Thursday, March 31, 2011

Unimaginable

I have read that the collapse of the soviet union may have been possible because it was unimaginable. Had it been seriously possible six months earlier, repression could have been stepped up, and the iron curtain maintained.

I know (and like) someone in whom the desire to demand more from people by pushing them is less restrained than it should be. I think it's because, as a small merry woman, she can't imagine pressure from her becoming overwhelming for anyone. Because she can't imagine it, she pushes as hard as she likes, and I've seen it be too much.
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Saturday, March 26, 2011

Feeling compromised

Several times in the last week, I've looked at where I stand at odds with many people, and realised that it comes down to feeling that they and I are compromised, committed to something which is inconsistent with who we want to be.  The first example was Australia - putting a high value on the well-being of an imagined community defined by geopolitical borders. To quote William Shatner - I can't get behind that.  A nation is just some people's excuse for treating other people worse, often much worse, than themselves.  But this problem doesn't stop with nations.  Being of a species is an embarassment.  Being a temporary living being is frustrating and demoralising.  Don't get me started on material existence.  Conversely, my friendships, projects and even this blog are unexceptionable.

It seems like the larger and more universal the commitment, the more the contingency of it rankles.  The smaller, more local things I enjoy spontaneously and naturally.  It is something to do with recognizing my finiteness and what Heidegger calls 'thrown-ness' - part of which is feelings of guilt which mask this ontological guilt, this compromisedness.

Friday, March 25, 2011

'Perfect Manhattan'

'Perfect' Manhattan @ Hairy Canary - half sweet half dry vermouth. Very nice - sweet, aromatic, smooth, liquorous. A little cherry in each taste.

Note to self: must try giving veronica corningstone's manhattan order ('kick the vermouth in the side with a pair of steel toed boots')
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Singularity University

Futurist Ray Kurzweil has founded an institution dedicated to the exponential tendencies of growing human knowledge  which is known as Singularity University - at present it offers a few short courses and some grad student programs, aiming to prepare business people to remain functional five minutes longer than the rest of us - just long enough to be well ahead when its all over.

Somehow, whenever I hear that name it makes me think of Bovine University from Troy McClure's short film on why its OK to eat meat.  The abbatoir is Bovine University.  I guess in my mind, the Singularity shows up we walking meatbags and confronts us with what else we might be.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Boat arrivals

Ted Lapkin has taken a stand in an article headlined 'How many more must drown, Julia?'


Ted's point seems to be that people flows occur because of a gradient between their expectations of fair treatment as someone in a politically dangerous situation in (for example) Afghanistan and their expectations in Australia. 

The solution offered by John Howard (and loved by Ted) is to ensure that Australia offers treatment that is about as unfair as being dragged from your home in the middle of the night and shot: for example, year after year of mandatory detention with a succession of DIMIA show trials in which no one makes any effort to understand your story as your mental health (perhaps already injured by oppresion and war in your homelad) spirals down the toilet. As long you can expect that unfair treatment regardless of your claim, the boats have no reason to come.

Even if this explanation for boat numbers is true (and plenty of knowledgable people believe it is not), it is amazing to think we could accept it and stand the sight of ourselves.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Australian Film

Jim Schembri has written in the Age about three recent releases in Australia - 'The Reef', 'Griff the Invisible' and 'A Heartbeat Away', which seem likely to throw away most of the millions spent generating them.  The Reef sounds like horror/drama, which I would not normally go to see.  'A Heatbeat Away' seems like warmed over dead heartwarming underdog story. 'Griff the Invisible' though, seems interesting and new, and I'd like to see it.   I will try to persuade the blog wife on that idea.

The interesting question is 'why does this ever happen?'  Not just in Australia, but everywhere, creative people of considerable talent tell horror stories of being unable to produce their great idea, and of ideas that seemed great but turned out to be terrible, and of ideas that started out terrible, were pushed and sank without trace. Why would something so financially horrific persist?  How can we do better at making good films?

I think the only people who I would trust to answer that are Pixar and maybe the Coen brothers, and the only difference I can see is that the people in charge take pains.  Their commitment to a story with a human problem, a real, earned resolution of it, is not just lip-service.  But although commitment means you can fight through difficulty, you have to be finding fairly elevated things difficult. That means you have to be very good, to know it when you have it. But it's hard to hold on to that in a world that will break all records seeing Avatar.

(I didn't like Avatar, but in fairness, it hit all its story marks. It was predictable and trite, characters were reduced to instruments (poor Michelle Rodriguez), the world was foolish, the resolution didn't resolve anything deeply, but it setup and paid off, it had a balance of humour and so on.)

Australian film production is greatly constrained by scale.  You can't get much money, so you can't do spectacle. You can't have many locations, many actors, many cameras, many microphones, long and careful editing. You could make Primer, The Magician, Paranormal Activity and similar - stories where ordinariness is exploited and subverted. My idea would be a RomCom set at a Uni, in which the big human experience is failure to communicate - the experience of floundering in a bewildering contre temps when you try to communicate with another human living in another background. But that needs crowd scenes. The whole bewildering contre temps thing is probably what goes wrong when creative people deeply love a film that bombs. So maybe a film school project.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Under 40 minutes

For the rides to and from work today.  That's about 16km.  It can take me that long to drive the 5km using the big bridge that bikes aren't allowed to use.  Fairly pleased with that.

