I'm moving all pk domains materials to the PKnatz blog where images will be relinked.
The fed destroyed my domains, evaporating the bulk of the graphics for IonaArc. As I can I'm putting back those I can: hard after they bankrupted me too.
Monday, February 28, 2005
Sunday, February 27, 2005
Tag Team
Special Interests manage the media – from theology to economics, from schools to speeches in Congress – in many many ways: and have always done so: long before there were schools or a Congress.
pk suggests that their magic has a single common denominator throughout history: to make the public believe that the public did it: that if anything is wrong with it, the public would be liable. Therefore, nothing can ever be found wrong with it: because, there is no axiom more basic to post-Original Sin political psychology than that the public can do no wrong.
If we stole continents by genocide, well, God must want us to have it.
If we paid taxes to build bombs, to imprison our children, to ensure that the wogs give us their resources on our terms, well ...
pk suggests that their magic has a single common denominator throughout history: to make the public believe that the public did it: that if anything is wrong with it, the public would be liable. Therefore, nothing can ever be found wrong with it: because, there is no axiom more basic to post-Original Sin political psychology than that the public can do no wrong.
If we stole continents by genocide, well, God must want us to have it.
If we paid taxes to build bombs, to imprison our children, to ensure that the wogs give us their resources on our terms, well ...
Proof
Courts prove things: but the next court can find errors in the proof.
Tautologies prove things: but only if the axioms are true, the logic perfect ... the whole system capable of truth.
Science knows better than to prove things; science disproves things:
That still doesn't span whether there's such a(n abstract) thing as truth, or whether humans (or any other sentience) qualifies for it.
I posted other comments on "proof" at IonaArc in 2005, in December as well as February, and in 2009 gathered some of my Thinking Tool modules from the deposed Knatz.com to a separate pk blog: pkTools, also at blogspot.com: the latter in the class of Reason.
Tautologies prove things: but only if the axioms are true, the logic perfect ... the whole system capable of truth.
Science knows better than to prove things; science disproves things:
That still doesn't span whether there's such a(n abstract) thing as truth, or whether humans (or any other sentience) qualifies for it.
2009 10 28
I posted other comments on "proof" at IonaArc in 2005, in December as well as February, and in 2009 gathered some of my Thinking Tool modules from the deposed Knatz.com to a separate pk blog: pkTools, also at blogspot.com: the latter in the class of Reason.
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Original Sin vs. Enlightenment
Original Sin:
The concept of original sin has it that, in a word, man is no damn good. I agree: but also note that churches nevertheless use this and other truths as a misdirection. While the gulls are pondering the accusation, considering the evidence, the priests waltz right by as though they're exempt!
If man is no damn good, how can a church, made up of men, be any better? Oh, because the church has a direct line to God!
Horse petuties.
Enlightenment:
The history of Christianity is the history of men trying to get around this central axiom of original sin. The Renaissance so much as said, Ah! We've found Aristotle now: and Plato. Now that we've read both the Bible and Ovid, it's different.
Not satisfied with the wiggles of the Renaissance, we then had the Enlightenment! Men could order their own affairs: if only we got rid of the Church! Then: men could order their own affairs: if only we got rid of the King!
Then the Communists wanted to get rid of the Capitalists. The President wants to get rid of terrorists. Now pk is ready to get rid of Congress.
But pk believes that it still wouldn't work.
Man again might be a nice species if only we could go back to the savanna of two million years ago and run around in small numbers!
If God came, in person, swept church, king, and democracy aside, and said, From now on you will do only, and exactly, what I say, pk might still be ready to try to get rid of God.
The concept of original sin has it that, in a word, man is no damn good. I agree: but also note that churches nevertheless use this and other truths as a misdirection. While the gulls are pondering the accusation, considering the evidence, the priests waltz right by as though they're exempt!
If man is no damn good, how can a church, made up of men, be any better? Oh, because the church has a direct line to God!
Horse petuties.
Enlightenment:
The history of Christianity is the history of men trying to get around this central axiom of original sin. The Renaissance so much as said, Ah! We've found Aristotle now: and Plato. Now that we've read both the Bible and Ovid, it's different.
Not satisfied with the wiggles of the Renaissance, we then had the Enlightenment! Men could order their own affairs: if only we got rid of the Church! Then: men could order their own affairs: if only we got rid of the King!
Then the Communists wanted to get rid of the Capitalists. The President wants to get rid of terrorists. Now pk is ready to get rid of Congress.
But pk believes that it still wouldn't work.
Man again might be a nice species if only we could go back to the savanna of two million years ago and run around in small numbers!
If God came, in person, swept church, king, and democracy aside, and said, From now on you will do only, and exactly, what I say, pk might still be ready to try to get rid of God.
Thirty: Under or Over
Anyone under thirty is too ignorant to understand a single one of the implications of a single one of my theses; anyone over thirty is too old, slow ... satisfied, corrupt, chicken.
And being thirty exactly is too fleeting. A nanosecond is too long for exactness. (Is time continuous? or does it come in quanta?)
Either way, time itself is inadequate to send, receive, or assimilate a single complex idea.
And being thirty exactly is too fleeting. A nanosecond is too long for exactness. (Is time continuous? or does it come in quanta?)
Either way, time itself is inadequate to send, receive, or assimilate a single complex idea.
Intelligible
I have never had an intelligible discussion of any of my theses with anyone connected with a university.
I am not sure that any of my theses can be presented with mutual intelligibility to anyone connected with a university: or a church: or the human species.
On the other hand, I have never had an intelligible discussion with a god either, or a devil. Or anyone not connected with a church or a university.
I am not sure that any of my theses can be presented with mutual intelligibility to anyone connected with a university: or a church: or the human species.
On the other hand, I have never had an intelligible discussion with a god either, or a devil. Or anyone not connected with a church or a university.
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Saturday, February 19, 2005
Cain and Abel
Cain and Abel are not primary symbols at Knatz.com. they are however important secondary symbols, and, since I just used Genesis with its Adam and Eve in a slightly new way, I'll also update a twist on Cain and Abel. pk has already repeated the point that since Cain was a herdman and Abel a tiller of the ground, the "brothers" symbolize agriculture overwhelming nomadism, but with the symbols backwards: this herd follower may have murdered that farmer; but it was not herding that destroyed farming; quite the opposite: farming destroyed herding: consumed the habitat, replaced free herds with domesticated beasts, tethered or caged.
