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Tom Veatch
Flames of inspiration often leave smoke signals behind.From mine, these.
| A More General Theory of the Syllogism | Abstracting logic. Aristotle's
list of syllogisms missed half of them; there's nothing to them
(H!); and we can do better
without. Still it is pretty fun and cool, considering this was the intellectual pinnacle of humanity for 2000 years, and plus I'd say this is not a bad introduction to "term logic", and might be suggested reading for students of computer science, philosophy, classics, and/or math. |
| Life as Art | An essay, inspired by Paul Klee discussing art, discussing life. I was coding up a Paul Klee style colored fiber, from his Pedagogical Studies, and happened across a quote that was very inspiring and rather parallel to how I feel about the combined killing logic and living power of evolution. Have a look, maybe you'll feel it too. And you can also click through to see the 63 steps along the way from an idea to a working, artistically-useful (I hope) computer-drawing function. |
| Trolling | If you don't know who the turkey is, it's you. A new kind of speech act, trolling, is seen to have a rich and peculiar structure, analysed here using five imputed participants including as follows: true speaker (the troll), acting speaker, true audience, straight audience, and shocked/reactive (trolled) audience. This collaboration elaborates the intentions and moral views of each, and the social consequences. |
| Staking Government | How to snake out the blocked pipes of government. |
| Foundations of Future AI | Towards a New Cognitive Science |
| Barnyard Mommy | An ode to motherhood. Cute, funny, short. |
| The Ugliness of Beauty | Beauty can also be ugly, an ugly business |
| The Chemistry Teacher's Son | A placeholder for autobiographical content. Nothing finished here. |
| Tom's Blog | A blog is a terrible idea, but I have one anyway. Lots of fun short topics here. |
| Bliss Theory and Thereabouts | How psychology must be that bliss is possible. Read about it here. |
| Tom's Diet and Supplements | Feel free to ignore my example, or to be stimulated to learn from it. But do read and share my 'Message to Black, Brown, and "White" People'. Also the important idea of the Optimum Healthy Allowances for nutrients, not just the RDA which is a limited if not bankrupt idea. |
| The Logic of Irrational Emotion | Emotion in general, considered evolutionarily and logically. Mathematical notation for the emotional process. Review of N+V Humor Theory using it. Veatch asserts that the process of identifying yourself with an emotionally significant circumstance or role has a binding function whereby the emotional system is bound or required to implement the specific emotion that the system associates with that circumstance or role. That is, identification binds emotion. From this, much follows. Bound, a person harmonizes with others in shared understanding, moral assessment, and feeling, around a shared activity. Bound, a person is not free to experience the moment, the now, the timeless flow, but is instead aware of their status and moral self-assessment. Unbound, wherein identification does not occur, emotional flow states, high performance, spiritual goodness, etc., occur with attention paid to the evolving situation rather than to thinking about how it reflects upon you and tells a story about you. Unbound, the person has access to the unconditioned or irrational emotions of bliss, serenity, transcendence, etc. Veatch's Razor, distinguishing these, is given. |
| Gesture Learning | How to learn effective physical movement. A research program for reinforcement learning by embodied systems, like people. |
| (Universal) Gravity is BS | An argument for Local, Quantum Gravity. Based on the winding problem in which galaxies remain spiralled or barred rather than a smoothly-blended coffee cup of stars, even after supposedly 20 rotations, I propose that gravitational attraction doesn't actually reach out forever, but only to a limited distance from each point of origin. Not only does this explain the mysterious maintenance of spiral galaxy arm coherence but it also explains the interaction of spiral arms with the galactic bar shape, and explains the process of formation of barred galaxies, and it predicts and explains systematic color variation within spiral galaxy arms (which are like tornadoes, spiralling around their centerlines, and detached gravitationally from the galactic center, according to this theory). Current alternative proposals in terms of dark matter and standing waves are demolished. Perhaps the merged projection of such local gravity quanta creates and constitutes space itself, thereby creating the expansion at and after the Big Bang. |
| On Hierarchy and Value | Hierarchy and its emotional opposite, Oneness, are explored. How Jordan Peterson agrees with Karl Marx. Why hierarchy is the compassionate, inclusive solution. The geometry of hierarchy. How dominance hierarchy transmutes into admiration hierarchy, creating communities of shared values. All this is prelude to an analysis of emotion within social hierarchy. |
| Negative Dimensionality | Abstracting geometry. Hilbert's axiomatization of geometry, full of redundancy, led me to a generalization which makes geometric dimensionality a characteristic that can be counted up (as in point to line to plane to space, etc.) and down (space to plane to line to point: etc.) Geometries, by intersecting, create lower-dimension geometries; for example two intersecting 2D planes create a 1D line. Geometries, by projecting, create higher-dimension geometries; for example, two 0D points project a 1D line. But if there is no upper limit, perhaps there is also no lower limit. The idea that a geometry might have negative dimensionality seems absurd, considered within the assumptions of spatial thinking, yet it derives from the same less-redundant axiom set as the geometries we understand. Suggestions for intuition and use of this idea are also given. |
| House Color Scheme Tester | Something I made to see what color combinations look good together. Act like you know, click the buttons, it'll help you explore your own aesthetic sense. |
| Introduction | Introduction to tomveatch.com and its author: motivation, scope, style, audience, history. |
| Meaningfulness Itself | Where the sense of meaningfulness is understood as transactional transcendence, using bliss theory. |
| Value in our 21st Century | Tom explores fundamentals around money. Price discovery; Market Equilibrium a false idea; Money being the metric of Value, what is the value of money?; Financial forces: Hydraulic Flow versus Smarts; Can we even bet?; The Turkey, The Butcher, and the Antifragile Investor; The Making of Money; Tech Deflation; Two Arms of Value; Real Value; Epilogue. |
| Populating | On the growth -- and decline -- of
species like pine trees, or humans. An essay toward a parametric model of species success and failure. A clear thought experiment showing how it proceeds, what factors influence it, and how to aim for a soft landing as resource limitations start to squeeze. Relevant to us? I think so. |
| Selves | The many things referred to by 'Self', with commentary. Concluding with emotionally disinhibitory goodness. |
| A Critique of the Big5 temperament model | Garbage in, garbage out. Big5 is not about how people are, it's about how people can be used. |
| Some Water Waves | ...A partial typology of water waves... Water waves come in a small set of types, listed here. Discover the anti-causal wave, the Soliton, the horizontal sheet flow, and other curiosities. Then, try to explain them. |
| Auditory User Interfaces | AUI is to GUI as ears are to eyes. In 27 years, little progress. This aspect of the Metaverse was conceived in 1995: a vision of how computers can improve our auditory environments, to benefit not just the blind but everyone with ears. Because the auditory channel carries more than just meaningless or musical background; it can be information-bearing as to place and source and content, so we could, should, enable our software to interact with us intelligently using those informational channels. Why not? Conceptual introduction, design specifications, killer applications, etc. |