Monday, March 21, 2011

Belly

Today I saw myself in a photo from a few months ago.  I was intrigued by the distortion that seemed to have hit those of us at the periphery, because there was no way I was doing this with my belly on purpose:


Oh dear.

quote of the day

I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at. - randall monroe, xkcd
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Sunday, March 20, 2011

Computational Theology - scale and God.

My mum threw through me a link in her social network bulletin 'The Lot of Rot', so I thought, as it's Sunday and her readership might be confounded by Tim Morton, I'd throw up this little bit I wrote a couple of years ago. It borrows from Paul Tillich(of all people!)'s 'ontology of Love' that love is the active power of life, and a drive toward re-union.


Trinity, spirit.

The spirit of a game is the thing that gives it its vital identity, its life, the thing that differentiates it from exercise, work, and from play.  The spirit is the unifying theme, the meaning of.  To bump your opponent off the ball in soccer is against the spirit of the game – to obstruct your opponent from reaching the ball is well within the spirit of Australian rules football.  In the first case, the deft footwork required to play the beautiful game is drawn out.  In the second, the fraternal bond of cooperation in a team is expressed in the freedom to help your man by obstructing his opponents.  The spirit is the underlying value network, the weight and glory system, the expression of the large values in the small.

So to God the Father, and God the Son.  The Son is the image of the father, and likens himself to the Father as he is continually shown how.  The Son is the Father’s pride and joy, the image of self, the image of the Invisible God.  For forgiveness, this pride and joy dies.  We are like God in feeling this death when we forgive.  Our wounded pride must be forgone, sacrificed, before the sinner is admitted to a new relationship.  Note also, the relationship between the Father and Son, is that the Father initiates and underwrites the Son’s activities; so the whole human mind relates to the part we call our Self.

Let us imagine an infinite God, but a countably infinite God of an infinite number of finite parts[1].  Perhaps you might like to think of a brain that is infinite in some or all dimensions, a blank universe-filling field of neurons. How does such a mind unite?  How is a single “I” attainable?  Would not the smaller parts prefer to produce more manageable selves, to secede, go rogue, than lose their wholeness to become the infinitesimal?  There must be some common drive to union inherent in the finite parts, some way to find useful connectedness with the other parts.  I suggest we identify this drive to union or (re-union) with Love (borrowing from Paul Tillich’s definition in Love, Power and Justice.)

The Holy Spirit is the spirit of God; the Holy Spirit is a person who means Love. The Holy Spirit is the Mind of Christ (1 Cor 2).

Becoming a Christian is being persuaded that God is Love; that love is the right character of persons, in their infinitesimals, in their mind, and in the congregation.  Becoming a Christian is being filled / transformed by the Holy Spirit.  At the time it becomes evident that God is right, the brain begins to embody this idea of (re)union. Many existing structures will be picked up: love of friends and family.  Many new structures will need to be constructed – forgiveness, love of enemies.


[1] As opposed to an uncountable infinity where the parts are infinitesimal.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Dark Ecology and the Romantics

Prof Tim Morton at UCLA Davis teaches a course (available in iTunes) on Romanticism and the environment. The course covers Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley (Mary and Percy), Coleridge, Austen, DeQuincey and John Clare - the last two previously unknown to me.

His theme is the implicit attitude of the Romantics, and the extent to which it's still with us. They wrestled with self-consciousness and the way it produced a seeing of the world and its effects on them as if through a glass.  (Plate glass shopfronts, he notes, are a Romantic period invention.)  This attitude of independence from the world is something he believes is still with us.  We still use our gaze to find the world - find used as discovery, but also judgement and construction.  We are like Romantics when we value Coke (or Jolt) for its desirability, the way they valued landscape for how like a picture of a landscape it was. We look at the environment the same way, as an object with properties unlike us, and doing so creates the space to argue whether or not there is climate change, whether or not pollution is bad, whether the sixth mass extinction in the history of life that we are causing is a big deal or not.

His thesis is that the Romantics were wrestling with this and modern thinking could be amended to rhyme not with Romantic self-consciousness, but with Romantic irony - the ability to recognise the self-conscious position, and to negotiate the gap it creates from the reality that we are absolutely embedded in ecology.  He doesn't say it, but he might well say with Heidegger that 'We are our world, existingly.'  What goes wrong out there is the wrong in human hearts. We need to adopt what he calls 'Dark Ecology' in which there is no hope of restoring nature to being Nature, no hope of avoiding catastrophe and no hope of remaining unimplicated - there is only the recognition that this is Real, that it is us out there, going extinct.

Although his lecturing is uber-offhand, and he has some annoying verbal tics like ',right?', and he explains unfamiliar things too often by analogy to other things that are unfamiliar, this is an excellent course. In addition to deft handling of complex philosophical challenges, you will get a pretty good handle on the skills for analysing poetry and prose.  Highly recommend.

