Jon Cogburn's Blog

We're Number Something Less than Nine!

Well the 3quarksdaily finalists to be sent to Dennett were announced (HERE), and my post didn't make the cut. It probably reflects badly on me (pride goes before a destruction, etc.)  that I'm genuinely surprised. I did not expect to ultimately win (there are some very good posts in competition), but did think the post would make it through this round. And I'm a bit bummed Dennett won't be reading it, in part because Zuhandenheit/Vorhandenheit/Dasein are explained in terms of Dennett's design/physical/intentional stances. And I thought that the post was part of a sustained reading group would have counted for something.

Oh well, such is life. Here's the song I always console myself with when facing paper rejections/etc..

I think part of what of hurt us was that the nominated post made lots of reference to Braver's realism related theses without explaining them. All of the theses were explained ad nauseum in the post on Chapter 1 of Braver's book. Everyone taking part in the reading group had been discussing these theses for a month by that point. I did think about putting links in to the earlier explanations, but by the time I thought of that it had already been nominated and I thought changing the post in any way would be cheating.

That might not have helped though. . . If I self-nominate something next year it's going to just be some counterexample such as THIS POST, which is the kind of thing they seem to be looking for.

If I could do it again though, I'd wouldn't change things and have entered the other post. I'm proud of the perverse egalitarianism reading group, and think it will continue to be helpful to reader's of Lee Braver's book.

There's a bigger issue here on how to assess the value of your own works. To me the reading group was just as good as stuff I've gotten published with top presses. . . But even in those cases, sometimes something that seems incidental to me gets published immediately, whereas something more important (deeper, though just as clear) may go through six or seven rejections before settling somewhere. There's absolutely no way to predict it.

You have to somehow be humble and completely open to revising based on criticism while still believing in what you are doing. If you can't combine both of these you'll not be able to get back up (AC/DC helps too).

[P.S. On re-examining the list, I realize I have no idea what they were looking for. I'm scandalized that the post on Priest's concept of time didn't make the cut either. Not to rip on any of the finalists, but Ben Burgis' post is probably the best of the bunch. That it didn't advance makes me think less of the contest, but also maes me feel much better about getting weeded out myself. I'm in good company.]

Happy Birthday Gustav

I forgot to wish Hurricane Gustav a happy birthday yesterday. It's hard to describe the particular kind of awfulness of a week without  electricity in a swelteringly  hot, humid, pedestrian unfriendly city with high crime and poverty. It's hard to describe the alien landscape of fallen trees and debris and mutilated buildings. And your one year old has bad heat rash and you are terrified about him overheating, and stores where you might purchase pedialite or baby powder (he's never had heat rash before) are all shut and without power.

It really sucked, and the national media totally dropped the story after it was clear it was not going to be another Katrina (which even in Baton Rouge also really sucked). The reporters for ABC News stood in the French Quarter of New Orleans, and after the levees failed to breach pronounced Gustav "a fizzle;" Reuters said that it "lacked punch." 

Thanks to youtube though we have access to films that non-media types made. The first (from Thibodaux) shows the destructive power of wind strong enough to peel off brick facade.

And here's a nice photo essay of what Baton Rouge looked like for months after the storm. Before viewing this, it is essential to note that. (1) These are not just the worst of the worst. Any place you were in Baton Rouge you saw multiple vistas of scenes like those in these photos. (2) A large portion of these photos were taken weeks or months after the storm. You can tell because the roads are not blocked by huge trees.

The thing that's truly appalling to me is that after the storm there was a little bit of talk about actually burying the power lines the way they are in many American cities that don't even suffer the double whammy of periodic hurricanes and lots of trees. But that completely disappeared. The private companies that run all of the electricity now have dictated that yearly extended power outages for millions of homes due to storms (usually winter storms in the north east and mid west) are just going to be part of the equation in the United States. And the rest of us accept that as inevitable.

When did we become the country where everything is impossible? Somehow, countries with much less per capita GDP than us have vastly nicer power grids, telecommunication infrastructure, airports, health care, prisons (and at least Christians are explicitly supposed to be concerned about this), roads, hurricane and flooding protection, and public transportation. At the current rate of degradation it will be less than twenty years before we lose out in our comparative advantage in space development and our university system. It's really bizarre. No country with near the per capita wealth of the United States is anywhere near as murderously dysfunctional as we are on any of these metrics. But any time someone tries to substantially improve anything in the United States for the past twenty five years the collective wisdom solidifies around the theme that it's impossible.

