Another great passage from Santayana’s “Scepticism and Animal Faith”

Belief in substance, taken transcendentally, as a critic of knowledge must take it, is the most irrational, animal, and primitive of beliefs; it is the voice of hunger. But when, as I must, I have yielded to this presumption, and proceeded to explore the world, I shall find in its constitution the most beautiful justification for my initial faith, and the proof of its secret rationality. This corroboration will not have any logical force, since it will be only pragmatic, based on begging the question, and perhaps only a bribe offered by fortune to confirm my illusions. The force of the corroboration will be merely moral, showing me how appropriate and harmonious with the nature of things such a belief was on my part. How else should the truth have been revealed to me at all? Truth and blindness, in such a case, are correlatives, since I am a sensitive creature surrounded by a universe utterly out of scale with myself: I must, therefore, address it questioningly but trustfully, and it must reply to me in my own terms, in symbols and parables, that only gradually enlarge my childish perceptions. It is as if Substance said to Knowledge: My child, there is a great world for thee to conquer, but it is a vast, an ancient, and a recalcitrant world. It yields wonderful treasures to courage, when courage is guided by art and respects the limits set to it by nature. I should not have been so cruel as to give thee birth, if there had been nothing for thee to master; but having first prepared the field, I set in thy heart the love of adventure.

Pp. 190-191.

My thesis in one sentence

Skepticism is not a dead end but a portal that opens only to those who have laid down their hopes for truth, and picked up the hope for fiction.

Amazing Santayana quote on skepticism

Wait, let me first share something I wrote:

To reach the sought-for starting point, Neurath’s ship has to face its destiny in the storm of skepticism — its shipwrecked crew will drift ashore an unexpected land of fiction and speculation. Here they can regroup, build shipyards, and set up bases for new explorations, by land and by sea.

Ok, pardon that feeble attempt at being poetical. I’ll make up for it immediately by giving you this, the most satisfying passage I’ve read in a long time:

The Indians, in asserting the non-existence of every term in possible experience, not only free the spirit from idolatry, but free the realm of spirit (which is that of intuition) from limitation; because if nothing that appears exists, anything may appear without the labour and expense of existing; and fancy is invited to range innocently — fancies not murdering other fancies as an existence must murder other existences. While life lasts, the field is thus cleared for innocent poetry and infinite hypothesis, without suffering the judgement to be deceived nor the heart enslaved.

It is from George Santayana’s excellent book Scepticism and Animal Faith (p. 53).

Bonus quotes, added later:

[A] mind enlightened by scepticism and cured of noisy dogma, a mind discounting all reports, and free from all tormenting anxiety about its own fortunes or existence, finds in the wilderness of essence [-- equivalent to what I call "virtuality"] a very sweet and marvellous solitude. The ultimate reaches of doubt and renunciation open out for it, by an easy transition, into fields of endless variety and peace, as if through the gorges of death it had passed into a paradise where all things are crystallised into the image of themselves, and have lost their urgency and their venom. (p. 76)

All essences and combinations of essences are brother-shapes in an eternal landscape; and the more I range in that wilderness, the less reason I find for stopping at anything, or for following any particular path. Willingly or regretfully, if I wish to live, I must rouse myself from this open-eyed trance into which utter scepticism has thrown me. I must allow subterranean forces within me to burst forth and to shatter that vision. I must consent to be an animal or a child, and to chase the fragments as if they were things of moment. But which fragment, and rolling in what direction? I am resigned to being a dogmatist; but at what point shall my dogmatism begin, and by what first solicitation of nature? [...] (p. 111)

Making time intelligible

I have abandoned the project to make decimal time systems, firstly because it is really impractical, and secondly because I’ve realized that a base-16 numeral system is preferable to base-10 anyway. But of course, I couldn’t quit altogether. Our conventional systems are so frustratingly bad, I had to at least try to make them more intelligible. Here are my suggestions for new ways to present our conventional time systems; one for the clock, one for the calendar, and one for a full lifetime (100 years). The idea is that a new way of presenting these things will enable us to relate to time in an easier and more intuitive way. For me at least, they do the trick.

