Archive for the ‘Grumman coinage’ Category
Entry 1697 — SAQ Wack-Classification, Cont.
Monday, January 19th, 2015
As I was saying:
The fallaciplex a rigidnik crank is victimized by is a rigidniplex. Almost all of a rigidnik’s knowleplexes in his magniscipience (where he is involved with questions outside the everyday like the SAQ) are rigidniplexes due to his innately excessively high basal cerebral energy (while in or mostly in his magniscipience and defective accommodance (i.e., ability to lower the level of his cerebral energy, which is the basis of creativity, among other things). Nonetheless, some of his rigidniplexes are valid: Newton’s understanding of physics may have been rigidnikal, for instance. (I have this suspicion that all the best theoretical mathematicians and physicists are rigidniks.) The SAQ one is not, as I will later demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt.
That is a memory-complex that comes to over-ride any new information contradicting the understanding it generates. Call it a fixation, or a permanent outlook. The result is extreme inner-directedness based not on the interaction of continuing data but on what data was around at the birth of the rigidniplex.
Hence, if Shakespeare becomes important in his life, he must form a Shakespeare rigidniplex. For reasons I’ll soon get into, this will become a delusional system based on some kind of insane conspiracy theory that someone other than Will Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works attributed to Will.
Soundbite definition of a rigidniplex: a mental structure that results in an understanding of some relatively large subject (that is much more often invalid than valid) that one possessing it can’t change his mind about.
The second kind of authorship wack, the milyoop, is a kind of pseudo-rigidnik. His fallaciplex is named after him, too: the milyooplex. It is the opposite of a rigidniplex, for milyoops suffer from a too low level of basal cerebral energy. This causes them to form knowleplexes they are too weak of mind to defend.
The sanest kind of wack is the eurekan. Usually he is the third type of the three my theory of temperaments hypothesizes, the freewender, but he can also be a strong milyoop or weak rigidnik (in real life, just about everyone is a mixture of the three types). He will have a healthy mentality, perhaps even a superior mentality, but been done in by a Eureka moment. A Eurekan moment can occur in almost any intelligent, creative person’s life. What happens is he meets an apparent problem without the background knowledge properly to deal with it, then finds a brilliant solution—which is incomplete but which excites him too much for him to notice that.
His cerebral energy is not naturally too high, but can be driven high by the pleasure of suddenly finding an apparent solution to a difficult problem. In the case of the eurekan, his burst of energy will allow him to build a fairly strong knowleplex, or understanding of the problem he believes he has solved. Moreover, if society considers the subject his solution deals with, and Shakespeare is one of the largest cultural subjects there is for most people in the West with any culture at all, he will be filled with energizing anticipation of fame and fortune.
From then on, he will work on it, each time with the energy of a rigidnik because of the pleasure his brilliant solution is giving him. As a result, he will make the knowleplex he began with into an artificial rigidniplex every bit as immune to reason as a natural rigidniplex.
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Entry 1696 — Some New Coinages
Sunday, January 18th, 2015
I’m hoping to do Important Work elsewhere today, so this entry will be short (unless I get inspired). Currently one of the essays I’m working on concerns the kinds of people who become Shakespeare cranks–i.e., people who are pretty much permanently certain that someone other than the rube from Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works of Shakespeare. So far there are three major kinds of Shakespeare cranks on my list: the rigidnikal, milyoopian and eurekan cranks. According to my wholly uncertified “knowlecular” theory of psychology, each of these cranks is the victim of a closely related but not quite identical group of inter-connected brain-cells in his cerebrum called a fallaciplex (fuh LAY shih plehks).
A fallaciplex is one of the brain’s two kinds of “knowleplexes,” or sets of brain-cell’s involved with a person’s understanding of some fairly large portion of reality (astronomy, say, rather than the moon as simply a bright object in the sky). If the understanding of a given knowleplex is obviously wrong (i.e., demonstrated to be invalid by rigorous logic applied to nothing by the known relevant facts of the subject of the knowleplex under analysis–in the view of an overwhelming majority of people with knowledge of the subject involved), it is a fallaciplex. The opposite of this is the validiplex. This, as should be obvious, is a knowleplex that logic and all the facts have shown–for an overwhelming majority of those with relevant knowledge–to be valid beyond reasonable doubt. All other knowleplexes can be considered validiplexes-in-progress until are shown to be maxilutely (i.e. as close to absolute certainty as any understanding can come) valid or invalid.
The crank’s fallaciplex is activated whenever he encounters the Shakespeare Authorship Question (SAQ (more than briefly). It then fills his mind with a delusional system concerning the SAQ that he is almost completely unable to free himself from–although he’s unlikely to want to.
The fallaciplex a rigidnikal crank is victimized by is a rigidniplex. Almost all of a rigidnik’s knowlexplexes in his magniscipience (where his involvement with questions outside the everyday like the SAQ) rigidniplexes due to his innately excessively high basal cerebral energy (while in or mostly in his magniscipience and defective accommodance (i.e., ability to lower the level of his cerebral energy, which is the basis of creativity, among other things). Nonetheless, some of his rigidniplexes are valid: Newton’s understanding of physics may have been rigidnikal, for instance. (I have this suspicion that all the best theoretical mathematicians and physicists are rigidniks.) The SAQ one is not, as I will later demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt.
Soundbite definition of a rigidniplex: a mental structure that results in an understanding of some relatively large subject (that is much more often invalid than valid) that one possessing it can’t change his mind about.
The fallaciplex a milyoopan crank is victimized by is the opposite of a rigidniplex, for milyoops, as I classify those who tend to form milyooplexes, suffer from a too low level of cerebral energy. This causes them to form knowleplexes they are too weak of mind to defend.
To be continued tomorrow, I hope. Right now, I suddenly need a nap–or a shot of cocaine, and I don’t know where to get any.
