Sí, no saber: cuándo entras y cuándo sales de la vida de una persona. Recuerdo que hace algún tiempo pensé ésto de alguien: “Ahora mismo, nos une un hilo muy delgado. Si se llegara a romper, nos alejaríamos tanto que su vida sería, de nuevo, una oscuridad inexpugnable desde donde yo estoy parado.” Es difícil decir si ese hilo se ha roto, o si su presencia meramente metafórica aún sirve de algo. Quizá su vida ahora me sea una oscuridad, un cuarto sin luz. Quizá si platicáramos de nuevo volvería a iluminarse, poco a poco, la sala –volvería a ver lo que amuebla su vida, poco a poco. A hacer sentido de su historia y su presente. Quizá. Ahora, pienso, no tengo ganas. Es como si estuviera en un hotel muy grande, tan grande que, al entrar en un pasillo, no puedo ver en dónde acaba. (Los caminos que se cruzan para alejarse, esas sombras que se tienden para descubrir). Me gusta pensar que uno nunca sabe en dónde acaban los caminos que iniciaste aquí o allá. Me gusta pensar que, ahora mismo, estoy en un camino que parece poder llevarme a lugares tremendamente bellos. (Then again, it may be pathological optimism. Jajaja)

Nunca saber: los caminos que se cruzan para alejarse, las palabras que se dicen para incendiar –las sombras que se tienden para descubrir. Nunca saber: los futuros posibles, el pasado difuminándose. (Las palabras que se dicen para incendiar, apenas provocando sorpresa). Nunca saber: el misterio humano.
(The impossibility of hacceitistic switch).
(The fictionality of the epistemic breach).
(“What is it like to be an X“) –for ‘X’ a variable
Nunca saber. Lejanas intuiciones (mejor así). Agencialidad. Agencialidad infinita: ser uno mismo una causa (it’s all up to you).

Esto está a punto de convertirse en un blog de citas. But who cares. Heaney on Milosz:

Milosz será recordado como alguien que mantuvo con vida la idea de responsabilidad individual en una edad de relativismo. Su poesía reconoce la inestabilidad del sujeto y nos muestra una y otra vez la conciencia humana como un ámbito de discursos contendientes, mas no permite que esta concesión niegue el mandato inmemorial que nos conmina a la firmeza moral y de espíritu. Algo así, en cualquier caso, deja claro en un poema llamado “Ars Poetica?”, donde el signo de interrogación en el título no es un gesto trivial, sino una forma de reconocer sus dudas sobre el valor de la vocación poética, una duda por lo demás tan seria como la que podía albergar un cristiano del XIX sobre la verdad literal del Libro del Génesis:

El fin de la poesía es recordarnos
Cuán difícil es ser una sola persona,
Pues tenemos la casa abierta, no hay llaves en las puertas,
E invisibles huéspedes entran y salen a su gusto.

Milosz on Reason:

Exhortación

Bello e invencible es el intelecto humano
Ni rejas, ni alambre de púas, ni condenar los libros al despiece,
Ni tampoco una sentencia de exilio pueden nada contra él.
Él establece en la palabra las ideas universales
Y nos guía de la mano, escribimos entonces con mayúscula
Verdad y Justicia, y con minúscula, engaño y humillación,
Él, por encima de lo que es, eleva lo que debiera ser,
Enemigo de la desesperación, amigo de la esperanza.
Él no conoce judío ni negro, esclavo ni señor,
Cediendo a nuestro gobierno el común patrimonio del mundo.
Él, de entre el impúdico estrépito de las palabras trituradas,
Salva las frases austeras y dignas.
Él nos dice que todo es siempre nuevo bajo el sol,
Y abre la mano yerta de lo que había sido.
Bella y muy joven es la Filosofía
Y su aliada al servicio del Bien, la poesía
Apenas ayer la Naturaleza celebró su nacimiento,
Lo anunciaron a los montes el unicornio y el eco.
Gloriosa será su alianza, ilimitado su tiempo.
Sus enemigos se condenaron a sí mismos a la destrucción.

