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THE INWARDNESS OF MENTAL LIFE: is here.
5k CONTEST: It won't be that long until there is a new 5k site. By then, no-one will care. In the meantime, view the current site.
Or, hey, this is funny: have a look at the Polish and Danish versions of the 5k. (Now confirmed by a helpful reader, it is a Polish version of the 5k contest.)
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GATHERING STEAM
00-6-14
To go along with the Toulmin posted earlier, I've had a chance to post the perfect (at least on the tangents I've been riding) follow-up. More on the topic of intersubjectivity: excerpts from an interview with Donald Davidson.
The scoop: Davidson holds a pretty radical epistemology, though an attractive one — just the opposite of the empiricists way of looking at knowledge as accreting from the inside out, building on induction over sense-perceptions, towards to knowledge of the world and finally towards knowledge of other minds. Instead, he believes that intersubjectivity is the foundation for any sort of knowledge whatsoever and we only get to self-knowledge via interaction with other people and after an understanding of the "external world".
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HI, DO YOU MIND IF I PUKE MISCELLANY ALL OVER YOU? (BORING. WAIT TILL NEXT ONE, THREE DAYS OR SO.)
00-6-13
Fortune received at Chef Wang (in Seattle with Mr. Josh Santangelo on June 1, 2000). I choose to interpret it figuratively. And, in this way, it has made me smile more than once.
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In my rooms, Thirkill Court, Clare College, winter 97/spring 98, where I am lighting my pipe. Note to Past Stewart: you can't really pull off a pipe yet. That was a little ridiculous.
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My only Repent Sinner sign on brown cardboard, given to me (I think) spring 2000. I remarked on last fall on these signs, many thousands of which can be found all over Vancouver. They are still to be found, and the variety of the media has increased (stickers, metallic papers, red plastic). Apparently, the Jamaican woman is not responsible. Most natives we're surprised that these bits of guerilla proselytizing continued to proliferate into Y2K (apparently, the motives were not time-sensitive).
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Almost exactly two years ago (give or take a week). This stone hut afforded a convenient excuse to take a break from an excruciating hike up in the foothills where the Pyrenees meet the Bay of Biscay. We planned for about two hours round trip, but it was three and half just getting to the top. There were cows and horses with bells tied around their necks grazing here and there.
I remember it was extremely hot, and I was wearing too many clothes, and we didn't carry enough water. But when we got to the top, we ate at a little restaurant perched on the very summit, with beautiful views on both the Spanish (all the way to San Sebastian) and French sides (we were staying in St. Jean de Luz). Then, with several bottles of wine, I feasted on
confit de canard, white asparagus and a perfect flan, all finished with the local (anise? licorice?) digestif.
It was right about here.
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These pictures need to be in sequence to be funny. If you've been to my apartment in the last week or so, I've already shown them to you (the funny incense, remember?). But most of you haven't been over recently.
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And so you see, it's not like I don't like trivia. It's just that I don't like trivia to the exclusion of the profound. By the way, I finally got it together to get a SCSI card and adapter and have set up my once dust-covered scanner.
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LAST CHANCE TO DANCE TRANCE (PERHAPS)
00-6-11
One of the things that I don't like about the web is how so much ephemera is saved and cataloged and indexed and preserved into infinity (example one, example two, example three) while 90% of the interesting things in those older repositories of human knowledge (take the 6 million volume Cambridge University Library for example) may never be available online.
So, anyway, at some point in the past, I wanted to make a point about an lecture the text of which I once read. But I couldn't link to it. Published in 1979, it was pretty likely that there wasn't even a electronic version of it anywhere. And that struck me as sad. So I got permission from the University of Chicago Press and the author himself and paid my own good money to have my crappy old non-OCR-able photocopy typed up and proofed: Without further ado, I present the 1979 Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture at the University of Chicago, given April 30, 1979 in the Glen A., Lloyd Auditorium of the Laird Bell Law Quadrangle by Professor Stephen Toulmin, later reprinted in the journal Critical Inquiry and published in booklet form (my source). Yes, that's right, I'm talking about:
The Inwardness of Mental Life
(A better home is coming soon.)
