Have a look at how many locations never even get "warm" — Agree to Disagree

That is all irrelevant to your argument. To show that there is or there is no global warming you have to find data that is global not local, cover at least decades, and that also can be clearly interpreted convincingly to non-experts like us to strongly suggest one or the other alternative.

What could that be? London is too local, any specific maximum temperature reading is too prone to some special occurrence at that time and place. What can be used are the mean temperature reading taken globally by satellites and summarized graphically for non-mathematicians. Agencies with supercomputers like ECMWF or the NOAA do this. There are a number of historical global charts maintained just for discussions like ours.

All you have to do is find one great chart that supports your argument, whatever you say your argument may be.

One that I like is this one because each decade is shown in a different color, starting with the 1940's at the bottom and the 2020's at the top as I would expect from a claim of incessant global warming. The very top line is 2023



Given that El Nino is kicking in, and that last January 2022 the vulcano Hunga-Tonga blasted water crystals all over the stratosphere, and most of all because humanity is FUBAR, there is little good to hope for here. I'm worried but not yet panicked.

Reading your very helpful suggestions and some of what I can find here, in general there can be many reasons for the string of coups in Africa but none of them is that military rule is better at solving the safety and economic realities of the region or that it has the support of the general population. The same military that was there constitutionally before the coup is still the one there unconstitutionally after the coup, and the presence of international troops only emphasizes their weakness to deal with internal security issues.

My search engine is feeding me US analysis which sees foreign affairs as continued East-West conflict. Perhaps it's fair to accuse this approach of paranoia, nevertheless history has shown the effectiveness of such polarizing presumptions. Russia and China, just like the US at times, has worked hard to take advantage of fragile circumstances in third world or developing nations, whether through friendly economic exchange, loans and technical assistance, or through the supply of arms in exchange for natural resources.

Ukraine is trying to send grain and sunflower oil to Africa, Russia is bombing those export depots. Russia is Africa's main arms supplier. In the Sahel, apparently arms and military support work better.

Then there is this instant military alliance that will defend Niger in war. How did this alliance come about so quickly unless it was prearranged by a foreign power?

"Earth Just Had Its Hottest Month Ever. How Six Cities Are Coping."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/july-2023-hottest-month-record-climate-change-5e5b3097
Interesting seeing that headline in the WSJ. That would have been unthinkable 15 years ago. — RogueAI

Now count the number of states that had their record high temperature BEFORE 1970. For those who don't want to do the counting, the answer is 36.
8 states had their record high temperature between 1911 and 1929.
24 states had their record high temperature in the 1930's. The 1930's were very hot in America.
What do people think that this data means? — Agree to Disagree

The record hottest day in California was in Death Valley. The coldest in Alaska was -80 at Prospect Creek. Regardless of the authority of the source, how could this data possibly address global warming or even 'hottest month ever'?

More than 20 were killed and hundreds were wounded when government forces attempted to retake the Maidan
Don't you see a difference between a genuine popular uprising and a military coup?

I'll answer this. There were so many other things happening during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, it must have slipped right past me. I do remember the oil embargo. Maybe you can pull up some of those articles from those eras, warning of global warming. I'm curious. — jgill

Back then we experienced with our unbelieving eyes the first dog in space, the exploration of the planets, and man leaving footprints on the Moon. Yet the exploration of the oceans and of Earth beneath our feet is still incomplete to this day.

Much of what we think we know of past ice ages comes from three deep ice core samples drilled out of the Greenland ice sheet and the Antarctic ice cap. This was done to explore the geological and biological archeology of Earth, including the timescale of past ice ages.

What was seen is shocking indeed. According to the record, we appear to be living in a relatively short-period warming of a long-lasting ice age. As long as there are ice caps over the poles we could claim to be in an ice age. Or not.

The anxiety that

Scientists raised the issue of a possible pending ice age around about the mid 70's. — Agree to Disagree

recalls was quite real back then. The fear was that our balmy existence could quickly, say in a decade, revert back to its normal frozen ways except for wide swath of equatorial belt.

Such as the absolute political power and money of the American and French governments and the puppet governments serving them — Jack Rogozhin

Two evils don't cancel each other to make things right. There must be a third better way. Popular elections are an attempt to find that third way.

