Men and Women

A few weeks ago I was listening to radio national, and a woman was being interviewed about the essential differences between men and women. Her answers critiqued the work of a male scientist based in London who's name I can't recall but who had developed a test for mental male or femaleness.  Part of her critique was that according to his own test, more than half of women were actually in the middle - neutral.

I suggested to my wife that my theory was that the difference was that men are very conscious of a difference, while women are not.  She thought probably men and women were no different on that front.

Are people crazy?

Another Something is asking if women are crazy.  For fear of causing an outburst (heh heh), and also because I think its not isolated to women I want to discuss it as 'Are people crazy?' The original blog raising the issue is talking about some things specific to western christian women's culture, and with reference to contemporary christian teaching, but anxiety is pretty universal, and comes up a lot in existentialism (kierkegaard, nietzsche, heidegger) and the existentialist psychologist Rollo May (Love and Will, The Meaning of Anxiety).

Anxiety is often described as fear of something you can't name, a pervasive sense that things are not what they seem, are not right, and maybe your place in the world is different from what you are assuming it is.  It is a fear of world collapse, and invalidation of what you've made yourself in response to it.  There are a lot of things that can provoke it, but the more specific the problem, the less the experience is anxiety.  The anxiety that your child may die when he is in perfect health is a 'Anything could happen and who will I be then?' fear.  This anxiety is inescapable if you are going to be aware, conscious, open to the possibilities of the future, and open to the possibilities of yourself. But this anxiety is also a terrible state to live in.  It produces physical stress that makes you sick and shortens your life.

What is the right way to respond to this?
Kierkegaard says its best to be the Knight of Faith - to face the future with such confidence that psychologically you enjoy total security in it.  His example is Abraham, obediently planning to sacrifice Isaac, and yet telling his servants 'I and the boy will come back to you.'

Heidegger talks about anticipatory resoluteness - about investing in a self (a stand on your own being) that can withstand the things life can throw at you and leave you satisfied. The idea is to spend yourself on a project (be a teacher, be a provider) that will give you an identity in the face of anything life throws at you, and to pursue it with resolve. Heidegger thinks the problem of death, the possibility, has to be faced every moment - you proceed through life in a state he names 'dying'.

Hajime Tanabe reckons repentance is the go - to look at your life and say 'I have ruined my life, I am sinful and weak, through and through' and then hear that silence of the void, the great compassion of the end of accusation, allowing you to live on through the grace of 'other power'.

Rollo May suggests anxiety can be understood and interpreted and responded to with identity, with a self understanding and acceptance (but that base levels of anxiety are set in childhood, reflecting how reliable our parents were in their words and actions, and this makes sense - these are our first world and where we learn about how well we do with worlds).

You get a sense, though, that they are all talking about the same things.

Is living with anxiety sinful?  No, in a sense it is essential, because we are finite, contingent, liable to suffering of all kinds - we have been 'putting it up every day of our lives' and we do well to recognize it.  Perhaps what is sinful might be letting the anxiety go on uninterrogated and unanswered by faith.

Rump Humanity

There is a trope in science fiction that technological developments, having grown exponentially, will soon be growing too fast for almost any humans to contribute. Beyond this point there won't be any meaningful economic value you can assign to human life, because a very smart person and a programmable factory and an army of robots, nanomachines and what have you will easily outcompete human labour.  I believe Facebook employs about 1000 people, Twitter a few hundred. How many people work on Intel's design staff? Add in AMD and NVidia - and you still won't have 100,000. People are constantly being laid off from automotive manufacturing, but there are more cars every year.

This nerdy future is sometimes called the Singularity - the point at which technological development relative to human life span and learning capacity is effectively vertical, an infinite rate of growth.  This is the rapture for Nerds, when all-powerful computers and the few humans intelligent enough to remain useful shake off all the bonds of scarcity of time and space.

And those of us who are not that useful will be stuck as Rump Humanity, the non-contributing 99%. I know one, maybe two people who might escape being Rump Humanity, but the rest of us, alas will soon have little to offer the productive ones but what Homer Simpson has to offer Marge - 'complete and utter dependence.'

<frown>  Mmmmm....  That's not a good thing, Homer. <frown/>

Revolution & the construction of social reality

John Searle suggests a description of social organization in where the fundamental organising principle is collective intentionality articulated in declarations, essentially statements in the form of X counts as Y in context C (e.g. shells count as money on our island.  In this game, let's make it that you're the daddy and I'm the mummy...). I mention it because it was helpful in the following case:

There was a terribly stupid and uncivil article on the abc news web-site by Ted Lapkin, alleging that the American right's foreign policy in the Bush years is being vindicated in the 'awakening' revolts across the middle-east, and citing this as a terrible slap in the face for those who criticised America. It had a point in bashing the potential for relativism and philosophical hand-folding on the left, but it is hard to give any credibility to someone who views the Bush years as wise pursuit and accomplishment of the best available goals.

