Dashed Off XIV

 The hatred of the natural seems often to be a perverted pursuit of infinity.

When we reflect on human violence, we find it to be in some way both natural and alien to us.

We know the world because we border it;
inside and out we border it.

To say that a novelist is only pretending to assert is obvious nonsense; the illocutionary acts all follow the same rules as usual, unless you assume there is no sense of truth that allows being true in a novel. Iris murdoch writing about a character commits to the truth of what she says (except in cases lik deliberately unreliable narrator) for the novel -- although assertion itself does not in fact usually require 'commitment', being often a much weaker act. As novelist, she has the ultimate possession of evidence about the novel she is writing -- although the need for assertion to involve evidence is in any case domain-specific and a norm rather than a need. And Iris Murdoch herself would, I think, hold that there is a sincerity in novel-writing, and if so, rightly -- although sincerity is a felicity condition and not a strict requirement of assertions, anyway. Apparent assertions in a novel are not defective in any way as assertions. In fact, teh opposite is the case: apparent assertions in a novel are *even more properly* assertions, because they are assertions of semi-divine kind: assertions that make the truth, and the evidence, of what is asserted, and compared to which out-of-fiction assertions can only be regarded, at least as assertions, as imperfect (although this is a comparative imperfection and not an imperfection for their kind and context).

Assertions in a novel are often perlocutionarily distinct from similar assertions in similar contexts.

If I make up a babble-language and act as if I were saying things in it, I pretend to assert. If I am putting something on the board of discourse as true, even if only in a persona or a fictional case, I am truly asserting.

the illocutionary act of writing a novel vs the illocutionary act of writing a sentence in a novel

'inter-fictional carry-over'

Truth-in-fiction is truth, in fiction.

admiring Guy Morville vs imagining admiring Guy Morville, vs pretending to admire Guy Morville in make-believe

All our imagination of what we are slips away, and all that is left is what we are.

What is good both is and ought to be treated as good.

A common problem in skeptical arguments is key terms being understood entirely in terms of the skeptic's own imaginative associations with the word; this is easily remediable, and it is often possible to build a skeptical argument that does not err this way. Unfortunately, this error is exactly the kind of error that is invisible to those who commit it.

Characterization is not accumulation of scenes but the sketched and flowing line through them. Characterization is done only by suggesting it, but in different ways suggesting a unified thing.

Worldbuilding is what characters do.

In make-believe, we socialize the world a certain way.

All comedy is based on contingency.

the sense of novelty in inquiry and Descartes on surprise

Every particular story can also be a concrete universal, forming a possible genre-region (a set of imitations), with actual genres arising out of strong overlaps of genre-regions.

Particulars can become concrete universals because of final causation.

mereological fusion as unity that rules out no kind of composition

mereological self-fusion

the courtesy of being treated as punishable

The range of architectonic ends that a human being could possibly have is limited.

1. The probability of any arbitrarily given state going to war against any other arbitrarily given state is quite small. (Qatar is unlikely to go to war against Bolivia.)
2. Two states whose countries do mutually profitable trade are slower to go to war.
3. States that require more steps to go to war are slower to go to war.
4. Since WWII, the United States has enforced peace among its allies, thus increasing the incentive for negotiated conflict resolution.
5. States that are active members of defensive leauges are somewhat less likely to be involved in wars.
--- These five seem to explain all of the so-called 'democratic peace' effect.

Music makes us about things.

In business, the difficulty is often getting the basics right; the flash and fluff, in so many cases, eat up resources while the basics languish.

checklist as one-dimensional memory palace
standard memory palaces as ways of organizing multiple related checklists

Kant on moral progress as a postulate of practical reason // Cohen on messianic community as same

locomotion as change in light-accessibility to other changes (change in communicability by way of light)

Bishops should be very careful not to turn wine into water and bread into stones.

Charity vests other virtues, both acquired and infused, bringing out their inner beauty.

"The most sublime feeling of oneself is the feeling of the harmony between oneself and the rule of the world as a whole, and thereby the highest beauty." Herder

heuristics --> best explanation for why given heuristics are heuristic --> general principles

Even accidental groupings need to be explained in terms of how the accident is possible.

A theory may be valuable for discovery (1) by being strange enough to raise interesting questions, (2) by solving genuine problems, (3) by encouraging and inspiring inquisitive pursuit.

The world is intermingled with our wills; the facts belong both to the tasks and to the performances.

