Suns – Grizzlies: you may be thinking because the grizzlies split with the suns in their season series and that they can run the ball, ergo the series might go to 7. However, these painful facts of reality need to be realized: the grizzlies don’t have that kind of offense to match the suns basket for basket, nor do they have the appropriate defense to neutralize the suns’ offense. The grizzlies aren’t as athletic or quick up front as the suns are (if you think Gasol can keep up with Armare, then you’re kidding yourself), and they can’t really rebound. They will have to crash the boards by throwing their guards on the glass, and that’s leaving Nash free to make a beeline to the other basket. Since J-Will has never demonstrated an ounce of defensive temerity in his career, he will not slow down Nash one whit, and Nash will wreak havoc. That said, the grizzlies can slow down the suns by a couple of things: play halfcourt ball, ratchet up their transition defense, make sure some bigman shoves around Armare, and get someone to hassle Nash the entire 94 feet for 40 plus minutes. But that is asking a lot from the Grizzlies, so Suns in 5.

Spurs – Nuggets: The darlings of the 2^nd half of this season, the Nuggets have been remade in Karl’s vision as a fastbreaking machine that springs into action from terrific defense. However, they’re matched up against the most balanced team in the league, the spurs. Carmelo, despite his offensive versatility, is going to have a hell of time scoring on the Defensive Player of the Year, Bowen. He might be capable of posting him up, given superior size and strength, but that merely funnels his shot attempts into the long arm of the law, Tim Duncan and the other spurs frontcourt players. Kenyon Martin is known for his ferocity, but all the nastiness in the world isn’t likely to faze the stone-faced Duncan. Camby, free to roam on defense, might block a few shots, but he can and will be muscled. Plus the Spurs depth in the backcourt – Parker, Ginobili, Barry, Udrih, Brown – will overpower the Nuggets’ backcourt. Spurs in 6.

Sonics – Kings: Both teams are limping into the playoffs with injuries: long range specialist Radmanovich isn’t healthy, and might not be back until game #3. Lewis has a bad foot, Peja is fighting off a groin injury, and Brad Miller has leg issues. Their head to head matchup doesn’t say much, because only one game was held after the Webber trade. How will the new guys on the Kings perform under playoff pressure? After winning last year’s title with the Pistons as a sub, Corliss has experience. Kenny Thomas will provide scoring, and Skinner is likely to bust someone’s nose. The Sonics were a great team for the first 2 thirds of the season – they crashed the boards relentlessly, moved without the ball intelligently, passed the ball swiftly until someone got an open look and buried the jumper. But injuries destroyed that chemistry, and questions saddle their playoff chances – can they regain their early season magic? Play better defense on the perimeter? Can the bruiser Evans slow down Thomas’ offensive potency? Far too many questions, and the answers won’t be pleasant for Seattle fans. If the kings display some semblance of defense, they will advance. Bottom line: Bibby will rise to the occasion, given his history of clutch shooting, and propel the Kings into the 2^nd round. Kings in 6.

Rockets – Mavericks: A spectacular first round match-up between two teams that can win the west – both teams boast players that can go off for 50 at any time, both possess size and length and defensive intensity. However, since the Mavericks are new to this defense thing, after Avery Johnson took over the coaching duties for Don Nelson, it remains to be seen whether their recent change is for real: although Dampier is strong enough to contain Yao, he has been in foul trouble his entire career. If he is not on the floor, the mavs won’t rebound as well. If they’re not rebounding, they’re not running the floor getting easy baskets. If they’re not running, the pace of the game will be in Houston’s favor. Despite Nowitzki’s purported improvement on defense, he still plays D with his hands, not his feet. Terry has the agility to play defense, but seems to conserve his energy on the offensive end of the floor. Keith Van Horn and Jerry Stackhouse aren’t known for their defense. Howard has the length to bother McGrady, but not the experience. The refrees won’t let him get away with anything cheap. Nonetheless, the Mavericks have a huge edge at the 4 spot, because the Rockets won’t have Howard for the series, losing him to injury. Watch for a big series from both Chairman Yao and Dirk Nowitzki. Since the home court edge goes to Dallas, I’m picking them in 7 games.

This is a brief summary of existential psychoanalysis. Admittedly, Freud was ahead of the times, and quite possibly the greatest psychologist of all time (discounting Nietzsche). However, since he was a philosopher of sorts, its only fair to rip his theory philosophically and attempt to demonstrate its absurdity without invoking a strawman.

