Tag Archives: philosophy

Link: ‘The Mind: Less Puzzling in Chinese?’

Posted on July 22, 2016 | 3 comments

In an essay at The New York Review of Books, writer Perry Link questions whether Western languages’ emphasis on using nouns over using verbs perhaps contributes to, or even creates, philosophical problems.

Link begins by explaining that:

Indo-European languages tend to prefer nouns, even when talking about things for which verbs might seem more appropriate. The English noun inflation, for example, refers to complex processes that were not a “thing” until language made them so. Things like inflation can even become animate, as when we say “we need to combat inflation” or “inflation is killing us at the check-out counter.” Modern cognitive linguists like George Lakoff at Berkeley call inflation an “ontological metaphor.” (The inflation example is Lakoff’s.)

When I studied Chinese, though, I began to notice a preference for verbs. Modern Chinese does use ontological metaphors, such as fāzhăn (literally “emit and unfold”) to mean “development” or xὶnxīn (“believe mind”) for “confidence.” But these are modern words that derive from Western languages (mostly via Japanese) and carry a Western flavor with them. “I firmly believe that…” is a natural phrase in Chinese; you can also say “I have a lot of confidence that…” but the use of a noun in such a phrase is a borrowing from the West.

Link points out that how we talk about things can shape our thinking. If we label something with a noun, that might lend some sort of existence to that something:

Ancient Chinese philosophers did discuss “being,” but to do it they used the words you, “there is,” and wu, “there is not,” both of which are fundamentally verbs. By contrast ancient Greek thinkers often conceived their puzzles in terms of nouns: What is “justice”? “Beauty”? “The good”? And so on.

I wanted to see whether “assuming that things exist just because nouns that refer to them exist” might cause problems for serious Western philosophers. I read Colin McGinn’s book The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World about the “mind-body problem”—which, briefly put, is the problem of how “mental substance” and “physical substance” can affect each other. Although a major problem in Western philosophy since Descartes, the question has scarcely been noticed in the history of Chinese philosophy. I much admire McGinn’s writing; I chose him purposefully as a powerful representative for the West.

At one point in his book, McGinn focuses on the curious fact that our perceptions of the world are often perceptions of things in space, and yet the perceptions themselves occupy no space. He writes:

Consider the visual experience of seeing a red sphere two feet away with a six-inch diameter. The object of this experience is of course a spatial object with spatial properties, but the experience itself does not have these properties: it is not two feet away from you and six inches in diameter. …When we reflect on the experience itself, we can see that it lacks spatial properties altogether.

For me, the crucial phrase here is “the experience itself.” Is there such a thing? The noun “experience” exists, but that is not the question. Does the experience exist? We might feel intuitively that it does. But does that intuition arise, in part, from the grammatical habit of using nouns like “experience” and assuming that they refer to things? Classical Chinese poets see, hear, and feel in all sorts of ways—they have no trouble “experiencing.” But they find no need to talk about “experience” as a noun. The modern Chinese word jīngyàn, “experience,” was invented to accommodate Western language.

Link also points out something that I’m often arguing to my students, that numbers and ideas — “mental things” — don’t need to exist:

McGinn goes on to point out that numbers, like the experience of red spots, do not occupy space. “We cannot sensibly ask how much space the number 2 takes up relative to the number 37,” he writes. “It is hardly true that the bigger the number the more space it occupies.” Then he writes:

To attribute spatial properties to numbers is an instance of what philosophers call a category-mistake, trying to talk about something as if it belonged to a category it does not belong to. Only concrete things have spatial properties, not abstract things like numbers or mental things like experiences of red.

In my imagination an ancient Chinese philosopher might well accept McGinn’s point, but then ask him: why do you talk about “mental things”? Is that not also a category-mistake? If I see a red spot, do I not simply see a red spot? The red spot, yes, is a thing, but “I see” is not a thing. I see is I see. If you change it into “my sight” or “my experience of seeing,” you are performing a grammatical act, but that grammatical act has no power to change the way the world is. Your perplexity about how two “things” relate comes only from your grammar.

Link concludes thus, focusing on language contexts of philosophical problems:

Once one enters an Indo-European language, the mind-body problem indeed is hard, and I had not been trying to solve it on that turf. At most, I have discovered only a question: are people who think in Indo-European languages better off because their languages lead them to clear conceptualization of an important puzzle, or are thinkers in Chinese better off because their language gets them through life equally well without the puzzle?

After reading this, I wonder whether Link’s point applies not just to philosophy but also to Buddhist ideas about seeing what things are real.

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Ideas aren’t real: A classroom discussion

Posted on October 31, 2015 | 5 comments

 

The paint doesn't know why it's peeling, nor does it seem to care.

The paint doesn’t know why it’s peeling, nor does it seem to care.

My students are trying to figure out what’s real.

I challenged my class of high school writers, as part of our study of argument, to define the word “real.” After a couple days of discussion, we came up with a tentative definition: something is real if it can be seen or touched or proved to be present.

So, physical material is real. If it’s something I wouldn’t want to hit against my head, it’s real. But ideas, which can’t been seen, are not real.

Someone said that the desk she was sitting at seemed real. I said, the materials are real, but the idea of that object being a “desk” is just an idea. My dog, which can’t understand language as we do, still goes around objects rather than through them, but he doesn’t know what an object is named or how it can be used.

One student asked, if I have an idea to make a desk, and then I make a desk, how did that thought become real? Two things, I said: 1. How ideas in the mind cross over to the body, nobody can yet explain, but 2., what she built was still not a “desk” — it’s a new arrangement of physical things.