During the July 30 march in Niamey, organized by a movement against the French army's Operation Barkhane, demonstrators chanted pro-Russian, anti-French and pro-junta slogans. "Vive Putin," "Vive la Russie," "A bas la France," ("Down with France"), "Vive l'armée nigérienne!" ("Long live the Nigerien Army!"). Demonstrators also targeted the French embassy, denouncing the presence of the former colonial power. The attack prompted Paris to evacuate its nationals. ~~ Le Monde, August 13, 2023

The underlying geopolitical aspect of these military coups is fundamental here. Safety, economic, political, healthcare, and even personal survival issues can be marginalized when absolute political power and money rule..

I can't help thinking that Russia and China are somehow responsible for stirring up this mess.

When economic conditions worsen then people all of the sudden become aware that they have a country that is governed by politicians. Politicians are the simplest target for having caused all worsening conditions. Why didn't 'they' foresee and prevent the hot sun the drought the locusts the famine. Surely whoever calls themselves the opposition party can do better.

Given the historical role of greedy Western powers, the right opposition party must then be either the equally foreign supported Islamists or the Eastern powers. In either case, if the population sees the West as the villain then there isn't much that the West can do to change that. Whether the French stay or leave they will still be the 'oppressors' in the reductionist dichotomous politics of Africa.

How can Jenny or anyone else know Jenny's psychological state of mind? Why can't knowledge be scientific knowledge learned from a book?

if we want to do metaphysics and make a logical argument, Peirce's logic of vagueness takes us a step past the usual "something out of nothing" ontology. — apokrisis

I agree that logic is not limited to this or that logic.

The most restricted logic I can think of is Parmenides' of the purely formal unique part-less featureless simple continuous motionless timeless One. With or without extent in space, It either is (logically exists) or not, end-of-logic. The advantage of this logic is its clarity simplicity wide-ranging applicability and rigorousness.

Plato extended this pure binary logic of a One fairly successfully to the more complex logical world of the many, the Forms. Then he attempts to extend binary logic to special classes of Platonic particulars through their theorized logical participation in the Forms.

Here come binary relations of many different types of objects. The pairs range in type from related objects, to related properties along some dimension, to two completely unrelated objects. These pairs are in 'opposition' (of sorts).

But as one would suspect they are not at all alike in their logical relation. This is looser binary logic, the application has become vague and ambiguous. Apples and oranges are both same and not-same depending on their basket. Simmias is both short and tall. Short/not-short are not the same as short/shorter or not-tall/tall.

Even worse, they leave room in the middle for some silent majority of the average, and for none-of-the-above. That's an implicitly 4-valued logic masquerading as binary.

This makes all ancient logic difficult to read unless additional logical assumption are publicly made in interpretation that are both clear and acceptable to other readers.

CS Peirce extended with his sketch for a logic of vagueness.
So the "before" of both something and nothing is the third category that is simply a "vagueness" as logically defined. Peirce flipped the principle of noncontradiction to show this.

The PNC says it cannot be true both that "p is the case" and "p is not the case". Peirce says vagueness is the indeterminate state out of which such counterfactual definiteness can arise. Vagueness is that to which the PNC fails to apply in any definite fashion. — apokrisis

Aristotle simplified logic to manage his material objects. By Pierce's time logic was removed from the ancient complications, but closer to Parmenides' original implicit PNC, this time expressed with mathematical rigor. Now the problem was seen in the opposite direction -- how can logic be expanded in scope (power) to meet the needs physicists, yet remain analytically rigorous enough to be reliable. Suggestions for 3- 4- and other valued logic have always been made but mathematicians are not easily moved away from what works.

Sorry about the slow response, I got COVID after my politicians assured me that there was no such thing anymore.

Everything is self-cancelling itself towards nothing. The probability of that was so high that it the Big Bang was a story of exponential decay. Almost everything self-cancelled almost immediately. Very little was left in terms of energy density even after the first second. We are now into the asymptotic last flattening of that curve as the average density of the vacuum is a few hydrogen atoms per cubic metre and the temperature is a frigid 2.7 degrees above absolute zero. — apokrisis

You are describing what is happening after the singular spark of universal creation. I am comparing before before to after after of the physical world or much more narrowly of the material world. From nothing came everything, and from everything will come nothing, given sufficient time. Matter is mortal.

