I see part of the reason for writing this blog as being to give people arguments to refute common materialist talking points they're certain to encounter online and in real life. I haven't found one, yet, that doesn't have a response they can't deal with.
Though some of those are complex because they depend on breaking down the materialist habit of cutting corners, purposely ignoring aspects of problems and issues and distortion by reductionism.
This area of consciousness, what materialists encounter as their "hard problem" is especially vulnerable - in their presentation of it - to their opponents insisting on looking at it in a fuller and more rigorous way than they would like it to be viewed in. And, for the same reasons they find it to be a hard problem, there is no way to hold it up to questioning except by looking at it in all of its enormous detail.
Consciousness, our minds, are what we use to do everything, to even be aware of everything, after all. For all intellectual purposes, our consciousness, our minds are us, are everyone and is everything of the world that we can know. It's bound to be complicated, it encompasses everything in so far as we can know of it. To try to reduce it in the typical fashion of atheism is to not deal with it as it really is. It is a tiny aspect of how they deal with God, perhaps because consciousness is, to a very tiny extent, the image of God, what makes us different from non-living matter.
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
Hate Mail
To paraphrase the late Lesley Gore, it's my website and I'll write what I want to.
You find it boring. Do you really think that I care?
Go talk about 45-year-old pop music everyone's already heard a million times, your shows and what you had for lunch, which you obviously find ever so much more interesting. I promise I'll ignore it.
You find it boring. Do you really think that I care?
Go talk about 45-year-old pop music everyone's already heard a million times, your shows and what you had for lunch, which you obviously find ever so much more interesting. I promise I'll ignore it.
The Knots of Contradiction That Sustain Atheism
That point I made on Saturday, that if our experience of free will is merely an illusion masking the reality of chemical and physical determinacy that all of our thinking is, as well, debased by that holding, is one that really interests me. It is is undeniable that it is a pressing issue for atheists that our minds be entirely less than our experience proves to us that they are. Despite that widely held belief among atheists, and though they have to rely on what they, clearly, believe to be their superior minds to do that debunking with, they MUST do that or their philosophical basis in materialism falls apart, leaving their cherished belief with no intellectual underpinnings at all.
If there is one thing that the period of neo-atheism has shown, it is that atheists are in love with the idea that their minds are better than the minds of the vast majority of human beings. They are so in love with that idea that it generally enrages them when someone refuses to go along with their assertions regarding that. Then they complain that people don't like them. It is a minor irony of the myriad of ironies that arise in neo-atheist assertions that the man who they falsely claim as one of them, Benjamin Franklin pointed out that a man who falls in love with himself will have no rivals. Goes for men who collect themselves into groups, too.
In several of his talks and writings, Rupert Sheldrake points out how the materialist, mechanistic ideology that is enforced among materialist scientists blinds them to some of the most obvious of observable experiences. One of the things he mentions is "The Cambridge Declaration" a few years back in which, "a prominent international group of cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophisiologists, neuroanatomists and computational neuroscientists gathered at the University of Cambridge to reassess the neurobiological substrates of consious experience and related behaviors in human and non-human animals." Their conclusion was that, shockingly, to them, at least, it turns out many mammals, birds and possibly even octopi are conscious. Yes, and, well, I guess they had to pretty much hold that we humans are conscious, as well. Though I'm sure they find some way to diminish human consciousness, exempting themselves and such things as science, of course.
Sheldrake points out that what took these big brains decades into the lives of their specialties, a major conference and much debate and consideration to discover, is obvious to anyone who has ever kept a dog or cat or bird as a pet, anyone who has observed other animals, including those not on their list, in the wild, that animals are conscious. Apparently their vast and extensive educations in science blinded them to what even the most uneducated of "bronze age goat herders" could have told them.
And, let it also be pointed out, there is angry criticism of their declaration by others in their fields and in others. And not just for reasons of science but for out of professional interest. They don't want anything that could possibly even raise questions about their use of animals in their professional pursuits.
The reason all of this is controversial is because the reigning dogma of traditional science was that all of life is mechanical, based in unconscious matter. That was never supported by research before it was adopted and what findings that support it are, generally, achieved by ignoring the obvious fact that animals considered to not have consciousness, such as dogs, obviously behave, they obviously can understand language, sometimes to a great extent, and they are quite capable of responding to our unexpressed emotions and conditions, sometimes even before we are aware of those and, certainly, are able to express their own desires and needs to us. The typical meaningless dismissal of that is that it was "reflex" or some such thing was always obviously a load of bilge but such is the strength within science of atheist ideology that it was the enforced way of talking about such phenomena.
The Cambridge Declarers tie their granting of consciousness to animals to neural structures and as the product of evolution. I went into that earlier this year, looking at claims by one of the hardest of materialist ideologues, Daniel Dennett using the clear behavior in response to an external stimulus of photo taxis in bacteria, which clearly don't have brains yet they clearly demonstrate a consciousness of light and a response to it.
This week I came across this article about Erythropsidinium, a single-celled organism which scientists have decided has an 'eye' which it uses to hunt down other tiny creatures which are not visible.
Now it appears that the tiny owner of this eye uses it to catch invisible prey by detecting polarised light. This suggestion is also likely to be greeted with disbelief, for the eye belongs to a single-celled organism called Erythropsidinium. It has no nerves, let alone a brain. So how could it "see" its prey?
Fernando Gómez of the University of São Paulo, Brazil, thinks it can. "Erythropsidinium is a sniper," he told New Scientist. "It is waiting to see the prey, and it shoots in that direction."
Erythropsidinium belongs to a group of single-celled planktonic organisms known as dinoflagellates. They can swim using a tail, or flagellum, and many possess chloroplasts, allowing them to get their food by photosynthesis just as plants do.
Others hunt by shooting out stinging darts similar to the nematocysts of jellyfishMovie Camera. They sense vibrations when prey comes near, but they often have to fire off several darts before they manage to hit it, Gómez says.
Erythropsidinium and its close relatives can do better, Gómez thinks, because they spot prey with their unique and sophisticated eye, called the ocelloid, which juts out from the cell. "It knows where the prey is," he says.
How can anyone who observes or reads about such a creature that "knows where the prey is" conclude that it isn't exhibiting what is clearly conscious behavior? If you want to attribute the general ability ascribed to some kind of genetically based "reflex" (and does that word even make sense in the absence of a central nervous system?) at any given point the knowledge of the location of a specific prey organism can't be held to be the result of a reflex, every time it does that it has clearly learned something it didn't know before, where that specific prey organism is at that time. To put it in the same terms I used earlier this week, where is the physical existence of those individual ideas within that one-celled organism? Where does the thinking that must underlie every one of those individual hunting events arise from within the organism, where does it reside, how does it happen as an internal, physical manifestation in the materialists' ideological claims? And, again, how does the organism know how to generate the specific idea of the location of a specific prey animal if the idea wasn't already present in it? That would have to be answered if the materialist practice of reducing such things to objects is to stand.
In the angry response to the Cambridge declaration, the, clearly professionally-interested scientist at "Speaking of Research" said, "Of course, there are animal activists that had already reached the conclusion that animals are conscious simply by staring into their eyes..." But the scientists who insist and insisted that animals were not consicous did so by closing their eyes to what they obviously saw and they did it for reasons that are every much as ideological as those of the animal rights activists that such scientists so love to mock. It was professionally inconvenient and violated the ruling ideology of their field to admit that they saw the clear signs of consciousness in animals which behave purposefully in response to external experience. And they did it for centuries, beginning with such non-atheist mechanists as Descartes. He was able to exempt people from being machines made of meat by his dualism, which became anathema to atheists in later generations. They, producing their science with their conscious minds, of which they were so arrogantly proud, were forced to frame that as a hard problem which had to be explained away in service to their ideology. So strong is their emotional need for everything to have a material explanation that is at least theoretically treated with science, that they tied themselves up in knots of contradiction, denying what was as clear empirical evidence of consciousness as anything they published in their research.
