My Mind is Made Up

(As noted here, I’ve been using Twitter to compile some sentences I have read and liked for one reason or another.  All have been stripped from their context.  Below I compile the first 100 sentences, with an occasional paragraph break for enhanced readability!)

Ah, but Korbal, think of all the fresh corpses. His taciturnity is legend. If he was going to be anywhere, he might as well be here, he thought, and then he slept. The methodological assumptions that underwrite causal inference are almost invariably implicit in scientific practice. Easter walked through the meadow, and spring flowers blossomed where she had passed. I saw you in the distance, wearing a huge, writhing hat; that then ate you whole. And devouring murders language, makes of it a dead thing. My own etiology of this supercilious attitude takes us back to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as its ultimate pathogen. It was an old man’s curse, he believed, to witness the horizons on all sides drawing ever closer. It is said that philosophy begins in wonder. That was the last time he masturbated.

Beware your gods, friend. What holds true of possible hallucination goes for all perceptual experience. Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks he can talk about language. No more need be said. But it is vision that is the queen of the senses. The unexceptional nature of philosophy is easier to discern if we avoid the philistine emphasis on a few natural sciences… First, we ate from the Tree of Illusion. Second, we ate from the Tree of Science. How many times, dear traveler, will you walk the same path? Devoid of majesty, a mockery of all that was once noble. The reason, my young friend, shall soon be made evident. I would know your thoughts. Frustrating. You’re not here, but wherever you are, you’re still there. It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism. You are not a loquacious man. Yet brutally perfect, a nightmare of synchronicity.

His mind was a maelstrom. Berkeley is a clear example of this. There must be such a word; I used it! I think I may have solved the Problem of Perception. The brain’s expectations are disrupted; something that should be there is missing, some epistemic hunger goes unsatisfied. Instruct yourself in blindness and indifference; I in turn intend to attempt the same. Does not experience lead to wisdom? I have not yet made up my mind. You cannot unmake yourself. Even blood decays. Virtues, flaws, limitations, everything — love will fondle them all, with child-like fascination. No one has produced any plausible explanation as to how the experience of the redness of red could arise from the actions of the brain. Certain things should never be taken for granted, among them… the precise meaning of words that are at the heart of your profession.

So you were a live birth? Attributing emotion where none exists. Are the two so different, or merely alternate approaches to the same thing? How do you know you’ve imagined ‘all that’ in sufficient detail, and with sufficient attention to all the implications? So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. Innocence is only a virtue when it is temporary. Too much beer and whiskey to ever be employed. Perhaps that is the truth of madness, when a mind can do nothing but make lists of the mundane tasks awaiting it, as proof of its sanity. She felt clumsy and coarse among them, trapped by her own silences. Folk psychology does not yield a clear verdict. Those are extraordinary trousers. And the day-in, day-out mindless yearnings of a people for whom possession was everything continued unabated. There would be vast senseless celebration, in any case. Of something, perhaps nothing, and certainly involving everything. Impervious to nuances, blind to subtlety. One cannot challenge the beliefs of such people, for they will not hear you. He had seen such certainty, yet had never shared it. What I desire is a meal that actually began with real food. In some counterfactual situations the stick might have been longer and in some shorter, if various stresses had been applied to it. They spend the hours, the days, and the future of Blond Ricky it follows without being sprightly. I want to be the one to walk in the sun.

So far I have said nothing that I did not think I had made clear before. But it should be apparent from the explanation that some criticisms are misunderstandings. To know and to understand is itself magic, for it made us stand tall. The problem arises from the role that is given to mere sensations. Faith is a dangerous thing. This confusion may seem too gross to have been committed by any competent philosopher, but various… circumstances rendered it possible. They seem to have been there, in consciousness, but were they really? Computers do not and cannot. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions and… possibilities are… rejected. I’ve put a penny on my desk, and I’m viewing it obliquely. Fate may well present itself, but the opportunity still must be embraced, willfully, eagerly. I look forward to a night of weathering attacks on my vanity. It may seem inconceivable that this could happen, but armchair conceptual analysis is powerless to establish this. The stone wall of skepticism would begin to crumble. Serious philosophy is always likely to bore those with short attention-spans.

The concept of imagining is rather like one of doing than receiving. I believe that I am a philosopher, and I’ve had that belief for some years. The dream is willed, but the willing occurs in the context of a psychotic split. Images are not hallucinations, nor yet fancies. But images are greedy for attention; it is what they live off. Delusional tendencies are the result of an imagination that has not grown up — one that still functions as it does in dreams. So we have sex to thank for freeing our imagination from its childish fears. Suppose the child’s environment is made intolerable, so that the perceived world is one in which the child has no desire to live. Was Mars always either dry or not dry? I drowned a world. Recognition and responsibility. Dreaming is sleeping insanity; insanity is a waking dream — roughly speaking. A grammatical unit of one or more words, bearing minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it…. I can imagine that I am a philosopher. I mean what I have just said to be familiar and widely accepted.

Stay mindful, my friend, and suspicious. Suspicious, but not frightened by complexity. You take your natural vices and call them virtues. Of which greed is the most despicable. Sometimes I think that nature is insane. In the proposition a state of affairs is, as it were, put together for the sake of experiment. Given any science, one may insist that it define its terms, and the terms used to define them, and so on until it’s driven round in a circle. Every notion vulnerable to any sordid breeze, stirred up, stirred together.