Let me elaborate on those interests.

Philosophy-
I study the subject full-time and have nearly finished my BA and am applying for an MA. There have been points on my course where I have truly hated philosophy. A mixture of badly taught and uninteresting topics had me convinced I would quit after the 3 years were up and become an accountant and dedicate myself to a life of boredom and money. As is usually the case in life, coming to the end of my degree I realised I had to continue, even if just for some closure. I was planning to read good fiction for the rest of my life. I finally had a chance to read the Iliad, the Odyssey and Borges, but they are merely delusions from the serious subject of the truth, a subject I will never be free from seeking. I'll still read those works, but they'll have to wait...

At the moment in philosophy I'm interested mainly in free will, rationality and decision theory, which leads me onto...

Poker-

I'm an obsessive low-stakes player who has built a nice bankroll from nothing playing online. I want to move to playing live 100% and have enough to play in casinos now. My bankroll isn't enough to justify playing for monetary reasons so I don't pay for things out of my poker account. I'm only interested in re-investing it. I could be described as a student of the game. I can often be found expounding difficult theories on statistics and behaviour on poker forums under the name "DiceMan", which basically nobody else begins to understand. They must react the same to my posts as I react to Morgenstern and von Neumann- totally baffled.

I'm close to taking my game entirely offline. I've got the internet to thank for my bankroll, but to be fair I could have made more money begging for spare change in relation to the hours I've put in. I didn't do it for the money but the skill and experience. I play live once a week for free and it is a highlight of the week. I just love the game. People who only play for the money don't have the passion to succeed in the long run.

Guitar-
I play guitar but I mean this more as my interest in music generally. I like music from Rammstein and The Corrs to Sonic Boom 6 and Donovan. One thing they all have in common is guitar. Other than that my taste is more diverse than anyone I know. I can make two top 15 lists of my favourite bands. The first list is of classic bands that are up there as a result of many albums. They are typically large and international bands of the 90s and 00s. I'm also a fan of the folk music of Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention, Tenacious D and Jimi Hendrix, but felt they wouldn't fit into this genre of classic 90s bands.

1. R.E.M
(In my opinion the greatest band ever. They're not especially musically talented individually which makes this very strange. Automatic for The People is the best album ever.)

2. Green Day
(A close 2nd. I've never heard a bad Green Day song or a track that is even below excellent.)

3. Catatonia
(My first love. I was devastated when they split up during a tour when they hadn't yet reached the gig I had tickets for. Thankfully I saw them at my first ever gig. My memory of that has now nearly completely gone. I think that may be the happiest I have ever been, and I'm a happy person)

4. System of A Down
(Daron, Serj, Shavo and John- I hope SOAD haven't split up. Their music just gets better and better. I'm not sure anybody enjoys what they do in life more than them when they're rocking on stage)

5. Travis
(I haven't heard much off them for the past few years. I think I may be gradually losing my affection for their music)

6. Stereophonics
(They've sold out now. JEEP was a tolerable album and the next one they had completely sold out. The fact they are this high up demonstrates how highly I regard their first two albums.)

7. Nirvana
(The one band on here I will never see live. RIP to Nirvana. To Kurt, you're an idiot...)

8.Muse
(Probably the most talented band in the world today. They've recently become a superpower of a band. I was a fan back in the days of Showbiz. That makes me superior to today's Muse fan...)

9. No Doubt
(Even I'm surprised I like them given the nature of the other bands in this list. They used to be ska/punk, but I don't even believe they sold out: even with Hollaback Girl and songs like that I still think Gwen and the others have good intentions, and I like them up to Rock Steady)

10. Foo Fighters
(I sometimes think I like them more than Nirvana. Maybe because I know they have further potential whereas Nirvana will never improve for me now. Everlong is a classic song.)

11.Smashing Pumpkins
(Or should I just say Billy Corgan? Disarm is one of the most beautiful songs I know, but you can't compete with tracks like Siva and Cherub Rock)

12. Manic Street Preachers
(I seem to have missed both the beginning and end of the MSP timeline. Their middle albums are good enough to get them here. I also met them once in Birmingham...which was nice. James Dean Bradfield has the strongest handshake I have ever received)

13. Red Hot Chili Peppers
(They get better with every album. I don't know how.)

14. Feeder
(I consciously acknowledge that I under-rate them. There's something about them that understates them, even though their songs are amazingly good.)