This was originally written for an aspiring psychologist who had a little too much premature faith in Freud. Since I had already gone through the theory on a philosophical level, heard all the attacks and debates, etc, I decided to bless her with this nugget of a brainfreeze she may not be able to overcome except through self-deception with willful dogmatism and ostrich-like behavior. The irony is truly rich!

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There are two problematic points with psychoanalysis.

I. Freud’s psychoanalysis irreversibly leads to self-deception.

It all begins within the ID – the unconscious part of the psyche that contains the instincts, drives that are generated by the individual’s personal history. Freud’s standard complex is the Oedipus where the desire to harm one’s father includes the sexual desire of one’s mother. This complex is in direct contradiction to the norms and standards of modern society. These moral and conventional standards of society are internalized in the human psyche as the superego. However, the unacceptable desires or impulses are repressed by the Censor, which lies between the ID and the Ego (the conscious psyche). The Censor, according to Freud, hides the unacceptable impulses from the conscious part of the psyche.

But the Censor cannot always succeed in hiding or suppressing these desires, for they eke out and manifest as different, more acceptable desires. An urge to destroy or violate an object may be interpreted as the manifestation of one’s hidden Oedipal instincts. Since that person does not know the actual reason for his/her behavior, that person will attribute such deviant behavior to other (more superficial) reasons or justifications, and take these reasons to be genuine.

Consequently that person is in self-deception with regards to the actual truth of his/her actions and the actual reason for performing them. The Ego is being deceived by the Id. Yet, the ID cannot be a lying bastard in any conventional sense because it is not conscious. In order to deceive, one must know the truth and then consciously attempt to hide it from the other. Ergo, there is a deception, but no deceiver.

II. During psychoanalysis, the patient will resist when the analyst is ‘getting warm’ or closer to the repressed desires. However, this resistance cannot possibly come from the Ego. Why? The Ego is not in any position to know the truth, nor is it in a better position than the outside observer. So it cannot know at all whether the analyst is getting ‘warm.’ In addition the Ego – the conscious psyche – has no reason to resist since it is part of the search party of the truth.

Nor can the ID be part of the psyche that resists, because its function is to manifest the raw impulses or complexes, bring them to the surface, but the Censor blocks it. Since it is also ‘unconscious’ or ‘subconscious’ the ID cannot be aware of the analyst’s probing actions.

Since it is neither the Ego nor the ID that resists, it must be the Censor. It knows full well what it represses, and whether the analyst is ‘getting warm.’ The Censor must also be conscious of what is being repressed because if it determines which drives/complexes are to be repressed, it must be conscious of which ones. On the level of the censor there is an awareness of what is being hidden, and the proximity of the analyst, plus the resistance of the analyst. Everything that takes place with self-deception is done at the level of the censor. The censor is itself in self-deception.

In Freud’s attempt to account for the duality between the deceiver and the deceived that is necessary for any type of deception, he offered the Id and the Ego as the primary suspects. Yet instead of a successful duality, Freud theory actually has a third and separate consciousness between the Id and the Ego that is in self-deception. Freud’s theory does nothing but pass the buck, for it posits a separate consciousness in self-deception, rife with the very problems psychoanalysis theory was supposed to solve in the first place!

Keywords:
Existential psychoanalysis = EPA
Fundamental Project = FP

The essential goal of EPA is its emphasis on a person’s fundamental project. This project is not to be confused with Freud’s libidinal cathexis, nor is it Heidy’s sein zum tode. Nonetheless, the method of EPA is quite similar to Freud’s, where there is an attempt to look past the complementary or secondary aspects of the person’s personality, and towards the primary project. What the EPA differs from Freud is the nature of the project: for Freud, the project is located within a libidinal attachment, which itself is constituted and determined by the person’s past history. The EPA expert increases the framework of explanation to include the future projects of the person as well. The FP is explained in the context of the person as an temporal being; one that includes the unity of the past, present & future.

The basic nuance of the concept of FP is the “desire to be.” Although it is impossible to advance much further than the concept of existence, but by reaching this far, the person has gotten away from the naive empiricist assumptions of behavior. The goal of FP, this “desire to be,” is to achieve the impermeability, solidity, and infinite density of brute existence. Human consciousness perpetually strives towards an ideal, and this ideal is to be the very foundation of its own existence. To be conscious is always to desire, and the fundamental desire is to strive and become the foundation of the existence of one’s own consciousness. This ideal is also recognized as God. Therefore, the most simple expression of the fundamental project of all human beings is the desire to be God. Since the ontological concept of God is a existential contradiction - to strive after this ideal the self must also destroy itself as a conscious entity - the fundamental desire to give birth to God will always be a failure. The person must resign himself to the fact that his/her fundamental project is doomed to a “useless passion.” As I’ve already said, fundamentally, to be human is the desire to be God, and I think this needs to be expanded in more detail.

