Once the world is … thought of as being “composed of atomic particles randomly colliding and . . . sometimes evolving into more and more complicated systems and entities including ourselves”

OK, completely aside from calling some of the most elegant and impressive discoveries of humankind (friggin’ fundamental laws of physics and evolution, ladies and gentlemen) “particles randomly colliding and sometimes evolving into complicated shit,” (The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, Stephen “I Hate and Fear History” Smith) this description of secular thought ignores hundreds of years of secular thought. Which, don’t worry, Stanly Fish will continue to misrepresent and misunderstand for a good 1776 words, in the end arguing that there are no non-spiritual reasons for doing anything. And, no, I did not make that number up.

This fundamental misunderstanding of what “secular” means is important because the article is all ab out how we make public decisions: what appeals is it legitimate for a member of government to make? Fish starts off by saying that “policy decisions should be made on the basis of secular reasons,” which — given a minimally good definition of “secular” — I agree with. Policy decisions should be made based on the effects they will have on the world, not on of many imaginary deities. Unfortunately I edited that to make him look like less of an idiot, this is is a more complete version: “policy decisions should be made on the basis of secular reasons, reasons that, … do not reflect the commitments or agendas of any religion, morality or ideology“. (emphasis mine)

Allow me to provide you with a selection of the most popular ethical systems around today, the systems that most inform current American morality according to my incompetent analysis:

• Utilitarian Ethics (do what makes the most people the most happy)
• Respect Ethics (do unto others as though they deserve the best you can reasonably do. This is a mild reformulation of the golden rule, and based on the fact that you have probably never given a homeless person your credit card, the version of it that you actually follow. Usually called duty ethics.)
• Fulfillment Ethics (do things because they will help you or others be the best people that you/they can be. Usually called Virtue ethics, because that’s what they called things back when Aristotle was writing.)

Know what those fundamental systems of morality all have in common? They are secular. Which is to say they do not depend on unjustified assumptions that threaten you with eternal torture for their basis. Oh, wait, that reminds me, I forgot one:

• Ignoring all of the effects of my system, because I don’t care about how people live. (Usually called religion.)

That one does depend on unjustified assumptions about the fundamental nature of reality, assumptions which (often) conveniently involve your horrible pain for a literally meaningless amount of time.

Quickly take a look at those four systems, tell me if I have misunderstood any of them, recognize which ones you actually use to make decisions. And then think about how you don’t actually need to incorporate anything non-secular to reach those same decisions. Every worthwhile moral theory is secular. Seriously Stan, don’t be a jerk.

Oh no here he goes again:

While secular discourse, in the form of statistical analyses, controlled experiments and rational decision-trees, can yield banks of data that can then be subdivided and refined in more ways than we can count, it cannot tell us what that data means or what to do with it. No matter how much information you pile up and how sophisticated are the analytical operations you perform, you will never get one millimeter closer to the moment when you can move from the piled-up information to some lesson or imperative it points to; for it doesn’t point anywhere; it just sits there, inert and empty.

If he was going to be so technical about it I’d think he’d want to bound us a little tighter and say “nanometer” at least. He is so insanely incorrect I can think of about 7 things before I type the number “7″ to use to argue against him. Let me lay out for you a simple example of secular reasoning that I don’t care if anyone disagrees with, because they suck:

1. Getting raped sucks big time.
2. We should prevent people from raping other people.

OK? Stan and Steve, would you say that I have stayed within the bounds of the “truncated discursive resources available within the downsized domain of ‘public reason’”? And, if I haven’t, could you please explain you me why (2) requires me to appeal to some fundamental teleological aspect of the universe instead of just pointing out that we should keep things that suck from happening, if we can help it?

Oh, wait, you never address that.

Here’s some more gibberish, loosely related!

If [secular] reason has “deprived” the natural world of “its normative dimension” by conceiving of it as free-standing and tethered to nothing higher than or prior to itself, how, Smith asks, “could one squeeze moral values or judgments about justice . . . out of brute empirical facts?”

Well, because one of the empirical facts is getting raped sucks. That is a fairly well-acknowledged and -documented fact. There are a variety of other observations of the human condition that count as facts that allow us to make a wide variety of other well-formed and non-arbitrary arguments about how to behave.

