head explains to you reasonably that whatever is the thing that’s going on outside right now, when you are back outside it’s more important to resolve the issue that we in here at the Black Bug Room are dealing with than just go with the flow you started earlier, so you say “listen to me, there are things we need to talk about, about our relationship.”
My Side Project That I Would Have Made My Main Life Project If I Could
- A lot of aesthetic merit is explicitly about modeling one phenomenon in terms of another phenomenon or showing how two phenomena can be modelled based on a common prototype.
- A lot of aesthetic merit is explicitly about finding a short or elegant description that intuitively generates vast data (i.e. deeply evocative descriptions). There is also an explicit subclass of this form of aesthetic merit that is explicitly concerned with finding a short description that intuitively generates vast data that one has previously interacted with (i.e. articulating things in your experience or things you encountered in the world).
- A lot of aesthetic merit is explicitly about stimuli that ‘resonate’ with many previously disconnected things you have encountered, felt or thought, and in so resonating illuminate possible connections (similarities?) between these previously disconnected things. Notably we sometimes have a very hard time verbalizing any personal-level reference points (hard to say what does the work resonate with et cetera) even when we are strongly inclined to claim that something like this has occurred. Often a verbalization comes within a week or two.
These three phenomena are at the core of our belief that art can be a form of thinking or of furthering our understanding or what have you. These three phenomena all call on seemingly related unexplained notions like ‘articulate’, ‘resonate’, ‘see connections,’ and so on, and I monomaniacally believe that the best way to cash out these notions has to be in terms taken from the world of data compression and data differentiation. (I mean the world of resource-bounded data compression and data differentiation — so, like, the A.I. research kind, not the pure theoretical computer science kind. Cf. Jurgen Schmidhuber on aesthetic merits of a kind related to but not identical to the phenomena above.)
An ideal theory along these lines is one that would use the language of data compression and data differentiation to provide something like a conceptual analysis of the core notions we employ in talking about these aesthetic phenomena, and also plausibly explain the empirical facts about what stimuli+person+context combos cause or fail to cause these phenomena to occur. Realistically, I think that concepts taken form the world of data compression and data differentiation can be used to construct nice approximations of the notions we employ in talking of these aesthetic phenomena, and that our aesthetic reactions imperfectly track data compression-type facts about our processing of things.
Big Nights
The strangest visual experience I ever had is looking at a picture of a pizza and then suddenly not seeing it as “pizza” but a dish of hot specialty bread baked in grated tomatoes and cheeses.
I LOVE ‘Shit Girls Say’
What makes it so amazing is the language in it is so slightly gender-correlated: the subject matter is almost invariably gender-neutral so it’s down to syntax and vocabulary, and occasionally illocution. Also the correlation is itself slight for the most part — like, most of the sentences are like “yeah, a woman’s 10% more likely to be saying that than is a man.”
Can’t Ever Tell if I’m The Last Person or First Person on Earth to Get This
There’s a cute way to unify verbal irony, dramatic irony, and “isn’t it ironic” irony: A thing’s ironic from perspective s if it involves a person with perspective s’ that is less well informed than s who for that reason would describe the thing in a way that is opposite of how a person with perspective s describes it. In verbal irony s is the speaker and s’ is the simulated speaker. In dramatic irony, s is the audience and s’ a character. In “isn’t it ironic” irony s’ is the person during the event and s that person in its aftermath.
The Fairest of the Seasons
When I feel strong I want ideas, people, works that satisfice rigour and maximize novelty. When I feel weak I want ideas, people, works that maximize rigour and satisfice novelty.
I’m sad. I miss my girlfriend. I don’t like having emotions about my own life they leave no elbow room.
A Volitional Analysis of Intense Happyness?
My view is that pleasure is liking an experience, and that supposed objectless pleasure (mood, euhphoria, what have you) is just liking our intra-bodily and agential experiences. Also my view is that liking an experience is to have certain attentional dispositions towards that experience. Basically my view’s that the hedonic does reduce to the volitional once you recall that the volitional includes attention.
A Two-Factors Analysis of Intense Happiness?
Some intense states are states of feeling very strongly and directly that a certain way that things can (hypothetically) be is good.
Some intense states are states of feeling very strongly and directly that things are a certain way.
States of intense happiness as overlaps of these two states?
I’m trying to say, like, that happiness is admiration minus distance. Or that the phenomenology of happiness’ a special case of the phenomenology of admiration.
Y’all Know There’s a Book That Makes Whoever Reads It Not Afraid to Die Anymore, Right?
“Though there will later be many experiences, none of these experiences will be connected to my present experiences by chains of such direct connections as those involved in experience-memory, or in the carrying out of an earlier intention. … That is all there is to the fact that there will be no one living who will be me. Now that I have seen this, my death seems to me less bad.” (Derek Parfit, ‘Reasons and Persons’)
