The busy of life rushes and ebbs. Right now the tide’s been low for a week, and I’m still working on a depression time diet, and expecting necessity to find the balance of work and play. Anyone want to find some adventure? Also, anyone want to help me with graphic design for a cool website project that ought to make money later on?

Mmmm, *wonderful* party Saturday night (and much of Sunday). It was great seeing anastasia1 and a_c_i_d. I felt horrible for a_c_i_d, who tried in a dozen ways to express the party’s id, and the party would have none of it (girlygothic was particularly relentless). I also had a good time hosting the Rocky party last week, and I’ll do it again in a couple months.

The rest of this post deals in drugs (I know I have family members around, and they’re welcome to stay onboard, but I wanted to give fair warning). I could sing books-worth of praise for the many fine experiences, perspectives, and understandings that I’ve found through drugs. And I’d happily post pieces of that praise if anyone wants, but I have more current topics.

About two weeks ago, I got some mushrooms from a friend, and had a great trip filled with anthropological thinks, about American culture’s use of drugs and the mechanics of “drug exploration”, and how we live compared to how we think we live.

I took the mushrooms at an independent living group of MIT’s in Boston with a long history of drugs, engineering, and craziness. The first room I was in had a built-in music-synced lights show and couches hanging on chains. I ended up sleeping on a room-sized suspended fishing net with internet-controlled lighting and a tradition of nudity. Claudia might live there next semester for free, at the top of a musical staircase filled with glowing murals, in a room that opens onto the roof.

And my apartment’s walls are still white. In our world, anything is possible given the right connection (or the wrong connection and the right price). So why do our huts look like Mr. Potatohead, with a mass-produced home life of interchangeable parts, cluttered by the debris of our consumerism? Money obscures the possibilities of life: it is the great hammer with which everything looks like a nail, setting the cost of life just beyond our capacity, at a time when the possibilities of people-in-connection are unfathomably great.

I recently acquired a pill of MDA, which is sort of a cross between ecstasy, speed, and a psychedelic. Where you feel the connections between yourself and others on ecstasy, you sense them and ideate on them with MDA. I’m really looking forward to trying it. But it’s a social drug, so I think I want to take it at a Rocky party. I’ve never tried MDA or MDMA (ecstacy) before, and I don’t know how I’ll react, and I don’t know if it’s fair to exercise that uncertainty around people some of whom wouldn’t know or understand.

Disclaimer: I hold a regular Salon discussion group, with wide-ranging conversations on politics, philosophy, society, and life. The ideas in this post came from a recent Salon, but are not meant to be an accurate reflection of the dialogue.

Our discussion started on the basis for animal rights, but soon toppled into the different foundations for ethics. We spent a long time disentangling consequentialist and deontological ethics, and trading ethical thought experiments. We talked about Habeas Corpus, in reference to the recent court decision which takes it away from foreign “enemy combatants” held on foreign soil, and briefly revisited the DRM discussion from last time. We also talked about toilets and the anthropology of bathrooms.

And we didn’t come to conclusions or consensus on anything. Which strikes me as tragic, given the weight of the questions. A post about ethics terminology is a waste of good bits, so I want to argue some points.

Both animal rights and habeas corpus hinge on unalienable rights, and are meant to be granted unconditionally. Habeas Corpus is a right for human beings to defend their freedom. Animal rights are about preventing the needless suffering of animals. While I acknowledge that these issues could be approached from very different angles, I want to consider them in tandem.

I don’t think that consequentialism can form a foundation for unalienable rights. The normal consequential argument for them is that a world that didn’t guarantee some basic rights wouldn’t be a very good (e.g., happy) place. But a world in which some people (not you or your friends) are secretly interrogated, exploited, or eliminated, would be even better. You could live in the psychological assurance of your own rights, and the safety and luxury from taking away others’.

Under consequentialism, ends always justify means. Often consequential claims are based on a bit of calculation: compare the projected worlds that result from each possible decision, and integrate up some metric (total happiness, average well-being, population of philosophers); do whatever act would result in the best world.

There’s a boundary problem here. Why should we care about the rights of animals and Arabs? We can extend the veil of ignorance to ask “What if we were born Arab in a United States-dominated world?” but we aren’t going to ask, “What if we were born a rabbit?” In choosing our laws, why should we consider the well-being of other societies or species? To make a consequentialist argument, you need to define the metric you’re trying to maximize. Why not draw the limit at your skin?

