variations on a shiver
like the ed sheeran song, but worse, and also not like the ed sheeran song in any discernible way
I met J— for coffee today. Or, rather, I was supposed to meet J— for coffee today. J— called me about 45 minutes after I arrived and, as I suspected, informed me that he’d overslept after a late night out—he didn’t make it to bed until 4am. J— showed up about half an hour later anyway, because I told him I planned to stick around at the rendezvous point (the coffee shop) anyway. He ordered his coffee, which quickly materialized in his hand (black coffee, as usual, for those of us whose souls are voids bereft of light (“us” as in, not me)); we sauntered to a nearby restaurant for lunch and shared the experience of consuming some of the best tacos I’ve had recently.
Incidentally, and in no way related to my previous statement, they are also some of the only tacos I’ve had recently.
It is a “listen to Sasha Sloan and brood” kind of evening. Brooding might entail walking around with headphones on, or sitting down next to my phone as the soothing tones envelop me in a cold embrace.
Is this self care, or is it the opposite?
J— has this tattoo on this arm—it’s the headband that the Monkey King wears. Tor J—, this tattoo has both metaphorical and aesthetic significance: the headband represents self-control to him, as it controlled Sun Wukong. It also looks pretty cool, and maybe that’s what really matters.
Saint-Beuve was kind of a douche to Baudelaire. It’s hard not to see oneself in Baudelaire’s reaction—Saint-Beuve is the critic whose opinion means the whole world. A few vague gestures—barely nice words—that could have been directed at anyone, when they come from the right person, mean the whole world to us. Are they meant for us in particular? What do they mean?
It’s amazing to me how rare an experience the receipt of a genuine, warm smile is. I’m working on my own.
I encouraged someone to auto-cite the other day, inspired by someone I read who, in a book, referred to his own work as an “intriguing study” with the clinical nonchalance of a savant giving you a tour of his field of study.
A: What is an analytic philosopher?
B: Annoying.
Nikhil wrote this wonderful essay on love and grief, and it made me think about the way I’ve withheld love, or earnestness perhaps, out of the fear of impending grief. I could easily disappear from the life of a new friend—even if the seeds of a great friendship were there—without affecting their life very much. I think I managed to convince myself that it would make little difference whether someone saw me tomorrow, or a month from now, or a year from now. That’s probably true, but that didn’t mean I needed to stress test its truth.
This is a thing people think about the world: all physical events have sufficient physical causes. Important here, in Jaegwon Kim’s exclusion argument, is that causal overdetermination isn’t a thing. Like: if thing X happens and the sufficient physical causes C exist for X, then it’s metaphysically troubling to think that there are some additional causes C’ that are responsible for X’s being the case. They’re superfluous. Useless. Pointless as a circle.
My diet includes an offensive amount of greek yogurt (controversial yoghurt). I’m not a health nut. It just works well in a lot of things. I eat way too much dessert to rightfully call myself a health nut. I’ve definitely pushed the limits of the amount of sugar I can consume in one day and still wake up feeling like the whole thing never happened.
Sarah Kay says poetry is like diarrhea: if there’s a poem inside you, it has to come out. If you haven’t put verses to paper for long enough, are you constipated?
I’m often unsure of the right way to introduce myself. Sometimes, I think the one potentially interesting (yet completely insufferable) thing about me is that I do a podcast. This is not a good thing, because I can’t take myself seriously if I introduce myself and, somewhere in the process of introducing myself, emit the mouth noises that sound like “I do a podcast.”
Kim uses as an essential premise that “our idea of causation requires that the causally connected items be situated in a space-like framework.” But this doesn’t convince the substance dualist, who is not committed to physicalism in the first place.
I think earnestness is pretty different from desparation. It comes from a place of positivity, as opposed to negativity. I think I’m willing to allow my earnestness to show to people, even if I look the fool for it.
Whoever picks the music for movie theatre bathrooms really likes Tchaikovsky’s 5th.
Kim thinks that the central problem of immaterial souls concerning mental causation relies (contra Princess Elizabeth) in the inherent nonspatiality commonly attributed to immaterial souls under substance dualism. His “pairing problem” says that pairing a specific cause with a specific affect is identifying spatiotemporal properties of the two objects; by doing so, we distinguish the exact physical cause from other nearby objects, as two distinct objects cannot co-exist in the same place at the same time.
The lack of defined spatial relations for souls makes it impossible to attribute causal activity to them, then, as they cannot be paired with anything else on the basis of physical relations.
I took a walk the other morning, and it was starting to get cold enough for me to wear gloves. I need to see if Costco has winter gloves yet, but why am I going to buy gloves again? I had gloves last season? Where did they go?
A lot of fun. Baudelaire would be proud of this episodic post. Kim’s exclusion theory intrigues. I want it to be true, but every fiber of my cultural studies background shivers at the proposition. Why reduce causes when you can multiply them? Keep doing what you are doing. This post reminds me that I need to have a little more fun while writing. I need a space to do that.
re: podcast & intros — to be cringe is to be free! if we all religiously avoided seeming like a Type Of Guy/Gal we’d never do anything interesting at all
also i’m pretty sure i generally refer to you as “Gradient Daniel” (complimentary)