Want? Choice?

Why is it so hard to be a particular way by choice?

Why is it that I cannot simply decide one day, hey, I want to accomplish X--and then pursue it?

Nothing prevents me.

Akrasia...?

Cats and the Qualia of Happiness

My cat, having satisfied himself with the food available indoors, ambles back to the door and sits expectantly. He'll look up at the portal, look around, look at me occasionally. If I draw close, he'll rise up and paw the side of the door, possibly rub himself against me, make movements that seem to express a readiness to go forth. He meows on occasion, if the exit remains barred for too long.

As near as I can tell, he experiences a desire to go outside.

Would he feel pleasure from his desire being fulfilled, or would he simply feel relief from the pressing urge?

Motivation

How can we (or I?) motivate ourselves to do things that we do not want to do?

Seems to me that "instrumental" and "punitive" approaches have been most popular over the years. Which is to say, under the instrumental approach we think, "X is unpleasant, but I need to accomplish/tolerate X in order to achieve Y, which I do desire", and thence derives motivation to do X.

The punitive approach--maybe it should be called the "threat of punishment" approach, but that just sounds long and awkward--is more along the lines of, "Q is unpleasant; but Z is even more unpleasant than Q, and Z will happen if I do not do Q".

Actually, these are analogous (although not perfectly so) to modus ponens and modus tollens, like so:

X->Y
X
Y

Z->~Q
Q
~Z

From a motivational standpoint, one looks toward the conclusion for a desired outcome. In the first case, we want Y to happen, and we know that one of the ways to effect Y is to do X. That is, if we do X, unpleasant though it may be, we will be rewarded with Y.

Similarly, in the second case Z is even more odious than Q, but we know that if Z is going to happen, it must be in Q's absence. Thus, we can prevent Z from happening (effect ~Z) by doing Q.


These also (unsurprisingly) map pretty handily onto the psychological principles of operant conditioning: what I've called the "instrumental approach" (modus ponens) is analogous to positive reinforcement and positive punishment, and the "punitive approach" (modus tollens) to negative reinforcement and negative punishment.


All four approaches are logically equivalent, depending on how we choose our premises. It is worthwhile to note, however, that they are not psychologically equivalent--and that people may react better to what they understand as a positive stimulus versus a negative stimulus, etc.

Leibnizesque Proclivities

I recently borrowed Bertrand Russell's A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, and I'm rather enjoying what little I've read of it so far.

One thing that struck me is the description (in the beginning) of Leibniz's disinclination toward publishing a fully developed system. Rather, it seems Leibniz tended to craft arguments in response to private correspondence, or to issues which he bore some personal connection to. Unfortunately, this makes giving a comprehensive take on his views a bit difficult, since most if it is fragmentary.

The amusing thing is that I think I find myself doing something similar. I rarely write for the sake of writing--I will always be most motivated to give an in-depth argument when it's directly in response to someone else, peculiarly enough.

Maybe I should work on that.

And sometimes...

[And sometimes, perhaps, desires can be trusted. Or, miraculously and all the more mysteriously, they can shape.]

I wonder then, were perfection nearly within grasp, how terrifying might that be? And too, how exhilarating, giddying! For Tantalus's hand to brush the grapes, his lips to graze the waters.

Imagine the moment following this unprecedented anomaly: his pulse races, a hitherto dulled and pessimistic mind comes alight, afire! Certainty (and its incumbent predictability) had blunted and wearied his existence. For surely Tantalus had realized – real-ized! – the despotic futility that ruled and overruled his every action, that denied him possibility of relief. Surely, he at last reached a point where unrelenting failure wore away the last of his persistence, leaving him stupefied, resigned, and stultified.

Imagine the moment prior: the cusp of despair, his head bows, and he begs penitently to the gods, as he has done countless times before. He knows well the gesture's uselessness: they will not heed him--and is it that they do not hear or do not care? Or is there anyone to hear? So long has been his imprisonment, that who can say which beings existed, or did fancy alone conjure up his divine imprisoners? Did he really host that profane and awful banquet? Or did he imagine his feat of hubris merely as to justify his own torment? But watch now, as his head bows, his parched and broken lips touch for one instant the inconceivable--the impossible, the unreal--and shatter his dreadful certainty.

How this moisture? How this incomprehensible moisture, there long enough to shock yet gone before it can be tasted? What does it mean, what can it mean? That the gods have heard, relented? Or their powers wane and may now be circumvented?

