Ma! I want to study there! — javi2541997

I have spent time in one of the other Stalinist skyscrapers, the Hotel Ukraine. They’re not made to be good places to study or live or work, but just to project the power of the state. Magnificent, but inhuman—downright horrible.

But yes, I guess the prestige of the institution, embodied in the building, is surely an attraction to students.

Monumento a Vittorio Emanuele II — Lionino

Nice photo, but I don't like the building. I think it's a bombastic and insensitively located monstrosity, and it reminds me of Stalinist architecture: impressive, sure, but totalitarian and tasteless.

I took this a couple of winters ago:



I don't think the building (Moscow State University) is a beautiful thing, and yet it's magnificent and photogenic. It's on Sparrow Hill, a high bank of the river, and can be seen far and wide. Looking in the other direction at the point where the photo was taken, you get a great view of the city.

What @Michael said.

In a sense, Russia was more communist under the tsars than after the revolution:

Until the 1860s, almost all Russian peasants held their land in a form of communal ownership known as obshchina or mir, which was similar, but not identical, to the commons-based communities in pre-industrial England. The communes were arranged in various ways, but typically, each household farmed strips in open fields, and the land was periodically redistributed. Control of common lands and forests was managed by village assemblies. — Monthly Review

No, and it wasn’t a secret. The Party’s official story was that they were working on it, so be patient. Until the eighties they were in the habit of perpetually pushing the future advent of communism later and later, until nobody believed it would ever come.

World Championship snooker from the BBC, my one enthusiasm in the world of sport (although traditionally it was classed as a game). Probably the best TV experience there is.

How did you get on with it? It's an extraordinary book, I thought, but hard going in all its self-reflexive cleverness. It's like someone on the spectrum, with a gift for wordplay, has just let rip. — Tom Storm

It’s lined up and ready to go; I’ll report back when I get around to reading it. I tried a few pages and liked it. A bit like Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon but easier to get into.

Solaris by Stanisław Lem
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth (RIP)

:nerd:

I think some passages are translated beautifully, like Katzman’s monologue about the temple of culture near the end, but yeah, the dialogue is really stilted sometimes.

I am still underway in the novel. I will think about that element before commenting. — Paine

:up:

Re-reading The Doomed City by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky — Paine

I just started that too. First time for me. — Jamal

Just finished it. It’s fascinating but difficult. I have a feeling that some of the difficulty is down to what seems to me like a not-so-great translation. The novel is very Russian and I think there’s a lot being lost; I could see the sharp sardonic force of the book only dimly through the clunky English rendering. Certain idioms and styles of humour are rendered awkwardly.

The result is that much of the time it’s difficult to get what the brothers are doing and saying. I’m comfortable with anti-mimetic modernism, with the surreal, the psychologically internal, and the inconclusive; the trouble here was that given the context of SF world-building, I was never quite sure of the status of the irruptions of surrealism, such as the chess game in the Building and Andrei’s speech to the statues. I didn’t know how to take it—were these in fact irruptions, or were they mere intensifications of an already unreal reality?

Anyway, it’s a rich and brilliant novel and I could be wrong about the translation. Reflection is allowing me to develop an understanding of it, but I’ll have to reread it.

I don't know where my answer to Alan1000 went, so I guess a moderator deleted it. Thankfully, you quoted me before it got deleted. — javi2541997

I deleted it because it was extremely low quality. Please calm down and approach this topic in a rational, thoughtful, philosophical manner, or risk having more of your posts deleted.

"But no shit, ok." — Baden

Aristocracies keep alive those endangered pleasures that repel the bourgeoisie. They may seem perverse, but they add to the possibilities of life.

:meh:

How the Mongolians view Genghis Khan.

The Entrepreneurial Operating System® is so effective it’s a wonder nobody has thought of it before.

Joe’s such a loser!

Crash is more uncompromising and better executed than Super-Cannes, and I found it intellectually stimulating, though I can’t say I liked it. Same goes for The Unlimited Dream Company: it’s repetitive and boring, but it’s interesting in that it’s fantastical and celebratory while also apocalyptic.

I once listened to the audiobook of Concrete Island but fell asleep. From what I recall its plot and style were exactly what I expected.

But I can recommend his short story collections, The Disaster Area, and Vermillion Sands.

I just started that too. First time for me.

