COMMENSAL ISSUE 93

Theo Todman - Editing; C92/8 : Optional Activity Theory says the volunteer can do the work the way they want. In this case that provides the option of the final word, be it sometimes the null word. But, is it necessarily the case the final word is the final word one wishes to use. Does Free Will Theory not mean that in many cases circumstance will oblige one knowingly or unknowingly into using some other final word.

John Stubbings - Art; C92/9 : We have the dilettante, the bodger, the crafter, and the artist. In succession they produce what;

1. fails to serve,


2. just serves,


3. serves in a convenient way,


4. serves in a convenient way and additionally causes attitude.

So, art begins where deliberate provocation towards attitude is introduced. But that point must be before seeking to bring out a particular attitude occurs, so, surely, the latter operation must be a special case of art. And only in such a special case would communication then be implicit. I must admit though, for the earlier stage I can think of only a few very simple examples of intentional non-communicative art; a burst of random noise, the ink blot, and a pile of stones. See Humour below for accidental art.

Michael Nisbet - Humour; C92/11 : Try the above on art for the case of one who can not set out information, one who can but it comes as a bit of a jumble, the script writer who can at least present the details efficiently, and the artist who by presenting the story with style and pace brings out the attitude. Intentional humour seems to be a special case of intentional art. Presumably we insert the missing part of communication in accidental humour, in the same way we do when developing an attitude to a thunder storm.

Anthony Owens - Cuckoos; C92/12 : Einstein had someone else do some of the mathematics of his theories because he found some equations too difficult to set up himself. Branches of mathematics are special cases of mathematics, and mathematics is a special case of logic, and logic is a special case of philosophy, and philosophy is a special case of thinking, and thinking is a special case of something bumbling about in the background of the mind. All these things have their full range of implements, from bulldozers to tweezers. Few need ever master the bulldozer, practically everyone must master the tweezers. Almost everything is done by repeated use of the tweezers. Note: Space, so vast nothing be small enough to fit outside it.

Valerie Ransford - Socrates; C92/15 : Sometimes life or death look like the final game. If Shakespeare or Spielberg had turned up to run him through his emotions with some real thumpers he would have happily logicked his way into paying the fine to be around for more.

John Neary - Mosquitoes; C92/17 : There are 3,000 species spread between the poles. They like damp areas for breeding; soggy tundra, coastlines, lakes and pond shores. The females like sticky fluids so are much more likely to feed on blood and spread infection than the males which prefer more watery fluids such as fruit juices. The females can work along a scent trail for several kilometres at night to find a sleeping human. My cousin's great great great uncle died in Rio de Janeiro harbour in 1852 from Yellow Fever given him by a local mosquito. They will survive until there is no water, as long as the diseases they transmit do not turn on them, which they never will.

John Neary - Epistemology; C92/18 : (1) Test your answer against the question of how do we know when the body is shut down or active. (2 & 3) These examples that turn up in books have usually been cobbled up on the basis that the model person is a gullible idiot who might do or say anything. The correct approach is to chuck away four billion years of survival experience and give the examiners whatever answers they want. Give the guard dogs a pork chop and they will happily let you go on to rob the world.

Graham Dare - Does The End ...; C92/20 : There is certainly no real case for criticism of humanity before the dawn of the true age of enlightenment, which one can roughly place in the late 18th Century. However, that enlightenment was pretty rough and ready so it would also be unwise to be all that critical of humanity between then and the introduction of reasoned education around 1900. And even with that, criticism for the following twenty five years or so would be on rather shaky ground because it wasn't until about 1925 that the youngsters of 1900 reached positions of authority in their careers. There is some case for some criticism of most western civilisations and Japan from then on. For much the same educational and career timescaling reasons, and because of some global politics, it is only about now that we can start to justify some criticism of some of the rest of the world. Incidental points: Napoleonic losses set the precedent for WWI losses. I can assure you the losses of WWI were justified on the grounds of very much more complex and important issues than whether the line would be moved forward a yard or two.

Rick Street - Monkeys; C92/22 : Over a few days, by my making a noise to a guinea pig like the sound it made when chewing grass, the guinea pig learned to chatter its teeth back at me to show that it wanted more grass. At a guess guinea pigs could probably manage about ten sentence representational words, providing one is willing to work in their language and chatter about what interests them.

Alan Carr - Democracy; C92/26 : The operational difficulties you report are caused by defective People. Switch off the Democracy and refer to the Operation, Maintenance, Repair & Test Manual for Democracies Type I. Perform the tests detailed in the Manual and from its included Diagnostic Chart determine the People affected and the degree of their defectiveness. According to what you find,

1. reprogram affected People,


2. change the Brains in affected People,


3. remove and return affected People to your local Workshop for rebuild, salvage or environmentally safe disposal.

As necessary draw fresh Memories, Brains and People from Stores, program and fit them. Switch on the Democracy and repeat the tests detailed in the Manual. If the Democracy passes all the prescribed tests then, and only then press the Activate button set in its bottom.

