selormohene

[selormohene]

day 145 (saturday, november 25th 2023)

As the record will no doubt show I haven't actually made any progress on the backlog in ages. At this point I will most probably have to abandon or at any rate sharply revise my original plans for this, concerning tailoring my reflections to the day for which they're made. Of course at this point most of them, even those which are mostly written on the day of, end up being substantially changed once I start to put them up, but we'll see if this ever gets properly back on track.

Not too long ago I started watching Suits, which is one of those many shows I’d heard of but hadn’t really had the chance to watch. It’s a fascinating show — not necessarily the highest-stakes drama, but entertaining enough to keep you watching and with a fair amount of levity. Of course the most compelling character is Harvey Specter. He’s fascinating as a moral archetype. He’s obviously selfish, thinks about himself first, etc., but not in a way where he’s devious or underhanded. He seems to be serious about his loyalties when he has them, or finds them useful, but he’s also pretty self-sufficient, etc. Perhaps what one wants to say is that stronger than anything else is his drive to win, and his ability to actualise that drive, and so that allows him to maintain his loyalties to other people in situations where someone otherwise as selfish as he is would have instead to turn his back on those obligations, or cut the people in question loose. He’s a very charismatic character with none of the insecurity that would otherwise characterise someone as self-important as he is. He essentially strikes me as a megalopsuchos but with fewer of the contemporary connotations of the word “magnanimity” (which seem to be somewhere in the original Aristotelian notion as well).

One theme of the show of course is the role of money in the good life. It takes place at an elite law firm and as I saw in college part of the reason why one would work at such a punishing place is presumably so you can make a lot of money and live well. This brings me in mind of the question of money as a means versus as an end. Although it's true that all sorts of people seek money as an end in itself (misers, capitalists), it seems to me that most people really seek money as a means to their ends. And this would sound like a somewhat trivial point but the idea is that extensionally speaking it yields a lot of the same behaviour, but it's being driven by different things. There are some people whose tastes or lifestyle doesn't change, but they still want to see the number go up, whereas there are other people whose lifestyle goes up as they acquire more income. Such people will either be driven towards just ever-more-lavish pursuits, and thus continue to be driven to acquire more money, or else their need to acquire more money will taper off as time goes on. I suspect that a lot of comfortable high earners actually display this pattern, although I couldn't tell you for sure. But you might also think that someone who falls into the second category wouldn't be driven to acquire as much as they think they'd like unless they also had a bit of the first in them. Who knows, anyway.

Something else, which is introversion as lack of social context. Or perhaps introversion isn't the right word, but rather something that manifests similarly. It strikes me that what one might call introverted behaviour could be construed as a lack of context in social situations. I've never really liked the idea of "reading the room," as it seems to index the bounds of one's own acceptable behaviour to the dispositions of others, which are taken for granted in precisely the way that one's dispositions are not so taken if their suitability for the given situation is being placed at issue, but it's a useful metaphor here I think; the idea is that a social situation calls for a certain sort of interpretive engagement and response — knowing what to say, knowing what the other person wants to talk about, knowing how to respond to certain signals, etc. Knowing how to read the vibes, and how not to bring them down as well. And to someone who doesn't have that interpretive ability a room full of people will seem like a page with letters on it which you can't make out into meaningful words. Phenomenologically anyway that's how it often seems to me, although I haven't been able to place this feeling so concretely until now.

I’ve been thinking about investing volume early on to build capacity for later; these are lessons I've learned from philosophy and running (and probably other stuff, like reading and writing), with applications to things like math and lifting, or music, and so on. There’s a way in which if you work really hard when you’re young, or try to study a lot, or make a lot of money, or build connections or whatever, even if later on you’re not at the same point in life, there’s still a difference between you and someone who just never did all that (or, if you want a less morally fraught comparison, between you and the version of yourself who didn’t do all that). The difference is that you’ve built capacity. So for instance having done sprint training means that even if you’re out of shape you have a higher peak to return to; it’s known for instance that in something like lifting or playing sports, there’s this “muscle memory” which can be reactivated even after it’s lain dormant for years, etc. And this is something I want to focus on right now. Of course I don’t know if I’m in the “early” stages of my life anymore, I think I’m transitioning into the middle stages. Which is terrifying to think of, because for whatever reason I still don’t feel like an adult, and this isn’t a matter of “well no one does” because I can point to very central things which would make me feel like an adult and which people I know actually have but I don’t, and a lot of it has had to do with not having had a peer group or just a support system of other humans within which I feel like I would have had the support to grow. So I’ve basically lived the same life so far, in my late twenties, that I was living five years ago, which is a profoundly sad thought. But there you have it, I guess.

[selormohene]

day 144 (friday, november 24th 2023)

I remember when I used to go out, early in college, and the music hurt my ears, or when I started losing sleep and not being able to function. I realised of course that I was sensitive to loud music, and that I couldn't function on fewer than eight hours of sleep and sometimes needed significantly more. But, for some reason, I didn't take either of these things seriously enough in deciding what to do; I continued to go to parties where the music hurt my ears, and was rather often too cavalier about my problems with sleep (though I did somewhat better in this regard).

Part of my reasoning process — "reasoning" process — was as follows. I looked at the people around me who were doing the same things — going to the same parties, running on the same sleep deficits. I figured, "well, they seem to be doing fine, and so the chances are that I'm making too much of a big deal about this, rather than that everyone's doing fine and I'm the only one being uniquely affected by this." Of course none of this makes any sense. For one thing it may have been that people were not doing fine, but that they simply couldn't tell, or that they'd been functioning in such a state for so long that they'd forgotten what it was like to function with better hearing and better sleep. The second thing, of course, is that there was no reason to believe that I was perfectly similar in all relevant respects to them, at least in this regard. The odd thing is that I had, in fact, always thought that there were things that set me apart from many of the people I met in college, that I was able to see things and think in ways that they couldn't, and for whatever reason I didn't ever stop to ask myself whether my unusual sensitivity in these domains might not be related to my sensitivity to loud music, or to lack of sleep — I assumed that I could simply put myself through the same things without losing the gifts I had.

