Results for 2004
As a child of the 90's, I find it strange that there's no longer any way of ignoring the fact that we are now well on our way into the first decade of the 21st century, with the advent of the year 2005. But, alas, still no flying cars, genetically optimized Ubermensches, Turing-proof artificial intelligence, mass-market cybernetic implants, Freemason-controlled New World Order, thermonuclear missile exchanges or cure for cancer.
Well, at least we have the iPod. And Arnold Schwarzenegger. And HAL9000. And cool sunglasses. And American global dominance. And an exciting series of bloody wars with plenty of collateral damage. And Viagra. That has got to count for something, right?
Anyway, enough speculations! The chances are that if you're reading this, I wish you a happiness and prosperity in the year 2005. If not, I'll be sure to let you know ;).
Gleðileg Jól, lesendur góðir.
Jæja, gott fólk. "Hell froze over" og Sveinbjörn Þórðarson skrifar á sínu ástkæra móðurmáli til tilbreytingar. Já, svona er þetta. Þótt enskan sé þægilegt mál á margan hátt (og hið prýðilegasta ritmál), þá verð ég að játa að það að tala hana til lengdar getur verið þreytandi, þá allra helst vegna þess að hún er svo hæg. Íslenskan er að miklu leiti töluð fremst í munninum (öll þessi hörðu err), sem gerir mönnum kleyft að tala hratt og skýrt, jafnvel á háværum skemmtistað. Hvað um það, þá rakst ég á eftirfarandi textabút í umræðu um Þjóðkirkjuna og rugludallana sem þar starfa:
"Það rennur mér til rifja að í nútímasamfélagi þar sem búið er að fletta dulúðinni af svo ótalmörgum hlutum, skuli gagnrýninni hugsun ekki vera gert hærra undir höfði en nú er. Í stað þess að hlúa að henni, uppfræða í krafti hennar og hampa á allan hátt er fjármagninu stöðugt veitt í að viðhalda gömlum hindurvitnum og heilli stétt manna haldið úti til að reyna að réttlæta hégiljurnar fyrir okkur hinum með vafasömum túlkunaraðferðum."
Og síðan:
"Væri ekki nær að koma á stofnunum gagnrýninnar hugsunar, þar sem fólk hefði stöðugan aðgang að fyrirlestrum og umræðum um heimsmyndina og gæti kynnt sér nýjustu hugmyndir þar að lútandi í stað þess að út um borg og bý séu kjólaklæddir töfralæknar að hampa einhverjum öndum og ástunda hvítagaldur, eins og ef við værum stödd aftur í kolsvartri forneskju?"
Þessi Birgir Baldursson sem ritaði þetta er maður að mínu skapi.
Það var haldin atkvæðagreiðsla hér í stúdentahúsnæðinu um daginn, og var þá kosið um alls kyns titla eins og "Myndarlegasti gaurinn", "Sætasta stúlkan", "Skemmtilegasta manneskjan", og svo framvegis. Ég kaus reyndar ekki, en þó hlaut ég verðlaun:
Já, ég var kosinn alki húsnæðisins. Mér þótti þó nokkuð viðeigandi að ég var sauðdrukkinn þegar ég tók við verðlaununum. En suss og svei! Þessir blessuðu Kanadabúar geta ekki drukkið fyrir fimmaura, ælandi og vælandi eins og kerlingar eftir örfáa bjóra. Og ég er álitinn alki fyrir það eitt að hafa heilbrigt víkingaþol?
Glöggir menn munu hafa séð að á verðlaunaplaggi þessu er nafnið mitt skrifað "Sven", en ég hef kynnt mig undir og svarað því nafni síðan ég kom út. Það er alveg handónýtt að reyna að kenna enskumælandi fólki að bera fram mitt tíu-stafa nafn (það endar alltaf sem "Swine-Bjoorne"), þannig að ég gríp bara gömlu góðu skandinavísku klisjuna: "Sven". Þetta er ágætis skipting frá því að ég bjó síðast í enskumælandi landi (nefnilega í Oxford 1996), en þá gekk ég undir nafninu "Bjorn". Nú hef ég prufað bæði nöfnin, og hefur Sven reynst auðveldari. Ég hlakka samt til að koma heim og endurheimta mitt rétta nafn, "Sveinbjörn".