David K. Lewis, “Putnam’s paradox”:

The rules of disputation sometimes give the wrong side a winning strategy. In particular, they favour the sceptic. They favour the ordinary sceptic about empirical knowledge; they favour the logical sceptic, Carroll’s tortoise or a present-day doubter of non-contradiction; and they favour the sceptic about determinate reference. It goes as follows. The Challenger asks how determinate reference is possible. The Respondent answers by giving an account of his favourite constraint. The Challenger says: ‘Unless the words of your answer had determinate reference, you have not answered me unequivocally. So I challenge you now to show how the words of your answer had determinate reference. If you cannot, I can only take you to have proposed an addtion to total theory — that I can understand, but that is futile’. If the Respondent answers just as before, he begs the question and loses. If he answers differently, he does not win, for he gets another challenge just like the one before. And so it goes. The challenger is playing by the rules, and the Respondent cannot win. And yet the Respondent may indeed have given a correct account of the constraint that makes determinate reference possible, couched in language that does indeed have determinate reference of the very constraint that it describes! [...] Moral: truth is one thing, winning disputations is another.

*

Derrida, The rhethoric of drugs:

“Adorno and Horkheimer correctly point out that drug culture has always been associated with the West’s other, with Oriental ethics and religion” and adds: “The Enlightenment [...] is in itself a declaration of war on drugs.”

En los tiempos en que estaba de moda acharle cualquier mierda social al proyecto de la Ilustración. Ahora hasta da risa…

*

Y:

I confess to be a nerdy, socially ackward guy, who sometimes seems to only find shelter from angst by either reading and being alone, or thinking while watching people come and go, or by ingesting alcohol and be partyin’, or writing. It’s not easy to be me sometimes. I’ve lived hard days, especially when it comes to meeting people. Nevertheless, I try, I do give my best, and I’ve been also lucky. It’s easy to be me sometimes. I’ve met really fantastic people through my life, and I feel strangely dizzied because of excitment when I think of what is yet to come. I find myself being optimistic, unorthodoxly optimistic, but feeling an strange appeal for pessimistic mood. I fall in love quickly when a crazy woman knows how to enter into my life, which includes the fact that it’s not me who has to enter in her life. I consider myself to be a person who’s trying to do good while leaving (I mean, while living). I like having sex, reading, dawns and sunsets, listening to music, going to parties, walking in the beach, and watching movies. I’m just human. And I have a passion for semantical complexity in daily life, infinity, and the never-found human essence. That includes logic and mathematics, art, philosophy and, well, love. That’s me in 5 minutes. I hope you like me (else just fuck off).

Salecl:

[...] Such a hysteric usually concludes: “If only my mother hadn’t done me this in my youth … if only that encounter had never ocurred … if only I could turn the clock backwards and arrange things differently”. Belief in such an “if only” is a necessary fantasy that enables the hysteric to sustain the position of innocent victim. Since the clock cannot be turned back, the hysteric can do nothing to change the situation.

(Hace poco escribi esta nota. Comentarios bienvenidos)

It is often claimed that religious people tend to hold their beliefs come what may, even in the face of recalcitrant evidence. And I do think that some religious people (I think not all of them –though I don’t have the statistics needed in order to be more specific) is plainly fanatic. The fact is that I’ve heard the same attack now in the side of the religious: unreligious people can come to be fanatically atheist, they say, even coming to the point of intolerance.
I do agree that atheism can come to be intolerant, as is the case for almost every human conception of whatever you may think. (To be sure, I also do agree that theism can come to be intolerant. But this is not suprise). To start an investigation of the roots of this intolerance of both opposites, one day reading Nozick’s The examined life, I came to imagine some stories that may be interesting. Let’s see.
[In advance, I apologize for any grammatical or syntactical or semantical or... ...errors you may find through the text]