Alfred Bester

I'm about four stories into Virtual Unrealities, a compendium of Alfred Bester's short stories, and I'm not sure if they are putting the best first, but they've been:

  • Disappearing Act: the story of America's relentless war, evolution and specialisation toward finally establishing the American Dream, which is thrown into jeopardy when a small proportion of the walking wounded start walking right out of reality and into their heroic interventions in fantasy histories. For a science fiction short story that works well, its pretty message-heavy.
  • Oddy and Id: A boy with a strange power over reality sets out to bring peace with surprising results. An amusement about the likely behaviour of a brain that can satisfy itself.
  • Star Light, Star Bright: A boy at the center of a circle of powerful child savants is hunted by a doomed man - doomed because he sees only the upside of new powers. (The least arresting of the four.)
  • 5,271,009: An evil old man puts a juvenile artist through the wringer to rescue him from flight into madness. Very Neitzschean - eternal return.

Friday, March 18, 2011

That wretched Keith!

My mother tells a story of a time in my life when I was perhaps three, and we lived in a little house in a very new development, while my dad worked at a factory.  We didn't have much, but I was the proud owner of orange thongs, and the proud friend of an energetic young kelpie-cross we had.  Some little distance away lived my friend / nemesis Keith and his mother.  Keith and I fought more than we played, but the final straw was when, one morning, we woke to find my little orange thongs had been chewed to pieces in the night.  'That wretched Keith has chewed up my thongs!" I declared.

Of course, it was really the dog.

Today I found that someone had bumped the wing mirror of the car we've borrowed because our got smashed by an idiot truck driver. No permanent damage, just evidence that someone had cut it a bit fine. At the time I was noticing it, an idiot teenage boy was crossing the road - insolently verging on playing chicken.  That wretched boy! I thought. I was very angry with whoever wanted to 'trespass against me' and get away with it. If it was that idiot boy, what a thrashing he should receive! Oh my!

Of course, I was an insolent, careless youth myself.  And I even clipped someone's wing-mirror and never got in touch with them.  There is a lot of wrongdoing that goes unpunished.  There is a lot that is not even punished with actual harm.  I've done my share of it, and more.  If I want my wrongdoing let go, I need to let it go against me, over and over and over. Just be liable, and live on.

(There is a psychological term for the way we fear to let ourselves be vulnerable, how we over-rate the distress of injuries and accidents.  It is called 'immune neglect'.  We (middle class uni educated folk) greatly overestimate how much bad things will hurt us because we don't appreciate how good our brains are at getting through them. I think the territorial rage is at least partly this unrealistic fear of largely imagined frailty.

Late addition: I do think 'trespasses' is a very interesting word - I feel there is a lot of territoriality in the degree of affront and rage generated, and its probably because 'home' is my last retreat - I've nowhere else to go from here, so if attacked, I get a double-dose of 'Fight'.  I'm sure it works the same way with home-turfs - like your expertise, family, favourite things)

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Why not use religious arguments in public debate?

Michael Jensen (of Moore Theological College) has written an interesting article at abc religion online, suggesting that religious arguments may be legitimate in public debate. This is a slightly edited version of my comments there (forgive my terrible vanity, readership). 

I think the validity of argumentation in the public arena depends on connecting to the unconsciously held ideas of the public. In times when the public believed that (or assumed everyone else believed and therefore acted as if) the best available knowledge was in the bible, religious arguments could be made for almost anything - even torture and execution. These days, the best available knowledge is widely considered to be science, except that science rightly holds aloof from the mess of politics, and gives us little help (see Alister McGrath's article at the same site). The next best available knowledge is up for grabs - and most of us choose a portfolio of our favourite sources and set our political sails accordingly. 

Ideally, enough commonality of background would remain that it would still be possible to have a conversation, but given the horrible kludge we call a nation-state, there's no guarantees. If you look at the US political divide, the economic positions are held with such conviction that the 1% trying to have a serious conversation are inaudible.

Anyway, political theology: every political position stakes out an implied system of origin, meaning, morality, destiny etc for humanity. The only valid argumentation for your opponent uses their reality, so I think those living in the larger religious reality should be able to make a valid argument most of the time. If not, there needs to be non-argumentative exchange of background until argument becomes possible.



One example of a religious position at odds with today's background is the New Testament's rather censorius statements on women.  The non-religious position wishes to pick and choose and develop a robust, proven ethics from experience and insight.  But there is a danger in the circularity of assembling the ethics you like as you go along. Zizek thinks the western liberal system that posits rights first implicitly configures all social relations as vehicles for harassment. The other's freedom limits mine and there is no way for me to take that except to suffer it. The bible seems to think that to submit is not degrading, but can be dignity itself. Until we can make something of that idea, there is an uncrossable gulf between religious and the non-religious mind of the moment.  If that's the situation, it may be time to ask with Paul in 1 Cor 5:12 "What have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge?"  


(This is why I am very disappointed by the foot-shooting campaigns against secular gay marriage.  Why enter and lose fights like this?  It's ridiculous. Of course, Andrew Sullivan from my blog-roll is one of the founding fathers of the Gay Marriage movement and a believing, practicing Catholic with a husband.  You can have a different argument with him, athough I don't recommend it.)


