Sunday, April 29, 2012

Screenplays

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

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

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

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

Capitalism

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

How Money Uses People to Make More Money.

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

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

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

 This would change my original definition to:

How Money gets things done to Make More Money.

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

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

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

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Empathy & Beauty

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

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

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

               Pied Beauty
                         Gerard Manley Hopkins


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


All things Counter, Orginal, Spare, Strange - 

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

Monday, April 23, 2012

I was giving a lift and taking directions

Which took me home by a different route than we had come by. The future, always so clear to me, was like a black highway at night. But I knew what Paul Muad-d'ib would do, and I took the opportunity to be a sort of Ersatz Haderach.
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Saturday, April 21, 2012

A chip off the old block

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

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

Stereotypes and imperfect knowledge

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

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

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

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

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

*actually not so much me as everyone.
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Thursday, April 19, 2012

Anders Breivik: Knight of Faith?

I was listening to Walter Kaufman talking about Existentialism in talks on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and so on, and he made the point that Nietzsche, for all his talk of the necessary cruelty of power, was not at all interested in power as mere abuse. He was, Kaufman says, very decent. His category for talking about cheats was often to talk of dirtiness. Dirtiness was for the weak. Kaufman went on to talk about how Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith (eg Abraham) is exemplified in Nazi executioners who did their evil work with confidence in (this is so stupid) German-ness. The teleological suspension of the ethical made Jay Bernstein wonder why anyone ever took Kierkegaard's reading as saying something good about God.

Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac shows him to be the knight of faith, able to pull off the impossible of freedom to do anything and live entirely reconciled to his construct of universals, his ideas of the whole. Anders Breivik appears to enjoy the same psychological freedom. And this goes back to my post Right and Right. It isn't enough to be the knight of faith. Montezuma was a man of faith, as the song goes. It is important to be correct.
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Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Dreams

I had a wakeful night, and some dreams I remember. For some reason my dreams are always bloody and feel full of import.

I dreamed two brothers in arms were on a campaign to kill as many as they could; they butchered people in a bus, and then later when survivors or relatives were waiting at a bus interchange, they turned up and killed them there.  Then there was a scene of a tall city tower, the killing of the security guard and a sort of announcers 'these things aren't too bad usually, but this time the shooter is from hell.'

Then that proved to be a trailer (way beyond what you would show on TV) running on At The Movies and about 12 or 15 family members were sitting staring at the screen, hyptonised or drugged.  Abel was one of them, and no one roused when I pointed out that he had just seen all this violence.  I went and distracted him. He seemed fine.

The next dream was of being in a massive gathering of cultists of some kind, in a very steeply tiered seating a thousand rows, and maybe two thousand feet high. There was a charismatic leader directing the most faithful to come up the highest. When everyone was in position, he set some large blocks rolling down the steep slope, and the cultists knew what to do joined in, throwing themselves down, creating a lethal avalanche of bodies.  Did the leader slip out once all was in progress? I think so.

Some of the imagery was probably from Drive (the bus interchange was sort of a garage space), and the city tower was from Source Code.  The human avalanche is a mystery.

Monday, April 16, 2012

Source Code

I finally watched Source Code, with Jake Gylenhall. He came over with some beers and a copy, and I was all like 'I've got new Dr Who, if you prefer', but he was really keen I see it. But seriously...

He is a good actor,and good looking to beat the band. And this was a tight film - well plotted and written very elegantly with emotional punch at the right times. I've been trying to work out why it felt slight. I think it was because there were no subplots. It just lacked a small thematic restatement in a minor key - someone who died but couldn't come back or someone hungry for another day, just a little more consciousness. JG's character Colter was too simply a good guy in a tough situation...
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Sunday, April 15, 2012

Negation in everyday life

Since reading Hegel I've slowly been developing the idea that creation is Not-God, a vast nothingness absent his presence.  The universe contrasts with human life as cold, impersonal, implacable and living nature is 'red in tooth and claw.'  It turns out that this is an obvious first take on the subject which almost everyone realises before me.  In church today, the minister pointed out that the creation is 'independent.'  This becomes obvious from the first act of creation: Let there be light...  The whole creation except humans are built this way.

Letting is a negative act. Its making room, allowing something to express itself.

So when atheists insist this is the world without God, I have some sympathy.

Love and Anxiety

The Dish has picked up a couple of blogs analysing a certain scene in Terence Malick's Tree of Life.