Anyway, that didn't work out very well, and ever since I started college I've felt a steady decline in myself. Much of it has been of my own doing, although there are so many things which, though they're in some sense of one's own doing, are also such that the causal chains set into motion by the acts that created them are so convoluted and diffuse that one cannot say, in the end, what one has done to oneself. But you have to learn at some point to understand what makes you who you are — among other things, what makes you different from other people — and to trust your sense of who you are. And this trust has at least two components: you have to be confident in your knowledge of what makes you special, resisting the voices in your ear that tell you that really you're no different from everybody else, and you have to value who you are, both in your emotions and with your actions; you have to defend your right and your ability to do what works for you even if it feels weird, or even if people seem to be looking at you funny. The truth is that people generally take the versions of ourselves we present to them for granted. It's easy to forget this, and to present to them the version of you that you think they want to see, but this merely gives over one's responsibility for oneself to others — worse, to the idea one has of others in one's head. These are all reminders to myself, and it's weird that I can see these things with such clarity and elaborate on them in such detail, and yet find them difficult to follow when it comes down to it. But hopefully the more one reminds oneself of certain things the more one moves, even if only so slightly, in the direction of living in accordance with them.

[selormohene]

day 143 (thursday, november 23rd 2023)

I remember being an exuberant child. I'm told that I used to be very wilful as a toddler; I definitely remember being very independent-minded, even from a young age, and in particular I remember that independence of mind having made its presence felt in the practical domain, rather than merely in thought. I remember being very emotional as well. I particularly remember that I used to tell my friends I loved them, and I'm pretty sure I may have gotten in trouble for it. I think I got in trouble for a few things, mostly for no good reason.

Anyway, I remember being an exuberant child, being emotional and perceptive and sensitive and intelligent in all sorts of ways. I feel like that's all gone now, or at the very least it's buried so far within me that I don't know how I'll ever get it all back. But even to state things in those terms seems to suggest that all the things I used to be continue to exist within me, somehow, in an undisturbed state, and that what's keeping me from them is only so many accretions of unnecessary muck, or protective layers, or scar tissue, or whatever it is, and that all that would be required would be to clear it all away to bring me back to the person I was as though nothing had happened. But I don't know if that's necessarily true; it may be that all of what I used to be and value in myself has been subtly distorted and redirected rather than having merely been covered over, and restoration is, at least in principle, a lot more difficult than excavation. At its easiest it can amount to unknotting something that has been tied up, or straightening something that's been bent, but it might also involve something like bringing back to its original shape something that's been warped, which may or may not ever fully return to the way it was, and at its most impossible it might be akin to trying to reverse the frying of an egg, or trying to reverse the melting of an ice cube. The former is basically impossible, and as for the latter, you can, of course, freeze ice that has melted into water, but you'll never get the exact same ice cube back.

When I think back over the years there are a few things that I can remember having contributed to crushing my spirit. Every time I was shouted at for crying, for instance, something inside me was broken. It's curious that of all the negative episodes in my past many of the particular moments I remember involve precisely that. Every time my pleas to be seen, to be heard, to have my emotions acknowledged, were dismissed, every time I had to keep quiet and go along because there was no point in saying what I wanted to say, knowing that nobody was listening. You don't necessarily notice the impact that each moment has, although sometimes you do. But the point is that I feel as though the process of my growth into adulthood, such as it has been, has primarily amounted to so many cases of being beaten half to death, to the point where my range of motion has been severely limited, both as a direct result of the injuries I've sustained and out of the fear of sustaining further damage. Part of the problem is that the sorts of situations which would go the furthest to helping you return to who you were, at least insofar as they involve being around other people, are precisely those in which you're most vulnerable to being beaten down even further. At the same time I feel as though I've developed a form of detachment which has been both protective and, in a way, detrimental. It's like once you understand the cruelty, intentional and unintentional, the thoughtlessness, the selfishness, the inveteracy, that people are capable of — yourself no less than others — you either become consumed with bitterness, or else you completely shun the company of others, or else you ignore all of it and continue to place yourself in situations where you can be hurt, essentially trying to deny the sense of certainty that tells you that people are or can be flawed in deeply significant ways, or else having no sense of discrimination between reasonable and unreasonable people because your only real operating modes are to assume that humanity as a whole is invariably one or the other, or else you adopt a sort of forgiving, understanding attitude which seems to be nearly incompatible with genuine intimacy, because you've essentially priced everything in from the start, but to do so is incompatible with trusting that people will not disappoint you. Or else you adopt some sort of nearly incoherent combination of these attitudes, so that you're constantly stumbling through life, never quite seeming to get it right, and it's partly the incoherence of your attitudes and partly your never having quite figured out how to live well that would seem to explain why you still find it difficult to feel close to the people around you.

[selormohene]

day 142 (wednesday, november 22nd 2023)

The last one was on the way other people help you learn to be a person. This one is on learning to be yourself in particular, and on learning to be yourself alone and through other people.

One learns to be oneself in all sorts of ways, from all sorts of situations and contexts. And there's something about each context, considered under the aspect of being that context, that teaches you how to be yourself in a particular way. There's this idea, for instance, that the coherence of the self, and its presentation of (relative) normality and so on, are all devices for interacting with others in a predictable way (or, more strongly, a way that doesn't dispose them negatively towards you — for which predictability is, in many circumstances, a necessary but hardly a sufficient condition). Now being able to interact with others in such a way is both something others need from you and, for that reason, something you need to be able to do if you're going to be able to interact with people who need that from you in order to interact with you. But you don't need to be able to predict your own behaviour, and so when you're alone you can do whatever you like, as long as it doesn't make you uncomfortable. (And of course to be fair it's very possible that by your own behaviour you might make yourself uncomfortable, so that even when alone you play the role of standardising your own behaviour that would otherwise be played by others, but often the discomfort you feel with your own behaviour is itself an introjection of the discomfort others feel towards you, whether by their immediate reactions or by the standards which express those reactions in the alienated form of a "social norm," and so that is itself just another form of presentation, albeit presentation to self, that will fall away as you spend more time alone.) So being alone, in short, enables you to express, or enact, the behaviour that is most natural to you, which comes to you spontaneously, as it were. (There's a bit of a paradox in this, because there is a sense in which, despite the provisional distinction between spontaneous behaviour and the behaviour by which you're able to interact with others, which might be said to be socially conditioned, much of even your spontaneous behaviour is socially conditioned in the sense that insofar as it's intelligible — insofar as it counts as action rather than mere behaviour, or perhaps some private and ineffable sort of action — it must take place within a field of social meaning — a language, for instance, or something you learned from your parents or your friends at school, or whatever. And yet we don't want to say that there's no sense in which it's authentically yours, or that the self is nothing but conditioning. There must be something else — and that's not reducible to genetics, per se, or an innate propensity to behave in a particular way, although it may be conditioned by it; rather, the best level at which to describe this "something else" is a felt sense of resonance: of the many ways of being you've been exposed to in the course of your life, as well as some of those to which you haven't been exposed, there are some which resonate with your innate temperament more strongly than others — and some which resonate with aspects of your temperament which, while not entirely innate, are deeply-enough rooted that they're for all intents and purposes innate, and which cannot be changed without completely changing you as a person.)