Another student asked whether atoms were real. We defined atoms as particles that make up all objects. They are composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons. We discussed the parts of this definition, including that the size of an atom is to an orange as an orange is to planet Earth. (An idea contained in this video. See also this post.) But such an explanation requires us to use our imaginations, which is a turn away from the physical world itself. We also discussed what a proton is, and how it’s got “positive charge,” and how this charge is a “fundamental property,” which is another way of saying, scientists can’t yet explain how or where this charge arises. 

And so, atoms are not real things that can be seen or touched. Atoms, rather, are explanatory ideas, and ideas are not real. Atoms are part of a scientific story, an interpretation, of how the world works. Physical matter itself doesn’t need to understand itself. Things don’t think. Only people think, and what we think are ideas, and ideas are not physical things.

Now, it can be useful to have science ideas about the world. If we want to alter the physical world — say, to build a house from wood or undergo surgery to fix a disease — it’d be nice to have the most useful ideas possible about how the house-building or body-repairing should go. Where early doctors would prescribe bloodletting to cure a variety of illnesses, modern doctors don’t. We like modern medicine because its ideas seem more successful at getting cures.

But, of course, modern medicine isn’t perfect. Much remains to be explained, to be mentally modeled. I suggested that there could be fictional ideas (which we don’t care if they are realistic), like how Greek mythology says Zeus turned into a bull, and nonfictional ideas (which we’d like to be as realistic as possible), like scientific interpretations, that atoms have parts called protons, electrons, and neutrons. And the nonfiction ideas are never perfect, are never worthy of being called “The Truth,” because they must remain open to revision, as new ideas are learned. The story of science remains imperfect.

 

So, why do we care about science? Our ancestors got by without it. The fact that we’re here means our ancestors knew enough to survive in the world (get food, form shelter, make babies, raise ‘em). However, science ideas are now taught in school because it’s important for citizens now to know these so as to be able to “join society,” as one student said. And we’d like the people we trust to do physical things — like engineers and doctors — to agree amongst themselves as to the best ideas for doing things. I don’t want the person designing the bridges I drive on to choose a different idea for gravity than what’s commonly accepted (unless his ideas are shows, through argument and evidence, to be better, the way science is supposed to proceed). 

So even though what schools teach are just imperfect stories, mere ideas, and not reality itself [ I wonder what a school that didn’t teach ideas would look like], these imperfect ideas are what we have to tie each other together into a society. If each individual had his/her own ideas about what’s real, that might be chaotic, a student said.

So we take part in civil, communal society by sharing some ideas about the best ways to think about physical reality.  And yet, of course, we shouldn’t take these ideas too seriously. I think it’s useful to form an idea about ideas. I told students that the reason we’re talking about ideas and reality is that it can be useful for them to have a theory of knowledge, and to question how it is that ideas are accepted or revised. When one student said he’d question his other teachers about how things are known in those classes, I said he could, but to remember that when Socrates asked too many questions, he got killed. Sometimes, people who like to believe that their ideas are real don’t like to have their ideas questioned.

Some students said it got them upset to think about these things, to ask these questions, to think of reality this way. I said I wasn’t trying to upset them, but that I like to think that ideas aren’t real because then it lets me think of new ideas. I also said, maybe it’s helpful to think that ideas aren’t real — real physical things themselves don’t give us ideas for how to change the things. Only ideas can direct us to change the physical things — change comes from the unreal.

A student asked if students’ grades merely tell how well they learn the unreal stories.  Yeah, I said. And I said that that’s why I like having discussions, so I can provoke students to ask these questions. Another student asked at the end of class yesterday: so schools brainwash us? And I said, well, kinda, but I’m having this discussion to help you unbrainwash yourself — unless that’s just a different kind of brainwash!

 

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Perpetuating Reality: Time is not real

Posted on April 26, 2015 | Leave a comment

Two students in my Rhet. & Comp. class claimed on Friday that time does not exist. I’m writing this now, describing a memory as an idea, and if you’re reading this now, you’re constructing these words and sentences into your own abstract ideas.

One of my students said she’d like to discuss time’s reality for her assignment to craft a philosophical argument. So we start by defining time as that which flows along, carrying all existing things in its current (the current moment). Clocks don’t measure this time, because clocks just measure events — electric clocks measure AC cycles or quartz crystal movements; atomic clocks measure the behavior of certain atoms — and clocks do not measure time itself.

We talked about how objects degrade over time — metal left outside rusts, wood breaks down. But this “wearing down” of physical objects isn’t caused by time but by the action of other physical things on this objects — chemical reactions cause rusting, mechanical erosion causes scratches, etc.

Physical objects can only be affected by materials and energy — time, being neither of these, does not exist physically.

So perhaps time exists only in our ideas, our minds, our conscious understanding. We can look at an old building and see the rust on the door hinge and the softening brick and think that this house is old. But then, we can think anything.

But objects exist in a perpetual now — there is no past, no future, for an object. (And even this description threatens to fall into thinking of objects as having their own form of consciousness — it’s hard not to think this way.) A homeowner might look at a rusting hinge and think that it should be replaced, because the hinge no longer lives up to the homeowner’s expectation of what should be. But someone, like an artist or scientist, who just wants to see what is might just see the object in the present moment without regard to what it was or could be.

As an artist myself, I can enjoy looking at dilapidated barns, for example, and appreciate their falling-down-ness, whereas if I owned those barns, I’d see trouble and expense and a physical world that wasn’t matching my expectations. (I can recognize that feeling, though, when I have a certain class session that isn’t happening the way I’d like it to be happening.)

