Chimp Cooks

Here are some of my first attempts at making GIFs.

Understanding People

I used to feel, regardless of whether I agreed with the consensus views about whether people are jerks, assholes, likable, etc., that I could speak with some confidence about what those views might be. Something in the vein of "We say of people like this that they are assholes."

I no longer believe I am capable of this on matters of character. I do not understand the reasons people have for disliking other people as a general matter. Someone can be unlikeable or hard to like without me even knowing this to be the case. If given a reason to dislike the person, I can see it and usually sympathize with it. But I don't see it right off. This is bad. Call it being "out of touch."

Sosa on Dream Skepticism

9. Are Dreams Indistinguishable in a Way That Matters? One need not be a Freudian to believe that dreams have causes, in which case most of us might be picked at random, in a futuristic scenario, and made to dream in a connected, realistic way so that our lives become lengthy dreams. Under that Matrix-like supposition, can I be said to know that I now see a hand? I might of course be dreaming in a maximally realistic way that I see a hand. Could I reason my way out by noting that, since I am wondering whether this is just a dream, therefore I cannot be dreaming? Can I conclude that this must be reality, not a dream, and that I really do see a hand? No, that certainly would not satisfy. If I wonder whether I am one of the dreamers in the first place, my doubt must extend to whether I am really wondering, or only dreaming that I am wondering.

10. Let us step back. Suppose I could now about as easily be dead, having barely escaped a potentially fatal accident. Obviously, I cannot distinguish my being alive from being dead by believing myself alive when alive, and dead when dead. Similarly, I cannot distinguish my being conscious from my being unconscious by attributing to myself consciousness when conscious and unconsciousness when unconscious. But that is no obstacle to my knowing myself to be alive and conscious when alive and conscious. So, perhaps the possibility that we dream is like that of being dead, or unconscious? Even if one could never tell that one suffers such a fate, one can still tell that one does not suffer it when one does not. Why not say the same of dreams?

I guess what Sosa has in mind is the notion that the skepticism starts with a thought about what it is like to be asleep. When one is asleep, one does not, as a matter of fact, realize it (most of the time). Even if one "thinks" about it in the context of the dream, there is no way of ensuring that one is, as Sosa puts it "really wondering" and not just dreaming that one is wondering. And that is the source of the skepticism:

1) If I were asleep, I wouldn't be able to tell I was asleep.
Therefore,
2) I don't know now that I am not asleep.
3) If I don't know that I am not sleeping, then I don't know X.
Therefore,
4) I don't know X.

But thinking about that argument in the context of being unconscious and being dead allows us to see that the first inference isn't a valid one because even though _were_ I asleep, I couldn't accurately judge the matter, so long as I am awake, I can judge just fine. That all seems actually like it might be right, and he's got an interesting point about the asymmetry here in that one does feel one can trust one's judgments about whether one is asleep or awake so long as one is awake.

But then he goes on to say that one cannot accurately think "I am asleep" just as one cannot accurately think "I am not thinking." He does this on the grounds he initiates at the end of 9. If one were asleep, one would not "really" be thinking it, but only dreaming that one was thinking it. Similarly, he thinks, as long as one is "really" thinking "I am awake," it must be true; because if it weren't, it would not be the case that one thought that one was awake.

That seems to push back the argument onto the question of how one can tell if one is "really" thinking that one is awake, or just dreaming that one is thinking one is awake -- which looks like the exact same problem Sosa started with in the first place (namely, of how one can tell the difference between being awake and being asleep). It looks like his claim there is that as long as you are awake, you can tell.

It is hard to see how this doesn't collapse into a kind of regress, because the sleeper could dream that she could tell the difference between being asleep and being awake (even if she couldn't really tell), and further the sleeper could sleep-think "I really think I am awake." But I suppose Sosa might be ready to say that it is okay that you cannot know you can tell that you are awake, as long as you can tell. And there is no danger really in believing this falsely, since even if you were "believing" it in a dream, you wouldn't actually be believing it, but just dreaming that you believe it, and you aren't really responsible for the content of your dreams. So you can't go wrong!

Consider the case of the "lucid" dreamer here to test this. The case requires a revision of Sosa's claim that if you are dreaming, you cannot "really" think you are dreaming. If you can actually be awake in a dream, and not just dream that you are awake in a dream, then you would be responsible for your beliefs. You really could have thoughts and beliefs while you were dreaming. But notice that the cases of "lucid" dreaming are co-extensive with the cases in which you can tell you are dreaming. So if such cases, which Sosa leaves out of his account, are possible, they are also irrelevant from the perspective of epistemological skepticism about dreaming without knowing it.

Heraclitus and Inception

Look at this:
24. "A man in the night kindles a light for himself when his sight is extinguished; living he touches the dead when asleep, when awake he touches the sleeper." -Heraclitus

First, clearly Heidegger is correct to worry that these passages are apparently translated by people who don't understand them.

Second, my book indicates that the word translated as "kindle" is actually the same word as the word translated as "touch." So what the man in darkness does to the light is the same thing as what the sleeping man does to the dead, and, in turn, what the waking man does to the sleeper.

So death "illuminates" the world for the sleeper, and sleep "illuminates" the world for the dead.