The ethical is borne not merely by the will but also by the reason, and of both we may often speak.

inquiry and the creation of notings-of-facts, or, indeed, facts qua constructs (i.e., truths taken as according to art, truths formed by a means or method into something cognitively useful)

-- For every Turing machine, there is a corresponding Diophantine equation. (Matiyasevuh, Ronbinson, Davis, & Putnam)

"We have come to think of the actual world as one among many possible worlds. We need to repaint that picture. All possible worlds lie within the actual one." Nelson Goodman

Leibniz often equates 'sufficient reason' with 'aggregate of all requisites'.

Everything presuppposes all of its requisites.
Everything that exists has some definition that is instantiated.

"...there is a surface to expressive behavior that may become detached. The child who pretends,t eh actor who portrays, the mime who imitates, and the hypocrite who feigns, all attempt, in different ways, to strip expressive behavior from the character it normally reveals." Alan Tormey

Music is expressive because we can easily express by way of it; indeed, because it is sophisticated and nuanced, it is the most perfectly adapted 'language' of expression.

The expression of others impresses on us.

"Our claims is that, because musical movement can be heard as making sense and because that sense is not determined solely by the composer's intentions, musical movement is sufficiently like the human behaviour which gives rise to emotion-characteristics in appearances that musical movement may give rise to emotion-characteristics in sound." Stephen Davies, "The Expression of Emotion in Music"
"Our point is this: Anything that can wear an expression or have a gait, carriage, or bearing in the way in which a person's behaviour may exhibit those things can present the aspect of an emotion-characteristic in its appearance. Few non-sentient things will be able to meet these requirements, but, amongs those few, music will find a place."

Music is not intrinsicially representational; this is different from saying that no forms of music are used to represent, which is false.

Time (1) defines an ordinal structure that allows description of changes in terms of sequential dependencies and (2) measures the communicability of information about one change to other changes.

Walton's df of props ("Metaphor, Fictionalism, Make-Believe"): 'real-word objects or states of affairs that make propositions true in the make-believe world, i.e., 'fictional'"
-- the fictionality seems an intrusion here; nothing prevents props making factual propositions true in a make-believe world; but perhaps one could say that things can be both factual and fictional

[Noun] was [Adjective], [Noun] [Adjective]
The way was long, the days short.
The moon was bright, the shadows long.
Her face was set, her lips tight.

How reliable a map is depends in part on how you use it.

Saying things badly often interferes with progress in inquiry.

People often say something is 'subjective' when they really mean it is imperfectly determinate, involves gray areas or fuzzy regions, or requires cultivated judgment.

formal institutional facts (cf. Searle's standing declarations) vs instrumental institutional facts

making something X by declaring it X vs making something to be X by declaring X to be

nature tourism and the pursuit of specific expressivities in nature

Utilitarianism errs in not recognizing that huamn happiness has a deontic structure.

People regularly borrow from religious language whenever they want to be very serious, regardless of their own religious views.

signs as the flora of thought in somethng like the way gut bacteria are the flora of digestion

Difficulties often hit us hardest when they ease.

Pr 17:6A and Bellarmine's Note of Temporal Prosperity

One of the greatest strengths of analytic philosophy is how much room it allows for, and how many of its methods facilitate, tinkering with arguments.

Syneidesis vs Sunteresis

 I previously noted the usual idea about how the word synderesis came about: that it was originally syneidesis, and that St. Jerome in his commentary on Ezekiel probably wrote it that way, particularly given that he seems to translate it fairly directly into Latin as conscientia. St. Thomas, however, for philosophical reasons distinguishes synderesis and conscientia, while recognizing that many people don't make a distinction.

However, Sarah Byers has an interesting argument for an alternative view. Her idea is that the original word was actually sunteresis, and synderesis is just an ordinary medieval Latin spelling variant for that. Sunteresis means something like 'safeguarding, protecting, taking care of'. It's not a common version of the Greek word, which is why it's usually not regarded, although the shorter teresis is not too difficult to find. Byers argues, however, that St. Jerome is probably influenced by Origen on this point; we don't have Origen's commentary on Ezekiel, but the fragments we have suggest that he might have made use of Stoic vocabulary, in which sunteresis and its variants are sometimes found. This is fairly tenuous -- although it seems possible -- but if this is the case, then it would mean that St. Thomas's distinction between synderesis and conscientia (syneidesis) might be a return to an older distinction that was lost in other texts. Very interesting, and worth at least considering: synderesis as the natural safeguard or caretaker for the human being and human conscience.