But on the theme of socially meaningful behaviour, there is a sense in which other people do not simply show you how to be yourself, but can also show you different ways of being that you could come to recognise as being yourself. That is: to the extent that action, qua action, must take place within a field of significance, the presence of other people — their responses and reactions, the context they provide within which you exist, the language and modes of description they have for what you do (and allow you to take on for your own behaviour), and even the distinctive modes of essentially social phenomenology for which their presence is a precondition and into which their presence initiates you — can show you what your actions mean, or give you a language to explain them in. But they can also, as it were, introduce you to a field of significance within which anything means anything at all, or a way things can mean things — that is, a particular field of significance. So there is a sense in which language gives you the words to use to express certain concepts, but also constitutes those concepts to begin with, in virtue of the appropriateness of certain descriptions in certain situations, the use of the same words to tie together multiple situations, and so on; language both follows the joints in the world and creates them. The claim is that this dual role exists for any field of significance. Others can show you how your behaviour takes on meaning in a world full of others who are coming from their own directions and have their own ideas about how (things mean things), but at the same time you need to make sure not to fall into interpreting who you are as simply what people happen to think about who you are. There are of course echoes of Heidegger and Sartre in all this. There is a delicate balance between who you are in yourself, to the extent that such a thing makes sense, and who you are in the eyes of others, and who you are allowed to be by the modes of significance to which you have access, and these are constantly in the process of reconstituting each other, and one hopes that what comes out of the process is something worthy of being called a being unto itself, something which is more than a mere coincidence of forces but which comes to take upon the status of a force of its own.

[selormohene]

day 141 (tuesday, november 21st 2023)

Another day where I can't think of anything day-specific so will write about a perennial concern. This one is about being lonely.

I've been lonely, or felt lonely, for a long time. Perhaps not as long as I can remember, but a long time. I remember this starting as early as class 3, although it was very subtle then, and of course once I started middle school it just took off and it's essentially just gotten worse. I think the problem is that loneliness compounds. You miss one step in the journey of being with other people and you've basically fallen off with no way to get back on.

The thing about other people, of course, is that they teach you how to be a person, how to live. And there's more than one aspect to the person one spends one's life learning how to be. There are at least three. There is the person you are now, there is the person others would have you be, and then there is the person you would be. And the pedagogical role of other people varies quite a bit with respect to these multiple aspects of one's existence. With respect to the person we are, we want to be accepted. We all have a basic need to be affirmed as we are, to be told that, even despite our flaws and faults, we are, at the most fundamental level, all right. But then, at the same time, we would like to be encouraged and inspired towards who we could be, and other people help either by explicitly encouraging us in this endeavour, guiding us in the right direction by their actions and so on, or else by serving as models of the sort of life we'd one day like to live. And then of course other people reveal to us different ways of being, again in various ways: by their own lives, by their ways of engaging with each other, by the things they say to us, and so on.

Now these things are true of everyone, at the abstract level at which they're stated, but the particular manner in which they manifest depends on the specific kind of person one is. Part of the problem is that if your general way of being is out of step with the people around you, you won't receive the sorts of responses from other people necessary to help you learn to become a person in these three ways: to be affirmed in who you are, to be engaged with different ways of being, and to be guided towards the sort of person you might become. And sometimes you will only be surrounded by people who can respond to you on one or two of these axes, and not all three. (I think it's important to have, across all the people in your life, people who can respond to you on all three axes, but there's a sense in which the third is most important and yet the first is most fundamental, in the sense that it's the prerequisite for your being able to meaningfully engage with the others, and the second occupies this weird space in that it only seems meaningful insofar as it enables you to properly inhabit the first and third, but it also seems meaningful for its own sake. It's hard to express.) In my case I feel like I spent a significant amount of time when I was young surrounded by people who could only seek to make me into the sort of person they would have had me be, rather than to affirm me in who I was or to guide me towards who I could become. And, as I mentioned earlier, the problem is that this sort of issue compounds, to the point where you are overindexed on the most problematic dimension, to the point where you aren't even able to engage meaningfully on that dimension, because part of what is required to engage in a fulfilling way with others is to have a sense of self that one feels comfortable bringing before those others, and which is both receptive to their influence and resistant to it, where it matters.

[selormohene]

day 140 (monday, november 20th 2023)

It's curious how much of an effect being around the right people has on one's ability to think. It's almost like magic. There's something about it that requires face-to-face engagement as well, at least I feel like; it can't be replicated simply by reading their words or watching them talk or whatever, it requires a certain dynamic feedback loop. This post is inspired by the fact that I had to do a "problem session" on one of the problem sets for the class I'm teaching for, and for various reasons I came in at the beginning having barely looked at much of the problem set itself or the material in the book that was required to solve the problems. But somehow, simply by some combination of my prior knowledge, looking at what I thought would be most relevant, being around people bandying around ideas in various stages of completion and with some decent amount of relevance, and taking time to think about the particular questions people brought up on a case-by-case basis (plus the time pressure of having to provide answers within a few minutes, of course), I was able to spontaneously come up with answers about things which I'd ordinarily have no idea about.