I’ve introduced my idea for the “clock” before, but for the occasion I have made a more presentable image file. To repeat what the idea behind it is: to include only the 16 waking hours, and split these up in four groups of four hours each. Why four? Because this number is so eminently intelligible.

The following is my new suggestion for how to reorganize the calendar. It was made with the OpenOffice equivalent of Excel (here’s the file, in .pdf and .xls format). As you can see, I have split the year in four seasons with an equal number of complete weeks. This way, it is not strictly adjusted to any definition of New Year, but starts, loosely, somewhere near the winter solstice. Also, a day or two will be left out of the overview of any one year, but this is of lesser importance, as the calendar is optimized just for ease of comprehension.

And finally, my suggestion for how to present the time available to one in one’s entire life. Plotted below is my own life (descriptions in Norwegian). It was quite powerful for me to see my whole life laid out like this. That might be partly because I have a poor memory, but I think a diagram such as this provides a perspective that would be useful even to people with excellent memory. On the one hand perspective on how long life really is, on the other, how significant every single season is.

The two quarter-circles on the outside of the life-circle represents the two seasons on the cold side of the equinoxes, and vice versa with the inner quarter-circles. My life began in the spring of 1983, and the chart ends 100 years after that. Click the image for a larger version.

I have taped the calendar and the lifetime overview on my door, so I see them several times a day. And I have printed out a few copies of the week overview, with the intention of testing it out over the coming weeks as a tool to help me make better use of my time. Already the comprehension of time is motivating. I have a feeling this method will work better than have some previous approaches of mine.

One last thing: An list view of how the decimal time project developed. This is provided primarily to get trackback links to here in reply to each of these posts.

• Version 1 (in Norwegian)
• Helpful tables for version 1 (in Norwegian)
• Version 1.5 (from now on, all versions are in English)
• Version 2
• Helpful tables for version 2
• Version 3 (an outline)

Metaphysics diagram

Questions are invited.

The reality illusion

Imagine an ideal world. Or a personal dystopia of some kind. Or just some random imagined place or situation. You probably have no problem whatsoever conjuring up at least the vague beginnings of such worlds in your imagination, and given some time, you’ll probably be able to elaborate quite a lot on them, without any further guidelines. Now, here’s a question I’d like you to think about: What is the relation between your imagined worlds and the real world? It’s an awkward question, and I guess you are at a loss for how to deal with it properly. Perhaps your most immediate response would be to start looking for similarities and differences, something which would result in a list of realistic and unrealistic properties of the imagined worlds. But this isn’t the kind of relation I’d like to have established, as you probably suspect. The question is ontological. What I want to know, to be specific, is what kind of world the real world is, what kind of world an imagined one is, and whether or not the latter can be reduced to the former.

We could take a reductionist approach: What are the respective worlds made of?

Reality, at least as far as science have been able to discover so far, is made of leptons, quarks and bosons with completely incomprehensible properties. Space and time is somehow interconnected, and there might be quite a few additional dimensions to the four we actually (if indirectly) do perceive. It’s an exceedingly strange world, far bigger, older and more complicated than any pre-scientific thinkers dared to suggest.

I think imaginary worlds can be separated into components as well, but doing this requires some care to avoid having one’s imagination start detailing further as one investigates. Take an imagined tree for instance: One might not originally have given the color and texture of the tree beneath the bark any thought. Therefore, filling this in would be tampering with the subject matter under investigation. A better approach would be to label the insides of the tree as “undefined”. Only the appearance of the tree was originally rendered, and this “skin” we might do well to define as one of the separate components we were looking for. Other components might include individual leaves or branches, if the level of detail in the imagined scene is sufficiently high. If not, the tree crown might be found to be defined in imagination as a whole. As a general principle, the imagined world is optimized for fast rendering in the mind, not for accurate modelling of whatever elements of reality it happens to imitate.

