I

This post is about why I've become disillusioned with Philosophy generally. I've got major issues with its approach as a discipline. With each of its branches. Philosophy might always be around...and doing it was rewarding for me; it helped me to analyse statements, clarifying my thoughts tremendously. And I do "love knowledge". But now I'm more interested in science, onto whose turf Philosophy illegitimately wanders.
I often wondered why philosophy books appeared in the same section as religious books. I thought it was because both tried to answer similar questions, albeit differently and often with mutual suspicion and intolerance, much like those between competing religions. I no longer see as great a distinction between their methodologies and habits, and I see science as something else entirely to philosophy and religion.
I don't consider it an accident that so many people, infant and adult alike, ask themselves these eternal questions at some point, but many adults find that there are problems with these eternal questions. Rarely do I see philosophers question their various methodologies as often or as seriously as I see them arguing over qualia, ethics, art, empiricism or determinism.

Firstly there was my recognition of the complete failure of philosophers to make sense of the way that the world works. This failure is shared with each and every religion. Over the millennia, only recently-developed scientific methods have added to the store of human knowledge and predictive power. Philosophers, like religious people should take this failure of their discipline/ideology/religion to discover facts about how the world works enormously seriously. Philosophers should be wondering why they're making no more progress on their eternal questions about the universe and the experience of life through their metaphysical arguments than religious people did for countless blood-soaked millenia. Or why they've spectacularly failed to create values out of thin air and alter human behaviour, as religion has failed to ground ethics in the Will or nature of God, and has failed to change human behaviour. Philosophers; now turn your attention to your inability to uniformly validate the scientific-mathematical method as the only successful route towards understanding nature.

What ultimately makes philosophy powerless is that philosophers courageously but futilely attempt to use language techniques alone (mostly populated by scientifically outdated concepts and other archaic words) to wrestle with their eternal questions. They do not experiment or observe nature uniformly - like religious people, they're biased towards using intuitively appealing, often introspective approaches cloaked up within a quasi-logical framework, legitimised by convenient but ancient natural language terms. Conceptual confusion abounds in philosophical discourse. The greatest symptom of the problem of using natural language is evident in Descartes' Error, or dualism, from which Western Philosophy has been suffering for a long time. Abandoning it would merely be acknowledging the superiority of the empirical approach. This tendency of the human brain, infused with language, to think using the word "I", has been one of the major sources of confusion over the years, which have led philosophers astray in so many of their questions. Using such a word with such obvious connections to the false notion of a soul, it is not surprising that philosophers scratch around in conceptual confusion. Witness the philosophical debates about free will, ethics, art the like and you see the problem with "I". Read about memetics and you start to see the general scope and power of evolutionary theory and its analogues first to kill the concept of God and then the idea of the soul, and then the human "mind", leaving only the brain. Always at the cutting edge of science, we see reductionist thinking.
Another good step would be to recognise that just as the physical difference between colours of the rainbow are merely different wavelengths and not completely different things (radically different colours, as we perceive them) (and we use our sensory systems to feel, so philosophy is no better equipped to study our phenomenal experiences than are any other disciplines), there is no real distinction between mind and body. The movement of our bodies affects our thinking!! For example, when rotating an object mentally, we do it worse if we're rotating our hand in the opposite direction to when we do it while rotating our hand in the same direction to which we're mentally rotating the object. The act of thinking about an object rotating, which occurs mostly in the visual thought area, is affected by inputs from the sensor-motor cortex which reports about hand movements. Similarly, self control is object control "The boxer picked himself up from the canvas". Self-control is being in one's normal location: "I'm besides myself with anger". Causing the self to act is the forced movement of an object "You're pushing yourself too hard", and self-control is having the self together as a container "She's falling to pieces". Self is an essence that is a found object'"He's trying to find himself in India". Even the Declaration of Independence in the United States invokes our understanding of the Newtonian independence of free bodies. It is no accident that we talk like this. Right from our births, our thoughts are dependent on the use and perception of our whole body. Those who've had fewer sensory systems eg the blind from birth think quite differently. Yes, our visual systems, like our sense of smell, affect our thoughts in many different ways! So no brain-in-a-vat could ever think like a brain inextricably attached to a body like ours could.There are no disembodied minds, no independent, questioning souls, no "I's", unless you are as much your body as you are your mind. And as for "consciousness", whatever this is supposed to be seems to be the tiny, fleeting recollection of whatever happened in the last 500ms, a fragment of your mind's powers to analyse other people briefly turning to analysing themselves, and entering and cycling around in the short term memory and other parts.