That point had been made by Isaac Asimov to name only one synthesizer to deal with these issues. What I am about to add about Cain and Abel is original pk this 2005 Saturday, February 19.
God created Adam: in his own image no less. We associate creativity with God, and intelligence, sentience ... goodness. Therefore we may associate those qualities with man. That is, we already associated those qualities with men (with whatever degree of justification) and therefore we projected them onto god with a capital G. God embodies those attributes in the purest possible form ... and we let our imaginations run wild. So far, I can buy into that view with only moderate raspberry blowing.
Then God created Eve: from Adam's rib.
Zero becomes one. (Zero already was "one": therefore 1 = 0 + 1.) Now one becomes two. (God + world includes God, male, and female – God: Adam / Eve.) This is already a very different world from just zero: God alone, no world. This is also a very different world from God alone with just Adam (and Adam just alone) (except for God.) I'm not getting into gender in this post, so we proceed: Eve bore Cain and Abel. One world: one man, one woman, two brothers. Ah, a family. A society! Chaos is come again.
God made the world from chaos: and chaos remade itself: immediately: parading as Order.
Cain slew Abel. Et cetera.
How's that for brotherhood. Fraternity, equality ... what can any of that mean?
A side word: None of these myths make for very good science. We need more of biology than "Adam and Eve." We need more of cosmology than "In the beginning, God." But never mind; we have fairly good biology, good evolution, and fairly good cosmology, fairly good and improving theories of chaos, gender, multi-body problems ... My point is to exploit how rich (how open, how readable the myth is.
God and man is vastly more complex than just God. Indeed, how complex would one find God without man? (How do you like that "one" thinking in nothing?) Male and female is vastly vastly more complex than biology without sex. And once they breed: watch out: Flatland just exploded into M Theory. Especially once the breed interacts, takes, spoils each other's resources, crowds their turf.
Actually, Flatland just exploded into M Theory with Darwin, Freud ... Leary, Wilson, Diamond ... as exponents.
That point had been made by Isaac Asimov to name only one synthesizer to deal with these issues. What I am about to add about Cain and Abel is original pk this 2005 Saturday, February 19.
God created Adam: in his own image no less. We associate creativity with God, and intelligence, sentience ... goodness. Therefore we may associate those qualities with man. That is, we already associated those qualities with men (with whatever degree of justification) and therefore we projected them onto god with a capital G. God embodies those attributes in the purest possible form ... and we let our imaginations run wild. So far, I can buy into that view with only moderate raspberry blowing.
Then God created Eve: from Adam's rib.
Zero becomes one. (Zero already was "one": therefore 1 = 0 + 1.) Now one becomes two. (God + world includes God, male, and female – God: Adam / Eve.) This is already a very different world from just zero: God alone, no world. This is also a very different world from God alone with just Adam (and Adam just alone) (except for God.) I'm not getting into gender in this post, so we proceed: Eve bore Cain and Abel. One world: one man, one woman, two brothers. Ah, a family. A society! Chaos is come again.
God made the world from chaos: and chaos remade itself: immediately: parading as Order.
Cain slew Abel. Et cetera.
How's that for brotherhood. Fraternity, equality ... what can any of that mean?
A side word: None of these myths make for very good science. We need more of biology than "Adam and Eve." We need more of cosmology than "In the beginning, God." But never mind; we have fairly good biology, good evolution, and fairly good cosmology, fairly good and improving theories of chaos, gender, multi-body problems ... My point is to exploit how rich (how open, how readable the myth is.
God and man is vastly more complex than just God. Indeed, how complex would one find God without man? (How do you like that "one" thinking in nothing?) Male and female is vastly vastly more complex than biology without sex. And once they breed: watch out: Flatland just exploded into M Theory. Especially once the breed interacts, takes, spoils each other's resources, crowds their turf.
Actually, Flatland just exploded into M Theory with Darwin, Freud ... Leary, Wilson, Diamond ... as exponents.
God: God as Foolable
Fundamental pk Symbols: God
Specifically: God as Foolable
However short the list of fundamental pk symbols, god must be on it.
It's a dangerous symbol: both perishable and flammable. Perhaps more than any other symbol, it's the one guaranteed to paralyze semiotic and semantic distinctions: the speaker says "map"; the hearer thinks "territory."
I'll try to illustrate that latter point by substituting a synonym: truth. Truth is a word: the meaning of the word is not a word. Some of us have a knee-jerk reflex to reify that particular symbol – "god": and also to capitalize it.
pk tries to be careful to distinguish, phonemically as it were, between lower case god and upper case God. in pk parlance, upper case God is the god who agrees to be fooled by the particular culture of the symbol user.
Genesis tells of God making the world: finally, Adam; then Eve. The narrative immediately skips to Eve's disobedience: and to Adam's backing her up. Are we going to be loyal to the Creator? Or to this woman: the place our penis fits? To the woman! Of course.
It's so funny. lower case god has nothing to do with obedience; for upper case God, it's his whole shtick. And in the story of upper case God (that is, in our story), disobedience is the very first thing we emphasize. (This is a pattern that appears again and again in our culture. To use a English major's example, the most famous early line of iambic pentameter in English begins not with an iamb but a trochee.) (Violate the cadence before you've established it.) (This basic information, this initial difference, will thereafter be invisible to the culture.)
There! You see? It's impossible to deal with so basic a symbol without spinning off away from it: like trying to swat a fly with your palm, or trying to pick a micron of fluff out of water with your fingers.
god may be a whole but we can only talk of god in facets: one, or perhaps two, at a time.
And the facet I wish to spin on a bit today relates to uppercase God and to what happened next in Genesis. God makes the world, God makes man, then woman. God gives the man rules. The woman disobeys them. And man backs the woman. Pussy is more important than rules, than truth, than God. Pussy is at least man's preference.
And then: God walks in the cool of the evening. And Adam and Eve hide from God.
