home

 

We'll expose the abnormality and perversity of Western nihilism. We'll fight it with our revolutionary enthusiasm and optimism, and we will use the greatest weapons, such as poetry and love.

∞

This doc is in standard chronological order.

1 May 2024

A 'blog' or 'web log' doesn't have to be in the formats you are used to, spread around by institutions and mass usage. This doc will run from here, 1st May 2024 down to there, at the bottom of the page, nearer to wherever you are now on the old spacetime continuum when you read 'this'.

∞

The only real way to save the humans.

13 May 2024

I'm going to have to show you that which Chomsky says almost every single one of you is (a) getting wrong and (b) prevented from any real progress, individually or collectively because of.

So start here, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l05YC9ITrsE (Noam Chomsky 'Language Use and Design conflicts and their significance')
(I will be watching it, as is my custom, many many times over, and ultimately transcribing much of it and then writing my statements about it after all of that, then being accused by lots of people either of talking about stuff without properly reading it - when that is all that THEY are doing - or of referring to someone whose evidence can be ignored because they say so).

∞

When you are fully in tune with the fact that language is externalised thinking and that language did NOT develop out of communication.

16 May 2024

Then you are able to not necessarily interrupt and screw up your own ability to think and thus able to use that capacity (relatively) well. My latest use of it goes way beyond my impressive financial scientific feats so far. This one looks like "total financial god mode". The helplessness and stupidity of most humans is all self-enforced and self-inflicted - my experience would have me believe about you all - ie that you can do so so so much better, as Chomsky has shown by example, not just his scientific evidence presentation.

17 June 2024

For now I'll just transcribe the entirety of that Chomsky lecture:

Well I'd like to discuss some questions about a topic that goes back to classical antiquity, has remained quite obscure in many ways and has many significant implications I think we shall try to bring out or at least indicate. The question is what is the fundamental nature of language? What's it for? What is it designed for. There's a simple classical formula, goes back to Aristotle, that language is sound with meaning. That raises three questions at once: what is sound? What is meaning? And what is 'with'? The most neglected and most crucial question.

There's been a good deal of discussion of sound over the past several millennia, a good bit is known. A lot of consideration of questions of meaning. How much is understood, one could debate. But virtually nothing about 'with'. Presumably because it was assumed to be trivial, simply by association. So a child sees a cow, somebody says 'cow', an association is set up between that thing over there and out of that spins the meaning. That doesn't survive much examination, but even if it did it wouldn't begin to touch the real question which has to do with the fact that the number of associations (if you want to call them associations) is unbounded so can't be set up by experience. That's the 'with' problem. It's very rarely been noticed in the whole history of thinking about language. Occasionally it has. Galileo was maybe the first to point out a pretty obvious fact: that our language capacity has infinite scope. He described the alphabet as the greatest invention that had ever been made because it enables us with 25 letters to express any thought that might come to our minds. Note that he's not accepting Aristotle's dictum exactly. That description of language is meaning with sound, which is not quite the same as sound with meaning. In fact it differs in interesting ways. It was picked up not long after by Descartes, and in fact for Descartes it is one of the foundations of his dualistic sciences: interesting and long story, also mostly ignored in the history of philosophy, but I think quite crucial.

After that it kind of languishes. It picks up again in the twentieth century, partly because the concept 'with' came to be understood in the 1930s and 1940s with the development of the theories of computability - Turing, Godel, Kleene, others. The notion of finite characterisation of an infinite class became well understood and that makes it possible to ask ourselves what would be the nature of the sound meaning relationship, whatever it is. Well the basic answer has to be that there's some kind of what's called generative procedure,

[.. will continue to transcribe asap..] [..]

[..] Actually a little bit is known about it, not very much. One thing that is known with considerable confidence is that in the past roughly 50 to 80,000 years, since humans left Africa, our ancestors left Africa, there's been no evolution of the language capacity, it's stayed identical, and there's very strong evidence for that [..] [..]

If you look at the archeological evidence there is a sudden leap in creative activity, sometimes called The Great Leap Forward by ??? anthropologists, roughly around 75,000 100,000 years ago, somewhere in that neighbourhood. [..] [..]

.. and as soon as those attempts were made, some very puzzling phenomena were discovered. It's commonly the case when you begin to look at some topic closely, it turns out everything you believed was wrong. [..] [..]

.. one puzzle about language that came to light about sixty years ago and is still very much debated, and bears on the question [..] take, say, the sentence "instinctively eagles that fly swim" and ask yourself what instinctively goes with. Well it goes with swim, not with fly. Similarly suppose you raise a question and you ask "Can eagles that fly swim?" Can goes with swim not with fly, which is a curious fact because a computational procedure is involved which is quite complex. There is a minimal distance relation that is true of the actual linkage, but it's minimal structural distance, it's the two things that are closest to each other when you look into the structures, and that's a complex computational problem. On the other hand if it worked the other way through proximity instead of structural distance, it would be a trivial computational problem, you'd just check the closest verb to instinctively or to can and that's the one it's associated with. That's elementary - elementary computational problem. But language doesn't use the simple computation, it uses a complex one, which ought to be puzzling - and is puzzling, I think. And it's not just true of these examples, it's true of every construction that's known in every language that's known, so there's something far reaching about it. [..] [..]

∞