It also happened to be my first (and hopefully only) multiple choice exam in philosophy. The first two exams in this course were essay-based. However, the professor decided to make this one multiple-choice because (and I quote verbatim) "based on what I saw in the first two exams, a great many of you seem to be unable to form coherent sentences...".
Wow. And this is a third year philosophy course. And it's not like we're talking about writing in Ancient Greek or Golden-Age Latin. This is contemporary North-American English. Hello? How do these people survive in the real world, never mind academia?
One of the articles I've had to read for my "Philosophy of Religion" class was William James' "The Will To Believe", and I am very impressed, against my will, as it were. It is a most persuasive and intellectually challenging read. I definitely recommend to anybody interested in debunking religious faith -- I was in for a rude shock. Despite my radical empiricist convictions in almost all matters of philosophy, I find myself curiously swayed by James' argument.
Hahaha!
I've been reading The Rise And Fall Of The Knights Templar and I stumbled across the following passage about the Gnostic Cathar heresy which Rome stamped out in the Middle Ages:
"They [the Cathars] held that their spirituality and their attained gnosis meant that they would be released from the mortal coil, and death would liberate their soulds to return to Heaven. Catholic propagandists wrote that some Cathar followers preferred, on account of their beliefs, to copulate in fashions that would not produce more children for the Devil. It therefore became common for the Inquisition to accuse suspected heretics of buggery (a word descended from Bulgar, or Bogomil)."
Well, next time you say "Bugger!" you'll know what you're actually saying...
Released AppHack after applying a few finishing touches. Still a lot of loose ends but it's a perfectly usable program at this point.
I've just made VirtualSafari available to the public via download. Hosting the damn thing is just too much of a hassle for me, although the idea is undeniably very cool.
Today is, by the way, my last day of courses. I then take my last exam in a week and fly home on the 13th, arriving on everybody's favourite North-Atlantic shoal early in the morning on the 14th.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
and no doubt there are many, many more. This is not a series of books. All of them are by different authors and published by different publishing houses. But of course there's no denying the fact that a lot of things have risen and fallen in the course of history.
Anyhow, I turned in my paper today. It was entitled Perception vs. Reality: A Matter of Consensus. It wasn't very good, so I don't see it fit to be put online, but the position I took was fundamentally sound: that the difference between a delusion (or illusion) and a 'veridical' sense-experience is fundamentally one of acquiring consent from others that the given experience is a correct representation of 'reality'. Thus, outside his social context, the solitary man becomes the ultimate arbiter of what is real and what is not (while certain standards, such as reproducibility and predictive accuracy might, of course, prove more efficient in terms of survival).
The most unlikely thing happened this weekend. I was out in the shelter smoking a cigarette and I got into a discussion with this Canadian girl, and it turned out that she had been an exchange student for a year in Copenhagen, Denmark, and spoke fluent "Københavner-dansk". I had a chat with her in Danish ("Hold da kæft! Det er sgu utroligt!"). To think, the chances of running into someone who speaks Danish around here must be very small indeed.
Also, see this article in the Guardian: The ignorant, racist, prejudiced, right-wing Christian, inbred redneck fucks in Alabama have refused to strike a school-segregation passage from the state constitution.
I was on a boat watching someone make sandwiches, and they'd placed a tiny puppy-dog on top of one of the sandwiches. He'd been skinned, etc. I of course refused to eat this, and howled bloody murder, so the cook transferred all responsibility for making the sandwiches over to me, and for some time I was struggling with frying an egg. Then things kind of degenerated into hand-to-hand combat aboard the boat between me and the cook, who was also some sort of military official. Anyhow, in the end I stabbed him in the throat with a some scissors. At that moment someone else appeared and explained in tears to me what an excellent man I had just murdered, and that I must pay the price for it. He said that I had to take a bunch of sleeping pills and never wake up, as retribution for my foul deed. I ate the pills, and ironically enough, at this point I suddenly woke up....
What would Freud, that great quack, make of this? No doubt he would say that I had paranoid, semi-schizoid superegoistical tendencies combined with delusions of grandeur and multiple personality disorder...