The desire to know everything aims at omniscience. The fear of death is conversely the desire for immortality. The desire for power leads to omnipotence. The yearning for romantic love resolves in self-completion or perfection. Therefore, the endpoint of all our desires is to be a perfect being, the figure of God who has no desires because he does not lack anything. This means the ultimate desire is to stop desiring, stop lacking, stop being incomplete.

There are 3 kinds of desires: the empirical one where you just want to browse the blogs during work. You have a number of different desires that form a unified whole, and that collection makes up a totality: that is your fundamental, overall desire as a person. Your particular desire to read or participate in discussion boards is a part of your desire to lead a particular life, to be a certain person. In addition, your fundamental desire is one expression of a general desire of existence, and that shows up as a manifestation of a person of your gender, nationality, century, family, background, etc.

Within this hierarchy you can interpret even the most immediate desire, such as your preference to home in on certain blogs, as an aspiration for divinity within a specific historical situation. This way a person’s taste are not confused as necessarily irreducible givens. As long as you know how to question them, these desires will reveal the fundamental projects of the person.

The final step in the EPA explanation of human action is to interpret them as choice. Conventionally, most theories of human behavior attempt to derive an act or a symptom from instinct or some fundamental motive (libido or will to power), but for EPA, the ultimate cause of any human act is an individual and concrete choice. All and any other attempt to identify human activity with a general cause is at best suspect. For example, Freudian psychoanalysis, despite its goal to free the patient, only reduces the patient’s behavior to a causal result of earlier environmental influences. Since the explanation behind an instance of behavior cannot be a mechanical account for, say, how erotic energy became identified or attached with an particular object, then the final explanation must view the person as a being who chosen his/her symptoms as a solution to the problem of WHAT TO BE. Sexuality is one of the several ways of how human consciousness strives to realize or recognize itself. If sexuality is seen as only one of the ways we act out what it is to be, then this shifts away from the freudian emphasis on sexuality as the ultimate ground of explanation. However, despite the existence of several existential psychologists, like Sartre said, EPA has yet to locate its Freud.

Due to the escalating sophistication of technology during the information age, privacy has become a romantic myth, an urban legend newscasters and armchair politicians keep in circulation. Electronic surveillance has effectively banished privacy from the public sector. E.g., there are hidden cameras behind the mirror in the dressing rooms at department stores. Consumer demographics has led to obnoxious telemarketers calling you during dinnertime hawking a product or a service you may or may not need. The emergence of the internet as the communication medium has in turn created a long digital ‘paper trail,’ which is much easier to share than paper documents. “Using the internet is a bit like wandering around town dragging a road-marking machine with a film crew right behind it.”¹

The specific information gathering methods I am concerned here with aren’t the intentional information gathering of eavesdropping, spying or wiretapping, but the passive archives of personal information, and that concerns data privacy. Data privacy is basically more sensitive personal information – name, address, phone number, bank accounts, medical history, and etcetera – the things your mother warned you not to give to strangers. A credit card transaction is recorded by the store; a grocery store number links yourself to your purchases. The information of owning a home, a business, being a registered voter is public knowledge. Even your internet service provider logs your online activity. They have a record of all the pages you visit, how long you stay on, what types of downloads you save on your computer. The good thing about this gargantuan amount of data is that most ISPs cannot investigate much and usually delete them after it is created, because it would not make any financial sense. But they are readily available if a law agency needs access.

The improved capability to monitor people’s activities during their work hours or at public areas or the ability to mine data from different sources has eliminated all pretense of privacy. Privacy used to be a cherished value, until security became an issue, until sensationalism became a priority, and corporations thought legal liability was more important than their employees’ civil rights. After September 11^th, 2002, several companies bent over backwards far enough to accommodate the knee-jerk reactionaries at enforcement agencies by handing over their entire customer databases, with nary a warrant in sight. Even the United States government is getting in on the act by tracking Visas,² which is, of course, carried out under the pretense of “national security.” Over in the Old World, the European Union awarded law enforcements sweeping power to monitor electronic communication (telephone, email, and other internet data) during summer of 2002.³

Thanks to the rise of modern technology, the proliferation of information has transformed humanity in more ways beyond the palpable application. The only way anyone could reconstruct a reasonable psychological profile for an adequate biography of a person who lived before the information age was through his or her personal letters. But today, thanks to the relatively efficient mode of communication – email, instant messages, online credit history, and discussion boards – the accuracy of a reconstruction of one’s profile has increased. The profiling techniques used online leads to a pastiche avatar that represents the user. Moreover, the virtual representation exists at the same time the actual user and that information may help project the user’s probable future based on his or her past behavior habits, as long as contingencies are factored in. In other words, your data has a social life too.