From my numerous encounters with atheists online over the past dozen years I have no doubt it is a question of emotion for them, not of reason. There is no scientific reason for them to maintain their willful blindness. They want materialism to be true and for most of them it is because they hate the idea that religion might have something to it. Religion is a bogeyman to them, something they attribute all sins to, including those which have been created by their own science - Steve Weinberg, I'm pointing at you - and those which properly belong to entirely worldly authorities in pursuit of material wealth and power. Scientists have promoted an enormous number of myths in support of their ideological war on religion, they've even had to turn their own minds into myths, that is when they aren't conveniently forgetting that they are mere animals, as well.
If there is one thing that the period of neo-atheism has shown, it is that atheists are in love with the idea that their minds are better than the minds of the vast majority of human beings. They are so in love with that idea that it generally enrages them when someone refuses to go along with their assertions regarding that. Then they complain that people don't like them. It is a minor irony of the myriad of ironies that arise in neo-atheist assertions that the man who they falsely claim as one of them, Benjamin Franklin pointed out that a man who falls in love with himself will have no rivals. Goes for men who collect themselves into groups, too.
In several of his talks and writings, Rupert Sheldrake points out how the materialist, mechanistic ideology that is enforced among materialist scientists blinds them to some of the most obvious of observable experiences. One of the things he mentions is "The Cambridge Declaration" a few years back in which, "a prominent international group of cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophisiologists, neuroanatomists and computational neuroscientists gathered at the University of Cambridge to reassess the neurobiological substrates of consious experience and related behaviors in human and non-human animals." Their conclusion was that, shockingly, to them, at least, it turns out many mammals, birds and possibly even octopi are conscious. Yes, and, well, I guess they had to pretty much hold that we humans are conscious, as well. Though I'm sure they find some way to diminish human consciousness, exempting themselves and such things as science, of course.
Sheldrake points out that what took these big brains decades into the lives of their specialties, a major conference and much debate and consideration to discover, is obvious to anyone who has ever kept a dog or cat or bird as a pet, anyone who has observed other animals, including those not on their list, in the wild, that animals are conscious. Apparently their vast and extensive educations in science blinded them to what even the most uneducated of "bronze age goat herders" could have told them.
And, let it also be pointed out, there is angry criticism of their declaration by others in their fields and in others. And not just for reasons of science but for out of professional interest. They don't want anything that could possibly even raise questions about their use of animals in their professional pursuits.
The reason all of this is controversial is because the reigning dogma of traditional science was that all of life is mechanical, based in unconscious matter. That was never supported by research before it was adopted and what findings that support it are, generally, achieved by ignoring the obvious fact that animals considered to not have consciousness, such as dogs, obviously behave, they obviously can understand language, sometimes to a great extent, and they are quite capable of responding to our unexpressed emotions and conditions, sometimes even before we are aware of those and, certainly, are able to express their own desires and needs to us. The typical meaningless dismissal of that is that it was "reflex" or some such thing was always obviously a load of bilge but such is the strength within science of atheist ideology that it was the enforced way of talking about such phenomena.
The Cambridge Declarers tie their granting of consciousness to animals to neural structures and as the product of evolution. I went into that earlier this year, looking at claims by one of the hardest of materialist ideologues, Daniel Dennett using the clear behavior in response to an external stimulus of photo taxis in bacteria, which clearly don't have brains yet they clearly demonstrate a consciousness of light and a response to it.
This week I came across this article about Erythropsidinium, a single-celled organism which scientists have decided has an 'eye' which it uses to hunt down other tiny creatures which are not visible.
Now it appears that the tiny owner of this eye uses it to catch invisible prey by detecting polarised light. This suggestion is also likely to be greeted with disbelief, for the eye belongs to a single-celled organism called Erythropsidinium. It has no nerves, let alone a brain. So how could it "see" its prey?
Fernando Gómez of the University of São Paulo, Brazil, thinks it can. "Erythropsidinium is a sniper," he told New Scientist. "It is waiting to see the prey, and it shoots in that direction."
Erythropsidinium belongs to a group of single-celled planktonic organisms known as dinoflagellates. They can swim using a tail, or flagellum, and many possess chloroplasts, allowing them to get their food by photosynthesis just as plants do.
Others hunt by shooting out stinging darts similar to the nematocysts of jellyfishMovie Camera. They sense vibrations when prey comes near, but they often have to fire off several darts before they manage to hit it, Gómez says.
Erythropsidinium and its close relatives can do better, Gómez thinks, because they spot prey with their unique and sophisticated eye, called the ocelloid, which juts out from the cell. "It knows where the prey is," he says.
How can anyone who observes or reads about such a creature that "knows where the prey is" conclude that it isn't exhibiting what is clearly conscious behavior? If you want to attribute the general ability ascribed to some kind of genetically based "reflex" (and does that word even make sense in the absence of a central nervous system?) at any given point the knowledge of the location of a specific prey organism can't be held to be the result of a reflex, every time it does that it has clearly learned something it didn't know before, where that specific prey organism is at that time. To put it in the same terms I used earlier this week, where is the physical existence of those individual ideas within that one-celled organism? Where does the thinking that must underlie every one of those individual hunting events arise from within the organism, where does it reside, how does it happen as an internal, physical manifestation in the materialists' ideological claims? And, again, how does the organism know how to generate the specific idea of the location of a specific prey animal if the idea wasn't already present in it? That would have to be answered if the materialist practice of reducing such things to objects is to stand.
In the angry response to the Cambridge declaration, the, clearly professionally-interested scientist at "Speaking of Research" said, "Of course, there are animal activists that had already reached the conclusion that animals are conscious simply by staring into their eyes..." But the scientists who insist and insisted that animals were not consicous did so by closing their eyes to what they obviously saw and they did it for reasons that are every much as ideological as those of the animal rights activists that such scientists so love to mock. It was professionally inconvenient and violated the ruling ideology of their field to admit that they saw the clear signs of consciousness in animals which behave purposefully in response to external experience. And they did it for centuries, beginning with such non-atheist mechanists as Descartes. He was able to exempt people from being machines made of meat by his dualism, which became anathema to atheists in later generations. They, producing their science with their conscious minds, of which they were so arrogantly proud, were forced to frame that as a hard problem which had to be explained away in service to their ideology. So strong is their emotional need for everything to have a material explanation that is at least theoretically treated with science, that they tied themselves up in knots of contradiction, denying what was as clear empirical evidence of consciousness as anything they published in their research.
From my numerous encounters with atheists online over the past dozen years I have no doubt it is a question of emotion for them, not of reason. There is no scientific reason for them to maintain their willful blindness. They want materialism to be true and for most of them it is because they hate the idea that religion might have something to it. Religion is a bogeyman to them, something they attribute all sins to, including those which have been created by their own science - Steve Weinberg, I'm pointing at you - and those which properly belong to entirely worldly authorities in pursuit of material wealth and power. Scientists have promoted an enormous number of myths in support of their ideological war on religion, they've even had to turn their own minds into myths, that is when they aren't conveniently forgetting that they are mere animals, as well.
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
Rupert Sheldrake - 2015 The Vegetable Sermon My Wednesday Post Posted Now
Thomas Fairchild was a pioneering plant breeder who lived in Shoreditch, in the East End of London. When he died in 1729, he left a legacy for a "Vegetable Sermon" to be preached each year in Shoreditch Parish Church in the week following Pentecost on "the wonderful works of God in creation". This sermon, on May 15, 2015, by Rupert Sheldrake, was on flowers.
