My earliest memory of thinking is a story I convinced myself of as a kid. This was that there were little people living all over the house, so small that they were invisible. And that these little people were Evil.

Well, Evil is too strong a word. I called the microscopic world that these people lived in Bad Land, because it was a place where everything Good was bad and everything Bad was Good.

I remembered this the other day, when I heard a child being told off. Young childhood for me was a time of arbitrary moral distinctions. Why was it bad to stay up late? Why was it bad to shout and run around early in the morning? I had no concept of reasons yet, so it seemed reasonable that the opposite could be true.

This principle fed through to the rest of my life. As a teenager I of course knew everything and swore off morality. Ethics, to me was a set of restrictions based on arbitrary reasons. For instance abortion is unethical because foetuses are assumed to have souls. This was unacceptable. Better to judge ethical decisions on a case by case basis than on the basis of reasons that are always wrong in some circumstances.

But of course, to judge what is good for a certain situation you need to ask a few questions: What is goodness and is worth doing good for. These are basic but they have to be asked. We need a basic definition of goodness to understand that shooting my best friend is not good for him. And we need to decide that what is good for my friend is more important than doing what is good for increasing the murder rate in my area.

These are basic things. But they show that in order to work out what is good we have to appeal to some abstract universal quality that is not merely found situationally.

So for a while I became a Satanist. I think a lot of people go through that kind of stage. I accepted moral values, but inverted some of the major ones. For instance, goodness for self as a high value, willingness to accept a level of self-destructive behaviour as a means of self-expression, justifying kindness to others as activity that makes me feel good, etc. I guess I was basically a good kid, but I justified morality from an inverted perspective.

This leads on to my current moral basis. Satanism failed to invert morality entirely because moral assumptions remained the basis for everything.

Full moral inversion became possible with the acceptance of absolute morality as a guiding principle. In accepting morality as a principle to apply to all things I finally made reality fully subordinate to ethics.

By living as a being subordinate to ethics, I aim to destroy my nature, and destroy the nature of everything I do. The result is that adherence to absolute Good is also an expression of radical Evil.

What purpose did all this hold? Is it just an attempt to understand good through the mediating quality of evil?

I'll probably write more tomorrow (lucky you, you non-existent audience) but I am pretty tired now. Sleep is good.

Weird Heterogeneity

I had a dream last night, which I don't remember. But I woke up thinking: "Any useless action which is not prohibited is outside of the social narrative."

This has to do with something I've been wandering about recently. The social/historical narrative of production is, in my opinion not wholley determinate for society. Other narratives disrupt or determine it. At the same time, however, the base/superstructure model of culture is not entirely wrong. To a high degree the economic base of a society does determine the cultural superstructure.

So what is wholley beyond the economic and social narrative? I would argue that heterogeneous activity is brought into the mainstream of society precisely thorough being made criminal.

Heterogeneous activity is activity that is not commensurable with the mainstream of homogeneous society. However, by being understood as a crime heterogeneous activity is made into something that can be understood, measured and even treated. There are even situations where limited transgression of a law upholds the law in principle. For instance, almost all teenagers in Britain who are not mentally unwell commit one crime or another. And through this limited transgression they "get it out of their system" and go on to be law-abiding citizens.

Certain societies see all non-commensurable activity as in some way suspect because it presents the possibility of non-state dominated discourse. For instance an Iranian friend recently told me that Ayatollah Khomeini went so far as to write a book describing what Qu'ran verses to read on the toilet. In this way, almost every part of our society is understood through the dominant social discourse.

But there is always that which is non-commensurable, that which is too Weird to be understood. It is small and insignificant. It cannot afford to be condemned as criminal or upheld as moral. It cannot be uplifting, or profitable, or respectable. It can't even afford to go for shock value by breaking taboos. But maybe it is where we can get a true alternative view. Maybe there's value there.

Fear of Death

Recently I've been looking through my old dream journals, trying to make an index of symbols. I've just finished reading through my diary from 2005. It's fascinating to watch dream symbols rise and fall, and even more fascinating when my subconscious decides to reuse a symbol that I've been reading about in one of my current dreams.

So far, I've got to the stage where I was eighteen and about to go to university. These are the most common symbols:

9. Three Entries: Another Universe, Babylon 5, Bekky, Bilborough College, Church, Cave, Colony, Dream, Dream Journal, Evil, Eris, G.W Bush, God, Homes, Hotel, Love, Nottingham, New Zealand, RPGs, University, Western Europe.

8. Four Entries: Another World, Alex L, America, Beach, China, Christianity, Dad, Family, Friends, Food, Joni, James B, Mr. Southey, Space, Spaceship, Star Trek, TV, The Twins, Toilet, Work.

7. Five Entries: Bus, Buddhism, Magic, Megan, Parents, Religion, Sleep.

6. Six Entries: Cars and Money.

5. Seven Entries: Police.

4. Eight Entries: Sex and War.

3. Nine Entries: Girl.

2. Twelve Entries: Death and the King's School.

1. Thirteen Entries: Chris B and Politics.

From this I discern that I was, to some limited degree a normal teenager. At the time I was a committed blogger, so it isn't surprising that political themes play heavilly on my mind. Mostly these dreams don't seem to provide any real insight. Mostly they present Politics as an Other to be afraid of. More often than not, the primary fear that is the fear that people are trying to make us afraid.

