Monday 30 October 2017

Toomas Karmo: Part Q: Philosophy of Perception, Action, and "Subjectivity"

Quality assessment:

On the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late, unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his  grubby imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so disastrous as to be epic", 3/5 is "mediocre pass", 4/5 is "good", and 5/5 is "excellent"): 2/5. Justification: Kmo's material this time was much sketchier than usual.


Revision history:

All times in these blog "revision histories" are stated in UTC (Universal Coordinated Time/ Temps Universel Coordoné,  a precisification of the old GMT, or "Greenwich Mean Time"), in the ISO-prescribed YYYYMMDDThhmmZ timestamping format. UTC currently leads Toronto civil time by 4 hours and currently lags Tallinn civil time by 3 hours. Tallinn reverted to its winter time on the last Sunday in October. Toronto is going to revert to its winter time on the first Sunday in November.
  • 20171031T0137Z/version 3.0.0: Kmo brought the work to a state that counted, given its very modest aspirations, as adequately finished. Kmo reserved the right to make minor, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 3.0.1, 3.0.2, 3.0.3, ... . 
  • 20171031T0050Z/version 2.0.0: Kmo made some ongoing improvements of substance. He still hoped to bring this work to an acceptably finished state by 20171031T0201Z.  
  • 20171031T0001Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo had time to upload semi-finished work. He hoped to bring this to an acceptably finished state by 20171031T0201Z.


[CAUTION: A bug in the blogger server-side software has in some past months shown a propensity to insert inappropriate whitespace at some points in some of my posted essays. If a screen seems to end in empty space, keep scrolling down. The end of the posting is not reached until the usual blogger "Posted by Toomas (Tom) Karmo at" appears. - The blogger software has also shown a propensity, at any rate when coupled with my erstwhile, out-of-date, Web-authoring uploading browser, to generate HTML that gets formatted in different ways on different downloading browsers. Some downloading browsers have sometimes perhaps not correctly read in the entirety of the "Cascading Style Sheets" (CSS) which on all ordinary Web servers control the browser placement of margins, sidebars, and the like. If you suspect CSS problems in your particular browser, be patient: it is probable that while some content has been shoved into some odd place (for instance, down to the bottom of your browser, where it ought to appear in the right-hand margin), all the server content has been pushed down into your browser in some place or other. - Finally, there may be blogger vagaries, outside my control, in font sizing or interlinear spacing or right-margin justification. - Anyone inclined to help with trouble-shooting, or to offer other kinds of technical advice, is welcome to write me via Toomas.Karmo@gmail.com.]



This week I carry on with the "Philosophy of Perception and Action". But instead of answering the homework set last week, I attend to rather urgent housekeeping. The homework answer (I think of it as less urgent) will have to wait until perhaps next week. 

As a precaution against administrative accidents, I really should now write up, and upload to the comparative safety of the blogger-cum-blogspot server, my ideas on Wittengestein's "Private Language Argument", adding also a bit of context. 

And in fact doing this now not only preserves my ideas against accidents, but helps make the overall course of my writing predictable to readers. The more dully predictable my writing becomes, from week to week, the easier it becomes for my persistent little week-to-week handful of readers to digest it.

For the time being, it suffices to upload a mere a "philosophical fragment", detailed enough for those of my readers whom I imagine to be in Departments of Philosophy, without reaching the level of detail appropriate for the overall blog-reading public. I had three such Departmental "fragments" at the end of the posting of 2017-05-22/2017-05-23 (headed "Part B"). Here, then, is a fourth.  (I upload it as my "Part Q". Last week was already "Part P". So this project is dragging on and on, to the point at which I almost fear I might end up having something like a "Part Y", a "Part ZA", and a "Part ZB".)  


__recall the intersubjective comparison from Part H,
  2017-07-17 or 2017-07-18:

You (the Gentle Reader) and I, as two fellow specimens of Homo sapiens, are together seated at the edge of a sunlit lawn. You have no way of knowing whether my greening is the same as your greening, or on the contrary is the same as your, so to speak, "redding". But suppose (I write tonight briefly, almost as a throw-away) that your greening is indeed like my redding, and your redding indeed like my greening. Then there is no content to the question which of us has "accurate colour vision", and which of us has "systematically distorted colour vision".
 
  __in Part xx, 2017-xx-xx or 2017-xx-xx, I did put on record the necessary
    caveat, stating that this material would have to be looked at again,
    and would at the right juncture 
     have to be made the subject of something like a partial retraction
    __((quote caveat))))
__we are now at that juncture 
__spose u and i are looking at a glass of tomato juice     
  on a sunlit lawn
  __or again at 2 square of cloth, with wooden top-dimpled R
    and wooden top-dimpled Cyrillic Ya
__I have already suggested that no content to qn which
  of us is seeing the tomato juice and the grass "in their true colours"
  (_and similarly for R and Ya: but I will here just stick to
    greening and redding)
__now I make a more subtle point
__I can construct a hypothesis  re your greening and redding
__two COMPETING hyps re yr greening and redding
  (_in "Part H", 2017-07-17/2017-07-18,
    I only had ONE of these, namely the first of the 2 I am about to give) -
  that
  yr greening and redding are the same as my redding and greening,
  and that
  yr greening and redding are the same as my greening and redding
__now I suggest, rather radically,
  that in one sense there is not, and in another sense there is,
  content to the very question which of these
  competing hyps re "what the other person is experiencing" is true
  __this rather radical suggestion
    is what I isolate as the defensible, correctly clear,
    content of that sometimes opaquely explained thing which is
    Ludwig Wittengstein's private-language discussion
    (his puzzling "beetle-in-a-box" discussion)
__re "there is not":                     
  no true choice for a Deity who creates both of us,
  but has not done so yet
  (_no choice whether to "in future make these two subjects mismatch in their
    subjective experiences of grass and tomato juice"
    or to "in future make these two subjects match 
    in their respective subjective experiences")
__re "there is":
  suppose, having created me, the Deity then GOES ON to create you
__from my own standpoint - in the frame of reference
  established by my
  own greening and redding - I can ask, "does the
  greening/redding second of the two
  subjects created by the Deity match
  my redding/greening, or on the contrary match my
  greening/redding?"

