Umm, Integration

I don't usually listen to commercial radio, because why would you? - but finding , myself sans iPod I was listening this morning. They were doing a bit about remembering the names of ypur coworkers - people you occasionally deal with and always need help from but who don't enter your sociality. The hosts had been around and met everyone the day before and now had a 'pop quiz.'

They had a girl, the last one. Make conversation: 'Where do you work?'
'In - oh, don't say it?' - she broke off responding to signs from someone off-mike - 'Ok, ummm integration.'

What do you think umm stood for? Racial integration? That would be quite a useful work area for a popular radio station to have. Mathematical integration? Probably not. Gender or other minority integration? No.

I bet it was product integration, and you don't say that out loud because this radio station is like the domesticated warren in Watership down. There's some things we don't talk about. The not very hilarious hyuckster's of the morning show are, in the end, some money's way of making some more money.

It's not wrong to have that role - most people do. It is a bit wrong to hide it, and if you want to hide it that should be your cue that it is a bit wrong.

(Of course, given the station, minority integration might actually hurt their audience figures more, so I can't be sure.)

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How annoying is James Cameron?

Oh, I just produce the most successful big budget sci-fi films as a day job to help fund my real passion - the deep ocean.

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Ignorant Knowledge

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

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

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

Clive Palmer

My wife noted a tweet the other day that amused her.  It was a link to the story of a person suing Clive Palmer, mining magnate, because Clive had accused them of treason, with the apt conclusion 'Worst. Public Sphere. Ever.'

Australia's national discourse is pretty low-grade.  When you compare it to the life in Britain, it suffers terribly.  It's partly being less stratified by class, so that buffoons like Andrew Bolt, sensible people (can't think of any), and outright loonies (Janet Albrechtsen) all have to share the same paper.  A great many arguments degenerate into 'we (Australia) don't want X, do we?' about things that opinion polls clearly show are 50-50 propositions.  'We' is not Australia at all in these articles, just 'my social circle of right-thinking people'.  There was an article in The Age from Austhink Consulting who provide argument mapping software and services which made the case for gay marriage on the grounds that 'we' don't want to enshrine two-state sexual valence systems* as the law.  'We' (Austhink Consulting and Age readers) may not, but 'We' Australia were still, in fact, significantly divided.  It was disheartening to see an arguing consultancy assume the ground of their conclusion, apparently without realising it.

Clive Palmer has been in the public's face for a while:
1.  Arguing that his great wealth is good for Australia and is entirely merited by his sagacity and good character (and hence that everything should be ordered to benefit him as much as it now does, or preferably more.) and
2.  Throwing tantrums befitting a two-year old and throwing accusations in a way befitting a man descending into dementia.

Try as I might, I can't not imagine him as a morbidly obese tick that doesn't know when to let go, and thinks its blood mine is entirely of its own creating. A leading Australian.

Worst. Public Sphere. Ever.

Indeed**.

*my free translation.
** Well, having said that, ridiculous idiocy about your outside context and power are together more than they are apart.

Being Liable, Being Brave

Around the time I started this blog, I read a little of Philosophy as Metanoetics (Repentance), and got burgled and twice bingled. The lesson seemed to be that there's no getting away from liability to injury and disappointment. 'Once you're born you can no longer hide.'*

I've actually started to try to digest some current literature on sciencey stuff, and I have to say it hurts. Everything I've felt proud to know, and more, is already known to everyone who publishes. I turn out, once again, to be an absolute beginner. I'm in my mid-thirties, and by temperament an expert, but in practice not master of anything. It's largely because I've been so sensitive to this, the sick anxiety of making an effort yet ending up nowhere (which for me has always equaled 'back in the pack.') And although I'm always trying to be 'intellectual', I am not really clever. Most of my 'insightfulness' is lazily understanding a new thing as something old in disguise. I'm not a great riddler out of problems, mainly because I never did my homework to build the automaticity of skill needed.

So, a little testimony to sadsack vainglory. But you spend your life, one way or another, and spending it learning something about how one exists seems more motivating than other possibilities.

* Film title.

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On Intelligence & Consciousness

I'm reading Jeff Hawkins' book 'On Intelligence.' Hawkins was a designer of the Palm Pilot and is clearly a sharp, creative engineer. He took some time to catch up on the literature of the scientific understanding of the brain, reading it with an engineer's eye. His conclusion is that traditional McCullough-Pitts neural networks are missing the most powerful features of the neural structure of at least the neocortex (his main focus and probably the main seat of our information-processing superiority). These features are coupled, but I will explain them singly.

The first is that each layer of neurons should be looking for patterns, and be able to find a denser way of representing some abstractable characteristics. These characteristics would not vary significantly across widely varying input types. One example he gives is melody - it consists of notes, and one abstraction above you can find that it consists of intervals, some of which may be repeated. The abstraction is not the full original sound, but does give important information about the melody, and gains some generality in that it may be possible to use the same set of intervals in listening to another melody.

The second feature is that as a set of neurons recognise their particular pattern, higher-level neurons fire stimulate lower, less abstract neurons to lower their activation threshold. They are predicting, based on a pattern of in-layer connections, the likely information the lower layer should expect. This is very helpful in two ways
- first, the forward work of recognising and handling (abstracting) gains power because if the note is distorted or faint, the weaker signal will still be able to stimulate the recognition.
- second, the power of disconfirming results is greatly increased and so the learning rate will be improved.

Hawkins calls this 'predictive memory.' He has founded a company Numenta, and they have released some demo software for their implementation of 'Hierarchical-Temporal Memory.' There isalso a demo of some vision applications, in which it performs quite well.