On balance, I was very pleased to see someone from Moore / Sydney Anglicanism at ABC Religion Online. Not a transformative article, but an engaged, interesting, nice-toned one.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

This Immortal

Roger Zelazny's 'This Immortal' made it into a list of the top hundred science fiction novels of all time.  It concerns the adventures of Conrad Nomikos, head of the Earth's department of Antiquities.  Of Greek background, Conrad is fiercely strong and something of a mutant - admitting quite early that he stopped aging between 30 and 40.  He still lives very largely in Greece.

But it is Greece post-Apocalypse - the world's great cities are now Hot Zones, peopled with fierce mutants and monsters. Vegans (striking blue folk from Vega) have intervened to take humans into their civilisation so that our kind might not disappear, and to marvel in horror at the  price of foolhardiness.  An important Vegan is to tour Earth, and Conrad acts as his escort. They have many adventures on the tour (which often reiterate ancient Greek myth) and Conrad has his hands full keeping the Vegan and himself alive.

This is a well constructed and enjoyable novel, but a pure entertainment.  A few light lessons in principles and possibilities, and a relatively interesting resolution, but no fundamental revisions.  It is a conservative story, a celebration of the long history of human being on the planet and a hope for long perseverance even after ecological catastrophe. Worth a look.

mobility

First post using 'Blogger-droid' from my ADP1
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Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Surface Detail

Iain M Banks* writes so engagingly that reading his novels is always a pleasure.  Surface Detail returns to the Culture, one of a small number of Level 8 (referring to a top degree of technical accomplishment) civilisations in the galaxy. The galaxy is not short of less developed civilisations and has its own meta-civilisation with strict social rules about technology transfer and comportment.  The Culture is perhaps defined by it's willingness to go all out at 'being' - engineering Minds (vast machine intelligences that are worth billions of human lives) that long since took over the running the show, extending the powers of matter to its limits in this universe - while usually remaining very laid back about 'doing' anything in particular, and having as little as possible in the way of 'tending'.  But somehow, the Minds and the humans and the drones all seem to get along pretty well, and if you can't get along, well you have as many options as you can think of, money being no object, literally.

Relations with other civilisations are more complicated, are regulated through a Culture organisation called Contact, and are usually where the story-worthy material uccurs.  Within Contact, the usual heroes of these novels, the ships, drones and humans of Special Circumstances.  In Surface Detail, the trouble arises around the widespread galactic practice of preserving the minds of people after death in simulations.  Once discovered, the possibility of condemning the images of sentient minds captured in their 'soulkeeper' to eternal punishment seems attractive to many societies.  Many civilisations maintain large and expanding Hells of a very medieval sort, in Matrix-style worlds in processing substrate. For some reason, there is debate about this obscenity, and the debate has reached such a pitch that the Hells themselves have been declared appropriate space for the war to a finish on the issue.  The war has gone on for thirty years.

The losing side, the one that has been aiming to shut down Hell, has become desperate and attempts action in the Real, with the help of Veppers, a corrupt corporate Tyrant from a Level 3 or 4, a couple of Level 8 civilisations and a Level 6 civilisation that is modeling itself on the Culture, trying to do what it thinks the Culture wants - in fact, offering the sincerest form of flattery.  While the Culture is against the Hells, it is careful about imposing values on other civilisations, and more than careful because there are a bunch of other Level 8s and they all have to agree on how to proceed.  The heroine, Lededje Y'breq, begins as an intagliated prize of Veppers - tattooed inside and out, her very DNA altered to imprint her flesh as the property of Veppers thanks to his betrayal of his oldest friend, her father.  Her native Sichult is a place that believes in punishment.

The themes Banks is playing with here are crime, revenge and punishment. Alongside these is 'surface detail' - and its significance is still a question for me.  Given the interest in simulation and reality throughout, surface detail makes sense as an issue is of interest to conscious beings looking to understand their world - it is repeated in the tattoo, the quality of simulation. The cover design is a fractal, the Mandelbrot set - defined in a simple algorithm, yet the most complicated possible 2D shape. Is the idea here that the Hells are an organising principle, a fractal algorithm for the societies that need them?  That abusive power is the final texture in those societies - that no relationship occurs without tincture of power?

Two confrontations stand out - Veppers confronts the Culture ambassador and the worlds collide: his world of abusive power, and her world of contentment and peace. This moment is small enough, but pivotal, providing insight into all the major players.

The second is Lededje confronting an old lover who tells her gently that Love is not Enough. I think the way this rankles expresses the secret essence of the Culture, hidden behind all the surface detail: that the Culture is founded on the idea that Love is Enough.  The Minds of the Culture enjoy themselves in their immense fashion, but they also make great sacrifices to remain engaged with humans, sometimes ultimate sacrifices. This is belied by the relish with which Banks has all his Culture people & Minds squabble with each other, and his interest in the fringe, the Contact section, in which the people are a bit edgier than the Culture mainstream. But I think the secret constitution of the Culture must be Love.