There have been a few occasions in the course of teaching this class during which I've sort of been winging it, and it's gone just well enough that I would be inclined to think the end justified the means, but of course it probably didn't. And that's something I need to start working on. It's another aspect of my capacity to improvise, or my tendency to procrastinate, that it actually doesn't tend to go all that badly. But of course you shouldn't judge actions on their one-off results, but on their general results; that is, you shouldn't judge your actions (and whether you should have taken them) in terms of what happened to pan out, but how they would generally have panned out, because no method is entirely reliable. There are of course all sorts of caveats to this rule, but still. That's something that I still need to figure out, how to put more efficient habits in place even though the ones I've been relying on in the past have gotten me out of trouble in spite of not being particularly reliable.

[selormohene]

day 139 (sunday, november 19th 2023)

What is pragmatism in philosophy? Or, more generally, what is the metaphilosophy behind pragmatism? The version of pragmatism that I'm going to be talking about here, of course, owes its expression mostly to Rorty and Brandom, and by extension to Dewey, but a bit less so to James and perhaps even less to Peirce. The idea is as follows. There is a traditional way of viewing normativity, which starts with an unreflective view form the inside of our ordinary way of facing the world, according to which things simply are as they are and have their normative natures or properties built into them, and we’re mostly just recognising and responding to that sort of external normativity. But in reality, most everything we do is a social practice. And what gives social practices their force is justification, in the social sense of getting people not just to submit or acquiesce to something but to accept it as right, just, legitimate. Now, we can abstract from the sorts of considerations we bring to bear on each other, and on ourselves — the considerations by which people in fact say that X works to accept certain things, to make claims in a more objectivist register, of the form "X is justified if p," or “X is governed by standards A, which apply if q.” And from the inside, we don't take ourselves to be bringing standards to bear on ourselves; we don't even take ourselves to "take ourselves" to do anything. It is simply the case that certain standards bear on certain things; that is, from the inside, normativity is simply there. And, so the pragmatist line goes, often we are really doing just that, abstracting from our practices.

But then, as we adopt a reflective stance on our practices, we can ask: how do our minds and social practices work, why is it that we accept certain things as reasons, are there resources from within our practice (not just because those are right a priori but because where else can we start but from where we are?) to criticise those practices, and, by iterating this process can we come up with a stable and relatively non-indexical sense of normativity? Of course this latter part, finding something like a reflective fixed point, is a purely optional move, one which someone like Rorty for instance had no interest in making. And even if you do make that move there's no reason to think that some future novelty will not render it open to question, or that it reflects something intrinsic to the world beyond us as opposed to, at the limit, a deep structural feature of our way of being the sorts of beings we are, either as agents or as social creatures. But then again it could be said that this very point that everything could be up for question is as much a feature of realistic scientific naturalism as of relativistic socially-oriented pragmatism, and that they are not so opposed to each other as one might think; rather their common opponent with respect to this question is the sort of metaphysical outlook which takes there to be things which not only are as they are independently of us, but also must figure that way in our consciousness — the kind of view according to which we are neither beings primarily accountable to each other nor finite beings faced with a world that is beyond our capacity to grasp in its entirety, but really beings who contain within us a capacity to know the complete and intrinsic nature of reality as a whole.

[selormohene]

day 138 (saturday, november 18th 2023)

In the first pages of A Secular Age, Charles Taylor speaks about what he calls the sense of fullness. The paradigm is that of the religious believer whose life has been transformed by God, or by transcendent reality, however it appears to the believer. Everything in the believer's life seems ordered, imbued with meaning and purpose. The sense of fullness is a feeling, but it's not merely a feeling, in the sense that it is precisely a sense not just of being in a certain state, but of being in such a state because of something outside oneself that is greater than oneself, and there is a question of genuine significance what the status is of the transcendent reality with which it purports to be in touch, and whether it is truly in touch with it.

I've always found that I felt closest to that sense of fullness, of being in touch with transcendent reality in moments when I was immersed in a truly enrapturing piece of music, or studying math, or reading an incredible novel, or watching a great movie or piece of television. (There is also another case which I won't mention here of course but when I read back on this I'm going to remember what it is.) I haven't really gotten that sense, or at any rate not nearly as easily, from philosophy, or from religion, or, as much as I wish I did, from being in the presence of other people. Not because these things can't get us in touch with transcendent reality but because I never felt like I could see my way through in these situations. It's like no matter how much I enjoy reading certain kinds of philosophy or engaging in certain rituals or experiencing various fulfilling social interactions I am nonetheless kept in mind of the fundamental contingency and fallenness and partiality and particularity of people and ofe thought, whereas when it comes to the aesthetic and mathematical domains I feel as though I can obtain direct access even through the imperfection of the manifestation; it doesn't seem as much like a medium which offers only imperfect and inflected access, so much as reality itself. There is an analogy with a window: there are some windows which are so thick, or blurred, or otherwise distorting, that the best one can say about what one sees through them is that one sees an image of the thing, as displayed in the window. But there are other windows that are so clear that through them one sees nothing less than the thing itself.

Anyway, that's usually how I feel. But at the tailgate for Harvard-Yale I had the opportunity to run into an old friend from college, or perhaps a friendly face, someone I'd met once after leaving but hadn't heard much from since. And there was just something about him. Meeting him then and there, in that moment, with everything else I had going on in my life and with everything I happened to have in mind at that moment, was like a beatific vision. It's hard to explain and I feel like it sounds ridiculous, but there it was. As I spoke to him I had a sense of being in the presence of someone who was centred, grounded, in touch with something that transcended chaos — it's a chaotic place, the Harvard-Yale tailgate, for many reasons and in more ways than one. I think that looking back, I had the sense that he was someone who was in a very deep way more at peace than I have usually been, and of course I have no way of knowing that except that it's not a very high bar, and it's fair to note that much of what we see in others is what we want or need to see in them. But that's fine. Sometimes all one needs to see in someone at a certain moment is the sense of a way that one might oneself be.

[selormohene]

day 137 (friday, november 17th 2023)

The weirdest thing happened to me "today." I was in the grocery store looking around, buying one or two things, and I heard a song playing over the speakers. It was a rather sentimental sort of song, and what happened was, first of all, that I found that I couldn't entirely relate to the sentimentality of it, but, secondly, and what's curious, there was a part of me that did seem to want to experience the song sentimentally, to listen to it and feel my heartstrings pulled and tears come to my eyes. The experience, in short, was that of having been hardened, or anaesthetised. And that realisation was stunning, that I had been anaesthetised; it's the sort of thing you don't realise because you're numb to everything, including to the fact of how numb you are.

