Entry 59 — Degrees of Absolutism « POETICKS-

Entry 59 — Degrees of Absolutism « POETICKS

Entry 59 — Degrees of Absolutism

Just a few unexciting Philosophical Thoughts today, just to record them somewhere.

There are, in my opinion, four or more kinds of absolutes:

1. Philosophical–an absolute 100% certain, usually by definition–e.g. 1 + 1 = 2. Not applicable to the physical universe.

2. Scientific–an absolute not 100% certain (in the universe as we know it perceptually) but so close to it as to be effectually an absolute with regard to the nature of the universe–e.g., Newton’s laws.

3. Historical–an absolute about what happened in the past not as certain as a scientific absolute but certain beyond rational doubt-e.g., that Shakespeare was the author of the works attributed to himm and Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo.

4. Literary-Critical–an absolute about the meaning of a literary work less certain than a historical absolute but certain beyond reasonable doubt–e.g., Keats’s “Ode to Psyche” is about Psyche and Nostrodamus’s writinghad nothing sane to do with the current political situation in the middle east.

I term absolutes 2 through 4 “effectual absolutes.” I believe an effectually absolute explanation of everything is possible. All that is needed is suffcient data.

Tags: Philosophy

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 at 12:55 PM and is filed under Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Entry 429 — Some Grumman Logic « POETICKS

Entry 429 — Some Grumman Logic

The sentence below this one is false.

The sentence above this one is true.

What can we now say about the two sentences above? That, if we dispense with the false true/false dichotomy, neither is either true or false: each is true/false or paradoxical. Parodoxes are inevitable in any human language, which in my thinking includes the language of mathematics and all the sciences. It seems to me they never occur in nature. That is, nothing in reality except our attempts to describe is ever paradoxical. Hence, two parallel lines can meet each other in Non-Euclidean geometry, but not in the real world.

An aside: I’ve always wondered at the fact that many intelligent people with scientific backgrounds find the idea that parallel lines that meet will exist if the universe were the surface of a sphere. Only in geometry. In the real world nothing that has less spatial dimensions than two can exist. Start drawing a line on your universe as the surface of a sphere and your first tiny dot with burst out if it on both sides.

Related to this absurdity is the idea of curved space. But that’s just an absurdity of expression–saying, for instance, that a curving ray of light curves due to the effect on space of gravity rather than due to the effect of gravity on it.

It applies, too, to the idea of transfinite numbers. The idea behind that, according to George Gamow is that you can’t form a list of infinitely-repeating decimal fractions that contains them all as shown by the fact (and this is true) that if someone brings up a fraction he claims is not on your list, giving you the first ten digits, say, and you show him it is on your list, he can show it isn’t by showing you the eleventh digit on his is different the eleventh digit on yours, or–in the one in ten chance thatthe digits match, that some other later digit on his fraction is different from the one in that spot on yours.

But that procedure can work oppositely: you can make a list of all possible decimal fractions including infinitely-repeating ones and challenge him to find an infinitely-repeating decimal fraction of a given length that’s not on your list. If you take all the integers in order, reversed, and make them infinitely-repeating decimal fractions by putting a point in front of each one as here:

.1 .2 . . . .9 .01 .11 .21 . . . .91 .02 . . . .99 .001 . . .

he will not be able to give you any decimal that you can’t immediately indicate the location of on your list of a decimal fraction matching whatever string of digits he gives you. Say it’s 00958746537 . . . That will be the 73564785900th number on your list. He can’t then say his number’s twelfth digit is different from your number’s because you can honestly say you don’t know what your number’s twelfth digit is. But that his second number can be as easily found as his first.

So you have two true statements about mathematics that contradict each other. I say they are therefore true/false statements, or paradoxes.

I don’t believe any real object can be infinite. Space may be said to be, but it doesn’t exist, in my philosophy. But I doubt that there’s any way of testing the truth of what is just my opinion.

Note to anyone concerned about my health: I managed to get through a stress test yesterday without having a heart attack or stroke. I’m now wearing a heart monitor that will come off in three hours, at ten a.m. I felt peculiar a few times while wearing it. I hope they don’t turn up as problems on the monitor’s record.

I had trouble walking properly on the stress test treadmill. My doctor and the woman overseeing me got quite frustrated. I felt incredibly stupid. I think I know what happened: there are rails to hold onto that I couldn’t grip without slightly stooping because I’m tall but have the arm-length of a 5′ 9″ white man, so I felt very awkward–until I just let my fingers touch the rails. I also tried too hard because I thought I was going to be tested with stress. When it was over, I asked why they’d never speeded it up. No stress at all except the stress of feeling physically incompetent.

Hmmm, my spell-checker doesn’t like “speeded up.” But surely “sped up” is not correct. Weird. I’d automatically say, “I sped home,” not “I speeded home.” But that’s great. The language should be crazy–as long as it tries for maximal stability.

I have opined on occasion that people who can remember rules of usage like sped/speeded may be use them to show their superiority to those who can’t–in other words, the lay/lie distinction that I hold to, for example, I hold to partly to show I’m not low-class. But I hope my main reason is that I like ways to break out of universal rules as a literary artist. I do believe in social classes, though. It slightly simplifies relating to people, which is incredibly complex. Not that my believing in it matters since a classless society is impossible.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 21st, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Entry 429 — Some Grumman Logic”

endwar says:

11 June 11 at 12:19 AM

Bob,

I don’t think your transfinite number statements make sense. Basically, you can show that the infinite number of fractions is equal to the infinite number of integers is equal to the infinite number of positive whole numbers, by showing a way to map them all. But you can also show that the (infinite) number of real numbers is greater than the infinite number of integers.

the way to show that that the number of fractions (or rational numbers) is to find a way to list them so that you can count them all, so that then given a fraction you can figure out what number it is on your list of fractions. Since all fractions are written as ratios of numbers, you can write them like this:

1/1 1/2 1/3 1/4 1/5 . . . .
2/1 2/2 2/3 2/4 2/5 . . . . .
3/1 3/2 3/3 3/4 3/5 . . . . .
4/1 4/2 4/3 4/4 4/5 . . .
5/1 5/2 5/3 5/4 5/5 . . .