The problem he raises but cheats in resolving is that some people do deserve punishment and the Real can't be relied on to administer justice - indeed the opposite is probably true for most of us (those who read and write blogs). Sometime its not even just people, its the entire civilisation.  The point of the Hells is to torture, and the point I expected him to be making is that Torture is Wrong - it isn't made significantly worse when applied to the weak or the moral, or carried out by the immoral, because in its face all are weak but relatively righteous, ad beyond its practice no one can remain righteous.  He went to some pains to set up a range of problems and to narrate the awful reality of Hell, but in the end the Culture wins thanks to the strength of an Abominator class vessel with psychopathy on tap.  The Hells become an object of disgust to most of the civilisations that used to operate them once they have the chance to try their civilisation without that threat, but the Abominator doesn't mind administering punishment. Apparently Culture principles of merciful treatment of fellow sentients are not Enough in the Real.

For Banks trainspotters (he invites it) look out for the return of a long lost SC agent. This may be a habit - certainly there was another one in Matter.  There are also major subplots that apparently come to nothing, just carrying a variety of interesting exposition - the treacheries of the SC agent in question, the involvement of the Bulbitians with the sublimed, and the Nauptre Reliquaria as a potential nemesis of the Culture.  I would like to think that these extraneous bits will one day add up to something, perhaps the revelation of the cause of the eventual demise of the Culture revealed in Look to Windward.  While this might be satisfying, I fear it may be too much to ask - these overconstrained plots, with too many players, have happened up before (in Excession, for example).  For all the annoyance of structural redundancy, Banks' writing is so smooth and pleasurable, and his idyllic world of the Culture so pleasant, that I will certainly be lining up again.

*probably the second best M Banks, after Rosy, but well ahead of the others.

Sunday, March 13, 2011

The Undead

A friend once at christmas wished me a merry zombie jew birthday - Jesus the reanimated.

I think the truth is far different. Life is not a substance - it is meta-substance.  Substance is an old word to capture that which continues to exist by itself - atoms are probably a good instance.  Life continues to exist by remaining within a world maintaining a certain character.  Living cells are just an organisation of dead atoms for which the process of becoming disorganised is so slow and complex that there is opportunity to address the winding down by manufacture of more life. In human consciousness, we get to meta-meta-substance, to being-in-the-world with such speed and exactitude that our ability to adapt far outstrips the worlds ability to kill us with collapse.  And yet, the meta-meta-substance of the mind depends on the operation of the meta-substance of cells which depend on 'dead' matter, and the substantial deadness of matter shows us by contrast the weakness of our bodies, the errancy of our minds.  The truth of the zombie myth is that we know we do not have life in ourselves. It is a temporary fire in us, but ur-zeit is end-zeit, and in the end and really, we are dead.

Why are zombies so hungry? What does a live human look like, smell like, feel like, taste like to a zombie?  Life. The living look like we wish we looked - enduring, full of health. They look as if a single mouthful would fill you forever, like they are so nutritious your wounds might heal and your ghastly pallor might be restored.  The living look like Jesus.

"And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst…. I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world."   John 6:35, 51

Friday, March 11, 2011

The Milgram Experiments

Back in the day, a very odd man called Stanley Milgram wanted to explore social psychology with a view to understanding human behavior and maybe helping get a handle on atrocities like the holocaust.  He set up an experiment where volunteers would come in and be told that they and another volunteer (really a confederate), after a coin toss, would take the roles of quizmaster and victim, and that the quizmaster would be required to shock the victim (confederate) with electricity if he gave a wrong answer.  The dial on the shock meter was marked in 45  volt increments and went to 450.  Somewhere around 200V was marked 'XXX', and the volunteer quizmaster would get a 45V shock (which is a fair kick) to see what it was like.  The subject of quizzing would not get many right, and the shocks would escalate with the confederate hamming it up - and the test was, when do people refuse to continue?  The result was that a great many people would proceed all the way, well into and beyond what they had reason to believe were lethal shocks - 70% was not unusual.  Factors that helped:

  • encouragement from the supervisor, and specifically the words 'you have no choice, the experiment must continue.'
    • the power of the encouragement was affected by the dress, proximity, loudness, attentiveness of the supervisor
  • remoteness of the subject.  The more vivid and real the subject was, the more and earlier people refused. However, some people, when asked, where willing to hold the subjects hand to the electrified plate late in the experiment when the shocks were getting too large for the 'victim'.
So much, so interesting, and by now a pretty familiar experiment.  Certainly not the sort of thing you are allowed to do now, because once Milgram's approval was absent or withdrawn and people started to reflect on possibly shocking another person to death, many experienced profound guilt and self-disgust. We do well to remember that we're all just some very inexpensive theatre away from being talked into things that horrify us in other company.

The question I have is 'what about good?'  How much of this participation comes from the fact that we would all quite like to electrocute a stranger, given a chance?  A counterpart experiment that I would like to see is a condition where you have to share a cupcake or donate some time to the subject.  I'd like to see Stanley Milgram persuade a person into that!

