Ice, The Comma and Interpretation

Frost Advisory Tonight

     A more real - a 'correcter' version of the suspect word realer - understanding of what is truly in the world would hold fast to the idea that nothing has a name.

    This realer understanding might point out that language is a naming tool which captures the movement of idea, silences it by converting it into a stopped object that can be fed through a funnel - a sentence - the essential structure of which is a straight line. Call this straight line a rule bound chain of connections that abjures any rejection of the rules, a misbehavior which in the past couple of years has been variously named 'hallucination,' 'hack,' 'last days of humanity'..... it's a long Madison Avenue worthy list, which in the legal world might be titled  'Misplaced Comma.'

    Let's have a look at the hallucinogen of misplaced commas.

    Rather than mention that ghoul Scalia's interpretation of a comma in the Second Amendment, it's up there alongside the absurdity of the contents of the Arc of the Covenant, consider this dedication - "To my parents, Mother Teresa and the Pope." Then there's a television program about Peter Ustinov's summer holiday - "Highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector."

    And the Oakhurst Dairy Case, Maine Labor Law and who gets overtime pay where a court decided that these words in the 1995 update to the statute "....the canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of...." without a comma after 'shipment,' meant that drivers who did the actual physical distributing by driving the delivery vehicles rather than the packing for shipment and distribution, were, despite the lack of a comma, indeed entitled to overtime pay.

    The tune is played, joy to the world, then along come the grammarians, written word monitors, a Gestapo which to keep us fat round and ever more frightened of misplaced commas has since 2003 been called the ICE of language. In the Maine Labor Law case Oakhurst Dairy, its lackeys, the my profits not yours hyenas and other hangers-on had to find between five and ten million dollars to pay drivers their mandated time and half back pay.

    

Pretty Sad Really

Dodo

    In an intellect that emerged from primordial wildernes as a survival tool that raises and makes answers to questions when it's not making things like battle tanks, silk stockings and wooden spoons, you might notice that hope finds patience, toys with tolerance before reverting to lumpen resignation. 

   "Learning that everything has a name transforms how the mind carves up reality, shifting an experience of a continuous, flowing background into distinct, labeled objects and categories"

    "While pre-linguistic minds can still grasp basic numerical and social concepts, acquiring a formal language dramatically expands abstract reasoning, complex planning, and the ability to share knowledge across generations"

    Gone are honor and glory, moments of bliss and explosions of consciousness that reduce being to the brilliance of a shooting star. Instead of basking in the glitter, we try to make it real by learning how to write so as to give ourselves over to an eternity that can be reproduced.

The enablers of Tyranny

Book

     An established pattern in our land places a premium on correct answers. A point comes when those correct answers become insecure. Let me just say that answers, a preoccupation that we people have chosen to call intellect, are written into history by politics not choice. And yes, there's a high chance you'll disagree on the definition of the symbol politics. And yes, there's a high chance you'll disagree on the statement; "The written world is an inadequate means of both communication and record keeping."

   "Aught is better than naught!" Or "owt better'n nowt." Then consider the expression or idiom: "Better aught than naught." 

    Granted aught and naught are archaic words. The first records suggest they go back to the 12 Century.  Allow yourself to understand that both words are still in use. Of the two statements, the second one, "better aught than naught," is recorded as the original and therefore correct version. This of course is nonsense in human speak but is sensible in number speak where "E=MC squared" is not "MC squared = E."

   The missing element between these two phrases, is not which one of them came first, it's the nuance, tone and the more visual signals that are entirely context related. Oh sure, Wittgenstein's language game has been well absorbed into the fabric of LLM training. If you want to know how, the machine records impressions of this or that human through the history of machine/human interactions. The context of a language exchange between machine and a particular person is build around past interactions and are added to the machines capacity to predict by searching through probabilities unique to the recorded interactions between machine and a particular human.

    The machine will have a record of your name, your age, your marital status and on it goes. A good chance the machine will have a record of you politics, your likes, your religion, what you find funny... From these records it will have a model of you from which it can predict likely interests, behaviors etc. It can do all these things as it quietly kicks the Turin Test in the nuts.

   The reason to give consideration to a machine's access to spoken language while converting written language into mathematically commodifiable number symbols has much to do with what, over the past five thousand years, the Written word has already done to our species.

    And what might that be?

    Written language is a consort of Agriculture, they are the original sins, together they have enabled the tyranny of commodity. Agriculture destroyed the natural world, written language began the process of destroying humanity. Spoken language, opposable thumbs and sublime sunsets are about all we have left of our humanity. 

       

It's fairly simple

Processionary Walnut Moth have hatched

    As a species we people struggle with singularity. Psychology, when in the pay of an autocracy, has puttered around probabilities and produced questionnaires that purport to match an individual to his or her calling. 

   And why is a questionnaire necessary? Because it's marketed as an efficient method of deciding where this or that human resource belongs. 

   The point about a type A personality, according to the Cleveland Clinic, is something like this : 'high ambition, intense competitiveness, time urgency, impatience, and a constant drive for achievement.' In short, for type A personality, singularity is getting other people to do what a type A personality wants them to do.

   In our world, many of these total a-holes are sieved out of the population then matched to employment opportunities in  corporations and other oligarchic structures that cut throats for their living, this includes theological structures and the political classes

    There's argument of course, but generally a personality emerges from a combination of innate genetic predispositions and the environment in which those predispositions are encouraged to dominate.

   When let loose on society, a type A personality will be subjected to levels of stress each time it senses the disappointment of not getting its way. Worth noting here that time moves and doesn't stand still so things like looking old, getting old and dying are unavoidable. 

   For a Type A, adapting to stress without being destroyed by it is a secret that doesn't come in a bottle, or from a kitchen or from a pharmacy or from a street corner or from a plastic surgeon or from giving itself to the Lord and finding peace in powerlessness.

   Where does the secret come from?

  It comes from becoming a bigger and bigger and more complex a-hole.