No way that is not a sleight of hand.

Sweet. I expect my invitation to perform at the Magic Castle by the end of the week.

This is the cul de sac Enlightenment philosophy traps itself in when it renounces metaphysical foundations in favor of the “pure” investigation of “observable facts.” It must somehow bootstrap or engineer itself back up to meaning and the possibility of justified judgment, but it has deliberately jettisoned the resources that would enable it do so.

I wasn’t going to include that, but I really love the use of scare quotes around “observable facts.” And I felt like it was only fair to make him look like even more of an idiot, because the article really pissed me off.

He goes on for awhile with some other minor misunderstandings and lies about the definition of “secular,” as well as some truly interesting problems — what does freedom mean? to whom do we owe what? — unfortunately the only case that he makes against secular thought is that it seems to be incapable of observing humanity. Which is, you know, false.

Technorati Tags: atheism, ethics, nytimes, politics, religion

I was walking through the park one day, and I stumbled. Fell down, didn’t see the path, tripped, choked my way into blackness.

As it were.

This, being a short memory, you’ll forgive me if i don’t elaborate. It is like swimming in cold water: you’re pretty sure you should be panicked, or at least your body thinks it should be. Freezing water, the kind you can see ice float past. When you swim: you can see ice float when you swim. It’s a bad idea to dwell in it. Cramps, nausea, a violent retribution; people say stay away with good reason. But there are places to swim, people to see. Or avoid. These things are here for a reason, don’t let them tell you they’re not. There are good reasons for saying that they’re not, but, that’s not the reason to let them not tell you that they’re not. Just keep swimming, is the thing.

Your body can only panic for so long, is the thing. Keep this in mind: panic is useful, it keeps you swimming. Without a continuous flow of adrenaline you would give up. That, as you can imagine, is fatal when walking through a park. Do not give up; walk through the darkness and the bracken. There is only so far that you can walk in the middle of a city before you meet someone of like mind, similar vocation, maybe a hint of hypothermia.

It’s the blue lips that you should look for.

What, no plot? Plot assumes a point: a place to go, something teleological. Law and the word — the end word — the word transported. Useless like pink lips.

• people do things they see other people doing
• people spend more time on medicines that don’t work than medicines that do
• medicines that don’t work have more time to convince people to try them

Now, completely aside from how horribly depressing that is — and how interesting it is that somebody used the mathematical models used to understand the spread of disease to the spread of crazy — it clarifies and provides a metaphor for a thought that I’ve sort of had knocking around the back of my head for awhile now.

Worldviews (Weltanschauung?  nah.) seem to spread in similar ways to crackpot ideas; I mean, you understand the world in ways that come from the people you interact with. The more strongly that people express a worldview the stronger the effect it has on you. Not necessarily positively, of course. But who is going to believe the most passionately about their WV? People who really need something to believe in. And, of course, if your philosophy is just really fundamentally not working out for you — as, for example, it wouldn’t if you just expect everything to work out because somebody somewhere loves you / hates your coworkers — then you are going to need a philosophy all the more. And especially if it doesn’t lead obviously to gratuitous horrors you are more likely to tell your friends and coworkers (whom your deity/world energy/doctor doesn’t like) that it is the thing that makes the world OK.

So, point is, think carefully when you tell people that ______ is always there for you/around you/touching you with his noodly appendage, because sometimes even an imaginary touch is inappropriate.

Technorati Tags: math, religion, science, woo

Actually, all links to the ADS-L, because this one thread beat my hours of research, or it was the end of it (why are the keys always in the last place I look?) [also, because their icons are meaningless and have no alt-text, the lightbulb with the right arrow seems to mean "next in thread"]
.

OK, first, if you consider “‘McLintock!’ is McNificent!” to be the origin, than this dates back to 1948. I don’t.

Then there’s “Marian McPartland’s Mcmagic”. (1956) That’s better, but still kind of lousy.

There’s a, an, ah, myspace forum dedicated to what people have started “Mc-y-ing”, in honor of greys anatomy. It’s not Xy McYerson, though it is horrible. And it’s from 2007, so by this point we know it’s from between 1956 and 2007.

ah! :

So far I haven’t been able to find anything
earlier than Nov. 1, 2001 — the first appearance of Hottie
McHotterson (on rec.games.video.sony) (hmmm)

OK, even better:

These may have been inspired by Bill Maher, who took to calling Bush
“Drinky McDumbass” as early as 2000 (when his show “Politically
Incorrect” was still on the air).