Norman Mackie - Life; C92/27-29 : I am inclined to the view that life comes from before the beginning of the local universe.

Stef Gula - Free Will; C92/30 : Playing safe until you know what is going on is a good principle. In defence one would avoid stationing forces where they could be surprised and set out guards to warn of something approaching. And in attack much the same, but with the emphasis more on avoiding obvious traps and using scouts to find the less obvious ones. These are all methods by which command seeks to maintain its capability to make decisions and set the outcome of those decisions into motion. Notice this capability is additional to that necessary to do the other things above and is essential for command to function as command rather than just as a registry of observations. There are other arguments that for command to function properly it must also have all relevant information and controls, the capability to accurately process and direct, and it must also have appropriate forces it can set to carry out tasks. Thus, free will is free when it is concerned only with matters individually and collectively complete and small, within what it alone can deal with and entirely control using whatever amount of power it will have available when action is desired. One might also want to say that command is usually working towards an objective and, depending upon the level, command might set that objective or have the objective set for it. I add that part because my own view is that when we think we have arrived at what we want by exercising our free will, what in fact has happened is that we set or were set an objective we happen to like and managed to reach it. And free will had nothing much to do with our setting off and achieving that objective at all, no more than infinity has anything much to do with measuring the width of this page. Free will and infinity are simply declared terminals, so far off it doesn't matter where they are because we will never reach them nor need to. Dealing with restrictions we do not like and avoiding falling into the null point are probably more important, and the health and safety committee rules in regard to that are what I started with above. After a while in the clearing you will begin to wonder what is in the trees.

David Taylor - Biochemistry; C92/32 : In a recent documentary a specialist in the field said science, in discovery and analysis, presently understands the purpose of only about 2% of what it has so far found in biochemistry. I offer that only to give the figure in case it has not been mentioned.

Malcolm Burn - Is/Ought; C92/35 : The bit about free will above might be interesting.

1. Evil is that which you can do. Killing is evil. Therefore you can kill.


2. Breaking the law is that which you can do. Killing is breaking the law. Therefore you can kill.


3. Doing what all else say you should not do is that which you can do. Killing is doing that which all else say you should not do. Therefore you can kill.


4. Ought we say "might be" rather than "is" ?


5. Are evil, a breakage of the law, and what all else say you should not do, all exact equivalents ?


6. Are the three acts of doing equivalents ?


7. Are the intents associated with the three acts of doing equivalents?


8. To judge is to take into account what is done, the way it is done, and the reason it is done.


9. A judge sets the ought in its proper position between must and must not.


10. If there are two or three oughts is it implicit that in all cases there need be two or three judges, or one judge who makes two or three judgements.


11. What sort of two or three branch phasor structure should one use to asses the overall penalty to be imposed ?


12. Should we introduce a double or triple penalty system ? Plays havoc with the language doesn't it. And a job for Theo.


13. Is checkmating a rule of chess or an option of chess strategy ?

Vijai Parhar - Endless Replies; C92/36 : On Endless. It is said that in the beginning the chicken or the egg came first. In the end will the question or the answer come last. On bees. I have thought hard about this and think the initial question must be on whether the bee begins in sin. It has been said that only a creature which has sensed sin and risen to sense purity can sense the pain in the purity of beauty, and hence fully appreciate beauty.

Theo Todman - Scrolls; C92/38 : I said the scrolls sit in a minefield of contention. Taking your points in order Theo :-

1. I don't think I actually ruled out pre-1991 books on the subject, but perhaps that got lost in my recommendation to also look at works from after that date to pick up lots of things not mentioned before then.


2. On Roland de Vaux. Well, he seems to have been the one who created and kept going for forty years or so the idea Qumran should be viewed as something like a medieval monastery in form and function. And several people whom I can only assume to be authorities are said in the last ten years to have pointed out glaring religious bias in his interpretations and called for a complete review of his work for that very reason. Their criticism does not seem directed at all at his archaeology, they seem to regard his descriptions of what was found to be well done. But they do seem to question almost all his interpretations of what was found. And it is in that area, the one of presenting interpretations to those who are not expert, that surely there is the greatest responsibility on the specialist to give as complete a picture as possible. In that regard one might ask to whom was De Vaux addressing his works, if only to other specialists then certainly he was at liberty to set out whatever interpretations he wanted, on the basis of equals to equals. Meaning that authors do not necessarily have to present all the truth and nothing but all the truth in order to be honest writers. But, if he wrote for the interested world in general, then perhaps he did not set things out properly, perhaps he should have taken a broader view and not written out other interpretations he knew were being set forth but did not agree with. Hence, the fact you have books which look all right does not necessarily mean they are. Taking an example of the problem from another place. There are many excellent write ups of Pompeii and I doubt if either of us would question the correctness of the actual descriptions of the finds in the more serious ones, indeed we probably wouldn't find much cause for criticism of the descriptions in more or less any work on Pompeii. But, what do we have with Pompeii, well, only that recently a volcanologist seems to have demolished a great deal of the historically "correct" interpretations of those descriptions. So much so that every book and film on Pompeii which does not mention pyroplastic flow must now be treated with extreme caution in regard to whatever it might say about what happened there. Except, curiously, Pliny the Younger's account. His previously inexplicably partially "incorrect" description of the eruption as he noted it from across the bay, now, after two thousand years and a volcanologist’s efforts, seems to be entirely "correct" in every detail. Isn't that strange. And doesn't it leave us with a huge library of suspect venerable works. With your third comment on sects. Well, tricky, but only because you stuck in a qualifying "that can be" and don't say which sect, leaving me neatly in the starting gate with no idea which way to run.