The English language needs to adapt to use as much scientific terminology as best it can or the knowledge generated by English-speaking peoples will slow, and their works will fade in to irrelevancy faster without the aid of new scientific words. Why do we not read Ancient English books anymore? [Well, some people read Bronte, fewer read Milton, and fewer still read 5th-century literature..]. Why do English monolinguals not read Modern French books? Same answer.We don't read things if....insert a million reasons OR If we cannot understand the author. Which is the case for Modern French and Ye Olde English books, as Modern French and Old English are both different languages to English. Sure, modern speakers of English can understand some Old English, but modern speakers of English can also understand some French through their English vocabulary alone...Even if ancient England did more strongly resemble the world that we live in today (which couldn't occur in any real sense without an accompanying change in the vocabulary used by its citizens), the book wouldn't be intelligible to us...because Old English people speak a different language...because the world has changed and language is used to communicate things, many of which are about the world [we also talk about things which aren't part of the world, such as Santa Claus and God]. I find it depressing that the best authors of today will likely be practically unintelligible to readers in the 23rd century, and not so at all to those later. Likewise, words like "kidney" will cease to mean anything concrete after humans have evolved different kidneys thousands of years down the track. So we should reduce knowledge wherever possible and practical to more basic terms. That is, Chemistry books of today will be of more use to doctors of the next century than will Biology books. And physics books will be even more 'timeless' than Chemistry books because of their superior generality.
SO WHAT FILLS THE VACUUM WHEN WE STOP DOING PHILOSOPHY?
- Epistemology could somewhat be replaced by theories and empirical studies of perception, linguistic theory and anthropology (that is, they'd each contribute in the "epistemological vacuum" that would follow)
- Ethics could somewhat be replaced by social and political sciences like psychology as well as by Economics
- Metaphysics simply will collapse on its arse; we have physics, chemistry, biology, history and the like
- Aesthetics; hmm. Art, Music, Dance, Drama, literary theories

******
I don't exist. I'm not conscious! Sometimes, "I" could be hungry, at other times "I think that X", at other times, "I'm absent", or tired, or happy, depressed, or 'conscious', or asleep, or funny. The word "I" has stopped making sense to me and I often actually get confused when I use the word now. Although not here. "I'm hungry" seems to make more sense nowadays compared to "I like X, Y, and Z" or, worse, "I like the idea that X, Y, or Z". "I" is supposed to be the way I remember many things (by relating things back to me), and the way that I make sense of everything that goes on or that went on in my brain. It is all-encompassing and infinitely vague term. It has become unavoidable to use such words, although lately I've done so more successfully when I've wanted to without thinking anything was wrong, and avoided confusion. I won't attempt to do so with this post.

Myergh

Exams. 6 of them. Back 27th

Memory

What'd you do yesterday? Last Tuesday? What were you like two years ago? Five? As a child? How many memories can you bring to mind between the ages of 5 and 10? We hardly remember anything, and it's quite scary.

We think we do, but tests show that our memories are absolutely awful.
It's true for all memories; procedural, semantic. Implicit, Explicit.
We remember less than 10% of the fraction of things that we studied very hard at during university. We forget most faces and names.
It is said that we remember what is important, but this is also mostly wishful thinking. We remember STORIES which we made up about what is important. We don't remember almost any meaningful event accurately (much less scary and dangerous ones), it's just that we repeat, adapt and rehearse stories of the event and our lives to ourselves over and over again, so we remember the stories.

