Let’s pretend there are 100.000.000 blogs. Actually we don’t need to pretend, they actually are. Let’s assume that some of them are active. And that people who make them active write often.
When writing, these people use words. But the number of words is finite. This means that the sum of all possible word-combinations is finite. Which means that, at some point in the future, when all the combinatory possibilities would already have been done, someone will rewrite this text, verbatim. And this person will realize that the literature is dead. And will commit suicide.

Dying literature

The optimistic version of this death of the literature was suggested by Borges, in Ficciones. The person who’ll rewrite this text, will do it in a totally different context. And this text, by the very fact that will be rewritten in a different context, will be another text. And the literature won’t be dead, but a ghost.

Photo by Andrew Mason.

Museum tickets. Letters. T-shirts. Minute pictures. Shells. A Mickey Mouse cigarette lighter. Some dusty SMS, stored in the phone’s memory. Compiled CDs. Little things. A pipe. Memories. A yellow sticky note, stealthly attached to an
agenda.

Relics

If you have something like this, or any other relic, I wellcome you at my new pawnshop. Instant cash payment. I also buy packed remainings (pay per pound).
For children (as children may someties relics of a couple), please contact our slave trade department.

Photo by sludgegulper.

We tend to wrongly believe that philosophy is a footnote to the work of Plato. I really don’t know who said such a stupid thing, but I bet he/she lived before 1905. For it is in 1905 that the new philosophical revolution began.
I won’t say a word about this revolution, otherwise very well known by the readers. I will only show how this idea (that we’ve received from Windelband, tells me one of my students) is stupid.
Knowing that the past is a foreign country (and, when saying that, I stand on the shoulders of authorities such as Lévi-Strauss and his pals), and knowing that Plato lived in the past, it follows that Plato is a stranger for anyone of us. He lived in a world where there weren’t train stations, fountain pens, electricity, or even common things like the coffee and cigarettes or the tomatoes. Not to mention the turkies and the computers.
If Plato came one day in our world, he would certainly be horrified. If we ourselves went in his world, we wouldn’t be less terrified.

The past, in fact, isn’t just any country. like Mexico for instance, but the alterity itself. Living in the past, (almost) unlike living in Mexico, is a logical impossibility. (Like any other logical impossibility, this one too, when taken into account, fathers the comedy. Just remember Mark Twain’s yankee.)
From this logical impossibility, it follows that any conceptual translation from a past language to a present one is impossible. How could we translate the greek “glottopoiein”? How to explain “the invisible hand” concept to an (ancient) greek?
Obviously, we can’t possibly understand a word from Plato’s work. So, writing footnotes to what we don’t understand (although it might be a current practice in the scientific papers) is just stupid.
All in all, philosophy has nothing to do with Plato.

[There is, however, a "theory" stating that beyond the Universe (where "beyeond" is understood in a spatial sense) is God. This "theory" is the consequence of an argumentative string: God is the Supreme Being; He is eternal, omnipotent, infinite, omniscient; He created the world solely by his word and by his will; the world is therefore subjected to laws (God's, nature's, aliens' and humans'); so the world isn't free; but God is perfect; so He is also free; so God is exterior to His creation; He is therefore outside the world, beyond the Universe.]

[There is another "theory" which says that beyond the Universe (where "beyond" is understood in a temporal sense) are the Paradise, the Purgatory and the Hell. This "theory" is also the consequence of an argment: the world is created, so it has a beginning; but what has a beginning is not infinite; so the world will perish; but after the world's distruction, there will be the Doomsday, which will establish who was virtuous, who still has to repent and who was definitely vicious; but these people will go to Heaven, to Purgatory and respectively to Hell; so, beyond the Universe, there is something, namely the Hell, the Purgatory and the Paradise.]
PS Both “theories” conceive space and time as separate entities, which suggest a naive vision of the world. Actually the Universe is everything around us, we ourselves and our theories included. Things only exist in relation whith each other, inside of a time-space continuum, because everything that exists, exists at a given time and in a given space. So there is nothing beyond the Universe.

Beyond Universe

The book presents the story story of an old lady who – left alone by her son who was at work – felt the spleen and turned on the radio.

John Smith offers to the reader a detailed account on the two hours that the old lady (her name is Clementine) spent in front of the radio set, changing the frequencie; it gave the author the opportunity to lead us in the world of radio waves (see the chapter covering the microwave background radiation of the Universe, a remnant of the Big Bang, the pages dealing with signals from distant galaxies and how they cross large void gaps), but also to outline a history of music. The narrative is particularly interesting, consisting of the interlacing of sounds and memories of Clementine.

