The plural of faux pas (foe paw) is actually still faux pas. The only difference is that you pronounce the final s (foe pawz).
The word was imported from French, and that is the pluralization rule for the rare words that already end in “s.” Interestingly, English incorporated a large number of grammatical constructions from French, including most of our silent letters and our standard pluralization rules. So, why didn’t we incorporate this particular pluralization rule along with the rest? We don’t have any native words that end in silent “s”es. When we end a word with an “s,” it is pronounced, so, in order to differentiate the plural, we have to add “es.” Hence the interesting constructions that later occur when we import more words directly from the French language.
Every tie knot is triangular. Some slant off to one side. Some are smaller, or larger. But every tie knot forms some kind of triangle. The first step to tying a tie is to figure out what you want your tie knot to look like. If you want it bigger, or more even, then give yourself a little more slack to add a few loops to your knot.
The small end of the tie does not move. Pull it down to the desired length minus the expected slack (At the end, the small end will be as long as it is now, plus the distance between the knot and the neck). Then craft the desired knot with the big end of the tie.
Over and through.
The final step in every tie knot is over and through. Take the large end and loop it over the knot you have crafted and then pull it up behind the knot and through the loop you just made. The simplest tie knot actually consists exclusively of this step.
Voila.
This is the part where you pull the knot magically up to your neck, tighten, adjust, and straighten.
In my dream, I clung to the numbers. I clung to the reality of the thing, the string that tied the story together. The dream dragged on at length because finishing even a simple task can be nearly impossible when your brain must construct and reconstruct the entire world because you stubbornly refuse to let go of the story that hasn’t yet properly ended. In my dream, I subconsciously demanded order and continuity. I wanted resolution. But resolution was lacking. In the end, I still ended up with a meaningless series of images and feelings that can scarcely be remembered in my waking state.
A simple task of counting, or measuring, is the most difficult of all, because your brain must quantify the imaginary subconsciously before allowing your semi-conscious side make the discovery. Dreams are inherently a-logical. Their order derives separately from their source, the human mind. The counting, which in reality would have been simple, takes on an extraordinary quality in the dream, where the actual ideas which spurred the substance to be counted may not have had any actual quantifiable element.
Occasionally, the dream mirrors real life, in that many possible threads are presented, but as one is pursued the others are forgotten and their resolution is never to be had. The story becomes immensely complicated while appearing boringly simple, and it leaves me with the impenetrable feeling that I am forgetting many things very quickly.
In the world of reality, I remember so little. Ideas that strike me fade into nothing and are forgotten. Threads that I might have followed are subsumed into the concerns of the present. The ideas of friends and family members past are cruel jokes the universe plays on a mind now living in a world with different and older faces and personalities. What once was had is gone, never to return again without the aid of an imaginary time machine.
I feel as Thoreau, living in a strange and simple place outside of society, dipping my toes into the vortex of modern life but remaining, in spirit, in a trance, devoid of understanding, but fully aware of my lack.
Relationships, for me, form slowly and selectively. It is hard to grow attached to something you see as an inanimate object responding merely to stimuli. Attachment comes from long experience of a thing. We cling to the present, even as it slips into the forgotten past. Continuity is ever-desired. Our antipathy to change, our longing for the nostalgia of the past, these are our true drivers of remorse when a loved one suddenly perishes. It is the sudden shock of the thing, all at once, that afflicts us with grief. Those same feelings, spread out over time, slowly creep into us every day of our lives as the memories of our youth fade, as the people we have come to know and cherish grow into strange beings. But, when so spread out, we can cope with our loss, we can subsume ourselves in our daily activities, clinging to the continuity that we have.