In one sense, it does seem perfectly plausible that the latter kind of world is reducible to the real world, as the organs presumably responsible for creating mentality are made of real stuff, with no supernatural components. A perfect theory should be able to account not only for the normal stuff of physics like matter and electricity etc., but even the far more elusive nature of mind. Thus, it seems very plausible to declare that the ontological domain of reality includes that of imaginary worlds.

But in another sense, the only reality we have access to — the one described above — is but a set of accepted beliefs rendered in mind. True reality is not to be equated with what in fact is merely a set of beliefs, even when these beliefs are perfectly reasonable and confirmed by all currently available empirical evidence. If we truly believe that mind is created somehow by computational activity of leptons, quarks and bosons (or whatever), we have to admit that the reality we can perceive, think about and talk about must be on the same level of ontological status as completely fictional, imaginary worlds. That the latter is not encompassed by the former, but that they are both encompassed by the ontological domain of an unknown true reality beyond the reach of mind.

We mistake our beliefs for reality all the time. In fact, that is essential for how our minds work, because our brains have limited resources and have to optimize for the greatest possible efficiency in the tasks we set ourselves to. So the illusion is our friend, as it saves us a lot of headache in most practical areas. But in certain theoretical areas, philosophy prominently among them, it is an obstacle we have to be very aware of. Philosophers should strive to become thoroughly acquainted with the reality illusion, to master it in the sense of being able to brake or restore it at will, as per required by practical and theoretical circumstances encountered. And what’s more, they should come up with theoretical accounts of mind and reality that can make sense of this aspect of our human situation.

This, I think, is what should be the defining role of philosophy.

Fundamentals, part 1 of a few

What is the starting point of philosophy? Where do we begin? This is a badly posed question, because we have already begun. Thought structures surround us on all sides, and the ones that haven’t been constructed yet can easily be summoned in the mind as hypotheticals. There’s no practical problem in beginning thought. The problem is that of finding a suitable criterion discerning the useful from the useless or harmful — the things we would do well to invest with belief and the things we should resist having belief in. And there is no good reason such criteria should be focused exclusively on the roots of thought — we’ve realized a long time ago that philosophy cannot be a deductive system similar to mathematics (even though this would indeed be prettier). The fruits of thought structures might instead be the decisive point of justification in philosophy, like it is in empirical science.

Finding themselves in this forest of actual and possible thought structures, the ancient dogmatists came up with a very special kind of criterion: Thought should strive to conform with truth – implying that a thought structure can be true, specifically in the sense of corresponding to reality. This claim is nothing less than postulating an ontological domain beyond that of mind, where there is no “forest of mistakes”, only a single structure of reality, to which the (actual or possible) true structure of thought by some miracle corresponds, as illustrated here:

Untrue thoughts and beliefs should, in the view of dogmatic realists such as these, be combated. The entire forest of mistakes should be cut down and burnt, or at least ignored. A thinking mind convinced of this consequently makes a desert of its surroundings. And as it grows brighter, no light is shed on the whereabouts of the sought-for “oasis of truth” — instead, the desert expands! It becomes painfully obvious that the only way to get the thirst for it quenched is to give in to unthinking belief, i.e. superstition.

Something is fundamentally wrong with this “realism”. The end result is unbearable enough, but already the criterion of reality-correspondence is deeply flawed, as it depends on prior belief in a particular one of the thought structures it is supposed to judge between. Put as a general statement, what this means is that at this level of thought, the most fundamental level, the ontological domain of reality cannot legitimately be postulated, much less the actual accord of a particular one thought structure with the structure of reality. We can’t presuppose mind-external reality, plain and simple. The only kind of reality we have access to is the idea of reality. Everything beyond that is speculative (although plausible) postulation – which, of course, is perfectly useful at other, more lenient levels of thought.

All fundamental criteria must work entirely within the domain of mentality. One may very well entertain the idea of mind-transcendent reality, but the criteria for separating good or useful thought structures from bad or useless ones cannot take the search beyond the limits of mind. All we have to work with is this:

Neither empirical science on the one hand nor mathematics on the other depend on realism in the sense used above. Philosophy would do well to free itself as well, and make realism a merely speculative topic, disallowing it to interfere with the fundamentals. In fact, philosophy should open the gates to even the most so-called “anti-realistic” corners of the forest. There are great treasures to be found, and much needed resources that have been condemned or ignored for too long, in particular on the mythical front. Philosophy can and should find its future role in the re-exploration and re-colonization of these lands, which Aristotle first abandoned, and which we’ve neglected ever since.

The dream of finding the true mental structure, the one that corresponds perfectly to the structure of reality, has, in light of the last hundred years of scientific progress, come to look almost as ridiculous as the more fantastical among superstitious beliefs out there. There is an urgent need to find new ways (or rediscover old ones) for us to manage in our ever more confusing human situation. And that centrally includes coming to terms with what empirical science and mathematics really is. Or better and more general: what thought, belief, immersion and reality really is. These, then, are the complex and elusive issues I’ll try to deal with in this series of posts.

To be continued…

Please give some reactions, so I can tailor the next segment to better suit you, the tiny and just barely interested audience I imagine myself having.

Essay: To what extent is it meaningful to interpret Plato as a fictionalist?

(This is a 4000 word exam paper I wrote a couple of weeks ago.)

Introduction

A common view is that we should take Plato’s ideas as very serious theoretical arguments, to be held up to scientific standards, and, when found wanting, excused on the ground of being ancient and charming. With this strategy of interpretation, most of Plato’s work has to be rejected. The only idea to withstand at least the bulk of such scrutiny, and which for that reason is framed as the great theoretical achievement entitling Plato to his traditionally very high position in the hall of philosophical fame, is his so-called Theory of Forms. This kind of interpretation was introduced as early as with Aristotle, who saw in elenchus something like a rudimentary scientific method, aiming narrowly at logical definitions. The modern heir is the tradition of linguistic philosophy, where prominent philosophers such as Frege and Russell self-identified as “platonists”, referring by that term to a philosophical realism of universals and abstract objects. But this tradition has long since outgrown the connection to its inspirational root, and is generally no longer invested in the issue of how we should interpret Plato.

In this essay, I’ll propose a “fictionalist” strategy of interpretation to challenge the one sketched above, which I’ll call “theoreticalist”. The term fictionalism is primarily meant to suggest that the best measure against which to judge Plato’s work is something else than truth (at least in the conventional sense). My ambition is to persuade the reader that this is a much more profound perspective than one might at first suspect.

I do not pretend to do theoreticalism justice. In fact, I am using it as a straw man position, to lever against in launching the fictionalist interpretation. The point of this essay is not to compare and evaluate the possible ways to interpret Plato, merely to propose and elaborate the fictionalist one.

The original intentions of the historical Plato is not the issue at stake here; for the purposes of this essay, the measure of an interpretation’s merit is simply how much it allows us to take out of Plato’s work – the width and depth opened to us by it. The interpretation is thus given a long leash: It shouldn’t stray too far off course, transforming Plato into something else entirely, but, on the other hand, there is no aspiration to actually capture the real Plato.

I will start out by reminding the reader of how Plato makes Socrates go about presenting his conception of the tripartite soul, as a representative example of Plato’s constructive thought. Then, I’ll point out the difficulties a theoreticalist interpretation of it faces, and go on to introduce the alternative, fictionalist approach, not just to the tripartite soul, but to Plato in general.

The wheel of fortune

Below is a screen capture from the fourth part of Bill Moyers’ highly recommended six-part interview of Joseph Campbell “The Power of Myth”. (You don’t have to see them in the right order. I suggest starting with the second or third to test your interest. All parts can be found on Google Video as well as on public torrent trackers.)