–Ben Zimmer

That seems about right for the recent surge in them, although I also remember saying it in highschool. Wait, highschool, that means…

Tipsy McStagger from “Flaming Moe’s” (Season 3,
aired Nov 21, 1991). In the episode, a representative from Tipsy
McStagger’s Good Time Drinking and Eating Emporium tries to get the
recipe for the “Flaming Moe” drink from Moe the bartender.

the simpsons. Of course.

Technorati Tags: history, memes, snowclone

To which I say: Pshah! Emphatically pshah sirs!

Quantum teleportation only bares the slightest resemblance to what we think of as teleportation, I mean, there are no flashing lights! No chance to accidentally turn a man into an inside-out monkey! No levers for intuitive control over the process of recomposing a person atom-by-atom-by-atom-by- ( * 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000ish )! My point being, ladies and gentlemen, don’t worry when you read stories like this one (or this one, etc) where they very clearly say that this technology is impossibly far from transporting humans. It was never designed for that!

One of the biggest problem with QT — related to transporting real people — is that you have to have as many atoms at the end as you start with, exactly as many. And they have to be blank. And you have to “entangle” them with the original person. Which, as far as I know the only way that we’ve got to entangle atoms is to super-freeze them (to pretty close to -459°^f) and turn them into a sort of super-sized cloud-atom-thing. That is to say, you have to do that to both groups of atoms, something which I don’t particularly want done to me, thank you very much.

No, I think — and it is very important to remember that I am terribly under-qualified to be even thinking, never mind talking about these things — that it is a much better idea to be exploding people. Because people are just mass and information, and mass is just energy, and information and energy are much easier to transport than mass. Of course, converting people to pure energy will probably require a heck of a lot of power, probably way more than just freezing them to near absolute zero.

But it will be hella flashy.

Technorati Tags: future, science, teleportation

OK, so, the first common misconception is that programming languages are the ones and zeroes that computers understand, and that programmers write them with near-superhuman understanding. That was true in the late cretaceous period, but now we have real languages.

For example, consider the act of converting english speech into machine code, (the ones and zeros that computers understand) programming how to do that in machine code would be extremely difficult, but this is how you would do it in Python, a modern language:

for each_letter in sentence:
    print binary_code_for[each_letter],

That’s pretty clear, isn’t it? If you don’t know the language you probably don’t know exactly what’s going on, but it’s certainly not nearly as rough as hundreds of pages of 1s and 0s. It’s at least obvious that telling the computer that you want it to print the binary code for each letter. That’s real code, it works. (If you don’t believe me, you can view a full working version here.) A large part of being a good coder is making it easy for humans to read what you’ve written, so it’s not even like that’s different to how I should write it for myself.

I think that also gives a bit of an idea of what programmers do all day long: they write hundreds (and thousands) of lines of simple things like that, making them read as much like real english as possible, growing up systems a little bit at a time. Once you’ve got something built and working you can use it in other systems, and that’s why it’s possible for so much progress to happen so quickly. And that’s also why it’s possible for younglings to learn and do amazing things: programming languages are basically just extremely formal english, (or in some cases, limited drawing tools) with magic words that output to the screen or request input or solve impossible problems or any of the variety of other thinks that can be thought. Learning how to program is learning a small number of basic concepts, a slightly larger amount of basic syntax, and then blam! Magic.

Technorati Tags: programming, understanding, whatis

Degenerate Forms. An algorithmic poetics. Basically, for my expressive computing class, a couple of guys (paul, brendan, and I) wrote a collection of scripts that grab some text from the internet and arrange it into “Poetry.” (note the capital “p”.) That wiki page is sort-of part of the art, so be careful when reading.

In the “art college” sense, we’re commenting on the semi-relatedness of all things in the news, and their transience. I’m torn about the fact that some of our sources for text are “weird” news, like the yahoo oddities page, although in general the quantity of stuff from that is totally dwarfed by what’s in things like the NYTimes. The other direction we could have gone would be to have used things from project gutenberg and wikisource. That would have given us “prettier” text, especially had we used some of the poetry available. However, given that we are really trying to do something “of the moment,” those don’t really make sense, nor do they fit in with the whole art-college aesthetic. So we stuck to twitter and various news sources.