When did that become our national ethos? Why did it become our ethos? In the vast majority of the above things we until very recently (through the early 1980s) were the envy of the world. Now Americans accept (and virulently defend!) mediocrity and worse as our birthright.

Ever since Hurricane Katrina I increasingly feel like I don't recognize this place. I still love it (every time I've travalled abroad I choke up when the border agent says "welcome home" when I finally get back). I mean, you don't stop loving a person when they become diseased. There's no reason it should be any different with countries.

Yes, Google loves me

Invesp Consulting currently ranks this blog as the 24th top philosophy blog (rankings HERE). Take that Andrew Sullivan; you didn't even make the list.

Invesp's methodology involves aggregating lots of other rankings, which they present. Since they only present the top 25, any movement down is likely to to move it off the ranking, so I thought I'd ego-maniacally make sure to note the aggregator's favor before it is lost.

Unfortunately, they don't aggregate results for blogs focused on the category subsuming: (a) cute pictures of offspring, (b) sustained whingeing about the decline of the West (in this context, of course meaning the decline of amount of tax payer money going to higher education in general, and philosophy departments in particular), (c) spiritual crises, (d) the ballet and opera that is professional wrestling, and (e) unapologetic celebration of all things RAWK, including and especially one's own sometimes bizarre attempts to instantiate the relevant platonic form. I think it's a sad testament to the expressive impoverishment of English that we don't have a word for this category (most importantly, if Invesp aggregated for it I'd have of course done significantly better than number 24).

Cool Roy Cook Triumph

My old friend Roy Cook is now one of the less than 20 American officially recognized Lego Ambassadors. His work is amazing. HERE are photos of two huge sculptures of Minnesota landmarks, and HERE is a page with some of the other stuff, including pointillist murals (he's a really good philosopher with logic superpowers too).

thought while cat barfs in the other room

One thing I do less and less is to tell people to go and read something I wrote when they are making a point that either follows from or contradicts something (my cowriters and) I have already published. It's just an obnoxious thing to do and a waste of energy anyhow.

Reading the blogs of some prominent video game folks recently, I've wanted to do this repeatedly.but I've thankfully managed to refrain. And if I'm reading their work, then I'm doing my part. When I have something interesting to say about their work I'll get that out there, And "I discussed this much better in Chapter 3 of my book, which by the way isn't just a philosophy textbook, but is concerned centrally with game design, my cowriter having worked on Earth and Beyond, Asheron's Call, and tons of underground interactive fiction,  blah, blah, blah. . ." does not count. It's just me being impatient for my turn at the damned guitar at the beach so people will listen to my songs rather than me listening to their songs. And that is just a bad way to lead your life, even if they are on the 82nd verse of "Alice's Restaurant." It does not matter.

Jesus' injunction to pray in private away from the eyes and ears of others holds for lots of other activities too. In the context of blogging, it's interesting to note that the "hypocrites" of "scribes and hypocrites" fame in the original Greek described orators and actors.

But still, it's pretty horrible to feel like Al Pacino in that movie Donnie Brasco, where he's standing on one end of the boat and the big king pins are talking to Donnie and ignoring him. Since life inevitably makes most people feel that way for large chunks of times I'm going to get down off my cross now.

I also heard they need the wood.

shut up Allanis Morrissette (if that is your real name)

(1)  First irony- the video game I was writing about lashed out in an attempt to destroy the chapter about that game. Two nights ago at approximately 2:00 A.M. I finally defeated Civilization IV on "settler" level (admittedly a pathetic achievement even by the standards of such things).  While the little movie at the end showing your spaceship travel to a new star system was playing my computer froze.  No biggie.  I hit control-alt-delete to get the Windows Task Manager Open, but when I hit "End Task" the program wouldn't stop.  No biggie.  I turned off my computer.  But then when I turned it back on it would not reboot.  While trying to fix the problem with the aid of tech support from some very nice young men in Delhi, India, I reinstalled the operating system, resulting in all my files on my home P.C. being lost.

(2)  Second irony.  The chapter in question concerns perception, and has a nice discussion of "difference blindness" and "change blindness" where people do not perceive obvious things in their visual field.  An example of this would be people not noticing a man in a gorilla suit on a baseball field.  Well apparently every time I tried to back up the chapter in question on my Geocities page a little message on the screen informed me that due to a space in the title the file had not uploaded.  I never saw it!  So not only was I initially defeated by the game I was writing about, I finally was defeated for the very reasons I was writing about.

So I lost two and a half weeks work, not the end of the world, but still stomach churning.

