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This is the demo site for Fuwari.
Sources of images used in this site
This is the demo site for Fuwari.
Sources of images used in this site
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---
-title: My First Blog Post
-published: 2023-09-09
-description: This is the first post of my new Astro blog.
-image: ./cover.jpg
-tags: [Foo, Bar]
-category: Front-end
-draft: false
----
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-My background of Physics told me to truly master a concept, one cannot ignore its origin. If I teach you Maxwell equations now you would end up with a blank mind. You need to start with “what is an electric charge”, “what is a field”, and “how a moving charge could produce magnetic field” so on and so forth. At the end of the day, you will be making a perfect sense of what Maxell equations mean. It it only through this way you can start applying Maxwell’s equations and solve real-worl problems.
Management, and everything else in our live, goes like this.
The field of management originated in ancient China, including possibly the first highly centralized bureaucratic state, and the earliest (by the second century BC) example of an administration based on merit through testing. Some theorists have cited ancient military texts as providing lessons for civilian managers. For example, Chinese general Sun Tzu in his 6th-century BC work The Art of War recommends[citation needed] (when re-phrased in modern terminology) being aware of and acting on strengths and weaknesses of both a manager’s organization and a foe’s.
《孙子兵法，孙膑兵法》下载
The writings of influential Chinese Legalist philosopher Shen Buhai (申子) may be considered to embody a rare premodern example of abstract theory of administration.
Key Takeaway多读一读诸子百家的书籍，发掘里面的管理学经验
Various ancient and medieval civilizations produced “mirrors for princes” books, which aimed to advise new monarchs on how to govern. Examples includes The Prince by Italian author Niccolò Machiavelli
in the De Administrando Imperio of Constantine Porphyrogenitus. Constantine had this written/compiled as advice to his son, Romanus. It functions as a practical manual, with a heavy foreign policy emphasis, on how to be a good emperor. Unlike some advice written by emperors and historians, this one is not a panegyric or solely praise; rather, it is candid and informative policy. Furthermore, it is (mostly) secular and research-based; though, the bit on the “obscene” and “blasphemous” Mohammed is obviously biased.
R.J.H. Jenkins, in his introduction to the De Administrando Imperio, describes Constantine’s attempt at teaching “practical wisdom” to his son by:
Scrutiny of the historical documentswriting or causing to be written histories of recent events and manuals of technical instruction on the various departments of business and administration… Documents from the files of every branch of the administration, from the foreign ministry, the treasury, the offices of ceremonial, were scrutinized and abstracted.
One of its key elements was a “summary of the recent internal history, politics, and organization within the borders of the empire.” Far from being a piece of rhetoric or self-absorbed thought, the document contains enormous, albeit intermittently erroneous, research and careful analysis. This is “no partial document of propaganda… to impress domestic or foreign circles.”
From Jenkins,
Provincial governors and imperial envoys wrote historical and topographical reports on the areas of their jurisdiction or assignment. Foreign ambassadors were diligently questioned as to the affairs of their respective countries.
One of the interesting things to note about the Administrando was its secret nature, having been written as advice for Constantine’s son, Romanus; it acts as part succession letter, part compilation, and part “confidential” advice/information.
As the emperor puts it,
On “Knowing the difference between being-managed”it is not for those who wish to govern lawfully to copy and emulate what has been ill done by some out of ignorance or arrogance, but rather to have the glorious deeds of those who have ruled lawfully and righteously as noble pictures set up for an example to be copied, and after their pattern to strive himself also to direct all that he does… it may greatly advantage you… [to know] the difference between other nations, their origins and customs and manner of life, and the position and climate of the land they dwell in…
My background of Physics told me to truly master a concept, one cannot ignore its origin. If I teach you Maxwell equations now you would end up with a blank mind. You need to start with “what is an electric charge”, “what is a field”, and “how a moving charge could produce magnetic field” so on and so forth. At the end of the day, you will be making a perfect sense of what Maxell equations mean. It it only through this way you can start applying Maxwell’s equations and solve real-worl problems.
Management, and everything else in our live, goes like this.
The field of management originated in ancient China, including possibly the first highly centralized bureaucratic state, and the earliest (by the second century BC) example of an administration based on merit through testing. Some theorists have cited ancient military texts as providing lessons for civilian managers. For example, Chinese general Sun Tzu in his 6th-century BC work The Art of War recommends[citation needed] (when re-phrased in modern terminology) being aware of and acting on strengths and weaknesses of both a manager’s organization and a foe’s.
《孙子兵法，孙膑兵法》下载
The writings of influential Chinese Legalist philosopher Shen Buhai (申子) may be considered to embody a rare premodern example of abstract theory of administration.
Key Takeaway多读一读诸子百家的书籍，发掘里面的管理学经验
Various ancient and medieval civilizations produced “mirrors for princes” books, which aimed to advise new monarchs on how to govern. Examples includes The Prince by Italian author Niccolò Machiavelli
in the De Administrando Imperio of Constantine Porphyrogenitus. Constantine had this written/compiled as advice to his son, Romanus. It functions as a practical manual, with a heavy foreign policy emphasis, on how to be a good emperor. Unlike some advice written by emperors and historians, this one is not a panegyric or solely praise; rather, it is candid and informative policy. Furthermore, it is (mostly) secular and research-based; though, the bit on the “obscene” and “blasphemous” Mohammed is obviously biased.
R.J.H. Jenkins, in his introduction to the De Administrando Imperio, describes Constantine’s attempt at teaching “practical wisdom” to his son by:
Scrutiny of the historical documentswriting or causing to be written histories of recent events and manuals of technical instruction on the various departments of business and administration… Documents from the files of every branch of the administration, from the foreign ministry, the treasury, the offices of ceremonial, were scrutinized and abstracted.
One of its key elements was a “summary of the recent internal history, politics, and organization within the borders of the empire.” Far from being a piece of rhetoric or self-absorbed thought, the document contains enormous, albeit intermittently erroneous, research and careful analysis. This is “no partial document of propaganda… to impress domestic or foreign circles.”
From Jenkins,
Provincial governors and imperial envoys wrote historical and topographical reports on the areas of their jurisdiction or assignment. Foreign ambassadors were diligently questioned as to the affairs of their respective countries.
One of the interesting things to note about the Administrando was its secret nature, having been written as advice for Constantine’s son, Romanus; it acts as part succession letter, part compilation, and part “confidential” advice/information.
As the emperor puts it,
On “Knowing the difference between being-managed”it is not for those who wish to govern lawfully to copy and emulate what has been ill done by some out of ignorance or arrogance, but rather to have the glorious deeds of those who have ruled lawfully and righteously as noble pictures set up for an example to be copied, and after their pattern to strive himself also to direct all that he does… it may greatly advantage you… [to know] the difference between other nations, their origins and customs and manner of life, and the position and climate of the land they dwell in…
Brook, Andrew and Julian Wuerth, “Kant’s View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.)