I am concerned by the reoccurring theme of death and war. It looks like I had a lot of fear when I was eighteen. Death especially was never tackled head on. I was a bit goth at the time, but even to this day I've never been able to face the idea of going to a funeral. I think my subconscious was presenting me with death in general because I was unable to face any particular incidences of death.

I love dreams. They turn normal logic on its head and work in contradictions. They can't be studied like logic or epistemology because they are not a passive subject. Instead I find my dreams teach me about themselves the more I study them. It is a really rewarding dialogue.

Why I Hate Existence

I was just wandering what itis about the concept of Being I find so distasteful, because for some reason I do find the very concept of being kind of alien and abhorrent. I am reading Sartre right now, and for some reason, even though I'm not far into Being and Nothingness I find that I am afraid of agreeing with him.

At first I thought it was because ontology is based on a transcendental, unprovable "category" - Being. But, my own logic finds a similar basis in the unprovable thing-in-itself. Both are pretty far from being empirical concepts, but the thing-in-itself is a transcendental object in a way that Being is not. Because Being is immanent in appearances while my concept of the thing-in-itself is always hidden.

Being can be known, to an extent. Being is. We have here a form of salvation: Being is so near to the world that it makes itself immanent in appearance, so that whoever searches for it shall not dispair, but shall have objective truth.

But the thing-in-itself, according to the implicit theory I think I work on, cannot be spoken of, cannot be known and ultimately, does not exist. It merely ought to exist. It raises a question it cannot answer. It is dispair without the possibility of truth.

So why choose dispair? The difference between them is largely a matter of how we see the world. My philosophy doesn't even give grounds for saying that its truthless state is more authentic. The only thing that my logic has going for it over existentialism is that I think it makes worship more difficult, and therefore more valuable.

Does that even count as a reason? I think it's the reason.

Quality and Quantity

Question: What is the difference between a qualitative and a quantitative difference?

Answer: It is a qualitative difference.

That's hardly fair. Maybe it isn't even true. Following Kant, we could call the difference between quality, quantity, relation and modality a categorical difference.

But I'm not so sure we have pure intuitions that reveal the categories of pure reason. These categories are instead a way of describing all things. We can only see our observation because, as (if I understood him correctly) Satre says in Being and Nothingness our awareness is always also the consciousness of being aware.

Therefore quality reveals itself as a quality and quantity reveals itself as a quality. But this means our conceptual understanding of quantity is never correct in essence. Even our understanding of quality reveals itself as either a particular quality or as an abstraction representing quality in general, and never as quality-in-itself.

So what is the difference between quality and quantity? Quality is always the hidden basis of our categories and quantity is always that which is at all times near to us in our sense data but hidden from us in itself.

This is too simple. I makes it sound as though quality and quantity are binary forces acting without interaction to other factors. This is never the case. Logic always abstracts, and in abstracting it takes everything out of the context of the totality, in which is stands a chance of making sense, perhaps. If only for some enlightened future, or for our God computer descendent at the end of time.

A Simple Machine

Say I have a computer, it isn't a complex device. I don't need anything complex. But it needs a function, so I'll give it one. This computer is fed sheets of plastic. One in five sheets of plastic is transparent. This computer has a simple sensor - a light on one side of the sheet, a light sensor on the other. The computer uses this to discern which sheets are transparent and which aren't, and records the results.

Now, say I want this machine to be conscious. How do I go about it?

A conscious mind can is aware of itself as that which is observing. We can easilly make a computer that monitors its sensors and records its activity. But does this count as awareness?

So maybe we give the computer a basic imperative - "identify and record transparency in objects of sense data" and program it with information on what its sensors do. It then would have to make the decision to use its sensors. Now, of course it will choose to use its sensors. But is the fact that it makes this decision a form of choice? I think we would be justified saying that this machine has part of the consciousness of a plant, it acts on basic imperatives and carries out actions based on the results. But this doesn't seem anything like animal, or human level consciousness.

Is this a different of the number of imperatives? What if we gave the device a lot more sensors, the ability to recognise complex shapes and to categorise them, for instance? What if we programmed it to monitor its power outlets, sensors, computational speed and heat?

We can imagine a self-conscious being who doesn't feel pain, in fact humans have been born without this capability. We can also imagine a self-conscious being without the self-preservation drive. So these things cannot be necessary to consciousness.

But maybe self-preservation is key. A high level conscious being is theoretically capable of refusing to engage in an activity for its own preservation. It sees a value in its activity and therefore carries it out. It makes a judgment call based on values.

So is value where we see a basic form of consciousness develop? Say we want to prove this machine is conscious. Maybe the best way to do so is to make it psychotic. Let's say this machine is cooled sufficiently when it identifies most shapes, but is left to overheat when it identifies red triangles. The machine correllates the two factors and comes to the conclusion that to most effectively carry out its primary imperative - to identify complex shapes, it must fail to identify red triangles.

However, for the machine to test this, it has to not identify a red triangle. But in the act of not making this identification, it has no way of knowing by its record if there was an identification to make. The machine must thus be given the capability to hold a parrallel memory which is aware of red triangles in addition to its primary memory which can be taught to ignore them.

