Thinking in Text

My interest in rational conlangs has been revived. The specific catalyst is that I am trying to translate a book that I absolutely love, The Book of Matan, into one. One reason for this choice of book is that its English is very simple and readable. It does not use a vocabulary that is too obscure. But it carries an emotional, poetic beauty that reminds of me of the King James Bible. If any language should translate well into a rational conlang, I would hope it was of this kind. Another reason is that it is a logical extension of my interest in the book. It is a catalyst for me to read the book more than I otherwise would be inclined to do. It is like when, as a teenager, I would try translating The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy into a conlang. I had already read and loved the book. Translating it became an exercise in looking at it from a fresh perspective. The best conlang to me was Rick Morneau’s concept of a machine translation interlingua. To me it captured what I most ...

==ALERT: CONTAINS SPOILERS== Watched "Lethe" last night and was blown away by the character development in the episode. Sarek had seemed like such a good bloke when we had seen him in earlier episodes. But this episode reminds us once again that he is a difficult person. It makes us realise how Spock had so many problems with him growing up. Here he was doing the same thing to Michael, piling all these impossible expectations on her and making her feel inferior for not measuring up. Like most Vulcans, he suppresses his own emotions. But also, like a proud person, he suppresses his own failings. He clearly has a sense of shame about what happened with the Vulcan Expeditionary Fleet, and he chose his own pride over revealing the truth of what happened to his daughter. That was why he let her live with the shame of thinking that she had not met his expectations. And after the mind meld, still suppressing what shames him, he pretends not to remember it. I also liked the sc...

I’m definitely enjoying Star Trek: Discovery so far. The production values of course are fabulous, and the performances are fine. Having already seen Sonequa Martin-Green in The Walking Dead I knew she would be awesome, and she so is. I’m reminded of something a guy said to me at Sutekh , at the University of Sydney. This was in the days when The Next Generation was still airing. He said that TNG was not good, because the way that they solved problems on the show was a Deus ex machina each week. I asked him how many of the episodes he’d seen and he said, all of them. I said that that was strange, because the show had already been running for two years by then. I asked why he would have seen all the episodes if he did not think it was a good show and he said, “Because it’s Star Trek !” I knew what he meant. It was easy to find fault with just about any episode you could think of, but you just kept on watching it because of this experience that you got from it. The Star Trek Exp...

It's been a long time since I last posted here. To think that it all began because I was conducting my own personal philosophical research, since I used to study philosophy at university. It all culminated in the decision that I had nothing to contribute. I had original contributions that had been recognised in my Honours and Masters theses. But I think you need to be in that sort of thing full-time in order to contribute, and employment prospects in that field are bleak. At least they were when I enquired near the end of my Masters thesis, and I can only assume they still are now. It helps me justify the time I spend reading and watching videos online if I write something about it. Writing something about it will help me know what I think of it. It's easy for me to love something but then have no defence against it when other people start talking about how bad it is. There are other things that I find are very popular but I cannot justify the high rating some websites give...

In Shakespeare's day, swear words were generally associated with religion. You would get words like ''sblood', short for 'God's blood', taking the Lord's name in vain, and so on. That was one of the interesting things that I learned from a drama teacher in high school. Words like that in those days would have had the power to shock because people were more religious in those days. People took blasphemy seriously. I was in high school in the 1980s. In those days, we thought of swear words as being mainly associated with bodily functions. They were the sort of things that would evoke disgust and they would upset our parents terribly if they heard us say them. We, of course, would say them between ourselves with joyful abandon. I am sure that many of us took a perverse pleasure in saying words that had the power to shock at least some people. Of course, now we're all grown up and those words have achieved much more currency. People will swear th...

I like to use language in a correct way. So I happened to Google accidentally quite a long time ago now that if you use 'like' with a phrase that includes a verb, it is wrong. 'Like' is a preposition, and 'as' is a conjunction. Hence, you use 'like' with a noun or a noun phrase, whereas you use 'as' with a clause that includes a verb. So you can say something like, 'you look like a monkey', or 'you look as if you swing through trees', but never 'you look like you swing through trees'. Sounds all very well, but I don't know of any English writer who actually uses this rule. Everywhere I read 'like' used as a conjunction. In fact, when I Google the exact phrase 'looks as if', all I get are pages that talk about how to use 'like' versus 'as if'. This seems to defeat the purpose of using the phrase. In the end, grammarians do not determine the rules of language, speakers do. And if they...

I think that philosophy in general has problems with falsifiability. Philosophers rarely if ever argue on each other's terms, or concede their opponents' premises. What would even happen if philosophers specified the evidence it would take to dissuade them? It reminds me of my empirical theory of ethics. If someone could produce a cogent argument that hypocrisy was viable, I would be dissuaded. When Robert Wright did this in The Moral Animal, I was dissuaded — and admittedly dismayed. How would falsifiability work with the idea that ethics were subjective or objective? I think that most people think that at least to some degree ethics is subjective. So to hard-core realists, I ask you, what evidence would it take to convince you that you were wrong? I have to be an anti-realist, although I don't think I'm a very hard-line one. I think that ethics inheres in subjects, but I don't think that that makes it arbitrary. But a realist can rightly ask me, what evidenc...