Habitude XXXIII

 To the third one proceeds thus. It seems that gifts of the Holy Spirit are not habitudes. For habitude is a quality remaining in the human being, for it is a difficult-to-change quality [qualitas difficile mobile], as is said in the Categories. But it belongs to Christ that the gifts of the Holy Spirit rest in Him, as is said in Isaiah XI. As is said in John I, On Him whom you see the Spirit descending and remaining on Him, He is who baptizes, of which Gregory, expositing, says, The Holy Spirit comes on all the faithful, but, uniquely, He dwells always in the Mediator.

Further, gifts of the Holy Spirit complete a man inasmuch as he is activated by the Spirit of God, as was said. But inasmuch as a human being is activated by the Spirit of God, he has himself [se habet] somewhat like an instrument with respect to Him. But it is appropriate to an instrument to be completed by not by habitude, but by the principal agent. Therefore the gifts of the Holy Spirit are not habitudes.

Further, the gifts of the Holy Spirit are from divine inspiration, as is the gift of prophecy. But prophecy is not habitude, for the spirit of prophecy is not always present to the prophet, as Gregory says, in Homily I on Ezekiel. Neither, therefore, are the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

But contrariwise is that the Lord said to the disciples, speaking of the Holy Spirit, John XIV, He shall remain with you and be in you. But the Holy Spirit is not in the human being without His gifts.

I reply that it must be said that, as was said, gifts are sorts of completions of the human being by which he is disposed to follow well the instigation of the Holy Spirit. But it is clear from what was said above that moral virtues complete striving impulse inasmuch as it participates in some way reason, to wit, inasmuch as it is born to to be changed through command of reason. In this way, therefore, gifts of the Holy Spirit have themselves [se habent] with respect to the human being in relation to the Holy Spirit, as moral virtues have themselves [se habent] with respect to the striving impulse in relation to reason. Now moral virtues are sorts of habitudes by which striving impulses are disposed to obeying reason promptly. Thus also gifts of the Holy Spirit are are sorts of habitudes by which a human being is completed to for promptly obeying the Holy Spirit.

To the first therefore it must be said that Gregory answers it there, saying that in those gifts without which one is not able to reach life, the Holy Spirit always remains in the chosen, but in others He does not remain. Now the seven gifts are necessary for salvation, as has been said. Thus, regarding them, the Holy Spirit always remains in the holy.

To the second it must be said that the reason proceeds from an instrument that is not for acting but only for being acted upon. But a human being is not such an instrument, but he is activated by the Holy Spirit, who also acts, inasmuch as he has free choice. Thus he needs habitude.

To the third it must be said that prophecy is among the gifts that are for the manifestation of the Spirit, but not for the necessity of salvation. Therefore it is not similar.

[Thomas Aquinas, ST 2-1.68.3. The Latin is here, the Dominican Fathers translation is here.]

I skipped article 2, on the necessity of the Gifts for salvation; it is useful for understanding why they are important, but less so for understanding how they work as habitudes, although, of course, it is relevant to the second and third objections here.

Links of Note

 * The children's books that shaped me, at "The Library Ladder"; a lot of overlap with what I read as a child, although I never come across any of the Hitchcock books.

* Giulia Schirripa, Social groups and classical extensional mereology (PDF)

* Owen Cyclops, Folk Religion and Alt-Christian Cosmology

* Austin Suggs, Augustine's Unusual Theodicy

* A. R. J. Fisher, Making Time: An Ontology of Temporal Fiat Objects (PDF)

* Virginia Karnstein, The Truth about Frankism, discussing the early modern Jewish messianic movement, at "Overlong Memories"

* Venanzio Raspa, Kant and the Debate on Aristotle's Categories in the Nineteenth Century (PDF)

* Matthew Minerd, Monastic Stories as a Method of Ascetical Casuistry, at "To Be a Thomist"

* Emmanuel Rutten, Atomism, Causalism, and the Existence of God (PDF)

* Mark K. Spencer, Taking Polytheism Seriously, reviews Travis Dumsday's Alternative Conceptions of the Spiritual, at "Living with Lady Philosophy"