Such an ethics is probably more palatable than we’d like to believe. We’re social creatures, and selfish motivations naturally lead to common goods. But the conscience is fairly malleable, and it’s easy to learn to consider another group (blacks, rabbits, Montagues) as unworthy of our consideration.

I think this is a problem of subjectivity in ethics. The consequentialist worldview distinguishes descriptive and normative statements, and orders them: first, there’s the world, then, there are value judgments about it. This division is a modern invention that gives us considerable analytical power, while simultaneously bracketing all ethical truths as subjective claims. But ethics by its very nature has to make objective claims if it’s going to say anything.

Deontological ethics aren’t based on value judgments (or at least, they aren’t supposed to be). “Killing is wrong” sounds like a value judgment to us, but within the deontological worldview, it’s purely (though not immediately) descriptive. Similarly, rights are actual entities of the deontological worldview. We can’t grant them– they were endowed without our help– so we can only respect them or break them.

The world as we experience it has no such descriptive/normative distinction. I believe that animals and foreigners have rights that we should respect. That’s a speculatively descriptive statement. On further evaluation, it might turn out that they have more or fewer rights than I thought. Currently my sense of their rights is based on Kant’s claim that it’s unjust to use another creature as a means to your ends, but even if that claim were discovered to be ill-founded, I would look for another *reason* why it is that they appear to have rights.

Even as I write this, I’m coming to doubt it. After all, don’t we create our world, not discover it? But then, let’s create a world where ethics can actually exist and have bearing on our lives– even if it would just make us happier to live in that world.

First, some activities.

A friend and I are struggling through Ulysses– join in! We just started, and we’re using a guidebook, a book of footnotes, and online resources to light the way. We meet to discuss the first 50 pages next Thursday.

The Salon is spawning a Film Group! Deep movies, bizarre movies, classic movies: the overarching theme is something like “films that make you think”. The first movie will probably be Fantastic Planet, this Tuesday, February 27, at 8pm in MIT room 2-105. You should come watch, and tell me if you want the announcements! There’s even a page to collect our movie recommendations– go to http://existencia.org/salon/movies/ and add some!

I’m thinking of hosting another Rocky party on March 3! And I thought it’d be fun to run a cocktail bar there: what’s your favorite drink?

Now, a little rant.

The world seems over-boiling with people searching for love– yearning for it and dejected in their lack of it. To be clear, I mean a particular brand of love: significant-other love. There are few creations that have brought as much misery and personal confusion as that one.

I’m no different. I want a girlfriend too. I want someone to share my joy with. I want the sex. I want the cuddling. I want the warmth next to me when I’m asleep. It’s not that I think love can’t be fun and worthwhile, but it doesn’t seem to do any of the things people want it to.

For example, love doesn’t bring you happiness. Cathexis, sure, which can be fun the way a good night of drinking is, but is that happiness? Love intensifies emotions, and stresses them, but it can’t make happiness out of thin air. And if it does, the result is a dynamic where you rely on (demand from?) the other person for the ingredients for your own happiness. It’s a recipe for hurt.

Love can give you newfound reasons for living, but it does this by what it takes away, not by what it adds. People seem to imagine love like the divided creatures from Hedwig and the Angry Inch. They want to glom onto another person and somehow grow and find new security in shear mass. Love is desire, which is a radical lack, not a fulfillment. We love into our weaknesses, but using the object of our love to “fill up” our holes is the same recipe for hurt. All love can do for our deficiencies is reveal them to us (but this may be exactly love’s most powerful gift).

Worst of all, people depend on each other for love. My teacher in philosophy said that all fights in relationships are because one party believes the other doesn’t love “enough”. Love is among the most fluid and unreliable of the emotions, and it’s as different from on day to the next as it is different on the two sides of the relationship. Expecting anything of love, and drawing conclusions of what it should mean to the other person, is a sure way to kill it.

I really need to get back in the habit of making thorough notes shortly after the Salon– I’m losing too many good discussion threads. One of our biggest topics at the Salon concerned recent changes in programming, which I’ve wanted to write about for a while. Here are my thoughts on it, informed by the Salon discussion, plus some other discussion topics below. Feel free to remind me of other topics in the comments, and I’ll record what I remember about them.