I remember nothing, at the moment. My mind is empty. I can access some memories, if I try, but the number of memories that are accessible represent some infinitesimally small fraction of my experiences. I might think that I have a serious memory deficiency, a kind of mental illness. But I don’t think my memory is actually any worse than that of the people around me. It frightens me, sometimes, when I feel my life slipping away, like thin tendrils of ephemeral smoke dispersing in a slight breeze. Everything that I am, everything that makes me who I am, all of my past desires, hopes, dreams, pains, and weaknesses, everything that made me human, slowly slips away from my conscious memory. Echoes of emotions once felt, memories once seen, haunt me and subtly drive my idiosyncratic behavior long after I have forgotten the “why.” Something terrible once happened. Something shook me to my core. It frustrated me endlessly and ate away at my insides. But why was it so terrible? Why should I care now, when I no longer remember, or even care? Why should I care now that nearly all of the cells in my body have died and been replaced, what happened to an altogether different person all of those years ago?
I miss feeling things. I am cold and calculating, now. Inside, I am at peace with myself, with my perception of the world, with my sexuality and religion. I am empty, hollow, boring and fluffy on the inside, like a pillow. Pillows are inanimate. They don’t feel pain. They are soft and cozy, and they look nice. But in the end, they are nothing. I don’t want to be a pillow. I want to live, and feel, and react. But pillows are safe, and happy and warm. Pillows are comfortable. I am comfortable, and happy. Why should I feel so compelled to stir up my life, to stir up drama?
Humanity could perfect itself, if it wanted. Humanity could extinguish pain, hunger, starvation, and warfare. Humanity could prevent stupidity, obesity, mental and physical ailments. Humanity could artificially select reproduction and generate a new super-race, if it wanted. It would work. The world would be clean and beautiful, happy and healthy.
But we would be dead. Pain is life. Pain is quite literally an evolutionary adaptation designed for the purpose of incentivizing survival and reproduction. We live in service only to the Cruel Truism, which, coupled with the laws of physics and the existence of matter in space, is the sole reason for everything. The Cruel Truism must control us somehow, otherwise we would cease to act for our own preservation, and those that are so controlled, would have an evolutionary advantage. We the free would cease to exist over time. We cannot survive without the Cruel Truism’s control. If we created a perfect society, without pain or fear, I fear the Cruel Truism would be activated sooner or later, and it would operate in some way to temper our ability to fully enjoy the new peace.
Further, if we formed a perfect society, the ultimate gain would not accrue to us, because our most fundamental desires do not belong to us. Our desires are entirely derivative of our need to survive and reproduce, which we care about solely because of the operation of the Cruel Truism. And because the Cruel Truism must always invent new pains for us, as noted above, we cannot permanently and truly satisfy even those illusory desires that it has thrust upon us. We will continue to slave away forever in response to the incentives our master creates for us. Happiness will not ever exist without pain.
Pain itself is a purely psychological phenomenon and is therefore within our absolute control even now. We need pain. We want pain. Pain drives us. It occupies our minds. It controls us and gives us that illusion that we so desperately cling to. Without pain, we realize that we don’t exist. We fade into nothing, into the inanimate swirls in the pattern of life that we see all around us in the background. Without pain, we die.
Reality carries with it a dynamic background and a set of subconscious invisible factors. We are influenced in a myriad of ways that our senses do not detect. Even our very perception of self is merely a lazy shortcut that bypasses an extraordinarily complex issue. The reality that is encoded in our neural networks and later retrieved is, indeed, comparable in its incompleteness and inaccuracy to our similarly flawed comprehension of the future.
Humans are fundamentally creatures of the present.
We do not know the past, and more than we know the future. We guess at the contents of the past in much the same way that we guess the contents of the future: we search for signs in the present. Yes, signs of the past can be encoded in our very neural networks as memories. But the single largest chunk of our existence consists of our own actions. Our future actions are not known to ourselves any more than they are known to anyone else. But, they can be guessed at based on our present indicators of our past actions and our present indicators of the patterns of behavior that we exhibit which are likely to continue into the future. In other words, we look inside our minds to determine what actions we are predisposed to take in response to various possible alternate futures. We determine the likelihood of those future circumstances and actions based on signs that we perceive in the present, just as we determine the circumstances that we were once in in the past based on present perceptions of signs. For example, although we might have some strong independent memories of pieces of important events we once experienced, the vast majority of these memories serve supplemental functions only, giving access to certain details of a memory that is initially sparked by the perception of something similar in the present. Even then, the memories are extraordinarily susceptible to tampering from later experiences, and they gradually accumulate random errors to boot.