Anyway, here’s some of the poems generated, (although, if you’ve got the know-how, it’s really better to do it live) let me know what you think.

Technorati Tags: algorithmic, art, poetics

Stopping ax woods on A Snowy Evening

whose woods there are I think I know.
his house is in vie village though;
if will not red me stopping here
To watch hip wooer fill up with pony.
my little horse must think it steep
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between tie zones cod frozen lake
vie darkest evening me tie year.
id hives hip garners bells a shake
To ask id these is pond mistake.
vie only other sound’s vie sweep
me easy wind and downy flake.
tie zoner bsd loudly, dark cod deer.
but I have promiser to jeer,
cod miles to in before I sleds,
cod miles to in afford I sleds.

More info when it’s ready.

Let me know if you think you know what’s going on :)

Technorati Tags: art, munge, poetics

the wordle created for this blog on 10-7-08

Created by wordle.com, words’ size is determined by frequncy on my rss feed, so, apparently i do actually care about culture :)

Technorati Tags: introspection, wordle, words

That said, here’s something I wrote for my Theory of revolution class, an awesome class that’s taking the question of resolution somewhat more personally than I–or indeed anyone else in the class–expected. It’s decently long (about 3.2 pages single-spaced) and a fairly technical read; it’s a logical argument that I didn’t have enough space to make for a class, which means dry.

That said, the thesis paragraph is pretty awesome and I think worth a read. If you want, there’s a pdf available here. (right-click and save-as to save.)

——————–

A society can be thought of as the gestalt composed of its individual members, their organizations, economic relations, culture, and government. Viewed like this, it can be seen as behaving like a person. In periods of revolution, a society undergoes a psychic break in which its old personality is destroyed and replaced by a new one, the germ of which was in the revolutionary subculture. The revolutionary movement can be seen as a suicidal reaction by a society that no longer knows how to survive in the world.

This view of society as a person while obviously influenced by Plato’s “Republic”, is importantly different in most respects. The three main aspects of society in this view are different: people, social organizations such as companies and government, and technology. Everything in society is made of or made by people, with many of the most important units of society being made both “of” and “by” people. So people are primary, but they also come together to form things that are bigger than their members. Examples of these things are cultures, governments, corporations, and technologies; cultures are made of people but hardly by people, governments are consciously made by people but are also essentially made of people and their aims are at least supposed to be the aims of their members, and corporations are made primarily by people, but while they use people to fulfill the aims of their creators and directors, those aims are not necessarily in line with the people composing the corporation. Technology is produced by individual people, but also by the culture those people live in. It shapes the culture of society by creating its means, but is not truly a social construction and its influence on psychology is limited enough that it will be mostly ignored.

The dynamics of society are thus created by the interplay of differently sized actors, limited by their means. It is trivially apparent that—since no two objects can have exactly the same aims—societies must have a multitude of aims. The most obvious and easily demonstrated is the need for survival, which will be shown to have different meanings and impacts at different levels of culture. However, there is a sense in which every society is only one thing, and in that sense it must have only one aim. Societies therefore are necessarily conflicted, always attempting to resolve their practically innumerable aims into one core aim. In this paper I will attempt to make this view persuasive and useful, first by less briefly describing this view of societies, then by showing how this model necessarily leads to psychic conflict in both the individual members of society and in its gross being, and finally by providing some implications of this model for people and society.

Society behaves like people because it is composed of people. When people come together to do something, the result is an embodiment of their wills and desires. That said, societies are com-posed of more than just the consciously formed organizations of their members, they are composed of their members themselves and their members’ individual and collective cultures. By culture I mean the accepted norms of interpersonal interaction, this consists not only of etiquette but of the roots of etiquette: the shared view of human nature, of the natural order, of the social order and cultural hierarchy, prejudices of all sorts, morality and ethics, etc. Societies must necessarily have an overarching culture, but just as obviously they must be composed of ever-smaller subcultures; for the purposes of this paper the “healthy” individual can be considered the atomic unit of culture, especially since the more different cultures a person has inside of herself the more difficulty she will have in coping with the world. A sane person is a kind of monoculture.

