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.)

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.

Thinking en Passant

I read an interview of a chess hustler in New York expounding on his personal philosophy. It was certainly an interesting interview with an unusual character. His theories struck me with a few thoughts. But perhaps a disclaimer and aside first.

I sucked at chess for a child of my intelligence. I used to play against the computer in primary school. I knew the rules, sure, and the goal of the game as well, but I could never figure out how to string them together. My eyes saw material and nothing else, even though the software had fancy features to help you track legal moves, fields of influence, and so on. I saw only the surface level, playing it like a Democritean atomist (I nearly said reductionist, but that would be false because I saw nothing to reduce). Barren of abstractions, the chessboard is a mere particle accelerator, one governed by a physics which permits only annihilation, not transmutation (except the occasional promoted pawn).

Notes from the Lift

If you want to go to heaven, you gotta climb the stairway. Turns out the way to purgatory is by lift. I found out after my recent move. In a bid to optimise travel time from the ground floor to my apartment, I pressed the door-close button in the lift immediately after selecting my floor.

No response.

I tried again. Then it sunk in.

The door-close button does nothing. Not even placebo, because the delay was so long that I did not get any feeling of agency when the doors eventually closed. An idiot button. I'd long heard rumours purporting the existence of these mythical beasts, but to actually come face to face with one in the field. They say the best part of being a cryptozoologist is when you can drop the crypto-. Like that guy who found coelacanth on sale in some African market.

De Reader Dunno De Différance

Due to an untimely laptop crash recently, my reading program has been expedited. I have surely exceeded 100 books already this year. Which of course pales in comparison to Winston Churchill's alleged book-a-day even while Prime-Ministering. Nonetheless, here's a few things I noticed while reading during the past few months.

1. You know you're reading some serious shit when the author uses the word 'problematic' as a noun rather than an adjective.

2. Buckminster Fuller likes to omnioveruse compound neologisms and Heideggerian hyphens in his throughout-the-book prose.

3. You're not reading a book qua book or a newspaper qua newspaper if you're not flipping any pages.

4. It's interesting how every author aligns philosophers differently. One author may villify Plato, Descartes, Heidegger and Nietzsche and lionise Socrates, Hume and Popper, another may decry Socrates, Bentham and Mill and praise Hume and Kant, and yet another may criticise Kant, Descartes and Bentham and adopt Socrates, Hume, Mill and Nietzsche. And yet others just disagree with all of them. Makes one wonder if everyone was reading the same writings.

5. One man's epiphany is often another man's truism. But isn't a truism always-already just a truism however it is expressed? At least truisms are true, by definition.

6. Books with the words 'tractatus', 'principia', 'being' or 'critique' in their title are guaranteed to be difficult. Let's hope no one writes Tractatus Principia: A Critique of Being.

On the Nature of Cool

Being cool is a talent that begins where talent ends. Yet we find ourselves surrounded these days by those who seek to perfect the art of cool with no other talent. Such a pursuit can only be pretense, so those that do succeed must have a talent for mimicry. These we celebrate as actors, and we do not begrudge them their coolness - it is merely an occupational hazard.

Crouching T-Rex, Hidden Raptor

I'd always thought that if I had an intelligent, erudite roommate, we'd either get nothing done, or everything. But the frequency of my bedtime thoughts suggests that we would just keep each other awake with our epiphanies until we both died from lack of sleep.

I've had trouble sleeping pretty much all my life. But what was it that used to occupy my thoughts? There seems to be a K-T boundary, maybe even a Mohorovičić discontinuity, between my present and past selves, somewhere around 3 years ago (ironically these geological terms come from before that boundary, sometime in primary school when I used to love dinosaurs (and yes, that is K for Kretaceous)). I no longer know him. But is he buried and fossilised inside my mind, or was I within his, waiting to be exposed by the erosive processes of time?

How to Philosophise with a Tottenhammer, Part One

Some time back, I failed to win a debate despite having superior intellect and knowledge of the subject matter. It happened one night as I was watching an Arsenal match alone in the lounge. An Indian guy in a Spurs jersey joined me after a bit, asking me how the game had been so far. I said I'd just got here myself, but that the passing didn't seem too fluid. This led to a long discussion of football in general. Somewhere along the way, I made a passing comment about how Arsenal had been undercompensated for the sale of Fàbregas, arguably the world's third best midfielder. Which sparked the debate, whether he was indeed the third best in the world.

The Meta-Post

It's been a while since my last post, during which much has happened, as is often the case when I'm not meditating on top of a mountain, seeking divine afflatus for my next post. Of course, all these happenings themselves serve as plentiful inspiration for contemplation and composition. What's been missing is the time to actually contemplate and compose. Now that it's the holidays, will that time finally be available? Possibly. These holidays mark a new phase for me, where I will focus on learning and thinking. Nonetheless, a new series of posts is in conception; has long been so in fact, but I finally feel ready to tackle them (a few months from now).

This new series will build quasi-hierarchically, and topics covered will include alphabets, words, names, languages, stories, and mind. The observant reader has already realised that this list strongly resembles the content in Reflexive Reflections. Indeed, the ideas expounded there will be present, implicitly or explicitly, in this series. Perhaps some of them will be elaborated. Perhaps others will be refuted. There is still a process of exploration due to take place. But a coherent school of thought and space of ideas will be mapped out.

The Iota Point Manifesto

We live within a tranquil cataclysm. Humpty Dumpty has fallen off the wall. All the king's men won't be able to put this one together for sure; it is the world that has exploded into a maelstrom of motion. The shards rain upon other shards, hurtle past each other, smash into each other – even the shard that carries you. Thus are we are assailed on all sides by Values, even by the Value of No-values. Whatever your cause, you will find a prophet. The cacophony of exhortations drowns this violent space, screams Doppler-shifted beyond recognition. What will be our final fate?

Reflexive Reflections

There is no better place to begin than with this self-referential sentence. Yes, like so. After all, all things in this universe (and all universes!) are connected, so any place is as good as another. To be is to relate. Every single thing is linked to other things which in turn connect to yet others, forming networks that also connect to other networks, coalescing into a single network of everything, such that one quickly snowballs into infinity. What happens to one thing sends waves that ripple through infinity. One cannot contemplate something without taking into account its place in the network of things; to fully contemplate something is to contemplate infinity. And to contemplate infinity is to contemplate unity.

Concrete Thoughts

Architects must be really free, considering how much time they seem to devote to reading widely. Consider this debate (after the lecture). Perhaps it is the relic of a liberal arts education, or else built on that foundation. Possibly a soi-disant autodidactic Renaissance man could accumulate a comparable amount of knowledge, though shaped by individual preference which may prove inadequate in some areas during public discourse. Or do such intellectuals only seem unfathomably erudite because of our paucity of knowledge in those areas? After all, a study showed that participants who asked questions of their own specialty to outsiders were later appraised as being more knowledgeable by those outsiders.

On a side note, this reminds me how much I want to visit MAXXI. I'm still sceptical about parametricism as the future of architecture though; as interpreted thus far, its aesthetics are not natural nor immediate enough, at least to the untrained eye of the present public.

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The grand narrative of progress is shoved in our faces wherever we go. Since consciousness is bound to the illusory arrow of time granted us by thermodynamic entropy, the existence of psychological phenomena such as memory and (apparent) free will leads us to adopt that grand narrative. That presupposes a certain principle that guides free will toward progress, but the grand narrative itself reinforces the existence of that principle in a positive feedback loop. Such a tripartite Escherian structure cannot exist without any pillar; the grand narrative is necessary to justify der Wille zur Macht, that driving force of life, and der Wille is required for progress.