[Re-posted from The Old Site, original dd. 13-08-2009. Sounds promising, it's at any rate actual.]

I do not exist! Or more accurately (and more boringly non-provocative): the ‘I’ does not exist. This claim would come closest to summing up my system, if such a thing as philosophical ‘systems’ would remain after Hume and Kant. As one was tempted to sum up Hume’s system in Hume’s day as “This world does not exist” in preparation of a smug chuckle with which to discard the details of what was said by him; I’m sure one would be tempted to Laugh Out Loud reading how I sum up my thoroughly individualist thought.

If we have been educated in one thing throughout our life (indeed, throughout the history of women and men) it is that the self is the cornerstone of all things (like the family is the cornerstone of the state). It is the Cartesian premise that survived despite all attacks. A dogma deeper than any other. It is the last stronghold of religion, because what can one do with a self that can disappear in an instant but make it responsible for its actions beyond this life.

Modernity has not created the self but it has enforced the myth of souls and their immateriality; an immaterality that’s fully focused on the material. This is the time of character, personality, ethos, passion, … anything dispassionate is of a suspect nature. Even altruism is only acceptable if done in an all-consuming personal passion and with the unbeatable commitment to renounce the self.

Hume came close (a couple of pages after the page from which the above quote is taken) but could not completely give up the self after giving up the certainty, and the necessities, of the external world. The personal remained primordial and the measure of all things. It’s the most basic dogma of empricism that everything starts from what we perceive, from sensations. It is most pronounced in Carnap (see post on Eigenpsychisches & Fremdpsychisches) who took the subjective as the primary material from which to construct all the rest.

It is a fallacy. You do not exist. If you think you’re sure you exist ‘because you feel things’, think again! How could you express feeling something if there was not prior to that feeling the notion of what it is to feel something. The self (in any commonly meaningful sense) comes after the linguification of the human species ans this linguification is possible only because before it there is a background of  complex social interaction. Even this complex social interaction is only possible based on non-verbalized concepts and instincts that are highly standardized by the commonality of a species living in the highly uniform conditions that we call the visible (tactible, audible, edible) world.

It’s nature that was first and Hume was wrong that we can’t conclude anything on it with certainty because of the fallibility of our senses and our understanding.  It is true that our senses are fallible but it is nevertheless certain that we can only  communicate on what we perceive because before there is the notion of selves  and individual perception, there has to be something on which to build such a notion.

Selves are but an unintended effect of that Cause of which it is impossible for us to ever determine a first cause.

Common sense has it right therefore: the objective is primary, and the subjective only derivative, even if an exceedingly interesting derivative with unbounded implications which go beyond anything included in its causes.

As we make plastics from crude oil that can be used for things crude oil as such can never be used; words and thoughts and selves and personalities &c & so on create their own applications that are independent on the original principles that were their substrate. But one restriction will always apply: the word will cease to exist if one denies the basis on which it has been formed (and our personalities will dissolve if there are no words to be shared with some other instances of a ‘word-species’).

That’s morality, the whole of it. [the need to create conditions which maximize a potential for 'wording']

It is unfortunately very possible to destroy previous steps that were necessary to get to this level of civilization as, alas, has been demonstrated repeatedly and is surely being demonstrated somewhere as we speak. But there are things that, if destroyed, cannot but destroy this shaky, derived but magnificent notion of the self; diminish the potential for further evolution, or which is the same, diminish the future expressiveness of individuals.

Morality is unavoidable, not as mere codex or dogma but, as our common sense always had it, as an integral part of what we are. Probably that is not enough for the moralizers that want to control other individuals but it’s invariably too much for the same moralizers when they need to restrain themselves, in their control over their neighbours.

Education is what drives us forward as mankind. It is also what holds us back as the creative individuals that we, essentially, are. But that conclusion will have to wait for yet another time.

There is more basis to this than the above quasi-poetry. You will find an early, amateurish attempt at reasoned underpinning of the above here. Unfortunately at that time I didn’t have the benefit of Davidson, Quine, Carnap, and Hume to name just a few. The basis is there but the conclusions are foggy at best – which is one of the reasons outside of pedantry to write this.

As you were! [this comes close]

[Whilst writing this I was listening to The Klezmatics, Rhythm & Jews, bought from iTunes.]

Gesang, wie du ihm lernst, ist nicht Begehr,
nicht Werbung um ein endlich noch Erreichtes;
Gesang ist Dasein. Für den Gott ein Leichtes.
Wann aber sind wir? Und wann wendet er
an unser Sein die Erde und die Sterne?

Dies ists nicht, Jüngling, Dass du liebst, wenn auch
die Stimme dann den Mund dir aufstösst, – lerne
vergessen, dass du aufsangst. Das verrinnt.
In Wahrheit singen, ist ein andrer Hauch.
Ein Hauch um nichts. Ein Wehn im Gott. Ein Wind.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Fünf Sonette an Orpheus, III, p.24 booklet with CD
“Rautavaara, Song of My Heart, Orchestral Songs”, published by Ondine.

[Official English translation:
"III
A god can do it. But how, tell me,
should a man follow him through that narrow lyre?
His mind is torn in two. At the crossing
of two heartways you will find no temple for Apollo.

Song, as you teach it, is no yearning,
no wooing for something that can be finally attained;
song is being. Easy for a God.
But when are we? And when will he turn
the earth and the stars to our being?

This is not about your loving, young man,
even if your voice exploded from your mouth;
learn to forget that you ever sang. It fades away.
To sing in truth is a different breath.
A breath of nothing. A breeze of god. A wind."]

[Re-posted from The Old Site, original dd. 22-07-2009. Just going through the motions, this has to have been a low point. I can only hope.]

What I wanted to talk about was ‘Mind-Mind Dualism’ but then I thought about Orpheus and remembered what is quoted above from Rilke (I hesitated a bit: Kierkegaard-Nietzsche came to mind as well, but I settled for Rilke’s Orpheus).

This godly creature could woo even the devil into appreciating the beauty of song but he was too human not to hesitate about whether his earthly beauty was still accompanying him. He was more man than a god in other words, and probably therefore as godly as can be, alive but not constrained by death.

‘Mind-Mind Dualism’! No, I’m not a dualist by any means. But given how much it
has gone out of fashion to confess to dualism, the phrase of ‘Mind-Mind Dualism’ may  just be provocative enough to make people think beyond the current status quo.

