What to think about everything, or 'Life is NP-Hard'

This post was entitled 'What to think about everything', and waiting in my drafts.  Naturally I got excited, but it turns out that it was not populated. I've no idea what I would have said, but anyway...

The world is a place full of entities and possibilities, because its always developing through time.  The brain is nature's way of keeping the world's tendencies to kill your genes from developing into actualities.  The mind is the brains way of keeping the brain's tendencies to kill you from developing into actualities.

The brain is solving the problem of Abduction - relating a schema of the super-sensible to a limited observation of a reality in motion is an NP-hard problem (C.S. Pierce first showed that thinking depends on abduction; there are a variety of papers on it but Bylander et al 'The Computational Complexity of Abduction' 1991 is pretty good). NP-hard in a large world means that you can't solve it fully in a reasonable amount of time*, unless you can reduce by orders of magnitude the number of involved entities by:

• lumping up sensations into objects which are cleanly defined by not being other objects, excluding them from their space.  Sensations denote limbs and a body which is really just one bear that can be treated as a point, in relation to the question of what to do next.
• expecting repetition of familiar scenarios.  Run away.
• importantly, being set up to be pretty darn insensitive to things that don't matter, like 'what if this bear just a regular cuddlepie who are not out to kill us?' meh. No one cares about that. Assume everyone's out to kill us, especially people who look like they don't have our genes.
• Being sensitive to generalisation logic, to reasoning with representations rather than imagining entire entities.  I really like Lukacs Kaiser's paper on building a logic detector and solver for tic-tac-toe, connect-four and other simple games. It shows the potential power for symbolic reasoning to play games, and I think games, narrative and dynamic logic are going to get unified pretty thoroughly pretty soon.
• Letting a really simple brain (the emotions) cooperate with you and run the mechanics of the limbic system and what not, and even take over entirely at times, causing you to punch people, cry, or start a blog.
• Making contingent decisions and commitments that will be modified soon.

Over time, the disintegrated solvers get fine-tuned to my environment and it becomes possible for them to be more and more integrated.  For me at least, many of those integrations didn't come up with more than a fractious truce.  My emotions are kept at arms length a lot of the time, and I don't feel very much, and I don't imagine how something would feel for myself in the future or another person in the present all that well.  My reasoning has not been very purposive - I hardly plan, am often unproductive, and get motivated about weirdly small things, and deeply dejected about normal size things, like having a job and a few extra-curricular commitments. (To illustrate agonizing about the very small, I spent a number of hours agonizing about buying a couple of computer components totalling about $30 which I don't need.  They were heavily marked down.  But I couldn't (or didn't try to) imagine a me in the future who just didn't care that he didn't have them, or a me who did but was disappointed, or a me who suddenly saw what that $30 could have gone toward.  I stalled in the emotional desiring and the super-ego's denial.)  My reasoning is also unmotivated by anything except deeply personal felt trouble.  The mere promise of approval and acceptance, of satisfaction in a job done (whether well, or medium) moves me very little, unless the job is immediately in front of me.

I've been reading 'The mindful way through depression' by Jon Kabat-Zinn. He points to a similar phenomenon in depression, of using the reasoning ('doing') executive brain parts in fruitless wars against desire; in inquisitions against feelings of disappointment or remembered shame; and (I suspect this in my case very much) in abdicating to the emotions when pressed to work hard at something that doesn't seem immediately personally relevant (item 0 -> coaching the emotional brain into useful contribution by putting the right prompting and questions to it).

These two (and other faculties of body and mind) are me.**

*Well, we can't at the moment. Some problems that are NP-hard have no conventional (Turing/von Neumann etc) computing algorithm that completes in polytime, but Shor's algorithm is a famous example that means a quantum computer could complete it in polytime.

** The recent PEL podcast on Lacan suggested that this unification of the divided subject, taking responsibility for all the internality (however it was produced. Mostly made of externality (cultured stuff)) was the goal of psychoanalysis.  This is a Pennebaker Essay on how I overcame the major psychic division and became cheerful, emotionally alert and productive. 