* Alexandre Declos, Toy stories: a metaphysics of playthings

* Daniel Weidner, Gershom Scholem, at the SEP

The Imaginative Charge of Words

 But even among the synonyms of our own tongue we cannot ignore the imaginative charge of words without being monstrous. You might, for example, be excused for declining an invitation to dinner when the menu that was offered was dead calf with fungus in heated dough, scorched ground tubers, and cabbage stalks, all swilled down with rotten German grape juice, and topped off with the dust of burnt berries in scalding water diluted with the oozings from the udders of a cow. You might well decline such a bill of fare, but you would miss an excellent meal of veal and mushroom pie, roast potatoes and spring greens, chased by a bottle of hock, and finished with a steaming cup of coffee and cream. What's in a name? Just about everything. 

[Paul Roche, "Translator's Preface," Euripides: Ten Plays (Signet, 1998) xvii.]

If I Blame, Be Assur'd I Am Tipsy

 The Modern Tippling Philosophers
by James Hay Beattie

Father Hodge had his pipe and his dram,
And at night, his cloy'd thirst to awaken,
He was served with a rasher of ham,
Which procured him the surname of Bacon.
He has shown that, though logical science
And dry theory oft prove unhandy,
Honest Truth will ne'er set at defiance
Experiment, aided by brandy. 

Des Cartes bore a musket, they tell us,
Ere he wished, or was able, to write,
And was noted among the brave fellows,
Who are bolder to tipple than fight.
Of his system the cause and design
We no more can be pos'd to explain:--
The materia subtilis was wine,
And the vortices whirl'd in his brain. 

Old Hobbes, as his name plainly shows,
At a hob-nob was frequently tried:
That all virtue from selfishness rose
He believ'd, and all laughter from pride.
The truth of his creed he would brag on,
Smoke his pipe, murder Homer, and quaff,
Then staring, as drunk as a dragon,
In the pride of his heart he would laugh. 

Sir Isaac discover'd, it seems,
The nature of colors and light,
In remarking the tremulous beams
That swom on his wandering sight.
Ever sapient, sober though seldom,
From experience attraction he found,
By observing, when no one upheld him,
That his wise head fell souse on the ground. 

As to Berkley's philosophy--he has
Left his poor pupils nought to inherit,
But a swarm of deceitful ideas
Kept like other monsters, in spirit.
Tar-drinkers can't think what's the matter,
That their health does not mend, but decline:
Why, they take but some wine to their water,
He took but some water to wine. 

One Mandeville once, or Man-devil,
(Either name you may give as you please)
By a brain ever brooding on evil,
Hatch'd a monster call'd Fable of Bees,
Vice, said he, aggrandizes a people;
By this light let my conduct be view'd;
I swagger, swear, guzzle, and tipple:
And d----- ye, 'tis all for your good. 

David Hume ate a swinging great dinner,
And grew every day fatter and fatter;
And yet the huge hulk of a sinner
Said there was neither spirit nor matter.
Now there's no sober man in the nation,
Who such nonsense could write, speak, or think:
It follows, by fair demonstration,
That he philosophiz'd in his drink. 

As a smuggler, even Priestley could sin;
Who, in hopes the poor gauger of frightening,
While he fill'd the case-bottles with gin,
Swore he fill'd them with thunder and lightning.
In his cups, (when Locke's laid on the shelf),
Could he speak, he would frankly confess t' ye,
That unable to manage himself,
He puts his whole trust in Necessity. 

If the young in rash folly engage,
How closely continues the evil!
Old Franklin retains, as a sage,
The thirst he acquired when a devil.
That charging drives fire from a phial,
It was natural for him to think,
After finding, from many a trial,
That drought may be kindled by drink. 

A certain high priest could explain,
How the soul is but nerve at the most;
And how Milton had glands in his brain,
That secreted the Paradise Lost.
And sure it is what they deserve,
Of such theories if I aver it,
They are not even dictates of nerve,
But mere muddy suggestions of claret. 

Our Holland Philosophers say,
Gin Is the true philosophical drink,
As it made Doctor Hartley imagine
That to shake is the same as to think.
For, while drunkenness throbb'd in his brain,
The sturdy materialist chose (O fye!)
To believe its vibrations not pain,
But wisdom, and downright philosophy. 

Ye sages, who shine in my verse,
On my labours with gratitude think,
Which condemn not the faults they rehearse,
But impute all your sin to your drink.
In drink, poets, philosophers, mob, err;
Then excuse if my satire e'er nips ye:
When I praise, think me prudent and sober,
If I blame, be assur'd I am tipsy.

