I have partly-written musings on drugs in America, cowardice, intention and passion, the oil crash, and web paradigms… but none ready for public consumption, so here’s the mundane update.

The back massage basics class goes well– although I had mixed feelings at one point when I had three guys working on me at once, which was awfully intense and testosteroneful.

Tuesday’s Salon was excellent, with impassioned discussion of drugs, education, poetry, and race, and a good group of people. I feel like I should continue to grow the group, though, until we can support multiple discussions, because I feel like a lot of people’s interests aren’t being addressed.

A Wednesday work meeting got distracted by discussion of theories of the impending fall of civilization from the market run on scarce oil. Later, at the halloween Rocky preshow meeting, my preshow pitch was put in a “RHPS Con Shows” pile I hadn’t known existed.

I took a Beginner Waltz class Thursday, where happened to be the Rocky people who brought me to the studio in the first place and where the other unpaired dancer was one I most danced with at that first activity. On the way back to my apartment, I crossed paths with Jon C. from Olin, now running his own business and who heard about my trip to Europe through his sister’s fiance’s housemate’s friend, who I met over there.

For Friday I decided I had been waking up unhappy too many mornings from over-sleeping my alarm, and left it off– and naturally got up earlier than I would have planned. I’ve also come to terms with work time: even though I only have 6 hours of contracting expected a day, I need to plan an 8 hour work day, plus a little extra on weekends and in crunch. My break for lunch, stops for email and house-stuff, and if go somewhere for a change of scene, all extend my day, and even if it’s not quite an 8-hours-plus-commute-job, it’s pretty close.

Saturday I saw Linklater’s new A Scanner Darkly, which I much enjoyed, but which frustrated my companion for [she believed] propagating untruths about psychedelics. That night, friends of mine (mostly Rocky-virgins) came to Rocky, and two stayed for the after party, and had a blast. The party was *packed*, strangely low-energy, and full and satisfying.

The nature of modern philosophy is hugely changed by the existence of psychology– both by the concept of the psyche, and the existence of a distinct study of the mind. Two of the original functions of philosophy, to explore ideas and cultivate sound minds, are better dealt with by a kind of psychology shrouded in philosophical-like discussion. Although as far as I know, Western Civilization has not yet cut specialties for these out of the liberal arts, philosophers recognize that it is not the concern of their study. That said, it’s not clear whether that distinction comes out of the existence of psychology by being revealed by it, or by being created by it.

All philosophical problems are recognized as mental constructs that fall out of the civilized mind. The tools of philosophy, ideas, are psycho-social products, and as such are almost philosophically bankrupt. The followers of Hegel tried to fix it by creating new tools from whole-cloth: assigning creating names to ideas which are at once universally huge and intricately distinct. Many contemporary philosophers stick to the tools of logic and formal languages, ultimately, I think, because it’s the only perfect safe haven. Modern philosophy loves to shroud itself in it’s own vocabulary because it’s the best chance of getting at something beyond the constructs. We don’t spend all our time talking about ontology and epistemology because that’s what most interests us, but because that’s all we’ve been able to disentangle so far from the world of the psyche.

But psyche is just another concept: a metaphor that structures our thinking. Just as “objective fact” is based on an abstraction on subjective experience designed to remove a point of view, philosophical truth is the product of an abstraction on ideology designed to remove the psyche. It too is a construct, and worthy of scrutiny. On some level, we don’t have a psyche, as we understand it, and like all studies, psychology is manipulating artificial symbols of a self-consistent universe, self-fulfilled by our belief in it.

What if there’s something of the psyche that is necessarily and properly core to the great questions of philosophy, in addition to the part of the psyche that is properly distinct from it. I’m not sure what the consequences of such a paradigm shift would be, but I have some ideas. Our different understandings of psychological ideas, rather than being obstacles to philosophical discussion, would be vehicles for progress. “Philosophical progress” would become personal progress; the function of the discipline of philosophy, rather than to be a reservoir of accepted best arguments, would be a reservoir of stepping stones, to help people from one philosophical conception of their universe to another. It likely also makes it impossible to answer questions of universality, but I doubt we can answer those anyway.