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Entry 1686 — Some Thoughts on ?enius
Friday, January 9th, 2015
None of my three or four faithful readers will be surprised that I have a rather large need to believe I am a genius–a genuine one, not an IQ or MacArthur genius. The only thing perhaps unusual, for a serious, meta-professional artist or verosopher like me, is that I admit my need. By “meta-professional artist or verosopher,” I mean someone whose main reason for his activities as either is to produce something of significant cultural value. Unlike Samuel Johnson, at least if we go by his famous saying about only fools writing for anything but money. Sam is one of my cultural heroes however much I disagree with him about possibly more things than I agree with him about. Of course, one reason for that is that money is much less meaningful in our incredibly affluent country than it was in his. True poverty was hard for a great many people to avoid in his, near-impossible to suffer in ours.
I think false modesty is so battered into people like me that, for most of us, it is no longer false. There is also the (innate) need to fit in in spite of being different. Like many ?eniuses, I do downplay my aptitudes (like the one that made schoolwork mostly easy for me). I also somewhat exaggerate my many ineptitudes such as the way it grab hold of conclusions prematurely, or my slowness to understand (which, most of the time, I contend, is a virtue due to realizing how much more there is to be understood than most others). What helps me most is that I’m actually pretty normal in most respects, and that’s genuine. I tend to think of myself as a television that has one channel no other television has that picks up telecasts from some weird planet in another galaxy . . but only once or twice a year. (Other ?eniuses are the same kind of television, each of which picks up telecasts from a different weird planet.)
I’ve now used my newest coinage, “?enius,” enough to indicate it’s not a typo. That’s because, as is the case, I suspect, with many blessed/cursed with the kind of brain I have, I have enough self-confidence to be sure I’m either a genius or not far off from being one, but not to declare myself one. In fact, I truly don’t know whether I am one or not. What I am, therefore, is a ?enius.
I would not be surprised if even the most ratified culturateur–Murray Gell-Mann, for instance–
Hey, I just did a quick search of the Internet for Murray to check for about the twentieth time whether or not he spelled his last name with a hyphen and found an entry at this Roman Catholic Blog that is one of the best blog entries I’ve ever come across–in spite of its having been written by someone who considers those not accepting the existence of God as a given to be intellectually vacuous, and their arguments on par with those of holocaust-deniers (which, he implies, are wholly worthless although some I’ve found to be pretty good, just not good enough to unconvince me that it is beyond reasonable doubt that a great many Jews were deliberately killed by the Nazis[1]).
Back to what I was saying: I would not be surprised if even Nobelist Murray Gell-Mann sometimes fears he’s not very smart, after all. Maybe not. More likely he is like Newton feeling like a small boy at the beach finding interesting pebbles or shells . . . but still aware at some level that only he was noticing them.
The situation is different for ?eniuses like me who, even in old age, are near-completely unrecognized. One would have to be close to insane to be sure the whole world, just about, was wrong about you. Nonetheless, I keep thinking and writing about genius and related topics, my own underlying aim always being, to some degree or other, to find a way to get around the evidence against me.
Not today, unless in just having revealed my invention (so far as I know) of the world’s first English word for day-to-day use that includes a typographical mark as one of its letters (Cummings and others have made words like it, but not for use outside the poems they are in) is my subtle argument for my being a genius. I guess I am never not trying to prove I’m a genius whenever I create a serious work of art or write a serious text. In this entry I’m mainly considering what someone you might reasonably characterize as “brilliant” of “gifted,” but not accept as a genius.
My latest thought is minor but taxonomically valuable: it is that a genuine genius has two characteristics: the temperament of a genius and the mentality of a genius. This thought occurred to me when (as so often) thinking about myself–in particular about what I could claim for myself as one striving to achieve genius. I feel certain that I do have the temperament of a genius; what is unknown is if I also have the mentality of a genius.
All I can say about the latter is it’s very much higher than even a superior human mentality, and that it’s far more than ability to score high on IQ tests or get high grades in school. I lean toward believing it is probably high-superiority in only one kind of art or verosophy, maybe two, not some kind of all-around superiority. In any case, I don’t feel capable of pinning it down objectively.
I do feel the temperament of a genius can be objectively defined. I contend it consists of some high proportion of the following characteristics, each overt and easy to identify:
1. Gross tendency to emotional ups and downs, sometimes psychotically extreme as with Theodore Roethke. (Note: most of the characteristics on this list have been pointed out by many others, and I doubt it any is original. While in this parenthesis, let me add that this is my first list so with surely be incomplete, perhaps severely so.)
2. A need for Great Achievements–like Keats’s declared hope of being among the English poets when he died.
3. A disregard for the opinions of others–i.e., non-conformity.
4. Reasonably high output as an artist and/or verosopher–due to determination and persistance. (Needless to say, I’m assuming in advance that I have the temperament of a genius, so basically listing my own characteristics–but I’ll leave out bald-headedness. And unbelievable potent wittiness.)
5. Extreme self-reliance–a variation on #3 because it importantly includes going one’s own way regardless of what others say.
Yikes, I see I don’t need to make a list–the National Enquirer beat me to it by some 35 years:
- DRIVE. Geniuses have a strong desire to work hard and long. They’re willing to give all they’ve got to a project. Develop your drive by focusing on your future success, and keep going. Sure: my #4 is the necessary result and provides objective evidence of this.
- COURAGE. It takes courage to do things others consider impossible. Stop worrying about what people will think if you’re different. See my #5.
- DEVOTION TO GOALS. Geniuses know what they want and go after it. Get control of your life and schedule. Have something specific to accomplish each day. Only sometimes true. My #4 again will be the result for someone with the temperament of genius.
- KNOWLEDGE. Geniuses continually accumulate information. Never go to sleep at night without having learned at least one new thing each day. Read. And question people who know. Everybody continually accumulates knowledge. A ?enius becomes a genius in part by applying what he accumulates better than others due to his genius mentality.
- HONESTY. Geniuses are frank, forthright and honest. Take the responsibility for things that go wrong. Be willing to admit, ‘I goofed’, and learn from your mistakes. That’s me, but I have no idea whether other ?eniuses tend to be frank, etc.
- OPTIMISM. Geniuses never doubt they will succeed. Deliberately focus your mind on something good coming up. Again, see my #4.
- ABILITY TO JUDGE. Try to understand the facts of a situation before you judge. Evaluate things on an opened minded, unprejudiced basis and be willing to change your mind. My mentality of genius would include this; it’s just the truism, be intelligent.
- ENTHUSIASM. Geniuses are so excited about what they are doing, it encourages others to cooperate with them. Really believe that things will turn out well. Don’t hold back. Maybe, but I tend to see being a loner in your field as more likely a characteristic of a genius temperament.
- WILLINGNESS TO TAKE CHANCES. Overcome your fear of failure. You won’t be afraid to take chances once you realize you can learn from your mistakes. #4.
- DYNAMIC ENERGY. Don’t sit on your butt waiting for something good to happen. Be determined to make it happen. #4.
- ENTERPRISE. Geniuses are opportunity seekers. Be willing to take on jobs others won’t touch. Never be afraid to try the unknown. #4 and #5.
- PERSUASION. Geniuses know how to motivate people to help them get ahead. You’ll find it easy to be persuasive if you believe in what you’re doing. I suspect ?eniuses are too advanced to be persuasive, and not involved in collective enterprises.
- OUTGOINGNESS. I’ve found geniuses able to make friends easily and be easy on their friends. Be a ‘booster’ not somebody who puts others down. That attitude will win you many valuable friends. No. Although this fits me more than it doesn’t. Many ?eniuses are ingoing. All ?eniuses must be ingoing at times, extremely ingoing, I would say.
- ABILITY TO COMMUNICATE. Geniuses are able to effectively get their ideas across to others. Take every opportunity to explain your ideas to others. This would be one of the characteristics of a genius mentality, I would guess. I tend to think it must be the hardest thing for a ?enius to achieve. A subject worth an essay. The geniuses most easily getting appropriate recognition before they are dead are those specializing in something where colleagues are in some sense clustered and on the same page–physicists, for example. Their VOCATION needs to have been recognized as significantly a superior one, as physics is, poetry not.
- PATIENCE. Be patient with others most of the time, but always be impatient with your self. Expect far more of yourself than others. #2
- PERCEPTION. Geniuses have their mental radar working full time. Think more of others’ needs and wants than you do of your own. BS.
- PERFECTIONISM. Geniuses cannot tolerate mediocrity, particularly in themselves. Never be easily satisfied with your self. Always strive to do better. I think I would put having high standards for oneself on my list although that would follow from #2, having a need to be great.
- SENSE OF HUMOR. Be willing to laugh at your own expense. Don’t take offense when the joke is on you. I feel I pretty decidedly have this, but don’t see what it has to do with genius.
- VERSATILITY. The more things you learn to accomplish, the more confidence you will develop. Don’t shy away from new endeavors. I’ll have to think about this. My initial thought is how one should balance improved understanding of one thing versus having many understandings. But having a genius mentality will automatically cause you to absorb a great many things not obviously related and use many of them (as well as know which ones to scrap).
- ADAPTABILITY. Being flexible enables you to adapt to changing circumstances readily. Resist doing things the same old way. Be willing to consider new options. Have superior accommodance, the most important characteristic of a genius mentality.
- CURIOSITY. An inquisitive, curious mind will help you seek out new information. Don’t be afraid to admit you don’t know it all. Always ask questions about things you don’t understand. I’m sure extreme curiosity, inability to be satisfied with one-step answers, or even ten-step answers, is an important part of the genius mentality.
- INDIVIDUALISM. Do things the way you think they should be done, without fearing somebody’s disapproval. This is on my list.
- IDEALISM. Keep your feet on the ground – but have your head in the clouds. Strive to achieve great things, not just for yourself, but for the better of mankind. Do great things, by your definition.
- IMAGINATION. Geniuses know how to think in new combinations, see things from a different perspective, than anyone else. Unclutter your mental environment to develop this type of imagination. Give yourself time each day to daydream, to fantasize, to drift into a dreamy inner life the way you did as a child. Again, be born with a superior accommodance.
L. Ron Hubbard thought this worthy of re-circulation. It’s not bad for The National Enquirer, but basically a guide for socio-economic go-getters, not my kind of geniuses.
The list is here, by the way. It’s followed by a lot of interesting comments.
I now need a break from this topic. I hope tomorrow to be able to have an updated list here.
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Entry 1683 — Certain Kinds of Facts
Monday, January 5th, 2015
A brand-new dogma of mine: certain kinds of ideas are perceived by our senses as facts. An obvious one, and one I discussed long ago when beginning to work out my theory of urceptual data, is the circle. I say that just as we have a sensor the is activated by the color red in a specific area of our visual grid, and eventually results in the activation of a brain-cell which the person involved experiences as a dot of red, we have a group of sensors that are activated by circles like the circumference of a full moon and eventually result in the activation of a brain-cell that we experience as a circle–although without experiencing it long enough or with sufficiently focused attention for us to be more than micraware of it. Rather than . . . ephemraware of it, or mildly, dully aware of it; or macraware of it.
Certified psychologists have found evidence for what I say about the circle, by the way.
One such ideational fact is dichotomy: a person’s innate recognition of opposites. Including something versus nothing (which would, and I say does, require senses activated by nothingness.
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Nothing more today, I had a bad day: I learned I’ll be out $1200 for the repair of a crown that came off one of my teeth last night. I had a lot of errands, too. Nonetheless, I was able to churn out the bs above.