To think, out of roughly 40 people in Watson Hall (three quarters whom are girls), there are three out-of-the-closet lesbians. One of them has a "boyfriend", i.e. a girl who has undergone the whole sex-change thing (i.e. breast removal etc.). I met "him" yesterday...and he's just like a regular guy except for the voice, which of course doesn't have the male timbre.
I will be holding my traditional birthday-slash-New-Year's-Eve-party on the 31st of December, and if you're reading this, the chances are that you're invited :).
Apart from my school work, I've got a new software development project running. It's called "AppHack" and it's a hacking tool to mess about with Mac OS X applications by modifying property lists, icons, associated document types, nib files and so forth. Here's a screenshot of the latest build.
Canada: Pros and Cons
I've been in Guelph, Canada for roughly three months now, and I have discovered that I miss things that I least expected to be missing. I would like to give a rough summary of what I miss about home and what I like about Canada. Apart from the usual cliché stuff about missing friends and family (which nobody wants to hear about anyway), here's what I miss from Iceland:
1. Being able to smoke in bars
This is so unbelievably lame that it's actually on the top of my list: It is forbidden to smoke in all bars in Canada, except in the occasional joint which masquerades as an "Exclusive Club". There is no way for me to enjoy a beer and a cigarette simultaneously within any drinking establishment for miles around.
2. Being able to (legally) carry open alchoholic beverages in public
Yessiree, it is forbidden to carry an open alcoholic beverage of any sort in public. It is therefore impossible for me to go outside for a smoke with my beer, an incredibly nuisance. Although I have been known to violate this law on occasions, it is unwise to engage in it on a regular basis since the fine is quite stiff. I regard this Nazi law as nothing less than a violation of my fundamental rights as a human being present on the surface of the Earth. You would think that a country as cold as Canada would adopt some sort of vodka-swilling public drinking orgies to stem away the frostbite, but this is obviously not the case.
3. Being free from that horrible Politically Correct attitude
I've alread touched on this topic before in these online revelations of mine, but it bears mentioning again because it gets so badly on my nerves. I have to watch every word in case I offend someone: of course, being the arrogant loudmouth that I am, I have already (metaphorically) tread on several mines. I miss being able to make crude jokes. People here are so easily shockable that my *hundred-carat-solid-gold* nasty jokes are lost on them. Instead they eye me with shocked bewilderment.
4. Eating good food and drinking good drinks
Let's just say that the University caféteria was tolerable for the first couple of weeks. At this point, the very thought of going in there makes me want to vomit. Granted, there are other places to buy food around here, but it is all of the junk food variety. I could, of course, theoretically go downtown with the bus and buy something good in a restaurant but it is difficult to persuade my impoverished fellow students to join me since it is not possible to use the University meal cards outside of the campus.
As far as drinks go, both the Coca-Cola and the water available around here tastes like shit. The only beverages that really meet my standards of quality is imported beer and I can't very well go about swilling Stella Artois (which, apart from causing inebriation, is also illegal in public -- see Item 2 above).
Now, let's turn to the things that I really like about Canada:
1. Low Prices
Stuff here is cheap. By cheap I don't mean USA-cheap, but almost everything is very inexpensive in comparison with my *beloved* home country, the Racketeering Business of Iceland. I would say that things here cost roughly 55-60% of what they cost back home. They're practically giving away food here -- I can get a good, filling meal for the equivalent of 300 Icelandic Kronas.
2. Amazon and Internet Retailing in General
Yes, this is actually number two because it is so amazing: You visit a website, you pick the stuff you want (be it books, films, digital equipment or whatnot), click a few buttons and the stuff ships directly to you, Free Of Charge (US or Canada only). No VAT, no *International* shipping costs, no extra crap which inflates the price to twice what you originally thought you were going to pay. Truly, this is a consumer heaven for an online geek such as my humble self.
3. No Evil, Hateful Looks From Strangers
As most of my fellow countrymen (at least those with a modicum of honesty) will readily acknowledge, our little shoal in the North Atlantic is not home to the friendliest people on earth. It is a thoroughly enjoyable surprise to no longer receive unwarranted hostile glances from strangers, or get treated like a piece of human offal by people in various levels of the service industry.