It has long been a thought with me that ‘Mind’ was treated in philosophy as too simple. And I don’t mean: ‘too simply’ because nothing has been treated as complicatedly as this. What I do mean is that ‘Mind’ is taken as some kind of simple entity, or as a simple quality common to a host of phenomena.

Let me try to be as arrogant and ambitious here again as I, hopefully,  always will be. My belief can be phrased as: ‘Mind is an ambiguous term being applied to  two qualitatively distinct phenomena, or objects.” On the one side there is the  associative Humean mind and on the other the deductive Fregean mind. The fact that we are using the same word to denote two vastly different things is not a coincidence: from the former springs the latter, and – all scientistic claims of the ‘Erreichtes’ and all the religious claims of the ‘Werbung’ can be put aside – the  deductive can can only originate in the associative.

More than this: the deductive can only continue to be if it has the associative as its continuous substratum. Leading to all positives and negatives of being ‘All too human’ – ‘Das verrinnt’ … ‘Lerne vergessen’ …, don’t think you’ll ever be beyond looking back.

If you follow my drift you’ll maybe say that this is Mind-Body Dualism all over again. The associative mind being associated to the body and the deductive mind being of eternal-soul-like qualities. You’d probably right to a certain extent but framing it as a mind-mind dualism is a clearer way of putting that, avoiding the basic known errors of dualism. It is in fact in line with my conjecture that a big part of insight in philosophy has to do with rephrasing, finding a way of speaking which enlightens what always tended to be obscure in context (with singing in fact).

This is where the ‘stepping-stone theory of language’ comes in (as I once have to dedicate myself to working out in less detail but with more clarity than in my thesis): from an initially associative background we gradually, socially construct our well-behaved languages that permit us to express things that survive our specific context. This is not a process that takes rubble from the associative side to construct clean self-supporting edifices on a logical side. This is a process that requires both elements to continuously cross-fertilize without aiming at heavens but with the natural consequence of increasing understanding and, ‘In Wahrheit singen’.

Yes, you got me, it’s very close to anomalous monism (which I discovered after
I’d grown a fixation to this theme). But still not quite, because there the muddle still persists, the muddle of ‘The Unified Signification of Mind’. It is – as far as I can see – a dogma that remains to be broken. As all dogma-breaking it is based on a hunch of association (dissociation between the paraphernalia of the Humean mind and those of the loftier, Orphean, mind). It is also a constructive thought: it demolishes all the ‘Either/Or’ to converge into an, albeit continually imperfect, harmony.

Specifically the notion, elsewhere expanded far too imperfectly, of the loftier Mind necessarily, and universally, being a Social Mind (rather than the hencetoforth used Fregean, or logical, adjectives put in at the service of clarity and provocation).

Stay Tuned.

[I said and I realized that the little hope I had for that was unjustified.]

[Whilst writing this I was listening to (yes, you can guess) Rautavaara, above for details.]

[Amateuristic English translation below: "I told him that it was quite something, certainly in those - like him - of eminent quality on whom everybody has their eyes, to present oneself to the world as always well tempered - but that the important thing was to provide for oneself internally; and that it was - to my taste - not a good way to manage one's affairs to be eating oneself from the inside: which was what I feared he did to maintain that mask and that temperate appearance on the outside."]

[Re-posted from The Old Site original dd. 14-07-2009. Finally Montaigne again, I'm not so sure about my translation so don't rely on it. I should look for a quote on impatience, I really should.]

Let me be clear: I’m fed up with all this excitement and passion and live fast stuff – even if I wouldn’t mind the ‘die young’ bit. We’re acting like the bunch of pubescent boys that we probably are at this time of the evolution of human culture. I like cool; from temperature over jazz up to lifestyle. All this frantic waving about and ‘expressing one’s emotions’ and being really committed is just a load of crap kept alive by those that can’t sit still for a moment if their life depended on it. Them lot which would go into sudden disintegration and molecular collapse if they were put in positions in which it would be unavoidable to question their own motives.

But, and forgive me the unphilosophical rant, if even Montaigne is confused the matter can’t be solved so lightly. Clearly, if you are fuming inside the smoke should be clear on the outside. Anything else is hypocrisy and (never even mind the others) that is not at all a good service to your self.

So what’s the deal?

Do we need to be completely and utterly dispassionate or should we accept as unquestionable all the typical 90s mess of burning ambition, sense of emergency and over-all impatience with … anything, really? As you might have figured: I thought about this. I came to the below dispassionate conclusion which, or at least I’d hope so, I will be defending vigorously, with a passion befitting the subject.

The conclusion is this: the issue is the familiar one of form/content confusion. What I see is that people want to be perceived as having strong convictions on what needs to happen and simultaneously want to appear relatively indifferent as to how it comes about. They have it backwards.

One should be passionate in the discussion but rather indifferent to the outcome of it. The outcome after all is the result of what can be reasonably expected to be the case, after discussion. The discussion itself however needs to be ferocious, because only if we’re ferocious in making sure that all arguments are weighed in properly can we ever be sure that the discussion will have been a real one, and hence can in fact be expected to be followed by a reasonable conclusion. That clearly doesn’t imply that one needs to gesticulate, shout, slam tables or push people around but it does imply that if any of it is really required to ensure the discussion is a proper one: by all means, no holds barred, except of course those preventing people to bring arguments.

[The last thought clearly cancels out most gesticulation, shouting and slamming so the end result is rather more civilized than suggested here originally.]

It specifically requires passion (biting sarcasm, creation of general uneasiness, …) to bull-dozer out of the way any emotions that are tied to a specific position being beyond discussion (or, on a more human note, tied to the benefits of a specific individual or group of individuals). I mean it: we should treat fixed opinion with the most complete and utter disrespect, and should never refrain from laughing away any strong convictions that are thought to be beyond such treatments.

That’s the role of passion, excitement, madness; to preserve the due process for us to arrive at conclusions. Once arrived at it we have to apply the conclusions without the least amount of passion (as Montaigne rightly councels in this Essai). In other words – the judge should be ‘all in’ when he shouts ‘order in the court’ but once sentencing is there he should deliver the sentence modestly, knowing he can be wrong but cool, as he will be sure everything has been done to ensure he has it right.

