Lev Lafayette's journal

Because I like to plan things in advance (it provides more opportunities for spontaneity), in six months' time I will be presenting at the Existentialist Society on "The Decline in French Philosophy" (April 4, 2026). There can be no doubt of my long-standing Francophile tendencies when it comes to the fine arts, cuisine, republican politics, and yes, especially French philosophy, at least from the Enlightenment to the Situationists. I admire the gentle spirit of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the grand knowledge and scope of Denis Diderot, and the courage of the entire body of "les philosophes" who took on the absolutism of the monarchy, the dead hand of the church and helped establish the modern public sphere through salon gatherings that, scandously, were hosted by women patrons, "les salonnières"!

Fast-forward to the twentieth century, and again I find myself delving deeply into the mathematics and physics of Henri Poincaré, the perceptual phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which would add to the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. I have all the time in the world for the incredible contributions to feminism by Simone de Beauvoir and consider her a better philosopher than her companion, Jean-Paul Sartre. Both, along with Albert Camus' ontological absurdism and the incredible personal standards of Simone Weil, raised and established existentialism a powerful force in the world of philosophy, demanding the primacy of existence over essence, authenticity in behaviour and thought, and recognition to the tension between people as objects and subjects.

These were all great thinkers in hard times. But subsequent to these contributions, things started to go astray. Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari's were all unable to incorporate their necessary criticisms of structuralism into subject disciplines. Jacques Derrida's would engage in intentional obfuscation through words with ambivalent meaning. Bruno Latour's social constructivism would end up becoming impossibly anti-scientific. Jean-François Lyotard retreated to the sublime, and Jean Baudrillard became obsessed with the interrelationship of signs and hypereality. Luce Irigaray asserted that E=mc^2 is a "sexed equation" and fluid mechanics is neglected in engineering because fluids are feminine.

It's not as if it's all bad; Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari all highlighted abhorrent behaviours in abusive institutions. Derrida's deconstructionism is a useful method to highlight the unity of opposites. Latour does recognise the role of scientific language and practices. Lyotard and Baudrillard both hinted at what could have been a sociology of the information age, and Irigaray really does provide a political economy grounded in sexual difference. But so much of the content produced by post-WWII French philosophers is simply gibberish, ignorant, or both. This, of course, has been explored in the past as "fashionable nonsense", an evocative title by Sokal and Bricmont, who highlight the sort of gibberish that eventually led to the The Postmodern Essay generator, produced by a Melbourne-based computer scientist.

For what it's worth, I do appreciate the use of metaphors and puns; they're often not just witticisms, they can also provide some linguistic-therapeutic insight. But I do wonder whether the success of ordinary language philosophy on one hand and formal pragmatics on the other has led to a situation where much of French philosophy has become more of an art than something tied to logic, ontology, and epistemology. At least, in this context, Catherine Malabou is returning to reality with work on brain plasticity and François Recanati with conditional pragmatics. These are, at least, positive projects after decades of French philosophy providing content that was highly entertaining but ultimately superficial.

On Sunday I gave an address to the local Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship on "The Pursuit of Happiness" which followed the phrase from the US Declaration of Independence, and outlined the three main approaches; hedonistic, Epicurean, and Stoic along with some empirical backing from the modern science of well-being and societal-level measures. As I mentioned in the presentation, I have discusssed this matter at some length in the past with "The Continuum of Needs and Wants", to the Melbourne Agnostics, on November 14, 2020, "From Stoicism and Naturalistic Pantheism to Effective Altruism" to The Sea of Faith in Australia, on April 21st 2022, and "We Are We Do: Emotions, Trauma, and Happiness" the Melbourne Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship, on May 15, 2022. I neglected to mention, because I plain forgot, that I also gave a presentation to The Philosophy Forum on August 7, 2011, also entitled "The Pursuit of Happiness". Across all these presentations there is a running theme where I note that there are different stages of happiness that correlate with Hannah Arendt's categories of being and the satisfaction of each stage can lead to an indulgence which brings unhappiness - and the empirical evidence backs this up. Thus there is an evolution from sensual hedonism, to the contentment of Epicureanism, to the moral virtue and social engagement exemplified by the Stoics.

