That’s a whole nother thing.
“Today I should have went to the grocery store. I only needed a couple of things, so I could have used the “ten items or less” line and gotten out of there pretty fast. That said, my friend’s coming over later and she could of picked those things up for me…but that begs the question how I’d pay her back. I’d have to go to the bank to get cash so for all intensive purposes it would be easier for me to go to the store myself. When I go I should bring my own bag so I don’t have to pay for one, but that’s a whole nother issue.”
Oh dear. It looks even worse when it’s all written down.
1. The conditional state of “go” requires you to use “gone” not “went”
2. “Less” describes an uncountable number. Ten (we hope) is countable. The sign should say “fewer”.
3. She could of? What the hell does that mean? Could of? It’s could have.
4. Question begging is the very specific logical fallacy of circular reasoning. I know that “beg” sounds like an “intellectual” word, but “brings up the question” is what makes sense.
5. Intensive purposes? As opposed to unintensive purposes? Increasing in intensity? Can purposes do that? The saying is for all intents and purposes.
6. Another is a word. Other is a word. Nother… is not.
I could ramble on for ages about common grammatical mistakes. In fact, I often do. The trouble is that recently I’ve come to the harsh realization that I could be wrong. The unwashed masses (which idiomatically, means uneducated not unhygienic; I have faith most people shower) might actually be right when they split their adjectives right down the middle into two words. There may in fact be such thing as a “nother”, or an intensive purpose. Why? Because grammar isn’t an a priori knowledge. It doesn’t exist outside of it’s practical application.
The way we use words is not determined by the “rules” which are stated by the “inventor” of the word, but rather how they are actually used. If words were strictly correct or incorrect, their meaning would never change. The word “cool” would only refer to relative temperature and “beef” would not be something you could have with somebody (unless you were sharing a steak). Whether or not something makes sense is determined by whether or not it makes sense TO SOMEBODY. You can’t just make up a term (sorry, philosophers…) and then just say “well it makes sense to me”. Unless other people understand the term, by definition, it doesn’t make sense!
Alas, when I say that something “begs the question”; it may be the case that unless I am in a room of equally neurotic amateur philosophers, I would be wrong. To most people, I would make no sense at all…
…which happens to be the case more often than I’d like to admit.
East Of The North Pole
Laughter is the best medicine. While this is obviously a broad generalization (it might make your appendicitis much much worse), I’ve always wondered why we laugh and joke; what is the fundamental concept that makes watching someone take a football in the scrotum so universally enjoyable?
Robert Nozick once said that the thing that makes humans unique is their ability to use humor. Just as a philosophical tangent (I can’t help myself), other proposals for the unique feature of human being have been the simple presence of human DNA (thanks Captain Redundancy), grammatically complex language (the use of different tenses), and the ability to reason.
There are different categories of humor. Firstly and most simply, there is physical humor. In these instances, something which the agent does not expect to occur occurs. There must be an “expected result” in order for the “unexpected result” to be funny. Watching someone get tied down knowing that Brett Favre is aiming at his testicles is not nearly as funny as if he thinks he’s going to catch the ball. In terms of logic (the boring translation), the conclusion does not follow from the premises.
This is actually exactly how psychological or intellectual humor functions as well. Really, humor is all about purposely committing logical fallacies. You could make a category mistake (confuse a part with a hole, for instance), a non-sequitur (where the conclusion does not follow from the premises), or my favorite gold standard of humor (which those who know me live in fear of), the pun.
The funny thing about humor ; – ) is that it actually requires people to use another so-called “unique” human characteristic – that of reason. Unreasonable people fundamentally lack the ability to find certain things humorous, because you need to identify the conclusion that should follow from the premises to recognize a bad conclusion. So, I guess Nozick wasn’t being all that original when he said that humans were unique in their ability to use humor. If humor is just nonsense, then it follows that you need sense to understand it. I guess we’re back to Aristotle (we’ve had no new ideas in the last couple millenia) in saying that rationality is the thing that makes people unique.