Does the God who just created the world really not see them? or is he just pretending?
That's a trivial question – for man – because it's not about pussy. Nevertheless it's the theme I want to follow here. Skip a bit: Cain, Abel (I'm come back to them next) ... Noah, Abraham ... The Covenant! Isaac ... Old men, funny marriages, and the passing of the Covenant. Primogeniture. Esau the eldest ... but mommy favors Jacob. Mommy and Jacob fool Isaac ...
And God (seems to) agree(s) to the fooling!
The rule giver can't find Adam when he's hiding. And the rule giver assists the fudging of the rules so that usurpers can commandeer the Covenant. No wonder God is the god of civilization!
One additional perspective on that spin: It's the characteristic of any theist culture to see that handling by Nazis contaminates evidence, but that handling by our cops is necessary.
At God's Judgment, the ascendant Church will determine who goes to heaven. God's angels will be indistinguishable from the human priests: or from the FBI. Which is why at god's judgment, all evidence contaminated by God will have to be thrown out.
Oh, goody. You mean if we contaminate all the evidence, then we can never be convicted? No. I mean the evidence will have to be decontaminated. Or: merely shown to be contaminated.
Scientists use dyes, injected or ingested, to reveal this or that virus, this or that cell type, to their instruments. Maybe God is a dye used by god. And maybe hell is the disinfecting process. Maybe real life will begin after eternity!
In fact maybe heaven is a place to put evidence so contaminated it can't be disinfected!
Specifically: God as Foolable
However short the list of fundamental pk symbols, god must be on it.
It's a dangerous symbol: both perishable and flammable. Perhaps more than any other symbol, it's the one guaranteed to paralyze semiotic and semantic distinctions: the speaker says "map"; the hearer thinks "territory."
I'll try to illustrate that latter point by substituting a synonym: truth. Truth is a word: the meaning of the word is not a word. Some of us have a knee-jerk reflex to reify that particular symbol – "god": and also to capitalize it.
pk tries to be careful to distinguish, phonemically as it were, between lower case god and upper case God. in pk parlance, upper case God is the god who agrees to be fooled by the particular culture of the symbol user.
Genesis tells of God making the world: finally, Adam; then Eve. The narrative immediately skips to Eve's disobedience: and to Adam's backing her up. Are we going to be loyal to the Creator? Or to this woman: the place our penis fits? To the woman! Of course.
It's so funny. lower case god has nothing to do with obedience; for upper case God, it's his whole shtick. And in the story of upper case God (that is, in our story), disobedience is the very first thing we emphasize. (This is a pattern that appears again and again in our culture. To use a English major's example, the most famous early line of iambic pentameter in English begins not with an iamb but a trochee.) (Violate the cadence before you've established it.) (This basic information, this initial difference, will thereafter be invisible to the culture.)
There! You see? It's impossible to deal with so basic a symbol without spinning off away from it: like trying to swat a fly with your palm, or trying to pick a micron of fluff out of water with your fingers.
god may be a whole but we can only talk of god in facets: one, or perhaps two, at a time.
And the facet I wish to spin on a bit today relates to uppercase God and to what happened next in Genesis. God makes the world, God makes man, then woman. God gives the man rules. The woman disobeys them. And man backs the woman. Pussy is more important than rules, than truth, than God. Pussy is at least man's preference.
And then: God walks in the cool of the evening. And Adam and Eve hide from God.
Does the God who just created the world really not see them? or is he just pretending?
That's a trivial question – for man – because it's not about pussy. Nevertheless it's the theme I want to follow here. Skip a bit: Cain, Abel (I'm come back to them next) ... Noah, Abraham ... The Covenant! Isaac ... Old men, funny marriages, and the passing of the Covenant. Primogeniture. Esau the eldest ... but mommy favors Jacob. Mommy and Jacob fool Isaac ...
And God (seems to) agree(s) to the fooling!
The rule giver can't find Adam when he's hiding. And the rule giver assists the fudging of the rules so that usurpers can commandeer the Covenant. No wonder God is the god of civilization!
One additional perspective on that spin: It's the characteristic of any theist culture to see that handling by Nazis contaminates evidence, but that handling by our cops is necessary.
At God's Judgment, the ascendant Church will determine who goes to heaven. God's angels will be indistinguishable from the human priests: or from the FBI. Which is why at god's judgment, all evidence contaminated by God will have to be thrown out.
Oh, goody. You mean if we contaminate all the evidence, then we can never be convicted? No. I mean the evidence will have to be decontaminated. Or: merely shown to be contaminated.
Scientists use dyes, injected or ingested, to reveal this or that virus, this or that cell type, to their instruments. Maybe God is a dye used by god. And maybe hell is the disinfecting process. Maybe real life will begin after eternity!
In fact maybe heaven is a place to put evidence so contaminated it can't be disinfected!
Sunday, February 13, 2005
Jesus
The word, name, symbol, man, god ... Jesus is at the core of the core of pk symbols. So simple sounding, its complexity is maximal, by now, its macroinformation near infinite.
Jesus is a core symbol for the culture: Jesus is a core symbol for pk: but pk must point out that pk's usages may overlap but do not often match the usages of the culture.
Jesus probably was, but we can't absolutely prove, a real man, living in an actual time and place. The history is hearsay: a perfect testing ground for faith. But what we mean by "Jesus" doesn't altogether depend on facts historically verifiable. It's the story which is the source of the meaning.
I deliberately simplify: Jesus was a good man (whether or not that's an oxymoron). He meant well. Jesus was a carpenter (read a man of the people: blue collar): Jesus was also a scholar (all Jews are scholars) – he wowed the rabbis at age twelve, pissed them off when he got even smarter. Jesus was a teacher. (I don't mean like Miss Tilly @ PS 417; I mean like Socrates.) A jillion other attributes have been poured onto "Jesus": the son of God, the Christ, the good shepherd ... And what kind of a healer Jesus was is way-open to question: curing the lame? raising the dead?
The attributes get in the way. Lop them off: Jesus was a good man –
too good for his society!
So we killed him. The Church killed him. The government killed him. The law killed him.
