Category Archives: Philosophy

Master language

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One thing I’ve noticed in my language studies is that there are a lot of words in various languages that almost duplicate each other. For example, in english you can “eat” dinner, or you can “dine” on dinner, or you can “feast” on dinner. There are slightly different connotations to all three options, but in general they speak of they same thing.

I strikes me it would be worthwhile to create a basic language that has about 200 hundred words – enough to get a point across – and then teach that to everyone in the world. As such, people everywhere would be able to communicate on a very basic level. This is a language that would not have separate words for “eat”, for example. All tigers, house cats and lions would be referred to as “cat.” (Maybe you could apply an adjective like “big” to tell them apart.)

What kinds of words would be needed to communicate just the essentials? Here’s a small, partial list.

I
You
We
Eat
Go
Blowjob
Animal
Food
Light
Dark
Anus
Big
Small
Car
Happy
Sad
Inflatable sex doll

You can add your own words to the list!

Great minds…

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Astute readers of Acid Logic have probably noted that I’ve been doing some writing on the horror author H.P. Lovecraft. As such, I’ve been reading materials other people have written on him, some of which collect his own commentary, and I can’t help but notice that so many of Lovecraft’s rants mirror my own thoughts. For example, here’s Lovecraft on the entertainment seeking general public.

Bourgeois capitalism gave artistic excellence & sincerity a death-blow by enthroning cheap amusement-value at the expense of that intrinsic excellence which only cultivated, non-acquisitive persons of assured position can enjoy. The determinant market for written, pictorial, musical, dramatic, decorative, architectural, & other heretofore aesthetic material ceased to be a small circle of truly educated persons, but became a substantially larger circle of mixed origin numerically dominated by crude, half-educated clods whose systematically perverted ideals (worship of low cunning, material acquisition, cheap comfort & smoothness, worldly success, ostentation, speed, intrinsic magnitude, surface glitter, &c.) prevented them from ever achieving the tastes and perspectives of the gentlefolk whose dress & speech & external manners they so assiduously mimicked. This herd of acquisitive boors brought up from the shop & the counting-house a complete set of artificial attitudes, oversimplifications, & mawkish sentimentalities which no sincere art or literature could gratify – & they so outnumbered the remaining educated gentlefolk that most of the purveying agencies became at once reoriented to them. Literature & art lost most of their market; & writing, painting, drama, &c. became engulfed more & more in the domain of amusement enterprises. (SL 5.397-98)

I’ve made similar comments, though using about 80% less adjectives, about the modern general public and their taste for morally simple stories, or childishly predictable music. I’m generally a defender of capitalism, but there’s no doubt that by giving voice to the common rabble (in the sense of giving them purchasing power) you’re dooming the appeal of the kinds of intellectually superior products both Lovecraft and I offer. He’s quite right that the “educated gentlefolk” who might appreciate the subtle nuance of my Acid logic writing, or my artfully produced music, are drowned out by the “acquisitive boors” and “half educated clods.” (I would argue that presuming they are even half educated is erring in kindness.)

Generally speaking, I think Lovecraft had a general disdain for pop culture; there I would probably part ways with him, though my fondness for pop culture is driven by an interest in the glittering oddities one can find within it, not the whole kit and caboodle.

It’s worth noting I interviewed the author who wrote the Lovecraft bio these quotes are drawn from.

The doctor is in

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I was thinking today how the problem with any creative project – a painting, a piece of writing or music – is that by the time you finish it, you’re sick of it (because of the endless repetition involved of the creative process.) Now I wonder if that’s the point of the story “Frankenstein.” The doctor creates his monster and hates it – an allegory for the creative process.

I think it is an allegory because “Frankenstein” is a gory story. HAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAW!!

Amazing ain’t so amazing

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People often talk about how “amazing” something is. People look up at the vast collection of stars and planets in the sky, glued together by gravity, and they say, “That’s amazing.” Or people contemplate the complex system by which all the properties of a living thing can be coded into strands of DNA which are housed in every cell of that living thing’s body and those people say, “That’s fucking amazing!” People look at the Great Wall of China and say, “That’s bloody well amazing!!”

