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Make the Decision Right: A 1987 Aphorism Against the Age of the Open Tab

An old professor of mine, holding forth in 1987, handed his students one sentence to carry out the door: don’t make the right decision; make the decision right. He attached a coda that landed harder than the maxim itself. Regret, he told us, is mindless. I have been turning that sentence over for nearly four decades, and the turning has become its own education, because the sentence makes a metaphysical bet most listeners never notice they are taking. It claims that rightness arrives after the choosing, manufactured through labor and revision, and that no quantity of advance analysis can locate it beforehand, since the future refuses to sit still long enough to be computed. With one stroke the professor moved the entire moral weight of decision-making off the moment of selection and onto the years of execution. Pick a door, any door, then build a house behind it.

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The Generative Excess: Soul, Dream, and Idea

There are three things you cannot show me. You cannot open your hand and reveal your soul. No technology exists to replay your dream from last night with any fidelity. And no surgeon can extract from your skull the moment a thought first assembled itself into an idea. Each of these phenomena exists, if it exists at all, only as a first-person event, invisible to external observation, resistant to measurement, and stubbornly private. That shared inaccessibility is worth taking seriously, because it suggests that the most important operations of human consciousness happen in a place that science can describe from the outside but never enter.

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Disparity Between Political Translation and Human Transliteration

Words are toxic and dangerous things. We currently have a Presidential contender who threatens his opponent with prison if he wins, and if he doesn’t win the election, then that means the election was rigged against him. That sort of clear and obvious threat against Democracy is not just craven and crass, but unwise — however, his threats are precise and clearly inform us all of his intentions and insanity.

We only need to travel back to the United Nations on October 12, 1960 and watch Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev take off his shoe and bang it on the podium while threatening to “bury us” all!

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The Value of a Liberal Arts Education

We live in a sneering world where if one isn’t majoring in business or actively becoming a lawyer — one’s future is worthless and their worldview is infantile. Who needs a Poet when you can sell your soul and then sue the person for breach of contract when they buy it and try to take it home from you?

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Not Everything Should Go

We are often confronted with the mandate of youth, and the conundrum of wisdom in the matter of — “Everything Goes!” — and I stand here to humbly submit that not everything must go. Sometimes, we need prescience and determination to realize the lack of self-restraint and that an untrained, unsavory, following can become profound enough to dangerously dismiss the best of us.

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Never Discuss Process

Your process — of creation, of thinking, of being — belongs to you and only you, and to discuss your process for understanding the world, and for coping within its spinning — is something you should never do, because nobody but you comprehends the when and the why of how you get things done to contextualize meaning.

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Comcast in the Philippines

I have had my share of joys and troubles with Comcast as my “Triple Play” provider, but I’ve never before experienced a total failure to communicate with a company — as I have this week — in trying to get my voice and cable modem replaced.

When you used to call Comcast customer support, you dialed an 800 number and you were then connected to the regional office that served your area.  Having that sort of local connection was important because, “Jersey Understands Jersey” and you could speak in cultural semaphores that clicked understanding that helped quicken resolutions to any technical or billing problem.

It now appears Comcast have outsourced all their technical support and billing to the Philippines, and that is causing a lot of widespread and furious grief for customers.  There isn’t just a cultural separation between the Philippines and the USA, but, like it or not, there is a language difference that often bears down on not understanding each other because of natural accents.

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How Reading Creates Empathy

We read to experience what we do not know.  We write to share what we think we understand.  Learning and sharing constructs leads to literacy and thus begins the formative memes of a shared, and cogent, morality.

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How to Know a Good Man

If we were to have a mascot for this Scientific Aesthetic blog where the Arts and Science converge, it would undoubtedly be the visage of the medically trained essayist, poet philosopher and Harvard professor — and brother of Henry and Alice and son of Henry, Sr. — William James.

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Welcome to Scientific Aesthetic

We welcome you to ScientificAesthetic.com where we bring The Arts to Science to create understanding and foment meaning! !  We hope you enjoy our two logos:  One explains it all and the second suggests everything.  You’ll see both versions floating around the web in the weeks, decades, and centuries to come:

 

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