Final question.  Why is it that when you do something totally boneheaded that you know was totally boneheaded, people respond by telling you over and over again the obvious thing you should have done so as to not commit the boneheaded act?  As an astoundingly clumsy and absentminded child who was also very tall I suffered this over and over again.  For example, once while explaining to the school nurse that I was bleeding profusely from the head because I'd unintentionally walking into an air-conditioner window-unit, she interrupted me and said, "Jon, you need to start watching out for those window units."  Unfortunately, in such situations as a child I was almost always too concussed to say "well, duh!"

Well I'm not concussed now, just sleep deprived.  So this is all by way of saying, if you want to respond to this post by writing, "You really should keep a hard copy at all times," or, "You really should get a data key," that's fine, but there's no point, and if there ever was one my dear friends and family have exhausted it by sharing these nuggets of wisdom dozens of times with in the last twenty-four hours alone.

me getting distracted while attempting to pose major fish art breakthroughs

I know that our ancestors have been doing this for millions of years, but it still seems miraculous to me that there is a baby in there.  If all goes well, two months from now he'll be on the outside.

Best Fishes

My normal medium is cod, but due to the season I had to settle for this guy.

Neal Hebert's cool new Blog http://lessthanpleased.blogspot.com/

Please check out Neal Hebert's new Blog, titled "An Instrument to be Thrown Away" which you can access here ( http://lessthanpleased.blogspot.com/ ).  It's also the first blog linked to in the list of blogs to the left of the screen at which you are currently looking (sorry for the piled up prepositions there). 

I'm hyped because he generously credited me with co-writing the best and most important political acceptance speech in history (it is in virtue of this that this post is categorized under realliferockandrollmoments).

Neal knows an awful lot, but in this context what's most significant is that he is able to channel into writing the mojo that makes him both an extremely entertaining human being and a great coffin salesperson.

the last days of generation X

During my first miserable years of graduate school in Columbus, Ohio I would sometimes visit old friends and family in Austin, Texas. 

On one such visit I got dragged along to a party by my college friend Ira.  The house was really depressing, everything covered in a layer of cigarette dust and dirt: shag carpets and linoleum in your field of vision no matter where you looked.  The keg of Shiner Bock (which had already entered its post Corona buyout slide) was somehow dripping on the yellow and lime green kitchen floor, creating a muddy puddle that slowly expanded during the course of the party.  A filthy dog would periodically walk over and lick at the mud.  The only furniture in the house was a T.V. on a milk crate and some mattresses in the denizens' bedroom.  The fifteen or so people in the party just sat around on the floor and smoked cigarettes. 

The smoke was so bad that it made me think of those old Viking longhouses with the hearth traversing the center of the whole house.  It must have really sucked to be in one of those places with all the smoke.  Viking legend has it that it was acceptable during fits of depression to "live in the ashes," which involved burying oneself in the three foot high piles of ash on each side of the fire and sneaking out to steal food and drink periodically.  According to New Age writer Robert Bly (or was it Joseph Conrad?), Leif Erikson supposedly did this for two or three years prior to washing himself off and discovering the new world.

I guarantee you that nobody at that party went on to discover a new world.

We were all three or four years out of college, at the point where the bad diet and slacker lifestyle finally started to rob a generation of their youthful looks.  Through the cloud of smoke I noticed how everyone's skin tone went from blanched to greenish, and how we all looked puffy, somehow both overweight and undernourished.  It was technically a "party" I guess, but nobody was festive, and the conversation drowned in unclever attempts at ironic distance.

Even worse, I'd just reached the point in my life where I'd already heard a lot of what many people had to say, and didn't quite know how to deal with that.  Going to cafes and eavesdropping or getting into conversations with new people had just begun to lose its charm.  So I sat there on ash soaked carpet and drank my beer, thinking dark thoughts.

Between sips, it occurred to me that the functional organization of groups maybe foisted personalities on people, sort of like how in war movies there's always the wise-cracking tough guy Sargent, the earnest and scared brainy kid, a couple of ethnic stereotypes, etc. . .  The narrative of a war movie seems to demand this.  I started then to worry if really life was the same way.  So let's say you got in a new group of friends who hadn't yet filled the "funny guy" spot, and because of that it's your job to be the funny guy, even if you aren't really funny.  Maybe this was why you can often observe groups of friends laughing at somebody's unfunny jokes?

While pondering this, one of Ira's friends introduced me to a slightly overweight bearded person who plopped down next to me.  Ira's friend said something like, "You'll like Bill, he's an intellectual like you."  This women didn't know I was in graduate school.  I think for her "intellectual" meant someone who wasn't a meathead (and Kurt Cobain's true cross was looking out in the audience and realizing he was performing for the same kind of meatheads that beat him mercilessly when he was a child in school, just that some of these meatheads now listened to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and wore flannel shirts).