****

__this point is admittedly subtle,
  and therefore hard to bring into sharp focus 
__trying as hard as I can here - perhaps not quite successfully - 
  I ask us to compare, as a parallel, a feature of
  the frame-relativity of space 
  (_it is a feature
    common both to an Einsteinean and to a merely Newtonian
    conception of space)                                         
__recall our own Milky Way Galaxy (in which our own
  solar system sits, quite some distance out from the
  centre) and its near twin,
  the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), about 2.5 million light years away 
  (_and easily examined with even the lowest-quality binoculars,
    from even the most light-polluted big-city site)
  __M31 and our own Milky Way Galaxy are falling toward each other,
    thanks to their mutual gravitational attraction
  __they are two large galaxies dominating our "Local Group",
    comprising a couple of dozen galaxies in all
    __the "Local Group" is vanishingly insignificant in the
      overall panorama of observable galaxies, 
      since this panorama comprises 
      perhaps over one hundred thousand million galaxies
  __although the cosmos overall is expanding,
    these two here-mentioned galaxies are too close to each other
    for their motions relative to each other to accurately reflect
    the overall cosmic expansion
    __to appreciate the overall expansion, one would have to look
      beyond the too-tidily-tight "Local Group"
__here, however, we ignore the grand topic of overall cosmic expansion, 
  confining ourselves to the cozy embrace of the Local Group 
__let us call "here" the place in fact presently occupied by
  the Milky Way Galaxy 
  and "there" the place in fact presently
  occupied by the Andromeda Galaxy
__then GIVEN the existence of the Milky Way Galaxy and the
  Andromeda Galaxy, the following is a contentful counterfactual
  supposition:
  * "It is the Andromeda Galaxy which is here, and the Milky Way
    Galaxy which is over there"
  (_call this the Counterfactual Possibility P)
  __indeed there is a physically possible situation in which
    the two galaxies exchange places: if the two galaxies
    were to receive a momentary impulse from
    a pair of short-lived appropriate forces, arranged
    approximately as 
    what classical-mechanics textbooks call a "couple" (forces
    antiparallel, with each force perpendicular to the line joining
    the centres of the two galaxies), then the two galaxies
    would begin - I imagine the forces soon gone - mutual circular
    orbital motion around their common centre of mass 
    (rather than, as in the actual cosmos, merely accelerating
    toward each other) 
    __after a suitably long time, they would actually trade places
  __even without supposing a temporally protracted process of
    exchanging places,
    we can say, "It COULD have been that the Andr Galaxy is
    the one that is here, and that the Milky Way Galaxy is the
    one that is over there"
__and yet suppose the Big Bang had never occurred
__no Deity contemplating what would have happened HAD there been
  a Big Bang could in that no-Bang contingency say,
  "Well, there are two coordinate possibilities:
  on the one hand the possibiliity that Galaxy A is in Place A
  and Galaxy B in Place B, on the other hand the possibility
  that Galaxy A is in Place B, and Galaxy B in Place A"
__the contingency P is itself only contingently existent
  (_requiring, for its existence, the existence of those
    eminently contingent entities which are Galaxy A and Galaxy B)

****

__a further parallel, albeit a looser one, will help
  with this so-difficult topic, 
  albeit to just a modest degree
__cf Toomas Karmo contingent-nonidentity paper from Austr J Phil 1983,  
  and also Lloyd Huberstone reply Austr J Phil 1983
  (_http://aap.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00048408312340991?src=recsys&#.Wfe6nK3SO58)
  __my point in Austr J Phil is that
    although all identities are necessary, some nonidentities
    are contingent
  __"all identities are necessary" in the sense that for every S X,
    and for every S Y, if X is the same S as Y, then not possibly
    X is a distinct S from Y
    (_classic example: Hesperus is the same heavenly body
      (namely Venus) as Phosphorus, 
      and it is not possibly the case that Hesperus
      is a distinct heavenly body from Phosphorus
  __and yet some nonidentities are contingent:
    we can find Ss X and Y such that
    X is a distinct S from Y,
    and such that possibly X is the same S as Y
    (_the distinct twins which could have been born as the same human,
      had the zygote not split early in the pregnancy;
      the distinct tunnels which could have been one and the same
      tunnel, had the two boring machines been steered differently)
  __in such a situation, we have a contingency (that there is just
    one human, or just one tunnel) in which our own actual
    situation would NOT - since all identities are,
    to repeat, necessary - be an available contingency 
    __so we can so-to-speak "inspect a remote contingency" 
      without having our own situation inspectable, as a real contingency, 
      from that remote perspective
    __it is as though a "possible world" w in which X is the same S as Y
      is reachable from our world, whereas our world is NOT from
      the w standpoint a possible world   

****

__this leads me to a further rather radical suggestion re  subjectivity
__consider a situation in which two human animals,
  Alfie and Betty, are jointly positioned at the edge of a sunlit lawn,
  and are both in a state of temporary swoon - as it might be,
  from the temporary pollution of their shared local atmosphere with fumes
  of chloroform 
__let us take it as given in this scenario
  that when the chloroform wears off,
  you and I are going to be seeing the lawn and juice
  in seeing events in the Alfie and Betty bodies - with one of us
  seeing events in the one body, the other of us events in the other
__two competing hypotheses, within the scope of the scenario as so far given: 
  (a) that u are
  going to be seeing grass and juice in seeing events in the Alfie body,
  and I am going to be
  seeing grass and juice in seeing events in the Bettie body;
  (b) that u are
  going to be seeing grass and juice in seeing events in the Betty body,
  and I am
  going to be seeing grass and juice in seeing events in the Alfie body
__I suggest, again rather radically,
  that in one sense there is not,
  and in another sense there is,
  content to the question which of THESE competing hyps is true
__so here again, as already in the case of greening/redding, 
  we have a "in one sense there is not and in another sense there is"  
__re "there is not":
  no true alternative now,
  as the chloroform acts
__re "there is":
  upon the chloroform's wearing off, spose I am seeing grass and juice
  in seeing events in Alfie's body
  __then from my own standpoint - in the frame of reference
    now established by my now seeing events in Alfie's body - I can say,
    "Well, it COULD have gone differently: I COULD have awakened
    to find myself instead seeing Betty-body events"

****

__I want to put the situation for the first of my
  two radical suggestions in a slogan like this:
  "Just as 'hereness' is not a fully real feature of the cosmos,
  but only a feature which gets its reality from the
  given existence of frame-defining things like the Milky Way Galaxy
  and the Andromeda Galaxy,
  so the 'respective subjective qualities'
  of greening and redding are not fully real features of the
  cosmos, but only features whose reality derives from 
  frame-defining things, from actual greenings and reddings"
__I want to put the situation for the second of my
  two radical suggestions in a slogan like this:
  "Just as 'hereness' is not a fully real feature of the cosmos,
  but only a feature which gets its reality from the
  given existence of frame-defining things like the Milky Way Galaxy
  and the Andromeda Galaxy,
  so the 'respective subjective identities of you and me
  vis-a-vis those animals which are Alfie and Betty'
  are not fully real features of the
  cosmos, but only features whose reality derives from 
  frame-defining things, from actual experiencingss-by-me
  and experiencings-by-you"
__can some reader(s) take this idea further,
  making my two slogans clearer than I have here succeeded in making them? 


[This is the end of the current blog posting.]









Monday 23 October 2017

Toomas Karmo: Part P: Philosophy of Perception, Action, and "Subjectivity"

Quality assessment:

On the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late, unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his  grubby imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so disastrous as to be epic", 3/5 is "mediocre pass", 4/5 is "good", and 5/5 is "excellent"): 4/5. Justification: There was enough time, while admittedly running behind schedule, to write out most or all of the appropriate points to reasonable length,.


Revision history:
 

All times in these blog "revision histories" are stated in UTC (Universal Coordinated Time/ Temps Universel Coordoné,  a precisification of the old GMT, or "Greenwich Mean Time"), in the ISO-prescribed YYYYMMDDThhmmZ timestamping format. UTC currently leads Toronto civil time by 4 hours and currently lags Tallinn civil time by 3 hours. Tallinn reverts to its winter time on the last Sunday in October. Toronto revers to its winter time on the first Sunday in November. 