Imagine, just for a moment, just for the sake of fanciful argumentation, that there is a unique god. Call it, him or she (whatever), “God”. (I don’t wanna be mysoginist or anthropocentric. But for the sake of brevity I’ll call Him, “Him”). Furthermore, imagine history had been just as it actually has been up to this moment but, diferring from our history, in the story we are imagining God decides to become known to us humans tomorrow (or what, in the story, would correspond to our history’s tomorrow). Now ask yourself what could God do in order for us to recognize God’s existence. So Imagine God somehow manages (after all, God is the god) to write his name in the Sun, in a way anyone speaking any language could see it was the name of the god –”God”, “Dios”, “Gott”, “Dieu”, all of those in one, so to speak. Could this be evidence for God’s existence?
Many people –let’s call them “The Irrationals”– would say this: Yep, it is so evidence. (And even conclusive evidence).
Many people –let’s call them “The Rationals”– would say this: Nope, it is not. It is not conclusive, if only because it is no evidence at all.
And in which side truth may lie?
The Rationals may then speak thus: “the appearance of God’s name is of no help to the Irrationals. For we have plenty of alternative explanations for the phenomenon in question, other than the theological. Consider theory 1: there are aliens, and were they who somehow (and here comes theory zero) managed to write that. Now consider theory 2: there a solutions to equations X such that, though extremely improbable, are still possible. And these solutions imply events of this kind –bording with the unnatural only because their extremely low probability but not because their being above natural laws. The disanalogy with the unnatural is this: the probability of these solutions to equations X is infinitesimal, as close to zero as you can get –while the probability of the unnatural is just zero”.
And so we would be led to think that God’s name written in the Sun’s surface is of no help (at least, not decisive help) to the Irrationals.
Now I think we should ask what could count as evidence for God’s existence, in the face of this story.
To have more grounds over which ask that, let’s continue imagining. And imagine one day God decides to appear to us. So He asks Himself (metaphorically speaking –for, by definition, God knows all the answers) how shall He appear to us in order for us to recognize Him not only as existent but as existent and the god. There seem to be two ways: He could appear to us as human or not.
Imagine, even more fancifully (if it is possible), that He decides to appear to us as nonhuman. So he must appear to us as something like an event, an inanimate object of whatever the number of kinds of inanimate objects there may be, an animal, a plant, a fungus, a process… what would be preferable? How could we consider a, say, stone, God? How different should we be as we are now in order to understand that this rock is God? And even more so for things like events or classes. (For can we even imagine that a set, say, could manage to make ourselves be sure that we were coming to be sure of God’s existence? (What kind of axiom would that be which were describing that set? If not before, we are here peeking at the absolutely unintelligible)). How about an event? Well, we may ask: How about? How could an event make us think that that event is God making Himself present to us? Even, maybe, for animals. For imagine one animal one day gets on two foots (or not, this may be not so important), and starts speaking to us. So he would be making Himself (Itself) present by resembling a human, and we would take this fact –or so it seems to me– as a serious revelation of God’s existence only to the extent that we would a take a speaking human claiming himself to be God as a serious revelation of God’s existence.
So imagine (as fancifully as before) that He decides to appear to us as a human. Now this human, it seems, could take two ways for making ourselves aware that not only is He God, but that we must be shure he is God. So he could tell us, well, “I am God” or he could not tell us so. And in this last way he could tell us “I am not God” (which would make Him just a wacky passerby) or He could say nothing about God –about him. (In one sense (favoured by the de dicto reading) it seems He could tell us a lot of things about him without making us aware of facts about God. For imagine He says to His friends: “I like fishing”. It would be strange if one of them came, just by that, to believe that God likes fishing. So it seems He could speak about Him without making us aware of facts about God; but a theory of opaque contexts is needed here to reach the ultimate answer).
Now, both ways of saying nothing seem to be strange ways, if the goal is to make us aware that He is God: the one, existent God. For if not by talking to us and saying, loudly (making it explicit) that HE IS GOD, how could we came to even consider that possibility? (The possibility of He being God: the epistemic possibility, that is). It seems He would have to appeal to some inanimate object, or event, or anything but a person, in order to make us aware of His divinity. But then we would be back to where we started to think the possibility of being necessary to Him to express Himself as human.
So it seems we are led to conclude he would have to appear to us as a human, and a human which says, publicy, that HE IS GOD. But imagine the poor possibilities of that poor guy. Should he ask for a two-minutes speech (or even less: he would speak and say “I AM GOD” and then do some miracles) at the UN General Assembly? Should he ask for some of Oprah’s time? Well, if He is God then He, as imagined, could do some miracles. So what miracles could count as evidence that He is God?
Imagine He manages to get into the UN General Assembly and, standing in front of all the countries’ delegates, He turns water into wine, then the wine back to water, and then multiplies the water and walks over it. And imagine He does it in the five minutes everyone (everyone permitted by coherence with the assumption that this story resembles our world as close as possible) is watching TV, and watching the proceedings of the UN General Assembly. So an enourmous part of the world’s population comes to know there’s a man in TV who claims to be God and has turned water into wine and wine back into water, who has multiplied this water and has, then, walked over it for some seconds –precious few, but still visible, seconds.
Would then we all become theist and accept there is a God, an existent God, who, in order for us to know about His existence, has come to Earth and manifested as a man who turns water into wine and wine back into water?
I’m not sure we would. More exactly, I’m not sure we all would. And, importantly: I’m not sure all of the Rationals would. Let’s call the Rationals who remain unconvinced even after the UN eventuality “The True Rationals”. (I would like to know how big is the percentage of Rationals who are True Rationals –unfortunately, I may never know it).
The True Rationals may speak thus: “This is still no evidence. For let us put our hands over this ‘God’. (If he or his frieds deny us to do so, that runs contrary to their supposed security in believing he’s God). And let us investigate how come he turns water into wine. And then we may say if he is, or is not, God”.
So imagine God offers himself to the True Rationals to investigate his psychology, phisiology, neurochemistry, and all that. Given time, either the True Rationals will find the source of the so-called ‘miracles’ in the self-claimed God or not. If they do find them, then they (given the assumption that True Rationals are doing science and not magic) could explain what the underlying causal mechanism of the so-called ‘miracles’ was –and so, the self-claimed God would amount to nothing but as an experienced illusionist, one of those who have some training in both physics and hypnosis.
But if they don’t find the causal explanation for the so-called ‘miracles’, why stop there? How many things have been taken as a mystery for a long time before they are explained? Aren’t there many cases in which a revolution in science is bred by the need to account for something deeply troubling?
I think the True Rationals would have open an answer of that fashion –and not only open, but obliged upon them in pain of leaving Truerationism in favor of theism.
And now I think we should ask what could count as evidence for God’s existence, in the face of this story. More exactly, what could count as evidence-for-God’s-existence which would be acceptable for the True Rationalist. So let’s ask:
What possible fact, object, person, word, event in the world could count as acceptable evidence for God’s existence, given Truerationism?
Is it that Truerationism knows, somehow, a priori that the concept of ‘God’ is per se impossible? Then we may ask on what grounds could this be. For this concept seems neither inconsistent (for all logic tells us, God exists –or he does not) neither conceptually impossible (for all the non-theological concepts we have (and even perhaps for most of all our theological concepts (and perhaps even for all of our theological concepts, including that strange one, possessed by some, of existing God)), God exists –or he does not).
Of course, it may be inconsistent with concepts or theories from physics, biology, chemistry or else. But precisely the point of imagining all of what we have claimed to be imagining was to test the very possibility of some God’s manifestating. This manifestating may be physically impossible (for all physics tells us, God is not possible), but that is not a priori, and even it is extra-physical: to derive, from an axiomatization of physics, that God does not exist, one must express (in the ‘physics language’, let’s say) the concept of ‘God’, and that is an extra-physical concept. So to say that God is physically impossible is to accept one prior conception of God which, then, is said to be inconsistent with our present conception of our (physical) world. And again: precisely the point of imagining all of these was to test to what extent even a flagrant violation of physical laws (turning water into wine and things like that) would count as evidence for God’s existence. We seem to be led to think that Truerationism would consider this either a priori and metaphysically impossible or, though possible, as no conclusive evidence for God’s existence. So we seem to be led to think that Truerationism seems to be, by definition, the position that denies God’s existence.
And so we seem to have a case of a theory which: (i) defines itself (as least partly, but importantly) as a negation of something’s existence, and then (ii) claims that nothing (nothing possible? or nothing epistemically possible?) in the world would count as evidence for that thing’s existence. So we seem to be faced with a theory that just asserts (at least partly, but importantly) its own truth and a priori denies all possible ways to falsify it.
As said, I do not know how many Rationals are True Rationals. I just thought it would be fun to check what could be happening on this side. Because if Truerationism is just the position that affirms its own truth and denies every possible way to falsify it, then it shouldn’t come out as surprise that even some atheism can come to the point of being fanaticism: it seems that, at least partly (but importantly), fanaticism is defined as a view that just affirms its own truth and denies every possible way to falsify it.

