August 31st;
Doteasy.com shuts this site.
Robin & Boris turn up, get excited about the scent of
vetivert, and take me out with
elegant Krisztina & lithe Edina to a lovely party on Margit Island with sticky cake
and dancing. Almond-eyed, half-Syrian Zena shakes her black locks
at me, accusingly claiming I know her already. If only.
Limping home in small hours I become aware of odd discomfort in right shoe. I take
shoe off and discover protruding metal nails and blood. Goodness gracious.
August 30th;
Doteasy.com shuts this site.
August 29th;
Doteasy.com shuts this site.
August 28th;
Doteasy.com shuts this site.
August 27th;
Doteasy.com shuts this site.
August 26th;
Doteasy.com shuts this site.
I finish the photocopy Ryan made of Anscombe's
'Intention'
and make a few scrappy notes. In these [apart from getting
confused about what Anscombe is trying to say about animate
and inanimate objects {if a cat stalking a bird is said to
be expressing an intention, then a car making a certain noise
could be just as easily said to be expressing an intention
of stalling}?] I sketch out what intentions seem to me to be.
How about defining an intention as a special kind of prediction where
the speaker or intender has
some reasonable chance of making the prediction come true?
So that eclipses are predicted but shopping lists are intended?
August 25th;
Doteasy.com shuts this site.
Parisa explains
Persian
politics.
August 24th;
Doteasy.com shuts this site.
August 23rd;
Doteasy.com shuts this site.
August 22nd;
Doteasy.com shuts this site.
August 21st;
Doteasy.com shuts this site.
August 20th;
Doteasy.com shuts this site.
August 19th;
Doteasy.com shuts this site.
August 18th;
In the early-afternoon heat, coming back from Erd, on a packed red 7 bus,
two working men get on and make their way to the centre of the articulated
bus. The younger one is carrying a large black dog across his arms, and
lays it down on the revolving metal disc floor-piece,
where the two-section
bus is hinged, with enormous tenderness, his arms trembling as he gets
back up to stand protectively over the body of his dog. The dog seems to
be still, and has an eye rolled back. I ask the man if it is dead and his
friend says quietly no. They are coming back from the vet, not going there,
and it will live, it will be fine. My last question - and yes, it will
even see. I felt a strangely intense outpouring of feeling for the
young Hungarian labourer and his colleague, welling up in my chest. Silent,
the man gently picked his dog up again several stops later and they carefully
got off. Despite the hopeful news, whatever had happened to his big black
hound had him still on the verge of tears.
August 17th;
Tim's garden is bursting with
quinces,
grapes,
damsons &
almonds.
August 16th;
Last night at Esther,
Elysia
& Tamas's.
August 15th;
No closer to tracking down that honey-skinned waitress in
Cserkeszolo, sad to say.
August 14th;
Find US trawler-fisheries
trade magazine?
August 13th;
A couple of nights ago, I got up in the small hours very sleepy to get a mug of
water from the bathroom. Switching on the light over the sink I suddenly saw
someone else standing there in the mirror, not even with my face. The face in
the mirror resembled me a little, but was more like a mask, or an animal face,
two holes for eyes and a slit for a mouth cut in a layer of skin. Perhaps my
frontal lobe was still asleep? It did feel a bit as if
lizard brain
was the one who got up for a drink.
August 12th;
Back in touch with Richard Stemp.
August 11th;
Odd weekend. I failed to meet both
Diane
and Dora at
Said's event
on different nights. Oh well.
August 10th;
I wonder if I can still find my
Forbes
article?
August 9th;
Rob
and I get enjoyably drunk
in kitchen.
August 8th;
Pleasant, cheering hour with
young
Hussam.
August 7th;
I do a practice run of cooking
this for myself.
August 6th;
Once again out to Erd on the
big yellow bus,
where as usual Szilveszter in his swimming
trunks picks me up in the silver car. My young student Sara is
allergic to cats
(like me), as well as to dogs, house dust, flowers, trees and grass.
August 5th;
A
delightful,
fresh weblog from
Vichy, France.
August 4th;
Robin
races me to the
Lakitelek
railway station and
I catch the last train. On the
Kecskemet postal train I meet Dora, from the
tourism school,
in a particularly bubbly mood, reading
'Lolita'.
August 3rd;
Great success completing a list. I didn't join the family swimming in the
Tisza
today.
August 2nd;
European
men firing paintballs filled with
stag's
blood?
Shooting to bring down
motorbike-riding nuns in
German forests? Teensy bit Hermann
Nitsch?
August 1st;
Finished 'A Megismerese Epitokovei' by
Andy
Clark, translated fairly lucidly
by Csaba Pleh.
Rather sad there's nothing better in Hungarian for
the information-theory term 'crosstalk' than 'atbeszeles' [wouldn't
something suggesting more 'overflow' or 'interfere',
like a 'tul-' or 'csere-', have worked a bit better?], but all done
pretty conscientiously, as far as I can judge. Clark spends the book
defending the Rumelhart
McClelland et al
parallel
distributed processing model
of human thought, while being careful not to put all his eggs in one
basket. Preferring 'explanatory cognitive science' to
Searle's rather
pointed 'weak AI', Clark dismisses the idea that classic logical
structures being simulated on neural nets means the nets are not
contributing anything, citing how weighted nets can be relatively
robust in the face of non-ordered input. I've lost faith
in AI a bit, so it looked drier than it used to. Clark's 1989 book
repeats the field's persistent error of seeing intelligence as
an autonomous structure independent of an animal. However much more
sophisticated his approach is [and it is], like Minsky or
Dennett,
there is still a bedazzlement by intelligence itself, as if
thinking is something that could be plucked out of the animal
whose drives to eat, fuck, survive etc thinking serves, somehow
leaving the rest of the system and its autonomy behind.
-
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
contact@otherlanguages.org
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