Three Hares & Beuckelaer's Air

    Joachim Beuckelaer's 4 elements, which I've just viewed at the National Portrait Gallery,  foregrounds sturdy peasant women- proletarians, in the strict sense of serving the State primarily by bearing children- while juxtaposing still life studies of various types of food with hazy depictions of Gospel episodes which, in each picture, populate one of its multiple perspectives' vanishing points.
  Thus, every canvass has a triadic structure such that the producers of food appear in the novel role of vendors or wage slaves, self-consciously connected to the cash nexus, while food itself is presented as an objective materiality nevertheless subordinate and doubly subject to two types of epiphanic Supervenience- that of the Market and that of the Messiah.
    Beuckelaer's canvass, 'Water' has 12 types of fish (for the 12 disciples) and, in the background, the resurrected Christ filling the fishermen's nets at Lake Galilee. Similarly, the canvass titled 'Earth' features various types of vegetables and fruits in the foreground, with the Holy Family fleeing to Egypt- that fabled land of agricultural plenty- in the background. 'Fire' depicts various types of meat and poultry with Jesus sitting with Mary and Martha (the first, the type of the Paschal lamb, the last a dab hand at turning a spit) in the background.
  What is puzzling is that, in Beuckelaer's 'Air', while we have various sorts of fowl which clearly have a relationship to the air, we also find cheese rounds and a brace of rabbits. Why?
  Well, I suppose, Dutch cheeses are air dried so that explains their appearance in the picture, but what about rabbits?
  True, they go hippity hop but they also spend a lot of time below ground in their burrows- so why do they feature in this canvass?
  Regular readers of my blog might be tempted to answer- 'Yes, yes, we well know what you are getting at. Cut to the chase already and just come out and say- 'All is the fault of this Tory Govt. Appearance of rabbits in Beucklelaer's 'Air' is a damning indictment of Govt. under funding of the Arts for which I, personally, blame David Cameron. That boy aint right. Etc, etc.'

While far from foreclosing this hermeneutic option, I ask you to suspend judgment a little while longer. The fact is, the Biblical episode featured in this canvass is that of the prodigal son- here depicted as an inebriate clutching a brace of supposedly aphrodisiac fowl while leaning against a comely vendeuse of sturdy peasant stock.

Prodigality has the meaning of extravagance- luxuria- which, in Catholicism, was replaced by lust as one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Perhaps extravagance and prodigality appear to be 'airy' properties and thus the extravagantly hopping, if not also lecherous, rabbit and the prodigal, if not also debauched, son share a common property.
The fact that Beuckelaer's canvass presents the two rabbits in conjunction with a basket of eggs suggests an association with Easter- eggs, Bunnies- resurrection, rebirth, fertility- hares, in medieval Europe were believed to be hermaphrodites who propagated their race without loss of Virginity- thus becoming a symbol for the Virgin Mary.
The 'three hares' motif- shown below- was popular in the Sixteenth Century.

Some have traced it to China and suggested that it was brought to Europe over the silk road. It's appearances in Churches and Cathedrals suggests that it was taken as a symbol of the Trinity.
In Beauckelaer's other 3 canvasses we find Trinities in the Biblical material- for Water, there is Christ, the Apostles (the Church) and the fish (the laity); for Earth there is the Holy Family- Joseph, Mary and baby Jesus; for fire, there is Christ, Mary (the contemplative life) and Martha (the active life); but for Air, we have only the Prodigal son- the two women depicted beside him having no place in the Biblical parable.
The three hares meme can be considered an 'impossible object' like the Penrose triangle, achievable only in a higher dimension. This suggests that the fifth element, the quintessence, the aether, the akasha, which, I suppose, comes closest to Air out of all the Four elements, arises out of an incompossibility or heteroclite conjugation in Air- which, it may be, breeds in an unbounded way- such that Fredric Van Eeden's therapeutic Walden is the lucid nightmare of a now irretrievably ontologically dysphoric & poisoned Eden because the incompossible Empedoclean Elements must yet ascend, but ascend only to their own fulmination, the Etna of the Aether and return only as brooding malevolence and topological rupture of perspective- as in the swell of the floor tiles in 'Fire' shown below- which must inevitably destroy the sustainable self-coincidence of the foregrounded proletarians who pause to look back pitilessly into our eyes as if not oblivious to their doom.

Am I being sexually harassed?

Ever since I turned 50, I find my rate of self-induced vomiting has risen astronomically. Why?

This article in Science Daily provides a clue-

'Men who experience high levels of sexual harassment are much more likely than women to induce vomiting and take laxatives and diuretics in an attempt to control their weight, according to a surprising finding by Michigan State University researchers.'

In addition to self-induced vomiting, I find I'm eating a lot more vindaloo (notoriously laxative) and taking black coffee (a diuretic) in the morning. What's more, all this is happening in the context of my Doctor, a neat little blonde, telling me I have to lose ten kilos.

Clearly I'm being sexually harassed at the pubs and Tandoori restaurants where I continue a staggered celebration of my half centennial in company with such of my co-evals as are not dead or, in marginal cases, still contactable through Facebook.