I'm concerned with the logical impossibility past either end of the sentence. The fault may well be in gap in logic rather than a gap in nature, but either way we're missing something. Once hot inflation starts we're into physical logic, but before that there is no before, no logic, there is nothing. This nothing may be unknown physics but it goes beyond a mere epistemological problem of our not knowing just yet.

we have that which never changed in its entire existence. Completely unperturbed/stable. The most objective phenomenon possible. The most consistent, the most repeatably measured as the exact same [?]regardless of time[?] — Benj96

I am caught up tracing Plato's use of 'same' in the Republic, There are 597 of them I think. For the life of me I can't see how anyone ever could understand what any of them mean, either in ancient times or since. Not even Plato, and certainly not the more logically limited Aristotle.

The second half of the Parmenides dialogue is similarly inexplicable. It was inexplicable to Plato as well, so he let a mature self-assured 'Parmenides' character dogmatically 'explain' it to a young and wide-eyed 'Aristotle' character. After the first public dramatic reading of the original, there was undoubtedly a drunken riot in the courtyard of the Academy.

change vs stasis is a unity of opposites — apokrisis

I just noticed this brilliant post in your archives Thank you! If we could only understand what any of those four words ever mean!

To be the swiftest change is to have the least notion that there was anything other that could have been done except that abrupt something. — apokrisis

Plato referred to that as 'suddenly'. Something in time but outside of time, as a quantum shift. He didn't see how change (for us, as at the smallest scale) can happen any other way.
But in real life we are a heap of complex imperceptibly slow changes that add up to make my beard grow.

to where it was originally going — apokrisis

...and where it originally came from. Which still leaves the question, is unscientific infinitesimal probability a sufficient ultimate scientific answer to how everything appears from nothing?

I only talked about the Rietdijk–Putnam argument itself and how it didn't make much sense to me. — Alkis Piskas

The Rietdijk–Putnam preceded Penrose and is seen more as a philosophical argument in the literature. Frankly, reading wiki and the SEP articles on Time and Becoming and Temporal Parts very little of it makes sense to me either.

That's probably because I am more hung up on Plato's various suggestions of space, time and change.

The Ship of Theseus makes more sense to me in terms of temporal parts, identity and change. but the notion of same time or gaps in time between events still throws me for a loop..

The galaxies you are moving towards would have come into view regardless of your motion, only at a later time as measured by your clock. Similarly, the galaxies you are moving away from will also come into view, but at a later time — Pierre-Normand

the edge of the visible universe is receding from us faster than the speed of light. Although individual galaxies are much slower than light their apparent movement adds up radially away from us. Over billions of years we would see fewer galaxies spread further apart in ever darkening space.

The moving observer effect is special because it is in the observer's present, here and now. But that present, that 'origin' is not fixed in space-time. I'll throw another log in the fire.

The Hubble space telescope orbits Earth. Let's suppose that when flying at maximum approach speed in the direction of Andromeda it sees a quickly brightening supernova star. Mission control decides to keep the telescope pointed there to record continuously for 10 days. From Earth we will not discover that supernova for another 3 days, and on the other side of the orbit, now moving away from Andromeda, Hubble will not see it for another 3 days. This is not an illusion. NASA could set this up just to make Penrose's point, showing that the universe is a weird place.

However, getting back to the description of four-dimensionalism, there are things that throw me off or, at best, make me wonder:
1) "An object's persistence through time is like its extension through space". — Alkis Piskas

In addition to the problematic objects, there is also the question of what to do with the uniqueness of observers.

What the Andromeda Paradox implies is that the observed universe apparently shifts in its entirety towards a moving observer. Which means that in the forward moving direction many more of the most distant galaxies come into possible view and we lose some distant galaxies from possible view behind us. This is all pretty absurd, yet it is demonstrably true.

Then this becomes equivalent to an observer shifting its 'present' physically measurably in space toward the direction of motion. The effect is that we can see from some future present some event that can then be prevented from causing harm in the present present after we quickly got back to where we belong.

absolute relativism, because it can be consistent with a sort of ontic structural realism where knowledge about the relations that generate observations is possible, at least in theory — Count Timothy von Icarus

Can the laws of physics about unknowable worlds be real, here meaning absolute, or must they be tentative as well?

Two different geometries can exist in the same ontological space. — EnPassant

But not at the same time and in the same respect. Physical universes are purely formal mathematical entities. Change the math and you change the world.

