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Today has been one of the most enlightening days of my life. Oddly, I am so full of thought and feeling at this moment I can scarsely think what to write! Well. The day started with Psychology 100; it was video day, and I was fortunate enough to watch a fascinating video on group psychology. According to several well-performed studies, it turns out that regular folk are suceptible to all kinds of horrible actions all in the name of conformity, or in the name of appeasing an authoity figure. Scary stuff! The early afternoon brought some interesting material in Philosophy of Mind (seminar class). We've spent the last two weeks resurrecting and discussing various dualist theories. Dualism is the philosophical position that the mind is separate and distinct from the brain, and that the stuff of which mind is made is not physical stuff. The later afternoon brought with it for me what I can only describe as the most horrifying train wreck of a breakup I've ever expe...

A very determined boy went to the store and bought the biggest jigsaw puzzle he could find, composed of several thousand pieces. It was a mystery puzzle, the kind where they do not print its picture on the box, so the boy did not know what picture he'd eventually get. Excitedly, the boy opened the box and poured all the pieces out onto the floor, only to find that every single piece was completely blank. There was no colour to be found; the only thing differentiating the cardboard cuttings was each of their individual shapes. But the boy was determined. He spent hours, days, months trying out every possible combination of pieces, slowly putting together the edges and filling the puzzle in toward the middle. The process was arduous - a deep challenge for the boy's sense of determination in the face of what appeared to be a picture of futility and meaninglessness. Finally he finished the puzzle: a complete blank square with every little piece in place. Unwilling to accept his end...

It seems unnatural to count numbers upward as each day passes. The most recent work of physicists tells us that time itself really did have a beginning, and it seems fundamentally odd to me that time should begin but not end, in the same way that those lines in high school geometry with one fixed point on the left and an 'infinite' length to the right. .---------------------------------------> Is this an infinitely long line? As opposed to... Time is supposed to be best represented by the top line. Is not the bottom line somehow longer? Does it not pop into your head occasionally that the top line's right-hand stretch will eventually circle back? At any rate, the very thought that time isn't a continuum analogous to the second line makes me seriously doubt my own conception of its "is-ness" (for lack of a sensical phrase). When we say time slows down in a moment of joy or sadness, we mean it only as a metaphor, but why should ...

I do fear, sometimes, that the act of pondering aloud has become a cathartic experience and nothing more . It is hard in this town to find a diversity of thought, because we've all been raised in very similar ways with the same norms, experiences, and conventions. I find that the mightiest opinions of some of the the twentysomethings I know are so damningly narrow that they cannot possibly stand to the slightest breeze of doubt. Often the biggest theory is the thinnest. Our shadows grow long and starved moments before they disappear under the sunset. The natural world has cursed us with its indifference, its vaccuum of conscience in which deeds neither good nor evil subsist. I find the urge to view our species of conscious and conscientious beings as alien. It is as though the world we inhabit was never intended for us to inhabit it. In short, this town is a box. This country, political system, individualistic ideology, humanist dogma, faux rebellion against imagined authority; it ...

Ralph Nader, again, has decided to throw in his bid for president! We all remember Nader from back in 2000, when he ran for the Green Party and gained thousands of votes in Florida; votes that, had he not been running, would almost certainly have gone to Al Gore instead. Since even by the official tally (which was highly questionable) G.W. Bush only won by a few hundred votes in the deciding state of Florida, it is often said that Nader ruined it for the democrats by running where he knew he'd never win anyway. Likewise in 2004, when he gained several million votes nationwide in an election that was decided by a margin of less than 1% nationally, and ultimately by the swing state of Ohio, in which if Nader's votes had all or mostly gone to Kerry at the time, we may well have had a president Kerry. And here we are. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are highly critical. Hillary more so, as she's been quoted as saying Nader is "responsible for George W. Bush," an...

I am writing again from Tofino; this is day two, and tomorrow I'll be home again. Like most students at UVic, I've done nearly none of the "getting ahead" homework I intended to do over this reading break. But that is okay. After all, it is called a break.  But then, it is also for reading. Perhaps UVic has accidentally given this week a paradoxical title.  At any rate, school goes back into session monday morning. It is the final stretch for graduating students such as myself. I am honestly a little bit worried; this is by far the most work I've ever signed up for in a single semester, and while I am certain none of it is beyond my abilities either in quantity or quality, I am not certain that it isn't beyond my particular proclivity to procrastinate. It is one of these circumstances in which I am finally forced to follow the same advice I give to everybody else: just get it done, and get it done right!  The rain is pouring down. Yesterday we had glimpses of ...

