My thoughts on "freedom of speech"

Freedom of speech is such absolute bullshit.

By which I mean the way it is used and the people who use it, not the concept of freedom of speech itself, which I think is noble and essential in our society. What I loathe about it is the way that it's misused in everyday society. To be fair, I suspect 90% of people who fall into this category aren't willingly being so wrong.

To contextualise: if you don't follow me on Twitter today I had a rather interesting conversation with GSK (though I suspect he could characterise the exchange rather differently *rolls eyes*). He was posting what I would consider spoilers - a term which you may or may not agree is applicable in that situation but nevertheless wholly irrelevant to the point I am trying to make (and I will write up a different post on it since my thoughts on the matter of both extensive and time consuming and I simply do not have time to bitch about two things right now), and I was telling him how it was ruining the show for me and asking him to stop.

Anyway, the exchange, where we debate the merits of the appropriateness of the term "spoiler", takes place for several tweets back and forth, and near the end he says: "... then I guess you'll just have to unfollow me. Freedom of speech. If I want to post about the episode, I will. Sorry."

(It occurs to me that this entire post sounds like I'm just bitching about GSK, but I swear it's not. I'm merely setting to scene and will further explicate my initial point further in a short paragraph's time)

He further characterised this, in a blog post: "apparently telling him that an episode of a TV show is amazing and he won't be disappointed is very very bad and he's threatening to block me." In his defense, he realised this wasn't smarted and that he didn't want to "shit around" with me so he deleted it. Apparently I won't be walking his moral highground :P

At this point I'm gonna switch gears to a more abstract mode, rather than harping on about GSK. The problem with how "freedom of speech" is used is that people think it's a legitimate rhetorical device. How often have you debated, particularly on the internet, some kind of issue, and someone just plays the "freedom of speech" card and raises their hands, absolves themselves of the debate, gets up on their high horse and ride's off into the next big debate?

Far too often is the answer.

This is something I've noticed, and I suppose it has to do with the legal system. There's this pervasive belief that the legal system is the epitome of rationality and of rhetoric in general society. Anyone who has any kind of rational brain, anyone who thinks about things with any sense of philosophy would vehemently disagree. The legal system is merely a body which arbitrates decisions. It is far more political and far less pure than we'd think it to be. It is not a basis on which we build the foundations of argument when intercoursing with others.

Let's look at this by way of an example: Hypocrisy. This one's simple. In a courtroom, a man can be sitting there espousing some diatribe about how evil some big company is, and then the opposition's lawyer goes, "Ah! But Mr X, can you explain this?" and going on to present some form of evidence which makes Mr X out to be a giant hypocrite, that he's just as guilty as the company he's witnessing against.

It's interesting isn't it, how this, for some reason, is a valid technique in the courtroom? I suspect it has to do with the accepted idea of Ad Hominem in the courtroom. It is probably the ONLY place that inherently allows one to bring up irrelevant facts to undermine another person's argument.

But one merely needs to think about it. What is inherently wrong with hypocrisy? All it means is that the person does not abide by the code they are suggesting all should live with. It does not mean that the code itself is somehow flawed. If a man is arguing that murder is wrong and it turns out he's a closeted serial killer, does that mean murder is fine? Of course not, it just means the man is just as wrong.

Anyway, hypocrisy is legitimised in the court. And society has leeched it out of the courtroom and started wanking it all over the place, incorporating it into everyday discussion. People begin to think, upon repeated exposure, that it's a valid form of argument. People begin to think of it as a card that they can play. It becomes one of those cliches that I often decry ... they're so blinded by their reliance on his crutch that they start subsuming anything that remotely resembles what it actually represents and just play the card.

So to is it so with freedom of speech. This perhaps is most strongly seen in America, where it's written into the very constitution. It is a legal concept. It is used in very specific legal situations. It is not a be-all and end-all argument. It is not a valid form of argument.

And the problem is when it becomes a collective cliche argument, all sorts of situations become subsumed under it. And this is where today comes into it.

1. Basically I've asked GSK to stop posting these tweets which I find to be a bad thing.
2. He says he won't.
3. I tell him that if he doesn't, then I will have to unfollow him and if he continues to @reply me so that I can *see* the spoilers he's posting then I will block him.

And, bless him, he's come from this and concluded not only the idea that this is a freedom of speech issue because it involves the request for him to stop saying something, AND the idea that I've threatened him.

Let's just unpack this a little bit. Freedom of speech is a very specific concept and used in specific situations. Is it applicable here? Don't be absurd. Of course it's not. This is not a threat because I hold no sway over him. This is not me abusing my authority and forcing him to stop. No one is forcing anyone to do anything.

All that is going on here is that I am making a request that he stop something. If he does not acquiesce then I must do the next best thing and avoid putting myself in a situation where that something can be done to me.

Unfortunately, society becomes so dependent on this "device" of freedom of speech that it blindly just moves anything that involves a request for someone to stop saying something under, and as such, any mentions of consequences get escalated into threat.

And that, quite frankly, is why freedom of speech is complete and utter bullshit.

Experience vs Experience

I've had this mumbling away in my mind for a week now and I feel like I ought to just say my bit and let it be done with. Theoretically this is meant to be a short entry, but may end up not being the case. We shall see, eh?


It's kind of is paradoxical how many paradoxes there are in life. Our very way of life aims to preclude us from falling into logical traps and circular logic and yet in doing so we've established the complex systems of logic that lead one to paradoxes.


The one I want to (briefly) mention is that of Experience and Experience, that the one human commodity that seek about all others is that of the human experience, and the one human commodity that I hate most in life is that of others' experience. I guess it's not much of a paradox since I'm using two meanings. The latter experience being that of the culminate history of someone and then imparted as advice, eg, "In my experience ..." and the former experience being the other, the epiphenomenal subjective character of humanity.

And I hate the latter because is so severely impacts that of the former.

For the individual, their "experience"-as-advice is an inductive generalisation of the events in their lives. Once this advice leaves them and is passed on to another, it becomes an abductive piece of advice. That person's experience-as-phenomena becomes limited, even without conscious engagement with it.

Let me use an example. An obvious one is that of Alzheimer's. How many middled-aged people do you know manage to forget something and then immediately attribute it to Alzheimer's? Once or twice is not that big of a deal, but when it happens a lot, all other symptoms that occur suddenly get subsumed under the same 'brella. It is a kind of confirmation bias.

My biggest gripe with it extends beyond simple things like diseases, but just with the more general process. The most important thing we have as humans is how we experience the world, and why would be not want it to be as pure as it can be? There are no limitations or expectations of how we can experience things, the beauty of it is its indefinitability.

And the other major problem is that it ends up creating a huge mess of things, where we can no longer be certain if people are experiencing the world a certain way because that's the 'pure' reaction or if someone told them something and now they've conformed with that mode of experience.

For a few years now I've tried to live my life guided by principles of a pure experience. That the experience-as-advice is just that, advice that is no more useful than fortune cookies. Something I often say is that I'd much rather be proven wrong and stabbed in the dark alley at night than to be right and never once venture into a dark alley.

My philosophy about money and business and faith in humans all kinds of stems from this as well. At the same time, I don't claim to ever be completely and utterly pure. That, unfortunately, due to the fact that I am apart of this society, can never be the case, as I can never be sure if I think some of the things I do by pureness or by influence. The point is never to consciously let that happen, and thus far I think I've faired quite well :)

Apologies for the mess that this post is, it's really too important for me to fart out here half falling asleep. Perhaps one day I will come back to it and make it better. G'night.

On Money

Over the past two days I've been seriously considering and trying to work through some issues with starting up a t-shirt business. Instead of outsourcing it out to a printing company, I'm thinking that perhaps the best thing to do is to do it myself. The "downside" to this, as you might guess, is that increased capital, since I'd have to purchase a printer (which are, as I gather, fucking expensive).

As part of this, I've been having some good, indepth chats with friends like AJ but also my parents tonight. And I guess a recurring theme that does come into some of the discussion has to do with financial viability and all that. If you know me at all then you'll know I have a rather acerbic taste to all things money. My goal in life is to avoid doing anything 'just for the money' or indeed any of the broader social implications of money, such as the pessimism in people as being greedy, selfish, capitalists out to screw you. It's almost ironic that a country like America which focuses so much on dreams and achieving the impossible and always striving for the next rung on the ladder is also a country in which there is this swathe of defeatism when it comes to money and buckles under a capitalist mentality.

Money is, as a matter of brute fact, unavoidable in our society. But so is death. And both, to me, are orthogonal epiphenomena to living in the lives that we lead. To most other people, however, they are really both indicators of success. Money (or owning a big business, having a good paying job or having a house or anything like that) is seen to be success. Death (or not owning a house, owing money, poor health, just in general poor living) is seen as failure.

Ironically, that heuristic of judgement is applied even to people like me, who actively try to subvert the paradigm and life 'outside the dichotomy'. For instance, if I make a claim such as "we shouldn't worry about money or death, we should only worry about having fun", then the strength of my position is by whether I get money by having fun or I end up being poor/dying by having fun. Is that paradigm so entrenched that it's even applied to the things that actively go against everything it stands for?

I know that each time I tell people that I do think for the pleasure of things, the love of it, I ALWAYS get asked with "but how can you pay rent" or "How will you go anywhere", like those questions are at all relevant to my tenet in the first place! And then I am forced to always qualify my claim with something like "and the money will come". Indeed, sometimes, like a couple of times this past week, it even gets to me, and I look at my life and wonder why I haven't "achieved" anything in the sense society makes of it, in pursuing a life of pleasure and fun and interest and curiosity.

