Later Heidegger

I've begun listening to Sean Dorrance Kelly* on Later Heidegger. Early Heidegger is his work in Being and Time, in which he believed he was doing Fundamental Ontology - really getting to the bottom of how things are. Later, Heidegger decided that it was a mistaken value judgement to call his work Fundamental and final. Not that his insight wasn't the deepest so far, to a level that shows itself as just the way things are. Early Heidegger sees the world show up through practices, recurrent patterns of behaviour that, because phenomena in the world recur, allow you to go on. These practices are all the myriad entwined techniques by which we live in the world.
Later, Heidegger saw a historical progression in the modes of life of different eras that could further illuminate what he was saying about 'Being' as background practices. The techniques of life had a tendency to aim toward or elevate a particular style or maybe a particular verb. (I'm inventing my own description here.) The ancient Greeks in the time of Homer, expected things to exist by whooshing up, staying around for a bit, and then passing away, like storms. The medieval society expected things to exist in their own createdness and to progress more and more to express God's glory, either through Christ-likeness as a Saint, or through material richness or destitution as a moral creature, or through vileness (and I must acknowledge that this category was mostly for non-Christians, and I think is reinforced the forces that became why Jewish people had such a terrible time, up to and including the Holocaust. Rejecting foreigners and refugees is pretty universal practice, and survived several epochs of other understandings of being. But the catholic church of the middle ages (AFAIK) just surfed the convenient waves of public resentment.)
Heidegger felt that the current understanding of being (which he had uncovered) was Technological - that this was a technological age, in which the defining verb should be enframing (he used a german word connected with bookcases. Everyone got confused. As usual.) The technological view sees everything by its usefulness, (cf economics utility, also Kauffman's discussion of work as constrained or channelised energy) and frames things in a 'black box' and looks for more useful alternatives. The problem for this very reasonable view is that humans are easily enframed and hence turned into blank, individual-value-free 'resources.' We lose the distinctive quality of seeing ourselves in relationship to 'being'. Instead we see ourselves as a resource and the panoply of background practices as a resource. Where all previous ages felt being had been given them, we see how unavoidably coupled to it we are. Seeing everything as resources leaves nothing for goals, or goods, that can have validity, independence, or meaning.

* SD Kelly has a lot of Dreyfusian verbal tics, for those who've heard the Dreyfus lectures.

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Men and women

Ursula K Leguin is most famous as an author of fantasy and science fiction, although she's also done some interesting academic work.  In 2010 she wrote this.  It seems fairly satisfactory to me, and the point that greater aggression and competitive instincts need to be more thoroughly subsumed in mutual respect 'in-group' seems right.  This is the thing with group selection arguments for morality.  There is almost a 'conservation of good behavior' so that it should never be too much; to construct in-group altruism, you establish the need for out-group genocide. (You can't, after all, allow interlopers inside an altruistic space to take advantage.  This is rather like the need for Hell in Christianity.  You can't say 'Yes' to humanity without saying no to mans inhumanity, or sin.)

Determinate Negation II

Is this the second time I've used that heading?

Quantum theory and information theory exist (in my head) as a sort of puddle of bedraggled ideas, tangled in with one another.  Also, Hegel's theory of conceptual structures forming as networks of 'determinate negation' as expounded by Robert Brandom, have my brain by the stem.  He explains that Hegel thinks that the reason conceptualisation can work, get real grips on the world, is that the world already shows up 'in conceptual shape.' By this he means that things are not other things. Places are not other places.  Things don't occupy identical coordinates of space-time.  They don't occupy more than once set of coordinates. Concepts or intentional content works like the world, except that what in the world is describable with 'alethic modal' vocabulary (does), in human minds applies with 'deontic normative' vocabulary (should).  An object can't have two properties from the same system of determinate negation (round and square).  A person though, can have two mental commitments (ideas) that are incompatible, although they should not - and to be a person for the most part they do not.  The information theory aspect is just that the entropy.

This article at Ars Technica reports a fascinating result from the famous double slit experiment and the first comment outlines a collection of the ways it didn't need to get any more fascinating. I feel like there is some relationship - it is as if we see the mental life of the particle/wave.  It can get into a state of entaglement, holding two or more states simultaneously in tension, but to engage with anything else the wave function collapses and fall into a determinate state.  This collapse is arbitration with exquisite fairness.