       I'm writing tonight from a B&B in Tofino. It's been since childhood that I've last been to this neck of the island, and I do wish I came more often. The nature is wonderful, the air refreshing, and the elements truly awe inspiring.        Sunday's upcoming entry (day 56) will hopefully be another photo gallery, as I've already managed to capture several wonderful shots in the short few hours that I've been here thus far.        I imagine it is an experience common to all of us, that after a day out in the wilderness, whether it be at the beach or on a hike, the night's sleep that follows is always particularly deep and satisfying. Perhaps the reason for this is not the physical exertion involved in the day, but the sheer quantity of input the senses receive. The wind is constantly changing, the temperature rising and dipping down, the sun waxing and waning, the trees rustling and the waves crashing up against stone and sand.       Compare this wit...

For the more elitist folk among us, there is a strong greivance against the new kind of language that has spreaded from internet communication. "MSN-ish" we'll call it for now. Acronyms and shortened words reign supreme, since people (mostly kids and teens) can't be bothered to type out entire words or phrases. What I want to say so often is that when people are speaking online, they ought to mimic their own personalities however possible in type format! This, at least, is what I try to do, but admittedly some of the countless signposts such as brb, cya, laters, sup?, sry, and of course lol have become a part of my language online. And the fun part: The truth of words, much to the dismay of said elitists, is that they are transient in their nature. The reason dictionaries re-publish every year is that unused (or 'replaced') words must be removed, and new words must be added. The lexicographer is more akin to an anthropologist than a historian. He maps the use ...

Unfortunately today is one of those days where I simply do not have the time to think of something to write much about. But, I would like to wish a happy birthday to my little sister, who (believe it or not) turns one today. Happy Birthday Erin! After some celebrations, I'll be off to the opera tonight. For any of you who've not been to an opera I'd recommend it highly. Think of it like a musical with good music, and good singing, and a full symphony to suppliment. Plus, if you like a good tragedy, opera has been all over that for several centuries now.

Numbers are milestones in and of themselves. We like the evenness of them, or the internal patterns or repetition of them. I suppose the last 'millenuim' new years would be a good exmple; what fuss there was made about a day that in truth is the 2000th anniversary of nothing in particular. Millions of people expected nothing short of a complete and total apocalypse. Whether Jesus (the man, religious figure, or however we want to characterize him) was actually born that day is extremely unlikely. "Numberization" might be a word we could invent to describe a human tendancy to view numbers with particular significance in and of themselves. At any rate, day 50 is here at the blog :-)

I heard a story about about someone who went on a safari tour in Africa. The animals in the park (ie. protected wildlife area) were so used to the safari trucks full of tourists that they would come right up, eat nearby, and generaly regard the tourists as though they weren't even there. On the same tour, this person told me a story of a lost baby wildebeast. A few of the people nearby assisted by directing the creature back to where its mother was. That is not nature. That is not a safari. That is nothing more than a very large zoo.

So yesterday we watched a video in psychology, in part on attractiveness. A test was done wherby participants were given a picture of a very attractive woman, and then told they'd be speaking on the phone with her. They were then told to make general judgements.. was she nice, smart, happy sounding, etc...? And there was a second goup of participants who were each given a pciture of a much less attractive lady and then told they'd be having a phone conversation. They were in turn asked the same personality questions. The lady on the other end was the same the whole time, who had the same lines and pre-arranged responses to general questions, and who tried to be uniformly herself for all participants. She wasn't the lady of either picture, and she did not know which callers had seen what picture prior to the conversation. So, the participants who saw the attractive picture rated the lady on the phone as being considerably nicer, more friendly, more intelligent s...

I feel invigorated when I see that this site actually generates a little over 50 hits per day. I was expecting 10 or 20, tops! Granted a few of the 100 hits so far have been me, checking the hit box, but still! This evening I want to present a guest writer, Jordan. He's an old buddy, fellow philosophy major, and someone who I really do feel should be a career writer in some capacity. So, Jordan (aka jr when commenting) on language: Looking back, in my experience, I've always had an affinity with 'the trouble that is language' view of philosophy, characterized here-- the idea of the futility of words trying to capture too much (i.e. implicating entire contexts, or ways or of life, to those who are unfamiliar with those contexts) or, conversely, containing so little that we are apt to take meanings for granted far too quickly, unwittingly attaching some idiosyncratic or superfluous significance of our own. This view resonates with me on a personal level, because it arises...