We didn't just kill him, we tortured him to death: stripped his flesh off, nailed him upright into the most awkward position we could devise, then threw rotten tomatoes at him.
The two most legalistic states of the day, Rome and Israel, cooperated (!) to get rid of him.
Rulers don't like leaders: especially not leaders who out-lead them. (It's rulers, not leaders, who put people in jail, tax them, school them, draft them.)
Christianity sells Jesus as some sort of proof that God loves us. God knows what we are, and loves us anyway. He watched us execute our best so he could forgive us: give us infinite joy for all the remainder of eternity.
That's a stretch. But the basic story – a good man happens, we kill him, we eat him, we drink his blood ... Once he's safely dead, we worship him ... – that strikes me as as accurate a portrayal of human society as we have. It's more true than either fiction or fact.
The ironies, the macroinformation, are endlessly rich: God sends us a message, we don't get it. Then we form a new church and say we did get it: we'll now speak for God.
Christians are different from Jews, from Romans? No, Christians are (almost) exactly the same.
Once again, the story hangs, regardless of the factual accuracy of some of the details. Some huge proportion of the words could be garbled. Some huge proportion could have been, no doubt was, edited for propaganda. Maybe the historical Jesus was actually a charlatan, didn't heal anybody. But then some other man was good, wasn't a charlatan, got tortured for his trouble. Maybe his name was also Jesus. The Jesus side of the equation may have a few IFs but the human society side is bang on. The story still hangs.
I can (and do) go on and on. But that's as close to a nutshell as I can put "what Jesus means to pk."
Jesus is a core symbol for the culture: Jesus is a core symbol for pk: but pk must point out that pk's usages may overlap but do not often match the usages of the culture.
Jesus probably was, but we can't absolutely prove, a real man, living in an actual time and place. The history is hearsay: a perfect testing ground for faith. But what we mean by "Jesus" doesn't altogether depend on facts historically verifiable. It's the story which is the source of the meaning.
I deliberately simplify: Jesus was a good man (whether or not that's an oxymoron). He meant well. Jesus was a carpenter (read a man of the people: blue collar): Jesus was also a scholar (all Jews are scholars) – he wowed the rabbis at age twelve, pissed them off when he got even smarter. Jesus was a teacher. (I don't mean like Miss Tilly @ PS 417; I mean like Socrates.) A jillion other attributes have been poured onto "Jesus": the son of God, the Christ, the good shepherd ... And what kind of a healer Jesus was is way-open to question: curing the lame? raising the dead?
The attributes get in the way. Lop them off: Jesus was a good man –
So we killed him. The Church killed him. The government killed him. The law killed him.
We didn't just kill him, we tortured him to death: stripped his flesh off, nailed him upright into the most awkward position we could devise, then threw rotten tomatoes at him.
The two most legalistic states of the day, Rome and Israel, cooperated (!) to get rid of him.
Rulers don't like leaders: especially not leaders who out-lead them. (It's rulers, not leaders, who put people in jail, tax them, school them, draft them.)
Christianity sells Jesus as some sort of proof that God loves us. God knows what we are, and loves us anyway. He watched us execute our best so he could forgive us: give us infinite joy for all the remainder of eternity.
That's a stretch. But the basic story – a good man happens, we kill him, we eat him, we drink his blood ... Once he's safely dead, we worship him ... – that strikes me as as accurate a portrayal of human society as we have. It's more true than either fiction or fact.
The ironies, the macroinformation, are endlessly rich: God sends us a message, we don't get it. Then we form a new church and say we did get it: we'll now speak for God.
Christians are different from Jews, from Romans? No, Christians are (almost) exactly the same.
Once again, the story hangs, regardless of the factual accuracy of some of the details. Some huge proportion of the words could be garbled. Some huge proportion could have been, no doubt was, edited for propaganda. Maybe the historical Jesus was actually a charlatan, didn't heal anybody. But then some other man was good, wasn't a charlatan, got tortured for his trouble. Maybe his name was also Jesus. The Jesus side of the equation may have a few IFs but the human society side is bang on. The story still hangs.
I can (and do) go on and on. But that's as close to a nutshell as I can put "what Jesus means to pk."
Saturday, February 12, 2005
pk Symbols
A language is a system for manipulating symbols and signs so that the group using the symbols can communicate with some degree of success. Grammar is distinct from vocabulary.
A published grammar may attempt to map the rules; a published dictionary may attempt to map individuated symbols as words, phrases ...
Each user within the group will have shis own ideolect: individuated grammar and vocabulary. He says "ain't"; she doesn't. Barbara means no by "no"; Susan means yes; no one can figure out what Gertrude means. When Shakespeare uses a term it's a fair bet that his meaning matches the average; when Shakespeare's Dogberry uses a term, you have to use the context to guess the meaning. And it's not just Shakespeare or Dogberry: "propagating allegories on the banks of the Nile."
Any family will have its own vocabulary (and to some extent its own grammar). I can't imagine any dialogue between pk and bk to be more than fractionally intelligible to any bystander. But, the more of it they hear, the more of it they may guess at (and, if they ask, we'll probably explain: at length). When Newton talked of gravity he did not mean what his neighbors meant. When Einstein talked of gravity he did not mean what Newton meant. When M theorists talk of gravity they do not mean what Einstein meant.
That series suggests a positive progression of ideas. Sometimes we do get somewhere; but it's not guaranteed. Sometimes we fall into chaos. pk tries to be progressive: sometimes; but negative progressions are not unfamiliar to me.
pk's domains mix Standard Written English with pk ideolect in varying degrees. Macroinformation.org is the closest to the former, but, introducing new ideas, new syntheses, MUST depart from some standards, hopefully superceding them. Knatz.com indulges in much more of the latter; but: pk labors to explain his symbols, especially where he is aware that they will NOT be found in dictionaries or encyclopedias.
Today it occurs to me to launch a new section at Knatz.com labeling and explaining pk symbols: one at a time. Time will tell how far I get, how well I do. (In sixty-six years, the bulk of which have been devoted to communication, some persons have sometimes understood somewhat of what I say; though never enough to form a quorum.
I intend to use my Iona Arc blog to initiate some of these exegeses, maturing them at K.