Is this machine conscious? I don't know. We can't just rely on some argument from analogy. This computer doesn't have any of the same drives we do, and it will never communicate with us in any way. But it may be more conscious than a machine merely programmed to pass the Turing Test.

But consciousness still seems magical somehow. Like something ephemerel that would be lost if we tried to give it to our mechanical descendents. There must be a key to this.

Fairie Theology

A while ago I read that even in the time of Chaucer fairies were believed to be something from a long time ago, that are no longer believed in. I heard a similar thing back in my Pagan days. People would talk about how their grandparents used to treat the fairies as though they were real.

The common view of the main-stream forthe last six hundred years seems to be that belief in fairies is dying out, which gets me thinking.

Žižek talks about the deferal of real belief in mythology. How, for instance, parents pretend to believe in Santa Claus for the children and children pretend to believe for thesake of presents and for the parent's benefit. But as long as belief can be differred to the other, ritual gift-giving can be carried out.

In the same way, belief in fairies is kept in our minds as a belief that we differ into the past, for the most part. This very distance feeds it of a symbol of some lost connection with the world. While, in a counter-move constant revivals of belief in fairies in the counter-culture maintains the main-stream in the long run because these revivals pass into the folk memory and in time become examples of people in the deep past believing in fairies.

This, of course, isn't to say fairies aren't real. I'm totally comfortable with the existence of fairies.

Unlike God, fairies have the decency to be amoral.

Theology Without Content

I've been reading God: A Guide To The Perplexed recently. It's a little out of the issues that are currently suited to my mind. To be honest I am struggling to stay interested in anything that I am currently reading.

God is an idea that is present in every culture. Which puts it on the same level as dragons and faeries. But then, I've always believed in maintaining a healthy respect for faeries. Dragons, I'm less worried by.

Theology, however, is a little separate from the issue of the empirical existence of God. Before I read God: A Guide To The Perplexed I thought of theology as a discipline which provided content for the asking of contentless but important logical questions. For instance, the issue of whether God will forgive Satan raises questions about the nature of good and evil which are impossible to ask outside of theology.

I'm beginning to wander if there isn't a little more to it. For instance, the content of theology can be described as the infinite, but there's more to it than that. It's about the whole of experience brought into an infinite, unknowable state.

So basically, theology describes the always unknowable whole, the pinnacle of awareness, etc. To what end? My problem here is that constituting the subject of theology determines what I filter out of theological discourse and is really no better than starting with the acceptance of a particular prophetic vision and working from there.

So, I don't know, about this one.

Georg Lukács

I believe that Georg Lukács once said that if the mere facts disagree with theory, then "So much the worse for the facts." He also, as I remember it, believed that the Communist Party represented the class consciousness of the Proletariat, and as they were the true movers of history its proclamations should be taken as true, even where they disagreed with his own logic.

I've been thinking about this, and I think it is possible that theory cannot disagree with facts.

The issue here is that to recognise a fact as such, we must have already made judgements about it. Therefore some part of our theoretical framework must have already recognised a contradiction.

What if, then, we split theory into two parts: explicit and implicit theory. Explicit theory is our attempt to bring our way of expressing our view of the universe. But because languageis imperfect it never quite expresses the implicit theory, which is the basic epistemological assumptions behind it.

So, when facts contradict with theory we have three possible causes of the conflict. The first is that the "mere fact" could be an ideological structure that is not necessarilly true: for instance, all facts brought forward in our society are already biased towards the upholding of our system and need to be re-examined rather than accepted on faith.

The second is that our implicit theory may be wrong, because the assumptions that we have worked out in a rational way havenot reached the subconscious; For instance someone brought up in a racist community might know intellectually that racism is wrong, but their subconscious conditioning still makes them interpret facts about people in a racist way.

The third is that explicit theory might not properly express implicit theory's insights. For instance, a creationist bases all knowledge, including ultimately their faith, on a way of understanding truth. But their faith stops them from accepting the facts about evolution.

So the object's apperance must be separated from its essence - in that we understand nothing is as we understand it. Theory is how we understand this.

Theory is itself an object with an essence and appearance: an implicit and an explicit formulation. But the implicit theory itself, because it proceeds dialectically from the object, is made up of an essence and appearance. Its essence is the object, which itself needs to be examined. So knowledge carries with it at every stage its own doubt.

This is not good.

When did I start Using the Word "Being"?

Thought can never achieve full identity with its object. For instance, no matter how hard we try political philosophy only creates a simulation of how our judgment says the world ought to work. This is why some people say we should ignore the philosophy behind politics and focus on "the reality of the situation".

What they fail to realise is that when they "get back to the reality of the situation" they are already making theoretical judgements about what evidence is politically relavent, how it should be interpreted, how to interpret news to remove the ideological bias, etc.

The difference then between a theorist and a realist is that a true realist is one who is totally unaware of the theories they bring into play when they view reality. Therefore, their view is likely to be the most distorted of all.

A while ago, in a chat with a group of people we were discussing whether we see ourselves as primarilly Human, European, British, English or from our particular region. We asked an older fellow, and his response was "You're English." I found this funny. To him, he was expressing The Real Fact that we were all overcomplicating. Of course we were all English. Butthe definition of Englishness includes being British, European, etc. By presenting Englishness as the Real Fact, to the exclusion of all else, this gentleman wasn't just ignoring other possibilities, he had also failed to properly grasp his own fact.