Reptiles emerge from the amphibians, and dinosaurs in turn from the reptiles. Among the dinosaurs we discover the first signs of maternal love, as the creatures learn to care for each other.Is not love, too, a work of the creation? What should we have been without it? How had things been then?
Silent as a shadow, consciousness has slipped into the world.

Here is Terence Malick, one-time Heidegger scholar, putting his finger on the special sauce of consciousness and calling it love.  I had the same intuition weakly in my thinking on my screenplay, but I have found it is already well expressed in Hegel, though it is hidden in dense 'reasoning'.  Hegel's 'self' is engaged in a restless, endless, relentless attempt to re-unite with the Other which is its essence.  This division is in consciousness at every level, but the uniting across the divide is the special sauce. 


Last night we read Luke 6:

27 “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. 29 If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. 30 Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. 31 Do to others as you would have them do to you.   32 “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. 33 And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. 34And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. 35 But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. 36 Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
This is anxious stuff to try to live, but it is also what Hegel prescribes for the self's self-relation. Stoicism (accepting experience overruling what rationality might expect) and Scepticism (doubting experiences except rational understandability) are simply modes of anxiety covering the self's difficulty with itself.  Heidegger's commentary on Hegel renames 'Absolute Knowledge' as 'Absolving Knowledge.' These verses are about that absolving, about living in Love.  If someone's ideas compel you to go one mile, you can go another with them. If something slaps you across the face and makes your eyes water, you go back for the rest.


Saturday, April 14, 2012

Breaking

In social psychology, 'breaking' is behaving without any reference to social norms.  Stanley Milgram was apparently happy to do it as a hobby - arriving for dinner he would skip greetings and proceed to counting the cutlery.

Bible study is a social gathering with a lot of norms.  Often there will be a short prayer time, where people share a personal concern, and someone else prays for them.  (There is a norm about not praying for your own stuff, so structures that ensure you know who you will be praying for are important - otherwise there's no guarantee everyone gets prayed for - also a terrible solecism.)

So I was sitting next to Chris, an IT guru - maybe a 'systems analyst' describes it.  He hacks Unix like other people hack cheese off a block the size of a car battery.  What was Chris's prayer point?  Was his boss on his case? Did he have a sick friend or relation? Was he feeling stressed and rundown?

Spam.  Chris wanted me to pray against spam emails. Why?  'They're very annoying.'

Although I joined a long period of hysterical laughter, I didn't think spam was absolutely outside God's concern - it's wasteful of time and intellect and processing power.  (Side note: If, as in Lawnmower Man, an AI decided to ring all the phones on the planet, or email all the email addresses on the planet, it would almost certainly be ignored.)

So I attempted to formulate a prayer beseeching the Lord to stifle spam.  I will leave this account there.  It's literally hysterical - I feel my (metaphorical) womb rise up and enter my brain.

Friday, April 13, 2012

Listening

At one of my jobs in the past, I discovered I was a sad rattle, to use the eighteenth century term. I was still fitting into the group and trying to working out how work there worked (something I have a philosopher's ability not to understand.) I was anxious, and so I spent a lot of time saying things that put me in (I thought) a better light, that made me feel relevant and valuable.
This was exposed by a friend who was the opposite. He would listen so attentively to my nonsense, allow me to take up so much of his headspace for a couple of minutes, that just to keep speaking made me look at myself from his perspective. I was regularly embarassed by what I was saying, the half-formed windy grumbles; the insights formed by closing one eye and squinting with the other until you could mistake real things for foolish ones.
It is not something I've succeeded in emulating in myself, but it is something lovely. It might be inwardness.
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Thursday, April 12, 2012

Python

I had a day of lessons introducing Python today.  I assumed I would need them because I'm slow with paradigm shifts, but so far its just been delightfully familiar (orderly and relaxed like MatLab) and at the same time large (a diversity of libraries to equal Java's coverage) and at the same time less obscure.  My first Java program had a lot of code that I didn't understand until six months after I started with it.  With Python, there are a few behavioural facts of interest (arising from object-oriented design), but no expressions that are simply unintelligible.  More tomorrow.

Mum: Python is free and open-source, is built into most Unix systems (including OS X).  You can find out about it and get it from www.python.org.  You can get a nicely constructed Windows distribution from ActiveState: http://www.activestate.com/activepython/downloads

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Determinate Negation

In my scouring of the internet for help understanding Hegel, I found 3 video lectures by Robert Brandom from LMU Munich (in English, of course)*.