I love, so much, the idea of a "Vegetable Sermon" and love so much that one of my favorite heretics, Rupert Sheldrake, was asked to give one. Now, I'll just wait to read the comments ridiculing and mocking Sheldrake, who has had a long and distinguished career in science, made by people who have never been guilty of publishing experimental research or getting near to quantitative analysis of anything except their bank accounts. One hint, the Wikipedia page on him has been thoroughly distorted by Susan Gerbic's "Guerrilla Skeptics" and is full of their lies about him so it can't be relied on. I take a lot of comfort in how often they have to resort to distortions and lying to support their ideology, one that was true wouldn't have to do that so continually.
There is an enormous storm headed our way, tornadoes were mentioned. If you don't hear from me in the next several days, that's probably why. I'm heading down to the barn cellar where it should be safe on first warning with the dog and the cat, if she'll tolerate being moved. See you later. Maybe.
John Coltrane - Spiritual - At Noon
John Coltrane, sax
McCoy Tyner, piano
Jimmy Garrison, bass
Elvin Jones, drums
Update: I just realized that version cuts out before the end. Here's another performance.
And I'm not sure, but I think that's actually an alto sax, I originally typed tenor by habit.
Hate Mail - Economics Is The Biggest Academic Brothel Of Them All
Good grief, someone is whining about me having said, economics as practiced and taught in academia has never been more than an extension of materialist Mammonism, in what I posted yesterday. What part of the past forty-five years of economics as a political entity, pushed by neo-classical economists, from such venues as The U. of Chicago and the Ivy League universities did they miss? Economics is a brothel almost exclusively serving the interests of those with wealth and or power, despite those outliers who don't see their role as that and who, generally, don't seem to move up in the field or stay in it.
Last month when the mathematician John Forbes Nash died in a car crash, I was kind of puzzled to get an e-mail pointing out that you know who snarked that I would rejoice in his death because he was an atheist. I ignored it at the time, as I ignore most of those pieces of hate mail I receive. But, since the e-mail also quoted the regulars at Duncan Black's blog who were mourning the loss of him as a great man, I was even more surprised at that. Black has a PhD in economics and is a critic of neo-classical economics, as I recall from the dim past when he actually wrote blog posts he was somewhat harsh about the claims of the Chicago boys and others that people make rational decisions in such areas as purchases and investments and the such. I'd have thought, since Nash played a huge role in the adoption and pushing of such tripe in economics, which has played such a big role in such things as Republicans trying to destroy Social Security by "letting people manage their retirement accounts" because "they were the best ones to make those investment decisions," Nash wouldn't be seen by Black's blog community as some kind of liberal hero. I mean, did they even read him at all?
Considering that about 100% of those blog commentators who were going all weepy over Nash had no deep understanding of his mathematical contribution to economics, if any at all, the source of his Nobel, or as I generally think of it, his Fauxbel in Economics, I have to conclude that what they knew was based soundly on a somewhat fictionalized bio of him from Hollywood, A Beautiful Mind, stared the admittedly beautious Russell Crowe but a source of reliable information, it wasn't. Thus is the depth of so much of the blog discourse one reads, such is the status of even those with college degrees as rational consumers of information, as seen on DVD if not premium cable TV.
I don't claim to understand Nash's mathematical work, knowing little about game theory, I doubt that a majority of university economists really do, never mind your average blog babblers. But I do know that it played a large part in the sales pitches of neo-classical economics, the economics that has brought us to the grotesque situation we are in today. This paper, giving a history of Nash's theories in the history of academic economics, quotes an academic economist who is frank about that:
As Aumann (1985:43) states:
"The Nash equilibrium is the embodiment of the idea that economic agents are rational; that they simultaneously act to maximize their utility. If there is any idea that can be considered the driving force of economic theory, that is it."
By the mid-1970s economics was ready for a new paradigm. The heyday of research into Walrasian markets was over, and graduate students were looking for new topics on which to write their dissertations. A game-theoretic revolution in economics was about to take place.
Oh, yes, how well I remember how economics shifted and its role in the shift of politics and the media which happened just about that time. And it was mostly a cynical ploy to rob people, such things as trying to get their Social Security in the safe hands of Wall Street, to steal from people who those pushing that line hardly saw as human, certainly not as rational players but as gullible dupes for the taking.
I also knew nothing about Nash's personal story, not having seen the movie* or having read the book it was supposed to be based on. I do, though, know that any liberal should start out by being skeptical of the motives of professional economists. In a section of the same paper about why those theories were, originally, rejected by most mathematical economists, including such figures as John von Neumann, that reason is made clear, though that wasn't the intent of the author.
The reason for this, it seems clear, was the normative orientation of mathematical game theory. True to its origins, game theory in the 1950s still sought to advise players of how best to make their strategic decisions. Nash equilibrium failed to generate unambiguous advice, since many non-zero-sum games possess a multiplicity of equlibria that are not interchangeable. The best advice being received by the other, even if both are being advised according to Nahs's theory, and so we arrive at yet another strategic impasse.
Social scientists, of course, are not concerned to advise people how they ought to behave, but rather to understand how they do behave. They required a positive theory of games. Nash equilibrium served this descriptive purpose perfectly.
Indeed, even Luce and Raiffa (1957:105) tempered their criticism of Nash with the observation that:
"Even if we were to reject equilibrium as a normative theory for noncooperative games ... it may still be that the notion is relevant as a description of behavior."
If there is one thing that is certain of liberalism, it is concerned with how people OUGHT TO BEHAVE. If a liberal is merely concerned with "scientifically" describing how people behave as they do, now, instead of changing behavior in support of the foundation of liberalism, equality, justice and preserving peoples' lives in decent and humane conditions and, as well, the entire planet in a viable condition, they aren't a liberal, they are some kind of neo-liberal libertarian. Any assumption that people can't be either convinced or, being unwilling to do so, compelled to behave in a way that produces better than the status quo is giving up on the whole reason for liberalism to exist as something distinct from conservatism.
The role of the social sciences, especially economics, has generally been conservative, in support of the economic status quo at any given time, assigning to present conditions the status of some, unchanging, unchangeable atavistic force, whatever attempts at changing things, which things will always revert to. There have been exceptions, few though, temporarily, influential.
That is especially problematic in economics where what it studies is largely artificial, the product of laws and systems invented by those with more money for the purpose of keeping it and having more of it, twisting any political and legal aspects impinging on their desires to their ends. Thus have money and economics always been artificial human constructs, not natural phenomena.
But the conceit of the social scientists, that they are revealing hidden aspects of unchanging nature, will always guarantee that their results will be presented that as if that were not true.. Considering the histories of the various social sciences, their hardly enduring theories, their frequent upheavals, casting down reigning schools with their universal and dominant declarations of what those facts of nature are, to often be replaced by opposing claims, their claims to find unchanging laws of nature are absurd. What they do do is support whatever the dominant political and financial interests want to hear. The liberals in social science were successful with such brief political-legal entities as the Warren Court, the Kennedy and, especially, the Johnson administration and the post-WWII generation which had been given such enormous reasons to not want to repeat what they'd gone through in the depression and that war. They had gotten the short end of the stick of classical economics and they didn't especially like it. As their influence began to wane, for various reasons, economics and other social sciences served new masters, economists who said the lines they liked gained influence. That time line for when Nash's ideas began to take hold in economics, the mid-1970s, immediately preceded the Reagan years in the 1980s and, since then has served those who have given the top 1% of the world ownership of more than half of the world's resources, with the resultant impoverishment of many and the destruction of middle-classes, not least of all, in the English speaking countries. Those things aren't just coincidences.
