James

Let's All Do Philosophy

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 23:50:45 GMT

I just put up a philosophy project at Strange Groupings. It's for anyone to participate in, so if you like to contribute to philosophical undertakings, this one is for you.

Strange Groupings Manifesto Release

Sun, 04 Jun 2006 00:09:28 GMT

Well, I finally got my book printed and we are having a release party.

The party is on Tuesday, June 13th at The Embassy (223 Augusta. in Toronto) starting around 8:00. We haven't finalized any bands yet, but we've got some pretty good ones lined up. I know that most of you who read this online aren't anywhere near Toronto and will be unable to come, but if you have any friends in Toronto who don't have anything to do on a Tuesday night tell them about this awesome event. Also, check out our new website at www.strangegroupings.org, where you can see images from the manifesto right now.

If you'd like a print copy of the manifesto they are going to cost CAN$20. If you aren't in Toronto and you'd like one, I'm sure we can find some mutually agreeable way to get it to you. They are small in size, so shipping shouldn't be a prohibitive expense.

Equations for Your Consideration

Mon, 17 Apr 2006 00:56:34 GMT

(Working Flying Machine) - 0 = Large
(Working Flying Machine) - (Non-Working Flying Machine) = 1 second

The Opening of this Livejournal Entry is Intentionally Formatted as a Short Story

Fri, 09 Dec 2005 04:52:00 GMT

After the In Search Of... Michael decided it was time to get the band going for real. Because Adrian didn't really have time to practice with us, he was left out of the plan. So, Phil, Michael and I started trying to figure out how we were going to play these songs with just three people.

Of course it doesn't help that I can't really play anything. It also doesn't help that we need to play everything. After two practices we could play four songs. On the first, Michael played guitar, Phil played guitar and I played bass. On another it was banjo, guitar and bass. On another it was organ, guitar and keyboards switching to drums. On the last it was violin, guitar and me on xylophone and a drum.

There is a problem with this. Two, really. First, three people cannot carry two guitars, two basses, a banjo, a drum kit, a xylophone, a violin, a small electric organ and a rather large keyboard to a show. Equally importantly, the audience doesn't want to wait a minute between songs while we switch instruments.

The solution to this problem was the play the same instrument more often. This solution requires me to actually be able to play bass. Fortunately I'm not really as incompetent at it as I imagined I was. Even more fortunately I have come to some realizations that are helping me get better pretty quickly.

For one thing, practicing makes me better. This is something I didn't really know for a long time, because I only did things that I found easy, and gave up on things that seemed hard. Another thing is that I should take advice from people who know better than me. Michael is a pretty good teacher, and he can give me tips to improve my technique. When I listen to him and do what he says, I get better in a hurry. Also, just because something seems hard doesn't mean that I can't do it. Yeah, I will never be the best bassist in the world. Being the best in the world is hard. Being good enough to play some songs–even some fairly difficult songs– and entertain a crowd is something that hundreds of thousands of people do. It's something that people do. I'm not really that special. If I was missing an arm, and I found bass really hard and frustrating I might be forgiven: I really would be special in my lack of ability to play bass. That is not to say that one armed people should give up on their quest to play bass, just that they can be forgiven for saying that it is extremely difficult. But I am able bodied, and of sound mind. If I think playing the bass is extremely difficult it is because I haven't practiced enough, because I haven't had someone instruct me on technique or I haven't taken the instruction I've been given. If I give up because it's too hard, it's because I'm a whiner and I don't like to be confronted with difficulty. It is because I am arrogant. I believe that if it is difficult for me then it must really be difficult.

And this is how it is with most things. Things that people do anyway. Unique things are something else, it's hard to guess how hard they are. But if hundreds of thousands of people do something, you'd better believe that unless you have an idenfiable limitation that would prevent it, and likely even it you do, you can probably do it to. You just have to practice enough. You just have to humble yourself to instruction enough.

