"The mountains are calling and I must go."  John Muir
                GAYLE DEAN                
Individualist, Philosopher, Cruciverbalist,  Animal-Rights Advocate, Outdoorswoman
Animal Lover
Outdoorswoman
Buddhist-flavored Individualist
Philosopher
Cruciverbalist
"We have to believe in free-will. 
We've got no choice."  
Isaac Bashevis Singer
"The Universe has favored patterns", said the Avatar.
From "The Religion War" by Scott Adams
"Man is obviously made for thinking.  Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his sole duty is to think as he ought."  Blaise Pascal
"But for the sake of some little mouthful of flesh we deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy."--  Plutarch, Moralia --"The Eating of Animal Flesh"
Chattooga River, S.C.  National Wild& Scenic River

PHILOSOPHER

Even though my work as a crossword constructor is a real brain-drain, my favorite pastime is to think some more -- but, this time, about philosophy.  I enjoy writing long esoteric essays, which usually take the form of logical arguments about all sorts of philosophical issues. I love to argue about almost anything --but I like consistency.  What better way to sort it all out than to argue about it? Internet discussion lists are also a good forum for this and I have posted some of my philosophical thoughts and debates from these fora --on issues such as personal identity, concepts, determinism & free-will, animal rights, cognition, and the nature of evil at the appropriate sections on this site.

If you really believe you have free-will, you should watch this short clip: www.youtube.com/watch

My philosophical interests include epistemology, moral theory, logic, and philosophy of mind, to start.  From there I take the short hop to related areas of neuroscience and physics, artificial intelligence, loop quantum gravity, posthumanism, theories about time and space,  human and animal consciousness, evolutionary-psychology, and evolutionary-germ-theory. Visit my Philosophy page here.

Could we really be living in a computer simulation as Nick Bostrom, Dept. of Philosophy, Oxford University argues here and here?

Sigh! Too much to do, too little time!  As a member of a species of information-gathering machines, I'm awaiting the day when I can download all the computer data directly through the brain-socket.  Reading books has its aesthetic rewards, but it is just too time-consuming for efficient information-gathering in finite beings like us. 

CRUCIVERBALIST 
                         
Gayle Dean lives with her husband and two rescue dogs- Beege and Rusty on filosofer's farm where she constructs crossword puzzles for all the major publications.  Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post Magazine, U.S.A. Today, The L.A. Times, Simon & Schuster books, Dell Puzzle Magazines, Crosswords for Dummies series, Book of the Month Club books, Tribune Media Services, and Universal Press syndicated websites, among others.  Gayle's puzzle books Wordplay Crosswords vols. 1&2 were published by Merriam-Webster.

In addition to creating challenging puzzles -meticulously crafted- Gayle is known for her clever wordplay.  Bo Peep's Antiques?  (SHEEPENDALE FURNITURE).  Let the Sturgeon Beware?  (CAVIAR EMPTOR)  Bo Peep's Snack?   (CHOCOLATE SHEEP COOKIES). Gayle's ridiculous anagrams delight solvers and editors alike! Who wouldn't drool for a bowl of her Sedate Seafood Stew?  (CALM CHOWDER). 

Touring the world anagrammatically, where would you:
1.  Ride An UNREAL KITTY BUS? 
2.  Dine on the National Dish SMOKED STENCH OWL?
    (answers)

Recently one of my puzzles, which had previously been published in the N.Y. Times was chosen by Will Shortz, the Times' editor, to appear in his new book Will Shortz's "Favorite Crossword Puzzles".  In the introduction Shortz says that he chose the 75 favorites for his collection from over 2600 daily puzzles that he had edited for the Times during his 8 1/2 year reign. Quite an honor to have one of my puzzles there!  Visit my Puzzle Page
ANIMAL LOVER

While studying the age-old philosophical questions surrounding free-will and determinism, I was inevitably led to areas of cognition and consciousness.  It is obvious that the intellect exists along a continuum in animals.  Non-human animals have complex minds and are capable of abstract reasoning- they experience many of the same emotions that humans experience -- they feel, they love, they fear, and they experience pleasure and suffer pain. They have rich lives of their own, have their own projects, and are not ours to be used for our own selfish and trivial ends! 