  • 20171025T2250Z/version 3.1.0: Kmo made some changes too numerous and tiny to invite quick summary here, but more appropriately deemed changes of substance than changes in cosmetics. (He changed a misleading "now" into the correct "not", or a misleading "not" into the correct "now"; he corrected something like "perceiving" into something like "perceiving and acting"; and so on.) He reserved the right to make nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 3.1.1, 3.1.2, 3.1.3, ... . 
  • 20171025T2154Z/version 3.0.0: Kmo finished converting his fine-grained outline into full-sentences prose. He reserved the right to make nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 3.0.1, 3.0.2, 3.0.3, ... .  
  • 20171025T1819Z/version 2.0.0: Kmo uploaded a properly polished fine-grained outline. He hoped to convert this into full-sentences prose by UTC=20171024T2230Z.
  • 20171024T1800Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo, already behind schedule, had time to upload merely a not-properly-polished fine-grained outline. He hoped to polish this and convert it to full-sentences prose around 26 or 28 hours from now. 


[CAUTION: A bug in the blogger server-side software has in some past months shown a propensity to insert inappropriate whitespace at some points in some of my posted essays. If a screen seems to end in empty space, keep scrolling down. The end of the posting is not reached until the usual blogger "Posted by Toomas (Tom) Karmo at" appears. - The blogger software has also shown a propensity, at any rate when coupled with my erstwhile, out-of-date, Web-authoring uploading browser, to generate HTML that gets formatted in different ways on different downloading browsers. Some downloading browsers have sometimes perhaps not correctly read in the entirety of the "Cascading Style Sheets" (CSS) which on all ordinary Web servers control the browser placement of margins, sidebars, and the like. If you suspect CSS problems in your particular browser, be patient: it is probable that while some content has been shoved into some odd place (for instance, down to the bottom of your browser, where it ought to appear in the right-hand margin), all the server content has been pushed down into your browser in some place or other. - Finally, there may be blogger vagaries, outside my control, in font sizing or interlinear spacing or right-margin justification. - Anyone inclined to help with trouble-shooting, or to offer other kinds of technical advice, is welcome to write me via Toomas.Karmo@gmail.com.]




In the most recent installment of this long multi-installment essay ("Part O", from 2017-10-02 or 2017-10-03), I posed an open-ended homework question: what further things can now be said about thinking, over and above what I have said already, to differentiate it still further from perceiving, from acting, from the imagining of perceiving, and from the imagining of acting? Are there, at least, some further questions (we might not find ourselves able to give confident answers) that can be posed on this deep topic, perhaps using some notions already introduced in the various installments of this essay? 

This week I will give part of my own effort at an answer, and will set a further homework problem to introduce the remaining part (a part which this week I leave pending). 

****

There seem to be at least two basic kinds of thinking. On the one hand, there is what might be called "thoughtfully being", or with equal propriety "thinking-in". On the other hand, there is what might be called "thinking about being".  

(A) Sometimes it is the case that I am undergoing something (as when I am greening-in-the-passive-sense, or am seeing grass, or am seeing a rising hand). The situation might possibly be summed up with an American Street English use of "being", in the locution "I be undergoing." Sometimes it is the case that I am doing something (as when I am raising a hand; or, again, as I would be in actively-greening, were I, counterfactually, to possess the "Active Visual Cortex" envisaged in "Part M" (2017-09-04/2017-09-05) as the special glory of some intellectually agile species other than Homo sapiens). The situation might possibly be summed up with an American Street English use of "being", in the locution "I be acting." 

All of these various specially personal ways of undergoing and acting (in the envisaged Street English, "these various specially personal ways of being") can, at least some of the time, be proceeding mindfully rather than absent-mindedly, and so can constitute ways of "thoughtfully being". All of the following, in particular, are possibilities:

  • mindfully greening, in the Estonian-passive, Mina rohetun sense (and similarly, mindfully seeing grass - what we call "looking at" grass - and mindfully seeing, i.e., looking at, a rising hand)
  • mindfully greening, in the Estonian-active Mina rohetan sense (and similarly, even for human animals, unable to glory in the envisaged Active Visual Cortex of "Part M" (2017-09-04/2017-09-05), mindfully raising a hand)
  • mindfully imagining greening, in the Estonian-passive Ma kujutan ette, et ma rohetun sense (and similarly, mindfully imagining seeing grass, and mindfully imagining seeing a rising hand)
  • mindfully imagining greening, in the Estonian active Ma kujutan ette, et ma rohetan sense (and similarly, mindfully imagining raising a hand) 
It would be equally proper in all four cases to say that one is "thinking-in". The analytical philosophers of action, the "Elizabeth Honeycombes" and the "Athur C. Dangoes" that one recalls from those old 1970s and 1980s Departments of Philosophy, rightly stressed - I have repeatedly used their helpful idea in previous installments of this essay, for my own various purposes - that one can be doing-A "in" doing-B (as when, e.g., one is entering into a contract in signing one's name, and indeed is signing one's name in moving a pen). It is now time to note that thinking itself can be "in", in broadly the same "Honeycombe-Dango" sense. Mindfully greening-passively, mindfully seeing (i.e., looking at) grass, mindfully raising a hand, mindfully imagining greening-passively, mindfully imagining greening-actively, mindfully imagining raising a hand - all such mindful undergoings and doings can properly be called instances of "thinking-in". ("Have you been thinking this afternoon? - Oh yes, I have been exercising the Perceptual Intellect in so-attentively looking at, in inspecting, in scrutinizing, the lawn"; "Have you been thinking this afternoon?  - Oh yes, I have been exercising the Practical Intellect in ever-so-attentively, in ever-so-thoughtfully, doing my prescribed hand gestures, as I rehearse for my upcoming belly-dance routine on the stage of the Blaue Engel.")

(B) Thinking about being occurs when, for instance, one reads this present essay, and therefore when

  • one thinks about greening, in the passive, Mina rohetun, sense (this can be done without actually greening-in-the-passive-sense; you the Gentle Reader, have yourself been thinking about this while looking at my essay on a computer screen, or else on some page of printout, at a time when you have surely not been directing your corneas to a Macau flag, or to a Mauritania flag, or to a sunlit lawn)
  • one thinks about greening, in the active, Mina rohetan, sense (or, again, thinks about the raising of one's hand)  
  • one thinks about the imagining of Mina-rohetun greening (this kind of thinking can be done even by humans - the congenitally colour-blind, for instance - neurologically incapable of imagining Mina-rohetun greening; "There are some things we," they truthfully think, "unfortunately cannot with our specific neurological handicap imagine - for instance, Mina-rohetun greening")
  • one thinks about the Anscombean, practical-imagination, imagining of Mina-rohetan greening (again, even congenitally colour-blind people can do this) - or, again, about the Anscombean, practical-imagination, imagining of raising one's hand
Thinking about being additionally occurs when one thinks about each of the following:

  • grass (as botany students, for example, do, in pondering chloroplasts and mitochondria: such students are not, in their acts of thinking, necessarily thinking about the  seeing of grass, or about greening in either its Mina rohetun or its Mina rohetan sense)
  • a rising hand (as anatomy students, for example do, in pondering the pull of biceps on tendon: such students are not in their acts of thinking necessarily thinking about anyone's raising a hand, though they admittedly might be) 
  • green light (as physics students, for example, might do, in thinking to themselves, "Well, the wavelength is about 500 nanometres, both in vacua and in media; and at all instants, whether or not the light is polarized, the electric and magnetic vectors are mutually perpendicular; and all the various speeds of propagation in the various transparent media are a little lower than the (invariant) speed of propagation in vacua (and so on, and so on)"
  • chirality (as solid-geometry students might do, in thinking to themselves, "The wooden R and the wooden Russian Ya (я), with their top-surface dimples [I discussed this in 'Part H', on 2017-07-17 or 2017-07-18] differ in chirality; and so do right-handed helices and left-handed helices (and so on, and so on)"
  • the number zero (as students of arithmetic might do)
In particular, the distinction between imagining passive-greening and thinking about passive-greening helps confer at least some initial mild plausibility on the late Prof. Peter Geach's aphoristic paraphrase of Saint Thomas Aquinas, as quoted here in "Part O", from 2017-10-02 or 2017-10-03: The disembodied soul will retain the purely intelligible or logical, though not the sensuous, content of its earthly thoughts. One could well envisage some thinking subjects - some angels? one or more Persons of the Trinity? some pleasantly Catholic humans, in some pleasantly respectable-Catholic state of post-death survival? - thinking coherently and insightfully about "the Toomas Karmo animal's imagining passively-greening", without themselves sinking so-to-speak down to the living Toomas Karmo level (without sinking so-to-speak so low as to be imagining anything).

To be sure, the topic of post-death survival raises questions of its own, which I will have to try to address in some small way in some later installment, once I have turned from the occasionally worrisome topics of "Perception" and "Action" to the perhaps more pervasively worrisome topic of "Subjectivity". - I do write here, "in some small way". I guess that, barring some sudden in-the-morning-shower εὕρηκα flash of insight I shall have to suggest that mere philosophy can  provide only scant consolation for would-be respectable Catholics, yearning as all of us in the respectable Catholic world admittedly are for some rigorous philosophical proof of our personal immortality.

****

I asked in "Part O" whether thinking occurs in dreams. In this connection, I mentioned the story of F.A. Kekulé (1829-1896), who is perhaps sometimes said to have worked out an organic-chemistry problem (specifically, the configuration of the benzene molecule) in a fit of armchair dozing. Today I answer the question in the negative, although in a provisional spirit. As always, I am anxious to be corrected by readers, should I be missing something.

The solving of chemistry (mathematics, physics, chess, ... ) problems in dreams seems to work as follows: One dreams of seeing symbols, or of writing symbols, or of seeing or doing something closely analogous, such as moving chess pieces on a board. [In general, one dreams of what in "Part O" (2017-10-02/2017-10-03) I called things "supporting" thought.] One additionally dreams of the pleasures of thinking. On occasion, one even dreams not only of seeings and doings, but in addition the imagining of seeings and doings. ("So I had this nice dream, see, in which I was walking up the Corso in Rome, wearing majorly cool Gucci shades. The October breeze was fresh on my face in the dream, and in the dream I was imagining all kinds of things - imagining seeing a most frightfully nice postcard in my right hand from Charles and Camilla, and also imagining writing down, in the margin of the postcard, with my ever-handy pencil, a most frightfully clever heat-and-work equation. And then, in this dream, I saw Don Vito Corleone approaching me on the Corso, flanked by two Roman bishops, and so in my dream I cut my imaginings short, and in my dream I knelt down to kiss the trio of approaching rings, worrying which particular ring as a matter of Sicilian and Vatican diplomatic protocol  ought to come first, and then in my dream Don Coreleone said to me ...") Upon waking, one recalls what it was one dreamed, and now one realizes that the dream content - amazingly, since dream content is for the most part merely confused - contains a solution to a physics problem. (Maybe the heat-and-work equation, in this example not even a thing dreamed of being seen, or dreamed of being written,  but a thing dreamed-of-being-imgined-to-be-seen or dreamed-of-being-imagined-to-be-written, really was clever. Some maths or physics students might be luckier in this regard than I generally, as an undisciplined dreamer, have managed to be.) The thinking occurs not during the dreaming, but afterward, when one examines the dream content, even as one might examine an incoming e-mail from some helpful university tutor. 

To be sure, there is also such a thing as the "Lucid Dream" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream). We dream "lucidly" when we are aware of dreaming, and quite mindfully construct (to take one example) witty rebukes to people who in a dream have been pressuring us to buy frivolous merchandise - well aware that the whole thing is a dream, and that the outright opening of eyelids, to face the duties of the morning, cannot now be far off. In this special case, I hesitantly suggest, we do have the coinciding of dream state with thoughtfully-being (if we are mindfully really selecting, with unreal dream-larynx, the words of a witty rebuke) or with thinking-about-being (if we are, in the manner of the alleged Kekulé, mindfully solving the Configuration-of-Benzene problem).

A nagging worry arises with special force regarding dreams in which one is addressing some practical problem. As I dream of wondering which ring to kiss first, in that ominous Corso meet-up, am I not thinking while dreaming? I have made up all my dream examples in this essay. But we will all admit that in our actual dreams - as we might write them down for, perhaps, some investigator, some day, in some Toronto or Tallinn psychology lab -  there seems to be a lot of pondering of practical problems. It is common enough to dream of being pursued, and of seeking an appropriate avenue of escape. I am unsure of my ground here. Maybe there is no real thinking when the dream presents an urgent practical conundrum, but a mere dreaming of the supports of thinking. I am more inclined, however, to concede that there is on at least some occasions already a modest kind of thinking here, in which the mind is active even as in the more dramatic case of Lucid Dreaming. It is as though we can think when moving real chess pieces on a real board, in waking life, and also can dream in bed, thinking real thoughts about what we erroneously take to be a real Mafia Don and a pair of real Prelates. So maybe, after all, we can solve the Benzene Configuaration Problem by thinking while dreaming - though I am still inclined to suggest that the more usual thing is a mere dreaming of the symbolic supports of the thinking, with their true import being in the most usual cases thought through upon waking.

Wittgenstein is famous for having discussed the seeing of an ambiguous drawing "either as a duck or as a rabbit" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Investigations, subsection headed "Seeing that vs. seeing as"). I suggest, again hesitantly and tentatively, that seeing those heavy black lines as (say) a mallard duck is one kind of thinking-in, somehow bound up with thinking-about. One is thinking-of-being (specifically, one is thinking of one particular kind of avian being, ultimately involving Anas platyrhynchos in the family Anatidae) in the seeing of the lines. It perhaps counts in favour of my hesitant suggestion that if one is seeing the lines in a thoroughly absent-minded spirit, in other words is seeing-without-at-all-looking, then one will be neither seeing them as a mallard nor seeing them as a rabbit. Similarly, I suppose, if one is imagining the lines in an absent-minded reverie (as discussed in the context of Mr Elvis Presley, back in "Part O"), then one can be neither imagining them as a mallard nor imaging them as a rabbit. (No: if either being-a-mallard or being-a-rabbit is in the mind, then some thinking is going on, with the imagining no longer absent-minded.)