There. Right there. K.: an abbreviation of kdot: which is an abbreviation of Knatz.com: as mi is an abbreviation of macroinformation, as Mi is an abbreviation of Macroinformation.org, as PIm is an abbreviation of PKImaging.com (as FLEX is an abbreviation for the Free Learning Exchange, Inc.) (as the Free Learning Exchange is a symbol for the never-yet-realized collection and regurging of all public information: uncensored, unselected, unmanaged: without licenses).
2005 02 19 I note that I've now launched posts on Jesus, God, and Cain & Abel: all familiar Knatz.com / pk symbols. They're all biblical: in origin, if not in how I use them. But the visitor to pk domains should recognize that that's one of several sets of basic symbols. Similarly important if not more important are my symbols from science: and note that I use them too as metaphor: homeostasis, semiotics, extension, information, potential difference ...
2005 07 05 I'll organize and develop these symbol maps further in my Teaching directory at Knatz.com: pk Symbols.
A published grammar may attempt to map the rules; a published dictionary may attempt to map individuated symbols as words, phrases ...
Each user within the group will have shis own ideolect: individuated grammar and vocabulary. He says "ain't"; she doesn't. Barbara means no by "no"; Susan means yes; no one can figure out what Gertrude means. When Shakespeare uses a term it's a fair bet that his meaning matches the average; when Shakespeare's Dogberry uses a term, you have to use the context to guess the meaning. And it's not just Shakespeare or Dogberry: "propagating allegories on the banks of the Nile."
Any family will have its own vocabulary (and to some extent its own grammar). I can't imagine any dialogue between pk and bk to be more than fractionally intelligible to any bystander. But, the more of it they hear, the more of it they may guess at (and, if they ask, we'll probably explain: at length). When Newton talked of gravity he did not mean what his neighbors meant. When Einstein talked of gravity he did not mean what Newton meant. When M theorists talk of gravity they do not mean what Einstein meant.
That series suggests a positive progression of ideas. Sometimes we do get somewhere; but it's not guaranteed. Sometimes we fall into chaos. pk tries to be progressive: sometimes; but negative progressions are not unfamiliar to me.
pk's domains mix Standard Written English with pk ideolect in varying degrees. Macroinformation.org is the closest to the former, but, introducing new ideas, new syntheses, MUST depart from some standards, hopefully superceding them. Knatz.com indulges in much more of the latter; but: pk labors to explain his symbols, especially where he is aware that they will NOT be found in dictionaries or encyclopedias.
Today it occurs to me to launch a new section at Knatz.com labeling and explaining pk symbols: one at a time. Time will tell how far I get, how well I do. (In sixty-six years, the bulk of which have been devoted to communication, some persons have sometimes understood somewhat of what I say; though never enough to form a quorum.
I intend to use my Iona Arc blog to initiate some of these exegeses, maturing them at K.
There. Right there. K.: an abbreviation of kdot: which is an abbreviation of Knatz.com: as mi is an abbreviation of macroinformation, as Mi is an abbreviation of Macroinformation.org, as PIm is an abbreviation of PKImaging.com (as FLEX is an abbreviation for the Free Learning Exchange, Inc.) (as the Free Learning Exchange is a symbol for the never-yet-realized collection and regurging of all public information: uncensored, unselected, unmanaged: without licenses).
2005 02 19 I note that I've now launched posts on Jesus, God, and Cain & Abel: all familiar Knatz.com / pk symbols. They're all biblical: in origin, if not in how I use them. But the visitor to pk domains should recognize that that's one of several sets of basic symbols. Similarly important if not more important are my symbols from science: and note that I use them too as metaphor: homeostasis, semiotics, extension, information, potential difference ...
2005 07 05 I'll organize and develop these symbol maps further in my Teaching directory at Knatz.com: pk Symbols.
Iron Mountain Logic
Iron Mountain Logic: Loading your Keystone Fallacy into your First Axiom.
(If you don't buy the premise, you are not bound by the argument.)
Iron Mountain is an important symbol in pk thinking and writing. The pk context for it is introduced in several places at Knatz.com. (A search from any page should find them.) Today I come at the symbol fresh, to christen my new resolve to form a pk lexicon at Knatz.com, sketching the new entries here at Iona Arc.
Ah, but pk uses stories to explain things.
Sometime in the mid-1970s a girl friend / voluntary secretary handed me a book: The Iron Mountain Report. Ginny asked me to glance at it and tell her what I thought. Then and there I started to read the first paragraph: and burst out laughing.
Complex emotions played over Ginny's face. She wanted me to explain to her what I thought was funny. I wanted to read a little bit further: before I made an ass out of myself. I wasn't sure I could explain it to her: not without giving her a liberal education that would take years: after taking perhaps decades to deprogram her existing education: IF she was qualified for any part of the process. (My friendship with Ginny was based neither on common culture nor on intellect.)
I judged that Ginny wanted me to explain it to her in a sentence or two: and, without having actually read the book. It turned out that Ginny couldn't lend me the book for more than a few minutes. It was a text for some class. (I hadn't known she was taking a class. Ginny may not have wanted to share such chitchat with the deschooler.) The teacher had assigned it. The class was enraged by the book. The teacher had explained to the class that The Iron Mountain Report was a satire: it was supposed to be funny. No one in the class had found it anything close to funny.
Ginny had seen in an instant that pk responded to it as funny. How come I did: and she and her class didn't? (Had her teacher thought it was funny?)
Once upon a time at Columbia Lionel Trilling had told us juniors that one must read a book all the way through, right to the last word of the last sentence of the last paragraph, before believing oneself qualified to begin to judge it. Now don't think for a minute that pk had ever not thought that. Still it was a funny thing for a Columbia professor to say: given that Trilling assigned Homer for Monday, the Bible for Wednesday, and Thomas Mann and Sir James Frazer for Friday: to students whose other professors had assigned Western Culture to freshman, the Greeks, Romans, and Renaissance to sophomores, and physics, chemistry, and mathematics to both. Can anyone possibly be admitted to an Ivy League school without having written more papers on books they haven't read than papers on books they have? Has any teacher in the school (and university) system ever not taught a subject they didn't know, assigned a book they hadn't read? Spent a lifetime reading reviews by reviewers who also hadn't read the book? by columnists whose deadlines were always scheduled before the game was over?