Perhaps we should stop ourselves and ask what the trade off here is. We should ask what exactly our assessment of privacy and discover what is worth conserving and decide what needs improving. Privacy is basically the comfort of anonymity. The issue of privacy involves two value concepts: security and liberty. Some element of security impedes on the potential freedom of liberty. Inversely, without any security there aren’t any constraints on liberty. However, the desire for security may override the comfort of liberty, but there is a point of no return in an increasingly sophisticated society where any action may be recorded somewhere, and we may have passed it already. Corporate liability and the officially sanctioned peeping tom antics by the government are motivated by reasons of security. How much security do we need, how much freedom do we want to maintain, before we end up with neither liberty nor security? Is it possible to gather intelligence for the purposes of security without “cannibalizing the civil liberties of Americans”?⁴

Really, what is the problem? Why should anyone worry about their own private ‘digital trail?’ For the most part, access to personal data leads to an increase in spam mail and calls from the friendly neighborhood telemarketer. But that is only the beginning of the slippery rocks of mayhem. Data mining creates the potential of abuse, or criminal acts such as credit card fraud or identity theft. Civil rights advocates are usually mobilized against data mining resources and other high-tech eavesdropping means. But the presumption of privacy as a sacrosanct belief is almost never inspected. There is no legal right to privacy whatever in the United States, since it is not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. While there are court cases that rule for the “basic right to privacy,”⁵ others rule against this presumption as well.⁶ Currently there is no U. S. law against sharing data privacy (social security, driver’s license, medical histories) with other countries,⁷ while the EU prevents information about their consumers from being available for marketing. We have a long way to go to fix our ill-founded presumptions about privacy and at the same time, and be more judicious in our trust of the enforcement agencies or the commercial companies with personal information, which is a byproduct of knowledge/power.

The conception of sin has Babylonian – Magian – Persian origins. The Chaldæan theologians developed sin as a theologoumenon idea in order to answer their 15th century question of theodicy: how to reconcile divine justice with the suffering of good people. Sin as a metaphysical conception, which has since been replaced with pre-Socratic and biblical refined philosophical awareness, was originally Persian. But first an account of the Chaldæan theologians’ shrewd insights requires exposition.

Being arose out of non-being. In other words creation and creatures, gods and mortals, devolved from non-being. Moira (Hellenic version of fate as absurd) reigned over the metaphysical realm of non-being, which was also the fountainhead of the young gods, as well as abstractions like freedom, creativity and ethics. The Enuma Elish describes gods emerging two by two from a formless, watery waste, which was also considered to be divine. Prior to the existence of the gods or human beings, a sacred raw material had existed eternally. This realm was also the origin of the spirit of man. There was never such thing as ex nihilo, creation out of nothing, in the ancient world. Our modern presumption of freedom, Meonic freedom, is the fulcrum of ethics and creativity which emerges from our being and this is the inception of intelligence. Hellenistic philosophy collapsed this realm of non-being to a divine Nous. The Christian philosophers identified this divine Nous with their Semitic god of Jewish/Christian/Islamic religion. Zoroastrianism also inherited some remaining vestiges of this original conception. The ancient Semitic mentality conceived of freedom in 3 contexts: freedom from slavery, from taxes and as another term of biological desire or warfare. The notion of freedom was developed in order to justify the Semitic intuition that man was a sinful being.

Interlocutor #1: I hate philosophy! It never gets to the point, because it is a bunch of talk stuck in a perpetual circle! If philosophy ever truly got to the point, then we can use it and apply it in life, and hopefully become better people.