Economics as If People Mattered**, such as became briefly popular in the 1970s was swamped by economics as if people were variables in equations and as optimally rational actors in games. I have no idea to what extent that Nash, a socially dysfunctional schizophrenic, after all, was aware of who he was serving in his mathematical games. I know who he did serve in real life. Our political and economic opponents.
* Anyone who thinks they know something about a real person or history based on movie bio-pics is, in almost every case, buying a line of tripe. In this case, it's apparently people who frequent a blog which officially is opposed to neo-classical economics, taking one of its cornerstones as a hero.
** When's the last time you heard anyone talking about the former best seller E. F. Schumacher?
Note: Due to time constraints on me today, I didn't have time to type out the passages from the pdf of that paper. Those generally paste into blogger with breaks in the line that I find impossible to fix. I'll try to get back to that tonight.
Last month when the mathematician John Forbes Nash died in a car crash, I was kind of puzzled to get an e-mail pointing out that you know who snarked that I would rejoice in his death because he was an atheist. I ignored it at the time, as I ignore most of those pieces of hate mail I receive. But, since the e-mail also quoted the regulars at Duncan Black's blog who were mourning the loss of him as a great man, I was even more surprised at that. Black has a PhD in economics and is a critic of neo-classical economics, as I recall from the dim past when he actually wrote blog posts he was somewhat harsh about the claims of the Chicago boys and others that people make rational decisions in such areas as purchases and investments and the such. I'd have thought, since Nash played a huge role in the adoption and pushing of such tripe in economics, which has played such a big role in such things as Republicans trying to destroy Social Security by "letting people manage their retirement accounts" because "they were the best ones to make those investment decisions," Nash wouldn't be seen by Black's blog community as some kind of liberal hero. I mean, did they even read him at all?
Considering that about 100% of those blog commentators who were going all weepy over Nash had no deep understanding of his mathematical contribution to economics, if any at all, the source of his Nobel, or as I generally think of it, his Fauxbel in Economics, I have to conclude that what they knew was based soundly on a somewhat fictionalized bio of him from Hollywood, A Beautiful Mind, stared the admittedly beautious Russell Crowe but a source of reliable information, it wasn't. Thus is the depth of so much of the blog discourse one reads, such is the status of even those with college degrees as rational consumers of information, as seen on DVD if not premium cable TV.
I don't claim to understand Nash's mathematical work, knowing little about game theory, I doubt that a majority of university economists really do, never mind your average blog babblers. But I do know that it played a large part in the sales pitches of neo-classical economics, the economics that has brought us to the grotesque situation we are in today. This paper, giving a history of Nash's theories in the history of academic economics, quotes an academic economist who is frank about that:
As Aumann (1985:43) states:
"The Nash equilibrium is the embodiment of the idea that economic agents are rational; that they simultaneously act to maximize their utility. If there is any idea that can be considered the driving force of economic theory, that is it."
By the mid-1970s economics was ready for a new paradigm. The heyday of research into Walrasian markets was over, and graduate students were looking for new topics on which to write their dissertations. A game-theoretic revolution in economics was about to take place.
Oh, yes, how well I remember how economics shifted and its role in the shift of politics and the media which happened just about that time. And it was mostly a cynical ploy to rob people, such things as trying to get their Social Security in the safe hands of Wall Street, to steal from people who those pushing that line hardly saw as human, certainly not as rational players but as gullible dupes for the taking.
I also knew nothing about Nash's personal story, not having seen the movie* or having read the book it was supposed to be based on. I do, though, know that any liberal should start out by being skeptical of the motives of professional economists. In a section of the same paper about why those theories were, originally, rejected by most mathematical economists, including such figures as John von Neumann, that reason is made clear, though that wasn't the intent of the author.
The reason for this, it seems clear, was the normative orientation of mathematical game theory. True to its origins, game theory in the 1950s still sought to advise players of how best to make their strategic decisions. Nash equilibrium failed to generate unambiguous advice, since many non-zero-sum games possess a multiplicity of equlibria that are not interchangeable. The best advice being received by the other, even if both are being advised according to Nahs's theory, and so we arrive at yet another strategic impasse.
Social scientists, of course, are not concerned to advise people how they ought to behave, but rather to understand how they do behave. They required a positive theory of games. Nash equilibrium served this descriptive purpose perfectly.
Indeed, even Luce and Raiffa (1957:105) tempered their criticism of Nash with the observation that:
"Even if we were to reject equilibrium as a normative theory for noncooperative games ... it may still be that the notion is relevant as a description of behavior."
If there is one thing that is certain of liberalism, it is concerned with how people OUGHT TO BEHAVE. If a liberal is merely concerned with "scientifically" describing how people behave as they do, now, instead of changing behavior in support of the foundation of liberalism, equality, justice and preserving peoples' lives in decent and humane conditions and, as well, the entire planet in a viable condition, they aren't a liberal, they are some kind of neo-liberal libertarian. Any assumption that people can't be either convinced or, being unwilling to do so, compelled to behave in a way that produces better than the status quo is giving up on the whole reason for liberalism to exist as something distinct from conservatism.
The role of the social sciences, especially economics, has generally been conservative, in support of the economic status quo at any given time, assigning to present conditions the status of some, unchanging, unchangeable atavistic force, whatever attempts at changing things, which things will always revert to. There have been exceptions, few though, temporarily, influential.
That is especially problematic in economics where what it studies is largely artificial, the product of laws and systems invented by those with more money for the purpose of keeping it and having more of it, twisting any political and legal aspects impinging on their desires to their ends. Thus have money and economics always been artificial human constructs, not natural phenomena.
But the conceit of the social scientists, that they are revealing hidden aspects of unchanging nature, will always guarantee that their results will be presented that as if that were not true.. Considering the histories of the various social sciences, their hardly enduring theories, their frequent upheavals, casting down reigning schools with their universal and dominant declarations of what those facts of nature are, to often be replaced by opposing claims, their claims to find unchanging laws of nature are absurd. What they do do is support whatever the dominant political and financial interests want to hear. The liberals in social science were successful with such brief political-legal entities as the Warren Court, the Kennedy and, especially, the Johnson administration and the post-WWII generation which had been given such enormous reasons to not want to repeat what they'd gone through in the depression and that war. They had gotten the short end of the stick of classical economics and they didn't especially like it. As their influence began to wane, for various reasons, economics and other social sciences served new masters, economists who said the lines they liked gained influence. That time line for when Nash's ideas began to take hold in economics, the mid-1970s, immediately preceded the Reagan years in the 1980s and, since then has served those who have given the top 1% of the world ownership of more than half of the world's resources, with the resultant impoverishment of many and the destruction of middle-classes, not least of all, in the English speaking countries. Those things aren't just coincidences.
Economics as If People Mattered**, such as became briefly popular in the 1970s was swamped by economics as if people were variables in equations and as optimally rational actors in games. I have no idea to what extent that Nash, a socially dysfunctional schizophrenic, after all, was aware of who he was serving in his mathematical games. I know who he did serve in real life. Our political and economic opponents.
* Anyone who thinks they know something about a real person or history based on movie bio-pics is, in almost every case, buying a line of tripe. In this case, it's apparently people who frequent a blog which officially is opposed to neo-classical economics, taking one of its cornerstones as a hero.
** When's the last time you heard anyone talking about the former best seller E. F. Schumacher?
Note: Due to time constraints on me today, I didn't have time to type out the passages from the pdf of that paper. Those generally paste into blogger with breaks in the line that I find impossible to fix. I'll try to get back to that tonight.
Monday, June 22, 2015
Hate Mail
The statement was about truth, it was bound to be weird, odd, exotic and unfamiliar to them.
Maybe what the first person to call it that meant was their brains were all held in trust until they grew up enough to run them. I don't expect they yield much in the way of dividends.