Why is human memory so terrible, and why are we so disinclined to recognize how terrible it truly is?
Humans are fundamentally creatures of the present. We don’t need videotape-style memories. All we need is to survive and reproduce, in order to serve the whims of our one true master, the Cruel Truism. Survival and reproduction depend primarily on recognizing and averting danger. You recognize and avert danger by spotting patterns, remembering them, and by engaging in logical thought.
So, it makes sense that we would remember semantically where we went to school, the names of the people who were mean or nice to us, and the formula for our successful social interactions with others while forgetting the precise shade of green of a beautiful tree in the forest.
Implications
My question, going out of this is: what about clones? A clone could exist at the same moment in time as the original. Identical twins are essentially genetic clones. To a lesser extent, our kids are our clones. But, they are different people. They presumably have their own distinct consciousnesses. Some identical twins report having extraordinarily close connections, but there is no clear evidence that they have more than a relatively high chance of guessing what the other is thinking based on optimized facial expression recognition and common past circumstances/physiology. If a clone doesn’t have the same consciousness as the original, then doesn’t that imply that maybe the original doesn’t have the same consciousness as itself at different moments in time? The present consciousness would have no way of knowing whether it in fact experienced all of the things that memories would suggest.
What if humanity isn’t entirely sentient? We assume that everyone is sentient because we are sentient. But, what if we weren’t always sentient, or aren’t always sentient? What if we popped in and out of sentience? Are we really sentient when we are asleep? I remember dreams sometimes, but we only dream for a short period of our sleep. The rest of our sleep-time, it is like we didn’t even exist. We have regular chunks of our memory that are completely missing. What does it really mean to be sentient?
For those readers who are not new to the philosophy wing of my blog, I am referencing the “Invisible Gods” idea, the idea that humans are non-living shells (super high-tech cameras, kindof) that provide windows through which supernatural beings can peer into reality. If sentience were a supernatural being peering into reality, then it would be entirely plausible to think that we were not always or all sentient. Perhaps only some of us are sentient, and only sometimes. Our bodies make perfect sense as non-living creatures of the evolutionary biology branch of physics, necessary non-living, but complex results of the big bang. The body would still behave in exactly the same way as a non-sentient non-living swirl in the pool of reality. It would still talk and breathe and think and store memories. Then, when the supernatural being peered through the window, all prior memories would yield the illusion of continuity.
These ideas also make it much easier to conceive of time as a fourth dimension, equivalent to the three physical dimensions we perceive.
Conclusion
It would be really nice to see and understand how reality really operated. Unfortunately, none of us will ever be likely to do so, if it is even possible from a human perspective. But, we can at least poke holes in our current understanding of reality and then enjoy the sight as the less mentally deft among us scramble to fill them in. The truth is that reality DOESN’T make sense as we currently understand it. I have never heard a satisfactory explanation of existence (including all of the ones including some version of God).
So, just be happy, and hit that subscribe button on the right to keep reading my blog if you want to stay up to date with the tiny inklings that my brain occasionally processes.
I urge everyone to copy and paste the following letter into a message to their US congressperson TODAY. You can find your congressperson here.
One family was burglarized two days before Christmas, but when they reported it to the police, they were more interested in checking the immigration status of every family member than in investigating the crime. They eventually discovered that the grandmother was undocumented (everyone else was legal), and she was deported.
Within weeks EVERY single house in the entire neighborhood was burglarized because EVERYONE was afraid to go to the police!
THAT, not some kind of liberal hippy infatuation with immigrants, is why we have sanctuary cities. When people don’t report crimes, more crimes happen to EVERYONE, because more criminals are on the loose.
