The origins of literature To define narrative formally is to accept, perhaps dangerously, the idea or the feeling that the origins of narrative are self-evident, that nothing is more natural than to tell a story or to arrange a group of actions into a myth, a short story, an epic, a novel. (Genette and Levonas…
Author: Kenneth
Cat owner, educator, learner
Fictitious reality in live action and animation
What’s the difference between live action film and animation? Well, a lot of things. A difference I’ve been thinking about lately is how each relates to reality. Live action is meant to depict a fictitious reality but actually presents a true reality (the performance) out of context (the film’s production). There is a suspension of…
A nihilist rebuttal to the cosmological argument
This is the basic form of the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of god. Some say premise 2 is implied by the big bang theory, but this is not strictly correct. Science cannot, at present, distinguish between a universe that began to exist and a universe that always existed. One counter to this argument…
Yoda was wrong
Do or do not. There is no try. There words from Jedi master Yoda are among the most quotable in the Star Wars saga. But in a world without the force, do Yoda’s words hold water? Judging by the title I clearly don’t think so, so here’s why. It’s reminiscent to me of a certain…
What it means to say “lobsters are conscious”
The creationist site Evolution News recently posted an article entitled What Does It Mean to Say “Lobsters Are Conscious”? The thrust of this article is to use research about animal sentience to uphold mind-body dualism while simultaneously downplaying the similarities between human and animal minds. In short, the author Denyse O’Leary is trying to have…
Rabbit hole: New Concepts in Global Tectonics
The New Concepts in Global Tectonics (NCGT) Journal is a pseudoscience publication imitating an academic journal since 1996. Their motto is “accept nothing on authority,” referring of course to the authority of peer reviewed scientific consensus. They publish work largely from “independent researchers,” in other words individuals with no institutional affiliation and potentially no relevant…
Operations
You’re certainly already familiar with several mathematical operations, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. You may also be familiar with the logical operations AND, OR, NOT, XOR, and IF…THEN. More generally, an operation can be defined on any nonempty set. Operations have the following properties. Arithmetic operations We’ve already discussed a few of the…
Jungianism and divination
The conscious and the unconscious An important part of Carl Jung’s philosophy is the separation of (and connection between) the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. Both are parts of the self, and this implies that there is a part of the self we have no awareness of. However, that does not make it inaccessible….
The omnibenevolence paradox
This, what I call a paradox, is a major irreconcilable difference between myself and some religious people, especially Christians. If you have faith that God is all good, then you are presupposing that whatever God does must be good. If you personally disagree with God then it must be your moral compass that’s wrong. In…
“Opinions about the science”
I recently heard a panel interview on NPR discussing how climate change and environmental policy will affect how people vote in November. A self-identified conservative panel member said that people have “different opinions about the science” of climate change. This particular person was not in fact a climate change denier, but was referring to climate…
thoughts on mind 