And they are. But what does amazing mean?

We’ve all been amazed when contemplating some part of the natural or the man made world. It’s a feeling of almost mental fatigue… like we’re saying, “I can’t possibly wrap my head around all the time and effort and understanding of detail it would take to create that.” I would argue a thing’s amazingness is not so much a property inherent of that thing but a limitation of our own brain.

Let me give an example. Let’s say you walk over to your friend’s house and he points you to three toy blocks that have been piled up – two on the ground, one perched on those two. He says, “Look what my toddler just built. Isn’t that amazing?” You would probably say, “No, that’s not fucking amazing. Any monkey could do that. Your toddler is a retard and so are you!” You might even kick the blocks over to make your point.

Now let’s redo that scenario: you walk over to your friend’s house and your friend points at his toddler’s latest creation. It’s a vast miniature city made of building blocks and it includes arches, skyscrapers, elaborate bridges and moving miniature cars. It takes up several rooms in your friend’s house. He says, “My kid did this this morning. Isn’t that amazing?” You say, “Fuck yeah!”

What’s the difference between the two projects? For the first project, it’s easy to envision the effort involved – I can mentally imaging myself putting one block on two with no effort. For the second – building a miniature building block city – well, I wouldn’t know where to begin. What makes the second amazing isn’t anything about the block city, it’s my inability to comprehend its complexity.

We all understand that we have a mental workspace and that this workspace is limited. It’s said, for example, that we can (somewhat) easily keep a string of 5-7 numbers in our head. As a result, it’s easy to recall one phone number, but recollection gets increasingly difficult with two or more phone numbers. If we see someone who can be introduced to twenty phone numbers and recite them back from memory a day later, we say, “That’s amazing.” But again, it’s our own mental limitations that make it so.

Lobbyists and social currency

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Ezra Klein has a piece in the new New York Review of Books reviewing two books – one by Jack Abramoff and one by Lawrence Lessig – on the topic of Washington lobbyists. Both book authors (and Klein) argue that lobbying is much more complex than outright bribery. Lawrence comes up with a specific term for how lobbying works: the gift economy.

a gift economy is a series of exchanges between two or more souls who never pretend to equate one exchange with the other, but who also don’t pretend that reciprocating is unimportant – an economy in the sense that it marks repeated interactions over time, but a gift economy in the sense that it doesn’t liquidate the relationship in terms of cash.

These ideas might sound familiar. That’s because several years I voiced very similar thoughts in an article about what I called “social currency.”

What is social currency? Let me explain with an anecdote. As some readers may know, I recently released an alt-country CD… One part of this process was to make the album available for purchase at the cdbaby.com website. As a result of my posting the album for sale, cdbaby sent me a guide on promoting music. I took the time to read it and thoughtfully digested its contents. I would summarize its advice as this: Be a good schmoozer. The guide fundamentally argues that musicians should build up a network of people and maintain genuine human interactions with them — be willing to do these people favors, and they will do the same in return. And musicians, whether their egos allow them to admit it or not, are heavily dependent on the kindness of others. They need fans to support them live, to help them network with other bands and promote them to the world.

In essence, the guide is breaking down human interaction to a social marketplace. If I buy someone a beer I expect that one day they should buy me one in return. If I go to someone’s show, I expect them to go to one of my shows. Fundamentally, how we interact with other people can be broken down the into the same bartering/trade system humans have used for things like food, goods, entertainment etc.

In essence, the cdbaby guide is arguing that musicians should become lobbyists for their own music.

I suppose I should be angry that Lessig is stealing my ideas and passing them off as his own, but really I don’t care. Ultimately history will give me credit for these profound arguments whereas he will fall into obscurity. I am both mankind’s king and its god.

For how long can we stave off our destruction?

