Should

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The world of should takes a lot of energy to inhabit. In comparison the world of is can seem like palatial comfort. To fully embody should you first have to build something to increase. When you have completed the simple task of finding the universal measure of good the shoulds can flow freely. This should that, that should this and schools should be doing more to encourage male ballet dancers etc. I had a particularly fruitful Friday yesterweek pondering a fine should over peas with a good claret. I forget the conclusion but it almost certainly included some reference to UK tax law. With chocolate and the mothers of tearaways to finish.

A friend from isville visited and left a particularly bad intellectual atmosphere in the air. She had no thoughts on the ideal proportion of pronouns in hypothetical prose and has never dramatically uttered the word herstory or hung an upside down map. Her name was almost certainly not Richard Dawkins. I should have invited him instead. Nevermind, my atheists tend to come less famous and more cheap with the wine they bring round. Nevertheless, it was a most successful evening of thought because as I was lying in bed afterwords looking confused I suddenly received a most brilliant idea. Where do these thoughts come from? It reminded me of the night I wrote An Ode To Impotent Men:

Was it the temperature?
Or was it the bankruptcy?

I think they must come from the bowel or the brain. Either way, the idea is to find the ultimate should.

Or just an excess of politeness?
You should have turned the iron off you fool!

The ultimate is would probably be some dreary formula or god or worse. Why bother look for it? It already is whether you find it or not. But could some should set all other shoulds rolling? The prime should could be something slight and easy such as dogs should be carried. At all times. Or something majorly inconvenient like the entire socio-political framework should be reformed according to Ayn Rand’s wildest imaginings. Either way I’d be interested to know it and should you have any possible candidates please let me know.

Oh the world of should does take patience and virtue and even brilliance, but persevere and you will find yourself in the land of the righteous. But more than that, it offers a deeper comfort; the soft maternal caress of self delusion.

Your humble master,

Argument Ad Hypocrisy: the spell of Christ

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There is a particular brand of right wing journalism which takes voyeuristic joy in portraying acts of hypocrisy. Consider the following from Toby Young’s latest Daily Mail column:

“I hesitate to criticise my father, whom I loved dearly, but his commitment to equality didn’t extend to his choice of motorcar — a vintage Bentley.”

In any given economic or political analysis, what is the relevance of the car of the father of Toby Young? When the bank of of England decides on what is an appropriate interest rate have they properly considered the car of…? It is common to see stories like this brought up in the mainstream press. Although I have noticed that any individual seems to place extra weight on the car of their father. My dad once had Ford. What a hypocrite; he didn’t like hamburgers, another famous american export. Pointing out errors in the Daily Mail is hardly a revelation but arguments like this can be found in any of the major newspapers.

My father was once run over and yet he later spoke out against road traffic accidents. Hypocrite!

Perhaps Toby Young is the finest purveyor of argument ad hypocrisy. To be a hypocrite may or may not be a negative personal quality, but lets assume it is a deeply negative quality. Lets agree with Christ that it is the master sin. I will here attempt to show that putting hypocrisy at the centre of political argument is a form of argument ad hominem and therefore a lesser use of subjective analysis. Something that can be traced back to Blair’s ‘I only know what I believe’. A general feature of democracy is this obsession with the speaker over the statement. When you vote for a party you are more concerned that the policy is not in contradiction with the leader’s behaviour rather than whether the policy has an effect that you want or don’t want.

My father once took a bus. What a hypocrite! He had a lifelong hatred of the poor.

The next question I want to address is why the hypocrisy obsession is so broadly associated with the right. Is there no opposite to the champagne socialist? The poor right winger? In attacking a champagne socialist are you not implicitly calling the poor right winger a self hater? Are you not implicitly assuming that left wing politics is useful to the poor? Otherwise there could be no hypocrisy in a non-pauper calling for policy which would harm themselves and committing the master sin of acting or at least speaking against self interest. But is not the central tenet of rightist thinking that a small inactive state helps the poor and that the economy is not a zero sum game and inequality is a price worth paying for overall increases in productivity. That is not an argument but a statement without evidence (there may be evidence but none is often provided). The truth is surely that economic performance is related to state economic activity and that as a game it is neither fully zero sum nor capable of infinite growth. In a system of total inequality (one person has everything and everyone else has nothing) we would not see maximum GDP growth even if that person was the best and most ‘hard working’.

