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.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Love and Anxiety
The Dish has picked up a couple of blogs analysing a certain scene in Terence Malick's Tree of Life.
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:
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:
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.
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.
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Breaking
In social psychology, 'breaking' is behaving without any reference to social norms. Stanley Milgram was apparently happy to do it as a hobby - arriving for dinner he would skip greetings and proceed to counting the cutlery.
Bible study is a social gathering with a lot of norms. Often there will be a short prayer time, where people share a personal concern, and someone else prays for them. (There is a norm about not praying for your own stuff, so structures that ensure you know who you will be praying for are important - otherwise there's no guarantee everyone gets prayed for - also a terrible solecism.)
So I was sitting next to Chris, an IT guru - maybe a 'systems analyst' describes it. He hacks Unix like other people hack cheese off a block the size of a car battery. What was Chris's prayer point? Was his boss on his case? Did he have a sick friend or relation? Was he feeling stressed and rundown?
Spam. Chris wanted me to pray against spam emails. Why? 'They're very annoying.'
Although I joined a long period of hysterical laughter, I didn't think spam was absolutely outside God's concern - it's wasteful of time and intellect and processing power. (Side note: If, as in Lawnmower Man, an AI decided to ring all the phones on the planet, or email all the email addresses on the planet, it would almost certainly be ignored.)
So I attempted to formulate a prayer beseeching the Lord to stifle spam. I will leave this account there. It's literally hysterical - I feel my (metaphorical) womb rise up and enter my brain.
Bible study is a social gathering with a lot of norms. Often there will be a short prayer time, where people share a personal concern, and someone else prays for them. (There is a norm about not praying for your own stuff, so structures that ensure you know who you will be praying for are important - otherwise there's no guarantee everyone gets prayed for - also a terrible solecism.)
So I was sitting next to Chris, an IT guru - maybe a 'systems analyst' describes it. He hacks Unix like other people hack cheese off a block the size of a car battery. What was Chris's prayer point? Was his boss on his case? Did he have a sick friend or relation? Was he feeling stressed and rundown?
Spam. Chris wanted me to pray against spam emails. Why? 'They're very annoying.'
Although I joined a long period of hysterical laughter, I didn't think spam was absolutely outside God's concern - it's wasteful of time and intellect and processing power. (Side note: If, as in Lawnmower Man, an AI decided to ring all the phones on the planet, or email all the email addresses on the planet, it would almost certainly be ignored.)
So I attempted to formulate a prayer beseeching the Lord to stifle spam. I will leave this account there. It's literally hysterical - I feel my (metaphorical) womb rise up and enter my brain.
Friday, April 13, 2012
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.
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.
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Thursday, April 12, 2012
Python
I had a day of lessons introducing Python today. I assumed I would need them because I'm slow with paradigm shifts, but so far its just been delightfully familiar (orderly and relaxed like MatLab) and at the same time large (a diversity of libraries to equal Java's coverage) and at the same time less obscure. My first Java program had a lot of code that I didn't understand until six months after I started with it. With Python, there are a few behavioural facts of interest (arising from object-oriented design), but no expressions that are simply unintelligible. More tomorrow.
Mum: Python is free and open-source, is built into most Unix systems (including OS X). You can find out about it and get it from www.python.org. You can get a nicely constructed Windows distribution from ActiveState: http://www.activestate.com/activepython/downloads
Mum: Python is free and open-source, is built into most Unix systems (including OS X). You can find out about it and get it from www.python.org. You can get a nicely constructed Windows distribution from ActiveState: http://www.activestate.com/activepython/downloads
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Determinate Negation
In my scouring of the internet for help understanding Hegel, I found 3 video lectures by Robert Brandom from LMU Munich (in English, of course)*.
They provide an overview of his recent work reading Kant and Hegel and thinking about the problems of metaphysical and semantic realism and idealism. The basic difficulty of providing a union of conceptual thinking (thinking in terms of objects, classes, entities, and rational relations between them) and reality as we experience it.