I always comfort myself with the fact that I have faith that in pursuing this path, those things I do not consider important but society does will come.

But why should I have that faith in the first place? My path goes to upturn norms and against everyone trod before.

Is it because I deep down also acknowledge and want these things that I, on the surface, decry? Or, and I think this is far more within my character, I desperately wish to prove people wrong. This implies, of course, that the only way to prove someone wrong on their paradigmatic view is by adhering by their narrow-minded criteria and then to perpetually and ostentatiously flaunt how I ignored the rules.

I don't think there is any way to prove a deeply ingrained belief about reality can be obliterated without adhering to its criteria and destroying it by the rules of its own game. Am I wrong in this?

My other main financial goal, outside of how to actually earn it, is how I use it. And basically, I want to never be in debt, to never have to borrow money and be put into a situation where I am legally bound to payback money (+ interest) in a systematic manner, i.e., a mortgage/loan. (I am aware that I am currently taking out student loans to go to uni, but that hardly counts as the way it's paid back is through tax).

Perhaps it is incredibly naive, and has frequently been called so, but my position is and, as far as I can tell from my current viewpoint, is that I will always purchase things outright with cash. The only time I will buy a house is if I've saved up enough money to purchase one - not enough money to afford a loan that I'll be indebted to for the rest of my life. I personally do feel the entire shares/mortgage/interest side of money to be a fucking joke and superfluous. The fact that they've somehow become so mainstream just boggles me.

And people (those older than me) have told me just how stupid I am for thinking that. That that's not what the "real world" is. And quite frankly, I'd like to think their views are inherently biased. The problem, of course, is that they're invariably almost always speaking in hindsight. And so not only is there the bias of the culminated subjective experience being so salient that it seems objective tot he subject, but the very notion that they need to justify the very positions they are in right now by acknowledging and objectifying the rules and beliefs they've adhered to/held on the long road here.

But as a young person, uninfluenced by these biases, I am come to the conclusion that this entire system is just plain wrong and not for me. I've yet to come across a person who has looked at it from an unrestricted perspective and not come up with a similar position to mine. But so many children are indoctrinated into it from even inside the womb it's difficult for them to change their ways (another bias!).

And to tie it all back to my t-shirt business. This is the very reason I'm trying hard to avoid having any business partners at all. This entire ethos will not be shared by most of them and quote frankly I'd just become a "liability" to them and a thorn in their financial asses. This entire venture is an attempt at trying to break the business model by not being about the money or avoiding bankruptcy or whatever. It's about having fun along the way and basically  want to emphasise that with anyone in the process.

The only way I can do that, however, is I am sturdy at the helm, guiding the entire enterprise.

The other way to read all this, I guess, is that I'm just a power hungry little man, which, again, would not be completely out of my character.

Further more!

... as a  continuation of yesterday's post, a small point I totally neglected to mention ...

If you yourself have a personal distaste for the game, have the balls to admit it yourself. Trying to dress it up as some kind of objective property and failing to do so with any capability just makes you look like a fuckwit.

"Grow up"? Seriously? Fuck off.

Let me set the context for you. At ANU for the next few weeks we have a Humans V Zombies tag-esque game happening across campus, basically involving a whole bunch of people carrying nerf guns and dressing in game-related accoutrement, such as headbands/armbands/capes/team-affliliators and such. For the record, no I am not apart of this game, yes I do know some of the people partaking, yes I do yearn to join.

(And I would've join, had numbers been better. I'd maintained before that numbers of 300-400 people aren't enough for me, and should they ever reach 1000, that's when I'd join up. I do think the idea is neat and potentially very fun, but I would rather do other things at this moment)

So, with this understanding in mind, imagine me coming home from a long day at uni, to see a status update on Facebook that was telling these folks to grow up. Seriously? Fuck off. I should make it clear now that I am not interested in defending them, I'm attacking the sheer stupidity of what was in the status update.

Do you know what's intrinsic to the idea of "oh you're playing with toys and therefore you're childish and need to grow up"? The notion of "Look at me! I'm not playing with toys and therefore am the epitome of mature and have no need to grow up".

And the great irony here is that this isn't all that surprising coming from this individual. Being one of the most superficial people I know, is it any wonder that their lives are arbitrated by even more superficial ideals?

Identity is a state of mind, not the byproduct of the archetypal behaviour. You're not a lad for going out partying, drinking and sexing. You party, drink and sex because you're a lad. You're not an adult for having a job and being condescending. You have a job and are condescending because you're an adult. You're not a child for playing with toys. You play with toys because you're a child.

You carry an umbrella because it's raining. It's not raining because you carry an umbrella. Get the fucking chain of causality right.

It's exactly this kind of attitude that I despise in the nature of adults. That what makes them adults is their behaviour, rather than the other way around. Because when you start thinking like that, you start getting all these ideas of what adults should and shouldn't do, what adults can and can't do, and the entire spectrum of human experience is impoverished.

I have no trouble reconciling the idea of people running around with nerf guns playing tag, wearing capes and carrying flags and being considered mature, responsible adults. Why the fuck do you? [person to whom this is addressed to, though you, in your arrogance, will never read this]

Free will?

I've opined in the past about my love of the semi-consciousness right before one becomes completely lucid from sleep and the crazy thoughts one can have in this state. I've composed many a story and many an essay from these disentangled mess of thoughts. So it should come as no surprise that this morning my thoughts went to tackle the problem of free will in a deterministic universe. (If you're a LOST fan as I am, then perhaps it really is no surprise it was this morning, what with free will being perhaps the most prominent theme of the show and with the final season premiere tomorrow.)

It wouldn't surprise me if every first year philosophy student in pretty much every university around the world will tackle this issue. Not only is it supremely old problem and therefore has an extensive literature for newly matriculated students to peruse, but I find it a useful heuristic to discern the actual philosophy students from those that will never get it. It's really a matter of properly understanding the different arguments that have been proposed and whether or not people can ask meaningful questions of these positions and arguing a point.

Very basically, you've got two sides to metaphysics: Determinists and non-determinists, most people falling into either category or at least leaning towards one pole on a spectrum. Determinism argues that people are merely extensions of the basic laws of physics that govern our universe and therefore one could theoretically, given all the variables, know how another person will behave. Non-determinists, I would define, are those that argue that there are at least some instances in which these physical laws can be defined, for instance, human free will.

Of the determinists you can further dichotomise. Compatibilists  and Incompatibilists. The latter argues that free will and determinism are incompatible and therefore if the universe is determined then free will is but an illusion. Compatibilists, on the other hand, argue they are compatible and most variations of the argument try to change the definition of free will, which escape the initial problem entirely and I've always found to be quite weak.

Given current scientific literature, it seems to indicate quite strongly for a deterministic universe. Advances in physics but also in neuroscience showing how fundamentally our perception of reality and rational thought can be usurped by a handful of damaged neurons (I am talking about, of course, Anosognosia, one of the most interesting conditions I've read about) all push towards determinism.

Anyway, deep in my semi-lucid state, I started thinking about the implications of quantum physics on this deterministic view. Things like the double-slit experiment, in which an electron will randomly pass through one of two slits, also seem to indicate indeterminism. Plenty of attempts to explain away this random behaviour (many worlds theory, for example) and no doubt more attempts to search for some underlying deterministic principle/law that governs where the electrons will go.

Interestingly, there is some correlational evidence to suggest the results of these random generators are heavily skewed to one side given mass global events (such as 9/11), which gives credence to some psychic form of phenomena.

After I had my thought I did a quick and brief search out there to see if there was any kind of theory out there similar to mine and I found some related, but nothing definitive. But then again, it might've been the physics jargon that completely went over my head.

The brain has an immense density of neurons, it's actually quite ridiculous when you read about the numbers. But each one of these neurons is made up of atoms and subatomic particles and even smaller ones (quarks etc). And at this quantum level, things such as spin and movements and such all have some level of randomness.

What if the human free will, or the soul if you will, were able to influence this randomness? If a bunch of electrons and their wave functions all collapse in a certain way then a certain neuron will fire or a certain chemical imbalance is created which then causes the behaviour. At least to me this idea does not seem implausible. What excites me about it is that you are able to retain the notion of a deterministic and scientifically valid universe AND that of free will. (Though I suppose you could argue that my acceptance of the premise of a fundamental randomness already undermines that of determinism. In which case you probably have a good point, and I would ask you to think of this rather as me trying to reconcile a scientific universe and free will)

Thinking of free will as directly acting on the universe will always cause problems (think mind-body problem). But recasting it as an indirect influence ... I think this reconciles the two seemingly opposite notions. Not having this idea would leave one with still the quantum randomness in the brain (and indeed the rest of the body) which indicates that humans were inherently totally random and capricious. At least this way we retain some semblance of a soul and can understand that very strong belief I think we all have of actual free will. That is, it's clear to everyone that they first want to do something and then have the brain chemical reaction which then causes the actions, which contradicts most scientific models that the neuronal impulse occurs which both causes your conscious awareness of it and the action at the same time (which would definitely be an exercise of determinism).

Amazing how in a semi-conscious state I would've thought something like this up. Usually my ideas lack any tangible logic, as far as I can see, this seems to have a logic throughline. Then again, you might argue that it's not amazing at all and I was always going to think this up in that state ...

Let's talk about conspiracy

Don't have much of a goal in mind, just a ramblin' stream...