Thanks to John Searle I was able to pull my thoughts together:
The function of a democracy depends on personal commitment to its institutions by people. Such commitment cannot be imposed from without (as it can in authoritarian regimes), and to some extent, cannot be negotiated in a single rapid step, because it takes practice to build confidence. This is why Iraq and Afghanistan are making flakey democracies - people are not that committed to or comfortable with the institutions, and commitment and comfort are the stuff that makes institutions (not just voting and parliament, also rule of law, judges, policing, limited liability companies, etc etc).

The recent 'awakening' style popular revolutions are not the shining example of unity we would like to take them for, but they are firmly founded on commitment of the people who would have to make democracy work. If they get captured by some older institution, it's unfortunate, and possibly a case where the foreign powers could make a difference.

I think Ted's complaint is that the left is sometimes too invested in the way they think things actually are - 'Arabs don't believe most of the 'self-evident' enlightenment truths' they might say. The right is too invested in the way things 'theoretically' should be - according to their pet theories anyway - let's not have a lot of leftist theory about how much trouble we'll have making an ommelette when we can get on breaking eggs.

Where we both go wrong is when the background shifts unnoticed - when the huge bulge of young people have surprising new perspectives, synthesising their old world and the new.

Axecop

Nothing has amused me as much as Axecop for a very long time.  Axecop is exactly what you think a man should be when you are six, and the most recent 'Ask Axecop' strip is about Sockarang, probably the greatest second banana concept I have ever seen.  Please check it out.

Burgled!

We were burgled.  We lost a new and an old laptop, and our camera - it was pretty unpleasant, although they also left a lot of stuff alone.  But we've only been paying insurance since we owned our own home, about 8 months, and so the payout replacing our modest losses will be far more than the premiums we've paid in just yet.  As I see it, its like I went to the blackjack table and got a specific number paying 35:1 after only 8 tries. The question is whether to walk away an insurance winner now...  And the flaw in the reasoning is... I haven't anyway to stop being exposed to loss.

From No Country For Old Men:
Anton Shagur, remorseless killer, confronts the old man manning a service station and asks 'What's the most you ever won on a coin toss?'  After some exchanges the coin is tossed and the old man is asked to call.  Old man - 'What are we playing for?  What do I stand to win?'
Shagur - 'Everything.'
Old man - 'What do I stand to lose?'
Shagur - 'Everything.'
Old Man - 'But I never put anything up.'
Shagur - 'You've been putting it up your whole life.'

Indeed.

Cocktail tips from Hal

No, not the heuristic algorithm.

1.  WebTender: an online bartender, which includes a big database of recipes, and some fun ways to search, such as in my bar, where you nominate a few things and see what you can approximate.

2.  1806.  Cocktail place in Melbourne - lives up to its great rep.

As soon as I lose 10-15kg, get the mortgage paid off and finish my responsibilities, that's just where I'll go.

Reading list

A photo of the books I need to read - philosophy, sci-fi, politics, and malcolm gladwell, who can consider himself lucky.  From left to right:

Iain M. Banks                 Surface Detail
Hajime Tanabe               Philosophy as Metanoetics  (2 chapters down)
Alfred Bester                  Who he?
Alfred Bester                  Virtual Unrealities (short stories)
Gillian Rose                    Hegel Contra Sociology
Zizek & Milbank            The Monstrosity of Christ (very nearly finished)
Cavalier                         Power Crisis
Sam R Delaney              The Fall of the Towers
Malcolm Gladwell          Outliers
H.G. Wells                    The World Set Free
Wittgenstein                   Philosophical Investigations
Kierkegaard                   Either/Or part I
Dan Dennet                    The Intentional Stance
Kierkegaard                   Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing*

This is a LOT of reading, some of it quite hard.

*  I suppose I could advance this up the reading order and save myself some time, and maybe challenge the tragic bent of this blog.

Resolution

I finished another pass through Resolution, my finished screenplay, in which I attempted to straighten out the hero's internal problem and external problem on the page and make his trajectory very clear.  I also needed to make the idea work a bit harder intellectually, and probably still need to work on this.