On the matter of hedonistic and epicurean approaches, the winter phase in Melbourne is an opportunity for me to engage in various forms of soups and stodgy fare of which various dining companions are given the opportunity to put on a kilo or two in my company. As promised in the last entry, I have a small mountain of recipes to update of this nature, so here's the new additions: Coq au vin, Vichyssoise, Soupe au Pistou, Hungarian Mushroom Soup and Langos, and Irish Colcannon. This last weekend also witnessed "German night" which is a challenge when you're cooking for vegetarians. Although in the past I have made Kaese Spaetzle (the German version of "mac and cheese"), this time I tried my hand at Eier in Senfsoße (eggs in mustard sauce) with a side of sauerkraut, Thuringian Klöße mit Bratkartofflen (potato dumplings and fried potatoes), with Schmorkohl (Braised Cabbage), and Frankfurter grie soβ (green sauce - mine was not nearly green enough), before finishing with a Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte (Blackforest Cake). Apart from the cake, there was a pretty serious amount of cabbage, potato, and onion and whilst it all wasn't bad at all, my friends of Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Württemberg regions may forgive my preferences of the more colourful foods of the Campagne française.

It is a curious thing, that in the week that I have written an extensive essay on how the new user interface of Duolingo will probably damage the company and is sufficiently bad that I have cancelled my paid subscription of many years, that I should end up on top of the Diamond League for the week. But then again, that does display how extensively I have been a user. Following a bit of investigation I have discovered - not to my surprise - that there are some reasonably good free-and-open-source software solutions, the most attractive seems to be the media-rich Anki flashcards, built on the principle of spaced repetition, but with user-created content (including your own). I can see why it has received such positive recommendations on various language-learning forums.

There have been a few political engagements in the past week as well, this time being an essay for the Isocracy Network, "The Failure of Putin's Gamble", which basically says what is stated on the title; Putin thought that Ukraine would be easy to defeat and it wasn't. Ultimately I keep returning to the article I wrote in 2014; let the oblasti in question themselves determine what country they would prefer to live under. On a much more local scale, I must mention that I also attended a local candidates forum for the State election, where both candidates and voters did not surprise in either the questions or answers.

The last item being noted here is that I've discovered that the philosopher Geoffrey Klempner has died. He is not the sort of philosopher that has left a magnum opus in terms of philosophical insight, but rather his great strength was opening up the discipline through the journal "Philosophical Pathways" and establishing the International Society for Philosophers, of which I am the University Outreach officer. I do have some concerns on the future of the organisation now that Geoffrey has gone as he really was the main driver, despite an extensive supporting board.

The subject title hints at what was a pretty interesting weekend. With regards to meetings there was my presentation to SoFiA on the topic "Is Moral Reasoning Innate of Learned?; plenty of discussion of course, and a video of the Zoom session is also available. The next meeting, the following day, was the Annual General Meeting of the Victorian Secular Lobby, Inc., where I have been president for over ten years. I've stepped down from that role and Andrew Rawling has taken it up, so it's a continuing organisation. I think we've done pretty well in getting our objectives achieved, although there are still a couple of big-ticket items to go.

A very lovely social occasion was a visit to The Rookery from Eddie, Robbie, Liana, and Nick for "linner", which developed further into the night, after animated conversation, into dance lesson instructions from Nick who knows a thing or two about such things, and a little bit of fencing instructions from myself, which is also a form of dancing. Actually, on that matter, it is a gap in my entry into proper society, right? I might be a scholar and gentleman, once who has toured to The Continent a few times, one who can ride a horse, shoot a pistol, and compose prose and poetry, but I have never learned to dance - well, not since school, anyway. So that is something I intend to change, and apparently, a smart thing to learn at my age.

Of course, I had to hit the books on the weekend, and I have again found myself on top of the Duolingo Diamond league after working through an unreasonable quantity of lessons on Sunday across French, Spanish, German, Esperanto, and Chinese. I actually topped the league a few weeks ago, and completely neglected to mention that. I rather wish that Duolingo had Thai as one of its courses as I find myself spending a bit of time on that language as well. As required of course there was also the need to put together a couple of thousand words for my final psych essay for the semester - almost done, except for the editing! How was your weekend?