Maybe what the first person to call it that meant was their brains were all held in trust until they grew up enough to run them. I don't expect they yield much in the way of dividends.
Wardell Gray - Dexter Gordon Live 1952 ~ The Chase
Dexter Gordon - Tenor Sax
Wardell Gray - Tenor Sax
Bobby Tucker - Piano
Don Bagley - Bass
Chico Hamilton - Drums
Gunther Schuller Has Died
When someone gets to be in their late 80s you naturally expect their death isn't far off, so it's not shocking to find out that the eminent composer, arranger, conductor, teacher, writer, administrator, publisher, recording producer, inventor of new movements and a true musical polymath, has died at the age of 89. Just last month, I know, he was giving the graduates of the Cleveland Institute of Music a graduation lecture at which a new composition of his was played, so he died active till the end. Which makes me very happy for him.
It is hard to pick out any one thing he did as his most important contribution to music and culture, the compositions, the arrangements, the mentoring of young and not so young musicians, the inventor of the "Third Stream" of music at an intersection of jazz and classical - that is if such great composers such as Charles Mingus and John Lewis, in fact composers going back to James P. Johnson hadn't already done that without naming it. One of the things I value most are the books about music, his "Compleat Conductor" is one of my favorites. If I had to choose someone whose career I'd have liked to have in music, his would be at the top of the list.
It is hard to know what to pick out to represent him, the strictly classical pieces, the massive and extraordinary first performance of a hugely scaled piece by Charles Mingus, which, perhaps I'll get back to later in the week.
Here is a recording of his Variants on a Theme of John Lewis, a Third Stream piece, recorded by John Lewis and an all star group including,
Eric Dolphy, flute
Robert DiDomenica, flute (I had no idea he played flute)
Jim Hall, guitar
Eddie Costa, vibes
Bill Evans, piano
Scott Lafaro, bass
George Duvivier, bass
Sticks Evans, drums
The Contemporary String Quartet
With people like that playing your music, you don't need extra praise.
It is hard to pick out any one thing he did as his most important contribution to music and culture, the compositions, the arrangements, the mentoring of young and not so young musicians, the inventor of the "Third Stream" of music at an intersection of jazz and classical - that is if such great composers such as Charles Mingus and John Lewis, in fact composers going back to James P. Johnson hadn't already done that without naming it. One of the things I value most are the books about music, his "Compleat Conductor" is one of my favorites. If I had to choose someone whose career I'd have liked to have in music, his would be at the top of the list.
It is hard to know what to pick out to represent him, the strictly classical pieces, the massive and extraordinary first performance of a hugely scaled piece by Charles Mingus, which, perhaps I'll get back to later in the week.
Here is a recording of his Variants on a Theme of John Lewis, a Third Stream piece, recorded by John Lewis and an all star group including,
Eric Dolphy, flute
Robert DiDomenica, flute (I had no idea he played flute)
Jim Hall, guitar
Eddie Costa, vibes
Bill Evans, piano
Scott Lafaro, bass
George Duvivier, bass
Sticks Evans, drums
The Contemporary String Quartet
With people like that playing your music, you don't need extra praise.
My God Is A Rock In The Weary Land - Georgia Sea Island Singers - Spiritual at Noon
I believe the soloist is John Davis.
There Are No Coincidences In Our Disasters They Are A Predictable Result of Imperial Decadence
Reading up on St. Sixtus II, who I admit had only ever been a name in one of the litanies sometimes said in the mass, I read the article in the old Catholic Encyclopedia about him and, following up, the article on another name pointed out by Richard McBrien, St. Cyrprian, who had also been just a name to me. The two articles, together, gave me some real insight into how something that might be presented by a scoffer against Christianity, such as the disagreement over re-baptism of those either originating or falling into heresy, arose in an historical context that makes it a lot more understandable. It arose through the specific events and persecutions that were faced by the Church in Carthage but which were not present in Rome in the same way. It is fashionable among atheists, having read some scholar on the make or other's claims that the period of persecution and martyrdom under the Romans is insignificant. Easy for them to say, as it is for them to discount the fact that Christians in other countries are routinely murdered, injured, raped and dispossessed in quite a similar manner right now.
But, reading about Cyprian's conversion to Christianity, this passage resonated with me.
Cyprian's first Christian writing is "Ad Donatum", a monologue spoken to a friend, sitting under a vine-clad pergola. He tells how, until the grace of God illuminated and strengthened the convert, it had seemed impossible to conquer vice; the decay of Roman society is pictured, the gladiatorial shows, the theatre, the unjust law-courts, the hollowness of political success; the only refuge is the temperate, studious, and prayerful life of the Christian.
"The gladiatorial shows, the theatre, the unjust law-courts, the hollowness of political success.." Sound familiar? Well, if you replace theater with our electronic entertainments and gladiatorial shows with football and mixed martial arts, I'd say it was a perfect description of life in the decay of Western culture which is championed by both right and left and has been for most of the past century. If they hadn't had the depression and WWII to sober them up, the twenties could have gone right on being one big party right up till today. For the current crop of "secularists" it has been one, most of them being relatively affluent.
The continual valuation and devaluation of human and other life to objects of utility and use, economics as practiced and taught in academia never being more than an extension of materialist Mammonism, is entirely related to the presentation of people as bodies to be used in blood sports and the cynical pornofied entertainment media. I hadn't thought about the extent to which it is all a manifestation of the same reduction of lives into things to be used by those with the resources and power to use them or to be disposed of by the same people, as they deem fit or just whimsically brush aside. When you notice that it is obvious that any culture that exhibits the symptoms that ours does is a culture that is rotted out with all of the deadly sins and our academic culture is as rotted out as popular culture, right up to the replacement for moral authority under a secular system, the legal profession and the courts which they staff.
I don't see any way to stop that under the very forces that brought us into decadence. What I wrote about the consequences of the atheist-materialist academics attacking the validity of our own minds is the ultimate in decadence and it is certainly has become the pervasive belief among the educated elite, even in science, even in philosophy.
If the Islamic world looks at the spectacle of Western decadence and doesn't buy it, is it any surprise that they over react so as to avoid becoming what we have become? That some of the worst of our corruption used the language of freedom, the First Amendment, among others such documents espousing liberty, to establish itself has certainly done nothing to inspire a suspicion that they won't lead to a regime based on lies and the use and destruction of the weak, the powerless, members of minorities and the exportation of murder and wars of conquest. The claim heard from the past half century that "more speech" in answer to lies will prevent such catastrophes is entirely shown to be a lie by the imperial wars, the degradation of people into first, industrial resources and then industrial waste, abroad and at home under the rule of such law.
I know that a lot of the change in my thinking over the past decade has come in response to the internalized hated fostered by pornography among gay men, the destructive sexual practices that brought us an endemic infection which forces the alternative of continual and damaging medical treatment or death, and the fact that in the full knowledge of that, anal sex is to be regarded as cool and desirable among young, hip, straight folk, as well as ubiquitously deemed the "real" gay sex among gay men. The present status of anal sex among gay men, a group that has lost enormous numbers as a result of anal sex, shows how pernicious the habit of that thinking is, how engrained it becomes, how pointing out the problems it leads to is speech that is to be mocked and suppressed, shows how bad things can get. Even people I know, men who saw their friends, their loved ones decaying through lesions on their bodies, in their brains, brought to total dementia, covered with seeping, bleeding lesions, have not really been changed by that experience. Only people who have internalized the hatred of others towards us could devalue ourselves, our loved ones to that extent.