Complex grammar is also not a different “unique property of humans” because it also fundamentally employs rationality. Recently, when I was asked where I was going to go to grad school, I answered “somewhere East of the North Pole”. While most people wouldn’t find this funny at all (I don’t have testicles and there was no football involved), I thought it was hilarious because it refers to both everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The statement is nonsense and of no use. Grammar itself requires reason, and because of this, grammatical mistakes are funny in the same way even physical humor is enjoyable. My mother (whose first language is not English), has long since gotten rid of her accent but sometimes struggles with employing grammatical rules to new words she learns. For instance, when she found out she had low iron levels; she said to me “I am anemia”. That is actually quite impressive. She IS the disorder that is anemia! You’d have to take supplements every time you were in the same room as her. Hilarity ensued.
So now when your buddy gets a shot in the nuts and while doubled over in pain gives you a glare and says “what are you laughing at?” You can now confidently answer “that conclusion didn’t follow from the premises!” If he doesn’t laugh with you, he’s just not being reasonable.
Where Did You Get That?
Do you ever wonder who would pay double for organic chocolate or buy a lifejacket made for a Labrador?
Money isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. If you knew every purchase someone made for a week, you’d be able to predict where they lived, whether they owned a car, if they were married or had kids. You might even be able to predict what they looked like.
Somewhere, someone has to be making money from an object for that object to even exist. 12 mpg SUVS, left-handed tweezers, tofu-turkeys (tofurkeys) and vitamin D drops for babies exist because somewhere out there, some extraordinary person is buying them. I often have an overwhelming urge to know who these people are… just so long as I have a trap door handy in case somebody starts to tell me that babies get fussy when they don’t tan often enough.
I get this familiar creeping curiosity when reading about breakthroughs scientific research. When you hear about breakthrough research resulting from things like Omega 3s or Acai extract, you have to marvel that this research actually gets funded because the company funding it has ALREADY identified a market that believes eating berries can reverse a cancer-causing genetic mutation.
The latest study from Newcastle University cites seaweed as “being key” to tackling obesity.
The researchers who promoted this study were also quoted as saying “Obesity is an ever-growing problem and many people find it difficult to stick to diet and exercise plans in order to lose weight.
These findings suggest alginates could offer a very real solution in the battle against obesity.”
The “real” solution couldn’t possibly be “eat less” because that would be “difficult”. The real key is that ultimately, we’re not eating enough seaweed. That’s why the Japanese live so long and are so thin right? They eat alginates. My obesity is caused by the fact that I am not eating enough of something. I tried diet and exercise, but it was so much easier just to eat something extra. Plus, science said so.
Science also “suggests” (my favorite word that gets researchers out of any actual liability) that seaweed can… you guessed it! Treat cancer. Because as we know (“Dr. Scientist” said so), everything that makes you lose weight also cures cancer. It’s a package deal. ‘Cause they’re both “genetic”.
If we really wanted to take a cue from the Japanese on weight loss, we’d overpopulate to the point where food was in actual scarcity, and then implement a law where you are literally fined by the government for having a waist circumference over 32 inches. Companies are also fined for hiring fat people. Exceptions apply… if you’re pregnant, not so much if you don’t eat enough seaweed.
The reason that “eat less” isn’t the “real” solution to obesity is not because it’s difficult, but because it doesn’t give people anything to buy. In fact, you’re saying they should buy less. In order to sell that, companies are going to have to get a lot more creative, or consumers are going to have a lot less savvy.
Spring Fever.
It’s only March. March is an appropriate name, at least here in the North because that’s usually the only way you can get through the snow. It was between “March” and “Trudge”. I guess March sounded less… slushy. This year, perhaps March should have been named “Frolic”. As you know, Canadians start the frolicking season every time frost melts enough for us to read the thermometer, and this year, it read “spring fever!” nice and early. Let the batty behavior begin.
I think that the first burst of sunshine and above zero temperatures should come with some ground rules. Speaking of the ground, it’s still covered in snow and mud, so platform sandals are probably not a good choice. I know that the miniskirt happens to “match” the flip flops or heels, but it is still March in Canada. Complaining of cold when you’re not wearing pants will not get you any of my warm sympathies. Or my sweater.