Then you can count by starting with at the corner with 1/1 and then moving around to 1/2, 2/1, 1/3, 2/2, 3/1, 1/4, 2/3, 3/2, 4/1, and so on. Now you are counting them in a pyramid, and you can label the rows of the pyramid by the sum of the numerator and denominator, so the first pyramid row consists of 1/1, which we label row 2 because 1+1=2. Then there’s row 3 with two members 1/2 and 2/1, and for each 1+2=2+1=3. The next row is 4 with 3 members, and 1+3=2+2=3+1=4. Now if you give me any (positive) fraction a/b, i can compute it’s position in my pyramid scheme — it is the a-th term in row (a+b), so it’s number is the Sum of 1+2+3+4+. . . +(a+b-1)+a. In other words I count up the terms in the preceding rows in my pyramid and add a because that’s where it is in the last row of fractions. So there’s a way to count fractions, which means that the total number (that degree of infinity) is the same.

But the number of real numbers is greater, and the proof works this way. Suppose you have some scheme for counting real numbers (we can even limit it to real numbers between 0 and 1, if you like), then take your first number on your list and write it as a decimal. If the decimal repeats, fine. If it ends, you can always add 0s on the end, after all 0.25=0.250=0.25000=0.25000000000000000000, etc.

Then i can take your list and generate a new decimal number that isn’t on your list. Suppose the first number starts 0.1, so i pick a different digit than 1, say 2,and start my new number as 0.2. If your next number starts 0.037763902, then i look at the second digit, 3, and pick a different digit, say 2, and so my number 0.22 . . . isn’t the second one on your list either. For the third digit, i look at the third digit of your third number and pick something different (I have 9 choices), for the fourth digit i look at the fourth digit of your fourth number and pick something different there. If you would prefer an algorithm to pick each digit, you can always add 1 cyclically, so that if the nth digit of your nth number is 9, i pick 0 for my nth digit. So thus you see that for any counting scheme you have for real numbers, i can make a number that isn’t on your list.

You can also show that the infinite number of points (real numbers) between 0 and 1 is equal to the number of points greater than one, because you can draw a one-to-one correspondence between x and 1/x.

Infinite numbers are pretty crazy, but there are actually rigorous ways of working with them.

– endwar
Bob Grumman says:

11 June 11 at 10:57 AM

Cantor wants a list of decimal fractions you can count. I don’t. I just want a list that every decimal fraction will eventually show up on, and I have it. The fact that when I find some decimal fraction asked for on my list, a second decimal fraction can be named of greater length that may not be the number I’ve just found on my list is lrrelevant. Bringing in non-repeating decimals is just a con game like bringing in lies and non-lies into linguistics to produce paradoxes. I’m sure transfinite numbers are fun for mathematicians but also sure they are inapplicable to anything in the real world. According to my philosophy. (And my neurophysiology, which holds that numbers are real secondary characteristics of real things, and that–possibly–addition and subtration and may be further processes are real the way motion is. I’m working on an attempt coherently to show how this is that may take me a while because it’s currently low on my list of priorities.)

Entry 298 — The Realities « POETICKS

Entry 298 — The Realities

I don’t have anything for today so will philosophize. I’ve been going over what reality is. Latest axioms:

Subjective Maxolute Reality (that reality whose existence comes closest absolute certainty): my mind plus all that it can directly experience through my body’s sensors.

Subjective Probsolute Reality (that reality that exists beyond reasonable doubt): the constituents of maxolute reality according to logic (pure rationality), and is not contradicted by anything I know about maxolute reality. It is not necessary for it to parallel what I know to be maxolutely real, but it helps. Others’ minds, for instance.

Objective Maxolute Reality: That portion of my maxolute reality that (I believe) a majority of others accept as mazolute reality.

Objective Probsolute Reality: That portion of my probsolute reality that (I believe) those (I consider) knowledgeable about the portion involved agree with me about.

Metaphysical Reality: Anything outside the above realities; fun to think about, but irrelevant

Note: I’m sure some real philosophers have written things similar to what I just have. My way to understanding, though, is (primarily) to go as far as I can on my own, and then check with others. I say “primarily” because I also unmethodically read and listen to others.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 28th, 2010 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Entry 213 — More Really Intellectual Chatter « POETICKS

Entry 213 — More Really Intellectual Chatter

Re: egotomic reality or the least possible full-scale universe, it serves nicely as the basis of practically any religion you want to believe in. It can have a God, maybe even an omniscient one, so much more able to expand than other egotoms that it could come into contact with all other egotoms and push them where it wanted to. I can’t see how it could be omnipotent, though, for there should always be uncovered parts of egotoms they could use to do something on their own.

No God is in my own egotomic reality because it’s more elegant to think of all egotoms as equal but slightly different from one another, and nicer. On the other hand, I like the idea of demi-gods–egotoms slightly superior to others, me, of course, being one of them. Being the greatest of them, in fact! Such an egotomic reality would explain why it does seem that perceived reality consists of a number of material entities ranging from the nearly infinitesimally simple–and able to effect perceptual reality–to extremely complex entities like you and I who seem able to effect perceptual reality relatively greatly.