Let’s broaden it up a bit. We all know that fundamentalists of any kind are the most passionate in defending what they happen to be convinced of. They do this up to a point of denying the mere possibility of any discussion about the reasons for their beliefs. On the other hand, when we confront holocaust-deniers, creationists (and the rest of this sorry lot of people content to be sophisticated machines ‘in the service’ of some, or other, grand idea) we may (make that: must) expose them as wankers but we’ll always do this ready to give our reasons
for exposing them as such.

(consider this a footnote: ‘Sure, you’ll readily find wankers passionately defending perfectly honourable points, without any inclination to get into their reasons; they’re idiots squared, as dogmatic as fundamentalists and on top of that discrediting what they defend by passionately believing in it instead of argueing for it. But it isn’t because sheep can also dress in wolf’s clothes that, once undressed, they can’t – make that: shouldn’t – be exposed for the idiotic sheep they are).

Ouf! I can keep my passion and eat it too.

Coming back to the quote: let it all go before you come to the conclusion but by all means, restrain yourself once you have come to it. We are not just beasts any more, after all. Clearly you wouldn’t want to make love dispassionately (the scariest people are those that do want to have dispassionate sex, actually) but you wouldn’t want to conclude passionately either; the competition for the best idea should be of the fiercest sort but the outcome should be accepted with equanimity.

[This certainly applies to democracy. The fierce discussion should go in how it is organized but meanwhile we should accept its outcomes as legitimate. The only thing that makes a democratic outcome illegitimate is if the democratic process itself is broken.]

[Whilst writing this I was listening to Jean-Jacques Perrey and Luke Vibert, 'Moog Acid'.]

]]> http://quoughts.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/delacolere/feed/ 0 guidonius http://quoughts.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/too-much-pressure/ http://quoughts.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/too-much-pressure/#comments Tue, 03 Jan 2012 13:43:27 +0000 Guido Nius http://quoughts.wordpress.com/?p=298 Continue reading →]]> “(..)
Too much pressure, my life’s so hard
Too much pressure, and all them certain kind of people
Too much pressure, them having it easy
Too much pressure, them having it easy
Too much pressure, them sail through life
Too much pressure, them have no joy
Too much pressure, them have no joy
It’s too much pressure, it’s too much pressure
This pressure got to stop
This pressure got to stop
This pressure got to stop
It’s got to stop, it’s got to stop….
(..)”
The Selecter, downloadable from iTunes & whatever.

[Re-posted from The Old Site, original dd. 27-06-2009. If anything is this is the cash value of my ideas.]

Well, something to kill the time (mine & maybe yours). Good lyrics. Great music.

Pressure has always been predominant; struggle for life and all that. Heaven and hell and the risk of eternal damnation as well. But it has transformed, and is still transforming, no doubt.

Let’s start with the former.

In times we know only of our history lessons, the phenomenon clearly was that only the happy few had the time on their hands  to be tormented by their own,  at least to some extent, chosen targets. I’m not speaking of the rich and famous, of the powerful and rich. Wealth, fame and power are sources of pressure: pressure to achieve goals mainly set by others, or by a general (e.g. sociological) context. I’m speaking of the happy few intellectuals who – either through inheritance or through selection on a basis of intellectual or physical ability – wound up having time that – from the point of view of immediate utility in the framework of the then current society – was unaccounted for.

This was literally unchallenged time: stressless and detached. The people having it had a lot of it but there were very few people that had any of it. Not the rich, wealthy and powerful as all of them were (and are) under constant pressure to conform to the many demands of their status and the continuation of it, not only for their lifetime but also across generations (of kindred blood or spirit). Those quoted here are mostly of the specific class of happy few with time that they did not have to account for to anyone but themselves.

The happy irony (proving just how utterly unavoidable intellectual and societal progress are) is that this class of happy few (from gladiators over clergy to academics) are the by-product of numerous status quo’s, numerous regimes. Necessary by-products, because the rich, famous and powerful needed the rewarding mechanism of inheritance [and merit] to ensure their continued service to the status quo by the promise of, at least, riches to their offspring [and to the studious]. Necessary as well because any regime needs some selection of the intellectually and physically best in case there is some external challenge is to be defended against. Once selected they will mainly be idle, since in the status quo the challenges will be few and far between.

I didn’t forgot the irony.

The irony is that the necessary by-product of a status quo invariably generates the ideas that will underpin the overturning of the status quo that allowed them to be generated.

[Oh, come on: if you want your irony in one-liners - Go somewhere else!]

This diagnosis of ‘idleness’, or lack of pressure, is probably accurate over vast times from the first civilizations until recently. Probably until the first fin de siècle that was called the ‘fin de siècle’. Only then (examples are Musil, Proust, Wilde et al.) did this type of idleness become self-assertive; no longer defensive against the charges of ‘decadence’ but claiming decadence as ‘the way to be’.

Not that there weren’t precursors, Montaigne was one and there were others, but the archetype was more that of Darwin (and there is nothing wrong with him, he just did not claim that the type of idleness he had was a good thing, in general).

Anyways, it is no co-incidence that the timing of assertive idleness (and laziness) co-incides with growing industrialization and urbanization. Both these latter not only generated more and more people with some idle time; they also colluded in bringing idle people together in ways that exponentially increase the generation of destabilizing ideas. This made modern society and modern regimes inherently unstable (post-modern, if you will). In some of the more fortunate cases this instability is even guaranteed by a constitution.

This transformation has been a good thing but has not remain unchallenged (far from it, our modern history is the history of challenging the democratization of idleness). Even the mechanism of creating and sustaining idle elites has been put to work in a constant struggle against democratization of idleness. ‘Conservative intellectuals’, and its specific pinnacle symbol of think-tanks, have emerged and are, as of very recently, the dominant claim to intellectualism. Elitism with the as yet unstated goal of reserving idleness for a happy few and a, sometimes even explicitly stated, framework of restraining the instability that is brought by new ideas.

Decadence soon became a pejorative term again.

As it proved impossible to contain the increase of free time (although, of late, this is again something that is attempted afresh, see for instance pushing up the retirement age and lengthening the effective work week), their struggle has been to contain the freedom, the ‘idleness’, of people to use free time. This is done by putting pressure on people’s direct utility for society (e.g. a pressure to procure more expensive or compulsively time consuming habits during one’s free time). It is also done by creating a societal context in which free time needs to be ‘spent’ by ever increasing demands for the free time to be supercharged with events and other trophies and symbols of it being ‘well spent’.