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Entry 1676 — Mars Rules My Moon
Monday, December 29th, 2014
The planet Mars is interfering with my normal reticence, pushing me to throw away the last shred of my pretense of being a Nice Person by finally revealing that I believe men and women are significantly different from one another. The transiting moon is contributing to the problem because it has entered the house where my natal moon, and that house is ruled by Aries, the sign of Mars! Meanwhile, Uranus is currently in Aries, too, and (energizingly) trine to my natal sun. Uranus is my ruling planet, and basically in charge of craziness, which is what it’s mainly energizing in the present case. So add it to the mix. As for Mars, it is conjunct to (with?) my natal sun, which is why it’s having such a great effect on me. Nothing, I fear can now save me. I must now continue with my follow-up to what I mentioned toward the end of my letter to William Voegeli.
What I believe was standard educated thought for at least a century before I was born and possibly until 1960. Somewhere along the way the feminist movement ordained that it was invalid, and that was it. I’m sure many males, and perhaps a few females, still believed it, but we kept our mouths shut. Let me be as honest as I can (an Aquarian defect): as an unfortunately close-to-100% male (tall, thin, bald-headed, heterosexual and much else I won’t get into): I not only consider men to be vastly superior to women but consider that a healthy point-of-view (and expect healthy women to believe women to be vastly superior to men). But I’m intelligent enough to see that men and women have to put up with each other. Needless to say, my innate sex drive makes that unavoidable for me personally, although not nearly as much now as it did earlier.
I believe men and women are innately psychologically different from one another in a way that increases both their need for each other and the friction between them. Men give life meaning; women make it livable. To lunge beyond the minor infamies of popular men-as-Martians, women-as-Venusians books. Back to what I said about a focus on aspiration and a focus on compassion.
Also: men are oaks in winter, needing the foliage that women are more or less as much as women need the structuring mean can provide them.
Men lead, women follow. Margaret Thatcher was a rare exception, an effective leader, there being about as many effective female leaders as there are superior male leaders, but only a hundredth as many effective female leaders as effective male leaders. Another effective female leader was anthropologist Margaret Mead. I don’t think much of her standard anthropological views (what makes effective leaders is their ability to think standardly better than most others, and avoid thinking unstandardly, and sometimes standard views make sense), but I think her right when she concluded that while male and female roles varied from one society to another, males always took the roles that society considered its most important ones (as I’m pretty sure it was her, but I’ve never called myself an effective scholar [believe my ideas, not my data]). I therefore more than half-think political positions are rapidly losing status in our society now that women are taking them over, and that college degrees have almost most entirely lost status with superior males now that females are proving much better at getting them than all but a few males.
As you may have noticed, I’m into my note-scattering mode now, writing thoughts as they occur without trying (much) for any kind of logical presentation. I’ll try to make connections between notes when I can, though. Like the connection of what I’m about to get into back to my honesty about myself. I said I healthily consider my sex superior to . . . my sister’s. I bring her into this because something she said to me as a little girl (around ten when I was eleven and the two of us were on the wonderful roof of our wonderful childhood house where no one could see us because of the M-shape of the roof we’d climbed down into where its two sides came to a point). I don’t remember how we got into it but we were arguing about who was better, boys or girls. I was winning because my sister couldn’t deny that men were physically superior to women, and in our family even my mother (who graduated from high school at the age of 15) agreed men were smarter than women (although, oddly, I thought my mother much smarter than my father until puberty when I realized that he, though slower by quite a bit than she, was deeper).
I had no reply to what she next said: “Only girls can have babies.” Later I learned of something called “division of labor,” than feminists seem not to believe in. But it caused me as the asexual objective being that I am to about an equal degree that I am a male to come to understand that sexes as equal but different–however much the male in me scoffs at the idea.
That reproduction is maximally complex in human beings is central to the division of labor between the sexes. Women have a womb, and it is not some minor organ they have and men don’t. For one thing, it must require energy for maintenance that must reduce a female’s energy for other things like boxing and writing symphonies. It more substantially affects the amount of energy a pregnant female has for various activities.
Meanwhile, the male has no womb holding him back. One major, rarely-mentioned side-effect of his womblessness, however, is how biologically-expendable it makes him, something I immediately recognized when at the age of 32 I learned about copulation. (Slight exaggeration in hopes that the wittiness of it will keep any female or girly-boy friend of mine who is reading this from being too mad at me.) Males are close to biologically irrelevant when it comes to reproduction, because one male can keep a village of a hundred nubile females and no males but him doubling in population yearly, and in eleven or twelve years, more than doubling whereas one nubile female in a village of a hundred healthy young men and no females but him will need help from daughters to ever double the population of her village.
This being the case, why wouldn’t Mother Nature make males courageous, sometimes excessively so, and females timid? Why shouldn’t they hunt and fight other tribes while females gathered vegetables and fruit, and fled from another tribe’s warriors? In short, why shouldn’t reproductively barely-relevant males be risk-takers–intellectually, eventually, as much as physically–like me, now, I try to convince myself, never having been much of a physical risk-taker, although I believe I would have been had I needed to because of a confrontation between a scared me and a German Shepherd who bit me (actually, just nipped me in the heel), which turned me instantly into a beserker whose scream of rage as I whirled around to face the dog made the it run away.
Of course, women can take on maleness when necessary, Mother Nature realizing there will be times when males are too scarce to fill all the male roles needing filling; but they won’t be as good males as natural males, nor able to keep it up for very long (generally). Men can make adequate mommies, too, but not usually for a long time.
Women are much better verbally than men . . . practiceptually, which is all that the the verbal portion of IQ tests test (incompletely). Orally, particularly, due to the female vocal cords–and superior flexibility of mind (which is also a female defect that makes them more suggestible than men–in the long term).
Culturally, women’s main value is their female point-of-view; that is, they can add much to any art or verosophy that no male can, even a maximally feminine one–just as males can supply much that no female can.
