taking the day off

I feel like it would be good to know when to "take the day
off", but maybe what's on my mind is just "lightening up"
and not expecting the day to be too serious?

identity, interrupted

I am listening to "Finnegans Wake" by James Joyce
read by Patrick Healy
(cf http://www.themodernword.com/Joyce/audio_5.html).
It seems to be exactly the sort of text that is best
enjoyed read aloud. Perhaps time after time.

I'm also looking at "Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature
and Cosmology". Thinking about the things that
go beyond language.
(cf http://mtprof.msun.edu/Win1993/PlankRev.html)

My current thought is that "intelligence" (sometimes
not so intelligent) exists in "interfaces". Or put it
another way, that Coincidence, Causality, and
Correlation, are completed by Creativity.

But.

The "but" is that once some rather concrete idea
is enunciated, it creates some requirement to
actually do work. That seems to create pressure.
It's not as though we have infinite attention (right?)
(cf http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/468828.html)

It's interesting to mix these things in with the legacy
of the Beats
(e.g. http://www.stevesilberman.com/celestial/)
which just aren't going to pay the bills no matter
how "true" they are -- though perhaps by simply
shifting perspective a bit ("trendiness not
timelessness") we can recover some Sex Pistols-like
/currency/.

I mean, thinking about how focus can be quite nice:
how in order to focus at all, one in fact needs to be
reasonably calm (not hyperfocused; not too "distracted"
either). In the words of Susanna Kaysen,

«freedom was the price of privacy»

but equally, /privacy is the price of freedom/.

an alternative to 'causative process'

We might conceive of the artist as a pre-given entity who views, is
inspired by, and utilizes pre-given things in the world around her as
she then goes about making her work. The production of the work would
then be a causative process contributing in turn to the production of
the historical world. We might also understand the work as an
objectification of the artist, an expression of her inner spirit that
externalizes and actualizes it. Nishida envisioned an alternative: the
artist takes in or intuits the world and transforms or enacts it, both
of which are but two moments in a single unfolding—not only of the
world but of the artist as well. Both artist and work are formed
mutually and are reflected in one another. While this mutual formation
can be described in terms of a causative process taking time, with the
person first intuiting or internalizing and then acting or
externalizing, Nishida described it in terms of the place or topos
wherein intuiting entails acting and acting intuiting, and wherein the
difference between internal and external collapses.
--http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nishida-kitaro/

the space in between seeing and acting

«In attempting to explain the formation and working of the historical
world, Nishida coined the term "action-oriented intuition" (kōi-teki
chokkan). His texts suggest a reciprocity between action and intution,
so that we could also speak of "intuition-oriented action" or simply
of "action-intution" [...] Here again Nishida sought to discover the
topos or common space that underlies a distinction, this time between
intuition or seeing as a more or less passive reception of the world
and its objects, and action as the human-engendered production of the
world.» --http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nishida-kitaro/

snake & monkey

To my way of thinking, the snake's main activity is to be
apprehensive. There are a variety of "good" reasons to
be apprehensive, and probably a variety of not so good
reasons as well.  What I notice is that there's a very
"embodied" or even "yogic" aspect of this.  Movement, talking
with people, breathing all tend to counteract the apprehension.
But much, much, more so -- a sense of accomplishment tends
to make the snake happy,  whereas a sense of failure puts it into
a mode of embroiled frustration.

The snake often sends messages that the monkey doesn't know
what to do with.  It's not clear to me whether it's more apprehensive
about the monkey's potential behavior or about the
situation as a whole.  One way the opposition can be fake is
if the snake says to the monkey: "look at this horrible situation
you've gotten us into."

Well, just because the monkey has a wider range of
activities and proclivities and so on doesn't mean that
it should always take the blame when things go wrong.
The snake seems to think so and wishes to absolve
itself of all blame.  But clearly an apprehension engine
like the snake DOES contribute to bringing things about
(even if its main contribution is to put on the brakes).

I don't think either one is going away (since both
presumably correspond to real brain structures and
not just temporary habits), so I'm guessing the
challenge I face (and presumably at least some
other people are challenged by the same thing) --
is how to make them both happy.

For example, putting in some effort to teach the
monkey to feed and care for the snake, while
also teaching it how to avoid getting bitten or
hissed at a lot.

Going a bit further with this:

Saying things like "trust your intuition!" may really
over simplify matters, if there's a snake-intuition
and a monkey-intuition, for example, and they
*are* in conflict.  And saying "humans are social
animals" is another over simplification, insofar
as humans do have hereditary origins among
much "less social" animals who are still somehow
"social".

http://www.stanford.edu/group/stanfordbirds/text/essays/Parental_Care.html

I don't think I understand where self-criticism
comes from (on the one hand) any better than I
understand where language comes from (on the
other).  Sometimes feeling better is as simple
as having a cup of coffee... potentially both very
social and at the same time, a "mere" matter of
neurochemical doctoring.  Similarly, sometimes
we have the strongest self-criticisms in social
situations -- other times it seems more a matter
of getting up on the wrong side of the bed.

The interplay of animal meanings (e.g. sex)
and human meanings (e.g. partnership) is
hard to understand.  Society is more than
the sum of its brains.  If I've done an OK job
sketching a hypothetical brain's self-relations,
another interesting next step would be to look
at what happens when brains collide.  How
do the range of interpersonal experiences from
admiration to zealotry come about, and where
do they go to once they've arisen?

Coincidence, Issue #1: Left over physical or online artefacts to examine

A moment of pure joy:

«thanks for your interest in Skepsi. "Left over physical or online
artefacts to examine" shall be available upon publication of our next
issue. Please do check our blog or website to keep updated:
http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/skepsi/»

What an awesome title for a special issue, I thought!

Then I realized that the *way* I had expressed my interest was implicated.

«I'm sorry to have missed your recent conference, it sounds like it was
great! Are there any left over physical or online artefacts to examine?»

life in an indeterminate space

Dick Taylor of UC Irvine proposed "Ten Little Questions"; the list
begins as follows:

1.What is the main goal of your work?
2.What are the tangible benefits of achieving your goal?
3.What are the technical problems that make your goal difficult to achieve?
4.What are the main elements of your approach?

etc. (the rest is elided for copyright reasons). My thought: Doesn't all this
talk about 'goals' immediately put us into a world in which the goal is always
distant, perhaps even -- unreachable? This is the typical critique of the
business of fighting poverty or what have you.

At the same time, explication is important, not just to function in 'society'
but also to function as part of the 'society of self'. In my case, at least
at the moment, it seems easier and more natural to have many small
goals than to have one large/central goal.

I *have* had various large/central goals in the past, and some of them
continue to resonate for me. But I tend to feel a bit guilty about the
way these giant-sized goals seem to come out of left field. If instead
of an extra-dimensional goal imposed from 'outside', I lived in a world
populated by micro-goals that sometimes assemble themselves into
interesting configurations... would I earn any respect from the
'academic establishment'? Or is that sort of thing just seen as... dicking
around?