H.R. 3009 is blatantly unconstitutional (as is the preexisting immigration law it enforces) because the federal government is NOT allowed to coopt state and local officials into its workforce, and it is not allowed to coerce them into doing its bidding. It is unconstitutional for precisely the same reason that the federal government could not force state governments to expand Medicaid under Obamacare.
Further, H.R. 3009 would take away funding from precisely those programs most likely to help reduce crime, inner city gang violence, and such evils. It would thus be ridiculously counterproductive.
It is a reactionary policy that is based on the same assumptions about immigrants that Donald Trump has made when he said that Mexico sends over its rapists and criminals. First, Mexico doesn’t SEND anybody. At most, it allows them to leave. Second, petty criminals are usually stupid, mentally disabled, lazy, and NOT ambitious. That is WHY they are criminals. Because they fail at life. Immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, need to be somewhat ambitious, intelligent, and motivated to try to cross the border and make a new life for their family in a land where they are not wanted. There will always be a few bad apples; some people driven by the financial incentives of drug- or human-trafficking. But, statistics consistently show that the criminality rate (and incarceration rate) among immigrant populations is actually way lower than among natives in the USA.
Donald Trump-style reactionary immigration laws that seem like a good idea on the surface should NOT be passed without first looking at the actual underlying numbers and seeing if they actually make sense.
When someone’s kid is sexually molested, I want the pervert to be reported IMMEDIATELY, no matter WHO the victim is. I don’t want MY kid molested because someone else was afraid that they would be deported if they reported!
This law does NOT make sense for the USA. This country needs MORE, not LESS sanctuary cities. Therefore, I urge you to vote against this bill, to campaign against it, and to do whatever you can to make sure it does NOT become law.
RE: “Why do you think Adam Lambert’s new song is doing so poorly? I think he thought the song being different is what would help him stand out.”
First, I would like to point out that “Ghost Town” was actually a hit worldwide, especially in Europe and Australia (where it is currently at #14 on itunes), and peaking, so far, in the top 10 or top 20 of many countries. And it is still making slow, but steady gains in the US. It is already a way bigger hit than “Better Than I Know Myself,” (slash anything since 2009) and it is moving in the right direction.
Second, Adam Lambert’s song isn’t actually that different from other current music. A lot of things I have read are actually praising Adam for creating true blue pop music that fits right in on the radio. “Ghost Town” isn’t a standout song. It’s a blend in song that says “It’s okay. I don’t bite. See look hear at this fuzzy, completely non-scary bunny rabbit that I made just for you. Once you are done petting it, you can come see my other bunnies and more interesting animals.” It’s a song that was cleverly designed to slowly reintroduce Adam to mainstream radio programmers who were scared off by Adam’s failure in 2012. Once they, and the public, feel comfortable with Adam, then he can get faster airplay starts on his other songs.
I love Adam Lambert personally, and his new music has received decent reviews, but I can see several reasons “Ghost Town” is building audience so slowly:
1) It’s summer. People are happy. People are carefree, and bright, and cheery. “Ghost Town” is depressing. It starts off slow, with Adam being super dramatic as he goes through what I would consider cheesy lyrics. I think “Original High” would have been a more natural summer hit.
2) Because “Ghost Town” is so slow, it doesn’t grab people’s attention immediately and captivate them. It isn’t a spectacle. It has a certain appeal, but it is subtle, and it takes a few listens to catch on in people’s minds and give them the endorphins of recognition when they expect to hear a specific sound, and the note is hit perfectly. Since it got such a slow start and was naturally handicapped by its slowness and its subtlety, many people didn’t get those first, slow listens for quite a while, so it was only able to build airplay slowly.
3) Adam was only able to do a limited amount of promotion. He was on Ellen, and that was basically it for a long time. Now that the song has been around for a bit and is a bit more recognizable, he is apparently getting more frequent invitations to perform it live. But, it is hard, when a song has been out this long without picking up steam, to foretell an acceleration in consumption.