The funny thing about anaesthesia is that it doesn't prevent against despair, because in spite of the anaesthesia I have been feeling a lot of despair lately. But that’s partly because despair needn’t be just the sharp and horrifying sort of pain. It’s often the kind of slow-seeping poison which you feel deep inside your bones. And yet at the same time it feels like the sort of emotion which manifests as intense pain can and does pierce through the anaesthesia better than moments of exuberant, transcendent pleasure, though it’s not entirely clear whether that has to do with the anaesthetic state of depression, or the nature of pleasure versus pain. I don't know if I've ever been able to exult in moments of pleasure to such an extent that I lose myself entirely; there's always that part of my mind that's sitting in the background looking on, waiting for the comedown, with a certain expression, not quite a smile.

[selormohene]

day 136 (thursday, november 16th 2023)

This post was inspired by more despair at procrastination. This has been a recurring theme in these posts, and in my life: that I leave things until the last minute, knowing full well that the consequences may (and often will) be dire, and yet doing so anyway, only to then look around at what's happening and not know what to do. And yet again I have to emphasise that what we have here is an alignment problem. That is, I always have some kind of subconscious inhibition which I can’t get over, and I feel like listening Ito it with the expectation of “if I listen to you you’ll disappear” doesn’t help, but also just letting it be doesn’t help, because I still feel like there’s something deep within me that knows what it wants to do, so the problem of disunity and not feeling like unification is forthcoming just feels really bad. And again I'm not sure whether ultimately this is a psychological thing or a physiological thing. At first I thought it must simply be a psychological thing, but now that I think about it I still feel like there are physiological elements. Part of it is my state of chronic exhaustion caused by bad sleep, but I know from past experience that the interplay between psychological and physiological factors, in my case at least, goes very deep indeed. Anyway, I don't have much of a resolution or anything of significant interest to say about this, just kind of recording another episode of woe.

(As it happens, I'm still writing these up from the future, i.e. still working through the backlog, I can't quite remember what precipitated it with certainty, but I think it had to do with not having figured out my plans for Harvard-Yale early enough, and as a result having missed out on Friday night, as well as not having made good enough plans to see deadmau5 in concert. The funny thing is that, now, looking back, it strikes me how well things ended up working out. I was too tired to go and see deadmau5, so even though I didn't have one I don't know if buying one was the thing to have done anyway, but I'm sure I'll be able to see him somewhere or other next year. And Harvard-Yale ended up going pretty well overall. Of course none of this is meant to be an argument in favour of the process that led to the results. And part of what I'd like to be able to do more is to be able to calibrate my decision-making processes more carefully, which can only happen if they're in line with my preferred outcomes. Of course there are other necessary conditions but those are for another time.)

[selormohene]

day 135 (wednesday, november 15th 2023)

On feeling like I have nothing to say. There was a point, probably during the summer it was, when I felt like I had a lot more to say with these posts. I remember that I started out having nothing, and then I got to a point where I felt like I usually had things to say, and now it's going down again. But then again I usually use even the slightest passing thought as a point from which to start when I make these posts, and they usually end up going in some meaningful direction or other, which makes me think that perhaps there is always something or other to say. But at the same time there are times when I just feel like there's nothing and I'm scraping the bottom of a dry barrel, which perhaps I have to accept as something that happens sometimes. I often find myself looking back with nostalgia at those days when I feel like I used to come up with more ideas than I knew what to do with, and on the one hand I sometimes wish I could stop reaching for the impossible return of something long gone, but on the other hand I don't, not really. I haven't found letting go of my wishfulness to be a very pleasant or beneficial process, it's just made me feel less alive. I barely imagine weird scenarios before I go to bed for instance, and there are short circuits in my brain which go off whenever my mind starts wandering. The problem is that these things were almost entirely beneficial for me, which is why I still don't understand why I thought it was a good idea to stop them. But alas that is how it goes I guess.

[selormohene]

day 134 (tuesday, november 14th 2023)

On feeling like I can’t think on my feet. I've started feeling this way a lot more nowadays, when I'm in class or teaching. So when I’m working on stuff for office hours, for instance, there’s a distinct inability to actually think on my feet. Like it feels like unless I’ve read the solution and I’m reproducing it, the idea of looking at a logic problem and in real time figuring out the road from start to finish, using my actual brain, I find, feels like shifting into a gear I don’t even have anymore, but certainly did ten years ago when I was doing calculus at the board during Math HL. In fact, now that I realise it, it feels like the ability to exert cognitive effort has a distinct feeling which I can’t even feel when I’m writing these posts, which makes me wonder if I’m just untangling things which are already in my head.

But at the same time I want to believe that problems are soluble. Like I've mentioned before, you can only know what things look like in retrospect, once you've seen their entire shape. And yet you can know what things could look like — or at any rate you can know what things could not look like, by closing off certain options prematurely and not trying everything you can, by giving up when you don't have to. And that's something I'd like to avoid as much as possible, so I guess all I can really do for now is continue to throw everything I have at the problem until, hopefully, I figure out what actually works.

[selormohene]

day 133 (monday, november 13th 2023)