What do we take a day to mean? We take Mothers day and Fathers day to be those days upon which we take a little extra step to show our parents what they mean to us. We take Christmas to be a day of generosity and togetherness. We take New Years Eve to be a time of reflection upon fond memories, and New Years Day to be a new beginning; the start of a reinvigorated life and new commitment to personal successes. We take Halloween as an opportunity to be confident; to take off masks of social convention and put on something silly, something which allows us to express ourselves more freely. We take election day as an opportunity to contribute to the ideological formation of the world. We take the anniversary of our country's inception as a chance to be proud of our mutual governance and individual contributions to it. We take our Birthday as a time of celebration; a joyful anniversary of that which it is to be alive. We take the anniversary of a death (or a war) as a day of remembrance ...

I installed a small hit counter on the left hand side. I set it to zero, not knowing how many hits there've been so far this last couple of years. My main aim is simply to see if all this regular updating eventually generates more hits per day, as I hope it may. So today and tomorrow hold for me a swath of philosophy work. The going will not be easy - like many students at UVic I feel much like a fish washed up on the shore, flapping and gasping its way back to the ocean. It is so close, so vast, yet so very far! I'll write something more interesting tomorrow, perhaps on the topic of Valentines.

I used to find that penning a title for each blog entry was the hard part. This system has been very nice in that one way. Too much philosophy these days. Every time I think I've got something figured out, I come up with what seem to be equally good reasons why it's all wrong. What I have begun to solidify as a belief over the last few months is the belief that language itself is often the problem, and not the 'problems' it works on. Language, often, doesn't so much elucidate issues as it does generate them. Again with the Wittgenstein: We try to cram too much into mere words. A word or sentence is like a teacup, as the analogy goes; it will only hold a teacup's worth, even if you pour a gallon over it. I see people using words, and their ideas are spilling out of the words as they are thrown around in every direction. The words contain too much. They become impossible to articulate, to understand, to clarify. Or worse, they become too easy to understand. Like a...

Sex is terribly overrated. I remember the first time I had sex at age 16, being told for years how amazing it is and how it should really be the focal point of my existence. Granted, at the time I had it I really did think it was that awesome, but times have since changed. I find interesting the notion that pleasure is a zero-sum game; as in, there is no way to really get ahead. Desire, as the idea goes, is a kind of deficiency, or suffering. Satisfaction of that desire will only ever bring you to a 'neutral' state in which the desire no longer exists, but you will have gained nothing, only brought yourself back to the same state you were in prior to the desire arising. This explains why we're never really satisfied no matter what desires we have satisfied. The rich and/or famous are just as miserable as the rest of us (probably more so), despite having what so many of us wish for. I think the Buddhists are on to something like this. Oh a totally different topic, I'd li...

A question raised in a class last week was" can a person be virtuous while alone on a deserted island? I believe a person can. Not all virtues, however, can be applied to such a situation with no social contact of any sort (generosity for example), but some still can. Take honesty. It would take honesty to be able to accept ones predicament. As in, there are times a person would have to be honest with himself about the reality of given situations. And courage. It may take courage to risk a life alone on this island (or a slow death) in order to will oneself to stay alive (ie. not committ suicide. See the movie Castaway for an example of this virtue playing out.) Perhaps peace as well. Does our lonely inhabitant lash out at the environment around him, or does he treat it with a kind nature? Now, maybe we can apply this all to real life. I believe that often the best way to learn about a person's true character is not to watch their deliberative actions, but ...

40 days down. Time flies when you're having fun. Or, as Kermit the frog says: "Time's fun when you're having flies." A thought: I was reading an article in Time today at the gym all about the 'science' of determining where morality comes from, and why humans behave in moral and immoral ways. It was all out of neuroscience and psychology. There was even a subheading titled: "Where moral decisions are made" in reference apparently to some part of the brain that's been associated with 'moral' decision making: ie. it lights up more under an MRI when a person is made to make moral choices. I could go on for literally thousands of words (no pun intended) on how this makes no sense at all, but I'll keep the thoughts to just two: 1. I imagine it highly problematic to offer up an actual spatial location for any given 'decision.' As in, how the heck do I point to a literal part of your brain and say that's ...

And now, I present part one of the essay on Descartes. If you've yet to read part two (Day 38), read this first, it helps. Enjoy! I. The subject of this discussion will be Descartes’ heavy reliance on the metaphysical stance of the rational mind when it comes to the practice of gaining knowledge of the world. This we might call the psychologizing, or subjectification of knowledge. I will outline the epistemological foundation Descartes’ lays down specifically in the second of the Meditations, and hook this up with some of his general conclusions about what academic practices are and are not reliable and worthwhile in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind. By the second meditation, Descartes is convinced that he has cast into doubt the reality of absolutely everything doubtable – from sensory experiences down to their foundations in matter and extension, down to even logical and mathematical truths – and makes an attempt to re-build knowledge on the basis of what be believes t...