Once in graduate school I commented to a study group on the importance of improvising, agreed to show them how it was done. Milton is a major poet. Still, I had at that date read only two of his sonnets. I ID'd them and told them to assign me any other Milton sonnet and I would on the spot orate a finals essay on it. A glance showed me that it was about water and fertility. I improvised something kin to my present Centers, Edges & Borders essay. One guy who was kneeling at my side when I began commented as I concluded that staying on his knees was appropriate as a homage to my performance. Secondary conclusion: I was bullshitting; but I was bullshitting well. Primary conclusion: I don't believe in bullshitting, nearly everything is already bullshit. I believe in judgments based in actual considered experience, not in lies and postures.
Thus: I tell you as close to the outset as I can meaningfully fit it: I have never read more than a few of the opening sentences of The Iron Mountain Report. And I haven't read those sentences but the one time, three decades ago. I have no business judging that work. I am not judging it. I don't say that my impression is correct. I am telling you what my impression was. What the nearsighted person thinks they're looking at without their glasses on is legitimate data; it is not a variorum view of the thing under consideration. What pk says is not necessarily THE Iron Mountain; it is, avowedly pk's Iron Mountain. (I would like to find time to locate and read the book some day: and then to macroinformationally compare my remembered first impression with my considered, legitimate, then-formed impression.)
Meantime, here's what I remember: close to its top, The Iron Mountain Report said something like Since nothing is more important than that the American way of life be preserved ... therefore, we must be prepared to think about the unthinkable, stockpile nuclear weapons ... defeat Communism. ...
The logic seemed unassailable. Ginny and her classmates wanted to assail it, but couldn't. The logic lassoed and hogtied them. They weren't comfortable, but they were bound. Whereas the lasso missed pk. I don't buy the premise, therefore, I am not bound by the argument.
Should anything be more familiar to civilized man than Iron Mountain logic?
IF you buy the Jew's God, Therefore you have bought that the Jews are Chosen.
IF you buy that Jesus is really CHRIST, and that Christ is really God, Therefore the Jews' Chosenness loses its capital C and Christians are Chosen.
IF you buy that Christians are Chosen, Therefore English colonists really owned the Iroquois territories ... American democracy is really more democratic than the Iroquois Great Law ... and we don't owe anything for our thefts, our plagiarisms ...
SINCE nothing is better than US ... Therefore whatever we do is justified.
Ginny, I hope you're well. I hope you find and read this. And I apologize for not trying better to answer your question back when.
OK, that's a start. Iron Mountain logic is not the most important pk symbol; it's merely the one I had in mind when it occurred to me to launch a collection of symbols. Now I'll try some truly core symbols. Jesus comes next.
(If you don't buy the premise, you are not bound by the argument.)
Iron Mountain is an important symbol in pk thinking and writing. The pk context for it is introduced in several places at Knatz.com. (A search from any page should find them.) Today I come at the symbol fresh, to christen my new resolve to form a pk lexicon at Knatz.com, sketching the new entries here at Iona Arc.
Ah, but pk uses stories to explain things.
Sometime in the mid-1970s a girl friend / voluntary secretary handed me a book: The Iron Mountain Report. Ginny asked me to glance at it and tell her what I thought. Then and there I started to read the first paragraph: and burst out laughing.
Complex emotions played over Ginny's face. She wanted me to explain to her what I thought was funny. I wanted to read a little bit further: before I made an ass out of myself. I wasn't sure I could explain it to her: not without giving her a liberal education that would take years: after taking perhaps decades to deprogram her existing education: IF she was qualified for any part of the process. (My friendship with Ginny was based neither on common culture nor on intellect.)
I judged that Ginny wanted me to explain it to her in a sentence or two: and, without having actually read the book. It turned out that Ginny couldn't lend me the book for more than a few minutes. It was a text for some class. (I hadn't known she was taking a class. Ginny may not have wanted to share such chitchat with the deschooler.) The teacher had assigned it. The class was enraged by the book. The teacher had explained to the class that The Iron Mountain Report was a satire: it was supposed to be funny. No one in the class had found it anything close to funny.
Ginny had seen in an instant that pk responded to it as funny. How come I did: and she and her class didn't? (Had her teacher thought it was funny?)
Once upon a time at Columbia Lionel Trilling had told us juniors that one must read a book all the way through, right to the last word of the last sentence of the last paragraph, before believing oneself qualified to begin to judge it. Now don't think for a minute that pk had ever not thought that. Still it was a funny thing for a Columbia professor to say: given that Trilling assigned Homer for Monday, the Bible for Wednesday, and Thomas Mann and Sir James Frazer for Friday: to students whose other professors had assigned Western Culture to freshman, the Greeks, Romans, and Renaissance to sophomores, and physics, chemistry, and mathematics to both. Can anyone possibly be admitted to an Ivy League school without having written more papers on books they haven't read than papers on books they have? Has any teacher in the school (and university) system ever not taught a subject they didn't know, assigned a book they hadn't read? Spent a lifetime reading reviews by reviewers who also hadn't read the book? by columnists whose deadlines were always scheduled before the game was over?
Once in graduate school I commented to a study group on the importance of improvising, agreed to show them how it was done. Milton is a major poet. Still, I had at that date read only two of his sonnets. I ID'd them and told them to assign me any other Milton sonnet and I would on the spot orate a finals essay on it. A glance showed me that it was about water and fertility. I improvised something kin to my present Centers, Edges & Borders essay. One guy who was kneeling at my side when I began commented as I concluded that staying on his knees was appropriate as a homage to my performance. Secondary conclusion: I was bullshitting; but I was bullshitting well. Primary conclusion: I don't believe in bullshitting, nearly everything is already bullshit. I believe in judgments based in actual considered experience, not in lies and postures.
