Screenplays

I have just realised what I am trying to write about in my screenplays.  This is not of great interest to the readership, but as this is the nearest thing I have to a journal, I shall jot it down.

Langley (the protagonist) is the razor edge on our relationship to the future.  We are throwing away the future - failing to agree, failing to work hard, failing, failing, failing.  Langley puts a face on that. When he kills, he kills futures, happinesses for humanity that will now never arrive.  And he does it so that things can stay the same.  The last will not be first on his watch.

We are throwing away chances because we can't believe any of them, because they are all a confusion, a superposition, of mutually exclusive realities, and the only way we know to resolve this is to disbelieve them all.  Nature is over, but we can't find a well-governed nature we can believe in, much less tolerate.

This is why I think some belief in a God as the actuality of possibilities, the something of which the universe is the nothingness (not-ing). Something that keeps the future open and prevents the collapse into nihilism is needed.  And it has to have a moral character and authority, to tell us what should become, what we ought.

Capitalism

I have no good references for this, but I think of capitalism as specifying:

How Money Uses People to Make More Money.

This definition (for me) makes the business school / economics assumption that the purpose of a business is to turn some money into more money logical, by narrowing human motivation to just their cash equivalents. Pro-capitalism positions would tend to say that this misses the concomitant fact that to make money, you have to meet a human need, but I think the meeting of the needs of the human who notionally owns the money at the expense of clients and workers for the business, tends to discourage that. The humans who 'own' the money have to serve it relentlessly or it will migrate to or get captured by other humans who can tend it more effectively. I always think of the 'Ton' in Regency England, where living off your fortune meant marrying to maintain your fortune, which meant spending enough to keep up with rich class. Every decision was warped by this one fear - will our money run out on us, leaving us to reduce our lifestyle or heaven forfend, work!

Pro-capitalist positions will also point to the virtues obtained under capitalism - the material wealth, the vigorous uptake of innovation.  These, though, are neutrals.  Capitalism would not end slavery, workhouses, introduce schooling for all children, or preserve the environment.  The benefits to human life are side effects.  The good side effects are not combated, the negative side effects are. What is defined as negative sometimes has a corollary justification to money (climate change might, universal education might now, although not before 1900), but if that corollary were convincing, money would be invested spontaneously.  Capitalism is not the summum bonum.  It has to be a part, not the whole, of your ideas of good human outcomes.  This idea might explored in 'The Darwin Economy' which I should maybe read, although I think it is more about the fact that evolutionary stable strategies in nature and Nash equilibria in business-style games are described by a single theoretical structure.  The Darwin Economy probably points out that Nash equilbria (local minima in which neither player can move to a better strategy without losing out to the other) can occur which are not nearly Pareto optimal, and suggest that we need to selectively breed (or otherwise put evolutionary pressure on) corporations and markets to edge toward Pareto optimal benignity.

There is an interesting theorist of technology called W. Brian Arthur, whose book 'The Nature of Technology' captures a lot of the true things you can say.  It would have been a better book with more Heidegger (Equipment as a starting point for understanding Human Being can't not be informative about technology), but it's still excellent.  He has put out an article recently called 'the second economy' in Mckinsey's (registration-walled), but summarised and expanded upon at theatlantic.com.  Essentially, he's pointing out that equipment 'works'.  It doesn't just increase productivity, it produces. It finishes things. The Second Economy is the automatic economy. Arguably, we've always depended on this - farming depends on the productivity of fruiting trees and plants.  But trees and plants are not doing information work, and they aren't Turing-complete in being able to work indefinitely accomplishing who knows what (is that a fair use of Turing-complete in a sentence?  Possibly not).

 This would change my original definition to:

How Money gets things done to Make More Money.

There is much speculation about the singularity, about the second economy becoming independent of the humans who think they own it.  Charles Stross' Accelerando does a wonderful job of imagining it while keeping at least one tippy-toe on the ground.  It could happen.  Well before it does, he notes, Money will migrate toward it.  Google and Facebook and Intel and so on are that beginning.  Amazon has bought a warehouse-robot factory to turn all its warehouses over to robots (rather than abuse humans into robot-form).

(One difficulty with trying to recognize this is that it might mean people don't take money seriously any more, in which case you lose the good of capitalism (anti-nepotist, results oriented, energized, innovation-attracted) with the bad.  And people are no better off, because they've migrated to thinking that (detached cool/ethical validation/family affection/etc) is the only thing worth having, and they'll put that on a pedestal until it kills them too.)