Things that appear the most complex can reduce to heartbreaking simplicities. An idea is composed much like a breath is drawn and released. The mind takes in the world, expands upon it, attaches names and order to things, develops theoretical constructs, and eventually reduces everything back to fundamential ideas the likes of which cannot be expressed by language.

Technically, I wrote Day 37 all of three hours ago, but I'm up late writing an essay, so I figured what the hell, it's technically day 38! The essay is in two parts, regarding aspects of Descartes' philosophical works. Here is part II, on one of his two criteria for determining if a being is in fact a rational being. I promise, the material is interesting as well as highly relevent to modern thinking. Enjoy! II. The subject of this discussion will be Descartes and his method by which to differentiate rational humans from beasts (non-human animals) and hypothetically constructed mechanical creatures. After outlining and expanding on Descartes argument in favour of language as a determining characteristic of humanity, I will rebut that while this test may distinguish humans from non-humans, it does not necessarily distinguish between things that are and are not conscious, or self-aware, or capable of pleasure/suffering. First, he hypothesizes artificially created (in oppo...

So today the girlfriend told me about an english assignment she'd been given. The assignment was to take a normal sentence or two from some journalistic source and re-arrange the sentence(s) into a free-verse poem. So, she made this poem from a couple sentences from a news headline: --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The rebels arrived on the outskirts of Chad’s capital, N’djamena, on Friday after a three-day push across the desert from its eastern border with Sudan. Government forces and rebels clashed for a third day on Monday with gunfire and shelling heard throughout the city, a UN official said. Thousands of people were fleeing the city. Casualties from the fighting in N’djamena were believed to be high, and the violence threatened peacekeeping and aid operations intended to stabilize a wide swath of Africa that borders the war-ravaged Darfur region of Sudan. ------------------------------------------------------------------------...

I want to quote three passages of work from three separate writers, each coming from an extremely different background. Read them carefully, and see what kind of common ground you might be able to find. First, from Douglas Adams: "Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for." Now, from Herbert Simon: "We watch an ant make his la...

I've been totally stuck for the last few months trying to get my head around just what the mind is made up of. Possible options include: The mind is simply the brain, all processes are physical processes; ie. there is no mind. The mind is of a separate and distinct substance from the brain. The mind is of the same substance as the brain, but somehow of different properties. There is no brain; everything is mental. There are probably other possibilities as well. I'll get back to this subject hopefully soon, but tonight is not the night; just too much on the plate for school to do much 'spare' philosophizing!

       It seems increasingly common thee days for people to explain human behaviour in terms of processes determined by evolutionary factors. For example, I hear it theorized often that men are more promiscuous because they are trying to 'spread their seed' while women are less so because they plan to be more stable caregivers, in virtue of their 'mothering instinct.'         This is one of countless examples. We refer to our desire for particular foods as instinctual, we refer to our attraction toward people as a mere pheromone response, and so on and so forth.         While I am very much a firm believer in evolutionary theory and processes, it sure seems to me that all these notions about behaviours and dispositions as being evolutionary products/byproducts have run amok. The basis upon which most people make such assumptions seems to be pure correlational reasoning. Ie: "Well, hunter-gatherers must have needed to eat meat in order to survive, so If I happen to ...

So on thursday I got off class at 3:30 for a half hour break, and decided to make my way to the annual career fair, not knowing what kind of a career I'm interested in quite yet. The geniuses at the career fair decided to close down at 3:30 though, the exact time that literally thousands of students finish for the day. Total bust. But today, I was reading the paper and noticed some letters to the editor about war protestors who set up a cute little kiosk literally directly in front of the military recruit kiosk. What was this kiosk composed of, you say? Well, as shown in the newspaper picture, it was a large coffin draped with a canadian flag, and on top were sitting dozens of various pamphlets full of anti-war blather. The two protestors manning it were quite disheveled, but very serious looking, while the two reruiters at the deak directly behind them were very friendly looking, clean cut, and stood with what I can only describe as exemplary posture. A few months back UVic held t...

MetaPolitics in Media The newscast is saturated with political talk. But upon examining the talk we find that it is not about the things we'd expect a national media in a democracy to talk about - namely - issues, platforms, and the like. Instead, the talk is all about strategy. How does so-and-so plan to win in that state? What does this stance do for so-and-so's attempot at capturing the hispanic vote? Which candidate can convince conservaties that he is the most conservative? The obvious point is that substance is sacrificed for entertainment, personality cults, and fully arbitrary means of decision making. But there is a lot more going on underneath it all. Let us dive deeply: Upon some thought, it becomes apparent that sways votes around the most is good/bad media focus on candidates. So, say some candidate says something stupid, or un platform-like, or expresses a bit of 'unwanted' emotion, like Hillary Clinton when she shed a public tear at s...