Archive for the ‘Autobiosophy’ Category
Entry 1477 — Progress Report
Saturday, June 7th, 2014
I’ve had a hard day, so only have a short report on the “progress” I made today on my current essay. I almost got to the 3,000-word mark, but ten minutes ago went back 800 words. I don’t believe I’ll delete them, just re-write a few hundred of them slightly–and delete the rest. What I find interesting about my current work is that I could be considered to be dumbing down my ideas. But I feel I’m trying for good science journalism. One result is that I’m now writing philosophy! It’s all conclusions based on general ideas.
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Entry 1469 — Is God Helping Me?
Friday, May 30th, 2014
The reason for my question is that an odd thing just happened to me: when I began work on my essay on Beauty this morning, I saw that everything I’d added to it yesterday was missing! I still have no idea what happened. I was saving the entire file every five minutes, I’m sure. Was it the Good Lord tormenting me again?
After weeping for an hour or so, I got to work replacing what I remembered I’d written. Fortunately, I wrote just enough, no more, than I felt gave me the right to say I’d been productive–if added to a lot of time spent seriously thinking — task-related thinking! And that is important. The reason I’m wondering if the Good Lord is finally being nice to me is that I quickly realized I’d badly bungled yesterday–in describing an important part of my theory of pleasure and pain, and thinking I’d found an improved way of writing about it, I got it all wrong! I may have left it wrong, too, had God not made me rework it.
Of course, it may only b e stupidly wrong in a different way, but I think what I’m writing now is not only right, but better expressed than any of my previous writing on the subject (and there have been scores). So now The Almightiest has finally made a mistake. Maybe even He is not allowed to make a mortal miserable more than a certain number of times. It will nonetheless be a long time before I consider him a non-enemy.
Now back to the essay. (Don’t nobody tell the Whoozis Upstairs what I just said–at least until I’ve finished this essay and posted it somewhere.)
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Entry 1430 — Trying to Define “Religion”
Monday, April 21st, 2014
It’s past eight in the evening. Usually I’ve posted my blog entry for the day before now. But I spent 9 A.M. until 6 P.M. helping a friend move. Very tiring but we got the job done–just me and his son, my friend, 81, having taken a spill in a tennis game a few days ago that hurt his back and hands, so was unable to help much. (He was my partner when he fell, by the way–but I had nothing to do with it.)
I thought I’d just post what I’d spent my day doing, and use it as an excuse not to say anything more. But something I read while having dinner about religious freedom got me thinking enough to scribble a few of my thoughts here. I have trouble with the first amendment because I don’t know what religion is. I consider Roger Williams the true founder of America because he established an at least approximate right not to be punished for having religious beliefs the government opposes. Actually, although I keep wanting to read up on Roger, I never have, so I’m not sure how far he went. I’m pretty sure he went farther than anyone else had.
Of course, I don’t care much about freedom of religious thought because I am a fanatic who believes in freedom of thought, period. One should have the right to think anything one wants to, and express any belief in speech or print that one wants to. So we shouldn’t be arguing about only one kind of freedom of belief.
I also believe that one should be allowed to do anything one wants to in the privacy of one’s own home . . . or church–so long as no physical harm of any significance comes to an innocent person against his will. So if your church believes in a yearly ceremony in which a member of the church chosen by lot is beheaded, and does not protest being sacrificed, I think it should be allowed to have the ceremony as long as it wants it. But so should a bunch of atheistic thrill-seekers who agree to play Russian Roulette, without having to call it a church service.
In short, my not knowing what religion is, is irrelevant. But the question of what it is, is interesting. Maybe I do know what it is: a system of belief in a doctrine covering a significant portion of life that is taken to be true by a group of people (i.e., more than three or four wacks) although premised on the notion that reason and material evidence can be ignored so far as some of the doctrine is concerned. Science is therefore not a religion.