Thus: I tell you as close to the outset as I can meaningfully fit it: I have never read more than a few of the opening sentences of The Iron Mountain Report. And I haven't read those sentences but the one time, three decades ago. I have no business judging that work. I am not judging it. I don't say that my impression is correct. I am telling you what my impression was. What the nearsighted person thinks they're looking at without their glasses on is legitimate data; it is not a variorum view of the thing under consideration. What pk says is not necessarily THE Iron Mountain; it is, avowedly pk's Iron Mountain. (I would like to find time to locate and read the book some day: and then to macroinformationally compare my remembered first impression with my considered, legitimate, then-formed impression.)
Meantime, here's what I remember: close to its top, The Iron Mountain Report said something like Since nothing is more important than that the American way of life be preserved ... therefore, we must be prepared to think about the unthinkable, stockpile nuclear weapons ... defeat Communism. ...
The logic seemed unassailable. Ginny and her classmates wanted to assail it, but couldn't. The logic lassoed and hogtied them. They weren't comfortable, but they were bound. Whereas the lasso missed pk. I don't buy the premise, therefore, I am not bound by the argument.
Should anything be more familiar to civilized man than Iron Mountain logic?
IF you buy the Jew's God, Therefore you have bought that the Jews are Chosen.
IF you buy that Jesus is really CHRIST, and that Christ is really God, Therefore the Jews' Chosenness loses its capital C and Christians are Chosen.
IF you buy that Christians are Chosen, Therefore English colonists really owned the Iroquois territories ... American democracy is really more democratic than the Iroquois Great Law ... and we don't owe anything for our thefts, our plagiarisms ...
SINCE nothing is better than US ... Therefore whatever we do is justified.
Ginny, I hope you're well. I hope you find and read this. And I apologize for not trying better to answer your question back when.
OK, that's a start. Iron Mountain logic is not the most important pk symbol; it's merely the one I had in mind when it occurred to me to launch a collection of symbols. Now I'll try some truly core symbols. Jesus comes next.
Thursday, February 10, 2005
Iona Arc
Iona: as in the Celtic monasteries resisting the destruction of records in the Dark Ages,
Arc: as in Noah's Ark,
Arc: as in any -- ahem -- sacred ark: trying to preserve some value from imminent destruction.
Arc: as in Ivan Illich's "arc of mankind." ...
bk started the pk blog for me: http://macroinformation.blogspot.com/; kicking me into the water as it were. Ah, perfect for quick notes associated with [my deposed] Macroinformation.org! But of course I used it to post Knatz.com type burbling [likewise deposed], called it IonaArc without changing the URL. Now I've changed it back and created this new IonaArc blog. At my leisure I'll move previous posts here, reserving Macroinformation for macroinformation.
2005 03 14 I've just corrected a dozen misspellings of "ark" around Knatz.com and [likewise deposed] InfoAll.org. pk is not a stickler for spelling. For Iona Arc, I don't mind feeling slightly stuck, because I don't mind any ambiguities it might suggest: especially ambiguities suggesting anARChism! Accidents can be good.
Note further: Iona is geographically located on the west coast of Scotland but is strongly associated with specifically Irish monasteries.
This note originated before the fed censored my AgainstHierarchy.org which act cascaded the destruction of all my domains. The parole board threatens me if I remount my domains, so all I have left, temporarily I hope, are my blogs.
Actually, Google has cooperated, probably unwittingly, and censored some of my blog material: a couple of hundred posts, some epistemological, some sexual: but my original blogs don't seem yet to have been tampered with.
2011 07 09 PKnatz blog is now my coordinator for my federally censored domains. I've been moving other blog posts there, the blogs remaining only as a redirect. For IonaArc, I leave the posts here but add them, one at a time, to the menus there. Thus PKnatz becomes the virtual Knatz.com-Macroinformation.org, InfoAll.org ... and AgainstHierarchy.org.
Arc: as in Noah's Ark,
Arc: as in any -- ahem -- sacred ark: trying to preserve some value from imminent destruction.
Arc: as in Ivan Illich's "arc of mankind." ...
bk started the pk blog for me: http://macroinformation.blogspot.com/; kicking me into the water as it were. Ah, perfect for quick notes associated with [my deposed] Macroinformation.org! But of course I used it to post Knatz.com type burbling [likewise deposed], called it IonaArc without changing the URL. Now I've changed it back and created this new IonaArc blog. At my leisure I'll move previous posts here, reserving Macroinformation for macroinformation.
2005 03 14 I've just corrected a dozen misspellings of "ark" around Knatz.com and [likewise deposed] InfoAll.org. pk is not a stickler for spelling. For Iona Arc, I don't mind feeling slightly stuck, because I don't mind any ambiguities it might suggest: especially ambiguities suggesting anARChism! Accidents can be good.
Note further: Iona is geographically located on the west coast of Scotland but is strongly associated with specifically Irish monasteries.
This note originated before the fed censored my AgainstHierarchy.org which act cascaded the destruction of all my domains. The parole board threatens me if I remount my domains, so all I have left, temporarily I hope, are my blogs.
Actually, Google has cooperated, probably unwittingly, and censored some of my blog material: a couple of hundred posts, some epistemological, some sexual: but my original blogs don't seem yet to have been tampered with.
2011 07 09 PKnatz blog is now my coordinator for my federally censored domains. I've been moving other blog posts there, the blogs remaining only as a redirect. For IonaArc, I leave the posts here but add them, one at a time, to the menus there. Thus PKnatz becomes the virtual Knatz.com-Macroinformation.org, InfoAll.org ... and AgainstHierarchy.org.
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Fallible Justice
The primitive asks forgiveness of the prey. I believe contemporary societies would do well to beg the indulgence of the condemned in case the jury is making a mistake. I think we should wear our fallibility on our sleeve. We know the umpire isn't infallible, we see missed line calls all the time in tennis, and on some very big points. But the game requires the call. The society needs to make judgments and get on with life; society has no business with the preposterous claim of being dignified: or just.
(Moved from macroinformation.blogspot.com)
(Moved from macroinformation.blogspot.com)
Monday, February 07, 2005
Development
The male grabs the female, willing or unwilling. Liquid squirts into moisture. The baby grabs the breast, tries to uproot the nipple with its sucking. Liquid squirts into moisture. The toddler finds something, picks it up, puts it in its mouth ... How does all this turn into "You have a right to an attorney"?