I’m clobbering together a conceit of the metaphysical topology of excellence in the world. It’s too much to describe in a single blog entry, but ideas are like birds of prey: the more time in open air, the better. A one-on-one discussion of this idea would start with asking what the Other wants to be good at.

Everyone has “excellences”: refined virtues of being capable and knowledgeable in some aspect of existence. The most common is excellence at being oneself– knowing how to act as oneself and respond to the behaviors this causes in others, familiarity with one’s own psychology and physiology, and the capacity to intricately detail a point of view and expectations of the future. Other excellences include the ability to argue, play chess, seduce women, program computers, and understand others. Conceiving of these as a manifold in the infinite-dimensional “excellence-space”, we are all shaped a bit like spiny tropical fruit.

Excellence is driven by interest (almost the integral of interest), which has a similar topology. People structure their lives in many ways, but one way is to pursue their interests and find situations which exploit or develop certain excellences. People fall in and out of love according to the ever morphing shape of their excellences.

Most interestingly, the topology of excellence is manifested in the structure of communities. Every community has towers of virtue: small groups of individuals drawn together by common interest and complementary excellence. Most communities have several such towers, each of which sets everyone else orbiting around their dimensional axis. For example, most communities have a social tower, a managerial tower, and a old-timer tower.

Finally, I believe that at this level, the experience of life is largely community-independent. From a distance, communities appear to exemplify certain virtues, but the actual extremes of excellence have only superficial similarities to the propounded values. In other words, the towers– the most obvious meta-personal elements of communities and the primary concern of one living in them– work pretty much the same everywhere. The differences are in the details, “feel”, and the people.

My copy of Introduction to Sanskrit arrived, and I’m already swooning over it. What’s not to love about a language that calls it’s script the “city of immortals” and organizes consonants into a 5-by-5 table based on point of articulation?

Tuesday and Wednesday ended at Tosci’s, in large groups of Scadians who had gathered from various activities around MIT. For improbable confluences, there was discussion there about the importance of after-activity social get-togethers, at the same time as people in Rocky have identified a lack of that as a cause for falling preshow meeting attendence. I’m considering starting to host after-preshow-meeting-gatherings for Rocky after next week.

On Friday I went ballroom dancing with the lights crew from Rocky; I go back for a free one-on-one lesson Monday. Aside from the kitschy feel and hard-selling of personal lessons, it’s exactly what I was looking for. I just hope they have group classes.

The Rocky show was a bittersweet blast. It was d_day and uncleaj‘s last show, for a while anyway, and the audience had tons of energy. When d_day, who was playing Rocky, got hurt, everyone and her dirty uncle helped play the role. I got to light and learn cues all night.

In other news, I’ve now gotten in bed with my two clients for pay, doing PHP/MySQL web design and C++/Java video hardware communication.

I also realized that I’ve been playing games recently to try to show someone that I’m worthy to spend time with; the kind of tactics that are an insult both to her and myself. I think I shook that off.

The first meeting of my salon will be this Tuesday, June 27, at 7 pm! I’m planning on having it at my apartment, but may move it if we have a lot of people.

Directions to my apartment are at http://www.existencia.org/info/grey17.txt

Please RSVP to let me know you can make it.

Also, this is the only meeting that I will announce on this scale. If you can’t come but want to join in other times, tell me and I’ll keep you informed.

Thanks!

Recent questions, from Louisiana disaster preparedness to timelines for troop withdrawal, hinge on a deep question of, “What can we know?” Specifically, I’m interested in the following difficulty: human models give us enormous power by predicting the future fairly well, but they seem to be always insufficient in the worst possible ways.

If chaos and critical states (and Heisenberg and human complexity) weren’t enough to spoil our knowledge of the future, there seems to be a necessary irrationality to reality. Unless we’re cooking with controlled experiments and Capitalized Abstracts, the devil is always in the details– from explaining history to solving moral dilemmas, we can’t get away from trouble, because there’s still an infinitude that we’ve been unable to capture by our theories and measurements. It’s a miracle of river-splitting proportions that our human game of mathematics can provide any comfort.

