Giving Something Back

Well, folks, it's been a while.

I've made several aborted attempts to resurrect this blog since my first foray into my public meanderings, but problems logging in, distractions elsewhere on the internet and in real-life have meant that this has been somewhat hapless. 

After much mucking about on forums and social media platforms of various stripe, I've now pretty much extricated myself from the web and, having failed to make any serious headway on the book I promised my readers almost a decade ago, I feel like it's time to knuckle down and do some serious writing.

This is an introduction to what I hope will be a concerted effort to finally make sense of things, as well as a place to distil the things I've been thinking about for the past several years into a single, coherent entity.

Under the rubric of this blog, it's my intention to post on various subjects, mostly geared toward the book, which means that much of the content will be about reason, logic, learning, and the importance and utility thereof, politics, science and philosophy (with due caveats regarding the separation of the latter two), but I'll also be including some interesting stuff about music and music production and various other topics .

Warning: There will be equations. I hope to keep them reasonably simple and straightforward, and I'll certainly be explaining everything as I go, including how equations and mathematical notation work, how to work out what numbers should be plugged in and what said equations mean.

Ultimately, the aim of this blog is to give something back, especially to all those people who've contributed so generously to my education over the years. Wherever possible, I'll name them and link to the writings by them that opened windows into reality for me, so that others may benefit from their knowledge and wisdom.

Most of all, I want to talk about logic and philosophy, what their remit is, how they're used, and how most of what people think of as being philosophy isn't philosophy, and what most people think of as being logic isn't logic. 

These latter might cause some consternation, not least because I'm really not a philosopher, at least in the classical sense. I think, though, that it's time somebody really drilled down what philosophy is about, not least because it's massively misunderstood, especially in the academic world, in which philosophy comprises having a ready list of ISBN numbers. Such work isn't philosophy, it's book-keeping. There's a reason that we teach philosophy the way we do, and it isn't because Aristotle was right.

Properly, this is going to be a blog about what we think we know and why we think it constitutes knowledge. The most important term in there is 'think', for various reasons: 1st, whatever we think we know, we can only ever think we know it. It MUST be held provisionally (there will be some clarification later, because there are things we can know with absolute certainty, but we have to be extremely careful in distinguishing them, for all sorts of reasons that I hope will become clear). 2nd, this is first and foremost about thinking, and in fact thinking about thinking, or metathinking.


Here's hoping that somebody's still watching this, and that it finds you well.