Ontological universes can similarly be many if we allow our implicit ontological presumptions not to be necessary. For example, psychological and social universes are also possible and can be shown to be more real than any philosophical ontological universe.

if Trump is elected, he could make it go away — frank

He could pardon himself on day one, then the trumped up supreme court majority would rule on a challenge a year or two later. In the meanwhile, who knows what he would do with the country.

"what about Hillary?" — GRWelsh

Just like Trump, Hillary stupidly acted in spite of technical and legal advice. She was guilty as hell, and as a consequence, and directly due to Comey's last minute antics, lost the election.

The question remains, though. In these sad times, no matter how clearly it is shown that the law has been violated, will it matter? What is or is not lawful doesn't seem to be a concern in our politics, nor does it seem to be a concern of many of our politicians. — Ciceronianus

Perhaps the legal battle only serves as a prelude to create even sharper lines of division between constitutional/democratic and tyrannical/self serving political forces. Smearing Trump with his own doodoo is fair and necessary politics, just as it was with Hillary. Should Trump be reelected he will surely militarize the country to raise himself above all laws meant for us ordinary folk.

“Virtual particles” are called such because they are not real. They do not exist. They are pieces of mathematical fiction.~~ Victor Toth — universeness

Isn't that true of all mathematical physics?
The confusion is semantic. The philosophical technical terms 'real' and 'exist' as used here in a naive deliberately vague popular sense have nothing to do with physical fictional objects of convenience.

According to Leiter's survey, these are the best general philosophy journals as of 2022.

browsing through just the recent titles, how many of these leading philosophical research articles would you be interested in reading even if you could understand their meaning?

Trump's punishment will probably be a small fine that he won't even notice. — frank

Which will come out of loyal donations for his defense that will exceed his costs many times over. If anything, this window dressing of prosecution for a relatively minor offense of an ex president will serve to support his claims of political persecution by the opposition party. His history of being a pig will bounce right off his teflon suit.

Unlike many philosophical discussion with fellow human beings, where we often end up having to agree to disagree, in this case, GPT4 and I regrettably had to agree to agree! — Pierre-Normand

Thank you for these enlightening and entertaining posts.

In maths, science, and engineering, just as in undergraduate philosophy, basic agreement to a consensus is taught, and is expected publicly from the professions. Disagreement in each enters mostly out of the sight of the general reader at the research level.

Looking at your conversations, it appears to me that poor GPT4 doesn't know initially where to place the query, so it conveniently starts at wiki level. Then it works its way up the ladder to more specialized knowledge bases depending on the stream of the conversation. Naively, it will also obligingly accept facts from you into its short-term buffer, to be forgotten whenever the buffer is scrapped.

From GPT4's point of view, it caters to your opinions to gain another happy 5-star exchange.

Unfortunately the user is cheated by its non-judgmental uncritical approach to the subject. Not being familiar with Rödl, I would really like to know where his work fits historically. I would also like to hear how he was able to make sense of nebulous jargon, and where he draws his distinctions and relations. But if GPT4 accepts my opinions based on my baseless assumptions and convinces me that I am correct then I have not gained.

In some cases it might be better if it challenged me first to at least clarify if not actually support my claims before giving in to me. For example, this may not apply to science, but all of Plato's work has to be re-read critically with the realization that he was a dedicated troll, even when he was most serious. We're not going to get this from an AI very soon, I imagine. But maybe I'm wrong.

In agreement, just want to add a new complete set of translations from David Horan, available online directly from https://www.platonicfoundation.org/

the moon exists to the rock — noAxioms

Only if they interact. Otherwise neither exists to the other.

The point is to look at what it means to 'exist' objectively, publicly, subject independently and time&space independently, as against exist subjectively with reason.

Subjectively the rock is the center of its universe without denying the possibility of the subjective universe of others. Without interaction nothing can exist.

Solipsism is an extreme scenario that denies other universes.

In other news, newly discovered asteroid 2023DW is on a collision course with Earth due to arrive on Feb 14, 2046.
It is about 50 meters across, roughly similar to the Tunguska (1908) and the Barringer Meteor Crater impactors.

However, people young enough to experience this in 2046 should not build up their expectations. NASA or some other agency will likely succeed in displacing the asteroid's orbit enough to delay or eliminate this event.