More Life

If there is a common theme in 'The Stars My Destination' and 'The Book of the New Sun' and my worrying about right and right (adaptive, functional and moral, upright) and perhaps the gospel, it is the power of wanting and believing in More Life.

Gully Foyle spends six months in a wrecked spaceship fighting for enough food and water and air, and gets to know himself as a thing deserving and demanding more life. He finishes by stripping moral and real power from the few and imposing it on the many who had chosen to lead empty formalities instead of lives.

Severian, weighing the consequences of a white fountain (an energy emitting singularity) entering our solar system and interrupting life on Urth, remembers how the long tortured clients would lose hope of justice or vindication, and wish only for sunlight and air, for more life. The despair of an Urth in which everything has been tried and come only to frustration, is absolute. But even to be destitute, to despair, there must be something better that is despairing. In the end the only dimension that matters is more life.

This is Nietzsche's 'yes to everything' morality; a morality that works differently from 19th century morality of good and evil. To the 19th century late-christian morality, evil was a kind of monstrosity, a self-justifying wickedness that (like virtue) was its own reward. Nietzsche thought this was more an artifact result of an artificial (and therefore wrong) morality.

This week I saw a paper on Arxiv on a recasting of certain statistics to revolve around an analogue of Absolute Zero in thermodynamics. The goal was to create statistical tests for which more evidence would always be additive - to find a way of expressing an absolute zero for evidence.

I think Christianity needs to get back to its moral work of asserting that 'to be is good'. There is more and less good, but there is a limit to evil, an absolute zero of good. The fundamental communication from public christians to 'the world' has been 'no to everything' when it should have been More Life.*

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

PS.  There is not space to point out that such a view is already, exactly the non-Manichean, Evil only as absence of good, view of Christianity.

PPS.  The Absolute Zero metaphor of evil is actually made a real thing somewhere in The Reality Dysfunction series by Peter F Hamilton.

Aristotle on Screenwriting.

In a satisfying natural coincidence of two interests of this blog, Aristotle (notable in philosophy) wrote a book (Poetics) unpacking how serious drama was done in his time.  English script-development guru Stephen Cleary gave three talks at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne Australia.  (It's Victorian only in being in a State called Victoria.  It's nature is a sort of strident Bloomsbury for 18-20 year olds.)

This blog post introduces them, and you can download them from there.

Plato wanted to ban fiction because it wasn't true, and he thought, couldn't contribute civic value.  Aristotle's defence of fiction (not that they had the concept fiction, but poetry and drama were understood to be in a different category from every events and rules for living) - I will begin again.  Aristotle's defence of fiction (according to SC) understood it from the inside out.  He looks at each of the elements and how it interfaces with the others, and what the overall effectiveness hinges on.

What I took from SC's explanation was that in a story, we understand people in ourselves - we read their situation intellectually and emotionally (and even physically - I sometimes notice I've got breathing anxiety when I see someone in a film underwater).  The complex drama (e.g. greek tragedy), though, keeps the protagonists off balance, constantly challenged or threatened by events, to which they respond with emotionally motivated actions that are not quite right, don't resolve the tension. The tension is escalating throughout the film until, at last, there is a realisation.

The realisation needs to happen in a specific series of moments, the hero being knocked off balance one last time and then receiving information that throws the mind back to the start of the story, that changes the meaning of everything, that makes them realise for the first time what has really been happening. The audience, feeling along with them, should be moved - in tragedy they should feel pity, and terror.  This moment is the moment of catharsis, a moment of powerful intellectual, emotional and physical reprocessing that lays hold of one as you realise that you are subject to some powerful truth, just as the tragic hero is: Macbeth learns that murder is wrong.  In a different type of film, Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner (and we) remember how we love our fathers, and they love us.

Please listen to the whole thing.  It's very good if you are interested in philosophy, film, or even just an interesting bit of psychological / cognitive processing.