So say you want to make a movie about a man who is in denial -- a movie about facing facts. Well, the waking man will find the truths he needs to learn through his dreams. These are the "deeper" truths... the deeper the dream, the deeper the truth. In Inception, the truth he needs to face is the truth about himself/the world that the fact of his wife's death is showing him and this is (superficially) a incidental part of the film. But if Heraclitus is correct, it is qua sleeper that the truth he has to confront is a truth to be learned through thinking about death.

This was a really excellent film, from my perspective, in that these somewhat baroque layers actually did pull me away from myself deeply enough to access something that felt, well, real, in a way that films ordinarily do not do for me. I could feel how intensely alive these people were, how viscerally alive, as they went deeper and deeper, and time got more and more condensed for them as they were swallowed up inside an exploding expansion of a single moment of vulgar everyday time. Each moment spent in this very ancient abandoned city felt stolen, as a result, precious and, perhaps above all, fleeting; isn't this a simulation of the "authentic" experience of time? What would happen each moment if we only paid attention? The essential relationship between death and time -- that fact that in a way the film takes advantage of a "vulgar" conception of time to then be able to replicate cinematically the way that moments _are not moments at all_ but that each requires a death, that each is a death (mortal/vanishing into Time's enormous nought), that _you, being in the moment, will die_.

I mean it cheats itself because _she_ is the one who is dead, so the truth DiCaprio is supposed to learn is not the one that is all around him, the one that we are meant to learn about time or about being alive or whatever through experiencing the structure of the film. There is a pretense that the film's content is separate from its form that is not removed even after we are meant to suspect he is dreaming, which doesn't remove what, on my interpretation, would have to be a mere pretense or denial on his part that his problem with death is a problem about someone else's death. Or maybe it _is_ threatened by that final shot. Maybe we could say he is still "dreaming" only _because_ he _hasn't_ yet realized it is _him_ who is dying at every moment. Dreaming because he hasn't realized that the uncanniness of his time experience is not something separate from the "vulgar" time of waking life; thus, dreaming because he does not know that he is awake (e.g. "people fail to notice what they do when awake, just as they forget what they do while asleep" -Heraclitus 1), that this "dream" in the film is the reality of each moment of waking life.

Christopher Nolan evidently reads some philosophy (The Prestige is based on a common thought experiment in person ontology, The Joker's little pranks are riffs on Trolley Cases), and so I wouldn't put it past him to know something about all of this Heidegger/Nietzsche/Heraclitus. Even if he doesn't, that isn't the point.

I'm not convinced I even understand what Heraclitus is saying in order to then be projecting his or Heidegger's concepts onto the film. But I have found a starting point for understanding the film in Heraclitus/Heidegger, and I thought that it was worth mentioning.

"Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star." - Thoreau

Lactation Lamentation

"Ah, that I were dark and nocturnal! How I would suck at the breasts of light!"

--Z

What's up with that?

Now that John Boehner will become Speaker of the House, I think it is time for a comparison between him and Nancy Pelosi:
1) In neither case is it at all clear to me why these people make good politicians. Neither of them seem to be in the least sincere in anything that they say. Perhaps this kind of public inability to project sincerity is something that comes with being more involved in arranging things behind the scenes.
2) In both cases, they have borderline freakish appearances.

I have speculated on 1 already. Why is 2 the case? Is it just a coincidence that the most fake looking people end up being Speaker of the House?

The lowest moment of W's presidency

Evidently W was deeply troubled by Kanye West saying he doesn't care about black people. He insists this means he is racist.

MATT LAUER: You remember what he said?

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Yes, I do. He called me a racist.

MATT LAUER: Well, what he said, "George Bush doesn't care about black people."

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: That's -- "he's a racist." And I didn't appreciate it then. I don't appreciate it now. It's one thing to say, "I don't appreciate the way he's handled his business." It's another thing to say, "This man's a racist." I resent it, it's not true, and it was one of the most disgusting moments in my Presidency.
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MATT LAUER: This from the book. "Five years later I can barely write those words without feeling disgust." You go on. "I faced a lot of criticism as President. I didn't like hearing people claim that I lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all time low."

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Yeah. I still feel that way as you read those words. I felt 'em when I heard 'em, felt 'em when I wrote 'em and I felt 'em when I'm listening to 'em.

MATT LAUER: You say you told Laura at the time it was the worst moment of your Presidency?

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Yes. My record was strong I felt when it came to race relations and giving people a chance. And-- it was a disgusting moment.

Three points:
1) Is it really okay to be that upset about having been called a racist if you believe that being non-racist is essentially a matter of giving black people a chance? "Try us: you'll like us!" How generous of him.

2) This is the cost of the social phobia about racism. It's plain as day that only a monster would be a racist. From this principle, each of us can easily deduce that we must not be racists. I don't think stigmas like this are the best way to solve these sorts of problems. It's not clear to me whether the stigma against being a racist even has an overall positive effect.

3) Of course, a real leader wouldn't allow himself to fall into feeling guilty in the way W evidently did as a replacement for re-doubling his efforts and so on. To think as W evidently does (and is willing to go around admitting) that what matters most in a situation like Katrina is how a private citizen's remarks might make the president feel is just so childish. "Godfather, godfather, what can I do? -- You can act like a man!" His idea is he wants to go around crying about how somebody called him a name 5 years ago? Maybe it does hurt. Maybe it hurts for a reason. Tell someone who cares (or whose job it is to pretend).


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/02/george-bush-kanye-racist_n_777967.html