An all-consuming lust for power.

I agree that it’s the height of bad manners for someone to say “you’re asking the wrong question,” without explaining what they mean.

However…

A question can be uninterpretable. It can be confusing. It can hide assumptions. It can be leading. But in what sense can it be wrong? — bert1

In the sense that the question already carries a view with it. Those hidden assumptions can indeed be wrong.

If your interlocutor explains this, as I think people here tend to do (correct me if I’m wrong), I think it’s fine.

I deleted it, because it was just a YouTube link with a question along the lines of “what do you think?”

If you want to discuss a video, it's best to make some effort to summarize it, and tell us what you think of it yourself.

By the way, there is a Feedback category where you can post questions or complaints about moderation, so I've moved this there.

You can block posts by certain members using SophistiCat’s browser extension:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/5738/ignore-list-browser-extension/p1

But I’m afraid you’ll have to live with all the short stories popping up. It’s just once or twice a year.

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov, which I just finished, is stunningly good.

Now...

Banned @Varde for low quality.

At first, when I saw they were dancing around, I was sceptical. But yeah, it works!

Ligeti - Six Bagatelles

The only piece by Boulez that I really enjoy, probably because he abandoned serialism to do it. Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna.

I'd suggest V or GR before Against the Day. It can be a real possibility that this latter book will erode your endurance. It's not a bad book by any means, but it far inferior to V and GR. V is probably his most fun book. — Manuel

Thank you for this excellent advice, which I have decided to ignore. :grin:

Just read Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon. To begin with I found it a bit annoying, and even once I got into it I thought it was kind of forgettable and ephemeral. Then in the second half it became more involving, and now I've finished it I miss it. In any case it's a lot of fun and paints a picture of a world I knew little about (early seventies Los Angeles, the tail end of the hippie dream). So I'll give it the much-coveted :up: :sparkle:

Before I take on the monster that is his Against the Day, I'm currently reading Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov.

I recently discovered Escalator Over the Hill by Carla Bley, Paul Haines, and the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, from 1967. Weird and wonderful, I love it. It’s like some kind of prog jazz (in the rock sense of progressive, not the Stan Kenton third stream sense).

Blame Alanis Morrisette — Banno

In defence of Alanis...

The notion of cosmic irony (or the irony of fate) might be stretched to cover the unlucky situations that she describes in the song.

He won the lottery and died the next day

The gods bestowed the winning ticket upon a man whom they had already condemned to death the next day, so that he could not enjoy the money. They do it all the time, subverting our hopes and expectations just for a laugh.

Alternatively, the fact that her examples are not ironic is what is ironic.

"Hollywood" of course is a synecdoche or metonym for the mainstream film industry (in America). The cowboy is in Mulholland Drive not because there are cowboys hanging around in Hollywood, the place, but because of the iconic status of the cowboy in the history of film.

Anyway I agree, it's one of my favourite films too.

:ok:

Couldn't make it fit.

That would make him, according to you, a hotheaded ginger Dutch fish out of water in a cryptoworld he never made.

I'm sorry that you feel I'm being uncharitable. I'm only trying to get my point across, but I'm probably not doing a great job of it. — Luke

Same here! No problem Luke: right now I don't have any more words.

I didn't say I can't show you "the" experience. I said I can't show you "my" experience. — Luke

Yes, but as far as showing me your experience has any meaning at all, it means just the same as showing me the experience, which is why I put it that way and why I made the point.

How do you know that "there's some level of qualitative identity"? Can that ever be anything more than an assumption? — Luke

There is little that is more certain than that we share lots of things, so I wouldn't want to characterize it as merely an assumption. (Obviously though, I could have lost the feeling in my finger, so we're not always right).

I have not described this as ineffability. I have said that language may not be able to communicate one person's experience such that another can "fully" understand their experience only from the language. — Luke

My point was that this is tantamount to saying what I said.

I don't presume or have any sympathy for an undistorted view from nowhere. — Luke

I didn't think you did. It's precisely because I thought you didn't that I used it as an analogy to help get across my point.

But this is going around in circles and I don't think you're reading me charitably, even though I'm being pretty clear. If I'm misunderstanding something (to do with knowledge and understanding I suppose), then you could try to explain what it is.

I think the main difference is that I can show you an apple, but I can't show you my experience. I can show you my expression of pain, but not the pain itself. — Luke

First, I think you can show me the experience. If you prick your finger with a pin, you can show me the experience by pricking me with a pin. Are the experiences the same? Well, there’s no numerical identity, but there’s some level of qualitative identity. There can’t be total qualitative identity because that would be equivalent to numerical identity, and that would require that I experience the pinprick as you, which is just to be you. I don’t think it’s right to describe this as ineffability.