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I’ve been having an email conversation with occasional acid logic contributor Pete Moss about a topic I frequently address here: the digitization of art, music and writing and how the resulting devaluation of these art forms is going to lead to the destruction of all humanity. As Pete has pointed out, there has been, in response to this cheapening of these art forms, a small revival of the Arts and Crafts movement, an aesthetic philosophy of the 1800s that responding to the mass production of art of that era. As the wikipedia article states:

Arts and Crafts was an international design movement that flourished between 1860 and 1910… It was largely a reaction against the impoverished state of the decorative arts at the time and the conditions in which they were produced.[4] It stood for traditional craftsmanship using simple forms and often applied medieval, romantic or folk styles of decoration. It advocated economic and social reform and has been said to be essentially anti-industrial.[4][5]

So maybe we’ll see something of a return to handmade arts across various forms – music, film etc. But in the long run I see no stopping the ultimate destruction of humanity.

Goodbye to Romance

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I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the genetic and physiological origins of emotions in individuals. It’s a fascinating topic, but it can be a little hard to map the science of it to the experience of day-to-day life. It can be a challenge to understand how, because of chemical interactions in the body, you are depressed.

I was, however, reading an interesting book recently that provided a nice example of how your genes, programmed from your parents, can affect how you react emotionally when, say, your girlfriend dumps you. It goes a little something like this. There’s a particular protein in the brain whose job it is to transport the neurotransmitter serotonin effectively. The map containing the design of this protein is housed in a gene in your DNA (a gene fundamentally being a specific segment of any one of the extremely long DNA molecules that lives in your chromosomes.) Certain people have a “long” version of this gene which results in proteins which are particularly effective at transporting serotonin. Others have a “short” version, which is less effective.

Now, serotonin is a neurotransmitter that operates in the synapses of your brain, and it correlate with feeling good. By “feeling good” we really just mean feelings of pleasure, or at least lack of pain. So, if you’ve got the “long” version of the gene that produces the better serotonin transporting protein, you’re probably going to go through life feeling better. And, statistics seem to back this up.

Of course, this view — this correlation of emotion and mood to proteins and genes — is largely at odds with the romantic version of emotions that came out of Europe in the 18th and 19th century. During that period poets such as Arthur Rimbaud and Lord Byron presented emotions as ethereal, spiritual, unknowable substances; invisible demons and angels that both haunted and tantalized us. This view now seems quite wrong. Emotions are knowable, and can be understood and even regulated.

With this realization in place, and the knowledge that Byron and Rimbaud’s mysterious model of emotional life cast tens of millions into the dank cellars of depression over the past 300 years (resulting in who knows how many suicides) I think we conclude only one thing: the Romantic poets were worse than Hitler. As such, I believe it should be the top priority of this nation to create a time travel device that will allow us to go back to the past and assassinate these two monsters of history. Our end goal should be two beefy Marines bursting into the apartments of each of these pansies, screaming “Eat shit, faggot!” and firing their M-16’s, reducing their targets to gory, fleshy detritus.

Only then can we progress as a species.

Where’s the beef?

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Last night I watched an episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” that kind of perturbed me. The plot was that these two little girls were killed in a fire and at the mid point of the show the cops had arrested the father for the crime. But then he made an emotional plea to one of the detectives (including trying to commit suicide in front of her) and the cops re-examined the case. They brought in a fire expert who concluded the deaths were accidental.

It was an interesting turn for a crime show because there was no real crime, but I found myself a little disappointed. “You mean there’s no murderer for me to hate?” I asked the television. Silence was its only reply, so I threw a bottle of brandy at it. I wanted a bad guy who could be defeated.

OK, so let me take a left turn here. I’ve often, when reading about neuroscience, or psychology, or philosophy, come across a fact that bedazzles me. I think to myself, “This is fascinating. Why doesn’t everyone know about this? Why isn’t everyone talking about this?” It’s a question(s) that really confounds me. I walk past people on the street talking about celebrity gossip, or office gossip, or what their stupid kids are doing, or what Mitt Romney is doing and I’m baffled how they can think those topics are important whereas, say, arguments against the existence of free will aren’t.

