one of Bilbo's old bath songs

Sing hey! For the bath at close of day
that washes the weary mud away
A loon is he that will not sing
O! Water Hot is a noble thing!

O! Sweet is the sound of falling rain,
and the brook that leaps from hill to plain;
but better than rain or rippling streams
is Water Hot that smokes and steams.

O! Water cold we may pour at need
down a thirsty throat and be glad indeed
but better is beer if drink we lack,
and Water Hot poured down the back.

O! Water is fair that leaps on high
in a fountain white beneath the sky;
but never did fountain sound so sweet
as splashing Hot Water with my feet!

on technology and AI

Carl Johnson pointed me to this essay on technological thinking in Heidegger and Borgmann apt with all the flutter surrounding the iPad.

I also hadn't heard of Moravec's paradox -- it's easy for us to teach computers to think, much harder to teach them the "simple" perception and mobility we share with the animals.

yelling Stop

George Packer provides a nice meditation on the technological entanglements of the historical moment.

the ladder, the circle, and the rest

The talent for friendship. - Among men who possess a particular gift for friendship, two types predominate. One is in a continual state of ascent and for each phase of his development finds a friend precisely appropriate to it. The succession of friends he acquires in this way are seldom at one with one another and sometimes in dissonance and discord: which is quite in accord with the fact that the later phases of his development abolish or infringe upon the earlier. Such a man may be jocularly called a ladder. - The other type is represented by him who exercises an attraction on very various characters and talents, so that he gains a whole circle of friends; they, however, establish friendly relations between one another, their differences notwithstanding, on account of being his friend. One can call such a man a circle: for in him this solidarity between such different natures and dispositions must in some way be prefigured. - For the rest, the gift of having good friends is in many men much greater than the gift of being a good friend. -Nietzsche (HAH I, §368)

many eyes

  
source: wikimedia commons

At this point I'm at least vaguely familiar with Nietzsche's perspectivism (GM 3.12 below, HAH, I, 618 or "argonauts of the ideal" GS 382) but I wonder about Nz's view in comparison to, say, a Keirkegaardian or Dostoevskian perspectivism. In Kierkegaard's case we have the pseudononymous authorship which must reflect some similar commitment though I don't know the extent of it. In Dostoevsky's case, the Brothers Karamazov stands as a monument to perspectivism (especially "The Grand Inquisitor") about certain views. I get the feeling Dostoevsky thoroughly understood each perspective he presents personally. Where Nietzsche articulates a perspectivism in pursuit of knowledge, I see Dostoevsky as articulating a perspectivism as an extension of a troubled psychology in the service of art. The idea being that a more troubled psyche may have the capacity for deeper commitment to alternate perspectives (think Tyler Durden). He embodies one and then the other; this is not at all healthy but it is at the core of what it means to be human.

I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this subject.

--

But precisely because we seek knowledge, let us not be ungrateful to such resolute reversals of accustomed perspectives and valuations with which the spirit has, with apparent mischievousness and futility, raged against itself for so long: to see differently in this way for once, to want to see differently, is no small discipline and preparation for its future "objectivity" -- the latter understood not as "contemplation without interest" (which is a nonsensical absurdity), but as the ability to control one's Pro and Con and to dispose of them, so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge.

Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a "pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject"; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as "pure reason," absolute spirituality," "knowledge in itself": these always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective "knowing"; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our "concept" of this thing, our "objectivity," be. But to eliminate the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of this -- what would that mean but to castrate the intellect?

Nietzsche GM 3.12

Pat Robertson gets screwtaped

here.

the meat shall inherit the earth

Udder Maddess - Woody Allen (newyorker.com)

Kierkegaard scholar answers questions from the internets

A real, live, Kierkegaard scholar is answering questions on reddit.

So far, Kierkegaard scholar: 1, internets: 0.

Camus' notebooks

I read The Fall, The Myth of Sisyphus and his Reflections on the Guillotine (excellent discussion of the death penalty) over the holidays. So far nothing I read was quite like The Rebel. Maybe a more pressing situation creates a better work or maybe it's just me. Not that the rest isn't worth reading; it's all worthwhile reading.

Camus' Notebooks from 1951-1959 have quite a few gems in them. Like most people's journals, they're all over the place. Still making my way through them.

There is not one talent for living and another for creating. The same suffices for both. And one can be sure that the talent that could not produce but an artificial work could not sustain but a frivolous life.

--
Why women? I cannot stand the company of men. They flatter or they judge. I can stand neither of the two.

--
One of B's secrets... is that she could never accept nor stand, or even forget, illness or death. Hence, her major distraction. She becomes exhausted, already having to live alone like the others, having to simulate the little nonchalance and innocence that is necessary to continue living. But deep inside her she never forgets. She does not even have enough innocence for sin. Life for her is nothing more than time, which itself is disease and death. She does not accept time. She is engaged in a battle already lost. When she gives up, she is there with the waves of water, with the face of a drowned girl. She is not of this world because she refuses it with all her being. Everything starts from there.

--
I realized that it was true that there were people greater and more genuine than others and that throughout the world they made an invisible and visible society that justified living.

--
Totally eliminating criticism and polemics - From now on, the single and constant affirmation.

Understand them all. Love and admire but a few.

--
The "limit" must be everyone's truth. It is mine as long as I am for everyone. But for me alone: the truth one cannot say.

--
Humanism. I do not like humanity in general. In myself I sense primarily solidarity with it, which is not the same thing. And then I love some men, alive or dead, with so much admiration that I am always jealous or anxious to protect or defend in all the others that which, by chance or on some day that I cannot foresee, has made or will make them like the former.

--
Two common errors: existence precedes essence or essence existence. Both march and rise with the same step.

letter Vonnegut wrote home in 1945

Steve send me a link to this letter posted in full at Letters of Note. That letter and the essay with the same name as the title are what I liked best from Armageddon in Retrospect.