Kant set up a view of this that the reason came fitted with 'synthetic judgments' - prejudices that make us see causality in some constant conjunction of phenomena, that may help us survive in the world bnut which can't themselves be grounded in reason or perceived directly in experience (see Hume on Causality). Their rationality is 'transcendental', which I would describe (probably wrongly), as meaning that they are justified as the condition of the possibility of rationality. Kant thought that perception grasped 'the object' for consciousness through an act of (synthetic) judgement, but that the object for itself remained ineffable, unknowable.
People said, well how do you know there's such a thing as the thing in itself then? But maybe they didn't say it to Kant, out of respect.** Robert Brandom diagnoses this as a gap in the intelligibility of the world, and explains that Hegel's project was to attempt to give an account with no gap.
Hegel argues that the mode of definition of the object is by what he calls 'determinate negation.' An object is white (and NOT black, red or any other colour). The 'IS' is Kant's synthetic judgement, but in Hegel the appearance is the appearance of a super-sensible object which becomes understandable as more and more experiences mean you can perhaps synthesise a law (law is the truth of appearances in Hegel).
As Brandom explains it, objects define themselves by means of determinate negation, and consciousness of the object characterises the object by determinate negation, and consciousness is engaged continually in reconciling its conceptual contents by judgements with the goal of eliminating material incompatibility and fitting the right scheme of determinate negations over the understood world. Although its impossible for the objects to hold materially incompatible properties, a subject (person) can hold materially incompatible beliefs or positions. But although they can, we hold that they shouldn't. You can't be in two places at once, we say to the double booked person. You must resolve that incompatibility. If you see a straight stick appear bent under water, you have to come up with a theory of how water bends appearances, or sticks. You can't believe the same stick is both straight and bent. Determinate negation implicitly (though minimally) puts concepts and objects into the kind of holistic structure Heidegger calls a world. Square is NOT round, triangular, pentagonal etc.
Brandom also draws out the parallel with Shannon information theory, in which the information provided by a bit depends on what it negates. If a thousand possible worlds would have had it be zero, and it is one (and NOT zero), then it is very informative - but you measure it by that negation.
I've made this much less clear than I should. I don't understand it well enough to do a much better job even if I took my time.
Itunes:
Review of his latest book - Being Human
* There is no reason for them to be released as video - the image of a luxuriantly bearded Robert Brandom is itself a luxury in this world of scarcity. Audio-only would have been fine, LMU.
** Did you know he first hypothesized the accretion disk formation of the solar system?
They provide an overview of his recent work reading Kant and Hegel and thinking about the problems of metaphysical and semantic realism and idealism. The basic difficulty of providing a union of conceptual thinking (thinking in terms of objects, classes, entities, and rational relations between them) and reality as we experience it.
Kant set up a view of this that the reason came fitted with 'synthetic judgments' - prejudices that make us see causality in some constant conjunction of phenomena, that may help us survive in the world bnut which can't themselves be grounded in reason or perceived directly in experience (see Hume on Causality). Their rationality is 'transcendental', which I would describe (probably wrongly), as meaning that they are justified as the condition of the possibility of rationality. Kant thought that perception grasped 'the object' for consciousness through an act of (synthetic) judgement, but that the object for itself remained ineffable, unknowable.
People said, well how do you know there's such a thing as the thing in itself then? But maybe they didn't say it to Kant, out of respect.** Robert Brandom diagnoses this as a gap in the intelligibility of the world, and explains that Hegel's project was to attempt to give an account with no gap.
Hegel argues that the mode of definition of the object is by what he calls 'determinate negation.' An object is white (and NOT black, red or any other colour). The 'IS' is Kant's synthetic judgement, but in Hegel the appearance is the appearance of a super-sensible object which becomes understandable as more and more experiences mean you can perhaps synthesise a law (law is the truth of appearances in Hegel).