The other day I was thinking about conspiracy. Don't ask me why. I recalled that once on the AW forums someone, I can't for the life of me remember who, talked about how entertaining notions of conspiracy was indicative of open-mindedness, that you were questioning and not blindly accepting the establishment. I recall distinctly that I repudiated his argument by telling him he was basically saying that you were either a rational conspiracist or a blind sheep listening to the government. Whatever happened to the people who had rationally evaluated conspiracy claims and believed them to be stupid?

On top of that, I also mentioned that conspiracy theories were by definition illogical (or at least irrational). Trying to push them as rational/logical is about the same as a Theist pushing religion as rational/logical. I pointed out that if, in the future, by some miracle, this particular conspiracy was proven to be correct, that the people of the future would not look back at us and at him in particular and "worship" him or give credence to his insight or call his actions logical.

It was my position, and still is, that logic is not predicated on the result and is rather about the process. In the same way I think about discrimination ... A company that has equal proportions of African Americans and Caucasian is not a non-racist community. In fact, I would wager that if they deliberately worked towards some racial quota then race directly entered into the process and therefore making them racist. As long as a company does all it can to give equal opportunity to all races, then as far as I'm concerned, their primary concern in the process is hiring the people most qualified for the job. Now if it should turn out that no African Americans are qualified for the job, then how can we judge the company? So long as the race wasn't the reason for ineligibility and they had equal opportunity to apply ...

In this same way logic is not about the result but is based on the process. If you asked me whether it would rain tomorrow, I could tell you "yes." In situation A I could look at weather charts and make a prediction based on meteorological models. In situation B I could have flipped a coin and said if heads it would rain. Now if it turns out that it did in fact rain, by this person's thinking, in both situations I would have made the logical decision, which is, of course, quite absurd.

So far nothing I've said is really groundbreaking. I'd've thought it quite obvious, but apparently not so to this individual. I got to thinking, however, about why this kind of retro-active result ever entered into our consciousness. I supposed that it had something to do with the stereotypical modern day Capitalism, where the ends justify the means. This kind of thinking became entrenched and, perhaps not coincidentally, the conspiracy theories started to develop at the same time.

In my philosophy course last semester, my lecturer mentioned as an aside one philosopher (again, can't remember) whose major tenet was that conspiracy was based on our own fear that the world does not make sense. That it places an ease on our cognitive load to have a responsible being in charge.

Which of course brought me to God. I don't think it too far of a stretch to put my previous ideas of logic back onto ideas of God. In that if in the future God does come down to Earth and smites Richard Dawkins, I do not believe the people of the future would look back at modern day Christians and call them rational. Atheists in particular aren't going to look back and call our contemporary non-believers (ie, everyone who doesn't spend their lives masturbating over The God Delusion) illogical. Christians aren't going to look back and think our Christians any more or less intelligent than they already did. Surely, the Christians in particular, would look back and acknowledge the unyielding faith of these people?

Reminds me of another philosopher I read in that same course, but this time I remember his name. Foucault. He described the qualitative change in experience over something like an 80 year gap in which public displays of power and authority were supplanted by the panopticon, an ethereal crude 'Big Brother' where people internalised the power of the external world. I remember quite distinctly asking in one of our tutorials about whether this development either was because of or caused a shift away from God as external to God as internal. The move away from the Bible as literal to metaphorical.

He had no answer for me.

And I haver no answer for you.

Purpose of the blog - feedback plz

Right well, before I make this my official statement of purpose about the blog, I'd like to get some feedback from you guys. Most of what is said here has been hinted at in numerous posts throughout the year and a half this been going. Nothing is completely new here, the basic idea was the philosophy behind why I started the blog and why I chose to write it in the style that I chose to write it.

I've waited this long to expound on it in full and at length because I wanted to wait until I had the perfect articulation of it. Never did I imagine that the very kinds of frustrations it was meant to ward off would sneak their devilish heads into my life before I wrote this. Most of the rationale behind taking the blog down so long was so that I could give it some time and word what I want to say in precisely the right way. But it was taking a long time to come so I put the blog back up and make it priority #1 to figure it out, a task that I completed late last night. 2am, brushing my teeth, it all kind of came together. So here it is, my draft.

Lemme just explain how this essay below will be used. Basically, this blog acts as the "professional face" of me on the internet. Not only am I proud of it, but it is something I wish for potential future employers/creative partners/friends/evaluators (as in, for instance, people looking to hand out scholarships) to see and ... perhaps not admire it, but something they can appreciate correctly. So when I link back to this on resumes or application forms or whatever, instead of linking directly to the blog, I'll give them a link to a splash page, where I ask that they read this fully before clicking a button to be linked to my actual blog. Kind of like the Age Verification pages on porn sites.

I will also put up an edited version of it for normal linkage from the blog, so if people happen upon the blog without me linking them to the right place, then there is an opportunity for them to read it as well. Of course I can't ensure EVERYONE's first visit here is on that page, but I've got to try, right?

*** *** ***

Title: "Read this before proceeding"

To Whom It May Concern:

If you have come looking for the blog of Shanan Kan, then you've come to the right place. Of you I would like to ask a boon: To read through the following essay in its entirety before proceeding to the actual blog. If you are reading this right now, then it is because I have given you a special link, a link which I give out only to people who are looking to potentially hire me or perhaps award me a scholarship or basically looking to find out more information about me from looking at the blog. And if your primary interest is in learning a bit more about me then reading this in its entirety will afford you the best possible chance of appreciating me with the appropriate perspective. I apologise for the excessive length for this, but if you are going to wish to read my blog then you will have to acquaint yourself with my logorrheic nature.

Right from its inception in June 2008, I had a very specific philosophy as to the purpose and feel of the blog, I knew the scope of the things I would feel free to discuss and the manner in which I discussed them. This philosophy was fuelled by how I believed society and the fundamental tenets of our experience had changed, particularly under the influence of Twitter, leading to what I believe to be the death of professionalism; that there is no such thing as a "professional image" and a different mode of interaction and being has usurped this outview which had dominated business practice for the past century and particularly exponentiated with the advent of the internet.

One of my major personal beliefs is that you live your life as if it were in the world that ought. This means, of course, that when I write this blog I am writing from a frame of mind where I believe I exist outside of the professional-unprofessional binary paradigm. Throughout history there have been individuals living their lives as if the qualitative shift in experience was universal. Over time these people may have been thought ludicrous or onto the wrong thing entirely, whilst others have helped usher in and accommodated the masses to this change. That's social Darwinism at it's finest. But the point is that someone has to do it.

Unfortunately, when dealing with people from archaic industries locked into one perspective and blind to any and all qualitative shifts. Businesses have collapsed based on this blindness and it is only too evident in our age, an age where changes to the landscape happen at an accelerating rate. A blog, such as this one, where the author oftentimes expresses controversial views, is hyperbolic in rhetoric, uses frequently ambiguous phrasing, sometimes makes an inappropriate joke, has a sharp tongue and a sometimes sly sarcasm, and perhaps above all has a love of language from its empyreal orotundity to its "uneducated palette", that is, expletives, is putting itself out there to be sniped by these anachronous individuals. They are unable to comprehend anyone who would want such an "unprofessional" blog as their professional face, to them this is something shameful and to be hidden and the only situation in which its contents are made public are by some journalist trying to end the career of its author.

This cognitive schism really harkens back to one of my favourite quotes from the inimitable Oscar Wilde, "A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world." If you choose to live by the sunlight you see then you will be mocked from those in the shadows.

Though I have always known such people to exist who will so wilfully misrepresent this blog and what it stands for, this was made grimly salient to me when I was accused of harbouring malice and hatred for a community of people that I mentioned here. In actual fact I had mentioned quite extensively how much unending adoration I had for the community and its members and how much it has shaped me to be the person I am today. This person who claimed this wasn't even a member of the community, though when reported to leaders in this group I was ousted and made to be a villain, they explicitly made the claim that this blog was like some secret diary that now everyone knew, when I had spent months ensuring it was on the first results page when you Googled my name.

At any rate, I extirpated my presence from that situation and group. The only real losers of that incident were the members of that community, for I was a positive and consequential influence over its members. Though they all remain my good friends, I am saddened that such a misunderstanding took place. In fact, when I told some of the individuals the circumstance in which I left they started to cry.

From this it became clear that I had to do all in my power to maintain the integrity of the project of this blog whilst ensuring my utmost to prevent such a situation like that from developing again. Hence this essay and my hope that anyone wishing to use my blog as a means of getting to know me to have read it fully. People who already know me will understand and contextualise the blog; those who don't run the risk of egregious miscomprehension.

I've maintained for some time that I've held this philosophy, that my ultimate goal with this blog had always been indifferent to the professional/unprofessional paradigm, since its birth. Perhaps you may think that this is me trying to spin things, that I was caught with my pants down and this is all some ludicrous excuse. And if you think this already then there's nothing I can do to convince you otherwise - you have an inherent bias against me. I can assure you that I have little to no interest in working for individuals who wilfully distort reality to suit their own blindspots, so you may as well stop reading now and leave.

The truth about why I've never fully explicated all this before (though I have hinted at numerous times) is because I had yet to fully articulate precisely what my views were. And for an essay whose purpose was to dispel the ambiguities, I had to be certain with what I wanted to say. It is unfortunate that such an incident is what was the spark for this letter, but I realise now it is necessary.