The idea is that conscious/productive/runaway Machine Intelligence will not arrive until the simplest constituent worthy of the name is capable of attachment to its external world with an attitude - and specifically an attitude of love.  To take the human brain as a model might help, but you have to let me use a simplified model - a brain as about 1400grams of thinking goop, with the smallest component being a single junction between two cells.  Each cell's external world is blood, and neighbouring cells.  Somehow it discerns which of its relationships with neighbouring cells are of service to the whole and strengthens them, but without any knowledge of the whole, only of its neighbours.  The cell is committed in relationship to its neighbours.  If necessary, it will give up connections, or die for lack of usefulness. Psychologically, the drives, reflexes, habits, substructures, structures, superstructures of personality are in relationship, competing, combining, forming alliances, frustrating each other. Somehow, we pull it all together. It's hardly original to liken the mind to society - Plato may have started it (I really have a lot of reading to do!), but once you start to do it, Rousseau seems like he's talking psychology and Kierkegaard seems to be prescribing for the state. And the point is, what character lets all things hold together?

The character that makes it better to be in relationship than not.  Service.  Love.  But the important qualification, Love from Wholeness, so that there should be an answer for anything that may go wrong in the self by reference to the neighbour, or the neighbour by reference to the self. This character, from top to bottom is Resolution.

Is there room for diversity in such a theory?  I think so, in the sense that I may yet have in my unthought, in potential, answers to problems I never experience. So paralleling gene expression, everything is present in potential, but only certain things are realised (expressed). Maybe.  Genes are one example.  Words, letters and substrate languages might make another potential example, and a more open one.  More work is required.

But anyway, confused and bored as you probably are now, you are ready to appreciate the difficulty of articulating all that and more through a sci-fi action blockbuster without confusing and boring is considerable.

Kanye West's MBDTF

Kanye West’s ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’ has rightly been praised as one of the better big albumns of the year, and rightly condemned as a voicing of some really loathsome bigotry toward women – but no one told me how sad it was.  It’s possible I’m projecting from my own life, or from my sadness for Kanye, but to me its dominant tone is grief of a specific kind – world collapse and its corollary - invalidation of self. 

The first track, Dark Fantasy, is about living the dream of money, power and girls and the refrain is ‘Can we get much higher?’ – ‘the plan was to drink until the painsover, but what’s worse, the pain or the hangover?’.

Second is Gorgeous: ‘ain’t no question if I want it, I need it.’ The ungroundedness of wealth – if I want it, I need it.

Power: ‘No one man should have all this power – 21^st Century Schizoid Man.’  ‘Now this’ll be a beautiful death – jumpin’ out the window, lettin’ everything go.’ ‘You got power to let power go?’  Kanye as superman who’s power has left him alienated, suicidal.

All of the lights: ‘turn up the lights in here baby, extra bright I want y’all to see this, flash cars, shooting stars, cop lights, flash lights, strobe lights, street lights, ghetto university’ – a sexual chorus, but lyrics of tragedy – death of Michael Jackson, domestic violence, conviction imprisonment, ‘restraining order, can’t see my daughter, we met at Border’s.’  The sexual tone is masking the embarrassing horror, the vulgarity of the daily tragedy of life in the real world.

Monster: ‘gossip gossip, nigger just stop it everybody know I’m a mf-in monster.’  A sequence of guests expand on the theme, but the thesis is there.  Refrain: ‘I, I, crossed the line/lime (-light), and I’ll let god decide. I’ll last these shows, so I’m headed home.’ Again, Kanye & co as monsters – the unintelligible, the inhumanly ferocious.

Ridiculous: Meaningless, meaningless, says Kanye. So appalled.  ‘Niggers out of work and I’d rather speak somethin’ with purp’  ‘Champagne dishes, dirty white bitches.’ The gulf between everyday life for buyers of this albumn (schlubs like me!) and Kanye & co appals him.

Runaway: ‘I always find something wrong, you’ve been putting up with my shit for way too long, and I think its time for us to have a toast, let’s have a toast for the douchebags, let’s have a toast for the scumbags, let’s have a toast for the jerk-offs that never take work off.  Baby I’ve got a plan, runaway fast as you can.’  ‘Find pictures in my email, sent this bitch a picture of my dick, Don’t know what it is with females but I not too good at that shit.’ - A song of mourning about the destructive attitudes and behaviour that makes up many of the other songs.

Hell of a Life: ‘I think I fell in love with a porn star, married in a bathroom, honeymoon on the dance floor and divorced by the end of the night, that’s one hell of a life.’ A song of love for alienated sex.

Blame Game:  ‘Let’s play the blame game.  You ain’t perfect but you made life worth it, stick around some real feelings might surface.’  Includes a de-edifying ‘sketch’ dialogue between an interloping ‘neighbourhood nigger’ and a Yeezy girl with an impoverished personality.

