Arriving at the housing estate where our accommodation is located our hosts Josh and his partner Yada arrive with some supplies to sustain us a night before helping us search out the exact apartment we're staying in and joining us a brief moment of socialisation before bed.

Eva and Pekko have never met him or Yada before but myself and Ome have a good idea of what to expect. The warm greetings turn into priming for the week and in comes the Sunday shock to clear some space for the rest of the week; an aggressive disregard of concepts lacking an agreed upon convention.

This change of temperature felt a little shocking but foundational context was getting set; we know only what we've been informed of and frankly much of that is nonsense. Josh demolishes any remotely abstract ideas that surface and proceeds to inform us about linguistic systems; the etymology and origins of the grammar we were using etc. - old territory for myself and Ome but foundational stuff. We retire for bed at around 1am on these notes.

You might say that Monday was largely an 'informal practice' of confronting Josh and trying to defend our ignorance - all the while being blatantly told of his meta-game ("domination") and the playing field ("with words I create"). This is largely apparent to me, so I take a back seat in order learn from the interactions of others attempting to share opinions and information... and Josh's vigilant rebuttal of their predications!

The style was certainly argumentative, but he gesture, form and delivery were all pretty considerate; in case we were to forget the game Josh was repeatedly informing us that words are tools and the intention behind their use is what really matters... don't bloody forget, its important!

Throughout the game he would often explicate things like "I'm the emperor wearing no clothes" or "I'm overtly playing in the mud to demonstrate what your up against in this world", just in case there was any confusion around motives... which of course happened at times!

Despite these paradoxes, I found Josh pretty congruent in enacting his philosophy and despite his unrelenting 'attacks' on unsubstantiated opinion, the gestures made were consistently kind hearted. What a brilliantly controversial character! Heresy!

We spent most of this first day in discussion while moving between various locations in the grounds (coffee, lunch, walks etc.). Like the night before he was  trying to set foundational context about knowledge itself, for the sake of convention... Metalinguistics right?

While sitting for coffee we encapsulated "what knowledge is" as five categories; synthesised information that is:

For me this definition validated well through the geometric epistemology I use for 'cognitive security'. The same can be said regarding a 'dispute of predication':

The conversation then turns to understanding; for which Josh provides a triad of triads to outline the dynamics:

Quite a deal was transmitted through our interactions and there were many gems; philosophical fragments of all sorts. Our conversation on knowledge and understanding moves us on to the study of deontology;

The Deontic square being:

The Deontic Star of:

• Deitic reference (here / now)
• Message (poetics)
• Channel (phatic function)
• Code (meta linguistic)
• Speaker (Locutory expressive/denotive function)
• Reciever (connotive function)

Types of reasoning:

Cognitive progression:

Later on in the evening Moritz arrives from the airport just in time for dinner, Yada after just having picked him up; he seems a bit apprehensive so Josh greets him with an introductory statement along the lines "you look tense, is everything ok?". There's a little dance of getting to know each other for a bit and to my senses Moritz feels cautious of the scenario, choosing to remain aloof while hanging back on his chair but they are both civil and accommodating.

Tuesday feels like there's a degree of polarity in the air; Ome's working most of the day, Moritz is on the couch next to him making use of his phone, Eva has occupied herself cooking lunch, while myself and Pekko dig around in a number of subjects like technology, morality, eschatology, ontology, definitions, semiotics and so on. - yes I'm defending a hopeful future of the third horizon.

After lunch we head for a brief walk down to the church before returning to the porch for coffee in order to continue our discussions. Somewhere along the line a confrontation between Moritz and Josh emerges; for the former it's an attempt at heart to heart interaction, for the latter it's a demonstrative opportunity...

Moritz seems to want to build personal rapport before a meaningful engagement with Josh can emerge, but the latter playing things pretty formally. Without this foundational rapport Moritz fells unwilling to be led (or spoken over) and decides it's time to try a new approach. Josh on the other hand is also unwilling to let anyone lead the conversation or be spoken over and consequently the pair get quite animated as they spar for their preferential operating conditions!

This uncompromising interaction is fascinating; as shits hitting the fan, I'm busy contemplating a mnemonic of the five speech acts that myself and Ome previously learnt from Josh on a prior visit (thumb: affirmation, index: accusation, middle: demonstration, ring: declaration and pinky: commisives). I practice identifying these modalities in real time and signal my interpretation to Ome with hand gestures - though he's unfortunately forgotten the learnt convention. As far as I can tell Moritz seems primarily in the accusative and declarative modalities; while Josh seems deeply engaged in enacting the demonstrative modality...