After skimming what I’ve so far written, I see that I’ve left out how Mother Nature has used common sense to make those who bear children have a much stronger mothering-instinct than those who may not be present at a child’s birth. Indeed, it seems obvious to me that women are the timid sex not only to protect themselves, but to protect the children they bear. And a good reason they are more empathetic than men is to be able to forge closer bonds than men to their children and be able to react faster to their needs, which they feel within to a greater degree than man.
At the same time, this gives men a freedom from domestic responsibilities, to be emotionally as well as physically better able to put aside their families (especially when young and thus more male than they will be) that allows them to go on quests.
I just remembered one other big difference between men and women. I discovered its importance thirty or forty years ago but this will be the first time in print I’ve mentioned it. I can’t believe geneticists are not aware of it, but can’t recall ever reading a discussion of it. It’s the fact that the y-chromosome, which only men have, is so much smaller than the x-chromosome it joins to form the genotype of the potential human being.[1] Unless I’m mistaken, the difference in size between the two means that many genes in the x-chromosome have no gene from the y-chromosome to fuse with; therefore variation is substantially increased: there’s no gene from the y-chromosome to neutralize or modify a freak gene from the x-chromosome as there would be in a fertilized ovum destined to become a female.
One of my speculations, by the way, is that our species and probably others have a mutation mechanism that intentionally causes genetic mutations, and that its target is the an individual’s sex chromosome–perhaps, in fact, an ovum’s sex chromosome. Hence, such a mechanism would increase the possibility of genetic variation.
Be that as it may, this greater male genetic variation would explain why more IQ geniuses as well as more of those of severely reduced mental-capacity are male than female, an empirical fact, I believe. It seems also a fact that males are much more susceptible to genetic defects and to a lesser degree since they are rarer, genetic blessings.
All this would go along with my theory of the biological expendability of males: mother Nature doesn’t mind if a bunch of males are born severely defective, so she can risk them to test new genes on. I further speculate that she keeps a woman’s mutation mechanism dormant until a woman is in her thirties, thus seeing to it that a woman’s first children are “normal” and only taking a chance of failed experiments on late-born children, children, in other words probably “extra.” I particularly like the idea as one such late-born who in his own view must have all kinds of genetic mutations in his XY chromosome. But my impression is that a fair number of superior culturateurs had older mothers. And it is a fact that the late-born are more likely to be defective than those to young mothers.
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[1] Sorry, right-to-lifers, but fetuses are not human beings for me, although I’d prefer they live as much as I prefer tadpoles to live (which I do) though much less than I want living cats to stay alive.
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My intention today was to get all my evil thoughts about the differences between men and women down, to get them out of the way. But there are quite a few more, and details to be recorded, and I’m tiring. To bring this entry past the 2,000-word mark, though, I’ll mention where differences between the sexes get most interesting. Those of temperament are the most obvious: men lean toward being rigidniks, women milyoops (though most are a healthy balance between them.
Otherwise, the main ones are in . . . I can’t remember my name for it: the “cerebrawareness?” All the awarenesses in the cerebrum taken together I mean. That would be a good term for it. Anyway, I contend that the cerebrawarelity of females is substantially different from the males. Females have a more developed anthroceptual awareness than men, for instance. I’ll get back to this sometime, but I think it less important than other things I want to discuss (although right now I can’t think what they might be).
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Entry 1674 — The Sun & My First House
Saturday, December 27th, 2014
For the past two days or so I have been feeling like I am on the verge of really getting started on a Major Work beginning with an in-depth survey of my theory of awarenesses. I couldn’t figure out why until I thought of the transitting sun. That’s what the sun is called when one is considering its location in one horoscope: right now the Sun is at 6 degrees Capricorn in the sky, which puts it just in my horoscope’s first house, which begins at around 3 degrees Capricorn. This house, as you might guess, has to do with beginnings!
It’s all rot, but fun. And I have to admit, when my life is suddenly doing something good that my horoscope says it should be doing, it encourages me, however many more times I’ve compared what my horoscope said my life should be doing with what my life was doing and found no similarity at all between the two. I think it’s because nothing in my life is ever encouraging. Okay, exaggeration. What’s more true is that the few things in my life that have been encouraging resulted in nothing but disappointment: get the gig at the Scientific American website, for instance. To be maximally accurate, I should say that the stars are no worse at predicting good things for me than real life is, and not as depressing when their predictions are full of hooey, because I don’t really believe in them.
On the other hand, anything encouraging is good for me, if I can even half believe in it for a few minutes because I think people like me may have an urceptual optimist in us that is sensitive to any sign of encouragement, and able to minimize all that our internal pessimist tries to warn us about.
Note: you have just had a front eye on the birth of the urceptual optimist and urceptual pessimist: neither existed until I began writing the paragraph above. They make sense to me, particularly the urceptual optimist. How else explain the insanity that keeps people like me going no matter how unarguably quickly the unreachability of our goals is increasing?
Hey, I also have three new terms for you: “magni-cerebrevalu-ceptual,” “practi-cerebrevaluceptual,” and “reflexevaluaceptual.” I’ll save my discussion of these till tomorrow.
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Entry 1668 — Additions & Blither
Sunday, December 21st, 2014
First an addition to my taxonomy of awarenesses: I’ve decided to give what I was temporarily calling the “X-ceptual Awareness” one of the names I previously considered, then junked, “the Magniceptual Awareness.” My problem with it was that it was too similar to “the Supraceptual Awareness,” the name I had given to my system’s over-all awareness. I made that problem go away by simply changing “Supraceptual Awareness” to “Cerebral Awareness.” Pretty clever, wot? It makes sense since both the Practiceptual Awareness and the Magniceptual Awareness are in, or mostly in, the cerebrum. And I’m comfortable with the idea of a Sub-Cerebral Awareness located in the cerebellum and other parts of the brain, as well as various places in the secondary nervous system.