James Hay Beattie was the son of the philosopher and poet James Beattie; he was something of an intellectual prodigy but died, around age 22, in 1790. Lots and lots going on here.

Roger Bacon, the Doctor Mirabilis, was a Franciscan (hence 'Father Hodge') who advocated the importance of experience (experimentum) as a form of a knowledge in itself, necessary for all other knowledge. Descartes was indeed a mercenary soldier, although he was probably used as an artillery calculator rather than in any direct fighting; he explained the motion of the body by a subtle fluid (the 'animal spirits', on which Beattie is indirectly punning) and the motion of the cosmos by vortices, little whirling circular motions. 

Hobbes held that laughter was 'sudden glory' arising from a sudden sense of superiority. He also translated Homer, and does indeed seem to have been a smoker. The stanza on Newton alludes both to his work on the refraction of white light into colored light and on gravity (alluding to the old story of the apple). 

Berkeley held that the only things that exist were ideas and minds (spirits), and has a couple of works, including the namesake of this blog, on the medicinal value of tar-water, which he advocated as a substitute for alcohol (and was quite popular for a while as such). Bernard Mandeville, in The Fable of the Bees, famously held that private vices were public benefits; in it, a hive of bees is thriving until they become virtuous, which drives them into poverty. 

David Hume was indeed quite fat (he once broke a sturdy chair just by sitting down too quickly); he doesn't quite say that there was neither spirit nor matter, but he does say that we cannot know the ultimate causes of our impressions; the latter part of his stanza is a parody of his view of induction as based on constant conjunction. Joseph Priestley is most famous today for his experiments in 'dephlogisticated air', i.e., oxygen, but in his own day his work on electricity and simple electrical batteries was often better known; he also held that there was no free will, and that everything was governed by necessary laws of causation.

Benjamin Franklin, the Sage of Philadelphia, well known for his Autobiography discussing his youthful attempts at self-improvement, was as famous then as now for his experiments with electricity; when he was in Britain, he also stayed with Hume and Priestley. David Hartley, a physician and philosopher, held that experience occurred due to vibrations of a subtle ether in the nerves; these vibrations left behind trace-vibrations, 'vibratiuncles', which allowed thinking and memory.

I have no idea who the "certain high priest" is, unfortunately; the description suggests a bishop, but it may, of course, be some kind of pun.

Dashed Off XIII

 The strangest things in the world are stranger the more they are known.

People who think they have reasons to think that A does not exist have ipso facto grounds of resistance to having a relationship with A.

Part of having a relationship is overcoming resistance to the relationship.

Sacrifice does not necessarily prevent self-righteousness, but self-righteousness without sacrifice is extraordinarily contagious.

Retroactive legislation is present causation; it modifies the present's uptake of the past.

memories as re-simulations within a modal tagging structure
memory as enduring self-testimony

While Walton takes pictures to have the function of being props in visual games of make-believe, his actual discussions only really require that they be accessible for such games to give them such use.

We normally distinguish cases of pretendings from (e.g.) watching movies or even acting in plays -- the actor may pretend as part of his approach to acting, and we may pretend in response to it, but these are different.

Few things make people as miserable as utilitarianism.

The rule of law is
(1) a state of law
(2) involving a politically and morally sustainable legal system
(3) in which the laws apply impartially, even to officials,
(4) and enforcement of the law is generally peaceable
(5) and maintained in broad cooperation with the general body of the citizens or subjects,
(6) who are protected from recognized abuses by safeguards.

People often think they are making themselves strong when theya re only making themselves brittle.

persons as principles of classification

"Every perfect thing is threefold." Mahabharata XIV.39.21

"The Father's Intellect said that all things be divided into three." Chaldean Oracles 22

"One who knows Brahman reaches the highest. Satya is Brahman, Jnana is Brahman, Ananta (infinity) is Brahman." Taittiriya Upanishad 21.1

The secular exists because of the sacred that shelters it.

(1) The totality of all contingents is either contingent or necessary.
(2) A given totality of all contingents depends materially on its contingent components.
(3) What depends materially for its existence on what is contingent is not necessary.
(4) As contingent, the totality of all contingents depend efficiently on a cause distinct from itself.
(5) The cause that makes the totality of all contingents a totality must be necessary.
-- All this requires the totality of contingents. Does it require that this be a consistent totality?