The idea of consciousness as essentially, irrevocably and necessarily private and subjective is so ingrained into all thinking about the mental (as it has been for centuries) that suggestions such as Toulmin's almost can't be heard. Most people would just dismiss as absurd the idea that the interpersonal is prior to the subjective, or that consciousness can just as easily be public as not. But they oughtn't. Moving beyond the "dualist v materialist" debate is long overdue and it is refreshing to imagine discourse about consciousness which was not bogged down by the problem of other minds, skepticism and the like.
More on this later.
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I am almost certainly the first one on my block to be reading Word.com's new book (?)
Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs at the Turn of the Millennium. It is all two to five page interviews or monologues — people talking about their jobs: from Human Resources Director in a slaughterhouse to supervisor at a telemarketing company to Julian Schnabel to a movie producer to Taco Bell employee and hundreds more (545 pages worth). Recommended.
Here is an excerpt which speaks to how I've been feeling for the last while:
But also big difference between life in Bosnia and in U.S. In Bosnia we all live more closer to each other, we visit friends more often, we have more dose relations with family, with aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers, than here.
When you work for ten or twelve hours a day, there is not much left for real life, you know? ... You know, there is freedom to change job from one company to another company. But there is no freedom to get something real, like four weeks of vacation instead of two. It is somehow self-understanding that you have to work more than eight hours per day. A friend of mine, a younger person than I, just finished university and is looking for first job. A good offer was made but the situation was sixty to eighty hours per week working. It's too much. There is no time to go see a movie, read a book, find a wife or husband, raise a child. I used to read two or three books per week in Bosnia, now if I finish one book in one month I am happy. I really miss that part of my time. Now I don't even remember the names of writers that I like.
Capitalism is without any doubt more efficient. It can generate, you know, wonderful products and everything else. The cars in America are much better than cars in former Yugoslavia, the homes are better. But somehow the time spent working and buying everything—it takes too much of life.
Cf.
Wordsworth:
The world is too much with us; late and soon
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers
Marvell:
But at my back I always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near
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Saw Medeski, Martin & Wood in their Acoustic Trio formulation at the Moore Theatre in Seattle last week. Great show if you can dig the dissonance, and sometimes I can, y'know? Sometimes I can. (Of course, if you like Ornette Coleman, then you can dig it too. Living in NYC, you've probably seen them though.) They are on tour all the time, check their site and see when they'll be in your neighborhood.
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IS THIS SITE STILL HERE?
00-5-29
It has been a long time since I updated this because I've been waiting until this really cool thing is finished. Pssshhk. Really cool things take forever.
I don't like that this is the case, but I feel compelled to update anyway.
More evidence that, per capita, Vancouver has the best personal sites: my ol' friend (and 5k reviewer) Lisa Marshall's new and improved zero9 and a friend-of-a-friend's jealousy.com. zero9 is a lot like this site, in the sense that it was once a mere portfolio site which eventually transmogrified in a more frequently updated personal site. But she redesigned (to good effect) in between. By way of contrast, I just renewed "sylloge.com" after two years and still no redesign ...
Linder's site (jealousy.com) has been around for a while, but I've just been reminded to go back and check it out. She has a something real cool going: foodpix.net — if you want your desktop to look like mine, that is the place to go. Not long till the cease and desist comes from foodpix.com, I'd bet.
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In June I'll be in St. Louis (where I was really bored last time — one of you know something fun to do there?) for the 11th & 12th, San Francisco from the 23rd to the 28th (for vacation, hooray) and Calgary for a few days sometime in between there. It's kind of like a tour. (One more bad trip though, and I swear to God that I'm driving everywhere.)
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CHI is Seattle next year and the theme is "Anyone. Anywhere." OK, I commit to going in 2001 no matter what.
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