Interlocutor #2: Well, this may come as a shock to you, but there is a point in philosophy. It is to articulate reasons, examine how our thinking works, and account for the beliefs we hold. Philosophy does not preoccupy itself with “what” questions, because that is being engaged with the immediacy of experience. A philosophical frame of mind requires a contemplative state at the level of reflection. Within reflection, “why” questions emerges and philosophy ensues. Pending culture, philosophy employs many different types of languages - metaphysical, religious, logical, or even aesthetics - to talk about the point. And “the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.” Bertrand Russell

Posted here

Questions that are framed by the word “what” are formally essentialist because they presuppose the possibility of an essence that satisfies the question. Ergo, asking questions like “what is art” predisposes the subject matter of art into an essentialist framework. Instead of posing this question that somewhat sets unnecessary limits for art, Nelson Goodman proposed to dump that question and begin asking “when is art” instead. By starting with a different word, the topic of art changes - no longer limited to the search for the necessary or sufficient conditions of the possibility of the concept of art - freeing its radical creativity from the prison of theory….

Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking instructs us how art is composed of category schemes that dictate the criteria of identity for their objects. If two category schemes contain different criteria of identity, then it follows that they are irreducible to one another. Both category schemes do not treat of the same things. Constructivism entails that since a world consists of the things it comprises, irreducible schemes establish different worlds, many worlds that are dramatically different. If the categories which determines identity conditions of objects are human constructs, then we are worldmakers, creatures of imagination, and creators of art. Art, inasmuch science, makes and reveal worlds. Formally, aesthetics is the branch of epistemology that analyzes the cognitive functions of art. Goodman investigates, in greater depth, syntactic and semantic structures of symbol systems, literal or figurative ones.

Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy posited a radical account of art: Art saves the suffering creator and through art, life saves the sufferer for himself. This is a kind of truth that denies life and subsists only by illusion or some form of self-deception. The greater the capacity of suffering, the greater the need to reinterpret reality. And man is an acute animal that suffers rather acutely. Art justifies existence through one’s creative energies by sanctioning it with values. Only the truly hypersensitive pour forth creative energy and recast the meaninglessness of reality into a vision of humanity.

This viewpoint rides shotgun on the Schopenhaueristic premise that life is bereft of meaning. The ancient Greeks were natural pessimists and had a great capacity for suffering. Silentus said “what is best of all is forever beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. The second best, however, is soon to die.” It should be added that for too long we, the inheritors of western civilization, have had this absurdly romantic view of the Greeks as enlightened or naive people who considered suffering a foreign concept. Nietzsche argued that they created Apollonian arts to render their existence endurable and the Homeric dream world is the medium of their idealization of the highest good. “Only as aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified.” (Birth of Tragedy) Aesthetics is not beholden to some foreign criteria of justification or metaphysics. In other words, the world isn’t moral in the Christian sense, nor rational in the Hegelian, but beautiful - simply just so.

Yet, some propose art to be an artifact of politics, a pedagogical tool of the masses. Some even purport to link a moral character to the quality of art. These alternatives hardly deserves a response. Moral behavior does not dictate the talent of the artist. The artist faces an empty canvas, without anything in advance. The artist is not following a schema, a pattern when he begins to paint or draw or Photoshop. No previous decision predetermines the next movement of the brush, the pencil, or the cursor. The picture is completed when he decides it is finished. The last line is the one he chooses as the end.

By no right does an artist claim whatever is art, besides his or her own aesthetic standard. Art does not exist outside the specific choices of the artist, who brings the concept of art into the world with their specific work of art. As a result, they take responsibility for the concept of art as a whole. They are stating what art means for everyone else as well. Artists create the values, the only legitimate sort of values that evaluates their work. Bottom line: there is no such a priori “predetermining explanation” that defines creativity. Everything in art is ad hoc, after the fact, and contingent upon the subjectivity of the artist. When the artist employs the concept of art, they are giving it a meaning for everyone to see. This resembles the “intersubjectivity” of language that a concept of one’s creation is available for everyone else to witness and comment on, agree or disagree with, or attempt to elaborate on.

This blog is an attempt at dialectical thinking with respect to Hinduism.

If Hinduism relies on the thesis that all sensory experiences are illusory, why doesn’t this affect the experience of “enlightenment,” where the realization that experiences are merely illusory? At least one experience should not be an illusion in order to determine that all other experiences are illusory.

The polemic forces the Hindu on either horns of a dilemma. Either the thesis of illusion is false or enlightenment is impossible - or the Hindu can admit that he is inconsistent. The only way to defeat the argument is to admit that the experience of enlightenment is itself not an experience. Regrettably that defeater is little more than ‘moving the goalposts…’ Of course the Hindu may assert that the only way is to “experience” it yourself. Then my experience is not necessarily illusory.

If all my experience are illusory then I cannot look forward to experiencing enlightenment on my own to determine that my experiences are illusory. By the by, dialectic operates on either/or reasoning, while other methods work differently (dialogic involves Both/And).