Short thoughts

1. Direction of argument in Heidegger vs Descartes. Being in Time might be fruitfully examined as an alternative logical derivation of the same experience as Descartes examined. Descartes begins his derivation by hypothesizing the cogito - that which thinks - but the cogito is merely a phenomenological fact. Heidegger begins his derivation differently, with what he thinks are more basic/ primordial phenomena (the sense of coping and habit, etc). As any mathematician will tell you, a logical argument depends a great deal on its direction, with what it presupposes and what it derives from those presuppositions.

2. "Validity", "truth", and temporality. Validity characterizes whether an argument adheres to rules of inference, whether strict (in mathematical logic) or intuitive (in rhetoric). Validity can only describe the present and the past. However, truth needs temporality and the future; a statement is true if it can applied into the future and yield something like prediction. The social sciences confuse validity with truth: the rules of plausibility (low p-values, criteria of good explanations) can only be used to evaluate validity. For truth we need to create the future using our new insight, but the social sciences aren't part of social engineering, so they are kind of stuck. The hard sciences are enmeshed with engineering, so they have plenty of future to play around in.

3. Methodological Nominalism. Semiosis and categories, Peirce on convergence, Sahlins on non-convergence.

4. Self-overcoming and the restlessness of Dasein. Dasein seems to be restless, always exploring newness and the future. In a weird way, transformation and the effect of feeling the transformation -- self transforming into non-self -- gives Dasein one of the biggest "rushes" possible. It is interesting that certain types of enjoyment can be "existentiales".

5. Emotional movies -- why? Dasein loves to reiterate its stances on itself, to "regroove" and practice (like practicing an athletic move) its taking stances. A movie allows for this -- Dasein can practice being moral and feeling the right feelings at the right times. Note--this isn't a finished thought.

6. Thermodynamics and social science. Inspired by Handwerker on "micro macro linkages", a personal obsession with the idea of entropy, and enough mathematical background to be dangerous, here are some thoughts about how we might use the sophisticated approaches to systems, scale, and causality that have been developed in thermodynamics to work on social issues. Entropy - systems tend to maximum entropy and low differentiation, as low entropy (and high differentiation) take lots of energy to maintain; for example, high racial segregation takes a lot of effort (indoctrinating the next generation, quelling the riots, etc), so it tends (ceteris paribus) to decrease. Micro-macro relationships and signaling between components - systems that are aggregates of other components might have completely different attributes, like temperature and molecule velocity, or death rate and lifespan; this aggregate measure might be what "counts" in the macro system, and might be the basis on which things like selection happen. For example, businesses choose regions to locate their companies based on aggregate things like labor supply characteristics (macro), while educational choices are emphatically micro (at least with respect to this); or consider shop floor discipline which targets everybody equally (macro), leading to a new set of micro decisions; or consider Darwinian selection which acts on a population level, but thereby creates individual attributes. Causality is weird here as we cross from system boundaries in which the applicable notions become very, very different.