hyperreal enterprises

"Stay in your hyperborean mists and Christian incense and leave our
pagan world to rest under the lava and the rubble. Do not dig us up
... You do not need the gods – they would freeze to death in your
climate!", Sacher Masoch, "Venus in Furs", quoted in Gilles Deleuze
(tr. Christian Kerslake) "From Sacher-Masoch To Masochism", Angelaki,
Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, volume 9, number 1, April 2004.

sublime masochism

Two quotes from
Slavoj Zizek. Notes on a Debate "From Within the People"
Criticism - Volume 46, Number 4, Fall 2004, pp. 661-666

...

With reference to Deleuze:

"The masochist, while remaining within the domain of the
paternal (contract), reintroduces the Woman as the partner
in the contract—not in order to fully enjoy the Woman, but
in order to mockingly undermine the paternal
authority. The masochist thus stages an uncanny
short-circuit, a monstrous travesty of the Law: in her
very elevation to the undisputed Master, whose every whim
the masochist is obliged to obey, the Woman is turned into
a puppet effectively controlled by her slave, who controls
the game, writing its rules—the explicit asymmetry of the
masochist contract (at the level of enunciated: man's
subordination to woman) relies on then opposite asymmetry
at the level of the position of enunciation. The humor of
masochism is therefore not directed only at the figure of
the father; it relies on the ridiculous (and,
simultaneously, monstrous) incompatibility or discord
between the symbolic place of symbolic power and the
element who occupies it."

With reference to Badiou:

"How can a human animal forsake its animality and put its
life in the service of a transcendent Truth? How can the
'transubstantiation' from the pleasure-oriented life of an
individual to the life of a subject dedicated to a Cause
occur? In other words, how is a free act possible? How
can one break (out of) the network of the causal
connections of positive reality and conceive of an act
that begins by and in itself?"

qualia (Sonnet 18 and Zombies)

"Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, or
the redness of an evening sky." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

"Zimboes think^Z they are conscious, think^Z they have qualia, think^Z
they suffer pains – they are just 'wrong' (according to this
lamentable tradition), in ways that neither they nor we could ever
discover!" -- Daniel Dennet,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

"When philosophers claim that zombies are conceivable, they invariably
underestimate the task of conception (or imagination), and end up
imagining something that violates their own definition" -- Daniel
Dennet, at ibid.

"As I see it, feelings are not strange alien things. It is precisely
those cognitive changes themselves that constitute what 'hurting' is —
and this also includes all those clumsy attempts to represent and
summarize those changes. The big mistake comes from looking for some
single, simple, 'essence' of hurting, rather than recognizing that
this is the word we use for complex rearrangement of our disposition
of resources." -- Marvin Minsky, again in the Qualia article

...

The quote from Minsky makes me think that the "discretized" world
of Qualia can itself be painful, perhaps even capturing (as well as can
be imagined), a sort of essence of hurting, after all.

What I mean is: it is quite painful either to feel that others aren't "real",
and possibly even more painful (and disturbing) to feel or imagine
the irreality of one's own inward existence.  However, the "instrumental"
nature of Qualia seem to be a step precisely in the irreal direction of
think^Z -- "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day", and so forth.

In other words, the simple mechanics of "judging" or "evaluating" (as
via an integral, for example), even just of "the thinginess of things" --
the self-same clumsy summarising and representing -- what might
be called "grasping thought" -- *are* Qualia, *are* pain, and *are
also* the key move to zombieism.

As an application: judging things/others to be irreal (i.e. to be zombies),
whether this is true or not, effectively infects one with zombieism.
It would be absolute insanity for a human to *embrace* this move...
and yet... taking a look at Sonnet 18, there are certain clear attractions
or, shall we say, enticements...

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

sonnet for joanne 2

I'M A buSy womaN AGAINST A BLACK BACKGROUND
aND EVERYTHING IS JUST OK
what thE hell WaS thAt crAzY Thing i sAid neXt?
PoppIng out of his HeaD lIkE thosE

(what is It you're after)
MAYBE IT IS JUST THAT ONE SECOND GUESSES ONESELF
MAKING IT EASIER AT TIMES TO APPROACH ELEGANCE...
OUT WITH THAT INVITATION.

WordS in my MoUth BACK, i
RE-SOLDERED THE TYPE ELEMENTS ON MY TyPewRiTeR

mad (what degree of intimacy + mutual care?)

Where do things stop short? Perhaps at the moment any sign of real
pleasure is involved ("jouissance"?)?

"This much madness is too much sorrow"

anatomy of a callback

"The 'Call back' is usually the first time everybody making the
commercial has been in the same room together, thus it's no surprise
that lines and action get changed or re-worked. So you may walk in to
see you have been rehearsing the wrong sides, or you might get asked
to read for a different part on the spot. This is all business as
usual, so be ready for it." --
http://commercialsuccessresource.blogspot.com/2009/03/anatomy-of-callback.html

D'oh - not that kind of callback!

At http://tanks4code.blogspot.com/2008/07/c-style-callbacks-in-c-code.html
there a kind of complicated object-oriented scenario is described,
indicating that a "callback" is quite similar to a "hook" but also a
bit like a "closure".

So then... from
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/615907/how-is-a-closure-different-from-a-callback:

"The bit that makes it a closure, is when that function accesses
anything on the context where it lives, like variables outside it."

And from here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2070275/javascript-closures-and-callbacks,

"Callbacks are a simpler concept. A callback is basically where a
function accepts another function as a parameter. At some point during
execution the called function will execute the function passed as a
parameter, this is a callback."