If you are still reading thus far, haven't been too bored or put off, then I will ask you to keep reading. This entire essay serves two purposes, number one is to properly introduce you to me and the way I write so you appreciate my blog appropriately, and number two it serves as a means to display what I believe to be some philosophical insights as well as the articulation and rhetoric with which I express it. This can only earn more brownie points towards whatever you are evaluating me for. The latter half of this essay explains some of the claims I made in the first section, most prominently notion that the fundemental way we experience the world has changed with services like Twitter and the death of professionalism.

It may be considered a bold claim Twitter could have such a universal affect. Afterall a large number of people still mock the idea of Twitter, they scoff at its users and ask, "What's the point?" I've said it many times before (though you wouldn't possibly know as you've yet to read my blog) that this is an inappropriate question to ask when it comes to Twitter. It is the same kind of inappropriateness that I believe the charge of "this is unprofessional" against this blog is.

It is the exact same inappropriateness Walter Benjamin describes in his famous essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, when he notes how when looking at a photograph, it is absurd to ask "Can I see the original?" There is no "original" of a photograph, they are all exactly the same. One can only imagine what he would have said about contemporary technology, the age of digital reproduction, where you can literally make thousands of copies of the same digital image in seconds, or to delete them without a single concern.

The best hallmark that there has been a breakway in thinking is when a technological development occurs where one of the guiding tenets of philosophy before it is rendered void. So for the age of technical reproduction, when there was only a singular original painting/sculpture/object and potential forgeries, this concept of originality became irrelevant in the face of the photograph. There were people who spoke out against Benjamin, who didn't see the gamechanging principles of the photograph, who were blind to how the art world was fundamentally shifted. But look at society now, we took the notion and ran with it, exhiling originality even more in our digital age.

I propose that the same kind of process has occured with Twitter's introduction. There is no utilitarian "point" to Twitter, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing because Twitter has never aimed to be pointful. Indeed, I would argue that the shift Twitter gives us isn't a move forward: It's a move back.

Think of your real world interactions, when you go on a lunchbreak with a co-worker, for instance. Think of how you're dressed .... What is the point of having worn the red argyle socks today? What is the point of the story you're telling right now? What is the point of you having sat on the left? What is the point of you crossing your legs? What is the point of your index finger to be spaced from the other fingers slightly more than the rest of them?

These questions are all ludicrous and unanswerable. Our real world interactions with other people are not bogged down by these Draconian demands of having meaning. There's no reason to why I crossed my legs at lunch today, I just did. Humans do not naturally have business, goal-orienteded interactions, despite how hard we try.

This harks back to something Stephen Fry said recently at the 140 Conference in London, 2009. To paraphrase, his insight was all in the name of the service: It is Twitter. It isn't ContentBroadcaster or GetFeedback or any other banal, functional and rational description. It a service that is designed to let it's users "babble inconsequentially." It's not made for businesses, it's not made to make money (there's a reason Twitter has yet to earn a single dollar in revenue), it's not made for politicians or celebrities. That's not to say that these people can't use Twitter, they can and they do, but it's important to note that's not why it was created.

Twitter was made by people for people.

If you use Twitter, and you "get it", then you realise that you form emotional relationships with these people. That's not to say you form deep and meaningful ones, but what you do form is a basic human relationship, one that isn't driven by function or benefits or money or purpose.

(I keep saying Twitter as if Twitter completely pioneered this fundamental shift, but that is a little misleading. Inklings of the notion, the yearning to go back to a human, emotional relationship between users on the internet really can first be seen in the Web2.0 or social media. Twitter is just the widest and most mainstream and fully embodies this philosophy.)

One need only look at the services of the past to really realise how much of a stark change this is. Less than 10 years ago, the web could be split into two categories, the authorities who created sources of information and the people who consumed it. Slowly this morphed into everyone by and large being some kind of content producer, either by comic, or indeed writing blogs, making videos, editing Wikipedia. Look at the websites of the professionals; celebrities and politicians all had websites with an entire staff of people dedicated to its maintenance and content producing. People who ran personal websites basically had to think 2, 3, or 6 times before posting anything onto the internet.

But this kind of thinking wasn't limited to just the internet. Even further back, celebrities had no way of handling the media. The newspapers and tabloids were the authority. Once a story broke about you, there was very little you could do to rectify the situation.

This is where my entire point of the death of professionalism is rooted. Somewhere in our history, probably during the first newspapers, people who were talked about by these journalists had to keep a professional or public image. This is an entity that is dicvorced from the person themselves. It didn't matter what difference between the image and the actual person was. One great example is of the concept of closeted homosexuals working in Hollywood, who had to keep their private lives totally and completely secret to protect this image. People came to know and adore this image.

Over time this concept of the image or brand or professional face grew further and further apart from the actual person. This kind of thinking carried over into the development of the internet and modern business practices. If someone is outed for immoral behaviour, there is this expectation that they either resign or their company dismiss them, else they tarnish the image of the company.

Along comes the internet then, and suddenly people didn't have to be a celebrity to have a professional image. Anyone and everyone, as they got more and more tools to be content producers on the internet, had to start watching the things they said and how they said it. It's become common practice for business to Google potential employees and see what footprint they have left.

This is all in the name of professionalism, to protect the image you create as that is what customers come to know. This is the guiding principle of business practice and the internet, that there is You, the person, and you the image and You should never leak into you.

Earlier I rather at length described how Twitter was different from traditional communicative tools, for it connect people at an emotional, at a human level. What does this mean for the existing dichotomy between the individual and their public image? Connecting in this human way bypasses directly the entire concept of the public image.

This brand that you once created was a separate entity entirely, a specious ghost of a person. As such, one could argue that in forming this image is the sum of its parts. So if you look at all the tweets and blog posts of an individual, with enough expletives or controversial views or offensive jokes, that image becomes less and less sterling.

But if you connect with someone at an emotional level, you are connecting with them as a person. Humans are, I have long argued, beings with infinite capacity. They are, to take the Gestaltian approach, greater than the sum of their parts. It is the classic problem of the philosophical zombie - if you took a zombie, made it look exactly like you and to have all the memories of you, would you say that that person had sentient thought? Would you say that they were you? Of course not. They lack that essential quidditas that makes you who you are. This missing component is indefinable for it lacks any grounding in science or rational thought, its place is in the realm of the emotional which isn't, and with any hope never will be explainable.

Therefore, whilst one can take the approach of definitively concluding a causal relation between the parts (Tweets, blog posts etc) and the professional image, there is not such concision relation with the person. The former is a fully rational, business and goal-oriented activity. The latter is fundamentally about making an evaluation about a person, so it would work in the same way you make evaluations about who is or isn't your friend: It becomes an emotional, human activity.

The death of professionalism, it can then be said, is the claim that because Twitter connects people at an emotional level, it completely skips the public image or brand. One is absolved of their dependence of monitoring their posts with the stringent level of paranoia that was once necessary.

Ergo, in conclusion, I argue that this blog follows on from the lead of Twitter. The entire paradigm of professionalism, like pointedness, is not the concern for Twitter as well as blogs any longer. This is the perspective from which I write this blog and my posts. I am connecting to my readers, who may be good friends of mine or total strangers, at an emotional, human level. That is why I am so open, that is why I feel free to discuss the things I do. I do not expect people to read a single post, or a single paragraph, or a single line, or a single word and claim that my professional reputation is tarnished without taking it all into context. (I do not expect people to read the blog in its entirety, which would be an absurd demand, but people to not treat every statement as contributing to my professional image, an entity that the blog is trying very hard to bypass completely.)

It was never my intention of insisting that people necessarily agree with my views and opinions on how this blog is unanswerable to questions of professionalism or how Twitter has fundamentally shifted our basic understandings of business practice. It most certainly could be the case that having after read this entire essay, you go on to read entries in my blog and begin to abhor me or feel that my addition to your business (or recipient of your scholarship) may tarnish your professional image. And I certainly would not begrudge you that. However, the important thing is that you will have read this letter and you will have some modicum of understanding, though perhaps not sharing, of my philosophical outview.

But I would much prefer that you decide not to hire me or award me for the right reasons, rather than having jumped straight into my blog and formed a whole array of ignorant assumptions. That is the purpose of this essay and I can only express gratitude and sympathy for you for having read all this.

Below are two choices, either you decide to jump into the deep and wade the mangrove of my blog, or you may leave. Either way, I trust you are making an informed decision.

Regards,

Shanan Kan

Yes, I would like to visit Shanan Kan's blog!

or

No, I would prefer to keep my head in the sand.

*** *** ***

Well there you go, the letter fully typed out. The kind of feedback I'm looking for is obviously related to content and whether or not you agree with the views I expressed. Interesting to see what you all think, I suspect several of you already could've guessed based on previous writings that this is how I've felt. Other issues are obviously spelling and grammar or logical holes or when I seem to start rambling, which I think I may do in the 2nd half. The first half I was quite lucide and awake for, now I've got a slight headache.

Phew, that was a lot to get off my chest and mind. Glad I've finally articulated it. Perhaps Mother can stop hassling me and my language on this blog :D

Does Irrationality Exist?

Quite thought, something my psych lecturer mentioned had a profound effect on me. He mentioned that no one ever considers themselves to be irrational. It's something that does have a lot of truth to it, when people make what would be considered an irrational decision, in hindsight they very rarely ever say "yeah I was just being irrational". If anything, they try to rationalise it away, either to do with the situation or something else affecting their judgement. It even has a lot of empirical psychological evidence supporting this idea.

