Author: Stevan Harnad

Proust describes Swann as lazy in his scholarly work, as one who is more interested in life itself than in reading or writing. Swann found an excuse for his laziness in “the idea that ‘Life’ contains situations more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written.” Swann had “acquired the habit of finding life interesting–of marveling at the strange discoveries that there were to be made in it.” (SW, Swann In Love)

Proust often reproached himself for not sitting down at his desk and working. Proust probably used the same excuse for his laziness that Swann used–life is more interesting than books. Proust wasn’t the only writer to believe that life is more interesting than books; “from life”, said Kafka, “one can extract comparatively so many books, but from books so little, so very little, life.” (Conversations With Kafka, by G. Janouch)

For the writer maybe, but for the reader?

And can one have the will (or wherewithal) to write without first having had it to read?

So, for a writer, laziness in reading is more unpardonable (and limiting) than laziness in writing.

It is right that Dr. Kevorkian has been freed, and it was a cruel miscarriage of justice to have imprisoned him in the first place. He is part-quack, but for the most part hero, and for a just and timely cause. He is naive and irresponsible on the criteria for euthanasia (that’s the quackish part), but right and brave on the basic need for and right to euthanasia. Let us hope that the reactivation of his campaign will help rather than hinder the spread of the Netherlands, Swiss and Oregon policies.

Anon: I got to thinking, as I pinched up a word and moved it to another place in the sentence: was it the same token?  If I cut an apostrophe and paste it somewhere else, is there ANY coherent sense in which it is the same apostrophe?  Heck, if I insert a few words in a document, so that all the succeeding ones have to “shift” down, are the “shifted” ones in any sense the same?  If I do nothing at all but watch as the computer continually redraws the words in front of me, isn’t there something really, really Heraclitean about visibles on a computer screen?  Of course just about everything like that, on a much slower scale; but this is unnerving.

I’m not sure whether you are wondering about recurrence in general, or just about token-identity vs type-identity.

It seems to me that epistemically (for Borges Funes-the-Memorious reasons), and ontically (for thermodynamic reasons), no two real-time events — hence, a fortiori, no two objects figuring in those events — are identical:  (“are identical” is already a misnomer: a thing can only be identical with itself, and even that only instantaneously). If there is a delta-T– change in time — then there is, a fortiori, a change, and hence non-identity. (At time T I am me-at-time-T and at time T+1 I am me-at-time-T+1: One could make the same argument about the “same” object at different points in space, but time has already done the trick, as the same object cannot be simultaneously at two different points in space — only different parts of the same object can be…)

Maye et al. have found a neurally (and genetically) based fractal order underlying the generation of spontaneous behavior. Their finding is undoubtedly important in understanding the mechanisms generating adaptive behavior and the authors have been cautious in their interpretations within the article, but less so in discussions with the press.

One co-author writes: “the term ‘will’ would not apply if our actions were completely random and it would not be ‘free’ if they were entirely determined. So if there is free will, it must be somewhere between chance and necessity – which is exactly where fly behavior comes to lie.”

The findings actually have nothing to do with free will. Free will is a feeling I have (when I do something deliberately) that I am doing what I am doing because I feel like it: a feeling that my willing it is the cause of my doing it.

It is undeniably true that that is what it feels like to do something deliberately. But whether what feels like the cause — feeling — is indeed the cause of my doing is an entirely different matter, especially if we are not ready to believe in telekinesis. The real cause might, for example, be a fractal order mechanism of the kind reported by Maye et al. But that mechanism is the causal mechanism it is irrespective of whether it happens to be accompanied by (or generates) feelings. And it certainly does not explain how or why we (let alone the fruit fly) feel anything at all.

And without feeling there is no free will, just mechanisms, whether deterministic or nondeterministic.

Stevan Harnad

Harnad, S. (2003) Can a Machine Be Conscious? How? Journal of Consciousness Studies 10(4-5): 69-75.

Harnad, S. (2005) What Is Consciousness. New York Review of Books 52 (11).

So first you do an online-age patent search to check whether your neologism or aphorism has been logged or phored afore.

Googling “food as an appetite suppressant” only nets two mentions, neither the intended one:

“…reduces the desire to eat more food. As an appetite suppressant supplement, pinolenic acid…”

“…sprinkle nail polish remover on your food as an appetite suppressant…”

But is it discovery or dysphoria to inisist that food as an appetite suppressant was the intended insight?

Fool. If thou wert my fool, nuncle, I’ld have thee beaten for being
old before thy time.

Lear. How’s that?

Fool. Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.

Aging is morphing
into a grotesque caricature
of oneself

Are all traits, distilled,
disgusting?

Or do some percolate
into perfection?

Kriszti, ma szabadultál meg.
Nagypéntek mátol kezdve a te napod is lesz,
ahogy a Mátyás Passzió már mindig is a tiéd volt.
וְשִׁירָתָא תֻּשְׁבְּחָתָא וְנֶחֱמָתָא

Is pledging the non-recurrence of a counterfactual condition casuistry, or just diplomacy?

Going postal has been enfranchised, technologically “empowered.” Now anyone with a grievance, righteous or wrongful, can register his displeasure with a vengeance, on a scale unprecedented, unimagined. Jilted? Blow up her wedding party. Underpaid? Sprinkle Eboli in their staff canteen. Overtaxed? Cyber-raid the IRS’s pantry. Losing Pascal’s Wager? Post Polonium-210 to the infidels (and anyone else along the paper trail). And if all else fails, or you’re in an especial rush, strap on a boom-belt and take out the nearest crowd. ‘At’ll teach ’em.