This is a depiction of the medieval symbol “the wheel of fortune”, which Campbell uses to express what he thinks is the the central message of myths in general: The contrasting of the drama of the circumference of this wheel to the stillness of the hub is a call for us to turn inward to the hub of existence, to find a home in consciousness rather than attaching ourselves to comforts or recognition from our peers — or to suffering or death for that matter (as perhaps Christians in particular tend to attach themselves to). All of these things are secondary aspects of reality. Non-central. Not where we should place our center.

Base-4 timekeeping method to make more sense of our standard (thousands of years old and completely obsolete) clock

Lately, beginning with getting really carried away with decimal time last year, I’ve been thinking a lot about timekeeping. Decimal time has the great advantage of making timekeeping intuitive for base-10 minds such as our own. But it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll see any revolutionary changes in society on this point, and even if we would have, I’d still have been unhappy, because I’ve realized that there is another, even more revolutionary step I’d much prefer: A step away from the base-10 numeral system. I’m not sure which alternative I prefer yet, but I think both base-8 and base-16 is far, far better. These have one huge advantage in common: They are multiples of 2. This is good for several reasons:

1. Doubling and halving is by far the most intuitive way we have of dealing with numbers.
2. In base-10, halving a number repeatedly becomes very hard very fast. Starting with 10, we get 10 — 5 — 2,5 — 1,25 — 0,625 — eh… That was four halvings. This is in stark contrast to the ease of halving in a base that is a multiple of 2. Take base-8, starting with 8, which in base-8 is written “10″, for reasons that should be obvious: 10 — 4 — 2 — 1 — 0,4 — 0,2 — 0,1 — 0,04 — 0,02 — 0,01 — 0,004 — etc. etc. That was 10 halvings, but you can go on forever without even having to think.
3. Computers are base-2, and use multiples of 2 as byte-sizes. We all know how poorly this translates to base-10: 2 — 4 — 8 — 16 — 32 — 64 — 128 — 256. In base-8, this same series would read: 2 — 4 — 10 — 20 — 40 — 100 — 200 — 400. And in base-16: 2 — 4 — 8 — 10 — 20 –40 — 80 — 100. A numeral system with a base that is a multiple of binary is perfectly suited for our computer age.

But this post isn’t really about numeral systems, I’m just getting carried away again. Let me just point to a brilliant pro-base-16 book from 1862 by the Swedish-American John William Nystrom, and get on to what was the reason I started writing this post: I have found a close-to-perfect system for timekeeping that doesn’t demand a hopelessly improbable revolution. I romantically call it the base-4 timekeeping method. The premises are that our waking day is 16 hours long, and that 4 is the most intelligible number there is. Now, have the day split in four parts of four hours each, and each hour in four quarters, and you get a new map of the day that looks something like this (the bars are hatched up to 10:30, the time that this post was published):

A full day is 64 quarters long. You probably have a lot better sense of the length of a quarter than of a full hour, so calculating time in terms of quarters might be a good idea, in particular short spans. You gain a better grasp of the experienced duration of time that way, and, when placed on the map above, you know exactly how to weight time in relation to a full day. Timekeeping is made very simple.

You’re probably not convinced yet. But try to think about — for instance — how your waking time is budgeted on work, play, exercise etc., and I’m quite confident you’ll start seeing some benefits to the base-4 method.

Some visionary rambling

I’d like to have a virtual office, with online functionality to replicate ways of interaction from the real world, i.e. blogs and messageboards, yammering etc., but in terms that makes it intuitive for my old and technology-suspicious coworkers. Google Wave will probably be the service to save us from the horrible impracticalities of email-based office work, but that’s mostly about communication and collaboration. The stuff that goes on in meeting rooms. I want to have a home and an office as well. Something else than just another url. I would like the web to be redesigned in some way, to allow me — as a legal entity — to have a virtual place to call my own. In this place, I can build a home, an office, another office perhaps (for my future freelancing career), a study desk etc. Call these the aspects of me as a virtual entity. Visit my office aspect at an address that looks something like this: [Gorm > Office no. 1], or alternatively, you can find the identical place via my workplace: [Super Secret Workplace > Dept. of Supersecrecy > Gorm's Office].

