The scenery of a dog walk

To say you learned from your mistakes is a sure sign you did not.

To skip the obvious meaning: if you learned something you would not
verbalize it.

A definite meaning of my first sentence is that anyone who says, I
learned from my mistake, obviously did NOT learn from their mistakes
because this statement assumes ignorance is a matter of isolated
pools, little bits that can be captured and swept up, even hoovered
up, by a stately intellect.

What if the intellect is not stately?

What if ignorance is not just a few lost pieces from a jigsaw puzzle.

How would we really KNOW what ignorance is? What if the shore is small, and the ocean of ignorance huge???

Spit Torrent

Here is a recent development in digital rights management. There is a product called MediaDefenders which keeps software from being downloaded for free by peer-to-peer networks by planting a huge number of phony versions of the desirable files on networks--what happens then when someone downloads a copy is that they find they just have mush. The account I read (by Michael Wolff) called this carpet-bombing a peer-to-peer network, like bit-torrent.

Life has a similar trick--someone actually realizes a fact, but when they try to share this information, the listener cannot really grasp what the original seer saw. You read a good bit in mystical literature how "words cannot convey what happened to me." Of course unless you are Ludwig Wittgenstein that does not stop folks from discussing what they believe they saw. The readers (or hearers) of these accounts however, do not themselves then HAVE a mystical experience, themselves. Without something like that however, what is it that the lecturer conveys? Without the recipient of these accounts seeing what the speaker is discussing, we conclude they did not grasp the speakers content. Had they grasped the speakers point, they would have had an experience similar to the one the speaker is pointing to.

A Real Teacher grasps that there is this dilemma and must take this into account. It is perhaps this understanding, rather than any mystical experience , that sets apart certain historical figures of this endeavor. Mystical experiences after all are very common in the general population. (Soon perhaps we can look more closely at this commonness and why it is so little appreciated or accounted for. That is something to talk about in the near future.)

Look at Wittgenstein again--his major insight was if you cannot talk about it, don't try. So along came the positivists---(a philosophical school that says only externally verifiable information is valid,) and they loved Wittgenstein. He, however, would conclude that the positivists just did not understand his ideas.

Now Wittgenstein had a mystical experience (there must be a better way to put this.). And saying that if you cannot talk about something, then you should not do so, is a brutal truth that needed to be stressed. But when Wittgenstein was misunderstood to be saying that the mystical realm did not exist, when what he was really saying was that you could not talk about this level of experience -- what did he do? Or let me ask, what did he not do----he did not take this misunderstanding as data for him to expand his thoughts, he did not wonder why these mystical experiences were fleeting and beyond his control. Either of these plausible responses would have helped Wittgenstein on to a wider understanding. Such was not however Ludwig Wittgenstein's fate. He would wind up regarded as one of the most intelligent philosophers in the western world, and I guarantee that he did know he missed something, but he did not have the verve, the integrity, the energy to pursue the questions.

From the example of Wittgenstein perhaps we can see that intelligence is not what is missing in the difficulties facing a teacher determined to convey something.

So here are a couple of responses to the situation a teacher faces when he has an experience and feels a responsibility to -- somehow share. He can discuss the experience and in doing so lose it for himself and find that others never comprehended what he was saying, or he can formulate a philosophy of language which is highly regarded and utterly misinterpreted.

What other alternatives are there? The example of Jan Cox is one, and no doubt we will be saying more soon about this.

How the mind keeps busy avoiding reality

Below is a quote from the free email newsletter that New Scientist magazine makes available to the interested.The quote illustrates a particular strategy of ordinary human mentation; this strategy must have some value though as yet what value that could be is not clear to me. Perhaps it is the repeat a silly argument if that argument was ever believed in the past ploy. The parting line politicians use that they want to spend more time with their family falls in this camp. Never mind the guy/gal was just indicted for bribes, never mind their kids have already left for college. Never mind that the wife is furious their summer vacation will not be spent in Greece now. For some reason they can trot out the old argument that they have to leave their office to spend more time with their family and their audience does not break out in laughter.

Along these lines is this blurb for an article that does not need to be read for anyone to know the conclusions. Yet an academic magazine is publishing this article. The topic is about the effectiveness of makeup. It is my assertion that everyone knows that make up only makes young people look younger. The blurb ends that we deserve some evidence make up works. Oh sure, and we will learn from our mistakes.(That's what those stock brokers say.) Something else is going on, not what is being said. Yet this kind of blurb is repeated ad hilariousnessness, and it is all part of a dream. Part of a dream. And the proof that this research is silly, is that---if the makeup worked, you would need NO article investigating the claim. Everybody would use the product and look younger. Maybe research about HOW, it works, but not IF makeup works. So here is the blurb.