I contend that at the root of religious intolerance is an innate intolerance of those who fail to conform to some groups idea of proper behavior. That, of course, is at the root of all intolerance of certain kinds of human behavior. Simplistic but I can’t find anything wrong with it. My theory of character types goes deeper: it shows the underlying mental defects that prevent people developing understandings effectively enough to tolerate almost any human behavior except that which is clearly harmful to others who have done no harm to anyone.
Hey, some good serious thinking here . . . for a fifteen-year-old. But I’m afraid it’s what I think.
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Entry 1095 — Vacationtime Again
Saturday, May 11th, 2013
Now this wretched blog has turned against me: when I try to paste a text into it, it leaves the Internet. I’m 78% ready to give the Internet up–except for e.mails. And my Scientific American Blog. I probably won’t. I’m taking some more time off from this blog, though. I’ll report back in a week if I haven’t starting posting here again by then.
This may be a good thing, it may force me to focus on books. A week or so ago, I had started once again to finish the revision of my Shakespeare book. I’ve posted five or six chapters in my Pages section here during the past few days. There are twelve or thirteen chapters in all, but the last two or three need a lot of work–complete overhauls, in fact. The others should not take long–although I’m finding to my dismay that they are much more flawed than I thought they were.
I’m also working on an essay of five or six thousand words about Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, by Diana Price, which is perhaps the most propagandistic book yet written denying Shakespeare’s authorship. If the essay goes well, I may use it as just one chapter in a book about propaganda.
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Entry 868 — Another Important Coinage
Friday, September 21st, 2012
For many years I’ve wanted a word for all the material things in the universe, by which I mean everything that seems to our perceptions a single material entity. Anyway, my new word is “physicum,” FIHZ ih cuhm. Not very splashy but the best I could do. Precise definition: any single entity that can be directly perceived by human perception, unaided or aided, and nothing else. Energy is excluded from this definition unless I’m wrong in believing energy cannot be sensorily perceived. Ditto motion, which is actually an attribute of physicums, not a physicum itself. Ditto, color, weight, and all other attributes. A photon, however, is a physicum.
“Entity” may already be the word I was after, but my grasp of it isn’t sure enough for me to accept it. I suspect energy may be considered an entity. Who knows. I’m less clear about all this than I am about most of my thinking, not all of which I feel completely clear about.
I have a second word: “sub-physicum.” That’s for any component of a physicum a human being cannot directly perceive even aided but whose existence makes sense to a consensus of those doing work in the field of verosophy concerned with it. An atom, for instance, before it was possible to view them through certain instruments.
Reality, in my philosophy, thus consists of physicums, only, while physicums consist of sub-physicums (whose definition can never be entirely certain, or even as near-certain as the definition of physicums). At least one urwareness, or thing able to apprehend physicums, in part of reality, too. Whether it is a sub-physicum or an unphysicum cannot be known.
Okay, I’ve started reading an introductory college textbook on philosophy and was covering the pre-Socratics, hence the ruminations above. Of late I’ve been in a second adolescence, intellectually. It’s wholly irrational, but I’ve been acting like I have a whole life left and eagerly trying to lay myself a foundation that will allow my to understand everything! Philosophy and phyics, a book on quarks I’m also reading–and have almost finished. I’ve learned a few things that quarks are said to be able to do, but mainly picked up the names I hadn’t known of a number of sub-atomic particles, and a few superficial things abouts them–like how quarks are permanently sub-physicumical: they stay inside protons and can’t come out. Or so I wobbily think the book I’m reading, which is around 30-years-old, says. My intent is to absorb a first layer of knowledge about sub-atomic particles not because I will then know anything, but because it will make the next layer easier to assimilate.
I’m also trying to buy one or more books on the evolution of the English language because of an Internet argument I’ve been having with an Oxfordian whose insanities include the belife that people in England two thousand years ago spoke about the same language they do now. I know he’s wrong, but found in arguing with him that I had huge areas of ignorance about what really happened, although I once read a book about it.
Meanwhile, near me right now is Latin for Dummies. All my life I’ve wanted to master Latin. I did okay in it in high school and even remember more than I thought I would, but am nowhere near having any real knowledge of it.