"You have a right to be here," perorated the author of "Go placidly amid the noise and haste." Well, we ARE here. What do we need a right for? And whether or not we have a right, whether or not there is such a thing as a right to have, do we therefore have a right to take diamonds from Africa, oil from the Middle East, illegal workers from Mexico ...?
Somewhere between the birth cry, the gasp for air, the grab for the nipple ... and fire bombing Dresden, napalming Vietnam, invading Iraq ... something went very wrong.
That's what my sleeping mind handed me upon waking today: not those words but that essence. (Sometimes my mind does hand me the words exact, already written, hardly in need of editing; but not today.)
The second I started to make a file of it, thing after thing went wrong. Or right: far to the right; or left -- went every-which-way. I have to talk about rights: more pk talk on the subject overdue anyway. That means I'll have to get into natural law: about which I know nothing -- and care less. No: do your Iron Mountain Report thing: point out that if you stuff your key stone fallacy into the opening axiom, they'll never be able to deflect your logic. Those who see and like the illusion will shout down any who see the reality. No wait: be sure to point out how the magicians, having gotten you to accept God, have magically slipped the Church, and priests ... congressmen, and the state through the crack.
Then I started automatically generating prose to patch older modules at Knatz.com. Sometimes I can't write because I'm writing in too many directions at once. That's why Knatz.com is the way it is: open-ended, incomplete, the road ripped up for repair before its bed extends a mile, the men working sign still blocking the road three years after the men never came back to work.
Some of what I'm hot to address today will form a module called "Development": in my Society section. Some could go into my long-neglected, never-matured module on Rights. I could tie my several Iron Mountain Report references together and link them to the God / Church thing: How dare the priest assume that because you believe in God you therefore also believe in him!?! (How dare the congregation believe that because you don't stand against God you therefore also swallow all their rubbish?)
But get this in the meantime: the initiating idea, the waking bomb, was to address development. How does I have a right to breathe turn into We have the right to cut down the forest to smelt iron, to coerce you to go to school, to determine who may immigrate, to prohibit the movements of these Americans while financing the movements of that American ...?
My main theme here transferred to and continues in my Society section as Development (as in Developed Nations).
"You have a right to be here," perorated the author of "Go placidly amid the noise and haste." Well, we ARE here. What do we need a right for? And whether or not we have a right, whether or not there is such a thing as a right to have, do we therefore have a right to take diamonds from Africa, oil from the Middle East, illegal workers from Mexico ...?
Somewhere between the birth cry, the gasp for air, the grab for the nipple ... and fire bombing Dresden, napalming Vietnam, invading Iraq ... something went very wrong.
That's what my sleeping mind handed me upon waking today: not those words but that essence. (Sometimes my mind does hand me the words exact, already written, hardly in need of editing; but not today.)
The second I started to make a file of it, thing after thing went wrong. Or right: far to the right; or left -- went every-which-way. I have to talk about rights: more pk talk on the subject overdue anyway. That means I'll have to get into natural law: about which I know nothing -- and care less. No: do your Iron Mountain Report thing: point out that if you stuff your key stone fallacy into the opening axiom, they'll never be able to deflect your logic. Those who see and like the illusion will shout down any who see the reality. No wait: be sure to point out how the magicians, having gotten you to accept God, have magically slipped the Church, and priests ... congressmen, and the state through the crack.
Then I started automatically generating prose to patch older modules at Knatz.com. Sometimes I can't write because I'm writing in too many directions at once. That's why Knatz.com is the way it is: open-ended, incomplete, the road ripped up for repair before its bed extends a mile, the men working sign still blocking the road three years after the men never came back to work.
Some of what I'm hot to address today will form a module called "Development": in my Society section. Some could go into my long-neglected, never-matured module on Rights. I could tie my several Iron Mountain Report references together and link them to the God / Church thing: How dare the priest assume that because you believe in God you therefore also believe in him!?! (How dare the congregation believe that because you don't stand against God you therefore also swallow all their rubbish?)
But get this in the meantime: the initiating idea, the waking bomb, was to address development. How does I have a right to breathe turn into We have the right to cut down the forest to smelt iron, to coerce you to go to school, to determine who may immigrate, to prohibit the movements of these Americans while financing the movements of that American ...?
My main theme here transferred to and continues in my Society section as Development (as in Developed Nations).
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
February 2005
Knatz.com:
On any day I may make dozens of changes to Knatz.com before I've had my second cup of coffee. Still, I'll attempt monthly to note significant changes. I meant to install a new Entrance: listing ways in which the assigned childhood habit of Witness for Christ became in my adulthood an urge to bear Witness against my Society is one temptation.
A new section, just roughed in, on Rules vs. Liberty should bear fruit, though at what pace I can't say.
pk's Quote section received a lot of attention, as usual.
I'll add other links as I recall them.
PKImaging.com:
Whoopee, this January I sold a commission for a 3/4 view life-size oil of one sixteen year old Mary Margaret and her horse Sage to be painted by Tom Donahue.
A couple of weeks ago a fizzled monitor cost me the better part of a week on the Mac G4. My new 19" CRT is dandy though.
As a rule pk pays little attention to calendars , but I hope I'll remember each new month from now on to post similar updates.
On any day I may make dozens of changes to Knatz.com before I've had my second cup of coffee. Still, I'll attempt monthly to note significant changes. I meant to install a new Entrance: listing ways in which the assigned childhood habit of Witness for Christ became in my adulthood an urge to bear Witness against my Society is one temptation.
A new section, just roughed in, on Rules vs. Liberty should bear fruit, though at what pace I can't say.
pk's Quote section received a lot of attention, as usual.
I'll add other links as I recall them.
PKImaging.com:
Whoopee, this January I sold a commission for a 3/4 view life-size oil of one sixteen year old Mary Margaret and her horse Sage to be painted by Tom Donahue.
A couple of weeks ago a fizzled monitor cost me the better part of a week on the Mac G4. My new 19" CRT is dandy though.
As a rule pk pays little attention to calendars , but I hope I'll remember each new month from now on to post similar updates.
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