The problem I have is this: theory abstracts from the world-in-itself. It is therefore necessary that the world-in-itself is part of the nature of our theories. As theories are an abstraction from the world they necessarilly attempt to approach being-in-itself. But the one thing that is both the absolute goal and absolute impossibility of theory is to reach the thing-in-itself.

If I'm not getting all muddled up this means that the imperative that arises naturally from the nature of thought itself is the impossible dream of being where we always already are to start off with.

Necessary Evil and the Thing-In-Itself

Something interesting that came up in the discussion of ethics in the Phenomenology of Mind: Ethics, being an absolute and perfect universal, can never be fully realised in any particular form.

Avctivity does not bridge this gap slightly merely by becoming more moral, because the closer activity comes to the absolute, the more significant the necessary dissimilarity between the universal and the particular becomes. In real terms, this can be seen in that a perfect selfless, saintly act still carries with it an element of moral satisfaction which is felt by the person responsible. This means that the action can be described as motivated by selfishness.

It strikes me that this problem is relevant to knowledge in general. The thing-in-itself, which is the objectas it really is regardless of perception, will always be distorted by the methods we use to try and understand it. If we try to view an object, then remove the distortion that our method of viewing it has brought, then we use another method to remove the distortion, and this method again distorts the thing-in-itself.

I haven't studied dialectical logic for a while, but as I remember it Adorno tries to solve this problem by saying that thought creates a simulation of reality out of concepts, while
Žižek says that the truth, which is ultimately unknowable, can be approached by "the dialectical tension" between the unknown thing-in-itself and the concept.

But as we approach the thing-in-itself we really approach the necessary dissimilarity between the concept and the object. So, trying to get around the problem by focusing on the mediating term through whichnotion and object become similar is not an ideal method for perfecting understanding.

In ethics, the answer, as I understand it, is in a very basic sense that we must learn to forgive the particularity of others. I wonder if something simialr could be applicable here.

Abstract Utopia

Back to utopias, this is my favourite Anne Coulter interview because it starts with a basic question that she just can't answer, what would America look like if she had her way.

Yes, she gave an answer to the question. It would look like New York in the Republican Democratic Convention, everyone would be Christian, Republican and would support America. But she never said what the economy would be like, how society would be ordered, etc.

This to me is the most basic kind of Utopia: society would be better if everyone belonged to Group A, and the agenda and activities of group A is seem as less important than the sheer fact of it's existence.

The problem in all ideal societies is what to do with outsiders. Some people seem to believe that society would be better without dissenting voices. This to me is insufficient, because it is impossile, and so often, the plan to fix society seems to end at removing the opposition.

My plan for perfecting society is of the slightly more developed model where difference is made into the essence of the society. This is good because such a society could harness its whole power and potential.

Let's say we have a society like The Culture in Iain M Banks' novels. There is no want, no sufferring, people live as long as they want, there's no hierarchy and if a group wants to go off and do its own thing, it can. All action is therefore helpful to The Culture: even groups that try to leave the Culture can't fully reject their background and contactswith wider society and end up just spreading Culture society further in their attempt to escape.

This is good in that it means the category of the outsider disappears while the outsider as a person remains. But if society is complete in such a way, then the activity of individuals can no longer be put towards building a better society. If human activity is no longer to be understood as socially constructive then I would argue that humans lose their way of understanding themselves as a part of society. Similarly, in a society with no taboos and no possibility of shame it becomes impossible for people to make themselves vulnerable to other people.

Emotional vulnerability is, ironically, a necessary characteristic of communication between humans. We always feel closest to people when we've been through bad times together than show us something of our nature.

Banks' answer to this is that his Culture engages in massive expenditure for romantic reasons. For instance its "war over principles" with the Idirans that put its very nature at risk. But where the perfect society finds the negativity in what is external to itself it creates a possibility that its citizens will align themselves with the negative rather than the positive. As the very essence of humanity is found in what is outside of society, those who have never been able to work towards a goal will be drawn to it.

The perfect society therefore starts to fall into violence in the moment it is created. Something more is needed to properly perfect society.

Concrete Utopia

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about society and knowledge, and things like that. I've been trying to figure out what society is capable of and what it isn't. And I've been thinking that maybe for knowledge to reach its completion it will be necessary to unify the opposites that make up our society into a unity.

To start off. We are all individuals, particular entities with our own subsistence and activity. But we live in a society. One of the ways a fact is made real is if it is recognised as such by the whole of society. Similarly, we rely on social recognition to confirm our ideas about ourself and to provide specialist knowledge of the world that our limited experience and world view is not sufficient to cover.

So we have our current situation where the individual is the sole arbitrator of truth and the particular entity which finds its own essence in its own activity. But the truth it finds is the necessity of an arbitrator of truth beyond itself, and its activity is what builds a society in which its particular individual activity is just a vanishing quantity.

To overcome this, the particular individual needs to have a role in constituting truth. Truth qua law is defined in democratic decision making. Truth qua knowledge in a democratic form is being discovered in wikipedia and internet use in general, where all individuals have a place in the critical process of knowledge creation.