Super-Cannes by J. G. Ballard. Ballardian creepiness on the French Riviera — Jamal

Plodding, plot-driven, prurient, old-fashioned in a certain upper middle class colonial English kind of way, and incredibly boring. I don’t know why I keep going back to Ballard. Well, I’ll be sure to stay away from his later stuff from now on.

The history of YKK, the zipper king.



It’s is the kind of uselessly interesting viewing that works for me right now, while I am in bed with a transient but bothersome illness.

I’ve seen that. It was a long time ago but I know I liked it. MD is always an engaging presence.

I love rereading books. It makes me feel a sweet nostalgic vibe. — javi2541997

The interesting thing to me is how different they seem at different ages. I’ve read Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess three times. The first two times, in my twenties and thirties, I thought it was exciting and fun. The last time, in my forties, I found it sad and disturbing.

Currently reading: The Tunnel, Ernesto Sábato. A classic of Argentine literature. A novel of gorgeous existentialism and a sense of despair. — javi2541997

I’ve added it to my list. Argentina has been good to me so far with fiction.

I have a few things going:

Getting into Death, a collection of stories by Thomas M. Disch. The one called “The Asian Shore” is top tier. Check it out.

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban, a post-apocalyptic SF novel written in its own unique dialect.

Super-Cannes by J. G. Ballard. Ballardian creepiness on the French Riviera.

Hothouse by Brian Aldiss. I read it in my teens; time for a reread.

Diseases of the Head: Essays on the Horrors of Speculative Philosophy, edited by Matt Rosen, an open access book you can download freely online. It’s “an anthology of essays from contemporary philosophers, artists, theorists, and writers working, broadly speaking, at the crossroads of speculative philosophy and speculative horror.”

Multicultural Dynamics and the Ends of History : Exploring Kant, Hegel, and Marx by Real Fillion, which is an attempt to rehabilitate speculative philosophy of history and “rearticulate a sense of the movement of history as a developmental whole,” with its own dynamics and telos.

Time and Free Will by Henri Bergson. Starts well:

We necessarily express ourselves by means of words and we usually think in terms of space. That is to say, language requires us to establish between our ideas the same sharp and precise distinctions, the same discontinuity, as between material objects. This assimilation of thought to things is useful in practical life and necessary in most of the sciences. But it may be asked whether the insurmountable difficulties presented by certain philosophical problems do not arise from our placing side by side in space phenomena which do not occupy space, and whether, by merely getting rid of the clumsy symbols round which we are fighting, we might not bring the fight to an end. When an illegitimate translation of the unextended into the extended, of quality into quantity, has introduced contradiction into the very heart of the question, contradiction must, of course, recur in the answer.

Banned @Vaskane for flaming (even after multiple warnings) and low quality.

This is the first time I've listened to it, so keep posting I say!

I enjoyed listening. — Moliere

Thank you for the encouragement :smile:

I think I’ve read those before. Ok, fair point, I’ll have to come back to it. Or I can hand-wave in the direction of dispositional properties (also in that SEP article).

And, most importantly, the features of phenomenal experience (colour, smell, taste), are not properties of those distal objects, contrary to the views of naive realism. — Michael

Nobody has ever thought that fire engines are red in the dark; colour can be seen as relational or dispositional, compatibly with direct realism.

There are many intermediaries between phenomenal experience and, say, a painting on the wall. There's light, the eyes, and the unconscious processing of neural signals. — Michael

Maybe I wasn’t clear enough. I meant phenomenal intermediaries.

I have basically less than zero sympathy for the positions of @Michael, @hypericin and their ilk. I’m aware there are still some philosophers around who tend to kind of agree with them, and I know that there do exist non-stupid ways of arguing for indirect realism. Even so, the position seems really weird to me. What I have the most trouble with are four things:

1. Their notion of directness, seldom stated and even seldomer relevant or coherent.
2. Their notions of “as it is” and “what it's really like.”
3. Their constant appeals to science, which are bewildering.
4. Their motivation: where they’re coming from is really unclear.

I’m on holiday without a computer so posting to TPF is a struggle, and yet this debate always has the power to draw me in. I’ll say something about (1) and might come back to the others some other time, when I can read and quote papers etc.

1. Directness

Here’s an argument…

Directness at its most abstract is the lack of an intermediary between two connected things. Directness in perception can mean two things: the lack of an intermediary in the physical process of perception, or the lack of an intermediary in phenomenal experience. The relevant context is phenomenal experience, and perception phenomenally lacks intermediaries between experiencer and object of experience, therefore perception is direct.