The war of all with all

Many of the early philosophers of society (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau etc) tried to understand society as arising from the relations of humans in the state of nature.  Sometimes this meant the natural authority of fathers  would justify as natural the authority of Kings.  Sometimes it was assumed that the natural state was war of all with all, which could only be restrained by social contract or (internalized) subjugation.

I think the famous 'Prisoner's Dilemma' problem is a very nice source for considering these issues. Two prisoners have committed a crime, but prosecutors will need evidence against them to establish a full conviction.  Hence they will cut a deal if you default on your partner and give evidence against them.  Formalised, it assumes that by cooperating, both parties can benefit, but by defaulting while the other cooperates your benefit can be even greater, and their penalty large.  The penalty for both defaulting is equal, but less severe than the individual penalty.   Suppose this table gives outcomes - negative numbers are penalties for years in prison.  So if you dob and your partner doesn't, you go free and they get five years.  If you each dob, responsibility is split and you get three years each.

                    Cooperate      Default

Cooperate         -1 / -1              0/-5

Default             -5 / 0              -3/-3

The game theory analysis of this situation is that you should always dob, because cooperating is a dominated strategy - that is, your expected results are considerably worse playing 'cooperate' than playing 'default' regardless of what your partner plays. If you partner cooperates, you wish you'd defaulted. If your partner defaults, you wish you defaulted.*

This game theory solution always makes people anxious.  In real life, the person defaulted against will get out eventually, and may be able to penalize defaulting. They may have powerful friends. These stem from the idea that there is some continuity, and in fact you can change the game by playing indefinitely.  (Interestingly, if you play a fixed series, there is an argument via backward induction that you won't be able to sustain cooperation, because at the last turn, we both know we'll both default, and therefore the decision point moves to the turn before last. The turn before last becomes the chance to default against and so on.)  If you don't know when the last turn will be, and the probability is low enough, the potential benefit of a series of future cooperations may begin to outweigh the loss of being defaulted against once after which you default against your opponent every turn.

I think the cooperate / default choice is foundational for society and that philosophers have tended to come down on one side or the other without consciously / explicitly considering the payoff table.  Society works when you can find games in which 'cooperate' is not strictly dominated by default. You can start structures that will increase the penalties of defaulting and increase the benefits of cooperating - contracts and so on.  Nietzsche has a whole thing about the value of conscience and the construction of beings with the right to make promises, that (I think) is an attempt to undercut the distinction between cooperation and default and an attempt to revalue the two.  In this he is motivated by a justifiable suspicion that the structures that work against 'default' will become a way for indecent power to overcome legitimate power.  That is, the government / law / elders will be motivated to eat the benefit of cooperation and begin to use the penalties of default - thus defaulting in their way, against their society.

A wise old jewish friend took exception to this model applied to marriage, because of the assumption that there is always a solution of defaulting against a cooperator that is better than cooperating. I think it depends on the units of gain and loss, the concept of marriage.  If marriage is a cynical money-making scheme, it may pay to marry Mel Gibson and have a child with him, and then divorce him.  If marriage is a cynical sex-maximising scheme, it might make sense to have an affair or visit prostitutes.  If marriage is a scheme to be known and loved, default cannot increase the bottom line.

*   This changes if the payoffs are different, of course. You can imagine a weakly positive payoff from being defaulted against. You can imagine a game where being defaulted against is still not as bad as both defaulting it. 

Abuse

The defence forces in Australia are in the news again as places where people have been abused, and I guess the important issue is whether or not there have been little cultures of abuse, little breeder reactors, insulated from justice by management. There is a level of abusive practice in the background - reading advice columnists like Prudence @ slate.com furnishes examples, and if you've ever been to or played competitive sport you will have your own.

This abuse is theoretically marginal, but there are a couple of things that worry me. The first couple are from Zizek. Zizek thinks that the rights-based subject is by definition a vulnerable porcupine, who can't experience unwelcome events except as harassment or abuse. He also quotes Ayn Rand's hymn to money (in which she says that without money, the only way to sort out power relations is guns or mobs) as giving the game away: money is (in capitalism) an instrument for domination.