All legal entities can have virtual locations. Indeed, I think they should have one reserved for them. Every individual, firm, government etc. should have reserved a virtual place with a unique address. First time visit by a proprietor of such a virtual place is greeted by a wizard with butler-like demeanor that explains and suggests ways to use the features available. Social networking stuff, virtual homemaking stuff, etc. The new Opera Unite has perhaps some attractive features in this regard. Your workplace can put requirements on your virtual office — for instance, it might be obligatory to have displayed a yammer gadget in your “office entrance” (how much better than “the front page of your personal office website” is this?).

It all has to be very rationally as well as intuitively designed, and completely void of the desperately social focus that a lot of social networking sites has. I have some ideas about the details, but you’re not that interested, and I have no way of realizing any of this anyway.

Addendum: I’d like to be able to design a map-like tool as an interface to my virtual world. Something vaguely resembling the Sims, where I can place my virtual home, my virtual office etc., and also my neighborhood — friends, colleagues, games I like to play, trusted newspapers I like to read etc. Imagine all of this placed on one big map with great zoom functionality (I guess this will be possible with html 5). At a distance, evertything is reduced to something diagrammatical: Icons and lines signifying relations, groups etc. But zoom in, and you get more details. Zoom all the way in, and you materialize into an avatar that shows your presence, and what you’re doing. You can talk to people, leave a note if noone’s there, search the place (e.g. your office) or “knock on the door”, which is something that pings the owner whereever he or she might be.

Model for zoom functionality: The game Sins of a Solar Empire.

Two drawings of Nietzsche

My brother Trym recently made these drawings of Nietzsche, unaware of how fitting quotes they could be paired with, as I’ve done below. The first quote is from section 146 of Beyond Good and Evil and the second one from section 4 of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman — a rope over an abyss.

A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and a down-going [Untergang].

Thanks, Trym!

Platonic Infographics

Why obsess about sentential logic and language in a time when visualization tools allow us to develop new and better ways to express thoughts? The visual language of infographics have the power to be clearer, broader and less ambiguous than sentential language, and it can offer a vision that can be shared more easily among minds, being far less dependent on interpretation.

I’m seriously wondering if studying infographics would be the best philosophical path for me right now — better than studying philosophy.

These days, I’m slowly but surely learning Illustrator, and I hope to expand to Flash and more in the future — because these tools, in this era of information, translate directly into power (in the sense of Nietzsche’s “will to power”).

I might even try to get work doing graphic design, to get paid while gaining the skillpoints I need to be able to create a philosophical work in the language of infographics. I already found a name for the sole proprietorship I’ll have to set up if I get work: “Platonic Infographics”. And in a moment of particular enthusiasm, I even bought a domain: infoplatonic.com.

The reason I’d like to associate myself with platonism, is that my own view of graphic design reminds me of Plato’s view of poetry: It is a very powerful tool that tend to be corrupting unless one actively ensures that it is wielded in the service of reason. I guess this is close to the principles of mainstream infographics as opposed to other kinds of graphic design, but I like to emphasize it anyway. And the connection to philosophy is nice as well.

Prediction

The inevitable pandemic will force schools and universities (as public places) to shut down their physical facilities and go online. There, they will meld together into a single entity (per language). And that will mark the beginning of a new age.

