August 24, 2006 – ‘Planet X?’ update…
[IAU 2006 General Assembly: Result of the IAU Resolution votes]
Pluto has been downgraded.
It’s not a planet anymore, as of now it’s a dwarf planet, a ‘pluton’ even: “the prototype of a new category of trans-Neptunian objects”…
Huh…? Trans-Neptunian objects…? As in Kuiper Belt…? Then why define this new category…?
Well, I guess scientists just love to bicker, so this is probably to ensure the astronomers they can still have their little dead-parrot-debates: ‘this is a pluton / it’s not / it is / no, it isn’t / yes, it is / …’
July 24, 2006 – Assertions, II [edit: February 17, 2008]
II.1: Biological death is merely confirming the very state many humans are in now (some ab ovo, some by choice…)
II.2: Vampires should be considered social workers, really
May 5, 2006 – On dichotomies…
All there is, is blue or yellow.
There is no alternative: it’s either blue, or it’s yellow… You must choose between them. You HAVE to choose, between blue and yellow… If you’re in favor of one, then you’re against the other…
Choose
(and don’t you pick the wrong one, for you will be considered a terrorist…)
March 10, 2006 – Hypothesis…
Due to its [a]rhythm[et]ic fractality and its apophenic pat[t]ernity, perception can only be deepened, not broadened…
February 24, 2006
Any Theory of Everything is based upon the notion that there are no inherently unknowable facts. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems show the impossibility to prove such a notion, which makes it unknowable as such…
Quod erat demonstrandum
[Comprehensive, yet incomplete (sic) introduction to Gödel’s Theorems]
February 23/24, 2006
There is no pattern in ‘pattern’ itself, there’s only pattern in the mind. And it’s culture that ascribes meaning.
Also, pattern recognition is highly intuitive – the word itself is quite indicative, I think: re-cognition…
Hypothesis: All pattern is apophenic… moiré, resulting from the slit-view we have on reality…
And, it’s highly dopamine driven…
January 2, 2006
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We are not physicists or metaphysicians; we must be Egyptologists. For there are no mechanical laws between things or voluntary communications between minds. Everything is implicated, everything is complicated, everything is sign, meaning, essence. Everything exists in those obscure zones that we penetrate as into crypts, in order to decipher hieroglyphs and secret languages. The Egyptologist, in all things, is the man who undergoes an initiation – the apprentice." Gilles Delueze, Proust et les signes (1964) |
December 1, 2005 – ‘the Singularity’
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Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly thereafter, the human era will be ended. Vernor Vinge (1993) |
Vingean singularity as a future predicament is a heavily biased cultural notion, an occidentism pur sang…
[Vernor Vinge – The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era]
November 20, 2005
temp.oral >-- overtones --< viol.ate
… un supplice du pal.et patalogique
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The Temporal Transvestite
Victor E. Lestat [Qx-CO-LogCo|2°17ecGNegative::Iv] |
October 1, 2005
It’s not what you see that is important, but what it represents…
October 1, 2005
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A faint white light is not a gray light. Ludwig Wittgenstein [RoC, III 218] |
September 17, 2005 – [Breakfast conversation…] thought, a posteriori…
To be bored is to be open, at last, to the emptyness of reality unveiling itself in it’s absolute indifference towards us… In other words: total freedom!
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The Breakfast Conviqt | thought*2… a priori The company of reality becomes bored at the table of the id.le.ss; perception is the living room of the soul, so
V!ctor Lestat |
September 16, 2005 – Breakfast conversation… (father and daughter)
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‘Any chances of having an interesting day at school today? What classes do you have?’ ‘Nothing much, we start off with two hours of devine boredom…’ ‘?’ ‘Religion and philosophy…’ |
September 5, 2005 – Zen.it h
In considering my work an activity apparently in harmony with the ongoing flow of cosmic transformation and change (for otherwise it would not be…), I refrain myself from going against the grain of things and go with the flow, thus endorsing Lao Tzu’s statement: ‘By nonaction everything can be done.’
September 3, 2005 – The truth is out|in there… II
What is human? What is truth?
Is begging these questions
for answers, a privilege of youth,
perceptional, normonal state?
Unveiling a dancer’s erotic suggestions,
her ceptional, hormonal bait?
Pourtant, jusqu’avant le moment suprême…
toujours le rideau se ferme, quand même.
August 29, 2005
The thought of ‘connecting’ to nature as a means of enlightening ourselves is to cultivate it and thus take away its very essence, for the main focus of this connecting is not Nature, but Self… In that it is exemplary of the notion of the human species as the pinnacle of evolution, of human supremacy over nature, par excellence…!
August 20, 2005
To me, Lacan’s ‘Graphe du désir’ looks like a woman’s reproductive organs…
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If anything, does that say something about my desires…? Or about his…?
