Nick Samoylov, programmer and writer

why classical music is not as popular as some other music genres? Well, many classical venues are packed, but pop music is called so for the reason – it IS most popular.

Everything is moving and changing all the time. Why? What drives the change?

We come to this world and assume it to be a stable one, with clear binary classification. Then one reads Wittgenstein or something similar and discovered the lies at the foundation of their world view. Then what?

He was unusual in his ways of life and thinking. His strangeness attracted attention, along with his prophetic literary style. Such a style requires an interpretation and, naturally, the reader comes with the interpretation that makes sense to them. The reader becomes a co-author.

A tragedy “helps” to look deeper. It is hard, but strips from stereotypes and preconceived patterns (expectations). Maybe that’s why it was the first theatric form developed by Ancient Greeks. We all experience problems, but very few of us get them as many and as deep as Wittgenstein.

Pattern recognition and automatic decision making create a foundation for our third activity of explaining (rationalizing) our decisions and whatever we observe – all the time, never pausing. Most of this third activity is done automatically too. Yet some of it we do consciously, sometimes with great effort, trying to “understand” – to discover the […]

A human, even in doubt, finds a way to make a decision, may be based just on the liking the instructor or not. Or on using some kind of moral principles. Or just from sheer compassion. Such irrational decision making apparently was beneficial, since human species managed to survive so far. This means that our […]

The change of the view on the language – from modeling structure to reflecting usage – was the primary motivation for Wittgenstein to write his second book Philosophical Investigations, where he introduced the notion of “language games”. He now states that the meaning of a word or even a sentence comes from the context of […]

Abraham Kaplan made an observation in his book The Conduct of Inquiry (1964): “In addition to the social pressures from the scientific community there is also at work a very human trait of individual scientist. I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a […]

If we try to talk about inexpressible – which goes beyond the language capacity – like philosophy does, in Wittgenstein’s view – we begin fighting non-existing problems and just waste time. That’s how Wittgenstein was able to claim that he solved all philosophical problems – by dismissing the alleged problems as nonsensical – made-up problems.