Back in the autumn of 2009 I got a new manager, call him X. Under whom, despite a slightly shaky start, I flourished. X recognised what I’m good at, and what I’m not so good at, and once hit me on the arm when I was a little less than tactful with a help desk guy who was being especially obtuse. The fact that I remember it tells you that it was the right thing to do and spoke a lot about our relationship. I enjoyed working with X, as I enjoy working with any manager strong enough to recognise their weaknesses and hire people with those things as strengths.
Now X has gone over to Another Bank. They are looking for a New Guy, and until then, I am reporting to the Director. Which speaks volumes about how I’ve developed, because two years ago, I would have been hidden from the Director by at least one, if not two, layers of intermediaries.
I took a week off after X left. Not the best weather. I only really started to unwind the Thursday and Friday. I stayed at home and went into town for the gym. It was then I decided, for no reason except Why Not, to do six days in the gym for six weeks. Week one was last week: Sunday, chest; Monday, shoulders; Tuesday, weights and spin; Wednesday, chest; Thursday, yoga; Friday, swimming. After the weights bit, there is always a 1km jog on the treadmill, pull-ups + other back, and abs. No all I need is to get the diet bit exactly right.
I saw Sara Baras, Gala Flamenco and Farraquito at Sadlers Wells; Non-Stop and Captain America at the local Cineworld; Under The Skin, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Nymphomaniac I and II at the Curzon Soho; the British Masters series on You Tube; and Mister John and 8 Weeks Idle via Curzon Online. DVDs included Californication S4 and Burn Notice S5, and I finally saw Godard’s British Sounds, Lotte in Italia and Pravda.
I slogged my way through Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night; read Jan Sokol’s Thinking About Ordinary Things; finished Maldoror; read Pedro Ferraria’s history of General Relativity, The Perfect Theory; Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s Worlds Without End; Imogen Edward_Jones’ Hospital Babylon, and an Aerofilms book, A History of Britain From The Air, which is excellent if you have no sense of what this country used to look like even eighty years ago.
The back garden got a spring-clean one Sunday. I had a visit from the kitchen fitters, who measured up and found the plans were 100mm out, so I had a another visit from the planners. All while I was on holiday.
Sis and I had supper at Picture - fast becoming my favourite restaurant - for her birthday, and I ate at the bar at Hix, and had lunch at Jamies Italian Trattoria in Richmond (the pizzas are really good).
And I had a minor revelation about complex one-forms, the real meaning of Cauchy’s formula, and why closed curves are more fundamental in complex analysis than points are.
Oh. And prunes. Every day. I say no more.
Thursday, 3 April 2014
Monday, 31 March 2014
Owens Field, Islington
Owens Field is a really small park about a hundred yards from the Angel, Islington, near the City and Islington College Centre for Applied Sciences. These photographs make it look larger and more pleasant than it really is.
There should probably be some comment about the value of urban spaces here, but the thing is, right across the road is a bunch of flats that look like this...
... and no amount of greenery is going to make that a heart-warming sight to return home to. We are not talking "leafy" anything here. But then I've never got the attractions of North London.
Thursday, 27 March 2014
Piccadilly Circus Sunday Morning
Sunday 15th March to be exact. About 09:00. I love London first thing in the morning. This is what I see on the way to the gym Sunday. At the weekend the streets are empty until around 11:00.
Looking down Lower Regent St to St James' Park; count the traffic lights on the Circus; the famous illustrated advertisments; the view up Regent Street. Notice the lack of traffic. Even buses.
Monday, 24 March 2014
Here's A Plan
For the next six weeks, until my birthday, I will live simply. I will:
go to the gym every day except Saturday;
get as close to the reducing diet as I can;
get as close to eight hours’ sleep as I can;
read books I want to read, not books I think I should read;
watch my way through the box sets in the evening.
Let’s just live it.
go to the gym every day except Saturday;
get as close to the reducing diet as I can;
get as close to eight hours’ sleep as I can;
read books I want to read, not books I think I should read;
watch my way through the box sets in the evening.
Let’s just live it.
Monday, 17 March 2014
Five Tear-Fests
Over at Jeff Goldblum’s Laugh, they have a list of five movies guaranteed to set loose that self-pity that’s straining at the leash and bring self-indulgent tears to your eyes. Didn’t agree with one of them. But I know what they mean.
At number one is this song from Rent. Wrecks me every time.