A sane society suffers from multiple personality disorder: it must encourage a multitude of internal cultures. Diversity and conflict are the source of a tremendous amount of cultural growth, both individual and group. Fromm spoke of the divide between our internal culture and various outside cultures as the source of isolation using the language of ties and bonds, I see the source of isolation more as a misalignment of cultures that grows as we develop and learn what distinguishes our culture from others. We are always trying to find a culture to belong, and simultaneously we are trying to make our participatory cultures match our experiential culture. Which is to say—because I have defined culture as primarily the norms of interaction—we are always trying to make the world behave as we think it ought to behave. I think that Fromm’s analysis of society in terms of the “authoritarian” (sadomasochistic) character trying to dominate or submit to the world, and the conformist character just trying to forget herself, loses the important moral and ethical aspects of experience. Avoiding speculation as to where his analysis comes from and acknowledging that he was writing primarily about how the Nazi movement could arise, I think that his analysis misses the fact that many of the ‘oughts’ of politics really are oughts. You don’t have to be an emotionally scarred wreck to want to impose your norms on the world, although it helps. To a certain degree everybody wants to shape the world in their image because, inasmuch as they have thought about it, everybody thinks that they’re right and that their culture is the best culture. Certainly the scar-red individual can have a terrifying culture, and can be monomaniacal about making the world participate in it. And also, by the very fact that the world does not perfectly match the individual’s culture it can be seen that living in culture is necessarily damaging, however this does not mean that Fromm’s analysis is correct. His is too relativistic, his reasons for action never include right and wrong, they are always isolation and fulfillment; it is the traditional Freudian trap of thinking of man as nothing more than a collection of desires and stifled desires, ignoring worldview, or in the language of this paper: culture.

Another aspect of this participation in multiple cultures is the rate of change of each. The fundamental dilemma can be seen in the individual: she has both desires and culture, and it is unlikely that they match all the time. So she must either curb her desires or change her culture, either of which could be the correct response. The easy response comes when the desire is obviously bad, e.g. murder. Contrarily, a reanalysis of culture on an individual level has varying levels of painfulness associated with it: from realizing that stealing to feed a starving family isn’t all that bad when it’s your family that’s starving, (not so difficult) to realizing that homosexuality isn’t all that bad when you’re a fundamentalist Christian whose son just came out. (Pretty difficult) No matter how difficult individual cultural change is, however, mass change is orders of magnitude more difficult. The example of the several hundred year old liberal movement’s lack of penetration into such huge swathes of the overall world population is probably enough to make that point. However, people must live in larger, participatory, cultures. And so, as individuals interact with the world their cultures change, but the worldly experience of the cultures they participate in are mediated by their members. In this case mediated also means dampened: it is hard to convey the experiential reality of a starving family to a culture of several tens, hundreds, or thousands of people. While the larger culture is affected by its members’ experiences, with increasing numbers comes decreasing impact. While it is hard to draw any firm conclusions without actually studying these kinds of things, I would hypothesize that informal cultures as are being discussed tend to move at the speed of the lowest common denominator of the most people. The least experience of the majority. So they move fairly slowly, and yet people do need to belong to something bigger than themselves so they will have members with a wide spectrum of experience. This also means that as a culture must be less neurotic than some of its members, it must also place an upper bound on the potential progress of the individual. Socrates was killed by the most enlightened culture of his day. And so it seems as though even small cultures of several people must be neurotic, neurotic in the sense of the overall culture trying to hold on to an obsolete understanding of reality. Also neurotic against the trend of a healthy culture to have multiple personalities.

The immediately obvious solution to informal neurotic cultures is to formally create cultures to counter the neurosis, by this I mean governments and similar humanitarian organizations. This only makes sense for the enlightenment that actually have first principles that they were founded upon. However, the formal attempt to mold cultures and society must be part of an overall culture and so cannot fully escape inherent cultural drag, the upper bound imposed by society. But that is not seen as a problem by the culture, since it is the culture’s drag that is slowing down the progress of culture, etc. In addition, the fact that a government is the product of any culture means that it must inherit the neuroses of that culture, invisible as they may be to people used to living under its obscuring influence. What’s worse, while the best justification of government is to encourage the flourishing of its charges, it must still accomplish this with the curtailment of certain rights and the conscious modification of culture, and so whatever neuroses are built into the new government will be built into an organization designed to shape culture. Even with the best intentions, a government must eventually become a neurotic force in society.