This act builds into utter absurdity by the time Josh gets round to addressing egoic drivers (which may or may not have originated from an accusation); by loudly assuring Moritz "my ego is bigger than yours" and repeating "MY EGO IS BIGGER THAN YOURS" in response to any interjections...

This leads to them both standing up and Josh gently demonstrates an energy exchange - 'the action, passion and force' - on Moritz's person... before reassuring that "It's all love Moritz, look it's all love, I mean you no harm" and showering him with hugs in the process.

This switch of modality (into comissives) diffuses the situation as no one can take the interaction seriously at this point, they both sit down again and we continue with relatively peaceful interactions as Ome and Eva head off for a walk.

My theory is that this exceptionally odd dance was an opportunity for embodied demonstration; movement from patterning into potential for the purpose of retro-causal theoretical dissection. My own speculations aside, this is the first triad which landed in my notes directly after; assumedly related to the field of 'Pragmatics':

Related to the demonstration followed the dyadic articulation 'Energy':

Followed by the triad of Transitive energy:

And Intransitive energy:

From the subject of energy we then moved into Rhetoric:

• Essence: Convincing through the senses.
• Existence: Convincing through reason.

The three branches of Rhetoric being:

The dynamics of these branches being:

And the Rhetorical field of action being:

Later in the evening Josh recommends we take a break from discussion and watch something together on the porch; "a brave new world" by Ardous Huxley... This is far more entertaining than expected and seems to have a number of pretty cynical undertones to it; though it would seem that Huxley was seeing pretty clearly having cleansed his 'doors of perception'.

About a third of the way through the film Josh suggests we turn the movie off. I'm pretty engaged with it but others apparently less so; I can sense that something's brewing just before Moritz decides to share some videos he sent me before.

Having already seen these videos and noting a glimmer in Josh's eyes, I decide to get the hell out of dodge. Yep, further confrontations; these offerings are nonsense, bullshit and ideological etc. - Josh is generally poking Moritz to defend his subjective sensibilities. I've died on this front line a few times already so I let the demonstration play out by walking off to throw sticks for the dog's... who are barking at a hedgehog.

Wednesday we hang out around our breakfast table sharing a little about our various backgrounds before heading over for lunch with Josh and Yada at around 2pm. Eva and Yada have done all the cooking thus far so I offer to throw a quick pasta salad together and let them chill out while others also tend to their devices. Josh and Yada have already eaten and the former is looking rather tired today which enables us to continue at a more chilled out pace.

There's enough of a breather for me to hang out on the couch for a bit, so I take the time to frame the eight attributes of ontology in an octad; a real diamond in the rough! According to Josh, the eight components of ontology that are covalent and coexistent 'en sino' (at once) are:

Having taken a brief walk down to the church and back, I show him the mandala over coffee; which brings us into other related fragments - the correspondence between predication and attribution, and further linking back to the triad of quality, quantity and modality.

From here we get into epistemology a little; the correspondence between reason and judgement, and the triad of deductive, inductive and adductive reasoning and so forth; yes - a systematic set is really starting to emerge!

Before I could figure out the full systematics of these topics however, we'd switched to reasoning and the "six types of question"; I'm not actually sure that "types" was accurate terminology as they were more "genus" but the hexadic geometry held together reasonably well:

Next to this is an already known pentad of questions; which seem more appropriately termed as "species" (for whom being the predicate):

The conversation was fragmented, so we move on to Truth as the triad of:

My notes indicate that we briefly moved back to deictics for a moment before traversing the conversational graph onwards; in particular Josh took a moment to explain the following triad of "speech acts":

• Locutionary (physical and grammatical aspects that convey literal meaning)
• Illocutionary (communicative function concerned with speakers purpose)
• Perlocutionary (impact, effect or outcome of speakers words on audience)

Before we moved back to reason or "where are you coming from?":

Usually constructed through logical syllogism:

At this juncture I notice a possible link between syllogism usually being a form of deductive reason - though it seems that there can be six permutations of a syllogisms layout - which opens up an interesting space for exploration.

For instance does the order of conclusion, minor, major result in abductive reasoning? I'll need to do some experiments to determine the implications... but I can imagine that starting with a conclusion, arguing a minor and ending on the major may well correlate with 'absurdist' reasoning...

