February 2012
4 posts
Where I'm At
I was so ashamed at my subculture’s elective affinity to Continental Philosophy that I cut most of my ties to my subculture and now I am part of nothing.
How do you not, like, lose your job when you are too sad from a breakup to be doing things?
Imaginary Frenemies Sorted by Age at Which They...
14: Ecclesiastes
15-16: Wittgenstein
17-18: Nabokov
19-20: The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E scene
21: The anti-Indie vibe
22-23: Wittgenstein
24-25: The LessWrong scene
January 2012
5 posts
The Common Dead-end at the End of Aesthetics,...
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...
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...
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....
December 2011
7 posts
My Side Project That I Would Have Made My Main...
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....
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...
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...
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...
November 2011
2 posts
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...
Y'all Know There's a Book That Makes Whoever Reads...
“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...
October 2011
7 posts
Evolutionary Psychology: A One Act Play
Evolutionary Psychologists: The real motive behind [some behaviour] is [some Darwinist benefit]!
Other People: That’s so conceptually confused!
Evolutionary Psychologists: That’s why we never said it!
More Towards "Experimental Literature for Nerds"
A simple point that people forget to explain to outsiders about the consumption of random/plain/goofy/noisy artifacts is that it’s not the random/plain/goofy/noisy artifact that is doing the work but the 3000 years long acummulation of techniques for attentively scrutizing objects (which developed as a corollary of 3000 years of creating objects that intuitively solicit new forms of...
My Favorite-Ever Things Today
Song: Après Moi
Poem: Ursonate
Book: Bouvard et Pécuchet
Oh Right There's a Play About That
I imagine mathematicians like the ancients imagined shepherds.
Had a Burst of Crazy in the Midst of Studying for...
“Just to explain what the — I think — possible alternative view is: One could theorize that suffering/pleasure is a gestalt that modulates an experience. So the idea would be, rather than that new experiences bring new pleasure, that new pleasures bring new experiences (i.e., that liking experiences you didn’t like before involves/creates novel modulations of the...
Illumination!
Jay-Z lyrics are so much like that song “hey boy, crazy boy” from West Side Story.
Long Week
Unsure re: the amount of things in heaven and earth. (Like, the amount of discourses that are sufficiently non-arbitrary.)
Makes me real nervous.
Jeez Adorno really doesn’t like things much.
September 2011
5 posts
Movie Joke
I’m going to clean my room tomorrow.
So...
I’m pretty sure that I can teach the principles of Modernist/experimental aesthetics by explaining how advice animals work.
Ugh
Anyway, Wittgenstenia always just makes me so deeply depressed. It never changes my intellectual inclinations, but always convinces me my intellectual inclinations are childish and shameful. This has been a terrible week.
People Who Know Wittgenstein's Work Well Will...
Wittgenstein drastically underplays the role that simulation (I mean, like, imagining another person’s first-person perspective) plays in knowing others’ mental lives. A lot of actual real-life language games concerned with knowing others’ mental lives revolve around the capacity to have an imaginative experience that counts as a correct imaginative simulation of the other...
July 2011
11 posts
Season Seven
Reading now ‘La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel.’ I’m real excited, cause for someone living in the Modernist/Avant tradition this is like the episode of Buffy in which Buffy dream-time-travels to see the creation of the Slayer-line.
An Update
Giving up on: Ever being physics-literate or economics-literate.
Not giving up on: All the rest.
The Black Album
The Black Album’s still the most sublime expression ever of wanting so bad to say p, wanting so bad to say ~p, and wanting so bad to be rid of that.
The Best Poem in the World
Cecilia Corrigan, “A Letter Never to Be Sent From the Desk of Veronica Lodge On The Occasion of Reflection on Her Overeducated Ex-Girlfriend”
“But B, Walter Pater will never be our friend, he’s dead.”
The Renaissance, also, is over, everyone can go home now. Or perhaps,
(over theme) “Road trip!”
Please I’d like to buy that massive bottle o...
A Note on Moby Dick
Is Queequeg the first Black Best Friend?
In Quaaludes and Red Wine
It’s always stunning to think Robbe-Grillet was once considered — by fans! — anti-literary. I think the rule is, it takes 50 years for a text’s heart of stone to melt?
Groups With Whom I've Had Horrible Arguments In My...
The Avant Garde
People Who Don’t Like The Avant Garde
Analytic Philosophers
Continental Philosophers
Pop Critics
Aesthetes
Science
Social Theorists
Marxists
Austrian Economists
Multiculturalists
Monoculturalists
Moderates
J. Gordon Faylor, 'Sebaceous Heph' →
I liked it better when I was inscrutable.
What is Modernist literature?
“It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all.”
An Argument
1) A good number of women start up on a high-powered path in their 20’s, and then when they’re older opt out, saying they’ve been denying their deeper inner bond with domesticity.
2) A good number of American Jews start up not wanting to date/marry Jewish or observe the holidays, and then when they are older change, saying they’ve been denying their deeper inner bond with...
June 2011
2 posts
Summertime
No TV so no daydreaming. No daydreaming so no thoughts. Not normal is it?
A Joke:
Orals are in three months and I can’t even remember what’s the name of the main character in the Inferno.
May 2011
4 posts
A Weird Taxonomy of Social-Performance Theories of...
0th degree social-performance theories of taste propose that taste-judgements are directly determined* by the subject’s (implicit or explicit) expectation of gaining (or maintaining) social status by expressing said taste-judgements.
1st degree social-performance theories of taste propose that taste-judgements are (at least partially) determined by the subject’s experience of...
This Neat Thing Shakespeare Does A Lot
This neat thing Shakespeare does a lot, where syntax borders on the meaningless and the sentence’s really just a house for all the words in it to throw a party in.
A New Belief of Mine
Annoying hipster-on-hipster political culture criticism works, or is at least auspicious: Indie kids are a lot more interested in rap now. There are lots more minorities in core hipster-culture itself. There’s a ‘women in comedy’ boom of some sort.
April 2011
6 posts
Science without Numbers
Bas C. van Fraassen says applied math is the only science. I believe him, and would like to note that our culture currently does not: our modern science mascots — Dawkins, CSI, Mythbusters — are way more about disecting frogs than about crunching numbers. I think it’s maybe because math is eerie, and what science as a concept stands for in our culture these days is sobriety...
Likes: environments, noticing things.
Dislikes: events, experiences.