More Transcendental, More Blues

It’s Christmas Eve, I’ve got a glass of whiskey, and I’ve finished prepping for cooking Christmas dinner tomorrow. I wrote Transcendental Blues in a bit of a fever over the last week. I failed to make the shortlist for another job on Monday, the first I’d applied to since my recovery began. This was for entirely understandable reasons, and it’s already water under the bridge. But it brought everything associated with the application process and the travails of academia back to the surface. It was also strangely liberating. I’d stopped applying for jobs, and this one was about as good a shot as I had at getting an interview. Having it over with, and being told promptly (a rare and welcome occurrence in my extensive experience of rejections), meant I could quickly move onto other things. So, for the first time in over a year, I started writing, just for the hell of it.

What I wrote was not Transcendental Blues. It was a first, sprawling attempt at articulating ideas that have been brewing for the last few years, ideas that weave together questions in the philosophies of logic, language, computation, and thereby mind/artificial intelligence. Ideas that are so strange and multi-faceted I often can’t fit them in my head. This means finding a way to interface my head with the page. Giving up on the thought that this has to be the thing that does it, along with the need to make it fit into the box, was like driving a forklift truck through writer’s block.

It started on Facebook, as a comment that spiralled until it could never possibly fit. Having returned to Mark’s writing recently, for obvious reasons, it became clear that I needed to stop being reactive, and become active again. I had to find a way to post it here. But the only way I could post it here was if I cleared the air. If I got rid of all the guilt, fear, and resentment holding me back. The accrued embarrassment of having not posted here in so long, and not having achieved what I’d aimed to achieve by retreating. It was an act of pure catharsis, designed to unburden myself of everything I needed to say, so I could say something I wanted to say. I did not expect it to get the response it has, and the kind comments, expressions of solidarity, and heartfelt overtures people have made towards me are the best Christmas present I could ever hope for. I cannot thank you enough. In the spirit of Spinoza, I say: more power to you all.

1. More Transcendental

It’s reasonably obvious that my thoughts about logic and computation ended up bleeding into my reflections on doing philosophy and my neurophenomenological musings on what is going on when we think. However, you might be surprised at how deep these threads go.

Liam Kofi Bright has written a generous post engaging with the way I describe my personal experience of philosophical problems, contrasting it with his own. This delights me no end. I’m a big believer in the prevalence of neurodiversity. By default, we assume other people experience the world in the same way we do, until we find out we don’t. It’s wonderful to have conversations about this that aren’t dissonant, but communicate and celebrate cognitive differences. I had a conversation about this with the incomparable Meredith L. Patterson, who seems to share similar spatial intuitions to me, and we coined the term ‘proprioceptive synaesthesia’ as a way to describe it. I’m quite happy with that. Regardless, Liam’s post gave me an occasion to say a little more about the philosophy of logic hiding behind my description of the tree of forking and looping paths. You’ll find a brief discussion of Girard’s ludics in a comment to his post.

If you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole, there are two secret sections of the Transcendental Blues post that I had to delete (between 4.1 and 4.2), because they got too technical, and interrupted the flow of the piece as a whole. They explore the way that computational asymmetries and the corresponding symmetries provide us with ways of thinking about communication, how this relates to Kant’s account of analytic/synthetic judgments, type theory, and the work of Per Martin-Löf and Jean-Yves Girard. Read them at your peril.

2. More Blues

In case you were wondering where the inspiration for the post came from.