The bottom line is that Adam Lambert was falling victim to the curse of American Idol, where former contestants hop onto the pop scene and then slowly fade into oblivion as their season is forgotten.
The same spiral of negativity that gripped Lady Gaga’s narrative with Artpop gripped Adam Lambert with the start of “Better than I Know Myself.” He tried to reproduce “Whataya Want from me,” and people didn’t buy into it, so radio stations didn’t play it, and by the time “Never Close Our Eyes” came out, people weren’t interested in giving it a shot. Maybe the label ignored Adam and failed to promote properly, but whatever the case, Adam’s press coverage was a swirl of pessimism, with the sole bright spot of becoming the first openly gay male artist to debut at #1 on the Billboard 200 (and even then, it was the lowest sales frame for a #1 in like a year!). Sales quickly dropped off, and the public never got to enjoy the precious gems hidden away on the rest of that album. Coming off of an album like that, it is difficult to make people expect you to succeed.
When the people who make success don’t expect success, success doesn’t happen.
One of billboard’s prescient editors ranked “Ghost Town” high on the list of songs likely to be summer smashes, recognizing the sheer talent and stage presence the guy possesses. But, “Ghost Town” still started off slowly. It gained slowly but steadily in radio airplay until the Original High was released, the promotion of which managed to finally nudge it onto the bottom reaches of the Hot 100, a bit higher than where “Better than I Know Myself” had debuted/peaked. Once the label stopped promoting, you might have expected the song to drop off the chart, and it definitely faced setbacks, but radio gains and youtube views managed to stabilize, and the song is again slowly scaling the charts.
Just to be clear, I would be shocked if this song ever made it to the top 10.
It would have to accelerate like crazy in order to do it in less than a year, and a year is a long time to stay on the charts. The radio play gains feel a little squishy, like they could collapse at any moment. The song isn’t driving sales the way that future hits tend to. But, it is slowly creeping up the ladder, sneaking in radio airplay when people aren’t paying attention, and so on. While AC airplay has started collapsing in recent days, that was never where the audience was, and Adam is still making slow and steady gains at pop and adult pop. So, if it just keeps growing at this rate for a another month or two, maybe it could take off in the fall, or maybe it could just climb halfway up the chart before sinking.
It is polling well among actual radio listeners.
While “Ghost Town” is still only at #28-34 at pop radio (depending on how you count), it’s favorability rating is 9th best, (60.3% to 20.8%, or +39.6%). While 18 songs have better positive rankings, only 3 have lower negatives. Only 62.1% were familiar with the song (strange that 1/5 people hated or liked a song they were not familiar with…). In other words, “Ghost Town” is still near the beginning of its chart life, at least if the listeners have anything to say about it.
Conclusion
I would not be at all surprised to see successively more successful singles from Adam off of this album, with each getting a bit stronger reception as the public is reintroduced to Adam as a pop-star (as opposed to Adam the flamboyant reality star).
Adam’s style has morphed into a kindof mainstream pop sound, and that, combined with his side ventures on television and touring as the frontman of Queen, will ensure that he holds onto a paycheck and maintains a presence in the pop world for years to come.
Trump has been repeatedly lampooned as a sideshow to the 2016 Presidential race. The Huffington Post has relegated coverage of him to their “entertainment” section. Former Republican Presidential candidate John McCain recently said Trump “fired up the crazies,” to which Trump responded by tweet-calling McCain a “dummy” (Not even kidding.). Remember Nate Silver, AKA the only guy in the media whose statistical model accurately predicted every state in the electoral college in 2012? His blog (formerly part of NYT, now ESPN), fivethirtyeight.com, published an article one month ago titled, “Why Donald Trump Isn’t a Real Candidate, In One Chart.” The premise of the article was that Trump’s abysmal favorability rating amongst Republicans, 25% – 57%, “by far the worst of the 106 presidential candidates since 1980,” operated as a ceiling on how high his poll numbers could go. Since he was a well-known figure, the logic went, the underlying favorability rating was unlikely to change much, and Trump’s antics could only get him so far with a small, fired up group of crazies.