But I don't know if I will ever be in love¹. People do that. But maybe I really am special in this regard. I know it's arrogant. I know that "everyone" feels that way sometimes. Some of them are right. It might actually be that there is something about me that means it just won't work out. Or it might just be that this isn't the sort of thing that you can practice very effectively, it's not something you can get really good at, and a couple of misunderstandings and poorly timed events can render you to loneliness for the rest of your life.

Some people are lonely. Some people have never been anything but lonely. Any day may be the best day of your life, and all other days beyond that are just the slide downhill.

1. What I really mean is that I don't know if my organism will ever be part of a couple in the future.

Being Mistaken

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 03:54:04 GMT

There are so many ways we can get it wrong. First of all, we can be misinformed, presented with falsehoods in place of facts, misled. Second, even if we are presented with the truth, our perceptions can be mistaken: perceiving is so much guesswork and we don't even know how to practice. Third, our memories can fail us, we can remember things that didn't happen and forget things that did. Fourth, our reasoning can be flawed, we can bring in false and hidden assumptions, we can jump to conclusions. Fifth, we can fail physically, our organisms can do things we didn't intend, we can say the wrong word or fall on our faces.

There is no reason to be sure you are right, not ever.

Experimental Evidence

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 17:54:15 GMT

The only way we know anything about the world is through experimental evidence. Different experiments produce different results. Sometimes we understand how these results can be compared, but many times we don't. It is thought that sometimes the results cannot be compared in any meaningful way.

Looking at the world through our own eyes is only one experimental way of ascertaining the properties of the world. No explanation of wavelengths of light will ever capture how it feels for us, from the first person, so see blue. But measuring wavelengths of light and looking at blue things are two different experiments. There is no reason to expect more similarity from them than from a particle and a wave.

Compared to the wealth of knowledge that we can potentially access, trusting the senses to ascertain the world is intellectually bankrupt, as is the reductionist drive to explain the feeling of senses purely in terms of brain function. Either picture could be complete if we did not know of the other. As long as we have access to both, it would be a waste to ignore one.

Strange Groupings

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 04:12:47 GMT

It's registered, and there is something there, though it isn't much.

Strange Groupings has a website.

Cooperation

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 23:18:07 GMT

Since the beginning of the theory of evolution, there has always been an attitude that we can guess what sorts of qualities will be favoured by evolution. It has been assumed that things that are stronger, faster and smarter are favoured. It has been assumed that things that are more selfish will be favoured.

In The Universe in a Single Atom the Dalai Lama muses that altruism cannot be explained by evolution alone. This view is an echo of what learned scientists who study evolution have told him.

But if evolution favours selfishness over altruism, then why aren't the cells in your body fighting it out with one another right now? Our cells don't eat each other the way paramecia do. That is because cooperation is better than defection. If cooperation were a failure, we would be paramecia at best, but it seems more likely we would be nothing at all.

Of course genes don't just create cells or organisms, they create groups of organisms. Yes, I have different DNA than you, but each of your chromosomes has different genes than the others. Collectively human DNA creates a wide variety of humans, and we to have evolved to work together. Examine the brain of a feral child, one that has grown up without contact with other humans and you find holes there; places where nothing grew because there was no stimulation for it. We are designed to care about each other. We are designed to sacrifice ourselves for each other if necessarily.

It makes perfect sense that evolution would create these traits. These traits are better than selfishness. We don't call it the tragedy of the commons because everything works out great for everyone. Selfishness is shit, we all know it, an evolution knows it too¹.

1. I know that evolution doesn't know anything.

I Have a Niece

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 04:58:00 GMT

Ellen Patricia Edmonds Whyte was born a little after noon today. She's a little less than a thirtieth of my weight, and my hair is longer than her.

Babies really have an unfair advantage when it comes to attracting attention. When I went to see my new niece in the hospital today she got the hiccups. This basically meant that the four of us who were there stood around and watched her hiccup for twenty minutes.

Feeling Terrible

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 02:16:17 GMT

So I've been feeling terrible for a few weeks now. What is really unusual is not that I feel really bad, but that I have been getting a lot of writing done during that same time. Normally when I feel bad I don't really do much of anything. But I've really been cranking out the manifesto recently, and my goal of having a finished draft by the middle of the month seems quite achievable. Hopefully I can translate that into a launch early next year.