15. Rammstein
(I've been close enough to feel the heat of the flames.)

I've seen those bands a total of 19 times, providing some of the greatest moments of my life.
The second list are smaller bands, some are underground, some are up-and-coming, some have split up through never making it. The quality of these bands are usually better than the first list. Maybe in 20 years they will dominate the other bands, but at the moment the best of them might reach number 5 or 6 in the other list if mixed together.

1. Hundred Reasons
(With 3 albums they maybe shouldn't be on this list. they are here because 1) they broke through then went underground again and 2) they have never left their underground roots. I've met a few of them at different gigs. They are one of the bigger bands that are supporting a whole network of smaller bands in the UK music scene)

2. Bitch Alert
(If you don't know them as 99% won't do, everybody knows their name is stupid, but they're Finnish and were 16 years old when they made the name so I can forgive them. As for quality they have perhaps the greatest average quality of track I have ever encountered, including Green Day and My Vitriol. They are like Nirvana with a much-better Courtney singing, but with amazing tunes.)

3. My Vitriol
(I knew of MV about 6 years ago but never picked up on how amazing they were. Now I have Finelines/Betweenthelines I think it may be the greatest concentration of musical genius outside of International Superhits (which shouldn't count). They are the only band on here I haven't seen live. When I do see them I will have reached an important musical milestone)

4. Hell Is For Heroes
(Along with HR, HIFH are a band that once nearly made it which are now competing all over again and holding up the smaller bands with their reputation. After losing Kinesis and Douglas I wouldn't be able to bear losing HIFH)

5. Kinesis
(RIP. I only saw them support other bands, including strangely enough, Linkin Park. That was quite strange. We had gone to see Linkin Park because we were average fans of theirs, Lost Prophets were supporting and my friend was a fan of them and I liked a few of their songs. The third band was suppsoed to be Static X who I was looking forward to seeing. On the day it turned out that Static X had pulled out. In the Car park of the NIA we saw the Kinesis-mobile, a hippy wagon they toured the country in: very far below the popularity standards of Linkin Park. When they came on other people in the crowd were disappointed Static X weren't playing, and most of them were asking who the hell these guys were. Those idiots. I would have paid more to see Kinesis than Linkin Park, even considering LP had a huge set constructed, and a longer time to play. Kinesis rocked those ignorant wiggas at the NIA, but they couldn't see it.
When I first saw Kinesis at a HR gig they were all wearing matching white shirts and red ties and I thought instantly they would be like Busted or some rubbish, but they blew my mind. The track Zyklon B literally stayed with me for around 6 months before I heard it again. They deserved to be huge, like most of the bands on this list. I don't even like to think about how Kinesis ended- such a waste. But I won't hold it against them that they wanted to end it, it's their choice after all)

6. Douglas
(RIP. This was the band you could always rely on to ROCK LIKE YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN ANYBODY ROCK EVER, and do it for a ticket price of £5 with 3 other bands and only 20 people in the audience. I saw their last ever gig in Cardiff. I could never have lived with myself if I'd missed it.)

7. Sonic Boom 6
(These guys are uber-up-and-coming. They're still underground but could pop up at any second. Since seeing them support Adequate 7 I've never encountered any band like them. I suppose they qualify as punk but there's so much stuff in there, including banghra and rap...I don't think they'll ever be huge as so much of their act is about being underground. Like the Stereophonics after Word Gets Around, they wouldn't be able to comment on society as they do so well if they made it big. Best lyrics ever. "It's uglier than Janet Street Porter!")

8. Halo
(RIP. I used to think they were the best band ever. I'm slowly losing my taste in their music but I still like The Vega Method, their second formation. Too many people have told me they are too "gay" or camp, and that's true I guess. They are actually the reason I came to study in Bristol in the first place, and they broke up the same week I came here and never told anyone for months. Since then they've tried their hardest to lose their fans and bum around Bristol working handing out leaflets and rubbish. I see them fairly often and I can't help but think a lot of talent is going to waste.)

9. Karine Polwart
(A big deviation from the rock-based music I usually like, I first saw her when a friend of mine came all the way from Hull to bristol to see her...and it was well worth it. She has one of the best voices I have ever heard. She is to Scotland as Maddy Prior is to England, Cerys Matthews is to Wales and Andrea Corr is to Ireland.)

10. Pure Reason Revolution
(This is a band the NME like to say all the time will be massive next year, but they never are. I haven't heard much of them recently. They supported Halo just before they split up.)

11. KubricK
(RIP. They were supporting 3 Colours Red when I went to see Bitch Alert and these guys blew me away with their opener, Introspection, and tendency to rock hard. They were always as small and unpopular as you could even imagine for a band. Unlucky.)