What evidence would it take to convince you that you were wrong? This was a question that I Googled. This is a good website I found in the results, and this is a good article in it, with a good principle. “It is irrational to hold any view so tightly that you aren’t willing to admit the possibility that you might be wrong.” “The rational response is to actually engage contrary information and truly consider whether or not your view is correct.” The principle that you must be able to answer this question is the principle of falsifiability . This reasoning is of relevance to the problem of induction . According to the principle of falsifiability, inductive scepticism is inherently irrational. An inductive sceptic can accept nothing as evidence that she is wrong. She cannot accept a deductive argument because induction is by definition not deductively valid. She cannot accept anything that occurred in the past because it might change in the future. She cannot accept anything that is o...

Got an idea yesterday afternoon for an approach to philosophy that I call "constructive scepticism". On my incredibly long train trips to and from work I wrote about three thousand words about it. By that time I had said everything I had wanted to say about it. That usually means that nothing more happens with it, because I have simply decided that I don't have enough to contribute to the subject. But in this case it seems different enough to me that I will post a link to it, right here .

As someone who builds a lot on his own work, I rely heavily on links back to previous blog entries. I discovered today that many of those links are now actually stale! They refer to impenetrable bookmark numbers that when followed, lead me to the wrong blog posts. Not only is that a disservice to my readers (when I get any) but also to me this long after the fact. It's not so bad when the text for the link mentions the blog entry by name because I can search for that. But when I merely use a word like "elsewhere" to refer to one of my previous articles it helps me not at all! I just fixed up the links in the entry for De Officiis  by Cicero, but there are doubtless others there as well to do. There is also a handy stats section to give me some feedback on who is visiting the site when. I see I got a visit from someone searching for a summary of Cicero's De Officiis . I do not actually provide any article with such a summary. But my titular article about that book ca...

I remember a book in the SF Masterworks series that I read, Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart. By the time the protagonist was an old man he was considered a god, but was paid "no great reverence." I decided to Google that exact phrase looking for the full passage for that quotation. Found I had to make it "him no great reverence" before I got correct results appearing. The top-ranked result is currently from a Tumblr blog. I can view the blogs on Tumblr, but I can no longer log into it. I had created a blog on Tumblr a long time ago but abandoned it after a while, yet when I returned I discovered my account had been terminated due to "spam or affiliate marketing"! It made me think of something strange that had happened to my Twitter account. I was galled to discover one day after I had not been there in a long time either that it was regularly tweeting spam. Some nonsense about how I had done some surveys and was making hundreds of dollars a day. I k...

The most beautiful feeling of nostalgia that I ever experienced was over ten years ago . I had been trying to resolve questions in my mind that had been left unanswered in my Masters thesis. I was using this blog as a notebook to help me do that. I lived in Newtown in those days, so it was a reasonably short walk for me to get to the University of Sydney, my alma mater. I wanted to go to their Fisher Library to get a library card to let me borrow books from their library again. I started at the Wentworth Building, and walked across the campus to the Fisher Library. While I was doing that, and looking at the buildings as I was walking by, the nostalgia hit. I felt all of the good things I had ever felt while studying there, and none of the bad things. And I just thought, if I actually felt  this way at the time I was actually here, I never would have left! But that's what nostalgia does: it protects you from the pain of the past. It let me, in the present day, simply enjoy this ...

Various books I have read claim that willpower is a limited resource . People who perform an exercise requiring willpower do worse on another willpower exercise immediately afterwards. This phenomenon is known as "ego depletion". But as I was perusing an APA article on willpower, I came across an article by Veronika Job contradicting this idea. Job suggests that the literature on the subject does not take into account individuals' beliefs about willpower. Furthermore, once those beliefs are taken into account (or manipulated with biased questionnaires) the results change. People who do not believe that willpower is a limited resource do not show signs of ego depletion. So put that in your pipe and smoke it! I was thinking of willpower in terms of trying to practise the ethics of Peter Singer consistently. Singer's views of social justice on a global scale are draconian. To do justice to the Third World we in the First World must reduce our standard of living to b...

Was thinking about a conversation that I had had with Robert Elliot at the University of New England. I  mentioned to him something I had read a long time ago in The Science in Science Fiction by Peter Nicholls. It was the Principle of Causality, stating, essentially, that effects happen after causes. This was the basic problem with travelling backwards through time, that it would violate the principle of causality. Robert said he thought that that was just a prejudice. He saw a cause as an engine that created an effect, which could just as easily occur in the past as in the future. Well, I know that the Principle of Causality is a cornerstone of physics, and I don't really think that it is a prejudice. I think it would be a prejudice if physicists were trying to define  causes in terms of temporal position, but they are not. Their claim that effects happen after causes is a posteriori, not a priori. He went on to talk about what logically consistent time travel is. Basical...

It's been a long time since I've seen fit to post anything here. But I felt that I needed to act to preserve a list that deserves to be somewhere on the internet in a form that is publicly editable. Not that it is publicly editable in my blog. But I will read all the emailed submissions that I receive for additions to or modifications of the list, and will update the list accordingly. The list is Liddle Facts, and comes from the Wikipedia, where it is about to be taken down. Liddle Facts are little factoids Spring Valley Juice prints on the underside of its juice bottle lids. They're really cool, and because they're numbered, you can check whether your list is complete. If I modify the list at all, I will keep it on this page. The first 140 facts of the  2004  series were printed in the bottle lids in black colour. At the end of 2005, they started with a second series, presented in a green cap. Those collected to date are as follows: Pre-2004 20. The howler monk...