I see this kind of how I see perception. Some around here will say that perception is deficient or distorted because we perceive in a particular way which is determined or conditioned by our anatomy and physiology and our behaviour in our environment. This view presumes that perfect, undistorted perception would be a view from nowhere or, in Kant’s terms, an intellectual intuition. This is a bad account of perception.

I don’t really disagree with the bulk of your post; we just draw different conclusions. In fact, I’m not yet even sure that I’m absolutely against your use of “ineffable”. I do think that the position I’ve set out goes some way to clarify things.

Second, all analogies will break down at some point. The apple, unlike the experience, is not subjective, so I agree that there’s a significant difference.

Then the parser appended an incomprehensible sentence, something that I must accept the answer that ansers my question — god must be atheist

PICNIC

"Question" and "poll" are options available as checkboxes under the main text box. You're never forced to choose one of them, as far as I know.

My post covered all of those points, I think.

I'm with @Moliere on this, because I thought of the same objection. To say that in talking about an experience, something is left unsaid--because it doesn't convey what it's like to have that experience--seems to imply an expectation that is too high, namely that my words can give you the experience.

We can no more expect to convey an exprience in this way than we can expect to convey an object: we can talk about an experience, but there is always something beyond the talk, namely the experience itself; similarly, we can talk about an apple, but there is always something beyond the talk, namely the apple itself. But we don't say that apples are ineffable.

What makes it tempting to say that experiences, but not apples, are ineffable? Whatever the answer--and that might be the most interesting thing, I'm not sure--is it too easy here to just say that when we realize that experiences, rather like objects, are to be had (in the case of objects, to be), the issue dissolves?

What I suggested might be "the most interesting thing" could be to do with the supposed Enlightenment and scientific effort to explain everything away.

First time listening to Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart. I'd been led to expect unlistenable cacophony but a lot of it's really groovy to my ears.

Telekinesis by Tyondai Braxton, released yesterday.

:up:

implies¹ = suggests
implies² = entails (to use the terminology being used in the thread so far)

It is precisely because correlation implies¹ causation that it's important to keep in mind that correlation does not imply² causation. It's not banal, as Bartricks has claimed.

By the way, and roughly speaking, I think implication in logic is something that happens within statements (if then), whereas entailment happens within arguments, that is, between sets of statements and a conclusion.

Don't waste your time with Bartricks.

:up:

It's all beginning to make sense.

The first time I heard that, I didn't know the story behind it, but I found it fascinating and moving all the same, which is significant I think.

@Srap Tasmaner

I took some time to explore Cecil Taylor and, rather than the early stuff, I've settled on the solo live album Garden, recorded in 1981, as a way in, because I liked it from the start (it's the re-issue split over two discs, Garden Set 1 and Garden Set 2).

I read that Duke Ellington was one of his heroes, but I couldn't see how his playing related to him at all. However, despite initially thinking the music was totally abstract, and closer to non-idiomatic free improv than jazz, I began to hear the jazz in it pretty strongly, and not only in the occasional blues phrases and inflections. The track "Pemmican" on Set 2 is almost close to being a conventional jazz ballad, and this is where I can see how his playing is an extension of the tradition (jazz is not dead, it just smells funny).

In a nutshell, I don't really know what he's doing, and although I can discern the repeating motifs and chords, I find it difficult to hear the carefully worked out structure that people say is there. But I like it. It's exciting, technically stunning, and somehow very precise and organized. And in this performance (Garden) he leaves quite a lot of space, which I appreciate.

Before finding that, I watched a video of him playing, and that's maybe why I was more interested in his solo work, because I dug it. I wondered why it should help to see him play, thinking that I ought to focus on the purity of the music, but on the other hand he was a kind of performance artist who liked to emphasize the physicality.

I see what you mean. Sounds quite conventional to begin with and then goes a bit mad later on. I like it.

I'll give some earlier Cecil a spin.

Don Pullen — Srap Tasmaner

Now that's someone I know absolutely nothing about.

It didn't bother me so much — Noble Dust

It didn't really bother me either; it was just disorientating. To end the book "making you feel like the layers of reality can continue to be peeled back indefinitely" is far from being a bad thing.

But why charge a fiction author with uncritically assuming a philosophical position? Isn't that a given? It's a story, not a treatise. — Noble Dust

Well I agree with you, and that's one reason I'm going to read more of his work.