My conclusion is that it will take a real conversion to save us. And by us, I mean Western society and all of us, everywhere. I think I understand a bit more about how the early Christians, in the age when their movement was outlawed and suppressed with the kind of violence it still meets must have experienced the rampant decadence everywhere around them and why they reacted as they do. If, by some miracle, statements by Christians, such as Pope Francis' encyclical on the environment and just distribution of wealth seriously challenged the oligarchs who are the real government here, there would be persecution, including, if necessary, murder. If Christians, today, would be willing to face death rather than become a cog in our decadent imperial system is a question. Would we be as brave as those Christians in other countries, some of them missionaries from the West, who are being killed now?
Update: I should have mentioned this kind of entertainment, shown to the entertainment and glee of so many here as so many there were getting killed and maimed and which would set off the next dozen years of carnage, up to and including the recent events surrouding ISIS or whatever it's being called this week.
We are the movie audience in 1984 watching lifeboats being blown up and our free press took the lead in that.
But, reading about Cyprian's conversion to Christianity, this passage resonated with me.
Cyprian's first Christian writing is "Ad Donatum", a monologue spoken to a friend, sitting under a vine-clad pergola. He tells how, until the grace of God illuminated and strengthened the convert, it had seemed impossible to conquer vice; the decay of Roman society is pictured, the gladiatorial shows, the theatre, the unjust law-courts, the hollowness of political success; the only refuge is the temperate, studious, and prayerful life of the Christian.
"The gladiatorial shows, the theatre, the unjust law-courts, the hollowness of political success.." Sound familiar? Well, if you replace theater with our electronic entertainments and gladiatorial shows with football and mixed martial arts, I'd say it was a perfect description of life in the decay of Western culture which is championed by both right and left and has been for most of the past century. If they hadn't had the depression and WWII to sober them up, the twenties could have gone right on being one big party right up till today. For the current crop of "secularists" it has been one, most of them being relatively affluent.
The continual valuation and devaluation of human and other life to objects of utility and use, economics as practiced and taught in academia never being more than an extension of materialist Mammonism, is entirely related to the presentation of people as bodies to be used in blood sports and the cynical pornofied entertainment media. I hadn't thought about the extent to which it is all a manifestation of the same reduction of lives into things to be used by those with the resources and power to use them or to be disposed of by the same people, as they deem fit or just whimsically brush aside. When you notice that it is obvious that any culture that exhibits the symptoms that ours does is a culture that is rotted out with all of the deadly sins and our academic culture is as rotted out as popular culture, right up to the replacement for moral authority under a secular system, the legal profession and the courts which they staff.
I don't see any way to stop that under the very forces that brought us into decadence. What I wrote about the consequences of the atheist-materialist academics attacking the validity of our own minds is the ultimate in decadence and it is certainly has become the pervasive belief among the educated elite, even in science, even in philosophy.
If the Islamic world looks at the spectacle of Western decadence and doesn't buy it, is it any surprise that they over react so as to avoid becoming what we have become? That some of the worst of our corruption used the language of freedom, the First Amendment, among others such documents espousing liberty, to establish itself has certainly done nothing to inspire a suspicion that they won't lead to a regime based on lies and the use and destruction of the weak, the powerless, members of minorities and the exportation of murder and wars of conquest. The claim heard from the past half century that "more speech" in answer to lies will prevent such catastrophes is entirely shown to be a lie by the imperial wars, the degradation of people into first, industrial resources and then industrial waste, abroad and at home under the rule of such law.
I know that a lot of the change in my thinking over the past decade has come in response to the internalized hated fostered by pornography among gay men, the destructive sexual practices that brought us an endemic infection which forces the alternative of continual and damaging medical treatment or death, and the fact that in the full knowledge of that, anal sex is to be regarded as cool and desirable among young, hip, straight folk, as well as ubiquitously deemed the "real" gay sex among gay men. The present status of anal sex among gay men, a group that has lost enormous numbers as a result of anal sex, shows how pernicious the habit of that thinking is, how engrained it becomes, how pointing out the problems it leads to is speech that is to be mocked and suppressed, shows how bad things can get. Even people I know, men who saw their friends, their loved ones decaying through lesions on their bodies, in their brains, brought to total dementia, covered with seeping, bleeding lesions, have not really been changed by that experience. Only people who have internalized the hatred of others towards us could devalue ourselves, our loved ones to that extent.
My conclusion is that it will take a real conversion to save us. And by us, I mean Western society and all of us, everywhere. I think I understand a bit more about how the early Christians, in the age when their movement was outlawed and suppressed with the kind of violence it still meets must have experienced the rampant decadence everywhere around them and why they reacted as they do. If, by some miracle, statements by Christians, such as Pope Francis' encyclical on the environment and just distribution of wealth seriously challenged the oligarchs who are the real government here, there would be persecution, including, if necessary, murder. If Christians, today, would be willing to face death rather than become a cog in our decadent imperial system is a question. Would we be as brave as those Christians in other countries, some of them missionaries from the West, who are being killed now?
Update: I should have mentioned this kind of entertainment, shown to the entertainment and glee of so many here as so many there were getting killed and maimed and which would set off the next dozen years of carnage, up to and including the recent events surrouding ISIS or whatever it's being called this week.
We are the movie audience in 1984 watching lifeboats being blown up and our free press took the lead in that.
An elderly pop music critic,
His columns, all copies, eidetic,
When seeing alternative
Thoughts, new, not derivative
Became quite unhinged and splenetic.
The blog upon which his invective,
And tantrums and logic, defective,
Are posted quite daily
Has thus aged quite stalely
"Buy ME things!", its basic directive.
His columns, all copies, eidetic,
When seeing alternative
Thoughts, new, not derivative
Became quite unhinged and splenetic.
The blog upon which his invective,
And tantrums and logic, defective,
Are posted quite daily
Has thus aged quite stalely
"Buy ME things!", its basic directive.
Wardell Gray Quartet - Easy Living
Wardell Gray - Tenor Sax
Al Haig - Piano
Tommy Potter - Bass
Roy Haynes - Drums
Reading that list of those who Elvin Jones had played with, I realized I hadn't listened to any of the regrettably few recordings of Wardell Gray for a long time. Gray was one of a long list of great jazz musicians who died young. A lot of them are of songs which have become standards but weren't standards yet. They became standards largely because such fine musicians chose to play and record them.
Sweet Lorraine
Twisted
Bernie's Tune - Wardell Gray Quintet
Art Farmer, trumpet
Wardell Gray, tenor sax
Hampton Hawes, piano
Joe Mondragon, bass
Shelly Manne, drums
Sunday, June 21, 2015
Dogs Make Good Fathers Cats Not So Much
I don't know who did the Father's Day Google doodle but they don't know much about the lives of adult male cats. They're more likely to kill kittens than take care of them. Not to mention that, in the wild, a batch of kittens is likely to have two or more fathers. So much for the evo-psy explanation of why tom cats kill kittens, they'd have a hard time figuring out which were theirs.
Hate Mail - If You Want Me To Stop Making That Point Refute It
It doesn't make the slightest difference if you don't like what I said, yesterday. If you want to hold that everything that is real conforms to the requirements of physical law and is the result of material substances or objects randomly combining with each other according to the present physical conditions at the time that happens, everything must conform to that system and nothing can have any more significance than anything else.
You can't debunk the status of minds in such matters as free choice without your debunking effort also applying, equally to all of human thought, including those thoughts you hold sacred, science, mathematics, even logic.
If free will and free thought are illusions masking merely physical combinations of molecules under randomly present conditions then your debunkery applies equally to all of those other aspects of our minds, literally, they can't be any more true than any other event in the physical universe. Your most cherished finding of science has exactly the same status in regard to truth as burning a piece of toast or the product of the chain of physical causation that produced Young Earth Creationism. Under materialism the physical causation that produced a Klansman has exactly the same truth value as that which produced a dedicated advocate for total equality. Rush Limbaugh's mind has the same truth status as that of Bill Moyers under materialism, none. That one group of minds were formed to believe Limbaugh and others were formed to believe Moyers is no different from one collection of water molecules forming into a puddle of water and another group into a sheet of ice.