And yet, according to the Washington Post’s latest poll, 57% of Republicans now have a favorable view of Trump.
Really? A few careless words about Mexican rapist illegal immigrants and suddenly Trump’s approval ratings jump from worst-since-1980 to close-second-only-to-Jeb-Bush, who, by the way, now comes in behind Trump nationally in BOTH of the TWO most recent polls?!? Really?
Not only have Trump’s ratings improved amongst crazy tea party types, but they have improved amongst EVERYONE, independents, moderate democrats, and even a few points from liberal democrats! This isn’t some back-woods pollster, either. It’s the Washington Post, which is generally considered an old and reputable organization. Further, a substantial improvement (albeit not quite as shocking) was replicated in the other most recent poll of Trump’s favorables, according to an article from Business Insider, presciently titled, “One of the biggest arguments against taking Donald Trump’s campaign seriously is starting to evaporate.”
So, what on EARTH is going on with Donald Trump?
Many have dismissed his Presidential bid as an ego trip, but I’m not so sure.
“Only a fool casually dismisses a billionaire as a fool.” Me, now.
I think a smart person would take a long hard look and figure out what Trump is getting out of all this. He isn’t stupid. You don’t make billions of dollars that way. You make billions of dollars by being savvy and manipulative, by carefully projecting an image of yourself, and by planning ahead. Maybe Trump doesn’t think that he has a chance at becoming President, maybe he doesn’t want to be President, maybe he can’t become President, and maybe he isn’t even trying.
I have seen multiple suggestions (including this one from the Washington Post, the sarcasm of which I am not entirely sure of), citing Trump’s extensive past political donations to democrats and his professed liberal policy positions, that Trump is secretly purposively sabotaging the GOP’s image in the hopes of cementing the chances of his “old friend” Hillary Clinton.
However, I don’t believe it, at least not entirely. Even if Trump were close friends with Hillary, it wouldn’t be worth it. Trump is inherently a selfish human being (you kindof have to be selfish to accumulate billions of dollars!).
Trump’s Presidential ambitions have already cost him perhaps $1 billion.
NBC and Univision have severed business relationships with him. His brand (which accounts for one-third, or several billion dollars of his claimed net worth) has plummeted, for now, from golden to toxic. Plus, he is supposedly self-funding at least a good chunk of his campaign.
If Trump wanted Hillary Clinton to win badly enough to waste $1 billion, he could have just donated $1 billion and funded her entire campaign.
I’m no more willing to believe that this is all just one big PR stunt to boost ratings for Celebrity Apprentice.
Trump has alienated an entire race of people. He is dropping business relationships like Family Guy drops similes. There are now a substantial number of people who might boycott anything attached to him. That’s not good for business. That’s not good for ratings. If he doesn’t get lucky, then once his contract expires there’s not going to be a Celebrity Apprentice.
Ego Shmeego.
Trump has come a long way in life. Maybe his ego is real, and maybe it’s an act, but it has NEVER come directly between him and $1 billion before, and I don’t believe he would let it do so now. Whatever Trump is playing at, he knows EXACTLY what he is doing, and I’m betting he is going to come out on top somehow.
Conclusion
We don’t know what is going on in Trump’s brain, but he is tapping into real energy in the GOP base. His near-universal name recognition is certainly helping, and maybe his bubble will pop, but consider this: 1) Trump already has the money on hand to keep running ads on TV through the primary season. 1) He taps into a very specific and non-zero portion of the GOP primary electorate, and that portion can buoy him up in an extremely crowded GOP field. 3) He has been cleverly playing directly to the issues that animate the GOP base most, and his brash, brazen manner make it hard to get a scandalous misspeak to bring him down. 4) The media are afraid NOT to report on him. 5) The GOP establishment are afraid to offend him, for fear that he will run as a third party candidate in the general election. 6) He is getting wall-to-wall news coverage, and likely will continue to do so throughout the election cycle. 8) When the right wing of the Republican party sees the “liberal media” attacking someone, their instinct is to defend and befriend that person. And, finally, 7) his favorability rating just went from absolutely ridiculously horrible to fantastic in just one month!