In general structure, Kant’s model of the mind was the dominant model in the empirical psychology that flowed from his work and then again, after a hiatus during which behaviourism reigned supreme (roughly 1910 to 1965), toward the end of the 20th century, especially in cognitive science. Central elements of the models of the mind of thinkers otherwise as different as Sigmund Freud and Jerry Fodor are broadly Kantian, for example.
Three ideas define the basic shape (‘cognitive architecture’) of Kant’s model and one its dominant method. They have all become part of the foundation of cognitive science.
These three ideas are fundamental to most thinking about cognition now. Kant’s most important method, the transcendental method, is also at the heart of contemporary cognitive science.
TIPTranslated into contemporary terms, the core of this method is inference to the best explanation, the method of postulating unobservable mental mechanisms in order to explain observed behaviour.
To be sure, Kant thought that he could get more out of his transcendental arguments than just ‘best explanations’. He thought that he could get a priori (experience independent) knowledge out of them. Kant had a tripartite doctrine of the a priori. He held that some features of the mind and its knowledge had a priori origins, i.e., must be in the mind prior to experience (because using them is necessary to have experience). That mind and knowledge have these features are a priori truths, i.e., necessary and universal. And we can come to know these truths, or that they are a priori at any rate, only by using a priori methods, i.e., we cannot learn these things from experience (B3) (Brook 1993). Kant thought that transcendental arguments were a priori or yielded the a priori in all three ways. Nonetheless, at the heart of this method is inference to the best explanation. When introspection fell out of favour about 100 years ago, the alternative approach adopted was exactly this approach. Its nonempirical roots in Kant notwithstanding, it is now the major method used by experimental cognitive scientists.
IMPORTANTOther topics equally central to Kant’s approach to the mind have hardly been discussed by cognitive science. These include a kind of synthesis that for Kant was essential to minds like ours and what struck him as the most striking features of consciousness of self. Far from his model having been superseded by cognitive science, some things central to the model have not even been assimilated by it.
The major works so far as Kant’s views on the mind are concerned are the monumental Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) and his little, late Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, first published in 1798 only six years before his death. Kant’s view of the mind arose from his general philosophical project in CPR the following way. Kant aimed among other things to,
Kant accepted without reservation that “God, freedom and immortality” (1781/7, Bxxx) exist but feared that, if science were relevant to their existence at all, it would provide reasons to doubt that they exist. As he saw it and very fortunately, science cannot touch these questions. “I have found it necessary to deny knowledge, … in order to make room for faith.” (Bxxx, his italics).
Laying the foundation for pursuit of the first aim, which as he saw it was no less than the aim of showing why physics is a science, was what led Kant to his views about how the mind works. He approached the grounding of physics by asking: What are the necessary conditions of experience? Put simply, he held that for our experience, and therefore our minds, to be as they are, the way that our experience is tied together must reflect the way that, according to physics, says objects in the world must be tied together. Seeing this connection also tells us a lot about what our minds must be like.
In pursuit of the second aim, Kant criticized some arguments of his predecessors that entailed if sound that we can know more about the mind’s consciousness of itself than Kant could allow. Mounting these criticisms led him to some extraordinarily penetrating ideas about our consciousness of ourselves.
In CPR, Kant discussed the mind only in connection with his main projects, never in its own right, so his treatment is remarkably scattered and sketchy. As he put it, “Enquiry … [into] the pure understanding itself, its possibility and the cognitive faculties upon which it rests … is of great importance for my chief purpose, … [but] does not form an essential part of it” (Axvii). Indeed, Kant offers no sustained, focussed discussion of the mind anywhere in his work except the popular Anthropology.
In addition, the two chapters of CPR in which most of Kant’s remarks on the mind occur, the chapter on the Transcendental Deduction (TD) and the chapter on what he called Paralogisms (faulty arguments about the mind mounted by his predecessors) were the two chapters that gave him the greatest difficulty. (They contain some of the most impenetrable prose ever written.) Kant completely rewrote the main body of both chapters for the second edition (though not the introductions, interestingly).
In the two editions of CPR, there are seven main discussions of the mind. The first is in the Transcendental Aesthetic, the second is in what is usually called the Metaphysical Deduction. Then there are two discussions of it in the first-edition TD, in parts 1 to 3 of Section 2 and in the whole of Section 3 and two more in the second-edition TD. The seventh and last is found in the first edition version of Kant’s attack on the Paralogisms, in the course of which he says things of the utmost interest about consciousness of and reference to self. (What little was retained of these remarks in the second edition was moved to the completely rewritten TD.) For understanding Kant on the mind and self-knowledge, the first edition of CPR is far more valuable than the second edition. Kant’s discussion proceeds through the following stages.
Kant calls the first stage the Transcendental Aesthetic. It is about what space and time must be like, and how we must handle them, if our experience is to have the spatial and temporal properties that it has. This question about the necessary conditions of experience is for Kant a ‘transcendental’ question and the strategy of proceeding by trying to find answers to such questions is, as we said, the strategy of transcendental argument.
Here Kant advances one of his most notorious views: that whatever it is that impinges on us from the mind-independent world does not come located in a spatial nor even a temporal matrix (A37=B54fn.). Rather, it is the mind that organizes this ‘manifold of raw intuition’, as he called it, spatially and temporally. The mind has two pure forms of intuition, space and time, built into it to allow it to do so. (‘Pure’ means ‘not derived from experience’.)
The Aesthetic is about the conditions of experience, Kant’s official project. The chapter leading up to the Transcendental Deduction, The Clue to the Discovery of All Pure Concepts of the Understanding has a very different starting point.
Starting from Aristotelian logic (the syllogisms and the formal concepts that Aristotle called categories), Kant proceeds by analysis to draw out the implications of these concepts and syllogisms for the conceptual structure (the “function of thought in judgment”) within which all thought and experience must take place. The result is what Kant called the Categories. That is to say, Kant tries to deduce the conceptual structure of experience from the components of Aristotelian logic.
Thus, in Kant’s thought about the mind early in CPR, there is not one central movement but two, one in the Transcendental Aesthetic and the other in the Metaphysical Deduction. The first is a move up from experience (of objects) to the necessary conditions of such experience. The second is a move down from the Aristotelian functions of judgment to the concepts that we have to use in judging, namely, the Categories. One is inference up from experience, the other deduction down from conceptual structures of the most abstract kind.
Then we get to the second chapter of the Transcendental Logic, the brilliant and baffling Transcendental Deduction (TD). Recall the two movements just discussed, the one from experience to its conditions and the one from Aristotelian functions of judgment to the concepts that we must use in all judging (the Categories). This duality led Kant to his famous question of right (quid juris): with what right do we apply the Categories, which are not acquired from experience, to the contents of experience?. Kant’s problem here is not as arcane as it might seem. It reflects an important question: How is it that the world as we experience it conforms to our logic? In briefest form, Kant thought that the trick to showing how it is possible for the Categories to apply to experience is to show that it is necessary that they apply.