The current balance is one in which the happy few of above have become the unhappy many.

Many of us have free time but almost none of us have it in such abundance as to allow us to be spening it idly in pursuit of our own useless, decadent goals. This has checked – and is constantly checking – the generation of new ideas, which is a pity. The fight to fight – against the consensus that the current elite has built to saveguard the prosperity of its offspring and other heirs – is the fight to claim the free time without having to be accounting for it to anyone or anything.

The fight to fight is the fight for unashamed decadence.

I kid you not.

An innocent quote, a complex thought. I apologize for all the usual incoherence. I am also under a lot of pressure so I don’t have the freedom to work these things
out to a satisfactory level of perfection.

[This is still true, I am unhappy enough to say.]

[Whilst writing this I was most appropriately listening to New York Ska-Jazz Ensemble, "Live in Paris" & The Selecter, "Greatest Hits".]

]]> http://quoughts.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/too-much-pressure/feed/ 0 guidonius http://quoughts.wordpress.com/2011/12/28/the-origin-of-species-authors-introduction/ http://quoughts.wordpress.com/2011/12/28/the-origin-of-species-authors-introduction/#comments Wed, 28 Dec 2011 12:04:14 +0000 Guido Nius http://quoughts.wordpress.com/?p=294 Continue reading →]]> “This is the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms.”,
The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin, Wordsworth classics of world literature, 1998, p. 5-6.

[Re-posted from The Old Site, original dd. 06-06-2009. Not only a simple one, a long one also. It's also blunt in combining Malthus and multi-culturalism.]

A simple one. Malthus has gotten loads of bad press. If at all a connection is made between Malthus and Darwin, it’s mostly made under the heading ‘Social Darwinism’, which is meant insultingly as misapplied Darwinism and associated to extreme right political views. This annoys me. Or more accurately:  infuriates me. But more importantly: it’s incorrect. And, most importantly: the error blocks us from an important insight.

First the error. Malthus was not a biologist. His theory was not biological. An interpretation of his theory along biological lines in which the weakest individuals, as per the weakest social or ethnic groups, should perish such as to have better human offsrping is in clear error. Darwin’s ‘(..) any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself (..) will have a better chance of surviving (..)” rewarped in Malthus’s sociological thinking needs to be seen as a variation of beliefs held by the human beings in society.

The Malthusian thesis is that, insofar people have a better set of beliefs, they will be better equipped to lead a good life. A necessary element of such a set of beliefs is to moderate population growth (not by a one-child policy but by a realization that it is better to moderate one’s own procreation even if – per Darwin – non-moderation of procreation is biologically inescapable instinct). In fact, as we know now, moderation of population growth is essential to survival of the human race as all natural checks – other than destructive disaster – on an  ever increasing human footprint have de facto been eliminated. As Malthus forewarned (and therefore, in its essence, his theory stands): the only check to disastrous crisis is the internal – i.e. self-imposed – check.

Second, the blocked insight: the dynamic of creation is as unavoidable as the law of logic. It applies indiscrimately to all that lives (and therefore all that isn’t just a matter of pure logic). Any living thing will tend to procreate. Any procreating thing will tend to vary. Only the competitive variants will remain. This applies to beings, as is generally accepted, but it also applies to beliefs. This is  the original Malthusian  thought as acknowledged by Darwin.

We have had to vary our ideas, and hence: create new ideas to avoid continuous
catastrophic crisis. One of the ideas that ‘had to’ be created is the understanding of the dynamism of all things living, the Malthusian idea more clearly illustrated by Darwin in biology.

So what?

So this: only the ‘best’ ideas survive with ‘best’ in the sense of adapted in the best (most competitive) way to the environment in which the idea is generated.

No, not just Dawkins’ memes again. Because the question is as it is with Darwin: ‘Adapted to what?’ The notion of memes misleadingly centered on things like nursery rhymes – and by pejorative extension to false populist ideology – such as ‘Darwinism-denialism’. That is as misleading as stating that the fittest creature is the one that survives in an environment artificially created to suit the creature.

The analogy holds: for populist ideology can only survive in artificially isolated environments (cfr. one of the fenced off pieces of nature described by Darwin). Such artificial islands can’t survive. Mono-cultures are like forced inbreeding, and will ultimately succumb under the weakness of their culture when inevitably it needs to face other cultures that survived (and evolved) in some less artificial environment (cfr. the current state of Muslim countries and the maybe future
state of the culture of Western supremacy).

[I may note here, to my own credit, that the last between brackets was written in tempore non suspecto.]

Bad ideology is a lot like rhyme: both are well adapted to a specific aspect of the environment: that of memory and instinctive beastly fear of the strange.

‘Adapted to the freely evolving conditions of nature’, however frustratingly vague this expression may be to some, is the correct view, also for ideas. One idea is the original one of Malthus: universal education. A later idea was: birth control. Both together are well adapted (even if still obviously varying), allowing a relative stability in the substrate for creating more ideas. They neutralize the imminent destruction – the trigger for Malthus ideas – by overpopulation.

Further well adapted ideas are ideas of universal social security and low-carbon emission growth (to give those that are currently relatively uncontroversial in non-populist monoculture group-think; the right to die and the right to be lazy are my typical controversial ones).

Here I unfortunately need to make this one even longer by going into a long ‘by the way’. It is indeed important to note that the above also explains the intuitive appeal of the Hegelian quasi-dynamic of the dialectic. In describing dynamic processes one is easily fooled by the fallacy of treating the description as if it were the reality and then applying logic to the description to get the truth, the way out, the next step. All current politics is Hegelian in this sense of identifying something bad then proposing some specific solution to it and thinking that in so doing the bad thing is irreversibly eliminated.

Taking Malthus and Darwin such an approach cannot be true. Whilst we can simplify our descriptions to isolate this animal and that plant, the real reality is that of all plants and all animals … and all ideas. Things change, interact and are constantly in motion with the brute creative force as Bergson tried to describe. This means that we can’t say that this situation is superseded by that one; this thing solved by forever applying such and such a solution.

Have I gone astray in my above example then as well? A fair question, and the answer is: ‘No!’. No, because I was not specific and took care to identify winning ideas on an abstract enough level to be able to be substantiated by the insights of Darwinism and the dynamics of Malthus. These ideas are winners in the sense that humans have to be winners; both are intrinsically and qualitatively better suited to support a creative, and continuous, growth.