So let's stop and consider this for a moment. Let's not presuppose that there is such a thing as irrationality. If no one on the planet considers themselves irrational, where the fuck do we all get off thinking there is such a thing, that people do act irrationally?

I mean I don't want to jump into moral relativism here. But I do think it is an important point. I mean it's akin to everyone on the planet believing and prescribing to an understanding that humans have three legs. We would learn it in school and in every day life, there are platitudes in the languages involving this third leg. Yet no one really believes that they themselves have three legs, but maintain the other person does.

Am I the only person who thinks there's something really screwed up in that situation?

The New House

Sorry about the bloggy absence, headed back to Goulburn and we'd just recently moved houses. Telstra, being the gracious company they are, managed to completely screw me over with internet. For one thing, instead of being a speedy transfer of service, they had to wait 3 days AFTER my phone had been set up. Furthermore, I then got an e-mail telling me that my service had been connected and usable on the 29th, but was not, and could not even change my plan online as my moving order was pending, despite the e-mail. Then I got earlier this afternoon, but I still cannot change my plan. @BigPondTeam over twitter was able to tell me that my serivce would officially start on the 1st and I would be able to change my plan. If I can't then there'll be another terse call I'll have to make, and if that can't be resolved then I just won't pay the full price, eventually writing a letter of complaint.

So, the new house my parents have moved to. It's pretty much exactly the same layout with our old house, a few things rearranged and a tiny bit smaller. The movers even remarked how simple the move was as they didn't need to ask where the furniture went: each piece went into their respective rooms.

Once I did make it to Goulburn I noticed something rather stunning. Despite living in the other house for a year and a half, it had not once felt "home-y" to me. There was no familial presence. It just seemed like temporary furniture in a temporary house, even more depraved than the furnishings of a student's sharehouse.

Yet despite the complete and total similarity of the layout of the house, the first thing I thought when I walked in was "this feels like a home." The same old furniture arranged in the same old way. Thus I started looking for what could account for this disparity in feeling... The colour scheme, the old house had an ugly beige and pink scheme, this one has a nice grey and pale blue. It goes with our furniture more.

It could be the old house was just visibly aged, with a dying carpet and worn out walls. The carpets look relatively clean here. It could be that the 2 photos of me my parents have adored the walls with have just done enough to add that homely feel. It could even just be the fact that everything feels a teensy bit smaller that makes it cosy that makes me feel like I'm in a home.

Of course, this all speaks to the seeming capriciousness of something as fleeting as an intuition and that gluttonous rationality that had to try and find a reason, a cause for it. Everything must have a cause, we are in a cause and effect universe afterall right? If you've read this blog long enough you'll realise that this is something I detest with the most stringent of loathings. Not everything has a cause, and trying to enforce a cause-effect dichotomy onto everything we see is just to misconstrue the world. Sometimes things aren't just that simple; to give cause is to simplify. Sometimes things shouldn't be that simple. Some things are just infinitely complex and no amount of rationality can account for anything beyond rationalisation.

I Hate Cliches

If you've been a long time follower of this blog, or even if you've recently joined the esteemed ranks of the reades, you'll've no doubt realised that a lot of things annoy me. I'm an easily irritable person. My days have been reduced down to an array of rant-inspiring, blood boiling, fury inciting stupidities. I may have writtent about the subject of today's rant before, but I can't remember any definitive post to link back to, so I'll pretend like I've never written about it.

Cliches. Platitudes.

Naturally I'm not opposed to cliches in and of themselves, so long as they serve a higher, meta-non-cliche purpose. So I may use a cliche in order to bring about a situation which isn't cliche, which is interesting, scintillating and fun. But using cliches in order to bring about a cliched situation?

And I'm not on just about people who use cliches in everyday speech. I mean I've been guilty of using them from time to time - one can hardly expect everyone to utter utterances which are universally unique ubiquitously. But cliched arguments are unforgivable. Perhaps this is my own personal philosophies on debating/argument coming through, but my discourse has never been an instrument of truth finding. Or of policy making. Or really any to any functional goal-oriented end.

Which is definitely my own personal philosophy, nothing ought to be treated as a means to an end. If we take this to be true then it becomes clear that the fundamental principle guiding arguments and debates ought to be pleasure and interest. This is what makes cliches so fundamentally ugly. They are the very inverse of what our human experience ought to be.

The situation which primed this rant serves as a perfect example. Recall from my last post that Freedomf came back with a flurry of posts. My response was to tell her to move into a nursing home and alluded to her needing incontinence pads.

QRM instantly responded with something alone the lines of "we shouldn't make fun of someone just because they disagree". This isn't the first time this has happened. It seems that any time anyone makes any kind of comment which could be construed as a personal attack, QRM makes the immediate assumption that it must be a personal attack AND that it must be because they disagreed.

Each and every time I've had to step in and methodically and slowly justify the comment to her and that her platitude of "we shouldn't make fun of someone just because they disagree" is totally untenable. I know this is a massive generalisation, but for the most part, people to whom she allays these cliches are young, and on the internet, a lot of 'young' people can be classified as liberals in a sense. This openness to ideas is definitionally characteristic of liberal thinking. These people are going to be quite sensitive to arguments which result in ad hominem or just name-calling. It's ludicrous to expect them to not be able to see it in themselves, and that they'd need someone to step in, say this one cliche and then walk out of the room as if doing the world a big fucking favour.

Digigurl is a prime culprit of this. Apparently so is some cunt called Snowkupp or something (can't be bothered opening forums has my internet has been shaped and the extra bandwidth would tax everything else I have going) who brought in the "Where's the first ammendment" question. Apart from thatbeing totally irrelevant, it's also a cliche as well.

And so I'm frustrated. What exactly is going on in the minds of these people? How can they actually just see stimuli that can be construed as name-calling and then immediately jump to that conclusion?? Is it that they're not actually reading anything else in the post or in the thread to give it context? Is it they do, but their sense of justice is so strong that it overrides their other faculties???

The thing is, these people come charging in as Knights of the Moral Standard from the Realm of the Moral Highground, lobbing these pellets of what they consider wisdom at the unruly moral underclass, bespeaks a bizarre sense of superiority. How can you be self-satisfied with yourself for saying something that is wholesomely cliched? Do they seriously think what they have to say is warranted, wanted, wise, smart, interesting, insightful? Do they seriously think the people making these comments they're critiquing haven't considered these and already come up with reasons why they don't hold?

Worst of all it shows a intrinsic lack of respect on their part. I consider myself both a smart and interesting person (the degree of which we can sit here all day (cliche?) debating, but I do believe most people would agree I am to some degree). By telling me that I shouldn't "make fun of others just because they disagree" they are denying both those traits. If I am truly disarmed by such a cliche then I cannot be interested nor smart.

In that same way I refuse to belief Freedomf is a troll, unlike Ferr's conclusion. If she was a troll that just wouldn't be interesting enough. I think she is just that stupid. I think she is just that ignorant and I think she is just as inarticulate. Now this isn't based on any empirical evidence (I have been told she acts similarly in real life), rather if she is actually this stupid then she is unique in my worldview. She exists outside the realm of what I consider humanly stupid. This also makes her interesting. I am much more satisfied with my world with her rocking my worldview than trying to subsume her under some uninteresting category.

Beyond that, in using cliches we also learn that these people are unable to form thoughts of their own. Most cliches (ie argumentative cliches), especially those thrown out during moral debates, are things parents say, the TV says, mentioend in the media. If you just gave it some thought you'd realise they were fundamentally flawed and thus not use it. By using it you prove you have not given it any thought, nor have you considered my discussion worthy of giving any thought. This coupled with my earlier argument that they're not even relevant most of the time, shows you're just not giving any thought to anything.

This is why I'm sometimes so grateful to have someone like SW Chris. It's become increasingly apparent that he and I differ in opinion on just about everything, but we're able to have totally polite, articulate, comprehensive and interesting debates about it. He is, for the most part, able to avoid cliches. A lot of the people in my life avoid these as well. Now that I think about it, it may be one of the criteria I've made unconsciously about who can and can't be one of my friends.

Eugh. Rant done. I'm tired. Good night :)

Two things that pissed me off

Title says it all. Two things pissed me off this week. I guess in the same way that I was turned off at any talk of morality. Exccept not as strong ... That one was just losing interest in the conversation. These two encroached upon and defied my personal philosophies, leading me to disrespect the individuals who gave it. Not that I disrespect people for the sole reason of defying my personal beliefs. This is more a case of these particular beliefs carry a very specific clause and renders any people who disagree with me a moron.

First, the trespassing statements in question. There was a presentation given earlier this week and this particular individual was quoting someone else. This is what was said:

Moron: "And [this man] called them *finger quotes* "Distinct Knowledges". *finger quotes*"
Me: *mental groan*
Moron: *for some fucking bizarre reason deciding to qualify themselves* "I was just quoting him so that's his, not my, bad grammar."

Firstly, you made it fucking clear you were quoting the man with your stupid finger quotes. We're not mentally impaired. We understand what *finger quotes* means - no need to translate for us, bitch. Secondly, the very fact that you feel the need to tell yourself this is indicative that you have the wrong idea about grammar.  Thirdly, the "bad grammar" as you caled it, was a name of a construct he'd just created. It's widely accepted that when coining things, ie taking a everyday word and capitalising the first letter, one has free reign as to its grammatical use. Open a fucking book and you're realise this.