It's Hard to be Green

A green pea galaxy imaged by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is shown alongside an infrared picture of an early pea [04590] captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. [...] Compensating for the cluster’s gravitational lensing effect and the galaxy’s greater distance to us, 04590 is even more compact, comparable to the smallest nearby green peas. — NASA

Green pea galaxies are small green and round.

But can our Milky Way be green?

Don't you see a problem with that? — magritte — Metaphysician Undercover

You're taking that out of its context. It was only meant to help unravel an attempt at a correct subjectivist philosophy. Not only psychology but also some physics can only be seen that way. But how?

I’m using physics definitions. — noAxioms

Don't you see a problem with that?

Physical definitions don't have to have any meaning either in conversational or in a philosophical sentence. Even in physics meaning is convenient but superfluous as long as the formulas invented/derived describe to a point of prediction of possible phenomena. Physical definitions relate hypothetical mathematical objects of pure intellect. When explored philosophically, which is really unnecessary except to aid students in bridging to a physical mode of thinking, physical objects, such as energy and so on become Platonic conditional abstractions.

What the claim that man is the measure means is still a matter of dispute. — Fooloso4

Plato himself made the 'man is the measure' doctrine sufficiently clear in the Theaetetus. “just as each thing appears to me, so too it is for me, and just as it appears to you, so too again for you” (Theaetetus 152a) The meaning of 'appears' was and still is ambiguous because the ancients couldn't have a clear distinction between sensation, psychological perception or insight, and logical judgment based on memories of personal experience. Plato suggested all of these for Protagoras (157d, 170a–171a). Mathematics and today's public scientific facts are not in the scope of subjective philosophy.

Plato argues against the claim that the man, that is, each person is the measure, and thus is able to refute it. — Fooloso4

No he is not able to do any such thing. A refutation would need to show that Protagorean premises are inconsistent or absurd and Plato can't do that, nor can anyone else because it is logically impossible. It then comes down to looking for the flaws or fallacies in Plato's arguments as presented with an eye on the list of ancient sophistical refutations. Typically, Plato saddles his opponents with one or more absurd premises just for the purpose.

Socrates describes his "second sailing" (Pheado 99d-100a). Rather than looking at things themselves:
~~So I thought I must take refuge in discussions and investigate the truth of beings by means of accounts [logoi] … On each occasion I put down as hypothesis whatever account I judge to be mightiest; and whatever seems to me to be consonant with this, I put down as being true, both about cause and about all the rest, while what isn’t, I put down as not true~~.” — Fooloso4

Fabulous, isn't it? Unfortunately this scientific method in search of forms, occupying an intermediate position between knowledge and ignorance, does not come up in the Theaetetus.

:up: Thank you for these posts.

The Forms are excluded in order that we may see how we can get on without them; and the negative conclusion of the whole discussion means that, as Plato had taught ever since the discovery of the Forms, without them there is no knowledge at all. — F.M. Cornford, Plato's Theory of Knowledge, page 28

Cornford's epochal work still had shadows of Kant, especially in being mindful of the unknowable noumenal universe and its original in Plato. What can be known is limited by our senses. rational resources, plus what humanity brought into the world. For Plato that is the objectively real Ideas that guide us. Without this guidance we are lost.
As you say,

Theaetetus ... shows the need for an intelligible world not possible through the relativity of Protagoras or Heraclitus. It is done without recourse to Anamnesis and the separate realm of Forms — Paine

Therefore, Theaetetus, neither perception nor true opinion, nor even an articulation that’s become attached to a true opinion would be knowledge. — Plato. Theaetetus 129b, translated by Joe Sachs

That is, it would not be Platonic knowledge. If Protagoras had been allowed into the argument at this point he would have thanked Plato for properly developing Protagorian subjective knowledge. The difference is that subjectively I can always be certain of my knowledge of this moment and this moment alone.

The puzzle arises because modern Aristotelians and materialists take JTB for granted as the sound definition of knowledge and are shocked to discover that Plato demonstrated that this cannot be. What could be the difference? Cornford suggests that according to Plato, only the Forms can be known unconditionally. If we dismiss the Forms as abstract nonsense then which way should we look for an answer?

In ... epistemology we can't know if quarks exist. Fine. I would probably agree with you on that issue — Bylaw

The problem is not with the mathematical physics of quarks but with the licentious use of exist and know which should not be allowed to seep into physics.