[To make this even longer: what I wanted to say was that a thinking creature has some intrinsic advantage over a large range of environments, just like insects do. These universal ideas I proposed are like that intrinsic advantage. They adapted to be more adaptable. There is more (cfr. the post below this one) but that's good enough in this context.]

Ideas are a major new element of growth. They don’t grow into something definite, virtuous just as DNA did not pruposely grow into humans. The only virtue that can be identified is the virtue of growth itself. The virtue of truth even is derived from the virtue of growth. Ideas can only grow insofar as they are, in a logical and a scientific sense, true (this does not settle the problem of logical truth and mathematics, by the way!).

Even if abstract, there are other things that we can pinpoint as winning ideas besides education [sourly non-discussed in the above] and birth control (the control over one’s own destiny). Without argument I give a few: competition, consumption, economic growth [I'm not so sure on this one anymore]. Other ideas clearly can’t but be categorized as losers: xenophobia, carbon waste, extension of life expectancy, hard and long work.

This has been a long one again so I have permitted myself some fun in implying but not arguing that economic growth is split from carbon growth (consumption from material consumption) and that working hard is incompatible with the emergence of original ideas.

Certainly the latter is a definite to do: maybe time for a Montaigne quote again.

[Whilst writing this I was listening to Anthrax, 'State of Euphoria' & 'Strawberry Jam', The Animal Collective.]

[Re-posted from The Old Site, original dd. 20-05-2009. I have almost come to the point where all old posts have been transferred to the new site and I feel like maybe one of these days I can make new stuff, hopefully having learned from all the many mistakes I have made previously.]

When discussing this with friends of mine, one of them suggested I argue for it on a reductio ad absurdum. I won’t. It seems more fitting to the case at hand to go for a less known (and known to be merely rhetorical) argument: the one “ab absurdo”, ie from the absurd. Hence (I am in a playful mood), I do apologize on beforehand: for assuming the existence of God in some parts of the below.

Shame on me to be reading the TLP only know. It is much better than it is made out to be. It does border on the juvenile from time to time but all philosophers disclaiming being influenced by it are definitely to be categorized as ‘hypocrites’.

But that is not the point here. The point is that I was baffled to find in these seas of abstraction an exquisitely explicit reference to Darwin.

Why so? What was his gripe? How come he wrote this down, never succeeded in
working it out and still decided to keep it in? I am sure it wasn’t merely to go against the fashion of his time (if it was a fashion then). As it happens (sorry to bore you with all these prosaic details but it is important for the later I to work this out better than the present I is doing now), I was in a mood to look up a quote from Kant on the synthetic a priori and ‘quought’ on it and could not get to it because the above questions got in the way. And somehow – somehow – I feel like this has to go out of the way before that other thing can get started. The reason is, I think, that I have no issue with a special status for mathematics (and its mysterious origins) but that I have an issue with what is commonly believed to be the uniqueness of this specialness. The blood of everyday life has its rights too and there has to be more to those rights than an unavoidable dirtiness (or,  to put the best known term for it: original sin).

Ab absurdo it was:

Let’s assume there is an omniscient God (you need not force yourself more: no need for omnipresence and omnipotence) and let’s assume there’s no matter. He was lazy – couldn’t be bothered … only God knows. This God would surely know mathematics – and if He knows some of it, He’ll know all of it. So much for the specialness of logic, 1-0.

But let’s assume there is matter as well (never mind where it came from). Then our God will have to know physics. He does not need to know the physics of our world and it is natural to assume he knows all kinds of physics (only one of which
happens to be the one governing our material world). So you get some kind of space-time, but nothing much more bloody than that. I would say 2-0 for mathematics.

Most physicists would agree as far as I know (but there’s something on the first and second law of thermodynamics I’ll need to explore later on, this post is already too thick as it stands).

And then comes the primeval soup (or whatever other sexy image that we invent to make our theories more TV-friendly). Now pure mathematical God has a problem as: “the show must go on!” (the theme of ‘show’ is continued in the paragraph below). Sure, it’s conceivable that the primeval soup and everything else was skipped, cutting straight to humanoids. But even that moronic conception is of no avail: life is in flux – if it wouldn’t be in flux it wouldn’t be life.

Evolution is unavoidable.

Even if all of the details of all evolutionary theories can be dismissed as ‘mere’ hypotheses, evolution itself cannot. So our assumed God is stuck with more than mathematics – and more than He can handle (maybe there’s concealed in all this a proof of atheism but let’s not get ahead of ourselves). So 2-1, there is some non-mathematical specialness after all; it is expressable in logic that things are in statis (in fact that’s the only thing logic will allow you to express: stasis) but it isn’t conceivable that you have life AND stasis.

Back to the show: enter intelligent life and, eventually, enter language. Clearly language requires an element of logic and requires matter as well (something to ‘language’ about) – it presupposes life as well but I’ll not work that out. Language scores our equalizer because – clearly – there is an element of logic in there if we are to make ‘sense’ of each other, but as evidently there is an element of creativity in it if we are to express, for instance, new hypotheses.

The creative power of language cannot just be a matter of recursive generation of propositions and/or the postulation of new names . Language that is restricted to that is thinkable (it’s the language which the TLP is about), but it just is not conceivable that that is the only language.

[In fact: the language of the TLP is only thinkable if there is some other vaguer, less strict, more organic language that comes evolutionarily before it. This still is cryptic but probably less so than what I originally said below.]

It is a.o. not conceivable because I – and Ludwig for that matter – would not be able to talk about logic. Hence, it wouldn’t be conceivable that anybody but our almost forgotten assumed God knows logic. It’s not my point that it’s a fact that we do speak about it (without being God); the point is that it’s inconceivable that we’d speak about logic if there would not be creativity in language beyond the mere logical element in language.

2-2, but blood wins since it was playing an away match

Although I shouldn’t declare victory that soon. It’s just a sketch to be worked out even if I believe that it is a quite convincing sketch and one that introduces non-logical specialness without vagaries of mysticism, idiocies of vulgarizing scientism and with a passing blow to a whole lot of intelligent design-freaks and other theists.