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

The dignity of the absurdity of this blog

In my traffic sources today, two African-based internet degree factories.  They didn't leave blogspam.  My theories on why not:
1.  Readership too small (no offense, readership);
2.  Blog too obscure to know how to win my trust and my readers trust; or
3.  I write like a spambot and they assumed I was one of their own, with my half formed thoughts and dangling

Scocca

I just added Tom Scocca from Slate to the blogroll and recommend about half his posts.  He has a variety of interests, but the most recent posts I think you should read are:

Pharmaceutical Industry Near Collapse Because It Is Stupid and Incredibly Bad at its Business.
The pharmaceutical industry is an easy target for pillory, with its years of collecting rents on patents, its sawing away at the branch of the medical research tree on which it lives (e.g. this case), its veeery grudging acceptance that selling aids drugs to people who can't pay at only a modest profit on the cost of manufacture instead of a ludicrous profit on the cost of CEO ego-stroking salaries, is possible. But it may be that the FDA is smartening up and more of their fraudulence is being caught and so the failure to find new drugs may not be that they've become stupid.  Let's hope it's that non-corporate interests are getting better at keeping them honest, and they're falling back on the capitalists last line of defence: "we can't cope, you have to change it back to when we were allowed to cheat everyone!"  Still, with Gene Patents, they can probably sue us all for infringing if we come down with one of the genetic syndromes they own.

The Machines: Human Professionals, Your days of High Paid Drudgery are Ending
Lawyers headed for Rump Humanity!  The Machines Explain!

He does care a lot about sport, and sports journalism. Just skip those ones.

Monday, March 7, 2011

D.M. Cornish

Just a swift plug for D.M. Cornish, author of the MonsterBloodTattoo series.  Young adult fiction in a rich world, beautifully illustrated by the author.  Wonderful stuff.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Tristrapedia

So what should be in the tristrapedia?  The main thing I've been reflecting on since I started listening to iTunesU is iTunesU, plus the supporting reading.  Probably a lot of stuff would be unintelligible to someone under twelve, but its the lectures, often first-year level, for undergrads with no backgound...

I read the Odyssey in Chinchilla on my Uncle's farm, which must have been when I was nine or ten. I did not learn the lesson I should have from Odysseus' cunning and ability to move from world to world, to hold his moods in tension and use them well.

Anyway, the point is, there's great feasts out there and I want young Elbetorte to misspend his youth less than I did.  This sounds like a sentence my father almost certainly said a lot when I was growing up, so I need to remember that I will fail at this, and that will turn out totally fine for both me and Elbetorte.

The other things I'm thinking about are the metabolism base-lining that apparently happens in the first few years of life, which set up what conditions you're going to cope with later.

Also resilience in the face of yelling.  In the world, people yell and fight and demand their own way, and its important to still function well, not think the world is coming to an end as I did.  I was a very scared little boy.

The Monstrosity of Christ

Slavoj Zizek and John Milbank debate the relative merits of Christian thinking in the present. The whole of the western philosophical and theological literature is furniture to be flung in the brawl, but Hegel is the mainstay, with a fair bit of GK Chesterton, reference to Aquinas and a surprising (to me) amount of Meister Eckhardt. And of course, Zizek does favor his Lacan.  I've read veeeeeery little of this background, so my apologies to Zizek, Milbank and you, reader, if this account of the book is terribly mangled and unreliable.

Creston Davis edits and introduces, pointing out that the important value of a Theos is all the clearer at this present moment when Capitalism's boasts, crowing and relentless dissolving power threaten to render humanity an undifferentiated, minimised, impoverished ocean, so that the owners of capital can be the most differentiated, maximised and enriched islands they can be.

The perspective of a transcendent good once allowed Europe to bear the conditions that allowed the enlightenment - a background idea of equality, of truth, of transcendent good and human dignity greater than the good of the body - ideas that powered the Reformation as a "Re" formation, because they were there all along in the new testament.  This book asks a modern philosopher and a continental theologian about the place of that transcendent good, 'knowing' what we know now.  (The knowing is in inverted commas because the epistemological foundation for a lot of this philosophy is that someone argued it, and a community of like-minded people found it a good and useful framework - there is no proving a psychoanalytic theory except every instance of its use which seems to bear good fruit.  All knowledge is a risk, but this knowledge is grounded in human reason as currently practiced, not the behaviour of the universe, as currently experienced.)

Zizek's position - Holy Saturday.
Zizek's position has been described as Holy Saturday.  The death of Christ was not sequeled by a resurrection, but it does make for the death of God in the lives of believers and makes them inheritors of his estate - by dying on a cross as the god of the universe, Jesus for all time destroyed the bigness of the Lacanian Big Other, disrupting it into a proportional, balanced relationship with regular-sized Others.  The freedom from condemnation for the past, the knowledge of liberty in the present, the hope of ongoing radically free subjectivity into the future are found in an atheist Christianity. God is dead and remains dead, but that forces us to construct the church/community so He can 'live' in us and in our love for one another.  Zizek is really very respectful of Christian teaching - he just doesn't think its factually founded.

Milbank's position - Paradox.
John Milbank argues as a Theologian for the vital importance of maintaining a respect for the paradoxes of existence in a theistic world.  I have read less of his stuff and his writing is denser so I will struggle to represent him adequately.  But take for example God's relationship to the creation - that he created, sustains, and regulates it, and yet it is definitively not 'Him', but rather his Creation.  We observe a world so full of trouble that people refuse to believe in God; but for Christians, much of the trouble is attributable to God, or to his absence because he cannot look on sin. Milbank is arguing (as best I can make out) that the sustained paradox of the good/evil world is the truth and there is no resolving it further: that God is present and absent (almost?) simultaneously.  He argues that this paradox logic allows the real existence of the triune God as an ontological necessity and a factical agent.  Or something...