Fragment 572, The Will to Power (Nietzsche)

An artist cannot endure reality, he looks away from it, back: he seriously believes that the value of a thing resides in that shadowy residue one derives from colors, form, sound, ideas, he believes that the more subtilized, attenuated, transient a thing or a man is, the more valuable he becomes; the less real, the more valuable. This is Platonism, which, however, involved yet another bold reversal: Plato measured the degree of reality by the degree of value and said: The more “Idea”, the more being. He reversed the concept “reality” and said: “What you take for real is an error, and the nearer we approach the ‘Idea’, the nearer we approach ‘truth’.” — Is this understood? It was the greatest of rebaptisms; and because it has been adopted by Christianity we do not recognize how astonishing it is. Fundamentally, Plato, as the artist he was, preferred appearance to being! lie and invention to truth! the unreal to the actual! But he was so convinced of the value of appearance that he gave it the attributes “being”, “causality” and “goodness”, and “truth”, in short everything men value.

The concept of value itself considered as a cause: first insight.

The ideal granted all honorific attributes: second insight.

This commentary is absolutely brilliant, even though the involved interpretation of Plato is unfair. It seems to me that Nietzsche simply attempted to set fire to the degenerated intellectual culture in effigie, with Plato as the straw man casualty.

A better or more useful interpretation of Plato is, in my view, one supposing that he was a special kind of mythologian, one working with logical form as well as the usual tools of the trade (drama, symbolism etc). At least in this fictionalist light he becomes palatable. Whether or not it is more historically accurate is, I think, irrelevant, as all I’m interested in here is how to gain access to as much of the wisdom contained in his work as possible. Fictionalism is perfectly suited for this.

Version 3 of the Rational Calendar

Bah, rationality has a way of undermining its own proposals. I’ve already managed to revise the Rational calendar so comprehensively that it has to be called version 3. Here it is (and I think it’s a keeper this time!):

• Exactly 90 day “seasons” to replace the variable month system of the Gregorian calendar. In version 2, the length was set to 91 days, but I realized that it’s much more important to make date calculation easy than to precisely balance the seasons on either side of the winter solstice.
• The five or six days not covered by the seasons are collected at the end of the year as a holiday.
• Each season can, in a transition period, be split in three groups of 30 days and called months, by the standard names.
• 10 day weeks. Week counts are reset by each month, so you have to say what season it is to be unambiguous. This is because it shouldn’t be necessary to do calculations to understand what period is referred to.

If you’ve been paying attention, you see how remarkably similar this is to the French Revolutionary Calendar. Which, bitterly, is kind of where I started.

I’ll come back to this after my exams, wrap it up properly, present some visuals, printable calendars, a furry mascot, and much more.

Translation tables for the Rational calendar (version 2)

Here’s a couple of translation tables to make the inevitable switch from the Gregorian calendar to my brilliant alternative a bit easier:

1st day of Winter, 2009	Dec. 21st, 2008
1st day of Spring	March 22nd, 2009
1st day of Summer	June 21st
1st day of Autumn	Sept. 20th

 

Awrg, now I’m reminded that we need to do something about the year count as well… I’ve suggested starting at 10 000, to encompass the entire history of civilization in the positive count, but I’m not completely convinced myself yet. Tell me if you have a better suggestion. Until one is found, I’ll just continue to use the standard one.

This table is better than the above for calculating what day it is:

Dec. 21st, 2008	Winter 1st, 2009
Jan. 1st, 2009	Winter 12th
Feb. 1st	Winter 43rd
March 1st	Winter 71st
March 22nd	Spring 1st
April 1st	Spring 11th
May 1st	Spring 41st
June 1st	Spring 72nd
June 21st	Summer 1st
July 1st	Summer 11th
August 1st	Summer 42nd
Sept. 1st	Summer 73rd
Sept. 20th	Autumn 1st
Oct. 1st	Autumn 12th
Nov. 1st	Autumn 43rd
Dec. 1st	Autumn 73rd
Dec. 20th, 2009	Extra-calendrical holiday!
Dec. 21st, 2009	Winter 1st, 2010

 

In the Gregorian calendar, today is May 11th, which is 10 days from May 1st, so in the Rational calendar it translates as the 51st day of Spring.