It seems likely, if something like egotomic reality exists, that non-living entities are not manisfestations of egotoms, but perceived matter rather than real matter. Put oppositely, I’m saying only living creatures and perhaps carbon atoms are egotomic, everything else being part of some egotom’s semblance to us. Simple example, the egotom that I’m aware out of touches egotom 539,750 at location 3. Wait, I need to start being more precise. Location 3 of the egotom I’m aware out of touches location 87 on egotom 539,750. As a result, I perceive my friend Ed, who is aware out of egotom 539,750 and his awarenessless clothes, shoes, scent of his after-shave lotion, and three square feet of the floor he’s standing on.

I like that better than a perceptual reality all of whose quarks, or whatever entities are the true atoms of our universe, have an awareness. (I say there are such things as the smallest entities in this universe even though it could as well consist of infinitely divisible entities and remain as simple because I don’t like infinity and won’t allow it on the premises.)

Good and Evil fit easily into any religion based on egotomic reality, Good being orderliness, Evil being disorder, as they are in most religions. This contradicts my belief that in perceptual reality, the Good is a balance between excessive order (boredom) and excessive disorder (confusion). So my egotomic religion supposes that once an egotom achieves stability at more than eighty percent, say, of its locations, it experiences pain and shivers its surface out of near-stasis, and begins again to seek eighty percent stability, but not a jot more. I think this condition may be a necessary one even for an egotomic reality at its simplest. Otherwise, total stasis might occur. Great for Buddhists but–well, it’d be Nirvana, or everlasting near-infinite happiness–which my irrational human brain doesn’t like although it’d have to be the best possible state. Ah, in that case, time being infinite (the one infinity I’m compelled to accept), egotomic reality would have already achieved total stasis and I wouldn’t be writing this.

It wouldn’t be fair to the egotoms on the outside of the egotomic universe, for they would have exposed locations.

As I’ve mentioned in my other writings about the versions of universe I’ve hypothesized that allow for a form of re-incarnation (here it would be egotomic continuation sans memory), a wonderful result of the existence of such a universe is that it gives one a rational reason for trying to make the universe better, to wit: by doing so you will make it better for you the next time you are a human being. You will also make it better for others, which will make them more likely to be nice to you then, too. I like that much better than your doing your best for others in order to escape damnation. I can’t conceive of any universe run by an entity that would punish anyone for anything since one can’t help the body something gave him, and because there are so many easier ways for omnipotence or even extreme immortal power to deal with harmfully defective entities, like isolation.

I think that may be all I have to say about egotomic reality. Surely it should make me famous. It’s as interesting as Jung’s baloney and makes more sense. It won’t. But if a world-religion is derived from it, I hope they give it a good name. Not “Grummananity.” I like “Bobbianity,” though.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 6th, 2010 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Entry 213 — More Really Intellectual Chatter”

Kaz Maslanka says:

7 September 10 at 5:46 AM

And the ones that mother gives you doesn’t do anything at all.
Bob Grumman says:

7 September 10 at 10:30 AM

Glad someone’s out there visiting this site, Kaz, but not sure what “the ones” you speak of are? Age is definitely slowing me down.

–Bob

Entry 212 — The Simplest Final Universe « POETICKS

Entry 212 — The Simplest Final Universe

After rambling through yesterday’s entry, I remembered that the main thing I had wanted to discuss was my theory of a primary universe. I’ve chattered about it before here. I haven’t change it any, though I’ve added details, I guess. What interests me now about it, though, is that I believe it is the simplest possible universe that can exist. That, I think, makes it a significant contribution to the study of what existence ultimately is, whatever branch of philosophy that is. (By “universe,” incidentally, I mean all of existence.)

Initial assumption: that the universe consists of nothing but space, or emptiness (not the thing with properties that modern physics takes space to be), and egotoms. “Egotom” is my coinage for the awareness each of us finally is, and which each of us thinks he calls “I” or “me.” He isn’t: his brain is calling his body that. But, at the time, one’s egotom coincides with one’s body. All of which is irrelevant to this discussion but I have a tendency–I mean, my brain has a tendency–to go off on tangents.

An egotom is permanent. Its ultimate size is very small, say about as small compared to a period as a period is to what current science says this universe is. But it can expand to become possible as large as our universe is said to be, or larger, though not infinitely large. Most egotoms are far larger than they are at their smallest.

An egotom has two properties: materiality and awareness of other egotoms. Its materiality allows them to touch neighboring egotoms, its awareness to sense the contact. An egotom automatically moves toward anything it touches, in effect trying to maximize the area of contact. This results in egotoms pushing each other around and continually changing shape. If it pushes hard enough, an egotom can protrude from the mass of egotoms that the ultimate universe (the universe under the one we know as human beings) is. It will continue to move in the direction it has ben moving in, but only for a certain time period. At the end of that time period, it will move in an direction opposite to the one it has been moving in. Hence, the ultimate universe will never fragment.

Besides its ability to sense other egotoms, an egotom has an evaluatory sense. It is happy to the degree that it attains stability, unhappy to the degree that it fails to. The rest of the universe it will experience in accordance with what egotoms it is in contact with and where it is in contact with each. It will “perceive” this experience in many possible ways, perhaps an infinity of ways, one of which is the way each of us is now perceiving it. For instance, an egotom in contact with egotoms 2,6 and 908 at points 77, 423 and 888,746 may perceive existence at that moment to be what a human being experiences in a rowboat drawing close to a beach on Long Island one summer. A slight change in where egotom 6 touches it may change its experience to hearing a seagull. Etc.

Space is infinite. It has to be unless what it’s in is. Simplicity requires minimization of the number of terms in an explanation. So space is infinite.

This description of the ultimate univers explains everything, as far as I can see. That doesn’t make it true. Nothing can do that, or make it false. It’s just the description of the universe that accounts for everything using the least unexplained objects and characteristics of objects.