The second couple are from the 'war on terror'. The kill/capture missions, as described by Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman and others, are a relentless pounding on people taken to be enemy soldiers. But some of them are very young, all of them are very misguided, and it isn't clear that there are attacks on the sources of misguidance, or that the strategy is headed toward making an ommelette. This may be a phantom resemblance, an artifact of feeling that anyone you can film for 8hrs, you can capture or negotiate with. Second, more obviously, the enhanced interrogation techniques that are brutal, and the lingering strong support for Bush-era torture. People still occasionally give the game away, that waterboarding is not merely functional - its also satisfying a power instinct, that this is punishment.

Another interesting correlate for me was something Amanda Marcotte put in a footnote on some anti-feminist pushback that included very low verbal abuse - vulgarity and namecalling. She pointed out that some abusers had posted pornography, intending it to be taken as hate speech.

The Toffler's (Future Shock etc) apparently suggested that the way you make money becomes the way you make war. I think we could be in the middle of one of Heidegger's reconfigurations. We were in a time when we considered ourselves blankly useable, possibly useful, in which there isn't any obvious way of evaluating goals against one another. He called it the default of the Gods - the closing over of the sky. There are no longer super-personal entities to relate your behaviour to. You can't resolve on any God and so you settle on none. You can't agree on any future, and settle for a future no closer than the end of your nose. We are going into a time when every practice will refer itself no longer to use, but to abuse. Where Heidegger complained of the emptiness of enframing, we will try to substitute a fullness of violation, of raw power. Google will try to do good, but find it is smothered by accusations of abuse and Government intervention because it turns out what they intended for good is experienced by people as bad.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

The Interval of Comedy

A couple of things came to mind after my last post.  First, when Berman speaks of an 'interval', it calls to my mind a moment from the Book of the New Sun, in which Severian has become the Autarch, but is lamed and weak. He travels up the Gyoll to Nessus on a ship of ordinary men, and finds them comical.  He declares that his story has reached 'the interval of comedy.'

The other thing that happened was that I listened to the Partially Examined Life podcast #57, reading a Henri Bergson essay from [1900] on comedy. (This is such an enjoyable and informative podcast - if you every listen to podcasts, you should check this one out.)  Bergson argues that comedy arises from a perceiving a rigidity, an automatism that has become irrational to you.  The sense of humour begins as something darker and more predatory:

In this sense, laughter cannot be absolutely just. Nor should it be
kind-hearted either. Its function is to intimidate by humiliating. Now,
it would not succeed in doing this, had not nature implanted for that
very purpose, even in the best of men, a spark of spitefulness or, at
all events, of mischief.

Bergson points out an important social function:

Laughter is, above all, a corrective. Being intended to humiliate, it
must make a painful impression on the person against whom it is
directed. By laughter, society avenges itself for the liberties taken
with it. It would fail in its object if it bore the stamp of sympathy
or kindness.
Shall we be told that the motive, at all events; may be a good one,
that we often punish because we love, and that laughter, by checking
the outer manifestations of certain failings, thus causes the person
laughed at to correct these failings and thereby improve himself
inwardly?
Much might be said on this point. As a general rule, and speaking
roughly, laughter doubtless exercises a useful function. Indeed, the
whole of our analysis points to this fact. But it does not therefore
follow that laughter always hits the mark or is invariably inspired by
sentiments of kindness or even of justice. 

And as Severian sees the behaviour of the common men around him as automatic, and comical, he shows he has their measure and is their master.

But I think laughter would be the nicest possible face to put on a coming interval of inequality. And if there is inequality but the poor are never too poor and the rich will only treat us as a comedy, perhaps we can bump through that interval together ok.

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.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

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.

Anders Breivik: Knight of Faith?