I’m lost in the world.  A heady, ecstatic trance chorus about partying, that offers forecasts on if we die...

Who will survive in America? – a spoken word poem in the beat poet vein about the great lie of America, the independence day that allowed citizen wealth to continue to depend on slave labour, and the freedom from responsibility for the effects of past crimes that makes the environment in America more hostile to black men than, for example, China.

See me now: I love it though, I love it though, you know?  Interestingly this is a second track 1 in iTunes, as if Who will survive in America was the conclusion of the matter, and this is the beginning of Kanye’s settling for this life, declining to suffer for it any more, now that everyone sees him.

I read recently that Kanye’s mother (joyfully thanked and celebrated on Late Registration, a Black college professor of English and latterly Kanye’s manager) died quite tragically in 2008 after inadvisable (and unnecessary) surgery.  This albumn seems tonally connected to me, to an experience of loss that is maybe like that.  The ground has vanished, and the new world can only substitute the most primitive satisfaction. Not only do you have no love in your life, the world in which love was meaningfully possible has shown itself insubstantial, failing, and you’re lost in the world.  You can lose your mother like this without her death – physical death is not really the thing at all.

This albumn is (as he says himself) ‘inner city anthems based on inner city tantrums’ and I think this blog has a small enough readership (no offense, readership) that I can suggest that perhaps what is going on with all the shocking lyrics and videos and self-pity is that Kanye wants his bottom smacked?

Exercise tolerance

I've ridden to work three days in a row, done my weights sunday and tuesday, and also had pilates today. I am pretty stiff and tired now!

Morality and Science - a union in Math?

Sam Harris is a neroscientist who believes that an accurate understanding of how the brain works and what it wants will sufficiently inform us to allow a morality to be derived.  A lot of philosophy has revolved around this question, and has pretty uniformly concluded that what is and what ought are in different games entirely, and the whole point of the ought is to describe what, in fact, isn't.


Doing a thought experiment of my own, what kind of scientific knowledge could be sufficiently 'grounded' that it was adequate for us. Morality is proper to the kind of beings that we are - not for dogs, not rocks, not ideas. If it could be shown that conscious minds in community had greater or lesser fulfillment of a single value (say existence) in proportion to their adherence to certain rules, then we would have a morality for reasoning beings grounded only in their existence. If you exist, you are subject to the basis rule.  If you want to give up the basis rule, you give up existence.  


My suggestion, borrowing from Heidegger's 'care'* as the basic structure the kind of being that we are, would be to say that something like 'love' holds the straying parts of a person together with their reality, and can hold together a super-personal reality of a community. So I imagine Sam Harris could be right as far as that. AI math could demonstrate some realities for thinking beings, some constraints on them and their behaviour, which we would need to interpret for eating, coupling, breathing and pooping beings.

To get through rationality to a value on existence though, I think you have to go to a Hajime Tanabe or similar (about whom more when I finish his book).


*Heidegger would not be terribly happy seeing 'care' alongside love.  Care in his scheme is just a kind of recognised and dealt-with ness, a functional acknowledgement and inclusion, and to him is worlds away from Love.  To me though, this is minimal love - to include, to reconcile.  But there's a world of difference between me and him, which leaves this idea as philosotainment (as Scott Adams terms it).

The Demolished Man - Alfred Bester

I read my first Alfred Bester novel in high school - The Stars My Destination (TSMD) aka Tiger Tiger.  It's a heady cocktail of revenge bildungsroman and tale of human transcendence. The dominant social change was teleportation, termed jaunting.

Last night I finished 'The Demolished Man' - the story of Ben Reich, a magnate locked in a war of commerce with old Craye D'Courtney. The dominant social change is the development of telepathy, occuring frequently enough to permit a small but growing guild of telepaths enormous social influence.  One of the biggest influences is that crime, especially murder, has been effectively rendered impossible.  But Ben Reich is not a man to be put off, though he is haunted by a spectre of the Man with No Face in his dreams and he's not going to beat D'Courtney.  So he schemes to murder, and does it, and gets away with it.  But not quite - because Lincoln Powell, telepath detective, presses him, both as a criminal, and as a powerful man who knows better, and is better, than to murder and own it.

As with TSMD, the hero's journey culminates in transcendence of the human condition.  But, on balance, I think TDM is less perfect that TSMD.  Both suffer from some under-earned 'reveals' and resolutions, but TDM raises the stakes in  way that feels particularly un-earned. I have enough respect for Bester that I can still appreciate what he's saying, and I suspect he was reading a lot of philosophy at the time which may have made him underestimate the strangeness of the introduction of "world-shakers" in the final chapters.  It's fine to do this, but it would be a better book if this was paying off a thorough set up.