TD has two sides, though Kant never treats them separately. He once called them the objective and the subjective deductions. The objective deduction is about the conceptual and other cognitive conditions of having representations of objects. It is Kant’s answer to the quid juris question. Exactly how the objective deduction goes is highly controversial, a controversy that we will sidestep here. The subjective deduction is about what the mind, the “subjective sources” of understanding, must as a consequence be like. The subjective deduction is what mainly interests us.
Kant argues as follows. Our experiences have objects, that is, they are about something. The objects of our experiences are discrete, unified particulars. To have such particulars available to it, the mind must construct them based on sensible input. To construct them, the mind must do three kinds of synthesis. It must generate temporal and spatial structure (Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition). It must associate spatio-temporally structured items with other spatio-temporally structured items (Synthesis of Reproduction in the Imagination). And it must recognize items using concepts, the Categories in particular (Synthesis of Recognition in a Concept). This threefold doctrine of synthesis is one of the cornerstones of Kant’s model of the mind. We will consider it in more detail in the next Section.
The ‘deduction of the categories’ should now be complete. Strangely enough, the chapter has only nicely got started. In the first edition version, for example, we have only reached about one-third of the way through the chapter. At this point, Kant introduces the notion of transcendental apperception for the first time and the unity of such apperception, the unity of consciousness. Evidently, something is happening (something, moreover, not at all well heralded in the text)
We can now understand in more detail why Kant said that the subjective deduction is inessential. Since the objective deduction is about the conditions of representations having objects, a better name for it might have been ‘deduction of the object’. Similarly, a better name for the subjective deduction might have been ‘the deduction of the subject’ or ‘the deduction of the subject’s nature’. The latter enquiry was inessential to Kant’s main critical project because the main project was to defend the synthetic a priori credentials of physics in the objective deduction. From this point of view, anything uncovered about the nature and functioning of the mind was a happy accident.
The chapter on the Paralogisms, the first of the three parts of Kant’s second project, contains Kant’s most original insights into the nature of consciousness of the self. In the first edition, he seems to have achieved a stable position on self-consciousness only as late as this chapter. Certainly his position was not stable in TD. Even his famous term for consciousness of self, ‘I think’, occurs for the first time only in the introduction to the chapter on the Paralogisms. His target is claims that we know what the mind is like. Whatever the merits of Kant’s attack on these claims, in the course of mounting it, he made some very deep-running observations about consciousness and knowledge of self.
TIPTo summarize: in the first edition, TD contains most of what Kant had to say about synthesis and unity, but little on the nature of consciousness of self. The chapter on the Paralogisms contains most of what he has to say about consciousness of self.
In other new material prepared for the second edition, we find a first gloss on the topic of self-consciousness as early as the Aesthetic (B68). The mind also appears in a new passage called the Refutation of Idealism, where Kant attempts to tie the possibility of one sort of consciousness of self to consciousness of permanence in something other than ourselves, in a way he thought to be inconsistent with Berkeleian idealism. This new Refutation of Idealism has often been viewed as a replacement for the argument against the Fourth Paralogism of the first edition.
Elsewhere in his work, the only sustained discussion of the mind and consciousness is, as we said, his little, late Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. By ‘anthropology’ Kant meant the study of human beings from the point of view of their (psychologically-controlled) behaviour, especially their behaviour toward one another, and of the things revealed in behaviour such as character. Though Kant sometimes contrasted anthropology as a legitimate study with what he understood empirical psychology to be, namely, psychology based on introspective observation, he meant by anthropology something fairly close to what we now mean by behavioural or experimental psychology.
Turning now to Kant’s view of the mind, we will start with a point about method: Kant held surprisingly strong and not entirely consistent views on the empirical study of the mind. The empirical method for doing psychology that Kant discussed was introspection.
Sometimes he held such study to be hopeless. The key text on psychology is in The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. There Kant tell us that “the empirical doctrine of the soul … must remain even further removed than chemistry from the rank of what may be called a natural science proper”. (In Kant’s defence, there was nothing resembling a single unified theory of chemical reactions in his time.) The contents of introspection, in his terms inner sense, cannot be studied scientifically for at least 5 reasons.
In these critical passages, it is not clear why he didn’t respect what he called anthropology more highly as an empirical study of the mind, given that he himself did it. He did so elsewhere. In the Anthropology, for example, he links ‘self-observation’ and observation of others and calls them both sources of anthropology
Whatever, no kind of empirical psychology can yield necessary truths about the mind. In the light of this limitation, how should we study the mind? Kant’s answer was: transcendental method using transcendental arguments (notions introduced earlier). If we cannot observe the connections among the denizens of inner sense to any purpose, we can study what the mind must be like and what capacities and structures (in Kant’s jargon, faculties) it must have if it is to represent things as it does. With this method we can find universally true, that is to say, ‘transcendental’ psychological propositions. We have already seen what some of them are: minds must be able to synthesize and minds must have a distinctive unity, for example. Let us turn now to these substantive claims.
We have already discussed Kant’s view of the mind’s handling of space and time, so we can proceed directly to his doctrine of synthesis. As Kant put it in one of his most famous passages, “Concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind”. Experience requires both percepts and concepts. As we might say now, to discriminate, we need information; but for information to be of any use to us, we must organize the information. This organization is provided by acts of synthesis.
By synthesis, in its most general sense, I understand the act of putting different representations together, and of grasping what is manifold in them in one knowledge
If the doctrine of space and time is the first major part of his model of the mind, the doctrine of synthesis is the second. Kant claimed, as we saw earlier, that three kinds of synthesis are required to organize information, namely apprehending in intuition, reproducing in imagination, and recognizing in concepts. Each of the three kinds of synthesis relates to a different aspect of Kant’s fundamental duality of intuition and concept. Synthesis of apprehension concerns raw perceptual input, synthesis of recognition concerns concepts, and synthesis of reproduction in imagination allows the mind to go from the one to the other.
They also relate to three fundamental faculties of the mind. One is the province of Sensibility, one is the province of Understanding, and the one in the middle is the province of a faculty that has a far less settled position than the other two, namely, Imagination
The first two, apprehension and reproduction, are inseparable; one cannot occur without the other. The third, recognition, requires the other two but is not required by them. It seems that only the third requires the use of concepts; this problem of non-concept-using syntheses and their relationship to use of the categories becomes a substantial issue in the second edition, where Kant tries to save the universality of the objective deduction by arguing that all three kinds of syntheses are required to represent objects.