Spontaneously coming to exist and coming to exist uncaused are not the same; spontaneity means that the causes are internal in some way to the effect, not wholly external.

Xunzi's criticicisms of the School of Names are broadly teleological: the dialectical paradoxes arise by ignoring the purposes of names/roles/classifications.

Nobility ranks tend to have a kind of sameness the world over, partly by diffusion, but mostly due to the fact that they are historically constrained by the structures of governance, land ownership, and military support.

Christians often err by limiting the ways they can glorify God.

Ens rationis is intellectually needed because attribution is not strictly tied to being an actually or potentially existing thing. It is metaphysically needed for an account of such things because some such attributions are true.

"When everything is made relative to profit-making, all traditions of virtue are dissolved, including that aspect of virtue known as love of country." George Grant

'Reliability' is a term of diachronic assessment.

We conceive before we know we conceive, and believe before we know we believe.

We criticize people for being bad, but criticize them more harshly for being worse; we take it to be the case that people should at least make the effort to be reasonably decent by the standards of their age and land. Part of the difference in harshness, I think, is that we recognize that we ourselves are biased in several ways, and take ourselves to be at least trying to make a reasonable effort in light of what is available to us, and to be doing, with all our efforts, at least as good as people in our land and age can usually be. If we are reasonably honest, we recognize that criticizing people for not being vastly better than others of the time would make us look like hypocrites; it is safer to criticize people for not reaching a basic minimum.

Without the breath of fiction there is no civilization.

Scientific theorizing is filled with fictional makeshifts and crutches, because all inquiry into difficult matters is.

All words that express sensible ideas also express immaterial conceptions.

Everywhere in law that there is legal fiction is a point at which the law is recognizing something beyond itself, which requires that something be fit into the legal account.

The removal of legal fictions from law is often a process of legal solipsizing.

Hume T 3.2.3 as an indirect discussion of juridical personhood in terms of occupation, prescription, accession, and succession; see also 3.2.10. (A weakness of Hume's account of allegiance is that he fails to recognize that 'public interest' itself has to be explained -- what makes there to be a public at all, such that we can attribute the relevant things at all? Allegiance grows up with the development of public interest, not after it.)

It is easiest to motivate oneself by pleasure, but we have motivations not necessarily linked to the pleasant -- e.g., the depressed can motivate themselves for duty or doing good to others even when it is clear that pleasure is out of their reach.

Many philosophers suffer from the intellectual malnutrition of exposure to too few kinds of philosophy.

You should not reason as if you were randomly selected but as if you were caused under specific conditions in a particular context.

We think of infinite series not by successive adding but by sweeping over all possible successive addings of a kind.

A firm is first and foremost an accounting system for a specific purpose in exchange.

The meaning of myth expands outward by suggestion, association, and allegorization.

Pleasures are often different in such a way that pleasures exclude pleasures.

We are given not merely miracles and laws but providential coincidences; that is to say, providence has set up the world so as to provide coincidences and chance events that may provide both windfall and challenge, and remind us of the world and the possibilities beyond our expectation but within our reach.

For much of ethics we need not a template but a method of discovery.

People often feel themselves indebted for the world itself.

LLMs draw texts with rational order from relationships between rationally ordered texts.

the key as symbolic title and title as symbolic key

Every narrative suggests further narratives.

To understand explanations, we embed them in narratives of how they were reached and how they are applied.

We have a reason that draws from our passions. It is precisely this that occasionally leads to conflict.

Holy Scripture is a shared inheritance that must be received as such.

When we look at technological progress closely, it often is much slower than it seems at superficial glance; innovations have to be developed, refined, diffused, usually across many different people and markets. Part of the reason for the difference is that some technologies that are very obvious (e.g., for entertainment) spread more quickly than the rest.

We often have to learn how things resemble each other; that is, resemblances are often not obvious and we need to learn how to recognize them.

We legislate for hypotheticals.

Bayesianism models cognition like stimulus-response models actions; it crudely approximates it with highly restrictive assumptions under limited conditions.

"Our visual perceptions sometimes contradict our tactile perceptions, for example, in teh case of a rod immersed in water, but nobody in his right mind will conclude from this fact that the outer world does not exist." Godel

the hatred of the natural as a recurring pathology of modernity

All loneliness presupposes some form of non-loneliness; loneliness lies in the contrast.