Speaking of shoes, regardless of whether it is twenty above or twenty below, (believe it or not) it is actually still inappropriate to remove your shoes in public. Particularly in class. Extra-particularly in places where food is served. Extra-extra -particularly if you sit down, untie your converses, remove your socks, and stretch your yoga toes all over the chair. Is thirteen degrees Celsius actually so unbearably warm that you could not think of any other option but to subject the other people in the room to what your little piggies picked up at the market?
Where does the craziness come from? When you don’t see the sun for months at a time, I think it may actually be possible to overdose on sunlight. Oh wait, no, they have a word for that; cancer. I wouldn’t go so far as to rule out tumors, because something has to be pressing on something in the one’s head to explain the literal circus that comes out of the snow sheds come March.
Let me explain why unicycling, juggling, and that indescribable thing where people walk on a rope that is tied between two trees are…against all reason.
First off, they all commit to an activity that is non-transferrable. Tightrope walking is useful only in the situation where you have reached a staggering abyss, and someone has conveniently previously tied a taunt rope across it, and therefore your ONLY option would be to walk across it. Oh wait, you could overhand crawl… that would be easier. Okay so it’s applicable to the circus. Juggling is often argued to improve hand eye coordination. So does every sport on Earth, and in doing those, you might get some social value and physical exercise in the process. Again, it might look good on a circus resumé. Unicycling might get you from point A to point B, but only about half as well as a bicycle would. So we’re back to the circus argument.
Why would anybody want to be in the circus? Because they want people to look at them! Therefore, it is not the actual process or event of juggling or unicycling that is enraging, but the fact that anybody would put so much time and effort into getting attention. At least with a spectator sport, the observers CHOOSE to go watch – and will pay money to do so. If I want to watch hockey, I’ll go to a hockey game. In the case of sidewalk “look-at-me” specialists, every passerby is subjected to something they probably had no interest in seeing. It’s like a small child on a diving board yelling “Look! Look! Look! Are you watching!?” or a punk that manifests his “I don’t care if other people notice me” attitude in dying his hair neon green and wearing black lipstick. If you were actually Cirque du Soleil material, people WOULD pay to go see you, so you wouldn’t need to tie back the dreadlocks, kick off your shoes, and get your hacky-sack on.
So unfortunately, a little part of me is looking forward for the rain and snow this weekend because it means that the fair-weather-circus might go back into hiding. At least if it were a traveling circus it would leave. All we can hope for is re-hibernation.
Keep in mind, unless she is actually traveling with the circus, the bearded lady still shaves.
A Prescription for Health
We make a lot of decisions based on our conception of health. We think about health all the time; when we pick what we’re going to eat for lunch, when we should turn into bed, whether we should take the stairs. The funny thing is; I haven’t a clue what health is. Do you?
Some judgments are necessarily subjective. For instance, even if there is an entire empirical field that can tell me why I like things that are symmetrical, I don’t really need to know why I find a certain thing “beautiful”. That is, it is not important whether or not there is a reason for me to find a painting beautiful in order for its beauty to influence me.
Whenever anyone says that something is beautiful, we understand that is their opinion, and that it is necessarily subjective, and that their statement in no way requires us to also find the object beautiful. Such a statement tells you much more about a person than it does about the object.
But “health” isn’t like that at all. Is it?
It is up for debate whether the concept of “health” is prescriptive or descriptive. If health is descriptive, then that means that the concept of health tells you something about how the world is; that there is something can be observed and pointed to (outside of any subjective opinion) and one can say “that is health because of these definite features”.
On the other hand, if “health” is prescriptive, it means that the concept of health tells us about things that people value. It means that “health” is a conception of what is good or bad; a value judgment.
I cannot (ironically, for the life of me) think of an empirical description for health. Is it a sustainable state? Not really, because diabetes is “sustainable”, as is a certain excess of weight. Health is not really “happiness” or “flourishing”. Health is not “what is natural”, as cancer can be caused naturally. Health is not even an avoidance of a disease state. Disease states are internal states that inhibit the normal functioning of an organism. It could be argued that contact sports and driving are just as likely to cause a disease state as overeating.
Even if I could point to a person and say “he is healthy”, I still couldn’t give you a satisfactory list of empirical conditions that make that person healthy. So then what is health?