August 16, 2005
Envision the symbiotic chaos of the mind, the inquilinic thought web assembly, the ambrosia secreting gall: thought deposited in thought, arising mentation within mentation in mutualistic, commensalistic or parasitic duality – copulating, incarnating, feasting in systemic mania – Dionysos…
August 14, 2005
Where and when discrepancies arise, I value Nicolas of Cusa’s ‘coincidence of opposites’ over Hegel’s dialectics any day:
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Think about the opposites, hold the contradiction and instead of resolving it, sustain it – practice sustaining contradiction! |
August 14, 2005
Q: ‘Is reality lordly indifferent to perception?’
A: This is perceptomorphic… As to that, reality is cruelly indifferent… :-)
August 3, 2005
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In contrast to the passive, disinterested, contemplative and aesthetic attitude to irrational phenomena, there is the active, systematic, organizational, cognizant attitude to irrational phenomena, considered as associative, partial and significant events in the authentic domain of our immediate and practical experience of life. Salvador Dali, La Conquête de l’Irrationnel (1935) |
July 30, 2005 – Planet X?
[BBC News: Astronomers detect ‘10th planet’]
Why not reclassify Pluto as a rather large and close-by Kuiper Belt Object?
Even more so… To end all future dead-parrot-debates ‘this is a planet / it’s not / it is / no, it isn’t / yes, it is / …’ in advance: why not reclassify the entire lot as ‘things flying around the sun’?
July 30, 2005
It is impossible to concede any value whatsoever to immediate reality, since it may represent or mean anything at all.
July 30, 2005 – ‘the Meaning of Life’
Though looking for a ‘Meaning of Life’ may have some therapeutic value, it has nothing to do with life of the mind, which is not the search for meaning, but the liberation from it…
July 29, 2005
Can one not have a thought for seven weeks?
June 11, 2005 – Nature vs. nurture: a hog cycle debate
I’ll do an essay on this…
Keywords: speculation, ‘rational beliefs’, endogenous uncertainty
June 7, 2005 – π
Saw the movie ‘π’ again yesterday… mind-lingering !
Funny thing though: it’s really about φ…
May 29, 2005 – Genetics = statistics
Insurance companies could exert themselves in applying higher statistics, but instead they prefer to stick to a belief: a defective gene is a ‘burning house’: someone with say Huntington’s disease running in the family is not to be insured.
Apparently these companies do not know the difference between carrying a disease and being affected by it; in their view a defective gene poses an ‘uninsurable risk’. Period.
This is not a matter of mere ethics. The problem is not: okay, this and that we know about genes; how is this knowledge applicable in an ethically sound manner? The problem is that genetics should be taken more seriously, beyond just thinking ourselves into knowing something about any relation between genes and individual qualities. Predicting individual qualities on the basis of genetic information and claiming these to be factual isn’t practising science, it’s auguring.
Perhaps it’s better not to speak of genes anymore, but of, say, ‘natural disposition’ – the vagueness of that notion is at least clear…
May 28, 2005 – The truth is out|in there…
Truth is a human condition; not ‘the knowledge of …’, but truth itself.
Arguably…
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem shows that in any formal system complicated enough to describe the numbers and operations of arithmetic, as long as the axioms don’t lead to contradictions there will always be some statement that is not provable – and the contradiction of it will not be provable either. It also shows that there’s no way to prove from within the system – a closed system by definition… – that the system itself won’t give rise to contradictions. So, any formal system worth bothering with will either sprout contradictions – which is bad news, since once you have a contradiction, you can prove anything at all, 2 + 2 = 5 included – or there will be perfectly ordinary statements that may well be true but can never be proved.
This means you’ll never fully understand the world, yourself included, since your mind is a closed system and it can only be sure of what it knows about the world by relying on what it knows about the world…
May 26, 2005 – Paradox?
I have nothing to say…
May 24, 2005 – Thought about doing this…
Why would I bother sharing my thoughts – at least the ones on display here? And why would you bother reading (about) them?
Why would I think you would want to read them in the first place? Have I fallen to the illusion to think that my thoughts are actually interesting? To the more common illusion even to think that I have something to say?
The thing is, we all have very little to say to the world. In the cosmic scheme of things nothing we do ever matters, really – we’re not important, and I’m no exception… Is that a sad thing to say?
I think not…
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The life of human beings […] does not exist in virtue of activities alone which have some thing for their object.
It is said that man experiences his world. What does that mean? Man travels over the surface of things and experiences them. He extracts knowledge about their constitution from them : he wins an experience from them. He experiences what belongs to the things.
I experience something – If we add ‘inner’ to ‘outer’ experiences nothing in the situation is changed. We are merely following the uneternal division that springs from the lust of the human race to whittle away the secret of death. Inner things or outer things, what are they but things and things!
The man who experiences has not part in the world. For it is ‘in him’ and not between him and the world that the experience arises.
Martin Buber, I and You (Ich und Du, 1923/1958) |
I have nothing to say to the world; it isn’t about I and It… It’s about I and You…