Unless you can come up with a logically coherent case that your ideological system doesn't force that logical conclusion - and it can't be done - you have to accept that your ideology destroys the idea that truth is more than merely an illusion as much as you would like the idea of free choice to be, and if that is the case then your entire ideology and its entire base in science is as much an illusion, the acceptance of which is based in what your particular chemical components produce as an illusion of your own preference. It could not possibly have any more truth than what my chemistry produces in my brain. Yours is the ideology that has to be false in order for it to be true, the same if you want to dodge the label and call it "physicalism" or "naturalism" which would, as well, be merely illusions of coherent truth when they were just determined outcomes of random physical events acting on randomly assembled molecules.
Tell me how your ideology can escape itself.
You can't debunk the status of minds in such matters as free choice without your debunking effort also applying, equally to all of human thought, including those thoughts you hold sacred, science, mathematics, even logic.
If free will and free thought are illusions masking merely physical combinations of molecules under randomly present conditions then your debunkery applies equally to all of those other aspects of our minds, literally, they can't be any more true than any other event in the physical universe. Your most cherished finding of science has exactly the same status in regard to truth as burning a piece of toast or the product of the chain of physical causation that produced Young Earth Creationism. Under materialism the physical causation that produced a Klansman has exactly the same truth value as that which produced a dedicated advocate for total equality. Rush Limbaugh's mind has the same truth status as that of Bill Moyers under materialism, none. That one group of minds were formed to believe Limbaugh and others were formed to believe Moyers is no different from one collection of water molecules forming into a puddle of water and another group into a sheet of ice.
Unless you can come up with a logically coherent case that your ideological system doesn't force that logical conclusion - and it can't be done - you have to accept that your ideology destroys the idea that truth is more than merely an illusion as much as you would like the idea of free choice to be, and if that is the case then your entire ideology and its entire base in science is as much an illusion, the acceptance of which is based in what your particular chemical components produce as an illusion of your own preference. It could not possibly have any more truth than what my chemistry produces in my brain. Yours is the ideology that has to be false in order for it to be true, the same if you want to dodge the label and call it "physicalism" or "naturalism" which would, as well, be merely illusions of coherent truth when they were just determined outcomes of random physical events acting on randomly assembled molecules.
Tell me how your ideology can escape itself.
Saturday, June 20, 2015
Hate Mail - Post Literate Brain Trust Speaks Again
SkepticTank Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 2 hours ago
His greatest retort to you would be to write an actual piece of music criticism. I'll bet he finds it way harder than it looks and well beyond his limited talents. It would be hilarious to see him try. A lot more fun than his endlessly recycled orations against the materialists.
Done that, dopes.
1. Arthur Berger
2. Charles Tomlinson Griffes' Sonata
3. High Anxiety Bones' cd Too Scared to Play
4. The Merling Trio Performs Works By Curtis Curtis-Smith
5. William Bolcom Gospel Preludes
6. World Premier of William Bolcom’s Canciones de Lorca
7. Music of Kenneth Gaburo
8. Imagining Arizona Dranes c. 1905-?
9. Washington Phillips and the Harps of Gold
10. John Lennon Is Dead His Song is Stupid
I could go on, there have been plenty more. I didn't find it hard at all, but, then, I had written scads of papers on music in college, some for teachers far more exigent than I would imagine what passed for editors at that ad vehicle that .... Well, only if provoked will I go into that. Don't mind saying they were wowed with my two papers in my senior seminar in music history, one took three classes to give.
I generally don't write about music I don't like or respect because so much of the music that is worth noticing doesn't get noticed or reviewed. No one ever paid me to write a review of a disc or criticism of music. Mind you, if any recording companies would like to send me free cds to review, I promise I will listen to them and if I like them I will write a review of them. That is if I get to keep the cds. If you wanted to tempt my integrity by offering payment I might agree to do that, but only for any recordings I actually liked. But, alas, as the great American composer, Carla Bley said, I could be corrupted but no one cared enough to make an offer.
Update: Oh, and apropos of my earlier post, in that old review of Griffes' Sonata I heaped praise on a composer, one of the very few fine composers who was -- wait for it -- AN ATHEIST. I could add this review I did of the atheist AND LOGICAL POSITIVIST! Milton Babbitt. I don't know but wouldn't be surprised if Kenneth Gaburo were an atheist, not to mention a number of others I've said nice things about.
Update 2: Good heavens, what do you imagine being a musician or a music major consists of. I don't think there has been a day in my life since I first started having a consciousness of musical form that I didn't do some analysis of music. It's inevitable that someone who does music and thinks about it will hear music analytically. If that's why I don't find it hard to write about music, I don't know, I didn't think about that until that idiot claimed it was hard. It just came with the package of being a musician and I took it for granted, I guess.
His greatest retort to you would be to write an actual piece of music criticism. I'll bet he finds it way harder than it looks and well beyond his limited talents. It would be hilarious to see him try. A lot more fun than his endlessly recycled orations against the materialists.
Done that, dopes.
1. Arthur Berger
2. Charles Tomlinson Griffes' Sonata
3. High Anxiety Bones' cd Too Scared to Play
4. The Merling Trio Performs Works By Curtis Curtis-Smith
5. William Bolcom Gospel Preludes
6. World Premier of William Bolcom’s Canciones de Lorca
7. Music of Kenneth Gaburo
8. Imagining Arizona Dranes c. 1905-?
9. Washington Phillips and the Harps of Gold
10. John Lennon Is Dead His Song is Stupid
I could go on, there have been plenty more. I didn't find it hard at all, but, then, I had written scads of papers on music in college, some for teachers far more exigent than I would imagine what passed for editors at that ad vehicle that .... Well, only if provoked will I go into that. Don't mind saying they were wowed with my two papers in my senior seminar in music history, one took three classes to give.
I generally don't write about music I don't like or respect because so much of the music that is worth noticing doesn't get noticed or reviewed. No one ever paid me to write a review of a disc or criticism of music. Mind you, if any recording companies would like to send me free cds to review, I promise I will listen to them and if I like them I will write a review of them. That is if I get to keep the cds. If you wanted to tempt my integrity by offering payment I might agree to do that, but only for any recordings I actually liked. But, alas, as the great American composer, Carla Bley said, I could be corrupted but no one cared enough to make an offer.
Update: Oh, and apropos of my earlier post, in that old review of Griffes' Sonata I heaped praise on a composer, one of the very few fine composers who was -- wait for it -- AN ATHEIST. I could add this review I did of the atheist AND LOGICAL POSITIVIST! Milton Babbitt. I don't know but wouldn't be surprised if Kenneth Gaburo were an atheist, not to mention a number of others I've said nice things about.
Update 2: Good heavens, what do you imagine being a musician or a music major consists of. I don't think there has been a day in my life since I first started having a consciousness of musical form that I didn't do some analysis of music. It's inevitable that someone who does music and thinks about it will hear music analytically. If that's why I don't find it hard to write about music, I don't know, I didn't think about that until that idiot claimed it was hard. It just came with the package of being a musician and I took it for granted, I guess.
The Physicalists' Dilemma
I said that Galen Strawson was a crappy philosopher because he is a materialist, or in his preferred construction a "realist physicalist" who has devoted a good part of his time to trying to invalidate the idea of free choice. I've been through that so many times already, that as a materialist, OK, "physicalist" the possibility of free thought and free choice has to be attacked because those would be impossible if materialism were true. Everything in materialism has to be reducible to matter-energy. Really, they can't get out of the 19th century. And the more recent pose of calling materialism "physicalism" that dodges the problem of old-fashioned materialism by deferring the definition of what the physical substance everything is by just claiming that everything has to abide by physical laws means that everything deemed to be real must be held within the nets of determinism, That only makes their dilemma more obvious to anyone who thinks it through.