Next, a Noun cement that I hope will will cause those of you feeling guilty about getting all this blog’s incredible brilliance for free to express your gratitude with money–to someone on food stamps (due to his actual economic situation, not lies about it, although I did not report the $200 I made as a writer last year in my 2013 request to continue on the dole, nor will I report the $350! I made as a writer this year on my upcoming request). You can do this by sending me $5 or more for an autographed numbered copy of a limited edition of 4 More Poem Poems. It just came off the press. Only 8 copies printed, each with a different cover from the others–in fact, I have just decided to paste a unique original visual image on each cover. (Note: I really think $20 would be reasonable for anyone who is paying that or more for a subscription to any poetry-related magazine whatever.) I claim that no one who likes Joycean foolery with the language and surrealism will find at least one of the poems delightful. And there iz not one (1) but two (2) dreadfully wicked attacks in the collection on our country’s poetry gate-keepers–but only in passing! Remember, Posterity will really be angry with you for not sending me any money!
To take advantage of this Fabulous Offer, send check & your name&address to:
Bob Grumman
1708 Hayworth Road
Port Charlotte FL 33952
Sorry for the begging, folks. I’m really not badly off: I still have credit cards that will allow me to borrow over ten thousand dollar before I max them. I just used on of the cards for $1500, in fact–to have some company try to get the data in an external drive of mine that went bad about a year ago, and has the only copies of a few of my poems, and a lot of my only copies of others’ poems including four or five of Guy Beining’s the originals of which are lost. But I thought it’d be fun to play marketeer for a little while. And at least I didn’t bold-face the above.
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Okay, now to what seems to me an interesting question I just wondered into (note: it’s near impossible now for me not to qualify every opinion of mine in some way like this) while discussing Karl Kempton’s current central project, an exhaustively researched history of visual poetry from pre-history on: what poem should be considered the world’s first major full-scale visual poem? Very subjective, I fear, because of the difficulty in defining both a full-scale poem (for me, to put it simply, it would be a poem that’d be mediocre or worse if not for what it does visually) and a major poem.
I have no idea what poem is but don’t think any of Mallarme’s was because not depending on the visual for anything truly central to them. Nor Apollinaire’s, which seem primitive to me, although I’d have to look at them again to be sure. Such a poem would have to have a highly significant and original visual metaphor at its core to get the prize, in my opinion. Nothing before the twentieth century that I know about does. I think I’d aware the prize to something by Cummings (although I’m not sure what, and he may not have composed what I’d call a full-scale visual poem); if not Cummings, then Grominger’s “silence,” but not with confidence because I don’t know what other superior visual poems came before it.
Here’s a related question I didn’t send Karl: what poet could be said to have been the world’s first serious, dedicated, lyrovisual poets, by which I mean poet who concentrated a fairly substantial portion of his thoughts and energy to lyrovisual poetry–as opposed to Lewis Carroll who (1) was not a lyrical visual poet and (2) wrote light visual poems (which were nonetheless an important contribution to poetry, or Mallarme or Herbert, neither of whom composed more than a few poems that could be called visual–or, from my standpoint, made primary visual poems, or poems whose visual content was at least as important aesthetically as its verbal content.
I’m not even sure Cummings would qualify for consideration since he did not compose all that many poems I’d call primary visual poems. I’d have to go through my volume of his complete poetry to be sure of this, though. So, we have a preliminary question: what poets devoted a fairly substantial portion of his thoughts and energy to lyrovisual poems. My impression is that Kenneth Patchen was one of them. I think Apollinaire probably was, too. Most of the concrete poets seem to have been. I know I’ll annoy a number of you with my next pronouncement: it is that fewer and fewer people calling themselves visual poets devote much, or any, time to the composition of visual poems, preferring to make textual designs (and mostly doing extremely well at it).
Now another addition, this to my thoughts about urceptual personae:
It occurred to me that I made no attempt in yesterday’s entry to indicate the biological advantage of having . . . ursonae, so I’ll try to do that now. I’ll need to go into some detail about the way an urceptual persona is created. For an example, I’ll use the urnemy (no, I’m just foolin’ around: I won’t make that my new name for “the urceptual enemy”). When a baby first sees its father, it will automatically be thrust into its socioceptual awareness[1] where its urceptual persona recognition mechanism is. This mechanism will activate the baby’s urceptual other—due to such stimuli as the father’s face and arms. The father will be unfamiliar to it (probably, although he may have experienced enough of him while in the womb for him to be familiar; or perhaps any face will be familiar enough not to cause the baby pain, or even to cause it pleasure; assume here, though, that the father is unfamiliar to the baby, maybe because he has a beard and is first encountered while he is sneezing or farting). Since the unfamiliar causes pain according to my theory, and pain caused by another person has to be one of the stimuli causing the activation of a person’s urceptual enemy, the baby’s urceptual enemy will become active.
The baby will withdraw as much as possible from its enemy, the father, because urceptual personae automatically activate appropriate certain reflexive behavior. This is value #1 of an urceptual persona.
At this point, I am going to drop the urceptual enemy for not being as good a choice as an example as I first thought. I’ll go instead to the urceptual father. In the scenario I began, the father will almost certainly not continue to activate the baby’s urceptual enemy for long, if he even does so when the baby first encounters him. The baby’s mother will probably be with the father and say something like, “Here’s your daddy, Flugwick (or whatever the kid’s name is),” in a momvoice, accompanied by a mom smile, and many another mo0mfeature, so neutralize the father’s unfamiliarity. And the father will smile and say something in a gentle voice and perhaps, tickle the kid under the chin—certainly something likely to seem pleasant to the kid. In short, little Flugwick’s urceptual persona recognition mechanism will soon activate its urceptual father (I now think a baby will recognize the first male it encounters as its father—but be able to correct the error before long—rather than as a friend; if my hypothesis turns out valid, it will be easy to determine exactly what happens.