4. Animals
I like animals. They're so much nicer than human beings. Of course, my harshest critics would say that I like them because I don't have to justify my superiority to them -- an accusation I received when dwelling on this topic recently -- but I shall let that be for the moment: Guelph has tons of little animals scurrying about. There are squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons and skunks crawling around everywhere. In fact, the entire campus is infested by squirrels. There are two different species, the Blacks and the Grays, and they fight each other with a vindictiveness that one would more readily attribute to one's fellow human beings. The Blacks seem to have a secure upper hand in this evolutionary struggle, for they are far more numerous. However, the University campus is hardly a *State Of Nature* by any reasonable standards: there is so much offal and so many leftovers everywhere that the squirrels have degenerated into fat, bloated creatures so clumsy that they occasionally fall out of the trees (and that is no exaggeration, I have seen it with my own eyes). Apparently they don't hibernate around here either anymore, which is quite understandable in light of the circumstances: Why hibernate when there are plenty of scraps to go around during the winter?
Yay! I received another donation for my software, bringing the grand total up to $60 over a period of roughly 6 months. Profitable work, this free software development business. It would be suitably ironic to invest this money in a "Getting Rich for Dummies" handbook.
Well, I'm not in the gutter so no complaints.
Speaking of the gutter, I am reminded of a story of Diogenes of Sinope, recounted by the greek historian Plutarchus in his Life of Alexander. Diogenes was a Cynic philosopher in the 4th century B.C. It is said that an interview took place between him and Alexander the Great (which, incidentally, they are now making another horrible Hollywood film about) in the city of Corinth. At this time, Diogenes was living in his infamous "tub", and as one of the city's better known characters, he was counted missing in attendance of the great conqueror. Alexander went with his retinue to find this man of such remarkably brave and independent spirit, and finally found Diogenes sitting in his tub in the sun.
"I am Alexander the Great," he said, "ruler of the known world".
"And I am Diogenes the Cynic" replied the philosopher.
"I have heard you are a man of great wisdom. I am willing to grant you any wish that is within my considerable power." Alexander said.
Diogenes then replied: "Would you kindly step back. You're blocking the sun".
Alexander, impressed by the reply, said to his friends, who were ridiculing the whimsicality of the philosopher, "If I were not Alexander, I should wish to be Diogenes."
I don't know how much credibility we can ascribe to this little anecdote, but it amusing nevertheless. Personally, I'd have asked for wealth, power and women ;). I suppose that's the reason why I don't live in a tub.
A Critique Of Pascal's Wager
I'm sick and tired of Pascal's Wager. I find it to be stupid and misguided-- it just so happened that it was brought up in my "Philosphy of Religion" class today. This is probably the billionth time it has wormed its way into the whole "Does God Exist?" discussion.
All right. I'll give you a short exposition of the whole thing. Blaise Pascal, 17th century mathematical genius of "Lousy Programming Language" and pressure measurement fame, turns his high-strung and finely tuned mathematical mind to the problem of religious belief and comes up with the following argument:
If we combine the factors of living a Christian life or not, with God's existence or non-existence, we have four different possibilities, suitably demonstrated by this chart:
Pascal, being the sensible, rational man that he was, argued that we should always choose to lead a Christian life. If we lead a Christian life, we will either go to Heaven or nothing will happen. If we don't, we'll either burn in Hell or nothing will happen. If we are forced to choose between the two, it is obviously, in light of this, more sensible to choose to live the Christian life.
This argument is superficially convincing, until we start looking a little deeper into things. Is that chart truly an accurate depiction of our options? My answer to that question is a firm NO (I just love making that word bold -- lends it such an outrageous tone of finality). I believe that the chart below is a much more accurate depiction of our options.
There we have a more realistic chart of the whole scheme. We can choose to live a dreary, boring goody-goody-two-shoes Christian life, devoid of even the rudimentary sinful pleasures, on the off-chance that that an omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent creator of the world truly does exist (sounds implausible doesn't it?) and wants us to be miserable, or we can just say "What the hell!" and go have a good time, risking aforementioned creator's eternal wrath and potential unimaginable suffering in the afterlife.
So what will it be? Well, I think that we can write off the existence of the omnibenevolent creator right away -- an omnipotent, omnibenevolent deity wouldn't have created Christians in the first place. If I were omnipotent and omnibenevolent, I could most certainly come up with something better than Jehova's Witnesses, Mormons, teetotallers, Gideons, the Inquisition, Pope Innocent II, witch-burnings, persecutions, the Crusades, misogynist oppression, pro-life doctor-murdering assassins, queer-bashers with tire jacks, the Bubonic Plague, Benito Mussolini, Ignatius Loyola, George Walker Bush and Britney Spears. Yes, I could do a MUCH better job.
