Sisyphus Unbound

“According to some, the punishment of the rock had only one purpose: to keep Sisyphus occupied and prevent him from hatching new schemes. But at the least expected moment, Sisyphus will devise something and he’ll come back to Earth...” - 2666, Roberto Bolaño

Of all the punishments in Greek mythology, few are as iconic as that imposed on Sisyphus. For ratting on Zeus, screwing around with Thanatos, and tricking Persephone, he was condemned to forever roll a boulder up a hill in Tartarus and having it roll back down again. His fate of endless futility earns him the sympathy of us moderns. But his tale also warns us of the hubris and uselessness of intelligence against authority, a message which is anathema to our revolutionary Zeitgeist. Is intelligence always a force opposed to authority? If so, which would win in a Hegelian slugfest? Or are they two sides of the same coin? And what of the different forms of intelligence? Let us seek to answer these questions intelligently.

Pumped Up Kicks

Bruce Lee claimed not to be afraid of the man who had practiced 10,000 kicks once each, but the man who had practised one kick 10,000 times. This seems prima facie a case of fox versus hedgehog in martial arts, with the hedgehog being the one-trick pony and the fox being the one with a wide repertoire of moves. Without running simulations like the Discovery Channel did for tigers fighting lions and so on, let us try to derive a definitive result to this debate.

Night of the Feeling Dead

For Halloween this year, I will be dressed as a philosophical zombie (p-zombie). By any measure it is the easiest costume, seeing as p-zombies are by definition behaviourally and hence sartorially indistinguishable from your garden variety Homo sapiens. But they are arguably the scariest of monsters as well. The parochialism of conscious beings leads them to consider only other conscious beings as suitable for entering into moral relations with, if that (although Shaun of the Dead provides a counterexample, with Shaun playing PlayStation games with zombie Ed). And given that our basis for believing in other minds is merely pragmatic, inductive faith, even the simple act of contemplating the possibility of p-zombies is sufficient to throw doubt on the rest of humanity. Other people would seem uncanny. It would be as if a genocide had been conducted stealthily in the heads of everyone else. All whom we love would be no more. (Of course some, like horror writer Thomas Ligotti, would consider the existence of consciousness to be the horrifying fact, but I venture it would be way more horrifying for those consciousnesses if other humans weren't conscious.)

Am-ing Myself

Triumphantly and anti-grammatically supreme I'll speak of 'am-ing myself'. I'll have stated a philosophy in just two words. - Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

This is the time of the year when people are too busy for anything other than are-ing themselves. All dreams of being someone else are put aside for the moment, and the price of being oneself must be paid before any new purchases made. We aren't are-ing ourselves; we are merely ourselves. Let us be ourselves then, so that we may better are ourselves when the time comes.

The Origin of Cognition in the Breakdown of the Caffeinated Mind

Ah, coffee. The sine qua non of modernity. And not merely the opium of the masses either. Alfréd Rényi once said, "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." Does coffee make me think better, or does it just make me think I'm thinking better? It feels like the former. Although, I hear a voice in my head asking, "And how would it feel if it was the latter, pray tell?"

Your Friendly Neighbourhood Philosopher

Deleuze and Guattari (D&G) note that the word "philo-sopher" comes from the Greek for "friend of wisdom". But how would philosophers fare as friends of people? In befriending a philosopher, would one also come closer to becoming friends with wisdom?

What criteria would we adopt in choosing philosophers as friends? The quality of their ideas or their writing? Their personalities or even their actual track record as friends to others? All valid considerations. Perhaps we shouldn't isolate any of these variables, and must instead treat each philosopher as a whole, as a person, which is surely what friendship demands of us. If, as Aristotle says, the best life is one engaged in reason, and true friendship is that in which persons of similar character exercise their virtues together, then philosophers are uniquely suited for friendship. These, then, are my choices in chronological order.

Consider the Hydra

The hydra (ὕδρα) is a polycephalic reptile native to Lake Lerna in Greece. The number of heads common to this species has been variously reported as five, seven, nine, or a hundred (the last known sighting of a hydra occurred more than three milennia ago, by a certain Heracles (a notable wildlife enthusiast of the day) so any knowledge we have of this creature has suffered from the Chinese whispers of time). Nonetheless, all accounts agree that the hydra regrows two heads for each one cut off, and has poisonous breath and blood.

Due to the overcompensatory nature of its response to trauma, Nassim Taleb has elected the hydra as the symbolic beast of antifragility. It roams the sands of Extremistan indifferent to danger, impervious to harm. The one known Black Swan for the hydra is cauterisation, so it seems the hydra has no natural predators. Yet it is not even sure that the hydra will survive the Blank Swan of my writing.