Imagine his reckless rejuvenation as thoughts careen throughout his jolted mind. An intoxicating force invigorates his ailing hopes and catapults him beyond Reason; and with that same resurgence comes a creeping, dawning horror: he is poised now at the brink of lunatic conclusions, and if he stretches just a little further, will his lips find long-sought respite? Or will the conscious act of striving revoke his supposed progress and rebuke him all the more?

Be this redemption, or a god's mocking laughter?

Is it chance that furnishes him with hope, or insidious design?

Is this opportunity, or is it a desire's wishful mirage? Is there any action he can possibly take to sway the outcome either way? If he chooses wrongly, will he ever get this chance again? And so horrible, if not, to live on knowing that he'd once come so near perfection, but failed and damned himself.

...

.. to desire a thing so much that one is paralyzed by the very possibility of it being unattainable...

Fancy

[Please forgive this amateur flight of fanciful, mystical indulgence. This comes from a diary entry I wrote over the summer. I decided I needed to post it somewhere. I can't say I believe these sentiments, but I have sometimes taken comfort in them.]

Maybe I am starting to feel... that somewhere, somehow, in a realm outside of conceivability, our essences intermingle. And our essences love each other, they love each other so much that it almost tears them apart, yet simultaneously unites them all the more gloriously for it. Our essences love and understand why all this tragedy is necessary, why the struggle is necessary for growth, why all is truly joy and not sorrow. Our beings love each other because they created each other, because they dreamed themselves into being, and they chose each other out of all the other possible existences because this way was right. We love each other eternally, devoutly, devotedly, passionately, irrepressibly.

We love each other and are each other. We love each other because we are each other--because of that sympathetic resonance from one core to another--a unification in rhythm that reveals our inherent, underlying unity. Our oneness.

... You and I are one, just as everything else is one. Yet somehow you are special, and I am special, and our love is special.

So we play this game--because it is the unmasking, the revealing, the unraveling, the development, the exploration, the uncertainty, the discovery--these things give us more meaning than jumping straight toward the answer.

Mrrem

Yeah, so this blog is suffering from a definite lack of attention.

I don't have any particularly meaningful, worked-out content to post now, so I'll just mention some of the things I've been thinking about lately.

I recently started learning about Alonzo Church's lambda calculus (via Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind), and I'm very impressed. It's so cool that logicians were able to construct systems like this (and like Turing's work) before the advent of computers – indeed, these logical systems led directly to and facilitated the advent of computers. They start from such simplicity, but possess incredible power.

The lambda calculus reminds me of the programming language LISP (unsurprisingly, of course, since LISP was based on this very calculus), and reading about it makes me want to get back into programming again. I dabbled with Haskell a bit at the start of this summer, and I found it oddly fascinating. There is something quite elegant about these functional* languages that more practical languages (C/C++, Python, Perl) don't quite capture.

* Apparently only certain variants of LISP (like Scheme) are fully functional, but anyway.


Still, it is difficult for me to remain interested in these things for their own sake. I think I would need some kind of projects to work toward if I were to take up programming again seriously. Ah, motivation, that state which so often eludes me...

There are so many things I would love to learn, but somehow actually sitting down and doing the work required bores me terribly. Sometimes it doesn't; sometimes I go through brief periods where I feel a great deal of enthusiasm toward some subject (say, Wittgenstein's Tractatus, or some aspect of symbolic logic), but then I end up dropping it again, feeling utterly bored with it for months.

I would like to have a very extensive knowledge of mathematics, physics, philosophy, logic, computer science, linguistics, music, and (select aspects of) history. It would be swell to know Greek, Latin, German, and French. It is so difficult to care about, though; sometimes my mind just seems to shut off, and whatever I'm currently trying to study becomes excruciatingly dull; suddenly I can't remember why I wanted to learn about it in the first place. I value knowledge generally, but to actually feel something for it, to care – somehow that is different from merely saying "I value it"?

What's WITH minds anyway?

Last night I dreamt a musical--well, at least one song from it, anyhow. It was rather amusing: in the manner typical of musicals, after some key event had occurred, abruptly music came from nowhere and everyone present engaged in singing or dancing. In the manner typical of dreams, of course this made perfect sense, and I participated just as willingly as everyone else. (I did think it was marvelous that everyone present somehow either knew the words and melody, or they were adroit enough at following by ear.)