To recall your memories better, be in the same state that you were when you encoded the memory. If you were drunk when studying, get drunk for when writing the exam and you'll probably remember more.
Those who learn lists of words underwater recall those same lists better underwater than on land. Those with bipolar disorder remember things they learnt during a depressive episode better during their next depressive episode than when they're on a manic high. So to recall more, be in a similar setting, time of day, frame of mind and energy level.

Schema-consistent information is also remembered better: Old stories are adapted eg the "black substance that came from mouth" from horror stories of old became "foamed at the mouth". Canoes become boats.
People who witnessed a bank robbery were more likely to later recall that the robber was acting "weirdly" and say that he had a moustache. People first recall their attitude and emotional state during the event. Second, they justify that attitude to the audience of today. Thirdly, they reconstruct the memory from these attitudes.
This is partly how false memories are made, of which we have a surprising abundance. If you ask kids that have never been lost in a shopping centre an average of 7 times whether or not they can remember being lost in a shopping mall, on average, they'll start to say that they can remember it happening once. We use a vividness heuristic (how vivid something is) to judge whether or not our memory is of a real or imagined event, so the longer we imagine something for, the more vivid and hence real it appears to be later.

Lastly, some pointers on if you want to remember something:
- Chunking. You do this all the time, eg with phone numbers 9437-8756 is easier to remember than 94378756 . Now chunk the chunked bits, optimal size 4. You could chunk any type of material
- Translate it in to your own natural mental, idiosyncratic inner language
- Make the information somehow significant to your identity
- Labouriously try to connect the information to everything else you know. Do it cross-modally by connecting it to sights, smells, sounds, and ideas.
- Rehearse it all day. Rehearse it periodically over a long period of time. Set up reminders of it everywhere
- Pnemonics, songs etc. There are people that can't speak that can sing full songs. That should be quite fascinating!

Szasz

What a quirky, brilliant old psychologist Szasz was.
Now I don't agree with Tom Cruise that the whole movement of psychiatry is somehow 'evil', but basically every industry is infused with the profit-making incentive and an evolution of more ancient activities.

You might've thought before that there's something a little odd about the numbers when it is said that 5% of people are allegedly suffering from disorder A, while another 3% are from disorder B and another 6-10% from disorder C. By these numbers, everybody, it would seem, has at least about 10 disorders, and some people have >50.
Now I'm not saying that there aren't an incredible variety of ailments, of things that can go wrong with the human body - things which go "wrong" causing pain or biological dysfunction. But the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) used by psychologists has a history of calling every normal human condition (and things which don't affect functioning) a disorder. Until 1973, homosexuality was classed in the DSM as a mental disorder. Masturbation was also said to be a symptom of insanity! The DSM continues to say that behaviours deemed socially unacceptable are in fact disorders...

It's also important to disentangle "moral"/un-scientific statements from real science. It's true that being fat reduces your life expectancy somewhat, but not by a lot. Historically, a lot of the digust obesity is not based on health concerns (as it might've been for lepers) but based on religious-moral paradigms - for example, thinking that eating too much was sinfully greedy and therefore should be avoided, even if it didn't really harm the subject anyway.
In fact, prior to Kraepelin's classification system, everyone a tiny bit different was "mad", and it was caused by the devil. Electro-convulsive-therapy, it was thought, could be used "to harm the evil spirits inside". Not surprising, when you consider that the Medical Model that most humans were supposed to be using when they thought up their 'scientific' theories was an extremely superstitious/religious one...I mean in most of the world, exorcisms to drive away "evil spirits" are still being performed! In the 21st century!



