A weedy florilegium

1 The world is a multiplicity of event. Wherein the world one perceives the event, thereof one deduces that the event is prior to itself within a medium which simplifies it. The extent to which the event may come into the world at all is the extent to which that event may be expressed. To deduce, to apply the a priori, is not to engage in the thought but to express what must be expressed of the event.
1.1 The event is simple. There exist no objects outside of the event. The event cannot be rightly understood as an object.
1.2 We are wont to say, now, that the event, so described, is a human description. We feign the notion of causation. We declare what is cause and what is effect to the extent that it pleases us. What does not please us is analytic and what does please us synthetic.
1.3 What does it mean “to please” in this sense? Earlier our kin called it “satisfaction.” This satisfies this. We bemoan that either the former or the latter must maintain at a “higher” level.
1.4 Why do we speak of foundations and levels? We reject coherence for it implies relativism of some sort. We claim that correspondence is the method, for there must be something that corresponds.
1.5 The world has no object that corresponds to anything whatever.
1.6 The world is composed of the event.
1.7 Each event of the world plays a part in a picture. And the world is mistaken for a picture. We argue that question must be meaningful. What is presupposed by a meaningful question? A model rests underneath the question, soaked in the filth of one’s method. We contrive method for we feel that the answer is best understood by a method. “What kind of question do you have for me?”–I have your answer, but you must suffer my method.
1.8 And the event; what does it presuppose? The event, so it is claimed, must be intelligible. Or else it is not an event. In speaking, not referring, there is an event. The event travels well within the discourse of science, and so to does it carry on in the discourse of conversation. “The belief is a cause so long as you understand me.” How might we go about understanding you? Here, I have reset the game. Meaning, if it is not grasped at first blush, is lost. Interpretation is the void of all reality. If you interpret, you do not “create” or “destroy,” but you become inert.

A past time of mine is to read a philosophical text aloud to myself, as powerfully and with as much urgency as I can muster. It is exciting to read the greats as though I was performing before an audience. Whilst reading Ayer’s assault on religious knowledge (though the avenue of religious language) I realized that I engage in this activity quite often. Where I see a poetry reading, I imagine a philosophy reading.

This brings a markedly human quality to the austere and distant melodies of systematically placed premises, definitions, statements. These be notes to the sheet; syllogisms are the chords of communication.

Now that Cartesian dualism is behind us (or so they say), we’re left with all kinds of property dualism (with identity theses) and wild reductionism. I’m reading “Strangers to Ourselves” and the author claims that our “… it [adaptive unconscious] feels.” But does he really claim this? First, it’s a popular psychology book (not in the pejorative sense). It seems that he’s aiming for something idiomatic, not aiming to ascribe conscious properties (of the whole human) to some one of its parts. He later claims “it generates those feelings.” Clearly, if taken literally, these two claims say very different things. The former is a philosophically ungrammatical misascription and the latter is a vacuous scientific statement.

But does the author even maintain such a thesis, that brains feel and one’s unconscious loves his daughter more than he? I think much of this debate springs out of authors want to sound punchy or idiomatic or to sell books. It’s alluring (to the science buffs) and captivating to think that your brain can do potentially all or most of what you do in your waking hours. Scientists take a grammatico-conceptual shorthand, which is likely the problem of the philosophy of mind.

From teeth as towers illuminated tellings
Of puzzling trips of grammar allure youths
To brigands of the letters, daft but parasitic
On the bellows of folk man

Misleading is each question as questions each
Impede wisdom, instead for whores de langue
Is each passé puzzle prompted futur plays,
O praise pickled hammers who pamper prongs

While we unstructured rage on in deft doubt,
The doubt of the hammer mangles and tangles
Us into our human form; and we continue,–
How we continue so, we know, we know

In some ways, the concept of money requires ignorance between buyer and seller. However, with the way we complain about “accountability” and “consumer awareness,” that “division of labor” is becoming clearer and clearer. Thus, our ignorance is being slowly removed.