My father once took a ferry to France. And yet he also believed the channel tunnel was good!

To fully take the hypocrisy fetish seriously we must ask if the left fulfills a similar role to charity. Is not charity primarily concerned with making the giver feel better about themselves and if anything aiming to maintain the object of the charity. Perhaps the nightmare of the left is to get what it wishes for and to have no-one to feel sorry for. Down this road lies the bizarre internal logic of self reference implicit in statements like ‘I vote to lie to myself about my true motivations which are ultimately inaccessible to me and concerned purely with building a set of theoretical relations which allow me to enact a deep and mysterious want about my setting myself in relation to real events in a pleasant way’ as opposed to the brutal leftist, objective, ‘veil of ignorance’ argument style of ‘this act causes this effect’.

My father once flew in an aeroplane. I wonder how he squared this with Bernoulli’s theorem.

This is how I am framing the two cultures. The right with Karl Popper’s anti-dialectical-materialism and the left with its objective inhuman analysis. The spell of Plato is clashing with the spell of Christ on a daily basis. Which side are you on? Plato, Hegel, and Marx vs Christ, Burke, and Popper. Is a good political argument one that is consistent with the behaviour of the person who says it or one that is true?

My father once walked somewhere. What a cunt!

Singing the National Anthem and inserting your penis in the mouth of a dead pig are symbolically identical

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Allegedly, there exists photographic evidence purporting to show Jeremy Corbyn failing to insert his penis into the mouth of a dead pig at an event which he did not attend. It is well established that every great established organisation must have an obscene symbolic opposite which simultaneously establishes the value of the said organisation and provides a means for the individuals within the organisation to establish a form of writing which almost exclusively uses the words establish and organisation. But could there be a greater obscenity than requiring a human being to say out loud ‘god save our gracious queen’; a sentence containing no words that any thinking animal wouldn’t find moronic. Each one of the five words referring to non-existent objects and presupposing a non-existent threat from which to be saved. Is the threat logic?

Everyone who has been a member of an educational institution can attest to the hatred directed towards those who break the unwritten rules. The written rules may be freely broken but the unwritten ones automatically exclude you from the organisation. The individual who stays within the geographical location of such an organisation but openly rejects the unwritten constitution in favour of the necessarily absurd written constitution is a self proclaimed pariah. And despite my ironical Meanderings I am here arguing in favour of the ‘team-player’. I am arguing in favour of the popular male who correctly realises that obscene illogical dances are the real location of the organisations operation. An organisation being a means to provide a collection of individuals with the illusion ‘our’.

Consider the phrase ‘long term economic plan’. Given that George Osborne is an open champion of free markets, what would a long term economic plan look like for such a man? Economies are best managed by governments allowing them to manage themselves. The plan is therefore not do get involved in the economy. The plan is to have no plan. The plan is to repeatedly say long term economic plan. I have a long term health and fitness plan. The plan is to let the body make itself healthy because the use of the brain to regulate the actions of the body will always result in a detriment to the body. I am literally claiming that a fundamental difference between the two political cultures is that one side chooses to do the ridiculous and look at what people actually do and say and the other chooses the rational path and acts, thinks and speaks irrationally.

I am a classic weak man who seeks to ingratiate myself by being humiliated in the eyes of the (dare I say it) big other. My pathetic lower instincts will always chose as a friend the male who perfectly embodies the obscene unwritten rules than the horrible rational person who points out the contradictions inherent within them. That is why I have a long term plan to investigate the logic of self referential ironic loops using a light-touch hands off approach.

Your pretentious majesty,

Putting the I in AI

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I want to offer a series of thoughts on the problem of artificial intelligence. The key idea I want to discuss is that philosophy offers the only hope for making progress in AI. In particular, a full development of AI is impossible so long as we don’t understand what an ‘I’ is. There is a book by the Dalai Lama called How to See Yourself as You Truly Are. In this book two conceptions of I are presented which are mutually exclusive and both self contradictory. The conclusion reached is that the ‘I’ is illusory:

1) The I is separate from the mind-body, in which case it must remain when the mind-body is taken away. If that is true then the I must either be a figment of the imagination or permanent.

