Oi, Thou! and the Other Channel

I'm not particularly happy with this video, but i really want to keep up the pace.  It is of course currently tomorrow's, not today's, and it's difficult to get Martin Buber's and even more so Emmanuel Levinas's ideas across in this form.  Having said that, what's been said on YouTube recently, and in particular the fact that it's a dialogue, illustrates particularly effectively what an I-Thou relationship is.  In particular, i was thinking of this:

Levinas is quite difficult to follow and i sometimes wonder if he's worth the effort.  However, i think i agree with him about the ethics of the face - the presence of another demands duty to that other, and moreover, the nature of that is prior to ontology.  I should probably explain further, but not yet.

Today's video is about my rather annoying other channel and its irritating success:

This was made and uploaded last night and i released it into the wild this morning.  This is the one you're supposed to watch today!

So:  Several years ago, there was a Wikipedia article on a particular proclivity which i have.  My contribution to the article was mainly in the form of the risks and precautions which could be taken.  I reasoned that if someone Googled the appropriate words, the chances are that they would encounter the text of the article at the top of the results and would (a) feel less isolated, and (b) either be put off or learn how to do it safely.  To provide an analogy, it has sometimes been thought that i practice erotic asphyxiation.  It's not that, but if it were, there will be people who try it without keeping themselves as safe as possible and others who would be put off if they knew the likelihood of whatever the risks were.  That was why i contributed to the article.

After a bit of argy-bargy on the discussion page, the article got deleted because it was not believed to be about a factual practice and in particular, the absence of peer-reviewed articles on it was considered problematic.  This considerably reduced my faith in the credibility of Wikipedia incidentally, because it made me wonder what else had disappeared as a result of these criteria.  What it amounts to is that my paraphilia is a Fortean phenomenon, something i pursue in the ebook.

Since i wanted to continue to pursue the agenda of safety and letting people know they weren't alone, i started a second YouTube channel.  Unlike most channels on this subject, i openly showed my face and talked directly to camera, although i didn't reveal my name.  Due to the remarkable nature of the activities i perform on that channel and my rather blatant attitude towards them, the channel quickly got taken up and blogged about, posted to various websites and the whole thing snowballed.  However, i was only active on it for a few months.  I went off and ignored the channel for a bit, oblivious of what was going on.  I made no effort at all to publicise it, get subs or tie the videos into other people's - it just sat there unattended.

When i went back to it, it had had over 300 000 views and is now heading for half a million, and it has 118 subscribers.  I now make the occasional contribution to it, but they're not videos i make much of an effort to make and i don't pay much attention to them.  Nonetheless, looking at the analytics show that in particular over 2011 and up to 31st January this year, i was getting a relatively huge number of views.  Once it got over a year old, it tailed off a bit, which clearly has some significance but i can't tell what.  Presumably if i'd gone on making videos regularly on that channel, it would've climbed to over a million views by now.  However, it's not monetisable and it's served its purpose, although i am going to upload a few more in the next couple of weeks.

However, all this is very frustrating!  The channel i actually want to succeed, on which this blog is based, has a lot of work put into it but bumps along the bottom of popularity.  I am doing it for its own sake but i also believe in what i'm doing and want more people to benefit from it.

What i need to do is work out what it was about that channel which made it popular and transfer those qualities to this channel without replicating it.  It can't be on the same subject, but it can be as uniquely me, as attention-grabbing, as unusual and so forth, as the other.  There is also now a bit of a cross-over.

Another thing which makes me slightly uneasy about the channel is whether people i know actually know what it is and are just not mentioning it.  I have, as i've said, deliberately "left the door ajar" so that if people really want to find it, they can.  What i don't know is if they have, or even if my version of dropping hints actually hits home.

It'd be nice if there was a way of tying these two things together at the end here, wouldn't it?

Pseudocyesis aeterna

Pseudocyesis is phantom pregnancy.  It occurs in dogs a fair amount and also in humans.  In a way, this belongs somewhere else, but i'm sticking it here.

Today's video:

is not about what would presumably happen if a phantom pregnancy resulted in a phantom baby who then grew up and became a teenager, which is how far we've got with this situation.  So then, Sophie Ure Gray, born 13th November, 1999, whose Facebook page is here:

https://www.facebook.com/sophie.gray.7771?fref=ts

and who looks like these pictures:

is a happy, healthy child who of course does not attend school like the other two, but she is remarkable for a further feature not true of either of them:  she is uninstantiated - does not have a corresponding example in the physical world.  I have also suggested to my son that he is my favourite son because of my infinite number of imaginary sons, each of which is slightly less perfect than the one before, but all of which are less perfect than he is, because they too share Sophie's non-instantiation.

