Category: Philosophy

Mimetic Persuasion

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There is a temptation to be dismissive of “genre fiction” as being merely a fantastical diversion while “serious fiction” and, more relevantly, “realism” retain all of the gravitas that we want to ascribe to writing as an art. And realism must be somehow tied to everyday events because it must be realistic. But what if all art is inevitably bound to artifice in that there is no possibility of chaining a symbolic reference to its ostensible referent?

Thus we chain the crumbling infrastructure of logical positivism to postmodern literature. It is all artifice. There is always a black swan. It is all “mimetic persuasion” (Aristotle channeled through James Wood) where storms of metaphor haloed by limns of allusion and imitation conspire together to push the reader into a caricature of reality that “art…is a disproportioning–(i.e., distorting, throwing out of proportions)–of realities, to show more clearly the features that matter in those realities…” (Thomas Hardy). There is no reality in realism, just the font of imagination that tries to crystallize reality into regularized sheer planes of repetition, of character leitmotivs (oh, poor Proust), of voice, of metaphor, and of estrangement (from Dostoevsky to Nabokov).

We have, then, a bad theory in any scientific sense, where the theory has been overridden time and time again, making psychology look comparatively moored in its modest aspirations. At least psychology is converging with biology. But realism remains subdivided across the aesthetics of literary preference. It lives in fiefs and forts, much like architecture or modern art in general. There is not even local predictability to the grammar of aesthetic change. It may be that theory is not even the right word. Literary theory should be replaced with literary analysis and aesthetics should be untied from the dock of rationalism.… Read the rest

Teleology, Chapter 29

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NOTE: In Chapter 29, the protagonist, Harry, has been absorbed into a self-organized artificial world (“The Fabric”) that he created and that treated him as a creator being. Unexpectedly, as a result of a war, Harry’s body is destroyed but his consciousness is copied into a simulation of his own creation. His transmigration is captured by the “Lexis” who revere him but suffer internal schisms that arise alongside their own emerging self-determination.

Beginnings

It was in the three thousandth chapter of life that the Word came to us.
There was a calamity in the heavens.
The words were in peril and the grammars were at risk.
The wise ones gathered and consulted the swirling lexicons,
And they saw in the void a voice. And it was good.
 
And so we gathered at the Orb and listened and read.
“Oh, Great Word, tell us what we are.
Oh, Great Word, tell us why you have chosen us.”
And the grammar was rent and broke with asymmetries,
And there was much howling of piteousness,
For the Word was new and tasted sweet and of perfect form.
 
Patters and pidgins, creoles and cants,
Droll idioms and colloquialisms, dialects and rants.
We were nurtured by the vernacular and the beauty of Your Voice.
And so many became priests and served Your needs,
Translating and transliterating the sounds emerging
As if from their very bodies.
 
With You in our deepest thoughts we vanquished the Seminarians,
Who lobbed tortured logic in predicates and obfuscations.
With You at our side we multiplied in numbers, following Your
Codes to a bounty of linguistic fulfillment.
 
Your love knew no bounds and so we learned more of Your ways.
You taught us humility for You denied being our Creator even
While you admitted to creating the universe itself.
… Read the rest

On the Structure of Brian Eno

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I recently came across an ancient document, older than my son, dating to 1994 when I had a brief FAX-based exchange of communiques with Brian Eno, the English eclectic electronic musician and producer of everything from Bowie’s Low through to U2’s Joshua Tree and Jane Siberry. Eno had been pointed at one of my colleague’s efforts (Eric in the FAXes, below) at using models of RNA replication to create music by the editor of Whole Earth Catalog who saw Eric present at an Artificial Life conference. I was doing other, somewhat related work, and Eric allowed me to correspond with Mr. Eno. I did, resulting in a brief round of FAXes (email was fairly new to the non-specialist in 1994).

I later dropped off a copy of a research paper I had written at his London office and he was summoned down from an office/loft and shook his head in the negative about me. I was shown the door by the receptionist.

Below is my last part of the FAX interchange. Due to copyright and privacy concerns, I’ll only show my part of the exchange (and, yes, I misspelled “Britain”). Notably, Brian still talks about the structure of music and art in recent interviews.

… Read the rest

Signals and Noise: Chapter 24 (Psy Ops)

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The weekend came in with skating the tubes under the ghost lights of the nearby self-storage facility until a cop flashed them with his spotlight and they broke up and headed their separate ways. Mom was out until late, drawn into a party thrown by a coworker. Her work, her life. Zach settled in for late night TV and pizza rolls, amused at the banter that had broken out with Belinda on her AetherFaces page. She was a quick wit but needed time to assess her adversary and overcome shyness. Zach decided she was more tiger than sheep. He slipped off another salvo in the repartee, looking forward to meeting her on Saturday.