On how one’s normative orientation is shaped by the historical circumstances of one’s birth. So this starts with a concrete example. Personally, I think the existence of the state project of Israel in anything like its presently existing form is utterly indefensible. I have no objection to Zionism in principle, if only because the idea of Zionism has room in it for realisations utterly remote from present historical circumstances. That is, I absolutely do not begrudge anyone their belief, at least insofar as it is specified in this abstract way and to this extent, that someday, somehow, God is going to lead the Jewish people into their promised land. But I think any version of the claim that anyone could possibly ask me to take seriously must be utterly divorced from anything like the state of Israel as it currently exists. And as far as I'm concerned, any view to the extent that respect for the religious view I've called Zionism above must grant as legitimate the idea that it has its realisation in anything like the present nation of Israel only strikes me as excusable if it’s interpreted as a complete fantasy, divorced from any honest reckoning with the history of Israel's founding, the explicit ideologies of settler colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing that guided its establishment and has inspired its leaders from Herzl to Jabotinsky all the way to Netanyahu, the role of European anti-Judaism and cavalier disregard for the inhabitants of historic Palestine in designating that geographical area as the site for the realisation of the Zionist project, and the subsequent relentless expansionism manifested in the violent siege and decimation of Gaza and the occupation and terrorism of the West Bank. In the face of this history, to hold to such platitudes as that Israel is nonetheless a democracy, or that it’s an imperfect state but could be made better, or that all that the people of Israel need to do is vote out Netanyahu’s right-wing government and elect some “progressives” and things will be better, or that the best outcome is a two-state solution within which reconciliation between the deeply-held ideologies of Israelis (or Jews) and Palestinians is to be sought, or whatever, but sorry we’re still going to maintain dominion over sixty percent of the land, half of your main city, and ninety percent of the border of one of your two non-contiguous territories, regarding which our bad, by the way, and the thousands of people who kicked Palestinians out of their homes and lands — Palestinians many of whom are still alive! — can keep those homes because what are you going to do, give the houses and the land back, can only be the product of wilful ignorance of a sort which I simply cannot take seriously, to say the least. Like thinking of people whose Zionism commits them to the actually existing state of Israel as deeply deluded is the most charitable I could possibly be.

Now there’s an objection I’ve heard to this, which is that at this point there are people who were born and raised in Israel, whose parents and grandparents have spent their entire lives there, and for whom “going back” to Eastern Europe or whatever would be impossible because they're not from there in any real sense, because Israel is the only place they’ve ever known — after all this is the same argument that's made against sending people back to Latin America whose parents brought them over without papers as kids (and of course their political positions are very different but if you're going to make that argument incorporate it directly into your case I'd imagine instead of trying to retrofit reasons why it's different in this instance). This situation of native Israelis is of course quite separate from the question of Jewish people who have lives in other countries but have claimed the present-day territory of Israel as their birthright. And to be fair the question of native Israelis is a hard one. But it strikes me that the response to that issue is to recognise that just because we find it difficult what to say about individuals caught up in certain circumstances, or just because we should not want to judge those individuals morally on the basis of the circumstances in which they find themselves, doesn’t thereby make the circumstances morally just. It’s true that it would be rather perverse to want to uproot someone who at this point only knows that place as their home, but that does not mean the state-making project into which they have been conscripted by their birth (and perhaps into identification with which their upbringing has aligned them) is thereby morally defensible. I actually said this about the Queen once. She didn’t choose to be born into the British royal family, and yet once born there was basically no chance, given the circumstances of her birth, that she would have formed the sort of moral or political consciousness under which she would have come to believe the monarchy was unjust and should be overthrown. You could say the same for the many of us who are participating in the state project of the USA, which is built on the destruction of the First Nations. And yet one still wants to say that that state project is not thereby rendered just simply because we cannot extricate ourselves from our default stance towards it, which is to see it as legitimate. We must work from within that situation in the recognition that it is not necessarily all right, instead of assuming that it must be because that's all we have to start with.

[selormohene]

day 132 (sunday, november 12th 2023)

On what it means to be a Set-valued functor. This one is going to be pretty rough and not very coherent because I'm still thinking about this, it's very much in its initial inchoate stages. But it occurs to me that there are at least three ways to think of what it means to be a Set-valued functor. The first pertains to being a concrete category, consisting of sets with extra structure. So the idea here is (or seems to be) that a set is its own thing, and then a group (for instance) just is a set with extra structure relating its elements, and the imposition of that extra structure is what defines the category of groups. The existence of a forgetful functor is in a sense returning to the original starting point.

But you can also think of Set-valued functors as a generalisation of the notion of “sets with extra structure.” And here you could drop various constraints on the initial conception, such as the requirement of faithfulness. So forgetful functors from concrete categories to Set are faithful (i.e. injective on maps), because once you have the structure you're just concerned with certain set-maps between the structured sets, but (as far as I can tell) such functors need not be injective on objects, which morally corresponds to the idea that concrete categories can consist of the same set with different structures on it, but the functions are just, extensionally speaking, the appropriate set-functions between these sets with structure imposed (that is, those set maps which respect the given structure). On this second way of understanding Set-valued functors, you might (for instance) drop the condition that the functor should be faithful, so it no longer needs to be injective on maps. And a way of looking at things here is that you’re considering functions intensionally, so to speak, just as you were initially considering objects intensionally. So multiple maps in the given category may correspond to the same set-theoretic function. More generally, what you get is something like a mathematical structure that can be implemented by sets, but the structure is prior to its set-theoretic implication. For instance if we define a very general sort of structure over a category in C to be a functor in Set, we can think of that as a generalisation of a sort of structured set. Consider, for instance, the category of simplicial sets. Even the name attests to this. A simplicial set is a (contravariant) functor from the simplicial category to the category of sets, which you could think of as a diagram of sets shaped like the simplicial category. And if you think about the simplicial category as encoding the most abstract, most general algebraic relations that the various n-cells of a simplicial structure could have in relation to each other, then any diagram of that shape in Set can be thought of as consisting of the sets of n-cells of some real simplicial structure, together with the relations that in fact hold between the n-cells in question. (Note here that whereas in the first instance the image of each object under a functor was the set of interest, in this case it's the image of the entire functor that gives the entire structure of interest, so to speak.)

The third thing is that a Set-valued functor encodes mathematical structure that can be implemented in sets by a certain algebra of morphisms, or set maps. I suppose this is the viewpoint behind algebraic set theory. (And this viewpoint was implicit in the example given above.) Here the important thing is not which elements get sent to where, but how the maps compose. And it could be that there are general aspects of the category of sets which are convenient for encoding a certain kind of structure, but in fact you don’t even need to consider Set at all, any category which has those more global features will do. For instance, the fact that we can define a notion of simplicial set simply as a functor from the simplicial operator category to Set suggests that if we have an indexed category of sets for every natural number together with some subclass of maps between them subject to certain constraints, we can think of them as abstractly representing something like a set of n-simplices, or whatever. And to give another example, you can think of the category of topological spaces (and its realisation in Set) as a set-theoretic version of an abstract structure of morphisms which could in principle exist in any category which has enough maps that you can pick subsets of each hom-set which display the required combinatorial and universal properties. So then it would be as though all one really has is a set-theoretic instantiation of what is really the abstract theory of locales.