Programming has changed enormously since computers were invented. I don’t just mean that assembly gave way to higher-level procedural languages which gave way to object-oriented languages, although that mirrors the shift I’m interested in. In the days before C, programming languages had a fairly-small, well-defined collection of building blocks, and it was the programmer’s responsibility to construct whatever they needed. In a shift into libraries and then object-oriented languages, the programmer’s job has become more to connect pieces constructed by other people.

The pieces are also changing. They’re becoming more intelligent, more communicative, and more accepting of ambiguity. Programmers have realized the power in– and the need for– type-fluidity. Currently that’s instantiated in typeless languages, but these still form a kind of antithesis waiting for new synthesis with traditional typed languages.

The things we’re programming are different too. The programmer is no longer a craftsman. In the past, people designed programs to do a certain thing well. Now, people realize that they are really engineering experiences or “ways of understanding”. We like one program over another not because it does something better, but because it allows us to conceive of our task differently.

Which is exactly what different programming languages themselves do. With plug-in designs, programs themselves are allowing users to construct the context for their own experience.

The way we think of technology is in such incredible flux right now. With web 2.0 ideas (participatory, dynamic content; new kinds of social networking), the internet is changing and becoming the necessary context of all computer use. With mobile devices, the personal computer, our interface to it, and the ways we use it are changing. In another 10 years, programming will be vastly different; in another 20, it probably won’t exist, as we currently conceive it.

Anyway, we also talked about Digital Rights Management, specifically relating to Apple’s decision to drop DRM-protection tying iTunes to iPods, and how artists should be “rewarded” for their work. And we talked about the nature of Salons, and the posibility of having a kind of “party-salon”, which is more like the kind of gathering that was found in Paris.

The aftershow party was at mals13‘s. I love her apartment for parties. It has an incredible good vibe: relaxed, varied, “come on in and take your top off”-inviting, filled with unassumingly trendy and enchanting furnishings, and mals13 and her roommates are laidback, fun hosts.

But last night there was a video camera.

Evidently it was there with mals13 blessing. By the time I asked about it, she said it’d been on for an hour, and that everyone knew. Well, *I* didn’t know, and I felt like it was something of a break of faith. The comments below aren’t directed at mals13 (or the camera’s owner), and I’m not still annoyed at all; I just have a definite opinion on this, and I’m interested in others’ thoughts on it.

Of course mals13 or any other party host is welcome to have cameras at their parties… but doing so is a break from the normal rules of Rocky parties: what happens at the party stays at the party. That rule isn’t just a good idea. It’s a vital assumption. It’s there to cultivate an atmosphere where anyone can let it all out, without worrying about the consequences. It’s not easy being sexually free or raw-bones open.

Rocky is a context for, among other things, exploring sexuality. Sexuality– a core of our selves– is complex, surprising, and shadowed in layers of societal nonsense. Opening it up and getting beyond all the layers is difficult work, and ultra-sensitive to the situation you’re doing it in. The more you’re concerned with the future (as when there’s a camera in the room), the more you’re taken out of the present, the only place where sexuality lives. Not having cameras doesn’t guarantee for that special context for sexuality, but it’s an important piece. The right mix happens so rarely anyway.

The rule is also there to protect people– especially the ones who aren’t willing to ask for that protection. There are members of Rocky and visitors to Rocky who could get into problems with their friends, family, work, and future plans if anything got out. Keeping records is forcing them to trust you, or assuming that you know their situation well enough to positively know that it wouldn’t be a problem. I don’t consider that an ethical stance.

As Rocky, we are the chauffeurs of a valuable treasure: our Arc of the Covenant is the Rocky party. It is unique and sorely needed in our world. If we treat it well, it will shower us with gifts and allow us to bring light into the lives of others who visit our temple. We don’t have to use it every week– other kinds of parties are fun too– but I hold it in special regard and do not want to see it corrupted.

This is a core aspect of what Rocky parties mean to me. If someone wants to have another kind of party I think attendees should be warned.

Life Updates: I helped with a party Friday, played Riff Saturday, dropped the Culture Tech seminar and picked up TA-ship of an AI section of MIT’s intro CS course, got a little sick, and am sore from my first rock climbing excursion.

St. Damian’s Day: Forget Mr. Valentine! His institutionalized version of love has been the cause too much sorrow to deserve the word. Seven days later is St. Damian’s Day, in honor of the saint of self-flagellation. Read it as the day of self-love, joy in independence and personal drives and finding love without loss of self.

LJ Essays: I have half-written entries on the Ethics of Manipulation, the Relation between Intention and Passion, the Future of Programming Paradigms, and the Dilemma of Physics, but today they seem pedantic and irrelevant. Give me dialogue, not blank pages.

Politics: We’ve successfully installed an bloody authoritarian regime in Iraq (and we want to blame Iran). Go USA, peace-maker of the world!

State of Self: My ego is weak today. I wish I had a yardstick to measure myself against, and a window into other people’s worlds. I’m feeling overwhelmed by what I want to do, like I’m falling behind my own moving train. Otherwise, I’m great, and I love being sick.

It’s snowing!!!

I’m back from roadtripping across Germany. Enormous fun! I love travel. I love Europe. But I love Cambridge too, and it’s good to be back amongst good friends and waiting projects.

There’s a blog of the adventures at http://www.depoint.net/roadtrip/. Highlights include hiking in the Alps of Slovenia; getting a personal tour of Ljubljana from someone we met at a 24-hour Burek eatery; discovering Ljubljana’s artsy, squattery alternative scene and staying at their prison-turned-hostel; wandering the grounds of Dachau Concentration Camp; having divine signals lead us to the best food of the trip in Worms; and seeing Cologne’s cathedral and gay town. Here are some images from the journey:

And I’m back with a change, if a small one. Recently I’d been back-of-my-mind depressed because of my job: I independent contract for two companies that give me an endless stream of interesting work… but work that I can’t believe in as anything but a fun way to make money. And I can’t live to make money or respect myself for it, no matter how fun. But as I sat in the prison-turned-hostel’s Oriental Cafe, I shifted my foreground and background and realized that I was already doing the job I wanted, just not the job I was hired for: I’m starting a business. My business is Departure Point, the traveler’s community site I’ve been working on on-and-off for months. I’ll continue contracting, to support my business until it gets off the ground, but now I have a end that I can believe in.

In addition, it looks like this semester I’m co-teaching a class on Technology and Culture, and teaching a section of MIT’s intro CS class. Exciting!

This Sunday, I’m taking a week’s trip to Germany with three friends. *Three*. Finding one person to go over-seas with is tough– four people going at the same time is unheard of! (When I got my tickets, incidentally, I thought I’d be going alone.) We’re renting a car in Cologne and road-tripping across Germany, Austria, and into Slovenia. Why? Because it’s there, and we aren’t. Yet.

I played Brad last week at Rocky, and it was a ton of fun. janetweiss69 was a huge help throughout, with blocking, advice, cues. I gave Costumes a scare when I forgot that I only had the bottom half of a floorshow costume, but they and catullus_5 got me on stage on time.

I’ve had a lot of busy weeks recently (and my game is taking a lot of time), and I’m half-nightshifted (but that’ll be good for Germany). This weekend is going to be exciting– I want to go to MTG’s Reefer Madness, Birka, the Fetish Flea, and a Dance Odyssey created by a friend.

And I need a new camera.

Disclaimer: I hold a regular Salon discussion group, with wide-ranging conversations on politics, philosophy, society, and life. The thoughts in this post came from a recent Salon, but are not meant to be an accurate reflection of the dialogue.

We had the Salon at MIT (and it will be again on Tuesday), and talked about MIT education, online gaming, and usury, and we griped about contemporary philosophy. I’m concentrating on the last, because it’s symptomatic of (what I believe is) a deep rot in society.

With few exceptions, education at MIT is engineering, no matter what they call it. It’s all math applied to different problems, or it tries to be. Our science is super-analytical, and we reduce everything to particle physics. Biology at MIT is biochemistry. Political science is the quantification and analysis of political metrics. In philosophy (my field), respectable papers contain at least one mathematical equation, and it’s rare to read anything written before 1970.

I love philosophy, but I don’t love what it’s become over the past 50 years. Philosophy today is obsessed with language, with disconnecting itself from the problems of life, with breaking things down to and building things up from the driest infinitesimals. Instead of bold statements, it prefers conditional hedges, most of which would be intuitively obvious if they weren’t couched in esoteric language. It’s boring, and irrelevant. Since Descartes, the history of philosophy has been dominated by trends that brought it to this point. (Jonathan Swift, of all people, wrote about these in his Battle of the Books).

There are some deep chasms that run through philosophy, and philosophy is in no small way *about* those chasms. Epistemology is about the gap between understanding and truth. Ethics centers on the gap between choice and conscience. Ontology is the gap between our perceptions and reality. Metaphysics is between reliability and causality. And on a deeper level, there’s a chasm between what we can philosophize about and *anything* real. “Truth”, “Right”, and “Being” are figments of the philosophical imagination, and we’ll never know if thinking about them is anything more than mental masturbation.

To cross the chasms, you have to embrace some (however small) totally unfounded beliefs. Modern philosophy hates that and avoids taking any leaps. We say, “You’re either progressing at a snail’s pace, or not at all.” The edges of these chasms are fractally complex, and modern philosophy satisfies itself with magnify-glassing the border. We’ve tried to build bridges across these gaps, brick-by-brick, so we could cross without making any jumps, but we haven’t succeeded yet, and I don’t think we will (the most famous failure was logical positivism).

Unfortunately, the unfounded leap is where the action, the adventure, the worth of philosophy is. The leap is the essence of paradigms, and it makes philosophy relevant. Ancient philosophy was quick to leap and quick to acknowledge the error in its leap, but do it anyway.

Modern philosophy conceives of itself as a science, and sees its future in scientificating itself ever more. It has some scientific methods and some so-far-so-good postulates, and it works on piecing those together into new corollaries. When an idea is shown to be false (not an easy thing to do, but anyway), it’s thrown out. Philosophy has become the science of ideas.

Plato made statements he knew were wrong (and said so), because they contained a grain of truth, and their rejection contained a different grain of truth. There’s no way to make real claims and have them be totally true, but ancient philosophers embraced and played with that fact.

Ancient philosophy wasn’t a science, even though it dealt in truth. It was an *art*. It glorified in making beautiful leaps, in awing the mind, in revealing truths by artfully constructing new perspectives. But art and fine craft aren’t appreciated in our society. Something is either science/technology/engineering/mathematics, or it’s a hobby.

Today, as a result of technology and science, the world that we and philosophy deal with is hugely different than ever before. We’ve barely begun to construct worldviews that can cope with and enlighten our new modern lives. We *need* philosophy… but it has forfeited its service in society.

There is a growing counter-philosophy. There are movements in the past decade to revitalize philosophy and make it relevant. I think the way forward is clear… but we didn’t discuss it much at the Salon, so I’ll leave that for another day.

I’m swooning over my new read, How to Succeed with Women. I’ve read *plenty* of books on the intricacies of sex: how to books on flirting, kissing, fucking; philosophy and essays on love and sex; books on manipulation that made me sick, on personal development that changed me, and on how the genders interact that still befuddle me. But books that are ethical and pragmatic and thorough are rare, and I think this is one such, but it’s so “dense to act on” that I’ve only dipped my feet in.

This kind of book demands to be more than the week’s lean-back recreation. The sexual world goes so deep, and holds such incredible excellence. I think you can learn about sex relations your whole life and still be surprised by every turn. The creative, ethical, and stylistic expertise possible makes it like a second career, with ever more responsibilities and privileges. It’s an alien world to me, who never gave sex a third thought before four years ago, but it’s one I want to immerse in.

I’m waffling over the consequences, though. Some days, I think of everything I can give to others and learn for myself, and I just want to get as many people as possible to play sexual games with me. But then, I think of all the good time I spend with girls as friends, and I hear about all the ways guys make a nuisance of themselves. I know I’m a lot better at being chaste– I can make more people happy and fewer hurt if my gender stays out of it. And there are no gentle paths in there.

Err, um, not that I can think of too many people I’ve hurt recently (If you beg to differ, kick me or something so I realize). But if practicing my drums gets on your nerves, I’ll always be happy to play elsewhere.