Farm animals in America are treated as nothing more than commodities on today's factory farms where they are subjected to horrendous pain and suffering their entire lives, before finally being inhumanely slaughtered. Over ten billion animals are "processed" into food each year by factory farms, whose assembly-line production necessarily means torture and suffering for the animals.The sole purpose for these mega-corporations is to maximize profits and animal abuse  helps maximize profits.

As Matthew Scully says,  "Factory farming is a predatory enterprise, absorbing profit and externalizing costs, unnaturally propped up by political influence and government subsidies much as factory-farmed animals are unnaturally sustained by hormones and antibiotics." 

Everyone should make a conscious decision to stop contributing to unnecessary suffering and harm. Give up eating meat! You'll be healthier, too!  Satisfying one's trivial gustatory pleasures is not a good reason to torture animals. 

OUTDOORSWOMAN

The perfect balance to all the mental exertion of creating crossword puzzles and philosophizing is my avocation as an outdoorsperson. I worked for many years as an American Canoe Association whitewater instructor and river guide, leading outdoor adventure trips in the Great Smoky Mountains of N.C. and on the big whitewater rivers of the southeast:  the Ocoee and Nolichucky in Tennessee, the  Nantahala and French Broad in N.C. and the Chattooga in S.C/Ga.  The Chattooga is the beautiful National Wild and Scenic River made famous by the movie "Deliverance". 

I've traveled extensively throughout the world, paddled hundreds of rivers in several countries, mountain-biked and hiked thousands of miles of trails in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and hiked and camped in some of the most beautiful, pristine, and isolated spots on the planet. Those wild places are rapidly disappearing under pressures from over-population and consumerist demand for stuff.  People are rapidly losing touch with nature and --in the process--losing touch with themselves.  I try to stay in touch with both.

When I am not doing mental gymnastics at my desk, relaxing with a good book, or playing speed chess with friends, you can probably find me paddling my canoe on a scenic lake or hiking a wilderness trail.

Visit my Outdoorswoman Page for more...
Bull Sluice Rapid (Class 5) Section III Chattooga .
Entrance Rapid Section (Class 3) Section IV on                        the Chattooga.

 

 

INDIVIDUALIST


When I came into the world, doctors say I was crying "Who is John Galt?" and that was years before I ever heard of Ayn Rand.  As a teen, I read Atlas Shrugged and began a systematic study of her other work. Rand got a lot right-- and a lot wrong.. A confounding factor in my view is that I lived for about 15 years among a wonderful group of Zen Buddhists, whose ideas weigh heavily upon me, and my philosophical views continue to evolve.  I think of myself as a liberal-minded, socially responsible, individualist, with a highly seasoned Buddhist flavoring.  I'm sympathetic to Left-Libertarianism, and while there's still a small corner of my mind that thinks pure free-markets could work if the world were full of perfectly rational people -- unfortunately, rational people are few and far between.  The situation we find ourselves in today, i.e., corrupt corporations in bed with corrupt politicians and a corrupt government trying to take over the world -- is NOT desirable!

I still believe that many of Rand's fundamental premises about individualism are correct, but, many of her conclusions didn't follow. She was not well-informed about psychology and this caused her to veer off course in several ways. It seems clear- logically- that egoism and rights conflict, that her concept of limited government, is itself, a violation of rights, and that there are major problems with her view of volitional free-will and the nature of evil.
 
On a philosophical note, I agree with Socrates (and Buddha) that no man knowingly does evil (corruption notwithstanding), with Darwin that the intellect exists on a continuum between mammals, and with physics, which may indicate that although quantum mechanics is correct, the universe is, never-the-less, determined.  Could a many-worlds-theory or Bostrum's simulated world account for that?

"I'd rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion."  Thoreau
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Updated Sunday June 19, 2011
"The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest."  Thoreau
One cannot eat meat and still call oneself an environmentalist!

According to a 400 page a recent UN report: Livestock's Long Shadow, livestock are responsible for 18 per cent of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together."


 

 
Junie R.I.P.
Janary 10, 1993-August 2, 2008