Ode pour L'Election de son Sépulchre

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 09:46:22 GMT

Right, hunting Vampires was awesome last weekend, even if
vampire hunting was not what we mainly did. The cafe Brazil is
awesome even during daylight hours. Things are generally going well.

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 12:42:21 GMT

I am back from Australia. The break was fantastic. Brisbane was cold, wet and dark for the
first few days, but in the end it was warm, dry and light. The light seemed somehow diffuse,
like it was able to pour through my skin and into my bones, like hot honey and vodka
rather than thick spiced honey. It was also refreshingly free of the burning pain I feel when exposed to direct sunlight in New Zealand. Huzzah for a functioning segment of ozone layer,
or some such.

I met up with Brendon for the last few days, which also contributed to the time asymetry
of goodness in the trip.

While I was there, I figured out what that whole Ascension thing may be
construed to be about. More on that some other time.

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 17:28:30 GMT

Right, I'm off to somewhere in Australia. I'll be back the week after next.

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 01:32:47 GMT

Well, I have been off tea, coffee, and energy drinks for over a week.
The unreasonable tiredness, head pain, shakes and so forth have mostly gone, which is good.
I am going to jump back on the caffeine bandwagon soon, just not yet.

The Hermitage progresses apace, at a rate of one minute per minute - ah, unitless units,
how I adore thee. I have encountered only one wandering knight, so I am behind the
rest of the community. Perhaps I can make up for it through acquisition of a relic,
or through the Carthusian connection?

Sun, 27 May 2007 10:24:16 GMT

The coffee shop Brazil not only makes the most fantastic coffee and coffee related paraphernalia I have ever experienced, it also had three DJ's when I went there last night. They were playing industrial music which, together with the appearance of the loft we drank in, the lateness of the hour, and my state of fatigue led to the feeling of being inside both Final Fantasy VII and one of William Gibson's later works. It was an experience I am keen to repeat.

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 11:53:16 GMT

Wellington was fantastic. We all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. I am going to be quite tired for a while now, but it was worth everything.

Also, I have seen two truths. But more on that later.

Sun, 21 Jan 2007 10:48:11 GMT

Tonight, I saw a comet. It was like a tree a billion kilometers tall, burning with reflected sun fire. I had a fleeting vision of Kether, and the taste of a spectrum on my tongue, the opalescent sheen of Chartreuse.

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 14:22:19 GMT

Well, Muse was good, Tool was amazingly fantastic and Shapeshifter was the perfect way to cap off the evening. The parties on Saturday were interesting, also. Sleep is elusive - I am sure that I would be able to catch it had I enough sleep, but as it stands the personification of sleep is just too wily. Damn you bright eyed Red Chartreuse.

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 13:57:18 GMT

My dissertation is well and truly handed in, and I finished the last of the marking
on the 20th of last month. I have had seventeen glorious days of not work.
So, I must apologise for how venomous I have been - conjuncts took
the brunt of my vexation, as we met up soon after I had finished marking, just before
I realised that I had in fact grown fangs from excessive logic. The miasma of academic effluvia
around me has now diminished to the point where I think I shall enjoy the next ten days, which
I will be spending in and around Paihia, away from all things relating to university. In theory,
I should be much better company upon my return.

And yes, now I can say that it is a bad thing to truly let analytic philosophy dictate,
though it dictates truly. Also, comma splices and run on sentences.

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 11:06:49 GMT

I have ill advisedly decided not to remove the passage where I cite one of my
(rather unpublishable) unpublished essays. It is amazingly vainglorious,
a conceit so far from justification, but it makes me almost happy, so it shall stay.
Not sure why I am posting this.

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 04:55:12 GMT

Right, all I need to do now is properly formalise quantification (I can use it implicitly in translation to get terms, but that results in gibberish without justification) and tighten up my definitions, and I will have definability reduced to satisfiability (ie the existence of a uniquely referring term, following Russel), with the undefinable being that to which non-referring terms could be said to refer. The Berry sentence being such a non-referring term. Bleh, existence is complicated - how do you quantify over the non-existent? Easy, just make a multimodal extension to your metalogic (without the Barcan Formula, of course).
That being said, if I can (at this late date) show that all Berry like sentences are non-referring terms, by characterising `Berry-like-ness' in terms of folded tree length greater than the bound of a contained positive length predicate...

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 09:21:51 GMT

I don't hate all marking. I hate marking philosophy 101 tests. In fact, I hate truth trees. They are a stupid method, worse than NK or the method of tableux; I hate those two also, however. All natural deduction methods seem to have the same flaw when it comes to systems stronger than \Sigma_1; undecidability, or rather, a lack of bound. I hate them, and it. Especially when I have my dissertation still to complete. The hate that I feel for marking philosophy 101 tests more than makes up for the lack of hate I have for other marking. That is all.<\lj-cut>

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 06:02:38 GMT

Argh. I can _now_ articulate that truth preserving \neq meaning preserving vis a vis translations. Damned \leq_{T}. Truth and meaning preservation here coincide over certain matters of cardinality, due to my methodology; specifically, limit ordinals. Soundness and completeness change entirely however, becoming fantastical creatures I cannot begin to explain outside of the bright and rushing crystal of my mind.

