Your result for The Who Would You Be in 1400 AD Test...

The Usurper

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Your result for The Who Would You Be in 1400 AD Test...

The Cardinal

You scored 79% Cardinal, 8% Monk, 29% Lady, and 49% Knight!

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~Well, my 'nap' lasted over ten hours and it was a hard, deep sleep. Guess I was toastier than I realized.

This whole 'conceptual frustration' issue is something that has dogged me for years. And with the context of my family, it becomes even more fucking heinous and a serious source of resentment...which is a Bad Thing.

I said this to 'timelight' in a comment on the teeth grinding post: “...I'm not talking about a phrase or a line, here. Back in Feb 1989 I had an idea for a redo of Twain's "Connecticut Yankee". I'll skip all the details, but one.

I thought of Sean Connery as King Arthur. Again, that's a natural and not a big deal original idea.

But I had a climax where he's wounded, a really bad chest would, and the hero prays 'for God to take him instead'.

It starts to rain...and the rain washes the blood away to reveal the wound healed.

Then lightning strikes the hero, sending him back into the future.

That June I go see "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" and what do I see? Sean Connery with a fatal chest wound and the blood is washed away to revealing it to be healed.

I had no prior knowledge of that, no on-line or TV show spoilers. I had simply seen the image in my mind, wrote it into my screenplay outline...and then there is was up on the Big Screen.

And "Last Crusade" was already in the can by then, so they couldn't have stolen it from me even if they knew about it.

This type of thing had happened before, though not yet with that kind of exactness, but it has happened again and with increasing accuracy. Now do you understand why this is so crazy making? Why it taxes my patience so severely?”

Add to this the fact that my lovely family is in the fucking Business, but the Evil Stepfather would not only not support any of my projects, but actively worked to sabotage me...shit like tossing me out of the house, then stealing one of my unfinished scripts, which he proceeded to rewrite [with a whole 'Oedipal punishment subtext' mixed in] and send around with his name on it. Sweet, eh?

Yeah, this is all Old News and I should just fucking 'get over it already'. Some days it feels like I have, but obviously I'm blowing smoke up my own ass on that one. Guess I'm working myself into 'a state' about having another birthday come and go. Oh, joy...

Dear You,

I have been angrier than this before, but I'm not sure if I've ever been so flat-out upset. I literally can't stop crying and it's pretty damn difficult to try to convince yourself that you don't give a shit in that condition. What is even up with you lately? The fact that you neglect to tell me you've made plans with other people until the day you're actually going, which ruins my plan for the entire day and ends up making me sit indoors doing nothing. The fact that I've been crying intermittently over all this since about 2AM. The fact that you somehow don't even know how upset you make me, you just don't get it.

The fact that you chose weed over me tonight. That's my favourite one.

exhaustion/frustration, me

A few months ago a psychology professor who I work for asked me about metaethical theories. More specifically he wanted to know what current philosophers think about what ethics is; what sorts of 'things' ethical statements are. Most of my experience has been in philosophy of mind so I was sort of at a loss; the best I could do was mention expressivism and objectivism. The problem is that objectivism (at least in its classic form) is simply unacceptable for most scientifically oriented people and expressivism just seems uninteresting. When I mentioned the latter to my professor he seemed to agree with it but didn't find it too illuminating, and I tend to agree with him. For a person with a naturalistic mindset, the fact that there are no moral facts or objects in the world would probably be the default view. But the fact that one has to bite the bullet and also say that they surface grammar of moral beliefs is simply wrong and that we can't perform any logical functions on them (like it seems we can) just seems lazy. It would be helpful to come up with a thorough explanation of why we use moral statements the way we do. This made me want to look for a better alternative and I came across what Timmons calls 'Contextual Moral Semantics' in his book Morality without Foundations. A nearly identical view is also described in a 2000 paper by Horgan and Timmons called 'Nondescriptivist Cognitivism: Framework for a New Metaethic”.

The gist of the view is that moral statements are not descriptive, meaning that they do not refer to any entities or properties in the mind-independent world. This complies with the naturalistic requirement. However they do have truth values, though these truth values depend on the semantic (and mind-dependent) context in which they are stated. This means that moral statements qualify as full fledged beliefs and we can perform all the logical operations on them; they aren't simply approval and disapproval utterances like expressivism posits. From what I understand, these contexts are largely societally determined; ethical statements only make sense if the speaker is in a certain background context in which they make sense.  Timmons also lays out a theory of moral justification that might be interesting.   I might post more about this later after I've had some time to better figure out the system, but the view does seem at least interesting to me. It also reminded me of the idea of paradigms in scientific thought and background practices from Heidegger; it might be an interesting project to try to unify these fields with a contextually based view of ethics. However, mostly I'm wondering if anyone else has come across or done any work on the metaethical views of Horgan and Timmons. I'm sorry if my summary was inadequate to inform those who haven't read anything by them, but I'm not sure I've thought through it all enough to do the view any justice.

hello ADIML! :D
yumin / singapore

4th July 2008 (heh i'm the greatest procrastinator i know...)
my cousin got married on that day.

so here's a traditional (okay maybe not that traditional anymore) chinese wedding for you!

45 pictures in total.

( down the hall )

no we're not colourblind,
i know the world is black and white

Dear you,

sometimes, i want to hurt you.

you make me feel emotions in extremes and i don't like it.

me.