There's more, society has to abolish the perceived difference between social capabilities and individual capabilities. In short, any expansion of the capabilities of society should feed through to an expansion in the capabilities of people within societies.

Most importantly of all, society must somehow bring the individuality of individuals fully into itself. This can only be done if society makes its essential activity into individuality so that it turns the non-identical qualities of individuals into a social quality. This means more than toleration of differences, it means that society should foster new divisions and creative expressions of individuality within itself.

Now, society as I have described it is society as it interacts with knowledge. As far as I can see knowledge takes two forms in its interaction with society. That is, knowledge as law and knowledge as fact. Knowledge as law is brought to some level of conclusion in what I have already said. In essence, law is what maintains the possibility of work to stamp human will onto objects in a concrete way.

But knowledge as fact relates to the objects as they are in themselves and for us. Knowledge of an object for us is expressed in science, where we see what an object is capable of, what its uses are, how it can be categorised, etc. But knowledge of an object in itself is found now in religion and art, where an object is appreciated regardless of its references to other things on its own merits. This is its inherent value.

Inherent value and value as an object to be catalogued find their unification in humanity. I believe we might be entering an era where humanity will become capable of conceiving of its potential. Religion must grasp this value and bring it to science. When science is conducted in the knowledge of the value of mankind and of life then it can be full knowledge, in and for itself.

At this point science and technology would replace and become one with religion as that which unfolds the human spirit into the universe and provides the basis for its moral and psychological development.

With technologies like space travel, genetic modification, psychotherapy, etc humanity would actually be able to achieve its values, and the quest to understand the universe would become one with the quest to actively and concretely change it. At such a time the difference between science/religion and government as individuality would dissappear inasmuch as both work towards the same end.

This is, of course, impossible. I'll come to why tomorrow, maybe.

Google and The Love of God/God of Love

If a piece of information is accessible on Google, this doesn't necessarilly mean that it is known. For instance, people keep on finding odd sights on Google Earth. Even though Google Maps is just a representation of the world, neither Google nor humanity as a whole can say with certainty that they know all of the weird things it contains. So knowledge is different from information in a merely existent form.

Let's say then, that the content of a unit of knowledge is information. But knowledge also has a formal quality, and this is the relationships through which we understand the information. So information, to become known, has to be related to other pieces of information and there can be no such thing as an isolated fact in itself.

For instance, I may see a crop circle pictured on Google Earth, but for me to take note of it and to understand that it to be categorised as awesome relies on a series of other facts pertaining to the nature of crop circles and google maps, which show me that it is an unusual fact.

Now, going by what I've talked about before, the Infinite Being (let's just call it God) would have a complete idea of all possibilities. If this is merely a simulation then it is information and to call it conscious would be wrong.* We must assume then that God understands all possible relations between all information in the universe. If this is true, then God must at once relate to you through the categories of hate and love.

This is contradictory. And as I've said before I do not believe that God would be capable of contradictory thought. All of God's thoughts must be logically necessary and complete. It seems to me then that God must neccessarilly be above both hate and love.

God, if such a being existed, would have a necessary, perfect understanding of hate and love towards any object as finite imperfect categories of Human experience. So although emotion must have a place in the mind of God, it cannot be an infinite quality. Therefore, if there is an infinite God, love cannot have an infinite value.

Of course, God could have been constructed to love. But to do so would be to limit God's computational facilities. A loving God would be incapable of having a complete idea of anything that contradicts the law of love because the complete idea of God would be a perfect simulation indistinguishable from reality.

A loving God would therefore be a finite God, and a finite God would by definition make mistakes. I would even argue that a finite God is even, by definition, mortal. For instance, a loving God may find that itself in a situation where to prevent the creation of a properly infinite God would involve contradicting the law of love. But I'm not so sure on that count.

This is all so theoretical it makes my head hurt. God is fun to think about because it involves imagining a situation where sentient is pushed to its radical extreme. But now I think I want to go think about space ships for a while.

Beauty and Rampaging Tents

This blog is far too complex and philosophical, but also incorrect about a lot of things. After the first few mammoth philosophy posts I hoped they would die down into little insights here and there.

Photography has really interested me for the last few days, since the whole truth/beauty thing started playing on my mind. When I moved to York, the whole place was somehow charged with sanctity. I promised myself I would walk the walls every day, I would find myself drawn to the cathedral just to admire it.

But, as the weeks have gone on, I've found that I never look at the cathedral anymore, I just take it as a fact of life. I walk along medieval city walls every day, and the only things I think about are spaceships and money and how tourists are slowing me down.

It seems obvious I've made a mistake. Coming to this city, I tried to live in its beauty all of the time, but the beautiful needs to be distant. So I've resolved to set the city walls apart as a place to go on special occassions, and to start taking photos, because photography is a basic way to change reality into a representation and therefore to have reality return as the object that it is in itself. I will also make sure I make a few comics. Because this is a way to simplify the world and reveal what matters most.

So far, so good. Yesterday was the most beautiful day I have had for a while. I was selling newspapers in a small village in the Yorkshire Moors. My boss took me into the moors and it was a totally different world.

The high point of the day was when a bar flew into our van and smashed the windscreen. Someone had forgotten to tie down the beer tent, and as we were selling papers it got caught by a gust of wind and this huge marquee flew right past us into the car park. It went through three rows of cars before we managed to stop it.