Acts of synthesis are performed on that to which we are passive in experience, namely intuitions (Anschauungen). Intuitions are quite different from sense-data as classically understood; we can become conscious of intuitions only after acts of synthesis and only by inference from these acts, not directly. Thus they are something more like theoretical entities (better, events) postulated to explain something in what we do recognize. What they explain is the non-conceptual element in representations, an element over which we have no control. Intuitions determine how our representations will serve to confirm or refute theories, aid or impede our efforts to reach various goals.
Brook, Andrew and Julian Wuerth, “Kant’s View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.)
In general structure, Kant’s model of the mind was the dominant model in the empirical psychology that flowed from his work and then again, after a hiatus during which behaviourism reigned supreme (roughly 1910 to 1965), toward the end of the 20th century, especially in cognitive science. Central elements of the models of the mind of thinkers otherwise as different as Sigmund Freud and Jerry Fodor are broadly Kantian, for example.
Three ideas define the basic shape (‘cognitive architecture’) of Kant’s model and one its dominant method. They have all become part of the foundation of cognitive science.
These three ideas are fundamental to most thinking about cognition now. Kant’s most important method, the transcendental method, is also at the heart of contemporary cognitive science.
TIPTranslated into contemporary terms, the core of this method is inference to the best explanation, the method of postulating unobservable mental mechanisms in order to explain observed behaviour.
To be sure, Kant thought that he could get more out of his transcendental arguments than just ‘best explanations’. He thought that he could get a priori (experience independent) knowledge out of them. Kant had a tripartite doctrine of the a priori. He held that some features of the mind and its knowledge had a priori origins, i.e., must be in the mind prior to experience (because using them is necessary to have experience). That mind and knowledge have these features are a priori truths, i.e., necessary and universal. And we can come to know these truths, or that they are a priori at any rate, only by using a priori methods, i.e., we cannot learn these things from experience (B3) (Brook 1993). Kant thought that transcendental arguments were a priori or yielded the a priori in all three ways. Nonetheless, at the heart of this method is inference to the best explanation. When introspection fell out of favour about 100 years ago, the alternative approach adopted was exactly this approach. Its nonempirical roots in Kant notwithstanding, it is now the major method used by experimental cognitive scientists.
IMPORTANTOther topics equally central to Kant’s approach to the mind have hardly been discussed by cognitive science. These include a kind of synthesis that for Kant was essential to minds like ours and what struck him as the most striking features of consciousness of self. Far from his model having been superseded by cognitive science, some things central to the model have not even been assimilated by it.
The major works so far as Kant’s views on the mind are concerned are the monumental Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) and his little, late Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, first published in 1798 only six years before his death. Kant’s view of the mind arose from his general philosophical project in CPR the following way. Kant aimed among other things to,
Kant accepted without reservation that “God, freedom and immortality” (1781/7, Bxxx) exist but feared that, if science were relevant to their existence at all, it would provide reasons to doubt that they exist. As he saw it and very fortunately, science cannot touch these questions. “I have found it necessary to deny knowledge, … in order to make room for faith.” (Bxxx, his italics).
Laying the foundation for pursuit of the first aim, which as he saw it was no less than the aim of showing why physics is a science, was what led Kant to his views about how the mind works. He approached the grounding of physics by asking: What are the necessary conditions of experience? Put simply, he held that for our experience, and therefore our minds, to be as they are, the way that our experience is tied together must reflect the way that, according to physics, says objects in the world must be tied together. Seeing this connection also tells us a lot about what our minds must be like.
In pursuit of the second aim, Kant criticized some arguments of his predecessors that entailed if sound that we can know more about the mind’s consciousness of itself than Kant could allow. Mounting these criticisms led him to some extraordinarily penetrating ideas about our consciousness of ourselves.
In CPR, Kant discussed the mind only in connection with his main projects, never in its own right, so his treatment is remarkably scattered and sketchy. As he put it, “Enquiry … [into] the pure understanding itself, its possibility and the cognitive faculties upon which it rests … is of great importance for my chief purpose, … [but] does not form an essential part of it” (Axvii). Indeed, Kant offers no sustained, focussed discussion of the mind anywhere in his work except the popular Anthropology.
In addition, the two chapters of CPR in which most of Kant’s remarks on the mind occur, the chapter on the Transcendental Deduction (TD) and the chapter on what he called Paralogisms (faulty arguments about the mind mounted by his predecessors) were the two chapters that gave him the greatest difficulty. (They contain some of the most impenetrable prose ever written.) Kant completely rewrote the main body of both chapters for the second edition (though not the introductions, interestingly).
In the two editions of CPR, there are seven main discussions of the mind. The first is in the Transcendental Aesthetic, the second is in what is usually called the Metaphysical Deduction. Then there are two discussions of it in the first-edition TD, in parts 1 to 3 of Section 2 and in the whole of Section 3 and two more in the second-edition TD. The seventh and last is found in the first edition version of Kant’s attack on the Paralogisms, in the course of which he says things of the utmost interest about consciousness of and reference to self. (What little was retained of these remarks in the second edition was moved to the completely rewritten TD.) For understanding Kant on the mind and self-knowledge, the first edition of CPR is far more valuable than the second edition. Kant’s discussion proceeds through the following stages.
Kant calls the first stage the Transcendental Aesthetic. It is about what space and time must be like, and how we must handle them, if our experience is to have the spatial and temporal properties that it has. This question about the necessary conditions of experience is for Kant a ‘transcendental’ question and the strategy of proceeding by trying to find answers to such questions is, as we said, the strategy of transcendental argument.
Here Kant advances one of his most notorious views: that whatever it is that impinges on us from the mind-independent world does not come located in a spatial nor even a temporal matrix (A37=B54fn.). Rather, it is the mind that organizes this ‘manifold of raw intuition’, as he called it, spatially and temporally. The mind has two pure forms of intuition, space and time, built into it to allow it to do so. (‘Pure’ means ‘not derived from experience’.)
The Aesthetic is about the conditions of experience, Kant’s official project. The chapter leading up to the Transcendental Deduction, The Clue to the Discovery of All Pure Concepts of the Understanding has a very different starting point.
Starting from Aristotelian logic (the syllogisms and the formal concepts that Aristotle called categories), Kant proceeds by analysis to draw out the implications of these concepts and syllogisms for the conceptual structure (the “function of thought in judgment”) within which all thought and experience must take place. The result is what Kant called the Categories. That is to say, Kant tries to deduce the conceptual structure of experience from the components of Aristotelian logic.
Thus, in Kant’s thought about the mind early in CPR, there is not one central movement but two, one in the Transcendental Aesthetic and the other in the Metaphysical Deduction. The first is a move up from experience (of objects) to the necessary conditions of such experience. The second is a move down from the Aristotelian functions of judgment to the concepts that we have to use in judging, namely, the Categories. One is inference up from experience, the other deduction down from conceptual structures of the most abstract kind.