Then there’s a film I cannot watch again. Ever. You want the bit between 1:00 and 4:00, where Alan Rickman comes back from the dead to comfort a grieving Juliet Stevenson. You really need the set-up first, in parts 1 and 2 of this to get into the state of mind.
I have no idea where Stevenson got those tears from, unless within herself, from the memory of some irreplaceable loss of the kind that one can only learn to stop awakening, because it is never going to go away.
There’s the end of Blue is the Warmest Colour.
How many times have I left a social occasion where I felt totally unconnected with everyone, especially since there was a someone I wanted to be connected to? How empty and hollow it feels to be talking to the people there? The moment of decision to leave, the slight hesitation as I pass through the door, and then the turn into the empty side street, the cigarette, the firm pace taking me away. As she approached the turn, I was thinking “Don’t walk down that street, don’t do it” and when she did, I teared up in the darkness of the Renoir. I had to rush back into the West End and eat ice cream and cake and coffee. The rest of my day was a mess.
There’s the end of Mahler’s Second. You do need to sit through the whole thing, which meanders and wanders and seems directionless for a long time, until the last ten minutes, when it starts to build, and in the final two minutes, he reaches into your chest and crushes your heart. (Don’t skip to then end, or it won’t work)
I first heard this at a Prom, up in the Gallery, and when the organ and the bells come in, I just thought “Good God above, how is music like this even possible?”. Not quite as articulate as that at the time, because the hairs were standing on the back of my neck and there was a bloody great lump in my throat.
Which brings me to the last one
Yep. Mastersingers. I saw this at the ENO and teared up in two places. First when that overture (the single best piece of music ever composed for orchestra) ends, the curtain rises and the choir starts. And then, of course, at the end, when the Boy gets the Girl, having overcome all the small-town silliness in-between. I swear people all around me were wiping their eyes.
At number one is this song from Rent. Wrecks me every time.
Then there’s a film I cannot watch again. Ever. You want the bit between 1:00 and 4:00, where Alan Rickman comes back from the dead to comfort a grieving Juliet Stevenson. You really need the set-up first, in parts 1 and 2 of this to get into the state of mind.
I have no idea where Stevenson got those tears from, unless within herself, from the memory of some irreplaceable loss of the kind that one can only learn to stop awakening, because it is never going to go away.
There’s the end of Blue is the Warmest Colour.
How many times have I left a social occasion where I felt totally unconnected with everyone, especially since there was a someone I wanted to be connected to? How empty and hollow it feels to be talking to the people there? The moment of decision to leave, the slight hesitation as I pass through the door, and then the turn into the empty side street, the cigarette, the firm pace taking me away. As she approached the turn, I was thinking “Don’t walk down that street, don’t do it” and when she did, I teared up in the darkness of the Renoir. I had to rush back into the West End and eat ice cream and cake and coffee. The rest of my day was a mess.
There’s the end of Mahler’s Second. You do need to sit through the whole thing, which meanders and wanders and seems directionless for a long time, until the last ten minutes, when it starts to build, and in the final two minutes, he reaches into your chest and crushes your heart. (Don’t skip to then end, or it won’t work)
I first heard this at a Prom, up in the Gallery, and when the organ and the bells come in, I just thought “Good God above, how is music like this even possible?”. Not quite as articulate as that at the time, because the hairs were standing on the back of my neck and there was a bloody great lump in my throat.
Which brings me to the last one
Yep. Mastersingers. I saw this at the ENO and teared up in two places. First when that overture (the single best piece of music ever composed for orchestra) ends, the curtain rises and the choir starts. And then, of course, at the end, when the Boy gets the Girl, having overcome all the small-town silliness in-between. I swear people all around me were wiping their eyes.
Thursday, 13 March 2014
Songs With Flutes
Songs with flutes are special. Many are by Traffic or Jethro Tull, few were made after 1970. The flute is, in the context of rock / pop / dance, a jazz instrument, and dropped out when the influence of jazz was no longer felt in rock music. All these songs are slightly wistful, elegiac, outside, and that’s what the flute did.
