I could've easily rationalized not doing this tonight (it's late and I already did writing today) but I didn't. I think this is a good sign. Also it's traditional because the video's loading. Unfortunately I think I'm getting a sore throat. Maybe hope will cure it. Hope is a desert apparently, which needs blood to nourish it. Didn't make sense to me either. Check your metaphors, fanatics, cause I'm here and I'm judging you.
I've decided that Plato probably won't force me to delve into my past, because I can get away with just engaging with the text and going from there, rather than thinking in reference to self alone which is what would get me in trouble. I expect there will be some of that because there was a fair amount of it yesterday and a little bit of it today but for the most part it seems we will be dealing textually which is great by me.
I remember that in middle school I was obsessed with the idea of memory. Specifically, though I don't think I could really articulate this then, the way in which memory was constitutive of the self and the way in which we can understand the experience of memory (this latter is an older question which relates to the embedding of both memory and prediction that tripped me up as a child). I was enticed and confused by the idea that a self could exceed memory. I was thinking about reincarnation; I still feel kind of the same way about it. I think it has to do with a certain sense of continuity. If I am reincarnated but have no memory of my past life, in what sense am I the same self. This assumes some sort of idea of soul. On further thought though, I guess it's simpler than I thought it was. I don't know how I ignored the example of amnesia (maybe I felt differently about it than I do now). At this point I feel that I would be the same as an amnesiac, so I think my crucial problem with reincarnation may in fact merely be the soul thing. Another possibility, maybe this is secondary, is that a critical part of selfhood is the establishment of a life story. The amnesiac has a continuous, though inaccessable, narrative, whereas the reincarnate is essentially starting over in the terms of a conventional narrative structure. I need to get some more water for my throat.
I think that I need to begin questioning my sentence structure again. Not the ones I write here, but in terms of my essays after a while of writing I got cocky and just started assuming that my thoughts translated transparently through my skill at writing into clear sentences. When I got to college that was reinforced by some of the writing I was reading which placed little emphasis on clarity of sentence structure. The things I need to be careful about are places where there is no place to put clarifying punctuation and there is an excessively, probably at least temporarily ambiguous grammatical constituents, like NPs, especially where they are in some sort of relation, where the syntactically important small words get lost among the pretentiously important big NPs. Sometimes I wish I could just bold some words or do lots of parantheses embedding, but in the end it's not that much trouble to restructure I just have to be humble enough to admit that even I don't always get it right the first time.