To complicate it to make it fit what I as a human being want to feel it does, I add that each egotom innately prefers certain egotoms to others, and uses more of its energy to get in and stay in contact with those eogtoms and ways from other egotoms. That allows love of a mother and others to dominate an egotom forever, which my brain considers a nice idea.

I also like the idea of my egotom’s being better able than any other eogotom to understand existence in detail–which being in contact with a maximun number of other egotoms would be.

This is metaphysics, needless to say. It does not negate the quest to understand this secondary universe of ours, for that can be thought of as simply how we experience our egotom’s under-quest to understand its existence. That is, both our this-world-quest and our ultimate-universe-quest are going on simultaneously, so I can think of my investigation of quarks as simply a marker for my egotom’s simultaneous spreading over egtoms 487 and 836.847,008.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 5th, 2010 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Entry 1740 — Of Meaning & Meaningfulness

Monday, March 2nd, 2015

I think a lot of gush and counter-gush in philosophical discussions has been caused by the use of the word, “meaning,” to mean two different things: (1) a description of a named entity in material reality that relates it to one or more named and defined entities in material reality in such a way that a person knowing the language its name is part of will, upon hearing or reading that name, be able to distinguish it from what it is not—by pointing to it on a table or the equivalent; and (2) a description of some real or alleged function of a real or unreal named entity that allows the entity to carry out or contribute to the carrying out of some mission important to whoever defines it as having this kind of meaning.

I’m satisfied with my definition of the first meaning of “meaning,” but consider my definition of the second meaning rough. The following examples should help clarify it:

Keats’s bust of Shakespeare had a great deal of meaning for him for reminding him of the possibilities of poetry. That is, the function of the bust was its help in encouraging him to follow Shakespeare’s lead as a poet.

The New Testament has a great deal of meaning for a sincere Christian for reminding him that Jesus died to allow him a chance for Heaven–i.e., its function (or one of its many functions) is to remind a Christian that immortality is possible.

Winning the first world series game has special meaning for a baseball manager because winning the first game in the other team’s ballpark gives a team an advantage, and winning it in one’s own ballpark prevents the other team from having an advantage–i.e. winning the first game regardless of where played has the function of increasing a team’s chance of winning the series (in addition to the advantage an victory will have.

Each time I list one of these “meanings,” it is plain to me that the word I should be using is not “meaning,” but “meaningfulness.” So my simple insight concerning the meaning of “meaning,” is that the second meaning should be junked. The main place it crops up is in the phrase “life’s meaning.” I maintain that “life’s meaning” should be, simply, “a state of being certain entities in material reality possess which allows the entity to move of its own volition, and in other ways act as living organisms in accordance with the latest scientific understanding of the state,” not “life’s purpose.” If you want to discuss the latter, the correct term should only be “life’s meaningfulness.”

And the question central to much of philosophy should be, “What gives life meaningfulness? not what gives life meaning? Linguistics with the aid of biology gives the word, “life,” its only proper meaning, a meaning that it is important to point out is objectively-arrived at, because based solely (for the rational) on the material attributes of the state of being the word, “life,” represents. (I’m ignoring the inexpressible intangibles those who believe in the existence of immaterial entities or substances consider part of life’s state of being as irrelevant because either non-existent or existent but not material, so incapable of having any effect on anything.)

There, another attempt to form a minor understanding of an over-rated question without great success. But if I’ve only gotten a few people to use “meaning” only in its linguistic sense, never in its philogushistic sense, I’ll be happy.

Posted in Linguistics, Philosophy | No Comments »

Entry 1714 — Further Beyond the Decimal Point

Wednesday, February 4th, 2015

Right of the Decimal Point, Part Two
(An Extreme Rough Draft)

Back to Calasso’s text, “How can we know something that doesn’t let itself be known? In only one way: by becoming to some extent that thing itself.” If one accepts my definition of “knowing something,” it is vacuous. Note: I would try to determine Calasso’s definition if I were concerned with addressing what he thinks his text means, but I’m more interested at the moment in what I think it means. Perhaps later I’ll try to understand it from his point of view. I just want to emphasize here that what some writer means by what he said is not necessarily the only its meaning, or even necessarily its best meaning.

For me, Calasso’s first statement is, “How can we know something unknowable?” Answer: we can’t. If the thing is material, we can perceive it. It has nothing to do with whether or not it lets us. I see I may be expressing another dogma of mine: that every bit of matter in the universe acts in accordance with what it is, and no other way. There is no such thing as will, If billiard ball A is hit by a second billiard ball, it will react in accordance to what it is (mainly a sphere of a certain hardness and weight), where it is, and what laws of nature pertain to its being struck the way it has been. It has no say in the matter.

Ditto the behavior of the atoms in an H2O molecule—and the atoms in each molecule of a person’s body. The universe’s behavior is determined by what it is, period. Now, then, if we jump into metaphysics, we can hypothesize a randomizer that can emit chance-rays from time to time that minutely make a few quarks misbehave, so that the universe will be unpredictable, each minute change eventually having extreme effects. But the universe will remain deterministic, but with its behavior determined by laws in absolute effect almost all the time instead of all the time, and to some degree determined by chance.

I can’t see how any piece of matter can have will. How, for example, can a man tell himself to throw a ball to one of two friends and not to the other “freely?” The question for me would be, “how can he prevent what he is from doing exactly and only that which what he is and his circumstances force him to do? There’s an infinite regress involved. Let’s say the man “decides” to throw the ball to his friend Jack. I say that what happened (in effect) is that a mechanism in his behavraceptual awareness will have analyzed the data transmitted to it about what’s going on, and evaluated all appropriate responses to it in its repertoire and activated the one with the highest score. Ergo, the man did what he did because what he is includes an executive mechanism that is what it is.