2) The I and the mind-body are one in which case there can be no sense in ‘my memory’ or ‘my body’ and if either is removed the I no longer exists.

One can treat these with a Kantian Transcendental Dialectic (i.e. one doesn’t get anywhere). In the words of the Dali Lama ‘one can meditate on the contradiction until one realises that the I is not existent but contingent’. The problem of AI in this framework then becomes a problem of representing an impossibility within a system of deterministic logical operations. The problem is creating an illusory I. Of somehow creating an object that appears to itself as existent permanently. We are not trying to create a wise intellect that understands the soul is not immortal but rather a foolish being which thinks itself immortal. The artificial I must consider itself a distinct piece of material to the rest of matter/energy. Perhaps mathematically one could describe this as an optimisation procedure which aims to maximise I. I aim to write some more on what the measure of I would be. I believe it might be related to value in economics; an abstract measure related to all other illusory Is.

Consider Euclid’s elements. The work performs a series of logical operations on axioms. One does not first consider if the axioms are true or false. Does real space adhere to Euclid’s specifications? In fact Euclid’s axioms define an abstract type of space (as opposed to hyperbolic or any other type of space). Perhaps the I is similar. One does not ask if the I is actually existent in terms of the dynamics of matter-energy. One simply acts on the I as an axiom.

The Cogito

I seem to remember a remark made by Nietzsche in which he mocks the syllogism I think therefore I am by saying that it would take pages and pages to begin to address the meaning of I. I would go further and say The Cogito can easily be rendered a ridiculous tautology by taking a relatively sane definition of I. Consider the definition I is the thinker of the thought. We then have:

The thinker of the thought thinks… therefore the thinker of the thought is.

By that logic every word is (the unicorn, the rabbits horns etc). The unicorn unicorns therefore the unicorn is. What does the verb unicorns mean. It means it bes a unicorn. The common word for bes is is. But is implies it exists over time. Doing some is-ing doesn’t use up the lifetime of the unicorn. Therefore I want to introduce bes as in being modifies the be-er. A key part of is is it doesn’t modify the is-er. Consider a delicate cup on the mantle piece. It appears to be in a state of is. But actually it is being. It is moving towards its ultimate state of not being.

A generalised form of the Cogito might therefore be:

Something is therefore something is.

And I’m going to say something even more bizzare: I find this to be false.

The present

Have you ever recorded music using a computer? There is a time delay between the sound being converted to an electronic and then digital signal and then travelling to the computer and being saved and then sent back out to the headphones to be converted back to an electronic signal and finally an actual sound from the headphones. Because of that lag it is very common to have a confusing delay which makes playing music in time extremely difficult. For that reason the computer can be programmed to introduce an intentional delay in the playing back of the music so that to the player she appears to playing in time to herself. This process essentially does away with the concept of present. I claim this is very similar to a process in the mind. The mind might have an abstract concept of the present, which is handled in sophisticated ways to appear to the I as existent but actually dependent on predictions and a number of processes taking place at different times. In this framework the I is an illusory object in the present which is contingent on past Is as well as phenomena.

A theory of representation

If it were possible to write down on a piece of paper a complete description of your I, would the paper itself think? If not then are you really thinking? Imagine an objective view of your life in a deterministic spacetime. You would appear as a four-dimensional shape. Like a cylinder in three dimensions is how a temporary circle in two dimensional space might appear in a two-space-one-time manifold. Does your four dimensional shape think? It would be possible to write down the time history of every particle in your body. Would this written down description think? Of course not. Therefore, either you don’t think or the representation I just presented is flawed somehow.

If a computer could be treated as a text file which can be modified and definitions of logical operations which modify the text file in addition to an input stream (time dependent inputs which depend on the manner in which the text file is modified then how might we go about representing the I? The text file should have two sections I and not-I. Now let us suppose we create this machine in such a way that is passes the Turing test or any other definition of being a high form of AI. Would the I section be comprehensible to us? Does it play a key role in the functioning of the AI? Might it necessary have false representations of itself (it is not a deterministic system for instance or it is eternal and not contingent on the physical presence of the computer).