Gene Wolfe (who I haven't talked about for a while) in his 'Wizard-Knight' novels constructs a seven-layered world.  The Most High God occupies the uppermost layer (Paradise); then Elysion (home of angels including Michael), then Skai (home of the Norse gods), then Mythgarthr (the middle level, home to humans), then Aelfrice (home to the Aelf), then Muspel (home to dragons), and then Hell, the home of one styling himself the Most Low God.  In Mythgarthr, things are most determinate - human life is quite conventional in most respects.  A level above or below, and things become a little more elastic - you can realise the mountain you have travelled three days on is a Frost Giant, but then fight him.  Each level also has its own time, but that's not so important.  I love Gene Wolfe for constructing this carefully, using it thoroughly and making it richly meaningful.

For both, I imagine a U shaped graph of scale and determinacy.  At the lowest and highest level there is the possibility of superposition, a thing that for a time is permitted to have two or more properties. No, I'm losing it.  Bad enough this blog is about everything, I definitely will try not to make posts about everything from now on.

The Film Sense

There's an ad for a show at the moment in which the final few lines are young man protesting:
'I won't go back inside, I won't go back inside.'
Then the voice-over guy says 'and a shocking conclusion...'
Then a woman says 'I'm pregnant.'

Join the dots on why that conclusion is shocking...

This is an example of Eisenstein's theory of montage.  The oft-cited experiment is of a great actor of the day who was shown intercut with a meal, or a gun, or something else, and ask people to rate the mans expression.  When the intercut was food, he looked hungry.  When it was a weapon, he looked threatening.  People also mentioned that he was the greatest actor they'd ever seen, even though it was the same footage of his face in every case.  The goal of montage-school film-making is to manufacture the passage of images in a way that the mind of the watcher puts a story on them.

Here's the book.  I got it from an op-shop, pretty much by accident.

Here's a good essay/post in case you want to actually learn something, rather than my half-remembered thoughts.

Inglorious Basterds

I finally caught up with Inglourious Basterds.  Heidegger's justly famous essay on the origin of the work of art talks about a hermenutic circle (or spiral) about trying to differentiate the whole of the work from what the parts are.  It's hard to know how to break in.  Inglorious Basterds is a grindhouse revenge-fantasy on the second world war.  It's about the viciousness of the Nazis, and a vicious retribution that should make you sorry for them.  I think the way I'm going to break in is in terms of Genre.

Grindhouse, for my money, is cinema for the weak, or rather, for those who are afraid of, and need to cover up their weaknesses with a prurient fondling of shock at sex and violence. That's a hoity-toity definition for a pretty common answer to a widespread hunger, the male equivalent of mills&boon and soap tv.

Can you use Grindhouse to talk about the holocaust?  Yes, you can do anything if you like.  Tarantino has done it; and of course its auteur grind-house, very cinematic and engaging, and with the dialogue and drama deftly constructed.  The end result is an enjoyable film, a memorable film, and a film with a moral - but the three are loosely tied together. What is memorable and enjoyable is not moral. It impresses you with a point, but it makes you a worse person.

I'm now very curious about 'Django Unchained', Tarantino's next film.  It seems likely to be a counter-part of Inglourious Basterds, unsubtly ramming home the point that Slavery in the South of the USA was an engine of violence and injustice that made with South liable for unlimited violence toward justice.  When Andrew Sullivan was objecting to a lack of anti-genocide protections for social classes, I thought he was right, but that the protections should not be universal, because there have been classes for whom it might be justice - for slave traders or slave owners to go into a Gulag for life would not have been unjust. Though it might have been counter-productive.

Chess and automaticity

I have played an awful lot of chess to be as bad at it as I am. I have a chess app that sees two moves ahead, and I beat it about one time in ten. The problem is that I play intuitively, doing things that I believe will be good ideas, usually because I've done them before - they are the kind of thing I do. I long ago took the correct insight that conscious processing of all possibilities will not be powerful enough to always win, and now act as though unconscious/automatic processing will refine itself over time into an unbeatable victory engine. In fact, conscious processing is the way to begin accumulating unconscious patterns to allow deeper insight into the future. Without puzzling it out, I have not improved.

This is a bit of a bad mental habit for me, which may be related to my mother praising 'cleverness' rather than 'effort.' This was heavily reinforced by schooling in a system that required respectful behaviour and a home life that fore-armed me with ideas. I think I actually did about 5% of my assigned homework, and so my facility with everything skilled, from algebra to music to Japanese to essay composition remained almost static.