So Wittgenstein was wrong. There are at least two points (remember the laws of thermodynamics: I hope to make it 1-3 one day) where philosophy needs to talk (and cannot but talk) about non-logical matters. Both points are closely linked to Darwin – let me risk the vulgarizing terms genes and memes. Sure, you can forget about the spirit of Darwinism and make an arbitrary non-vague definition of Darwin’s theory (and Adam Smith’s & …) to get out of it,  but that’s not playing it fair. You also could dismiss talk of ‘the spirit’ of a theory like Darwin’s but that would be self-defeating (just read the TLP) exactly for the reasons highlighted above.

Evolution and creativity are of the essence in convergence. Their special status, and the other kind of special nature of logic and mathematics combine to a view which is a sustainable view that accords well with our intuition of knowledge “locked in” but not specific (logic/evolution), and knowledge that is specific but always improvable (that of empirical science).

Philosophy is indeed an activity. Logic as such is not.

[I'm actually quite happy with this.]

[Whilst writing this I was listening to Richard Muhal, George Lewis and Roscoe Mitchell, PI Recordings, "Streaming".]

[Re-posted from The Old Site, original dd. 02-05-2009. Surprisingly good one, à propos of this as well. ]

I never cared too much for most of this series. Among my many weaknesses there is a certain immunity to being radically ‘into’ anything. Still, that line and the general gist of it mean a lot to me and should mean a lot to you. No, not because of nostalgia, a passing infatuation with camp or because one has to dig at least somewhat what used to be popular in a niche kind of way. None of that.

It has to mean a lot because it does mean a lot.

It is universal ‘to boldly go where no man has ever gone before’. So universal it wouldn’t make any sense to think of intelligent creatures that wouldn’t want to go there (this does, alas, not mean that all creatures are intelligent, most of us humans are not intelligent, most of the time).

That’s what I’m doing here: going where no man has gone before. Mind you, not trying to do; doing! I have no idea if I will wind up in places of any relevance whatsoever. Nor am I very sure that at least the ride itself is very enjoyable (or whether there is anybody on it at all). More, I’m going boldly because doing it prudently is just to keep within this, ot that, known territory; and for all one knows, that territory might as well be prison (‘God’-prison, ‘being responsible’-prison, ‘hard work’-prison, ‘listen to your experts’-prison, …).

The spirit of Star Trek is the truely human spirit (and yes!, Lts Uhura & Chekhov are beasts in bed), the human spirit as it should be. And every single time I have heard the above line I have felt (albeit I have no appetite for travel and less so for even the most convenient space travel imaginable) that it was enough in and of itself to lead one through this business of living.

Without any of us physically going anywhere we can be everyhwere (-Q!-). It seems like the mediocrest of points one can make based on a corny piece of pop culture but it really isn’t.

It’s the meaning of life, Jim, but not as we know it.

We have succumbed, or all but succumbed, to the neurotic interpretation of meaning as a fixed point, that is to be discovered and henceforward used as the steadfast anchor point. We are so far into this obsessive-compulsive behaviour in this 21st century that it’s hard to see how we would ever be able to cut loose from the ‘religious prison renamed compliance’ in an as short stretch of time as is left between us and the 24th century.

But precisely this mediocre point is the mental virus that will save us from our pet-genes of pettiness: it is a well known point, it is well understood, across cultures. Going boldly is fun, it’s good for those coming after you, it is respectful to those that have gone before you, and it will only succeed when you take care in communicating how you went there.

And on an unimportant side note: it has relevance for philosophy as it has  for language. I don’t know any clearer illustration of Davidson’s point on conceptual schemes than Star Trek. I don’t know better illustrations of far-reaching cultural relativity in some loose sense and an universal and absolute primacy of needing-to-understand in the strictest of senses.

Also, it always, in my memory at least, has ended well as it cannot but end well with us because there is, rationally, only possibility for long term improvement. It is a victory over the pessimism that is a necessary by-product of some strong and strict (neurotic) belief in cultural relativism. Let’s have a good strong dose of psychosis once in a while, certainly given the short term looking like it is going to be miserabilistic.

[Whilst writing this I was listening to Schoenberg (Chamber Symphony 1) and Brahms, (Piano Quartet 1), Simon Rattle: City of Birmingham Orchestra.]

In giving up dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside of all schemes and science, we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth – quite the contrary. Given the dogma of a dualism of scheme and reality, we get conceptual relativity, and truth relative to a scheme. Without the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board. (..)”

D. Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2001, p. 197-198.

[Re-posted from The Old Site, original dd. 19-04-09. Key quote, weak thought, at least very weakly expressed.]

This long quote is one of the rare wormholes (some basic notion of science fiction is a assumed existant in the reader of this) between philosophy of language and ethics.

If true we have speakers that understand each other at least somewhat and a world against which they can check each other’s understanding. Insofar as speakers don’t understand each other, they are not speakers and they are merely, if that, part of the background against which understanding is possible., part of the world. That is clean and neat. It is not much but it is not only better than nothing, it is enough to make some quite striking moral observations.

Assuming that our ability to communicate is an important part of what we are,  there clearly is virtue in extending both breadth and depth of communication (it is a truely Habermasian point to make).

And not just that: whatever else may be said of an erroneous but shared and understood notion, if it is to have any cash value in the world it will have to allow being judged intersubjectively. It either helps or blocks communication and understanding. Some undoubtedly find this plebeian morality naïve and counter to the everyday observation that common people cling on to many falsities.

But these elitists are wrong.

As per the above: language can’t be individuated (more on that later – language by the way is not alone here, genes can’t be properly individuated – subatomic particles can’t properly …) Integers don’t work for communication and the continuum isn’t as easily filled by the elite (must find back that article by Church!) as the elite thinks it can be filled, by them.

Common sense is a product that involves the common people more than it involves the happy few. We are constantly creating understanding and (Quine is right albeit in this case he is not radical enough) there’s no possible end to it (although there is a beginning: any successful attempt at communication).

So that is the moral path: neither crooked nor narrow . No requirement to force us in directions against our grain because nothing is so natural for human beings as to be blabbering constantly. The risk does not come from a momentary tiredness of this talking, our instinctive conservativeness in not allowing new understanding that could jeopardize a status quo in which we and our children are pretty sure to thrive.

No sir, the risk comes from the attempts to regiment our communication (rules for spelling come to mind as early symptoms) which is always (and necessarily, per the above) the creation of arbitrary and untenable (except temporarily, by force and coercion) in- and outsiders who are, as always, immoral by the simple but strong lights described above.

