From: "SWT" Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Pants Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2000 18:16:18 -0700 [A: Nietzsche in 90 minutes] I just read a book titled "Nietzsche in 90 minutes" from my local lending library. I HEART NIETZSCHE! It seems strange to me that I find even his less intractable passages so engaging, especially given that years ago (when I was in college and accustomed to reading reams of dense, dry academic text before breakfast) I found his writings not unappealing but simply incomprehensible. ERROR in 3360: CANNOT PARSE ILLUCID HENRY-JAMES-IAN PROSE. GO BACK TO READING "MR. TICKLE", MISTER SHORT ATTENTION SPAN. Nietzsche's aphorisms lends themselves exceptionally well to kontext-away; genuinely representative quotes like "I'm not a man, I'm dynamite" mingle with non-sequiturs like "We are not thinking frogs!", and my favorite tourism slogan "You're not dead - you're in Germany!" [B: Movie Callback Alpha] 80 minutes? NOBODY becomes an Ubermensch in 80 minutes! [C: Triumph of the Will] I was told as a child that "Will" in my name is not short for anything. (My grandfather, from whom I received my middle name, hangs up the phone on anyone asking for William). But apparently "Will" is short for "Will to Power". If only Civilization: Call to Power had been subtitled Will to Power, it would have given rise to many a hearty jest on the theme of "eternal recurrence" during the mopping-up repetitiveness of the endgame. O, ho ho! I am an Ultima III NPC, I have two frames of animation, and I say: Beware of the bridge of lava! [ 20 tons of cosmetic lava elided ] Of course, to go by strict logic: Any two self-inconsistent collections of statements are logically equivalent, because they're both fallacious. The two collections are merely two sides of the same coin - or rather, two views of an infinite wheelbarrow filled with beautiful memetic currency inflated to worthlessness. But - and here is a parallel between Nietzsche's writings and the Book of the SubGenius and, for that matter, Discordianism - it is possible to enthrone usefulness as a higher value than truth. Maybe Picasso is right, and art is the lie that lets us see the truth; but then again, maybe Nietzsche is right, and language and consciousness are lies that conceal no higher truth, but are necessary for survival. [ dissertation on the effects of mass production on levels of workplace trust omitted ] My glass-bead-game can beat up your glass-bead-game. [ insert smooth segue here...if you dare! ] "Tod" is death in German, and "TOD" is a financial TLA for "Transfer on Death". @toad is a command to destroy a MUCK object, and the Firesign Theater wrote a mock hymn about "Where do we go when we're _towed_ away". The inescapable conclusion is that you should send me all your Devo MP3s. Speaking of Tod, I'm listening to a song titled Komm Susser Tod ("come, sweet death") from Evangelion. The song has an ascendant, happy tone; a non-English-speaking listener would probably guess it is about young love in the springtime or somesuch. But the lyrics are just about as shiny and optimistic as Trent Reznor on a bad day. Somewhere out there - and ONE DAY I will FIND IT - is its sister song, some sort of macabre Bauhausian tune with lyrics about bouncing fluffy bunnies, hippity hop, hippity hop. The other musical EvilTwin I seek: Devo made a cover of Head Like a Hole, with some zany noises, and a zippy woman's voice saying "MONEY!" I want to find the Nine Inch Nails version of Whip It. (Or would that puncture the wafer-thin layer of denial over the not-so-sub text of Whip It?) [ stuff ] Truth is complicated. Even in the ivory tower of mathematical logic, where everyone is agreed on a basic set of definitions, strange things can happen. I used to picture things like this: Lay out all statements about the natural numbers on a grid. A particular set of axioms assigns a coloring to this grid - one color for false, one color for true, and so you have one big black-and-white image. (An inconsistent axiom-set makes every square toggle between colors at the resonant frequency of chicken skulls, thus sending innocent children into grand mal seizures. This is unfortunate, so let us restrict our attentions to consistent axiom-sets, and continue to use Pikachu for all our seizure-inducing needs) But even this picture will have shades of grey - the (consistent) axiom set will have some statements which are not (provably) true or false. DAMN YOU, GOEDEL! KHAAAAAN! As we exit the hallowed halls of mathematics, things will only get more complicated. For example, many people will talk about degrees of truth; they will ask how true something is in much the same way they would ask how tall it is. This comparison is apt, for just as "tallness" is non-intrinsic, measured always in comparison to some