Wave/Particle Duality

Thu, 03 Nov 2005 04:18:40 GMT

Whether an electron acts like a wave or acts like a particle depends on what experiment we do to observe it. The so-called "paradox" of wave particle duality isn't really that surprising at all.

Here are two experiments you could do to determine the effects of a table sitting in the middle of the room: 1) You could walk through the middle of the room, or 2) You could walk around the outside of the room. In one experiment you conclude that tables get in the way of people, in the other you conclude that tables don't really get in the way of people at all.

Since electrons, and other similar things, are basically as small as anything can be, any experiment we do to determine their properties is about as oafish as the experiements I just described. I mean, firing photons at them? Trying to find out what an electron is like by bouncing a photon off it is like trying to find out what an elephant is like by bouncing a hippo off of it.

Both "wave" and "particle" are analogies. Sure, it wouldn't make sense if something was a wave and a particle at the same time, but it certainly makes sense that something is analogous to a wave and analogous to a particle at the same time. There's nothing tricky about that at all.

I think a big part of the problem is that the word "particle" makes us think of solids. Electrons, of course, aren't solid at all. Nothing that small is. Solid is an emergent property of multi-molecular things. Atoms and smaller things can't be solid. We shouldn't imagine electrons being little balls, because they aren't like that at all.

Yay!

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 23:10:43 GMT

Okay, everything is going according to plan... B.

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 04:21:40 GMT

LJ Interests meme results

bad decisions:
I make a lot of bad decisions, and often I know that they are bad decisions at the time. I am interested in why I do that.
cosmos sort:
Cosmos sort is perhaps the most inefficient sort possible for data on a computer. The idea is that you store the data to be sorted in poorly shielded memory, exposed to cosmic rays, hopefully in space. These cosmic rays will occasionally cause random bit changes in the memory. Every now and then the program checks the memory to see whether it currently contains a list containing exactly what the original list of data contained and in order. The program itself would have to be stored in well shielded memory and often check itself to make sure that it had not been corrupted. This would, in theory, eventually sort the data.
editing old entries:
I like changing what I wrote in old entries, knowing that it is unlikely that anyone will ever notice. I like the idea of doing things that will never be discovered.
gravity:
I, in the past, had a lot of interest in gravity because we don't really know why it happens. Recently, though, I have concocted my own theory of why masses are attracted to one another, and I am even more interested in gravity.
kissing:
I like kissing.
mike kinsella:
Mike kinsella is the little brother of Tim Kinsella. The brothers were members of the band Cap'n Jazz. From there Tim went on to form Joan of Arc who Mike occasionally drummed for. Mike has had two of his own projects: American Football and Owen. More recently both got together to form Owls.
ontology:
Ontology is the study of what exists. It is my primary area of interest in philosophy.
rhoda:
Rhoda is the name of an unlabelled song by Slint on their unlabelled single.
stephanie beard:
Stephanie Beard, known as Sugar even to her mother, is a canadian celebrity who has appeared in commercials, hosted children's programming on YTV and done voices for the american version of Sailor Moon. Sugar is a little less than 5 feet tall and has an outrageous voice that you would say sounds like a little kid, except that there are no little kids that actually sound that much like a little kid.
tim kinsella:
Tim Kinsella is the older brother of Mike Kinsella. In addition to the projects mentioned above, he has released a solo accoutic album.

Enter your LJ user name, and 10 interests will be selected from your interest list.

Time and Place

Mon, 12 Sep 2005 18:32:07 GMT

When I was a kid I heard that the sun was about eight light-minutes from Earth. I realized that if she sun mysteriously vanished, or exploded, or befell some other calamatous event, we would not know about it for several minutes. At any given time, our fate could be already be sealed, the sun having gone nova, and we wouldn't even know. This really scared me at the time¹.