Be that as it may, eventually the baby will (in normal circumstance) automatically perceive its father as both a certain shape with a certain voice and smell—and as its urceptual father. The activation of the latter will help it more quickly react to the father appropriately. It will learn from its social environment—mainly its family—the details of appropriate reactions not instinctive like its smile will be until it learns enough to control it.
That an urceptual persona will double the ability of the real person it is attached to cause reactions is it second extremely important biological value. For one thing, this will make people more important than almost anything else to a person, which would obviously help a species survive.
What might be as important to a person as people? Here’s where my superspeculative nature takes over from my speculative nature. The goals a person shoots for may become as important to a person as others, or even himself Beauty, for an artist. As I’ve already tried to demonstrate, an artist will almost surely be motivated to some small or large degree to create an object of beauty to gain others’ approval. But simply to create something of beauty for its own sake can very well be his main motive, or even his only motive. I’m back to the magniceptual awareness where one might go to concentrate on beauty free of interpersonal concerns. Where I increase my speculativeness is in thinking puberty may open a person’s magniceptual awareness—give him doors into it, or significantly increase his doors into it. I strongly suspect a male’s magniceptual awareness is significantly large than a female’s. Just as a female’s anthroceptual awareness is much larger than a male’s. Of course, feminists will take this to be an insult to women, but I don’t see it as that. Well, as a male, I have to think of what I am as superior to females, but nonetheless trying to be objective about it, there’s no reason to say that interpersonal matters require less talent than impersonal matters.
[2] A major awareness is an awareness just under one of the primary awarenesses on my taxonomical chart of the awarenesses.
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Entry 1665 — Additions to Yesterday’s Entry
Thursday, December 18th, 2014
Note: in yesterday’s entry, I opposed entities that are “real,” because capable of being sensorily perceived, to “imaginary” ones that cannot be perceived. I should have used “communicatively perceived” in place of just “perceived,” or whatever term I used for that. That’s because some believers in Eastern x-ceptualities, believe themselves actually perceiving gods and the like whom others cannot. I say that if I see a tree, and say the tree is real and get almost any sane person to look at it and agree with me that it is, I have identified a communicably perceivable entity whereas if an Eastern mystic says he went somewhere in his mind, or some like place, and talked with his god, his god is only perceptible to him, if he cannot take me where I can also meet him; the god is not communicably perceivable.
This goes back to the two realities idea of mine. I’m not sure what nutto names I gave them, but they are the personal reality and the collective reality, and–for me–the only one the means anything is the collective reality: reality is what I and others agree it is. I think my personal reality is almost the collective’s. The important differences are no questions not yet genuinely decided by the collective: for instance, the value of my cultural contributions. I suspect there will never be a fair way to determine that but the collective’s current answer would have to be”who knows.”
As I think more on it, it seems to me there might be two collective realities: the one with a city called New York separated by an ocean called the Atlantic from a city called London, and we go into our x-ceptual awareness to consider. There most questions are a good deal less than 95% decided by the collective, and I think it fair not to consider something to be part of the collective reality (“objective reality” is or should be my name for this unless 95% of the clearly sane say it is. It is insane, though, to reject something proposed as real because it hasn’t gotten enough votes; one must accept it as not sufficiently demonstrated only.
Maybe I’m saying objective reality is what we deal with in a practiceptual awareness, while insufficiently-demonstrated reality makes up most of what we deal with in our higher awareness. From another slant, objective reality consists of entities; non-practiceptual possible reality consists of the inter-relationships of entities.
I’ve thought more about what to call x-ceptuality. “Sapienceptuality” may be my best attempt, but it’s not right. “Aristoceptuality” gets it almost exactly, but only if we put aside the fact that most aristocrats are not very bright. And Aristotle, my favorite philosopher, had little to do with the arts. Another miss: “Magnaceptual,” out because too similar to “Supraceptual,” which I want to keep for my ruling awareness.
I thought of following Siggy in using the names of gods which would have given me “Apolloceptual.” But what god’s name could I use for “practiceptual,” assuming I could give up that name, which seems near ideal for what I want it to mean. Also, Apollo seems to me to represent only part of where goes on in the “second” awareness.
“Significeptual?” I like it but fear it’s too much of a slur on the practical. I thought of “culturaceptual” because the practiceptual awareness has to do with survival and comfort, the other awareness with what I think of as culture. But “culture” is a contaminated word.
“Abracaceptual?” A good one, but no.
Fie on it. I’m quitting for now.
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Entry 1649 — More Blither about Words
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2014
Another of my too tired to do anything days. I suppose I should begin calling them my “Elderly Codger Days.” So the main item for you today is an excerpt from an email I wrote to Sabrina Feldman protesting the way she and other adherents to the proposition that Shakespeare was not the author of the works attributed to him too frequently refer to questions concerning his life and related matters call them “mysteries” rather than questions not yet satisfactorily answered:
For me, a mystery is a question for which there seems no even semi-plausible possible answer not employing in the equivalent of a deus ex machina whereas a problem is a question for which there is at least one plausible possible answer employing no deus ex machina, and there are many plausible possible answers to the Two-Shrew Problem including yours. Sorry, but I have this need to force The World to accept My Definition of certain words (like “poetry,” when some of my friends claim a poem need not have any words, or “marriage,” when so many are able to take it to mean a union of mirror-images rather than of opposites ) and “mystery” became one of them after my encounter of so many authorship-skeptics telling us that things like what my Willie was doing for three or four of his younger years is a mystery instead of just unknown (without the slightest reason for that to seem strange to any sane person knowing anything of the times).