Having provided a plethora of empirical evidence which seems to strongly suggest the non-existence (or at least mistaken attributes) of such a deity, we have a choice between the Christian life of dreary conformity, obedience and dogmatism, as opposed to the vivacious, audacious and, above all, roaringly entertaining rock'n roll lifestyle of the Sinner. Which are we to choose? For my part, I don't think I will be converting any time soon...
getfcomment: prints out the Desktop Database "Comment" meta-data of files.
rcmac: descends into directory structures and lists all files in the style of 'lsmac'
In addition to these new tools, there have been some updates to the existing ones.
mkalias can now be set to create relative aliases, and some of the man pages have been revamped. The next release will have some juicy extras -- I'm thinking of creating a tool called hfsdata, which allows the querying of any HFS+ attribute of a file, including label, file and creator, flags, comments etc.
In other news, I'm working on my own terminal client. I'm sick and tired of the horrible shortcomings of the clients I've used so far, in terms of user interface and features. I like the cold ascetic austerity of full-screen command line interfaces, so I've adapted CocoaTech's TerminalView NSView subclass, and with a bit of tweaking I'll soon have something akin to what I want.
And yes, I was bored today.
In other news, Vilborg has returned to 'the land of the ice and snow, with the midnight sun where the hot springs flow', while I linger on, studying J.L. Austin's critique of sense-data theories in epistemology. It's fairly interesting stuff. Austin most definitely had a sense of humour, though. His book is called "Sense and Sensibilia". Just think about it. We have these two books:
J. L. Austin: "Sense and Sensibilia"
and then we have:
Jane Austen: "Sense and Sensibility"
Those of you familiar with Black Adder The Third will recognize Jane Austen as the pseudonym for the great, big, roaring, bearded Yorkshireman.
I shall soon have to turn in a monstrous 12-page essay on "Propaganda and Manipulation", which is a fascinating topic.
As the end of my Bachelor of Arts program looms on the horizon, I have been giving some thought to what the future holds. I think I'll either move abroad and finish a PhD in Philosophy, or undertake another Bachelor degree.
Back in Guelph now. Vilborg leaves tomorrow.
A detailed examination of these statistics revealed the following:
The typical Bush voter is an old, married white, gun-owning conservative Protestant with medium-to-high income and no college degree who furthermore attends church at least once a week and lives in a rural community. This person is very concerned with terrorism and believes that most important attributes for a President is that he be religious and have strong moral values. He thinks that abortion should be banned, approves of the war in Iraq, and disapproves of same-sex marriage.
Sounds like your average bigoted southern hick, doesn't it?
The typical Kerry voter, on the other hand, is a poor, young, unmarried black college-graduate union-member with low income who never attends a place of worship. Furthermore, this person believes that most important issues are education, the economy, and Iraq and thinks the most important attributes in a leader are intelligence, caring about people and a will to bring about change.
Seems like we have quite a dichotomy here...
Everything seems to indicate that the world will have to put up with that piece of shit Bush for another four years. A sad day indeed.
I also have a new pet project to work on: I'm going to undertake a port of Larry Herzberg's Bertrand, a symbolic logic problem-solving program, over to Mac OS X. It shouldn't be too hard to bring it over to the Carbon APIs.
Furthermore, I've just finished some feature-work on everybody's favourite website maintenance program, the infamous Mentat. It is now possible to edit news items. For those of you who would like the upgrade, let me know.
I found this online transcript of the BBC debate between Bertrand Russell and F. C. Copleston (Jesuit scholar) on the merits and truth of the Christian religion. It's fairly interesting -- Russell doing his typical and oh-so-upper-class-English thing: reserved, cautious, rational, while the Jesuit is using big, ill-defined words and metaphysical mumbo-jumbo.
Also, the photos for October are now online.
At least it's a step in the right direction, although it doesn't really meet the standards of eloquence and wit I had hoped for. Then again, that's only to be expected. We are, after all, dealing with the subspecies of homo sapiens which stoops so low as to draw political slogans with chalk instead of using the good ol' spray can like all self-respecting bombers.
