Ironick

The Heterogeneous Self.

Self is hetro across time (diachronic?): old self, current self, future self.

Self is hetro in time (synchronic?): hetro components compose the self.

Both forms of hetro entail competition and cooperation.

Donald Davidson Obituary.

Dr. Davidson wrote his dissertation on Plato's "Philebus," a dialogue between Socrates and Philebus, one of his many foils, a lengthy defense of the superiority of intellectual activity over physical pleasure. Dr. Davidson told Mr. Lepore that he thought Quine was perplexed over why he chose such an antiquated topic, but kept it to himself.

This is really going to bug me now...So I just went off and looked into it while writing this entry. In tracking this down, I stumbled across the following set of links on Davidson (see #18). Apparently the movie, The Thirteenth Floor, references Davidson! Of course the link is now dead, but Google to the rescue, with a cached page describing why Philebus is relevant.

It seems to be an excerpt from this bio. I guess I'll have to go and read Philebus now...In his honor. (I wonder if Project Gutenberg has it...)

Think orgasmically

Saw this post entitled Think orgasmically on Scripting News and it reminded me of an epiphany I had during a series of insights:

 

Epiphanies are functionally similar to orgasms in that both are emotional "rewards" for "connecting."

 

In the case of orgasm, the connection is sexual. While in the case of epiphany, the connection is conceptual. That is, my epiphanies occur when I connect concepts. Heidegger would note that both forms of connection share the same Latin root: copula葉o link. <grin>

 

Of course, not every conceptual connection triggers an epiphany. Dave Winer says he has them when he has an idea that mixes well with the world. My epiphanies are triggered when I make a broad set of connections between concepts that had seemed unconnected and such connections lead to a whole series of insights.

 

Why do both ways of connecting (sexual and conceptual) trigger an emotional feeling of pleasure and satisfaction? I believe it is because both forms of connecting are essential to evolution, i.e., genetic and memetic.

 

BTW, I disagree with Dave's apparent suggestion that mostly women understand this relationship between sexual and conceptual connection. Google epiphany orgasm and you'll find many men observing the connection between them. When I did so, I found at least one man who has apparently thought about this extensively: Neil Greenberg, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His web site has interesting pages on epiphany as a state of consciousness triggered by connecting. Here's one other man who's made the connection.

 

My four greatest epiphanies (roughly spaced by decades) were triggered by the following (in order):

ｷ         The realization of finality of death and my embrace of atheism

ｷ         Derrida

ｷ         Rorty

ｷ         The realization of the fundamental importance of conceptual connection in the evolution of complexity

 

I hesitated to post this because it sounds so wacko, but given how many others have commented on the phenomenon, I felt I had to add my perspective on the issue.

Process

is unchanging change? 'process' is change that is held to continue unchanged from a given point of view. This is a line tossed off by Salthe in the work cited in my previous post. It seems very profound to me. It seems to solve the endurantism/perdurantism dichotomy by suggesting how a process is like an object/structure in that it is unchanged over time from a given point of view. And an object is like a process in that it changes over time. Thus, process vs. information (i.e., structure) are simply two equally valid views of the same phenomenon, just as wave vs. particle are two equally valid views of energy. Somehow Quine's metaphor of Neurath's boat seems apropos here as well, though I haven't thought this through.