At the moment I am struggling to become a skilled researcher instead of just a magpie-minded popinjay. But this long habit of believing that effort is a sign you should just give up, because you are innately unqualified and can't become qualified is hard to break. I need to get a virtuous dopamine circle going around reading things and learning, instead of a vicious shame-spiral at not already knowing them.

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Stuart Kauffman

I recently read Stuart Kauffman's 'Investigations' (Oxford 2000)*, a series of investigative essays examining different facets of what life is, how thermodynamics and life interact, the limits of reductionist science and so on. It aims to begin a conversation about a 'general biology.' Overall, it was like my ideal internet browsing, organised in a book - lots of fascinating references, big ideas and so on.  As an example that I remember most clearly now: there have not been enough femtoseconds since the big bang that if every particle was in a protein, all the proteins of length 200 could even have existed, much less their usefulness explored.  The sparsity of material in the universe is rather like the sparsity of explored combinations in the universe - there is only a very little yet in existence. Life on earth may be a very particular example out of a huge gamut of feasible lifes.

Kauffman's main point is that we probably lack some kind of paradigm shift and associated mathematical laws that would allow us to understand the autopoiesis of life from non-life.  He thinks there will be some entailment of the second law of thermodynamics that causes complexity to accumulate and well up, for energy to cascade through equilibrium pools which auto-catalyse toward some particular structures, into self-organised criticality, a near-chaos region that is not quite chaos, characterised by 1/F (Power Law) avalanches of disorder. He is already referring to the self-organisation of dissipative systems, so it goes beyond merely that.

I think the self-organised criticality of non-reacting systems has a constant dimensionality, whereas reacting systems can escalate their dimensionality as a means of structuring the dissipation. (I'm not sure he doesn't say this - it seems obvious.) This escalation of dimensionality in complexes reminds me of that Tononi paper on integrated information theory, giving phi, a measure of consciousness from how much information is integrated from moment to moment.  Someone good at thinking, get on that.

* Written, like Brian Arthur's book, at the Santa Fe Institute.

A cryptic whine

My current screenplay project is too much for me at the moment, so I am going to post a list (senseless to all but me) complaining about problems I don't know how to solve (timely objections from anothersomething notwithstanding).

The story takes place in 2045 or so.  The tensions in the social fabric of the USA have come undone again and the US Army's heaviest casualties occur in a war with secessionists in the southern states.  Our hero, Langley, wants to get away from the front line and is guided into investigating a biotech company which is not producing biotech.  The tech in question is equipment (nano-technology etc) that lives in the body to repair it and protect it, something Army would obviously want.  The script currently owes itself the following:

• clarity about the law on nanotech. When is it grounds to kill a person and destroy their body without a trial, just for survival / disaster prevention?  What is the mechanism that does it?  Lasers?
• clarity about the devilry of the major devil.  While there is a bit of moustache-twirling, I haven't really got the relationship to Langley, York, and Troy clear in the text.  If it does get clear, do I lose the tension in subsequent scripts?
• A decent set of clues and very concrete bits of evidence.  (I dislike detective stories - I shouldn't have started one, perhaps)
• An alternative to animated 'data mining', which is realistic but terrible in a story.
• Action to carry conversation: no one is busy.  It's all a bit 'miss marple' but without even wastrel hobbies to form a background while people answer questions.
• Hell needs more setup.

Thanks for bearing with.  Now, unconscious processing, go!

A talk on gender

This seems better than a lot that we often get (basically coherent).  I think there is some merit in the epistemic doubt of saying that we can't get unmediated access biological differences in mental function or psyche (John Milbank's attack on the biopolitical fallacy), but I feel doubtful that say anthropology's massive collections of different human customs would not add up to some insight about sex through all the contradictions of the ways of doing gender.

Pandora

Whenever I'm feeling low, which happens reasonably regularly, I begin to imagine that the world is in a shape that would fit a variant of the Pandora myth - that all the ills in the world have been unleashed, and that at the bottom of them was hope.  In the original myth (as I recall it), hope is there to counteract the ills - people get sick, but maybe they'll get better.  People die, but maybe the people left will live on, remembering them, and founding families that give the lie to death overall.

But, when I'm feeling low, it seems that hope is there to give all the ills teeth. Hope is what persuades you to press your teeth to the grindstone of your suffering. Buy a house, have a family, seek out work you imagine you'll enjoy - that way the ills will have more to work on.

Perhaps you can't identify with this (I think its slightly buddhist, although getting all upset about how upsetting everything can be is not).  Let me say to you who somehow are not depressed: an Avatar sequel is almost certain.  How about now?  Avatar, but derivative. Yikes.