*cough*
Hahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!
Oh, yes, sorry. You just have to check this out.
Hehehehehehe.....
I've been doing some serious reading on the topic of semantics and the philosophy of language -- in particular the logical positivist criterion of significance, i.e. the verifiability theory of propositional meaning. When reading a certain article, I came across the following piece of metaphysical nonsense. It's a quote from an English translation of a work of Heidegger's, and it's a typical example of a certain kind of nonsense that some philosophers seem to get away with and still be taken seriously:
Why are we concerned about this nothing? The nothing is rejected by science and sacrificed as the unreal. Science wants to have nothing to do with the nothing. What is the nothing? Does the nothing exist only because the not, i.e, negation, exists? Or do negation and the not exist only because the nothing exists? We maintain: The nothing is more primitive than the not and negation. We know the nothing. The nothing is the simple negation of the totality of being. Anxiety reveals the nothing. The nothing itself nots.
Now, that truly is an amazing text. I don't think I have ever read anything equally nonsensical. The nothing itself nots? What kind of twisted treatment of language is this? What exactly does the verb 'to not' entail? This sort of stuff is bullshit of the highest order, and the positivists were right about wanting to permanently expel it from philosophical debate.
We stopped and chatted with this fellow for a while. Apparently my companions, Mark and Mike, both from Columbia, had seen him on that very street corner several times before. He was stationed outside a strip club and was pestering the wealthy clientele for money as they came out of their limousines. The guy certainly had the attitude and the heart in the right place, not to mention a humor for his situation. He explained to us that he was 59 years old and had been on the streets for 10 years. Apparently he'd had money once, and had been an automobile enthusiast. Then he'd speculated in some businesses, lost all his money and thrown into great debt. He chose to work the street instead of getting a job because his wages were garnished. A stunning 40% would go straight to his creditors. "They're never, ever getting those 240 thousand dollars from me" he said proudly and told us he'd rather sleep in a dumpster than give those pigs a dime.
Damn straight, that's the spirit!
But (and this is apparently a big 'but' for some people, no pun intended) humans have art and philsophy, it is said. Well, my response to that is that is the following:
Maybe animals (such as squirrels) do too.
That's just silly, I hear you saying. Well, just pause for a moment and think about it. We don't really have access to any consciousness than our own. We have no way of knowing what a squirrel is thinking. Perhaps it is contemplating the nature of nuts, or asking itself how trees came to be, or messing about with leaves in such a way as it finds aesthetically pleasant. This is perfectly possible. The squirrel's thoughts are inaccessible to me, as are the thoughts of other humans.
Of course, inferring from one's own consciousness that other humans also possess it is one thing. Inferring that squirrels have consciousness from the same premise is a much shakier inference. I realise this. However, assuming that only humans possess consciousness and intelligence is just as dangerous an inference. The only way determine this one way or another is by empirical observation of behaviour, and I''m not so sure that the behaviour of humans which I have observed in my time has done much to convince me that they are more intelligent than squirrels ;).
No doubt Freud would have some very interesting things to say about that, most of them complete rubbish, of course. Dreams are interesting though. I can't say this one has been inspired by recent events. I haven't been reading Solzhenitsyn or anything. Maybe it's the oncoming cold here. They still haven't turned on the central heating in Watson Hall so the nights can get a bit chilly.
I think my Thanksgiving dinner will be some sushi. Hardly fitting the occasion, but I don't really care much for turkey.
Why not be a bit bolder and have something like "Thanksdemanding", where everyone gets to complain about how ungrateful and sleazy the world happens to be?
I think I'll just be staying here (almost) alone in Watson Hall over the weekend, although I have been invited to a family dinner in Toronto. I somehow don't feel like going through the hassle of finding my way to Toronto and back. Maybe I'll just find someone to get drunk with instead.
Anyhow, as I sat in my "Contemporary British and American Philosophy" class today, poring over Wittgenstein's Tractatus, I came to realize just how important it is to have philosophy explained to you by a clever person. When I read philosophy on my own, I have a tendency to be too gullible; Provided that the philosopher in question has a convincing style and (seemingly) fairly logical arguments, I tend to agree with him when I put the book down.
