My Bury Life

[j4]

Maybe Bury St Edmunds isn't that far away after all. Decided last night that if I stayed in I'd just feel guilty about everything, and while it'd take me an hour and a half to get to London (and I'd be perpetually worrying about catching last trains back etc.) it'd only take me 30 minutes to drive to BSE and I could leave whenever I wanted. So now instead I feel doubly guilty about not making it to the uk.misc meet, made even more guilty by Huge being so cross about it. Probably best if I just don't go near misc for a while.

It was really nice to see J-P and Colin and everybody though. And the pub was great, it's a brewery as well & makes its own rather good beer. And the drive there was good driving practice. But I feel like I'm not supposed to have enjoyed anything because I was supposed to be somewhere else. :-(

Slept badly, and had weird dreams. I can only remember fragments: in one bit I was trying to skate on a frozen pond because cats were walking on it quite happily, but I knew as I did it that I was probably too heavy, so I sort of slid across the pond but then slid off towards the side so I wouldn't be over the deep bit if the ice broke, and the person I was with said "You're doing it all wrong, you're supposed to go towards the middle", but I couldn't be bothered to try to explain to them, I knew why I'd slid that way. In the other bit of the dream that I can remember, emperor had asked me if I could photocopy some of the cards from the game "Whot" [it's a real game, honest], only he called them the "danger cards", and I assumed he meant the wild cards, and I was going to photocopy them but then it turned out lnr had already done a really complicated database of hundreds of games, with spare pieces available to download, only the database was all on paper, all neatly coloured in to show the relations between things, and I felt really cross because it seemed as though somebody always came along and did everything better than me before I even had a chance to try. [Sometimes I wish my dreams were a bit more subtle.]

American Paul cheered me up enormously this morning by telling me that you can buy BADGERS at Asda. Apparently they're ornamental badgers designed to go in your garden, so they look like they're coming up out of the ground. They sound gloriously tacky and apparently they're very cheap so sion_a may come home some day soon to find that the garden is full of ornamental badgers.

Comments

[j4.livejournal.com]

Wittgenstein and his disciples held/hold the view that if you say or think you are intending to do something but you don't actually do it, you aren't intending to do it either (in fact, "intending" doesn't mean anything, you either will do something or you will not)

I like this viewpoint as an abstract[1], and I agree that when it comes to the point of doing something you either do something or you don't. And that it's not really that much use saying "I meant to do this" or "I want to change" or whatever.

OTOH in the real world I think there are situations where intent does mean something, in the same way that "it's the thought that counts" (well, it isn't solely the thought, but sometimes it makes a difference to us illogical emotional human beings).

I keep going round in circles on this one. Will stop thinking out loud now.

[1] Would I sound like I was showing off if I said I'd arrived at it independently? If you prefer you can count it as a shamefaced admission that I still haven't read any Wittgenstein (though I keep intending to...)

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

Do. Or Do Not.

There is no Try
--Yoda.

[j4.livejournal.com]

Despite being spouted by Yoda, it's not a bad philosophy...

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

Can I just say I've only seen the first Star Wars film, once, in 1976?

[sparrowsion]

That's very impressive, as it wasn't released until 1977....

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

Was it? I could have sworn it was '76.
Ah, well, it's nearly 20 years either way.
Which is a Long Time. And a 5% margin of error.

I saw it on the same day as I saw Close Encounters.

[nja.livejournal.com]

I like this viewpoint as an abstract[1], and I agree that when it comes to the point of doing something you either do something or you don't. And that it's not really that much use saying "I meant to do this" or "I want to change" or whatever.

OTOH in the real world I think there are situations where intent does mean something, in the same way that "it's the thought that counts" (well, it isn't solely the thought, but sometimes it makes a difference to us illogical emotional human beings).

I certainly don't think it's impossible to have conflicting desires, so I think it's possible to want to do something even if it's not what you decide to do in the end. A lot of this stuff makes me boggle - Wittgenstein was obviously a very very very intelligent man, which makes me think I must be missing some subtlety because some of what he believed seems to me to fly in the face of common sense. Gilbert Ryle thought (following LW) that there is no such thing as a privileged perspective on your own mind - since all "thought" is manifested in action, there is no "interior" thought. He seems to have seriously suggested that the only way I know I'm happy is because I see or sense myself smiling, that I know as much about someone else's state of mind as my own, which I'm afraid I think is just bollocks. I think there's a lot of truth in the intent/action argument, though - ultimately, intentions and un-acted-upon¹ desires count for nothing, it's what you actually do that counts, so if you "intend" to do something and don't do it, you didn't really intend to do it.

¹ This is so inelegant. I have spent nearly three hours in a meeting tonight and I am simultaneously wired on cheap coffee and knackered.