Finally, even if he wasn't coining a term, there is nothing wrong with appending an s to 'knowledge'. Language, particularly english, invites generativity. Syntaxes and Grammars are not laws. They have no ontological or normative value. They are merely empirical and inductive summaries of language use to that point in time. And while I don't accept ignorant and outright refusal to acknowledge these rules, you have to realise deliberate misuse and change in language is fine. Fine's too weak of a word. It ought to be encouraged.

People should be verbing nouns. (see what I did there??). I do it all the time in my everyday speech. There's that sketch by Rowan Atkinson ... Sir Marcus Browning MP ... "Purposelessnesslessnessless!" That's a perfectly acceptable word, as far as I'm concerned. This pedantic, Ceberian vanguard surrounding language is fucking insane.

And petty. Mostly stupid, though. And you, madam in my tute, fall into all three categories.

Now the second Shananian anecdote. Another problem in my philosophy tute. Like I've said, we've recently been discussing the effect of technology on human experience. Thus it is inevitable that we would discuss computers, particularly online relationships .. and whether "social networking" counted as networking.

Now some cunts in the room said that online communication alienates us. That the only form of meaningful contact is face-to-face. That social networking sites are ironically not social at all.

Fuck off.

This harkens back to something I've been harping on and on about for ages now. That there have been fundamental, paradigms shifts. Our understanding and experience of certain phenomena has changed.

In this case how we define "social interaction" has changed. The face-to-face, real world stipulation has been removed. At a phenomenological level, we no longer use this dated construct in our behaviour. Thus this archaic notion that communication via the internet is somehow not part of the social realm or the real world no longer fits. To act otherwise is to force an irrelevant law over something that is very distinct. Anything you do online with another person now COUNTS AS a real world interaction. It's not just a quantitative difference .. "a faster, better, electronic" translation of a real world interaction, but something quanlitatively different.

It's the same with Twitter. People who dismiss Twitter as meaningless are idiots. They clearly don't understand how Twitter has changed things. Twitter quite deliberately isn't meant to be meaningful. It doesn't need to be meaningful to be good. Meaningfulness is now no longer a relevant measure of the goodness of an online interaction. Nor should it ever have been. That is the power of Twitter.

Again, this is all rehasing things I've said in the past. But these are the thoughts going through my mind and are thusly articulated here. All the things I wanted to say in my tutes today or the other day, but never got the chance to, instead I was left to tempestuously fume mentally.

This, like my last post, was supposed to be a dot point list. In particular this was supposed to be 2 lines. Somehow it expanded to this expounding :P

Reification of Experience

One of the major things we've started looking at in my film as philosophy course is how much our experience of the world, our subjective, experiential substance, is a product of the world we live in. Looking at the works of Heidegger, the Humanist Marxists, Debord, Focault, even an Aesthete like Benjamin, all these people who explore the notion that our experience can be fundamentally changed by the world. It goes against the idea, and I believe to be a widely prevelant assumption that the human experience doesn't fundamentally change over time. That the ideas and concepts come and go, but at the very core, the experience we have now is of the same qualitative essence as those of people 100 years ago, even 1000 years back.

To use a Lukacsian term, it's the reification of experience. We assume the way we experience things now to be how all humans, past, present and future, experience things. It's probably important to note here that I'm not arguing a skeptical argument, though one could potentially go that road.

Funnily, I find that I've mentioned similar ideas in the past, particularly when looking at things like Twitter and the internet and how I believe they've changed the way things work. Of course, I didn't know then the ideas I was looking at was so similar to these ideas. This notion of epochs between modernity and post-modernity, when such fundamental change occured in a technical, worldly thing that could then impact the very way we experience the world and relate to it, others and ourselves.

By way of example, Focault in his Panoptic chapter in Discipline and Punish talks about how the very notion and function and execution of power had qualitative changed in a short period of just 80 years. And with that change, the very fabric of our experience was unknotted and restitched into a new pattern. In a similar way, I guess my (primitive, thus far) arguments go along the line of the very way we communicate and relate to others has changed in the advent of the internet and particularly web 2.0, which and then fundamentally changed things.

But of course it's always hard to try to extract oneself (and to decide whether one ought to extract oneself) from the world for a bit and notice how we are moving into a new epoch when it's actually happening. And there's another side of the reification of experience - we assume our very experience doesn't change over lifetime. We may adopt different philosophies and we may learn new things and new skills that may change our cognito-perception, but we assume the underlying experience stays constant.

Reification of experience ... probably best seen when we look at works of fiction. Either books, movies, whatever type of adaptation in societies that are not our current ones. Characters are always relateable and do, in one way or another, act the same way we do ... and by "act" I mean they experience the world the same way we do.  All we've done, as authors and creators is stick ourselves into those times.

Which is an inherent flaw in stories. Not that I'm saying we ought not to enjoy them - indeed the reason we can enjoy them is because the experience presented there is of our own.

It's the same thing as when we make stories about animals or aliens. We can only imagine being them through the eyes of being a human. And ultimately we have to in order to translate it for the masses. Thomas Nagel argues this in his essay What is it Like to be a Bat? which I think is one of the best written essays I've ever read. We can't possibly imagine what having sonar senses would be like. Only what would it be like for a human to have sonar. We can't imagine what it is like to be able to fly, only what it would be like if a human could fly.

I submit that in that very same way, we instrinsically cannot imagine what it would be like to experience life as a person outside of our own time. It is a type of problem of other minds in this case.. but I don't think I've ever heard it articulated in quite this way.

Yet of course we all do engage in reification. Why? Any number of reasons, I'm sure one could argue that we can't make sense of the world unless we presuppose that is how everyone would experience it. A kind of Kantian, transcendental argument. A more fundamental we want to think we have some sort of grasp on the world.

The prevailing conclusion all the philosophers I listed earlier, particularly Heidegger is that this digestive philosophy, our obsession with the rational, is just a fad. It is just part of one epoch and will eventually lose importance. Which sounds absurd. Guess in many ways another sign of that kind of reification. Which I guess is why Heidegger argues rationality is so destructive, it's self-propogating and sucks us further into a vortex and we may find it very difficult to get out of.

Many of this echoes back to the Death of Logic thing I've wanted to write, if I ever were to write a philosophical and extended book. That would totally be my thing. Something that builds of a base of these kinds of ideas I've been toying with this past week.

Can we shout, therefore, that what I'm thinking now, how I'm feeling is just a byproduct of this? Am I wrong to claim that humans have always indulged in the reification of experience? Or is that claim subsequent to my own experience??

To these I yet not answer.

Three Philosophical Insights on Scepticism

I have a tendency to ramble on far too long regarding my philosophical diatribes, so here's my attempt to give off a mini-digest. Funnily enough, they're all on scepticism or something similar... Just some thoughts I've accumulated over the past few weeks, things I've thought about a bit, but not long enough to write a full blown post. My current philosophy course looks at a lot of sceptical ideas, particularly its place with our society, providing me with some delicious material.

On Scepticism's relationship with our current society
I wrote a short piece awhile because on the growing trend of atheism, in fact arguing that atheism is more and more becomming the norm. That in a group of friends, more often than not, one is assumed to hold some atheistic, or at least agnostic position, where one has to reveal one's religiousity (oftentimes involving an entire episode of some teen drama series). And even then, people modestly say "I'm just sorta religious" or some other weakening qualifier. And that was just my experience from a small country town at a Catholic school.

That's still an opinion I hold, and this was further reinforced through my studies in philosophy this semester. One of the things has does become clear is that scepticism, perhaps not a full blown "I believe we cannot know anything" type of scepticism, but sceptical doubts are thoughts that do cross most people's minds. The Matrix film series comes to mind. It does in many ways popularise the notion of the "brain in a vat", but even before then there was a trend for films to explore these notions of acosmicism, eXistenZ being the other film we've studied (which is an absolutely revolting film and I do not recommend it at all).

I know for me that I'd reached my own solipsistic beliefs from quite an early age. Year 6 or 7 (11-12 yrs old) I had already gone through Descartes' Meditations (without ever knowing about Descartes), coming to my own conclusion that my own existence was the only certainty. And I think I've written before how odd it is to come to it at a university level and be sitting with people who may not've appreciated such thoughts before... The notion of clearl and distinct knowledge, as made famouse by Descartes, was no stranger to me.

What I think is the most interesting things I've learned thus far has to be Cavell's reason for why scepticism thrives in our society. Indeed, what gave rise to it all those years ago with Descartes and what it is that makes humans and our scientific age to search for things that are clear and distinct. To search for certainties.

Cavell argues that it has to do with how the entirety of our surroundings is mediated by subjectivity. In a globalising world we grow more and more exposed to different cultures whose moral codes differ from those we have grown used to. We learn to be tolerent, there is a strong notion of moral relativity in dealing with cross-cultural conflicts (not as a full blown philosophical position, I just mean in every day society). We're taught that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The world of art constantly reminds us of the powerful subjectivity we've entrenched ourselves in.

He calls it being "unhinged" from consciousness. We're stuck in a sea of subjectivity and we're all desperately trying to cling onto some tangible and floating certainty.

In many ways this is new to me. I'd never really thought about why our society nurtures sceptical doubts. So this countsas sceptical insight #1.

Different types of Scepticism
I had a lot of difficulty deciding whether I ought to include this one, merely because there are some glaring inconsistencies that I've yet to work through. But I'm not here to try to convince anyone or anything... just to try and provoke some thought.

