2024.08.22
When I went off to Wesleyan the next year, I met another real musician, Stanley Lewis, who was also a superb artist and has made his career as a painter. We formed a quartet (piano, bass, and drums, with Stan on alto sax) and played at fraternity parties that year, and one night we particularly got it together and played some amazing jazz. The next day, I said to Stan that I wished it had been recorded, and he jumped on me. "NO! Don't try to accumulate things like that as if they made you somehow better. Last night was a trip. Be grateful it happened, but now let go of it." That was Stan the purist, and I got the message
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," Quine is said to have responded: "Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth."
Here is one substantive message to extract from this tale: Don't trust your "intuitions"! Our convictions about what is alive and what isn't, what is conscious and what isn't, are easily provoked and manipulated. Think of it this way: If oysters had a smiley-face pattern when you opened them, and seemed to have two eyespots with long, blinking eyelashes, few people would be willing to eat them. In fact, if apples had chubby childish faces, complete with dimples, they would disconcert even the vegans.
Marvin spotted the music on the piano: two collections of ragtime pieces, one a nearly complete Scott Joplin collection and a fine collection by the excellent ragtime pianist Max Morath. This was my ragtime phase. Marvin perused the collections for a few minutes and made a rather rude remark: "I see you like music that's *obvious*." Indeed, ragtime is often gloriously obvious; that's part of its charm.
Goodhart's law rules: whenever a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
The history of philosophy is largely the history of very tempting mistakes made by very smart people, and if you don't know the history, you are almost certain to make the same mistakes, because they're still very tempting. I find it both amusing and satisfying when a scientist leaps in, as they sometimes do when they have a free afternoon, and attempts to solve the mind-body problem or the free-will problem or the problem of causation and ends up, with gratifying regularity, remaking Plato's mistakes, Kant's mistakes, Hume's mistakes.