I was listening to Walter Kaufman talking about Existentialism in talks on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and so on, and he made the point that Nietzsche, for all his talk of the necessary cruelty of power, was not at all interested in power as mere abuse. He was, Kaufman says, very decent. His category for talking about cheats was often to talk of dirtiness. Dirtiness was for the weak. Kaufman went on to talk about how Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith (eg Abraham) is exemplified in Nazi executioners who did their evil work with confidence in (this is so stupid) German-ness. The teleological suspension of the ethical made Jay Bernstein wonder why anyone ever took Kierkegaard's reading as saying something good about God.

Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac shows him to be the knight of faith, able to pull off the impossible of freedom to do anything and live entirely reconciled to his construct of universals, his ideas of the whole. Anders Breivik appears to enjoy the same psychological freedom. And this goes back to my post Right and Right. It isn't enough to be the knight of faith. Montezuma was a man of faith, as the song goes. It is important to be correct.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Negation in everyday life

Since reading Hegel I've slowly been developing the idea that creation is Not-God, a vast nothingness absent his presence.  The universe contrasts with human life as cold, impersonal, implacable and living nature is 'red in tooth and claw.'  It turns out that this is an obvious first take on the subject which almost everyone realises before me.  In church today, the minister pointed out that the creation is 'independent.'  This becomes obvious from the first act of creation: Let there be light...  The whole creation except humans are built this way.

Letting is a negative act. Its making room, allowing something to express itself.

So when atheists insist this is the world without God, I have some sympathy.

Love and Anxiety

The Dish has picked up a couple of blogs analysing a certain scene in Terence Malick's Tree of Life.

Reptiles emerge from the amphibians, and dinosaurs in turn from the reptiles. Among the dinosaurs we discover the first signs of maternal love, as the creatures learn to care for each other.Is not love, too, a work of the creation? What should we have been without it? How had things been then?
Silent as a shadow, consciousness has slipped into the world.

Here is Terence Malick, one-time Heidegger scholar, putting his finger on the special sauce of consciousness and calling it love.  I had the same intuition weakly in my thinking on my screenplay, but I have found it is already well expressed in Hegel, though it is hidden in dense 'reasoning'.  Hegel's 'self' is engaged in a restless, endless, relentless attempt to re-unite with the Other which is its essence.  This division is in consciousness at every level, but the uniting across the divide is the special sauce. 


Last night we read Luke 6:

²⁷ “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, ²⁸ bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. ²⁹ If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. ³⁰ Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. ³¹ Do to others as you would have them do to you.   ³² “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. ³³ And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. ³⁴And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. ³⁵ But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. ³⁶ Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

This is anxious stuff to try to live, but it is also what Hegel prescribes for the self's self-relation. Stoicism (accepting experience overruling what rationality might expect) and Scepticism (doubting experiences except rational understandability) are simply modes of anxiety covering the self's difficulty with itself.  Heidegger's commentary on Hegel renames 'Absolute Knowledge' as 'Absolving Knowledge.' These verses are about that absolving, about living in Love.  If someone's ideas compel you to go one mile, you can go another with them. If something slaps you across the face and makes your eyes water, you go back for the rest.

Listening

At one of my jobs in the past, I discovered I was a sad rattle, to use the eighteenth century term. I was still fitting into the group and trying to working out how work there worked (something I have a philosopher's ability not to understand.) I was anxious, and so I spent a lot of time saying things that put me in (I thought) a better light, that made me feel relevant and valuable.
This was exposed by a friend who was the opposite. He would listen so attentively to my nonsense, allow me to take up so much of his headspace for a couple of minutes, that just to keep speaking made me look at myself from his perspective. I was regularly embarassed by what I was saying, the half-formed windy grumbles; the insights formed by closing one eye and squinting with the other until you could mistake real things for foolish ones.
It is not something I've succeeded in emulating in myself, but it is something lovely. It might be inwardness.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Ignorant Knowledge

I'm indebted to the Elucidations Podcast of U Chicago interview with Jennifer Lockhart on Ignorant Knowledge.