This is something that Chris was guilty of awhile back and I called him up on it on Facebook, which resulted in another epic discussion with him and his friend Lindsay (I think that was the name)... Both of whom missed my point entirely (but then again, Lindsay is a moron so I can't really hold it against him ;)). I propose that there are two really different types of scepticism, one that is productive and one that isn't. Those that aren't basically just undermine the entire argument, and I maintain you would be stupid to even bring up.

The example with Chris was basically we were in (yet another) abortion debate. Well I wasn't in it, it was Chris and Strike, who was sorta struggling along, but I observed silently. Then Chris came out and said "All I'm saying is that in the past we have been wrong with what we classified as humans, such as black people as slaves. Perhaps it is the case here when we don't consider a foetus human" or something to that effect.

It is, in effect, a kind of inductive scepticism. My big issue with this is when you bring doubt to the certainty we had at those times. Yes, the absolute convinction we've had on some issues has lead us astray, but is that therefore any reason for one to bring doubt to the table? By undermining our sense of certainty we can't proceed to do anything anymore, because they all require that certainty.

I mean, we're certain that animals don't count as human. But then again, we thought black people weren't human and yet now we do. It's possible that future generations will change and consider animals to be just as human as you or me. How can we be so certain?! How can we be certain that trees and rocks aren't human??

You end up opening a black hole in which no further discussion is intelligible. I personally thought it was ironic that Chris, one of the most asceptical people I know, was the one who brought it up :P

But that's not the case with all scepticism. I guess in a sense it'd be a logical, a priori, deductive scepticism. This would be things like the problems of other minds etc. Things that don't rely on "I was wrong in the past and there I may be wrong now".

The big flaw I mentioned at the beginning is this: how does this reconcile with us just making every day mistakes? Let's say one day I walk to uni but I take the wrong road and end up on the other side of Canberra. Come the next day, I would prolly go in another direction at that intersection. Have I just committed some inductive fallacy?

I suppose in a way this doesn't count since I'm not coming to the crossroads and thinking "I was wrong yesterday, therefore I might be wrong again today if I go in this direction". Can one be completely wrong with one's sense of certainty in tact? Another resolution to this is that changing course and going down another road is something that happens after the initial wrong turn. The problem only comes into it when I am trying to make a decision for which road to go down.. I myself am not so convinced.. but I also know this dichotomy is important.

Our relationship with Truth
I can't confess to have read a lot of Nietchze. I quite enjoy his rhetoric and style, his need to shock people out of complacency. That's a personal philosophy I can personally empathise with quite well. We had to read one of this essays today and I came across a metaphor I thought was quite insightful.

Consider sound. The experience of hearing something is the quintessential experience of it. We experience the thing, it is the most pure and clear form that it takes.  But then take a person who is born deaf. They are forever trapped from experiencing sound its noblest, most beautiful form. They cannot experience the thing that is sound. However, they do have other modalities, the sense of touch, for instance, they can feel the vibrations of an instrument/speaker. But it's never going to be as perfect an experience as when I hear it.

Nietchze argues that this is our relationship to truth. We may be able to reach it via our faculty of language, like touch for the deaf person, but we will never be able to "hear" truth in all its glory, to experience the full power of truth. We can only viscerally get at it.

And his point isn't really that the truth is inaccessible. It's more that problems, particularly sceptical ones, arise when we start confusing our "touch" of truth with the "hearing" of truth.

He has quite a long winded argument for why this is the case, but what I thought to be the most insightful part of it was this metaphor. And even if you don't agree with his point on accessing truth, I think the notion of the deaf man ever being able to fully experience sound to be oddly compelling. Just as a metaphor, in fact, I may even use it in a novel one day.

"You're dismissing my arguments/sources because you disagree with me"

How to deconstruct the statement "You're dismissing my arguments/sources because you disagree with me," and come to the conclusion that you're a moron. We don't even need to prove that I wasn't in fact doing that at all, even if I was, you'd still be a moron.

What this statement signifies is you're decrying me for (let's assume I am) being bias, that I am simply dismissing your arguments because I disagree.

Great. But isn't that precisely what you're doing with my argument? What I am saying isn't valid because I'm simply disagreeing with you? You're saying I'm dimissing you because you disagree with me, and therefore you can dismiss me?

You end up looking a moron because independent of whether I am or not actually engaging in this bias, what you are saying is oxymoronic-esque. You might as well be saying "You're an idiot for calling me an idiot." You are committing the offense you are decrying in the very sentence you're decrying it with!

You completely and utterly ruin any credibility you may have. At least I'm not trying to place myself on some moral highground, I've never said I wasn't bias. But you are stuck in a position of implicitly contradicting yourself.

The onus is then on me to simply prove and argue why I wasn't being bias. I still have a way out. You, on the other hand, do not. You're stuck, having completely undermined your own argument.

That is why, Digi, you're a moron. I'd write this on the forums, but you'd no doubt just attack me for calling you a moron or whatever and totally ignore what I'm saying here anyway. So why bother.

The paradox of absolute denial

I'm gonna make this one really quick, given myself a maximum of 10 minutes to write. It's a good, interesting topic, but I reckon I can get the basic gist down in a short amount of time. It concerns an interesting logical paradox that I awoke with yesterday morning (yes, in that same semi-lucid state that I've come to write a lot about over the course of the (almost) year I've been writing here).

Over at LessWrong, Yudkowsky wrote a very interesting post. You'll recall a long time I ago I wrote about the phenomenon of anosognosics. These are people who suffer from brain damage such that a limb is completely paralysed. However, what is interesting is that these people display complete denial of their condition, so much so that they take really strong evidence and construe and rationalise it to fit into their delusion. So instead of admitting my left arm is paralysed when you make me look at it lying limply by my side, I insist that the arm in fact isn't mine and is my mother's, who is lying underneath me in bed. Or something along those lines.

In that post, Yudkowsky postulates the existence of "absolute denial", a condition like anosognosia that is universal to all humans, all denying one aspect. That is to say there is one very obvious truth about the world that we cannot come to know because we rationalise any evidence contrary to what we've already come to believe. So for instance, it could be that all humans actually have tails, but this absolute denial has compelled us to either look at the tail and call it something completely different, or that it's so strong that our visual cognition filters that element out and our somatosensory systems ignore sensations from the tail. But to all non-humans it is perfectly plain. This is the tangent Yudkowsky goes on ... but I want to focus on something a lil' more fundamental about the problem.

This is another one of my steps on my crusade against logic, so please stay with me.

Is it at all possible for us to even consider the existence of absolute denial? Is such a suggestion logical sound?

Suppose it does exist, can we ever actually acknowledge its existence? It seems like we can't as that would be a logical contradiction. Absolute denial is absolute, to acknowledge it presupposes that it isn't absolute. Therefore anytime we state that absolute denial does exist, we've immediately proved it cannot exist because otherwise we would not have stated it in the first palce!

On the other hand, suppose it doesn't exist, can we ever actually come to know that? By its very nature, all the laws and truisms that we've come to accept as veridical become subject to scrutiny as potential rationalisations. And here's the really interesting thing I've come to realise (which I do not think is too far of a leap or a fallacy) the very fact that we have no proof nor any inclination to believe absolute denial exists proves it does exist! I don't think this to be a flaw in reasoning because from a definitional standpoint, this seems to be a rational entailment, and because we humans are stuck looking at the issue from within the system. Obviously looking from outside the system makes it an easy case of either absolute denial is true or false - but it's a different matter when you're within the system.

And here's the kicker.

Following from both my points, this seems to be the conclusion:

1. The fact that there is no proof for absolute denial confirms our belief in its existence.
2. We cannot believe in its existence because that is a logical contradiction, suggesting it to be false.
3. Therefore, we believe it cannot exist.
4. This leaves us with no proof for absolute denial, leading to point 1 again.

What it seems to me is that we're left in a logical loop. A chain of postulates that never actually leads anywhere. It's neither a vicious nor strengthening circular argument ... it's just circular. If I've done this right, this seems to be a huge problem with logical reasoning and using it in situations like this.

Any solutions?

Why do we mourn?

Last night the Michael Jackson funeral was being rebroadcast. Halfway through an ep of Dexter my mother asked me to come outside to watch a few vids of MJ dancing and singing (and honestly, it was the first real concert video I'd seen of him. Wasn't impressed). I listened to a bit of the celebrity 'acts' and a few statements, very touching, very poignant and very thought-provoking.

In a time like this, his death inspired world-wide grieving. People's lives were stopped as they took the time to watch the funeral. But what I couldn't figure out was why, from an evolutionary perspective, we mourn. From a social, humanistic, 'realist' perspective, mourning a loved one just seems a natural and intuitive response to death. But could evolution, and evolutionary psychology, explain the phenomena of mourning?

From a simplistic perspective, evolution is all about survival of the fittest. Many social conventions, in the Middle Ages of admiring and lusting for the corpulent to the contemporary age of rake-thin love, these can be attributed to some evolutionary need to pass on our genes. So why is it then that we mourn? Death is such an instrinsic part of survival. You survive because someone else dies. If someone dies then they are weak - unable to produce more offspring.

In terms of utility, it serves no good to cry and feel melancholy about someone's death, especially when considered on such a widespread scale as MJ's death. Why is it that we suddenly admire the work of the dead (such as his music suddenly skyrocketing in sales) and spurn people who mock the dead ("too soon"; Chaser's Eulogy song)? Suddenly, when someone dies, all the jokes we made of them seem less politically correct - no more kiddie jokes. People say "if you made a joke about MJ and paedophilia you shouldn't be mourning because you're being a fake fucker".