other object or some average of other objects, "truth" rests upon a statement's relation to other statements. A is not, in isolation, true - A is true because it follows from B and B is true; B is true because it follows from C and C is true; and so on. Unless it's "turtles all the way down" (and even as a Utah native, I find that kind of infinite regress to be an alarming amount of stuff to believe in), the tower of reasoning will eventually rest on some foundation - Y is true because it follows from Z and Z is true; Z is true JUST BECAUSE IT IS. What complicates debate is that (as you, Dear Reader, may have noticed) people do not share one basic set of assumptions about the universe. People choose their own set of "axioms" (and, in general, change them if they become inconvenient). If questioned, they will describe these axioms as "obvious" or "self-evident". This translates into the usefulness or the acceptability of the axiom. And indeed, if people who behave as though X is false generally suffer and die, and people who behave as though X is true generally prosper and live, then we have a sort of "proof by survival" for X as an axiom. Not that axioms need proof at all, but bear in mind that one man's axiom is another man's corollary! Because of this confusion on basic principles, a discussion over a given issue must (if it is to end in agreement) find some "common ground", meaning a set of statements that all concerned will agree on. Usually this disoursal maneuvering avoids the controversial and steers toward the "obvious", turning from the specific to the general (and, necessarily, the vague). It may be that the participants quickly find enough shared assumptions to decide the issue - this makes for a short conversation. They may find a more fundamental disagreement, and "shift the battlefield" to this new venue. Or - and this is where the sparks really fly - they may agree on some "axioms", but not on enough to decide the issue under discussion. This is where things become interesting. Fred says "I believe A and B, and they imply C is true, and so I believe C". Barney replies "I believe A and B, but they imply C is false, so I disagree". It may be quite true that A and B imply C if (and only if!) you add the unspoken assumption D. The discussion may become quite heated, especially if Fred is unaware of his extra assumption D! The debate may be protracted if neither side is willing - or able - to bring these extra assumptions into the conversation. For example, a christian and an atheist may have a political debate, and the christian may make a point whose proof involves, at some point, the fact that God Said So. If the two of them have made an agreement (tacit or overt) not to argue about religion, the christian may consciously refrain from playing The God Card, leaving a hole in his case's infrastructure which the two of them will argue around. An especially well-worn conversational path is this one: There are two values that you and I (and probably everybody) agree on; if value A says to do one thing and value B says to do another, what is the right thing to do? (Less morality-minded conversationalists may choose different contenders for the conversational cock-fight, such as Quake 3 versus Unreal Tournament). The key to the puzzle (and the reason this becomes a conversation at all) is that the answer demands the use of other values; probably more fundamental values. Truth is a strange thing. Even in the careful world of computer code, truth is slippery. In C, 0 "means" false, while any other number "means" true. Typically the special words TRUE and FALSE are taken (by the compiler) to mean 1 and 0 respectively. In a patch of code I once debugged, some poor soul put the bitwise-or | when he meant to put the logical or ||. Later he made a comparison like this: if (bThingy == TRUE) { do stuff; }. Sadly, due to the typo, bThingy was often neither 0 nor 1, neither fish nor fowl, TRUE nor FALSE. WITH HILARIOUS CONSEQUENCES! (This bug lingered in code for about 2 years. This just goes to show that given few enough eyes ALL bugs are deep, har har) [ OSHA-mandated whitespace inserted for your listening pleasure ] This post is just six words long! This post is just six words long! This post is just six words long! This post is just six words long! [ Postscript! For YOU! ] I went to do a web search and see if Henry James is the author I was thinking of way back in Paragraph Two, but I clicked the "Start Diablo 2" icon instead of the "Altavista" icon. WHEEE! MY SUBCONSCIOUS MIND IS WEARING A FREUDIAN SLIP! TIME TO KILL THE ZOMBIES! AND MAKE THE DONUTS! KOMM, SUSSER TOD! BEFORE I DIE! I WANT ANOTHER PIECE OF PIE! I MAY HAVE BURNT OUT MY FRONTAL LOBE IN AN EFFORT TO REFUTE A DISPROOF OF THE VALIDITY OF THE CONCEPT OF CONCEPTS, BUT MY SORCERESS CAN BEAT UP YOUR SORCERESS!