Oct. 3rd, 2006

cincinnatus_c: loon (Default)
But even to say that brains anticipate (not so much mirror, I guess) is already to risk literalizing metaphors. The Damasios go one worse, though: over and over, they say that brains represent things, in the sense of making maps of the world. For good measure, they have a paragraph where they speculate about the reasons for the evolution of the anticipatory mechanism (or something). It's so easy to be hard-headed materialists about everything when your materialism is so soft.

Buried in the middle of the Star today: US Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist says the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable, and the Taliban should be invited to join the government.

I'm not sure, but I think that means we lost the war on terror. Oh well.

Actually, last week, when people were spouting off bullshit about October Surprises and Iran (and ignoring the real possibility that neither party wants to win the upcoming elections), I said to L., you know what would be a great October Surprise, would be if the Taliban took over (the rest of) Afghanistan--and then everyone would be, like, HOLY SHIT, WE LOST THE WAR ON TERROR!

Hey presto: surprise.

I've been meaning to note that the brown ducks with white chests have reverted to normal male mallards. I wasn't expecting that. I'd never noticed before that male mallards spend so much of the year not looking like male mallards--the whole summer, more or less. The question remains why these male mallards don't spend the summer looking like female mallards, but like something else altogether.

Since my printer isn't getting along with its cartridges this week and hence prevented me from doing what I'd meant to do today, I had a look at Prado's 198something book on Rorty (The Limits of Pragmatism). It's remarkably similar to the Foucault/Searle book--all about (so far, at least) whether the idea that truth is correspondence ought to be jettisoned. I think this book (so far) actually gets closer to the real problem: you can think about truth as a matter of correspondence between what is said or believed and how things are without thinking of it as a matter of correspondence between what is said or believed and unconceptualized, un-linguistified Reality Itself. It seems like the main point of the book is to take Rorty to task for taking reasons for jettisoning the latter as reasons for jettisoning the former.

And some more poking around in the Sartre literature: Linda A. Bell, The Ethics of Authenticity, promisingly says near the beginning of her section on bad faith that Sartre's critics (though encouraged by Sartre himself) overemphasize the free aspect of Sartrean human being at the expense of the factical, but then she goes on to characterize bad faith, like everyone does, as flight from freedom. I dunno, I think I'm going to have to try to hammer my way through Being and Nothingness on our upcoming plane trips (and holy crap, I just realized I'M GOING TO MISS THE ENTIRE WORLD SERIES), but if Sartre really doesn't have bad faith equally as flight from facticity then, well ... that's just accidental: it follows from his premises that it must be, and as a matter of fact--I mean, if you just pay attention to the phenomena--it is.

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