Rudie Can't Fail -- The Clash

You know how sometimes a song seems to narrate your day? Well the Grosse Pointe Blank soundtrack really delivered today. I banged out my Marshall application with a really good feeling. Life is definitely good.


Getting some cash for my birthday and I'm seriously considering going wild and buying a digital SLR. Unfortunately, one of the incredible deals I came across appears to have disappeared. So now things are getting expensive, and I wonder if I should just stay within my means. One part of me cries out Thoreau's maxim "Simplify, Simplify!" But family members and an other part of me considers a good camera to be an investment in art, a chance to create physical instantiations of my internal appreciation of the beauty that surrounds us.

I think I'll meditate on this one.

Anamnesis: PKD and Plato

So today I decided to treat myself to a new book: The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings

I've always enjoyed the thoughts of PKD and this appears to be an excellent compilation of his philosophical corpus. In August 2006, I read A Scanner Darkly and Valis in rapid succession. At times, I found myself getting really wrapped up and carried away with the ideas in Valis. I became intrigued with the idea that there is some sort of secret knowledge to be attained and that the attainment of said knowledge could lead to the transcendence of the current level of reality.

Of course as a rational thinker, when making a coherent mental model of reality I can't completely ignore sense-data. However, as a mathematician I also feel that there are structures that are in some sense more fundamentally real then the things which I perceive with my five senses. When comparing the statements

1. Snow is white.
2. Over the ring of integers, 1+1=2.

one seems to be a directly contingent truth (potentially different in other possible worlds), while the other is tautologically true given the definitions, axioms and rules for inference. Certainly a formal system has a sort of self-contingent truth status that stands upon legs that are summoned seemingly out of nowhere, but mathematicians don't like to just invent symbols and rules of manipulation for shits and giggles, rather there is a genuine attempt to intuit structure that is "out there" and formulate this structure into a rigorous mental model.

Although mathematicians are careful creatures -- when pressed they will fall back into a more conservative outlook on the ontological status of mathematics -- when we are not observed, we tend to really believe in the Platonist outlook -- that there is a realm of fundamental forms that exists on a different level from our material universe and that the interplay between these worlds is as beautiful and intriguing as we could possibly hope for.

This leads me finally to the key word in the title of this post: Anamnesis. Lawrence Sutin describes it as "the recollection of the archetypal realm of Ideas of Plato" and he hits the nail on the head. He uses it to describe what is for PKD ideally the case, with the other option being that people like Plato, Hermes Trismegistus, The Gnostics, PKD and a lot of mathematicians (maybe not all at once) are all totally wacked out bouncing-bananas-in-straight-jackets crazy.

Testing the Waters...

I have finally decided to try the blogging experience. Motivated by my friend Curran, I've decided to expose myself to the world in an almost frightening way. So what do I see as the future and purpose of this blog? To report on daily events? Hardly. To dump my photos for friends and family to see and span the gap in this increasingly impersonal world? Almost certainly.

Ultimately, I just want to spread open my own little canvas to the world. Ideally this will open a fissure to help blow off the constant buildup of thoughts and speculations that too often don't get vented. As a child I use to pen entire subjective worlds, setting up my own imaginative premises and following their inevitable logical implcations. Although I think I secretly desired my words to be read, I couldn't bare the possibly scrutiny of my contemporaries. Perhaps published posthumously, protected by the barrier of death would my memes be absorbed and distributed among people -- my soul a dandelion dispersed by the mighty wind of some future publishing company!

But alas! The internet revolution is here and my port key into other minds is as simple as a click of the button! So let the stream of consciousness begin! Whether a trickle or a torrent of thought at least I can say I've added a drop to this great ocean that is collective consciousness!