Vanilla Sky

The Days after the Day I learned

2008-05-27T03:02:00.001-07:00

Would be a bit different, I guess :).

Amy Winehouse - Back To Black lyrics

2008-05-27T02:58:00.000-07:00

He left no time to regret
Kept his dick wet
With his same old safe bet
Me and my head high
And my tears dry
Get on without my guy
You went back to what you knew
So far removed from all that we went through
And I tread a troubled track
My odds are stacked
I'll go back to black

We only said good-bye with words
I died a hundred times
You go back to her
And I go back to.....

I go back to us

I love you much
It's not enough
You love blow and I love puff
And life is like a pipe
And I'm a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside

We only said goodbye with words
I died a hundred times
You go back to her
And I go back to

Black, black, black, black, black, black, black,
I go back to
I go back to

We only said good-bye with words
I died a hundred times
You go back to her
And I go back to

We only said good-bye with words
I died a hundred times
You go back to her
And I go back to black

"Elections" in the institute

2008-03-29T16:11:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we had the second tour of our elections. We had to select two people (from the Assoc. Prof. level or above, younger people are democratically ineligible to compete) who would represent the Institute of Philosophy within the Assembly of the BG Academy of Sciences. Among many non-democratic events that day one seems particularly repulsive. One of the right hands of the chief "competitor"(the very director of the Institute), a middle aged Professor, probably due to his own stupidity, said to one of the young colleagues:

You HAVE to vote for the director and his partner because if you don't you the young people would start getting kicked out of the Institute.

Year is 2008. Bulgaria. EU.

Post-Communist democrazy in academic BG

2007-12-29T13:32:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago two people in a state academic place received official warning that they would be fired. For posting their protesting letters in a philosophical web forum. The letters protested against the imbecile system of evaluation at the academic place and were sent to the managing heads of the place. Instead of discussion the warnings, actually in the form of semi-official threats followed. Cheers!

Cake, "Frank Sinatra"

2007-12-29T13:21:00.000-08:00

We know of an ancient radiation
That haunts dismembered constellations,
A faintly glimmering radio station.
While Frank Sinatra sings stormy weather,
The flies and spiders get along together,
Cobwebs fall on an old skipping record.

Beyond the suns that guard this roof,
Beyond your flowers of flaming truths,
Beyond your latest ad campaigns,
An old man sits collecting stamps
In a room all filled with Chinese lamps.
He saves what others throw away.
He says that hell be rich some day.

We know of an ancient radiation
That haunts dismembered constellations,
A faintly glimmering radio station.

We know of an ancient radiation
That haunts dismembered constellations,
A faintly glimmering radio station.
While Frank Sinatra sings stormy weather,
The flies and spiders get along together,
Cobwebs fall on an old skipping record.

RICHARD III

2007-12-03T15:36:00.000-08:00

NO BEAST SO FIERCE BUT KNOWS SOME TOUCH OF PITY.
BUT I KNOW NONE, AND THEREFORE I AM NO BEAST.

Richard III

William Shakespeare

The "no regrets" illumination

2007-12-02T16:10:00.000-08:00

Now, that I look back, and I see the things in a quite different way that I used to. In fact, it is clear that it does not matter whether A would do a mistake first or B. Yes, it is true that B's mistake might have been influenced by A's one but not necessarily. For if A was a kind of unmistakable would not have committed a mistake in the first place. Time could show that once thought to be wrong choices are actually good ones. And therefore the attitude of no regrets is the adequate one and not the one that goes on digging and trying to rebuild the past with a back date. People should be as ready to acknowledge the mistakes of the others as their own. It is fair. Thus fuck you, past, welcome dynamic present. Pardon my French, if you know what I mean (and you probably don't).