Birthdays are trickier to translate, because in the Gregorian calendar winter solstice isn’t fixed to a date, and might fall on another date in the year you were born than in the current one. My own birthday is 16th of May (1983), but the winter solstice of 1982 fell on the 22nd of December, so if I define my birthday using the Rational calendar, I should celebrate my birthday the 15th of May this year, which, by coincidence is what it’ll continue to be the next few years as well. But as this chart shows, it will slowly slide backward to an earlier date:

The word “entertainment”

I have tended to define the word entertainment in morally disapproving terms, as something shallow and meaningless. But in fact there are higher ways of entertainment as well, even though these are overshadowed by the lower ones predominant in society (also in my personal life, but to a lesser extent). Stigmatizing the feeling of being entertained as reprehensible is unhealthy, because it attaches guilt even to higher forms of enjoyment. I need to adjust my definition of the word to channelize my stream of associations to bypass this moral feeling:

Entertainment: Having one’s attention focused by enjoyment and interest. The best possible normal state — that which is to be aimed for at most or all times — is being entertained by worthy activity.

Addendum: Children and others who are not yet accustomed to worthy activity should see it as their duty to invest themselves in education sufficiently for their further development to be self-driven, i.e. driven by enjoyment and interest rather than letting oneself being pushed around by duty. These to attitudes are natural enemies, and hard to reconcile in one soul.

Version 2 of the Rational Calendar

My previous suggestion was too messy. Here’s how it should be, from the beginning:

• The 12 months are abolished. Day counts should follow seasons instead of pretending to follow the moon’s cycles.
• New year is fixed to the day of winter solstice. This day also marks the beginning of Winter.
• Each season is defined as 91 days long. The first day of Spring, Summer and Autumn is called the calendrical vernal equinox, summer solstice and autumnal equinox respectively (this distinction because the natural events may fall on other dates).
• 91 days times 4 seasons is 364 days. The extra one day (or the two in leap years) is a holiday.
• The week is also redefined, as 10 days long. The 10th day is a weekly holiday.
• The 91st day of each season is a seasonal holiday, and is outside the week system. 
• The annual holiday (or days) are outside both week and season systems.
• The 1st day of each season is a holiday as well, as this is the day of solstice or equinox. They are not outside week or season systems.

Here I’ve tried to visualize this:

The holidays line up in such a way that the transition from one season to the next is marked by a series of holidays, in ascending order (if you think of the rare as higher than the common). New year, for ezample, is preceded by three or four holidays: first a weekly, then seasonal, and finally the annual holiday or days. The moment of New Year is of course midnight between the last day and the day of winter solstice. And since the day of solstice is a holiday as well, New Year is associated with a four or five day vacation. Seasonal transitions are associated with a three day vacation.

This makes for a most orderly calendar. The only unknown is when leap years come in, as it is determined by the astronomical event of winter solstice. But this uncertainty is of minimal importance, as weeks and seasons are defined as unaffected.

I need an English name

Introducing myself as “Gorm”, I’m almost invariably asked to repeat or spell out the garbled sound I just made. Even Norwegians find it difficult. Perhaps Danes find it easier. After all, they specialize in garbled sounds, and have Gorm the Old (or Sleepy) as the ancestral head of their monarchy. But everyone else stumbles on my name. So I have to follow the example of my Hungarian neighbors “Dave” and “Mike” and translate my name into English. But what to choose? I’ve searched, and the four contestants in the poll below are at this time closest to my approval. At least I like the names. I don’t know if they suit me very well. Of course, if you have better suggestions, do tell.

I have a slight preference for Graham, if only because its original meaning was “gray home”. My favorite color!

Update: The commenter Occasional Reporter changed my mind after all. I’ll just pronounce my name with an American “r”. I wouldn’t have been able to get comfortable with being called Graham or Gordon anyway. But if some unusual situation insists on translating my name, I now have a name choice ready: Graham (the other alternative is too closely associated with Gordon Freeman in my mind).