Bill's skin was kind of waxy and the sweat rolled off of him.  He was so drunk he could barely speak.  In between periodic bouts of drooling, he talked about himself.  The first thing he said was "My life is Kafkaesque."  I responded flippantly (and unfunnily), "Dude, you've got an apple stuck under your right wing on your back," and he just stared at me through bleary eyes.  I wanted to ask him how he knew his life was Kafkaesque without him having read any Kafka, but I'm actually too polite to do stuff like that.  After more drooling he said (very slowly), "I work at Burlington Coat Factory , I help build the new coat factories," and began crying.  I said, "Whattaya crying about?  That's a good job.  Hey!  Hey!  People need coats."  But he kept crying and mumbling, and my praise of outerwear garments didn't seem to help much. Finally he snuffled in and solemnly proclaimed, "I should write a book." 

This mawkish display went on for about fifteen minutes and there was nothing I could do to cheer him up.  He was just too drunk and pathetic.  Plus the crying I think was part of his view of himself as a tortured genius forced to labor beneath himself.

When my friend Ira came over, Bill started mumbling incoherent, yet loud, things about Plato.  "Oh crap" I thought.  Ira is such a sweet person (he will help anyone with anything) that I thought we'd be stuck there all night listening to the drunk windbag.   But as soon as the guy mentioned Plato, Ira said, "Dude, you're full of s**t and you don't know what you're talking about; just sit there and shut up while we leave."  And we did.  We went and then got some really good Mexican food. 

Ira's curse was the last sentence of the last generation X/slacker party I attended.  I haven't even been to a party with a keg of beer (this was over a decade ago) since then.  Nor do I want to.  Saint Paul was pretty much right about kid stuff being for kids and grownup stuff being for grownups.  Grownup stuff is actually a lot more fun and rewarding.  So is Mexican food.

the last time I went for a walk without first shaving

Since being diagnosed with hypertension, I've changed a lot of things in my life for the better.  No caffeine, a lot less alcohol, more olive oil, and a lot more exercise.  One of the things I do for exercise is to try to walk a lot.  Sometimes this leads to problems.

A few Thanksgivings ago I woke up early and decided to take a walk to the Mississippi River levee in downtown Baton Rouge, less than a mile from where I live.  It's really pretty down there early in the morning and it's also a good chance to check out all of the neat construction in downtown Baton Rouge.

As I walked along Third Street an old car with the name of a church painted on its side (it was one of those off-brand churches with a name like "New Covenant Fellowship" or something) slowed alongside me.  The driver was a woman who had that kind of smile only worn by evangelicals and people who take massive doses of protease re-uptake inhibitors.  Thinking she wanted directions somewhere, I ambled over to the car.

She said, "Well hello there, Sir!  The Breakfast is just down the street!"

I said something like, "Huh?"

As I leaned down she said, "Just right down third street and keep going straight.  You'll see the sign."  Then she took off.

During my four block trek along Third Street, two other cars did the same thing, all driven by people with the weird Prozac/evangelical grins urging me in the direction of the convention center.  I felt like I was in a zombie movie.

So, in my sadly predictable Milgramistic way, I shuffled to the convention center to see what was going on.   Once there I was confronted by a long line of bearded men, half of them wearing fatigues, and a couple of women.  The ammonia reek of the dried urine saturating many of their clothes was nauseating.  I still didn't understand what the heck was going on until I finally noticed a sign that said, "Line for Free Thanksgiving Breakfast Starts Here."  The gathered bums, so bad at everything else in their mentally ill and booze and drug saturated lives, were surprisingly good at standing in line for a free breakfast.  This really amazed me, and I thought that if these people were so good at lining up, maybe they wouldn't stay homeless forever.  Unfortunately, I quickly learned that, like so much else in their lives, the line was not in fact the result of their innate disposition to self-restraint.

My first thought was, "Oh, those women thought I was going to volunteer to help with the breakfast."  Unfortunately, this was shattered when one of the smiling, sweater bedecked, Christians came up to me and said, "Sir, the back of the line is over there.  If you just wait there we'll start letting people in soon." 