Recently, though, I was thinking more about time and place. What I worried about, that a distant event was going to kill me and there was no way for me to know that it would happen, made the assumption that the truth of what has happened propagates instantaneously; the sun explodes in one place, so it is true that the sun has exploded everywhere else. I don't really think that's true, though. The fact that the sun has or hasn't exploded doesn't just appear everywhere at once, it takes time to get around. The sun may explode at the sun, but it won't be the case that the sun has exploded on earth for eight minutes, not even in hindsight.

I'm not relying on facts and ideas being physical things to say this: just on the fact that we are temporally isolated. Being a certain distance away from something also means that you are a certain amount of time away from it. The reason we don't notice this in our everyday lives is because we deal almost exclusively with very small distances and very long times.

1. Now I know that at any given time a course of events that will inevitably lead to my or any else's death could have begun at any time and for many reason more likely than the sun exploding, so I don't worry much about the sun anymore.

What it means to exist

Tue, 23 Aug 2005 05:07:47 GMT

This is probably the biggest idea I've ever had. I feel like I just found out I had the winning lottery numbers and I have to wait to cash them in, worrying about my ticket all the while.

To exist is to have a location.

The best part about this is that the first objection that springs to mind, that location is meaningless without some relative point to judge it again, is actually not an objection but an explanation of why this definition of existence works. Of course location has to be relative, so does existence. We have spent too long saying that to exist is to be because we thought that anyone who said that to exist is to be there was just floundering around using extra words they didn't need to. It turns out that the "there" is the important part and the "be" is an artifact of our language. How could we think that existence is not relative, with everything we know?

Existence has always been framed as a question of, "What?" but now we know that it is question of "Where?"

Flies

Wed, 03 Aug 2005 02:18:31 GMT

I killed a fly today. There were a lot of dead flies in the display cases in my store, so I took it upon myself to pick them up and throw them out. A couple of the flies were still alive, and when I picked up a living one in the tissue I was using to pick up the dead ones, I crushed it. It was no accident, I realized that I was holding a living thing in my hand and I decided to crush it to death. It seemed a little sickly: it couldn't seem to fly, otherwise it probably would have gotten away from me. It had already half crushed it's back when I picked it up. I didn't really know what else to do with it.

There was another living fly in the display case. It also looked a little weak. Instead of picking it up I put the tissue down in front of it so it could climb on. Then I took it outside and shook it off. It flew away.

I feel really bad about that first fly.

Weddings

Sun, 31 Jul 2005 17:15:51 GMT

I went to a wedding on Friday afternoon. Having resolved some internal issues regarding goings on in my life and at the wedding I can now say without reservation that I had a good time there and that it was good all-round.

Weddings are interesting times. People go up and make speeches and say things that they would never say on any other day. Weddings are a day when two people get up in front of lots of other people and declare that they love one another, but in general it is an opportunity for people to express how much they care about each other openly.

Do you realize... that everyone you know some day will die?

For most of us, we can't just walk up to people in your life and tell them how much you care about them. It's not just that we would be embarrassed, it's that it would break some covenant of normalcy that we have all agreed to. We would actually lose friends over it. I know there are some people, and some groups of people, who live with their feelings bared all the time, but that's not for everyone.

Weddings, happening once or twice a year, give us the opportunities we need to mention how we feel about one another, but they separate it from our daily lives, so we can go back to treating each other normally the next day even after that experience.

Of course weddings don't leave us entirely unchanged. I sent about six messages out today on online dating sites, and I'm sure its not entirely unrelated to going to a wedding on Friday.

Celebrity Excitement

Tue, 26 Jul 2005 03:33:08 GMT

I shook Bruce Campbell's hand tonight. I was very excited to meet him, because Bubba Ho-Tep is one of my favourite movies of all time. Unfortunately I didn't really think ahead, so I just got him to sign a book for a friend rather than buying a copy of the movie to have him sign.

I said, "Bubba Ho-Tep was a wicked movie."

He said, "Good Taste"

Anyway, I have some mixed feelings about the whole experience, because in a way it was just another impersonal exchange: he is a person and he and I could relate under other circumstances, but meeting a celebrity at a book signing is a very business-transaction kind of thing. Still, I'm glad that I shook his hand.