Can any animals be described as morally worse, or morally better? — Wayfarer

Yes, according to my personal decree of morality, subject to revision but absolute for each judgment of course. Like the baseball umpire's call of balls and strikes. Pigeons that roost on the head of the Teddy Roosevelt statue, and gulls and starlings that aim for pedestrians in a mall have low morals, but male sparrows that throw chicks out of the nest of a competing sparrow are despicable.

You think it's easy becoming top meerkat in a mob or alpha wolf in a pack? — Vera Mont

I suppose not. Can it be more hopeless than the millions of bank and insurance company clerks working years for a promotion to assistant supervisory manager?

I don't see how human law can be compared favourably with natural law. — Vera Mont

Although I don't think you can demonstrate either a universal natural law of animal behavior nor that the laws in your country are the same as in mine, I agree with the gist of your point about people being morally worse than many other social animals when it comes to the treatment of their own kind. One major factor making for the difference is the shift from a fight for survival in animals to competition for higher social standing for people. We are competing for power, money, or prestige in the eyes of other people.

in combining them, 1 + 1 = 2 (the sum) plus the addition of a new emergent conferred from the act of combination. — Benj96

Fitting regular hexagons together in a circle makes 6 hexagons plus 1 more emergent in the middle making 7 hexagons. But on the surface of a soccer ball 5 hexagons make 5 hexagons + 1 pentagon. It would appear that you are not entirely either right or wrong. Emergence seems to require at least one additional outside factor to guide a convergent or divergent process.

If philosophical analysis is not concerned with matters of empiricism, such as whether the morning star and the evening star are really just the same thing, then why is there so little attention paid to the analysis of logical form? — Shawn

Because analysis of propositions without content is empty and empirical content without formalism is blind?

Mathematical probabilities are calculated. Empirical probabilities can at times be theoretically estimated based on looking at the actual world. Probabilities of fictional events are meaningless.

One issue with empirical theoretical estimates is that they require biased philosophical presuppositions prior to any personal experience or possible futuristic scientific observations. Another is that cosmological speculations require cosmological presuppositions, not fictional ones.

To my estimate, even if there ever was any extraterrestrial intelligence, their signals will never cross our timelines, therefore whether there are or ever were aliens out there we remain thankfully alone and free forever.

With AI the issue of creativity pokes a hole in the narrative of an extreme material-mind dichotomy. The intelligence of the machines improve gradually to eventually surpass human limitations.

Query ~ Please write a haiku about a walk in snowy woods

Snowy woods, so still
Silent footsteps crunch and crunch
Winter's peaceful thrill
~ ChatGPT

Query ~ What is creativity and how is ChatGPT creative?

Creativity is the ability to generate new and original ideas or things, often in the form of artistic or intellectual works. It involves using imagination, originality, and innovation to produce something that is novel and valuable.
ChatGPT is a machine learning model that is trained on a large dataset of human language and can generate human-like text. It is not inherently creative in the same way that a human is, but it can be used to produce text that appears creative to some extent. This is because ChatGPT has the ability to generate a wide range of responses to a given prompt and can produce novel combinations of words and ideas. However, it is important to note that ChatGPT's responses are based on patterns it has learned from the data it was trained on, rather than on its own original thoughts or ideas.
~ ChatGPT

Statistically speaking,
All sheep are black (based on a sample of 1 of course)
All people have straight black hair
Shakespeare is alive and well in China (most people who ever lived are alive today)

The process of bringing forth creative ideas may be like digging in the ground. But some seem to have got it down to a fine art. To some extent it may be possible to improve by practice but it does seem that some are so much better naturally — Jack Cummins

Creativity is just a word for a platonic abstraction of a mind process we share with all living animals of bringing to action or to words hidden meaning arising from deep forms of thought not directly available to conscious awareness. The creative process is autonomous until we choose to exercise it by force, digging directed with purpose and intent for extended periods. My wife fixed up a poetry closet for herself to shut out the world while she mulled over, wrote, revised and rewrote. A friend walks in the park in the mornings telling children's tales to a voice recorder. My best ideas pop into awareness out of the abyss when I lie in bed in the middle of the night seeking to get back to sleep.

performance is measured according to standards and is also an act of communication — Jack Cummins

Creation is a struggle to bring to light ideas that might emerge from the formless depths of one's mind. Some ideas are merely new rearrangement of cultural memes and these can be judged according to some odd standards. Ideas that truly brake new ground will not be judged.