Terminal Logorrhoea

An SJW with a PhD writes:

It’s probably about time to collect all the issues and discussion of the 2015 Hugo Awards into one big post that is, at least in terms of what I have to say, a definitive take on it…. Three days after unveiling his slate of nominees, Torgersen wrote an essay explaining the necessity of the slate in terms of the “unreliability” of contemporary science fiction… The easiest mistake to make when trying to understand fascists is to think that they are best described in terms of a philosophy…. As a PhD in English with no small amount of training in postmodernism[,] I feel some qualification to speak here… and he does explain his beliefs in part in terms of a religious experience… Let us view it this way, since, in terms of the Hugos, we now have no other choice…. That covers the actual response in terms of the Hugos…. Your beliefs are horrible. You’re horrible. You’re a nasty, cruel little bully, and I do not like you…. in terms of brilliant, Hugo-worthy stuff that spits in the face of everything Theodore Beale loves… Norman Spinrad’s 1972 novel The Iron Dream, which imagines an alternate history where Hitler became a hack sci-fi writer in America, is probably the most notable in terms of just how much it anticipates this mess… afrofuturism, an artistic movement that uses the imaginative possibilities of science fiction to try to conceive of the African Diaspora not in terms of its tragic past but in terms of the generative potential of the future…. As a song, “Electric Lady” is an anthem in praise of Cindi Mayweather, long on braggadocio, but framed in terms of Monáe’s carefully worked out vision of black female sexuality… — Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons: An Analysis of Theodore Beale and his Supporters, Philip Sandifer, 21/iv/2015.


Elsewhere other-posted:

Ex-term-in-ate!

Material Whirled

When we are conscious of being conscious, what are we consciousness-conscious with? If consciousness is a process in the brain, the process has become aware of itself, but how does it do so? And what purpose does consciousness-of-consciousness serve? Is it an artefact or an instrument? Is it an illusion? A sight or sound or smell is consciousness of a thing-in-itself, but that doesn’t apply here. We aren’t conscious of the thing-in-itself: the brain and its electro-chemistry. We’re conscious of the glitter on the swinging sword, but not the sword or the swing.

We can also be conscious of being conscious of being conscious, but beyond that my head begins to spin. Which brings me to an interesting reminder of how long the puzzle of consciousness has existed in its present form: how do we get from matter to mind? As far as I can see, science understands the material substrate of consciousness – the brain – in greater and greater detail, but is utterly unable to explain how objective matter becomes subjective consciousness. We have not moved an inch towards understanding how quanta become qualia since this was published in 1871:

Were our minds and senses so expanded, strengthened, and illuminated, as to enable us to see and feel the very molecules of the brain; were we capable of following all their motions, all their groupings, all their electric discharges, if such there be; and were we intimately acquainted with the corresponding states of thought and feeling, we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem, “How are these physical processes connected with the facts of consciousness?” The chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable.

Let the consciousness of love, for example, be associated with a right-handed spiral motion of the molecules of the brain, and the consciousness of hate with a left-handed spiral motion. We should then know, when we love, that the motion is in one direction, and, when we hate, that the motion is in the other; but the “Why?” would remain as unanswerable as before. — John Tyndall, Fragments of Science (1871), viâ Rational Buddhism.


Elsewhere other-posted:

Double Bubble
The Brain in Pain
The Brain in Train
This Mortal Doyle

He Say, He Sigh, He Sow #20

“In 1997, Fabrice Bellard announced that the trillionth digit of π, in binary notation, is 1.” — Ian Stewart, The Great Mathematical Problems (2013).

The Verm Terms

“Our relationship with Saudi Arabia is vitally important for our country in terms of counter-terrorism, in terms of the broader Middle East, in terms of helping in respect of Israel and Palestine.” — Tony Blair hits back at criticism…, BBC News, 15/xii/2006.


Elsewhere other-posted:

Ex-term-in-ate!

He Say, He Sigh, He Sow #19

“The study of mathematics is the indispensable basis for all intellectual and spiritual progress.” — F.M. Cornford (1874-1943) quoted in The Sacred in Music (see also Pythagoreanism).

She Say, She Sigh, She Sow

“Those who view mathematical science, not merely as a vast body of abstract and immutable truths, whose intrinsic beauty, symmetry and logical completeness, when regarded in their connection together as a whole, entitle them to a prominent place in the interest of all profound and logical minds, but as possessing a yet deeper interest for the human race, when it is remembered that this science constitutes the language through which alone we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world, and those unceasing changes of mutual relationship which, visibly or invisibly, consciously or unconsciously to our immediate physical perceptions, are interminably going on in the agencies of the creation we live amidst: those who thus think on mathematical truth as the instrument through which the weak mind of man can most effectively read his Creator’s works, will regard with especial interest all that can tend to facilitate the translation of its principles into explicit practical forms.” — Ada Lovelace (née Byron) (1815-52).

He Say, He Sigh, He Sow #13

“In the early thirties Trotsky also spoke of ‘Bonapartism’ in the Stalinist regime. In 1935, however, he observed that in the French Revolution Thermidor had come first and Napoleon afterwards; the order should be the same in Russia, and, as there was already a Bonaparte, Thermidor must have come and gone.” — Leszek Kołakowski in Main Currents of Marxism: Vol. III, The Breakdown (1978).