What, now, about dreaming of seeing the Wittgenstein drawing?  Can one not dream of seeing the lines as a mallard, and of a moment later of seeing the lines as a rabbit? Surely this is a possible kind of dreaming, although in actual psychology-of-sleep laboratories rare. So, I suppose (subject to correction by others) that here, just as in the case of thinking-under-the-duvet-about-Sicilian-and-Vatican-diplomatic-protocol, and even on some conceivable rare occasions about the benzene configuration, there is a modest kind of actual thinking.

And how does dreaming relate to hallucinating? Here I am at a loss on what to write.

****

The reader who has thought about the homework which I set at the end of "Part O" will now have posed for the philosophically troubling mental feat of thinking a pair of questions drawing on notions I have already used for the (philosophically less alarming?) mental feats which are perception and action:

  1. Is there a possible distinction between thinking "absentmindedly"and thinking "mindfully" - as I have suggested that we can be (a) absentmindedly seeing grass or mindfully seeing (looking at) grass, (b) absentmindedly raising a hand or mindfully raising a hand, (c) absentmindedly imagining the seeing of something or mindfully imagining the seeing of that thing ("Well, I am imagining that notorious line drawing, and I am saying to myself at this moment, MALLARD! MALLARD! - and now, instead, RABBIT! RABBIT!"), and (d) absentmindedly imagining doing something or mindfully imagining doing that thing? 
  2. Is there a possible distinction between thinking "actively" and thinking "passively" - a distinction, that is, mirroring the distinction between actively and passively "greening", and again the distinction between actively imagining (as in anxious insomnia) and passively imagining (as at the blissful edge of approaching sleep)? 
I tentatively suggest a "no" in both cases.

  1. As far as I can see, the notion of absentmindedly thinking-about-being is a contradiction in terms. The closest we can come to this is absentmindedly imagining, whether actively or passively, some pencil writing some helpful thermodynamics equation, or one's writing an equation. (Here are two things to be imagined - one Perceptual, one Agentual - with each to be imagined either actively or passively. So we have here fully four distinct ways of being absentminded.) Such imagining is an imagining of the mere "supports" of thinking. If thermodynamics thinking ever does occur, it is not in that act of imagining, but in a subsequent act of recalling and pondering - in a mental feat akin to the recalling and pondering of some diagram once seen on the blackboard, or of some words once heard on the radio. - Still more is it a contradiction in terms to suppose someone to be absentmindedly "thoughtfully being". If you are thoughtfully, say, raising an arm, perhaps while rehearsing for the Blaue Engel stage show, then you are doing so mindfully - and yet the performance of mindfully-raising-an-arm cannot itself be mindless. (That is to say, one cannot be mindlessly mindfully-raising-an-arm. "Mindfully" and "mindlessly" are in this respect a different kind of adverbial-contraries pair from the contraries "right-handedly and "left-handedly", as say, applied to a spring of 1-millimetre coil radius coiled up loosely in a wide-mouthed jar of radius 5 centimetres, for convenient storage. Such a spring could be right-handedly left-handedly coiling - as one should point out, with an actual left-handed spring coiled up in lazy right-handed turns in a big glass jar,  to K12 students, when being duly thorough in teaching them chirality.)
  2. There is, to be sure, such a thing as "compulsive ideation". This thing, however, occurs at the level of imagining, and not at the level of thoughtfully being or thoughtfully thinking about being. Let me try here to envisage, extrapolating in extravagant drama-queen style from my own modest private experiences, which it might mean to be an actual hospital patient, mentally ill with actual intergenerational PTSD, and specifically through "being obsessed with the Camps". In what would that consist? Simply in one's imagining, compulsively, - and for the most part passively, for the most part no doubt wishing not to be enduring such intrusive imagery - the cattle cars, the piles of cadavers, the ovens, day upon sombre day. The imaginings are not themselves thinkings. They are at best supports for episodes of thinking. The nurse may well say, "This psychiatric patient is passive in respect of his imaginings," without thereby touching on the patient's thoughts. For all the nurse has said, it might be that the patient, while perpetually imagining the Camps, is at some instants in his sombre day (a) thinking about the Camps (as in pondering, in the footsteps of professional philosophers-of-law and professional ethicists, the correctness or incorrectness of the 1945 "Collective Guilt" suggestion), at other instants (b) being-thoughtfully (being in a particular imaginative state, and mindfully being in it) while not thinking-about-being, and at yet other instants (c) neither thinking-about-being nor even being-thoughtfully. (Instants in the third category are instants at which the envisaged psychiatric patient is in sheer - no doubt in fortunate - absentmindedness either performing or enduring the imagining, perhaps while now pottering about, calmly enough, in the hospital's Occupational Therapy rooms.) 
In suggesting a negative answer to the second question, I am rejecting the idea that thoughts (as distinct from imaginings) "might on occasion be forced into one's head".

****

It is appropriate to finish by setting up a piece of homework. What more can be said on the topic of "Thinking about Being"? In the last installment, I mentioned thinking about chirality and thinking about zero. Consider now a third example of mathematical thinking, namely thinking about randomness and nonrandomness. Let the Gentle Reader consider what is meant by claiming an infinite sequence of bits - say, a sequence that begins 10100010000001011011101100101110... - to be "random", or again to be "not random". We in some sense "rationally expect, without asserting certainty" that in a truly random sequence, any finite segment that is "sufficiently long" will contain "approximately equal numbers of ON bits and OFF bits". But what is meant here by the words "rationally expect" and "sufficiently" and "approximately"? Is it at all possible to give a rigorous definition of "random" and "nonrandom", free of such cheap weasel words?

O Gentle reader: Is the concept of a Turing Machine, with its infinite, initially blank, read-write tape and its program of finite length, helpful in the quest for rigour? The challenge is to (a) try, as one's best effort, to write definitions of the concept of "random sequence'" and "nonrandom sequence" which somehow incorporate such phrases as "There exists at least one Turing Machine such that zacka-zacka," or again "Every Turing Machine which is such that zecka-zecka is such that zicka-zicka," and to (b) write out some critique of the proffered best-effort definitions - a critique perhaps sympathetic, perhaps unsympathetic, and perhaps comprising even a mixture of the sympathetic and the unsympathetic.

In writing out the critique, the Gentle Reader should consider also the question, "On my definition, does it become a known fact that somewhere in the vast universe of infinite bit-sequences, some truly random sequences do exist? Or is this, rather, a point on which, under my best-efforts definition, humanity is doomed to agnosticism?"

And finally, the Gentle Reader should try to relate this example to the notion of thinking-about-being, perhaps seeking with the aid of this troubling, concept-of-randomness/concept-of-nonrandomness example, to show that the notion features hard-to-plumb depths.  

In providing a solution for the homework - I hope, in the next installment - I rather expect to be referring to the Wittgenstein "now-I-know-how-to-go-on" infinite-sequence scenario with which I ended "Part O".