One serious point which arises from this set of circumstances is that, as i mentioned before, i already suspected i knew Daniel's name in about 1977, twenty years before his birth.  By this i mean that whereas one may be physicalist, dualist, idealist or have some other position about the mind-body problem, one thing that's clear is that a person's identity and role is not necessarily directly connected to their physical being or even their "unextended conscious" non-physical being, but is something else existing in an abstract realm.  This is something which causes me to reject realism rather strongly.

So:  tomorrow i do a subscriber drive and a giveaway.  My subscriber number is stubbornly nailed at just over three dozen and i need to push it up.  The other channel has almost ten dozen subscribers.  Something about the essence of the other channel's success needs to be distilled and transfused.  Tomorrow i will attempt to do something like that.

Beachballs and the existence of God

Phew!  Glad i got that out of my system.

Anyway, here's today's video:

This is about the ontological argument, one of the most interestingly silly arguments for the existence of God.  Basically, the idea is that God is a perfect being, that an idea of a perfect being is possible, that existence is a quality of a perfect being which would be more perfect than the quality of not existing and therefore that God exists.  This was thought up by Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury.  This is Anselm:

And this is Canterbury:

(I actually wanted to find a picture of the Clocktower as this is too picturesque, but then so's the Clocktower).

Anyway, this bloke Gaunilo came along and wrote a dialogue about it where he pointed out, respectfully and carefully, that the argument was rubbish because it was possible to think of a perfect island without that island existing.  I would take that further, but not yet.

Later on, the question of whether existence was a property arose.  Here is a beachball:

(it's actually a Wikipedia beachball, not the one in the front room, because the camcorder's still plugged in and i can't take pictures with it at the moment).  This beachball has various predicates - it is round, made of plastic, inflated, multicoloured and similar to the one in the front room.  However, does it have the predicate of existence?  Is existence actually a predicate?  Does it add anything to the description of that beachball to say that it exists?

This is what's meant by "wrong for interesting reasons".  The ontological argument is wrong for much more interesting reasons than any other argument for the existence of God.  However, when they were younger the children used to express the concept of existence as a predicate.  Instead of saying that something existed, they used to say it "was real".  In other words, they used the predicate of having an instance, instantiation, instead of the concept of existence, but it seems to mean the same thing.

I have a completely different reason for throwing away the ontological argument.  Well, i have several in fact but they're not all interesting.  My main reason for rejecting it is that i see non-existence as more commonly associated with perfection than existence.  Perfectly spherical or flat objects, for example, do not and could not exist.  The very existence of an object makes it less perfect, on the whole, than its concept.  Therefore, far from being an argument for the existence of God, the ontological "proof" is more like one for God's non-existence.

The weirdness of slight fame

People want to be famous.  In fact, nowadays they seem to want to be famous just for the sake of it and probably expect to get money and power with it, or something, maybe sex.  Yes, probably that too.  Not something which occurs to me.  Anyway, here's this:

We are very slightly famous on occasion (despite my apparent complete lack of telegenicity ^^^^).  Namely, the children have been on the TV and newspapers, i've been in TV documentaries and news and current affairs programmes and Liz has of course been in magazines and newspapers and on the TV because, to quote "Black Books", she quaffs pints of her own whizz (or is it "wizz"?).  However, fame is a weird thing because it just goes off on its own and has a life of its own, apparently.  You don't have any control on what you're famous for, and the things for which you are known float away and have a life of their own, which is hard to handle because you sort of put stuff out there and then people draw their own conclusions about who you are.