What lies beneath the makeup?
We spend a fortune on cosmetics that promise to keep our skin youthful, so surely we deserve some evidence that they work, says Richard Welle

Southeast Asia

It seems unlikely that no one else has noticed this but there seems to be some kind of engine of creativity, planetary creativity, apparently located in South East Asia.
The reasons I bring this up---recently the science news that flu viruses originate in southeast
Asia, brought back these things I had noticed before. The incredible biological diversity in for instance Malaysia. The origin of many species in this area (southeast China.) The fact that the oldest religion, Hinduism, is not only in this area, but is still vigorous after all these millenia (I base this judgment of vigor on the fact animal life is still protected in a way it is not in the west, animals protected in temples for instance.) You could make a case that the Chinese civilization is the greatest in terms of art and philosophy, that we have ever had on the planet. Religions that originated in southest Asia --Taosim and Buddhism --are able to continue while not loosing track of basic truths that the West has trouble even grasping---truths regarding change and nothingness). And a major language group appears to have originated in India, that to which English belongs.

One is tempted to assume the fact that some of this area is so volcanically active, is relevant,though exactly HOW increased volanic activity would be relevant is not clear. (See my mention of mind and matter in the first paragraph. (no reason to conclude creativity means human life is safer though, in such an area.) That a line through the Malayasian archipelago and the area including the Phillipines, seems to divide species, though the details are not right to hand (mind.)also may be relevant.

Against this idea that there is something special and generative about south east Asia,is the fact that civilization itself arose in the fertile crescent, which I cannot include in South east Asia, without extending the boundaries so much they are silly. And Jasper's axis time of history is a different kind of mapping which points to the fact that philosophy and major religions all arose within a narrow time frame. Whatever---though I am not sure we can say where civilization first arose, all we know is what is beneath where we choose to, or can, dig.

So when I say there seems to be something going on in South East Asia, am I referring to something geological?, to something spiritual, some magnetic lines of force, some energy derived from plate tectonics? I am clueless....

Cow Hum

So how come, -- no one marvels that no two pigeons are alike.?.

Constellations

By day attention went to survival, even after people started living together in small herds. But at night, yes one slept, but some had to be awake some of the time, perhaps the assigned guard person as the daily shift from hunter to hunted was effective, but men have always also, looked UP, at the sky. Hard to argue about, yet what other animal did this, looked up, especially when laterally, all was dark, but UP what a spectacle, every clear night. So much more incredible than the city skies we are used to. And so---out of reach, so mesmerizing, but not anything that had an immediate use. You could just gaze upward at the sky. Not for a purpose that was obvious, or could be handled. Just looking, with the body still. Probably soon men started to note changes. Every thing they knew had some relevance, a plant to avoid, or study for clues, or consume. Surely the spectacle above also had some relevance, some survival value, but what. The sky appeared unchanging in comparison with the daylight jungle, and yet, did a sense of change among the permanent, the falling star, become apparent? And yet the permanent also persisted among the changing. And to what end, in a world where all related to hunter or hunted, did this sky persist.

Perhaps there was an event, from the sky, some totally amazing, that may have left an impact crater we have or haven't found. Perhaps not, perhaps just the incredible glittering night, inviting study to an end that was not obvious, that had to be concentrated on, studied out. The patterns men described in the sky now seem arbitrary but these patterns we call constellations, we have not forgotten. Why have we not forgotten these old patterns? The ancient gods and cosmology is everywhere faded like a pressed flower, and yet all us know the names of the patterns traced out millenia ago.

One reason we have not forgotten -- is it is possible that the night sky, the patterns men talked about, are evidence of the ignition of, the invention of, human abstract thought.

Would this event, whenever, however it happened, the dawn of human thought, of mentation, would not this event be in the category of the Big Bang. And in looking up at the sky, and seeing, as we now understand, the light of past events,
could it not be that we also are seeing the beginning of human thought?

April Schools Day

On April Fools Day I find myself thinking of some news stories, is that a joke? What if everyday we could pinch our internal news and hold it to a light, and scan it for it's integrity.... Would our thoughts melt away, would we think who is doing the scanning,now? And where does all this news come from... Would we think?