Health is a set of values that we ascribe to certain measurable (and unfortunately, certain immeasurable) conditions. These measurable conditions are actually NOT a scale of “good/bad”, but rather are on a scale of “normal/abnormal”. For instance, I am arguing that there is no such thing as “good” or “bad” blood pressure, but rather there is such thing as “normal” and “abnormal” blood pressure. Because “abnormal” blood pressure has a higher correlation to a risk of a disease state, and we value not being in a disease state, we then make a value judgment and make statements such as “that is healthy blood pressure”. This is a false statement, because plenty of people with abnormal blood pressure never succumb to a disease state, and plenty of people with normal blood pressure do succumb to a disease state. Therefore, normal blood pressure is only a marker of a chance of a disease state, not a state of health/unhealth itself.
If health is a set of value judgments itself, it follows that you cannot value health itself. Let me explain. Going back to our example of beauty; there are measurable and logical reasons why most people prefer symmetry and therefore people are more likely to define symmetrical things as “beautiful”. However, it is obvious that beauty is not objective. I could describe a piece of music, a person, an action, or a tree as beautiful and you needn’t agree with me on any of my judgments. Thus, you can value something because it is beautiful, but you cannot value beauty itself. You cannot value beauty because that would be valuing a set of things that you find valuable (a completely circular statement).
If beauty is a set of values concerning aesthetics (about the best description I can come up with), then health is a set of values concerning lifestyle. Obviously, what we value within our lifestyle is going to vary, and therefore for each of us health is a different set of things that we value.
Here is an example. I value physical ability. I prefer and relate better to people who can complete a certain level of physical activities. In my definition of perfect health, physical fitness weighs greatly. To somebody who has never competed in athletics, their conception of “perfectly healthy” might not include being strong, fast or anything other fitness marker.
With this kind of definition of health, “measurable health markers” are better defined as “normal ranges of populations”. There is such thing as normal blood pressure, normal weight, or normal number of headaches a month. These descriptive statements are statements we could make about lifestyle – similar to the statements someone could say about odd numbered flower arrangements being generally more aesthetically pleasing than others. They are things that are likely to contribute to the things that we are likely to value in terms of lifestyle.
So what does this definition of heath give us? I think the most important that comes from a prescriptive definition of health is that it gets us away from using health as a reason. We can describe things as healthy just as we can describe things as beautiful, but “health”, just like “beauty” is a statement more about the person than the subject. To do something “because it is healthy” when “healthy” has no objective definition is like saying something is “beautiful” and expecting everybody else to agree with you. Such statements should not be accepted. Health is not a reason or an explanation for anything, but rather requires reasons and explanations to justify it.
Health is prescriptive; it is a set of things that you think that one SHOULD encompass. There may be reasons for these things, but health is not that reason. The reason might be susceptibility to a disease state or dispelling worry, but “health” is not the goal. “Health” is a set of values.
It’s not what your prescription for health is, but how your health is prescriptive.
You Don’t Have The Right
In a recent BBC world service poll, four out of five people around the world think that internet access is a human right. Just to take things in perspective, this was an internet poll. Thus one might more accurately be able to say that “four out of five people in developed countries who are at least moderately influenced by British broadcasting…” you get the point.
Confirmation biases and selective reporting aside, let’s get down to the real issue here.
I’m a university student. I have what I would call strong emotional ties to the internet. The unexpected lack of internet might actually cause me to weep. Profusely. Will I move to Estonia or Finland, who have both already ruled internet access a human right? No. Here’s why.
When trying to determine what a right is, one can’t turn to arbitrary and frustrating documents like the charter of human rights, because quite frankly, the way those documents are determined and upheld is miserable to say the least. Describing something in terms of a legal document is like starting a speech with “the oxford dictionary defines…” it’s just avoiding the issue.
So what is a more practical definition of a right? I’d say that defining a right as something we expect other people in our community to uphold for us and that we would be expected to uphold for other people. Food might fall into this category, as we (at least hope) that we would try to provide this to people in our community or social vicinity who are in need and hope that we might be provided with such in out times of need. That said we do a pretty miserable job of providing something like food to people even in our close vicinity, let alone in a global sense. This tells me that when it comes to rights, very little qualifies. We often feel as though we have the right to a lot of things (education, healthcare, days off work or even internet), but if you look at the reciprocal angle, when it comes to how committed we are to providing those things to other people, we really aren’t that motivated.