The man’s brain will cause him to experience a feeling his language will have attached some words like “I am throwing a ball” to, although he won’t ordinarily track down the words for the feeling, just feel he is in charge of throwing the ball as he does so.

In a sense, the man’s arm is in charge, but only because it is what it is, not because it will ever have more than one choice about what it does. What we call free will, then, is most often (or always, I’m not sure which), that which we exercise when what we are determines an event we participate in more than what the other elements part of the event are: when the man throws the ball, the ball goes where it does partly because it is what it is in shape and weight, partly because of the relevant laws of nature, but mostly because of the thrust given to it by the man’s arm—which in turn was determined by a brain state due to the way its machinery chooses behavior.

This is one of the many areas of philosophy that I consider ridiculously simple but have trouble using words to describe. We do what we do because of what we are because of our genome because of some coming together of those genes in our genome at some previous time because of the presence before then of various atoms and molecules, etc., etc., down to because of the what the universe is.

Political free will is everything you can do, or elect not to do, because of what you are versus everything you have to do, or keep yourself from doing, because of what the state is as well as because of what you are. Social free will is a little different. It is what your society rather than the state allows you to do, and includes the ability to ignore the external determinant involved (i.e. society) whereas you lack that ability concerning what the state make you do or avoid doing.

The ability of the state to punish you for disobedience to its rules make it able to curtail the size of your free will, but you can still exercise all your free will if willing to risk punishment or even suffer it. That, of course, depends on what you are.

Yes, I definitely feel like I’m a third-grader trying to teach a very simple subject to first-graders (with sixth-graders making fun of me behind my back).

Anyway, to get back to free will, there are three kinds of will: (1) the will freely to do or avoid doing everything that what you are allows you to do or not do; (2) the will to do or avoid doing everything that what you are allows you to do or not do except that which some entity or group of entities will punish you for doing or not doing; and (3) the will to do nothing except what your external environment makes you do (because of what you are).

Will number two is what religions that believe in free will allow you to have. It is idiotic because you either have to do what your priests tell you to do or be punished, but you have no control over whether you are able to obey your priests: that depends on your executive mechanism, and you were stuck with that, you are the slave of that, you did not visit a shop selling executive mechanisms, or brains with such mechanisms or the equivalent in them before you were born. Or, if you did, the equivalent of a brain you then had, or what you then were, determined your choice. (See what I earlier said in passing about the eternal regress involved.)

* * *

Posted in Philosophy, Pronouncements & Blither | 3 Comments »

Entry 1702 — The Three Meaningfulnesses

Friday, January 23rd, 2015

“Meaning in life is a matter of meaning to others,” writes Wayne L. Trotta, encapsulating a central view of Philip Kitcher’s Life After Faith in his review of it the February/March 2015 issue of the secular humanist periodical, Free Inquiry. It seemed an excellent expression of what I’ve recently been writing about our need to matter to others . . . except for one significant thing: it suggests that the only meaning in life is what I’d slightly change to “meaningfulness to others.” And that reminded me of the liberal compassion that was a subject of one or two recent entries of mine. It reminded me how tunnel-visionedly liberals (and all secular humanists are wholly liberal) over-value their idea of compassion.

I immediately saw that my life was ruled (as far as I know) by three meaningfulnesses, anthroceptual, reducticeptual and aesthetic meaningfulness, of which the first is the least important. I would not be surprised if this turned out to be a premature conclusion, but right now I can’t think of any other meaningfulness–for me, at least. Mere survival is as important as any of the three meaningfulnesses, but not meaningful, just something we have to do. One might call reproduction biologically meaningful, but I’d call that, and survival, sub-cerebral meaningfulnesses, if meaningfulnesses at all.

There are many different varieties of the three main meaningfulnesses. Liberal compassion, for instance, is only one kind of anthroceptual meaningfulness, and mathematical meaningfulness just one kind of reducticeptual meaningfulness. But I would call the final goal of each goodness, truth and beauty.

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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.

* * *

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

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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Entry 1638 — Choice of Ethotactic, Part 3

Friday, November 21st, 2014

A Note to the Fore:

YES

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.

* * *

A new start. What I think I think now is that an ethotactic is any choice of action that is made fully or to a great extent on the basis of anthreval- uceptual input. Do I need to say more? Surely that clarifies the subject satisfactorily? (I’m exercising my wit here because I’m scared that if I go on, I’ll horribly bungle the amplification what I’ve just said requires. But my verboceptual awareness—along perhaps with some part of my scienceptual awareness—has convinced my socioceptual awareness, that I have a verosophical moral duty to expose my full thinking on this in spite of how bad my egoceptual awareness, trying to stop me, will feel about my exposing the lameness of my brain. More exactly, my evaluceptual awareness, which right now I think has offices in each of the rest of the cerebrum’s awarenesses as well as a brain area all to itself where it collects the votes pro and con about all the choices available to the behavraceptual awareness, where a final choice of action will generate the action the person involved takes.

You know, I truly do not know whether I’m making sense at all. I’m fairly sure that I have a good idea what I’m saying, but am also certain that I am over-simplifying what I think is occurring. Which may not be. Not that it matters, since I don’t think I can make any headway toward a reasonably intelligent rough description doing anything other than taking a series of very simple steps of description.

Note: it is at this point that I thought of constructing the YES/NO buttons above.