It’s such a part of my consciousness, of my way of understanding reality, to think of time as being an ongoing thread (or flowing river) connecting all my experiences throughout my life. I suspect that this is one of the features of the cultural software that was constructed as a framework for thinking as I grew up.

I developed in the late 1970s/early 1980s version of this software, in which certain things — TV, microwaves, nuclear arms race — already existed, and in which certain values — divorce is normal, women have careers, and it’s OK for boys to cry — were normal. I suspect that the 1930s-era software my grandparents grew up with (during which time the metaphor would not have been “software,” of course — but player piano rolls? timing gears?) had different technology and different values and so they no doubt have trouble understanding things like the satellite television remote and the value of racial and ethnic diversity. No doubt I myself will find it difficult to understand change as my system-software ages. But this is also why it’s pointless for old people to say “In MY day, we didn’t do that” — as long as one is still alive, one might as well adapt.

So, yeah — there may be no time at all. It’s so easy for me to think of the past as these experiences I remember, and the future as things I will do, that it’s easy to overlook that the only time I’m really alive is right now (see also here). I’ve got 20 years of journals — but “years of” anything is an empty idea. What I should say is that I have notebooks and print-outs (and computer files, even) that are marked with dates from 20 years ago, but these notebooks, etc., still exist now, and when I read them, I’m reading them now. I’ve long tried to figure out how to understand the writer of these past writings, which writer’s handwriting looked like mine, and some of what the writer said sounded like something I’d say, but which I don’t remember saying it. Was it Younger-Me? But Younger-Me is not Now-Me, so then, is it a different person? Well, maybe it might as well be. My old writings are just ink on paper that exists in that form today. My memory of having written a certain page (or my not-having such a memory) doesn’t really matter. Without memory, there is no past, anyway.

And probably there is no “reality,” either, other than whatever “reality”-image we construct in our minds, our mental models of the world. Even terms like “reality” and “the world” are abstractions, and what really seems to exist — matter and energy, physical things — exist without the names of “matter” and “energy” or “atoms” or any science label. We can think about the physical world — that’s what science is, thoughts about the physical world — but we don’t really know what’s there. We perpetuate reality only by perpetuating the idea of reality.

And if there’s no time-river, and no time-thread, then there’s no place for events or experiences to be saved, and so there’s no such thing as “truth” that any statement or story could correspond to. So in a criminal court, the verdict of any trial is the constructed story that the jury finds most realistic.

And if there’s no time-river, no time-thread, then there’s no time in which one could jump (it’s so easy to think of time-as-distance this way), and so there can be no time travel. Time might be how we explain change, or we extrapolate from perceiving change (which perception requires memory), but time itself doesn’t need to exist. (Though, of course, some abstract explanations for how matter-and-energy work invoke the idea of time, such as space-time).

It’s so hard for a conscious, abstracting mind to escape abstraction. Abstracting is its habit, its process; abstracting is what the mind does. It’s exhausting, sometimes. Yet, I live in a world of abstractions — following rules and curricula, teaching theories and ideas — those are what keep the physical roof over my head and the physical food coming to my body. But no ideas are real in the same way that anything I can touch is real.  That may be why I so desperately enjoy, at certain moments, letting go of thinking and lying down flat on my back and just not-abstracting (which can’t be directed by thinking but can seem to be allowed to happen) — some people might call this mediation, but I often just fall asleep. This not-thinking allows me to just be now and not think about anything else.

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Living outside of stories, or When does Lennie poop?

Posted on August 8, 2014 | Leave a comment
There is symbolic value in this photo only if you want there to be symbolic value there.

There is symbolic value in this photo only if you want there to be symbolic value.

Where do literary characters go when they’re not on the page?

When I watch outtakes from a movie, I can see the actors stop being the characters and return to being actors. Of course, they never stopped being the actors; the characters they play are just ideas.

And so are the characters in a fiction or nonfiction narrative. They’re just ideas, which is to say, they aren’t physically real at all. You can’t touch Sherlock Holmes in “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” you can’t touch Abraham Lincoln in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” and neither you nor I can touch the person who, according to my journal today, got a cavity filled yesterday. Yesterday-me is not who I am now.

When we tell stories, we turn real (nonfiction) or imagined (fiction) experiences into ideas. What one sees as a real person with particular traits (this height, that eye color, a certain laugh, a tone of voice) becomes just “Jim” or “a tall man with blue-green eyes,” etc. We give up particulars, abstracting the experience so we can communicate it. And while we can give in-depth descriptions of particular things, we are at best only specifying an idea, not really conveying the experience itself. To tell a reasonably compact story, we limit our descriptions to just what we think are the most-important things (and, I suggest, choosing what was most-important may not be a conscious, intentional process).

As we tell our own stories and take in others’, we get more efficient at turning experience into stories, so that not only does the process start to seem automatic but we may even start making our stories interesting in themselves, as entertaining abstractions. For instance, if we decide to tell an experience as a comic narrative, we may choose funny words, reveal things in order to create tension or suspense, and even exaggerate certain aspects of the story, all in service of making the story itself into a work of art. Two people who witness the same event may turn it into very different stories.

The broader concept here is that when we turn our experiences into stories (and even as we store our experiences as remembered narratives), we are no longer dealing with physical reality but with ideas. Particularly when we read or listen to others’ stories, we are getting not the experiences that they had but their  interpretations of those experiences into abstractions. This can lead us astray if we take the stories as somehow more real than reality. It has taken me years to learn this.

