“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, August 11, 2011

Third Death Note

A show on NPR this morning about sleep apnea. Many callers calling in with varying degrees of resistance.

To what?

1) To having to go through the humiliation tunnel of wearing an invasive prosthetic device that resists the fact that

2) Your brain largely doesn't care if you die, and might even have some pleasure in the repeated action of snuggling that flap of skin in your windpipe against itself because

3) Physical entities contain an inner irreducible disequilibrium such that

4) Martin Hagglund would have to hold that a single celled organism (his critique of Freud) must "want" to survive...

I conclude:

A) My counter-argument is easier than Hagglund's argument. All I have to do is show that there's an inner disequilibrium, in organic tissue and possibly in replicants. There's no wonder your brain is irritated by the body's physicality: it's a thrown together kluge.

Hagglund, by contrast, must show that lifeforms that are not strictly sentient obey LNC to the point of being unable to "want" to die.

B) Get a CPAP if you need one. Sleep apnea is a fatal condition that affects 40% of men and some women over 40.







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