But, wait!!! That’s not all I have for you! From my unstifleable coinage factory I have received three new coinages: cerebritecture, triflitecture and reptilitecture, for high-brow, middle-brow and low-brow culture, respectively (and only roughly, because actual high-brow culture is crap whereas I want cerebritecture to mean the culture of genuinely high cultural taste). I expect to say more about these when not held back by my codgerality.
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Entry 1639 — Choice of Ethotactic, Part 4
Saturday, November 22nd, 2014
What I’ve said so far suggests a question to me: can something a person does with no ethical intentions be ethotactical? For instance, say I am with a friend I know to be much more poor than I and we come upon an apple tree in a public forest with one apple on it, and I pick it and eat it, not thinking of my friend. Or, for a more colorful example, say I have been taught that Irishmen are subhuman creatures without the ability to feel pain, and that hunting them will be good practice in the use of firearms that one may one day need to fight off aliens from outer space. So I shoot a few Irishmen between the eyes, inflicting pain on them without realizing it, and even perhaps killing one or two of them. Have I behaved immorally?
According to my theory of knowlecular psychology, no. That’s because an ethotactic, or the choice of a moral or immoral action, can only be the result of some anthroceptual decision based on living in harmony with a known social code.
I think I would go so far as to say that my killing an Irishmen or two in such a case is not immoral even according to most people’s standards. Many would protest, but because it would seem that I would be excusing a Nazi taught to consider Jews sub-human for gassing them. I would excuse the Nazi, but only morally. For me, he would be not immoral, but homicidally stupid—and therefore deserving to be reprimanded! Sorry. I have a weakness for black humor. What I believe is that such a person should be prevented from continuing to gas Jews by being executed—unless one truly believes some kind of re-education can make him accept Jews as human, and he is compelled to repay society for his social stupidity by spending the rest of his life shining the shoes of Jews for free or something.
Ultimately, I believe all reprehensible acts are acts of stupidity, and that what kind of stupidity is involved—moral stupidity or some other kind of stupidity—is irrelevant. Society should be maximally protected from the person acting reprehensibly (and protected from his genes, for I believe criminals [real criminals], and that’s who I’m talking about, should not be allowed to breed). Of course, I realize I’m making a complex subject seem much more cut&dry than it is. Just ideas to counteract simple-minded bad/good anti-continuumism and the insensitivity of certain sentimentalists to Evil.
About evil I will say that all definitions of it are necessarily subjective, but that it does exist, and can be defined sociobjectively. Sociobjectivity is a view of an idea that is held by such a large majority of the members of a society and which has an objective neurophysiological basis as to be close enough to true objectivity as to be taken as such. Take the evil of killing an innocent child. Almost everyone would disapprove of that, and (I believe) almost all of us are instinctively repelled by the deed, and—in fact—would instinctively try to prevent a child, innocent or not, from being killed.
Not that our instinct to use reason would necessarily not be involved. If effective, it might tell us that our standing in society will go up if we stop someone from murdering a child. Although our instinct to advance statoosnikally would be part of that. Actually, I think in most cases, protecting the child would be reflexive whereas our explanation would be taken care of mostly by our reasoning.
To be honest, if I were dominated by reason, I would never risk my life, even as the old man I now am, for some child, because what I believe I may contribute to World Culture is almost sure to be more than what the child will, however long he lives. The problem with that, of course, is that my ability to reason may be defective, in which case, my not saving a child at the risk of losing my own life would be stupid integrity–that is, acting according to my code that I should protect my own life at all costs because of its great value to the world. I claim that following that code would be absolutely valid if I were another . . . Nietzsche, without his breakdown.
Needless to say, the idea that Evil is what some deity has said it to be is absurd; various deities have universally defined certain acts as evil because the men who invented them were instinctively against those acts. Other non-universal acts, like saying something contemptuous about some deity, have also been said to have been ordained Evil by a deity invented by men not because their inventors were instinctively against such acts but because the definition of Evil helped them gain power or destroy other tribes, or simply because of some personal dislike—of a priest once clawed by a cat that made him claim his main god had defined cats as evil, for example.
I do think that reasoning should dominate every moral choice one makes, but it can’t overcome one’s instincts, all of which are ultimately moral, for a given person. We can only argue about whose individual morals would work best for the society we want to live in, and perhaps use reason to show that giving in to a society’s chosen code will be better for each individual in the long run, the long run excluding some never-seen Heaven or anything like it.
Which brings to mind the question of whether or not it is moral to lie to the masses and tell them some God will do horrible things to them if they don’t accept a society’s code. I realize that there are those who don’t believe that our species naturally, due to our genes, divides into different social classes–three of them, roughly speaking: masters, slaves, and . . . cerebreans. They’re nuts.
I divide ethics into the study of socioethotactics and the study of egoethotactics . . . I think. There are two major problems: formulation of a maximally fair and biologically advantageous set of socioethotactics by a society, and an individuals’ reconciling his inevitably conflicting set of egoethotactics with his society’s socioethotactics.
More on this eventually, if I think I can say anything at all interesting about it.
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Note: on the day I made my first entry here about ethotactics, 36 people checked up on me at my Wikipedia entry; rarely do more than 4 people visit it on a day, and none since the first month it was up have anywhere near that many done so. Were they fans of Jonah Goldberg, whose article I was commenting on? The visits after that have been few, for or five in a day at most.
Last, and definitely least, here’s this SURVEY again:
Please, Dear Reader, I implore thee: when you have read as much of this entry as you feel like reading, let me know whether you have found it worth reading in full or not by clicking “YES” or “NO” below. You would help me a great deal, and might even get me to make my entries more reader-friendly. (And for the love of Jayzuz, please don’t try to spare my feelings by politely declining to click the NO although you think the entry Vile Beyond Imagination. Oh, some of you may need to know that I am not asking you whether you agree with me or not!)
YES
NO
Note: I will be repeating this request in some of my entries to come. Feel free to click one of my buttons each time I do, but please don’t click either more than once a day.
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