The strange thing is I've always suspected that I was being subjected to sexual harassment- especially by big ass Nigerian women whose buttocks constantly stare at me in the street. However, big ass Nigerian women don't frequent the sorts of pubs and curry houses I've been patronizing lately. So- as my Cockney friends are wont to say- what is occurring? My guess is that all them callipygian draughts of piping hot chocolate lurk outside the mini-cab office at which my friends deposit me, blind drunk, for my journey home- at which time they have a window of opportunity to sexually harass the hell out of me with none the wiser.

It's a comforting thought for me, next time I have to tickle my throat before passing out on the bathroom floor so as to avoid choking on my own vomit during the night, that this distasteful proceeding is occasioned not by my own intemperance but the raging libidos of them big ass Nigerian women whose buttocks just won't quit staring at me suggestively and like undressing me with their eyes and...okay, putting a paper bag over my head and maybe a big cardboard box over my pot belly and like photoshopping stuff over my junk and... well you get the picture.

Anyway, I'm not saying this to 'name and shame' big ass Nigerian women.

Clearly, it's all David Cameron's fault.

I've said it before and I'll say it again.

That boy aint right.

Madam, your butt is sexually harassing me but don't worry it's all David Cameron's fault.

The folly of reading Ghalib as un-Muslim- Ghazal 65

Every beauty throngs to thee, by propinquity, in all candor
I only accede to tyranny, so a rival raise thy dander

Ghalib wrote this when he was about 19

{65,1}

sitam-kash maṣlaḥat se hūñ kih ḳhūbāñ tujh pah ʿāshiq haiñ
takalluf bar-t̤araf mil jāʾegā tujh-sā raqīb āḳhir

1) I am oppression-accepting from advice/prudence, for beautiful ones are your lovers
2) {leaving aside formality / 'to tell the truth'}, a Rival like you will become available [to me] finally

The commentators, and Prof Pritchett herself, take Raqib as 'rival in love' and neglect its other meaning, when applied to God, as protector as in the phrase 'Allah raqib'.

Pascal's Muggle, Negative Probababilities & the Book of Job

Suppose a beggar asks you for 5 quid in return for saving the lives of billions in a Universe he controls. You demur. He then shows you that he is a Matrix Lord and does in fact control such a Universe and only asked your for a fiver because he is running an experiment in behavioral Econ re evidential decision theory.

This is the 'not even wrong' scenario described by Elizier Yudkowsky over at Lesswrong.
My response is-

You may be aware of the use of negative probabilities in machine learning and quantum mechanics and, of course, Economics. For the last, the appearance of a 'Matrix Lord' has such a large negative probability that it   indicates the existence of highly possible as yet unspecified possible states of the world such that the decision situation is swamped and no money changes hands on the basis of the agent's decision theory.

Thus Pascal's muggle isn't interesting- it's a wank for nerds who get off on words like 'gogoolplex' and  random invocations of Kosmogorov complexity theory.

On the other hand, the reverse situation- Job's complaint against God- is profound. It shows why variables with negative probabilities tend to disappear out of discourse to be replaced by the difference between two independent 'normal' variables- in the Biblical case, univocal Cosmic Justice is replaced by the I-Thou relationship of 'God' & 'Man'.

What do I mean by Negative Probabilities?
Think of them as constraints on observation/decision spaces
Suppose I have a Utility function for possible states of the world. Is it reasonable to believe this Utility function is independent of the mechanism by which those states of the world come into being? No. Otherwise 'the monkey's paw' wouldn't be a good story. Indeed, for any state of the world brought about in a way we thought incompossible with our Universe, something so drastic has happened to our Information Set that we must abandon the decision problem altogether and forget about our Utility function because we need to start thinking about the nature of this unexpected Universe we find ourselves in and what sort of things we ought to want in it (meta-preferences).  One way to do this is to assign negative probabilities to states of the world arrived at by what we currently consider incompossible means. This immediately means that there is at least one new possible state of the world which hasn't yet been assigned a probability. So decision making halts till that new state or states have been specified or speculated about.

In the Pascal Muggle example, clearly the fact that a Matrix Lord exists completely changes what we want out of Life.
Job's agon, on the other hand, changes what we want out of death.
All Philosophy is practicing that death.

Ghalib's ghazal 68- harif-e-matlab-e-mushkil

For to its own maze unequal, the Mystic path enchants

& Prayer's Alexanderine purpose, Khizr supplants

Why wander the waterless wastes of univocity, ego?

You yet retain a conception of high and low.

Its tryst is a glorious spectacle but where is the Mind?

Where Alexander's mirror by Anticipation refined?

Every atom of the Udhri being but Sun worshipping sand

Night & the Desert's love-play may the Simoom understand

The bowl of the starry Heavens is the waste-paper basket of the glib

Don't ask the depth of Siduri's flagon of Madness, Ghalib!

Note

Al Khdir (Khizr), who first appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh, led Alexander to the Waters of  Life but drank from them alone.

Alexander is considered the inventor of the mirror. (So the one Empire he can't conquer, command his attention/ Allah to Alexander allots the Mirror's invention). 

