Thursday, January 15, 2009

“She maintained the basic attitudes of counseling; she reflected and clarified... She did not attempt to persuade.”
Who’s sayin dis again?
“Even my mother who has always been against me in the sense of, well, you’re lazy or just no good or anything, even she in the last year said, ‘You are, people like you don’t exist, able to take what you’re takin.’ And my mother says it’s partly my fault but not to the degree when I have to live the way that I do. It’s not necessary anymore.”
Who is dis?
“It is, especially...” She pauses. “Another thing, he’s always been a child who clings to a blanket. Have you ever heard of that?”
“Mmmhuh. Many times.”
“Since he was a small baby. For a while I was worried because I thought it was taking the place of me. Whenever he gets into any trouble, he goes into a panic if he doesn’t have his blanket. He just threw a regular fit right here in the street.”
“Mmmhuh.”
“And I just don’t know exactly how to handle him. For a while I thought about taking it away completely, but the pediatrician said that he would outgrow it. He also sucks his fingers. The pediatrician said he would outgrow that too. He’s only two years old. But I don’t know; it has me worried.”
Where am I?
At the conservancy’s annual general meeting, dried-up old equestrians and amateur botanists adamantly dicuss the current battles they are waging for one cause or another. Dey even get’o arguin bout which cause is de best. Den of course, der’s de gossip.

“So tell me everything... very Canadian... earnestness... all those kind of strands are there... yeah, yeah, that’s very interesting territory... A man recording very beautifu women... ages ago... something she wrote on visual pleasure and we’re all stuck on it... That happens with the show quite a bit... the artists.”

“When I created the graduate show... and then come to the back of the exhibition... yeah, I had this comment... come to the gallery to spectate... defining things... contemporary art is...”

“What’s that for?”

“Flying saucer... latest pictorialist... artificial and real... the shift from the ground to air and also military developments.... light from the sky... absolutely... explicitly... kernal of an attitude... see what’s going on. And so, now I’m kind of looking at... the war in... how that’s shifted... so it’s all quick... complicated... I have a very good outline...”

“But it is fascinating... Sometimes you get caught up into things almost by accident... Really does help you understand things...”

“Maybe that sort of potentially...You don’t want it to multiply too much...”

“Ummm, if I sort of go off... it can become so vague... If there’s a kind of conversation ... hadn’t thought about...”

“I’m a feminist curator... I’m not excluding people whose gender... It’s not just essentialism...and I think things have moved beyond that, theoretically... Well, it’s complimentary programming... 80s and 90s... Examination should still be going on... Identity... and then here we could insert that...”
“Examination.”
“Yeah. So, it’s kind of... formulation of what I’m doing... describe it in words... I think that... what’s happening now... So I think... But I... I’ve had quite a lot of interest...”
“Good. Take the support where it’s being offered... Involved will benefit... Some of it... people’s schedules... DOING... about a year now... provide a focus... platform as being an opportunity to challenge... pre-empt...”
“Nice.”
“Interested in it... They want a site for... platform... interface between... It could all be... I dump. I haven’t got any of it worked-out... To people who...”

I should send this conversation to Carey.
Oh, snap. It’s happening again.
“Special guest speakers will include... Robert Campbell... Basics of Computational Number Theory...”
I’ve known them for years and still don’t understand them. Goddammit. I really need a fuckin appointment. How many fuckin pills is that? Just use it, whatever it is. I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record. One, one, one cuz you left me and two, two, two for my family, and three, three, three for my heartache, and four, four, four for my headaches, and five, five, five for my lonely, and six, six, six for my sorrow, and seven, seven, no no no tomorrow, and eight, eight, I forget what eight was for, nine, nine, nine for my... ten, ten, ten, ten everything, everything, everything.

I can’t wait until I get rid of you. You know that don’t you? But you’re like the best parts of me, the best parts that I could come up with and run by themselves. Of course you know that. You know every single fuckin thing that I do. And that will never change. All of these antiquated systems... And then I create something like you, something so beautiful that you hope it will live forever... Day after day I will walk and I will keep faith in you, even if it destroys me. That is a mother’s love. Shoot, shoot, shoot those things at me. Go ahead. Make my day.

Whoa. Where de fuck did that come from?! Guess I lost a few moments there. Erich Neumann has taken de stage. Don’t remember how he got der though.
“Art is at this stage a collective phenomenon, which cannot be isolated from the context of collective existence but is integrated with the life of the group.”
I wonder what Clement Greenberg would have to say to that. Probably something like, oh: since Manet, art has progressively headed towards purification of form. The deployment of colours. This makes me think about how the set of real numbers constitutes a continuum in the strict mathematical sense. Consequently, the order-preserving one-to-one correspondence between the real numbers and the points of the geometrical line renders the line a continuum as well. (I’m gettin dis’hit mostly from W. Salmon’s “Contemporary Look at Zeno’s Paradoxes”.) And THEN this leads me to Davidson on truth... We need truth because it helps us to understand meaning and language in general. The concept of truth should not have an infinite number of axioms. (This would not be learnable, right?) One cannot be both a deflationist regarding truth and an emotivist. One needs a substantial theory of truth to back up one’s emotivism...

“Computational hypothesis...”

“State of cell at one time is a function of the state of a cell at a previous time...”
Well, as if we didn’t all know dat. Still, I can’t help thinkin o’Kim’s new version o’functionalism. Or at least, I guess it was new at some point.
“This hypothesis would not require massive revisions in other beliefs.”
“What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.”

The problem with experience is that we cannot seem to figure out how or why such feelings arise from physical processes. Seems like dey all need a bit o’schoolin here.
“Kim wishes to apply the term ‘conscious’ both to systems and the states through which these systems pass.... A system can be classified as conscious in a way that indicates its potential for mental states. A system can be conscious in a way that indicates that it has mental states. Those mental states are in turn deemed conscious if the system is aware of having them. In this way, a mental state can also be classified as conscious in a way that indicates the potential for the system to become aware of the mental state. Under Kim’s definition we can have a system that has the potential for consciousness, that is a system that is conscious, in that it has mental states. We can have a system that has the potential for conscious mental states (i.e. a mental state that the system is aware of having). We can also have a system that has such conscious mental states. Therefore, a system that possesses a human mentality can be described as conscious in that it does have mental states and it is aware of such mental states (even if such an animal is not aware of those states)...” Am I repeating myself here? Sometimes I really feel like I have to with these people... “The issues of sleep... unconsciousness becomes doubly complex under these circumstances. Is human sleep a mental state? If it is a mental state, is it one of which the subject is aware?” Blank looks all around. Seems like dey sleepin wid’er eyes open. Now dey gonna bring up somethin bout Searle. I might as well put on my screensaver. “... Kim does not count beliefs among his list of phenomenal properties, for the simple reason that there can exist within a subject a number of unconscious beliefs... In this way we can assume that a conscious belief constitutes a conscious mental state... It seems that beliefs can be applied to phenomenal properties... How would this work?”

“... mental state doesn’t necessarily take first and third person accounts in one go... This assumes an omniscient point of view...”

“In order to describe the state of a given item one must first identify the schema in relation to which the identification takes place.”

“In order to identify a state it is necessary to...”
Now I have a question: “How do emotions differ from beliefs?”
I know dey don got d’answer, but I do.