Put your Facades where I can see them

Okay, okay, so we can learn a lot from the world of appearances.  

Barack Obama said, in his inauguration speech, that the time has come to put away childish things.  My dad said that this was from Corinthians, in the Bible.  

Quick facades-game:  Obama probably wrote some of his inauguration speech.  He also spoke it literally.  With his own input, he used a patchwork of quotes, but he probably used speechwriters, too.  He could have had a great deal of impact on writing the speech, or he could have had very little;  he could have only spoken the speech.  I don't mean any offense to Obamaniacs, but I just want to consider the different values of the speech.  

Quick point against things-in-themselves:  I dislike when anyone talks of intrinsic values.  Intrinsic means inside something.  If you ever have a true love who tells you about the intrinsic value of your combined love, get out of the relationship.  It means that he or she does not know what they like about you except that they should.  

There's still a lot of work to do with appearances, is all.  Likewise, there is something that college age indie rockers like myself do when we assess an artist's talent(s).  For example, Ween is a good band under this assumption because they write their own original songs, but opposing this is Britney Spears who does not always write her own material.  Somehow my friends and I don't like Britney Spears for this reason (among others).  There is a legerdemain (sleight of hand;  magic trick, shell game) that we are not getting exactly what we see.  It is especially part of the cognitive dissonance that part of us actually wants to know that Britney feels it when she says she loves her boyfriend, when in actuality she does not.  Combine this with new technology, where Britney's voice can be and increasingly is just played on the computer in order to write her songs, and now we have something where the singer does not even sing;  and the whole enterprise is something akin to pornography.  This is way too close to home with Britney Spears.  

But I disagree with this!  In the history of music, people have generally covered songs and used other writers.  The person who reads the speech is the one who is liable!  

Come on Come on!!!

BY SPECIAL REQUEST

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1IoQJ_PVoM

Come on come on come on come on
Come on is such a joy
Come on is such a joy
Come on lets take it easy
Come on lets take it easy
Take it easy take it easy
Everybody's got something to hide except for me and my monkey!


The deeper you go the higher you fly
The higher you fly the deeper you go
So come on come on
Come on is such a joy
Come on is such a joy
Come on lets make it easy
Come on lets make it easy.

Take it easy take it easy
Everybody's got something to hide except for me and my monkey!

Your inside is out and your outside is in
Your outside is in and your inside is out
So come on come on
Come on is such a joy
Come on is such a joy
Come on lets make it easy
Come on lets make it easy
Make it easy make it easy
Everybody's got something to hide except for me and my monkey!

Jeff Kasser's farewell to Colby Speech

I might have to take this down, but it is available through Colby College regardless so I do not see so much harm. One damaging thing is the stalker-ness of this. Professor Kasser was my adviser for Philosophy when I first came to NC State. He did an okay job as adviser but he really didn't teach me anything. In a creepy moment, I researched him and this is what I came up with. Kasser transferred out to another job by the end of the semester. In a way, I feel this man owes me for what he did not give me, but that's all side drama. It's a good window for some thought, which is what he says he wanted from this speech.

That said, what does this have to do with anything? Well for one it's from a philosophy professor. For another it's about being honest with oneself. I'm also interested in the damaging effects of bro culture, that is, popular culture of mainstream males who seem to be unconcerned with the future. Kasser brings up two specific and eery incidents of drama. In one, students vandalize the school in a rage, which shouldn't happen in a "satisfied" small rich liberal arts school. In another, students bring beer to a professor's last day of classes. Kasser says to look at what we do in order to gauge what is important to us. Students went in to celebrate, but Kasser implies that they went in to celebrate more for the sake of celebration. The Professor who was teaching was outraged and eventually went back to work. Kasser says we have an obligation to be honest with ourselves about what we care for, and we have an obligation to not say that we take things seriously when we don't. His cry to ask students to work hard, or at least be more honest to themselves about the amount of work that they are doing is especially endearing.

I'll post more on this if I think of anything later.

I don't like this. Facade?

http://www.slate.com/id/2214447/



Here, Farhad Manjoo argues that just because you say you don't like it doesn't mean that you are not going to like it, or that this layout isn't going to, well, have people get used to it.


For our purposes, consider how modern philosophy's response to skepticism lead to greater and greater idealism. That is, Kant believes that appearances are reality, but that we should understand these appearances using logic.