12. Auf der Maur
(Probably the only band on this list that is recognised internationally. I feel she is slipping into this chart rather than being further down the other one. If you don't know her, she was the bass player in Hole and then in Smashing Pumpkins after the departure of D'arcy. I think she's been "working" on her second album for a good 3 years now, maybe longer.)

13. Instruction
(RIP. I first saw them supporting HIFH, and later Violent Delight. Another hard-rocking band like KubricK. I hear they have partially become Gay For Johnny Depp.)

14. Adequate 7
(RIP. First saw them supporting Capdown alongside Douglas. 7 guys on a tiny stage jumping all over the place. If you stand at the front you are at major risk of being smacked over the head with their trombone. Another band that really put the energy into their performance. Jamie from Douglas joined them for a tour a couple of years ago. I remember after the Cardiff gig Jamie said to me "I'll see you around", and I thought "no you won't" thinking that I had no idea where Douglas or the members were going after they broke up, but there he was playing with Adequate 7 in Bristol two years later. Last year I saw him on BBC playing at Reading Festival in this band that were getting a great reception from the crowd. I'm not sure who they were but they looked like they could make it big. I hope Jamie makes it since he was always a good guy and dedicated to Douglas. He also thanked us for coming up from Birmingham at their last gig. How could we not when Douglas were so amazing? That was one of the best gigs I've been to. Boom In The Diamond Insustry then The Take, Adequate 7, Capdown and Douglas. The fact that A7 and Capdown played before Douglas when they were both bigger bands used to being supported by Douglas showed you the support within the community. It was also there that I met Larry Hibbet of Hundred Reasons fame come to see Douglas' last gig too.)

15. Dogs Die In Hot Cars
(Nearly broke onto the scene with their debut album, but like most bands that take more than one year for a follow-up they are sinking into obscurity. I would fervently welcome another album)

I've seen those bands 42 times, an average of 3 times per band if you don't count My Vitriol, and some of them on the same bill. These are the truly great gigs, where you stand 4 feet from your band playing on a tiny stage, with three other bands you know and love, all for £5-£10. That's where music comes from. Some of those bands that have split up have produced the greatest pieces of music I have ever heard. The top 3 bands, Hundred Reasons, Bitch Alert and My Vitriol, all have the potential to be greater than Green Day and R.E.M.

I'm perhaps more passionate about music than the other three interests on this list. Music is like a drug to me that vastly improves my quality of life.

Football- Am I a glory hunter? No. I support England: they are my number 1 team. Every World Cup until my death will be a pivotal moment in my life, a major life-changing milestone.

Besides them I support every English club. The Premier League is the greatest league in the world, and I love nothing more than when one of our 3rd or 4th best teams beats AC Milan or Barcelona, teams that claim to be the number 1 best team in the whole world. I guess I have to confess I am a Liverpool fan, and have been since I was about 7. I saw them defeat Aston Villa while I was in the Holte End at Villa Park, and no amount of sympathy and allegiance to Villa will stop me supporting Liverpool. I love the fact how their two best players, Gerrard and Carragher, are pure-blood scousers. You just don't see that very often. Paulo Maldini probably has to be the best example of that. I recently heard he hadn't yet retired after all. What a legend.

Do I have any other interests? I play guitar, as mentioned, but I'm not very good at it. I spend most of my time doing soloes that actually sound quite bad. they're fast but they sound bad and I don't know how to make them sound good. Maybe it is about playing in the key of some note. Maybe I will look into that over the Summer. I've written one song fully, and have lots of pieces in the pipeline. It doesn't bother me that it takes years for me to write a song. I don't tend to forget what I have already written so I'm cool with it.

One more thing...The Dice Man. I read this book a couple of years ago and it became the greatest fiction I had ever read. it even leap-frogged Nineteen Eighty-Four, which literally changed my life and put me on the path of philosophy. There's just so many excellent things about The Dice Man that I won't try explaining it here. Maybe I will write a post about The Dice Man some other time, but I don't think I could ever do it justice. To call it amazing really says nothing about it. If you haven't read The Dice Man then you just don't have the necessary concepts fired up to appreciate a review of it. As it says on the back, "This book can change your life. If you dare to try it." Emphasise the "can". I reckon most people who read it think "good thriller there, well-written, now on with my life as it was before". I have nothing against those people: I'm not saying they haven't understood the book at all. They just haven't thought of the book as anything other than a fiction. The book is way more than that. It's much bigger than the Bible or any other religious text. It's a whole new idea that I have never heard elsewhere. Even the Cogito was influenced by Augustine and Greek philosophy. As far as I'm aware, Rhinehart is a modern-day Socrates.

