Bodell

I'd have to give it serious thought, but if I were to agree, I'd also have to add that: The last two millennia of physics were also blindsided by it's own implications of it's discoveries in the 20th century.

Philosophy of mind I think is only a good example of all the things we still do not understand about neurology and cognitive science. I am not personally disheartened by it, as I typically get excited about unanswered questions. But I would agree modern day philosophers would be well advised to read more interdisciplinary science journals if they want to remain relevant. A good example of this is the Bereitschaftspotential from Libet's famous experiments.The experiment was sound the results were sound, the interpretations however may not have been. Diligent philosophers could have pointed this out, but it was the work of a medical researcher who did disprove it's underlying assumptions.[1][2]

[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will... [2]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/230624040_An_Accumu...

I think this fairly well points out that we do not actually mean the same thing when we say “high” and “low”. Although, I will concede that the two terms are often interchangeable and often misused.

Correct me if I’m reading you wrongly, but It seems to me when you say high level you’re offering philosophy up as an umbrella where all things that fall beneath it are then equivocated.

My argument is that I do not believe this. I believe philosophy is a tool best used to build things up from the bottom. I think when physics asks a question of itself, we can safely call that philosophy. In much the same way, it is also philosophy when we ask ourselves if what we are doing is morally “right”. Same tool, vastly different jobs. With little to no connection inherent between the jobs themselves.

This would be the same in mathematics if I were to offer an axiom in traditional number theory (specifically all positive integers in a base 10 system). I would then need to argue that my proposed axiom did not apply also to propositional calculus, as no reasonable mathematical would believe that they were equivalent. This is not to say there is no overlap, there very well may be if interpreted correctly. But it does not by its existence imply they should be the same thing.

This is also where I think we agree. For me physics’ ability to question its axioms are in fact what separates it from things like religious dogma. An axiom that is indisputable is dogma in a sense. So the reason why science is so powerful is this ability to question and not take results on faith. To remove philosophy from that would be to diminish what sets it apart.

So with the tool metaphor I’d just say agin that not all practitioners use their tools wisely. But this does not mean we should throw out all of our hammers just because we see someone using one upside down.

I would also suggest reading more on the topic of ethics in philosophy. I think you may find that the field is far more scientific then you believe it to be. You’ll also note that there are many similarities in its logic and methods of categorization. The issue is simply that it is much more difficult to answer questions in ethics than it is to find out what happens to an object on a frictionless plane. And if physics is the one true answer, than not much can be considered purely human made. As humans abide the same physical laws that frictionless planes do.

Logic is a field of philosophy [1]. As most inductive reasoning is. It would be impossible to separate philosophy from math, and in turn math from physics. Philosophy is not intended to be a high level view but a low level one, willing to examine the core structures of any system, weather those are man made ones such as ethics or beliefs, or supposed nature laws such as the physical world.

It’s is true that some modern philosophers have done poorly to keep up with recent discoveries. However this is also true of many other proponents of different fields (i.e. neurology has been accused in lacking cognitive/computer science knowledge, biological science is often accused of lacking knowledge in statistical models). No matter the claim we don’t tend to decide entire fields of study are useless because we disagree with some of its practitioners.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic

I often quote this line from Nabokov “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.” [1]

Also, these books mentioned, as all non-fiction books do, include a bibliography. If someone wants to learn more, they simply should read more.

We can’t expect any device, book or otherwise, to do the work for us. If someone is not getting what they want out of it, I would suggest that they work harder.

“I believe that learning at its best is the antithesis of comfort.” Ruth J. Simmons, 18th president of Brown University. [2]

[1] http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/goodre.htm...

[2] https://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/2001-02/01-...

I killed it a few days after this post as I am working on submitting for publishing. Which is to say, I am a glutton for punishment and rejection, haha. However, thank you for looking up the archive link. If you do read it please email me with notes you may have. Any input good or bad would warmly received.

I agree completely. If we pander to the lowest common denominator we only serve in lowing that denominator even farther. A “race to the bottom” where the bottom is never ending.

