Week 18 2024

It's late again (Tuesday 17:48) but by God I'm hanging on to this publication schedule by my fingernails.

I know I've said it before, but I'm going to say it again to you, my notional reader (because TBH you're more likely to be reading this than me) — 18 weeks is, by far, the longest streak of blogging I've ever done, and possibly the longest streak of anything I've ever done intentionally, and I'm proud of myself for achieving it, and I'm proud of you for reaching the end of this run-on sentence.

Good stuff

The weeks seem to be going by fast recently, and I've not been feeling wonderful "in myself" (as they say). Drained by social obligations? Ground down by chores necessary to a life more complicated than I would choose? Enervated by a sense of all-pervading existential dread? All of the above.

But, HAHA, this is the GOOD STUFF section, and by Christ do I have some GOOD STUFF to report:

Quotes

"In fact all life is actually fermentation waiting to happen. When we like it we call it 'fermentation' and when we don't like it we call it 'rotting' or 'spoilage'"

Thots

Fermenation

The quote above hit me hard in the autestes. There's something about the cutting-away of bullshit that makes me feel so… what? gratified? validated? relieved? It's like all the natural language I ever learned is this edifice of self-referential nonsense. We have to hack through the thickets of disinformation and connotation to get at the truth.

R pointed out some bullshit about weedkiller this week. "Weeds" and "Poison" are my two top examples of how words don't necessarily have objective meaning, but I'd never really processed the implications of that for compound terms. Of course if weeds are just "things you don't want growing there" then the term "weed-killer" is fundamentally magical. What, can it read my mind?

Anyway, understanding Fermentaion to be "controlled, desirable rotting" helped simplify my world.

Panpsychism

I've only been exposed to this term in the last year or so, but it has a certain attraction for me. I don't know if I've written it in this blog before, but for a long time I've had this idea about atoms and other subatomic particles:

We can't experience atoms directly, but our scientific mental model demands that they exist. Outside of a scientific context, therefore, atoms become a unit of thought rather than a unit of matter. While I'm laying out my crazy metaphysical views I might as well say that atoms-of-thought really are indivisble. It's intuitively possible that we can conceive of an-atom-of-gold or an-atom-of-iron or an-atom-of-hydrogen — the difference between an atom-of-lead and a chunk of lead feels quantitative rather than qualitative.

It seems obvious to me that at the level of protons, neutrons and electrons, our intuitive understanding breaks down. And why not? Can we imagine, a priori, that blue and yellow make green?

Anyway, the theory of Panpsychism says that consciousness is a fundamental property of matter, and I think it has some cool explanatory possibilities. Maybe I'll return to this topic in a future post.

END