Ignorant Knowledge is a Kierkegaardism, describing the person who has the words and arguments mastered for a particular skill or role, but in fact is terrible at it, and apparently unable to connect the bad outcomes to incomplete performance of the role. I myself, have been a terrible 'Ignorant Knower' of a lot of things - things about people and leadership and right and wrong, but also about skills and discipline and rationality.  The ignorant knower is in a bind as long as their correction is only available in words - as the discussion on the podcast pointed out, a manager who is terribly inconsistent, and has it pointed out to them, is likely to add 'practising what they preach' to their tissue of litanies, but having no idea how to be unselfish, make a considerate and effective plan, or monitor progress in a motivating way.

Ignorant knowledge (according to Jennifer Lockhart) is a useful problem case for philosophical understandings, like weakness of will.  It forces a confrontation with 'how do we work?'

Cardinal Bellarmine

Cardinal Bellarmine wrote to his good friend of Galileo's writing that while he understood the elegance and attraction of the sun-centered (or decentered) universe, there was too great a danger in abandoning the common sense perception that the sun rises in the east, and sets in the west over a fixed ground, in saying that REALLY no such thing occurred.

It may be that this was simply a science vs religion clash of an unenlightenable faith putting an intelligent man in the wrong. But I think you can see another instantiation of the Athens / Jerusalem distinction. You will recall that in Athens, the more abstractaction from the human sphere the more truth. In the Jerusalem pattern, God, ultimate reality, meets you in a particular place, enters a committed reationship with you. This ground is Holy Ground. Truth is local, humans are in contact with it. Bellarmine is aware that in Christianity (which Catholicism was for him), human life (weelll except for Jewish and muslim and other life) had been declared (paradoxically) at once very precious, and utterly unworthy. But if you say that Really what is most familiar is wrong, what is most assumed is flawed, you undo human being. What has been called 'the view from nowhere' is now Reality - object has distinguished itself from subject and killed indepent george (- I mean subject).

It's something I've been thinking about for a little while - civilisation is a process of creating social value with little more than hot air (declarations of love, esteem, fealty, and their negatives excluding from the circle of society with death, disease, judgement and war).

Cardinal Bellarmine need not have been a catholic to feel that claiming the Earth REALLY orbits the sun is destructive of social value, declaring the common sense understanding of the Earth simply false, and the entire structure of common life therefore suspect at best.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

An Idiot Abroad

I've been enjoying 'An Idiot Abroad', Ricky Gervais and Stephen Marchant sending Karl Pilkington on adventures around the world. Karl is a talent, trenchant, observant , sweet through all his sourness. He is the sort of genuinely funny but entirely unassuming person who would never become a star. Ricky Gervais edited Extras with him (I think) and realised how comical he could be.

Hegel's Master and Servant analysis ends up being an analysis of how self-consciousness attunes itself to a reality of being one among many. The problem of other minds doesn't pose itself anywhere that other minds represent serious threats. Master and Servant shows how freedom is conserved inwardly bythe servant when the master expends his own limited store of freedom outwardly. The Servant is therefore enriched, being conscious of his own and the Master's point of view. The great thing about Karl Pilkington is how interesting his deliberately small world is. I'm sure he was joking when he talked about the moon as being 'like Tenerife' - everyone wanted to go there in the 60's and 70's, but then they realised it wasn't that great. You can make a man bungee jump, but it prompts no reflection. The bungee-jumper on the other hand, is a furious ball of anxious reflection, alive to everything he wants and everything the paymaster wants.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Narrative and Practice

You might recall my Illustration: Story and Game post.

The other realisation I've had since then, is that a story is a 4D map of the world; it gives you a view of a bit of narrative terrain you might have to negotiate.  A rich movie (grand narrative) will pick up alternative paths in neighbouring regions in the subplots.

The relationship that is interesting is that between narrative and practice.  We live by practice, familiar ways of resolving the world.  Narrative is the way of 3rd-person-ing the practice so that it can be out there for us to learn from each other, which is invaluable for infrequent occurrences.

