May 2008
13 posts
3 hypotheses re: meditation
1. It does you good because trying-to-avoid-boredom is the indirect root of most (\many) bad behavioural patterns but meditations makes boredom exciting. 2. It does you good because prejudice about the appropriate response to a given situation or feeling are directly what keeps most bad behavioural patterns going but meditation effaces these. 3. It does you good because sentimental attachment to...
Enough with the poetics of having a shitty personality already.
At times you do something because you feel a compulsion to do it and choose not to oppose this felt compulsion. This fact is fundamental to a lot of how I’m trying to “make big changes” these days, so I’m taking extra care to remind myself that this doesn’t mean that desires are feelings you react to.
A quick one: if we read Wittgenstein’s beetle-in-a-box section concretely — we got hard evidence that de-facto private is private enough for whatever Wittgenstein has to say about private objects\languages\whathaveyou. [Ok, now to bed, to bed]
I’ve started doing walking meditation. Suddenly my relation to the world is not one of panic. Refreshing!
I’m trying to make (!) an interactive fiction of inner monologue. Trouble is the user’s position vs. the interactive text will inevitably end up implying a Cartesian divide of “self” and “input”, but what I want is a philosophically neutral (kinda), non-categorical divide of “deliberate” and “symptomatic”. I need to find a way to make...
A Meta-Methodological Parable That Really Happened
When I was 14 I went into a quasi clinical depression after reading Ecclesiastes. I read Ecclesiastes weird* — I took it as making a good case that that there is no such property as “significance” to be had by things, open-question style. To me it was an ontological essay proceeding by demonstration, going through the constituents the world one by one showing them vacant of any...
I always (wrongly) believe manic manic-depressives about their successes.
I often think of how dramatic his own existence must seem to Peter Hacker. It must be a lot like “I Am Legend”. Truly if I were a charcter in a Tom Stoppard play I would have been a character writing a comedy about Peter Hacker.
Possible title for a book I would have written in another life about why I can’t go fully Wittgensteinian: “Motivating Our Grammar”. It’s got that not-actually-evocative-but-close-enough-that-we-can-pretend-that-it-is-evocative ring you want from the title of an academic book.
— Every one of the 7 blurbs on the 4th edition of “The Elements of Style” violates at least a single rule. — What’s great about teen-snuff*-oldie Tell Laura I Love Her is that when Tommy dies and his dying words make for only a second reiteration of the refrain you really freak out because a refrain that comes in only twice is structural madness, and so when...
New tag-line for the blog, as most of my time nowadays seems to go into not-discussing-things-on-their-own-terms. [I’ve been reading Gordon Baker’s ‘Wittgenstein’s Method: Neglected Aspects’, which offers some good encouragement on this front]
Every 6 months I give Derrida another try. This time it’s Structure, Sign, Play. It’s a good essay. It’s crisp and clear, also, kinda. But it gives me more of an idea why continental philosophy can’t work for me: the laws of the land are such that an observation may only be challenged by placing another observation on top of it. “No” isn’t a playable...