The uber-song with flute is of course
)
followed by anything by Traffic, of which I offer this especially stoned example
)
This is so famous that the flute itself is in some kind of Hall of Fame museum
)
And if you haven’t discovered After Bathing At Baxters, listen to this and then You Tube the rest
)
and while we’re doing San Francisco psychedelia, let’s throw in
)
and some good solid stuff
)
)
The uber-song with flute is of course
)
followed by anything by Traffic, of which I offer this especially stoned example
)
This is so famous that the flute itself is in some kind of Hall of Fame museum
)
And if you haven’t discovered After Bathing At Baxters, listen to this and then You Tube the rest
)
and while we’re doing San Francisco psychedelia, let’s throw in
)
and some good solid stuff
)
)
Monday, 10 March 2014
Intuition, Imagination and Philosophical Methodology by Tamar Szabo Gendler
(I’m commenting on this book because it took two weeks out of my reading time and was painful. It turned out to be one of those books with which I disagreed on so many levels that I had to set out how and why.)
Perhaps the single most interesting thing Professor Gendler says is about his inability to process the following sentence from an imaginary novel: “In killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing: after all, it was a girl”. The poor guy blows a fuse at this. Exhibiting a phenomenon he calls “imaginative resistance”, he refuses to imagine a world where killing a girl baby would be the right thing to do. Which is kinda odd, because that would be this one. Killing baby girls because they are girls is standard operating procedure in many cultures, some of which have colonies in the UK and the USA. And a sentence like that is to be found in many feminist dystopias. Most of J G Ballard’s mid-period novels open with a shocker like that. Its function is exactly to push you out of your imaginative rut and accept the imaginative world they going to set up. (He has a similar problem with Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden” he can imagine that there are or were white men who felt like that, but not that that’s the way they should have felt. He’s very PC is our good Professor.)
In one approach to explaining what knowledge is, we take knowledge to be what people know, and knowing to be the primary epistemological act and state. Knowing is believing things for which we have evidence and which are true. It is definitive and certain - because it is true. Knowledge is something people have (though that may be species-ist, of course), and dies with them.
In another approach, knowledge is something that people can have, but exists in some sense independently of knowers. Knowledge can be forgotten, and re-discovered. It is held in books, photographs, academic papers and other media, and also in people’s memories. It can be learned and understood. It does not have to be true, but it does have to be our current best attempt at the truth.
In the first approach, the key mental act is believing. Knowing is an honorific term for those believings that are of true things. Believing is so fundamental that all propositional attitudes are taken to be shades of believing. Which of course gives us a problem when dealing with counterfactuals such as thought-experiments and imaginative fiction. Do we “believe” a thought-experiment, and if not, what are we doing? These are the questions Gendler sets out to examine some answers to.
There are two little problems with the project. The first is that those answers are irrelevant to an epistemologist. Epistemology is a normative discipline, as is Logic. It’s only a philosopher’s job to tell us how we do think, so they can tell us to stop thinking like that as it will only get us into trouble.
The second is that mental states have no relevance to understanding how we think. That may seem odd, but consider that mental states are exactly like the states of a computer while it does something. Two computers may be in very different states and be doing the same thing (because they have different operating systems, hardware architectures and so on). It’s what the computers are doing that matters, not the exact disposition of 0’s and 1’s inside them while they are doing it.
The emphasis on ‘belief’ is a hangover from religious and tribal law and society. The priests and witch-doctors didn’t give a hoot what went on in your grandfather’ head, but they did care that he acted in such-a-way and said specific things on specific occasions. If they said that he did not ‘believe’ they were talking about his behaviour, not his mental state. At some point, probably when someone invented souls, belief-as-behaviour was associated to belief-as-state-of-soul and thence to the “mind". The point of ‘believing’ was and is commitment. You were going to fight for the tribe and the church, you were going to trust the tribal elders and your relatives, and of course, you’re going to wave the flag of whatever political causes have insinuated themselves into your chosen academic pursuit. (cough *Climate science* cough)
(The real reason so many Anglo academics have a problem with Popper? Popperians don’t commit, as the core of his approach is the demand that you specify in advance the conditions under which you would abandon your theory / belief. But if you’re going to get an academic gravy train running, everyone must commit.)
If you are a believer in belief, then thought-experiments and fiction, make-believe generally, is difficult to describe and incorporate into your theory of knowledge. If you believe that belief about the world must be at heart rational, then instincts are even harder to incorporate. Or you banish instinct and make-believe to a nether world of irrationality, and accept that, at times the irrational can guide us despite itself.