Hoy, el último día de este mes (justamente este mes), pienso: Jaja, Over it. (Lo cabrón fue ese intermedio… but destiny has its own times)
Just over it. (Over. Think about it: over)

Cumple número 23, Rozz Williams y Luomo y Placebo y Somatic Responses y Rolling Stones, un día frío y bonito y gris. No pasa nada. La vida de siempre. Esto, de nuevo: otras cosas por hacer.

Por fin terminé el primer draft de mi tesis. Agradeceré no sólo el interés de leer más de dos páginas, sino de lanzarse a hacer cualquier comentario que crean útil.
Carlos Romero: Tesis, Draft 1
yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

Supongo que las crisis son esenciales para la formación de la personalidad en el mismo sentido en que la homeostasis continua, según algunos teóricos, impediría la evolución de la vida. Así que, después de todo, aquí estoy. Me puse un día límite para cerrar la tesis: hoy. Tengo proyectos en la cabeza, papeleo por hacer. Amanece todavía (en un sentido metafórico: strictly speaking, son casi las cuatro de la tarde, jajaja) y estoy feliz de preguntarme, de nuevo, qué voy a hacer, qué debo hacer, y cómo debo hacerlo. Pronto estaré subiendo el primer draft oficial de mi tesis, lista para ser revisada por asesores y sinodales.