For example, if someone is watching a film it is not at all clear that the sounds are more direct than the story — Leontiskos

To me it is crystal clear. Only by way of the sounds and sights coming from the viewing device do you experience the on screen action of the film. And only by experiencing and interpreting the on screen action do you construe the story. This seems indisputable. — hypericin

In phenomenal experience, it’s crystal clear to me that when I hear spoken language, I directly hear words, questions, commands, and so on—generally, people speaking—and only indirectly if at all hear the sounds of speech as such (where “indirect” could mean something like, through the intellect or by an effort of will). Our perceptual faculties produce this phenomenal directness in response to the environment and our action in it.

Maybe an example from vision is less controversial. When you walk around a table, you don’t see it metamorphose as the shape and area of the projected light subtending your retina changes. On the contrary, you see it as constant in size and shape.

The empirical evidence suggests that perception distorts reality. — Michael

The very idea of a perceptual distortion of reality, or even of a distortion of reality per se, is suspect. As far as perception goes, surely only the perception of reality can be distorted—by earplugs or hallucinogenic drugs, for example—rather than reality itself. In other words, the signal can be distorted, but not what is sending the signal (I use this metaphor because it fits my point and because the concepts of distortion and signal go together so nicely–not because I think it's a very good description of perception).

If you mean, e.g., fire engines look red even though they are not red except as perceived by certain creatures like us, this does not amount to any kind of distortion, since the concept of distortion is meaningless without a conceivable neutral and undistorted perception to oppose it to. In this case a neutral and undistorted perception could only be seeing the red fire engine as red, not some super-perception without perspective and particular characteristics.

So I understand perceptual distortion, but I do not understand perceptual “distortion of reality”. So I have to ask: which evidence?

the science shows that this isn't the case — Michael

You haven't shown how. It doesn't.

Do you know O.rang ? — Noble Dust

No, I didn’t know about them :cool:

:up: I like the solo record best but love Laughing Stock too. I don’t listen to the other stuff much any more.

I just watched Color Out of Space from 2019. I loved it. My kind of film. Some people say it’s best to be stoned while watching it, but I say there’s no need, since the film itself is in a sense totally wasted.

(I was told that I was 'bordering on insanity' by one of the mods for bringing it up, speaking of insults.) — Wayfarer

I think @Mikie took you to be repeating your claim that the word “being” refers only to conscious referents. Perhaps he wasn’t right about that—and calling you borderline insane was mildly bad—but it was understandable, because in fact you have conflated the issues.

It is this distinction which I say has been occluded by the fact that physicalist ontology only allows for one kind of fundamental substance, namely, the physical, so it can't allow for an in-principle difference between beings and things, of the kind that Aristotlelian philosophy refers to here. (I was told that I was 'bordering on insanity' by one of the mods for bringing it up, speaking of insults.) — Wayfarer

Okay, so according to Aristotle, for living beings, living constitutes their being. I can go along with that. I don’t know my Aristotle well enough to know if Perl’s interpretation is correct, to the effect that living beings are more beingy than non-living beings, but I can go along with that too if pushed. (It does not, of course, follow that rocks are not beings.)

You’re right that a distinction has been lost in the physicalist paradigm. This is because physicalism has no need for the general concept of being. But it’s crucial, I reckon, not to respond to physicalists by using being in a way that is equally as restrictive as their concept of existence. It’s good to have a general notion that is uncommitted, and that’s what being is. To stick to the grammatically basic meaning is to preserve the non-physicalist notion, even though it doesn’t assert—indeed, partly because it doesn’t assert—anything about consciousness.

There is another example that came up in my reading the other day. In the paralogisms of pure reason in the CPR, Kant argues that the “I think” cannot be said to be a substance, though there is a logical or transcendental subject. I wondered if this was an example of being (transcendental subject) vs. thing (substantial immortal soul).

Good question!

I don’t know, but the fact is that in certain contexts they mean different things. Although being and substance are related and sometimes coincide, the former can refer to a referent more fundamental than the latter. Substance tends to have a more specific meaning:

This conception of substance derives from the intuitive notion of individual thing or object, which contrast mainly with properties and events. — SEP

So in a process metaphysics, you have dynamic beings, as opposed to things—or maybe things are seen as dynamic beings. In any case, I don’t know about the ontological difference, but the words/concepts certainly can be different.

Yep, it’s annoying. The devs won’t change it.