The last triad of the day sees to be around etymology; prefix (head), radicle (body), and suffix (tail). I'm not entirely sure how this fitted in with the conversation but is still good to know. This is actually the last set of records in my notebook, though there were many more discussions and interactions centred around previously covered material.

I seem to remember Thursday being a fairly calm day with Josh and Yada turning up at our place in the afternoon for lunch before taking Moritz to the airport.

During a coffee session conversation turns to the term 'love'. Josh exclaims "Love; oh, don't get me started on THAT word - the use of the term is so wide that it encompasses the entire fucking universe"... though this aligns with his philosophy regarding the use of words to alter reality, it's somewhat telling that his dog is called "Eros".

While he's driving the point home I add some more controversy to the mix; that 'love' and 'narcissism' are two sides of the same coin. The former being open and free, the latter being a possessive or expectant variety.

On Friday, Yada is kind enough to lend us their car for a group excursion and we head into Olbia town for dinner together. Parking is quite the difficulty as there are many hungry drivers in search of a space; sharks cruising around the lot, cutting in on each other and blocking out spots as they become available. The locals have quite the plurality of parking strategies!

We return their car on Saturday afternoon, before having lunch together in the hosting space which is to be followed by a loooooong walk up the mountain. I'm offered an LSD cookie but once again psychedelics are not calling me despite everyone else indulging; I'm becoming quite the trip sitter!

This hike up the mountains leads us through all kinds of beautiful scenery, stopping at an old church ground before continuing up to the pinnacle our journeys most aesthetic view. Returning down the mountain (much quicker than when we climbed) we pass Yada in the car who's off to get some of the tastiest potatoes I've ever eaten and some pizza as additional nourishment.

Josh shares a recording called the 'Art of Fugue' over dinner which opens the door for a youtube music night; theres a journey through some gospel music with the same chord progression as 'Up on Cripple Creek' by The Band, 'Sympathy for the Devil', 'Man of Constant Sorrow', 'Father Son' by Cat Stevens, and so on - theres even a bit of dancing!

Before leaving for the evening Josh wishes to demonstrate his metagame one last time via the analogy of pool; thinking ahead about positioning seemed to be the main point but also other players / balls blocking the way, spin and how quantity effects quality.

The next morning, we're picked up around 12am and Pekko's delivered with verbal shock about an hour before he's taken to the Airport; Eva goes along as well to say goodbye as they seem to have become pretty close. The rest of us take it slow for the day and chill out - including Eva upon her return.

Josh seems to be celebrating a 'perfect game', an inference indicated by the classical music and fresh white shirt, worn as if to imply that he "played in the muck and didn't even get dirty"!

After Pekko and Eva depart, Ome leaves for a solitary wander while I continue to quiz Josh on various points that arose over the week in order to fill in any blanks. Eva returns and sits with us, at some point informs me that I'm "doing great"... possibly because my interactions with Josh are nearly entirely non-adverserial (so somewhat exceptional) and have lead to some reasonably constructive conversation!

Ome comes back from his walk before heading for another with Eva as I hang back with Josh and smoke some CBD he kindly offers. This is the first time we're actually alone together which is a shift from previous days; theres a sense of relaxation to our conversation - probably he's also let go of teacher mode and I'm acting pretty parsimonious with my words.

There's a stillness between us which seems to make him slightly uncomfortable or perhaps even slightly anxious. He brings me in to watch some videos from a channel called "Babylon decoded" which is hosted by a pretty authentic Swiss Rastafarian. Conversation has moved into a more personal modality and I sense some concern about the world his daughter is embedded in so reassure Josh that there is still plenty of hope in the present moment; despite a mess the might appear pretty intractable!

Ome and Eva return and we take the latter to the ferry; I stretch out from all the sitting while goodbyes are shared. After this we walk around Olbia for some people watching and a tour of social hotspots. We stop for drinks and pizza at the spot where Josh and Yada met before returning for the night; our AirBnB is gone at this point, along with the others so myself and Ome are permitted to stay in the guest house.

The next morning we wake up for coffee and some final conversation before Josh and Yada drop us at the airport. I give them both hugs and before a depart by blowing a raspberry; a convention he joked about several times during the week - addios amigo, the lessons are much appreciated!

Finally, before taking off, myself and Ome share a few minutes of retrospective before he leaves through security and I search out some food to "fill a gap". It's a long travel home via Tolouse and I land back in Lisbon around midnight, grateful to stop traveling at long last!

Here ends the adventures of 2023!

Onwards, Ad Astra! ✨

Gallery of Faces: