Wednesday, December 27, 2023
Monday, December 25, 2023
Saturday, December 23, 2023
Saturday, December 16, 2023
Wednesday, December 13, 2023
Friday, December 8, 2023
Thursday, December 7, 2023
Honest Broker 3
https://aeon.co/essays/the-moral-imperative-to-learn-from-diverse-phenomenal-experiences
But 85 per cent is hardly everyone. What about those who disagree with these statements? Some of them report experiencing an inner voice only in specific situations. For example, when it comes to reading, some say that they hear a voice only if they deliberately slow down or are reading something difficult. But a small percentage (2-5 per cent) report never experiencing an inner voice at all. Like those with aphantasia who assume their whole lives that visual imagery is just a metaphor, those with anendophasia – a term Johanne Nedergaard and I coined to refer to the absence of inner speech – assume that those inner monologues so common in TV shows are just a cinematic device rather than something that people actually experience. People with anendophasia report that they never replay past conversations and that, although they have an idea of what they want to say, they don’t know what words will come out of their mouths until they start talking.
It is tempting to think that there is a trade-off between thinking using language and thinking using imagery. Take the widespread idea that people have different ‘learning styles’, some being visual learners and others verbal learners (it turns out this idea is largely incorrect). When it comes to imagery and inner speech, what we find is a moderate positive correlation between vividness of visual imagery and inner speech. On average, those who report having more visual imagery also report experiencing more inner speech. Most who claim to not experience inner speech also report having little imagery.
This raises the question of what their thoughts feel like to them. When we have asked, we tend to get answers that are quite vague, for example: ‘I think in ideas’ and ‘I think in concepts.’ We have lots of language at our disposal that we can use to talk about perceptual properties (especially visual ones) and, of course, we can use language to talk about language. So it is not really surprising that people have trouble conveying what thoughts without a perceptual or linguistic format feel like. But the difficulties in expressing these types of thoughts using language don’t make them any less real. They merely show that we have to work harder to better understand what they are like.
https://rosselliotbarkan.com/p/the-new-romantic-age
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/my-rule-of-the-6-spheres
Rene Girard, the scapegoat, and rock & roll.
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/why-do-they-burn-a-man-at-burning
Rene Girard and imitiation
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/12-things-i-learned-from-rene-girard
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-real-crisis-in-humanities-isnt
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-village
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-rise-of-the-anonymous-music-star
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/western-music-isnt-what-you-think
Friday, December 1, 2023
Thursday, November 30, 2023
Sunday, November 26, 2023
Interesting
Saturday, November 25, 2023
Bali Rice and the Green Revolution
Wednesday, November 22, 2023
Monday, November 20, 2023
Sunday, November 19, 2023
Saturday, November 18, 2023
Friday, November 17, 2023
Wednesday, November 15, 2023
Tuesday, November 14, 2023
Monday, November 13, 2023
Saturday, November 11, 2023
Honest Broker 2
Aquinas & Angels
Although the substance of each angel innately includes all the intelligible likenesses pertaining to the whole gamut of its natural knowledge, it does not make use of all these imprinted species at once in its actual understanding. Regarding its natural cognition, an angel can know simultaneously only the plurality of those things subsumable under a single intentional form –not the noetic contents comprised under distinct intelligible similitudes. In particular, it cannot contemplate the total spectrum of its native knowledge all at once. Thus, even though the angelic mind is never in a condition of absolute or essential passive potentiality with respect to its natural knowledge (as is the human possible intellect, which acquires knowledge from a privative state of primitive ignorance), yet, because it is not always exhaustively considering everything that it knows, it does undergo an accidental transition from relative potency to exercised act when it decides to advert to and reflect on some habitually possessed epistemic datum. As Aquinas declares, “[I]n the intellect of a separate substance there is a certain succession of understandings; there is not, however, movement properly speaking, since act does not succeed potentiality, but [rather] act succeeds act.” Still, this limiting feature does radically differentiate angels from the omniscient Deity, Who knows everything without successiveness in one eternal act of understanding identical with His Divine Essence.