If you're on the same page as me, you might like this quote from Szasz:

"Mental illness...is a myth, whose function it is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations”...
I disagree with this, because he is saying that ALL mental illness is a myth, and I don't think ALL mental illness is a myth. I don't want to be seen to be playing-down the reality, that a lot of people have crippling disorders...but a lot of "mental conditions" are just concepts created to make profits off people in the form of drugs and/or consultations, or to control them.
What is more primary, pervasive, perpetual and problematic is struggle between humans cloaked up as morality, not mental disease. The vast majority of us are organisms which function incredibly well, and there are reasons why we feel supposedly 'dysfunctional' or 'negative' emotions such as anger, jealousy, spite etc. Here, medicine is acting in the service of social control, not our understanding of nature. It is is unconstrained by the requirement pertaining to all good science, which is to be concerned with fact and entirely ethically disinterested, not concerned with values. "Science" concerning value systems is religion, not science.

And Szasz again:
"The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself. In the typical Western [movie/novel] two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim. For example, in the family, husband and wife, mother and child do not get along; who defines whom as troublesome or mentally sick?...[the one] who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other; [the one] who defines thus dominates and lives; and [the one] who is defined is subjugated and may be killed.

Also, Rosenhan's study in 1973: Eight well-adjusted people acted as patients, presenting themselves for admission at psychiatric hospitals, reporting that they were hearing noises/voices...they otherwise told the truth about themselves. All but 1 diagnosed were diagnosed as schizophrenic, and then hospitalised and prescribed medication. Perhaps to be expected. But what was interesting was that the psychiatric staff interpreted all of their otherwise normal behaviour as being somehow "insane"...

The Little Red Schoolbook

It's amazing that a book that would be largely uncontroversial today received so much attention in the early 1970s. I mean, can you imagine, a book which explained to kids what sex actually involved. Australia was so much more a conservative place.
t's funny to hear how over the ages people have justified censorship on the grounds that people are somehow incapable of processing material deemed to be morally questionable...they really thought this book was going to tear apart the fabric of society and turn kids in to monsters. But then again I suppose some of the people who hated that book probably do think that kids nowadays are monsters
***
"What do you mean by 'it began as a joke' ? It was the joke that was brilliant!"

Richard Pratt

So the court says that Richard Pratt's company Visy ripped off Australians to the tune of $700million by fixing the prices of carboard boxes.
This really ought to outrage you a lot more than it probably does. Just about everything you buy has travelled through one of his overpriced cardboard boxes at some stage, so you've been paying through your eyeballs for everything.
But then the powerless court fines Visy $36million. Quite a return on his investment for Pratt, isn't it? Make $700 million, lose $36 million...it's a no brainer. Pratt should be in jail for a long time (without the possibility of managing a company afterwards), and he should've had to return the $700 million plus about another $700 million and interest on the lot...and then to start prosecuting everyone else aware of what was going on.

What's ironic though, is that it is ultimately EVERYBODY ELSE BUT PRATT that will pay the $36 million, because Visy will simply put up the price on its cardboard boxes. Although I guess Pratt also has to buy things from Boxes so he probably pays a couple cents to himself.
***
"A person today has no heart if they've never been a communist before, and has no brain if they're still one"