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 04:42:19 GMT

Teleology + Ontology = Theology?
Epistemology is lonely out in the cold, but that does explain certain things...

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 04:36:35 GMT

Unless you count quals, or I ever actually go back and finish my other undergrad degrees. So, a qualified `No more exams ever', I suppose. Now I just need to finish marking phil 101 exams, finish my dissertation, and get my masters proposal in. What could be easier?

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 08:04:23 GMT

Argh. FDE is too weak to even begin to talk about its own weakness, and there is no such thing as a real model theory for FDE, because it has no metatheory - that being the problem I am trying to rectify. No wonder it is hard to explain my project; I had thought it was a problem with my skill as an orator, but I have shown - if not actually proven - that the words needed do not actually exist yet. On the upside, I think I have a generalised metaresult for cardinality. Expressed within my metasemantics, and demonstrated by my metaproof theory - as distinct from my meta-proof theory and my soon to be proof metatheory. Anyway, back to work.

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 07:44:31 GMT

Well, last night was fantastic, if triple edged. My uncle Rhys came up from Wellington, and we talked maths and family history. Later in the evening, Rhys, my Father and I shared a bottle of fifty year old port as part of the ongoing celebrations of my Father's fiftieth birthday. Finally, I had a long phone conversation with a very good friend; something that I have not done in rather too long.

Rambling

Sun, 08 Oct 2006 01:30:01 GMT

Faustus was fantastic, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I am going to go again. Also, I ate a crunchy bar during the intermission. I felt so subversive. The only gripe I had was minor - my French is lacking, so I could not compensate for the sometimes equally lacking surtitles.

Some very slightly odd things happened afterwards as I wandered around town. I am never sure of what to make of that kind of thing. Was my manner insufficient to indicate my lack of interest? Does my lack of interest make me approachable only to those whom I lack interest in? Bleh. I will never understand women.

In university ish news, I believe that I have tamed both xy - the graph theory environment for LaTeX - and Metatheory for FDE. Well, I have a semantics, at least. The proof theory makes no sense to me, but I have a system for generating models, with the bonus that consistent submodels fall out naturally. Now I just need to convince Koji that a consistent metatheory is a good thing, and Fred that my sleight of hand accomplishes consistency through sheer trickyness, yet with a profound lack of sophistry. Pin around four tails on me and call me a fox. I'll up that to five if I can generate the semantics that I want (that is, with indefinate denotation by terms) for Situation Theory and tie it in to the Proof Theory via canonical sentences.

Lastly, I went to a gig at Hysteria on Friday night - Naquidah were okay, Ishtar was bad, but Slipping Tongue were rather good. An enjoyable evening all around, with philosophy for everyone present who signified. Damn that quantisation, damn scale, and damn burn out.

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 08:45:54 GMT

The last few weeks have been rather vexing, and I want to thank everyone for being so nice, being even nicer than usual. Thank you.

Now, I have finished with marking for the time being, and all I have to currently contend with are the usual twin joys of assignments and dissertation. As an old sifu of mine would say, `make your point of extension into your point of relaxation by pushing to a new point of extension.' Only having to do what seemed impossible three weeks ago now seems relaxing - thus, I have succesfully completed another iteration. There are now only aleph null more iterations to go before I hit the Omega point. What I look forward to the most, however, is a full eight hours of sleep.

Pointless update.

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 09:51:53 GMT

A belated huzzah. No more August this year.

Vexation

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 09:36:44 GMT

I have come to the conclusion that the standard Russelian interpretation of Situation Theory
is a decidable fragment of second order logic - rendered decidable by dint of the lack of explicit quantification
over objects or predicates, with only restricted quantification over situations - that is, something like

< P, s > =_{df} ( \forall sit \ni Ps )

This is analogous to the restricted quantification depicted like so ( \forall x_{\leq i}).

Handling terms in anything approaching the method of Russel requires `proper' quantification over objects.