Okay, what happens in slightly more detail is that (1) a person experiences instacon A (i.e., “instant of consciousness A”), or the contents thereof, which I probably have a name for but can’t now recall. (2) Instacon A activates a number of possible actions out of the awarenesses participating in it. Let us say, for instance, that it contains data depicting an ant on his kitchen counter that activate cells in his visioceptual awareness (a sub-awareness of his protoceptual or fundaceptual awareness [whose name I haven’t permanently chosen], data activating cells representing “me, innocently going about my daily business, in the egoceptual sub-awareness of my anthroceptual awareness (I’m going into detail to try to keep things straight for myself), data activating cells in the socioceptual sub-awareness of my anthroceptual awareness representing “enemy deleteriously approaching my food,” data activating cells representing the word, “ant,” in the verboceptual sub-awareness of the linguiceptual sub-awareness of my reducticeptual awareness, and maybe data activating cells causing a barely perceptible reaction to fear of the sting of a fire ant.

All these active cells will send attempt to activate behavraceptual cells capable of causing appropriate behavioral responses like moving a hand that’s near the ant, carefully sliding a piece of paper under the ant and removing it from the house without injuring it, splotting the damned thing, or singing a song about “Aunt Delores,” if I knew one. Meanwhile, instacon A would probably have continuing sequences of information in it with nothing to do with the ant—something to do with why I’d come into the kitchen, for instance. Behavraceptual cells responsible for various appropriate behavioral responses (or behavioral responses that seem appropriate to me) would activate those responses.

In effect, they would vote for the action begun, or continued—make that actions, because we generally carry out more than one action during each instacon. Each activated cell or cell-group would try to send energy to the muscles or glands responsible for carrying out its desire. But much of that energy would be blocked by the greater energy another cell or cell-groups responsible for a behavior in conflict with the behavior the first cell or group was trying to cause. In other words, a lot of votes would be cast, and the evaluceptual awareness, where they were being cast, would determine which candidates receiving votes would win, and succeed in causing action. If any. For I may take no action, no cell or cell-group’s transmission being strong enough to cause me to do anything.I suspect that in this case, the word, “ant,” would make me say to myself, “Damned ants.” This would be an ethotactical response based on my perception of the ant as an intruder, and—possibly—my empathy for the robotic damned thing. Perhaps my laziness would be a factor, too. Would it have any ethical component? I think not. I think I would have a musclaceptual reaction of “don’t squash, too much work” that would be purely, amorally, protoceptual—i.e., having to do with my desire not to exert myself, nothing else.

Which suggests a question to me: can something a person does with no ethical intentions be ethotactical?

TO BE CONTINUED

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Entry 1636 — Back to Goldberg

Wednesday, November 19th, 2014

Okay, back to my response to an essay by Jonah Goldberg. I was writing about the effect of ethotactical intelligence on ethotactical duration but also the width of said duration. An “ethotactic” is a person’s moral choice of action in a given situation. I ended my writing for that day with the following:

“Obviously, the situation will have a lot to do with the length of a person’s ethotactical durations, there seldom being little point in trying for a long one regarding what to do morally about a piece of candy one has been offered. Short-term moral behavior will not depend much on ethotactical intelligence. That means day-to-day behavior will generally be intelligent enough (and considered acceptable enough) although not based on long ethotactical durations or particularly high ethotactical intelligence.

“Now for a scattering of points, because I don’t see right off how to present a better organized response to Goldberg’s essay. First is his suggestion that too many people, especially young people, believe that “if it feels right, do it!’ by which he means all they think is necessary to make an ethotactical decision is passion. Goldberg amplifies this when he quotes a character in the movie, Legally Blonde, as follows: “On our very first day at Harvard, a very wise professor quoted Aristotle; ‘The law is reason free from passion.’ Well, no offense to Aristotle, but in my three years at Harvard, I have come to find that passion is a key ingredient to the study and practice of law—and of life.’”

“Well, I would agree with Goldberg that the character is an airhead . . .” I stopped there, cutting the paragraphs above from the text because I thought it had come to a good stopping point before them. When I came back to them just now, three days later, and wrote the paragraph beginning this entry, to set the scene, I was immediately unsure what I was talking about. There’s a person’s plain choice of action. How is it different from his moral choice of action?

Okay, a person’s choice of action depends on a vote from each of his active awarenesses at the time. These votes will probably never be equal. How much weight the vote of a given awareness will have will depend on the person and on the situation. And now I suspect I’m constructing a different theory or set of ideas than I was describing in part one of this cluster-dementia of an intellectual exploration.

I should probably re-start but I’m too lazy too. It is also possible that I’ve got an idea begun that may lead somewhere worthwhile. Question: what awareness provides the ethical portion of a person’s choice of action? Immediate answer: the evaluceptual awareness, because it is the awareness that determines on the basis of past experience what path is most likely to maximize the pleasure-to-pain ratio. This answer is wrong.

The moral content of the evaluceptual awareness’s choice will be determined all or mostly in the anthroceptual awareness, because it will try to make one act properly in order to satisfy one or more social instincts like the need to conform, the empathic need not to cause pain . . . there must be others but I can’t think of them now. The instinct not to cause pain probably has many sub-instincts under it: like the need not to boast (because it may make others feel smaller) . . .

I wonder if there’s an egoceptual instinct to be honest in appraising oneself. No one else need see that you dishonestly rate yourself a better poet than some Nobel Prize Winner, so it’s not a socioceptual instinct, if it exists. I think it may exist because it would be advantageous for preventing unrealistic behavior. But would it be moral? And what about the embarrassment of missing five lay-ups in a row in your backyard where no one can see you. You have immorally failed to live up to your own expectations just as missing one layup in a game would be immorally failing to live up to your group’s expectations. If doing what you’re supposed to in a team effort hasn’t to do with morality, what does it have to do with?