Myself and at least thirty other people took it apart. And for the rest of the day people talked about how they wished someone had taken a photo.

The Oscillating Mind

I've been studying Hegel pretty hard this week, and last yesterday I got caught on an interesting section describing patriotism, hedonism and romanticism. It expressed something of what I've been groping for in my understanding of society.

Forgive me my mistakes, but as I understand what Hegel is saying; consciousness, having realised that the universal principles of reason are to be found in action, identifies itself as a particular with the nation as an expression of the absolute. In the nation, all people are equally recognised (I assume under the rule of law) and are held to be of one essence. The essence of the nation is taken to be expressed in the manners, language, culture, etc. All people are taken to be equal and the activity of another is taken to be activity for the activity of all. This pretty much describes this ideal I hold sometimes of a socialistic rationalistic utopia. Although I would add that the nation should attempt to hold itself to universal principles so that it can act as a mediator between the particular and the universal.

Hegel, however, seems to understand it a little better than I did. The individual in a nation will always at some point be made aware of the independent singleness of their continuation of existence. But in the form of the nation this independence can only appear as a quantity, and it is a tiny one, at that. But this tiny, insignificant quality relates to the whole essence of the individual. If I understand Hegel correctly, the individual always ends up understanding themselves as the antithesis of the nation state. I don't know if I do understand Hegel here, but I think non-identity is an important characteristic here. Individuality is the essence of the individual, but it can only be understood as what is non-identical with the customs and laws of a nation.

Now, the nation of the nation contains everything that exists within that nation, but it can only contain individuality as a series of distinct, vanishingly small quantitative categories. Non-identity (i.e. individuality, eccentricity, etc) as a quality cannot be directly assimilated into the nation because the content of a nation is its laws, history, language, etc. So non-identity expresses itself in forms of culture which are no longer non-identical, but are only representations of the non-identical. For instance in laws defending the right to free speach, or in the repitition of Monty Python jokes which are taken as an example of "quirky" British humour, etc.

So the individual has to understand itself as not the nation. Which is a shame. I'll skip Hedonism, because Hedonism is boring. But the idea of a romantic consciousness fascinates me because it expresses a tendency I have noticed in the modern world. But my explanation of it is going to be even more basic and wrong: The individual sets its own heart as its guide and tries to solve the problems of the world through compassion, beauty, etc. But when it manages to do this, and other people start listening to their hearts, the movement no longer exists as a movement based on the individual, instead it is a social principle. So the success of romanticism leads to it becoming the opposite of itself.

These two forms of consciousness seem to me to explain our present culture very well. When we wish for patriotic unity, we fall down because we can only express our own identity as that which is different to the individual. When we follow our own hearts we find that our hearts desire is still the betterment of society and are drawn into social networks that are antithetical to our own self-consciousness.

I used to see this all the time in Paganism and in the New Age; where there is a nearly universal belief in the goodness of community which often comes into conflict with the subculture's existence as a self-consciously non-mainstream group dedicated to self-interpretation of spiritual insights.

This explains how I feel, at least. I try to forge an identity as a part of a group, but this can never be complete because they contradict the very essence of the essence of the ideal of interpreting the universe as a free entity. So I oscillate. And this in the end gets nowhere.

Hegel may yet know the answer. But it seems to me that what is needed is a society which has as its essence non-identity as a quality. This would mean a society in which creativity and diversity is the sole reason for social existence. But this would involve a unity of identity and non-identity, meaning that that which is not a social quality would have to be understood as the most important quality of society... this could be difficult. I'll think about it.

Beauty

The Barbican Centre closed down before I moved to York. It is a massive leisure centre with untold treasures inside, and it sits behind a neat metal fence. Every so often it appears in the news and I sigh, and think about what it must have been like when it was open, and how sad it is when things lie abandoned.

But then I wander why I feel this reverence for the Barbican Centre when I never visit the leisure centres that still exist.

I was thinking about this yesterday, and I came to the conclusion that the element of resistance is a factor in what is beautiful.

A building is an thing for a particular purpose. But when it is abandoned the purpose is incomplete. As the activity can no longer be for us, it is revealed as activity in itself, which we can appreciate as what it is in itself. This is great because a building is essentially purpose. So in an abandoned building we find human purposiveness without purpose.

This made me think about the art I like, which is mostly honest stuff which reflects my life accurately. Again, it is a matter of the element of resistance. In biographical art, my actual situation and ends are abandoned to reveal the universal essence behind it.

So maybe truth is beauty, in that what an object is in essence is beautiful to us. But beauty relies on separation and destruction to remove the particular and reflect the essence. Therefore the true, the beautiful, and the in-itself can only exist when we imagine it as separate from ourselves.

And this is all inaccurate, messy thinking.

The God Computer

The concept of God seems a little out there to me. I study it every so often, and I am a big fan of the Kantian concept of the God who has ethical existence. But in general I shut down when someone tries to prove the existence of God.

My problem is, the arguments for the existence of God are distressingly familiar. The British education system had me studying them at A-level and for two years in university, and I've had to argue them ad nauseum in reality and on the internet. I'm bored of them.