Trips

As of last year, I had been to 26 countries, but I had not travelled much within Australia, except along the East Coast (usually to the same places, involving a lot of alcohol and/or other substances) dozens of times. Now obviously the remote, the mysterious, the inexplicable is more interesting and stays with you for longer, but my shunning Australia as a tourist destination had become unforgiveable.
I've recently done two trips, so for all my international readers [Quite a lot in Turkey and Japan for some reason], I'll explain where I went and what I did.
My first trip was to Australia's red centre [Alice Springs in the Northern Territory and surrounding areas] on The Ghan train which left from Adelaide, capital of "The Defense State", South Australia. Australia is a very arid country; 2/3 of it is covered by desert., and the Red Centre is so named because it is filled with red rock, red sand, red sunsets and (where they are successful) red animals. And green spinifex, which we'll ignore. It is a beautiful area which contains Ayers Rock, the most incredible rock in the world. A gigantic clump which formed from a now-eroded mountain range. I recommend that all go here, as you see the Olgas too (one of the 7 natural wonders of the world).
Many Australians are unaware that Australia was originally inhabited by up to 690 different Aboriginal tribes, which spoke a staggering 250+ distinct languages, many of which are completely different. Most Aboriginals (sensibly) lived along the coasts, but those that couldn't eeked out an unlikely existence in a climatically extreme area. People often mock the Aboriginal people because their way of life didn't change for a long time (they did not invent many of the things that European settlers did). However, it should be pointed out that (aside from the small numbers of people on the coast) the Aboriginals couldn't grow crops due to the irregularity of rain, and struggled just to survive...Most of their artwork and myths are related to the scarcity of water and available food and how to find it. They also have some judicial autonomy in some regions, so tourists...behave yourselves. One wrong move and the Australian Court may give the Aboriginals the right to deal out tribal justice to you, which could involve spearing your leg...or, if you were Aboriginal and had earnt a death sentence but ran away, killing your next of kin [mother, father etc].

My second trip was to Melbourne, in Victoria. I also went along the Great Ocean Road (a road built by WW2 vets whom the government had to do something with), which has some beautiful views of the coast (including the Twelve Apostles).
We passed towns which hold races where drunk people swim from a lighthouse to a pub at night, past the towns like Torquay where US soldiers based in Australia invented surfing after WW2, and where 'surfing' clothes brands like Billabong and Rip Curl started up.
There was a town, all of the buildings in which burnt to the ground during fires, except that of an Austrian engineer who had specifically designed his house to survive a fire. Sitting on the veranda of his odd Bahaus home as the fire consumed everyone else's home in the town, he must have felt vindicated.
The Aboriginals came up again too. There was a convict and four fellow-escapees from prison who wandered around. This convict's four fellow-escapees became so desperate that they voluntarily returned to prison. The convict staggered on, walking through the town 1 hour's drive from Melbourne that is now Geelong. After falling unconscious, he woke up surrounded by Aboriginals, who nursed him back to health. He spent 30 years amongst the Aboriginals. then, 30 years on, the British recognised him as the escaped prisoner. In return for not going to prison, he helped translate the Aboriginal language in negotations in which the Aboriginal people sold the entire plot of land that is now Geelong to the British for a sack of hay. The Aboriginals had not understood the concept that man can own the land. They would be exploited because of this.
Another random fact: "Fair dinkum" is an Australian slang term which roughly means "Do you mean that seriously?" It came from Chinese goldminers who came to Australia in the 19th century goldrush, who used to excitedly shout "Den Kum" (sounds like 'dinkum'), which means "Real gold" in Cantonese, so you can see where the inquiry about the sincerity of the speaker comes from. Ok I'm as bored as you are. -- update, no, this language fact is apparently not true. folk etymology. but i'm leaving it in because it sounds funny.

Hirschhorn

A tribute to my retiring History of Maths lecturer, Mike Hirschhorn. (He also takes a whole bunch of other Maths subjects and is widely known at UNSW). He's an old-fashioned, old stubborn dude who is even better than myself at mental arithmetic, knows a lot, and you have to admit, he's an arsehole, but he's pretty funny too. I especially like it when he mocks essays written by students in my class. He goes "What kind of idiot wrote this? He says that trisecting an angle HAS BEEN LABELLED AS IMPOSSIBLE. Who LABELLED the problem as being impossible? Did somebody take a labelling machine and label an A4 sheet of paper containing the problem as impossible?" If you can imagine that kind of anal annoying but funny person.
****** "To avoid congestion, commuters are advised to distribute themselves along the platform.."

Which One

Some say that a person simply knows who they are. To another, that person is closed to change. And so we ask: "Have you considered..." and we hope for the best