I tried to explain that I was just going for a walk, but the  woman was kind of nervous from dealing with so many bums,  and she just kept telling me that I needed to go to the back of the line.  Finally, a police officer walked over and told me I needed to "move on, immediately."  Though thoroughly cowed by the police officer and evangelical Christian, the bums still had it in them to laugh at me as I wandered off.

my first Henry Rollins story, featuring the only fistfight I won

think the last time I went to see live music was a year ago when Weird Al Yankovic played downtown.  I just have almost no motivation to see most bands today.  Reasons: (1) I don't want to add to my hearing loss, (2) I always get a sort of hangover from cigarette smoke inhalation the next morning, (3) bands start really late in Baton Rouge, and (4) I find the mating rituals of human beings in their early twenties to be really depressing, and I don't enjoy witnessing their early stages in bars.

In college I saw a pretty good amount of live music, and it was at once such concert that I actually won a fistfight.  Henry Rollins was touring to support his second solo album, I think called "Lifetime."  This was I think probably right before the patina of true rock and roll (from his time as Black Flag's lead singer) had worn off him, and when you could also still see him in a tiny bar.  Even though I don't really like any of his music from "The End of Silence" onwards, and am pretty equivocal about his other creative endeavors (with the exception of the good works he's done for Hubert Selby Junior, for which Mr. Rollins gets a place in heaven) the concert was phenomenal.

Unfortunately, the tiny club I saw him at (then called "The Cannibal Club" in Austin) featured "slam dancing" which is when stupid kids run around in spastic circles and bang into each other.  Although I didn't partake in the dancing, a drunk skinhead slammed into me and tripped.  I didn't think much of it and turned around. 

Here's where I got very lucky.  Skinheads both in Britain and the U.S. are really fond of traveling in groups and assaulting people as a pack.  This skinhead was solo that evening and (even more lucky for me) very, very drunk.  I felt this pop on the side of my head, which caused my glasses to careen into the mosh pit, only to be crushed under a hundred pairs of combat boots and Dr. Martin's.  I turned around and by squinting could make out the light shining off of the jerk's bald head.  My night vision is so bad without glasses that I didn't see him swing again though.  But the gods of the rock and roll pantheon were with me.  His fist missed my head and the momentum pulled him forward onto the concrete floor, on which he caught himself with his face.   He just lay there in an expanding pool of blood coming out of his very broken nose.

Security grabbed my arms and escorted me out.  Once we got outside they bummed me a cigarette and one of them said, "Finally someone took that a**hole Scuff down.  Man, he had it coming."  I didn't have the heart to tell them that it was really the slippery floor of the club combined with "Scuff's" drunkenness and low I.Q. that "took him down."  I just enjoyed that brief and to me genuinely alien moment of male camaraderie and then never went to that club again. 

one way Jesus can help you

Last year when Emily and I were crossing the street in our neighborhood a car came very close to running into us.  The car was some kind of old Ford (does Ford still make cars, or is it all "light trucks" now?) and the driver was a dowdy, middle aged African American woman.  Emily and I had been crossing at a corner that had a stop sign.  If the woman hadn't slammed on the breaks to avoid hitting us, she would have sped through the intersection without stopping for the sign.

I was standing in the middle of the road having one of those freeze reactions that prey animals (and humans were prey animals long before they were predators) have evolved as a response to predators who attack moving things.  As my adrenalin calmed down a little bit I noticed the driver was waving her hands and screaming. 

Emily and I moved out of her car's way, but the woman just kept screaming.  You couldn't hear what she was saying because her windows were closed.  When I finally figured that she was mad at us for having the temerity to be on foot and in her way, I pointed at the stop sign.  At that point she threw her door open and ran out of the car.

Uh oh, Jerry Springer time, except without the bodyguards to separate us.  The woman was literally snarling and she kept screaming things like, "Don't tell me you didn't see me coming."  Of course, my response was to say, "I really didn't see you coming" (we really didn't).

Emily remained calm and said, "The sign says 'stop.'  It's not optional.  You have to stop, whether pedestrians are in the street or not."

This went on, and I finally said, "Hey, don't be mad."

She was briefly taken aback, silent for a moment, before again snarling, "You give me one god-damned reason why I shouldn't be mad?"

Her animosity was so misdirected, and I'm such a natural pedant, that I was going to attempt to explain to her why it was in fact Emily and I that should be mad, with the driver apologizing to us.  I knew that would be futile though, so I tried to think of other reasons not to be consumed with anger.  I opened my mouth, not knowing how I was going to answer her, and what came out was "Because Jesus loves you."  She paused, stepping back.  I smiled and held open my arms in case she wanted a hug, raising my eyebrows and nodding my head in encouragement.

She screamed, "Oh f**k this!" waddled back to her Ford and drove away.