Hal Duncan's Blog, page 23

New Link, Not Quite New Story

At some point I'll probably pick up where I left off before Christmas with my ramblings about mnemes and semes and whatnot. There is a big post on memes sitting half-done in Scrivener. But at the moment, I'm sworn to get my shit together and finish the fucking novel. So needless to say I procrastinated and updated the "Online Fiction" links to include my story from the latest Cabinet des Fées, "

Happy New Year

Having returned from my annual Hogmanay jaunt with mates to a remote cottage -- in the wilds of Dumfries and Galloway this year -- I just thought a quick wee post was in order to say Happy New Year to yez all.Unfortunately, my MacBook seems to have become a boddhisatva with the end of the festive period, extinguishing all ego in the form of the letter "i," so emphasis on the wee. Oh, it survived

Of Mnemes and Semes

The Philosophy of the ExperientialIn a previous entry, I kicked the notion of qualia around a bit and ended up with the notion of the aestheme, a term paralleling words such as phoneme or grapheme and basically decomposing to aesthetic morpheme. What with semes in the mix too, it looks like rhyme is the name of the game here, but hey, works for me. Besides, qualia sounds like a fucking Roman

Atheism Is Not a Faith

Seeing an acerbic comment on Twitter the other day on the "atheist faith" having religious features in the shape of apostolic figureheads and a persecution complex, part of me thinks I can appreciate a skepticism as regards some hardline proselytisers who scorn all doubt of their position being the only legitimate position. Part of me, on the other hand, is well aware that I am myself a fairly

The Wolf and the Three Wise Monkeys

Once upon a time, there was a Big Bad Wolf, a cultivated guy, top hat and tails, but a bit of a cad, a cur, a bounder, not a bad sort per se, but of dubious scruples and instatiable appetites, a propensity for exotic narcotics and avante garde Swedish art magazines featuring young male cyclists in sundry stages of undress. He came to me, he did, in the bathroom mirror one day, saying, Where

A Digression into Ontological Bootstrapping

Position, Supposition and PresuppositionFor a while now I've been toying with the notion of what I call a suppositional logic, a model of reasoning protocols that doesn't so much drop the strictures of logic as thrashed out over the centuries as take a step back to consider that tradition in the context of natural language with its epistemic and alethic modalities, modalities of actuality and

Flame-Grilled Fillet of Quale

Some Hypothetical HoojamaflipsSo the last few posts have taken swings at universals and objects, and out of that I've found myself fucking around with an idea of narrative as how we ideate sensation into entity -- which begs the question of just what sensation is. I guess that puts qualia next in the firing line, these hypothetical hoojamaflips in which the physicalist philosophy (where there are

Narrativve, Anagnorisis and Entity

Narrative as Experience, Experience as NarrativeSo where to from here? (From here, here and here, that is, if you haven't been following along.) We've got substantia as a start point -- stuff actually instantiated within the frame of events, the flux of activity, material spatiotemporal reality. We've got the entire vocabulary of objects abandoned for one of collective entity as a conceit based

There Are No Objects in the World

Pixie Farts and ParticlesHmmm. I seem to be slowly drifting into a philosophical kitbashing mode here. This is what happens when you read too much of PKD's Exegesis (... so to speak. As if one could ever really read too much of the Exegesis. Feh!) Anyway, fuck it. Let's run with the whole freeform ontological jazz riff, see where we get to from Plato's Cave and an OOP-principled take on

OOP and the Problem of Universals

Types, Properties and RelationsFollowing on from the previous post on Plato's allegory of the cave, I thought I'd dig a little deeper into the whole notion of the morphological realm -- the realm of forms -- in particular the so-called "problem of universals," the question curiously belaboured through the history of philosophy as to whether types like "human," properties like "redness," or