Now a major distinction among them, a criterion disclosing their natural inequality, lies in the degree of universality of their innate ideas. Indeed, since God understands all things through one Idea identical with His Infinite Essence and since intellectual substances rise in dignity the nearer they approach His supreme Unity, it follows that an angel occupying a stratum of greater eminence knows larger tracts of reality covered by fewer intelligible species than an angel of lower ontological status (though even the latter succeeds in comprehending the cosmos via a mental map of it). For a weaker intellect always needs a more multifarious variety of detailed concepts to grasp what a stronger mind can encompass with fewer, but more universally embracing, cognitive principles.
Moreover, we note that, because angels do not abstract their ideas from sensible objects, their universal concepts are by nature prior (not posterior)to the material world. Furthermore, the angelic universals are not merely general notions about broad classes of things, but rather unified media by which the angel also knows singulars in an intensely distinctive fashion: within one universal idea there is contained a representative similitude of the properly rich density of manifold species and specimens.
An angel itself can be said to undergo local motion (again, by an analogical use of the term), in that it can successively apply its power to different places. Its so-called “movement,” though, does not betray any intrinsic potentiality on the part of the angel itself: the passive potency resides totally in the object receiving the action. Moreover, the angel’s “movement” is not necessarily continuous; indeed, its movement will be discontinuous if it instantaneously exchanges the focus of its causal efficacy from the whole of one arena to an utterly diverse locale. In the latter case of discrete motion, it bypasses the entire intermediate magnitude linking initial and terminal positions. Thus, an angel can violate the usual laws of space-traversal by effecting quantum leaps.
Friday, November 10, 2023
Psychedelic electronic
Wednesday, November 8, 2023
Tuesday, November 7, 2023
Saturday, November 4, 2023
Thursday, November 2, 2023
Wednesday, November 1, 2023
Tuesday, October 31, 2023
Krazy Kat
Monday, October 30, 2023
European soccer
Friday, October 27, 2023
Thursday, October 26, 2023
OOTP
https://theathletic.com/4339875/2023/03/24/out-of-the-park-baseball-24/
Wednesday, October 25, 2023
Tuesday, October 24, 2023
Monday, October 23, 2023
AFX etc.
https://soundcloud.com/user18081971/a12-ab3-215061https://soundcloud.com/user18081971/a12-ab3-215061
https://www.reddit.com/r/aphextwin/comments/17d6td5/not_aphex_but_rephlex_artist_related_im/
https://rareafx.wordpress.com/aphex-twin-old-dat-and-cassette-demos-soundcloud-janfeb-2015/
https://www.reddit.com/r/aphextwin/comments/17dg5bz/does_anyone_have_a_list_of_all_the_songs_richard/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boku_Mo_Wakaran
https://www.clashmusic.com/news/brian-eno-praises-warp-records/
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/influence-aphex-twin-words-of-admirers/
Friday, October 13, 2023
Honest Broker
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/my-12-favorite-problems
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/i-answer-questions-from-readers music, is rock dead?, the horror of archives
"I suspect that the fear that we have exhausted melodies is actually a disguised concern that commercial music today is embracing very simple formulas. If we expanded our musical palette, many of these apparent limitations would disappear. "
But the most extreme case of music copyright comes from Elizabethan England. Here the Queen gave William Byrd and Thomas Tallis a patent covering all music publishing for a period of 21 years. Not only did the two composers secure a monopoly over English music, but they also could prevent retailers or other entrepreneurs in the country from selling “songs made and printed in any foreign country.”
If anybody violated this patent, the fine was 40 shillings. And the music itself was seized and given to Tallis and Byrd. They probably had quite a nice private library of scores by the time the patent expired.
But that’s not all. Byrd and Tallis’s stranglehold on music was so extreme it even covered the printing of blank music paper. That meant that other composers had to pay Tallis and Byrd even before they had written down a single note.
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/8-pieces-of-advice-for-struggling
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/thomas-pynchons-gravitys-rainbow
https://thomaspynchon.com/professor-irwin-coreys-acceptance-of-pynchons-national-book-award/