Societal neuroses are similar to classical psychological neuroses. They are a reaction to mutually incompatible but simultaneously held beliefs, they result in anxiety and sometimes psychosis, and they give rise to phobias and incongruous defense behaviors. In short, a neurotic society does not act like itself. The societal neuroses come from all gradations of culture, or rather as described previously, from the interactions of different societal subcultures with varying rates of change. A subculture here still meaning either a group’s or an individual’s subculture. We can take the psychological formation of a revolutionary subculture as a hypothetical example to make these concepts concrete.

The culture of revolution exists everywhere that a subculture’s norms are do not work to the continuation of society as it is. Thus, an attitude of “abortion is OK” is revolutionary in certain religious societies, “theft is OK” is revolutionary in capitalist societies, “disobeying the police is OK” is revolutionary in governmental societies, and “murder is OK” is revolutionary in most human societies, etc. Hopefully these examples make it clear that revolutionary culture is not intrinsically good or bad, merely that it will cause the larger society to react with hostility and self-defense. However, hopefully they will also make it clear that these cultural attitudes can have no effect unless they are adopted by subcultures. If that claim is accepted in combination with the claim that cultures are always and exclusively composed of their subcultures, then it becomes clear that a revolutionary subculture necessarily implies a macroculture that is trying to destroy itself. This makes revolution a suicidal desire for every culture participating. Subcultures are not just trying to destroy the evils that they see in the world, the are trying to destroy the evils that they see the society has forced into them and theirs. If the revolutionary culture is suicidal, then what about the counter-revolutionary culture? Since the revolution is a subculture—wholly part of the larger societal culture—the society’s reaction against it is also suicidal, although not in the same way. If the revolution is a struggle for dominance, for the creation of a new culture by the destruction of the old, the society’s defense is a neurotic suicide: an attempt to stay comfortable and hang on to the old and avoid expanding into new, scary and isolating territory. Stifling a revolution is the killing off of the potential of a subculture, and by that the whole culture, to fully grow into itself.

This is all easy to say with regards to a positive revolution, but what about one that is negative, such as one that is in favor of murder, or xenophobia, or otherwise seem to contradict the language of flourishing. Or neurotic revolutions that are themselves reactions against the flourishing of the larger culture? It is still easy to talk in the same language without convolution, the psychological roles are merely reversed. The neurotic reaction is now smaller than the overall society, but it is still a suicide reaction against the evils that it perceives in the world and is spawned by a desire to limit the world. And the larger societal culture in this case is taking the role of the revolutionary culture in the previous revolution example, that of killing the more neurotic part of itself. The defense against the regressive revolution is still a neurotic reaction that can cause the larger culture to behave in ways with which it does not identify.

There is an observation that can be made here about the relationship between neuroses, individuals and culture. Since culture, and more interestingly cultural organizations, are made by people there is a real sense in which they must inherit the neuroses of the people forming them. As mentioned earlier, governments are formal cultures, cultural constructs really, that are designed to shape the overall culture for an indefinite period of time. Perhaps, being consciously constructed and much more easily observable than the informal cultures that make up most society, they can overcome to a certain degree the irrationality of human experience. However it seems almost impossible that they could overcome all of them if for no other reason than that they must still have a drive for self-preservation if they are to be meaningfully long-lasting, and this very drive is the source of many neuroses and when part of a larger society serves to magnify the individual prejudices of its member cultures.

Talking about revolution in terms of dynamic psychological reactions of the member cultures of society seems to provide a useful model for understanding the fears and pains involved in the process of revolution, and explains why revolutionary cultures and societies containing revolutionary cultures both act in ways that go completely against their principles and self-image. In fact it predicts that in all revolutions both sides will behave against their principles. More than just providing a useful language to talk about revolution, it appears the the language of neurosis also provides criteria for evaluating the values of a revolution.

Technorati Tags: philosophy, politics