Collection on collecting

I doubt there is anyone who buys books on the internet who has not yet discovered thebookdepository, a wonderful retailer of books.  The low price always includes shipping.  Delivery is not urgent, but usually takes only a week or two. Alfred Bester's 'The demolished man' is in great condition.  Hegel Contra Sociology has arrived with a mark on the cover, but totally fine for reading purposes.  A friend has recommended Fishpond, and with reason. Having been too busy to do anything of note on my projects, my last tip is to buy a dreamfarm spatula - perhaps from Everten Online.  Fantastic silicon spatula.

The Screewriter - state of play

Another of my absurd projects is to try to become a screenwriter.  I've been nursing this one for a long while now, but so far I've accomplished only:

1.  One complete feature screenplay that could still stand to be a bit better in some ways, despite the fact that it is what I mostly worked on the last embarassingly many years. But we learn as we go.
2.  A treatment adapting one of my favourite novels.
3.  Half of one more feature prequeling the complete feature.
4.  A title and concept for the intermediate prequel.
5.  Improving skills.
6.  Entered a few competitions to very little acclaim.

The absurdities:
1.  Hollywood doesn't buy screenplays for hundreds of thousands any more, if it ever did. A very few, very successful screenwriters can make a handsome living while they're writing hot work.
2.  Once sold, you waive any control at all.  Usually you'll be given one chance to re-write more to the taste of the directing crew, and then a really good writer will come in and re-write you.
3.  Like most creative, enjoyable pursuits there is a super-abundance of people working for love.  There are many thousands of people moving to Hollywood each year to work in really hard, low-paid jobs in the entertainment industry so that they can write spec scripts on the side.  So there are tens of thousands of scripts generated every year.  The selling of advice to aspirants is a business. If you write a letter to an agent, they will throw it out or return it to sender unopened, unless it is a letter they asked you for.  They give you a code to put on the envelope so they know its you.
4.  If I ever wrote anything that got positive attention, the first question will be 'when can you move to X' (probably LA)?  And I can't move there.
5.  I really like strange philosophical challenging science fiction.  Moviegoers need about one of those a year.

The recommends:

• Creative Screenwriting Magazine, especially Jeff Goldsmith's podcast.
• Pilar Alessandra's podcast. I really enjoy this 40 minutes of talk about how to write.  Light and funny.
• Books: Story.  Dramatica.  The coffee-break screenwriter.  The Screenwriter's Bible. and more...  

The action:
1.  currently waiting for the return unopened or the disappearance without trace of a letter I wrote covering a treatment of a novel to the people listed as developers.
2.  working on the first prequel.

That's Desktertainment!!!

We have a small house with a small living room, and we hope to turn the study (which has our big desk and filing cabinet) into a bedroom.

In the living room already we have a home-theater pc as the basis of our home entertainment - using MythTV on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 64bit, one of the least absurd and most successful of my projects.

Previous projects have left me with a nice little home studio - a good midi keyboard, a midi synth module, a small 8-track mixer, a cheap condenser mic and a pre-amp.  Unfortunately, this is a lot of kit to have in any room and you get a lot of wires and untidiness.

I've designed this solution using Google SketchUp, a free drawing program.  (The price of 'free' in this case is that it is very hard for me to do exact dimensioning, but for sketching its not too bad at all.)  These drawings include components taken from Google's 3d warehouse - my thanks to their creators for distributing them.

It is for use in a few modes, like an old-fashioned 'secretary' desk.  In mode 1a, it is closed, and you sit on the couch and watch TV.  In mode 1b, you prop your laptop up on the angled surface and hook it up to a usb keyboard and optionally, the bigger monitor (only 22", but enough bigger to make a difference). Mode 1b either has a slide out desktop mounted as a drawer in the body, or the whole unit could sit on a nice big expanse of desk if we thought we could keep from cluttering that much space.

In mode 2, you open the lid and slide out the music kit and are free to rock out, practice your piano or painstakingly compose.

I still need to decide exactly where the lid goes, which is a pretty fundamental decision. They could fold forward to become desk space, but strength would be a problem.  They could lift to allow access and then return to position with the keyboard safely far forward.  They could lift and slide back, although the mounting for this would be difficult.

There are some obstacles to the desktertainment unit: I can't do woodwork, this is about a $400 job and will need tools I don't have, and its not clear that the blog wife will tolerate it in any case.

First Post!

 It is better to meet a mother bear robbed of her cubs than to meet some fool busy with a stupid project.


Proverbs 17:12