We should instead approach issues in our lives with this “how the world should be” attitude, instead of “how do I make gains out of the world that is”. This means treating people with respect and courtesy even when we believe they are wrong. We work with them to achieve a better result, because lack of knowledge is not equal to stupidity and laziness in all cases. For instance I do not have a medical degree, but appreciate not having doctors talk down to me. Work with me, help fill in the gaps, don’t pander with hand wavy explanations. If it requires too much time in the moment then point me to were I can independently find the information and study on my own.

In other words, live by the “means” not by the “ends”.

Just wanted to say that I love this website. It’s a static site that’s been maintained by one person for 20+ years. For me it’s like a campfire, a great spot to come and find discussions, communion, and information in general on all thing DeLillo. So for anyone who likes this post I encourage you to check out the rest of the site: http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html

I completely respect your opinion on this and would agree that Zero K is jarring if your a fan of his earlier work.

However, I quite enjoyed it. It was short and to the point. It also reminded me quite a bit of my own experience walking through the hospice ward in the days leading up to my grandmothers death. The namelessness of it, the religious iconography, even the traveling to a distant place (AR) and sleeping there in the hospital. Because of this I feel it was not so much a book about cytogenetics but how living people deal with death. The cryogenic part of it could easily be supplanted with our religious beliefs that we will die and wake up in a better world.

I wrote finished a short story this year that explores some of these ideas heavy-handedly. It is placed in a Universal Library setting, a continuation of Borges' Library of Babel. In a sense it is both for and against the idea of compression as a way to gaining knowledge, attempting to make a greyer area out of it.

"Unlike the entirety of the Library, incomprehensible due to its sheer vastness, the book itself was much smaller. Any single one could easily be read hundreds of times over during the lifespan of a librarian. Therefore, the book’s gibberish nature did not come of its own accord but simply sprouted out of its relation to us and our lack of knowledge concerning the Library as a whole. In other words, for any book to make any sense to any librarian, it must have recognizable patterns, like those in language. And since every possible book that could exist did, most of them were simply random, nonsensical strings of characters. Leaving the librarians themselves to search for the language or sets of languages that could bring meaning to them (them:themselves or them:the books no one was sure). This was reflected — maybe the same sort of reflection Tanner was searching for — in the various languages the librarians did know and use; the ever-evolving nature of them, incorporating and condensing larger and larger swaths of ideas that then needed to be condensed even further into shorter acronyms for quicker reference."

https://medium.com/@odell.brenden/a-return-to-the-library-of...

Yes a friend of mine said exactly the same thing and sent me a torrented copy of The Dreamers. I looked awful. So bad I ordered the dvd. Which had some of its own issues with quality I’ll admit, but at least it wasn’t full of digital compression artifacts. I know not everything is like this but my experience with torrents has yielded a lot of varying quality problems. And these movies are not very esoteric they are made by much lauded directors. The fact that they are out of print means there is no higher quality rip to speak of. It’s why I’m particularly am a big fan of Criterion because they do do this work (such as a 4K restoration of Ran, beautiful!). That work requires money. It will take happen often we disregard these issues because we can get something close faster for free. With books of course this is mostly a non issue so I’ll give you that (aside from good and bad translations or edits. Dostoevsky is a good example. I believe Wallace once asked what does it mean “to fly at” and why would you translate the Russian to somethings so unreasonable.)

However the overall point was that I made a real flesh and blood friend in a physical place which is how I came to know these things to begin with. And otherwise have never heard certain movies ever mentioned and wouldn’t know about them at all.

This reeks of literal illiteracy, as well as a lack of visual aesthetic literacy. I'm not trying to sling mud here but I'd be really embarrassed by this if I were you. This is near saying that jazz music is just noise, despite whoever saying it likely not being able to even keep up with a basic chord chart. Or possibly it would be more appropriate, to imagine someone able to do a quick and dirty script in python, not understanding that CPU architecture is more nuanced and complicated simply because they know nothing about it. One is not necessarily better than the other, but you yourself are the one losing out from your inability to appreciate things outside of your comfort zone.