Last Thursday evening I gave a presentation to SoFiA Melbourne on "From Stoicism and Natural Pantheism to Effective Altruism" which weighs in at some 2500 words. Apart from what is included on the title, also had quite a bit on the relationship between Stoicism and therapeutic techniques. Like any school of philosophy, I have some significant disagreements with the Stoics and lean more towards the Peripatetics when it comes to virtue and external goods, but I really do admire their early pantheism and their contributions to cognitive behaviour and its successors. Over the past two years, I increasingly feel my interest in such matters is increasingly going to be one of my life projects, and I feel pretty good about that. The presentation went well, there were some excellent questions from the audience, and I caught up with Nigel S., a dear friend whom I hadn't seen for quite a few years.

Work-wise the past three days have consisted of delivering high-performance computing workshops; the first two (intro to supercomputing, shell scripting for HPC) went quite well. But I found, unusually, that I was a bit out-of-sorts for the third (parallel processing) and finished the workshop a little earlier than usual - even with the addition of some new content (recurring jobs). In hindsight, I realise the reason was that I was simply exhausted from the previous two days of workshops and the evening's Stoic presentation - even an extrovert such as myself who is energised with communication in groups can run out of steam. Worse still, I was cognisant that this might happen beforehand. Oh well, all in the past. I know to timetable myself with just two workshops rather than three in succession.

Following an important dinner with Robin M., and Anthony L., on Friday night, on Saturday spent a good portion of the day preparing food and drinks for the Wild Arts Social Club dinner at The Rookery. Apparently, my dining room can fit 15 people in it with plenty of room to spare, so that's a good sign that the apartment can hold such events at this scale so there will be more to come. It was a wonderful night of animated conversation with some pretty amazing people, veritable mountains of food, and a wonderful dance performance with private randomly (fated?) readings in the study from the famous Sufi poet Rumi ("The ruby and the sunrise are one"); I provided my own Sufi story in return. The porró drinking game also proved to be a bit of a hit. Sabre, bless her old cat heart, decided to join in the party rather than hiding in the wardrobe, as expected, and was on excellent behaviour. Many thanks to Miriam G., as organiser, Sandy, Dave, Gerhard, and Rob for bringing even more delicious food (have I missed anyone?), and to all attendees.

Last Sunday I gave my presentation on "Pantheism: Beyond Theism and Atheism", which seemed to go fairly well with a pretty good turnout and excellent discussion. An MP4 audio-video recording is also available. There was a hint that perhaps I will do a follow-up presentation on "unverifiable ontologies", that is metaphysics, metaideals, metasymbols some time in the future, and also a reminder to self to put on paper (so to speak) thoughts about Spinoza's rational pantheism and the nature of the infinite, as twice now I have presented primarily on subjective experientiality. As pointed out in the presentation there was a little twist, namely if the universe is considered to be divine in the pantheistic perspective then the secular transcendentals (Truth, Justice, Beauty) must be considered, in some sense, "holy".

It is with this in mind one can think of the "freedom" rallies held in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane over the weekend. Now here's a curious thing; I support the choice of people not to undergo vaccinations on the basis of personal preference, even if I think they are completely ignorant in doing so. However, their "freedom" is also balanced an obligation to respect the safety of the rest of the public. This means movement restrictions and masks in public are valid, as are vaccination requirements for workplaces etc, even to the French method where a health pass is required for restaurants, trains, planes, and some public venues. . If people don't like this they find themselves their own special community to live in, a sort of quarantine from everyone else, or a big 'flu party if you like. I am prepared to take suggestions from Australia's currently uninhabited islands where this should be. Proper shelters can be constructed and food drops arranged. We won't need them for long, right?

It's all part of that difficult balance between truth and freedom, and the challenge when practices and expressions become objectively harmful. I have written about this before in the context of political advertising, suggesting that voters deserve the same protections from politicians as consumers. Of course, in the scientific world, there is a well-established practice of hypothesis-making and hypothesis-breaking where facts trump feelings as a matter of professional competence. "Science is not a democracy", as they say. Sometimes that can lead to surprises; I only recently became aware that the clinical results of the curative properties of aloe vera are mixed at best, regardless of subjective experiences. The most difficult confirmation bias is one's own opinion, experience, and iatrogenic memories, which is why corroborative and external evidence is requisite. But how many are going to believe external evidence against their own feelings and thoughts?