One issue with making stories is editing — what to leave in and what to crop out. A story is usually organized around around a central theme — say, all the times I went to the E.R. — or around a plot that shows how characters’ actions result in a logical or likely consequence — for instance, in “Of Mice and Men,” how George and Lennie’s choices result in two deaths. The storyteller must include the parts needed to tell a satisfying narrative, and exclude parts would be off-topic or digressive. When information is organized thematically, around a topic or plot, it is not necessarily complete chronologically (or in other ways). (On the other hand, texts that are organized chronologically, like my daily journals, describe all the things in the order they happened (more or less), but these things may not have any connection to each other and may be thematically ordered into several different themes or plots.)

We live chronologically, where a bunch of unrelated stuff happens in one day, but we mostly tell stories thematically, skipping around in time.

When we read a story such as “Of Mice and Men,” which tells about decisions and deaths across three days in the lives of characters George and Lennie in less than 120 pages, chronological time will be skipped. We don’t know what the characters are doing in each moment of the day — for instance, we never see Lennie poop. Not that we need to see Lennie poop — that’s not the organizing theme of the story! But the story we’re told includes only those aspects that lead up to, that contribute to, the murders at the end of the book. It’s a story about murders; it’s a story where the plot is central (more than, say, the characters).

But, back to the original question in this post, where are George and Lennie when they’re not on the page? Perhaps they are occupying entirely different novels, essays, or poems — George’s travel memoir, “Me and Lennie,” Lennie’s Montaigne-style ponderings, “Why I Like to Touch Soft Things,” or Curley’s poem, “Ode to Things I Hate about Guys Bigger Than Me.” And if these characters were real people, they would surely have done things like wiping the sweat off their brows as they did fieldwork, and maybe stopping to appreciate the summer flowers.

In other words, the characters, if they lived like real people, would not have known that they were in a plot at all. They saw things, met people, had various and disparate experiences, and only at what constitutes the end of the story did George decide that he had to kill Lennie. Up until what occupies the last minutes (in story-time) of the book, none of the characters in the book would have had any idea of what the plot was — in our own lives, we can see things like plot (causal relationships) only in retrospect. There’s no such thing as foreshadowing until after the fact (as the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20). And in fact, there are no such organizing principles as theme or plot in our lives as we live them. This is to say, theme and plot are aspects only of stories, and not of real life. Of course, if we are interviewed and asked something like, “What was the most important moment in your life,” we may be able to come up with an answer, but of course, this would be an arbitrary choice and an abstraction. One person could write about her own life experiences in many different ways, say, as comedy, as tragedy, etc. — and there’s no one correct story of her life. Perhaps all meaning that is derived from our experiences is exactly that — derived, a result of our interpretation — and there’s no meaning that’s inherent in our experiences.

In a story like “Of Mice and Men,” we see characters on what will probably (hopefully, for their sake) be the worst day of their lives. I feel bad for them — I wouldn’t want to be judged by how I acted on the worst day of my life. I wonder what these characters would’ve been like in other contexts — say, if they were paid for their labor and took the afternoon off to go on a picnic, say. (Or these other possibilities.)

At least, on a picnic, they would’ve been eating not abstractions but particular foods — not “an apple,” but this apple, with its particular shape and spots and taste. I too like to return to particulars, to draw my attention away from the abstractions of words and ideas and toward the particulars around me: this bite of sandwich, this smooth pen, this slanted sidewalk — and all the other things that seem physically real and thus don’t need my (and our) names for them. When my attention is directed toward real, particular, physical things, I am able to live outside of labels and principles and stories myself. I can be undefined, as can everything around me. It’s not a feeling that lasts long, but it’s kinda wonderful to not have to live as if I were a character myself, trapped in some plot, some theme, my life always having to mean something — how tedious that would be!

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Links: TV stories replace novels, etc.

Posted on March 2, 2014 | Leave a comment

1. This post at The Dish about people having their need for stories fulfilled by watching TV rather than by reading books reminds me of a similar thing Kurt Vonnegut said about why short stories aren’t purchased by and read in magazines during the age of TV as they were before TV. (I can’t seem to find this particular quote online.)

2. But I did find these collections of wonderful KVJ quotes here and here.

3. Fiction as moral, and writing fiction as a process of inquiry. See also my recent posting on fiction-as-morality here.

4. Tolstoy on meaning and death, from a recent review excerpted here:

And by accepting existence as it was they accepted its cessation too.

5. Secular societies and spiritual experiences.

6. A sarcastic-but-excellent column about why guns don’t belong on any campus.

7. We study philosophy to have our own perspectives challenged. Some great bits in this interview with philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, starting with philosophy and kids:

How early do you think children can, or should, start learning about philosophy?

I started really early with my daughters. They said the most interesting things that if you’re trained in philosophy you realize are big philosophical statements. The wonderful thing about kids is that the normal way of thinking, the conceptual schemes we get locked up in, haven’t gelled yet with them. When my daughter was a toddler, I’d say “Danielle!” she would very assuredly, almost indignantly, say, “I’m not Danielle! I’m this!” I’d think, What is she trying to express? This is going to sound ridiculous, but she was trying to express what Immanuel Kant calls the transcendental ego. You’re not a thing in the world the way there are other things in the world, you’re the thing experiencing other things—putting it all together. This is what this toddler was trying to tell me. Or when my other daughter, six at the time, was talking with her hands and knocked over a glass of juice. She said, “Look at what my body did!” I said, “Oh, you didn’t do that?” And she said, “No! My body did that!” I thought, Oh! Cartesian dualism! She meant that she didn’t intend to do that, and she identified herself with her intentional self. It was fascinating to me.

And kids love to argue.

They could argue with me about anything. If it were a good argument I would take it seriously. See if you can change my mind. It teaches them to be self-critical, to look at their own opinions and see what the weak spots are. This is also important in getting them to defend their own positions, to take other people’s positions seriously, to be able to self-correct, to be tolerant, to be good citizens and not to be taken in by demagoguery. The other thing is to get them to think about moral views. Kids have a natural egotistical morality. Every kid by age three is saying, “That’s not fair!” Well, use that to get them to think about fairness. Yes, they feel a certain sense of entitlement, but what is special about them? What gives them such a strong sense of fairness? They’re natural philosophers. And they’re still so flexible.

There’s a peer pressure that sets in at a certain age. They so much want to be like everybody else. But what I’ve found is that if you instill this joy of thinking, the sheer intellectual fun, it will survive even the adolescent years and come back in fighting form. It’s empowering.

and on philosophical progress:

There is, among some scientists, a real anti-philosophical bias. The sense that philosophy will eventually disappear. But there’s a lot of philosophical progress, it’s just a progress that’s very hard to see. It’s very hard to see because we see with it. We incorporate philosophical progress into our own way of viewing the world. … It’s amazing how long it takes us, but we do make progress. And it’s usually philosophical arguments that first introduce the very outlandish idea that we need to extend rights. And it takes more, it takes a movement, and activism, and emotions, to affect real social change. It starts with an argument, but then it becomes obvious. The tracks of philosophy’s work are erased because it becomes intuitively obvious. The arguments against slavery, against cruel and unusual punishment, against unjust wars, against treating children cruelly—these all took arguments.

and

What was intuition two generations ago is no longer intuition; and it’s arguments that change it. We are very inertial creatures. We do not like to change our thinking, especially if it’s inconvenient for us. And certainly the people in power never want to wonder whether they should hold power. So it really takes hard, hard work to overcome that.

and on how to teach philosophy:

How do you think philosophy is best taught?

I get very upset when I’m giving a lecture and I’m not interrupted every few sentences by questions. My style is such that that happens very rarely. That’s my technique. I’m really trying to draw the students out, make them think for themselves. The more they challenge me, the more successful I feel as a teacher. It has to be very active. Plato used the metaphor that in teaching philosophy, there needs to be a fire in the teacher, and the sheer heat will help the fire grow in the student. It’s something that’s kindled because of the proximity to the heat.

and

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A summary of my fundamental (and temporary) beliefs

Posted on January 29, 2014 | Leave a comment

Every so often, I define what it is that I’m really interested in. Somehow, these definitions don’t feel right for long, or they feel too dull. But I’m still trying to get a grasp on what I really want to do and enjoy doing, and tonight these are:

*  I’ve posted several times recently about my frustrations with fiction. I think I can save readers a lot of work by saying that my current perspective is that the ideas we have — the ideas we’ve learned in school, received from family and friends, read from the great wise elders, and even those we came up with ourselves — are insufficient. (OK, I realize I’m trying to drag others into this with me by using “we.” Correct this to “I” and “my ideas are insufficient.”) I feel lately like there are books-full of ideas, and I have a mind-full of ideas, that model the world and try to explain reality but actually pull my attention away from direct experience of my present surroundings and my present thought and from even not-thinking.

* I don’t feel I’ll be done with this re-evaluation anytime soon, or ever, because part (not the whole, but part) of being alive is letting go of all things I’ve ever already done or thought. I just don’t care that much about things I’ve written or photographed or done or thought in the past. (I used to think I was dumber in every moment of the past before now — I try not to think that way now. I try to look at stuff I did in the past as just different from now, but not necessarily worse or less accurate.)

* Corollary: I had an idea today about how maybe all my prior writings — notes, journals, poems, blog posts, etc. — are perhaps not meant to be published (since I don’t usually feel like doing that, but I tell myself sometimes that I should, and then I feel guilty that I haven’t) but instead are meant to be just ideas that I could go back and read and write about again in the future.

* Any work I’ve done feels dead to me. I feel no real connection to anything I’ve done, especially writing from more than a few months ago. My journal notebooks are no longer viable, unfinished, once all their pages are filled. I put them on the shelf and start another, unfilled one.

* I think lack and absence are judgments I make only in the abstract, and likewise, when I judge anything (as adequate or inadequate), I’m comparing it to an abstract standard. Problem is, I think standards and comparisons are arbitrary, and so judgments are bullshit, and that when I actually look at the real things around me, I see only fullness, wholeness, completion. Even the worn stocking cap on the desk in front of me now is “worn” only in my judgment. The hat is the hat — it doesn’t even need the words I’m using to call it the hat.

* Words are arbitrary. Words are abstract. Words are bound to fail to capture or even fully reflect reality. Reality is beyond words, outside of words. If words and reality were infinite lines, they would neither intersect nor be parallel.

* Metaphors are comparisons, are simultaneously right and wrong, and so are also bullshit.

* I tend to look at the world in human terms, in my terms, so often. It’s easy to say that a tree’s branches are “reaching for the sky,” but that’s what a person does. I have no idea what a tree’s consciousness looks like, or what would even be comparable.

* I have no idea what any other creature’s consciousness looks like. I think I catch my dog doing some things that resemble human consciousness, but that’s probably because he lives with us and, to some extent, may not fully have an animal’s mind anymore (as I once heard someone say that dogs aren’t quite people but also aren’t quite animals anymore). So whenever I write fiction that attempts to imagine what, say, an animal or inanimate object thinks, I’m basically turning that thing into a person.

* I like trying to imagine the inner life of a tree or a dog or a chair because, basically, human characters bore me. I’m aware that this position may indicate a certain misanthropic or autistic tendency in me, but I’m also aware that I seem to be as human as most others, so there. But these others tend to bore me, with their fascination with ball-game-playing and beer-drinking and sex-having.

* I’m also aware that I sometimes am fascinated by these things as well, and that I’m not elevating my own human status by criticizing others. But it’s lonely being a humble genius, too.

* I’m almost 40 and I realize that such abstractions as number-counting are also bullshit in terms of having significance. I have awoken and done things each of the previous nearly 14,600 days, and I’m aware that I have some limited number of days to continue to be conscious, yet I’m not sure that any of these things matter. In a way, I completely fulfill whatever it means to be alive by being alive. There’s nothing I have to do before I could die. Could happen anytime. But it’s pretty nice to be alive, and I hope to continue to do so for many thousands more days. But I just don’t think it matters — I don’t see any importance in an amount of living measured in duration of time.

* I also don’t see any importance in measuring a life by money earned or titles granted or projects completed. I’m not sure we need to measure life at all — that could be another bullshit idea. I’m not interested in what the measurement of life, or of a life, is — but I am interested in the measuring.

* I’m kinda interested in writing as if I were a wise sage, a brilliant guru, a Liver of Life — but I’m humble enough to know that I’d be bullshitting others, and I’m also humble enough to know that I don’t really care whether what I write is of interest to others. I don’t mean that to be rude — I’m glad to have people read what I write, and I’m glad if it intrigues or inspires others. I’ve been much inspired and intrigued by others’ work that I’ve read. But I also know that thinking about what others think of my work doesn’t help me to do my work. It’s bad if people dislike my work; it’s worse if they overpraise it. Being ignored is something I can live with, and do my work with.

* I’m aware that this summary has gotten far too long. But I’m a complicated person (or like to think that I am) and I’m certainly a wordy person, and nobody had to read this far, even me.

* I’m aware that there are other smart people who have said and written many smart things, but I’m feeling like it’s OK for me (at least, at this stage of my intellectual development) to ignore others. Maybe it’s more valuable now for me to cut out other ideas than it is to try to take it in and argue with it. This reminds me of something I read in the past: an essay by Richard Hugo in which he advises his students to ignore what he says if it doesn’t help them — your important arguments are with yourself, he wrote. (I just checked with this source: it seems Hugo was quoting from Yeats. When I was young, I wondered how writers could quote each other so easily, offhandedly. Now that I’m older, I realize how off-hand it is. Certain ideas, certain writers’ words, stick in my brains, become part of that world-model I carry around in my mind.)

* I’m aware that that previous paragraph, if it isn’t exactly self-contradicting, is sorta that way, and I sometimes believe that there’s truth in paradox.

* I also don’t believe in truth. I’m not saying that a person shouldn’t try to be as honest as one can be when testifying in court, but that if truth is some sort of correspondence of a word-statement to reality, that’s bullshit because words and reality don’t intersect, as I said above. I just wanted to be clear about that.

* Finally, I realize that I need to finish this up because I’m getting tired and that I kept writing because it felt good to write, though this text may not feel so good to me tomorrow, but I think it feels good enough (in my memory, at least — I haven’t re-read it, and probably won’t before posting it) to post tonight. I feel like I’ve been laying down some charming prose (which is, of course, not charming to admit), but I could be fooling myself.  (I might always be fooling myself, or is that false modesty?) I could go back and cut out all the bad parts — but then, eh, this whole thing would fall apart. It’s just a text, after all, and it doesn’t matter what it says so much as that I enjoyed spending some of my life-time’s consciousness writing it. That seems sorta bombastically profound — I don’t mean it that way. I don’t mean anything that way — or, let’s say that I meant what I wrote as I wrote it tonight. But I might think of these things in different ways tomorrow.

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Links: Free college for all, crap jobs, math, etc.

Posted on January 4, 2014 | Leave a comment

1. What college would cost taxpayers if it were free for students. I’m starting to think lately that maybe no one should expect to profit from teaching people or healing people.

2. School of Rock actors, plus 10 years.

3. One explanation for middle-class decline: Even crap jobs paid better 50 years ago.

4. “Would math exist without us?,” continued.

5. How some people follow the Bible literally, but selectively.

6. “Surprising benefits” of smog: A parody and/or a display of rhetorical exercise?

7. SNL’s “I wish it was Christmas today” (aka “Christmas time is here”).

8. “A Comprehensive History of the ‘Cups’ Phenomenon.”

9. Sesame Street clips of the ’70s.

10. Scraps by Emily Dickinson.

11. “The Poem as ‘Thing‘”

12. From Brain Pickings: A list of the best psychology and philosophy books of ’13.

13. Andrew Sullivan says Fox News is anti-Christian.

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The past is not -7: Remembering to forget

Posted on January 2, 2014 | Leave a comment

I’m not sure it helps to think of time in a linear way, as if time were on a number line (with the present at zero, the past as negative numbers, and the future as positive numbers). This seems to suggest that we could time-travel by jumping to some other spot on the number line. Maybe the past is only memories, the future is only conjecture, and the present is — is the only thing that’s real but even the present can’t be defined.

Hell, time may not exist outside of one’s consciousness at all.

But what I have in the present moment is a lot of pages of writings that seem to be in my handwriting (and those things that are not in my handwriting — those things I typed — do feel a little less mine, somehow). I’m glad I have these writings. Sometimes I can look back and read about things I said I did but no longer remember doing. Sometimes I’m surprised by how wise I was years ago, or that an idea that seems recent was in my mind several years ago. (Sometimes this makes me wonder if I’m really ever doing anything new, or just refining — or spiraling back over — things I first said 20 or more years ago.)

And I’m tempted, at times, to look through these older writings and get passages to write here on the blog. There are some reasons why I don’t do this more often, namely that doing this seems boring. I don’t feel like I really wanna go back over all those old things. A dip into the past, a glimpse back, are fine, but I don’t want to spend a lot of time typing up stuff I wrote when I was not the person that I am now.

Besides, I’m tempted to not be limited creatively by what I did in the past. I want to be doing new things, not thoroughly wringing out whatever life was in an ideas I had once. Ideas come all the time when I’m open to them, and I’d rather keep having new ideas than feel some obligation to a past idea just because I’ve spent a lot of time on it. I want to do what I want to do, creatively speaking, and what I want to do is keeping having new ideas — by “ideas” here, I mean new perspectives, new understandings, new points of view. But even modest ideas are new ideas.

I’m not explaining this well (a familiar feeling: words suck, and yet, they’re what we have, unless we also have other things).

But, hells bells, that’s OK, too. Why does every explanation need to be good? Eff that. I’m alive and I do stuff and I think stuff and that’s all. I mean, my writings are, in a way, just a by-product of my consciousness, anyway. My texts are by-products of the creative process, of the mind engaged in writing, of my conscious mind seeming to take dictation from the mind-voice that is the source of the words. It’s easy to think of the writing as the product, rather than as the by-product — it’s the writing that sells, that can be shared, not the experience of writing, and yet, the libraries and used book shops give away books filled with ink all the time. Empty books would have more value than a lot of the books filled with words. It’s easy to focus on the thing, the material object, rather than on the immaterial, subjective experience, and yet, why would anyone do something just to make a dead product.

And one of my older ideas is that my completed journals feel dead to me. Once I’ve filled all the pages with my writing, the notebook goes on a shelf and I get a new one that feels more vital. Of course, the words I wrote even moments ago are already past, and dead to me. This is how we live, of course, with every moment being new; revision pretends that things can be done over, re-lived. I understand that writing is not speech, can’t always be compared to speech, and yet writing that is worried over is dead in a way that speech never is — and how weird it’d be if we went back and revised our conversations. Sure, sometimes we wish we hadn’t said a thing, but, eh, life goes on. Apologies can be good. But we don’t get to revise our lives, of course; those continue. Each moment is new.  (However one defines “moment,” which is awkward of course. I like the metaphor of a mind crystallizing, coming into focus, around a feeling, idea, or perceived pattern, say, like recognizing a face, either a real person’s face or a face in a cloud). Living is fluid, is an act, is a process — we often will talk about a life, or one’s life, as if it were a thing, an object, when of course it is nothing but an abstraction.

All is fluid, is act, is process — or I should use verbs here and say, flowing, acting, processing (and these verbs are, of course, as abstract as the nouns are). And these labels we use are, of course, our own mental shorthand — these labels are not anywhere in nature, in physical reality (unless some human has written them there).

And I’ve said this before. But that’s OK, too. It’s a funny thing to be alive. I’ve long thought that there can be no statement of a meaning of life — statements are inadequate. We experience. We can think about what we see, and then we can think about it again. We do things whether we understand what we do or not. Maybe we never know why we do a particular thing. Maybe that’s OK.

And I think it’s fine that we try to understand things through words and labels and concepts and models and such, just so long as we remember that all of this has very little purchase on or intersection with our experiences, our bodies, and the things our bodies interact with. So long as we remember to forget all we think we know.

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Links: Teacher movies, teaching philosophy, etc.

Posted on January 1, 2014 | Leave a comment

1. This post about teacher movies makes a valuable point about education and how we talk about it in general terms but this makes little rhetorical sense, since education (maybe more than almost any broad aspect of our lives) is irreducibly a matter of what particular individuals learn, how individuals come to understand the world of ideas and facts but only through the framework of their own perspectives:

It would be a huge step forward if we could conceive of the people in our education system—students, teachers, families, administrators—as human rather than cartoonish media representations or, perhaps worse, mere data points. Policies not only have human consequences but they are also implemented by humans—invariably flawed, often self-seeking, sometimes incompetent humans.   It’s humans all the way down.  The language we use should reflect this and not carelessly cede ground to abstractions like “African-American males” or “the lowest-third percentile” or even “teachers unions.”  This is an acknowledgment that idealized categories, run amok, can in fact short-circuit the hard work of ensuring each individual student, in their individual family context, neighborhood, and cultural background, receives a high-quality education.

And the fact that while education is a system, learning is a particular, even private, matter, is the reason that any new educational system that attempts to treat students as indistinguishable, like Common Core (in which “common” is used to mean that every student learns the same things, in the same ways), is doomed to irrelevance.