"The unexamined life is not worth living.”- Socrates

"If you haven't lived the life of the dice, you haven't lived at all. Let the dice decide. And roll with it."- The Dice Man

I'm not sure how often I'll be writing these blogs. They will mostly be philosophical ideas that I have to write down before I forget completely. I do have one of those on the horizon, a theory about a certain kind of rationality. It's influenced by the Sleeping Beauty paradox I think was introduced by Elga (attributed to Stalnaker). I'm waiting for a chance to discuss my theory with one of my lecturers before I elaborate on it. He has written a paper on the topic himself. It requires further thought either way.

I've been thinking about the Sorites Paradox recently. To sum up briefly we don't believe that a single grain of sand is a heap, and we don't believe that adding one grain of sand to a set of grains is enough to turn a non-heap into a heap. Therefore we are forced to conclude that no number of grains of sand ever constitute a heap, even in the face of our intuition that we can imagine or even witness all kinds of heaps. I could produce a set of sand grains that we all agree is a heap and find it to have 10,000 grains (a convenient number). So that is our paradox.

Introduce prototype theories of concepts. We normally suppose that for an x to be a certain concept it has to satisfy necessary and sufficient conditions of being an x, whatever concept x is representing. For example, knowledge is justified true belief. Those three conditions are individually necessary for knowledge and jointly sufficient. But if we go with the prototype theory of concepts we can solve problems like the impossibility of knowledge and the problem of vagueness. People believe they have counter-examples to the JTB theory, examples of knowledge that aren't JTB (I am strongly inclined to disagree). The reason could be because they are using different criteria of knowledge and the extension doesn't overlap with the JTB extension. When we ask people what knowledge is, we might get a list of theories like this:

1. JTB (overwhelming favourite)
2. Reliabilism
3. Tracking the truth.
4. True belief.
5. Non-lucky true belief.
6. No true defeaters.
7. No false lemmas.
8. Belief (crazy new-agers/bullshit-merchants)
.
.
The list could go on but I can't think of anymore theories off-hand. Someone using the theory of Reliabilism will find a counter-example to JTB, i.e. Gettier examples, cases where they have JTB but in most cases their connection to the truth of their belief isn't reliable. The prototype theory is saying that it's not the case that the JTB advocate is right and the Reliabilist wrong, or vice versa, or at least one of them has to be wrong. They can both be right. In fact all these theories are right. One could say the set of things that are the extension of knowledge (all beliefs surely?) don't have the same necessary and sufficient conditions...but they do resemble each other. We would find that we have beliefs that are better examples of knowledge than other beliefs, even if they are both knowledge or neither knowledge, because we are going to the people to find the answer. We're asking the idiots on the street what knowledge is, and why not? This is a language that more idiots speak than non-idiots.

One theory I am not prepared to consent to is the labour-sharing theory of reference or whatever it is called. (what I've called it doesn't sound quite right to me: that's what I get for having a bad memory) The labour-sharing theory states that we can defer to the experts when we use words we don't understand. For example I can say, "I like pizza". But I don't know for sure what "pizza" means. I'm not sure if those breakfast pizzas count as pizza, or those mini-pizzas, or pizza pies. I would be counting on some pizza expert to know the correct definition of "pizza". I really don't agree with that theory, and I think it is an enemy of the prototype theory of concepts. No expert is going to tell me I'm using a word wrongly; it's my language! Obviously I care if other users of the language aren't understanding what I'm conveying to them, but that's a practical version of the theory. I'm cool with that.

I've just thought of a good example of the prototype theory in general use: the urban dictionary. if you go there and type in some word you'll find at the top the definition that most people have agreed is the one they mean by it. (or the best candidate amongst the list that resembles their subjective definition). At the bottom of the list you'll find unpopular uses: maybe they are regional. At the very bottom are just stupid suggestions. You might look up "tard" and there'll be some definition like "wot Jerome is rofl". These people are idiots for sure, but if they really believed that definition I'd give them some credit. They are like the person who says he likes pizza but is referring to what most people know as Manx cats. That guy's an idiot, practically speaking, but he has a right of opinion as valid as anybody else's. What shields us from anarchy is that he will be ignored by the majority. The game of being the best definition is essentially a popularity contest, and that's how it should be, as we are all equal users of the language.