[selormohene]

day 131 (saturday, november 11th 2023)

Following on from the post for Friday, and a bit of the one for Thursday, and a post from a while back. The contemporary progressive ideology, at least as it manifests in the USA among relatively affluent young urbanites and suburbanites, is influenced by three systems of thought which are in tension. To begin with, there's identitarianism, which involves the valuation of a number of individual identity categories, both the general right of people to "identify" one way or another and to affirm the values they take to be associated with that identity, and as it were the identities that are thereby affirmed. In other words, it's not enough to say "I respect your right to place value on your identity, though I place no such value whatsoever on it myself," it's thought that you should see a wide range of identities as genuinely valuable. This doesn't mean anything goes, for instance, people who identify with being white aren't meant to have their identities affirmed, and there's a genuine question of why not. But it does mean that there are a wide range of identities which would otherwise be thought to be in tension with each other which are somehow meant to be valued simultaneously. And what's more, sometimes you have people identifying with multiple of these categories at once, and it is thought that their own identification with these categories is what determines what those categories can and should be, rather than the other way round. Now in a way it makes complete sense that this should be so; for things to be otherwise would be for human beings to lay down their lives for the sake of abstract ideas. Surely it is the living, breathing human being who should take primacy over the ideology. The problem is that this view often extends to categories which one would think have their basis in some sort of view of what is the case objectively. And so you here have situations where people are like "well Christianity doesn't require X because I identify as a Christian and I don't want it to require X," which wouldn't be an issue of the people who made such claims didn't want their interpretations to govern the interpretations of others, for one thing, and to determine actually existing Christianity, which one would have thought should be constituted independently of their however-formed preferences.

Anyway, that's one strand. Then the second is leftism. The point of leftism lies in two things: the first is the valuation of solidarity across what one might call "superficial" ideological differences, and the second is the affirmation of substantive values such as freedom from the oppression of the bourgeoisie, socialist or communist modes of social organisation, the possibility of free creative or recreational activity untethered from being compelled to reproduce the material conditions of one's existence, perhaps the quasi-Aristotelian idea of realising one's species-being, and so on. So here you have various tensions with the identitarian viewpoint. For one thing you have a privileged set of values which are to be shared by all, rather than different sets of values which nominally have no reason to be compatible but nonetheless have to be valued by all. Second, you have what often seems to amount to a dismissal of categories of identity based on things like race or religion, or sexuality; here there is an argument that such categories arise from falsehoods, are "ideological" in the pejorative sense. Such an argument might take various forms: it might be epistemic in nature, saying that racial or religious identities somehow generate an unreal or reified picture of the social world and its joints; genetic, arguing that the origin of such categories is in a bad aspect of the productive process, either as a sort of false reconciliation in the case of religion or as a divide-and-conquer strategy in the case of race; or functional in nature, arguing that in fact such categories serve to facilitate oppressive relations of production. At least in its Marxist incarnation there is quite a substantive metaphysics behind the leftist impulse, one which is materialist in nature (and I genuinely think that historical and dialectical materialism and metaphysical materialism are meant to go together, though I've heard it argued that they aren't), and this metaphysics is hostile to the idea that there are different spiritualities or ways of knowing or what have you which come with different identities and should all be respected and are equally valuable (or even, somehow, equally true). There is a view of real interests which is divorced from the interests people take themselves to have under these other aspects, and so on.

So that's identitarianism and leftism. And then the third leg is liberalism. Liberalism proceeds from two values: first, the right of each individual to pursue their vision of the good. This it has in common with identitarianism at any rate. But then there's another aspect which puts it in tension with both identitarianism and leftism, which is that the liberal ideology prescinds from including individual or even communal substantive values in public valuation. At any rate, it allows for people to end up agreeing on certain public courses of action for different reasons. Now of course I have my own problems with this sort of view, because it seems to me to reduce reason in the public sphere to a simulacrum which is employed insincerely to produce a veneer of theoretical consensus for the sake of practical coordination, and (depending on how you want to look at things) either forbids people from advocating for their own substantive complex of interests in terms which cannot otherwise be "justified" to others, or is naïve to the fact that people will do this anyway. But the point here is that there is nothing like public valuation. And in a sense liberalism is the glue that binds everything together: it waters down the public substance of identities and the cost of their affirmation to the point where the sort of multiple valuation compelled by identitarianism is pretty cheap. And although there have been efforts recently to reconcile liberalism and leftism, which are perhaps better explained by the fact that contemporary political philosophy professors identify with both ideologies than might their viability explain why people are drawn to both, there nonetheless remains an influential anti-leftist version of liberalism, call it economic libertarianism, which does not construe class differences in the leftist sense as barriers to the liberal vision, perhaps because it starts from the viewpoint (both procedurally and, in a sense, metaphysically) of individuals as free and equal rational points without substantive content, whose particular positions and interests do not enter into public life.

[selormohene]

day 130 (friday, november 10th 2023)

On mathematical techniques, building on from Wednesday’s post. Often, when one is studying a particular subfield of mathematics, one learns not just a body of knowledge defined in a certain way but also a variety of techniques of proof dedicated to the solution of problems characteristic of the subfield, or at least the area and aspect of the subfield one is studying. For instance in the logic class I'm teaching for, there are initial segment lemmas for proving readability of certain formulas, results about automorphisms for answering questions of definability, proofs by induction on the length of a formula, etc. It's well-known of course that generalising examples or ideas or concepts from one mathematical context to another is a good way to gain mathematical fluency, and that turning an idea in one area into one in a better-understood area is such a way as well. But this is also true for generalising proof techniques or methods of construction from the better-understood area to the less well-understood area. In fact, even recognising and mastering the mathematical techniques that reliably work in a given domain is a good way to gain such fluency in that domain, and one which is relatively easy to implement and doesn’t require any sort of leap of mathematical creativity — it's mostly just grinding through examples until one can carry out the process automatically, and in fact this is how most lower-level mathematical understanding proceeds. And then, besides the question of how to transfer proof techniques towards questions in other subfields, there's also the question of how to apply ideas generalised from a given proof technique towards the creation of new proof techniques in other subfields.