MJ's death would signify his weakness (from an evolutionary perspective), so surely the art he produced wouldn't be admired.... but would be shunned? We would want to imitate the art of the strong so that we ourselves may be strong. It's an interesting paradox, or at least a conundrum that evolution never really answers. I've never been gone to go for the whole evolution being the key to our existence (what with being both a humanist and a solipsist and irrationalist).

Of course all my objections rely on a very simplistic view of evolution. A more complex one could argue that mourning is an act that signifies our recognition of a person's strength as a genetic figurehead. One could argue that the strongest form of power would be one where you could affect others even through death. Therefore mourning is a function where we succumb ourselves willingly in recognition - others will observe how we have mourned them and will accordingly imitate they who died in order to achieve the same kind of power through mourning.

But as in all cases of these meta-complexities, one has to ask how it happens in the first instance? Which came first, the mourning or the recognition of the power of mourning? This will still pose the same question to evolution proponents - how does the function of mourning fit in??

On the Change of the Internet.

It's an odd sign when I check my home page only to find that the majority of posts in the past month have either been awkward short pieces or even shorted quotes/links of some description. I remember the times when I could come here and spout of some deluded ramblings on why I am right and the rest of the world is wrong - I very much long for those days. Consider this an attempt to reinvigorate the past.

Perhaps it's an even worse sign that when I thought about what I'm going to write about today, I wanted to find a post I'd written before. Instead of doing a search for Twitter or something like that... I remembered very specifically that I had used the word "draconian" in the post and searched for that. It is most worrisome when I can remember my ramblings here down to the word... Anyway.

A few months ago, when Twitter first caught on in mainstream culture, I had written a long manifesto proposing why Twitter is a good thing. Essentially I had one major point I wanted to get across, that Twitter was the start of a movement towards the concept of a stream being more important than its constituents. That the concept of meaningfulness was meaningless on the 'new' internet. I guess the buzzphrase web 2.0 is appropriate here.

Recently I started thinking about this idea in terms of terms I had learnt at uni, or at least got into the habit of usually casually in language, qualitative and quantitative. I'll admit, for many years in my life I just bullshitted my way through using those words without quite knowing which one had to do with the numbers. Now I know that's quantitative, but I digress.

Here's where I start talking about how wrong everyone but me is. Most people are stuck into this mindset that the internet and all components of it, whether it be Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, MMORPGs, are a quantitative extension to real life. The e-mail is essentially a letter but quicker, cheaper and replicable. VOIP is just a more organised phone system. Blogs are newspapers and the letters to the editor section combined. Downloading TV shows is just like regular TV except more convenient.

And I suppose to an extent that was the case. When the internet first came out and international interactions became possible instantaneously, when search engines revolutionised how content was stored and retrieved. However now, when we move into an aeon where virtually everyone in a developed country will have good access to it, it can no longer be said to be a quantitative change.

It's no longer an extension to real life.

It is real life.

It has moved beyond a mere extension and has integrated itself into being an essential part of how we interact with other people. E-mail is now no longer just letters on steroids, it can do things that letters could never even dream of doing (and not due to technical restraints, but just at a conceptual level doesn't work) - I mean look at how Gmail and its labels revolutionised things. Think about attachments, it's so intrinsically different to sending a letter to someone with a video tape in the envelope.

The internet, or rather the web 2.0 has completely undermined any preconceived notions we may have about how things operate. It is not only futile but also foolish to try and insist on quantitative standards on something that is qualitatively distinct. In fact, take a look at all the contemporary 'debates' happening with anything internet related and you'll find that one side, the people opposing the 'change' are trying to impose rules that are no longer relevant upon an anonymous and almighty collective movement.

Twitter
Just to quickly reiterate. Opposition is that Twitter does not provide meaningful messages and is often filled with boring pablum. This whole idea that interactions should be meaningful... it's a bizarre and inaccurate standard to apply not only to anything on the internet, but also odd to insist IRL. So where did this rule come from!? Less focus on the individual tweets and more focus on the people, on the stream or the consciousness a tweet stream creates. In many ways it is putting the focus *back* onto the individual, because interactions online are now very much real life interactions. This is where I think Google Wave has it right - it's directly latching onto this conceptual distinction.

Online friends vs IRL friends
Not sure if I have writtena bout this before, but it seems likely that I would've. This is a matter that is both near and dear to my heart. I've long since maintained that the friends I make online, SW Chris, Comit, Ferr, Esp, Syn ... all those clowns, they are not only as important and close, but as real as my "real life" friends are. The mere fact that I know my "real life" friends in a physical sense no longer carries any weight when talking about friendships.

Opposition always says that "you never know, they could be 50yr old paedophiles waiting to meet you and gruesomely plunge their penis into your anus". My response has been and always has been since I joined the internet at 11, "So what?" It's just as possible that a person I know, say a family friend, who is a 50yr old man can be extremely nice to me, but it turns out he has paedophillic intentions as well. The phenomena of deceptive personality is not confined to the monitor - yes, I would be able to tell if Comit who claims to be 25 was actually a 50yr old man. But surely what is the most destructive of deceptions would be that of the mind, rather than the physical?

The whole idea that the persona presented in person and their actual personality having to be congruent is not something that is longer applicable to interactions online. If the internet were an extension, then I suppose yes, you could say that. But looking at it as an integrated change, the persona *is* the person and asking any more of it is bizarre and impossible.

Wikipedia - source of information?
This one is amazing. Every time anyone of an academic marker standard (whether it be a lecturer, tutor) whenever discussing assignments will ALWAYS, without fail, say "don't use wikipedia". I have so often wanted to stand up and shout "why the fuck not?". "Because anyone can change it," the cunts will regurgitate out, as if that's a worthy excuse.

For one thing, changes on wikipedia are also large and obnoxious. Changes of the vandalism kind are never insidious. For instance a vandal will attack the page on Pi by turning it into a "LOL I IZ KITTAH" or something like that. They aren't going to go in and change 3.14 to 3.15. Their attacks are always going to be loud and very obviously fake. If you go in and use "LOL I IZ KITTAH" as a value of Pi then you deserve the public humiliation and failure you've got coming. So the only possibility for getting erroneous information from wikipedia would be if the authors were mistaken or confused about a point.

One must always remember that there are tens of thousands of people who contribute to wikipedia. Each subject area has hundreds if not thousands of people who would be contributing content and ten fold more people editing and reverting any vandal attacks or changes that are subject to debate.

Furthermore, the whole idea of an information source having authority doesn't exist on the internet. Encyclopaedias that need you to pay to use it, journal databases that are password protected etc, they're all trying to latch onto whatever power they can. Their excuse for their behaviour will always inevitably be one that looks at the internet as a quantitative extension to real life.

Personally I'm confident in saying that things that appear on wikipedia are not only correct, but in a sense they are correct because they are on wikipedia. As a qualitative change, information is revolutionised. It is no longer a case of well educated people to lecture to us from their pedastals, rather the knowledge of the world falls firmly into the hands of the people. It is ours to know and play with. Experts no longer hold the same status. They will maintain prestige, but one that is, you guessed it, qualitatively different from the experts of the Copernican age (for example).

Finally...

Piracy
This one boils my blood the most. Copyright companies that are suing people for infringing upon the rights of artists, people who are trying to maintain a financial monopoly over their distribution, governments who indulge these fantasies and make fucking copyright laws, these morons under the wrong impression. The internet is not just a faster way to deliver content and an easier way for pirates to make their copies, it is a hollistic change, revolutionising everything, including the concept of piracy.

The whole notion of illegally downloading movies, music, games, that no loner applies. Benjamin the German aesthete wrote about the death of auratic art. That in the age of mechanical reproduction, artworks lost their aura. People wouldn't go to see the Mona Lisa because they could go see replicas. Movies and books are mass produced for the masses. It was a revolution. There was a quanlitative change then and there is one now.

Now, instead of mass production allowing for easy access to replicas, the internet has allowed to perfect, identical duplicates. Anyone can download perfect quality songs of any CD that comes out, they themselves can burn that onto a disc and have the CD for use (though why they'd do that instead of mp3 player is anyones guess...).

It not only is a fruitless endavour to try and stop piracy from happening, but they shouldn't anyway.

And people always react to this kind of view by saying "how will artists make money?". One, fuck the money. You shouldn't be doing it for the money in the first place. Two, the money will come, have some faith in your fans and the internet. Plenty of people, young people might I add, who capitalise on producing content for Youtube, for example, don't do it by a subscription service but through adspace. I mean ideally my world is one in which money ceased to exist and people did things for pure pleasure - and I am confident that soceity wouldn't change one iota, we'd pretty much ave the same system, but that's a post for another late evening. Three, if you stopped thinking about things in the narrowminded quantitative view, you'd realise you're doing more harm than good by bizarrely trying to retain onto your "artistic rights".

Conclusion
Problem with late night posts is you start out writing a pretty coherent and grammatically/spellingly correct piece of writing only to have it disintegrate by the conclusion. But I think what I had to say was pretty simple and I got it across. There has been a paradigm shift - the ease and ubiquity of the internet has revolutionised the way we interact with others and as such we need to view the internet in the right light. It is an integrated part of our lives now, it is not some extension that makes interactions "easier" or "quicker". The sooner we can forget that latter perspective the sooner we will cease trying to impose illogical rules that are antiquated and irrelevant to the web 2.0.