(I'm indebted to Dramatica, and probably sadly derivative of everyone who has gone before.)

Logic of Addiction

I think my mother would line up with Georges Battaille on living life. There were those in my year 2 class for whom being organised was satisfaction itself, and I often felt threatened (legitimately: I always lost permission slips and money, forgot to keep the journal I was supposed to keep, forgot it was sports day etc). When I fretted on this she reassured me that there were two ways of living, the careful, insulated, controlling remoteness of being organised and the vital immediacy of living in the moment, which is what she preferred, and thought was better. I don't know much about Battaille, but he was a stickler for the irreplaceable, unmissable, ungovernable excess to be found in sensuous experience; he wrote some (relatively philosophical) pornography.

I think this is part of how addiction functions - if life is to be lived, it has to be given over, moment by moment. A sensuous experience which exceeds the reason's capacities to appreciate and represent is a good candidate to give your moments over to. Battaille and my mother know there's more to it than that, but they are alive to the possibility that there may be nothing better.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Worldviews

I noticed in my facebook feed an atheist page quoting 1 Timothy 2, one of several new testament passages giving different instructions to the different sexes - in particular the troubling? counter-cultural? obnoxious? 'a woman should learn in quietness and full submission.  I do not permit a woman to teach or assume authority over a man - she must keep silent.'  It appears to be growing at a geometric rate, so it may soon be in your feed too.  Christians are naively trying to explain something from their worldview to those outside it which they have plenty of trouble digesting inside the worldview.  Atheists are making rules like 'we only allow rational statements on this site', which is so close to 'we only allow what we agree with or what makes us feel more secure' as makes no mind.

I guess atheism is always going to be parasitic on theism, just a very narrow nihilism with no positive content; but this sort of baiting makes the parasitism so naked that I would have thought atheists would feel embarrassed.

Love

Socrates asked whether good acts are good because the Gods love them, or whether the Gods love them because they are good. I think the truth is that they are Gods because they love them; and they are lovely because they lead to Gods.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

From 'Sickness Unto Death'

Penguin classics,  Translated by Alastair Hannay.

p74 - Kierkegaard's opinion of Hegel, after drawing so heavily on Christian theology, concluding that he drained it dry and disbelieving.

No, being in error is, quite un-Socratically, what people are least afraid of.  One sees amazing examples of this which illustrate it on a stupendous scale.  A thinker erects a huge building, a system, one that encompasses the whole of life and world-history, etc. - and if one turns one's attention to his personal life one discovers to one's astonishment the appalling and ludicrous fact that he himself does not live in this huge, high-vaulted palace, but in a store-house next-door, or a kennel, or at most in the janitor's quarters.  If one took it upon oneself to draw attention with but a single word to this contradiction, he would be insulted.  For so long as he can complete the system - with the help of his error - being in error is not what he is afraid of.

 p104 - Kierkegaard's describes yours truly with clarity and brutality:

We began [] with the lowest form of despair, which in despair did not want to be itself. The demonic despair is the most heightened form of the despair which in despair wants to be itself.  This latter despair does not even want to be itself in Stoic self-infatuation and self-exaltation, not even in that no doubt mendacious way, but one that in a certain sense conformed to its own ideal of perfection; no,  it wants to be itself in hatred towards existence, to be itself according to its misery; it does not even want defiantly to be itself, but to be itself in sheer spite; it does not even want to sever itself defiantly from the power which established it; it wants in sheer spite to press itself on that power, importune it, hang on to it out of malice. And that is understandable - a malicious objection must, of all things, take care to hang on to that to which it is an objection.  Rebelling against all existence, it thinks it has acquired evidence against existence, against its goodness.  The despairer thinks he himself is this evidence.  And it is this that he wants to be; this is the reason he wants to be himself, to be himself in his agony, so as to protest with this agony against all existence.

This is what I am constantly to repent of. To be is good.  Even if you are a silly person who can't forsake too many projects and has very little talent at any of them.