They further remark:

"Quite often the reason that closures get created (either
incidentally, accidentally or deliberately) is the need to create a
callback. [... some code defining a function ...] A closure is
created containing in part the 'message' parameter; 'fn' is executed
[on delay] quite some time after the call to 'AlertThisLater' has
returned, yet 'fn' still has access to the original content of
'message'."

So, that's the scoop on that: a "callback" is when a function executes
another function that is one of its arguments, and a "closure" is when
a function executes another function (whether it was initially passed
in as an argument or not) that continues to have access to the scope
of the original function.

OK, not so bad, but still it seems so much more *comprehensible* in
LISP, where one wouldn't geverally bother thinking about whether the
thing was a "closure" or not - one would just put some local variables
to a lambda, then pass that lambda as an argument to another function,
and be done with it.

BDGBTW

Do you like girls or boys
It's confusing these days...
They sat together in the park
As the evening sky grew dark,
holding hands in the moonlight.
There was silence between them.
Silence to say goodbye.
(And the wall won't come down,
until they're no longer afraid of themselves.)

when reviewing or writing a paper

Two thematic questions one could ask about any paper are:

(1) What problem and solution does the paper
describe? (What have the authors themselves learned?)

(2) What problem does the paper itself solve?
(What do the authors want the readers to learn from
reading the paper?)

paul coelho on being read

"I always thought that when, at the beginning of your career, you
strive to be read, you can't change your mind later and become greedy
about it" -- http://www.newsweek.com/2008/02/05/free-speech.html

like a chronically stressed rat looking for sugar

"Bike Messengers face death on a constant basis. And what do they
receive in return. Harassment, ridicule and getting ripped off[,] and
this is from the companies they work for. Bike Messengers are paid by
the amount of packages they can pick up and drop off in a given day.
This is why they usually look like a rat on crack. All jittery and
looking for sugar." -- "Those Crazy Messengers", Hideousewhitenoise
#56, 2003, by Mr Forehead,
http://www.messmedia.org/Toronto/hwn56-crazy.html

"Extrapolating from the observations that positive emotional
experiences boost the immune system, Roberts speculates that intensely
positive emotional experiences –- sometimes brought about during
mystical experiences occasioned by psychedelic medicines -- may boost
the immune system powerfully. Research on salivary IgA supports this
hypothesis, but experimental testing has not been done." --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoneuroimmunology, citing
Thomas B. Roberts (2006). "Do Entheogen-induced Mystical Experiences Boost the Immune System?: Psychedelics, Peak Experiences, and Wellness." Chapter 6 in Psychedelic Horizons. Westport, CT: Praeger/Greenwood.

Even if the connection to psychedelia is "as fine as powdered doll
shit" [0], it seems like a good idea to look around for positive
emotional experiences as a general contribution to health and
wellness. And perhaps also to look for any associations between
negative emotional experiences and a downturn in general health.

In a glance through this "negative" lens, we find some research with
an interesting extrapolation of that thought, namely that exposure to
"chronic stress" can sap an individual's ability to select actions
based on the consequences of those actions, and instead causes the
stressed person (or rat) to fall back on habit [1]. The conclusion of
[1] is quoted below in full (minus citations, for readability):

"Optimization of decision-making processes confers an important
advantage in response to a constantly changing environment. The
ability to select the appropriate actions on the basis of their
consequences and on our needs at the time of the decision allows us to
respond in an efficient way to changing situations. However, the
continuous control and attention that this process demands can result
in an unnecessary expenditure of resources and can be inefficient in
many situations. For instance, when behavior is repeated regularly for
extensive periods without major changes in outcome value or
contingency, or under uncertain situations where we cannot manipulate
the probability of obtaining an outcome, general rules and habits can
be advantageous. Thus, the more rapid shift to habits after chronic
stress could be a coping mechanism to improve performance of
well-trained behaviors, while increasing the bioavailability to
acquire and process new information, which seems essential for
adaptation to complex environments. However, when objectives need to
be re-updated in order to make the most appropriate choice, the
inability of stressed subjects to shift from habitual strategies to
goal-directed behavior might be highly detrimental. Such impairment
might be of relevance to understand the high comorbidity between
stress-related disorders and addictive behavior or compulsivity, but
certainly has a broader impact spanning activities from everyday life
decisions to economics."

One of the citations here is [2], which at 33 pages is effectively a
guidebook to stress, including a bit of "stress management".
Recommended reading. (Just now sitting on my desk as a printout.)

I now briefly return to the theme I suggested above: What if a negative
emotional experience is like a "hit" of "chronic stress", inasmuch as
it *temporarily* ratchets up the use of previously learned habits, and
ratchets down the learning of new patterns? As one becomes (perhaps
only briefly) more automaton- or puppet-like, "health" becomes
less and less of a viable facility and perhaps even an undefined
quantity.

To switch to the positive lens: Situations in which we are adaptable
(let's say, autonomous, not automaton-ish) could be taken to be the
very *definition* of health - and positive emotional experiences could
be found by ratcheting habit-use down, and pattern-learning up.
For some reason I'm reminded of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are
Dead"... [3].

"There was a messenger.
Rosencrantz... Guildenstern...
We were sent for."

And for whatever reason, it cheers me up.

[1]: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/325/5940/621.full
[2]: http://physrev.physiology.org/content/87/3/873.full.pdf+html
[3]: http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/r/rosencrantz-and-guildenstern-are-dead-script.html

what are you adding?

It keeps occurring to me to post in various mailing lists

"Hey have you considered such-and-such?"

But it also occurs to me to stop myself. Is it really going to add
much? Perhaps not unless I actually have time to follow through and
actually implement the thing in question.

I don't see the point in talking in that way, if I'm just doing it to
hear myself talk. That's what blogs are for :)

1->2

"My philosophy basically reduces to the idea that
if one is good, two would be better."

(How many philosophies are really so different
from that?)