Okay, here it is a different way. 1) Remember in kindergarten when they said you could trust everything and you believed them?

2) Remember in middle school when they told you that you can't trust only perception when you make a scientific judgment? For example, many students found out that we use rulers and measuring utensils to verify our findings. In order to figure out a Newtonian equation, you use mathematics, but less and less you were using outside information in the way that you think. It was the math applied to nature and not the other way around.

3) Well it turns out that all of this is subject to doubt if you do it without the math. Yes, even those rulers and measuring cups. You have to remove yourself 1 more time in order to really grasp Kant's final argument, which is basically using reason only in order to understand science. This is because nothing exists outside of your perception of existence, what translations of Kant call appearances, what I might call facades for the sake of this blog. Knowledge very much depends on reason and how we know that reason exists outside of nature.

How does all of this relate back to Farhad Manjoo and his argument? Facebook recently redesigned itself. By doing so it made a number of people, Manjoo quotes 1 million or 94% of those surveyed, very annoyed. Zuckerberg has an unpolitic office memo that says users don't know what they're talking about. Zuckerberg thinks that people do not know what they want. In this way, theory is separate from nature. Theory is reasoned and then applied to what happens.

This is not to say that the facade, that people really are annoyed is not happening. Indeed, I think in some way it is unrefutable that they are. Rather, the nature of the connection between being annoyed and stopping the use of the program was not as it appears.

Nine Inch Nails is sweet

Listen to Right where it belongs:

http://music.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=music.artistalbums&artistid=7788701&ap=0&albumid=15690

See the animal in it's cage that you built
Are you sure what side you're on?
Better not look him too closely in the eye
Are you sure what side of the glass you are on?
See the safety of the life you have built
Everything where it belongs
Feel the hollowness inside of your heart
And it's all
Right where it belongs

[Chorus:]
What if everything around you
Isn't quite as it seems?
What if all the world you think you know
Is an elaborate dream?
And if you look at your reflection
Is it all you wanted to be?
What if you could look right through the cracks?
Would you find yourself
Find yourself afraid to see?

What if all the world's inside of your head
Just creations of your own?
Your devils and your gods
All the living and the dead
And you really are alone
You can live in this illusion
You can choose to believe
You keep looking but you can't find the woods
While you're hiding in the trees

[Chorus:]
What if everything around you
Isn't quite as it seems?
What if all the world you used to know
Is an elaborate dream?
And if you look at your reflection
Is it all you wanted to be?
What if you could look right through the cracks
Would you find yourself
Find yourself afraid to see?

Facadesaside: And...Scene

And...scene. In order to end a scene, a thespian might say, "And...scene." Then they would stop rolling the cameras and hopefully cut that last sentence out.

My sister has done this as of recently. I don't know if she's cool with me putting this in with her name, so I'm not going to name her. She does it with her friend and mine, but same goes with her citation.

When they do it, it can be in the middle of a conversation, as in when a particular subject ends, or a particular part of the conversation.

It's done with a sort of reverse-flowering motion. Open your palm facing yourself, then bring your fingers and thumb together from all the way apart. Pull down chest-level as you complete this.

That said, the act of making a point, for me at least, changes depending upon who I'm talking to. Usually this is unintentional. So then it gets to be that we might make an aside, that is talk to someone about our talking to someone.

For example, if I intimate or tell someone personal experience, their reactions to my experience might be something else to react to, or the entire interaction as a whole might cause something or someone to reveal something.

This could happen between more than two people, two people, and I guess it could happen by our lonesome.

My friend Liz (last name left blank for same reason as above) says, "whatever"just about all of the time. Turns out that this is what is called a thought-terminating cliche. People do this by themselves, too. Think about not thinking about it. I just lost the game.

Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9


And....scene. [reverse-flowering motion from hand]

Facades: Goldman's Barn Example

In theory of knowledge last semester, we did Goldman's famous barn example.


It goes: suppose John and Dina are driving in the middle of Graceland, Tennessee, and John spots out a number of barns. They are all barns, except for one, which is only a movie-set prop of a barn front, or facade. In this way, it looks like a barn, but because he can only see the front, he does not know that it's not a barn.

He does know that there are other barns around (they are not facades). He points to the facade and, even though it is not a barn says, "Look at that barn."

Does John know that this a barn?

The example certainly implies no.