What I should do is pick out one of my main life-works, like my theory of psychology, and work on just about nothing but it, until I’ve gotten it as complete as I can. I suffer from what I’ve called the “Leonardo Syndrome,” though–an inability to finish works because of excessive curiosity. Also, I think, an over-confidence that deludes you with the belief that you can take care of some major question in a week or two, and then get back to the project you had been working on. Related to that is actual ability: if Leonardo weren’t able to be effective in some many things, he may have stuck to a few, and gotten more done. Me, too–or so I must believe.
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Entry 681 — Why I Like Long Division Poetry
Sunday, March 11th, 2012
I think six people have now seen and commented on my Sequences. 17 in all have seen it, if the counter involved is only counting each person’s first visit. The only slightly negative comment about it came from the one of the very few who made any meaningful comment on it, Endwar, who said he wasn’t all that taken with long division. Which, I (Moon in Aries!) instantly responded to with a phooey directed at him followed by a description of (some of) my feelings about long division poems: “I don’t think of any of my long divisions as division, but one multiplication and one addition. I love the idea of objects or images multiplying each other. Also the complication of the metaphor resulting: the metaphor having three parts: the multiplier, the multiplicand and the process of multiplication. My long division poems also bring me back to how wonderful I thought the process of long division was when I was first exposed to it.”
I also commented that my long divisions are much more poetic than conceptual, and Endwar leans more to the poeticoceptual than to the conceptipoetic. As I’m sure I’ve mused before, I feel many people in science (like Endwar although this may not apply to him), are too conceptual to be able to break out of their analytical minds enough to flow into the weirdwhere my long divisions bobble into.
Ha, they may need the mix of APCs and opiated pain pills I sometimes take. I say that because I took such a mix just twenty minutes ago after being dead-headedly uncreative for a week or more–and look how “creative” my weiords bobbled at the end of the previous sentence. The lilt up into poeticonceptuality. Actually, with me, it is an ascent into an energy level sufficient to express whatever poeticonceptuality I have–but others not naturally in the zone may well be helped by such a mix into it. So, require visitors to my exhibts and readers of my books to take a dose prior to engaging my work?
Meanwhile, the mix continues working on me. It’s got me into my semi-megalomaniacal zone. “Semi,” because I’m aware that I’m in it, or at least enough aware of my readers to pretend to think I’m in it when IT IS NOT ANY KIND OF MANIA FOR ME TO RECOGNIZE THAT I AM TO JEHOVAH WHAT HE IS TO KOOL-AID JONES. I do get hilarious when in the zone, don’t I! Anyway, as I was about to say, I once again wonder why hardly anyone bothers with writings of mine like this one. So many others have large audiences for similar reflections whose plod is way lower than the deft snipper of mine. Okay, I’m not quite a Thoreau or Emerson (the first two I can think of whom I hope have contributed to what I try for with my poetic prose–Robert Frost another), but surely, I keep believing (even when not in my possibly megalomaniacal zone, the difference being that I keep my belief to myself then), I’m close enough to them often enough to attract the attention of people who like that kind of writing more than I do.
Two possibilities: I’m more wildly out-of-phase with the zeitgeist than I feel I am–or I’m too boring repeating a long-dead zeitgeist. I can’t tell, which is why I so much wish I could get feedback from my few readers. But they are all as creatively other-occupied as I, who rarely am able to critique them! What I need are academics, and academics are academics because they are innately behind and want to stay there–who can’t not stay there.
I just made up a new category for entries like this one: “Autobiosophy.” Words about my, uh, wisdom, rather than words about me. I feel I write a lot more about my thoughts than I do about me, a good reason for my claim that I ain’t no narcissiphist. Another argument of mine against the latter tag, which has been applied to me, is that I don’t worship myself, I am aware of and point out flaws of mine all the time. I am balancedly ego-postive and ego-negative. Or so it seems to me.
I could go on forever but will try to do it taking care of the reviewing I’m behind on. Wish me luck. You needn’t wish me contentedness: the pills have me ridiculously content with the whole universe.
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