Then we get to the second chapter of the Transcendental Logic, the brilliant and baffling Transcendental Deduction (TD). Recall the two movements just discussed, the one from experience to its conditions and the one from Aristotelian functions of judgment to the concepts that we must use in all judging (the Categories). This duality led Kant to his famous question of right (quid juris): with what right do we apply the Categories, which are not acquired from experience, to the contents of experience?. Kant’s problem here is not as arcane as it might seem. It reflects an important question: How is it that the world as we experience it conforms to our logic? In briefest form, Kant thought that the trick to showing how it is possible for the Categories to apply to experience is to show that it is necessary that they apply.
TD has two sides, though Kant never treats them separately. He once called them the objective and the subjective deductions. The objective deduction is about the conceptual and other cognitive conditions of having representations of objects. It is Kant’s answer to the quid juris question. Exactly how the objective deduction goes is highly controversial, a controversy that we will sidestep here. The subjective deduction is about what the mind, the “subjective sources” of understanding, must as a consequence be like. The subjective deduction is what mainly interests us.
Kant argues as follows. Our experiences have objects, that is, they are about something. The objects of our experiences are discrete, unified particulars. To have such particulars available to it, the mind must construct them based on sensible input. To construct them, the mind must do three kinds of synthesis. It must generate temporal and spatial structure (Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition). It must associate spatio-temporally structured items with other spatio-temporally structured items (Synthesis of Reproduction in the Imagination). And it must recognize items using concepts, the Categories in particular (Synthesis of Recognition in a Concept). This threefold doctrine of synthesis is one of the cornerstones of Kant’s model of the mind. We will consider it in more detail in the next Section.
The ‘deduction of the categories’ should now be complete. Strangely enough, the chapter has only nicely got started. In the first edition version, for example, we have only reached about one-third of the way through the chapter. At this point, Kant introduces the notion of transcendental apperception for the first time and the unity of such apperception, the unity of consciousness. Evidently, something is happening (something, moreover, not at all well heralded in the text)
We can now understand in more detail why Kant said that the subjective deduction is inessential. Since the objective deduction is about the conditions of representations having objects, a better name for it might have been ‘deduction of the object’. Similarly, a better name for the subjective deduction might have been ‘the deduction of the subject’ or ‘the deduction of the subject’s nature’. The latter enquiry was inessential to Kant’s main critical project because the main project was to defend the synthetic a priori credentials of physics in the objective deduction. From this point of view, anything uncovered about the nature and functioning of the mind was a happy accident.
The chapter on the Paralogisms, the first of the three parts of Kant’s second project, contains Kant’s most original insights into the nature of consciousness of the self. In the first edition, he seems to have achieved a stable position on self-consciousness only as late as this chapter. Certainly his position was not stable in TD. Even his famous term for consciousness of self, ‘I think’, occurs for the first time only in the introduction to the chapter on the Paralogisms. His target is claims that we know what the mind is like. Whatever the merits of Kant’s attack on these claims, in the course of mounting it, he made some very deep-running observations about consciousness and knowledge of self.
TIPTo summarize: in the first edition, TD contains most of what Kant had to say about synthesis and unity, but little on the nature of consciousness of self. The chapter on the Paralogisms contains most of what he has to say about consciousness of self.
In other new material prepared for the second edition, we find a first gloss on the topic of self-consciousness as early as the Aesthetic (B68). The mind also appears in a new passage called the Refutation of Idealism, where Kant attempts to tie the possibility of one sort of consciousness of self to consciousness of permanence in something other than ourselves, in a way he thought to be inconsistent with Berkeleian idealism. This new Refutation of Idealism has often been viewed as a replacement for the argument against the Fourth Paralogism of the first edition.
Elsewhere in his work, the only sustained discussion of the mind and consciousness is, as we said, his little, late Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. By ‘anthropology’ Kant meant the study of human beings from the point of view of their (psychologically-controlled) behaviour, especially their behaviour toward one another, and of the things revealed in behaviour such as character. Though Kant sometimes contrasted anthropology as a legitimate study with what he understood empirical psychology to be, namely, psychology based on introspective observation, he meant by anthropology something fairly close to what we now mean by behavioural or experimental psychology.
Turning now to Kant’s view of the mind, we will start with a point about method: Kant held surprisingly strong and not entirely consistent views on the empirical study of the mind. The empirical method for doing psychology that Kant discussed was introspection.
Sometimes he held such study to be hopeless. The key text on psychology is in The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. There Kant tell us that “the empirical doctrine of the soul … must remain even further removed than chemistry from the rank of what may be called a natural science proper”. (In Kant’s defence, there was nothing resembling a single unified theory of chemical reactions in his time.) The contents of introspection, in his terms inner sense, cannot be studied scientifically for at least 5 reasons.
In these critical passages, it is not clear why he didn’t respect what he called anthropology more highly as an empirical study of the mind, given that he himself did it. He did so elsewhere. In the Anthropology, for example, he links ‘self-observation’ and observation of others and calls them both sources of anthropology
Whatever, no kind of empirical psychology can yield necessary truths about the mind. In the light of this limitation, how should we study the mind? Kant’s answer was: transcendental method using transcendental arguments (notions introduced earlier). If we cannot observe the connections among the denizens of inner sense to any purpose, we can study what the mind must be like and what capacities and structures (in Kant’s jargon, faculties) it must have if it is to represent things as it does. With this method we can find universally true, that is to say, ‘transcendental’ psychological propositions. We have already seen what some of them are: minds must be able to synthesize and minds must have a distinctive unity, for example. Let us turn now to these substantive claims.
We have already discussed Kant’s view of the mind’s handling of space and time, so we can proceed directly to his doctrine of synthesis. As Kant put it in one of his most famous passages, “Concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind”. Experience requires both percepts and concepts. As we might say now, to discriminate, we need information; but for information to be of any use to us, we must organize the information. This organization is provided by acts of synthesis.
By synthesis, in its most general sense, I understand the act of putting different representations together, and of grasping what is manifold in them in one knowledge
If the doctrine of space and time is the first major part of his model of the mind, the doctrine of synthesis is the second. Kant claimed, as we saw earlier, that three kinds of synthesis are required to organize information, namely apprehending in intuition, reproducing in imagination, and recognizing in concepts. Each of the three kinds of synthesis relates to a different aspect of Kant’s fundamental duality of intuition and concept. Synthesis of apprehension concerns raw perceptual input, synthesis of recognition concerns concepts, and synthesis of reproduction in imagination allows the mind to go from the one to the other.
They also relate to three fundamental faculties of the mind. One is the province of Sensibility, one is the province of Understanding, and the one in the middle is the province of a faculty that has a far less settled position than the other two, namely, Imagination
The first two, apprehension and reproduction, are inseparable; one cannot occur without the other. The third, recognition, requires the other two but is not required by them. It seems that only the third requires the use of concepts; this problem of non-concept-using syntheses and their relationship to use of the categories becomes a substantial issue in the second edition, where Kant tries to save the universality of the objective deduction by arguing that all three kinds of syntheses are required to represent objects.
Acts of synthesis are performed on that to which we are passive in experience, namely intuitions (Anschauungen). Intuitions are quite different from sense-data as classically understood; we can become conscious of intuitions only after acts of synthesis and only by inference from these acts, not directly. Thus they are something more like theoretical entities (better, events) postulated to explain something in what we do recognize. What they explain is the non-conceptual element in representations, an element over which we have no control. Intuitions determine how our representations will serve to confirm or refute theories, aid or impede our efforts to reach various goals.
”Embarrassingly I introduced a “common” library, named as such, in a team environment a couple of decades back. I didn’t really understand the dynamics back then of what could happen in a loosely-coordinated team setting in just a matter of months.
When I introduced it I thought I made it clear and also documented that it’s for things we’d all agree we find useful on a daily basis, that it’s intended to be a minimalist library, and that the library should depend on nothing else besides the standard library so that it’s as easy to deploy as possible in new projects. My thinking at the time was that it was our own little extension to the standard library for things that, in our particular domain, we found useful on a daily basis.
And it started off well enough. We started off with a math library (common/math*) of routines which we all used on a daily basis, since we were working on computer graphics which was often heavy on the linear algebra. And since we were often interoping with C code, we agreed on some useful utility functions like find_index which, unlike std::find in C++, would return an index to an element found in a sequence instead of an iterator which mimicked how our C functions worked — things of this sort — a little bit eclectic but minimalist and widely used enough to remain familiar and practical to everyone, and instant familiarity is an extremely important criteria as I see it in trying to make anything that is “common” or “standard” since if it truly is “common”, it should have that familiar quality about it as a result of its wide adoption and daily usage.
But over time the design intentions of the library slipped out of my fingers as people started to add things they used personally that they merely thought might be of use to someone else, only to find no one else using it. And later someone started adding functions that depended on OpenGL for common GL-related routines. Further on we adopted Qt and people started adding code that depended on Qt, so already the common library was dependent on two external libraries. At some point someone added common shader routines which was dependent on our application-specific shader library, and at that point you couldn’t even deploy it in a new project without bringing in Qt, OGL, and our application-specific shader library and writing a non-trivial build script for your project. So it turned into this eclectic, interdependent mess. Later on people even added GUI-dependent code to it.
But I’ve also found by debating what should and shouldn’t go into this library that what is considered “common” can easily turn into a very subjective idea if you don’t set a very hard line rule that what’s “common” is what everyone tends to find useful on a daily basis. Any loosening of the standards and it quickly degrades from things everyone finds useful on a daily basis to something a single developer finds useful that might have the possibility of being beneficial to someone else, and at that point the library degrades into an eclectic mess really fast.
But furthermore when you reach that point, some developers can start adding things for the simple reason that they don’t like the programming language. They might not like the syntax of a for loop or a function call, at which point the library is starting to get filled with things that’s just fighting the fundamental syntax of the language, replacing a couple of lines of straightforward code which isn’t really duplicating any logic down to a single terse line of exotic code only familiar to the developer who introduced such a shorthand. Then such a developer might start adding more functionality to the common library implemented using such shorthands, at which point significant sections of the common library become interwoven with these exotic shorthands which might seem beautiful and intuitive to the developer who introduced it but ugly and foreign and hard to understand for everyone else. And at that point I think you know that any hope of making something truly “common” is lost, since “common” and “unfamiliar” are polar opposite ideas.
So there’s all kinds of cans of worms there, at least in a loosely-coordinated team environment, with a library with ambitions as broad and as generalized as just “commonly-used stuff”. And while the underlying problem might have been the loose coordination above all else, at least multiple libraries intended to serve a more singular purpose, like a library intended to provide math routines and nothing else, probably wouldn’t degrade as significantly in terms of its design purity and dependencies as a “common” library. So in retrospect I think it would be much better to err on the side of libraries which have much more clear design intentions. I’ve also found over the years that narrow in purpose and narrow in applicability are radically different ideas. Often the most widely applicable things are the narrowest and most singular in purpose, since you can then say, “aha, this is exactly what I need”, as opposed to wading through an eclectic library of disparate functionality trying to see if it has something you need.
Also I’m admittedly at least a little bit impractical and care maybe a bit too much about aesthetics, but the way I tend to perceive my idea of a library’s quality (and maybe even “beauty”) is judged more by its weakest link than its strongest, in a similar way that if you presented me the most appetitizing food in the world but, on the same plate, put something rotting on there that smells really bad, I tend to want to reject the entire plate. And if you’re like me in that regard and make something that invites all sorts of additions as something called “common”, you might find yourself looking at that analogical plate with something rotting on the side. So likewise I think it’s good if a library is organized and named and documented in a way such that it doesn’t invite more and more and more additions over time. And that can even apply to your personal creations, since I’ve certainly created some rotten stuff here and there, and it “taints” a lot less if it’s not being added to the biggest plate. Separating things out into small, very singular libraries has a tendency to better decouple code as well, if only by the sheer virtue that it becomes far less convenient to start coupling everything.
TIPCode deduplication has been hammered into me over the years but I feel like I should try it this time around.
What I might suggest in your case is to start to take it easy on code deduplication. I’m not saying to copy and paste big snippets of poorly-tested, error-prone code around or anything of this sort, or duplicating huge amounts of non-trivial code that has a decent probability of requiring changes in the future.
But especially if you are of the mindset to create a “common” library, for which I assume your desire is to create something widely-applicable, highly reusable, and perhaps ideally something you find just as useful today as you do a decade from now, then sometimes you might even need or want some duplication to achieve this elusive quality. Because the duplication might actually serve as a decoupling mechanism. It’s like if you want to separate a video player from an MP3 player, then you at least have to duplicate some things like batteries and hard drives. They can’t share these things or else they’re indivisibly coupled and cannot be used independently of each other, and at that point people might not be interested in the device anymore if all they want to do is play MP3s. But some time after you split these two devices apart, you might find that the MP3 player can benefit from a different battery design or smaller hard drive than the video player, at which point you’re no longer duplicating anything; what initially started out as duplication to allow this interdependent device to split into two separate, independent devices might later turn out to yield designs and implementations that are no longer redundant at all.
It’s worth considering things from the perspective of the one using a library. Would you actually want to use a library that minimizes code duplication? Chances are that you won’t because one that does will naturally depend on other libraries. And those other libraries might depend on other libraries to avoid duplicating their code, and so on, until you might need to import/link 50 different libraries to just to get some basic functionality like loading and playing an audio file, and that becomes very unwieldy. Meanwhile if such an audio library deliberately chose to duplicate some things here and there to achieve its independence, it becomes so much easier to use in new projects, and chances are that it won’t need to be updated nearly as often since it won’t need to change as a result of one its dependent external libraries changing which might be trying to fulfill a much more generalized purpose than what the audio library needs.
So sometimes it’s worth deliberately choosing to duplicate a little bit (consciously, never out of laziness — actually out of diligence) in order to decouple a library and make it independent because, through that independence, it achieves a wider range of practical applicability and even stability (no more afferent couplings). If you want to design the most reusable libraries possible that will last you from one project to the next and over the years, then on top of narrowing its scope to the minimum, I would actually suggest considering duplicating a little bit here. And naturally write unit tests and make sure it’s really thoroughly tested and reliable at what it’s doing. This is only for the libraries that you really want to take the time to generalize to a point that goes far beyond a single project.”
”Embarrassingly I introduced a “common” library, named as such, in a team environment a couple of decades back. I didn’t really understand the dynamics back then of what could happen in a loosely-coordinated team setting in just a matter of months.
When I introduced it I thought I made it clear and also documented that it’s for things we’d all agree we find useful on a daily basis, that it’s intended to be a minimalist library, and that the library should depend on nothing else besides the standard library so that it’s as easy to deploy as possible in new projects. My thinking at the time was that it was our own little extension to the standard library for things that, in our particular domain, we found useful on a daily basis.
And it started off well enough. We started off with a math library (common/math*) of routines which we all used on a daily basis, since we were working on computer graphics which was often heavy on the linear algebra. And since we were often interoping with C code, we agreed on some useful utility functions like find_index which, unlike std::find in C++, would return an index to an element found in a sequence instead of an iterator which mimicked how our C functions worked — things of this sort — a little bit eclectic but minimalist and widely used enough to remain familiar and practical to everyone, and instant familiarity is an extremely important criteria as I see it in trying to make anything that is “common” or “standard” since if it truly is “common”, it should have that familiar quality about it as a result of its wide adoption and daily usage.
But over time the design intentions of the library slipped out of my fingers as people started to add things they used personally that they merely thought might be of use to someone else, only to find no one else using it. And later someone started adding functions that depended on OpenGL for common GL-related routines. Further on we adopted Qt and people started adding code that depended on Qt, so already the common library was dependent on two external libraries. At some point someone added common shader routines which was dependent on our application-specific shader library, and at that point you couldn’t even deploy it in a new project without bringing in Qt, OGL, and our application-specific shader library and writing a non-trivial build script for your project. So it turned into this eclectic, interdependent mess. Later on people even added GUI-dependent code to it.
But I’ve also found by debating what should and shouldn’t go into this library that what is considered “common” can easily turn into a very subjective idea if you don’t set a very hard line rule that what’s “common” is what everyone tends to find useful on a daily basis. Any loosening of the standards and it quickly degrades from things everyone finds useful on a daily basis to something a single developer finds useful that might have the possibility of being beneficial to someone else, and at that point the library degrades into an eclectic mess really fast.
But furthermore when you reach that point, some developers can start adding things for the simple reason that they don’t like the programming language. They might not like the syntax of a for loop or a function call, at which point the library is starting to get filled with things that’s just fighting the fundamental syntax of the language, replacing a couple of lines of straightforward code which isn’t really duplicating any logic down to a single terse line of exotic code only familiar to the developer who introduced such a shorthand. Then such a developer might start adding more functionality to the common library implemented using such shorthands, at which point significant sections of the common library become interwoven with these exotic shorthands which might seem beautiful and intuitive to the developer who introduced it but ugly and foreign and hard to understand for everyone else. And at that point I think you know that any hope of making something truly “common” is lost, since “common” and “unfamiliar” are polar opposite ideas.
So there’s all kinds of cans of worms there, at least in a loosely-coordinated team environment, with a library with ambitions as broad and as generalized as just “commonly-used stuff”. And while the underlying problem might have been the loose coordination above all else, at least multiple libraries intended to serve a more singular purpose, like a library intended to provide math routines and nothing else, probably wouldn’t degrade as significantly in terms of its design purity and dependencies as a “common” library. So in retrospect I think it would be much better to err on the side of libraries which have much more clear design intentions. I’ve also found over the years that narrow in purpose and narrow in applicability are radically different ideas. Often the most widely applicable things are the narrowest and most singular in purpose, since you can then say, “aha, this is exactly what I need”, as opposed to wading through an eclectic library of disparate functionality trying to see if it has something you need.
Also I’m admittedly at least a little bit impractical and care maybe a bit too much about aesthetics, but the way I tend to perceive my idea of a library’s quality (and maybe even “beauty”) is judged more by its weakest link than its strongest, in a similar way that if you presented me the most appetitizing food in the world but, on the same plate, put something rotting on there that smells really bad, I tend to want to reject the entire plate. And if you’re like me in that regard and make something that invites all sorts of additions as something called “common”, you might find yourself looking at that analogical plate with something rotting on the side. So likewise I think it’s good if a library is organized and named and documented in a way such that it doesn’t invite more and more and more additions over time. And that can even apply to your personal creations, since I’ve certainly created some rotten stuff here and there, and it “taints” a lot less if it’s not being added to the biggest plate. Separating things out into small, very singular libraries has a tendency to better decouple code as well, if only by the sheer virtue that it becomes far less convenient to start coupling everything.
TIPCode deduplication has been hammered into me over the years but I feel like I should try it this time around.
What I might suggest in your case is to start to take it easy on code deduplication. I’m not saying to copy and paste big snippets of poorly-tested, error-prone code around or anything of this sort, or duplicating huge amounts of non-trivial code that has a decent probability of requiring changes in the future.
But especially if you are of the mindset to create a “common” library, for which I assume your desire is to create something widely-applicable, highly reusable, and perhaps ideally something you find just as useful today as you do a decade from now, then sometimes you might even need or want some duplication to achieve this elusive quality. Because the duplication might actually serve as a decoupling mechanism. It’s like if you want to separate a video player from an MP3 player, then you at least have to duplicate some things like batteries and hard drives. They can’t share these things or else they’re indivisibly coupled and cannot be used independently of each other, and at that point people might not be interested in the device anymore if all they want to do is play MP3s. But some time after you split these two devices apart, you might find that the MP3 player can benefit from a different battery design or smaller hard drive than the video player, at which point you’re no longer duplicating anything; what initially started out as duplication to allow this interdependent device to split into two separate, independent devices might later turn out to yield designs and implementations that are no longer redundant at all.
It’s worth considering things from the perspective of the one using a library. Would you actually want to use a library that minimizes code duplication? Chances are that you won’t because one that does will naturally depend on other libraries. And those other libraries might depend on other libraries to avoid duplicating their code, and so on, until you might need to import/link 50 different libraries to just to get some basic functionality like loading and playing an audio file, and that becomes very unwieldy. Meanwhile if such an audio library deliberately chose to duplicate some things here and there to achieve its independence, it becomes so much easier to use in new projects, and chances are that it won’t need to be updated nearly as often since it won’t need to change as a result of one its dependent external libraries changing which might be trying to fulfill a much more generalized purpose than what the audio library needs.
So sometimes it’s worth deliberately choosing to duplicate a little bit (consciously, never out of laziness — actually out of diligence) in order to decouple a library and make it independent because, through that independence, it achieves a wider range of practical applicability and even stability (no more afferent couplings). If you want to design the most reusable libraries possible that will last you from one project to the next and over the years, then on top of narrowing its scope to the minimum, I would actually suggest considering duplicating a little bit here. And naturally write unit tests and make sure it’s really thoroughly tested and reliable at what it’s doing. This is only for the libraries that you really want to take the time to generalize to a point that goes far beyond a single project.”
You can add dynamic cards that link to GitHub repositories, on page load, the repository information is pulled from the GitHub API.
Create a GitHub repository card with the code ::github{repo="<owner>/<repo>"}.
::github{repo="saicaca/fuwari"}
-Following types of admonitions are supported: note tip important warning caution
NOTEHighlights information that users should take into account, even when skimming.
TIPOptional information to help a user be more successful.
IMPORTANTCrucial information necessary for users to succeed.
WARNINGCritical content demanding immediate user attention due to potential risks.
CAUTIONNegative potential consequences of an action.
:::note
-Highlights information that users should take into account, even when skimming.
-:::
-
-:::tip
-Optional information to help a user be more successful.
-:::
-The title of the admonition can be customized.
MY CUSTOM TITLEThis is a note with a custom title.
:::note[MY CUSTOM TITLE]
-This is a note with a custom title.
-:::
-TIPThe GitHub syntax is also supported.
> [!NOTE]
-> The GitHub syntax is also supported.
-
-> [!TIP]
-> The GitHub syntax is also supported.
-Paragraphs are separated by a blank line.
2nd paragraph. Italic, bold, and monospace. Itemized lists look like:
Note that --- not considering the asterisk --- the actual text content starts at 4-columns in.
Block quotes are written like so.
They can span multiple paragraphs, if you like.
Use 3 dashes for an em-dash. Use 2 dashes for ranges (ex., “it’s all in chapters 12—14”). Three dots … will be converted to an ellipsis. Unicode is supported. ☺
Here’s a numbered list:
Note again how the actual text starts at 4 columns in (4 characters from the left side). Here’s a code sample:
# Let me re-iterate ...
-for i in 1 .. 10 { do-something(i) }
-As you probably guessed, indented 4 spaces. By the way, instead of indenting the block, you can use delimited blocks, if you like:
define foobar() {
- print "Welcome to flavor country!";
-}
-(which makes copying & pasting easier). You can optionally mark the delimited block for Pandoc to syntax highlight it:
import time
-# Quick, count to ten!
-for i in range(10):
- # (but not *too* quick)
- time.sleep(0.5)
- print i
-Now a nested list:
First, get these ingredients:
Boil some water.
Dump everything in the pot and follow this algorithm:
find wooden spoon
- uncover pot
- stir
- cover pot
- balance wooden spoon precariously on pot handle
- wait 10 minutes
- goto first step (or shut off burner when done)
-Do not bump wooden spoon or it will fall.
Notice again how text always lines up on 4-space indents (including that last line which continues item 3 above).
Here’s a link to a website, to a local doc, and to a section heading in the current doc. Here’s a footnote 1.
Tables can look like this:
size material color
9 leather brown 10 hemp canvas natural 11 glass transparent
Table: Shoes, their sizes, and what they’re made of
(The above is the caption for the table.) Pandoc also supports multi-line tables:
keyword text
red Sunsets, apples, and other red or reddish things.
green Leaves, grass, frogs and other things it’s not easy being.
A horizontal rule follows.
Here’s a definition list:
apples : Good for making applesauce. oranges : Citrus! tomatoes : There’s no “e” in tomatoe.
Again, text is indented 4 spaces. (Put a blank line between each term/definition pair to spread things out more.)
Here’s a “line block”:
| Line one | Line too | Line tree
and images can be specified like so:
Inline math equations go in like so: . Display math should get its own line and be put in in double-dollarsigns:
And note that you can backslash-escape any punctuation characters which you wish to be displayed literally, ex.: `foo`, *bar*, etc.
Footnote text goes here. ↩
In Oliver Twist, Dickens mixes grim realism with merciless satire to describe the effects of industrialism on 19th-century England and to criticise the harsh new Poor Laws. Oliver, an innocent child, is trapped in a world where his only options seem to be the workhouse, a life of crime symbolised by Fagin’s gang, a prison, or an early grave. From this unpromising industrial/institutional setting, however, a fairy tale also emerges. In the midst of corruption and degradation, the essentially passive Oliver remains pure-hearted; he steers away from evil when those around him give in to it, and in proper fairy-tale fashion, he eventually receives his reward - leaving for a peaceful life in the country, surrounded by kind friends. On the way to this happy ending, Dickens explores the kind of life an outcast, orphan boy could expect to lead in 1830s London
Nancy, by contrast, redeems herself at the cost of her own life and dies in a prayerful pose. She is one of the few characters in Oliver Twist to display much ambivalence. Her storyline in the novel strongly reflects themes of domestic violence and psychological abuse at the hands of Bill. Although Nancy is a full-fledged criminal, indoctrinated and trained by Fagin since childhood, she retains enough empathy to repent her role in Oliver’s kidnapping, and to take steps to try to atone. As one of Fagin’s victims, corrupted but not yet morally dead, she gives eloquent voice to the horrors of the old man’s little criminal empire. She wants to save Oliver from a similar fate; at the same time, she recoils from the idea of turning traitor, especially to Bill Sikes, whom she loves. When Dickens was later criticised for giving to a “thieving, whoring slut of the streets” such an unaccountable reversal of character, he ascribed her change of heart to “the last fair drop of water at the bottom of a dried-up, weed-choked well”.
At the end of the day, the movie symbolizes the Golden Rule:
When dealing with the huge pressure of meeting deadlines or attaining shareholder profitability targets, in most cases, the Golden Rule tends to be forgotten by employers. In this respect, business leaders need to stop putting corporate priorities and greed above the needs of employees. I am not arguing for an end of profit, but to prevent businesses from profiting from employee harm and potential exploitation. Profits should be a product of an organisation’s purpose, but not the purpose of the organisation.
”Great leaders are willing to sacrifice the numbers to save the people” (Simon Sinek)
Just copy the embed code from YouTube or other platforms, and paste it in the markdown file.
---
-title: Include Video in the Post
-published: 2023-10-19
-// ...
----
-
-<iframe width="100%" height="468" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5gIf0_xpFPI?si=N1WTorLKL0uwLsU_" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
-