Now, the peculiar thing to note is that this was music (complete with orchestration and lyrics) I'd never hard before--it was the product of my unconscious mind. I can't guarantee that the music would win any awards, but it made harmonic sense, had convincing melodic content, and it flowed pleasingly. The lyrics were probably pretty nonsensical but I can't remember a thing about them.

(Also notable was the fact that I myself sung along, I was very deft at picking out various ways to harmonize with the other singers, something I've sometimes had trouble doing by ear. But this was easy--so very easy--and it felt natural.)

So my question: why is it so much easier to create music while I'm asleep? Why does it flow out so effortlessly, without thought or conscious guidance? I'm not saying that conscious guidance is necessarily a bad thing, but it's kind of frustrating that I can't simply choose to let this same thing happen to me while I'm awake. Again, I don't have any guarantees that the music produced would be any good, but I'd at least like to experiment and see what comes out.

I know that this ability is in my head somewhere: the ability to simply let musical works flow out, as Mozart was allegedly able to do. But I remain frustratingly unable to tap it--just as, for a highly relevant analogy, I know that the other events from that dream are in my head somewhere, but I can't remember them. Just as with any other memory one has difficulty recalling. The knowledge is there somewhere, encoded in an obscure part of one's neural circuitry. But how does one access it?


This leads me to ponder again the difference between the waking state and the dreaming state. I feel as though inhibition must be a large part of it. In dreams, while I do retain a modicum of reasoning ability, I am often so much more willing to simply embrace the absurd, the inconsistent, and the unusual without pausing to think, "Hey wait--this doesn't make sense."

Would I be better able to let music flow forth from within me if I stopped being so critical of it, then?

But if I am not critical, how can I trust that it will be any good?

Perhaps a strategy like the following is needed: relax the constraints of one's mind ("Free your mind," as Morpheus advised Neo), and let whatever wants to come forth, come forth. Do not seek to consciously guide it, do not judge it, do not think about impact this will have on others, about what it means--try not to think at all, really. After you have let this outflowing run its course, then--and only then!--do you reactivate your critical faculties in order to evaluate the products of your creativity. Only then ought to occur assessment, judgement, and revision.

Three Cheers for Angst

When I ask, "Is life worth living," what does that really mean?

The very notion entails that there is a "worth" to be evaluated here. Normally, when we ask something like, "Is X worth doing," it suggests that we ought to examine whatever activity "X" represents, then determine whether its expected return will compensate for the expected investment.

So, is life worth living?

Living, under all meanings of the word, requires quite a bit of an investment--it involves suffering, tedium, labor, constant maintenance of and vigilance toward a physical shell. In fact, simply by choosing to continue to live, we open ourselves up to the possibility of undergoing every torment that could possibly be experienced by a human in a similar situation.

On the other hand, living also yields the possibility of every greatest joy that we could conceive. On the more mundane level, it is normal to experience pleasures, happiness at friends and family, food, bits of luck, enjoyment of love and sex, etc.

So, to evaluate whether "life is worth living" for a particular individual, she should determine whether her expected benefits will outweigh her expected detriments. Often, when someone reaches the point of suicide, it is because life no longer seems worth living: to the severely depressed individual, the expected suffering far outweighs the expected pleasure--and, perhaps, at some point it seems impossible for there ever to be any future pleasure again.

When I consider this post--I think, implicitly, is it worth it to try and keep working and rewriting until I come up with something more coherent? Something that others will be able to appreciate, that I will be able to look back at with pride (or something resembling pride)? Apparently the answer is no--or at least, it's not worth the extensive reworking that calls out to me--the post almost has a life of its own, in how it shouts to me, "There are parts of me that are wrong! Fix them!"--but sometimes--as now--it does not seem worth the revision and editing process. The striving. I mean, don't get me wrong--I'm doing some minimal reworking as I go, of course--but I keep needing to sort of grit my teeth and continue on past the glaring errors in order to make progress at a ll--because I lack the perseverance, dedication, and motivation required to bring it up to the standards it should be. For example, as I write, I am conscious that this paragraph (nor the post as a whole) does not flow particularly well; it skips from one subject to another without preamble or continuity, and it contains long, ill-formed sentences--often broken with m-dashes, because that's easier than figuring out how to make it into something elegant.

(I wonder how much my need to be free of errors stems from a fear that others will mock me or think less of me for them?)