The beginning of the end

2007-11-25T17:29:00.000-08:00

Some 30 minutes ago I have finished the main body of my CEU thesis. When I look back, honestly, I can't believe it. I left my good job in Sofia, I left my girlfriend and my family to come to a country with a language I will never learn to write a text in a philosophical tradition I hardly knew at all. The first year was perhaps the most difficult in my academic life. Not because of the complexity of the ideas, which are usually far from simple, but because I had to face the true reality of my intellectual limits. I just could not believe that I am that stupid. Now, I am much more comfortable with myself. I know that some things I will never understand and this does not bother me as much as some 6 years ago. Yet, and this is the good part, I also know that if presented with sufficiently efficient stimulae I am capable, at least in principle, to develop my rationality in such a way that to become able to grasp what any human on the planet is able to grasp. Technicalities like time, energy, actual neuron configurations, love life, lazyness and the like I leave aside :). Thus, I have now much greater confidence in human rationality (and by far not just mine) than I had before. Also, I prefer to think that I have better understanding of it too. If I knew how those years would change my life I am not sure that I would have chosen the same way. Still, as I know how stubborn I am and especially for non-rational matters (I have reinvented the application of the euphemism "intuitive") I would have probably done all things in the same way again. I have the feeling that all mistakes that I made are actually inherent part of me and choosing to avoid them would have amounted to pretending to be someone actually I am not. Even the worst of them, such that concern and hurt the closest people. If I am a bad person and If I do bad things or simply stupid then be it but at least that is me and me alone. And I need to know my real me. This could not be a mistake. My text could be full of mistakes, for sure, but I liked the intellectual road that led to it. I might even not be able to defend but now (unlike 5 years ago) I really do not consider that so important. At the end of the day if the text is not good I myself would not like to get a degree that allegedly pronounces it as a good one. Fair enough. Walking is often so much better than arriving. Perhaps, there might be no arriving at all.

Philosophy of Film

2007-11-23T17:23:00.000-08:00

Last week, besides writing my thesis, I was devising courses in Philosophy. For SU. First I mounted one about Philosophy of Film. then, to make it worse, I assembled one about Philosophy of Science. At the end I wrote one on what I know best, the a priori. My guess would be that the Film would be rejected for being "too lite". :). Then, the philosophy of science would be rejected for being too "same" like the main course. Last chances for the a priori. But it is offered in English so I do not really know. If some english speaking students really can cope with analityc philosophy lang-wise chances are that they are not at SU. So looking forward to next year :).

The catch in Leibniz's Law

2007-11-23T17:18:00.000-08:00

Eversince I read Kripke I can't get rid of that feeling that there is huge problem lurking in the LL. It is a numerical problem and it comes from language and not the world as it is. I could hardly be accused of being Millean about mathematics but I am pretty sure that even if some part of Frege's criticism is right the whole aproach was wrong. I mean, wrong. For as far as genuine metaphysics is involved properties might not happen to be just properties of concepts and thus a second order properties. I like the idea that our mind attributes numbers as properties to our concepts but I have the feeling that this does not help us much with the actual role maths plays in natural sciences. So yesterday I wrote 3k words on Kripke, blaming him for Lebniz's faults. I mean, the guy is still alive and can do somethign about it. Leibniz can't, Frege too so it would be a kind of unfair :).

A Good New day

2007-11-23T17:03:00.000-08:00

More than an year after. Keane, "Everybody's changing". Morpheus, "Some things never change". Anyway. Who gives a flying fuck. For what is worth, I don't. Can't fly, you see. Yesterday of all the streets in Budapest I got on Vaci Utca. Yeah, I know. But I was sick, the flu got me well and I was trying to get to a change and get some money to go home. So before that, just to make it a bit clearer, for several months I freak out on all LEICA stuff. I dream about the Noctilux, no kiddin'. Making plans to get the RED camera. Now when I recall that I was seriously thinking that bying the HVX is crazy, quite funny. So I do lousy pics with my Lumix just to learn how to work with Leica and then the next moment I get out of the change beaureau. Some forints in the pocket. I turn left to the square and I see the typical tourist trap, selling photos of Budapest. 250ft each. Cheap. I look at them, like three and as I bye them I ask the girl with the hat whether she took them. She nods and points with her head towards a guy, Zoltan. Looks like a beggar. I ask him "Nice pictures, what camera did you use." The guy says in bad English "Leica". I can't believe my ears. I say "Yeah, I really like the M8 but it is too expensive for me right now". The guy smiles and opens his bag "I have one here". There it was. An M8. With a zoom lens though. but nice. Later, I was thinking whether it was the Leica look of the pictures of Danube or it was just a random catch. At the end of the day, who doesn't have a Leica these days :).