As a obsessive model-maker, I’d like to believe that it’s possible to capture some features of any process, and have it be enough to fool some of the future some of the time. I’m fairly certain I’ll never have proof that I can get that much, and no more, but it’s worked so far. What does that leave us with, though? Disaster. Catastrophe. Terrorist Action. The unexpected, unexplained, unaccounted for.

In some sense, our drive to model the universe creates these features. The unexplained is our greatest threat because we care so much about explaining. If we build a better model, the most it can do is provide a hidden potential for a new critical state– an unseen reservoir for everything left over to ferment in until the pressure is great enough that our world pops.

So we come to the real problem: why bother? Why develop new antibiotics when it leads to deadlier bacteria for our children? Why build stronger levees when there will always a storm strong enough to burst them? Why fight oil use when the human drive to use up any available resource and butt against new misery is as natural as water to a level surface?

I do think there’s part of a reason, but it can’t be about averting the unexpected. Since I spent this long posing the question, I’ll just sketch today was seems to me to be an answer (I don’t have more yet). I think it has to be about finding a way of life, rather than solutions to problems (I can rant some other time about how life isn’t a solution). We need to concentrate on ways to live healthy lives, individually and as a society, physically and psychologically. We still learn from disaster– not about the disaster, but about ourselves (because the unexpected is usually a direct result of our efforts). We’re still concerned with the future– more so, I think. But the future isn’t taken to be a string of possible unexpectedness, even though it’s that too. Instead, we worry about the harm or the kindness we’re bringing about in it by the actions and attitudes we take now, irrespective of the new challenges that are bound to appear.

The pragmatic fact that such an approach calms many of the fate’s furies– terrorism to consumerism– is another miracle. Of reincarnative proportions, that one.

Have I mentioned recently how much I love Cambridge? Cambridge is the center of my world and the meeting point of all things good: MIT, with it’s infinity of communities; Carolingia, the finest Barony in the Known World; the Full Body Cast, alternative life lived to the fullest. [I’m exploring adding links to explain references between my various communities; though I expect they’re usually not needed.]

On Wednesday, when the FBC preshow meeting ran short, I put in my first appearance at SCA dance practice in more than six months, dragging along a new friend from Rocky. I’d abandoned the SCA when consulting got crazy before my trip, but it was so excellent seeing my old friends that I need to start juggling the two again. Afterwards at Tosci’s, the discussion raged between cross-dressing, LARPing conventions, aging, Pennsic, and Rocky (brough up by another Scadian), when a large birthday crowd from Random Hall burst in. It was a beautiful confluence of our small world of the weird.

In other news, after much work, my apartment is feeling well enough to accept visitors, and senor_don_gato is helping me design my kitchen. My consulting prospects are looking ideal, with two excellent companies doing very different kinds of work, and enough time left over to pursue personal projects. I’ve settled into a new way to keep track of 50+ blogs and news sources using BlogBridge and WordCount, and a better calendar system using Emacs and PHP iCalendar. And somehow I ended up being responsible for a cat and an iguana. So life is good.

I want to start a Salon: a gathering of minds to entertain and enlighten
each other, to discuss the questions of the day, and to explore new
avenues of art, philosophy, and society.

The worth of the Salon is its atmosphere, which I hope will be one of
bold mutual discovery. It is a place where every contribution is
welcomed, deep truths are doggedly ferreted out, and we respect each
other as reservoirs of untold riches. I hope we can learn to bring
light to the most hidden ideas, and never shy away from discussing
religion, politics, or science, if therein lies the answer we’re groping
for or the question hanging over us. Let us read Byron, debate theories
of the universe, critique contemporary art, and build revolutions.

Our goal will be like that of the Reality Club, “to arrive at the edge
of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated
minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the
questions they are asking themselves.”

It is said that this particularly flower of the social world rarely
blossoms in the English-speaking world, but I expect that with the
proper cultivation we can coax it out. There will be no assigned
discussion topics, just good conversation about what’s important. The
only preparation possible between meetings will be to live a deeply
considered life full of contributions, and be ready to bare it and them
to your peers.

To start, I think the Salon should gather once a week, in the evening.
The day may vary depending on what interesting characters are in town,
but I want to find a good default. If you want to ensure that it’s a
day you can join in, tell me your constraints now and I’ll do my best to
satisfy them.