"Did you see that painting what Rothko did?, Looks like it was painted by a two year old kid, Hot air, Hot air, Ignorance is bliss, yeah?, Well I'm not pleased, Because you spread your opinion like a rectal disease, Hot air, Hot air, Did you see that photo what Bellingham took?, He needs to take a leaf out the screensaver book, Hot air, Hot air, If all photos were as you wanted them to be, That would be page three as far as the eye could see, Hot air, Hot air, Forgive me you sound stupid, Here lies the one I love, Forgive me you sound stupid, Here lies the one I love" --Stendhal Syndrome by IDLES

To add to your point, I recently tried to pick up some of my favorite movies from when I was younger, only to find that they were “out of print”. Some of these may not be lost to people searching around online because the directors are well known, but you’d likely have to search first.

Inland Empire - David Lynch / The Dreamers - Bernardo Bertolucci / Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia - Sam Peckinpaw / La Luna - Bernardo Bertolucci / (I’m sure there are many more, these are just a few that I’ve hunt down on eBay this year)

The last two on this list, I watched because I made friends with a video rental store manager, who loved to recommend movies for me. The store itself often did not have things he thought I should watch so he would bring them from home and lone them to me personally. I really miss that sort of thing.

I do have a good used bookstore nearby though, and the last personal recommendation I received led to me reading every George Saunders book.

"Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of."

The Circus Animal's Desertion, W. B. Yeats

So I have not watched this yet (as I have never heard of it before today) but will do so soon. However based on the description of the movie, it's hard not to view it as a major source of inspiration for the character Tchitcherine from the Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow. Tchitcherine is part of the red army stationed in Central Asia, who saves and befriends an ethnic minority from Kazakhstan. Pynchon's scenes are both reminiscent of westerns and slapstick, through out the book but also in full force during the Tchitcherine sections. Considering GR's major themes are film and rockets (ones that destroy us and well as ones that take us to the stars) it's really hard to imagine that Pynchon himself had not watched this before publishing his novel 3 years after The White Son of the Desert's release.

All that said I have found no mention of anyone putting these two things together.

This is definitely something I had to work on a lot (and am still working on) as I've gotten older. Some time After 25 it became apparent to me that I was leaving the house with full armor on. This was getting in the way of my being apart of the world and making me into more of a passive observer than active participant. Now, I think it is much better to leave with the defenses down. Which means a "softer face" for sure. I feel as if interactions with strangers makes most of us humans feel vulnerable in general. But that vulnerability is something to be embraced not warded off. In fact, the only thing that really gets warded off when we attempt to protect ourselves in this way is real life "living" and engagement.

That said my interactions with strangers are still hit or miss, but people tend to be very open regardless and now I have a lot of crazy random interaction stories to tell.

To agree on this inside of a broader context: I would argue that there are so many abstractions in language (“good”, “evil”, “god”, even less lofty things such as “color”, “heat”, “weather”), science ("gravity" would probably an arguable but interesting example as well as one that came up recently with a neighbor of mine), and even basic functional things (including “plumbing”, “electricity”, and even “computers” at quite literally every level of understanding above mathematics), so in keeping all of that in mind possibly our entire sense of being and living in the world would be completely debilitating without making use of an innumerable amount of abstractions.

That said there are always valid arguments against the use of particular abstractions, as they can be seen in practice as being largely more detrimental that helpful. Many make this argument against "god". My High school physics teacher made the argument against the use of “centripetal force.” I myself like to remind people that they probably know far less about the world around them than they think simply because that have replaced conceptual knowledge with a definition and categorical knowledge.

Though at the end of the day, I feel that abstractions in general are quite harmless, as long as you are aware of the fact that they are just that “abstractions.”

These "pull yourself up by your bootstraps” comments, always seem to reek of the Munchhausen Trilemma[0]. Take that to mean whatever you will, however I'd say from my own personal experience most of the bootstrap pulling seems only to further selfish means, or worse is just some sort of wheel spinning that no one sees gains from.

Due to the overwhelming amount of memoirs and op-ed's and other things of the like that exist in abundance, I will refrain from giving example circumstances that prevent people from taking such “obvious” poverty relinquishing actions, such as education, and “workharder-ness.”