2006-07-06T09:21:00.000-07:00

Shivaree, Goodnight Moon lyrics:
http://www.personal.ceu.hu/students/03/Boris_Grozdanoff/goodnight%20moon.htm

Many Worlds and A priori Knowledge

2006-04-25T11:08:00.000-07:00

1. If MWI is true then all physical possibilities are realized (Saunders 1998)
2. All realized possibilities are decoherent with each other
3. Decoherence implies that no experience in the sense physics puts behind this term could transcend the actual physical possibility [to use the conventional term “world”] of an observer
4. Hence, no observer in one world could have some experience about what is going on in a different world
5. Still, observers could have some knowledge about decoherent worlds
6. Experiential or non-experiential [a priori] knowledge
7. Therefore, observers could have [some] a priori knowledge about decoherent worlds

Tales and Stories Page

2006-04-20T14:56:00.000-07:00

http://www.personal.ceu.hu/students/03/Boris_Grozdanoff/tns.htm

Al Casullo's New arguments on a priori

2006-04-18T14:10:00.000-07:00

http://www.personal.ceu.hu/students/03/Boris_Grozdanoff/ACA.htm

More Photos Dubrovnik

2006-04-18T04:19:00.000-07:00

http://photos.yahoo.com/vukas_maja

Some photos from Dubrovnik conference 2006

2006-04-15T01:17:00.000-07:00

More than half of the photos are disfocused due to the slow camera shutter. Mostly the ones in the lecture halls. The ones where objects (and people for that matter) are shot in motion are basically ruined. My first reaction was to delete all of the ruined ones but then, even some of the disfocued ones bring memories which will fade away without them so I decided to leave them as they are. Apologies for unpleasant representation of what happened to be a nice event.

The dubrovnik album can be found under the title

Philosophy of Physics Dubrovnik 2006
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/borisgrozdanoff/my_photos

The Oxonian Everettian Repsonse

2006-04-13T07:59:00.001-07:00

James Ladyman gave a talk at Philosophy of Physics conference in Dubrovnik where he posed some questions about the Oxonian Everettian (Saunders, Deutsch, Wallace). Harvey Brown summarized as a response the following crucial point: it is not the branching but the multiplicity that is the real problem that has to be solved. My intuition is that he is quite right about that and that proper effort should be directed to solve the problem of multiplicity.

Remark: several years ago such debate would have been impossbile. Brown himself recognized that it took him years to realize the non-schizo component behind the MWI. Now, everyone is talking about MW. I had the feeling some 7 years ago that this is exactly what is going to happen, I just did not expect to be so soon.

Dubrovnik conference April 2006

2006-04-11T06:22:00.000-07:00

In brief:

AMAZING talk by Harvey Brown, Oxford. About the Role of geometry in physics. Briefly: not so big.

Devastating talk by Butterfield. On Harvey Brown :).

Cute Talks by Nenad and Danny. Still waiting the hard core stuff by James Ladyman and Oliver Pooley as well as Itamar Pitowsky.

Bad weather, TRUBADUR is practically not working.

Ph D defense passed

2006-02-14T12:03:00.000-08:00

On the 9th of February I had my first Ph D defense, under the hat of the Philosophy of Science Department within the Institute for Philosophical Research, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Had nasty flu for the weeks before the defense and did not feel very well at the event but at the end of the day all went fine. Two quite positive reviews of the thesis, nice comments by my supervisor and some questions. Criticism from my friend, the deputy editor for "The World of Physics", who argued that the most important purpose of thought experiments is the heuristic one. Personally, I did not quite see how is that opposing my main claim that some TE in science manage to provide a priori knowledge about the physical world. Further, the former dean of the philosophy dept. at Sofia University considered the threatment of only exact scientific TE as a serious deficiency of the thesis and required an explanation about how come so. I explained briefly that it is a declared main interest of the thesis to deal only with TE from physics.

Overall, felt quite relieved from the burden and still disappointed from the evident lack of true academic weight of the whole event.

Busy and writing

2005-11-12T23:03:00.000-08:00

Finally I managed to finalize my first thesis devoted on the role of thought experiments in science. Now I am expecting to defend it. In the meanwhile I wrote a couple of papers: a review of Angel Stefanov's new book "The Philosophy of Time", which would appear at some moment in Philosophical Alternatives, then a paper for the Croatian Journal of Philosophy. Currently I amwriting a review of Jim Brown's last book "Who Rules in Science?". After that I start systematic work on my second thesis on a priori principles and scientific epistemology at CEU. All of these were going on parallely with a fundamental repair of my flat which, fortunately, ended.