My take-homes.

  1. Zizek's position is the more Hegelian, and interestingly compatible (through Hegel's evolution of mind philosophy as I understand it) with the Singularity, the possibility of a weakly God-like being (to borrow from Charles Stross's Accelerando and Eschaton novels) fulfilling in a local, materialist way, the promise of Christ's death - the Kingdom of Heaven breaking in.
  2. This thought is one I've entertained that grew in reading this book, but which is not really in it.  The absence of evidence for God's existence, always a huge obstacle for unbelievers, is explained in Genesis.  Christians do themselves no favours by pretending that God is at work in the world for the benefit of all people everywhere. Only in Christ is that true. His work in the world is de-personalised.  He sends rain on the just and unjust alike, but also earthquakes. The wrath of God is revealed as he gives people over. (Romans)  * **
  3. Believing in God is more complicated than you realise.  You are probably doing it wrong. Lots of logic problems arise when you try to formalise God's relation to himself and everything else.  Some of them may come from early theology importing a lot of Greek theoretics into their readings of the bible (e.g. God's 'simplicity'), but if you're going to tell the story of gospel into our society, you have to be able to give a reasonable systematic account.
  4. The continental philosophers aren't kidding around with this theological turn.  They have done a lot of reading.
  5. I need to read more Hegel and others.

* Of course, the worst of everything is that we never help each other. Imagine that instead of making war for the thousands of years from the kingdoms before Sumer, people had worked on getting along and making sure that they had enough to share and sharing it. Modern medicine is a project of maybe 500 years.  Admittedly there were a lot more people living in those five hundred years than ever lived before, but still.  Many of the hundreds of thousands who die in a tsunami or earthquake affecting poor countries die because no one with the ability has the will to provide them with warning systems and safety measures.

** This may be heretical.  I'm not sure. It seems true to me.

The Social Network

Cracking Yarns has a good review of The Social Network, with the goal of examining the screenwriting - Sorkin has broken a lot of rules for this script but somehow it works.  Creative Screenwriting's podcast (Sorkin interviewed by Jeff Goldsmith) was also very interesting.

The screenwriter for something like this has a real problem - reality is messy, in events and timings, in personality and desire, in character and choice, in the big issues that a movement of moments instantiates.  To smooth this out, Sorkin has created a Zuckerberg who is looking for, starving for, good female company, but who has only hard-edged intelligence to offer for it. The film is full of cheap sex with women with little or no value to the project, serving to emphasise both the want (sex) and the need (connection into the feminine half of the world).  The film has been condemned for its treatment of women.

The other thing that was untidy from a screenplay perspective was the late introduction of Sean Parker and California. Might a scene showing the software guys' investment in the dream of silicon valley have smoothed this transition?  Would that smoothness have detracted from the sense of losing our footing that the new world of California suggested? For me, I think the Silicon Valley Dreamland setup could have loaded and integrated this new world.

The Social Network is a very good movie, and a sign that Hollywood still knows, and can produce, a deep story.

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Loglines

A good screenplay should have a certain unity, a completeness.  As a proxy for success at that, Hollywood craves a clear, one sentence summary of your story.  If your story will make a good film, the theory goes, the external conflict, internal conflict, the stakes and the antagonist will be clear in a single exciting-to-read sentence.

I've listed my screenplay with inktip.com, so far just using a free one-week trial.  InkTip takes a script and makes it available for production companies or agents who are looking for scripts, with a searchable database of tags.  I've turned up in searches about 7 times for about 4 different companies, but nothing in my log-line inspires anyone to read my synopsis or script.  Currently the logline is:

    Locked in the contest for control of the future, the great powers of earth panic when a young mathematician creates       machine intelligence and runs, pursued by their agents across the world, up the great space elevator and beyond, before he unleashes the permanent Resolution.


This is still too long, doesn't describe the hero's problem (except that he's young).  Here are some alternatives, but they all leave out so much that they disappoint and bore even me:


1.  A young man creates machine intelligence and is hunted by evil agents of the USA.
2.  A young man takes a risk by revealing his design for machine intelligence, but when the world comes looking for him he must step up and take responsibility before it changes beyond recognition.
3.  The war of all with all is founded in the human soul, but in 2054, a young mathematician threatens us all with the spectre of machine intelligence, machine peace, machine love.
4.  Or something else.  These are surpisingly hard to write and I should be reviewing 'The Monstrosity of Christ' and 'The Social Network'

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Simple Pleasure

I visited an Air Show today - militaries and commercial organisation and flying enthusiasts getting together to show off and enjoy.  As I toured the display aircraft, I realised that the light and ultra-light aircraft were making me mad.  It's an odd reaction.  I just felt cross at how many there were, and how many varieties.

There are a few levels to this.  First, I suppose I am envious and resentful of people who have tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and hundreds of hours to spend doing something of limited utility.