Anyway, to get back to feeling low - its almost always a result of being laid low by something, or realising it after a period of poor outcomes.  Finish a report that looks dumb, enter a competition and get nowhere, complete something overdue and get two more assignments in its place.  The solution is to 'take up arms against a sea of troubles' by:

• exercising;
• organising;
• making some decisions about what you care about and how to do something about it;
• go to bed earlier
• ease up on the coffee
• ease up on the lollies, pastries, peanut butter from a jar
• stop ditzing on the internet and build something good!

All of these involve a degree of hoping in a certain mode; hoping of myself and my immediately visible sphere.  And

Clive Palmer

Annabel Crabb on Clive Palmer's proposal to rebuild the Titanic.  Seriously, someone should get him to a specialist.

Game Theory

I've been listening to Yale's Ben Polak on Game Theory.  It's very good.

Here are some highlights:

• Never play a strictly dominated strategy (if given a choice).
• Look for a strategy or mix of strategies that will make your opponent's choice of strategy indifferent, and is also a 'best response' for you, and you have a Nash equilibrium.
• Evolutionarily Stable Strategies are Nash Equilibria (an ESS is an evolution game that has reached an end point - male sea elephants have to be huge to hold down a big harem and have a lot of offspring; but the non-huge bulls can sneak around among the females. The ratios of effort spent on these two strategies prove to be a Nash equilibrium).
• Sometimes more choices make your situation weaker - burning your boats or otherwise making a total commitment can increase your chance of a positive outcomes; but it is important that your adversary knows you're committed, and that it is that sort of game.
• A game known as 'battle of the sexes' assumes that two people going on a date have slightly different taste in film but would prefer to meet up, rather than not. But if they both go to their least favourite film in the hopes of meeting the other, they lose out.  What was particularly interesting was that the example 'couple' for the class exercise won out every time because the woman went to her favoured film, and the man went to her favourite film.  The traditional practice that in courtship, the effort should be on the man's side, beat the rational game rules.

Vulnerability

Brene Brown has a couple of great TED talks on vulnerability and shame and whole-hearted living.

This is the first, on vulnerability. I have talked abou this as liability.

This is the second, at TED, on shame.

An interesting distinction is that guilt is rectifiable discrepancy from society; shame is unrectifiable cut-offness from society.

Dad joke: I guess that's why Tobias Funke wears cutoffs.

Beyond serious

This weeks screenwriting lesson for me, from Pilar's podcast (search podcasts for 'on the page' in iTunes), squares exactly with Scriptshadow's judgement of this line.

The lesson is 'get enough words to produce a vivid sense*, and then you're done'.  Sentences are nice, but a lot of life and film is not done in them, and a serious, careful, complete sentence or four to describe some action, is bad writing for a movie. The script is a prospectus for a million-dollar project, but you don't get to have flashy graphs, artful color scheme and cheese. Sadly, money is not a keen reader.  It gets eye strain and annoyance really easily. It doesn't even do its own reading, so the eyestrain and annoyance have to be felt vicariously by other people without money, like me.

Let's look at some amateur writing (me.  It's me, mum.) As there's only a paragraph, and my posts are usually way longer, you probably have trouble seeing 4.5 lines as a chore.  You have to imagine reading this after reading it 800 times (its an eighth of a page, say, and a screenplay runs about 100 pages), and its only ten in the morning, and you've got eight more scripts to read.

To intro - Reeves is an old man who has been dismantling himself under the influence of a chem**.

Reeves looks down, and starts to squeal with fear and horror.  The medic places a mask over his face against his terrified shaking of his head.  He eventually relaxes, recognizing his powerlessness.  His eyes dart terrified from face to face.

How should I have written that?  Well,
a. I don't know.  That's the main thing about me.  But
b. I can tell better from worse.  Maybe.

Reeves sees himself - 

- he writhes, squeals.   

The Medic FIGHTS - masking him. 

He snaps it on - gas floods Reeves.

His thrashing subsides - eyes dart terrified from face to face.

Better?  Maybe a bit, but there still isn't flow.  The test is, are you beyond serious? Is your skill so built up, so bedded down, that you can write like you're rapping, lyrically flowing from moment to moment, giving just the sense.  Seriousness can get you so far, but you have to get the serious into the background and just leave a vivid, emotional whole.


* Gottlob Frege reference
** A Chemical, but also the script you put in the head of a Golem.