If we can barely call food a right, as we don’t feel particularly inclined to provide it for those who don’t have it (if we did, a lot less people would be hungry), then how could internet possibly qualify? Don’t get me wrong, my life changes drastically and becomes a lot harder when my modem is on the fritz, but do I expect my neighbor to provide me with internet? Do I expect him to pay tax dollars to provide me with unfailing email? More importantly would I pay for my neighbors to surf the web? Of course not.
We all like the internet. That’s why we’re on it right now. It makes our lives easier. We can access information, communicate in ways that were never possible before. It is universal medium via which we can express ourselves. It also makes difficult conversations much easier by removing personal contact. We can also pretend to live a life that is much more satisfactory than the one we have to wake up to. Oh, and don’t forget facebook, youtube and porn.
Is it a right? No.
BUT apparently it’s up for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Move over Obama, “the internet” is being nominated.
Rant to follow.
Conditional Love
It’s an interesting experiment to write about unconditional love when you’re not a person who really believes in any kind of love. Do I hold out a kind of irrational wishful thought that something to the tune of love might exist? Sure. Do I have any kind of belief or belief network based around a concept of love such that it might influence my day to day decisions? No.
"Billy, I thought we made it clear to you that our love was conditional on you doing well in school"
I’m interested in unconditional love because it’s a peculiar concept. Is anything really unconditional? What, for the romantics out there, separates unconditional from just regular love?
This is kind of a funny argument to get involved in considering the basic principle (love) is so vague and poorly defined that putting an adjective in front of it isn’t particularly helpful.
Thus, to avoid falling into the logical hell of subjectivism, let’s start by looking at what “unconditional” might mean.
For something to exist without conditions, it has to a) persist through time, b) remain unchanged with exterior events and c) a conditional form must exist. The first two might seem relatively obvious. Time is a factor because conditions deal with a hypothetical (future) and by definition, the unconditional cannot change. The third is a logical trick. In order for “not A” to exist, A must exist, as it is A that defines “not A”. For instance, if there was no such thing as a frisbee, you could never say that a metal disk flying through the air is “not a frisbee”, as you need something to be a frisbee in order for everything else to be described as “not a frisbee”. Thus we must accept that in order for unconditional love to exist, there must be conditional love.
Love is awfully vague, but even to the skeptic; the popular understanding of “love” might not really include something like “conditional love”. It takes a bit of the zing out of it to say “I will love my spouse on the condition that they clean the kitchen and are faithful” or “I’ll love the Flames as long as they keep winning”. Unfortunately, divorce rates and bandwagon fans tell us that when it comes to what we call love, some of it is definitely conditional. Bummer.
If unconditional love must persist through time and remain unchanged regardless of external events, then it follows that it must be contained within the lover. Given that you cannot control external events, then it must be the person who does the loving must then be able to remain uninfluenced by external events, at least with respect to their loving.
I don’t really believe that anything is completely unconditional, but I will accept that the things that we have less conditions towards are the things that reward us in our own action towards them. Let me explain this concept further. If by my action I receive a certain positive benefit, then no matter the response of who or what my action was directed towards, I will probably continue my action.
Here is an example. I don’t like having an animal because the animal “unconditionally loves me”. Try not feeding the thing and see how conditional that love really is. I like having an animal because that animal needs me. To know that without my action, this thing would probably cease to live gives me a sense of importance and power that I enjoy. That may be unpalatable, but that feeling of importance is very compelling. Similarly, (almost) no matter what a child does, a parent will still be rewarded emotionally, psychologically, and socially for taking care of said child that these actions of “love” are almost without condition.
I don’t really believe in love, and I don’t really think that anything is completely unconditional. That said; if you really believe that there is absolutely nothing that the other party could ever do to make you feel differently, then I guess to you (and I think you’re wrong, but as a cynic and a curmudgeon, you shouldn’t take me too seriously) that’s unconditional something. The irrational romantic smidgen left in me will hold out a hope that it might be love. The rest of me will say that it’s less-conditional affection.