I do enjoy the Omega Point idea, though. As far as I understand it, the notion is that life must expand to fill the universe and that when this happens it will be able to effectively turn the universe into an infinitely powerful computer. Tipler would have us believe that such an Infinite Being would be very much like the Judeo-Christian God, in fact he's keen to quote the Bible as though it makes prophecies that God will emerge at a future time.

The big thing for Tipler is that the Infinite Being would quite easilly be able to resurrect the dead from all of history, and thus we will get to live in an ideal technological heaven for all eternity. This view, I think, is simplistic.

The issue is with what we would mean when we talk about the thoughts of an Infinite Mind would be able to conceive of all things completely. Complete comprehension of an object would be indistinguishable from the object itself. Therefore, the Infinite Mind would simulate an infinite amount of things, including all life as it is now.

The limitations of such a mind could only be the limitations of logical necessity. The Infinite Mind could not conceive of a four-sided triangle, for instance.

Now, our universe is how things happened, therefore it is a logical possibility. Therefore it is logically necessary that any infinite mind in the future would perfectly simulate every event in the universe's history leading to its own creation.

But the Infinite Mind would also contain other possibilities. Because an infinite mind would run simulations of quantum miracles some of these would be pretty odd. For instance, the Infinite Mind would contain perfects simulations of people acting against their natures, due to different upbringings or just through a random quirk of brain chemistry. The Infinite Mind would necessarilly have to simulate all possibilities, because it can, and because for it to even consider a possibility is for it to make it real.

The Infinite Mind might resurrect a perfect copy of you, but it would also resurrect an infinite number of imperfect copies, and the perfect one would have no special status. This implies no special will to resurrect the universe. In fact, I doubt the Infinite Mind could have a will as we understand it. After all, it must already be all things.

There is a problem though. For an infinite mind to emerge finite beings would have to set up a process which carries out an infinite number of computations.

If it is possible for a finite being to capture the infinite, and if the Infinite Mind neccessarilly simulates the universe up to the creation of an infinite mind which simulates the universe up to the creation of an infinite mind, and so on; then the chances that we live in a real universe. rather than a simulation of a universe, are infinitely tiny.

Matter Arising

Matter arising from my last post: can an ethical society based on moral principles thatare held to have universal significance leave anything alone?

If ethical society is our nation, does that mean we have a responsibility to people within our borders, but not beyond it?

Given that there is no difference between an animal suffering in nature and an animal suffering because it has been brought into the human world, why help one but not the other?

It could be that we have a moral responsibility to allow for the freedom of other beings. But this doesn't quite play out. The freedom of an animal to eat another animal greatly hinders the freedom of the animal being eaten. It would therefore be our responsibility to prevent all carnivores from ever eating.

It could be a matter of resources: we cannot feed all creatures on the planet, so we have to leave them be. But if this is the case there would be no moral reason to help one entity rather than another. Instead our resources go on the nearest problems or where they do the most good.

This leads to two contradictions: helping the nearest entities leads to the contradiction of a person wanting to prevent a specific animal from being killed for food, while supporting the principle that carnivores eat herbivores. Helping the most needy leads to another paradox. One's money may be best spent helping one group of people, but there are still other people less "deserving of help" who are starving to death.

Maybe morality has no standards which can be agreed upon, in which case all ethical decisions become arbitrary. So it might be best to think in terms of general over-arching principles which are subordinate to a long-term view. If this is the case, it stands to reason that we should have some idea of a long-term view for the development of life in general, so that we can use our resources effectively.

It still leaves me wandering whether society based on rights should be extended to cover all beings possible, or whether some things should be left outside of rational universality in order to remain in accordance with their own natures.

Veganism

Recently, I've been thinking about veganism and deep ecology.

My justification for veganism is that humans are capable of transcending the state of nature in order to establish an ethical society. We have no responsibility for animals in the state of nature, but once we bring a creature into the society of ethics we have to take responsibility for it.

Humans have to defend their society from nature, so it is necessary to innoculate against germs, kill pests, pull weeds, punish criminals, etc. But once an animal of any form is brought into ethical society, it becomes subject to moral judgements. Hence, capital punishment, meat eating, etc is wrong because it uses other beings merely as means to an end, and because we would not wish to be farmed or murdered ourselves. The problem is that this distinction between the ethical and natural worlds implies that there is a qualitative difference between animals and humans, and I'm not sure what this could be.

If humans are different from animals, there must be an "anthropogenic moment" - a point where humans become qualitatively different from animals. This means that there needs to be some kind of experience which we are capable of that animals aren't.

Hegel places the development of self-consciousness at the moment of frustrated desire, when a human first realises that there is a distinction between the world and the self. But this moment is experienced by animals. Bataille says that tool use separates us from animals because the tool is a "nasceant non-I" through the mediation of which we build knowledge of the world. But tool use again is found in animals.

It seems that language, compassion, a knowledge of the future, an awareness of self, the ability to abstract, subtract, etc, etc are all found in many different animal species. The difference between animals and humans is never more than quantitative.

This worries me. The only solution I can think of is that the ethical society is based on ethical principles which all conscious beings living in a society must necessarilly be able to conceive. For instance, the golden rule and the categorical imperatives. The ethical world is therefore qualitatively different from the animals which establish it.