2. Isaac Asimov’s 1964 predictions for the year 2014.

3. New Year’s traditions as religious/magical.

4. A compelling text by Ta-Nehisi Coates: “The Myth of Western Civilization.”

5. Dan Savage’s review of Sarah Palin’s Christmas book. (Via The Dish).

6. Jason Silva and awe.

7. The Scottish tradition of Hogmanay.

8. Miguel de Unamuno on consciousness.

9. An article suggesting reading on tablets is different from reading on paper, vis-a-vis getting engaged in narrative.

10. The New York Times editorializes about Finnish education. Interesting link here to Finland’s curriculum, including philosophy education:

5.13 PHILOSOPHY
Philosophical thinking deals with reality as a whole, its diverse perception and human activity in it. The special nature of philosophy lies in its way of structuring problems conceptually, rationally and through discussion. Upper secondary school studies in philosophy will support students’ individual development and promote the general learning and thinking skills that they will need in a changing and complex society. The theoretical themes studied in philosophy are necessary to form an understanding of cultural heritage and contemporary culture.
The practical significance of philosophy is based on the fact that students will learn to structure questions about values, norms and meanings in conceptual terms. Studies in philosophy will help them to perceive the significance that different types of skills and knowledge hold for individuals and society. To counterbalance the specialised skills and knowledge, studies in philosophy will also teach students to grasp broader conceptual systems and relationships. It will help them to see the ways in which the conceptions of reality, values and norms held in different branches of science and schools of thought may form consistent systems or contradict each other. Philosophy will develop judgement.
Philosophy instruction will promote development of creative and independent thinking. Philosophy will provide students with plenty of scope to form their own personal views. As they delve deeper into basic philosophical questions — to which there are no simple solutions — they will learn to formulate and justify their own views and, at the same time, to respect other reasoned views. Group deliberations on complicated questions will develop students’ ability
to trust their own individual opportunities to resolve even the most difficult problems. Studies in philosophy will support students’ growth into active, responsible and tolerant citizens.

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Indecipherable metaphorical palimpsest: Letting go of past ideas

Posted on December 31, 2013 | Leave a comment

I’ve been here, writing at the top of a blank screen, three or four times already. You, reader, wouldn’t know that.  (Even if many people read this post, we read it one mind at a time. Each mind’s on its own, reading-wise, right?)

And I put an idea out there — that I write my journals so I can get ideas out of my mind, so my thinking doesn’t burden others by me telling them all of my ideas — and that’s an idea I had earlier today, and it’s sorta inert. By inert, I mean, it’s … it’s sorta done already. I don’t want to deal in done-ideas; I wanna have new ideas.

I want to write what I don’t know about already (even that’s an old idea). I had an idea a few minutes (and at least one start-over) ago that I don’t have to know where I’m going as I write, that I could really just be as open as possible to new ideas and whatnot. And then that thought seemed worth holding onto, until I realized I was holding onto it and by so doing, I was not being open and fresh and ready to receive new ideas — sitting on the cusp of a new idea.

Metaphors are inept, but then, so are all words. Words are not ept.

But I’ve been critical of words before, too. It’s New Year’s Eve now and I don’t feel very much like looking back or looking forward — I will say this idea that comes to mind from when I thought it yesterday: that I’ll complete my 40th year of living this year, and I had a feeling yesterday, as a salesman at the electronic store explained Windows 8’s “charms” to me (not the program’s charm, but its actual usable features uncharmingly called “charms,” apparently), that I am …

See, it doesn’t matter what I thought, because it was just a thought and it was fleeting, and so I can let it fleet. Also, a charms criticism reference made in 2013 is probably dumb, and so I’ll probably take it out, and if I leave this line in, this text will be hard to read — that revisability aspect of writing can make it some indecipherable metaphorical palimpsest …

And I’m now spiraling into meta-writing and personal self-criticism. Moving on.

So, you know, or should I say, just so you know, I reminded myself today that I don’t really need to feel old as I approach 40. It’s a cliche to think that turning 40 matters.

Someone recently asked me why I write things down — this was at our local diner and I had a piece of paper out and was noting things I heard — for instance, an older lady actually, unironically, used “crick” instead of “creek,” a typical Midwesternism — I felt I was documenting some actual usage. I told my questioner that it’s interesting to pay attention to overhearing others and noting some things, because it makes me realize how much cliche people use (myself not excepted).

And we use cliches and familiar expressions because these things can facilitate communication of meaning. An older man at the diner last week said, “I can’t say enough good things about” a local hospital, where (I’m presuming) he was recently treated, and treated well. I imagine this man trying to say enough good things … standing at a street corner and uttering praises, maybe as someone utters prayers. But that’s me, and I have a tendency to be what some call a “smart-ass,” and I take words apart as if words meant nothing, as if communication were impossible, but of course I’m aware of language weirdness but I also write as if language could convey stuff.

Eh, what are ya gonna do? I’ve also thought lately that it was … I don’t remember what it was that I thought lately. At any rate, it’s past, no? And I’m trying to stay present. I’m carrying on this monologue, straight from my brain-parts to your brain parts. Oh, here is my idea from a day ago: that there can be sentences whose meanings can’t both be true — say, “This stapler is made of metal” and “This stapler is not made of metal” and these two statements don’t try to resolve their discrepancy — it’s only within a reader’s mind that these two statements would feel/seem discrepant, and then we may feel we need to discern which statement is real (and if we’re gonna get technical, which, why not?, we might examine the definitions of the nouns and verbs above — what does it mean to be “made of” something?).

And yeah … I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s damned freeing to not know. To not-know may mean to let go. Writing piles up in books or online, or wherever, and nobody really needs it, probably. Sartre’s dead, my dad’s dead, and I’ll be dead one day. But those too are just ideas — hell, Sartre’s just an idea.

And now I’m boring myself. I’m at 800-some words. I could edit this down to make that last sentence a lie. I could take out every other word as a sort of avant-garde experiment. I could just publish this post in the middle of this sentence. But I didn’t.

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