One example Gendler takes is Galileo’s famous thought experiment whereby a light and a heavy weight are tied together by a strap and dropped. According to Aristotle, heavier weights fall faster. How fast does our assembly fall? Try working out some of the alternatives: as fast as the maximum, the average, the sum. None quite hold together.
The argument is a rhetorical trick. His audience were a handful of literate Florentines and the scholars of the Catholic Church. These were ingenious, practical, commercially-minded and for all intents and purposes, atheist, men. Faced with Galileo’s argument, they knew very well Aristotle’s ideas could be saved. But at the cost of ever-mounting complexity. The only assumption that sounds neat is that, in fact, all objects fall at the same speed, mod air resistance. It’s not a physical argument at all, but a methodological one.
Gendler thinks the argument is about physics, and wonders how can an argument about an imaginary situation affect our beliefs about the real world. How can that even be legitimate? This drags him into horrible problems, which can all be avoided the moment we accept that we don’t believe a darn thing, but use the assumptions that work best for us. Until they don’t. Then we try some different stuff until we find something that works. (That attitude, of course, suits people with a knack for problem-solving, extemporisation and generally winging-it. That’s a minority and getting smaller.)
If this was phenomenology, I wouldn’t mind. I’m partial to a bit of phenomenology. But it isn’t. It’s an attempt to systematise stuff that really isn’t. In the final chapters he discusses a mental state he calls “alief”. These are propensities to behave in such a way that is automatic, arational, action-generating, affect-laden and prior to anything else we learned. He says that he hasn’t run across this idea anywhere before, which is odd, because regular people call these, “instincts”. Aliefs are, however, a translation of instincts into the language of belief, a kind of “propositionalisation” of instinct, if you will. The trick can be turned, and Gendler turns it, but should we coo and applaud?
Some things make sense. Usually because they have been designed by men to make sense. The rest may not be random, but it sure was a mess cobbled together in a hurry. Thus the human mind. It does the job, but how it does, is, like the making of laws and sausages, something we would sleep better for not knowing.
Trying to habilitate instinct as a belief-related process, and hence a quasi-cognative one, is right up there with ego-psycho explanations of promiscuity. Not because it’s post-hoc, but because it is trying to find pattern and sense where there isn’t any. Galileo’s argument was a trick, and a good one, not an attempt to exploit some subtle state of mind which validly allows reasoning about imaginary situations to influence our beliefs about real situations. Heck, most people don’t allow reasoning about real situations to influence their beliefs about real situations. The process Gendler wants to describe would happen, if it happens at all, in a very small number of minds, mostly, one suspects, minds with tenure.
Perhaps the single most interesting thing Professor Gendler says is about his inability to process the following sentence from an imaginary novel: “In killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing: after all, it was a girl”. The poor guy blows a fuse at this. Exhibiting a phenomenon he calls “imaginative resistance”, he refuses to imagine a world where killing a girl baby would be the right thing to do. Which is kinda odd, because that would be this one. Killing baby girls because they are girls is standard operating procedure in many cultures, some of which have colonies in the UK and the USA. And a sentence like that is to be found in many feminist dystopias. Most of J G Ballard’s mid-period novels open with a shocker like that. Its function is exactly to push you out of your imaginative rut and accept the imaginative world they going to set up. (He has a similar problem with Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden” he can imagine that there are or were white men who felt like that, but not that that’s the way they should have felt. He’s very PC is our good Professor.)
In one approach to explaining what knowledge is, we take knowledge to be what people know, and knowing to be the primary epistemological act and state. Knowing is believing things for which we have evidence and which are true. It is definitive and certain - because it is true. Knowledge is something people have (though that may be species-ist, of course), and dies with them.
In another approach, knowledge is something that people can have, but exists in some sense independently of knowers. Knowledge can be forgotten, and re-discovered. It is held in books, photographs, academic papers and other media, and also in people’s memories. It can be learned and understood. It does not have to be true, but it does have to be our current best attempt at the truth.
In the first approach, the key mental act is believing. Knowing is an honorific term for those believings that are of true things. Believing is so fundamental that all propositional attitudes are taken to be shades of believing. Which of course gives us a problem when dealing with counterfactuals such as thought-experiments and imaginative fiction. Do we “believe” a thought-experiment, and if not, what are we doing? These are the questions Gendler sets out to examine some answers to.