A personal history of the music though, because the reader perceives that the old lady can be identified with the author. In the epilogue we learn that – while trying to prepare a tea – Clementine has caused an explosion and, thereafter, she died burned. Shaken, the radio set changes the frequency by itself and all can be heard in the loudspeaker is the background noise of the universe.

Explanation

We always imagine future people as being superior to us. (This means we have properly acquired the myth of the progress.) If future people are superior, they must necessarily be smarter than us. Constrained by the myth of the progress, which we’re going to inoculate in their heads, they will feel the urge to be more intelligent than we are. So they’ll give up on the TV. (I pittifylly look at the science-fiction shows presenting the future households turning, just like ours, around TV sets – wide and flat plasma screens). But, anyway, one shouln’t dramatize the future people’s situation, they’ll have a much more exciting Internet then ours.

Additional predictions

Telephones (fixed or mobiles), walkmans, computers (desktop, notebook or handheld) will also disappear. The people of the future will have, embeded in their brains, some very dense chips (imagine a powerful computer compressed to a 1 cubic millimeter size, taking advantage of the neural sensory circuits, imagine an Internet that was addressed to all your senses), and these chips will satisfy all their communication and instruction needs.

On the other hand, this scenario is rather a consequence of the myth of the progress (which we never question). In reality, the future will be similar to the riots in French suburbs in 2005. They’ll live a perpetual urban war. They’ll live in police states. And they’ll be cured of the myth of the progress.

A household of the future

PS Let’s go back, for a moment, to the TV of the future. If it will exist, the current sets will undoubtly disappear; the future television won’t address to senses any more, but to people’s brains; when you can stimulate the sensory centers, it is not worth the trouble to stimulate the senses. The people of the future will necessarily be insensitive.

Stanislav Grof is a big naive. In a monist and materialist world, he seems convinced that the consciousness exists.

In the history of philosophy, consciousness was defined as the thing that makes us aware. For Descartes – the most authorized voice in the field – conscoiusness is immaterial and has no particular place inside the body; for the rationalist philoopher, it is the fundamental entity that makes possible the appearance of the awareness about the two innate ideas – God and the self.

I won’t spare my time refuting this notion (that Gilbert Ryle called the doctrine of “the ghost in the machine”, where the machine is of course the body, and the ghost, you guessed, the consciousness); anyways, the cartesian thesis has nothing to do with Grof’s ideas.

For Stanislaf Grof, the consciousness is not innate, but aquired. It actually is a sequel of our interactions with other individuals; according to this description, the consciousness is just like a sexually transmitted disease. Once aquired, the consciousness starts laying eggs, which generate the feelings. These feelings prevent us from being sociopaths or serial killers.

For Stanislav Grof, the psychology of the future is an exact science: a genealogy of the feelings.

But, it must be said, that Grofs began his reasoning with the undemonstrated premise that the psycholofy exists. On the contrary, the private language argument and the problem of mental states, clearly show us that psychology as a science is impossible. In reality, the psychology of the future is nonexistent; or it’s a genre d’écriture, just like the historical novel, the X-rated literature or the arithmetics.

Consciousness: past and future

What I definetily understood from Grof’s book is that we say we have consciousness in the sense we say we have head lice. Hopefully I’ll soon return to this matter, with an article named no more and no less then “Do bottles have a consciousness?”.

Let M be the actual world. Let “a” be an object of our world, for instance this pen. Let us suppose “a” was a meinongian object (i.e. impossible). But if “a” is impossible, and if “a” belongs to M, then M is also impossible.

But, you will say, this pen is a real object, so M is at least possible.

Let M be the actual world. Let “b” be an object of our world, such as a square circle. Obviously, “b” is a meinongian object “by definition”. But, obviously again, “b” belongs to M. So M is impossible.

Impossible object

But, you will tell me, square circles aren’t real entities; they’re rather rational entities.

There are two very strong arguments against this critique.

1. Firstly, many particles used by the physics are rational entities. Quarks, for example, which are believed to be the fundamental bricks of the (real) material world, are rational entities.
2. Secondly, the dichotomy real / rational only makes sense for a Hegelian.

There is therefore no reason to deny the truth about the world:

THE ACTUAL WORLD, AS WE KNOW IT, IS IMPOSSIBLE.

Consequences

• Since we know this world (as little as we might know it), and since this world is impossible, out knowledge is impossible.
• Given that our knowledge is impossible and that we yet know something, we ourselves are impossible.

The levitation’s secret consists in laziness. When you want to levitate, you should be really idle. You lay down and pretend getting asleep. The body is tupid (in any case, it’s more stupid then the brain), so it will be convinced that you’re going to fall asleep; so it will relax its muscles.

When the muscles are totally relaxed, the job is done; you’ll acually be able to fly.

A guru preparing to levitate

PS It takes a lot of practice to become this lazy.