On political belief clusters. So there’s the argument that you can predict for instance what someone in the USA believes about guns from what they believe about abortion, although a priori these things don’t have anything to do with each other per se (and people in other places who are otherwise “conservative” or “liberal” more generally differ on those specific topics), and that this can be taken as evidence that the process of formation of those beliefs and things isn’t very rational. But you could argue instead as follows: what happens is that in a given society, the history of that society and its culture (both the culture internal to a given political party or other sort of ideological formation and the general culture, which both influences and is influenced by these political or ideological formations) end up framing the space of reasons in a certain way, creating or making salient certain points of local correlation: thus certain correlations which aren’t a priori nonetheless show up as being highly correlated. So for instance under the very general rubric of "protecting life," you could argue, one should oppose both the unregulated proliferation of guns and abortion, whereas under the general rubric of "individual freedom" one should see no problem with both. Or, to go back to a certain sort of example, a certain view of what it means to be a minority might lead you to seek tolerance and acceptance for different groups, not because their views or interests are intrinsically in harmony with yours or with each other, but because of the position they occupy in the society you're in — and this may further lead you to take as central aspects of those groups and their viewpoints which could, in a different context, be considered marginal.

Now, of course we shouldn’t necessarily conclude that there’s no room for irrationality and mere memetic bias under such an explanation of belief-cluster formation (and the sorts of toy rubrics I presented are certainly ripe for post-hoc rationalisation), but all I'm saying is that we shouldn’t say that there’s no room for rational explanations of these dynamics either. The point is that under certain exogenous or extrinsic constraints, certain otherwise contingent correlations can come to be genuinely informative (and just as real, given the constraint — not spurious in any sense) as “intrinsic” or “necessary” or “endogenous” correlations, and the mistake is when you neglect the fact of their having been produced by extrinsic conditions, not when you take them to be meaningful at all.

[selormohene]

day 129 (thursday, november 9th 2023)

This one is about identity, in particular personal and political identity. I think I remember being interested in the question of personal identity once. The interesting thing about it is that it doesn't satisfy Leibniz's law. In fact almost no versions of what is generally invoked under the name of identity, it would seem, satisfy Leibniz's law in the strict sense of the indiscerniblity of identicals, because you generally want to say that identity is compatible with the possibility of having been different, or changing (or even enduring) over time, but then that means that in different times (or at a different world) X has different properties while remaining identical to X. Or else you might want to resist this, and say identity means you retain all your properties in every context, but at the very minimum it seems you can fold being in a certain context into a property: thus X possesses both the property of existing at time t and having existed at time t', but then at time t' X possessed the property of existing at time t' and future existence at t, for instance. Thus you have tensed or modally indexed properties. But you can't place that sort of property within a temporal context or else you violate the indiscernibility of identicals. You can deny that any such properties exist I guess, or try to restrict your view to something like intrinsic properties (on the view that temporal context is relative to a world or whatever and thus an illegitimate relational property), or you can also argue for a level distinction between the properties denoted by your theory (i.e. as the interpretation of a predicate) and the terms which arise from the machinery of your theory (and would thus be denoted by terms in a second-order theory). Whatever. But anyway I was interested in the question of how you could be the same person as you were years ago when you don't seem to satisfy the criteria for physical identity, even if you do satisfy the conditions for physical continuity. Perhaps the idea is that you're connected by memory, or by some other complex of things like a life history, or that you only really exist over time and not in time, etc.

But this post is about something else, the identity in "identity politics." What's interesting about that is that to have X as your identity is to be part of a group; you're black, you're a woman, etc., and in some sense that's not an identity in the sense that it's something only you have, or a relation everyone has only to themselves, or anything like that. Identities in this social or political sense are thus not these sorts of special objective properties, they are sustained, as it were, by a certain sort of recognition, or claim to recognition. That's another shift I think, from a model in which identity is conferred from outside ("subject identified as a 6'4" black male") to one in which it's declared from within ("I identify as a first-generation immigrant,") even if declared identities issue from externally ascribed traits, they're filtered through one's own interpretation of and relationship to those traits and sometimes in opposition to the common understanding of those traits. (See the many debates about the extent to which people should or shouldn't be classified under X racial category if they're from social context Y and don't "identify" with category X, etc. So some people who are generally understood by others to be of a certain race, or gender, do not identify as that race or gender, and in some cases the self-identification is taken to be primary and in other places the external identification is considered primary, either on the basis of the contingent claim that no one can sincerely and rationally go against their external identification or on the stronger claim that the identity category in question is not the sort on which one can unilaterally cast off one's externally designated identity category.)

I think that on the "I identify as" model, the use of the term "identity" is fundamentally to make a very particular kind of normative claim, and one which is related to its more traditional metaphysical overtones. So traditionally, questions of identity have been related to questions of existence, continuity, change and survival. What makes it the case that something is what it is, that it continues to be what it is in a different context or under a different aspect, that it continues to be, rather than to be something else, or to cease to be. And I think that invocations of identity in this sense involve taking the trait one identifies with and saying "this is who I am, fundamentally." It's a way to fold a certain sort of commitment into one's very essence or being. This isn't to say this sort of claim is generally voluntaristic, not at all. The person making the claim may well believe that this is simply how things are. But the claim is to the effect of "this aspect of me is essential to me." (Or perhaps just is me, although this version of the claim raises the question of how an aspect of you, which would seem to bear an asymmetric, quasi-mereological relation to you, can just be you, where something's being you is a symmetric relation. The point is that something's being part of your identity would seem to be different in that way from its being a mere property you have.) But anyway, "this aspect of me just is me; if you're against this belief, this value, this commitment of mine, this feature of my personality, you're against me; to demand that I give it up is to demand that I no longer exist, or no longer am who I am; if you claim to accept me you must accept this as well, and if you don't accept this you don't accept me." And acceptance of this sort of move in connection with the sanctity of persons raises all sorts of questions, because people have all sorts of things they identify with and it seems like if we only want to accept some claims and not others, we have to admit the voluntaristic foundations of our acceptance of identity claims, or else make the controversial contingent judgment that everyone who makes a certain sort of identification is being insincere or evil, or else judge that some people are making a moral mistake, not a cognitive one, but then that raises the question of whether we can legitimately speak of identity claims in the object mode, saying "it is a fact that these claims are legitimate and these ones aren't," which is what we often do when we're trying to give these moral claims the full weight of objective reality.