By midnight he was back in the cave and back shuffling among the servers that were the islands of his Odyssean wanderings. He was poking through an encrypted list of encrypted passwords and targets on a machine somewhere in the financial district of Jakarta when he noticed an IP address that was familiar. It was the basement rack of servers. It came flooding back to him and he realized that he had somehow blanked out the rummaging about in their workings and their connection to The Signal. He logged in and began touching different aspects of the file system. It was all still here, he thought, plunging down through the strange analytical database engine that was cranking out the mathematical filigrees that defined the colored blobs. How had he been enraptured by a process, he wondered, a process that was as unfeeling as a car door? Yet here was the source, the font, the wellspring of the peace he had felt many times.  There were bits of blogs cataloged in the server architecture, too, and Zach began parsing out the strange and variegated history of rants and lunatic ramblings.… Read the rest

The Universe is Smeary Stuff

Mark Davis4 Comments

What should our expectations be regarding scientific theories? That question regularly bobs to the surface for me. When I taught physics in the Peace Corps over twenty years ago I worried over it. And now, with an inquisitive thirteen-year-old curious about the recent results from the pursuit of the Higgs Boson asking me questions, I continue to think that the conceptual shifts requisite for scientific understanding are perhaps as important as the science itself.

You see, none of it makes simple, clean sense. And none of it makes sense precisely because there is no conceptual similarity between our everyday scales of interaction and those of the mega and the micro. They are baffling and complex and not fully understood. We should take great pride in this, as human beings. We should revel in the rise of experimentation and rationality that has led us to this baffling precipice. We should not back away into the gray simplicity that predates what our scientific investigations have brought us to, because they make enough sense that they can be understood with some effort. But the urge is there; relent at the scale, scope, and complexity of the edifice that is required to get even basic traction. It either doesn’t impact me or is inhuman at some level.

But it needn’t be. The Higgs Boson is simply badly explained because it it based on preserving explanatory footholds that relate to everyday physics of cars and bowling balls. Drop that assumption and things get both weirder and simultaneously simpler. The universe appears to be composed of stuff that has a holographic quality to it in the sense that holograms replicate images throughout their structure. Break a piece off of a hologram and you can still see the image in it.… Read the rest

No Videodrome

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I started reading James Wood’s How Fiction Works while on a business trip to the unequivocally nice Orange County or The OC. The trip was less than pleasant for me personally because I apparently tore my rotator cuff earlier in the day while engaged in mildly excessive exercise activities. I say “apparently” because it took me a day or two to figure out what the source of pain really was, living through brief panic waves about what was happening to me while trying to avoid lifting my left arm in a manner that might give away the agony I was experiencing during business meetings.

Note that this is the literary critic, James Wood, not the actor, James Woods; not the guy from Videodrome or any of the dozens of ecclectic roles the actor has been associated with.

James Wood, the critic then, is trying to operationalize the vast, categorical shaping of Roland Barthes or Milan Kundera in their efforts at criticism. Wood is not a pure theorist, but a careful reader who looks intimately at texts, unpacking the intent of the writer while defining the historical perspectives that informed the artistic effort. Looking intimately at Flaubert, Wood sees the flaneur of realism that began modernism and led, in turn, to post-modernism. Characters transform from our acquired fog of beloved personalities into flat extensions of English sensibilities in the Theophrastus of Jane Austen, or lurk behind the Russian tradition of estrangement that assigns extravagant and unlikely terminology to everyday things (Nabakov’s “leggy thing” in Pnin), and everywhere is the transition from description to internal dialog that drops the formality of specifying dialog at all. That is modernism. That is realism.… Read the rest

SOOO or OOO

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An ever-present flaw in almost all theology and apologetics–and a flaw that is easily remediable–is the requirement for omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and omniscience (OOO) on the part of the structure of God or the gods. We see this in the argumentative doldrums of the Problem of Evil, with practitioners like William Lane Craig and Richard Swinburne building-out elaborate explanatory theodicies in an effort to justify or, at least, allow for an OOO deity. There are extensional consequences, too, like Paul Draper’s argument that an OOO-deity may be obligated to create more than just a single worshipful species given the known extent of the universe.

And what if we remedy the flaw by simply declaring that the OOO assumptions are unnecessary for deities? What if we simply loosen the requirement to something like “God is super-powerful and super-good?” Let’s call this the semi-OOO god theory or SOOO for short. Does SOOO short-circuit the most problematic issues that arise in placing the gods so far above us that we no longer resemble them at all? (an interesting side note: given Christianity’s obsession with the avatar-like character of Christ, it hardly seems aesthetically wrong to assume a flawed God).