Argument Against Experiential Identity of Objects

2005-05-29T14:53:00.000-07:00

Only our description [including description following logical rules like the 1st law] actually grants the identity of an object. All our descriptions come from experience [or, the substantial and crucial part of our descriptions], therefore experience grants the identity of objects. Our experience is false, so is the content of the identity of the objects. The identity concept may turn out to be an offspring of our interpretation of the experience.

Problems with Frege's Argument

2005-05-29T14:36:00.000-07:00

Recently, I was thinking about what could the actual force behind Frege's argument for numbers as properties of concepts be. Let us suppose that the argument passes by and we agree that numbers are in fact properties of concepts. Does this necessarily lead us to conclude that numbers are not and could not be properties of physical objects as well? I am not sure. Even if numerosity turns out to hold as property of [a] concept[s] this does not exclude automatically numerosity as property of the reference of an concept. I think it is important to distinguish between numerosity and attribution of numerosity. Although attribution of numerosity might turn out to depend almost entirely on concept or conceptualization this still does not mean necessarily that numerosity is not a property of physical objects. It might turn out to be the wrong value of the numerosity [due to wrong attribution or coordination, in the Reichenbachian sense, for example] but still it could turn out to be numerosity of some kind, not necessarily the traditional one. Task to work on: formulate reductio of Frege's argument.

Michael Bishop's Home Page

2005-04-19T06:11:00.000-07:00

After I successfully missed what would probably be the most interesting and useful [for both me and my thesis] talk at Dubrovnik I am trying to catch up. Good starting point is here:

http://www.niu.edu/phil/~bishop/Research.shtml

And, in particular

Bishop, Michael. “Why Thought Experiments are Not Arguments” in Philosophy of Science, 1999, 66: 534-541.

DUBROVNIK CONFERENCE [11 - 18 APRIL] PAPER

2005-04-03T17:02:00.000-07:00

STRUCTURE OF THE ARGUMENT

FRIEDMAN ACCEPTS PRINCIPLES THAT ARE A PRIORI IN A RELATIVE SENSE

HOW USEFULL THE WEAK RELATIVE A PRIORI IS? NOT MUCH.

THEY ARE REVISABLE IN CONDITIONS OF EMPIRICAL PRESSURE

THIS MAKES IT DIFFICULT TO HOLD THAT THEY ARE A PRIORI AT ALL

TRADITIONALLY REVISABILITY IN SCIENCE IS EMPIRICAL REVISABILITY
HOWEVER, THERE IS ANOTHER TYPE OF REVISABILITY WHICH TAKES PLACE
FOLLOWING KUHN, TE IN SCIENCE PLAY IMPORTANT ROLE ON THE EDGE OF A PARADIGM SHIFT

FOLLOWING AN INFLUENTIAL CONTEMPORATY INTERPRETATION OF TE IN SCIENCE [JIM BROWN] SOME TE COULD BE CONSIDERED AS A PRIORI
IF SOME OF THEM HAPPEN TO REVISE PRINCIPLES OF A FRIEDMANIAN TYPE THAT WOULD PRESENT A CASE WHERE A PRIORI PRINCIPLES WERE A PRIORI REVISED

IN THIS WAY WE 1. KEEP THE FALLIBILITY OF THE [A PRIORI] PRINCIPLES, 2. PRESERVE THEIR SUGGESTED EPISTEMIC CHARACTER [A PRIORI] AND SHOW [COMPATIBLE WITH GENERAL KUHNIAN FRAMEWORK] THAT FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES IN SCIENCE SOMETIMES GOT REVISED BY A PRIORI REASONING

WITH BROWN I ARGUE THAT SUCH CASES ACTUALLY EXIST IN HISTORY OF SCIENCE

I ARGUE THAT PRS IS EXAMPLE OF A PRIORI PRINCIPLE WHICH IS REVISED A PRIORI THROUGH A TE [EINSTEIN’S TTE]

AT THE END I PRESENT SHORT DEFENSE AGAINST NORTON’S CRITICISM

ON THE BASIS OF THIS I ARGUE THAT FRIEDMAN’S PRINCIPLES HAVE MUCH BIGGER POTENTIAL TO BE A PRIORI THAN THE WEAK ONE SUGGESTED. BROWN’S INTERPRETATION OF TE IF SUCCESSFUL WOULD COMPLEMENT THIS EPISTEMIC PROBLEM IN FRIEDMAN’S THEORETICAL MODEL.