Some readers may be helped in the homework by the following minor remarks, with which I shall have to end this week:

  • In practical engineering, it is required that people should have available to them random bit sequences, or at any rate sequences that in some (philosophically troubling!) sense manage to be "close enough to being random, without being truly random". Here is a practical illustration. We are in a branch of government, procuring many tens of thousands of halogen light bulbs as a shipment from some corporation. We write into the contract a stipulation  regarding quality - "In a random sampling of 700 bulbs in our own civil-service workshops, at least 99.9% of the bulbs in the shipment shall be found to achieve a lifetime exceeding 500 hours, when run by us at a voltage 50% higher than the vendor's advertised power-mains rating." We, as government officials, now set aside the three weeks needed for that 500-hour test, selecting 700 bulbs "at random" from the big ocean-shipping container. To our dismay, we get a poor outcome, with just 92.1% of the tested bulbs lasting the full 500 hours. So we send that ocean-shipping container, with its many tens of thousands of untested, but now untrusted, bubs back, and we decline to pay the invoice. To our further dismay, the corporation is not only disagreeable, but even impertinent, going so far as to sue us. What happens in court? Some lawyer defends the corporation, challenging us to prove that we selected our disappointing bulbs, as it was written in our mutually binding contract, "at random". Well, we reply, we in the Government of Canada (or in the Government of Estonia, or whatever) did not do anything so crude, and so open to legal challenge, as to draw the bulbs at whim, with our own itchy little fingers. No Ma'am, no, Your Honour: we were correctly rigorous, as per the contract. We asked a government statistician to supply us with some finite-length initial segment of a random bit sequence. We drew the bulbs for testing not at our whim (we concede to the Court that a whim, however innocent, can harbour unconscious bias), but under the guidance of the bit-sequence our official statistician had written for us. (We perhaps took the first few thousand bits and chopped them into octets, as when 10100010000001011011101100101110...gets chopped into 10100010,  00000101, 10111011, 00101110, ... . Each octet is the binary representation of some integer in the range 0, 1, 2, ..., 256. So now we had lots and lots of random integers, in convenient decimal notation on our clipboards at the shipping dock. We thereupon used our clipboards to work out which pallets to unload, and from which pallets to extract which carton(s), and from which carton(s) to pull out which particular bulb(s) for testing.) So we explain, in that scary courtroom. And now the scary corporate lawyer asks us, "How do you know your test-regulating sequence to have been truly random?" On our ability to answer the lawyer's comeback question now turns our legal case, with perhaps many hundred thousand dollars of taxpayers' money (or many hundred thousand Euros of taxpayers' money, or whatever) now at stake. 
  • The practical engineering task is addressed from Switzerland by an American thinker, Mr or Dr John Walker, who earlier in his life was instrumental in the development of CAD-CAM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer)). This authority, mindful of the need for random numbers in industry and government, offers a random-number server at  https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/. One might in the same spirit cite a further example, the Australian National University's random-number-server offering at https://qrng.anu.edu.au/.
  • Turing Machines are conceptually less scary than they perhaps sound. The topic is (a) readily researched through Google, and (b) already appropriate for inclusion in the humble K12 curriculum, let alone in such things as third-year university logic. 
  • In pondering Turing Machines and randomness, one can usefully ask, in the spirit of my remarks from "Part O", "The (clearly infinite) collection of possible finite-program-length, infinite-initially-blank-tape, Turing Machines is an infinite collection of what order of infinity? Have we here a collection which is infinite in the modest sense in which the positive integers are an infinite collection? Or have we instead a collection infinite in, say, the sense [as noted in 'Part O', less modest] in which the entire collection of infinite bit-strings is infinite?" 

[This is the end of the present blog posting.] 





  






 

Monday 16 October 2017

Toomas Karmo: Remarks, Including Duly Diligent Advisories to Organs, on the R.F.Garrison 2017-10-14 Memorial

Some mementos of Prof. R.G.Garrison, by way of a snapshot from one of my approximately five GNU/Linux GNOME desktops. Anticlockwise, from top right: a /usr/bin/xterm window, configured to display some of my casenotes on the Garrison database conservation problem (in fact - perhaps helpfully? - a formal report which I wrote around 2009, for several individuals in Prof. Garrison's circle); performers of Chilean music at the Prof. Garrison's 2017-10-14 memorial; a /usr/bin/xterm window, configured to display my sole casenote for a never-completed biographical essay on Prof. Garrison (although it was I who wrote this note, its pronoun "I" refers to Prof. Garrison); a framed photograph, as displayed at the 2017-10-14 memorial, of a meeting between the very Catholic Pope John Paul II and the very nice-but-not-Catholic Prof. Garrison, in the context of a Vatican Observatory "Summer School" at which Prof. Garrison was lecturing. - Popes tend to be friendly toward astronomy without being knowledgeable. A wonderful photo exists of John XXIII examining 1960-era gear which I think was used by the Vatican Observatory to construct a line atlas of the iron spectrum. (Iron absorption lines are prominent in the spectroscopy of the cooler stars, such as our own Sun.) The Pope who got farthest in astronomy was amateur observer Paul VI. Paul VI was said to have liked visiting the Castel Gandolfo telescope, near Rome, which back in the 1960s and 1970s was pretty much all the Vatican had. Nowadays, Castel Gandolfo is light-polluted, and the serious work gets done in Arizona, at the "Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope" (VATT).  Francis I for his part is too busy in Vatican City to spend much time at  Castel Gandolfo, and the Arizona VATT mountaintop will surely be too remote for him to visit.  - As is usual with Web publications through blogger and blogspot, the image can be enlarged through mouse-clicking. 
Quality assessment:

On the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late, unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his  grubby imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so disastrous as to be epic", 3/5 is "mediocre pass", 4/5 is "good", and 5/5 is "excellent"): 4/5. Justification: There was enough time, given an unvaoidably brisk overall work tempo, to write out most or all of the appropriate points to reasonable length,.


Revision history:
All times in these blog "revision histories" are stated in UTC (Universal Coordinated Time/ Temps Universel Coordoné,  a precisification of the old GMT, or "Greenwich Mean Time"), in the ISO-prescribed YYYYMMDDThhmmZ timestamping format. UTC currently leads Toronto civil time by 4 hours and currently lags Tallinn civil time by 3 hours.

  • 20171020T0131Z/version 2.1.0: Kmo added a graphic. He  reserved the right to make tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 2.1.1, 2.1.2, 2.1.3, ... .
  • 20171017T1825Z/version 2.0.0: Kmo, running about two and a half hours late, finished converting  his finegrained outline into coherent full-sentences prose. He reserved the right to make tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 2.0.1, 2.0.2, 2.0.3, ... .
  • 20171017T0414Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo had time only to upload a moderately polished finegrained outline. He hoped to convert this into a short full-sentences essay by UTC=20171017T1600Z.


[CAUTION: A bug in the blogger server-side software has in some past months shown a propensity to insert inappropriate whitespace at some points in some of my posted essays. If a screen seems to end in empty space, keep scrolling down. The end of the posting is not reached until the usual blogger "Posted by Toomas (Tom) Karmo at" appears. - The blogger software has also shown a propensity, at any rate when coupled with my erstwhile, out-of-date, Web-authoring uploading browser, to generate HTML that gets formatted in different ways on different downloading browsers. Some downloading browsers have sometimes perhaps not correctly read in the entirety of the "Cascading Style Sheets" (CSS) which on all ordinary Web servers control the browser placement of margins, sidebars, and the like. If you suspect CSS problems in your particular browser, be patient: it is probable that while some content has been shoved into some odd place (for instance, down to the bottom of your browser, where it ought to appear in the right-hand margin), all the server content has been pushed down into your browser in some place or other. - Finally, there may be blogger vagaries, outside my control, in font sizing or interlinear spacing or right-margin justification. - Anyone inclined to help with trouble-shooting, or to offer other kinds of technical advice, is welcome to write me via Toomas.Karmo@gmail.com.]