I most definitely need to develop my critical thinking faculties. Ironically enough, I just dropped my "Critical Thinking" class. It was kind of lame (the course, that is) -- taught me nothing I didn't already know. Also, as I see it, no serious course would be using a textbook called "The Pocket Guide To Critical Thinking". What is this, a DIY for philosophy newbies? In any case, I don't think you can really teach people to think critically. It's just probably just one of those things you have to figure out for yourself -- more of an attitude than memorizing a set of arbitrary guidelines.
I slept two hours last night. Yes, I went to bed at seven in the morning and woke up at nine for class. I swear, I would have sold my soul to some malignant religious entity for a few hours of extra sleep, but alas, that was not an option. At the very moment I'm typing this, my eyes are watery and hurting from the hostile, glaring light of my PowerBook's Liquid Crystal Display. I'm pale and I look like a quasi-animated corpose. That's it. I'm off to class to do a presentation in my "Philosophy and Literature" seminar.
If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics . . . let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
The Canadians are politically correct to the extreme, just like their neighbour in the South. I was admonished the other day for referring to something as "retarded". "You might offend somone who has a handicapped relative" was what I was told.
All right! The line shall be drawn here. I will not stop saying that things are retarded. Since when has it been a good thing to be retarded? It's from French and it means "slow" or "late". It's a negative word and I'm using it in a negative context. So what?
This paranoid fear of offending people makes me sick. Don't the expounders of political correctness realize that if their doctrines are taken to their logical conclusions, we will eventually be unable to say anything. I might go up to someone and say that I loved dairy products, only to find out that the person's father drowned in a great pot of milk and that I just aroused horrible, horrible memories and grievously offended the person in question. Yes, the example is ridiculous, but it should get my point across: once you start limiting people's vocabulary, you'll soon have some sort of Orwellian Newspeak nonsense in place. As if changing out words made hatred and intolerance go away...
Online Writings of Bertrand Russell
What light from yonder dung doth shine?
'Tis feces, glorious feces that doth usher forth
and fall heavy on the cheeks of sorry youths.
Oh, why hadst thy waste forsaken this Yorkshire sun?
These are wondrous times indeed, when such verbal beauty can be transmitted electronically via an instant messaging protocol.
Of course, I plan to change this title, since I'll want to leave some room for the essay itself.
Ten pages. The story of my life isn't ten bloody pages! Sometimes I wonder if I really have a future in philosophy. I seem to be unable to churn out the mindless filler material that everyone else expounds with apparent ease.
On the bright side, I'll be reading Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray in this seminar, which should prove fairly interesting.
All is well hitherto, although I must confess that I am exhausted by the accursed beurocracy here -- everything has to go through advisors, managers, cousellors and clerks. Even the most trivial issues require a form signed in triplicate and explicitly approved by some beurocrat.
Hah! Got you there, didn't I? I'm only joking, of course. The truth of the matter is that I am in fine spirits and very much enjoying the courses I'm taking, with the notable exception of the course "The Philosophical Problems of Religion", which might be more aptly named "The Neverending Series of Logically Invalid Proofs for the Existence of God". I gives me great pleasure to pick on religious people and their ridiculous, superstitious nonsense. I signed up for the course under the maxim "Know thy enemy", but this stuff is really more nonsense than anyone should have to tolerate, even in a philosophy class. Here's one of the proofs we were doing today -- St. Anselm's ontological argument:
God is a perfect being, the greatest of all beings
If God were lacking the attribute of existing, he would be inferior to all beings that existed and therefore not greater than all beings.
Hence, God must exist.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you have just been submitted to what is basically the most powerful argument the Christians could come up with for the existence of God. Awful, isn't it? Can you tell where the logical fallacy is?
As any modern logician can tell you, existence is not an attribute of things. They either exist or they don't -- however, assigning an attribute to something already postulates its existence. Thus the conclusion of this argument is granted by the first premise.
It is also interesting to note that the book I'm reading for this highly academic and rigorous course contains a transcript of the famous BBC debate between F. Copleston, the Jesuit scholar, and Bertrand Russell. The professor for the course had the gall to proclaim that the argument "got them nowhere", when it is self-evident to anyone remotely endowed with rudimentary powers of reasoning that Russell systematically tears to pieces every piece of metaphysical Platonic nonsense expounded by the Catholic. Good Lord, I despise Christians!. Hah!