I understand that this is a rambling mess, but I hope you might look favourably on my central premise that we must gain philosophical insight into our own Is in order to recreate one.

A theory concerning the eradication of poverty

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I hate the poor. The uncouth uneducated unsophisticated smelly poor. In fact, I’d go so far as to say the only people I hate more than those people with less money than me are those with more, and especially those with the same (current account = £1226.23). I will deal with the latter two groups some other day but here and now I wish discuss a scheme I have devised to eliminate the world’s poor. The mechanism I propose is to declassify the world’s poorest as animal life and therefore open up the very real possibility of firing them into the sun. This will achieve three main objectives: 1) Entertainment value 2) A sustaining meal for the sun king and 3 )the extinction of the poor and the end of poverty. This section of the plan is easily achieved. The hard part is in stopping those not quite poor from slipping down and becoming the new poor. It is in this theoretical direction that I shall invest the most energy here.

I have always done my bit for social mobility. Being born the greatest aristocrat in the land this could mean only one thing: sliding downward and fast. The silver spoon that I had in my mouth at birth was so big (serving) that I could not remove it from my lips manually but instead had to swallow it and then hope for the best. Unfortunately it is still there in my stomach. However, the good news is that I once swallowed a family of middle class children who now use that spoon to serve up Sunday roast in there. Sometimes I find it irritating having to swallow a roasting joint every Sunday and especially so when a new gas canister must be swallowed for the four ring cooker I sent them a few years back. The little notes they send me (I wont be so rude as to explain how they send these) are humorous though and I find them to be quite charming in a parochial sort of way.

This is the way I see myself: as a beneficent father to the little adorable family residing within me. And they themselves see themselves as looking after the men and women who now live in my lower intestinal cavities and process the stomach people’s waste. The unmarried couples who live in my anus however are very lazy, and hardly ever contribute anything to the whole scheme of things. I often swallow some especially trivial books such as Orwell’s novels just for them and they show no gratitude. To punish them I refused to swallow any batteries for their torches for a month. I must say, sitting here in the sun with my whisky sour I sometimes find it a rather quaint little set up I have here.

Moving swiftly on, like a family with no time to look around Calais in the rush to Paris, I come to the central thrust of argument. Where were we? We have extinguished the poor. Let us define the poor as the lowest 10% by earning potential. That is done. Where they are gone to we know not. Did they make it to the sun? Did the improvised cannon merely burn them into a smoldering heap at the bottom of my garden? Who can say? They key thing is they no longer exist. Now to the very pressing issue of stopping the next lowest 10% from becoming the lowest 10%. To use a personally relevant metaphor; can I remove my anal canal without generally pissing with the good operation of the digestive system? Who will wipe my arse? It is most certainly not going to be me.

The solution I propose is the following: any especially pretty arse dweller may swim upward if they please me. After they have all been given the chance to better themselves in this way I will have my body up to my belly button removed. This will allow me to eat well for a week. But if I used these legs to fashion the means to walk to the supermarket, I will eat well for a year or so. Eventually, I can have the legs added to the top of my head. I will be the first to celebrate this. True, I may here and their begrudge a little their new lofty position. If they mock me and my petty ways I may show a little ill humor. But fundamentally I will say ‘well done’. Let me tell you, this is what I did, but my feet and legs were so useless and lazy that they just lay on the floor bleeding and providing no useful service to anyone, least of all me. So you see the difficulty?

The arsedwellers are so crude in their world view that they have never bothered to better themselves. So I gave everyone a pat on the back, swallowed a load of batteries for each layer of human garbage, and settled down to another rereading of Animal Farm. My father who rests in my mind disapproves but let him! Let him read what he wants but I love a good old fashioned yarn. I decide what to read by asking all the lovely little people what they want and they know Dostoevsky gives me a stomach ache.

The reason I write all this down for your perusal is that it sets the stage for a most remarkable change. Last, Friday I passed around a hundred seeds through my vaginal opening. I quickly reached for the magnifying glass and found these seeds to be little men. Most of them were utterly grotesque little gloop covered things but one of them reminded me a little of my father.