My problem is to intelligently describe a person’s choice of action, which I now see is a matter of describing the many choices it is a combination of—basically the votes of various awarenesses (and sub-awarenesses) I’ve already mentioned. Too much work for me now, so I’m outta here. I hope I return to this matter, for my own sake. (It would be immoral for me to deprive the world of my further thoughts about it.) Not sure I will.

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Entry 1633 — Moral Integrity

Sunday, November 16th, 2014

Jonah Goldberg is one of my favorite writers. I consider him funny enough to steal material from, and agree with (most of) his political outlook. Often, though, I find myself partially disagreeing with some position of his. At the moment, I’m disagreeing with portions of his latest essay in National Review, “Empty Integrity.” Goldberg believes the world is opting for a kind of “integrity” that Irish philosopher David Thunder categorizes as “purely formal accounts of integrity (which) essentially demand internal consistency within the form or structure of an agent’s desires, actions, beliefs, and evaluations.” Opposed to this is a kind of integrity, Thunder describes as “fully substantive accounts.” The difference between the two is that a person with the first kind acts in accordance with ethical principles designed to maximize his pleasure-to-pain ratio whereas a person with the second kind “desires to do what is morally good in all of his decisions,” according, again, to Thunder.

Goldberg implies that the first kind of integrity, which—because he associates it with the philosophy of Nietzsche, one of my idols—I will hereafter term Nietzschean Integrity, is “empty.” It isn’t. What he is really bothered by, first, is that a person possessing it does not “apply reason to nature and our consciences in order to discover what is moral” but simply does what “feels right.” This is wrong for Goldberg because it ultimately means understanding integrity “only as a firm commitment to one’s own principles—because one’s own principles are the only legitimate principles. The god of a person’s morality is thus not Jehovah but the person.”

Nietzschean Integrity is “empty” only inasmuch as there is no imaginary being running it. It seems to me that a truly empty integrity would be one that was devoid of rules to follow. That is not the case with Nietzschean Integrity. What makes it empty for Goldberg is merely his dislike of its rules . . . No, what is wrong with it for him is not its rules but the rules he believes it will be based on if some entity outside it is not their source. Actually there is no reason a person with Nietzschean Integrity might not “apply reason to nature and (his) conscience in order to discover what is moral” and, as a result become firmly committed to absolutely standard good old George Washington principles—because they lead him to rules of morality that “feel right” to him.

Ultimately, we all must follow the internal moral rules that feel right regardless of where they come from. Everything we do, we do because it feels right. Reason may tell someone that if he sticks his hand in a fire, he will experience pain, but he will accept what it tells him because it feels right. To give just one example of why you should accept my generality that should suffice to clinch my case—which, I suppose, reduces the question to one of simple semantics.

In any case, the real problem for Goldberg (and me) is what I have some up with the brilliant name for of “Stupid Integrity.” And here I bumble into boilerplate I feel bad about repeating but, I fear, is all I have to say about the topic. I claim that one necessarily tries always to maximize his P2P (i.e., his “pleasure-to-pain ratio”), as he at the time believes—I should say, “guesses”—it to be for a length of time dependent on his . . . anthreffec- tiveness, or effectiveness as a human being, which includes but is quite a bit more than his “cerebreffectiveness,” which includes what those less picky about such matters than I would call “intelligence” but is significantly more than. To make it easier to plow through what I will go on to say, though, I will replace “anthreffectiveness” with “intelligence.”

The stupider a person is, the shorter the period of time I’m speaking of will be. Since my greatest defect as a thinker is a need to name just about everything I discuss, I am now going to call this period of time the “ethotactical duration.” It’s a term I’ve come up with on the spot, so probably won’t last long. It’s how long ahead a person plans (in effect, since usually the “planning” will be nothing like formal planning, and won’t even involve what most people think of as thought)—or, to put it more simply, it’s how long a person will take to decide, based on his (conscious or unconscious) moral code, what he will next do. (A “behavratactical duration” is how far ahead a person plans before initiating any behavior.)

Note to Goldberg: please tell your couch that I am not purposely trying to distract my readers from my essentially empty ideas by overloading them with terminology, and that—while I do feel he’s almost as good an influence on my as he is on you, I’d prefer that he not bother me until I’ve finished saying what I want to say here. I should add that if he wants me to continue referring to him in the future, thus improving his chances of immortality by at least 0.62%, he needs to try harder to be my friend.)

To be fastidious to a nauseating extreme, I must say that by “how long ahead a person thinks before making an ethotactical decision about what he will do next,” I actually mean “how long ahead the wide variety of facts, feelings, and who-knows-what-else a person will (in effect) consult before making an ethotactical decision regarding what he will next do.

Now then, while the length of a person’s ethotactical duration has a great deal to do with the intelligence of his moral acts, the width and depth of his moral decisions (i.e., their intelligence) will have significantly more to do with it. Does he just consider the taste of a piece of candy he has been offered, or also its effect on his health and/or its effect on his reputation, and/or its effect on a child with him if you don’t offer it to him and the effect of that on you, and/or its effect on his mood and the effect of that on the poem he is composing . . . and the effect of that on what the world thinks of him in the year 2222?

As you can see, ethotactical intelligence will effect ethotactical duration but also the width of said duration. In the case just described, if the person is concerned only with the taste of the candy bar and the immediate effect of his giving it versus not giving it to the child, he will only be concerned with a duration approximately equal to the time it takes him to eat the candy, or the same length of time (let’s assume) that he will enjoy the child’s enjoyment of the candy if he gives it to the child, or feel guilty about not giving it the child if he eats it but the width of the duration will be greater than it would have been had he only considered how the candy would taste.

(My thanks to Goldberg’s couch for not telling me how clumsily I just expressed myself.)

