User:Tastyummy

IMPORTANT
Please do not edit this page.

This is a new update as of St. Paddy's 2009. Anyone may still contact me at tastyummy@hotmail.com about any wiki-related or other issues.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -Francis Bacon

Beauty is only possible in imperfection. -Me

Miscellaneous information about this user
Please feel free to email me at tastyummy@hotmail.com for any good reason (you be the judge!).

My name is Alex Olsen and I live in Tallahassee, Florida.

I'm relatively inexperienced at writing and editing Wikipedia articles, but I love Wikipedia and have relied on it almost constantly for (relatively) neutral and up-to-date information on a great variety of subjects since my first visit to the site. I'm not new to writing or editing in general; I scored a perfect 800 on the writing section of the old SAT, and my scores on the writing and critical reading sections of the new SAT were perfect as well. Unfortunately, I can offer no other credentials, as I am currently only in my freshman year at Florida State University. But an argument from authority is never a sound argument anyway; it is presented here only in defense of my own corrections of various grammatical errors, since they've been attacked in the past in various, in sundry, and, above all, largely in unproductive ways.

I intend to contribute to Wikipedia by doing as many minor edits for grammar, usage, and the like as I possibly and practically can, as well as by writing new articles on the few subjects I know well, and, probably more rarely, doing larger edits of articles that need them. I appreciate any comments on, or criticism of, my work on my user talk page; as I say, I love Wikipedia and the last thing I want to do is screw it up.

I firmly believe that church and state should be entirely separate-- meaning that no religious organization should be allowed a tax-exempt status unless I can personally found such a tax-exempt "religion" in my apartment with only me as a member; any other policy necessarily constitutes favoritism toward certain religions, or against a lack thereof, in government, which is a clear breach of our constitution.

I share my modest apartment with my cat, Lila.

I am a musician and, more specifically, a composer who uses computer software to create music. The following is a sample of my musical work; I used computer software to write and synthesize it a couple of years ago. I hereby release it publicly for any and all use as long as I, Alex Olsen, am cited as its composer during such use: [just a little song I wrote.] I am now learning to play the keyboard as well.

I am a long-time student of philosophy and, more importantly, I live by it and am addicted to debate; I'm not as widely-read as I wish I were, but I've read most of Nietzsche's work many times and consider myself to be quite well-informed on his views, although my own views are not purely Nietzschean. I have also studied several works by Freud, and some by Schopenhauer, Kant, Sartre, Camus, and various other (mostly continental) philosophers, as well as most of the standard old-Greek favorites; I also read philosophy-related articles on Wikipedia whenever original writings are unavailable to me (i.e., regularly). I have been told that my own work seems similar to Foucault's, although I have only very recently begun to read his, so I can't call myself Foucaultian either.

I am especially impressed with some of Nietzsche's assertions' precursion of various aspects of the scientific method: for example, Nietzsche's assertion, "that a theory is refutable is, frankly, not the least of its charms: this is precisely how it attracts the more refined intellects" (from Beyond Good and Evil, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy edition) approximates Karl Popper's view that a theory is scientific to the extent that it is falsifiable.

In what I am now very glad to call the past, my work focused on ethical and existential philosophy with an emphasis on the problems of nihilism and suicide. I next worked on ontology, linguistic systems, and indeterminacy as they relate to the philosophy of consciousness. Currently, I am studying set theory, and I am particularly interested in the work of Thomas Jech, Akihiro Kanamori, Saharon Shelah, Solomon Fefferman, Stephen Simpson, Itay Neeman, and W. Hugh Woodin at the moment. I'll write more on current studies and an update of my current philosophical interests and positions later; some of this text is still recycled from a years-old version of this page as of today's edit.

Anti-Psychiatry
The following section was written years ago and is in need of an update to reflect my current (St. Paddy's 2009) views on philosophy, psychology, ontology, Nietzsche and Kant, et cetera, but for now here is a bit for those interested: (I will fill this page with interesting writing again soon if I can get that "interesting" part to happen! :)

As is obviously evidenced above, I am a proponent of various aspects of "the anti-psychiatry movement". That a society invents various "disorders" of the mind evidences its faith in (that is, its invention of) a fundamental "order" of the mind-- in other words, its assumption of the existence of an ideal mind in the Platonic sense-- and Plato's Ideas were reduced to the unknowable noumenon by Kant, which in turn was shown not to be possible by Nietzsche and, more importantly, which, along with Platonic ideas in general, can never be shown to exist independently of the "phenomenon" via scientific experimentation.