If you've listened to some other earlyish Ornette but not to Free Jazz, just spin it. There's just more players, but it's very listenable. I only finally got around to it in the past year, and it's nothing to be afraid of. — Srap Tasmaner

I've got it playing now. Thanks :up:

(It used to be said there were two routes into free jazz (my music theory is almost non-existent, so grain of salt here): Ornette just passes right by the theory of harmony and frees melody from it; Cecil layers in more, augmenting traditional harmony, broadening it. Free Jazz the record is definitely still on Ornette's end of the spectrum.) — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, that's how I see it.

Cecil Taylor is baffling. I guess I haven't given him enough of a chance.

Couple things about Elvin Jones: he told some interviewer that part of the secret of his style, the polyrhythmic thing, is that he always hits something on the beat, just not always the same thing. Also, when Mingus was forming a group in the late fifties, the only drummer he wanted was Elvin Jones, but Elvin was playing with someone else at the moment, so Mingus taught saxophonist Danny Richmond how to play drums, and Danny was his drummer for the rest of his life.

I think it might be the liner notes to the Coltrane I recommended where Trane says of Elvin, "Sometimes he's too much even for me." — Srap Tasmaner

:cool:

Coltrane's last couple years, I don't do — Srap Tasmaner

I don't much like Ascension or the later stuff like Interstellar Space, but I like a few things from around 1965 and 1966, like Kulu Se Mama and Transition (which have some tracks in common).

The track "Welcome" is calm and beautiful. As a jazzhead you may know it already, but I'll put it here anyway:


But it was the track "Transition" that first really got me into jazz. As a teenage fan of thrash metal, I was looking for something even more heavy, and that did the trick (along with Stravinsky). I still love to listen to it, even though my appetite for that kind of intensity has waned. It's intense and dark, but driving and controlled. His playing is clear and strong, although at first I didn't like the altissimo explorations, which I felt detracted from the strength of his normal registers. I changed my mind about that, mostly.

I love how it starts, right in it.

Understanding and loving the many varieties of free jazz (and fusion, for that matter) remains on my to-do list. — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah, I feel I ought to try getting into Albert Ayler, who might be more akin to Ornette than to Coltrane. Anthony Braxton is another sax player who seems fascinating but who I can't get to grips with. Otherwise, I'm tentatively exploring non-idiomatic free improvisers, among whom I like Fred Frith and the fairly obscure Lol Coxhill, who seems to have been an outsider even in that scene.

But with both free improvisation and free jazz, I can't often listen to the large groups, so I don't feel much desire to get into the large group improvisations of Coleman and Coltrane (the former, Free Jazz, sounds like more fun to me though).

It might be useful for those who are not so familiar with football if you summarize the problems and the criticism more clearly. What makes this one so much worse than others? How did it come about that it's happening in Qatar in the first place? How has it caused disruption to the football season?

I'm also bad at chess and the only time I felt drawn to play and improve my skills, I quickly became discouraged. Whether this was to do with the way I think, my abilities, social discomfort, or problems with interpersonal competition, it doesn't make a big difference: it's not chess that's deficient, it's us.

That said, I don't beat myself up about it.

Excellent. Curious to hear your thoughts. — Noble Dust

It's a wild ride, very enjoyable, original, and stimulating, and obviously hugely influential. He's full of ideas and has the ability to pile them up and repeatedly surprise while also maintaning a good story. He can make you feel you know a character with only a few words. He makes ideas as exciting as action. The corny, anachronistic, sixties-drenched stuff won't please people who look to science fiction for credible predictions (at least about technology), but it's humorously weird and also obviously satirical. The descriptions of clothing are ridiculous and seemingly pointless, but perhaps knowingly so. I liked that about it.

The ending threw me off. I can't tell if it was a mischievous afterthought or if it had been part of the design all along. It ends making you feel like the layers of reality can continue to be peeled back indefinitely.

So I like it a lot and I'm happy for people to class him as one of the literary greats of the twentieth century, and yet something about it rubs me the wrong way. Never mind the unreliable narrator: I feel with Dick we have an unreliable author. I don't quite trust him or feel an affinity with where he's coming from. I can get used to the occasionally clunky prose, even though I sometimes find it annoying, and I don't mind that characters are still using phone books in a world of commercialized precognition, flying cars and robot shop assistants, but there's something bordering on madness that's a bit alienating (could be I'm just saying that because I know he went mad in the end, in which case strike it from the record).

Also I think he uncritically assumes a philosophical position that I don't get along with, namely the soul or mind as in principle independent of the body and the physical world, as in fact tied down by the physical world to its detriment. This seems basic and unexamined for Dick, but to me it's a cliché.

I'll definitely read more though.