What is the power of money? We typically do not question the journey each dollar in our pocket book takes. But is this tendency to not question what really countenances the division of labor? Are we divided only because we are ignorant?

It would seem that this tendency for accountability presupposes that we understand each person’s role in society. In effect, demanding accountability demands that the people have power over the big car companies, banks, the market. Essentially, we want to be able to tell those divided that their planning, their models, etc are poor plans, poor models. We do not want to perform their labor; we want more; we want to ability to decide how their labor operates by constraining them to monetary accountability. So the division of labor becomes clear, but the division of power becomes less divided. Control becomes more unified.

How can I hold a banker accountable when that banker can simply say, “You do not understand the complexity of my work, the interest models, the loan models?” It seems that we are divided in our labor because we’ve had a proclivity to accept ignorance. What is the limit of my understanding the world of a banker? It would seem my limit here shows the limit of communism.

This “accountability” issue is in opposition to “accepting ignorance.”

It seems that “accountability” is a tenet closer to communist economics. “You might produce your information, but it belongs to us all so that we can each make rational decision, dictate the next whim of the market.” Accountability is deleterious to capitalist economics.

1 That we call it “artificial” seems to be a misnomer. What we mean is artefactual, but we apply this terminology so as to elevate our own status. That is was created. However, our true intention is to suggest that such an intelligence is derivative. We are dealing with derivative intelligence, in that such an intelligence, should it be considered intelligence at all, follows from our being fundamentally related to it in some way. That way consists of its intelligence depending on our own.

2 But we should not wish to call such an intelligence just that, namely intelligence, which is why we call it artificial, fake, etc. But what is the relation of derivative intelligence to rule following? Might a derived intelligence interpret a rule? Do we use “rule” in an equivocal way when we suggest that the derived intelligence is following rules? Do we in fact mean “following input”? Can a derived intelligence interpret a rule? What is an interpretation? Is it indeed “the expression of a rule”? Derived intelligence has no use for interpretation of a rule; it cannot see interpretation of a rule for it does not understand that its following a rule is an interpretation of it. Derived intelligence does not express the rule; it neither stands in accordance or in disagreement with it.

3 A derived intelligence does not compute. Does it make sense to say that a derived intelligence has symbols? Is a finite sequence of binary digits a symbol? Can this intelligence realize that “finite sequence” is indeed what it is processing? Are there “finite sequences” at the most basic level of this intelligence? Is such a concept, “finite sequence,” a criterion for intelligence? A criterion for “understanding a symbol”? Is a symbol a finite-object? In what ways might it be called one? A derived intelligence seems to satisfy a treatment criterion for symbolism. Binary sequences are treated as if they are symbols. At higher levels of operation, the derived intelligence processes not the binary sequence but the encapsulated variable. A higher level language may compute the binary sequence, but the symbol (encoded variable) means nothing to the processor or to the video memory or to the monitor screen. However, the principle still remains: higher level software is replaceable other softwares; this is not so for the human whole or human brain.

Common sense tells us that our pains are located in physical space within our bodies, that for example, a pain in the foot is literally inside the area of the foot. But we now know that is false. The brain forms a body image and pains, like all bodily sensations, are part of the body image. The pain-in-the-foot is literally in the physical space of the brain. [Searle, J., The Rediscovery of the Mind, 1992: p. 63.]

Are you kidding me?! I almost vomited-and-had-an-aneurysm-in-the-physical-space-of-my-mouth. I’m shaking uncontrollably, painfully…

How might “The pain I experience from reading analytic philosophy journal articles” given this line of thinking? Even if we accept such an philosophically ungrammatical premise, are we to, by extension, conclude that pain felt from reading analytic philosophy is thing located in space and time in the same way that my foot is located in space and time?

One grammar has got to give! And the other cannot be given bootstraps of any kind!