Not trying to be rude here but "the morally right thing...(is to) make a better future for YOU" is really laughable honestly. I am not broadly traveled but this sort of sentiment seems uniquely American. A land where even the idea of community is a bad word that stings with thoughts of dependence. Where self-sufficiency and lack of illness are the greatest things to behold, in much the same way that we measure the quality of chattel (be that farm animal, slave, or inanimate property).

I have had more than one conversation with some supposed Ayn Rand [1] touting "ideologist", that seemed to have no inkling of anything that was per-provided for their meager successes. Such as, an entrepreneur who started with no small sum of money provided by a parent, that did not believe an any sort of government regulation, other than ones that hold his employees to mythical slavery contracts he dreamed up in his spare time. Not willing to even except that food practices were made safer but some regulatory concerns, because of course there is no such thing as germs anyway(including all sickness which was simply a lie to get out of working hard). A friend of mine installs captioned phones for people who have lost their hearing, and even though he is required to explain as well as have them accept a contract that specifically states it is a government program at no cost to them, they still confide in him with their fears of socialist uprisings. In fact, I hardly meet a person with even an appreciation for the roads they rode in on. Much less the horse, that seems to brandish itself at the mere existence of their will to travel and an ability to procure a loan.

I’m not only suggesting that we should be a little more aware of the benefits that so many of us have been given from the past, but also that we not cheapen ourselves by only valuing self-reliance. We may have a system in which individuals can live in an imagined state of “I’ve done all of this by the sweat of my own brow,” but this is only imagined, and our souls are weaker for it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_trilemma

[1] Not intended to denounce Rand, only pointing out a trend.

After downloading the dictionary from libreOffice, it seems there are only ~53,000 entries. Compared to the OED's second edition of nearly 300,000 entries, I would say that is staggeringly small.

I cant remember the exact years, but I won two state championships in Idaho somewhere between 12-14 years of age (so early 2000’s I think. I would love to find some correlating information about this, but it seems the online records don’t go back that far). I even tied a game with a master who was 30-40 years older than me in a rated tournament. From what I remember I was the only one younger than 25 in many tournaments during those times. Nothing really happened though, it was mostly ignored, no school scholarships, no apartment, no money. I did get alot of offers for free lessons from high rated players, people who wanted to be able to say they taught the kid that won state. Truth was I was raised by a single mother who never had money enough to be able to afford things like chess lessons. I actually learned by playing “Chessmaster” on the original play station, sitting home alone in a trailer in Texas. No one including my mother found out that I knew how to play until a year or two later. I quite playing after moving to a different state, around 14 or 15 years old. We continued to live in near homeless circumstances until I was 18. “Near” is important here, as I grew older I learned about many of the small kindnesses of strangers and friends that kept us a float in times of turmoil.

[In response to another comment here:]

America is a place where we care a lot for a short period of time about one kid in one state winning one tournament. We really enjoy what are essentially lotteries, and their winners (this is not to imply that chess is some sort of crap shoot, but that simply from the perspective of the outside observer, so many circumstances are unseen, and that which rises to the level of public conciseness is absolutely due to luck). However, the thing in my humble anecdotal story that knows no country borders; The thing we (in my opinion) should be far more concerned with are the small kindnesses. The $200 dollars loaned for refinancing, to help a single mother leave a job that holds a car note over her head, for a better one (one that can pay for the rent and food and a good Christmas for a son), never asking to be paid back. I really loved this story. I would wish this kid and his family the best, but I have a feeling they don’t need my well wishes. They will be just fine, same as me and my mother, who both now live in infinity better circumstances.

Wow, I haven't heard "Job for a Cowboy" since I was in high school. HN was definitely last place I would have expected the reminder. I will say I saw my fair share of fights at shows between the typical crowd and Neo-Nazi types, who were sometimes hard to distinguish from what we called "gutter-punks". So I don't completely share your experience, though the way you state it was how it was most of the time. Communal and caring, admittedly it seems ever group is this way toward it's in-crowd. West-coast hardcore seemed to bring out people who were looking for fights, I even got someones blood on my shoe once at a Terror show. As an innocent bystander ofcourse.