The Banu Udhra were a sun-worshiping tribe who 'died when they fell in love'. Lailah & Majnun belonged to this tribe.

Wisdom dispensing Siduri, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, kept a Tavern at the end of the World.

(See Prof Pritchetts 'Desertful of roses' for full commentary)

ḥarīf-e mat̤lab-e mushkil nahīñ fusūn-e niyāz
duʿā qabūl ho yā rab kih ʿumr-e ḳhiżr darāz

1) it's not equal to a difficult purpose, the incantation/enchantment of prayer/desire/neediness
2) may the blessing/prayer be accepted, oh Lord, that the lifetime of Khizr be long

nah ho bah harzah bayābāñ-navard-e vahm-e vujūd
hanūz tere taṣavvur meñ hai nasheb-o-farāz

1) do not be, foolishly/absurdly, a desert-wanderer of the illusion/imagination of existence
2) still/now in your imagination/thought is lowness and highness

viṣāl jalvah tamāshā hai par dimāġh kahāñ
kih dīje āʾinah-e intiz̤ār ko pardāz

1) union is a {glory/appearance}-spectacle, but where is the mind/spirit/mood
2) such that a finish/perfection would be given to the mirror of waiting?

har ek żarrah-e ʿāshiq hai āftāb-parast

gaʾī nah ḳhāk huʾe par havā-e jalvah-e nāz

1) every single sand-grain of the lover is a sun-worshipper
2) even on [his] having become dust, the desire/wind of the glory/appearance of coquetry did not go

nah pūchh vusʿat-e mai-ḳhānah-e junūñ ġhālib
jahāñ yih kāsah-e gardūñ hai ek ḳhāk-andāz

1) don't ask about the extent/capacity of the wine-house of madness, Ghalib
2) where this bowl of the heavens/'wheel' is a mere/single/particular/unique/excellent dust-bin

South Park and Super intelligent Machines

This is a link to a potentially interesting, but not even wrong (because it is ignorant about Capital re-switching problems) Paper (pdf) about 'the microeconomics of cognitive returns' on self-improving machines which thus become super-intelligent- (FOOM)

What philosophical problems does such speculation give rise to?

Suppose there is a single A.I. with a 'Devote x % of resources to Smartening myself' directive. Suppose further that the A.I is already operating with David Lewis 'elite eligible' ways of carving up the World along its joints- i.e. it is climbing the right hill, or, to put it another way, is tackling a problem with Bellman optimal sub-structure. Presumably, the Self-Smartening module faces a race hazard type problem in deciding whether it is smarter to devote resources to evaluating returns to smartness or to just release resources back (re-switching) to existing operations. I suppose, as part of its evolved glitch avoidance, it already internally breeds its own heuristics for Karnaugh map type pattern recognition and this would extend to spotting and side-stepping NP complete decision problems. However, if NP hard problems are like predators, there has to be a heuristic to stop the A.I avoiding them to the extent of roaming uninteresting spaces and breeding only 'Speigelman monster' or trivial or degenerate results. In other words the A.I's 'smarten yourself' Module is now doing just enough dynamic programming to justify its upkeep but not so much as to endanger its own survival. At this point it is enough for there to be some exogenous shock or random discontinuity on the morphology of the fitness landscape for (as a corollary of dynamical insufficiency under Price's equation) some sort of gender dimorphism and sexual selection to start taking place within the A.I. with speciation events and so on. However, this opens an exploit for systematic manipulation by lazy good for nothing parasites- i.e. humans- so FOOM cashes out as ...oh fuck, it's the episode of South Park with the cat saying 'O long Johnson'.
So Beenakker solution to Hempel's dillemma was wrong- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hempel's_dilemma- The boundary between physics and metaphysics is NOT the boundary between what can and what cannot be computed in the age of the universe' because South Park resolves every possible philosophical puzzle in the space of what?- well, the current upper limit is three episodes.

Hilary Putnam's Last Tango in Paris

What is happening here? Did Putnam really want the Derrida acolyte to pass him the butter or was his real purpose to signal an intention to bugger with his brains Brando style? Now it is true that Putnam actually ate the butter that the Derridista passed him but was it not to recruit himself for the purpose of buggering with the young fellow's brains? Yet, given that Putnam's life-project can't decompose facts from values might not the reverse be the case- i.e. that Putnam's quest for butter drives his buggering with brains rather than the other way round?
Putnam thinks that a theory which returns the same answer to anything it analyses is not a theory. Yet  nothing else is. The point about paying money to get a Credential as a theorist is that your output is predictable and thus marketable or rent yielding as Bourdieusian capital.
Assuming the fitness landscape changes unpredictably, as must be the case if Life evolved, it does not matter if a particular theory is incoherent and silly so long as it as it always returns the same answer under any perturbation of the Social Information Set. Some Theory will be objectively- i.e. instrumentally- better than every other, irrespective of its incoherence and silliness, so it makes sense for Society to devote a very small amount of its total resources to feeding and clothing Theorists because of a Newcomb or Kavka's toxin type problem facing Society such that strategically simulated belief in an Theorist- i.e. a guy who always says the same thing yet also believes he is a smart oracle- yields better or more stable correlated equlibria.