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote about this in his story Borges y Yo.  He describes the situation of writing stories for publication and having knowledge of the stranger out there whom everyone calls Borges.  It's a short-short and he notes at the end that he doesn't know who has written the story.  He also notes that he finds himself pompous and annoying and i share this dissatisfaction with him about the other person depicted up there who did this video.  I'm also irritated by the person who wrote this blog, and i wonder if they're the same person in fact.  Maybe this blog is actually written by someone who is stalking the person uploading the YouTube vids, though goodness knows why they think it's worth the effort.  They are both me of course, and neither of them are me.  For more on this aspect, you might want to read the story itself here:

http://anagrammatically.com/2008/01/31/borges-and-i-borges-y-yo/

There's also a PDF on certain philosophical aspects of the story here:

http://www.amherstlecture.org/perry2007/perry2007_ALP.pdf

However, i also afflict Liz with this problem.  For years after we married, i used to have the occasional experience of seeing a real woman in the distance (these were not hallucinations - the people i saw really existed so far as i know but in a sense that doesn't matter) and mistake it for Liz.  The following thought would then occur:  "Hmm, that looks like Liz Gray.  I wonder what she's doing nowadays."  This impression finally faded when i observed her as part of a training course in adult education.  I sat in on one of her excellent Yoga classes and took notes, and i finally discovered what that figure in the distance with whom i was vaguely acquainted was doing:  she had become an excellent Yoga teacher.

Once i had had that experience, my previous weird impression that Liz was both my wife and a virtual stranger i hardly knew was gone.  I knew what had become of that stranger and that she was both a Yoga teacher and my wife.

I have this image of our rather weedy, pathetic fame which is constantly on the blink and needs the occasional thump to keep the picture from constantly flickering as being a long stick with us at one end and "us" at the other.  It seems absurdly easy to generate tiny bits of fame but it doesn't matter at all, they seem to mean very little and have no apparent connection with any kind of success.  Also, they seem to move along railway lines and we can't control the brakes or the points.  Fame is a train, not an off-the-road vehicle.

Is Donna Noble's soul a magic Mars bar?

First of all, credit to charlieissocoollike for the idea of the magic Mars bar (other chocolate bars are available too):

The basic idea is that filesharing is less immoral than stealing Mars bars because the latter involve a lot of work to produce each time, but files such as music or videos, or ebooks for that matter, will still be available after they are "stolen".  Douglas Adams might say they're freemantled.  As it happens, Adams himself had one of his ideas freemantled - Cannock Chase - and was not amused, so maybe he wouldn't, but then again H2G2's plot is reminiscent of "Kilgore Trout"'s 'Venus On the Half-Shell', so i'm not sure he's in a position to complain.

Another thing Douglas Adams did, of course, was write three excellent Doctor Who adventures and edit Doctor Who scripts for several years.  Then Jon Nathan-Turner showed up and, according to some, decided to ruin the whole thing, resulting in it being taken off air.  A few years after it came back, Donna Noble appeared as the Doctor's companion. In an episode referred to as 'Silence In The Library'...

SPOILER ALERT!


 ...she suffered what Adams would call a "total existence failure" and woke up in a virtual world as herself.  The Doctor later found a way to restore her to existence, but of course by that point she had in a sense been replaced by an identical copy, a fact about which he seemed rather relaxed.  Some might say she had died and been replaced by an identical copy with all her memories intact, but now of course in a sense false.

SPOILERS OVER!

Back to the magic Mars bars, and of course the question of selling your soul (forgot to mention that).  Souls are apparently like magic Mars bars, because when you sell it on Ebay its still there to sell and unless you have either a contract or maybe uniquely numbered bits of soul like Voldemort or someone might do.  Therefore, clearly souls are intellectual property and when you sell them to the Devil, you sign a contract.  You might do something similar when you join a religion.

Now my suggestion is that the Doctor was so relaxed about Donna's recreation from a completely different set of materials with no overlap because he does something similar when he regenerates.  I see a regeneration as like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly:  the Doctor's matter rearranges, so far into a similar form in the sense of being a white male humanoid, but with potential new characteristics such as ginger hair or no legs.  Clearly the tenth Doctor didn't "want to go", so it's not a case of simply changing your face.  Major physical characteristics can change too - Romanadvoratrelundar, for example, was at one point a blue dwarf for a few seconds (a life form, by the way, not a star).

So there are a number of issues here.  Firstly, this version of a soul is a culturally constructed thing and seems to have nothing to do with consciousness, an afterlife or reincarnation.  Secondly, it constitutes one's identity in the same way as the Doctor is the "same" person throughout all his regenerations, and even apparently Donna through her experiences, of which there are many.

This is the sense in which i mean soul, and it's even possible that i use the word in this sense when i think about the afterlife and the resurrection.

I realise that there's a poor fit between the two parts of this video.  I have had a tendency for things not to link up well when i've done them, and that's happened here too, so in future, as well as getting better at making videos from a technical perspective, i will also endeavour to do some joined up planning.