Existential
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Angry all the time
I am an angry man, in my head I may already have killed you and disposed of your corpse… You only have to say the word yawn and I will yawn. If you yawn, I will yawn. If my cat yawns then guess what… I yawn. Apparently that is a sign that sympathy is indeed Continue reading
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Revisiting mistruths
Every philosopher is on a quest to write something that changes the way the person who reads it thinks, a search for some compelling argument. Not truth as we might contend, persuasion would be a better term. What is verifiable through testing is scientific fact, those are not arguable in the same way as the Continue reading
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Constants end
I’m not going to tell you the details, but it’s been a month, and at the point of writing this it’s still that month… There are things in life that seem like they’ve always been there, and then they’re not, and it’s a shock when they go. My neighbour has this year experienced her husband’s Continue reading
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What would the machine want?
I heard this fantastic story on Radio 4, read by Stephen Fry, written by someone who was speculating on what will happen when AI inevitably finds agency, when it starts to want something. This is a serious consideration, we assume at some point that we will, either accidentally or by our genius, create a machine Continue reading
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A difficult question with an likely unsatisfactory answer..
So, trying to be as diplomatic as possible, and not get myself into trouble, I ask Em a question. It occurred to me that sometimes I considered that women are often irrational, and sometimes slaves to their current emotions in a way that men tend not to be. Now that is a generalisation, yes, but Continue reading
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An argument on the pre-Holocene
Induce or deduce the existing object. Two men argue about far back human history, one uses inductive reasoning, the other deductive, both are wrong and correct at the same time. Person one observes the objects made by man and concludes that these are the products of civilisations during the Holocene, the other sees the same Continue reading
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A good life
The most important philosophy is the good life, unfortunately nobody has ever been able to define what this is satisfactorily. Every philosopher in history has been trying to give humanity their take on what is the best way to live, personally, spiritually, or structurally. Mozi is the origin of the golden rule, where the treatment Continue reading
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A changing river
“No man ever steps in the same river twice” Heraclitus Meaning that everything changes, all the time. The river you stepped in that one time has changed now, it may be the same river nominally, but it is not made of the same material. The water and the fish are not the same, the banks Continue reading
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Are there unforgivable things?
I watch the news, so do you. We make judgments on what we see and we comment to our spouses about how we think the perpetrators of the crimes we are told of should be treated, how they would be treated if it were up to us. I suspect one of the reasons we feel Continue reading
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Invisibility, a superpower?
I’m invisible, I’m convinced of it, but this is not a rant…I’m going to tell you about a phenomenon that just is… I went to the plumber’s merchants and was first in the door, nobody else was in the shop. I had a simple enquiry about a washing machine pipe and a coupling. My pal Continue reading
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