Still alive. As I mentioned in the previous post back in October, the new job and family issues have been keeping me busy. Hopefully I’ll get more time in the new year for blogging. A couple of people have suggested that I consider shorter posts more to generate discussion rather than waiting until I have the time to formulate my own carefully worked out theses. I like this advice and may take it, although my previous attempts to make shorter posts were not a roaring success. We’ll see.
Anyway, just wanted to wish my online friends a happy holiday. Whatever Christmas means to you, I hope you and your family are safe, comfortable, and enjoying the holiday season.
Merry Christmas!
SelfAwarePatterns 
Yes you have a merry Christmas as well Mike!
Regarding future posts when you now have so much less time, I suppose you’re right that some changes may be in order. I suspect that a great deal of your blogging efforts are not so much the post writing, but rather engaging each person that comments as you tend to. (Especially me!) Of course many authors of blogs say little to the people that comment, and so readers must engage with each other in order to have discussions. But the question you’d have to wonder there is, would we? And if so, would our conversations be relatively constructive? Hopefully we’d make you proud of us, but may instead make you cringe. Here you’d be somewhat letting your creation go, and then watching to see if it’s still able to grow.
As the logs show, I love having conversations with you. Still I’ve been somewhat disappointed that others haven’t joined in as well. If my demeanor has been at all ambivalent, I am extremely interested in having discussions with hard core naturalists. I’m pretty sure that there are some around here beyond yourself. (This is not to say that I can’t have productive discussions with people who are less naturalistic, but I see this as a very different sort of metaphysical position.)
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Thanks Eric. Actually, in my case, the blog posts do take up a lot of time. Not the posts in and of themselves necessarily, but thinking through the issue before I sit down to post, and time for that is what’s been missing for the last few months. I’m usually more free form in the discussions, and feel less obligation to have everything thought through to the nth degree (which makes me more likely to have to reverse myself after a poorly thought out reply).
I don’t have a problem when independent discussions break out on the blog, but I don’t really have the volume for them to happen on a regular basis. But I also probably won’t have the time for 500 word exchanges. We’ll see what happens.
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Mike,
Well if you can continue to manage providing personalized responses, we do appreciate that. My thought then would be that if you don’t have time right now for those deeper posts in which you decide that you may have figured some things out and so are seeking the assessments of others, maybe some lighter stuff would be appropriate? This could be recommending any fun or interesting books that you happen to read, or even opening up discussion regarding issues in science, politics, current events, and so on, that you haven’t quite gotten your head around. This is your forum, and so you can certainly go lighter if that’s all you’ve got time for right now.
Then as far as not having enough volume for independent discussions to frequently break out on your site, I doubt that this is actually the case. It only takes two to tango. I personally am looking for naturalist, but there will be all sorts of people here looking for all sorts of things in discussion partners. It’s really just a matter of how you want to structure your site going forward.
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Discussions between blog followers are always fun and enlightening (unless they turn trollish and nasty, but I don’t think that ever happens here.) The tendency is for dialogues to form between Mike and one other person. Mike, if you are happy for others to jump in and join in a discussion (like I have rudely done right here) then perhaps it’s up to you, Eric, to initiate those exchanges by replying to other people’s comments.
Either way, may I join Eric in saying how much we all appreciate you taking the time and energy to run this blog space and provide a forum where we can all gain some much-needed intellectual stimulation.
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That’s an excellent point Steve. If I want conversations with people here beyond just Mike, then I should be more proactive about it. Of course the danger there is that I’d try to make it all about me, and so become a nuisance. But perhaps if I were able to keep that danger in mind, then I wouldn’t? Still I doubt that there would be nearly the risk of others hijacking my conversations, as me hijacking their’s. Whenever I’m rambling on and on about how philosophy and soft science can and must become straightened out, I’m sure that you’d always provide a welcome voice.
(Some of the reason that you’re engaging me now, I suspect, is because you believe, as do I, that this blog is good for Mike’s head. Cheers on that!)
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Merry Christmas!
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Wishing you all the best for Christmas, Mike, and also hoping for a wonderful 2018.
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Merry Christmas, and looking forward to when you can write more or whatever you choose to post!
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Merry Christmas, my friend! I look forward to your next round of posts, whenever they may come and whatever form they may take.
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For some reason I didn’t realize you’d posted since the last one…I’ll have to check on that. Anyway, I wanted to stop by to wish you a happy new year and to see how you’re doing. I hope the holidays have treated you well.
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Hey Tina. I actually didn’t publish this post on my social accounts, so if you monitor me with any of those, it would have been an easy one to miss.
I’m doing well. New job is keeping me crazy busy, but that’s been a good thing for the last few months. But I’m hoping the new year will allow more time for online discussions. Or perhaps more accurately, I’m hoping to be able to carve out that time. And I’m trying to rethink how I do the posting to make them more frequent, such as shorter lighter ones, but as I mentioned in this post, I’ve tried it before with limited results (I’m too much of a pontificator to shut up at only 100-300 words), so we’ll have to see.
No idea when I’ll ever get back to writing though, but my writing was so scattered and limited anyway, it’s no great loss. At this point, that will probably have to wait for retirement in a few years.
We got so involved in Husserl, Heidegger, and James on your post that I didn’t ask how you’re doing. How are you feeling these days?
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I’m glad to hear you’re doing well and that your work is keeping you enjoyably busy. I’m facing a bit of the same problem with blogging, but I’m hoping to get back into the swing of things. I’ve said that before, though, so we’ll see.
I know what you mean about shorter posts…I can’t write short. Just can’t. It would probably be more time consuming for me to try to figure out what to keep and what to leave off. I tend to write long and then later break the post down into chunks. That’s what I decided to do with my last one when I felt myself going down the rabbit hole. Unfortunately, that means I don’t post frequently.
As for me, I’m doing about the same, overall pretty good. Getting better at managing the weird symptoms. As for writing, I’m rewriting my novel in omniscient as I do an overall edit for plot. That’s been a learning experience, but I think it’s working. Still doing flamenco and loving it. Other than that, things are basically the same—I’m kind of like Geordie and I count that as a good thing!
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It seems like we’re both caught in a trap. We don’t write short posts because we know they’ll grow into large ones, and we don’t start large ones because we know they’ll take a lot of time. I’m wondering if promising myself that I’ll only spend X amount of time on a post might help.
Interesting choice moving to omniscient. It used to be much more prevalent, and I think it’s seriously underused today. Many writers worry about the distance it creates between the reader and characters, but I think as long as you’re careful about how often you flex your omniscient prerogatives, it’s a very manageable issue.
Glad to hear you’re getting better. Unfortunately, as we get older, living with ailments seems to become an ever increasing fact of life. But if you’re enjoying flamenco, you’re doing well.
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