Cyberpunk 2020: Year of the Stainless Steel Rat convention continues in its development. A massive success in the past few days was scoring major author Walter Jon Williams as a speaker. Hardwired is, of course, one of the earliest and most famous cyberpunk novels and was certainly one of the first that introduced me to the genre. Nevertheless, with no intention to stop, the quest is on to bring even more interested and interesting panelists along with the fans. Appropriately, played in a session of CyberDarkSpace on Thursday night. Still working on what was supposed to be the September release of RPG Review - only five more pages to go! In the past week I've managed to put together reviews of In Nomine, Little Fears, and LexOccultum. The latter was particularly appropriate with watching the series La Révolution, a very fine example of historical horror-fiction.

Earlier this week delivered two HPC workshops on successive days; Regular Expressions with Linux, followed by Mathematical Applications and Programming. The latter was the first time I'd run the course at UniMelb and I must confess it was quite difficult, mainly because there is so many relevant applications; from core Linux utilities, to giants like R, Octave, and Maxima, to impressive new upstarts like Julia. Bringing all those under a single umbrella in four hours is difficult and there will be future fine-tuning. In comparison, I attended an Australian BioCommons workshop today on what was supposed to be data management, but really it was a really basic showcase for CloudStore. As a related online meeting, managed to squeeze in an hour to see a live presentation by Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz on "Regulating Big Tech", which was heavily orientated around media quality, fake news, and social media. In further academic matters, today I ventured out to Swinburne University to help give lei_loo more of a feel for the place. She's been a bit unlucky in finishing tertiary studies, but this time she has a superhero in such matters for support, and I know she'll make it.

"Life is for the living"; a saying which was strongly affirmed recently when I attended a funeral procession and celebratory wake in a local park and gardens. It did not know the deceased (it was a friend of lei_loo's) but I can determine from their friends that being driven down a major road in an old Cadillac with cheering support from the procession behind and from the kerbside was just what they would have wanted (and probably planned). It also served as yet another reminder of our temporal state. To be a passive consumer of the arts, to be a mere subject of laws, to be neglectfully ignorant of science, is about a close to being mentally dead as far as I'm concerned, and I despair when I see it happen. The purpose of consumption is to inspire critique and from critique we prepare ourselves to make a better world; whether through the expressions of art, the justice of laws, or the discoveries of science. It is not even success in those fields that makes us truly human, but the very struggle itself to improve; that is living.

Several weeks ago I made the announcement to the committee that I intend to resign as president of the RPG Review Cooperative, and as editor of the eponymous journal which I have edited for over ten years. I'll see out the year, and will continue to assist on the technical side of things. The hunt is on for one or more people who are willing and able to take these roles, and it is my intention to follow through with assistance and mentorship. Yet as one exits one door, another opens, I have become the University Outreach Officer for the International Society for Philosophers. There is a publishing arm associated with the Society as well, which will be a handy opportunity to compile a number of essays on pragmatism and pantheism in particular that I have written or presented over the years.

Workwise, the three-day outage of the Spartan HPC system was completed successfully. New filesystem (Spectrum Scale aka GPFS) replacing CephFS, new LMod/Easybuild system in place, and a few thousand new cores with the old cloud partition retired, and of course, extensive additions and testing to our sample job scripts, and a re-working of the entire website workflow (it needed it). Today was the first of two days of classes, literally hours after completing the outage and all went reasonably well. It followed after a two-hour tutorial for my course in higher education; and with an HPC certification forum the evening before. All this said, I am somewhat looking forward to a few day's leave next week, even if The Plague means that my ticket to Adelaide is useless.

As mentioned in my last post, I've put together a short essay on a couple of Fake News issues (local BLM, global hydroxychloroquine), where I raise the question on whether free speech is limited by at less some association with the truth. It is a curious feeling that to watch the continuing unfolding of the global pandemic with its still worsening toll of infections (15.4m) and fatalities (631K) when comparing it with my own, micro-level, health. Compared with this time last year, my weight is down some 22kg less (15 in the past three months), and my fitness levels continue to improve. A biennial check for bowel cancer (Australia does this by post, which is somewhat amusing) has come back negative, and I have a hepatobiliary telehealth booking in the future for my occasional stomach issues.