Starbucks and Real People

Sun, 24 Jul 2005 23:49:23 GMT

I work in the customer service/sales business. I deal with customers by listening to their problems and trying to find solutions, or listening to what they want and giving it to them in exchange from currency. There are a lot of crappy things about that business, not the least of which is being a big phony all the time.

It is my job to be polite and nice. That means that customers who are rude and mean are very difficult to deal with. The majority of being polite is reflexive. Someone does something nice for you, so you say, "Thank you." Someone says, "Thank you," so you say, "You're Welcome." Reflexes, pushing each other's buttons, etc. When someone is being rude and you have to be polite, the reflexes are working against you. You have to quash every instinct and replace it with actions that don't seem to fit. You don't say, "Thank you," when someone says, "Fuck you," normally.

There are, then, two kinds of customers who make the job easy, rather than hard. There are those who are polite themselves, since them being polite is reflexive and easy. There are also those who walk in, tell me what they want to buy, produce money, and leave with the item in question.

Because I don't think anyone likes it when other people make their job harder, I try to make the jobs of those in the service industry easy. I choose to do so in the second way, rather than the first.

In fact, I really don't like polite and friendly exchanges with people who are selling me things. I find them to be dehumanizing. It's all the button pushing. Of course, I'm sure there are people out there who really mean all of those polite things they say, but I'm not one of them, so participating is just faking it, whether I am behind the counter or in front of it. I don't like it when people get to know me as a customer. I order the same kind of tea from Starbucks every morning, but if they ask me if that's what I want before I order it, I will order something else instead, just so that they won't do that again.

The other day, however, I walked into the same starbucks I always go into, and the woman behind the counter said, "Venti Chai Tea?" I said, "No," and ordered something else, prompting the person working the bar to say, "This guy orders different drinks sometimes just to throw us off."

Ever since then I have had a friendly relationship with the people at that Starbucks. Somehow that exchange made me feel like they have gotten to know me, at least a little bit, as a person rather than as a customer. It's very encouraging to experience real interaction coming out of a commerce based relationship.

Dolphins and Chi

Sat, 23 Jul 2005 23:15:32 GMT

I was watching a TV show today about a man who uses dolphins to treat depression. He used to be a pharmaceutical researcher, but had an experience with dolphins that led him to start using this alternative therapy. The voiceover was asking whether this therapy could really work: it compared his current methods, which are only shown to work through anecdotal evidence, to his previous methods, which involved clinical trials.

The doubt about this dolphin therapy seemed pretty unbelievable. Even if there have been no clinical trials showing that it works there have been lots of studies showing that 1) spending time with animals helps to relieve depression and 2) exercise helps to relieve depression. Therefore, it shouldn't really surprise anyone that spending time with some of the kindest, most intelligent, and most human loving animals while swimming should probably help with depression.

A few moments later the guy was expanding on his idea. He was talking about chi flows, and about how he thinks that dolphins can directly manipulate chi.

This goes a ways to explaining why the voiceover was incredulous about his methods.

At some point, someone said that if the greatest fool in the world said the sun would rise tomorrow then it still would. I can't remember if that's a famous quote or just a canonical example from philosophy classes but it doesn't really matter. That message, that bad evidence in favour of something is not good evidence against that thing could really use some reinforcement. There is, I think, a tendency to dismiss a conclusion, in this case a conclusion that should be very easy to accept, just because the evidence presented in favour of it seems foolish.

On the other hand, I actually think that, chi flows aside, there is the distinct possibility that dolphins have, over tens of thousands of years of cultural evolution, mastered the art of making noises that have the effect of producing feelings of calm and contentment in each other, and quite possibly in other mammals as well. That's not mysticism, it's just plausible.

Winning an Argument

Wed, 20 Jul 2005 23:27:49 GMT

One of my friends was recently invited to join a newly forming debate league. He said he would join, but not to put him on a team because he would bring his own. He has this plan: He will go around and talk himself up, acting like no one could possibly beat him in a debate so that people will think, "He's bitten off more than he can chew this time." Then he will bring me in on the team, and I will wipe the floor with everyone, and he will never have to pay for his cockiness.