Second, I am envious of the ability to allow oneself something so expensive of such limited utility. There is something about people actually self-satisfying that galls me.

Third, I think general aviation, just going out a footling around, is a stupid thing to enjoy. Simple development and exercise of a skill is dull, dull, dull unless you create with it.  This is just my personal ego boundary though, not reality. It straitjackets me as a creative person, in circumstances when I'd be better served by simply being a man.  Practice is sheer pleasure for a lot of people, even me in certain situations.

So how do I get over this?  Analysis is probably part of my not getting over it.  Thinking it out like this is amusing and lets me justify it, and do nothing about it.  And maybe become more willing to spend on simple pleasure.

(Wait, a blog listing about futile endeavours that includes cocktails among its interests has a problem with simple pleasure?  I can only offer with Walt Whitman that I am complex, I contain multitudes.)

Repentance or dying are needed.  I need to look at this reflection of myself in resentment and realise it lies in my overall failure, my eventual death.

Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe is a reputable engineer who helped design the special oven that Pringles are baked in (or something - see wikipedia for the exact fact).  He is also the author of some of the most profound fantasy and sci-fi.  Ursula  Le Guin is often quoted on his book jackets saying 'He is our Melville' and she's right.  The theological riches in his best books are amazing. If you haven't read any, I recommend you don't start with the Book of the New Sun - it is a magnificent series, but it is hard to get it all first time through. Re-reading is almost essential.

In addition to the usual sci-fi strangeness, Wolfe very often works through a memoirist, who may liken things to events which are yet to happen in the narration, and often an unreliable memoirist.

The Fifth Head of Cerberus is brief enough and representative enough to be a good starting place for those who are patient with literary novels. Alternatively Soldier of the Mist is a good starting place for someone who usually reads fantasy.  The Wizard-Knight (two books, The Knight and The Wizard) is Wolfe putting his own spin on the western fantasy world, with a fully worked out cosmology of seven realms from the heaven of the Most High God, to the hell of the Most Low God, and the hero, Sir Able of the High Heart, is like Axecop in armour.  There is even a thread back to our own world and what Sir Able achieves for us from his world.

Wolfe's faults.  Sometimes the narrators are so unreliable that you wonder if GW is really in control.  Sometimes the story structure is just confusing or under-developed around a great world.  Free Live Free is extraordinary in some ways, but I'm not racing to re-read it, because the meat of the story is the repetitiveness of the faults of the characters. Castleview seemed like just a mess to me. The Book of the Long Sun seems to end with a whimper, although its continuation in another series may resolve all that.

For all that, Gene Wolfe is the only fiction author that has reconfigurative power for me, who re-orders my thoughts, who sows reality with latent epiphanies which land when you read other books, or in conversation, or in deep thought. I will read a bad book of his before a good book of someone competent but predictable like Iain M Banks.

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Updates

More vulnerability: Parked on the street at home, the car was hit quite hard and is back at the panel beaters for another four weeks.  We'd had it back from them for five days.  And I can't stop adding 'don't forget the burglary!' as though people might think they've shown enough sympathy but they don't know the half of it.  Exhausting for you all, I'm sure.  I will try to cut down.

Lots of exercise while its my only mode of travel.

Old friends to visit on Friday night which will be great.

The potential future offspring is progressing really well.  Tristrapedia not so well.

Listed Resolution on InkTip.  It seems like an outlier in terms of cost of production, narrowness of audience, and quantity of revolting content.

I've read only - a little of the Monstrosity of Christ, started Surface Detail, and been lent two more books. 

The horizon retreats faster than I advance on every front.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Aboutness

The Atlantic has an interesting interview with Gary Kasparov on the achievement of IBMs Watson as a player of Jeopardy.  Kasparov's point is simply that, as with his defeat by IBMs Deep Blue, the intelligence applied to this specific goal proves strangely empty and unsatisfying.  Watson may have a very rich semantic network at its heart and be able to query that in some very powerful ways, but once again most of the problem of intelligence seems to lie in other dimensions.

The problem may be one of chauvinism - that our kind of intelligence is preferred the that of the Google, or the Deep Blue or the Watson. But although they have shown an ability to maintain their existence in the middle of a furiously busy circle of genii, somehow this seems less grounded, less real, than the intelligence even we normal folk exercise in the lives we live.

My question is what should an AI be intelligent at? What intentional content is satisfying to our appetite for fellow intelligence? The Turing Test stipulates success at deceptive conversation - the original calls for a man to pretend to be a woman (or vice versa) while a computer program pretends to be a man or woman, and both try to fool a third person.  But most of the candidates at the annual challenge are chatbots, more like an attempt to show that the intelligence of the human judge is easily gamed.  This does not seem like intelligence to me.

As a Heideggerian, the essential thing seems to be a being-in-the-world that has sufficient granularity to accept and respond to, influence and alter its own image of itself.  This may be what Kierkegaard called R3 - that a person is a relation, relating itself to itself.  The resolution of the paradox here is (I think) found in time. The past self is the Real, the future self is only in the imagination, and the present self is a bridge between the two, built, as bridges are, of spare and rigid structure.

Does Watson, or Google pass or fail such a test?