On the Saturday which was 2017-10-14 came the event I had long been anticipating with unease and worry. On that afternoon, many tens of people gathered in the Common Room of Massey College, in the physical and intellectual centre of the University of Toronto, for their communal memorial to Prof. R.F. Garrison. 

I discussed Prof. Garrison's scientific and community contributions in my blogspot posting of 2017-08-14 or 2017-08-15, headed "Prof. Robert F. Garrison Remembered (1936-05-09/2017-08-13)". Now I have to discuss his memorial. I will try to do so in the spirit of my companion blogspot posting this week, on the Innermost House Foundation. I will in a particular way try to follow the spirit of Innermost House as I discuss shadowy, troubling, things - my presumed surveillance officer Z____ from the University of Toronto, and his connection (or rather, in my respectfully submitted estimation, in his present lack of connection) with the organs of Russian state security. 

****

Seldom, if ever, have I seen a memorial so well planned and executed. Toward the end, music was delivered in the Chilean tradition dear to Prof. Garrison, who through much of his career had been a guiding mind at the David Dunlap Observatory's erstwhile Andean outstation. My afternoon's unhappiness was relieved, at this Chilean moment, by seeing a few couples even dancing.

Additionally, there was music of the highest professional calibre from one of Ontario's leading vocal ensembles, the Nathaniel Dett Chorale. (From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Dett_Chorale, one gathers that President Obama had the good fortune to hear this ensemble performing at his 2009 Inauguration.)

And there were speeches.

Here I treasured not only Garrison family reminiscences, and words from variable-stars authority Prof. John Percy, and of course remarks from Prof. Garrison's Shelton-family collaborators regarding Supernova 1987A, but also a set of remarks from Prof. Garrison's sometime Ph.D. student Prof. Richard Gray (Department of Physics and Astronomy, Appalachian State University). As I remarked in my blogspot death notice for Prof. Garrison back in August, Prof. Gray is the lead author, with Fr Chris Corbally, S.J. (Vatican Observatory Research Group, Arizona) his collaborator, of the currently authoritative work on stellar spectroscopic classification.

I was touched that upon timidly entering that big Massey College space, I was so promptly greeted by Prof. Garrison's widow. She was under no obligation to be specially warm toward me in her crowded assembly - standing as I do at the mere periphery of Toronto scientific life, and having not even been properly diligent in visiting Prof. Garrison, in his capacity of mentor, during the final phases of his illness.

I am pained that I did not correct dots correctly, and so did not take the correct initiative in greeting my astrophysics-coursework classmate, through fully three years, Adam Muzzin (now Prof. Adam Muzzin,  Department of Physics and Astronomy, in Ontario's York University). He for his part had directed to me a glance of friendly query.

I was touched that I was greeted warmly by various former DDO colleagues, several of whom would now have adequate, or arguably adequate, reasons for personal coolness. It seems to me that in the just-mentioned portion of Saturday's socializing there was an element of generous understanding - a sort of tacit, generous, acknowledgement that in the destruction of 32 out of the total 77 David Dunlap Observatory and Park hectares, and in my failure to save so much as a single tree from the commercial ambitions of the De Gasperis and Muzzo families (they are acting through the "D.G. Group" subsidiary "Corsica"), and in my concomitant loss through legal bills of the bulk of my life savings, I did not now have to be made a target of reprisals. (I do, after all, plead - here today on this blog as on earlier occasions - that I did pretty much everything I could think of, from 2007 right up to 2014 or 2015, in the teeth of opposition, and that my various actions have in their seeming recklessness harboured also an element of prudence. Who could ever have predicted not merely that the greater part, but that, astonishingly, the entirety, of the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) and Divisional Court work would in the end prove futile? Was it not a reasonable supposition when the OMB hearings kicked off, back in the northern-hemisphere summer of 2012, that the conservationists, under the aegis of my friends the Richmond Hill Naturalists, would succeed in blocking at least a few of the most offensive of the developers' projected Hillsview Drive McMansions, so close to the main dome? The expectation would surely have been reasonable - I do not say, reasonable back home in Estonia; but I do say, reasonable in so well governed and law-abiding a jurisdiction as Finland, or again Switzerland. And are we not in general right in according to the Canadian legal system the same level of confidence as we habitually accord to, at any rate, Finland and Switzerland?)

****

In the course of conversations in that big Massey College room, I obtained a point of scientific importance, which I now set down to supplement what I was able to write here to blogspot on 2017-08-14 or 2017-08-15, in discussing Prof. Garrison's database: Contrary to what I had feared, the physical media on which the database was stored are safe - and this despite my own lack of diligence, as discussed in my posting of 2017-08-14/2017-08-15. It will suffice for a couple of us now to work on the problem together. We will have to get the database once more running as an application under Prof. Garrison's antique OS/2 operating system, whether running the legacy hard drive, or better an exact byte-by-byte mirroring of it, either on his (as I learned on Saturday, conserved) workstation, or (better?) on some other. (I myself have some documentation for OS/2, and conceivably even an installation CD.) - The run will of course be the first step toward doing a flat-ASCII database dump, for which I think I can work out the appropriate SQL commands, I think drawing in part on some private casenotes regarding the organization of Prof. Garrison's SQL tables. With flat ASCII safely in hand, we can hope to port the SQL tables to some modern database-managing application, running under some convenient modern flavour of GNU/Linux. 

****

From that thing of joy which is the database, I turn now to a darker aspect of the Saturday afternoon. (That afternoon does as a whole remind me of a passage in Homer, about the minds of men being cast over with varying sunshine and cloud, as Olympus may from moment to moment decree.) Was I under surveillance; and if "yes", then on the part of what organ, or even alliance of organs?

We are told to pray for our enemies. However, I do not have enemies, at any rate in the sense of having people I am out to punch, kick, sue, or even in vigorous ways humiliate or mock. It is true that I imagine, perhaps especially in the morning shower, fancy courtroom scenes, involving this person and that. In these scenes, I reduce this person or that to a pulp, quivering in the dock, as I quietly pose question upon incisive question, in my imagined capacity of amateur advocate. In my flattering scenario, I end by suavely murmuring to my now-weeping victim and the judge, "Thank you. That was helpful." And afterward, outside the courtroom, I am urged by my learned opponent, perhaps property-developer advocate Mr David Bronskill, to enter the legal profession, so as to ornament the Ontario Bar. At this point one switches the flow of hot water briefly over to the Icy Cold, and then one reaches for the towels.

Enemies in the sense just sketched are the proper province of the schoolyard. In a schoolyard, I imagine noses could on occasion be bloodied and clothes on occasion torn.

I did not myself suffer such things to any notable degree. When one looks at the lives of others, who did suffer them, one applauds above all the stance of eventual mathematical physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), on his first day at the Edinburgh Academy.

When I started school early in the September of 1958, not knowing English, and to my alarm seeing children in boisterous play, I wailed in the only language I then knew - I see in my mind's eye that noisy Nova Scotian classroom, with its firewood piled high in a small side-room, as though it were yesterday - Aga  Ämi, millal siis õpitakse?" - "But Mummy, when, then, are they going to be learning?"