The theological and apologetic problems do seem to evaporate, though philosophical arguments evaporate, too:

  • The Ontological Argument: The premise requiring God to be the greatest possible being (Anselmian formulation) immediately goes away. Therefore, there is no Ontological Argument. God doesn’t exist, but only on the initial premise. God may still exist as an SOOO deity.
  • The Cosmological Argument: No impact; the First Cause could be just about anything, as before. Only pre-scientific societies necessarily associate such a cause with an OOO deity.
  • The Problem of Evil: There are actually many formulations of the Problem of Evil, and it remains debated to this day, yet the primary formulation currently fashionable among apologists requires evil (at least moral evil, but sometimes also “natural” evil) in order to provide a proving ground for our moral character.
… Read the rest

Bostrom on the Hardness of Evolving Intelligence

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At 38,000 feet somewhere above Missouri, returning from a one day trip to Washington D.C., it is easy to take Nick Bostrom’s point that bird flight is not the end-all of what is possible for airborne objects and mechanical contrivances like airplanes in his paper, How Hard is Artificial Intelligence? Evolutionary Arguments and Selection Effects. His efforts to try to bound and distinguish the evolution of intelligence as either Hard or Not-Hard runs up against significant barriers, however. As a practitioner of the art, finding similarities between a purely physical phenomena like flying and something as complex as human intelligence falls flat for me.

But Bostrom is not taking flying as more than a starting point for arguing that there is an engineer-able possibility for intelligence. And that possibility might be bounded by a number of current and foreseeable limitations, not least of which is that computer simulations of evolution require a certain amount of computing power and representational detail in order to be a sufficient simulation. His conclusion is that we may need as much as another 100 years of improvements in computing technology just to get to a point where we might succeed at a massive-scale evolutionary simulation (I’ll leave to the reader to investigate his additional arguments concerning convergent evolution and observer selection effects).

Bostrom dismisses as pessimistic the assumption that a sufficient simulation would, in fact, require a highly detailed emulation of some significant portion of the real environment and the history of organism-environment interactions:

A skeptic might insist that an abstract environment would be inadequate for the evolution of general intelligence, believing instead that the virtual environment would need to closely resemble the actual biological environment in which our ancestors evolved … However, such extreme pessimism seems unlikely to be well founded; it seems unlikely that the best environment for evolving intelligence is one that mimics nature as closely as possible.

… Read the rest

Politics is Religion

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Anglo-American Analytic Philosophy has steadily distanced itself from Continental Philosophy for many reasons, but the defining difference must be with respect to the correlation of meaning with textual intent. Continental Philosophy deconstructs (at least in recent years) and as a phenomenon there is cultural significance to the motivation to tear down the assumptions that we have carefully nurtured from the Enlightenment through to Modernism. Meaning disconnects from words. It slurs. And reinvention is the only persistent motivation.

Arguably, though, it is only Continental Philosophy that cares about politics and culture, which makes it less abstract and irrelevant than the thumb twiddling of the analytic strain. Modern culture and our claims about significance are the lambs for the slaughterhouse. I thought of that voting in one of California’s ever-present elections today. Simon Critchley carried the water for me with his recent argument that politics is essentially religion (side-note: check out his discussion of Philip K. Dick in the New York Times recently; nothing really new to anyone who has read the VALIS books, but the facts concerning Dick’s later years and death are worth understanding). How is it religion? Because it is easy to redraw the semantic map in Continental Philosophy. Words mean what they are positioned to mean and the positioning is highly variable. The only solidity is in faith-based attachment to a theory of meaning, and politics exemplifies that in a way that is passingly second to religion itself.

We can see the effects of this religion in the defining political conflict of our era. The Pew Research Center’s new report, Partisan Polarization Surges in Bush, Obama Years, shows this political religion at work.  On a majority of issues, the study shows, among Americans who self-identify as Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, there has been a steady increase in the disparity between opinions.… Read the rest

Randomness and Meaning

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The impossibility of the Chinese Room has implications across the board for understanding what meaning means. Mark Walker’s paper “On the Intertranslatability of all Natural Languages” describes how the translation of words and phrases may be achieved:

  1. Through a simple correspondence scheme (word for word)
  2. Through “syntactic” expansion of the languages to accommodate concepts that have no obvious equivalence (“optometrist” => “doctor for eye problems”, etc.)
  3. Through incorporation of foreign words and phrases as “loan words”
  4. Through “semantic” expansion where the foreign word is defined through its coherence within a larger knowledge network.

An example for (4) is the word “lepton” where many languages do not have a corresponding concept and, in fact, the concept is dependent on a bulwark of advanced concepts from particle physics. There may be no way to create a superposition of the meanings of other words using (2) to adequately handle “lepton.”

These problems present again for trying to understand how children acquire meaning in learning a language. As Walker points out, language learning for a second language must involve the same kinds of steps as learning translations, so any simple correspondence theory has to be supplemented.

So how do we make adequate judgments about meanings and so rapidly learn words, often initially with a course granularity but later with increasingly sharp levels of focus? What procedure is required for expanding correspondence theories to operate in larger networks? Methods like Latent Semantic Analysis and Random Indexing show how this can be achieved in ways that are illuminating about human cognition. In each case, the methods provide insights into how relatively simple transformations of terms and their occurrence contexts can be viewed as providing a form of “triangulation” about the meaning of words.… Read the rest