September Update

Whelp time to start another schoolyear. My life's rhythm is totally dominated by school. The difference from one quarter to another feels to be an entire era. Very strange, really, compared to what it would presumably have been like as an american just a couple centuries ago. Although I think there will be substantially new things this year. Before now the story was all about clases and reflective self-refinement according to reading and teaching. Now, I'm starting to focus more on originating things. 13 hours of classes, 2 hours of phonetics research seminar, 3 hours of research assistantship, plus another paid research assistantship with no academic hours.

Oh, and I finished writing that paper with my advisor and submitted it to TLT '07... I don't find out if I'm in until oct. 1st. Part of the writing process, in fact, reflects this change perfectly. I was asking my advisor about showing the paper to a third party to look over prior to submission, and he said "you aren't really writing as a student anymore; you're just doing research."

Actually this is sort of relevant to some philosophy of mind stuff that's been floating around in my head for a while. The thing that first started this line of thought was a paper called "where am I?" that we read in cog-sci winter quarter '07 (click here to read it). Basically it stresses that we identify our mind with neither our body, nor with our brain. I've decided to explore that one's mind is wholly constituted in one's point of view. I need to figure out exactly what I mean by point of view, but it has something to do with any factor which structures one's phenomenal experience. Rocks, then, seem not to have a mind because they seem not to have any phenomenal experience. Moreover, people share a mind to the extent that their phenomenal experiences are structured by the same factors (could such shared minds be the thing called culture?).

So for the last several years, with the emphasis on class and reading, I have been working to structure my phenomenal experience in the same way as that of other great thinkers. I have been attempting to perpetuate the minds of others in me, to become a living vessel for proven minds. So what am I doing next? Clearly I will never stop doing what I've done before, but do I proceed to simply recombine others' mental factors and apply it to new data? Or is it possible to obtain genuinely new factors to structure my experience? If so, the next trick is to make any such factor communicable to other willing minds.

And I think this is my new religion. I am alive now, and I serve as the afterlife for points-of-view whose original bodies have expired. What a high calling becomes every branch and semblance of history!

And what a rambling post this has been...

-=-raptur-=-