Expressionism / Prudence Heward/ Farmhouse and Car

“I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others”

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Not quite a crappy day here, clouds are thin enough that brightness does exist out my window.  No true rays of sunlight, but bright enough to drive most of the gloom out of my soul.  

I am being very hit and miss with my self-discipline of walking.  Gotta get better at that, but it might take until the summer clearing until things get really cracking on that.  I like to walk in the wild, but the nice rubberized track over at the high school really seems to save my knees the pain when I do start walking.

Screed

Oddly enough, the latest little word craze has got me thinking about the nature of consciousness.  I found Wordle a week or so ago after I found Worldle.  These two, taken together are giving me a hint on how differing aspects of consciousness/communication are processed.  

Worldle is the simpler of the two.  An image of an artificial boundary denoting a country is displayed, Black and white, nothing other than the outline.  You get to decide the identification of that construct and get six guesses to figure it out.

Wordle is more complicated.  Five-letter words are hidden from you and you get to go through your algorithm to figure out which five-letter word is the word of the day.

Now, stay with me here, this is gonna take a bit to work out.

Let’s go back to my two hypotheses from yesterday.

1. The nature of consciousness is situational, and

2. The nature of consciousness cannot be separated from language.

Worldle and wordle kinda provide a tenuous insight into how the brain works. 

 Worldle provides you a representation of a entity, granted it is a human defined entity, a piece of a map, but the goal of the process is to figure out what the piece is.   You look at the map, dredge into the file system that you call a brain or a mind, and create a link between what you see portrayed in a bunch of LED’s and the physical entity that those LED’s portray.  It is really quite satisfying.

Wordle comes after it the other way.  You have a 5x6 grid of letters (read here: verbal language subunits symbolizing spoken syllables),  You get to string these letters together to figure out what five letter word is hidden.  

But consider these two processes together.  The first begins from a representation of a physical object which is then backtraced into a set of syllable symbols.  The second starts with the syllable symbols and derives the representation of the physical object by working out the the structure of the verbal representation.

Allow and Madagascar were today’s puzzles.

I think that this highlights my hypothesis de jour.  This hypothesis is that our definition of things is contingent on language.  Our language doesn’t define what it is we see, but allows us to create entries into a file management system all our own.  The trouble is that there are a whole bunch of us and even should we speak the same language, the individual file systems have unfortunately been going their own way and assigning different meanings to the same physical/mental occurrence.

I am already seeing holes in this.  I will ponder it some more and either try and fill in the holes or discard the current thoughts.  

Time will tell.

Harlem Renaissance (New Negro Movement) / William H. Johnson/ Moon Over Harlem

Gonna try something new today since I overslept (sleeping has been really good since the temperature went down, I didn’t want to chance not getting my share of zzzz’s in.

Here’s Michael:

Maybe the main problem with much of what is called science, is that it is not really science.

What is a scientific report?

Typically, it refers to and applies science, but the point of the report is to suggest that certain scientific results mean something in relation to something beyond the abstraction that applies to the science itself.

Regardless of how the argument in the report is made, or what other science is used to support the argument, the report is not science. The report is called science, and unfortunately accepted as science, because an argument is made by applying science. This does not make the report scientific; in fact, it guarantees it is not, unless the report simply presents the data and says no more. A report that contains science data is not a scientific report if the science is applied to predicting a result other than a repeat of the same experiment or the identical conditions that produced the science.

People will say this is ridiculous because the application of science always goes beyond the science itself. True, but as soon as predictions are regarded as scientific, anything can be called scientific. And this is what happens. Why? Because things that are not scientific are less convincing and sell for less.

A scientist does not make up science. The application of science is not science. Consensus about science is not science. If consensus were scientific, there would be a formula/pattern for consensus other than killing or punishing those who do not consent.

Maybe this means that many who are called a “scientist”, produce non-scientific reports. So? The name of an occupation does not change the definition of science. Maybe what needs to be changed, is the name of the occupation. How about “Marketing”? That sounds pretty accurate.

Post-Impressionism / Tom Thomson/ Northern Lights

Mike and I got a bit spirited a couple of week ago when I mentioned the possibility that the election of 2020 might have been less than honest.  I have pondering this for a while and I want to take some time to go over my thoughts.

1.  Trump needed to lose.  He was an astonishingly bad President and not a very good man.  Truthfully, he was one of the worst presidents ever and was in the process of breaking the country.  He had to go.

2. Unfortunately, the Democrats are becoming the party that nominates people that actually make Trump look like a viable option.  Hillary and Joe are two incredibly corrupt hacks that represent the elite status quo and despite all their protestations to the contrary, they appear to despise and sneer at the lower classes and lie to them shamelessly while currying the favor of who they perceive as the elites.

3. #1 and #2 above lead me to believe that we are truly fucked for the next three years and seven or so months.  So, Let me make it clear here, I do not have a dog in this fight.

4. Now the part that pissed Mike off.  I mentioned that the elections in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia might have some serious irregularities.  Michael correctly pointed out that there is nothing to be done about it.  Which is true.  

5. I am not in any way, shape, or form suggesting that Fuckwad the first be brought back to the oval office by any means.  Fuckwad the second is equally incompetent and subserviant to the elite (just different ones).  Bringing Fuckwad the first back would be a nearly instant death to the Republic.  Fuckwad the second will at least allow for a chance (albeit small) that we can work our way out of the mess we have gotten ourselves into.

6. #’s 1-5 are merely prolegomena now we get down to the basics.

7. We are a Republic that uses the tools of Democracy to affect the selection of our leadership.  The country as a whole is governed by this leadership with the laws created by the Congress, vetted by the Judiciary, and executed by the executive (at least in theory, things have been muddied considerably in that timespan)

8. But, in my reading of the aforementioned constitution, the states and the states alone have responsibility for elections.  This has been watered down a bit with the requirements of the various voter’s rights acts that have been passed in my lifetime.  BTW, I heartily approve of these bills).

9. It is my firm opinion that participation in elections should not be made simple and should be confined strictly to those who have spent the time and effort to prove that they are legal citizens of the United States of America and the Precinct where they reside.  I do not believe that the vote should be extended to non-citizens or expatriates.

10. It is my firmly held belief that there has never been a US election that was free of some type of election fraud.  Pure and simple, straight and true.  Democracy lends itself to such things.  It is part of the system and cannot be purged, it can only be suppressed to a level where it is inconsequential.  In the past, the two parties were equally guilty of the practice; they did tend to differ in techniques, with the Democrats going with ballot box stuffing and the Republicans specializing in voter suppression.

11. Now that groundwork has been laid, I will get down to the brass tacks of what I was trying to say up in Kingston.

12. I think that the circumstances of a seriously imcompetent executive branch, coupled with the advent of a pandemic (whether COVID actually rates as such is a subject for another discussion) gave rise to conditions that allowed the Democrat’s preferred method of voter fraud to have a serious premium over the Republican’s preferred methodology.  

13. By this circumstance, I believe that the laws and voting methodology were skewed in favor of the Democratic party in a couple of key states.

14. I think that the results of the election should be examined carefully.  This is not to lead to a reinstatement of Fuckwad I, but to establish if there was an imbalance in voting methodology that allowed one method of voter suppression to succeed in key state elections that changed the result of the election from one miserable candidate to another miserable candidate.

15. I do think that Fuckwad I should go back to activities related to bilking unsuspecting fools by means just short of fraud.  I do believe that Fuckwad II should serve out his term and go the fuck away.

16. These next three years are going to be shit on a plate.