3. On Blitzkrieg. A strange usage of the term for describing a fifty year campaign plan I agree, but I did think on it and I came to the conclusion that for most people it would probably carry my meaning adequately, it goes with ideas of planned assault, technological warfare, timetables and so forth, which all seem within the war scroll. Non-snidely by the way, should you use snide as it means pretended.


4. On the Damascus issue. The question is really whether it is true that in places the writers of the scrolls called Qumran by the name Damascus. If that is true then the trip to Syria might be the forced version. There is no way I can answer you on the point though as I have no idea as to which interpretations are right and which are wrong. All I can go on is things like someone said no one argues that Qumran was not called Damascus. From that base writers launch off into all the sorts of standard history revisions I indicated. But I will happily go along with you about Paul setting out more than just some of the message, I certainly failed to show that. To a considerable extent likewise on the 1910 "Damascus Document" find you noted. It was so "included in" in what I read of the Qumran finds that I didn't notice to render its particular story properly. But then I am not sure you did it justice in your note either. As I understand it the "Damascus Document" of c.1910 was not one of the Dead Sea Scrolls but two generated documents, which today we might call virtual documents, worked out backwards from what seemed to be fragments of two slightly different 900AD dated documents found in Cairo in 1896, which fragments were worn out Synagogue working copies of earlier lost copies of unknown date. At the time no one knew which of these virtual documents, if either, might prove to be a perfect copy presenting from an assumed single original, especially as nothing was found to fill in the central part of the texts. It turned out that numerous pieces of the real Damascus Document turned up at Qumran, they dated from around two thousand years ago and addressed then current matters to prove that. It now seems these pieces of the original text pretty much confirm what had been largely supposed around 1910. But it took a long time to find that out because de Vaux's team didn't publish them and up until at least as late as 1989 flatly and rudely rejected any other scholar's request to see them. So, what we have seems to be a two thousand year old original and a couple of one thousand year old copies, and infilled translations and opinions from one hundred years ago and from today, which say that in those documents Qumran is called Damascus, with the implications already mentioned. Logically, to preserve free will, a rapid retreat from the scrolls and the acts is the best option because it is obvious neither need then decide what is done next. But the trouble is we are not logical creatures, and the next issue might show retreat is not yet possible because it is not yet possible to disengage.

Albert : In general, I haven’t got much to say on your long contribution above - you did give me the option to cut bits of it, but we have space this time & I see no reason to wield the knife. The discussion on Qumran has no real place in this newsletter as we’re not really raising philosophical issues. So, unless some other members want to take it up, we must let the subject die, interesting though it is. I did appreciate your responses to John Stubbings and Alan Carr, but (and maybe I’m thick), failed to see the point of some of your other remarks. Maybe the respective authors you’re engaging with will better connect with your chain of thought. I do have a couple of points to raise, though.....

Firstly, I think your point 13 in response to Malcolm Burn is valid - in chess, the "rule" to checkmate if possible is of a different sort to the rules on how to move the pieces. This rule gives the point of the game, the others only the mechanics. There is an unwritten rule in most games - "you must want to win and not want to lose". The checkmate rule tells you how to do it. Games such as social bridge need to be played for money, else people don’t mind losing & the game degenerates into a farce.

Secondly, on words ... back to blitzkrieg ! The whole original idea behind Hitler’s blitzkrieg - "lightening war" - was to do away with the stodgy trench warfare of WW1. The idea was to get things over with quickly. I dare say it always had overtones of "irresistible force" and "carefully planned tactics" - which was why it was ‘lightening’. I maintain that long campaigns are not blitzkriegs, though they may use blitzkrieg to force a tactical advantage. ‘Snide’ was evidently a ‘new word’ in 1964, since it’s consigned to the Supplement of my copy of Chambers Dictionary; which gives, "sham : counterfeit : base : mean : dishonest : derogatory in an insinuating way : showing malice." No doubt it’s moved on a bit since then, and has become softer. Picking someone up on their vocabulary (a dangerous sport as it leads to retaliation as we’ve seen !) can be understood as derogatory in an insinuating way (and even as showing malice), so my use of snide is valid. But, I wanted to avoid the harshness of such an understanding by pre-empting such a misinterpretation by my very use of the word "snide", which is habitually used tongue in cheek. Evidently without success. And who cares ? Still, philosophy is mainly to do with words, and the muddles they get us into.

Theo