There are two little problems with the project. The first is that those answers are irrelevant to an epistemologist. Epistemology is a normative discipline, as is Logic. It’s only a philosopher’s job to tell us how we do think, so they can tell us to stop thinking like that as it will only get us into trouble.
The second is that mental states have no relevance to understanding how we think. That may seem odd, but consider that mental states are exactly like the states of a computer while it does something. Two computers may be in very different states and be doing the same thing (because they have different operating systems, hardware architectures and so on). It’s what the computers are doing that matters, not the exact disposition of 0’s and 1’s inside them while they are doing it.
The emphasis on ‘belief’ is a hangover from religious and tribal law and society. The priests and witch-doctors didn’t give a hoot what went on in your grandfather’ head, but they did care that he acted in such-a-way and said specific things on specific occasions. If they said that he did not ‘believe’ they were talking about his behaviour, not his mental state. At some point, probably when someone invented souls, belief-as-behaviour was associated to belief-as-state-of-soul and thence to the “mind". The point of ‘believing’ was and is commitment. You were going to fight for the tribe and the church, you were going to trust the tribal elders and your relatives, and of course, you’re going to wave the flag of whatever political causes have insinuated themselves into your chosen academic pursuit. (cough *Climate science* cough)
(The real reason so many Anglo academics have a problem with Popper? Popperians don’t commit, as the core of his approach is the demand that you specify in advance the conditions under which you would abandon your theory / belief. But if you’re going to get an academic gravy train running, everyone must commit.)
If you are a believer in belief, then thought-experiments and fiction, make-believe generally, is difficult to describe and incorporate into your theory of knowledge. If you believe that belief about the world must be at heart rational, then instincts are even harder to incorporate. Or you banish instinct and make-believe to a nether world of irrationality, and accept that, at times the irrational can guide us despite itself.
One example Gendler takes is Galileo’s famous thought experiment whereby a light and a heavy weight are tied together by a strap and dropped. According to Aristotle, heavier weights fall faster. How fast does our assembly fall? Try working out some of the alternatives: as fast as the maximum, the average, the sum. None quite hold together.
The argument is a rhetorical trick. His audience were a handful of literate Florentines and the scholars of the Catholic Church. These were ingenious, practical, commercially-minded and for all intents and purposes, atheist, men. Faced with Galileo’s argument, they knew very well Aristotle’s ideas could be saved. But at the cost of ever-mounting complexity. The only assumption that sounds neat is that, in fact, all objects fall at the same speed, mod air resistance. It’s not a physical argument at all, but a methodological one.
Gendler thinks the argument is about physics, and wonders how can an argument about an imaginary situation affect our beliefs about the real world. How can that even be legitimate? This drags him into horrible problems, which can all be avoided the moment we accept that we don’t believe a darn thing, but use the assumptions that work best for us. Until they don’t. Then we try some different stuff until we find something that works. (That attitude, of course, suits people with a knack for problem-solving, extemporisation and generally winging-it. That’s a minority and getting smaller.)
If this was phenomenology, I wouldn’t mind. I’m partial to a bit of phenomenology. But it isn’t. It’s an attempt to systematise stuff that really isn’t. In the final chapters he discusses a mental state he calls “alief”. These are propensities to behave in such a way that is automatic, arational, action-generating, affect-laden and prior to anything else we learned. He says that he hasn’t run across this idea anywhere before, which is odd, because regular people call these, “instincts”. Aliefs are, however, a translation of instincts into the language of belief, a kind of “propositionalisation” of instinct, if you will. The trick can be turned, and Gendler turns it, but should we coo and applaud?
Some things make sense. Usually because they have been designed by men to make sense. The rest may not be random, but it sure was a mess cobbled together in a hurry. Thus the human mind. It does the job, but how it does, is, like the making of laws and sausages, something we would sleep better for not knowing.
Trying to habilitate instinct as a belief-related process, and hence a quasi-cognative one, is right up there with ego-psycho explanations of promiscuity. Not because it’s post-hoc, but because it is trying to find pattern and sense where there isn’t any. Galileo’s argument was a trick, and a good one, not an attempt to exploit some subtle state of mind which validly allows reasoning about imaginary situations to influence our beliefs about real situations. Heck, most people don’t allow reasoning about real situations to influence their beliefs about real situations. The process Gendler wants to describe would happen, if it happens at all, in a very small number of minds, mostly, one suspects, minds with tenure.
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