The past four nights have been spent moving furniture out of the two storerooms on the second level to either the attic bedroom, or the ground floor lounge-room and dining room. This included a total of some 16 bookcases, a similar number of 50L tubs, also full of books, a large desk, a filing cabinet, at least a half-dozen desktop systems, a spare bed, and other assorted bits-and-pieces. I'm covered in bruises as a result and feeling a bit sore. It has been, of course, some 10 years since all this furnishing has been shifted. Mac the cat has gone into hiding somewhere. Anyway it's all done just in time for the flooring people to come in tomorrow, rip up the thirty-year old carpet (largely destroyed by past pet rabbits, guinea pigs, and rats), and replace it with a new underlay and some nice laminate boards. I rather suspect that the rest of the house will have to wait until returning from Europe, which is a mere couple of weeks which is, of course, plenty of time to organise hotels and trains, right?

When not shifting several thousand books and associated meubles around the place, I've been at work, primarily engaged in teaching on Monday and Tuesday; the usual classes, Introduction to Linux and HPC and Advanced Linux and Shell Scripting for HPC. I admit I was pretty tired during the courses, but I can run at least these ones whilst almost dead, I am sure. This said, every class I do try to introduce or modify the content slightly, and this one expanded the archiving options to include various tools for viewing archives without uncompressing them. The classes were pretty switched on, and there is one particular project that we'll follow up on, seeing how much parallelisation we can force out of large coastal dataset for Delft3D. Horrible software, but then again a lot of scientific software is written with idiosyncratic approaches, often ignoring well-known conventions in favour of what the development group things is a good idea for their environment. "We found this software useful, and hope you will too". Well, as the Germans say Hoffnung ist keine Strategie.

The next two days I'll be working from home. I have a small mountain of work which is suitable from such a location (including the Delft3D issue) and it means I can be around to let the tradies in and their work on-site. I also have a paper revision for Open Philosophy to submit on reproduibility issues in computer modelling, along with an phenomenology paper to finish for the journal Philosophy Study. Fortunately both are pretty much done, so they're not going to be too time-consuming by any stretch of the imagination. Actually, I probably have several philosophy papers that I probably should get published, mainly from various talks that I've presented over the past ten years or so. I really want to see Mary, the Swampy Philosophical Zombie, Is In Your Chinese Room! Problems With Reductionist Theories of Consciousness, and not only for the title.

Visited the doctor on Monday to discuss my bronchitis and they were of the opinion that it's on its way to clear up. Now back at work, although being careful not to overdo it, and still prone to some coughing (and keeping a good arm's length form workmates). I am far from operating at 100%, and I suspect it will be several days before I am completely in the clear. Will be going in for blood tests as part of a general checkup and chest x-rays as part of the hemoptysis, although this is almost certainly part of the bronchitis rather than anything more serious. There are now four days of my life which were pretty much spent on the couch wrapped in a blanket and sipping tea with a rapidly emptying box of tissues next to me, whilst playing Supertuxkart and Torcs.

Among all this I have managed to step outside into the world for brief periods of time. On Sunday I presented at The Philosophy Forum on The Philosophy of Technology, which is a subject that I have had a long standing interest in. Take away message; technology has ontological and empirical priority over science which provides epistemological abstraction and rational predictions. On Tuesday night presented at Linux Users of Victoria on New Developments in Supercomputing, deriving from material from ISC and the HPC Advisory Council conferences. Of particular interest to me is the number of issues and challenges that Intel, that most mighty of chip manufacturers, has faced over the past year - and how competitors are positioning themselves. Also last week wrote a whimsically entitled piece for Isocracy on Killing and Eating Your Prime Minister following the circus that has been Australian politics recently.

Various gaming plans have been put on hold over the past few days, which I really need to get my teeth into. Final confirmations with Kryal Castle are being put in place for RuneQuest Con Down Under III, a LARP scenario has been received, Chaosium are providing prizes and an organised play scenario and so forth. Tickets will be on sale very soon, just as the final budget it put together. Plus there is the RuneQuest special of RPG Review coming up, plus I am hoping to hold some sort of dinner to celebrate ten years of the publication, and perhaps this can coincide with a new online RPG Review store. This is, of course, in addition to the usual actual play and various writings.