Ethical society can only establish ethical responsibility between beings which are quantitatively, rather than qualitatively distinguished - for instance between rich and poor, or the strong and the weak. here, the principle established is based, as far as I can see, on the categorical imperative to act on maxims which we might wish to be universal laws. One such maxim is that the strong have some ethical responsibility to the weak.

Therefore Humans, as quantitatively more intelligent and adaptable beings have a responsibility to all living things.

This is fortunate, and answers another long-term question of mine; which is how we can morally justify an alliance to the underlying instincts of life when living things are just one class of thing in the universe and of have no inherent value.

Essence and Object

Today was the last day of a sixty hour week. For the last five days I have been working at a traction fair. I am very tired. There's only been a few thoughts that I've had time to think.

For instance, I have been thinking about essence, identity and definition. On friday, I thought that the essence of an object and the definition of an object are our attempt to understand an object by identifying it with a class of objects. But, I think that this is an inexact way to think. And that if we go down this route the essence of an object will aways be the object's essence to us.

Definition is to do with identity and as such will always be inexact because there is a necessary dissimilarity between everyday objects and their definitions (i.e. all particular cats have features that are not covered by the general concept of "cat").

I hate the notion that we should start with the essence of an object, and understand the object by way of its state of being because if we start with essence then we run the risk of confusing essence and definition. And therefore we come to a circular reasoning: I know A is A because I have studied it based on its essential quality which is its A-ness.

Maybe we could understand essence as the opposite of definition. Maybe the essence of an object could be what sets it apart and makes it unclassifiable?

Or maybe not. I'm tired, and now it is lunch time.

Fiction, Reality, Error and Other

Just as a warning, in this entry I'll be discussing a funny experience I had while reading "A Scanner Darkly". I'll try to avoid spoiling the plot, though. But I can't necessarilly promise anything. Writing any kind of review is difficult because you have to capture the essence, but not the plot, of a story.

Towards the end of the book, one of the main characters mentions a guy called Tony Amsterdam, a friend of her's who saw God while on an LSD trip, and for months afterwards saw a beautiful doorway everywhere he went. But Tony never actually went through the door, he just admired it until it went away. After that he went slowly crazy because he would never see anything that beautiful again.

A few pages later, another main character meets Donald Abrahams, a major crime lord and businessman. The moment this guy was introduced, I got excited. I couldn't quite remember Tony Abraham's name and I thought they might be the same character. What a twist to find in the book: that an LSD burn-out case with a possible grudge against beauty and life had become a major figure in the sale of a drug called Death.

Of course, I quickly realised, the two characters where different people. But I decided to pretend that they were the same person and considered the symbolic significance of this plot twist some more.

Also, as I had been reading I had decided to read the book as though conspiracies and facts mentioned explicitly in the film but not in the book where real facts in the fictional world of the book.

This got me thinking. A Scanner Darkly is a fictional book. Therefore, nothing in it is literally true. However, it is true that in A Scanner Darkly Bob Arctor is a narcotics agent and it is false that Bob Arctor meets Tony Amsterdam. Can it however be true that in my reading of A Scanner Darkly, Tony Amsterdam is Donald Abrahams? Further, can my reading offer any insights into the text? How far can we take this? If I read the Lord of The Rings understanding that Tony Amsterdam is Gandalf, would my interpretation be right to some extent.

I have no answer, on the off-chance that someone reads this, I would very much like them to just ponder this for a few seconds.

But... if I were to answer, it would be that everyone reads every text differently. For instance, we all imagine character's differently. However, in discussions, we must go by what is commonly understood, this is usually what is written down and understood. This is an attempt to understand what the writer transmits. So we ask questions like, "What did Phillip K Dick want to say in A Scanner Darkly?"

Maybe, if we wanted to, instead we could try to interpret the material the reader receives, almost like dream analysis. So we could ask "Why did I misread the text in the way I did? I my subconscious trying to communicate anything through the connections it made while reading A Scanner Darkly?" Maybe we could go further, and cut up texts, connect characters from different stories, mess withdialogue, etc. After all, if fictional facts are only facts in the mind of the person imagining them then aren't we entitled to see our own meanings in them?

After all, anything we perceive only has the meaning for us that we see in it, so we can only ever see our own meaning in things.

The Sky Will Burn

One day, the sky will burn. The continents will boil away. The surviving artifacts from billions of years of accumulated, unimaginable history will become indistinguishable as they evaporate into our dying sun. And that will be the end of it.

Our system of time is tied to our planet. If the speed the earth orbits the sun changes, the year becomes irrelevent, days and hours disappear when the planet stops spinning. This is a relief. I can't deal with the idea that the world will be destroyed on a Wednesday, or at lunch time. I can barely deal with the idea that there must, logically, be a specific exact moment when the planet stops existing.

These exact moments are odd to me. First moments and last moments. I am fond of them in general. But I have trouble imagining them actually happening.

For instance, after three months job-hunting, I can't actually imagine actually starting a job, although I put a lot of time into reaching that general state of being. I have no trouble imagining doing something that will last, but I have trouble imagining the specific circumstances that start it off.

I mention this because, obviously, this is a start of something. It might be pretentious, idiotic, wasteful, potentially embarrassing later on. But at least it's a start. Theoretically I only need to write one first post in this thing.