Over the coming weeks, I began to fall in love with that little man. I fed him up on a meal of milk and bread and, while somewhat uncouth, he has a certain gritty charm. He is now just three quarters my size and getting bigger all the time. His soft caresses and gentle suckling at my breast make my body shimmer with sexual energy. He is my pride encapsulated in the form of a sweet little darling x

A great surprise

I have come to dislike those around me. The little seeds I passed from my nethers were all collected by these horrid neighbors and taken as lovers and darlings and friends. I find this most unsporting and wish they would all go hang with their red and blue scarfs and their cheep little sofas.

I looked up at the great cathedral of gut in which I reside. Foie Gras was raining down through David Cameron’s throat and we basked in it. Eating and laughing and enjoying the merriment. My little love looked sad and cried. I have never been so upset in my life. I lay down in the champagne and liver, hugged my husband and sobbed. We made sweet love in the mixture of acid and wine. For the first time in my life I reached climax. I could hear through the walls of Cameron’s side he was listening to ‘I Had the Time of my Life’ at full volume. We embraced and my peasant boy looked almost my size. His face, now drooping in the final stages looked more like my father’s ghost than ever. ‘Let me look upon you with my own eyes’ he whispered and for the first time his eyelids parted and he looked at his first sight. My glowing post-orgasm flushed cheeks his first and final view. He died in my arms and shriveled to the size of a bean. I put him in my vagina and lived a fulfilled life and flew a plane or something. In a hundred years divers will enter Cameron’s throat and find my valuable furniture. My body on a bit of wood, floating in the icy sea.

Some notes on Dirty Dancing

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There are two types of music in Dirty Dancing. The diegetic music is from the era in which the film is set; the sixties, and the non-diegetic music is from the era in which the film is made; the eighties. There is one exception to this. The final dance is to ‘I Had the Time of my Life’ a song newly composed for the film. Given the film’s explicit parallel between dancing and sex (surely sex is dirty dancing), we are warranted to inspect the metaphor a little more closely.

In a previous scene Baby is unable to do ‘the lift’. She struggles to reach orgasm because she lacks confidence and is hidden from the paternal gaze. Only when performing the sex act in full view of her father can she finally perform ‘the lift’. The lift involves Swayze (vertical, firm) and her gracefully horizontal above him. The young working class stud has of course frequently lifted other dancers, the problem is not his but purely hers. Baby cannot masturbate, she requires Swayze for gratification but is still having difficulties. They have previously practiced lifts ‘in the water’. Twice she came close but ultimately, she failed and dived under water. In The Water his body below this waist is submerged; she needs more than just his fine chest, face and luscious locks.

What is the meaning of the new musical frontier associated with the final dance scene? The whole film is clearly the fantasy of an old woman remembering her first sexual encounter (there are some minor diversions from topic such as a lazy critique of Ayn Rand: the toe rag who gets that peroxide blond pregnant (fake hair = fake love) offers Baby a copy of The Fountainhead. Presumably an allusion to Rand’s arguably pro-rape ideology (the middle classes can both patronise the irresponsible immoral workers and out-philosophise them)). As she masturbates furiously she first inserts the young working class stud in to the fantasy which is not enough. Finally, she must have her father watch her with the working class stud at which point the pure sexual virility of the peasantry can flow through her exhibitionism under the gaze of her father, two realms of reality and fantasy are combined (the two musical types are one) and she successfully does ‘the lift’. I jest when I say this middle aged Jewish woman is masturbating! She is of course, making love to her husband. The only way she can bear this is to dissociate and think of her happy youthful sexual awakening. Unfortunately the power of imagination is not strong enough to completely banish the present (eighties music). However, the orgasm only comes when the reality is melded with the fantasy. She imagines her father’s gaze and the working class lover, but the real present of sex with her hideous husband (actual physical stimulus) provides the final phantasmagorical push and orgasm is achieved. The film must finish immediately.

I had the time of my life. Yes I swear. It’s the truth, and I owe it all to you. The only question remaining is whether this ‘you’ refers to her father, the young stud, or the idea of working class virility in the mind of a middle class Jewish woman. There is, however, a more radical possibility: you.

Regards,