Young James, on the other hand, got well and truly worked over. We are told in biographical notes (cf http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Maxwell_House.html) that he came home "with his tunic in rags", "his neat frill rumpled and torn". But, we are also told, he came "/.../ excessively amused by his experiences, and showing not the smallest sign of irritation".

So either you can have enemies, or you can not have them (instead diverting energies into, perhaps, mathematics), and I choose the latter.

Now, O Gentle Reader, comes the topic of people for whom I myself wish no ill, and toward whom indeed I try to be correctly sympathetic, sorry and helpful, but who all the same may have it in for me in my past, present, and future capacities as a DDO troublemaker. In particular, there is the high academic administrator Z____, remaining through much or most of Prof. Garrison's memorial immobile, at practically the sole spot in Massey College's big public space which gave him a commanding view of everything important. I, mounting countersurveillance in response to anticipated surveillance, was of course also pretty much immobile, and of course likewise in a good vantage point. We stayed at all times ten, or so, metres apart, without exchanging the slightest tokens of recognition.

It was Z____ who was the chief 2003-era or 2007-era architect, within the University of Toronto at the ordinary Departmental level, as opposed to the more exalted decanal and Vice Presidential  levels,  of the University's eventual, widely condemned, 2008 DDO sale. I am not at all sure that Z____was on a surveillance mission. If he was, I have no proof that Z____'s interest lay in me. But it is true that of all the persons in that room, I was the sole DDO troublemaker, the Visible Tree-Hugger. If Z____ had anyone else in his sights in that room, then he was poorly briefed, and was wasting both his own time and the time of his masters. This would seem to me uncharacteristic of his sharp intellect. It is also true that (I repeat) we squared off, as people must in all spookshops be trained to do - in MI5, in MI6, in Mossad, in FSB, in Estonia's Kaistepolitsei - with the two of us far apart, each thoughtfully selecting the spot  physically appropriate for (so to speak) his particular set of Embassy duties. All I can do here is to put everything on public record, herewith assuring Z____ that I mean him no harm.

****

It will in addition be asked: Was Z____'s putative Saturday operation linked to FSB-cum-SVR?

Russia has been very active indeed in the last 48 or 72 or so hours, reading my blog with an assiduity only seldom precedented in my personal blogspot operations. Whether the so-recent downloading was linked to Z____, I cannot say.

Trying to be helpful to everyone, I make the following points:

  • I am most desperately sorry for the current situation in Russia. I wish Russia no ill. Quite the reverse - I wish Russia to turn aside from its current trajectory, which can only end badly. (On the current trajectory, things hold together, more or less. for twenty years, or even for thirty. Then, however, Vovan Vovanitch is dead - he may, I grant, as a person from my own generation, now reasonably aspire to high old age, in imitation of Mr Robert Mugabe - with the oilwells running dry (in their own eventual, sad, imitation of Britain's now-departed "North Sea Oil"). What comes next? On the current trajectory, the Russia of the mid-century has no world-class universities, no manufacturing capable of competing with China and Germany, and perhaps not even any correctly managed forests. So I think people to the east of the Urals will have to throw their mid-century political lot in with China, and that the people to the west of the Urals will have to do all in their now-limited power to avoid becoming a failed state. I know we in Estonia, surveying this impending meltdown from our own side of the Narva River, may not always be too keen on east-bank wild dancing, on east-bank vodka binges, on east-bank balalaikas,  on those teary east-bank folk songs - I do, on the other hand, in a certain russophilia, applaud two such songs in my blog posting of 2017-03-20 or 2017-03-21, headed "A Russia Situation Appraisal, for Kmo Case Officer and Others" - or on the noisy, wearisome, kinda-sorta American-patriot exaggeration of legitimate love-of-родина-or-отечество. But Russia deserves something better than failed-state status. A country with Tolstoy, Rachmaninoff, geometer Lobachevsky, and theoretical physicist L.D. Landau in its history deserves better.)
  • I appreciate that my presumed FSB or SVR case officers are unlikely to themselves be recruited from the criminal and near-criminal classes. The old rule from the pertinent recruitment folklore - The organs check you out, they find out if you fight dirty in a street brawl, or again are capable of killing some small animal; if those initial observations are promising, the organs set up a situation, harvest the resulting компромат, and make you a recruitment offer you cannot refuse - is in their case unlikely to apply. They do, to be sure, know who pays their nice salaries. But they are themselves no criminals, merely analysts - not even all that different from me in their training, their literary and musical interests, and their temperament. There is not the slightest point in shaking a fist at them.
  • It is interesting that FSB and/or SVR should be working hard on my case (with all that blogspot downloading, now and in past months, and perhaps also with that pleasant pair of sex workers waiting for me in vain, that night I emerged from the Toronto Hacklab - unless, indeed, it was the DDO developers, in place of FSB or SVR, who engaged the pleasant, talkative,  молодой человек and the pleasant, silent, дебушка; but I really do not think Italians are so detail-oriented). All the same, I cannot in the legitimate Russian public interest encourage Russian officials in fostering illusions. The organs need NATO dirt. Mere dirt on a Canadian municipal matter, such as DDO, is of scant Foreign Ministry utility. This is a point I have already covered in all the correct detail - right down to the matter of professional services putatively rendered to a few York Region officials, perhaps outside Richmond Hill, by our erstwhile local Natasha (now said to be an "investor" in one of the warmer parts of the Union, and I think unconnected in her professional life with the just-mentioned pleasant молодой человек and pleasant дебушка)  - in my blog posting of 2017-03-06 or 2017-03-07, headed "Open Letter to My FSB/SVR Case Officer, with a Query on Practical Russian". 
  • Racking my brains for some way the FSB or SVR could play the DDO card, I still come up with nothing beter than what I was able to offer in the posting of 2017-03-06 or 2017-03-07: if (if, if) you want to run a big public-relations risk - and I advise against it - then first buy up some of the DDO developers' lots, as currently promoted at http://myobservatoryhill.ca/, and then with diplomatic fanfare turn them back into greenspace. Explain, as the rootballs of birch saplings enter newly humus-remediated soil by way of a graceful botanical tribute to the родина or отечество, that Vovan Vovanitch is "as a worried friend of Canada doing for Canadian natural and scientific heritage what Canada, in its hour of need, lacked the courage and skill to do".
  • In the a priori improbable event that FSB or SVR in future approach Z____, exploring the prospects for collaboration, Z____ should proceed circumspectly, on no account doing anything which could later be construed by some troublesome blogger (by me, for example) as the accepting of a personal benefit. The sole question which can in that a-priori-improbable contingency of an approach be allowed to form in Z____'s cranium is, "What might I now do, working with these now approaching three-letter agencies, to protect the telescope I helped harm in 2008?"
  • All parties should feel free to consult me if necessary. I am not haughty; I am not proud; I am not stiff; I do not carry on like some doctrinaire Estonian-diaspora Cold Warrior, much though it might sometimes sound that way: if people come to me, I will give what help I can. Admittedly, I might, even while giving help, seek guidance from such Church or NATO authorities as might seem to me from hour to hour, in the rapidly evolving situation, appropriate. 
[This is the end of the current blog posting.]