That's it for now.
Address:
Sveinbjorn Thordarson
PO Box 720-206
University of Guelph
50 Stone Road East
Guelph ON Canada, N1G 2W1
Phone Numbers:
Residence Phone Number: 519-824-0022
Residence Phone Extension: 78336
Mobile Phone Number: 861-0584 (emergencies only)
In regard to news, not much happening. I'm attending classes -- the workload is significantly higher here than at the University of Iceland so I find my self surprisingly busy.
Bertrand Russell on the value of philosophy:
"...we must free our minds from the prejudices of what are wrongly called 'practical' men. The 'practical' man, as this word is often used, is one who recognizes only material needs, who realizes that men must have food for the body, but is oblivious of the necessity of providing food for the mind. [...] It is exclusively among the goods of the mind that the value of philsophy is to be found; and only those who are not indifferent to these goods can be persuaded that the study of philosophy is not a waste of time."
"If you ask a mathematician, a mineralogist, a historian or any man of learning, what definite body of truths has been ascertained by his science, his answer will last as long as your are willing to listen. But if you put the same question to a philosopher, he will, if he is candid, have to confess that his study has not achieved positive results such as have been achieved by other sciences. It is true that this is partly accounted for by the fact that, as soon as definite knowledge concerning any subject becomes possible, this subject ceases to be called philsophy and becomes a seperate science. The whole study of the heavens, which now belongs to astronomy, was once included in philosophy; Newton's great work was called "the mathematical principles of natural philsophy". Similarly, the study of the human mind, which was a part of philosophy, has now been seperated from philosophy and has become psychology. Thus, to a great extent, the uncertainty of philsophy is more apparent thant real: those questions which are already capable of definite answers are placed in the sciences, while those only to which, at present, no definite answer can be given, remain to form the residue which is called philosophy."
"The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. [...] Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves."
Wanted! Dead or alive.
A most peculiar thing happened last night. I returned from a concert in downtown Guelph in a state of modest inebriation and sat down on a grassy hill near Watson Hall to rest my tired legs. I had hardly been there for more than a few minutes when some fat guy and his friend walked by. I pulled out my camera and took a photo of them. At this, the fat guy walked up to me and offered to take a picture of me. I handed him the camera, and lo and behold, he starts running off with it. I sprang to my feet, caught up with his fat carcass and punched him as hard as I could in the back of the neck. At this, he tossed away the camera and ran off, while I retrieved it from the undergrowth. That stupid sack of shit must know I have his photo -- If I see him around again, I shall most certainly confront him.
One Eyed Jack's: Those familiar with the "Twin Peaks" television series will recognize the name as that of the decadent gambling and prostitution joint on the American-Canadian border in the series. Interesting to see that there's actually a place with that name -- no doubt inspired by the series. I definitely want to check this place out sometime when it's open.
I also have a new girlfriend which I'm going out with tonight. Her name is Stella and she's from Belgium:
I am now firmly settled here and I'm slowly becoming acquainted with the University grounds. Guelph isn't as large as I had anticipated, with pretty much everything I need within managable walking distance. The university has about 15 thousand students, a third of which live in student housing. I get free access to to public transportation as a student at the University. The prices here are very reasonable and people are very friendly. So friendly, in fact, that my naturally-bred Icelandic reticence is thrown off-track.
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Although it has not been my custom in the past to put details from my personal life on this website, I feel that it may serve well as a place to keep friends and acquaintances notified of the latest developments in my life, seeing as how I will be shoving off to Canada on the first of September and thus unable to keep them up to date in person. You may therefore expect updates and news items of a slightly more personal nature than hitherto.
What gives one the right to believe in the existence of a certain material thing is simply the fact that one has certain sensations: for, whether one realizes it or not, to say that the thing exists is equivalent to saying that such sensations are obtainable.
"I cannot believe that virtue is proportional to income, nor yet that it is wicked to have difficulty in comforming to the herd. However, doubtless my views on these matters are biased, since I am both poor and a crank."-- Bertrand Russell
Farið endilega á Almenningur.is og skrifið undir mótmæli til ríkisstjórnarinnar vegna nýlegri eftirlaunahækkun ráðamanna ríkisins.