I said, "I hope I can live up to your expectations," and he said, "I hope so too."

Anyway, this debate league thing got me thinking about arguments. People get into arguments all the time, and it is very common that, when in an argument, a person's goal is make the other participant see the error in their way. A person wants to win an argument by convincing their opponent that they are right.

Despite this common view of an argument, anyone who has ever been involved in organized debate knows how they work: Each side does everything they can to make its case, and then a third party decides who wins. And it's not just the artificial environment of organized debate, it is also our legal system, and our political system. All of these things are structured so that a third party decides the winner. No one who organized those structures held the naive view that a person involved in an argument would ever admit defeat.

Humans are Artificial

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 03:58:52 GMT

Humans are artificial.

My New Idea

Sun, 10 Jul 2005 00:25:31 GMT

Well, I have a new idea and I hope I can get many of your to participate. You see, I realized today that I would really like to have a way to find more music to enjoy. "It would be really nice," I thought, "if there was a website with a regularly updated list of songs to listen to."

There may already be such a website, but why would I think that someone else could make a better one than I could?

With that in mind I created a weblog at blogspot.com for the purpose of creating just such a regularly updated list of songs. The address is whattolistento.blogspot.com. Right now there is nothing there to listen to, because I haven't had any suggestions for songs. This is where you come in.

I was going to use the comments feature to get people to post songs, but the comments functionality leaves something to be desired¹, so I've decided that the best way to get suggestions is via email. If you have a song suggestion, and I'm sure you do, please email it to whattolistento@gmail.com. Along with your suggestion, I would like a handle to call you on the blog and a website where people can go to find out who made the suggestion. For the website your lj will do, of course, as will any other homepage or blog you have. Right now I'm looking for one suggestion per person per update, so don't burn yourself out on song suggestions by sending me a big list right now. Hopefully I will post a list of what to listen to on the blog every week.

If we all work together on this, we could all end up hearing a lot of great new music.

Being Sad

Sat, 09 Jul 2005 05:34:50 GMT

I think the most irritating thing about being unhappy is that it has a tendency to make people who care about me unhappy, or at least make them feel uncomfortable about being happy. It makes me want to say, "I am not unhappy to make you unhappy." Or perhaps, "It's bad enough that I feel unhappy, don't make it worse by letting it affect you."

When I feel unhappy, I am making the world a worse place. Talk about injury to insult.

What Comes Naturally

Fri, 08 Jul 2005 02:17:20 GMT

I was watching a bit of The Nature of Things today and the episode was on aggression. It should surprise no one to find out that small children are more physically aggressive than adolescents or adults. As the researcher on the program said, when they measure aggressive incidents in small children they count the number of incidents per half hour or hour, while in teenagers they count the number of incidents per month.

Anyway, they were talking to different experts who were speculating about why physical aggression is lower in adults, including adult animals such as apes. They said that there is a natural tendency toward solving problems with physical aggression and that it is socialized out of us.

Bullshit.

Alright, obviously physically aggressive acts are socialized out of us. What I really take issue with is the idea of our natural tendency towards physically aggressive acts. We cannot have a natural tendency towards a certain kind of action, we can only have a natural tendency towards a certain kind of action in a certain kind of environment. Heavy social influences are an environment, as is complete isolation from others of your species. It could be argued that some of these environments are natural and others are not, but blanketing the term "natural" on unsocialized environments is ridiculous. For any decent idea of what is natural, it is natural for apes to spend time around other apes. The only idea of natural that would suggest that a completely unsocialized environment is natural for humans is the one where everything done by humans is artificial while everything else is natural.

But really, it seems like we have to realize that the natural/artificial distinction, while it could have some technical usefulness in some cases, is bogus in common usage. Living things, including people, are part of the environment that shapes the conditions for living things. They are just as real and natural a part of this environment as the soil or the weather.