At the risk of repetition of things elsewhere slumbered about on this site; it is not at all a coincidence to discover that the shorter, simpler and less detailed version is the better. Only by stripping away the coincidental and realizing it’s just an instant in the journey rather than the possible end point we can fix something worthwhile (Darwin’s like that as well). It is immoral to defend a multiplicity of rules. Certainly when we’re told that bending, or sometimes even only calling into question, these rules is in and by itself immoral.

There are not too many things that are truly immoral. Religion was maybe right in that (and only that): in the end judgment is simple and not a question of arithmetic.

[Whilst writing this I was listening to Chemical Brothers, We Are The Night, 2007.]

[Amateuristic English translation: The grumbler at his writing desk: "(..) Why didn't I get the bodily strength, to slay with one blow of the axe all the sins of this planet? Why didn't I get the strength of thought, to force this defiled mankind to an outcry? Why is my voice of opposition not stronger than these hollow commands, that have in their power the souls of this globe? I keep documents for a time, no longer capable of grasping them or so far from now, that it will say, I am a manipulator. But no, the time will not come to say this. Because it will never be. (..)"

[Re-posted from The Old Site, original dd. 30-03-2009. As these posts get more recent I would hope they get better. Hope is always misguiding. It is what it is.]

I am an optimist. But, being an optimist, I don’t get it; I don’t get why, despite Kraus, we wound up in another world war; simply don’t get it why, for all the advances we did make, we still see words used in service of this, that or the other pet belief of one or another set of ‘in’-people domesticating us to pets.

The point is, I guess (or at least that’s been chasing me ever since I re- read the quote above), that we make steady progress (ignoring times of intermittent world war type collapse [and we might well at current be in such a relapse]) but that at every time we wind up in the worst possible world that we’d be able to have at that specific time.

Let me in turn try to chase the thought that has been chasing me for a week now. I am not a fan of ‘possible worlds’ logic and certainly not the kind that – in an almost mystical way – tends to give a lot of reality value to worlds possible but not actual. I do however think I can make sense of ‘the worst possible world at a specific time’. More specifically as per the following:

Each specific time – instant, historical period – is characterized by many possible ways of organizing. At least, to limit ourselves to the really real, there are at any time a range of actual (politicial, judicial, economic) systems in place. We can therefore – glossing over many important qualifications no doubt, but bear with me – quantify at a specific time over these actual systems.

If we can quantify over such systems, and we can make sense of the predicate ‘better than’ predicated of such systems, we’re in good shape. Indeed, any world that doesn’t maximize its ‘better’ systems is worse, and any world in which the ‘better’ systems are, in effect, minimized is the worst.

OK, fair enough with rather more than a whiff of poetical liberty (I do apologize for buckets full of implicitly assumed non-trivial premises but I’m chasing here; only if I actually catch something will I be able to give it a thorough going-over).

But I did introduce maximize (& minimize, but you’ll sure forgive the one if you forgive the other) and that, at least, requires me to pause (likewise with the jump from systems to worlds would, but – whether you forgive me or not – I will pass that one for now). Maximize implies that there is an action that could at least be taken but who is the actor? And what is the action?

Time for some more boldness. Time to get back to Kraus.

My suggestion is that the actors would be the people living at that specific time, and the action would be to use their knowledge of better/worse systems. I guess by now I’ll have lost what little credibility I had when I started but my suggestion poses an interesting constraint: the actual systems over which I was quantifying have to be ‘visible’ to all actors. Not only have they to be known but they also in some way have to be understood (it isn’t, by the way, at all necessary they be completely understood, they need only to be relatively clear and only insofar as the ‘better/worse’ relation is concerned).

An example from Kraus’ time:

There was the Austrian system and the British one,. The British one was better (if an historian reads this: just assume with me, for fun if not for anything else). Both systems were visible to each other: there was no lack of communication. In fact there were people like Kraus that were very vocal in the worse system on the fact that there was something ‘better’ to be had. In the Austrian empire one could make a lot of excuses on why they stuck to the ‘worse’ (and they did, just read Kraus) – but not because of lack of knowing the ‘better’ (and remember: this is no longer about the ideal ‘best’, at any time – lots of criticism applies to what I say but not that of utopianism). Opting then – not only to stay in the ‘worse’ – but also to go to war with the ‘best’ is – at least close to very categorically – the worst possible situation; a situation that actually minimizes the good.

At this time I can relax the quantificational diversion – the worst possible world at a given time is the world that takes minimal account of the knowledge and the criticism that is available at that given time. Minimal account does not mean ‘no account’ as it is perfectly plausible that, however much the Austrian rulers tried, they were unable to disregard entirely the knowledge and criticism waged at that specific time (it is, in fact, part of the Kraussian story how these rulers quite deliberately saved appearance by giving lip service to modernity; and, in double fact, isn’t that something that rings a bell, across all times, including ours?).

[Maybe it comes later but my cultural optimism is based on the assumption that, whatever else rulers do, they have to at least pay lip service to what is better and in so doing, regardless of their own aims, cannot but further knowledge of  what is good.]

Given we do progress, the argument isn’t too hard that in actual dynamic reality the ‘minimal account’ isn’t zero (yes, I will have to allow this over a considerably longer stretch of time than from instant to instant, otherwise the world war data would falsify the theory).

So, enough chasing done, I can have my cake and eat it too. I can be a grumbler and I can be an optimist. Grumbler because at any given point in time, including a time like the present, we are as worse off as possible (taken statically). Optimist because I can see evolution over sufficiently large stretches of time as showing such clear progress that nobody would deny if for instance speaking over the last century.

[Turning back to the Kraus' quote: it is in fact true that in newer times it is less and less possible to understand the worst of older times. It becomes literally inconceivable to understand why the facts were as they were. This is specifically true of acceptance of inter-personal violence.]

Shorter all of the above: things progress extremely badly.

The reason for this, and therefore the reason for the conundrum with which Karl
Kraus expresses his frustration in the quote, is that “the word” (knowledge and  criticism and all that) isn’t allowed to ‘flow’ (more: the word is actively blocked and abused by the people which happen to be in charge at a given time). My optimism, to close on the up, is that it nevertheless flows and, like water, can’t be
blocked indefinitely. Kraus could not see that because he could not see progress over time, yet. Better still: progress is self-re-enforcing – the more the word has flown the more rapidly it will flow next.