There is a very interesting parallel with Integrated Information Theory by Andrea Tononi, which proposes that Consciousness could be computed as an entropy measure on all the current neuron-states against their probable states. If there is lots of disconfirming or just unpredicted information being integrated and learned from, the measure would be quite large. He gives a measure called Phi, and, while acknowledging he is probably only creating a mathematical cartoon, suggests that if something like this were the case it would perhaps be useful ethically. His theory transforms consciousness from something we don't understand into some maths that are probably wrong and a computation that would be impossible to perform. Quite an achievement.

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Dad jokes

In todays sermon, in two sentences, our minister spoke of 'God the Builder, not Bob the Builder' as the response to 'Humanity's edifice complex, not Oedipus complex, edifice complex.'

Good stuff, but I'm worried about us lining up against a powerful cultural force like Bob.

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The Cell

I picked up 'the Cell' from our Opp shop for $3. It is sf (machine-aided psychological interventions through lucid co-dreaming) with a nasty serial killer. The visual compositions are magic, appropriate to vivid, lucid dreaming. Apart from a weak performance from Vince Vaughan (Dodgeball is the only movie he has benefitted), and a slightly too-linear plot, and a resolution that lacked irony/symbolic setup, I really like it. Most of the thinking apparently went into arresting imagery, but they were playing to their strengths and the result is rich.

For me this earns its R rating, so if you usually avoid R, I don't recommend this film. It has a voyeurism that relishes what it claims to revile, like Law&Order SVU and similar - killing women for money, as one of Pilar's guests described it in an On-the-Page podcast.

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Total Recall

I had forgotten how good Total Recall (more Paul Verhoeven) is, or perhaps I had not been alert to its double structure on past viewings. For the case that it was all a sophisticated self-covering memory in which something went wrong, there is some troubling evidence - how would they make money if there was supposed to be a full refund? For the case that it is all real, the intervention at the beginning and at the midpoint in which 'Recall' staffmembers give plot summaries that anticipate events uncannily. This amplifies the tension because instead of coherent mutually exclusive accounts, each is slightly incoherent at points where the other story would make it very plausible. I'm not sure, but it seems very like Philip K Dick. A blurb on neuromancer praises William Gibson's Dickian vertigo, but really, no one can do it like Dick.

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Big Dog Talk

SFB: So you own a BMW?
BD: Yep.
SFB: What kind?
BD: It's an X-5.
SFB(approvingly): Mmm for a man who's ashamed of his penis they can be a very nice car.
BD (proving he's big enoughto take a friendly thump in the chest): Exactly.

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Cardinal Bellarmine

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

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

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

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

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Fitness

Since my baby arrived, I've not exercised much, I've run a lot of time on adrenalin and exhaustion, I've found energy through eating, and so I've got fairly fat. I wasn't too worried until I tried my customary high-intensity interval training and got no corresponding rev up.

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An Idiot Abroad

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

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

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Narrative and Practice

You might recall my Illustration: Story and Game post.

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

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

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

Logic of Addiction

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

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

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Commuted

In November last year, our State Govt commenced funding for a punt service across the river. The punt operators had tried to get a service through the week, but it wasn't economical without a small subsidy. I enjoy the punt so much that I might harmlessly vote conservative in the next election. The government is in dispute with nurses and teachers to cut their pay and I'd still probably vote for them. They could use schools for firewood and I still would have to think. I will attach a pic or two later. Did I tell you we once saw a fur seal touring the upstream regions?

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Achieving your dreams in an hour a week

Due to the pressures of life, there is always too little time for everything. The Tristrapedia of child rearing is always a very good and pleasant task, and life and my work are good. But when I thought about ways to rustle up $X00 for a new synthesiser, I rediscovered that it is still possible to sell science fiction to science fiction magazines, for a few hundred dollars per 5-8000words (5c / word). So my plan for creative success as a musician is now predicated on creative success as a short sci-fi fictionist. (I am going to write the short stories of my screenplays first, thus killing two birds with one stone).

The thing is, progress toward basic completeness (much less excellence) is incredibly slow at a rate of an hour a week. A short story of 8000 words might take until the end of the year; advancing from not very musical to musical will take longer by far.

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Starship Troopers

Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven's film of Robert Heinlein's book) is another nice use of science-fiction.  The tone is lighter than Moon, District 9 or Rise of TPOTApes, but it's only light with ironic distance from quite heavy material. In Heinlein's book, the heaviness of a war with an existential threat is treated without irony, as requiring courage.  In Verhoeven's film, the visual feel is Beverly Hills 90210 meets The Empire from Star Wars, and the ironic distance allows you to see the following:

• globalisation means we are all Americans now.  Jonny Rico, Carmen Ibanez and all are from Rio de Janeiro Buenos Aires, but there is no trace of latin culture to be seen.
• the militarism of Heinlein's book, which draws on his WWII experience and is reasonable given a significant threat, is shown in its fullness - on the one hand, discipline, training, power and career advancement at a young age; on the other a narrowed conception of the possibilities of life and an inability to do anything other than fight.
• 'Violence is the supreme authority, from which all other authority derives.' A perfect, ironic summation of the problem of this culture (and ours). Relating this to Foucault's Knowledge-Power we might say that yes it is, but the technology of such power is becoming overspecialised and will miss opportunities to finesse, or to find new efficiencies.
• The neat fit of 90210-world and the Empire - the same winner-takes-all competitiveness, the same casual commitment of your all in relationships, the same unreflective self-enlargement, the same expense of the destruction of the weak.

What I think is so clever about Verhoeven's film is that it doesn't really do a disservice to Heinlein's book - the reality of the book is there, and its goods are present; but Verhoeven gives us lines to follow that take us outside the frame and show the weakness behind the strength, the narrowness of outlook and the foreshortening of life.