About
    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Search
Page Contents
Full

Very Bad Wizards/Borges

05 Aug 2025 - 11 Apr 2026
Open in Logseq
    • On A New Refutation of Time. Borges idealism. https://gwern.net/doc/borges/1947-borges-anewrefutationoftime.pdf
      • The epigraph translates:
        • Before me, there was no time; after me, there shall be none. With me, it is born; with me, it also passes away.
      • ..penetrate this unstable world of the mind. A world of evanescent impressions; a world without matter or spirit, neither objective nor subjective; a world without the ideal architecture of space; a world made of time, of the absolute uniform time of the Principia; an inexhaustible labyrinth, a chaos, a dream-the almost complete disintegration that David Hume reached
    • Title is ironic because "new" implies temporality, Oh he calls that out explicitly, I would have not explained the joke. Wow, the joke even has a latin category name contradictum in adjecto .
    • The argument is present in the background of all his writings.
    • preterite: a grammatical tense. Past tense basically, although subtle distinction, "the perfective aspect" whatever the fuck that means.
      • In "A New Refutation of Time," when Borges refers to a "preterite system," he's talking about our conceptual framework for organizing and categorizing past events or experiences. Essentially, it's the mental system by which we structure things that have supposedly "already happened."
      • – Claude