I'm about 10 years older now, and have traded in that sound wall, for a different kind. As an "adult" (Is 29 adult, probably not) I can get that same feeling listening to people like Lawrence English, and Tim Hecker, who are most assuredly not metal at all but produce much denser layers of frequency that would put any metal band to shame. I mostly just listen to jazz though, which takes a severe bit of concentration, attacking the "ADHD" from a different angle. Forcing me to follow a phrase through, for fear of it becoming noise.

I would only add the caveat that you should ONLY invest in 401K IF you company is matching. Otherwise look into a vanguard fund or something on the like. I think the automatic opting in on 401k is of course better than no investing, but may not be the best course of action in a company that does not match. The last company I worked for, made the decision of if, and how much it matched at the end of each year. During my 2 years there they never matched a single cent. My money would have been better somewhere else, as well as more ethical than handing it to a major bank to auto invest in it's own subsidiaries.

Just read snow crash for the fist time last year. Is fun as the book is, I don't want to live in that world and am most definitely scared now.

Just to play devils advocate for a moment :)

1) The video showed that you could receive a chicken sandwich now. That you were only paying more to receive only ,specifically, a whooper faster. This I thought shows preferential treatment over different types of food (data).

2) the quality of the food was not an issue in this video everyone was receiving the 'same' whooper, presumably.

3) The example burger king made was not quite the same as bribing a Maitre d' to get a table faster than other customers due to limited table resources. The video showed them withholding whoopers that were already made and ready to go, for a certain time-frame, in order to shake down the customer for more money. The idea that others who paid more for their whooper got it faster, due to limited supply of whoopers, was not the issue. The issue was that burger king would be falsely creating a pipeline delay, simply to get money out of the end user.

Although, all metaphors will be mostly speculation, as far as how it will directly relate to future ISP behavior and it's relationship with the end users. How exactly US ISP's decide to use the repeal of net neutrality, debatably, remains to be seen. It would be quite hard to form a 100% accurate metaphor for something that hasn't been fully realized quite yet. I do not mean this to imply that the behavior would in anyway be good. simply that the specifics of it are still unknown.

As a side note I like to think burger king is also inadvertently creating a self-deprecating metaphor. I hope that in the Internet world it is also only the shitty food that is being tiered. If you have to pay more to get Google, Facebook, Amazon (terrible junk food) then no worries for me. Unfortunately that bit of speculation is probably way to optimistic. ;)

Honestly, I'm tired of the race for games to just 'look' better. Most of the time it seems as if it is a detriment to actual gameplay and frame rate.

I would definitely prefer games to look bad (or preferably stylized in a way that works for the game) over having a somewhat realistic looking game ( only when your standing still so the frame rate doesn't dip) and terrible mechanics and a bad story.

Far to much information and talk about making games look better and very little about how to make games actually better. Modern gaming to me has become the same as clicking the X on hundreds of popups from your windows 98 machine. Just with somewhat realistic looking ugly faces instead of X's.

Reminds me of a quote from Citizen Kane.

"It's no trick to make a lot of money if all you want... is to make a lot of money"

So yeah obviously Facebook like any other large advertising platform is gonna use its data for seedy means. What's crazy to me is that the author seems to be using the word 'ethics' synonymously with the concept of political correctness. As if he actually does not know the difference.

This is great I just got into a long conversation about this with a friend, because of comments in another recent post about "Mapping Mathematics." A specific comment had refereed to the information in the video about Godel as being false. Specifically they did not like the video claiming that Godel's incompleteness had impacted the way in which we view maths 'usefulness' all be it an over-simplification Godel's work definitely had a vast impact on the philosophical way that we view information, math, and science and does certainly beg some questions about the limits of mathematics).

Being as I am currently in the middle of reading 'Meta Math' by Chaitin, (because of his recommendations in that book) 'NKS' by Wolfram, and 'Number: The Language of Science' by Datzig. I am glad to see this on the front page in an era where we have so many 'science loving philosophy deniers' out there. I'm assuming this being here at all is not a coincidence and that OP was maybe thinking something similar, but I could be wrong.

for some reason I like this "comment" :)

I am ok, But I've been there before and know people who are going through it, thought this might be a useful diagram of how I view the issue.