* Is that Turing-complete?  Turing-complete means a language of instructions that can articulate write, read and delete, conditional execution and repetition (loops) - perform the functions of a Turing machine and be implemented by a Turing Machine.

Empathy & Beauty

I recently did a few of the tests from Simon Baron-Cohen's work on Systematizing vs Empathizing brains.  In his research, men are biased toward systematizing, such that there is a part of the systematizing curve in which women are almost never found, occupied by 5% of men.  Similarly there is a region at the empathizing end where nearly no men exist, but 5% of women spend their lives.  There were two self-report tests which didn't seem terribly reliable (Do you often say things that offend people without realising? - I don't know - I may not realise.)  But there was also a test of looking at just eyes and reading the expression.  I scored 24/36.  Asberger's suspicion starts immediately below 22, average is 29 for men and higher for women.

I hate being bad at things, and having lacks.  I spend a lot of mental energy worrying because I am aware of times past when I lacked empathy.  I respect and value it, but by working hard I can remain only in the bottom quartile of insensitive jerks. Although I hate it, there's not much to be done.

I take some encouragement from this poem (quoted from here):

               Pied Beauty
                         Gerard Manley Hopkins

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;	5
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:	10
Praise him.

All things Counter, Orginal, Spare, Strange - 

Spare in this context I take to mean, sparingly made, made out of not quite all the parts.  As I am.

I was giving a lift and taking directions

Which took me home by a different route than we had come by. The future, always so clear to me, was like a black highway at night. But I knew what Paul Muad-d'ib would do, and I took the opportunity to be a sort of Ersatz Haderach.

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A chip off the old block

My little son is not so little.  He's 11.5kg at 9 months 90-95%ile.  He's not especially big given the families he's from, but he's big and tall enough that crawling is more of a challenge than for more compact babies.  It's reasonably important, so we're putting him on his back or tummy instead of sitting up whenever we can persuade him to stop walking around holding our fingers.

On his tummy, he tries for 10-20 seconds to crawl, makes a reasonable approximation of leopard crawling, then decides its all too hard and puts his head on his arm and weeps until rescued.  So exactly like me.

Stereotypes and imperfect knowledge

Thinking again about the question of gender difference, I keep being driven back into stereotypes drawn from salient experience. Quantity and intensity both matter to the codified memory that is predicted onto people of particular types. Predictive-memory (as per Jeff Hawkins) means the world we perceive is continually being primed for recognition as things we're familiar with it. If I meet a person I haven't met before, I* am able to divine an incredible amount about them ('brief glimpses' research) because we are all trading in types all the time. We don't just fall into types, we clothe ourselves in them.

So stereotypes are not simply self-protective defences of the authoritarian mind; they are massively information-rich guides to convention and behaviour. That's not the safe, independent thing it sounds like though - you are your world existingly, and if this is your map of the world, its also you. When it seems inaccurate, your very self becomes and feels unstable. You are plunged into disconnectedness - shame, world-collapse.

Sometimes that needs to happen. Your stereotypes of winning and losing need to be transformed from those you formed in childhood, because they're wrong, whether you think it doesn't matter or it does. But your stereotypes of male and female aren't (entirely) like that. They've accumulated to manage differences between the sexes and here I would go a little way with Freud and say that the structure of mother and father is formatively important. These stereotypes pre-exist the self. Indeed, I think given the amount of evidence linking sensitivities to dna, they pre-exist the individual person (phylogenetic more than ontogenetic).

So I think the bible uses stereotypes as part of its 'now but not yet' structure of things demonstrated and achieved at the cross, but not universally accomplished. We know that 'in christ(ianity) there is neither male nor female' and in heaven there is no marriage, but here on earth, and even in church, both still matter. So I read the proscriptions on women teaching as something like the forbidding to eat meat offered to idols if that's difficult for anyone. Unless everyone is conditioned to tolerate it, it will be very threatening without being productive. There isn't a stereotype-free mode of 'being' that we could shift to. (This assumes that the patriarchy is pretty universal (which it was in the world of the new testament), but it isn't. I think it might be something like a Nash equilibrium though, that societies flourish (or at least grow aggressively) by playing it and it spreads by competition-contagion. Maybe the promise of 'neither male nor female' is coming to fruition in our time in the liberal refusal to impose on anyone's self-definition.)

I doubt anyone is very impressed by this. It certainly has some weaknesses. When my little brother was about three, he was with my mother in the street when something happened that caused a total meltdown - a bus went by, driven by a woman. One of the few things he felt sure of had given way, and he was enraged. So there's an amusing story as compensation.

*actually not so much me as everyone.

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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.

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