But yes. That calling-- that anthropomorphization of error. Maybe it's not so much an anthropomorphization as--I don't know. But it's nearly tangible sometimes--the wrongness of a given object (compared to its ideal standards). I feel thus when I compose music, when I write a paper, when I long to be perfect in any way. In fact, too often the world as a whole seems this way to me.

And when I don't have the energy or ability to make it right--or at least to put forth a good solid effort, if nothing else--it doesn't seem worth continuing with.

Hence, perhaps, why I have no motivation?

I don't know. Is the problem that I lack motivation or that I lack competence?

Lack of Content

Well, as was probably inevitable, I seem to have run out of steam with this blog. That tends to happen. I guess I just haven't been quite as enthused about writing out my own thoughts on various issues, or something. This blog should probably be considered "dying."

It's not as though I really blog about anything that's genuinely philosophical, in the academic sense. I seem to excel at pseudo-philosophy more than anything else. Mreh. Writing papers for class is quite a drudgery too. For whatever reason, genuine philosophical issues seem to have soured for me.

I can't seem to make myself care about what various commentators think Kant really meant in the Transcendental Dialectic, or how his principles can be applied to field X for fascinating result Y. Do I care about the Ship of Theseus, the nature of time, or the fundamental nature of the reality? Not really, no. Not at the moment. If ever, to some degree.

What am I interested in?

I'm interested in how we as a species apply logic to the world. I'm interested in whether there's something wrong with how we conceptualize the world, generally. Could it be possible that our fundamental assumptions and frameworks are holding us back? What if there's a better way?

And yet, I don't want to do any studying that would aid me to find that out.

=/

Discouraging Thoughts

I recently began reading Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind. It's a very fascinating book that covers (directly, tangentially, or in passing) many of the topics that I'm interested in these days: artificial intelligence, Turing Machines, Gödel's theorem, formalism in mathematics, quantum mechanics, fractals, complexity, predictability, etc., etc. In fact, it's a lot like another excellent book that I'm trying to get through at the moment, Douglas Hoftstader's Gödel, Escher, Bach, both in terms of related topics and in how the author draws from many different sources to drive toward an eventual point about the mind (the impossibility of strong AI and/or the irreducibility of the mental to the physical in the case of Penrose, and the self-referential nature of consciousness in the case of Hofstadter. Or so I believe, since I haven't gotten too terribly far in either of them yet, and I'm only dimly aware of what their conclusions will be).

Anyway, the problem: I was skimming through the latter parts of The Emperor's New Mind to see what lies ahead, and for a pop-science book, it contains a bewildering number of frightening equations (aghh! Look at all the ψ's, ω's, and other intimidating esoterica!) . Now, I'm not as put off by this as the average reader might be, but still, I'm worried about my ability to adequately grasp this kind of thing, particularly given my currently less-than-pleasing math knowledge. And, moreover, I'd genuinely like to be able to understand these sorts of things. But do I have the patience? Do I even care enough? How can I learn these things outside of a classroom environment?

I'm also slightly concerned that the math-heavy sections of the book will be like roadblocks for my reading: that is, I will procrastinate getting through them since I'll keep thinking, "I want to understand this, so I'll just come back to it when I'm not feeling so tired, when I'm more in the mood to concentrate, etc., etc." And then, six months later, I still won't have made any progress in the book. Just some things for me to watch out for.


Etymological fact of the day: the word 'rapt'—to be engrossed or enraptured—derived from the past participle of 'rape,' which originally denoted 'seizing' or 'carrying off' without necessarily denoting non-consensual sex acts. Indeed, 'rapt' was occasionally used to indicate being carried from Earth to Heaven (as, perhaps, a prophet or mystic might be taken by God; or as one might be struck rapt in the midst of a vision). 'Rapture,' unsurprisingly, shares a very similar derivation, and this, I presume, is why the modern Christian doctrine of The Rapture has the name it does. The word 'ravish' also derives from the same distant root (Latin rapere); it has a near-identical meaning—to carry off forcibly, particularly in the case of a woman. But, 'ravish' has also been used in the sense of transport from Earth to Heaven, much the way 'rapt' has been, and so 'ravishing' is a complimentary term because it means something like 'enchanting' or 'entrancing.'

The frightening thing is that 'ravish' is still a synonym for our modern sense of 'rape' today. And so, telling a woman that she looking 'ravishing' seems to indicate that she looks rape-able. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) does not list anything like this in its usage history of the word, and I generally consider the OED the final authority on all things language related, but still... kinda makes you think.