TO BE CONTINUED (alas)

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Entry 1519 — Thoughts on Morality, Continued

Saturday, July 26th, 2014

When writing about morality yesterday, I puttered on after finishing the part I post in yesterday’s blog entry. That resulted in this:

When I first had my little cluster of ideas, I thought I could describe how what I consider the central innate human drive, the pleasure-to-pain ratio maximization (P2P) drive, leads to a person’s internalized morality (also innate). Further reflection on this was what put me in my null zone. What follows are fragments from the system I thought I could come up with.

To begin with, the P2P drive, as its name, indicates, compels a person to try to maximize his pleasure (or minimize his pain). The “try” is important for he won’t necessarily know what will lead to a maximum pleasure and/or minimum pain. Hence, his attempt may result in the opposite of what he wants.

By maximum pleasure, by the way, I mean anything that causes happiness or diminishes pain, not just wine, women and song, or the like. It is most important to note, too, that I am speaking of a person’s lifetime of pleasure. Hence, heavy, unpleasant physical exercising, or piano-practice, or studying–because of the pleasure the person believes his sacrifices will lead to. The same reasoning holds for minimum pain.

I feel pretty much out of ideas about my subject now–the ones I had didn’t last very long. But I going to try now to add a few thoughts about the innate mechanisms I think most of us have that influence our moral behavior. “Ethiplexes,” I think I’ll call them for now.

Two are the empathy instinct and need for social approbation drive that I’ve already mentioned. It occurred to me that a sub-instinct of the empathy instinct might be the maternal drive, narrowly defined here as a human need to nurture and protect children, infants in particular, and much more developed in most women than in men. But it is definitely present in most men–which is why there is so much more grief when a homicidal lunatic’s victims are children rather than adults. I think it may well be the basis of the nanny-state western nations have turned into. It has something to do with the perception of losers as infants by those with strong maternal drives.

I’m not sure how to discuss this without mortally offending just about everybody. I’ll just add that evidence in support of my contention is the way exploration of space halted once we got to the moon, with almost no complaints. Which reminds me of another drive that is too morally influential in my opinion: the species-preservation drive. It seems like the more people we have in the world, the more horrifying events like the Challenger disaster seem. I suppose the media is part of that.

The social approbation drive is also a conformity drive; an offshoot may be the drive to make others conform, the totalitarian drive. “Do what you’re told” is a leading moral tenet. Because utter conformity wouldn’t work for a species, I believe a few of us have an anti-authoritarian drive. Perhaps most boys (and many fewer girls) have one that weakens as they age.

Yes, I’m really dragging today. Not thinking clearly or deeply. I was hoping I’d get going but it doesn’t look like I will today. Maybe tomorrow.

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Entry 1441 — Can a Stone Feel Pain?

Friday, May 2nd, 2014

Whether or not a stone can feel pain is key question in philosophy although few would recognize as such. I keep coming back to it. The unreflective answer is, “Of course not.” The insane answer is, “Certainly.” The correct answer is, “We have no way of knowing, probably ever.” You see, we only know a stone would have no way of telling us it was in pain, if it ever were. Moreover, even if it did, how could we know it to be in pain rather than signalling that something hit it–without being conscious of pain, as such? It may even experience it as pleasure.

What difference does it make? Well, if one is a liberal suffering from empathophilia, or excessive need to express empathy, one–recognizing that a stone could feel–would forbid one from kicking one. Of course, to those of us not so afflicted, it makes no difference. We recognize that we can mistreat a stone because a stone is not us. And can’t fight back.

There–another dumb entry because I take my vow of a blog entry a day seriously. My computer would be in deep pain if I didn’t, not to mention the Internet. How about someone reading this? Well, I didn’t force him too. Besides, he’s not me. (Note: this last was a joke. My theory of ethics holds that other human beings, and many other creatures, are in most contexts, as almost-us as members of our family. Unless we iz psychopaths.)

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Entry 1377A — Taxonomy Construction, Cont.

Thursday, February 20th, 2014

I left out something important in Entry 1377. (I probably should say that I realized that I just thought of one of important things I left out.) It has to with the helpfulness of showing how one’s taxonomy evolved from earlier ones. For instance, to help show the validity of accepting visual poetry as a class of art that my poetry taxonomy should cover, I go back in history to the earliest (significant) visual poems (in English, since that’s my main focus, although pre-English culture should be investigated (as I have, I maintain, without finding anything useful to my particular project). I’m speaking of the shaped poems of Herbert (and perhaps others). They consist of nothing but words but are importantly visual. Hence, I can argue that the first visual poems (of those I’m concerned with) were too verbal for any reasonable person to call not poems.

From there it seems to me the evolution of visual poetry is clear, with a side trip to France and other more purely verbal poems that are partly or wholly visually presented like Mallarme’s scatter of letters, and Apollinaire’s visual onomatopoeia (letters arranged to suggest rainfall, for instance), then on to more sophisticated visual arrangements of the purely verbal carried out by Cummings. How can anyone argue against his visual poems as not poems? What else can a lineated text doing other things poetry has long done, as well as a few thins visual art has done, but containing nothing but words? And make sense only if their words are taken into consideration? Concrete poetry was much more sophisticated than the work of Cummings, but remained in its purest form entirely verbal. But some of it took on averbal graphic matter (and in my view sometimes stopped being poetry). Combinations of the verbal and the purely graphic were at first no greater a step from what had previously been accepted as visual poetry than Herbert’s shaped poems were from entirely unvisual poems. How could anyone argue that it was not reasonable to call them visual poems?

And so it can be shown, in my view, that the most complexly visual poetry of today has evolved, one small step at a time from Herbert’s shaped poetry, so should be accepted as a kind of poetry.

Posted in Philosophy | 4 Comments »

POETICKS

Category: Philosophy