Now, there might be an obvious explanation for this difference of priorities between myself and the vast stinking masses of mankind. It’s possible I’m just intellectually superior to most people and their feeble brains can’t begin to comprehend my thoughts. Perhaps… but I think there’s something more.

I’ve always been baffled by sports. Why do people give a fuck about such a meaningless activity? I’m also baffled by people’s interest in the granular detail of politics. I mean, sure, I’m interested in who wins the presidential election, but why does anyone care about the Governor of Arizona yelling at Obama or some offhand comment Ron Paul makes. But, as I think about it, I get it. Sports and politics have conflict. It’s my team or side against the other bastards. We want to crush them, to DESTROY THEM!!! Humans are tribal creatures. But science has none of that. If you figure out what protein this gene programs for, it might have great ramifications, maybe cure some illness, but nobody really loses. The gene doesn’t care if you’ve figured it out. There’s no conflict.

That was the problem with that “Law & Order.” The was no loser. And the same is true with much of science.

(Obviously, the politics of science – scientists racing to beat each other to a Nobel Prize – has plenty of conflict, but that’s a different story.)

Ant city excavated

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The above is a pretty interesting video detailing a process in which scientists poured wet concrete into an giant anthill. They waited a bit and then removed all the dirt surrounding the now solidified concrete and were able to get a good view into the structure and architecture of this gigantic ant metropolis. What was impressive was that the design and construction of this ant city — carried out by numerous worker ants — seemed as if it had been designed by a single architect, a mind that had some kind of oversight of the larger project.

This is, of course, impossible, because as we all know, ants are stupid. The other day, I saw an ant and I said, “Hey, ant, can you tell me the chemical structure of chlorophyll?” He didn’t even answer; he just wandered off. Then I saw another ant and I said, “Hey ant — what movie starring comic songsmith Weird Al Yankovic also featured Michael Richards (Seinfeld’s “Kramer”) among its cast?” The ant just kept climbing up a tree. I was like, “Don’t ignore me! Get back here you cocksucker! The answer is ‘UHF’!”

So we’re left with a conundrum. How can a population of feebleminded creatures design a habitat of such complexity that it is clearly beyond their individual intelligences? Do the ants have some kind of bizarre and complex communication system by which the bits of information possessed by individual ants can somehow be combined into a group ant intelligence?

Can these questions offer insights into our own human intelligence? If an individual human designs a complex building or structure, it’s not considered all that unusual. But in that case, who is doing the designing? A single human entity, or the brain, a collection of billions of neurons grouped together in networks which perform specific calculations which are then passed on to other parts of the brain? Is our brain really nothing more than a swarming collection of ants, writhing in the dirt, crawling through filth, antennas ever quivering?

Or, dig this: are we — individual humans — nodes in a larger intelligence, a super advanced ant colony? Are we merely parts of a machine whose complexity is so vast and overwhelming that we can’t begin to comprehend it?

Flute this!

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I was having a discussion with my Dad today about what DNA is. He asked for a specific definition and I said, “D-Something Nucleic Acid.” But as I thought about it, that definition is almost meaningless to me. I don’t even know the D word, I don’t know what nucleic means (something about the nucleus of cells?) and I don’t really know what acid means since I think of it as something that burns up things (as in “flesh eating acid.”)

This got me thinking about what it means to really know information. Say someone wants to know what a flute is. You can say it’s a “metal cylindrical musical instrument played by blowing air into it.” That’s technically correct from a dictionary definitional viewpoint but do you really “know” what a flute is at that point? I think you probably need some understanding of the different sounds a flute can make, some understanding of the kind of music (Western Classical) it’s historically part of, perhaps knowledge that it plays a prominent role in the beginning parts of the children’s classical piece “Peter and the Wolf” and the fact that it’s a feminine instrument and that male flute players can be presumed to be homosexuals. (Of course, at that point I’m hinting at the phallic nature of flutes which gets into needing additional knowledge about penises, blowjobs, semen etc…)

At what point in this cornucopia of facts can we say we “know” what a flute is? Never, it’s an ever changing definition, ever fleeing our grasp.