0dense

So I'm writing my final on cognition and impact of technology on consciousness and so on, and there are so many thought experiments like "what if you woke up and part of you was a machine! How would you feel then? Who would you be!' with this gotcha attitude turning on the presumption of identity being dependent on physical attributes. And I'm like ... this isn't actually revelatory? Like, people are going around every day with pacemakers and cochlear implants and prosthetic limbs, and they're cogitating just fine, pal. We don't actually need to look far to find cyborgs. 

Also, when the thought experiment is about the extent to which ones consciousness can inhabit a body it doesn't perfectly match? Buddy I am trans as the day is long, and I'm just trucking along here. That's dysmorphia you're describing. It's not new. We get by. We're making it work. 

There are good arguments out there, there are so many experiments that are actually interesting. I'm enjoying my papers, and getting the work done. But the prevalence of these low-investment arguments is a grind. 



Also, cylons are Swamp People and I am GONNA make that point somewhere in one of these papers so help me lmao

Friends, we have come to the point in the semester where I'm getting sincere emotional support from reading virtue epistemology. No lie, it's Grice and Lynch time!! My courses have us reading on the Cambridge Analytica debacle and postmodernist skepticism and systems of misogyny (from authors that are still transphobic) and censorship, and sometimes I've just got to go back to the cooperative principle and the intrinsic values of truth. Whereas we owe attention to another for the sake of the other. Whereas we owe not only sincerity but integrity. That communication, contrary to what the internet is doing to us, should be an act of care, a sharing of relevant and appropriate content. And that depriving truth from one another is a concern with actual meaning, because we have a right to reality. Fuck it up, Adorno and Murdoch and Bakhtin.

(I know Grice has been around for a while, but are people also reading Michael Lynch? because True to Life: Why Truth Matters is an excellent short volume. It's what it says on the tin, and a complete delight. I am in somewhat desperate need of encouragement from time to time, and I can't be alone in this. Not to get emotional, but truth is less like money than it is like love: it is objective in its existence, subjective in its appreciation, and able to exist in more than one form. (181))

((related, yall know those 'philosophy and [popular tv show]' anthologies? usually they're mostly just for a laugh, but Blackwell did one on The Daily Show and it's got some really good papers on truthiness))

(((my brain, VO: To Be a Virtue Epistemologist Is to Be Naive. We are so focused on our search for truth, we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there, whether we can see it or not, whether we choose to or not. The truth doesn't care about our needs or wants. It doesn't care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait, for all time.)))


In additional news, today I got to give the Fricker Talk to a classmate, politic in the office, and find the episode of [redacted] I participated in. It's honestly wild to realise that my voice has gone out on uhhhhh international satellite broadcast. Catch me dragging care ethics into a stereo near you!! 

So I got out of a ToK lecture today and saw a poster up across the hall, advertising meetings for a Queer And Questioning group. 

• oh sure, I thought. That reminds me, I need to find/found the continental society here. 

I get to my next class, sit down, and finally realize that this is probably the new name for a GSA-style org, and not an LGBT skeptics society

So code name Phil and I were talking DnD after being and knowing today, and not to be a Massive nerd, but my current character is largely inspired by cartesian doubt; I'm trying to poke at idealism in context René never ever meant. Or show me the metaphysics of arcadia, man, let me at the wyrd, let's see how this place is held up, what can it tell me and how can I carry out my intentions under its terms!!! 
anyway, so the last few lectures in epistemology have been on the Gettier cases, and I was having fun trying to decide how my char would possibly integrate JTBs and this shenanigans into their cognitive structure
( Read more... )



also, unrelated to the above, a list of good things recently, bc I'm not About being down: 

• the campus farmer's market has a stall that sells these really awesome chicken adobo bao, and another stall that has great ginger-hibiscus iced tea, so even though I've got about six straight hours of class, thursdays always get a fun lunch
  • they don't call them bao but it's bao, I know what I'm seeing
• also today sister brought me a dang good taro boba from a new place, hella
  • am I food-motivated? probably, sure, you bet
• the latest scene in my vaguely serious YJ and JR fic is looking decent; I'll keep giving it side-eye for a bit, but it's certainly looking better than I thought it would run
• came to Opinions on Camus
  • tl;dr: for a guy who hated nihilism, I feel very strongly about him the same way I do for Nietzsche
• got good paper topic feedback from a handful of grad classmates, even from code name cousin, who spent an hour drawing bauhaus rectangles in ms paint and surfacing with great comments out of nowhere, it was really funny
• went and got vietnamese food with the grad classmates, took the scenic route back to campus to skip traffic and ended up looking right down at the ocean while everyone tried not to spill pho and drinks on each other, three of us crammed in the back, while also all contributing percussion to our driver's preferred techno/electronica, all with the sunset rolling in over the water and spilling through the windows
  • was not late to seminar, despite it all
• went to the apothecary downtown and got stuff for a new tea
  • I will say the first try has not been evenly balanced, I did not expect the viburnum to be so distinctive lol
• just got walk through such a beautiful day
• Soon, Easter

So, I get it. The Summa isn't the blockbuster it was; not all of the arguments are welcome in the secular day and age. No, St Aquinas didn't have our modern perspective on many issues, and yes, the commentary around, eg, sex out of marriage, isn't as applicable as it was. But just because he was limited doesn't mean we need to limit his argument! The point he's getting at with natural law isn't that we need to have punishments for every article he brings up, it's not that the only way to try to be good is to restrict oneself to exactitude. Contrary: every principle is intended to guide us to eudaimonia, and that is Not utilitarianism*. The restriction against sex out of marriage was intended to prevent mothers from having to raise children alone - if that's hard in the modern day, the 1200s were nowhere as forgiving**. It's oriented towards helping people have a better life. That's what it all intends towards. If he was writing now, he could use another argument, but the point still stands: how can we make a world that is good to live in? How can we as a society make a good world happen?
All of his questions are for us as a unified people, as a world. Don't take it so personally, we're detracting from the mission. A charitable reading is one that looks for the good we can do, and why aren't we trying to take that as far as we can??

Anyway, I'm reading the Summa excerpts along with Politics and the Hackett abridged Guide of the Perplexed, and it's a trifecta I Highly recommend.



* The fact that we look at 'what's good for people' and immediately slap a modern label on it is our problem, not a charitable reading. And no, hedonism as a predecessor isn't the same style of thing either. 
** @the diocese^, if this is an exogenous reading, it's the best I've got in the name of promoting that charitable reading. 

^ @the diocese tho I put the Ash Wednesday mass in my calendar on the break from seminar where we're doing Nietzsche, so that was fun

 So my seminar is tackling the genealogy of morals, and I have to say, I think I like what Nietzsche is getting at, more than what he says, if you catch my drift. Like, 'we should recognise that we are constrained, but also that we have a capacity to live better lives'? yea! but 'altruism and charity are weak and misguided'? nah!! So it's like reading a soliloquy, with a very passionate voice, and a character who really needs to trim that neckbeard. 
Anyway, my response was getting the Hass version of the Beatitudes stuck in my head, soooooo sorry, freddie.

Also, one of the interns has her first ethics course this semester, and if we're talking verses, I'm really quite in the mood for the kind of perspective the young'uns sing about -