Anyway onto the vagueness. I was thinking this question: If we asked the users of our language whether exhibit A is a heap or not, what entity would exhibit A be that yielded the highest proportion of agreements that it is a heap? It really is contextual on what the constituents of the hopeful heap are, and that is very important, and not at all related to the necesary and sufficient conditions of our normal concepts. For example, I'd maybe guess that the best example of a heap of sand is 10,000 grains. What about a heap of sandbags? 100? Isn't that a bit significant? Now I think about it, there's such a thing as being too big to be a heap. I mean, imagine so many grains of sand that the resulting monstrosity was bigger than the Himalayas. Technically that's a heap but come on! You know a better description of it would be "mountain" or even "monstrosity" or "God's wrath projected on us innocent paupers". It's too big to really be a heap, for the word "heap" to be relevant to it.

I've got some other factors. How about the constuction of the "heap"? Imagine 1500 playing cards stacked up into an enormous tower by a legendary card-stacker. Is that a heap of cards? No. They are too well-constructed. The higher cards are rested upon the flat edges of lower cards. Now knock it over. Cards go everywhere, taking a good hour to clean up, and literally days to sort back into the original decks. That's a heap. Yet it's the same number of cards. That's a big deal. Only some things can be heaps: things where the constituents are randomly or unskillfully conglomerated. (That is a weak definition but you get the picture). I seem to be saying this is a necessary condition, but of course this is only one prototype concept of "heap", the one that I have and I suspect many others have. Perhaps philosophers in the past have not thought it relevant to talk of the formation of the grains of sand because it's hard to build sand into structures that aren't just boring piles. (Is it? What about sandcastles and sand sculptures?! They're not just heaps! Again, not relevant to ordinary discourse on the Sorites)

I could even be said to be sitting in a heap right now. And I'm just one big thing. (To quote myself in my first ever live debate about philosophy about 4 years ago- classic line there). We're supposed to accept as a premise that one grain of sand isn't s heap yet I am a heap and I'm one grain of legend!

One important point to bring up here: does the word "heap" refer to many concepts that are really distinct from each other? We are taught to believe that about words like "bank" and "space" and loads of words. Imagine a book in the library of Babel. It is a perfect dictionary of the English language: everything is correct. The book is probably infinitely long but that might be contraversial. In this book, when we look up "heap" does it have several different concepts that the word applies to? I hope not. But if it did it might say something like:

1. (Of a grainy substance): About 10,000, composed according to how they would naturally congregate under no forces other than gravity and the ground pushing back.
2. (Of a sandbag-like substance): About 100 " ".
3. (Of a person): slumped on the ground or in a chair.

The above quote from the perfect English language dcitionary could be used as evidence why I shouldn't be chosen to write that dictionary, but you get the picture (as usual).

Still...the concepts of "heap" would still have something in common to suggest they are the same concept: they portray a number of objects in a "slumped" formation. That's something. But "bank"? Is there anything that the "river" and the "money" concepts share that would make the concept "bank" still useful? I can't really think of one. I am inclined to say the symbol "bank" really does give us at least two concepts. But if I say that then I am stuck with the problem of how little must the different alleged concepts of a word resemble each other for them to in reality be just one concept? Annoyingly that's actually a question of vagueness. I know I wasn't solving the problem of vagueness in this discussion: I was just looking at what we intuitively think a heap is, but I was heading in a nice direction. What I was doing in a roundabout fashion was fixing the predicate.

I think Russell said he thought our language was vague because the people who originally came up wih it were too lazy to fix their words to an exact reference (and not intelligent enough). I'm not sure whether he thought it was impossible. I'm about to read some arguments suggesting it is impossible. I also have a very faded memory of 3.5 years ago (that's sad) when I was reading Wittgenstein, only the 3rd philosopher I had ever read, write about a similar subject to what I am approaching again: a logical and probably infinite language. I remember being obsessed with that idea for a long enough time that my thoughts became stagnant and I couldn't find a solution myself and had to let it go as it was intellectually exhausting. I don't think I'm heading back in that direction. I don't expect to be reading Wittgenstein again for maybe many years. I got sidetracked by Descartes and Russell, then Hume. Since Hume I've been enjoying a good run of successful studies that rightfully motivate me not to go back to Wittgenstein yet. Although I do know my study of Wittgenstein was probably pretty poor and my understanding might change now I am better at reading philosophy. I may have a look back over the Summer...