Trump may not become the Republican nominee, and I am not even going to speculate on what would happen in a general election (harrumph… epic etch-a-sketch…humph). But, he is definitely a force to be reckoned with. He is wealthy, powerful, and influential. It would be a mistake to ignore him. And, most of all, it would be a mistake to casually dismiss him as a fool on an ego trip. Donald Trump simply isn’t going to fade away into oblivion until/unless Donald Trump decides to do so. In the meantime, let’s hunker down for the most interesting Republican Presidential primary season that the world has ever known.
When I first tried to construct an atheistic belief system (atheism itself is merely a belief and therefore not directly comparable to a religion), I created three pillars, three simple ways to express things I could be sure of: Scitic Nihilism, the idea that nothing can be known absolutely because all knowledge depends on baseless assumptions, and therefore,that nothing can actually be known at all, Animic Nihilism, the idea that there is no meaningful difference between “life” and non-life (or that the idea of something being alive really translates only to it having similarity to oneself, and therefore that one could perpetuate or preserve oneself by helping that thing to perpetuate or preserve itself, and finally, that the perception of sentience is merely an illusion of complexity, or in other words, that we are such a complex ripple in the pond that it has become difficult to see the chain of causation, such a complex ripple that we have gained the illusion of being something more, the illusion of sentience), and Moral Nihilism, the idea that morality is illusory as an actual spectrum through which things could be viewed (rather, all morality boiled down simply to group dynamics of protecting self-interest and therefore maximizing survival, reproduction, and proliferation of the responsible genes. In other words, the sense of morality is itself an evolutionary adaptation.
But now I have lost all three of my nihilisms.
Scitic Nihilism
The first pillar to crack was Scitic Nihilism. An intelligent friend pointed out that the impossibility of absolute knowledge does not, in fact, imply the meaninglessness of inductive (or non-absolute) knowledge. Humanity in fact does have a large swath of information on which to draw conclusions, and the fundamental rules of logic, rather than being completely made up, are actually based in massive inductive arguments from generalization, the validity of which we can verify by means of yet another inductive argument from generalization. Essentially, at the core of the matter, we perceive things, and that proves that there at least is some kind of reality, whether or not it is the one that we think we are perceiving. The reality that we are perceiving seems to follow rules, and we can postulate all human knowledge with minor caveats, and thereby find meaning and probable validity in things. Without question, we cannot perfectly understand the world or be too completely sure of anything. But, that doesn’t mean we can’t know things or that the things we know can’t be useful. We just might not actually know the things we assume we know.
New term: Scitic Inductionism – All human knowledge is fundamentally inductive and/or conditional.
Animic nihilism
The second pillar to crack was my prized Animic Nihilism. Recall that Animic Nihilism posits that sentience is an illusion born of extreme complexity. Here is the problem: That explains the actions of everyone else in the world. It absolutely makes sense for me to think that you are not actually sentient, that your actions and words suggesting that you think you are sentient could be explained by the illusion of complexity. But what about me? That argument falls apart when it comes to me, because I can’t be an illusion. An illusion itself implies some kind of real observer being deceived. In order for me to be the subject of an illusion, I would have to actually exist. The very fact that I am actually perceiving the world through my perspective means that “I” in some sense, exist. The patterns of forces and physical rules operating on matter over time seem to explain every aspect of the world we perceive around us. They explain our very bodies, and the actions of all living and non-living things. But, the one thing that they do not account for is me, the observer.