As Brandom explains it, objects define themselves by means of determinate negation, and consciousness of the object characterises the object by determinate negation, and consciousness is engaged continually in reconciling its conceptual contents by judgements with the goal of eliminating material incompatibility and fitting the right scheme of determinate negations over the understood world. Although its impossible for the objects to hold materially incompatible properties, a subject (person) can hold materially incompatible beliefs or positions. But although they can, we hold that they shouldn't. You can't be in two places at once, we say to the double booked person. You must resolve that incompatibility. If you see a straight stick appear bent under water, you have to come up with a theory of how water bends appearances, or sticks. You can't believe the same stick is both straight and bent. Determinate negation implicitly (though minimally) puts concepts and objects into the kind of holistic structure Heidegger calls a world. Square is NOT round, triangular, pentagonal etc.
Brandom also draws out the parallel with Shannon information theory, in which the information provided by a bit depends on what it negates. If a thousand possible worlds would have had it be zero, and it is one (and NOT zero), then it is very informative - but you measure it by that negation.
I've made this much less clear than I should. I don't understand it well enough to do a much better job even if I took my time.
Itunes:
Review of his latest book - Being Human
* There is no reason for them to be released as video - the image of a luxuriantly bearded Robert Brandom is itself a luxury in this world of scarcity. Audio-only would have been fine, LMU.
** Did you know he first hypothesized the accretion disk formation of the solar system?
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Movie Review: Drive
Ryan Gosling and director Nicolas Winding Refn got a lot of attention for Drive, the story of a young man with a gift for driving who does some stunt driving, some racing and some getaway work. He has no name, and is known in secondary sources as Driver. Seeing his pretty neighbour (Carey Mulligan) needing help, he befriends her. A week later, her husband is released from jail and moves back in. They're not a perfect match, but he's a pretty good guy wanting to go straight. The trouble is, he's got old debts that need repaying. So he takes on one last job because Driver offers to help him. Things go horribly wrong, leaving Driver with a lot of money, and trouble with two crime syndicates that lay claim to it. Can he get square? Will cool nerves and discipline and timing be enough?
This is an interesting film to watch after hearing it built up. Coming in cold, I would have regarded it pretty highly, because the story is always surprising you and the emotional story is simple and well told. There are no wasted words, no wasted scenes, no gore spared. It sits somewhere close to a western, and the violence was extreme. The structure and story resolution are not upbeat, but satisfying.
Some things that didn't totally satisfy - the score is largely techno, and it works well for the half of the story that happens in the dark, but in some of the rundown motels and diners it just seemed a little thin and clean - also, there's nothing of the calibre of Oxygene. There's an air of unreality about some of the car sequences: reverse doesn't go that fast; and cars that slam their foes in the side don't retain working headlights.
The character of Driver is very close to my vision for Langley, a character in the screenplays I've been working on. A man of great ability, curiously blank, hard to read yet straightforward, emotionally vulnerable and tightly wound but holding it together coldly, and struggling with old men and economics to carve out some secure space, to get a place in the world. I wonder if this is a new type we will see more of. It's not exactly coming of age, because he's come of age and is an omni-competent adult. But after you come of age, life is still a struggle, and if you fight well and are lucky, you might come out even.
This is an interesting film to watch after hearing it built up. Coming in cold, I would have regarded it pretty highly, because the story is always surprising you and the emotional story is simple and well told. There are no wasted words, no wasted scenes, no gore spared. It sits somewhere close to a western, and the violence was extreme. The structure and story resolution are not upbeat, but satisfying.
Some things that didn't totally satisfy - the score is largely techno, and it works well for the half of the story that happens in the dark, but in some of the rundown motels and diners it just seemed a little thin and clean - also, there's nothing of the calibre of Oxygene. There's an air of unreality about some of the car sequences: reverse doesn't go that fast; and cars that slam their foes in the side don't retain working headlights.
The character of Driver is very close to my vision for Langley, a character in the screenplays I've been working on. A man of great ability, curiously blank, hard to read yet straightforward, emotionally vulnerable and tightly wound but holding it together coldly, and struggling with old men and economics to carve out some secure space, to get a place in the world. I wonder if this is a new type we will see more of. It's not exactly coming of age, because he's come of age and is an omni-competent adult. But after you come of age, life is still a struggle, and if you fight well and are lucky, you might come out even.
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