They provide an overview of his recent work reading Kant and Hegel and thinking about the problems of metaphysical and semantic realism and idealism.  The basic difficulty of providing a union of conceptual thinking (thinking in terms of objects, classes, entities, and rational relations between them) and reality as we experience it.

Kant set up a view of this that the reason came fitted with 'synthetic judgments' - prejudices that make us see causality in some constant conjunction of phenomena, that may help us survive in the world bnut which can't themselves be grounded in reason or perceived directly in experience (see Hume on Causality). Their rationality is 'transcendental', which I would describe (probably wrongly), as meaning that they are justified as the condition of the possibility of rationality.  Kant thought that perception grasped 'the object' for consciousness through an act of (synthetic) judgement, but that the object for itself remained ineffable, unknowable.

People said, well how do you know there's such a thing as the thing in itself then? But maybe they didn't say it to Kant, out of respect.**  Robert Brandom diagnoses this as a gap in the intelligibility of the world, and explains that Hegel's project was to attempt to give an account with no gap.

Hegel argues that the mode of definition of the object is by what he calls 'determinate negation.' An object is white (and NOT black, red or any other colour). The 'IS' is Kant's synthetic judgement, but in Hegel the appearance is the appearance of a super-sensible object which becomes understandable as more and more experiences mean you can perhaps synthesise a law (law is the truth of appearances in Hegel).

As Brandom explains it, objects define themselves by means of determinate negation, and consciousness of the object characterises the object by determinate negation, and consciousness is engaged continually in reconciling its conceptual contents by judgements with the goal of eliminating material incompatibility and fitting the right scheme of determinate negations over the understood world. Although its impossible for the objects to hold materially incompatible properties, a subject (person) can hold materially incompatible beliefs or positions.  But although they can, we hold that they shouldn't.  You can't be in two places at once, we say to the double booked person.  You must resolve that incompatibility.  If you see a straight stick appear bent under water, you have to come up with a theory of how water bends appearances, or sticks. You can't believe the same stick is both straight and bent.  Determinate negation implicitly (though minimally) puts concepts and objects into the kind of holistic structure Heidegger calls a world. Square is NOT round, triangular, pentagonal etc.

Brandom also draws out the parallel with Shannon information theory, in which the information provided by a bit depends on what it negates.  If a thousand possible worlds would have had it be zero, and it is one (and NOT zero), then it is very informative - but you measure it by that negation.

I've made this much less clear than I should. I don't understand it well enough to do a much better job even if I took my time.

Itunes:

Review of his latest book - Being Human


* There is no reason for them to be released as video - the image of a luxuriantly bearded Robert Brandom is itself a luxury in this world of scarcity.  Audio-only would have been fine, LMU.

** Did you know he first hypothesized the accretion disk formation of the solar system?

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Movie Review: Drive

Ryan Gosling and director Nicolas Winding Refn got a lot of attention for Drive, the story of a young man with a gift for driving who does some stunt driving, some racing and some getaway work. He has no name, and is known in secondary sources as Driver.  Seeing his pretty neighbour (Carey Mulligan) needing help, he befriends her. A week later, her husband is released from jail and moves back in. They're not a perfect match, but he's a pretty good guy wanting to go straight.  The trouble is, he's got old debts that need repaying. So he takes on one last job because Driver offers to help him.  Things go horribly wrong, leaving Driver with a lot of money, and trouble with two crime syndicates that lay claim to it. Can he get square? Will cool nerves and discipline and timing be enough?

This is an interesting film to watch after hearing it built up.  Coming in cold, I would have regarded it pretty highly, because the story is always surprising you and the emotional story is simple and well told. There are no wasted words, no wasted scenes, no gore spared.  It sits somewhere close to a western, and the violence was extreme.  The structure and story resolution are not upbeat, but satisfying.

Some things that didn't totally satisfy - the score is largely techno, and it works well for the half of the story that happens in the dark, but in some of the rundown motels and diners it just seemed a little thin and clean - also, there's nothing of the calibre of Oxygene.  There's an air of unreality about some of the car sequences: reverse doesn't go that fast; and cars that slam their foes in the side don't retain working headlights.

The character of Driver is very close to my vision for Langley, a character in the screenplays I've been working on.  A man of great ability, curiously blank, hard to read yet straightforward, emotionally vulnerable and tightly wound but holding it together coldly, and struggling with old men and economics to carve out some secure space, to get a place in the world.  I wonder if this is a new type we will see more of.  It's not exactly coming of age, because he's come of age and is an omni-competent adult. But after you come of age, life is still a struggle, and if you fight well and are lucky, you might come out even.