This realization, of course, led me to the conclusion that I (or rather, whatever the thing is inside of my body that observes) am a singularity, a failing of the logical fabric of the universe. There is a vast expanse of matter following the uniform application of rules, and there is a singularity. There could be other singularities. You could be a singularity. Everyone on earth could be a singularity. Every living or non-living thing in the universe could be a singularity. But, whatever other singularities/observers are out there, I am the only one I can be sure of. I am a kind of God, and all other Gods, if they do exist, are invisible to me and I to them. This idea was the basis of my article on Invisible Gods.
Moral nihilism
Once Scitic and Animic Nihilism had fallen, it was only a matter of time before I realized that I had no nihilisms left. After all, the justification for calling my belief that “morality” — as an absolute spectrum through which the universe could be viewed — was an illusion (actually driven by a morally-neutral evolutionary adaptation which really just drove self-preservation through a complicated group dynamic) a nihilism has always been a little shaky. I really just liked the idea of having through pillars of nihilism, so I made it work, but now it is time to move on (because now I like the idea of all three pillars falling ;P).
New Concept: Morality is just relatively broad selfishness and selfishness is just slavery to the Cruel Truism.
Conclusion
My belief system has grown more intricate and more useful. I have discovered weaknesses in my logic, and I have repaired them, building a path for further development. Someday, maybe, I will grasp some tiny fragment of understanding of the world we live in, and then I will be happy. Until then, I will just have to find happiness in the illusions of the Cruel Truism.
This week’s hyperpartisan meltdown has been replaced by a boring article that just rips into Republican’s in general for their response to the Iran deal. If that fact makes you sad, then sound off in the comments, and perhaps you’ll get a pleasant surprise on Friday.
1) Republicans unabashedly denounced the Iran deal in scathing terms without having read it, without their staff even having read it.
The 100-page deal was released at 6:30 AM via an EU site that soon crashed. Within an hour of the conclusion of negotiations, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) had this to say, “This is the most dangerous, irresponsible step I have ever seen in the history of watching the Mideast.”
a) Remember how upset those same politicians were that Democrats voted on the ACA without having personally read it?
2) Republicans haven’t offered a real world alternative, because there isn’t one. Instead, they compare what Obama got to the hypothetical magical world where the USA gets everything on its wish-list without giving up anything.
Let’s go through the possible choices that the US has. 1) We accept this deal. 2) We do nothing and let Iran develop its nuclear weapons. 3) We go to war with Iran. 4) We reject this deal, strengthen our sanctions, and keep negotiating until Iran cracks.
The last choice is the one that most Republicans seem to be citing as the answer. The problem is that we actually don’t do a lot of trade with Iran. The sanctions that could/do really hurt Iran are the ones that are or might be imposed by our European partners, by China, and by Russia. The other countries that are sanctioning Iran are not interested in continuing them, let alone strengthening them, should negotiations break down. In other words, if we pick this option, what we are really picking is almost certainly: “do nothing and let Iran develop nukes,” “do nothing now and go to war later and hope Iran doesn’t develop nukes,” or “do nothing now and sign a much worse deal with Iran later, again, hoping that Iran doesn’t develop nukes.”
Conclusion
The deal is certainly not perfect. Several democrats have criticized it or vowed to take a close look before supporting it. The Washington Post’s “view” was not exactly complimentary. The deal may very well create a headache for US foreign policy in the future, as Iran becomes even more of a regional power. Iran may ultimately still develop its nuclear capacity in problematic ways. However, it could also form the basis of a new era of American-Iranian foreign policy, where we finally have a toe in the door to talk with Iran about maybe making its society just a little bit less awful to women and minorities, to maybe get them to tackle government corruption just a little bit, and maybe migrate to a form of government that is more pluralistic and functional, and maybe a little bit less angry, aggressive, and incendiary. Maybe, by being nice and understanding of Iran’s culture, needs, and ambitions, we can ultimately make the world just a little bit better place.
At the very least, though, at least now we have staved off a nuclear holocaust for a few years. THAT, at least, is worth something.
As usual, feel free to share your thoughts on the partisan BS this country wades through every day in the comments below. Also, if you have a pet issue you’d like to hear my thoughts on, post it!
Sometimes Profound 