But, unfortunately, the mechanisms of delay by the powerful is still with us. Although we know the tricks of propaganda and abuse of power, we haven’t been able to get rid of them (cfr. Murdoch and Davos and economists in general) . The word is still more controlled than that it controls our progress (and, on a darker note, possibly the point of irreversibility has not been reached yet

Ouf!

[See On Education elsewhere on this blog. Progress to dynamics is based to large extent on the ability of masses of people to understand the word and the speed with which it flows is directly proportional to the number of people  capable of  critically understanding it. This is why education is not just a crucial thing but is the crucial thing contra the current zeitgeist that puts several items, specifically wealth and tradition, as more primordial than learning. I am happy with this one as it may be badly written and all but it is nevertheless spot on.]

[Whilst writing this I was listening to Bill Laswell; both Dub Chamber 3  and Land of Look Behind.]

[Re-posted from The Old Site, original dd. 08-03-2009. Good intentions, but as usual no follow-through. Anyway, these are the origins of quadrialectics.]

I have decided to re-read Grice after completing my reading of Davidson. I think it more and more likely that some kind of “stepping stone theory of language” – as per  my not (yet?) published thesis on common sense reasoning – might just be the sort of alternative that Grice would have found attractive.

That’s of course not much more, presently, than a hunch but it’s precisely things like hunches that continue to present difficulties for theories like the one of Davidson (it will be necessary for the reader to bear with me even more than usual, my sincerest apologies). A hunch is not something irrational (let alone antirational) even if it is in itself theoretically unambitious. Hunches do not commit someone to give up hope of a systematic treatment of natural reasoning, not even the hope of a systematic treatment of hunches.

Truth be told, hunches and intuition are suspect because they tend to be spoken by ‘believers’ that not just lack intellectual ambition but are proudly affirming that it is a sort of sin (mystery-murder!) to have any ambition beyond them. Such a point of view is, not just merely unattractive, but positively lethal (albeit temporarily cosy). A hunch is indeed a call to action but it’s a call to a specific sort of action i.e. the action of an investigation into the rational merits of the hunch – any other action on hunches can only be justified by appeal to lack of time or another rational argument preventing a subject to thinking on the actual merits of what your hunch is about. This being said, I do not doubt (although I do not know for sure) whether there are no intuitions that don’t admit of further rationalizing (philosophical litterature suggest there are some such), but if this were the case it would not prevent us from at least having ambition to detail which intuitions are of this kind and why this is so (contra Grice – he implies that the 2 alternatives are equally unattractive and this is not so unless he is sure a third alternative exists, which he says he is not).

Before saying anything ambitiously positive I feel compelled to add such a third alternative: the alternative of overly ambitious regimentation. The traditional rationalist assumption that everything can be systematized, because everything is systematic, is also lethal (Popper said how, Quine/Davidson say why). Regimenting the facts, in some or other preconceived scheme, always leads to paradoxes (call it, on a lighter note, the Kantian hunch). Either these paradoxes are assimilated as mysteries in a scheme (and so back to lack of ambition, cfr. scientism) or they are denied (and then we have the overambitious that looks eerily similar to the overzealous but is worse: the overzealous always contains a rest fraction of mystery, and therefore at least some openness to novelty). So, again contra Grice, the implicature that there are only 3 alternatives is a real error (there are at least 4) and the topological map of the ones described here at least supports the hunch that more theoretical ambition isn’t necessarily better.

So why the hell quote something and then go off on a tangent condemning it? Well I don’t know; these things just happen but – as it happens – it allows me to express something I wanted to express: Grice’s hunch is, I think, correctly critical of a certain strand of thought coming from the great Witt over people like Ryle, Austin, Strawson to him: they are theoretically too unambitious. At the same time, I think, another strand of thought running over both Quine and Davidson is, for all they say themselves, theoretically too ambitious. How’s that possible? Is there some ideal level of ambition in between? And what would it be for there to be some sufficiently unambitious level of ambition?

I do not think we need to bother too long with such paradoxes; these two strands of thought – that is at least my conjecture, or hunch – deal with two qualitatively different aspects of a (still assumed indivisible) phenomenon of human thought.

Davidson’s tradition is focused on standard (deductive) reasoning and – in line with the nature of logic – it is theoretically ambitious. Grice’s tradition on the other hand focuses on common sense (inductive) reasoning and – in line with the tendenciy of common sense – is theoretically unambitious. The problem for both traditions (& maybe not for Wittgenstein because he suitably split himself in two) is that they discuss things as if there were only one aspect, as if deduction, knowledge and beliefs are things single isolated humans do on the background or as if the fuzziness of the type of human acting we know from individuals is a fact about this world.

The former therefore tends to overregiment (even if the stated goal is not to do so) and, more specifically, assume humans have intellectual superpowers (e.g. a consistent belief system) that happen to be impaired by the lack of adequate processing powers. In the latter we see the theoretical lack of ambition Grice is on about. By the way, Wittgenstein in this sense doesn’t have the better of anybody because the guy didn’t attempt to integrate, only to delineate.

The truth then is probably  – turning the ‘probably’ of a hunch into something more definite would be a worthy project indeed – and quite symbolically not in the middle. The truth, according to my present hunch, consists in systematic interactions between the purity, the extensionality and eternality of logic (with pure combinatorial productivity) and the fuzzy, intensional here-and-now-ness of our practical reasoning (with its impredictable creativity of imagination).

I think Grice launched himself into a project at the level of the ‘systematic’ in the (alas, too long) sentence before this. But – from the angle of his tradition – he thought it was about unfuzzying the fuzzy of the last part of the sentence. Thence the charges of ‘theoretically unambitious’ and a lack of mention of  theoretically overambitious alternatives.

I have to stop here: I think I have (for myself at least clarified) what program is there to be had. I think it is an important program because it enables to find a real and systematic place for the traditional dichotomies of static and dynamic, synchronic and diachronic and pure and practical reason. The important corrolary is in ethics where we can move on from the stalemate of relativism vs. absolutism. A nice corrolary will be that the field of common sense reasoning can finally be discussed on its own merits (and relatively unknown philosophers like Kyburg saved from oblivion).

[Whilst I realize that this is practically incomprehensible I have to say that I am in awe of my former self. It is not because something is incompetently phrased that it is without great merit.]

[Whilst writing this I was listening to "Stimmung", KarlHeinz Stockhausen, by Paul Hillier's Theatre of Voices, published by harmonia mundi.]

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