That is why those who push atheism, the real motive behind the banal trinity of "materialism, physicalism and naturalism" are continually trying to debunk free choice, free thought, the mind and consciousness, the most basic aspect of our existence, our experience of consciousness, can't be made to conform to their ideological support for their hatred of religion and God.
However, they always, always need and insist on exempting one thing or another about their own preferred areas of thought from their, otherwise, universal and iron clad rules of reality. Especially those who call their ideology "physicalism" can't contain his debunking of free choice to merely that one area of our minds, insisting that the experience of free choice is merely illusion while maintaining that any other area of our experience and the conclusions we draw from it are any less of an illusion. Everything, from our perceptions of physical reality, to our measurement and counting of things, the logical analysis of those experiences, the descriptions that even the most rigorous of scientists might publish about them, to the conclusions of peers who read and agree with what they say are every much as bound by the same proposed disqualifications of the experience of free choice as Strawson and others insist that free choice is falsified by.
Those philosophers who debunk free choice, minds or consciousness, removing any possibility of transcendence from physical causation for those, has to grant themselves a logically incoherent exemption from their same insisted upon conditions in order for what they are saying to have any possibility of not also being an illusion. They are merely producing a different set of experienced sensations caused by their own particular and randomly present chemical and physical constituents working themselves out. As I've said before, if they are right, nothing any of us thinks or says can be any more true that what happens when you put an acid and a base together or melt an ice cube. Their own framing could only be true if it were false.
Any philosopher who spends their professional life doing that without realizing the inevitable consequences of their position can't have thought very hard about the matter.
That is why those who push atheism, the real motive behind the banal trinity of "materialism, physicalism and naturalism" are continually trying to debunk free choice, free thought, the mind and consciousness, the most basic aspect of our existence, our experience of consciousness, can't be made to conform to their ideological support for their hatred of religion and God.
However, they always, always need and insist on exempting one thing or another about their own preferred areas of thought from their, otherwise, universal and iron clad rules of reality. Especially those who call their ideology "physicalism" can't contain his debunking of free choice to merely that one area of our minds, insisting that the experience of free choice is merely illusion while maintaining that any other area of our experience and the conclusions we draw from it are any less of an illusion. Everything, from our perceptions of physical reality, to our measurement and counting of things, the logical analysis of those experiences, the descriptions that even the most rigorous of scientists might publish about them, to the conclusions of peers who read and agree with what they say are every much as bound by the same proposed disqualifications of the experience of free choice as Strawson and others insist that free choice is falsified by.
Those philosophers who debunk free choice, minds or consciousness, removing any possibility of transcendence from physical causation for those, has to grant themselves a logically incoherent exemption from their same insisted upon conditions in order for what they are saying to have any possibility of not also being an illusion. They are merely producing a different set of experienced sensations caused by their own particular and randomly present chemical and physical constituents working themselves out. As I've said before, if they are right, nothing any of us thinks or says can be any more true that what happens when you put an acid and a base together or melt an ice cube. Their own framing could only be true if it were false.
Any philosopher who spends their professional life doing that without realizing the inevitable consequences of their position can't have thought very hard about the matter.
Hate Mail - What Did I Say About Him Not Reading It?
Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 20 hours ago
Morning, good people (and others).
And meanwhile, over you know where, you know who dismisses a brilliant New Yorker essay on Keith Moon because -- wait for it -- its author may be an atheist.
Anyone who wants to read it for themselves can see that I didn't say anything remotely like that.
I don't have any idea if James Wood is an atheist and didn't mention anything about that. All I did was say he wrote a self-indulgent, irrelevantly name-dropping childhood nostalgia piece about him fantasizing to be a rock star like Keith Moon in a typical New Yorker style. And that he obviously knew little about music, his piece had nothing to do with music. That bit of hackery is the only thing by him I've ever read. Brilliant, it waren't.
Galen Strawson, now, in his review of Wood's novel which I linked to he talked about atheism, I didn't. Why would I have linked to a review by Strawson, well known to those who have any idea who he is as an atheist, if I were dismissing what someone said because they're an atheist? Not only that, but Strawson is one of those materialists who calls himself a "physicalist", a position I criticized here last week and, as such, has attacked the possibility of free thought. Yet I cited him and his rather unpositive review of Wood's attempt at practicing the art of fiction. I think he's a pretty crappy philosopher but am prepared to read what he has to say as a literary critic.
I don't expect that Simels or the other equally lazy ditto heads at Duncan's "brain trust" (they really have called their chat room that) will bother reading this, either. Just wanted to point out that I called it right. Well, that is unless he did read it and he just lied to "the reality community" (another thing they like to call themselves) and they believed him. Him! if you can believe it.
Update: Sims is now trying to wriggle out of lying about what I said because he said I dismissed, "a brilliant New Yorker essay on Keith Moon because -- wait for it -- its author may be an atheist." Since Simels was a professional writer - in the sense that he was paid to write crappy reviews of crappy music - who slammed my writing, let me point out that his statement trying to back out of what he said backs up what I said.
He didn't say that I "might have dismissed a brilliant ... (yada yada) ... because he might have been an atheist". Which is what he's claiming he meant now.
Won't read, can't think, can't tell the truth..... that pretty much sums up all but a handful of the bright no longer young things at Duncan Black's blog. I really don't know how that handful can stand the place, most everyone else with any integrity left it long ago.
Morning, good people (and others).
And meanwhile, over you know where, you know who dismisses a brilliant New Yorker essay on Keith Moon because -- wait for it -- its author may be an atheist.
Anyone who wants to read it for themselves can see that I didn't say anything remotely like that.
I don't have any idea if James Wood is an atheist and didn't mention anything about that. All I did was say he wrote a self-indulgent, irrelevantly name-dropping childhood nostalgia piece about him fantasizing to be a rock star like Keith Moon in a typical New Yorker style. And that he obviously knew little about music, his piece had nothing to do with music. That bit of hackery is the only thing by him I've ever read. Brilliant, it waren't.
Galen Strawson, now, in his review of Wood's novel which I linked to he talked about atheism, I didn't. Why would I have linked to a review by Strawson, well known to those who have any idea who he is as an atheist, if I were dismissing what someone said because they're an atheist? Not only that, but Strawson is one of those materialists who calls himself a "physicalist", a position I criticized here last week and, as such, has attacked the possibility of free thought. Yet I cited him and his rather unpositive review of Wood's attempt at practicing the art of fiction. I think he's a pretty crappy philosopher but am prepared to read what he has to say as a literary critic.
I don't expect that Simels or the other equally lazy ditto heads at Duncan's "brain trust" (they really have called their chat room that) will bother reading this, either. Just wanted to point out that I called it right. Well, that is unless he did read it and he just lied to "the reality community" (another thing they like to call themselves) and they believed him. Him! if you can believe it.
Update: Sims is now trying to wriggle out of lying about what I said because he said I dismissed, "a brilliant New Yorker essay on Keith Moon because -- wait for it -- its author may be an atheist." Since Simels was a professional writer - in the sense that he was paid to write crappy reviews of crappy music - who slammed my writing, let me point out that his statement trying to back out of what he said backs up what I said.
He didn't say that I "might have dismissed a brilliant ... (yada yada) ... because he might have been an atheist". Which is what he's claiming he meant now.
Won't read, can't think, can't tell the truth..... that pretty much sums up all but a handful of the bright no longer young things at Duncan Black's blog. I really don't know how that handful can stand the place, most everyone else with any integrity left it long ago.
Friday, June 19, 2015
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