This is problematic. Jerry has suggested Lambda Abstraction as a solution, which is ten thousand times better
than Substitutional Quantification - but my mathematical intuition tells me that the philosophy is flawed,
so whatever technology I use will, if it works, result in a diagonalisation.
<\lj-cut>

I hate August. I hate it in a way that is probably quite irrational. Bad things happen, and it seems impossible to gain untainted advantage - Barrabi so close to Hermetic, and so very damning. While I believe that we move steadily toward Teilhards Omega Point, August is the month that reminds me that the Lord of this Age was Elohim, but is not El-Sh-ddai. While I have faint hope of earning the title Baal-Shem, a namer I certainly am, and thus the Principle of Sufficient Reason cuts me. In a related note, completeness without soundness seems to utterly defeat the purpose of things, as logic was founded in pain, formal logic a means of understanding it, rather than asserting it (that being the domain of metalogic) - understanding it through the understanding of implication. Despite its name, First Degree Entailment fails on this count, relevance implication being too weak to capture implication. So we have a failure of analyticity, which seems to be the surest criterion for duckspeak, which is the ultimate breakdown of naming. So, we seem to intuitively (intuitionistically) have another diagonalisation.
I see them everywhere, now, and I begin to see them even without the Law of Excluded Middle.
<\lj-cut>

I will admit that this is rather hand-wavy, with many suppressed premises. The two taken together are an accurate if not precise summation of my vexation, however.

Indirection

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 10:08:22 GMT

Well, it seemed like a good idea to post my class schedule. It is not particularly sensible, but the people that I want to know now may, perhaps, even if my technique is reminiscent of grapeshot. My office hour is for the express purpose of answering philosophical questions, so if anyone has any, and does not mind the form my answers usually take, or the content they are composed of, drop on by to room 108 in the Fisher Building between twelve and one on a Wednesday and I would be more than happy to give my usual form of answer. Yes, I am only taking two post grad papers, but this does not count the time taken for my dissertation, or that I have to explain things, even if I do not have to explain what I have explained beyond the level of meta of the smallest ordinal epsilon zero that is unreachable by Peano Arithmetic. Also, comma splices.

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
9-10		Philosophy 101 Lecture Auditing		Philosophy 101 Lecture Auditing
10-11	CompSci 750 Lecture Taking		CompSci 750 Lecture Taking	CompSci 750 Lecture Taking
11-12			Philosophy 101 Tutorial Giving
12-1		Philosophy 222 Lecture Auditing	Justin Marsh Office Hour Giving
1-2		Philosophy 222 Lecture Auditing	Philosophy 736 Lecture Taking		Koji Tanaka Office Hour Debating With
2-3			Philosophy 736 Lecture Taking		Koji Tanaka Office Hour Debating With
3-4					Koji Tanaka Office Hour Debating With

There was supposed to be angsty poetry below here, but the latest batch is either so subtle as to be incoherent, or so obvious as to be insulting. I am not a good enough judge of the perception of even one person in order to solve the problem structurally using only preweighting factors. I mean, infinite unions of infinite cuts? Not only is that line emo as all heck, but the pun of 'deconstructing eye' and 'enumerate your traits' and the obvious reference to Dedekind preface the line about 'not natural, but everything that is real' in a way that makes it just... automorphic and faithful. Authoring math and love poetry together exposes more of me than I am happy with. And large cardinal axioms may be independent, but I hope to be Rosser Seperable, which unfortunately makes me inconsistent. How does the pretty german manage it without the madness of that thing that I have struggled with these years? In a flawless segue, Koji Tanaka believes in paraconsistency with the same fervor the I hold my belief in metamathematics, the foundations of which cry out for consistency. Todays Phil 736 lecture could be summed up 'Hierarchy Guy and Rabid Classicist Russellian Girl vs Inconsistent Weirdo, with cameo appearances by Quantum Jim (the other one) and No Intuitions Man'. Round Two will be on Friday, with a potential for weekly syndication. Studio audiences are surely next.

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 10:43:32 GMT

Today was interesting. I feel that it was a good day, despite ill omens, boring lectures, and certain other factors. While saying as little as possible, I would like to say something in particular. On another topic, multimodal systems present interesting stability and pathology problems. In my increasingly mythical spare time I am looking into a way to make this more precise using topology, using a canonical conversion. So, if I am staring off into the distance, this has a good chance of being what I am staring off into the distance about.

Finally, my seminars. My maths seminar was apparently excellent, while my logic seminar was apparently complete rubbish. I thought they were both pretty bad, but apparently I am just as bad a judge of future marks now as I always have been.

I have strong feelings in conflicting directions about translucency, moreso about transparency.

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 02:08:37 GMT

Right, the seminar has been shifted from Wednesday to Thursday.
My apologies for the short notice. It will still be at 2pm,
and will be occurring in the Fisher Building, room 611.
It will be about half an hour long, and there will be time for
questions afterwards. Unfortunately, as this is not a departmental
seminar, there will be no biscuits.

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 03:46:11 GMT

The Wednesday seminar will be open to all of you fine people. No formal background in mathematics will be required, but if you would like to know some of the vague background information, Tarski's seminal work on Truth is available at http://www.ditext.com/tarski/tarski.html
Saul Kripke's paper `Outline of a Theory of Truth' is available on JSTOR via Voyager.
Davey and Priestly and Aczel's books are available through the internet and the library system. They are
very long, however.

Finally, the relevant essay is available from me if anyone is interested in reading it first.

Barring all of that, show up anyway.